of Christian life must be realized. The past cannot be undone; history moves zig-zag, like a sailing
vessel, but never backwards. The work of church history, whether Greek, Roman, or Protestant,
cannot be in vain. Every denomination and sect has to furnish some stones for the building of the
temple of God.
And out of the greatest human discord God will bring the richest concord.
§ 11. Protestantism and Religious Liberty.
Comp. Ph. Schaff: The Progress of Religious Freedom as shown in the History of Toleration Acts,
N. York, 1889. (126 pages.)
The Reformation was a grand act of emancipation from spiritual tyranny, and a vindication of
the sacred rights of conscience in matters of religious belief. Luther’s bold stand at the Diet of
Worms, in the face of the pope and the emperor, is one of the sublimest events in the history of
liberty, and the eloquence of his testimony rings through the centuries.^42 To break the force of the
pope, who called himself and was believed to be, the visible vicar of God on earth, and who held
in his hands the keys of the kingdom of heaven, required more moral courage than to fight a hundred
battles, and it was done by an humble monk in the might of faith.
If liberty, both civil and religious, has since made progress, it is due in large measure to the
inspiration of that heroic act. But the progress was slow and passed through many obstructions and
reactions. "The mills of God grind slowly, but wonderfully fine."
It seems one of the strangest inconsistencies that the very men who claimed and exercised
the right of protest in essentials, should have denied the same right to others, who differed from
them in nonessentials. After having secured liberty from the yoke of popery, they acted on the
persecuting principles in which they had been brought up. They had no idea of toleration or liberty
in our modern sense. They fought for liberty in Christ, not from Christ, for liberty to preach and
teach the gospel, not to oppose or pervert it. They were as intensely convinced of their views as
their Roman opponents of theirs. They abhorred popery and heresy as dangerous errors which
should not be tolerated in a Christian society. John Knox feared one Romish mass in Scotland more
than an army of ten thousand French invaders. The Protestant divines and princes of the sixteenth
century felt it to be their duty to God and to themselves to suppress and punish heresy as well as
civil crimes. They confounded the law with the gospel. In many cases they acted in retaliation, and
in self-defense. They were surrounded by a swarm of sects and errorists who claimed to be the
legitimate children of the Reformation, exposed it to the reproach of the enemies and threatened
to turn it into confusion and anarchy. The world and the church were not ripe for a universal reign
of liberty, nor are they even now.
Religious persecution arises not only from bigotry and fanaticism, and the base passions of
malice, hatred and uncharitableness, but also from mistaken zeal for truth and orthodoxy, from the
intensity of religious conviction, and from the alliance of religion with politics or the union of
church and state, whereby an offence against the one becomes an offence against the other.
Persecution is found in all religions, churches and sects which had the power; while on the other
(^42) Froude says (Luther, p. 38): "The appearance of Luther before the Diet on this occasion, is one of the finest, perhaps it is the very
finest, scene in human history."