Heresy: Its Utility And Morality. A Plea And A JustificationBradlaugh, Charles
Religion
Heresy: Its Utility And Morality. A Plea And A Justification
Bradlaugh, Charles
Free thought; Heresy
Luther were alive to-day, the Established Church of England,
which pretends to revere him, would prosecute him in the English
Ecclesiastical Courts if he ventured to repeat the foregoing phrases
from her pulpits. What would the writers who attack me for coarseness,
say of the following passage, which occurs with reference to Melancthon,
whom Luther boasts that he raised miraculously from the dead?
"Melancthon," says Sir William Hamilton, to whose essay I am indebted
for the extracts here given, "had fallen ill at Weimar from contrition
and fear for the part he had been led to take in the Landgrave's
polygamy: his life was even in danger." "Then and there," said Luther,
"I made our Lord God to smart for it. For I threw down the sack before
the door, and rubbed his ears with all his promises of hearing prayer,
which I knew how to recapitulate from Holy Writ, so that he could
not but hearken to me, should I ever again place any reliance on his
promises." Martin Luther, with his absolute denial of free-will, and
with his double code of morality for princes and peasants--easy for one
and harsh for the other--may be fairly left now with those who desire
to vaunt his orthodoxy; here his name is used only to illustrate the
popular impetus given to nonconformity by his quarrel with the papal
authorities. Luther protested against the Romish Church, but established
by the very fact the right for some more advanced man than Doctor Martin
to protest in turn against the Lutheran Church. The only consistent
church in Christendom is the Romish Church, for it claims the right to
think for all its followers. The whole of the Protestant Churches are
inconsistent, for they claim the right to think and judge against Rome,
but deny extremer Nonconformists the right to think and judge against
themselves. Goethe, says Froude, declares that Luther threw back the
intellectual progress of mankind by using the passions of the multitude
to decide subjects which should have been left to the learned. I do not
believe this to be wholly true, for the multitude once having their ears
fairly opened, listened to more than the appeal to their passions, and
examined for themselves propositions which otherwise they would have
accepted or rejected from habit and without inquiry. Martin Luther's
public discussions with pen and tongue, in Wittemberg, Augsburg,
Liebenwerd, and Lichtenberg, and the protest he encouraged against Rome,
were the commencement of a vigorous controversy, in which the public
(who heard for the first time sharp controversial sermons preached
publicly in the various pulpits by Lutheran preachers on free-will and
necessity, election and predestination, &c.) began to take real part and
interest; and which is still going on, and will in fact never end until
the unholy alliance of Church and State is everywhere annulled, and each
religion is left to sustain itself by its own truth, or to fall from
its own weakness, no man being molested under the law on account of his
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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