15. The Error of the Reformers.--The great error which the Reformers made was in not giving full application to their principle of the right of private judgment in matters of {249} religion. They claimed the right to revolt from the Catholic church, to interpret the Bible for themselves, and to found their mode of worship upon their own conceptions of what was required by the revelations of God; but when others differed from them, and desired to exercise the same liberty, the Reformers were themselves intolerant, and attempted to compel men by force to accept their religious faith and modes of worship. It is this intolerance which is the chief reproach applied to the Reformation by its enemies, and it must be admitted that it somewhat sullies the glory of its achievements. (See note 5, end of section.) NOTES. 1. Motives Back of the Reformation.--The Protestant historian, Mosheim, with whom Hume agrees, admits that several of the principal agents in this revolution were actuated more by the impulse of passion and views of interest than by a zeal for true religion. (Maclaine's Mosheim, vol. iv. p. 135.) He had before acknowledged that King Gustavus introduced Lutheranism into Sweden in opposition to the clergy and bishops, not only as agreeable to the genius and spirit of the gospel, but also as favorable to the temporal state and political constitution of the Swedish dominions. He adds that Christiern, who introduced the Reformation into Denmark, was animated by no other motives than those of ambition and avarice. Grotius, another Protestant, testifies that it was sedition and violence which gave birth to the Reformation in his own country--Holland. The same was the case in France, Geneva and Scotland. It is to be observed, that in all these countries the Reformers, as soon as they got the upper hand, became violent persecutors of the Catholics. Bergier defies Protestants to name so much as a town or village in which, when they became masters of it, they tolerated a single Catholic.--End of Religious Controversy, note, p. 105. 2. Desire for Freedom the Moving Cause in Reformation.--The strength of the Protestant party had been derived, both in Germany and England, far less from their superiority in argument, however decisive {250} this might be, than from that desire which all classes, and especially the higher, had long experienced to emancipate themselves from the thraldom of ecclesiastical jurisdiction.--Hallam's Const. Hist. of Eng.