[Footnote A: A doubtful assertion. We, the children of the Puritans, and educated in their views and prejudices, have still many lessons to learn in the school of charily. It was not 'Luther who rendered subsequent history possible,' but the ever onward growth of humanity itself. Luther had no broader views of liberty of conscience than the church with which he struggled. Mr. Hallam says: 'It has been often said that the essential principle of Protestantism and that for which the struggle was made, was something different from all we have mentioned: a perpetual freedom from all authority in religious belief, or what goes by the name of private judgment. But to look more nearly at what occurred, this permanent independence was not much asserted, and still less acted upon. The Reformation was a _change of masters_, a voluntary one, no doubt, in those _who had any choice_, and in this sense an exercise, for the time, of their personal judgment. But no one having gone over to the Confession of Augsburg or that of Zurich, was deemed at liberty to modify these creeds at his pleasure. He might, of course, become an Anabaptist or Arian, but he was not the less a heretic in doing so than if he had continued in the Church of Rome. By what light a Protestant was to steer, might be a problem which at that time, as ever since, it would perplex a theologian to decide: but in practice, the law of the land which established one exclusive mode of faith, was the only safe, as, in ordinary circumstances, it was, upon the whole, the most eligible guide.' Speaking, in another place, of the causes which brought about the decline of Protestantism, etc., Mr. Hallam says: 'We ought to reckon also among the principal causes of this change, those perpetual disputes, those irreconcilable animosities, that bigotry, above all, and persecuting spirit, which were exhibited in the Lutheran and Calvinistic churches. Each began with a common principle--the necessity of an orthodox faith. But this orthodoxy meant nothing more than their _own_ belief as opposed to that of their adversaries; a belief acknowledged to be fallible, yet maintained as certain; rejecting authority with one breath and appealing to it in the next, and claiming to rest on sure proofs of reason and Scripture, which their opponents were ready with just as much confidence to invalidate.'