The Protestantism of Luther and Calvin was a compromise replacing a despotism; it was a broad faith, although it is at the same time intolerant and orthodox; for there are certain things even in Protestantism which do not admit of compromise; it contains _dogmas_ that it is impious to reject, and which, to the free-thinker, seem scarcely less contrary to calm reason than the dogmas of Catholicism; it contains a system of metaphysical or historical theses regarded not as merely human, but as divine. The most desirable thing in a religion that is to be progressive is that the sacred texts should be ambiguous; and the text of the Bible is not ambiguous enough. How are we to doubt, for example, the divinity of Christ’s mission? How doubt the miracles? A belief in the divinity of Christ, and the genuineness of the miracles, are the very foundation of the Christian religion; Luther was obliged to accept them, and in our day even they bear down with their full weight on orthodox Protestantism. So that what seemed at first a generous concession to liberty of thought amounts in the end to little. The circle one moves about in is so contracted! Protestants, too, are fettered; the chain is simply longer and more flexible. Protestantism has rendered services of great importance to law and to liberty of conscience; but alongside of the concessions to liberty that it enforced, it contains dogmas from which the use of “charitable constraint” may logically be deduced. These dogmas which are essential to true Protestantism are: original sin, conceived as even more radical than it appears in Catholicism, and as destructive of freedom of the will; the redemption, which recognizes the death of God the Son as necessary to redeem man from the vindictiveness of God the Father; predestination in all its rigour; grace and election in their most fatalistic and mystical form; and last and most important, an eternity of suffering without purgatory! If all these dogmas are simply philosophical myths, Christian is a purely verbal title, and one might as well call one’s self a heathen, for all the myths of Jupiter, Saturn, Ceres, Proserpine, and the “divinities of Samothrace,” are also susceptible of becoming symbols of higher metaphysics; we refer the reader to Jamblicus and Schelling. We must thus assume that orthodox Protestants believe in hell, redemption, and grace; and if so, the consequences that we have deduced from these dogmas become inevitable. Also Luther, Calvin, Théodore de Bèze, have preached and practised intolerance for the same reasons as did the Catholics. They claimed the right of private judgment for themselves alone, and only in so far as they felt need of it; they never raised it to the level of an orthodox doctrine. Calvin burned Servetius, and the Puritans in America in 1692 punished witchcraft with death. [Sidenote: Every heresy serves liberty of conscience.]