The Religious Persecution in France 1900-1906Brodhead, J. Napier (Jane Napier)
History
The Religious Persecution in France 1900-1906
Brodhead, J. Napier (Jane Napier)
Catholic Church -- France; Church and state -- France
In this same connexion Schiller makes the following statement. “No
country changed religion oftener than the Palatinate. Unhappy
weathercock of the political and religious versatility of its
sovereigns, it had twice been forced to embrace the doctrines of Luther
and then to abandon them for those of Calvin. Frederick III deserted the
Confession of Augsburg, but his son re-established it by most violent
and unjust measures. After closing all the Calvinist temples and exiling
the ministers and school teachers, he ordered by his will that his son
should be brought up by Lutherans; his brother, however, annulled this
will and became regent under the young Frederick IV, who was confided to
Calvinists with strict orders to destroy in his mind the “heretical
doctrines of Luther by all means, by beating and whipping even.” It is
easy to guess how subjects were treated when the heir to the throne was
thus tyrannized over” (_Thirty Years War_, p. 40).
What, I ask, has Europe gained by the overthrow of its public law?
Strife, anarchy, nihilism in religion as in philosophy. After centuries
of dabbling, floundering, and blundering, we are again seeking to devise
some principle of unity, some Amphictyonic Council to supplement the
illusory balance of power; to set up a Court of Arbitration to replace
the one that really did exist in the Middle Ages and functioned as well
as could be expected in those days of liquescence.
All in vain. The grand Peace Congress from which the Papacy was excluded
was followed, almost immediately, by two most cruel wars which were
pre-eminently subjects for arbitration. Men will submit to this court
questions about which they do not care enough to fight about them, but
these subjects only will they submit to arbitration. Unless the Lord
build the house, in vain they labour who build.
There is only one tribunal that can ever arbitrate efficaciously, and
this is the one which presided at the Genesis of Christendom.[27]
Socialists and anarchists, without having pondered the passage from
Guizot I quoted in beginning this chapter, understand perfectly that our
Western or Christian civilization is grounded on the unity of one Holy
Catholic Church, and the destruction of the social structure being the
object of their ambition, they very logically direct all their efforts
to destroying this foundation.
The work of disintegration was begun in the sixteenth century.
“Socinius, the most iconoclastic of Protestants, predicted that the
seditious doctrines by which Protestants supported their cause would
lead to the disintegration of society” (_History of Rationalism_, II,
239).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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