The intrepid reformer who begins his career by insisting that we must not force our own system of logic upon God, ends his days by burning an opponent whose power of reasoning was undoubtedly superior to his own. The heretic of today becomes the arch-enemy of all dissenters of tomorrow. And with all their talk of a new era in which the dawn has at last followed upon the dark, both Calvin and Luther remained faithful sons of the Middle Ages as long as they lived. Tolerance did not and could not possibly show itself to them in the light of a virtue. As long as they themselves were outcasts, they were willing to invoke the divine right of freedom of conscience that they might use it as an argument against their enemies. Once the battle was won, this trusted weapon was carefully deposited in a corner of the Protestant junk-room, already cluttered with so many other good intentions that had been discarded as unpractical. There it lay, forgotten and neglected, until a great many years later, when it was discovered behind a trunk full of old sermons. But the people who picked it up, scraped off the rust and once more carried it into battle were of a different nature from those who had fought the good fight in the early days of the sixteenth century. And yet, the Protestant revolution contributed greatly to the cause of tolerance. Not through what it accomplished directly. In that field the gain was small indeed. But indirectly the results of the Reformation were all on the side of progress. In the first place, it made people familiar with the Bible. The Church had never positively forbidden people to read the Bible, but neither had it encouraged the study of the sacred book by ordinary laymen. Now at last every honest baker and candlestick maker could own a copy of the holy work; could peruse it in the privacy of his workshop and could draw his own conclusions without running the risk of being burned at the stake. Familiarity is apt to kill those sentiments of awe and fear which we feel before the mysteries of the unknown. During the first two hundred years which followed immediately upon the Reformation, pious Protestants believed everything they read in the Old Testament from Balaam’s ass to Jonah’s whale. And those who dared to question a single comma (the “inspired” vowel-points of learned Abraham Colovius!) knew better than to let their sceptical tittering be heard by the community at large. Not because they were afraid any longer of the Inquisition, but Protestant pastors could upon occasion make a man’s life exceedingly unpleasant and the economic consequences of a public ministerial censure were often very serious, not to say disastrous. Gradually however this eternally repeated study of a book which was really the national history of a small nation of shepherds and traders was to bear results which Luther and Calvin and the other reformers had never foreseen.