[78] was nothing to choose between the new and the old Churches.  The religious wars were not for the cause of freedom, but for particular sets of doctrines; and in France, if the Protestants had been victorious, it is certain that they would not have given more liberal terms to the Catholics than the Catholics gave to them.

Luther was quite opposed to liberty of conscience and worship, a doctrine which was inconsistent with Scripture as he read it.  He might protest against coercion and condemn the burning of heretics, when he was in fear that he and his party might be victims, but when he was safe and in power, he asserted his real view that it was the duty of the State to impose the true doctrine and exterminate heresy, which was an abomination, that unlimited obedience to their prince in religious as in other matters was the duty of subjects, and that the end of the State was to defend the faith.  He held that Anabaptists should be put to the sword.  With Protestants and Catholics alike the dogma of exclusive salvation led to the same place.

Calvin’s fame for intolerance is blackest.  He did not, like Luther, advocate the absolute power of the civil ruler; he stood for the control of the State by the Church—­a form of government which is commonly called theocracy;

[79] and he established a theocracy at Geneva.  Here liberty was completely crushed; false doctrines were put down by imprisonment, exile, and death.  The punishment of Servetus is the most famous exploit of Calvin’s warfare against heresy.  The Spaniard Servetus, who had written against the dogma of the Trinity, was imprisoned at Lyons (partly through the machinations of Calvin) and having escaped came rashly to Geneva.  He was tried for heresy and committed to the flames (1553), though Geneva had no jurisdiction over him.  Melanchthon, who formulated the principles of persecution, praised this act as a memorable example to posterity.  Posterity however was one day to be ashamed of that example.  In 1903 the Calvinists of Geneva felt impelled to erect an expiatory monument, in which Calvin “our great Reformer” is excused as guilty of an error “which was that of his century.”

Thus the Reformers, like the Church from which they parted, cared nothing for freedom, they only cared for “truth.”  If the mediaeval ideal was to purge the world of heretics, the object of the Protestant was to exclude all dissidents from his own land.  The people at large were to be driven into a fold, to accept their faith at the command of their sovran.  This was the principle laid down in the

[80] religious peace which (1555) composed the struggle between the Catholic Emperor and the Protestant German princes.  It was recognized by Catherine de’ Medici when she massacred the French Protestants and signified to Queen Elizabeth that she might do likewise with English Catholics.

Nor did the Protestant creeds represent enlightenment.  The Reformation on the Continent was as hostile to enlightenment as it was to liberty; and science, if it seemed to contradict the Bible, has as little chance with Luther as with the Pope.  The Bible, interpreted by the Protestants or the Roman Church, was equally fatal to witches.  In Germany the development of learning received a long set-back.