This right of private judgment, on which Luther was among the first to insist, and of which certainly he was the first great champion in Europe, was in that age a very bold idea, as well as original.  It flattered as well as stimulated the intellect of the people, and gave them dignity; it gave to the Reformation its popular character; it appealed to the mind and heart of Christendom.  It gave consolation to the peasantry of Europe; for no family was too poor to possess a Bible, the greatest possible boon and treasure,—­ read and pondered in the evening, after hard labors and bitter insults; read aloud to the family circle, with its inexhaustible store of moral wealth, its beautiful and touching narratives, its glorious poetry, its awful prophecies, its supernal counsels, its consoling and emancipating truths,—­so tender and yet so exalting, raising the soul above the grim trials of toil and poverty into the realms of seraphic peace and boundless joy.  The Bible even gave hope to heretics.  All sects and parties could take shelter under it; all could stand on the broad platform of religion, and survey from it the wonders and glories of God.  At last men might even differ on important points of doctrine and worship, and yet be Protestants.  Religious liberty became as wide in its application as the unity of the Church.  It might create sects, but those sects would be all united as to the value of the Scriptures and their cardinal declarations.  On this broad basis John Milton could shake hands with John Knox, and John Locke with Richard Baxter, and Oliver Cromwell with Queen Elizabeth, and Lord Bacon with William Penn; and Bishop Butler with John Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards with Doctor Channing.

This idea of private judgment is what separates the Catholics from the Protestants; not most ostensibly, but most vitally.  Many are the Catholics who would accept Luther’s idea of grace, since it is the idea of Saint Augustine; and of the supreme authority of the Scriptures, since they were so highly valued by the Fathers:  but few of the Catholic clergy have ever tolerated religious liberty,—­ that is, the interpretation of the Scriptures by the people,—­for it is a vital blow to their supremacy, their hierarchy, and their institutions.  They will no more readily accept it than William the Conqueror would have accepted the Magna Charta; for the free circulation and free interpretation of the Scriptures are the charter of human liberties fought for at Leipsic by Gustavus Adolphus, at Ivry by Henry IV.  This right of worshipping God according to the dictates of conscience, enlightened by the free reading of the Scriptures, is just what the “invincible armada” was sent by Philip II. to crush; just what Alva, dictated by Rome, sought to crush in Holland; just what Louis XIV., instructed by the Jesuits, did crush out in France, by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.  The Satanic hatred of this right was the cause of most of the martyrdoms and persecutions