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The establishment of state churches

Adoption of state religion for

reasons of

policy

sovereigns might encourage either the Catholic, the Lutheran, or the Calvinist religions within their domains. Other creeds were discountenanced. There was a limited toleration among princes, but none among their peoples. The principles of absolute sovereignty and religious intolerance produced that characteristic institution of modern times, the established church. In the medieval Christian Commonwealth there could be no question of an established church. The commonwealth was the church. The so-called conflicts between church and state were in reality jurisdictional controversies between spiritual and temporal authorities, between churchmen and statesmen. One effect of the Reformation was to emphasize the primitive Christian concept of the church as the whole body of believers, not merely an estate of the realm. But it brought into existence many such bodies, each conscious of its separate identity. Religious intolerance prompted political discrimination in each state in favor of some one of these churches and against the others. The absolutism of temporal sovereigns enabled them to establish the favored church as the state church. They gave it financial and, in case of need, military support, and in return secured control of the appointment of ecclesiastical officers. Such ecclesiastics became in effect officers of state. If the state church, as in England and the other Protestant countries, severed its connection with Rome, they might become state officials in form as well as in effect. Thus a Christian commonwealth would be created on a sectarian basis. Church and state would become one political entity under the sovereignty of the king.

Absolute sovereigns could use their power to favor either that religion which was more agreeable to their consciences or that most profitable to their interests. Probably the early Reformers did not mean to do more than assert that all coercive authority in the Christian

Commonwealth is vested in its temporal rulers. But by adding to this the prevailing notion that the ruler must support the one true religion and tolerate no other it was not many steps, as Figgis' has demonstrated, to the theory of Hobbes that the sovereign might support any religion he pleased from motives of policy and with no regard to the truth. Thus Henry of Navarre renounced the Huguenot faith in which he had been bred in order, for reasons of state, to recognize the religion which most of his subjects preferred. Paris, he frankly avowed, was worth a mass. Such Machiavellianism was the legitimate offspring of the marriage of statesmanship and churchmanship.

The beginmodern

nings of

toleration

Nevertheless, it is to Machiavellian politics that the beginning of toleration in an age of religious zeal must be credited. A sagacious, though unscrupulous, statesman, religious Henry of Navarre tempered his favoritism towards the state religion by respecting the desire of the Protestants. among his subjects to worship according to their own consciences. In 1598 the Edict of Nantes, by recognizing the right of the Huguenots to maintain their separate churches. and the public exercise of their religion, set an illustrious example. But in general toleration for subject peoples was extorted from reluctant princes by bitter necessity. In England the founders of the Puritan Commonwealth were as bent on remoulding the established church-state according to the requirements of their own peculiar creed as their opponents had been before them. Despite the wisdom of a Cromwell, the first attempt to found a modern national commonwealth was shipwrecked upon the rock of religious intolerance. Charles II profited by the experience of Cavalier and Roundhead alike, and borrowed, grudgingly no doubt and without acknowledgments, from the statecraft of the great Protector. The menace of a revival of persecution under Charles's

1 J. N. Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings, 2d edition, pp. 338-339.

Locke's theory of toleration

The limits of tolera

tion

fanatical and incompetent successor produced not only the "great and glorious revolution" of 1688, which Macaulay has so eloquently described, but also a general conviction that a moderate policy of toleration would be a lesser evil than chronic civil war. In the Calvinist and Lutheran states the same conviction was fast gaining ground.

The foremost advocate in the seventeenth century of the principle of religious toleration was the political philosopher of the English Revolution, John Locke. In his famous Letters Concerning Toleration he declared that the saving of men's souls could not be the business of the civil magistrates. His arguments need not now detain us. It is enough to point out that they rested upon the assumption that neither civil magistrates nor ecclesiastical authorities are more likely to discover the way that leads to Heaven than "every private man's search and study discovers it unto himself." At last the full implications of Protestantism were recognized and their consequences acknowledged. From these premises Locke's conclusions followed logically enough. First, "All the power of civil government relates only to men's civil interests, is confined to the care of things of this world and hath nothing to do with the world to come." Secondly, "The church itself is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth." Thus at last the modern idea of religious toleration was formulated on the basis of the primitive Christian principle that there should be a complete separation of church and state. State and church alike, according to Locke, must be regarded as communities with limited. objects. Each must be understood in the light of its characteristic purposes, and neither can be recognized as the exclusive possessor of absolute sovereign power.

In view of the existing conditions, however, Locke was forced to admit exceptions to the principle of toleration. Magistrates, he thought, ought not to tolerate: first, those

who claimed for themselves upon religious grounds any special authority over others in civil affairs; second, those who upon religious grounds claim any kind of authority over others not of the same religious faith; third, those who will not acknowledge the duty of tolerating others in matters of religion; fourth, those who belong to a church so constituted that its members owe allegiance to an alien prince; and fifth, atheists. In the latter part of the seventeenth century these exceptions were important, so important that neither England nor any other European state dared to carry the principle of toleration so far as to disestablish the state church and bring about the complete separation of church and state. Nor has the principle of full religious toleration yet been adopted in all Christian states, though much progress has been made since the close of the religious wars in the seventeenth century.

2

between

in modern

of church

of intoler

The subsequent policies of European states with respect Relations to the church and religion may be classified under four churches heads. In the first place, there were those states which and states clung to the medieval idea of the church-state and prac- times ticed unmitigated intolerance. In Spain and Portugal the persecution of heretics by the Inquisition was continued 1. Union throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until and state interrupted by the incursions of Napoleon Bonaparte. The and practice principle of religious toleration was not finally recognized ance in Spain until 1876; nor in Portugal until the establishment of the republic in 1910. In Portugal, for example, ́ by the constitution in force, nominally at least, prior to the establishment of the republic, the apostolic Roman Catholic religion was the religion of the kingdom, but other religions were permitted to foreigners, who were allowed to hold private services in houses intended for that purpose, provided these houses did not have the

2. Union of church

external appearance of churches. But no such liberty was allowed to subjects. In the Italian Papal States the exercise of temporal sovereignty by the Pope preserved the confusion of heresy and treason and made every form of toleration impossible. There the principle of absolute sovereignty culminated in the dogma of papal infallibility, promulgated on the eve of the absorption of the States of the Church into the Kingdom of Italy in 1870. Since then there has been no Christian state, except orthodox Russia under the Czars, where the principles of absolute sovereignty and religious intolerance have so completely prevailed as before 1870 in the temporal dominions of the Supreme Pontiff.

Another class of states comprises those which declared the apostolic Roman Catholic religion to be the state and limited religion, but practiced a limited toleration of other

and state

toleration

religions. Within this class there have been great diversities in actual practice. In France, for example, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 the Huguenots were tolerated, but only upon very hard terms. Public worship by adherents of the reformed religion was prohibited, and even private worship was forbidden in the houses of noblemen, though not in those of other subjects. Huguenot ministers were required to accept Catholicism or leave the country. The Huguenots were forbidden to maintain private schools for the education of their children, who were to be baptized by Roman Catholic priests. Huguenots who nevertheless remained true to their religion were not to be molested, provided they made no attempt to leave the country. In that event the men were to be sent to the galleys and the women became liable to equally heavy penalties. Despite these severe conditions, few Huguenots abandoned their faith, though many fled the country. This harsh policy of limited toleration was maintained until the outbreak of the French Revolution a century later.

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