Stack Annex JC 585 H73 ROGRESS OF FREEDOM . If. ear he was provoked, by the admission of fondness for skepticism by Erasmus, to say: "It is characteristic of a Christian's mind to delight in assertions. The Christian wishes to be as certain as possible, even in things that are unnecessary and out- side of Scripture. Take away assertions, and you have taken away Christianity." He was too kind-hearted to have any man killed for mere opinions; but he tried to have Zwingli's adherents banished, and among his last books is one advising that the Jews be enslaved and the synagogues burned. His disciples sent heretic after heretic to the scaffold. Interest in theology became so keen all over Germany as to bring on her, during the seventeenth century, the worst war ever waged for re- ligion, while the great poets of the sixteenth, Hutten, Sachs and Fischart, had no successor until long after- wards. It is doubtful whether any German painter has yet appeared equal to Luther's contemporaries, Holbein, Durer and Cranach; and there is much truth in these lines of dough's (Amours de Voyage, Canto I. v.): "Luther, they saj", was unwise; like a half-taught German, he could not See that old follies were passing most tranquilly out of re- membrance." "He mu..t, forsooth, make a fuss, and distend his huge Witten- berg lungs and Bring back Theology once yet again in a flood upon Europe." Nowhere was this deluge more destructive than at Geneva, where religious interests became so absorbing that Calvin was able to establish such proscription of amusements as had never before been attempted. A woman was whipped for singing ordinary words to a 18 SKETCHES OF THE psalm tune; and among the criminals sent to prison were a whole family who had allowed dancing at a wed- ding, a bride who had gone to church with her hair hanging down too far, and a man who had read an in- decent book. Four hundred people were punished, in 1558 and 1559, for dancing, laughing in church, dress- ing loo gaily, and similar offences. Novel-reading, theatricals and games of chance, were strictly prohib- ited, and staying away from church became criminal for the first time in history. Desire to obey the Bible literally caused a hundred and fifty witches to be burned within sixty years, and it was at Calvin's request that a citizen of Geneva, named Gruet, was put on the rack for disrespect to the clergy, and beheaded as a blasphemer. A paper had been found in his house, proving that he had written these shocking words: "If I wish to dance and enjoy myself, what have just laws to do with that? Nothing." The cross-examination brought out his disbelief that the State has any right to punish conduct which injures no one, however contrary to scripture. He was also charged at his trial with disbelief in Moses; but it was not until some years after his execution that he was discovered to have written a manuscript, which was promptly destroyed, and which was said to be grossly anti-Christian by the bigot who afterwards bore false witness against Servetus. Gruet's real offence was die- like of persecution ; and the wickedness of shedding his bloed was aggravated by the failure of his petition, con- ceding that he had done wrong and promising amend- ment, to find such favor with Calvin and the magistrates of Geneva a& would probably have been given by the Inquisition. PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 19 Calvin's most famous victim was Servetus, who had been obliged to take refuge in France under an assumed name because he had published a book which Luther called horribly wicked. He had asserted that the per- sons in the Trinity are merely attributes, insisted on the necessity of morality, and denied the pre-existence of Jesus. In his exclusion from Protestant lands he be- came a physician, and discovered that the blood moves through the lungs. He aroused no opposition among Catholics by teaching that the only way to understand the Bible or any other book correctly, is to accept it as written directly for readers in the author's own day. This success made him venture to write his "Restora- tion of Christianity," where he treated the principal rites and doctrines of both Protestants and Catholics with unprecedented boldness. He sent a copy in man- uscript to Calvin, who wrote to one of his friends a let- ter, still extant, declaring that if the author should ever come to Geneva, "I will never suffer him to depart alive." Servetus wrote soon after to another clergy- man: "I am sure I shall die fcr this; but I do not falter in soul, for I would be a disciple like the Master." The book was printed secretly in France, where Servetus resided, but all the copies were seized before any could be sold, and he was arrested as the author. This was in consequence of a letter from Geneva, de- claring that the physician ought to be burned alive. He was discharged for lack of evidence, but the case against him became complete when his letters to Calvin were seat on by the latter to be used by the Inquisition. Servetus was then confined in prison, but he escaped, and spent some months wandering to and fro. The news that he was in hiding at Geneva was brought one 20 SKETCHES OF THE Sunday to Calvin, who had him arrested that very day. The only charge against him was his opinions; these had never been published or uttered in Geneva, and no heretic was liable to any penalty worse than banish- ment by her laws, but he was at once put on trial for his life. The leading prosecutor was Calvin, who also preached against Servetus and wrote a letter expressing the hope that he would be put to death. The charges presented against him were drawn up by Calvin, and in- cluded disrespect toward the latter, sedition in fleeing from the Inquisition, irreverence toward the Old Testa- ment, denial of the pre-existence of Jesus, of the dam- nation of unbaptized babies, and of the efficacy of in- fant baptism, as well as disbelief in immortality. The last charge was utterly false, and was promptly denied by Servetus, who asked in vain for legal advice. He pleaded that he had done nothing worse than suggest abstruse problems to scholars and that heretics ought not to be put to death. A violent discussion on that point took place between him and Calvin, who re- peated the false charge of disbelf in immortality when he drew up a new list of heresies, mainly about pre- existence, for consideration by the ministers and magis- trates of Basel, Bern, Schaffhausen and Zurich. They decided in favor of capital punishment, and the court of magistrates at Geneva voted that Servetus be burned alive, according to an ancient law which had been re- pealed ten years before. Calvin tried to have the sword substituted for the stake; but Servetus perished in the flames, with a crown of leaves and straw covered with sulphur on his head, and at his waist a printed copy of his last book, together with the manuscript which he had loaned to Calvin and had been unable to recover. PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 21 Green wood was used to prolong his sufferings, which lasted half an hour. With him perished every copy but two of his book, which was known only by name until late in the eighteenth century, while his discovery about the blood, fully stated therein, had to be made anew and published independently. His murder was cen- sured severely by advanced thinkers like Castalio and the uncle of that Socinus who became the founder of Socinianism, but most of the orthodox approved of burn- ing Secvetus. The Reformation had already passed beyond its second period, that of reactionary conservatism with incidental persecution. This was all the more cruel on account of the alarm created among both Catholics and Protest- ants by the Anabaptists, revolutionary mystics, among whom there was much opposition to ail ceremonies, dogmas and institutions. The third and last stage of the Reformation, its bloody period, began with the re- ligious war of 1546, in Germany, and closed there with the thirty years' war in 1648. The burning of Servetus, in 1553, was soon surpassed in horror by the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. War after war cursed France dur- ing the latter part of this century; and it was only by losing thousands of lives, both on the scaffold and in battle, and suffering every other calamity, that the Dutch achieved political and mental independence. In England, the Reformation had no years of hero- ism and no religious wars before 1642. Between that year and 1558, when persecutions of Protestants ceased at the accession of Elizabeth, there was a lucid inter- val when there was much less controversy than on the Continent, and much more progress in manufactures, commerce, literature and science. Subordination of 22 SKETCHES OF THE theological to practical interests was easy because the Reformation had been much more closely confined in England than in Germany to attacking the rapacity of the clergy. The people were satisfied with the old creeds and ceremonies, and the bishops said that no "notable person" had fallen into heresy in their time. They did complain that some "idle fellows of corrupt intent" were propagating Luther's views; and punish- ment of this offence by burning alive was occasionally inflicted during the period of sixteen years, beginning with 1531. In that year, however, the convocation of the clergy were forced by King Henry VIII. to acknowl- edge him as supreme and only Head of the Church, and they concurred soon after with Parliament in allow- ing him to put away his wife. This he did to gratify a lawless love which found no approval at Rome; but the authority of the pope was renounced by Parliament at the same time that an oath was imposed acknowl- edging that the divorce was legal, that the children by the new marriage were heirs to the crown, and that the king was Head of the Church. Among the Catholics beheaded for refusing to do violence to conscience by swearing thus was the author of "Utopia." The breach with Rome was made irreparable by th suppression of the abbeys; for the wealth thus acquired was for the most part given to influential people, whose refusal to make restitution committed them to hostility against the pope. It is probable that love of spoil was quite as powerful with Parliament and with the king himself as horror at the vices of the monks and nuns. Neither they nor the parish priests were permitted to marry during the reign of Henry VIII.; the doctrine of justification by faith alone continued under condem- PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 23 nation, and opposition to auricular confession or tran- substautiation remained a capital crime. The saintly Anne Ascue was burned for such heresy in 1546. The circulation of the Bible in English was permitted but not much encouraged by the government. The servil- ity of Parliament was increased, as the withdrawal of the abbots made the lay peers a majority in the House of Lords, where they had hitherto been greatly out- numbered; but this made it easy for both houses to support the king in a policy which, despite its intoler- ance, was utterly irreligious. The English Reforma- tion was not directed like the German and Swiss agi- tations, against the theology of Rome, but rather against her rapacity. Too little was done to check the vices of the clergy and too much to encourage those of the king. Protestantism did advance in England for half-a- dozen years after the death of Henry VIII., but it was checked by the accession, in 1553, three months before the burning of Servetus, of a queen who soon became infamous as the Bloody Mary. Her atrocities began the same year, 1555, that the Protestants obtained tol- eration in Germany, and that Philip II. became ruler of the Netherlands in place of his father, who had already put to death fifty thousand heretics in Holland and Belgium. Persecution ceased in England with the life of the queen in 1558, when the great majority of the people, and even of the priests, renounced Catholi- cism as coolly as they had given up Protestantism but five years and four months earlier. Neither religion had any firm hold of the people's heart. There had been altogether too much servility, rapacity and profli- gacy among the prominent representatives of both 24 SKETCHES OF THE forms of faith, and Catholicism had of late years shown itself hatefully cruel. The Reformation had not yet been established as completely in England as it was in Geneva, northern Germany and the Scandinavian lands; but, on the other hand, it had not been suppressed so thoroughly as was the case in southern Europe. Neither its suppression nor its establishment proved favorable to the advance of the Renaissance. That great secularization of 1 bought had been carrying everything before it at the beginning of the century to the rapid promotion of tol- eration as well as of literature, art, commerce and in- dustrial prosperity; but these activities were now ar- rested everywhere except in England. That country was so far from Italy, the cradle of the Renaissance, and, as yet, so illiterate, that English literature was still in its infancy. Great industrial progress was going on, however, aa we shall see later; and it will then be shown how England succeeded before the end of the century in combining a little more of the Reformation with a great deal more of the Renaissance. This en- bled the nation to produce Shakespeare, Bacon and their brilliant contemporaries at a time when there was no other literature of equal value. If England had had more martyrs she might had fewer poets. The peculiar circumstances under which Elizabeth mounted the throne in 1558 were so much in harmony with her own taste and character, as well as with the wishes of her people, as to enable the nation to hold throughout her reign a position singularly favorable, not only to the general prosperity but to the brilliant success of those great dramas, poems, novels, histories and scientific works, which were published in England PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 25 during the glorious years beginning A.D. 1587 and closing A.D. 1620. Marlowe's "Tamburlane" was acted in 1587 and Bacon's "Novum Organum" was printed in 1520. How singularly fortunate the English were during her reign is plain from a comparison of their condition with that of the neighboring nations. Ireland was still sunk in mediaeval darkness and destitution. The Scandinavian kingdoms had received the Reformation without the Renaissance, and the latter government gained very little from the establishment of Protes- tanism in Scotland by insurrection in 1560. Reaction against the Reformation had led to its suppression in Spain and Italy, as well as to destruction of the origi- nality and brilliancy of the Renaissance. Philip II. was already persecuting the Netherlander most cruelly and France was soon to be rent asunder by the plan which he had made in conspiracy with her king and the Pope for destroying all the Protestants everywhere. The toleration which had been introduced by L'Hop- ital was frustrated in 1562 by a bloody attack on Hu- guenots engaged in worship, and fighting went on with but short intermission until 1594, when Paris opened her gates to the new king, whose title was recognized throughout France and even at Rome, Henry of Na- varre. Instead of the nine Huguenot wars, during these thirty-two years, enumerated by historians, it is better to speak of two. The lesser, in which Coligni was leader, ended with the truce of St. Germain in 1570. The greater, under Henry of Navarre, began soon after the massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572, when Coligni was among the twenty thousand slaugh- tered heretics. Indignation at this butchery brought 26 SKETCHES OF THE those liberal Catholics who called themselves "the Politic" to support Henry of Navarre, but conformity to the Church of Borne was exacted before he was allowed to give peace to France and nearly eighty years of toleration to the Huguenots. There was so much bigotry on both sides during these wars as to strengthen that tendency to irreligion which caused sixty editions of Rabelais to be published in the sixteenth century. An author was hung soon after the massacre of 1572 for declaring that there is more happiness for the sceptic, who never believes nor disbelieves but is incessantly in doubt, than for all the believers. There was nothing but popularity, however, for Montaigne, who took sides against the Huguenots, but who won readers all over Europe for his brilliant "Essays," published in 1580, and irresistibly severe against execution of heretics, torture of criminals and belief in witchcraft. His longest and ablest chapter is devoted to proving that it is for our happiness to keep our minds in as complete suspense and freedom from all pressure of authority as is permitted by the church that rules us. The mottoes still legible on the walls of his study are in harmony with many passages, espe- cially in his latest "Essays," like these: "I hate every kind of tyranny;" "Assertion and obstinacy are special marks of stupidity;" "He who contradicts me is my teacher, for the cause of truth is mine as well as his;" "Contrary opinions do not hurt or offend me but only keep me in practice and wide awake." One year later the Dutch declared themselves inde- pendent of the mighty monarch who had planned the universal destruction of Protestantism and had sent Alva to the Netherlands, where the duke had eighteen PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 27 thousand heretics executed with atrocious tortures. Just before the massacre of St. Bartholomew, a revolt had broken out in Holland and been punished that same year, 1572, by sacking cities amid such outrages as are not tolerated at present in war, and butchering prisoners by hundreds. The Spanish soldiers were the most terrible yet known, but the Dutch were ready to meet instant death or to endure the utmost pangs of famine in beleagured cities. Leyden actually held out for weeks after all wholesome food was exhausted, and while people were dying of hunger and pestilence by thousands daily, until the liberators were enabled to sail in on a flood which the peasants and farmers let in cheerfully to destroy their own fields. The Dutch were better sailors, as well as better patriots, than the Span- iards; and the latter were driven finally out of Holland in 1590, the same year that Henry of Navarre gained the decisive battle of Ivry over the league of bigoted Catholics. The success of the Dutch is particularly gratifying, because they were champions of liberty, not for them- selves alone, but for all mankind. Their leader, Wil- liam of Orange, began publicly, in 1566, his efforts to make Catholics and Protestants trust each other as broth- ers. During the twelve years from the beginning of the war against Catholic persecutors, in 1572, until his murder by a Catholic assassin, he insisted sternly that peaceable Catholics should not be molested. Protes- tants preached against him for this as a man without religion; but he went on to establish toleration in 1577 for Romanists, and in 1578 for even Anabaptists, who were thought elsewhere to be fit only to be burned alive. He was advised to exclude them from citizen- 28 SKETCHES OF THE ship because they would not swear allegiance to the republic of which he was chief magistrate ; but he re- fused indignantly, saying: "Their yea is as good as our oath." "Our pot," he added, "has not gone to the fire so often as that of our enemies, but when the time comes it will be black enough." His authority prevailed all the easier because the Spaniards were so strong that no recruit against them could safely be rejected on account of differences in religion; and one of the first results of peace was active commerce of the Dutch, not only with Lutheran, Epis- copalian and Catholic lands, but with Eussia, Turkey and India. This toleration became^one of the funda- mental principles of the republic. Before the close of the century, Holland made a treaty with the Sultan, and allowed synagogues to be built by the Jews, who were still totally excluded or else wickedly oppressed by every Christian nation but this. In deciding not to punish people for differences about religion, the Dutch were at least a century in advance of every other Protestant nation, two in advance of Catholic Europe, and more than three in advance of Kussia. Holland at once adopted the correction of the calendar introduced by Pope Gregory XIII. in 1582, Protestant Germany yielded in 1700, but England held out until 1752, preferring to make believe that events took place eleven days earlier than was actually the case, rather than be set right by a pope. Protestantism on the whole, however, was much more friendly than Catholicism to the advance of knowledge. Ssaroely had Galileo proved by aid of the telescope that the earth moves around the sun, when he was told at Rome that both the Church and the Bible required him PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 29 to keep silence. He evaded the injunction, and was summoned to Some in 1633, when he was threatened with torture by a court over which the pope presided, forced to recant, and sentenced to imprisonment for life. The Church put his book, as well as that of Co- pernicus, under a ban, which was not repealed before 1835. It was in that intensely Catholic city, Toulouse, that the last noted author who was condemned to death for writing irreverently, Vanini, was strangled at the stake in 1619. He had aggravated his guilt by denying that there could be ghosts, witches, or possession by devils, and even suggesting that negroes sprang from apes, and men generally from the lower animals. Another skeptical Italian, Giordano Bruno, found his arguments in support of Copernicus received favorably at Oxford, but punished by expulsion from Paris. The comparatively tolerant city of Venice suffered him to be arrested by the Inquisition, and Kome sentenced him to the fiery death which he met most bravely on Thurs- day, February 17, 1600. Among his crimes was main- taining that there is more than one inhabitable world ; and he was also charged with disbelief in Christianity. His faith in the unity of all phenomena and the sov- ereignty of transcendent laws made him very skeptical about miracles, as may be seen in his "Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast." This allegory was written "to hasten the time when good deeds shall no longer be thought worthless for salvation, nor credulity be hon- ored more than wisdom." It is proposed that the pole- star be called "Truth," that the names "Toleration" and "Liberty of Thought" be given to prominent con- stellations, and that the Northern Crown bear the name of some future destroyer of that pernicious sect which 30 SKETCHES OF THE thinks morality worthless and sin foreordained. This dialogue also protests against that inequality of property which allows some to feast while others starve. In an- other work he declares that nothing ennobles the soul like love of truth. "What path of truth he followed is shown by his satire on credulity, which may be trans- lated from the Italian thus: "O saintly Asininity, O pious foolishness 1 More mighty thou to lead the sonl in paths of righteousness Than all our pride of intellect, which ne'er can entrance gain To heaven. There the student's toil is all accounted vain ; But there thou buildest palaces in which no scholars dwell. Ah, what availeth the attempt Dame Nature's ways to tell, And find out if the stars are flames, or only lands and seas? The holy Asininity cares not for facts like these. Her knees are bent ; her hands are clasped ; she looketh up to him From whom she hopes eternal rest, when Wisdom's crown is dim." That so advanced a thinker as Giordano Bruno was received exceptionally well in England is precisely what might have been expected from a nation where there had been but little opposition, either to the sub- stitution of Catholicism for Protestantism in 1553, or to the repudiation of Catholicism in 1558. The cruelty recently displayed by the old Church had made her deeply hated in England; but Protestantism had not yet been preached there freely, except during the britf reign of Edward VI., and its chief supporters had beeu Somerset, who sent his brother to the scaffold for such ambition as soon brought on his own execution, and Northumberland, who confessed as he was about to die the death of a traitor that he had always been a Catho- lic at heart. Literary habits were not yet common in PBOGRES8 OF FREEDOM. 31, England, but Erasmus, Ariosto and Kabelais won more readers than Luther or Calvin. The people were still fond of Catholic rites and ceremonies, with the excep- tion of the burnt-offerings; but there was a decided ob- jection to paying more tribute to Kome, or placing the clergy again above the laws of the land. It was this neutral condition of popular feeling which enabled a girl of twenty-five to make the Church of England substantially what it has continued to be down to the present day. Elizabeth's own religion was mod- erately Catholic, bur her title was exclusively Protest- ant. The Church of Rome had never sanctioned the marriage which made her heir to King Henry VIII. ; the pope declared her to be a usurper as well as a bas- tard; and her firmest supporters clung to her as the only refuge from having a persecutor of Protestantism on the throne. This state of things outweighed thoge tastes, implanted by early education, which made her delight in the pomp of the Catholic ritual, worship the Virgin to the last in a closet where candles burned be- fore a crucifix, and oppose marriage of priests all through her reign. Her dislike of Protestantism was kept alive by the revolutionary tendency which it dis- played in Scotland as well as on the continent, and she had no wish to give King Philip any excuse for attack- ing England, as he finally did. She had to favor Prot- estantism more than Catholicism, or her reign would have been very short; but the rites which she and her court celebrated most zealously were held in honor of Ap'ollo and the Muses. One of her first measures was to stop the persecution of Protestants; but the new laws against heresy were so framed as not to touch Roman Catholics. Anabaptists, 32 SKETCHES OF THE Unitarians and Atheists, however, remained liable to the fiery penalty, for such views were considered dan- gerous to the State. Performance of Catholic ceremo- nies, even in private, was promptly forbidden, and ab- sence from church became punishable by fine, but the "Order for Prayer," then imposed and still in use, says nothing against the Church of Eome, and decidedly fa- vors her position that morality is necessary for admit- tance to heaven. In fact, the English Catholics were so well satisfied that they asked the pope to permit them to attend service, a request which was prudently re- fused. Catholics and Protestants were on much better terms in England than anywhere else until 1577, when toleration was proclaimed in Holland. Elizabeth had reigned for ten years without putting a single heretic or traitor to death when a Catholic re- bellion broke out, in 1569, with the approval of the pope and at the instigation of Philip. The latter was thenceforth deep in conspiracies for her assassination. Many Romanists were beheaded as rebels or conspira- tors, an excuse which seems fairly applicable to the ex- ecution of Mary Stewart in 1587 but not to that of some subsequent victims, who died merely for worshiping as conscience ordained. No one was burned to death in this reign on account of religion before 1575, when this wicked penalty was inflicted on two Anabaptists. It was afterwards employed against two Unitarians and an Atheist. Few Englishmen knew what wide differences in religion could exist without becoming politically dan- gerous; and there must have been very little humanity in a nation where the queen did not lose her popularity by laughing heartily at a theatrical performance, in spite of its having been interrupted by an accident in PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 33 which three lives had been lost before her eyes. She never spared man or woman who blocked her way, but that way Was of the world worldly, and she never went out of it in order to persecute for the sake of religion. Among the results of the Catholic insurrection was the enactment in 1571 of the Thirty-nine Articles, which carried England finally out of the Koman Catholic Church. They repudiated some of the doctrines on which that Church still insists, and asserted that justi- fication must be by faith alone. They would have been imposed earlier, if it had not been for the opposition of the queen to the open wish of Parliament as well as of the clergy. It is supposed to be due to her that the first clause of Article XX. was inserted, to the abridg- ment of the rights of private judgment, as well as that the custom of bowing at the name of Jesus was retained ; and Episcopalians in America, as well as in England, still do what she wished. The passage of the Thirty-nine Articles in 1571 shows the strength of Puritanism in Parliament. The zealous Protestants, who had fled to Switzerland before the wrath of the Bloody Mary and returned to welcome Elizabeth, brought back with them not only Calvin's theology but his dislike of gorgeous ceremonies and of amusements. This ascetic tendency led, before the close of the century, to prohibition of recreation on Sunday. The day had hitherto been observed on ec- clesiastical authority as a Church festival, like Christ- mas, and had been selected for the coronation of seven English kings, while the name Sabbath was applied only to Saturday, according to New Testament usage. In 1595 a Puritan, named Bownde, introduced what an Episcopalian divine in the next century called "the 34 SKETCHES OF THE most bewitching error" and "the most popular deceit," of shuffling Sunday into the place held by Saturday among the Jews, and thus making Sunday amusements appear to be forbidden by God. The object of this claim was exposed by Bownde himself, as follows: 'This is the chiefest end of all government, that men might not profess what religion they list, and serve God after what manner it pleaseth them best, but that God's true worship might be set up everywhere, and all men compelled to stoop unto it." A controversy has been going on for the last three hundred years about what right government has to for- bid any man to spend Sunday in ways which seem per- fectly right to him, and which are generally considered so on six days of the week, but which his neighbors think irreligious on the seventh. In other words, has the community any more right to say to the individual, "You must abstain from amusements which we think irreligious," than to say, "You must observe all cere- monies which seem religious to us?" If the Puritans, as they were called as early as 1564 on account of their zeal for simplicity in worship, could have had their own way throughout the sixteenth cent- ury in England, her people might have become not only as thoroughly Sabbatarian as the Scotch, but as submis- sive to the clergy, as preoccupied with theology, as slow to produce any literature but political pamphlets, hymns and tracts, as intolerant of differences in religion, as eager for burning witches, and as destitute of other amusements. The magistrates of Edinburgh, accordiag to Eogers' "Social Life in Scotland," actually con- demned a man to be hanged, in July, 1667, for playing "Robin Hood," but he was rescued by the mechanics. PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 35 The best trait of the Puritans was brought out by their conviction that their religion was too sacred to be meddled with by any sovereign. The reputation of Queen Mary of Scotland was bad enough to strengthen their belief that peasants who are of God's elect have a perfect right to resist a monarch who is among the rep- robate*. Mary Stuart was deposed and imprisoned by the champions of the kirk, and her son found much dif- ficulty in maintaining his authority against so demo- cratic and popular an organization. Languet, a fugi- tive from French despotism, found a publisher in Edin- burgh, as well as in Basel, for his "Vindication of the Eights of the People." That same year, 1579, a Scotch- man named Buchanan published a book on "The Eight to Eeign." This right, he says, belongs only to &uch kings as have been elected by the nation and use their power for its good. The authority of the legislature is above that of the crown. A beneficent despot is as dangerous an example as an open-handed robber. All wicked kings are tyfants, and tyrants may justly be slain as enemies of mankind. The same position is maintained in the "History of Scotland," which Bu- chanan finished just before his death. He was told that his books would be prohibited by the king, but he replied: "Have I told the truth?" "You have," an- swered his friends. "Then I will abide his feud, and all his kin's." No such books could then be published in England, where the press was kept under strict restraint by Eliza- beth from the first. Her dauntless courage, high abil- ity and great popularity, at a time when the nation's chief desire was for a government strong enough to keep out the Spaniards, enabled her to rule more 36 SKETCHES OF THE despotically than any successor has done, except Oliver Cromwell. Her proclamations, prohibiting erection of houses near London, forbidding exportation of gram, and commanding Irishmen to return to Ireland, had the force of laws. Judges and jurymen did whatever she desired. Parliament did not meet as often as once in three years; members who displeased her were sent to the Tower; and ihe only instance in which she changed her course at the request of the House of Commons was a revocation of monopolies in 1601. No opposition was excited by the Act of 1563, in consequence of which wages were fixed by the magistrates, and kept so low that the laborers suffered sadly from poverty during two hundred and fifty years. Individual rights were so far respected in England, however, that the government was much less ready to meddle with a man's property than with his religion. Elizabeth knew that the Puritans were her most trusty subjects; and she allowed their favorite bock, the Geneva Bible, to have free circulation from the first; their peculiar dogmas were prescribed in the Thirty- nine Articles; an admonition against stage-plays, bear- baiting, and other amusements on Sundays was issued in 1580; and laws to the same effect were passed soon after. Amusements on other days, however, were pro- tected by the queen ; and so were many of the old holi- days and ceremonies which the people loved but which the Puritans wished to have suppressed. !NTo religious services could be held, except by clergymen approved fcy the government; and even then they were forbidden to meet for public discussion, or to preach without special license. The Archbishop of Canterbury was suspended for five years because he was slow to carry PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 37 out the royal purpose to check the growth of Protest- antism. This purpose found a fit agent in the next archbishop, who began in 1583 a system of repression, which was so vigorously sustained by the court of high commission, as well as by the censors of the press, that many of the ablest and most zealous clergymen in the Church of England were driven out of the pulpit. The people had already become much dissatisfied with the immorality and inefficiency of many of the pastors appointed by the nobles and bishops; and secret societies were organized about 1570, not only of Gongregationalists but also of Presbyterians. The latter followed Calvin so closely as to declare that all heretics, however penitent, ought to be put to death. They were at first openly in favor of suppressing every form of worship except their own, but they found the Church of England BO mighty that they soon, concluded to shelter themselves under her vestments until they became strong enough to rule as despotically as they had done in Scotland since 1560. The right of every congregation to choose not only its pastor but its creed and ritual was maintained all the more vigorously against both Episcopalians and Presbyterians because this plan was actually followed, with the approval of Elizabeth and her bishops, by refugees from Holland and Belgium, who were also permitted to dispense with the Book of Common Prayer. Foremost in organizing English congregations on this model was Eobert Browne, who adopted the Dutch doc- trine of universal liberty of worship. He and his ad- herents were treated, despite Raleigh's protest in Par- liament, with such severity that they retaliated by circulating furious pamphlets against the bishops. Two 38 SKETCHES OF THE clergymen, a lawyer, a shoemaker and a tailor were hung for this offence. Browne and many others took refuge in Holland, where they could worship freely. Those who remained behind had to endure petty persecutions which finally drove some to emigration across the At- lantic and others to rebellion. Elizabeth's success in restraining Puritanism from becoming inconveniently popular was largely due to the fact that she reigned in a century when the title, "Merry England," could be used much more justly than ever before. Englishmen were at peace among themselves from 1485 to 1640, and were thus enabled to make their land twice as productive as it had been previously, to enlarge greatly their fisheries and to gain much success as manufacturers, especially of woolen goods. London became the centre of the world's com- merce about 1580. English ships opened a lucrative trade at this time not only with Turkey and Egypt but also with India, which had been, since 1556, under a philanthropic monarch who recognized the equal rights of all religions. Russia had been reached long before by way of the Arctic Sea, and piracy in the Gulf of Mexico proved highly profitable to its patrons, among whom was Elizabeth herself. English sailors saved their country, in 1588, from a terrible invasion by de- feating the Armada. Scarcity of opportunities for safe investment caused much of the wealth acquired by Englishmen in the six- teenth century to be spent on luxuries and amusements. Gloomy caatles were transformed to stately palaces as the Elizabethan style took the place of the Gothic. Houses of the better class became well supplied with glass windows, chimneys, stoves, tapestry, sheets, PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 39 pillows, pewter platters, and table-knives by the year 1580. Tobacco was introduced soon after. Choice kinds of meat were used freely, as may be seen from Shakespeare's account of Justice Shallow's supper. Nearly a hundred kinds of wine were imported, and the London brewers made three or four barrels of beer a year for every man, woman and child within reach. Women followed eagerly the example of Queen Eliza- beth, who left three thousand gowns behind her. Fash- ions changed frequently; and costly silks, laces and jewels were thought as necessary for gentlemen as for ladies. Rich and poor delighted in the Christmas fes- tivities as well as in the out-door sports of May Day, and these latter were then peculiarly pleasant because they were delayed, by an error in the calendar, to what was really May ^,1 V The Puritans were unable to pre- vent the erection of a theatre at London in 1576; and what they called "the horrible vice of pestiferous danc- ing" continued to be a favorite amusement of all classes. Gorgeous pageants were frequent. Wander- ing minstrels and strolling players were so popular everywhere as to be checked by special statute. The national fondness for music led to the composition of innumerable songs, and Elizabeth never represented her people more fitly than when she presided Joyfully at the performance of one of those gorgeous masques which were forerunners of the opera. Where both queen and people were so fond of worldly pleasure, there was little hearing for the Puri- tans, who held that music "depraveth the mind," and that fiddlers, minstrels and musicians, like actors and dancers, were "a wicked brood." Here, as elsewhere, the Episcopal Church was so non-committal as to be 40 SKETCHES OF THE able to hold her own during a large part of the next century against the exacting champions of a more con- sistent Protestantism; and the supremacy of her oppo- nents was so brief that England can scarcely be said to have ever become thoroughly Protestant to the extent in which Scotland became so in 1560 and Geneva in 1541. If Puritantism had been supreme during the latter part of the sixteenth century that period would in all probability have been much richer in theologians and much poorer in poets. Shakespeare and his contem- poraries would have had little occasion to write plays or even songs; Bacon might have confined his literary labors to translating Psalms, for his brilliant and suc- cessful works would have been too obnoxiously worldly; and Spencer might not have dared to indulge his taste for romantic imagery and Koman Catholic ethics to the extent needed for producing "The Faery Queen." England's literature might have been almost as desti- tute of melody, beauty, brilliancy and vivacity as that of Scotland at this time, or of New England before the Eevolutionary War. On the other hand, if Elizabeth had accepted the hand of Philip II., and succeeded, with his help and that of the Jesuits, in making England as narrowly Catholic as Spain, or even Italy, the English literature of this period would certainly have lacked the original- ity and daring which are its peculiar charms. Bacon with his contemporaries, Gilbert and Harvey, might have been silenced like Galileo. Spenser, Shakespeare and other poets might have been restricted too closely to conventional and ecclesiastical standards to do their best work. It is also possible that a civil war furious PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 41 enough to extinguish literary life would have been ex- cited by efforts of the Church of Eome to recover the lands which had been confiscated by Henry VIII. and his adherents. Nothing conld have been better adapted than the supremacy of a thoroughly worldly taste for business and amusements, with the approval of a State Church, Protestant enough to exclude Eomanism with- out encouraging Puritanism, for building up that im- mortal literature which is rightly called Elizabethan. Much of its best work was done after the queen's death ; but it was all the legitimate result of principles which she made supreme. Thus modern literature retained in England that power of depicting mundane realities and promoting mental vigor which it pesseaeed origin- ally, but lost elsewhere. That English literature became remarkably bold and independent after the defeat of the Armada, in 1588, was due partly to the nation's pride at this vietory and at others achieved by English sailors, partly to satisfac- tion with the general prosperity of the people, and partly to a growing admiration of the determination of the Puritans to write and worship as they thought. This upward tendency of literature was greatly strength- ened by the peculiar requirements of its most popular forms. A successful tragedy must give opportunity to see pathetic situations as well as to hear impassioned speech; and the spectators in England hare always in- sisted on having battles, single conflicts, murders, riots and other impressive incidents acted out before their eyes, and not merely recounted afterwards. The need of having something done as well as said on the stage is even greater in comedy, where the exhibition of ridiculous characters and funny incidents has always 4? SKETCHES OF TIIE been found as necessary as the utterance of witty or absurd remarks, and where heroes and heroines must not only say but do what is interesting and agreeable. It was in conformity with artistic requirements that the founder of English tragedy, Marlowe, "master of the mighty line," enabled the spectators of "Tambur- laine" to see the rebel shepherd, whose courage had made him a mighty monarch, ride in a chariot drawn by captive kings. Another early drama showed upon the stage how a legitimate king of England had been not only deposed for misrule by Parliament but mur- dered. The most impressive plays which Shakespeare produced before 1601 were the eight whose spectators saw how their ancestors had risen in rebellion against King John, Kichard II., Henry IV., Henry VI., Ed- ward IV., and Eichard III.; how one of these sover- eigns was deposed by the Lords and Commons, how another was slain in battle by his own subjects, and how three others were put to death. Some of the rebels, for instance, Warwick, the king-maker, and Hotspur, "confident against a world in arms," are re- markbly picturesque; and among the grandest figures which Shakespeare drew are the regicides, Macbeth, Brutus and Hamlet. No spectator could doubt that the king of Denmark was "justly served," as is plainly declared to be the case. The same lesson was taught by Beaumont and Fletcher in "The Maid's Tragedy," where Evadne slays her king on the stage for treating her according to royal custom, even in England, and where the rebels against him are pardoned by his suc- cessor. This last play, like the earliest editions of Hamlet, were all the more effective for appearing in the seventeenth century, after the despotism of PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 43 beth had been resisted successfully by Parliament. "Kichard III." had already been brought upon the stage by Essex, to encourage his unsuccessful rebellion. Shakespeare himself, however, did not care enough for Magna Charta to refer to it in "King John." The noble champion of the people's rights, who was nicknamed "Jack Cade," is caricatured grossly and deliberately in "Henry VI." Coriolanus and Julius Cseaar are made to seem much less guilty than they really were, according to authorities whom Shakes- peare usually follows blindly. He used regicide and rebellion merely as stage properties; and thus he served the cause of freedom better than he could have done with a patriotic purpose. He called up heroes from the past in order to attract spectators, and his voice awakened liberty. All the patriotism of the Puritans does not win a word from him except ridicule; and his comedies are excessively aristocratic compared with others of that date. In Decker's "Shoemakers' Holiday," for in- stance, a cobbler of low birth becomes Lord Mayor of London by honest industry, and feasts his old friends in company with his king. The high-born heroine of this play is in love with a young shoemaker, but is to be inveigled into an aristocratic marriage. Before the wedding procession enters the church it is attacked by a mob of mechanics, who expose the plot and drive the gentleman off the stage. In another comedy, the keeper of the village pound wins the heart of an heir- ess away from an earl, and finding that his rival is plotting against the state, takes him and other traitors prisoner single-handed, saying, "A poor man that is true Is better than an earl, if he be false." 44 SKETCHES OF THE The view of women's rights in "The Taming of the Shrew" does not favor the supposition that when Shakespeare made seven of his damsels don male attire, he had any object but variety in costume, humor in situation as well as in dialogue, and good acting of parts which were then taken by boys in deference to Puritanical prejudice. Some of the best traits of Queen Elizabeth may be copied in Beatrice, and some of the worst in Lady Macbeth. The crown of England had descended from on of the manliest of women to one of the meanest of kings when Beaumont and Fletcher filled their stage with British soldiers led against inva- ders by a heroic queen. In Fletcher's sequel to "The Taming of th Shrew," Petruchio takes a second wife after Katherine's death, but is shut out of the house after the wedding by a band of women who force him to surrender at discretion. The heroine of "Love's Care" has been brought up in camp, and can never see a fight without rushing into it. Twice she saves her lovar's life, sword in hand, before affection softens her into womanhood. Her brother has been brought up as a girl, and does not dare to look at a sword or go out alone after dark. Even falling in love is not enough to make him brave without the additional stimulus of the sight of his father in deadly peril. This last drama was founded, like one by Middleton, entitled, "The Bearing Girl," on the adventures of a lady of high character named Mary Frith, who might have done much in aid of a protest, published about this time, against the right of husbands to beat their wives. Marlowe's reputation for unbelief must have in- creased the effect of Faust's calling hell a fable, and of Tamburlaine's declaring that Nature PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 45 / -'Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds," "Still climbing after knowledge infinite." Death is called an eternal sleep by this dramatist, and the same view is expressed more than a dozen times by Shakespeare, who is not following either artistic or historical requirements in putting such language into the mouths of Brutus, Hamlet, Prospero, Lear, Borneo, Friar Ludowick, Eichard II., and the widow of Ed- ward IV. The words, "Miracles are ceased," are so eut of place in the mouth of the mediaeval archbishop, who is made to speak them to a bishop, that we must suppose them to be the author's own opinion. This seems also to be the case when Lucretia discovers, as she is preparing to kill herself, that the legitimate work of time is "To eat up errors by opinion bred ;" > "To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light," "To wake the morn and sentinel the night, To wrong the wronger, till he render right;" "To spoil antiquities of hammered steel, And turn the giddy round of Fortune's wheel." The same sympathy with revolt against the past is prominent in a tragedy which was an especial favorite with Emerson, "Coriolanus." The hero says: "What custom wills, in all things should we do 't, The dust on ancique time would lie unswept, And mountainous error be too highly heaped For truth to o'erpeer. Rather than fool it so Let the high office and the honor go !" These lines seem all the more Shakespearean because they are spoken by an aspirant for the consulship who is finding fault with the law requiring him to gain the 46 SKETCHES OF THE consent of the plebeians, and who afterwards demands so violently their exclusion from power that he is ban- ished as a traitor. There is as little sympathy with popular rights here as in the caricature of Jack Cade, already referred to, or in the passage of that play where the members of Parliament are called "rude, unpolished hinds," or in the eulogium of absolute monarchy and hereditary rank in "Troilus and Cressida" (I. 3). These plays are more favorable to the exaltation of exception- ally endowed individuals than to any recognition of universal rights. The independence demanded is no broader than that claimed by Carlyle; but even that was a desirable innovation three hundred years ago. Another dramatist, Chapman, wrote such plain dec- larations of the supremacy of the higher law as have seldom been surpassed. The third act of "Byron's Conspiracy" ends thus: "Give me a spirit that on life's rough sea Loves t' have his sails filled with a lusty wind," "There is no danger to a man that knows What life and death are : there's not any law Exceeds his knowledge ; neither is it lawful That he should stoop to any other law. He goes before them and commands them all, That to himself is a law rational." Chapman also says : "The mind hath in herself a deity." "Who to himself is law, no law doth need, Offends no law, and is a king indeed." ["Bussy D'Amhois," II. 1. "Free minds, like dice, fall square, whate'er the cast." "He's never down whose mind fights still aloft." ["Only a Just Man is a Free Man," III. 1. PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 47 "A virtuous man is subject to no prince, But to his soul and honor : which are laws That carry fire and sword within themselves, Never corrupted, never out of rule." The men who speak these lines are not particularly virtuous. Coriolanus leads his country's enemies against her in battle. Timon's hatred of mankind makes him join with the worst members of society in the hope of destroying the best. Most of the other people who appear in Shakespeare as completely eman- cipated from conventional restraints are drunkards, swindlers and libertines. History gave him Anthony, but not Falstaff, nor Antolycus, nor Stephano, nor Lucio, who "had as lief have the foppery of freedom as the morality of imprisonment," nor Sir Toby, who says to the administrator of a perfectly proper rebuke: "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" Thus Shakespeare and Chap- man proposed a problem, which is still extremely diffi- cult, but which must be solved before mankind can de- velop the highest possible form of social life, the prob- lem how to combine restraint enough for safety with freedom enough for progress. The most famous of lawless revellers, the inimitable Falstaff , is plainly drawn from the life, and is described as delighting in precisely such adventures and habits as are recorded of Shakespeare himself. The opinion, universal until recently and still predominant, that the plays were really written by the man whose name they have always borne, is favored by many other circum- stances. The knowledge displayed therein, consider- ing not only its excesses but its defects, is just what might be expected of a man who learned rapidly from conversation and desultory reading in several of the 48 SKETCHES OF THE modern languages, but had not much regular education. No one not familiar professionally with the theatre could then have met its requirements so successfully. And no subject of a queen so fond of the drama, and also of flattery, would have let any other man enjoy the credit of having written the lines in the "Midsummer Night's Dream" telling how Cupid failed in his aim "At a fair vestal throned by the west." It is particu- larly unlikely that so good a chance of gaining the queen's favor should have been thrown away by a man who had been striving after it vainly but eagerly for more than a dozen years like Francis Bacon, especially when a recent lord-chancellor was known to have owed his place in great measure to having pleased Elizabeth by writing a play. Hatton's example was actually fol- lowed by Bacon in dramatic performances of little merit at about the date of the "Midsummer Night's Dream." Shakespeare's genius is attested by his intimate friend, Jonson, and also by the near relatives who reared his monument. It is altogether unlikely that his fellow- actors were mistaken in publishing the plays as his. Not one of the works attributed to Shakespeare shows much knowledge of Bacon's favorite truth, the suprem- acy of science. This has saved many an Englishman from making his intuitions so completely his law as to disregard his neighbors' rights. Metaphysicians and theologians who took abstractions for realities found the authority of the Novum Organum to stand firm against them. The most famous passage of this mighty book shows what dangerous tendencies to dogmatism are produced by the habit of looking within for truth. Among these "Phantasms of the Tribe" and "Phan- tasms of the Den," as Bacon quaintly calls them, he PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 49 mentions preference for affirmations rather than nega- tions, disregard of facts not easily seen, and belief that agreeable propositions are more likely to be true than disagreeable ones. He also calls attention to such indi- vidual peculiarities as that one man has a prejudice for very old ideas and another for very new ones. To guard against such errors Bacon gives this practical ad- vice: "In general, let every student of Kature take this as a rule, that whatever his mind seizes and dwells upon with particular satisfaction, is to be held in sus- picion." Bacon admits that the best service which he did to science was in ringing the bell which called other peo- ple together to work for her, and he made no discovery to be. named in comparison with that of the earth's magnetism, by Gilbert, or of the circulation of the blood, by Harvey. Both were his contemporaries; but the time when scientific training could be acquired easily was still distant. Among other sayings by which he brought that time nearer was the warning that at- tempts to keep philosophy in harmony with religion must give undue authority to received theories and hin- der progress. To insist on explaining everything as part of the divine plan seems to him to be trying to glorify God by a lie. Turning from the "Novum Or- ganum" to earlier works we find a declaration, in his "Essays," that superstition is more prejudicial than Atheism to the development of morality, and also a plain denial of the right "to propagate religion by wars or sanguinary persecutions." He blames all attempts "to force conscience," or to punish any language not blasphemous or seditious; and he sees nothing worthy of death in what the Puritans wrote against the bishops. 50 SKETCHES OF THE His "New Atlantis" demands toleration for the Jews, whom both Shakespeare and Marlowe had treated in a way too much in conformity to popular prejudice. None of the famous Englishmen of this period seems to have realized that the greatest event of the century, except Lu*her's protest, was the establishment by the Dutch of political and religious liberty. The '-New Atlantis" was written to promote scientific study; and it might have done so if Bacon had not shown himself singularly unable to make imaginary people interesting. When we further consider the badness of the verses which he acknowledged as his own, for instance, the "Translation of Certain Psalms," it is hard to believe that he wrote the most musical of songs and the most effective of dramas. Whether the greatest of dramatists was named Bacon or Shakespeare is of little importance, however, in com- parison with the fact that almost all the plays written in English have conformed so thoroughly to the na- tional taste as to deal mainly with our outer life and mundane aspiration. Novels, histories and books of travel have worked in the same direction ever since the invention of printing, and nowhere more successfully than in England where literature has always been more cheerful, healthy, and practically useful than elsewhere. Much of the richness and beauty of the Elizabethan period was soon lost, on account of a temporary ascend- ency of Puritanism; but the nineteenth century has shown even more plainly than the sixteenth how much can be done by delight in this world and by endeavor to be happy here, to make life and literature strong, sunny and glorious. PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 51 The foremost champioMS of political liberty during the beventeenth century were the Puritans. They op- posed the mighty Elizabeth with success in 1601, and waged open war against her contemptible successor, who began his reign by imprisoning clergymen for a petition to make the church ceremonies more purely Protestant. Their faith, that their religion was too sa- cred for any king to be allowed to check its growth, soon developed into conviction that there was a divine sanction for their political rights also. They did not object to his sending a Unitarian and a Baptist to the stake, with a declaration that heretics "ought to be burned with fire," nor to his silencing Selden, a histo- rian who had ventured to assert that "Liberty of in- quiry is the only way which, in all kinds of studies, leads to the sanctuary of truth." James I. was not, however, permitted to enforce the claim which he had made in one of his books while only king of Scotland, that he was above the law. His first Parliament in England promptly denied his asser- tion that it sat merely by his permission. His wish to tolerate the Catholics was checked, partly by the attempt of some of the most fanatical to assassinate both him and bis Parliament, and partly by the protest of the Commons against his making laws without their con- sent. There was a fierce contest about the constitu- tionality of his collecting revenue by his own authority alone. The Londoners opposed him, and he threatened to depart from their city and take his judges away with him; but the lord mayor replied that the citizens hum- bly desired his majesty to leave them the Thames. His refusal to take part in the long war against Ca- thahcism in Germany made his unpopularity greater 52 SKETCHES OF THE than ever; and Parliament seized upon an opportunity to intimidate those foes of freedom who were assisting him to violate the constitution. Bacon was impeached for taking bribes while sitting as judge, and confessed his guilt. He was expelled from his post of lord-chan- cellor and sentenced to an enormous fine, as well as to imprisonment; but these penalties were remitted by the king whom he had served too loyally. A vigorous pro- test in favor of the right of members of Parliament to free speech was adopted that same year, 1621. The king erased the record with his own hand and impris- oned the leading supporters of the measure, among whom were Pym and Coke. Public opinion was so much against him, however, that he was obliged, before the close of his reign, not only to promise to have more respect for the wish of Parliament, especially as re- garded foreign affairs, but to suffer one of his ministers, the Earl of Middlesex, to be convicted of bribery and other misdemeanors by the House of Lords. The con- demnation of Bacon and Middlesex involved that of their master. The next king, Charles I., tried to levy contributions in the form of loans, and imprisoned Hampden and other patriots who refused to lend; but he was forced to grant the Petition of Bights, and his powers of ex- tortion were thus much diminished. He still insisted on collecting tariff duties without parliamentary sanc- tion, but the House of Commons voted that whoever should advise this, or even pay the money voluntarily, would be a public enemy. The same condemnation was pronounced upon all who should favor disbelief in election and reprobation, or permit other innovations in religion. Dissenters from Calvinism had been obliged, PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 63 like Roman Catholics and supporters of Episcopal gov- ernment, to advocate absolute monarchy in order to have the help of the king and courtiers against the Pu- ritans; and these last continued so intolerant that many friends of religious liberty were short-sighted enough to take sides against the champions of political freedom. The foremost advocate of the vote just mentioned, Eliot, was imprisoned in the Tower for the rest of his life by Charles, who publicly declared his intention to rule without a Parliament. This he managed to do for eleven years, by refusing to aid the French or Ger- man Protestants against the Catholics, levying tariff duties and selling monopolies. Heavy fines were levied on men who refused to be knighted, or built houses in London, or violated forest laws which had become ob- solete. A penalty of 70,000 pounds was extorted from the city of London by the Star chamber, which inflicted many atrociously cruel punishments on Puritan authors. The High Commission, too, was on the watch for of- fenders against the Church; and the northern counties of England were stripped of political rights by the Roy- alist who afterwards became Earl of Strafford. These outrages were at first endured with little com- plaint; for even so bad a king was supposed to be a necessary evil, and dread of Puritan austerity was in- creased by sight of the indignation among the zealots, when attempts of local magistrates to suppress Sunday amusements called out the royal proclamation known as "The Book of Sports." The clergymen, however, whom Archbishop Laud removed by the hundred, either for refusing to read this proclamation in church or for not conforming to the pvMafcittf*t ritual, had many warm friends. There had been little sympathy 54 SKETCHES OF THE with Prynne when this author was punished, in 1634, for writing against the theatre, but there was a great deal three years later, when he and other Puritans were fined, mutilated, branded, pilloried and impris- oned for attacking the bishops; and the nation was with Hampden when he pleaded in court that same year, 1637, against the legality of collecting ship money. This tax for the navy had become obsolete, but had recently been revived, and it was enforced so generally as to bring in 200,000 annually, while the coasts were left without protection. England was not yet ready for rebellion, when an attempt to force Episcopalianism upon Scotland brought on a riot in Edinburgh on Sunday, Aug. 2, 1637. A Scottish army entered England, and won a battle against the king, who was unable to resist without asking help from Parliament. The first blows in a great war for liberty were struck by bigots, who held that toleration was blasphemously wicked, that all who did not belong to the kirk were "beastly slaves of Satan," and that "pleasures are most carefully to be avoided." This last principle they carried so far as to forbid children eight years old to play, and they denounced music, writing poetry, and bathing, especially on Sunday. They called men to account for rescuing shipwrecked sailors on that day, and women for watering vegetables likely to wither but they saved England. Their support made Parliament strong enough to abolish ship money, and every other expedient by which the king had collected revenue, to suppress the Star Chamber, the High Commission and other lawless tribunals, to punish the judges who had condemned Hampden, and to send Straff ord to the scaffold as a PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 55 traitor. Charles had to consent to the execution of his too faithful servant, and also to promise that what soon became famous as the Long Parliament should not be dissolved without its own consent. Thus, in May, 1641, he accepted the position of a constitutional mon- arch, ruling according to the laws. If he had kept faith with the nation he might have reigned safely ; and this would have prevented the Presbyterians from put- ting England under a more intolerant rule than that of the bishops. Pyrn, Vane, Cromwell, and other oppo- nents of absolute monarchy were ready to ce-operate with Chillingworth, who hall said in his book against the exaction of subscription to creeds, "I will love no man the less for differing in opinion from me"; and the same position had been taken by many other Koyal- ists like Falkland and Herbert of Cherbury. The lat- ter had published a system of religion free from intol- erance or superstition, but had unfortunately written in Latin, and overloaded his book with metaphysics. Union with such men would have made it possible for Charles to establish a toleration of all Protestants with little molestation of loyal Catholics. The golden opportunity was lost early in 1642, when Charles broke his word of honor to the members of Parliament, and came with armed men to take Pym, Hampden, and three other patriots from their seats. This justified the suspicions, excited by his intrigues in Scotland and his sending the queen with the crown jewels to the continent, that he was plotting to destroy English liberty by force. Vigorous measures were taken against him and his devoted partisans, the bish- ops, while the need of more help from Scotland in- creased the influence of the Presbyterians in Parlia- 56 SKETCHES OF THE raent. Falkland, Ghillingworth, and other men who hated all tyranny in Church or State, took sides re- luctantly with the champions of absolute monarchy rather than suffer all literary, social and religious life to pass under the crushing yoke of Presbyterianism. The nobles took the same side so generally that the contest was largely one of them and their dependents against shop-keepers and mechanics. The king's troops had the advantage at first, but lost a decisive battle at Naseby, in 1645, against Oliver Cromwell and his army of mighty men, bound together by the fiercest zeal and the strictest discipline. The victorious soldiers held that advanced form of Puritanism which had just inspired Koger Williams to denounce "The Bloody Tenet of Persecution," and John Milton to demand liberty of the press, on the ground that diversity of opinion is "knowledge in the making," and progress toward truth. Cromwell was already the leader of these friends of religious liberty, who were called Independents, because they insisted on the right of every congregation to be free from all tyranny, whether of pope, bishop or synod. They had thus far been able, with the help of moderate and patriotic Episcopalians like Pym and Selden,to prevent Presbyterianism from establishing itself as the only legal form of public worship in England. The defeated monarch was assured, not only by the Scotch but by their friends who controlled Parliament that, by favor- ing them, he could purchase his restoration to the throne. While he was still negotiating with Parlia- ment, he was taken from its custody by a party of sol- diers, who said, in answer to his request, that he should not be required to act against his conscience, "It is not PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 57 our maxim to constrain the conscience of any one, still less that of our king." The army, loo, offered to make him really king again if he would promise to reign in harmony with a re- formed Parliament, in which the people should be fairly represented, to redress abuses in the courts and to allow no form of worship either to be prohibited or to be made compulsory. Such liberality was more hateful than even Presbyterianism to the bigoted Epis- copalian. He made a secret league, called an "Engage- ment," with the Scotch; their troops entered England; many Royalists rose in arms again, and people who had opposed him fiercely now took his side openly, as even the Londoners threatened to do. Cromwell and his soldier* soon defeated the Presbyterians in battle and then expelled them from Parliament, where they had just passed a law, providing that all Atheists, Unitari- ans, or unbelievers in the Bible should be put to death. Among the heresies to be punished only by imprison- ment was a new one, which held that no one ought to believe what he cannot understand. Thus England came, at the close of 1648, under the authority of Cromwell, Vane, Sidney, Marten, Ludlow, and about a hundred other Independents who were generals in the army, or members still sitting in Par- liament. They gave an impressive demonstration of the fact that nations have rights which kings cannot afford to violate. If the judges of Charles I. had merely deposed him, however, they could have made his eldest son, or his frienldy nephew, Charles Louis, king on their own terms, the desire of the people to retain the form of monarchy with the substance of lib- erty would have been fully satisfied; and any future 58 SKETCHES OF THE attempts at either persecution or despotism would at once have called out an opposition which would have keen irresistible. During four years after the execution of King Charles, in 1649, the attempt to set up a republic seemed a suc- cess. Some attempts at anarchy were easily suppressed. The Royalists were so submissive that Charles II. gained scarcely any recruits in his march to the centre of ^England with a Scotch army. This invasion was quickly crushed by Cromwell; and otherwise the people enjoyed such internal peace as allowed prosperity to revive rapidly. Prejudice against Catholics was still strong enough to bring a priest to the scaffold; but other worship was not interfered with. Hobbes proved his assertion that anyone who obeyed the laws could write what he liked by publishing, in 1651, his terrible "Leviathan." This widely influential bock declared that no government which is not useful to society has any right to exist; that all vindictive punishments, es- pecially for heresy, should be abolished ; that all knowl- edge comes through the senses, and that it is our duty "not to take any principle on trust." Early next year, a committee to reform the laws was appointed with Matthew Hale in the chair; and many measures were proposed which would have been very valuable as safeguards of individual rights, and which have since been adopted, one by one (see "The Puri- tan in Holland, England and America," by Bouglas Campbell, vol. ii., pp. 386-391) , The judges and other officials wre at once changed for the better, proceed- ings were carried on in English and juries were permit- ted to give verdicts against the government. The treas- ury was kept full despite the vigorous policy pursued PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 59 in Scotland and Ireland as well as toward Holland, but taxation was unpopularly severe. The government did not represent the people fully, but it was their best representative then possible; and its continuance was the only way either to establish a real republic, or to restore limited monarchy. The first duty of this Parliament was acknowledged to be the convocation of a new one which should contain more delegates of the people but not too many enemies of liberty; and Vane was carrying through a reform bill, by which rotten boroughs were to be disfranchised, representatives were to be given to Scotland and Ireland as well as to great towns in England, which had hitherto been shut out, and the suffrage was to be extended greatly. This was the condition of things on April 80, 1653, when Cromwell destroyed all that remained of national government by the people and set up his own authority instead on the basis merely of military force. His own soldiers murmured. Vane, Sidney, and most of the other leading patriots openly refused support. His violation of the right of the nation to a voice in the government was so plain that he had to wait for eigh- teen months before suffering any election to be held for Parliament. No one who had fought againstjiim could be either voter or candidate; and it was expressly stipulated that the new members must sustain his authority. They proved to be so strongly against it that he promptly excluded one-third of them from their seats. Even those he retained refused to permit him to collect revenue, and they would have forbidden him to do so without their consent if he had not sent them away. 60 SKETCHES OF THE Then came nineteen months of open and lawless despotism. He had levied taxes from the beginning on his own responsibility, like the Stuarts; and he now imprisoned a merchant who refused tribute as well as the lawyers who showed the tax to be illegal. The judges who questioned his title lost their places. Lib- erty of preaching without a license ceased when the Long Parliament was dissolved; and Cromwell now forbade Episcopalians to worship even in private. About two thousand Quakers were imprisoned at vari- ous times during his reign, and twenty-one died under the hardships of a confinement which was, in some cases, punishment for disturbing public worship, but was often merely persecution. Catholics were treated from first to last with great severity, especially in Ire- land; and an inoffensive old man who had committed no crime but that of officiating as a priest was beheaded in London, by Cromwell's order, in 1654. The victim protested on the scaffold, in the name of liberty of eonscience, and no more blood was shed thus in Lon- don on account of differences in religion. During the last months of 1656 the press was fettered so rigidly that but two journals survived out of a dozen, and all England was put under the rule of major gen- erals, who fined, disarmed and imprisoned people with- out permission or interference from the courts. Vane, Marten, and other patriots, were imprisoned for writ- ing against Cromwell; a noted agitator, named Lilburne, who called himself "Freeborn John," was kept in jail, despite acquittal by a jury; and among other authors incarcerated at this time was Jeremy Taylor, who had already published a theory of toleration, which he did not practice or defend when he became bishop. The PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 61 most advanced view of this subject, yet presented, was that of Harrington, who said: "Where civil liberty is entire, it includes liberty of conscience." "Liberty of conscience is entire, when a man may have the free exercise of his religion, without impediment to his pre- ferment or employment in the State." He also held that the best government is a republic based on popu- lar education and universal suffrage by secret ballot, with rotation of chief magistrates. His "Oceara" was for scholars only; but Cromwell suppressed it, probably because it insisted that rulers ought to conform to the laws. His daughter, however, persuaded him to per- mit it to appear. At this time, 1656, he a&ked one of his open opponents, Ludlow, what they wanted. Lud- low told him, before his council, "That for which we fought that the nation might be governed by its own consent." Another Parliament was intimidated, next year, into offering Cromwell the crown. He would have ruled less arbitrarily as king than as dictator; but the array preferred the dictatorship. The controversy soon took a turn &o hostile to Cromwell's authority that he dis- solved this Parliament also; and his reign ended as it began, merely a display of military force without sanc- tion from the voluntary consent of the goversed. It is true that he promoted reform in the Court of Chancery, that he enabled the Jews to return to England after centuries of exile, that he protected English sailors and merchants against the Inquisition, and that he checked the persecution of the Waldenses. His greatness, both as statesman and general, is manifest. The fact re- mains, that he overthrew a government which was striving to make England free, and reduced her to the C2 SKETCHES OF THE degrading necessity of choosing between despotism and anarchy. His rule had no foundation but his own will, and therefore it perished with him. His death left the friends of liberty hopelessly at variance, and brought on anarchy, from which there was no escape except by restoring the Stuarts on their own terms. The fall of the Puritans from power, in 1660, was all the more complete on account of the rigidity with which they had put down innocent amusements, especially on Sunday. This, and other forms of intolerance, were still kept up by them in New England. The Plymouth Pilgrims and many of the leading settlers at Salem and Boston had been hospitably sheltered in Holland, but had not outgrown either their Sabbatarianism or their belief that only their own form of worship wag accept- able to God. They deliberately discarded the Dutch plan of making character, not creed, the test of citizen- ship, and went back, like the Spaniards, toward the Old Testament ideal of a peculiar people among whom there should be no differences about customs, ceremo- nies, or dogmas. People were whipped and set in the stocks for what was called breaking the Sabbath; and one of the first acts of the founders of the colony of Massachusetts Bay was to send back two of their num- ber for using the Book of Prayer authorized by the laws of England. Only those men who were members of the Puritan churches were allowed to vote; laws were passed to punish absence from worship, wearing of gay attire, or purchase of dainty viands; and an oath of al- legiance to the local authorities was imposed upon res- idents. These proceedings were censured by a clergyman who, like Sidney and Harrington, had studied with PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 68 much advantage in Holland. Eoger Williams had been driven from Salem for holding that neither heresy, blasphemy, nor Sabbath-breaking ought to be punished as crime. He found shelter at Plymouth, but returned to Salem in time to protest against the oath of alle- giance. An oath, he said, was an act of worship, and "Forced worship stinks in God's nostrils." He also objected to restriction of the franchise to church-mem- bers. It was merely for his opinions that he was ban- ished in 1635, and he had to flee to the Indians to es- cape from being sent back to England, where he might have been worse treated by Laud and Straff ord. He was soon able to found at Providence what is now the State of Rhode Island. He and his associates were bound by no oath, but merely by a promise to keep whatever laws might be agreed upon by the majority of house-holders. Order was maintained without restrict- ing liberty in religion, even by exalting one sect above another, or by requiring observance of the Sabbath; and all peaceably disposed strangers, whether Jews, Catholics, Quakers, or other heretics, were made wel- come. Williams risked his life to save the colony, which had banished him, from being attacked by a formidable coalition of Indian tribes, and the sentence was then repealed. How much his protest against persecution had to do with his banishment, may be judged from the fact that his friend Vane's advocacy of similar views cost him his place as governor of the Bay Colony in 1637. Prominent among the rulers then chosen, and for many years kept in power, was Dudley, who had seen toleration in force in Holland, and wrote his opin- ion of it in these lines, found in his pocket after hia death: 64 SKETCHES OF THE "Let men of God in courts and churchea watch O'er such as do a toleration hatch, Lest that ill egg bring forth a cockatrice To poison all with heresy and vice." Another result of Vane's defeat was that Anne Hutchinson, whose faith in the Inner Light had made her talk too boldly about the ministers, was driven out into the wilderness. Other women who denied the in- fallibility of the clergy were flogged in public at Bos- ton. A mystic named Gorton, who believed in the salvation of all souls, was banished by Plymouth, but he tried to found a new settlement outside of her juris- diction and that of the Bay Colony. A band of soldiers from Boston set fire to his blockhouse one Sunday, and led him away to be tried for his life. The ministers and magistrates wished to put him to death for his opinions, but the delegates from the towns saved him and his eight companions from anything worse than hard labor in irons; and they soon won so much sym- pathy that they had to be released and banished, after being robbed of their weapons and their cattle. That same year, 1644, Williams published his demonstration that there ought to be no punishment except for crimes against human beings, and that error should be met by no weapon but argument. Citizens who petitioned against persecution were rebuked by Governor Brad- ford at Plymouth, and punished with fine and impris- onment at Boston. The Bay legislation made blas- phemy and Atheism capital crimes; and it was also enacted that Catholic priests should be banished and put to death if they returned. There was general ap- proval in Massachusetts and Connecticut of the books in which Cotton urged that Jesus delights in the blood of men who reject him knowingly (see Luke xix,, t7, PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 65 and Eev. xix., 11-21). Another popular preacher, named Ward, who called himself "The Simple Cobbler of Agawam," denounced toleration, in spite of kaviog had the benefit of it in Holland himself, and asserted that such "polypiety is the greatest impiety." The habit of excluding people, on account of differ- ences about religion, from residing in Massachusetts, soon led to whipping and hanging also. A Baptist was severely flogged, in 1651, for uniting with a few breth- ren in worship. The same punishment was established for every Quaker who should enter the Bay Colony; and this law was passed before the slightest disturbance was made there by any member of the sect. It was soon enacted that those who returned from banishment should be hanged; but none of the laws against them charged them with any worse offense than holding pe- culiar opinions and meeting by themselves for worship. Two of their women did expose themselves improperly, but it was after a persecution in which many of their sisters had been whipped, naked to the waist, until their backs streamed with blood, and after four of their preachers had been hanged on Boston Common. One at least of these martyrs never preached in Massachusetts. Mary Dyer had left Boston after her baby's grave was violated by Governor Winthrop be- cause she was in sympathy with Mrs. Hutchinson. Twenty years later she was arrested because she came back from Rhode Island to comfort two of the impris- oned preachers. All three were banished, and warned that the gallows was ready for them. All three soon reappeared to protest against the bloody laws, and were promptly sentenced to the scaffold. "Yea, and joyfully I go," said Mary Dyer. She had seen hw 66 SKETCHES OF THE companions hanged, after the Thursday lecture, and had mounted up the ladder cheerfully, when she was told that she might come down and depart in peace. "Here I am," she said, "willing to suffer as my brethren have done. Unless you will 'null your wicked law, I have no freedom to accept reprieve." She was carried down the ladder and out of the colony; but she soon came back and told Governor Endicott and the little Legisla- ture, on May, 30, 1660, that the Lord had sent her to bid them repeal their cruel laws. The next morning she was led to the gallows, with drums beating so that she could not be heard. She was told on the scaffold that she might eave he* life by leaving the colony; but she replied, "JJay, I cannot; for in obedience to the Lord I came, and in his will 1 abide, faithful to the death." She warned her persecutors that her blood would be required at their hands, and refused to accept the prayers of the ministers who stood by, or to obey their exhortation to repent. Her last words were, "I have been in Paradise for several days." Quaker preachers had roamed far and wide through the settlements in North America, as well as through Central and Southern Europe, and had even visited Asia and Africa. They were treated cruelly in Catho- lic lands, as well as in Great Britain, though not sen- tenced to death; they were tolerated by the Moslems and most of the American colonists; and only one coun- try in the world hung them merely for coming back after they had been banished. The Boston atrocities continued until Charles II. interfered; and there was another persecution some years later, though not unto death. Khode Island still kept foremost among the colonies in religious liberty. Maryland had always ex- PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 67 eluded Jews, and now disfranchised Catholics. Quakers had always been safe at Baltimore, but they had been whipped at Plymouth and New Haven. Sabbath-breakers were liable to be flogged in both these colonies, and also in Massachusetts Bay where no one was allowed to keep cards or dice. A Plymouth woman was fined for hanging out her washing on Sun- day, and a Bostonian was put in the stocks for kissing his wife on the doorstep. Absentees from church were fined, and wages were fixed by statute at both Boston and New Haven. The founders of the latter colony began by voting that "The Scriptures do hold forth a perfect rule for the direction and government of all men." It was accordingly agreed that only church- members should vote, and that there should be no trial by jury. Among the capital offenses was profaning the Lord's day "proudly, presumptuously, and with a high hand." A man was whipped for "singing pro- fane songs"; and no stranger could sojourn there for more than a month without permission from the mag- istrates. This last enactment did much to keep the colony a small one until 1662, when it was merged in that of Connecticut, which started at the same time, but on a broader basis. Its founders had objected in vain, before leaving Massachusetts, to the restriction of suffrage to church-members. Their pastor, Hooker, preached at Hartford a sermon declaring that "the choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people," and recommend- ing that the foundation of authority be laid "in the free consent of the people" in order to secure their obedi- ence and love. This public statement of democratic principles was made on June 10, 1638; and the written 08 SKETCHES OF THE constitution, adopted on January 24, 1639, was the earliest one by which the suffrage was anywhere guar- anteed to all men. Political rights had already been as fully established in Rhode Island; but it was not until eight years later that the form of government was publicly declared to be "Democratical, that is to say, a government held by the free and voluntary consent of all, or the greater part, of the free inhabitants." The provision adopted in 1G58, that voters must hold real estate, meant at that time, and for generations afterwards, merely that they must be permanent residenta. No witch was put to death, before 1692, in any colo- ninal town, except Boston and Fairfield, Connecticut; and nowhere in New England was anyone ever burned alive for witchcraft, heresy, blasphemy, or any other offense not now punished as a dangerous crime. Bang- ing Quakers was so unpopular a measure in Boston, that the scaffold was guarded and the streets patrolled by armed men. Toleration petitions had already been presented there and at Plymouth. More settlers were so much needed, that it was foolish to try to keep out all but Puritans; and the attempt had to be given up after Episcopalianism regained supremacy in England. The collapse of Puritan rule, in 1660, was a just pun- ishment for Cromwell's usurping and carrying on the government without consent of the governed. It was largely his fault that Vane, Sidney, Ludlow, and other consistent Independents were not able to remove the impression, already given by the members of their own sect in Massachusetts, and by the Presbyterians in both England and Scotland, that the Puritans did not PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 89 consider any man but themselves good enough to have any voice in government. Their open opposition to all amusements, however innocent, increased that hatred among the people which swept them forever from power. The Puritans who remained in England were subjected to many persecutions, and were ex- cluded from the House of Commons, as well as from serving as magistrates or as officers in the army or navy. In this and other ways they were treated like Catholics, and classed with them as dissenters. The Puritan name survived only in history. Opponents of absolute monarchy were known as Whigs, a title bor- rowed from Scotland, where enemies of kings and bishops were tortured and murdered in great numbers. The toleration controversy, which the Puritans had carried on among themselves, continued until it was decided in favor of a moderate amount of liberty by comparatively irreligious men acting under the pres- sure of peculiar circumstances. The Eevolution of 1688 gave a permanent triumph to that principle of re- sistance to tyrants for which the Puritans had fought bravely. Their neglect of other men's rights, as re- gards both government and amusements, was punished cruelly. Their heroic struggle to gain political and religious liberty, if only for themselves, was rewarded by the final establishment of a broader freedom than most of them desired. I was asked recently how it happened that American literature had been so rich of late years in writers like Holmes, Lowell, Saxe, Stockton, Clemens and Brete Harte while scarcely a single book was written in New England during two hundred years after the lauding of the Pilgrim Fathers which even calLed out a smile 70 SKETCHES OF THE PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. except in pity for the unfortunate readers. During these two centuries there were quite a number of funny novelists, poets and dramatists in England, and the comic element was particularly prominent in the liter- ature of the last forty years of the seventeenth century. Puritanism collapsed about 1660 in England, and that country was thus enabled to produce a brilliant comic literature. Puritanism remained supreme here until about 1830, and its shadow hung heavy over American thought until the rosy dawn of Transcendentalism. Emerson opened the way for the new literature in which we all rejoice; but we must still wait for the full daylight of Science. APPENDIX. A CRIME AGAINST LIBERTY. The sacred principle that governments mu&t derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed" is now more fully established in France than ever be- fore. Danton and Robespierre, for instance, made a deplorable mistake in appealing to bullets instead of ballots against the Girondists. Even the danger from rebels and invaders did not justify the long Reign of Terror; there was very little persecution for opinions about religion, but there was intimidation enough to make peaceable citizens afraid to take part in politics. Patriotism revived, however, under the mild rule of the Directory; and open opposition was made, in 1797, to Bonaparte's system of plundering and enslaving Italy. His own agents at Paris told him that this party was composed almost entirely of Republicans; and this was acknowledged by the Directory afterward. The elections, for the four years ending with 1799, show that the majority of Frenchmen wishd to preserve the Republic by keeping up friendly relations with foreign countries and restoring harmony at home. There was much opposition in the Councils, in the summer of 1797, not only to the refusal of the Directors to accept the honorable peace then offered by Great 72 SKETCHES OF THE Britain but to their whole system of revolutionizing and plundering friendly cities in Italy. The soldiers there, especially Bonaparte, were so provoked at this as to threaten to march back and attack Paris. The party of peace also wished to permit the labor- ers, who had fled from their farms or looms across the frontier during the Reign of Terror, to return to France. The warmest debate in the Councils was called out by the demand of one of the Five Hundred, Camille Jordan, that, as priests were no longer paid by the government, they should not be required to pledge allegiance, and also that all citizens should be allowed to erect symbols of their religion, keep their holy days openly, and give notice of their meetings by ringing bells. It was also urged that the banished priests might be safely recalled, as the Pope had declared that all Frenchmen ought to acknowledge the authority of the Republic. The Catholics insisted that they had a right to worship the GoJ of their fathers in the old way; but they were reminded of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew by men who said frankly, "We do not want the God of your fathers." Among the haters of priests was a Director whose name is printed in many ways, but was signed thus by himself, Larevelliere-Ltjpaux. He was at the head of a new sect, to whioh Paine belonged, that of the Theo- philauthropists, lovers of G0d and man. They rejected the Bible, and held festivals In honor of Socrates, Rousseau and Washington. Twenty churches in Paris had been given them; but the tendencies which were breaking down the old religions were not building up new ones. Larevelliere asked Talleyrand how converts could be made; and the answer was, "All you have tc PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 73 do is this. Get crucified, and rise again the third day." Larevelliere's bigotry made him side with his col- leagues, Barras, who thought only of keeping himself in power, and Rewbell, who knew of no better way of filling the empty treasury than plunder. All three held that the best government is that of the strongest; and the army was at their disposal. Against them were the majority of the deputies as well as of the citizens, and also of the journalists, who then enjoyed great liberty. Carnot and another Director favored the moderate party, but were constantly outvoted by their colleagues. It was these latter who were respon- sible for those depredations on American commerce, and insults to an American ambassabor, which came very near bringing on war. The party of peace knew itself to be in great danger. The National Guard was practically disbanded; Car- not's demand for reorganization was rejected by his colleagues. No force which he and his friends could have got together would have fought long against the conquerors of Italy; and the result would have been the supremacy of Bonaparte. The patriots who had said, "The French have no masters but the laws," refused to violate the constitution, even in self-de- fence. At three o'clock on the morning of Sept. 4, 1797, a cannon gave the signal for General Augereau, who had been sent for the purpose by Bonaparte, to march with ten thousand soldiers to take possession of the Tuile- ries, where the Councils had hitherto met. A smaller party tried in vain to find Carnot, and arrested the other Director on that side. Some of the deputies 74 SKETCHES OF THE were taken into custody, and others ordered to meet in places selected in violation of the constitution. De- crees were passed by mere fragments of Councils, and under intimidation, to annul the election of deputies and municipal magistrates in more than half of France, Paris included, to suppress forty-two journals and put the others under censorship, and to banish Carnot with fifty-three legislators, several other patriots in high positions, four hundred writers for the press, and all the refractory priests. None of these exiles had a trial, some of them were treated cruelly, and many were sent to Guiana, whose deadly climate gave it the name of "the dry guillotine." This "coup d' etat" took place in the month of fruit, Fructidor. The demands of the majority were again denied after the election in 1798; intimidation continued; and a conscription was established to procure soldiers for needless wars. Among the petty tyrannies was a pro- hibition to celebrate Sunday, even by dancing and going to the theatre. In short, the rule of the Direc- tory became so unpopular that Bonaparte found it easy to usurp absolute power. The government had already become too much centralized by war for individual liberty to be maintained; and the Kepublic soon ceased to exist even in name. This was not because its rulers had been too democratic, but because they were too despotic. Some of the benefits of the Kevolution have never been lost, even temporarily. Jews and Protestants have continued to enjoy full liberty of worship. The public schools have been kept up, though they were too much centralized by Napoleon, who, for instance, thought lectures on history incendiary. The great PROGRESS OF FREEDOM. 75 prizes of life have remained within the reach of citi- zens of lowly birth. No Frenchman has stood too high to be taxed or too low to be protected by the laws. It has been impossible to restore primogeniture; and most ot the land which was taken from the aristocracy and sold to the peasantry is still owned as little farms which make millions happy. These blessings are worth all they cost. A 000 191 055 3