Religious Persecution

Mr. Marjoribanks will not let me be: he has been at me again, this time as to Popish persecutions, the massacre of St. Bartholomew, Torquemada, and Bloody Queen Mary. And I may as well confess at once that I could not answer him; I am well aware that there are answers — that the Huguenots were desperate conspirators, and that the Pope struck the medal, not in thanksgiving for their death, but for the news of the King's escape; that Torquemada's methods were mildness itself compared to those of the contemporary civil law of England, that Good Queen Bess stood a head and shoulders above her sister in truculence; but these answers do not content me. I am not willing to allow that the Catholic Church is only a good deal better than everything else; she should be surely quite different from all else: her standard should be heavenly, not earthly; her Law, the Sermon on the Mount rather than the Napoleonic code.

When, therefore, the clergyman rhetorically demanded whether my moral sense was not as much outraged as his own when I contemplated the disciples of Jesus Christ using the stake and faggot for the defence of the Gospel, I was obliged to assent.

I have, however, been pondering the question since, and I think that I have been able to formulate a few conclusions that were dark to me before.

Now, the root of the whole matter — the reason of this complete reversal of public opinion — seems to me to lie very deep, and to be entwined with nothing less than our conceptions of God's intentions for the salvation of man.

The world has seen some very curious variations in these conceptions. In the middle ajjes it was coinmonlv uiulerstood that man was saved by faith and works — by the response of his inner nature to God's Spirit, and the coincidence of his outer actions to God's \VilI. Luther stoutly protested against the second of these two ideas: he declared that the attitude of the soul was all that mattered; tluit the outward life was comparatively unimportant: a man, he proclaimed, is saved by faith without works. In our own days the pendulum has swung completely across. A man's faith, it is said, is comparatively unimportant, it is his actions that matter. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, has remained motionless throughout: faith and works, she declares, are alike necessary. Not half, but the whole of man's nature must co-operate.

It is useless to discuss whether she is right or wrong; but that she has been stable when all else has changed, is an undeniable fact. She holds the positive ])rinciples on either side, and always has so held them.

Now, on these premisses I do not understand how rehgious persecution can be condemned by those who continue to support the framework of society by means of the hangman and the rope. Society, it is said, must be kept up at all costs; individual whims must subordinate themselves to the good of the community: I am not allowed to fire guns in the street, to throw stones at my neighbour's windows, to strangle Mr. Marjoribank's baby. In one sense I am free to do so; but if I do so I am fined, imprisoned, or hanged according to the nature of my crime. In other words, in the opinion of society, a man is justified or condemned by his works, not his faith.

If, however, it is once granted that justification by faith is also true, I do not see how we can object to the fires of Smithfield and Toledo, for exactly parallel arguments, neither more nor less, can be adduced in their behalf: and Beza, Luther, and Calvin were the first to say so, and even to act upon their theory.

When I strangle Master Marjoribanks I commit at least two injuries: I kill the child, and I iniperil society; — the harm inflicted on my own character is a negligible quantity. Very well, answers the world; you have chosen to do this, and tlierefore in self-defence I choose to hang you.

Now% when a man fell into heresy precisely the same argument was applied.

"You are endangering," cried Torquemada — "y^'^^ ^^'^ endangering the salvation of your neighbour, even if you have not already actually assaulted it; you are injuring the whole scheme of the Church by w^hich salvation is to be found; and you have done more than this: you have insulted the Divine Majesty, and you are slaying your own soul. Therefore you will appear next Saturday in the market-square and be put to death there according to agreement."

Now% honestly I do not at first see how to answer the Spaniard except by denying his premisses — by crying out that a man is not justified by his faith, that it does not in the least matter what he believes because there is no such thing as definite Revelation, by joining myself with those who say that outward works are alone important, and that the rest must be a matter of individual choice.

It is of no use to tell him that his laws were brutal: he will answer me that they were far less brutal than the civil laws of contemporary England, and that the State, and not the Church, was responsible for the penalty. It is of no use to tell him that a man's faith cannot be compelled at will: he will answer me that it can; for that faith is not an intellectual process or an emotional state, but an act of the will assenting to the Church, exactly as loyalty is an act of the will assenting to the State. And he will add, moreover, a number of even more irrefutable arguments. He will tell me that the word " heresy," used in the sense of his time, always and invariably denoted a spirit of anarchical revolt which rebelled not only against Revelation, but against both morality and civil authority as well; he will remind me that it was apostates, not infidels.

who suffered, and that the Cliurch always denouneed in the fiercest manner any attempt to proselytize the latter class by any means but those of (juiet persuasion; and if, in a final struggle, I assert the rights of conscience, he will ask me how far I am willing to respect those rights in a man whom conscience bids blow up Parliament-house with gunpowder.

Where, then, lies the escape of one who like myself regards a right faith as of equal importance with a right life? Does it lie in the retort that corporal penalties in such matters are utterly alien to the gentle spirit of Christ? I think not; for it would be equally hard to show that Jesus Christ's words are compatible with our own Wormwood Scrubs and Wandsworth gallows. So long as we continue to enforce morality and punish attempted suicide by such matters as the Criminal Law Amendment Act and the police-court, so long, indeed, as we resist the evil-doer at all or summon a policeman with his truncheon to resist him on our behalf, so long will it be impossible to take the Sermon on the Mount in its literal sense; we must be content with some other interpretation of it before we can deduce that we are justified in using force against either violence, or immorality, or heresy in any shape or form.

The escape seems to me to lie in another direction.

So long as the Catholic Church was actually as well as ideally the undisputed mistress of the inner life, the whole framework of society, civil and moral alike, rested upon her as their sanction and support. All finally came back to her and to the laws that she proclaimed, and revolt against her supreme claim meant a blow struck against society as a whole. Under these circumstances, therefore, granted that the civil magistrates were justified in punishing theft, I do not see how it can be denied that Torquemada was justified in punishing heresy. (The Quaker argument I deeply respect, which is to the effect that both magistrate and inquisitor are alike wrong

— but I am not dealing with that: I am assuming that the Quaker is wrong.) But, I repeat, if the magistrate is right, the inquisitor was right. It was not a que.stion of detail, but of ])rinciple; public opinion declared unhesitatin""lv that the constitution and inviolability of the Church were no less certain than the constitution and inviolability of the State. Religion in those days was neither more nor less a matter of opinion than loyalty is in our ow^n; the average man was far more insulted by being called a heretic than our own citizens were insulted three years ago by being called pro-Boers. To the simple eyes of Spaniards Christ's Revelation was as much assured to him as representative government or Magna Charta to ourselves.

But times have changed. Religion is now a matter of opinion, perhaps even of mere convention, amongst most of our civilized nations; it is impossible to say that public order and peace rest with us upon a revealed dogmatic basis. Society professedly protects, not the rights of God, but her own; she punishes theft, but not fornication; she avenges blasphemy, not as being an insult to God, but an offence to her own ears. It is utterly impossible, therefore — it is more, it would be actually immoral — for the Catholic Church to attempt to act according to her old methods. She would now be protecting, not a universally acknowledged fact, but a personal opinion. This change, I suppose, took definite shape in England towards the end of Henry VIII. 's reign, and about the same time began to affect the continent of Europe. Mary Tudor, therefore, must be blamed, not for tyranny, but stupidity; she had not realized the momentous transformation, and she attempted to act as if Protestantism were a passing breeze, not a steady wind. But for Elizabeth I can find no words too hard; she was attacking, not a new opinion, but the old faith; she used her rack and knife against that which had secured to her the throne, not against that which threatened it; she punished men for standing still, not for moving forward in a new and dangerous direction; and, above all, she who now stands forth in the Protestant world as the chanij)i()n of private judgment, racked and butchered those whose private judgment did not coincide with her own.

Mr. Marjoribanks, therefore, can take courage. He need fear neither for his flock, his baby, nor himself, when he contemplates such an improbable event as my turning Papist. I should not dream of gathering a company of masked familiars and surrounding his house at nightfall in an attempt to terrify or rack him in the direction of an act of faith; I should consider such an attempt as not only foolish, but actually immoral; for by such an act I should be defending, not the constitution of English or European society, but only what I should then believe to be God's Truth. And God's Truth, pure and simple, apart from its union with civil law (faith, that is, without works), can no more be propagated by ropes or whips than can a man's private opinion on lust or truthfulness be ati'ected by the same means.

Religious persecution, Mr. Marjoribanks, I repeat, is not an attempt, and never has been an attempt, to change a man's inner mind by means of direct pain, any more than the hanging of Mr. Palmer of Rugeley was an attempt to persuade him that the poisoning of his friend, Mr. Cook, was an immoral action. Certainly many heretics, possibly even Mr. Palmer himself, were led by the prospect of death to reconsider their position; but the main idea in both courses was primarily to protect that scheme in which men in general, it was believed, found their justification, and by which they lived....

SCIENCE AND FxVITII

I HAVE lately emerged from a fit of gloom — a fit that, I am beginning to see, recurs as regularly as any other physical depression in those who are endowed with the "artistic temperament." It is difficult to put its characteristics into words; but I think it will be useful for me to attempt it, and to write down at the same time the considerations which have helped to disperse its horror.

It was this: — It seemed to me that Religion was a very unsatisfactory affair altogether. Here we are, placed in a world of undoubted matter — a world that, in spite of philosophers, is a fairly intelligible thing — intelligible, that is to say, as far as action is concerned. If you will but be sensible, I told myself, and live an ordinary life, and do things that please me, and relieve suffering in others so soon as that suffering becomes an unpleasant thought to myself, and observe the ordinary social laws, and look after myself, and give tit for tat — in short, live exactly as nine out of any ten men do live — life becomes a very reasonable and pleasant affair. For, after all, does not religion give one more pain than pleasure? It is for ever interfering with my natural instincts, and perplexing me with the additional problems of itself, and making demands for which apparently it gives no adequate compensation. Further, it is not as if religion was undoubtedly and irrefutably true. If, of course, I knew for certain that God was God and the Catholic Church His representative, I should be simply a fool if I did not lead a religious life; but I do not know it. Millions of persons far more clever than myself deny it; and, on the other hand, they put forward theories, supported it seems by science, which certainly appear to explain everything with the exception, of course, of the