persecution
defeating its own object, that the Church, holding the dogma of exclusive
salvation, was perfectly consequent, and really achieved its end of
spreading one belief and quenching another, by calling in the aid of the
civil arm. Who will say that governments, by their power over
institutions and patronage, as well as over punishment, have not power
also over the interests and inclinations of men, and over most of those
external conditions into which subjects are born, and which make them
adopt the prevalent belief as a second nature? Hence, to a sincere
believer in the doctrine of exclusive salvation, governments had it in
their power to save men from perdition; and wherever the clergy were at
the elbow of the civil arm, no matter whether they were Catholic or
Protestant, persecution was the result. "Compel them to come in" was a
rule that seemed sanctioned by mercy, and the horrible sufferings it led
men to inflict seemed small to minds accustomed to contemplate, as a
perpetual source of motive, the eternal unmitigated miseries of a hell
that was the inevitable destination of a majority among mankind.

It is a significant fact, noted by Mr. Lecky, that the only two leaders
of the Reformation who advocated tolerance were Zuinglius and Socinus,
both of them disbelievers in exclusive salvation. And in corroboration
of other evidence that the chief triumphs of the Reformation were due to
coercion, he commends to the special attention of his readers the
following quotation from a work attributed without question to the famous
Protestant theologian, Jurieu, who had himself been hindered, as a
Protestant, from exercising his professional functions in France, and was
settled as pastor at Rotterdam. It should be remembered that Jurieu's
labors fell in the latter part of the seventeenth century and in the
beginning of the eighteenth, and that he was the contemporary of Bayle,
with whom he was in bitter controversial hostility. He wrote, then, at a
time when there was warm debate on the question of Toleration; and it was
his great object to vindicate himself and his French fellow-Protestants
from all laxity on this point.

"Peut on nier que le panganisme est tombe dans le monde par
l'autorite des empereurs Romains? On peut assurer sans temerite que
le paganisme seroit encore debout, et que les trois quarts de
l'Europe seroient encore payens si Constantin et ses successeurs
n'avaient employe le