solved how society should exist
at all, and history gives us the solution of it. Despotism in politics
and authority in religion was the grand, primal, leading, and executive
idea of it. What learning and culture existed was confined to the guild
of the ecclesiastics, and they, for the most part, ruled the rulers as
well as the people, by _virtue of their intelligence_. It required many
centuries to usher in the dawn of unfettered thought, and generate the
idea of liberty. And when at last the epoch of Protestantism arrived,
and Luther, who was the exponent and historical embodiment of it,
gathered to its armories the spiritual forces then extant in Europe, and
overthrew therewith the immemorial supremacy of kings and priests over
the bodies and souls of men, he made all subsequent history possible,
and was the planter of nations, and the founder of yet undeveloped
civilizations.[A]

[Footnote A: A doubtful assertion. We, the children of the Puritans, and
educated in their views and prejudices, have still many lessons to learn
in the school of charily. It was not 'Luther who rendered subsequent
history possible,' but the ever onward growth of humanity itself. Luther
had no broader views of liberty of conscience than the church with which
he struggled. Mr. Hallam says: 'It has been often said that the
essential principle of Protestantism and that for which the struggle was
made, was something different from all we have mentioned: a perpetual
freedom from all authority in religious belief, or what goes by the name
of private judgment. But to look more nearly at what occurred, this
permanent independence was not much asserted, and still less acted upon.
The Reformation was a _change of masters_, a voluntary one, no doubt, in
those _who had any choice_, and in this sense an exercise, for the time,
of their personal judgment. But no one having gone over to the
Confession of Augsburg or that of Zurich, was deemed at liberty to
modify these creeds at his pleasure. He might, of course, become an
Anabaptist or Arian, but he was not the less a heretic in doing so than
if he had continued in the Church of Rome. By what light a Protestant
was to steer, might be a problem which at that time, as ever since, it
would perplex a theologian to decide: but in practice, the law of the
land which established one exclusive mode of faith, was the only safe,
as, in ordinary circumstances, it was, upon the whole, the most eligible
guide.' Speak