but he denied the right.
Catholic powers, he deemed, might justly persecute, but they could only
persecute error. They must apply the same criterion which the Lutherans
applied, and then they were justified in persecuting those whom the
Lutherans also proscribed. For the civil power had no right to proscribe
a religion in order to save itself from the dangers of a distracted and
divided population. The judge of the fact and of the danger must be, not
the magistrate, but the clergy.[236] The crime lay, not in dissent, but
in error. Here, therefore, Melanchthon repudiated the theory and
practice of the Catholics, whose aid he invoked; for all the intolerance
in the Catholic times was founded on the combination of two ideas--the
criminality of apostasy, and the inability of the State to maintain its
authority where the moral sense of a part of the community was in
opposition to it. The reformers, therefore, approved the Catholic
practice of intolerance, and even encouraged it, although their own
principles of persecution were destitute not only of connection, but
even of analogy, with it. By simply accepting the inheritance of the
mediaeval theory of the religious unity of the empire, they would have
been its victims. By asserting that persecution was justifiable only
against error, that is, only when purely religious, they set up a shield
for themselves, and a sword against those sects for whose destruction
they were more eager than the Catholics. Whether we refer the origin of
Protestant intolerance to the doctrines or to the interests of the
Reformation, it appears totally unconnected with the tradition of
Catholic ages, or the atmosphere of Catholicism. All severities
exercised by Catholics before that time had a practical motive; but
Protestant persecution was based on a purely speculative foundation, and
was due partly to the influence of Scripture examples, partly to the
supposed interests of the Protestant party. It never admitted the
exclusion of dissent to be a political right of the State, but
maintained the suppression of error to be its political duty. To say,
therefore, that the Protestants learnt persecution from the Catholics,
is as false as to say that they used it by way of revenge. For they
founded it on very different and contradictory grounds, and they
admitted the right of the Catholics to persecute even the Protestant
sects.

Melanchthon taught that the sects ought to be put down by the sword, and