that any individual who started new opinions ought to be punished with
death.[237] He carefully laid down that these severities were requisite,
not in consideration of the danger to the State, nor of immoral
teaching, nor even of such differences as would weaken the authority or
arrest the action of the ecclesiastical organisation, but simply on
account of a difference, however slight, in the theologumena of
Protestantism.[238] Thamer, who held the possibility of salvation among
the heathen; Schwenkfeld, who taught that not the written Word, but the
internal illumination of grace in the soul was the channel of God's
influence on man; the Zwinglians, with their error on the Eucharist, all
these met with no more favour than the fanatical Anabaptists.[239] The
State was held bound to vindicate the first table of the law with the
same severity as those commandments on which civil society depends for
its existence. The government of the Church being administered by the
civil magistrates, it was their office also to enforce the ordinances of
religion; and the same power whose voice proclaimed religious orthodoxy
and law held in its hand the sword by which they were enforced. No
religious authority existed except through the civil power.[240] The
Church was merged in the State; but the laws of the State, in return,
were identified with the commandments of religion.[241]

In accordance with these principles, the condemnation of Servetus by a
civil tribunal, which had no authority over him, and no jurisdiction
over his crime--the most aggressive and revolutionary act, therefore,
that is conceivable in the casuistry of persecution--was highly approved
by Melanchthon. He declared it a most useful example for all future
ages, and could not understand that there should be any who did not
regard it in the same favourable light.[242] It is true that Servetus,
by denying the divinity of Christ, was open to the charge of blasphemy
in a stricter sense than that in which the reformers generally applied
it. But this was not the case with the Catholics. They did not
represent, like the sects, an element of dissolution in Protestantism,
and the bulk of their doctrine was admitted by the reformers. They were
not in revolt against existing authority; they required no special
innovations for their protection; they demanded only that the change of
religion should not be compulsory. Yet Melanchthon held that they too
were to be proscribed, because