their worship was idolatrous.[243] In
doing this he adopted the principle of aggressive intolerance, which was
at that time new to the Christian world; and which the Popes and
Councils of the Catholic Church had condemned when the zeal of laymen
had gone beyond the lawful measure. In the Middle Ages there had been
persecution far more sanguinary than any that has been inflicted by
Protestants. Various motives had occasioned it and various arguments had
been used in its defence. But the principle on which the Protestants
oppressed the Catholics was new. The Catholics had never admitted the
theory of absolute toleration, as it was defined at first by Luther, and
afterwards by some of the sects. In principle, their tolerance differed
from that of the Protestants as widely as their intolerance. They had
exterminated sects which, like the Albigenses, threatened to overturn
the fabric of Christian society. They had proscribed different
religions where the State was founded on religious unity, and where this
unity formed an integral part of its laws and administration. They had
gone one step further, and punished those whom the Church condemned as
apostates; thereby vindicating, not, as in the first case, the moral
basis of society, nor, as in the second, the religious foundation of the
State, but the authority of the Church and the purity of her doctrine,
on which they relied as the pillar and bulwark of the social and
political order. Where a portion of the inhabitants of any country
preferred a different creed, Jew, Mohammedan, heathen, or schismatic,
they had been generally tolerated, with enjoyment of property and
personal freedom, but not with that of political power or autonomy. But
political freedom had been denied them because they did not admit the
common ideas of duty which were its basis. This position, however, was
not tenable, and was the source of great disorders. The Protestants, in
like manner, could give reasons for several kinds of persecution. They
could bring the Socinians under the category of blasphemers; and
blasphemy, like the ridicule of sacred things, destroys reverence and
awe, and tends to the destruction of society. The Anabaptists, they
might argue, were revolutionary fanatics, whose doctrines were
subversive of the civil order; and the dogmatic sects threatened the
ruin of ecclesiastical unity within the Protestant community itself. But
by placing the necessity of intolerance on the simple ground