ince ever made an attempt to introduce a new religion into
his dominions, or to abandon the old. But the Reformation taught that
this was the supreme duty of princes; whilst Luther declared that in
matters of faith the individual is above every authority, and that a
child could understand the Scriptures better than Popes or Councils, he
taught at the same time, with an inconsistency which he never attempted
to remove, that it is the duty of the civil power to exterminate popery,
to set up the Gospel, and to suppress every other religion.

The result was a despotism such as the world had never seen. It was
worse than the Byzantine system; for there no attempt was made to change
the faith of the people. The Protestant princes exercised an
ecclesiastical authority more arbitrary than the Pope had ever
possessed; for the papal authority can only be used to maintain an
existing doctrine, whilst theirs was aggressive and wholly unlimited.
Possessing the power to command, and to alter in religion, they
naturally acquired by degrees a corresponding absolutism in the civil
order. The consistories, the office by which the sovereign ruled the
Church, were the commencement of bureaucratic centralisation. A great
lawyer of those days says, that after the treaties of Westphalia had
recognised the territorial supremacy over religion, the business of
administration in the German States increased tenfold. Whilst that
system remained in its integrity, there could be no peaceful
neighbourhood between Catholics and Protestants. From this point of
view, the protest of the Pope was entirely justified. So far from having
been made in the spirit of the mediaeval authority, which would have been
fatal to the work of the Congress, it was never used by any Catholic
prince to invalidate the treaties. They took advantage of the law in
their own territories to exercise the _jus reformandi_. It was not
possible for them to tolerate a body which still refused to tolerate the
Catholic religion by the side of its own, which accordingly eradicated
it wherever it had the means, and whose theory made the existence of
every religion depend on the power and the will of the sovereign. A
system which so resolutely denied that two religions could coexist in
the same State, put every attempt at mutual toleration out of the
question. The Reformation was a great movement against the freedom of
conscience--an effort to subject it to a new authority, the arbitrary
i