was expiated in the blood of their successors.

The excess of evil led to its gradual cure. In England Protestantism
lost its vigour after the victory over the Catholic dynasty; religion
faded away, and with it that religious zeal which leads to persecution:
when the religious antagonism was no longer kept alive by a political
controversy, the sense of right and the spirit of freedom which belongs
to the Anglo-Saxon race accomplished the work which indifference had
begun. In Germany the vitality of the Lutheran theology expired after it
had lasted for about two hundred years. The intellectual contradictions
and the social consequences of the system had become intolerable to the
German mind. Rationalism had begun to prevail, when Frederick II.
declared that his subjects should work out their salvation in their own
way. That generation of men, who looked with contempt on religious zeal,
looked with horror on religious persecution. The Catholic Church, which
had never taught that princes are supreme over the religion of their
subjects, could have no difficulty in going along with public opinion
when it disapproved of compulsion in matters of conscience. It was
natural that in the new order of things, when Christendom had lost its
unity, and Protestantism its violence, she should revert to the position
she occupied of old, when she admitted other religions to equal rights
with herself, and when men like St. Ambrose, St. Martin, and St. Leo
deprecated the use of violence against heretics. Nevertheless, as the
preservation of morality depends on the preservation of faith, both
alike are in the interest and within the competence of the State. The
Church of her own strength is not strong enough to resist the advance of
heresy and unbelief. Those enemies find an auxiliary in the breast of
every man whose weakness and whose passions repel him from a Church
which imposes such onerous duties on her members. But it is neither
possible to define the conditions without which liberty must be fatal to
the State, nor the limits beyond which protection and repression become
tyrannical, and provoke a reaction more terrible than the indifference
of the civil power. The events of the last hundred years have tended in
most places to mingle Protestants and Catholics together, and to break
down the social and political lines of demarcation between them; and
time will show the providential design which has brought about this
great change.

Thes