anded to the common people? What was free, except
dentistry, to the Jews, expelled from Spain and Portugal and persecuted
everywhere else? What tolerance was extended to the Hussites? What
mercy was shown to the Lollards or to Savonarola?

{650} [Sidenote: Reformation]

Paradoxical as it may seem to say it, after what has been said of the
intolerance of the Reformers, the second cause that extended modern
freedom of conscience from the privileged few to the masses, was the
Reformation. Overclouding, as it did for a few years, all the glorious
culture of the Renaissance with a dark mist of fanaticism, it
nevertheless proved, contrary to its own purpose, one of the two
parents of liberty. What neither the common ground of the Christians
in doctrine, nor their vaunted love of God, nor their enlightenment by
the Spirit, could produce, was finally wrung from their mutual and
bitter hatreds. Of all the fair flowers that have sprung from a dark
and noisome soil, that of religious liberty sprouting from religious
war has been the fairest.

The steps were gradual. First, after the long deadlock of Lutheran and
Catholic, came to be worked out the principle of the toleration of the
two churches, [Sidenote: 1555] embodied in the Peace of Augsburg. The
Compact of Warsaw [Sidenote: 1573] granted absolute religious liberty
to the nobles. The people of the Netherlands, sickened with slaughter
in the name of the faith, took a longer step in the direction of
toleration in the Union of Utrecht. [Sidenote: 1579] The government
of Elizabeth, acting from prudential motives only, created and
maintained an extra-legal tolerance of Catholics, again and again
refusing to molest those who were peaceable and quiet. The papists
even hoped to obtain legal recognition when Francis Bacon proposed to
tolerate all Christians except those who refused to fight a foreign
enemy. France found herself in a like position, [Sidenote: 1592] and
solved it by allowing the two religions to live side by side in the
Edict of Nantes. The furious hatred of the Christians for each other
blazed forth in the Thirty Years War, [Sidenote: 1598] but after that
lesson persecution on a large scale was at an end. Indeed, before its
end, wide religious {651} liberty had been granted in some of the
American colonies, notably in Rhode Island and Maryland.

[1] Gregory XVI, Encyclical, _Mirari vos_, 1832.

[2] _Letters to Mary Gladstone_, ed. H. Paul, 1904, p.