the ocean to have "freedom of
religious worship." Vaguely in the course of time (and more especially
in our Protestant countries) the Reformation has come to stand for the
idea of "liberty of thought." Martin Luther is represented as the leader
of the vanguard of progress. But when history is something more than a
series of flattering speeches addressed to our own glorious ancestors,
when to use the words of the German historian Ranke, we try to discover
what "actually happened," then much of the past is seen in a very
different light.

Few things in human life are either entirely good or entirely bad.
Few things are either black or white. It is the duty of the honest
chronicler to give a true account of all the good and bad sides of every
historical event. It is very difficult to do this because we all have
our personal likes and dislikes. But we ought to try and be as fair as
we can be, and must not allow our prejudices to influence us too much.

Take my own case as an example. I grew up in the very Protestant centre
of a very Protestant country. I never saw any Catholics until I was
about twelve years old. Then I felt very uncomfortable when I met them.
I was a little bit afraid. I knew the story of the many thousand people
who had been burned and hanged and quartered by the Spanish Inquisition
when the Duke of Alba tried to cure the Dutch people of their Lutheran
and Calvinistic heresies. All that was very real to me. It seemed to
have happened only the day before. It might occur again. There might
be another Saint Bartholomew's night, and poor little me would be
slaughtered in my nightie and my body would be thrown out of the window,
as had happened to the noble Admiral de Coligny.

Much later I went to live for a number of years in a Catholic country.
I found the people much pleasanter and much more tolerant and quite as
intelligent as my former countrymen. To my great surprise, I began to
discover that there was a Catholic side to the Reformation, quite as
much as a Protestant.

Of course the good people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
who actually lived through the Reformation, did not see things that
way. They were always right and their enemy was always wrong. It was
a question of hang or be hanged, and both sides preferred to do the
hanging. Which was no more than human and for which they deserve no
blame.

When we look at the world as it appeared in the year 1500, an easy date
to remember,