Curiosities of Literature Volume Iii Part 23

Towards the close of the fifth volume we at last find the sacred muse of Milton,--but, unluckily, he was a man "di pochissima religione," and spoke of Christ like an Arian. Quadrio quotes Ramsay for Milton's vomiting forth abuse on the Roman Church. His figures are said to be often mean, unworthy of the majesty of his subject; but in a later place, excepting his religion, our poet, it is decided on, is worthy "di molti laudi."

Thus much for the information the curious may obtain on English poetry from its universal history. Quadrio unquestionably writes with more ignorance than prejudice against us: he has not only highly distinguished the comic genius of our writers, and raised it above that of our neighbours, but he has also advanced another discovery, which ranks us still higher for original invention, and which, I am confident, will be as new as it is extraordinary to the English reader.

Quadrio, who, among other erudite accessories to his work, has exhausted the most copious researches on the origin of Punch and Harlequin, has also written, with equal curiosity and value, the history of Puppet-shows. But whom has he lauded? whom has he placed paramount, above all other people, for their genius of invention in improving this art!--The Englis.h.!.+ and the glory which has. .h.i.therto been universally conceded to the Italian nation themselves, appears to belong to us! For we, it appears, while others were dandling and pulling their little representatives of human nature into such awkward and unnatural motions, first invented pulleys, or wires, and gave a fine and natural action to the artificial life of these gesticulating machines!

We seem to know little of ourselves as connected with the history of puppet-shows; but in an article in the curious Dictionary of Trevoux, I find that John Brioche, to whom had been attributed the invention of _Marionnettes_, is only to be considered as an improver; in his time (but the learned writers supply no date) _an Englishman_ discovered the secret of moving them by springs, and without strings; but the Marionnettes of Brioche were preferred for the pleasantries which he made them deliver. The erudite Quadrio appears to have more successfully substantiated our claims to the pulleys or wires, or springs of the puppets, than any of our own antiquaries; and perhaps the uncommemorated name of this Englishman was that Powell, whose Solomon and Sheba were celebrated in the days of Addison and Steele; the former of whom has composed a cla.s.sical and sportive Latin poem on this very subject. But Quadrio might well rest satisfied that the nation which could boast of its _Fantoccini_, surpa.s.sed, and must ever surpa.s.s the puny efforts of a doll-loving people!

FOOTNOTES:

[156] Even recently, il Cavaliere Onofrio Boni, in his Eloge of Lanzi, in naming the three Augustan periods of modern literature, fixes them, for the Italians, under Leo the Tenth; for the French, under Louis the Fourteenth, or the Great; and for the English, under Charles the Second!

[157] Quadrio, vol. ii. p. 416.

"POLITICAL RELIGIONISM."

In Professor Dugald Stewart's first Dissertation on the Progress of Philosophy, I find this singular and significant term. It has occasioned me to reflect on those contests for religion, in which a particular faith has been made the ostensible pretext, while the secret motive was usually political. The historians, who view in religious wars only religion itself, have written large volumes, in which we may never discover that they have either been a struggle to obtain predominance, or an expedient to secure it. The hatreds of ambitious men have disguised their own purposes, while Christianity has borne the odium of loosening a destroying spirit among mankind; which, had Christianity never existed, would have equally prevailed in human affairs. Of a moral malady, it is not only necessary to know the nature, but to designate it by a right name, that we may not err in our mode of treatment. If we call that _religious_ which we shall find for the greater part is _political_, we are likely to be mistaken in the regimen and the cure.

Fox, in his "Acts and Monuments," writes the martyrology of the _Protestants_ in three mighty folios; where, in the third, "the tender mercies" of the Catholics are "cut in wood" for those who might not otherwise be enabled to read or spell them. Such pictures are abridgments of long narratives, but they leave in the mind a fulness of horror. Fox made more than one generation shudder; and his volume, particularly this third, chained to a reading-desk in the halls of the great, and in the aisles of churches, often detained the loiterer, as it furnished some new scene of papistical horrors to paint forth on returning to his fireside. The protestants were then the martyrs, because, under Mary, the protestants had been thrown out of power.

Dodd has opposed to Fox three curious folios, which he calls "The Church History of England," exhibiting a most abundant martyrology of the _catholics_, inflicted by the hands of the protestants; who in the succeeding reign of Elizabeth, after long trepidations and balancings, were confirmed into power. He grieves over the delusion and seduction of the black-letter romance of honest John Fox, which he says, "has obtained a place in protestant churches next to the Bible, while John Fox himself is esteemed little less than an evangelist."[158] Dodd's narratives are not less pathetic: for the situation of the catholic, who had to secrete himself, as well as to suffer, was more adapted for romantic adventures, than even the melancholy but monotonous story of the protestants tortured in the cell, or bound to the stake. These catholics, however, were attempting all sorts of intrigues; and the saints and martyrs of Dodd, to the parliament of England, were only traitors and conspirators!

Heylin, in his history of the _Puritans_ and the _Presbyterians_, blackens them for political devils. He is the Spagnolet of history, delighting himself with horrors at which the painter himself must have started. He tells of their "oppositions" to monarchical and episcopal government; their "innovations" in the church; and their "embroilments"

of the kingdoms. The sword rages in their hands; treason, sacrilege, plunder; while "more of the blood of Englishmen had poured like water within the s.p.a.ce of four years, than had been shed in the civil wars of York and Lancaster in four centuries!"

Neal opposes a more elaborate history; where these "great and good men,"

the puritans and the presbyterians, "are placed among the _reformers_;"

while their fame is blanched into angelic purity. Neal and his party opined that the protestant had not sufficiently protested, and that the reformation itself needed to be reformed. They wearied the impatient Elizabeth and her ardent churchmen; and disputed with the learned James, and his courtly bishops, about such ceremonial trifles, that the historian may blush or smile who has to record them. And when the _puritan_ was thrown out of preferment, and seceded into separation, he turned into a _presbyter_. Nonconformity was their darling sin, and their sullen triumph.

Calamy, in four painful volumes, chronicles the bloodless martyrology of the two thousand silenced and ejected ministers. Their history is not glorious, and their heroes are obscure; but it is a domestic tale. When the second Charles was restored, the _presbyterians_, like every other faction, were to be amused, if not courted. Some of the king's chaplains were selected from among them, and preached once. Their hopes were raised that they should, by some agreement, be enabled to share in that ecclesiastical establishment which they had so often opposed; and the bishops met the presbyters in a convocation at the Savoy. A conference was held between the _high church_, resuming the seat of power, and the _low church_, now prostrate; that is, between the _old clergy_ who had recently been mercilessly ejected by the _new_, who in their turn were awaiting their fate. The conference was closed with arguments by the weaker, and votes by the stronger. Many curious anecdotes of this conference have come down to us. The presbyterians, in their last struggle, pet.i.tioned for _indulgence_; but oppressors who had become pet.i.tioners, only showed that they possessed no longer the means of resistance. This conference was followed up by the _Act of Uniformity_, which took place on Bartholomew day, August 24, 1652: an act which ejected Calamy's two thousand ministers from the bosom of the established church. Bartholomew day with this party was long paralleled, and perhaps is still, with the dreadful French ma.s.sacre of that fatal saint's day. The calamity was rather, however, of a private than of a public nature. The two thousand ejected ministers were indeed deprived of their livings; but this was, however, a happier fate than what has often occurred in these contests for the security of political power.

This _ejection_ was not like the expulsion of the Moriscoes, the best and most useful subjects of Spain, which was a human sacrifice of half a million of men, and the proscription of many Jews from that land of Catholicism; or the ma.s.sacre of thousands of Huguenots, and the expulsion of more than a hundred thousand by Louis the Fourteenth from France. The presbyterian divines were not driven from their fatherland, and compelled to learn another language than their mother-tongue.

Dest.i.tute as divines, they were suffered to remain as citizens; and the result was remarkable. These divines could not disrobe themselves of their learning and their piety, while several of them were compelled to become tradesmen: among these the learned Samuel Chandler, whose literary productions are numerous, kept a bookseller's shop in the Poultry.

Hard as this event proved in its result, it was, however, pleaded, that "It was but like for like." And that the history of "the like" might not be curtailed in the telling, opposed to Calamy's chronicle of the two thousand ejected ministers stands another, in folio magnitude, of the same sort of chronicle of the clergy of the Church of England, with a t.i.tle by no means less pathetic.

This is Walker's "Attempt towards recovering an Account of the Clergy of the Church of England who were sequestered, hara.s.sed, &c., in the late Times." Walker is himself astonished at the size of his volume, the number of his sufferers, and the variety of the sufferings. "Shall the church," says he, "not have the liberty to preserve the history of her sufferings, as well as the _separation_ to set forth an account of theirs? Can Dr. Calamy be acquitted for publis.h.i.+ng the history of the _Bartholomew sufferers_, if I am condemned for writing that of the _sequestered loyalists_?" He allows that "the number of the ejected amounts to two thousand," and there were no less than "seven or eight thousand of the episcopal clergy imprisoned, banished, and sent a starving," &c. &c.

Whether the reformed were martyred by the catholics, or the catholics executed by the reformed; whether the puritans expelled those of the established church, or the established church ejected the puritans, all seems reducible to two cla.s.ses, conformists and non-conformists, or, in the political style, the administration and the opposition. When we discover that the heads of all parties are of the same hot temperament, and observe the same evil conduct in similar situations; when we view honest old Latimer with his own hands hanging a mendicant friar on a tree, and, the government changing, the friars binding Latimer to the stake; when we see the French catholics cutting out the tongues of the protestants, that they might no longer protest; the haughty Luther writing submissive apologies to Leo the Tenth and Henry the Eighth for the scurrility with which he had treated them in his writings, and finding that his apologies were received with contempt, then retracting his retractations; when we find that haughtiest of the haughty, John Knox, when Elizabeth first ascended the throne, crouching and repenting of having written his famous excommunication against all female sovereignty; or pulling down the monasteries, from the axiom that when the rookery was destroyed, the rooks would never return; when we find his recent apologist admiring, while he apologises for, some extraordinary proofs of Machiavelian politics, an impenetrable mystery seems to hang over the conduct of men who profess to be guided by the bloodless code of Jesus. But try them by a human standard, and treat them as _politicians_, and the motives once discovered, the actions are understood!

Two edicts of Charles the Fifth, in 1555, condemned to death the Reformed of the Low Countries, even should they return to the catholic faith, with this exception, however, in favour of the latter, that they shall not be burnt alive, but that the men shall be beheaded, and the women buried alive! _Religion_ could not, then, be the real motive of the Spanish cabinet, for in returning to the ancient faith that point was obtained; but the truth is, that the Spanish government considered the reformed as _rebels_, whom it was not safe to re-admit to the rights of citizens.h.i.+p. The undisguised fact appears in the codicil to the will of the emperor, when he solemnly declares that he had written to the Inquisition "to burn and extirpate the heretics," _after trying to make Christians of them_, because he is convinced that they never can become sincere catholics; and he acknowledges that he had committed a great fault in permitting Luther to return free on the faith of his safe-conduct, as the emperor was not bound to keep a promise with a heretic. "It is because that I destroyed him not, that heresy has now become strong, which I am convinced might have been stifled with him in its birth."[159] The whole conduct of Charles the Fifth in this mighty revolution was, from its beginning, censured by contemporaries as purely _political_. Francis the First observed that the emperor, under the colour of religion, was placing himself at the head of a league to make his way to a predominant monarchy. "The pretext of religion is no new thing," writes the Duke of Nevers. "Charles the Fifth had never undertaken a war against the Protestant princes but with the design of rendering the Imperial crown hereditary in the house of Austria; and he has only attacked the electoral princes to ruin them, and to abolish their right of election. Had it been zeal for the catholic religion, would he have delayed from 1519 to 1549 to arm? That he might have extinguished the Lutheran heresy, which he could easily have done in 1526, but he considered that this novelty would serve to divide the German princes, and he patiently waited till the effect was realised."[160]

Good men of both parties, mistaking the nature of these religious wars, have drawn horrid inferences! The "dragonnades" of Louis XIV. excited the admiration of Bruyere; and Anquetil, in his "Esprit de la Ligue,"

compares the revocation of the Edict of Nantes to a salutary amputation.

The ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew in its own day, and even recently, has found advocates; a Greek professor at the time a.s.serted that there were _two cla.s.ses_ of protestants in France--political and religious; and that "the late ebullition of public vengeance was solely directed against the former." Dr. M'Crie, cursing the catholic with a catholic's curse, execrates "the stale sophistry of this calumniator." But should we allow that the Greek professor who advocated their national crime was the wretch the calvinistic doctor describes, yet the nature of things cannot be altered by the equal violence of Peter Charpentier and Dr.

M'Crie.

This subject of "Political Religionism" is indeed as nice as it is curious; _politics_ have been so cunningly worked into the cause of _religion_, that the parties themselves will never be able to separate them; and to this moment the most opposite opinions are formed concerning the same events and the same persons. When public disturbances broke out at Nismes on the first restoration of the Bourbons, the protestants, who there are numerous, declared that they were persecuted for religion, and their cry, echoed by their brethren the dissenters, resounded in this country. We have not forgotten the ferment it raised here; much was said, and something was done. Our minister, however, persisted in declaring that it was a mere _political_ affair. It is clear that our government was right on the _cause_, and those zealous complainants wrong, who only observed the _effect_; for as soon as the Bourbonists had triumphed over the Bonapartists, we heard no more of those sanguinary persecutions of the protestants of Nismes, of which a dissenter has just published a large history. It is a curious fact, that when two writers at the same time were occupied in a Life of Cardinal Ximenes, Flechier converted the cardinal into a saint, and every incident in his administration was made to connect itself with his religious character; Marsollier, a writer very inferior to Flechier, shows the cardinal merely as a politician. The elegances of Flechier were soon neglected by the public, and the deep interests of truth soon acquired, and still retain, for the less elegant writer the attention of the statesman.

A modern historian has observed that "the affairs of religion were the grand fomenters and promoters of the _Thirty Years' War_, which first brought down the powers of the North to mix in the politics of the Southern states." The fact is indisputable, but the cause is not so apparent. Gustavus Adolphus, the vast military genius of his age, had designed, and was successfully attempting, to oppose the overgrown power of the imperial house of Austria, which had long aimed at an universal monarchy in Europe; a circ.u.mstance which Philip IV. weakly hinted at to the world when he placed this motto under his arms--"_Sine ipso factum est nihil_;" an expression applied to Jesus Christ by St. John!

FOOTNOTES:

[158] "Fox's Martyrs," as the book was popularly called, was often chained to a reading-desk in churches; one is still thus affixed at Cirencester; it thus received equal honour with the Bible.

[159] Llorente's "Critical History of the Inquisition."

[160] Naude, "Considerations Politiques," p. 115. See a curious note in Hart's "Life of Gustavus Adolphus," ii. 129.

TOLERATION.

An enlightened toleration is a blessing of the last age--it would seem to have been practised by the Romans, when they did not mistake the primitive Christians for seditious members of society; and was inculcated even by Mahomet, in a pa.s.sage in the Koran, but scarcely practised by his followers. In modern history it was condemned when religion was turned into a political contest under the aspiring house of Austria--and in Spain--and in France. It required a long time before its nature was comprehended--and to this moment it is far from being clear, either to the tolerators or the tolerated.

It does not appear that the precepts or the practice of Jesus and the apostles inculcate the _compelling_ of any to be Christians;[161] yet an expression employed in the nuptial parable of the great supper, when the hospitable lord commanded the servant, finding that he had still room to accommodate more guests, to go out in the highways and hedges, and "_compel them to come in, that my house may be filled_," was alleged as an authority by those catholics who called themselves "the converters,"

for using religious force, which, still alluding to the hospitable lord, they called "a charitable and salutary violence." It was this circ.u.mstance which produced Bayle's "Commentaire Philosophique sur ces Paroles de Jesus Christ," published under the supposit.i.tious name of an _Englishman_, as printed at Canterbury in 1686, but really at Amsterdam.

It is curious that Locke published his first letter on "Toleration" in Latin at Gouda, in 1689--the second in 1690--and the third in 1692.

Bayle opened the mind of Locke, and some time after quotes Locke's Latin letter with high commendation.[162] The caution of both writers in publis.h.i.+ng in foreign places, however, indicates the prudence which it was deemed necessary to observe in writing in favour of toleration.

These were the first _philosophical_ attempts; but the earliest advocates for toleration may be found among the religious controversialists of a preceding period; it was probably started among the fugitive sects who had found an asylum in Holland. It was a blessing which they had gone far to find, and the miserable, reduced to humane feelings, are compa.s.sionate to one another. With us the sect called "the Independents" had, early in our revolution under Charles the First, pleaded for the doctrine of religious liberty, and long maintained it against the presbyterians. Both proved persecutors when they possessed power. The first of our respectable divines who advocated this cause were Jeremy Taylor, in his "Discourse on the Liberty of Prophesying,"

1647, and Bishop Hall, who had pleaded the cause of _moderation_ in a discourse about the same period.[163] Locke had no doubt examined all these writers. The history of opinions is among the most curious of histories; and I suspect that Bayle was well acquainted with the pamphlets of our sectarists, who, in their flight to Holland, conveyed those curiosities of theology, which had cost them their happiness and their estates: I think he indicates this hidden source of his ideas by the extraordinary ascription of his book to _an Englishman_, and fixing the place of its publication at _Canterbury_!

Toleration has been a vast engine in the hands of modern politicians. It was established in the United Provinces of Holland, and our numerous non-conformists took refuge in that asylum for disturbed consciences; it attracted a valuable community of French refugees; it conducted a colony of Hebrew fugitives from Portugal; conventicles of Brownists, quakers'

meetings, French churches, and Jewish synagogues, and (had it been required) Mahometan mosques, in Amsterdam, were the precursors of its mart, and its exchange; the moment they could preserve their consciences sacred to themselves, they lived without mutual persecution, and mixed together as good Dutchmen.

The excommunicated part of Europe seemed to be the most enlightened, and it was then considered as a proof of the admirable progress of the human mind, that Locke and Clarke and Newton corresponded with Leibnitz, and others of the learned in France and Italy. Some were astonished that philosophers who differed in their _religious opinions_ should communicate among themselves with so much toleration.[164]

It is not, however, clear that had any one of these sects at Amsterdam obtained predominance, which was sometimes attempted, they would have granted to others the toleration they partic.i.p.ated in common. The infancy of a party is accompanied by a political weakness which disables it from weakening others.

The catholic in this country pleads for toleration; in his own he refuses to grant it. Here, the presbyterian, who had complained of persecution, once fixed in the seat of power, abrogated every kind of independence among others. When the flames consumed Servetus at Geneva, the controversy began, whether the civil magistrate might punish heretics, which Beza, the a.s.sociate of Calvin, maintained; he triumphed in the small predestinating city of Geneva; but the book he wrote was fatal to the protestants a few leagues distant, among a majority of catholics. Whenever the protestants complained of the persecutions they suffered, the catholics, for authority and sanction, never failed to appeal to the volume of their own Beza.

M. Necker de Saussure has recently observed on "what trivial circ.u.mstances the change or the preservation of the established religion in different districts of Europe has depended!" When the Reformation penetrated into Switzerland, the government of the princ.i.p.ality of Neufchatel, wis.h.i.+ng to allow liberty of conscience to all their subjects, invited each parish to vote "for or against the adoption of the new wors.h.i.+p; and in all the parishes, except two, the majority of suffrages declared in favour of the protestant communion." The inhabitants of the small village of Cressier had also a.s.sembled; and forming an even number, there happened to be an equality of votes for and against the change of religion. A shepherd being absent, tending the flocks on the hills, they summoned him to appear and decide this important question: when, having no liking to innovation, he gave his voice in favour of the existing form of wors.h.i.+p; and this parish remained catholic, and is so at this day, in the heart of the protestant cantons.

I proceed to some facts which I have arranged for the history of Toleration. In the Memoirs of James the Second, when that monarch published "The Declaration for Liberty of Conscience," the catholic reasons and liberalises like a modern philosopher: he accuses "the jealousy of our clergy, who had degraded themselves into intriguers; and like mechanics in a trade, who are afraid of nothing so much as interlopers--they had therefore induced indifferent persons to imagine that their earnest contest was not about their faith, but about their temporal possessions. It was incongruous that a church, which does not pretend to be infallible, should constrain persons, under heavy penalties and punishments, to believe as she does: they delighted, he a.s.serted, to hold an iron rod over dissenters and catholics; so sweet was dominion, that the very thought of others partic.i.p.ating in their freedom made them deny the very doctrine they preached." The chief argument the catholic urged on this occasion was "the reasonableness of repealing laws which made men liable to the greatest punishments for that it was not in their power to remedy, for that no man could force himself to believe what he really did not believe."[165]

Such was the rational language of the most bigoted of zealots!--The fox can bleat like the lamb. At the very moment James the Second was uttering this mild expostulation, in his own heart he had anathematised the nation; for I have seen some of the king's private papers, which still exist; they consist of communications, chiefly by the most bigoted priests, with the wildest projects, and most infatuated prophecies and dreams, of restoring the true catholic faith in England! Had the Jesuit-led monarch retained the English throne, the language he now addressed to the nation would have been no longer used; and in that case it would have served his protestant subjects. He asked for toleration, to become intolerant! He devoted himself, not to the hundredth part of the English nation; and yet he was surprised that he was left one morning without an army! When the catholic monarch issued this declaration for "liberty of conscience," the Jekyll of his day observed, that "it was but scaffolding: they intend to build another house, and when that house (Popery) is built, they will take down the scaffold."[166]

When presbytery was our lord, they who had endured the tortures of persecution, and raised such sharp outcries for freedom, of all men were the most intolerant: hardly had they tasted of the Circean cup of dominion, ere they were transformed into the most hideous or the most grotesque monsters of political power. To their eyes toleration was an hydra, and the dethroned bishops had never so vehemently declaimed against what, in ludicrous rage, one of the high-flying presbyterians called "a cursed intolerable toleration!" They advocated the rights of persecution; and "shallow Edwards," as Milton calls the author of "The Gangraena," published a treatise _against toleration_. They who had so long complained of "the licensers," now sent all the books they condemned to penal fires. Prynne now vindicated the very doctrines under which he himself had so severely suffered; a.s.suming the highest possible power of civil government, even to the infliction of death on its opponents. Prynne lost all feeling for the ears of others!

The idea of toleration was not intelligible for too long a period in the annals of Europe: no parties probably could conceive the idea of toleration in the struggle for predominance. Treaties are not proffered when conquest is the concealed object. Men were immolated! a ma.s.sacre was a sacrifice! medals were struck to commemorate these holy persecutions![167] The destroying angel, holding in one hand a cross, and in the other a sword, with these words--_Vgonottorum Strages_, 1572--"The ma.s.sacre of the Huguenots"--proves that toleration will not agree with that date.[168] Castelnau, a statesman and a humane man, was at a loss how to decide on a point of the utmost importance to France.

In 1532 they first began to burn the Lutherans or Calvinists, and to cut out the tongues of all protestants, "that they might no longer protest."