precepts of religion; on the contrary, no Spanish Inquisition ever exercised greater cruelty in matters of conscience than the petty monsters then clothed in a little brief authority. The Lutheran Elector, Augustus of Saxony (1574), haled all the pastors who, by the commands of his predecessor, had preached Calvinism, made them abjure their principles and swear never to preach them again. Six brave men alone withstood him, and, with the exception of one, who escaped, they were all literally tortured to death. After which, the Elector had a coin struck in commemoration of his victory-he being represented in armour holding a scale, the infant Saviour seated on the one side, the Devil and four Calvinists on the other. An old dramatist says, 'Mercy and Love are crimes in Rome and 'hell.' Another locality might have been then added.

These things were done in obscure corners of a barbarous country, the very divisions of the land intercepting the circulation of knowledge. There is something unspeakably revolting to the human mind in this combination of petty dominion and boundless tyranny; but never did it assume a more odious form than when religion became the sport of such men's caprices. The latest instance of baneful persecution in matters of religion, always with the exception of the doings of present Prussia, is even ludicrous in its tea-cup' proportions. It is told of the august house of Schönburg, which, at the beginning of this century, broke into two branches--that of Wechselburg and that of Hinter-Glauchau-with another minor and tiny branch, which was neither Glauchau behind or before, but Glauchau alone. This twig belonged by arrangement to the two other branches alternately. The count who ruled over Wechselburg was a so-called Pietist;' the count who ruled over Hinter-Glauchau, a Rationalist. Accordingly, Glauchau regularly changed its pastors with its sovereign; the one sect preaching belief in the Atonement and Free Justification, the other laughing both doctrines to scorn. What could unfortunate Glauchauans do under such circumstances? They did that which the whole Protestant Church, more or less, in Germany, has found it necessary to do. They suited themselves to all creeds by not caring for any creeds at all; only carrying various flags, and hoisting whatever colour best pleased the reigning Dictator!

The debasing influence on the German mind resulting from the paltry rank and distinctions obtaining in the country, which we have so constantly to remark, is painfully seen even in the character of Luther. The courage with which he withstood the Pope failed him when confronting the petty princes

6

of his own land. The sanction of a Zufrau' was not apparently the only symptom of his subservience. Mr. Baring Gould quotes a curious passage of his preaching, though omitting to give precise reference. This was in answer to an appeal from oppressed consciences on an occasion when a prince had been more than commonly tyrannical. That two and five make seven, thou canst comprehend with thine own 'reason; but when the "Obrigkeit" (higher power) declares that two and five make eight, thou art bound to believe it, however contrary to thy knowledge and feeling.'* This

needs no comment.

We have to consider that the Reformation in Germany swept away the power of Rome as much for good as for evil. Not all Catholic bishops had been tyrants and persecutors like Jean Sans Pitié.' The higher dignitaries of the Roman Church both could and did, however rarely, interpose between the oppressed and the oppressor. They were, at all events, independent in position. The Reformation provided no substitutes in this respect. The pastors, whether Lutheran or Calvinist, were as poor and insignificant almost as their worried and harried flocks, and as much despised by the secular powers. But human nature is so constituted that an earthly Church, in order to command the respect of the higher classes of society, must have earthly dignity. The warning of Protestant Germany was not needed to prove that. We go into that society in Germany which is nearest on a par with the habits, manners, and culture of English gentlemen, and find that a German clergyman has no place in it-that he is, when not despised, ignored as a minister, and looked down upon as a man. He takes no lead in the business of charity, for, as affecting the thoughts and occupation of the middle class noblesse, there is none. He hallows no meal with the preliminary of grace,' for he is never admitted to the table. The clerical class and element is altogether absent from German society, enlisted occasionally in the monotony of country life to take a fourth hand at whist, but absolutely invisible in what is curiously and comically called 'die Residenz!' The truth is, that neither wish nor want for them is felt; for with the cessation of controversial struggles all interest in the Christian religion has ended.

When the Bible ceased to be a sedes controversi e it ceased to be

* Vol. ii. p. 172.

Meaning, not the residence of 800,000 souls, as at Berlin, but that of the sovereign only.

read. When sermons were no longer seasoned with polemical pepper and vinegar, they were no longer listened to. As long as the preacher taught that something needed to be pulled down and undone, he attracted attention; when he began to build up and amend, his people turned their backs. Pastors became tired of haranguing empty benches and gave up holding services. In the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg an enquiry was made in 1854 into the condition of the Lutheran Church, and it was found that no service had been held in the head churches for 228 times, because there had been no congregation.'

These statistics as to absence of church attendance might be multiplied to any extent.

year

It may strike some as contradictory and strange that the attendance at Communion should exceed by far, statistically proved, that of church attendance. But this is the lingering result of laws which made qualification for Government offices dependent on proofs that the candidate belonged to the State Church; the partaking of the Sacrament four times in the being considered conclusive on that point. Hence it is that a number of persons still proclaim their adhesion by communicating once or twice in the year, though perhaps not entering the church on any other occasion. This was a device natural to a despotic Government, as one means of keeping its subjects under its eye. In Russia, certificates of a certain frequency of Communion are still required for various official purposes, and were, and perhaps still are, necessary preludes to obtaining a passport.

Altogether, the decline and fall of the Protestant Church in Germany is a subject well worth the investigation of minds which seek to unravel the causes that underlie the phenomena of history. One reason lies on the surface, viz. that a legislature which ignores the mixed nature of the human mind can only end by losing all hold upon it. If man be so constituted as to need freedom in the exercise of his reason on those things which belong to his peace, he is also so constituted as to yearn for some authority in the interpretation of them. Rome gave the one, however arbitrarily, but the pedantic rulers of Protestant Germany, especially those of Prussia, do neither. They have rigorously prescribed to their subjects a form of worship, but have left them free to exercise any amount of license of thought. Their whole aim has been to establish the same system of drill and subservience in the externals of the Church as in those of the army and the bureaucracy; with this difference, that in those two departments they exact conformity as well as uniformity, but in that of the Church, if a man be not

disposed to take religion in their way, he has the alternative of leaving it altogether. The Bible in the knapsack of every soldier, which strikes some as so paternal a regulation, comes under the category of military discipline. It is a proof of the soldier's subordination to his rulers, not of their solicitude for his religion. For the army chaplains are free to preach against the most sacred tenets of the Christian faith, so long as they preach obedience to military superiors.

Its

The decline of the Protestant Church may indeed be said, however paradoxical it may sound, to have begun with the Reformation-in other words, with a capricious tyranny in matters of conscience which Rome had never exercised. ultimate fall has been brought about in the following manner. The electors and kings of Prussia were Calvinists, and did all they could to stamp out Lutheranism, but, as the interest in these controversies died away, the princes of that State began to consider less how they could uphold the one tenet and crush the other, than how they could smelt the two together. In 1733 Frederick William I. began the campaign on approved martinet principles, by commanding the Lutherans to give way in certain respects, so as to diminish the points of difference, those pastors who refused being, of course, suspended. Diminution of differences being thus effected, obliteration was next ordered. But Frederick the Great, who 'cared for none of these things,' rescinded this last order, and the land for a time had spiritual peace. Wars and misery intervened, and for more than a generation delayed further meddlings. But in 1808 Frederick William III. renewed the attack. A new department for public instruction and worship' was appointed, by which all self-government, equally for Lutherans and Calvinists, was abrogated, and both fell under the individual sceptre, or more properly the crosier, of the King. By 1817, peace being restored on all sides, his majesty felt the time was ripe for carrying out his grand scheme-that of uniting the two Churches absolutely in one. To a centralising government uniformity is everything. As it must interfere in all departments, the more these are amalgamated the less trouble they give. Questions of dogma are of less importance in this light than systems of general headings and neat account-keeping. Accordingly a royal edict announced that in future one board would do the work for both confessions, and that meanwhile all definite tests and standards would be dispensed with.*

6

Schleiermacher, the Court chaplain, greatly assisted the monarch

This announcement created no excitement in the Church, but rather, as our author expresses it, 'shook up its pillows and allowed it to sleep more comfortably.' The work of fusion was resumed in 1839, when Frederick William IV. (brother to the present Emperor) finally abolished the very name of the Protestant Church,' and embodied Lutherans and Calvinists under one denomination, called the Evangelical Church, which he graciously endowed with a service and liturgy of his own composition. The old sects relinquished, without any apparent regret, their customary modes of worship, 'not because either were convinced of error, but because both 'were alike indifferent, and easily induced to accept a nullity.' Only a few country parishes resisted the royal bounty, and the old measures-Falk laws without the name-were forthwith put in force. The ministers were imprisoned, troops quartered upon the recusant congregations, and above six hundred poor peasant families abandoned their little holdings and fled to America. In England we are accused of wanting to reform men's ways by Act of Parliament; in Prussia it is done without Act of Parliament.

We have said that his late Prussian Majesty concocted a Church in which all standards of belief were omitted. It must be owned that this was unavoidable; for even royal infallibility would fail to amalgamate such opposite doctrines as Free Justification and Election. The primitive Church had rubbed 'on comfortably with only the Apostles' Creed; why not the 'Prussian Evangelical Church with no creed at all?' Accordingly the Act of Union set up no confession of faith for people to quarrel about, but simply asserted God's Word' to be its foundation. The royal theologian forgot that, under his and his predecessors' persecutions and tamperings, that very Word has been so undermined and unsettled in Protestant Germany that few believe in it at all, and they are not agreed.

We have thus endeavoured to trace an outline of some of those successive agencies by which the decline and fall of German Protestantism has been gradually brought about, and which have landed it at length on the lowest step of all-a

in these arrangements. A German, writing in the

Nineteenth

Century,' June 1880 ('Modern England,' by Karl Hillebrand), speaks of Christians à la Schleiermacher, who did not even think God and 'immortality necessary elements of religion, which did not prevent him 'from remaining for years the highest ecclesiastical authority.' We do not quote this to impugn Schleiermacher, who, however latitudinarian, never descended to such insane depths, but to show how lightly such profanity is regarded.