§ 27. KESTKIJTION OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. 139
we have seen iu the previous section, under the patrouagt and supervision of the head of the Christian state, especially in the Byzantine empire. In the first three centuries, the church, with all her external lowliness and oppression, enjoyed the g] eater liberty within, in the development of her doctrines and institutions, by reason of her entire separation from the state.
But the freedom of error and division was now still more restricted. In the ante-Nicene age, heresy and schism were as much hated and abhorred, indeed, as afterward, yet were met only in a moral way, by word and writing, and were punished with excommunication from the rights of the church. Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and even Lactantius w^ere the first advocates of the principle of freedom of conscience, and maintained, against the heathen, that religion was essentially a matter of free will, and could be promoted only by instruction and persuasion, not by outward force.' All they say against the persecution of Christians by the heathen applies in full to the persecution of heretics by the church. After the Nicene age all departures from the reigning state-church faitli were not only abhorred and excommunicated as religious errors, but were treated also as crimes against the Christian state, and hence were punished with civil penalties ; at first with deposition, banishment, confiscation, and, after Theodosius, even with death.
This persecution of heretics was a natural consequence of the union of religious and civil duties and rights, the confusion of the civil and the ecclesiastical, the judicial and the moral, which came to pass since Constantino. It proceeded from the state and from the emperors, who in this respect showed themselves the successors of the Pontifices Maximi, with their relation to the church reversed. The church, indeed, steadfastly adhered to the principle that, as such, she should employ only spiritual penalties, excommunication in extreme cases ; as in fact Christ and the apostles expressly spurned and prohibited all carnal weapons, and would rather &nSer and die than use
' Just. Mart. Apol. i. 2, 4, 13; Tertull. Apolog. c. 24, 28; Ad Scapul. c. 2; Lactaut. Instit. V. 19, 20 ; Epit. c. 54. Comp. vol. ii. § 18 (p. 35).
no THIRD TERIOD. A.V. 311-590.
violence. But, involved in the idea of Jew sli tLeocracy and of a state cliurdi, she practiciilly confounded in various ways the position of the law and tliat of tlie gospel, And in theory approved the application of forcible measures to heretics, and not rarely encouraged and urged the state to it ; thus making hei^elf at least indirectly responsible for the persecution. This is especially true of the Roman church in the times of her greatest power, in the middle age and down to the end of the sixteenth century ; and by this course that church has made herself almost more offensive in the eyes, of the world and of modern civilization than by her peculiar doctrines and usages. Tlie Protestant reformation dispelled the dream that Christianity was identical with an outward organization, or the papacy, and gave a mighty shock thereby to the principle of ecclesiastical exclusivencss. Yet, properly speaking, it Avas not till the eighteenth century that a radical revolution of views was accomplished in regard to religious toleration ; and the progress of toleration and free worship has gone liand in hand with the gradual loosening of the state-church basis and with the clearer separation of civil and religious rights and of the temporal and spiritual ])ower.
In the beginning of liis reign, Constantine proc:aimed full freedom of religion (313), and in the main continued tolerably true to it ; at all events he used no violent measures, as his Euccessors did. This toleration, however, v>'as not a matter of fixed princi})le with him, but merely of temporary policy ; a necessary consequence of the incii)ient sej^aration of the Roman throne from idolatry, and the natural transition from the sole supremacy of the heathen religion to the same supremacy of the Christian. Intolerance directed itself first against heathenism ; but as the false religion gradually died out of itself, and at any rate had no moral energy for martyrdom, there resulted no such bloody persecutions of idolatry under the Christian emperors, as there had been of Christianity under their heathen predecessors. Instead of Cliristianity, tho intolerance of the civil power now took up Christian lieretics, whom it recognized as such. Constaiitine even in his day limited the freedom and the privileges which he conferred, to the catholic, that is, tlie