64 ORIENTATION.
The Protestant dissenters fared no better in Lutheran Saxony. The Philippists (Melanchthonians) or Crypto-Calvinists were outlawed, and all clergymen, professors and school teachers who would not subscribe the Formula of Concord, were deposed (1580). Dr. Caspar Peucer, Melanchthon’s son-in-law, professor of medicine at Wittenberg and physician to the Elector Augustus of Saxony, was imprisoned for ten years (1576-1586) for no other crime than “ Philippism” (7. 6. Melanchthonianism), and Nicolas Crell, the chancellor of Saxony, was, after ten years’ confinement, beheaded at Dresden for favoring Crypto-Calvinism at home and supporting the Huguenots abroad, which was construed as high treason (1601). Since that time the name of Calvin was as much hated in Saxony as the name of the Pope and the Turk.? |
In other Lutheran countries, Zwinglians and Calvinists fared no better. John a Lasco, the Reformer of Poland and minister of a Protestant congregation in London, when fleeing with his followers, including many women and children, from the persecution of the bloody Mary, was not allowed a resting place at Copenhagen, or Rostock, or Litbeck, or Hamburg, because he could not accept the Lutheran doctrine of the real presence, and the poor fugitives were driven from port to port in cold winter, till at last they found a temporary home at Emden (1559).
und halten soll, so wollen wir doch zur Verhiitung schaédlicher Aufruhre und anderer Unrichtigkeiten keine Sekten noch -Trennung in unseren Landen dulden.” Késtlin II., 29. What a difference between this restriction and the declaration of Frederick the Great, that in his dominions every body may be saved after his own fashion (nach seiner eigenen Facon).
1Fr. Koch, De Vita Caspar. Peuceri Marburg, 1856. Richard, Der churfiirstl. sachs. Kanzler Dr. Nic. Krell, Dresden, 1859, 2 vols. Henke, Kaspar Peucer und Nik. Krell, Marburg, 1865. Calinich, Kampf und Untergang des Melanchthonismus in Kursachsen, Leipzig, 1866; Zwei sachsische Kanzler, Chemnitz, 1868.
2 The following lines were familiar during the seventeenth century :
“ Gottes Wort und Lutheri Schrift Sind des Papst’s und Calvini Gift.”
5 Hermann Dalton (of St. Petersburg), in his Johannes a Lasco (Gotha, 1881),
pp. 427-438, gives a graphic description of what he calls Laski’s “martyrdom in
8 11. PROTESTANTISM AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. 65
In Scandinavia every religion except the Lutheran was forbidden on pain of confiscation and exile, and these laws were in force till the middle of the nineteenth century. Queen Christina lost her Swedish crown by her apostasy from Lutheranism, which her father had so heroically defended in the Thirty Years’ War.
(6) The Swiss Reformers, though republicans, were not behind the Germans in intolerance against Romanists and heretics.
Zwingli extended the hand of brotherhood to Luther, and hoped to meet even the nobler heathen in heaven, but had no -mercy on the Anabaptists, who threatened to overthrow his work in Ziirich. After trying in vain to convince them by successive disputations, the magistrate under his control resorted to the cruel irony of drowning their leaders (six in all) in the Limmat near the lake of Ziirich (between 1527 and 15382).1
Zwingli counselled, at the risk of his own life, the forcible introduction of the Reformed religion into the territory of the Catholic Forest Cantons (1531); forgetting the warning of Christ to Peter, that they who take the sword shall perish by the sword.
Calvin has the misfortune rather than the guilt of pre-eminence for intolerance among the Reformers. He and Servetus are the best abused men of the sixteenth century ; and the depreciation of the good name of the one and the exculpation of the bad name of the other have been carried far beyond the limits of historic truth and justice. Both must be judged from the standpoint of the sixteenth, not of the nineteenth, century.
Denmark and North Germany.” Calvin raised his indignant protest against this cruel treatment of his brethren, but in the same year Servetus was made to suffer death for heresy and blasphemy under Calvin’s eye !
1 Bullinger, Reformationsgeschichte, I., 382. Comp. his Von der Wiedertéufer Ursprung, etc., 1560. Hagenbach, Kirchengesh., III., 350 sqq. Emil Egli, Die Ziiricher Wiedertaufer zur Reformationszeit, Ziirich, 1884. Nitsche, Gesch. der Wiedertaufer in der Schweiz, Einsiedeln, 1885.
? The statue erected to his memory at Ziirich, August 25th, 1885, represents him as holding the Bible in his right hand and the sword with his left. Dr. Alex. Schweizer protested (as he informed me) against the sword, and took no part in the festivities of the dedication of the monument,