600 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 15380.
religious liberty made great progress, and was embodied in the Prussian Constitution of 1850, which guarantees in Article XII. the freedom of conscience and of private and public worship to all religious associations.
William I., aided by Bismarck and Moltke, raised Prussia, by superior statesmanship and diplomacy, and by brilliant victories in the wars with Austria (1866) and France (1870), to her present commanding position. He became by common consent of the German sovereigns and people the first hereditary emperor of United Germany under the lead of Prussia. He adorned this position in eighteen years of peace by his wisdom, integrity, justice, untiring industry, and simple piety, and gained the universal esteem and affection of the German nation, yea, we may say, of the civilized world, which mourned for him when on the 9th of March, 1888, in the ninety-first year of an eventful life, he entered into his rest. History has never seen a more illustrious trio than the Emperor William, ‘‘ the Iron Chancellor,’”’ and “the Battle-thinker,’’ who ‘‘ feared God, and nothing else.”’ .
The new German Empire with a Protestant head is the last outcome of the Reformation of Prussia, and would not have been possible without it.
§ 100. Protestant Martyrs.
No great cause in church or state, in religion or science, has ever succeeded without sacrifice. Blood is the price of liberty. ‘The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christianity.” Persecution develops the heroic qualities of human nature, and the passive virtues of patience and endurance under suffering. Protestantism has its martyrs as well as Catholicism. In Germany it achieved a permanent legal existence only after the Thirty Years’ War. The Reformed churches in France, Holland, England, and Scotland, passed through the fiery ordeal of persecution. It has been estimated that the victims of the Spanish Inquisition outnumber those of heathen Rome, and that more Protestants were executed by the Spaniards in a single reign, and in a single province of Holland, than Christians in the Roman empire during the first three centuries.2_ Jews and heathens have persecuted Christians, Christians have persecuted Jews and heathens, Roman-
1 See Schaff, Church and State in the United States, New York, 1888, p. 97 sq. * See Schaff, Church Hist. II. 78.
§ 100. PROTESTANT MARTYRS. 001
ists have persecuted Protestants, Protestants have persecuted Romanists, and every state-church has more or less persecuted dissenters and sects. It is only within a recent period that the sacred rights of conscience have been properly appreciated, and that the line is clearly and sharply drawn between church and state, religious and civil offenses, heresy and crime, spiritual and temporal punishments.
The persecution of Protestants began at the Diet of Worms in 1521. Charles V. issued from that city the first of a series of cruel enactments, or “ placards,” for the extermination of the Lutheran heresy in his hereditary dominion of the Netherlands. In 1523 two Augustinian monks, Henry Voes and John Esch, were publicly burnt, as adherents of Luther, at the stake in Brussels. After the fires were kindled, they repeated the Apostles’ Creed, sang the “Te Deum laudamus,” and prayed in the flames, “ Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy upon us.” The heroic death of these Protestant proto-martyrs inspired Luther’s first poem, which begins, —
‘* Ein neues Lied wir heben an.” 1
The prior of their convent, Lampert Thorn, was suffocated in prison. The martyrdom of Henry of Zitphen has already been noticed.2 Adolph Klarenbach and Peter Flysteden suffered at the stake in Cologne with constancy and triumphant joy, Sept. 28, 1529.8
George Winkler, a preacher in Halle, was cited by the Archbishop of Cologne to Aschaffenburg for distributing the communion in both kinds, and released, but murdered by unknown hands on his return, May, 1527.4
Duke George of Saxony persecuted the Lutherans, not by
1 See above, p. 505, and Ranke, II. 119. 2 § 96, p. 574, sq.
8 See their biography in Piper’s Evang. Kalender, VII. 408, and article **Klarenbach”’ by C. Krafft, in Herzog?, VIII. 20-33.
4 Luther wrote a letter of comfort to the Christians at Halle on the death
of their minister. Walch, X. 2260. See also his letter, April 28, 1528, in De Wette, III. 305.