§ 138. CATHOLIC INTOLERANCE. 699
stance, the burning of Savonarola in Florence (1498), the burning of the three English Reformers at Oxford (1556), of Aonio Paleario at Rome (1570), and of Giordano Bruno (1600) in the same city and on the same spot where (1889) the liberals of Ital}- have erec^ted a statue to his memory. Servetus was condemned to death at the stake, and burnt in effigy, by a Roman Catholic tribunal before he fell into the hands of Calvin.
The Roman Church has lost the power, and to a large extent also the disposition, to persecute by fire and sword. Some of her highest dignitaries frankly disown the principle of persecution, especially in America, where they enjoy the full benefit of religious freedom.^ But the Roman curia has never officially disowned the theory on which the practice of persecution is based. On the contrary, several popes since the Reformation have indorsed it. Pope Clement VIII. denounced the Toleration Edict of Nantes as "the most accursed that can be imagined, whereby liberty of conscience is granted to everybody ; which is the worst thing in the world." Pope Innocent X. " condemned, rejected, and annulled" the toleration ai'ticles of the Westphalian Treaty of 1648, and his successors have ever protested against it, though in vain. Pope Pius IX., in the Syllabus of 1864, expressly condemned, among the errors of this age, the doctrine of religious toleration and liberty.^
1 Among these is Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, who says {The Faith of our Fathers, Balto., 1890, 36th ed., p. 284 sq.) : " I am not the apologist of the Spanish Inquisition, and I have no desire to palliate or excuse the excesses into which that tribunal may at times have fallen. From my heart I abhor and denounce every species of violence, and injustice, and persecution, of which the Spanish Inquisition may have been guilty. And in raising my voice against coercion for conscience's sake, I am expressing not only my own sentiments, but those of every Catholic priest and layman in the land.
" Our Catholic ancestors, for the last three hundred years, have suffered so much for freedom of conscience, that they would rise up in judgment against lis, were we to become the advocates and defenders of religious persecution. We would be a disgrace to our sires were we to trample on the principle of liberty which tliey held dearer than life."
2 Syllabus Errorum, § III. 15; VI. 55; X. 78.
700 THE REFORMATION IN FRENCH SWITZERLAND.
And this pope has been declared to be officially infallible by the Vatican decree of 1870, which embraces all his predecessors (notwithstanding the stubborn case of Honorius I.) and all his successors in the chair of St. Peter. Leo XIII. has moderately and cautiously indorsed the doctrine of the Syllabus.^
§ 139. Protestant Intolerance. Judgments of the Reformers
on Servetus.
The Reformers inherited the doctrine of persecution from their mother Church, and practised it as far as they had the power. They fought intolerance with intolerance. They differed favorably from their opponents in the degree and extent, but not in the principle, of intolerance. They broke down the tyranny of popery, and thus opened the way for the development of religious freedom ; but they denied to others the liberty which they exercised themselves. The Protestant governments in Germany and Switzerland excluded, within the limits of their jurisdiction, the Roman Catholics from all religious and civil rights, and took exclusive possession of their churches, convents, and other property. They banished, imprisoned, drowned, beheaded, hanged, and burned Anabaptists, Antitrinitarians, Schwenkfeldians, and other dissenters. In Saxom*, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark no religion and public worship was allowed but the Lutheran. The Synod of Dort deposed and expatriated all Arrainian ministers and school-teachers. The penal code of Queen Elizabeth and the successive acts of Uniformity aimed at the complete extermination of all dissent, whether papal or protestant, and ma'de it a crime for an Englishman to be anything else than an Episcopalian. The Puritans when in power ejected two thousand ministers
1 See his Encyclicals of Nov. 1, 1885 (Immortale Dei), and of June 20, 1888 (Libertas priestantissimum natunu donum). They are printed in the latest ed. of Schaff's Creeds of Christendom, II. 555-602.