PROTESTANTISM AND CIVIL WARS.
The Reformation has often been charged by Roman Catholic writers with being the mother of the bloody civil wars which grew out of the close union of Church and State, and which devastated Europe for more than a century. But the fault is primarily on the side of Rome. Exclusiveness and intolerance are fundamental principles of her creed, and persecution her consistent practice wherever she has the power. In Italy and Spain Protestantism was strangled in its cradle. In Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland it was reduced to a struggling minority by the civil sword and the Jesuit intrigues. In France it barely escaped annihilation in the massacre of the night of St. Bartholomew, which the pope hailed with a Te Deum; and after fighting its way to the throne, and acquiring the limited toleration of the Edict of Nantes, it was again persecuted almost to extermination by the most Catholic King Louis XIV. In Switzerland the war between the Catholic and Reformed Cantons, in which Zwingli fell, fixed the boundaries of the two religions on a basis of equality. Germany had to pass through the fearful ordeal of the Thirty-Years' War, which destroyed nearly one half of its population, but ended, in spite of the protest of the pope, with the legal recognition of the Lutheran and Reformed Confessions by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The United Provinces of Holland came out victorious from the long and bloody struggle with the tyranny and bigotry of Spain. Scotland fought persistently and successfully against popery and prelacy. England, after the permanent establishment of the Reformation under Elizabeth, was shaken to the base by an internal conflict, not between Protestants and foreign Romanists, but between Protestants and native Romanizers, ultra-Protestant Puritans and semi-Catholic Churchmen.
This conflict marks the most important period in the Church history of that island; it called forth on both sides its deepest moral and religious forces; it made England at last the stronghold of constitutional liberty in Europe, and laid the foundations for a Protestant republic in America. The Puritans were the pioneers in this struggle in Old England, and the fathers of New England beyond the sea. As the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church, so freedom is the sweet fruit of bitter persecution.
CHARACTER OF PURITANISM.
Puritanism--an honorable name, etymologically and historically, though originally given in reproach, [1350] like Pietism and Methodism--aimed at a radical purification and reconstruction of Church and State on the sole basis of the Word of God, without regard to the traditions of men. It was a second Reformation, as bold and earnest as the first, but less profound and comprehensive, and more radical in its antagonism to the mediæval Church. It was a revolution, and ran into the excesses of a revolution, which called forth, by the natural law of reaction, the opposite excesses of a reactionary restoration; but it differs from more recent revolutions by the predominance of the religious motive and aim. The English Puritans, the Scotch Covenanters, and the French Huguenots were alike spiritual descendants of Calvin, and represent, with different national characteristics, the same heroic faith and severe discipline. They were alike animated by the fear of God, which made them strong and free. They bowed reverently before his holy Word, but before no human authority. In their eyes God alone was great.
The Puritans were no separate organization or sect, but the advanced wing of the national Church of England, and at one time they became the national Church itself, treating their opponents as Nonconformists, as they had been treated by them before, and as they were treated afterwards in turn. Conformity and Nonconformity were relative terms, which each party construed in its own way and for its own advantage. The Puritan ministers were educated at Oxford and Cambridge, and had bishops, deans, and professors of theology among their leaders and sympathizers. Their intention was not to secede, but simply to reform still further the national Church in the interest of primitive purity and simplicity by legislative and executive sovereignty. The tyrannical measures of the ruling party drove them to greater opposition, and a large portion of them into complete independency and the advocacy of toleration and freedom. But originally they were as intolerant and exclusive as their opponents. The common error of both was that they held to a close union of Church and State, and aimed at one national Church, to which all citizens must conform.