Butterfield Toleration in Early Modern Times.pdf

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Toleration in Early Modern Times Author(s): Herbert Butterfield Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1977), pp. 573-584Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2708688Accessed: 28-06-2015 15:25 UTC

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TOLERATION IN EARLY MODERN TIMES

BY HERBERT BUTTERFIELD

I. The present paper will deal with toleration only in the restricted sense of the word, involving a system in which a religious society has ceased to insist on an absolute unanimity in faith and practice. Follow- ing some modern students, like De Ruggiero, I would regard the rather different system of what we call "religious liberty" as a higher class of article altogether, since it involves freedom to be Christian or Moham- medan, Protestant or Catholic, liberal or fundamentalist; and it involves the freedom to bring up one's children in that way too, or, alternatively, to have no religion at all, no children at all-this freedom including of course the right to reject the whole theory and practice of religion.

Toleration, like religious liberty, can perhaps best be regarded as a system or a regime. It was not so much an ideal, a positive end, that people wanted to establish for its own sake; but, rather, a pis aller, a retreat to the next best thing, a last resort for those who often still hated one another, but found it impossible to go on fighting any more. It was hardly even an "idea" for the most part-just a happening-the sort of thing that happens when no choice is left and there is no hope of further struggle being worth while. During the second half of the sixteenth

century there were both Catholics and Protestants who became politiques, declaring that persecution (and a national unanimity in the faith) was the ideal but the bloodshed must be ended-the body politic itself was

being destroyed, and further conflicts would make the tragedy irremedi- able.

In the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, there is an article on this

subject which is simply entitled "Religious Toleration"; and though it carries no limit of date, it does in fact end where the early modem

period itself ends. Its author, Elisabeth Labrousse, whose pathway through the subject I wouldn't necessarily want to follow, presents a few

opening sentences which I think might be particularly stressed.

Lexicology tells us [she says] that up to the beginning of the eighteenth century, the word "tolerance' had, in French, a pejorative meaning [it sig- nified] a lax complacency towards evil. In 1691, in his admonition to Protes- tants (Vie avertissement aux protestants, 111, ix), Bossuet still proudly described Catholicism as the least tolerant of all religions and, as if to compete with this proud boast, the Walloon Synod of Leyden (an overwhelming majority of whose members were Huguenot refugees) firmly condemned religious toleration as a heresy.

573



574 HERBERT BUTTERFIELD

It has long been realized in any case that the Huguenot preachers of mid- sixteenth-century France were determined not to condem religious persecution as such, even though it was they themselves who were bound to be the sufferers from it for the time being. And, indeed, earlier still, Martin Luther had not been provoked to his rebellion against the papacy by any desire for a greater freedom in religious matters. What had goaded him to action was rather an excess of liberty somewhere in the church-the multitude of the evils which ecclesiastical authority was leaving uncorrected.

Those who are interested in the way in which the regime of modern

liberty came to emerge will find themselves safeguarded against certain

types of error if they will keep in mind the fact that they are looking at the actions and purposes of men as these appear in retrospect-they are making their observations from the hither side of a great transition. Even historians of science, when they are considering the movement of the earth and the idea of gravitation, have to do something to their minds in order to see Copernicus or Newton as more than discoverers of some-

thing that any schoolboy in the twentieth century knows. And religious liberty can almost seem a similar banality to us-a principle which, in the nature of things, we today-we of Western culture-are too inclined to take for granted.

It is easy to make mistakes when one is dealing with the thinking- especially the religious thinking-of bygone centuries. That field of

scholarship which we describe as "The History of Ideas" seems to carry some subtle dangers as well as charms. We see ideas sometimes as though they were bubbles floating in the air-piloting themselves or colliding and combining to form new shapes-when the picture needs to be qualified by the sense that, here, is just the spectacle of human beings thinking. Lord Acton made ideas his principal preoccupation, and perhaps this otherwise highly happy side of his work made him too ready to regard ideas as crucial "causes" in history, instead of stressing also that they must be examined as "results"-they are examples of human beings simply doing things. Karl Marx was ready to see that it is man, the human being in toto, who makes history; and this qualified the effects of some of his faults and enabled him to see fresh sides of the truth.

II. Even in the ancient world it seems to have been in the nature of religion that it should be an affair of the whole community, though this might not necessarily prevent a people from adopting further gods from neighbors, allies, and conquered territory; nor did it prevent what the literature of the Babylonians, the Hittites, and the Old Testament

suggests to have been touching personal relationships between individuals and some particular deity. Amongst the ancient Jews there appears, especially after the passage into Exile-appears very specifically in the

prophecies of Ezekiel, for example-a stronger emphasis on the private



TOLERATION IN EARLY MODERN TIMES 575

wire between the individual and God; while in the period before Christ, various sects like the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes seem to have emerged without breaking the unity of the essential faith; and (ap- parently as a result of influences from abroad) there were some Jews who believed and some who disbelieved in the notion of life after death. All this was calculated to produce fructifying tensions in religious life, and the coming of Christianity revealed the limits of what Judaism could accept, and opened a period of greater intolerance. This whole predicament, along with the resulting tensions-though inconsistent with a regime of total religious liberty-is the essential background to the dif- ficulties, the essential cause of the self-contradictions and the internal struggles, of any "early modern" system of "religious toleration."

It was the fate and perhaps the good fortune of early Christianity- as is was the good fortune of early Methodism-to be in a position in which it could not for a moment dream of resorting to persecution and securing unanimity (whether in city, or nation, or empire) by the use of force; though, being in the position of a voluntary society, it could impose its very strict rules of membership-could exclude people from the group-and, of course was itself open to being persecuted. It is a question whether the Church was really catching the authentic flavor of the New Testament, however, when, at almost the earliest stage at which the thing was possible, it adopted persecution, and even came to use this in order to capture the ancient Roman Empire entirely. Saint Augustine seems to hold a key position here, for he could not forget how far from orthodoxy his own earlier opinion had been, and he felt that even after

becoming a Christian-even with the help of God-he had scarcely been able to conquer "those vain imaginings of the soul." He was converted to persecution, partly owing to the bitterness of the conflict with the Donatists, and partly because he had come to know people who, after enforced conversion, had ended by expressing gratitude for the compul- sion that had brought them to the truth. His ideas and his change of ideas, were to be of very great importance, since his influence remained so strong for over a thousand years.

At the opening of the sixteenth century, the peoples of Europe still

accepted what was realized to be for the most part an inherited faith, the very authenticity of which depended on the fidelity with which an

original truth, an approximately datable "revelation," had been handed down from generation to generation. So much of the faith consisted of the acceptance and interpretation of certain historical assertions, that, basically-since these must be either right or wrong-the belief was more than any mere matter of opinion, and-so far as concerned essential questions-only one form of religion could be true. Anything else must be not merely error, but an actual danger to human souls and to society in general. The fact, furthermore, that heaven and hell-the one of which rewarded right belief, while the other punished the wrong-were




not (to the men of those days) merely hypotheses for discussion, but realities more compelling than the theories of scientists or the narratives of the ordinary historian-all this was a powerful deterrent to any easy policy of toleration. Above all, religion, though making so great a call on the pieties and the inner life of personalities, was at the same time the faith of entire nations, the faith indeed of more than a continent-an affair not merely for individuals but, par excellence, for vast communities. If the monarchies of Europe were to recognize the coexistence on the Continent of two forms of religion, it was likely to be very difficult to go on maintaining any notion of a "Christendom." But if, within each separate monarchy rival forms of belief were allowed to coexist, it would be very difficult indeed to maintain the ideal of the "State as a Religious Society."

It was this grand idea-this beautiful ideal-of the State (e.g., France or England) as a Religious Society which, more than anything else prompted the insistence on persecution in the "early modern" period. And because, if the State gave support to the Church, it was also true that the Church could be of very great value to the State, one can under- stand why it was only after a war often against both government and Church combined-only after the conquest of many incidental obstruc- tions too-that voluntariness in religion could be effectively achieved. It is not clear even today that, if the Church, by accumulated individual conversions were to achieve a great majority in a state, or a sufficient leverage to ensure a capture of power, the dream of forming a "Christian England" would not recover its fatal fascination. In a field as risky as this, unanimity itself must take a self-denying ordinance, and refuse to use either politics or force to maintain itself in existence.

The controversies on the subject of persecution in the sixteenth century envisaged a policy of "toleration" rather than a system of "religious liberty"-this latter being further removed from the idea of the "religious society" and more likely to lead to a greater degree of secularization. At the same time much of the argumentation in these "early modern" conflicts was drawn from discussions that had already taken place in the later, christianized, Roman Empire.

When Acton was running about Europe as a cleverish young man, and arguing, for example, that only the Roman Catholics held the key to the writing of impartial history, he made the claim that the Protestant theory of persecution was more unsatisfactory than that of the Catholics. In favor of this view, it could be argued that one of the effects of the Reformation was to elevate the Bible to the highest authority, replacing both the Papacy and the Canon Law. The chief beneficiary of all this was bound to be the Old Testament, since here, rather than in the New Testament, was much of the teaching that governed mundane matters- theories of the physical universe, questions of war and peace, doctrines of monarchy, etc. In particular it was the Old Testament that dealt in a




drastic manner with the problem of persecution. The Church of the de- clining Roman Empire found support for persecution in the Old Testa- ment passages which denounced false prophets and called for the destruc- tion of blasphemers and idolaters. But it was the early Protestants who added to the force of all this by identifying heresy so closely with blas- phemy, describing Catholic practices as idolatry, and regarding the mass as an "abomination." The Protestants, furthermore, were open to the criticism that they were ready to persecute on behalf of a form of religion which they themselves had only just discovered or invented; while, when they abolished the mass, they were persecuting things to which they themselves had been attached only a year or two before-something indeed which until very recently, Luther himself had instructed Catholics to treasure with particular fervor.

The more tolerant party in the early decades of the sixteenth century also drew much of their argument from the ecclesiastical controversies that had taken place in the period before the downfall of Rome's Western

Empire. The strength of their case lay in the fact that they put the

emphasis rather on the teaching of the New Testament; and this had so

repeatedly directed its call to the individual person, and had addressed itself so much to man's inner life, that the essence of religion seemed now to lie in its genuine voluntariness. For, as Acton once pointed out, it is the individual man, and not Society or the State that has the eternal soul.

Both before and after the emergence of the large-scale conflict with Luther, adherents of the Catholic Church had been evolving a theory of toleration which, though it had had its precedents in ancient writings, can be regarded as having really based itself on the very nature of reli-

gion. In Erasmus, who acquired great influence in the decades after the Lutheran outbreak, we find that the gospel of love, which had once been used to justify persecution-killing the body in order to save the soul, for example-was directed to the more immediate end, saving the human

being for the present and giving him the chance of being converted later in life. Although Erasmus came to have a leading place in this whole

movement, he never wavered in his Catholicism; and Protestants, disap- pointed by his refusal to join them, have generally done less than justice to the authenticity and the quality of his faith. The movement which he did so much to inspire, captured some famous men, at least for a time, but failed completely in the long run; and it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the hopes in it were doomed beforehand to total failure. Some of the clashes in theological doctrine were so extreme that the

belligerent parties could not see one another as genuine variants of the same religion. Paradoxically enough, the atrocities that occurred in the wars of religion and the civil dissensions must be attributed to ideas-- ideas especially about the relations between religion and society-which practically all the warring parties held in common.




Wherever it was established, it became clear that toleration, as a working system, was subject to serious limitations. Its own upholders tended to regard it as only a temporary expedient-a thing necessary perhaps until a General Council of the Church had met and established a new order. Alternatively, there was an assumption that after a period of generous treatment, the heretics would voluntarily return to the fold. Even in France, where, perhaps the history of toleration proved the most remarkable, there remained a persistent Catholic view that the heretics would sooner or later come back to the Church of Rome. Even Richelieu, who had taken from the Huguenots the military and political privileges which had turned them into "a State within the State"-privileges which were making the work of government very difficult-seriously felt that since by leaving them with their religious privileges intact (even though they had been defeated in war) he had shown a generosity which would win them over in the long run to the true religion.

A neater way of disposing of the divisions in religious belief was the

policy of "comprehension" which, while envisaging a broader kind of Church that would embrace both parties, involved some negotiation for a kind of compromise. This way of recovering unity was the one most

congenial to the heads of great monarchies. Some of the supporters of toleration were anxious that the established Catholic system should not be too severe in the case of differences about minor points; and some would have liked to see Christianity reduced to a restricted number of

inescapable doctrines-something like the Apostles' Creed, perhaps. All this involved the hope that, by finding a lowest common factor, and

regarding the rest as non-essential, they might pacify Christendom and achieve a system tolerable for all. Some people were ready to agree to a toleration which would allow for dissent on the part of a small minority of people. Even they might be unprepared, however, to see important heresy erecting itself into an organized body and developing its own established system of worship. Yet amongst these themselves there were

people who said that there must be no actual shedding of blood, even if men had fallen into obstinate and recognizable heresy.

Long before the sixteenth century, the Church had been ready to

grant an exceptional toleration to Jews and to those who had been

brought up in paganism. This practice is recognized by Saint Thomas

Aquinas and was brought into currency by humanists who wanted a more liberal treatment of offenders. A similar liberty was naturally desired on occasion by heretics themselves, who, claiming to be Christian believers of a sort, did not see why they should not be treated as generously as Jews and unbelievers. As the decades passed, there were Catholics in the Reformation struggles who felt that Protestants of the second or third

generation could hardly be persecuted for adhering to the faith in which

they had been brought up. Sometimes the enemies of persecution made considerable play with




the argument that the attempt to impose religious beliefs by force would only turn the Protestants into hypocrites; and in the long run these latter would sink into unbelief. Although this consideration is not without its value one must not infer that persecution is always doomed to failure. In the light of what happened at the time of the Thirty Years War, it was surprising in 1919 to see how Catholic the population of Czechoslovakia had become. And after the Barbarian Invasion a great deal of Europe was brought over to the Church by methods of mass-conversion not very different from the way in which so much of the Continent became com- munistic as a result of two World Wars. Both the Christianity and the communism needed a great display of force to secure their initial establishment; but, in both cases it appears that, after the first generation the

system has a way of continuing-just running to routine. It would seem that, throughout the centuries, the developing idea of

conscience was a cause (even if sometimes it had been also a result) of a growing sense of the essential inwardness of religion. In the Old Testa- ment and in the pagan thought of the time of Cicero, it had been regarded for the most part as the seat of that self-judgment which human beings sometimes make on sins that have already been committed. By the time of Saint Paul it had also come to be regarded as the inner light that should

guide one's choice of a course of action; in other words it was the director of a man's religious and moral life. While Christianity had been still a faith liable to persecution, some of its leaders had begun to emphasize freedom of conscience, freedom to obey whatever was the inner voice; and in the Middle Ages there was already some serious discussion of the

question whether it might not be important that a man should follow this inner voice, even when it was erratic and untrained. Gradually the

emphasis shifted to "freedom of conscience" and this freedom was largely construed as the liberty to follow one's own religious convictions, even to create Christian dogma for oneself. Lord Acton made this freedom of conscience the key to both his interpretation of all history and his

political philosophy-a point remarkably illustrated by the first significant thesis that he has to make in his Lectures on Modern History.' As the eighteenth century developed it became clear that the notion of conscience was becoming more and more secularized, acquiring greater importance as religion in general came into decline.

We can discover in English history, and particularly in the period of the Protectorate, that those who claimed to be in favor of toleration for all types of Christianity could make an exception of Roman Catholics,

1Lord Acton, Lectures on Modern History (London, 1906). "It was late in the

thirteenth century that the psychology of Conscience was closely studied for the first time and men began to speak of it as the audible voice of God that never misleads or fails, and that ought to be obeyed always, whether enlightened or dark-

ened, right or wrong."




on the ground that Catholicism was not really a branch of Christianity. They could do honor to freedom of conscience while insisting that Catholicism had nothing at all to do with conscience. Although it has been claimed (and it is probably true) that in England the majority of thoughtful Christians had been converted to the idea of toleration by 1660, there was a reaction after that in parliamentary circles, and "No- Popery" remained very powerful, though, after James II (and in con- sonance with what had happened in the reign of Elizabeth, and again after the Gunpowder Plot) it excused itself (not always fairly) by claim-

ing that it was moved only by political considerations. In the era of toleration not only England but also the Dutch were notably cruel in their legislation against Roman Catholicism; though the British were more generous than they pretended (their government and their politicians being more tolerant than the people, especially in 1780 at the time of the Gordon Riots, when even some of the bishops were remarkably more generous than many of the laity). In the eighteenth century the Catholics had to suffer the cruel penal laws, and one of the limitations of the system of toleration-one of the limitations from which dissenters suffered- lay in the fact that, even if conscience itself was respected, and freedom in actual belief permitted, there remained further incapacities for nonconformists in respect of education, the holding of public office, the holding of land and even the right to sit in Parliament. In other words, the policy of allowing dissenters to exist (and, to this degree, therefore, pay- ing respect to the rights of conscience) while robbing the same people of governmental privileges and thereby reducing the nonconformists to the position of second-class citizens, is a practice introduced by the Christian churches and intended to vindicate the concept of a nation or a people as a single religious-society. It should be noted, moreover, that in France in early modern times, but also in other countries further to the east, the prerogatives of the nobility are part of the very structure of the wars of religion, even treaty-grants of toleration being made to depend on social status. In Bohemia, the concession of toleration to a powerful nobility gave the landlords the very prerogatives that were being denied to the King, i.e., the power to impose their own heterodoxies on their own tenantry. It might be questioned whether any religious minority in Europe suffered so greatly and for so long a time as the Catholic majority in Ireland from policies based on religious intolerance. In Holland a numerous Catholic population were the victims of similar legislation, but were enabled to survive through their willingness to submit to financial extortion.

Two Catholic countries, France and Poland, held a remarkable position in the age that was particularly associated with toleration. In France an extraordinary difficult situation arose, partly because various groups of reformers (some of them not clearly heretics) secured patronage at first in high places, while the King, not always the friend of the Pope,




was able to hope that the dissenting bodies could be a support to his diplomacy. When at last, in 1559, the King found it necessary to turn his attention seriously to the religious problem, it turned out that he had neglected the matter too long, and he could not cope with the size of the movement, or with the insurrectionary character that it had been developing. In the last four decades of the sixteenth century the Catholics and Huguenots represented parties both of which on a number of occasions were stronger than the Crown-the monarch being able to save himself only by making alliance now with the one and now with the other. In France there developed in fact what might properly be called "the Ulster situation"; and no man should pretend to have policies for such a predicament, unless he has studied the last four decades of French history in the sixteenth century, including the massacre of Saint Bar- tholomew. A minister who, in the early stages of such a story should say that disorders and murders should be taken quietly, that the trouble would soon cure itself and the culprits soon find out that violence "didn't pay," might well live to see both England and Ireland brought to an immeasurable risk and perhaps irretrievable tragedy. In France the Huguenots became powerful enough to exact from the government, not only toleration, but also the right to have armies and troops to defend their possession of it. Here, more than anywhere else, a system of toleration had to be accepted because the country and the government realized that further war would mean, not victory for anybody but just the defeat of France.

The religious settlement in Germany in 1555, after civil war, confined its benefits to Catholics and Lutherans, but established the principle of Cuius regio eius religio. It did not allow religious variations within single states but permitted the dissidents of either party to move to a principality which had established the form of religion they preferred. In 1568-69, however, the Emperor Maximilian granted freedom to the States in Lower and Upper Austria, and this system which normally extended only to Lutheranism, and was formally confined to the higher classes, in practice spread to everybody, receiving its legal establishment in the Assecuratio of 1571. This was the first part of Germany in which toleration (as distinct from the mere permission to emigrate) was properly established. In Poland, however, the Calvinists as well as the Lutherans were able to introduce their system under King Sigismund II

Augustus (1548-72) who was determined not to persecute the Protest- ants; and, before he died, even the Anti-Trinitarians had introduced themselves, for Cardinal Hosius, though not really opposed to the use of force, had advised that the suppression of the small sects at the wish of the Calvinists would only be playing into the hands of these latter. He thought that, "if they could not all be suppressed it was better to tolerate them all, so that, attacking and devouring each other, they would ruin




themselves."2 In the seventeenth century religious uniformity was re- established largely because the very enemies of Catholicism had so hated one another.

It would seem that gradually in early modern times, but more pow- erfully still in the seventeenth century, the situation was affected by a maxim from Matthew VII, 12, which in reality had been known all the time; namely, "All things whatsoever men should do to you, do ye also to them." On something like this even Hobbes would seem to have based his idea of morality. The heart of the whole problem lies in the fact that men regard the objects of their religious belief as an absolute, but if they make them an absolute absolute there will be no room for the toleration of differences of opinion. They would argue on occasion that Catholicism was too wicked-it could not be regarded as even capable of being a matter of conscience. To adhere to your own absolute, so far as concerns your own thought and conduct, while really putting yourself in the position of the dissenter, and saying "If I insist on freedom of conscience for myself, surely I must insist that the other man enjoys the same privilege"-to feel secure in your own beliefs but to allow the other man to have his own absolute (though it can be only relatively absolute to you)-this simple step seems always just about the hardest of all for human beings to take.

III. Professor Jordan, in the Conclusion to his study of toleration in England, makes a remark particularly relevant to the study of religion, and especially the examination of the transition taking place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It should be regarded as an important corrective of the straight lines of causation which so often over-simplify the passage from one period to another. He writes:

The historian of ideas, at least, must ever realise that a dozen works written in the heat of controversy, or a score of pamphlets indited by sectaries gripped by a blinding fear, may not, despite their blinding intensity, be so significant as indices of the nature of cultural change as the cold verdict of a judge on assize, the casual quip of a Pepys, or the blunt observation of the squire to his lady.3

In the kind of case that Professor Jordan has in mind, the historical transition to which we are tempted to attach a too simple linear cause, ought rather to be seen as a gradual change of texture taking place in a complicated piece of material.

For some years after 1950 I saw a good deal of the Danish physicist and Nobel prize-winner, Niels Bohr, who seemed to have a great need

2J. Le Cler, Toleration and the Reformation (New York and London, 1960; Eng. trans.), 1,392.

3W. K. Jordan, The Development of Toleration in England, 1640-1660 (Lon- don, 1940), 11,469.




to talk to a historian, because he had a hunch that the texture of history was analogous to the pattern of movement that one finds inside the atom. (I do not think that his conjecture was quite correct, because, granted that human beings are the ultimate particles, and that there is an inde- terminacy about them, there is nothing inside the atom that quite corre- sponds with Alexander the Great or Napoleon, so superior to everything else that their comparatively local movements, give a new direction to the whole historical fabric and to the motions of the great mass of the other particles.)

On the other hand, the German physicist and Nobel prize-winner, Heisenberg, who once spent a good deal of time in Cambridge, discussed with me on various occasions a point that he loved to make; namely, that the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was really due to a general change, but a subtle change, in man's feeling for matter-this matter not being a quasi-mystical, quasi-magical thing any longer, but sluggish and inert, lying motionless unless a person happened to do something to it. In other words, Heisenberg attributed a peculiar causative importance not to the passage of an idea from one writer to another, but to something that can be described as a more general change of texture. Some students of early modern science have held that the secret of this general change lies in the emergence of the artisan, but also the assistants engaged in the workshops of artists like Leonardo da Vinci who were makers of gadgets. Furthermore, in the early part of the sixteenth century it was regarded as entirely natural that the stars, the planets, and the heavenly bodies in general, were com- posed of a special ethereal kind of matter, not like anything on the cum- brous and rugged earth-not subject actually to weight or friction or chemical analysis. But within a century or so it was just as natural for everybody to feel that the stuff the planets were made of was essentially the same as our earthy kind of matter, and the obvious result of this was that the scope of science itself was mightily enlarged. Yet I am not clear that it was any book or any demonstration that directly generated this

particular change of feeling about matter. I would judge that a score of

separate things had made people come to feel differently about the heavens. There had occurred a different way of experiencing things.

This aspect of the changes that take place with the passage of time is not less remarkable in the sphere of general religious beliefs. At the

beginning of the sixteenth century the majority of men still found it natural that the clergy should be considered a class apart-exempt from the action of the secular courts. I remember being quite jolted when I read a letter written later by a pious layman, who simply found himself

incapable of imagining why the clergy were not amenable to the law of the land like everybody else. I didn't feel that this man had found the idea in a book-it looked like a change of feeling-the effect of some-




thing actually experienced. More unexpected, perhaps are the words of Michel de L'Hopital in the France of 1560. He declared:

We ... see that a Frenchman and an Englishman of the same religion are more friendly towards each other than two citizens of one town, but of different religions, so far does the relationship of religion surpass that of nationality.4

It is clear that toleration at one stage of the story and religious liberty in a more general sense at a later stage-the process making great advances in the latter half of the seventeenth century-owed much to purely secular motives: the inability to carry on war any longer, the economic interests that encouraged immigration, the need to reduce the status of religion itself, in order to establish public order and give the government better control over its territory. And in a thousand ways the general secularization that took place (only partly due to the religious conflicts themselves but promoted by so many other factors) gave a tremendous power to the cause of liberty. Here, above all, we see that causation is by no means a narrow linear affair, but rather like a tightly meshed network, the whole of which acquires a radical new texture from time to time.

But perhaps the most interesting of all utterances on the question of new developments in religion is one that was known in the early modern period but was not sufficiently assimilated: the declaration of the Pharisee Gamaliel on the subject of the nascent Christian Church itself (Acts V,34).

Men of Israel, be cautious in deciding what to do with these men . . . Keep clear of these men; I tell you, leave them alone. For if this idea of theirs or its execution is of human origin, it will collapse; but if it is from God, you will never be able to put them down, and you risk finding yourselves at war with God.

Peterhouse, Cambridge University.

4J. Le Cler, op. cit., 11,45.

[The article above was contributed to the Fourth Conference of the Inter- national Society for the History of Ideas, held at the Fondazione Cini, San

Giorgio, Venice (Sept. 28-Oct. 2, 1975).]



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