SUPPRESSION OF HERESY IN THE NETHERLANDS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. (Continued.)

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 235, 2 November 1877, Page 13

SUPPRESSION OF HERESY IN THE NETHERLANDS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. (Continued.)

The reports of Fray Lorenzo de Villavicencio, corroborated by the evidences of the judicial archives of the country, cast a horrid light upon the local results of the convulsion of minds. We may be permitted to dwell upon this point for a few moments. During the first half of the sixteenth century, there was started a sect with its seat at Antwerp. Its members practised poligamy. Every man was allowed two, four, and six wives, according as he had the means of support ng them. They had to marry and unmarry them a minister who they themselves elected ; they had special laws for their government ; surnames by which to recognise one another, and a spirit of infernal invention " that would have sufficed to accomplish the destruction of this country, if Our Lord had not permitted them to Le discovered." Those who enjoyed the advantages of this sect were some twenty in number ; the others were hired for a price to do their bidding, wihhout being fully initiated. "No one was received among the elect of this religion until it became evident, after the torments to which the candidate was subjected, that he would, if arrested, bear with courage tortures to which civil justice would condemn him." If an affiliated woman repented her manner of life, she was delivered to the minister who killed her, precisely like one who had given her husband, or lord, some cause of complaint. The sect also suppressed in the dark such members as left them. It extended its depredations over Flanders, the country around Antwerp, the county of Looz, and its audacity was so great, owing to the complicity it could rely on, that it one day robbed a tottery in the very heart of Antwerp, and the residence of a Spanish merchant in the centre of the city of Bruges. * These brief evidences will suffice to convince the reader that, without energetic action on the part of the authorities, in view of the frightful demoralization of minds, social order itself, and not political order alone, would have been gravely imperilled. The new worships were not defined. The new doctrines were as incoherent as they were numerous. Those that captivated the masses were precisely those that contributed most to the overthrow of eveiy principle of social stability, and their adepts sought everywhere to impose them hy force and violence. It was only by entrenching itself firmly upon the ground of orthodoxy, in guarding against the propagation of theories which logically threatened social dissolution, that public authority could hope to arrest the evil before it became absolutely impossible to suppress it. It is the most complete, the most distinct, and the most inexplicable historical error to represent Protestanism as having been the originator of civil toleration. Never and nowhere has Protestanism ever asked for toleration, except where it was weak and shaky to disarm power, waiting to show itself intolerant, persecuting, false to its own declarations as soon as the number, the strength, the sedition, the audacity, or the interested connivance of power had committed secular authority into its hands. Everywhere, as soon as the occasion presented itself, the Reformers invoked the assistance of the secular arm of the Princes and Magistrates they had won over, to silence their opponents with, f Calvin had Servet burned. Bucer, as far back as 1531, tauglit at Strasbourg that Servet deserved the most ignominious death, because of his book on the Holy Trinity. Mclancthon praised Calvin's act, " giving full assent to his judgment and maintaining that his magisstrates had acted fully in accordance with justice in executing a

* Correspondence of Philip 11, tome 11, p. 26 et seq. t For particulars see my Memoire crowned by the Royal Academy, on the Droit Crimiuel dans le Duche de Brabaut depute Cliarles-Quint Jusqu' a la Reunion de la Beligique a la France, pp. 66 et seq.

blasphemer after a proper inquest." . . . Calvin himself publishes a book entitled : " Fidelia Expositio Errorum Mich. Serveti et brevit eorum, Mefutatio ttbi docetw Jure gladii Coercendos cute Haereticos." Theodore de Beza developed the thesis : De Haereticis a Magistratu Oivili Pvniendis."% Not one among them contested theoretically the fundamental principle of Government of the times ; they all merely wanted to turn this principle against Catholics and against dissenters from their own doctrines. In Germany the first territorial princes that embraced Lutheranism, exerted themselves to extirpate Catholicity out of their dominions by interdicting its worship, exiling its clergy, despoiling it of its property, and driving its faithful into apostacy or emigration. When the treachery of Maurice Saxe broke the imperial power of Charles V., they had inscribed in the peace of Augsburg the despotic maxim, cujus regio illivs religio, which leaves the consciences of their subjects to their individual whims, and they hastened to apply it to the utmost limit. The Lutherans were in accord with Catholics legally to repulse Calvinism. The Anabaptists, despite the Reformation in Germany, continued to be menaced with the penalty of death. In the Scandinanavian States, where the Government became Lutheran, Catholicity was at first hunted down with a murderous violence, which was encouraged, or, at least, not restrained, by Toyalty, and it soon became, by legal enactments, more and more circumscribed. These decrees were almost in full force down to the nineteenth century ! In Switzerland, Xwinglianism and then Calvinism, were introduced by the violence of governments, and Catholicity became entirely proscribed, except in the five old mountaineer Cantons, which succeeded by their energy in preserving their freedom. In Berne, the Bourbons becoming Huguenots, in their turn introduced Calvinism by the means of secular authority, and crushed orthodoxy by violence. In France the Huguenots, wherever they were in authority, during the civil wars, showed themselves to be iconoclasts, destroyers of churches and monasteries, intolerant persecutors and anarchists of the unfortunate Catholics who fell into their hands. t Hefele Cardinal Ximenes p. 344-345.