Principles of western civilisation

314 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

be punished than that one guilty person should remain unpunished.” *

Throughout Northern Europe the development continued with unabated pace. In Sweden dissenters were banished by the civil authorities. The duty of the civil power to punish heretics was expressed in the Swiss, Scottish, and Belgic “ Confessions” of the new movement. Even the Anabaptists, mentioned towards the end of the seventeenth century by Bossuet as one of the only two bodies of Christians then known to him which did not maintain the right of the civil magistrate to punish false doctrine,? turned naturally to force for the suppression of religious error in that disastrous experiment at government in Miinster which Karl Pearson has so graphically though characteristically described.* The ideas underlying the experiment of Calvin in Geneva profoundly impressed, as time went on, the religious life of Western Europe.*

1 Cf. Moeller, Hist. of Chr. Church, vol. iii. div. ii. ch. ii.

* Hist. Variat. Protestantes, liv. x. ch. 56; cf. Lecky’s Europ. Ratl., vol. ii. 53.

3 Ethic of Free Thought, by Karl Pearson, pp. 263-313; cf. Moeller, Hist. of Chr. Church, vol. iii. div. i. ch. v. p. 4.

+ “Calvin,” as Mr. Morley has said, ‘‘ shaped the mould in which the bronze of Puritanism was cast. That commanding figure, of such vast power, yet somehow with so little lustre, by his unbending will, his pride, his severity, his French spirit of system, his gift for government, for legislation, for dialectic in every field, his incomparable industry and persistence, had conquered a more than pontifical ascendency in the Protestant world. He meets us in England, as in Scotland, Holland, France, Switzerland, and the rising England across the Atlantic. He died (1564) a generation before Cromwell was born, but his influence was still at its height. Nothing less than to create in man a new nature was his far-reaching aim, to regenerate character, to simplify and consolidate religious faith. His scheme comprehended a doctrine that went to the very root of man’s relations with the scheme of universal things ; a Church order as closely compacted as that of Rome; a system of moral discipline as concise and as imperative as the code of Napoleon. He built it all upon a certain theory of the government of the universe, which by his agency has exerted an amazing influence upon the world” (Olver Cromwell, by Right Hon. John Morley).