Identity of civil and religious life ages. suggested antithesis; as with most of Voltaire's keen-edged remarks, there was deep and earnest meaning behind it. Until quite modern times toleration was found only in union with indifference. In religious matters the Gallio, who "cared for none of those things," might refuse to play the part of a persecutor, but the most devout and disinterested zeal for religion was apt to be combined with more or less fanatical intolerance. Various causes from time to time contributed to this, but the deepest and most abiding cause was the imperfect separation between religion in primitive and politics. If we carry our thoughts back to primeval ages, we see that there was no such separation; religious life and civil life were identical. The earliest glimpses we can get of the human race show us nowhere anything like a nation, but everywhere small tribes perpetually encroaching upon one another and perpetually fighting to escape annihilation. The state of things among the American Indians of the seventeenth century may serve to illustrate what had been going on over a large part of the earth's surface for at least 300,000 or 400,000 years. From the Australian stage of human existence up to the Iroquois stage there was in many respects an enormous advance toward civilization, but the omnipresence of exterminating warfare continued, and enables us to understand that feature of primeval times. In such a stage of society almost conformity. every act of tribal life is invested with religious significance, and absolute conformity to tribal rules and observances is enforced with piti Need for less rigour. The slightest neglect of an omen, for example, might offend some tutelar deity and thus bring on defeat; it is therefore unhesitatingly punished with death. It is an important part of the duties of medicine-men to take cognizance of the slightest offences and lapses. In early society the enforced conformity relates chiefly to matters of ritual and ceremony; questions of dogma arise at a later stage, after a considerable development in human thinking. But to whatever matter the enforcement of conformity relates, there can be no doubt as to the absolute necessity of it in early society. No liberty of divergence can be allowed to the individual without endangering the community. As a kind of help toward the illustration of this point, let me cite a familiar instance of persecution in modern times and in a highly civilized community, where some of the conditions of primitive society had been temporarily reproduced. In 1636 there were about 5000 Englishmen in New England, distributed in more than twenty villages, mostly on the shores of Massachusetts Bay, but some as remote as the Connecticut River. Such a concerted Indian assault upon them as was actually made forty years later, in King Phil ip's war, might have overwhelmed them. Such an assault was contemplated by the Pequots and dreaded throughout the settlements, and the train-bands were making ready for war, when a certain number of Boston men refused to There were a few persons of influence in Boston, called Antinomians, of whom the one best serve. The Antinomians and war. the Pequot remembered is Anne Hutchinson. According to them it made a great difference to one's salvation whether one were under a "covenant of grace 66 or only under a covenant of works." The men who in a moment of supreme peril to the commonwealth refused to march against the enemy alleged as a sufficient reason that they suspected their chaplain of being under a "covenant of works," and therefore would not serve with him. Under such circumstances Mrs. Hutchinson and the other Antinomians were banished from Boston. A disagreement upon a transcendental question of theology was breeding sedition and endangering the very existence of the state. Those who defend the government of Massachusetts for banishing Mrs. Hutchinson rest their defence upon such grounds. Without feeling called upon to decide that question, we can see that the case is historically instructive in a high degree. Now when we come to early society, the military urgency is incessant and imperative, and all other things must yield to it. It is sustained by the feeling of corporate responsibility which is uni Corporate responsi bility. versal among tribal communities. The tribe is regarded as responsible for the acts of each one of its individuals. Religious sanctions and penalties are visited upon everything. What we call conventionalities are in the tribal stage of society regarded as sacraments, and thus the slightest infringement is liable to call down upon the whole tribe the wrath of some offended tutelar deity, in the shape of defeat or famine or pestilence. In such a stern discipline there is no room for divergence or dissent. And such was undoubtedly the kind of training under which all our ancestors were reared, from far-off ages of which only a geologic record remains down to the mere yesterday that witnessed the building of the Pyramids. Under such rigid training were formed, through wave after wave of conquest, the great nations of prechristian times. persecu tions. It is not strange that it has taken the foremost races of men three or four thousand years to free themselves from the tyranny of mental habits which had been engrained into them for three or four hundred thousand. A careful study of the history of religious persecution shows us Political and that sometimes politics and sometimes religious religion have been most actively concerned in it. The persecution of Christians by the Roman emperors was chiefly political, because Christianity asserted a dominion over men paramount to that of the emperor. The persecution of the Albigenses by Pope Innocent III. was largely political, because that heresy threatened the very continuance of the Papacy as part of the complex government of medieval Europe. Innocent, like the heathen emperors, was fighting in self-defence. So, too, a considerable part of the mutual persecutions of Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was simply downright warfare in which A kills B to prevent B from killing A. But if we consider the nature of the religious motives that have entered into persecution, whether they have been dominating motives or have simply been enlisted in furtherance of political ends, we find that they have always been rooted in the ancient notion of corporate responsibility. Let us get rid of the unclean thing lest we be cursed for its sake; such has been the feeling which has more than anything else sustained persecution. The Spanish prelates, for example, who urged the banishment of the Moriscos, loudly asseverated that the failure to suppress the Dutch Netherlands was a mark of God's displeasure that such people were allowed to stay in Spain. Was God likely to aid the Spaniards in exterminating infidels abroad while they were so sinful as to harbour infidels in their own country? So when Queen Mary Tudor was led by domestic disappointments to fancy herself undergoing divine punishment, she quickly reached the conclusion that she had not been sufficiently zealous in purging the kingdom of heresy, and this particular act of logic kindled the flames for more than fifty Protestants. In the sixteenth century this way of looking at things (which I now take pains to explain to my readers) would not have needed a word of explanation for anybody; it was simply a piece of plain common sense, self-evident to all! Now inasmuch as this notion of corporate responsibility is a survival from the very infancy of the human race, since the rigorous restriction of individuality persisted through countless generations of men to whom it proved indispenlonged vital sably useful, it is not strange that, since it has come to be recognized as harmful and stigmatized as persecution, it has been found so hard to kill. The conditions of Reasons for the pro ity of the persecuting spirit. |