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ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
and Beza was of opinion that Anti-Trinitarians ought to be executed, even after recantation. But no Lutheran could cOlnplain when the secular arm converted him into a Calvinist. " Your conscience is in error," he \vould say, "but under the circumstances you are not only justified, but compelled, on my own principles, to act as you do." 1 The resistance of the Catholic Governments to the progress of a religion which announced that it would destroy them as soon as it had the po\ver, was an instinct of self-preservation. No Protestant divine denied or disguised the truth that his party sought the destruc- tion of Catholicism, and would accomplish it whenever they could. The Calvinists, with their usual fearless consistency, held that as civil and ecclesiastical power must be in the same hands, no prince had any right to govern who did not belong to them. Even in the Low Countries, \vhere other sects were free, and the notion of unity abandoned, the Catholics were oppressed. This new and aggressive intolerance infected even Catholic countries, where there was neither, as in Spain, religious unity to be preserved; nor, as in Austria, a menacing danger to be resisted. For in Spain the persecution of the Protestants might be defended on the mediæval principle of unity, whilst under Ferdinand II. it was provoked in the hereditary dominions by the imminent peril which threatened to dethrone the monarch, and to ruin every faithful Catholic. But in France the Protestant doctrine that every good subject must follow the religion of his king grew out of the intensity of personal absolutism. At the revocation of the Edict of N antes, the official argument was the will of the sovereign - an argument \vhich in Germany had reigned so
1 So 1ate as 1791 Pius VI. wrote: II Discrimen intercedit inter homines, qui extra gremium Ecclesiae semper fuerunt, quales sunt Infideles atque ]udaei, atque inter illos qui se Ecclesiae ipsi per susceptum baptismi sacramentum subjecerunt, Primi enim constringi ad catholicam obedientiam non debent, contra vero aIteri sunt cogendi." If this theory had, like that of the Protestants, been put in practice by the Government, it would have furnished the Protestants with an argument precisely similar to that by which the Catholics justified the scveri ty they exercised towards them,
