interpretations. It is surprising that they were not stranger and grotesquer. But the human reason is an obstinate thing, and will criticize and select in spite of its own resolutions. The bulk of these new Bible students took what their consciences approved from the Bible and ignored its riddles and contradictions. All over Europe, wherever the new Protestant churches of the princes were set up, a living and very active residuum of Protestants remained who declined to have their religion made over for them in this fashion. These were the Nonconformists, a medley of sects, having nothing in common but their resistance to authoritative religion, whether of the Pope or the State.[1] Most but not all of these Nonconformists held to the Bible as a divinely inspired and authoritative guide. This was a strategic rather than an abiding position, and the modern drift of Nonconformity has been onward away from this original Bibliolatry towards a mitigated and sentimentalized recognition of the bare teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Beyond the range of Nonconformity, beyond the range of professed Christianity at all, there is also now a great and growing mass of equalitarian belief and altruistic impulse in the modern civilizations, which certainly owes, as we have already asserted, its spirit to Christianity, which began to appear in Europe as the church lost its grip upon the general mind.[2]
- ↑ But Nonconformity was stamped out in Germany. See § 11b of this chapter.
- ↑ "If I were writing a history of democracy," comments E. B., "I should deal first with democracy in religion, which is Calvinism, founded by a great Frenchman at Geneva, and then with democracy in politics, which is the French Revolution, inaugurated by another great Frenchman at Geneva, Rousseau. (The parallel of these two is striking—both typical exponents of the French genius, in its ardent logic and its apostolic fervour which gives in a burning lava to the world the findings of its logic.) It is noticeable in England how democracy in religion (Presbyterianism, which is simply Calvinism, plus Independency or Congregationalism) leads straight under the Stuarts to the English democratic ideas of the seventeenth century. I do not think the democratic element in Protestantism is sufficiently appreciated in the text. Even Luther, in the early days of 1520, could write The Freedom of a Christian Man and champion the priesthood of each believer and his direct access to his Maker. Luther, it is true, changed by 1525, and became a monarchist, the apostle of a state religion, under a godly prince who was summus episcopus. Anglicanism was from the first a monarchist religion, under a Henry VIII who was supremum caput. But if Lutheranism became, and Anglicanism was from the first, a religion of the State, Calvinism was always the religion of resistance to the State—in Holland and in Scotland most especially. The Reformation thus
