Note 135 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT—(Continued)

Of popular freethought in the rest of Europe there is little to chronicle for a hundred and fifty years after the Reformation. The epoch-making work of Copernicus, published in 1543, had little or no immediate effect in Germany, where, as we have seen, physical and verbal strifes had begun with the ecclesiastical revolution, and were to continue to waste the nation’s energy for a century. In 1546, all attempts at ecclesiastical reconciliation having failed, the emperor Charles V, in whom Melanchthon had seen a model monarch,135 decided to put down the Protestant heresy by war. Luther had just died, apprehensive for his cause. Civil war now raged till the peace of Augsburg in 1555; whereafter Charles abdicated in favour of his son Philip. Here were in part the conditions which in France and elsewhere were later followed by a growth of rational unbelief; and there are some traces even at this time of partial skepticism in high places in the German world, notably in the case of the Emperor Maximilian II, who, “grown up in the spirit of doubt,”136 would never identify himself with either Protestants or Catholics.137 But in Germany there was still too little intellectual light, too little brooding over experience, to permit of the spread of such a temper; and the balance of forces amounted only to a deadlock between the ecclesiastical parties. Protestantism on the intellectual side, as already noted, had sunk into a bitter and barren polemic138 among the reformers themselves; and many who had joined the movement reverted to Catholicism.139 Meanwhile the teaching and preaching Jesuits were zealously at work, turning the dissensions of the enemy to account, and contrasting its schism upon schism with the unity of the Church. But Protestantism was well welded to the financial interest of the many princes and others who had acquired the Church lands confiscated at the Reformation; since a return to Catholicism would mean the surrender of these.140 Thus there wrought on the one side the organized spirit of anti-heresy141 and on the other the organized spirit of Bibliolatry, neither gaining ground; and between the two, intellectual life was paralysed. Protestantism saw no way of advance; and the prevailing temper began to be that of the Dark Ages, expectant of the end of the world.142 Superstition abounded, especially the belief in witchcraft, now acted on with frightful cruelty throughout the whole Christian world;143 and in the nature of the case Catholicism counted for nothing on the opposite side.