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VIII
Liberalism and the Reformation

J. Holland Rose maintained that the "chief propelling power of democracy in England was misery" (The Rise of Democracy, p. 10); and in so far as the final drive towards Universal Suffrage is concerned, this is true. But generally speaking the statement is inaccurate, for it implies that the poverty, privation and oppression, suffered by the masses owing to the worthlessness of their secular rulers, caused the revolt that generated the democratic movement. It was not, however, chiefly by this form of misrule that the seeds of Popular Government were sown, hut strange to say by the gross abuses of the ecclesiastical authorities, whose excesses and reckless tyrannies at last outraged not merely the populace but, what was more important, their temporal rulers.
        And it is probably correct to maintain that even the latter, in their revolt against the clerics, inadvertently committed themselves to doctrines which were eventually to be turned against them and their order. For, in the prolonged and successful struggle of both rulers and ruled against the Church's exacting pretensions and privileges, ideas about freedom and equality began to be formulated which eventually the intelligentsia among the populace eagerly applied to politics. Even when this stage was reached, however, the humble reticence among the masses delayed for some time their readiness to step into their masters' shoes. It was not enough that for generations these same masters, like the Church, had been guilty of gross abuses. What the common people required in order to be convinced that they could become self-governing was a body of doctrine justifying the belief in Mankind's right to Freedom and Equality. And, surprising as it may seem, it was through apostasy and religions sedition that this body of doctrine was ultimately formulated. Nor is it without interest to note that in both the religious rebels themselves and their teaching, the

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common factor was a pronounced aversion to Aristotle, the aristocratic tendencies of whose philosophy found no favour with the anticlericals. For he had taught that the men "born to govern" were they who had been "endowed with minds capable of reflection and forethought", and therefore superior to common mankind, and that the association of the two — born rulers and born subjects — was of practical advantage to both. (Politics II, 1252a and 1254a).
        These principles firmly inculcated upon the population by tradition (also, though much more rarely, by experience) had to be exposed as nonsense, and this could be done only by demonstrating that no such fundamental distinctions existed; in fact, that all men were equal.
        At first this sounded so absurd that its advocacy presented difficulties, and many did not hesitate to dispute it. Rabelais, for instance in the sixteenth century, boldly declared that "en toutes compagnies il y a plus de fols que de sages, et la plus grande partie surmonte toujours la meilleure." (Gargantua, Livre II, Chap. X: "In every human group there are more fools than sages and the majority always prevails over the superior elements.")
        In the heat of their disputations, however, little did the reformers suspect that their attacks on the most powerful institution of the day, and their appeals for a revision of religious doctrine and observance, would ultimately redound as much to political as to religious transformation. Yet the innovations they introduced actually founded a political faith which was new to the people and their times. For, by insensibly grafting on to the principles thought necessary for a successful assault on the Mediaeval Church — i.e. the right of laymen to interpret the scriptures as they thought fit, and the doctrine of human equality — those aspects of Graeco-Roman politics which were relevant to their aims, the leading reformers virtually launched the Liberal and Democratic Movement in Politics and gave it considerable plausibility.
        For most of them, from Wycliffe to Luther and Hooker, were scholars besides being ecclesiastical rebels, and, as except among the masses, there was no ignorance of the political improvisations of the ancient Greeks and Romans, Liberalism may be said to owe its philosophy to men who, although actuated chiefly by hostility to the Mediaeval Church and the

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tyrannies its supremacy had fostered, were inevitably influenced by their familiarity with classical antiquity.
        In the European world of the late fourteenth century, there was in both Church and State much evidence of privileges abused and rights enjoyed without the performance of any corresponding duties. Against the civil forms of these evils, revolt, as we have seen, certainly smouldered and sometimes broke out. But nowhere was the indignation more persistent, violent and overt (because it was felt also by the temporal rulers) than against the Church, whose members, aware of the opportunities for the exploitation of the community afforded by their religious monopoly, pressed their advantage to reckless limits.
        What with the priesthood's complete freedom from responsibility to the civil authorities — a privilege which attracted to the lower clerical orders countless criminals and vagabonds who could thereby defy the officers of justice, and also tempted to crime even those bred to the Church and performing its functions; what with the unremitting and crippling exactions consisting of annates, tithes, and the sale of dispensations, absolutions and indulgences, all of which not only incensed the secular rulers, but also outraged the peasantry by whose hard toil the necessary wealth was supplied; discontent and hostility to the Church was an ever increasing source of revolt throughout the later Middle Ages. For, whilst the fabulous cost of the central administration in Rome and the lavish expenditure of the leading prelates everywhere, with their constant demands on every national purse, dismayed the temporal rulers, what most embittered the peasantry was the wretched meanness of their own lot compared with the luxuries and fat-living everywhere to be seen among the ministers of religion and the affluent leisure and frequently concubinary lives these people led, whilst they themselves, especially the villeins among them, were subjected to forced labour and, with their wives and children, were obliged to set an example in self-denial and austerity.
        The drain on the national wealth through the sale of absolutions and indulgences alone (i.e. apart from Peter's Pence, abolished by Henry VIII in 1534) was considerable. We are told that "Europe was overrun with pardon-sellers" authorised to sell indulgences, "and for centuries their lies, frauds, ex-

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actions and evil living were the cause of the bitterest and most indignant complaints." (The Cambridge Modern History, Vol. I. Chap. XIX). Who can wonder that "the pretensions of the Church were becoming unendurable to the advancing intelligence of the Age?" (Ibid).
        If Chilperic I, grandson of Clovis, and ruler of the Western Kingdom of France, as early as the sixth century A.D., felt entitled to declare, "Our treasury remains impoverished and our wealth transferred to the churches; bishops alone are our rulers; they alone are great; our dignity is dying and is transmitted to the prelates of our cities" ("Voici que notre fisc demeure pauvre, que nos richesses sont transférées aux eglises; personne ne règne si ce n'est les évêques; notre dignité périt et est transportée aux évêques des cités"); if, moreover, he cancelled wills made in favour of the Church and annulled endowments made by his father, Clotaire, can we wonder that seven centuries later both the people and rulers of Europe had grown sufficiently restive to lend a willing ear to the Reformers? (See Histoire des Francs by Grégoire de Tours (VIth century A.D. Livre VI, Chap. XLVI and Livre VII Chap. VII. Translation by M. Guizot, 1861).
        The intellectuals of the Age naturally seized upon the opportunity afforded by this widespread temper to dress their arguments for revolt in a doctrinal garb, and many of them, aware of the support they could count on from the masses and their temporal rulers, used the abuses of the Church as backing for their theological deviations from it.
        It was thus that their reasoning and the grounds on which they based their attack on the Church became, as I have suggested above, the pillars of the Liberal and Democratic doctrines that ultimately prevailed.
        Nor need this surprise us; for the aim of the Reformers was primarily to wean the people from the Church by laying bare its vices and undermining their respect for its sanctity and authority. And they did not shrink from this daring and dangerous task because they knew that they had the support, often clandestine, of the powerful in the land, without which they could hardly have hoped to succeed.
        In order to overthrow clerical authority and be able to insist on religious freedom they knew they must convince their generation, first of all that everybody was free to formulate his

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own religious tenets and, with the Bible and Ins conscience as his guide, to criticise official theology and settle the terms of his own Belief; and secondly, that no essential virtue appertained to priests: therefore that every mail could be his own priest and deal directly with the Deity.
        The first principle assumed the right of freedom of judgment; whilst the second rested on the claim that all men were equal.
        In their effort to release the religions life from the thraldom of unworthy tyrants, they may be acquitted of any conscious intention of founding a novel political creed. But that this proved to be the outcome of their labours is unquestionable, and the historian, Dr. G. P. Gooch very rightly observes that "Modern Democracy is the child of the Reformation, not of the Reformers." (English Democratic Ideas in the 17th Century, Chap. I). Phyllis Doyle concurs. "The right to religions freedom," she says, "led to an assertion of political freedom," and "liberty of conscience" meant "a power of judgment which expressed itself in political form as democratic control over the important organs of state, whether civil or ecclesiastical." (A History of Political Thought, Chap. IX). Whilst Dr. David Thomson, in a similar vein, says, "The English democratic dream has its roots ultimately in the mystical egalitarian ideals of the seventeenth century Puritans. It derives its accent of protest from Protestantism." (The Democratic Ideal in France and England, Chap. I, ii).
        Another outcome of the Movement, which the Reformers could hardly have foreseen and would vehemently have deprecated if they had, was that by opening wide the portals of the Council Chamber and inviting all comers to join in the deliberations of Church and State, the masses were inevitably imbued with the idea that as they were competent to judge the most sacred and complex matters, the minor ones connected with Civil Government were as nothing in comparison, for the religious Whole must include the political Part.
        Thus there occurred not only the lowering of the standards and requirements of all wisdom of judgment, but also an actual degradation of Thought itself. For if thought and judgment were free, how could they and the problems submitted to them and assumed to be soluble by them, be exalted or profound, let alone sacred? The era of snap-judgments, short-term policies and of Feelings masquerading as Thoughts, was thus ushered

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in; and insensibly there arose in modern Europe and its offshoots, a cheapening of the quality of wisdom. To inspire awe, it was better to be a showman than a thinker, with the result that again and again all over Western Civilisation, the dynamism of subversive religious ideas only came to be recognised after they had proved catastrophic.
        In practical politics, these changes inevitably enthroned the Philosophy of Liberalism. And as sanity can only be restored by the total renunciation of this philosophy, Western Civilisation may well succumb in anarchy and chaos before the salutary volte face occurs. There are signs, indeed, that it is already succumbing in this way, and our only chance of survival lies in our being able so completely to besot and thereby weaken other — particularly Eastern — Powers, by spreading our Liberalism to them, that they will become as decadent as ourselves. We have already gone some considerable way towards achieving this end; for is not Democracy now established even in India? But whether it will last in that sub-continent is at least doubtful; and as to whether it is likely to last in the countless new States improvised by American and British efforts elsewhere in the World, we already know that this is hardly likely.

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