he Lutheran Church the bulwark of political
stability, and bequeathed to his disciples the doctrine of divine right
and passive obedience. Zwingli, who was a staunch republican, desired
that all magistrates should be elected, and should be liable to be
dismissed by their electors; but he died too soon for his influence, and
the permanent action of the Reformation on democracy was exercised
through the Presbyterian constitution of Calvin.

It was long before the democratic element in Presbyterianism began to
tell. The Netherlands resisted Philip II. for fifteen years before they
took courage to depose him, and the scheme of the ultra-Calvinist
Deventer, to subvert the ascendency of the leading States by the
sovereign action of the whole people, was foiled by Leicester's
incapacity, and by the consummate policy of Barnevelt. The Huguenots,
having lost their leaders in 1572, reconstituted themselves on a
democratic footing, and learned to think that a king who murders his
subjects forfeits his divine right to be obeyed. But Junius Brutus and
Buchanan damaged their credit by advocating regicide; and Hotoman, whose
_Franco-Gallia_ is the most serious work of the group, deserted his
liberal opinions when the chief of his own party became king. The most
violent explosion of democracy in that age proceeded from the opposite
quarter. When Henry of Navarre became the next heir to the throne of
France, the theory of the deposing power, which had proved ineffectual
for more than a century, awoke with a new and more vigorous life.
One-half of the nation accepted the view, that they were not bound to
submit to a king they would not have chosen. A Committee of Sixteen made
itself master of Paris, and, with the aid of Spain, succeeded for years
in excluding Henry from his capital. The impulse thus given endured in
literature for a whole generation, and produced a library of treatises
on the right of Catholics to choose, to control, and to cashier their
magistrates. They were on the losing side. Most of them were
bloodthirsty, and were soon forgotten. But the greater part of the
political ideas of Milton, Locke, and Rousseau, may be found in the
ponderous Latin of Jesuits who were subjects of the Spanish Crown, of
Lessius, Molina, Mariana, and Suarez.

The ideas were there, and were taken up when it suited them by extreme
adherents of Rome and of Geneva; but they produced no lasting fruit
until, a century after the Reformation, they be