me out strongly for
toleration, but he made two extremely sage remarks about it. The first
was that it was setting a high value on our own conjectures to put men
to death for their sake. The second was thus phrased, in the old
English translation: "It might be urged that to give factions the
bridle to uphold their opinion, is by that facility and ease, the ready
way to mollify and release them; and to blunt the edge, which is
sharpened by rareness, novelty and difficulty."

Had the course of history been decided by weight of argument,
persecution would have been fastened on the world forever, for the
consensus of opinion was overwhelmingly against liberty of conscience.
But just as individuals are rarely converted on any vital question by
argument, so the course of races and of civilizations is decided by
factors lying deeper than {649} the logic of publicists can reach.
Modern toleration developed from two very different sources; by one of
which the whole point of view of the race has changed, and by the other
of which a truce between warring factions, at first imposed as bitter
necessity, has developed, because of its proved value, into a permanent
peace.

[Sidenote: Renaissance]

The first cause of modern tolerance is the growing rationalism of which
the seeds were sown by the Renaissance. The generation before Luther
saw an almost unparalleled liberty in the expression of learned
opinion. Valla could attack pope, Bible and Christian ethics;
Pomponazzi could doubt the immortality of the soul; More could frame a
Utopia of deists, and Machiavelli could treat religion as an instrument
in the hands of knaves to dupe fools. As far as it went this liberty
was admirable; but it was really narrow and "academic" in the worst
sense of the word. The scholars who vindicated for themselves the
right to say and think what they pleased in the learned tongue and in
university halls, never dreamed that the people had the same rights.
Even Erasmus was always urging Luther not to communicate imprudent
truths to the vulgar, and when he kept on doing so Erasmus was so vexed
that he "cared not whether Luther was roasted or boiled" for it.
Erasmus's good friend Ammonius jocosely complained that heretics were
so plentiful in England in 1511 before the Reformation had been heard
of, that the demand for faggots to burn them was enhancing the price of
fire-wood. Indeed, in this enlightened era of the Renaissance, what
porridge was h