ealing process, and the
splendid prestige which the process itself assured. Yet the method of
warfare which it had so brilliantly proved to be worthless was speedily
adopted by Christianity itself, and is even yet, at intervals,
spasmodically applied.

That these attempts should have such results as we see is not surprising
when we remember that even movements, at the outset, mainly inspired by
moral energy, rather than by faith in moral legislation, when that
energy becomes reckless, violent and intolerant, lead in the end to
results altogether opposed to the aims of those who initiated them. It
was thus that Luther has permanently fortified the position of the Popes
whom he assailed, and that the Reformation produced the
Counter-Reformation, a movement as formidable and as enduring as that
which it countered. When Luther appeared all that was rigid and inhuman
in the Church was slowly dissolving, certainly not without an inevitable
sediment of immorality, yet the solution was in the highest degree
favourable to the development of the freer and larger conceptions of
life, the expansion of science and art and philosophy, which at that
moment was pre-eminently necessary for the progress of civilisation,
and, indirectly, therefore, for the progress of morals.[219] The violence
of the Reformation not only resulted in a new tyranny for its own
adherents--calling in turn for fresh reformations by Puritans, Quakers,
Deists, and Freethinkers--but it re-established, and even to-day
continues to support, that very tyranny of the old Church against which
it was a protest.

When we try to regulate the morals of men on the same uniform pattern we
have to remember that we are touching the most subtle, intimate, and
incalculable springs of action. It is useless to apply the crude methods
of "suppression" and "annihilation" to these complex and indestructible
forces. When Charles V retired in weariness from the greatest throne in
the world to the solitude of the monastery at Yuste, he occupied his
leisure for some weeks in trying to regulate two clocks. It proved very
difficult. One day, it is recorded, he turned to his assistant and said:
"To think that I attempted to force the reason and conscience of
thousands of men into one mould, and I cannot make two clocks agree!"
Wisdom comes to the rulers of men, sometimes, usually when they have
ceased to be rulers. It comes to the moral legislators not otherwise
than it comes to the immo