nt vigilance is the price of
liberty. The tendency of our own times, stimulated by scientific
discoveries and their practical application, is to political
consolidation, to the absorption of lesser communities in greater; just
as disintegration was the leading characteristic of the darker ages. The
scheme of Charlemagne to organize Europe into a single despotism was a
brilliant failure because the forces which were driving human society
into local and gradual reconstruction around various centres of
crystallization: were irresistible to any countervailing enginry which
the emperor had at his disposal. The attempt of Philip, eight centuries
later, at universal monarchy, was frivolous, although he could dispose of
material agencies which in the hands of Charlemagne might have made the
dreams of Charlemagne possible. It was frivolous because the rising
instinct of the age was for religious, political, and commercial freedom
in a far intenser degree than those who lived in that age were themselves
aware. A considerable republic had been evolved as it were involuntarily
out of the necessities of the time almost without self-consciousness that
it was a republic, and even against the desire of many who were guiding
its destinies. And it found itself in constant combination with two
monarchs, despotic at heart and of enigmatical or indifferent religious
convictions, who yet reigned over peoples, largely influenced by
enthusiasm for freedom. Thus liberty was preserved for the world; but, as
the law of human progress would seem to be ever by a spiral movement, it;
seems strange to the superficial observer not prone to generalizing, that
Calvinism, which unquestionably was the hard receptacle in which the germ
of human freedom was preserved in various countries and at different
epochs, should have so often degenerated into tyranny. Yet
notwithstanding the burning of Servetus at Geneva, and the hanging of
Mary Dyer at Boston, it is certain that France, England, the Netherlands,
and America, owe a large share of such political liberty as they have
enjoyed to Calvinism. It may be possible for large masses of humanity to
accept for ages the idea of one infallible Church, however tyrannical but
the idea once admitted that there may be many churches; that what is
called the State can be separated from what is called the Church; the
plea of infallibility and of authority soon becomes ridiculous--a mere
fiction of political or fashionable q