f persecution as the
Catholics. It was not disputed that death was the proper punishment of
obstinate heresy. The only dispute was--which were the heretics, and who
should die?

Luther's influence was very great in England, as Calvin's was in
Scotland, and the leaders of the Reformation in our own country had
no doubt as to the justice of killing men for a difference of opinion.
Cranmer taught that heretics were first to be excommunicated; if that
made no impression on them they were to suffer death. It satisfies one
sense of the fitness of things that Cranmer himself perished at the
stake. Becon taught that the duty of magistrates with regard to heretics
was to punish them--"yea, and also to take them out of this life." This
same Becon called upon the temporal rulers to "be no longer the pope's
hangmen." He preferred their being the hangmen of Protestantism. Latimer
himself said of the Anabaptists who were executed, "Well, let them go!"
Bishop Jewel, the great apologist of the Protestant Church of England,
in answering Harding the Jesuit, replies in this way to the charge of
being of the brotherhood of Servetus, David George, and Joan of
Kent: "We detected their heresies, and not you. We arraigned them; we
condemned them. We put them to the execution of the laws. It seemeth
very much to call them our brothers, because we burnt them."

Calvin held the same persecuting doctrine. All who opposed him were
dealt with ruthlessly. He was a veritable Pope of Geneva. His treatment
of Servetus was infamous. But so universal was the principle on which
Calvin acted, that even the mild Melancthon called the cruel roasting
of Servetus at a slow fire "a pious and memorable example for all
posterity."

Protestantism boasts of having asserted the right of private judgment.
It never did anything of the kind. Not a single leader of the
Reformation ever asserted such a principle. Erasmus did, though not in
decisive language; but Erasmus never belonged to the Protestant Church,
and his humanity, no less than his philosophy, brought upon him the
vituperation of Luther. The hero of Protestantism did not intend the
consequences of his revolt against Rome. He would have been appalled
at the thought of them. He made a breach, for his own purposes, in the
great wall of faith. He did not anticipate that others would widen it,
or that the forces of reason would march through and occupy post after
post. He simply did his own stroke of work, and