Posted by
ValiantForTruth on Tuesday, March 11, 2008 7:35:44 PM
Pages from Forgotten American History from the works of George Bancroft (1800-1891)
Our fathers were not only Christians; they were even in Maryland by a vast majority, elsewhere almost unanimously, Protestants. Now the Protestant reformation, considered in its largest influence on politics, was the common people awakening to freedom of mind. During the decline of the Roman empire, the oppressed invoked the power of Christianity to resist the tyranny of brute force; and the merciful priest assumed the office of protector. The tribunes of Rome, appointed by the people, had been declared inviolable by the popular vote; the new tribunes of humanity, deriving their office from religion, and ordained by religion to an inviolable sanctity, defended the poor man's house against lust by the sacrament of marriage; restrained arbitrary passion by a menace of the misery due to sin unrepented and unatoned; and taught respect for naked humanity by sprinkling every new-born child with the water of life, confirming every youth, bearing the oil of consolation to every death-bed, and sharing freely with every human being the consecrated emblem of God present with man.
But the protection from priests became a tyranny Expressing all moral truth by the mysteries of symbols, and reserving to itself the administration of the seven sacraments, the priesthood claimed a monopoly of thought, and exercised an absolute spiritual dominion. Human bondage was deeply riveted; for tyranny had fastened on the affections, the understanding, and reason. The priesthood, ordaining its own successors, ruled human destiny at birth, on entering active life, at marriage, in the hour when frailty breathed its confession, in the hour when faith aspired to communion with God, and at death. The fortunes of the human race are embarked in a lifeboat, and cannot be wrecked. Mind refuses to rest; and active freedom is a necessary condition of intelligent existence. The instinctive love of truth could warm even the scholastic theologian; but the light which it kindled for him was oppressed by verbal erudition, and its flickering beams, scarce lighting the cell of the solitary, could not fill the colonnade of the cloister, far less reach the busy world.
Sensualism also was free to mock superstition. Scoffing infidelity put on the cardinal's hat, and made even the Vatican ring with ribaldry. But the indifference of dissoluteness has no creative power; it does but substitute the despotism of the senses for a spiritual despotism; it never brought enfranchisements to the multitude. The feudal aristocracy resisted spiritual authority by the sword; but it was only to claim greater license for their own violence. Temporal sovereigns, jealous of a power which threatened to depose the unjust prince, were ready to set prelacy against prelacy, the national church against the Catholic church, but it was only to assert the absolute liberty of despotism. By slow degrees the students of the humanities, as they were called, polished scholars, learned lessons of freedom from Grecian and Roman example; but they hid their patriotism in a dead language, and forfeited the claim to higher influence and enduring fame by suppressing truth, and yielding independence to the interests of priests and princes.