RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION. E NGLISHMEN whenever they discuss persecution are apt to
fall into one historical error. The persecutions with which they are most familiar—those of the early Christians and the Marian persecutions in their own country—all failed, and they therefore assume that persecu- tion is a most untrustworthy, or even feeble, instrument of conversion. That is an erroneous opinion. Not to mention the great probability that the Imperial persecutions, which though intermittent were terrible in their severity, delayed the triumph of Christianity, by alarming the higher ranks of the governing classes, for at least a century, it is certain that the edicts of Theodosius gave the old paganism its death warrant, and that Charlemagne converted Eastern and Northern Germany to Christianity by the sword. The Germans have never relapsed. Arianism also was practically put down by physical force. The Catholic troops completely extinguished in Southern France a heretical belief or negation of belief—it was rather a modernised Nature-worship than Protestantism—which threatened Catholicism with destruc- tion, and made orthodoxy dominant from that day to the present, Toulouse, in particular, being as Catholic a city as exists. The Spanish persecutions suppressed both Judaism and Protestantism; and the semi-Spanish Hapsburgs recon-
verted Bohemia by their ferocity, and arrested the spread of the Protestant movement over half Germany and all Belgium. The popular abhorrence of Englishmen for Catholicism undoubtedly facilitated the triumph of Protestantism in England, though a similar process failed utterly in Ireland; and the savage persecution of Christianity in the French Revolution developed an amount of infidelity with which the Church has been contending for nearly a century with imper- fect success. The successors of Mahommed made millions of converts by savage persecution; and sections of the Mussulman world in India, more especially in the South, owe their origin to despotic conversions to a creed which, now that all creeds are equal, has never receded. Hyder Ali made fifty thousand Hindoos Musulmano at a blow, and there are no fiercer Mussulanins in the world ; and the history of Arab conversions in Africa is not altogether a narrative of successful per. suasion. The conversion, too, of the American Indians was carried out mainly by force, and though they are imperfi ot Christians they have not, when released from compulsion, shown any general disposition to relapse. The truth seems to be that, except among the most resolute of mankind— people, for instance, like the Dutch and English—persecution, when carried to its logical extreme and made to involve the death penalty usually succeeds, and that it is only half- hearted persecution which fails. We have little doubt that if either the Catholic or the atheistic parties in France could carry out the persecution to which both are almost equally inclined to its logical extreme, and send the faithful on either side in batches to the guillotine, France would for generations become either an Ultramontane or a purely rationalistic State, with profoundly different effects upon the nature of her civilisation.
Death cannot, however, in modern times and in Western Europe be inflicted as a penalty on " miscreancy " or erroneous belief, and a restrained form of persecution certainly always fails. Bismarck hardly succeeded for a minute with his Kulturkampf, and the irreligious party in France will find, if, as is reported, they are about to commence a new campaign against the Church, that they will only render Catholicism fervent, and prepare against themselves a severe, possibly even a terrible, reaction. It is a little curious, if you will think of it, that it should be so, but so it undoubtedly is. The steady pressure of moderately punitive law or of energetic boycotting will alter most habits and many kinds of opinion—for example, it has repeatedly produced transfers of loyalty—but against a religion or sentiment having its base in religion it appears to be almost inoperative. The reason is to be found, we think, in two causes, which are closely intertwined, and yet perfectly distinct. Persecution on religious grounds offends, we conceive, the instinctive conscience of mankind. The idea of the right of a man to worship as seems to him best is inherent, as much so as the idea of a difference between right and wrong. It may be paralysed or suppressed by an overlying faith, but it always crops up again, never dying even for a moment in those who have to suffer. The most determined Catholic or the fiercest Mussulman always holds that his foeman if he persecutes him for his religion is more unjust, more wicked, than if be oppresses him for any other cause. No Jew ever admits that the mob rushes upon him because he is rich or a usurer, or an unpopular stranger ; he always attributes the rush to his faith, that being the most emphatic way in which he can express his sense of malignant injustice. That this should be the case with decided Christians is but natural, for they have the example of Christ before them, who in the prayer upon the Cross—" Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do "—clearly indicated forgiveness for religious error, even of the worst kind, as most in consonance with the divine character. But the feeling exists also in men of other creeds, and among Hindoos has developed into the extra- ordinary theory that a religion may be actually true for some men and untrue for others. Then with this instinctive con- viction there is associated an intense idea of honour. A man whose creed is persecnced feels himself dishonoured if he does not resist, the creed being as it were part of himself, and this even if his belief is held in a very lax way. Whole com- munities of very lax-living men have fought to the death for their creed, and there have been cases of utter sceptics in- curring martyrdom rather than submit to what they consider
such burning injustice. The ICulturkampf, for example, at once made strong Romanists in the political sense of the easygoing Catholics of the Rhine, who before were as divided as all other Germans; and Protestants who believed nothing have refused most tempting offers rather than profess themselves of another faith. Persecution, in fact, if it stops short of a menace of martyrdom, is the least tolerable of insults, and by forcing the victims to consider what they believe and why, constantly deepens rather than dispels conviction, with the frequent result that very ordinary people, from whom no one expected anything—e.g., in the Marian persecution—suddenly appear as heroes for the faith. Limited persecution, there- fore, invariably fails, and as it usually makes the persecuted much better, often results in a recoil towards their faith. As the persecution relaxes the persecuted Church appears more earnest, and therefore more successful, than before. (There is a singular exception to this rule in the case of the Jews, whose innumerable persecutions have brought them no adherents, but that is because the Jewish teachers, departing from the earlier precedents of their history, have since the Dispersion intertwined their faith and their descent in what is now inextricable confusion.) The rule is clear, and ought to move statesmen as much as the example of Christ ought to move religious men. We question if it does, however, outside England, or always and everywhere within its confines. On the Continent, at any rate, the most experienced rulers seem unable to rid themselves of the idea that pressure will make men give up a religious belief, and they favour this set of sectaries and disfavour that as if they had learned nothing from his- tory and little from their own hearts. In Russia, in Austria, even in France, men who know that nothing would make them give up their own convictions or their own scepticism still believe that petty annoyances or heavy bribes will " con- vert " their religious opponents into faithful, or at all events submissive, followers. "Orthodox" statesmen of high ability promote the persecution of Catholics in Poland, Catholics actually persecute Protestants in Bohemia, and agnostics in France try to persecute both, with the same result in failure. The last-named, indeed, are foolish enough to argue that their position is separate because they are only perse- cuting persecutors, not seeing that where persecution is part of a creed they are persecuting that creed as well as its devotees, and forgetting that their own existence is proof positive that persecution produces no result. They will never have such weapons as the orthodox Churches wielded, yet in spite of those weapons they, and not the Churches, are in possession of power. If you disbelieve a faith and want to weaken it politically, relieve it of disabilities. Then it has nothing to stand on except the power of persuasion, which on yourself has ex hypothesi been exerted in vain.
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