Excellent post.
Whatever Protestantism became later, mostly by necessity owing to the existence of multiple sects, the early reality was starkly different. Let us not forget the internecine quarrels among the Protestant founders. Let us not forget that Luther himself advised the cold-blooded culling of 100,000 peasants by the princes in his native Germany. And what can one say of England, torn from the Faith of its fathers by a schismatic and lecherous king, who closed the monasteries, other religious houses and began to persecute Catholics?
The historian William Cobett put it best,
"a devastation of England, which was at the time when this event took place, the happiest country, perhaps, that the world had ever seen ... marched on plundering, devastating, and inflicting torments on the people, and shedding their innocent blood ...in exchange for the ease and happiness and harmony and Christian charity enjoyed so abundantly and for so many ages ... the Reformation is the cause of misery, mendicity, nakedness, famine and the endless list of woes which we see and which stun our ears. England celebrated, when it was Catholic, as the land of hospitality, generosity, comfort, opulence and serenity, has become, under the Protestant yoke, the theatre of cold egotism, of the labor of the beasts of burden, of extreme misery and rapacity."
And Will Durant,
Your emphasis on faith as against works was ruinous . . . for a hundred years charity almost died in the centers of your victory . . . You destroyed nearly all the schools we had established, and you weakened to the verge of death the universities that the Church had created and developed. Your own leaders admit that your disruption of the faith led to a dangerous deterioration of morals both in Germany and England. You let loose a chaos of individualism in morals, philosophy, industry, and government. You took all the joy and beauty out of religion . . . you condemned the masses of mankind to damnation as 'reprobates,' and consoled an insolent few with the pride of 'election' and salvation. You stifled the growth of art, and wherever you triumphed classical studies withered. You expropriated Church property to give it to the state and the rich, but you left the poor poorer than before, and added contempt to misery . . .
You rejected the papacy only to exalt the state: you gave to selfish princes the right to determine the religion of their subjects . . . You divided nation against nation, and many a nation and city against itself; you wrecked the international moral checks on national powers, and created a chaos of warring national states . . . You claimed the right of private judgment, but you denied it to others as soon as you could . . . Every man becomes a pope, and judges the doctrines of religion before he is old enough to comprehend the functions of religion in society and morals . . . A kind of disintegrative mania, unhindered by any . . . authority, throws your followers into such absurd and violent disputes that men begin to doubt all religion, and Christianity itself would be dissolved . . . were it not that the Church stands firm amid all the fluctuations of opinion and argument . . . the one fold that can preserve religion.
Topic: THE INQUISTION LIE (Read 2355 times)