Introductory. 3 1 



guides against the would-be autocracy of a king who 

 sought to lord it over the consciences as well as over the 

 bodies of his subjects. 



Coincidentally with the first breath of the humanistic 

 spirit, and increasing with the movement of the Renais- 

 sance, appeared a revival of State claims over the indi- 

 vidual consciences of subjects, and when the destructive 

 portion of the Reformation movement had done its work, 

 it left behind it, as a worthy monument, that monstrous 

 rule of German legislation, " Cujus regio ejus religio" 

 and paganism reappeared in the political arena. 



Religious indifferentism and the rapid multiplication of 

 sects in certain countries have for a time suspended the 

 practical development of this worst of tyrannies ; but in 

 theory the evil has augmented, and is in our own day 

 beginning to bear bitter practical fruit in Germany and 

 Switzerland. 



It has augmented theoretically, because the religious 

 tyranny of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was 

 at least avowedly based on an assertion of religious truth 

 and a professed care for the souls of subjects. Now, how- 

 ever, we meet with an express negation of such motives, 

 and the naked assertion of the State's right, qua State, 

 to dictate to its subjects their religious practices and im- 

 pose on them its own doctrines the logical outcome of 

 the monistic philosophy in vogue. 



Christians have again imposed upon them the glorious 



