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The early application of these principles was a stroke of genius far in advance of the then condition of the world. Seen from this standpoint, all the rest of the continental world, not yet mechanized, and burdened with the relics of mediævalism, Cæsarism and clericalism, seemed torpid and lost in illusions: arbitrary, inaccurate and slovenly.
Will there be picturesque speakers?" "There are some, but they are not going to speak. There is one, Uncle Chinaman, who is a marvel. In describing the actual condition of Spain, he once uttered this authoritative phrase: 'Clericalism in the zenith, immorality in high places, the debt floating more every day,..." "That's very good." "It certainly is.
He shone neither as a scholar nor as an officer, being obdurate to all training, but by independent exertions and desultory reading of a high class he formed an ideal of society in which there prevailed equality of station and purse, purity of life and manners, religion without clericalism, free speech and honorable administration of just laws.
But the prejudice is discernible in every class of society, even in the very highest. We have also arrayed against us in our crusade for right and justice the dying but still formidable power of clericalism. Society is but half emancipated from its medieval trammels, and the priest, that Eternal Enemy of Liberty, can still put in his evil word against the rights of the Simian. Let us not despair!
I remember he closed his great oration with words to the following effect: "I said in the Chamber not long ago, 'Clericalism, that is the enemy. I predict now that when this election is over, I shall say, 'Clericalism, that is the vanquished." I was introduced to him after his speech.
But their martyrdom does not prove it; and the public does not always believe it. Undoubtedly, as a fact, Dr. Clifford is quite honourably indignant with what he considers to be clericalism, but he does not prove it by having his teapot sold; for a man might easily have his teapot sold as an actress has her diamonds stolen as a personal advertisement.
But in England and Belgium there is Capitalism mixed up with a great many other things, strong things and things that pursue other aims; Clericalism, for instance, and militant Socialism in Belgium; Trades Unionism and sport and the remains of real aristocracy in England.
And although, in an age of chivalry even, it would have appeared exaggerated, it redounds to his credit. It is not surprising that a man animated by such noble sentiments should have died as became a hero and a Christian. His ministers, more audacious than himself, carried their blind hatred of “Clericalism” to such an extent as to sacrifice many of the best supporters of the empire.
But it does not attach to those who attack the privileges of any Church, and who, when the Church steps into the political arena, strike at it with political weapons. This was Brown's position. He was the sworn foe of clericalism.
Let us suppose that, at the beginning of the Lutheran and Zwinglian movement, a vision of its immediate consequences had been granted to Erasmus; imagine that to the spectre of the fierce outbreak of Anabaptist communism which opened the apocalypse had succeeded, in shadowy procession, the reign of terror and of spoliation in England, with the judicial murders of his friends, More and Fisher; the bitter tyranny of evangelistic clericalism in Geneva and in Scotland; the long agony of religious wars, persecutions, and massacres, which devastated France and reduced Germany almost to savagery; finishing with the spectacle of Lutheranism in its native country sunk into mere dead Erastian formalism, before it was a century old; while Jesuitry triumphed over Protestantism in three-fourths of Europe, bringing in its train a recrudescence of all the corruptions Erasmus and his friends sought to abolish; might not he have quite honestly thought this a somewhat too heavy price to pay for Protestantism; more especially, since no one was in a better position than himself to know how little the dogmatic foundation of the new confessions was able to bear the light which the inevitable progress of humanistic criticism would throw upon them?
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