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Updated: June 23, 2025
Protestantism proclaims the liberty of Christian prophesying, the free and unimpeded access of every human soul to the heavenly Father, the spiritual equality of all men in the sight of GOD. The Protestant tradition is jealous for the evangelical simplicity of the Gospel, and in general may be said to represent the principle of democracy in religion.
Here was born that strongly individualized and much contested genius, Dominique Ingres, and here Protestantism withstood the League, De Luyne's besieging army and the dragonnades of Louis XIV.
Like so much else in the Protestant revolt, the strength of this attitude lay in the fact that it was a protest, based on its negative side on reasonable and natural grounds. But while Protestantism was right in its attempt for it was only an attempt to deny the authority of Canon law, that attempt was altogether unsatisfactory on the positive side.
It was essentially a hesitation to accept the Incarnation and therefore it would have bred sooner or later a denial of the Sacrament, and at length it would have relapsed, as Protestantism has, into nothingness. Such a decline of imagination and of will would have been fatal to a society materially decadent. Had Arianism triumphed, the aged Society of Europe would have perished.
It was because Holland was the threshold of England; because the two countries were one by danger and by destiny; because the naval expedition from Spain against England was already secretly preparing; because the deposed tyrant of Spain intended the Provinces, when again subjugated, as a steppingstone to the conquest of England; because the naval and military forces of Holland her numerous ships, her hardy mariners, her vast wealth, her commodious sea-ports, close to the English coast if made Spanish property would render Philip invincible by sea and land; and because the downfall of Holland and of Protestantism would be death to Elizabeth, and annihilation to England.
Alas! there was no Protestantism in Piedmont, for it had been one of the most bigoted kingdoms in Italy. It was their own handiwork; for a tyranny always produces a democracy. As if by a miracle, a powerful and popular press started up in Turin.
The great Arnault, their most illustrious interpreter, though in exile in the Low Countries, declared that though the means which Louis XIV. had employed had been "rather violent, they had in nowise been unjust." But Protestantism being declared destroyed, and Jansenism being in disgrace, there was virtually no legal religion in France but one that of the Roman Catholic Church.
Whatever direct superiority, therefore, Protestantism had over Catholicism was a moral superiority, a superiority arising out of its greater sincerity and earnestness, at the moment of its apparition at any rate, in dealing with the heart and conscience; its pretensions to an intellectual superiority are in general quite illusory.
Absolute power was established under Louis XIII., in order to conquer Protestantism, the final effort of feudalism; and '89 is a return to the constitution of our ancestors. Pécuchet admired his ideas.
At this time the Maronite priesthood began to be alarmed by the distribution of the Scriptures, and the spread of Protestantism. The Patriarch issued a proclamation against the missionaries, and they replied. Asaad set himself to answer their reply. It was in this connection that his name first became known to the missionaries, to whom he was reported as a man of talent and high education.
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