naturally good and loves justice and order. Another was the illusion
that all men are equal by nature. The puerile conviction prevailed that
legislation could completely blot out the past and radically transform
the character of a society. “Liberty, equality, and fraternity” was as
much a creed as the Creed of the Apostles; it hypnotized men’s minds
like a revelation from on high; and reason had as little part in its
propagation as in the spread

[117] of Christianity or of Protestantism. It meant anything but
equality, fraternity, or liberty, especially liberty, when it was
translated into action by the fanatical apostles of “Reason,” who were
blind to the facts of human nature and defied the facts of econnomics.
Terror, the usual instrument in propagating religions, was never more
mercilessly applied. Any one who questioned the doctrines was a heretic
and deserved a heretic’s fate. And, as in most religious movements, the
milder and less unreasonable spirits succumbed to the fanatics. Never
was the name of reason more grievously abused than by those who believed
they were inaugurating her reign.

Religious liberty, however, among other good things, did emerge from the
Revolution, at first in the form of Separation, and then under the
Concordat. The Concordat lasted for more than a century, under
monarchies and republics, till it was abolished in December, 1905, when
the system of Separation was introduced again.

In the German States the history of religious liberty differs in many
ways, but it resembles the development in France in so far as toleration
in a limited form was at first brought about by war. The Thirty Years’
War, which divided Germany in the first half