education; and the Catholic adversaries of the “Arch-Heretic,” Hus, made the Czechs an object of general hatred as a people of heretics. It was Catholic, ultra-Catholic, Austria that fell politically under the sway of Protestant Prussia and became her obedient vanguard on the Danube.
Notwithstanding the Battle of the White Mountain and its sequel, Catholicism failed to take deep root among us. It was addicted to violence, its leaders were alien in blood and in creed—especially the Jesuits, who are alien even to-day—and, with few exceptions, its hierarchy was German and Hapsburgian, not Czech. The argument that the Czech defeat on the White Mountain was a national advantage is mistaken. It seeks to turn a religious into a racial question in order to appeal to patriotic sentiment. The Catholic historians and those non-Catholics who judge the Reformation solely as a strengthening of our national consciousness misunderstand the essence of religious feeling and the whole sense of our history.
To examine exactly how far Protestantism and how far Prussianism was a decisive influence in the evolution of Prussian Germany would be to go beyond my present purpose. The Lutheran Church unquestionably became a handmaid of the Prussian State; but half of Germany was Catholic, and there is no proof that the German Catholic or Centre Party, despite its opposition to Bismarck, would have acted otherwise than Bismarck towards the non-German Catholics. The case of Luther, founder of German Protestantism, is significant. As long as he was a Catholic he opposed the Czechs. After leaving the Church he always stood out for a just and sober estimate of them, preached racial peace, extolled the moral purity of the Bohemian Brethren, and held them up as an example to the Germans by declaring that he and his followers were Hussites. Leading German thinkers, like Leibnitz, Herder and Goethe afterwards showed goodwill towards the Czech people and condemned the Hapsburg hangmen. Herder, in particular, embraced the ideas of Comenius and desired the restoration of Czech independence, while poets and writers such as Schiller, Lenau, Alfred Meissner and Moritz Hartmann gladly sought in our history material for their works.
An impartial history of our religious development will show the relationship between Catholicism and the Reformation in a light different from that which the adversaries of Palacký throw upon it. The facts that the Reformation affected us so profoundly (nine-tenths of the people are estimated to have accepted it); that it so long withstood the fierce pressure of
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