Rome, the Hapsburgs and their German partisans in Bavaria and elsewhere, the last religious rising of the Moravian peasants taking place as late as 1775; and that the fight for religion and morality formed for four centuries the main substance of our history, prove that our Reformation arose from and responded to national character. True, our historians should enquire to what extent the spirit of Catholicism was national before and during the Reformation, and whether it did not suffer from the drawback that it came to us from abroad, from Germany, Italy and elsewhere. I know well that Catholicism is international. Yet its centralizing tendency did not prevent it from assuming a national complexion which theologians and ecclesiastical experts have noticed in France, England, Germany, Italy and other countries. Our lower Catholic clergy, who are recruited mainly from the people, had and have the same national sense as the people, and some of them took an active part in the literary work of our reawakening. But the Hierarchy, which determines ecclesiastical policy and life, was, like the training of the priests, with very few exceptions, non-Czech. It is a striking fact that, among us, Catholicism has never brought forth a Czech theology, and that it has not shown the same independence and individual character as in other lands.
The problem whether this or that religion and Church is best suited to the character of a people deserves to be more carefully studied. Half the Germans, for instance, are Protestant and half are Catholic; the English are chiefly Anglican, but most of them are thoroughgoing Protestants; and in France there is an important Protestant minority. I name these, the most cultured and most important nations, as evidence that nationality does not exclude ecclesiastical differentiation and that this very differentiation has been of value to those nations themselves and to mankind at large. On the other hand, the nations that did not pass through the Reformation and failed to differentiate themselves religiously, have not yet attained the same historical importance as the others. We belong to these others; and our history, especially since the fourteenth century, is one of the most living and spiritually valuable.
Church and State.
What is the meaning of the Hapsburg Counter-Reformation for us to-day? Save for some tiny remnants our Reformed
