thought that each form of belief responds to a need of the human spirit, Catholicism representing the principle of authority and Protestantism the principle of reason. The difference between them seemed to him relative, not absolute; and he expected this relativity to develop not by the triumph of the one principle over the other but by their reconciliation, harmony and interpenetration. The two Churches, he held, should tolerate, not oppose each other, since disbelief would in future menace both of them.
As an explanation of the relationship between Catholicism and Protestantism I think this interpretation too general and abstract. Moreover, it is insufficient to cover our contemporary religious position. We are confronted with the special relationship between Protestantism and Catholicism in our own country, and have to judge the religious and moral value of the Hapsburg Counter-Reformation. Now that hundreds of thousands of our people are taking advantage of their religious freedom to leave the Catholic Church and to found another on the basis of the Reformation, the religious question is acquiring practical importance and is compelling thoughtful minds to revise the Liberal standpoint on the subject of religion. To assert, as some indifferentists do, that religion is out of date and that the dispute between Catholicism and Protestantism is consequently of no moment, is a view at once shallow and mistaken—and fatal to Liberalism everywhere.
Palacký’s interpretation of the relationship between Protestantism and Catholicism cannot stand even against the strictures of our Liberals; for in Czech Liberalism there has always been some disposition to understand the religious side of our renascence, however little it grasped the essential nature of the Reformation and of religion itself. To what lengths this disposition could go may be seen in the case of the Young Czech Radical leader Sladkovský, who went over to the Orthodox Church and expected his followers and all opponents of the Catholic Church to do likewise. What I opposed in Liberalism was its religious indifference. I claimed and proved that religious feeling is not dead and that, in the last resort, we should not be able to ignore the Churches or to escape from the necessity of making up our minds about them. For my part, I declined to coquet with Orthodoxy, and urged that the religious question should be earnestly studied in order to prepare means of solving it. As a result, there arose the dispute upon the meaning of our renascence, the Hapsburg Counter-Reformation and the religious question.
