What were the religious wars / wars of religion?

To every thoughtful mind, to every man of faith, especially to those who study history from a scriptural point of view, the wars in Languedoc are most suggestive. They are the first of the kind on record. It was reserved for Innocent III. to inaugurate this new character of warfare. There had been many instances of individuals being sacrificed to the prejudice of the priesthood, such as Arnold of Brescia: but this was the first experiment on a great scale, which the church made to retain her supremacy by force of arms. It was not, observe, the army of the church going forth in holy zeal against the pagan, the Mahometan, the denier of Christ, but the church itself in arms against the true followers of Christ against those who acknowledged His deity, and the authority of the word of God.

A new field of blood, and an entirely new character of warfare, were now brought before the mind of the voracious priest of Rome. It was a war not against the enemies of the faith abroad, or against the refractory kings at home, but the army of the church warring against the confessed followers of the Lord Jesus Christ. This was a new thing in the annals of Christendom.

We now come to the wars of religion. Parties began to be formed from political motives, which threw the whole of France into the most ruinous, desolating, civil war, which lasted, with brief intervals, for many years-we might say, centuries. All the liberalism of France became Huguenot, which then simply meant antipapist. And thus, to their great injury and final destruction, the French Protestants became a great political party in the state. Meanwhile Francis II., after a reign of seventeen months, died; and Catherine, emerging from the obscurity in which she had restrained her ambition, claimed the custody of her next son, Charles IX., who was only nine years of age; and before the court could assemble, assumed the guardianship of the king, and in fact, if not in name, the regency of the kingdom.

The new king was a mere boy when he ascended the throne, and his weak body and still weaker mind rendered him eminently unfit to rule. It was during his reign that the work of Reformation in France assumed a political complexion, and the wars of religion began. French Protestantism could now number among its adherents several of the highest nobles in the land, men like Coligny and Sully, and the Huguenots had become a body which could no longer be despised. There were two parties then in the State in violent opposition; the one, with Catherine de' Medici at its head, representing the old nobility of France — the Bourbons, Montmorencys, etc.; the other, headed by the brothers Francis and Charles Guise, representing an entirely new faction, which had grown out of the intrigues of these men. Francis Guise, in rank a duke, had control of the army, and aspired to the throne; Charles held the rank of a cardinal, and had control of the finances and foreign affairs. How to check the power of the two brothers, who virtually ruled the kingdom between them, became a problem with Catherine's party, and they sought to solve it by drawing to their side the Huguenot opposition. Many members of the discontented aristocracy even adopted Calvinistic sentiments for purely political motives; and when one of these nobles, La Renaudie by name, who held a grudge against the Guises for the murder of his brother, had been detected in a plot against their lives, the Huguenots were implicated in the conspiracy. But the death of Francis II., in the year 1560, effected the overthrow of the Guise party, and Catherine de' Medici having undertaken, in her own interests, the guardianship of the new king, Charles IX., then in his tenth year, the reins of government were practically transferred to her hands. Though possessed of no strong religious convictions, she was a catholic in name, and hated Protestantism be cause of its supposed democratic tendencies: yet, in order to consolidate her power, and to destroy more effectually the power of the Guises, she professed toleration, and released the Huguenots who had been imprisoned during the reign of Francis II. At the same time she avoided mortally offending the Guises, and permitted them, and all their adherents, to remain in their offices and posts of honour.

A good deal of what followed, for some twenty years, took more the character of civil rather than religious warfare, though the popes of Rome never lost sight of their one great object, to root out entirely all who differed from the church of Rome, no matter by what name they were called; and for this purpose they were not particular by what means they could induce the various authorities to fight for the catholic church.

In the seventeenth century, when the times were comparatively quiet, the Protestants, or "the Reformed," as they were called in Bohemia, had greatly increased. A numerous sect, called Utraquists, had special privileges from the Emperor, in which the other Reformed churches desired to share. Matthias, King of Bohemia, became Emperor in 1612, and he refused to grant their request. This caused the Utraquists to fear that they too might be next robbed of their privileges, so they united with the Lutherans and Calvinists to oppose the Emperor. Matthias had sent commissioners to Prague to inform the deputies of his majesty's final decision. While they met, an armed body of Utraquists, forgetting their character as professed followers of Christ, entered the council chamber, seized three of the most obnoxious of the commissioners, and threw them out of the window, which was eighty feet from the ground. A large heap of dung saved their lives, and they escaped. This was the commencement of a long and bloody war between the Catholics and Protestants, known in history as the Thirty Years' War. After devastating Germany and surrounding countries, in 1648 the peace of Westphalia established what is called "religious liberty."

Meanwhile the popish cantons were not idle. They knew what they had done, and what they had to expect. The war of religion was begun. The sound of the warhorn re-echoed in the mountains and the valleys: men were arming in every direction; messengers were sent off in haste to Austria; but Ferdinand, having been attacked by the Turks, could not furnish them with the troops he had promised. Nevertheless, firmly united among themselves, the men of the five cantons marched under the great banner of Lucerne, on the 8th of June, to join battle with the Reformers. Zurich saw there was not a moment to be lost. Four thousand men, on the 9th of June, well armed, issued from the gates of Zurich to meet the foe. The walls and towers were crowded with spectators to witness the departure, among whom was Anna, the wife of Zwingle. At nine in the evening they arrived at Cappel, a village on the frontiers of Zurich and Zug. At day-break, on the morning of the 10th, the Zurich warriors sent a herald with a formal declaration of war, and of the rupture of the alliance. Immediately the small town of Zug was filled with cries and alarm. The sudden march of the Zurichers had taken them by surprise; great consternation prevailed: men hasting to put on their armour, and women and children in tears.

A war of religion now began. It is always distressing, and deeply to be deplored, to see Reformers taking up the carnal weapons of the world in their defence, and for the moment laying aside the sword of the Spirit. But the cry to arms by the queen led the Reformers to utter the same cry in self-defense; and in that age they thought that it was as lawful to follow the example of Joshua and David as of Peter and Paul. But the Lord in mercy interposed and removed the queen dowager by death. This took place in the castle of Edinburgh on the 10th of June 1560. Her decease was the death-blow to French influence in Scottish affairs, and happily resulted in the emancipation of the nation from a foreign yoke. The way was now fully open for the establishment of the Reformation. The nation, through the wonderful preaching of Knox during the previous fifteen months was ready to throw off the papal yoke, and abolish its jurisdiction in the land.

The principles of the protest of the Reformers at Spires and that of the Confession of Augsburg of 1530 were embodied in the national constitution of Germany and the German princes pledged themselves to defend these beliefs by the armed might of governmental power. Now Protestantism assumed a political form and the moral glory of the Reformation declined. National Churches were formed in various countries with evangelical creeds as part of the government's statesmanship, and political power to back them up.

Of the men, too, who were the dear and honoured instruments in handing them down to us we cannot speak with enough affection and esteem. God honoured them - how many! - taking them to Himself in fiery chariots, from which their voices come, thrilling us with the accents of the heaven opening to receive them. Those who disparage them will have to hear, one day, their names confessed and honoured by Him they served, as those of whom the world was not worthy. But on the other hand, we must not make, as many are doing, the Reformation the measure of divine truth. They are not loyal to the Reformation really who accept any thing beside Scripture as the measure and test of this. The broken and conflicting voices which are heard the moment it is a question no longer of the gospel but of the church and its government, assure us that if here Scripture has spoken, the churches of the Reformation do not in the same sense convey to us its utterances. Lutherism is not Calvinism, the Church of England is not the Church of Geneva here. We must needs, whether we will or not, take Scripture to decide amid claims so conflicting; and when we do so, we find, with no great difficulty, that no one of these takes us back to the Church as it was at the beginning - the body of Christ, or the house of living stones - at all. Instead of this, as is well known, the churches of the Reformation were essentially national churches. Not in every country, of course, able to attain the full ideal, - as in France , where Rome retained its ascendency by such cruel means, - but always of that pattern. Rome had herself prepared the way for this. The nations of Europe were already professedly Christian nations, and it was not to be expected that those who escaped from Jezebel's tyranny would give up their long hereditary claim to Christianity. The adoption of an evangelical creed did not and could not change the reality of what they were. They learned the formula, put their names upon the church-books as Protestants, learned to battle fiercely for the gospel of peace, and how could you deny their title to be Christians? Yet, as to the many, it was but the "name to live." We must learn to distinguish two elements in the ecclesiastical revolution of those times. There was, first of all, a most mighty and most manifest work of God. The Scriptures, released from their imprisonment in a foreign tongue, began to speak to responsive human hearts with the decision and persuasiveness that the Word of God alone can have. Christ began once more to teach as one having authority, and not as the scribes. The blessed doctrine of justification by faith every where brought souls held fast in bondage into liberty and the knowledge of a Saviour-God. The ecclesiastical yoke could not hold any longer those whom the truth had freed; and where Christ had become thus the soul's rightful Lord, the yoke of Rome was but the tyranny of Antichrist. This was the first and most powerful element in Protestantism; not a political movement, but a movement of faith. Luther, solitary at Worms , in the presence of the mightiest political power in Europe , was the testimony that the work was of Him. His strength was manifest in human weakness. Had that place of weakness been retained all through, - had but God been allowed to show that power was of Him alone, how different would have been the result! And it is due to the foremost name of Protestantism to acknowledge that, as far as carnal weapons were concerned, Luther would have rightly refused them a place in a warfare which was God's. At any rate, to think of Protestantism as essentially a political movement is to do it glaring injustice, and to contradict the plainest facts. On the other hand, we cannot ignore the political element which so soon entered into it. Rome had made the nations every where feel the iron hand of her despotism, and the national reaction against her was the natural result of her intolerable and insolent oppression. The notorious wickedness of her chiefs had long destroyed all real respect. Her power stood now in an excessive and degrading superstition She lived upon men's vices and their fears, and where the light fell and removed the darkness, the fears were removed also, where the vices were not. Men learned to look upon the power they had cringed to with contrary feelings, deep in proportion to their depth before. Their interests, political and otherwise, coincided with the spiritual movement which divine power had produced. Soldiers, politicians, governments, made common cause with the men of faith. It was hard not to welcome such apparently God-sent allies, when on every side persecution raged. The movement increased in external power and importance, but its character was in just that proportion lowered and perverted. And now there was need of defined principles to give cohesion to elements which the Spirit of God no longer sufficed to bind together.