ON PERSECUTION.

Another consideration that exerted a very important influence in the same direction—I mean the example of the Jewish legislators. When we now read of such scenes as the massacres of Canaan, the slaughter of the priests of Baal, or the forcible reforms of Josiah, they can scarcely be said to present themselves to the mind as having any very definite application to the present. Those who do not regard them as the natural products of an imperfect civilization, regard them at least as belonging to a dispensation so entirely exceptional as to be removed altogether from the ordinary conditions of society. But in the early Church, and in the sixteenth century, they were looked upon in a very different light. The relations of an established religion to the State were mainly derived from the Old Testament. The Jewish was deemed a type of the Christian Church, and the policy that was commended in the one was regarded as at least not blamable in the other. Now the Levitical code was the first code of religious persecution that had ever appeared among mankind. It pronounced idolatry to be not simply an error, but a crime, and a crime that must be expiated with blood.¹

¹ On the influence of this command on Christian persecution, see Bayle, Contrains-les d’entrer, pt. ii. ch. iv., and some striking remarks in Renan, Vie de Jésus (Life of Jesus), pp. 412–413; to which I may add as an illustration the following passage of Simancas:—"Persistent heretics must be burned publicly in the sight of the people; and this is usually done outside the city gates: just as once, in Deut. ch. xvii., the idolater was led to the city gates and stoned." (De Cathol. Instit. p. 375.) Taylor, in noticing this argument, finely says that Christ, by refusing to permit his apostles to call