[p. 519]
|519| on which Protestantism insisted. Both parties finally agreed to exclude one another civilly and to surround and fortify this exclusion with all the pedantry of right.
The appearance is the same, that in Catholic countries civil rights are denied to Protestants and in Protestant ones to Catholics. Yet the ground seems different. The Catholics had the position of oppressors, the Protestants that of the oppressed: the Catholics [had denied] the Protestants, as criminals, free exercise of religion in their midst; for the Protestants, where their church was dominant, this ground falls away, as does the fear of being oppressed. The ground of Protestant intolerance could be only either the right of retaliation of the hatred and intolerance of the Catholics – which would have been too unchristian a motive – or a distrust of the strength and truth of their own faith and the fear of easy seduction by the splendour of Catholic worship and the zeal of its adherents and so on [was it].
In the last century in particular this perpetual fear that the Protestant faith might be outwitted and stolen upon, this Zion-watchman’s faith in its own impotence and fear of the enemy’s cunning, was dominant and the occasion for entrenching grace with God behind unspeakable measures of security and bulwarks of rights.
This relation of right has been maintained with the greatest bitterness whenever it was presented by individuals of the opposing party as a matter of grace; and indeed grace is on the one hand lower than right, for right is determinate and that which is rightful has been made non-arbitrary for both parties, and grace is for right only arbitrary will. Through this clinging to pure, mere right, however, the higher sense of grace has also been obscured, so that for a long time neither party rose above right
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