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INTRODUCTION
xi

a national Church authority and to deny the existence of the international Church authority.

Religion and Absolutism.—It should also be remembered that by the time when the Reformation came, the European countries had absolute monarchy. When a country is governed by a monarch free to change or set aside laws and methods of procedure at will, supremacy of the State over Church and the denial of religion as a law at the foundation of society means an encouragement to absolutism and is therefore a very dangerous doctrine either to preach or to assert. The King could not set aside religion himself. For no monarch is strong enough to declare that he is above all laws and rules of morals.

For a King to call himself the head of a Church does not become a very bad declaration, for he thereby does not disown the supremacy of religion but only declares himself to be its administrator.

Religion and individual interpretation.— When the Protestants became independent of the See of Rome, they had certain doctrines, differing from those of the Catholic Church. The Bible was sacred to both sects, but that is no reason why two people should believe the same. It is said of the Bible with a certain amount of truth that if one wants to find support to any doctrine one can find it in the Bible; if one wants to find just the opposite doc- trine one can find it in the same book. When the authority of the Pope to interpret the Bible is once denied then there is no limit to the interpreters and interpretations. Some time or other the stage of the right to individual interpretation of the Bible comes.

When there are a large number of societies observing different rules regarding conduct, all deduced from the

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