Schaff - History of the Christian Church Vol. 8 - Media Sabda Org

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the Reformation upon the Forest Cantons and all the bailiwicks, and would
thereby have provoked a reaction which, with the aid of Austria and Spain
and the counter-Reformation of the papacy, might have ended in the
destruction of Protestantism, as it actually did in the Italian dependencies
of Switzerland and the Grisons, in Italy, Spain, and Bohemia.
It was evidently the will of Providence that in Switzerland, as well as in
Germany, both Churches, the Roman Catholic and the Evangelical, should
co-exist, and live in mutual toleration and useful rivalry for a long time to
come.
We must judge past events in the light of subsequent events and final
results. “By their fruits ye shall know them.”
The death of Zwingli is a heroic tragedy. He died for God and his country.
He was a martyr of religious liberty and of the independence of
Switzerland. He was right in his aim to secure the freedom of preaching in
all the Cantons and bailiwicks, and to abolish the military pensions which
made the Swiss tributary to foreign masters. But he had no right to coërce
the Catholics and to appeal to the sword. He was mistaken in the means,
and he anticipated the proper time. It took nearly three centuries before
these reforms could be executed.
In 1847 the civil war in Switzerland was renewed in a different shape and
under different conditions. The same Forest Cantons which had combined
against the Reformation and for the foreign pensions, and had appealed to
the aid of Austria, formed a confederacy within the confederacy
(Sonderbund) against modern political liberalism, and again entered into an
alliance with Austria; but at this time they were defeated by the federal
troops under the wise leadership of General Dufour of Geneva, with very
little bloodshed. f295 In the year 1848 while the revolution raged in other
countries, the Swiss Diet quickly remodelled the constitution, and
transformed the loose confederacy of independent Cantons into a federal
union, after the model of the United States, with a representation of the
people (in the Nationalrath) and a central government, acting directly upon
the people. The federal constitution of 1848 guaranteed “the free exercise
of public worship to the recognized Confessions” (i.e. the Roman Catholic
and Reformed); the Revised Constitution of 1874 extended this freedom,
within the limits of morality and public safety, to all other denominations;
only the order of the Jesuits was excluded, for political reasons.