Protestantism in Poland and Bohemia - James Aitken Wylie

Poland, and whence they spread themselves over
the kingdom.[2]
It was during the reign of King Stephen that the
tide began to turn in the fortunes of this great,
intelligent, and free nation. The ebb first showed
itself in a piece of subtle legislation which was
achieved by the Roman Synod of Piotrkow, in
1577. That Synod decreed excommunication
against all who held the doctrine of religious
toleration [3] But toleration of all religions was one
of the fundamental laws of the kingdom, and the
enactment of the Synod was levelled against this
law. True, they could not blot out the law of the
State, nor could they compel the tribunals of the
nation to enforce their own ecclesiastical edict;
nevertheless their sentence, though spiritual in its
form, was very decidedly temporal in both its
substance and its issues, seeing excommunication
carried with it many grievous civil and social
inflictions. This legislation was the commencement
of a stealthy policy which had for its object the
recovery of that temporal jurisdiction of which, as
we have seen, the Diet had stripped them.
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