24th November, 1906.
DISGUISEthe fact as they may, there is religious persecution in France. Never since the days of Julian the Apostate has any war been waged against Christianity more malign, more insidious. The ancient Faith was crushed out, by sheer force, in England and in many parts of the Continent, in the sixteenth century. In France, too, it seemed, in the eighteenth century, as though Christianity had received its quietus by the same brutal means. But methods have greatly altered. Masonic Jacobins, to-day, shudder at the mere suggestion of blood. A senator of the Right warned the Government that the Separation might lead to bloodshed. Thereupon the minister Briand made a gesture of deprecation. “Pray do not speak of blood,” he cried. One man was killed during the inventories; and immediately they were stopped, and the Rouvier Ministry fell. Yesterday again in the Chambers M. Briand exclaimed, “Du sang, quelle parole atroce!” (“Blood, what an atrocious word!”).
They have pondered the words of the Divine Master, “Fear not them that kill the body”; andthey are determined that there shall be no more martyrs in the usual sense, no more guillotines, no morenoyadesas in 1790. But they mean to choke out every germ of Christianity by casting the minds of the rising generation in a mould of atheism, and to quench every divine spark in the adult by degrading him in his own eyes to the level of a mere animal, that must seize every fleeting advantage, by fair means or foul, because there is no hereafter.
“We have combated the religious chimera, and by a magnificent gesture we have put out all the lights in heaven, which will never more be rekindled.... But what then shall we say to the man whose religious beliefs we have destroyed?” Thus spoke on November 8th, 1906, M. Viviani, Socialist Minister of Labour. At the same tribune, the very next day, M. Briand declared that his Government was not anti-religious, but only irreligious, or neutral. Meanwhile both this Minister of Public Instruction and M. Clemenceau, in public speeches all over the country, have been reviling and calumniating the religion of the nation, and congratulating public instructors on their zeal in emancipating the minds of their pupils from all religious superstition, thus training up “true men whose brains are not obstructed by mystery and dogma,” whose “consciences and reason are emancipated.”
In December 1905, this same M. Briand declared that the Government would never suffer that itshundreds of thousands of public functionaries send their children to any but state schools, and to make assurance doubly sure, a law is deposed, and will soon be passed, establishing a state monopoly of instruction. Disconcerted by the attitude of the Papacy and the splendid unity of the clergy and their flocks, the one contingency for which they were not prepared, the French atheocracy has decided to content itself with spoliation for the present. A receiver is to be appointed for all the holdings of the Church,menses episcopales, pious and charitable foundations, libraries, etc. The Left clamoured for the immediate attribution of the property to the communes, as the law requires. But M. Briand declared that it would be for them “a nest of vipers” and “poison their budgets”!
M. Lassies summed up M. Briand’s discourse by these unparliamentary words: “Vous avez du toupet, vous——” (“You have brass enough, you——”).
Not daring to close the churches at present, they have resorted to a subterfuge (cousu de blanc) in order to avoid doing so. The Republic having promised religious liberty, they say the faithful and their priests may come together “accidentally” and “individually” in the churches. Now the text of the law is formal. Art. I says: “The Republic guarantees the free exercise of public worship, underthe following restrictions.” Then follow the restrictions, i.e. articles regarding the associations; in other words,the constitution of the newby-law-establishedchurches, which were to inherit all the patrimony of the ancient Church and take its place.
M. Briand himself, before the encyclical, had openly proclaimed that there could be no public worship without these associations. The efforts made by M. des Houx of theMatin(alias “Mirambeau”), M. Decker David (a deputy mayor), and other agents of the lodges or of the Republic, to form these associations have been ludicrously pathetic. Failing these, the Government has decided to leave the churches open for another year, nevertheless. To storm them, and hold them after they had been stormed, would be too perilous an enterprise, judging by the troubles caused by the inventories. Therefore they have resolved to reduce the clergy by famine, by military conscription, the suppression of seminaries, and other vexatory measures. Moreover, the closing of the churches is the one measure that would convince the masses that something had happened, and that their religion was really persecuted. To the extreme Left, clamouring for the immediate confiscation of Church edifices and property, M. Briand said, “You want to strangle the Catholics right away; we do not wish to do so” (November 9th, 1906). Precisely. What they do wish is to empty the churches by every means, then close them, one by one.
On December 11th, 1906, state receivers are to beappointed for all Church property, movable and immovable. The very sacred vessels and ornaments, chasubles, etc., are all appropriated, and merely lent to the Catholics, temporarily, at the Government’s good pleasure. There has been of late years a dearth of treasures of ancient religious art in the Salles Drouots of Paris, Frankfort, Munich, etc. But soon Jewbrocanteurswill be in clover. All that escaped the revolutionists of 1790 will be scattered to the four winds ere long. This is one of the by-products, duly discounted, of this “law of liberty” called “Separation.”
But they still have a latent hope that the inextricable difficulties will force Catholics to capitulate and form associations. M. Briand’s circular, 31st August, 1906, ordered his prefects to report to him anysubrepticeassociations not in conformity with the law of 1905. Cardinal Lecot’s society for the support of aged priests (their old age pension fund being taken like everything else) is certainly of this category. It conforms to none of the requirements of the law of 1905, nevertheless M. Briand gives it a clean bill of health (November 9th). His speech in the Chambers is a complete repudiation of his circular of August 31st, and is a tissue of misrepresentation and tergiversation. He harps upon Article 4 (“the associations must be formed according to the general rules of worship”), which he declares “places all the associations under the control of the bishopsand of the Holy See.” Article 8 of the law provides, it is true, for endless schisms, all subject to the decisions of the Conseil d’Etat, alone competent to judge if an association is or is not orthodox, i.e. “formed according to the general rules of worship.” In this Article 8, also, he finds a guarantee which should satisfy all reasonable Catholics!
Now this same M. Briand, as Minister and reporter of the law, combated (April 6th, 1905) in the Chambers a proposed amendment tending to safeguard ecclesiastical authority in this matter. “You wish to turn over to the Pope, by means of the bishops (la haute discipline), the government of these associations. We cannot subject the faithful to this discipline.”
In the Senate, too, this same minister declared “that even after one association had been legally formed, dissensions might arise, not only in matters of dogma, but also of administration; we must allow those, who do not wish to submit, to form another independent association if they wish to use the same church.”[21]
If the intentions of the Government were so benevolent as M. Briand pretends, why did they not accept the insertion of the word “bishop” in Article 4?It would have rendered the associations tolerable; but this they strenuously opposed, and the keystone of their law was demolished by thenon possumusof Pius X, August 15th. In the Chambers (November 9th) M. Briand admitted that “the law had been made in view of the organization ofAssociations cultuelles.” This I have affirmed since nearly two years, and it is in vain that, elsewhere, M. Briand seeks to make-believe that the law has accomplished its purpose, which, in reality, it has just missed.
Even to-day, if the intentions of the Government are as candid and benignant as M. Briand pretends, why do they not insert one little amendment in the text of the law which would make it possible for the Church to form these associations? No, not so. They wish the Holy See to accept the word of some irresponsible minister, or some declaration of the Conseil d’Etat, equally valueless.
In 1901 Waldeck Rousseau solemnly declared in the Chambers that Article 13 of the Associations Bill in no wise affected the parochial schools, and two days after the law was voted three thousand of these schools were summarily closed. He had also assured the Vatican that authorized Congregations had nothing to fear. Even M. Delcassé and the Ambassador at Rome had given similar assurances to the Vatican before the law of 1901 was deposed in the Chambers. With these and similar precedents it would be idle indeed to attach any faith to M.Briand’s dulcet, fair, feline, fallacious utterances in the Chambers (November 9th). They are merely “words, words,” andverba volant. Moreover, how long will M. Briand and the Clemenceau Cabinet be able to resist the Socialist impact of the advance guard?
More than a year ago, I wrote that any interpretation could be given to some of the ambiguous terms in which the law was couched, and that this ambiguity was deliberate and intentional.
By his own authority. M. Briand (Chambers, November 12th, 1906) has offered the Catholics one year more in which to form associations under the Separation Bill. Thereupon M. Puech, a deputy of the Left, flung these biting words at the Government: “The law without the associations is void ... it has fallen to pieces.... And you have no associations. In 1907 you will not have them any more than in 1906.... Void, nothingness, chaos, behold your law.” “In 1790,” said the same deputy, “as to-day, the struggle was engaged between two principles, between dogma and science.... The Constituante was not firm. Camille Desmoulins spoke like M. le Ministre Briand.... Three succeeding assemblies were forced logically to extreme measures—death and transportation.”
The astute guile that characterizes M. Briand’s declarations in the Chambers can only be compared to that of Julian the Apostate, who began his reign by agrand edict of toleration. Or rather it recalls those deliberations of that council in Pandemonium (Book II,Paradise Lost): “Moloch, horrid king, besmeared with blood, the fiercest spirit, now fiercer by despair, spoke thus: My sentence is for open war of wiles I boast not.” But he was overruled by Beelzebub, who “pleaded devilish counsel first devised by Satan,” and which consisted in “seducing the puny habitants of Paradise to our party” by guile and fraud.
These associations of the law of 1905, which ignorant or malevolent writers continue to represent as being the same as those of Prussia and other half-Protestant countries, were a most ingenious device for inducing the Church to commit suicide by the repudiation of her divinely given constitution.
The point, that essentially differentiates associations for public worship in Prussia and elsewhere from those of the law of 1905, is that, in the former, the Catholic hierarchy was respected. In them the curate is by right president, episcopal authority is paramount, and the State cannot intervene if dissensions arise. Now Articles 8, 9, etc., of the French law are the very antipodes of all this.[22]
The fact is that there can be no real accord between the Church and the French atheocracy, whose openly avowed object is the radical destruction of the religious idea, even of natural religion.
Never perhaps, in the history of humanity, has there been such a monstrosity as a distinctly atheistic state. Pagan antiquity, even the Grecian Republics, had a cult of some kind. The First Republic, under Robespierre, having decreed the abolition of Christianity, immediately substituted theo-philanthropy. But the Third Republic proclaims itself atheist, and insists that the nation shall be made atheist by means of public schools.
Hitherto the words lay, layman, meant in French as in English, simply, not of the clergy; to-day,laïquein France means atheist.L’école laïquemeans, not a school taught by laymen, but a school of infidelity. Catholic lay or secular schools are still holding their own against the state schools, which are nearly empty in some communes.
Not satisfied with having suppressed twenty-seven thousand religious or congregational schools, the annual September convent of the Grand Orient has decided that all these Christian lay schools, primary and secondary, must disappear. It also finds that the Statelycées de filles“are not sufficiently laicized,” meaning of course not sufficiently atheized and depraved. Yet the work seems to be well under way, if we are to judge by the following extracts from the discourse pronounced on the grave of a child of twelve by one of her companions of anécole laïquenear Allevard, in presence of the whole school. “For thee infinite nothingness has begun, as it will begin for all of us. Thy death, or rather the supposed Being who caused it, must be very wicked or very stupid.... He made thee the victim of a society refractory to society solidarity.... We really cannot excuse this celestial iniquity.” I transcribe from the anti-clericalDépêche Dauphinoise. The spectacle of this free-thought funeral, and of a little schoolgirl blaspheming over the grave of a playmate, is simply hideous. Poor hapless victims of a pagan state, that nevertheless enlists the sympathies of Christians who spend millions on missions to the heathen Chinese!
This Masonic convent has also decided “that the means of production and exchange must be restituted to the collectivity.” Therefore we know in advance what the new Chambers will accomplish: State monopoly of instruction, and StateSocialism prepared and accomplished as rapidly as possible.
Under these circumstances it really does not matter very much if the churches remain open or not, for the present. As an English ecclesiastic recently observed, “We can do without our churches, but we cannot do without our schools.”
It is by means of Christian schools that Europe was redeemed from barbarism, and preserved from relapsing into its first estate. Each generation, in turn, must be redeemed from barbarism, as were our forefathers, by the Christian upbringing of the young, otherwise retrogression must inevitably ensue. Every gardener understands this. It is natural law in the spiritual world. To descend and retrograde is so much easier than to ascend.
To-day, the eternal enemy of God and man seeks to wrest from the Church the great fulcrum by which Christendom was upraised from barbarism, and to use her own arms against the Church, by converting schools into nurseries of infidelity and immorality.
In vain secularists would tell us that history, geography, and grammar are neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Mohammedan. The venom of infidelity and vice can be conveyed by the conjugation of a verb. Physical geography may be used as a catapult against the very notion of right and wrong. As to the misuse of history, its possibilities are unlimited. Moreover, the Church, that has received the divinecommission to “teach all nations,” needs the aid of all the arts and sciences to accomplish this mission. The Catholic Church, that is essentially, andjure divino,Ecclesia docens, will never forego her right to teach them all, as she has been doing for two thousand years. In the sixteenth century China seemed hopelessly closed against Christian missionaries. But where apostles failed to penetrate, a man of science, who was also a saint, succeeded. Mathew Ricci, the Jesuit savant, was welcomed by mandarinliterati, and founded the first Christian mission in China in 1581.
All the old universities of Europe were founded by the Church. The arts and sciences grouped themselves around the Chair of Theology, as hand-maidens around their mistress. Religion is, indeed, the aromat which alone preserves them from becoming corrupt and corrupting. Already, society is beginning to discover the evil effects of separating religion from learning. The knowledge and uses of fire form one of the main lines of demarcation that separate us from animals. Monkeys appreciate the kindly blaze, but the smartest of them has never attempted to light a fire.
When men, with this distinctive and dangerous knowledge of fire, shall have degraded their mentality to that of the simian by atheism or secularism, and its concomitant materialism, the social order will no longer be possible. A few rudely constructed,diminutive bombs can lay the proudest city in ruins.
To-day, as in 1790, France is the field on which another great battle is to be fought between Christianity and paganism, and its results will be far-reaching. The French atheocracy has “said unto God, Depart from us; for we desire not the knowledge of Thy ways” (JobXXI.14). Churches, here and there, have already been profaned by Masonic revelry, the cross has been demolished on every highway, and removed from every school and hospital. The State, disposing of all the power and all the riches of the nation, is at the command of a secret society that is the sworn and avowed enemy of religion. If the Church again come forth victorious from the struggle, stronger and purer through poverty and persecution, “if the Christian Hercules uplift Antæus, son of the earth, into the air and stifle him there, then—patuit Deus.”
LIBERTYis, pre-eminently and indisputably, a product of Christianity and must diminish with every diminution of the faith. “Other influences,” writes Lecky, “could produce the manumission of many slaves, but Christianity alone could effect that profound change of character that rendered the abolition of slavery possible, and there are,” he says, “few subjects more interesting than the history of that great transition” (History of Rationalism, II, 258).
There is, indeed, no grander spectacle than that of the Catholic Church proclaiming, in ages of barbarism, a divine “Thou shalt not” to masters, whose power over their slaves was unlimited by any law, and even assuming jurisdiction over them in virtue of a moral law, above all human laws.
Ecclesiastical jurisprudence enacted penalties against “masters who took from their theows (Saxon slaves) the money they had earned; against those who slew their theows without just cause; against mistresses who beat their theows so that they died within three days.... Above all, the whole machinery of ecclesiastical discipline was set in motion to shelter the otherwise unprotected chastity of the female slaves” (Wright’sPolitical Condition of the English Peasantry in the Middle Ages). “That Church which seemed so haughty and so overbearing in its dealings with kings and nobles,” writes Lecky, “never failed to listen to the poor and the oppressed, and for many centuries their protection was the foremost of all the objects of its policy” (History of Rationalism, II, 260). Simultaneously with the gradual abolition of slavery, we find the elevation of woman, and her redemption from polygamy, a natural concomitant of slavery. “No ideal,” writes Lecky, “has exercised a more salutary influence than the mediæval conception of the Virgin [he means devotion to]. For the first time, woman was elevated to her rightful position and the sanctity of weakness was recognized. No longer the slave, the toy of man, no longer associated only with ideas of degradation and sensuality, woman rose, in the person of the Virgin Mother, into a new sphere, and became the object of a reverential homage of which antiquity had no conception. Love was idealized. The moral character and beauty of female excellence was for the first time felt ... a new kind of admiration was fostered. Into a harsh, and ignorant, and benighted age this ideal type infused a conception of gentleness and purity, unknown to the proudest civilizations of the past.... In the millions who have sought with nobarren desire to mould their characters into her image ... in the new sense of honour, in the softening of manners in all walks of society, in this, and in many ways, we detect its influence. All that was best in Europe clustered around it [the devotion to Mary], and it is the origin of many of the purest elements of our civilization” (History of Rationalism, I, 231).
These are striking words from the pen of a rationalist, and would that all women understood that the laws of divorce, the first-fruits of the weakening of the Christian principle, and the pagan renaissance in Europe, mark also the first steps of their retrogression to the condition, from which they were uplifted by Christianity.
After centuries of judicious preparation, the emancipation of all Christians was proclaimed by Pope Alexander III. “This law alone,” writes Voltaire, “should render his memory precious to all, as his efforts on behalf of Italian liberty should endear him to Italians” (Essai sur les mœurs).
Mr. Hallam has satirically remarked in hisHistory of the Middle Ages, page 221, that “though several popes and the clergy enforced manumission as a duty on laymen, the villeins on church lands were the last to be emancipated.” But he well knows, for he has told us himself on page 217 of the same work, that “the mildness of ecclesiastical rule and the desire to obtain the prayers of the monks induced many to attach themselves as serfs to monasteries.” An old German proverb, too, says: “It is good to live under the crozier.” When the monasteries were suppressedby Henry VIII, we know by Strype’sChronicles, that misery and vagrancy reached terrible proportions.
But while freely admitting that “in the transition from slavery to serfdom, and from serfdom to liberty, the Catholic Church was the most zealous and the most efficient agent” (II, 234), Lecky is loath to admit that her action in the sphere of political liberty was equally efficacious, and that this second emancipation could have been accomplished slowly, and judiciously, as was the first, without the upheavals, the violence, and the excesses of the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Yet on page 158, vol. II, he reminds us that “St. Thomas Aquinas, the ablest theologian of the Middle Ages, distinctly asserts the right of subjects to withhold obedience from rulers who were usurpers or unjust.” “To the scholastics of those days also,” he says, “we chiefly owe the doctrine of the mediate rights of kings, which is very remarkable as the embryo of the principles of Locke and Rousseau.” Authority considered in the abstract is of divine origin; but still the direct and immediate source of regal power is the nation, according to Suarez. Apparently, the noisy standard-bearers of civil liberties and political rights, in the eighteenth century, were not exactly pioneers, but mere plagiarists.
“As long,” continues Lecky, “as the object was not so much to produce freedom, as to mitigate servitude,the Church was still the champion of the people.... The balance of power created by the numerous corporations she created or sanctioned, the reverence for tradition, which created a network of unwritten customs with the force of public law, the dependence of the civil on the ecclesiastical power, and the right of excommunication and deposition, had all contributed to lighten the pressure of despotism” (II, 235).
We must array Mr. Lecky against himself, and conclude that the Church did more than “mitigate servitude”; she also produced freedom by the institution of these numerous guilds and unwritten laws, many of which still existed until they were swept away by the Revolution of 1790, which left nothing standing but an omnipotent tyrant, called the State, and a defenceless people,corvéable,taillable, and guillotinable, at mercy. These “unwritten customs with the force of public law” made Spain the freest country in Europe, until the seventeenth century. To suppress thesefuerosof the commons, or unwritten constitutional liberties, was one of the chief objects of the Spanish Inquisition, established by royal authority, and aimed chiefly at the bishops, as champions of popular rights. One of its first victims was the saintly Archbishop of Toledo. The Basque provinces retain theirfuerosintact to this day.
In France too liberty succumbed with the Public Law of Europe (1648).
In 1314 Philippe le Bel, in order to obtain subsidies, convoked the States General (Les Trois Etats). From that time to 1359, they were convoked seven times. In the first half of the fifteenth century there were fourteen convocations. From 1506 to 1558 there was an interruption of fifty-two years. From Henry II to the minority of Louis XIII, the States met six times. In 1614 was held the last convocation of the Trois Etats, until 1789.
Under the despotic Louis XI (1401-83), Philippe de Commines still dared to write with impunity: “Il n’y a roi ni seigneur qui ait pouvoir, outre son domaine, de mettre un denier sur ses sujets sans octroi et consentement, sinon par tyrannie et violence.” (“It would be tyranny and violence for any king or lord to raise a penny of taxation on his subjects, without their leave and consent.”)[23]
“Nevertheless,” writes de Tocqueville, “the elections were not abolished till 1692 ... the cities still preserved the right to govern themselves. Until the end of the seventeenth century we find some which were small republics, in which the magistrates were freely elected by the citizens and answerable to them, and in which public spirit was active and proud of its independence” (Ancien Régime, p. 83).
Mr. Lecky is pleased to attribute to the papal power “some of the worst calamities—the Crusades, religious persecutions, the worst features of the semi-religious struggle that convulsed Italy.... It is not necessary,” he continues, “to follow in detail the history of [what he is pleased to call] the encroachments of the spiritual on the civil power” (II, 155), though it would be more correct to say the encroachments of the civil on the religious power.
But it is very necessary to do so, because though the main object of these struggles of the spiritual power with despotic kings was the independence of the Church, it cannot be gainsaid that personal and civil liberty were thereby enhanced, as Lecky himself admits (p. 235).
It would be too long to discuss here the Crusades, which merely saved us from the fate now enjoyed by Islamic countries, or the alleged persecution of the Manichæans, who, under the name of Albigenses, menaced to disrupt the incipient civilization of Europe by their subversive tenets of anarchy and collectivism, equally opposed as they were to ecclesiastical and to civil government.
The “semi-religious wars,” or the so-called “wars of investiture,” which both he and Montesquieu disingenuously confound with the wars of Italian independence, eminently contributed to the cause of civil liberty in England, not less than in Italy, and elsewhere. Anselm, Becket, and Stephen Langtonwere worthy coadjutors of the policy of St. Gregory VII and the pioneers of political liberty. No one understands this better than Mr. Wakeman, the Anglican author of a recent History of the English Church.
“It is true,” he says, “that Anselm could not have maintained the struggle [against clerical investiture by laymen] at all if he had not had the power of Rome at his back. Englishmen quickly saw that the question between Anselm and Henry was part of a far wider question. They felt that bound up with the resistance of the archbishop was the sacred cause of their own liberty. The Church was the one power in England not yet reduced under the iron heel of the Norman kings. The clergy was the one body which still dared to dispute their will. To them belonged the task of handing on the torch of liberty amid the gloom of a tyrannical age. The despotism of the crown was the special danger to England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It was the Church that, in that time of crisis, rescued England from slavery. Had there been no Becket, Stephen Langton, Archbishop of York, would have failed to inspire the barons to wrest the Charter from John” (p. 105). And on page 108 he continues: “From the Conquest to the time of Simon de Montfort two great dangers threatened England, the uncontrolled will of unjust, wicked kings and the grinding administrative despotism of the government. From both shewas saved by the Church. In her own canon law she opposed to the king’s laws a system which claimed a higher sanction, was based on principles not less scientific, and was already invested with the halo of tradition.”
It is this same canon law that the Church in France is, to-day, opposing to the tyranny of an omnipotent State or parliamentary majority,aliasGrand Orient, which has, since four years, crushed out two of the most sacred liberties—the right to live in community and the right to educate one’s children in the Christian faith, the faith of our fathers, “once delivered to the saints.”
The long struggle, between the Popes and the German rulers, who sought to establish their despotic rule in Italy and enslave the whole Church by making the bishops of Rome their domestic chaplains, resulted in the glorious Congress of Venice, 1177, confirmed by the Peace of Constance, which is the first instance in history of peoples wresting political liberties from regal tyrants. The Magna Charta is the second in point of time.
After a long and seemingly hopeless struggle with Frederick Barbarossa, Alexander III, to whom this Hohenstaufen had opposed a series of servile anti-popes, triumphed, and with him triumphed the League of the Italian Cities, of which he was the unarmed chief. Milan, Brescia, Pavia, and other cities, whichhad been razed to the ground by the tyrant, thanked the Pope for having rendered them their liberty. Alexandria, an important city of the Piedmont, bears the name of this peaceful liberator. Voltaire refers to these events in the following terms: “Barbarossa finished the quarrel by recognizing Pope Alexandria III, kissing his feet, and holding his stirrup.” (Le maître du monde se fit le palefrenier du fils d’un gueux qui avait vécu d’aumônes.) “God has permitted,” exclaimed the Pope, “that an old man and a priest should triumph, without fighting, over a terrible and powerful emperor” (Essai sur les mœurs, II, 82).[24]
In the Eastern or Byzantine Empire, the clergy, at an early date, and long before the schism of 1054, began to succumb to Cæsaro-papism, a revival of the ancient pagan system, in which the temporal ruler was also the high-priest of his realm, and we well know that neither personal nor civil liberty ever found foothold in thisBas Empire.
“While the ecclesiastical monarchy of the West,” writes a Protestant historian, “could lead onward the mental development of the nations to the age of majority, could permit and even promote freedom and variety within certain limits, the brute force of the Byzantine despotism stifled and checked everyfree movement” (Neander,History of the Church, VIII, 244).
The French kings, even more than the English before Henry VIII, strove hard to establish the same system, and above all to exempt themselves from the Christian law of monogamy, which, with personal freedom, constitutes the great line of demarcation between Eastern, and Western or Latin civilization. Montesquieu assures us that a neighbour’s wife, unlawfully taken, or their own unjustly repudiated, caused all, or nearly all, the troubles between the Papacy and the French kings.
On the whole, however, civil liberty in Europe had reached an advanced stage in the fifteenth century. Cities and provinces really had more self-government then, than during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, more than they have now in some countries, notably in France.
The neo-paganism of the Renaissance was one of those periodical revolts of what St. Paul calls the “carnal mind, which is enmity with God.” “Sapientia carnis inimica est Deo” (Rom. VIII). It was a conjuration against Christianity and culminated in the Protestant revolt, which for ever destroyed the unity of Christendom, and set in motion a progressive scepticism or rationalism, which is Protestantism in its last analysis.
For more than three centuries English writers have repeated that the Protestant revolt was astruggle for liberty of conscience, notwithstanding the incontrovertible fact that all its foremost leaders were bitterly opposed to religious toleration, and that the sects relentlessly persecuted each other, as well as the adherents of the ancient faith.
Protestantism being, intrinsically, the nursery of rationalism, was necessarily a diminution of Christianity, and produced a corresponding diminution of liberty, both personal and civil. At the Congress of Westphalia, 1648, where, as Macaulay states, “Protestantism reached its highest point, a point it soon lost and never regained” (Essay on Ranke), was formulated the monstrous axiomCujus regio ejus religio, which became the common law of Europe in lieu of the hitherto prevailing rule of One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism. Henceforth, as in pagan days, each ruler assumed the right to dictate the religious beliefs of his subjects in the new system of national churches. The “territorial system” it was called, and represented the net result of a century of Protestantism.
There were, indeed, no fiercer despots over men’s consciences than the so-called “reformers.” If any doubt let him read their lives. Let him read of the bloody strife that rent the Netherlands after they had shaken off the Spanish yoke; how the great Barneveldt fell a victim to miserable oppression of Gomarists by followers of Arminius, and vice versa; how Remonstrants persecuted contra-Remonstrants,all on account of some metaphysico-religico distinctions neither understood clearly.
Then let us consider the embarkation of the Pilgrim Fathers from Holland, where they had sought asylum from the rigid conformity enforced by reformed England. Finding themselves no better off in the republic, which had emancipated itself, simultaneously, from Spain and Rome, the Pilgrim Fathers shook the dust of the old world from their feet and sought a new hemisphere. Surely in the primeval forests men might hope to interpret Scripture and serve God each according to his own lights. Not so. No sooner were the camp fires lighted, and the barest necessities of life provided for, than we find a theocracy of the most hard and fast type established by the Argonauts of the Golden Fleece of religious toleration. A veritable office of the Holy Inquisition was instituted “to search out and deliver to the law” all who “dared to set up any other exercises than what authority hath set up.” While it was gravely affirmed that “these cases were not a matter of conscience, but of a civil nature,” Sir John Saltonstall wrote from England to the first Puritan Grand Inquisitors, Wilson and Cotton, remonstrating “at the things reported daily of your tyranny, as that you fine, whip, and imprison men for their consciences.”
The acts of the Inquisition dwindle into insignificance if we place in the other balance the excessescommitted, and the penal laws enacted from 1530 to 1829 against Dissenters and against English Roman Catholics in England. The Toleration Act of William and Mary, 1701, relieved Protestant “Recusants,” but the penal laws against Catholics were maintained till 1829, though many had fallen into desuetude. The principal were: For hearing Mass a fine of 66 pounds and one year’s imprisonment; they were debarred from inheriting or purchasing lands; they could hold no office nor bring any action in law; they could not teach under pain of perpetual imprisonment; they could not travel five miles without a licence, nor appear within ten miles of London under penalty of 100 pounds; while the universities were closed against them by test acts. Catholics having been thus deprived of all means of obtaining a liberal education and raising their voice on behalf of the truth, Protestant writers, since three hundred years, have been able to travesty and misrepresent, unchallenged, all the facts connected with the Reformation.
In France Louis XIV persecuted the Huguenots in virtue of theCujus regio ejus religio(Whose the kingdom his the religion), and in spite of the protests of Innocent XI, who instructed his legate d’Adda to beg James II to intercede for them, declaring that “men must be led, not dragged to the altar.”
The German, Swiss, and Scandinavian rulers made,modified, and changed the religion of their subjects at will. Of the intolerance of the Calvanistic Republic of Geneva less said the better. Oppenheim, often pawned by its needy electors, is said to have changed its form of Protestantism fifteen times in twenty-one years. In Denmark, where Lutheranism was paramount and unadulterated, we find, writes Dollinger, “that the nobility made use of the Reformation to appropriate not only the Church lands, but that owned by the peasants.” “A dog-like servitude weighs down the Danish peasants, and the citizens, deprived of all representative power, groan under oppressive burdens” (Geshicte von Rugen, p. 294, quoted by Dollinger).
“The dwellers on the great estates of the Church were now obliged to exchange the mild rule of the clergy for the oppressive rule of the nobility,” writes Allen, page 313. “By these laws and enforced compacts the spoliation and the degradation of once free peasants were accomplished.” In 1702 Frederick IX abolished slavery, but glebe serfdom, as in Russia, continued till 1804. Until 1766 the education of the people stood at the lowest grade, and it was not till 1804 that freedom was conferred on 20,000 families who had been in a state of serfdom since the Reformation.
In Sweden we find the great Protestant hero, Gustavus Vasa, appropriating all the commonage lands of the villages, and even the weirs, the mines,and all uncultivated lands. Gustavus was, of course, obliged to share the spoils with his henchmen, whose rule was even more oppressive, and the peasants became wholly impoverished and degraded.
In Germany we find the same record of spoliation and oppression of the peasantry, whose rights there was none to defend since bishops no longer sat in the Diet. In 1663, 1646, 1654, the personal liberty of the peasants was progressively annihilated. “Then was forged that slave chain,” writes Boll, “which our peasantry have had to drag within a few decades of the present day” (Mecklenburg Geschichte). In 1820 this glebe serfdom was abolished by the Grand Duke.
In Pomerania, united with Brandenburg since the Reformation, Protestantism was paramount already in 1534, and the fate of the peasantry was the same. The oppression was so intolerable that even those whose farms had not been appropriated or turned into grazing grounds, as in Ireland, fled the country. In the peasant ordinance of 1616 they were declared “serfs without any civil rights,” and preachers were compelled to denounce fugitives from the pulpit.
The Elector of Brandenburg, it will be recalled, was the first to abjure Catholicism, and founded what became in 1701 the Prussian monarchy.
There was no general Diet since 1656. The Estates no longer met, and the rulers imposed taxes at their will. Peasants fled to Poland, or became mendicant vagrants or brigands.
The Lutheran clergy were mere puppets in the hands of their tyrannical rulers, who even dictated or revised their sermons at times. Prussian despotism reached high-water mark under Frederick the Great, but he being a frank and consistent rationalist, who believed “in letting every man be blessed in his own way,” religious persecution ceased.
In Brunswick and Hanover the spoils of the Church appeased for a time the greed of reformation princes, but habits of luxury were engendered by their ill-gotten wealth, and they soon resorted to “money clipping.” The towns lost all their inherited independence. For the decisions of municipal councils were substituted governmental decrees and circulars, as in France to-day, and ere long all trace of the ancient freedom of the Estates was lost. “The clergy,” writes Havemann, “had long since sunk into dependence.... The cities were languishing from lack of public spirit.... The power of modern states was unfolding itself over the sad remains of the ancient life and liberty of the Estates.”
In Saxony there was a nip-and-tuck struggle between Lutheranism and Calvinism in which the rack and the scaffold were freely used by Lutheran princes, who enforced their form of Protestantism according to the axiomCujus regio ejus religio.
On the Church lands in England had lived a dense population of tenant farmers. When these lands were confiscated by Henry VIII, thousands of thesepeasantry became helpless paupers under the new regime. Vagrancy and mendicancy reached alarming proportions. It was enacted that vagrant beggars should be enslaved. If they tried to escape they were to be killed.
It appeared to Burnet (History of Reformation) that the intention of the nobility was to restore slavery. According to Lecky there were 72,000 executions in the reign of Henry VIII; vagrant beggars furnishing a large contingent.
Under Elizabeth charity by taxation or poor rates was resorted to for the first time in the history of Christendom.
I think we must admit that liberty, both civil and religious, made shipwreck at the Reformation, and that the champions of the Protestant revolt were not exactly actuated by a desire for the well-being and freedom of conscience of their fellow-men.
In England all was laboriously reconquered till 1829, when Catholics wereemancipatedon their native soil.[25]
Some Catholic countries, Spain and Italy, were saved from the horrors of religious wars, but all felt the effects of the new rationalistic spirit, which, being a diminution of Christianity, was also a diminution of liberty. They lost many civil liberties, and despotism strengthened its bands, till the great upheaval of 1790 destroyed the whole fabric of Europe and inaugurated a system of constitutional representative government.
Representative government, our modern fetish, was not unjustly rated by J. J. Rousseau, when he said “that a people with a representative government were slaves except during the period of elections, when they were sovereigns.” France to-day is a striking illustration.[26]
An amusing incident is related by Leroy Beaulieu of a Neapolitan who hired donkeys to tourists. He was an eager advocate of representative government in 1869. Questioned as to his reasons, he said that since twenty-one years he had been hiring donkeys to English, French, and American tourists, who enjoyed representative governments and were all rich. Some years later the eminent economist met him again, and congratulated him on Italy’s having acquired a representative constitution. The disabused peasant bitterly denounced the new regime in that the burden of taxation had trebled, and that the very donkey he hired out was taxed.
If the laws, or at least all important ones, were submitted to untrammelled public vote, then only might we say that the government was truly representative.
In many cases universal suffrage means the tyranny of ignorant, unprincipled majorities, while nowhere can it oppose an effective barrier against the accumulation of immense wealth in a few hands, and the creation of all-powerful oligarchies. When the majorities and the oligarchies come into collision, liberty will succumb. There will be more than one Bridge of Sighs.
It is in vain that false philosophers would persuade us that altruism, some vague “moral element of Christianism,” will combine with rationalism and perpetuate our Christian civilization in some transcendent form.
Christian civilization and morality are intimately and indissolubly connected with Christian dogma. The Fatherhood of God, Jupiter Optimus, was not unknown to the ancients, but the brotherhood of man, involving personal liberty and also civil liberty by extension, is essentially a Christian predicate, and is based on the dogma of the Incarnation.
The lofty contempt our modern rationalists express for the fierce controversy waged over two Greek vowels by the partisans ofHomoousionandHomoiousionmerely betrays their ignorance of its vital importance. On that dogma, so nobly maintained by the See of Peter and Athanasius, rests our whole fabric of Christian civilization, the brotherhood of man, and its logical sequence, freedom from slavery.
It is as absurd to suppose that the “moral element of Christianity” will continue to exist after the erosion of Christian dogma, as to expect that a tree we have hewn down will continue to bear fruit. It may indeed for a time remain verdant, and even put forth new shoots, just as we often see the loveliest flowers and fruits of Christianity in the lives and characters of individuals with whom the Christian faith has almost ceased to exist. But let us not be deceived. The lingering sap will cease to flow, and the last semblance of life will fade away. “The elements of dissolution have been multiplying all around us,” writes Lecky. And when rationalism or secularism, or neo-paganism in other words, whichhas already corroded Christendom to so great an extent, shall have accomplished its work of disintegration with the aid of godless schools and gross literature, society will, I repeat, be compelled to restore Christianity, or slavery, or perish.
“ATthe end of the fourth century,” writes Guizot, “the Church saved Christianity ... resisted the internal dissolution of the Empire and the barbarians, and became the bond, the medium, and the principle of civilization.... Had the Church not existed the whole world must have been abandoned to purely material force” (History of Civilization, I, 38).... “When all was chaos, when every great social combination was vanishing, the Church proclaimed the unity of her doctrine and the universality of her right; this is a great and powerful fact which has rendered immense service to humanity” (ibid., II, 19).
This unity was indeed the great factor in European civilization. On it the new civil societies, like wild olive branches, were grafted, so to speak. It became the bond of political unity, a kind of centripetal force, we may say, and the redemption from that inordinate love of independence which characterized the barbarians.
Consequently the new civil societies made the maintenance of religious unity the foremost object of their policy. It became the public law of allEurope and the common law of each state. To impugn this unity was considered a most heinous offence not against God only, but against the nation and against all Christendom.
“Thus,” writes another great Protestant, “Christianity became crystallized into a single bond embracing all nations, and giving to all life, civilization, and all the riches of the mind” (Hurter,Life of Innocent III, I, 38).
A corollary of this system of an universal Christian society was the recognition of a supreme tribunal. “One of the most elevated principles of the age,” writes the same eminent German, “was that, in the struggles between the peoples and their rulers, there should be a superior authority charged to recall laws not made by men, though their interpreter were himself a man.” Referring to the fiercely contested election of Othon, he continues: “Othon was the first to have recourse to Rome, the tribunal with whom rested the decision in these matters, when the parties did not wish to resort to the arbitrament of war.”
In France we find the great Suger, Abbot of St. Denis, remonstrating with the Bishop of the free chartered city of Beauvais, brother of the King, with whom he was often at odds.
“I beseech you not to raise a guilty hand against the King ... for you must see the consequences of armed insurrection against the King, especially if it be without consulting the Sovereign Pontiff....If the King, drawn aside by evil counsellors, has not acted rightly, it was proper to have informed him by the bishops and notables, or rather by our Holy Father the Pope, who is at the head of the whole Church, and could easily have reconciled all differences.”
In England we have many instances of both laymen and clergy appealing to the arbitrament of the Papacy.
“The recognition of some principle of right, powerful enough to form a bond of lasting concord, has always been the dream of statesmen and philosophers,” writes Lecky. “Hildebrand sought it in the supremacy of the spiritual power, and in the consequent ascendency of moral law” (History of Rationalism, 245).
Voltaire pays homage to this public policy of the Middle Ages. “The interests of the human race required a controlling power to restrain sovereigns and protect the lives of peoples. This controlling power of religion could well be placed in the hands of the Papacy. The Sovereign Pontiffs warning princes and people of their duties, appeasing quarrels, rebuking crimes, might always have been regarded as the images of God on earth. But men, alas, are reduced to the protection of laws without force” (Essai sur les mœurs, II).
He describes what really did exist for centuries, though, of course, papal arbitration was not alwaysefficacious. Every great institution needs time to develop and mature. It would not be great were it otherwise. Moreover there were, unfortunately, many troublous times between the sixth and the fifteenth century, in which the Papacy itself was captive, buffeted, demeaned, and exiled by the struggles and ambitions of turbulent political factions in Rome itself. The very day on which Gregory VII excommunicated the German Emperor, he was seized and imprisoned by a noble Roman bandit, until his people were able to deliver him by main force.
“Another corollary of this universal Christian Society was that right found a protector in the common Father of the faithful; in the grand idea of a supreme chief who without employing material force judged in last resort.... What great misfortunes would France and all Europe have been spared if, in the reign of Louis XVI, an Innocent III had been Pope. His rôle would have been to save the lives of the people” (Hurter’sInnocent III, II, 200-23). To German Protestant writers like Hurter, Voigt, Neander, etc., is due the honour of vindicating the true rôle of the Papacy in the Middle Ages.
The rights of suzerainty exercised by the Papacy also formed part of the public law of Europe. In those wild, lawless days, when robber barons enjoyed the privilege of being highwaymen on their own estates, and often extended their depredations to those of their neighbours, property rights had nosanction, and the weaker succumbed to the stronger in virtue of the “fist right,” which we now translate variously by “the right of the strongest,” political “majorities,” and the “survival of the fittest.”
The practice then arose among weak owners of dedicating their lands to the Church, in order to obtain spiritual or moral protection against the brute force of stronger neighbours. What private owners did in a small way was done by princes on a larger scale.
Referring to the peculiar incidents when roving Norman pirates, in possession of Sicily and Naples, seized the person of the Pope and insisted on becoming his vassal, Voltaire writes as follows:—“Robert Guiscard, wishing to be independent of the German Emperor, resorted to a precaution which private owners took in those days of trouble and rapine. The latter gave their property to the Church under the name of Oblata, and, paying a slight tax, continued to enjoy the use of it. The Normans resorted to this custom, placing under the protection of the Church in the hands of Nicholas II (1059) not only what they held, but also their future conquests (on the Saracens). This homage was an act of political piety like Peter’s Pence; the two pence of gold paid by the Kings of Portugal; like the voluntary submission of so many kingdoms” (Essai sur les mœurs, II, 44).
It was thus that England became a fief of the Holy See, a most unfortunate circumstance, as the temporalpecuniary obligations arising therefrom were exploited to estrange the English from the See of Peter, in the following centuries.
“In 1329,” continues Voltaire, “the King of Sweden, who wished to conquer Denmark, addressed the Pope as follows: ‘Your Holiness knows that Denmark depends on the Roman See and not on the German Emperor.’ ... I only wish to show,” Voltaire adds, “how every prince who wished to recover or usurp a domain appealed to the Pope.... In this case the Pope defended Denmark, and said he could only decide on the justice of the case when the parties had appeared before his tribunal, according to the ancient usage.”
Nor did Christians alone appeal to this spiritual tribunal. The bull of Innocent III, cited by Hurter, is an excellent exponent of the mind of the Church in all times. “As they (the Jews) claim our succour against their persecutors, we take them under our special protection, following in this the example of our predecessors, Calixtus, Eugenius, Alexander, Clement, and Celestin. We forbid every one to force a Jew to be baptized, for he who is compelled cannot be said to have the faith. No Christian must dare commit any violence against them, nor seize their property, without a legal judgment. Let no one trouble them on their feast days by striking or throwing stones at them,” etc.
It will be objected that the fulcrum of Western civilization was a spiritual despotism. But theseterms exclude each other. Can we call an authority despotic which had no material force, and rested only on a divine commission and the common sense of prince and people, recognizing its credentials—on public opinion in fact?
It was a fundamental law of every state that any one, no matter what his rank, who impugned the Unity of the Faith, or committed offences so heinous as to justify the supposition that he was no longer a Christian, fell under the ban of the Church and became outlawed, if at the end of a year he had not been absolved. In hisHistoria ImperatorumSchafnaburg explains the wintry flight of Henry IV across the Alps to Canossa by his eagerness to be absolved before the year had revolved, because otherwise he would have forfeited his crown.Ut ante hanc diem non absolveretur, deinceps juxta Palatinas leges indignus regio honore habeatur.
Three causes were generally admitted as sufficient for the excommunication of a sovereign. First, if he fell from the faith. Second, if he ravaged or seized ecclesiastical lands or desecrated churches. Third, if he repudiated his own wife or appropriated his neighbour’s. This latter point, as Voltaire and Montesquieu have pointed out, was the cause of nearly all the quarrels between the French kings and the Papacy, a fact which our Jacobins, in the Chambers and elsewhere, deliberately ignore, when they mendaciously misrepresent the Church as having constantlyencroached on the civil power. The case of Philippe Augustus and the hapless Ingleburge of Denmark was a test case, so to speak.
“It was not,” writes Hurter, “a question of contested claims of the Papacy, but of this great question, Is the sovereign subject to the laws of Christianity? It had to be decided whether the royal will should triumph or not over the force regarded as constituting the unity of Christendom” (Life of Innocent III). Montesquieu’s testimony is unimpeachable when he testifies that this Public Law of Europe was universally recognized. “All the sovereigns,” he writes, “with inconceivable blindness, themselves accredited and sanctioned, in public opinion, which had no force except by it.”
If the laws against heretics, who were to our forefathers what the anarchists are to us, were oppressive, some of the blame should surely be apportioned to the laymen who sat in the mixed assemblies in which they were made. “Almost all Europe, for many centuries, was deluged in bloodshed at the direct instigation or with the full approval of the ecclesiastical authorities.” It is in this disingenuous way that Lecky refers to the operations of the Public Law of Europe against the Albigenses or Manichæans of Provence, and probably to the wars of Italian independence and the Thirty Years War. Until the thirteenth century he assures us that practically no persecutions (prosecutions) against heretics occurred.It was then that the Public Law of Europe began to be trampled on by sectarians who adopted and propagated Gnostic, Paulician, Manichæan, and other subversive theories, imported from the East by Semitic-Islamic settlers in the fair lands of Provence. Spain and Italy, the countries in which the Public Law of Europe was maintained, were the only ones who were spared the horrors of civil religious wars. They were saved by inquisitions, it will be retorted.
Without seeking to defend the system, we may be permitted to inquire whether it were not preferable, at that time, to execute some ringleaders of religious revolt (30,000 in three centuries is a fair estimate), than to deluge whole countries in blood for many decades, about controversies which not one in a million could possibly grasp? Lecky the rationalist assures us that “the overwhelming majority of the human race, necessarily, accept their opinions from authority. Avowedly like Catholics, or unconsciously like Protestants. They have neither time nor opportunity (nor capacity) to examine for themselves” (History of Rationalism, I, 101).
Does any one seriously believe that the Camisards were fighting for predestination and infant damnation, which have been shelved recently by Presbyterians in the United States?
In England, France, Germany, everywhere, greed and political ambition were the incentives; the passions of ignorant masses were merely used as ameans. Back of both, and behind all, we descry secret societies, the true pandemoniums, where these revolts are organized, and whence Mammon, “the least-erected spirit that fell,” Moloch, “horrid king besmeared with blood,” Belial, and all that crew, described by Milton, are sent forth to execute the behests of the eternal enmity between “the serpent’s seed and the seed of the woman.”
In this unholy struggle “all the bonds of cohesion on which political organization depended were weakened or destroyed,” writes Lecky. “The spirit of private judgment had descended to those totally incapable of self-government, and lashed their passions into the wildest fury” (History of Rationalism, p. 239). Voltaire is even less complimentary. He describes the Hussites as “wild beasts whom the severity of the emperor had roused to furor.”
In Germany, apostate ecclesiastical and secular electors were seeking their own aggrandizement. Bishoprics with their manses were converted into hereditary principalities. As to their Swedish ally, Gustavus Adolphus, I refer my readers to the judgment of a Protestant admirer of this doughty champion of the Reformation. On page 329 ofThirty Years WarSchiller writes as follows:—
“The last, the greatest service, Gustavus Adolphus could render to religious and civil liberty was to die (1632, at battle of Lutzen).... It was no longer possible to doubt that he was seeking to establish himselfin Germany, not as a protector, but as a conqueror. Already Augsburg boasted that it had been chosen as the capital of the new monarchy. The Protestant princes, his allies, made claims which could only be satisfied by despoiling the Catholics. It is then permitted to conclude that like the barbarian hordes of yore, he intended to divide the conquered provinces of Germany among the Swedish chiefs of his army. His conduct towards the unfortunate Elector Palatine, Frederick V, is unworthy of a hero. The Palatinate was in his hands, justice and honour required that he return it to the legitimate sovereign. But to avoid doing so he had recourse to subtleties which make us blush for him.”
It is only fair to add that Gustavus did finally restore the Palatinate to Frederick, but as a fief of the Swedish crown.
What, I ask, has been gained by the overthrow of the Public Law of Europe? For this was waged the Thirty Years War, one of the most cruel the world has known. Atrocities were committed on both sides, and thetu quoqueargument is very foolish. But if it be admitted that defensive war is always just and righteous, we must allow that the Catholics were justified in fighting for their public law. They were in possession since more than twelve centuries, and were resisting assailants who showed no quarter, and who robbed them of their churches and persecuted them, relentlessly, whenever they gainedthe upper hand, just as the Puritans did in Maryland. And what was the net result of the Thirty Years War? The loss of liberty both civil and religious. The German electors, ecclesiastical as well as secular, had been but administrators of free citizens, who now became subjects with little or no voice in the government. As to religious liberty, the new axiomCujus regio ejus religiowas substituted for One Lord One Faith. The ruler of each realm became the infallible Pontiff of his subjects. “If any gratitude from this scandalous and accursed world were to be gained, and I, Martin Luther, had taught and done nothing else than this, that I have enlightened and adorned the temporal authority, for this alone should it be thankful to me, since even my worst enemies know that a like understanding as to the temporal authority was completely concealed under the Papacy” (Walch’sAugs., XIV, p. 520).
In this same connexion Schiller makes the following statement. “No country changed religion oftener than the Palatinate. Unhappy weathercock of the political and religious versatility of its sovereigns, it had twice been forced to embrace the doctrines of Luther and then to abandon them for those of Calvin. Frederick III deserted the Confession of Augsburg, but his son re-established it by most violent and unjust measures. After closing all the Calvinist temples and exiling the ministers and school teachers, he ordered by his will that his son should be brought up byLutherans; his brother, however, annulled this will and became regent under the young Frederick IV, who was confided to Calvinists with strict orders to destroy in his mind the “heretical doctrines of Luther by all means, by beating and whipping even.” It is easy to guess how subjects were treated when the heir to the throne was thus tyrannized over” (Thirty Years War, p. 40).
What, I ask, has Europe gained by the overthrow of its public law? Strife, anarchy, nihilism in religion as in philosophy. After centuries of dabbling, floundering, and blundering, we are again seeking to devise some principle of unity, some Amphictyonic Council to supplement the illusory balance of power; to set up a Court of Arbitration to replace the one that really did exist in the Middle Ages and functioned as well as could be expected in those days of liquescence.
All in vain. The grand Peace Congress from which the Papacy was excluded was followed, almost immediately, by two most cruel wars which were pre-eminently subjects for arbitration. Men will submit to this court questions about which they do not care enough to fight about them, but these subjects only will they submit to arbitration. Unless the Lord build the house, in vain they labour who build.
There is only one tribunal that can ever arbitrate efficaciously, and this is the one which presided at the Genesis of Christendom.[27]
Socialists and anarchists, without having pondered the passage from Guizot I quoted in beginning this chapter, understand perfectly that our Western or Christian civilization is grounded on the unity of one Holy Catholic Church, and the destruction of the social structure being the object of their ambition, they very logically direct all their efforts to destroying this foundation.
The work of disintegration was begun in the sixteenth century. “Socinius, the most iconoclastic of Protestants, predicted that the seditious doctrines by which Protestants supported their cause would lead to the disintegration of society” (History of Rationalism, II, 239).
This work of disintegration has made rapid progress since the eighteenth century in virtue of the law of accelerated movement. The French Revolution, like the Protestant revolt, was essentially a work of disintegration. The successors of the Masonic Jacobins of 1790 openly proclaim their set purpose of completing the work begun by thegrands ancêtresof bloody memory.
“The Revolution,” wrote Renan (in the preface toQuestions contemporaines), “has disintegrated everything, broken up all organizations, excepting onlythe Catholic Church. The clergy alone have remained organized outside the State. As the cities, in the days of the ruin of the Roman Empire, chose bishops for their representatives, so in our provinces the bishops will soon be the only leaders left in a dismantled society.”
The object of the Separation Law was to accomplish the disintegration of the Church, the only organized body, outside the State, which the Revolution failed to disintegrate, because Pius VI rejected,in toto, the civil constitution of the clergy. These noble French priests were drowned, guillotined, proscribed, and imprisoned by tens of thousands, but the Church in France maintained the principle of life strong within her, and on the third day she rose again.
What violence failed to accomplish a century ago, the Third Republic hoped to compass by guile and fraud, labelled liberty and legality.
The true purpose of the Law of Separation was to break up the Church into an ever-increasing number of viviparousAssociations cultuelles, independent of all ecclesiastical control.
The successor of Pius VI, Ithuriel-like, has pierced the thin disguise of the toad lurking in the purlieus of Eden.[28]Instead of a divided demoralized clergy, the Masonic Jacobins are confronted by the serried ranks of an invincible phalanx.
“At the end of the fourth century,” writes Guizot, “it was the Church with its magistrates, its institutions, and its power that vigorously resisted the internal dissolution of the empire and of the barbarians, and became the bond, the medium, and the principle of civilization between the Roman and the barbarian worlds” (History of Civilization).
Now, as in the fourth century, we are menaced with social dissolution. The barbarians are at our gates, nay, in our midst, and not in France alone, by any means. A ferocious, self-seeking atheistic materialism is disrupting Christendom. And let us not be deceived. Societies are never saved and regenerated except by their generating principle; and the generating principle of Western civilization is Christianity.
Therefore, I repeat, that society will be compelled, in self-defence, to restore Christianity or slavery, in some form; State Socialism perhaps—or perish.
21st November, 1906.