Transcriber's Notes:

In the original, chapter headings II-IX showed subtitles above chapter numbers, disagreeing with the display of numbers above subtitles on the Contents page and in chapter I. Those headings have been standardized.

Line spacing in the original varied inconsistently from single to 1.5, making the identification of intended block quotes difficult. For consistency, only speeches, quotes and reprints from document texts that were contained entirely within whole paragraphs—with no other narrative material—were treated as block quotes in this project (Exception: beginning P. 430 "To My Countrymen...."; this quote continues over several remaining pages and sections to the end of the book, and was not blocked).

Remaining transcriber's notes are at the end of the text.

The War Upon Religion
Being an Account of the Rise and Progress of Anti-Christianism in Europe

By
Rev. Francis A. Cunningham

Boston
The Pilot Publishing Company
1911

Copyright 1911, By Rev. F. A. Cunningham.

Nihil Obstat:
David J. Toomey, Ph. D., S. T. D.
Censor Deputatus.

Imprimatur:
✠GULIELMUS
Archiep. Boston.

Contents

[CHAPTER I.
THE EARLIER CRISES.]

Influence of the Reformation— Jansenism— The Abbey of Port Royal— Quesnel— The Bull "Unigenitus"— Destructive Influence of Jansenism— Not Quite Extinguished Even Yet— Quietism— Molinos and Madame Guyon— Louis XIV. and Gallicanism— The Gallican Liberties— Resistance to Them— Gallicanism One of the Chief Causes of Anti-Christianism in France— Van Espen and the Pseudo-Canonists— Johannes von Hontheim, Known as Febronius— His Hostility to the Papal Supremacy— Scipio di Ricci— The Congress of Ems— Joseph II. of Austria and the Josephine Schism— Suppression of the Society of Jesus— The Sophists— Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists— Freemasonry— Neo-Paganism

Page 1

[CHAPTER II.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.]

Immediate Causes— The States General— Confiscation of Church Property— Persecution of Religious Orders— The Civil Constitution— Sorrow of Pope Pius VI.— His Condemnation of the Civil Constitution— The Constituent Assembly— Massacres of September— The Convention— Changing the Calendar— Persecution of Catholics— The Reign of Terror— The Goddess of Reason— The Worship of the Supreme Being— The Council of Five Hundred, or the Directory— Arrest and Exile of Pope Pius VI.— The Death of the Pontiff in France

Page 51

[CHAPTER III.
OPENING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.]

State of France at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century— The Conclave of Venice— Cardinal Chiaramonti Elected Pope Pius VII.— Sketch of His Life— Cardinal Consalvi— Napoleon Makes Proposals of Peace With the Pope— Preliminary Deliberations for the Concordat— Diplomacy of Cardinal Consalvi— The Concordat Signed and Ratified— Text of the Concordat— The Organic Articles— They Are Repudiated by the Pope— The Case of Jerome Bonaparte— The Coronation of Napoleon— The Emperor Becomes a Persecutor— Excommunication of Napoleon— Arrest of Pope Pius VII.— His Imprisonment at Savona— The Council of Paris— The Pope is Imprisoned at Fontainebleau— Defeat of Napoleon— Triumphant Return of Pius VII. to Rome

Page 105

[CHAPTER IV.
ANTI-CHRISTIANISM IN ROME.]

The Holy Alliance— The Carbonari— Mazzini and Young Italy— Hostile Congresses— Accession of Pope Pius IX.— Generous Dispositions of the Holy Father— Eighteen Hundred and Forty-eight— Flight of the Pope— Garibaldi— Rome Retaken by the Papal Allies— Conspiracy Against the Holy See— Iniquities of Piedmont— Hypocrisy of Napoleon III.— Usurpation of Victor Emmanuel— Fall of Rome in 1870— Accession of Leo XIII.— Leo XIII. and Labor— Accession of Pius X.— Modernism— The Methodist in Rome— The Insult of Mayor Nathan— Character of Pope Pius X

Page 177

[CHAPTER V.
THE KULTURKAMPF IN GERMANY.]

(1) The Causes— The Liberalism of the Rationalists— The Liberalism of Pseudo-Catholics— Günther— Frohschammer— Doellinger— The Desire for Protestant Ascendancy— The Hatred for Catholic Nations— The Determination of Caesarism to Reduce All Religion to the Domination of the State— (2) The Men— Bismarck— Bishop Ketteler— Windthorst— Malincrodt— The Centre Party— The Laws of Hate— May Laws— Courage of the Bishops— War of Violence— The Turn of the Tide— Reconciliation

Page 209

[CHAPTER VI.
THE THIRD REPUBLIC.]

The Franco-Prussian War— The Commune of 1870— Its Victims— Establishment of Third Republic— Beginning of the War on the Church— Gambetta— Paul Bert— Jules Ferry— War on the Religious Orders in 1880— Irreligious Education— Secularization of Schools— Peaceful Advances of Pope Leo XIII.— Anarchy and Socialism Gaining Ground— The Affair of Dreyfus— France at the End of the Nineteenth Century

Page 276

[CHAPTER VII.
WAR ON THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS.]

Beginning of the War— The Cabinet of Freemasons— Waldeck-Rousseau— The Associations Law of 1901— Its Hypocritical Character— Suppression of the Congregations— Combes— The Closing of Religious Establishments— Expulsion of Monks and Nuns— Character of Combes— Early Attempts at Separation— The Affair of "Nobis Nominavit"— The Bishops of Laval and Dijon— The Visit of President Loubet to Rome— The Rupture of Diplomatic Relations With Rome— The Discussion Upon the Separation Law— Speech of M. Ribot— The Separation Law Passed— Its Chief Measures— Sufferings of Catholics— The Associations of Worship Condemned by the Holy See— The Liquidation of Ecclesiastical Property— The School Question in France

Page 313

[CHAPTER VIII.
THE TROUBLES IN SPAIN.]

Accession of Ferdinand VII.— Apostolics and Liberals— Disaffection of Ferdinand— Carlist War— Hatred of the Jesuits— Atrocities of Espartero— The Pope Protests— Papal Encyclical— Balmes and Cortes— Concordat of 1851— Attempt on the Life of the Queen— Revolution of 1854— Persecution and Calumny— Protests of the Holy See— Espartero Fails— The Campaign of 1867— Trickery of Napoleon III.— Spain a Republic— Persecution of Catholics— Amadeus of Savoy— The Republic of 1873— Castillo— Canovas in Power— The Twentieth Century— Canalejas— Ferrer and the Barcelona Riots

Page 379

[CHAPTER IX.
THE CRISIS IN PORTUGAL.]

Old Glories of Portugal— Pombal the Infamous— Portugal and Napoleon— English Influence— Dom Pedro— Maria da Gloria and Dom Miguel— The Revolution of 1833— The Present Time— Assassination of Carlos I.— Revolution Always Active— The Young King a Victim of Conspirators— The Revolution of 1910— Violence Against the Religious and the Clergy Generally— Letter of the Jesuit Provincial— Spoliation— Treatment of the Prisoners— Outlawed and Exiled— The Charges and Their Answers— Armaments and Subterranean Galleries— Alleged Wealth of the Jesuits— Another Charge— Alleged Secret Association— Charge of Political Activity— Reactionary Influence

Page 418

Introduction.

If it is true that a nation is what its doctrines are, it becomes very easy to discover in the doctrines of contemporary Europe the last reason of the troubles and revolutions which keep it in constant turmoil. It has sowed the wind, now it is reaping the whirlwind. It has destroyed the foundations, and it is but natural that the edifice should begin to fall to its ruin.

The English Socinians, followed by Voltaire, uprooted the Christian idea, and Rousseau after denying the true nature of God, set up the worship of man in His place. From these ancestors was born a generation of rationalists and atheists, who celebrated their triumphs, first in the French Revolution, and afterwards in the general dissolution of organized society. Out of the jumble of confused systems arose all those philosophic, religious, moral, and social aberrations which strive to root themselves in the human mind of the twentieth century. Among the Catholics themselves, whenever ambition or the malign influence of worldly allurements were in the ascendant, there were here and there excrescences of error which tended to diminish the vigor and integrity of the Christian spirit, and lead to that mongrel condition characterized under the name of "Liberal Catholicism."

Rationalism, properly speaking, began in Germany, a country which, until lately, has effected little in the domain of thought, and in the fields of faith and reason, except to ravage and destroy the creations of centuries. Unhappily, however, it has built up nothing in their place. Emmanuel Kant, born in Prussia in 1724, began the process of demolition. Materialistic philosophy had already denied the existence of the soul, and of the invisible world; Kant proceeded to the denial of any certitude regarding the material and visible. With him everything assumed the character of the mythical and ideal. To explain his process he invented in man a second reason, the practical reason, which reconstructs what the speculative reason destroys. In fact, by separating the faculties of the human soul from the objects which they perceive, he led the way to systematic scepticism.

Kant was followed by Fichte. As the former instituted a doubt as to the reality of external objects, Fichte declared that there was no external reality, that the universe surrounding us is only a fiction of the mind to which we alone give reality, and the world is only a form of our own activity. Kant and Fichte assailed the reality of things outside the "Ego," the personal mind; it remained for Schelling—born in 1775—to destroy both subject and object, and to confound all things mind and matter in one immutable, eternal existence. With Hegel, a disciple of Schelling everything becomes pure obscurity, absolute confusion, chaos. Hegelianism was, in principle, the identity of contradictories, the identity of truth and error, of good and evil. In him was verified the prophesy of Isaias of those "who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter." It was a system that insinuated that nothing really exists, that existence is merely a happening; that truth is not truth in itself, that there is no definite truth. It was the affirmation and negation of one and the same thing, fact, or being, at one and the same time. It was important inasmuch as it led the way to systems even more bizarre and destructive in the intellectual and moral order.

Not to speak of the eclecticism of Cousin in the earlier days of the last century, which consisted in culling what he considered truth out of all the various philosophies of the past, without, however, having any definite idea of what was the truth, the chief product of German rationalism in the first half of the century was the system of Positivism. It consisted in confining human knowledge within the sole domain of the observation of the forces of matter, and the study of the mathematical laws and conditions which regulate these forces. Beyond that domain it declares that nothing exists scientifically. Neither first causes, final causes, nor the essences of things, ought—according to it—to be the object of scientific research, for these, it considers, are not science, but metaphysics. Under the name of metaphysics it included religion, theology, and moral teaching, all of which were to be simply eliminated as of no interest to men of intellect. Hegelianism had closed the eyes of human understanding; Positivism had mutilated and crippled its activities.

This disorderly system would have died with its author, August Compt, had not two of his disciples taken it up and given it a certain stability. One of these, M. Littré gave a resume of its teachings in 1845; but it was Taine who endowed it with a species of life, especially in his later writings. According to Littré, Positivism would do away with God, the Creator, the First Cause, the Final End, as subjects "worthy of childish minds." He declares that "outside the sphere of material and positive things the eye of the intelligence can perceive only an infinite void." He considers the soul, anatomically, as the ensemble of the functions of the brain and spinal column, and psychologically, as the ensemble of the functions of the cerebral sensibility. He denies all immortality and future life. "The dead," he declares, "survive only in the ideal existence which presents them to our memory, or in the part they played in the collective life of progress accomplished by humanity." There was to be no more religion or worship. Instead of supernatural ideas and the dogmas of faith it would substitute the cult of "humanity." Finally, in denying the existence of God he ceased to recognize the divinity of Christ, His miracles, and the divine authority of His Church.

The new philosophy became the fad. It was welcomed by young men impatient of restraint; it was preconized by free-thought in a congress of students at Liege; it descended into the workshops, infested the schools, and became a necessary accomplishment for professors in academies and colleges. The danger was increased by the hypocrisy of its writings. "One of the characteristic traits of modern irreligion," says Mgr. Baunard, "is that taint of poetry mingled with mysticism which accompanies the most blasphemous negations."

Out of the union of Hegelianism and Positivism—the negation of absolute truth, and the disdain of metaphysics—was born a new historical criticism, which repudiated a priori the supernatural as false and impossible. This new system taught that: "When criticism refuses to believe in the narration of miracles, it has no need to bring proofs to the support of its negation. What is narrated is false, simply because it cannot be," and again, it declares—"The foundation of all criticism consists in setting aside in the life of Christ the supernatural," and again, "Nothing enters into human affairs but what is human; and every science, particularly history, must bid farewell definitely to the supernatural and the divine."

This perversive philosophy once launched needed only a leader to present it in a concrete and popular form. For such a purpose the German Life of Christ by Strauss could serve as a model. A hand was ready in France to take up the enterprise, Ernest Renan, the modern Voltaire, put forth his notorious "Life of Jesus," which might be called the great crime of the nineteenth century. Renan wished to show that Jesus is not God, and at every page his demonstration is shattered like glass against the evidence of the texts. These texts he knows, but he is content to falsify them. He does so because in his Hegelian school no one assertion is truer than its opposite. Sometimes he adopts the respectful, unctuous tone of those who cried out: "Hail, King of the Jews." In this frame of mind he speaks of Christ as "the man who even yet directs the destinies of humanity," "the man who has given the most beautiful code of perfect life that any moralist has ever traced." But almost in the same breath he insults, minimizes and reproaches our Lord as a pedantic peasant, an eccentric, an anarchist, and the like.

This intermingling of adulation and insult to the divine character of Christ had its effect. It seduced the simple-minded, and brought the book into the hands of the imprudent and deluded multitude. It blinded the masses, it brought tears to the eyes of the faithful, it crushed the great heart of Mother Church, it gave a tone to lying criticism, it gave to blasphemy the character of elegance; it lent assistance to a policy oppressive of truth and liberty; it performed its part in the war of spoliation and sacrilegious confiscation; it renewed the hours of darkness around the Cross of the dying Redeemer; it essayed to make humanity, regenerated through the Blood of the Son of God, return back to Arius and to paganism. The work of Renan and his followers has been the great crime of the century.

During the last half of the century anti-Christianism underwent a change. The position held by Positivism was taken by evolutionist transformation. Its authors were Charles Darwin, the naturalist, and Herbert Spencer, the philosopher. Their doctrines were received with enthusiasm by thousands who had been seeking some new fad in the intellectual line. The anti-Christian looked to it to replace Christianity. In France it became the religion of the Third Republic. Jules Ferry, in the Lodge Clemente Amitie, 1877, declared openly: "We can now throw aside our theological toys. Let us free humanity from the fear of death, and let us believe in a humanity eternally progressing." It was the religion of atheism, and it has been forcing its creed upon humanity ever since.

Scepticism, born of Kant and Hegel, had come to its throne. With Hegel all things were only relative; with Kant objects are only phenomena, and the truth of things is merely subjective; religion itself was to him only subjective, and was, moreover, relegated to the things unknowable. In this he resembled Spencer with whom Religion held the first place in the category of the Unknowable, and that vast, dark, and bottomless pit into which he consigned everything which could not be known by experimentation. This glorification of ignorance, elevated into a system, became known as agnosticism.

The vagaries of sophism in the English-speaking world were hardly less prolific than in Continental Europe. The great intellectual forces of the nineteenth century allied themselves to two movements, the transcendental and the empiric. The former sprang from the writings of Rousseau; created the French Revolution, developed into German rationalism, passed into England to the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, generated in France a whole tribe of soliloquists and dreamers, and was finally crystallized in the half-prophetic, half-delirious preachings of Carlyle. Crossing the Atlantic it inspired and originated New England Transcendentalism through the Concord School of Philosophy, of which Emerson, a pupil of Carlyle, was the chief exponent.

It was a vague and abstract school. It took its very name from the fancy that this new knowledge transcended all experience and was quite independent of reason, authority, the testimony of the senses, or the testimony of mankind. It spoke freely of the Infinite, the Infinite Nothing, the Infinite Essence of Things. Carlyle spoke of Eternal Verities, the Immensities, the Eternal Silences. Emerson wrote of it as the Over-soul, the Spirit of the Universe. It permeated all literature, it directed the study of history, it inspired poetry, it became a religious creed; it hypnotized a large portion of the studious world.

About the middle of the century men began to question it, especially when it was perceived that its conclusions did not correspond with its premises. Human thought suddenly veered to the opposite extreme. The world was tired of abstractions; it called for facts. Thenceforth reason was to be omnipotent, and Nature began to be studied. The philosophy of the new order made her a god. "She will give up her secrets to us, and we will build our systems upon them. We will tear open the bowels of the mountains, and read their signs. We will pull down the stars from the skies, weigh them, and test their constituents. We will seek the elemental forces of Nature, and there we shall find the elemental truths. We will dredge the seas, sweep the rivers, drag fossils out of forgotten caves, construct the forms of dead leviathans from one bone, examine the dust of stars in shattered aerolites, and the structure of the animal creation in the spawn of frogs by the wayside, or the tadpoles in the month of May. And we shall find that all things are made for man; and that man alone is the Omnipotent and Divine." The world took up the cry and called it Progress. Mankind was shaken by new emotions. Through steamship, telegraph, telephone, and wave currents, distance was annihilated. The world was moved from its solid basis. Vast buildings were flung into the sky; the populations flocked to fill them in the dense cities; and in the exultation of the moment men looked back upon the past with a kind of pitying ridicule, and cried: "This is our earth, our world; we want no other. Humanity is our God, and the earth its throne!"

Then in the very height of all this pride, men suddenly discovered that under all this huge mechanism and masonry they had actually driven out the soul of man. The building of sky-scrapers, the slaughter of so many millions of hogs, the stretching of wiry networks over cities and states, the underground railways and sea-tunnels—all these were but a poor substitute or compensation for the ideals that were lost. Beneath all this material splendor every noble quality that distinguishes man was utterly extinguished, and one saw only the horrors of the midnight streets, the masses festering in city slums, the great gulf broadening between the rich and the poor, selfishness, greed, Mammon-worship, the extinction of the weak, the sovereignty of the strong, the cruelty, the brutality, the latent meanness of the human heart developing day by day like a monstrous disease upon the face of humanity.

Then came the mutterings of a new terror, the very offspring of the materialism that was worshiped, the spectre of socialism and anarchy, the new belief in the terrible destructiveness of a Godless science. The intellectual world drew back in horror at the sight of the child it had begotten. It began to repudiate the transcendentalism that made pantheism, and the empiricism which made Nature a god, and now it strives to justify itself by a futile attempt to reconcile God with human fancy. Its new religions are but the sugaring of the pill that a docile humanity must swallow. The vagueness of transcendentalism is united with the materialism of nature worship, and the resulting equation is pessimism. Charity, kindness, love, the smile of friendship and the laughter of innocence, all must vanish into the black night of despair before the mandate of a Moloch who has eaten the heart and smothered the thinking soul. It is the moment of crisis, when the world is beginning to look for a savior; and out of the darkness only one source of hope is seen glowing with eternal fire, one shelter for poor persecuted, over-ridden, oppressed humanity—the mother of order and happiness, the protectress of the home, the warmth of the heart, the life of the soul—the mistress of all true philosophy—the old, the never changing Church.

SATANISM.

In following up the various assaults made by the Gates of Hell upon the Church established by Christ, one is struck by the absolute method and order they betray. There is a mind behind them all, and that mind has been working vigorously for nineteen centuries. Arianism, Manicheeism, the paganism of the sixteenth century, Protestantism, all were conceived along religious lines, and the thought of God was ever their central proposition. With the French Revolution, born of Deism in England and Rationalism in Germany, there came into view the spirit of Paganism, which has set itself against Christianity for over a hundred years. Even Paganism, with its aping of the ancients and its depreciation of Christian doctrine and morality, has yielded before the human craving for spirituality, and is falling to pieces rapidly. But the Gates of Hell never grow weary, and the mind that in past ages could trouble the peace of the Church rises to a new effort, an effort that, with strange fatuity, it dreams will be final. Arianism, Protestantism, Paganism failing, the new religion of degeneration takes on a darker, a more repellent aspect. It no longer hides behind religious phrases, but comes out into the open, and those who can read its character have called it Satanism.

Under the guise of Modernism it strove to plant its poisonous weeds even in the vestibule of the Church, but, exposed through the vigilance of our great Pontiff, it made use of the Protestant churches to propagate its errors, until in many pulpits the authority of Jesus is as much a stranger as if Christ had never been born. Out of this chaos came the strange philosophy of Charles W. Eliot with its use of Christian phrases and its negation of the Christian religion. Eliot's nonsense, however, was but a stepping stone whereby the last assault might be made upon the Church. The plans of this assault have been developing for years in many universities of the country, in the yellow press, and in many organizations of men who have grown weary of law and seek in absolute license the gratification of animalism. Satanism is thus the danger of the day.

After many exemplifications of the creed of Satanism in the matters of divorce, abortion, race suicide, white slavery, not to speak of burnings at the stake and the thousand and one horrible crimes that a "wicked and adulterous generation" perpetrates in the open light of day, the world was prepared to hear its praises sung from the rostrum of one of America's largest educational establishments.

One evening last year an eminent professor, speaking in one of our largest universities, formulated some of its tenets, the horror of which, let us hope, will shock even the most depraved of minds. In Satanism charity shall be no more; that spirit of love which made life tolerable, which brought the smile to the face of poverty and suffering, which, born of Divine love, spreads its wings over the darkness of earth and creates faith in better things and hope of higher destinies—that charity shall have no place in the creed of these men, no more than it shall have place in that land of eternal despair whence first that creed came forth. More satanic still, the hand of this new religionist is red with the blood of the helpless, the infant whose feeble wailings wring the heart of a human mother, the blood of the infirm whose hollow cheek bespeaks the pity of the more fortunate, or whose halting step awakens the manhood of the young and noble, the blood of the aged who have given the years of their lives to the cause of humanity. To Satanism all these, to whom Christ had said, "Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy burdened, and I will refresh you," are obstacles, in the pathway of conquest to the Gates of Hell. This Satanism gives as its excuse the cause of economy as against humanitarianism, as if Divine Providence during the many centuries that have passed has not fully demonstrated Its ability to care for the world, to prevent by natural means the danger of over-population to keep the balance in human affairs as wonderfully as It has in the circling of the stars in the firmament.

One notes these various assaults not with any sense of fear for the Church to which Christ has promised His assisting presence, until the end of time, but as signs of the times, as warnings to those who thoughtlessly are led into the toils, to those who for a little temporary gain would deliver up the souls of their children that they may drink the doctrines of Satanism and lie down in pleasant places to die of its noxious poison.

MODERN LITERATURE.

The day has gone by when the discussion was between Christian and Christian; it is now a stand-up fight, a fierce struggle, every day becoming more fierce, between faith and infidelity. A spurious philosophy has prevailed under one name or another in every age, from the days of Democritus down to our own; but it has received recently an impetus from the teachings of Materialists. Emboldened by their success in research, the professors of the Materialistic school have attempted to lift the mysterious veil of nature, and have challenged the truths of Revelation on the most fundamental principles of the Christian creed.

In fact the Materialistic theories which today deify reason and make matter eternal, and which recognize in matter the principle and perfection of every form of life, are the substratum underlying almost every species of modern literature. It is this materialistic philosophy in the trappings of popular literature which is filling the earth with crime and making the lives of men a veritable inferno. Its pernicious influence has been stealing over the minds of men till it has succeeded in shaking to its centre the whole fabric of social life in almost every civilized country.

The irreligious works of the European continent have been translated into English, and circulated in every variety of form from the most ornate to the cheapest and most accessible. They are on the counters in the department stores, in the most flashing advertisements where their most prurient qualities are held out as inducements to the buyer. Nor are works of a similar spirit and tendency wanting in our own literature. And these works, adapted to every class of readers, and to every grade of intellect, revive the old errors, while fertile in the production of new ones, flatter the pride of the understanding, stimulate the passions of the heart, and diffuse their poison in every department of human learning and through every form of publication by which the popular mind can be reached.

An evil press, largely circulated and read by many who suspect no evil, is rapidly sapping the faith of the multitudes.

Unfortunately there exists in our nature a propensity to evil. Whatever flatters our passions or vicious inclinations we, as a rule, are readier to follow than what is good and virtuous. Hence we find that bad books are more generally read than good ones, and that newspapers wherein religion and morality are outraged, have a very wide circulation. If anything more than bad example tends to propagate vice, it is bad reading. Vice in itself is odious, but when decked out in the false coloring of a cleverly written book it becomes enticing. Young inquisitive people—and young people are generally inquisitive—are tempted.

After perusing such a book their horror of vice is much lessened; they take up another, and so, by degrees, their ideas become perverted. Nearly all men agree that it is the familiarity with vice which develops all the immoral and vicious propensities of human nature, and it is this familiarity with the face of vice which is so contagious, and draws so many into the vortex of crime in the large cities while its absence keeps country life so pure and untarnished.

It is indeed hard to say which is the more dangerous among books—those which are written professedly against Christ, His Church and His laws, or the furtive and stealthy literature which is penetrated through and through with unbelief and passion, false principles, immoral whispers and inflaming imaginations. To read such books is a moral contagion—it is to imbibe poison—it is certain spiritual death.

It is certainly a melancholy reflection, that any such books should be extant among us. It is sad to think that any of the human species should have so far lost all sense of shame, all feelings of conscience, as to sit down deliberately and compile a work entirely in the cause of vice and immorality, which, for anything they know, may serve to pollute the minds of millions, and to propagate contagion and iniquity through generations yet unborn—living, and spreading its baneful influence long after the unhappy hand that wrote it is mouldering in the dust.

It is a striking observation made by one of the Fathers of the Church that "as the authors of good books may hope to find their future crown lightened by the degree of wisdom and virtue which their writings impart through successive generations, so the writers of evil books may well dread an increase of punishment in the future world proportionate to the pollution which they spread, and the evil effects which their writings shall produce as long as they continue to be read."

To what frightful deserts must the writers of modern literature look forward in accordance with such a prediction! The literature of today, light and popular, stately and philosophical alike, teems with immorality and infidelity. It displays itself in every form of poetry and prose, in lectures, essays, histories, and in biblical criticism. There it stands palpable and terrible, like Milton's Death, black and horrible, obstructing the light of heaven, and overshadowing God's fair creation. The press is a Catholic institution: a Catholic invented it; a Catholic first printed books, and the Catholic Church first fostered it. But the enemies of Catholicity have seized it and turned it into an engine of destruction to faith and morals.

The newspapers in most cases teem with scandals which absorb the thoughts or arouse the passions. Such reading familiarizes the young with the details of vice, and their better nature is overshadowed by the vicious existences pictured, while the moral strength to resist temptation is slowly but surely weakened.

Then there is that inward strife and struggle—that warring of the passions from which no one is free—that tendency to evil which seeks to cast off the salutary restraints of religion, and which has carried down with the current of innate corruption the greater part of mankind. All these things are borne in upon the soul, day by day, and year by year, as though life were to last forever, until the unhappy reader begins to abandon the absolute realities of life and law and to dwell in the house of a diseased imagination like a leper waiting for the moment of final dissolution.

What we want thus today is an arousing of the Catholic conscience in this regard, the cultivation of Catholic instincts, and the acquiring of Catholic habits of thought. While the banners of atheism and anarchy are waving throughout Europe, the forces of infidelity and indifference are doing their deadly work at home. The spirit of revolt, born of corruption and bred of disease, has swept across the ocean and finds a resting place nearer home. The enemy has laid hold of a great part of the Press and is using it for the destruction of morality and the perversion of truth. The wells of knowledge and the fountains of truth are being daily and hourly poisoned by means of the current literature. A spiritual pestilence is passing over the earth, and the souls of millions are perishing through its foul agencies.

If God, therefore, has given to Catholics wealth of ability and strength of mind, and richness of opportunity to engage in the intellectual combat which is being fought everywhere around us, they ought to use these means to oppose the tide of infidelity and indifference which is sweeping over the nations by putting against it the barrier of good books and Catholic reading. In many quarters the mists are beginning to lift; many intelligent people are beginning to look to the Catholic Church because of her openly proclaimed doctrines, her magnificent works in building up the mighty fabric of the social world, and her lofty ideals of humanity. Secularism in education is confessing its failure at home and abroad.

The toiling masses are turning to the Church for the solution of the vexed problems of labor. The creeds are falling to pieces for want of unity, cohesive principle and authority. Thousands are flocking back to the old Church in sheer weariness of spirit. The thousands would swell into millions if we were up and active in the dissemination of good books, and did our part in helping on the cause of Catholic literature. The Catholic book, the Catholic magazine, the Catholic newspaper is the fiery cross spread from hand to hand, to light up the darkness and to kindle the faith of the multitudes.

SOCIALISM.

One of the forces that make most of contemporary conditions is that of Socialism.

Modern Socialism originated in a group of uncompromising materialists. Marx was one of the young men who revolted from the extravagant Idealism of Hegel, into the crassest Materialism, along with such men as Feuerbach, Bruno, Bauer and Engel. His theory of the universe reduces it to matter and force, and that of duty to the pursuit of pleasure in its material forms. The man's life was better than his creed, for there were some heroic sacrifices in it, for the good of the cause. But his theory neither called for nor sanctioned any such sacrifices. They were due to the pervading atmosphere of an imperfectly Christian civilization, with its ideals of pity and sympathy. They could not find their roots in a materialist view of the process of human history, which is but the tale of "conflict of existence and survival of the fittest," not much above the wrangling of wild beasts in the forests.

While it is only the errors of Socialism that meet with opposition from sound minds—the good points not being identified with the system except by accident—there are some of its errors that are fundamental and therefore deserve a larger exposure than the rest.

Among these is its false conception of the relation of individuals to society. Socialism of its very nature absorbs the individual into the State in such a way as to sacrifice the individual rights to the State's authority. This is an essential feature of all forms of real Socialism, and it puts an end to morality because it destroys all personal freedom and responsibility.

In the early days the Christian Church vindicated the inherent rights of conscience against the unholy tyranny of pagan Rome, which claimed authority to dictate the belief and control the religious practices of its subjects. Socialism would sacrifice the rights which the Church has won and must continue to defend, and proposes to erect a State, with unlimited power in the civil and ecclesiastical spheres.

In the view of the Socialist the State does not exist to furnish opportunities for personal development or defend our rights. In that State the individual must exist only for the sake of society, and his principal function is to promote the temporal well-being of the governing section. To this conception of man's nature they attempt to give a scientific authority.

They borrow from biology the idea of an organism and then, passing over the essential differences, they apply it in an unqualified sense to the State. Thus we are not surprised to read that "the relations of individuals to the social organism are on a par with the relation of cells to an animal organism." This monstrous doctrine implies that man is not a person, a free moral agent, with God-given rights and duties independent of the State.

It is Gronlund who says of rights: "There are none save what the State gives," and he adds "this conception of the State, as an organism, consigns the rights of man to obscurity." It certainly reduces man to a condition of physical and moral slavery.

Could it be established Socialism would thus prove a more frightful despotism than any pagan government of the past. Not a remnant of freedom would be left. The nature of our work, its place, time and reward would be fixed for us. The State could dispose at pleasure of our persons, our families and our property. It would lay its hands upon the family to destroy its unity and stability.

The masses of mankind would be placed completely at the disposal of a small and closely centralized body of politicians whose judgments would have the force of infallibility and who would be armed with irresistible power to enforce their ideals and to compel the observance of their laws.

The Socialists continually assert that religion in their system will be a private affair and no concern of the State. But they also take it for granted that once Socialism is realized religious belief must vanish. Indeed, it is impossible that Church and State, which both claim to be supreme and conflicting directors of mind and conscience, should co-exist.

An omnipotent collectivism would not long bear with a spiritual authority which speaks in God's name, which necessarily disputes its jurisdiction and the truth and justice of its fundamental principles, and which is therefore a constant menace to its stability. In order to save itself such a State would naturally try to suppress and destroy the Church.

In the face of such a proposed revival of pagan society, it becomes more and more necessary to insist upon the doctrine of man's spiritual dignity and moral freedom, and the unassailable basis upon which they rest. A personal God, whose essence is absolutely moral, is the fundamental truth, which alone can safeguard our rights from unjust attack.

The obligation to obey the laws which God has imposed upon our conscience carries with it the power and the right to obey. Our rights thus are not given and cannot be taken away by such a State. They have their origin and authority in the supreme Author of our being. Their validity is bound up with the sovereign rights of God, and are therefore, absolute and inalienable. It is in this Divine right that we find the broad and strong foundation of our freedom and of all the rights of man.

Thus Socialism is antagonistic to human liberty. Inseparably bound up with it is a materialistic philosophy. In the name of science—a word more abused than liberty—its adherents claim the right to revise and revalue all standards of morality. Experience shows that it thrives and propagates best in the soil of materialism. Its natural allies are the Secularists. Its irreconcilable foe, and the most formidable obstacle to its progress, is the Catholic Church.

It is, in fact, not merely a party for social reform, but a wing of the irreligious army, operating among the working classes, doing its utmost to sow mistrust and hatred of religion and to excite the hope and belief that the amelioration of the condition of labor depends upon the success of materialism.

While thus a warning is in order to those who are led by its utterances, its greatest danger lies in the fact that it may do much mischief in spreading an irreligious spirit, and weakening the foundations of belief among men whom it may not capture to its economic heresies, but who permit themselves to be influenced by what it might term its philosophic doctrines.

MODERNISM.

Out of the multiplicity of religious sects and philosophical systems with which Europe was deluged at the beginning of the present century, came the new form of Modernism, which is, as the Holy Father has said, but the synthesis of all errors. That vague endeavor to reduce Christian life and teaching to the vagaries of modern thought found its exponents in Germany, Italy, France and England. Schell in Germany sounded the note, and Fogazzaro in Milan took it up, picturing it in his novel "Il Santo." In England it found favor with the unhappy Father Tyrrell, and in France, with the Abbe Loisy and Houtin. The latter, according to present reports has become reconciled with the Church.

The watchful eye of the present Pontiff, Pope Pius X., detected the nature and aims of the new sect before it had yet time to fasten itself upon the minds of the faithful. Accordingly, on September 16, 1907, he issued to the world his famous Encyclical, Pascendi Dominici gregis, treating of the errors of Modernism.

The Encyclical was divided into four parts as follows

I. The Errors of Modernism—Agnosticism—This error declares that the human reason is merely a phenomenon, and cannot raise itself to the knowledge of God. This negation offers free access to scientific atheism, which is an opposition to what Faith teaches.

Immanence—Agnosticism is the negative side of Modernism; immanence constitutes its positive constituent. This doctrine would have it, that religion is a fact and as such demands an explanation; this is not to be sought from without, but from within. Religious immanence thus places as the basis of faith the sensus cordis, or a feeling of the heart, taking its origin from a need of the Divine hidden in the folds of the subconscious.

Subjectivism—Modernism supposing that the religious conscience is the supreme rule in all things relating to God, declares that that conscience, attracted by the unknowable, either exalts the phenomenon, that is, transfigures it, or deforms, that is, disfigures it, according to circumstances, persons, places or time.

Symbolism—Modernism declares that man, before thinking upon his faith, creates that faith, either in an ordinary and vulgar manner, or in a reflex and studied way. In this second case there come what are called the dogmas of the Church. These dogmas, Modernism says, are the instruments of the believer, the symbols of his faith.

Thus the essence of Modernism tends, from a social point of view, to subject the doctrines of the Church to the vague but dominant ideas of the moment, unknown yesterday, and forgotten tomorrow. From the point of view of the individual it would subject objective, theological and philosophic truth to the sensation of the individual and to the sentiment of the ego.

II. How these errors are employed.—The Pope then points out the principles which the Modernist theologian makes use of. For the theologian of this kind, dogma arises from the need which the believer has of elaborating his own religious thought. For him the Sacraments are only the symbols of faith, the consequences of worship, or something instituted for its nourishment. Inspiration is the need which the believer has of expressing his thought by writing or by word; in this way it approaches very nearly to poetical inspiration. It teaches, moreover, that the Church is only the product of the collective conscience, which, in virtue of vital immanence, comes down from a first believer; autocratic at first, it must now, according to Modernism bend itself to the popular forms.

To the historian, history is only the relation of phenomena, and should thus exclude God and everything divine. It declares that the apologist ought not to depend upon the Church, but should seek the aid of historical and psychological researches in the treatment of religious questions. The reformer would thus reform everything according to the above principles. It would replace positive theology by the history of dogmas, which it would write in accordance with history and science. As to worship, the Modernists while desiring to be indulgent in its regard, would nevertheless gradually diminish it. Finally, they look for the abolition of the Roman Congregations in general, and particularly of the Holy Office and of the Index.

Condemnation—The Holy Father then condemns Modernism: "But these suffice to show by how many ways the doctrine of the Modernists leads to atheism and to the destruction of all religion. Indeed, it was Protestantism which made the first step upon this path; then followed the error of the Modernists; atheism will follow next."

III. The causes, the results and the purpose of Modernism. The proximate cause are the errors of the intellect; its remote causes are curiosity and pride: non sumus sicut ceteri homines, and philosophical ignorance. The purpose of Modernism is threefold: the abolition of the scholastic method in philosophy, the abolition of tradition and of the authority of the Fathers; and the abolition of the ecclesiastical magisterium, the teaching Church.

IV. The Remedies—First. The teaching of scholastic philosophy and theology in all Seminaries and Catholic Universities, and at the same time the study of positive theology, which ought to be prosecuted in a sincerely Catholic spirit.

Second. The expulsion of all Modernists from the rectorship and professorships of Seminaries and Catholic Universities.

Third. The care which bishops as delegates of the Holy See, should take to keep from their priests and the faithful all Modernist writings. They should be exceedingly careful not to give their imprimatur to books which are Modernist in any way.

Fourth. The institution in each diocese of a council of censors to revise carefully all Catholic publications. The formula Imprimatur of the Bishop will be preceded by the Nihil obstat of the censor. The priest may not undertake, without permission of the Bishop, the direction of journals or reviews, and the Bishop will carefully examine those who write as editors or correspondents.

Fifth. The Bishops will forbid congresses of priests, except in rare occasions, when they shall be certain that there is no danger of Modernism, laicism, or presbyterianism.

Sixth. There shall be instituted in every diocese a council of vigilance, to watch over books and schools. They shall make certain as to the authenticity of the relics venerated in the churches, and see that the truth of pious traditions are not ridiculed in the newspapers; they shall maintain a surveillance over institutions of a social character and the publications pertaining thereto.

Seventh. One year after the publication of this Encyclical, the Bishops and religious superiors shall hand to the Holy See a diligent report, detailed and complete on the matters which constitute the object of the articles of this Encyclical; and thenceforth they shall do the same in their triennial report to the Holy See.

Such is in brief the resume of this famous document, whose appearance aroused the interest of the whole world. That its measures were effective is evident from the history of Modernism in the last three years. The incipient heresy is practically dead in the pale of the Church itself. Without it has invaded Protestantism, giving rise to pragmatism and all those vagaries which fill the philosophical curriculums of many universities. The Holy Father himself has gained a signal and complete victory.

And now a word as to the purport of the book which begins in the following pages. It is intended primarily to demonstrate that the struggle against the Church has ever been a struggle against the Holy See as the head and centre of all Catholicity. The repudiation of authority began with the Reformation. Then indeed it was merely an outcry against the claim of the Church to possess her authority from God. Later this error developed into a repudiation of human authority. Finally there came the repudiation of all lawfully constituted authority whether human or divine. It was the sequence of Protestantism, Rationalism and Radical Socialism.

Moreover, in the Catholic countries themselves the Church ever remained strong as long as all looked loyally to the centre of unity in the Holy See at Rome. The whole history of Jansenism, Gallicanism, Febronianism and Josephinism, is but the history of human ambition battling against the divine authority of the Sovereign Pontiff. And even then the result would have been a calming down of inordinate ambition before the claims of reason and Revelation, had not an impetus come from without. For a hundred years there has not been a revolution in the Latin lands which has not been aroused and engineered by the influence of English speaking powers. So that it may be said that if the Catholic countries were left to their own ways, they would remain not only Catholic, but up to date in every form of enlightenment and progress.

The War Upon Religion

CHAPTER I.

The Earlier Crises.

The history of Christ's Church on earth has ever been a story of storm and stress. The faithful heart of today mourns in discouragement over the evils that afflict the Church in the opening decade of the twentieth century; yet it needs but a glance at the past to convince us that the severest trials of the Spouse of Christ have happened in times long gone by. She has seen the tempest arise out of the clear sky; the clouds of persecution have hung low, at times even enveloping her in their gloomy shadows; she has seen the lightning's flash and heard the loud roar of the thunders of human wrath, while the hurricane swept over the face of the earth overturning the fondest memorials of her progress, and levelling to the dust the proudest monuments of her civilization. She has prostrated herself to the ground and with buried face has called upon the mercy of God to comfort her sorrow and heal her wounds. And when the storm has passed, she has lifted up her eyes to behold the glory of a newer day, the rainbow of hope, telling of that ancient promise: "For, behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world."

The story of the past has been told too often to need repetition in this place. Our interest lies entirely with modern days, with the struggle of the Church against the spirit of anti-Christ incarnate in all the movements of error from the sixteenth century until our own times. And thus, while we are seeking the causes of that anti-Christian spirit, we cannot help regarding with interest the influence exerted by the Protestant Reformation upon the intellectual and moral life of Europe. The abandonment of the old faith led, by a natural sequence, to estrangement from Christianity itself. This is so palpable that it is surprising how the innovators could have overlooked the fact that to abuse and ruin the one meant the wounding and destruction of the other. Indeed, had not organized Catholicity existed at the time, and in its then form, there would have been no concrete Christianity to reform, but only some archaeological remnants out of which it would have been difficult to construct even an imperfect idea of the religion of Christ.

Coincident with the great revolt against the Church was the impetus given to the study of the natural sciences. This coincidence, unhappily, assumed to the unthinking the appearance of cause and effect, as if the intellectual powers of man had been stunted and repressed under the regime of ecclesiastical authority, to be freed and exercised in a time of revolt against the Church. This unfortunate conviction was gradually instilled into the minds of the masses by men brilliant of intellect, but unscrupulous in their hatred of the Church and of her teachings. The people accepted the premise and followed it out to its conclusion; that Catholicity should be regarded as an enemy, and as such should be persecuted and destroyed. They were unable to measure the force of circumstances surrounding the new unfolding of the physical sciences, to recognize the evil character of many champions of the new order, or the glamor which the awakening of new studies cast upon minds hitherto engrossed with the sober logic of the schools. The fact, moreover, that many of the old theories with regard to natural phenomena must eventually have yielded to the processes of scientific evolution had not occurred to them. All these were forgotten or missed in the enthusiasm for the novelties of nature, and under the influence of a gaudy literature they permitted themselves to believe that the Church was responsible for the tardiness of the awakening, and hence that she should be discarded, that Christianity as a consequence should be uprooted, and that the intellect should acknowledge no other deity than the impersonal God of nature.

Moreover, the Church had ever been recognized as the supreme authority in the matter of Christian morality. To attack, therefore, her existence could mean nothing less than to open wide the floodgates of iniquity, to cast down the barriers that had hitherto restrained the evil passions, and to proclaim the reign of license and anarchy. These fatal conditions, taking their rise in the sixteenth century, grew into palpable being and gave place later to that monster of iniquity which today holds half of the world in its grasp.

JANSENISM.

The influences of the Protestant revolt were more far-reaching than the limits of any provincial or national territory, for although the Council of Trent, in 1545, had met the challenge of European discontent with a rigid investigation into every disputed point of ecclesiastical discipline, nevertheless the roots of the new heresy penetrated by secret channels into those very countries which had repudiated the advances of Luther, and taken their stand upon the basis of Roman Catholic unity. It was but natural that a people nurtured upon the living bread of Apostolic doctrine as delivered to them through the ministry of the Holy See should look with distrust upon the excessive and destructive theories of the German Protestantism. They found, however, in the morbid doctrines of Calvin a certain weird and uncanny attraction, which like an hypnotic obsession led them on until they mistook empty and high-sounding formulas for the clear light of truth. It was not that they did not see much that was repugnant and absolutely untenable in Calvinism; nor would they openly espouse the outward organization which the heretic called his church; but they hoped to find a middle path as far removed from the rigid fatality of the Genevan heresiarch as it would be from what they would call, the laxity of the Roman Church. Out of the resulting confusion was born the spirit of Jansenism, which proved to be little else than the Calvinistic heresy disguised under the external forms of Catholic unity. It was a heresy all the more dangerous that its assaults were not directed in the open and from the outside, but were nurtured within the very household of the faith, where it spent its arrows of discontent upon the children of the Sanctuary kneeling in devotion under the shadow of the altar.

Midway between the strongholds of Luther and Calvin lay the country of the Netherlands, rendered important at the time through the influence of its celebrated University of Louvain. Out of its curious people came that Cornelius Jansen whose name was to acquire a questionable celebrity through his championship of the new idea. A quondam conspirator in the interests of Philip II., he had been raised, for his services in that direction, to the See of Ypres. For twenty years he studied in his own way the great tomes of St. Augustine, reading his whole works ten times over, and his refutation of the Pelagians as many as thirty times. It was a period when theologians were much interested in grace, free will, predestination, and kindred questions. The Church had already condemned the theories of Baius in that regard, and Calvin's errors, which he claimed to have found in St. Augustine, had been refuted time and again. It was the work of Jansen to revive in a more classical form all these condemned doctrines and to seal them by an appeal to St. Augustine. To this end he finished before his death, in 1638, an immense work entitled Augustinus, which, however, was not published until 1640, two years after his death.

Its heretical character was immediately recognized. The University of Paris censured five leading propositions extracted from the work, which were in turn formally condemned by Pope Urban VIII., in 1642. The Jansenists, however, endeavored to meet the Papal condemnation with casuistic subtlety. They resorted to a distinction between the orthodox sense of the propositions and the heretical sense in which they might be read; they thus claimed that Jansen understood them only in their orthodox sense, while they agreed that the propositions were rightly condemned in a heretical sense. Hence they declared that the five propositions were either not at all contained in the work of Jansen, or at least that they were not there in the sense condemned by the Bull of Urban VIII. To these observations Pope Alexander VII. replied by the Bull of 1656, wherein he condemned such distinctions, declaring that the five propositions were taken from the work of Jansen, and that they were condemned in the sense of that author. The Jansenists retorted by asserting that the Papal Bull was only a simple regulation of discipline, and that it could exact nothing more than a respectful silence. Practically the whole action of the new sectaries amounted to an effort to restrict the scope of Papal infallibility, in as much as they declared the Pope might rightly adjudicate in regard to dogmatic doctrines, but not in regard to dogmatic facts. Thus, he was right in condemning the five propositions, as they held, but wrong in declaring that Jansen taught them in a heretical sense. This distinction was formally condemned by Clement XI. in 1705, and the bishops and prelates of France were obliged to subscribe to a formula declaring that they condemned the propositions with heart as well as with lips, according to the mind of the Holy Father.

The novelty of the Jansenistic ideas raised up, especially in France, a coterie of supporters, brilliant of intellect, but entirely dominated by pride and egotism. Foremost of these was the Abbe St. Cyran, who became the sponsor of the Jansenistic doctrine after the death of its inventor. A Calvinist in sentiment, however orthodox by profession, his career was hardly such as might be expected of an apostle of truth. His treasonable life had awakened the hostility of the great Richelieu long before the advent of Jansenism, and he had spent years of weary confinement in the prison of Vincennes. His character was one of duplicity as is evident from his general tone of teaching. It was he who, one day, informed St. Vincent de Paul, that he would speak the truth in one place if he thought the truth would be appreciated there, and its opposite where ever he should find the people unable to apprehend the truth. It is significant of his pride that he declared that the Holy Scriptures were clearer in his own mind than they were in themselves. This strange individual upon his liberation from prison, at the death of Richelieu, set himself up as a martyr and contrived to chant his woes into the ears of the courtly set that hovered about the French throne. He succeeded in casting the glamor of fashion over his Jansenistic theories. He was welcomed especially by the members of a family destined to hold the destinies of Jansenism in their grasp, the Arnaulds of Port Royal. There were two brothers of especial prominence, and two sisters, Angelique and Agnes, who had received their initiation into Jansenism in all good faith, but who became later on most bitter in their advocacy of principles which no true Catholic could hold. The Abbey of Port Royal, near Paris, thus became the very stronghold of the new sect and drew to its doors some of the brightest men of the day. Among these was that celebrated Pascal whose "Provincial Letters" exerted such an influence in stirring up a national hatred of the Jesuits. The Abbey of Port Royal, however, proved itself too great a factor in the seditious movements of the day. It was suppressed by a royal order in 1709, and its buildings demolished in the year following.

Just at the moment when the followers of Jansen seemed most ready to yield to the claims of saner thought, when the instructions of the Holy See were already bearing salutary fruit, the heresy took on a new lease of life, and opened up an avenue to greater dissension and error. In the year 1693 appeared a work entitled: Moral Reflections Upon the New Testament by Pasquier Quesnel, an ex-priest of the Oratory of Jesus. He was a man who had already incurred suspicion and censure. The book, although conceived in a tone of lofty piety and deep meditation, was found nevertheless to be a very storehouse of Jansenistic ideas. It was received with enthusiasm even by many pious souls whose mental acumen could not perceive the poisonous spirit that it harbored. Cardinal Noailles, Archbishop of Paris, was at first one of its strongest supporters until the book, after a critical examination by a Papal commission, was condemned by Pope Clement XI. in 1713. The Bull by which this condemnation was proclaimed was the celebrated "Unigenitus," a factor not alone in the religious, but in the political history of the eighteenth century.

After the appearance of the Bull, Cardinal Noailles forbade his people to read the "Moral Reflections," but at the same time he refused to receive the Papal Bull without some qualification. Other prelates proceeded to greater extremes than this, four of them having the hardihood to appeal from the Bull to a further Ecumenical Council. This attitude was a declaration of open rebellion; it was a call to many who had hitherto hidden behind the screen of prudent silence. A new religious faction was formed and rapidly grew in numbers. They termed themselves the Appellants from their appeal to a future council. To meet the disastrous effects of this growing schism Pope Clement XI. in 1718 put forth the severe Bull, "Pastoralis officii," wherein it was declared that anyone, though he be cardinal or bishop, refusing to accept the Bull "Unigenitus" should thereby cease to be a member of the Church. The contest went on ten years longer before Cardinal Noailles and the French episcopate with but few exceptions yielded entirely to the demands of the Holy See. The affair, however, though quieted to a great extent in the ranks of the clergy, was nevertheless secretly supported by a number of contumacious persons, and openly by the Parliament of Paris and other governmental bodies, who brought persecution to bear upon the issue. In 1746 de Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris, forbade his clergy to administer the Sacraments to any sick person who should be unable to produce a certificate from the parish priest stating that he had been to confession. He was cited before the Parliament in 1752, and was later banished from Paris. The controversy was finally settled by Clement XIV. who permitted that the Sacraments might be given to a person whose opposition to the Bull, "Unigenitus" was not notorious.

Such are the barest outlines of the rise and progress of Jansenism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Beneath its surface lay strong and lasting issues, the effect of which is often perceptible even in our own day. One of these was its determined opposition to the Society of Jesus. Ever loyal to the Holy See and to the sound doctrine of the Church, the Jesuits could not but be an obstacle in the path of the sectaries, who in turn strove by every means for their annihilation. Both in the circles of religious life and among the courtiers and ever restless against the restraints of morality, the Jansenists pursued their foe with relentless energy. Through Pascal and his followers the resources of polite literature were brought to bear against the defenders of the faith, until, just as Jansenism was losing its last hold upon European society, their great purpose was accomplished, and the Society of Jesus was suppressed.

Into the private life of the ordinary Catholic the principles of Jansenism injected a gloom and sadness similar to the extravagant sullenness of Puritanism or its sister, Calvinism. Rigor and haughty reserve were accompanied by a false humility which caused its votaries to shun the Sacraments, to despair of God's mercy, to abandon all hope after the commission of one sin, or on the other hand a presumption without grounds upon an election which God had denied to others less fortunate. It threatened for a moment a total overturning of belief in the salutary life of grace and an utter misconception of the free will of man which must lead eventually to a wandering away from God and ultimate atheism.

That the spirit of Jansenism is not altogether dead our Holy Father, Pope Pius X. assures us in recommending the daily reception of Holy Communion: "The poison of Jansenism," he says "did not entirely disappear. The controversy as to the dispositions requisite for the lawful and laudable frequentation of the Holy Eucharist survived the declarations of the Holy See; so much so, indeed, that certain theologians of good repute judged that daily Communion should be allowed to the faithful only in rare cases and under many conditions." Our present Holy Father disposes of Jansenistic doctrines by opening up freely the graces of the Holy Sacrament even as far as its daily reception.

QUIETISM.

A movement which rivaled Jansenism in its peculiar fanaticism was that Quietism which owes its public notoriety to a Spanish priest, Michael Molinos, who in 1675 published a work entitled: Spiritual Guide Leading the Soul, by Means of Interior Progress, to Attain Perfect Contemplation, and to the Rich Treasure of Interior Peace. Therein was developed a religious system that was apparently in harmony with the most orthodox asceticism, but which upon examination proved to be fundamentally false and seducing towards the most rampant error. The writings of Molinos were condemned by Pope Innocent XI. and their author compelled to do severe penance for the harm they had caused. In substance Quietism taught that the interior life or spiritual perfection is reached when the soul, by union with God, holds itself in a thoroughly passive state with regard to everything else. In all things whether of this life or of the next, in questions of virtue as in questions of sin, the perfect soul wishes for nothing and fears nothing, not even hell; it is simply in a state of inactivity. Hence good works are not only unnecessary for salvation, but are even a hindrance to perfection, since the soul must act to perform them. Farther still went this theory in insinuating that when a person is attacked by even the grossest temptations he should never offer any positive resistance, such resistance being in itself action. Hence that the tempted person was never responsible for his actions, be they ever so infamous, since the criminality affects only the sensitive part of the soul, not the higher part which is united with God.

It is quite evident that a theory such as this could only lead to grave excesses not only in the matter of doctrine, but especially in that of morality. Examples were not wanting to show the practical workings of the new movement, which, however, rapidly disappeared under the watchful eye of the Holy See. It is worthy of note that a discussion over the orthodoxy of the writings of one of this class, a certain Madame Guyon, residing at the time in France, effected an estrangement between those two brilliant lights of the French Church, Bossuet and Fenelon. The latter, in his too great sympathy for one whom he believed too harshly judged, published a sort of defence of her. The defence was at once condemned by the Pope, and Fenelon out of the humility and true loyalty of his great heart submitted immediately and without reserve to the decision of the Holy See.

GALLICANISM.

LOUIS XIV.

In a line with Jansenism as a force destructive of the influence of Catholic grace upon modern life was the movement of Gallicanism. It differed, however, from Jansenism inasmuch as the latter affected the interior life of the Church while the former touched upon her external regimen. Its genesis can be traced far backward in history, though it never attained to proportions capable of inspiring fear until the middle of the seventeenth century. A feeling of restless annoyance at the restraints exercised by the Court of Rome upon his absolute dominion in France caused the young King Louis XIV. to regard the Holy See with something of hostility even from the beginning of his reign. In fact, were he disposed in his youth to act with fairness towards his ecclesiastical neighbor there were not wanting courtiers who instilled into his ear the notion that the Holy See was seeking his utter abasement and ought therefore to be reminded strongly of its true position. An unfortunate event in the year 1662 brought this hidden fire to a flame. At that time the Duc de Crequy was acting as ambassador of France in the Eternal City. This ambitious and testy nobleman signalized his residence in Rome by permitting and even encouraging his retainers and friends to defy the city's laws, to insult the Roman authorities and to abuse in every way possible the hospitality extended them by the Papal government. Their acts of rowdyism at length inflamed the police and the soldiery to such an extent that a body of Corsican troops in the service of the Holy Father threw off all restraint and attacked the French retainers, killing three or four of them. The ambassador abandoned Rome in an excess of fury and brought a garbled version of the affair to the ears of Louis XIV. The King in his anger retaliated by dismissing the Papal Nuncio, and demanding from the Pope the most absurd and extravagant conditions as the price of reconciliation and peace. The Holy Father, Pope Alexander VII. had been guiltless in the whole affair, he had suffered patiently the impositions of de Crequy and his lawless band, and he displayed an extreme anxiety to repair any evil committed by his own soldiery; he could not, however, yield to the exactions of the French King. Thinking to meet the warlike threats of Louis by the aid of the Catholic sovereigns, he found himself abandoned by all of them, and thus left at the mercy of the infuriated monarch. Louis XIV. had already proceeded to take possession of the Papal city of Avignon, and his armies were already on the march towards Rome for the purpose of intimidating the Holy See. The Pope perceiving that the crisis demanded immediate and radical action, agreed to many of the humiliating conditions, and thus secured an exterior appearance of peace. This was in the year 1663.

The passions of Louis XIV. were not, however, composed, and were awaiting only a favorable occasion for breaking forth into open heat. This occasion was offered in connection with a dispute concerning certain royal privileges in the ecclesiastical order, termed the Regalia. This was the right of the kings to enjoy the revenues of a vacant bishopric, and to confer, during the vacancy of a See, benefices without care of souls. The Parliament of Paris, by a sentence of 1668, had extended the regalia to all benefices which might be included in countries where the regalia had not previously obtained. King Louis XIV., by his edicts of 1673 and 1675, had confirmed that sentence, and the French clergy for fear of greater evils had approved. Two bishops, however, stood out against the edicts, and were deprived of their revenues in consequence; they were at the same time supported in their opposition by Pope Innocent XI. The Holy Father, when the question was brought before him, appealed to a decision of the Second Council of Lyons, held in 1474, which opposed the extension of the regalia. In two briefs of March and September 1677, he exhorted the French monarch to respect the rights of the vacant Sees; but when his exhortations were only disregarded, he issued two other briefs in 1678 and 1680, adding ecclesiastical menaces to his exhortations.

THE GALLICAN LIBERTIES.

It was at this juncture that Louis XIV. had recourse to his influence over the clergy in France, and perceiving that his encroachments were meeting with firmness upon the part of the Pope, he determined to effect a legal enactment whereby the powers of the Sovereign Pontiff should be made forever subservient to the will of the French king. Already in 1662 the University of the Sorbonne had signed six articles denying not only the divinely constituted primacy of the Pope, but asserting an undue independence in the powers of the king himself. To revive these articles as well as to strengthen his position in regard to the Holy See, the French Monarch convoked at Paris in 1682 an assemblage of the clergy which was attended by thirty-four archbishops and bishops, besides as many minor prelates. The members of this assemblage were invited individually by the king's order, and only such were called as were known to be in harmony with the pretensions of Louis XIV. Fenelon was not there, nor Mabillon, nor Bourdalone, nor many another brilliant light of the French Church, for the simple reason that they could not support the king in his unjust usurpations. The Convocation possessed at least one strong mind, that of Bossuet, the celebrated Bishop of Meaux, whose presence and action in such an assembly it is difficult to reconcile with his usual manly loyalty to Catholic principles. His excuse, that he hoped thereby to ward off greater evils and even schism from the Church is hardly of any value against the depressing influence of the act itself. The result of this assembly was the formal framing of the notorious Gallican Liberties which in a few words meant:

"1. That the Pope could not interfere with the temporal concerns of Princes either directly or indirectly.

"2. That in spiritual matters he was subject to a general council.

"3. That the rules and usages of the Gallican Church were inviolable.

"4. That the Pope's decision in points of faith was not infallible, unless attended by the consent of the Church."

Four days after the signing of these articles the king put forth an edict imposing their observance strictly upon all the country. His commands were as follows:

"1. We forbid all our subjects, and all foreigners resident in our kingdom, secular or regular, of whatever order, to teach in their houses, colleges, or seminaries, or to write anything contrary to the doctrine herein stated.

"2. We order that all those hereafter to be chosen to teach theology in all the colleges of each university, whether seculars or regulars, shall subscribe to the said declaration before being permitted to act; that they shall submit to teach said doctrine, and that the syndics of the faculty of theology shall present to the local ordinaries and to our attorneys-general, copies of the said submission, signed by the secretaries of the said faculties.

"3. That in all the colleges and houses of the said universities, in which there are several professors, secular or regular, one of them shall be annually appointed to teach the doctrine contained in the said declaration; and in those colleges in which there is but one professor, he shall be bound to teach that in one of every three consecutive years.

"4. We enjoin upon the syndics of the faculties of theology annually to present, before the commencement of the lectures, to the archbishops and bishops of the cities in which they shall be, and to send to our attorneys-general, the names of the professors appointed to teach said doctrine; and we enjoin the said professors to present to the said prelates the writings which they will dictate to their scholars when they shall order them.

"5. It is our will that hereafter no bachelor shall be licensed either in theology, or in canon law, or received as doctor, until he shall have maintained that doctrine in one of his theses, and having shown proof of such support in such theses to those having power to confer the degrees.

"6. We exhort and enjoin all archbishops and bishops to exert their authority to cause the doctrine maintained in the said declaration to be taught within their dioceses."

Artaud de Montor, in his Lives of the Popes writes in this connection: "Assuredly, if the archbishops and bishops made no resistance to the signing of the four articles; if they thought that such a notification might become useful to the Church; if they recognized that the authority of the Pope was to be thus boldly limited; if they thought it requisite to curb what Bruno called the Tiberine tyranny, they must now at length have discovered that they were subject to a perfectly insatiable authority, which would employ not even the language of the country to exhort and enjoin them to exert their authority in diffusing a doctrine more administrative than Christian, and more military than religious, with a view to substitute for the words of peace, concord, and mildness, new words of command, injunction, unbridled will, to which Catholicity was no longer accustomed. From the Attorney-General who thus lectures the bishops, to the Attorney-General who has immediately under his hand the secular power, there is, in such times, but a step. The same hand countersigned a document, and ordered the sword to leap from the scabbard."

In the meantime the Roman court was not idle. On the 11th of April, 1682, Pope Innocent XI. annulled the propositions by a brief, and refused to grant canonical bulls to the bishops named by King Louis XIV. The hostile attitude of France continued openly for ten years, and it was only in 1693 that the King agreed that the provisions of his edict were not to be enforced. The spirit of Gallicanism, however, after being thus fostered for a decade in the schools and colleges of France was not to be eradicated by a mere permission of tolerance. A generation had grown up imbued with its false principles and ready to cast broadside through the country the seeds of a lasting hostility towards the Papal prerogatives. In fact, all through the whole course of the eighteenth century the creed of Gallicanism governed in a large measure the whole action and liturgy of the French Church. Its attitude of independence in regard to the Holy See very naturally encouraged that rising anti-Christianism which found its most potent foe in the successor of St. Peter. Even in the nineteenth century it possessed a certain life. Napoleon, in his Organic Articles, imposed it upon the seminaries of France even more strictly than did Louis XIV., at an earlier day. It has ever been the great obstacle to Catholic unity in France, the source of persecution against the Church; and if it virtually died in that country about the time of the Vatican Council, in 1870, its absence was never more noteworthy and consoling than at the present day when the whole French episcopacy stands united to a man in its loyalty and devotion to the Holy See.

VAN ESPEN.

Scarce had the battles of Jansenism and Gallicanism been ended, than a new campaign of destruction was inaugurated against the peace and unity of the Church. Born of the confusion of Jansenism, it found a sponsor in Bernard Van Espen, the Flemish canonist, it was introduced to the world by Febronius, and it reached its development under the Austrian Emperor, Joseph II.

Until the eighteenth century the student of canon law believed his task fulfilled if he had read diligently the great Code of ecclesiastical law, if he had commented upon the Decretals, and had drawn therefrom conclusions entirely in harmony with the mind of the Church. This mode of procedure seemed altogether too slow and antiquated to Van Espen, Professor in the University of Louvain, who accordingly put forth, between the years 1693 and 1728 a new work upon the laws of the Church, the method of which was startling as its purpose was revolutionary. It was styled the Universal Ecclesiastical Law. It was no attempt to study or tabulate the old laws; it was rather an investigation, conducted in a spirit of prejudice, into the origin and authority of the laws by which the Church was governed, and an endeavor to minimize thereby the rights and prerogatives of the Roman See in favor of lesser and more recent human institutions.

The new system of Van Espen was taken up with avidity by every student who imagined he had a grievance against the Holy See. It became the order of the day to wander back piously to the primitive days of Christianity, to explore its history for evidences of modern institutions, to seek therein for the organization of the Vatican and the Roman Curia, and not finding them in days of Clement and Cletus, to raise the voice in loud protestation against the novelties introduced by the Popes. They scoured the ages of history to gather up every expression of hostility against the Temporal Power or the institution of the Cardinalate; they recorded scrupulously every complaint against the revenues of the Holy See; they revived the epithets concerning the "superstition, the fanaticism, and the darkness" of the Middle Ages. In a word they framed a system whose watchword was the destruction of the Papal supremacy, the exaltation of episcopal pretensions, and the ultimate domination of the State in the affairs of the Church.

FEBRONIANISM.

The theories of these pseudo-canonists nowhere found greater favor than among a certain class of prelates in Germany, who besides their jurisdiction as bishops of the Roman Catholic Church enjoyed the further dignity and revenues of prince-electors in the German Empire. These combinations of politician and churchman could hardly regard with favor the pre-eminence of a Bishop in Rome who claimed however justly the rights of jurisdiction in any manner over them. They thus welcomed with open arms any daring spirit who would minimize or destroy the value of the Papal supremacy, and thus leave them in undisturbed possession of their pretended rights, carrying as these did with them a broad license to all the worldly luxuries and distractions of a political court.

The prince Bishop of Treves in Germany was one of this kind, and it is not surprising that when a canonist or theologian of the new order suddenly appeared at his court that the latter should receive all the honor and encouragement such a bishop could bestow. The court of the Bishop of Treves produced in the middle of the eighteenth century such a spirit in Johannes von Hontheim, a suffragan of the electoral diocese, and better known under his pseudonym of Febronius. In 1763 appeared in Germany some copies of a mysterious quarto entitled: The State of the Church and of the Legitimate Power of the Roman Pontiff, bearing the name of Justinus Febronius, and the place of publication Bouillon, though the author was in reality Johannes von Hontheim, and the place of its publication, Frankfort-on-the-Main. The book, finally increased to five volumes, was rapidly spread throughout Europe. In Venice it appeared in two editions, Latin and Italian. In France it was translated twice. In Spain the Council of Castile defrayed in part the expenses of a new translation, and that edition according to Cardinal Capara became the law for the Court and the Nation. Portugal provided both a Latin and a Portuguese text which latter was distributed gratuitously. Germany also produced both a Latin and German edition.

The book was condemned by Clement XIII., in 1764, and anathematized by the greater number of the German bishops upon its appearance, yet it made so much noise in the world, was so highly eulogized by the ignorant, and so greedily welcomed by the enemies of the Church, besides the fact that it has served to sanction so many desolating assaults upon the faith, the hierarchy and the discipline of the Catholic Church, that it is necessary to discuss it in detail, in order to undeceive many who even today hold some of the views espoused by Febronius.

And first as to the theme around which the author has woven his network of sophisms. George Goyau, in his Catholicism, thus synopsises the whole teaching of Febronius: "Febronius recognized the Pope as the Vicar of Jesus Christ; he professes that the Church has need of a chief to direct it, and that the bonds which unite the members to the chief ought to be sacred and inviolable; he desires that the primacy be conserved in the Church with care, and that it be piously honored; and Photius who strove to sap its foundations appears to him a fool. But this primacy is to Febronius only a simple pre-eminence; all that it imports is a right of inspection and direction over the different dioceses, similar to that which an archbishop possesses with regard to his suffragans; but it does not signify that the Pope has any jurisdiction." He holds, moreover, that "The power of the keys was conferred by Christ to the whole body of the faithful; it belongs to them all radicaliter et principaliter; the bishops exercise it under the title of usufruct, usualiter et usufructualiter; while as to the Pope, he is superior to each bishop in particular in virtue of what Hontheim terms the majoritas; but that majoritas does not extend over the whole episcopal body in its entirety; the episcopal body is thus the real sovereign of the Church."

It was a consequence of such ideas that Febronius should utter the usual outcry against the "abuses" of the Roman Church, and recommend a general council of all Christians to the decisions of which all must bow. In all this he pretended to seek the furtherance of unity in the great Christian body.

The false doctrines of Febronius were met with denunciation and refutation from all reliable sources. Clement XIII. in 1764, Clement XIV. in 1769, and Pius VI. in 1775, raised their voices solemnly in condemnation of the book. The ablest theologians of the Church gave their services to combat its errors. Among these were especially Zaccaria, Amort, Kleiner and St. Alphonsus Liguori. It is noteworthy that the first refutation of Febronius came from the pen of a Lutheran, Frederick Bahrdt, in Leipzig.

Among the many able discussions upon the work of Hontheim that of the Abbe Bernier deserves to be reproduced in part, not only because it reflects the sentiment of the time, but especially for its keen exposure of the falsehoods and inconsistencies which abound in the work of the heretic. It is found in a letter to the Duke Louis Eugene of Wurtemburg dated 1775.

"It is astonishing how the Treatise on the Government of the Church and the Authority of the Pope, by Febronius has made so much noise in some of the states of Germany; neither in its depth nor in its form was this book ever capable of impressing men of intellect or such as pretend to the faculty of reasoning. Whatever of truth the author produces is taken from French theologians, particularly from Bossuet, in his Defense of the Declaration of the Clergy of France of 1682; his falsehoods and errors are extracted from Protestants and Jansenists, or from those canonists who seek to humiliate the Court of Rome in her time of trouble. Various materials, which were never intended to be taken together, have been maladroitly compiled by Febronius; he has lighted torches which destroy each other; as he never takes his stand upon principles universally admitted, he is continually falling into contradictions; he denies in one place what he affirms in another; he sustains one theory at the very time that he professes to reject it; it would be sufficient to compare the titles of the sections and chapters of his work, to perceive that he either does not understand what he writes, or that he is not in accord with himself."

The Abbe thereupon goes on to point out the most glaring contradictions in the work, and to show that to any person not yet blinded by prejudice, the very contention of the author is destroyed by his evident lack of truthfulness.

In 1778, through the influence brought to bear upon the Archbishop Elector of Treves by the Papal nuncios, Caprara and Bellisomi, Febronius was led to reconsider his action, and signed a retractation of his errors in a letter sent to Pope Pius VI. Three years later, however, in 1781, he published a Commentary on his Retraction, which served to show the spirit of insincerity which dominated him throughout his whole career. He died in 1790.

Febronianism was not so disastrous in itself as (it proved to be) in its consequences. Its immediate result was a weakening of that loyalty which Catholic peoples owe to the centre of unity in the Holy See; but through all that, it affected, in a certain way, the very foundations of the social and political life of Europe. Although its immediate effects were almost simultaneous in their action, yet for the sake of brevity we shall notice them in order. 1. The revolt of the Elector archbishops of Germany. 2. The schism of Scipio de Ricci. 3. The final development into Josepheism.

THE CONGRESS OF EMS.

For two centuries, there were three nuncios sent by the Holy See to Germany: to Vienna, to Cologne, and to Lucerne. In 1777, the new Elector of Bavaria petitioned Pius VI. for a fourth nunciature, to Munich. This measure, so just and useful in itself, irritated the German archbishops, already too jealous of the jurisdiction of the nuncios in the Empire. The three Electors, Clement Wenceslas of Saxony, Archbishop of Treves; Maximilian of Austria, Archbishop of Cologne, and Baron d'Erthal, Archbishop of Mayence, were the soul of the resistance to the will of the Sovereign Pastor. Jerome Collerodo, Archbishop of Salzburg, and Legate of the Holy See, joined forces with them, and when Cardinal Pacca, the papal nuncio, arrived at Cologne, the Archbishop forbade any official reception, pretending that henceforth he would recognize no external jurisdiction. A like treatment was accorded to Zogno, the new nuncio to Munich.

In August, 1786, the delegates of the above-mentioned four prelates, assembled in a congress at Ems, near Coblenz, and agreed upon measures to be taken in order to restrict the authority of the Pope in his relations with Germany, a restriction that, in their anticipations, was to mean nothing less than complete annihilation. The Congress of Ems formulated twenty-three decisions, which have become known as the Punctuations of Ems. Their purport was to suppress the immunities which were enjoyed by convents in regard to episcopal jurisdiction, to forbid all intercourse between the religious orders of Germany and their superiors in Rome, to suppress the nunciatures to Germany; they would also abolish the custom by which the Holy Father granted to German bishops the faculty, to be renewed every five years, of granting matrimonial dispensations. Moreover the Pontifical documents might not be circulated without the formal acceptance of each bishop; they changed the formula of the oath of fidelity to the Pope as fixed by Pope Gregory VII. The Electors, in fine, made themselves thenceforth the legislators for the Church of Germany, and as such addressed their "Punctuations" to the Emperor for his approval.

It is significant that Joseph II. much as he had encouraged the Electors, one of whom, Maximilian, was his brother, in their hostility to the Holy See, nevertheless he received the acts of the Congress coldly; it was not his policy to permit so much power to the German bishops when he had already decided that all ecclesiastical authority in his dominions was to reside in his own hands. Nor was the King of Prussia, Protestant as he was, any more enthusiastic in support of the rebellious Electors. On the contrary he accorded to the Papal nuncio, Mgr. Pacca, every reasonable service, even receiving the latter, with all the formalities due to his ambassadorial character, at Wesel, in 1788. In fact the advent of this great representative of the Holy See proved a God-sent blessing to the Catholic people of the German States; for the spirit of revolt so obstinately settled in the minds of the ecclesiastical princes, found no echo in the hearts of their subjects, always as loyal to the Holy Father as they were disgusted and humiliated by the time-serving attitude of those to whom they had the right to look for guidance and example.

The anger of the four archbishops against Mgr. Pacca increased despite all reverses. In 1788 they petitioned the Diet of Ratisbonne to cause the framing of a law suppressing altogether the nunciatures. The German princes, however, had no intention of issuing thus a formal insult to the Court of Rome, and the law was not passed. Moreover, the archbishops had by this time discovered that their suffragans had taken umbrage at the fact that they were not officially notified as to the proceedings of the Congress of Ems, thus weakening the effect of that assembly in its most vital point, the adhesion of the episcopate to the repudiation of Papal authority. Finally, after various vain attempts to gain the aid of the secular princes, three of the archbishops, those of Salzburg, Treves, and Cologne, yielded a tardy obedience to the authority of the Pope; the Archbishop of Mayence, von Erthal, held obstinately to his position until after seeing himself abandoned by his quondam friends, he was at length driven from his See by the advent of the French revolutionary troops in 1793. By this event Febronianism lost, for a time at least, the influence it had exerted for thirty years over the Church in Germany.

THE SYNOD OF PISTOIA.

While these events were taking place in Germany a like movement was observable in Northern Italy. The Diocese of Pistoia, presided over from 1780 by Scipione di Ricci, was the scene of the trouble. This bishop, fanatically addicted to the reforms introduced into the Austrian States by Joseph II. held himself in constant opposition to the Holy See, especially because of the Pope's rejection of his errors. As counsellor to the Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany, he permitted the government to meddle with ecclesiastical affairs, to regulate all matters of worship and ceremony, and to assume full control of ecclesiastical teaching. Catechisms were composed without consulting the bishops, and schools were established by professors imbued with doctrines accredited by the government.

In 1786, at the instance of the Grand Duke, Ricci assembled at Pistoia a synod which was to formulate regularly the reforms he had in view. The schismatical bishop placed as moderator in this gathering that Tamburini who had been deprived of his professional office by Cardinal Molino, and who had not the right even to be present at an ecclesiastical assembly. The synod adopted all the doctrines of the French Appellants, and reconsecrated the old errors of Baius, Jansen, and Quesnel. The year following, the people of Prato, in the Diocese of Pistoia, arose in arms against the tyrannical bishop. They overthrew his episcopal throne and burned his coat-of-arms, after having despoiled his palace and seminary of the books and manuscripts found therein.

Despite these reverses Ricci, still sustained by the Grand Duke, held firmly to his position. He caused new edicts hostile to legitimate religion to be put forth, which might have had disastrous effects but for the death of Joseph II., which caused Leopold to abandon Tuscany for the Imperial throne. The errors of Ricci were formally condemned by Pope Pius VI., in the Constitution Auctorem Fidei of 1794. Ricci, however, held his See in opposition to the will of the Sovereign Pontiff until 1799, when at length he sent his resignation to the Emperor. He was finally reconciled with the Church through the good offices of Pope Pius VII. in 1805, and died in 1810.

JOSEPHINISM.

Joseph II. of Austria, son of the celebrated Maria Theresa, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, was the incarnation of that spirit which, beginning its active life in Jansenism, was formulated in the doctrines of Febronius. More anti-Roman than all his predecessors, except perhaps Frederic II. of Hohenstaufen, he was destined through his practical alliance with the anti-Christian spirit of his day, to sound the knell of that same Holy Roman Empire, which was dissolved fifteen years after his death.

JOSEPH II. OF AUSTRIA.

It was not, indeed, that Joseph II. desired to be, or to be considered un-Christian or un-Catholic. He had his own ideas of the Church of Christ, which were not the ideas of the rest of Christendom. His principle of rendering to God what belongs to God, and to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, he interpreted with a large margin in favor of Caesar, to such an extent, indeed, that the tribute to God besides being determined wholly by himself, was to be so meagre as almost to be non-existent. Following the lead of his too liberal counsellor Heinke, he distinguished, much in the manner of the Modernists of today, between what he considered essential and immutable in the Church, and what was only accessory and changeable. The former he would accept as coming from Christ, and as manifested in the primitive Church; under the latter category he classed all that might not suit his caprices, especially all that was bound up in the authority and functions of the Holy See, its supremacy, for instance, its infallibility, its temporal power, its court of Cardinals, its Curia, and all else that, according to him, were but abuses arising from the mutations of history. Hence he looked upon himself as one whose duty it was to reform the Church, at least within the extent of his own dominions, and he entered upon that work with a vigor worthy of a nobler cause.

In the Church as conceived by Joseph II. everything was to be subordinate to the needs of the State. It was to be his Church, and its bishops and priests were to be his bishops, his clergy. Persuaded that he was the absolute and sole source of authority he employed all his energies in isolating his bishops, clergy and people from the centre of Catholic unity. The system of vexatious persecutions which he introduced to uphold his ideas gave to his system the name of Josephinism, a system which, but for the intervention of the French invasions, might even today have become the ruling force of Germany.

On April 2nd, 1781, he issued his edict against the religious orders; it was at this point, in accordance with the ideas of Frederic II. and the Encyclopaedists, that his subversive work ought to begin, a process indeed, which has been imitated in our own days by Jules Ferry, and by Combes. Eight days later, another edict exacted the imperial placet for all bulls or other documents emanating from Rome. The canonical oath of the Austrian bishops at their consecration, was modified to restrict all loyalty to the Holy See; the Papal nuncio, Mgr. Varampi, was made the object of vexatious measures, and all recourse to Rome, even for marriage dispensations was interdicted. Still more, the Emperor suppressed all sodalities and confraternities, abolished processions, restricted the number of the holy days, and even went so far in his meddlesome measures as to regulate the number of candles to be lighted at the various devotions, and forbade the use of coffins for burial, making it obligatory to bury the dead in shrouds of cloth. At the same time, however, while interfering with and persecuting his Catholic subjects, his mind assumed a spasm of broadness to such an extent as to induce him to offer freely to Jews and Protestants, what he denied to his co-religionists.

At the same time it must be acknowledged that the headstrong attitude of the Emperor owed much of its obstinacy to the influence of counsellors in whom the spirit of flattery was more pronounced than any care for the welfare either of the Church or the people. Foremost among these was that Prince Kaunitz, who after serving through many successive reigns had acquired an ascendancy in the imperial household which would require strength of character in the sovereign to destroy. The mind and policy of Joseph II. were almost entirely in the hands of this politician, who had imbibed every rampant theory that the times could offer. Influenced by Voltaire and the encyclopaedists his reverence for religion was dictated only by the demands of expediency. Throughout his whole reign the Emperor listened to the counsels of this statesman in every matter of State or religion. Nevertheless, in order that his reforms might appear to have the sanction of ecclesiastical law, the Emperor gathered around him canonists and professors only too willing to prostitute their casuistry to the imperial will. Riegger, a disciple of the Jesuits in his youth, and later a Freemason, compiled in his Outlines of Ecclesiastical Law a new digest out of all sympathy with the laws that bore the Papal approval. Eybel published an Introduction to the Ecclesiastical Law of the Catholics, and by his teachings in regard to the laws of marriage, created such scandal as to require his resignation from the professor's chair which he held; this fact, however, in no way diminished his credit at court. Pehem, another professor of the same kindred, diffused his untenable theories among the priests of the Empire. Chief among these destructive canonists was the Benedictine Rautenstrauch, whose influence extended throughout the dominions of the Emperor. It was through the instrumentality of this cleric that Joseph II. brought about the unification of the Universities and Seminaries of the Empire, building them up upon a plan of utter independence of all Papal control, and making their programme of ecclesiastical studies emanate from the powers of the State. Naturally the guidance of teachers such as the above could lead a selfish and ambitious mind like that of Joseph II. to any extreme of absurdity; nor was the Emperor slow in following their counsels.

In the meantime Pope Pius VI. regarded with grave anxiety the eccentric tactics of the Emperor. At first he made use of all his paternal condescension in the hope of leading Joseph to better sentiments. Perceiving, however, that he was gaining nothing by his representations, the Pope resolved upon a decision which surprised the world. Breaking with all traditions of the Holy See, he declared his intention of proceeding in person to Vienna. With this end in view he accordingly wrote to the Emperor stating his desire for an interview close at hand, with the hope of thus reconciling the rights of the Emperor with those of the Church. To this letter full of touching kindness, and announcing so unusual an action on the part of the Holy See, he answered in his pride:

"As the object of your journey touches upon matters which Your Holiness regards as doubtful, but which I have settled, permit me to believe that you are giving yourself needless trouble. I ought to warn you that, in my resolutions, I act only in conformity with my reason, equity, and religion. Before coming to a decision, I weigh the matter long and well, and I consult my council; but once having decided, I remain firm."

POPE PIUS VI.

Pope Pius VI. was not discouraged by the discourteous reply of the Emperor; nor did he give heed to the remonstrances of the cardinals and of his own family. On February 27, 1782, he set out for Vienna, reaching his destination on March 22 following. The Emperor and his brother Maximilian, that Archbishop of Cologne who had already so deeply wounded the heart of the Pontiff, came to meet him some leagues from the capital. As soon as the Papal carriage was seen, the two royalties descended and walked forward to meet it. The greeting on both sides was most affectionate. The visit of the Holy Father, however, did not prove in every way a consoling event. An imperial ordinance had forbidden the Austrian bishops from appearing in the presence of the Pope. The latter, nevertheless, could officiate pontifically on Easter Day, and a few days later were opened the negotiations which had determined this journey of the Sovereign Pontiff. Unfortunately these conferences produced no result at all commensurate with the sacrifices entailed. Joseph showed himself inflexible in every main contention, and his concessions affected only points of the slightest importance, namely the promised cessation of new encroachments, and the renewal of the official relations between the nuncio Varampi on the part of the Holy See and Cardinal Herzan, representing the Emperor. The departure of the Holy Father from Vienna called forth the same official courtesies as marked his arrival.

On his return to Rome, Pius VI. was pained to see that his journey, which had met with disapprobation at its start, was more loudly censured now on his arrival in the Eternal City. These criticisms, indeed, seemed somewhat justified in the events which happened almost immediately, for the news was brought that the Emperor still continued to abolish convents and to confiscate their property. Moreover, the See of Milan being then vacant, Joseph appointed its new incumbent, although he knew very well that such right belonged to the Holy See. Prince Kaunitz, the Austrian Premier, who had added brutality to hostility during the Pope's sojourn at Vienna, continued his insults, and threatened the Bishop of Rome officially that he would bring about a startling rupture of relations. The feeble and too confiding Emperor encouraged these audacious menaces. Indeed, writings of the most venomous character were being circulated throughout the Empire, their object being to throw discredit upon the Papal authority to the exaltation of that of the Emperor.

A visit of Joseph II. to Rome in December of the following year, 1783, effected little towards softening his sentiments in regard to the rights of religion in his dominions. A change of heart, however, came to him at length, but only when the evil seeds he had sown had sprung up into a harvest of destruction for that Empire which he valued more than God. In his mania for regulating everything, he decided to consolidate all the Seminaries of his States into four principal establishments at Vienna, Pesth, Pavia, and Louvain; and in these institutions the tribunes were to be given only to enlightened professors, that is, to professors in harmony with Josephist ideas. At Louvain this measure met with a particularly hostile reception: Cardinal de Frankenberg, Archbishop of Malines, refused absolutely to send his young men to Louvain, until he had obtained the promise that he should have control of the professors. When the University opened, in 1786, the Emperor's professors, Stagger and Leplat, were driven away by the students, who themselves soon abandoned the establishment. Cardinal Frankenberg and the nuncio Oppizzoni, were accused of inciting this movement and were punished, the one by being recalled to Vienna, and the other by an order to leave the Netherlands. At length, in 1789, the Netherlands, disgusted with the conduct of the Emperor, declared their independence, and signalized the last day of that year by signing their own Constitution. Movements of unrest and rebellion began to manifest themselves at the same time in Hungary, and in the Tyrol, and although Pope Pius VI., forgetful of the injuries he had received at the hands of the Austrian monarch, interceded with the angry people in his behalf, the harm was too great to be remedied. Joseph II., who had brought these evils upon himself by his disregard of the duties he owed to God and His Church, died of a broken heart on February 20, 1790, begging that his monument should bear the inscription: Here lies Joseph, who was unfortunate in all his undertakings.

The purpose of Joseph II., however, like those of his teachers, bore fruit more abundant that they would have desired. Out of their determined efforts to undermine the authority of the Holy See, and the sanctity of Catholic institutions, the forces of revolution and anarchy drew their inspiration. The way was prepared, and the enemy had only to march dry-shod to their sanguinary victories.

SUPPRESSION OF THE SOCIETY OF JESUS.

The rapid rise of the Society of Jesus in the various countries of Europe, naturally attracted the attention of all those whose aim was the acquisition of as much personal power as was possible, to the detriment of individual, family, and social rights, and who had reason to fear an influence that stood for human progress and equal rights to all. The Jesuits soon assumed great prominence among the religious orders. Their excellence was admitted both in school and seminary; their learning gained for them the spiritual direction of influential persons; they became the confessors to princes and kings; they displayed extraordinary zeal in the practices of devotion, especially that in honor of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and they had already embraced the whole world in the field of their missions. They became a power that excited the envy of the less active, and the fear of potentates whose greed and inhumanity found a check in the gentle teachings of the followers of St. Ignatius. More than all, they had ever shown themselves energetic in their support of ecclesiastical authority, especially in times when the latter was threatened by the vagaries of Gallicanism, Jansenism, and like movements; in the state itself they showed themselves veritable defenders against the machinations of those secret societies which even in the eighteenth century were very much in evidence.

FATHER RICCI, S. J.
The last General of the Society of Jesus before the suppression in 1773.

It was impossible that an organization such as theirs, blessed by the spirit of religion, going about doing good, defending the principles of true Christianity against any and every assault, should escape the odium and persecution of spirits whose chief claim to existence lay in the desire to pull down the structure of civilization and to erect in its place the temple of anti-Christ. The vials of irreligious wrath were poured out upon them to the last dregs. In the various countries of Europe they met with proscription and expulsion. In 1759 they were driven from Portugal through the efforts of the infamous Pombal; in 1764 they were forbidden to live as a society in France; they were exiled from Spain in 1767, from Naples in 1767, and from Parma in 1768. Finally every effort of anti-Christianism and Masonry was exerted to bring about their complete extinction in the whole world. In 1773 pressure was brought to bear upon Pope Clement XIV., who, while refusing to listen to the invidious complaints brought against them, nevertheless, for the sake of a temporary peace, was compelled to sign the decree of their suppression.

The suppression of the Society of Jesus may be regarded as the first great blow in the modern war of anti-Christianism. It was the annihilation of the vanguard of the army of civilization and Christianity. With the Society of Jesus out of the way, the campaign of social, moral, intellectual and religious subversion found an open road to the excesses of anarchy and revolution. The Jesuits, however, like well-disciplined soldiers of Christ, bowed to the will of the Vicar of Christ, and bore their humiliation in silence for forty years, till the day when the Pope, Pius VII., freed from the chains of persecution, called them back to honor and usefulness.

THE SOPHISTS.

The suppression of the Jesuits met with no greater joy than in the hearts of a certain class of intellectual perverts who may be regarded as the actual founders of modern anti-Christianism; these were the sophists who in that period of the eighteenth century were already flooding France and Europe with a deluge of immoral, irreligious and uncivilized literature.

It is to England that we must go to find the immediate origin of this desolating spirit. There, among the Socinians and Deists, a school arose that taught men to trifle with the sublime truths of revelation and to undermine the foundations of religious belief, men like Shaftesbury, Collins, Tindal, and Bolingbroke, who strove to subject religion to the state, and regarded virtue as a mere human instinct; who declared reason antagonistic to revelation, and saw in the Holy Scriptures nothing more than a collection of pretty fables. It was not until the eighteenth century that the influence of their theories began to ruffle the Catholic atmosphere of France. There were not wanting birds of passage who, while hibernating among the philosophic haunts of London, gathered up the seeds of infidelity to scatter them broadcast upon the soil of France.

ROUSSEAU.

The writings of Montesquieu (1689-1775) display a sneering attitude towards the most sacred teachings and institutions of the Church. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) in his Social Contract and similar works endeavored to destroy the social order and bring back humanity to primitive barbarism. But more terrible in the rage of his iniquity than all others, in the great war of anti-Christianism, was the arch-infidel, Francois Marie Arouet, later called Voltaire (1694-1778). Of him might have been written the lines which Milton puts into the mouth of Satan:

"To do aught good never will be our task,
But ever to do ill our sole delight;
As being contrary to his high will,
Whom we resist. If then his providence
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labor must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still find means of evil."

Par. Lost, Bk. I.

Born in Paris of a mother whose loose morals made her a by-word to all who knew her, he imbibed at her breast that appetite for lawlessness and iniquity which ruled him to the last hour. His mother dying during his infancy, he became the protege of an abbe who had abandoned the duties of his sacred calling for the allurements of the world. In his boyhood he was sent to the Jesuit school of Louis le Grand, where the perversity of his character manifested itself to such an extent that one of his teachers prophesied that he would one day become the coryphee of deism. Thereafter his career was one of unlicensed depravity. More than once he was arrested and cast into prison; he had reason to hate the Bastille, for he himself had experienced the life of a criminal therein.

VOLTAIRE.

That writer was not far wrong who asserted that irreligion is but one form of the insanity which is born of immoral living. It is remarkable in the anti-Christian literature of all times, and of none more than our own, that its heroes and heroines are the abandoned roués and harlots who, having defiled the temples of their own bodies, seek to carry the abomination of desolation into the holy places of God. In this matter Voltaire was no exception. His immoral life was lived ostentatiously and boastingly. We will not, however, enter upon a list of the criminal observances of this man, preferring to leave such details to their proper place. It will be sufficient to point out the purpose that underlay all the actions and words of his life. This purpose is best indicated by citations from his letters and other written works.

His hatred for the Church and for morality is clearly displayed in the works that he gave forth during the later years of his life. In his Age of Louis XIV., a work that has been made an obligatory text book in the educational establishments subject to the University of France, we find passages full of insinuations and falsehoods directed against the Holy See. "The Pope's spiritual authority," he says, "is now destroyed and abhorred in one-half of Christendom; and if in the other half he is regarded as a father, he has children who sometimes properly and successfully resist him." Again he asserts: "To swear fidelity to any other than one's own sovereign is high treason in a layman; in the cloister it is an act of religion." He terms the Pope "the foreign sovereign." His Pucelle is a diabolical attempt to besmirch the pure character of Joan of Arc. It was a work, however, which excited so much disgust in all circles that Voltaire endeavored at first to disclaim it, and it was many years before the whole poem could venture forth with his authorization. The high society that could welcome its foetid pages was already ripe for the horrors of the Revolution.

From 1760 to the end of his life Voltaire assumed as his motto the impious expression: Ecrassez l'infame, "crush the infamous thing," intending thereby to indicate Christ and His Church. Throughout all these years the term appears constantly in his own and his disciples' letters. How he revels in his insane and satanic hatred, hardly finding words that can fitly convey his utter aversion for the things of God! The Christian religion he proclaims "an abominable hydra, a monster which a hundred hands must destroy." He bids the philosophers scour the streets to destroy it "as missionaries journey over land and sea to propagate it." He bids them dare everything even to being burned in order to destroy Christianity. Again he calls upon his fawning admirers to annihilate Christianity, to hunt it down, to vilify it, to ruin it. The perusal of his works leaves one with the impression that Voltaire was constantly troubled with a nightmare, in the effort to free himself from which he emitted his lugubrious wailings.

In 1778 the mob of Paris united to crown him at the Theatre Francais. Referring to these manifestations the impious one wrote: "My entry into Paris was more triumphant than that of Jesus into Jerusalem." The further work of Voltaire was in accordance with expressions like these. His intimacy with Frederic II., of Prussia afforded the blasphemer many opportunities of indulging his satanic impulses. Among the anti-Christian sophists who made the Palace of Berlin their rendezvous was a school of Freemasons who had already begun to celebrate the final downfall of the Papacy. For the more rapid realization of this hope various expedients were advocated, among them being the pet resort of irreligious tyrants,—the abolition of the monastic orders, a project which found its foremost exponent in Voltaire.

Such was the man to whom anti-Christianism looks up, as to its great and original patriarch, a man utterly devoid of the human moral sense, a man to whom all that savored of the good or virtuous was an abomination and a thing of infamy, a man whose methods of deceit are expressed in his own words: "Lying is a vice only when it harms. You ought to lie like the devil, not timidly or once only, but boldly, and all the time. Lie, lie! my friends, and some of it will be sure to stick." From his works anti-Christianism took the chief formulas of its creed, and following in the footsteps of its master, it has performed deeds worthy of his approbation.

Close in line with the irreligion of Voltaire was the work of Denis Diderot, the founder of the infamous Encyclopaedia, a huge mass of calumny against the religion of Christ, abounding in falsification of history, in doctrines inviting to immorality of life and subversion of all lawfully constituted authority. The poison of the Encyclopaedia was quickly assimilated by the aristocratic element of Paris. At first the salons, those rendezvous of the higher classes, took up the work, and by their discussions gave it a tone. It was highly acceptable to a social order, at that time immoral and impious to a degree; but its venom gradually overflowed to the masses, ever eager to imitate the excesses of the great.

The efforts of the leaders of irreligion were ably seconded by the various systems that arose towards the close of the eighteenth century, as so many developments of Deism and the worship of nature. The Sensationalists, under the tutelage of La Metrie, Condillac, Helvetius, and Holback, would make of man a mere machine, more ingeniously organized than the brutes; thought was reduced to a mere physical operation of the human body; hence the negation of the spiritual world, the spiritual soul, and the hope of immortality. The Rationalists in Germany led to disbelief in the inspiration and authenticity of the Holy Scriptures. Pantheism, Agnosticism, Idealism, and a thousand and one like branches of error, sprang forth from the revolt of the earlier sophists, all contributing their part to inflame and destroy the souls of men, and leading them on by sure steps to final anarchy. The very multiplicity of such sophistic theories, arising amidst the darkness of anti-Christian night, like the constantly changing figures in a kaleidoscope, were but the ghosts of a hideous phantasmagoria, that, scarcely seen, resolved themselves into something more strange and more appalling. It was the gathering of the spirits of iniquity for the grand assault upon the City of God.

FREEMASONRY.

Prominent among the subversive forces of the eighteenth century was that of Freemasonry and its kindred associations. As to its real origin but little is known. The modern order seems to have taken its rise in England in the year 1717, its first constitution appearing in 1723. The new association spread with remarkable rapidity over the Continent, founding its lodges in Berlin, Leipzig, Brunswick, Naples, Paris, and other places, before the middle of the century. On its first appearance it was denounced as subversive of government, and as a peril to the social order. The members of which it was composed were men of evil omen, Voltaire, Condorcet, Volney, Laland, Mirabeau, Frederic II., and the like. Pope Clement XII., in his Constitution, In Eminenti, of 1738, condemned the order. Thereby all who should join a Masonic lodge, assist at any Masonic assembly, or have any connection with the sect, were ipso facto excommunicated. Benedict XIV., in 1751, issued the Bull, Provides, renewing the decrees of his predecessor, and giving many cogent reasons for his act.

The deep secrecy which involved all the operations of regular Freemasonry in the eighteenth century was not so closely guarded in one of the independent forms of its spirit, known as the Society of the Illuminati. The founder of this order was Adam Weishaupt, a professor of ecclesiastical law at Ingolstadt. The end of this secret society, and the purpose which was to dominate it, was clearly the overthrow of all existing social and religious institutions. The statutes exacted from the members a blind obedience. Instead of works of devotion, prayer-books and the lives of the saints, it prescribed for its devotees the works of the ancient pagan authors or modern books of a similar description; its books of religion comprised such titles as: The System of Nature and the works of Rousseau.

The new order gained many disciples even among the crowned heads, who were slow to perceive that the very spirit of the organization was centred in hatred of the throne as well as of religion. As soon as the real nature and purposes of the Illuminati became known, efforts were at once made by the civil authorities for their suppression. In this they were aided greatly by the inevitable dissensions introduced into the order in the course of time. In 1784 all secret societies, communities, and confraternities, were prohibited in Bavaria. In 1785 Weishaupt was expelled from Ingolstadt, and after many wanderings finally found refuge with the Duke of Saxe-Gotha. Before his death he had the good fortune to repent and was reconciled with the Church. The order, everywhere fallen into disfavor, was gradually either disbanded, or incorporated into the other forms of the Masonry of the times. Its influence, however, like that of Freemasonry, remained, and was exerted with great vigor in the unhappy events that began in the year 1789.

NEO-PAGANISM.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the youth of Europe, and especially of France, educated to admire merely natural virtue, enamored of the ideal beauty and of the political and civil institutions of other times, found in their schools a spirit of paganism. Little in touch with the true spirit of Christianity, it was easily led by the glamor of resounding phrases and classical figures. These classical studies, in which the excellent and virtuous teachers of the time found only literary and philological exercises, became through the evil influence of outside doctrinaires a subtle poison to the young mind, and brought to a point that rage for pagan antiquity which formed one of the most dangerous and misleading features of anti-Christianism.

From the time of the Reformation heterodoxy had sought its weapons in antiquity, whose uncertainty and obscurity could easily provide material for the desolating revolt against Christian authority. Machiavelli had already denounced modern Christianity as the cause of popular and national decadence; politicians lost themselves in adoration of the Greeks and Romans; to the sophists everything was grand and noble, in as far as it was pagan, everything was barbarous in as far as it receded from the ancient type. It was one of the methods of the war of impiety: anti-Christianism had need of antiquity as a mantle to cover its emptiness: it felt it must needs seek aid in the names of celebrated pagans, and thus strengthened, it might dare to abandon the Christian era, and take refuge around a Roman or Greek civilization resurrected and placed in a position of honor. Classical education unconsciously aided in this mode of warfare, and while the school teacher, with the best of intentions in the world, taught his pupils to admire the great beauties of the classical authors, without attending to the false principles and doctrines, intended for a social order entirely different from the Christian, there were not wanting those who profited by these studies to lead the pupil to a love of the pagan philosophy therein contained. By their efforts the Roman and Greek world was held up as the only condition that could provide true happiness, the only political society worthy of man.

LOUIS XV.

Throughout the whole reign of Louis XV. this mania for paganism invaded every part of society, so that when Louis XVI. ascended the throne, he found it dominant not only in literature, but in art and in life itself. It was reflected in the corruption of the Court, in the sensual epicurism of the people, in the very manners of those whose ecclesiastical dignity ought to lead to more modern types of excellence. The hope of a return to the conditions of pagan Rome and Greece was one of the saddest hallucinations of the new anti-Christianism.

CHAPTER II.

The French Revolution of 1789.

All the various forces indicated in the preceding chapter came together in one appalling union towards the year 1789, forming a veritable cauldron seething with malign influences. An unhappy public opinion had been created, "a power vague and terrible, born of the confusion of all interests, strong in its opposition to every power, constantly caressed by princes who feared it, and feared by those who pretended to defy it." The masses of France, provoked by the arbitrary government of Louis XIV., angered by the feeble and scandalous rule of Louis XV., broke out into license and destruction under the gentle and paternal administration of Louis XVI. The latter monarch had come into an inheritance vitiated by the extravagances and follies of his predecessors; with all the virtues and noble characteristics of a sincere Christian and refined gentleman, he was destined to bear the punishment for the sins of his fathers. He had long foreseen the hastening storm, and trembled before its coming. The exhausted state of the treasury and the diminution of credit gave the excuse for demands of the most far-reaching extent. The nobility, regarding the situation with indifference, remained inert before the approaching ruin of the social order. Unwilling to be disturbed in their round of pleasure, they permitted the evil to grow until the very moment of the crisis.

The royal government betrayed its weakness when it convoked the States General, which held its first session on May 5, 1789. It was an assembly constituted of the three classes of the French nation—the nobility, the clergy, and the common people. Of its 1148 members, the Third Estate was represented by 598; there were 308 members of the clergy, of whom forty-four were bishops, 205 curés, fifty-two abbes or canons, and seven religious; the remaining 242 comprised the representatives of the noble class. The States General was an event of rare occurrence in French history, and was called together only in the most extreme crises of the State. It was now nearly two centuries (1615) since a gathering of a similar nature had been convoked, and from its unusual character and the gravity of its purpose much was expected on all sides. In the heat of its first debates, and in the rancor aroused in the public mind through the foolish and humiliating etiquette of the aristocratic elements, a strong sentiment of hostility made itself manifest between the people and their former masters. The popular element was conscious of its power, and made it felt almost from the beginning: in the space of a few months it was master of the situation: it had inaugurated a revolution before which the court, the nobility, the clergy, and every order that stood for law and decency went down in ruin. With the political phases of this great crisis we are not particularly concerned at present; the religious aspects of the conflict will suffice for our consideration.

MEETING OF THE STATES GENERAL.

CONFISCATION OF CHURCH PROPERTY.

On the night of August 4, 1789, the privileged classes abandoned their feudal rights, and the clergy renounced their titles, and the offerings usual at baptisms, marriages, and funerals. This sacrifice, however, did not suffice to appease the revolutionary spirits, and on August 6th, the right of the clergy to hold property was called into question for the first time. It was then that Buzot pronounced that phrase which was soon to re-echo through the halls of the Assembly: "The property of the clergy belongs to the nation."

On October 10, Talleyrand, the Bishop of Autun, so soon to become an apostate and indefatigable persecutor of the Church, returned to the charge. After a fawning address to the popular passions he concluded in proposing a law whose first article declared that "the revenues and property of the clergy are at the disposition of the nation," with the condition that the State should recompense the ministers of worship with a suitable salary, which should be solemnly recognized as a public debt. The project of Talleyrand was espoused with fierce eloquence by Mirabeau and became a law on Nov. 2, 1789, framed in these terms:

"The National Assembly decrees: First. That all ecclesiastical property is at the disposition of the nation which charges itself with providing in a suitable manner for the expenses of worship, the maintenance of its ministers, and the relief of the poor, subject to the surveillance and according to the instructions of the provinces. Second. That in the dispositions to be made for the maintenance of the ministers of religion, there shall be assured every curé a payment of not less than 1,200 livres a year, not including his house and garden."

TALLEYRAND.

On April 9, 1790, Chasset demanded the actual confiscation of all ecclesiastical property, a motion that was voted a law on April 14th following. The possessions of the clergy, valued at $400,000,000, were then put up at auction, and sold to speculators at prices that at once betrayed the venal spirit of the agitators. Indignant protests went up on all sides against a sacrilege whose effect could be nothing less than the destruction of religion; but all efforts to stay the action were unavailing.

PERSECUTION Of THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS.

The religious orders have ever been the object of peculiar hatred on the part of all that stands for anti-Christianism. Their close identification with the best interests of the Church, and the exemplification in their life of that evangelical perfection to which the whole doctrine of Christ invites, became a crime in the eyes of a generation delivered up to lawlessness, and the slavery of passion. It was only natural, therefore, that the impious spirit of 1789 should fasten its fangs upon this order of men and women and do them to death. The laws of the time tell the story very graphically. A decree of October 28, 1789, suspended the taking of monastic vows. The monastic orders were suppressed by a decree of February 13, 1790:

Article 1. The constitutional law of the realm shall no longer recognize solemn monastic vows of either sex; in consequence the orders and regular corporations in which such vows are taken are and will remain suppressed in France, nor may they be again established in the future.

Article 2. All individuals of either sex living in monasteries and religious houses, may leave such houses by making a declaration before the municipality of the place, and they shall receive a suitable pension. Houses shall also be indicated to which all religious men who do not desire to profit by the present disposition shall be obliged to retire. For the present there shall be no change in regard to houses charged with public education and establishments of charity, until measures have been taken for that purpose.

On March 11, 1791, a law was passed abolishing the monastic habit. On July 31, of the same year, all religious houses were declared for sale. On August 7, 1792, a new decree declares that the pension accorded to religious shall be granted to such as should marry, or who have abandoned or shall abandon their monasteries. On August 12, 1792, a decree orders the evacuation before October 1, following, and the sale of "all houses as yet actually occupied by religious men or women," excepting such as are consecrated to the service of hospitals or establishments of charity.

On August 18, 1792, a decree was passed suppressing "the corporations known in France under the name of secular ecclesiastical congregations, such as the priests of the Oratory of Jesus, of Christian Doctrine, of the Mission of France, of St. Lazare, etc., etc., and generally all religious corporations of men and women, ecclesiastical or lay, even those devoted only to the service of hospitals and the relief of the sick, under whatever denomination they may exist in France." All such persons, however, were authorized to continue their care of the poor and sick, "but only as individuals, and under the surveillance of the municipal and administrative bodies, until the definitive organization which the Committee on Aid shall present as soon as possible to the National Assembly. Those who shall continue their services in houses indicated by the directories of departments shall receive only a part of the salary which would have been accorded them. All irremovable property of such societies shall be put on sale, except colleges still open in 1789 which may be utilized for seminaries. Pensions shall be accorded all members of the suppressed societies on condition that they take the oath of fidelity to the nation, of maintaining liberty and equality, and of being ready to die in its defence."

THE CIVIL CONSTITUTION.

The defenders of the Revolution take great pains to demonstrate that the object of the earlier laws was not anti-Christian or subversive of religion, alleging that the spirit of demolition appeared only after and because of the hostile attitude of the Church. One has only to read the speeches in the National Assembly, and the early laws emanating therefrom, to perceive the hypocritical nature of such assurances. The spirit of Voltaire is evident from the first day of the States General, and its tactics of falsehood and deception mark every stage of revolutionary progress until the end. The pretext of establishing a national church is a fact in evidence, whereby under the pretence of safeguarding the liberties of Catholics in France, an effort was made to uproot all idea of religion from the minds of the people. The signal for the opening of such a perversive campaign was the passing of that iniquitous law to which was given the name of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.

On August 20, 1789, an ecclesiastical committee was formed for the regulation of all affairs pending between Church and State. It was composed of thirty members, chosen with great care from among the most violent sectaries of the Assembly. Out of the thirty only nine were able to approach the discussion of ecclesiastical subjects with any appearance of justice, and this small minority soon found it impossible to advance their views in the face of the twenty-one radicals sworn to enslave and degrade the Church; they were consequently compelled to resign from the commission, leaving the great work of Church affairs in the hands of an impious cabal. The result of the deliberations of this diminished committee is found in the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which was voted in the Constituent Assembly, from July 12 to July 24, 1790.

The adversaries of religion betray a naive surprise that the Church should refuse to accept a law so worded as the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Yet to anyone acquainted with the spirit of Christianity the reasons for such hostility are sufficiently evident. The Abbe Hubert Mailfait in his comprehensive little work upon the subject thus sums up the most objectionable features of the wholly iniquitous law:

First. It destroys the religious hierarchy and annihilates the pontifical supremacy when it stipulates: (a) that the new bishops can no longer address the Pope to obtain from him the bulls of confirmation (tit. II., art. 19): (b) that the canonical institution shall no longer be given by the Pope, but by the metropolitan (tit. II., art. 16 and 17): (c) that the old division of France into dioceses and parishes shall be substituted by a new repartition, decreed without the advice of ecclesiastical authority, and without the approbation of the head of Christianity (tit. I.).

Second. It destroys ecclesiastical discipline: (a) by attributing the election of bishops and pastors to the laity, by way of the ballot and the absolute plurality of votes (tit. II., art. 2) and in decreeing the conditions of eligibility which should be found in candidates to a bishopric or parish (tit. II.): (b) in determining the number of foundations, prebends, abbeys, priories, etc. (tit. I., art. 20-24 and 25); in restricting to the point of annihilation the power of the bishops in the nomination to ecclesiastical employments (tit. II., art. 22, 24, 25, 43).

Third. It sanctions an inadmissible domination of the temporal over the spiritual power, in subordinating the exercise of ecclesiastical functions to the taking of an oath of fidelity to the Constitution decreed by the Assembly (tit. II., art. 21 and 38).

The Civic Constitution of the Clergy thus established in France not only a schism, by depriving the bishops of the right of recourse to the Pope, but heresy also in denying the effective primacy of the Pope and his sovereign power in the direction of the Church and the nomination of her ministers.

SORROW OF PIUS VI.

When the news was brought to Pope Pius VI. that the Assembly was actually engaged in voting the several articles of the Civil Constitution, his sorrow knew no bounds. Public prayers were at once ordered in the churches of Rome, while at the same time the Holy Father addressed an impressive appeal to Louis XVI., insisting on his refusing his sanction to the impious measures. Letters were also sent by the Pope to the Archbishops of Bordeaux and Vienne, requesting them to use their good offices in dissuading the king from sanctioning the law. Unhappily these two prelates betrayed the trust reposed in them and used their influence to the opposite end. It is to their credit that they soon perceived their error and repented bitterly for it.

In the meantime Louis XVI. wrote to the Pope beseeching him to approve, at least provisorily, of the first five articles to which he was in a manner forced to give his sanction. The Holy Father placed the matter in the hands of a commission of cardinals for examination. On October 30, of the same year, the thirty bishops who occupied seats in the Assembly subscribed their names to a carefully prepared memorial entitled Exposition of Principles Concerning the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, wherein the new code of laws was unequivocably condemned. In this position the episcopal deputies were supported by the adherence of nearly all the French bishops. Their expression of disapproval, however, came too late, as the civil constitution had already received the royal sanction (August 24, 1790), and thereby became a law of the realm.

MIRABEAU.

A test of the new decrees developed an unexpected resistance, so bitter and decisive in many quarters as to awaken newer outbursts of harshness from the enemies of the Church. On November 27, 1790, after a violent diatribe delivered by Mirabeau against the independent bishops a law was voted in the Assembly declaring that all clergy "shall take the oath within eight days" under the penalty of being debarred from the exercise of their functions. It stipulated, moreover, that in case of resistance the offending clergy should be treated as disturbers of the public peace, and deprived of their civic rights. This law received the royal sanction on December 26, and went into execution from that date. In the Assembly itself were many bishops and priests who were called upon to give the example of subservience. Only a few, encouraged by such notorious characters as Talleyrand, Gregoire, Camus, and Gobel, and tempted by the hope of preferment under the new order, yielded to the demands of the revolutionaries. Of the one hundred and thirty-five bishops of France, only four, including Talleyrand and Cardinal de Brienne, took the oath. During the following year the latter prelate was degraded from the honor of the Roman purple, for his unworthy act.

When the question was put to the priests of the country it met with a like reception. One should not be deceived, in reading the anti-Christian records of this time, by the long lists of names purporting to be the official register of priests who had subscribed to the oath. An examination of these lists reveals the usual duplicity of irreligious hatred, for in many cases, notably in the lists of Paris, they contain the names of church employees, sacristans, choir-singers, bell-ringers, and other ordinary laymen. In other cases we find the names of young men just preparing for the seminary, and school teachers who taught the catechism. Often, too, country pastors were deceived into believing that the taking of such oath was an act demanded by their bishop; these, however, were only too anxious to retract as soon as the true state of the case was made evident to them. Of the real pastors of the Church the number who proved unfaithful to their duty was inconsiderable; the loyalty of the vast body, both of bishops and clergy, forms one of the brightest pages in the dark history of those unhappy years.

CARDINAL DOMENIE D. BRIENNE.

In the midst of the general anxiety there came to Paris on April 13, 1791, the Bull of Pope Pius VI., formally condemning the Civil Constitution and calling upon the bishops and priests of France to stand firmly to the principles of their faith. This act of the Holy Father was the signal for outbursts of fury in the hostile camp. The Papal Bull was publicly burned amidst outcries of hatred and execration; women coming from Mass were whipped through the streets; ruffians interrupted the divine services and threw disorder into congregations of the faithful, while in many places disorderly mobs invaded the convents and dragging the nuns out to the public squares inflicted upon them the degrading punishment of the scourge. It was in vain that the Directory of Paris, frightened at the prospect of civil war, permitted Catholics to hire places for the use of divine worship; the very appearance of leniency only drew forth greater exhibitions of hatred and persecution. The king himself was compelled to attend at Mass celebrated by a Constitutional priest, as a pledge of his adherence to the principles of the Civil Constitution. Throughout the departments the persecution had already gone to great lengths; priests were everywhere imprisoned, and the Catholic laity who had dared to assist at the Catholic Mass, or who had refused to take part in the election of schismatical priests, were declared incapable of all civil functions. On June 9, 1790, the Constituent decreed that no bulls or briefs of the Pope might be published or propagated in the kingdom without the authorization of the Legislative Corps and of the king.

In the meantime, the apostate bishop of Autun, Talleyrand, had consecrated two constitutional bishops, who in their turn proceeded to ordain to the priesthood a list of unworthy, illiterate, immoral, and dishonest rascals. The legitimate clergy, shut out from their churches, and driven to the homes of their friends, had nevertheless the consolation of knowing that the faithful were refusing everywhere to acknowledge the authority of the unlawful priests, and demanding in quiet, but significant ways, the services of those who alone had been called to the sanctuary.

THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY.

The Constituent Assembly was dissolved on Sept. 30, 1791, and was succeeded on the following day, by the Legislative Assembly. The new government, in the hands of men more impious than those of the Constituent, began their proceedings with the passage of new laws of persecution, to which, however, the king had the courage to refuse his sanction. In spite, however, of the royal opposition new decrees continued to be published. On the twenty-ninth of November, a law was voted declaring that all ecclesiastics, other than those who had conformed to the decree of November 29 last would be obliged to present themselves before the municipality of the place in which they lived, and there take the civic oath, in the terms of Art. 5, title II. of the Constitution, and sign a legal attestation of the same. Such as should refuse would be held as suspects in revolt against the law, and with evil intent against their country, and as such particularly subjected and recommended to the surveillance of all constituted authorities. If trouble should arise in the place of their residence they could be evicted from their domicile, arrested by the directory of the department, and, in case of disobedience, condemned to prison.

On May 27, 1792, the Legislative Assembly published another decree, stating that the deportation of non-juring ecclesiastics would take place as a measure of public safety and police regulation. Ecclesiastics were considered as non-juring who, being subject to the law of December 26, 1790, had not taken the oath; those also who, though not subject to that law had not taken the oath posterior to September 3rd, preceding, the day on which the French constitution was considered as completed; those also, who had retracted their oath. The deportation could be pronounced by the local authorities upon the denunciation of twenty citizens.

A law of August 26, 1792, prescribed that "all those ecclesiastics who have not taken the oath, or who having taken it have retracted and persist in their retraction, shall be compelled to leave within eight days, the limits of the district or department in which they reside, and within fifteen days they must leave the country. After fifteen days such ecclesiastics as shall not have obeyed the preceding dispositions should be deported to French Guyenne. Every ecclesiastic, who should dare to remain in the country after such procedures, should be condemned to ten years of imprisonment." This law was applicable to all priests—both secular and regular. About 50,000 priests became victims of these violent proscriptions.

STORMING OF THE BASTILLE.

THE MASSACRES OF SEPTEMBER.

The passion of hatred for religion never abated during the sad days of 1792. Law followed law proscribing, persecuting, hunting down all who dared to oppose the evil suggestions of the revolutionary despots. On August 16, an order was issued appropriating all the sacred vessels of the churches, with the design of converting them into money or utensils of war. Another project of the government had for its purpose the banishment of all clergy within a fortnight. This method, however, of getting rid of the priesthood, seemed too slow to suit the ferocious lust of the tyrants—a quicker and surer plan suggested itself. To secure its execution, the leaders of the anti-Christian party sought to inflame the minds of the rabble with stories of plots and treason, perpetrated by the priests against the safety of the nation. Above all the threatened invasion of the Prussians was laid to their door, and the report of the same circulated through every street and alley of Paris. The populace, already made familiar with the sight of blood, seized upon the wild reports with the avidity of hungry animals, and needed only a suggestion to lead them on to acts of violence. This was not wanting. In the Assembly, Marat, Legendre and others openly demanded the slaughter of the priests, while Danton, the Minister of Justice, was appointed to see that the project was executed. In the meantime hundreds of priests, and thousands of Catholic laity, men, women and children, had been arrested, and filled the prisons of the country to overflowing. On August 31, the Commune of Paris put up everywhere placards containing a proclamation of Robespierre: "We have arrested the priestly disturbers; we hold them behind prison bars, and in a few days, the sun of liberty shall be purged of their presence." All was ready for a massacre of gigantic proportions. A signal was agreed upon, for the commencement of the bloody deed; it was to be the third discharge of the cannon on Point-Neuf. On the morning of September 2, the dreadful carnage began in the prison house of the Carmes, where 120 fell by the sword. The massacre lasted four days, while bands of assassins went from prison to prison, and in that short space of time took the lives of 1,400 persons of every sex, age and condition, 300 of whom were priests.

MASSACRE OF PRINCESS LAMBELLE.

The Abbe Lecard, an eye-witness, describes the awful scene at the prison of the Abbey:

"The massacre took place under my window. The cries of the victims, the blows of the sabres as they fell upon the heads of the innocent victims, the shouts of the murderers, the applause of the witnesses, all resounded in my soul. I even distinguished the voices of my confreres, who were arrested and brought in the night before. I heard the questions put to them, and the responses they gave. They were asked if they had taken the civil oath, but none had done so. All could have escaped death by a lie; but all preferred death. All said when dying: 'We are subject to your law, we die faithful to your constitution, we except only what regards religion and what has reference to conscience.' They were immediately pierced by numerous swords, amid the most frightful vociferations. The spectators while applauding cried out: 'Long live the nation!'—at the same time executing abominable dances around the corpses.

"Towards three or four o'clock in the morning, similar cries, tumult and ribaldry were repeated. This was in consequence of their bringing into the court-yard, now strewn with corpses, two priests whom they had dragged from their beds. The executioners jested over the horrible scene. The two priests were asked to take the oath, but they refused with mildness and firmness. Seeing themselves on that account condemned to death, they demanded a few hours to prepare themselves, and they obtained their request. The assassins employed the interval in removing the bodies, in washing and sweeping the court-yard, red with blood—a work which caused them considerable difficulty. To avoid this in the case of others who were about to be massacred, they proposed various expedients and, finally, agreed upon employing a quantity of straw on which they would butcher their victims and which would absorb the blood and prevent the pavement from being stained. One of the assassins complained that the aristocrats died too quickly; that only those in the front row had the pleasure of striking them. It was accordingly determined that the victims should be struck only with the back of the sword, and that they should be made to run between two files of assassins. It was determined that around the place where the victims were to be immolated there should be benches for the ladies and gentlemen. All were free to enter. All this I have seen and heard with my own eyes and ears."

These frightful scenes of Paris were equalled if not surpassed by the terrorists of the provinces, and especially in the cities of Lyons, Rheims, Nantes, Bordeaux, and Avignon. It was but natural that the flight of priests from the insane fury of the Revolution should be hastened by the events of those days. Many succeeded in gaining the frontier and found refuge in the Papal States, in Spain, Portugal and in England where they were received with respect and welcome. Many returned secretly to France and bravely defied the dangers of martyrdom in the exercise of their sacred ministry.

MARAT.

The Legislative Assembly, after a final law granting divorce upon mutual consent, or upon the demand of one of the parties, was dissolved on September 20, 1792.

THE CONVENTION.

On September 21st, 1792, a new government, entitled the Convention, began its sittings. It has been justly characterized as an organization the most bloody and atrocious in history. It was during its administration that that dark period occurred to which has been given the significant name of the "Reign of Terror." Composed as it was of the vilest and most unscrupulous element of the nation its inauguration gave little promise of peace or security to the country. Its sessions were dominated by the Jacobins, the Girondists, and the Mountaineers, parties sworn to oppose each other in all political matters, though uniting in all measures of oppression to religion and the Church.

Their methods of tyranny were conceived with system and precision worthy of a better cause, and were executed by a machinery whose organized efforts reached into every village and hamlet in the land. Its Committee of Public Safety, the supreme secret council of the Convention, included men like Danton, Marat, and Robespierre. There was a Committee of General Security for the detection of political crimes, and the punishment of all suspected or proscribed persons. The Revolutionary Tribunal condemned the victims indicated by the General Security, and condemned them to death without a hearing.

There were Revolutionary committees in every department and municipality throughout the country, whose office it was to imprison suspects, and to employ the guillotine regardless of trial. The Revolutionary Army—composed of only such as had proven themselves devoted to the anarchistic doctrines of the times—was employed in the guarding the prisons, arresting suspects, demolishing castles, pulling down belfries, ransacking churches for gold and silver vessels, and other like purposes. It had its regiments in every city of France. It was by means of such powerfully organized associations that the Convention was able to perpetrate the atrocities of the Reign of Terror.

The first act of the new Assembly was to declare the abolition of royalty, and to proclaim France a Republic. At the same time it began the attempt to inaugurate a new era, the first day of the first year of which was to be September 22nd, 1792.

THE CALENDAR.

In the new Revolutionary calendar the Christian order of months and weeks was set aside for an arbitrary arrangement whose awkward and frivolous character was evident, even independently of its sacrilegious intent. Instead of weeks of seven days, periods of ten days, or decades, were substituted. As there was to be no Sunday, the tenth or last day of the decade, called "Decadi," was to be observed as the day of rest, and have all the importance of the Lord's Day, the place of which it had taken. The months were twelve and consisted each of thirty days; to make up the necessary 365 days of the year, five intercalary days, called sans culottes, were added.