Part 50

§ 209.1. =Mexico.=--Of all the American states, Mexico, since its independence in 1823, has been most disturbed by revolutions and civil wars. The rich and influential clergy, possessing nearly a half of all landed property, was the factor with which all pretenders, presidents and rulers had to reckon. After most of the earlier governments had supported the clergy and been supported by them, the ultimately victorious liberal party under president Juarez shook off the yoke in 1859. He proclaimed absolute religious freedom, introduced civil marriage, abolished cloisters, pronounced church possessions national property and exiled the obstinate bishops. The clerical party now sought and obtained foreign aid. Spain, France and England joined in a common military convention in 1861 in supporting certain claims of citizens repudiated by Juarez. Spain and England soon withdrew their troops, and Napoleon III. openly declared the purpose of his interference to be the strengthening of the Latin race and the monarchical principle in America. At his instigation the Austrian Grand-Duke Maximilian was elected emperor, and that prince, after receiving the pope’s blessing in Rome, began his reign in 1864. Distrusted by all parties as a stranger, in difficulties with the curia and clergy because he opposed their claims to have their most extravagant privileges restored, shamefully left in the lurch by Napoleon from fear of the threatening attitude of the North American Union, and then sold and betrayed by his own general Bazaine, this noble but unfortunate prince was at last sentenced by Juarez at a court-martial to be shot in 1867. Juarez now maintained his position till the end of his life in 1872, and strictly carried out his anticlerical reforms. After his death clericalism again raised her head, and the Jesuits expelled from Guatemala swarmed over the land. Yet constitutional sanction was given to the Juarez legislation at the congress of 1873. The Jesuits were driven across the frontiers, obstinate priests as well as a great number of nuns, who had gathered again in cloisters and received novices, were put in prison.--Also =Evangelization= advanced slowly under sanction of law, though regarded with disfavour by the people and interfered with often by the mob. It began in 1865 with the awakening of a Catholic priest Francisco Aguilar and a Dominican monk Manuel Aguas, through the reading of the Scriptures. They laid the foundation of the “_Iglesia de Jesus_” of converted Mexicans, with evangelical doctrine and apostolic-episcopal constitution, which has now 71 congregations throughout the whole country with about 10,000 souls. This movement received a new impulse in 1869, when a Chilian-born Anglican episcopal minister of a Spanish-speaking congregation in New York, called Riley, took the control of it and was in 1879 consecrated its bishop. Besides this independent “_Church of Jesus_” North American missionaries of various denominations have wrought there since 1872 with slow but steady success.

§ 209.2. =In the Republics of Central and Southern America=, when the liberal party obtained the helm of government through almost incessant civil wars, religious freedom was generally proclaimed, civil marriage introduced, the Jesuits expelled, cloisters shut up, etc. But in =Ecuador=, president Moreno, aided by the clergy, concluded in 1862 a concordat with the curia by which throughout the country only the Catholic worship was tolerated, the bishops could condemn and confiscate any book, education was under the Jesuits, and the government undertook to employ the police in suppressing all errors and compelling all citizens to fulfil all their religious duties. And further the public resolved in 1873, although unable to pay the interest of the national debt, to hand over a tenth of all state revenues to the pope. But Moreno was murdered in 1875. The Jesuits, who were out of favour, left Quito. The tithe hitherto paid to the pope was immediately withheld, and in 1877 the concordat was abrogated. As Ecuador in Moreno, so =Peru= at the same time in Pierola had a dictator after the pope’s own heart. The republic had his misgovernment to thank for one defeat after another in the war with Chili.--=Bolivia= in 1872 declared that the Roman Catholic religion alone would be tolerated in the country, and suffered, in common with Peru, annihilating defeats at the hand of Chili.--When at St. Iago in Chili, during the festival of the Immaculate Conception in 1863, the Jesuit church La Compania was burnt and in it more than 2,000 women and children consumed, the clergy pronounced this disaster an act of grace of the blessed Virgin, who wished to give the country a vast number of saints and martyrs. But here, too, the conflicts between church and state continued. In 1874 the Chilian episcopate pronounced the ban against the president and the members of the national council and of the Lower House who had favoured the introduction of a new penal code which secured liberty of worship, but it remained quite unheeded. When then the archiepiscopal chair of St. Iago became vacant in 1878, the pope refused on any condition to confirm the candidate appointed by the government. After the decisive victory over Peru and Bolivia, the government again in December, 1881, urgently insisted upon their presentation. The curia now sent to Chili, avowedly to obtain more accurate information, an apostolic delegate who took advantage of his position to stir up strife, so that the government was obliged to insist upon his recall. As the curia declined to do so, his passports were sent to the legate in January, 1883, and a presidential message was addressed to the next congress which demanded the separation of the church and state, with the introduction of civil marriage and register of civil station, as the only remaining means for putting down the confusion caused by papal tergiversation. The result of the long and heated debates that followed was the promulgation of a law by which Catholicism was deprived of the character of the state religion and the perfect equality of all forms of worship was proclaimed.--=Guatemala= in 1872 expelled the Jesuits whose power and wealth had become very great. In 1874 the president Borrias opened a new campaign against the clergy by forbidding them to wear the clerical dress except when discharging the duties of their office, and closing all the nunneries.--In =Venezuela=, in 1872, Archbishop Guevara of Caracas, who had previously come into collision with the government by favouring the rebels, forbade his clergy taking part in the national festival, and put the cathedral in which it was to be celebrated under the interdict. Deposed and banished on this account, he continued from the British island of Trinidad his endeavours to stir up a new rebellion. The president, Guzman Blanco, after long fruitless negotiations with the papal nuncio, submitted in May, 1876, to the congress at St. Domingo the draft of a bill, which declared the national church wholly independent of Rome. The congress not only homologated his proposals, but carried them further, by abolishing the episcopal hierarchy and assigning its revenues to the national exchequer, for education. Now at last the Roman curia agreed to the deposition of Guevara and confirmed the nomination of his previously appointed successor. But president Blanco now asked congress to abolish the law, and this was agreed to.--In the United States of =Colombia= since 1853, and in the =Argentine Republic= since 1865, perfect liberty of faith and worship have been constitutionally secured. From the latter state the Jesuits had been banished for a long time but had managed to smuggle themselves in again. When in the beginning of 1875 Archbishop Aneiros of Buenos Ayres addressed to the government which favoured the clerical party rather than to the congress which was the only competent court, a request to reinvest the Jesuits with the churches, cloisters, and properties held by them before their expulsion, a terrible outbreak took place, which the archbishop intensified to the utmost by issuing a violent pastoral. A mob of 30,000 men, convened by the students of the university, wrecked the palace of the archbishop, then attacked the Jesuit college, burnt all its furniture and ornaments on the streets and by means of petroleum soon reduced the building itself to flames. Only with difficulty did the military succeed in preventing further mischief. In October, 1884, the papal nuncio was expelled, because, when the government decidedly refused his request to prevent the spread of Protestant teaching and to place Sunday schools under the oversight of the bishops, he replied in a most violent and passionate manner. About the same time the republic of =Costa-rica= issued a law forbidding all religious orders, pronouncing all vows invalid, and threatening banishment against all who should contravene these enactments, and also an education act which forbade all public instruction apart from that provided by the State.

§ 209.3. =Brazil.=--In Brazil down to 1884, the “Catholic Apostolic Roman Religion” was, according to the constitution, the religion of the empire. But from 1828 there was a Protestant congregation in Rio de Janeiro, and through the inland districts, in consequence of immigration, there were 100 small evangelical congregations, with twenty-five ordained pastors, whose forms of worship were of various kinds. In earlier times Protestant marriage was regarded as concubinage, but in 1851 a law was passed which gave it civil recognition. But the bishops held to their previous views and demanded of married converts a repetition of the ceremony. Since 1870, however, the government has energetically opposed the claims of the clergy who wished only to acknowledge the authority of Rome. Protestant marriages were pronounced equally legitimate with Catholic marriages, no civil penalties are incurred by excommunication, all papal bulls are subject to the approval of the government, and it was insisted that announcement should be made of all clergy nominated. The clergy considered freemasonry the chief source of all this liberal current, and against it therefore they directed all their forces. The pope assisted by his brief of May, 1873, condemning freemasonry. At the head of the rebel prelates stood Don Vitalis Gonsalvez de Oliveira, bishop of Olinda and Pernambuco. He published the papal brief without asking the imperial permission, pronounced the ban upon all freemasons and suspended the interdict over all associations which refused to expel masonic brothers from their membership. In vain the government demanded its withdrawal. It then accused him of an attack upon the constitution. The supreme court ordered his detention, and he was placed in the state prison at Rio de Janeiro in January, 1874. The trial ended by his being sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, which the emperor as an act of grace commuted to detention in a fortress, and set him free in a year and a half. In consequence of this occurrence the Jesuits were, in 1874, expelled from the country. The increasing advent of monks and nuns from Europe led the government, in 1884, to appoint a commission to carry out the law already passed in 1870, for the secularization of all monastic property after providing pensions for those entitled to support. In the same year all naturalized non-Catholics were pronounced eligible for election to the imperial parliament and to the provincial assemblies. The members belonging to the evangelical churches now number about 50,000, of whom 30,000 are Germans.[566]

V. Opponents of Church and of Christianity.

§ 210. SECTARIANS AND ENTHUSIASTS IN THE ROMAN CATHOLIC AND ORTHODOX RUSSIAN DOMAINS.

It cannot be denied that since the Tridentine attempt to define the church doctrine far fewer sects condemning the church as such have sprung from Roman Catholicism than from Protestantism. Yet such phenomena are not wanting in the nineteenth century. Their scarcity is abundantly made up for by the numberless degenerations and errors (§ 191) which the Catholic church or its representatives in the higher and lower grades of the clergy not only fell into, but actually provoked and furthered, and thus encouraged an unhealthy love for religious peculiarities. Were the absence of new heretical, sectarian and fanatical developments something to be gloried in for itself alone, the Eastern church, with its absolute stability, would obtain this distinction in a far higher degree. In the Russian church, however, the multitude of sects which amid manifold oppressions and persecutions continue to exist to the present day, in spite of many persistent and even condemnable errors, witnesses to a deep religious need in the Russian people.

§ 210.1. =Sects and Fanatics in the Roman Catholic Domain= (§ 187, 6-8, § 190).--On the Catholic Irvingites see § 211, 10.

1. =The Order of New Templars= sprang from the Freemasons (§ 172, 2). Soon after their establishment in France the Jesuits sought to carry out their own hierarchical ideas. The fable of an uninterrupted connection between freemasonry as a “temple of humanity” and the Templars of the Middle Ages, and the introduction therewith in their secret ceremonies of exercises, borrowed from the chivalry of romance, afforded a means toward this end. The idea was started in the Jesuit college at Claremont and was approved and accepted by the local lodge. In A.D. 1754 a great number of their noble members, who were disgusted with the Jesuit templar farce, withdrew in order as “New Templars” to continue the old order in the spirit of modern times. In consequence, however, of the revolution that broke out in A.D. 1789 they could no longer hold their ground as a band of nobles. Napoleon favoured the reorganization of the order freed from those limits. The day of Molay’s death (§ 112, 7) was publicly celebrated with great pomp in Paris, A.D. 1808 and the order spread among all French populations. On the Bourbon restoration the grand-master was, at the instigation of the Jesuits, cast into prison and the order suppressed. After the July revolution he was liberated and a new temple was opened in Paris in A.D. 1833. The show-loving Parisians for a long time took pleasure in the peculiar rites and costume of the templars. When this interest declined the order passed out of view. Its religion, which professed to be a primitive revelation carried down in the Greek and Egyptian mysteries, from which Moses borrowed, then further developed by Christ and transmitted in esoteric tradition by John and his successors the grand-masters of the templars, taught a divine trinity of being, act and consciousness, the eternity of the world alongside of God and an indwelling of God in man. It declared the Roman Catholic church to be the only true Christianity (_église chrétienne primitive_). Its sacred book consisted of an apocryphal gospel of John in accordance with its own notions.

2. On the communistic society of =St. Simonians=, which also sprang up in France, see § 212, 2.

3. St. Simon’s secretary was =Aug. Comte=, the founder of the Positivist philosophical school (§ 174, 2) and he maintained intimate relations with his master all through life. In his later years he undertook by carrying his philosophical doctrine into the practical domain to sketch out a “religion of humanity,” and thus became the founder of a Positivist religious sect. The men of science indeed who had adopted his philosophical principles (Littré, Renan, Taine, Lewes, Leslie Stephens, Tyndall, Huxley, Draper, etc.), repudiate it; but in the middle and lower ranks some were found longing for an object of worship, who endeavoured on the basis of his _Calendrier positiviste_ and _Catechisme positiviste_ to form a religious society for the worship of humanity. His festival calendar divides the year into thirteen months of four weeks each, named after the thirteen great benefactors of mankind (among whom Christ does not appear), while the weeks are named after lesser heroes. By the profound veneration of woman, which savours greatly of Mariolatry, as well as by the fantastic worship of heroes, geniuses and scholars, which is a mimicry of the popish saint worship, and by the adoption of a sacerdotalism like that of Catholicism, this religion of humanity shows itself to be an antichristian growth on Roman Catholic soil.

§ 210.2.

4. =Thomas Pöschl=, in the second decade of the century, presents an instance of a degeneration of originally pietistic tendencies into mischievous fanaticism. A Catholic priest at Ampfelwang near Linz, he sought under the influence of Sailer’s mysticism to awaken in his congregation a more lively Christianity by means of prayer meetings and the circulation of tracts, in which he proclaimed the approaching end of the world. When the district in which he lived was, in 1814, attached to Austria, he was committed to prison, and his followers accepted as their leader the peasant =Jos. Haas=, who led them further still into fanatical excesses. His fanaticism at length went so far that on Good Friday of 1817 a young maiden belonging to their party suffered a voluntary death after the example of Christ for her brothers and sisters. Pöschl professed the deepest horror at this cruel deed for which he was blamed. He died in close monastic confinement in 1837.

5. The Antinomian sect of the =Antonians=, most numerous in the Canton Bern, had its beginning among the Roman Catholics. Its founder was Antoni Unternährer, born and reared at Shüpfheim, near Lucerne, in the Catholic faith. From 1802 he resided at Amfoldingen, near Thun, where he stood in high repute among the peasants as a quack doctor, gave himself out as the son of God a second time become man, and proclaimed by word and writing the perfect redemption from the curse of the law by the introduction of the true freedom of the sons of God, which was to show itself first of all in the absolutely unrestricted intercourse of the sexes. After two years’ confinement in a house of correction he was banished from the Canton Bern and transported to his native place, where, abandoning all pastoral duties, he died in a police cell in 1814. The sect, which had meanwhile spread widely, and at Gsteig near Interlaken had obtained a new leader in the person of Benedict Schori, a third incarnation of Christ, could not be finally suppressed, notwithstanding the liberal use of the prison, till the beginning of 1840. Even at this day scattered remnants of Antonians are to be found in Canton Bern.

6. When the Austrian constitution of 1849 gave unconditional religious toleration, the Bohemian =Adamites= (§ 115, 5), of whom remnants under the mask of Catholicism had continued down to the nineteenth century, ventured again publicly to engage in proselytising efforts. An official enquiry instituted on this occasion declared that the sect, consisting of Bohemian peasants and artisans, had its headquarters among the mystics of the Krüdener school, that its religious doctrine was a mixture of communism, freethinking and quietism, and that its members were in their ordinary public life blameless, but that in their secret nightly assemblies, where they dispensed with clothes, they celebrated orgies regardless of marriage or relationship.

7. =David Lazzaretti=, formerly a carrier in Tuscany, appeared in his native place after an absence of several years, in 1872, declaring that he was descended from a natural son of Charlemagne and had been entrusted by the Apostle Peter with a message to the pope, pointing to a cross that had been burnt upon his brow by the apostle himself. He startled those of the Vatican, where he was quite unknown, by declaring that the bones of his ancestors lay under the ruins of an old Franciscan cloister in Sabina, of whose existence nobody was aware, the discovery of which seemed to vouch for his claims. These were all the more readily admitted when it was found that he made the restoration of the Pope’s temporal power his main task. The number of his adherents, mostly peasants, soon increased immensely, reaching, it is said, 40,000. On Monte Labro they built a church with a strong “David’s Tower,” over which “St. David” appointed two priests who, when they had made certain changes in worship at the call of the prophet, were excommunicated by the bishop. David now began to spread his socialistic and communistic ideas. He insisted that his adherents should surrender their goods to him as representative of the society, and promised down to December 31st, 1890, the introduction of community of goods throughout Italy and afterwards in other countries. In Arcidosso, the prophet’s birthplace, a beginning was to be made, but in its overthrow on August 18th, 1878, he met his death, and his befooled followers waited in vain for the fulfilment of his dying promise that he would rise again on the third day.

§ 210.3. =Russian Sects and Fanatics.=--After the attempt under Nicholas I. at the forcible conversion of the =Raskolniks=, especially the purely schismatic =Starowerzians= or Old Believers (§ 163, 10), had proved fruitless, the government of Alexander II. by patience and concession took a surer way to reconciliation and restoration. In October, 1874, their marriages, births and deaths, which had hitherto been without legal recognition, were put on the regular register and so their lawful rights of inheritance were secured. Under Alexander III. in 1883 an imperial decree was issued, which gave them permission to celebrate divine service after their own methods in their chapels, which had not before the legal standing of churches, and declared them also eligible for public appointments.--To the =Duchoborzians= (§ 166, 2), sorely oppressed under Catherine II. and Paul I., Alexander I., after they had laid before him the confession which they had adopted, granted toleration, but assigned them a separate residence in the Taurus district. Under Nicholas I. they were to the number of 3,000 transported to the Transcaucasian mountains in 1841, where they were called Duchoborje.--The Württemberg Pietist colonists of South Russia originated among the peasants the widespread sect of the =Stundists= soon after the abolition of serfdom in 1863. The originator of those separatist meetings for the study of Scripture, which led first of all to the condemnation of image worship and making the sign of the cross as unbiblical, and subsequently to a complete withdrawal from the worship of the orthodox church and the forming of conventicles, was the peasant and congregational elder Ratusny of Osnowa near Odessa, to whom, at a later period, with equal propagandist zeal, the peasant Balabok attached himself. The latter was, in 1871, sentenced to one year’s imprisonment at Kiev and the loss of civil rights, and in 1873, at Odessa, a great criminal prosecution was instituted against Ratusny and all the other leaders of the sect, which, however, after proceeding for five years ended in a verdict of acquittal. A process started in 1878 against the so-called =Schaloputs= had a similar issue. This sect, spread most widely among the Cossacks of Cuban, rejects the Old Testament, the sacraments and the doctrine of the resurrection, but believes in a continued effusion of the Holy Spirit upon the prophets of the church who have prepared themselves for their vocation by complete abstinence from flesh and spirituous liquor as well as by incessant prayer and frequent fasting.