Part 12

In vain secularists would tell us that history, geography, and grammar are neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Mohammedan. The venom of infidelity and vice can be conveyed by the conjugation of a verb. Physical geography may be used as a catapult against the very notion of right and wrong. As to the misuse of history, its possibilities are unlimited. Moreover, the Church, that has received the divine commission to “teach all nations,” needs the aid of all the arts and sciences to accomplish this mission. The Catholic Church, that is essentially, and _jure divino_, _Ecclesia docens_, will never forego her right to teach them all, as she has been doing for two thousand years. In the sixteenth century China seemed hopelessly closed against Christian missionaries. But where apostles failed to penetrate, a man of science, who was also a saint, succeeded. Mathew Ricci, the Jesuit savant, was welcomed by mandarin _literati_, and founded the first Christian mission in China in 1581.

All the old universities of Europe were founded by the Church. The arts and sciences grouped themselves around the Chair of Theology, as hand-maidens around their mistress. Religion is, indeed, the aromat which alone preserves them from becoming corrupt and corrupting. Already, society is beginning to discover the evil effects of separating religion from learning. The knowledge and uses of fire form one of the main lines of demarcation that separate us from animals. Monkeys appreciate the kindly blaze, but the smartest of them has never attempted to light a fire.

When men, with this distinctive and dangerous knowledge of fire, shall have degraded their mentality to that of the simian by atheism or secularism, and its concomitant materialism, the social order will no longer be possible. A few rudely constructed, diminutive bombs can lay the proudest city in ruins.

To-day, as in 1790, France is the field on which another great battle is to be fought between Christianity and paganism, and its results will be far-reaching. The French atheocracy has “said unto God, Depart from us; for we desire not the knowledge of Thy ways” (Job XXI. 14). Churches, here and there, have already been profaned by Masonic revelry, the cross has been demolished on every highway, and removed from every school and hospital. The State, disposing of all the power and all the riches of the nation, is at the command of a secret society that is the sworn and avowed enemy of religion. If the Church again come forth victorious from the struggle, stronger and purer through poverty and persecution, “if the Christian Hercules uplift Antæus, son of the earth, into the air and stifle him there, then--_patuit Deus_.”

LIBERTY AND CHRISTIANITY

Liberty is, pre-eminently and indisputably, a product of Christianity and must diminish with every diminution of the faith. “Other influences,” writes Lecky, “could produce the manumission of many slaves, but Christianity alone could effect that profound change of character that rendered the abolition of slavery possible, and there are,” he says, “few subjects more interesting than the history of that great transition” (_History of Rationalism_, II, 258).

There is, indeed, no grander spectacle than that of the Catholic Church proclaiming, in ages of barbarism, a divine “Thou shalt not” to masters, whose power over their slaves was unlimited by any law, and even assuming jurisdiction over them in virtue of a moral law, above all human laws.

Ecclesiastical jurisprudence enacted penalties against “masters who took from their theows (Saxon slaves) the money they had earned; against those who slew their theows without just cause; against mistresses who beat their theows so that they died within three days.... Above all, the whole machinery of ecclesiastical discipline was set in motion to shelter the otherwise unprotected chastity of the female slaves” (Wright’s _Political Condition of the English Peasantry in the Middle Ages_). “That Church which seemed so haughty and so overbearing in its dealings with kings and nobles,” writes Lecky, “never failed to listen to the poor and the oppressed, and for many centuries their protection was the foremost of all the objects of its policy” (_History of Rationalism_, II, 260). Simultaneously with the gradual abolition of slavery, we find the elevation of woman, and her redemption from polygamy, a natural concomitant of slavery. “No ideal,” writes Lecky, “has exercised a more salutary influence than the mediæval conception of the Virgin [he means devotion to]. For the first time, woman was elevated to her rightful position and the sanctity of weakness was recognized. No longer the slave, the toy of man, no longer associated only with ideas of degradation and sensuality, woman rose, in the person of the Virgin Mother, into a new sphere, and became the object of a reverential homage of which antiquity had no conception. Love was idealized. The moral character and beauty of female excellence was for the first time felt ... a new kind of admiration was fostered. Into a harsh, and ignorant, and benighted age this ideal type infused a conception of gentleness and purity, unknown to the proudest civilizations of the past.... In the millions who have sought with no barren desire to mould their characters into her image ... in the new sense of honour, in the softening of manners in all walks of society, in this, and in many ways, we detect its influence. All that was best in Europe clustered around it [the devotion to Mary], and it is the origin of many of the purest elements of our civilization” (_History of Rationalism_, I, 231).

These are striking words from the pen of a rationalist, and would that all women understood that the laws of divorce, the first-fruits of the weakening of the Christian principle, and the pagan renaissance in Europe, mark also the first steps of their retrogression to the condition, from which they were uplifted by Christianity.

After centuries of judicious preparation, the emancipation of all Christians was proclaimed by Pope Alexander III. “This law alone,” writes Voltaire, “should render his memory precious to all, as his efforts on behalf of Italian liberty should endear him to Italians” (_Essai sur les mœurs_).

Mr. Hallam has satirically remarked in his _History of the Middle Ages_, page 221, that “though several popes and the clergy enforced manumission as a duty on laymen, the villeins on church lands were the last to be emancipated.” But he well knows, for he has told us himself on page 217 of the same work, that “the mildness of ecclesiastical rule and the desire to obtain the prayers of the monks induced many to attach themselves as serfs to monasteries.” An old German proverb, too, says: “It is good to live under the crozier.” When the monasteries were suppressed by Henry VIII, we know by Strype’s _Chronicles_, that misery and vagrancy reached terrible proportions.

But while freely admitting that “in the transition from slavery to serfdom, and from serfdom to liberty, the Catholic Church was the most zealous and the most efficient agent” (II, 234), Lecky is loath to admit that her action in the sphere of political liberty was equally efficacious, and that this second emancipation could have been accomplished slowly, and judiciously, as was the first, without the upheavals, the violence, and the excesses of the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Yet on page 158, vol. II, he reminds us that “St. Thomas Aquinas, the ablest theologian of the Middle Ages, distinctly asserts the right of subjects to withhold obedience from rulers who were usurpers or unjust.” “To the scholastics of those days also,” he says, “we chiefly owe the doctrine of the mediate rights of kings, which is very remarkable as the embryo of the principles of Locke and Rousseau.” Authority considered in the abstract is of divine origin; but still the direct and immediate source of regal power is the nation, according to Suarez. Apparently, the noisy standard-bearers of civil liberties and political rights, in the eighteenth century, were not exactly pioneers, but mere plagiarists.

“As long,” continues Lecky, “as the object was not so much to produce freedom, as to mitigate servitude, the Church was still the champion of the people.... The balance of power created by the numerous corporations she created or sanctioned, the reverence for tradition, which created a network of unwritten customs with the force of public law, the dependence of the civil on the ecclesiastical power, and the right of excommunication and deposition, had all contributed to lighten the pressure of despotism” (II, 235).

We must array Mr. Lecky against himself, and conclude that the Church did more than “mitigate servitude”; she also produced freedom by the institution of these numerous guilds and unwritten laws, many of which still existed until they were swept away by the Revolution of 1790, which left nothing standing but an omnipotent tyrant, called the State, and a defenceless people, _corvéable_, _taillable_, and guillotinable, at mercy. These “unwritten customs with the force of public law” made Spain the freest country in Europe, until the seventeenth century. To suppress these _fueros_ of the commons, or unwritten constitutional liberties, was one of the chief objects of the Spanish Inquisition, established by royal authority, and aimed chiefly at the bishops, as champions of popular rights. One of its first victims was the saintly Archbishop of Toledo. The Basque provinces retain their _fueros_ intact to this day.

In France too liberty succumbed with the Public Law of Europe (1648).

In 1314 Philippe le Bel, in order to obtain subsidies, convoked the States General (Les Trois Etats). From that time to 1359, they were convoked seven times. In the first half of the fifteenth century there were fourteen convocations. From 1506 to 1558 there was an interruption of fifty-two years. From Henry II to the minority of Louis XIII, the States met six times. In 1614 was held the last convocation of the Trois Etats, until 1789.

Under the despotic Louis XI (1401-83), Philippe de Commines still dared to write with impunity: “Il n’y a roi ni seigneur qui ait pouvoir, outre son domaine, de mettre un denier sur ses sujets sans octroi et consentement, sinon par tyrannie et violence.” (“It would be tyranny and violence for any king or lord to raise a penny of taxation on his subjects, without their leave and consent.”)[23]

“Nevertheless,” writes de Tocqueville, “the elections were not abolished till 1692 ... the cities still preserved the right to govern themselves. Until the end of the seventeenth century we find some which were small republics, in which the magistrates were freely elected by the citizens and answerable to them, and in which public spirit was active and proud of its independence” (_Ancien Régime_, p. 83).

Mr. Lecky is pleased to attribute to the papal power “some of the worst calamities--the Crusades, religious persecutions, the worst features of the semi-religious struggle that convulsed Italy.... It is not necessary,” he continues, “to follow in detail the history of [what he is pleased to call] the encroachments of the spiritual on the civil power” (II, 155), though it would be more correct to say the encroachments of the civil on the religious power.

But it is very necessary to do so, because though the main object of these struggles of the spiritual power with despotic kings was the independence of the Church, it cannot be gainsaid that personal and civil liberty were thereby enhanced, as Lecky himself admits (p. 235).

It would be too long to discuss here the Crusades, which merely saved us from the fate now enjoyed by Islamic countries, or the alleged persecution of the Manichæans, who, under the name of Albigenses, menaced to disrupt the incipient civilization of Europe by their subversive tenets of anarchy and collectivism, equally opposed as they were to ecclesiastical and to civil government.

The “semi-religious wars,” or the so-called “wars of investiture,” which both he and Montesquieu disingenuously confound with the wars of Italian independence, eminently contributed to the cause of civil liberty in England, not less than in Italy, and elsewhere. Anselm, Becket, and Stephen Langton were worthy coadjutors of the policy of St. Gregory VII and the pioneers of political liberty. No one understands this better than Mr. Wakeman, the Anglican author of a recent History of the English Church.

“It is true,” he says, “that Anselm could not have maintained the struggle [against clerical investiture by laymen] at all if he had not had the power of Rome at his back. Englishmen quickly saw that the question between Anselm and Henry was part of a far wider question. They felt that bound up with the resistance of the archbishop was the sacred cause of their own liberty. The Church was the one power in England not yet reduced under the iron heel of the Norman kings. The clergy was the one body which still dared to dispute their will. To them belonged the task of handing on the torch of liberty amid the gloom of a tyrannical age. The despotism of the crown was the special danger to England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It was the Church that, in that time of crisis, rescued England from slavery. Had there been no Becket, Stephen Langton, Archbishop of York, would have failed to inspire the barons to wrest the Charter from John” (p. 105). And on page 108 he continues: “From the Conquest to the time of Simon de Montfort two great dangers threatened England, the uncontrolled will of unjust, wicked kings and the grinding administrative despotism of the government. From both she was saved by the Church. In her own canon law she opposed to the king’s laws a system which claimed a higher sanction, was based on principles not less scientific, and was already invested with the halo of tradition.”

It is this same canon law that the Church in France is, to-day, opposing to the tyranny of an omnipotent State or parliamentary majority, _alias_ Grand Orient, which has, since four years, crushed out two of the most sacred liberties--the right to live in community and the right to educate one’s children in the Christian faith, the faith of our fathers, “once delivered to the saints.”

The long struggle, between the Popes and the German rulers, who sought to establish their despotic rule in Italy and enslave the whole Church by making the bishops of Rome their domestic chaplains, resulted in the glorious Congress of Venice, 1177, confirmed by the Peace of Constance, which is the first instance in history of peoples wresting political liberties from regal tyrants. The Magna Charta is the second in point of time.

After a long and seemingly hopeless struggle with Frederick Barbarossa, Alexander III, to whom this Hohenstaufen had opposed a series of servile anti-popes, triumphed, and with him triumphed the League of the Italian Cities, of which he was the unarmed chief. Milan, Brescia, Pavia, and other cities, which had been razed to the ground by the tyrant, thanked the Pope for having rendered them their liberty. Alexandria, an important city of the Piedmont, bears the name of this peaceful liberator. Voltaire refers to these events in the following terms: “Barbarossa finished the quarrel by recognizing Pope Alexandria III, kissing his feet, and holding his stirrup.” (Le maître du monde se fit le palefrenier du fils d’un gueux qui avait vécu d’aumônes.) “God has permitted,” exclaimed the Pope, “that an old man and a priest should triumph, without fighting, over a terrible and powerful emperor” (_Essai sur les mœurs_, II, 82).[24]

In the Eastern or Byzantine Empire, the clergy, at an early date, and long before the schism of 1054, began to succumb to Cæsaro-papism, a revival of the ancient pagan system, in which the temporal ruler was also the high-priest of his realm, and we well know that neither personal nor civil liberty ever found foothold in this _Bas Empire_.

“While the ecclesiastical monarchy of the West,” writes a Protestant historian, “could lead onward the mental development of the nations to the age of majority, could permit and even promote freedom and variety within certain limits, the brute force of the Byzantine despotism stifled and checked every free movement” (Neander, _History of the Church_, VIII, 244).

The French kings, even more than the English before Henry VIII, strove hard to establish the same system, and above all to exempt themselves from the Christian law of monogamy, which, with personal freedom, constitutes the great line of demarcation between Eastern, and Western or Latin civilization. Montesquieu assures us that a neighbour’s wife, unlawfully taken, or their own unjustly repudiated, caused all, or nearly all, the troubles between the Papacy and the French kings.

On the whole, however, civil liberty in Europe had reached an advanced stage in the fifteenth century. Cities and provinces really had more self-government then, than during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, more than they have now in some countries, notably in France.

The neo-paganism of the Renaissance was one of those periodical revolts of what St. Paul calls the “carnal mind, which is enmity with God.” “Sapientia carnis inimica est Deo” (Rom. VIII). It was a conjuration against Christianity and culminated in the Protestant revolt, which for ever destroyed the unity of Christendom, and set in motion a progressive scepticism or rationalism, which is Protestantism in its last analysis.

For more than three centuries English writers have repeated that the Protestant revolt was a struggle for liberty of conscience, notwithstanding the incontrovertible fact that all its foremost leaders were bitterly opposed to religious toleration, and that the sects relentlessly persecuted each other, as well as the adherents of the ancient faith.

Protestantism being, intrinsically, the nursery of rationalism, was necessarily a diminution of Christianity, and produced a corresponding diminution of liberty, both personal and civil. At the Congress of Westphalia, 1648, where, as Macaulay states, “Protestantism reached its highest point, a point it soon lost and never regained” (_Essay on Ranke_), was formulated the monstrous axiom _Cujus regio ejus religio_, which became the common law of Europe in lieu of the hitherto prevailing rule of One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism. Henceforth, as in pagan days, each ruler assumed the right to dictate the religious beliefs of his subjects in the new system of national churches. The “territorial system” it was called, and represented the net result of a century of Protestantism.

There were, indeed, no fiercer despots over men’s consciences than the so-called “reformers.” If any doubt let him read their lives. Let him read of the bloody strife that rent the Netherlands after they had shaken off the Spanish yoke; how the great Barneveldt fell a victim to miserable oppression of Gomarists by followers of Arminius, and vice versa; how Remonstrants persecuted contra-Remonstrants, all on account of some metaphysico-religico distinctions neither understood clearly.

Then let us consider the embarkation of the Pilgrim Fathers from Holland, where they had sought asylum from the rigid conformity enforced by reformed England. Finding themselves no better off in the republic, which had emancipated itself, simultaneously, from Spain and Rome, the Pilgrim Fathers shook the dust of the old world from their feet and sought a new hemisphere. Surely in the primeval forests men might hope to interpret Scripture and serve God each according to his own lights. Not so. No sooner were the camp fires lighted, and the barest necessities of life provided for, than we find a theocracy of the most hard and fast type established by the Argonauts of the Golden Fleece of religious toleration. A veritable office of the Holy Inquisition was instituted “to search out and deliver to the law” all who “dared to set up any other exercises than what authority hath set up.” While it was gravely affirmed that “these cases were not a matter of conscience, but of a civil nature,” Sir John Saltonstall wrote from England to the first Puritan Grand Inquisitors, Wilson and Cotton, remonstrating “at the things reported daily of your tyranny, as that you fine, whip, and imprison men for their consciences.”

The acts of the Inquisition dwindle into insignificance if we place in the other balance the excesses committed, and the penal laws enacted from 1530 to 1829 against Dissenters and against English Roman Catholics in England. The Toleration Act of William and Mary, 1701, relieved Protestant “Recusants,” but the penal laws against Catholics were maintained till 1829, though many had fallen into desuetude. The principal were: For hearing Mass a fine of 66 pounds and one year’s imprisonment; they were debarred from inheriting or purchasing lands; they could hold no office nor bring any action in law; they could not teach under pain of perpetual imprisonment; they could not travel five miles without a licence, nor appear within ten miles of London under penalty of 100 pounds; while the universities were closed against them by test acts. Catholics having been thus deprived of all means of obtaining a liberal education and raising their voice on behalf of the truth, Protestant writers, since three hundred years, have been able to travesty and misrepresent, unchallenged, all the facts connected with the Reformation.

In France Louis XIV persecuted the Huguenots in virtue of the _Cujus regio ejus religio_ (Whose the kingdom his the religion), and in spite of the protests of Innocent XI, who instructed his legate d’Adda to beg James II to intercede for them, declaring that “men must be led, not dragged to the altar.”

The German, Swiss, and Scandinavian rulers made, modified, and changed the religion of their subjects at will. Of the intolerance of the Calvanistic Republic of Geneva less said the better. Oppenheim, often pawned by its needy electors, is said to have changed its form of Protestantism fifteen times in twenty-one years. In Denmark, where Lutheranism was paramount and unadulterated, we find, writes Dollinger, “that the nobility made use of the Reformation to appropriate not only the Church lands, but that owned by the peasants.” “A dog-like servitude weighs down the Danish peasants, and the citizens, deprived of all representative power, groan under oppressive burdens” (_Geshicte von Rugen_, p. 294, quoted by Dollinger).

“The dwellers on the great estates of the Church were now obliged to exchange the mild rule of the clergy for the oppressive rule of the nobility,” writes Allen, page 313. “By these laws and enforced compacts the spoliation and the degradation of once free peasants were accomplished.” In 1702 Frederick IX abolished slavery, but glebe serfdom, as in Russia, continued till 1804. Until 1766 the education of the people stood at the lowest grade, and it was not till 1804 that freedom was conferred on 20,000 families who had been in a state of serfdom since the Reformation.

In Sweden we find the great Protestant hero, Gustavus Vasa, appropriating all the commonage lands of the villages, and even the weirs, the mines, and all uncultivated lands. Gustavus was, of course, obliged to share the spoils with his henchmen, whose rule was even more oppressive, and the peasants became wholly impoverished and degraded.

In Germany we find the same record of spoliation and oppression of the peasantry, whose rights there was none to defend since bishops no longer sat in the Diet. In 1663, 1646, 1654, the personal liberty of the peasants was progressively annihilated. “Then was forged that slave chain,” writes Boll, “which our peasantry have had to drag within a few decades of the present day” (_Mecklenburg Geschichte_). In 1820 this glebe serfdom was abolished by the Grand Duke.

In Pomerania, united with Brandenburg since the Reformation, Protestantism was paramount already in 1534, and the fate of the peasantry was the same. The oppression was so intolerable that even those whose farms had not been appropriated or turned into grazing grounds, as in Ireland, fled the country. In the peasant ordinance of 1616 they were declared “serfs without any civil rights,” and preachers were compelled to denounce fugitives from the pulpit.