Chapter XXIII: Controversy on Important Points (2)

In this struggle the church has always sympathized with the Romanizing tendencies. It was under the patronage of the Pope that Charlemagne sought to revive Imperial Rome, and to re-establish in substance the Roman constitution of society; but his generous efforts ended only in the systematization and confirmation of feudalism. The Franconian and especially the Swabian in emperors attempted to renew the work of Charlemagne, but were opposed and defeated by the church, not because she had any sympathy with feudalism, but because these emperors undertook to unite with the civil and military powers held by the Roman emperors the pontifical power, which before the conversion of the empire they also held. This she could not tolerate, for by the Christian law the Imperial power and the pontifical are separated, and the temporal authority, as such, has no competency in spirituals. The Popes, in their long and severe struggles with the German emperors, or emperors of the holy Roman empire, as they styled themselves, did not struggle to preserve feudalism, but the independence of the church, threatened by the Imperial assumption of the pontifical authority held by the emperors of pagan Rome. This is the real meaning of those struggles which have been so strangely misapprehended, and so grossly misrepresented by the majority of historians, as Voigt and Leo, both Protestants, have conclusively shown. St. Gregory VII., who is the best representative of the church in that long war, did not struggle to establish a theocracy as so many foolishly repeat, nor to obtain for the church or clergy a single particle of civil power, but to maintain the spiritual independence of the church, or her independent and supreme authority over all her children in things spiritual, against the Emperor, who claimed, indirectly at least, supreme authority in spirituals as well as in temporal's. For the same reason Gregory IX. And Innocent IV. Opposed Frederic II., the last and greatest of the Hohenstaufen, the Ward in his childhood of Innocent III. {631} Frederic undertook to revise Roman imperialism against mediaeval feudalism, but unhappily he remembered that the pagan Emperor was Pontifex Maximus, as well as Imperator. Had he simply labored to substitute the Roman constitution of society for the feudal without seeking to subject the church to the empire, he might have been opposed by all those Catholics, whether lay or cleric, whose interests were identified with feudalism, but not by the church herself; at least nothing indicates that she would have opposed him, for her sympathies were not and have never been with the feudal constitution of society.

In the subsequent struggles between the two systems, the church, as far as I have discovered, has uniformly sympathized with kings and kaisers only so far as they simply asserted the republican principles of the Roman constitution against feudalism, and has uniformly opposed them, whenever they claimed or attempted to exercise pontifical authority, or to make the temporal supreme over the spiritual, that is to say, to subject conscience to the state. But in this she has been on the side of liberty in its largest and truest sense. Liberty, as commonly understood, or as it enters into the life, the thought, and conscience of modern Christian nations, is certainly of Greek and Roman, not barbarian origin, enlarged and purified by Christianity. The pagan republic united in the sovereign people both the pontifical and imperial powers as they were in the pagan emperors, and hence subjected the individual, both exteriorly and interiorly, to the state, and left him no rights which he could assert before the republic. The Christian republic adds to the liberty of the state, the liberty of the individual, and so far restricts the power of the state over individuals. This personal or individual freedom, unknown in the Graeco-Roman republic, Guizot and many others tell us was introduced by the German invaders of the Roman empire. They assign it a barbarian origin; but I am unable to agree with them, because I cannot find that the German barbarians ever had it. The barbarian, as the feudal, individual freedom was the freedom of the chief or noble, not the freedom of all men, or of all individuals irrespective of class or caste. This universal individual freedom, asserted and in a measure secured by the Christian republic, could not be a development of a barbarian idea, or come by way of logical deduction from the barbarian individual freedom, for it rests on a different basis, and is different in kind. The only ancient people with whom I can find any distinct traces of it are the Hebrew people. It is plainly asserted in the laws of Moses for the Jewish people. Christianity asserts it for all, both Jews and Gentiles, in that noble maxim. We must obey God rather than men. Every martyr to the Christian faith asserted it, in choosing rather to be put to death in the most frightful and excruciating forms than to yield up the freedom of conscience at the command of the civil authority, and the church shows that she approves it by preserving the relics of martyrs, and proposing them to the perpetual veneration of the faithful. The martyr witnesses alike to faith and the freedom of conscience.

To this individual freedom, as the right of manhood, the real enemy is the feudal society, which is founded on privilege; and where then should the church be found but on the side of those who asserted Graeco-Roman civilization as enlarged, purified, and invigorated by Christianity against the barbarian elements retained by the feudal society? It was her place as the friend of liberty and civilization. There can be no question that since the beginning of the fifteenth century the interests of humanity, liberty, religion, have been with the kings and people, as against the feudal nobility. It is owing to this fact, not to any partiality for monarchy, even in its representative sense, that the church has supported the monarchs in their struggle against feudal privileges and corporations.

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But it is said that she has favored Roman imperialism not only against feudalism, but also against democracy. This is partially true, but she has done so for the very reason that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries she opposed the German emperors, because everywhere, except in the United States, it seeks to unite in the republic or state, after the manner of the pagan republic, both the imperial and the pontifical powers. In the United States this has not been done; our republic recognizes its own incompetency in spirituals, protects all religions not _contra bonos mores_, and establishes none; and here the church has never opposed republicanism or democracy. In Europe she has done so, not always, but generally since the French revolution assumed to itself pontifical authority. In the beginning of the French revolution, while it was confined to the correction of abuses, the redress of grievances, and the extension and confirmation of civil liberty, the Pope, Pius VI., the cardinals, prelates, and people of Rome, encouraged it; and the Pope censured it only when it transcended the civil order, made a new distribution of dioceses, enacted a civil constitution for the clergy, and sought to separate the Gallican Church from the Catholic Church, precisely as the Popes had previously censured Henry IV., Frederic Barbarossa, Frederic II., Louis of Bavaria, and others. She opposes to-day European democrats, not because they are democrats, but because they claim for the people the pontifical power, and seek to put them in the place of the church, nay, in the place of God The more advanced among them utter the words, people-pontiff and people-God, as well as people-king, and your German democrats assert almost to a man humanity as the supreme God. She opposes them not because they make deadly war on monarchy and aristocracy, and assert the sovereignty, under God, of the people, but because the war against catholic truth, the great eternal, universal, and immutable principles of the divine government, which lie at the basis of all government and indeed of society itself, and of which she is the divinely appointed guardian in human affairs. If she supports the European governments against them, it is not because those governments are monarchical or aristocratic in their constitution, but because they represent, however imperfectly, the interests of humanity, social order, civilization, without which there is and can be no real progress. She cannot oppose them because they seek to establish democratic government unless they seek to do so by unlawful or unjust means, because she prescribes for the faithful no particular form of civil government, and cannot do it, because no particular form is or can be Catholic. She offers no opposition to American democracy.

The church opposes, by her principles, however, what is called Absolutism, or what is commonly understood by Oriental despotism, that is, monarchy as understood by Bishop England, under which the monarch is held to be the absolute owner of the soil and the people of the nation, and may dispose of either at his pleasure. This is evident from the fact that when she speaks officially of the state generally, without referring to any particular state, she calls it _republica_, the republic; especially is this the case when she speaks of the civil society in distinction from the ecclesiastical society. Our present Holy Father, in his much miss apprehended and grossly misrepresented Encyclical of December 8, 1864, calls the civil community _republica_, or commonwealth. St. Augustine denies that God has given to man the lordship of man. He gave man the lordship or dominion over irrational creations, but not of the rational made in his own image, "Rationalem factum ad maginem suam noluit nisi irrationabilibus, dominari: non hominem homini, sed hominem {633} pecori. Inde primi justi pastores pecorum magis quam reges hominum constituti sunt." [Footnote 176] Hence he denies that the master has the lordship of his servants or slaves, and admits slavery only as a punishment, as does the civil law itself. For the same reason we may conclude against despotism. If the master has not the absolute lordship of his servants, far less can a king have the absolute lordship of a whole nation. St. Gregory the great cites St. Augustine with approbation, so also, if my memory serves me, does St. Gregory VII., the famous Hildebrand, who tells the princes of his time that they hold their power from violence, wrong, Satan.

[Footnote 176: De Civit. Dei. Opera, tom. vii. 900.]

Catholic writers of the highest authority St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Bellarmin, and Suarez, whom to cite is to cite nearly the whole body of Catholic theologians, follow in the main the political philosophy of Greece and Rome as set forth by Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero; and there is no doubt that, while vesting sovereignty in the community, or the people politically associated, they generally incline to monarchy, tempered by a mixture of aristocracy and democracy, as does Aristotle himself. But the monarchy they favor is always the representative monarchy, the Roman, not the feudal or the oriental. The prince or king, according to them, holds his power from the people or community, _jure humano_, not _jure divino_, and holds it as a trust, not as a personal and indefeasible right. It is amissible; the king may forfeit it, and be deprived of it. St. Augustine asserts, and Suarez after him, the inherent right of the people or political society to change their magistrates and even their form of government; and the Popes, on more occasions than one in the middle ages, not only excommunicated princes, but declared them by a sovereign judgment deprived of their crowns, which proves, if nothing else, that kings and kaisers are held by the church to be responsible to the nation for the manner in which they use their trusts, for the Popes never declared a forfeiture except on the ground that it was incurred by a violation of the civil constitution.

There were numerous republics in Europe before the reformation, as Venice, Genoa, Florence, the Swiss Cantons, and many others, not to speak of the Lombard municipalities, the Hanse towns, and the Flemish or Belgian communes, all of which sprang up during Catholic times, and were founded and sustained by a Catholic population. Nearly all of them have now disappeared, and some of them almost within our own memory; but I am not aware that there is a single republic in Europe founded and sustained by Protestants, unless the United Dutch Provinces, now a monarchical state, be a partial exception. The fact that Catholics as a body are wedded to monarchy is therefore not susceptible of very satisfactory proof, not even if we take monarchy only as representing the majesty of the people, in which sense it is republican in principle.

Protestantism is in itself negative, and neither favors nor disfavors any form of government; but the reformation resulted, wherever it prevailed in Europe, in uniting what the church from the first had struggled to keep separate, the pontifical and the imperial or royal powers, and also in maintaining the feudal monarchy instead of the Roman or representative monarchy. In every nation that accepted the reformation the feudal monarchy was retained, and still subsists. The crown in them all is an estate, as in England, and in some of them is, in fact, the only estate recognized by the constitution. The elector of Saxony, the landgrave of Hesse, the margrave of Brandenburg, the kings of Sweden, of Denmark, and of England and Scotland, became each in his own dominions supreme pontiff, and united in his own person the supreme civil and ecclesiastical powers. The same in principle {634} became the fact in the Protestant Netherlands and the Protestant cantons of Switzerland; and though some Protestant European states tolerate dissent from the state religion, there is not one that recognizes the freedom of religion, or that does not subject religion to the civil power. The political sense of the reformation was the union of the imperial and pontifical powers in the political sovereign, and the maintenance of the feudal monarchy and nobility, or the constitution of society on feudal principles. Nothing, then, is or can be further from the fact than that Protestants generally incline to republicanism, except the pretense that Protestantism emancipates the mind and establishes religious liberty.

No doubt, the feudal monarchy and nobility struggled in all Europe to maintain themselves against the Greco-Roman system represented by the Civil Law and favored by the theologians of the church and her supreme pontiffs. So far as the struggle was against the feudal nobility, or, as I may term it, the system of privilege, the church, the kings, and the people have in their general action been on the same side; and hence in France, where the struggle was the best defined, the great nobles were the first to embrace the reformation; they came very near detaching the kingdom itself from the church, during the wars of the Ligue, and were prevented only by the conversion, interested or sincere, of Henri Quatre. Henry saw clearly enough that monarchy could not struggled successfully in France against the feudal nobility without the support of the church and the people. Richelieu and Mazarin saw the same, and destroyed what remained of the feudal nobility as a political power. They, no doubt, did it in the interest and for the time to the advantage of monarchy. Louis XIV. concentrated in himself all the powers of the state, and could say "_L'état, c'est moi_--I am the state," and tried hard to grasp the pontifical power, and to be able to say, "_L'église, c'est moi_--I am the church;" but failed. Always did and do kings and emperors, whether Catholic or non-Catholic, seek to enlarge their power and to gain to themselves the supreme control not only of civil but also of ecclesiastical affairs, and courtiers, whether lay or cleric, are always but too ready to sustain absolute monarchy. Warring against the system of privilege, for national unity against the disintegrating tendencies of feudalism, monarchy threatens in the seventeen and eighteenth centuries to become absolute in all Europe, but it met with permanent success in no state that did not adopt the reformation, and ceased to be Catholic.

I hold that Roman constitution, as modified and amended by Christianity, is far better for society and more in accordance with religion and liberty, then the feudal constitution, which is essentially barbaric. If we look at Europe as it really was during the long struggle hardly yet ended, we shall see that it was impossible to break up the feudal constitution of society without for the moment giving to the kings and undue power, which in its turn would need to be resisted. But in all countries that remained Catholic, monarchy was always treated as representative by the theologians, and the republican doctrines that subsequent to the reformation found advocates in Protestant states were borrowed either from the agents or from Catholic writers--for the most part, probably, from the mediaeval monks, of whom modern liberals know so little and against whom they say so much. It was only in those countries where the reformation was followed and religion subjected to the state that the feudal monarchy developed into the oriental. England under Henry VIII., Edward VI., Elizabeth Tudor, and James and Charles Stuart, had lost nearly all its old liberties, and nearly all power was centred in the crown. The resistance offered to Charles I. was {635} not to gain new but to recover old liberties, with some new and stronger guaranties. The Protestant princes of northern Germany governed as absolutely as any oriental despot. The movement toward republicanism started in the south, not in the north, in Catholic not in Protestant states. The fact is patent and undeniable, explain it as you will.

I admit that Catholic princes, as well as Protestant, sought to grasp the pontifical power, and to subject the church in their respective dominions to their own authority, but they never fully succeeded. The civil power claimed in France more than belonged to it; but while it impeded the free movements of the Gallican Church, it never succeeded in absolutely enslaving it. Louis XIV., or even Napoleon the First, never succeeded in making himself the head of the Gallican Church; and the Constitutional church created by the Revolution, and which, like the Church of England, was absolutely dependent on the civil power, has long since disappeared and left no trace behind. In Spain, Portugal, Naples, Tuscany, Austria, attempts to subject religion to the state have not been wanting, but, though doing great harm to both the ecclesiastical and the civil society, they have never been completely successful. It is only in Protestant states that they have fully succeeded, or rather, I should say, in non-Catholic states, for the church is as much a slave in Russia as in Great Britain.

Bossuet, courtier and high-toned monarchist as he was, and as much as he consented to yield to the king, never admitted the competency of the king in scriptuals strictly so called; and if he yielded to the king on the question of the regalia, it was only on the ground of an original concession from the head of the church to the kings of France, or the immemorial custom of the kingdom, not as an inherent right of the civil power. He went too far in the Four Articles of 1682 to meet the approbation of Innocent XI., but he did not fall into heresy or schism. And it may be alleged in his defence, that if he had not gone thus far the court would most likely have gone further, and have actually separated the Gallican Church from the Holy See.

Bossuet was unquestionably a monarchist and something of a courtier, though he appears to have had always the best interests of religion at heart; and we can hardly say that he did not take the best means possible in his time of promoting them. As one of the preceptors of the Dauphin, father of the Duke of Burgundy, of whom Fénelon was the principal preceptor, he taught the political system acceptable to the king; but he impressed on his pupil as much as possible under that system a sense of his responsibility, his duty to regard his power as a high trust from God to be exercised without fear or favor for the good of the people committed to his charge. Fénelon went further, and hinted that the nation had not abdicated its original rights, and still retained the right to be consulted in the management of its affairs; and he was dismissed from his preceptorship, forbidden to appear at court, and exiled to his diocese, while every possible effort, in which it is to be regretted that Bossuet took a prominent part, to degrade him as a man and a theologian, and to procure his condemnation as a heretic, was made by the French court. But heretic he was not; he simply erred in the use of language which, though it had been used by canonized saints, was susceptible of an heretical sense. The Congregation condemned the language, not the man, nor his real doctrine. He retracted the language, not the doctrine, and edified the world by his submission.

There is hardly any doctrine further removed from every form of republicanism than that of the divine right of kings, defended by James I. of England in his Remonstrance for the Divine Right of Kings and the Independency of their Crowns, written in reply to a speech of the {636} celebrated Cardinal Duperron in the States-General of France in 1614--the last time the States-General were convoked till convoked by the unhappy Louis XVI. at Versailles, in May, 1789. In that work, a copy of the original edition of which, as well as of "his majestie's speech in the Star-chamber," now lies before me, their kingship immediately from God, and are accountable to him alone for the use they made of their power. He denies their accountability alike to the Pope and the people. This was and really is the doctrine, if not of all Protestants, at least of the Anglican Church and of all Protestant courts; but it is not and never was a Catholic doctrine. The utmost length in the same direction that any Catholic writer of note, except Bossuet, ever went, so far as I can find, is that the king, supposing him to be elected by the people, does, when so elected, reign _de jure divino_ or by divine right; but Suarez [Footnote 177] refutes them, and maintains that the royal power emanates from the community, and is exercised, _formaliter_, by human right, _de jure humano_, and thus asserts the real republican principle. Balmes, in his great work on the Influence of Catholicity and Protestantism on European Civilization compared, cites an instance of a Spanish monk who in the time of Philip II. ventured one day to preach the irresponsibility of the king, but was compelled by the Inquisition to retract his doctrine publicly, in the very pulpit from which he had preached it.

[Footnote 177: De Legibus, lib. iii., cap. 3 and 4, i.]

He who has studied somewhat profoundly the internal political history of the so-called Latin nations of Europe, will find that they have had, from very early times, a strong tendency to republicanism, and even to democracy, and that the tendency has been checked never by the church, but by the kings and feudal nobility. The doctrines of 1789 were no novelty in France even in the thirteenth century, and they were preached very distinctly and very boldly in the Ligue when the nation was threatened with a non-Catholic or Huguenot king, even by Jesuits. The great Dominican and Franciscan orders have never shown any strong attachment to monarchy in any form, and have rarely been the courtiers or flatterers of power. That the sad effects of the old French revolution produced a reaction in many Catholic minds, as well as in many Protestant minds, in favor of monarchy, is very true; and perhaps the most influential portion of European Catholics, living as they do in the midst of a revolution that makes war on the church, on civil order, on society, on civilization itself, cling to the royal authority as the lesser evil and as their only security, under God, for the future of religion. And it is not strange that they should. But this, whether wise or otherwise, is only accidental, and no people will be more loyal republicans than Catholics, when the republic gives them security for life and property, and more than all, for the free and full exercise of their religion as Catholics, as is the case in the United States.

The republic of the United States, we are told, was founded by Protestants, and it is only the United States that can give the slightest coloring to the pretense that Protestants are inclined to republicanism. But, closely examined, the fact gives less coloring than is commonly supposed. The republic of the United States can hardly be said to be founded either by Catholics or Protestants: it was founded by Providence, not by men. The Puritans, the most disposed to republicanism of any of the original colonists, were dissenters from the Church of England, and the principles on which they dissented were in the main those which they had borrowed or inherited from Catholic tradition. They objected to the Church of England that she allowed the king to be both king and pontiff, and subjected religion to the civil power. In this they only followed the example of the Popes. They {637} with the Popes denied the competency of the civil power in spirituals. This was the principle of their dissent, as it has recently been the principle of the separation of the Free Kirk in Scotland from the national church. As the king was the head of the Church of England, making it a royal church, they were naturally led to defend their dissent on republican principles. M. Guizot seems to regard the English revolution, which made Cromwell Lord Protector of the realm, as primarily political; but with all due respect to so great an authority, I venture to say that it was primarily religious, that its first movement was a protest against the authority of the king or parliament to ordain anything in religion not prescribed by the word of God. I state the principle universally, without taking notice of the matters accidentally associated with it, and so stated it is a Catholic principle, always asserted and insisted on by the Popes. It was primarily to carry out this principle, and to regain the civil liberties lost by the nation through the reformation, but not forgotten, that they resisted the king, and made a republican revolution, which very few foresaw or desired. The Puritans who settled in the wilds of America brought with them the ideas and principles they had adopted before leaving England, and if they had republican tendencies, they were hardly republicans.

Mr. Bancroft, in Volume IX. of his History of the United States, just published, shows very clearly that at the beginning of their disputes with the mother country the colonists were not generally republican in the ordinary sense of the word, but attached to monarchy after the English fashion, and also that the struggle in the minds of the colonists was long and severe before they reluctantly abandoned monarchy and accepted republicanism. The American revolution did not originate in any desire to suppress monarchy as it existed in Great Britain and establish republicanism, but to resist the encroachments of the mother country on their rights as British colonists, or rather, as British subjects. The rights of man they asserted had been derived from the civil law, for the most part through medium of the common law, and the writings, if not of Catholic theologians, at least of Catholic lawyers. They held as republicans not from Protestantism, but chiefly from Greece and Rome. Moreover, a monarchical government was impracticable, and there really was no alternative for the American people but republican government or colonial dependence. In the main our institutions were the growth of the country, and were very little influenced by the political theories of the colonists or the political wisdom and sagacity of American statesmen. Hence they are more strictly the work of Providence than of human foresight or human intelligence and will. It is therefore that their permanence and growth are to be counted on. They have their root in the soil, and are adapted to both the soil and the climate. They are of American origin and growth.

Religious liberty is not, as I have shown, of Protestant origin. Most of the colonists held the Catholic principle of the incompetency of the civil power in spirituals, but the greater part of them held that the civil power is bound to recognize and to provide for the support by appropriate legislation of the true religion, and that only. Yet as they were not agreed among themselves as to which is the true religion, or what is the true sense of the revealed word, and having no authoritative interpreter recognized as such by all, and no one sect being strong enough to establish itself and to suppress the others, there was no course practicable but to protect all religions not _contra banos mores_, and leave each individual free before the law to choose his own religion and to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience. This was of absolute necessity in our case if we were to form a political community and carry on civil government at all.

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I do not claim that Catholics founded civil and religious liberty in the United States, nor do I deny that so far as men had a hand in founding them, they were founded by Protestants, but I do contend that our Protestant ancestors acted in regard to them on Catholic rather than on Protestant principles. We have so often heard civil and religious liberty spoken of as the result of the reformation that many people really believe it, and many good honest American citizens are really afraid that the rapid increase of Catholicity in the country threatens ruin to our free institutions. But the only liberty Protestantism, as such, has ever yet favored, is the liberty of the civil power to control the ecclesiastical. There is no danger to any other liberty from the spread of Catholicity. There is a great difference between accepting and sustaining a democratic government where it already legally exists, and laboring to introduce it in opposition to the established and to the habits, customs, and usages of the people where it does not exist. And even if Catholics in other countries had a preference for the monarchical form, they would not dream of introducing it here, and would be led by their own conservative principles, if here, to oppose it, since nothing in their religion requires them, as a Catholic duty, to support one particular form of government rather than another.

Protestantism affords in its principles no basis for either civil or religious liberty. Its great doctrine, that which it opposes as a religion to the church, is the absolute moral and spiritual inability of man, or the total moral and spiritual depravity of human nature, by the fall. This is the central principle of the reformation, from which all its distinctive doctrines radiate. This doctrine denies all natural liberty and all natural virtue, and hence the reformation maintains justification without works, by faith alone, in which man is passive, not active, and that all the works of unbelievers or the unregenerate are sins. Man is impotent for good, and does not and cannot even by grace concur with grace. All his thoughts and deeds our only evil, and that continually, and even the regenerate continue to sin after regeneration as before, only God does not impute there seems to them, but for his dear Son's seek turns away his eyes from them, and imputes to them the righteousness of Christ, and with it covers their iniquities. There is no ground on which to assert the natural rights of man, for the fall has deprived man of all his natural rights; and for republican equality the Reformation phones at best the aristocracy of grace, of the elect, as was taught by Wickliffe, and attempted to be realized by Calvin in Geneva, and by the Puritans in New England, who confined the elective franchise and eligibility to the saints, which is repugnant to both civil and religious liberty for all men.

It is time that our historians and popular writers should reflect a little on what they are saying, when they assert that the reformation emancipated the mind and prepared the way for civil and religious freedom. This has become a sort of cant, and Catholics here it repeated so often that some of them almost think that it cannot be without some foundation, and therefore that there must be something uncatholic in civil and religious liberty. It is all a mistake, and illusion, or a delusion. The principles of the reformation, as far as principles it had, were and are in direct conflict with them, and whatever progress either has made has been not buy it, but in spite of it, by means and influences it began its career by repudiating. The man reared in the bosom of the reformation has no conception of real religious, civil, or mental liberty till he is converted to the Catholic faith, and enters as a freeman into the Catholic Church.

I have dwelt at length on this subject for the sake of historical truth, and also to quiet the fears of my non-Catholic countrymen that the spread {639} of the church in our country will endanger our republican or democratic system of government. That system of government is quite as acceptable to Catholics as it is to Protestants, and accords far better with Catholic principles then with the principles of the reformation. The church does not make our system of government obligatory on all nations; she directly enjoins it nowhere, because no one system is adapted alike to all nations; and each nation, under God, is free to adapt its political institutions to its own wants, taste, and genius; but she is satisfied with it here, and requires her children to be loyal to it. It is here the law, and as such I supported it. I might not support a similar system for Great Britain, France, or Russia; because, though it fits us, it might not fit equally well the British, the French, or the Russians, or as well as the systems they already have fit them. My coat may not fit my neighbor, and my neighbor's coat may not fit me. I am neither as a Catholic nor as a statesman a political propagandist. But I love my own country with an affection I was unconscious of as a Protestant, and Americans bred up Catholics will always be found to be among our most ardent patriots, and our most stanch defenders of both civil and religious freedom.

The mistake is that people are too ready to make a religion of their politics, and to seek to make the system of government they happen to be enamored of for themselves a universal system, and to look upon all nations that do not accept it, or not blessed with it, as deprived of the advantages of civil society. They make their system the standard by which all institutions, all men and nations, are to be tried. They become political bigots, and will tolerate no political theories but their own. Hence, the American people are apt to suppose there is no political freedom where our system of government does not prevail; and to conclude because the church recognizes the legitimacy in other forms of governments in other countries, and does not preach a crusade against them, that she is the enemy of free institutions and social progress. All this is wrong. Religion is one and catholic, and obligatory upon all alike; political systems, save in the great ethical principles which underlie them, are particular, national, and are obligatory only on the nation that adopts them. There are catholic principles of government, but no catholic or universal form of government. Our government is best for us, but that does not prove that in political matters we are wiser or better than other civilized nations, or that we have the right to set ourselves up as the model nation of the world. Other nations may not be wholly forsaken by Providence. Non-Catholic Americans cry out against the church that she is anti-republican; but if we were monarchists we should cry out as did the monarchical party in the sixteenth century, that she is anti-monarchical and hostile to the independence of kings. Let us learn that she may in one age or country support one form of civil constitution, and without inconsistency support a different system in another.

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From All the Year Round.

"DEO OPT. MAX"

Art thou drowsy, dull, indifferent,
Folder of the hands,
Dreaming o'er the silent falling
Of life's measured sands?

Living without aim or motion,
Save thyself to please,
Careless as the beasts that perish,
Sitting at thine ease?

Not for thee the mighty message
Rings in startling tone;
Vainly would its peeling accents
Strike through hearts of stone.

Sounding o'er the clash and clatter
Of this earth's vain din,
Unto you, that live in earnest,
And that work to win,

Thus it speaks: "Aspirants, toilers
For some lofty gain,
See ye spend not strength and spirits,
Hope and faith, in vain!

"All that soars past self is noble--
Every upward aim--
Make it nobler yet--the noblest!
And immortal fame!

"Let not good or great content ye--
Higher and still higher,
Only for the best, the greatest,
Labor and aspire!

"Spurning all that's partial, doubtful,
All your vigor bend
(Worthiest aim and worthiest effort)
To a perfect end!

"Thus have all true saints before ye,
All true heroes striven,
Reaching for the best, the highest,
Beyond earth to heaven."

------

{641}

Translated from the French.

ROBERT; OR, THE INFLUENCE OF A GOOD MOTHER.

CHAPTER FIRST.

"Although young on the earth,
I am already alone.
. . . . .
And when I ask myself
Where are those I love?
I look at the green turf."
LAMARTINE.

THE ORPHAN.

The traveler who passes through the village of the baths of Mount Dore, situated at the base of the mountain of Angle, will find that between the mountains the little streams of Dore and Dogne unites, and take the name of the river Dordogne. In looking at the course of this new-born River, he will see to the left of the mountain of Ecorchade, thus named for its ruggedness and its deep ravines. This mountain crumbles away each day under the powerful hand of time, and its volcanic wrecks move the valley with strange sounds, which the echo takes up and wafts to the most distant spots. On the other side of the valley, to the right of the mountain, and in front of Ecorchade, is another mountain, the round top of which is covered with verdure and with wood. Its base is formed of basaltic columns of black, white, and gray rocks of different shapes and sizes, which stand there like a troop of phantoms. Near the base, and in one of the fissures of this mass of rocks, piled up by some giant hand, there was, about twenty-five years ago, a little house, constructed, one might imagine, by the spirit of the mountain, to serve as a refuge for travellers when the furious children of the tempest were unchained. Hidden by the abrupt flanks of the mountain, and masked in the spring and summer by the dense foliage of trees centuries old, this retreat suddenly became visible to mortal eye. But the chief interest attached to it is, that for twelve years it was inhabited by a high-bred lady, who chose this secluded spot, and placed herself, one might say, on the first step of this gigantic ladder, which seemed by degrees to draw her nearer to heaven, and away from the vain pursuits of earth. She came unattended, carrying in her arms an infant several months old. This child, her son, was the object of her most tender care, and was the only thing that was to endear her to this savage solitude. From whence came this person, who was she, and what were her resources for living? No one knew. Her real name even was to remain a mystery for all, even for those eager and pitiless people who are always ready to unravel the causes of secret sorrow, and who rejoice when they can see tears and suffering. Such people are like a species of wasp that only approach to sting you most cruelly. The people of the valley had on many occasions tried to stop this young woman and capture her confidence by testimonials of friendship and feigned sensibility, but they had seen their insidious advances repulsed with such coldness that, deceived and disappointed, they were obliged to put an end to their efforts. Finally, when all curiosity had subsided and given place to the most complete indifference, they learned in some way that she called herself Madame Dormeuil, and her little boy Robert. There was one person, however, who had received the intimate confidence of Madame Dormeuil, and that was the curé of the village, and from time to time he was seen directing his steps toward the solitary abode, where more than one indiscreet eye had wished to penetrate. At the time this story opens it is {642} night, one of those glorious nights of the month of May, nights full of sweet mysteries and soft perfumes, nights the nightingale resounds in harmonious cadences. It is the hour of silence and repose for humanity; but still a dim light shone through one of the windows of this isolated house. As the hours of the night advanced, when all nature slept, even the smallest insect under the humid leaves of the rose, hard necessity constrained even the inmates of this house to sleep, but alas! It proved a funeral awakening. The tender mother, who, during the infancy of her child, had tasted in this modest asylum moments of happiness, pure and chaste, such as our only given to maternal love, closed her eyes, and breathed out her last sigh, with no one here but her little son. In vain he calls his dear mother, her voice can reply to him no more. Poor child! what will become of him? for he has no one in the wide world to love and protect him; and in the bitterness of his grief he sobs and cries, "Dead! dead! I have no mother now!" and takes her hand, but it is cold and stiff, and no longer sensible to the soft pressure of his. The unaccustomed silence of those lips, that never parted but to speak tenderly to him, is more than he can bear, but suddenly his face recovers its habitual serenity, and a smile lights up his pallid cheeks. What means this sudden change, this almost instantaneous forgetfulness of sorrow, which drives in an instant the tears of love? But do not blame him; it is not forgetfulness, but remembrance--the remembrance of his mother's last words--her last adieu, her last sublime expression of a love which cannot be extinguished, even by the cold shadow of death, for it re-lives in heaven. "My child," said his mother to him on that day, "I have loved you much, but I must leave you. I am going to live with the angels, but I will watch over you. Be wise, honest, laborious; love God with all your heart, and others as yourself, and he will bless you. Do not grieve for my loss, for I will still be useful to you in heaven. I will pray there for you. Take courage, and always remember, when you are in trouble, to raise your thoughts to the eternal throne, and consolation will not be denied you." These were the words which Robert remember, and which stopped so suddenly the violence of his grief. This was why he almost thought his mother was not dead; this was why he felt no fear, though alone; with these sweet thoughts forever present, he fancied her eyes would reopen and smile upon him. He knelt in prayed with fervor, seeming to solicit some special manifestation, and his attitude told that he mentally invoked of his mother and the Protector of children what he knew to be good for them; and his prayer, no doubt, was favorably received, for it his imagination he saw the home of the saints. "My mother!" cried the child, transported with joy, "is it thee? Oh! speak, I pray thee, speak to thy Robert!" But the celestial vision faded, and he saw nothing but the thousands of little globes of light, the sparkling fire of which dazzled his eyes. Thus maternal influence, even from the tomb, comes as a gentle authority to this pious orphan. We will see him in each important event, and in each critical phase of his life invoking this mysterious and beneficent power that presides over him from heaven, in the presence of his mother. It is already under the generous impulse of this belief that he is consoled and strengthens, and returns to the funeral chamber, and calls again upon prayer and reflection.

Robert had never played with children. Always with his mother, whom he passionately loved, and who conversed with him as she would have done with an older person, he had acquired a seriousness of conversation and a precocity of judgment which made him, though still a child in years, almost a man in his intelligence and good sense. Child of solitude, wild flower of the mountain, he was {643} entirely ignorant of the habits of cities and of society, but he possessed an instinct which took the place of large experience in human nature. He was what God had made him, good and generous, loving the beautiful with the fervent adoration which characterizes great souls, and feeling a deep repugnance for even the appearance of evil. These inestimable gifts God in his wisdom has seen fit to endow to certain souls.

Robert was not more than twelve years of age, but he could read and write well. Possessed of a good memory, he had retained the many recitations made him by his mother in geography and sacred and profane history. His course of reading had not been extensive, for his mother had but few books; but she had been to him the living book from which he had gained all he knew, and which developed the qualities of the heart and Christian virtues which, later in life, shone so brilliantly in him. Robert was often absorbed in thinking over his past life, so rich in delicious memories. He remembered that his mother had spoken to him of Paris with an emotion which betrayed itself in her trembling voice. She was born there, she had told him, and had passed a part of her youth there. He remembered perfectly that, each time his mother referred to the subject, she exercised upon him a charm which entirely captivated his attention. If by her glowing descriptions of Madame Dormeuil had any intention of exciting in her son the wish to go to that city, she completely succeeded, for, notwithstanding his tender years, the words of his mother had filled him with an ardent desire to see the place predestined to be the most beautiful and most wonderful city ever built by the hands of man. This desire taking hold of him, he naturally thinks of the means of satisfying it, if the unfortunate circumstances in which he finds himself will forget. Moved by the strong wish, which was not weekend when obstacles presented themselves, Robert tried to get things ready to start. Opening a closet where he had often seen his mother put things she intended for him, the first object that met his eyes was a package, tied, and bearing this inscription, "For my son when he is twenty-one years of age." Under this was another paper, folded double, but not tied. He opened this, looking at the words which were written at the top: "My last requests." "When I shall be no more, my son," said Madame Dormeuil (and unfortunately the hour of death approaches very near) "quit this mountain where thou hast been a happy child, and go to Paris, where thou wast born. God and my love will conduct thee there, but constantly place thyself under his protection. Work; make thyself beloved, by thy sweetness and perseverance and good conduct. A voice within said to me one day, that happiness crowned all virtuous efforts, and this prediction of my heart will be realized, and thy mother will rejoice in heaven when she sees it descend on thee. Thou wilt find in a purse some crown pieces; it is all that I possess. Start soon, walk the short roads, have courage. Avoid bad children, seek the old and the wise. Pray to God fervently, and he will never abandon the good who walk in his presence and keep in their hearts the counsels of a mother. Adieu, my child, my dear and much loved Robert I will meet you in a better world than that in which I leave you, my poor little one, and then we will never part again."