Chapter VIII: Avowals (8)

This is a pleasant, readable, feminine sort of book, written by an ardent and intelligent lover of nature, and quite equal to inspiring almost any body with more or less enthusiasm for the pursuit to which it is devoted. The writer catalogues minutely the botanical charms of all the different seasons--midwinter as well as the depth of summer; describes the flowers of each month, and tells where to look for them; and gives practical instructions for making miniature conservatories of wild flowers, and doing various other pretty things such as young ladies delight in. The book is written for the latitude of New York. Excellent wood-cuts accompany the text, and the paper and binding are suitable for the holiday season.

* * * * *

CHRIST AND THE CHURCH. Lectures delivered during Advent, by
the Rev. Thomas S. Preston. New York: The Catholic Publication
Society, 126 Nassau Street. 1870.

This volume is by far the most original and the best in every respect of several excellent volumes by the reverend author. The style and method of treating the subject remind us of Archbishop Manning. The discourses here published were preached to overflowing congregations, on the Sunday evenings during the last Advent. They develop a most important and interesting line of argument, not frequently handled, but likely to be most useful to the best class of Protestants. They are intended to show how those doctrines of the church and sacraments which are distinctively Catholic flow necessarily from the doctrines of original justice, the fall, the incarnation and redemption. They address, therefore, directly, and in the most conclusive manner, those Protestants who are called orthodox or evangelical, in common parlance. They cannot be too strongly recommended to those persons who believe in the true divinity of Jesus Christ and seek to know his doctrine and law. Pious Catholics, also, will derive great instruction and edification from this volume. It is published in the neatest and most attractive form, and is especially to be welcomed at a moment when so much glittering but counterfeit coin is in circulation.

* * * * *

SADLIER'S CATHOLIC DIRECTORY, ALMANAC, AND ORDO, for the year of
our Lord, 1870. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co. 1870.

We are pleased to see that our suggestion of last year, with regard to the binding of the _Almanac_, has been acted upon this year; and we now have a work we can at least open without tearing it to pieces. We would suggest other improvements--in the matter of better paper, more margin on the page, less advertisements, and a little more correctness in names and places in next year's issue--all of which would be a great improvement on the present volume, which is in some points superior to former ones.

* * * * *

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH IN THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES.
By K. R. Hagenbach, D.D. Translated by the Rev. I. F. Hurst, D.D.
2 vols. New York: Scribner.

This author, who is a moderately orthodox Protestant, is well acquainted with German Protestantism, and his work will therefore be useful to those who wish to study the phases of that rapidly dissolving view of Christianity.

* * * * *

THE LIFE, PASSION, DEATH, AND RESURRECTION OF OUR LORD JESUS
CHRIST. Being an Abridged Harmony of the Four Gospels in the
Words of the Sacred Text. Edited by the Rev. Henry Formby. With
an entirely new series of engravings on wood, from designs by
C. Clasen, D. Nolen, and others. New York: Catholic Publication
Society. 1870.

Fr. Formby is well known as a writer of great taste and remarkable skill in preparing books for children and grown people who require reading that is easily understood. His pictorial series has long been popular in England, and will now be republished, with the author's permission, by the Catholic Publication Society. The present volume is the first of the series. It is a continuous narrative taken from all the four Gospels, according to the Rhemish version, judiciously compiled according to the best harmonies, and abridged in such a way as to simplify without curtailing in any important respect the history. The illustrations are numerous and spirited, and, with one or two exceptions, are pleasing. The book is a charming one, as well as one most useful and important for children. Nothing can be more suitable, also, for good, plain Catholics, who ought by all means to be familiar with the Gospel history, and who will find this arrangement of it much better for their use than the Gospels themselves read separately. This book ought to be in every Catholic family, day-school, and Sunday-school, and to be circulated by the ten thousand.

* * * * *

THE LIBRARY OF GOOD EXAMPLE. In twelve volumes. New York: P.
O'Shea. 1870.

This series is mainly composed of tales, etc., already before the public in manifold guises. Hence an enumeration of the titles of the several volumes, or a review of their contents, would be to our readers "a thrice-told tale." We will only say that, in our opinion, although they are admirably adapted for the perusal of children, the temper, at least of the juvenile reader, in search of "fresh fields and pastures new," will not be improved by the discovery that, in expending his pocket-money for the _Library of Good Example_, he has, for the third time, in some instances, purchased the same book. In one respect, however, this series is an improvement on its predecessors--it is _not_ illustrated.

* * * * *

CONCILIEN GESCHICHTE. Hefele. Vol. vii. Part I. Council of
Constance. 1869.

This part of the learned bishop's great work is especially interesting at the present moment, on account of the pretence raised by a certain number of persons that the Council of Constance was, in all its sessions, oecumenical. It is, besides this temporary interest, of lasting and intrinsic importance, for reasons well known to every scholar. Dr. Hefele not only gives us a learned and accurate historical work, but also a graphic picture of the intensely exciting and interesting events of the great Council of Constance. We cite the author's concluding sentence on the authority of the decrees of the council: "That (Eugenius IV.) intended to exclude the decrees of Constance respecting the superiority of general councils over the pope from his approbation is indubitable. In accordance with this, and according to modern law, which declares the papal approbation of general councils necessary in order to make them such, there can be no doubt that (_a_) all the decrees of Constance, which are not prejudicial to the papacy, are to be considered oecumenical; on the other hand, that (_b_) all which infringe against the _jus_, the _dignitas_, and _præeminentia_ of the apostolic see, are to be considered as reprobated." This is in harmony with the sentiment of all the soundest canonists and theologians, namely, that which excludes the Council of Constance from the number of the councils strictly called oecumenical, and relegates it to a second class of general councils some of whose decrees are rejected and others approved.

* * * * *

THE STATUS OF THE CATHOLIC CLERGY IN THE UNITED STATES. Bishop
McQuaid!--Father O'Flaherty!--The Imbroglio in the Diocess of
Rochester.

This vile anonymous pamphlet, printed without any publisher's name and signed, "Priests of the Diocese of Rochester," is a disgrace to its authors, especially if they are really priests. A publication of this kind, which is in itself a grievous offence, cannot claim even a hearing for any thing it may contain. If any priests of the diocese of Rochester have so far lost all sense of sacerdotal duty as to put forth this pamphlet, taking advantage of their bishop's absence, it is evident that a little more application of ecclesiastical discipline in that diocese will prove salutary.

* * * * *

THE BYRNES OF GLENGOULAH. A True Tale. By Alice Nolan. New York:
P. O'Shea.

SALLY CAVANAGH; OR, THE UNTENANTED GRAVES. A Tale of Tipperary. By
Charles J. Kickham. Boston: Patrick Donahoe.

The foul wrongs to which the existing laws between landlord and tenant expose the peasantry of Ireland are made the ground-work of both these stories of Irish life. While these wrongs are familiar to all, so also are their sad effects, as narrated in the volumes before us. Of these, the former is undoubtedly more racy of the soil; though the latter, we think, will leave a more pleasing impression on the reader. The great fault with Miss Nolan is a talent for exaggeration; her _favorites_ are always right; their enemies are ever harsh in word, cruel in act, and villainous in appearance. The landlord's victims are almost too ethereal for humanity--only a little less than angels; he and his myrmidons too diabolical for fiends.

* * * * *

GREAT MYSTERIES AND LITTLE PLAGUES. By John Neal. Boston: Roberts
Brothers. 1870.

The author proves that he has fully studied his subject, and that his title-page, though rather mysterious, is still most expressive and true. He shows by nearly three hundred anecdotes that children are really great mysteries and little plagues. His fairy story of "Goody Gracious! and the Forget-me-not" is the very model of a fairy story--plenty of imagination without going into the impossible and improbable.

* * * * *

ACTA EX IIS DECERPTA QUÆ APUD SANCTAM SEDEM GERUNTUR, etc.
Baltimore: Kelly & Piet.

This is a fac-simile reprint of the Roman edition. It is a work of the greatest utility to ecclesiastics. We noticed some errors of the press, which suggests the remark that the proofs should invariably be carefully revised by a clergyman.

* * * * *

P. Donahoe, Boston, announces for early publication, _Life Pictures of the Passion of Christ_, translated from the German of Dr. Veith, by Rev. Father Noethen; _The Our Father_, translated from the German of the same author; _The Monks of the West_, by the Count Montalembert, and a _Life of Pius IX_.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

From P. O'Shea, New York, The Key of Heaven; or, A Manual of
Prayer. With the approbation of the Most Rev. John McCloskey,
D.D., Archbishop of New York. Revised, corrected, and improved.
1869. Pp. 532.

* * * * *

From J. W. SCHERMERHORN & CO., New York: Scottish University
Addresses by Mill, Froude, Carlyle. Paper.

* * * * *

From E. CUMMISKEY, Philadelphia: Considerations upon Christian
Truths and Christian Duties; digested into Meditations for
every day in the year. By Rt. Rev. Richard Challoner. New
edition. 1 vol. 12mo. Controversy between Rev. Messrs. Hughes
and Breckinridge on the subject, "Is the Protestant Religion the
Religion of Christ?" Sixth edition. 1 vol. 12mo.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. X., No. 60.--MARCH, 1870.

CIVIL AND POLITICAL LIBERTY.[176]

That evangelical romancer, M. Merle d'Aubigné, not long since published a discourse having for title, _Jean Calvin, un des Fondateurs des Libertés Modernes_, or "John Calvin, one of the Founders of Modern Liberty." The discourse, as the Abbé Martin says, is of no importance; but the title is significant. It claims for the Genevan reformer the merit of being one of the founders of liberty in modern society. Mr. Bancroft in his _History of the United States_ does the same. A Lutheran might with equal truth claim as much for Luther, a Scottish Presbyterian as much for John Knox, and an Anglican as much for Henry VIII. and the Virgin Queen Elizabeth. Nearly all Protestant and anti-Catholic writers assume, as an indisputable maxim, that liberty was born of the Reformation. All your Protestant and liberal journals assert it, and the ignorant multitude believe it. Whoever contradicts it is denounced as an ultramontanist, a tool of the clergy, or a Jesuit, and, of course, is silenced. Protestant nations enjoy, even with many Catholics, the _prestige_ of being free nations; and all Catholic nations are set down as despotic, and, owing to the influence of the church, as deadly hostile to every kind of liberty, religious, political, civil, and individual. Protestantism and liberty, or Catholicity and despotism, is adopted as the formula of the convictions of this enlightened age.

This alleged connection of Protestantism and liberty, and of Catholicity and despotism, the Abbé Martin maintains, is what gives to Protestant missions in old Catholic nations the principal part of their success in unmaking Catholics. The Protestant missionaries, seconded by all the liberal journals, proclaim their Protestantism as the liberator of nations, as that which emancipates the people from political despotism, and the mind from spiritual thraldom. The great argument used in this country against the church is her alleged hostility to liberty, and the certainty, if she once gained the ascendency here, she would destroy our free institutions, and reduce the nation to political and spiritual slavery. Such is the allegation; such the argument.

Now, every man who knows anything of history knows that the reverse of what is here alleged is true. The church has, undoubtedly, always opposed lawlessness, and set her face against revolutions for either king or people; but she has never favored slavery or despotism, and has always favored that orderly liberty, the only true liberty, which consists in the reign of law, instead of passion, caprice, or arbitrary will. She has always and everywhere insisted that the laws should be just and supreme, alike for ruler and ruled. She has sometimes submitted to despotic authority, but she has never approved it, or recognized it as legitimate; and when a courtier monk preached before Philip II. of Spain that the king is absolute, and may do whatever he wills, the Spanish Inquisition arraigned him for his false doctrine, and compelled him to retract it publicly from the same pulpit from which he had preached it.

The fact is, not that liberty was born of or with the Reformation, but that the Reformation itself was born of absolute monarchy, despotism, or Cæsarism, revived and confirmed at the epoch of its birth. Prior to the Reformation, which marked the triumph of Cæsarism over feudalism, there was, no doubt, much barbarism in Christian Europe; but there was no absolutism. A reminiscence of Græco-Roman imperialism remained, indeed, and was cherished by the civil lawyers or legists, whose maxim was, _Quod placuit principi, legis habet vigorem_; but absolutism never succeeded in getting itself established. The German emperors, especially the Hohenstauffen, Cæsarists in principle as well as in name, attempted to revive the Roman empire, but did not succeed. Power was divided. There were free cities and _communes_ that governed themselves as veritable republics under the guardianship, nominal rather than real, of a suzerain. The royal power was limited by the great vassals of the crown, and the authority of these in turn was limited by the lesser nobles, by the estates, and by the laws, and usages which had the force of laws. What characterizes the middle ages is the spirit of liberty. Few men in our time have better understood the middle ages, save as to the action of the church, than Sir Walter Scott, who, if a romancer, was also something more and better. He says in his _Anne of Geierstein_:

"We may remind our readers that, in all feudalized countries,
(that is to say, in almost all Europe during the middle ages,) an
_ardent spirit of liberty_ pervaded the constitution; and the only
fault that could be found was, that the privileges and freedom for
which the great vassals contended did not sufficiently descend to
the lower orders of society, or extend protection to those most
likely to need it. The two first ranks in the state, the nobles
and the clergy, enjoyed high and important privileges, and even
the third estate, or citizens, had this immunity in peculiar, that
no new duties, customs, or taxes of any kind could be exacted from
them save by their own consent."

The fault Sir Walter mentions was not peculiar to the middle ages, and is not less in European countries to-day than it was then. The representatives or delegates of the cities and _communes_ constituted the third estate, and sat in the assembly of the estates as early as the reign of Philip the Fair. If the rural population were not represented in the estates, they were not forgotten. The church had received that population as either slaves or serfs. She had succeeded in completely abolishing slavery in all continental Europe before the fifteenth century, and had made much progress toward putting an end to serfage. The enslaved populations were emancipated in nearly all Catholic Europe before the Reformation, and in the early part of the seventeenth century the French courts decided that "a slave could not breathe the air of France." The maxim of the English courts was plagiarized from the French judges. There may be a question whether the European peasant has gained much since the middle ages; whether his increased wants have not more than kept pace with his increased means of supply; and as for protection, they who most need it never find it under any political _régime_. The most cruel and heartless landlords could not have been more cruel and heartless than are your cotton-mills and mammoth moneyed corporations, especially when Mammon was not exclusively worshipped.

But be all this as it may, this much is certain: that during the feudal ages there was, under the influence and untiring exertions of the pope and the monastic orders, a constant social amelioration of society going on, and the whole tendency of those marvellous ages, so little understood, and so foully belied, was toward the establishment in every nation of a well-ordered liberty, under the safeguard of the church, and of Christian or Christianized traditions and manners. The fifteenth century came, and brought with it not only the revival of pagan literature, but of pagan politics, which gave to the secular order a predominance over the spiritual, as we have explained in previous articles. The unhappy residence of the popes at Avignon, that "Babylonian captivity," as it has been called, and the great schism of the west, which followed it, in the fourteenth century, had served much to diminish the splendor and to weaken the political power of the papacy. This, coupled with the secular development of the age, and the pagan revival, gave a chance for Cæsarism to raise its head, and for the sovereigns to declare themselves absolute, and responsible to God alone for their exercise of power. The feudal constitution of Europe was crushed, and the pagan empire took its place. Not only the emperor and the mightiest kings, but the pettiest sovereign duke or count became a Cæsar in his own dominions.

At this moment, just as Cæsarism was on the point of winning the victory, the Reformation broke out, not in behalf of the old liberties, but to help abolish them and secure to Cæsar his triumph. So far from founding or even aiding liberty, it interrupted its progress, and gave the movement in its favor, which had from the seventh century been going on, a false and fatal direction. The originators of the Reformation may have been simply heterodox theologians; but they could not sustain themselves without the aid of the princes, and that aid could be obtained only by ministering to their love of power, and submitting to their supremacy alike in spirituals and temporals. The princes that favored the Reformation became each in his own principality absolute prince and _pontifex maximus_. The prince protects the reformers, and uses his civil and military power to crush their enemies, and to extirpate the old religion from his dominions. Dependent on him, and sustained only as upheld by him, the Reformation was impotent to restrain his arbitrary power. The reformed religion, like gentilism, of which it was in fact only a revival, assumed at once the character of a national religion; and the reformed church was absorbed by the state, and became one of its functions, an instrument of police, which must always be the fate of a national religion.

But the Protestant nations not only helped on Cæsarism, which was the spirit of the age, but they gave up or were despoiled of their old liberties, which they had long possessed and enjoyed under the benign protection of the church. England saw her parliament practically annulled, and the prince governing, under Henry VIII., his daughter Elizabeth, and the first two Stuarts, as a Byzantine Basileus or an oriental despot; and it cost her a century of insurrections, revolutions, and civil wars to recover some portion of the political and civil freedom of which the Reformation had despoiled her. Even the Abbé Martin seems to forget that from 1639 to 1746 England was in a state as unsettled as France has been since 1789. She has not even yet recovered all her old liberties. She has, indeed, depressed the crown to exalt the aristocracy of birth or wealth, and is now entering upon a fearful struggle between aristocracy and democracy, most likely to end either in reviving the pagan republic, or in establishing once more the absolute authority of the crown.

The author very justly maintains that Protestantism has not created liberty, and that it has arrested or falsified it. He recalls that,

"At the breaking out of Protestantism slavery had entirely
disappeared, and serfage or villenage, the transition state from
slavery to complete liberty, was gradually disappearing, and
giving place to free labor and domestic servants. The third estate
was everywhere constituted, and nowhere had it more life and vigor
than in the neighborhood of the churches and monasteries. This
emancipation was the work of the Catholic Church, and never had
a more signal service been rendered to liberty. The basis of all
liberties, I say not of modern but of Christian liberties, was
laid.

"Impartial history testifies that Protestantism has not
accelerated this movement in behalf of liberty, but has arrested
it. A few facts, gathered at random from the immense number that
might be adduced, will sufficiently prove this assertion.

"'In Denmark,' says Berthold, 'the peasant was reduced to serfage
as a dog.' The nobility profited by the reform, not only to
appropriate to themselves the greater part of the goods of the
church, but also the free goods of the peasant.

"'The _corvées_,' says Allen, the best historian of Denmark,
'were arbitrarily multiplied; the peasants were treated as serfs.
It happened frequently that the children of the preachers and
sacristans themselves were reduced to serfage. In 1804--mark
the late date--personal liberty was granted for the first time
to twenty thousand families of serfs. Sweden and Norway fared
no better. In Mecklenburg, the oppression of the peasants,
who had no one to defend their rights since they had lost the
effective and vigilant protection of the Catholic clergy, followed
immediately the triumph of the Reformation. At the diet of 1607,
they were declared simple tenants at will--_colons_--who must
yield up to the landlords, on their demand, even the lands which
they had possessed from time immemorial. Their personal liberty
was suppressed by the ordinances of 1633, 1648, and 1654. They
sought to escape from this intolerable servitude by flight. The
emigration was large. But the severest punishments, the lash,
the carcan, even death, could not arrest it, nor prevent the
depopulation of the fields. The lot of those miserable creatures
hardly differed from that of negro slaves. The only difference
was, that the masters were prohibited from separating families,
and selling the members to the highest bidder at public auction;
but they eluded it by trading off their serfs as horses and cows.
Serfage was abolished in Mecklenburg only in 1820.

"The introduction of the Reform into Pomerania gave birth there
to all the horrors of slavery. The ordinance of 1616 decreed that
all peasants are serfs without any rights.... The ministers were
required to denounce the fugitive serf from the pulpit. People are
astonished to-day at the emigration from Germany, which nearly
doubles that from Ireland. May not the cause be found in that old
state of things, which, though recently abolished, has left but
too many traces of its existence?

"A single fact will enable us to judge of the magnitude of the
evil in Prussia. Under Frederick II., the contemporary and friend
of Voltaire, who labored so energetically to make of his infant
kingdom an immense barrack, the soldiers themselves, the support
and instrument of his power, when discharged, returned to the
common lot of serfs, after having fought his battles and won his
victories. They were subjected anew to their landlords; and not
only they, but also their wives, their widows, and their children,
even though born in a state of freedom....

"Calvinism has not produced so sad results of the same kind. Less
hierarchical in its nature than Lutheranism, and having taken
its rise in Geneva, a free state, it has preserved something of
its original constitution. Thus it has prevailed generally in
countries organized under a republican form; in France, even, it
aspired to a federation. But the liberty it has found, rather
than created, it turns into an odious tyranny. It has, above
all, no respect for individual liberty. The system which Calvin
established at Geneva was even surpassed by that of John Knox
in Scotland. The ecclesiastical domination over the faithful,
and the inquisition into all their doings, were frightful. Every
detail of private life could be brought before the presbyterial
_forum_; nobody could feel himself safe. Espionage and domestic
accusation were the soul of the system. The secrets of the
family were scrutinized and inventoried; and the terrible arm
of excommunication struck without relaxation and without mercy.
Woe to him who fell under its blows; for him there was no social
right. Will it be believed? The Puritans of England, who, to
escape oppression and death, free, and masters of a virgin
territory, became only the more rigorous, and their communities in
North America were even more exclusive and tyrannical than those
of their brethren in Europe." (Pp. 326-330.)

The author is too lenient toward Calvinism. It had, indeed, no partiality for monarchy, and just as little for democracy. What it aimed at was an aristocracy of the saints. Only those in grace could be freemen or exercise any authority in the community. The church was composed of the saints alone; and hence, in the colony of Massachusetts, only church members could be selectmen, or magistrates, or vote in elections. Church members had equal rights indeed; but those who were not church members had no rights at all, political, civil, or individual, and no social standing. The church members themselves covenanted to watch over each other, which meant, practically, that every member was to act as a spy upon every other member; and hence that cautiousness in speech, that fear of a _mouchard_ in every neighbor, and that obsequiousness to public opinion, which marks not a few of the descendants of the New England Puritans even to this day. The rights of man in relation to his brother man were undreamed of, and for individual liberty there was no respect whatever. The individual was subject to the congregation, ruled by the pastor and elders or deacons, themselves ruled by two or three venerable spinsters. Calvinism sought, in fact, to govern society, _minus_ celibacy, as a monastery, by converting the evangelical counsels into inflexible laws, and without the assistance of the grace of vocation. We shall never forget the odious tyranny to which Calvinism subjected our own boyhood. Life for us was stern, gloomy, hedged round with terror. We did not dare listen to the joyous song of a bird, nor to inhale the fragrance of an opening flower. Whatever gave pleasure was to be eschewed, and the most innocent pleasures were to be accounted deadly sins. We cannot even now, in our old age, think of our own Calvinistic childhood, which was by no means exceptional, without a shudder.

Thus far the author has spoken of individual liberty, which is the most essential of all, and without which civil and political liberty is a vain mockery. He asserts and proves, as we have seen, that Protestantism has not given to individual liberty a new development, but has arrested it. Well, was it more favorable to political liberty? We have answered this question already, but we cannot forbear citing the author's own reply:

"At the epoch of the outbreak of Protestantism, Christendom was
advancing with rapid strides toward the practice of the largest
liberty. For centuries the Italian republics had pushed liberty
almost to license. They were, no doubt, often disorderly and
turbulent; but they were full of sap, overflowing with life and
activity, which availed for Italy a power and a glory which
she seeks in vain from a factitious unity. Switzerland, by the
energy of her patriotism and the wisdom of her government, won
the admiration of the whole world. Flanders and the northern
provinces of Spain watched with jealous susceptibility over their
proud and noble independence; England had her _Magna Charta_, the
basis of the strong constitution which has given her security
in the midst of modern political and social convulsions; the
cities and _communes_ of France and Germany administered freely
their own affairs, as small republics under the guardianship,
often more nominal than real, of some few suzerains. The guilds
or corporations of the mechanics and tradesmen enjoyed rights
the most extended. Power was nowhere despotic, and, though not
restrained by scientific and uniform rules, it encountered
everywhere a counterpoise to its authority and obstacles to
its arbitrary will. Christian monarchy, that creation of the
church, unknown in antiquity, approached maturity, and there was
room to hope that it would found liberty without opening the
door to license, and without having recourse to that enormous
centralization which has only too often become a necessity.
Catholic theology, always liberal, in the true sense of the word,
inclined more to the rights of the people than to the rights of
the sovereign. It knew not yet that right divine of kings as it
was understood under Louis XIV., a diminutive pagan Cæsarism,
which, as we shall show further on, held more strictly than is
commonly believed from the principles which the Renaissance and
Protestantism caused to prevail." (Pp. 330-332.)

We remark here that the _Christian monarchy_ of which the learned abbé speaks existed in the doctrines of the theologians and in the efforts of the church, rather than in the actual order. There were Christian monarchs or sovereigns, like St. Henry of Germany, St. Ferdinand of Spain, and St. Louis of France; but there was nowhere, that we have been able to discover, a _Christian_ monarchy. The feudal monarchy was of barbarian origin, and was a development of the chief of the tribe or clan. Side by side with this, constantly struggling with it for the mastership of society, was Græco-Roman imperialism, or briefly, Cæsarism, favored by the whole body of the legists, and always opposed by the church, though not always by churchmen become statesmen and courtiers. This pagan Cæsarism, which concentrates in the hands of the prince absolute authority in both temporals and spirituals, survived the fall of the Roman empire, and never for a moment ceased to struggle to recover the mastership; and it was it that was in question in the long struggle between the pope and the emperor. Defeated in the last of the Hohenstauffen, it revived in every petty prince in Christendom. It drove the popes from Rome into the exile of Avignon, and caused the great western schism. Still, the church was for a time able to prevent its complete success. But in 1453 came the taking of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks, the dispersion of the Greek scholars through the west; and the revival of pagan politics and literature served to reinforce Cæsarism, to weaken the influence of the church, and to give birth to the Protestant Reformation--at bottom nothing more nor less than a revival of the pagan order, against which the church from her birth had struggled.

The movement of which Protestantism was one of the results dates from a period before Luther, Melancthon, and Calvin, from the revival in the fifteenth century, and the successful struggle of Cæsarism against feudalism and the church. Protestantism may have prevented the development of a Christian monarchy; but it was itself a child of Cæsarism. The movement against feudalism, and for the concentration of power in the hands of the monarch, as well as for great centralized states, preceded the birth of Protestantism. Louis XI. in France, Maximilian I. in Germany, Henry VII. of England, the Cardinal Ximenes in Spain, and the de' Medici in Italy, all labored for the centralization of power, and paved the way for the revival and triumph in their respective countries of pagan Cæsarism. The Abbé Martin's statements are correct only in case we count Protestantism, under its social and political aspects, as the continuation and development of the movement in behalf of Cæsarism, or the centralization of power, and against the liberties secured by feudalism.

We are no admirers of feudalism; but we hold it better than the Græco-Roman imperialism it supplanted, or the absolute monarchy which succeeded it in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of which Bossuet was a conspicuous defender. The Reformation aided the movement in behalf of Cæsarism, by bringing to its support an open rebellion against the papal authority and the faith of the church, and secured it the victory. Cæsarism followed it immediately, not only in the nations that accepted the new religion, but also, to a great extent, in the nations that remained Catholic. On the first point the author asks:

"Who does not know that Lutheranism depended solely on the
princes and nobles to overcome and despoil the church, and to
triumph over the resistance of the people? Through gratitude, and
through necessity, it surrendered itself and the people to the
discretionary authority of the princes. In all countries where it
became predominant, absolute power prevailed.

"As the result of the revolution in 1661, Frederic III. of Denmark
and his successors were declared absolute monarchs. The royal
law of 1665 attests that the king was required to take no oath,
was under no obligation whatever; but had plenary authority to
do whatever he pleased. In Sweden, the violent and surreptitious
establishment of Protestantism was done in the interest of royalty
and nobility, and, moreover, raised up an antagonism between
these two powers which produced a series of revolutions in that
country unrivalled in any other European state. But royalty
finally triumphed. The estates, in 1680, declared that the king
is bound to no form of government. In 1682, they declared it an
absurdity to pretend that he was bound by statutes and ordinances
to consult, before acting, the estates; whence it follows that
the will of the king was the supreme law. 'After that,' says
Geijer, the classic historian of Sweden, 'all was interpreted to
the advantage of the omnipotence of one alone. The estates were
no longer called the estates of the realm, but the estates of his
majesty. In 1693, the unlimited absolutism of royalty became the
law; the king was free to govern according to his good pleasure,
without any responsibility.'

"It would be too long to follow the introduction of the same
_régime_ as the consequence of the Reformation into the several
states and principalities of Germany, in Mecklenburg, Pomerania,
the duchies of Hanover and Brunswick, Brandenburg and Saxony.
Everywhere the introduction of the new religion was followed
by an augmentation of the power of the prince and nobles, and
everywhere the prince finally succeeded in absorbing the power
of the nobility. Prussia affords us a striking example of this
result. Under the reign of the Elector Frederick William, from
1640 to 1688, the arbitrary and absolute power of the prince was
developed according to a regular plan. The General Diet after 1665
ceased to be convoked. Crushing taxes were imposed without the
consent and against the protests of the estates, and collected by
the military; and so heavy were they, that multitudes of peasants,
despoiled of their goods, were driven to brigandage for a living.
A great number sought refuge in Poland, and nobles even deserted
a country that devoured their children. Lands which were taxed
beyond the value of their produce were abandoned, and suffered
to run to waste. The country was oppressed by an unprecedented
tyranny. Prussia, according to the expression of Stenzel, was
in the way of becoming one of those Asiatic countries in which
despotism stifles the growth of whatever is beautiful or noble."
(Pp. 332-334.)

We have already spoken of the effects of the introduction of Protestantism into England and Scotland. Calvinism, the author considers, caused less grave and less durable damage to liberty; yet it was not less tyrannical by nature, only it was less monarchical. "At Geneva it confiscated all the ancient franchises to the profit of the oligarchy it established, and it was not owing to it that in Holland the stadtholder did not become absolute." Protestant historians are perfectly well aware of these facts, and from time to time they concede them; and yet the best of them continue to assert the impudent falsehood, that Protestantism has created and sustained modern liberty, individual, civil, and political--not, indeed, because it has done so, but because they think it would have been much in its favor if it had.

The other point, that Protestantism is in great measure responsible for the establishment or partial establishment of the pagan monarchy, or Cæsarism, in Catholic nations, we have shown in our previous articles on the work before us; yet we cite the following from the author:

"It is not simply in countries in which it triumphed that
the Protestant Reformation has given to liberty a retrograde
movement; it has reacted in a most fatal, though generally in
an imperceptible, manner on Catholic governments themselves.
It was, at its first appearance, a terrible temptation to the
princes and sovereigns of Europe. It broke that firm independence
of the Catholic clergy which had for so many ages repressed the
tyrannical aspirations of secular governments; it gave up the
rich spoils of the church to them, reversed their parts, and
after having placed the priest, the representative of heaven, at
the mercy of the powers of earth, it constituted the prince the
master and director of consciences. What could be more seductive?
An obstacle to overcome, almost a yoke to break, independence
to conquer, vast riches to appropriate, the empire of souls to
place by the side of the empire of bodies, the ideal of a power
veritably sovereign; is it not the dream of every man who feels
himself at the head of a nation? Princes and sovereigns yielded to
the temptation. They were, besides, already prepared for it, by
the received theories of legists or civil lawyers, inherited from
the pagan state; by the ideas propagated by the Renaissance and by
the Machiavelian lessons then taught in all the courts of Europe;
and if all did not accept Protestantism, it was far less due to
their personal repulsion than to the decided opposition of their
people. But the new ideal of power germinated in their minds.
On the other hand, the church, weakened and her very existence
threatened, saw herself reduced to the necessity of relying on
them for support against the armed violence of the Reformation.
She must purchase their protection, and could do it only at the
expense of her independence. In various places she abandoned to
them the nomination of bishops and the collation of benefices,
giving by this sacrifice, rigorously exacted by circumstances,
and by this abandonment of her rights, which afterward proved so
fatal, a sufficient satisfaction for the moment to the secret
reason which inclined them to Protestantism. She loosened a prey
to them, in order not to be devoured herself. Their hunger thus
appeased, they consented to sustain her, but without having a
common cause with her.

"Profiting adroitly by their position, the sovereigns passed
rapidly from the part of defenders of the church to that of
guardians and masters, and while respecting the essence of the
spiritual power, they labored to subordinate the church and the
exercise of her authority to the surveillance of the state. Not
content with excluding all control of the church over their own
acts, all interventions of the spiritual authority in civil
and political affairs, they sought, after the example of the
Protestant princes, to penetrate the interior of the church,
and make themselves pontiffs; and if we cannot say that they
completely succeeded, we cannot any more say that they wholly
failed. What is certain is, that thenceforward they ceased to find
any serious obstacle in the Catholic clergy or their chief to
their designs, and that the legists, imbued with the maxims of the
Roman law, and for a long time hostile to the church, coming to
their aid, absolute royalty, without much difficulty, prevailed.
The indirect influence of Protestantism was there.

"Even the Catholic clergy themselves contributed to this fatal
evolution. Whether moved by gratitude, by a monarchical impulse,
or, in fine, by necessity, they accepted, at least in the civil
and political order, the new pretensions, and acknowledged the
new rights of those sovereigns who, in espousing the Catholic
religion, had saved it from the greatest danger it had as yet run.
Influenced by the tendency of the times, Catholic theologians,
especially in France, deserted the highways of the political
theology of the middle ages, and proclaimed not only the divine
origin of power, but the divine right of the king, his dependence
on God alone, and the passive obedience of the people. The idea
of the Christian monarchy was perverted, and in Catholic as in
Protestant countries it inclined to Cæsarism. The church was the
principal victim of this political transformation; she was all but
smothered in the cruel embraces of Catholic monarchs, when God
himself delivered her by the blow which was intended to extinguish
her--the French Revolution. When that revolution broke out, the
work of the Renaissance and of the Reform seemed accomplished.
Except in England, Holland, and some microscopic Swiss republics,
Catholic for the most part, absolutism reigned everywhere. Is it
not, then, the strangest falsification of history to attribute to
Protestantism the initiation of modern liberty?" (Pp. 339-341.)

Unhappily, Protestants will pay little heed to the fact that the loss of liberty in Catholic nations was due either to Protestantism or to the movement of which Protestantism was simply a development. There can be no reasonable doubt that but for Protestantism the church would have been able to check and roll back the powerful movement for the revival of Cæsarism, which had commenced in the fifteenth century, and have prevented the growth of absolute monarchy in a single Catholic state. The Protestant rebellion so weakened her external power, and detached from her so large a portion of the populations of Europe, that she was no longer able to restrain the absolutist tendencies of all European sovereigns. The sovereigns themselves, almost without exception, were inclined to the movement--were, in fact, its chief supporters; and if they did not all join it, it was because they were held back by their people, whose faith in the old religion was too strong to be given up at the pleasure of their princes, not because they had personally any devotion or attachment to her faith. The French court and most of the higher French nobility openly or secretly favored Protestantism till the conversion of Henry IV.; and even that monarch had formed a league with the Protestant princes, and was preparing for a war against the Catholic powers of Europe, at the very moment he was assassinated. His policy was adopted and carried out under his successors by Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, who repressed Protestantism in the interior, but supported it everywhere else. That France remained Catholic, was owing to the concessions made by the pope to her sovereigns, and to the firmness of the French people under the lead of the noble Guises, so calumniated by almost all modern French writers.

Yet the abbé expresses himself too strongly. The triumph of absolutism was never so complete in Catholic as in Protestant nations. In Protestant nations, the sovereigns united both the political and the spiritual powers, as under Greek and Roman gentilism, absorbed the church, and made religion a function of the state. In Catholic nations, although royalty interfered beyond measure in ecclesiastical affairs, the two powers remained distinct, and the church retained, at least in principle, her autonomy, however circumscribed and circumvented in its exercise. This is evident from the concordats she conceded to the sovereigns, and the diplomatic relations of Catholic powers with the holy see. Throughout all her humiliations, the church asserted and maintained, in principle, her independence. In all Protestant countries, the state legislated for the Protestant church; it nowhere treated with it as a separate power, and held, and could hold, no diplomatic relations with it. In all Protestant nations, the church became national and local; but in all Catholic nations she continued to be Catholic, and was always and everywhere some restraint on the absolute power of the sovereign, as both Louis XIV. and Napoleon I. learned by experience, and hence their discreditable quarrels with the holy see, and the imprisonment of the holy father by the latter. Lord Molesworth remarked in 1792, as cited by the author from Döllinger's _Church and Churches_, that, "in the Roman Catholic religion, with the supreme head of the church at Rome, there is a principle of opposition to unlimited political power. It is not the same with the Lutheran [he might have added the Anglican] clergy, who depend on the crown as their spiritual and temporal superior." This principle opposes the unlimited power of the people no less than of the monarch, and hence the sects all agree, now that the age tends to democratic absolutism, in opposing the church in the name of the people; for Protestantism has the same absolutist instincts always and everywhere.

The author, we think, exaggerates the adoption by the Catholic clergy, even in France, of absolutism in politics. Bossuet, who was a French courtier as well as a Catholic bishop, as tutor to the dauphin, went, no doubt, as far in asserting the divine right of kings, and passive obedience, as the Anglican divines under the Stuarts; and some of the clergy, yielding to court influence and the spirit of the age, followed him; but the noble Fénélon, in no respect his inferior as a theologian, differed from him, held, with the great body of Catholic theologians in all ages, that power is a trust for the public good, and that kings are responsible to the nation for their exercise of it. It was his anti-absolutist doctrine, not his few inaccurate expressions on the doctrine of pure love, in his _Maxims of the Saints_, that caused him to be stripped of his charges at court, and exiled to his diocese of Cambray. Nor is it true, as the abbé insinuates, that the pope sanctioned the absolutist doctrines which prevailed in France or elsewhere in the seventeenth century. The four articles, dictated by the government, slightly modified by Bossuet, and accepted by a small minority of the French bishops, which contain the very essence of absolutism, were no sooner published by order of the king, and commanded to be taught in all the theological seminaries, and to be conformed to by all the professors and clergy of the realm, than the pope condemned them, annulled the order of the king, and finally compelled him to withdraw it, or at least to pledge himself that he would do so. The pope never failed to assert, and, as far as he could, to cause to be respected, the rights of the church--that is to say, the rights of God, which are the only solid basis of the rights of man.

Every theologian knows that, prior to the rise of Protestantism, and even for a considerable time afterward, Catholic political theology bears no trace of the absolutism taught by Bossuet, and which he had borrowed from contemporary Protestantism. It is worthy of remark that nowhere were the first acts of the French Revolution hailed with more joy than at Rome with the pope and cardinals, and it found no warmer, firmer, or more disinterested supporters than the French clergy as a body, whose representatives were the first to join the _Tiers-Etats_. Afterward, when the revolution run into horrible excesses, put forth doctrines subversive of all religion, and even of society itself, assumed the right to legislate on spiritual matters, and showed that it only transferred absolutism from the king to the mob, there was undoubtedly a reaction against it in the minds of the pope and clergy, as there was in the minds of all men not incapable of profiting by experience, and who could not prefer license to orderly liberty. The salvation of religion and society made it the duty of the church to sustain with all her power the sovereigns in their efforts to repress the revolutionary spirit, and to restore and maintain social peace and order.

It is this fact, stripped of its reasons, and its real nature misunderstood or misrepresented, that has given rise to the pretence that the church opposes, while Protestantism, which is leagued, if not identical, with the revolution, favors liberty. Protestants never, that we are aware, put forth any pretence of the sort prior to 1792. Up to the moment of this reaction against the French revolution, the contrary charge had been made, and the church condemned for being hostile to the rights of sovereigns, and it was in reply to the speech of Cardinal Duperron, in the states-general in France in 1614, in favor of the rights of the nation and the church against the irresponsibility of the crown, that James I. of England wrote his _Remonstrance for the Divine Right of Kings_. History as written by Protestants is composed of disjointed facts, misplaced and misrepresented, whenever it is not pure invention.

The author is not quite exact in saying absolutism reigned everywhere at the breaking out of the French revolution, except in England, Holland, and the Swiss cantons. The United States had won their independence and adopted their federal constitution before that event, and certainly the American republic was not founded on the principle of the omnipotence of the state or of the people. It revived neither pagan imperialism nor pagan republicanism, and was in its fundamental principles more nearly a Christian republic than the world had hitherto seen.

It would seem, as the great mass of the American people were Protestants, and the more influential portion of them intensely Protestant, of the Calvinistic type, that the American republic should be held as an exception to the assertion that Protestantism resulted everywhere in the establishment of absolutism. But it is in reality no exception. It had no existence at the epoch of the Reformation, and Protestantism had no hand in founding it. It was founded by Providence, and the principles which form its basis were derived by the English colonists, not from Protestantism, but from the old constitution of England in Catholic times, and which, though suppressed by the ruling classes, never ceased to live in the traditions of the English people. The revolution in the seventeenth century in England was the struggle of the English people to recover their old rights, of which Protestant royalty and nobility had deprived them. Royalty and nobility did not emigrate; they remained at home, and there were in the Anglo-American colonies no materials from which either could be constructed. The great principle of the Puritans, that the church is independent of the state and superior to it, or that the state has no authority to legislate in religious matters, not even in non-essentials, was a Catholic principle, for which the popes, in their long struggles with the secular power, had uniformly contended. It is the vital principle of liberty; for it interposes the rights of God, represented by the church, as the limits of the rights of the state. The Puritans had asserted this principle in their own defence against the Protestant king and parliament of England, which assumed plenary authority in spirituals as well as in temporals. It was not Protestantism that developed this great principle of all just liberty, and opposed to all absolutism; it was the old Catholic principle, always and everywhere asserted by the Catholic Church.

But taking the Bible, especially the Old Testament, interpreted by a fallible authority, as their criterion of the rights of God, as represented by their Puritan church, the Puritans failed not in asserting, but in applying the principle, and established, in practice, as we have seen, a most odious tyranny. They misapplied the principle, which can be rightly applied only by the Catholic Church. Their Protestantism misled them, and perverted the truth they retained, as was universally the case with Calvinists. It is easy to see now why Protestantism deserves no credit for founding American liberty. It was not of Protestant origin, and we may add Protestantism is busy at work to destroy it, or at least shows itself impotent to sustain it.