Chapter II: I Introduce My Wife—She Disappears! (6)

This, from the history of the past, is what may be with certainty foreseen, whether with regard to the inefficiency of the help which the Russian Church may promise herself from the various branches of the orthodox communion, in a struggle against unbelief and impious governments, or with regard to the solid support which, in this case, she would find from the Catholic Church. But this prevision is not only justified by history. History has done nothing more than throw light upon that which had been foretold to us by a terrible declaration of Jesus Christ; and it is in this declaration that lies the deep reason and the true explanation of that which history causes to pass before our eyes. _Omne regnum in seipsum divisum desolabitur_—“Every kingdom divided against itself shall be brought to desolation” (S. Luke xi. 17), Our Lord has said.

The Orthodox Church is a divided kingdom—divided into as many branches as there are states in which she counts her adherents; divided to such a degree that, without the consent of sovereigns, no communication is possible between these divers branches; so divided that it is also the will of sovereigns which regulates and measures the relations which the bishops of the eparchies (dioceses) of one self‐same state may hold among themselves. The Orthodox Church is a kingdom divided against itself—so divided that nowhere is there to be found an authority which, being itself the source of jurisdiction, can terminate the litigations about jurisdiction without appeal; so divided that a little boldness and obstinacy sufficed to enable Greece to withdraw herself from the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople; that a little boldness and obstinacy sufficed to gain the cause for Bulgaria, when, not long ago, she also shook off the authority of the same patriarch; and that a little boldness and obstinacy always suffice to enable the revolted definitively to shake off the yoke of their pastors.(192)

Alas! it is not even here that the desolation of this kingdom ends. Of the Orthodox Church it may be truly said that the desolation has no bounds. It has no bounds because already the principle has been established that the church of each state ought to be independent, and that each separate nation also ought to have its distinct and independent church. It is endless because to these principles—subversive of all order and all stability, and which make ecclesiastical jurisdiction depend no longer upon the laws and customs of the church, but on the chances of war, the valor of conquerors, and the craftiness of conspirators—the Orthodox Church can oppose nothing but vain protestations; it is endless because the very bishops themselves of the Orthodox Church take the lead in upholding these principles, and are the first to treat with contempt the complaints of those of their brethren whose jurisdiction is injured.

And, in fact, it was by invoking its political independence that the recently‐formed kingdom of Greece declared itself, in 1833, freed from the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople. This declaration was made and carried by _all_ the bishops of the kingdom, assembled at Nauplia; not a single voice appears to have been raised to require that the patriarch should at least be first consulted. The patriarch appealed to the canons of the church, and protested—and they let him protest. For seventeen years he went on protesting, until at last, in 1850, his successor recognized the accomplished fact; had he not done so, he would have been allowed to protest to an indefinite period, as long as he might be inclined. It was by appealing to the principle of nationality (_phyletism_) that the Bulgarians shook off the authority of the same patriarch. Their bishops nominated an exarch, and long before the sultan had definitely settled this affair they gave no more heed to the patriarch’s protestations than for seventeen years had been given by the bishops of the Hellenic kingdom. In the hope of leading back the Bulgarians to obedience, the patriarch, in 1872, convoked a great council in the Church of S. George at Constantinople. He made his complaints against his rebellious children, and without apparently considering the effect which might be produced by the publicity given to his words, he there related that, having summoned the recalcitrant bishops to return to obedience, one of them had answered him, _by the telegraph_, that he should go and receive the reply from the exarch.

The council thereupon proceeded to excommunicate the Bulgarians, who had already so willingly excommunicated themselves, sure beforehand that they would none the less continue to be considered members of the Orthodox Church— a certainty which could not fail to be realized. The example of Greece had borne its fruit. Besides, this council was not œcumenical; amongst others, the Russian bishops did not sit there at all; a letter of the Synod had the mission of representing them, probably unknown to themselves, and certainly without their permission. By what right, then, could the council separate the Bulgarian nation from _the whole_ church? By what right did it speak in the name of _the whole_ church? It had so much the less right, also, from the fact that the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cyril, who happened to be then at Constantinople, determinedly refused, for reasons which gave evidence of more than unwillingness, to appear at its sittings.(193)

Will it be said that the Bulgarians were excommunicated by virtue of the canons of the church; that the council applied to them an anathema already decreed by the fathers and the œcumenical councils against those who violated the canons? We have some acquaintance with these canons; and, if they are to be taken literally, we would not take upon ourselves to prove that the whole Orthodox Church has not long ago fallen under some excommunication pronounced by her own canons; such, at any rate, would be the case with regard to the Russian Church, which forms its principal portion. To escape this somewhat embarrassing conclusion, it becomes necessary to admit that the canons must be understood, as it is commonly expressed, _cum grano salis_, and that they are susceptible of a mild interpretation. It is this which the Bulgarians believe themselves to have done. They have found in the past history of their church _several_ examples authorizing an interpretation of the canons conformable to their wishes; amongst others, that of Peter the Great, who, _without ever ceasing to be considered orthodox_, abolished the patriarchate of Moscow, instituted the Synod, made it the principal authority of the Russian Church, and declared himself to be the “Supreme Judge” thereof; after which he informed the Oriental patriarchs of what had happened, and demanded of them an approbation which he was fully determined to do without, in case it should be refused. The crime of the Bulgarians consisted in interpreting the canons as they had been interpreted by the numerous bishops who had not on that account been, by any means, expelled from the church; and if the letter of the Russian Synod, the mandatory of the Russian episcopate at the council of 1872, blamed them, besides that, in their revolt, they were sustained by Russia.(194) The Bulgarians called to mind that it was Russia, too, which had the most strenuously labored to induce the Patriarch of Constantinople to recognize the independence of the Church of the Hellenic kingdom as an accomplished fact. With memories such as these, the anathema of the Council of Constantinople of 1872 could scarcely disquiet the Bulgarians.

And this is not all. This council made a decision which is, in truth, a _doctrinal_ decision by declaring that the exterior constitution of the church is independent of the principle of nationality, and in condemning the application of this principle to the church, as being contrary to the Scriptures and to the Fathers. By what right did this council, not being ecumenical, make a decision of this kind, and what value could it possess? Will it be said that this council did nothing more than define and affirm what was contained in the Scriptures and the Fathers? It was precisely this to which the Bulgarians would not agree, and of which the Patriarch of Jerusalem—to mention him only—was by no means convinced; in short, that which only a truly ecumenical council could _authoritatively_ decide. In presence of a merely nominal doctrinal authority, it was perfectly natural that the Bulgarians should keep their own view of the matter.

But still more embarrassing by far would be the consequences resulting to the Orthodox Church if it were admitted that this council possessed a really doctrinal authority, and that its decisions were obligatory on the consciences of the orthodox faithful. In this case the Orthodox Church would have added yet another definition to those already recorded in the seven Ecumenical Councils allowed by her. This church has always boasted of having _added nothing_ to the doctrine expressed in the seven Ecumenical Councils, in which, according to her, the Holy Ghost has deposited, _once for all_,(195) whatever it is necessary to believe. She is so persuaded that nothing can be added to them that she takes pleasure in recognizing in these councils the seven pillars of wisdom, the seven mysterious seals, spoken of by S. John—pillars and seals which will eternally remain seven in number, without any possible chance of reaching even to the number eight. Therefore it is that she throws in our faces our western councils and their definitions, and therefore that she reproaches us with _new dogmas_. But the Immaculate Conception of Mary and the doctrinal Infallibility of the Pope—these two dogmas which the church has found in the Scriptures and in the Fathers—were they newer in the eyes of the Bulgarians than the dogma defined at the Council of Constantinople in 1872, that “the church, in her exterior constitution, is independent of the principle of nationality”—a dogma condemned, implicitly at least, by the previous practice of a large portion of the Orthodox Church?

Finally, why should the Bulgarians have submitted to the decision of a particular council—a decision, carried by the Greeks _judices in causâ propriâ_, when the Russian Church, as all the world knew, thought so lightly of the doctrine and practice of the whole Greek Church in a matter of far greater importance, _the validity of baptism_? Baptism by infusion is in fact recognized at St. Petersburg and Moscow as valid, while at Constantinople it is null and void. A Protestant or a Catholic baptized by infusion, who should ask to be received into the Orthodox Church, would be accepted unconditionally in Russia: but at Constantinople he would be required to be rebaptized. A Christian in the dominions of the czar, he would become a pagan at Constantinople; and yet this is one and the same church!(196)

Yes, the shock has been given. The Council of Constantinople of 1872 has not been able to hinder the defection of the Bulgarians, but it has attracted the attention of the Christian world to the fact that the Orthodox Church has no authority which can force consciences to reject as heretical the application to the exterior constitution of the church, either of the principle of nationality, or any other principle upon which might be based the political constitution of nations. And further, the acts of the Council of Constantinople of 1872 give evidence of the hesitation and uncertainty existing among the representatives of the orthodox faith(197) with regard to a question so momentous, and which concerns the very life of that church. The shock has been given. Error has a terrible logic. Where will the divisions, the sub‐divisions, and the parcellings‐out of the orthodox communion end?

And what consequences may result from the want of exterior unity, not only for the independence, but also for the faith, of the church, we have just glanced at; but it will be revealed by the _Ecclesiastical Regulation_ in a manner more convincing and more sad.

Assuredly the future had not been foreseen when, in the _Confession of the Orthodox Faith_, the great catechism of the whole Oriental Church, it was considered sufficient to explain as follows the unity of the church:

“The church is one, ... according to the teaching of the apostle: _For I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ_ (2 Cor. xi. 2). For even as there is but one Christ, even so his spouse can be but one; as it is written in the fourth chapter of the Epistle of S. Paul to the Ephesians (iv. 5, 6): _One Lord, one faith, one baptism: there is but one God, the Father of all._”(198)

Nor was the future any more foreseen when, in the catechism of Mgr. Philarete, the unity of the church was defined:(199)

“Q. Why is the church one?

“A. Because she represents one _spiritual_ body, animated by one sole and only divine Spirit, and having one head only, who is Christ.”

Let us now turn away our gaze from the Orthodox Church, in which the terrible declaration of Jesus Christ finds only too fully its accomplishment. Another church appears before us. She is not a divided kingdom: on the contrary, if there be one characteristic mark by which she may be at once recognized by all who seek for her, it is the imposing unity of her exterior organization. The pope forms this unity. Let us ask of history what the pope has done for the church.

And history answers: The pope has saved the church. The pope alone has been able to hinder this church from breaking up, as the Orthodox Church has done, into so many national churches, at first under the protection, then under the authority, and finally under the rod, of sovereigns who were at first kings, then presidents of a republic, sometimes Robespierres. It is the pope, and the pope only, who has maintained, not merely the vague notion, but the living sentiment of Catholic fraternity—a sentiment which inspires the adversaries of the church with a fear which, in spite of themselves, they betray. It is the pope, and the pope alone, who has caused the sap of Christian piety to circulate in the whole Catholic world, by the honors of the altars accorded to the saints of every land, and by those institutions which, originating in one country, belong to all countries, as powerful, in the realization of their vast aspirations, as zeal and charity themselves. It is the pope who makes the treasures of virtue and learning which he discovers in any particular locality the common property of the world—in a word, it is the pope who causes the church always to survive, not only the enemies who desire her death, not only the false prophets who, for centuries past, have gone on announcing this death as imminent, but all kingdoms and all empires, their institutions, and even their remembrance. This is what the pope is for the Catholic Church.

Thus we see, on the one side, division, and, as its consequence, the dissolution foretold by Jesus Christ; on the other side, unity, and, with unity, victory and strength. This is the signification of the church having or not having a pope. Besides, the unity of government is so necessary to arrest the indefinite parcelling out of one church into a number of independent churches, and as a safeguard to the common faith, that each separate branch of the Orthodox Eastern Church has not been able to maintain its integrity without the aid of a supreme and central authority. Instead of the pope, this is a patriarch, or it is a synod, or it is the sovereign of the country, but everywhere and always the very adversaries of the Papacy themselves render an involuntary homage to the Catholic dogma which declares a visible head, a pope, necessary to the church.

Yes, a pope is necessary for the church—necessary to her existence, and necessary for the fulfilment of her mission.

Let us consider it with regard to the most powerful of the various branches of the orthodox communion—the Russian Church. Even could this church (by hypothesis) maintain herself alone, and could she continue her work without the operation of the laws; could she alone combat unbelief, and alone make head against impious governments, the pope would be none the less necessary for her. And why? Because the Russian Church calls herself _Catholic_; that is, _universal_. Now, it is not enough for a church which calls itself Catholic, and the one church of the Saviour of all, to be able to maintain her ground in that part of the world in which she is now enclosed; it is not enough that she should combat unbelief in the empire of the czars, nor that she should be able to resist an impious government which may succeed to theirs.

If she is Catholic, she ought, the Russian Church herself, to be equal to penetrating _everywhere_, and everywhere to maintain herself; to combat _everywhere_ heresy and unbelief, and everywhere to sustain collision with the government. If she is Catholic, let her issue from the limits of the country of the czars, and at least _attempt_ the conquest of Italy, Germany, France, England, all Europe; America, the whole world; let her, in the name of Jesus Christ, utter words of authority to the conquerors of the earth, brave the hatred which the consciousness of her rights would draw upon her, and dare to declare to crowned heads that all Christians belong to her; let her not confine herself to raising in capital cities Russian temples for the use of the Russian embassies, but let her require every government to recognize the orthodox worship; let her missionaries penetrate, whether welcomed or repelled, into all the countries of the earth with the sole credentials of the apostles, and, strong in this single right, let them return whither they are driven out, and sprinkle with their blood the soil wherein they sow the seed of orthodoxy. Then, and only then, will the Russian Church show herself Catholic; that is to say, universal; that is to say, the church of the Saviour of all. Until then in vain may she call herself Catholic while the title is denied by the fact.

But these things the Russian Church will never be able to accomplish without a pope.

From whom, in fact, will her priests hold their commission? To whom will they recur for counsel, protection, and support? In whose name will they speak to governments and kings? To whom will they refer the latter to authenticate the validity of their mission, to propose objections, or to lodge complaints? If we except Russia, Turkey, the Hellenic kingdom, Roumania, Servia, and some provinces of the Austro‐Hungarian Empire, the rest of the world is missionary ground for the Orthodox Church, just as much as is China for the Catholic Church. Let us suppose the Russian Church wishing only to undertake the conversion of France. Paris already possesses a Russian temple; it is now the Synod, in concert with the government, which nominates the persons attached to this temple. When the official church shall have fallen, and all the Russian bishops shall be canonically equal, or at least independent of each other, to which among them will the charge of this mission belong?

Paris is a place to stimulate the zeal of many bishops. It is allowable to believe that a settlement will not be very quickly made. Let us suppose it made, however, and moreover that even there is established a college _De Propaganda Fide Orthodoxâ_ at St. Petersburg or Moscow. What would be the attitude of the Greek Church of Constantinople? Will the latter possess, or will she not possess, the right to evangelize France, and there to exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction? If it be allowed that she has this right, the same question presents itself also for the three patriarchates of Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem; it also presents itself for the Greek Church of the Hellenic kingdom, for the Church of Roumania, for that of Servia, for the Orthodox Church of the Austro‐Hungarian Empire, and even for that of Montenegro. Here is already an accumulation and intermingling of jurisdictions liable to give rise to numerous contests. Who shall decide amongst them? Will they come to a mutual agreement? But an agreement will be everlastingly impossible between the Greek and Russian Churches, at least so long as the question of the validity of baptism by infusion remains undecided. We will say Catholics are to be “converted” to orthodoxy: the Russian ministers will not rebaptize them. The Greek Church knows it—this church, as we have just said, which regards baptism by infusion as null. If the Greek Church consents that the Russian missionaries shall evangelize France, it declares, by that consent, that baptism is no longer necessary for belonging to the church. If, however, she opposes their so doing, who is to decide between them? And the simple ones who had previously let themselves be incorporated into the Russian Church—would they be very certain that they really belonged to the church? Which, then, will be the true missionaries?

We confine ourselves to this example. Let us apply ourselves carefully to realize, in imagination, what would be the situation of a church attempting to do without a pope that which must be done by a church believing herself divine, and invested by God with a commission to convert the world—wishing to do, without a pope, what is done by the Catholic Church every day. Then it will be easy to understand whether there can be a divine church without a pope.

And this pope, without which the Russian Church will never be the universal church of Jesus Christ nor fulfil the mission of that church—where would she seek him? Would she, on account of the needs created by her new situation, confer upon one of the bishops all the authority which is now concentrated in the hands of the Synod? Will she say to him, Help me to fulfil the mission of converting the world? But this charge, this part, would it not with greater right belong to the Patriarch of Constantinople, who, so powerful is the need of unity, has already declared, upon one solemn occasion, that on him rests the _care of all the churches?_(200) We are supposing in the Russian Church, and in the other branches of the orthodox communion, enough self‐denial to consent to this. But when this great event shall have been accomplished, what will have been done?

It will have been acknowledged before the face of all the world that it is not Rome who made the schism. It will have been confessed that during ten centuries it has been charged as a crime upon the Catholic Church that she has not sacrificed that which, after ten centuries of disasters, the Eastern Church has found it necessary to force herself to regain under pain of ceasing to exist. There will have been rendered to the Catholic Church the most splendid of testimonies, in confessing that she alone possesses the true sense of the words of Jesus Christ, and that the rock on which Jesus Christ has built his church is Peter.

Indeed, from that day forward there will be no more excuse for schism. Between a rock designated by men of the XIXth century, and that rock of which the manifest existence goes back to Jesus Christ himself, and has been pointed out by him, who that but knows how to read and write can hesitate for an instant?

Such, therefore, is the alternative: either the Orthodox Church will be forced to give herself a pope, to show that she is really that which she entitles herself, “Catholic,” or universal, and to fulfil the mission imposed by this name, or she will never be able to justify her appreciation of this title. What will happen in the former case, we have just said; if, on the contrary, the Orthodox Church delays to give herself a pope, the rapid march of events, and the revolutionary storm from which neither Russia nor the East will by any means be preserved, will, before very long, prove to us that it is not upon the sand that Jesus Christ has built his church.

To Be Concluded Next Month.

Burke And The Revolution.

Bacon’s grand testamentary vindication of his life, “bequeathing his name and memory to foreign nations and his own countrymen after some time be passed over,” might have been written with even greater justice of himself—because free from any imputation of moral weakness—by the master‐ mind of the XVIIIth century in England in the domain of political philosophy—Edmund Burke, the illustrious orator and statesman, the author of _Reflections on the Revolution in France_. To‐day, when France, “incessantly agitated by a propaganda of the most pernicious doctrines,”(201) still vindicates the sagacity which foresaw the disastrous course of the Revolution, while England, which he saved from the same propaganda, uninterruptedly illustrates the “beneficial influence of the regular action of the public powers,” it may not be amiss to recall some of the opinions to which he gave utterance at the beginning of the storm. Burke’s genius, like Bacon’s, was indeed too refulgent not to be acknowledged even in his own day. But the burning questions upon the discussion of which and their solution, so far as human reason can go, he has built up an enduring fame—_monumentum ære perennius_—lighted up passions too gigantic and furious in the tremendous conflict then inaugurated to allow of contemporary justice being done to his labors. Nor did their negatory influence upon his fame end with his death; two allied causes have conspired to partially obscure the clear and immortal flame of his genius, even to our time:

First, the jealousy of the political and literary followers of Charles James Fox.

Second, the inimical spirit of the Revolution.

Burke, as it is well known, had to contend, during his parliamentary career, not only against the Tory prejudices of the country party, represented by such men as William Lord Bagot and Col. Onslow, but also against the ill‐concealed jealousy and oligarchical exclusiveness of his nominal allies, the Whig aristocracy. But this influence of caste, which in his lifetime placed over his head his political pupil, Charles Fox, as the representative of the Whig family compacts, has been succeeded since his death by a more acrimonious spirit of personal jealousy in defence of the fame of his younger rival. The partisans of Fox have never been able to forgive Burke’s renunciation of his alliance with the eloquent Whig leader; and so large a share of literary and political criticism during the last half‐century has come from the pens of that small but popular band of writers who took their inspiration from the traditions of Holland House, that the acknowledgment of Burke’s profound and prophetic genius has been unduly circumscribed by the desire of elevating the “great man” of the family. Macaulay and Earl Russell have given expression to this feeling; the former by covertly insinuating a doubt of Burke’s judgment, while lavishly extolling the splendor of his imagination; the latter by open denunciation of his course at the outbreak of the Revolution; Earl Russell with unconscious self‐satire quoting these lines from La Fontaine:

“L’homme est de feu pour le mensonge
Il est de glace pour la vérité.”

The efforts of a powerful literary and family connection to elevate its idol, Charles Fox, at the expense of Burke, have had, however, but small effect in limiting the measure of the latter’s fame, compared with the hostile spirit of revolution animating the current periodical literature of England and America. If the apostles of the Revolution, who steal Burke’s thunder without acknowledgment, when it suits their purpose, against the despotism of power, could bury out of sight his protests against that worse despotism of unchained human passions, which is their ideal of liberty, they would gladly place him in their Pantheon. But the mind of the great political philosopher was too grandly comprehensive to be narrowed within the grooves of that fashionable “liberalism” which covers even the basest tyranny, if directed against the Catholic Church. His humanity was too broad and true not to be aroused into flaming denunciation of the abuse of power, whether it assumed the shape of “opulent oppression” in India or democratic priest‐slaughter in France. Hence it is that Burke holds but a half‐allegiance of the Liberal party; that his fame has been, as it were, truncated, so far as they have been able to effect it; and that his magnificent vindications of the cause of liberty, bounded by no limitations of race, government, or creed, are circumscribed in their minds by his ante‐revolutionary labors.

But it is not in the power of any class of critics, least of all of the light artillery of “liberalism,” to narrow or permanently diminish Burke’s kingdom over human thought. His fame will not be dependent upon the fashion of this or any single age. The _consensus_ of humanity has crowned him among the Immortals. When Macaulay and Russell shall have become obscure names, the works of Burke will endure as monuments of our civilization. His place will be with Demosthenes and Cicero, and in the estimation of a more remote posterity he will probably overtop them both.

The long, lean figure, with spectacles on nose, once familiar to the caricaturists of the third George’s reign, has faded a good deal from the eyes of the present generation. We now turn over with a smile the prints of the “concealed Jesuit” from S. Omer’s, _barrette_ on head, and long _soutane_ clinging to his heels; or the more portly figure of the highwayman, blunderbuss in hand, waylaying, in company with North and Fox, the “savior of India” (Warren Hastings); or the “Watchman” of the constitution, in heavy cloak, lantern in hand, and spectacles on the formidable nose, ferreting out the revolutionary preacher, Dr. Price, in his midnight study. The gravers of Gilray and Sayer have yielded to those of the caricaturists for _Punch_. The figures of Gladstone, Disraeli, and Bright have supplanted those of Pitt, Fox, and Burke. The great orator and statesman has taken his place as a classic on the shelves of all libraries, but is popularly known only by a few rounded extracts from his speeches, or by Macaulay’s description of the entrance on the parliamentary stage of Lord Rockingham’s young Irish secretary, “who to an eloquence surpassing the eloquence of Pitt, and an industry that shamed the industry of Grenville, united an amplitude of comprehension to which neither Pitt nor Grenville could lay claim.” But if Burke has shared the fate of all great writers not strictly popular in being conventionally admired but practically neglected by the general reader, no political author is more diligently studied by the “middlemen” of thought, the makers and leaders of public opinion. He is the private tutor of public teachers; the _vade mecum_ of the orator and politician. Most of the questions of political ethics which have been the subjects of discussion during the present century have been profoundly treated of by him. Catholic emancipation, parliamentary reform, the freedom of the press, ministerial responsibility, the relations of church and state, the abolition of the slave trade, the amelioration of the criminal law—all have received from him their most ample and brilliant illustration.

Of all the events of his time, however, the Revolution of 1789 gave the chief exercise to his powers. Born in 1730, he was then at the zenith of his fame, in the full maturity of his massive yet acute intellect. Earl Russell’s senile complaint in his life of Fox of “the wreck of his (Burke’s) judgment” betrays only the dotage of his own. Advancing age had better fitted him for the contest. His mind had, as Macaulay truly says, bloomed late into flower, although the rhetoric of the essayist has caricatured the sterility of his youth. The giant trunk was now crowned with a luxuriant and graceful foliage, which added to its beauty, while it detracted nothing from its strength. The experience of “his long and laborious life,” the accumulated stores of his prodigious industry, furnished him with weapons of finest temper and irresistible force. Thus armed, stepping to the front as the champion of civilization and religion against the Giant Despair which had broken its bonds in Europe, it was with striking appropriateness that his friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds, applied to him, at the moment of his rupture with Fox and the opposition, the lines written under the engraving of 1790 from the portrait of 1775—lines in which Milton describes the faithful Abdiel striding forth, solitary, from amid the rebel host:

“So spake the fervent angel, but his zeal
None seconded: .....
...... Unmoved,
Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,
His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal;
Nor number nor example with him wrought
To move from truth, or change his constant mind,
Though single. From amidst forth he passed
Long way through hostile scorn, nor of violence feared aught;
And with retorting scorn, his back he turned
On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed.”

The efforts of Burke’s single mind at this critical moment decided the course of events in England. His speeches in Parliament and the publication of his _Reflections on the Revolution in France_ aroused a national feeling that all the efforts of the revolutionary propagandists were unable to stem; which Pitt followed rather than led; and which enabled England to carry on without flinching, to a triumphant close, the long and bloody war in national self‐defence into which she was driven by the aggressive spirit of the Revolution. Pitt only gave utterance to the national feeling when he declared at the close of Burke’s speech on the Army Estimates, in which he flung down the gauntlet to the Revolution, “that not only the present generation but the latest posterity would revere his name for the decided part he had that day taken.”

It was Burke’s fortune to witness the temporary triumph, but not the succeeding repulse, of the first outbreak of the Revolution. He died at the full tide of its fury. Yet the tremendous blows he dealt its principles, single‐handed, before all that was mortal of him was laid at rest at Beaconsfield, undoubtedly saved England from succumbing to its influence in his own day, and their conservative force is still felt in the government of that country. “This man,” said Schlegel, “has been to his own country and to all Europe—and, in a particular manner, to all Germany—a new light of political wisdom and moral experience. He corrected his age when it was at the height of its revolutionary fury; and without maintaining any system of philosophy, he seems to have seen further into the true nature of society, and to have more clearly comprehended the effect of religion in connecting individual security with national welfare, than any philosopher or any system of philosophy of any preceding age.” True words, and worthy of attention at this moment, when Germany has entered on a new and dangerous course of political action.

From the first mutterings of the revolutionary storm Burke had distrusted its character and future violence. Alarmed by what he had seen of the undisguised levity and scepticism of Parisian society during his visit to France in 1772, he had taken occasion in one of his speeches, as early as 1773, to point out “this conspiracy of atheism to the watchful eyes of European governments.” The outrages in the name of liberty which were simultaneous with its outburst determined his course, although his keen political vision had long before penetrated the hollowness of its professions. The old political gladiator, “in whose breast,” as he proudly and truly said of himself, “no anger, durable or vehement, had ever been kindled but by what he considered as tyranny”; whose potent voice had re‐ echoed across the Western ocean in support of the American colonist, had pleaded for the African slave and Hindoo laborer, and had instilled fresh hope, in the broken heart of the Irish “Papist,” roused himself now to his last and most powerful effort in defence of the fugitive French “aristocrat” and hunted priest.

“I have struggled,” he said, “to the best of my power against two great evils, growing out of the most sacred of all things—liberty and authority. I have struggled against the licentiousness of freedom, I have contended against the tyranny of power.” Nearly ten years before, in his speech on the Marriage Act, defending himself against the charges of “aristocrat” and “radical” which had been alternately levelled against him, he had predicted his course in these noble words:

“When indeed the smallest rights of the poorest people in the
kingdom are in question, I would set my face against any act of
pride countenanced by the highest that are in it; and if it should
come to the last extremity, and a contest of blood, my course is
taken. I would take my fate with the poor, and low, and feeble.
But if these people come to turn their liberty into a cloak for
mischievousness, and to seek a privilege of exemption, not from
power, but from the rules of morality and virtuous discipline, I
would join my hand to make them feel the force which a few united
in a good cause have over a multitude of the profligate and
ferocious.”

Burke’s theory of true reform, illustrated by the honorable labors of his whole public career, was in fact so radically opposed to that of the French constitution makers that no standing‐ground common to both could be found. He foresaw plainly enough what were the secret aims and aspirations of the revolutionary leaders from the first, whatever might be their humanitarian professions; that whatever their changes of leaders or watchwords, their goal would always be the same—the destruction of existing society; not reparation, but ruin. He would have seen in M. Gambetta’s programme of a _nouvelle couche sociale_, enunciated at Grenoble in 1872, only a new reading of M. Marat’s schemes of universal confiscation in 1792. Neither would have found more favor in his eyes than in those of any English reformer from S. Thomas à Becket to Hampden. He believed with Bacon that there could be no wise design of reform which did not set out with the determination “to weed, to prune, and to graft, rather than to plough up and plant all afresh.” Sixty years afterwards another writer, after an elaborate and prolonged study of the _ancien régime_, and a lifetime’s experience of the results of the Revolution, arrived at the point from which Burke started. The writer was Alexis de Tocqueville. Those who are familiar only with the _Democracy in America_, the work of his inexperienced youth, would do well to read his _Memoir and Letters_ by De Beaumont. Writing to M. Freslon in 1853, after the events of 1848‐51 had pretty well cured him of liberalism, he said:

“When one examines, as I am doing at Tours, the archives of an
ancient provincial government, one finds a thousand reasons for
hating the _ancien régime_, but few for loving the Revolution; for
one sees that the _ancien régime_ was rapidly sinking under the
weight of years and a gradual change of ideas and manners, so
that, with a little patience and good conduct, it might have been
reformed without destroying indiscriminately all that was good in
it with all that was bad. It is curious to see how different was
the government of 1780 from that of 1750. One does not recognize
the government or the governed. The Revolution broke out not when
evils were at their worst, but when reform was beginning. Halfway
down the staircase we threw ourselves out of the window, in order
to get sooner to the bottom” (_Memoir and Remains_, vol. ii. pp.
242, 243, Eng. ed.)

Burke had an invincible distrust of the crude theories and rash speculations of the _doctrinaires_ of the Revolution. “Follow experience and common sense,” he says in a hundred different ways; “these are the arguments of statesmen! Leave the rest to the schools, where only they may be debated with—safety.” “In politics,” he says, “the most fallacious of all things is geometrical demonstration.” Again: “The majors make a pompous figure in the battle, but the victory of truth depends upon the little minors of circumstances.” He compares the socialist theorist ready to plunge into the volcano of revolutionary experiment to the Sicilian sophist—_ardentem frigidus Ætnam insiluit_. The atrocious principles of the literary and philosophical guides of the Revolution seemed to him almost more portentous than the brutalities of the mob. “Never before this time,” he says, “was a set of literary men converted into a gang of robbers and assassins. Never before did a den of bravoes and banditti assume the garb and tone of an academy of philosophers.”

Remarkable sayings then, and true of experience anterior to his time. But had Burke lived in our day, he would have witnessed with astonishment the full development of the spirit he denounced, in the terrible spectacle of an aggressive infidel philosophy, and an almost universal infidel press, sometimes truculent, sometimes frivolous, but always shamelessly boastful of its pagan principles. He would have seen a school of pseudo‐philosophy professing its open design to destroy the foundations of revealed religion; filled with the spirit of the apostate Julian; as audacious and boastful as he, but destined to meet as shameful an end.

Let us compare, then, Burke’s theory of true liberty, and his opinion of what France might have gained by a large and loyal measure of reform, with the desperate counsels and futile outrages which followed the surrender of the movement by the French conservatives into the hands of the Jacobins. “You would,” he says, had such a course as he recommended been pursued, “have rendered the cause of liberty venerable in the eyes of every worthy mind in every nation. You would have shamed despotism from the earth by showing that freedom was not only reconcilable, but, as when well disciplined it is, auxiliary to law. You would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and recognize that happiness is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walks of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real inequality which it never can remove.”

Burke’s frequent definitions of true liberty are as beautiful as they are true. “You hope, sir,” he says, writing to De Menonville, “that I think the French deserving of liberty. I certainly do. I certainly think all men who desire it deserve it. It is not the reward of our merit or the acquisition of our industry. It is our inheritance. It is the birthright of our species. We cannot forfeit our right to it but by what forfeits our title to the privileges of our kind. I mean the abuse or oblivion of our natural faculties, and a ferocious indocility which is prompt to wrong or violence, destroys our social nature, and transforms us into something a little better than a description of wild beast. To men so degraded a state of strong restraint is a sort of necessary substitute for freedom, since, bad as it is, it may deliver them in some measure from the worst of all slavery, that is, the despotism of their own blind and brutal passions. You have kindly said that you began to love freedom from your intercourse with me. Permit me, then, to continue our conversation, and to tell you what that freedom is that I love. It is not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish liberty. It is social freedom. It is that state of things in which the liberty of no man and no body of men is in a condition to trespass on the liberty of any person or any description of persons in society. The liberty, the only liberty, I mean, is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with virtue and order, but which cannot exist without them.”

“Am I,” he asks, in answer to the shibboleth of the “rights of man,”—“am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer, who has broke prison, upon the recovery of his natural rights? This would be to act over again the case of the criminals condemned to the galleys and their heroic deliverer, the knight of the ’sorrowful countenance.’”

If we turn from Burke’s satire upon the revolutionary actors to his opinions on its probable onward course and changing fortunes, we shall find a series of the most remarkable political prophecies on record. At a time when Fox and the opposition hailed the Revolution as already accomplished, with nothing before it but a future of ideal progress and happiness; when Pitt and the government seemed lulled into a still more fatal inaction, Burke proclaimed in decisive tones that the contest between socialism and all constituted governments had only begun. We group together a few of these remarkable predictions, which time has so amply verified: “He proposed to prove,” he said in his _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_, “that the present state of things in France is not a transient evil, productive, as some have too favorably supposed, of a lasting good; but that the present evil is only the means of producing future and, if that were possible, worse evils. That this is not an undigested, imperfect, and crude scheme of liberty, which may be gradually mellowed and ripened into an orderly and social freedom; but that it is so fundamentally wrong as to be incapable of correcting itself by any length of time.” Again: “We are not at the end of our struggle or near it. Let us not deceive ourselves; we are at the beginning of great troubles.” Predicting the changing features of the Revolution, he said: “In its present form it can hardly remain; but before its final settlement it may have to pass, as one of our poets says, ’through great varieties of untried being,’ and in all its transmigrations to be purified by fire and sword.” The very spirit of the Commune is thus foreshadowed in a letter to M. de Menonville, 1790: “But if the same ends should hereafter require the same course which had been already pursued, there is no doubt but the same ferocious delight in murder and the same savage cruelty will be again renewed.” _Tous les évêques a la lanterne_ was the watchword of both outbreaks of the Revolution.

Compare with these sayings the remarks, fifty years later, of another observer, of great acuteness, but moulded in less heroic proportions than Burke. “This day fifty‐one years,” writes De Tocqueville, the author of _Democracy in America_, “the French Revolution commenced, and, after the destruction of so many men and institutions, we may say it is still going on. Is not this reassuring to the nations that are only just beginning theirs?”(202) De Tocqueville, it is well known, during the early part of his career, was tainted with the prevalent liberal Catholicism of his day in France. He wished to unite the church with the Revolution—chimerical task, of which advancing years and experience convinced him of the sinful folly! Happily for himself, he died a good Catholic in the bosom of the church.

“I scarcely dare hope,” he says, “to see a regular government,
strong and at the same time liberal, established in our country.
This ideal was, as you know, the dream of my youth, and likewise
of the portion of my mature age that has passed. Is it possible
still to believe in its realization? For a long time I thought
(but long before February this belief had been much shaken) that
we had been making our way over a stormy sea, on which we were
still tossing, but that the port was at hand. Was I not wrong? Are
we not on a rolling sea that has no shore? Or is not the land so
distant, so unknown, that our lives and those of our children may
pass away before it is reached, or, at least, before any
settlement is made upon it?... I am indeed alarmed at the state of
the public mind. It is far from betokening the close of a
revolution. At the time it was said, and to this day it is
commonly repeated, that the insurgents of June were the dregs of
the populace; that they were all outcasts of the basest
description, whose only motive was lust for plunder. Such, of
course, were many of them. But it is not true that they were all
of this kind; would to God that they had been! Such wretches are
always a small minority; they never prevail; they are imprisoned
or executed, and all is over. In the insurrection of June, besides
bad passions, there were, what are far more dangerous, false
opinions. Many of the men who attempted to overthrow the most
sacred rights were carried away by an erroneous notion of right.
They sincerely believed that society was based upon injustice, and
they wished to give it another foundation. [Compare Gambetta’s
_nouvelle couche sociale._] Our bayonets and our cannon will never
destroy this revolutionary fanaticism. It will create for us
dangers and embarrassments without end. Finally, I begin to ask
myself whether anything solid or durable can be built on the
shifting basis of our society? Whether it will support even a
despotism, which many people, tired of storms, would, for want of
a better, hail as a haven? We did not see this great revolution in
human society begin; we shall not see it end. If I had children, I
should always be repeating this to them, and should tell them that
in this age and in this country one ought to be fit for
everything, and prepared for everything, for no one can count on
the future.”(203)

A conversation apropos of a Benedictine survivor of 1789, given from Mr. Senior’s _Journal_ (_Memoir_, vol. ii. p. 1), illustrates the final opinion of the author of _Democracy in America_ upon the Revolution. It took place only one year before his death:

“And what effect,” I asked, “has the contemplation of seventy
years of revolution produced on him (the Benedictine)? Does he
look back, like Talleyrand, to the _ancien régime_ as a golden
age?” “He admits,” said Tocqueville, “the material superiority of
our own age, but he believes that intellectually and morally we
are far inferior to our grandfathers. And I agree with him. These
seventy years of revolution have destroyed our courage, our
hopefulness, our self‐reliance, our public spirit, and, as
respects by far the majority of our higher classes, our passions,
except the vulgarest and most selfish ones, vanity and
covetousness. Even ambition seems extinct. The men who seek power
seek it not for itself, not as a means of doing good to their
country but as a means of getting money and flatterers.”(204)

What more remarkable testimony to Burke’s prophetic vision could be offered?

If any were needed, it would be found in an opposite quarter, in the revelations of Cluseret and his accomplices as to the premeditated burning of Paris and the destruction of the Vendôme Column in 1871, viewed in connection with Burke’s positive and reiterated assertions that the worst excesses of 1789 were not the result of sudden passion, nor accidental, “as some believed or pretended to believe, but were systematically designed from the beginning.” It is known that among his correspondents in 1789‐90 were the notorious Tom Paine and the eccentric cosmopolite, Anacharsis Baron de Clootz, both of whom strove to enlist Burke in the defence of the revolutionary cause before he had decisively pronounced himself. Paine and Clootz, congenial birds of prey, had both flown to Paris (anticipating the course of their disciples in 1871), smelling the approaching carnage afar off; and from them there is reason to believe Burke gathered ample hints of the full measure of the revolutionary programme. Striking also is Burke’s remark that the revolutionary subdivision of France would induce a demand for communal or cantonal independence. “These commonwealths,” he says, “will not long bear a state of subjection to the republic of Paris”—a prediction wonderfully verified by the attitude of Lyons and Marseilles during the late war and the period of the Commune, as well as by the cantonal programme of the Spanish revolutionists.

Burke’s theory of the true basis of government was as moderate and well conceived as the revolutionary schemes were destructive and unsound. “We know,” he says, “and, what is better, we feel, that religion is the basis of society and the source of all good and all comfort. A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than as he finds it; but a good patriot and a true politician always considers how he shall make the most of the existing constitution of his country. A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.” His defence of the cause of religion in France, and his glowing tribute to the virtue and learning of the French clergy, then, as now, the mark of the deadliest shafts of the Revolution, are eloquent and inspiring, but too long to quote in this article.