Chapter X (1)

How far has the Vatican Movement been a Success, and how far a Failure?--As to Measures of the Nature of Means a Success--As to Measures of the Nature of Ends hitherto a Failure--Testimony of Liberal Catholics to the one, and of Ultramontanes to the other--Apparatus of Means in Operation for the Ultimate End of Universal Dominion--Story of Scherr as an Example of the Minority--Different Classes of those who "Submit"--Condition and Prospects of the Two Powers in Italy--Proximate Ends at present aimed at--Control of Elections--Of the Press--Of Schools--Problem of France and Italy--Power of the Priests for Disturbance--Comparison between Catholic and Non-Catholic Nations for last Sixty Years--Are Priests capable of fomenting Anarchical Plots?--Hopes of Ultramontanes rest on France and England--The Former for Military Service, the Latter for Converts--This hope Illusory.

Before allowing ourselves to form any opinion on the question how far the attempt to place all authorities under the Pontiff has been a failure and how far a success, it is necessary that, in our own thoughts, two classes of measures should be set well apart. If we look only at measures which the leaders of the movement regarded in the light of ends, it is easy to pronounce it an utter failure, as most Italians and many of other nations have done. If, on the other hand, we look only at measures which the leaders regarded in the light of means, it is easy to proclaim, as all the voices of the Vatican have proclaimed, that so far the movement has been a success, wondrous even to the point of being manifestly divine.

We think it impossible to deny the complete success of the Vatican movement in perfecting the measures devised as means. Those Liberal Catholics who at present loudly pronounce the movement a failure, have only to read their own writings of 1869 and of the earlier months of 1870, to find that at that time certain advances in the policy of the Curia were described as unattainable. Those advances have been accomplished. As to certain measures, it was said that governments, bishops, clergy, people, would unite to make them impossible. Those measures are now statutes and ordinances. The Liberal Catholics, indeed, may pensively say that the gains of the Curia are the losses of the Church. That may be. Time will tell. The fact now to be registered is simply this: Certain changes were declared necessary, and at the same time sufficient for the attainment of the great end of universal domination. Those changes were pronounced to be revolutionary in the Church, dangerous to society, and, in fine, impossible. They were resisted, were urged on, and were triumphantly carried.

We also think it impossible to deny that up to the present time (1876) the movement, viewed in relation to ultimate ends, has been a complete failure. We do not say as much of proximate ends. As we have used the writings of Liberal Catholics to measure the success in regard to means, so would we use the writings of the Court party to measure the failure in regard to ends. It is already familiar to us that in those writings the moral renovations which were to attend the dawn of the new era, could not be indicated by any metaphor short of the primal burst of light on the horror of chaos. It was to be! So soon as the Lord should manifestly set His king upon His holy hill of Sion, all kings were to fall down before him, and his enemies were to lick the dust. Parliaments were to recognize their impotence and expire. Populations, suddenly illuminated, were to behold the saviour of society, and were lovingly to bow to his law. As to any possible opposition, it was described as the heathen raging--as the people imagining a vain thing. It was only the kings of the earth setting themselves and the rulers taking counsel together against the Lord and against His anointed.

Now, in fulfilment of these promises, what has come to pass? The Pope has fallen from his temporal throne. A long and bloody war, carried on with a view to place Don Carlos on the throne of Spain, has failed. Contrary to the fairest promise, hopes of placing the Count of Chambord on the throne of France have faded away. The tentative federation of Germany has been consolidated by an imperial crown, hereditary in the reigning house of Prussia. Austria has persisted in her anti-Catholic legislation, as it was called, and has extended it by abrogating the Concordat. Switzerland and Germany have both returned the attacks of the ecclesiastical power upon the civil power, by laws reasserting the national supremacy in every sphere of public life. Italy, in the act of overturning the temporal power, has completed her own unity. In the act of completing her own unity, she has, in the city of Rome, violated what the Pope calls Catholic unity, by admitting religious liberty within the sacred walls. In America no great State has modified its law in favour of the new theocracy. Several of the Catholic States have shown a consciousness of its aims, and jealousy of its accredited agents. In Canada, leading Liberal statesmen have clearly evinced a rising consciousness of what the Papacy is, and of what it aims at. The one ideal ruler of the Curia, the one set before the youth of nations as their model, Garcia Moreno, President of Ecuador, has fallen, openly assassinated in broad daylight. Thus, at the time when, according to his seers, the Pontiff was to survey a new cosmos rising out of the chaos of the Modern State, he, all round the horizon, beholds only confusion worse confounded. Not one nation has submitted its code to his revision. Not in one kingdom of the earth has a ruler been installed to reign under the laws of the Syllabus.

Does not this statement concede all that is claimed by those who say that the movement is a failure not redeemed by one success? What it does really concede is, that of the two ways, in one of which the ends aimed at were to be accomplished, the first has disappointed all hope. The ends proposed were so grand that only in one of two ways could they be realized; and whatever may be said of the enthusiasm of the projectors, it is not to be denied that they never lost sight of this fact, and never concealed it. The two ways were either such an intervention of Providence as would amount to a cosmopolitan miracle, or else the slow operation of means extending over ages. While the Pope and his more superstitious followers seemed to expect that the Virgin and the new-made saints would obtain miraculous transformations, the more calculating, even at moments when the flow of money and of friends seemed not only to exhilarate the Vatican, but to intoxicate it, did not fail to keep in view the fact that centuries might intervene--centuries marked by many a partial success and many a temporary discomfiture--between the day when the perfected machinery of means should be set in motion, and the day when the crowning victory should lead the head of the human species in triumph to the goal. The Jesuits are now entitled to point to that fact in bar of any premature exultation over their disappointment. At the same time, with all their power of simulating the joy of victory in defeat, they have been unable to prevent chagrin from tinging much of their later language. The great spectacle did not operate as a charm. The sublime revelation of a central authority for all human affairs did not subdue any wayward institutions. Providence put no seal on the deeds done. The replacing of St. Michael in his office of patron of the Church, was symptomatic of considerable dissatisfaction with the departmental divinities in general.

On the other hand, this complete failure of supernatural aid, or of any favouring current in public events, does not alter the fact that a system of means, contemplated and desired for ages, has at last been perfected, and that it is now over all the world being gradually brought into operation. The magnitude of the means indicates the universality of the ends. The fact that centuries upon centuries have elapsed since Popes began to claim what Pius IX has now acquired, that more than three centuries have passed even since, at Trent, the Jesuit General set up the pretensions which have now, at last, become the law of one hundred and seventy millions, is a consideration not lightly to be set aside, particularly when we contemplate the strife for universal dominion now openly inaugurated as a continuing struggle, to be handed down from generation to generation of men trained and consecrated to this very thing.

The stupendous scope of the ends might well demand as means measures exceptionally great, and the magnitude of the measures already carried as means may now well excuse, if not justify, confidence that the ends after they shall have been steadily pursued for ages will also be attained. Those ends were not less, when united into one, than the dominion of the world.

The Internal Tribunal, seated in every church, in every palace, in every castle, and at need in every private chamber, would always in point of authority take precedence of any local law, and would rule bed, board, purse, family, and all action which conscience determines.

The External Tribunal, seated in every city, would maintain the headship of the bishop over the civil magistrate, and the supremacy of spiritual over civil law and authority, as sacredly as we should maintain the supremacy of our civil law and authority over military law and authority.

The External Tribunal would make the Internal an establishment of the law. Every man, every woman, ay, every child of a certain age, who should not appear at least once in the year in that tribunal, would run into a punishable offence.

The Supreme Tribunal in the person of the Pope, acting either directly or through any Court or Congregation he might appoint, would be the final bar at which would appear contending kings, contending nations, or other appellants whatever, as also all whom he might, for any cause, be pleased to cite. From that judgment-seat would fall the sentence that only the Almighty could challenge. According to the well-known formula, the Supreme Judge would carry all rights in the shrine of his own breast.

Such a universal dominion was the end, the ultimate end in view. The end was hallowed to the mind of those proposing it by the persuasion that this dominion of the priest of God is the veritable kingdom of Christ. It is only by realizing how conscientious is this view of the spiritual empire, or the Roman Empire in a spiritual form--a view which, founded on a historic ideal, fascinates the imagination of Romanists--that we can either be just and charitable to the men who move for these ends, or can arrive at any reasonable estimate of the amount of future force in their movement. Mere politicians, say some, who have no religious feeling! Yes, many such; but these politicians well know that their power is proportioned to the amount of religious feeling which they can create and make ready to be acted upon. It is by putting together the political skill of the one set of men and the religious feeling of the other, that we obtain means of judging as to the quality of the directing and the amount of the impelling forces to be developed in the future struggle.

After all that they have recently accomplished within the Church, what can be too hard, they ask, to accomplish outside? They wanted to make the entire Church an instrument in which every joint, to the remotest limb, should infallibly respond to the will of the central director, so that at any given moment, and on any one point, the whole of its force could be brought to bear wherever resistance might be encountered, or wherever an advance might promise success. To make it such an instrument required changes which were pronounced unattainable, but they laughed the discouragement to scorn. Those changes affected all the three spheres of organization, constitution, and dogma. In _organization_ every clergyman had to be made movable at the will of the bishop, and every bishop had to be made dependent on the will of the Pope. The franchises of both the parish and the diocese had to be revoked. It is done. But it could not be done without a constitutional change. In the _constitution_ the Bishop of Rome had to be made by law the Ordinary of every diocese in the world, and every other bishop in the world had to be made by law a mere surrogate of the Bishop of Rome. That one bishop had to be made by law the sole lawgiver even when the entire episcopate meets in a General Council, and the whole episcopate in General Council assembled had to be by law reduced from a co-ordinate branch of a legislature to what is, in effect, a mere privy council to the Bishop of Rome. It is all done. But it could not be done without a dogmatic change. In _dogma_ it had to be determined that the edicts of the Bishop of Rome embodied in themselves all the alleged infallibility of the Church; ay, and even the consent of the Church, as a necessary sanction, had to be in dogma disavowed. We blame not any Liberal Catholic who said that these things were impossible. But the impossible is done. The new organization is not a mere administrative change, but rests firmly on a new legislative constitution. The new constitution is not a mere legislative change liable to legislative revision--it rests irreformable on adamantine dogma.

Thus, then, are the hundred and seventy millions, or two hundred millions, as they are called, bound into one very compact bundle, to be thrown into this scale or that by a single hand. Within the Church, says Vitelleschi, resistance is impossible. No obstruction can now arrest the current of command from Pope to nuncio, from nuncio to bishop and regulars, from bishop to canons and parish priests, from regulars to all manner of confraternities, from parish priests to unions and to voters. Where governments have one officer the Church has many. Where the government officer has no time to shape public opinion, the Church officer has little else to do. Where the lackeys in government service wear fine liveries, and the lords walk about like our fellow-creatures, the lackeys of the Church have fine liveries too, but the lords outshine even the theatre. Where, in Catholic countries, the officer of government comes into his seat of authority, or returns into it quietly, care is taken that the bishop shall, at his coming, appear exalted above all principality and power. In proportion as States, becoming more Christianized, have risen above show, the Papal Church, becoming more paganized and materialized, has sunk deeper into the craft and the love of display. While the officers of government see that the young are taught the material processes necessary to future power, the officers of the Church see that they are taught for what ends it will be good, noble, and martyr-like to employ power when they shall take their future share in governing the world. Bishop Reinkens, in a little work that ought to be read by every man who means to understand the questions that are to come up--_Revolution und Kirche_--declares that the policy of the Papacy is now revolution. Certain it is that for effecting a world-wide revolution, never did instrument exist so generally outspread and so perfectly centralized, so elaborately ramified and yet so pliant, as will be the society ruled over at the Vatican when once all the old men who resisted the changes have died off, and the new generation instructed in the spirit of the Syllabus has slowly grown up, as the generations formed by Trent grew up wherever the canons of that Council were received.

Such a growth is too slow to be waited for before partial results are secured; and every partial result it is hoped will be a stepping-stone towards the complete one. Therefore is every agency already named employed in promoting the organization of forces to bear a part in the grand struggle when it comes; but meantime in every local struggle. Associations of children, associations of peasants, associations of artizans, associations of old soldiers, called veteran associations, and numerous associations besides, are formed in various countries and on several models. On the social side clubs and "circles" contribute the convivial element, and on the devotional side orders and confraternities contribute the ascetic element to the common organization. New "devotions," new visions, new places of pilgrimage, new images, new prayers, new relics, new charms, new waters of virtue, new shrines, new patrons, new miracles, and new wonders feed the flame. By tens of thousands, and by hundreds of thousands, men take an oath of obedience to the Pope. By tens of thousands volunteers pledged to shed their blood for him are enrolled--"On paper," say the Italians, mocking; but 1867 showed that the crusaders meant crusading; and if tens of thousands of such volunteers under leaders such as Charette are enrolled they are not to be laughed at. The schools have not been in operation during the last ten years for nothing. Associations in France bear the portentous names of Jesu-Workman and Jesu-King (_Jésu-Ouvrier_ and _Jésu-Roi_)--the one aiming at organizing workmen, the other at organizing courts. The name of Jésu set up on these associations clearly points to the central organizing Company which Liberal Catholics with reverent indignation charge with daring to give a double meaning even to the all-blessed Name, not excepting its use in the solemn words, "At the name of Jesus every knee shall bow."

Even after July 18 the Liberal Catholics did not give up the Church as irrevocably sunk into the hands of the Jesuits. They counted on the eighty-eight bishops who had voted Nay, and on their promise one to another not to act separately. Had that promise been kept, it was just possible that, under favouring circumstances, the fatal steps of July might have been modified or even recalled, for by all tradition the acts of any Council were supposed to remain within its power, and to be open to its revision till it was legally dissolved. The Curia put this tradition under its heel. It posted up the Decrees on the doors of the Lateran and in other public places in the city, and certified the whole world that by this act they had become its supreme and irreformable law. How did the eighty-eight deport themselves? They had tamely allowed all manner of revolutionary acts, when done from above, and they allowed this last one as tamely as the rest. The erring Peter of the Vatican was not at the head of a community capable of producing a man who could withstand him to the face, and could tell him, as one told the erring Peter of Antioch, that he was to be blamed. Indeed, logically, the bishops seemed to have no ground of objection. The Decrees did not profess to be those of a Council, but those of the Pope, a Council having approved of them. If, then, the Pope by promulging any doctrinal Bull without citing the approbation of a Council, could give to it the force of irreformable law, unless it should be rejected by the bishops, how much more was he entitled to give that force to these Decrees. Even had their tenets afforded them ground for resistance, the eighty-eight were not the men to avail themselves of it. From one we may learn the complexion of them all.

At midnight on July 19, Von Scherr, Archbishop of Munich, who had throughout the Council acted with the Opposition, re-entered his city. He came, as the Germans say, without song or chime--that is, in strict privacy. At first many thought--and Friedrich was one of the number--that this demeanour was adopted, on the part of his Grace, to shun any public demonstration which the people might have made in honour of his attitude in Rome. But the whisper soon crept round, "Gregory has submitted."

Presently the Faculty of Theology, with Döllinger at its head, came in all form to present the Archbishop with an address of congratulation on his happy return. After the formal reply to the address, his Grace said, "Rome has spoken: you gentlemen know the rest. We could do nothing but give in." Friedrich says that he saw how Döllinger was boiling, while the rest were also moved. "We struggled long," continued the Archbishop, "and gained much, and we also averted a deal of evil." This remark, says Friedrich, evidently encountered general incredulity. The Archbishop then told of the deputation to the Pope--of which he was a member--on July 15; of the hopes raised by the reply it received; of how those hopes were dashed by the influence of Senestrey--for he does not seem to have named Manning; and finally, of the sad disappointment of Cardinal Rauscher on going the next day to thank his Holiness for yielding, and on hearing from those lips which to the "Catholic" world are the fount of truth, that the formula which, on the previous evening, the Pope denied having seen, was actually distributed among the prelates, and was declared to be irrevocable.

At the close of the conversation, Scherr, turning to Döllinger, said, "Shall we start afresh to work for the Holy Church?" The aged _Probst_ replied, "Yes, for the OLD one." It was evident that, if Scherr had just then had any other man before him, his anger would have waxed hot. He suppressed it, however, and replied, "There is only one Church, not a new one and an old." Then were the words pronounced by Döllinger, "They have MADE a new one." The note was sounded. The Archbishop could only say, "There have always been alterations in the Church and in the doctrines." This speech played upon the countenances of the Professors, calling up in each case a look characteristic of the man. "Never shall I forget," says Friedrich, "the respective bearing of Döllinger and Haneberg." Döllinger was soon excommunicated; Haneberg was soon in a bishop's palace, but ere long he died. No one took up the conversation, and as the Archbishop turned from Döllinger to address some one else, Friedrich saw tears in his eyes.

In the hall of the university where the Professors had robed, and where they now unrobed, they spent a quarter of an hour in talking over the scene. Döllinger, however, did not stay. Rather early the next morning, the Archbishop deigned to visit the plain house in Von der Tann Street. Döllinger plainly told him that he could not receive the dogma of July 18, being, as it was, in open contradiction to the past teaching and history of the Church. In that dogma the worst thing of all was the addition made after the discussion, "not by the consent of the Church." Here was a surprise for the Archbishop. He knew nothing of that addition. He had left the field before the last gun was fired. He had now to learn the shape which his new faith had actually taken, and to learn it from the lips of Döllinger. The venerable Provost who was to be excommunicated had to tell the Archbishop who was to do the deed what the change of creed actually was for not conforming to which he was to be given over to Satan. That scene might have afforded Kaulbach another picture.

Von Scherr at first spoke in Munich of the promise made by the bishops of the minority to one another not to act separately. By the end of August he had forgotten all about it. A "highly placed" layman was informed by the Archbishop that he need not trouble himself with infallibility, as the Decree would not be promulged in the diocese, and what was not promulged was not binding. Almost immediately afterwards it was printed in his own paper. Ere long, Scherr was as hot for infallibility as if his object had been to make the Curia forget in his present zeal any unpleasant impressions made by his former opposition. He was exemplary in protesting, threatening, and excommunicating. Friedrich gives particulars to prove, in the case of Scherr, that disregard of truth which is so freely alleged against the bishops generally, into which we will not enter.

As we have said, from one of the minority we may judge of all. Neither Hefele nor Kenrick, neither Dupanloup nor Strossmayer, displayed any Christian fortitude sufficient to arrest their Church in her downward course, or indeed displayed anything to give the Curia aught but food for scorn of the Opposition. Their convictions had been solemnly stated and ably argued. Those convictions did suffice to cause hesitation. But the force of conviction only tested the force of habit, and did not break it. The new submission made them tenfold more than ever the creatures of that overweening power which they had spent their lives in exalting, which for a moment they had attempted to moderate, but to which they now succumbed in its most heinous assumptions.

The lower clergy have followed the bishops in submission. At one time it seemed as if many of them would withstand. Except, however, in the two countries nearest to Italy--Switzerland and Germany--no appreciable resistance has been offered. In Germany the men in whom the force of belief overcame the habit of submission were almost exclusively those whom the elevating influence of university life had lifted above the ordinary level of the clergy. Their number is not large; but the valuable writings which they have already produced show that they have no mean power of influencing the future currents of theological thought. Spirited France, in spite of its Gallican traditions, was a pattern of tameness. The striking examples of Loyson and Michaud found exceedingly few to follow. Gratry "submitted." Throughout the rest of the world the exceptions have been isolated and without influence.

Among the laity, again, it is only in Switzerland and Germany that success has been even chequered. The otherwise uniform submission has there been broken by numbers considerable to-day, but more considerable for the future. Yet compared with the mass in submission, those numbers are soon told. But, on the other hand, that mass in submission is not of uniform value to the future theocracy. It contains the cordial adherents who already believed; the dutiful adherents who doubted, but at the word of the Council said, It is decided, and I now, as in duty bound, believe; the reckless adherents, who, like most in Italy and many in France, would as cheerfully have submitted to a dogma declaring the Popes imponderable, as to one declaring them infallible, and who do really believe that they are irreformable. Differing from all these are men who had an intelligent conviction against the new dogma, or against the new constitution, or against both. These, brought face to face with the alternative--submit, or bear the curse of the Church; submit, or survive the rending in twain of every life-tie--did sadly and slowly submit--submit without attempting to reconcile things to their reason, as it is said that Montalembert declared he would do. These men may never make apt instruments of the priests, but they do make their proud trophies. One strong man silently submitting is a statuesque monition to many others not to think. A still further element of unknown extent mingles with the mass. It consists of those who, without either formal submission or open breach, do not believe the new dogma, and do not approve of the new constitution. This now inert bulk may turn to a force bearing in either direction, or may divide into two portions; one giving the priests control over profession and appearance, without any corresponding control over belief--which is, perhaps, of all their triumphs the most practical; and another in which conviction, growing at last too strong for the habit of submission, breaks by its divine force the human bond, and throws men upon their conscience, their Bible, and their God. But when men have once really believed in a God who leaves the rule over His redeemed offspring to a Vicar, and have believed in man as a creature whose conscience another man is to keep, it is hard to find in them foothold for solid Christian convictions. They are kneaded to the hand of the priest. If they leave him, they become infidels, who though in feeling his opponents, perhaps his persecutors, become in argument and action his practical allies. Joining him in rooting out faith in the Bible and in primitive Christianity, they urge men to his two extremes of doctrine, the authority of the Church or Atheism, and consequently to his two extremes of government, the Papacy or the International. One Auguste Comte is worth many a monastery.

It is this "sublime" spectacle of success with hierarchy, clergy, and laity, which makes the recent past, to the augurs of reconstruction, a certain presage of a triumph, perhaps distant, but complete, in the future. No recalcitrating bishop now; or if a few worn-out men are still secretly of the old inclining, they are rapidly dying off. The list of the eighty-eight is already a short one. No bishop is now installed who to the old oath which already made him a vassal of the Pope does not add the new articles of the Vatican Decrees. No seminaries are now training priests to deny the infallibility of the Pope, or his ordinary, immediate, and omnipresent authority. In most the Jesuit text-books are adopted. No catechisms are now teaching against Papal infallibility, or teaching ambiguously. The new doctrine will be couched in terms clearer or less clear, according to political and theological necessities; but, whether in Prague or Sydney, in Florence or Liverpool, in Boston or Warsaw, in Berlin or Lima, the catechism will contain a text from which the friar or priest will put the same principles of social reconstruction into the minds of boys and girls. To the view of the Jesuits, the future unfolds like a peacock's tail, all sparkling with the eyes of the young. The outward loss to the Church which has been sustained was reckoned upon before hand. They hold that it is more than compensated by the perfect internal compactness gained. When once the preparations are complete--and a few score years are of no account--a generation well trained will be ready at the call of him who holds among men the place of God, to take up the cross of St. Peter, to cry, "God wills it," and to march till all high things that exalt themselves against Christ shall be pulled down, and the Church alone shall stand, the one all-perfect society embracing the human species.

The loss of the temporal power affected all the calculations of the foregoing period. It came with appalling suddenness. It startled all men to see the Emperor who had been the sole prop of the temporal power fall, not like a prince put to the worst amid a loyal people, but with an unheard-of crash like a log upon ice, while his empire instantly went under; and to see in another moment the Italian sentries standing round the Vatican. All efforts had first to be turned to a restoration. As if to illustrate the weakness which the subjects of the Pope form for any State, while yet the war was raging King William had to negotiate with Ledochowsky,[485] and ere yet the blood was dry, a petition signed by fifty-six members of the Prussian Parliament prayed the new Emperor of Germany to restore the Pope--which meant to declare war on Italy. While the Emperor still lay at Versailles a deputation, headed by three counts, passed through bleeding France to pray the victor to flesh his sword anew. Emperor William well knew that if all the powers of the Papacy sufficed for the task, the new empire would be rent to shivers in a day. The army which had taken Paris did not march on Rome. France had next to exhibit herself as a suppliant at the feet of the Holy Father--a Holy Father who wanted her with her right arm broken to draw with her left and cut down the Italians. She met this wicked suggestion with humble requests that the Holy Father would show forbearance and not demand services for which she was not prepared. Incredible as it may seem, Father Hyacinth Loyson stated, in the _Journal des Débats_, that French bishops, before thus attempting to entangle their own government, had actually applied to the invading Germans.[486] Refused by the invader, refused by their country, they hated where they could not smite. Germany was marked for destruction; and France was held to future service when the time should come. Meantime, every effort was put forth to check and disunite Italy, but in vain. She has strained the religious toleration which the Pope abhors so as even to cover overt political hostilities. She has allowed him to issue all manner of incentives to undo the Italian kingdom by either domestic revolt or foreign intervention, or if possible by both. She has allowed him to gather together crowds of hostile foreigners and to excite them to affront and revile the nation. She has grown stronger and more solid during the process, laughing equally at the Napoleonic idea that the Pope was to be treated as if he had two hundred thousand bayonets, and at the Bonaparte violence which inflicted personal insult, prison, and exile. At this moment, after six years have passed, the Vatican as unblushingly asserts that Italy--the real Italy--is on its side as it did in the years preceding Solferino.[487] Victor Emmanuel has tried the experiment of letting the Pope play the prisoner or the freeman, the prophet, priest, or Caesar, the tribune or the medicine-man, just at his wayward will. The enmity of the Pope has been good for Italy as for England, Germany, America, and all countries favoured with it; but if the day comes when the Pope meets the bow of any future Prime Minister of Italy with a responsive bow, then may we begin to look for fresh cycles of conspiracy and convulsion.

The future must be its own interpreter. Meantime in the Vatican sits a king calling himself a prisoner, though he is free to go where he will; and in the Quirinal, a king calling himself a good Catholic, though he is a rebel against the Vicar of God. If the wisdom of Italy in allowing to the Pope unlimited personal freedom has been great, the want of wisdom in professing to exalt his spiritual authority, and in giving in to his sole hand the ancient powers of both the crown and the people in the election of bishops and clergy, amounts perhaps to the grossest political folly of our age. When Bonaparte dealt with the Pope as sole arbiter of the bishoprics of France, he opened a mine against the national authority whether seated on a throne or on a president's chair, over which it has never sat securely, and in which it will one day sink if France goes on as she has done of late, giving the priests increasing power in education. But when Victor Emmanuel repeats this blunder in a form more completely providing for future Papal power, he digs a grave under the feet of his own dynasty. To Italians, unhappily, a great hypocrisy may be a great triumph of skill; they smile at principles, admire shifts, and are wondrously clever at them. In politics, till they found the principle of constitutional monarchy, they, in spite of all their shifts, floundered between fruitless conspiracy and repression--never ending, still beginning. In religion they want what in politics they have found, a principle and a basis. Ancient scriptural Christianity, the Christianity of the Epistle to the Romans, would give them the firm rock between the quicksands of sacerdotalism and the floods of infidelity; a rock on which a nation might securely rise to take its place with realms which own no other foundation. But hitherto scarcely a glimmer of light on this matter has appeared among Italian statesmen. They sadly underrate the power of the Curia. The Curia know their weakness, and count upon their fall. To bring it to pass may, they think, take time; but the Pope well knows how to play upon the king for the undoing of the nation. Any ruler who does not in his conscience believe the Pope to be a pretender in his claims to represent God and to rule the universal Church, and who does not believe him to be the worst and greatest corrupter of the Christian religion ever brought to light by time, is in constant danger of risking all by some act of compliance induced perhaps by his religious sentiments, by the remorse of his vices, by the intrigues of the women about him, or by the guile of the ecclesiastics who lie in wait.

For the time being the Vatican is placed at the disadvantage of complicating the general struggle for supremacy with the particular one for the restoration of the temporal power. The ultimate end being now manifestly distant, the whole power of the perfected mechanism is turned to the gaining in detail of the proximate ends which will lead to it. These, roughly stated, are, control over elections, control over the Press, and control over schools. If we take Bavaria and Belgium as favourable specimens of Roman Catholic countries, the priestly power in elections has already become a source of bloodshed, and threatens to be so in continuance. The Catholic and the Liberal parties stand arrayed as two forces, not representing, like our Conservatives and Liberals, two tendencies necessary to balance one another, but two hostile principles one or other of which must perish. In Germany the power of the Pope in elections has proved to be a real not to say a terrible one. In France it was found such at the first election after the war as to be all but sufficient to place the destinies of the country at his disposal for a time. The last general election showed a decided recoil from this danger. In Italy it had come to that point that in municipal elections the moderate party, in several instances, made common cause with the Papal one. But there, again, the last general election has given a result in the opposite direction. The terror which the priests can turn to account in elections is threefold--dread of civil hurt or loss, for which contrivances are manifold; dread of personal violence, which of course supposes a strong Catholic party; and dread of eternal ruin, which the priest of God can inflict for voting against the interests of the Church. Even on Roman Catholics not brought up in the schools of priests, these influences are powerful. What will they become with generations brought up in schools under the new inspiration of the Syllabus?

"In every mode and by every means that is not contrary to our conscience" is the formula expressing the solemn pledges of all Catholics to war against the revolution, or the Modern State. Not merely as to the occupation of Rome, but in its very principles, says the _Civiltá_, will we oppose it--

We shall fight it with Catholic associations, we shall fight it
with the Press, we shall fight it in parliament. We shall confront
theory with theory, morality with morality, school with school, the
flag of Christ with the flag of Satan, raised by the revolution.
Catholic societies where they existed are being multiplied, where
they did not exist they are being planted. The number of Catholic
members in the Prussian Parliament has increased beyond hope, and
in Belgium they have drawn closer together. The struggle against
the Austrian ministry which favoured the revolution has grown
hotter, and _obligations in defence of Catholic principles will
be imposed upon the future Members of Parliament of England and
Ireland_. With whom will be the final victory?--there can be no
doubt.[488]

As to the Press, the "work of the 'good Press'" is one of the most meritorious of the many "works" in operation for the new celestial empire. From the great _Civiltá_, the mainspring of the whole, to the episcopal organ in the remotest diocese, it moves for one end, whether in the form of review, magazine, journal, pamphlet, or book. It represents a literature really prodigious, and is in its own eyes on the high road to supremacy. Of journals it is said that in Germany alone hundreds are subsidized.[489] How far the assertions are true or false we know not, which are frequently made, that the most rabid and blaspheming organs of low and anarchical demagogues are in Jesuit pay; but those assertions in themselves are a serious symptom. In Italy it is often popularly said that there are one hundred and eighty thousand nuns, friars, and priests, all counted. In France of priests alone there are forty thousand. In Germany, as Schulte has shown, in certain cities the ecclesiastical persons, male and female, number from ten per cent. upwards of the _adult_ population. If we extend to the whole Roman Catholic population of the world calculations of an organization on a scale somewhat similar, we cannot do otherwise than regard a Press which controls such a cosmopolitan force as a serious power.

At the same time a twofold weakness of the "_good Press_" is obvious. First, it does not carry with it the Press which really leads nations, though it runs strong in by-channels of its own. And, again, it tends to change the ignorance of the general Press into knowledge. In Germany this is already done. There the pious and mystic style of the Vatican dialect has ceased to be an unknown tongue. Men of letters and jurists who twenty years ago would have passed over the ecclesiastico-political phrases of a bishop or cardinal as unwittingly as an English Member of Parliament, now read them with luminous and searching insight. Even in England and America a process of self-instruction is rapidly going on in the best journals. Lord Beaconsfield, in _Lothair_, has shown that he is awake to the social and scenic aspects of the Ultramontane movement, and has displayed more insight into the genealogy of its cult than have the men in this nation to whom the country has a right to look for something better than slipshod arguments, and well-played parodies. Mr. Gladstone has shown himself awake to the national and international, to the moral and political aspects of Ultramontanism. Mr. Cartwright's work on the Jesuits shows that younger politicians are beginning to do the best thing they can do, that is, to study at original sources, and to give solid information. Mr. T.A. Trollope's work on Papal Conclaves shows that all Englishmen are not able in Rome to resist the rational tendency to see the place with unveiled eyes, and to speak of it and its ways in plain English, and that some of those who thoroughly know it are not disposed to enhance the reputation which the English of late years have been earning for love of monkish finery and open-mouthed credence of monkish fables. Perhaps in time some ecclesiastic of a rank, in the religious world, corresponding to that of Lord Beaconsfield and Mr. Gladstone in the political world, may show some grasp of the subject. The relation of our jurists to the movement is hardly so close as to warrant the hope that they will be led to such a study of it as is now manifest among the jurists of Germany. Yet no result is so much to be desired. In fact the whole question belongs much more to the jurist and the politician than to the theologian; although theological ideas are throughout employed as the motive power.

Desirable as is the control of elections and of the Press, still more desirable is that of universities, colleges, and schools, for they now bear within their bosoms the electors and lawgivers, the writers and readers who will hereafter mould statutes and determine the temper of armies as well as their destination. The establishment throughout Europe of universities canonically instituted was, at the commencement of its career, pointed out by the _Civiltá_ as a leading object in the movement it projected. When we trace with Ranke the Papal restoration which in part repaired the great revolt of the sixteenth century, we find that the greatest results of that movement were not won till after a generation or two had passed away. It was only south of the Pyrenees and the Alps that the arms of Charles V and Philip II effectually stayed the Reformation. In central Europe and in France the Bible, the school, and the Reformed Churches continued to spread long after the Council of Trent. When the two princely youths Ferdinand of Austria and Maximilian of Bavaria were still imbibing the Jesuit lessons of Ingolstadt, the memory of Alva had long been execrated in the Low Countries, and the songs of England had long thanked God for the overthrow of the Armada. At the same time imperial cities on the Danube, and castles in Austria, Styria, and Bohemia, were becoming more and more centres of the Reformed doctrine. The decisive check to the spread of that doctrine was not given till education had done its work. Education did not supply the check otherwise than by ensuring the command of the sword. The schoolmaster made the Thirty Years' War. It was the teaching of Ingolstadt that trained Ferdinand to the cool, conscientious, adroit, and unrelenting use of physical force for the greater glory of God. No sooner had the young Archduke begun to rule, than week after week, in one town or another, Styria beheld the repression of the Reformed worship, till with quiet but dreadful strength Ferdinand had shut up every heretical temple, "to the astonishment of all Germany," as Schiller naïvely says. In this manner did he kindle the flame; and at the end of thirty years the Protestantism of Austria, Bohemia, Styria, and other states was no more. This work went on till the revocation of the Edict of Nantes well nigh accomplished for France what had been completely accomplished for Austria by Ferdinand, and for Bavaria by Maximilian.

The fighting Company of Jesus now looks to a similar process for results similar in nature, but on a wider scale. Colleges and high schools are preparing young princes, nobles, and gentlemen to bear the part of leaders, one at the Court, another in the parliament and a third in the camp. Elementary schools are training the followers. All round the Catholic horizon, in the literature of the new dominion, one object looms up out of clouds of hazy words, dilates before the imagination of the devout, and towers till others are dwarfed; and this object is the Crusade of St. Peter. Lads with old blood in their veins are learning how glorious it will be to lead a charge or to command a division in the greatest of all Crusades, for the most glorious of all restorations; and poor lads are learning how they that smite like Peter Jong will win in death the palm of the martyr.

M. Veuillot's description of the duty of governments in respect of education was terse: "To allow men to be made against this perpetual plague of revolution." To do this, governments must set aside all other moral authorities but one. The authority of parents may, indeed, determine for their children questions of diet and of dress, of calling or of fortune, but the priest is the father of the child's soul, and must determine the whole of its moral regimen. In keeping with this, the authorities of a parish or a commune, as representing the parents of a neighbourhood; a corporation, as representing the parents of a city; a legislature, as representing the parents of the whole land, can nowhere else be so effectually shut out from the realm of morals as in the school. Not, we would once more say, that the devout Ultramontane believes that by shutting them out he is loosening moral ties, for he thinks that by ensuring full scope to the sole authority, of the priest, he best defends every moral right. The object of training that union of families which we call a State, to regard itself as a union without any higher end than a material one, having in it neither divine office nor divine authority, is an object which cannot be so impressively advanced by any other means as when, at the bidding of priests, a government by law renounces control over the moral portion of the training of its own citizens, conducted under its own direction and paid for out of its own funds. The object of training the laity to own that it is not for them to have any opinion as to what, in morals or in faith, is true or false, or for them to assume any responsibility as to what is right or wrong, saving always the responsibility of fulfilling the directions of their spiritual guides, can never be more effectually promoted than when the representatives of the households of an entire community, having set up schools and provided for their maintenance, hand over to priests the power to determine whether any moral training shall be given in those schools or not, and, if any, what. When all this can be carried out in the normal manner, matters are so arranged that throughout the days of impressible youth, no authority shall be heard of, as deciding any moral question, but that of the priest of God. When circumstances prevent the normal arrangements from being carried out, the way for them will be best prepared by whatever compromise leads the State furthest away from principles opposed to those of the Pontiff, and entangles it in what is called a practical solution wherein his principles are, if only virtually, conceded. In preparing such a solution, dangers to be shunned by his agents are anything that would practically recognize the right of parents, singly or collectively, to decide moral questions for their children independently of the priests; anything that would recognize in the laity a right of moral or religious self-direction; anything that would, in practice, show that others than Romanists have the power of uniting for moral and religious purposes; anything that would allow the Bible to be honoured as a public standard without a priest; anything that would embody the hateful and condemned principle of the equality of different denominations before the law.

Bishop Reinkens has described what is the practical effect of the training now being given to very large portions of the children in Europe. It is, he says, to fix in the mind the conviction "that Roman Catholics have a divinely guaranteed right, under certain circumstances, violently to overturn existing authorities, and the chiefs of those authorities, if they have only the power to do so, and that it is an exercise of virtue to employ all means for that end." Bishop Reinkens[490] asserts that what formerly was regarded as a mere theory of the Curia is now its practice, namely, that, in the language of John Capestrano, the Pope "can abrogate all human rights," and that "what has the force of law is just what is pleasing to him." Even already, according to Bishop Reinkens, does the denominational instruction given in schools in Germany justify the prediction of Hefele to the effect that, for scholastic purposes, the new exaltation of the Papal power would be made the primary dogma. The bishop solemnly adds: "The divine power of the Pope over all human beings perplexes the children in the schools; they early learn to obey the Vicegerent of God against the empire and the emperor. In the superior schools, the higher scholastic clergy attend to the same thing" (p. 8).