THIRD DIVISION. (Continued.) (continued 11)

§ 202.5. Protestant Dissenters in England.―Down nearly to the end of the eighteenth century all the enactments and restrictions of the Toleration Act of 1689 (§ 155, 3) continued in full force. But in 1779 the obligation of Protestant dissenters to subscribe the Thirty-nine Articles was abolished, and the acknowledgment of the Bible as God’s revealed word substituted. The right of founding schools of their own, hitherto denied them, was granted in 1798. In 1813 the Socinians were also included among the dissenters who should enjoy these privileges. After a severe struggle the Corporation and Test Acts were set aside in 1826, affording all dissenters entrance to Parliament and to all civil offices. The necessity of being married and having their children baptized in an episcopal church was removed by the Marriage and Registration Act of 1836 and 1837, and divorce suits were removed from the ecclesiastical to a civil tribunal in 1857. In 1868 compulsory church rates for the episcopal parish church were abolished. Lord Russell’s University Bill of 1854, by restricting subscription of the Thirty-nine Articles to the theological students, opened the universities of Oxford and Cambridge to dissenters, while the University Tests Bill of 1871 made the adherents of all religious confessions eligible for all university honours and emoluments at both seminaries. Thus one restriction after another was removed, so that at last the episcopal church has nothing of her exclusive privileges left beyond the rank and title of a state church, and the undiminished possession of all her ancient property, from which her prelates draw princely revenues.

§ 202.6. Scotch Marriages in England.―The saints of the English Revolution had indeed resolved in 1653 to introduce civil marriage (§ 162, 1). But the reaction under Cromwell set this unpopular law aside, and the Restoration made marriage by an Anglican clergyman, even for dissenters, an indispensable condition of legal recognition. But in no country, especially among the higher orders, were private marriages, without the knowledge and consent of the family, so frequent as here, and clergymen were always to be found unscrupulous enough to celebrate such weddings in taverns or other convenient places. When an end had been put to such irregularities on English soil by an Act of Parliament of 1753, lovers seeking secret marriage betook themselves to Scotland. In that country there prevailed, and still prevails, the theory that a declaration of willingness on both sides constitutes a perfectly valid marriage. The Scottish ecclesiastical law indeed requires church proclamation and ceremony, but failure to observe this requirement is followed only by a small pecuniary fine. Fugitive English couples generally made the necessary declaration before a blacksmith at Gretna-Green, who was also justice of the peace in this small border village, and were then legitimately married people according to Scottish law. Only in 1856 were all marriages performed in this manner without previous residence in Scotland pronounced by Act of Parliament invalid.

§ 202.7. The Scottish State Church.―The Presbyterian Church of Scotland, from the beginning strictly Calvinistic in constitution, doctrine and practice, has, generally speaking, preserved this character. Only in recent times has the endeavour of the so-called Moderates to introduce a milder type of doctrine won favour. The Established Church, as a national church properly so-called and recognised by law, dates from the political union of England and Scotland in the kingdom of Great Britain in 1707, and the Anglican Episcopal Church there was then reduced to a feebly represented dissenting denomination. Patronage, set aside indeed in the Reformation age, but restored under Queen Anne in 1712, and since then, in spite of all opposition from the stricter party, continued, because often misused to secure the intrusion of inacceptable ministers upon congregations, gave occasion to repeated secessions. Thus the Secession Church broke off in 1732, and the Relief Church in 1752, the latter going beyond the former’s protest against patronage by unconditional repudiation of Erastianism, i.e. the theory of the necessary connection of Church and State (§ 144, 1), and the assertion of the spiritual independence of the church, and expressed firmly the principles of Voluntaryism, i.e. the payment of all ecclesiastical officers, etc., by voluntary contributions. Both parties united in 1847 in the United Presbyterian Church, which now embraces one-fifth of the population.―Twice that number joined the secession of the Free Church in 1843. The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland granted to congregations in 1834 the right of vetoing presentations to vacancies. The civil courts, however, upheld the absolute right of patrons, and at the Assembly of 1843 about two hundred of the most distinguished ministers, with the great Dr. Chalmers (died 1847) at their head, left the state church, and, as Non-Intrusionists, founded the Free Church of Scotland, which at its own cost formed new parishes and distinguished itself by Christian zeal in every direction. It differs from the United Presbyterian Church in restricting its opposition to the abuse of patronage, without repudiating right off every sort of state aid and endowment as unevangelical. But even to it the law passed in 1846, granting to all congregations the right of veto, seemed now no longer a sufficient motive to return to the state church. Even when in 1874, parliament, at the call of the government, formally abolished the rights of patronage through all Scotland and gave to the congregations the right of choosing their own ministers, the General Assembly of the Free Church by a great majority refused to reunite with the state church brought so near it, because it conceded to the civil courts unwarrantable interference with its internal affairs, especially the right of suspending its clergy.559

§ 202.8. Scottish Heresy Cases.―The Glasgow presbytery lodged before the United Presbyterian Synod in Edinburgh of 1878 a charge against the Rev. Fergus Ferguson of heresy, because his teaching was in conflict with the church doctrine of the atonement in saying that sinners, apart from Christ’s intervention, would not suffer eternal punishment but extinction, and that the same fate still lay before unbelievers and the impenitent. After five days’ violent discussion, the majority of the synod, while strongly dissenting from his views and urging him to avoid it in his preaching and catechising, resolved to retain him in office as having proved his adherence to the orthodox doctrine of the atonement. But when, at next year’s synod, the Rev. D. Macrae of Gourock asserted that, in spite of the Westminster Confession, it was allowable for ministers to deny the eternity of punishment, and would not promise to preach otherwise, he was unanimously deposed.―Far more exciting and long continued were the proceedings begun in the Free Church in 1876, against Professor Robertson Smith of Aberdeen, who was charged before his presbytery with offensive statements about angels, but especially with contradicting the inspiration of Scripture by contesting the Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy. After various proposals of deposition, suspension, rebuke, acquittal, had been made, the General Assembly of 1880, after much deliberation and discussion, by a majority found the charge of heterodoxy not proven, but earnestly exhorted the accused to greater circumspection and moderation, and the decision was greeted with thundering applause from the students and waving of handkerchiefs from the ladies present. But when, very soon after this acquittal, several other contributions by him appeared in the Encyclopædia Britannica, on the Hebrew Language and Literature, and Haggai, in the spirit of the Wellhausen criticism (§ 182, 18), as also an article on Animal Worship among the Arabians and in the Old Testament, in the Journal of Philology, the Commission sitting in Edinburgh reinstituted proceedings against him. In October, 1880, Smith vindicated before that court his scientific attitude toward the Old Testament, maintaining that a moderate criticism of the biblical books was reconcilable with the maintenance of their inspired authority. The majority of the Commission, however, voted for his expulsion from his chair. Smith protested both against the competence and against the judgment of the Commission, but declared himself ready to submit to the judgment of the General Assembly. Meanwhile he accepted an invitation from Glasgow to deliver public lectures there on the Old Testament, which were received with extraordinary favour. This course was published under the title: “The Old Testament in the Jewish Church.” The General Assembly of May, 1881, now decided by a large majority to remove him from his academical chair, with retention of his license and his professor’s salary, which latter, however, Smith declined. But his numerous sympathizers presented him with a scientific library worth £3,000, and promised an annual stipend equal to his former salary. In 1883 he received the appointment as Professor of Arabic in Cambridge and the large revenues of that office allowed him to decline the offer of his friends.560

§ 202.9. The Catholic Church in Ireland.―The Catholic inhabitants of Ireland under Protestant proprietors, and forced to pay tithes for the support of the Protestant clergy, were always deprived of civil rights. In 1809 O’Connell (died 1847), an agitator of great popular eloquence, placed himself at the head of the oppressed people, in order in a constitutional way to secure religious and political freedom and equality. At last, in 1829, the Emancipation Bill, supported by Peel and Wellington, was passed, which on the basis of the formal declaration of the whole Catholic episcopate that papal infallibility and papal sovereignty in civil matters was not part of the Catholic faith nor could be joined therewith either in Ireland or anywhere else in the Catholic world, gave to Catholics admission to parliament and to all civil and military appointments. But the hated tithes remained, and were enforced, when refused, by military force. After long debates in both houses of parliament, the Tithes Bill was adopted in 1838, which transferred the tithe as a land-tax from tenants to proprietors, which, however, was only a postponing of the question. It was thus regarded by O’Connell. He declared that justice for Ireland could only be got by abolishing the legislative union with Great Britain existing since 1800, and restoring her independent parliament. For this purpose he organized the Repeal Association. In 1840 another no less powerful popular agitator arose in the person of the Irish Capuchin, Father Mathew, the apostle of temperance, who with unparalleled success persuaded thousands of those degraded by drink to take vows of abstinence from spirituous liquors. He kept apart from all political agitation, but the fruits of his exertions were all in its favour. O’Connell in 1843 organized monster meetings, attended by hundreds of thousands. The government had him tried, the jury found him guilty, but the House of Lords quashed the conviction and liberated him from prison in 1844. The Peel ministry now sought to soothe the excitement by passing in 1845 the Legacy Act, which allowed Catholics to hold property in their own names, and the Maynooth Bill, by which the theological seminary at Maynooth received a rich endowment from the State. Continued famine, and consequent emigration of several hundreds of thousands to America and Australia, relieved Ireland of a considerable portion of its Catholic population, while Protestant missions by Bible and tract circulation and by schools had some success in evangelizing those who remained. On November 5th, 1855, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, the Redemptorists at Kingstown, near Dublin, erected and burnt a great bonfire in the public streets of Bibles which they had seized, and the primate archbishop of Ireland justified it by reference to the example of the believers at Ephesus (Acts xix. 19).

§ 202.10. The Fenian movement, originating among the American Irish, which since 1863 created such terror among the English, was the result of political rather than religious agitation. Although this movement failed in its proper end, namely the complete separation of Ireland from England, it yet forced upon the government the conviction of the absolute necessity of meeting the just demands of the Irish by thorough-going reforms and putting an end to the oppressions which the native farmers suffered at the hands of foreign landowners, and the grievances endured by the Catholic church by the maintenance of the Anglican church established in Ireland. The carrying out of these reforms was the service rendered by the Gladstone ministry. By the Irish Land Bill of 1870 the land question was solved according to the demands of justice, and by the Irish Church Bill of 1869, which deprived the Anglican church in Ireland of the character of a state church and put it on the same footing as other denominations, the church question was similarly settled. The dignitaries of the Anglican church thus lost their position as state officials and their seats in the House of Lords. The rich property of the hitherto established church was calculated and applied partly to compensating for losses caused by this reform, partly to creating benevolent institutions for the general good. But neither the Church Bill, nor the Land Bill, nor the Universities Bill, which in 1880 founded by state aid a Catholic university in Dublin, secured the reconciliation of the Irish. “Eternal hatred of England” was and is the battle cry; “Ireland for the Irish, and only for them,” is their watchword. In order to carry out this scheme an Irish “National League” was formed, and innumerable secret “Moonlighters,” under the supposed leadership of “Captain Moonshine,” committed atrocities by burning farm steadings and mutilating cattle, murdering and massacring by dagger and revolver, petroleum and dynamite, and directed their operations against the representatives of the government, against proprietors who sought rent, against tenants who paid rent, against officials who endeavoured to enforce it, and against everything that was, or was called, English. In order to cut at the root of this lawlessness, which by proclamation of a state of siege was only restricted, not overthrown, the government of 1881 passed further agrarian reforms: All tenant rights were to be purchased by the surplus of the fund formed by the disestablishment of the Irish church, and where this did not suffice, by state grants, and the right to conclude contracts for rent and to determine its amount was transferred from the proprietors to a newly-constituted land court, without whose permission, after the lapse of the fifteen years’ term, no rent contract could be made. But even this did not stop almost daily repeated murders and acts of destruction. The government now sought the aid of the pope through the mediation of a Catholic member of parliament on a visit to Rome; but these merely confidential negotiations led to no considerable result. In May, 1883, the curia, on the occasion of a collection promoted by the National League as a magnificent national present to the great (Protestant) leader of the agitation, Mr. Parnell, in a circular letter, forbad “proprio motu,” the bishops in the strictest manner taking any part in the movement, and urged them to dissuade their members from doing so. But only Archbishop McCabe of Dublin (died 1885), from the first an opponent of the League, issued a pastoral against it to be read in all the pulpits of his diocese. The other bishops ignored the papal command, and among the Catholic people the opinion obtained that they owed to the pope obedience in spiritual but not in political matters. The collections for the Parnell fund were continued with redoubled zeal. The attempts of dynamitards, supplied with materials by their American compatriots, and other agrarian offences have not yet been finally stopped.

§ 202.11. The Catholic Church in England and Scotland.―The Emancipation Act, passed mainly for the relief of the Irish, naturally also benefited English Catholics, who in 1791 had been allowed to hold Catholic services. Led by the numerous accessions of Puseyites to entertain the most extravagant hopes, Pius IX. in 1850 issued a bull, by which the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England was reinstituted with twelve suffragan bishoprics under one archbishop of Westminster. The bull occasioned great excitement in the Protestant population (Anti-Papal Aggression), and the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill forbade the use of ecclesiastical titles not sanctioned by the law of the land. After the first excitement had passed, the Catholic bishops, at their head the learned and brilliant and zealous ultramontane Cardinal Archbishop Wiseman (died 1865), and his successor, surpassing him, if not in genius and learning, at least in ultramontane zeal, the Puseyite convert Manning, made a cardinal in 1875, used with impunity their condemned titles, until in 1871 the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill was formally revoked by act of parliament. Conversions in noble families were particularly numerous in the later decades. Since 1850 the number of Catholics in England and Scotland has quadrupled. This has been caused in great part by Irish emigration, for the middle and lower ranks of the English have scarcely been affected by the conversion fever, which as the latest form of the fitful humour of the English had so rich a harvest in the families of the nobility. In 1780 all London had only one Catholic place of worship, the chapel of the Sardinian embassy, which on June 2nd of that year was wrecked and burnt by a raging mob. Now the English capital has two episcopal dioceses, ninety-four Catholic churches and chapels (besides about 900 Anglican churches) with 313 clergymen, and forty-four cloisters. In the House of Lords sit twenty-eight Roman Catholic peers, and in both countries there are forty-seven Catholic baronets. Since 1847 England has a specifically Catholic university at Kensington, under the episcopate, and with the pope as its supreme head, which, however, with its poor staff of teachers and its expensive course attracts but a few of the Catholic youth of England. Since the Anti-Papal Aggression of 1850 failed, the Protestant people have shown themselves comparatively indifferent to such assumptions of the papacy.―In the Act of Union of 1707 (§ 155, 3), Scotland was guaranteed the absolute exclusion of every sort of Roman Catholic hierarchy for all time to come. But in recent times the number of its Catholic inhabitants so greatly increased, that Pius IX. in his last years, not unaided by the English government, eagerly urged the re-establishment of the hierarchy, and Leo XIII. was able at his first consistory of the college of cardinals in March, 1878, to make appointments to the two newly-erected archdioceses and their bishoprics. On the following Easter Sunday the allocution relating thereto was read in all Catholic churches in Scotland. The restoration was thus carried out in spite of all protests and demonstrations of Scottish Protestants.

§ 202.12. German Lutheran Congregations in Australia.―Besides the dominant Anglican church, emigration has led to the formation of a considerable number of German Lutheran congregations, which are distributed in three synods.

The Victoria Synod was founded in 1852 by pastor Göthe. It adopted at first the union platform, but subsequently attached itself more decidedly to the Lutheran confession.

Pastor Karch, who in 1830 emigrated with a number of Prussian Lutherans, in order to avoid the union, laid the foundation of the Immanuel Synod. Since 1875 it has been supplied with preachers from the missionary institute of Neuendettelsau. It is distinguished by its missionary zeal for the conversion of the natives, pursues with special interest the study of the prophetic word, and makes chiliasm an open question which need not rend the church.

The South Australian Synod, on the other hand, is the decided opponent of any sort of chiliasm, and has assumed an attitude of violent antagonism to the Immanuel Synod.

§ 203. France.

In France, lauded as the eldest daughter of the church after the overthrow of the first Empire, ultramontanism, under the secret and open co-operation of the Jesuits, has ever arisen with revived youth and vigour out of all the political convulsions which have since passed over the land. And though indeed Gallicanism seemed again to obtain strength under the second Empire and, down to the close of that period, found many able champions among learned theologians like Bishop Maret (§ 189, 1), and even among exalted prelates like the noble Archbishop Darboy of Paris, a martyr of his office under the Commune (§ 212, 4), its influence faded gradually, and in the latest phase of France’s political development, the third republic, seems utterly to have disappeared, so that even the “Kulturkampf” which broke out in 1879 could not give it life again.―The number of Protestant churches and church members, in spite of bloody persecutions during the Bourbon restoration, and many arbitrary restrictions by Catholic prefects under the citizen king and the second Empire, by numerous accessions of whole congregations and groups of congregations through zealous evangelization efforts, by means of school instruction, itinerant preaching, and Bible colportage, has increased during the century fourfold. In the Reformed church the opposition of methodistically tinctured orthodoxy, reinforced from England and French Switzerland, and rationalistic freethinking, led to sharp conflicts. Also in the Lutheran church, more strongly influenced by Germany, similar discussions arose, but a more conciliatory spirit prevailed and violent struggles were avoided.

§ 203.1. The French Church under Napoleon I.―In 1801 Napoleon as Consul concluded with Pius VII. a Concordat which, adopting the concordat of Francis I. (§ 110, 14), abandoning the pragmatic sanction of Bourges, and only haggling about the limits to be fixed for the two powers, gave no consideration to the idea of a wholesome internal reform of the French Church: Catholicism is the acknowledged religion of the majority of the French people; the church property belongs to the state, with the obligation to maintain the clergy and ordinances; the clergy who had taken the oath and those who were expatriated were all to resign, but were eligible for election; new boundaries were to be marked out for the episcopal dioceses with reference to the political divisions of the country; the government elects and the pope confirms the bishops, and these, with approval of the government, appoint the priests. The one-sided Organic Articles of the first Consul of 1802, which were annexed to the publication of the Concordat as a code of explanatory regulations, made any proclamation of papal orders and decrees of all foreign councils dependent on previous permission of the government, as also the calling of synods and consultative assemblies of the clergy. They further ordained that all official services of the clergy should be gratuitous, and transferred to the civil council the right and duty of strict inquiry into any clerical breach of civil laws and any misuse or excessive exercise of clerical authority. The thirty-first article, however, created that unhappy order of Desservants or curates, the result of which was that interim appointments were made to most of the benefices in order to squeeze state pay in supplement to the inadequate ecclesiastical endowments, and so their holders were at the absolute mercy of the bishops who could transport or dispense with them at any moment. For further particulars about the friendly and hostile relations of Napoleon and the pope, see § 185, 1. By an imperial decree of 1810, the four articles of the Gallican Church (§ 156, 3) were made laws of the Empire; and a French National Council of 1811 sought to complete the reconstruction of the church according to Napoleon’s ideas, but proved utterly incapable for such a task, and was therefore dissolved by the emperor himself.―To pacify the Protestants, dissatisfied with the Concordat, amid flattering acknowledgment of their services to the state, to science and to the arts, an appendix was attached to the Organic Articles, securing to them liberty of religious worship and political and municipal equality with Catholics. For training ministers for the Reformed Church a theological seminary was founded at Montauban, and for Lutherans an academy with a seminary at Strassburg. Napoleon also afterwards proved himself on every occasion ready to help the Protestants. He was equally forward in recognising public opinion in France. The National Institute of France in 1804 offered a prize for an essay on the influence of Luther’s Reformation on the formation and advance of European national life, and awarded it to the treatise of the Catholic physician Villers (Essai sur l’influence de la réf. de Luther, etc.), which in all respects glorified Protestantism. Even the Catholic clergy during the first Empire exhibited an easy temper and tolerance such as was never shown before or since. The obligatory civil marriage law introduced by the Revolution in 1792, obtained place in the Code Napoléon in 1804, and was with it introduced in Belgium and the provinces of the Rhine.561

§ 203.2. The Restoration and the Citizen Kingdom.―The Charter of the Bourbon Restoration under Louis XVIII. (1814-1824) and Charles X. (1824-1830) made Catholicism the state religion and granted toleration and state protection to the other confessions. A new concordat concluded with Pius VII. in 1817, by which that of Napoleon of 1801, with the Organic Articles of the following year, were abrogated, and the state of matters previous to 1789 restored, was so vigorously opposed by the nation, that the ministry were obliged to withdraw the measure introduced in both chambers for giving it legislative sanction. Ultramontanism, however, in its boldest form, steadily favoured by the government, soon prevailed among the clergy to such an extent that any inclination to Gallicanism was denounced as heresy and intolerance of Protestantism lauded as piety. In southern France the rekindled hatred of the Catholic mob against the Reformed broke out in 1815 in brutal and bloody persecution. The government kept silence till the indignation of Europe obliged it to put down the atrocities, but the offenders were left unpunished. Connivance in such lawlessness on the part of the government contributed largely to its overthrow in the July revolution of 1830. The Catholic Church then lost again the privilege of a state religion, and the hitherto persecuted and oppressed Protestants obtained equal rights with the Catholics. But even under the new constitutional government of Orleans, ultramontanism soon reasserted itself. The Protestants had to complain of much injury and injustice from Catholic prefects, and the Protestant minister Guizot claimed for France the protectorate of the whole Catholic world. The Reformed Church meanwhile flourished, though vacillating between methodistic narrowness and rationalistic shallowness, growing both inwardly and outwardly, and also the Lutheran communities, which outside of Alsace were only thinly scattered, enjoyed great prosperity. In the February revolution of 1848 the Catholic clergy readily yielded obedience to the citizen king Louis Philippe, and, on the ground that the Catholic church is suited to any form of government which only grants liberty to the church, did not refuse their benediction to the tree of freedom with the sovereign people at the barricades.

§ 203.3. The Catholic Church under Napoleon III.―Louis Napoleon, as president of the new republic (1848-1852), and still more decidedly as emperor (1852-1870), inclined to follow the traditions of his uncle, regarded the concordat of 1801 as still legally in force and seemed specially anxious to arouse zeal for the Gallican liberties. Although his bayonets secured the pope’s return to Rome (§ 185, 2) and even afterwards supported his authority there, he did not fulfil the heart’s wish of the emperor by the people’s grace to place the imperial crown upon his head in his own person. Severely strained relations between the imperial court and the episcopate resulted in 1860 from a pamphlet against the papacy inspired by the government (§ 185, 3). Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans, was one of the oldest and most determined defenders of the interests of the papal see, and from Poitiers the emperor was pretty openly characterized as a second Pilate. The government did not venture directly to interfere between the two, but reminded the bishops that the emperor’s differences with the pope referred only to temporal affairs. It also forbade the forming of separate societies for the collecting of Peter’s pence, and dissolved the societies of St. Vincent, instituted for benevolent purposes, but misused for ultramontane agitations. When Archbishop Desprez of Toulouse, like his predecessors in 1662 and 1762, on May 16th, 1862, with pompous phrases of piety appointed the jubilee festival of the “fait glorieux,” by which at Toulouse three hundred years before, by means of shameful treachery and base breach of pledges 4,000 Protestants were murdered (§ 139, 15), a shout of indignation rose from almost all French journals and the government forbade the ceremonial. It also refused permission to proclaim the papal encyclical with the syllabus (§ 185, 2) and condemned several bishops who disobeyed for misuse of their office. Under the influence of the ultramontane empress Eugenie, however, the relation of the government to the curia and the higher clergy of the empire, since the one could not do without the other, became more friendly and intimate, till the day of Sedan, September 2nd, 1870, put an end to the Napoleonic empire and the temporal power of the papacy which it had maintained.

§ 203.4. The Protestant Churches under Napoleon III.―After the revolution of 1848, the Lutherans at an assembly in Strassburg and the Reformed in Paris consulted about a new organization of their churches. But as the latter resolved in order to maintain constitutional union amid doctrinal diversity, entirely to set aside symbol and dogma, pastor Fr. Monod and Count Gasparin, the noble defenders of French Protestantism, lodged a protest, and with thirty congregations of the strict party constituted a new council at Paris in 1849, independent of the state, as the Union des églises évangéliques de France with biennial synods. Louis Napoleon gave to the Reformed Church a central council in Paris with consistories and presbyteries; to the Lutheran, an annual general consistory as a legislative court and a standing directory as an administrative court. The Lutheran theological faculty at Strassburg with its vigorous unconfessional science represents the westernmost school of Schleiermacher’s theology. The academy at Montauban, with Adolph Monod at its head, represents Reformed orthodoxy, not strictly confessional but coloured by methodistic piety, and Coquerel in Paris, was the head of the rationalistic party of the Reformed national church. The lead in the reaction against rationalism since 1830 has been taken by the Société évangélique at Paris, which, aiming at the Protestantising of France, and using for this end Bible colportage, tract distribution, the sending out of evangelists, school instruction, etc., has developed an extraordinarily restless and successful activity. It has been powerfully supported by the evangelical society of Geneva. The number of Protestant clergymen in France has steadily risen, and almost every year in and out of the Catholic population new evangelical congregations have been formed, in spite of endless difficulties put in the way by Catholic courts. In Strassburg, in 1854, the Jesuits persuaded the Catholic prefects to recall and arrest the revenues of the former St. Thomas institute, which since the Reformation had been applied to the maintenance of a Protestant gymnasium. The prefect of Paris, however, was instructed to desist from his claims. In the speech from the throne in 1858, the emperor declared that the government secured for Protestants full liberty of worship, without forgetting, however, that Catholicism is the religion of the majority, and the Moniteur commented on this imperial speech so evidently in the spirit of the Univers, that the prefects could not be in doubt how to understand it. By General Espinasse, who, after the Orsini attempt on the emperor’s life in 1858, officiated for a long time as Minister of the Interior, the prefects were expressly instructed, to extend their espionage of the ill-affected press to the proceedings of the evangelical societies, and to prohibit the colportage of Protestant Bibles. On a change of minister, however, the latter enactment was withdrawn, and only agents of foreign Bible societies were interfered with. By an imperial decree of 1859, the right of permitting of the opening of new Protestant churches and chapels was taken from the local courts and transferred to the imperial council of state. For every Protestant congregation, so soon as it numbered 400 souls, the legal state salary for the clergymen would be paid.

§ 203.5. The Catholic Church in the Third French Republic.―The Gambetta government, the national vindication of the 4th September, 1870, resigned its power in February, 1871, into the hands of the National Assembly elected by the whole nation, which, although through clerical influence upon the electors predominantly monarchical and clerical, appointed the old Voltairean Thiers (died, 1877), formerly ministerial president under Louis Philippe, as alone qualified for the difficult post of president of the republic. In the necessary second vote, indeed, there was a considerable increase of the republican and as such thoroughly anti-clerical party; but even in its ranks it was admitted that the establishment of France as leader of all Europe in the fight against ultramontanism and the co-operation therein of the clergy were the absolutely indispensable means for the political Revanche, after which the hearts of all Frenchmen longed as the hart for the water streams. A petition from five bishops and other dignitaries to the National Assembly for the restoration of the temporal power of the pope was set aside as inopportune. But Archbishop Guibert of Paris, without asking the government, proclaimed the infallibility dogma, and the minister of instruction, Jules Simon, contented himself with warning the episcopate in a friendly way against any further illegal steps of that kind. The clerical party was also successful in its protest to the National Assembly against the education law, which by raising the standard of instruction, placing it under the supervision of the state and making inspection of schools obligatory, proposed to put an end to the terrible ignorance of the French people as the chief cause of their deep decay. Bishop Dupanloup of Orleans was appointed president of the commission for examining it, and so its fate was sealed. Meanwhile the people, by frequent manifestations of the Virgin, were roused to a high pitch of religious excitement. Crowds of pilgrims encouraged by miraculous healings flocked to our Lady of La Salette, at Lourdes, etc. (§ 188, 6), and the consecration of Notre Dame de la Deliverance at Bayeux was celebrated as a brilliant national festival. When in May, 1873, Thiers gave way before the machinations of his opponents and, under the new president, Marshal Macmahon, the thoroughly clerical ministry of the Duc de Broglie got the helm of affairs, the pilgrimage craze, mariolatry and ultramontane piety, aided by the prefects and mayors, increased to an unparalleled extent among all ranks. Under the Buffet ministry of 1875 the influence of clericalism was unabated. To him it owed its most important acquisition, the right of creating free Catholic universities wholly independent of the State, with the privilege of conferring degrees. But when in 1876 the new elections for the National Assembly gave an anti-clerical majority, Buffet was obliged to resign. The new Dufaure ministry, with the Protestant Waddington as minister of instruction, declared indeed that it continued the liberty of instruction, but decidedly refused the right of conferring degrees. The proposal to this effect met with the hearty support of the new chamber of deputies. But all the greater was the jubilation of the clericals when the senate by a small majority refused its consent, and all the more eagerly was the founding of new free Catholic universities carried on, at Paris, Angers, Lyons, Lille and Toulouse, but notwithstanding every effort they only attracted a very small number of scholars,―in 1879, when they flourished most, at all the five there were only 742 students.

§ 203.6. The French “Kulturkampf,” 1880.―The Dufaure ministry was succeeded in December, 1876, by the semi-liberal ministry of Jules Simon, which again was driven out in a summary fashion by president Macmahon on May 16th, 1877, and replaced, on the dissolution of the chamber, by a clerical ministry under Duc de Broglie. But in the newly elected chamber the republican anti-clerical majority was so overwhelming that Macmahon, on January 30th, 1879, abandoning his motto of government, J’y suis et j’y reste, was at last obliged, between the alternatives offered him by Gambetta, Se soumettre ou se démettre, to choose the latter. His successor was Grévy, president of the Chamber, who entrusted the protestant Waddington with the forming of a new ministry in which Jules Ferry was minister of instruction. Ferry brought in a bill in March to abolish the representation of the clergy in the High Council of Education by four archiepiscopal deputies, continuing indeed the free Catholic universities, but requiring their students to enroll in a state university which alone could hold examinations and give degrees, and finally enacting by Article 7 that the right of teaching in all educational institutions should be refused to members of all religious orders and congregations not recognised by the state. The chamber deputies accepted this bill without amendment on July 9th, but the senate on March 7th, 1880, after passing six articles refused to adopt the seventh. On March 29th, the president of the republic issued on his own authority two decrees, based indeed upon earlier enactments (1789-1852), gone into desuetude indeed, but never abrogated (§ 186, 2), demanded the dissolution of the Society of Jesus, containing 1,480 members in 56 institutions, within three months, and insisted that the orders and congregations not recognised by the State, embracing 14,033 sisters in 602 institutions and 7,444 brothers in 384 institutions, in the same time should by production of their statutes and rules seek formal recognition or else be broken up. A storm of protests on the part of the bishops greeted these “March Decrees,” and riotous demonstrations made before the Minister of Instruction at his residence at Lille expressed the protests of the students of the Catholic university there. The pope now broke his reserve and by a nuncio sent the president of the republic a holograph letter in which he declared that he must interfere on behalf of the Jesuits and the threatened orders, because they were indispensably necessary to the wellbeing of the church. He did not wish that they should have recourse to unlawful means, but it must be understood that they would appeal to the courts for protection of their threatened civil liberties. When therefore on the morning of June 30th the police began their work of expelling the Jesuits from their houses, these lodged a complaint before the courts of invasion of their domestic peace and infringement of their personal liberty. Their schools were closed on August 31st, the end of the school year; meanwhile they had taken the precaution to transfer most of them to such as would be ready afterwards to restore them. The enforcement of the second of the March Decrees against the other orders was delayed for a while. A compromise proposed by the episcopate, favoured by the pope and not absolutely rejected even by the minister Freycinet, Waddington’s successor, according to which instead of the required application for recognition all these orders should sign a declaration of loyalty, undertaking to avoid all participation in political affairs and to do nothing opposed to existing order, brought about the overthrow of this ministry in September, 1880, by the machinations from other motives of the president of the chamber and latent dictator, Leon Gambetta. At the head of the new ministry was Ferry, who held the portfolio of instruction, and under him the carrying out of the second March Decree began on October 16th, 1880. Up to the meeting of the chamber in November 261 monasteries had been vacated; the rest, as from the first all female congregations, were spared, so that France with its colonies and mission stations still number 4,288 male and 14,990 female settlements of spiritual orders, the former with about 32,000, the latter with about 166,200 inmates.―The expulsion of the Jesuits, as well as the more recent of the other orders, was, however, stoutly opposed. The police told off for this duty found doors shut and barricaded against them or defended by fanatical peasants and mobs of shrieking women, so that they had often to be stormed and broken up by the military. Still more threatening than this opposition was the reaction which began to assert itself at the instance of the almost thoroughly ultramontane jurists of the country, a survival of the times of Napoleon III. and Macmahon. An advocate Rousse, who publicly stated the opinion that the March Decrees were illegal and therefore not binding, was supported by 2,000 attorneys and over 200 corporations of attorneys and by many distinguished university jurists. More than 200 state officials and many judiciary and police officers, together with several officers of the army, tendered their resignations so as to avoid taking part in the execution of the decrees. When it became clear that unfavourable verdicts would be given by the courts invoked by the Jesuits against the executors of the decree, as indeed was soon actually done by several courts, the government lodged an appeal against their competence before the tribunal of conflicts which also actually in regard to all such cases pronounced them incompetent and their decisions therefore null and void; but the complainers insisted that their complaints should be taken to a Council of State as the only court suitable to deal with charges against officials, which, as might be expected, was not done.

§ 203.7. In the future course of the French “Kulturkampf” the most important proceedings of the government were the following: The abolition of the institute of military chaplains, highly serviceable in ultramontanizing the officers, was carried out in 1880, as well as the requirement that the clergy and teachers should give military service for one year, and subsequently also military escorts to the Corpus Christi procession were forbidden. In 1880 the Municipal Council of Paris, with the concurrence of the prefect of the Seine, forbad the continuance of the beautiful building of the church of the Heart of Jesus begun in 1875 on Montmartre (§ 188, 12), confiscating the site that had been granted for it. In 1881 the churchyards were relieved of their denominational character, and the following year the right of managing them, with permission of merely civil interment without the aid of a clergyman, was transferred from the ecclesiastical to the civil authorities. By introducing in 1880 high schools for girls with boarding establishments an end was put to the education of girls of the upper ranks in nunneries, which had hitherto been the almost exclusive practice. Far more sweeping was the School Act brought in by the radical minister of worship, Paul Bert, and first enforced in October, 1886, which made attendance compulsory, relegated religious instruction wholly to the church and home, and absolutely excluded all the clergy from the right of giving any sort of instruction in the public schools, and demanded the removal of all crucifixes and other religious symbols from the school buildings. In December, 1884, a tax was imposed on the property of all religious orders, also the state allowance for the five Catholic seminaries with only thirty-seven students was withdrawn, and many other important deductions made upon the budget for Catholic worship, which at first the senate opposed, but at last agreed to. The Divorce Bill frequently introduced since 1881, which permitted parties to marry again, and gave disposal of the matter to the civil court, got the assent of the senate only in the end of July, 1884. The clericals were also greatly offended by the decree passed in May, 1885, which closed the church of St. Genoveva, the former Pantheon, as a place of worship and made it again a burial place for distinguished Frenchmen. This resolution was first carried out by placing there the remains of Victor Hugo. Amid these and many other injuries to its interests the Roman curia, concentrating all its energies upon the German “Kulturkampf,” endeavoured to keep things back in a moderate way. Yet in July, 1883, the pope addressed to president Grévy a friendly but earnest remonstrance, which he treated simply as a private letter and, without communicating it officially to his cabinet, answered that apart from parliament he could not act, but that so far as he and his ministry were able they would seek to avoid conflict with the holy see. And in fact the government, especially after the overthrow of the Gambetta ministry in 1882, often successfully opposed the proposal of the radical chamber, e.g. the separation of church and state, the abrogation of the concordat, the recall of the embassy to the Vatican, the abolition of religious oaths in the proceedings of the courts, the stopping of the state subvention of a million francs for payment of salaries in seminaries for priests, etc.

§ 203.8. The Protestant Churches under the Third Republic.―Since the French Reformed began to emulate their Catholic countrymen in wild Chauvinism, fanatical hatred of Germany and unreasoning enthusiasm for the Revanche, they were left by the advancing clerical party unmolested in respect of life, confession and worship during the time of war. The Lutherans on the other hand, consisting, although on French territory, mainly of German emigrants and settlers, even their French members not so disposed to Chauvinistic extravagance, were obliged to atone for this double offence by expulsion from house and home and by various injuries to their ecclesiastical interests. After the conclusion of peace, especially under Thiers’ moderate government, this fanaticism gradually cooled down, so that the expelled Germans returned and the churches and institutions that had been destroyed were restored, so far as means would allow. By the decree of Waddington, the minister of instruction, of date March 27th, 1877, instead of the theological faculty of Strassburg, now lost for the French Lutheran church, one for both Protestant churches was founded in Paris.―The Lutheran Church, in consequence of the cession of Alsace-Lorraine, had only sixty-four out of 278 pastorates and six out of forty-four consistories remaining. At the general synod convened at Paris, in July, 1872, by the government for reorganising the Lutheran church it was resolved: To form two inspectorates independent of each other―Paris, predominantly orthodox, Mömpelgard, predominantly liberal; the general assembly, which meets every third year alternately at Mömpelgard and Paris, to consist of delegates from both. The two inspectorates are to correspond in administrative matters directly with the minister of public instruction, but in everything referring to confession, doctrine, worship and discipline, the general assembly is the supreme authority. In regard to the confessional question they agreed to the statement, that the holy Scripture is the supreme authority in matters of faith, and the Augsburg Confession the basis of the legal constitution of the church. An express undertaking on the part of the clergy to this effect is not, however, insisted upon. Only in 1879 could this constitution obtain legal sanction by the State, and that only after considerable modification in the direction of liberalism, especially in reference to electoral qualification. In consequence of this the first ordinary general assembly held in Paris in May, 1881, found both parties in a conciliatory mood.―The Reformed Church, with about 500 pastorates and 105 consistories, summoned by order of government a newly constituted General Assembly at Paris, in June, 1872. Prominent among the leaders of the orthodox party was the aged ex-minister Guizot; the leaders of the liberals were Coquerel and Colani. The former supported the proposal of Professor Bois of Montauban, who insisted on the frank and full confession of holy Scripture as the sovereign authority in matters of faith, of Christ as the only Son of God, and of justification by faith as the legal basis of instruction, worship and discipline; while the latter protested against every attempt to lay down an obligatory and exclusive confession. The orthodox party prevailed and the dissenters who would not yield were struck off the voting lists. When now in consequence of the complaint of the liberal party the summoning of an ordinary general assembly was refused by the government, the orthodox party repeatedly met in “official” provincial and general assemblies without state sanction. The council of state then declared all decisions regarding voting qualifications passed by the synod of 1872 to be null and void, the minister of worship, Ferry, ordered the readmission of electors struck from the lists, and his successor Bert legalized, by a decree of March 25th, 1882, the division of the Parisian consistorial circuit into two independent consistories of Paris and Versailles, moved for by the liberal party but opposed by the orthodox. But upon the elections for the new consistory of Paris, ordered in spite of all protests, and for the presbyteries of the eight parishes assigned to it, contrary to all expectation, in seven of these the elections with great majorities were in favour of the orthodox, and the first official document issued by the new consistory was a solemn protest against the decree to which it owed its existence. Under such circumstances the government as well as the liberal party had no desire for the calling of an official general assembly, and the latter resolved at a general assembly at Nimes, in October, 1882, to institute official synods of their own for consultation and protection of their own interests.

§ 204. Italy.

In Italy matters returned to their old position after the restoration of 1814. But liberalism, aiming at the liberty and unity of Italy, gained the mastery, and where for the time it prevailed, the Jesuits were expelled, and the power of the clergy restricted; where it failed, both came back with greatly increased importance. The arms of Austria and subsequently also of France stamped out on all sides the revolutionary movements. Pius IX., who at first was not indisposed, contrary to all traditions of the papacy, to put himself at the head of the national party, was obliged bitterly to regret his dealings with the liberals (§ 185, 2). Sardinia, Modena and Naples put the severest strain upon the bow of the restoration, while Parma and Tuscany distinguished themselves by adopting liberal measures in a moderate degree. Sardinia, however, in 1840 came to a better mind. Charles Albert first broke ground with a more liberal constitution, and in 1848 proclaimed himself the deliverer of Italy, but yielded to the arms of Austria. His son Victor Emanuel II. succeeded amid singularly favourable circumstances in uniting the whole peninsula under his sceptre as a united kingdom of Italy governed by liberal institutions.

§ 204.1. The Kingdom of Sardinia.―Victor Emanuel I. after the restoration had nothing else to do but to recall the Jesuits, to hand over to them the whole management of the schools, and, guided and led by them in everything, to restore the church and state to the condition prevailing before 1789. Charles Felix (1821-1831) carried still further the absolutist-reactionary endeavours of his predecessor, and even Charles Albert (1831-1849) refused for a long time to realize the hopes which the liberal party had previously placed in him. Only in the second decade of his reign did he begin gradually to display a more liberal tendency, and at last in 1848 when, in consequence of the French Revolution, Lombardy rose against the Austrian rule, he placed himself at the head of the national movement for freeing Italy from the yoke of strangers. But the king gloried in as “the sword of Italy” was defeated and obliged to abdicate. Victor Emanuel II. (1849-1878) allowed meanwhile the liberal constitution of his father to remain and indeed carried it out to the utmost. The minister of justice, Siccardi, proposed a new legislative code which abolished all clerical jurisdiction in civil and criminal proceedings, as also the right of asylum and of exacting tithes, the latter with moderate compensation. It was passed by parliament and subscribed by the king in 1850. The clergy, with archbishop Fransoni of Turin at their head, protested with all their might against these sacrilegious encroachments on the rights of the church. Fransoni was on this account committed for a month to prison and, when he refused the last sacrament to a minister, was regularly sentenced to deposition and banishment from the country. Pius IX. thwarted all attempts to obtain a new concordat. But the government went recklessly forward. As Fransoni from his exile in France continued his agitation, all the property of the archiepiscopal chair was in 1854 sequestered and a number of cloisters were closed. Soon all penalties in the penal code for spreading non-Catholic doctrines were struck out and non-Catholic soldiers freed from compulsory attendance at mass on Sundays and festivals. The chief blow now fell on March 2nd, 1855, in the Cloister Act, which abolished all orders and cloisters not devoted to preaching, teaching, and nursing the sick. In consequence 331 out of 605 cloisters were shut up. The pope ceased not to condemn all these sacrilegious and church robbing acts, and when his threats were without result, thundered the great excommunication in July, 1855, against all originators, aiders, and abettors of such deeds. Among the masses this indeed caused some excitement, but it never came to an explosion.

§ 204.2. The Kingdom of Italy.―Amid such vigorous progress the year 1859 came round with its fateful Franco-Italian war. The French alliance had not indeed, as it promised, made Italy free to the Adriatic, but by the peace of Villafranca the whole of Lombardy was given to the kingdom of Sardinia as a present from the emperor of the French. In the same year by popular vote Tuscany, including Modena and Parma, and in the following year the kingdom of the two Sicilies, as well as the three provinces of the States of the Church, revolted and were annexed, so that the new kingdom of Italy embraced the whole of the peninsula, with the exception of Venice, Rome and the Campagna. Prussia’s remarkable successes in the seven days’ German war of 1866 shook Venice like ripe fruit into the lap of her Italian ally, and the day of Sedan, 1870, prepared the way for the addition of Rome and the Campagna (§ 185, 3).―In Lombardy and then also in Venice, immediately after they had been taken possession of, the concordat with Austria was abrogated and the Jesuits expelled. Ecclesiastical tithes on the produce of the soil were abolished throughout the whole kingdom, begging was forbidden the mendicant friars as unworthy of a spiritual order, ecclesiastical property was put under state control and the support of the clergy provided for by state grants. In 1867 the government began the appropriation and conversion of the church property; in 1870 all religious orders were dissolved, with exception for the time being of those in Rome, wherever they did not engage in educational and other useful works. In May, 1873, this law was extended to the Roman province, only it was not to be applied to the generals of orders in Rome. Nuns and some monks were also allowed to remain in their cloisters situated in unpeopled districts. The amount of state pensions paid to monks and nuns reached in 1882 the sum of eleven million lire, at the rate of 330 lire for each person. The abolition of the theological faculties in ten Italian universities in 1873, because these altogether had only six students of theology, was regarded by the curia rather as a victory than a defeat. The newly appointed bishops were forbidden by the pope to produce their credentials for inspection in order to obtain their salaries from the government. The loss of temporalities thus occasioned was made up by Pius IX. out of Peter’s pence flowing in so abundantly from abroad; each bishop receiving 500 and each archbishop 700 lire in the month. Leo XIII., however, felt obliged in 1879, owing to the great decrease in the Peter’s pence contributions, to cancel this enactment and to permit the bishops to accept the state allowance. In consequence of the civil marriage law passed in 1866 having been altogether ignored by the clergy, nearly 400,000 marriages had down to the close of 1878 received only ecclesiastical sanction, and the offspring of such parties would be regarded in the eye of the law as illegitimate. To obviate this difficulty a law was passed in May, 1879, which insisted that in all cases civil marriage must precede the ecclesiastical ceremony, and clergymen, witnesses and parties engaging in an illegal marriage should suffer three or six months’ imprisonment; but all marriages contracted in accordance merely with church forms before the passing of this law might be legitimized by being entered on the civil register.―Finally in January, 1884, the controversy pending since 1873 as to whether the rich property of the Roman propaganda (§ 156, 9) amounting to twenty million lire should be converted into state consols was decided by the supreme court in favour of the curia, which had pronounced these funds international because consisting of presents and contributions from all lands. But not only was the revenue of the propaganda subjected to a heavy tax, but also all increase of its property forbidden. In vain did the pope by his nuncios call for the intervention of foreign nations. None of these were inclined to meddle in the internal affairs of Italy. The curia now devised the plan of affiliating a number of societies outside of Italy to the propaganda for receiving and administering donations and presents.

§ 204.3. The Evangelization of Italy.―Emigrant Protestants of various nationalities had at an early date, by the silent sufferance of the respective governments, formed small evangelical congregations in some of the Italian cities; in Venice and Leghorn during the seventeenth century, at Bergamo in 1807, at Florence in 1826, at Milan in 1847. Also by aid of the diplomatic intervention of Prussia and England, the erection of Protestant chapels for the embassy was allowed at Rome in 1819, at Naples in 1825, and at Florence in 1826. When in 1848 Italy’s hopes from the liberal tendencies of Pius IX. were so bitterly disappointed, Protestant sympathies began to spread far and wide through the land, even among native Catholics, fostered by English missionaries, Bibles and tracts, which the governments sought in vain to check by prisons, penitentiaries and exile. Persecution began in 1851 in Tuscany, where, in spite of the liberty of faith and worship guaranteed by the constitution of 1848, Tuscan subjects taking part in the Italian services in the chapel of the Prussian embassy at Florence were punished with six months’ hard labour, and in the following year the pious pair Francesco and Rosa Madiai were sentenced to four years’ rigorous punishment in a penitentiary for the crime of having edified themselves and their household by reading the Bible. In vain did the Evangelical Alliance remonstrate (§ 178, 3), in vain did even the king of Prussia intercede. But when, stirred up by public opinion in England, the English premier Lord Palmerston offered to secure the requirement of Christian humanity by means of British ships of war, the grand-duke got rid of both martyrs by banishing them from the country in 1853. In proportion as the union of Italy under Victor Emanuel II. advanced, the field for evangelistic effort and the powers devoted thereto increased. So it was too since 1860 in Southern Italy. But when in 1866 a Protestant congregation began to be formed at Barletta in Naples, a fanatical priest roused a popular mob in which seventeen persons were killed and torn in pieces. The government put down the uproar and punished the miscreants, and the nobler portion of the nation throughout the whole land collected for the families of those murdered. The work of evangelization supported by liberal contributions chiefly from England, but also from Holland, Switzerland, and the German Gustav-Adolf-Verein (§ 178, 1), advanced steadily in spite of occasional brutal interferences of the clergy and the mob, so that soon in all the large cities and in many of the smaller towns of Italy and Sicily there were thriving and flourishing little evangelical congregations of converted native Catholics, numbering as many as 182 in 1882.

§ 204.4. The chief factor in the evangelization of Italy as far as the southern coast of Sicily was the old Waldensian Church, which for three hundred years had occupied the Protestant platform in the spirit of Calvinism (§ 139, 25). Remnants consisting of some 200,000 souls still survived in the valleys of Piedmont, almost without protection of law amid constant persecution and oppressions (§ 153, 5), moderated only by Prussian and English intervention. But when Sardinia headed Italian liberalism in 1848 religious liberty and all civil rights were secured to them. A Waldensian congregation was then formed in the capital, Turin, which was strengthened by numerous Protestant refugees from other parts of Italy. But in 1854 a split occurred between the two elements in it. The new Italian converts objected, not altogether without ground, against the old Waldensians that by maintaining their church government with its centre in the valleys, the so-called “Tables” and their old forms of constitution, doctrine and worship, much too contracted and narrow for the enlarged boundaries of the present, they thought more of Waldensianizing than of evangelizing Italy. Besides, their language since 1630, when a plague caused their preachers and teachers to withdraw from Geneva, had been French, and the national Italian pride was disposed on this domain also to unfurl her favourite banner “Italia farà da se.” The division spread from Turin to the other congregations. At the head of the separatists, afterwards designated the “Free Italian Church” (Chiesa libera), stood Dr. Luigi Desanctis, a man of rich theological culture and glowing eloquence, who, when Catholic priest and theologian of the inquisition at Rome, became convinced of the truth of the evangelical confession, joined the evangelical church at Malta in 1847 and wrought from 1852 with great success in the congregation at Turin. After ten years’ faithful service in the newly formed free church he felt obliged, owing to the Darbyite views (§ 211, 11) that began to prevail in it, to attach himself again in 1864 to the Waldensians, who meanwhile had been greatly liberalised. He now officiated for them till his death in 1869 as professor of theology at Florence, and edited their journal Eco della verità. This journal was succeeded in 1873 by the able monthly Rivista Cristiana, edited at Florence by Prof. Emilio Comba.―After Desanctis left the Chiesa libera its chief representative was the ex-Barnabite father Alessandro Gavazzi of Naples. Endowed with glowing eloquence and remarkable popularity as a lecturer, he appeared at Rome in 1848 as a politico-religious orator, attached himself to the evangelical church in London in 1850, and undertook the charge of the evangelical Italian congregation there. He returned to Italy in 1860 and accompanied the hero of Italian liberty, Garibaldi, as his military chaplain, preaching to the people everywhere with his leonine voice with equal enthusiasm of Victor Emanuel as the only saviour of Italy and of Jesus Christ as the only Saviour of sinners. He then joined the Chiesa libera, and, as he himself obtained gradually fuller acquaintance with evangelical truth, wrought zealously in organizing the congregations hitherto almost entirely isolated from one another. At a general assembly at Milan in 1870, deputies from thirty-two congregations drew up a simple biblical confession of faith, and in the following year at Florence a constitutional code was adopted which recognised the necessity of the pastoral office, of annual assemblies, and a standing evangelization committee. They now took the name “Unione della Chiesa libere in Italia.” The predominantly Darbyist congregations, which had not taken part in these constitutional assemblies, have since formed a community of their own as Chiesa Cristiana, depending only on the immediate leading of the Holy Spirit, rejecting every sort of ecclesiastical and official organization, and denouncing infant baptism as unevangelical.―Besides these three national Italian churches, English and American Methodists and Baptists carry on active missions. On May 1st, 1884, the evangelical denominations at a general assembly in Florence, with the exception only of the Darbyist Chiesa Cristiana, joined in a confederation to meet annually in an “Italian Evangelical Congress” as a preparation for ecclesiastical union. When, however, the various Methodist and Baptist denominations began to check the progress of the work of union, the two leading bodies, the Waldensians and the Free Church party, separated from them. A committee chosen from these two sketched at Florence in 1885 a basis of union, according to which the Free Church adopted the confession and church order of the Waldensians, subject to revision by the joint synods, their theological school at Rome was to be amalgamated with the Waldensian school at Florence, and the united church was to take the name of the “Evangelical Church of Italy.” But a Waldensian synod in September, 1886, resolved to hold by the ancient name of the “Waldensian Church.” Whether the “Free Church” will agree to this demand is not yet known.

§ 205. Spain and Portugal.

No European country has during the nineteenth century been the scene of so many revolutions, outbreaks and civil wars, of changes of government, ministries and constitutions, sometimes of a clerical absolutist, sometimes of a democratic radical tendency, and in none has revolution gone so unsparingly for the time against hierarchy, clergy and monasticism, as in unfortunate Spain. Portugal too passed through similar struggles, which, however, did not prove so dreadfully disordering to the commonwealth as those of Spain.

§ 205.1. Spain under Ferdinand VII. and Maria Christina.―Joseph Bonaparte (1808-1813) had given to the Spaniards a constitution of the French pattern, abolishing inquisition and cloisters. The constitution which the Cortes proclaimed in 1812 carried out still further the demands of political liberalism, but still declared the apostolic Roman Catholic religion as alone true to be the religion of the Spanish nation and forbad the exercise of any other. Ferdinand VII., whom Napoleon restored in December, 1813, hastened to restore the inquisition, the cloisters and despotism, especially from 1815 under the direction of the Jesuits highly esteemed by him. The revolution of 1820 indeed obliged him to reintroduce the constitution of 1812 and to banish the Jesuits; but scarcely had the feudal clerical party of the apostolic Junta with their army of faith in the field and Bourbon French intervention under the Duke of Angoulême again made his way clear, than he began to crush as before by means of his Jesuit Camarilla every liberal movement in church and state. But all the more successful was the reaction of liberalism in the civil war which broke out after Ferdinand’s death under the regency of his fourth wife, the intriguing Maria Christina (1833-1837). The revolution now erected an inquisition, but it was one directed against the clergy and monks, and celebrated its autos de fe; but these were in the form of spoliation of cloisters and massacres of monks. Ecclesiastical tithes were abolished, all monkish orders suspended, the cloisters closed, ecclesiastical goods declared national property, and the papal nuncio sent over the frontier. A threatening papal allocution of 1841 only increased the violence of the Cortes, and when Gregory XVI. in 1842 pronounced all decrees of the government null and void, it branded all intercourse with Rome as an offence against the state.

§ 205.2. Spain under Isabella II., 1843-1865.―Ferdinand VII., overlooking the right of his brother Don Carlos, had, by abolishing the Salic law, secured the throne to Isabella, his own and Maria Christina’s daughter. After the Cortes of 1843 had declared Isabella of age in her thirteenth year, the Spanish government became more and more favourable to the restoration. After long negotiations and vacillations under constantly changing ministries a concordat was at last drawn up in 1851, which returned the churches and cloisters that had not been sold, allowed compensation for what had been sold, reduced the number of bishoprics by six, put education and the censorship of the press under the oversight of the bishops, and declared the Catholic religion the only one to be tolerated. But although in 1854 the Holy Virgin was named generalissima of the brave army and her image at Atocha had been decorated by the queen with a band of the Golden Fleece, a revolution soon broke out in the army which threatened to deal the finishing stroke to ultramontanism. Meanwhile it had not fully permeated the republican party. The proposal of unrestricted liberty to all forms of worship was supported by a small minority, and the new constitution of 1855 called upon the Spanish nation to maintain and guard the Catholic religion which “the Spaniards profess;” yet no Spaniard was to be persecuted on account of his faith, so long as he did not commit irreligious acts. A new law determined the sale of all church and cloister property, and compensation therefore by annual rents according to the existing concordat. Several bishops had to be banished owing to their continued opposition; the pope protested and recalled his legates. Clerical influence meanwhile regained power over the queen. The sale of church and cloister property was stopped, and previous possessors were indemnified for what had been already sold. Owing to frequent change of ministry, each of which manifested a tendency different from its predecessor, it was only in 1859 that matters were settled by a new concordat. In it the government admitted the inalienability of church property, admitted the unrestricted right of the church to obtain new property of any kind, and declared itself ready to exchange state paper money for property that had fallen into decay according to the estimation of the bishops. The queen proved her Catholic zeal at the instigation of the nun Patrocinio by fanatical persecution of Protestants, and hearty but vain sympathies for the sufferings of the pope and the expatriated Italian princes. Pius IX. rewarded Isabella, who seemed to him adorned with all the virtues, by sending her in 1868 the consecrated rose at a time when she was causing public scandal more than ever by her private life, and by her proceedings with her paramour Marforio had lost the last remnant of the respect and confidence of the Spanish nation. Eight months later her reign was at an end. The provisional government now ordered the suppression of the Society of Jesus, as well as of all cloister and spiritual associations, and in 1869 the Cortes sanctioned the draught of a new civil constitution, which required the Spanish nation to maintain the Catholic worship, but allowed the exercise of other forms of worship to strangers and as cases might arise even to natives, and generally made all political and civil rights independent of religious profession.

§ 205.3. Spain under Alphonso XII., 1875-1885.―When Isabella’s son returned to Spain in January, 1875, in his seventeenth year, he obtained the blessing of his sponsor the pope on his ascending the throne, promised to the Catholic church powerful support, but also to non-Catholics the maintenance of liberty of worship. How he meant to perform both is shown by a decree of 10th February, 1875, which, abolishing the civil marriage law passed by the Cortes in 1870, gave back to the Catholic church the administration of marriage and matters connected therewith; for all persons living in Spain, however, “who professed another than the true faith,” as well as for “the bad Catholics,” to whom ecclesiastical marriage on account of church censures is refused, liberty was given to contract a civil marriage; but this did not apply to apostate priests, monks, and nuns, to whom any sort of marriage is for ever refused, and whose previously contracted marriages are invalid, without, however, affecting the legitimacy of children already born of such connections.―Against the draught of the new constitution, whose eleventh article indeed affords toleration to all dissenting forms of worship, but prohibits any public manifestation thereof outside of their place of worship and burial grounds, Pius IX. protested as infringing upon the still existing concordat in its “noblest” part, and aiming a serious blow at the Catholic church. The Cortes, however, sanctioned it in 1876.

§ 205.4. The Evangelization of Spain.―A number of Bibles and tracts, as well as a religious paper in Spanish called el Albo, found entrance into Spain from the English settlement at Gibraltar, without Spain being able even in the most flourishing days of the restoration to prevent it, and evangelical sympathies began more or less openly to be expressed. Franc. Ruat, formerly a lascivious Spanish poet, who was awakened at Turin by the preaching of the Waldensian Desanctis, and by reading the Bible had obtained knowledge of evangelical truths, appeared publicly after the publication of the new constitution of 1855 as a preacher of the gospel in Spain. The reaction that soon set in, however, secured for him repeated imprisonments, and finally in 1856 sentence of banishment for life. He then wrought for several years successfully in Gibraltar, next in London, afterwards in Algiers among Spanish residents, till the new civil constitution of 1868 allowed him to return to Spain, where, in the service of the German mission at Madrid, he gathered around him an evangelical congregation, to which he ministered till his death in 1878. While labouring in Gibraltar he won to the evangelical faith among others the young officer Manuel Matamoros, living there as a political refugee. This noble man, whose whole career, till his death in exile in 1866, was a sore martyrdom for the truth, became the soul of the whole movement, against which the government in 1861 and 1862 took the severest measures. By intercepted correspondence the leaders and many of the members of the secret evangelical propaganda were discovered and thrown into prison. The final judgment condemned the leaders of the movement to severe punishment in penitentiaries and the galleys. Infliction of these sentences had already begun when the queen found herself obliged, by a visit to Madrid in 1863 of a deputation of the Evangelical Alliance (§ 178, 3), consisting of the most distinguished and respected Protestants of all lands, to commute them to banishment.―After Isabella’s overthrow in 1868, permission was given for the building of the first Protestant church in Madrid, where a congregation soon gathered of more than 2,000 souls. In Seville an almost equally strong congregation obtained for its services what had been a church of the Jesuits. Also at Cordova a considerable congregation was collected, and in almost all the other large cities there were largely attended places of worship. Several of those banished under Isabella, who had returned after her overthrow, Carrasco, Trigo, Alhama, and others, increased by new converts who had received their theological training at Geneva, Lausanne, etc., and supported by American, English and German fellow-labourers, such as the brothers F. and H. Fliedner, wrought with unwearied zeal as preachers and pastors, for the spreading and deeper grounding of the gospel among their countrymen. With the restoration of the monarchy in 1875, the oppression of the Protestants was renewed with increasing severity. The widest possible interpretation was given to the prohibition of every public manifestation of dissenting worship in Article XI. of the constitution. The excesses and insults of the mob, whose fanaticism was stirred up by the clergy, were left unpunished and uncensured. Even the most sorely abused and injured Protestants were themselves subjected to imprisonment as disturbers of the peace. No essential improvement in their condition resulted from the liberal ministry of Sagasta in 1881. Nevertheless the number of evangelical congregations continued steadily though slowly to increase, so that now they number more than sixty, with somewhere about 15,000 native Protestant members.―Besides these an Iglesia Española arose in 1881, consisting of eight congregations, which may be regarded to some extent as a national Spanish counterpart to the Old Catholicism of Germany. Its founder and first bishop is Cabrera, formerly a Catholic priest, who, after having wrought from 1868 in the service of the Edinburgh (Presbyterian) Evangelization Society as preacher in Seville, and then in Madrid, received in 1880 episcopal consecration from the Anglican bishop Riley of Mexico (§ 209, 1), then visiting Madrid. Although thus of Anglican origin, the church directed by him wishes not to be Anglican, but Spanish episcopal. It attaches itself therefore, while accepting the thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican Church, in the sketch of its order of service in the Spanish language, more to the old Mozarabic ritual (§ 88, 1) than to the Anglican liturgy.562

§ 205.5. The Church in Portugal.―Portugal after some months followed the example of the Spanish revolution of 1820. John VI. (1816-1826) confirmed the new constitution, drawn up after the pattern of the democratic Spanish constitution of 1812, enacting the seizure of church property and the suppression of the monasteries. But a counter revolution, led by the younger son of the king, Dom Miguel, obliged him in 1823 to repudiate it and to return to the older constitution. But he persistently resisted the reintroduction of the Jesuits. After his death in 1826, the legitimate heir, Pedro I. of Brazil, abandoned his claims to the Portuguese throne in favour of his daughter Donna Maria II. da Gloria, then under a year old, whom he betrothed to his brother Dom Miguel. Appointed regent, Dom Miguel took the oath to the constitution, but immediately broke his oath, had himself proclaimed king, recalled the Jesuits, and, till his overthrow in 1834, carried on a clerical monarchical reign of terror. Dom Pedro, who had meanwhile vacated the Brazilian throne, as regent again suppressed all monkish orders, seized the property of the church, and abolished ecclesiastical tithes, but died in the same year. His daughter Donna Maria, now pronounced of age and proclaimed queen (1834-1853), amid continual revolutions and changes of the constitution, manifested an ever-growing inclination to reconciliation with Rome. In 1841 she negotiated about a concordat, and showed herself so submissive that the pope rewarded her in 1842 with the consecrated golden rose. But the liberal Cortes resisted the introduction of the concordat, and maintained the right of veto by the civil government as well as the rest of the restrictions upon the hierarchy, and the Codigo penal of 1882 threatened the Catholic clergy with heavy fines and imprisonment for every abuse of their spiritual prerogatives and every breach of the laws of the State. In 1857 a concordat was at last agreed to, which, however, was adopted by the representatives of the people not before 1859, and then only by a small majority. Its chief provisions consist in the regulating of the patronage rights of the crown in regard to existing and newly created bishoprics. The relation of government to the curia, however, still continued strained. The constitution declares generally that the Catholic Apostolic Romish Church is the state religion. A Portuguese who passes over from it to another loses thereby his civil rights as a citizen. Yet no one is to be persecuted on account of his religion. The erection of Protestant places of worship, but not in church form, and also of burial grounds, where necessary, is permitted.―Evangelization has made but little progress in Portugal. The first evangelical congregation, with Anglican episcopal constitution, was founded at Lisbon by a Spanish convert, Don Angelo Herrero de Mora, who in the service of the Bible Society had edited a revision of the old Spanish Bible in New York, and had there been naturalized as an American citizen. Consisting originally of American and English Protestants, about a hundred Spanish and Portuguese converts have since 1868 gradually attached themselves to it, the latter after they had been made Spanish instead of Portuguese subjects. After the pattern of this mother congregation, two others have been formed in the neighbourhood of Lisbon and one at Oporto.

§ 206. Russia.

The Russian government since the time of Alexander I. has sought amid many difficulties to advance the education and enlightenment of the people, and to elevate the orthodox church by securing a more highly cultured clergy, and to increase its influence upon the life of the people; a task which proved peculiarly difficult in consequence of the wide-spread anti-ecclesiastical spirit (§ 210, 3) and the incomparably more dangerous antichristian Nihilism (§ 212, 6).―The Catholic church, mainly represented in what had before been the kingdom of Poland, had, in consequence of the repeated revolutionary agitation of the Poles, in which the clergy had zealously taken part by stirring up fanaticism among the people and converting their religion and worship into a vehicle of rebellion, so compromised itself that the government, besides taking away the national political privileges, reduced more and more the rights and liberties granted to the church as such.―The prosperous development of the evangelical church in Russia, which, through the absolutely faultless loyalty of its members, had hitherto enjoyed the hearty protection of the government, in 1845 and 1846, and afterwards in 1883, in consequence of numerous conversions among Esthonian and Livonian peasants, was checked by incessant persecutions.

§ 206.1. The Orthodox National Church.―The evangelical influences introduced from the West during the previous century, especially among the higher clergy, found further encouragement under Alexander I., A.D. 1801-1825. Himself affected by the evangelical pietism of Madame Krüdener (§ 176, 2), he aimed at the elevation of the orthodox church in this direction, founded clerical seminaries and public schools, and took a lively interest in Bible circulation among the Russian people. But under Nicholas I., A.D. 1825-1855, a reaction proceeding from the holy synod set in which unweariedly sought to seal the orthodox church hermetically against all evangelical influences. Also during the reign of Alexander II., A.D. 1855-1881, a reign singularly fruitful in civil reforms, this tendency was even more rigidly illustrated, while with the consent and aid of the holy synod every effort was put forth to improve the church according to its own principles. Specially active in this work was Count Tolstoi, minister of instruction and also procurator of the holy synod. A committee presided over by him produced a whole series of useful reforms in 1868, which were approved by the synod and confirmed by the emperor. While the inferior clergy had hitherto formed an order by themselves, all higher ranks of preferment were now opened to them, but, on the other hand, the obligation of priests’ sons to remain in the order of their fathers was abolished. The clamant abuse of putting mere clerks and sextons to do the work of priests was also now put a stop to, and training in clerical seminaries or academies was made compulsory. Previously only married men could hold the offices of deacon and priest; now widowers and bachelors were admitted, so soon as they reached the age of forty years. In order to increase the poor incomes many churches had not their regular equipment of clergy, and instead of the full set of priest, deacon, sub-deacon, reader, sexton, and doorkeeper, in the poorer churches there were only priest and reader. Order was restored to monastic life, now generally grown dissolute, by a fixed rule of a common table and uniform dress, etc. In 1860 an Orthodox Church Society for Missions among the peoples of the Caucasus, and in 1866 a second for Pagans and Mohammedans throughout the empire, were founded, both under the patronage of the empress. The Russian church also cleverly took advantage of political events to carry on missionary work in Japan (§ 184, 6). A society of the “Friends of Intellectual Enlightenment,” founded in St. Petersburg in 1872, aimed chiefly at the religious improvement of the cultured classes in the spirit of the orthodox church by means of tracts and addresses, while agreeing with foreign confessions as to the nature and characteristics of the true church. Under Alexander III., since A.D. 1881, the emperor’s former tutor Pobedownoszew, with the conviction of the incomparable superiority of his church, and believing that by it and only by it could the dangerous commotions of the present be overcome (§ 212, 6) and Russia regenerated, as procurator of the holy synod has zealously wrought in this direction.―But meanwhile a new impulse was given to the evangelical movement in aristocratic circles by Lord Radstock, who appeared in St. Petersburg in 1870. The addresses delivered by him in French in the salons of the fashionable world won a success scarcely to be looked for. The most famous gain was the conversion of a hitherto proud, worldly, rich and popular Colonel of the Guards, called Paschcow, who now turned the beautiful ball-room of his palatial residence into a prayer-meeting room, and with all the enthusiasm of a neophyte proclaimed successfully among high and low the newly won saving truth in a Biblical evangelical spirit, though not without a methodistic flavour. The excitement thus created led to police interference, and finally, when he refused to abstain from spreading his religious views among the members of the orthodox church by the circulation of evangelical tracts in the Russian language, he was, at the instigation of the holy synod and its all powerful procurator, banished first from St. Petersburg and then in 1884 from the empire, whereupon he withdrew to London.

§ 206.2. The Catholic Church.―After the Greeks in the old West Russian provinces (§ 151, 3), who had been forcibly united to Rome in 1596, had again in 1772, in consequence of the first partition of Poland, come under Russian rule, the government sought to restore them also to the orthodox national church. This was first accomplished under Nicholas I., when at the synod of Polosk in 1839 they themselves spontaneously expressed a wish to be thus reunited with the mother church. Rome thus lost two million members. But the allocution directed against this robbery by Gregory XVI. was without effect, and the public opinion of Europe saw a case of historical justice in this reunion, though effected not without severe measures against those who proved obstinate and rebellious. Yet there always remained a considerable remnant, about one-third of a million, under the bishop of Chelun, in the Romish communion. But even these in 1875, after many disturbances with the prelate Popiel at their head, almost wholly severed their connection with the pope, and were again received into the bosom of the orthodox national church. In a memorial addressed to the emperor for this purpose, they declared they were led to this on the one hand by the continual endeavour of the curia and its partisans, by Latinizing their old Greek liturgy and Polandizing the people, to overthrow their old Russian nationality, and on the other hand, by their aversion to the new papal dogmas of the immaculate conception of Mary and the infallibility of the pope.―The insurrection of the Poles against Russian rule in 1830, which even Pope Gregory XVI. condemned, bore bitter fruits for the Catholic church of that country. The organic statute of 1832 indeed secured anew to the Poles religious liberty, but the bishops were prohibited holding any direct communication with Rome, the clergy deprived of all control over the schools, and the Russian law regarding mixed marriages made applicable to that province. By an understanding with the curia in 1847 the choice of the bishops was given to the emperor, their canonical investiture to the pope. The mildness with which Alexander II. treated the Poles and the political troubles in the rest of Europe fostered the hope of restoring the old kingdom of Poland. Reckless demonstrations were made in the beginning of 1861, pilgrimages to the graves of the martyrs of freedom were organized, political memorial festivals were celebrated in churches, a general national mourning was enjoined, mourning services were held, revolutionary songs were sung in churches, etc. The Catholic clergy headed the movement and canonized it as a religious duty. In vain the government sought to put it down by making liberal concessions, in vain they applied to Pius IX. to discountenance it. When in October the country lay in a state of siege, and the military forced their way into the churches to apprehend the ringleaders of rebellion, the episcopal administrator, Bialobezeski, denounced that as church profanation, had all the Catholic churches in Warsaw closed, and answered the government’s request to reopen them by making extravagant demands and uttering proud words of defiance. The military tribunal sentenced him to death, but the emperor commuted this to one year’s detention in a fortress, with loss of all his dignities and orders. Meanwhile the eyes of the pope had at length been opened. He now confirmed the government’s appointment of Archbishop Felinsky, who entered Warsaw in February, 1862, and reopened the churches. After the suppression of the revolt in 1864, almost all cloisters, as nurseries of revolution, were abolished; in the following year the whole property of the church was taken in charge by the State, and the clergy supported by state pay. The pope, enraged at this, gave violent expression to his feelings to the Russian ambassador at Rome during the New Year festivities of 1866, whereupon the government completely broke off all relations with the curia. Consequently in 1867 all the affairs of the Catholic church were committed to the clerical college at St. Petersburg, and intercourse between the clergy and the pope prohibited. Hence arose many conflicts with Catholic bishops, whose obstinacy was punished by their being interned in their dioceses. In 1869 the Russian calendar was introduced, and Russian made the compulsory language of instruction. But in 1870 greater opposition was offered to the introduction of Russian in the public services by means of translations of the common Polish prayer and psalm-books. Pietrowitsch, dean of Wilna, read from the pulpit the ukase referring to this matter, but then cast it together with the Russian translations into the flames, with violent denunciations of the government, and gave information against himself to the governor-general. He was agreeably to his own desire imprisoned, and then transported to Archangel. The same sentence was pronounced against several other obstinate prelates and clergy, among them Archbishop Felinsky, and thus further opposition was stamped out.―Leo XIII. soon after entering on his pontificate in 1878 took the first step toward reconciliation. His efforts reached a successful issue first in February, 1883. The deposed prelates were restored from their places of banishment, with promise of a liberal pension, and were allowed to choose their residences as they pleased, only not within their former dioceses. In their stead the pope consecrated ten new bishops nominated by the emperor, who amid the jubilation of the people entered their episcopal residences. With reference to the Roman Catholic seminaries and clerical academies at Warsaw, the curia granted to the government the right of control over instruction in the Russian language, literature and history, but committed instruction in canonical matters solely to the bishops, who, after obtaining the approval of the government, appointed the rector and inspector and canonical teachers. Vacant pastorates were filled by the bishops, and only in the case of the more important was the approval of the government required. As to the language to be used, it was resolved that only where the people speak Russian were the clergy obliged to employ that language in preaching and in their pastoral work.

§ 206.3. The Evangelical Church.―The Lutheran church in Russia, comprising two and a half millions of Germans, Letts, Esthonians and Finns, is strongest in Livonia, Esthonia and Courland, is the national church in Finland, and is also largely represented in Poland, in the chief cities of Russia, and in the numerous German colonies in South Russia. In 1832 it obtained, for the Baltic provinces and the scattered congregations in central Russia, a church constitution and service book, the latter on the basis of the old Swedish service book, the former requiring all religious teachers in church and school to accept the Formula of Concord. Annual provincial synods have the initiative in calling in, when necessary for legislative purposes, the aid of the general synod.―In Poland the Reformed and Lutheran churches were in 1828 united under one combined consistory. By an imperial ukase of 1849, however, the independent existence of both churches was restored. Protestants enjoyed all civil rights and had absolute liberty in the exercise of their religion; but in central Russia down to recent times, when a more liberal spirit began to prevail, they were prohibited putting bells in their churches. The old prohibition of evangelical preaching and the teaching of religion in the Russian tongue also continued; but the attempt made for some decades in St. Petersburg and the surrounding district to preach the gospel to Germans who had lost their mother tongue, in the Russian language, has been hitherto ungrudgingly allowed by the government. Quitting the national church or returning from it to a church that had been left before, is visited by severe penalties, and children of mixed marriages, where one parent belongs to the national orthodox church, are claimed by law for that church. Only Finland counts among her privileges the right of assigning children of mixed marriages to the church of the father. The Lutheran church in Livonia, with the island of Oesel, suffered considerable, and according to the law of the land irreparable, loss by the secession of sixty or seventy thousand Letts and Esthonians to the orthodox church under the widespread delusion that thereby their economic position would be improved. Disillusions and regret came too late, and the ever increasing desire for restoration to the church forsaken in a moment of excitement could only obtain arbitrary and insufficient satisfaction in Lutheran baptism of infants seemingly near death, and in permission at irregular intervals and without previous announcement to sit at the Lord’s Table according to the Lutheran rite. In 1865, not indeed legislatively but administratively, the contracting of mixed marriages in the Baltic provinces was permitted without the enforcement of the legal enactment requiring that the children should be trained in the Greek church. In Esthonia, however, in 1883 there was a new outbreak of conversions in Leal, where five hundred peasants went over to the orthodox church, declaring their wish to be of the same faith as the emperor and the whole of the Russian people. By imperial decree in 1885 the suspension of the law against withdrawing again from the national church, which had existed for twenty years, was abolished. At the instigation of Pobedownoszew the Imperial Council granted an annual subsidy of 100,000 roubles for furthering orthodoxy in the Baltic provinces. No evangelical church could be built in these provinces without the approval of the orthodox bishop of the diocese, and any evangelical pastor who should dissuade a member of his church from his purpose of joining the orthodox church, was liable to punishment.―In order to supply the want of churches and schools, preachers and teachers in the Lutheran congregations of Russia, a society was formed in 1858 similar to the Gustav-Adolfs-Verein, under the supervision of the General Consistory of St. Petersburg, which has laboriously and zealously endeavoured to improve the condition of the oppressed church.563

§ 207. Greece and Turkey.

In the spirited struggle for liberty Greece freed herself from the tyranny of the Turkish Mohammedan rule and obtained complete civil independence. But the same princes representing all the three principal Christian confessions, who in 1830 gave their sanction to this emancipation within lamentably narrow limits, in 1840 conquered again the Holy Land for the Turks out of the hands of a revolting vassal. And so inextricable were, and still are, the political interests of the Christian States of Europe with reference to the East, that in the London parliament of 1854 it could be affirmed that the existence of Turkey in a condition of utter impotence was so necessary, that if it did not exist, it would require to be created. On two occasions has Russia called out her whole military force to emancipate from the Turkish yoke her Slavic brethren of a common race and common faith, without being able to give the finishing blow to the “sick man” who had the protection of European diplomacy.

§ 207.1. The Orthodox Church of Greece.―Deceived in their expectations from the Vienna Congress, the Greeks tried to deliver themselves from Turkish tyranny. In 1814 a Hetairia was formed, branches of which spread over the whole land and fostered among the people ideas of freedom. The war of independence broke out in 1821. Its first result was a fearful massacre, especially in Constantinople. The patriarch Gregorius [Gregory] with his whole synod and about 30,000 Christians were in three months with horrid cruelty murdered by the Turks. The London Conference of 1830 at last declared Greece an independent state, and an assembly of Greek bishops at Nauplia in 1833 freed the national church of Greece from the authority of the patriarch of Constantinople, who was under the control of Turkey. Its supreme direction was committed to a permanent Holy Synod at Athens, instituted by the king but in all internal matters absolutely independent. The king must belong to the national church, but otherwise all religions are on the same footing. Meanwhile the orthodox church is fully represented, the Roman Catholic being strongest, especially in the islands. The University of Athens, opened in 1856 with professors mostly trained in Germany, has not been unsuccessful in its task even in the domain of theology.