Part 2 — CIVIL AND POLITICAL LIBERTY.[176]

CIVIL AND POLITICAL LIBERTY.[176]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The true basis of American liberty is in the assertion of the rights of God, represented by the church, or by religion, as bounding or limiting the power of the state, whether imperial or popular. But under Protestant influences, the rights of God are resolved into the rights of man, and the Christian republic becomes simply a humanitarian republic, which can offer no solid foundation for liberty of any sort. The rights of man are no more sacred and inviolable than the rights of the prince or the state. It is only when the rights of man are resolved into the rights of God in and over man, that they are sacred and inviolable, or inalienable. But the American people have ceased so to resolve them, if, indeed, they ever did it, and recognize no more ultimate basis for liberty than humanity itself. If, as many of them do, they insist on religion as necessary to the maintenance of liberty, it is only as an external prop or support, not as its logical basis, or root, out of which it grows, and from which it derives all its sap and vigor.

No humanitarian republic is or can be a free republic, because, though it recognizes the people as the state, and establishes universal suffrage and eligibility, it has nothing but humanity, nothing above the people, to limit or restrict their power as the state. The people are humanity in the concrete, and a humanitarian republic therefore simply transfers the absolutism from the monarch to the people, and substitutes democratic Cæsarism for monarchical Cæsarism, the pagan republic for the pagan empire. Absolutism is absolutism, whether predicated of the one or of the many. We in the United States are rapidly losing sight of the Catholic principle retained by the Puritans, and rushing into democratic absolutism; we assert the omnipotence of the will of the people, and treat constitutions as simply self-imposed restrictions, which bind no longer than the people will. Demagogues, politicians, and statesmen tell the people that their will is supreme; and vainly would he seek their suffrages who should deny it. The opposition to the extension of the church in this country grows precisely out of the well-known fact, that she does not emanate from the people, is not subject to the will of the people, and would restrict their omnipotence—an opposition that proves that she, not Protestantism, is the defender of liberty. Certainly, if she were to become predominant here, she would soon put an end to the absolutism of the state, sustained by all our leading journals, and reëstablish the Christian republic, in place of the humanitarian or pagan republic, to which we are pushed by the Protestant spirit of the age, the veritable Welt-Geist, or prince of this world, as all Protestant movements amply prove.

The abbé shows a strict alliance between contemporary Protestantism and the revolution, or revolutionary movements in all European nations. With these revolutionary movements we have the authority of the chief magistrate of the Union for saying the American people generally sympathize. We lend, at least, all our moral support to these movements wherever we see them. They owe their origin, in fact, to Protestantism; and, so far at least as they are confined to Catholic nations, are fomented and encouraged by Protestant emissaries and Protestant associations and contributions; yet these movements are, under the name of liberty, purely humanitarian, and their success would simply substitute the absolutism of the people for the absolutism of the monarch—democratic Cæsarism, or rather, demagogic Cæsarism, for imperial Cæsarism. In the sixteenth century, the sovereigns embraced or inclined to the Reformation, because it removed the restraints that the church imposed on their absolute power and arbitrary will; demagogues and revolutionists in the nineteenth century glorify it, because it removes all restrictions on the will of the people as the state. In each case the church is opposed to it, and for the same reason, because she asserts the rights of God as the basis of the rights of man; and, as their divinely constituted guardian and representative, interposes them as a limit to the absolute power of the state, whether monarchical or democratic, the only security possible for the reign of justice, of just laws, and therefore of real liberty, individual, civil, and political.

There is no doubt that Protestantism, since the culmination of monarchical absolutism in the seventeenth century, has agitated for the revival of what it calls liberty, but what we call the humanitarian or pagan republic. The people moved by it have, no doubt, supposed they were marching toward real liberty; but they have nowhere gained it, and have only removed the day of its acquisition. Under its influence we have smothered the principle of liberty, and lost most of the guarantees which Providence gave us in the outset. We have lost not only the principle of liberty, but also its correlative, the principle of authority; and have no basis for either freedom or government, for the basis of neither can be found in humanity. Great Britain, to a certain extent, has popularized her administration; but through all her changes of dynasties and constitutions, she has never ceased to assert the omnipotence of the state as the state, supreme in spirituals as in temporals. On the continent, the revolution, attempted in the name of humanity, has nowhere founded liberty. Its momentary success in France from 1792 to 1795, inclusive, is universally recognized as the Reign of Terror, when religion was suppressed and virtue was punished as a crime. France, after a century of revolutions, is not as free to-day as she was even under her old monarchical institutions. The French are just now trying anew the experiment of parliamentary government which the Anglo-maniacs consider only as another name for liberty; but whether the experiment succeeds or fails, liberty will gain nothing; for the parliamentary government is as absolute as the personal government of Napoleon III., and most likely will have even less regard for the rights of God. The one no more than the other will recognize the spiritual power as a restriction on the power of the temporal.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the spirit of the age was for the revival of pagan imperialism; the spirit of the age is now, and has been since the middle of the last century, the pagan republic; but there is just as little liberty under the one as under the other, or, if any difference, there is less under pagan republicanism than under pagan imperialism; for the Roman empire was really an improvement on the Roman republic. Under the one the monarch is the state; under the other the people or the ruling classes are the state; and under both the state is alike supreme, and acknowledges no limit to its power. The republican party is now, here and in all Europe, as hostile to the church as were the sovereigns in the sixteenth century, and for the same reason. The party knows perfectly well that it is impossible for her to approve any form of absolutism in the state. Having decided that the humanitarian republic it seeks to establish, and to which the spirit of the age tends, is liberty, it holds, and public opinion sustains it, that its success depends on sweeping her away, and destroying all religion that does not emanate from the people, or that claims to be a power independent of the state, and authorized to declare the law for the people instead of receiving it from them. Because she resists the madmen of this party, and seeks to save herself and society, they denounce her as opposed to liberty, as the upholder of despots and despotism, as at war with the spirit of the age, and the bitter enemy of modern civilization. "If," said the accusers of our Lord to the Roman procurator, "thou lettest this man go, thou art not Cæsar's friend." "If," said the reformers in the sixteenth century, "thou sparest the pope or the church, thou art no friend, but a traitor to the king;" "if," say their children in this nineteenth century, "thou upholdest the church, thou art no friend, but a traitor to the sovereign people, and false to liberty;" and the nineteenth century believeth them. We disbelieve them, and believe the Lord, who hath bought us with his own precious blood and made us free.

These madmen are animated and carried away by the spirit of the age, and suppose all the time that they are battling for liberty against its most dangerous enemies. They carry the people with them, and induce them to crucify their God as a malefactor. What is to restrain them? The strong arm of power? That were only to establish the reign of force. Reason? What can reason do with madmen, or against the multitude blinded by false lights and moved onward by an unreasoning passion? The intelligence of the age? Are they not carried away by the age, and is it not from the very madness of the age that they need to be saved? When the very light in the age is darkness, how great must be its darkness! It is only a power that draws its light from a source of light above the light of the age, and acts with a wisdom and strength that is above the people, above the world, that can restrain them and convert them into freemen.

If there is any truth in history, or any reliance to be placed on the inductions of reason, the author has amply proved, in opposition to the pretensions of Protestants and revolutionists, that society under the direction and influences of the Catholic Church marches steadily toward a true and regular liberty—a liberty which is grounded in the rights of God, and therefore secures the rights of man. He has also proved conclusively, as experience itself proves, that just in proportion as the influence of the church in society is weakened, liberty disappears, and absolutism, either of king or people, advances. He has shown that the Reformation, instead of founding or aiding liberty, has interrupted it, and prevented the development of the germs of free institutions deposited in society during the much-maligned and little-understood middle ages. Protestantism, even when, as in our own time, professing to labor for liberty, only falsifies it, and interposes insurmountable obstacles to its realization. Protestantism—and we have studied it both as a Protestant and as a Catholic—is made up of false pretences; is, as Carlyle would say, an unveracity, and loses not only the eternal world, but also this present world. The Divine Thought after which the universe is created and governed is one and catholic, and the law by which we gain our final end is one and holy; and without obedience to it there is no good possible, here or hereafter, either for society or for the individual. The present can have its fulfilment only in the future, and the temporal has its origin, medium, and end only in the spiritual, and finds its true support as its true law only in the one eternal law of God, the universal Lawgiver, declared and applied by the one Holy Catholic Church, which he himself has instituted for that purpose, and which is his body, which he animates, and in which he dwells, teaches, and governs.

It remains for us to consider the respective relations of Protestantism and Catholicity to religious liberty, or the freedom of conscience.