Front matter (continued 16)

On August 4, the Pope was chafing at the news that the French troops at Civitá Vecchia had actually commenced embarkation. On the same day Bonaparte read the telegram from Wissenberg. On August 6, Count Arnim on the Capitoline was writing to Berlin to tell his government that Napoleon had declined an offer of the Pope to mediate between the belligerents, assigning as the ground that after the declaration of war negotiations were too late. That same day came upon Napoleon the double disasters of Wörth and Spichern. The reply of the King of Prussia to the same offer of mediation on the part of the Pope was to the effect that if the Pontiff would procure for him assurances of the pacific intentions of Napoleon, and guarantees against similar violations of the peace in the future, he would not refuse to receive them from the hands of his Holiness.[476] The total result then of the first attempt at political action abroad, in the new character, was a simple failure. At the same time political embarrassments at home were thickening, as they had done every day since the fatal July 13.

It was after Rome had learned that the sun of Austerlitz had not shone on the fields of Wörth and Spichern, that the first formal act occurred showing that the Council had neither been dissolved nor prorogued. All that the Pope had done was to give the bishops a general leave until November 11. Had everything gone smoothly, this arrangement would have enabled the men of the Curia to go on as if they were a General Council. The step to which we allude was merely the formal addition of certain names to the Committee on Church Discipline, to replace those who had left Rome. And this is registered on August 13.

Meantime an intimation was given of the style of adhesion to the Papacy in its renewed glory which would be acceptable at the Vatican. The Civiltá selected for publication, "by preference," as it expresses it, an address from the Society of Catholic Youth in Bologna. It stated that, as if in recompense of the new and lofty honour to the Virgin Mary procured by the word of Pius IX, Divine Providence had exalted in his person the divine dignity of the successor of Peter to the summit of glory and power—

We shall ever keep our eyes fixed on Thee, the mirror of eternal Truth. We shall ever keep them directed to this Apostolical Chair, whence the waters of true wisdom and of eternal life perennially flow. Speak, then, O Infallible Teacher, and we, the youthful sons of the Catholic Church, will hear Your words as the words of eternal wisdom; Your judgment shall be for us the judgment of God; Your definition shall be as the definitions of God; Your instruction as the instruction of God. In your authority as Vicar of Christ we venerate the authority of God, and submitting our mind and our heart to that authority, we have faith to sustain the dignity of human nature in face of the pretentious tyranny of haughty intellect spoiled and blinded by guilty passions.[477]

The historical tales which had for years been carried on in the pages of the Civiltá under the title The Crusaders of St. Peter, from which we have occasionally given scenes, rather strangely happened, in the number of the Civiltá for August 24, to come to an end. It concluded with the list of the immortal dead, as recorded for the world in a monument which Italy may well preserve. The Pope did not know what a record of the exotic character of his own power he was putting up. The ideal of this monument, and of the methods by which the world was to be made Catholic, is given by the Civiltá in a very few words—

It was the conception of Pius IX that, in the Agro Verano, on soil consecrated by the tombs of the ancient martyrs, should arise the memorial of the crusaders of the nineteenth century. And another conception of Pius IX was the colossal group in marble which represents St. Peter in the attitude of committing the sword to a warrior in armour, who with the cross bears a flag, with the legend, The Catholic World. Peter is Pius; the warrior is the Christian army. The idea of the mission of that army glows in the authoritative action of him who gives the commission, and in the humble and generous action of him who receives the commission, and is admirably expressed in two texts of Scripture beneath, drawn from the Book of the Maccabees: "Take this holy sword, a gift from God, wherewith thou shalt overthrow the adversaries of my people Israel.... For victory standeth not in the multitude of the army, but strength cometh from heaven."

The names of the martyrs of this crusade are given, and among those who fell in the Battle of Mentana is only one Italian. France, Belgium, Holland, England, Ireland, and Germany are all represented, and Switzerland still more strongly. In the other most considerable engagement, that of Monte Libretti, there is again but a single Italian. Among those who perished by being blown up in barracks in Rome were several Italians, in large part musicians. That record is certainly worth the keeping of Italy at any cost, and the setting of it up is only one of the manifold evidences of how blinded the Papacy was in the last days of its temporal power.[478] Well might the Pope in the Syllabus condemn the doctrine of non-intervention.

On August 15, a great "function" was celebrated at Rome, in the Church of St. Louis of the French, in commemoration of the name-day of the Emperor Napoleon—that modern Charlemagne who restored the Roman Catholic Church in France, and whose nephew restored the Pope to his holy city. Cardinal Bonaparte, the Marquis de Banneville, and all the French notables attended in state. About the same time a sorely smitten man, accompanied by his boy, was crossing the drawbridges of Metz, turning their faces to the rear, amid gibes and nicknames from the French soldiery. While winding up the heights of orchard and of vineyard which overhang the beauteous dale of the Moselle, and when looking on the fair uplands of Lorraine, upon which were sleeping, in happy obscurity, villages like St. Privat and Gravelotte, like Rezonville and Mars La Tour, the withered Emperor and his yet unripe son might see French soldiers marching in retreat, but could not see the Germans by whom they were being already outmarched. Meanwhile in Paris the two elect ladies of the Golden Rose—Isabella and Eugénie—were spectators, the first sighing after a crown already lost, the second trembling for a regency attained as if only to expedite the breaking of the sceptre of her husband. Had either of them faith enough to believe that the Virgin could reward them for services done to the Holy Father by giving them the necks of their enemies? Our Lady of Victories, "terrible as an army with banners," to quote a favourite text with Jesuit writers, was propitiated at least by the Empress Regent.

So far the political calculations of the Curia had all been turned to vanity. Bavaria had not fraternized with the French, much less carried Würtemburg and Baden with her. The blast of invasion which was to sound the death-knell of German unity had proved to be its mustering-cry. Italy up to the present moment had stood in awe of France, but if the latter should receive another blow or two, matters might reach a pass at which the Italian government would have more cause to fear Garibaldi than Napoleon—and then?

News soon arrived that the Germans, out-marching the French, had met them in the villages which we have lately mentioned, the names of which were by that meeting written large on the memory of nations. The poor Pope saw that Bonaparte, whom he had used and hated, was not likely to retain power any longer to guard his temporal throne. He knew that Italy was wiser than the first Bonaparte, who taught the French that the Pope was to be treated as if he had two hundred thousand bayonets—a lesson that has cost them dear. Italy adopted the principle that, in respect of bayonets, the Pope was to be counted as worth just as many as he could command. Italy would also treat him more wisely as a teacher. She would not incarcerate, exile, or personally insult him, but would leave him free to bless or curse as he felt moved, and to be heeded or disregarded according as every man felt persuaded in his own mind.

It was with hearts weighted with the heavy news from the banks of the Moselle that the Fathers of the Council met in their Congregation on August 23. How changed that gathering from the proud assembly of last December, which challenged the homage of all kings, and at the sight of which the Margottis and the Veuillots spoke of our Parliaments as puppet-shows! Those whose organs of the Press a few months before wrote as if neither kings nor presidents had any long tenure of power, except as they might make their peace with the Church, felt themselves to sit amid the indifference of mankind, and under the menacing strokes of Providence. The bishops who had warned them of their ignorance and folly, but had been crushed, were now far away. In the Congregation, the Fathers discussed some matters of Church discipline, but as the shadow of Sadowa had arrested all preparations for the Council during fourteen months, and that of Garibaldi for three or four, now a darker shadow, projected from Wörth and Gravelotte, was falling upon the remaining ecclesiastics, as the evening gloom of the Aventine falls on late gamblers in what was once the Circus Maximus. They had played for the certainty of the temporal power, and for the reversion of the lordship of the world. They had boldly staked all episcopal and clerical rights. The upshot was that the losers had lost, and that the one winner was to be a loser too. The next news showed them that, on the very day when they thus met, was completed the investment of Metz. Thus did they see the thrice beaten but still coherent army of Bazaine altogether cut off from the routed and disorganised army of MacMahon. They had fixed to meet again on September 1.

The Fathers probably felt that it was doubtful whether the Congregation fixed for September 1 would meet; but it was highly politic to keep up the airs of a General Council, because it increased the sanctity of the city, and made it morally more difficult for Italy to attack. Ere they met, it became known that at Beaumont, Failly—the faithful General Failly, the leader of the expedition of Mentana, lauded and blessed for his "prodigious chassepots"—had met the Bavarians, soldiers of that king whom the Unitá never wearied of insulting, and that at their hands Failly had lost his guns, his baggage, and his camp, a large part of his men, and all his reputation. The Congregation of September 1, did meet, and it was the last. While Bishop Quinn, of Brisbane, in Australia, was offering up the Mass, the undulating plateaux around Sedan were reeking with an incense which had, within the last few years, been invoked with lamentable frequency by the organs of the Vatican. As the Fathers were rising from their afternoon siesta, tens of thousands of blue and grey eyes, from all the heights commanding the city of Turenne, began to dance for joy at seeing the white flag waving from the old castle lying low down in the hollow—ay, the white flag waving over the Imperial head of him who to them represented the traditional devastators of the German Fatherland, but who was, to the bishops of the Council, the prince who for twenty years had been the stay of the temporal power.

No sooner had the news from Sedan reached the Agro Romano, than Curia and peasant alike knew all that was to follow. One week after that day the Fathers gathered, on September 8, for the last great ceremony, or, as it was called, "the last extra conciliar act."[479] The remains of the world-transforming host of December now speckled the noble Piazza del Popolo, pressing to the great church of Santa Maria. It was the Festival of the Nativity of the Virgin. All that the Civiltá tells of the day is that there were great expectations, and that the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, then three months distant, would witness a splendid session. We should say that there was no expectation of the sort, except indeed among the few who really counted on the Virgin as being certain at last to work for the Pope the miracles which it had been so often suggested that she was in gratitude bound to perform. The majority calculated that she had acquitted all her debts to him by making him infallible. Desirable as it was to keep up the appearance that Rome was just then the seat of a General Council, they knew that though for us and other remote people beyond the mountains that might have a sacred sound, for the Italians it was not a name to conjure with.

On the very day when the Fathers were cheerlessly performing this final ceremony, a notification was sent forward by Victor Emmanuel that he was unable longer to stay the impetus of the nation, which panted to take possession of its capital. The letter of the king was weak and disingenuous. It was more like the work of a priest than of a soldier. He affected to be a good Catholic, while deliberately dethroning the Vicar of God. He affected to hope that the Pope would acquiesce in his own dethronement. The reply of the Pontiff was more worthy of his position, and more becoming his professions.

This hostile movement called out a quality in which Popes are surely infallible, that of appealing to foreigners for armed intervention against their own countrymen. Of all men, to whom should the Pope now turn but to the King of Prussia—as if the King of Prussia did not know at what the Pope and his instruments had been aiming! The date of the reply of King William was in itself a history. He wrote from the capital of fair Champagne. Already had the tide of war closed round the hot infallibilist Räss in his stately Cathedral of Strasburg; and, rolling on, it had, under the shadow of St. Remy, enveloped the deserter from the Opposition, Landriot, in his thrice beautiful fane at Rheims.

St. Remy sent no sufficing homage by the hand of King William. The soldier-king quietly declined to undertake any such political intervention as the priest-king desired. In one word, he dispelled the idea of the venerable applicant, that the cause of Prussia was implicated. The matter, said King William, is one "which does not, as your Holiness appears to think, in any way affect the interests of Prussia." That calm word would provoke many a vow to make the heretic feel that the Pope could affect the temper of millions of his subjects, and therefore the interests of his government.

Yet one week from the notification of Victor Emmanuel, and on September 15, rode up an Italian staff officer, with all the forms of war, to the Milvian Bridge—that Pons Milvius ever memorable for the victory of Constantine and the death of Maxentius. The latest addition to its history of military incidents, which began with the conspiracy of Catiline, had been made one-and-twenty years previously, when the insurgent Romans defeated an attempt to carry the bridge made by the French under Oudinot. The point of meeting did not, therefore, seem to be one of good omen for Pius IX. The Italian officer was Colonel Count Caccialupi, or Chase-the-Wolves. He came from General Cadorna to demand, in the name of the King of Italy, the surrender of the city. On behalf of his Holiness, General Kanzler at once gave his reply. The place was to be defended. General Bixio on that day closed in upon Civitá Vecchia.

Meanwhile, Count Arnim, in the hope of averting bloodshed, plied between the city and the Italian camp. The Pope, however, was resolved upon resistance. He did, indeed, give orders that it should be continued only so long as to compel the Italians to open a breach, in order, as he said, to attest the fact that his capital fell by violence. That end, we might have thought, would have been equally well answered, without bloodshed, by surrendering after the first gun. The forces of the Pope numbered eight thousand, and those of Cadorna fifty thousand. Rapidly as the temporal power and the Second Empire were both rushing downhill, it appeared as if they were constantly to keep step. So did it fall out that on that very September 19, when the Prussians, defeating Vinoy, closed round Paris, Cadorna, coming up from the north, sat down before gates of Rome. His lines stretched from the Salara Gate to the Gate of San Giovanni, thus enclosing that cemetery of St. Lorenzo, where stood the monument to the Crusaders, with so many foreign and so few Italian names. Coming up from the south, General Angiolotti stretched from the Gate of St. Giovanni to that of St. Sebastiano. Early the next morning Bixio, coming up from Civitá Vecchia, which he had captured, took post before the Gate of San Pancrazio, remembered for the contest between Garibaldi and the French.

With the first light of September 20 did the chambers of the Vatican begin to rattle with the sound of other artillery than the joy-guns of St. Angelo. The last time that sound had disturbed those vaults was when it came as the voice of a French republic, commanding a Roman republic to make way for the most despotic rule in Europe. Now France was learning for herself what it is to hear the guns of the stranger before the gates of the capital; and Rome was feeling what it is to hear the voice of the Fatherland bidding the stranger depart. Of the two potentates who in 1849 thundered at the weak walls of poor old Rome, he who then acted the restorer was now an exile and a captive, while he who was then an exile panting for return, now sat in the halls to which he was then restored, but sat feeling in the thud of every gun that even within those halls he too would soon call himself a captive.

While the din pained the spirit of the aged Pio Nono, forty of the Italians attacking and twenty of the foreigners defending were killed, and a hundred and fifty of the assailants and fifty of the garrison were wounded. Reports came that the heaviest fire was directed against the Porta Pia, the gate particularly connected by name with his own name, adorned and restored by his liberality, and endeared to his military recollections by the triumphal entrance of his crusaders from Mentana less than three years before. A letter is published in which the Pope ordered General Kanzler to surrender as soon as a breach should be made. But it would not appear that he had really granted him power to do so; for the Civiltá expressly says that the order to hoist the white flag was given by the Pope himself, and accounts for needless bloodshed by the delay which occurred ere that order could reach the gate that was beleaguered.[480]

Some five hours had passed since the horrid din began. No Michael with his legions of angels, no Madonna terrible as an army with banners, smote the host of the aliens. No Peter struck the barbarians with blindness. No Dominic, with a cohort of sainted Inquisitors; no Ignatius, with a celestial "Company," flashed death upon the worse than Moslems who fought for uprisen Italy. All these things had been expected. They came not, but instead of them came the news that a breach at the Porta Pia invited the Italians in. At last the poor old priest-king made up his mind to stay the futile flow of blood. He knew the temper of his zouaves. They would have stood and died like crusaders; but at last the word was given. There on the dome of proud St. Peter's was the white flag, and there did it float out upon the September breeze, and waved in the forenoon sun—waved over Pontiff and Cardinal, over the Circus of Nero and the Inquisition of the Popes. Was it real? Eyes would be wiped to see if they did not deceive. Eyes, ay, the eyes of soldiers, would be wiped from thick, hot tears. Could it be—could it ever be? Come at last! The hour for which ages had impatiently waited, for which myriads of Italians had died. Italy one! her arms outstretched from Etna and from Monte Rosa, clasping at last every one of her children, and even availing by their returning strength to lift up her poor old Rome from under the load of the priest and the stranger.

He who two brief months before had, amid deep darkness at noonday, read out, by artificial light, the Decree of his own unlimited power and irreformable law, lay down that night amid a rude and intrusive glare streaming from across the Tiber into the multitudinous windows of the Vatican. It came from the lights of Rome all ablaze with illuminations for the fall of the temporal power. In the piazza below lay the Pope's little army of foreigners, passing their last night in the Holy City under shade of the basilica in which they had consecrated their bayonets to St. Peter, and within embrace of the two arms of the glorious crescent colonnade. For true it is that stone cupolas, and stone columns, put up by the distant dead, may be of real avail as stays of a power after the hearts and hands of willing men have ceased to hold it up. The soldiers passed the next morning in confused preparations for a departure. At noon a cannon was fired, and the Pope appeared on his balcony. He could not conceal his overpowering emotion. With the retreating steps of these prisoners of war, were about to vanish mystic visions of martial feats crowned by divine miracle. The soldiers raised their old cry, Viva Pio Nono, in loud and ringing tones; which, smiting against the basilica and the palace, were from thence rolled back, and flew across the stream, till the sound of Viva Pio Nono once more floated along the neighbouring streets of the capital. Uprisen Italy, quietly sustaining her uplifted Rome, hearkened in silence to the foreign cheer. Then, for the last time, did the Pope give to his beloved soldiers what they had so often received, his benediction. As he withdrew, when the corridors opened lone and long before him, when the doors closed behind, cutting him off from the only bayonets on which he could rely, no wonder if he felt that the palace of the Pontiffs had become a prison.

The crusaders, turning to the left, passed out of the Gate Angelica; then winding round under the windows of the Vatican, close by the garden walls, and along the Janiculum, they finally reached the Gate of San Pancrazio, where Cadorna and his staff awaited them to receive the formal surrender. Proud were the men under the red, white, and green, with the cross of Savoy, as they saw the head of the approaching column. As the first men of the French legion came up they insulted the Italian staff. According to the Civiltá, Bixio was so incensed that he reproached Cadorna for having conceded to such troops the honours of war. The friendly writer extenuates their misconduct by alleging the irritation cause by affronts received from the rabble in the streets on the previous day. But when the zouaves came up led by the brave Colonel Charette, they behaved like soldiers (Civiltá, VIII. i. 212).

When the crusaders of Pio Nono passed away from the Gate of San Pancrazio, who would have dared to say that the sixty dead and the two hundred wounded of the day before were to be the last victims of war provoked by Popes abusing the name of the Prince of Peace? And who would not feel for the French crusaders, who, led by their priests, and thinking that they did God service, had for twenty years inflicted upon Italy, at the behest of the Pope, the miseries of foreign occupation, and now, in facing their own fair land, were to behold the foreigner seated in her proudest palaces.

From that day forth, when the Roman met the priest on the street, he felt that he was no longer bound, except at the dictate of his own conscience, to confess to him his sins; that, indeed, he was not even bound to purchase an Easter ticket, to be produced as evidence that he had duly presented himself in a tribunal in which, in fact, he had never set foot. From that day forth, when the friar entered the church of St. Ignatius, neither the great picture of the torments of the heretics, nor what, in his dialect, he might call the "divine" lapis lazuli, retained all its old brilliancy; for within those sacred walls the internal tribunal of the kingdom of God was no longer anything more than a voluntary confessional. From that day forth disappeared from the seats of justice on the Seven Hills the ecclesiastical magistrate, and with him the external tribunal of the Church. From that day forth appeared for the first time for long and weary ages, the civil magistrates, sitting in open court under the eye of all, to administer, with whatever shortcomings, a law which accepted the Christian principle of even-handed justice to Jew and Gentile; to those who said, We are of Cephas, and to those who only said, We are of Christ. In the eye of the Vatican this was the fall of the supernatural order, the godless triumph of naturalism; but in other eyes it was the substitution of God's good ordinance for the contrivance of priestcraft, which, conscious that it was not natural, called itself supernatural. From that day forth the Roman noble ceased to be a mere title-bearer and jewel-stand, for now a career in the government of his country opened before him. From that time forth the people ceased to be a mere populace, and entered on the dignities of a democracy. Law, letters, science, politics, diplomacy, and oratory now called upon the bright-browed child of the working man to come and grace them with his gifts, and not to sit doomed to the destiny of the incapable, unless he would put on the frock of the priest. From that day forth the double office of Despot-Pontiff, answering to the ideal of later Pagan Rome, was replaced by the mild office of the monarch, reigning at the head of an aristocracy and a democracy. The priest as a teacher of doctrines, as a celebrant of rites, or as a practitioner of charms, remained as free as ever he had been before; but as a power to impose himself upon all, and as exclusive king of men, his reign had passed away. Italy said, "For ever"; the priest replied, "Only for a very little time"!

On October 2 the Italian government took a plébiscite in the Roman States, to enable the people by a vote to record their own desire as to whether they would belong to the kingdom of Italy or to the Spiritual State. According to the Civiltá, the voting in the Holy City was 40,835 in favour of Italy, and 46 against. It must not be imagined that the total amount of dissent was represented by the 46. The partisans of the supernatural order generally abstained; but probably they would have done otherwise had they not known that, even if they all mustered, the majority would be overwhelming. They, as usual, cried out against bribery, coercion, and similar wrongs. Indeed, to read the Papal organs at this day, one might believe that ever since the national movement began, every vote and every battle has been carried against the preponderating mass of Italians by some few Freemasons, Jews, and invisible conspirators.

The Council which was to restore all things still sat. Not even a prorogation had taken place. Now, however, the Pontiff, though not intending to dissolve it, determined to suspend it until a happier time. Exactly a month after Rome had passed into the hands of Italy, appeared on October 20 the Act by which the Council was suspended. In the Bull of Convocation the Pope had spoken of his intentions for the general benefit of society. In the Bull of Suspension it appeared that the particular society which best knew him and his remedies had spewed them out of her mouth. After having for many centuries had experience of his spiritual supremacy and temporal power, Italy had mournful proofs that they were socially evil. No land in Europe could produce a record of any dynasty which had so often brought into it foreign armies, to beat its people down, and to keep them under. No land in Europe could, from times within the memory of living men, produce such lists of the executed, the exiled, the imprisoned, and of those submitted to torture. No land in Europe had a ruling class among members of which public justice, when once free, had, week after week, to deal with such vile immoralities as the Courts of Italy had to punish in members of the priesthood. Italy had made the last trial of priestly rule with a prince personally free from the social blots which in the case of many of his predecessors had complicated questions of the public weal with questions of personal vice. Under Pius IX the system stood out more fairly to be judged by its principles and by its fruits. And under Pius IX Italy had rung with accounts of moral wrongs, of crimes of power, of curses uttered by the subject, such as had long since ceased to be heard of in other countries of Europe free from Turkish rule. The monstrosity that called itself a Spiritual State, and sneered at Lay States, was carnal, and vile to the core. The wave which, as soon as the breakwater of the Second Empire had been removed, rolled in at the Porta Pia, was even more a wave of moral scorn and of social execration than of political hostility.

The Council met amid florid promises that princes generally, at least Catholic ones, would accept the Vicar of God as their supreme judge, mingled with terrible citations of them all to appear before him, in order to find at one and the same time their correction and their deliverance in his infallible sentence. All this was uttered with the haughty spirit that goes before a fall. The fall after the haughtiness did not tarry, and was strikingly indicated by a phrase under the hand of the High Priest himself, in the Bull of Suspension: "We have been brought into such a position as to be entirely under a hostile dominion and power, God in His inscrutable judgments having so permitted it." Society had already beheld its self-proffered saviour clinging to the skirts of Napoleon III, and then crying to King William to save him from his fellow-countrymen. Now the kings heard their self-proffered judge himself declare that by a judgment truly supreme the temporal power had fallen—that power which he and all his bishops had separately and unitedly assured the Church was altogether necessary to the proper exercise of his office of universal bishop.

We heard the Civiltá, in September, foretell that when December 8 should come it would witness a splendid session. Now at last it came, a waymark noting the end of a very eventful year—eventful in the life of France, in the life of Italy, in the life of the German nation, and in that of the Papal Church. But the anniversary of the Immaculate, of the Syllabus, and of the opening of the Vatican Council, brought with it no splendid session. They who twelve months ago had met to sit in judgment on the nations were scattered, and were in various languages making strange explanations and dexterous appeals to allay the general disquiet relating to their political plans; and in doing so were creating in the minds of all who understood what they said, and who knew what they had done, an impossibility of ever hereafter trusting to representations of theirs. Meantime, without his seven hundred bishops, without his adoring crowds, without the glitter of fallen royalties and of quasi-civic dignitaries, without his beloved zouaves, yet still guarded by his stalwart and fantastic Swiss—for at that Court it is ever foreign steel that is true—the Pope, sitting in a palace of eleven thousand apartments, rich as any king, and free as any bishop in the world, yet felt and called himself a prisoner. Therefore when the day of exciting memories came, it was, says the Civiltá, spent in mourning and desolation. But a new offering to the Virgin was to raise the sacredness of December 8, even in this year of sorrow, to a higher pitch than ever. Hitherto the patron of the Holy Church had been St. Michael the Archangel, under whose spear the first rebel fell—which rebel, as some time ago we saw, prefigured the latest rebel, Garibaldi. Indeed, after Mentana, St. Michael was, as military men say, "mentioned" in the Court journal. For the Civiltá, in relating the overthrow of the Garibaldians, did not fail to note the fact that "it was on the day consecrated to the Prince of the Angelic Host, to the Patron of the Holy Church, St. Michael," that the invaders crossed the border. But now the Immaculate, who alone is terrible as an army with banners, who alone destroys all heresies, was to be further exalted, by the raising of her husband to that celestial dignity which had hitherto been borne by the great archangel. It was, say the reverend college of writers in the ruling periodical, a grand consolation that amid the mourning and desolation wherein December 8 was passed, the Decree proclaiming St. Joseph as the Patron of the Catholic Church was promulged. They add that this Decree was issued to satisfy the Fathers of the Council, and that it might be considered as a firstfruit of devotion and piety reaped from the Council. The Italians said that St. Michael, as captain of the Lord's host, had not in late years wielded the sword to the satisfaction of the authorities. Others said that the reason of the slight put upon him was simply that St. Joseph was the patron of the Company of Jesus. Others again looked no further for an explanation than to the fact that a form of religion which now—whatever was imagined and in theory professed—had in reality no standard of faith left but that of the fait accompli, would naturally seek change for the sake of rest.

Certain it is that from centre to circumference of the Papal orb, the devout were besieging the altars of those powers among whom Modern Rome distributes the affairs of that department which was by Ancient Rome assigned to Mars. In England, as the Civiltá proudly tells, was formed "The Prayer League of our Lady of Victories, entirely composed of innocent children." In Vienna the arch-confraternity of St. Michael called the citizens to a solemn novena; Belgium moved in a similar manner, and Spain on December 8 beheld the faithful thronging to the altars of Mary. "Processions and pilgrimages" added a "splendid" demonstration, in which Belgium, Germany, and the Tyrol merited particular mention. The tomb of St. Boniface was besieged with pilgrims, praying that the tomb of Peter might be redeemed from the hands of the Italian Islamite. And the tomb of Henry the Emperor Saint, "fierce defender of the rights of the Holy See," was so beset with pilgrims on the day two months after the commencement of the captivity, that the streets of Bamberg resounded with the suppliant song of eighty-two processions seeking to move the warrior saint. In Munich, after exhibiting in "functions" within the Churches "all that is grand in the Catholic cult," the clergy, the archbishop, and the devout, in crowds said to comprise all Munich, paraded the streets chanting prayers for the ransom of the Pontiff.

If St. Michael had not retained his militant position, his confraternity in Vienna, conscious of where lay the sinews of war, sent loads of Peter's Pence. So in point after point of Europe the vows and bonds assumed in favour of Peter's Pence by fresh associations from Holland to Portugal, and from England to Hungary, are recorded. In England it was to the ladies that the "work" of raising Peter's Pence was assigned. The ladies of Vienna claimed it, the ladies of Madrid followed the example. And a valiant meeting in Belfast, and a meeting in Galway, resolved largely to swell the tide of Peter's Pence. The Catholic clubs joined in the movement, not only to console the Holy Father, but to condemn "the guilty policy of spoliation." Italy was grievously complained of for having dealt, by law, with certain Catholic Associations as political bodies, committing offences against the nation. But the great and splendid "work" of the Pence of Peter is not enough. The meetings and manifestoes are equally necessary, and of the manifestoes the spirit is breathed in these words, addressed to governments: "Do us justice; or if not, to shake you out of your indifference, we shall avail ourselves of every means which the law allows."

One brave claim of German Catholics is this: "As loyal subjects we demand that our rights and our interests shall be protected even in the territories of the Church." And politicians, knowing these things, will say and write that men moved from a foreign centre to make such claims of intervention on their governments are as good subjects as other men! They well know that such an agitation raised in the midst of a mortal struggle, if it succeeds, plunges the nation into a second war; and even if it does not succeed, diverts the nation from its own defence, and tends to divide it. But these German patriots say that they will embrace every opportunity that arises of pressing such rights as those above indicated upon their governments, by the Press, by "councils," by meetings, and especially by sending men to Parliament who will have courage to take up the Catholic cause. The Civiltá characterizes this language as the proclamation "of a vigorous, a continued, and a legal struggle against all governments which do not care for the cause of the Pontiff." "What the law allows," would, in the mind of many an honest Catholic, mean the law of the land; but on how many of such men could reliance be placed when, after all had been done which the law of the land allowed, they were instructed by sacred lips that when it contradicted the "divine" law it ceased to be binding, and that then the law in the case was God's law, which was whatever the Church declared it to be?

Geneva was made a chosen centre of activity, and the names of great and famous personages were paraded. While the ultimate ends to be aimed at were fitly expressed as "reinstating the Holy Father in his temporal sovereignty, and re-establishing the social reign of the gospel," the proximate ends were, to move the heart of Christ to mercy by pilgrimages and prayers, to act upon governments, to excite opinion by the Press, and to procure for the Pope means. Fifty meetings in the middle of December in the diocese of Fulda alone, while Germany was in the crisis of the war; the object of those meetings being to plunge her into a war with Italy! Indeed, it seemed to the Civiltá as if, awoke from the slumber of ages by the prayers of the Catholics around his tomb, St. Boniface had gone out anew upon his apostolic pilgrimage, to rouse up the ancient devotion of the people to the Holy See.[481]

One new society, which has not its name specified, is said to be already a great one. It is composed of all who had borne arms in the crusade of Pius IX. From Holland to Marseilles, from Canada to the Tyrol, they had bound themselves together in a common bond. We are not left in doubt as to what that bond might be. Indeed, we are told that "what it is cannot be obscure; their former enterprise makes it clear." To us the former enterprise would make the means clear—namely, war; but not so clear the end. They formerly warred to avert the fall of the temporal power. Were they now to go to war for the immediate and local object of "reinstating the Holy Father," and at the same time for the ulterior and world-conquering object of "re-establishing the social reign of the gospel"; that is, of forming the world into Spiritual States, or at least into States under the spiritual reign of the clergy? The object is prudently veiled in vague language, but language clear enough for the instructed; "full of warlike ardour in a meeting of Dutch and Belgians at Lovaine, they said that the aim of their union was to meet the future wants of the Church, was to conquer all the forces of impiety."[482] But even in the language put into the lips of soldiers, and into the resolutions of public meetings, the object is never defined so as to limit it to restoring the temporal power, and generally a wide object beyond that narrow one is allowed to transpire. When old crusaders undertake with "warlike ardour" to meet the future wants of the Church, we may divine of what kind her future wants are to be; and when such men undertake to conquer all the forces of impiety, we may expect a social reign of the gospel, ushered in by the zouaves—such a social reign of it as some of the spiritual princes of the Continent re-established when, after their Spiritual States had been shaken by the Reformation, Catholic leagues reinstated the prince-bishops in power. As to England, the Civiltá, at a date subsequent to notices already alluded to, names the Duke of Norfolk as heading a protest against the occupation of Rome from the noblest of the nation; Lord Campden and "Giorgio Clifford" as leading a universal subscription of English youth; the ladies as conducting the "work" of Peter's Pence; R. Martin as forming a league of prayer for persons of all grades; and Warteton (sic) as instituting "the crusade for Pius IX, a league of our Lady of Victories entirely composed of children."[483] How many British children are learning in this much-mentioned league by the inspirations of our Lady of Victories, to covet their baptism of fire in the projected crusade, we do not know, nor yet how they are to be taught to select the particular branch of the "forces of impiety" against which their first arms are to be proved. But, says the Civiltá—

there will be a struggle, there will be travails, there will be sorrows. But the victory is in their [the Catholics'] hands: of this the proof more than manifest is found in eighteen centuries of continuous combats and victories of Catholicism. As the great Matthias, indignant because before his eyes an officer of the king dared to burn incense to an idol, rose up crying, "Let him that is true to the law follow me," and commenced those grand struggles and grand victories of the Maccabees which are known to all, so the most fervent Catholics, indignant and horrified at the capture of Rome, pointing out the Revolution, in the meetings at Fulda and at Malines, at Ghent and at Geneva, as the cause of so much evil, as the enemy of Christ and of His Vicar, cried, "Let all that are Catholics at heart rise up and follow us in the fight." Their cry has been heard, and the general crusade is already begun.[484]

The development of the general crusade has been slower than the seers in their many Maccabean visions saw; but at the end of six years all the preparations for it are in progress, and the two-fold end is steadily kept in view: first, Rome is to receive back the Pope at the point of the bayonet; and secondly, the whole world is to accept "the social reign of the gospel" at the point of the bayonet too, unless nations, being timely wise, bow the neck and lick the dust where marches the Vicar of God. So man proposes. But since the day in 1850 when, as we heard at the beginning, a "salutary conspiracy and a holy crusade" were formally announced as the two things needful, much that man astutely planned and firmly proposed has not come to pass according to man's design, but has been strangely turned to the purposes of a clearer wisdom, and a kinder will. Even the monument in the cemetery of St. Lorenzo to the Crusaders, which exhibits Peter, under the effigy of Pio Nono, giving the sword to the Christian army, and commanding it to make a Catholic world, now bears, in addition to its texts from the Maccabees, a fresh inscription: "Ransomed Rome leaves to posterity, as a lasting sign of calamitous times, this monument, erected by the theocratic government to foreign mercenaries."

On the last day of 1870—that year of which the echoes will sound all down the vale of time, repeating the cry, "Man proposes but God disposes"—a strange sound was heard in Rome. Floods had brought sorrow into the city. Victor Emmanuel left Florence, and at four o'clock in the morning of December 31, for the first time, as king in his capital, set foot in Rome. In its sovereigns the city was familiar with titles of Saints, of Great, of Holiness, and of Blessedness, and with ancient titles noting many a shade of skill and power. But there was a title which was not only unknown, but seemed alien to all the traditions that had gathered around the place from the days of Sulla and of Catiline till now. As the burly king, amid the frantic joy which had marked his brief visit, was about to enter the carriage to return, a little girl approached with a nosegay of fair flowers, and said: "Take this, King Honest Man!"

If with the expiring hours of 1870 the reign of Craft died in Rome, and that of Honesty began, it would mark the mightiest of all the modern revolutions.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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