(often wholly unjust), our aspirations and dreams of the restoration of a régime in which, as it seemed to us, the lot of the church would be happier because she would be more protected. Finally our compromising alliances with the promoters of civil war,- all these have been disastrous to us, have covered us with unpopularity, have estranged us from the masses of people. A certain Père Le Doré, superior of a religious order, on his return to Paris from a visit to Rome, said, "The Holy Father said he would order French Catholics to revolt against the law, if he could be quite sure they would all obey him." Doré further said, "It is not enough to offer prayers, to make communions, to go on pilgrimages. What is wanted is blood; blood alone can appease the wrath of God; and when the pope asked me: Well, Father, what do you propose to do?" I replied, "Holy Father, I wish to give battle, to fight, to organize, and I shall not be satisfied until I have caused two or three dozen good nuns to be killed and massacred." The Osservatore Romano has declared this account of the audience with the pope to be fictitious; yet, in spite of this serious reflection on his veracity and the fact that he has been guilty of a public incitement to murder and armed rebellion, he remains the general superior of a religious order and has incurred no formal censure. This is no isolated case, nor is there anything new in all this.

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They were in possession of every public office, officials of every grade at their beck and call. What blunders must they not have committed to have been driven from power, to a man, when they held every avenue to it," says Leon Chaine, a lay Catholic writer. What Englishmen must realize, is, that the clerical party in France, if they had the power, would repeat the massacre of St. Bartholomew tomorrow, without the slightest compunction. Can we wonder that anti-clerical feeling in France is what it is? that to give liberty to these people is about as safe as to give it to mad

dogs? A system of autocracy and terrorism has crushed out initiative and extinguished healthy public opinion among Catholics. Few dare to speak, to whom, alone, Rome always gives unbounded license. In this crisis Rome has assumed all the power and with it goes all the responsibility. The Associations Cultuelles gives the laity a voice in the management of the church property and will be freely formed without authorization, and have privileges no other associations enjoy. There is not a vestige of excuse for the outcry against the law. Protestants would be far more injuriously affected than Catholics by any oppressive provisions. Again and again it has given these people a chance of settling down to be content with the same rights and liberties as their fellowcitizens; when suddenly, a plot for the destruction of the republic was discovered, engineered by organizations pledged to blind obedience to an executive seated in a foreign country, and chiefly composed of foreigners. Then the republic rose in its wrath, and deprived them of control over the education of the nation. The organizations loudly protested in the name of absolute liberty, they, the men who had preached day after day that it was a Christian duty to massacre the Jews, who had demanded the suppression of all Masonic lodges, and called on the nation to bid all impious sects to vanish from the soil of France. Nothing could be more alien from the spirit of Christ than the lust of dominion. It was the same spirit that led a pope to offer public thanks for the massacre of St. Bartholomew,* and to order Vasari to paint the murder of Coligny on the walls of the Vatican among the triumphs of the church. No Christian sovereign of modern times has left a worse memory behind him than Ferdinand II of Naples, who received the pope when he fled to Naples, in 1848. He not only destroyed the constitution he had sworn to observe, but threw into a loathsome dungeon the liberal ministers who had trusted him. But in the eyes *Page 180, "The Map of Life "— Lecky.

of the pope his services to the church far outweighed all defects, and the monument erected to this "most pious prince" may be seen in one of the chapels of St. Peter's. "The French republic is irrevocably fundamentally anticlerical. It has been so for centuries, and it will always be so. The French republic must defend itself against rebellion, however specious its pretext, and it will certainly do so. It will be equally clear that that defense is not a religious persecution. France will be able to say to the pope, "You now know what we are fighting for; we are struggling for the preservation of liberty of thought. We are struggling to prevent the Catholic Church from tyrannizing over men's and women's consciences. We are struggling, not to attack your freedom of belief, but to make it finally impossible for you to impose your belief on others by constraint and force. In that struggle France will have the sympathy of the English Catholic England in the thirteenth century rose against the king, who submitted to the temporal claims of the papacy, and treated with contempt the condemnation of the Great Charter by Innocent the Third. Republican France in the twentieth century can hardly do less than follow so excellent an example. France desires peace. Should, however, war be declared by the pope on the republic, it will be fought to the finish, and there cannot be the smallest doubt as to the result. If compelled to vindicate her civil autonomy (right of self government) against Roman aggression, her cause will be the cause of every free people.

race.

Second: The Papal Aggression in France and its Significance for other Nations.

"In the year 1570, Pius V absolved English capitalists from their allegiance to Elizabeth and called upon them to revolt against their sovereign, and to betray their country to a

foreign enemy. In both cases, Spanish and Jesuit influences in the Vatican were in large measure responsible for the papal policy.

"In the recent case the place of Philip was taken rather by the German emperor than by Cardinal Viors y Tuto, and Cardinal Merry del Val; and the late Father Martin played the sinister part of Robert Parsons. Whenever Spanish and Jesuit influences have been in the ascendant at Rome the Catholic Church has paid dearly for them. Not only in France where Catholics are placed, as were their English coreligionists in the sixteenth century, in the position of having to choose between their country and their church, will Catholicism reap the bitter harvest of the policy of Pius X; that policy must recoil on Catholics in every civilized country. None have more reason to resent it than those who, like the present writer, are Catholics, not by inheritance or early training or habit, but by their own deliberate choice, who have come into the church of their own free will, and by an act of private judgment, because they were convinced, after much hesitation and inquiry, of the justice of her claims. For what is our position? We became Catholics for purely religious reasons; we accepted the papacy as a spiritual and moral, but in no sense as a political, authority; we made no profession of undivided allegiance to the pope; we gave no

pledge to renounce our allegiance to the civil government and the laws of our country at the will and pleasure of an ecclesiastical authority; no such profession and no such pledge were demanded of

us.

We now find ourselves face to face with the claim of the pope that his authority is absolute and unlimited, that he can at will annul and set aside laws regularly made by the constituted law-making authority, and that, if he annuls them or sets them aside, we are bound to disobey them. Hitherto the desire to make proselytes would seem to have blunted the moral sense of those who are possessed by it. How else can we account for the remarkable difference between the plausible presentment of Catholic teaching and obligation that is dangled before the outside world in controversial lectures and publications, and that which the dominant ultramontane party imposes on those who are inside the church? If any one thinks I am speaking too strongly let him study the utterances of French ultramontanes in the present crisis. He will find bishops declaring that the will of the pope is the will of God, absolutely, and with no restriction; he will find the authorized organs in the press of ultramontane opinion, the semi-official exponents of the mind of the Vatican, declaring explicitly that the pope has a divine and immutable right to ratify, or refuse to ratify, civil legislation (the deposing power applied to modern conditions) and which is still more significant — he will find men of superior intelligence and ability, credited with modern and intellectual sympathies, accepting these principles as a matter of course; otherwise, how could such men as M. Brunetière, Count d'Hansonville, and the Viscount de Vogué have stultified themselves as they have.