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THE GALLICAN CHURCH AND THE REVOLUTION.11' [SECOND NOTICE.] MR. JERVIS does not tell us enough of that ecclesiastical phe- nomenon, the Constitutional Church of the Revolution. In its origin it was one of the most groundless and unprovoked schisms on record. Ecclesiastical validity the Constitution Civilc had none, and the very efforts of the Clergy who adopted it to make good their position only brought out this defect more clearly. Where was the consistency of men who professed belief in the Papal authority, when they were acting in open defiance of it, and condescending to the poor subterfuge of denying the authenticity of the Bulls which condemned them?" Even if they were of opinion that the so-called" Galilean liber- ties " needed vindication, they chose a wrong time to assert them.. When the oath to maintaiu the new Constitution in Church and State was tendered to the clergy, it was not any particular theory of jurisdiction that was in question. The pretensions set up by the Assembly were inconsistent with a fundamental principle of the Roman Church. It was open to any section of the clergy to reject this principle, and take their place among Protestant Reformers. That the Constitutional Clergy did not do this is, perhaps, to be explained by the very slight grasp which they seem to have had of truth or falsehood in religion.. They wished to keep on good terms with a Government which had both the power and the will to take their lives, if they re-• sisted it, and they did not care to do anything more than was necessary to this end. Some of them were found wanting. even iu the one thing which might have redeemed their char- acters,—constancy under persecution. The Constitutional Clergy had scarcely taken the oath, when the Revolution showed itself in its true colours ; religion in every form was persecuted and its professors threatened with im-. prisonment or death. Under this pressure, upwards of twenty of the Constitutional Bishops abjured Christianity.. The happiest of these apostates were those who were sent to the guillotine by the men whose service they had chosen. In prison they had time to repent of what they done, and of some of them, at all events, it may be said that they used the time well. The Abb6 Emery,who was imprisoned for seventeen mouths in the Conciergerie, assured Pius VI. that "the Constitutional priests, great numbers of whom have perished, before making their- appearance at the tribunal, repudiated the oath which bound them to the Constitution Cicile, and urgently entreated to be reconciled to the Church, all of them protesting that they had never ceased to believe and to acknowledge the Primacy of the Holy See." Lamourette, Constitutional Bishop of Lyons, Fauchet, Constitutional Bishop of Bayeux, and Gobet, Consti- tutional Bishop of Paris, were among those who repudiated all that they had done in their episcopal capacity, and received absolution in prison. Yet this Church, which appears in sa despicable a light under the Terror, seems to have done real service to religion in the last five years of the century. The success—even the temporary success—of the Revolution in making France Atheist has been greatly exaggerated. Before. the Concordat existed, save in the brain of Napoleon Bona- parte, both the Catholic and the Constitutional Clergy were- active in getting possession of the churches, and in restoring. public worship. The misfortune was that the Constitutional Bishops refused to regard their position as in any-way exceptional or irregular. At the very time that they were adopting, in their- * Tho Galliean Church and the Revolution. By the Rev. W. Henley Jervis, MA,. London : Regan Paul and Co. 1882. Encyclical Letter to their brethren, the statement of Bossuet, that " the Son of God, having determined that his Church should be one, established the primacy of St. Peter in order to preserve and cement it.," and acknowledging that primacy " in the successors of the Chief of the Apostles, to whom we, there- fore, profess the same submission and obedience which the Fathers and the Councils have always enjoined. upon the faithful," they were preaching conformity and submission to the former holders of the Sees into which they had been thrust by the Revolutionary Government, whose only crime had been that they had obeyed the Pope, when the Constitutional Bishops -talked of obeying him.
Mr. Jervis's limits do not allow him to do more than touch upon the fortunes of the Catholic Clergy during the Terror and under the Directory. 'Treated with adequate local knowledge, a narrative of their sufferings would. make a book of singular and painful charm. The French Church was tried, in the furnace, and she came out strengthened. from the ordeal. But Mr. Jervis's book is, in the main, a Constitutional history, and when once the Revolutionary Legislature has ceased to re- model the Church, he naturally hastens forward to the Con- cordat. As early as 1797, Bonaparte had sketched out the first notion of such an arrangement, in a letter to the Pope's Minister at Florence; and when, two years later, he became master of France, he at once began to perfect the scheme. " No man," 'he told the Milan Clergy on June 5th, 1800, " can be virtuous and just, if he knows not whence he came, and whither he goes. Mere reason cannot enlighten us upon this head ; without reli- gion, one walks continually in darkness ; and the Catholic reli- gion is the only one that imparts to man certain and infallible instruction as to his origin and his ultimate destiny." A new Pope of unusually liberal sympathies had just been elected, probably with the desire on the part of the Sacred. Col- lege that the First Consul's expected overtures should be met half-way. Nothing but the utmost eagerness on the part of Pius VII. could have surmounted the obstacles which stood in the way of a compromise. These obstacles were the creation, in part of events, in part of Bonaparte's own imperious and shifty character. Among the former, the most serious, per- haps, was the temper of the existing French Bishops. They were exiles, and most of them were warmly attached to the -dethroned dynasty. If they returned to their dioceses, it was useless to expect that they should yield a ready obedience to the existing Government. They must be asked by the Pope to resign their Sees, " not by way of judicial punishment, but as -an act of meritorious self-devotion to the interests of religion .and the Church." The second concession demanded of the Pope was the ratification of the sales of ecclesiastical property by decree of the National Assembly. "The estates in -question had passed legally into the hands of the actual possessors, and were held under the express guarantee -of the Government and the public faith." Among the points upon which Bonaparte insisted, without, perhaps, equal necessity, were the inclusion in the Concordat of the Con- ntitutional Bishops, and the new arrangement of dioceses, by which more than half the ancient sees were to be swept .away. The Pope resisted all these demands with more or less .of firmness, but in no case was his resistance successful. One scheme after another was drafted and rejected, and after the fifth had been returned from Rome, with certain proposed alterations, the First Consul suddenly declared that if the draft last forwarded was not signed within five days, the French Ambassador would. leave Rome. To avoid this, Consalvi, the Cardinal Secretary, was sent to Paris. All that he oould,in the first instance, obtain from Bonaparte was a further delay of -five days. If the Concordat were not then signed, the First Consul would adopt a National religion,—an enterprise, he said, which be possessed the means of undertaking with the certainty of success. Nor was Bonaparte wholly without ground for his assurance. The Constitutional Church was at that moment holding its second "National Council," and for a time, at all Was the Concordat a gain to religion in France ? That is a question which it is hard to answer. Mr. Jervis is of opinion that it was. He dwells on the contrast between the proclamation of the Catholic and Apostolic and Roman religion as that of the great majority of French citizens and the persecution which had but just ended,—on the importance of putting an end to the anomalies which existed after the professed concession of religions liberty by the Directory,—and on the substantial peace which was restored among Catholics by the extinction of the Constitutional Church, "identified as it was with all the most humiliating memories of the Revolution." It cannot be denied that these were great benefits, but, on the other hand, they were purchased at tremendous cost. Little as Pius VII. could have foreseen it, the Bull " Qui Christi Domini" was the principal SO urce of later Ultramontanism. Th e national organisation which was the chief obstacle to the extension of the Papal claims was swept away, and swept away not against the Pope's will, or merely with the Pope's acquiescence, but by the Pope's express decree. That is one element of loss. Another is the restric- tions on the free exercise of religion which the Civil Power imposed, with the consent of the Pope. The petty annoyances to which the Church is now exposed in France are constantly justified by an appeal to the Concordat, and though, in many cases, this appeal turns out, when examined, to imply that the "organic laws" are a part of the Concordat, whereas they were really made by Bonaparte in direct defiance of it, there is no doubt that the spirit of the Concordat is the spirit of its author. The, imperious arrogance which marked every action of the First Napoleon was never more evident, than in his dealings with the religion which he half feared and half despised. We must not take leave of 'lac Galli van Churvlb and the Revolution, without thanking. Mr. Jervis for his interesting and useful contribution to a part of history which has been too much neglected in England.
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