AGGRESSIVE IRRELIGION IN FRANCE.
THE new policy of the Papacy, or, rather, the revival of it old policy, is succeeding in every country except France. Leo XIIL, a wise and reflective man, with a deep belief in
moderation, has evidently come to the conclusion that the atti- tude maintained by the Catholic Episcopate from 1850 to- 1881—an attitude which was practically one of Conservatism in secular, as well as ecclesiastical politics—must be modified; and that the Church, for the sake of independence in its own.•. affairs, must accept all Governments and all dominant opinions not inconsistent with its spiritual teaching. If the Govern–.
ment is Protestant but irresistible, as in Germany, the Papacy will accept and support it, provided the Church is left free from all State interference. If it is Catholic but Liberal, as in Spain under SeiIor Sagasta, the Church will ally itself with the Ministry, provided nothing is done against what are regarded as the higher ecclesias- tical interests. If the Government is Republican and Agnostic, as in France, the Church will submit and wait, if only she is exempt from persecution. And if the popular movement, as in Ireland, is revolutionary, and on points even immoral, but carries all away, the Church will stand aloof from resistance, or even condone offences, if only she may be the ruling Church, and re-cement her sway over the young. These ideas, for some time past dominant in the Vatican, as
we showed a fortnight since, have at last been accepted by the Episcopate—after, as we conceive, a period of silent but strenuous resistance—and already their effect- is becoming patent to the world. In Germany, Prince'
Bismarck, in the strangely suggestive speech delivered on Monday to the Prussian House of Lords, formally with- drew from the contest with Rome, promised the total abolition of the May Laws, and deliberately eulogised the Papacy as far more impartial, more reasonable, and more statesmanlike than the local branches of the Catholic Church.
We may be sure that the Chancellor has arranged fcr his reward, and that in future Parliamentary opposition to his plans though it cannot disappear, will be profoundly modified, the Ultramontane Centre, which holds the balance of power, either supporting him, or breaking into fragments, according
to its members' political ideas. In Spain, the Premier, who has just secured a majority in the elections; announced on Tuesday that, in consequence of the " truly Christian" policy of Leo XIII., Liberalism renounced its distrust of the clergy, and would seek a solution of the social problem, which was its most pressing business, in concert with them, and even in reliance on their initiative,—a declaration cordially endorsed by the Nuncio, and understood to mean that educa- tion will be Catholic, and that the Church will support the Monarchical Liberals and their Queen-Regent. In Ireland, finally, the Church has accepted Home-rule, has' allied itself with the Parnellite party, and has, in return, been readmitted to a leading voice in the direction of the popular movement. The Catholic Primate, who two years ago was nobody, is to- day the second man in Ireland. The consideration offered by the Bishops in all three countries is large, in Ireland so large as to be inconsistent, in the judgment of many grave Catholics, with the claim of their Church to Divine guidance ; but it has been offered, and the expected rewards are beginning to flow in. In Germany, the Kulturkampf has ended ; in Spain, education will be Catholic ; in Ireland, Dr. Walsh is, next to Mr. Parnell, the strongest• person, and may yet supersede or dismiss his rival.
Only in France is there hesitation or refusal. The Arch- bishop of Paris, Cardinal Guibert, in the astonishingly eloquent manifesto which he published to France and the world last week, and which, but for the Irish Question, would have attracted all eyes even in Protestant England, offered on behalf of the Catholic Church to accept and support the Republic, if the Republic would cease from persecuting. If the State would be but tolerant, he and his clergy would cease to interest themselves in the form of the State. Nobody who knows anything of Cardinals, or Archbishops, or Rome, doubts that this manifesto had received the previous approval of the Papacy, or that it expressed a deliberate policy which should have been in the highest degree acceptable to Republi- cans, if only because it makes Republicanism possible to an Ultramontane. Yet what is the reply of the accredited representatives of the party ? They voted on Tuesday, by 340 to 187, that the Minister of Justice, in sending soldiers to close an unlicensed Catholic chapel—soldiers who fired a volley, killing one person and wounding five—was entirely in the right. Legally, he was in the right, as there is a law autho- rising the closing of such chapels, and the closing was resisted ; but it may be taken as certain that the police could have done the work, that the motive was to terrify two vicars who insisted that the chapel was wanted, and that, but that the recalcitrants were priests, such measures would never have been employed. The Minister, in fact, acted as if the priests were armed insurgents, and the Chamber, which will not fire on strikers who shed blood, approved his action. No one in France questions, though, of course, many justify, the animus
=of the proceeding, or doubts that the Radical majority intends to carry on the war against the Church by the same means,— that is, by the stringent application of every law, obsolete -or new, which can in any way injure or affront the Church, or =minimise her prestige in the eyes of the common people. All the Lent sermons preached in Paris this year are, for instance, to be reported by shorthand-writers to M. Goblet. Such conduct almost forces the clergy into opposition • and the puzzle to onlookers is why politicians who know that, and who not only recognise but exaggerate the power of the Church, should prefer to excite her unwilling hostility to the Republican system, rather than accept the peace—or, if you will, call it even truce —which she is at present offering. Many of the Republican Members are Opportunists who on any other subject will agree to almost any compromise ; many more are intensely solicitous of votes ; and the vast majority are sincere in wishing the Republic to continue, yet rather than conclude a
truce with the Church, they will endanger their seats, and the future of the system they admire. Why ? Why, to be quite clear, do not Frenchmen adopt the course which Mr. J. Morley, in one of the most striking passages of his writings, said ought to be adopted ?—
" You, he might have said to the priests—you have so debilitated the minds of men and women by your promises and your dreams, that many a generation must come and go before Europe can throw off the yoke of your superstition. But we promise you that they shall be generations of strenuous battle. We give you all the advan- tage that you can get from the sincerity and pious worth of the good and simple among you. We give you all that the bad among you may get by resort to the poisoned weapons of your profession and your traditions—its bribes to mental indolence, its hypocritical affecta- tions in the pulpit, its tyranny in the closet, its false speciousness in the world, its menace at the deathbed. With all these you may do your worst, and still humanity will escape you ; still the conscience of the race will rise away from you, still the growth of brighter ideals and a nobler purpose will go on, leaving ever further and further behind them your dwarfed finality and leaden, moveless stereotype. We shall pass you by on your flank, your fieriest darts will only spend themselves upon air. We will not attack you ne Voltaire did. We will not exterminate you ; we shall explain you. History will place your dogma in its class, above or below a hundred competing dogmas, exactly as the naturalist classifies his species. From being a conviction, it will sink to a curiosity; from being a guide to millions of human lives, it will dwindle down to a chapter in a book. As history explains your dogma, so science will dry it up ; the concep- tion of law will silently make the conception of the daily miracle of your altars seem impossible ; the mental climate will gradually de- prive your symbols of your nourishment, and men will turn their backs upon your systeth, not because they confuted it, but because, like witchcraft or astrology, it has ceased to interest them. The great ship of your Church, once so stout and fair, and well laden with good destinies, is become a skeleton ship ; it is a phantom hulk, with warped planks and sere canvas, and you who work it are no more than the ghosts of dead men, and at the hoar when you seem to have reached the bay, down your ship will sink like lead or like stone to the deepest bottom."—Critical Miscellanies (Chapman and Hall), Second Series, pp. 90-91.
That would be the course natural to the French genius ; and why upon this one question, which ought not to seem to them one of the first concern, are they so insensible to all arguments drawn from expediency, self-interest, and common-sense, that they are careless to keep up even an outward semblance of fin- partiality, and are ready to treat men who are, at all events, citizens, as if they were public enemies ? The usual answer is that they are fanatics for irreligion, that they positively hate the system of thought of which the Church is the exponent, and that opportunity offering the expression of this hatred gives them deep gratification. They feel when insulting the Church as Parnellites feel when irritating England, or as roughs feel when jeering at respectables. That explanation is, no doubt, partially true. The French.. man's dislike of Christianity, when he dislikes it, is constantly a fanaticism, an impulse which, like some Orangemen's hatred of Rome, seems irrepressible by time, opportunity, or place. He loathes it, and wants to express his loathing, even if he as Minister of Religion, responsible for main- taining the detested system. He thinks of it as, no doubt, the Christian Bishops once thought of the dying Paganism, as an evil and detestable thing, a baleful super- stition ; and as it is not strong enough to fight, he desires to extinguish it by force. If he could make it penal to attend the Mass, he would, just as the Christian Emperors made it penal to attend sacrifices to Venus or to Jove. That is true, and is the secret, in part, of the aggressive irreligion of France ; but there is, we believe, something more. Persecu- tion of this kind is so alien to the modern spirit, and the conviction of the French majority that Christianity is dead is so complete, that something more is required to explain a malignity which sometimes seems hardly sane,—as, for example, when a Republican Atheist of the advanced type is threatened with boycotting for attending the religious por- tion of his daughter's marriage, which, nevertheless, he is not expected to forbid. That something is the adoption with hearty faith of another creed, which the agnostic Frenchman calls sometimes Science, sometimes Enlightenment, and some- times Modern Thought, which he believes to be absolutely true, and from which, if it could only be made triumphant, he expects the happy and contented earth—the Utopia, in fact— which the Frenchman since 1789 has never long ceased to seek. He looks through and beyond Christianity to a world which he thinks will be a happier one for him, and will not, even to protect his political system, give up or postpone his dream. He even grows restless when at rest, seeks oppor- tunities of removing the obstacle, and regards every blow, no matter how feeble, as a help towards a clearance. He cannot be patient, cannot tolerate, cannot wait for a slow movement of opinion, which he nevertheless believes to be all on his side, because he hopes to establish another and wiser system, which will rid him of the evils he feels. The enthusiasm which the Socialist feels against society as an obstacle in the way of his millennium, when all shall labour and none be superior, is felt by the French Atheist against religion, and the Church which is the only teacher of religion that he knows. There is hope inside his strange fanaticism, the hope of the visionary, and unless we recognise that as well as the hatred, we shall never understand why the Frenchman enjoys blows at the Church which seem unworthy of his intelligence, why he rejects truce even when trace would prosper him, and what is the real extent of the danger that one great European country, full of vivid life and intellectual energy, may break utterly away from Christianity, and estab- lish in the centre of Europe a civilisation with no restraints save " reason"—which means the opinion of the majority— and " scientific truth," which means the conjectured result of inductive experiments in living.
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