III.

In presence of the melancholy reality of to‐day, and in expectation of a

yet sadder morrow, those Russians who are sincerely attached to their

church, and who have at heart the interests of their faith, will perhaps

ask themselves if it be not needful to labor in some direct manner to

deliver the Russian Church from a protection which has been so fatal to

her.

The question is a very serious one; we do not venture to decide upon it.

As Catholic, and precisely because we are Catholic, we must, in a question

of this kind, consider souls. Now, to work _directly_ to overthrow the

religious autocracy of the czars might easily, considering the actual

circumstances of Russia, hasten this morrow we have been considering, and

that without any efficacious remedy being at hand to accompany or to

follow quickly upon so great an evil. If it were not to be feared that,

under present circumstances, the overthrow of the official church would

cause the unbelief of the higher classes to descend also among the lower,

thus rendering it general, and endangering the existence of every faith in

the Russian people, the question would be easy to answer; but so long as

this doubt exists it is quite a case to which to apply the principle that

of two evils we must choose the least. From this point of view we prefer

the continuance of the present state of things, because it seems to us the

lesser evil.

There exist, however, other doubts, and their existence is of an extreme

gravity, in determining the attitude of Russians toward their church; they

are these:

Will the czars, even should they change their policy and show themselves

for the future true protectors and not masters, be able long to continue

to the Russian Church the support of the laws?

Again: Will Russia much longer have the czars?

These doubts are not chimerical.

In the first place, it appears to us unlikely that the czars should be

able to continue indefinitely to refuse liberty of conscience. Already, at

this present time, the Russian authorities shut their eyes to many

infractions of the laws relating to the different religious communions;

the ever‐increasing and multiplied relations of Russia with other

countries, and of her people with foreigners, and foreigners with

Russians, might easily create serious embarrassments, and even give rise

to political complications, if there were a desire to apply the religious

laws in all their rigor.

Nevertheless, it seems to us equally difficult to imagine that Russia

should, at one bound, arrive at declaring the civil law to be atheistical,

and to repel all solidarity between material interests and the religious

interests of the people. During some time Russia will probably offer to us

the same spectacle as in England, the classic land of religious license,

where every one, _except the sovereign_, is free to believe what he

pleases, and where at the same time _convenances_ and multiplied interests

keep the official church standing. But the Anglican Church has a far

different past and far other memories—above all, a very different

literature—from the Russian Church. In continuing this comparison the

reader will find an explanation of the vitality shown by the state‐church

of England, and at the same time the motives which do not allow us to

predict for that of Russia either able defenders or even a lingering

death.

If, then, the Russians ought not to labor directly to overthrow the

religious autocracy of the czars, seeing that, in present circumstances,

the overthrow of this autocracy might be the cause of still greater

disasters than those of the past, they nevertheless ought not to fold

their arms and contemplate with indifference the probability that this

overthrow may be brought about at no distant period by the mere force of

circumstances.

There remains the other doubt: Will Russia much longer have the czars?

This doubt, considering the epoch in which we live, scarcely needs to be

justified. What sovereign is there who can promise himself that he shall

end his days upon the throne? One alone—the Pope, because even in a

dungeon he is obeyed just as if he were upon a throne.

Let Russians who have at heart the interests of their faith boldly face

this second doubt and the fears to which it gives rise. Never, perhaps,

could history offer us a more remarkable spectacle than that of an

orthodox church, and a perfect automaton; to‐day receiving speech,

movement, and action from an orthodox emperor, and to‐morrow receiving

them from the head of a Protestant government, perhaps a Jew, perhaps an

atheist. In fact, the organization of a church reckoning nearly fifty

millions of adherents cannot be changed in twenty‐four hours, especially

if this organization is identified with the state to the degree of

confusing herself with the latter. What will then become of the Synod we

do not know, but neither do we know whether the new government will

readily consent to lose the profit of so powerful an _instrumentum regni_

as the church organized by the czars.

In presence of these eventualities, which, on account of the rapid march

of modern revolutions, are far from improbable, and may take place any

day, is there anything the Russians can do in order to save orthodoxy?

There is one thing, and, we believe, one only. We will say what that is,

though we greatly doubt whether it will be accepted; too many prejudices,

too many objections, will oppose themselves to it; everything else will be

tried, rather than have recourse to it; a great confidence especially will

be placed in the triumph of the panslavist idea; but each new attempt will

but prove this one plan to be the only efficacious one, and the ill‐

success of all the others will gradually lead minds to ally themselves to

it. In the alternative of accepting this, or else of letting orthodoxy

perish, Russians sincerely attached to their faith will not indefinitely

hesitate. Besides, a Providence watches over states and peoples; in that

Providence we place our trust, and it will not be in vain.

If, calling things by their names, we were to say plainly that this only

way is the reunion of the Russian with the Catholic Church, a Russian who

might do us the honor to peruse these pages would perhaps throw down the

book, and, however well disposed he might be, would see nothing more in it

than vain and dangerous imaginations. This alarm, however, would prove,

more than anything else, the exceeding power of the words. We will

endeavor to express the same idea in another manner; and, without

flattering ourselves that we shall gain acceptance for it, we hope at

least to obtain for it serious examination.

What is Russian orthodoxy? It is the collection of the dogmas accepted and

taught by the Russian Church. Now, these dogmas, with the exception of

some few misunderstandings,(189) are the same as those of the Catholic

Church; the point which really separates the two churches is the denial,

on the part of the Russians, of the jurisdiction of the Pope over the

universal church. At the utmost, a real doctrinal disagreement should be

admitted respecting the infallibility of the Pope defining _ex cathedrâ_

on faith or morals. But however important this disagreement may be in the

eyes of Catholics, it has no importance in the eyes of Protestants and

rationalists. Those who admit no revelation would not certainly prefer

orthodoxy merely because there is in it one article less to believe. As to

Protestants, the difficult point is to make them admit a visible authority

taught by God himself, and having the right and mission to explain the

Scriptures and to make a practical application of them to our lives. Now,

is it likely that, in their eyes, an authority residing in the dispersed

church, without the necessary bond which unites the bishops to each other,

would be much more acceptable than a central authority, always living,

always ready to declare its oracles, and, by that very fact, independent

of the obstacles which an inimical government or any other adversary might

raise against it to prevent it from declaring itself? For the rest, the

_Spiritual Regulation_ will let Protestants know whether a church

organized as is that of Russia at the present time can alone make a free

word to be heard.

Protestants and rationalists are, then, common adversaries of the Russian

and also of the Catholic Church. Common adversaries also, on doctrinal

grounds, are all those who cannot be exactly classed with either

Protestants or rationalists, but against whom the Russian Church will no

less have to defend herself—Jews, Mahometans, and, lastly, the Raskolniks

also, unless, indeed, a portion of the latter should not prefer to ally

themselves to the Catholic Church rather than to the Synod, if only they

can be persuaded that in becoming Catholics they do not by any means cease

to be Russians. Now, when in the XVIIth century the heresy of Calvin was

for a moment seated on the patriarchal throne of Constantinople in the

person of Cyril‐Lucar, and when that patriarch had published his _Orthodox

Confession of the Christian Faith_,(190) which was full of Calvinistic

errors, the gravity of the danger to orthodoxy was then sufficiently

powerful to render the Greeks far from being disdainful of the support

offered to them by Catholics, and even by the Pope himself, for the

purpose of guarding in safety the articles of the common faith.

Nothing was found too hard to be said against Catholics and Rome, because

of their intervention in the deposition of the heretical patriarch and the

condemnation of his doctrine. For their justification we may be permitted

to refer the reader to a publication which, upon its appearance, had the

importance of a great event, and this is No. 42 of the _Tracts for the

Times_, which, in England, opened the way to the Catholic faith.(191)

This historical precedent will not, we hope, remain without its

consequences in history. Already Catholic theologians unconsciously afford

a solid support to orthodoxy, with regard to the defence of the dogmas

which are common to us with the Russians. Our theological works find

entrance into Russia, and are there studied and quoted; whilst it is

rarely, if ever, that we find modern authors of the Greek Church quoted,

unless it be to draw from them arguments against the primacy of the Pope,

and to perpetuate the misunderstandings relating to the Procession of the

Holy Ghost and to purgatory.

From the time of Peter the Great orthodoxy has done nothing but lose

ground in Russia; neither the patriarchs of the East nor the other heads

of the various branches of the Orthodox Church appear to be solely

occupied with it. One might say that any heresy inspires them with less

horror than the Catholic doctrine about the Pope, and that they consider

the rejection of this doctrine a sufficient proof of a healthy orthodoxy.

But the day will come when every Russian who loves orthodoxy above all

else will no longer regard with so much horror as now a church which is

far better calculated than the Greek Church to furnish him with arms

wherewith to defend the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Real Presence, the

sacraments, the veneration of Mary and the saints. The same horror with

which we Catholics still inspire many orthodox Russians we formerly

inspired Anglicans. Relations with us, and _study_, have disabused many

credulous minds; in Russia, moreover, the double sentiment will operate in

our favor of the danger to which orthodoxy will be exposed, and the

insufficiency of the succor which can arrive to it from any quarter except

the Catholic Church alone.

But Protestants, rationalists, Jews, Mahometans, and Raskolniks are not

the only adversaries which the Russian Church must prepare to combat, and

against whom she will find no help more efficacious than that which

Catholics can afford. Among her adversaries she may reckon the government,

atheism in the legislation, obstacles of every kind created against the

propaganda of orthodoxy, compulsory irreligious instruction, unbelief and

materialism “crowned” by the academies—in a word, all the constituted

authorities upon which the people depend. Can the Russian Church promise

herself that she will be able successfully to contend against such

adversaries? No one will maintain that the past history of this church

offers a certain guarantee that she will; her existence, especially since

Peter the Great, has been too monotonous, and has had a sphere of action

too circumscribed, to allow her to make trial of her strength. Alas! there

is something more; however monotonous may have been her existence, it

nevertheless offers one characteristic feature, and this is, the facility

with which she has permitted the czars to impose their laws upon her, and

to obtain from her that which nothing would have forced from the great

doctors and fathers of the Greek Church. Now, if the Russian Church has

been so feeble in presence of the czars, is it very certain that she would

instantaneously recover her energy, were she to find herself face to face

with a government inspired by principles the most hostile to Christianity,

and the declared enemy, no longer of the whole Christian church only, but

of Jesus Christ himself? We are no prophet; but, after all, it is not

absolutely impossible that, at a period more or less distant, some Russian

socialist may find himself seated in the place of the czars.

Thus the past history of the Russian Church is far from being a sure

warranty that she will know how to wrestle with impious governments. What

succor, in fact, can she expect from churches which, in presence of the

sultan, and of the sovereigns of the other countries where they are

established, have shown themselves fully as feeble as the Russian Church

has been in presence of the czars? The sultan—to speak of him only—has not

he himself settled the Bulgarian question? And, besides, will not these

churches have enough to do to defend themselves at a time when political

importance decides everything? What influence in the religious affairs of

Russia can be exercised by little states occupying scarcely the third or

fourth rank among the states of Europe?

Should the Russian Church accept the aid of the Catholic Church, it will

be a very different matter. In the same way that history shows us the

latter as having already had to deal, on doctrinal ground, with every sort

of error, and of having fought against it, thus offering, with the weight

of her experience, the aid of a science as vast as the variety of errors

against which it has combated; so also has the Catholic Church already

encountered, on practical ground, every sort of obstacle, and has passed

through storms and tempests which would a thousand times over have

submerged her were she not divine. The number, variety, and gravity of the

struggles she has maintained also against governments and nations give her

the right to repeat with a calm security, each time that the signs of a

fresh persecution appear: _Alios vidi ventos aliasque procellas_—“Other

tempestuous winds and other storms have I seen.” She possesses

institutions born of these struggles and adapted to those of the future,

which will also create new ones in their turn. Her missionaries and her

priests present us with the spectacle of an army as numerous as it is

varied, answering to all the needs of war and to all the possible

eventualities of the field of battle. Still more: in the existence of the

church warfare is, so to speak, the normal condition, and peace the

exception; it thus follows that the powers of the Catholic Church are kept

in continual exercise, and that the science of the means of victory is

never reduced to simple memories.

This, from the history of the past, is what may be with certainty

foreseen, whether with regard to the inefficiency of the help which the

Russian Church may promise herself from the various branches of the

orthodox communion, in a struggle against unbelief and impious

governments, or with regard to the solid support which, in this case, she

would find from the Catholic Church. But this prevision is not only

justified by history. History has done nothing more than throw light upon

that which had been foretold to us by a terrible declaration of Jesus

Christ; and it is in this declaration that lies the deep reason and the

true explanation of that which history causes to pass before our eyes.

_Omne regnum in seipsum divisum desolabitur_—“Every kingdom divided

against itself shall be brought to desolation” (S. Luke xi. 17), Our Lord

has said.

The Orthodox Church is a divided kingdom—divided into as many branches as

there are states in which she counts her adherents; divided to such a

degree that, without the consent of sovereigns, no communication is

possible between these divers branches; so divided that it is also the

will of sovereigns which regulates and measures the relations which the

bishops of the eparchies (dioceses) of one self‐same state may hold among

themselves. The Orthodox Church is a kingdom divided against itself—so

divided that nowhere is there to be found an authority which, being itself

the source of jurisdiction, can terminate the litigations about

jurisdiction without appeal; so divided that a little boldness and

obstinacy sufficed to enable Greece to withdraw herself from the

jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople; that a little boldness

and obstinacy sufficed to gain the cause for Bulgaria, when, not long ago,

she also shook off the authority of the same patriarch; and that a little

boldness and obstinacy always suffice to enable the revolted definitively

to shake off the yoke of their pastors.(192)

Alas! it is not even here that the desolation of this kingdom ends. Of the

Orthodox Church it may be truly said that the desolation has no bounds. It

has no bounds because already the principle has been established that the

church of each state ought to be independent, and that each separate

nation also ought to have its distinct and independent church. It is

endless because to these principles—subversive of all order and all

stability, and which make ecclesiastical jurisdiction depend no longer

upon the laws and customs of the church, but on the chances of war, the

valor of conquerors, and the craftiness of conspirators—the Orthodox

Church can oppose nothing but vain protestations; it is endless because

the very bishops themselves of the Orthodox Church take the lead in

upholding these principles, and are the first to treat with contempt the

complaints of those of their brethren whose jurisdiction is injured.

And, in fact, it was by invoking its political independence that the

recently‐formed kingdom of Greece declared itself, in 1833, freed from the

jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople. This declaration was made

and carried by _all_ the bishops of the kingdom, assembled at Nauplia; not

a single voice appears to have been raised to require that the patriarch

should at least be first consulted. The patriarch appealed to the canons

of the church, and protested—and they let him protest. For seventeen years

he went on protesting, until at last, in 1850, his successor recognized

the accomplished fact; had he not done so, he would have been allowed to

protest to an indefinite period, as long as he might be inclined. It was

by appealing to the principle of nationality (_phyletism_) that the

Bulgarians shook off the authority of the same patriarch. Their bishops

nominated an exarch, and long before the sultan had definitely settled

this affair they gave no more heed to the patriarch’s protestations than

for seventeen years had been given by the bishops of the Hellenic kingdom.

In the hope of leading back the Bulgarians to obedience, the patriarch, in

1872, convoked a great council in the Church of S. George at

Constantinople. He made his complaints against his rebellious children,

and without apparently considering the effect which might be produced by

the publicity given to his words, he there related that, having summoned

the recalcitrant bishops to return to obedience, one of them had answered

him, _by the telegraph_, that he should go and receive the reply from the

exarch.

The council thereupon proceeded to excommunicate the Bulgarians, who had

already so willingly excommunicated themselves, sure beforehand that they

would none the less continue to be considered members of the Orthodox

Church— a certainty which could not fail to be realized. The example of

Greece had borne its fruit. Besides, this council was not œcumenical;

amongst others, the Russian bishops did not sit there at all; a letter of

the Synod had the mission of representing them, probably unknown to

themselves, and certainly without their permission. By what right, then,

could the council separate the Bulgarian nation from _the whole_ church?

By what right did it speak in the name of _the whole_ church? It had so

much the less right, also, from the fact that the Patriarch of Jerusalem,

Cyril, who happened to be then at Constantinople, determinedly refused,

for reasons which gave evidence of more than unwillingness, to appear at

its sittings.(193)

Will it be said that the Bulgarians were excommunicated by virtue of the

canons of the church; that the council applied to them an anathema already

decreed by the fathers and the œcumenical councils against those who

violated the canons? We have some acquaintance with these canons; and, if

they are to be taken literally, we would not take upon ourselves to prove

that the whole Orthodox Church has not long ago fallen under some

excommunication pronounced by her own canons; such, at any rate, would be

the case with regard to the Russian Church, which forms its principal

portion. To escape this somewhat embarrassing conclusion, it becomes

necessary to admit that the canons must be understood, as it is commonly

expressed, _cum grano salis_, and that they are susceptible of a mild

interpretation. It is this which the Bulgarians believe themselves to have

done. They have found in the past history of their church _several_

examples authorizing an interpretation of the canons conformable to their

wishes; amongst others, that of Peter the Great, who, _without ever

ceasing to be considered orthodox_, abolished the patriarchate of Moscow,

instituted the Synod, made it the principal authority of the Russian

Church, and declared himself to be the “Supreme Judge” thereof; after

which he informed the Oriental patriarchs of what had happened, and

demanded of them an approbation which he was fully determined to do

without, in case it should be refused. The crime of the Bulgarians

consisted in interpreting the canons as they had been interpreted by the

numerous bishops who had not on that account been, by any means, expelled

from the church; and if the letter of the Russian Synod, the mandatory of

the Russian episcopate at the council of 1872, blamed them, besides that,

in their revolt, they were sustained by Russia.(194) The Bulgarians called

to mind that it was Russia, too, which had the most strenuously labored to

induce the Patriarch of Constantinople to recognize the independence of

the Church of the Hellenic kingdom as an accomplished fact. With memories

such as these, the anathema of the Council of Constantinople of 1872 could

scarcely disquiet the Bulgarians.

And this is not all. This council made a decision which is, in truth, a

_doctrinal_ decision by declaring that the exterior constitution of the

church is independent of the principle of nationality, and in condemning

the application of this principle to the church, as being contrary to the

Scriptures and to the Fathers. By what right did this council, not being

ecumenical, make a decision of this kind, and what value could it possess?

Will it be said that this council did nothing more than define and affirm

what was contained in the Scriptures and the Fathers? It was precisely

this to which the Bulgarians would not agree, and of which the Patriarch

of Jerusalem—to mention him only—was by no means convinced; in short, that

which only a truly ecumenical council could _authoritatively_ decide. In

presence of a merely nominal doctrinal authority, it was perfectly natural

that the Bulgarians should keep their own view of the matter.

But still more embarrassing by far would be the consequences resulting to

the Orthodox Church if it were admitted that this council possessed a

really doctrinal authority, and that its decisions were obligatory on the

consciences of the orthodox faithful. In this case the Orthodox Church

would have added yet another definition to those already recorded in the

seven Ecumenical Councils allowed by her. This church has always boasted

of having _added nothing_ to the doctrine expressed in the seven

Ecumenical Councils, in which, according to her, the Holy Ghost has

deposited, _once for all_,(195) whatever it is necessary to believe. She

is so persuaded that nothing can be added to them that she takes pleasure

in recognizing in these councils the seven pillars of wisdom, the seven

mysterious seals, spoken of by S. John—pillars and seals which will

eternally remain seven in number, without any possible chance of reaching

even to the number eight. Therefore it is that she throws in our faces our

western councils and their definitions, and therefore that she reproaches

us with _new dogmas_. But the Immaculate Conception of Mary and the

doctrinal Infallibility of the Pope—these two dogmas which the church has

found in the Scriptures and in the Fathers—were they newer in the eyes of

the Bulgarians than the dogma defined at the Council of Constantinople in

1872, that “the church, in her exterior constitution, is independent of

the principle of nationality”—a dogma condemned, implicitly at least, by

the previous practice of a large portion of the Orthodox Church?

Finally, why should the Bulgarians have submitted to the decision of a

particular council—a decision, carried by the Greeks _judices in causâ

propriâ_, when the Russian Church, as all the world knew, thought so

lightly of the doctrine and practice of the whole Greek Church in a matter

of far greater importance, _the validity of baptism_? Baptism by infusion

is in fact recognized at St. Petersburg and Moscow as valid, while at

Constantinople it is null and void. A Protestant or a Catholic baptized by

infusion, who should ask to be received into the Orthodox Church, would be

accepted unconditionally in Russia: but at Constantinople he would be

required to be rebaptized. A Christian in the dominions of the czar, he

would become a pagan at Constantinople; and yet this is one and the same

church!(196)

Yes, the shock has been given. The Council of Constantinople of 1872 has

not been able to hinder the defection of the Bulgarians, but it has

attracted the attention of the Christian world to the fact that the

Orthodox Church has no authority which can force consciences to reject as

heretical the application to the exterior constitution of the church,

either of the principle of nationality, or any other principle upon which

might be based the political constitution of nations. And further, the

acts of the Council of Constantinople of 1872 give evidence of the

hesitation and uncertainty existing among the representatives of the

orthodox faith(197) with regard to a question so momentous, and which

concerns the very life of that church. The shock has been given. Error has

a terrible logic. Where will the divisions, the sub‐divisions, and the

parcellings‐out of the orthodox communion end?

And what consequences may result from the want of exterior unity, not only

for the independence, but also for the faith, of the church, we have just

glanced at; but it will be revealed by the _Ecclesiastical Regulation_ in

a manner more convincing and more sad.

Assuredly the future had not been foreseen when, in the _Confession of the

Orthodox Faith_, the great catechism of the whole Oriental Church, it was

considered sufficient to explain as follows the unity of the church:

“The church is one, ... according to the teaching of the apostle: _For I

have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste

virgin to Christ_ (2 Cor. xi. 2). For even as there is but one Christ,

even so his spouse can be but one; as it is written in the fourth chapter

of the Epistle of S. Paul to the Ephesians (iv. 5, 6): _One Lord, one

faith, one baptism: there is but one God, the Father of all._”(198)

Nor was the future any more foreseen when, in the catechism of Mgr.

Philarete, the unity of the church was defined:(199)

“Q. Why is the church one?

“A. Because she represents one _spiritual_ body, animated by one sole and

only divine Spirit, and having one head only, who is Christ.”

Let us now turn away our gaze from the Orthodox Church, in which the

terrible declaration of Jesus Christ finds only too fully its

accomplishment. Another church appears before us. She is not a divided

kingdom: on the contrary, if there be one characteristic mark by which she

may be at once recognized by all who seek for her, it is the imposing

unity of her exterior organization. The pope forms this unity. Let us ask

of history what the pope has done for the church.

And history answers: The pope has saved the church. The pope alone has

been able to hinder this church from breaking up, as the Orthodox Church

has done, into so many national churches, at first under the protection,

then under the authority, and finally under the rod, of sovereigns who

were at first kings, then presidents of a republic, sometimes

Robespierres. It is the pope, and the pope only, who has maintained, not

merely the vague notion, but the living sentiment of Catholic fraternity—a

sentiment which inspires the adversaries of the church with a fear which,

in spite of themselves, they betray. It is the pope, and the pope alone,

who has caused the sap of Christian piety to circulate in the whole

Catholic world, by the honors of the altars accorded to the saints of

every land, and by those institutions which, originating in one country,

belong to all countries, as powerful, in the realization of their vast

aspirations, as zeal and charity themselves. It is the pope who makes the

treasures of virtue and learning which he discovers in any particular

locality the common property of the world—in a word, it is the pope who

causes the church always to survive, not only the enemies who desire her

death, not only the false prophets who, for centuries past, have gone on

announcing this death as imminent, but all kingdoms and all empires, their

institutions, and even their remembrance. This is what the pope is for the

Catholic Church.

Thus we see, on the one side, division, and, as its consequence, the

dissolution foretold by Jesus Christ; on the other side, unity, and, with

unity, victory and strength. This is the signification of the church

having or not having a pope. Besides, the unity of government is so

necessary to arrest the indefinite parcelling out of one church into a

number of independent churches, and as a safeguard to the common faith,

that each separate branch of the Orthodox Eastern Church has not been able

to maintain its integrity without the aid of a supreme and central

authority. Instead of the pope, this is a patriarch, or it is a synod, or

it is the sovereign of the country, but everywhere and always the very

adversaries of the Papacy themselves render an involuntary homage to the

Catholic dogma which declares a visible head, a pope, necessary to the

church.

Yes, a pope is necessary for the church—necessary to her existence, and

necessary for the fulfilment of her mission.

Let us consider it with regard to the most powerful of the various

branches of the orthodox communion—the Russian Church. Even could this

church (by hypothesis) maintain herself alone, and could she continue her

work without the operation of the laws; could she alone combat unbelief,

and alone make head against impious governments, the pope would be none

the less necessary for her. And why? Because the Russian Church calls

herself _Catholic_; that is, _universal_. Now, it is not enough for a

church which calls itself Catholic, and the one church of the Saviour of

all, to be able to maintain her ground in that part of the world in which

she is now enclosed; it is not enough that she should combat unbelief in

the empire of the czars, nor that she should be able to resist an impious

government which may succeed to theirs.

If she is Catholic, she ought, the Russian Church herself, to be equal to

penetrating _everywhere_, and everywhere to maintain herself; to combat

_everywhere_ heresy and unbelief, and everywhere to sustain collision with

the government. If she is Catholic, let her issue from the limits of the

country of the czars, and at least _attempt_ the conquest of Italy,

Germany, France, England, all Europe; America, the whole world; let her,

in the name of Jesus Christ, utter words of authority to the conquerors of

the earth, brave the hatred which the consciousness of her rights would

draw upon her, and dare to declare to crowned heads that all Christians

belong to her; let her not confine herself to raising in capital cities

Russian temples for the use of the Russian embassies, but let her require

every government to recognize the orthodox worship; let her missionaries

penetrate, whether welcomed or repelled, into all the countries of the

earth with the sole credentials of the apostles, and, strong in this

single right, let them return whither they are driven out, and sprinkle

with their blood the soil wherein they sow the seed of orthodoxy. Then,

and only then, will the Russian Church show herself Catholic; that is to

say, universal; that is to say, the church of the Saviour of all. Until

then in vain may she call herself Catholic while the title is denied by

the fact.

But these things the Russian Church will never be able to accomplish

without a pope.

From whom, in fact, will her priests hold their commission? To whom will

they recur for counsel, protection, and support? In whose name will they

speak to governments and kings? To whom will they refer the latter to

authenticate the validity of their mission, to propose objections, or to

lodge complaints? If we except Russia, Turkey, the Hellenic kingdom,

Roumania, Servia, and some provinces of the Austro‐Hungarian Empire, the

rest of the world is missionary ground for the Orthodox Church, just as

much as is China for the Catholic Church. Let us suppose the Russian

Church wishing only to undertake the conversion of France. Paris already

possesses a Russian temple; it is now the Synod, in concert with the

government, which nominates the persons attached to this temple. When the

official church shall have fallen, and all the Russian bishops shall be

canonically equal, or at least independent of each other, to which among

them will the charge of this mission belong?

Paris is a place to stimulate the zeal of many bishops. It is allowable to

believe that a settlement will not be very quickly made. Let us suppose it

made, however, and moreover that even there is established a college _De

Propaganda Fide Orthodoxâ_ at St. Petersburg or Moscow. What would be the

attitude of the Greek Church of Constantinople? Will the latter possess,

or will she not possess, the right to evangelize France, and there to

exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction? If it be allowed that she has this

right, the same question presents itself also for the three patriarchates

of Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem; it also presents itself for the

Greek Church of the Hellenic kingdom, for the Church of Roumania, for that

of Servia, for the Orthodox Church of the Austro‐Hungarian Empire, and

even for that of Montenegro. Here is already an accumulation and

intermingling of jurisdictions liable to give rise to numerous contests.

Who shall decide amongst them? Will they come to a mutual agreement? But

an agreement will be everlastingly impossible between the Greek and

Russian Churches, at least so long as the question of the validity of

baptism by infusion remains undecided. We will say Catholics are to be

“converted” to orthodoxy: the Russian ministers will not rebaptize them.

The Greek Church knows it—this church, as we have just said, which regards

baptism by infusion as null. If the Greek Church consents that the Russian

missionaries shall evangelize France, it declares, by that consent, that

baptism is no longer necessary for belonging to the church. If, however,

she opposes their so doing, who is to decide between them? And the simple

ones who had previously let themselves be incorporated into the Russian

Church—would they be very certain that they really belonged to the church?

Which, then, will be the true missionaries?

We confine ourselves to this example. Let us apply ourselves carefully to

realize, in imagination, what would be the situation of a church

attempting to do without a pope that which must be done by a church

believing herself divine, and invested by God with a commission to convert

the world—wishing to do, without a pope, what is done by the Catholic

Church every day. Then it will be easy to understand whether there can be

a divine church without a pope.

And this pope, without which the Russian Church will never be the

universal church of Jesus Christ nor fulfil the mission of that

church—where would she seek him? Would she, on account of the needs

created by her new situation, confer upon one of the bishops all the

authority which is now concentrated in the hands of the Synod? Will she

say to him, Help me to fulfil the mission of converting the world? But

this charge, this part, would it not with greater right belong to the

Patriarch of Constantinople, who, so powerful is the need of unity, has

already declared, upon one solemn occasion, that on him rests the _care of

all the churches?_(200) We are supposing in the Russian Church, and in the

other branches of the orthodox communion, enough self‐denial to consent to

this. But when this great event shall have been accomplished, what will

have been done?

It will have been acknowledged before the face of all the world that it is

not Rome who made the schism. It will have been confessed that during ten

centuries it has been charged as a crime upon the Catholic Church that she

has not sacrificed that which, after ten centuries of disasters, the

Eastern Church has found it necessary to force herself to regain under

pain of ceasing to exist. There will have been rendered to the Catholic

Church the most splendid of testimonies, in confessing that she alone

possesses the true sense of the words of Jesus Christ, and that the rock

on which Jesus Christ has built his church is Peter.

Indeed, from that day forward there will be no more excuse for schism.

Between a rock designated by men of the XIXth century, and that rock of

which the manifest existence goes back to Jesus Christ himself, and has

been pointed out by him, who that but knows how to read and write can

hesitate for an instant?

Such, therefore, is the alternative: either the Orthodox Church will be

forced to give herself a pope, to show that she is really that which she

entitles herself, “Catholic,” or universal, and to fulfil the mission

imposed by this name, or she will never be able to justify her

appreciation of this title. What will happen in the former case, we have

just said; if, on the contrary, the Orthodox Church delays to give herself

a pope, the rapid march of events, and the revolutionary storm from which

neither Russia nor the East will by any means be preserved, will, before

very long, prove to us that it is not upon the sand that Jesus Christ has

built his church.

To Be Concluded Next Month.

Burke And The Revolution.

Bacon’s grand testamentary vindication of his life, “bequeathing his name

and memory to foreign nations and his own countrymen after some time be

passed over,” might have been written with even greater justice of

himself—because free from any imputation of moral weakness—by the master‐

mind of the XVIIIth century in England in the domain of political

philosophy—Edmund Burke, the illustrious orator and statesman, the author

of _Reflections on the Revolution in France_. To‐day, when France,

“incessantly agitated by a propaganda of the most pernicious

doctrines,”(201) still vindicates the sagacity which foresaw the

disastrous course of the Revolution, while England, which he saved from

the same propaganda, uninterruptedly illustrates the “beneficial influence

of the regular action of the public powers,” it may not be amiss to recall

some of the opinions to which he gave utterance at the beginning of the

storm. Burke’s genius, like Bacon’s, was indeed too refulgent not to be

acknowledged even in his own day. But the burning questions upon the

discussion of which and their solution, so far as human reason can go, he

has built up an enduring fame—_monumentum ære perennius_—lighted up

passions too gigantic and furious in the tremendous conflict then

inaugurated to allow of contemporary justice being done to his labors. Nor

did their negatory influence upon his fame end with his death; two allied

causes have conspired to partially obscure the clear and immortal flame of

his genius, even to our time:

First, the jealousy of the political and literary followers of Charles

James Fox.

Second, the inimical spirit of the Revolution.

Burke, as it is well known, had to contend, during his parliamentary

career, not only against the Tory prejudices of the country party,

represented by such men as William Lord Bagot and Col. Onslow, but also

against the ill‐concealed jealousy and oligarchical exclusiveness of his

nominal allies, the Whig aristocracy. But this influence of caste, which

in his lifetime placed over his head his political pupil, Charles Fox, as

the representative of the Whig family compacts, has been succeeded since

his death by a more acrimonious spirit of personal jealousy in defence of

the fame of his younger rival. The partisans of Fox have never been able

to forgive Burke’s renunciation of his alliance with the eloquent Whig

leader; and so large a share of literary and political criticism during

the last half‐century has come from the pens of that small but popular

band of writers who took their inspiration from the traditions of Holland

House, that the acknowledgment of Burke’s profound and prophetic genius

has been unduly circumscribed by the desire of elevating the “great man”

of the family. Macaulay and Earl Russell have given expression to this

feeling; the former by covertly insinuating a doubt of Burke’s judgment,

while lavishly extolling the splendor of his imagination; the latter by

open denunciation of his course at the outbreak of the Revolution; Earl

Russell with unconscious self‐satire quoting these lines from La Fontaine:

“L’homme est de feu pour le mensonge

Il est de glace pour la vérité.”

The efforts of a powerful literary and family connection to elevate its

idol, Charles Fox, at the expense of Burke, have had, however, but small

effect in limiting the measure of the latter’s fame, compared with the

hostile spirit of revolution animating the current periodical literature

of England and America. If the apostles of the Revolution, who steal

Burke’s thunder without acknowledgment, when it suits their purpose,

against the despotism of power, could bury out of sight his protests

against that worse despotism of unchained human passions, which is their

ideal of liberty, they would gladly place him in their Pantheon. But the

mind of the great political philosopher was too grandly comprehensive to

be narrowed within the grooves of that fashionable “liberalism” which

covers even the basest tyranny, if directed against the Catholic Church.

His humanity was too broad and true not to be aroused into flaming

denunciation of the abuse of power, whether it assumed the shape of

“opulent oppression” in India or democratic priest‐slaughter in France.

Hence it is that Burke holds but a half‐allegiance of the Liberal party;

that his fame has been, as it were, truncated, so far as they have been

able to effect it; and that his magnificent vindications of the cause of

liberty, bounded by no limitations of race, government, or creed, are

circumscribed in their minds by his ante‐revolutionary labors.

But it is not in the power of any class of critics, least of all of the

light artillery of “liberalism,” to narrow or permanently diminish Burke’s

kingdom over human thought. His fame will not be dependent upon the

fashion of this or any single age. The _consensus_ of humanity has crowned

him among the Immortals. When Macaulay and Russell shall have become

obscure names, the works of Burke will endure as monuments of our

civilization. His place will be with Demosthenes and Cicero, and in the

estimation of a more remote posterity he will probably overtop them both.

The long, lean figure, with spectacles on nose, once familiar to the

caricaturists of the third George’s reign, has faded a good deal from the

eyes of the present generation. We now turn over with a smile the prints

of the “concealed Jesuit” from S. Omer’s, _barrette_ on head, and long

_soutane_ clinging to his heels; or the more portly figure of the

highwayman, blunderbuss in hand, waylaying, in company with North and Fox,

the “savior of India” (Warren Hastings); or the “Watchman” of the

constitution, in heavy cloak, lantern in hand, and spectacles on the

formidable nose, ferreting out the revolutionary preacher, Dr. Price, in

his midnight study. The gravers of Gilray and Sayer have yielded to those

of the caricaturists for _Punch_. The figures of Gladstone, Disraeli, and

Bright have supplanted those of Pitt, Fox, and Burke. The great orator and

statesman has taken his place as a classic on the shelves of all

libraries, but is popularly known only by a few rounded extracts from his

speeches, or by Macaulay’s description of the entrance on the

parliamentary stage of Lord Rockingham’s young Irish secretary, “who to an

eloquence surpassing the eloquence of Pitt, and an industry that shamed

the industry of Grenville, united an amplitude of comprehension to which

neither Pitt nor Grenville could lay claim.” But if Burke has shared the

fate of all great writers not strictly popular in being conventionally

admired but practically neglected by the general reader, no political

author is more diligently studied by the “middlemen” of thought, the

makers and leaders of public opinion. He is the private tutor of public

teachers; the _vade mecum_ of the orator and politician. Most of the

questions of political ethics which have been the subjects of discussion

during the present century have been profoundly treated of by him.

Catholic emancipation, parliamentary reform, the freedom of the press,

ministerial responsibility, the relations of church and state, the

abolition of the slave trade, the amelioration of the criminal law—all

have received from him their most ample and brilliant illustration.

Of all the events of his time, however, the Revolution of 1789 gave the

chief exercise to his powers. Born in 1730, he was then at the zenith of

his fame, in the full maturity of his massive yet acute intellect. Earl

Russell’s senile complaint in his life of Fox of “the wreck of his

(Burke’s) judgment” betrays only the dotage of his own. Advancing age had

better fitted him for the contest. His mind had, as Macaulay truly says,

bloomed late into flower, although the rhetoric of the essayist has

caricatured the sterility of his youth. The giant trunk was now crowned

with a luxuriant and graceful foliage, which added to its beauty, while it

detracted nothing from its strength. The experience of “his long and

laborious life,” the accumulated stores of his prodigious industry,

furnished him with weapons of finest temper and irresistible force. Thus

armed, stepping to the front as the champion of civilization and religion

against the Giant Despair which had broken its bonds in Europe, it was

with striking appropriateness that his friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds,

applied to him, at the moment of his rupture with Fox and the opposition,

the lines written under the engraving of 1790 from the portrait of

1775—lines in which Milton describes the faithful Abdiel striding forth,

solitary, from amid the rebel host:

“So spake the fervent angel, but his zeal

None seconded: .....

...... Unmoved,

Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,

His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal;

Nor number nor example with him wrought

To move from truth, or change his constant mind,

Though single. From amidst forth he passed

Long way through hostile scorn, nor of violence feared aught;

And with retorting scorn, his back he turned

On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed.”

The efforts of Burke’s single mind at this critical moment decided the

course of events in England. His speeches in Parliament and the

publication of his _Reflections on the Revolution in France_ aroused a

national feeling that all the efforts of the revolutionary propagandists

were unable to stem; which Pitt followed rather than led; and which

enabled England to carry on without flinching, to a triumphant close, the

long and bloody war in national self‐defence into which she was driven by

the aggressive spirit of the Revolution. Pitt only gave utterance to the

national feeling when he declared at the close of Burke’s speech on the

Army Estimates, in which he flung down the gauntlet to the Revolution,

“that not only the present generation but the latest posterity would

revere his name for the decided part he had that day taken.”

It was Burke’s fortune to witness the temporary triumph, but not the

succeeding repulse, of the first outbreak of the Revolution. He died at

the full tide of its fury. Yet the tremendous blows he dealt its

principles, single‐handed, before all that was mortal of him was laid at

rest at Beaconsfield, undoubtedly saved England from succumbing to its

influence in his own day, and their conservative force is still felt in

the government of that country. “This man,” said Schlegel, “has been to

his own country and to all Europe—and, in a particular manner, to all

Germany—a new light of political wisdom and moral experience. He corrected

his age when it was at the height of its revolutionary fury; and without

maintaining any system of philosophy, he seems to have seen further into

the true nature of society, and to have more clearly comprehended the

effect of religion in connecting individual security with national

welfare, than any philosopher or any system of philosophy of any preceding

age.” True words, and worthy of attention at this moment, when Germany has

entered on a new and dangerous course of political action.

From the first mutterings of the revolutionary storm Burke had distrusted

its character and future violence. Alarmed by what he had seen of the

undisguised levity and scepticism of Parisian society during his visit to

France in 1772, he had taken occasion in one of his speeches, as early as

1773, to point out “this conspiracy of atheism to the watchful eyes of

European governments.” The outrages in the name of liberty which were

simultaneous with its outburst determined his course, although his keen

political vision had long before penetrated the hollowness of its

professions. The old political gladiator, “in whose breast,” as he proudly

and truly said of himself, “no anger, durable or vehement, had ever been

kindled but by what he considered as tyranny”; whose potent voice had re‐

echoed across the Western ocean in support of the American colonist, had

pleaded for the African slave and Hindoo laborer, and had instilled fresh

hope, in the broken heart of the Irish “Papist,” roused himself now to his

last and most powerful effort in defence of the fugitive French

“aristocrat” and hunted priest.

“I have struggled,” he said, “to the best of my power against two great

evils, growing out of the most sacred of all things—liberty and authority.

I have struggled against the licentiousness of freedom, I have contended

against the tyranny of power.” Nearly ten years before, in his speech on

the Marriage Act, defending himself against the charges of “aristocrat”

and “radical” which had been alternately levelled against him, he had

predicted his course in these noble words:

“When indeed the smallest rights of the poorest people in the

kingdom are in question, I would set my face against any act of

pride countenanced by the highest that are in it; and if it should

come to the last extremity, and a contest of blood, my course is

taken. I would take my fate with the poor, and low, and feeble.

But if these people come to turn their liberty into a cloak for

mischievousness, and to seek a privilege of exemption, not from

power, but from the rules of morality and virtuous discipline, I

would join my hand to make them feel the force which a few united

in a good cause have over a multitude of the profligate and

ferocious.”

Burke’s theory of true reform, illustrated by the honorable labors of his

whole public career, was in fact so radically opposed to that of the

French constitution makers that no standing‐ground common to both could be

found. He foresaw plainly enough what were the secret aims and aspirations

of the revolutionary leaders from the first, whatever might be their

humanitarian professions; that whatever their changes of leaders or

watchwords, their goal would always be the same—the destruction of

existing society; not reparation, but ruin. He would have seen in M.

Gambetta’s programme of a _nouvelle couche sociale_, enunciated at

Grenoble in 1872, only a new reading of M. Marat’s schemes of universal

confiscation in 1792. Neither would have found more favor in his eyes than

in those of any English reformer from S. Thomas à Becket to Hampden. He

believed with Bacon that there could be no wise design of reform which did

not set out with the determination “to weed, to prune, and to graft,

rather than to plough up and plant all afresh.” Sixty years afterwards

another writer, after an elaborate and prolonged study of the _ancien

régime_, and a lifetime’s experience of the results of the Revolution,

arrived at the point from which Burke started. The writer was Alexis de

Tocqueville. Those who are familiar only with the _Democracy in America_,

the work of his inexperienced youth, would do well to read his _Memoir and

Letters_ by De Beaumont. Writing to M. Freslon in 1853, after the events

of 1848‐51 had pretty well cured him of liberalism, he said:

“When one examines, as I am doing at Tours, the archives of an

ancient provincial government, one finds a thousand reasons for

hating the _ancien régime_, but few for loving the Revolution; for

one sees that the _ancien régime_ was rapidly sinking under the

weight of years and a gradual change of ideas and manners, so

that, with a little patience and good conduct, it might have been

reformed without destroying indiscriminately all that was good in

it with all that was bad. It is curious to see how different was

the government of 1780 from that of 1750. One does not recognize

the government or the governed. The Revolution broke out not when

evils were at their worst, but when reform was beginning. Halfway

down the staircase we threw ourselves out of the window, in order

to get sooner to the bottom” (_Memoir and Remains_, vol. ii. pp.

242, 243, Eng. ed.)

Burke had an invincible distrust of the crude theories and rash

speculations of the _doctrinaires_ of the Revolution. “Follow experience

and common sense,” he says in a hundred different ways; “these are the

arguments of statesmen! Leave the rest to the schools, where only they may

be debated with—safety.” “In politics,” he says, “the most fallacious of

all things is geometrical demonstration.” Again: “The majors make a

pompous figure in the battle, but the victory of truth depends upon the

little minors of circumstances.” He compares the socialist theorist ready

to plunge into the volcano of revolutionary experiment to the Sicilian

sophist—_ardentem frigidus Ætnam insiluit_. The atrocious principles of

the literary and philosophical guides of the Revolution seemed to him

almost more portentous than the brutalities of the mob. “Never before this

time,” he says, “was a set of literary men converted into a gang of

robbers and assassins. Never before did a den of bravoes and banditti

assume the garb and tone of an academy of philosophers.”

Remarkable sayings then, and true of experience anterior to his time. But

had Burke lived in our day, he would have witnessed with astonishment the

full development of the spirit he denounced, in the terrible spectacle of

an aggressive infidel philosophy, and an almost universal infidel press,

sometimes truculent, sometimes frivolous, but always shamelessly boastful

of its pagan principles. He would have seen a school of pseudo‐philosophy

professing its open design to destroy the foundations of revealed

religion; filled with the spirit of the apostate Julian; as audacious and

boastful as he, but destined to meet as shameful an end.

Let us compare, then, Burke’s theory of true liberty, and his opinion of

what France might have gained by a large and loyal measure of reform, with

the desperate counsels and futile outrages which followed the surrender of

the movement by the French conservatives into the hands of the Jacobins.

“You would,” he says, had such a course as he recommended been pursued,

“have rendered the cause of liberty venerable in the eyes of every worthy

mind in every nation. You would have shamed despotism from the earth by

showing that freedom was not only reconcilable, but, as when well

disciplined it is, auxiliary to law. You would have had a protected,

satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and recognize

that happiness is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which

consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous

fiction which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men

destined to travel in the obscure walks of laborious life, serves only to

aggravate and embitter that real inequality which it never can remove.”

Burke’s frequent definitions of true liberty are as beautiful as they are

true. “You hope, sir,” he says, writing to De Menonville, “that I think

the French deserving of liberty. I certainly do. I certainly think all men

who desire it deserve it. It is not the reward of our merit or the

acquisition of our industry. It is our inheritance. It is the birthright

of our species. We cannot forfeit our right to it but by what forfeits our

title to the privileges of our kind. I mean the abuse or oblivion of our

natural faculties, and a ferocious indocility which is prompt to wrong or

violence, destroys our social nature, and transforms us into something a

little better than a description of wild beast. To men so degraded a state

of strong restraint is a sort of necessary substitute for freedom, since,

bad as it is, it may deliver them in some measure from the worst of all

slavery, that is, the despotism of their own blind and brutal passions.

You have kindly said that you began to love freedom from your intercourse

with me. Permit me, then, to continue our conversation, and to tell you

what that freedom is that I love. It is not solitary, unconnected,

individual, selfish liberty. It is social freedom. It is that state of

things in which the liberty of no man and no body of men is in a condition

to trespass on the liberty of any person or any description of persons in

society. The liberty, the only liberty, I mean, is a liberty connected

with order; that not only exists along with virtue and order, but which

cannot exist without them.”

“Am I,” he asks, in answer to the shibboleth of the “rights of man,”—“am I

to congratulate a highwayman and murderer, who has broke prison, upon the

recovery of his natural rights? This would be to act over again the case

of the criminals condemned to the galleys and their heroic deliverer, the

knight of the ’sorrowful countenance.’”

If we turn from Burke’s satire upon the revolutionary actors to his

opinions on its probable onward course and changing fortunes, we shall

find a series of the most remarkable political prophecies on record. At a

time when Fox and the opposition hailed the Revolution as already

accomplished, with nothing before it but a future of ideal progress and

happiness; when Pitt and the government seemed lulled into a still more

fatal inaction, Burke proclaimed in decisive tones that the contest

between socialism and all constituted governments had only begun. We group

together a few of these remarkable predictions, which time has so amply

verified: “He proposed to prove,” he said in his _Appeal from the New to

the Old Whigs_, “that the present state of things in France is not a

transient evil, productive, as some have too favorably supposed, of a

lasting good; but that the present evil is only the means of producing

future and, if that were possible, worse evils. That this is not an

undigested, imperfect, and crude scheme of liberty, which may be gradually

mellowed and ripened into an orderly and social freedom; but that it is so

fundamentally wrong as to be incapable of correcting itself by any length

of time.” Again: “We are not at the end of our struggle or near it. Let us

not deceive ourselves; we are at the beginning of great troubles.”

Predicting the changing features of the Revolution, he said: “In its

present form it can hardly remain; but before its final settlement it may

have to pass, as one of our poets says, ’through great varieties of

untried being,’ and in all its transmigrations to be purified by fire and

sword.” The very spirit of the Commune is thus foreshadowed in a letter to

M. de Menonville, 1790: “But if the same ends should hereafter require the

same course which had been already pursued, there is no doubt but the same

ferocious delight in murder and the same savage cruelty will be again

renewed.” _Tous les évêques a la lanterne_ was the watchword of both

outbreaks of the Revolution.

Compare with these sayings the remarks, fifty years later, of another

observer, of great acuteness, but moulded in less heroic proportions than

Burke. “This day fifty‐one years,” writes De Tocqueville, the author of

_Democracy in America_, “the French Revolution commenced, and, after the

destruction of so many men and institutions, we may say it is still going

on. Is not this reassuring to the nations that are only just beginning

theirs?”(202) De Tocqueville, it is well known, during the early part of

his career, was tainted with the prevalent liberal Catholicism of his day

in France. He wished to unite the church with the Revolution—chimerical

task, of which advancing years and experience convinced him of the sinful

folly! Happily for himself, he died a good Catholic in the bosom of the

church.

“I scarcely dare hope,” he says, “to see a regular government,

strong and at the same time liberal, established in our country.

This ideal was, as you know, the dream of my youth, and likewise

of the portion of my mature age that has passed. Is it possible

still to believe in its realization? For a long time I thought

(but long before February this belief had been much shaken) that

we had been making our way over a stormy sea, on which we were

still tossing, but that the port was at hand. Was I not wrong? Are

we not on a rolling sea that has no shore? Or is not the land so

distant, so unknown, that our lives and those of our children may

pass away before it is reached, or, at least, before any

settlement is made upon it?... I am indeed alarmed at the state of

the public mind. It is far from betokening the close of a

revolution. At the time it was said, and to this day it is

commonly repeated, that the insurgents of June were the dregs of

the populace; that they were all outcasts of the basest

description, whose only motive was lust for plunder. Such, of

course, were many of them. But it is not true that they were all

of this kind; would to God that they had been! Such wretches are

always a small minority; they never prevail; they are imprisoned

or executed, and all is over. In the insurrection of June, besides

bad passions, there were, what are far more dangerous, false

opinions. Many of the men who attempted to overthrow the most

sacred rights were carried away by an erroneous notion of right.

They sincerely believed that society was based upon injustice, and

they wished to give it another foundation. [Compare Gambetta’s

_nouvelle couche sociale._] Our bayonets and our cannon will never

destroy this revolutionary fanaticism. It will create for us

dangers and embarrassments without end. Finally, I begin to ask

myself whether anything solid or durable can be built on the

shifting basis of our society? Whether it will support even a

despotism, which many people, tired of storms, would, for want of

a better, hail as a haven? We did not see this great revolution in

human society begin; we shall not see it end. If I had children, I

should always be repeating this to them, and should tell them that

in this age and in this country one ought to be fit for

everything, and prepared for everything, for no one can count on

the future.”(203)

A conversation apropos of a Benedictine survivor of 1789, given from Mr.

Senior’s _Journal_ (_Memoir_, vol. ii. p. 1), illustrates the final

opinion of the author of _Democracy in America_ upon the Revolution. It

took place only one year before his death:

“And what effect,” I asked, “has the contemplation of seventy

years of revolution produced on him (the Benedictine)? Does he

look back, like Talleyrand, to the _ancien régime_ as a golden

age?” “He admits,” said Tocqueville, “the material superiority of

our own age, but he believes that intellectually and morally we

are far inferior to our grandfathers. And I agree with him. These

seventy years of revolution have destroyed our courage, our

hopefulness, our self‐reliance, our public spirit, and, as

respects by far the majority of our higher classes, our passions,

except the vulgarest and most selfish ones, vanity and

covetousness. Even ambition seems extinct. The men who seek power

seek it not for itself, not as a means of doing good to their

country but as a means of getting money and flatterers.”(204)

What more remarkable testimony to Burke’s prophetic vision could be

offered?

If any were needed, it would be found in an opposite quarter, in the

revelations of Cluseret and his accomplices as to the premeditated burning

of Paris and the destruction of the Vendôme Column in 1871, viewed in

connection with Burke’s positive and reiterated assertions that the worst

excesses of 1789 were not the result of sudden passion, nor accidental,

“as some believed or pretended to believe, but were systematically

designed from the beginning.” It is known that among his correspondents in

1789‐90 were the notorious Tom Paine and the eccentric cosmopolite,

Anacharsis Baron de Clootz, both of whom strove to enlist Burke in the

defence of the revolutionary cause before he had decisively pronounced

himself. Paine and Clootz, congenial birds of prey, had both flown to

Paris (anticipating the course of their disciples in 1871), smelling the

approaching carnage afar off; and from them there is reason to believe

Burke gathered ample hints of the full measure of the revolutionary

programme. Striking also is Burke’s remark that the revolutionary

subdivision of France would induce a demand for communal or cantonal

independence. “These commonwealths,” he says, “will not long bear a state

of subjection to the republic of Paris”—a prediction wonderfully verified

by the attitude of Lyons and Marseilles during the late war and the period

of the Commune, as well as by the cantonal programme of the Spanish

revolutionists.

Burke’s theory of the true basis of government was as moderate and well

conceived as the revolutionary schemes were destructive and unsound. “We

know,” he says, “and, what is better, we feel, that religion is the basis

of society and the source of all good and all comfort. A man full of warm,

speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than as

he finds it; but a good patriot and a true politician always considers how

he shall make the most of the existing constitution of his country. A

disposition to preserve and an ability to improve taken together, would be

my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception,

perilous in the execution.” His defence of the cause of religion in

France, and his glowing tribute to the virtue and learning of the French

clergy, then, as now, the mark of the deadliest shafts of the Revolution,

are eloquent and inspiring, but too long to quote in this article.

Equally remarkable with Burke’s prophetic warnings of the successive

crimes and follies of the Revolution and its offspring, the Commune, are

his speculations on a supposed restoration of the monarchy. More than a

quarter of a century after his death their wisdom was illustrated in the

events of the inglorious reign of Charles X. His words are almost

startling in their applicability to the present posture of French affairs,

the Septennate, and the conflicting aspirations of the Comte de Chambord

and the Prince Imperial:

“What difficulties,” he says, referring to a Restoration, in his

letter on the policy of the allies, “will be met with in a

country, exhausted by the taking of its capital, and among a

people in a manner trained and actively disciplined to anarchy,

rebellion, disorder, and impiety, may be conceived by those who

know what Jacobin France is; who may have occupied themselves in

revolving in their minds what they were to do if it fell to their

lot to re‐establish the affairs of France. What support or what

limitations the restored monarchy must have may be a doubt, or how

it will settle or pitch at last; but one thing I conceive to be

far beyond a doubt—that the settlement cannot be immediate, but

that it must be preceded by some sort of power equal, at least in

vigor, vigilance, promptness, and decision, to a military

government. For such a preparatory government no slow‐paced,

methodical, formal, lawyer‐like system; still less that of a

showy, artificial, trifling, intriguing court, guided by cabals of

ladies, or men like ladies; least of all a philosophic, theoretic,

disputatious school of sophistry—none of these ever will, or ever

can, lay the foundations of an order that will last.”

“A judicious, well‐tempered, and manly severity in the support of law and

order”—this was Burke’s advice to princes. He advocated freedom of the

press as understood in England; “but they indeed,” he said, “who seriously

write upon a principle of levelling, ought to be answered by the

magistrate, and not by the speculatist.” We conclude our quotations by the

following portrait of the “Legitimate Prince”:

“Whoever,” says Burke, “claims a right by birth to govern there,

must find in his breast, or conjure up in it, an energy not always

to be expected, not always to be wished, in well‐ordered states.

The lawful prince must have in everything but crime the character

of an usurper. He is gone if he imagines himself the quiet

possessor of a throne. He is to contend for it as much after an

apparent conquest as before. His task is to win it. He must leave

posterity to adorn and enjoy it. No velvet cushions for him. He is

to be always—I speak nearly to the letter—on horseback. This

opinion is the result of much patient thinking on the subject,

which I conceive no event is likely to alter.”

Burke’s tremendous onslaught on the Revolution drew forth swarms of

opponents in his own day, most of whom are now forgotten. More than

emulating the besotted conceit of those early apologists of anarchy,

“liberal” writers are still to be found so infatuated with hostility to

the Catholic Church, so purblind to the experience of nearly a hundred

years—of the bloody chapters of 1793, of 1830, of 1848, of 1851, of

1871—so unawakened by the ruin the same accursed spirit has wrought in

Spain, as to be heard chanting the glories of the Revolution and bewailing

the possibility of “a priestly reaction” as the “destruction of all that

has been gained by the national agonies of the last century.” What has

been gained which would not have been gained in the gradual progress of

society? What rather has not been lost in national honor and domestic

virtue and happiness which would have been retained “if men had not been

quite shrunk,” as Burke said, “from their natural dimensions by a

degrading and sordid philosophy”? Let a witness like De Tocqueville

answer!

The great political philosopher’s warnings against the real spirit of the

Revolution are still worthy the attention of all governments. Time has

added to their value, not diminished it. “Against these, their ‘rights of

men,’ let no government,” he says, “look for security in the length of its

continuance or in the justice and lenity of its administration. They are

always at issue with governments, not on a question of abuse, but on a

question of competency and a question of title.”

His advice is vigorous and plain. “Never,” he says, “succumb to the enemy.

It is a struggle for your national existence. If you must die, die with

the sword in your hand! But I have no fear for the result!”

Robert Cavelier De La Salle. Concluded.

On the 6th of April La Salle discovered that the river was running through

three channels. The following day he divided his company into three

parties, of which he led the one that followed the western channel; the

Sieur de Tonty, accompanied by Father Membré, took the middle channel, and

the Sieur Dautray took the eastern channel. Father Membré relates that

these channels appeared to them “beautiful and deep.” The water began to

get brackish; then two leagues further down it became perfectly salt; and

now, O glorious sight!

“The sea! the sea! the open sea,

The blue, the fresh, the ever free,”

was spread out before the eager and enchanted eyes of those brave and

noble voyagers. Their first impulse was to return thanks to the King of

kings for the protecting arm of his providence, that had thus guided them

safely to this glorious consummation of their hopes; their second was to

honor the King of France for his favor and protection. For these purposes,

on the 9th of April, a cross and a column were erected with appropriate

ceremonies. The entire company, under arms, joined with the minister of

religion in chanting the hymn of the church, _Vexilla Regis_, and the _Te

Deum_, and then followed a discharge of their muskets and shouts of “Long

live the King!” The column bore the following inscription: “Louis the

Great, King of France and Navarre, reigns; the 9th of April, 1682.” At the

foot of a tree La Salle caused a leaden plate to be buried, bearing the

arms of France and a Latin inscription commemorative of the first

navigation of the Mississippi, from the Illinois to its mouth, by La

Salle, Tonty, Membré, and twenty Frenchmen. An authentic act, in the form

of a _procès verbal_, was drawn up by La Metairie, the notary of the

expedition, and signed by La Salle, Father Membré, Tonty, and the other

principal members of the company. La Salle took formal possession of the

country, which he was the first to call Louisiana, for the King of France;

also of the natives and people residing therein, the seas, harbors, and

all the streams flowing into the Mississippi. The great river itself he

called the St. Louis.

In the midst of their rejoicings they were suffering for food. They found

some dried meat prepared by the Indians, of which they partook with

relish, and, as the good missionary says, “It was very good and delicate.”

What must have been their feelings when they discovered that they had

partaken of human flesh! Scarcity of food compelled them to turn their

canoes up‐stream. La Salle paid a visit to the hostile Quinipissas, with

whom he resorted to his usual address to propitiate their friendship, and,

though invited to a banquet, his men partook of it with their guns at

their sides. A treacherous treaty of peace was entered into, but was used

as a cover for an attack next morning upon the Europeans. But the ever‐

watchful La Salle was prepared for them. The two parties were engaged in a

contest of two hours, in which the Quinipissas were worsted, and sustained

a loss of ten men killed and many wounded. This is the only occasion in

which the hostile dispositions of the natives did not yield to skill and

diplomacy. His men, exasperated at the conduct of the treacherous natives,

urged him to allow them to burn their village; but he adopted the wiser

and more humane policy of refraining from alienating still more by

unnecessary cruelty those whom he wished to make devout worshippers of the

King of heaven and loyal subjects of the King of France. During the

remainder of the return voyage, with the exception of the Koroas, who had

now become allies of the Quinipissas, he met with the same hospitable

treatment from the tribes on the banks of the river as he had received

while going down. They were now regaled on the fresh green corn of the

fields. La Salle with two canoes pushed forward from the Arkansas, in

advance of his party, as far as Fort Prudhomme. Here he became dangerously

ill, and could advance no further, and on the 2d of June was joined by the

entire company. His malady became so violent that he was compelled to send

Tonty forward to convey early information to the Comte de Frontenac of the

great discovery. Father Membré remained with La Salle, doing all in his

power to alleviate the sufferings of his cherished leader, whose illness

continued forty days. The expedition by slow advances reached the Miami

late in September, where they learned of several of Tonty’s military

expeditions undertaken after he left the main body. Intending to make the

voyage of the Mississippi again in the spring, and plant colonies along

its shores, La Salle appointed Father Membré his messenger to the king;

and this zealous man, accepting the commission with promptness, proceeded

to Quebec, and on the 2d of October sailed for France, to lay before the

French court accurate information of La Salle’s discoveries. During the

next ten or twelve months La Salle remained in the Illinois country,

cementing his friendly alliances with the Indians, and pushing forward his

trading interests. Having seen Fort St. Louis completed, he left Tonty in

command of it, and for his plan of colonization he substituted the project

of applying to the French government for co‐operation in a much more

extensive one. He reached Quebec early in November, and sailed for France

to render an account of his fulfilment of the royal orders, and to enlist

the good offices of the government in his future plans, and landed at

Rochelle on the 23d of December, 1683.

The following allusion to La Salle’s services to France in extending the

province of New France by the exploration of the Mississippi, by Gov.

Dongan, of the rival English province of New York, is interesting.

Alluding to a map of the country which he was sending home to his

superiors, Gov. Dongan writes: “Also, it points out where there’s a great

river discovered by one Lassal, a Frenchman from Canada, who thereupon

went into France, and, as it’s reported, brought two or three vessels with

people to settle there, which (if true) will prove very inconvenient to

us, but to the Spanish also (the river running all along from our lakes by

the back of Virginia and Carolina into the Bay of Mexico); and it’s

believed Nova Mexico cannot be far from the mountains adjoining it, that

place being in 36° North Latitude. If your lordships thought it fit, I

could send a sloop or two from this place to discover that river.”(205)

La Salle now conceived the plan of approaching the mouth of the

Mississippi by sea, exploring the country, and founding powerful colonies

therein. The evil reports of his enemies had preceded him to France, and

these were strengthened by the disparaging representations which De La

Barre, Frontenac’s successor as Governor of Canada, had been sending home.

But the Marquis de Seignelay, the son of the deceased minister Colbert,

again favored La Salle’s enterprises, and secured for them the favor of

the king. The government provided a fleet of four vessels for the

expedition: the _Joly_, a royal ship, a frigate of thirty‐six tons,

commanded by Capt. de Beaujeu, a Norman gentleman, who was also commander

of the squadron; the _Belle_, of six tons, a present from the king to La

Salle; the _Aimable_, a store‐ship of three hundred tons burden, on board

of which were the goods, implements, and effects of the expedition; and

the _St. Francis_, a ketch containing munitions and merchandise for San

Domingo. M. de Chevalier d’Aire was lieutenant to Capt. de Beaujeu, and

the Sieur de Hamel, a young gentleman full of fire and courage, his

ensign. Father Le Clercq, the narrator of the expedition, exclaims: “Would

to God the troops and rest of the crew had been as well chosen!”

A new commission was issued to La Salle, by which he was authorized to

found colonies in Louisiana, and to govern the vast country and its

inhabitants from Lake Michigan to the borders of Mexico. The commander of

the squadron was to be subject to his orders, except in navigating the

ships at sea—an arrangement which the jealous and sensitive mind of

Beaujeu permitted to embitter him against La Salle, and which led to

difficulties between them. Besides marines and one hundred soldiers, the

company to embark in the expedition amounted to about two hundred and

eighty persons, amongst whom were several persons of consideration. The

Sieur Moranget, and the Sieur Cavelier, nephews of La Salle, the latter

only fourteen years old; Planterose, Thibault, Ory, Joutel, Talon, a

Canadian gentleman with his family, and some other families, consisting of

men and young women, also joined the expedition as volunteers. One of La

Salle’s first cares was to provide for the spiritual wants of his

followers and colonists and the conversion of the heathen nations he

expected to visit. For ten years the zealous Recollect Fathers had

seconded and promoted the efforts of La Salle to Christianize the natives

of the New World, and he now made it an essential point to obtain some of

these holy men to accompany his great expedition. His application to their

superior, the Rev. Father Hyacinth le Febvre, was cordially complied with,

and accordingly Fathers Zenobe Membré, Anastace Donay, and Maxime Le

Clercq were selected from this order for the task. M. Tronçon, superior of

the Sulpitians, was not behind the Recollects in zeal for the good work,

and accordingly three secular priests, Cavelier, the brother of La Salle,

Chefdeville his relative, and Majulle, were chosen. These constituted the

ecclesiastical corps of the expedition. Nothing was left undone, either by

the superiors of the Recollects or of the Sulpitians, nor by the Holy See,

for carrying the faith of Christ to those remote and benighted regions.

Ample powers and privileges were conferred upon the good missionaries, so

as to relieve them from the necessity in emergencies of resorting to the

distant ordinary of Quebec.

But in selecting soldiers, artisans, and laborers, the most culpable

disregard of duty was chargeable to the agents of La Salle, who, while he

was engaged at Paris, filled up the ranks by receiving from the streets of

Rochelle worthless vagabonds and beggars, who were wholly ignorant of the

trades for which they were chosen. La Salle was only partially able to

remedy this evil before sailing. Bancroft thus describes the composition

of this part of the expedition: “But the mechanics were poor workmen, ill‐

versed in their art; the soldiers, though they had for commander Joutel, a

man of courage and truth, and afterwards the historian of the grand

enterprise, were themselves spiritless vagabonds, without discipline and

without experience; the volunteers were restless with indefinite

expectations; and, worst of all, the naval commander, Beaujeu, was

deficient in judgment, incapable of sympathy with the magnanimous heroism

of La Salle, envious, self‐willed, and foolishly proud.” La Salle arrived

at Rochelle on the 28th of May, 1684, and during his stay of some weeks

the unhappy misunderstanding between him and the commander of the

squadron, which proved so great a drawback on the enterprise, began to

manifest itself. The four vessels sailed from Rochelle on the 24th of

July, but the breaking of one of the masts of the _Joly_ in a storm caused

them to put in at Chef‐de‐Bois, and finally, on the 1st of August, they

set sail again, steering for San Domingo. During the voyage to San

Domingo, La Salle and Beaujeu could not proceed together with cordiality

or harmony, and the former was unfortunate in gaining the ill‐will of the

subordinate officers and sailors by interfering to protect his own men

from what he regarded as an absurd and unnecessary procedure. It was the

custom among sailors to require all who had not before crossed the tropic

to submit to the penalty of being plunged into a tub of water by their

veteran companions for the amusement of others, or pay liberally for a

commutation of the penalty. La Salle peremptorily forbade his men being

subjected to this alternative; hence the hostility of those who failed to

realize the usual fun or fine at their expense. After a prosperous voyage

a storm overtook the squadron as they approached San Domingo. It was

agreed that the _Joly_ should put in at Port de Paix in the north of the

island; but Beaujeu changed his course of his own will, and carried her to

Petit Gonave, far to the south. In four days the _Belle_ and _Aimable_,

which had been separated from her by the storm, joined her there. The _St.

Francis_ was surprised and captured by two Spanish pirogues, which was a

serious loss to the expedition and a sore affliction to La Salle.