VON RANKE. (1)

(_Edinburgh Review_, October, 1840.)

It {299}is hardly necessary for us to say that this is an excellent

book excellently translated. The original work of Professor Ranke is

known and esteemed wherever German literature is studied, and has

been found interesting even in a most inaccurate and dishonest French

version. It is, indeed, the work of a mind fitted both for minute

researches and for large speculations. It is written also in an

admirable spirit, equally remote from levity and bigotry, serious and

earnest, yet tolerant and impartial. It is, therefore, with the greatest

pleasure that we now see this book take its place among the English

classics. Of the translation we need only say that it is such as might

be expected from the skill, the taste, and the scrupulous integrity of

the accomplished lady who, as an interpreter between the mind of Germany

and the mind of Britain, has already deserved so well of both countries.

The subject of this book has always appeared to us singularly

interesting. How it was that Protestantism did so much, yet did no more,

how it was that the

(1) _The Ecclesiastical and Political History of the Popes

of Rome, during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries_. By

Leopold Ranke, Professor in the University of Berlin:

Translated from the German, by Sakah Austin. 3 vols. 8vo.

London: 1840.

{300}Church of Rome, having lost a large part of Europe, not only ceased

to lose, but actually regained nearly half of what she had lost, is

certainly a most curious and important question; and on this question

Professor Ranke has thrown far more light than any other person who has

written on it.

There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy

so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The

history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human

civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries

the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from

the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian

amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when

compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace

back in an unbroken series from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the

nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far

beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in

the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity.

But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy;

and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy

remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and useful

vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends

of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with

Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with

which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than

in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than

compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency

extends over the {301}vast countries which lie between the plains of

the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which, a century hence, may not

improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits

Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a

hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all

other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions.

Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long

dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments

and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the

world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end

of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set

foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian

eloquence still flourished in Antioch, when idols were still worshipped

in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour

when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast

solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the

ruins of St. Paul’s.

We often hear it said that the world is constantly becoming more and

more enlightened, and that this enlightening must be favourable to

Protestantism, and unfavourable to Catholicism. We wish that we could

think so. But we see great reason to doubt whether this be a well

founded expectation. We see that during the last two hundred and fifty

years the human mind has been in the highest degree active, that it has

made great advances in every branch of natural philosophy, that it has

produced innumerable inventions tending to promote the convenience of

life, that medicine, surgery, chemistry, engineering, have been

very greatly improved, that government, police, and law have been

{302}improved, though not to so great an extent as the physical

sciences. But we see that, during these two hundred and fifty years,

Protestantism has made no conquests worth speaking of. Nay, we believe

that, as far as there has been a change, that change has, on the

whole, been in favour of the Church of Rome. We cannot, therefore, feel

confident that the progress of knowledge will necessarily be fatal to

a system which has, to say the least, stood its ground in spite of the

immense progress made by the human race in knowledge since the days of

Queen Elizabeth.

Indeed the argument which we are considering, seems to us to be founded

on an entire mistake. There are branches of knowledge with respect to

which the law of the human mind is progress. In mathematics, when once

a proposition has been demonstrated, it is never afterwards contested.

Every fresh story is as solid a basis for a new superstructure as the

original foundation was. Here, therefore, there is a constant addition

to the stock of truth. In the inductive sciences again, the law is

progress. Every day furnishes new facts, and thus brings theory nearer

and nearer to perfection. There is no chance that, either in the purely

demonstrative, or in the purely experimental sciences, the world will

ever go back or even remain stationary. Nobody ever heard of a reaction

against Taylor’s theorem, or of a reaction against Harvey’s doctrine of

the circulation of the blood.

But with theology the case is very different. As respects natural

religion,--revelation being for the present altogether left out of the

question,--it is not easy to see that a philosopher of the present day

is more favourably situated than Thales or Simonides. He has before him

just the same evidences of design {303}in the structure of the universe

which the early Greeks had. We say just the same; for the discoveries of

modern astronomers and anatomists have really added nothing to the force

of that argument which a reflecting mind finds in every beast, bird,

insect, fish, leaf, flower, and shell. The reasoning by which Socrates,

in Xenophon’s hearing, confuted the little atheist Aristodemus, is

exactly the reasoning of Paley’s Natural Theology. Socrates makes

precisely the same use of the statues of Polycletus and the pictures of

Zeuxis which Paley makes of the watch. As to the other great question,

the question, what becomes of man after death, we do not see that a

highly educated European, left to his unassisted reason, is more likely

to be in the right than a Blackfoot Indian. Not a single one of the many

sciences in which we surpass the Blackfoot Indians throws the smallest

light on the state of the soul after the animal life is extinct. In

truth all the philosophers, ancient and modern, who have attempted,

without the help of revelation, to prove the immortality of man, from

Plato down to Franklin, appear to us to have failed deplorably.

Then, again, all the great enigmas which perplex the natural theologian

are the same in all ages. The ingenuity of a people just emerging from

barbarism is quite sufficient to propound those enigmas. The genius

of Locke or Clarke is quite unable to solve them. It is a mistake to

imagine that subtle speculations touching the Divine attributes, the

origin of evil, the necessity of human actions, the foundation of

moral obligation, imply any high degree of intellectual culture. Such

speculations, on the contrary, are in a peculiar manner the delight of

intelligent children and of half civilised men. The number of boys is

not {304}small who, at fourteen, have thought enough on these questions

to be fully entitled to the praise which Voltaire gives to Zadig. “Il

en savait ce qu’on en a su dans tous les âges; c’est-à-dire, fort peu

de chose.” The book of Job shows that, long before letters and arts were

known to Ionia, these vexing questions were debated with no common

skill and eloquence, under the tents of the Idumean Emirs; nor has

human reason, in the course of three thousand years, discovered any

satisfactory solution of the riddles which perplexed Eliphaz and Zophar.

Natural theology, then, is not a progressive science. That knowledge of

our origin and of our destiny which we derive from revelation is indeed

of very different clearness, and of very different importance. But

neither is revealed religion of the nature of a progressive science. All

Divine truth is, according to the doctrine of the Protestant Churches,

recorded in certain books. It is equally open to all who, in any

age, can read those books; nor can all the discoveries of all the

philosophers in the world add a single verse to any of those books.

It is plain, therefore, that in divinity there cannot be a progress

analogous to that which is constantly taking place in pharmacy, geology,

and navigation. A Christian of the fifth century with a Bible is neither

better nor worse situated than a Christian of the nineteenth century

with a Bible, candour and natural acuteness being, of course, supposed

equal. It matters not at all that the compass, printing, gunpowder,

steam, gas, vaccination, and a thousand other discoveries and

inventions, which were unknown in the fifth century, are familiar to the

nineteenth. None of these discoveries and inventions has the smallest

bearing on the question {305}whether man is justified by faith alone,

or whether the invocation of saints is an orthodox practice. It seems

to us, therefore, that we have no security for the future against the

prevalence of any theological error that ever has prevailed in time past

among Christian men. We are confident that the world will never go

back to the solar system of Ptolemy; nor is our confidence in the least

shaken by the circumstance, that even so great a man as Bacon rejected

the theory of Galileo with scorn; for Bacon had not all the means of

arriving at a sound conclusion which are within our reach, and which

secure people who would not have been worthy to mend his pens from

falling into his mistakes. But when we reflect that Sir Thomas More was

ready to die for the doctrine of transubstantiation, we cannot but feel

some doubt whether the doctrine of transubstantiation may not triumph

over all opposition. More was a man of eminent talents. He had all the

information on the subject that we have, or that, while the world lasts,

any human being will have. The text, “This is my body,” was in his New

Testament as it is in ours. The absurdity of the literal interpretation

was as great and as obvious in the sixteenth century as it is now. No

progress that science has made, or will make, can add to what seems to

us the overwhelming force of the argument against the real presence. We

are, therefore, unable to understand why what Sir Thomas More believed

respecting transubstantiation may not be believed to the end of time by

men equal in abilities and honesty to Sir Thomas More. But Sir Thomas

More is one of the choice specimens of human wisdom and virtue; and the

doctrine of transubstantiation is a kind of proof charge. A faith

which stands that test will stand any test. The prophecies of Brothers

{306}and the miracles of Prince Hohenlohe sink to trifles in the

comparison.

One reservation, indeed, must be made. The books and traditions of a

sect may contain, mingled with propositions strictly theological, other

propositions, purporting to rest on the same authority, which relate

to physics. If new discoveries should throw discredit on the physical

propositions, the theological propositions, unless they can be separated

from the physical propositions, will share in that discredit. In this

way, undoubtedly, the progress of science may indirectly serve the cause

of religious truth. The Hindoo mythology, for example, is bound up with

a most absurd geography. Every young Brahmin, therefore, who learns

geography in our colleges, learns to smile at the Hindoo mythology. If

Catholicism has not suffered to an equal degree from the Papal decision

that the sun goes round the earth, this is because all intelligent

Catholics now hold, with Pascal, that, in deciding the point at all, the

Church exceeded her powers, and was, therefore, justly left destitute

of that supernatural assistance which, in the exercise of her legitimate

functions, the promise of her Founder authorised her to expect.

This reservation affects not at all the truth of our proposition, that

divinity, properly so called, is not a progressive science. A very

common knowledge of history, a very little observation of life, will

suffice to prove that no learning, no sagacity, affords a security

against the greatest errors on subjects relating to the invisible world.

Bayle and Chillingworth, two of the most sceptical of mankind, turned

Catholics from sincere conviction. Johnson, incredulous on all other

points, was a ready believer in miracles and apparitions. He would not

believe in Ossian; but he was willing to {307}believe in the second

sight. He would not believe in the earthquake of Lisbon; but he was

willing to believe in the Cock Lane ghost.

For these reasons we have ceased to wonder at any vagaries of

superstition. We have seen men, not of mean intellect or neglected

education, but qualified by their talents and acquirements to attain

eminence either in active or speculative pursuits, well read scholars,

expert logicians, keen observers of life and manners, prophesying,

interpreting, talking unknown tongues, working miraculous cures, coming

down with messages from God to the House of Commons. We have seen an old

woman, with no talents beyond the cunning of a fortune-teller, and with

the education of a scullion, exalted into a prophetess, and surrounded

by tens of thousands of devoted followers, many of whom were, in

station and knowledge, immeasurably her superiors; and all this in the

nineteenth century; and all this in London. Yet why not? For of the

dealings of God with man no more has been revealed to the nineteenth

century than to the first, or to London than to the wildest parish in

the Hebrides. It is true that, in those things which concern this life

and this world, man constantly becomes wiser and wiser. But it is no

less true that, as respects a higher power and a future state, man, in

the language of Goethe’s scoffing fiend,

“bleibt stets von gleichem Schlag,

Und ist so Wunderlich als wie am ersten Tag.”

The history of Catholicism strikingly illustrates these observations.

During the last seven centuries the public mind of Europe has made

constant progress in every department of secular knowledge. But

in religion we can trace no constant progress. The ecclesiastical

{308}history of that long period is a history of movement to and fro.

Four times, since the authority of the Church of Rome was established in

Western Christendom, has the human intellect risen up against her yoke.

Twice that Church remained completely victorious. Twice she came forth

from the conflict bearing the marks of cruel wounds, but with the

principle of life still strong within her. When we reflect on the

tremendous assaults which she has survived, we find it difficult to

conceive in what way she is to perish.

The first of these insurrections broke out in the region where the

beautiful language of _Oc_ was spoken. That country, singularly favoured

by nature, was, in the twelfth century, the most flourishing and

civilised portion of Western Europe. It was in nowise a part of France.

It had a distinct political existence, a distinct national character,

distinct usages, and a distinct speech. The soil was fruitful and well

cultivated; and amidst the cornfields and vineyards arose many rich

cities, each of which was a little republic, and many stately castles,

each of which contained a miniature of an imperial court. It was there

that the spirit of chivalry first laid aside its terrors, first took a

humane and graceful form, first appeared as the inseparable associate of

art and literature, of courtesy and love. The other vernacular dialects

which, since the fifth century, had sprung up in the ancient provinces

of the Roman empire, were still rude and imperfect. The sweet Tuscan,

the rich and energetic English, were abandoned to artisans and

shepherds. No clerk had ever condescended to use such barbarous jargon

for the teaching of science, for the recording of great events, or

for the painting of life and manners; But the language of Provence was

already the language of the learned and polite, and was {309}employed

by numerous writers, studious of all the arts of composition and

versification. A literature rich in ballads, in war-songs, in satire,

and, above all, in amatory poetry, amused the leisure of the knights

and ladies, whose fortified mansions adorned the banks of the Rhone and

Garonne. With civilisation had come freedom of thought. Use had taken

away the horror with which misbelievers were elsewhere regarded. No

Norman or Breton ever saw a Mussulman, except to give and receive blows

on some Syrian field of battle. But the people of the rich countries

which lay under the Pyrenees lived in habits of courteous and profitable

intercourse with the Moorish kingdoms of Spain, and gave a hospitable

welcome to skilful leeches and mathematicians who, in the schools

of Cordova and Granada, had become versed in all the learning of

the Arabians. The Greek, still preserving, in the midst of political

degradation, the ready wit and the inquiring spirit of his fathers,

still able to read the most perfect of human compositions, still

speaking the most powerful and flexible of human languages, brought to

the marts of Narbonne and Toulouse, together with the drugs and silks of

remote climates, bold and subtle theories long unknown to the ignorant

and credulous West. The Paulician theology, a theology in which, as it

should seem, many of the doctrines of the modern Calvinists were mingled

with some doctrines derived from the ancient Manichees, spread rapidly

through Provence and Languedoc. The clergy of the Catholic Church

were regarded with loathing and contempt. “Viler than a priest,”

“I would as soon be a priest,” became proverbial expressions. The Papacy

had lost all authority with all classes, from the great feudal princes

down to the cultivators of the soil. {310}The danger to the hierarchy

was indeed formidable. Only one transalpine nation had emerged from

barbarism; and that nation had thrown off all respect for Rome. Only one

of the vernacular languages of Europe had yet been extensively employed

for literary purposes; and that language was a machine in the hands of

heretics. The geographical position of the sectaries made the danger

peculiarly formidable. They occupied a central region communicating

directly with France, with Italy, and with Spain. The provinces which

were still untainted were separated from each other by this infected

district. Under these circumstances, it seemed probable that a single

generation would suffice to spread the reformed doctrine to Lisbon, to

London, and to Naples. But this was not to be. Rome cried for help

to the warriors of northern France. She appealed at once to their

superstition and to their cupidity. To the devout believer she promised

pardons as ample as those with which she had rewarded the deliverers

of the Holy Sepulchre. To the rapacious and profligate she offered the

plunder of fertile plains and wealthy cities. Unhappily, the ingenious

and polished inhabitants of the Languedocian provinces were far better

qualified to enrich and embellish their country than to defend it.

Eminent in the arts of peace, unrivalled in the “gay science,” elevated

above many vulgar superstitions, they wanted that iron courage, and

that skill in martial exercises, which distinguished the chivalry of

the region beyond the Loire, and were ill fitted to face enemies who,

in every country from Ireland to Palestine, had been victorious against

tenfold odds. A war, distinguished even among wars of religion by

merciless atrocity, destroyed the Albigensian heresy, and with that

heresy the {311}prosperity, the civilisation, the literature, the

national existence, of what was once the most opulent and enlightened

part of the great European family. Rome, in the mean time, warned by

that fearful danger from which the exterminating swords of her crusaders

had narrowly saved her, proceeded to revise and to strengthen her whole

system of polity. At this period were instituted the Order of Francis,

the Order of Dominic, the Tribunal of the Inquisition. The new spiritual

police was everywhere. No alley in a great city, no hamlet on a remote

mountain, was unvisited by the begging friar. The simple Catholic, who

was content to be no wiser than his fathers, found, wherever he turned,

a friendly voice to encourage him. The path of the heretic was beset by

innumerable spies; and the Church, lately in danger of utter subversion,

now appeared to be impregnably fortified by the love, the reverence, and

the terror of mankind.

A century and a half passed away; and then came the second great rising

up of the human intellect against the spiritual domination of Rome.

During the two generations which followed the Albigensian crusade, the

power of the Papacy had been at the height. Frederic the Second, the

ablest and most accomplished of the long line of German Cæsars, had in

vain exhausted all the resources of military and political skill in

the attempt to defend the rights of the civil power against the

encroachments of the Church. The vengeance of the priesthood had pursued

his house to the third generation. Manfred had perished on the field of

battle, Conradin on the scaffold. Then a turn took place. The secular

authority, long unduly depressed, regained the ascendant with startling

rapidity. The change is doubtless to be ascribed chiefly to the general

{312}disgust excited by the way in which the Church had abused its power

and its success. But something must be attributed to the character and

situation of individuals. The man who bore the chief part in effecting

this revolution was Philip the Fourth of France, surnamed the Beautiful,

a despot by position, a despot by temperament, stern, implacable, and

unscrupulous, equally prepared for violence and for chicanery, and

surrounded by a devoted band of men of the sword and of men of law.

The fiercest and most highminded of the Roman Pontiffs, while bestowing

kingdoms and citing great princes to his judgment-seat, was seized in

his palace by armed men, and so foully outraged that he died mad with

rage and terror. “Thus,” sang the great Florentine poet, “was Christ, in

the person of his vicar, a second time seized by ruffians, a second time

mocked, a second time drenched with the vinegar and the gall.” The seat

of the Papal court was carried beyond the Alps, and the Bishops of Rome

became dependents of France. Then came the great schism of the West.

Two Popes, each with a doubtful title, made all Europe ring with their

mutual invectives and anathemas. Rome cried out against the corruptions

of Avignon; and Avignon, with equal justice, recriminated on Rome. The

plain Christian people, brought up in the belief that it was a sacred

duty to be in communion with the head of the Church, were unable to

discover, amidst conflicting testimonies and conflicting arguments, to

which of the two worthless priests who were cursing and reviling each

other, the headship of the Church rightfully belonged. It was nearly

at this juncture that the voice of John Wickliffe began to make itself

heard. The public mind of England was soon stirred to its inmost depths;

and the influence of {313}the new doctrines was soon felt, even in the

distant kingdom of Bohemia. In Bohemia, indeed, there had long been a

predisposition to heresy. Merchants from the Lower Danube were often

seen in the fairs of Prague; and the Lower Danube was peculiarly the

seat of the Paulician theology. The Church, torn by schism, and fiercely

assailed at once in England and in the German empire, was in a situation

scarcely less perilous than at the crisis which preceded the Albigensian

crusade.

But this danger also passed by. The civil power gave its strenuous

support to the Church; and the Church made some show of reforming

itself. The Council of Constance put an end to the schism. The whole

Catholic world was again united under a single chief; and rules were

laid down which seemed to make it improbable that the power of that

chief would be grossly abused. The most distinguished teachers of the

new doctrine were slaughtered. The English government put down the

Lollards with merciless rigour; and, in the next generation, scarcely

one trace of the second great revolt against the Papacy could be found,

except among the rude population of the mountains of Bohemia.

Another century went by; and then began the third and the most memorable

struggle for spiritual freedom. The times were changed. The great

remains of Athenian and Roman genius were studied by thousands. The

Church had no longer a monopoly of learning. The powers of the modern

languages had at length been developed. The invention of printing had

given new facilities to the intercourse of mind with mind. With such

auspices commenced the great Reformation. {314}We will attempt to lay

before our readers, in a short compass, what appears to us to be the

real history of the contest which began with the preaching of Luther

against the Indulgences, and which may, in one sense, be said to have

been terminated, a hundred and thirty years later, by the treaty of

Westphalia.

In the northern parts of Europe the victory of Protestantism was rapid

and decisive. The dominion of the Papacy was felt by the nations of

Teutonic blood as the dominion of Italians, of foreigners, of men who

were aliens in language, manners, and intellectual constitution. The

large jurisdiction exercised by the spiritual tribunals of Rome seemed

to be a degrading badge of servitude. The sums which, under a thousand

pretexts, were exacted by a distant court, were regarded both as a

humiliating and as a ruinous tribute. The character of that court

excited the scorn and disgust of a grave, earnest, sincere, and devout

people. The new theology spread with a rapidity never known before. All

ranks, all varieties of character, joined the ranks of the innovators.

Sovereigns impatient to appropriate to themselves the prerogatives

of the Pope, nobles desirous to share the plunder of abbeys, suitors

exasperated by the extortions of the Roman Camera, patriots impatient of

a foreign rule, good men scandalized by the corruptions of the

Church, bad men desirous of the license inseparable from great moral

revolutions, wise men eager in the pursuit of truth, weak men allured

by the glitter of novelty, all were found on one side. Alone among the

northern nations the Irish adhered to the ancient faith: and the cause

of this seems to have been that the national feeling which, in happier

countries, was directed against Rome, was in Ireland directed against

England. Within {315}fifty years from the day on which Luther publicly

renounced communion with the Papacy, and burned the bull of Leo before

the gates of Wittenberg, Protestantism attained its highest ascendency,

an ascendency which it soon lost, and which it has never regained.

Hundreds, who could well remember Brother Martin a devout Catholic,

lived to see the revolution of which he was the chief author, victorious

in half the states in Europe. In England, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden,

Livonia, Prussia, Saxony, Hesse, Wurtemburg, the Palatinate, in several

cantons of Switzerland, in the Northern Netherlands, the Reformation had

completely triumphed; and in all the other countries on this side of the

Alps and the Pyrenees, it seemed on the point of triumphing.

But while this mighty work was proceeding in the north of Europe, a

revolution of a very different kind had taken place in the south. The

temper of Italy and Spain was widely different from that of Germany and

England. As the national feeling of the Teutonic nations impelled them

to throw off the Italian supremacy, so the national feeling of the

Italians impelled them to resist any change which might deprive their

country of the honours and advantages which she enjoyed as the seat

of the government of the Universal Church. It was in Italy that the

tributes were spent of which foreign nations so bitterly complained. It

was to adorn Italy that the traffic in Indulgences had been carried to

that scandalous excess which had roused the indignation of Luther. There

was among the Italians both much piety and much impiety: but, with

very few exceptions, neither the piety nor the impiety took the turn

of Protestantism. The religious Italians desired a reform of morals

and discipline, but {316}not a reform of doctrine, and least of all

a schism. The irreligious Italians simply disbelieved Christianity,

without hating it. They looked at it as artists or as statesmen; and, so

looking at it, they liked it better in the established form than in

any other. It was to them what the old Pagan worship was to Trajan and

Pliny. Neither the spirit of Savonarola nor the spirit of Machiavelli

had any thing in common with the spirit of the religious or political

Protestants of the North.

Spain again was, with respect to the Catholic Church, in a situation

very different from that of the Teutonic nations. Italy was, in truth,

a part of the empire of Charles the Fifth; and the court of Rome was,

on many important occasions, his tool. He had not, therefore, like the

distant princes of the North, a strong selfish motive for attacking

the Papacy. In fact, the very measures which provoked the Sovereign

of England to renounce all connection with Rome were dictated by the

Sovereign of Spain. The feeling, of the Spanish people concurred with

the interest of the Spanish government. The attachment of the Castilian

to the faith of his ancestors was peculiarly strong and ardent. With

that faith were inseparably bound up the institutions, the independence,

and the glory of his countiy. Between the day when the last Gothic king

was vanquished on the banks of the Xeres, and the day when Ferdinand

and Isabella entered Granada in triumph, near eight hundred years had

elapsed; and during those years the Spanish nation had been engaged in a

desperate struggle against misbelievers. The Crusades had been merely an

episode in the history of other nations. The existence of Spain had been

one long Crusade. After fighting Mussulmans in the Old {317}World, she

began to fight heathens in the New. It was under the authority of a

Papal bull that her children steered into unknown seas. It was under

the standard of the cross that they marched fearlessly into the heart of

great kingdoms. It was with the cry of “St. James for Spain,” that they

charged armies which outnumbered them a hundredfold. And men said

that the Saint had heard the call, and had himself, in arms, on a gray

war-horse, led the onset before which the worshippers of false gods had

given way. After the battle, every excess of rapacity or cruelty was

sufficiently vindicated by the plea that the sufferers were unbaptized.

avarice stimulated zeal. Zeal consecrated avarice. Proselytes and gold

mines were sought with equal ardour. In the very year in which the

Saxons, maddened by the exactions of Rome, broke loose from her yoke,

the Spaniards, under the authority of Rome, made themselves masters of

the empire and of the treasures of Montezuma. Thus Catholicism which, in

the public mind of Northern Europe, was associated with spoliation and

oppression, was in the public mind of Spain associated with liberty,

victory, dominion, wealth, and glory.

It is not, therefore, strange that the effect of the great outbreak of

Protestantism in one part of Christendom should have been to produce an

equally violent outbreak of Catholic zeal in another. Two reformations

were pushed on at once with equal energy and effect, a reformation of

doctrine in the North, a reformation of manners and discipline in the

South. In the course of a single generation, the whole spirit of the

church of Rome underwent a change. From the halls of the Vatican to

the most secluded hermitage of the Apennines, the great revival wad

{318}everywhere felt and seen. All the institutions anciently devised

for the propagation and defence of the faith were furbished up and

made efficient. Fresh engines of still more formidable power were

constructed. Everywhere old religious communities were remodelled and

new religious communities called into existence. Within a year after

the death of Leo, the order of Camaldoli was purified. The Capuchins

restored the old Franciscan discipline, the midnight prayer and the life

of silence. The Barnabites and the society of Somasca devoted themselves

to the relief and education of the poor. To the Theatine order a still

higher interest belongs. Its great object was the same with that of our

early Methodists, namely to supply the deficiencies of the parochial

clergy. The Church of Rome, wiser than the Church of England, gave

every countenance to the good work. The members of the new brotherhood

preached to great multitudes in the streets and in the fields, prayed by

the beds of the sick, and administered the last sacraments to the

dying. Foremost among them in zeal and devotion was Gian Pietro Caraffa,

afterwards Pope Paul the Fourth. In the convent of the Theatines at

Venice, under the eye of Caraffa, a Spanish gentleman took up his abode,

tended the poor in the hospitals, went about in rags, starved himself

almost to death, and often sallied into the streets, mounted on stones,

and, waving his hat to invite the passers-by, began to preach in a

strange jargon of mingled Castilian and Tuscan. The Theatines were among

the most zealous and rigid of men; but to this enthusiastic neophyte

their discipline seemed lax, and their movements sluggish; for his

own mind, naturally passionate and imaginative, had passed through

a training which had given to all its peculiarities a morbid

{319}intensity and energy. In his early life lie had been the very

prototype of the hero of Cervantes. The single study of the young

Hidalgo had been chivalrous romance; and his existence had been one

gorgeous day-dream of princesses rescued and infidels subdued. He

had chosen a Dulcinea, “no countess, no duchess,”--these are his own

words,--but one of far higher station and he flattered himself with the

hope of laying at her feet the keys of Moorish castles and the jewelled

turbans of Asiatic kings. In the midst of these visions of martial glory

and prosperous love, a severe wound stretched him on a bed of sickness.

His constitution was shattered and he was doomed to be a cripple for

life. The palm of strength, grace, and skill in knightly exercises,

was no longer for him. He could no longer hope to strike down gigantic

soldans, or to find favour in the sight of beautiful women. A new vision

then arose in his mind, and mingled itself with his own delusions in a

manner which to most Englishmen must seem singular, but which those who

know how close was the union between religion and chivalry in Spain will

be at no loss to understand. He would still be a soldier; he would still

be a knight errant; but the soldier and knight errant of the spouse of

Christ. He would smite the Great Red Dragon. He would be the champion

of the Woman clothed with the Sun. He would break the charm under which

false prophets held the souls of men in bondage. His restless spirit

led him to the Syrian deserts, and to the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre.

Thence he wandered back to the farthest West, and astonished the

convents of Spain and the schools of France by his penances and vigils.

The same lively imagination which had been employed in picturing the

{320}tumult of unreal battles, and the charms of unreal queens, now

peopled his solitude with saints and angels. The Holy Virgin descended

to commune with him. He saw the Saviour face to face with the eye of

flesh. Even those mysteries of religion which are the hardest trial

of faith were in his case palpable to sight. It is difficult to relate

without a pitying smile that, in the sacrifice of the mass, he saw

transubstantiation take place, and that, as he stood praying on the

steps of the Church of St. Dominic, he saw the Trinity in Unity, and

wept aloud with joy and wonder. Such was the celebrated Ignatius Loyola,

who, in the great Catholic reaction, bore the same part which Luther

bore in the great Protestant movement.

Dissatisfied with the system of the Theatines, the enthusiastic Spaniard

turned his face towards Rome. Poor, obscure, without a patron, without

recommendations, he entered the city where now two princely temples,

rich with painting and many-coloured marble, commemorate his great

services to the Church; where his form stands sculptured in massive

silver; where his bones, enshrined amidst jewels, are placed beneath the

altar of God. His activity and zeal bore down all opposition; and under

his rule the order of Jesuits began to exist, and grew rapidly to the

full measure of his gigantic powers. With what vehemence, with what

policy, with what exact discipline, with what dauntless courage, with

what self-denial, with what forgetfulness of the dearest private ties,

with what intense and stubborn devotion to a single end, with what

unscrupulous laxity and versatility in the choice of means, the Jesuits

fought the battle of their church, is written in every page of the

annals of Europe during several generations. In the order of Jesus

was concentrated the {321}quintessence of the Catholic spirit; and

the history of the order of Jesus is the history of the great Catholic

reaction. That order possessed itself at once of all the strongholds

which command the public mind, of the pulpit, of the press, of the

confessional, of the academies. Wherever the Jesuit preached, the church

was too small for the audience. The name of Jesuit on a title-page

secured the circulation of a book. It was in the ears of the Jesuit that

the powerful, the noble, and the beautiful, breathed the secret history

of their lives. It was at the feet of the Jesuit that the youth of the

higher and middle classes were brought up from childhood to manhood,

from the’ first rudiments to the courses of rhetoric and philosophy.

Literature and science, lately associated with infidelity or with

heresy, now became the allies of orthodoxy. Dominant in the South of

Europe, the great order soon went forth conquering and to conquer. In

spite of oceans and deserts, of hunger and pestilence, of spies and

penal laws, of dungeons and racks, of gibbets and quartering-blocks,

Jesuits were to be found under every disguise, and in every country;

scholars, physicians, merchants, serving men; in the hostile court

of Sweden, in the old manor-house of Cheshire, among the hovels of

Connaught; arguing, instructing, consoling, stealing away the hearts of

the young, animating the courage of the timid, holding up the crucifix

before the eyes of the dying. Nor was it less their office to plot

against the thrones and lives of the apostate kings, to spread evil

rumours, to raise tumults, to inflame civil wars, to arm the hand of

the assassin. Inflexible in nothing but in their fidelity to the Church,

they were equally ready to appeal in her cause to the spirit of loyalty

and to the spirit of freedom. Extreme doctrines of obedience {322}and

extreme doctrines of liberty, the right of rulers to misgovern the

people, the right of every one of the people to plunge his knife in the

heart of a bad ruler, were inculcated by the same man, according as

he addressed himself to the subject of Philip or to the subject of

Elizabeth. Some described these divines as the most rigid, others as

the most indulgent of spiritual directors; and both descriptions were

correct. The truly devout listened with awe to the high and saintly

morality of the Jesuit. The gay cavalier who had run his rival through

the body, the frail beauty who had forgotten her marriage-vow, found

in the Jesuit an easy well-bred man of the world, who knew how to

make allowance for the little irregularities of people of fashion. The

confessor was strict or lax, according to the temper of the penitent.

The first object was to drive no person out of the pale of the Church.

Since there were bad people, it was better that they should be bad

Catholics than bad Protestants. If a person was so unfortunate as to be

a bravo, a libertine, or a gambler, that was no reason for making him a

heretic too.

The Old World was not wide enough for this strange activity. The Jesuits

invaded all the countries which the great maritime discoveries of the

preceding age had laid open to European enterprise. They were to be

found in the depths of the Peruvian mines, at the marts of the African

slave-caravans, on the shores of the Spice Islands, in the observatories

of China. They made converts in regions which neither avarice nor

curiosity had tempted any of their countrymen to enter; and preached and

disputed in tongues of which no other native of the West understood a

word.

The spirit which appeared so eminently in this order animated the whole

Catholic world. The Court of {323}Rome itself was purified. During the

generation which preceded the Reformation, that court had been a scandal

to the Christian name. Its annals are black with treason, murder, and

incest. Even its more respectable members were utterly unfit to be

ministers of religion. They were men like Leo the Tenth; men who, with

the Latinity of the Augustan age, had acquired its atheistical and

scoffing spirit. They regarded those Christian mysteries, of which

they were stewards, just as the Augur Cicero and the high Pontiff Cæsar

regarded the Sibylline books and the pecking of the sacred chickens.

Among themselves, they spoke of the Incarnation, the Eucharist, and

the Trinity, in the same tone in which Cotta and Velleius talked of the

oracle of Delphi or the voice of Faunus in the mountains. Their years

glided by in a soft dream of sensual and intellectual voluptuousness.

Choice cookery, delicious wines, lovely women, hounds, falcons, horses,

newly discovered manuscripts of the classics, sonnets and burlesque

romances in the sweetest Tuscan, just as licentious as a fine sense of

the graceful would permit, plate from the hand of Benvenuto, designs for

palaces by Michael Angelo, frescoes by Raphael, busts, mosaics, and gems

just dug up from among the ruins of ancient temples and villas, these

things were the delight and even the serious business of their lives.

Letters and the fine arts undoubtedly owe much to this not inelegant

sloth. But when the great Stirling of the mind of Europe began, when

doctrine after doctrine was assailed, when nation after nation withdrew

from communion with the successor of St. Peter, it was felt that the

Church could not be safely confided to chiefs whose highest praise was

that they were good judges of Latin compositions, of {324}paintings, and

of statues, whose severest studies had a pagan character, and who

were suspected of laughing in secret at the sacraments which they

administered, and of believing no more of the Gospel than of the

_Morgante Maggiore_. Men of a very different class now rose to the

direction of ecclesiastical affairs, men whose spirit resembled that of

Dunstan and of Becket. The Roman Pontiffs exhibited in their own persons

all the austerity of the early anchorites of Syria. Paul the Fourth

brought to the Papal throne the same fervent zeal which had carried him

into the Theatine convent. Pius the Fifth, under his gorgeous vestments,

wore day and night the hair shirt of a simple friar, walked barefoot in

the streets at the head of processions, found, even in the midst of his

most pressing avocations, time for private prayer, often regretted

that the public duties, of his station were unfavourable to growth of

holiness, and edified his flock by innumerable instances of humility,

charity, and forgiveness of personal injuries, while, at the same time,

he upheld the authority of his see, and the unadulterated doctrines

of his Church, with all the stubbornness and vehemence of Hildebrand.

Gregory the Thirteenth exerted himself not only to imitate but to

surpass Pius in the severe virtues of his sacred profession. As was the

head, such were the members. The change in the spirit of the Catholic

world may be traced in every walk of literature and of art. It will be

at once perceived by every person who compares the poem of Tasso with

that of Ariosto, or the monuments of Sixtus the Fifth with those of Leo

the Tenth.

But it was not on moral influence alone that the Catholic Church relied.

The civil sword in Spain and Italy was unsparingly employed in her

support. The {325}Inquisition was armed with new powers and inspired

with a new energy. If Protestantism, or the semblance of Protestantism,

showed itself in any quarter, it was instantly met, not by petty,

teasing persecution, but by persecution of that sort which bows down

and crashes all but a very few select spirits. Whoever was suspected of

heresy, whatever his rank, his learning, or his reputation, knew that

he must purge himself to the satisfaction of a severe and vigilant

tribunal, or die by fire. Heretical books were sought out and destroyed

with similar rigour. Works which were once in every house were so

effectually suppressed that no copy of them is now to be found in the

most extensive libraries. One book in particular, entitled “Of the

Benefits of the Death of Christ,” had this fate. It was written in

Tuscan, was many times reprinted, and was eagerly read in every part

of Italy. But the inquisitors detected in it the Lutheran doctrine

of justification by faith alone. They proscribed it; and it is now as

hopelessly lost as the second decade of Livy.

Thus, while the Protestant reformation proceeded rapidly at one

extremity of Europe, the Catholic revival went on as rapidly at the

other. About half a century after the great separation, there were,

throughout the North, Protestant governments and Protestant nations. In

the South were governments and nations actuated by the most intense zeal

for the ancient Church. Between these two hostile regions lay, morally

as well as geographically, a great debatable land. In France, Belgium,

Southern Germany, Hungary, and Poland, the contest was still undecided.

The governments of those countries had not renounced their connection

with Rome; but the Protestants were numerous, powerful, bold, and

active. In France, they formed a commonwealth {326}within the realm,

held fortresses, were able to bring great armies into the field, and had

treated with their sovereign on terms of equality. In Poland, the King

was still a Catholic; but the Protestants had the upper hand in the

Diet, filled the chief offices in the administration, and, in the large

towns, took possession of the parish churches. “It appeared,” says the

Papal nuncio, “that in Poland, Protestantism would completely supersede

Catholicism.” In Bavaria, the state of things was nearly the same. The

Protestants had a majority in the Assembly of the States, and demanded

from the duke concessions in favour of their religion, as the price of

their subsidies. In Transylvania, the House of Austria was unable to

prevent the Diet from confiscating, by one sweeping decree, the estates

of the Church. In Austria Proper it was generally said that only one

thirtieth part of the population could be counted on as good Catholics.

In Belgium the adherents of the new opinions were reckoned by hundreds

of thousands.

The history of the two succeeding generations is the history of the

struggle between Protestantism possessed of the North of Europe, and

Catholicism possessed of the South, for the doubtful territory which

lay between. All the weapons of carnal and of spiritual warfare were

employed. Both sides may boast of great talents and of great virtues.

Both have to blush for many follies and crimes. At first the chances

seemed to be decidedly in favour of Protestantism; but the victory

remained with the Church of Rome. On every point she was successful. If

we overleap another half century, we find her victorious and dominant in

France, Belgium, Bavaria, Bohemia, Austria, Poland, and Hungary. Nor

has Protestantism, in the course of two {327}hundred years been able to

reconquer any portion of what was then lost.

It is, moreover, not to be dissembled that this triumph of the Papacy

is to be chiefly attributed, not to the force of arms, but to a great

reflux in public opinion. During the first half century after the

commencement of the Reformation, the current of feeling in the countries

on this side of the Alps and of the Pyrenees ran impetuously towards

the new doctrines. Then the tide turned, and rushed as fiercely in the

opposite direction. Neither during the one period, nor during the other,

did much depend upon the event of battles or sieges. The Protestant

movement was hardly checked for an instant by the defeat at Muhlberg.

The Catholic reaction went on at full speed in spite of the destruction

of the Armada. It is difficult to say whether the violence of the first

blow or of the recoil was the greater. Fifty years after the Lutheran

separation, Catholicism could scarcely maintain itself on the shores of

the Mediterranean. A hundred years after the separation, Protestantism

could scarcely maintain itself on the shores of the Baltic. The causes

of this memorable turn in human affairs well deserve to be investigated.

The contest between the two parties bore some resemblance to the

fencing-match in Shakspeare; “Laertes wounds Hamlet; then, in scuffling,

they change rapiers, and Hamlet wounds Laertes.” The war between Luther

and Leo was a war between firm faith and unbelief, between zeal and

apathy, between energy and indolence, between seriousness and frivolity,

between a pure morality and vice. Very different was the war which

degenerate Protestantism had to wage against regenerate Catholicism. To

the debauchee, {328}the poisoners, the atheists, who had worn the tiara

during the generation which preceded the Reformation, had succeeded

Popes who, in religious fervour and severe sanctity of manners, might

bear a comparison with Cyprian or Ambrose. The order of Jesuits alone

could show many men not inferior in sincerity, constancy, courage, and

austerity of life, to the apostles of the Reformation. But while danger

had thus called forth in the bosoms of the Church of Rome many of the

highest qualities of the Reformers, the Reformers had contracted some

of the corruptions which had been justly censured in the Church of Rome.

They had become lukewarm and worldly. Their great old leaders had been

borne to the grave, and had left no successors. Among the Protestant

princes there was little or no hearty Protestant feeling. Elizabeth

herself was a Protestant rather from policy than from firm conviction.

James the First, in order to effect his favourite object of marrying his

son into one of the great continental houses, was ready to make immense

concessions to Rome, and even to admit a modified primacy in the Pope.

Henry the Fourth twice abjured the reformed doctrines from interested

motives. The Elector of Saxony, the natural head of the Protestant party

in Germany, submitted to become, at the most important crisis of

the struggle, a tool in the hands of the Papists. Among the Catholic

sovereigns, on the other hand, we find a religious zeal often amounting

to fanaticism. Philip the Second was a Papist in a very different sense

from that in which Elizabeth was a Protestant. Maximilian of Bavaria,

brought up under the teaching of the Jesuits, was a fervent missionary

wielding the powers of a prince. The Emperor Ferdinand the Second

deliberately put {329}his throne to hazard over and over again, rather

than make the smallest concession to the spirit of religious innovation.

Sigismund of Sweden lost a crown which he might have preserved if he

would have renounced the Catholic faith. In short, everywhere on the

Protestant side we see languor; everywhere on the Catholic side we see

ardour and devotion.

Not only was there, at this time, a much more intense zeal among

the Catholics than among the Protestants; but the whole zeal of the

Catholics was directed against the Protestants, while almost the whole

zeal of the Protestants was directed against each other. Within the

Catholic Church there were no serious disputes on points of doctrine.

The decisions of the Council of Trent were received; and the Jansenian

controversy had not yet arisen. The whole force of Rome was,

therefore, effective for the purpose of carrying on the war against the

Reformation. On the other hand, the force which ought to have fought the

battle of the Reformation was exhausted in civil conflict. While Jesuit

preachers, Jesuit confessors, Jesuit teachers of youth, overspread

Europe, eager to expend every faculty of their minds and every drop

of their blood in the cause of their Church, Protestant doctors were

confuting, and Protestant rulers were punishing, sectaries who were just

as good Protestants as themselves.

“Cumque superba foret Babylon spolianda tropaeis,

Bella geri placuit nullos habitura triumphos.”

In the Palatinate, a Calvinistic prince persecuted the Lutherans. In

Saxony, a Lutheran prince persecuted the Calvinists. Everybody who

objected to any of the articles of the Confession of Augsburg was

banished from Sweden. In Scotland, Melville was {330}disputing with

other Protestants on questions of ecclesiastical government. In England

the gaols were filled with men, who, though zealous for the Reformation,

did not exactly agree with the Court on all points of discipline and

doctrine. Some were persecuted for denying the tenet of reprobation;

some for not wearing surplices. The Irish people might at that time have

been, in all probability, reclaimed from Popery, at the expense of half

the zeal and activity which Whitgift employed in oppressing Puritans,

and Martin Marprelate in reviling bishops.

As the Catholics in zeal and in union had a great advantage over the

Protestants, so had they also an infinitely superior organization. In

truth, Protestantism, for aggressive purposes, had no organization at

all. The Reformed Churches, were mere national Churches. The Church of

England existed for England alone. It was an institution as purely local

as the Court of Common Pleas, and was utterly without any machinery for

foreign operations. The Church of Scotland, in the same manner, existed

for Scotland alone. The operations of the Catholic Church, on the

other hand, took in the whole world. Nobody at Lambeth or at Edinburgh

troubled himself about what was doing in Poland or Bavaria. But Cracow

and Munich were at Rome objects of as much interest as the purlieus of

St. John Lateran. Our island, the head of the Protestant interest, did

not send out a single missionary or a single instructor of youth to the

scene of the great spiritual war. Not a single seminary was established

here for the purpose of furnishing a supply of such persons to foreign

countries. On the other hand, Germany, Hungary, and Poland were filled

with able and active Catholic emissaries of Spanish or Italian birth;

and {331}colleges for the instruction of the northern youth were founded

at Rome. The spiritual force of Protestantism was a mere local militia,

which might be useful in case of an invasion, but could not be sent

abroad, and could therefore make no conquests. Rome had such a local

militia; but she had also a force disposable at a moment’s notice for

foreign service, however dangerous or disagreeable. If it was thought at

head-quarters that a Jesuit at Palermo was qualified by his talents

and character to withstand the Reformers in Lithuania, the order was

instantly given and instantly obeyed. In a month, the faithful servant

of the Church was preaching, catechising, confessing, beyond the Niemen.

It is impossible to deny that the polity of the Church of Rome is the

very master-piece of human wisdom. In truth, nothing but such a

polity could, against such assaults, have borne up such doctrines. The

experience of twelve hundred eventful years, the ingenuity and patient

care of forty generations of statesmen, have improved that polity to

such perfection that, among the contrivances which have been devised

for deceiving and oppressing mankind it occupies the highest place. The

stronger our conviction that reason and scripture were decidedly on

the side of Protestantism, the greater is the reluctant admiration

with which we regard that system of tactics against which reason and

scripture were employed in vain.

If we went at large into this most interesting subject we should fill

volumes. We will, therefore, at present, advert to only one important

part of the policy of the Church of Rome. She thoroughly understands,

what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.

In some sects, particularly in infant sects, enthusiasm is suffered to

be rampant. In other sects, {332}particularly in sects long established

and richly endowed, it is regarded with aversion. The Catholic Church

neither submits to enthusiasm nor proscribes it, but uses it. She

considers it as a great moving force which in itself, like the muscular

power of a fine horse, is neither good nor evil, but which may be so

directed as to produce great good or great evil; and she assumes the

direction to herself. It would be absurd to run down a horse like a

wolf. It would be still more absurd to let him run wild, breaking fences

and trampling down passengers. The rational course is to subjugate his

will without impairing his vigour, to teach him to obey the rein and

then to urge him to full speed. When once he knows his master, he is

valuable in proportion to his strength and spirit. Just such has been

the system of the Church of Rome with regard to enthusiasts. She knows

that, when religious feelings have obtained the complete’ empire of

the mind, they impart a strange energy, that they raise men above the

dominion of pain and pleasure, that obloquy becomes glory, that death

itself is contemplated only as the beginning of a higher and happier

life. She knows that a person in this state is no object of contempt.

He may be vulgar, ignorant, visionary, extravagant; but he will do and

suffer things which it is for her interest that somebody should do

and suffer, yet from which calm and sober-minded men would shrink. She

accordingly enlists him in her service, assigns to him some forlorn

hope, in which intrepidity and impetuosity are more wanted than judgment

and self-command, and sends him forth with her benediction and her

applause.

In England it not unfrequently happens that a tinker or coalheaver hears

a sermon or falls in with a tract which alarms him about the state

of his soul. If he be a {333}man of excitable nerves and strong

imagination, he thinks himself given over to the Evil Power. He doubts

whether he has not committed the unpardonable sin. He imputes every wild

fancy that springs up in his mind to the whisper of a fiend. His sleep

is broken by dreams of the great judgment seat, the open books, and the

unquenchable fire. If, in order to escape from these vexing thoughts, he

flies to amusement or to licentious indulgence, the delusive relief only

makes his misery darker and more hopeless. At length a turn takes place.

He is reconciled to his offended Maker. To borrow the fine imagery of

one who had himself been thus tried, he emerges from the Valley of the

Shadow of death, from the dark land of gins and snares, of quagmires and

precipices, of evil spirits and ravenous beasts. The sunshine is on his

path. He ascends the Delectable Mountains, and catches from their summit

a distant view of the shining city which is the end of his pilgrimage.

Then arises in his mind a natural and surely not a censurable desire,

to impart to others the thoughts of which his own heart is full, to warn

the careless, to comfort those who are troubled in spirit. The impulse

which urges him to devote his whole life to the teaching of religion is

a strong passion in the guise of a duty. He exhorts his neighbours; and,

if he be a man of strong parts, he often does so with great effect. He

pleads as if he were pleading for his life, with tears, and pathetic

gestures, and burning words; and he soon finds with delight, not

perhaps wholly unmixed with the alloy of human infirmity, that his rude

eloquence rouses and melts hearers who sleep very composedly while the

rector preaches on the apostolical succession. Zeal for God, love for

his fellow-creatures, pleasure in the exercise of his newly discovered

powers, {334}impel him to become a preacher. He has no quarrel with the

establishment, no objection to its formularies, its government, or its

vestments. He would gladly be admitted among its humblest ministers.

But, admitted or rejected, he feels that his vocation is determined. His

orders have come down to him, not through a long and doubtful series of

Arian and Popish bishops, but direct from on high. His commission is

the same that, on the Mountain of Ascension was given to the Eleven. Nor

will he, for lack of human credentials, spare to deliver the glorious

message with which he is charged by the true Head of the Church. For a

man thus minded, there is within the pale of the establishment no place.

He has been at no college; he cannot construe a Greek author or write a

Latin theme; and he is told that, if he remains in the communion of the

Church, he must do so as a hearer, and that, if he is resolved to be a

teacher, he must begin by being a schismatic. His choice is soon made.

He harangues on Tower Hill or in Smithfield. A congregation is formed. A

license is obtained. A plain brick building, with a desk and benches, is

run up, and named Ebenezer or Bethel. In a few weeks the Church has

lost for ever a hundred families, not one of which entertained the

least scruple about her articles, her liturgy, her government, or her

ceremonies.

Far different is the policy of Rome. The ignorant enthusiast whom the

Anglican Church makes an enemy, and, whatever the polite and learned may

think, a most dangerous enemy, the Catholic Church makes a champion. She

bids him nurse his beard, covers him with a gown and hood of coarse dark

stuff, ties a rope round his waist, and sends him forth to teach in

her name. He costs her nothing. He takes not a ducat {335}away from

the revenues of her beneficed clergy. He lives by the alms of those who

respect his spiritual character, and are grateful for his instructions.

He preaches, not exactly in the style of Massillon, but in a way which

moves the passions of uneducated hearers; and all his influence is

employed to strengthen the Church of which he is a minister. To that

Church he becomes as strongly attached as any of the cardinals whose

scarlet carriages and liveries crowd the entrance of the palace on

the Quirinal. In this way the Church of Rome unites in herself all the

strength of establishment, and all the strength of dissent. With the

utmost pomp of a dominant hierarchy above, she has all the energy of

the voluntary system below. It would be easy to mention very recent

instances in which the hearts of hundreds of thousands, estranged from

her by the selfishness, sloth, and cowardice of the beneficed clergy,

have been brought back by the zeal of the begging friars.

Even for female agency there is a place in her system. To devout women

she assigns spiritual functions, dignities, and magistracies. In our

country, if a noble lady is moved by more than ordinary zeal for the

propagation of religion, the chance is that, though she may disapprove

of no doctrine or ceremony of the Established Church, she will end by

giving her name to a new schism. If a pious and benevolent woman enters

the cells of a prison to pray with the most unhappy and degraded of her

own sex, she does so without any authority from the Church. No line of

action is traced out for her; and it is well if the Ordinary does not

complain of her intrusion, and if the Bishop does not shake his head at

such irregular benevolence. At Rome, the Countess of Huntingdon would

have a place in {336}the calendar as St. Selina, and Mrs. Fry would

be foundress and first Superior of the Blessed Order of Sisters of the

Gaols.

Place Ignatius Loyola at Oxford. He is certain to become the head of a

formidable secession. Place John Wesley at Rome. He is certain to be the

first General of a new society devoted to the interests and honour

of the Church. Place St. Theresa in London. Her restless enthusiasm

ferments into madness, not untinctured with craft. She becomes the

prophetess, the mother of the faithful, holds disputations with the

devil, issues sealed pardons to her adorers, and lies in of the Shiloh.

Place Joanna Southcote at Rome. She founds an order of barefooted

Carmelites, every one of whom is ready to suffer martyrdom for the

Church; a solemn service is consecrated to her memory; and her statue,

placed over the holy water, strikes the eye of every stranger who enters

St. Peter’s.

We have dwelt long on this subject, because we believe that of the many

causes to which the Church of Rome owed her safety and her triumph at

the close of the sixteenth century, the chief was the profound policy

with which she used the fanaticism of such persons as St Ignatius and

St. Theresa.

The Protestant party was now indeed vanquished and humbled. In France

so strong had been the Catholic reaction that Henry the Fourth found it

necessary to choose between his religion and his crown. In spite of his

clear hereditary right, in spite of his eminent personal qualities, he

saw that, unless he reconciled himself to the Church of Rome, he

could not count on the fidelity even of those gallant gentlemen whose

impetuous valour had turned the tide of battle at Ivry. In Belgium,

Poland, and Southern Germany, Catholicism {337}had obtained complete

ascendency. The resistance of Bohemia was put down. The Palatinate was

conquered. Upper and Lower Saxony were overflowed by Catholic invaders.

The King of Denmark stood forth as the Protector of the Reformed

Churches: he was defeated, driven out of the empire, and attacked in

his own possessions. The armies of the House of Austria pressed on,

subjugated Pomerania, and were stopped in their progress only by the

ramparts of Stralsund.

And now again the tide turned. Two violent outbreaks of religious

feeling in opposite directions had given a character to the history of a

whole century. Protestantism had at first driven back Catholicism to

the Alps and the Pyrenees. Catholicism had rallied, and had driven back

Protestantism even to the German Ocean. Then the great southern reaction

began to slacken, as the great northern movement had slackened before.

The zeal of the Catholics waxed cool. Their union was dissolved. The

paroxysm of religious excitement was over on both sides. One party

had degenerated as far from the spirit of Loyola as the other from

the spirit of Luther. During three generations religion had been the

mainspring of politics. The revolutions and civil wars of France,

Scotland, Holland, Sweden, the long struggle between Philip and

Elizabeth, the bloody competition for the Bohemian crown, had all

originated in theological disputes. But a great change now took place.

The contest which was raging in Germany lost its religious character. It

was now, on one side, less a contest for the spiritual ascendency of the

Church of Rome than for the temporal ascendency of the House of Austria.

On the other side, it was less a contest for the reformed doctrines than

for {338}national independence. Governments began to form themselves

into new combinations, in which community of political interest was

far more regarded than community of religious belief. Even at Rome the

progress of the Catholic arms was observed with mixed feelings. The

Supreme Pontiff was a sovereign prince of the second rank, and was

anxious about the balance of power as well as about the propagation of

truth. It was known that he dreaded the rise of an universal monarchy

even more than he desired the prosperity of the Universal Church. At

length a great event announced to the world that the war of sects bad

ceased, and that the war of states had succeeded. A coalition, including

Calvinists, Lutherans, and Catholics, was formed against the House of

Austria. At the head of that coalition were the first statesman and the

first warrior of the age; the former a prince of the Catholic Church,

distinguished by the vigour and success with which he had put down

the Huguenots; the latter a Protestant king, who owed his throne to a

revolution caused by hatred of Popery. The alliance of Richelieu

and Gustavus marks the time at which the great religious struggle

terminated. The war which followed was a war for the equilibrium of

Europe. When, at length, the peace of Westphalia was concluded, it

appeared that the Church of Rome remained in full possession of a vast

dominion, which in the middle of the preceding century she seemed to be

on the point of losing. No part of Europe remained Protestant, except

that part which had become thoroughly Protestant before the generation

which heard Luther preach had passed away.

Since that time there has been no religious war between Catholics and

Protestants as such. In the time {339}of Cromwell, Protestant England

was united with Catholic France, then governed by a priest, against

Catholic Spain. William the Third, the eminently Protestant hero, was at

the head of a coalition which included many Catholic powers, and which

was secretly favoured even by Rome, against the Catholic Lewis. In the

time of Anne, Protestant England and Protestant Holland joined with

Catholic Savoy and Catholic Portugal, for the purpose of transferring

the crown of Spain from one bigoted Catholic to another.

The geographical frontier between the two religions has continued to run

almost precisely where it ran at the close of the Thirty Years’ War; nor

has Protestantism given any proofs of that “expansive power” which has

been ascribed to it. But the Protestant boasts, and boasts most justly,

that wealth, civilisation, and intelligence, have increased far more

on the northern than on the southern side of the boundary, and that

countries so little favoured by nature as Scotland and Prussia are now

among the most flourishing and best governed portions of the world,

while the marble palaces of Genoa are deserted, while banditti infest

the beautiful shores of Campania, while the fertile sea-coast of the

Pontifical State is abandoned to buffaloes and wild boars. It cannot be

doubted that, since the sixteenth century, the Protestant nations have

made decidedly greater progress than their neighbours. The progress made

by those nations in which Protestantism, though not finally successful,

yet maintained a long struggle, and left permanent traces, has generally

been considerable. But when we come to the Catholic Land, to the part of

Europe in which the first spark of reformation was trodden out as

soon as it appeared, and from which proceeded the impulse which drove

{340}Protestantism back, we find, at best, a very slow progress, and

on the whole a retrogression. Compare Denmark and Portugal. When Luther

began to preach, the superiority of the Portuguese was unquestionable.

At present, the superiority of the Danes is no less so. Compare

Edinburgh and Florence. Edinburgh has owed less to climate, to soil,

and to the fostering care of rulers than any capital, Protestant or

Catholic. In all these respects, Florence has been singularly happy.

Yet whoever knows what Florence and Edinburgh were in the generation

preceding the Reformation, and what they are now, will acknowledge that

some great cause has, during the last three centuries, operated to raise

one part of the European family, and to depress the other. Compare the

history of England and that of Spain during the last century. In arms,

arts, sciences, letters, commerce, agriculture, the contrast is most

striking. The distinction is not confined to this side of the Atlantic.

The colonies planted by England in America have immeasurably outgrown in

power those planted by Spain. Yet we have no reason to believe that, at

the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Castilian was in any respect

inferior to the Englishman. Our firm belief is, that the North owes its

great civilisation and prosperity chiefly to the moral, effect of the

Protestant Reformation, and that the decay of the Southern countries of

Europe is to be mainly ascribed to the great Catholic revival.

About a hundred years after the final settlement of the boundary line

between Protestantism and Catholicism, began to appear the signs of the

fourth great peril of the Church of Rome. The storm which was now rising

against her was of a very different kind from those which had preceded

it. Those who had formerly {341}attacked her had questioned only a part

of her doctrines. A school was now growing up which rejected the whole.

The Albigenses, the Lollards, the Lutherans, the Calvinists, had a

positive religious system, and were strongly attached to it. The creed

of the new sectaries was altogether negative. They took one of their

premises from the Protestants, and one from the Catholics. From the

latter they borrowed the principle, that Catholicism was the only pure

and genuine Christianity. With the former, they held that some parts of

the Catholic system were contrary to reason. The conclusion was obvious.

Two propositions, each of which separately is compatible with the most

exalted piety, formed, when held in conjunction, the groundwork of a

system of irreligion. The doctrine of Bossuet, that transubstantiation

is affirmed in the Gospel, and the doctrine of Tillotson, that

transubstantiation is an absurdity, when put together, produced by

logical necessity the inferences of Voltaire.

Had the sect which was rising at Paris been a sect of mere scoffers, it

is very improbable that it would have left deep traces of its existence

in the institutions and manners of Europe. Mere negation, mere Epicurean

infidelity, as Lord Bacon most justly observes, has never disturbed the

peace of the world. It furnishes no motive for action. It inspires no

enthusiasm. It has no missionaries, no crusaders, no martyrs. If the

Patriarch of the Holy Philosophical Church had contented himself with

making jokes about Saul’s asses and David’s wives, and with criticizing

the poetry of Ezekiel in the same narrow spirit in which he criticized

that of Shakspeare, Rome would have had little to fear. But it is due

to him and to his compeers to say that the real secret of their strength

lay in the truth which {342}was mingled with their errors, and in the

generous enthusiasm which was hidden under their flippancy. They were

men who, with all their faults, moral and intellectual, sincerely and

earnestly desired the improvement of the condition of the human race,

whose blood boiled at the sight of cruelty and injustice, who made

manful war, with every faculty which they possessed, on what they

considered as abuses, and who on many signal occasions placed themselves

gallantly between the powerful and the oppressed. While they assailed

Christianity with a rancour and an unfairness disgraceful to men who

called themselves philosophers, they yet had, in far greater measure

than their opponents, that charity towards men of all classes and races

which Christianity enjoins. Religious persecution, judicial torture,

arbitrary imprisonment, the unnecessary multiplication of capital

punishments, the delay and chicanery of tribunals, the exactions of

farmers of the revenue, slavery, the slave trade, were the constant

subjects of their lively satire and eloquent disquisitions. When an

innocent man was broken on the wheel at Toulouse, when a youth, guilty

only of an indiscretion, was beheaded at Abbeville, when a brave

officer, borne down by public injustice, was dragged, with a gag in his

mouth, to die on the Place de Grève, a voice instantly went forth from

the banks of Lake Leman, which made itself heard from Moscow to Cadiz,

and which sentenced the unjust judges to the contempt and detestation

of all Europe. The really efficient weapons with which the philosophers

assailed the evangelical faith were borrowed from the evangelical

morality. The ethical and dogmatical parts of the Gospel were unhappily

turned against each other. On one side was a Church boasting of the

purity of a doctrine derived from the Apostles, but disgraced {343}by

the massacre of St. Bartholomew, by the murder of the best of kings, by

the war of Cevennes, by the destruction of Port-Royal. On the other side

was a sect laughing at the Scriptures, shooting out the tongue at the

sacraments, but ready to encounter principalities and powers in the

cause of justice, mercy, and toleration.

Irreligion, accidentally associated with philanthropy, triumphed for

a time over religion accidentally associated with political and social

abuses. Every thing gave way to the zeal and activity of the new

reformers. In France, every man distinguished in letters was found in

their ranks. Every year gave birth to works in which the fundamental

principles of the Church were attacked with argument, invective, and

ridicule. The Church made no defence, except by acts of power. Censures

were pronounced: books were seized: insults were offered to the remains

of infidel writers; but no Bossuet, no Pascal, came forth to encounter

Voltaire. There appeared not a single defence of the Catholic doctrine

which produced any considerable effect, or which is now even remembered.

A bloody and unsparing persecution, like that which put down the

Albigenses, might have put down the philosophers. But the time for De

Montforts and Dominies had gone by. The punishments which the priests

were still able to inflict were sufficient to irritate, but not

sufficient to destroy. The war was between power on one side, and wit

on the other; and the power was under far more restraint than the wit.

Orthodoxy soon became a synonyme for ignorance and stupidity. It was as

necessary to the character of an accomplished man that he should despise

the religion of his country, as that he should know his letters. The new

doctrines spread {344}rapidly through Christendom. Paris was the capital

of the whole continent. French was everywhere the language of polite

circles. The literary glory of Italy and Spain had departed. That of

Germany had not dawned. That of England shone, as yet, for the English

alone. The teachers of France were the teachers of Europe. The Parisian

opinions spread fast among the educated classes beyond the Alps:

nor could the vigilance of the Inquisition prevent the contraband

importation of the new heresy into Castile and Portugal. Governments,

even arbitrary governments, saw with pleasure the progress of this

philosophy. Numerous reforms, generally laudable, sometimes hurried

on without sufficient regard to time, to place, and to public feeling,

showed the extent of its influence. The rulers of Prussia, of Russia,

of Austria, and of many smaller states, were supposed to be among the

initiated.

The Church of Rome was still, in outward show, as stately and splendid

as ever; but her foundation was undermined. No state had quitted her

communion or confiscated her revenues; but the reverence of the people

was everywhere departing from her.

The first great warning stroke was the fall of that society which, in

the conflict with Protestantism, had saved the Catholic Church from

destruction. The order of Jesus had never recovered from the injury

received in the struggle with Port-Royal. It was now still more rudely

assailed by the philosophers. Its spirit was broken; its reputation was

tainted. Insulted by all the men of genius in Europe, condemned by the

civil, magistrate, feebly defended by the chiefs of the hierarchy, it

fell: and great, was the fall of it.

The movement went on with increasing speed. The first generation of the

new sect passed away. The {345}doctrines of Voltaire were inherited and

exaggerated by successors, who bore to him the same relation which the

Anabaptists bore to Luther, or the Fifth-Monarchy men to Pym. At length

the Revolution came. Down went the old Church of France, with all

its pomp and wealth. Some of its priests purchased a maintenance by

separating themselves from Rome, and by becoming the authors of a fresh

schism. Some, rejoicing in the new license, flung away their sacred

vestments, proclaimed that their whole life had been an imposture,

insulted and persecuted the religion of which they had been ministers,

and distinguished themselves, even in the Jacobin Club and the Commune

of Paris, by the excess of their impudence and ferocity. Others, more

faithful to their principles, were butchered by scores without a trial,

drowned, shot, hung on lamp-posts. Thousands fled from their country

to take sanctuary under the shade of hostile altars. The churches were

closed; the bells were silent; the shrines were plundered; the silver

crucifixes were melted down. Buffoons, dressed in copes and surplices,

came dancing the _carmagnole_ even to the bar of the Convention.

The bust of Marat was substituted for the statues of the martyrs of

Christianity. A prostitute, seated on a chair of state in the chancel of

Nôtre Dame, received the adoration of thousands, who exclaimed that at

length, for the first time, those ancient Gothic arches had resounded

with the accents of truth. The new unbelief was as intolerant as the old

superstition. To show reverence for religion was to incur the suspicion

of disaffection. It was not without imminent danger that the priest

baptized the infant, joined the hands of lovers, or listened to the

confession of the dying. The absurd worship of the Goddess of Reason

was, indeed, {346}of short duration; but the deism of Robespierre and

Lepaux was not less hostile to the Catholic faith than the atheism of

Clootz and Chaumette.

Nor were the calamities of the Church confined to France. The

revolutionary spirit, attacked by all Europe, beat all Europe back,

became conqueror in its turn, and, not satisfied with the Belgian cities

and the rich domains of the spiritual electors, went raging over the

Rhine and through the passes of the Alps. Throughout the whole of the

great war against Protestantism, Italy and Spain had been the base of

the Catholic operations. Spain was now the obsequious vassal of the

infidels. Italy was subjugated by them. To her ancient principalities

succeeded the Cisalpine republic, and the Ligurian republic, and

the Parthenopean republic. The shrine of Loretto was stripped of the

treasures piled up by the devotion of six hundred years. The convents

of Rome were pillaged. The tricoloured flag floated on the top of

the Castle of St. Angelo. The successor of St. Peter Was carried away

captive by the unbelievers. He died a prisoner in their hands; and even

the honours of sepulture were long withheld from his remains.

It is not strange that, in the year 1799, even sagacious observers

should have thought that, at length, the hour of the Church of Rome was

come. An infidel power ascendant, the Pope dying in captivity, the most

illustrious prelates of France living in a foreign country on Protestant

alms, the noblest edifices which-the munificence of former ages had

consecrated to the worship of God turned into temples of Victory,

or into banqueting-houses for political societies, or into

Theophilanthropic chapels, such signs might well be supposed to indicate

the approaching end of that long domination. {347}But the end was not

yet. Again doomed to death, the milk-white hind was still fated not to

die. Even before the funeral rites had been performed over the ashes of

Pius the Sixth, a great reaction had commenced, which, after the lapse

of more than forty years, appears to be still in progress. Anarchy

had had its day. A new order of things rose out of the confusion, new

dynasties, new laws, new titles; and amidst them emerged the ancient

religion. The Arabs have a fable that the Great Pyramid was built by

antediluvian kings, and alone, of all the works of men, bore the weight

of the flood. Such as this was the fate of the Papacy. It had been

buried under the great inundation; but its deep foundations had remained

unshaken; and, when the waters abated, it appeared alone amidst the

ruins of a world which had passed away. The republic of Holland was

gone, and the empire of Germany, and the great Council of Venice, and

the old Helvetian League, and the House of Bourbon, and the parliaments

and aristocracy of France. Europe was full of young creations, a French

empire, a kingdom of Italy, a Confederation of the Rhine. Nor had the

late events affected only territorial limits and political institutions.

The distribution of property, the composition and spirit of society,

had, through great part of Catholic Europe, undergone a complete change.

But the unchangeable Church was still there.

Some future historian, as able and temperate as Professor Ranke, will,

we hope, trace the progress of the Catholic revival of the nineteenth

century. We feel that we are drawing too near our own time, and that, if

we go on we shall be in danger of saying much which may be supposed

to indicate, and which will certainly excite angry feelings. We will,

therefore, make only {348}one more observation, which, in our opinion,

is deserving of serious attention.

During the eighteenth century, the influence of the Church of Rome was

constantly on the decline. Unbelief made extensive conquests in all the

Catholic countries of Europe, and in some countries obtained a complete

ascendency. The Papacy was at length brought so low as to be an

object of derision to infidels, and of pity rather than of hatred to

Protestants. During the nineteenth century, this fallen Church has

been gradually rising from her depressed state and reconquering her old

dominion. No person who calmly reflects on what, within the last few

years, has passed in Spain, in Italy, in South America, in Ireland, in

the Netherlands, in Prussia, even in France, can doubt that the power of

this Church over the hearts and minds of men, is now greater far than it

was when the Encyclopaedia and the Philosophical Dictionary appeared.

It is surely remarkable, that neither the moral revolution of the

eighteenth century, nor the moral counter-revolution of the nineteenth,

should, in any perceptible degree, have added to the domain of

Protestantism. During the former period, whatever was lost to

Catholicism was lost also to Christianity; during the latter, whatever

was regained by Christianity in Catholic countries was regained also by

Catholicism. We should naturally have expected that many minds, on the

way from superstition to infidelity, or on the way back from infidelity

to superstition, would have stopped at an intermediate point. Between

the doctrines taught in the schools of the Jesuits, and those which were

maintained at the little supper parties of the Baron Holbach, there is

a vast interval, in which the human mind, it should seem, might find for

itself some resting-place more satisfactory {349}than either of the

two extremes. And at the time of the Reformation, millions found such

a resting-place. Whole nations then renounced Popery without ceasing to

believe in a first cause, in a future life, or in the Divine mission of

Jesus. In the last century, on the other hand, when a Catholic renounced

his belief in the real presence, it was a thousand to one that he

renounced his belief in the Gospel too; and, when the reaction took

place, with belief in the Gospel came back belief in the real presence.

We by no means venture to deduce from these phænomena any general law;

but we think it a most remarkable fact, that no Christian nation, which

did not adopt the principles of the Reformation before the end of the

sixteenth century, should ever have adopted them. Catholic communities

have, since that time, become infidel and become Catholic again; but

none has become Protestant.

Here we close this hasty sketch of one of the most important portions

of the history of mankind. Our readers will have great reason to feel

obliged to us if we have interested them sufficiently to induce them

to peruse Professor Ranke’s book. We will only caution them against

the French translation, a performance which, in our opinion, is just as

discreditable to the moral character of the person from whom it proceeds

as a false affidavit or a forged bill of exchange would have been, and

advise them to study either the original, or the English version, in

which the sense and spirit of the original are admirably preserved.