round its walls; but the industry and speculative spirit of its
citizens wonderfully enriched them, and, since “all things obey money”
(Ecclesiastes x. 19), they soon became the predominant power, and
finally the masters in Tuscany. They were money-changers,
moneylenders, jewellers, and goldsmiths for the whole of Europe and no
little part of the East. The elements of a business education were
given to its youth in numerous schools, attended by some twelve
hundred boys, who were taught arithmetic and book-keeping. A great
deal of money circulated within the city itself, and a large amount
was necessary, particularly before the introduction of bills of
exchange, to accommodate merchants in their visits to other countries.
The public mint coined annually during the fourteenth century from
three hundred and fifty thousand to four hundred thousand gold
florins, and about twenty thousand pounds weight of coppers, called
_danari da quattro_, or half-farthings; and eighty private banks
assisted the circulation. The beautiful golden florins were first
coined in the year 1252, bearing on one side the impression of St.
John Baptist, the patron, and on the other that of a lily, the device
of the city. This was considered the finest coin in the world, and so
much admired that many princes and governments began to imitate it
while preserving its original name, and consequently perpetuating the
monetary renown of Florence. It was current in Europe, Asia, and
Africa. The workmanship of the Florentines was so superior that they
were often called upon to conduct or superintend the coinage in
foreign countries. During the reign of King David II., in the first
half of the thirteenth century, he appointed a Florentine one of the
two keepers of the exchange for all Scotland, and masters of the mint;
and under King Robert III. (1390-1424) gold was minted for that
kingdom by Bonaccio of Florence.[34] In 1278 the Exchange at London
was under the direction of some Lucca merchants; and it seems to be
directly from the Italian that we get our English word cash, derived
from _cassa_, the chest in which Italian merchants kept their money.
We may have some idea of what a money-centre Florence was in that age
from the fact that the notorious French adventurer, the Duke of
Athens, who was elected Lord of Florence in 1342, contrived in the
course of only ten months to draw four hundred thousand golden florins
out of the city. The Florentines, who had the reputation of being the
smartest people in Italy, were extremely fond of banking in all its
branches. While the middle and lower orders of society were mostly
engaged in mechanical occupations, the higher classes handled the
money, and would appear to have taken lessons of the Jews. The great
feudal nobles of the north, with more land than gold, would often
ask their chaplains to reprove them with some holy text of
Scripture—Ecclesiasticus X. 10 being a favorite one—when interest was
demanded or mortgages were forfeited. They were not by any means the
only Italians who publicly courted the queen _Regina Pecunia_; the
ancient name in England for a banker, which was _Lombard_, and the
street in London called Lombard Street, preserving the memory of the
Milanese and others out of Lombardy who took up their first residence
there before the year 1274, and were great moneychangers and usurers.
The stupendous fortunes of the Chigi, who gave Pope Alexander VII. to
the church and are now Roman princes, and before them of the Medici
family, which became royal, were amassed chiefly in the banking
business; but it is a popular error that the well-known sign of the
pawnbrokers’ three gilt balls is derived from the armorial bearings of
the latter, which their agents in England and other countries placed
over the doors of their loan-shops. The arms of the Medici were _or_,
six torteaux _gules_ except the one in chief, which was _azure_
charged with three fleurs-de-lis _or_. Whether these roundlets had any
allusion, as has been suggested, to doctors’ pills and the
professional origin whence the family name is supposed to be derived,
we cannot determine; but the gold pieces called bezants because coined
at Constantinople—Byzantium—and so common at an early period in Italy
that the saying _Aver buoni Bisanzi_ was a proverbial expression
of one who had plenty of money, seem to have been early the
distinguishing sign of money-lenders and changers, and are the true
origin of the pawnbrokers’ balls.
The shrewdness of the Italians in money matters did not always save
them from disastrous failures and bankruptcies caused by wars, breach
of faith in persons too high to be reached, loss of goods and bullion
by fire, piracy, shipwreck, and other accidents. The first great
failure of this kind was that of a mercantile company in 1296, which
had existed for one hundred and twenty years, and became insolvent for
400,000 gold florins, due to citizens and strangers. It was felt
throughout the republic of Florence like the loss of a battle. Even
worse was the failure of the Bardi and Peruzzi in 1347. They were both
merchants and bankers, and stood at the head of their class in Italy.
Loans to the kings of England and Sicily brought them down. The first
owed them 900,000 and the second 450,000 gold florins. These were
unavailable assets when the 550,000 florins they owed their
fellow-citizens and others began to be called for, and therefore they
broke. This downfall carried with it a large number of smaller houses,
and among them that of Corsini, of the since princely family of that
name, which gave St. Andrew and Pope Clement XII. to the church. The
celebrated historian John Villani was a great loser by this failure,
and was even imprisoned in the _Stinche_ in consequence of it as an
insolvent. The law punished fraudulent failures very severely; but if
it could be proved that the failures resulted from unavoidable
accidents, the debtors were allowed to go free, after surrendering all
they possessed to their creditors. For the convenience of customers,
the bank-offices used to be on the ground-floor of the houses—sometimes
palaces—the masters living above. The rate of discount on exchange was
from one and one-half to two per cent., and four per cent. on sums
advanced. Jacques Savary, in his _Parfait Négociant_, says that the
invention of bills of exchange is due to French Jews who were driven
out of France by Philip the Fair in 1316, and took refuge in Lombardy.
By means of such bills they were able to get the value of the property
they had left in the hands of friends. They were imitated by certain
Ghibellines who, being exiled, went to Amsterdam and saved some of
their goods left in Italy. In negotiating these bills and effecting
the sale of goods, persons called _sensali_ (brokers) were employed.
No duties were levied on exports, but imported goods had to be stored
in government buildings called _dogane_—_i.e._, custom-houses, or,
perhaps more accurately, bonded warehouses—from which, although they
might be hypothecated, they could be withdrawn only after payment of a
certain sum. There was a chamber of commerce called _Mercanzia_ at
Florence, and all the other commercial cities had their merchants’
exchange for the transaction of business, the sordid use to which they
were put being often disguised by the beauties of architecture,
painting, and sculpture. Thus, the _Sala del Cambio_ at Perugia was
decorated with frescoes by the celebrated Pietro Perugino, assisted by
his immortal pupil Raphael of Urbino.
In all seaports there were certain judges, elected by and from among
the merchants, who composed a tribunal called _Consolato di Mare_.
They settled disputes between traders and ship-owners, gave assistance
in distress, and watched over the interests of commerce. The origin of
such boards of trade was very ancient among the Italians, for as early
as the year 1129 one was established at Messina. It is said that the
Pisans were the first to make laws regulating navigation, and that
their code was approved in 1075 by Pope Gregory VII.[35] There was no
appeal from the decisions of these admiralty courts, and in cases of
fraud or other misdemeanor the guilty party was punished by public
authority.
Sericulture began in Italy in the fourteenth century, and was
practised with success, especially in Lombardy. The statutes of Modena
obliged the peasants to plant a large number of mulberry-trees, in
order to promote it.
The wide extent of Italian commerce and the industrial prosperity of
Italy, which was a consequence of it, greatly enriched her higher
classes and led to the most extravagant luxury during the latter part
of the middle ages. Nations now reckoned highly civilized, and where
the comforts of life are within the reach of all, were then badly
clothed and poorly fed. The effeminacy of the wealthier Italians
during the fourteenth century, when commerce was most extended, caused
them to despise, amidst the delicacies of the East and the fruits of
their own intelligence, the rude simplicity of their more northern
neighbors. Even the lower classes among them felt a desire for greater
convenience and refinement. Dante, Boccaccio, the chroniclers, and
other writers of this period portray or lament the ever-increasing
luxury of the age, and we can gather from them an accurate idea of the
style of living and magnificence of the patricians in their
provisions, furniture, and dress during the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. Nuptial entertainments and civic festivals were the
occasions of most display; and Chaucer, who had partaken of such,
writes probably as much from recollection as after Petrarch, whom he
has imitated, when he describes the preparations for Griselda’s
wedding to the young Marquis of Saluce.
The women were particularly dainty, and many sumptuary laws were
enacted to restrain the excess of refinement in houses, furniture, and
apparel. A very fine sort of thin, transparent linen, made in Cyprus,
was much worn by the female sex. It resembled, but was not quite so
indecent as the _Coa vestis_ of the ancients. They also carried much
jewelry, and were clothed in garments worked in silver and gold stuff.
Their minds naturally ran on money:
“_Julia._ What thinkest thou of the rich Mercutio?
_Lucetta._ Well of his wealth; but of himself, so, so.”
—_Two Gentlemen of Verona_, act i. sc. 2.
The habits and head-dress of the men were often bespangled with
precious stones, and their whole attire answered to their haughty
bearing, which bespoke successful foreign ventures and a splendid
style maintained at home. In innumerable ways they exemplified Dr.
Johnson’s observation: “With what munificence a great merchant will
spend his money, both from his having it at command and from his
enlarged views by calculation of a good effect upon the whole.” Few of
them would have dared to say with _Bassanio_:
“Gentle lady,
When I did first impart my love to you,
I freely told you all the wealth I had
Ran in my veins; I was a gentleman.”
—_Merchant of Venice_, act iii. sc. 2.
When Shakspere uses the expression “royal merchant” in the play from
which we have just quoted, it is, as Warburton remarks, no ranting
epithet; for several Italian merchant families obtained principalities
in the Archipelago and elsewhere, which their descendants enjoyed for
many generations, and others of their class made sovereign alliances.
For instance, James, King of Cyprus, married Catherine Cornaro,
daughter of a Venetian merchant, who gave her a dowry of 100,000
golden ducats.[36]
[31] The Cathedral of Pisa, one of the most remarkable
monuments of the middle ages, owes its origin to such
an expedition; for it was built with part of the rich
booty taken from the Saracens at Palermo in the year
1063.
[32] This city was taken from the Genoese by the Turks in
1474, but the Christians were not all driven out. The
late Father Theiner has published an interesting letter
from the Papal Nuncio in Poland in 1579, in which he
mentions having met some Kaffa people at Wilna and
tells of their strange manner of obtaining a priest,
reminding one a little of Michas and the Levite in
Judges xvii.
[33] McPherson’s _Annals of Commerce_, vol. i. p. 562.
[34] Innes, _Scotland in the Middle Ages_, p. 309.
[35] Muratori, _Ant. Ital._, tom. ii. p. 54.
[36] The ducat was the great money of Venice, as the florin
was of Florence, and bears in its name a proof of the
more aristocratic government of the former city. The
first gold ducats were coined by the Doge John Dandolo
in 1280, and are inscribed I0. DANDVL. DVX.
A DAUGHTER OF THE PURITANS.
Rose Standish Howson—that was her name, and very proud she was of it.
Back of the _Mayflower_, she knew little about her ancestors; but
certain it was that in that well-filled vessel one of her forefathers
had come to America, and, marrying a distant connection of the
veritable Standish family, had handed this name down to all succeeding
generations. Rose boasted, so far as it is proper for a well-bred New
England girl to boast, that, however it might have been outside of her
own country, here at least her lineage was most democratically noble;
she belonged—and could prove it, too, out of a little book compiled by
her grandfather—thoroughly to the old Puritan race. In all her books
the name was written in full—Rose Standish Howson; and it was her
unfailing source of regret that her only brother had not been called
Miles. John Howson laughed good-naturedly at his sister’s foible, but
was really quite as proud as she, though in a more passive way.
Their home was not in Boston. Let this important fact receive our
prompt attention. But, since it could not be there, it was in the next
best place—an old academic town; in which New England State matters
little to our story. There for thirty years Rose Howson’s father had
been the academy’s honored principal. His wife had died young, leaving
only this son and daughter. John fitted for Harvard at the academy;
Rose went steadily through grammar-school and high-school in her
native place, then went to Boston with hopes of at least a two years’
added course of study there. It resolved itself into one brilliant
winter and spring of hard work and exhausting pleasure, symphony
concerts, Shakspere clubs, Parker Fraternity lectures, abstruse
reading, and keenly exciting conversation; one merry June, one gay
class-day, one delightful commencement, when Dr. Howson came to
Cambridge to meet old pupils and friends, and see his son bear off the
highest honors; then they went home for vacation, and before it was
over Dr. Howson sickened and died.
The whole town was in a fervor of excitement; there was a funeral, to
which people came from far and near; resolutions were passed, and in
the flush of enthusiasm John Howson, young as he was and just out of
college, was elected on trial to fill his father’s place. So the
brother and sister still lived on in their old home, but into it they
infused a new manner of living. Fresh from the intellectual arena,
they sought to shape society about them into some likeness to that
they loved so well, and they found their old friends and playmates
more than ready to meet them half-way. A book club was started, into
which the current literature of the day was crowded, and from which,
it was placidly affirmed, all “trash” was excluded; but Mill was
there, and Darwin, and a strange mixture of German philosophy, which
the young men, but more especially the young women, read, or fancied
they read, and about which they talked much, after a fashion revealing
more ideas than thought. There were “musicals” too, and a Shakspere
club, and German and French conversations and readings, and the second
winter after Dr. Howson’s death there were dramatic entertainments and
concerts; and it came to pass that almost every afternoon and evening
of Rose’s life was filled with some sort of intellectual work or
pleasure. She was a capital housekeeper, and so her early mornings
were occupied with household cares; but, later, she was always ready
for a walk or talk, and her reading was done in snatches by day and by
long hours of steady work late at night.
About religion “experimentally” she knew little. The old
meeting-house, which the Puritan settlers had built, was still
standing, but it had been enlarged and made over, though not
beautified. There Rose had been accustomed to go Sunday after Sunday
as a matter of course, and sometimes to the Friday evening
prayer-meeting; but she was not “a Christian.” Once there had been a
revival, when she tried to be converted, but she had failed. Then in
Boston she had been taken to hear preachers who were not “orthodox” at
all; she had almost feared them at first, because of strange names she
had heard applied to them—they had German tendencies, rationalistic
tendencies, were free-thinkers. But when she came under the spell of
their presence and their eloquence she was fascinated. They appealed
to what she thought the highest faculties of her nature—her intellect,
her love for the beautiful, her reason. She missed it when she came
home and she did more than miss it: she began to doubt. Was old Mr.
Gray wiser than the cultured men she had been hearing? He claimed that
they were wrong; how did he know that? How could she tell that he was
not mistaken? In this one small town, originally occupied by orthodox
Congregationalists only, there were now Orthodox Unitarians,
Methodists, Episcopalians, Baptists, and Universalists. A Roman
Catholic priest was serving there too, in a dingy hall in a back
street, but “society” rarely noticed him or his work; he and his alike
were out of its pale, anomalies, hardly worth mentioning except with
pitying wonder or idle jest and scorn. What made Mr. Gray superior to
any or all of these in his power of discerning truth?
And while Rose queried thus on Sunday mornings, sitting wearily in her
accustomed place at the right of the pulpit, sometimes trying to find
out how to be good, but oftener losing herself in memories of the
feasts of reason she had known for so brief and bright a while, some
one came to town who was to influence her life greatly. Looking up
suddenly from one of these reveries, she found herself still in the
meeting-house, but opposite her was a new face, a lady’s, thin and
pale, with searching eyes fixed upon hers, and after service the lady
came straight to her pew and held out her hand.
“I am sure you are Miss Howson,” she said. “Your friend Grace Roland
has told me much of you. I am Ellen Lawton.”
Rose’s heart leaped up. In those happy Boston days she had often heard
Ellen Lawton spoken of as one of the most elegant and cultured women
of her time, and she had read her writings with delight, but she had
hardly hoped to meet her. It took her breath away with joy when she
learned that Miss Lawton had come to live for a while in this quiet
country place.
It was a season of keen delight. Rose had thought she knew what it was
to revel in intellectual pleasure, but it was something new to meet
one so superior to herself, yet so loving; always ready to listen to
her ideas, to help her unfold them, and yet so calm and tranquil. Miss
Lawton was an invalid, and, after that first Sunday, Rose never saw
her at church again. Once, when Rose stopped on her way thither to
leave her some flowers, Miss Lawton said that she was going to sit in
the sunshine; would not Rose stay with her? And when Rose demurred,
Miss Lawton said gently, “Shall we not please God as well in the
beauty of his sunshine as in that bare and cheerless house where you
know you do not like to go?”
This was the beginning of Rose’s first knowledge of Ellen Lawton’s
so-called religious life; they sat and talked all that morning about
it. With a sweet smile upon her calm face, the invalid said quietly
that she believed there might be a God; she was not sure, of course;
but if there was one, he was kind and good, and loved to see her
happy. She made life as bright and beautiful as she possibly could
always; it was given her to enjoy. Books and music and art and flowers
were parts of her religion; beyond this world she did not look; what
came after death she knew not and cared not; if there was a God, he
was good and would be good to her; if there was not, the thought of
annihilation did not distress her. Rose watched her closely after
this; she never heard an impatient word or saw a hasty movement; the
life was an exposition of what a great many people would call “the
beautiful,” and Rose found in it more and more satisfaction for her
extreme intellectual cravings.
One morning a servant ran in with blanched face to tell her that Miss
Lawton was dead. Rose had known that heart-disease was the fatal
malady which was surely sapping at her friend’s life, yet this blow
fell upon her with an awful suddenness. She went to the house, where
they left her to do as she would, for she was the nearest friend Miss
Lawton had there; she went up to the silent room, and shut herself in
alone with the silent dead. Ellen Lawton lay as they had found her;
she must have risen in the morning and dressed with her usual dainty
care; then, perhaps feeling some acute pang of the pain to which she
was subject, she had sunk upon the couch by the window. Her face was,
as in life, calm and noble; about her lay her books that she had
loved, her rare pictures looked down upon her, her flowers scented the
room; outside the sun shone brightly on the grand hills she had been
used to watch, finding in them food for heart and soul both, she said.
None of these moved her now at all.
Rose went close to her and looked at her, and looked, and looked, as
if she would waken her by the very fixedness of her gaze. What was
this _thing_ lying there, this beautiful clay, this voiceless,
motionless, tenantless body? Yesterday it spoke to her, kissed her,
loved her; what had changed it, gone out of it? The spirit? The soul?
Where was that soul then?
She knelt down trembling, and put her hand where the heart had beat
not five short hours ago. There was no movement now; and the silence
in the room grew terrible. Where was that which yesterday she spoke
with? Nowhere? Then to-morrow she herself might be nowhere and
nothing.
Suddenly there came to her a memory which she had striven for years to
banish. A stranger had preached at the time of that unforgotten
revival; he had painted vividly and unsparingly the torments of the
lost. Often in the night Rose had wakened from a dream of it, and
found herself cold with horror, and cried out, “I never will believe
it.” Now like a painting she seemed to see it all again, and through
her mind rang the words with which the sermon had ended, “Doubt on as
you will, O unbeliever, O careless soul, O faithless Christian! Laugh
on as you will, forget as you will. But suppose that you wake up after
death and find this true! _What then?_”
John Howson, hearing the news at school, hurried home at noon to
comfort Rose, but she was gone. He found her in that room of death,
rocking to and fro upon her knees, her hands held out over the dead,
while she was whispering in hoarse tones: “Ellen, is it true? Tell me
it is not true.” And no one answered.
John lifted her tenderly, and she clung to him like a little child.
“Take me home!” she cried, quivering all over. She could not walk; he
had to carry her, and all the way she clung to him as if the very
touch of something that lived and loved was comfort. “O John! I am so
glad you are alive,” she sobbed. “Dear John, do not die, do not die!”
He could hardly bear to leave her for afternoon school, and when he
came home she was crouching by his arm-chair, while Abby, their old
servant, sat looking at her with pitying horror. “You’d best do what
you can for her, Master John,” she said, “or she’ll kill herself going
on in this way.”
“No, no! not kill myself,” Rose answered hysterically. “It is awful to
live, but it is worse to die.”
John sat down near her, and she took his hand and held it tightly. “I
want to _feel_ that you are here, and warm and well,” she said. “O
John! tell me what is true.”
“What is true?” he repeated. “Why, I am, I hope; and you, dear child.”
“Oh! no,” she exclaimed, as if his tender lightness were unbearable.
“Is God true? Is there a God? What comes after death?”
He answered her honestly; he had even less faith than she, but his
doubts did not trouble him. He lived a life as upright and fair as his
neighbors; whether there was a God or not, what difference did it
make, so long as he behaved himself? This was John Howson’s creed, if
such a title could be applied to it.
How strong and kind he looked, how honorable he always was! Why should
Rose worry, if he did not? Either there was no God, and what they did
made no difference—they could live as they liked and get all the
pleasure possible—or, if there was a God, he was too good to be ever
angry with them. It was a consoling belief; she would take the comfort
of it. But alone at night the horror returned. Suppose there was a God
who demanded something—she knew not what—from his creatures; she could
only express it by the vague term, “to be Christians.” She held her
head between her hands and tried to think what that meant. Yes, she
must be converted, and be sorry for all her sins, and join the church.
How were people converted, and what church should she join? Perhaps
she had better say a prayer. “O God!” she began, then paused. Her
brain was reeling with the doubt whether there was any God at all; and
even if there were, what was the use of prayer?
The next morning she went to Mr. Gray. With nerves unstrung by intense
feeling, she had little thought left for ordinary greetings or for
ceremony. The old man was jarred and hurt by what he thought her
rudeness, never dreaming that he was dealing with a soul which was
fast losing all care for earthly joys or pains, or for any earthly
thing at all, in the one absorbing fear of eternal things. For forty
years he had labored in this place in a calm routine, hearing
something but comprehending little of the doubts through which the
world without was passing. It filled him with horror to hear Rose
talk; he had never imagined what thoughts had been working in the mind
of his old friend’s child.
“What must one do to be a Christian?” she had asked abruptly.
He had not expected such a question, and looked surprised, but he
answered simply enough: “You must believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, my
child, and come to him in repentance.”
“And where is he?” Rose cried, “and who is he, and what does he want
of me?”
Mr. Gray stared at her in amazement and sorrow. “My dear,” he said,
“who is he? He is God, and he is everywhere, and he wants your heart.”
“How do you know that?” Rose exclaimed. “Tell me how you know it.
The old man laid his hand upon his Bible. “Where should I know it but
here?” he asked.
“But other people think differently,” Rose said. “I have read it
myself, and I don’t find what you preach. The Baptists read the Bible,
and so do the Methodists, and so do the Episcopalians, and you cannot
agree to be one. How do you know the Bible is true?”
It was of no avail to tell her of internal evidence, or of spiritual
conviction, or of visible effects. Quickly enough it became clear that
Rose Howson had no faith left in the Lord Jesus Christ as God. She did
believe as an historical fact that he had lived once upon earth, and
was man, and possibly something more than man; that was all. To
everything Mr. Gray said she returned the answer, “_How do you know
it?_ Is not the Baptist minister a Christian?—and yet you differ. Is
not the Unitarian minister a scholar, and does not he pray to
God?—and yet you say he is mistaken.” And when Mr. Gray reminded her
of her father, and asked how he would have felt to hear her speak
thus, she cried out that she was a woman grown, and it was her own
soul she was talking of, and her father could not save that; fathers
made very little difference when it was heaven and hell you were
thinking about.
“All Christians agree on the vital points,” Mr. Gray said; “at least,
all evangelical Protestants.”
“And what about the unevangelical Protestants and the poor Catholics?
and who decides what are the vital points? and why cannot you and the
Baptists commune together, then?” The eager questions were poured
forth, overwhelming the listener.
Mr. Gray shook his head sadly. “I do not think you are in a fit state
to speak of such matters, Rose,” he said. “The Lord Jesus Christ died
for you. Pray to him that he will himself teach you.”
Rose stood up. “Good-by, Mr. Gray,” she said gently. “I am afraid I
have troubled you. Perhaps you will say a prayer for me sometimes.”
“I will indeed, my child,” he answered her, with a very troubled look
upon his face; “but you must pray too.”
“Pray?” she repeated to herself mechanically as she went out of the
room. “I wonder how they do it, and what they mean by it, and what
good it ever does? Pray? Oh! if I only could.”
After this Rose was never seen inside the old meeting-house again.
Everybody learned that she was in some religious difficulty; most
persons never mentioned the subject to her; some told her not to
worry, but to trust; others that it made no manner of difference what
she believed, so long as she was sincere. To the one she answered that
the only belief she was sincere in was that she did not know what to
believe; to the other she made no reply. But to John once she answered
wearily: “If you sat here studying, and I told you the house was on
fire, and you could smell it burning, would you keep still at your
books, and trust and not worry, because other people said it was not
your house?”
On one occasion she took up a Protestant Episcopal _Book of Common
Prayer_ which she found in her father’s library, and, turning its
pages, came to the Apostles’ Creed. It comforted her to read it; she
thought it must be a blessed thing to be brought up always with that
impressed upon one, and never to know anything else. She had some
Protestant Episcopal friends; they seemed very content. But, still
idly turning the leaves, she came to the Thirty-Nine Articles, and her
eye lighted on the words, “As the Church of _Jerusalem_, _Alexandria_,
and _Antioch_, have erred; so also the Church of _Rome_ hath erred,
not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters
of Faith.” So then even they could not be sure and settled in their
belief, she said to herself; for if Rome and Jerusalem and Antioch had
erred, why not the Protestant Episcopal Church of America? It was the
closing drop of bitterness. John found her that noon in as terrible a
state as on the day of Ellen Lawton’s death.
“Rose,” he said gravely, “for some time, as you know, I have doubted
the existence of a God; but I will tell you now that my doubts on that
point are settled. Wherever and whatever he may be, there surely is
one; for I am convinced that no one could suffer as you do without
some reality to cause it.”
The unexpected words brought a ray of comfort; she lifted her poor
pale face to his with a look of pitiful longing. “Then, John,” she
said, “don’t you think he must know how dreadful the suffering is, and
that he will tell me some day where to find him?”
The tears—a man’s rare tears—sprang to John Howson’s eyes. “I surely
think he will, Rose,” he answered; and he stooped and kissed her with
great compassion. His love was the only comfort Rose had now, and at
times she found no comfort even in that.
Fanny Mason came to see her in the afternoon. People did not come to
the house as freely as they used to come; Rose showed too plainly that
she did not care to see them. But Fanny had been an intimate family
friend always; the affection between the two girls was more like that
of relatives than of friends. Fanny was not at all intellectual, had
never known a shadow of doubt; she ran in to chat and gossip, not
waiting for replies, and brought a sense of refreshment, or at least
of change, to Rose’s burdened mind.
“To-morrow is Ascension Day,” she said. “The Episcopalians are going
to have service and trim their church beautifully—white lilacs and
wistaria and lilies of the valley and bunches of forget-me-not. It
will be lovely; wouldn’t you like to see it?”
“I am tired and sick of prettiness and pettiness,” Rose said.
“Rose Howson! What next? You used to say that the beautiful satisfied
you entirely.”
“I thought it did,” Rose answered sadly. “But where is it? All at once
it failed me. Now I see a death’s-head behind all.”
“Rose! Not really?”
Rose almost smiled at Fanny’s scared face. “No, Fanny; not literally,
at least. Once, though, I did really see it in the very centre of
loveliness, and I cannot forget.”
“I wish you could forget,” Fanny said pityingly. “I wish we could be
little girls once more, Rose.”
“No, no!” Rose answered, shuddering. “Not to live all these years over
again. But, O Fanny! if I only could forget for ever so short a
while!”
The strained, wild passion of her look and manner frightened Fanny;
she tried to return to her former chatty lightness. “I’ll tell you
what you had better do,” she said, “since you are tired of the
beautiful. The Catholics are going to keep Ascension Day too. What a
queer set they are! Do you know that they call this the month of Mary,
and in their hall her image is dressed in lace and flowers, with
candles burning around it all day long? It is not so pretty there, I
assure you. Suppose you try that.” Then laughing as if she had
suggested the most absurd of absurdities, Fanny went away.
The dark cloud of depression which had come upon Rose that morning,
and had lifted slightly at John’s words, shadowed her now more densely
than ever. She looked about the room which John’s taste and hers had
made so fair. How everything palled upon her! What good was it to try
to make life as beautiful as possible, if even in life she ceased to
care for the beautiful? The strong, the true, the lasting, was what
she needed now.
It seemed to her that there was no hope anywhere. She fled out into
the open air, and walked fast to escape her haunting thoughts; but
there was no escape from self. Passing the hall where the Catholics
had services, she saw an old woman climbing the steps, remembered
Fanny’s words, and followed her. “Since the beautiful fails me,” she
thought with a bitter smile, “I will look at what is not beautiful.”
It was a very dingy hall, and uninviting. On the side walls were poor
wood-cuts representing the scenes of the Passion. On a plain white
wood altar a lamp was burning. Near by hung a colored print of the
Saviour, but as Rose had never seen him portrayed before—with his
Heart exposed upon his breast, and great blood-drops falling from it.
Rose shrank from the sight; it displeased her. Close by the altar-rail
was a highly-colored and gaudily-decorated statue of the Blessed
Virgin, with flowers distastefully arranged about it. The old woman
had fallen on her knees before it, and was praying. Rose wondered at
her.
But she was strangely conscious of a peculiar quiet in the place; it
soothed her. She sat down on one of the benches, and took up a book
lying there. _The Key of Heaven_ it was called; a very soiled and worn
book it was; she hardly liked to touch it. It opened at the Apostles’
Creed. “He ascended into heaven,” she read.
Who was “he”? Jesus Christ—God! So Catholics believed as well as Mr.
Gray; in this they were agreed. But, oh! what difference did it make?
God and heaven were so very far away—if indeed there were a heaven
anywhere—that who on earth could tell anything about them? She looked
up wearily from the book; again her eyes met the poor print of the
Sacred Heart, the poor statue of the holy Mother. Like a flash the
thought came into her mind, “Jesus Christ—God—ascended into heaven,
and he had a heart like ours, and he had a mother.”
It was not as if she were uttering a belief—whether Jesus Christ was
God she did not know; she was not even thinking about it then. But it
was as if she had grasped a link in a mighty chain, which, if one
other link could be supplied, would solve and settle all doubt for
ever. Over and over she said the words, fearing to lose or forget
them: “Jesus Christ—God—ascended into heaven, and he had a heart like
ours, and he had a mother.” If this was true, how God in heaven must
pity her, how he must love her!
And suddenly the tears were falling on Rose’s cheeks. When she had
wept last she could not tell; certainly not since Ellen Lawton’s
death, though she had often craved the relief of tears. Now they fell
softly and plenteously, while she kept repeating the strange formula
with a keen sense that it soothed her and she was resting; and oh! she
had been so tired. A mother, a mother—how very sweet it must be to
have a mother! And a God with a heart like ours, a heart that could be
wounded and bleed and suffer sorely; oh! how one must love a God like
that.
“John,” she said abruptly, when they were sitting by the study-lamp
after tea, “what are Catholics? I mean, what do you know about them?”
“Not much of anything,” he answered in some surprise, “except as one
is always coming upon them in history and the papers. Why?”
“What makes them different from Protestants? Aren’t you always coming
upon them too?”
“Not in the same way, child. You know that Protestants are not so—so
obtrusive.”
“But why, John? I want to know about them.”
There was an animation in her manner which reminded him of old times;
he saw that she was really in earnest, and set himself to answer her
in his straightforward, kindly way, glad to notice any change for the
better in her tone of mind.
“I have never thought very much about them, Rose,” he said; “but every
general reader must come in contact with them somehow, even if, like
me, he has not had personal acquaintance with them in society. Of
course you know the distinguishing features of confession and
transubstantiation, the papacy, the worship of saints and relics,
prayer for the dead.”
“Are you sure they are all wrong?”
“Not at all. We were brought up to think them wrong, but I have never
looked so deeply into the matter as to make such an assertion on my
own judgment; it never has seemed worth while. However, if you care
for my opinion, I will tell you what, from all I have read and heard,
presents itself to my mind as the peculiar and fatal mark of
Catholicism. It is its claim of absolute authority over the bodies and
minds and souls of men—a claim which reached its height of tyranny in
the declaration of the infallibility of the pope.”
“What does that mean, John?”
“Why, that whatever the pope may say—no matter who he is, remember, if
he is only a pope—that thing you and I and every one must believe to
be right. However, I mean to be just to all sects. If I have the idea
rightly, their exact claim is this: that the pope, as pope, speaking
to the whole church as the Head of the Church, cannot be mistaken,
simply because God will not permit him to be. Do you understand?”
She was sitting in the full light of the lamp. He noticed the quiet,
thoughtful look upon her face; it made him very happy to see it there.
“John,” she said after a minute’s pause, “why should it not be?”
“What, Rose?”
“I mean, if there is a God Almighty, why could he not keep a man from
error in teaching, just as easily as he could make a man in the first
place?”
“Really,” said John with an amused smile at what he thought her
brightness, “I don’t see but that he could; that is, if you give up
the idea that we are free agents.”
“But do they say he is not generally a free agent?” Rose asked, like
one thinking out a problem. “Only, when God wants to use him to teach
the church, he will not let him teach a lie. _Why_ should not an
Almighty God do that? O John! look here.”
She hurried to the bookcase, brought back and opened the _Book of
Common Prayer_. “I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic
Church,” she read. “Then there are those who do really believe it; who
really think that now—to-day—there is a church where God speaks
plainly and unmistakably, and always will speak so, and there can be
no error?”
“Yes, Rose.”
Was it only the glow of the lamplight shining upon her face? Did his
eyes deceive him, or was that creature, radiant with happiness and a
bloom of beauty never witnessed there before—was this his poor and
fading Rose of that very noon? Once in his life he had heard a child
laugh who had been suddenly and entirely released from excruciating
pain—a low, sweet laugh most exquisite to hear in the sense it gave of
indescribable relief. Such a laugh he heard now from Rose’s lips,
which he had almost feared would never so much as smile again.
“John,” she said exultingly, “I have it! There is a Heavenly
Father—God—and he made us all. And there is Jesus Christ—God—who
ascended into heaven, and he had a heart like ours, and he had a
mother. And there is a Holy Ghost—God—who is with the church, and so
she _cannot_ lie. And how those three are one, and how the blood of
Christ saves us, we may never be able to explain; but, if there is a
God, he will never let his church tell lies or err or make mistakes,
and whatever his church says that we ought to believe, whether we
understand it or not. And only Catholics claim an infallible voice.
John, I am going to try it. I shall speak to the priest to-morrow.”
“You are your own mistress, Rose,” he said gravely. “You can do as you
please. I only warn you that after that one act of your own choice,
you must give up your reason and will to another.”
The color flashed more brightly in her cheeks. He was amazed as he
looked at her; once again the fire was in her eyes, and the brilliant
intellect shone in the face that had been dulled so long.
“I shall give up my reason and my will to God,” she said. “It is he
who will speak to me, without erring and without lying. I do not
expect to be as wise as my Creator, and I am sure I shall be none the
worse for it when he who is wisdom itself teaches me. It is God that I
am talking about, John, and not a mere man that can make mistakes. I
am quite content to yield my intellect and my will to him.”
And then, as suddenly as it had come, the glow faded from her face;
she was kneeling down beside him with that look of anguish in her eyes
which for so many long weeks had wrung his heart with pity. “You know
I have suffered,” she said, “but, John, it is only the outside you
have seen; you can’t tell what it has been within. And now a great
light is coming—I am sure of it. It is not the love of beauty or
anything I used to crave. It is the thing I need and we all need;
something stronger than we are: something that cannot by any
possibility teach us a lie; something that cannot by any possibility
err; something plain to hear and plain to see—infallible! I have not
got it yet; I am only on my way to it. If it was in your power to stop
me, would you do it?”
“I do not understand you, Rose,” he answered thoughtfully, “nor do I
entirely follow your train of reasoning. Still, I grant that for a
temperament such as yours has of late disclosed itself to be there is
comfort in what you think you see. No, I would not say a word to stop
you, my poor child! It goes against the grain to think of one of us
becoming a Catholic; but if anything will help you, I shall bless the
hand that brings relief.”
She looked full in his face with a look of grave surprise. “I did not
think that of you,” she said; “you always have seemed so honest. Don’t
you know that nothing in heaven or earth can satisfy me, unless it is
the _truth_? No shams, no half-way things, but something like rock
that will never fail. I did not think that of you, John!”
John sat alone and puzzled over her words that night. “I always have
to puzzle things out,” he said. “They never come to me like a flash,
as they do to Rose. Stop, though! I am wrong there. She has been
months in getting at it, and they were months that almost killed her.
Why was it?”
Plainly enough he saw at last why it was. God, the soul,
eternity—those things which are invisible—were more real to Rose than
the visible things. And should they not be? He knew very well that he
would be stung to the quick to be told that his body—his material,
tangible, lower nature—had the upper hand in his life. No, his reason,
his intellect—something intangible and invisible anyhow, by whatever
name you named it—was the governing power. And if so, then why should
not One invisible and intangible be the ruler of that, and claim from
him more than a merely blameless life and an honest fame; demand
submission of his will and reason and thought? John shook his head
ruefully; the idea struck home; he did not like it, but there it was.
The next day Rose quietly laid before him her little Catechism, open
at the very first section, and John read this:
“_Question._ _Who made you?_
“_Answer._ GOD.
“_Q._ Why did he make you?
“_A._ That I might know him, love him, and serve him in this
world, and be happy with him for ever in the next.
“_Q._ To whose likeness did he make you?
“_A._ To his own image and likeness.
“_Q._ Is this likeness in your body or in your soul?
“_A._ In my soul.
“_Q._ In what is your soul like to God?
“_A._ Because my soul is a spirit endowed with understanding
and free will, and is immortal—that is to say, can never
die.
“_Q._ In what else is your soul like to God?
“_A._ Because as in God there are three persons and one God,
so in man there is one soul and three powers.
“_Q._ Which are the three powers?
“_A._ Will, memory, and understanding.
“_Q._ Which must we take most care of, our body or our soul?
“_A._ Of our soul.
“_Q._ Why so?
“_A._ Because, ‘What doth it profit a man if he gain the
whole world and lose his own soul?’
“_Q._ What must we do to save our soul?
“_A._ We must worship God by faith, hope, and charity; that
is, we must believe in him, hope in him, and love him with
all our heart.
“_Q._ How shall we know the things which we are to believe?
“_A._ From the Catholic Church of God, which he has
established by innumerable miracles, and illustrated by the
lives and deaths of innumerable saints.”
“John,” said Rose steadily, “be honest with God.”
* * * * *
Professor Howson is a name which no one hears now, though it was once
supposed that it would rank among those of New England’s noblest
scholars. But John Howson teaches still. People had often said of him
that he would never marry; that his books and his sister were enough
for him. He never did marry; but it was God and the church of God that
satisfied him. Once, in a great city, an old friend of his collegiate
days, who had not heard of him for years, met him face to face in his
dress of a religious, and stopped him in utter amazement.
“John Howson! You are unmistakable, but how is this? I was told of
your change, but did not know it had gone so far. Are not your Puritan
ancestors groaning in their shrouds, man, because of such doings?”
The priest returned a courteous answer, and would have turned to other
themes, but his friend persisted. Then, not with the old outspoken
frankness as of one who feared none, but instead, thoughtfully and
humbly as in the very fear of God, there came this reply:
“Once I matched my mind with the mind of God, and judged him, and
thought his will to be of no account. It was a great sin, and he saved
me from it. After that I could only say, as another in like case once
said, ‘I cannot give God less than all.’”
“A great sin?” his friend repeated. “I do not understand that.”
He saw a shade of peculiar awe creep over the countenance before him.
“And is it no sin,” John Howson asked in a deep voice, “to hear said
in the face of God that there is no God? to have counted your own
judgment superior to his? to have given God the lie? One who is now of
the mightiest saints thought that he did God service while he fought
against him, and afterward he named himself the chief of sinners. But
I did not so much as think of the service of God at all in matters of
belief.”
“I can’t see the fault in that,” his friend said wonderingly. “If it
was murder you had on your conscience, I might sympathize with you;
but this!”
“You are fresh from Massachusetts,” said Father Howson, “and it is
years since I was there. Do they still count the mind as nobler than
the body, and the intellect as among their highest gifts?”
“Yes,” was the proud reply.
“Some time,” returned Father Howson with deep meaning in his tone, “we
all shall have to learn that God judges sin of the mind by as terrible
a judgment as sin of the body, and that he demands his gifts with
usury. Believe me, it is better to forestall that judgment, and to
meet that demand here than hereafter.”
And Rose? Long since she learned to say, “I have loved, O Lord, the
beauty of thy house; and the place where thy glory dwelleth.” Long
since she learned that there is One invisible who is fairer than any
child of man, and to him she gave the heart which a wealth of
intellectual and earthly loveliness had failed to satisfy. She has
learned that there is a nobler Blood than any that the world can
boast; His place is with the nobility of an eternal kingdom, whose
peculiar marks of honor are poverty, and self-renunciation, and an
utter lowliness of obedience, whereby every faculty of one’s nature is
brought with a glad free-will into the obedience of Christ. One day
the daughter of the Puritans heard another voice than theirs call her
by that tender name: “Hearken, O daughter, and see, and incline thy
ear: and forget thy people and thy father’s house. And the King shall
greatly desire thy beauty: for he is thy Lord God.” Once before, but
after sore struggle and heartrending suffering, she had heard that
voice. Hearing it again, she rose up joyfully and followed it, as
then, without delay.
PRUSSIA AND THE CHURCH.
III.
We have already alluded to that feature in the recent ecclesiastical
legislation of Prussia which gives to the people the right to choose
their pastors, and we have also seen how nobly the Catholics of
Germany have thwarted this unholy attempt to create dissension and
discord in the church. When it could no longer be doubted that the
German bishops were immovable in their allegiance to the pope, Prussia
sought, by holding out every possible inducement to apostasy, to
create disunion between the priests and the bishops; but in this, too,
she met with signal defeat. Nothing, therefore, remained to be done,
but to devise measures whereby the administration of ecclesiastical
affairs would be placed exclusively in the hands of the laity; since
the breaking of the bonds which unite church and state would not have
as a result that weakening of ecclesiastical power which is so
ardently desired. This Professor Friedberg, in his _German Empire and
the Catholic Church_, expressly states in the following words:
“If the government were to adhere to the plan of a total
separation of church and state, what would be the
consequence? Would the bishops lose their authority because
the state no longer recognized it? Would the parochial
system be broken up if unsupported by the state? In a word,
would the church lose any of her power? It would argue an
absolute want of perception and a total ignorance of
Catholic history to affirm that she would. The stream which
for centuries has flowed in its own channel does not run dry
because its course is obstructed. It only overflows and
floods the country. To continue the metaphor, we must first
seek with all care to draw off the waters, and to lead them
into pools and reservoirs, where what remains will readily
evaporate.”
The Protestants of Prussia are opposed to the separation of church and
state, because they are well aware that in the present condition of
religious opinion in Germany the rationalists and socialists would at
once get control of most of the parishes of the Evangelical church, if
it were deprived of the support of the government; and, on the other
hand, both they and the infidels are persuaded that the Catholic
Church is quite able to maintain herself, and even to wax strong,
without any help from the temporal power.
“One thing,” says the _Edinburgh Review_, “the state is
quite at liberty to do. The state is not bound to pay or
maintain churches or sects which it does not approve.
Indeed, if these conditions are annexed to the acceptance of
state payment, the church herself would do well to reject
the terms. But will Prince Bismarck withdraw the stipend and
set the church free? Nothing of the kind. There is no
freedom of religious orders or communities in Prussia. The
whole spirit of these laws is to make every form of
religious belief and organization as subservient to the
state as a Prussian recruit is to the rattan of a corporal.
That we abhor and denounce as an intolerable oppression; and
it is only by the strangest perversion of judgment that any
Englishman can have imagined that the cause of true
religious liberty was identical with the policy of Prince
Bismarck.”[37]
To consent to a separation of church and state would be a recognition
of the independent existence of the church, which Prussia holds to be
contrary to the true theory of the constitution of human society in
relation to government and religion. This theory is that man exists
for the state, to which he owes his supreme and undivided allegiance;
whose duty it is to train and govern him for its own service alike in
peace and war. All the interests of society, therefore, material,
political, educational, and religious, must be subjected to the state,
independently of which no organization of any kind ought to be
permitted to exist. And in fact the whole spirit of the recent
ecclesiastical legislation of Prussia is in perfect consonance with
this theory. The Falck Laws deny to the church the right to educate
her priests, to decide as to their fitness for the care of souls, to
appoint them to or remove them from office; in a word, the right to
administer her own affairs, and consequently to exist at all as an
organization separate from the state.
It can hardly surprise us that the attempt should have been made to
prove that this is in accordance with the teachings of the New
Testament.
“The New Testament,” says the _British Quarterly_, “requires
that the Christian shall be a loyal subject of the
government under which he lives. ‘Let every soul be subject
unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God;
the powers that be are ordained of God: whosoever therefore
resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God.’”[38]
After quoting several texts from the Epistles of St. Paul, of the same
general import, the writer in the _British Quarterly_ continues:
“Now, it is impossible to find in the New Testament any
injunctions of obedience to organized ecclesiastical power,
like those here given of obedience to the civil government.
It is not ecclesiastical authority, nor a corporate
ecclesiastical institution, but the personal God, and the
individual conscience in its direct personal relations with
God, which is set over against an unrighteous demand of the
civil authority in the crucial motto of Peter, ‘We ought to
obey God rather than men,’ and in the teaching of Christ,
‘Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s, and unto
God the things which are God’s.’ Of conscience as an
ecclesiastical corporation, or of conscience as an imputed
or vicarious faculty, determined and exercised by one for
another, the ethics of the New Testament have no
knowledge.”[39]
It is hard to realize the ignorance or the bad faith of a man who is
capable of making such statements as these. Let us take the last words
of the gospel of St. Matthew: “And Jesus coming, spoke to them,
saying: All power is given to me in heaven and in earth. Going,
therefore, teach ye all nations, … teaching them to observe all things
whatsoever I have commanded you; and, behold, I am with you all days,
even to the consummation of the world.” Here surely is an organized
body of men, receiving from Christ himself the divine command to teach
all the nations of the earth their religious faith and duties, which
necessarily carries with it the right to exact obedience. But, lest
there be any room for doubt, let us hear Christ himself: “He that
heareth you, heareth me: and he that despiseth you despiseth me. And
he that despiseth me, despiseth him that sent me.”[40]
Again: “And if he will not hear the church, let him be to thee as the
heathen and the publican. Amen I say to you, whatsoever you shall bind
upon earth, shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever you shall
loose upon earth, shall be loosed also in heaven.”[41]
When Peter and John were brought into court and “charged not to speak
at all, nor teach in the name of Jesus,” they should have submitted at
once, upon the theory that the state has the right to exact supreme
and undivided allegiance; but they appealed to their divine
commission, just as the bishops of Germany do to-day, and answered,
“We cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.”[42]
And in the council at Jerusalem, “an ecclesiastical corporation”
surely, the apostles say: “For it hath seemed good to the Holy Ghost,
and to us, to lay no further burden upon you than these necessary
things”;[43] plainly indicating and using their right to impose
commands and exact obedience. But enough of this. The persecutors of
the church to-day are not at all concerned about the teachings of the
New Testament. The attempt, however, to make it appear that only
Catholics protest against the doctrine of absolute and undivided
allegiance to the state is wholly unjustifiable. There is no
Protestant sect in England or the United States which would submit to
the intervention of the government in its spiritual life and internal
discipline. Would the Methodists, or the Baptists, or the
Presbyterians permit the state to decide what kind of education their
ministers are to receive, or to determine whether they are capable of
properly discharging their spiritual duties, or to keep in office by
force those whom the church had cast off? They would go out to pray on
the hillside and by the river banks rather than submit to such
tyranny.
Is not the right of revolution, which in our day, especially outside
of the Catholic Church, is held to be divine, based upon the principle
of divided allegiance? Practically it is impossible to distinguish
between loyalty to the government and loyalty to the state; and no man
in this age thinks of questioning the right of rebellion against a
tyrannical government. This divided allegiance marks the radical
difference between Christian and pagan civilization. Before Christ
there was no divided allegiance, because the individual was absorbed
by the state, and nothing could have wrested mankind from this bondage
but a great spiritual organization such as the Catholic Church; and
this, we believe, is generally admitted by our adversaries. They fail
to perceive, however, that there is no other institution than the
Catholic Church which has the power to prevent the state from again
absorbing the individual and destroying all civil and political
liberty. If the church could be broken up into national
establishments, and the entire control of education handed over to the
state, the bringing all men to the servile temper which characterizes
the Russians and Protestant Prussians would be only a question of
time. Many will be inclined to hold that the general freedom, and even
license, of thought of our time would be a sufficient protection
against any such danger.
A little reflection, however, will suffice to dispel this illusion. No
number of individuals, unless they are organized, can successfully
oppose tyranny; and mere speculations or opinions as to the abstract
right of resistance can not stop the march of the state toward
absolutism. The most despotic states have often encouraged the most
unbounded freedom of thought, and we need not go beyond Prussia for an
example. In no country in the world has there been more of what is
called free-thinking, nor has any government been more tolerant of
wild theories and extravagant speculations; and yet the free-thinkers
and _illuminati_ have done nothing to promote the growth of free
institutions or to encourage civil or religious liberty. They are
without unity or organization or programme. Many of them to-day are
the strongest supporters of Bismarckian despotism. Even in 1848 they
succeeded only in getting up a mob and evaporating in wild talk.
The divine right of resistance to tyranny would have no sanction or
efficacy if it were not kept living in the hearts of men by
supernatural religion.
This is thoroughly understood by the advocates of absolutism, who do
not trouble themselves about doctrines of any kind, except when they
are upheld by organizations, and for this reason all their efforts are
directed to the destruction of the organic unity of the church. Had
Prince Bismarck succeeded in his attempt to get the Catholic
congregations which have been deprived of their priests to elect
pastors for themselves, there would have been but another step to open
schism, which would have inevitably resulted in favor of Old
Catholicism. But, as we have seen, out of more than a hundred
parishes, not one has lent itself to the iniquitous designs of the
enemies of the church.
Another striking example of the perfect unanimity of thought and
action which in Prussia exists between priests and people was given
last year when the so-called State-Catholics tried to get up a protest
against the encyclical letter of the Pope, in which he declared that
the May Laws were not binding upon the consciences of Catholics. All
the liberal papers of Germany were loud in praise of this project,
which presented the fairest opportunity to Catholic government
officials to curry favor by showing their acceptance of the Falck
laws; and yet, in spite of every effort that was made, only about a
thousand signatures were obtained, most of which were found outside of
the eight millions of Prussian Catholics.
Mr. Gladstone, in his article on the “Speeches of Pope Pius IX.,”[44]
says of the Catholic clergy that they “are more and more an army, a
police, a caste; further and further from the Christian Commons, but
nearer to one another and in closer subservience to the pope.” However
near the Catholic clergy may be to one another, it certainly shows a
great lack of power to see things as they are to maintain that they
are losing the hold which more than any other class of men they have
always had on the hearts of the people. The persecution in Germany has
shown there that inseparable union of priest and people which is
to-day as universal as the life of the church. Had there existed any
seed of discord, it certainly would have sprung up and flourished in
Prussia during the last four or five years.
What circumstances could have been more favorable to such development
than those created by the Old Catholics in league with Bismarck? The
unprecedented victories over Austria and France had set all Germany
wild with enthusiasm. “Deutschland über alles, über alles in der
Welt,” was the refrain of every song. On the other hand, many
Catholics, especially in Germany, had been prejudiced and somewhat
soured by the false interpretations which were everywhere put on the
dogma of papal infallibility. Just at this moment Dr. Döllinger, whose
reputation was greater than that of any other German theologian,
announced his separation from the church, and at once there gathered
around him a party of dissatisfied or suspended priests and
rationalistic laymen. Reinkens was made bishop, and the Emperor of
Germany publicly prayed that the “certainly correct conviction of the
_Hochwürdiger Herr Bischof_ might win ground more and more.” Fortune
smiled upon the new religion and everything seemed to promise it the
brightest future. What has been the result? In a population of eight
millions of Catholics this sect, with the aid of the state, German
enthusiasm, and the whole liberal press, has been able to gather only
about six thousand adherents; and they are without zeal, without
doctrinal or moral unity, having as yet not even dared to define their
position towards the Pope. Dr. Döllinger himself has lost interest in
the movement, and its most sanguine friends have yielded to
despondency. Old Catholicism was, in fact, impossible from the
beginning. But two roads open before those who to-day go forth from
the fold of the church: the one leads to the Babel and decomposition
of Protestant sectarianism, the other to the unbelief of scientific
naturalism.
To declare that Christianity is lying disjointed, in shattered
fragments, and yet to pretend that human hands, with paste and glue,
out of these broken pieces can remake the heavenly vase once filled
with God’s spirit of faith, hope, and love, is an idle fancy. Into
this patchwork no divine life will come; men will not believe in it,
nor will it inspire enthusiasm or the heroic courage of martyrdom.
Therefore they who leave the church, their native soil, have indeed
all the world before them, and yet no place where they can find rest
for their souls.
What the religious policy of the Prussian Liberals is, Herr von
Kirchmann, to whom in a previous article we introduced our readers,
informs us in the following words:
“The majority of the Liberal representatives are
highly-educated men who have fallen out with the Christian
churches, because they no longer accept their creed, and
therefore hold as a principle that freedom of conscience for
the individual is abundantly sufficient to satisfy the
religious wants of the people. At best, they would consent
to the existence of congregations; any organization beyond
this they consider not only unnecessary but hurtful.”
This, then, is the Liberal programme: the individual shall have
perfect freedom to believe, as he pleases, in God or the devil; but
there shall be no ecclesiastical organization, unless a kind of
congregationalism, which, having neither unity nor strength, can be
easily rendered harmless by being placed under police supervision.
These men of culture, as Herr von Kirchmann says, have fallen out with
all the churches; and they are liberal enough to be willing to do
everything in their power to make it impossible that any of them
should exist at all, since without organic unity of some kind there
can be no church, as there can be no state.
But let us hear what Herr von Kirchmann has to remark upon this
subject.
“This view,” he says, “may satisfy those who have reached
the high degree of culture of the Liberals; but those who
take it utterly ignore the religious wants of the middle and
lower classes, and fail to perceive the yearning,
inseparable from all religious feeling, for association with
persons of like sentiments, in order, through public
worship, to obtain the strength and contentment after which
this fundamental craving of the human heart longs.”
To the existence of this feeling, and its yearning for the largest
possible association, the history of all Christian peoples, down even
to the present day, bears witness; for this reason nowhere have men
been satisfied with the freedom of the individual, but have ever
demanded a church with acknowledged rights and the privilege of free
intercommunion.
“To the dangers which would threaten society if religious
associations should be broken up, and faith left to the whim
of individuals, these highly cultivated men give no heed,
because they do not themselves feel the need of such
support; but they forget that their security, the very
possibility, indeed, of reaching the point at which they
stand, rests upon the power of the church over the masses;
and should they destroy this by allowing the congregations
to break up into atoms, leaving the Christian creed to be
fashioned by passion and ever-varying interests, according
to the fancy of each and every one, nothing would remain but
the brute force of the state, which, without the aid of the
internal dispositions of the people, cannot save society
from complete dissolution.”[45]
Herr von Kirchmann, then, adds his testimony to that of many other
observers who, though they do not believe in the divine origin and
truth of the Christian religion, yet hold that its acceptance by the
masses as a system of belief, received on the authority of a church,
is essential to the preservation and permanence of our civilization.
This is a subject to which we Americans might with great profit give
our thoughts.
As Emerson, who is probably our most characteristic thinker, has
declared that he would write over the portal of the Temple of
Philosophy WHIM, American Protestantism seems more and more inclined
to accept this as the only satisfactory, or indeed possible,
shibboleth in religion. The multiplication of sects holding
conflicting creeds, while it has weakened faith in all religious
doctrines, has helped on the natural tendency of Protestantism to
throw men back upon their own feelings or fancies for their faith.
This, of course, results in the breaking up even of congregations into
atoms of individualism, and will, if not counteracted, necessarily
destroy our character as a Christian people; and for us it is needless
to say Christianity is the only possible religion.
Our statesmen—politicians may be the more proper word—though not
irreligious, lack grasp of mind and depth of view, else they could not
fail to perceive, however little they may sympathize with the
doctrines or what they conceive to be the social tendencies of the
Catholic Church, that just such a strong and conservative Christian
organism as she is, is for us an indispensable political requirement.
That none of the leading minds of the country should have taken this
view is a sad evidence of want of intellectual power or of moral
courage. The most that any of them feel authorized in saying in our
favor is that a country which tolerates free-love, Mormonism, and the
joss-house of the Chinaman ought not, if consistency be a virtue, to
persecute Catholics. In spite of appearances which mislead superficial
observers, we are the most secular people in the world. No other
people is so ready to sacrifice religious to material interests; no
other people has ever to an equal extent banished all religious
instruction from its national education; no other people has ever
taken such a worldly view of its religion. The supernatural in
religion is lost sight of by us, and we value it chiefly for its
social and æsthetic power. The popular creed is that religion is
something which favors republicanism, promotes the exploitation of the
material resources of the globe, softens manners, and makes life
comfortable.
The proposition to tax church property shows that a large portion
of the American people have ceased to believe in religion as a
moral and social power. A church is like a bank or theatre or
coal-mine—something which concerns only those who have stock in it,
and has nothing whatever to do with the public welfare. The
school-house occupies quite other ground. The country is interested in
having all its citizens intelligent; this is for the general good; but
whether they believe in God or the soul is a matter of profound
indifference, unless, possibly, to themselves, since this can in no
way affect the progress or civilization of the American people. This
is evidently the only possible philosophy for those who would tax
church property. The popular contempt for theology encouraged by
nearly all Protestant ministers is another evidence of the tendency to
religious disintegration. There is but little danger that any church
will ever get a controlling influence in the national life of this
country; our peril lies in the opposite direction; and that so few of
those who think should see this is to us the saddest sign of the
times; but those who do recognize it cannot help knowing that the
Catholic Church is the strongest bulwark against this flood-tide.
The social dangers of an open persecution of the Catholic Church are
most clearly seen in Prussia to-day. Since the German chancellor
entered upon his present course of violence five bishops and fifteen
thousand priests have been imprisoned or fined, and about the same
number of laymen have suffered for daring to speak unfavorably of
these proceedings. Never before, probably, have the police been so
generally or constantly employed in arresting men who are loved and
venerated by the people, and whose only crime is fidelity to
conscience. The inevitable consequence of this is that the officers of
the government come to be looked upon, not as the ministers of
justice, but as the agents of tyranny and oppression, which must, of
course, weaken respect for authority. These coercive measures, from
the nature of things, tend only to confirm the Catholics in their
conscientious convictions, and the government is thereby instigated to
harsher methods of dealing with this passive resistance. The number of
confessors of the faith increases, the enthusiasm and devotion of the
people are heightened, and it becomes an honor and a glory to be made
a victim of tyranny. The feeling of disgrace which is attached to the
penalties for violation of law is more efficacious in repressing crime
than the suffering which is inflicted; but this feeling is destroyed,
or rather changed, into one of an opposite character in the minds of
the people when they behold their venerated bishops and much-loved
priests dragged to prison for saying Mass or administering the
sacraments. No amount of reasoning, no refinement of logic, can ever
convince them that there can be anything criminal in the performance
of these sacred functions. In this way the ignominy which in the
public mind follows conviction for crime is wiped away, and the
sacredness of the law itself endangered.
This alone is sufficient to show how blind and thoughtless Prince
Bismarck has been in making war upon the Catholic Church just at the
moment when wise counsels would have led him to seek to add the
strength of reverence and respect to the enthusiasm with which the
creation of the new empire had been hailed. The spoilt child of
success, wounded pride made him mad. How serviceable he might have
found the moral support of the Catholic clergy Herr von Kirchmann has
informed him.
“I myself,” he says, “from 1849 to 1866, with the exception
of some intervals, lived in Upper Silesia, a wholly Catholic
province, and, as the president of the Criminal Senate of a
Court of Appeals, had the fullest opportunity to study the
moral and religious state of the people, which in nothing is
so truly seen as in those circumstances out of which spring
offences against the law. Now, although this province of
more than a million of men was thoroughly Catholic and
entirely in the hands of the clergy; although the school
system was still very imperfect, and the population, with
the exception of the landowners and the inhabitants of the
large cities, not speaking the German language, was thereby
deprived of culture and of intercourse with the German
provinces, yet can I unhesitatingly affirm that the moral
condition of the people was in no way worse than in Saxony
or the Margravate where formerly I held similar official
positions. The number of crimes was rather less, the
security of person and of property greater, and the
relations between the different classes of society far more
peaceable and friendly than in the provinces to which I have
just made allusion. The socage and heavy taxes pressed hard
upon the peasantry; nevertheless in 1848 insurrections
against the landlords were not more frequent here than
elsewhere. It was unquestionably the powerful influence of
the clergy which, in spite of so many obstacles, gave to the
people their moral character, and produced the general
contentment and obedience which reflected the greatest honor
upon the whole population. The vice of drunkenness, through
the agency of temperance societies established solely by the
priests, had been in an almost marvellous manner rooted out
from among the people, and the general welfare made manifest
progress. By means of my official and political position I
had the opportunity to make the acquaintance of a large
number of the pastors and curates, and still to-day I recall
with pleasure my intercourse with these men, for the most
part cultivated, but above all distinguished by their
thorough gentleness of character. They were firm in
maintaining the rights of their church, they were filled
with the excellence of their mission, but they never thought
of thwarting the civil authorities; on the contrary, they
found in the clergy a great and efficacious support, so that
this province needed fewer protective and executive
officials than others.”[46]
No enlightened and fair government has anything to fear from the
influence of men who are as firm in upholding the authority of the
state as they are in asserting their own liberty of conscience; who
will neither do wrong nor tamely submit to it. If, in the social,
religious, and political crisis through which the nations of
Christendom are passing, sound reason is ultimately to prevail and
civilization is to be preserved, the necessity of an institution like
the Catholic Church will come to be recognized by all who are capable
of serious thought. The divided allegiance, the maintenance of the
supremacy of conscience, is essential to the preservation of the
principle of authority in society. If it were possible to nationalize
religion by placing all churches under state control, the authority of
the state would necessarily become that of brute force, and would in
consequence be deprived of its sacredness. The respect of Christian
nations for the civil power is a religious sentiment; and if the
church could cease to be, there would be a radical revolution in the
attitude of the people toward the state. In Europe even now, in
consequence of the progress of unbelief, respect for authority and the
duty of obedience have been so far destroyed in the minds and hearts
of the masses that government is possible only with the support of
immense standing armies, which help on the social dissolution; and
with us things would be in a still worse condition, were it not that
the vast undeveloped resources of the country draw off the energies
which else would be fatal to public order. Our strength and security
are rather in our physical surroundings than in our moral resources.
Our greatest moral force, during the century of our existence, has
been the universal veneration of the people for the Constitution,
which was regarded with a kind of religious reverence; but this
element of strength is fast wasting away and will not pass over as a
vital power into the second century of our life. The criticisms, the
amendments, the patchings, which the Constitution has been made to
suffer, have, more than civil strife, debased it to the common level
of profane parchments and robbed it of the consecration which it had
received in the hearts of the people The change which has taken place,
though it have something of the nature of growth and development, is
yet, unquestionably, more a breaking down and dissevering. The
Catholic Church, by the reverence which she inspires for institutions,
is, and in the future will be yet more, the powerful ally of those who
will stand by the Constitution as our fathers made it.
Our statesmen, we know, are in the habit of looking elsewhere for the
means which are to give permanence to our free institutions. The
theory now most in favor is that universal education is the surest
safeguard of liberty, and it is upon this more than upon anything else
that we, as a people, rely for the perpetuity of our form of
government. This hope, we cannot but think, is based upon an erroneous
opinion of the necessary tendency of intellectual culture; which is to
increase the spirit of criticism, and consequently, by dissatisfying
the mind with what is, to direct it continually to new experiments,
with the hope of finding something better. Now, though this may be
well enough in the realms of speculation, and may be a great help to
the progress of science, it most assuredly does not tend either to
beget or to foster reverence for existing institutions of any kind;
and this same mental habit which has already made American
Protestantism so fragmentary and contradictory will beyond doubt
weaken and, unless counteracted, destroy the unity of our political
life. This is a question which does not concern us alone; with it is
bound up the future of the human race. If the American experiment of
government by the people fails, all hope of such government perishes.
If we allow our personal prejudices to warp our judgment in a matter
so catholic and all-important, no further evidence of our unfitness
for the great mission which God seems to have assigned us is needed.
Unfortunately, we are at the mercy of politicians for whom all other
questions than the present success of party have no interest, and who
therefore flatter the passions of the people instead of seeking to
enlighten them; and the insane hatred and fear of the church which the
Protestant masses have inherited from the Old World prevents them from
seeing what a source of strength and bond of union is her strong and
firmly-knit organism in a social state like ours, in which there are
so many elements of dissolution and disintegration.
Herr von Kirchmann, though, as we have seen, not a Catholic nor a
Christian, is yet too profound a statesman not to recognize the
supreme social importance of the church to the modern world.
“Human society,” he says, “cannot do without the principle
of authority, of obedience, of respect for law, any more
than it can do without the principle of individual freedom;
and now that the family has been shoved into the background,
there remains to uphold this principle of authority only one
great institution, and that is the Christian churches, and,
above all, the Catholic Church.
“The Reformation has so filled the Evangelical Church with
the principle of self-examination and self-determination
that she cannot at all take upon herself the mission of
protectress of authority, of respect for law, as law; which
is essential to modern society. She is also too far removed
from the laity, and lacks those special institutions which
would enable her energetically to uphold this principle.
“The same is true of all reform parties within the church,
and must be applied to the Old Catholics, should they
succeed in acquiring any importance. The Roman Catholic
Church alone must be considered the true mother of respect
for authority. She does not permit the individual to decide
in matters of faith and discipline; and she most perfectly
realizes the essence of religion, which cannot proceed from
the individual, but must have its source in the commandments
of God. In the bishops, in the councils, in the pope, the
individual finds authorities who announce to him religious
truth, and by the administration of the sacraments bring him
nearer to God. Changes in faith and worship which, with the
progress of science and of general culture, become
necessary, are here withdrawn from the disputes of the
learned and the criticism of individuals; in the councils
and in their head, the pope, an institution is found by
which modifications may be permitted without shaking faith
in the teachings of the church.
“In the position of the priest toward the laity this
relation of the individual to the church becomes most
intimate, and numerous special ordinances cultivate the
spirit of obedience and respect for the commands of
ecclesiastical superiors, while they also serve the ends of
Christian charity and benevolence. It ought not, indeed, to
be denied that this repression of individual
self-determination and this fostering of obedience may be
carried too far, and to some extent has, in the Catholic
Church, been exaggerated, as in civil society the
cultivation of individual freedom and the repression of
authority have produced an opposite excess; but precisely
through the interaction of these extremes will the true mean
be obtained; and therefore ought the state to seek in the
Catholic Church that powerful institution which alone, by
virtue of her whole organization, is able to ward off the
dangers which threaten society from the exaggeration of the
principle of individual freedom. But to do this the church
must be left in the possession of her constitution as it has
hitherto existed, and the state, consequently, should not
interfere with her external power any further than its own
existence demands. In this respect the principle of
individual freedom which pervades all modern life is so
powerful an auxiliary of the state that no fear of the
influence of the church need be felt, of which a little too
much is far less dangerous to society than too little.
“These are considerations, indeed, which are not in harmony
with the programme of modern liberalism, and will therefore
have but little weight with those who swim with the current
of the time; nevertheless, if we look around us, we perceive
many evidences of the instinctive feeling of human society
that in the Catholic Church may be found a protection for
the harmony of social life which now no longer exists
elsewhere. Only in this way can we explain the rapid growth
of the Catholic Church in her strictly hierarchical
constitution in America, and the increasing Catholic
movement in England, together with the efforts of the
Established Church to draw nearer to the Catholic; and this
tendency would be far more pronounced had it not to contend
against historical reminiscences which in England are more
vivid than elsewhere. Similar reasons influence the
government of France to seek rather to strengthen than to
weaken the power of the church; and in this matter the
unbelieving Thiers has not acted otherwise than the
religious MacMahon.
“After the principle of authority had been shaken by
revolutions and an unhappy war in France more than in any
other country, the people knew not where to seek help,
except in the fostering of religion and the support of the
Catholic Church. Like grounds prevent Italy and Austria from
coming to an open rupture with the church; they prefer to
yield somewhat in the execution of the laws rather than
suffer themselves to be deprived of her indispensable aid.
Similar tendencies exist in the other German governments,
and also among the rich and powerful families of Germany and
Prussia. Everywhere, even where these families are not
adherents of the Catholic faith, they feel that this church
is a fortress against the anarchy of individual freedom
which should be defended and not destroyed. The members of
these families are not blind to the defects of the church;
but they know that in the present age these are the least to
be feared, while her power against the self-exaltation of
the individual is indispensable to modern society. It is
altogether a mistake to attribute this bearing of the
wealthy classes of all civilized nations towards the church
to selfish motives or to the cunning of priests; these
motives may, as in all great things, slip in in isolated
cases; but this whole movement in Europe and America springs
from deeper causes—from causes which lie at the very bottom
of our common nature, which can neither suffer the loss of
freedom nor yet do without order and authority.
“About every ten years we are assured that, if only this or
that is reached, the Catholic Church will of herself fall to
pieces. Never has the attempt to bring about this
consummation been made with more spirit and energy than in
the literature and political constitutions of the last
century; and yet this church lives still in our day, and
what she has lost in temporal sovereignty is doubly and
trebly made up to her in the growing number of her children
and the gradually-increasing insight into the significance
of her mission for human society.
“For this reason the present conflict with the church in
Prussia ought not to be pushed so far as to bring her power
as low as the state has brought that of the Evangelical
Church. If the Catholic Church is to fulfil the great social
mission which we have just described, and which consists
essentially in her maintaining an equilibrium between
freedom and obedience, which is indispensable to society and
the state, her external power and internal organization must
not be interfered with in a way to render the accomplishment
of this exalted mission impossible.”[47]
Herr Joerg, the editor of one of the first reviews of Germany, has
said that Prince Bismarck has done more to strengthen and make popular
the Catholic cause in the empire than the two hundred Jesuits whom he
has exiled could have done in half a century. This, we believe, is
coming to be generally recognized. The war on the church was begun
with loud boastings. Men of high position declared that in two years
not a Catholic would be left in Germany. The prince chancellor
disdained to treat with the Pope or the bishops, and defiantly entered
upon his course of draconic legislation to compel to his stubborn will
the consciences of eight millions of Prussian subjects. He is not able
to conceal his disappointment. With glory enough to satisfy the most
ambitious he could not rest content, but must court defeat. All his
hopes have fallen to the ground. The Old Catholics who were to have
been his most powerful allies have sunk into the oblivion of contempt;
the priests whom he expected to throw off the authority of their
bishops have not been found; the uprising of the laity against their
pastors has not taken place; the bishop who was to have put himself at
the head of a German Catholic Church has not appeared; the Falck laws
have not served the purpose for which they were enacted, nor have the
numerous supplementary bills met with better success. He has indeed
made his victims personally most uncomfortable; bishops and priests he
has cast into dungeons, monks and nuns he has driven forth from their
homes and their country to beg the bread of exile; laymen he has sent
to jail for speaking and writing the truth; but with all this he has
not advanced one step towards the end he aims at. He has not made a
breach in the serried Catholic phalanx. His legislation has nearly
doubled the number of Catholic representatives in the parliament; it
has given new life and wider influence to the Catholic press; it has
welded the union of bishops, priests, and people, and bound all closer
to the Pope. From their dungeons the bishops and priests come forth
and are received in triumph like conquering heroes; imprisonments and
fines of Catholic editors serve only to increase the circulation of
their journals. In the meantime the radicals and revolutionists are
gaining strength, crime is becoming more common, and the laws aimed at
the church are beginning to tell upon the feebler organizations of
Protestantism. Since the law on civil marriage has been passed
comparatively few contract matrimony in the presence of the Protestant
ministers; great numbers refuse to have their children baptized or to
have the preachers assist at the burial of the dead. The government
has become alarmed, and quite recently circulars have been sent to the
officials charged with carrying out the law on civil marriage, in
which they are instructed to inform the contracting parties that the
law does not abrogate the hitherto existing regulation concerning
ecclesiastical marriage, and that they are still bound to present
themselves before the clergyman and to have their children baptized as
formerly. The service of the police, we need scarcely say, is not
required to induce the Catholics to seek the blessing of the church
upon their marriage contracts or to have their children baptized.
The result of all this is that many wise and large-minded men, like
Von Hoffmann, Von Gerlach, and Von Kirchmann, have lost all sympathy
with the policy of Bismarck towards the Catholic Church, as well as
confidence in its success. They now thoroughly understand that, were
it possible to destroy the church, this would be an irreparable
misfortune for the fatherland. The state needs the church more than
the church the state. She can live with Hottentots and Esquimaux, but
without her neither liberty nor culture can be permanent. It must also
be humiliating to Prince Bismarck to see with what little success
those who have sought to ape him have met. Mr. Gladstone, from faith
in the chancellor, thought to bolster up a falling party by
“expostulating” with the Pope, and he has succeeded only in finding
himself in the company of Newdegate and Whalley. President Grant has
been made to believe that the Pope is such a monstrous man that by
means of him even a third term might become possible; and he will
retire to the obscurity of private life with the stigma of having
sought to stir up religious strife for the furtherance of his own
private interest.
[37] April, 1874, p. 195.
[38] Romans xiii. 1, 2.
[39] The _British Quarterly_, January, 1875, p. 17.
[40] Luke x. 16.
[41] Matthew xviii. 17, 18.
[42] Acts iv. 20.
[43] Acts xv. 28.
[44] The _London Quarterly Review_, January, 1875, p. 160.
[45] _Der Culturkampf_, § 28, 29.
[46] _Culturkampf_, pp. 33, 34.
[47] _Culturkampf_ pp. 44-47.
NOTRE DAME DE PITIE.
“Was ever sorrow like, unto my sorrow?”
There is in the Imperial Library at Paris an old copy of the gospels
written on parchment, evidently of the fourteenth or fifteenth
century, with the arms of Colbert on the cover. It once belonged to
the church of Albi. At the end of the gospels is the _Planctus_, or
_Complainte de Notre Dame_ in the _langue d’Oc_—the old language of
Southern France—full of naïve piety and charming simplicity. No one
could hear unmoved the touching tone of reproach and grief it breathes
throughout. It is in thirty-two stanzas, the lines of which,
monotonous and melancholy, are like the repeated tollings of a funeral
bell. The last words of each verse are an expression of exhausted
grief—the dying away of a voice drowned in tears.…
It is entitled: “Here begins the Plaint in honor of the Passion of our
Lord Jesus Christ and the sorrow of his most holy Mother.”
“Planh sobre planh! dolor sobre dolor!
Cel e terra an perdut lor senhor,
E yeu mon filh, el solelh sa clardor;
Jusieus lan mort an grande desonor.
Ay filh, tan mortal dolor!”[48]
The cry of _Ay filh!_—“Alas! my Son”—at the end of every verse is like
a sob that breaks the plaint. This long wail of maternal grief, which
no translation fully renders, was doubtless sung round many an effigy
of the dead Christ in the dim old churches of Languedoc centuries ago,
just as the people of the Pyrenees at this day gather around their
dead to weep and improvise a dirge of sorrow. We were particularly
touched at coming across this ancient document; for it seemed to echo
the devotion to the Mother of Sorrows which we had found written all
over southwestern France. Everywhere in this _Terra Mariæ_ are
churches and oratories in honor of _Notre Dame de Pitié_, most of
which are monuments of an age as sorrowful as the holy mystery they
commemorate.
It is remarkable how popular devotion turned to the _Mater Dolorosa_
in the sixteenth century, when Christ seemed bleeding anew in this
land of altars ruined and priests slaughtered by the Huguenots.
Numberless are the legends of the apparitions of Our Lady of Sorrows
in those sad days, which led to the erection of a great number of
churches wherein she is represented holding her divine Son taken down
from the cross—one of the most affecting appeals that can be made to
the human heart. For the long, sad procession of mourners who go
weeping and groaning through this valley of tears—_gementes et
flentes in hac lacrymarum valle_—constitutes the greater part of the
human race. The widow, the orphan, the friendless, the infirm, the
needy, and the laborer with little or no joy in life, when they turn
towards Mary, love to find her at the foot of the cross in mute sorrow
over the inanimate form of her Son, or with the wheel of swords in her
bleeding heart, or some other attribute of human infirmity. Hence the
names given to these mountain chapels by the sorrowful as a mark
of their trust in this sweet type of grief: _Notre Dame des
Larmes_, _Notre Dame des Souffrances_, _de la Consolation_, _de
l’Espérance_—names which have balm in their very sound. Above all is
the title which seems to include all other sorrows—_Notre Dame de
Pitié_—the most common among the perils of the mountain streams and on
the broad moors of the Landes. There are innumerable _Pietàs_, or
_Pitiés_, all through this region—on the sands of the seashore below
Bayonne, where the sailors go to pray before embarking on the
perfidious waves of the Bay of Biscay; in dangerous mountain passes,
as in the oratory of Pène-Taillade beyond Arreau; among country
groves, as in the lone sanctuary near Lannemezan to which the
husbandman resorts to be spared the ravages of hail among his vines
and wheat-fields; in the valleys of Bigorre; on the Calvary of
Betharam; on the heights near Pau; and at Goudosse, where the poor
_goîtreux_ of the mountains go to pray. Yes, the shadow of this great
type of sorrow extends over all the land. There are several chapels of
_Notre Dame de Pitié_ in the ecclesiastical province of Auch that are
particularly renowned. One of these is the beautiful chapel of _Notre
Dame de Garaison_, in the Diocese of Tarbes, dear to every Catholic
heart in the land, embosomed among the hills of the Hautes Pyrénées
like a lily in the green valley, whose Madonna was solemnly crowned in
1865, by the authorization of Pope Pius IX., in the presence of forty
thousand people. At the very entrance is a _Pietà_, melting the heart
with the sight of the pale, inanimate Christ and Mary’s incomparable
woe.
“_Ay filh, tan mortal dolor!_”
Within are dim Gothic arches, large gilt statues of the twelve
apostles, and the holy image of the _Mère des Douleurs_, before which
we went to pray amid devout pilgrims. At one side is the fountain of
healing waters; behind is a garden of roses; and on the other side are
cloisters shaded with acacias, in the centre of which is the white
Madonna standing serene and holy in the peaceful solitude with
outstretched arms, as if calling on all:
“Dites, dites une oraison
A la Vierge de Garaison
Vous qui en ces lieux amène la souffrance,
Bon pèlerins,
Accablés de chagrins,
Pour que vos cœurs s’ouvrent à l’espérance.
Dans ce séjour,
Dites avec amour,
Dites, dites une oraison,
A la Vierge de Garaison!”[49]
Near Gimont, in the department of Gers, is _Notre Dame de Cahuzac_, in
a pleasant valley on the left bank of a stream that bathes the walls
of the church. Like all places of pilgrimage in this land of favored
sanctuaries, it has its old legend, which is associated with a
venerable elm, the relic of past ages. It was in the sixteenth century
when a young shepherd, leading his flock at an early hour to a distant
pasture, saw an elm in a garden by the wayside surrounded by an
extraordinary light. The amazed youth fell on his knees—a spontaneous
act in those days when the heart turned naturally to God at the moment
of terror—stammered a prayer, and, unable to turn his eyes away, saw
through the branches aflame, but not consumed, the wondrous form of
Our Lady of Pity. As soon as he recovered his self-possession he ran
to the Cistercian abbey at Gimont, and the monks, going to the tree,
found the sacred, image of Mary, which they bore in procession to
their church with songs of praise. The next day it was gone, and they
found it again in the favored elm. Three times they bore it to their
church: three times it returned to the tree. It was no use to contend
with divine Providence. The garden was then purchased and an oratory
built on the spot—a graceful monument of rural piety, to which one
generation after another has resorted for spiritual favors and
physical aid. It has its silver lamps and vessels; its walls are hung
with golden hearts, valuable medals, and other offerings from the
grateful votary. There is great devotion among Catholics to the one
leper who returned to give thanks.
Cahuzac became renowned throughout the kingdom and attracted pilgrims
of the highest distinction—lords, bishops, and cardinals. The
archbishops of Auch, who bore the high title of Primate of the two
Navarres, when they took possession of their see, came to place
themselves under the protection of Our Lady of Cahuzac. Popes granted
indulgences to the chapel, which thousands of pilgrims came annually
to win—not only peasants from the neighboring fields, but the nobles
of the land in penitential garb, with bare feet bleeding from the
roughness of the way.
This holy sanctuary was saved, as it were, by a miracle from the
Huguenots who came to lay it waste three centuries ago, the leader
being struck down, as by an invisible hand, at the very door, to the
consternation of his followers. It was closed at the Revolution, but
again spared; and when better days arrived, it was reopened to popular
devotion. The Abbé de Cahuzac, a young nobleman who had renounced the
honors of the world and received holy orders at Rome, became chaplain
of the church that bore his name. He served it with zeal and affection
for more than thirty years, and at his death bequeathed a part of his
fortune for its support, leaving behind him a holy memory still dear
to the people.
A confraternity of _Notre Dame de Pitié_ was founded in this chapel by
Dom Bidos, abbot of Gimont, under the patronage of Cardinal de
Polignac, which became celebrated in the province and included all
ranks of society. Men of illustrious birth, beside the man of humblest
condition, bore the lighted torch before the revered image of Cahuzac
in the public processions.
The arches and walls of the church were, under Henry IV., covered with
rich paintings, which in time became half effaced. The church has been
recently restored, and attracts great numbers of pilgrims from the
neighboring departments. It consists of a nave and five chapels. Over
the main altar is the revered statue, full of sweet, sad grace, at the
feet of which so many have sought consolation. On one of the capitals
in the nave is sculptured an episode from the old _Roman du Renard_,
in which the fox takes the guise of a preacher to a barnyard auditory,
who do not perceive the store of provisions already accumulated in the
hood thrown back on his shoulders. This species of satire was one of
the liberties of former times of which artists largely availed
themselves.
Another chapel of _Notre Dame de Pitié_ is at Sainte-Gemme, built
against the walls of an old feudal castle—a cave-like oratory of the
thirteenth century, beneath a square tower, simple, antique, severe.
Its gilt statue of the Mother of Sorrows and a few old frescos of the
Passion are the sole ornaments, unless we except the arms of the old
lords of Sainte-Gemme, carved among the arches. When the castle was
besieged by the Protestants in the sixteenth century, the _châtelaine_
and her attendants betook themselves to the foot of the altar, where
they prayed with fervor while the lord of the place defended it
against the attacks of the enemy. A superhuman power seemed to aid
him. After a few days the siege was raised, and he came, with his
handful of brave followers, to ascribe the deliverance to Our Lady of
Pity. The chapel became celebrated, and so great at times was the
affluence of the pilgrims that services were held in the court of the
castle before an altar set up beneath a venerable elm. Every Friday,
in the good old times, the chaplain piously read the Passion according
to St. John in this chapel, and then sang on his knees the _Stabat
Mater_ with the verse,
“Quando corpus morietur,
Fac ut animæ donetur
Paradisi gloria,”
to obtain a happy end for the dying.
In the middle of the sixteenth century Dominique de Cuilhens was
appointed chaplain of Sainte-Gemme. He was born in the vicinity—in the
old manor-house of Cuilhens, which falling into his possession in the
year 1569, he at once drew up a will in which he founded the little
hospital of St. Blaise for the poor, and bequeathed to the needy of
the parish the annual sum of forty-five livres, which the magistrates
of the place, who were the executors, continued to pay till 1789.
In 1648 the lord of Sainte-Gemme, about to join the royal army in
Catalonia, made a will, in which, in order to encourage morality in
the town, greatly weakened by the troubles of the times, he gave the
interest of a thousand livres, to be distributed annually by the
rector and consuls of the place to girls of irreproachable morals
about to marry—a legacy regularly paid till 1792.
The widow of his brother, Marie d’Antras, in her will ordered her body
to be buried in the sanctuary where the lords of Sainte-Gemme had been
buried since the ninth century, and left extensive domains for the
foundation and support of a chapel adjoining, to be served by three
chaplains, who were to say two requiem Masses a week for her soul, a
_De Profundis_ at the end of every Mass, and perform a funeral service
on the anniversary of her death. Moreover, the parishioners were to be
summoned by the ringing of the bell every Saturday at a late hour to
join in the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, which the three chaplains
were to say aloud, adding a _De Profundis_ in her memory. Out of these
domains were to be paid various legacies to relatives and domestics.
They were seized by the revolutionary government and never restored to
the church. The parish made an effort to save the legacy of the old
lord to poor girls of good morals, but in vain. The chapel of Our Lady
of Pity was also closed, and the government has never allowed it to be
reopened for public worship, except during Passion Week, when Mass is
still offered at the ancient altar and many come here to pray and
receive the Holy Eucharist.