Christianity and Heathenism

Brownson's Quarterly Review, January, 1852

Art. I.  Lorraine et France. Etudes sur les Doctrines religieuses et la Politique de ces deux Pays et de leurs Princes. Par M. G. De La Tour. Paris: Au Bureau de Correspondant. 1851. 8vo.  pp. 186.

Somebody has said that history for the last three or four centuries is only a grand conspiracy against truth, and we are every day more and more convinced, that, whether its authors have been Catholics or Protestants, believers or unbelievers, it needs to be rewritten from the original documents. Certain it is, that Catholics have never yet done justice to the defenders of their cause in troubulous times,   and that, when the full historical truth comes to be told, it will be altogether more favorable to them then they have dared to believe.
 
Nearly all our popular histories, even those circulating among Catholics,  especially in England and this country, have been written from the point of view of the secular order, by unbelievers, misbelievers, or at least' by men whose devotion to the state was more lively than their devotion to the Church. The truly orthodox have seldom written history ; and if men of unimpeachable faith have sometimes written it, they have done it, not primarily as Catholics, but as Italians, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Germans, Poles, or Englishmen, in whose hearts for the time being their country predominated over their Church, and their patriotism got the better of their religion. Even ecclesiastical history proper, in so far as adapted to popular reading, has fallen into the hands, when not of open heretics, of Gallicans,  if we may use the term without implying or intending to imply any peculiar reproach to France or to Frenchmen, for the thing we mean has been confined to no nation,  or at least of men moved by Gallican tendencies, and more intent on vindicating the conduct of their political sovereigns towards the Church, than on placing in its true light the character of the Popes who were forced from time to time to resist them. We have met with no history circulating among the people, civil or ecclesiastical, written from the true Catholic point of view, with that deep love and reverence for the chair of Peter which every Catholic ought to entertain, and which are invariably warranted by the. facts in the case.

This may, perhaps, be easily accounted for. History is a record of the past, and its proper subject is the dead, not, the living. The Church has never been numbered with the dead. Always and everywhere present, immutable and immortal, she has, and can have, strictly speaking, no past, and is and can be no proper subject of history. She lias no need of history for her own instruction and edification. They who partake the most of her spirit, and have the most lively sense of her Catholicity in time as well as in space, must always be precisely those who are the least disposed to devote themselves to the long and wearisome study of the chronicles and monuments of past ages. They live in the present and the future, and all of the past of interest to them is present in the Church, which is one in time and space, teaching all ages and nations, and maintaining all truth. They have for themselves no motive to study history. They have no need of its lessons. The Church teaches them, here and now, all they need to learn, and they have only to learn and understand what she teaches to be able to perform well their part either as churchmen or statesmen.

Moreover, the sincere, earnest-minded Catholic, whose faith is firm, who knows that his Church is indefectible, that she is founded upon a rock, and the gates of hell cannot prevail against her, that she is sustained by God himself without the aid of the puny arm of man, has always other and more pressing work than that of poring over the records of the past,  that of relieving present suffering, and of inducing men to live for the glory of God and the salvation of their souls.   He finds always, here and now, more than he can do, and has no time or thought to spare for any thing else. He cannot, therefore, consent to devote himself either to the study or the writing of history, any farther than he finds it necessary in order to refute or repel contemporary heresies. As far as necessary for this purpose, he will, indeed, study it, and even write it; but all beyond is to him a matter of comparative indiirerence. He is prepared to let men read history in their own way, so far as their reading leaves him room to defend the dogmas, the unity, catholicity, apostolicity, and sanctity of the Church. He therefore lets much pass that he might well dispute, and concedes much that a little closer study of documents would prove to be false ; because he sees that 1o concede it does not really affect any thing he holds it necessary to defend. Nothing is, then, more natural, than that popular history, from the half-Arian Ensebius down to b'leury, from the Nestorian Socrates down to the Gallican Lingard and the infidel Voltaire, (iibbon, or lluine, should be written by men without faith, by misbelievers, or at best by men whose attentions for the Church, especially for the Holy See, are cold and languid, if they even exist.

In this way, too, we must explain those numerous unwarranted concessions and uncalled for apologies made in regard to historical personages and events, by professedly Catholic writers, and which constitute the chief difliculty the modern Catholic encounters in his controversies with Protestants. These concessions have passed into history as undisputed and indisputable facts, and have misled Catholics as well as their enemies. Hence we find even Catholics apologizing for men in whom they should glory, and resorting to much narrow and unsatisiactory special pleading to explain away events which demand only frank acknowledgment and warm admiration. How many among us have felt it necessary to apologize for the acts of the sainted Hildebrand, the illustrious Innocent the Third, the noble Boniface the Eighth, and the heroic Julius the Second,  acts among the most admirable recorded in history, and which endear these great Pontiffs to every truly Catholic heart! What Catholic needs to be told that the Sovereign Pontitt's most censured by the world are always those most dear to the celestial Spouse of the Church? Whom does the world more deeply hate, or more bitterly persecute, than our Blessed Lord and Master, whom it crucified between two thieves, and continues to crucify afresh every day ? If they call the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more them of his household ? Always will the most worthy Popes be those most hated and calumniated by men of the world, by heretics, unbelievers, temporal sovereigns, lukewarm, and, as we say to-day, liberal Catholics.    Whom God loves, the world must always hate.

The causes which have operated to throw the concocting of popular history into the hands of the unorthodox or
the worldly-minded, have operated also to render all gen
eral, or, as it is not inaptly called, profane, literature mi-
catholic and heathenish. In no age or country has popu
lar secular literature been truly catholic. The popular
literature in what Digby calls the " ages of faith " was un
christian in its substance, and breathed the spirit of Grajco-
Eoman gentilism, Celtic and Scandinavian superstition, or
Arabic and Moorish sensualism. The songs of the Trou
badours, the Trouveres, Minnesingers, minstrels, and bards,
the ballads of Spain, Armorica, and England, which are
sometimes adduced as specimens of Christian literature,
were as little Christian in reality as the Arabian Nights'
Entertainments, the odes of Horace, Pindar, or Anacreon.
Not a few of the popular tales of our own day, written by
Catholics for the especial instruction of our Catholic youth,
are surcharged with carnal Judaism. They feed their ami
able little boys and girls with sugar-plums, and reward
them with sugar-kisses. They may be passably sound in
their didactic chapters, they may contain some wholesome
commonplace morality, and abundance of fine sentimental
izing about piety and devotion ; but their practical influ
ence on their readers is to enervate their minds, to render
their hearts weak and their imaginations morbid, to confine
their aspirations to this world, and to induce them to look
for an earthly recompense,  a happy marriage, riches, or
worldly distinction. Seldom does the author, or rather authoress, dare propose spiritual consolation here, and eternal life hereafter, as the adequate reward of suffering virtue and patient piety.

This all lies in the natural course of things. Nomatter who creates it, all secular, general, or popular literature, when sundered from sacred letters, is sure to be heathen in its spirit and tendency. It is so when created by a Dante, a Tasso, a Racine, as well as when created by a Boccaccio,
a Pulci, an Ariosto, an Alfieri, a Rabelais, a Montaigne, a Voltaire, a Goethe, a Schelling, a Carlyle, or an Emerson. The sincere, the firm, the devout believer, the moment he so far forgets himself as to leave sacred letters and devote himself to profane or secular literature, becomes for the time being practically a heathen. It cannot be otherwise, because the secular sundered from the spiritual, and cultivated by and for itself, although in an inferior sphere, is the very essence and source of heathenism. Our Lord has defined heathenism for us, and shown us that its essence consists precisely in seeking the secular order as an end, or in seeking secular or earthly goods for their own sake. " For after all these things do the heathen seek.'* (St. Matt, vi. 32.) Impossible is it then to waive the spiritual, and fallback on the secular, without lapsing into heathenism. Even Digby's pious bishops, whom he praises for having cultivated polite literature in their youth, seldom fail to tell us in their old age that they regret having done so.

We do not set our faces against all literature, as not a few will allege ; but against all profane literature, sundered from sacred letters, and cultivated separately and for its own sake; just as we reprobate philosophy separated from Catholic theology, and the whole secular order, emancipated from the spiritual, and cultivated as a separate and independent order, subsisting morally by and for itself. What, indeed, on this subject, is the Christian law ? Is it simply that the secular should be held inferior to the spiritual ? Not by any means. The Christian law demands that the secular should be morally subordinated and made subservient to the spiritual, and recognizes in it no right, no legitimacy, except in so far as so subordinated and made subservient. Prior to sin, the body, represented by the secular order, physically subsisted, indeed, but in complete subjection to the rational nature, and moved only at its bidding, with no original or independent motions of ils own. It was in all respects subject to reason, and moved only in subordination and subserviency to it. This is the normal relation of the spirit and the flesh, and the exact type of the normal relation of the spiritual order and the secular. In consequence of sin, this normal relation has been disturbed; the body has escaped from its original subjection ; the flesh has rebelled against the spirit, and now claims to be recognized as independent, and treated as subsisting by and for itself. It cannot now in this life be reduced again to its original subjection, but remains rebellious even in the saint till death. Hence, to maintain the spiritual integrity to which through the grace of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ we are restored, we must resist its motions to independence, and mortify its original and independent desires,  subject it, morally, to the spirit, and, in obedience to the law of the spirit, sternly resist all its importunities, and in no instance suffer ourselves to yield to its demands as a separate and self-subsisting power. We may use the body for spiritual ends, but never sutler the body to use the spirit for bodily or carnal ends.
The same is to be said of the secular order in general. We cannot and should not physically annihilate the secular, for we have bodies as well as souls ; but we must annihilate it morally, as we must the flesh. We may consult and use it for spiritual purposes, as a means to spiritual ends, but are not to cultivate it for its own sake, or as having its end in its own order. The secular does not subsist morally by or for itself, and was never created by Cod for its own sake. It was created and subsists only for the spiritual, and in so far as it can not be used for, or made subservient to, a spiritual purpose, it has no moral, or, if you prefer, no Christian significance, and is to be ignored, resisted, or mortified. This world, the men and women in it, states, kingdoms, empires, the Church herself, all the works of nature and of grace, are for no other purpose than that of the spiritual order, the glory of God in his saints. The right, the legitimacy, of the secular order is in its subordination and subserviency to spiritual ends, themselves subordinated and referred to the glory of God as ultimate end of creation and of grace. For this end, the ultimate end of all, the spiritual order may use the secular, has dominion over it, over all nature, and may press it into its service, and so far as so used or so pressed it is honorable, is sacred, is holy ; but beyond, in so far as it refuses to be so used or pressed, and claims to be respected for itself, it is the principle of heathenism, opposed to the Christian law, and to be resisted, mortified, morally annihilated. Hence whoever so devotes himself to the secular beyond its use for spiritual ends, or to it for its own sake, is at least an incipient heathen, and needs only time and opportunity to become a full-grown heathen.

Now all strictly profane or secular literature has its principle and end in the secular order, as subsisting by and for itself, not as a means to a spiritual end, and therefore is and must in the nature of the case be really heathen in its principle and tendency. The more we have of it, the more highly we prize it, the more assiduously we cultivate it, the farther are we removed from the spiritual order, the more averse do we become to Christianity. The enemies of our holy religion understand this full well, and hence their loud, praises of profane literature, and their perpetual ranting and canting about popular education; hence do they never cease to charge the Church with being opposed to the education of the people and hostile to intellectual light and culture. But it is never intellectual light, truly such, nor Christian education, that the Church opposes, for these she labors unweariedly to promote ; it is, as these enemies themselves know, only the false light of heathenism, which dazzles to blind, and shines only to lure men to destruction, and the heathenish education, which educates for the world, the flesh, and the Devil, instead of God and heaven, that she sets her face against and anathematizes.

Protestants are fond of claiming the revival of classical studies in the fifteenth century as one of the most active and influential causes of what they call the Reformation. They are no doubt right in this; not indeed, as they pretend, because these studies marked or effected an intellectual progress, not indeed because the people were or became more generally educated or more truly enlightened than they had previously been ; but because these studies tended to draw oil" the mind and heart from sacred literature, and to turn them from the spiritual to the secular, from the Christian to the heathen. It is very possible that the people, or at least the learned men, of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were better educated, as heathens, and better instructed in heathenism, than they were in the Middle Ages ; but this does not in the least imply that they were more generally or better educated as Christians, or that they were better able to appreciate moral and religious truth, or better prepared to discharge the various duties of their respective states in life, and to attain to the end for which man and all things are created. Quite the reverse is the fact. He who shoxild pretend that Luther and Calvin, Melancthon and Beza, were more enlightened theologians, and better understood moral and religions truth, than St. Anselm apd St. Bernard, St. Thomas and St. Bonaventura, or that Philip of Hesse and Henry the Eighth of England were more enlightened Christians than St. Henry of Germany and St. Louis of France, would need to be shut up in a mad-house, or at least to be subjected to physic and good regimen. That the chiefs of Protestantism were superior in light and cultivation as heathens to the mediaeval doctors and princes, may be conceded ; that they were superior as Christians, in the discipline of grace, in the knowledge of God, of the divine law, of duty, it were ridiculous to pretend.

It is easy to understand, on principles quite creditable to the Church, why the revival of letters, the renaissance, as the French call it, was influential in preparing Protestantism. It was an effect and a cause of the revival of the secular order. It threw men back on the order outside of the Church, back on nature as unelevated by grace, and made them prefer the city of the world to the city of God. It was a revival of heathenism, not, indeed, solely because it revived a literature actually created by ancient Gentiles, but because it emancipated the secular order from the spiritual, and left men to their corrupt nature, the inexhaustible fountain of all heathenism. Heathenism is nothing but the expression of fallen nature, neglecting grace and following out its own instincts and tendencies,  following its own inherent law, and acting out itself. It has its source in the natural heart, in the flesh, which subsists in every man, though mortified and kept under by grace in the saint. When faith is strong and active, and the Church and her ministers are free to fulfil their mission, it is in a measure kept down, and prevented from displaying itself on a large scale ; but whenever, whether through increased worldly prosperity, or other causes, faith sickens or dies, and the Church is impeded in her free action by the tyranny of the state, whenever the affections are turned away from the Church, and the restraints of the spiritual order are disregarded or but slightly heeded, it spontaneously revives, and becomes predominant; because aside from the Church, whether before or since its institution as the Christian Church in distinction from the Patriarchal religion and the Synagogue, there is nothing but fallen nature, of which it is the natural expression.    Heathenism is natural to man in his fallen state, and consequently whatever throws him back on his fallen neture, or stimulates it to vigorous and energetic action, necessarily draws him off from Catholicity and plunges him into heathenism. Ancient heathenism, Eastern or Western, was nothing but the natural result of the falling away of the nations from the patriarchal religion, and modern heathenism is nothing but the natural effect of breaking away from the Church and following corrupt human nature ; as the Transcenden-talists say, acting out ourselves. The revival of classical literature in the fifteenth century tended naturally to strengthen the corrupt tendencies of the human heart, and therefore to bring up the secular order, and thus to weaken the hold of religion on the intellect and the heart. In doing this, it necessarily prepared the way for Protestantism.

Protestantism is, no doubt, a heresy, but all heresy is at best only inchoate heathenism, and needs only time and freedom to become fully developed heathenism ; for it is the assertion of the natural against the supernatural, the secular against the spiritual, the human against^the divine. Protestantism is civilized heathenism in its natural form, since the Church, as ancient Assyrian, Chaldean, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman gentilism was the natural form of civilized heathenism before her. It is only the Church that introduces into the world another than a heathen element; remove her, and nothing but heathenism does or can remain. The essence of all heathenism, whether before or since the Christian Church, is in the emancipation of the flesh, of the secular order, and the subjection of the spiritual. Protestantism, whatever its pretensions, is therefore really heathenism, and nothing else ; or, if it please its friends better, since it professes to believe in the Messiah, we will consent to call it carnal Judaism, which holds the Messiah to be a temporal instead of a spiritual prince, the founder of an earthly instead of a heavenly kingdom, places the secular above the spiritual, and puts the creature in the place of the Creator,  the essential principle of all heathenism and of all idolatry. It bears the same relation to Christianity that carnal Judaism bore to spiritual Judaism.

No doubt, there are Protestants who will not recognize the truth of this statement; no doubt, there are many who have no suspicion that, in being Protestants, they are necessarily heathens or carnal Jews ; but this amounts to nothing. They who crucified our Lord between two thieves, and cried out, "His blood be upon us and our children," had no suspicion that they were carnal and not spiritual, and knew not what they did; but this did not alter the fact; and as they were not excused for crucifying our Lord because they knew not what they did, so will not our modern Protestants be excused, because they know not what they are. They might know if they would, and they would know if they were not, like their prototypes, wedded to the world, and blinded by their lusts.

It is easy, then, to understand why the revival of classical studies, which was the revival of profane or secular literature, must have favored heresy, and helped to prepare the Protestant apostasy, and even without supposing it to have effected or indicated any advance in true intellectual culture, in the love of virtue, or the knowledge of truth. It is easy to understand, also, why Protestants cannot taste the literature of the Church, and always seek to depreciate the learning and intellect of her great doctors, and to wrest from her the education of youth,  to establish everywhere a system of secular education in schools exclusively under the control of the state, the representative of the secular order,  the real significance of their much vaunted common-school system, a system fitted and intended only for the propagation of what is really heathenism.

Ever since the prevarication of Adam there have been, in the language of St. Augustine, two cities, the city of the world and the city of God, and all history resolves itself into the history of the mutual hostility of these two cities. The city of the world is founded in corrupt nature, the city of God in supernatural grace.    The latter is represented by the Catholic Church; the former, in the main, by the state, although the state, rightly considered, and faithful to its mission, holds from and is included in the spiritual order, and has no other office than the application to secular affairs of the law of God, natural or revealed, as promulgated and declared by the pastors of the Church.    Its true position is that of the secular agent of the spiritual order; but as the flesh in the individual has a perpetual tendency to rebel against the spirit, and to declare its independence, so has the state a perpetual tendency to rebel against the spiritual order, to emancipate itself from the Church, and to assert its right to treat with her at least on the footing of perfect equality. In point of fact, then, the state or civil authority almost always represents the city of the world, and therefore, as against the Church, it is always sure to be supported by corrupt human nature, and by all who are emancipated from the religious order, or who feel but lightly the restraints of religion, and of course by all the cultivators and lovers of profane or secular literature.

It consequently happens, that, in the struggle between the two cities, the whole force of the state and of general literature, and especially of popular history, both civil and ecclesiastical, is thrown on the side of the city of the world, and, in the struggle between the Church and the state, general literature and popular histories are thrown on the side of the state.    In history, facts are suppressed, warped, or colored to exonerate the chiefs of the state, and to throw the blame on the chiefs of the Church.   As the Church succeeds only supernaturally and by violence to nature, and as the state succeeds naturally and always triumphs over the Church unless God interposes supernaturally to defeat it, the voice of those who side with the state finds always a response in every natural heart, and with the public at large is ordinarily sure to prevail over the voice of those who side with the Church and attempt the defence of her chiefs. Many are called ; few are chosen.    The bulk of the people in every age and nation, at least for the greater part of their lives, have only a dead faith, and walk after the flesh, not after the spirit,  pertain to  the city of the world rather than to the city of God.    They are  thus predisposed to listen to the partisans of the secular order, and to credit whatever they may find it convenient to allege in its defence.    It requires no virtue, no intelligence, to credit them, and hence their accounts of the struggle become accredited history, and form the basis of all popular historical judgments.    The true account, being unacceptable to the secular order and to the natural heart, is discredited by all except the enlightened and devout few, on the same principle that a tale of divine and supernatural love touches only few hearts, while a tale of mere human love commands universal sympathy.

What we allege is exemplified in all modern history. The truth has indeed been written, but the works in which it has been written are not in general circulation.    They are buried in public or private libraries, unread, or, if read, unheeded, by all except a few old-world students, whose statements have no weight with the multitude. The chiefs of the secular order have told their story, given in the evidence on their side, and all the world has heard and believed it; the chiefs of the Church have had no public hearing, and their story and their evidence are known only in private, and to a few. Kings have had their historians, their defenders, their flatterers, but there is no work, to our knowledge, in general circulation, that does justice, or any thing like justice, to the chiefs of the Church, the Supreme Pontiffs. Even those works which profess to defend them against their calumniators are written, for the most part, in a secular spirit, and dwell on their secular rather than their spiritual virtues. The Popes, according to their popular advocates, are to be loved and reverenced because they were the patrons of literature and art, fostered material civilization, and promoted the temporal prosperity of nations. If their heroic resistance to civil tyrants is not timidly apologized for or explained away, if by some miracle it is commended, it is because thereby secular liberty was defended, not because thereby the freedom of religion was asserted and vindicated, and the Church saved from becoming the slave of the state. The defence of the Church is rested on her services as a secular rather than as a spiritual institution,  on her services to modern civilization rather than on her services to the souls of men. St. Gregory's alleged condemnation of all merely secular literature is humbly apologized for, and any amount of special pleading is resorted to in order to prove that the Holy Pontiff could not have meant what he said. Gregory the Sixteenth, of immortal memory, is harshly treated because he devoted himself to the interests of the Church, rather than directly to those of the state, and thought more of saving men's souls than of pampering their bodies. The same thing is happening to our present Holy Father, since the silly notion that he was to place himself at the head of European Liberalism, and to bless its banners, is clearly seen never to have had any foundation.

Kings and princes, no doubt, have been censured by popular historians, and censured beyond all reason ; but not for their gravest errors and crimes. We rarely find them condemned for seeking to emancipate themselves from the spiritual order, and to enslave the Church,  for refusing to recognize her freedom and independence, and laboring to make the secular order independent and supreme.    We hear much of the insolence of priests, the arrogance of churchmen, the pride and ambition of Popes in face of the civil power; very little of the insolence of statesmen, the arrogance, pride, and ambition of kings and princes in face of the Church.   Secular princes and statesmen, poor souls! have been the meekest and humblest of men, always laboring for the good of the state, and prevented from succeeding  only  by  the   interference   of  wily   priests,  haughty prelates, and ambitious Popes!     The severest critics of secular princes seldom blame them  unless they fail  for attempting to oppress the  Church, to confiscate her goods, and to suppress her religious houses.    To do such things is meritorious, and has gained for many a crowned monster the praise of being enlightened, liberal, wise, and just.   Popular sympathy, to-day, is far more active in favor of the court of Turin than that of Vienna, and Kossuth and Mazzini are our heroes, not Windischgrata and noble old Radetzky.    Louis Napoleon is a tyrant because  he has not oppressed the Church, and has refused to persecute her ministers; and his government must be overthrown because it has respected religion.    The great princes of popular history are those whose policy has been the most hostile to the Church, and the most successful against the city of God.    If any body doubts it, let him read the interesting and instructive work named at the head of this article. We do not suppose it likely that the heathenish judgments of historical personages and events, already rendered and accepted by the public, can be reversed in the minds of the great body of the people ; but the appearance of this work by M. de la Tour, and various other recent publications, does lead us to hope that something may and will be done to disabuse the great body of Catholics, and to correct the false notions current in the historical works on which they have generally relied.    The histories they have read have all been written from the point of view of the secular order, the earlier from the point of view of the court, the later from the point of view of the mob ; but there are some indications that hereafter they may read histories written from the point of view of the Church.    Such histories have become necessary, in some degree, to refute contemporary heresies, and good and loyal Catholics may therefore find it their duty to produce them. Events and prevailing doctrines make it important [for the defence of religion that history be reexamined and rewritten, and it is certain that, in so far as it is, the traducers of the Church and of her defenders will appear, as they are, unworthy of the least credit. As far as the work has been prosecuted, whether by Catholics or by Protestants, the characters of the Supreme Pontiffs and devoted Catholic princes who hnd been painted in the darkest colors have come forth cleared of the principal charges against them, and worthy of the reverence and affection of the Catholic heart. The Protestant Voigt has prepared the vindication of the great Hildebrand, St. Gregory the Seventh ; Hurter has done the same for Innocent the Third; Roscoe, as far as he goes, for Leo the Tenth and Lucretia Borgia; Ranke, in his History of the Popes of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, has refuted much Protestant calumny; and M. de la Tour, in the brief work before us, has triumphantly vindicated the Guises, cleared the princes of the house of Lorraine, whether of the elder or the younger branch, of the aspersions cast upon them by Protestant malice and the jealousy of rival princes, and, Frenchman as he is, has passed a severe judgment, whether deserved or not, on the kings of France, both of the family of Valois and that of Bourbon, and on those able statesmen, Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin.

The natural tendency of all civil government, as of the corrupt human heart, is to assert and maintain the supremacy of the secular order. It naturally adopts heathen maxims, and applauds itself for directing its power to the promotion of temporal prosperity, as man's chief good. In its view, man's supreme good, at least so far as it has any concern with it, lies in this world, and its duty is to shape its policy to its realization. It therefore necessarily comes into conflict with the spiritual authority, or the Church, and therefore with the Pope, as supreme visible head of the Church ; for the Church teaches that our supreme good is not in this world, and that the inferior temporal good which is permitted us in this life is attainable only by not seeking it as an end, and by living solely for the world to come,  the glory of God and the salvation of the soul. The policy proper on the assumption that our good is temporal must in the nature of the case be repugnant to the policy proper on the assumption that it is spiritual, and out of this world. The civil authority, therefore, must either yield to the spiritual, and use its power to further the ends proposed by the spiritual authority, or else the two authorities must come into conflict with each other; for the spiritual authority cannot yield to the civil without ceasing to be spiritual. The state ordinarily refuses to yield, and so ordinarily the relation between the two authorities is that of mutual hostility.

In the contest between the two powers, if the Church is free, and able to exercise her spiritual discipline without restraint, and if the clergy are independent of the state, and accountable only to the spiritual authority, she can maintain faith in its vigor, and make certain of victory. This the state knows as well as she does, and hence its constant endeavor is to subject her to itself, by controlling her temporalities and making it necessary for her ministers to obtain its permission to exercise their sacred functions ; that is, by reducing her from the Catholic to a national church, from an independent spiritual kingdom to a function of the state, and converting the clergy into a branch of the civil police. This is the real meaning of the famous quarrel with the Emperors about investitures. The state claimed the faculty of investing the pastors of the Church, and if it could have obtained that faculty, it could and would have filled the churches with creatures of its own, and been able to force them to act according to its pleasure. It would have had a national, and therefore a state church, the submissive slave and obsequious tool of its will. We should have seen in process of time in every country what we early saw in the Greek empire, and what we see now in Russia, England, and every Protestant kingdom.

The grand obstacle to the success of the state in its efforts to enslave the Church, and convert the clergy into mere parish constables, was and is the feeble old man Ivho occupies the chair of Peter at Rome. Not Aman was more troubled to see Mardochocus sitting in the king's gate, than the temporal sovereigns were to see that feeble old man sitting in that chair. The Papacy is the keystone of the arch ; it is a centre of unity and authority, essential to the very idea of Catholicity, for Catholicity without unity is a metaphysical impossibility.    They who talk of Catholicity without the Papacy, talk very foolishly, very absurdly. Without the Papacy the Church could have no organic unity, could not hold together for a moment, but would break into national churches, and each national church would be bound hand and foot, as Anglicanism is, by the temporal sovereign. But so long as the Papacy remains intact, the Church is and must be Catholic, and cannot be national. By virtue of the Papacy it is one in all nations, over every particular nation, and therefore under the control of none. When the civil authority attacks it in any one nation, it attacks it in every nation, and the clergy and faithful of all the other nations can be summoned to its defence. The thing, then, to be done first of all by the civil authority in order to effect its purpose, is always to attack the Papacy, and make war on the Pope. This the temporal sovereigns have always done, save when they chanced to be truly pious, as St. Henry of Germany and St. Louis of France, and not always even then, or when they needed the Papal authority to protect them against a foreign or a domestic enemy ; well knowing that, when the clergy are withdrawn from their dependence on Rome, they also lose the protection of Rome, and fall an easy prey to the prince, with no power to refuse to aid his projects of usurpation, oppression, or temporal aggrandizement.

Moreover, hostility to the Papacy was precisely the kind of hostility to the Church that could be carried on with the least risk of alarming the faith or the conscience of the faithful. Courtly prelates and the more worldly of the secular clergy, not always too regular in their lives, would seldom be absolutely unwilling to be released from the discipline of Rome, and placed in dependence on the state, for they knew well that their irregularities would receive no rebuke from the temporal prince so long as they flattered his passions, or applied themselves to the furtherance of his interests. Hence we have in our own days seen Austrian prel&tes oppose the repeal of the infamous Josephine laws, even after the government had become willing to repeal them. The universities would also be willing to have the state rather than the Church for their sovereign, for it would trouble itself less with their rash, and often heretical speculations. The great body of the faithful in the humbler walks of life could understand very little of the controversy. They had no immediate and direct relations with the Pope, and no clear or definite notions of his powers and prerogatives.    They knew their king, their bishop, and their parish priest, and if these sounded no note of alarm they could take no alarm, and must naturally conclude that all was right.    They could  not be expected to see, because inconceivable without the Papacy, that the blows aimed at the Pope were necessarily aimed at the Church herself, or feel obliged to refuse to assist their sovereign  in a war which they were told was in no sense a war against the Church, but against the ambitious and  nefarious Pontiff who abused his spiritual power to violate the rights of their nation and of their prince.    Hence, even when, if he had made open war on the Church, his  subjects would have resisted him almost to a man, the sovereign was rarely unable to bring the whole material, and even moral, force of his kingdom to bear against the head of the Church ; and if he sometimes was unable, it was in  general owing to the regular clergy or the poor monks, who mingled with the people;, and, holding immediately from the Pope, were almost always indefatigable defenders of the Papal rights. This is wherefore the monks or regular clergy, after the Popes, have been the principal objects of that secular hatred, of which we saw a striking example in the last century, in Hie hostility of all the so-called Catholic sovereigns to the illustrious Society of Jesus, and which became so violent that Clement the Fourteenth was obliged, as a measure of peace, to suppress the order.    Erasmus, Ulrich von Huten, and others, who prepared the way for Luther and Calvin, began by showering ridicule on the monks, and by endeavoring to destroy their iniluence with the people.   So the demagogues preparatory to their recent revolutions in Europe began by suppressing the Jesuits in France, expelling them from Switzerland and Italy, and making war everywhere upon all the religious orders that remained active and, living, and that retained any considerable public influence.

Such from the first was the policy of secular sovereigns. As long as the feudal constitution of Europe remained in its vigor, and the power of the monarchs was limited by the feudal nobility, the Church, save in the East,  where the Emperor was absolute, and the government a centralized monarchy, that is, a monarchical despotism,  could in general maintain the more essential rights of the spiritual order, and through the nobility when the aggressor was the monarch, and through the monarch when the aggressors were the nobility, compel, after a longer or shorter struggle, the secular authority to respect the Papal rights and dignity. It could obtain from the chivalry of Europe, whether they were always governed by as pure motives as might be wished or not, soldiers able and willing to defend her. But when the feudal nobility, after having suppressed the insurrection of the peasants, and defeated at Hosebecque, in 1382, the movement of the communes to revive the municipal regime of ancient republican Home, were themselves suppressed by the combined power of the king and commons, as in France under Louis the Eleventh, and the political order tended to centralized monarchy or despotism, she lost her principal political support, and the monarchs were in a condition to pursue their policy against, her with fairer prospects of success. They assumed a bolder tone  against the Sovereign Pontiff,   denied his infallibility in deciding questions of faith and morals,   distinguished not only between the Pope and the Court of Home, but between the Papacy and the Church;   asserted the superiority of the Council to the Pope, broached the doctrine that the Pope holds his authority from the appointment of the Church, not immediately from God as the successor of St. Peter; and even contended that the acts of the Supreme Pontiff do not bind by their own force, and to become binding need to be confirmed or accepted by the Universal Church. These doctrines, which they took good care to have widely diffused among their subjects, stripped the Sovereign Pontiff, theoretically, of all real authority as head of the Church, reduced his primacy to a mere primacy of order, and made his bulls and constitutions matters of no moment, since it was always easy, where these doctrines were held, for the sovereign to prohibit their publication in his dominions, to prevent the national Church from accepting them, or to induce it to declare them null and void. M. de la Tour tells us that " the Fathers of the National Council of Tours, assembled by Louis the Twelfth, declare null the excommunications which Julius the Second might fulminate against that monarch, prohibit the sending of money to the Holy Father, and all recourse to Home on any matter whatever, and of their own authority, without consulting the Pope, grant the king a hundred thousand crowns from the goods of the Church. They prepared, moreover, the Council of Pisa, by which Louis, and the Emperor Maximilian, then allied with him, sought to depose Julius, and gave < the Code of Gallican Liberties' to Matthew Lang, Bishop of Goritz and envoy of the Emperor, which, diffused in the German universities where Luther was studying, did immense evil." (p. 2.) It is easy to see that, with such anti-Papal doctrines accredited, the monarchs could force the Church in their respective states to consult their pleasure, and to refrain from interfering with any of their projects.

We have spoken of the influence of the revival of letters in preparing Protestantism ; but in point of fact, the monarchs in the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth had a far greater share in preparing it than had the old Humanists.    The Wars of the Roses had extinguished the feudal nobility in England, and prepared the centralized monarchy, that is, the despotism of the Tudors; Louis the  Eleventh, with his crafty and cruel policy, had decapitated them  in   France,  and   Maximilian  had  done much to weaken their power in the Empire.   The tendency throughout all Europe, it is well known, was to the Byzantine or centralized monarchy, and nothing prevented the complete triumph of that political system  but the Pope, seconded, indeed, to some extent, by Italian and Spanish feudalism and republicanism.    In fact, Julius the Second, that  heroic Pontiff, whom revolutionary movements  and duty to the Church compelled to be a soldier, was in his time well nigh the only defender of European liberty and Christian order then remaining in the world.    Nothing, therefore, is more natural, than that such a Pontiff', who knew well how to wield with effect either sword which God   had given him, should  be an especial object of the hatred of ambitious kings and princes, or than that they should load him with calumnies, use all the arts that malice could invent to render him personally odious, and make him the occasion of attacking the Papacy itself.    This is only what the Red Republicans have done in our own day in regard to Gregory the Sixteenth and Pius the Ninth. Gallicanism  not, indeed, then known by that name, for it was rather of Byzantine than of French origin, and has prevailed no more in France than it has in Germany, England, and even Italy  was, in its most exaggerated form, everywhere preached by their sovereigns and their ministers, and His people were taught to look upon the "Holy Pontiffs as rapacious, ambitious, the enemies of the rights of sovereigns and of nations, and the disturbers of the peace of the world.
" In France," says a French writer, who on this point need not be distrusted, "the quarrels of the kings and the Popes had from a distance prepared the way for Luther. Julius the Second, ibi* example, had recently leagued all Italy against Louis the Twelfth, to despoil him of all his Italian possessions; and, not content to conquer him wiih temporal arms, had employed spiritual arms against him, excommunicated him, placed his kingdom under interdict, and absolved his subjects from their oath of allegiance. Such conduct (fUonie) had exasperated many minds. Louis, on his side, used every means to render the Pope odious to France and to Europe. Is it astonishing, then, that so many seigniors embraced the Reformation, which broke out a little after? Its cause was in many respects that of tin; monarchy itself. Hence its partisans found refuge in royal houses, of which they were, so to speak, the loyal servants. This explains how it was that Margarite of Navarre made them a rampart of her states, and Renee of France, daughter of Louis the Twelfth, and Duchess of Ferrara, sustained them with all her power in Italy. There exists on this point a curious letter from this last-mentioned princess to Calvin, which shows very clearly the intimate alliance of the royal cause with that of the Reformers. She thanks Calvin for having sent her a gold coin (ecu iVor) of Louis the Twelfth, which that king had caused to be struck against Julius the Second, with the legend, Per dam Baby to-ids nomen. ' I assure you,' says she, ' that I have willingly seen and accepted it, and I praise God that the king, my father, took such a device. If the grace of executing it was not vouchsafed him, it was, perhaps, because it is reserved for some one of his descendants to accomplish it in his place.' The kings called Roino Babylon before she was so called by the Reformers." *(footnote: Enajclopidic Nouvelle, Art. Calvin.)
Whoever has studied with tolerable insight the history of the fifteenth century, is well aware that the question involved was then, as it is now, the supremacy of the secular order, or the administration of civil government on purely heathen principles. The supremacy of the secular order was asserted against the Popes by kings in favor of monarchical absolutism, just as it is asserted against Pius the Ninth by demagogues in favor of democratic absolutism. The sole difference- between the two epochs is, that kings then played the part now played by demagogues, and that the kings labored to centralize despotism in the throne, while the demagogues labor to centralize it in the mob. The Papacy is now attacked on the pretence that it is hostile to democracy ; it was attacked then on the pretence that it was hostile to monarchy. The principle of the attack at either epoch is the same, namely, the supremacy of the secular order; and the aim was, at the former as it is at the latter epoch, not precisely to throw oil' all religion, at least not directly, but to destroy the Papacy, so as to nationalize the Church, and to subject her to the national sovereignty, and therefore is the same, whether you suppose that sovereignty to be vested in the king or in the people. Society in the fifteenth century was undergoing, as it is now, throughout nearly all Europe, a radical revolution, only kings and princes were then, as demagogues now are, the revolutionists ; and revolutionists, whether kings or demagogues, always find the Pope in their way, and must either light him, or desist from their iniquitous attempts to overthrow the legal order of things.

Louis the Twelfth failed in his attempts against, the Papacy, submitted to the Church, and received from her the title of Christian King-, and from his subjects that of Father of his People ; but he had produced a profound impression on the mind of Europe, and had raised up a strong public opinion against the Papacy. His doctrines* and measures, as well as those of other princes of his time, had so weakened its moral influence throughout Christendom, that when Luther appeared and declaimed against Home as Babylon, and the Pope as Antichrist, there was little that appeared strange in his language, or that indicated to the minds of his auditors any settled purpose of attacking the Church. It was not till he went farther, and denied the authority of General Councils, that he began really to shock the consciences of the faithful. Maximilian, who, it is said, aspired himself to the Papacy, was favorably disposed to him, and instructed his ambassador at Home to see that no harm befell him ; " because," he added, " we may yet have need of him." There is little question that the German princes protected Luther at first, not out of sympathy with his doctrinal innovations, but with a view of using him, and the party he might form, as a means of extorting concessions from Rome in their favor. We find his Catholic opponents refuting his doctrinal innovations, but only feebly and very timidly rebuking his violence towards the Pope. Henry the Eighth of England ably defends the Seven Sacraments against him, but, if we recollect aright, not very heartily, to say the least, the Papal authority. Indeed, the opinion seems to have very generally prevailed throughout France, England, Northern Germany, and several other states, that the Papacy, as including any thing more than a mere primacy of order, was an excrescence on the constitution of the Church, and that its institution was, in fact, a blunder. It is only on this supposition that we can, for instance, account for the facility with which Henry the Eighth separated his kingdom from Rome, and caused himself to be acknowledged as supreme head of the Church in his dominions. Evidently he obtained the support or acquiescence of the great body of his subjects only on the ground that there was little in his measures which appeared to them to be directed against the Catholic Church. They may have thought he was in some respects going too far, but they looked upon him mainly as asserting the rightful independence of his crown and kingdom against the ambitious and unwarrantable pretensions of an Italian priest, who was little or nothing to them. He was only asserting the rights of England and of Englishmen, and therefore to be supported by his loyal subjects.

What may have heretofore seemed mysterious to some in the rapid rise and progress of Protestantism is now easily explained by what we have just seen in our Liberal Catholics, that is, Catholics who sympathize with the revolutionary movements of the Mazzinis, Kossuths, Led.ru-Rollins, Heckers, Struves, and other Red Republican chiefs. These Liberal Catholics have, in general, no intention of renouncing the Church ; they have no suspicion that they are really making war on Catholicity, or that there are any grounds for calling in question their orthodoxy. Once and awhile one of them will even go to confession and to communion. Yet did they throw up their caps and hurrah lustily when the Roman Republic was proclaimed; they were not unpleasantly atVected when the Holy Father was driven into exile,  were really delighted when he was stripped of his temporal dominions, and became indignant only when the Triumvirate were driven out, and the Pope was restored to his rights by the intervention of France. These men wished no harm to the Holy Father; they may have respected him personally; but they were democrats; first and last they were democrats, and held it far more important to establish democracy throughout Europe than to retain the Papacy. Now just understand that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a revolution was going on against the fetidal monarchy and nobility of the Middle Ages, and that the passion for centralized monarchy was then as strong and as universal as the passion for centralized democracy is now, and you have the whole secret of the success of the Protestant rebellion explained. There was no intention in the outset of breaking with the Church, of rushing into schism, or of setting up a new religion ; but the public feeling was, that the Papacy was hostile to the policy of monarchs, and that the monarchical cause should be sustained against it at all hazards, and that the complete emancipation of sovereigns and the whole secular order from the authority claimed by the Italian priest should be effected. The heresiarchs, regarded as mere doctrinal innovators, counted for nothing, or next to nothing. Luther, Melanethon, Calvin, Cranmer, and Knox were only the fly in the fable, tugging at the wheel to assist the horses to roll the heavy coach through the ruts, and might have bellowed in High or Low .Dutch, good or bad Latin, good or bad French, good or bad English, or in broad Scotch, until doomsday, with no other ellect than that of making themselves puny leaders of contemptible sects, had not their heretical movement been prepared and sustained by the political passions and revolutions of their time. Protestantism, as a religious movement, deserves not a moment's consideration ; its whole strength always lay, and still lies, in its character as a political or purely secular movement. The age had become rich; luxury had become general ; the world had resumed its mastery over men's hearts ; kings, no longer impeded by the nobles, resolved to centralize their power and reign as absolute monarchs, which they could not do without declaring the state supreme, and subjecting the Church to the temporal order, which in its turn could not be done without destroying the Papacy. Much progress had been made in reproducing the heathen order, and the world, without precisely knowing what it was about, determined that its reproduction should be complete, and so rebelled against the Pope, turned Protestant, and pulled down and trampled on the cross, the symbol at once of man's salvation and of the supremacy of the spiritual order, or of the subjection of heathenism.

The movement was strong throughout all Europe, and for a moment there did not appear to be a single secular power on whose fidelity the Holy Father could rely. Princes and people were everywhere in rebellion and in arms against him, and his enemies everywhere predicted the speedy destruction of the Papacy. But God had promised to be with his Church all days unto the consummation of the world, and that the gates of hell should not prevail against her. In vain did the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing. In vain did the kings and princes of the earth stand up and conspire against the Lord and against his anointed. The Lord himself defended his Spouse, and delivered his chosen Pontiffs. The human instruments he used in defending the Church, our author labors to show, were the princes of the House of Lorraine, the only royal house, he would persuade us, that has uniformly remained faithful to its Catholic engagements. He espouses with a noble zeal the side of the Lorraine princes, of the elder branch in Lorraine itself, of the Guises in France, and of the Hapsburgs in Austria, and holds up their conduct in favorable contrast with what he alleges to have been the policy of the kings and ministers of France. He represents the policy pursued by the French court, from the time of Henry the Fourth down to our own times, to have been uniformly that of humbling the Pope on the one hand, and the Lorraine princes, or more especially Austria, on the other. Having assumed that the Lorraine princes of both the elder and younger branch were uniformly on the side of Catholic interests, he denounces the French policy as rationalistic, or, as we should say, heathenish, and leaves on his readers the impression, that, if there is Protestantism in Fiurope to-day, we have to thank the French government, and especially Cardinal Richelieu, who, while lie humbled the Huguenots in France, secured, by his hostility to Ferdinand the Second, their triumph in Germany.

Certainly we are not prepared to approve the policy of Henry the Fourth, which was, to some extent, adopted by Cardinal Richelieu, and the attempt to justify it on the ground that it was necessary to the preservation of a due balance of power has never seemed to us successful. There is something which strikes us unpleasantly in seeing a prince of the Church leaguing with the determined enemies of his religion to humble her friends, and without meaning to indorse the severe judgment of the defender of the House of Lorraine, we mast confess that we have never seen a valid excuse for the strange conduct of the Cardinal in intervening against Ferdinand,  who, as far as we are informed, had done no injury and offered no insult to France, and was only engaged in a war in defence of the just rights of his empire and of the Church,  and forcing upon him a peace in which were sacrificed the Catholic interests of Germany, and in some measure of Europe and the world. Such intervention would be much more intelligible, to say the least, in a Protestant, than in the minister of a Catholic sovereign and a prince of the Church. But though we have not seen it, we are not prepared to say that the Cardinal had no valid excuse, and we do not doubt that, if M. de la Tour had set himself as heartily at work to defend tins able, though certainly not faultless statesman, as he has to defend the Lorraine prince, Joseph the Second of Germany, he would have found it no difficult matter to very much soften the judgments he has rendered against him.

The author apparently sees nothing to commend in any thing French, and he has no mercy on a single French prince or statesman. If good has ever been done in France, it has always been by a Lorraine prince, an Austrian princess, or by a Bas-Breton prince, princess, or nobleman. The author is a native of Bretagne, and has served in the Austrian army. This is too one-sided to be true. France has committed great faults, great wrongs, but we think a sharp eye might find some redeeming traits in her character, and that she has had some virtues derived neither from the Bretons nor from the Lotharingians. We find much to censure in Louis the Fourteenth, yet we are not-willing, when pleading the interests of the true faith, to join with heretics in condemning him for his energetic treatment of rebellious Huguenots. The author, we hope, will forgive us, if we say that we have detected in him, as in several others of our good friends in France, whom we highly esteem, and with whom in most things we warmly sympathize, a slight tendency to the whimpering sentinien-talism, characteristic of our times, over the punishment of great criminals, and which is no mark of real benevolence of heart or of true Christian charity. If the Huguenots of France had demeaned themselves as loyal subjects, if they had been contented with holding and practising their heresy for themselves, and had suffered Catholics in their neighborhood to practise unmolested the true religion, the state might have permitted them to damn their sotils, as they insisted on doing; but when they abused the liberty secured to them by the Edict of Nantes, to disturb the peace of the state, to persecute Catholics, to sack and burn Catholic villages, to destroy Catholic churches and convents, to murder women and children, or carry them away captive, it was the right, it was the duty, of the civil authority to intervene, and reduce them to subjection ; for the first duty of every civil government is to protect the Church, and maintain the freedom of religion,  of religion, we say, not of heresy and infidelity, which, as far as we could ever learn, have not, and never had, and never can have, any rights, being, as they undeniably are, contrary to the law of God. After providing for the freedom of religion, and fully securing to every one the right to profess and practise it without, let or hinderance from any quarter, it may be wise, jnst, and even necessary, for the government to leave heresy and infidelity to take care of themselves, and to go for what they are worth. We are no friends to severity, and we. are perfectly well aware of the folly of trying to force men into heaven. God himself forces no man to receive his bounty, but, leaves all men to the freedom of their own choice, subject only to the penalty of eternal damnation for choosing wrong; but we should be wanting in common sense, if we did not recognize the right and the duty of the civil government, when heresy and infidelity undertake to propagate themselves by carnal weapons, by fire and sword, to intervene, and by physical force, if necessary, to coerce them into peaceable subjects and harmless neighbors.

But passing over French politics, we cannot assent in all respects to the author's unqualified praise of Hie Lorraine princes. We quite agree in his vindication of the noble Guises, and thank him for it; we think highly of the Dukes of Lorraine, especially of the good Anthony and Charles the Fifth. The Austrian princes certainly have often deserved well, not only of their country, but of the Church; yet we cannot say that they have always been loyal sons of the Church, and always true to Catholic interests. Maximilian united with Louis the Twelfth in calling the Council of Pisa to depose Julius the Second ; Charles the Fifth, his son, labored to establish centralism in his Spanish possessions, was very lukewarm in suppressing the Protestant rebellion in Germany, was not very Catholic in his bearing towards the Holy Council of Trent, and it was he, we believe, who made war on Clement the Seventh, and they were his troops who, under the Constable Bourbon, took and sacked Rome, and from whom the Eternal City suffered more than it had in early times from the Goths and Vandals. Maria Theresa was a purty to the infamous partition of Poland, a crime and a blunder which must make the sovereigns dumb before the crimes and blunders of the demagogues ; and her son, the half-crazed Joseph the Second, was undeniably one of the worst enemies the Church in modern times has had, and he all but threw the Church in his hereditary dominions into schism. The well-known Josephine laws, so called from him, were a scandal to Christendom, and far surpassed any thing attempted by Louis the Fourteenth, or any other monarch on the throne of St. Louis. In no country in Europe  in the world, we may almost say  was the Church less free than she was in Austria from his time down to the accession to the imperial throne of the present young Emperor, who promises to revive the early glories of the house of Lorraine, and to rival the fame of the pious Godfrey of Bouillon. Personally, the Austrian princes have been, for the most part, pious and exemplary Catholics ; and though in general less irreligious in their policy than most other princes of Europe, they have not escaped the besetting sin of all secular princes, that of seeking to subject the spiritual to the temporal, of treating religion as a civil function, and its ministers as a branch of the civil police. They have almost always insisted on religion, but pretty uniformly on having it under their own control.     The  Sovereign  Pontiff has generally had as much to fear as to hope from them, for they have seldom been unwilling to take the administration of religion from his hands into their own. Not much more can be said against the kings of France.

M. de la Tour is an Ultramontane, but he will pardon us, we hope, if we hint that his Ultramontanism is not ultra enough for us.    He doubtless concedes the Papal infallibility, and the Pope's supreme authority in all ecclesiastical matters; but he does not seem to have very well understood that the secular order exists only for the spiritual, personified in the Sovereign Pontiff, and should in all respects be subjected to it.    We try all princes and secular powers by their relations to the spiritual order, and care not a fig for any of them any farther than they serve it.    The Church is all and in all to us, and she is to us only through the Sovereign Pontiff.    Our Lord founded his Church on Peter, and we are submissive to her only as we are submissive to Peter in the person of his successors.    The Sovereign Pontiff is, under God, the fountain of all the authority we respect on earth, and we have no praise for those who offer him insults, or withhold from him the loyalty of their hearts.    The saddest page of all modern history is that which records the ingratitude of individuals and nations to the holy Pontiffs who, for these eighteen hundred years, have ruled the Church of God, and labored for the eternal welfare of mankind.    They have borne the brunt of the battle; they have been the mark for every arrow; they have been the peculiar objects of the wrath of man and the assaults of hell; they have often been insulted by their own children; and scarcely one drop of consolation have they during these long ages been permitted to taste, except that consolation which is vouchsafed them by the interior visits of the Holy Spirit. O, how the world has wronged them, and how slow and how loath arc we ourselves to make them some little reparation !   O, let us away with our cold, half-heretical reserve, away with our ungenerous distrust, and let our hearts gush forth in warm and pure love to the Vicegerent of God on earth, and never for one moment suffer a mere secular prince to weigh in the balance with him !

We do not pretend that the Popes are personally impeccable, nor that every Pope has been a saint; but we have yet to see full evidence that any one of them, during his pontificate, has been a very bad man. Nearly all we read against some few of them is mere calumny, invented by men whose projects they had thwarted, or by party, political, or sectarian spite and vindictiveness. We are slow to believe any thing against a single Pope, and we have little doubt that even Alexander the Sixth, after he became Pope, would be found, if the truth were known, to be, even as a man, worthy of our respect. We place no confidence in Italian lampoons and pasquinades, and when we find a Pope painted in very black colors, we always take it for granted that there were very wicked men in his reign, whose schemes of wickedness he defeated, and whose pride and ambition he offended. With this feeling with regard to the Popes, the cold respect or courtly patronage shown them by the house of Austria does not satisfy us. We can honor as a truly Catholic government only that government which recognizes cheerfully the supremacy of the Pope, obeys him as a sovereign, and loves and reverences him as a lather. Such a government Austria, let M. de la Tour say what he will, never has been, and in reality no secular government of much importance ever was or ever will be.

Yet we concede most cheerfully, that, upon the whole, the princes of the house of Lorraine and of Lorraine-IIaps-burg are honorably distinguished among the princes of Europe, and that Austria has been, for the most part, the least uncatholic of the great European powers, though, unhappily, always, while laboring to preserve her subjects Catholic, inclining to the policy of the Byzantine emperors, which finally destroyed the Church in the East. There is no doubt, that, at the present moment, she is the most reliable Catholic power of Europe, and about the only one to which the friends of social order and Christian liberty can now look with hope for the future. Spain has been distracted, impoverished, and weakened by her revolutionary struggles and anticatholic policy for the last thirty or forty years ; Portugal, of whom it was first said, " The sun never sets on her empire," has become a mere dependency of Great Britain ; France, with generous impulses and Catholic instincts, is drunk with demagogic, ; Sardinia is under the control of the demagogues, and her whole influence is thrown into the scale of heathenism; the other Italian states, no longer what they were in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, have at least as much as they can do to protect themselves from the ravages of Red Republicanism ; Russia, a schismatic power, advances slowly, but surely, as the representative of the old Byzantine despotism, or monarchical absolutism ; and our own country, losing its constitutional character, advances as surely, and far more rapidly, as the representative of demagogical absolutism ; and where, if not in Ausiria, is, under God and his Church, the hope of the Christian freeman ?

Speaking with an eye to the immediate future, there are but three great powers of the first order in the world,  the United States, Russia, and Austria. These are three great representative nations, each representing a distinct and peculiar political system. The other states of Europe and America, owing either to internal dissensions or to external weakness, become important in the political order only in the direct or indirect alliances they respectively form with some one or another of these three. Russia represents the old Byzantine monarchy, and her progress is the progress of monarchical centralism, or absolutism. The other Northern kingdoms of Europe must revolve around her as their centre, and throw their influence into her scale. The United States, having practically abandoned English constitutionalism, after which their own institutions were originally modelled, represent centralized democracy, or democratic absolutism, and head the demagogical revolutionary movement of the age. Great Britain does and must act in concert with vis, and throw her influence, be it more or less, on the side of American democracy. English constitutionalism, which has for over a century played a conspicuous part in the policy of the world, and which seems still to be the idol of many statesmen, is after all as good as defunct; for in all, except perhaps a few minor states and principalities, the balance between the three estates, the king, lords, and commons, essential to its harmonious workings, has been lost, and cannot now be restored. Constitutional monarchy is now in reality but the dream, and the very silly dream, of a past age. Modern revolutions have rendered it impracticable. In all the great states of Europe, either the king is too strong for the lords and commons, or the commons are too strong for the king and lords.   The balance has been lost even in England herself, and the British constitution may before one thinks of it cease to exist. Great Britain, then, really represents no system of her own, and must ally herself with us. She is not able to subsist within herself, and could not hold her present rank a single year if she were to lose her trade with the United States, while we could lose our trade with her, not indeed without inconvenience, not indeed without much individual suffering, but without any permanent detriment to our national strength or national prosperity, for we are able to subsist entirely within ourselves. England cannot ailord to break with us, and if she were to do so, and to refuse to join us, avowedly or unavowedly, in furthering the designs of Continental Red Republicanism, she would speedily fall a prey to a Red Republican revolution herself. She, then, can remain politically important only by uniting with us, and throwing her influence on the side of democratic absolutism. These two absolutisms thus represented and supported, the Russian and the American, are the two aggressive powers of the age, and they threaten ere long to meet in China or India, and, on the plains of that old Asiatic continent, to dispute the empire of the world, and the triumph of either will be the triumph of heathenism, and the oppression of the Church of God.

Between the success of one or the other of these two absolutisms or despotisms stands Austria, with the other Catholic states of Europe, and the hope of social order and of Christian freedom, under God and the Church, rests now on saving her from throwing herself into the arms of either despotism, and of so strengthening her by union within and alliances without that she can resist and repel both the American absolutism and the Russian. Austria properly represents what remains of feudal Europe, and from the federative character of her empire, uniting, as it docs, under one sovereign many nations, differing in language, manners, customs, and local institutions, she is naturally the representative of centralism tempered by federalism, the very system with which we, under a republican form, professedly set out, but which we have hopelessly abandoned for democratic centralism,  and by her central position in Europe and her vast resources she is naturally i'ttted to take the lead in resisting and repelling the two advancing despotisms. She should therefore be supported by all the Catholic states of Europe, for their liberties and salvation are bound up with hers. We wish, therefore, to see her enter into the Germanic Diet with all her non-Germanic states, that she may be able to protect all Germany both from Russian and demagogical centralism ; and we quite agree with M. de la Tour, that France should lay aside her hereditary policy of humbling Austria, and form with her an intimate and honorable alliance. Such an alliance would secure to social order and Catholic freedom the firm support of both the Spanish and Italian peninsulas, and put a stop to the further advance of despotism under either of its forms. It would protect Austria and the other German states ; it would neutralize the demagogical influence which the United States and Great Britain might attempt to exert on Continental affairs, and enable France herself to reestablish order, to recover from her demagogical delirium tremens, and to reassume her rightful rank among the nations of the earth. Such an alliance is evidently for the interests of both France and Austria, of Catholic Europe, and therefore of the whole world.

The great crime, nay, the great blunder of modern politics, was the monarchical revolution against the feudal monarchy and nobility of the Middle Ages, and which prepared the way for the democratic revolution of our times, nay, in some sense necessarily involved it. Kings and ministers, not the people, were the first revolutionists of modern Europe, and the people are now only making revolutions against them, as they had made revolutions against the feudal barons. The true policy for all the friends of order and liberty is now to attempt, by safe and honorable alliances, to check both revolutions, and to repair, as far as possible, the wrongs indicted by both, by restoring, as far as the altered circumstances of the times will admit, the old feudal order, that is, under some form, as we express it, centralism tempered by federalism. This order lias certainly been greatly weakened in Austria, but its elements are preserved there with more life and vigor than elsewhere, and therefore is she best fitted to assume the lead in reconstituting fallen Europe. Assisted by all the Catholic states of Europe she can easily do it, and with advantage to their separate independence and internal prosperity. Let these states, then, all form a league with Austria, and with one another, to resist both the Russian and the American despotisms, and to repair the wrongs of past revolutions, and let them recognize anew the Holy Father as the divinely appointed arbitrator between sovereign and sovereign, and between the sovereign and his subjects, and something like order and liberty may again flourish on the earth. Will they do it? We know not. Very likely they will refuse to do it; and if they do refuse, all that remains certain is, that heathenism will triumph anew, and the Church will be obliged to take refuge once more in the catacombs.

But it is time to draw our somewhat desultory remarks to a close. The reader will find much information and much food for useful reflection in M. de la Tour's unpretending little work, and we very sincerely thank the author for the pleasure and profit we have derived from it. We have had no intention of giving it a regular review, and have merely used it, as our readers will have perceived, as a peg on which to hang some disconnected but matured reflections of our own. France has inundated the world with bad books, and worse theories, but her Catholic sons seem now laboring in earnest, and we trust not without efleet, to repair the wrongs she has done to literature, politics, and religion ; and although Catholic Germany is awaking from her long sleep, and beginning to make energetic war on paganism, and although even Catholic England shows some symptoms of reviving life, and appears to suspect that there is something else to be done than to show that Catholicity, after all, is about as good as Anglicanism, it must be owned that our ablest workmen and our most eflective soldiers are Frenchmen, who are sure to be foremost in every battle, whether against the armies of the city of God or against those of the city of the world. Singular people, that old Franco-Celtic race, always preeminent alike in good and in evil! Well has it been said, that for a Frenchman there is no purgatory, and that when he dies he either goes straight to heaven or straight to hell. Well, better be either cold or hot than lukewarm.

The chief point we have wished to bring out is, that there are only two systems in the world, Catholicity and heathenism. All that is not of the one is of the other. There are but two causes that we can espouse, but two masters that we can serve. Disguise it as you will, all who are not Catholics arc heathens, and all who are not heathens are Catholics. Heresy and infidelity may assume a thousand shapes, but always at bottom are they heathenism. and nothing else. Catholicity asserts the supremacy of the spiritual order, and allows the secular order to be sought only in subordination and subserviency to it, in like manner as it asserts the supremacy of the spirit, and commands us to subject the tlesh to it, and to deny and mortify it in so far as it cannot be so subjected. Heathenism asserts the independence of the secular order, proposes it as an end to be sought for its own sake, and finally declares it supreme and exclusive, the only end to be sought, or that can be conceived of as worth seeking. Here are the two systems, the two causes, the two cities, old as the prevarication of Adam, and always disputing for the empire of the soul of man. The dispute between these is the only dispute there ever has been or ever can be. Our situation is no novelty. The thing that has been is. and shall be. and there is nothing new under the sun. We have no new enemies, no new controversies, and for us as for the old Patriarchs, as for the Synagogue, as for the Apostles and early Christians, the battle is with gentilism, heathenism, or carnal Judaism. In the individual the battle is between the spirit and the flesh, in the intellectual order it is between orthodoxy and heresy, in society between the Church and the state, order and anarchy, liberty and license. It is always the same controversy in principle, always the parties to the combat are the same.

Heathenism is natural ; Christianity is supernatural. To be heathens demands no training, no self-denial, no effort; we have only to follow nature, and, as we have said, act out ourselves : to be Christians demands supernatural grace to elevate us above nature,  instruction, discipline, self-restraint, self-denial, constant vigilance and effort. All natural action tends to heathenism. Hence all men are naturally heathens, and naturally heathenism always triumphs over Catholicity. As nature survives in all men. even in the saint, all men, even though Catholics, have a natural tendency to lapse into heathenism, and are held in the Christian order only by supernatural grace and supernatural effort. It is easy, then, to comprehend why in all age? and countries heathenism more abounds than Christianity, and evil gains the victory over good, save when su-pernaturally prevented. In no age or nation has the victory of Christianity over heathenism been complete, and in the individual Christian it is never complete, save in the moment of his death. Only in dying do we conquer.

Hence our life is called a warfare, and the Church in this
world the Church Militant; and hence, too, the true Cath
olic? are always in the minority, in a worldly sense, the
weaker party, and always oppressed, and the high places
of the world are occupied by their enemies. The power,
the dominion, and the honors of this world, whether in the
political, the military, the literary, or the scientific order,
are never theirs. Their enemies are of the world, and the
world loves them, and bestows on them its dignities and
honors. True Catholics the world knows not. lor their life
is hid with God. The day for them to reign never comes
in this world. As far as the world heeds them, it hates
or despises them. Their glory commences only when this
world and the fashion thereof pass away. " Then shall the
just stand with great constancy against those who have
atllicted them, and taken away their labors. These, seeing
it, shall be troubled with terrible fear, and shall be amazed at
the suddenness of their salvation, saying within themselves,
repenting and groaning for anguish of spirit: These are they
whom we had sometime in derision, and for a parable of re
proach. We fools esteemed their life madness, and their end
without honor. Behold how they are numbered among the
children of God, and their lot is among the saints. There
fore we have erred from the way of truth ; and the light of
justice hath not shined unto us ; and the sun of under
standing hath not arisen upon us. We wearied ourselves
in the way of iniquity and destruction, and have walked
through hard ways ; but the way of the Lord have we not
known. What hath pride profited us ? or what advantage
hath the boasting of riches brought us ? All those things
are passed away like a shadow, and like a post that runneth
on, and as a ship that passeth through the waves, whereof
when it is gone by the trace cannot be found, nor the path
of its keel in the waters So we also, being born, forth
with ceased to be ; and have been able to show no mark of
virtue ; but are consumed in our wickedness. Such things
as these the sinners said in hell. For the wicked is as dust,
which is blown away with the wind ; and as a thin froth,
which is dispersed by the storm ; and as smoke, which is
scattered abroad by the wind ; and as the guest of one day
that passeth by. But the just shall live for evermore, and
their reward is with the Lord, and the care of them with
the Most High. Therefore shall they receive a kingdom of glory, and a crown of beauty at the hand of the Lord ; for with his right hand will he cover them, and with his holy arm he will defend them." *(footnote:Wisdom v.1- 17.)

Such is the fact. The two systems stand opposed one to the other, the one triumphing naturally and in this world, and the other supcrnaturally and in the world to come. We must take Catholicity, and with the grace of God struggle as we can, triumph in dying, and reign with the just for ever hereafter, or take our side with heathenism, flourish for a moment here, and be depressed hereafter with sinners for ever in hell. There is no other alternative. We must make our election, and take our side. There is no compromise possible, no neutral position conceivable. He who is not on the side of the Church, let him call himself by what name he may, is by that fact a gentile, a carnal Jew, and on the side of heathenism. Let us understand this, and thus understand that the only enemy we have to fight is paganism, the old enemy which the early Christian saints and martyrs fought before us, and also that, if we take the side of the Church, we must do so bravely and unreservedly, and be prepared at all times and in all things to assert her supremacy, and therefore that of the Holy Father, the representative on earth and the pesonification of the spiritual order.

The real test of a man's Catholicity, the criterion by which to determine whether he is a true Christian, or at best following heathen tendencies, is his position in regard to the Pope or the Papacy. " Where Peter is, there is the Church," and where the Church is, there is God our Redeemer. Whoso disregards the Papacy, or stints his love and reverence for the Pope, has little reason to count himself one of the elect of God ; and whoso, embracing the cause of the Church, yet postpones, her claims to those of the world, or seeks to effect a compromise between the spiritual and the secular, is very far from having fought the good fight and won the victory. If we take the Lord's side, we must take it, and look to the Lord for support, and trust that he will sustain us while we devote ourselves to his service. We must cease to lust after the flesh or the world.    We must trample the world and all its promises beneath our feet, and live for God alone. It is only in this way that we can carry on our war with heathenism successfully, and in dying obtain the crown of victory. If we do so, the world, no doubt, will hate us, the men of the world, the lukewarm, and the liberal will jeer or denounce us, the strong will persecute us, and the secular will seek to destroy us ; but so let it be. The soldier of the cross has no promise of peace in this world, and he is a poor soldier who fears the face of the enemy. His business is to fight, and to light bravely, and to die with his harness on,  only the weapons of his warfare are spiritual, not carnal.