A PAGE OF THE PAST AND A SHADOW OF THE FUTURE.
It is, perhaps, hardly to be believed, in this new country whose mental geology grows and changes so quickly that one stratum of thought and of circumstances is gone even before one has had time to analyze it—it is, perhaps, hardly to be believed that the shadow of the penal laws in the mother-country should still cloud with lingering touches the reminiscences of a yet unfaded life. Young people whose ideas and education belong to this century can still remember one of those priests of old—one of those silent champions—whom the English law made outcasts from their kind, and fair game for their enemies.
Such a one was James Duckett, the pastor of a scattered flock that covered the plain of Gresham, of historic memory, to the fort of Edgehill, the last standpoint of the "lost cause" of the Stuarts.
The way in which his retreat was discovered, by a party of Catholics from one of the large country-houses of Gloucestershire, was very amusing as well as interesting.
They were returning from a picnic at a charming old Tudor manor-house, one of the seats of the Marquis of Northampton, by name Compton-Wyniatts, and where the family tradition asserts a portion of the Royalist army to have lain hidden the eve of the terrible battle of Edgehill. The house is full of holes and hiding-places, sliding-panels, and trap-doors, great ghostly chambers, and funereal beds, not to mention the vast cobwebbed garrets which the soldiers are alleged to have occupied. It has a very deserted appearance, and, indeed, its owner hardly ever lives there; but it is picturesque in inverse ratio of its desolation. Just outside the front courtyard is the lawn, shaded by chestnut-trees, and here the picnic took place.
Returning home, and passing through the hamlet of Brailes, two miles from Compton-Wyniatts, the party observed some curious things lying on the roadside hedges. Upon examination, they proved to be ecclesiastical vestments, and evidently genuine Catholic property, ritualism being as yet unknown in the country districts of England. It turned out that they belonged to Mr. Duckett, and the whole party repaired to Mr. Duckett's house. This was a cottage in a little garden, with a hay-field between it and the old parish church, Protestant now, but once the only home these costly vestments should have known. There was the old man, the priest of the past, in the homely peasant garb, now abandoned by the peasants themselves, in coarse blue woollen stockings and a snuff-colored coat, and leather garters at the knee. Huge-buckled shoes were on his feet, and a thickly-folded neckcloth was wound stiffly round his throat. I saw him myself, later on, when the existence of this living relic of the penal days was better known among the county circle. The lower room of his cottage, stone-flagged and bare, was a little school where a few children were taught catechism and reading; the upper rooms were reached by a steep wooden staircase outside the house. Here was a "large upper chamber, furnished," and this was the chapel. It was as cold, and bare, and poor as it could well be; the roughest workmanship was displayed in the altar, the rails, and the benches. The raftered and thatched roof that was immediately above was broken and untrustworthy, and the rain of the last thunder-shower had discolored both it and the floor below. The small sacristy, off the chapel, was in the same state of decay and dilapidation; hence the damage done to the vestments that had been put out in the sun to dry. Mr. Duckett had treasures here that many modern churches might, and with reason, have envied. The vestments—especially a white cope and a gold-embroidered chasuble—were very rich and beautiful, and such as must have been, no doubt, a gift from some persecuted Catholic family to the persecuted temple of God. But, better still, there was a small leaden chalice, said to have been used by many of the martyrs of Tyburn, by special permission given in consideration of the difficulty of obtaining gold and silver vessels for sacred purposes, and of the probable sacrilege and spoliation the known existence of such vessels would provoke. And, among other things, there was also a little bell, wide and round, like a low-crowned hat, and four little clappers inside, making a sweet chime when the bell was shaken. This was afterwards copied by the modern artificers of Birmingham, but they could not transmit to their copy the mellow, time-harmonized tone of the original.
In Mr. Duckett's sitting-room, a small, unpretending, and homely nook, was the portrait of his revered and beloved patron, Bishop Bishop, in Mr. Duckett's youth the only and supreme ecclesiastical authority in England. The priest was an old man now, seventy-five or thereabouts, but his heart was true yet to his friend and patron, whose praises he was never tired of repeating. He told, also, how, although parishes had been formed around him and churches had grown up at his side, yet once his duties carried him on midnight rides and to distances of forty or fifty miles, for a sick-call or a promised and occasional Mass at some one of the many places that claimed his care. Broadway, a village at the foot of the Coteswold Hills, just at the edge of the fruitful plain or vale of Gresham, was one of these stations, and now, as for many long years past, there stands in its midst the Passionist Monastery of St. Saviour, the novitiate house for the province of Great Britain. Two hundred Catholics and a spacious church, model schools under government inspection, and confraternities of many kinds, have turned the far-off hamlet, where a few stray and hunted Catholics were hidden, into a very centre of religion for twenty miles around. Wordnorton, the hunting-box of the Duc d'Aumale, and Chipping-Campden, a thriving little mission on the opposite ridge of the Coteswold, are both served from the monastery at Broadway; and so great is the personal ascendency of the monks, and so universal their popularity, that they need not fear the letter of the law, and do often contravene it by walking abroad in their monastic habit.
Here is one of the changes that have occurred in the straggling field of Mr. Duckett's early labors; and, while all this is happening around him, the calm old man waits for his summons in the same homely and unobtrusive dress he has sanctified by his daily work in the vineyard of Christ.
It is said, and I believe with truth—at least, I hope so—that the monastic garb of all religious orders was originally modelled on the coarse habiliments of the poorest and simplest of mankind—the shepherds and husbandmen of the hard-working rural districts. If so, it suggests a very beautiful and a very happy thought, and brings before our eyes the many parables in which God's church is likened to a field, a vineyard, an orchard, a garden. Tillers of the soil and sowers of the grain, reapers of the harvest and fosterers of the vine, are priests and deacons, bishops and monks; and all through sacred history runs this touching parallel. Nowhere is religion without her crown of nature's weaving: the blossoming rod and the sceptre of Christ's jurisdiction are one.
And so, to return to our friend, the priest and pastor of a forgotten and happily buried age of persecution, God's voice called him in time, and among the many who daily wait in the temple's outer court he was chosen to blossom forth in a higher life, and to wear his robe of glory in a nobler place than that where he had clothed himself like the poor and the unnoticed, and only wore by stealth the sacred garments of his priesthood.
He died in the year 1866, if I mistake not, and his place was filled by a young man, newly ordained, as if to bear witness how suddenly one state of things had died away and another had come in its stead, but also, perchance, to point out to us—too secure in our present safety—that as quickly as freedom had followed persecution, so we should be ever ready to see persecution follow freedom.
And in these days, surely, we dare not think such a past as that of English religious intolerance so far from us as that it should never draw near us again, and renew itself in many shapes of tyranny and horror. And this, not only in England, where religious persecution may suddenly emerge from the apparent extreme of religious indifference, and where it may be carried on, some day, on members of all Christian communities, no longer in the name of a state church or a general catechism, but in the name of rabid hatred to a Creator, God, and senseless chafing against any constituted authority—not only, I say, may this happen in England, but in other lands, Eastern and Western, old and new.
We see it to-day in red-handed France and Judas-tongued Italy; we may see it elsewhere to-morrow. Persecution is an instinct of the brute; what is not after its own kind, it has no desire to spare. The prevailing systems of philosophy—if we may so degrade the word whose first meaning is love of wisdom—tend to the apotheosis of the brute, and the negation and indignant repudiation of anything in man above the brute. When this task shall be completed, and man educated into the right usage of his newly-discovered nature, what are we to expect but persecution in one form or another from the new lords of the creation, the new monarchs of the system of materialistic supremacy?
There is a new and subtle alchemy running through the so-called moral world, the Areopagus of modern thinkers. Of old, all things might be resolved into component parts, of which gold was infallibly one; now, all men must be resolved into perishable parts, of which each one is stamped with the brand of the brute.
It is a sad contrast, and no doubt it would be needless to define which of the two is the more harmful theory. Let us pass now from the life of the hidden pastor of an obscure village to an incident, perhaps hardly better known, in the career of one of the apostles of a great and glorious city, the same whose comeliness has been so cruelly brought low, and whose desolation at this moment reminds one too forcibly of the plaint of the prophet Jeremiah over doomed Jerusalem.
The Père de Ravignan, whose name is a household word in France, and whose influence over the young men of his day was something all but miraculous, was summoned one night to attend a sick-call. A carriage was in attendance; the two men who had come for him represented the case as of the greatest urgency, but refused to take him with them unless he suffered himself to be blindfolded. After briefly hesitating, he complied with this strange request. The times were dangerous, revolution was hovering like a storm over the state, secret societies were in ever-watchful and almost infallibly secure fermentation. He himself was a well-known man, a representative man, one whose voice was ever raised uncompromisingly against the foes of law and order—one whose life was every day exposed, in consequence of his grand fearlessness of conscience, to the machinations of hidden and treacherous enemies. A less suspicious man might have feared a snare in this strange condition of blindfolding a priest called to a death-bed, but the blood of the old race of gentilhommes that was fast disappearing, added to the courage of the consecrated line of God's ministers that never disappears, made the Jesuit strong in this hour of peril, and he forgot himself to think only of the sinking soul to whose aid he was summoned. He took the holy oils and the viaticum with him, and left the house in the Rue de Sèvres in the carriage that was waiting at the door.
They drove off rapidly; his companions pulled down the blinds, and effectually shut out any daylight that might straggle in. The motion of the vehicle, however, and the many sudden jerks it gave, indicated turnings and corners as being constantly doubled, and even suggested the not unlikely idea that this was done on purpose, with the object of confusing the priest's recollection. The two men preserved a dead silence all the time. At last the carriage stopped; the door was opened, the Père de Ravignan helped out, and conducted up a wide staircase; doors were opened and shut, and then the bandage was taken from his eyes, and he found himself in a large anteroom, handsomely and massively furnished.
"In the end room of this suite of apartments, you will find the person who requires your ministry," said one of his guides.
He passed room after room with the windows darkened, and rich furniture giving a sumptuous air to the large and airy saloons, but order reigned everywhere. He saw neither sign of confusion nor heard any sound of sorrow, nothing to indicate the presence of death or mortal sickness. He began to fear that in truth he had been snared by secret enemies, and that it was his own death he had to expect as the dénouement of this solemn masquerade. The last door was reached; a curtain hung across the entrance, and the chamber was darkened. One lamp burned in the furthest recess. He looked in vain for signs of sickness; there were none. The room was a drawing-room, and was furnished much like the rest. But soon a form rose to meet him, coming slowly from the luxurious lounge near the solitary lamp. It was that of a young man, very handsome, and fashionably dressed. He looked pale and anxious, and his hands trembled slightly as he moved. Yet sick to death he certainly was not. Was this his executioner, or some part of the ghastly pageant of his own coming doom? The priest paused, and the young stranger said, in eager, hollow tones:
"Mon père, it is for me that you are here. I am going to die. I shall be dead within twenty-four hours, but I obtained this favor that I might first make my peace with God."
"My son, what does this mean?" asked the priest. "You are not ill!"
"No; yet I shall not see to-morrow's sunset. I dare say no more. I must make my confession."
An hour went by; the solemn mysteries that pass unseen and undreamt-of by the careless world soothed and comforted the doomed man. We know nothing further, nor can we ever know aught concerning this dread interview on the very threshold of invisible death; but, the priest's duty done, the young man craved his blessing and his prayers, and took an agonizing farewell of the last human being who was to show him mercy and promise him forgiveness.
Reluctantly, sorrowfully, the priest parted from the victim, and wended his way through the splendid rooms, whose beauty now seemed so baleful, as though it were but the refinement and gloss of cruelty, the gay mask that hid the torture-chamber.
At the door of the anteroom, the same silent guides were watching his return, and, again blindfolding him, led him out of the gates that closed on such strange mysteries, and hid from view such appalling possibilities of horror.
How many might there have been of these human holocausts, immolated in silence, perchance without the gracious respite allowed this one victim! How many might there have been, perhaps priests, beguiled by a lure such as he had thought his own carrying-off to be, and never allowed to go forth again, as he was being providentially helped to do! And what other crimes besides silent murder might have taken place in that mysterious and seemingly demon-guarded house!
These and other thoughts not unlike them must have pressed painfully on his overstrung mind, as with the same precautions, turnings, doublings, and joltings the Père de Ravignan was driven back to the house of his order, the sinister guides in whose hands his life had helplessly and inevitably lain for several hours preserving yet that impenetrable silence and seemingly respectful behavior, which in themselves were enough to shake the courage of most men.
The house was all astir. Every one had been anxious for the safe return of the superior from his mysterious and perilous errand; for perilous they had intuitively felt it to be, and had indeed once attempted at first to follow the carriage. This, however, had been cleverly frustrated by the well-instructed driver.
Search was made next day by the secret police for any house answering the only description the priest could imperfectly give; inquiries were instituted concerning the disappearance of any person answering the minute description given by the confessor of his young penitent; but although the police swore that they knew every house, and could put their finger upon every individual in Paris, yet not a single trace could be discovered of anything unusual having taken place in the city.
And there the mystery remained and was forgotten, and came to be related only as a tale of dread and wonder, and was only known to few. Even so the secret organization itself, for nothing but vagueness surrounded its palpable though ever-invisible existence, and some believed that the parti prêtre invented stories of its horrors, and others thought they exaggerated the importance of its influence.
Then came '48, with its wild volcanic outburst all over Europe, and under the name of freedom a modern Vehmgericht convulsed and tortured the civilized world. Those who had pooh-poohed its existence or underrated its strength were the first to crouch before its explosive power. Persecution began again, for we all know the story of revolutions, and how the final court of appeal was always death. What mattered it that the persecutors handled the axe, the guillotine, or the rifle, instead of the scourges, the fasces, the swords of the Roman lictors? Amphitheatres there were, and wild beasts to tear the Christians in pieces, although the former were called public squares, and streets, and gardens, and the wild beasts were hideous human forms. One Archbishop of Paris in '48 was shot down—perhaps by chance, but who can tell save only God?—on the barricades, as he was trying to quiet the infuriate rabble; another Archbishop of Paris followed him in '71, more foully murdered in shear demoniac wantonness, because order and authority were represented in his person, and because to be a child of God was a burning reproach offered to the godless and soulless Commune.
Thus, two ages of persecution join hands within a short half-century, and in one life, yet in its prime, two figures are prominently and personally interwoven: the old peasant priest who almost dreaded to have the sanctuary lamps lighted for fear of attracting unwelcome notice, so imbued was he with the idea that before the law a Catholic must need be a criminal; and the intrepid Jesuit, having secret dangers in the fulfilment of his ministry, and knowing full well that, before the self-styled law of lawless liberty, to be a priest is to be nothing better than a dog.
Some talk lightly of these things that are passing as of mere ebullitions that cannot fail to be quelled; but where is the power to quell, the power to charm these serpents, to humanize these savages? Gone from the kings of the earth, who have abjured the aid of religion, who have expelled her from the schools and colleges, and repudiated her offices in the most solemn and tender relations of life. Gone from the philosophers of this century, who control the thoughts of millions by pandering freely to their passions, and whose first axiom is that everything that is natural is right. Gone from the timid politicians, whose precarious object is, not the happy and steady consolidation and progress of the state, but the maintenance of themselves and their creatures in office, and the increase of their hoarded fortunes. Gone, too, from the poets and artists, who should clothe truth and religion in dignified and attractive forms, but whose dearest aim is but to court popularity by encouraging vice. Gone, in a word, from all whose mission it is to raise and guide the people, simply because they find it more profitable to grovel with and follow them.
And religion stands this day as our divine Lord stood centuries ago in the Garden of Gethsemani, with lukewarm and timid disciples in numbers, and with a Judas striving with honeyed words to betray her. The sword she may not use, nor any earthly weapon; for, if God would have it so, could he not send her twelve legions of angels? But no; she stands as he stood, unarmed; and when she preached with the voice of princes and commanded through the mouth of statesmen, no one attacked her, even as the Jews did not apprehend Jesus when he taught openly in the synagogue. But when worldly power was taken away, when concordats were broken, when heresy rose up in her midst, the enemies of the church fell upon her, and in their onslaught tore up kingdoms by the root and trampled order in the dust. The crushed ones look to her—"they shall look upon him they have pierced"—imploringly, but they had tied her hands, they had crippled her in the days of their triumph, and the deluge breaks over them and annihilates them, while it tosses the church on its turbid waves, and at each angry toss only lifts the Ark of the Covenant safer and higher toward heaven.
We may be only at the beginning of a scathing trial: we may be almost at its end. We have seen the blood of the martyrs flow once more; we have seen '71 rival '93, and the Mazas Prison reflect the Massacre des Carmes; elsewhere we see the spectre of blood not yet let loose, but hiding impatiently behind the spirit of sacrilege and spoliation. Perhaps this is the hour before the dawn; perhaps only the first watch of the night. But let us not think that the nineteenth century bears a charmed life, and that we dwellers in it have a prescriptive right to a safe and easy-going existence. We must be for the church, in her, with her of her; be hers in spirit and in truth, "not merely pause and hesitate at the threshold, or linger within the outer courts." This is the hour of conversions, for the next may be the hour of martyrdom. And above all, it is the hour for sound philosophy, that will lead us firmly by the hand into the haven of faith, and show us that, to be a good citizen, one has need to be a perfect Christian.
Truth is one; and just as water will rise to its own level, so all particles of truth will lead to the fountain of truth. The church has solved all problems, and fulfilled all yearnings, and realized all ideals long ago; and while men are seeking what they severally want, the church has offered it to thousands of their forefathers before they themselves were ever born to seek it.