THE PRUSSIAN PERSECUTION EXHIBITED IN ITS RESULTS.
Seven years ago the government of the new German Empire, pursuing the Protestant traditions of Prussia, and spurred on to action by the occult power of Freemasonry, began its gigantic attack on the Catholic Church. It opened hostilities without the customary declaration of war, and, in order to hide the real motives and aims of the campaign, its crafty rulers professed well-meant intentions and a sincere solicitude for the welfare of the church, declaring over and over again that the religious policy they were inaugurating was exclusively directed against the Jesuit or ultramontane influence in the church. Soon, however, and as the government gradually unfurled the banner of persecution, the dark designs of Freemasonry appeared in their real light and character. Whilst the ministers moved heaven and earth to produce some plausible pretexts in justification of the announced legislation, such as the pope’s infallibility, the pretended encroachments of the Roman Church on the domains of the state, the creation of the Centre party, etc., the national liberals in the Landtag dogmatized on the religion of the future, the first mission of which was to bring Christianity into harmony with the spirit of the age, or, as one of their leading organs put it, “to reconcile the faith of our forefathers with the reason of their children.” At last, when the legislators had gained the conviction that the reasons alleged for the May Laws found neither credence with Catholics nor favor with honest Protestants, they threw off the mask, and Infidelity, fully armed and with colors flying, boldly entered the lists of the Kulturkampf. The final aim of the struggle, so long and persistently denied, now openly acknowledged, was nothing less than the annihilation of the Roman Catholic Church, and thereby of Christianity itself. Whatever exception Prince Bismarck may have taken to this sweeping programme in favor of his own idea of a German state church, with the emperor for its head, appears irrelevant before the extraordinary fact that he placed himself at the head of the enemies of Christ, and with their help worked for the destruction of his religion. For this end, and for this end only, did the German infidels devise and pass the May Laws. Have they succeeded? Will they ever achieve their object? To these questions we unhesitatingly oppose a decided never. As Catholics we have the promise of Christ that his church here on earth will last to the end of the world; as witnesses of the persecution and its results we proclaim with unspeakable satisfaction that the attempt to destroy the church in Germany has completely failed. Although the body of the church has been roughly handled, although it bleeds from a thousand wounds, and stands mutilated, disfigured, a most piteous sight, still the church itself, the Catholic faith, has remained untouched and shineth forth with increased splendor, strength, and beauty. Men have suffered, not their religion.
Taking a bird’s-eye view of the present condition of the Catholic Church in Prussia, we discover an immense field of desolation on which a seven years’ relentless war has spread intense misery and suffering, heaped ruins upon ruins, and well-nigh destroyed every monument of Christian faith and piety. The guides and pastors of the church are dispersed, the whole hierarchy is broken up, hundreds of priests eat the bitter bread of exile, many more waste their lives in prison, and greater still is the number of those for whom the exercise of priestly functions is accounted a treasonable crime. More than one million of loyal Prussian subjects are doomed to live and die without the blessings of the church. In more than seven hundred parishes no sacraments can be received, no Mass be heard, no Christian burial obtained. New-born children must be baptized by lay hands or carried with personal danger to distant parishes. The sick and dying are denied the last sacraments, unless they, too, can be conveyed to neighboring churches. All Catholic seminaries, schools, and educational establishments are either closed altogether or taken possession of by the Protestant government. Convents and monasteries are empty or inhabited by criminals, their former saintly inmates driven out of their homes and country. Catholic orphanages, hospitals, reformatories, all charitable institutions are suppressed, and the church property of dioceses deprived of their bishops is sequestrated by the civil power. Catholic religious instruction in popular and higher schools, no longer under the control of the church, is now exclusively taught in the name and by authority of the Prussian government.
This sad work of destruction and persecution appears sadder still when viewed in the ghastliness of its details. By clause 1 of the law of May 11, 1873, all papal jurisdiction in matters of church discipline was transferred from the pope to the German ecclesiastical authorities, or, in other words, German Catholics were, declared cut off from the visible head of their church. This law, on the very face of it, could have no practical meaning in the nineteenth century, and therefore remained a dead letter. Beyond a certain number of penalties inflicted on priests and editors for publishing papal documents addressed to German bishops and priests, or forwarding letters of excommunication to apostates, no harm was done to any one by this law, and diocesan communications are uninterruptedly carried on by the pope, not publicly, it is true, but almost as completely and safely as if the Holy Father enjoyed the Prussian government’s sanction for it.
Far more mischievous, downright disastrous to the German hierarchy, became the various laws concerning the education and appointment of priests to the ecclesiastical office. With regard to the clause prescribing a state examination in science for ecclesiastics over and above the usual examination in philosophy and theology, its severity could not hitherto be tested; for, although the official list of thirty-four examiners is every year published in the leading newspapers, not one Catholic candidate has presented himself for examination. This clause, too, may therefore be termed a failure. On the other hand, the appointing and not appointing of priests to vacant parishes became fatal to all Prussian bishops. Whenever they proceeded to such appointments without giving the required notice to their respective ober-presidents, or if they failed to comply with the latter’s orders to fill up vacant parishes, the bishops were in all cases prosecuted, fined, or imprisoned. For a time fines were paid by some good diocesans, or the bishops’ sold furniture was bought back and restored to their owners; but when, from the continued and increased severity of such prosecutions, it became evident that the well-meant aid of good Catholics contributed only to enrich the persecuting government without removing their chief pastors’ difficulties, perhaps also on the express wish of the exalted victims themselves, the generous practice was discontinued, and the bishops, some reduced to utter poverty and unable to pay the ever-increasing penalties, were ignominiously dragged into prison. The Archbishop of Cologne alone was condemned to pay at very short intervals 120, 150, 3000, 21,000, 88,500, in all 112,770 marks. His brother bishops, even those not deposed, had to suffer similarly high and numerous penalties. What made a great many of these condemnations appear excessively hard and unjust was the bishops’ inability to fill up the vacancies; for they had no longer priests at their disposal, since the closing of the seminaries made new ordinations impossible. Thus the government asked an impossibility and punished the bishops for not achieving it. With the exception of the Prince Bishop of Breslau and the Bishop of Limburg, who escaped imprisonment by going abroad, all the Prussian bishops had to go to jail, some for months, others for years. As soon as their imprisonment was over proceedings for their “deposition” were instituted at the royal Tribunal of Ecclesiastical Affairs in Berlin. To the official summons to lay down their offices the bishops answered in substance that, the state not being a spiritual power capable of investing them with or depriving them of their ecclesiastical offices, they did not consider themselves empowered to accede to the government’s request; and that as the church alone—i.e., her head, the pope—had endowed them with the said offices, she alone possessed the spiritual power to dismiss them. The answers which priests gave to the government, when summoned to lay down their offices as parish priests, were couched in equally decided language. Thus Dean Leineweber, of Heiligenstadt, wrote to the ober-president that, according to the principle and teaching of the Catholic Church, Bishop Martin, although “deposed” by the state, was still their bishop, and that consequently no priest was released by this “deposition” from the vow of obedience by which he is bound to his bishop; moreover, that a faithful priest is a better and more loyal state officer than an unfaithful priest, and therefore could not in any way admit that his removal from office was required by the interest of the state. The government, however, paying no heed to the bishops’ refusals to resign, summoned them one after the other before the Supreme Tribunal of Ecclesiastical Affairs. After a short trial, at which the accused bishops neither appeared in person nor were represented by counsel, the court pronounced sentence of dismissal from their offices as Prussian bishops on the ground that “the accused had so grossly violated their duties as servants of the church that their remaining in office involved a serious danger incompatible with public order.” In this way the Prussian government managed to get rid of seven bishops—viz., Archbishop Melchers, of Cologne, who is supposed to reside in Holland; Cardinal Ledochowski, Archbishop of Gnesen-Posen, now in Rome; the Prince Bishop of Breslau, living in the Austrian part of his diocese; Bishop Martin, of Paderborn, now in Belgium; Bishop Brinckmann, of Münster, present residence unknown; Bishop Blum, of Limburg, somewhere with the Benedictines; Dr. Janiszewski, suffragan Bishop of Posen, in Cracow. The three episcopal sees of Treves, Fulda, and Mayence being vacant through the death of their former occupants, there are now nine dioceses without visible spiritual administration in Prussia. The only remaining bishops are those of Hildesheim, Osnabrück, Ermeland, and Kulm. For what reason these church dignitaries are allowed to remain in office, although they committed the same transgressions of the May Laws and are in every respect in the same position as their brethren, is indeed difficult to say; the only reasonable explanation we can venture to offer for this forbearance is either the government’s determination to discontinue the useless persecution, or the emperor’s unwillingness to consent to the expulsion of all the Catholic bishops from the country over which he rules. Even an emperor may dread the verdict of history.
As was to be expected, the “deposed” bishops, although far away from their flocks, found the necessary means and ways to carry on the spiritual administration of their dioceses, either by appointing secret delegates or with the help of certain priests with whom they keep up regular communications. Of course their conduct involved, in the eyes of the government, fresh and very grave offences, which were resented by endless prosecutions not only against the bishops themselves but all persons, laymen as well as priests, whom the public prosecutor suspected of helping the bishops in the exercise of their “illegal” episcopal functions. Summonses to appear again before the royal tribunal in Berlin were nailed on the doors of the bishops’ former residences, and in the trials which ensued the accused were sentenced in contumaciam to fines and years of imprisonment. And as the government could neither exact the inflicted penalties nor lay hold of the convicted dignitaries, it issued disgraceful writs of arrest in which the Prussian gendarmes were ordered to watch for the said criminals, and, when apprehended, to deliver them to the next police station for the execution of the sentences passed upon them. The bishops, in their safe retirement, could afford to smile at these futile attempts on their liberty, but those persons who remained within the grasp of the government had to suffer many hardships for the support they had lent to their bishops. Hundreds of priests are constantly harassed with summonses to make depositions concerning the secret delegate, but, to their glory be it said, all proved faithful, all persistently refused to give the demanded evidence, declaring their inability to recognize the authority of civil courts of justice in purely ecclesiastical affairs. The only case in which the prosecution was successful is that of Dean Kurowski, of Posen, who, on secondary evidence, was pronounced to be the secret delegate of Cardinal Ledochowski, and sentenced to two years and four months’ imprisonment. Released in October, 1877, he received his dismissal from office in the beginning of the present year. Connected with the illegal exercise of episcopal functions was the persecution of the Rev. Dr. Kantecki, editor of a Polish newspaper, who sat six months in prison without trial simply because he refused to turn king’s evidence; and that of Fathers Herold and Pudenz, of Heiligenstadt, who were kept in jail for more than one year for not revealing the name of the secret delegate.
Another deplorable consequence of the law concerning the education and appointment to ecclesiastical offices is the closing of all priests’ seminaries, which took place almost immediately after the promulgation of that law in 1873, in consequence of the refusal of the authorities to admit the delegates of the government as inspectors of these purely ecclesiastical institutions. Since then not one priest has received ordination in Prussia. That is not, however, a great hardship, as no new priests can, under the present circumstances, be appointed in Prussia, and a great many Prussian young men are constantly ordained abroad who will one day return to their country. On the other hand, the number of vacant parishes increases rapidly every day. At the present moment there are in Prussia about 700 parishes deprived of priests—viz., in the archdiocese of Cologne, 121; in the diocese of Treves, 153; Paderborn, 68; Münster, 70; Limburg, 33; Fulda, 30; Hildesheim, 22; Osnabrück, 23; Kulm, 14; Ermeland, 13; Breslau, about 100; Posen, about 100; in the principality of Hohenzollern, 19, to which must be added more than 100 curacies.
Of the exiled secular priests of Prussia about three hundred found a field for their labors in Bavaria; the others went chiefly to Belgium, Austria, Italy, England, and America. As the religious orders were expelled from the whole German Empire, their members had to settle outside of Germany; they emigrated either to America, or went as missionaries among the heathens, or transferred their establishments to Belgium, England, etc.
The number of Prussian Catholics deprived of church ministrations now amounts to one million and a half. If these wish to hear Mass on Sundays or receive the sacraments, they must attend the services in churches of their neighborhood, and sometimes walk as far as ten and fifteen miles. In a great many places, and now in nearly every widowed parish, so-called lay services have been arranged by the parishioners, at which one of them reads the prayers of Mass, and, if not forbidden by the local police, a sermon as well. In the afternoon they sing Vespers and hymns in the same manner. At first it was feared that even this poor comfort would be taken away from the desolate parishes, for in many places the conductors of lay worship were prosecuted and heavily fined for exercising illegal functions in church; but later on both the officials and the judges took a more lenient view of these cases and abstained from interfering with them. Now and then, however, the forsaken parishes have the unexpected joy of hearing Mass in their own churches. In every diocese, especially in that of Posen, banished or newly-ordained priests travel in disguise through the country, baptizing, hearing confessions, giving the last sacraments to the dying, and saying Mass in every deserted church they can reach. Notwithstanding the greatest vigilance by day and by night, the police seldom succeed in arresting one of these faithful shepherds, for the parishioners exercise a strict watch over the police and give their pastors timely warning of the enemy’s approach. When found out the itinerant priests invariably undergo a severe punishment of two or three years’ imprisonment, followed by banishment from their country. How loyal to these priests not only the Catholic but even the Protestant and Jewish population is may be seen from the following case, taken out of many. From Schwerin-on-the-Wartha, diocese of Posen, Father Logan, whom the government had exiled several years ago, managed for a whole year to administer a parish in the neighborhood, and to carry the consolations of his ministry wherever they were required. During that time he kept a well-attended shop in the little town, and travelled about in the neighborhood apparently as a cattle-driver, in reality as a good shepherd of souls. At last discovered and tried, he was committed to prison for thirteen months. Forty-six such priests, mostly newly ordained, are said to administer the vacant parishes of this much-troubled diocese, in which meritorious work they are successfully assisted by the great landowners, who provide them with food and shelter, and, when wanted, with safe hiding-places. Several of them have lately been discovered and thrown into prison. Greatly and unnecessarily increased was the number of vacant parishes by the arbitrary decision of some ober-presidents, that junior priests, after the death of their elders, should abstain, under pain of expulsion, from all parochial work, even from saying Mass. In vacant parishes the dead themselves fell under the application of the law, for Dr. Falk decreed that founded Masses cannot be said in such parishes, but must stand over until the vacancies are filled up with legally-appointed priests.
According to one of the May Laws, a parish which has stood vacant for one year possesses the right of electing a new priest. This law was evidently passed with a view of destroying the authority of priests as well as bishops; in fact, it was a bait thrown out to Catholics to join the state church. But Catholics at once understood the malign intention, and spurned it, to the amazement and discomfiture of the persecuting party, which had built its brightest hopes on the working of that law. Not one vacant parish in the whole kingdom of Prussia has as yet been found willing to elect a new pastor. Whenever the Landrath convened an election meeting for that purpose, the invitation was either not responded to at all, or, if for prudence’s sake the electors appeared at the meeting, it was decidedly refused with the declaration that the parishioners had no power to elect their own priests, and that they would never acknowledge a pastor who was not sent to them by their bishop. Such being the firm attitude of all Prussian parishes towards that particular law, how could the government flatter itself with the hope that its own nominees would be received and acknowledged by the faithful? And yet Dr. Falk, disregarding all previous experience, went on imposing state priests on protesting parishes wherever he found an opportunity for it, to the great injury of the faithless priests themselves, who were excommunicated, to the parishes that rejected them, and to government, which made itself only the more odious. By this time, however, the ministry must see their mistake, for, in spite of the many enticements and premiums offered to priests of doubtful character and doctrine, the government during the interval of three years has not been able to gather more than twenty-one apostates round its state-church banner. Twenty-one out of ten thousand! With the exception of one, all these misguided men belong to the provinces of Silesia and Posen. Here is a complete list of them: Mr. Mücke in Gross Strelitz; Kolany in Murzyno; Nowacki in Obornik; Lizack in Schrotz; Kubezak in Xionz; Brenk in Kosten; Kick in Kähme; Gutzmer in Grätz; Würtz in Grabia; Moercke in Podwitz Golembiowsky in Plusnitz; Sterba in Leschnitz; Pischel in Girlachsdorf; Kenty in Boronow; Grünastle in Cösel; Sabotta in Kettch; Czerwinski in Zirke; Büchs in Gross Rudno; Rymarowicz (Posen); and Glattfelder in Balg (Baden).
Besides these state priests who profess to remain faithful to Rome, the Prussian government introduced two apostates in vacant parishes, one of whom is the Old Catholic pastor, Struckberg, presented by the Protestant Baron von Dyherrn to the fat living of Oberherzogswaldau in Silesia, and the other the notorious Suszynski, the married state-priest of Mogilno, who enjoys the emoluments of his sinecure comfortably at Königsberg. In all these state parishes the faithful refuse to entertain any communication, social or religious, with the intruders, and fulfil their religious duties in other churches. As to the congregations of these state priests, they principally consist of a few bad Catholics or government officials, such as burgomasters, policemen, etc.; in some even Protestants and Jews attend, and several count no other members than the clergyman’s housekeepers.
As the sect of Old Catholics must be looked upon as forming part of Prince Bismarck’s intended state church, it may fittingly be mentioned in connection with the state parishes. None of the 26 Kulturkampf laws issued in Prussia and the German Empire since 1871 has been more abused, more arbitrarily and unjustly applied by the government, than the so-called Old Catholic law, which grants to Old Catholic communities the joint use of Catholic parish churches and cemeteries, and the joint possession of the Catholic Church property, wherever a considerable number of these sectarians exist. How ober-presidents apply that law and determine the meaning of the word “considerable” may be seen by the two cases of Braunsberg and Königsberg, where in the one case about 20 and in the other about 40 Old Catholics formed, in the governor’s estimation, a sufficient number to allow the application of the law, and to rob as many as 10,000 Catholics in one instance of their churches and property. The ober-president’s partiality and self-contradicting conduct received a further illustration by the treatment of the Catholics of Hohenstein, who, although numbering 1,500, were refused permission to build a church in the town because the number 1,500 was not considered “considerable” in the meaning of the law. The thousand Catholics of Willenberg who petitioned the government for the same purpose received a similar answer. Thanks to this unjust application of the law, the Old Catholics obtained hitherto possession of 13 beautiful Catholic churches—viz., in Witten (10,000 Catholics to 76 Old Catholics); in Breslau the Corpus Christi Church (20,000 Catholics to a few hundred Old Catholics); in Neisse the Church of the Cross; in Hirschberg St. Ann’s Church (3,000 Catholics to 250 Old Catholics); in Königsberg; in Wiesbaden (15,000 Catholics to 250 Old Catholics); in Bochum (10,000 Catholics to about 200 Old Catholics); in Cologne St. Gereon’s Church (10,000 Catholics to 87 Old Catholics); in Crefeld St. Stephen’s; in Boppard the Carmelite Church (5,000 Catholics to 45 Old Catholics); in Coblentz the Jesuit Church; in Bonn the Gymnasium Church; and quite recently the parish church of Gottesberg in Silesia. In nearly all these churches the Old Catholics made their first entrance with the help of the police, the doors being forced open with hammer and crow-bar. Since they fell into Old Catholic hands most of them stand empty. On Easter Sunday about 20 to 30 worshippers attended in the robbed church in Wiesbaden; in several places grass is growing on the pavement surrounding the churches, and in others mushrooms are springing up freely at the very foot of the altars. There can be no doubt that the sect is already declining. Were it not for the aid in money and other advantages which its members receive from the Prussian government, it would probably by this time have shared the fate of Rongeanism. According to the report read at the fourth Old Catholic synod at Bonn, in May, 1877, there were at that time 35 Old Catholic communities in Prussia, counting in all 6,510 people with civil independence; in Baden there were 44 communities, in Bavaria 31, in Hesse 5, in Oldenburg 2, in Würtemberg 1. The total number of adherents, women and children included, amounted in Prussia to 20,524, in Baden to 17,203, in Bavaria to 10,100, in Hesse to 1,042, in Oldenburg to 240, in Würtemberg to 223—in all 49,342 out of a population of 14 millions. The number of Old Catholic priests in the whole German Empire is now 56. In the course of last year four of them and a good many laymen from Wiesbaden and Dortmund retracted their error and returned to the mother church; others became Protestants.
Although passed in May, 1875, the law ordering the dissolution of Catholic religious congregations has not yet been fully carried into execution, not out of regard for the establishments themselves, but because the state interest required a departure from the rule. The last term granted to Catholic sisters engaged in education expires on the 1st of October next. Their expulsion is causing the deepest grief among all classes of German Catholics, for the good sisters have, by their noble and self-sacrificing exertions, so endeared themselves to the hearts of the people that they are looked upon as—what they really are—the greatest benefactors of the people, without whose help the moral and religious training of the young will remain defective. More than all do the poor and unhappy feel their departure, for it was chiefly on orphanages and other charitable institutions that the expelled nuns exercised their salutary influence. Now that these establishments no longer stand under the direction of those ministering angels, who work only for the love of God and man, the respective parishes have to grant salaries to their successors, for which the poor as well as the rich are compelled to contribute. In a great many towns, however, they cannot be replaced at all, not only for want of means but also for want of the competent persons, and about 10,000 orphans of the poor are left destitute by the expulsion of the nuns. No wonder, then, if under such circumstances the parting scenes were everywhere heart-rending; not only sobbing children thronged round their foster-mothers in uncontrollable grief, but the inhabitants, burgomasters, and magistrates came to express their thanks for the eminent services they had rendered to their parishes, and their deep regret at seeing them driven out of home and country—their own beloved benefactresses. No exact statistics regarding the number of expelled nuns have as yet been published, nor is it possible to say what has become of them all. It is, however, computed that about 500 houses have been broken up, which must have included at least between two and three thousand inmates. The Ursulines of Dorsten transferred their establishment to Holland, where forty pupils followed them on the very day of their expulsion. The house of Posen went to Cracow; those of Cologne, Aix-la-Chapelle, Duderstadt, Kitzlar, etc., emigrated partly to North America, partly to neighboring countries. The Sisters of Our Lady, whose convents had been established more than 200 years in Essen and Coesfeld, went 250 strong across the Atlantic, and the School Sisters either returned to their families or left off their religious habits and continued their calling as lay teachers. The names of the other congregations that had to leave this year are chiefly the following: The English Ladies (Fulda and Mayence), the Franciscans (Frankfort, Erfurt, Treves, Fulda, Aix-la-Chapelle, Bonn, Oberwesel, Emmerich), the Sisters of Mercy conducting orphanages (Posen, Breslau, Lauban, Myslowitz, Steinfeld, Bromberg, Peplin, Düsseldorf, Crefeld, Bonn, Dortmund, Berncastle, Malmedy, Lannerz, Berge-Borbeck, Mayen, Rheinberg, Paderborn, Schroda, Düren, Bitburg, Neuss, Neustadt, Osnabrück, Salzkotten), the Sisters of St. Charles (Boppard, Oberglogau, etc.), St. Vincent de Paul (Deutz, Nippes, Ehrenfeld), the Daughters of the Holy Cross, and the Poor Sisters of Christ. Those Sisters of Mercy who exclusively devote themselves to hospital work have been allowed to remain; their exact number was a short time ago 5,763.
Of all the laws enacted since 1871 against the Catholic Church in Prussia, none will be attended with more injurious effects than the law regulating school supervision and religious instruction in popular schools. Not content with having removed nearly all ecclesiastical district and local school inspectors, and appointed Protestants and “liberal” Catholics in their place, the government has also forbidden the priests to teach the Catholic religion anywhere except in church out of school hours. In a decree issued by Dr. Falk in March, 1876, the right of parents to bring up their children in accordance with their religious principles is virtually denied, at all events practically destroyed, for it places the whole teaching and supervision of Catholic religious instruction under the supreme control of the Protestant government, and thus arbitrarily cancels clause 24 of the Prussian constitution, which guarantees to recognized religious societies the right of conducting religious instruction either through their priests or laymen invested with the missio canonica. By virtue of this ministerial ordinance the government, feeling its hands strengthened and unshackled, proceeds to all kinds of arbitrary and unjustifiable changes in matters of religious teaching. It sets aside Catholic catechisms and reading-books hitherto used in schools with ecclesiastical approbation, and replaces them by works more in harmony with the spirit of the age; it commissions schoolmasters (now already about 1,000) to teach the Catholic religion only in the name and by order of the civil power, threatening them with prosecution if they ask for or accept the missio canonica from church authorities; it either dissolves Catholic schools or amalgamates them with Protestant institutions under the name of simultan-schools, all of which stand under exclusively Protestant direction; it appoints Protestant and Jewish teachers to purely Catholic schools; it compels, as was recently done in Crefeld, Catholic children to attend Protestant school prayers; it limits the hearing of Mass to two days in the week, and strictly forbids Catholic teachers to exhort their pupils to a greater frequency of the Sacraments of Penance and Holy Communion; in one word, it uses all possible means to Protestantize Catholic children in popular schools. Priests and parents, school boards and parishes, have sought redress of this bitter grievance in innumerable petitions and protests addressed from all parts of the country to the emperor, the ministers, to both houses of Parliament, demanding in the name of liberty, of justice, of the constitution, of natural and human rights, that the teaching of their religion should again be declared free and placed under the only rightful authority, that of the church; but neither the prayers of distressed parents nor the powerful agitation got up by the leading Catholic representatives proved of any avail, Dr. Falk invariably rejecting all petitions on the ground that the grievances complained of did not exist—an assertion which the minister, if he had ventured to do so, could not have reconciled with the truth of facts. As ministers and national liberals alike expect the realization of their plans from the destructive school policy rather than from any of the other May laws, the Prussian government feels the less disposed to make concessions on this question, as it enables them to administer the poison of infidelity to the rising generation in a quiet and imperceptible but systematic and effective manner. Catholics have therefore nothing to hope from the present rulers of Prussia towards an equitable settlement of the religious question, as party interest, and not justice, is the moving principle of the May legislators. If the faith of the next generation is to be saved, it must be done by the parents themselves; if they take the religious instruction in their own hands, if by vigilance and self-devotion they detect, counteract, and destroy the evil influence of heterodox school-teaching, no power on earth will be able to interfere with their children’s faith; but if they neglect this solemn duty, which now devolves upon them with a fearful responsibility, they will have to bear the guilt of their children’s apostasy. Happily there is little or no ground for such apprehensions, now that bishops, priests, and laity have all so manfully withstood the storm and so far passed unscathed through the crucible of the persecution. Persevering in their course of loyal attachment to the church, Catholic parents of all classes of society look after their children’s faith and teach them catechism at home, in which excellent work they are effectually assisted by the advice and practical help of numerous societies instituted for that purpose all over Prussia.
Whilst Catholics heartily rejoice at the failure of their enemies’ endeavors to destroy their church in Germany, they deeply feel the enormous losses and sufferings which the application of the May Laws has so wantonly inflicted on so many thousands of their innocent co-religionists. Apart from the innumerable convictions of bishops, priests, and laymen for so-called May-law transgressions, Prince Bismarck alone instituted more than 7,000 prosecutions for alleged offences against his person. In his eagerness to silence opposition he spared neither sex nor age, neither office nor rank, proceeding with equal animosity against statesmen and artisans, distinguished writers and poor peasants, washerwomen and children. The sums paid in fines and the time spent in prison for Kulturkampf offences are said to be enormous; our readers may form an idea of the magnitude of the penal results of the persecution by the perusal of the following statistics: Within the first four months of 1877 Prussian courts of justice pronounced sentences of imprisonment amounting to 55 years, 11 months, and 6 days, and fines to the amount of 27,843 marks. The victims were 241 priests, 210 laymen, and 136 editors of newspapers. Imprisonment of 12 years, 8 months, and 14 days was decreed for offences against the emperor, and 8 years, 4 months, 7 days for 68 Bismarck offences. Besides these penalties, the police made 55 arrests, 74 domiciliary visits, and 56 dissolutions of unions and assemblies. A compositor of a Mayence paper, father of eight children, was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for having used a disrespectful expression towards his majesty whilst in a state of intoxication; a doctor had to spend a whole year in a fortress for a similar offence; a rag and bone gatherer got five and a half months, and a poor servant-girl of nineteen years of age one month’s imprisonment.
A few more instances, taken at random from the masses of Kulturkampf convictions, will further exemplify the nature of the offences and the penalties with which they were visited. Bishop Brinckmann received one year’s imprisonment, Vicar-General Giese two years, Father Fievez three months, Father Haversath four weeks, for alleged embezzlement of diocesan money; in reality for preventing certain church funds from falling into the hands of the government, which had no claim whatever to them. In Münster 2,500 heads of families were fined for not sending their children to school on Corpus Christi day. The successive editors of the Kuryer Poznanski, the Germania, and the Frankfort Zeitung have for several years past gone to prison, some for publishing papal and episcopal documents, others for offending the emperor, Prince Bismarck, and other members of the administration. Father Isbert, of Namborn, Treves, spent 903 days in the prison of Saarbrücken for “illegally” saying Mass, hearing confessions, etc. In April, 1876, the priests of the diocese of Posen had to pay 163,463 marks for similar offences. Father Simon was sentenced to seven months’ imprisonment because he removed the sacred Host from the church of the Girlachsdorf the day before state priest Pischel’s installation. Fathers Bruns of Geldern and Kroll of Adekerke were prosecuted and punished for refusing absolution to two penitents. A French priest accidentally staying in Hanover was condemned to a fine of 4,800 marks for saying Mass in a private chapel. Dean Leineweber, of Heiligenstadt, went to prison for 18 months for granting dispensations; Father Nawrocki two years for secretly administrating the parish of Goszieszy. Besides endless prosecutions, hundreds of the inhabitants of Marpingen had to pay fines for granting hospitality to pilgrims.
But the Catholic clergy had to suffer for not acknowledging the May Laws as well as for transgressing them. By the so-called Bread-basket Law, intended to starve the priests into submission, many thousands lost their income and had to bear great misery, especially in poor parishes, where church offerings usually consist of farthings. In the diocese of Fulda, for instance, the average income of a great number of parish priests fluctuated between twelve and twenty pounds a year. In other districts they fared in so far better as their parishioners indemnified them for the loss of their state emoluments and homes by voluntary contributions or gifts in kind, such as meat, bread, firewood, etc. This help, if lastingly established, might have considerably alleviated the existing distress; but unfortunately the Prussian government forbade public offerings and collections for the relief of priests in distress, on the ground that such illegal remunerations encouraged resistance to the state laws. This harsh, not to say inhuman, proceeding, however, only harmed its victims for a time; for very soon the inventive spirit of the faithful found out other means of relief, over which the most watchful officials could obtain no control. In addition to secret parish subventions the priests now receive regular assistance from the Paulinus Verein, which charitable association collects contributions not only in Germany but also from foreign countries, among which England especially has distinguished itself.
Destructive as the Kulturkampf has been to the outward organization of the church and the happiness and worldly interest of the people, its consequences have in many other respects proved an immense blessing to the Catholic Church in Germany. Instead of having been destroyed or weakened, as her enemies hoped, she has, on the contrary, become stronger and more powerful in her influence over the masses, more respected by her adversaries, better understood by Protestant Christians, better loved and obeyed by her own children. Lukewarm Catholics, formerly almost ashamed of professing their religion in public, now no longer shrink from manifesting their loyal attachment to the church; nay, more, they stand up in her defence, and edify others by the regular fulfilment of their religious duties. The devout crowds that fill the churches on Sundays and all festive occasions; the enormous increase of regular communicants; the frequent processions from widowed dioceses to cathedrals of other dioceses for the reception of the Sacrament of Confirmation; the deep and universal grief shown by the people at the death of Pope Pius IX. and their cordial rejoicing at the election of his successor; the numerous addresses of loyalty sent on every possible occasion to the banished bishops by millions of the faithful; the touching attachment of the masses to their pastors—all these and a great many more significant manifestations afford ample proof that the Catholic Church has gained, and not lost, by the Kulturkampf. And it may not be exaggeration to say that never at any time did the religious sentiment among German Catholics shine forth so brightly, their piety so fervently, their spirit of self-sacrifice so strongly, their love for their church so unboundedly, as now after seven years of relentless persecution. Giving to the state what belongs to the state, but fearlessly obeying the church in all matters that regard their eternal salvation, the German Catholics, bishops, priests, and people, stand firm and unshaken in their resolution to remain true to God and his church, and to lose wealth, freedom, life itself, rather than give up one particle of their faith.
Nor are the beneficial consequences of the persecution limited to a revival in religion; they are also felt, with almost equal power, in the political and literary life of the Catholic portion of the German nation. Purified, ennobled, raised from a state of political servility to a sense of self-dignity, the persecuted German Catholics feel their love of freedom rekindled, their sunken courage revived, and a hitherto unknown power—the power of outraged honesty and truth—growing and spreading among them, and defending their inalienable rights with energy and success, in society, in parliament, in the press, and in general literature, wherever religious and political liberty and independence are wont to assert themselves. The Catholics of Prussia now constitute a political body second only in importance to the national liberals, whose influence in the country is rapidly declining. If the wishes for a return to a religious policy, as expressed by the emperor shortly after the late attempt on his life, should be carried out by his ministers, we may live to see Prince Bismarck courting the help of the Catholic Church to save that same state which resolved upon and worked for her destruction. How valuable the support of the Catholic party would be to the perplexed German government in these critical times is sufficiently shown by the number of its representatives in the various parliaments: in the Reichstag the Catholic Centre party counts 98 members; in the Bavarian Chamber of Deputies it commands the majority; in Baden, where only one Catholic sat in parliament before the year 1870, there are now 13 Catholic deputies. The best illustration of the growth of the Catholic party in Germany was furnished at the last elections, when, in spite of the arbitrary dissection of Catholic voting districts, Catholic members were returned with overwhelming majorities wherever a sufficient number of constituents made such elections possible. The same success attended the elections of municipal officers, but unfortunately to no purpose, as the Prussian government, contrary to right and justice, annulled all elections of Catholic burgomasters and appointed its own creatures to the vacant posts.
Another creation of the Kulturkampf for which we cannot be too thankful is the German Catholic press, which for its tone, skill, influence, and general success stands unrivalled by any press in the world. Beyond a few more or less obscure provincial papers, Germany possessed no Catholic press organization before the year 1870; now nearly 200 of these spirited children of the persecution flourish in the German Empire. Foremost among all appears the Germania, of world-wide reputation, which expounds and defends the political programme of the Catholic party with such statesmanlike ability that Prince Bismarck himself, in one of his parliamentary speeches, was fain to acknowledge the superior character and excellence of the paper. Worthy associates of the Berlin central organ of Catholic publicity are the great provincial daily papers, such as the Deutsche Reichszeitung in Bonn, the Kölnische Volkszeitung in Cologne, the Westphalian Merkur, and last, not least, the smaller provincial and local papers, all of which, in the involuntary absence of the chief pastors of the church, teach and guide the people in the paths of religion as well as in those of public life. The influence of the Catholic press over the people was felt in two ways: in the first place, it succeeded in preserving and consolidating among them that spirit of union, order, and loyalty of which the bishops and priests had given such admirable examples; and in the second place it prevented, by its wise admonitions, the exasperated people from abandoning the policy of passive resistance as recommended by the bishops, so that, in the midst of incessant, almost unbearable provocations, the Catholic population of Prussia has not been found guilty of one single act of rebellion or open resistance to the state power.
The difference of the effects which the May-law legislation has had on the Catholic and the Protestant inhabitants of Prussia must strike every one. Whilst to the former the Kulturkampf has been a school of improvement, of moral and religious regeneration, the latter have derived none but deplorable results from it; witness the general lawlessness, the frightful increase of crime, the sunken state of morality, and the all but complete extinction of Christianity which now prevails among the Protestant people. According to the Nord Allgemeine Zeitung, Prince Bismarck’s non-official organ, not a day passes in Prussia without murder and manslaughter, and the demoralization of the lower classes has reached such a depth that there is no longer any security for life and property, that the son murders his father, that the intoxicated father stabs his son, and that the servant kills his master on the slightest provocation. School-boys have become regular frequenters of public-houses; they fight duels in love affairs, commit suicide for the most trifling causes, and help to fill the overcrowded prisons. Since 1874 the number of prisoners has increased by nearly two hundred per cent. To mention a few instances only, in 1872 the town of Frankfort-on-the-Main had 1,072 convicts; in the present year it has 5,323. In the province of East Prussia more crimes were committed in 1875 than in the 20 preceding years together. Sacrileges, theft, murder, suicide, immoralities are the crimes of most frequent occurrence in Protestant Prussia. In the one small province of Schleswig-Holstein not less than 212 suicides were recorded in the year 1874; and in the city of Berlin in 1875 there were 284 (213 men and 71 women) cases, besides 38 corpses found in the Spree. In one month of the year 1876 the army counted 26 suicides—i.e., one-fifth of the whole mortality. Another offence, formerly little known in Prussia, but now spreading in an extraordinary manner, is the wholesale evasion of the obligatory military service. According to official returns the number of young men who evaded that duty by going abroad increased within the period of 1862 to 1872 from 1,648 to 10,069. Last year it was about twice the latter number. We may here add that Catholic priests are now also obliged to serve in the army as private soldiers. It is a remarkable fact, perhaps only a coincidence, but at all events one of the fruits of Bismarck’s anti-church policy, that socialism has grown in Prussia in proportion as crimes have multiplied. In the year 1871 the socialists had only two members in Parliament; now they have 13, representing two millions of adherents, who support 45 socialist newspapers. The party has not reached its maturity yet; but if the Prussian government, disregarding the disapproving vote of the Reichstag, should proceed against it with violent repressive police measures, it is sure to grow rapidly into a dangerous power that may one day shake the new German Empire to its very foundation.
Prince Bismarck did not intend to injure the Protestant Church by his May legislation, but, whether intended or not, it is now an undeniable fact that the two great results of that legislation are the growth of socialism and the accelerated extinction of Christianity in the German Protestant Church. When preachers of the Gospel are allowed to declare from the pulpit that to them the Bible is nothing but Jewish literature, that our Lord Jesus Christ was a mere man, that the idea of a Trinity, sacraments, miracles, etc., are human inventions, can it surprise any one if socialists go further still, and in numerously-attended meetings openly deny the existence of God and eternal life? Enabled by the May Laws to utter any blasphemies they like, the German infidels carry on their anti-Christian propaganda on a very extensive scale, and succeed in drawing hundreds of thousands of Protestants out of the established church. They alone make use of the so-called Alt-Catholic law, which gives freedom to leave a church without joining another, and which was passed for the purpose of inducing Catholics to follow the lead of the Alt-Catholic Bishop Reinkens. This ostentatious secession from the Protestant Church, however, is not its greatest loss; far more disastrous to its existence is that wholesale defection which takes place quietly, without people thinking it worth while to go out of the church. They simply abstain from frequenting places of worship, and refuse all ministrations from their clergymen for themselves and their children. During the last three months of 1874—that is to say, in the year following the promulgation of the May Laws—16,631 Protestant children remained unbaptized, and 8,346 Protestant couples refused to be married in church. In the year 1875 Berlin alone had 9,964 civil marriages without church blessing, and 15,000 children who received no baptism. In Königsberg the number of civil marriages not accompanied by any church ceremony was 36 per cent., in Dantzic 47 per cent., in Breslau 53 per cent., in Stettin 68 per cent. In Berlin 70,000 Protestants reject their church altogether. There only 18 per cent. of the whole Protestant population go to church; in Worms 6 per cent., in Mayence 5 per cent., in Giessen 5 per cent., in Darmstadt 3 per cent., in Chemnitz 3 per cent., and in some other places of Saxony only 1 per cent. In short, the Protestant Church in Germany is irretrievably lost. Thus it has come to pass, under God’s providence, that the blow which Prince Bismarck aimed at the Catholic Church glided off from the Rock of Peter, and fell with deadly effect on the Protestant Church, of which he counts himself a stanch adherent.
SONNET.
THE MORAL LAW, AND THE UTILITARIAN PHILOSOPHY.
That law which cynic-sophists desecrate,
Creation deft, they boast of mortal hand;
Custom’s weak nurseling; or, by sea and land,
A tyrant’s edict fencing doubtful state,
Is older than the brazen books of Fate;
A bondage unto liberty; a grand
And circumscribing harmony, unplanned,
But from the breasts of all things good and great
Where’er the flame of thought and feeling played,
Issuing divine, a universal birth,
Before the first-born zephyr sang its ode,
Before pines grew on mountains of the north,
Before the greater light, or less, had flowed
O’er the glad bosom of the new-shaped earth
“THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY.”[[132]]
The strangest and saddest commentary upon that dreary religious sentimentality known as positivism, or the Religion of Humanity, was the infatuation of Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill with regard to two very commonplace women whom these men, one the founder and the other the ablest exponent of the religion, foolishly loved and worshipped in life, and actually deified after death. Guizot says that Comte was crazy, but Mill was confessedly a man of rare logical acumen, thoroughly-trained intellectual powers, and with no trace of mental alienation. One does not know whether to laugh at or to pity the maudlin sentimentalism of his love for his wife, the idolatrous honors he paid to her portrait and bust, and the painful conflict of his soul, halting between a frantic wish to believe in the presence and intimations of her disembodied spirit, and the necessity of rejecting, according to his theory, all hope or belief in the hereafter. There is something at once ludicrous and shocking in this, the only religious sentiment that such a mind as Mill’s would admit—the worship of a woman’s memory as the full satisfaction and highest reach of religion. The worship of woman irresistibly suggests the crowning of the Goddess of Reason by the French Revolutionists; and we trust our reflection will not be misconstrued when we say that woman holds her true and rightful position only in the Catholic Church. The tolerance of divorce in Protestantism is an injury to the sex, and when we glance at woman’s relations to most of the philosophico-moral systems that have been the outgrowth of the religious rebellion of the sixteenth century, we see how wise and tender the church has ever been in her treatment of the weaker vessel. St. Paul has laid down for all time the true idea of woman in her religious relations, and every attempt to change those conditions has resulted in failure and shame.
The Religion of Humanity is one of those vague terms which logic rejects with scorn. The phrase has a certain hazy beauty for hazy minds; but its gross spirit means the deification of man, the boundless extent of his natural powers, a worse than Pelagian confidence in his own moral strength, and the natural, social, and civil equality of woman. In our own country the system has not revealed all its deformity, nor are its principles apparently very familiar even to its advocates; but all its hideousness is laid bare in the writings of the German Feuerbach, and it is sad to think that Mrs. Lewes (George Eliot) devotes her uncommon powers to the exposition of its distinctive doctrinal phase—namely, that all religion is a diseased state of our consciousness, and its exercise through any form or in any sphere gives us neither present comfort nor future hope.
A primal instinct and yearning of the human heart tends toward an object of infinite blessedness and beauty. Descartes inferred from our knowledge and love of Infinite and Absolute Being, in which all glory, perfection, mercy, and power co-exist, that such a Being really does exist; and this famous proof of the existence of God has never been shown to be false or unwarranted, though some philosophers have held that it is not strictly a demonstration. Our readers know how cogently and eloquently Dr. Brownson expatiates upon that beautiful formula, Ens creat existentias. God IS. Every affirmation and reality announces that glorious and all-sufficient Being. Nothing less than himself can satisfy our immortal longings and aspirations. The very difficulties that enshroud our ideas of the Supreme Being seem to be only “dark with excess of light.” Nor has this truth, on which man’s feet have been stayed since the creation, ever been shaken. Dr. Newman, using Lamennais’ argument from universal authority, but without falling into Lamennais’ mistake of its being the only argument, challenges the world to explain away the universal consent of mankind to the divine existence. Cicero only echoes Plato when he says that there never was a nation, no matter how barbarous, that had not some idea of the existence of God. Talleyrand used to say: “There is somebody that has more intellect than Napoleon and more wit than Voltaire, and that somebody is—mankind.” The great heart of the world leaps to its Creator, and the testimony of individual experience in all ages but repeats the saying of St. Augustine: “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord! and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”
If we compare this noble and sublime creed, “I believe in God the Father Almighty,” with the hollow metaphysical and humanitarian beliefs of our unhappy age, we at once recognize the profound truth and beauty of many of the utterances of the ancient Fathers upon the subject of religion. Their simple and antique majesty of thought and phrase is like a statue of Michael Angelo’s alongside of a bizarre specimen of fashionable ceramics. St. Clement of Alexandria holds that there is only one religion, and the great argument of St. Augustine’s City of God is the essential unity of the divine cultus, coming from Adam, through the patriarchs, the prophets, fully revealed in Christ the Son of God, and destined to endure for ever. All theology germinates from the invocation of the three divine Persons. When we bless ourselves we worship God, with the worship of unending ages, from everlasting to everlasting. The church condemned the proposition that all the virtues of the pagan philosophers were vices. Christ, the God-Man, is the object of religion, and, as thus presented, he fulfils all the yearnings and hopes spoken of by the humanitarians, who, in making the human race at once the subject and object of worship, fail to see that Catholicity gratifies man beyond his wildest dreams of exalted manhood and infinite progress; for humanity cannot be raised higher than it has been raised by the Eternal Son of God, who, clothed with our glorified humanity, which he will never lay aside, “sitteth at the right hand of the Majesty on high.”
It seems an unworthy concession to a very weak school of scepticism for Max Müller, in the May number of the Contemporary Review, to propound the queries, What is religion? Have we any religion? and, after giving a long and flattering notice of every fool that says in his heart there is no God, to inform us graciously that there is a term for God in every language with which he is acquainted. The logical vice of nearly all non-Catholic scientific men here and in Europe at the present day is an ignorant and unwarranted obtrusion of their crude theories upon the subjects of religion. They have no perception of the exquisite sense and appositeness of the old saying, Ne sutor ultra crepidam. A satirical friend, after listening to Proudhon’s theories about the creation, remarked to him: “What a pity God had not the benefit of your suggestions when he made the world!” and such was the hebetude of the infidel that he rejoined: “In that event creation would have been infinitely better.” Huxley, who is pronounced a scientific charlatan even in those studies upon the invertebrata to which he has devoted twenty-five years, has the blasphemous audacity to call his Creator “a pedantic drill-sergeant”; and Tyndall refers to his God as an “atom-manufacturer.” Max Müller has far greater reverence, but his latest utterances convict him hopelessly of pantheism, which is about the absurdest form of “religion” that any unfortunate man can adopt.
It is a curious exemplification of the state of religious thought in England when such a man as Müller is selected to deliver a course of lectures upon theology. His only qualification is his philological learning, of which Scaliger, the greatest of modern philologists, said its value in theology has been very much over-rated. To such an extent does Müller carry his linguistic fanaticism that he derives all reason and all truth from language. He settles a controversy by appealing to the root of a word. The most cursory study of etymology suffices to show that it is in the main a vague guess-work; and the words we employ to express the subtlest operations of the intellect are so many metaphors or images drawn from sensible objects. The word religion may be derived from three distinct roots, relegere, to read back, to retrace; or religere, to collect; or religare, to bind together; and an enthusiastic etymologist, warming with the subject, would run us back to Babel. Who would suppose that the word goose, for example, which, on the “bow-wow” theory of language, must have originated with an old farmer driving his poultry to market, is traceable directly to the Sanscrit, through the Teutonic, Gothic, Latin, and Greek, and enjoys a proud pedigree of Aryan etymology? Like all modern specialists, Müller drives his philological hobby through all theological science. He has done a very great injury to religious thought by his constant prating about the essential oneness of all creeds, and his studied purpose to represent Christianity as only a modification of the great “world-creeds,” with a very decidedly expressed preference for the Vedas over the Gospels and for Zoroaster over St. John the Evangelist.
If Protestantism continues to disintegrate as rapidly in the next decade as it has in the last two, our theological professors may skip all the tracts at present devoted to the refutation of the principles and consequences of the Reformation. The older controversial works are already antiquated, and the theological lore of thirty years ago is no longer available. Yet it is very doubtful if any solid advantage can be gained by the study of modern philosophy. The Holy Ghost, ever ruling the mind of the church, brought about the definition of Papal Infallibility at the most opportune period of the world’s history. The only salvation for the human intellect is the dogmatic authority of the church, and the clearer this is shown and enforced the better for the world. The day of tedious Christian controversy is gone for ever. Amicable discussions upon controverted points of doctrine are no longer possible. The field has been narrowed down. The contest now is conducted upon the primal bases of the primitive truths—God or Satan, heaven or hell. “Under which king, Bezonian? Speak or die!” When the admired and acknowledged “leaders of modern thought” are come to such a pass as to ask if life is worth living? is there a hell? is not man the beginning and end of himself? was not Christ sublimely self-deceived? does not matter contain the promise and potency of all life, and is not immortality a splendid dream? it is manifestly useless labor for a Catholic theologian to pore for years over the question of Anglican Orders or the Donation of Constantine.
Our objection to the prolonged study of philosophy must be understood not of Catholic philosophy, which is the handmaid of revealed truth, but of those degrading systems that the materialistic mind of the age is constantly spawning. The facilities of the printing-press, and the habit of writing philosophical articles and systems in the common languages, have familiarized the world with a vast amount of error. One advantage of the learned tongues lay in their preventing many people from obtaining the little learning which is proverbially a dangerous thing. In our day we not only have technical treatises on science, philosophy, and theology, but popular hand-books which aim at the greatest simplicity and directness. Materialists give illustrated lectures to unscientific people, and labor strenuously to accommodate their ideas even to the unformed mind of childhood. The newspapers teem with all sorts of crude theories, and no effort is spared to disseminate the most outrageous fallacies. When Diderot and D’Alembert started the Encyclopédie there were protests and remonstrances from the church and from scientific bodies; but few persons could afford to purchase the huge tomes, as compared with the multitudes that now can buy for a few cents a dangerous publication at any news-stand. The New York Daily Graphic, not content with printing a likeness of Müller, gave also long extracts from the article to which we have adverted; and nothing is commoner than a so-called philosophical essay even in our lightest magazines. With the help of a learned and often unintelligible phraseology the impression is left that a mighty mind, after many mental throes, has given birth to a wonderful truth or profound reflection destined to influence modern thought and lead eventually to the widest-reaching social results. The only remedy for such a delusion is to impress readers with a modest consciousness of their own ability to penetrate the sibyllic meaning, which, if they fail to do, is very likely without any meaning at all. By this manly and rational process it is surprising how quickly one sees through absurdities, and catches a glimpse of the ass’ ears under the lion’s skin. Our present study of the Religion of Humanity will illustrate this idea (not in our own case, of course). Let us take up a few of the most famous dicta of humanitarianism. Note the obscurity of the language, which in many cases is intentional. In Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, who may be regarded as the first arch-priest of positivism, the sage of Weimar expressly remarks that philosophical writers contemporary with him had told him that when they were most perplexed and confused, that was the very time when they courageously wrote on! This is enough to make a man give up metaphysics for the rest of his days.
“My theory,” says Feuerbach, “may be condensed into two words—nature and man. The cause of existence is not God—a vague, mysterious, and indefinite term—but nature. The being in which nature becomes conscious of itself is man. It follows that there is no God—that is to say, no abstract being, distinct from nature and man, which disposes of the destinies of the universe and mankind at its discretion; but this negation is but the consequence of the cognition of God’s identity with the essence of nature and man.”
What does Feuerbach mean by nature? Something distinct from man, evidently, for he continually separates them. Ah! man is the being in which nature becomes conscious—of what? Then nature, God, and man are said to be identical in essence. But if God is only an abstract term, how can an abstraction enter into a conscious essence, and how does it follow that after all there is no God? Oh! you mistake. This negation (of what?) is a consequence of a cognition, etc. Now, all this stuff amounts to nothing but low, base materialism. There is not a particle of reasoning, fancy, or poetic beauty in the entire book from which this extract, which is clear by contrast with others, is taken. Yet George Eliot, who is trumpeted through the world as a glorious prophetess of humanity, deemed it worth her patient toil to translate this bathos into English. In the foregoing extract are used at random words of deep and pregnant import, the meaning of which has been fixed by the sharp and subtle but eminently truthful and honest minds of Catholic philosophy and theology. These words are vilely misused by reputed philosophers, until there is no clearness or exactitude of statement in half the philosophical treatises that one takes up to read. The church herself, in her dogmatic infallibility, has defined for all time the meanings of certain expressions which she has made touchstones of the faith—tesseræ fidei. The devil was the first to equivocate, and his children have always followed his example. The term “nature” has an exact philosophical meaning which Feuerbach knew, and his school know. Essence, existence, cognition, and cause are words that have to be weighed with the nicest care when used in a philosophical disquisition. If these writers are sincere they should speak their meaning plainly, and not darken counsel with vain words. The plain English of the extract is this: “There is no God in the sense of creator or judge of man. Man is his own God. We cannot know that anything exists outside of our own consciousness.” Even this is obscure, because there is darkness upon the face of these abysmal depths of unbelief, over which the Spirit of God never moved.
The Religion of Humanity, in contradiction to the very consciousness and irresistible instincts and traditions of the human race, thus assumes that there is no God but man, out-Mohammeding Mohammed, who admitted that there is one God, and contented himself with the humbler title of prophet. It stands alone in its horrible deformity. It is a leper from which all other creeds shrink. It has attempted to prove its identity with many of the old pagan beliefs, but, notwithstanding a cumbrous and learned exposition of mythology, no such identification could be proved. There are some gibing comments upon the gods in Lucian, and Juvenal at times hints slyly at the amours of Olympic Jove; but there is no student of mythology but knows the depth of the religious sentiment in the vast masses of the Greek and Roman states. The worship of the earth, sea, and skies was idealized. It may be boldly asserted that ancient history does not present any traces of the gross materialism of modern times. Æschylus repeatedly declares that there was a power superior to Jove himself, and the researches of Niebuhr have established the virtual monotheism of Greece and Rome. Despite the multitude of gods, there was the Deus Optimus Maximus, clearly spoken of by Tully, and not obscurely intimated in nearly every relic of ancient literature and art. The attempt to trace the Religion of Humanity back to the beginnings of the human race proved a complete failure. Man never worshipped himself as the Supreme God. There was a broad distinction made between the heroes or the emperors to whom divine honors were decreed and the gods themselves. These are but the commonplaces of the history of religion; but the attempt showed a consciousness of weakness on the part of this wretched school of unbelief. Euripides himself would have upbraided them:
Απιστ᾽ ἄπιστα, καινὰ χαινὰ δέρκομαι.
Ἔτερα δ᾽ εφ ἑτερῶν
Κακὰ κακῶν κυρεῖ.[[133]]
Every effort that has been made to find a purely natural and human cause for religion has failed. The wide study of religion which modern scepticism has unweariedly pursued always results in perplexing it the more. Volney went to Palestine to disprove the ancient prophecies, and his book shows their literal and startling fulfilment. Fichte used to open his lectures upon God with the blasphemous remark, “Gentlemen, to-day let us construct the Supreme Being,” but all attempts at such construction have only brought out more clearly the immemorial belief of his creatures in his existence. The permanency of the original traditions of the human family is so remarkable a phenomenon, in view of the perishableness of merely human records, that the most sceptical minds have been struck with fear and amazement. It is like the living proof of the Psalmist’s words: “If I go up into heaven, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and flee to the outermost ends of the earth, thou art there!” Even the pantheism of Brahminism is something entirely distinct from the confusion and chaos of the Religion of Humanity.
Strauss, in his last book, The Old and the New Faith, asks if the modern world is as religious as the ancient world was, and he appears to derive satisfaction from his conclusion that there is a vast falling off in religion. But as he does not deign to define what he means by religion, we are left in the dark. One loses patience with the perverse stupidity of the British and American public, that have always their ears erect for what Strauss will say, and sceptics will complacently assure you that there are arguments in Strauss that have left Christianity in a deplorable plight; whereas the fact is, Strauss’ Life of Christ is familiarly cited in the schools of Germany as an illustration of the futility of an argument against well-authenticated human testimony. Whately wrote a book to prove that such a person as Napoleon Bonaparte never existed, and Strauss wrote a book to prove that Christ never existed, both with equal success.
The true animus of Comte, Strauss, Renan, and the other heads of this school is demoniac hatred of Christ. Why are they for ever attacking him, if, as they claim, all religions are preparative of the advent of this Religion of Humanity? Why can they go into hysterics of admiration over Socrates, Voltaire, and Shakspere, yet foam with fury at the name of Jesus? They will not even credit our Saviour with effecting the slightest moral good in the world, but refer to his blessed religion as a darkness and blight on the human intellect. Surely no true measure for the elevation of humanity would throw aside Christianity. But it is clear that these men have no true love for man. It is only their insufferable pride that will not bend the knee before Christ, or bend it in mockery like Renan and the author of Ecce Homo. They cry out, “Son of David, what have we to do with you?” and their cry is that of lost souls. All the infidel literature about Christ that has appeared so abundantly in the past score of years bears traces of this humanitarian spirit. They fain would make out Christ to be a mere man, but they are in this quandary: that he had no “humanitarian” notions. He came to do the will of his Father. He said nothing about the Sublime Humanity, the greatness and glory of this world, the god-like intellect of man, the progress of vast ideas, the universal diffusion of knowledge, the infinite progressiveness of the species, the force of cosmic influences, and the gorgeous future that will dawn for woman. Therefore, worse than paganism, the Religion of Humanity will not erect a statue to him.
Comte, desirous of giving hierarchical form to positivism, invented a worship and a calendar in which were commemorated three hundred and sixty-five “eminent servitors of humanity” in place of the saints of the Catholic Church. He began with Moses and ended with himself. Among the saints were Bichat, Condillac, Gutenberg, and Frederick II. of Prussia. He also invented a public service, a hymnal, and a certain form of worshipping the Sublime Humanity, by which he probably meant himself. He himself adored the Sublime Humanity as embodied and idealized in a very commonplace lady. Guizot says of him that he made repeated attempts to commit suicide, and in his review of positivism seems to think the insanity of its founder a sufficient refutation of his strange opinions. He admits, however, that long before Comte’s death his religion had made considerable progress in France and in England, where it was enthusiastically embraced by two men who, one would suppose, would be the last to adopt a fantastic creed—J. S. Mill and Wm. Hartpole Lecky, the historian of rationalism.
Toning down the sublimities of the irrepressible Comte, and not deigning to admit his hierarchy or his saints—which, to say the truth, smacked too much of Catholicity—the positivists of England and America contented themselves with a denial of all supernatural religion, and announced with a flourish of trumpets the infinite perfectibility of the human race, the glory of humanity, the cosmic emotion which is the deepest religious feeling of humanity, and the superiority of aggregate immortality to a private or personal existence after death. Man, very much in the abstract, was exalted to the throne of the Deity. All this blatant puffing of modern progress, development, and evolution is kept up by these man-worshippers. The spirit is the spirit of pride. But it must in justice be said of Mr. Frothingham that he is not so enthusiastic in the cause of humanity as he might be. His book on the subject is quite tame when contrasted, say, with Comte’s Woman and Priest. He does not gush enough, and he has not the irreverent boldness of his master, Theodore Parker. Mr. Frothingham is not by any means an emotional man, and this is fatal to his humanitarian progress. Nor is he a deeply-read man even in his own theology, though, to be sure, no sane man would blame him for that defect.
The doctrine of the infinite progressiveness of man is another of those high-sounding phrases that no logic will tolerate. There can be no internal progress in religion. All the scientific discoveries that may be made to the end of time will not have the slightest influence upon one jot or one tittle of revealed truth. Nor will they have any essential or related power over the truths of natural theology, or what is generally known as such. The relations of man to God, the coming of Christ, the establishment and conservation of his church, are truths and facts that can never be changed. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but the word of God shall not pass. This is why the church is so calm when all Protestantism is in a ferment about science. The two spheres of truth, divine and human, supernatural and natural, can never collide. Man may progress in many things, but religion, the Everlasting Yea, as Carlyle calls it, cannot from its very nature change, transform, advance, increase, or diminish. The humanitarians long for the day when there will be no sects and no religious differences. Then the best plan is for all the sects to enter the Catholic Church. They want a religion for man, and surely that religion is the best which God himself made for man.
There is a great deal of speciousness in this cry of progress, culture, and modern enlightenment, and even Catholics are deceived by the spirit of pride, for man from the beginning loved to consider himself a god knowing good from evil. Humanitarianism gains adherents in Catholic countries who would roar with laughter at the idea of turning Protestants. France never forgets those delusive words, liberty, fraternity, and equality, and this religion of humanity has blazoned them over the world. The restlessness under church government, the rational submission which the faith exacts, the lessons of mortification, and the stern portrayal of man which Christianity presents are all influences that tend to the progress of humanitarianism. No man likes to hear the dread truth regarding his slavery to the devil, the necessity of grace, the duty of confessing, and his unutterable weakness. It is these that are the unpalatable truths which spoil the teaching of the Ideal Man, as they call our Saviour. Comte would not suffer him to be enrolled among his saints, perhaps for the reason that St. Frederick the Great of Prussia used to refer to our Lord as L’Infame. If there is one truth most saliently brought out in the Gospel, it is that without Christ we can do nothing, and this would never suit the apostles of the infinite progressiveness of the human race.
This latter absurdity, most ridiculous when applied to religion, is not a whit more reasonable as applied to science. There must be a limit. The human mind is not infinite. No doubt we shall continue our improvements in machinery. There can be no vast progress made in literature or art. It seems from the history of the race that our powers are limited, and, though we boast of our great mechanical improvements, Washington Irving said that he would not be surprised if they yet unearthed a locomotive engine from the ruins of Persepolis. Infinite progress would seem to be only a figment of the brain of a poetic humanitarian. It is well known that Don Quixote, who certainly gave himself up to redressing the wrongs of humanity, was peculiarly eloquent upon the charms and perfections of Dulcinea; though the honest old knight, crackbrained though he was, would have crossed himself devoutly at the idea of Dulcinea being a divinity in any other sense than that familiar to true lovers.
The motives for moral action presented by the humanitarian theory are very noble but, alas! very impracticable. While we entirely dissent from the opinion of Bentham and Paley, that selfishness is the guiding principle of our actions—an opinion which is at once an insult and a falsehood—still the vast majority of mankind cannot be influenced by the very airy and sublime notions of our philosophers. Even natural goodness appears to be prompted by heavenly intimations and aids. Gratia supponit naturam. Of course a good work, to merit salvation, must be attended with grace from its origin to its consummation. But our humanitarians will not even promise us happiness hereafter, and we know how slim are the chances for happiness in this world. This great humanity for which we must labor is only an abstraction. No doubt a man may have a real and pure love for his fellow-man on merely speculative grounds or through natural kindness of heart; for have we not a Bergh for the brutes? All of us, however, feel how vague and impotent such a feeling must be or is likely to become. Christ unites love of our neighbor with love of God, its reason and cause, and there is a world of sweet philosophy in this precept on which depend the law and the prophets. It is the only motive that has been found fruitful in any age. Charity is a Christian growth. There was not one hospital in pagan Athens or Rome, though there were numerous coteries of eminent philosophers.
From whatever side we view this strange “religion,” its hollowness and absurdity become apparent. Its genesis in a morbid mind clouded at times with insanity, and its elaboration in other morally unbalanced intellects, awaken at the outset doubts of its coherency. The vagueness of its formulas wearies and confounds the critic. It has no philosophical structure, and, we are afraid, no theological results. Its literature is marked with weak sentiment and an effusive love and praise of mere naturalism—we were going to say mere animalism—which cannot hold any mind that has a perception of the true dignity and exaltation of human nature as created by God and redeemed by his only Son. So far as we are aware, it has exerted no appreciable influence upon the morality of the world, and its failure to commend itself generally to the humanity it so loudly praises would indicate that men perceive its intrinsic weakness and ineptitudes.
We know that many Protestants condemn and detest this creed as heartily as does the church, which in simple and noble language condemned it in the very first session of the Vatican Council. But we cannot help thinking that Protestantism has had much to do in bringing the monster to birth. It is the logical evolution of Protestant right of private judgment, of personal independence of the doctrinal authority of the church, and of unwise tolerance of all sorts of mischievous religious vagaries. Stripped, of all disguises and forced to speak in true tones, this deified man of the Religion of Humanity is the Antichrist, setting himself up as God and claiming to be God. It is the apotheosis of man, who renews the folly of building a tower of pride in which he may secure himself against the wrath of the Eternal. But before the face of His wrath who can abide? It will not do to speak of the Omniscient as the Unknowable or the Unknowing.
The worst feature of this placitum is that it is militant and aggressive. Comte, as we have said, established a regular system of worship, and what passes under the more respectable name of Unitarianism is really formulated positivism. We should care little for it, did it openly profess its origin and purpose, but it works under a false name and has no scruples about deceiving the confiding and unwary. The Boston Index would be highly indignant if asked to defend Comte’s calendar of saints and to explain the culte of the Sublime Humanity; and George Eliot places in the mouth of Daniel Deronda the most exquisite praise and appreciation of the Hebrew creed. Comte says that the day advances when we shall worship no being inferior to man; and as no man is very much disposed to think another greater than himself, especially under the religious teachings which we have analyzed, each of us will act practically upon Satan’s declaration to Eve, “You shall be as God.”
There is no doubt that as the doctrinal authority of Protestantism fades away year by year, this pronounced individualism will more boldly assert itself. The gospel of vulgar and intense selfishness will triumph, and the worst phases of paganism will return. St. Paul complains of the heathens that they were without affection, and this was because of their creed. The spirit of modern infidelity hates and despises the poor, the ignorant, and, like the Spartans of old, would soon dispose of the sick, the lame, and the blind. Herbert Spencer luckily is no philosopher, though he labors hard to synthetize humanitarianism. Should this monstrous parody on religion ever take clear and scientific form, all traces of faith and charity in Protestantism will disappear. Fetichism itself would be better than this horrible worship and deification of selfishness. If a man believes in anything outside of himself as something diviner and better than he, there is hope for him; but woe to him and to his neighbor when he enthrones himself upon an altar and worships his humanity. It is to be hoped that much of the excessive laudation of ourselves in these days springs from no deeper source than an overweening opinion of our abilities. It may be only vanity. It may not be spiritual and intellectual pride. This question we leave to the reflection of our readers, with a concluding remark that all exaltation of the merely natural powers of the human intellect is attended with extreme danger to moral sanity. The man who has cast off the yoke of the church, the traditions of his race, and the honest suggestions of his conscience has already joined the ranks of the arch-deceiver who first flattered us with hopes of divinity, and now tempts us with unbounded visions of the enlightenment of the world, social progress, the political amelioration of the human race, the downfall of all tyranny in church and state, and the splendid advent of the coming man; but he only lures us to that awful destruction which hurled him from heaven because of the usurping thought, “I will become like unto the Most High.”
SONNET.
UNCONSCIOUS FACULTIES.
Say, do the mighty winds in silence sweep
The crystal breadth of ocean’s quivering plane?
The unmeasured forests, quickening in their sleep,
Breathe they no sound, or breathe that sound in vain?
Say, can our compass small of ear and brain
With Nature’s boundless concords measure keep?
Not so! Her lyre, we know, hath tones too deep,
Too high, for man to hear, or to sustain.
Nor doubt that likewise in this soul of ours
Functions and faculties there work alway
Below the level of our conscious powers;
And chords whose music—were there aught to wake
Its echoes ’mid that inner world—would shake
To dust our tenement of mortal clay.