CHAPTER I.
The Earlier Crises.
The history of Christ's Church on earth has ever been a story of storm and stress. The faithful heart of today mourns in discouragement over the evils that afflict the Church in the opening decade of the twentieth century; yet it needs but a glance at the past to convince us that the severest trials of the Spouse of Christ have happened in times long gone by. She has seen the tempest arise out of the clear sky; the clouds of persecution have hung low, at times even enveloping her in their gloomy shadows; she has seen the lightning's flash and heard the loud roar of the thunders of human wrath, while the hurricane swept over the face of the earth overturning the fondest memorials of her progress, and levelling to the dust the proudest monuments of her civilization. She has prostrated herself to the ground and with buried face has called upon the mercy of God to comfort her sorrow and heal her wounds. And when the storm has passed, she has lifted up her eyes to behold the glory of a newer day, the rainbow of hope, telling of that ancient promise: "For, behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world."
The story of the past has been told too often to need repetition in this place. Our interest lies entirely with modern days, with the struggle of the Church against the spirit of anti-Christ incarnate in all the movements of error from the sixteenth century until our own times. And thus, while we are seeking the causes of that anti-Christian spirit, we cannot help regarding with interest the influence exerted by the Protestant Reformation upon the intellectual and moral life of Europe. The abandonment of the old faith led, by a natural sequence, to estrangement from Christianity itself. This is so palpable that it is surprising how the innovators could have overlooked the fact that to abuse and ruin the one meant the wounding and destruction of the other. Indeed, had not organized Catholicity existed at the time, and in its then form, there would have been no concrete Christianity to reform, but only some archaeological remnants out of which it would have been difficult to construct even an imperfect idea of the religion of Christ.
Coincident with the great revolt against the Church was the impetus given to the study of the natural sciences. This coincidence, unhappily, assumed to the unthinking the appearance of cause and effect, as if the intellectual powers of man had been stunted and repressed under the regime of ecclesiastical authority, to be freed and exercised in a time of revolt against the Church. This unfortunate conviction was gradually instilled into the minds of the masses by men brilliant of intellect, but unscrupulous in their hatred of the Church and of her teachings. The people accepted the premise and followed it out to its conclusion; that Catholicity should be regarded as an enemy, and as such should be persecuted and destroyed. They were unable to measure the force of circumstances surrounding the new unfolding of the physical sciences, to recognize the evil character of many champions of the new order, or the glamor which the awakening of new studies cast upon minds hitherto engrossed with the sober logic of the schools. The fact, moreover, that many of the old theories with regard to natural phenomena must eventually have yielded to the processes of scientific evolution had not occurred to them. All these were forgotten or missed in the enthusiasm for the novelties of nature, and under the influence of a gaudy literature they permitted themselves to believe that the Church was responsible for the tardiness of the awakening, and hence that she should be discarded, that Christianity as a consequence should be uprooted, and that the intellect should acknowledge no other deity than the impersonal God of nature.
Moreover, the Church had ever been recognized as the supreme authority in the matter of Christian morality. To attack, therefore, her existence could mean nothing less than to open wide the floodgates of iniquity, to cast down the barriers that had hitherto restrained the evil passions, and to proclaim the reign of license and anarchy. These fatal conditions, taking their rise in the sixteenth century, grew into palpable being and gave place later to that monster of iniquity which today holds half of the world in its grasp.
JANSENISM.
The influences of the Protestant revolt were more far-reaching than the limits of any provincial or national territory, for although the Council of Trent, in 1545, had met the challenge of European discontent with a rigid investigation into every disputed point of ecclesiastical discipline, nevertheless the roots of the new heresy penetrated by secret channels into those very countries which had repudiated the advances of Luther, and taken their stand upon the basis of Roman Catholic unity. It was but natural that a people nurtured upon the living bread of Apostolic doctrine as delivered to them through the ministry of the Holy See should look with distrust upon the excessive and destructive theories of the German Protestantism. They found, however, in the morbid doctrines of Calvin a certain weird and uncanny attraction, which like an hypnotic obsession led them on until they mistook empty and high-sounding formulas for the clear light of truth. It was not that they did not see much that was repugnant and absolutely untenable in Calvinism; nor would they openly espouse the outward organization which the heretic called his church; but they hoped to find a middle path as far removed from the rigid fatality of the Genevan heresiarch as it would be from what they would call, the laxity of the Roman Church. Out of the resulting confusion was born the spirit of Jansenism, which proved to be little else than the Calvinistic heresy disguised under the external forms of Catholic unity. It was a heresy all the more dangerous that its assaults were not directed in the open and from the outside, but were nurtured within the very household of the faith, where it spent its arrows of discontent upon the children of the Sanctuary kneeling in devotion under the shadow of the altar.
Midway between the strongholds of Luther and Calvin lay the country of the Netherlands, rendered important at the time through the influence of its celebrated University of Louvain. Out of its curious people came that Cornelius Jansen whose name was to acquire a questionable celebrity through his championship of the new idea. A quondam conspirator in the interests of Philip II., he had been raised, for his services in that direction, to the See of Ypres. For twenty years he studied in his own way the great tomes of St. Augustine, reading his whole works ten times over, and his refutation of the Pelagians as many as thirty times. It was a period when theologians were much interested in grace, free will, predestination, and kindred questions. The Church had already condemned the theories of Baius in that regard, and Calvin's errors, which he claimed to have found in St. Augustine, had been refuted time and again. It was the work of Jansen to revive in a more classical form all these condemned doctrines and to seal them by an appeal to St. Augustine. To this end he finished before his death, in 1638, an immense work entitled Augustinus, which, however, was not published until 1640, two years after his death.