"Christ only, of God's messengers to man,
Finished the work of grace which He began.
List, Christian warrior, thou whose soul is fain
To rid thy mother of her present chain;—
Christ will unloose His Church; yea, even now
Begins the work, and thou
Shalt spend in it thy strength, but, ere He save,
Thy lot shall be the grave."
The work of educating the French clergy is largely in the hands of the Congregation of S. Sulpice, a celibate body of course, and whose members are not paid, but merely clothed and boarded. They necessarily teach one uniform dogma, that is, within that sufficiently wide range of doctrine on which the Church has set her immutable seal. More than this, they impress one uniform sacerdotal mould and type, and exercise one discipline on all committed to them. It results, of course, that all who go forth from them, passing through their various public and private scrutinies, are trained and practised combatants to the extent to which their teaching goes. More yet than this; a severe ascetic and self-denying character is from the beginning attached to the sacerdotal life; they take the Apostle literally, "no man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life;" parents who consent to their children entering into the priesthood think and speak of it as "a sacrifice;" those who look forward to it have it so set before them, and can count the cost before they take the first step. Few situations to which they can afterwards be called require the exercise of greater self-denial than has been expected from them from the first. Does not this point out to us the quarter from which a reform among ourselves must proceed? Surely before the laity can become sound churchmen, the priesthood must be uniformly taught; "the priest's lips should keep knowledge, and they should seek the law at his mouth." But High Church and Low Church, not to mention the interminable shapes of distinction in individual minds between and beyond them, are utterly incompatible with each other. After the dogma of the Trinity they part company. Until then the Anglican Church teaches her priests an uniform dogma, and moulds them in a severe and uniform discipline, she cannot hope for any other fate, than that her bosom should be rent with interminable heresies and divisions. The existence of the Séminaires, and the order of S. Sulpice, is a reform in the Roman Church. Are we never to reform? Not by introducing novelties, but by recurring to ancient practices. The continual encroachment of the world upon the Church rendered it necessary to promote Seminaries as places of spiritual retreat for candidates for Holy Orders; and when, as a consequence of the Revolution, the course of study in the university became quite secularised, it became also necessary to detach the candidates altogether from that course, and to provide all that was requisite for instruction as well as for inward discipline within the walls of the Séminaire. This, as to instruction, is not completely done yet. But it is in course of doing. Now does not that necessity which sprung up in the French Church exist just as much among ourselves? Are our Universities at present a fit school for preparing men for a life of the utmost patience, self-denial, and humiliation? Is the sacerdotal type impressed there at all? Is anything like an uniform dogma known? Is it not precisely there that moral control is relaxed, and habits of indulgence are commonly introduced? Is there any attempt made to form the inward life, and discern a man's vocation? Oh, is it not the severest censure of our Universities even to mention such things? And without any special training, without any knowledge of his inward state, the young man who has been accustomed to unrestricted company, to studies almost exclusively classical or mathematical, to every kind of worldly amusement and sport, or to travel at the time of life most perilous to innocence, is taken and made a priest of, and sent to the "Cure of Souls," in a parish. Can any state of deeper practical corruption than this be well imagined? Or any system more thoroughly opposed to that pursued in the Church, which is proverbially mentioned among us as "corrupt?"
Surely the establishment of a system of "Séminaires" among ourselves, a course of close and effective moral discipline for the candidates for orders, and the inculcation of one uniform dogma, must precede any real change for the better among us. God grant that such a change may come!