Well, the thunder-clouds have gathered and are now impending. During the greater part of the year the world has waited with bated breath to see them burst and the bolts that smite nations fall. The hand of Providence is in it. The sins of three centuries seem to be gathering to a head at last. There is no nation in Europe that can call the other friend. There is no such thing as the comity of nations. The big battalions alone take right and wrong into their hands. Treaties most solemnly and formally ratified within a quarter of a century are torn to pieces as waste paper. Such alliances as are patched up between the Powers are rather personal than national—the alliances of savage chieftains against some rival, to be broken as occasion requires when the allies may fly in turn at each other’s throats. France and Germany are sworn foes; Russia and England hate each other; Austria trembles between Germany and Russia; Turkey is doomed, but seems resolved to sell its life dearly, and draw all Europe in to witness and operate at the death. Italy seems ready to follow the beck of Germany, and Spain is consumed with her own troubles. Add to this that each nation is disorganized within itself. The war, as will be shown later on, has proved a curse to Prussia, and, through Prussia, to all Germany. The empire is far from consolidated; the Catholics have been alienated from the government; the socialists, who are now in the ascendant, have been denounced by Prince Bismarck; the Protestants have lost what unity they ever possessed, and have shown an example of weak subserviency to infamous laws that has won for them the contempt of the world. In Russia the emperor himself dreads the future. The long-pent up elements of discord are bursting through at last, and even his immense power cannot restrain the nation from a war which, it is generally believed, his mind and heart condemn. Austria
has its Hungary, and its persecution like to that of Germany; England its Ireland and a people that, with all its wealth, it cannot find employment for or feed. It has its India, also, with Russia for a neighbor. France has its Imperialists, its Legitimists, its Socialists of the fiercest kind; Italy its secret societies, its persecutions, its people that groan under an incompetent government and scandalous monarch. What a picture! And in the background millions of armed men, millions of starving people, bankrupt treasuries, general disaffection, a thousand conflicting passions of race, of religion, of social and moral theories, and the pale ghosts of murdered kings vainly warning the handful of monarchs who are riding over the old ruts red with so many an awful disaster! Such is Europe in the year of our Lord 1876. Why is Europe not united? why is it not at rest? why is it ever on the verge of war? why is its surface being constantly changed? why are its governments so diverse? why is it the stronghold of the foes of all government? why is it bristling with armies and weighed down by armaments? why, wherever the eye turns, is it faced by cannon?
That the Reformation divided Europe into two hostile camps is a fact acknowledged by all students of history. We do not say that previous to the Reformation there were no wars among the Catholic European nations. There were—bloody, long sustained sometimes, and bitter. But they were wars of dynasties rather than of nations, for which the feudal system, that in its essence and construction was a pagan system, was chiefly accountable. The people hated not each other. They were one in faith, one in religion, one in their worship, one in their hopes of a hereafter and the means to attain it, one in their recognition of one supreme head of the church in which all believed. While they were just as much Germans, French, Italians, English, Irish, as they are to-day, they all worshipped one God in one manner. English saints were revered in Ireland, Irish saints in England, German saints in France, French saints in Italy. While Charlemagne was battling with pagan hordes and Moslem infidels, Irish missionaries went forth and spread themselves along the borders of the Rhine, diffusing the light of faith and knowledge in their path. They were welcomed as angels, not looked upon as
aliens and foes, as are the missionaries of Protestant societies to-day in Catholic lands, who only stir up strife wherever they set their foot. Thus there existed something stronger, broader, more universal than nationalism, which destroyed not nationality, but taught all men that they were brethren, and that geographical lines were blotted out in the sight of God and in the common home of faith. Then was exemplified the sacred words of Scripture: “This is the victory which overcometh the world, your faith.” It was this faith that out of barbarism drew and moulded the mighty nations of Europe. It was this faith alone that saved Europe from being overrun by the Moslem as it already had been by the pagan North. Just at the moment when the Moslem power was about to receive its last check and overthrow came the Protestant Reformation, which was not only a religious revolt, but a disruption of Christendom. To that we owe the presence of the Turk in Europe and all the fatal consequences that have flowed from it, now at their ripest, when the moribund carcase that the faithless kings and nations allowed to lie there and rot threatens, in its final dissolution, their descendants with ruin. To that movement also we owe the bitterly hostile lines that have been set up between nations that once were brethren. To it we owe the persecutions and the cruelties that have resulted on either side from the day when a man’s religion assumed a political and geographical character. To it we owe something worse than all this—the substitution of doubt for faith, and the questioning of all authority, both human and divine. To the impious setting up of the monarch as the great high-priest of the nation we owe the absolutism which has crushed peoples, been overthrown and crushed in turn by them, and risen again only to repeat the old story of devastation.
Ever since that fatal outbreak Europe has been steadily drifting back into the old paganism to which such civilization as letters give is only a thin veneer; and paganism, at its highest, is only a step removed from barbarism. What is called progress would have come without Protestantism, and been estimated at its true value—as a means to a higher life for all the world; not as an end, not as the all in all in this life. Mere worshippers of progress make this world their
heaven and self their god. This is the growing feeling in nations to-day, and the Reformation it was that, however unconsciously at the beginning, formulated it into a religion.
It seems to us that the present state of Europe is the logical and plain outcome of the great religious revolt in these last days. What nation to-day has a religion? Has Russia? Has England? Has Germany? Has France? They each have religions—fragments of religions or no religion—as apart from one another as the poles. At the very least this depriving men of a unity in their highest beliefs is fraught with interminable discord. And never were the minds of men more disturbed than they are to-day. Protestantism has almost run its course, and, by its own confession, disbelief in Catholicity is resolving itself more and more into disbelief in all things spiritual and necessary bowing to brute force in the material and moral order. Men look around blankly and ask, Where do we stand? And the answer is, Nowhere. Men are born and live, they eat and sleep, they sin and die in their sin, passing through life in a sort of dumb wonder that life should be. Life is a hopeless mystery to those from whose eyes heaven has been shut out. Then all those hard social problems become unanswerable. Why, they cry out in despair, should kings have our blood and sustenance? Why should we kill each other to make them great or small? Why should they live and we die? Why should our lives be spent in drill, portioned out by the corporal, and our means be dragged from us to buy cannon? These thoughts are boiling and seething in the hearts of the masses, and kings know it. They and those they favored have destroyed faith and religious unity. They have in its place what is called socialism, which means revolt against all things that be. The name of priest was made hateful by the calumnies of false teachers with the sanction of kings; and now the name of king is coupled with that of priest in the mouths of the irreligious masses. The first French Revolution was but the awful flash of a fire that smouldered and still smoulders under the thrones of Europe. It has set kings up and set them down like toys with which a child is pleased and then breaks, and then takes others to make its sport and break again. The history of Europe from the Reformation
down is a continuous conflict between despotism and revolution. The fullest liberty is the only safeguard against it; but the fullest liberty may no longer be allowed to the peoples, for the Christian spirit and the Christian guiding hand have been withdrawn; deprived of which, liberty of the masses means license and lawlessness, government either absolutism or a strong tendency thereto.
SOCIALISM.
Let it not be thought that we are drawing a fancy picture. “Socialistic journals,” said Prince Bismarck in a speech delivered early in the year, “had recently done much harm, and had done so without let or hindrance. The poor people who subscribed for socialistic papers read but one journal, and were perverted by that one. They had an indistinct idea that they were badly off, which was no doubt true, and they therefore were ever ready to believe the insane promises held out by the socialistic journals. The result was that the German operative no longer worked as much and as well as did the English and French, and that German manufactories could no more compete in the great markets of the world. A nation that had been industrious and steady to a proverb had, by the incessant agitation of the socialistic press, been brought to this sad pass.”