If the propositions of which Spinola was the bearer were warmly supported in Germany, they were no less warmly supported at Rome. The interest which the chief of the Church could not fail to take in the re-establishment of Catholic unity, was greatly enhanced at the time by the special need which that wise and prudent pontiff, Innocent XI., felt of creating in Europe allies for the Holy See against the offensive pretensions of France. At Rome as in Germany Louis XIV. was the target and the bugbear. That most Christian king, who consented to protect the faith in his own kingdom on the condition of tacitly subjecting it to his royal will, took strange liberties, as everybody knows, with the common Father of the faithful. Innocent XI., almost besieged in his palace by the arms of France, and seeing his bulls handed over, by magistrates sitting on fleurs de lis, to the common hangman to be publicly burned, was strongly tempted to seek in converted schismatics, and in prodigal sons returning to the fold, a support against the arrogant pretensions of the elder son of the Church. [{437}] Spinola, therefore, was everywhere well received. Rome listened to him, entered into his views, even annotated the bases of the negotiation he was charged to transmit, and for several years the winds on both sides of the Alps blew in favor of peace.
Leibnitz, holding relations with both Spinola and the principal Protestant doctors, serving as the medium of intercommunication between them, and frequently taking his pen to give precision to their respective views, was already the king-bolt of the negotiation, and very early in its prosecution. Bossuet's name began to be mentioned. The controversies of this great prelate with the French Protestants, his writings, strongly marked by a doctrine at once so firm and enlightened, and which placed Catholic truth on so broad and so solid a foundation, were more than once used to smooth the way to reunion, either by solving difficulties or by reconciling differences. Twice he was even directly solicited to give his advice, and to put his own hand to the work; but he gave vague and embarrassed answers, and refused to accept the overtures made to him. Wherefore? Is it necessary to think, as M. Foucher de Careil leaves it to be understood, that the King of France viewed with an evil eye a reunion not likely to turn to his profit, or to strengthen his influence, and that as on other occasions the submission, a little blind, of the subject to his sovereign, arrested with Bossuet the accomplishment, I will not say of the duty, but of the desire of the Catholic bishop?
Such was the first phase of this remarkable negotiation, related, or more properly exhumed, with details very curious and perfectly new. The characters, the parts, the motives, of the various actors in the scene are fairly set forth and analyzed by M. de Careil, and we congratulate him on having added a new and piquant page to the diplomatic history of the seventeenth century. A single gap, however, very important and very easy to fill he has left, which renders his exposition a little obscure and uncertain. We nowhere find the text of the propositions, the instruments, to speak the language of cabinets, which made during twenty years the bases of the negotiation. They were in great number, M. de Careil informs us, drawn up under different circumstances, and by different authors. The Protestant theologians assembled at Hanover, and especially the most illustrious of them, Gerard Molanus, abbot of Lockum, drew up, collectively or individually, complete plans or methods, as they called them, of reunion, in which they expressed at the same time their views and their wishes, the sacrifices which they believed their communions would consent to make, and those which they expected from Rome in return for the re-establishment of unity. The Bishop of Neustadt, on his part, produced several compositions of the same kind, the titles of which, as given by M. de Careil, are, Regulae circa Christianorum omnium eccesiasticam reunionem—Media conciliatoria incitantia, praestanda ad conciliationem. And, in fine, under the name of Propositiones novellorum discretiorum et praecipuorum, he himself made a methodical abstract, in twenty-five propositions, or heads of chapters, of the views and wishes of Protestants, a capital document, which was discussed and corrected at Rome in a congregation of cardinals, and sent back to Germany with an approbatory brief of His Holiness. Leibnitz had it under his eye, and copied it with his own hand at Vienna, carefully marking the corrections and additions made by the Sacred College, and we understand M. Foucher de Careil to have had personal knowledge of the copy taken by Leibnitz.
It is difficult, therefore, to explain why M. de Careil has thought it necessary to subject our curiosity to the veritable punishment of Tantalus by simply mentioning the existence of a document of such great importance [{438}] without reproducing it. That he should believe it his duty not to swell his volume—though the previous editors of Leibnitz and Bossuet did it—by inserting the private lucubrations of Protestant theologians, we can, in rigor, comprehend, but not approve. As in almost all the letters he has published, especially those of Molanus, these writings are discussed and commented on, it would, we think, have much facilitated the clear understanding of the subject, to have given at least the more important of them in extenso. But after all, the reformed doctors the most accredited spoke only in their own private names, for themselves alone, without any authority to bind their contemporary co-religionists, and a fortiori without any authority to bind their Protestant posterity. Little imports it to know what Molanus or any other Protestant in 1680 thought of the points in controversy between the Church and the Reformation. But an act of the Court of Rome, discussed in a congregation, and clothed with the pontifical sign-manual—an official decision defining the maximum of concessions either as to language or practice which the Church could make to her separated children in order to bring them back to her bosom, Protestant propositions in their origin, indeed, but, as says M. de Careil—in a note written, I know not wherefore, in Italian—accommodate secundo il gusto di Roma(modified to suit the taste of Rome), is a document of a value very different, and yields in historical interest only to its dogmatic importance. It would be a document to place by the side of the most celebrated Professions of faith, and even above them, and to present, along with the excellent Exposition by Bossuet, to all those troubled souls, so numerous in Protestant communions, who discern the truth only through the mists of prejudice, or misconceive it when stated to them in terms the real sense of which has for them been distorted or perverted from their childhood.
What Leibnitz in various places, and M. de Careil after him, show us of the propositions submitted to Rome, increases not a little our desire to know precisely what she replied to them. It seems from all that is told us, that the process or method of affecting reunion uniformly, or very nearly so, indicated by the Protestant doctors, was to place in two distinct categories the several points of difference which separate the Protestant communions from the Catholic Church; then place in the first category all the questions on which agreement may be hoped either by way of accommodation, if matters of simple disciplinary usage, if susceptible of modification; or by way of explanation, if points of dogmatic dispute turning on words rather than on ideas. On all these, agreement being easy, it should be immediately effected and proclaimed. In the second category must be placed all disputed questions too important, or on which minds are too embittered, to admit of their settlement by previous explanation. These must not be treated immediately, but be left in suspense, and reserved for discussion and final settlement in a future council. Meanwhile the Protestant doctors, pastors, ministers, and their flocks must be received into the Roman communion on the simple declaration that they acknowledge the infallibility of the Church in matters of dogma, and the promise, beforehand, that when she has freely decided with certainty, clearness, precision, and without ambiguity or equivocation, the several points reserved for adjudication, they will accept her decisions and offer no resistance to her decrees.
Such was the method proposed, which Leibnitz calls by turns the method of mutual tolerance, abstraction, suspension, and to which he reverts so frequently, and on which he insists with so much complaisance, under so many forms, and in so many different writings, that it is hardly possible not to regard him as its inventor. In his [{439}] view, this method has the merit of cutting off with a single stroke the interminable debates in which the sixteenth century was consumed, and of making the peace of nations no longer depend on the quibbling spirit of theologians. We shall soon briefly examine whether this abridgment of controversies might not have the inconvenience of leaving out the truth, or of spurning it aside; but for the moment we would simply remark that the method suggested or eagerly adopted by Leibnitz involved, with him, a grave consequence, so obvious that nobody can mistake it.
The questions proposed to be placed in the second category, or the points of controversy too important to be treated in advance, and to be reserved for discussion and settlement in a council to be convoked and held after reunion, had every one of them already been examined, one by one, discussed, and determined without appeal, in the celebrated assembly whose fame still filled all Europe, and whose decrees were read from the pulpits of more than half of Christendom. During twenty-five years, athwart the intrigues of courts, the ravages of war, and even the unchained plagues of heaven, three times interrupted, but as often resumed, the whole cause of the Reformation, dogmas and discipline, had been presented and argued at Trent. Judgment was there rendered on all the counts in the indictment, and the Reformation was henceforth res judicata. Consequently, to propose to reserve and open anew for discussion, were it only the least point of doctrine, was to forfeit the whole work of Trent, and to declare that great assembly illegal and all its decrees vacated. The Protestant proposition amounted, then, simply to this: Annul the Council of Trent, and convoke a new council in which Protestants en masse will have the right to sit!
Under what form was such a proposition presented to Rome? What impression on Rome did it make? Was there really found a Catholic bishop to support it? Was it really discussed in a Congregation of Cardinals? Was it really included in the list of propositions admitted to discussion by the Papal brief whose existence is enigmatically revealed to us? If we understand certain phrases of M. de Careil, all these questions must be answered in the affirmative. He himself firmly believes that this project was accepted by the Bishop of Neustadt; he even believes that it was not discouraged at Rome; and that, the suspension of the Council of Trent was counted among the concessions which the bishop returned from Rome authorized to lead the Protestants, who had charged him with their interests, to hope would be granted.
It is certainly very embarrassing for us to question an assertion by M. de Careil, who seems to speak with the documents before him, while we, in the darkness in which he leaves us, can reason only from conjecture. We can only express our deep surprise, and ask him, if he is quite sure of having carefully read what he relates, or duly reflected on what he asserts? What, the Court of Rome authorized a bishop to promise Protestants, in its name, the suspension of the Council of Trent! Rome, with a stroke of the pen, pledged herself to permit the destruction of the work to which she had, during four glorious pontificates, devoted the persistent perseverance which she owed to the Holy Ghost, and all the traditional resources of her policy—the work which, in reaffirming the immovable foundations of the Christian faith, had at the same time drawn tighter, to the profit of the Holy See, the loosened bonds of the hierarchy! Rome exposed herself to see effaced, on the one hand, those dogmatic decrees in which the magnificence of the language rivals the depth of the ideas, and which have taken rank in the admiration of the world by the side of the Nicaean symbol, and on the other, those canons of discipline for which she had [{440}] maintained with the great Catholic powers a persistent struggle from which nothing could divert her, no, not even the fear of seeing France follow in the footsteps of England! And for what this condescension? For a negotiation of doubtful success, and the success of which, were it certain, would have restored to her communion only Germany, leaving outside of Catholic unity the Protestant centres of London, Geneva, and Amsterdam! Moreover, under what form would such a concession be made? By a confidential act, by a secret power given to an obscure agent! The Council of Trent would have been thus disavowed in the shade by one Congregation of Cardinals, whilst another, instituted expressly to give it vigor, continued, as it does still at Rome itself, to comment and develop it in public, and while at the foot of all altars the decisions of that great council received the solemn adhesion of all those whom the episcopal investiture raised to the rank of judges of the faith!
M. de Careil must not think us too difficult, if we hesitate to admit on his bare word, or even on that of Leibnitz, the reality of so strange a fact. Leibnitz was a party interested, and very deeply interested, in the success of a project for which he had a paternal affection, and his testimony is here too open to suspicion of at least involuntary illusion for us to receive it as conclusive proof. Leibnitz, beside, whatever was his intimacy with the Bishop of Neustadt, doubtless did not know thoroughly the confidential instructions of the plenipotentiary with whom he negotiated. The slightest affirmation of the bishop himself would have incomparably more weight with us, but that prelate, from whom M. de Careil publishes several documents, so far from ever mentioning any such engagement, takes special care, on the contrary, to avoid giving any personal opinion of his own on any of the plans presented to him. He takes care to remark to Leibnitz, in a special letter, that in the whole matter he acts only as a simple reporter, guards himself from supporting any proposition made to him, and simply promises the Protestant theologians to labor to secure a favorable reception to any overtures they might make consistent with Catholic principles. Ego, says he, nullibi causae susceptae agam doctorem, sed simplicem apud utramque partem solicitatorum. . . Nihil aliud polliceor quam quod . . ego theologicam et tam favorabilem ac principia nostra patiantur, approbationem procurare laborabo. Such a promise, which lends itself indeed to everything, engages assuredly to nothing, and if it in some measure explains the hopes which Leibnitz cherished, it is far from sufficing to remove our doubts.