"The right that a spirit vast and firm in its designs
Has over the gross spirits of vulgar men;"
or, at least, the right which maturity has naturally over youth, science over ignorance, reason over unreason. The mature man, whom chance has placed in the midst of indocile and imprudent children, has over them by his age and reason alone a part, at least, of the rights of a father and a teacher. Only, with the father or teacher physical force supports this right, while to the papacy it was wanting, and could be supplied only by the sanctity of its character, the authority of it's words, and the intrepidity of its government.
This will be for ever its glory. The glory of the church is far less in having reigned than in having fought. That temporal dominion of the Holy See was never in the state of a peaceable, regular, acknowledged sovereignty. It was only a form of the unrelenting warfare which the church sustained against evil,—one of the phases of her never-ending combat, one of the arms of her ceaseless struggle. The church has fought either without auxiliaries, or with auxiliaries always ready to abandon her; she herself wields not the sword of the flesh, and is never sure that those who do handle it in her name will not turn it against her; sometimes saved by kings and menaced by the people, sometimes aided by the people and crushed by kings, she has fought her fight without having, in reality, any other human power than that of her dangers, the sufferings, the exile, the captivity, the humiliations, the death of her pontiffs. She has never completely triumphed, but she has never fainted. She has never completely teamed the lion she combated, but she has been able to soften him. She has never been a peaceful and happy mother in the midst of submissive children, a pacific queen in the midst of devoted subjects; she has been rather an unwearied combatant, according to his word who said, "I am calm to bring the world not peace, but a sword."
But the moment must come when the child becomes a man. The struggle then changes front. The man is not better than the child; properly speaking, he is not wiser or more reasonable: he has simply more order in his life, and more logical sequence in his conduct. A sort of human respect induces him to study to maintain greater harmony between his principles and his actions; when he has a good theory, he tries oftener than the child to have a good practice; and oftener when his conduct is bad, he concocts a bad theory to justify it. To use a well-known word, he practices his good maxims or he maxims his bad practices, as the grace of God in him and his conscience are stronger or weaker. This accord with himself, which is the characteristic, at least the pretension, of the mature man, makes alike his greatness and his littleness. The church, when society is matured, has to combat doctrines rather than passions, ideas rather than vices. The middle ages were, then, the infancy of Christian nations; should we say the sixteenth century—the age of passion, of effervescence, of revolt, of lapses—was the age of youth? Is the present age the age of maturity or of decrepitude? This, five hundred years hence, our descendants may be able to determine.
It still remains to know whether the childhood of a people, like the childhood of individuals, ought not to be regretted rather than disdained, and whether it does not charm us more by the memory of its joys than it humiliates us by the memory of its weaknesses. If the childhood of the individual is not capable of crimes, it is not any more capable of great deeds; the childhood of a people, on the contrary, although it may have its gentle and simple side, has also its heroic and sublime side. It was so with the child-people who passed the Red Sea, or fought under the walls of Troy. They are child-men for whom the Pentateuch was written, and who inspired the Iliad. They are child-men, our ancestors, who reconquered the tomb of Christ, who carried faith even to the depths of China, and who with Joan of Arc chased the English from France. They were not souls free from all blemish, nor hands never sullied; very often the brutality of their manners repels us, and we are borne, in seeing them, like the tender souls in those iron ages, to seek refuge in the shadow of the cloister, in order to find there, at least, peace, delicacy of heart, dignity of intelligence, and serenity of soul. But they were really of those to whom much is forgiven, for they loved much. Among their contradictions they had this grand and noble contradiction—that of having committed great faults, and yet preserving the love of God; of being soiled with vice, and yet not abandoned to it; of having removed far from the Lord, [{204}] but having never despaired of his mercy; of being very hard and very cruel, and yet preserving a loving fibre in their hearts, and tears in their eyes. After all, if these men were children, they were the children of whom it is said, "Of such is the kingdom of heaven." If the middle ages had vices, they had also faith: the world in ripening has lost the faith, and retained the vices.
Here is what, as it seems to me, may be said of the middle ages, after what M. de Carné has said, and by the side of what he has said. It may not be without some advantage to place this very different view by the side of the political view, which he has so well developed. I repeat it, that considering only the two types of Suger and St. Louis, he comprehends them, for they come within his sphere; he has, perhaps, not so well comprehended the medium in which they lived, or perhaps he partially forgets it.
We must now follow France and Europe in that more manly, or senile, epoch of their life, which M. de Carné after having given us sketches of Du Guesclin and Joan of Arc, personifies in Louis XI., Henry IV., Cardinal Richelieu, and Mazarin. These are already times which touch very closely our own. The work of Henry IV., of Richelieu, Mazarin, and Louis XIV., has crumbled almost under our own eyes, and in many respects their spirit is still living in our midst. The proof is in the fact that it is still the object of attack, Richelieu especially. Louis XIV. is discussed with all the vehemence of a contemporary controversy. This indeed is not the case with M. de Carné. There is not, perhaps, in his book an appreciation more calm, more dignified, more grave than that of the policy of the great cardinal.
He has justified this policy. He shows with an evidence that seems to me incontestable, that, setting aside the severity of certain acts, setting aside the last months of a premature old age, when weariness of power began to obscure his lofty intellect, Richelieu could have done hardly otherwise than he did. The nobility, it must be said, a little in all times, and very much for a century, had yielded to a deplorable spirit of faction. Whether it dreamed, like the Calvinistic gentlemen of the sixteenth century, of a resurrection of feudalism; whether in its eyes, as in those of the Duke of Rohan, was zoning the plan of an aristocratic republic; or whether, as more frequently happens, all its ambitions were individual, and that the alliances it formed were only the coalitions of dissatisfied pretensions, always is it certain that it was in an eminent degree incapable of a serious and well-defined policy. It could not even be national, and for fourscore years there was not a chief of the party who did not seek his support in England or in Spain, and who did not treat in the beginning of his revolt with foreigners, as he counted at its close on treating with his king. The commonalty, though more national, had not a whit more case for the necessary conditions of regular political action. The parliament incontestably formed the head all the Third Estate: it was the most dignified post, the highest placed, the gravest, and the most capable of affairs; and yet the parliaments interfered in politics only with the littlenesses and caprice of children, the conceit of youngsters, or the timidity of old men; by turns submissive and rebellious, idolaters of absolute power, and rebels to every government; rash and timid, rebelling and begging pardon.
The cardinal has been almost always reproached for having established royalty without a basis; but this basis, where was he to find it? Was it ever in his power to create it? Could he found a political aristocracy, respecting the laws, and protecting the people, where there was only a turbulent, unpopular, and unstatesmanlike nobility? Could he erect on French soil a House of Commons, animated at once with the spirit of legal obedience and of constitutional resistance, [{205}] at a time when it did not exist even in England, and where there were only citizens ready to revolt, as was proved in the time of the League, and ready to submit, and even to worship power, as was proved under Henry IV., but wholly incapable of resisting without rebelling? At least, it will not be said that at all hazards, and without taking any account of these facts, the cardinal should have inaugurated in France something like the charter of 1814, or that of 1830, which would be very much like reproaching Hannibal for not using gunpowder, and Christopher Columbus for not using steam!