Bossuet was unquestionably a monarchist and something of a courtier, though he appears to have had always the best interests of religion at heart; and we can hardly say that he did not take the best means possible in his time of promoting them. As one of the preceptors of the Dauphin, father of the Duke of Burgundy, of whom Fénelon was the principal preceptor, he taught the political system acceptable to the king; but he impressed on his pupil as much as possible under that system a sense of his responsibility, his duty to regard his power as a high trust from God to be exercised without fear or favor for the good of the people committed to his charge. Fénelon went further, and hinted that the nation had not abdicated its original rights, and still retained the right to be consulted in the management of its affairs; and he was dismissed from his preceptorship, forbidden to appear at court, and exiled to his diocese, while every possible effort, in which it is to be regretted that Bossuet took a prominent part, to degrade him as a man and a theologian, and to procure his condemnation as a heretic, was made by the French court. But heretic he was not; he simply erred in the use of language which, though it had been used by canonized saints, was susceptible of an heretical sense. The Congregation condemned the language, not the man, nor his real doctrine. He retracted the language, not the doctrine, and edified the world by his submission.
There is hardly any doctrine further removed from every form of republicanism than that of the divine right of kings, defended by James I. of England in his Remonstrance for the Divine Right of Kings and the Independency of their Crowns, written in reply to a speech of the [{636}] celebrated Cardinal Duperron in the States-General of France in 1614—the last time the States-General were convoked till convoked by the unhappy Louis XVI. at Versailles, in May, 1789. In that work, a copy of the original edition of which, as well as of "his majestie's speech in the Star-chamber," now lies before me, their kingship immediately from God, and are accountable to him alone for the use they made of their power. He denies their accountability alike to the Pope and the people. This was and really is the doctrine, if not of all Protestants, at least of the Anglican Church and of all Protestant courts; but it is not and never was a Catholic doctrine. The utmost length in the same direction that any Catholic writer of note, except Bossuet, ever went, so far as I can find, is that the king, supposing him to be elected by the people, does, when so elected, reign de jure divino or by divine right; but Suarez [Footnote 177] refutes them, and maintains that the royal power emanates from the community, and is exercised, formaliter, by human right, de jure humano, and thus asserts the real republican principle. Balmes, in his great work on the Influence of Catholicity and Protestantism on European Civilization compared, cites an instance of a Spanish monk who in the time of Philip II. ventured one day to preach the irresponsibility of the king, but was compelled by the Inquisition to retract his doctrine publicly, in the very pulpit from which he had preached it.
[Footnote 177: De Legibus, lib. iii., cap. 3 and 4, i.]
He who has studied somewhat profoundly the internal political history of the so-called Latin nations of Europe, will find that they have had, from very early times, a strong tendency to republicanism, and even to democracy, and that the tendency has been checked never by the church, but by the kings and feudal nobility. The doctrines of 1789 were no novelty in France even in the thirteenth century, and they were preached very distinctly and very boldly in the Ligue when the nation was threatened with a non-Catholic or Huguenot king, even by Jesuits. The great Dominican and Franciscan orders have never shown any strong attachment to monarchy in any form, and have rarely been the courtiers or flatterers of power. That the sad effects of the old French revolution produced a reaction in many Catholic minds, as well as in many Protestant minds, in favor of monarchy, is very true; and perhaps the most influential portion of European Catholics, living as they do in the midst of a revolution that makes war on the church, on civil order, on society, on civilization itself, cling to the royal authority as the lesser evil and as their only security, under God, for the future of religion. And it is not strange that they should. But this, whether wise or otherwise, is only accidental, and no people will be more loyal republicans than Catholics, when the republic gives them security for life and property, and more than all, for the free and full exercise of their religion as Catholics, as is the case in the United States.
The republic of the United States, we are told, was founded by Protestants, and it is only the United States that can give the slightest coloring to the pretense that Protestants are inclined to republicanism. But, closely examined, the fact gives less coloring than is commonly supposed. The republic of the United States can hardly be said to be founded either by Catholics or Protestants: it was founded by Providence, not by men. The Puritans, the most disposed to republicanism of any of the original colonists, were dissenters from the Church of England, and the principles on which they dissented were in the main those which they had borrowed or inherited from Catholic tradition. They objected to the Church of England that she allowed the king to be both king and pontiff, and subjected religion to the civil power. In this they only followed the example of the Popes. They [{637}] with the Popes denied the competency of the civil power in spirituals. This was the principle of their dissent, as it has recently been the principle of the separation of the Free Kirk in Scotland from the national church. As the king was the head of the Church of England, making it a royal church, they were naturally led to defend their dissent on republican principles. M. Guizot seems to regard the English revolution, which made Cromwell Lord Protector of the realm, as primarily political; but with all due respect to so great an authority, I venture to say that it was primarily religious, that its first movement was a protest against the authority of the king or parliament to ordain anything in religion not prescribed by the word of God. I state the principle universally, without taking notice of the matters accidentally associated with it, and so stated it is a Catholic principle, always asserted and insisted on by the Popes. It was primarily to carry out this principle, and to regain the civil liberties lost by the nation through the reformation, but not forgotten, that they resisted the king, and made a republican revolution, which very few foresaw or desired. The Puritans who settled in the wilds of America brought with them the ideas and principles they had adopted before leaving England, and if they had republican tendencies, they were hardly republicans.
Mr. Bancroft, in Volume IX. of his History of the United States, just published, shows very clearly that at the beginning of their disputes with the mother country the colonists were not generally republican in the ordinary sense of the word, but attached to monarchy after the English fashion, and also that the struggle in the minds of the colonists was long and severe before they reluctantly abandoned monarchy and accepted republicanism. The American revolution did not originate in any desire to suppress monarchy as it existed in Great Britain and establish republicanism, but to resist the encroachments of the mother country on their rights as British colonists, or rather, as British subjects. The rights of man they asserted had been derived from the civil law, for the most part through medium of the common law, and the writings, if not of Catholic theologians, at least of Catholic lawyers. They held as republicans not from Protestantism, but chiefly from Greece and Rome. Moreover, a monarchical government was impracticable, and there really was no alternative for the American people but republican government or colonial dependence. In the main our institutions were the growth of the country, and were very little influenced by the political theories of the colonists or the political wisdom and sagacity of American statesmen. Hence they are more strictly the work of Providence than of human foresight or human intelligence and will. It is therefore that their permanence and growth are to be counted on. They have their root in the soil, and are adapted to both the soil and the climate. They are of American origin and growth.
Religious liberty is not, as I have shown, of Protestant origin. Most of the colonists held the Catholic principle of the incompetency of the civil power in spirituals, but the greater part of them held that the civil power is bound to recognize and to provide for the support by appropriate legislation of the true religion, and that only. Yet as they were not agreed among themselves as to which is the true religion, or what is the true sense of the revealed word, and having no authoritative interpreter recognized as such by all, and no one sect being strong enough to establish itself and to suppress the others, there was no course practicable but to protect all religions not contra banos mores, and leave each individual free before the law to choose his own religion and to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience. This was of absolute necessity in our case if we were to form a political community and carry on civil government at all.
I do not claim that Catholics founded civil and religious liberty in the United States, nor do I deny that so far as men had a hand in founding them, they were founded by Protestants, but I do contend that our Protestant ancestors acted in regard to them on Catholic rather than on Protestant principles. We have so often heard civil and religious liberty spoken of as the result of the reformation that many people really believe it, and many good honest American citizens are really afraid that the rapid increase of Catholicity in the country threatens ruin to our free institutions. But the only liberty Protestantism, as such, has ever yet favored, is the liberty of the civil power to control the ecclesiastical. There is no danger to any other liberty from the spread of Catholicity. There is a great difference between accepting and sustaining a democratic government where it already legally exists, and laboring to introduce it in opposition to the established and to the habits, customs, and usages of the people where it does not exist. And even if Catholics in other countries had a preference for the monarchical form, they would not dream of introducing it here, and would be led by their own conservative principles, if here, to oppose it, since nothing in their religion requires them, as a Catholic duty, to support one particular form of government rather than another.
Protestantism affords in its principles no basis for either civil or religious liberty. Its great doctrine, that which it opposes as a religion to the church, is the absolute moral and spiritual inability of man, or the total moral and spiritual depravity of human nature, by the fall. This is the central principle of the reformation, from which all its distinctive doctrines radiate. This doctrine denies all natural liberty and all natural virtue, and hence the reformation maintains justification without works, by faith alone, in which man is passive, not active, and that all the works of unbelievers or the unregenerate are sins. Man is impotent for good, and does not and cannot even by grace concur with grace. All his thoughts and deeds our only evil, and that continually, and even the regenerate continue to sin after regeneration as before, only God does not impute there seems to them, but for his dear Son's seek turns away his eyes from them, and imputes to them the righteousness of Christ, and with it covers their iniquities. There is no ground on which to assert the natural rights of man, for the fall has deprived man of all his natural rights; and for republican equality the Reformation phones at best the aristocracy of grace, of the elect, as was taught by Wickliffe, and attempted to be realized by Calvin in Geneva, and by the Puritans in New England, who confined the elective franchise and eligibility to the saints, which is repugnant to both civil and religious liberty for all men.