We have taken up the author's theory point by point, and we find him utterly failing to establish it in whole or in part. His allegations are set forth with great confidence, but the authorities he cites do not sustain them, and are either not to his purpose or, like St. Cyprian, point blank against him. He may have demolished the man of straw which he himself had set up, but he leaves standing the papacy as held by the Catholic Church and defined by the council of Florence. He has asserted in very strong terms the ignorance, the chicanery, the sophistry, and the dishonesty of the Roman theologians, and leaves no doubt in the minds of intelligent readers that he greatly excels them in the qualities and practices he ascribes to them; but he adduces nothing beyond his own assertions and misrepresentations against their fairness and candor, and their intelligence and learning. His sneers at them are pointed only by his own ignorance or malice, and present him in a most unfavorable light. His cant, so abundant against them, is very stale and simply disgusting. From first to last he proves that he lacks, we will not say the humility of the Christian, but the modesty and reserve of real learning and science, and that he is moved not by love of truth, but by a spirit of hatred and revenge.
Here we might well close, for the author has refuted from St. Cyprian himself, by proving by his own witness the primacy of jurisdiction by divine right was possessed even in the third century, while he has left all the arguments and authorities adduced by the Roman theologians from Scripture and tradition to prove affirmatively the papal authority by divine right, or by the positive appointment of Jesus Christ in their full force. But the reasons which induced us in the first place to begin the examination of the author's lucubrations induce us to go through with them. The work has been translated and published here under Protestant auspices, set up as an important work against the papal authority and the Church of Rome, "the root and matrix of the Catholic Church," as says St. Cyprian, and, were it left unnoticed or unreplied to, many people might take it to be really what it is represented to be, and conclude that we cannot answer it because we have not done it.
Besides, the controversy between large classes of Protestants and Catholics is narrowed down to two questions, the honor we render to Mary the mother of God, and the authority we attribute to the Holy See and the Roman pontiff. M. Guettée, having been reared in our communion and gone out from us because he was not of us, and having in this work done his best to prove the papacy schismatic, and that its assertion has been the cause of the schism between the East and the West, affords us as good an occasion as we can expect to discuss the latter question, and to consider the arguments, facts, and authorities alleged in their defence by those who refuse their obedience to St. Peter in his successor. The work is rambling, and made up of details most wearisome to read, and difficult to bring into a shape in which its real value can be brought to the test, but it is a fair specimen in spirit and arrangement of the works written against the Roman and Catholic Church, and contains in some form all that schismatics allege first and last against her. We may as well make it our text-book for the discussion as any other. But we have already trespassed long enough on the patience of our readers for this month.
Translated from the French.
The Crucifix of Baden.
A Legend of the Middle Ages.
Will you follow me to Baden? Not to that elegant and wild and whirling Baden of painted faces and flashy toilettes, where gentlemen of the turf display their horsemanship on the plain of Iffezheim; where the majesty of old Germany elbows, in the Trinkhalle, the princes of Bohemia; but to the fresh, dark, silent, almost unknown nooks of that Baden which God has made and which man has yet left untouched; where the artist wanders for his picture, the poet for his inspiration, the dreamer for his vision, the Christian to murmur his prayer; for it is to a burial-ground that I am about to lead you. But fear not on that account; this burial-place of Baden has comparatively but little of the mournful in its appearance; it is truly, as its name declares, the Fried Hof—the Court of Peace. Under that green turf, under those flower-clad hillocks, there lie bodies that suffer no more, but sleep in quiet; their souls may suffer, indeed, and be in pain, but their souls are no longer there; and can repose alone be frightful? Look around, and, as far as the eye can reach, what beauty shines in the landscape, what a charm invests the distant meeting of earth and sky! Look up to the gray blue heaven, pale and transparent, as is ever that sky which stretches over the valley of the Rhine; to those pure white clouds floating like distant sails on a stormless sea; to those distant hills, with outlines softening as they recede; to the green woods that fringe their sides; to those walls which time has breached; those crumbling towers; those ruined castles which seem to overhang the plain of the dead—man's work, and the hands that created it, becoming dust together. These sights may, indeed, be melancholy, but they are peace-giving too; for there in the midst hangs Christ bowing his weary head and stretching out his bruised arms in yonder great crucifix of stone.
In a churchyard, nothing is more frequent, nor, so to speak, more natural, than to see a crucifix. It is there like the flag on the bastion, the mast on the vessel. Without it the place would be accursed and desolate, for hope would be wanting there. All know and acknowledge this, but, nevertheless, few passers-by bestow a glance on the holy image. Some faithful ones may, when they see it, make the sign of the cross; others bend slightly before it; well-bred people uncover; free-thinkers, with proud look and step, with unbending knee and body erect, pass it by, they who would bow so low before the coronet of a prince or even the key of a chamberlain.
And certainly indifferent, timid, and free-thinking ones come to the Fried Hof of Baden; but there, few stop not and marvel, if by chance their eyes fall upon its crucifix. There is upon that rigid face—those features of stone—a look of life, of flesh and blood, which enchains you, moves the depths of your heart, speaks to you. To understand that gaze, it is not necessary to be a Christian; alas! it is enough to be a man. Those lips, half parted in a sigh, tremble in the stone; those half-closed eyes seem really to weep; agony sits upon every feature; bitterness of soul has worn every one of those furrows, the arch of the brows has been contracted, the pure lines of the profile broken, the calm of the forehead destroyed by a sorrow, overwhelming, silent, inconsolable; and you would have before you the image of human misery the most complete, the deepest, the most horrible, if a ray from the Majesty on high did not come to elevate and illumine that petrifaction of grief.