The Catholic World.
Vol. VI., No. 36.—March, 1868.
Canada Thistles.
The accident of a heavy snowstorm detained me, a little while ago, at the house of a friend in the country. It was certainly a pleasant place to be cast away in. My friend was a gentleman-farmer, who united a strong taste for rustic pursuits with an equally strong as well as an intelligent fondness for literature and art. In the matter of books and pictures, philosophy and religion, we were in sympathy with each other; but when he came to milch cows and turnips, my city education got the better of me. I could neither understand his conversation nor appreciate his enthusiasm. It was agreed, therefore, that as soon as he put on his long boots and set out for the barnyard, I should retire into his cheerful library, where a blazing fire of hickory-logs, shelves well stored with all that is best in literature, and a great green-covered table, on which papers, reviews, and magazines were piled in pleasant confusion, kept me in excellent spirits while he was attending to the daily duties of the farm. How I enjoyed those idle hours! Throwing myself back in a wide arm-chair, I passed the winter mornings skimming over the pages of my favorite authors, half reading them and half dreaming; and when my friend returned from his rounds, and stretched himself in another chair on the opposite side of the fire-place, we used to chat over the various subjects that had occupied my mind since breakfast. After dinner, we usually went back to the library with our cigars. The evening we always spent with the rest of the family in the parlor.
My friend read a great deal, and was also something of an author. He contributed essays on agricultural subjects to one or two magazines. He had even published a book or so in the course of his life; and he still amused himself by penning literary criticisms, for a periodical printed in New York. I was not surprised, therefore, to find his table burdened with a good many volumes, newspapers, and pamphlets, which I knew he would never have been at the trouble of ordering.
"Yes," said he, when I made a remark about the worthless character of some of these publications; "there is trash enough here to make a man melancholy. People send me these things for their own purposes, and I read them sometimes for mine. I should be tempted to be sorry for the invention of printing, only if we lost the bane, we should lose the antidote with it. Besides, I have little faith in the negative sort of virtue which is founded on ignorance. We ought to grow wiser, day by day, with the number of our teachers; but what I see here often makes me doubt it. You will find that mankind have the same propensity to use calumny instead of argument that they had two or three hundred years ago. In matters of religion and history, I believe that lies are very much like Canada thistles: let them once take root, and it is next to impossible to get the field clear of them. You may cut them all down to-day, and to-morrow their ugly heads will be as high as ever. Now, here," he continued, picking up a handful of pamphlets and newspapers, "is a crop of Canada thistles. These are all philippics against the Catholic Church. I suppose their authors call them polemical publications; but there is not an argument in one of them. They are nothing whatever but slanders which have been demolished a hundred times; and yet here they are, as bold as ever. It is consoling to be told, as we often are, that 'Truth crushed to earth will rise again;' but if a lie crushed to earth has not an incorrigible habit of rising again, then I am no reader of current literature. You and I may go out into the field of theological controversy, and, being well armed and on the right side, we may cut down every one of the calumnies which are marshalled against the church; but we know that they will jump right up again as soon as our backs are turned, and swear that they never went down. It is rather discouraging to fight against a man who doesn't know when he is dead. To answer these things now, that I hold in my hand, would be like running around the battle-field in chase of a rabble of lively corpses."
"Well," said I, "you are partly right and partly wrong. We have got to cut away at the Canada thistles, as you call them, whether we root them out or not; if we don't, they will stifle the grain. Besides, your lively corpses cannot run for ever. You may galvanize a dead body into spasmodic activity, but you cannot bring it to life again; and I believe that, every time a lie is exposed, there is good done to somebody, though the exposure may have been made a hundred times before. Take the old fiction of a female pope; one of the most preposterous of anti-Catholic calumnies, and one of the easiest to demolish, because the admitted facts of history were so plain against it. That was an incredibly long time dying; but it is dead at last—so dead that even Mr. Murphy, of Birmingham, probably does not believe it. Well, that lie would never have been laid on the shelf if Catholics had not hammered away at it until they forced their enemies to listen to them. Take the St. Bartholomew massacre—"
"I don't know about that," interrupted my friend; "there is a good deal of vitality in that thistle yet. Two things have been proved, and are now admitted by the most candid Protestant historians—that the massacre was the crime of a political, not a religious, party, and that the number of the slain has been frightfully exaggerated. The old story used to be that 100,000 fell, and Lingard has shown that the number, in all probability, did not exceed 1500. Notwithstanding this, I have a volume here, called Willson's Outlines of History, which, I learn, is used as a text-book in the College of the City of New York, and which represents the massacre as a rising of the 'Catholics of Paris' against their Huguenot brethren, declares that it lasted in the capital 'eight days and eight nights without any apparent diminution of the fury of the murderers,' and estimates the number of the victims at 50,000. Then the writer goes on to say that the pope caused medals to be struck in commemoration of the auspicious event, and returned public thanks to heaven. A student would never suspect from this that the assassins were not the Catholic inhabitants, but the hirelings of the queen mother. Besides, the massacre lasted, not eight days and nights, but three days and two nights. This fact is of more importance than at first appears. If the slaughter had lasted so long, and so many persons had been killed, it could hardly have been the work of a band of cutthroats; but if we remember that, as all reputable historians admit, it was over on the third day, and that the number of victims, according to Froude, who is the latest Protestant authority, certainly did not exceed 2000 in Paris, and 10,000 in all France, or, according to Lingard, 1500 in the whole kingdom, it is evident that it could not have been shared in by the Catholic inhabitants."
"Froude, you say, puts the number at 10,000?"
"Yes, and admits that the French Catholics cried out with horror at the outrage. Yet Froude is a most unwilling witness in our favor. His bias, as you know, is all the other way. The Calvinistic author of the martyrology of the Huguenots, published only ten years after the massacre, made careful search, and was able to find the names of only 786 persons who perished. Froude's estimate is too high, and Willson's is altogether preposterous. Then about that medal and the Te Deum at Rome; everybody knows that, as soon as the horrible deed was over, the first care of the French king was to justify himself at the other European courts by false accounts of what had taken place. His ambassador informed the pope that his majesty had discovered a Huguenot conspiracy against his life and throne, and had overcome it by promptly executing the criminals. It was in the belief of this lie that the pope caused public thanks to be given for the king's victory. This is a fact as well established as any other of the 16th century. Yet Mr. Willson, and men like him, choose to go on quietly disregarding it. I think it simply a sin that anybody so grossly ignorant or so shamefully perverse should be allowed to deceive the young with what they presume to call 'history.'"