What we want, what has given an expansive power and grandeur and beauty to the thirteenth century, is a moral unity in the general direction of civil society. Our epoch feels its instinct, it seeks it, it desires it. People submit to the heaviest sacrifices, and agitate themselves to obtain what they call their unity. It is a false, factious, exterior unity, I know, but after all, it is unity.
But a true, living, and moral unity can only be found in efforts such as I have tried to depict; and moral unity, which should be the only legitimate aim of a people, is not established by force, nor even by the splendor of industrial production, nor the attractions of an economical well-being. It will only grow as the people liberally accept the direction of the Christian law. Expelled from political constitutions, I see this unity reconstitute itself in the masses. The neighboring democracies should be Christian. Recently we have met a battalion of crusaders, going to Rome, and coming from North America, which will soon add to the number of its bishops as many as presided at the Council of Nice. To manifest with new éclat the fact of Christianity, and advance so salutary a movement, which will perhaps produce moral splendors unknown to the thirteenth century, we must arm ourselves, under the buckler of faith, with the science and rights of the citizen, as did the great doctors of the thirteenth century.
This struggle, I know, is to-day more difficult, but therefore more meritorious, more glorious. Nowhere have we the support of governments. I do not complain—I state a fact; and perhaps this very support is a defect because it has been so much abused. The purity of the moral struggle of the thirteenth century is tarnished by the religious persecutions. I know the adversaries of the church have exaggerated their intensity; but I know also that never has the church, as a church, persecuted, nor given or proclaimed the right to persecute. Besides, we must not lose sight of the fact that the alliance of church and state was such that a heresy was considered above everything a crime against the state. For example, we are astonished to see a Saint Louis condemn severely the blasphemers of God as state criminals; but we do not consider it extraordinary nowadays to see the blasphemers of a sovereign or minister condemned to prison, exile, or transportation. It is necessary to remark that the greater part of the sects of the middle ages proclaimed principles the realization of which would have consequences of great civil and political importance. I defy our contemporary societies, so proud of their religious tolerance, to support the worship of the Mormons, those pests of our age. Only Christian societies are strong enough to resist such currents of corruption, to preserve their integrity, to endure and develop by the side of such sects. Christians alone can be tolerant with impunity, because tolerance for them is not a social necessity, but a virtue. Only they can repeat with Saint Augustine: "Let us convert the heretics, but let them not be sacrificed." So when we think of the universal blame of which St. Ambrose and St. Martin made themselves interpreters, against the condemnation to death of the Priscillians, those Mormons of the fourteenth century, we are justly astonished at the rigors exercised in the thirteenth century against the Albigenses and other sectarians. To-day, thanks be to God, a religious persecution could not be possible in countries where the Catholic religion predominates. Persecutions are only prevalent among the Mussulmans of Asia Minor or the schismatics of Poland; and if the Protestants of Ireland or the liberal anti-Catholics of the Continent have such tendencies, they devise some form which to them alone appears as progress.
For the contest, then, we must act as citizens, and use the pen and the word, and without truce or relaxation. When St. Francis Xavier made in the Indies his great and admirable spiritual conquests, destroyed by the Holland Protestants and the English, he asked for reinforcements from the superior of his order. "Especially," said he, "send me from Belgium those robust and broad-shouldered men." With such, this great saint believed himself able to encounter every difficulty. Their race is not extinct, thank God; and it seems to me Europeans are easier conquered than Asiatics.
Brittany: Its People and its Poems.
Progress is the order of the day; the very watchword of the nineteenth century. Our times are possessed by an ever-active, restless spirit. Here and there only, in this surging sea, sheltered havens are found, where the quiet waters can reflect the fair forms and hues of heaven, floating above them in the deep and far-off blue. Here and there, out of the beaten track of the world's highways, lie rich and fertile retreats, among whose hills and fountains, woods and mossy stones, the spirit of the past, with music on her lips, poetry in her soul, and the cross clear and bright on her brow, still loves to dwell.
In scarcely another corner of Europe is the influence of this spirit so tenacious, so pervading, as in Brittany. Nor to those among us who may be descended from, or linked with, the original inhabitants of the British island, can Europe furnish many more interesting studies than this granite promontory—the bulwark of France against the wild Atlantic—and the Celtic tribes there, who guard, even to-day, their old Armorica from invasion of the novelties of Paris in manners and in thought.