More than any country, England has furnished astounding and repulsive proofs of the truth of Count De Maistre's assertion that "History is a vast conspiracy against truth." With uplifted hands, dripping with the blood of the innocent, she accuses other nations of murder. With a statute-book black with intolerance and suppression of knowledge, she talks complacently of the rights of conscience and the blessings of education.
In a lecture on Daniel O'Connell, delivered in Brooklyn on the fifth of March last, the distinguished orator, Wendell Phillips, of Boston, with all his eloquence, appeared almost at a loss fittingly to qualify, by description and illustration, the frightful tyranny of Protestant England against Catholic Ireland, as exemplified in the diabolical ingenuity of the means by which she sought to "stamp out" Irish nationality and annihilate Catholicity. And, Mr. Phillips might have added, she was as consistently bigoted at home as in Ireland. Here, the poor hedge schoolmaster if a Catholic, who taught a child its a b c, was, for the first offence, subject to banishment, and for the second, to be hanged as a felon. There, when the University of Oxford was asked to confer the honorary degree of A.M. on Alban Francis, a learned Benedictine, he was rudely thrust back, solely for the reason that he was a Catholic. And yet the same university had shortly before conferred the same degree on—a Mohammedan! The old distich is very trite, but on that occasion it was very true:
"Turk, Jew, or atheist may enter here,
But not a papist."
It is a memorable fact that Sir Isaac Newton particularly distinguished himself by active participation in this piece of bigotry. He actually suspended the preparation for the press of his Principia, and lent all the influence of his position and his great name in order that an Englishman, distinguished for his virtues and his learning, might not, because he was a Catholic, receive the cheap recognition of the honorary degree of a Protestant university. And Newton's English biographer coolly states that "it was this circumstance, perhaps, as much as the personal merit of Newton, that induced the university to select him, the following year, to serve as their representative in parliament."
But space fails us to dwell on this subject, and we desire merely to note the fact that, so thoroughly has a spirit of intolerant anti-Catholicity permeated English literature, that its expression, in some shape, is constantly found at the points of the pens of many who are personally unconscious of any such inspiration. The spirit we refer to so thoroughly pervades every department of literature—history, biography, travels, poetry, philosophy—that from youth to old age it is unconsciously infiltrated into the mental processes of every one who uses the English language as a means of acquiring or communicating knowledge. Even as we write, an instance of this presents itself. Here is a passage from the editorial columns of a leading daily, published in Brooklyn, the third city of the Union:
"——the church so long deemed the enemy of human freedom and intellectual progress, which imprisoned Galileo, and tried to thwart Columbus in putting the girdle of her ancient faith around the world!"
And yet the article from which this extract is made is evidently written in a spirit that its author honestly supposes to be one of entire freedom from religious prejudice. The church tried to thwart Columbus! That is the main idea of the passage quoted, as it was also the inspiration of the Kauffman painting. Such ideas and such inspiration are the result of general prejudice and a foregone conclusion.
Of course we are aware of the accommodating pliability of the term "the church," as used by writers who have anything disagreeable or false to say of Catholicity. "The church" is, by turns, a council, the pope, the cardinals, the inquisition, a bishop or two, a knot of priests, sometimes only one, a king, a viceroy, a barefooted friar, a dying nun, or even a simple layman. It is really difficult and discouraging to deal with people who either cannot or will not abide by some standard of meaning for words whose proper acceptance is well defined and recognized.
In the case of Columbus these misrepresentations are the more remarkable for the reason that there is no history of the discovery of America, no biography of Columbus, how ever imperfect, however prejudiced it may be, from whose perusal the student can arise with any other conviction than that Columbus, so far from being thwarted, was, on the contrary, enabled to succeed in obtaining from Spain the means to fit out his expedition only, wholly, and solely by reason of the encouragement and aid he received from friars, priests, bishops, and cardinals!
From the moment he set foot on Spanish soil until he sailed from Palos the generous sympathy and brave advocacy of churchmen never forsook him. Never for a moment did they waver in their appreciation of his noble nature, his sincere piety, and the merit of his enterprise. From the Dominicans cloistered in St. Stephens to Luis de St. Angel, high treasurer at the royal court; from the saintly hermit of La Rabida to the grand Cardinal Mendoza, ("a man of sound judgment, quick intellect, eloquent and able," says Washington Irving,) in all are found the same generous enthusiasm and unwavering boldness in their support of the strange sailor's enterprise.