[Footnote 168: Lest those who may be unacquainted with previous conferences of Père Hyacinthe should interpret this passage as referring to the temporal power, we subjoin a quotation from a conference delivered by him in Notre Dame in the year 1867. Speaking of the complications caused by placing political power and religious power in the same hands, R. P. Hyacinthe says: "Nowhere under the sun of the Catholic world do I find this dreadful confusion. If you bid me look toward Rome, it is not the confusion, it is the exceptional alliance of the two powers that I hail in that place, itself exceptional as a miracle. Beneficent alliance, knot of the liberty of conscience, never to be united, because it unites there what it must separate elsewhere, never were you more fearfully necessary to us than now! You have received the testimony of French blood, shed by those who have been called mercenaries while they are simply heroes! You are defended by the eloquent words, the national words of our orators, by the energetic and loyal declarations of our government."
In a conference preached at Rome during the Lent of 1868, R. P. Hyacinthe compares those who urge the church to throw aside the temporal power, and lead a purely supernatural existence, to Satan tempting Christ to cast himself from the pinnacle of the temple, that angels may bear him up.]
Such, however, was the kingdom which kings, and the partisans of kings, persistently dreamed of giving to humanity. For one single instant, under David, that prophetic ideal foreseen and pictured by the prophet king shone with unblemished purity, soon to be veiled under the worldly, (we will speak in plain terms,) under the pagan ideal of Solomon.
Solomon was a great king, especially at the outset of his career. He was always great, even in his errors and crimes. But intoxicated with the science of nature, which he possessed, says the inspired text, from the cedar growing on the summit of Lebanon to the hyssop piercing the cracks of the walls, Solomon, not content with knowledge leading to God, wished to possess all the riches and the loves of earth. He built him palaces bearing little resemblance to the palm-tree beneath which Deborah administered justice, or to the tents where David camped with his soldiers; palaces so sumptuous that the queen of Sheba came from the depths of Arabia to admire them. He had harems filled with women, chiefly foreigners and idolaters; seven hundred sultanas and three hundred concubines! Then letting this inebriation mount, I will not say from heart, but from sense to brain, he fell down with his women at the feet of all their idols, venerating, under poetic symbols, that great nature which is the work of God and so easily takes the place of God.
Such was the spectacle presented by Jerusalem under the successor of David—a hideous spectacle, but made less repulsive in the days of Solomon by a glory he had no power to bequeath to his heirs in Judah and to his Israelitish emulators. He left them only his pride, his sensuality, his idolatry; and when the two inimical yet analogous monarchies succumbed at last beneath the blows of powerful neighbors, of those northern conquerors whose favors they had so often solicited, and whose arms they had so often braved, they left behind them, in the history of the holy nation, a long track of mire and blood.
Such was the royalty of Judea, such the royalty of Israel; promised to the world under the name of the kingdom of God!
So perverted were the Jews by their kings—or, to speak more justly, for we must not misjudge these kings, so perverted were they by national pride, that they could not throw aside this gross ideal, but contemplated still, under the profaned name of the kingdom of God, the domination of races with the sword and with a rod of iron. When the true Messiah, Jesus, came to them, they misunderstood him, chiefly because he rejected this low and narrow royalty, proclaiming the true principle of the kingdom of God—a spiritual kingdom which should be in the world, but not of the world; regnum meum non est de hoc mundo; a spiritual kingdom which comes to bear witness of the truth, ego in hoc natus sum et ad hoc veni in mundum, ut testimonium perhibeam veritati. They preferred, before him, the seditious Barabbas, who had fought in the streets of Jerusalem, shedding blood to deliver them from the Romans. They preferred, before him, all the false Messiahs, all the impotent and treacherous Christs, who closed their mad career by precipitating the ruin of the nation, the city, and the temple they had pretended to save.
Break, then, vase of Jewish nationality! formed so lovingly by God through the hand of Moses; royal and sacerdotal vessel, break! since thou wilt have it so. Thou wert formed to keep the treasures of religious life for all humanity; thou didst close upon thyself in jealous egotism; break! and let thy shivered atoms, scattered through the world, spread abroad the balm which shall intoxicate all nations. "The vase was shattered," says Holy Writ, "and the whole house was filled with the odor." Et domus impleta est ex odore unguenti.
What kings effected in the political order, priests accomplished in the religious order. Indeed, fatal as is the mistake of confounding religious with political forms, still more lamentable is the error of identifying, within the very heart of religion, accidental and accessory forms with essential forms. Every religion—above all, the true religion, the Christian religion—going back to Moses, Abraham, Adam, is not merely a religious idea, a religious sentiment, as it pleases contemporary rationalism to call it. It is a fact, and therefore has positive forms; it is a living fact, and therefore has a determined organism. But, placed amid time and space, the fact of religion must consider the varying conditions of space, the changing conditions of time. Its organism must discharge its functions amid dissimilar or even contradictory surroundings. Therefore, side by side with substantial, permanent forms, we find variable, accessory forms, clothing the first, so to speak, according to the exigencies of races and centuries. By trying to confound religion with accessory forms peculiar to certain countries or races, we should isolate it from the great current of humanity in the present. By trying to bind it to worn-out forms, we should isolate it from the great current of humanity in the future. We should misinterpret St. Paul's words to the ancient synagogue: "Quod autem antiquatur et senescit, prope interitum est." No worse service could be rendered to religious unity. On this shoal the Jewish priesthood stranded.