All anxiety which may have been felt in regard to the disposition of the French Liberal Catholics toward the council is completely set at rest by the clear and emphatic declaration of their principal organ, the Correspondant, that they will submit most unreservedly and joyously to all its decisions, as expressing the infallible judgment of the church.
The Grand Master of the Free-Masons of France has published a circular calling an extraordinary convention of the order, to meet on the 8th of December, in order to issue a manifesto declaring the principles of universal human right. The Anti-Council of Free-Thinkers will also assemble at Naples on the same day.
FOREIGN LITERARY NOTES.
It was simply natural that the universal desire to hear and learn something concerning the approaching Œcumenical Council—a desire that with some meant anxiety for serious knowledge and with others mere idle curiosity—should be responded to by writers willing and able to gratify it. We should far transcend our prescribed limits were we to undertake to do more than give a list of works on the subject possessing the mere qualities of serious treatment and some degree of merit. Of a large class of works on the council whose object is to vulgarize the subject we of course make no mention. Not to speak of pamphlets without number, France and Germany have been most prolific in literary productions concerning the council. Indeed, in these two countries alone, books of solid erudition and elevated tone are so numerous as almost to form a special encyclopædia, treating of the council from the various stand-points of history, law, politics, social philosophy, liturgy, and theology. And now, scanning more narrowly the long list, we find ourselves obliged to pass over in silence many of them that present the subject simply as historical, doctrinal, or specially theological, and to confine our brief mention to those which distinguish themselves from the mere treatise by an exceptional style and tone that render them more spirited and militant. We begin with La Société devant le Concile, par le Chanoine Martinet. For the great majority of persons outside of the Catholic Church in England and the United States, the mere title of this work is in itself a surprise. They have been so absorbingly occupied in arraigning the council before society in general and before their own little societies in particular, that it never appears to have occurred to them that a counter-arraignment was among modern possibilities. They have busied themselves, and for that matter still busy themselves, in squaring the ability and jurisdiction of the church by what they are pleased to call the demands of modern society—the ideas of modern civilization; as though these demands and these ideas were so perfectly recognized, classified, and codified as to present a compact and intelligible system. And yet, if, going from one to another of the entire chorus so loudly chanting the hosannas of the assumed system, we ask what is this system, you will find that no two of them agree. If the Œcumenical Council were to commence its work by a decree that should meet the views of any given one out of a hundred of them, there would arise a shout of malediction from the other ninety-nine. Suppose the orthodox Episcopalian to be satisfied, the Unitarian would inevitably be discontented. And if the Socialist could with any reason approve of what was done, just so certainly it would not suit his Presbyterian neighbor. Thus, for instance, take the first fourteen articles of the so-called "Papal Syllabus," of December, 1864, and will any one undertake to point out the Protestant country in Europe or in America in which one half the community would not be at once arrayed against the other half on the question as to whether they are truth or error? People talk of modern civilization and the spirit of the age as though these expressions conveyed a clear and definite meaning, and represented certain ideas distinctly recognized as truth by all; as though this so-called spirit of the age were something as definite, as tangible, and of as efficacious an application as a code of civil law; and as though its practical working were one of truth and harmony; whereas, in reality, no incomprehensible jargon of words, no jumble of ideas, no jungle of thicket is so helplessly confused and impenetrable as the maze of struggling, confused, and contradictory theories supposed to constitute the spirit of the age and serve as the exponent of modern enlightenment. We are not aware that the author of the work before us takes this view of the matter; but it is one so irresistibly suggested to us by the juxtaposition of the two statements—society before the council, and the council before society, that we cannot avoid expressing it. The enemies of the church, whose fear of her and whose ignorance concerning her are equally great, have long announced that she is in her decline; and yet she is now about to affirm her existence by a movement of prodigious vitality—an œcumenical council. The council, pronounced impossible by a great number, will obtain its first success by showing the falsity of the asserted impossibility of the attention of the world. "The council," says the Abbé Martinet, "will do all that needs be done to classify and render coördinate without destroying, all those ideas whose want of unity distracts us, whose opposition, real or apparent, creates strife and destructive collision among social classes and nations. Not only will it place in the light grand principles, great truths, but it will show to all right-minded men universal Catholic truth, which, in enlightening and conciliating all truths, all principles, prevents them from degenerating into serious errors in theory, into great iniquities in application. Possessing the centre of lights that do not deceive, it will elevate the source of the vital forces which save individuals, families, and nations."
Le Concile Œcumenique et la Situation Actuelle, par M. l'Abbé Christophe, presents the main ideas of the preceding work, with more concision.
L'Influence Sociale des Conciles is by M. Albert Du Boys, already known as the author of a meritorious work on jurisprudence.[93] The work now under consideration is a historical study in which the author describes the influence former councils have exercised upon the past. From a social point of view, the author shows that the councils have powerfully contributed to the enfranchisement and amelioration of humanity by victoriously combating the material and moral disorders of rude and barbarous ages, by their promotion of the foundation of hospitals and institutions of charity, by their denunciation of errors and superstitions injurious to public order or social well-being, by their gradual renunciation of clerical privileges and immunities whenever those immunities and privileges appeared to have become anomalous in a new social order. Showing that all the elements of modern civilization come to us from and through the church, the author concludes that the coming council will not be less inspired by the spirit of the gospel than the councils that have preceded it. The work is accompanied by a complimentary letter of the distinguished Bishop of Orleans, who says in it that the council assembles no less for the good of civil than of religious society.