There is an important fact too often lost sight of in discussing the alleged superior aptitude of Protestants in relation to this world. We find nowhere braver soldiers, bolder sailors, more enterprising merchants, or more ingenious workmen than were the Venetians, the Genoese, the Florentines, and the Portuguese when in their best estate. A Portuguese sailor opened the way by the Cape of Good Hope to India; a Genoese discovered this western continent, which bears an Italian name; an Italian, also, was the discoverer of this northern half of the American continent; and it was a Catholic sovereign who aided the Anglo-American colonies to assert their independence. Yet Portugal, Venice, Genoa, Florence, when they were greatest, were Catholic, and their decline in later times is not owing to their Catholicity; for they were Catholic all the time that they were rising from their feeble beginnings, and at the period of their greatest power and splendor, more bigotedly so, as our liberals would say, than they are now; and what did not hinder their rise and growth could not be the cause of their decline. They have declined through other causes, and causes well known to the student of the rise and fall of nations.
It is, no doubt, true that in France, Belgium, and Italy, and perhaps in other old Catholic states, Catholics, even where they are the immense majority, permit the public offices to be filled, and themselves to be ruled by Protestants, Jews, infidels, and such secularized Catholics as hold the state should govern the church; and we have often felt not a little indignant to find it so; but modern society in all Catholic states recedes from the old aristocratic constitution of Europe, and tends to democracy; and democracy, as our American experience proves, elevates to power not the best men in the community, but often the worst, the least scrupulous, the most intriguing, selfish, and ambitious. The fact may also be explained by the false political education which the Catholic populations have received. Under Gallicanism they are not instructed to regard Catholicity as catholic, and are taught to look upon politics as exempted from the law of God as defined by the church. For them religion and politics are wholly disconnected, have no necessary relation one to the other, rest not on a common principle. Their political education relegates religion to private and domestic life, to the personal and domestic virtues, and has nothing to say in public affairs. Why then should not Protestants, Jews, infidels, or merely nominal Catholics, fill the public offices, and take the management of public affairs?
The French, and other Catholics, who see and deplore this, having received the same sort of education, make the evil worse by laboring not to bring politics up to Catholicity, but to bring the church down to the level of politics, thus lowering the one without elevating the other. They assume an attitude toward the government of distrust, if not of hostility, and exert their influence to Jacobinize the church instead of destroying her, as the revolution would do if it could. Practically, they are only Catholic instead of infidel Jacobins; and whatever their personal hopes and intentions, simply play into the hands of the revolution. It is not the church that needs liberalizing, but the state that needs Catholicizing. The evil, the political imbecility of Catholics in these old Catholic nations, results from the divorce of politics from religion, or the withdrawal of the political order from its proper subordination and subserviency to the spiritual. It is the fruit of the so-called "Gallican liberties," and the remedy is not in the alliance of the church either with democracy or with monarchy, with Jacobinism or with absolutism; but in bringing the faithful to understand that the Catholic religion is catholic, and has the right from God to govern them alike in their public relations and in their private and personal relations; in their public and official life, and in their private and domestic life.
In all these old nations the predominant religion is Christian, but the politics are pagan; and Protestants take the lead in political affairs because they have succeeded in paganizing their own religion, and in eliminating all antagonism between it and their politics; while the Catholics are politically inefficient because, owing to the paganism of the state, they have not been able to Christianize their politics and bring them into harmony with their religion. They themselves sympathize politically with Protestants, but are less efficient than they, because more or less restrained by their religion. Eliminate, by Christianizing politics, all antagonism between politics and religion, which now renders Catholics politically indifferent or imbecile, and enable them to act with a united instead of a divided mind, and they will show even a greater aptitude for the affairs of this world than Protestants, because they will act from a higher plane, from profounder and more luminous principles, and with the energy and tenacity of an ever-present and living faith, instead of interest or expediency. But how can they do so when politics in every state in Europe are divorced from Catholic principle, are pagan, and at war with Christianity, and to take part in them they must sacrifice their religion and give up heaven for earth?
It is not Catholicity that renders the Catholics of old Catholic nations politically imbecile, and that permits a miserable minority of Protestants, Jews, and infidels to control the state, but the lack of it; not the fact that they are, but that they are not, thoroughly Catholic. It is the paganism that rules in the state, and is the basis of modern politics, that renders them timid and inefficient. In all Protestant nations religion itself is paganized, and there is as little conflict between religion and politics as there was in old pagan Greece or Rome. They are torn, distracted, weakened by no internal conflict between the two powers; for the first act of the Reformation was to subject the spiritual order to the secular. Hence, they can act politically with undivided mind and undivided strength and energy. They have conformed their religion to their politics. But in all Catholic nations the governments, and, therefore, politics are pagan, and really, if not avowedly, at war with their religion that remains Christian. Those nations are therefore distracted, divided, weakened by the irrepressible antagonism between pagan politics supported by the secular authorities, and the Christian religion sustained only by the church, crippled by being denied her freedom.
It is easy now to understand why Protestant missions in old Catholic nations should not be wholly barren of results. They are backed by the whole weight of Protestant nations, governments and people; they are aided by the real sympathies and tendencies of the so-called Catholic governments and the pagan politics of Catholics themselves. What is surprising is, that their successes are no greater. It is no mean proof of the life and power of the church, and of her divine assistance, that she is able to retain so strong a hold as she does on so large a portion of the old Catholic populations, and to bear up against so many and such powerful enemies, enemies within as well as without the fortress.
The explanation offered by the author of the facts he concedes does not wholly satisfy us. He attributes them to the influence of the Catholic faith in inducing a renunciation of the world, producing in the minds and hearts of the faithful indifference to it, and a disposition to live only for piety and heaven.
That Catholicity has, and was designed to have this tendency, of course, we ourselves maintain; but we have studied the Gospel and Providence as manifested in human affairs to little effect if the renunciation of the world for Christ's sake is not the very way to secure it. They who give up all for Christ have even in this world the promise of a hundred-fold, and in the world to come life everlasting. "Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you." The true principle, both of political and domestic economy, is self-denial, renunciation. He who seeks the world and lives for it, shall lose it, since in so doing he violates the divine order, and takes as his end what at best is only a means. Other things being equal, then, we should expect a truly Catholic people to surpass in wealth and well-being, as in industry and virtue, a heathen, an infidel, or a Protestant people. Certainly, the inferiority of Catholic nations in material wealth and well-being is no argument against Catholicity; but it is, in our judgment, a proof that its government and people are not truly Catholic. We do not admit, to the extent the author does, the alleged superiority of Protestant nations, even as to the material goods of this life; but as far as they can claim any superiority over Catholic nations in this respect, we attribute it to what we have called paganism in politics, or to the fact that in no Catholic nation since the revival of pagan literature in the fifteenth century have politics been elevated to the Catholic standard and made to harmonize with the Christian religion.
The author concedes, also, that, during the last century and the present, Catholic nations have been steadily declining, and Protestant nations advancing. At the opening of the seventeenth century, the Catholic were the great and leading nations of the world. Italy, it is true, had begun to decline; Spain had attained its zenith; but the German empire was still the first power in Europe. France was succeeding to the rank of Spain, and Poland was regarded as the barrier of Catholicity against the North and the East, while England was weakened by revolution at home. Prussia was only a principality, though soon to become a kingdom, and the United States did not exist. At present, England is the undisputed mistress of the ocean, is a great Asiatic and a great American power, weighing heavily on continental Europe; Prussia is absorbing all Germany. The United States have the mastership of the new world, and are exerting a terrible pressure on the old; while, on the other hand, Portugal has become virtually a colony of England; Spain has lost a world, ceased to be a great power, and is worse than nothing to the Catholic cause; Poland is divided among her neighbors, and annihilated; Austria is expelled from Germany, and threatened with the fate of Poland; Italy, at war with the pope, throws her weight on the side of the Protestant nations. Russia and the new Greek empire that is to be are not Protestant; but, as schismatic powers, will sustain the Protestant policy as against Catholicity. France, if she has not declined, has abandoned her mission as a great Catholic power, and is as little to be counted on to resist Anglo-Saxon ascendency as Russia or the revived Greek empire.
The excellent abbé, however, admonishes us that this decline on the one side, and growth and preponderance on the other, is political, not religious; and indicates no decline in Catholicity, or progress of Protestantism. The Latin races, except in France, have declined; but the church has gained more members than she has lost. Only the Anglo-Saxon race, the bulwark of Protestantism, has advanced. Denmark, Sweden, and Holland, considerable Protestant powers at the opening of the seventeenth century, have lost their political importance. Holland is half Catholic, and the Dutch Catholics are not less devoted to the church, less tenacious of their rights, nor less politically active and energetic than the Catholics of Ireland, and even less distracted by questions of national relief or national independence.