Here we see the cause. Paganism in the state corrupted the sovereigns, their courts, and the ruling classes in morals and manners, enfeebled character, debased society, in the Catholic states. The failure, through divine Providence, of the ambitious and selfish schemes of such professedly Catholic sovereigns as Philip II., Louis XIV., and Napoleon I., reduced the Latin races to the low estate in which we now find them, and gave, in the political, commercial, and industrial order, the ascendency to Protestant nations, as a chastisement to both, and a lesson to Catholics from which it is to be hoped they will profit. If the Catholic nations had been truly Catholic, if the educated and ruling classes had recognized and defended the church steadily from the first on Catholic principles, and unflinchingly maintained her freedom and independence as the kingdom of God on earth, representing him who is King of kings and Lord of lords, these nations would have retained their preponderance, the church would have reformed the morals and manners of society, and the Protestant nations would never have existed, or would have speedily returned to the fold.
Yet we do not despair of these Latin races; for, though their governments have betrayed the faith, and the people have been alienated from the church by attributing to her the political faults of their rulers, from which she and they alike have suffered, they still retain Catholic tradition, and have in them large numbers of men and women, more than enough to have saved the cities of the plain, who are true believers, and who know and practise in sincerity and earnestness their faith. They have still a recuperative energy, and may yet re-ascend the scale they have descended. The present emperor of the French believed it possible, and his mission to recover the Latin races. He attempted it, and his plan, to human wisdom, seemed well devised and practicable. It was to break the alliance between England and Russia; to create an independent, confederated, or united Italy; to divide the Anglo-Saxon race in the United States, and to raise up and consolidate a Latin power in Mexico and Central America, while he extended the French power in North Africa, defeated English and Russian diplomatic preponderance in the East, opened a maritime canal across the Isthmus of Suez, and recovered the commerce of India for the Mediterranean powers. By these means he would give to France the protectorate of the Latin races, and guard alike against Anglo-Saxon and Russian preponderance. But his plan made no account, or a false account, of the moral and religious causes of the decline of Latin races, and sought to elevate them not as truly Catholic but as temporal powers, and to use the church for a secular end, instead of using the secular power he possessed for a spiritual and Catholic end. He committed over again the error of his uncle, Louis XIV., and Philip II., and has failed, as he might have foreseen if he had understood that the church must be served, if at all, for herself, and that she serves the secular only when the secular serves her for her own sake.
The result of Napoleon's policy has been not to elevate the Latin races and to bring them to gravitate around France as the great central Latin power, but to weaken the power of the church over them, to strengthen the antagonism between their faith and their politics, and to depress them still more in relation to the Teutonic and Slavonic races. The emperor of the French, whether he had or had not Catholic interests at heart, has done them great injury. He began by subordinating the spiritual to the secular, when he should have begun by subordinating the secular to the spiritual. He would then have secured the divine protection and assistance, and been invincible. He has, in reality, only defeated the end he aimed at, and left the Latin races in a more deplorable condition than that in which he found them. As a Catholic and as a Latin sovereign, he has not been a success. The Protestant and schismatical powers have grown only by the faults and blunders, the want of submission and fidelity of the professedly Catholic powers; not by any means, as they suppose, by the errors and abuses of the ecclesiastical administration, nor by any positive virtue, even for this world, in their heresy and schism. God, as we have just said, is a jealous God, and his glory he will not give to another. The Latin races, so called, when in power sought not his glory but their own, and failed. But they may yet recover their former power and splendor, if not their commercial preponderance, by rejecting the subtle paganism which has enervated them, the infidel politics they have adopted; by restoring to the church her full freedom and independence as the spiritual order, and by subordinating the secular to the spiritual order; that is, by making themselves really and truly Catholic.
In France there was, at an early day, an attempt made to reconcile paganism in politics with Catholicity in religion, in what is called Gallicanism, which, however, only served to systematize the antagonism between church and state, and to render it all the more destructive to both. We look upon Gallicanism, as expressed in the four articles adopted at the dictation of the government by the assembly of the French clergy in 1682, and which had shown itself all along from Philip the Fair, the grandson of St. Louis, which broke out in great violence with Louis XII., and his petit council of five cardinals at Pisa, acted on by the politiques of Henry IV., and formulated by the great Bossuet under Louis XIV., as the most formidable as well as the most subtle enemy the church has ever had to contend with.
The essence, the real virus, so to speak, of Gallicanism is not, as so many suppose, in the assertion that the dogmatic definitions of the pope are not irreformible—though that is a grave error, in our judgment—but in the assertion of the independence of the state in face of the spiritual order. No doubt Bossuet's purpose in drawing up the four articles was to prevent the French government from going farther and carrying away the kingdom into open heresy and schism; but the Subtle secularism to which he gave his sanction, especially as sure to be practically understood and applied, is far harder to deal with than either heresy or schism, and it seems to us far more embarrassing to the church. It forbids the Catholic to be logical, to draw from his Catholic principles their proper consequences, or to give them their legitimate application; takes away from the defences of faith its outposts, and reduces them to the bare citadel, and proves an almost insurmountable obstacle to the church in her efforts to reach and subdue the world to the law of God. It withdraws the secular order from its rightful subjection to the spiritual order, and denies that religion is the supreme law for nations as well as for individuals, and for kings as well as for subjects.
The principal fault we find with the author, as may be gathered from what we have said, is that he appears to see in the antagonism between pagan politics and Christian, or in the original and inextinguishable dualism asserted by Gallicanism, no cause of the deterioration of Catholic nations, or of the partial success in old Catholic populations of Protestant missions in unmaking Catholics, if not in making Protestants. He seems to accept the one-sided asceticism which places the goods of this life in antagonism with the goods of the world to come, and, though he does not avow Gallicanism, originated by paganism in the state, he does not disavow it, or appear to be aware that it has any influence in detaching the people from the church, by making them Catholics only on one side of their minds, and leaving them pagan on the other.
The enemies of the church understand this matter far better, and they look upon a Gallican as being as good as a Protestant. James I., the English Solomon, declared himself ready to accept the church, if allowed to do it on Gallican principles. Protestants have very little controversy with out-and-out Gallicanism. They feel instinctively that the Catholics who assert the independence, which means practically the supremacy, of the secular order, and bind the pope by the canons which the church herself makes, are near enough to them; and if they are not separated from the church, it is all the better, because they can better serve the Protestant cause in her communion than they could if out of it. It is the Papal, not the Gallican church they hate.
We do not agree, if we may be permitted to say so, with the author as to the superiority of Protestant nations, or that they are likely to retain for any great length of time the superiority they appear now to have, nor do we accept, as we have already intimated, the one-sided asceticism which supposes any necessary antagonism between this world and the next. The antagonism grows out of the error of placing this world as the end or supreme good, when it is, in fact, only a medium. We as Christians renounce it as the end we live for; but if we so renounce it, and live only in Christ for God, who is really our supreme good, we find this world in its true place with all its goods; and a really Catholic nation that holds the spiritual and eternal supreme, and subordinates the secular to it, will have a hundred-fold more of the really good things of this life, than a nation that subordinates the spiritual to the secular, and seeks only material goods. We believe, and the author proves it, that there is even now more real wealth and well-being in Catholic than in Protestant nations; though we agree with the author, that if it were not so, it would be no argument against the church.
The question of tolerance and intolerance, and of civil and religious liberty, as related to Catholic and Protestant nations respectively, will form the subject of a future article. In the mean time we commend again to our readers the work we are reviewing.