The principle of revolution, asserted and acted on as a Christian principle by the reformers, has not been inoperative, or remained barren of results, on being transferred to modern political and civil society. If the reformation, by drawing off men's attention and affections from the spiritual order, and fixing them on the material order, has promoted a marvellous progress in mechanical inventions and the applications of science to the industrial and productive arts, it has at the same time undermined the whole political order, shaken every civil government to its foundation, and, in fact, revolutionized nearly every modern state. It has loosened the bonds of society, destroyed the Christian family, erected disobedience into a principle, a virtue even, and reduced authority to an empty name. It has taught the people to be discontented with their lot, filled them with an insane desire for change, made them greedy of novelties, and stirred them up to a chronic war with their rulers. Everywhere we meet the revolutionary spirit, and there is not a government in Europe that has any strong hold on the consciences of the governed, or that can sustain itself except by its army. Even Russia, where the people are most attached to their emperor, is covered over with a network of secret societies, which are so many conspiracies against government, laboring night and day to revolutionize the empire. Prussia, which has just succeeded in absorbing the greater part of Germany, and is flushed with her recent triumph over the French empire and the improvised French republic, may seem to be strong and stable; but she has the affections of the people in no part of Germany, which she has recently annexed or confederated under her headship, and the new empire is pervaded in all directions by the revolutionary spirit to which it owes its existence, and which may be strong enough to resist its power, and reduce the ill-compacted body to its original elements to-morrow.
We need not speak of Austria; she may become hereafter once more a power in Europe, but she is now nothing. Voltairianism, and the spirit generated by the Reformation, have prostrated her, and sunk her so low that no one deigns to do her reverence. In England the government itself seems penetrated with the revolutionary spirit, or at least believes that spirit is so strong in the people that it is unsafe to resist it, and that it is necessary to make large and continual concessions to it. It is a maxim with the liberals and most English and American statesmen, or politicians rather, for our age has no statesmen, that a government is strengthened by timely and large concessions to popular demands. The government is undoubtedly strengthened by just laws and wise administration, but in our times, when the old respect for authority has gone, and governments have little or no hold on consciences, there is no government existing strong enough to make concessions to popular demands, or to the clamors of the governed, without endangering its power, and even its existence. The Holy Father, Pius IX., in the beginning of his pontificate, tried the experiment, and was soon driven from his throne, and found safety only in flight and exile. Napoleon III. tried it in January of last year, was driven by his people into a war for which he was unprepared, met with disasters, was defeated and taken prisoner, declared deposed and his empire at an end by a Parisian mob, before the end of September of the same year. The policy of concession is a ruinous policy; one concession leads to the demand for another and a larger concession, and each concession strengthens the disaffected, and weakens the power of authority to resist. But England has adopted the policy, is fully committed to it, as she is to many false and ruinous maxims, and it will go hard but she yields to her democracy, and reaps in her own fields the fruits of the liberalism and revolutionism which she has, especially when under Whig influence, so industriously sown broadcast throughout Europe.
We need not speak of our own country. Everybody knows its intense devotion to popular sovereignty, its hatred of authority, and its warm sympathy—in words at least—with every insurrection or uprising of the people, or any portion of the people, to overthrow the established authority, whether in church or state, they can hear of, without any inquiry into the right or wrong of the case. The insurrection or revolutionary party, it is assumed, is always in the right. There is no more intensely Protestant people on the globe than the American, and none more deeply imbued with the revolutionary spirit, in which it is pretended our own institutions originated, and which nearly the whole American press mistake for the spirit of liberty, and cherish as the American spirit. What will come of it, time will not be slow in revealing.
But France, so long the leader of modern civilization, and which she has so long led in a false direction, shows better than any other nation the workings of the revolutionary spirit introduced by the Reformers. She, indeed, repelled, after some hesitation and a severe struggle, the Reformation in the religious order; but through the indomitable energy of the princely Guises and their brave Lorraine supporters, whom every French historian and publicist since takes delight in denouncing, she was retained in the communion of the church; but with Henry IV. the parti politique came into power, and Protestantism was adopted and acted on in the political order. On more occasions than one, France became the diplomatic and even the armed defender of the Reformation against the Catholic sovereigns of Europe. She was the first Christian power to form an alliance with the Grand Turk, against whom Luther declared to be against the will of God for his followers to fight, even in defence of Christendom; she aided the Low Countries in their rebellion against Catholic Spain, Protestant Sweden, and Northern Germany in their effort to crush Catholic Austria, and protestantize all Germany; and saw, without an effort to save her, Catholic Poland struck from the list of nations. Twice has she with armed force dragged the Holy Father from his throne, and secularized and appropriated the States of the Church, and set the example which the Italian Liberals have but too faithfully followed. Rarely, if ever, has she since the sixteenth century, by her foreign policy, consulted the interests of the church any further than they happened to be coincident with her own. In an evil hour, she forgot the principles which made the glory of the French sovereigns, and on which Christendom was reconstructed after the downfall of the Roman Empire of the West, and severed her politics from her religion. At first asserting with the reformers and the Lutheran princes the independence of the secular order of the spiritual, afterwards the superiority of the secular power, and finally the sovereignty of the people or the governed in face of their governers, as the reformers asserted the sovereignty of the faithful in face of the pope and hierarchy, she made her world-famous revolution of 1789, inaugurated the mob, and has been weltering in anarchy and groaning under despotism ever since.
The accession of Henry IV., the beau ideal of a king with the French people, marks a compromise between Catholicity and Protestantism, by which it was tacitly agreed that France should in religion profess the Catholic faith and observe the Catholic worship, while in politics, both at home and abroad, she should be Protestant, and independent of the spiritual authority. It was hoped the compromise would secure her both worlds, but it has caused her to lose both, at least this world as every one may now see. It is worse than idle to attempt to deny the solidarity of the French revolution with Luther's rebellion; both rest on the same principle and tend to the same end; and it is the position and influence of France as the leader of the civilized world, that has given to the revolutionary principle its popularity, diffused it through all modern nations, and made it the Weltgeist, or spirit of the age. The socialistic insurrection in Paris, and which we fear is only "scotched, not killed," is only the logical development of '93, as '93 was of '89, and '89 of Luther's revolt against the church in the sixteenth century. Its success would be only the full realization in church and state, in religion and society, of what Dr. Krauth calls "the conservative reformation." The communists deny the right of property, indeed, but not more than did Protestants in despoiling the church and sacrilegiously confiscating the possessions of religious houses and the goods of the clergy. No more consistent and thoroughgoing Protestants has the world seen than these French socialists or communists, who treat property as theft and God as a despot.
We do not exult in the downfall of France, in which there are so many good Catholics and has always been so much to love and admire, any more than, had we lived then, we should have exulted in the downfall of the Roman Empire before the invasion of the barbarians. Like that downfall, it is the breaking up of Christendom, and leaves the Holy Father without a single Christian power to defend his rights or the liberty of the Holy See; but it deprives Protestantism of its most efficient supporter and its great popularizer, and all the more efficient because nominally Catholic. It is not Catholic but Protestant and liberal France that has fallen. The Bonapartes never represented Catholic France, but the principles of 1789—that is, the revolution which created them, and which they sought to use or retain as they judged expedient for their own interests. In the last Napoleon's defeat we see the defeat, we wish we could say the final defeat, of the revolution. Yet so terrible a disaster occurring so suddenly to so great a nation, we think must prove the turning-point in the life and tendencies of the nations of Europe, and pave the way for the reconstruction of Christendom on its old basis of the mutual concord and co-operation of the two powers. We think it must lead the nations to pause and reflect on the career civilization has for three centuries been running, and open their eyes to the folly and madness of attempting to found permanent political and social order, or authority and liberty, on the revolutionary principle of the Reformation or of 1789. We look for a powerful reaction at no distant date against the revolution in favor of the church and her divine authority. It is sometimes necessary to make men despair of the earth in order to turn their attention to heaven.
But to conclude: we have wished to show Dr. Krauth that the Reformation in any or all its phases, in its principle and in its effects, in church and state is decidedly revolutionary. He as a Protestant has not been able to see and set forth the truth; bound by his office and position to defend the Reformation, he has considered what it must have been if defensible, not what it actually was, and has given us his ideal of the Reformation, not the Reformation itself. If it does not, he reasons, maintain all Catholic principles and doctrines it is indefensible; but if it concedes that these principles and doctrines, were held in their purity and integrity in their unity and catholicity, by the church Luther warred against, what need was there of it? Our good doctor must then assume that they were not so held, that the church had erred both in faith and practice, and that the Reformation simply restored the faith, purified practice, re-established discipline, freed the mind from undue shackles, and opened the way for the free and orderly progress of the word. All very fine; only there does not happen to be a word of truth in it. Besides, if it were so, it would only prove that the church had failed, therefore that Christianity had failed, and that Christ was not equal to the work he undertook. If Christ is true, there must always be the true church somewhere, for she is indefectible as he is indefectible. If the church in communion with the See of Rome had become corrupt and false, as the reformers alleged, then some other existing body was the true church, and Luther and his associates, in order to be in the true church, should have ascertained and joined it—a thing which it is well known they did not do, for they joined no other church or organic body, but set furiously at work to pull down the old church which had hitherto sheltered them and to build a new one for themselves on its ruins.
We grant the Reformation should have been conservative in order to be defensible, but it was not so, it was radical and subversive. It rejected the Papacy, the hierarchy, the church herself as a visible institution, as a teaching and governing body, and asserted the liberty of the faithful to teach and govern their prelates and pastors. It is the common principle of all Protestant denominations that the church is constituted by the faithful, holds from them, and the pastor is called not sent. This, we need not say, is the subversion of all church authority, of the kingdom of God founded by our Lord himself, and ruling from above instead of from below. It reduces religion from law to opinion or personal conviction, without light or authority for conscience. This principle, applied to politics, is the subversion of the state, overthrows all government, and leaves every man free to do "what is right in his own eyes." It transfers power from the governors to the governed, and allows the government no powers not held from their assent, which is simply to make it no government at all. It has been so applied, and the effect is seen especially in France, which, since her revolution of '89, has had no settled government, but has alternated, as she alternates to-day, between the mob and the despot, anarchy and military despotism.
We so apply it, theoretically, in this country; and in the recent civil war the North was able to fight for the preservation of the Union only by pocketing for a time its principles and forswearing its logic. The logic was on the side of the South; the force was on the side of the North; on which side was the right or the wrong, it is not our province to decide. We will only add that we do not agree at all with journals that speak of the issues which led to the war as being decided by it. War may make it inexpedient to revive them, but the only issue it ever does or can decide is, on which side is, for the time, the superior force. We deny not the right of the people to resist the prince who makes himself a tyrant, if declared to be such and judicially deposed by the competent authority, but we do deny their right, for any cause whatever, to conspire against or to resist the legitimate government in the legal exercise of its constitutional powers. We recognize the sovereignty of the people in the sense that, if a case occurs in which they are without any government, they have the right, in concert with the spiritual power, to institute or reconstitute government in such way and in such form as they judge wisest and best; but we utterly deny that they remain sovereign, otherwise than in the government, when once they have constituted it, or that the government, when constituted, holds from them and is responsible to their will outside of the constitution; for that would make the government a mere agent of the people and revocable at their will, which is tantamount to no government at all. The doctrine of the demagogues and their journals we are not able to accept; it deprives the people collectively of all government, and leaves individuals and minorities no government to protect and defend them from the ungoverned will and passions of the majority for the time.