so that nothing which the human mind can grasp will be concealed from him.” De omni re scibili! Well, that is wonderful indeed! No doubt you will have the power to create minds capable of taking in this encyclopædia! You are equal to so many undertakings! So that which you have in view, gratuitous, compulsory, lay tuition, integral besides for every one and complete to an impossible degree—this is the formula of socialism, and is also the formula of absurdity.
“In the schools,” you add, “children will be taught scientific truth in its rigor and its majestic simplicity,” and by this process “you will have reared citizens whose principles will rest on the same bases on which our entire society is founded.”
What do you mean by these big words? What are these principles? what are these bases? Whether it be that those principles rest on these bases, or that these bases are fast to those principles, how much of this will you teach to children from the ages of seven to eleven years? I call upon you to give me plainly the text of the programme of science which our worthy village teachers, who are to seek to instil into children of from seven to eleven years the sense of duty and sacrifice, will have to substitute for the Ten Commandments of God, and for the sublime and popular Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.
What is it, pray, sir, that renders you so ungrateful towards the voters of Paris or of Lyons, who nearly all have been educated by the Brothers, so severe on the priests, who perhaps have done something for your early education, and so unjust towards the church?
It is my duty to insist on this point, and to protest against your calumnies.
What! though the clergy of
France have devoted themselves, as they have done, to the service of our soldiers and our prisoners, and though when, only four months ago, our chaplains and our Brothers of the Christian Schools had served and died on the battle-fields, and though all our female religious have devoted themselves to the care of our ambulances, you have the heart to come and tell us that we are no longer French! And it is immediately after the massacre of the hostages that you repeat these calumnies, and represent us as constituting for modern society “the greatest peril.” Such are your very words, and you hold us up anew to the blind fury of our enemies.
And you direct your calumnies not against us alone, but, besides, against the Pope. Ah! I admit, the horrors, treachery, meanness, and falsehood by which he has been surrounded during the past twenty-five years have not brought him to look with favor on the charms of that sham liberty which you promise him, and he may well fail to admire that Garibaldi for whose sake you, perhaps, sacrificed our army of the East. But in the Encyclical which your hearers have never read, the Pope has not condemned the various forms of government as they exist in the laws of various nations. He has condemned liberty unrestrained, rights without countervailing duties, and societies that know not God. As to the family and property, sir, is it becoming your friends to style themselves their virtuous defenders?
But what is singular in this pell-mell gathering of confused and incoherent ideas, is your alleged motive for denying to French priests the right to teach which belongs to them in common with all their fellow-countrymen: “When you have appealed to the energies of men reared
by such teachers, when you seek to arouse in them ideas of sacrifice, of devotedness, of patriotism, you will find that you have to deal with an emasculated, debilitated class of men.” And the reason you assign for the emasculation and debilitation of this class reared under our care is still more singular: it is because we teach them to believe in Providence, and because teachers that believe in Providence are only fit to emasculate and debilitate the human race. At this point, sir, you set “the doctrine which accustoms the mind to the idea of a Providence” in opposition to “revolution, which teaches the authority and responsibility of the will of man and free agency.” But, sir, these things are not incompatible with one another. Both are taught by Christian doctrine, and, by setting them in opposition as you do, you show that you neither understand yourself nor the matters of which you are treating.