We would wish, if space permitted, to give selections from some of the good bishop’s “Brief Notes” of his recollections connected with the persecutions in France in 1793 and the following years, for they show in their simple details the striking contrasts between the lives and deaths of the children of Christ and the children of Antichrist, among the French people of that day. Never before in the history of the church, or in the history of humanity, did virtue and vice, face to face, reach loftier heights or deeper depths.
The aim of the French rulers was to extinguish Christianity. The “age of reason” had arrived, and its advanced fautors determined that the world should recognize it. But the priests stood in the way, and, by some strange mischance, all the honest and meritorious people of the land made common cause with the priests. To bring these people to a just appreciation of reason, the churches were plundered and dismantled, and turned into temples of reason or barracks and stables, and, if possible, viler uses. To take God’s house from him was to deprive him of a dwelling-place in France, and the example of France would be followed everywhere, so that God should be banished from the earth of his own creation. But the priests—the unreasonable, intractable priests—instead of adopting the new lights, would adhere to the doctrines and traditions of past ages. When the churches were closed, they would worship God by stealth, with their followers, in private houses, in the fields, in the woods, offering their pure and unbloody sacrifice on every hill and in every dale and valley of France. To correct this, their existence, and that of those who harbored them, was demanded in bloody sacrifice. “During the progress of the persecution,” says Bishop Bruté, “the greater number of the priests of the diocese had been either guillotined or shot, or transported to the penal colonies. The more aged and infirm were imprisoned in the Castle of St. Michael. Of the few left in deep concealment, some were almost daily discovered, and, according to the law, led with those who had harbored them to the guillotine within twenty-four hours.” Young Bruté often followed the accused to the criminal court, and listened with palpitating heart to the mock trials of priests and people. His instances are deeply touching. The very capitula arrest attention: as “Trial of the priest and the three sisters of La Chapelle S. Aubert, Diocese of Rennes.” The priest, M. Raoul, was summarily convicted and sentenced; he submitted without a murmur, but attempted to offer a plea for the sisters, who sheltered him, when he was immediately silenced. The ladies were then put upon trial, and convicted and sentenced also. One of them had been a nun, and, driven from her convent home, had returned to her sister’s house. She was a woman of spirit, and when under the sentence of death she had a word to say to the court and the spectators. “When the sentence had been pronounced, the nun could not restrain her feelings of indignation. She rose from her seat, snatched from her cap the national cockade, which even the women were obliged to wear during those days of national delusion, and, trampling it under her feet, she addressed alternately the judges and the people with two or three sentences of vehement reproach: ‘Barbarous people,’ she exclaimed, ‘amongst what savage nations has hospitality ever been made a crime punishable with death?’ I cannot now call to mind her other expressions, except that she appealed to the higher tribunal of God, and denounced his judgment against them.... The same day these four victims were immolated upon the fatal guillotine. They were taken, I think, as was often the case, from the tribunal to the scaffold, which remained permanently erected under the windows.” “A priest and peasant, bound together, were led to the ‘Fusilade’ singing the service for the dead.” One morning early, young Bruté was startled from his studies by the notes of the Libera me, Domine, from the Burial Service of the church, sung by some one in the streets. “I understood too well what it all meant, and ran to the door to go out and follow them, agitated and partially frightened by the usual terror which rested on my heart, but at the same time animated by the song of death, for it was the priest who was thus singing his own Libera, and the poor peasant stepped along quickly by his side, looking, as may be supposed, very serious, but without the least appearance of fear. The impression on my mind is that the soldiers, who generally followed their prisoners with jokes and abuse, accompanied these two in silence.”
Priests and peasants and nobles were victims to the impious rage of those days, and even women and children. It is appalling to read the summary account of “children shot and children drowned; women shot and women drowned; priests shot and priests drowned; nobles drowned, and artisans drowned, besides the hosts who were guillotined or sent into exile.”
We cannot draw further from the pages of this most interesting book, but the reader may do so at his leisure. We have thought sometimes in reading it that Victor Emanuel and Bismarck might find its perusal profitable. While writing this, we see by the papers that the Upper House of the Prussian diet has passed a bill authorizing a complete control of the church—that is, of all religious matter—by the state government. In other words, the church must be the king’s creature, or must perish. We shall see. There is traditional policy in this move. In one of Frederic the Great’s letters to Voltaire, he expresses a wish to break up the Catholic Church first, for then, he adds, the Protestant churches will be very easily disposed of.
The modern persecutors might see, if they were not blind, that after all the follies and crimes and slaughters of the French Revolution—and surely they can bring nothing worse or more potent than this—the church has risen again in France in her glory, and that hers is at this day the only one great conservative influence in France, as everywhere else in Christendom. Surely it is plain that, though often doomed to death, she is fated not to die. But how strange the infatuation of princes or people who would wish to blot out Christianity from the face of the earth, or to make it a mere servile tool of tyrants! To blot it out! and what then the history of man? Some philosophic inquirer has suggested the extinction of the sun, and then on this now bright planet of ours universal darkness, intense cold, the congelation of all the waters, the death of all vegetable life, the death of all animal life, and of the last strong man in the midst of an infinitude of horrors!
Even so in the moral world if the church of Christ, by the malice of man, could be extinguished: darkness, crime, and death, death temporal and eternal, would be poor lost man’s only inheritance. But, thanks be to God, we know that the bark of Peter will survive all tempests in the future as in the past, and that she will float over the stormy sea of time in safety to the consummation of ages; for the divine assistance is promised to her for ever.
In conclusion, we beg leave to express the hope that Archbishop Bayley will give to the world a new and enlarged edition of Bishop Bruté’s life, as his materials are by no means exhausted. It will be no detriment to Mr. Clarke’s excellent work to give to many of the deceased prelates, individually, much more extended biographies than that gentleman could possibly give in his instructive pages. And finally, we may express a hope that, when Lady Herbert edits a new edition, she will not forget to give due credit to the distinguished author whose labors she has in some sense so fully appreciated.[194]