We do not sufficiently reflect on this. Obelisks, immense pyramids, splendid porticos, hippodromes where so much plebeian blood flowed; theatres where modesty was brutally violated; temples where they adored so many passions, so many vices; tombs where so much vanity is revealed; elegant houses, but where the wife and child were so little valued; astonishing monuments of incomparable art, I admire you much less since I know by whose hands you were raised. It is not thus that they have built since the advent of Jesus Christ and the church.
There is in history a proposition of more than mathematical clearness, which I declare solemnly to be true; it is that the church destroyed slavery. It is the church that gradually transformed the slave into the serf; that by degrees compelled society, formed by her, to change the serf into the freeman. This is established by the records, century after century, year after year, day after day. It is true, the church did not improvise in an hour this admirable change, this marvellous progress; it is not her custom to improvise, and, truth to say, she improvises nothing; she moves slowly but surely. She never roused the slaves to revolt, but she recalled the masters to their duty. She gave great care to the question of marriage between slaves; for, with intelligent foresight, she knew that the whole future depended on it: briefly, in 300, there were millions of slaves—in 1000, not one.
Everywhere existed admirable confraternities of workmen, who worked without pay on the numerous cathedrals scattered throughout Europe; thousands of men labored gratuitously for God, or nobly earned their living in working for their brothers. Will you deny this fact? I defy you to do it. The church conquered for the workmen two inappreciable things—liberty and dignity; and, for so many benefits, she too often receives but ingratitude and forgetfulness. One day, while rambling through the wide streets of Oxford, that city of twenty-four colleges, formerly founded by the church, and which live to-day on those foundations of our fathers, I inquired if there could be found a Catholic Church. I was conducted into a kind of room, narrow and low, which many of your employers would not use for a factory or shop. That was what they condescended to lease the holy church of God in the splendid city, built with her hands, and bathed in her sweat. It is thus with the working-class, which is also a creation of the church; its mother is forgotten, and it is with difficulty that she is left a little corner in the workshop; but it is there we will endeavor to replace her with honor, and then each one of you can say with the poet Jasmin: “I remember that, when I was young, the church found me naked, and clothed me; now that I am a man, I find her naked, in my turn I will cover her.” It is this cry we wish to hear from you.
Again, we hear that “the church is not the same to the rich and to the poor.” When will it be proved, when can it be shown, that there are two Creeds, two Decalogues, two codes of morality, two families of sacraments, two dogmas, two disciplines, two altars—one for the use of the great ones of the earth, the other destined for the poor? It can never be done. They can bring forward a certain number of facts; they can cite abuses more or less deplorable, and which we condemn implacably; but the equality remains entire. I go further, and affirm that the church has unceasingly favored the humble, the weak, and the laborers. They are her privileged ones, and she has well shown it.
Another objection current among the working-class, another calumny which has triumphed over the minds of the people, unworthily deceived, is the scandalous assertion that “the church is the enemy of instruction,” and this abominable falsehood is, above all, applied to primary instruction. Now, it is mathematically proved that, before the establishment of the church, there did not exist in the much-lauded antiquity a single school for workmen. This first proposition is clearly evident, and it is not less mathematically demonstrated that, since the advent of the church, “free schools have been attached to each parish, and confided to the direction of the clergy.” Such are the words of a learned man of our day, who has best appreciated this question, and who, in order to establish his conclusion, appeals to texts the most luminously authentic.[201] We will not pause here to speak of the profound love of Christ for the ignorant—that love which shines forth in every page of the Gospel; nor will we linger over the epoch of the persecution of the early church; but we will transport ourselves to France in the first period of our history.
At the commencement of the VIth century, the Council of Vaison declares that for a long time in Italy “the priests had brought up young students in their own houses, and instructed them like good fathers in faith and sound knowledge.” In the year 700, a Council of Rouen goes further, and commands all Christians to send their children to the city school: is not that instruction Christianly free and Christianly obligatory? Meanwhile, Charlemagne appears, and watches energetically that these noble lights shall not be extinguished, or that they may be relighted. In 797, a capitulary of Theodulph offers these admirable words: “That the priests should establish schools in the villages and boroughs, and that no pay should be exacted from the children in return.” The same decrees are found in the canons of the Council of Rome in 826, in the bulls of Pope Leo IV., and in the capitulary of Hérard, Archbishop of Tours, in 858.
Observe that these last quotations belong to the darkest, most savage epoch of our history. Feudalism reigned supreme; that redoubtable institution had recently come into existence, without having yet at its side the Christian counterpoise of chivalry. But if we make a leap of two or three hundred years, and arrive at the XIIth and XIIIth centuries, all becomes brilliant, and history can furnish the list of all the schools that then existed even in the smallest villages. These statistics are extant, and can be consulted; and from so many accumulated documents, which extend from 529 to 1790, the conclusion, rigorously scientific, must be drawn that “from a distant period, even at the foundation of our parishes, the clergy in the country dispensed instruction to the agricultural classes. It was thus throughout the middle ages; and even at a recent epoch we have seen the priests in many parishes perform the functions of teachers.”[202] What do our adversaries think of such exact testimony? All the schools, then, having been founded by the church, what satanic skill was needed to persuade the people that the church had not established one!
Still more scandalous is the objection that the church has failed in her errand of mercy; for they accuse her of not having sufficiently loved the poor and abandoned. We were stupefied, several years ago, to find this strange assertion in a celebrated review: that the church owed to the Protestants the idea of the Sisters of Charity. Now, we have before our eyes acts truly innumerable, establishing clearly that there were many thousand institutions of charity in France in the XIIth and XIIIth centuries. During the first ages of the church, in the midst of the persecution, the poor, all poor, were assisted in their homes by the deacons; and, after the persecutions, these same poor were reunited in splendid palaces, which were divided into as many classes as there were miseries to relieve. But for the fear of being called pedants, we would cite here the Bretotrophia, or asylums for children; the Nosocomia, or houses for the sick; the Orphanotrophia, reserved for orphans; and the Gerontocomia, consecrated to old age.
Such establishments continued to exist from the XIIth and XIIIth centuries in all the episcopal cities, in the monastic centres, and in the humblest parishes, where they never ceased, during the Christian ages, to soothe the suffering, feed the hungry, counsel the erring, and instruct the ignorant. By these we are easily led to the XIVth and XVth centuries, when we behold so many hospitals, so many charitable institutions, flourishing on the surface of the Christian soil. Where are the tears the church has not dried? the nakedness she has not covered? the captives she has not redeemed? the sick she has not visited? the strangers she has not received? the dead she has not buried with her tears? the sinners she has not pressed to her heart? the children she has not made smile, and has not instructed and consoled? the laborers she has not loved? This is a blow to error and misrepresentation; the proofs are clear—you can, you must read them.
Again, they object that “the church does not occupy herself at the present time with the social, the labor question.” I can show a hundred books, bearing the greatest Catholic names, entirely consecrated to this new science. For eighteen hundred years, the church has not ceased for an instant to put political economy into action; for she has not ceased an instant to lean towards all miseries to relieve them; towards all enjoyments to purify them. Without ever having regarded sacrifice and resignation as the last solution of the social problem; without ever having renounced the hope of seeing the reign of God in a happier future, she has never ceased to preach resignation to the weak, and sacrifice to the powerful. For eighteen hundred years, the church has also written her economical theory; for, on account of the intimate connection between the social question and theology, it can be said with all truth that, up to the XIXth century, there have been as many books written of political economy as treatises of theology.