Mr. Edward F. Beale, of Pennsylvania, was our representative at Vienna, having been sent there to succeed that ardent anti-Catholic, Mr. John Jay, and being now in his turn superseded by Mr. Kasson, of Iowa. Mr. Beale’s career at the Austrian capital was brief but not brilliant. In August, 1876, he undertook to instruct Mr. Fish concerning the drift of public opinion, not only in Austria but in France and England, upon the Eastern question. He had ascertained that the prevailing sentiment in these countries was “religious fervor”; the people were so much in love with Christianity and so full of hatred of Moslemism in that they desired nothing more than to see Russia enter Constantinople, and to drive the Turks out of Europe “bag and baggage.” “It is a question of faith which will govern Europe,” writes the astute Mr. Beale, “and a crusade is quite as possible now as when Peter the Hermit preached.” The European congress which is about to assemble as we are writing will not disturb itself about any “question of faith”; its members will concern themselves only with questions of boundaries, fleets, and money. But not content with forecasting the future, Mr. Beale reverts to the past, and kindly undertakes to furnish the State Department with easy lessons in European history. Thus, in a despatch dated September 27, 1876, and apropos des bottes, he bids Mr. Fish to remember that
“It is interesting to recall that in Bosnia originated the first Protestant movement of Western Europe, and that even before the heresies (as the Catholic Church calls them) of John Huss in Bohemia she had sent out her missionaries to preach the Gospel as she read it, and to disseminate her religious views over the rest of the world. When the persecutions of the Church of Rome were at their worst she offered a generous asylum to her co-religionists, many of whom found here what had been denied them at home—the right to worship God after their own forms and belief.”
In point of fact, the heretics of Bosnia, at the time referred to by our erudite minister at Vienna, were advocating principles utterly subversive of order and tending directly to anarchy. They taught that a subject was released from all allegiance to a ruler if that ruler were in a state of mortal sin, and each subject was to judge for himself as to the spiritual condition of his ruler. The Church of Rome had no hesitation in setting the seal of her condemnation upon this vagary of Protestantism, and even Mr. Beale would probably admit that she was right in so doing. But he evidently was ignorant of the facts, and was anxious only to air his newly-acquired learning and to have a fling at the church. Is there among the secret instructions of our State Department to its agents a rule to this effect: “When you have nothing else to write about, pitch into the Pope”?
It is a far cry from Vienna to Port au Prince; but our misrepresentative in Hayti next demands our attention. He, of all his brethren, is perhaps the most vulgar, insolent, and ignorant; but he is one of the most outspoken. The United States pay him $7,500 a year, and have done so since 1869. How much the Protestant Episcopal Church pays him, if anything, we do not know; but he seems to have given much of his time and influence to the advancement of the interests of that body, and to the abuse of the Roman Catholic clergy of the island. Several of Mr. Bassett’s despatches contain eulogiums upon a “Rev. Dr. Holly,” who, he says, was “at Grace Church, New York, in 1874, ordained bishop of Hayti,” and whom Mr. Bassett appears to have taken under his special protection and care. Now, there is no “bishop of Hayti”; there is an archbishop of Port au Prince, the Most Rev. Alexius Guilloux; and he has four suffragans, the bishops of Cap-Haitien, Les Cayes, Gonayves, and Port Paix. “The Rev. Dr. Holly” has no more right to call himself bishop of Hayti than he has to call himself the Pope of Rome; but Mr. Bassett deems it very hard indeed that the archbishop, the bishops, and the clergy of Hayti have taken the liberty of warning their people that “the Rev. Dr. Holly” is not bishop, and that his teachings that marriage is not a sacrament, and that the first duty of a Christian is to revolt against the church, are not to be accepted. In May Mr. Bassett writes to Mr. Evarts that “the Roman Catholic archbishop and his clergy have assumed a pretension to supremacy over the civil code, notably in the matter of marriage”; and in July he writes again a long letter upon “the introduction and growth of Protestantism in Hayti and its influence upon the government.” He admits that in 1804 “Romanism,” which was “then, as now, the faith professed by a great majority of the Haytian people,” “was declared to be the religion of the state and placed under the state’s special protection and support,” and that “it still continues to enjoy that protection and support.” But he complains that “the Roman priesthood have made many strongly-directed and persistent but truly uncommendable efforts to cause to be suppressed, or effectively placed under ban, every other form of worship and belief than their own.” Mr. Bassett is not the only Protestant who cannot or will not understand the difference between the duty of Catholic prelates in a country where heresy does not exist and where it is sought to be introduced from outside, and their duty in countries like our own, where theoretically all religions are placed on the same footing, and the government is absolutely forbidden by its organic law to interfere in any way for the propagation of religious truth or the suppression of religious error. The first ruler of Hayti who endeavored to introduce Protestantism into the island was, according to Mr. Bassett, “Henri Christophe, the autocratic king of the north of Hayti,” who in 1815, although “himself a Roman Catholic,” engaged a clergyman of the Church of England to propagate heresy in his dominions. But King Henri, five years afterwards, “died by his own hand,” and Protestantism made no further progress “until, in 1861, the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States was pleased to establish a mission with the Rev. J. T. Holly as its pastor.”
He hit upon the idea “of raising up a national clergy in Hayti—a policy which seems never to have been thought of by any other religious denomination in this country, and which opened a new road and gave a new impetus to Protestantism here. The mission continued to grow. It was encouraged and visited in 1863 by Bishop Lee, of Delaware; in 1866 by Bishop Burgess, of Maine; and in 1872 by Bishop Coxe, of Western New York; and finally the Rev. Dr. Holly was, at Grace Church, New York City, in 1874, ordained bishop of Hayti. So that since 1874 there has been established in Hayti an independent Protestant Church, with the distinguishing feature that all its clergy are citizens of the country, several of them educated in the United States under the vigilance of Bishop Holly.”
There are ninety-three Catholic priests in Hayti, and of these nearly all are educated and cultured French gentlemen, who are undoubtedly far better able to discharge the duties of the priestly office than the native apostates who have been “educated in the United States under the vigilance of Bishop Holly.” But Mr. Bassett has the ignorant malice to vilify them and to display his own foolishness in this happy style:
“The French Roman Catholic priest, in coming to Hayti, leaves behind him all his social ties, in the hope of returning to them within eight or ten years, the average period of his labors here. All that he receives while in the country, over and above his scanty personal wants, goes abroad to enrich France at the expense of the Haytian people, and he even bends his energies to accumulate. In addition to his salary from the government, which ranges from 20,000 francs to the archbishop to 1,200 francs to the country curate, he is allowed a tariff of prices for all public religious services performed by him. Baptisms, marriages, funerals, dispensations, indulgences, Masses for the dead—services for each of these yield him by law a revenue ranging from 50 cents up to $50. Not only this, but he can collect offerings from the faithful, and it is even affirmed that many such offerings are made to him under the dread secrecy inspired by the confessional.
“It is true that France lost open political control over this island in 1804, but by means of the Roman Catholic clergy she has maintained almost exclusive control over the religious affairs of these people. Indeed, the domination which she once held over their bodies was hardly more complete than that which she still holds over their consciences and spiritual susceptibilities. The priests, in their present controversy with the government, which is outlined in my No. 501 already referred to, do not fail to rely upon the spiritual subjugation of the Haytian to the papal system of Rome, in connection with their own supposed power over him as citizens of a country which once held him in physical bondage, and to whose interests they themselves are devoted.
“In the light of these facts it is no cause for astonishment that the Haytian government, aroused and inspired by the policy and success of the Protestant Bishop Holly in raising up and establishing a national clergy for the Protestant Episcopal denomination, should seek to conserve its own integrity and the resources of its people, as well as to avoid continual misunderstandings with a class of foreigners resident here and shielded by the dignity of sacerdotal robes, by stimulating and encouraging the young men of the country to enter the ecclesiastical vocation.
“Meanwhile, it ought not to be unknown to those who feel bound by the holy injunction to have the Gospel preached to all the world that in Hayti the door stands wide open for every kind of Christian missionary work.”