The stupendous scope of the ends might well demand as means measures exceptionally great, and the magnitude of the measures already carried as means may now well excuse, if not justify, confidence that the ends after they shall have been steadily pursued for ages will also be attained. Those ends were not less, when united into one, than the dominion of the world.
The Internal Tribunal, seated in every church, in every palace, in every castle, and at need in every private chamber, would always in point of authority take precedence of any local law, and would rule bed, board, purse, family, and all action which conscience determines.
The External Tribunal, seated in every city, would maintain the headship of the bishop over the civil magistrate, and the supremacy of spiritual over civil law and authority, as sacredly as we should maintain the supremacy of our civil law and authority over military law and authority.
The External Tribunal would make the Internal an establishment of the law. Every man, every woman, ay, every child of a certain age, who should not appear at least once in the year in that tribunal, would run into a punishable offence.
The Supreme Tribunal in the person of the Pope, acting either directly or through any Court or Congregation he might appoint, would be the final bar at which would appear contending kings, contending nations, or other appellants whatever, as also all whom he might, for any cause, be pleased to cite. From that judgment-seat would fall the sentence that only the Almighty could challenge. According to the well-known formula, the Supreme Judge would carry all rights in the shrine of his own breast.
Such a universal dominion was the end, the ultimate end in view. The end was hallowed to the mind of those proposing it by the persuasion that this dominion of the priest of God is the veritable kingdom of Christ. It is only by realizing how conscientious is this view of the spiritual empire, or the Roman Empire in a spiritual form—a view which, founded on a historic ideal, fascinates the imagination of Romanists—that we can either be just and charitable to the men who move for these ends, or can arrive at any reasonable estimate of the amount of future force in their movement. Mere politicians, say some, who have no religious feeling! Yes, many such; but these politicians well know that their power is proportioned to the amount of religious feeling which they can create and make ready to be acted upon. It is by putting together the political skill of the one set of men and the religious feeling of the other, that we obtain means of judging as to the quality of the directing and the amount of the impelling forces to be developed in the future struggle.
After all that they have recently accomplished within the Church, what can be too hard, they ask, to accomplish outside? They wanted to make the entire Church an instrument in which every joint, to the remotest limb, should infallibly respond to the will of the central director, so that at any given moment, and on any one point, the whole of its force could be brought to bear wherever resistance might be encountered, or wherever an advance might promise success. To make it such an instrument required changes which were pronounced unattainable, but they laughed the discouragement to scorn. Those changes affected all the three spheres of organization, constitution, and dogma. In organization every clergyman had to be made movable at the will of the bishop, and every bishop had to be made dependent on the will of the Pope. The franchises of both the parish and the diocese had to be revoked. It is done. But it could not be done without a constitutional change. In the constitution the Bishop of Rome had to be made by law the Ordinary of every diocese in the world, and every other bishop in the world had to be made by law a mere surrogate of the Bishop of Rome. That one bishop had to be made by law the sole lawgiver even when the entire episcopate meets in a General Council, and the whole episcopate in General Council assembled had to be by law reduced from a co-ordinate branch of a legislature to what is, in effect, a mere privy council to the Bishop of Rome. It is all done. But it could not be done without a dogmatic change. In dogma it had to be determined that the edicts of the Bishop of Rome embodied in themselves all the alleged infallibility of the Church; ay, and even the consent of the Church, as a necessary sanction, had to be in dogma disavowed. We blame not any Liberal Catholic who said that these things were impossible. But the impossible is done. The new organization is not a mere administrative change, but rests firmly on a new legislative constitution. The new constitution is not a mere legislative change liable to legislative revision—it rests irreformable on adamantine dogma.
Thus, then, are the hundred and seventy millions, or two hundred millions, as they are called, bound into one very compact bundle, to be thrown into this scale or that by a single hand. Within the Church, says Vitelleschi, resistance is impossible. No obstruction can now arrest the current of command from Pope to nuncio, from nuncio to bishop and regulars, from bishop to canons and parish priests, from regulars to all manner of confraternities, from parish priests to unions and to voters. Where governments have one officer the Church has many. Where the government officer has no time to shape public opinion, the Church officer has little else to do. Where the lackeys in government service wear fine liveries, and the lords walk about like our fellow-creatures, the lackeys of the Church have fine liveries too, but the lords outshine even the theatre. Where, in Catholic countries, the officer of government comes into his seat of authority, or returns into it quietly, care is taken that the bishop shall, at his coming, appear exalted above all principality and power. In proportion as States, becoming more Christianized, have risen above show, the Papal Church, becoming more paganized and materialized, has sunk deeper into the craft and the love of display. While the officers of government see that the young are taught the material processes necessary to future power, the officers of the Church see that they are taught for what ends it will be good, noble, and martyr-like to employ power when they shall take their future share in governing the world. Bishop Reinkens, in a little work that ought to be read by every man who means to understand the questions that are to come up—Revolution und Kirche—declares that the policy of the Papacy is now revolution. Certain it is that for effecting a world-wide revolution, never did instrument exist so generally outspread and so perfectly centralized, so elaborately ramified and yet so pliant, as will be the society ruled over at the Vatican when once all the old men who resisted the changes have died off, and the new generation instructed in the spirit of the Syllabus has slowly grown up, as the generations formed by Trent grew up wherever the canons of that Council were received.
Such a growth is too slow to be waited for before partial results are secured; and every partial result it is hoped will be a stepping-stone towards the complete one. Therefore is every agency already named employed in promoting the organization of forces to bear a part in the grand struggle when it comes; but meantime in every local struggle. Associations of children, associations of peasants, associations of artizans, associations of old soldiers, called veteran associations, and numerous associations besides, are formed in various countries and on several models. On the social side clubs and "circles" contribute the convivial element, and on the devotional side orders and confraternities contribute the ascetic element to the common organization. New "devotions," new visions, new places of pilgrimage, new images, new prayers, new relics, new charms, new waters of virtue, new shrines, new patrons, new miracles, and new wonders feed the flame. By tens of thousands, and by hundreds of thousands, men take an oath of obedience to the Pope. By tens of thousands volunteers pledged to shed their blood for him are enrolled—"On paper," say the Italians, mocking; but 1867 showed that the crusaders meant crusading; and if tens of thousands of such volunteers under leaders such as Charette are enrolled they are not to be laughed at. The schools have not been in operation during the last ten years for nothing. Associations in France bear the portentous names of Jesu-Workman and Jesu-King (Jésu-Ouvrier and Jésu-Roi)—the one aiming at organizing workmen, the other at organizing courts. The name of Jésu set up on these associations clearly points to the central organizing Company which Liberal Catholics with reverent indignation charge with daring to give a double meaning even to the all-blessed Name, not excepting its use in the solemn words, "At the name of Jesus every knee shall bow."
Even after July 18 the Liberal Catholics did not give up the Church as irrevocably sunk into the hands of the Jesuits. They counted on the eighty-eight bishops who had voted Nay, and on their promise one to another not to act separately. Had that promise been kept, it was just possible that, under favouring circumstances, the fatal steps of July might have been modified or even recalled, for by all tradition the acts of any Council were supposed to remain within its power, and to be open to its revision till it was legally dissolved. The Curia put this tradition under its heel. It posted up the Decrees on the doors of the Lateran and in other public places in the city, and certified the whole world that by this act they had become its supreme and irreformable law. How did the eighty-eight deport themselves? They had tamely allowed all manner of revolutionary acts, when done from above, and they allowed this last one as tamely as the rest. The erring Peter of the Vatican was not at the head of a community capable of producing a man who could withstand him to the face, and could tell him, as one told the erring Peter of Antioch, that he was to be blamed. Indeed, logically, the bishops seemed to have no ground of objection. The Decrees did not profess to be those of a Council, but those of the Pope, a Council having approved of them. If, then, the Pope by promulging any doctrinal Bull without citing the approbation of a Council, could give to it the force of irreformable law, unless it should be rejected by the bishops, how much more was he entitled to give that force to these Decrees. Even had their tenets afforded them ground for resistance, the eighty-eight were not the men to avail themselves of it. From one we may learn the complexion of them all.