The fighting Company of Jesus now looks to a similar process for results similar in nature, but on a wider scale. Colleges and high schools are preparing young princes, nobles, and gentlemen to bear the part of leaders, one at the Court, another in the parliament and a third in the camp. Elementary schools are training the followers. All round the Catholic horizon, in the literature of the new dominion, one object looms up out of clouds of hazy words, dilates before the imagination of the devout, and towers till others are dwarfed; and this object is the Crusade of St. Peter. Lads with old blood in their veins are learning how glorious it will be to lead a charge or to command a division in the greatest of all Crusades, for the most glorious of all restorations; and poor lads are learning how they that smite like Peter Jong will win in death the palm of the martyr.
M. Veuillot's description of the duty of governments in respect of education was terse: "To allow men to be made against this perpetual plague of revolution." To do this, governments must set aside all other moral authorities but one. The authority of parents may, indeed, determine for their children questions of diet and of dress, of calling or of fortune, but the priest is the father of the child's soul, and must determine the whole of its moral regimen. In keeping with this, the authorities of a parish or a commune, as representing the parents of a neighbourhood; a corporation, as representing the parents of a city; a legislature, as representing the parents of the whole land, can nowhere else be so effectually shut out from the realm of morals as in the school. Not, we would once more say, that the devout Ultramontane believes that by shutting them out he is loosening moral ties, for he thinks that by ensuring full scope to the sole authority, of the priest, he best defends every moral right. The object of training that union of families which we call a State, to regard itself as a union without any higher end than a material one, having in it neither divine office nor divine authority, is an object which cannot be so impressively advanced by any other means as when, at the bidding of priests, a government by law renounces control over the moral portion of the training of its own citizens, conducted under its own direction and paid for out of its own funds. The object of training the laity to own that it is not for them to have any opinion as to what, in morals or in faith, is true or false, or for them to assume any responsibility as to what is right or wrong, saving always the responsibility of fulfilling the directions of their spiritual guides, can never be more effectually promoted than when the representatives of the households of an entire community, having set up schools and provided for their maintenance, hand over to priests the power to determine whether any moral training shall be given in those schools or not, and, if any, what. When all this can be carried out in the normal manner, matters are so arranged that throughout the days of impressible youth, no authority shall be heard of, as deciding any moral question, but that of the priest of God. When circumstances prevent the normal arrangements from being carried out, the way for them will be best prepared by whatever compromise leads the State furthest away from principles opposed to those of the Pontiff, and entangles it in what is called a practical solution wherein his principles are, if only virtually, conceded. In preparing such a solution, dangers to be shunned by his agents are anything that would practically recognize the right of parents, singly or collectively, to decide moral questions for their children independently of the priests; anything that would recognize in the laity a right of moral or religious self-direction; anything that would, in practice, show that others than Romanists have the power of uniting for moral and religious purposes; anything that would allow the Bible to be honoured as a public standard without a priest; anything that would embody the hateful and condemned principle of the equality of different denominations before the law.
Bishop Reinkens has described what is the practical effect of the training now being given to very large portions of the children in Europe. It is, he says, to fix in the mind the conviction "that Roman Catholics have a divinely guaranteed right, under certain circumstances, violently to overturn existing authorities, and the chiefs of those authorities, if they have only the power to do so, and that it is an exercise of virtue to employ all means for that end." Bishop Reinkens[490] asserts that what formerly was regarded as a mere theory of the Curia is now its practice, namely, that, in the language of John Capestrano, the Pope "can abrogate all human rights," and that "what has the force of law is just what is pleasing to him." Even already, according to Bishop Reinkens, does the denominational instruction given in schools in Germany justify the prediction of Hefele to the effect that, for scholastic purposes, the new exaltation of the Papal power would be made the primary dogma. The bishop solemnly adds: "The divine power of the Pope over all human beings perplexes the children in the schools; they early learn to obey the Vicegerent of God against the empire and the emperor. In the superior schools, the higher scholastic clergy attend to the same thing" (p. 8).
The most urgent question appears to be, How far will the control of schools in France ultimately enable the priests to determine the destination of French armies, and how far will their partial control of schools in other countries enable them to support any movements of France, so as to sway Roman Catholic governments, and to paralyse even Protestant ones? The enthusiastic priest strangely exaggerates the power of his order. The superficial politician no less strangely underrates it. What we at present know is, not what the clerical party will be able to accomplish, but the simple fact that the hold which it now has upon schools in France, Spain, Germany, England, and elsewhere, assures to it, in the next generation, a vast number of men trained in the doctrine of the Syllabus, and imbued with the antipathies and the hopes which, in the eye of a Jesuit, form the cardinal virtues of a soldier of God. Jesuits are often very unsuccessful in training the convictions, turning as they do many of their pupils into deadly foes. But they seldom fail to train the antipathies. Hatred of scriptural Christianity is almost invariably a ruling passion with both classes of their pupils, the Papists and the infidels. To all true disciples of the new school, the holiest of public ends will be the reconstruction of society in every country under the sky, according to the outline of the Syllabus. In pursuit of that end all means will to them be not only fair but meritorious, if adopted with a real intention to the greater glory of God. And the States of Europe have put it into the power of priests to train millions for the new school. And England has given to the effort very considerable encouragement, though doubtless that encouragement is praiseworthy in such eyes as those of the Marquis of Ripon and Lord Robert Montagu, both of whom have held high place in our department of education.
The Stimmen aus Maria Laach met the first mutterings of discontent with the Syllabus by saying that when those who, in pride of power, were resisting its authority, had passed away, those judgments of the Pontiff would be taught from every chair in the Catholic world. That forecast is already fulfilled. The politics of the Syllabus and the morals of teachers like Gury are now everywhere forming the clergy of the future. And very carefully are the laity being trained in the same principles, less expanded. To them the ideal of the one commonwealth, with its one pastor-king, its unity of faith, its glory of ceremonial, its divine law, and its supernatural magistracy, is made to appear as the fairest of ideals, as one, indeed, truly divine. Many brave English boys—heirs, some of them, to what once were noted Protestant names; boys whose fathers or grandfathers our great schools and noblest colleges trained up in gross ignorance of the principles that are contending for the government of the world—are now imbibing from continental priests principles and passions that will one day appear in our mess-rooms and our legislature. And what are our great schools and colleges even now doing to prepare our youth generally to understand what the pupils of priests approve, what they condemn, and what they mean when, to innocent Englishmen, they appear to assert one thing and to deny another? Has the Papal cry for the exclusion of modern history from national universities been met by any sensible attempt to teach anything as to the elements struggling in contemporaneous history, especially the most potent ones?
In that strange literature to which the Prefects of the Pope give the name of pastorals, it is in mystic phrases often indicated that the flocks of the bellicose shepherds are to be prepared for a terrific combat. Sometimes the veil is dropped and in plain language war is spoken of as the only means of avenging the Church for her wrongs. Men called bishops in the vineyard of Jesus Christ speak of the mustering of the opposed hosts, and of the inevitable collision, covering the design of raising nation against nation, and of raising the people against their own rulers, by allusions to the fact that in the beginning the Church had to act without the kings, and that once more she will be obliged to throw herself upon the people. In Protestant countries, or in mixed ones, aged men in sacred vestments will say, without a blush, that the Pope himself would not make war. But let only a glimmer of political hope invite, and then kings and queens, ay, ex-kings and ex-queens, are applied to; and could the Pope only find bayonets, the same aged men in the same sacred vestments, and again without a blush, would be heard proving that in making war the Pope was only fulfilling a painful duty imposed upon him by his office as the Vicar of Christ! At this day Europe witnesses a stage of the movement of reconstruction, at which every cope and mitre in the Papal hierarchy covers a centre of force impelling to a general war. Every grey-headed bishop is an official promoter of a cataclysm that shall engulf all that opposes the Syllabus. Every friar schoolmaster and every quiet nun who teaches school is a trainer for future bloodshed. Even at his audiences the man of more than fourscore years old fans the flame in little children dressed as soldiers, sometimes the boys of English converts; and convert fathers flatter him by hoping that their sons will yet bear his banner, so are womanhood, childhood, and old age all fascinated by the war passion of the priest.[491]
We do not pretend to know how it is calculated that the great struggle is to be brought on. We should think that, confidently as its approach is foretold, it must be doubtful to all but those whose faith rests only on the divine destiny of the Papacy. Yet many who may not believe that the Pope is about to recover Rome, and then to make Rome the capital of the world, and who do not even believe that he will succeed in bringing about a general struggle with a view to those ends, do nevertheless fully believe that he will succeed in leading forth France once more against the Italians, and that he will, in some general complication, be able to find means of unsettling other interests so as to advance his own. To this it is replied that the Jesuits who foster these hopes are poor politicians; and that is perfectly true. Yet they are skilled in intrigue, and versed in the ways of courts and of cliques. They proudly note their hold upon schools in France, their growing hold upon colleges, the zeal of General Charette and his ex-pontifical zouaves, the military preaching of Count Mun, the adhesion to the dominion of the Syllabus publicly signified by many French generals whose names are trumpeted with a joyful noise; and with special pride do they note such an incident as that which occurred at a recent examination in the great military college of St. Cyr, when, out of twenty-eight candidates for admission, no less than twenty-two came from one Jesuit college. They note the clubs and associations everywhere spreading; that of the Sacred Heart, said to number a million of members; that of Jesu-Workmen and that of Jesu-King, meant to organize in factory, workshop, and palace a company of soldiers as true to the chair of St. Peter as the central Company of Jesus. They note the numbers of the official class who believe that "moral order" is to be promoted by the priests. They note the zeal of ladies, and of the aristocracy.
Beyond those encouragements openly proclaimed, lies that mystery which, in Roman Catholic countries, envelopes all Courts. At the time when Thiers was taking counsel with Louis Philippe for the fortification of Paris, or even when Guizot was making himself the tool of the court for compassing the Spanish marriages, who would have dared to tell those statesmen that both of them would survive to see the day when the fate of France for peace or war, slipping out of the hands of an exhausted Bonaparte, would virtually fall into those of one who was then a Spanish girl in a private station, one whose very name was unknown to the people of France? To this Court element of strange uncertainty—and women and priests can weave webs around presidents as well as around emperors—is to be added the solid fact that even Frenchmen, who hate the priests and dread their politics, are not healed of the idea that it is well to have weak neighbours, so divided that, at any time, an invasion of their territory is more a matter of excitement than of serious peril. Against all this what have we to set? Humanly speaking, only the fund of good sense and good feeling which, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, does exist among the French people to a degree far greater than they who do not know them well can realize. And beyond this, the good providence of God; for surely France is not to become a second Spain, or else to be partitioned, one or other of which lots would seem to be before her if the priests can drive her as they hope to do.
The "good Press" gloats over every prospect of a general broil of nations. The failure in 1870 of calculations as to what would occur in the Catholic portions of Germany on the breaking out of a war between France and Prussia, did not change the current of Ultramontane hope. Any great conflict, it seems to be assumed, must somehow lead to a restoration of the Pope. The poor old man has himself all along fed a belief in the certainty of that restoration. At first he seemed to emit tentative prophecies giving mystic hints of dates. Time blotted out the dates hinted at. Then came declarations more general but perhaps more impressive to the conscience of his disciples. On the second anniversary of the Roman plébiscite, after many promises of restoration had been long overdue, the aged high priest said to the nobles of Rome—
Yes, this change, this triumph is to come: and it is of faith. Whether it is to come while I am living, while this poor Vicar of Jesus Christ is living, I know not. I know that it is to come. The resurrection is to take place, and this great impiety is to have an end (Discorsi, ii. p. 82).