[155] Ibid. p. 488.
Publication of Janus—Hotter Controversy—Bishop Maret's Book—Père Hyacinthe—the Saviour of Society again—Dress—True Doctrine of Concordats not Contracts but Papal Laws—Every Catholic State has Two Heads—Four National Governments Condemned in One Day—What a Free Church means—Fulda Manifesto—Meeting of Catholic Notables in Berlin—Political Agitation in Bavaria and Austria—Stumpf's Critique of the Jesuit Schemes.
Little more than three months remained before the opening of the Council, when the intellectual movement respecting it received a new impulse. A book under the title of The Pope and the Council, by Janus, issued from the German press; and conjecture at once ascribed the principle authorship to no less a person than Döllinger, although it was assumed that he had availed himself of aid. The profound impression made by this work may be accounted for, partly by the excitement in the midst of which it appeared, and partly by its own force. It combined a minute knowledge of the inner history of the Church, with comprehensive views of the questions, both doctrinal and constitutional, which were now raised.
After a few clear passages from modern utterances of authority. Janus strikes the keynote rather higher than he is prepared to sustain it—"So they find themselves under a delusion, who believed that in the Church, the spirit of the Bible, and of old Christianity, had got the upper hand of that spirit of the middle ages according to which she was a penal establishment, able to send men to prison, to the gallows, or to the stake."
Beginning with the Magna Charta which Innocent III condemned, while he excommunicated the Barons, Janus cites case after case in which the establishment of free institutions, and especially of freedom of worship, brought down the solemn condemnation of the Pope. The case of Austria in 1868 is the latest. With the quietness of scientific knowledge, he states what at the time would have required from an English writer arguments and proofs in detail, namely, the simple but most important fact that the oft-quoted word of the Apostle, "We must obey God rather than men," means, in the Jesuit sense, We must obey the Pope as the representative of God upon earth, and the infallible interpreter of the Divine will, rather than any civil superior, or any law of the State (p. 33).
The tone of Janus is calm and scholarly, without being cold; and the acuteness of his analysis is such as is found only where clear intellectual insight is united to trained habits of weighing language with reference to possible interpretations by such casuists as are formed by the Curia and the Jesuits.
He clearly proved that the Church was on the eve of one of the greatest constitutional changes ever effected in any commonwealth. If, in the past, the forged Decretals of the pseudo-Isidore had facilitated inroads upon the constitution of the Church, how much more would an authentic article of the creed, containing in itself the power of making any number of other articles, and assuming as its basis the unlimited authority of the Pope, pave the way to far-reaching civil and ecclesiastical encroachments! When Archbishop Manning said of Janus that by some it was "regarded as the shallowest and most pretentious book of the day" (Priv. Pet., iii. p. 114), he greatly moderated the tone of his Continental friends. Most bad things that could be said against a book, or its writers, were said in very bad language. The Archbishop himself could not let it pass without twice calling it "infamous," and that in a pastoral.