ULTRAMONTANISM IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND ANNIE LEE. BY THE AUTHOR OF "SEVEN YEARS IN THE WEDDED LIFE OF A ROMAN CATHOLIC" MORTEN LANGE. A CHRISTMAS STORY. FROM THE DANISH OF HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. BY MRS. BUSHBY DOUBLE VUE. BY FREDERICK MARSHALL A YANKEE STEAMER ON THE ATLANTIC. BY J. W. HENGISTON, CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. To whom all Communications for the Editor are to be addressed. PRINTED BY CHARLES WHITING, BEAUFORT HOUSE, STRAND. COLBURN'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE. SOME REMINISCENCES OF THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON. ON THE DEATH OF THE DUKE of WellinGTON. BY MRS. BUSHBY. LITERARY LEAFLETS. BY SIR NATHANIEL. No. II.-A "SPLENDID" WRITER. THE EVE OF ALL-SOULS. BY MRS. ACTON TINDAL. WOODTHORPE. A REMINISCENCE OF A PHYSICIAN. BY KELLY KENNYON. FEMALE NOVELISTS. No. VII.-MRS. MARSH. FRENCH ALMANACKS FOR 1853, AND PARISIAN LITERARY AND POLITICAL A POTTER'S TRIALS. YOUNG TOM HALL'S HEART-ACHES AND HORSES. CHAP. XXXIX. TO XLV. THE PARTING FRIENDS. BY J. E. CARPENTER. VILLAGE LIFE IN EGYPT. LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC NOTES. NOTICE TO CORRESPONDENTS. REJECTED ARTICLES CANNOT BE RETURNED. NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE. ULTRAMONTANISM IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND. THERE have not been wanting those who have attributed the political successes of Louis Napoleon to the partisanship of the Roman Catholic Church, and more especially of the Jesuits. A variety of concurring circumstances would tend to corroborate the fact of an alliance, boding no good to the liberties of mankind, or to the peace of the world. We have seen that in recent Napoleonic publications, the religious character of the prince is much dwelt upon: he is stated to be a believer in every sense of the word. In all the great political events accomplished during the past three years, he has never failed to invoke the assistance of Religion. The name of the Supreme Being is to be met with in all his addresses. In all his different journeys his first care has always been on entering a city to ask the blessings of Heaven in the metropolitan church. He has salaried the bishops, and won over the clergy by giving to them a prominence and importance long since unknown in France. The Bird of Rapine is blessed by a whole army of mitred and robed ecclesiastics, and a climax is attained by the emperor-elect declaring himself to be the protector of the sanctuaries or holy places, thereby assuming to himself by a stroke of the pen a power which the crusading princes of old failed to preserve by the sword; and inevitably renewing those old undying enmities between the eastern and western churches, which have never been totally extinguished since the first usurpation of supreme authority by the bishops of Rome. Placed in such a position, and with such prospects before them, it is not surprising to find an able pen declaring in a communication made to the daily papers that The Jesuits and Ultramontanes are drunk with exultation. The sacerdotal heel is on the neck of France-the garotte prepared for Europe. The Holy Roman Apostolic Church dreams once more of universal empire. Before or behind its ecstatic obscurantism six centuries vanish, and the nineteenth, which we falsely believed this to be, is only really the thirteenth. The Univers laments that Luther was not burnt, and sanctifies the Inquisition; Donoso Cortez denounces reason as a damnable impertinence; abbés and bishops aroynt the classics, anathematise Cicero and Virgil, and prescribe for the education of youth the study of the "Fathers," the breviary and paternoster; Frère Léotade and the Curé Gothland are on the road to canonization, and the land teems with miracles. Winking Madonnas, sweating saints, bleeding altar-pieces, and inspired cow-boys; the gendarme who deposes to the pious lie, and the sub-prefect who endorses it; episcopal charges, archiepiscopal pastorals, and papal rescripts, all testify alike that the favour of Heaven has fallen on the Jesuits, that Louis Napoleon is the "chosen of the Lord," and that "society is saved." M. V. Schoelcher, the author of the "Histoire du Deux Décembre," a Dec.-VOL. XCVI. NO. CCCLXXXIV. 2 c stern republican, but not the less to be credited on this particular pointfor personally hostile to Louis Napoleon, it is not his interest to lighten the burden of responsibility from off the prince's shoulders-declares that the Jesuits played a prominent part in the late coup d'état; and the writer before quoted, adds further: Jesuitism plays the desperate game of double or quits with reason. After the revolution of February Catholic priests blessed the trees of liberty. After the coup d'état they chanted a Te Deum on its massacre. They sanctified legitimacy until it fell; they consecrate perjury when it has triumphed. Ministers of Christ, they burlesque Christianity; teachers of morality, they deify crime. They have learnt and forgotten nothing. For them Hildebrand may still thunder in the Vatican; the Inquisition is an incomplete experiment; the Reformation is a heresy, and not a lesson, and the war on civilisation must be recommenced. Their black conspiracy against intelligence envelopes Europe, its staff in Rome, its file everywhere. In Italy its banner is "the Pope!" in France, "Society!" in Ireland, "Religious Equality!" The equality which triumphant Jesuitism would dispense is that of persecution and damnation. Wishing to examine more thoroughly into the state of this question, we have taken as text books two works recently published, which profess to grapple with Romanism as it exists in France; the one by M. Capefigue, begins with the "Church" as it existed in the Middle Ages, as contrasted with the Church in our own times; the other, by M. le Comte de Montalembert, takes up at once what the author terms "the interests of the Catholics in the nineteenth century." The "Middle Ages," in that which concerns the "Church," commences in the seventh century and ends with the fourteenth, and it was during this interval that the Church organised itself into its particular institutions. They open with the local administration of the bishopsthose old citizens of Gaul, of Italy, and of Germany, who stood at the head of the Roman municipalities as protectors of the city, and ultimately won the power from the conquerors themselves. The episcopacy, and after it the order of Saint Benoît, were the two leading forces of the Church up to the eighth century. From the summit of Mount Cassin, the last-mentioned solitary dictated a code which gave to mankind the spirit of association and of labour united with science and epoch was succeeded by the political supremacy of the popes-a dictatorship which, founded by Gregory VII., kept strengthening its dominion to the times of Innocent III. and Gregory IX. prayer. This Nothing, according to M. Capefigue, in the history of governments, can be compared to the wonderful activity of the medieval Church in repressing the tyrannical spirit of feudalism, which at that time had established its sway in fortified castles, the crown upon the head, and the sword in hand. The Church fought at that time the battle of the individual against serfdom; of moral authority as opposed to brutal force. The means which popedom employed to obtain such great results were excommunication, or placing the feudal lords under the ban of the Church, nay, even deposing them from power; these, as M. Capefigue remarks, were possibly legitimate means at the confused epoch of these old ages. In the progress of time the papal supremacy established a moral and * L'Eglise au Moyen Age du vii. au xii. Siècle. Par M. Capefigue. Des Intérêts Catholiques au xixe. Siècle. Par le Comte de Montalembert, l'un des Quarante de l'Académie Française. intellectual thraldom where had previously existed a simple dominion of brute force; the change was for the better in those early times, there is no doubt; but such a Church could never have attained the perfection of modern times without a reformation. The Reformation restricted the papal dominion within just bounds, and sowed the seeds of moral and intellectual liberty among Romanists and seceders alike, although in different degrees. But the same arguments that are used to justify the proceedings of the early Church, when the objects to be attained were good, are also applied to the most inhuman persecutions carried on when the objects were simply atrocious, and are made to apply in the present day, when the objects to be gained are still the same the moral and intellectual serfdom of the human race. Thus, according to M. Capefigue, the orders of St. Francis, the mission of the Dominicans, and especially the Holy Inquisition, were among the things which were more especially justified by the habits, the manners, and the necessities of the time. "We must," he says, 66 transport our selves into the midst of those terrible disorders of the Albigenses, Stadingues, Lollards, Wickliffites, Bohemians, rebels against the ties both of family and of property! We must study the noble efforts made by Spanish patriotism against the Moors, in order to comprehend the imperious necessity of a social police indispensable to every age under diverse forms; the same argument applying in the present day to the assumption of power by the emperor-elect of the French, without whom France would no doubt have been a victim to the gravest accidents of a general disorder and anarchy. The disciples of Saint Dominic (the name causes an involuntary shudder) were commissioned to persuade and to convert. Well-informed and active, they travelled through fields and towns alike, proclaiming the eternal order of Society.' But when anarchy gained the ascendancy, they constituted themselves into a tribunal to inquire into and to judge cases of heresy. The children of St. Francis, on their part, imposed poverty on themselves; they could possess nothing; to them the terms thine and mine were perfectly unknown. This regular democracy, guided by Providence, seemed to say to the irregular bands of trampers, vagabonds, and Albigenses (a curious classification), 'We are poor voluntaries under a government and an organisation which imparts nobility to misery, by placing it under the law of the Lord.' 6 "I know," adds Capefigue, "that these are not the ideas entertained in our times; the education of the present day has another direction given to it; and indeed it requires to express such to possess that zealous love of truth, which makes one indifferent to all hopes of a vulgar popularity." Gregory, surnamed the Great, was the first pontiff who aimed at universal power-unity, Capefigue calls it; but unity under one head, whether in civil, military, or ecclesiastical matters, is simply despotism. Gregory began by imposing the dogma of Nicea and the Roman Catholic symbol on all alike, as the universal faith. The "heresy" of Arius was at that time all powerful among the Lombards: he took measures to coerce and subdue the people to his rule. The patriarchs of Constantinople refused their allegiance to the new seat of ecclesiastical |