T HE prospect of Disestablishment in France—that is, of the greatest
social change which has been proposed since the fall of Napoleon—has drawn perceptibly nearer. The great speech delivered by M. Combes at Auxerre on Sunday last was by far the most formidable assault yet directed. against the Church considered as a part of the State organisation, and that for a reason which has in this country almost escaped attention. Many consider that it breathes a deadly hatred to the Church, and many more that it shows M. Combes to be slowly weakening in his policy, and becoming afraid. of the resistance, the strength of which he is already able to perceive. We cannot accept either of those views. To us the speech seems penetrated. with a spirit of resolute moderation which is unusual in France, and which will unite all opponents of the Estab- lishment into one compact, and. probably irresistible, body. Personally, M. Combes is undoubtedly devoted to laicism, which in this very speech he speaks of as a sort of religion whose " doctrines " are incompatible with those of the Church; and he has been convinced by the recent depart- mental elections—which, he says, have " paralysed ' the Opposition—that the vast majority of French electors, who are also the French people, share his convictions and. approve his course. He speaks out, therefore, with a clearness which even in France has been unusual with statesmen. It is time, he says, "to put an end to the Ultramontane pretensions which have lasted for so many centuries,"—in fact, ever since Charlemagne paid for the revival of the Western Empire by implicitly acknowledging that only a Pope could consecrate an Emperor, and granting him in payment for the recogni- tion of himself in that capacity a territorial dominion to be held in sovereignty. It was useless to talk to M. Combes of the French protectorate over all Christians in the East. He repudiated even its traditionary basis. "We have," he said, "no longer the slightest pretension to the title of Eldest Daughter of the Church." The Republic, in fact, he practically says, has broken with the traditions of the Monarchy in the religious as in the social area, and is ready to give up glories which have appealed for ages to the national imagination if only it may be rid of the control of the "universal Church." That phrase about the "Eldest Daughter" may always have had in it, like so many patriotic phrases, a trace of unreality ; but it has been a source of pride to great castes of Frenchmen for a thousand years, and the Republic, through M. Combos, pronounces it to be a pure illusion. M. Combes knows history and knows Frenchmen, and he must when he uttered that sentence have been very sure of the governing feeling among the majority of those who vote.
He probably judges the electors rightly—those electors who, as we have so often pointed out, have since 1870 always supported anti-Clerical legislation—but he has still many difficulties to face, and it in the way in which he has faced them that, in our eyes, the force of his speech, and of the commentary on it uttered by himself to a repre- sentative of the Matin, consists. The supporters behind him, though ready to follow him in his anti-Clerical legislation, are upon certain points which that legislation will affect by no means unanimous. Great numbers, particularly of the cultivated Liberals, wince at the idea of laicising grand buildings like the Cathedrals, the very meaning of which is that they were erected for purposes which, as is clear to every eye, are not lay. Those high towers and spires, and those glades of masonry, are ecclesiastical in their very conception ; you cannot take the soul out of them without destroying not only their mean- ing, but something of their beauty and. grandeur too. They were not built to be museums, and as museums they will offend both the artist and the utilitarian. Many more, probably a third of the Liberals in France, dread the re- action which may follow the laicising of the village churches, and the crushing demands for money to replace them which must immediately fall upon the "faithful," a body which, recollect, probably includes two-thirds of the women of France. And another large section of the electors will pity the country clergy, the worthy men who for wretched stipends have for nearly a century performed the offices of the Church ; have baptised, married, and buried them; have arbitrated in their village quarrels, and have been ready at all times with secular as well as religious advice. The agnosticism of the majority in France has had, it should be remembered, this effect among others, that it has turned upon every cure hundreds of potentially hostile eyes ; and that the cure, aware of those eyes, has in the great majority of cases walked straight. The clergy of France are good folk. The electors like neither the idea of flinging them into the streets, nor that of providing for them out of their own pockets. Therefore,' says in effect M. Combes, there are no reasonable concessions which I am not, as regards pensions, ready to make,' the "reasonable concession" which finds most favour with him, it is said, being the continuance of the entire stipend during the lifetime of its present possessor. He will also propose to leave the churches as buildings with the ecclesiastics, and in every other respect to make the rupture, not a violent result of quarrel, but—the words are his own—" a rational, decent, and courteous divorce," which, as M. Combes doubtless remembered, does not, except in one case, preclude the possibility of reunion. There must, of course, be no fresh marriage.
There will be no such marriage. Nothing to English- men and Americans is more amazing in all the progress of this great controversy than the total absence in it of any- thing like a wish for religious change. Of all the millions who, as the votes prove, must dislike the French Church as it now exists, not fifty persons affirm any wish that its doctrines should be altered. The electors may be agnostics, but if they wish any religion at all to be taught, it is the Roman Catholic. There is no sign that France is becoming Protestant, or even Neo-Catholic. Of the intense anti-Papal feeling which marked the English Reformation there is hardly a trace, for even M. Combes, bitter as he is in regard to the interference of the Vatican in civil concerns, utters no malediction on its interference in strictly religious affairs, and perhaps never in his life considered that Christianity could be other than Roman Catholic. The Vatican, it is said, dreads the rise of a Gallican Church—and. of course when a Church is free a new discipline may grow up in it as well as new heresies—but there is no sign of any such process going on now. Not a Bishop has declared himself on the side of an independent Church for France, nor has any one of the episcopal body expressed the smallest hope that any section of the people will cease to pay obedience to the "Vicar of Christ." Indeed, one current objection to the separation of Church and State is that the Popes will be able when it has once occurred to fill the Sees with Bishops of the most pro- nounc,ed Ultramontane type, and perhaps to draw from the principles of liberty the deduction that they may re- introduce into France all the monastic Orders they please. The two great rival "doctrines," as M. Combes calls them—belief in the Papacy, and belief in the civil power—will to all appearance remain supreme with the masses of the French people ; and it is pretty clear that the Vatican, though terribly angry because it is defied, still hopes that the cataclysm will leave its own philosophy the stronger of the two. It may, for the civil power, however purified. or however benevolent, cannot teach any man anything of the Whence and Whither, which in all lands, except, perhaps, modern Japan, and in all centuries he has most desired to know.
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