TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE LATEST ENCYCLICAL.
THE Papal Encyclical issued to the world on January 11th shows Pius X. to be a very sincere and a very imprudent man. His Holiness believes every word he says, and what he says is that, loaded as he is with a mystic responsibility, he can make no peace with the civil Government of France until it recognises that the Church, " of which the Hierarchy is the foundation laid by our Saviour Jesus Christ," is exempt from lay control, especially as regards her property. This means that the civil Government of France must submit to the Vatican under penalty of perpetual war with the Papacy, which at the same time has prohibited the Episcopacy from devising or adopting any form of compromise. The resort to " private worship "—that is, the closing of all the churches—is not, it is true, enjoined "for the present "; but, with that exception, the Church is to proclaim herself despoiled, and to remain disestablished and disendowed. The Pope obviously hopes that under this decision France will grow restless, and at last insist that all ecclesiastical property shall be replaced in ecclesiastical bands ; and that the Government of France, beaten and humiliated, will desist from what he calls its effort " to de-Christianise " the country, and will reopen negotiations with Rome.
We cannot but think that in thus hoping Pius X. deceives himself, and will find that be has inflicted a grave blow upon the position, and, it may be, on the unity, of the Roman Catholic Church. There is no chance whatever, unless the Republic is overthrown, of any French Govern- ment repealing the Act of Separation, and unless it is repealed the tendency of the Church of France must be towards a new and national organisation. How else is that Church to be maintained? The idea that thirty-five thousand priests and nearly a hundred Bishops can be maintained by contributions from abroad, or from Peter's Pence, as has been occasionally suggested, is an amiable dream which will not delude the Episcopate even for a day. Already the French Bishops are preparing to solicit subscriptions from the faithful in each parish, which when paid are to be at their own disposal, and, without selling the offices, to demand a higher rate for any ceremonial other than those provided for the very poor. The priests will not charge for a pauper funeral or for " the simplest form" of baptism or marriage, but they will charge for any office attended with the forms which the respectables of France think seemly or dignified. Supposing that device to succeed, the Bishops will be independent, will almost to a certainty act together, and will thus constitute themselves informally a Gallican Church. The Papal power to dictate to them will slowly wither away, the Papacy ceasing to be in any true sense a Monarchy, and falling back on its ancient position of a primacy among Bishops. Even if the Pope is recalcitrant and insists on his right to confirm the election of any Bishop, the Episcopacy will retain its co-optative power pending negotiations, and supported, as it is sure to be, by general public opinion, will be as little under discipline as if its members were the beads of English Congregational Churches. We say they will be supported by public opinion, because, so far as we can perceive, France, whether or no she has ceased to be Christian, has ceased to believe in ecclesiasticism. If the churches remain open and the offices are performed, and the Bishops keep up the necessary numbers of the priesthood, the French will forget the Pope, or regard him, as English Churchmen do, as a most eminent and interesting foreign prelate. The tendency of the world being towards national organisations, the example is almost certain to be followed, and the Papacy may find that the universal Christian Monarchy which it has tried for so many centuries to build up, and which with the aid of the Council of the Vatican it has nearly built up, has crumbled to pieces in its hands. There is no chance whatever that France will become Protestant; there is little chance that she will become anything but what she is, a nation nominally Roman Catholic, leniently, not to say loosely, governed as to religious observances by a native Episcopate, which in its turn will own a most shadowy allegiance to the central power. Gallicanism, the spirit which the Popes have so long dreaded, will, in fact, have been enthroned by a Pope who most honestly believes that his first duty is to protect his position as ecclesiastical Monarch. That is the way in which great institutions get ruined when their ultimate managers try to draw the chain by which they hold their subordinates too tightly.
One is tempted to wonder as one surveys the Christian world whether a second Reformation may not be in the air, a Reformation directed not against Christianity, nor even against dogmatic theology—which, though often attacked, has very deep roots—but against ecclesiasticism, against the idea, that is, that any Christian priesthood has as a caste been invested by Christ with miraculous or semi-miraculous powers. We seem to see signs of such a movement even among the Roman Catholic peoples ; and among Protestant peoples the laity at least have as a body largely accepted that new view. One observes this tendency in the struggle for the control of education, which, if the clergy were accepted as priests in the old sense, would naturally have passed into their hands, but which is passing in one way or another into the hands of the civil State, which daily in many directions accretes to itself more and more far-reaching powers. It is charging itself with the health of the body, and may slowly charge itself with the health of the mind. The symptoms of which we speak may be mere appear- ances, for nothing is so impossible to forecast as the direction of a religious movement ; but, as it seems to us, the laity are everywhere grasping all power, and with the new education, and the spread of what is called " science," the laity will not be the friends of ecclesiasticism. They may be deeply pious, for the interest in the Whence and the Whither must always be the supreme interest of ordinary men ; and if they are pious they will be Christian, though their definitions of Christianity may be very numerous, or occasionally very vague. The popular one for the immediate future will probably be philanthropy, touched and warmed by reverence for Christ; but that may not prove lasting. We do not believe in the least in the coming of an agnostic civilisation, such as the French Cabinet is said by its enemies to hope for; but the next development of society may take a form in which every man will be a priest unto himself, guided more, as he believes, by an inner light than by any external influence, whether from organised Churches or any other association of authorised men.
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