TOPICS OF THE D AY
THE CHANCES OF A " RELIGIOUS " WAR.
ALL the world seems agreed that the next war in Europe is to be a religious war. Mr. Gladstone and Cardinal Manning, at daggers-drawn upon every other question of re- ligious politics, are in harmony in predicting that a grand religious war is either imminent or certain, and they express the latent or avowed belief of multitudes of lesser men. Half the Protestants of the world capable of forming an opinion believe that, under one disguise or another, the leaders of the Catholic Church are providing for a great military movement, the nominal object of which will be the restoration of French territory, but its real one the re-establishment of the Temporal Power, and of the material ascendancy of Catholicism in Europe. All fervid Catholics, and probably a majority of indifferent Catholics, though they deny that any such "con- spiracy" is toward, still believe and announce that the probable way in which Providence will avenge or revenge its affronted honour is by allowing a dreadful war, in the course of which unfaithful Europe will be "scourged," and at the end of which the Chair of St. Peter will again be shown to be founded on a r3ck. The ultra-Protestant mob, like the Ultramontane mob, catches and exaggerates the view of its usual leaders, and each is ready to expect and sanction any course, however violent, which may frustrate or hasten the fulfilment of the prediction, while some usually cool-headed observers affirm that for once the clergy and the crowd are in the right. It may be doubted whether these observers are not unconsciously influenced by the heated atmosphere around them, but they say, apparently in a spirit of the coldest calculation, that a serious contest of opinion always does end in war, that the contest about the claims of the sacerdotal order has now reached the point where argument is no longer possible, that toleration can now be ex- pected only after exhaustion, and that a religious war is as certain as Catholics and Protestants believe, though it may have a widely different result from any they expect.
When Mr. Gladstone, and Cardinal Manning, and cool Whig sceptics, and the mob of the Univers, and the mob of the Record are all agreed, controversy would seem to be useless, but we may do some service by pointing out on how very thin a substratum of reason all this edifice of conviction appears to rest. Everybody assumes the religious war, but nobody tells us why he assumes it, or, indeed, in what way he interprets an exceedingly wide phrase. Mr. Gladstone, it is true, in his new book offers us a reason, but then it is scarcely one which reason- -able men can unhesitatingly accept. He says Rome intends war, or in the mystically aggravating phraseology which he affects in his controversies with the Papacy, that " Vaticanism has not only the tendency, but the design to disturb civil society, and to proceed when it may be requisite and practicable to the issue of blood for the accomplishment of its aims." Considering that every creed is always more or less at war with civil society, and that if the Catholic Church were true, the establishment of its ascendancy would be a much higher cause for war than territorial extension, or even territorial safety, the accusation does not strike us with the horror Mr. Gladstone evidently in- tends it should inspire ; but even admitting his own view, we may remind him of his own warning on another occasion that the magnitude of an accusation is not a substitute for evidence of the crime charged. That the Pope, next to a miraculous and peaceful interposition of Providence on his behalf, would like a short, sharp war, in which the Catholic horn should be exalted and the Protestant horn abased, and God be shown to be an Ultramontane, and he himself be restored to his autocracy in the Papal States, is very probable indeed, and in a self-satisfied old clergyman who honestly believes that his cause is God's cause, is not very blameworthy; but the Pope's wish, whether blameless or heinous, does not prove the Pope's power. He must use human instruments, and where is he to find them ? In the rulers of the nations ? Of the seven persons who actually or nominally dis- pose of great resources for war, three, the Emperor of Germany, the Czar of Russia, and the Queen of Great Britain, are con- vinced heretics, bound by every tie of custom, education, and interest to look upon the Roman Church as hostile or in error. It is contrary to the interest of all three that Italy should die. Of the remaining four, the Emperor of Austria, though a good Catholic up to a point—that is, until religion interferes with his personal ways—is as a monarch a Laodicean intent on the interests of his House and his people—ready to sign any neces- sary law however "impious," eager to defend the Turk if the Turk will give him a province, and quite willing to ally him- self with Gambetta if Gambetta could but secure to him the Wittelsbach heritage. The idea of his rejecting an English subsidy, because England makes Italian inviolability a condition of the cash, would create a smile even in a monastery. The King of Italy, though like all his House very superstitious, is excom- municated, and holds his throne by the tenure of not giving up the very lands which the Papacy wishes to regain. The first hint of such an intention would make Garibaldi Dictator of the Peninsula. The King of Spain, though a Bourbon, and therefore, of course, Most Catholic, is powerless for foreign war; and Marshak, MacMahon, though a Catholic, is a soldier and a Frenchman before all, and would no more scruple to place faithful Belgians- under heretic Dutchmen, if that would give France back Alsace and Lorraine, than he would to fight a battle on Easter Sunday, or to storm the Vatican, if the road to his end lay there. It was Marshal MacMahon who, at Magenta, overthrew the Papacy. Or is it the nations in whom Rome trusts ? The Austrians certainly do not want the revival of the old clerical) system which so nearly drove them to rebellion ; the Hun- garians dread above all things the revival of the old dominion over Italy, which could be maintained only by the impartial dominance of the Army throughout the Empire ; the Italians want Rome for themselves, and not for the Pope-King ; and the French, if they commence a crusade, intend to commence it for themselves, and not for the Roman priesthood. H they had been anxious for them, they would have accepted their nominee, the Count de Chambord. Not one of the four would pay a sixpenny income-tax or risk a week's foreign occupation to reseat the Pope for ever. If they would, he would have been reseated long since, for 50,000 resolved volunteers could over and over again in the interval since 1862 have done the- work. Clearly, if the war is religious, the religion in it will be unconscious, and a religious war in the sixteenth-century sense—a war in which consciousness was the essence of the matter, in which men believed their souls were involved, and compromise impossible, and moderation a crime, in which_ rulers risked all to dethronement and nations bore all to depopulation rather than give way—is, humanly speaking, impossible. Europe is too materialised for any conflict of the. kind, and another Emperor Ferdinand would be accounted not a missionary, but a madman.
But may not events produce a war which, though not avowedly religious, shall either become so, or at all events prove in its ultimate results to have been such ? Well, of course, if Cardinal Manning is right in his opinions, that may prove to be the case. If the world is really ruled by a. Being who will scourge France and Germany because- Germany is opposed to the Papacy and France trying to. set it up again, and punish Italy for accepting Rome, and reward the Romans—for it is reward, on the Cardinal's theory —for wishing to be accepted, and exalt the Russian Patriarch to the arbitership of Europe because Protestantism has ap- proved the Falk laws, then the war may have a religious result, but according to mere human reason, no such consequence is probable. The threads of national policy and of Catholic policy do not make a rope. It is essential, before the war can be successful according to Cardinal Manning's wishes, that Germany and Italy should both be utterly crushed, so crushed that the former could fight no longer, and the latter could neither fight nor rise in insurrection. But it is eisential, on the other hand, to such crushing that France and Austria should be relieved in the war from Southern attack,— from an invasion either of. Italians, who have allies in Nice, and Savoy, and Trieste, and Dalmatia ; or of Germans and Italians combined, German co7ps d'arme'e having a quite possible road in war-time through the Bavarian Tyrol into Italy. No man in the position of a French President would reject an Italian alliance or an offer of Italian neutrality in such a war, and the price of either is always the same,—a guarantee of the condition of affairs which the Vatican most dislikes. Italy is not to be quieted by a promise of losing Rome. France would need in such a war the assistance of Russia, which holds the Papacy a. foe, and is the chief because the nearest enemy of Catholicism ; the benevolent neutrality of Great Britain, which would resent the breaking-up of Italy as an outrage ; and the cordial support of her own revolutionary party, which would never consent to that reoccupation of Rome without which Peter's Chair could 4.-11 only be sustained by miracle. Even assuming, what is a bold assumption, that France would be victorious, she must have allies whose objects would be far other than those of Rome, who would dread and prevent the re-establishment of a perpetual cause of insurrection in Italy, and who would be ready to renew the war
rather than see a Red Government in Florence—the certain result of the loss of Rome—or France restored as chief police- man of order to dominant influence in the Peninsula. It fol- lows, therefore, that the Vatican, if willing to make the next war a religious one, has not the power to prevent its being wholly secular ; and that the war, if it breaks out, will secure no Catholic religious end. Indeed, though we admit that the prediction is a speculation and not a calculation, the chances are very heavy that the next war in Europe will end in a drawn battle, and a compromise under which the main result of the war would be that the only Ultramontane State of the Continent. Belgium, would be the spoil alike of the victors and the van- .nuished. At all events, we may rely on it that the great struggle will no more be influenced when it has once begun by " religious " considerations, than by considerations of the suffering inflicted on the yeomen whose corn may be trampled down or oxen requisitioned. Masses of men could still be found, we dare say, to fight for religious interests ; but masses of men disorganised are powerless ; and those who organise them, the statesmen and soldiers, though they may consider the Papacy useful or essential, hold that the Papacy can do very well without a few millions of discontented Italian subjects. If Mr. Gladstone is right, or Cardinal Manning, let either of them name the statesman in Europe who will risk a battle or a province to re-establish the Papal throne.
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