THE PAPACY IN ITS MODERN VICTORIES AND DEFEATS.* Kara CLArrnrus's
assurance to Laertes at the Castle of Elsinore, "You cannot speak of reason to the Dane and lose your voice," has received modern confirmation by this historian's career. The former Professor in the University of Copenhagen was no favourite of "the buried majesty of Denmark," or of the Radical Government on the Sound, yet he was appointed to the bishopric of Aarhus, and given an advisory position in educational legislation. His scholarship enabled him to produce a series of historical books almost comparable with classics like Milman, Creighton, and Ranke, who, as writers, though not as men, were destitute of Dr. Nielsen's sense of humour. The translation is the work of a "ring," "a good deal of it" having, moreover, been recomposed by the learned Master of Pembroke. Readers who are acquainted with the language of Heiberg, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Bmndes of to-day, with its delightful post-articles, passive verbs, and amusing numerals, will be well satisfied with the
The History of the Papery in the Nineteenth Century. By Dr. Frederik Nielsen, Bishop of Anrhue, and formerly Professor of Ecclesiastical History is the University of Copenhagen. Translated nnder the Direction of Arthur James Mason, D.D., Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge. 2 vols. Loudon John Murray. [24a. net.1 present version of the Danish text. How far the want of a bibliography, the almost monosyllabic "Contents," and the starvation supply of essential dates should be saddled on the author or on his coadjutors we do not know.
The connexion between the domestic vicissitudes of the Rock of Peter and the gradual annihilation of the Papal power and influence throughout Roman Catholio Europe obliged the author to deal in full introductory detail with that wide topic, and he gives an elaborate account of the struggles of the French Galilean Party and their allies, the Jansenists, with the Jesuit faction when Louis XIV. was on the throne. The spiritual consequences of these battles of the Church militant were plainly felt in the reign of his successor. When Le Boi bien-aime was ill in 1744 six thousand masses were ordered in Notre-Dame for his recovery, but when he was at the point of death thirty years later the number was only three, a fact cited as a thermometer showing the growth of infidelity in Paris. The upper and learned classes were honeycombed by indifference and aggressive unbelief, while the prelates, amongst whom there was no longer an "Eagle of Meaux" or a Massillon, led luxurious lives, some of them being ignorant enough of theology to talk rank Jansenism, of which they disapproved, without knowing it :— " The reports of brilliant files, balls, and plays in bishops' palaces and convents gave great offence to those who cared for the Church. The Abbot of Clairvaux, the ancient monastery of St. Bernard, held quite a Court. He drove four horses, and insisted upon his monks addressing him as Monseigneur. When Cardinal Bohan resided in his palace at Saverne, lie had seven hundred beds, one hundred and eighty horses, and twenty-five valets for his numerous high-born guests. It was not talk of the kingdom of God which seasoned the luxurious feasts of these wealthy prelates. More than one of the French bishops in the days of Louis XVI. were altogether unbelievers. A simple priest, it used to be said, ought to believe something, else he will be called a hypocrite ; but if he is steadfast in the faith, he will be thought bigoted. A vicar-general can permit himself to smile at religion ; a bishop can laugh at it ; and a cardinal can make jokes about it The smile of the vicar-general was seen when the Abbe Bassinet of Cabers in 1767, in the chapel of the Louvre, delivered the customary oration in memory of St. Louis, in which he described the Crusades as a mixture of folly, cruelty, and injustice ; did not mention God, nor any of the Saints, nor quoted a single word of Scripture."
With the Revolution came the "Goddess of Reason" ; and after her high priests, Chaumette and Anacharsia Clootz, had gone to the guillotine, Robespierre proclaimed the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, himself figuring as High Priest in a ceremonial which brought on him the reproach in the Convention : "You are beginning to bore me with your Supreme Being." Before the Napoleonic "whiff of grape-shot" of Vendemiaire the pendulum was swinging backwards towards the old faith; but the Directory instituting the farcical cult of the "Friends of God and Man," which in its turn soon vanished, there was decreed a religious peace acknowledging the Pope as head of the Church by divine right, but asserting the liberties of the Gallican Church. On the series of fusillades, noyades, and other hideous consequences of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy adopted by the Convention (vide Carlyle), the author is strangely silent. He explains, however, that Notre-Dame was turned into a warehouse for wine-barrels, and that under the orders of the relatively lenient Directory a hundred churches were sold in Paris and pulled down, the ancient Abbey of Cluny sharing their fate.
The episcopal historian's record of the insults and brutalities connected with the seizure by Napoleon's order, and death at Valence, of Pins VI., and the seven years' detention of Pius VII., is followed by an explanation of the idea of Italia una as a European question, of the rise of the Carbonari, and the importance of the writings of the un- happy Carlo Alberto's frocked Minister, the Abbe Gioberti. In the case of the many-aided Massimo d'Azeglio, novelist, painter, statesman, of Mazzini and Victor Emmanuel, of Cavour, humorously looking at you through his spectacles, of the noble Etruscan Ricasoli, and the now venerable Visconti- Venosta, there are too many mere allusions without portraiture. II papa delle colombe, as the Romans called Pius IL., because two doves alighted on his camiage as he neared the capital, was a neo-Guelph with liberal leanings ; but his reforming horizon was local, so that he forbade the ardent Padre Gave zzi —a familiar figure at Covent Garden Opera in the "fifties "—to utter the word "Italy" in his presence. After the establishment in his capital of Mazzini's revolutionary triumvirate, the flight to Gaeta, and the return under French protection, the Romans found themselves under the rule, as Pasquin said, of Pie nano seeando,—he had become an entirely new Pope. Soon came the Bull proclaiming the dogma of tile Immaculate Conception, "the pilot balloon for the definition of the Pope's Infallibility." Years passed, and when Garibaldi, leaving his Elba, was thundering forth his Roma a merle I the transmuted Vicar of Christ could only think of the Apostles Peter and Paul, the eighteen-hundredth anniversary of whose martyrdom was to be celebrated in Rome :— " This centenary, which, as Manning said, was also to be a festival of ' St. Peter's primacy over the whole world,' assembled together 490 bishops and prelates, all the Eastern patriarchs in communion with Rome' and nearly 4, i 000 priests n the city of St. Peter. The Italian Press spoke scornfully of this migration of the crows' (it passaggio dells corauckie), which daily brought large flocks of black-robed figures to Rome. There came vivacious little Frenchmen, bearing the stamp of pride as belonging to 'the great nation'; quiet, dignified, and elegant Spaniards in Don Bartel° hats ; stout Germans, rough in their manners, most of them from the Tyrol. Bavaria, and Austria ; Slays with whiskers ; Orieutals in magnificent dresses, looking like the patriarchs of the Old Testament; yellow Chinamen; black and brown bishops and prelates from Africa and India ; one of these exotic arch- bishops is even said to have worn a ring in his nose. The Italians formed the setting of the foreign types ; they moved about with the ease of those born in the country, and they were proud of being the Church's life-guard, in contradistinction to the foreign auxiliaries."
The mark of Jesuit prompters was visible in the Papal Encyclical and Syllabus which, denouncing the ungodly dreams of the time, condemned liberty of conscience, of public worship, and of the Press, asserted the Apostolic Sees juris- diction over family life and education, and repudiated the Idea of an alliance of the Holy See with "progress, liberty, and the new civilisation." After a prologue of illuminations, festivals, and musical services, with the excommunication in St. Peter's of the "King of Sardinia" and his accomplices, the Pontiff revealed the fact "that a secret power emanated. from the grave of the Prince of the Apostles, which could strengthen and kindle the bishops to the fight against the audacity of the foe," further announcing his intention of bolding a General Council whereby the enemies of the kingdom of Christ would be brought to naught. These proceedings were in 1867; a year later appeared a Bull, modelled on the invitation of Paul HI. to the Council of Trent, and letters addressed to the European Protestant and other non-Catholic Bishops. The Dane's brilliant narrative makes you realise how the average Frenchman viewed the matter with Gallio's indifference, the prelates being mostly anti-Infallibilists, their representation in the Council falling to the biting, manceuvring Cardinal Dupanloup, who was somewhat of a Mr. Facing- both-ways. His orthodoxy of theological belief was not enough for the Pontiff, who on one occasion said : "This Bishop of Orleans is mad! He wants me to stop the mouth of the Holy Ghost and the Council—I, the Pope, who am merely the mouthpiece of the Holy Ghost! The Bishop of Orleans is mad, is mad ! " At that prelate's side were Archbishop Darboy, the German and Austrian Epiecopacy, and, above all, the Bosnian Bishop, Strossmayer, who went so far as to tell the Council that Protestantism was by no means, as the "Scheme" pretended, the mother of Rationalism, which was the offspring of the so-called Humanism or Classicism, contempt for the faith having originated, not in a Protestant land, but in the country of Voltaire and the Enoyclopaedists. Cardinal Manning and the Oratory approved the new dogma, and our .historian, concluding his chapter on the Council, says that "if any single man were able to asciibe to himself the honour of this victory, it would be the Archbishop of Westminster, ii dined.° del Coneilio." Manning's colleague at home, Cardinal Newman, took different ground. "What have we done," he asked in a letter to the Roman Catholic Bishop of Birmingham, "to be treated as the faithful never were treated before5 Why should an aggressive, insolent faction be allowed to make the hearts of the just sad?"
If anything be now "rotten in the state of Denmark," it is not arithmetic, for our author minutely analyses the votings at the different stages of the Assembly, and he explains how before the final count the majority of the two hundred and thirty opponents of Infallibility made the saeribio dell' intelletto, and to avoid calling out Non-plaest withdrew from the Council. The day before the acceptance of the decree by the remaining majority our indefatigable subterraneoes agent in Rome, the future Lord A.mpthill, whose genius in his Berlin Ambassadorial days baffled even Bismarck, verified the flight of the fathers who were throwing up the sponge. The Dane says in his semi-sarcastic manner :— " Odo Russell was at the railway station in order to see who was leaving, and he at once informed Manning that twenty bishops had left the city, he had spoken to Melchers, Ketteler, Haynald, and Dupanloup. The two last left in the same compart- ment. Their state of mind was one of depression. The two prelates huddled themselves up, each in his corner, and at dawn of day, while Dupanloup, according to his custom, was reading his breviary, the Archbishop of Colocza suddenly cried to him 'Monseigneur, we have made a great mistake' by not remainbq and voting Ron-p/aret."
The account of the rise of the "Old Catholics," following on the excommunication of the Bavarian Professor Dbllinger, who publicly rejected the new dogma, and of the German Ifulturkampf, might be improved. Dr. Nielsen does not clearly explain that Bismarck's so-called "Falk" laws, with their results of grievous Roman Catholic persecution, were Prussian legislation, the expulsion of the Jesuits being, on the other hand, effected by a law of the German Reichstag. Then he ignores the trustworthy statements of Monsignor Liverani and the Abbe Perfetti on the appalling condition of moral and educational degradation of the Roman clergy at the time of the Risergintento. Perhaps all such defects will be remedied in the Bishop's forthcoming work on the inner life of the Papacy (Det indre Liv), or in his third volume of the present Pavedommel, which will include the reign of Pius X., the successor, must we say ? of the mighty Hildebrand of Canossa, and of the Pontiff who, as the legendary version of a great historic incident runs, trampled on the neck of the Imperial dragon in the porch of St. Mark's !
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