M. PAUL BERT'S "MODERATION."
WE can hardly remember a speech better worth the atten- tion of those who are interested in watching the,develop- latent of European civilisation than that in which. M. Paul
Bert on Sunday replied to the ceremonial address of his sub- ordinates in the Ministry of Public Worship. It has been de- scribed in this country as a "moderate" speech, and it is moderate thus far, that the Minister expressly repudiates any resort to revolutionary or illegal methods in dealing with the Churches of France. He will not use violence, and he will not descend to small worryings. He will keep himself and his Department within the law. Nevertheless, though he rejects violence and prides himself on being at once legal and scientific, M. Bert takes up for himself as Minister, for his Department, and for the State, a position which, so far as our knowledge of history extends, is absolutely novel in Europe. We have had Minis- tries often enough in all countries which were either nominally or really devoted to an Established Church. We have had Ministries in some countries for short periods which were bent on sweeping away all ecclesiastical systems together, at once, and by main force. And we have had Ministries bent on separating the Churches from the State, and leaving both to take their course, unfettered by any considerations, except their own interests or their own conception of right and wrong. But we have never before seen a Ministry which regarded religion, or its expression through ecclesiastical agencies, as a hostile power in the State, so formidable that it must not be set free, so inherently evil or dangerous that it must be restrained by the whole power of the representatives of the community. We have never seen a Ministry which regarded religion as men of property regard Socialism,—as a menacing impulse, that justifies the State in treating its votaries with the utmost rigour of the law, in withdrawing from them all privileges they may have accidentally acquired, and in calling up even obsolete laws for their suppression. M. Paul Bert treats the Catholic Church in France as many Teetotallers would treat the Liquor Trade, as a great corporation of doubt- ful morality and more than doubtful utility, which, until opinion will allow of its abolition, must be permitted to .exist, but which must be watched and restricted, and made to feel at every turn that it is only tolerated -by the law. • The organic laws, based upon the Con- cordat, says M. Paul Bert, are "the conditions of the existence of the Catholic Church in the bosom of civil society." That is to say, the Church is not a part of that society, has no inherent right to exist, has no right at all apart from law, is, in fact, only tolerated, so as to make easier and less rapid that "great movement" of opinion which M. Paul Bert thinks is rushing towards the separation of Church and State, and which we may add, if it rushes on in France, will not end in leaving the Church free, but the State free;and the Church at once pau- perised and enslaved. Religion is not regarded as property is regarded, as something with "duties, as well as rights," or as liberty is regarded, as something valuable, but still of neces- sity to be restricted ; but as something suspect, doubtful, or bad, to be watched and controlled and regulated, and made to feel that it may yet, if men grow wiser, be swept con- temptuously away. That is surely a very strange attitude for a Liberal Ministry, in a country supposed to be Catholic, and in a time when liberty is held to be sacred, to assume ; and the probable out- come of it deserves some serious consideration, the more so as direct resistance is extremely improbable. M. Paul Bert's policy is, for his purposes, a very strong one, much stronger than a passionate or spasmodic policy would be. The law is very strong in France, and the Concordat, although extorted from the Papacy, as it were at the point of the bayonet, is, undoubtedly, part of the law. The laity would consider it- reasonable to enforce it, at least until it produces visible ill consequences ; while the Church itself is much weakened for resistance by the impossibility of admitting that the Papacy in signing such a Concordat either committed an error, or gave up any liberty vital to the Church. The new Ministry, we con- ceive, will be able, if it pleases, to carry out its design, and the only subject of interest is the result such carrying-out will have. We cannot doubt that it will be bad for the State, for the Church as a corporation, and for religion itself. It will be bad for the State, because is will make the most powerful of all human emotions hostile to authority, will render large classes disaffected upon grounds which they will consider sacred, and will impose upon all officials of the State an obli- gation as demoralising as any other obligation to tyrannize. It is thoroughly bad for a Prefect to be compelled to watch the pulpit with a view to prosecutions, whether he is a sceptic or a believer. If he is a sceptic, his duty will make him malignant, as we know it made State officials in all times of persecution, and makes them now, when new social theories are to be hunted down ; while, if he is a believer, and thinks the pulpit should be free, it must demoralise his conscience. That is a process which, when the State becomes the jailer of the Church, must go on in all departments of life, the priest being everywhere, and everywhere influential, and its effect must be distinctly bad, as bad as if the State had declared war upon a prevalent opinion. It is a tyranny which M. Bert is enjoining—that is, the restriction of a liberty to which the conscience is in no way opposed, but rather justifies—and that tyranny is no better because it is exercised through forms of law, and on the teachers of ideas with which the better minds, and not the worse minds, among the people have a tendency to sympathise. All Englishmen see the ill- effect of treating other speculative opinions as social dangers, and the opinions of priests are not so much worse than the opinions, say, of French Communists, or French Anarchists, or French men of science, that the evil effect on the State should be diminished. M. Paul Bert will, in fact, stir up a hostility of the most determined kind among the best persons, and, as he works through the laws, it is against the Law that this hostility will be directed. No sincere Catholic, whose Church is so treated, can regard the State as otherwise than impious, while no lukewarm Catholic can regard it as otherwise than insolently overbearing. Why should a Church be regarded as hostile or dangerous, any more than any other association for the propagation of opinion ?
As to the Church and Religion, they will also suffer deeply. The Church will suffer, because its most dangerous tendency, that of regarding itself as a corporate body apart from or even hostile to lay influence, will be necessarily exaggerated. The corporate feeling of the priesthood will be intensified beyond all restraint. It is simply impossible for thirty or forty thousand priests, who in their own judgment are obey- ing their consciences, to be told by the State that they are objects of suspicion, without their drawing them- selves together, defending one another as against law, and feeling that the law is as against them morally bad. They must, in the nature of things, tend to become as disloyal as M. Paul Bert believes them to be,—as hostile to the Republic, as eager for the success of its internal enemies. That is a bad attitude of mind for a priesthood, and the worse because it will seem to them to be justified by religion itself, which will suffer in another way. Religion, considered as the impalpable mental action which induces men to consider divine questions as higher than mundane questions, cannot be crushed out, or even diminished, by any action of M. Paul Bert ; but it can be greatly injured, by being mixed with other impalpable and mental impulses. Nothing is worse for religion than to become fanatic, hot, bitter, angry, and violent, and it is fanaticism which such an attitude of the State as M. Bert desires and orders, must inevitably produce. Tell an ordinary Liberal that the leading idea of his mind—the one which he thinks noble—is dangerous and bad ; that it must be watched, and he must be %%etched, and, above all, the exponents of his idea must be watched, and see, after a few months of that treat- ment, what his Liberalism will become. It was, perhaps, an idea accepted lazily on the balance of evidence ; it becomes an ide'e fire, an immutable conviction, over which the man's own reason has hardly any power, which he applies in season and out of season, and to which the very conscience becomes subordinate. Liberals do not believe Liberalism as religious men believe religion ; nor can Liberalism become such an absorbing and, so to speak, blazing monopolist of the mental powers as religion can. The effect of M. Paul Bert's speech, so far as it represents the actual policy of the Govern- ment, must be to weaken the State, by making the insulted Church, with all its adherents, bitterly hostile ; to injure the Church as a beneficial organisation, by separating its priests still farther from the laity ; and to spoil religion by tainting it, so far as that which is divine can be tainted, with the blacken- ing heat of fanaticism. We can see, if the teaching of history or the study of the human mind convey any knowledge at all, no escape from those consequences, and they are purely bad.
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