16th February, 1901.

THE attitude of the Jacobin government in France towards the religion professed by nine-tenths of the inhabitants is truly instructive. After prating about liberty, fraternity, and equality, and the rights of man for a hundred years, the successors of the revolutionary Constituante are preparing to deal a deathblow at the most sacred rights of the individual, to overstep the most arbitrary acts of any regime, nay of the Inquisition itself. These, at least, only concerned themselves with outward manifestations of personal idiosyncrasies tending to disturb the social order. But the successors of the Jacobins of the Constituante, so proud of their blood-stained origin, direct their attacks, to-day, against that most intangible thing the Vow, which has no existence except in the inner conscience of the individual, seeing that monastic vows which involved “civil death” were abolished by law in 1790, and all religious are, to-day, free to exercise the rights of citizens—to buy, sell, contract, or vote. The vow cannot even be considered a convention or a contract binding together the members of a religious association.

The ground on which it is proposed to declare religious congregations illegal without interfering with Masonic and other associations is, said Waldeck Rousseau, that “our public right [droit public] and that of other States proscribes all that constitutes an abdication of the rights of the individual, right to marry, to possess, all, in fact, that resembles personal servitude.”

Thus in the name of liberty and the famous rights of man, I am denied the right to exercise my freewill by electing to remain single, because not to marry would be an abdication of one of the rights of the individual, and resemble “personal servitude.” Anything more grotesquely inconsistent cannot well be imagined, and this project of law has been in process of elaboration in the lodges since twenty years! In 1880, when the decree against the Jesuits and all congregations of men was promulgated, it was declared illicit and unconstitutional by 1500 jurists, and 400 of the higher magistrates, who refused their connivence, were removed from office. One of my best friends was among these victims. The decree was enforced manu militari, but the current of public opinion was so strong that, ere long, these establishments were reopened and continued their good works unmolested.

It was next proposed to crush out the Congregations by fiscal measures. This also has proved inadequate, and the present project of law is the supreme effort of a most paternal and absolute Republic to secure the liberty of thousands of unappreciative subjects, by preventing them from exercising it in the choice of a mode of life. Truly a strange aberration of liberty, equality, and fraternity!

Of course it is an open secret that what is aimed at is the destruction of the Catholic Church in France, and the establishment, if possible, of a national church with a “civil constitution of the clergy” as was attempted in 1792.

Before attacking the citadel it is proposed to demolish the two great ramparts of the Church, Christian education and Christian charity, by disbanding the noble men and women who man these ramparts.

It is a notorious fact, well established by Taine, that the French Revolution, with all its saturnalia of carnage and nameless tyranny, was the work of a handful, some ten thousand in all, and even many of these were foreigners. They carried all before them, and I fear that history will repeat itself.

The moral unity of France was destroyed for ever by the Huguenots in the seventeenth century. Louis XIV sought in vain to restore it by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The Revolution also tried to enforce moral unity by the unlimited practice of the “Sois mon frÈre ou je te tue.” It is in the name of this lost moral unity that the coalition in power now propose to crush out all educational and religious liberty. French Protestantism can hardly be said to exist any longer. In 1799, when their religious and civil liberties were restored, Rabaut de St. Etienne, then president of the Constituante, stated their number to be 2,000,000 in a population of 26,000,000. After a century of complete liberty and equality, the Agenda Protestant of Lyons states their number to be 650,000 in a population of 37,000,000. In the usual process of Protestant disintegration, the Huguenots, erstwhile so zealous for Calvinistic purity of doctrine, have evolved into the freethinking materialists, who form an important contingent in the anti-religious Masonic coalition I referred to some months ago.

The situation in France painfully recalls that of Constantinople some forty years before the fall of the Eastern Empire. A house divided against itself cannot stand.