“AT the end of the fourth century,” writes Guizot, “the Church saved Christianity ... resisted the internal dissolution of the Empire and the barbarians, and became the bond, the medium, and the principle of civilization.... Had the Church not existed the whole world must have been abandoned to purely material force” (History of Civilization, I, 38).... “When all was chaos, when every great social combination was vanishing, the Church proclaimed the unity of her doctrine and the universality of her right; this is a great and powerful fact which has rendered immense service to humanity” (ibid., II, 19).

This unity was indeed the great factor in European civilization. On it the new civil societies, like wild olive branches, were grafted, so to speak. It became the bond of political unity, a kind of centripetal force, we may say, and the redemption from that inordinate love of independence which characterized the barbarians.

Consequently the new civil societies made the maintenance of religious unity the foremost object of their policy. It became the public law of all Europe and the common law of each state. To impugn this unity was considered a most heinous offence not against God only, but against the nation and against all Christendom.

“Thus,” writes another great Protestant, “Christianity became crystallized into a single bond embracing all nations, and giving to all life, civilization, and all the riches of the mind” (Hurter, Life of Innocent III, I, 38).

A corollary of this system of an universal Christian society was the recognition of a supreme tribunal. “One of the most elevated principles of the age,” writes the same eminent German, “was that, in the struggles between the peoples and their rulers, there should be a superior authority charged to recall laws not made by men, though their interpreter were himself a man.” Referring to the fiercely contested election of Othon, he continues: “Othon was the first to have recourse to Rome, the tribunal with whom rested the decision in these matters, when the parties did not wish to resort to the arbitrament of war.”

In France we find the great Suger, Abbot of St. Denis, remonstrating with the Bishop of the free chartered city of Beauvais, brother of the King, with whom he was often at odds.

“I beseech you not to raise a guilty hand against the King ... for you must see the consequences of armed insurrection against the King, especially if it be without consulting the Sovereign Pontiff.... If the King, drawn aside by evil counsellors, has not acted rightly, it was proper to have informed him by the bishops and notables, or rather by our Holy Father the Pope, who is at the head of the whole Church, and could easily have reconciled all differences.”

In England we have many instances of both laymen and clergy appealing to the arbitrament of the Papacy.

“The recognition of some principle of right, powerful enough to form a bond of lasting concord, has always been the dream of statesmen and philosophers,” writes Lecky. “Hildebrand sought it in the supremacy of the spiritual power, and in the consequent ascendency of moral law” (History of Rationalism, 245).

Voltaire pays homage to this public policy of the Middle Ages. “The interests of the human race required a controlling power to restrain sovereigns and protect the lives of peoples. This controlling power of religion could well be placed in the hands of the Papacy. The Sovereign Pontiffs warning princes and people of their duties, appeasing quarrels, rebuking crimes, might always have been regarded as the images of God on earth. But men, alas, are reduced to the protection of laws without force” (Essai sur les moeurs, II).

He describes what really did exist for centuries, though, of course, papal arbitration was not always efficacious. Every great institution needs time to develop and mature. It would not be great were it otherwise. Moreover there were, unfortunately, many troublous times between the sixth and the fifteenth century, in which the Papacy itself was captive, buffeted, demeaned, and exiled by the struggles and ambitions of turbulent political factions in Rome itself. The very day on which Gregory VII excommunicated the German Emperor, he was seized and imprisoned by a noble Roman bandit, until his people were able to deliver him by main force.

“Another corollary of this universal Christian Society was that right found a protector in the common Father of the faithful; in the grand idea of a supreme chief who without employing material force judged in last resort.... What great misfortunes would France and all Europe have been spared if, in the reign of Louis XVI, an Innocent III had been Pope. His rÔle would have been to save the lives of the people” (Hurter’s Innocent III, II, 200-23). To German Protestant writers like Hurter, Voigt, Neander, etc., is due the honour of vindicating the true rÔle of the Papacy in the Middle Ages.

The rights of suzerainty exercised by the Papacy also formed part of the public law of Europe. In those wild, lawless days, when robber barons enjoyed the privilege of being highwaymen on their own estates, and often extended their depredations to those of their neighbours, property rights had no sanction, and the weaker succumbed to the stronger in virtue of the “fist right,” which we now translate variously by “the right of the strongest,” political “majorities,” and the “survival of the fittest.”

The practice then arose among weak owners of dedicating their lands to the Church, in order to obtain spiritual or moral protection against the brute force of stronger neighbours. What private owners did in a small way was done by princes on a larger scale.

Referring to the peculiar incidents when roving Norman pirates, in possession of Sicily and Naples, seized the person of the Pope and insisted on becoming his vassal, Voltaire writes as follows:—“Robert Guiscard, wishing to be independent of the German Emperor, resorted to a precaution which private owners took in those days of trouble and rapine. The latter gave their property to the Church under the name of Oblata, and, paying a slight tax, continued to enjoy the use of it. The Normans resorted to this custom, placing under the protection of the Church in the hands of Nicholas II (1059) not only what they held, but also their future conquests (on the Saracens). This homage was an act of political piety like Peter’s Pence; the two pence of gold paid by the Kings of Portugal; like the voluntary submission of so many kingdoms” (Essai sur les moeurs, II, 44).

It was thus that England became a fief of the Holy See, a most unfortunate circumstance, as the temporal pecuniary obligations arising therefrom were exploited to estrange the English from the See of Peter, in the following centuries.

“In 1329,” continues Voltaire, “the King of Sweden, who wished to conquer Denmark, addressed the Pope as follows: ‘Your Holiness knows that Denmark depends on the Roman See and not on the German Emperor.’ ... I only wish to show,” Voltaire adds, “how every prince who wished to recover or usurp a domain appealed to the Pope.... In this case the Pope defended Denmark, and said he could only decide on the justice of the case when the parties had appeared before his tribunal, according to the ancient usage.”

Nor did Christians alone appeal to this spiritual tribunal. The bull of Innocent III, cited by Hurter, is an excellent exponent of the mind of the Church in all times. “As they (the Jews) claim our succour against their persecutors, we take them under our special protection, following in this the example of our predecessors, Calixtus, Eugenius, Alexander, Clement, and Celestin. We forbid every one to force a Jew to be baptized, for he who is compelled cannot be said to have the faith. No Christian must dare commit any violence against them, nor seize their property, without a legal judgment. Let no one trouble them on their feast days by striking or throwing stones at them,” etc.

It will be objected that the fulcrum of Western civilization was a spiritual despotism. But these terms exclude each other. Can we call an authority despotic which had no material force, and rested only on a divine commission and the common sense of prince and people, recognizing its credentials—on public opinion in fact?

It was a fundamental law of every state that any one, no matter what his rank, who impugned the Unity of the Faith, or committed offences so heinous as to justify the supposition that he was no longer a Christian, fell under the ban of the Church and became outlawed, if at the end of a year he had not been absolved. In his Historia Imperatorum Schafnaburg explains the wintry flight of Henry IV across the Alps to Canossa by his eagerness to be absolved before the year had revolved, because otherwise he would have forfeited his crown. Ut ante hanc diem non absolveretur, deinceps juxta Palatinas leges indignus regio honore habeatur.

Three causes were generally admitted as sufficient for the excommunication of a sovereign. First, if he fell from the faith. Second, if he ravaged or seized ecclesiastical lands or desecrated churches. Third, if he repudiated his own wife or appropriated his neighbour’s. This latter point, as Voltaire and Montesquieu have pointed out, was the cause of nearly all the quarrels between the French kings and the Papacy, a fact which our Jacobins, in the Chambers and elsewhere, deliberately ignore, when they mendaciously misrepresent the Church as having constantly encroached on the civil power. The case of Philippe Augustus and the hapless Ingleburge of Denmark was a test case, so to speak.

“It was not,” writes Hurter, “a question of contested claims of the Papacy, but of this great question, Is the sovereign subject to the laws of Christianity? It had to be decided whether the royal will should triumph or not over the force regarded as constituting the unity of Christendom” (Life of Innocent III). Montesquieu’s testimony is unimpeachable when he testifies that this Public Law of Europe was universally recognized. “All the sovereigns,” he writes, “with inconceivable blindness, themselves accredited and sanctioned, in public opinion, which had no force except by it.”

If the laws against heretics, who were to our forefathers what the anarchists are to us, were oppressive, some of the blame should surely be apportioned to the laymen who sat in the mixed assemblies in which they were made. “Almost all Europe, for many centuries, was deluged in bloodshed at the direct instigation or with the full approval of the ecclesiastical authorities.” It is in this disingenuous way that Lecky refers to the operations of the Public Law of Europe against the Albigenses or ManichÆans of Provence, and probably to the wars of Italian independence and the Thirty Years War. Until the thirteenth century he assures us that practically no persecutions (prosecutions) against heretics occurred. It was then that the Public Law of Europe began to be trampled on by sectarians who adopted and propagated Gnostic, Paulician, ManichÆan, and other subversive theories, imported from the East by Semitic-Islamic settlers in the fair lands of Provence. Spain and Italy, the countries in which the Public Law of Europe was maintained, were the only ones who were spared the horrors of civil religious wars. They were saved by inquisitions, it will be retorted.

Without seeking to defend the system, we may be permitted to inquire whether it were not preferable, at that time, to execute some ringleaders of religious revolt (30,000 in three centuries is a fair estimate), than to deluge whole countries in blood for many decades, about controversies which not one in a million could possibly grasp? Lecky the rationalist assures us that “the overwhelming majority of the human race, necessarily, accept their opinions from authority. Avowedly like Catholics, or unconsciously like Protestants. They have neither time nor opportunity (nor capacity) to examine for themselves” (History of Rationalism, I, 101).

Does any one seriously believe that the Camisards were fighting for predestination and infant damnation, which have been shelved recently by Presbyterians in the United States?

In England, France, Germany, everywhere, greed and political ambition were the incentives; the passions of ignorant masses were merely used as a means. Back of both, and behind all, we descry secret societies, the true pandemoniums, where these revolts are organized, and whence Mammon, “the least-erected spirit that fell,” Moloch, “horrid king besmeared with blood,” Belial, and all that crew, described by Milton, are sent forth to execute the behests of the eternal enmity between “the serpent’s seed and the seed of the woman.”

In this unholy struggle “all the bonds of cohesion on which political organization depended were weakened or destroyed,” writes Lecky. “The spirit of private judgment had descended to those totally incapable of self-government, and lashed their passions into the wildest fury” (History of Rationalism, p. 239). Voltaire is even less complimentary. He describes the Hussites as “wild beasts whom the severity of the emperor had roused to furor.”

In Germany, apostate ecclesiastical and secular electors were seeking their own aggrandizement. Bishoprics with their manses were converted into hereditary principalities. As to their Swedish ally, Gustavus Adolphus, I refer my readers to the judgment of a Protestant admirer of this doughty champion of the Reformation. On page 329 of Thirty Years War Schiller writes as follows:—

“The last, the greatest service, Gustavus Adolphus could render to religious and civil liberty was to die (1632, at battle of Lutzen).... It was no longer possible to doubt that he was seeking to establish himself in Germany, not as a protector, but as a conqueror. Already Augsburg boasted that it had been chosen as the capital of the new monarchy. The Protestant princes, his allies, made claims which could only be satisfied by despoiling the Catholics. It is then permitted to conclude that like the barbarian hordes of yore, he intended to divide the conquered provinces of Germany among the Swedish chiefs of his army. His conduct towards the unfortunate Elector Palatine, Frederick V, is unworthy of a hero. The Palatinate was in his hands, justice and honour required that he return it to the legitimate sovereign. But to avoid doing so he had recourse to subtleties which make us blush for him.”

It is only fair to add that Gustavus did finally restore the Palatinate to Frederick, but as a fief of the Swedish crown.

What, I ask, has been gained by the overthrow of the Public Law of Europe? For this was waged the Thirty Years War, one of the most cruel the world has known. Atrocities were committed on both sides, and the tu quoque argument is very foolish. But if it be admitted that defensive war is always just and righteous, we must allow that the Catholics were justified in fighting for their public law. They were in possession since more than twelve centuries, and were resisting assailants who showed no quarter, and who robbed them of their churches and persecuted them, relentlessly, whenever they gained the upper hand, just as the Puritans did in Maryland. And what was the net result of the Thirty Years War? The loss of liberty both civil and religious. The German electors, ecclesiastical as well as secular, had been but administrators of free citizens, who now became subjects with little or no voice in the government. As to religious liberty, the new axiom Cujus regio ejus religio was substituted for One Lord One Faith. The ruler of each realm became the infallible Pontiff of his subjects. “If any gratitude from this scandalous and accursed world were to be gained, and I, Martin Luther, had taught and done nothing else than this, that I have enlightened and adorned the temporal authority, for this alone should it be thankful to me, since even my worst enemies know that a like understanding as to the temporal authority was completely concealed under the Papacy” (Walch’s Augs., XIV, p. 520).

In this same connexion Schiller makes the following statement. “No country changed religion oftener than the Palatinate. Unhappy weathercock of the political and religious versatility of its sovereigns, it had twice been forced to embrace the doctrines of Luther and then to abandon them for those of Calvin. Frederick III deserted the Confession of Augsburg, but his son re-established it by most violent and unjust measures. After closing all the Calvinist temples and exiling the ministers and school teachers, he ordered by his will that his son should be brought up by Lutherans; his brother, however, annulled this will and became regent under the young Frederick IV, who was confided to Calvinists with strict orders to destroy in his mind the “heretical doctrines of Luther by all means, by beating and whipping even.” It is easy to guess how subjects were treated when the heir to the throne was thus tyrannized over” (Thirty Years War, p. 40).

What, I ask, has Europe gained by the overthrow of its public law? Strife, anarchy, nihilism in religion as in philosophy. After centuries of dabbling, floundering, and blundering, we are again seeking to devise some principle of unity, some Amphictyonic Council to supplement the illusory balance of power; to set up a Court of Arbitration to replace the one that really did exist in the Middle Ages and functioned as well as could be expected in those days of liquescence.

All in vain. The grand Peace Congress from which the Papacy was excluded was followed, almost immediately, by two most cruel wars which were pre-eminently subjects for arbitration. Men will submit to this court questions about which they do not care enough to fight about them, but these subjects only will they submit to arbitration. Unless the Lord build the house, in vain they labour who build.

There is only one tribunal that can ever arbitrate efficaciously, and this is the one which presided at the Genesis of Christendom.[27]

Socialists and anarchists, without having pondered the passage from Guizot I quoted in beginning this chapter, understand perfectly that our Western or Christian civilization is grounded on the unity of one Holy Catholic Church, and the destruction of the social structure being the object of their ambition, they very logically direct all their efforts to destroying this foundation.

The work of disintegration was begun in the sixteenth century. “Socinius, the most iconoclastic of Protestants, predicted that the seditious doctrines by which Protestants supported their cause would lead to the disintegration of society” (History of Rationalism, II, 239).

This work of disintegration has made rapid progress since the eighteenth century in virtue of the law of accelerated movement. The French Revolution, like the Protestant revolt, was essentially a work of disintegration. The successors of the Masonic Jacobins of 1790 openly proclaim their set purpose of completing the work begun by the grands ancÊtres of bloody memory.

“The Revolution,” wrote Renan (in the preface to Questions contemporaines), “has disintegrated everything, broken up all organizations, excepting only the Catholic Church. The clergy alone have remained organized outside the State. As the cities, in the days of the ruin of the Roman Empire, chose bishops for their representatives, so in our provinces the bishops will soon be the only leaders left in a dismantled society.”

The object of the Separation Law was to accomplish the disintegration of the Church, the only organized body, outside the State, which the Revolution failed to disintegrate, because Pius VI rejected, in toto, the civil constitution of the clergy. These noble French priests were drowned, guillotined, proscribed, and imprisoned by tens of thousands, but the Church in France maintained the principle of life strong within her, and on the third day she rose again.

What violence failed to accomplish a century ago, the Third Republic hoped to compass by guile and fraud, labelled liberty and legality.

The true purpose of the Law of Separation was to break up the Church into an ever-increasing number of viviparous Associations cultuelles, independent of all ecclesiastical control.

The successor of Pius VI, Ithuriel-like, has pierced the thin disguise of the toad lurking in the purlieus of Eden.[28] Instead of a divided demoralized clergy, the Masonic Jacobins are confronted by the serried ranks of an invincible phalanx.

“At the end of the fourth century,” writes Guizot, “it was the Church with its magistrates, its institutions, and its power that vigorously resisted the internal dissolution of the empire and of the barbarians, and became the bond, the medium, and the principle of civilization between the Roman and the barbarian worlds” (History of Civilization).

Now, as in the fourth century, we are menaced with social dissolution. The barbarians are at our gates, nay, in our midst, and not in France alone, by any means. A ferocious, self-seeking atheistic materialism is disrupting Christendom. And let us not be deceived. Societies are never saved and regenerated except by their generating principle; and the generating principle of Western civilization is Christianity.

Therefore, I repeat, that society will be compelled, in self-defence, to restore Christianity or slavery, in some form; State Socialism perhaps—or perish.

21st November, 1906.