October, 1904.

M. COMBES, who proclaimed at the Chambers two years ago that he had taken office only to wage war on Clericalism, enumerated his deeds of prowess recently in a political speech at Auxerre. Fifteen thousand scholar establishments, strongholds of the ghostly enemy, had been demolished! “Gentlemen, you will grant that this is a great deal for a ministry obliged to fight at every instant for its own existence,” he exclaimed.

We are now coming to the second part of the Jacobin programme. As I wrote last year in the Evening Post (June 27th), the true object of the Revolution in 1790, as to-day, is the destruction of Christianity and its offspring, Liberty, in order to establish on the ruins of both, the reign of the Omnipotent Infallible State, before which all must fall down and worship or disappear. To-day the State is M. Combes and his “bloc,” a very poor avatar of the Titanic Corsican who measured himself with all Europe. There was but one force that resisted him, and against this obstacle M. Combes stumbled when he demanded, peremptorily, that the Vatican withdraw letters addressed to two bishops needing to be disciplined. The Holy See was acting in the plenitude of its spiritual jurisdiction. M. Combes curtly demanded that Pius X send in his resignation, as “the political system of the Republic consists in the subordination of all institutions, whatever they may be, to the supremacy of the State.”

This is the latest phase of a very old struggle which began in the days of the Apostles. In the history of all the nations of antiquity, the problem of Church and State and their correlations existed, and was solved, easily and summarily, by the system proclaimed by M. Combes. The ruler of each nation was the Pontifex Maximus of his realm. This system, with its necessary concomitant of national religions, reached its culminating point in the worship of the “divine CÆsars,” the acme of human servitude.

Now Christianity was a profound and radical innovation. Never had the supremacy of the ruler or the State been questioned before the Apostles proclaimed the Creed in “One Holy Catholic Church,” destined to transcend all natural and political boundaries, without distinction of class or colour. Not less radical was the second innovation, a necessary corollary of the first, viz. the ecclesiastical autonomy and independence of the new spiritual society or Church, one, Catholic. “Never,” writes J. B. Martineau, “until the Church arose did faith undertake the conquest alone, and triumph over diversities of speech and antipathies of race.”

But Paganism, with its system of state absolutism in spiritual as well as in temporal matters, has never accepted its defeat by the Catholic Church, a spiritual, autonomous society, distinct from the State. The tale of Byzantine heresies, from the fourth to the eighth century, were all efforts of each successive Emperor of Constantinople to shake off the spiritual supremacy of Rome, and be again the Pontifex Maximus of his dominions. The long struggle of the Investitures, the Constitutions of Clarendon, statutes of PrÆmunire, State Gallicanism, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 1792, Josephism in Austria, the Kultur-Kampf laws in Germany and Switzerland, 1870-76 were all episodes of this struggle, between the new dispensation and the ancient system of national religions under state supremacy. In the sixteenth century there was a vast renaissance of this latter system in a new dress called Erastianism. Lord Clarendon declared that this spiritual supremacy of rulers was “the better moiety of their sovereignty.” The old pagan, or Erastian system, triumphed in the eastern empire with the Schism of Photius, in Russia under Peter the Great, in England under Elizabeth, in all the Protestant States of northern Europe.

The well-defined purpose of the Revolution and of Napoleon, its heir-at-law, was to establish this system in France. After long and arduous negotiations the Concordat of 1801 was concluded with Pius VII. It was a bilateral contract between two sovereignties, the French Republic, as party of the first part, and the Holy See as party of the second part. It contains seventeen articles. To these, Napoleon, without the knowledge of the Pope, added seventy-six articles, and published both documents, in conjunction, as the law of Germinal l’an X. Great was the indignation, and loud were the protestations of the party of the second part, as we may well suppose. Nor is this surprising when we consider that one of these “organic articles” (24th) requires that all professors in ecclesiastical seminaries shall “submit to teach the doctrine of the Declaration of 1682, and the bishops shall send act of this submission to the Council of State.” In other words, the Catholic Church in France was to turn Protestant. Even Louis XIV, who had had this famous Declaration drawn up to spite Pope Innocent, who alone in Europe had dared to oppose him, never exacted that it should be taught, and had practically suppressed it before he died. Since the Council of the Vatican the subscribing to and teaching the Declaration of 1682 would be an act of formal heresy and apostasy. The fifty-sixth of the organic articles renders obligatory the use of the Republican calendar to the exclusion of the Gregorian. There are other articles equally absurd, which have never been observed.

Now M. Combes declares that “in deliberately separating the diplomatic convention (Concordat) from the organic articles, Pius VII and his successors have destroyed its efficacy.” Napoleon himself understood this and, for seven years, he held Pius VII a close prisoner, hoping to break his spirit and wring from him another Concordat which would be an abdication. Fortunately, the tide of war turned against Napoleon, and the new Concordat was never ratified. M. Combes recognizes that no Government since a century has been able to enforce the “organic articles,” and that the only course left is “divorce,” and by this unstatesmanlike term he means the repudiation of thirty or forty million francs of the national debt. The payment in perpetuity of suitable subsidies to the Catholic clergy is stipulated for by Article 14 of the Concordat. It is a quid pro quo of Article 13, by which the Holy See consented to give a clear title to all the Church property confiscated by the Revolution. The payment of these subsidies was inscribed on the national debt by the spoliators themselves, the Conventionals of 1792, and it was solemnly recognized as part of this debt in 1816, 1828, 1830, and 1848. The salaries paid to Jewish and Protestant clergymen are purely gratuitous. Their property was not stolen by the Revolution in 1792. They had no part in the Concordat.

But the projected spoliation of the Catholic clergy is a mere detail, and would be an insignificant ransom, if at this price the French Catholics could have liberty such as we enjoy in England and the United States. “Separation” means strangulation in Jacobin parlance. They would infinitely prefer Erastianism. But the defection of the Bishops of Dijon and Laval, on whom they counted, and the spontaneous and unanimous adhesion of the episcopate to the Holy See, which provoked the thunders of M. Combes against the Vatican in July, have shown the impossibility of a schism. It was tried for four years a century ago and failed. The “Separation” plan was also tried in 1795 for two or three years, and was an epoch of virulent persecution. History will repeat itself, though not exactly in the same words.