It is the sage remark of Montesquieu, that, under a government of laws, liberty consists simply in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in freedom from any constraint to do what we ought not to will. The true conservative not only accepts this maxim, but he gives it completeness by prescribing a pure religion as the standard of what a people ought to will, and as the only sober guide of conscience. And this may be added as a corollary, that so long as a free people is substantially Christian, their conscience coinciding with absolute right, their liberty, so far as affected by popular causes, will preserve itself from fatal disorders. Such a people, possessed of liberty, will know it and be content. But where the popular conscience is morbid, they may have liberty without knowing it. They will fancy that they ought to will what they are not permitted to will, and the most wholesome restraints of wise laws will appear tyrannical. For such a people there can be no cure, till they are restored to a healthy conscience. A despotism successfully established over them, and then moderately maintained, and benevolently administered, is the only thing that can save them from self-destruction.

I was not writing at random, then, my Basil, when I said in my last letter that the first want of France is a national conscience. As a nation, the French lack the moral sense. What sign of moral life have they shown for the last fifty years? The root of bitterness in the body politic of France, is the astonishing infidelity of the people. Whatever be the causes, the fact is not to be denied: the land whose crown was once, by courtesy, most Christian, must draw on courtesy and charity too, if it be now called Christian at all. The spirit of unbelief is national. It is the spirit of French literature—of the French press—of the French academy—of the French senate; I had almost added of the French church; and if I hesitate, it is not so much because I doubt the corrupting influences of the French priesthood, as because they are no longer Gallican priests, but simply the emissaries of Ultramontanism. There is no longer a French church. The Revolution made an end of that. When Napoleon, walking at Malmaison, heard the bells of Ruel, he was overpowered with a sense of the value of such associations as they revived in his own heart, and forthwith he opened the churches which had so long been the sepulchres of a nation's faith, convinced that they served a purpose in government, if only as a cheap police. He opened the churches, but he could not restore the church of France. He could do no more than enthrone surviving Ultramontanism in her ancient seats, and that by a manoeuvre, which made it a creature and a slave of his ambition. When it revolted, he talked of Gallican liberties, but only for political purposes. Nor did the Restoration do any better. The church of St Louis was defunct. Gallican immunities were indeed asserted on paper; but, in effect, the Jesuits gained the day. The Orleans usurpation carried things further; for the priesthood, severed from the state, became more Ultramontane from apparent necessity, and lost, accordingly, their feeble hold on the remaining respect of the French people. Who was not startled, when the once devout Lamartine talked of "the new Christianity" of Liberty and Equality over the ruins of the Orleans dynasty, and thus betrayed the irreligion into which he had been repelled by the Christianity of French ecclesiastics! Thus always uncongenial to the national character, Ultramontanism has coated, like quicksilver, and eaten away those golden liberties which St Louis consecrated his life to preserve, and with which have perished the life and power of Christianity in France.

The history of France is emphatically a religious history. Every student must be struck with it. To understand even the history of its court, one must get at least an outline of what is meant by Jansenism and Molinism, and Ultramontanism, and the whole tissue of isms which they have created. No historian gives us an exemption from this amount of polemical information. The school of Michelet is as forward as that of de Maistre, in claiming a "religious mission" for France among the nations; and de Stael and Chateaubriand are impressed with the same idea. Her publicists, as well as her statesmen, have been always, in their own way, theologians; and, from Louis IX. to Louis XVI., the spirit of theology was, in some form or other, the spirit of every reign. Not only the Mazarins, but the Pompadours also, have made religion part of their craft; and religion became so entirely political under Louis XV., that irreligion was easily made political in its stead. In the court of France, in fact, theology has been the common trade; the trade of CondÉ and of Guise, of Huguenot and Papist, of Jansenist and Jesuit, of philosopher and poet, of harlots, and almost of lap-dogs. Even Robespierre must legislate upon the "consoling principle of an Etre SuprÊme," and Napoleon elevates himself into "the eldest son of the church." "A peculiar characteristic of this monarchy," says de Maistre, "is that it possesses a certain theocratic element, special to itself, which has given it fourteen centuries of duration." This element has given its colour to reigns and revolutions alike; and if one admit the necessity of religion to the perpetuity of a state, it deserves our attention, in the light of whatever contending parties have advanced upon the subject.

Let us begin with the revolutionists themselves. In the month of June 1844, Monsieur Quinet, "of the college of France," stood in his lecture-room, venting his little utmost against the "impassioned leaven of Reaction," which he declared to be fermenting in French society. His audience was literally the youth of nations; for, as I gather from his oratory, it embraced not only his countrymen, but, besides them, Poles, Russians, Italians, Germans, Hungarians, Spaniards, Portuguese, and a sprinkling of negroes. Upon this interesting assembly, in which black spirits and white must have maintained the proportion, and something of the appearance, of their corresponding ebony and ivory in the key-board of a pianoforte, and which he had tuned to his liking by a series of preparatory exercises, he played, as a grand finale, a most brilliant experimental quick-step, which satisfied him that every chord vibrated in harmony with his own sweet voice. He was closing his instructions, and addressed his pupils, not as disciples, but as friends. His great object seems to have been to convince them of their own importance, as the illuminated school of a new gospel of which he is himself the dispenser, and through which, he promised them, they would become, with him, the regenerators of the world. Having fully indoctrinated them with his new Christianity, it was necessary to work them into fury against the old. He had already established the unity of politics and religion; he had shown, very artfully, that Christianity had identified itself with Ultramontanism, and that France must perish if it should triumph; and he had only to convince them of danger from that quarter, to influence the combustible spirits of his credulous hearers to the heat which his purpose required. This he did by bellowing Reaction, and anathematising Schlegel and de Maistre.

You were mistaken then, my Basil, in supposing this word Reaction altogether a bugbear, and in understanding it with reference only to the counter-spirit in favour of legitimacy, which has been generated by the revolution of last year. You see it was the hobgoblin of a certain class of fanatics, long before Louis Philippe had received his notice to quit. It was an "impassioned leaven" in French society five years ago, in the heated imagination, or else in the artful theory, of Quinet. What was really the case? There was, in his sober opinion, as much danger from the reaction at that time as from the Great Turk, and no more. He merely used it as an academic man-of-straw to play at foils with. He held it up to contempt as an exploded folly, and then pretended it was a living danger, only to increase his own reputation for daring, and to quicken the development of antagonist principles. He little dreamed the manikin would come to life, and show fight for the Bourbons and legitimacy. He cried Wolf for his own purposes, and the actual barking of the pack must be a terrible retribution! The reaction of 1848 must have come upon the professors like doomsday. I can conceive of him, at present, only as of Friar Bacon, when he stumbled upon the discovery of gunpowder. A moment since, he stood in his laboratory compounding the genuine elixir of life, and assuring his gaping disciples of the success of his experiment; but there has been a sudden detonation, and if the professor has miraculously escaped, it is only to find chaos come again, his admiring auditors blown to atoms, and nothing remaining of his philosophical trituration, except his smutty self, and a very bad smell. I speak of him as the personification of his system. Personally, he has been a gainer by the revolution. Guizot put him out of his place, and the Republic has put him back; but the Reaction is upon him, and his theories are already resolved into their original gases. "The college of France" may soon come to a similar dissolution.

Let us look for a while at foreign conservatism through Monsieur Quinet's glasses. I have introduced you to de Maistre, and de Maistre is to him what the Pope was to Luther. Quinet is, in his own way, another reformer; in fact, he announces his system, in its relations to Protestantism, as another noon risen upon mid-day. The theological character of foreign politics is as prominent in his writings as in those of his antagonists. Thus, to illustrate the character of the French Revolution, he takes us to the Council of Trent; and to demolish French Tories, he attacks Ultramontanism. This is indeed philosophical, considering the actual history of Europe, and the affinities of its Conservative party. Action and reaction are always equal. The cold infidelity of Great Britain was met by the cool reason of Butler, and sufficiently counteracted by even the frigid apologies of Watson, and the mechanical faith of Paley. But the passionate unbelief of the EncyclopÆdists produced the unbalanced credulity of the reaction; and Diderot, d'Alembert, and Voltaire, have almost, by fatality, involved the noble spirits of their correctors in that wrongheaded habit of believing, which shows its vigorous weakness in the mild Ballanche and the wavering Lamennais, and develops all its weak vigour in de Maistre and de Bonald. Thus it happens that Mons. Quinet gives to his published lectures the title of Ultramontanism; for he prefers to meet his antagonists on the untenable field of their superstition, and there to win a virtual victory over their philosophical and political wisdom. His book has reached me through the translation of Mr Cocks,[2] who has kindly favoured the literature of England with several similar importations from "the College of France," and who seems to be the chosen mouthpiece of the benevolent author himself, in addressing the besotted self-sufficiency of John Bull. So far, indeed, as it discusses Ultramontanism in itself, the work may have its use. It shows, with some force and more vociferation, that it has been the death of Spain, and of every state in which it has been allowed to work; and that, moreover, it has been the persevering foe of law, of science, and of morality. This is a true bill; but of him, as of his master Michelet, it may be said with emphasis, Tout, jusqu' À la vÉritÉ, trompe dans ses Écrits. It does not follow, as he would argue, that political wisdom and Christian truth fall with Ultramontanism; nor does he prove it be so, by proving that de Maistre and others have thought so. The school of the Reaction are convicted of a mistake, into which their masters in Great Britain never fell. That is all that Quinet has gained, though he crows lustily for victory, and proceeds to construct his own political religion, as if Christianity were confessedly defunct. As to the style of the Professor, so far as I can judge it from a tumid and verbose translation, it is not wanting in the hectic brilliancy of rhetoric raised to fever-heat, or of French run mad. Even its argument, I doubt not, sounded logical and satisfactory, when its slender postulate of truth was set off with oratorical sophistry, enforced with professorial shrugs of the shoulders, or driven home with conclusive raps upon the auxiliary tabatiÈre. But the inanimate logic, as it lies coffined in the version of Mr Cocks, looks very revolting. In fact, stripped of its false ornament, all its practical part is simply the revolutionism of the Chartists. Worse stuff was never declaimed to a subterranean conclave of insurgent operatives by a drunken Barabbas, with Tom Paine for his text, and a faggot of pikes for his rostrum. The results have been too immediate for even Mons. Quinet's ambition. From hearing sedition in the "College of France," his motley and party-coloured audience has broken up to enforce it behind the barricades. They turned revolutionists against reaction in posse, and reaction in esse is the very natural consequence.

"Every nation, like every individual, has received a certain mission, which it must fulfil. France exercises over Europe a real magistracy, which cannot be denied, and she was at the head of its religious system." So says de Maistre, and so far his bitter enemy is agreed. But, says de Maistre, "She has shamefully abused her mission; and since she has used her influence to contradict her vocation, and to debauch the morals of Europe, it is not surprising that she is restored to herself by terrible remedies." Here speaks the spirit of Reaction, and Quinet immediately shows fight. In his view she has but carried out her vocation. The Revolution was a glorious outbreak towards a new universal principle. In the jargon of his own sect, "it was a revolution differing from all preceding revolutions, ancient or modern, precisely in this, that it was the deliverance of a nation from the bonds and limits of her church, into the spirit of universality." The spirit of the national church, he maintains, had become Ultramontane; had lost its hold on men's minds; had made way for the ascendency of philosophy, and had tacitly yielded the sceptre of her sway over the intelligence and the conscience to Rousseau and Voltaire. Nor does the Professor admit that subsequent events have restored that sceptre. On the contrary, he appeals to his auditors in asserting that the priesthood have ceased to guide the French conscience. His audience applauds, and the enraptured Quinet catches up the response like an auctioneer. He is charmed with his young friends. He is sure the reaction will never seduce them into travelling to heaven by the old sterile roads. As for the rÉactionnaires, no language can convey his contempt for them. "After this nation," says he, "has been communing with the spirit of the universe upon Sinai, conversing face to face with God, they propose to her to descend from her vast conceptions, and to creep, crestfallen, into the spirit of sect." Thus he contrasts the catholicity of Pantheism with the catholicity of Romanism; and thus, with the instinct of a bulldog, does he fasten upon the weak points of foreign Conservatism, or hold it by the nose, a baited victim, in spite of its massive sinews and its generous indignation. This plan is a cunning one. He sinks the Conservative principles of the Reaction, and gives prominence only to its Ultramontanism. He shows that modern Ultramontanism is the creature of the Council of Trent, and reviews the history of Europe as connected with that Council. He proves the pernicious results of that Council in every state which has acknowledged it; shows that not preservation but ruin has been its inevitable effect upon national character; and so congratulates France for having broken loose from it in the great Revolution. He then deprecates its attempted resuscitation by Schlegel and de Maistre, and, falling back upon the "religious vocation" of France, exhorts his auditors to work it out in the spirit of his own evangel. This new gospel, it is almost needless to add, is that detestable impiety which was so singularly religious in the revolution of last February, profaning the name of the Redeemer to sanctify its brutal excesses, and pretending to find in the spirit of his gospel the elements of its furious Liberty and Equality. In the true sentiment of that revolution, an ideal portrait of the Messiah is elaborately engraved for the title-page of Mr Cock's translation! So a French quack adorns his shop with a gilded bust of Hippocrates! It is a significant hint of the humble origin of a system which, it must be understood, owes its present dignity and importance entirely to the genius of Mons. Quinet.

That the Reaction is thus identified with Ultramontanism, is a fact which its leading spirits would be the very last to deny. The necessity of religion to the prosperity of France is their fundamental principle; and religion being, in their minds, inseparable from Romanism, they will not see its defects; and their blind faith, like chloroform, makes them absolutely insensible to the sharp point of the weak spear with which Quinet pierces them. And it is but fair to suppose that Quinet and his colleagues are equally honest in considering Christianity and Ultramontanism synonymous. They see that the old religion of France has become, historically, a corrupt thing, and they propose a fresh Christianity in its place. Of one thing I am sure—they do not over-estimate the political importance of the Council of Trent. Let it be fairly traced in its connexions with kingdoms, with science, with letters, and with the conscience of nations, and it will be seen that Quinet is not far from correct, in taking it as the turning-point of the history of Europe. It produced Ultramontanism, or rather changed it from an abstraction into an organised system; and Ultramontanism, in its new shape, gave birth to the Jesuits. Christendom saw a new creed proposed as the bond of unity, and a new race of apostles propagating it with intrigue and with crime, and, in some places, with fire and sword. In proportion as the states of Europe incorporated Ultramontanism with their political institutions, they withered and perished. Old Romanism was one thing, and modern Ultramontanism another. Kingdoms that flourished while they were but Romanised, have perished since they became Tridentine.

Among English writers this distinction has not been generally made. Coleridge seems to have observed it, and has incidentally employed it in treating of another subject. But foreign literature is full of it, either tacitly implied or openly avowed, in different ways. Ultramontanism is, in Europe, a political and not merely a theological word,—its meaning results from its history. Before the Tridentine epoch, the national churches of Europe were still seven candle-sticks, in which glittered the seven stars of an essential personality and individual completeness. The "Church of Rome" still meant the Roman See, and, vast as were its usurpations over the national churches, it had neither reduced them to absolute unity in theology, nor absorbed their individuality into its own. The Roman Church, as we now understand it, was created by the Council of Trent, by a consolidation of national churches, and the quiet substitution of the creed of Pius IV. for the ancient creeds, as a test of unity. This fact explains the position of the Reformed before and after that extraordinary assembly. Till its final epoch, they had never fully settled their relations to the Papal See. The history of England is full of illustrations of this fact. Old Grostete of Lincoln spurned the authority of the Pope, but continued in all his functions as an English bishop till his death, in the thirteenth century. Wycliffe, in the fourteenth, was still more remarkable for resisting the papal pretensions, yet he died in the full exercise of his pastoral office, while elevating the host at Childermas. Henry VIII. himself had the benefit of masses for his pious soul at Notre Dame; and his friend Erasmus lived on easy terms with the Reformed, and yet never broke with the Vatican. Even the English prayer-book, under Elizabeth, was sanctioned by papal authority, with the proviso of her recognition of the supremacy, and for twelve years of her reign the popish party lived in communion with the Reformed Church of England. During all this period the dogmas of popes were fearlessly controverted by Cisalpine theologians, who still owned their supremacy in a qualified sense, and who boldly appealed to a future council against the decisions of the See of Rome. Ultramontanism had then, indeed, its home beyond the mountains, and when it came bellowing over its barrier, it was often met as "the Tinchel cows the game." But modern Ultramontanism is another thing. It is an organised system, swallowing up the nationalities of constituent churches, and giving them the absolute unity of an individual Roman church, in which Jesuitism is the circulating life-blood, and the Italian consistory the heart and head together. Such was the prodigy hatched during the seventeen years of Tridentine incubation. It appeared at the close of those interminable sessions, so different from all that had been anticipated, that it startled all Europe. It had quietly changed everything, and made Rome the sole church of Southern Europe. Quinet has not failed to present this fact very strongly. "That Council," says he, "had not, like its predecessors, its roots in all nations; it did not assemble about it the representatives of all Christendom. Its spirit was to give full sanction to the idea, which certain popes of the middle ages had established, of their pre-eminence over oecumenical assemblies. Thenceforward, what had been the effect of a particular genius, became the very constitution of the church. The great adroitness consisted in making the change without anywhere speaking of it. The church which was before tempered by assemblies convoked from all the earth, became an absolute monarchy. From that moment the ecclesiastical world is silent. The meeting of councils is closed, no more discussions, no more solemn deliberations; everything is regulated by bulls, letters, and ordinances. Popedom usurps all Christendom; the book of life is shut; for three centuries not one page has been added." One would think the school of the Reaction would feel the force of facts so efficiently urged, even in spite of their towering disgust at the purposes for which they are employed. In fact, their own maxims may be turned against them with great power, in this matter of Ultramontanism. De Maistre, in his argument for unwritten constitutions, speaks of the creeds of the church as furnishing no exception to his rule; for these, he argues, are not codes of belief, but they partake the nature of hymns—they have rhythmical beauty, they are chanted in solemn services, they are confessed to God upon the harp and organ. Now this is indeed true of those three ancient creeds which are still chanted in the service of the Church of England; but the creed of Pius IV., which is the distinguishing creed of the Roman church, is absolutely nothing else than a code of belief, and is the only creed in Christendom which lacks that rhythmical glory which he considers a test of truth! Even Quinet notices this liturgic impotence of the Ultramontane religion. "The Roman church," he says, "has lost in literature, together with the ideal of Christianity, the sentiment of her own poetry. What has become of the burning accents of Ambrose and Paulinus? Urban VIII. writes pagan verses to the Cavalier Berni;[3] and instead of Stabat mater or Salutaris hostia, the princes of the church compose mythological sonnets, at the very moment when Luther is thundering Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, that Te Deum of the Reformation."

No wonder France was reluctant to acknowledge a Council which had thus imposed a new creed on Christendom, and which dictated a new organisation to the ancient churches of Southern Europe. While other nations subscribed with artful evasions, she hesitated and submitted, but gave no formal assent. Rome had come over the Alps to absorb her, and she was loth to yield her birthright. She stood long in what Schlegel calls "a disguised half-schism," struggling against dissolution, the last lump to melt away in the Tridentine element. But where now is the church which St Louis left to France, strong in her anti-papal bulwarks? Where now are those bulwarks, the labour of his life, and the chief glory of a name which even Rome has canonised? As for Spain, Ultramontanism was riveted upon her by the Inquisition, and she is twice dead. One sees no more the churches of Western Christendom, fortified by Pragmatic Sanctions, and treated with as younger sisters, even by domineering Rome! They have disappeared; and the only light that lingers in their places is the sad sepulchral flame that owes its existence to decay.

Such is Ultramontanism. Follow its history, in connexion with political events in France, and you cannot fail to charge it with all the responsibility of French infidelity, and, consequently, of the present lamentable condition of the nation. Thrice has the spirit of France been in deadly collision with it—in the fire, in the wind, and in the earthquake. Its first antagonists were the Huguenots, and over them it triumphed by the persecutions of Louis XIV., following up the policy of Catherine de Medicis. It was next confronted by Jansenism under Louis XV., and that it overcame by intrigue and by ridicule. Under Louis XVI. it was obliged to meet the atheism of the EncyclopÆdists, which it had itself produced, and which terribly visited upon its head its own infernal inventions. To overwhelm the Port-Royalists, it had resorted to low caricatures and epigrams, and to philosophical satires upon their piety. Voltaire took from these the hint of his first warfare against Christianity. This was first a joke and a song, and then Ca Ira and A la lanterne; first the popguns of wit, then the open battery of Ecrasez l'infÂme, and then the exploding mine of revolution. It merely reversed the stratagems of Ultramontanism, which began in massacre, and finished its triumphs with a jest; and both together have stamped the nation with its indelible character of half tiger and half monkey. The origin of such an issue of infamy cannot be concealed. France owes it all to her conduct in the crisis of the Reformation. Had the Gallic Church, under Henry of Navarre, fully copied the example of England, or had she even carried out her own instincts, repudiating the Council of Trent, and falling back upon the Pragmatic Sanction for a full defence of her independence, how different would have been her history, and that of the monarchy to which she would have proved a lasting support! Let the difference between Henri Quatre and Louis Quatorze, between Sully and Richelieu, illustrate the reply. Or it may be imagined, by comparing the campaigns of Cevennes with the peaceful mission of Fenelon to the Huguenots of Saintonge. Where now both church and state appear the mere materials of ambition to such as Mazarin and Dubois, or where even the purer genius of such as Bossuet and Massillon is exhibited in humiliating and disgraceful associations, the places of history might have been adorned by such bright spirits as were immured at Port-Royal, or such virtue as sketched the ideal kingdom of TÉlÉmaque, and rendered illustrious a life of uncomplaining sorrow in the pastoral chair of Cambray. Where the court can boast one Bourdaloue, there would have been, beside him, not a few like Pascal; and in the rural parishes there would have been many such as Arnauld and Nicole, training in simple piety and loyal worth the successive generations of a contented people. As for the palace, it would never have been haunted by the dark spirit of Jesuitism, which has so often hid itself in the robes of royalty, and reigned in the sovereign's name; and the people would have known it only as a fearful thing beyond the Pyrenees, whose ear was always in the confessional, and whose hand was ever upon the secret wires of the terrible Inquisition. The capital would have been a citadel of law, and the kingdom still a Christian state. Its history might have lacked a "Grand Monarque," and certainly a Napoleon; but then there would have been no dragonnades, and possibly no Dubarrydom; no EncyclopÆdie, and no Ca Ira! The bell of St Germain l'Auxerrois would have retained its bloody memory as the tocsin of St Bartholomew's massacre, but it would never have sounded its second peal of infamy as the signal for storming the Tuileries, and for opening those successive vials of avenging woe, in which France is expiating her follies and her crimes.

Bossuet, in his funeral oration upon Queen Henrietta, unhappily for his own cause, has challenged a comparison between the histories of France and England, which, if he were living in our days, he would hardly renew with pleasure. The Anglican Reformation was rashly charged by him with all the responsibility of the Great Rebellion; but facts have proved that revolutions are by no means confined to anti-papal countries, while history may be safely appealed to by Englishmen, in deciding as to the kind of religion which has best encountered the excesses of rebellion, and most effectually cured the disease. The Anglican Church survived the Great Rebellion, with fidelity to itself: the Gallic Church perished in the Revolution. Before the vainglorious taunt of Bossuet had passed from the memory of living men, all those causes were at work in France, which bred the whirlwind of infidelity, and which insured a revolution, not of fanaticism, but of atheism. The real power of the two churches, in moulding the character of a people, and retaining the loyalty of its noblest intellect, became, then, singularly apparent. In France, it was superstition to believe in God. In France, philosophers were afraid to own a great First Cause. In France, noblemen were ashamed to confess a conscience. In France, bishops and cardinals were foremost in apostasy, and claimed their sacerdotal rank only to become the high-priests of atheistic orgies. It is needless to cite, in comparison, the conduct of parallel classes during the Great Rebellion in England; while, at the very moment in which these things were transacting, the brightest genius in her Imperial Parliament could proclaim himself not only a believer, but a crusader for Christianity. It was a noble answer to the ghost of poor Bossuet, when such a man as Burke, addressing a gentleman of France, declared the adhesion of England to her Reformed religion to be not the result of indifference but of zeal; when he proudly contrasted the intelligent faith of his countrymen with the fanatical impiety of the French; and when, with a dignity to which sarcasm has seldom attained, he reminded a nation of atheists, that there was a people, every whit its peer, which still exulted in the Christian name, and among whom religion, so far from being relegated to provinces, and the firesides of peasants, still sat in the first rank of the legislature, and "reared its mitred front" in the very face of the throne. The withering rebuke of such a boast must be measured by the standard of the time when it was given. In Paris, the mitre had just been made the ornament of an ass, which bore in mockery, upon its back, the vessels of the holy sacrament, and dragged a Bible at its tail.

Thus the colossal genius of Burke stood before the world, in that war of elements, trampling the irreligion of France beneath his feet, like the Archangel thrusting Satan to his bottomless abyss. The spectacle was not lost. It was that beautiful and sublime exhibition of moral grandeur that quickened the noblest minds in Europe to imitative virtue, and produced the school of the Reaction. It was rather the spirit of British faith, and law, and loyalty, personified in him. The same spirit had been felt in France before: it had moulded the genius of Montesquieu, abstractly; but Burke was its mighty concrete, and he wrote himself like a photograph upon kindred intellect throughout the world. Before his day, the character of English liberty had been laboriously studied and mechanically learned; but he, as its living representative and embodiment, made himself the procreant author of an intellectual family. I fear you will regard this as a theory of my own, but I would not have ventured to say this on my mere surmise. One whose religion identifies him with Ultramontanism has made the acknowledgment before me. I refer to the English editor and translator of Schlegel's Philosophy of History. According to him, Schlegel at Vienna, and Goerres at Munich, were "the supreme oracles of that illustrious school of liberal conservatives, which numbered, besides those eminent Germans, a Baron von Haller in Switzerland, a Viscount de Bonald in France, a Count Henri de Merode in Belgium, and a Count de Maistre in Piedmont."[4] From the writings of these great men, in a greater or less degree, he augurs the future political regeneration of Europe; and yet, strongly warped as he is away from England, and towards Rome, as the source of all moral and national good, he does not conceal the fact that this splendid school of the Reaction was "founded by our great Burke." My hopes from the writings of these men are not so sanguine: but, so far as they are true to their original, they have been already of great service. They may hereafter be made still more powerful for good; and if, at the same time, the rising school of Conservatism, which begins to make itself felt in America, shall impart its wholesome influences to an off-shoot of England, so vast already, and of such grand importance to the future, then, and not till then, will be duly estimated the real greatness of those splendid services which Burke was created to perform, not for his country only, but for the human race.

Perhaps it could hardly have been otherwise; but it must always be deplored that the Conservatism of England was reproduced on the Continent in connexion with the Christianity of Ultramontanism. The conservatism of de Stael and of Chateaubriand, though repudiated by the rÉactionnaires, is indeed worthy of honourable mention, as their characters will ever be of all admiration; yet it must be owned to be deficient in force, and by no means executive. It was the Conservatism of impulse—the Conservatism of genius, but not the Conservatism of profound philosophy and energetic benevolence. The spirit that breathes in the GÉnie du Christianisme is always beautiful, and often devout, yet it has been justly censured, as recommending less the truth than the beauty of the religion of Jesus Christ; and though it doubtless did something to reproduce the religious sentiment, it seems to have effected nothing in behalf of religious principle. Its author would have fulfilled a nobler mission had he taught his countrymen, in sober prose, their radical defects in morality, and their absolute lack of a conscience. The Conservatives of the Reaction have at least attempted greater things. They have bluntly told the French nation that they must reform; they have set themselves to produce again the believing spirit: their mistake has been, that they have confounded faith with superstition, and taken the cause of the Jesuits into the cause of their country and their God. Nothing could have been more fatal. It arms against them such characters as Michelet,[5] with his Priests, Women, and Families, and makes even Quinet formidable with his lectures on "the Jesuits and Ultramontanism." Yet it must be urged in their behalf, that they have been pardonably foolish, for they drew their error with their mother's milk; and when even faith was ridiculed as credulity, it was an extravagance almost virtuous to rush into superstition. Such is the dilemma of a good man in Continental Europe: his choice lies between the extremes of corrupt faith and philosophic unbelief. This was the misfortune of poor Frederick Schlegel; and, disgusted with the hollow rationalism of Germany, he became a Papist, in order to profess himself a Christian. The mistake was magnanimously made. We cannot but admire the man who eats the book of Roman infallibility, in his hunger for the bread of everlasting life. Even Chateaubriand must claim our sympathies on this ground. Our feelings are with such errorists—our convictions of truth remain unaltered; and we cannot but lament the fatality which has thus attended European Conservatism like its shadow, and exposed it to successful assaults from its foes. I have shown how they use their opportunity. And no wonder, when this substitution of Ultramontanism for Christianity has involved de Maistre in an elaborate defence of the Inquisition—debased the Conservatism of de Bonald to slavish absolutism;[6] and when true to its deadening influence upon the conscience, it implicated von Haller in the infamous perjury which, though committed under the sanction of a Romish bishop, led to his ignominious expulsion from the sovereign council at Berne. Chateaubriand has not escaped an infection from the same atmosphere. It taints his writings. In such a work as the GÉnie du Christianisme, denounced as it is by the Ultramontanists generally, there is much that is not wholesome. The eloquent champion of faith wields the glaive as stoutly for fables as for eternal verities. The poet makes beauty drag decay in her train, and ties a dead corpse to the wings of immortality. Truth itself, in his apology, though brought out in grand relief, is sculptured on a sepulchre full of dead men's bones; and, unhappily, while we draw near to examine the perfection of his ideal, we find ourselves repelled by a lurking scent of putrefaction.

The career of de Maistre is, in epitome, that of his school. Disgusted with Jacobinism, and naturally delighting in paradox, it seemed to afford him relief to avow himself a papist, in an age of atheism. He was not only the author of the reactionary movement, but his character was itself the product of Reaction. Driven with his king to Sardinia, in 1792, by the invasion of Piedmont, his philosophical contempt for the revolutionists was exhibited in his Considerations sur la France, from which, in a former letter, I have made so long a quotation. In this work—in some respects his best—his Ultramontanism is far from extravagant: and not only his religious principles as they were then, but also the effect which everything English was then producing on his mind, is clearly seen in a comment upon the English Church, which, as it passed his review, and was printed again in 1817 with no retractation, must be regarded as somewhat extraordinary. "If ever Christians reunite," says he, "as all things make it their interest to do, it would seem that the movement must take rise in the Church of England. Calvinism was French work, and consequently an exaggerated production. We are pushed too far away by the sectarians of so unsubstantial a religion, and there is no mean by which they may comprehend us: but the Church of England, which touches us with one hand, touches with the other a class whom we cannot reach; and although, in a certain point of view, she may thus appear the butt of two parties, (as being herself rebellious, though preaching authority,) yet in other respects she is most precious, and may be considered as one of those chemical intermÈdes, which are capable of producing a union between elements dissociable in themselves." He seldom shows such moderation; for the Greek and Anglican churches he specially hates. In 1804 he was sent ambassador to St Petersburg; and there he resided till 1817, fulfilling his diplomatic duties with that zeal for his master, and that devotion to conservative interests, which are the spirit of his writings. There he published, in 1814, the pithy Essai sur le principe gÉnÉrateur des Constitutions, in which he reduced to an abstract form the doctrines of his former treatise on France. His style is peculiarly relishable, sometimes even sportive; but its main maxims are laid down with a dictatorial dignity and sternness, which associate the tractate, in the minds of many, with the writings of Montesquieu. This essay, so little known in England, has found an able translator and editor in America, who commends it to his countrymen as an antidote to those interpretations which are put upon our constitutional law by the political disciples of Rousseau. I commend the simple fact to your consideration, as a sign of the more earnest tone of thinking, on such matters, which is beginning to be felt among us. The fault of the essay is its practical part, or those applications into which his growing Ultramontanism diverted his sound theories. His principles are often capable of being turned upon himself, as I have noticed in the matter of creeds. His genius also found a congenial amusement in translating Plutarch's Delays of Divine Justice, which he accompanied with learned notes, illustrating the influence of Christianity upon a heathen mind. On his return from St Petersburg in 1817, appeared his violent Ultramontane work, Du Pape, in which he most ingeniously, but very sophistically, uses in support of the papacy an elaborate argument, drawn from the good which an overruling Providence has accomplished, by the very usurpations and tyrannies of the Roman See. As if this were not enough, however, he closes his life and labours with another work, the SoirÉes de St Petersbourg, in which, with bewitching eloquence, he expends all his powers of varied learning, and pointed sarcasm, and splendid sophistry, upon questions which have but the one point of turning everything to the account of his grand theory of church and state. Thus, from first to last, he identifies his political and moral philosophy with religious dogmas essentially ruinous to liberty, and which, during three centuries, have wasted every kingdom in which they have gained ascendency. To the direct purpose of uprooting the little that remained of Gallicanism, he devoted a treatise, which accompanies his work Du Pape, and of which the first book is entitled, De l'Esprit d'opposition nourri en France contre le Saint-SiÈge. Its points may be stated in a simple sentence from the works of his coadjutor, Frederick Schlegel, who, in a few words, gives the theory which has been the great mistake of the Reaction. "The disguised half-schism of the Gallican church," says he,—"not less fatal in its historical effects than the open schism of the Greeks—has contributed very materially towards the decline of religion in France, down to the period of the Restoration."[7] He illustrates it by the disputes of Louis XIV. with the court of Rome, but forgets to say anything of his extermination of the Huguenots. In one sense, however, he is right. It was precisely the half-schism to which the mischief is attributable. This half-way work it was that enabled Louis XIV. to assert the Gallican theory against a semi-Protestant pope, for the very purpose of fostering genuine Ultramontanism and favouring the Jesuits; while under another pontiff he could repudiate Gallicanism, and force the clergy to retract what he had forced them to adopt! The schism of England was doubtless "an open schism," in the opinion of Schlegel, and if so, it should have been followed, on his theory, by worse effects; but Schlegel lives too long after the days of Bossuet to bring her example into view. The natural appeal would have been to that example, as its history is cotemporary; but he adroitly diverts attention from so instructive a parallel, and cunningly drags in "the open schism of the Greeks!" Thus, against a bristling front of facts, he drives his theory that France has not been Romish enough, and lends all his energies to render her less Gallican and more Tridentine. Were he now alive, he might see reason to amend his doctrine in the condition of Rome itself! But the condition of France is quite as conclusive. Since the Restoration, the French Church has been growing more and more Ultramontane, and the people are worse and worse. Gallicanism is extinct, but results are all against the Reactionary theory. France has no more a la VendÉe; there will be no more Chouans; the present Church is incapable of reviving such things. It makes the infidels. I know there is less show of rampant atheism just now than formerly; but if there is less of paroxysm, there is less of life. France dies of a chronic atheism. The AbbÉ Bonnetat, writing in 1845 on The Religious and Moral Wants of the French Population, expresses nothing but contempt for the alleged improvement in religious feeling. According to him, almost a tenth of the male population, in any given district, not only do not believe in God, but glory in their unbelief. Half of all the rest make no secret of their infidelity as to the immortality of the soul; and their wives are equally sceptical, to the curse of their children's children! "The residue believe," says the AbbÉ, "only in the sense of not denying. They affirm nothing, but, as compared with the others, they lack the science of misbelief." To go on with his melancholy picture, the divine and salutary institution of the Lord's day no longer effects its purpose. In towns, the working classes and tradespeople scarcely ever enter the churches. In the rural districts, a tenth of the people never go to church at all; and of the rest, one half may hear a mass on the five great festivals, while the other half, though more frequent in attendance, are very irregular. One Sunday they perform the duty perfunctorily; the next they work in the fields; the next they stay at home, amuse themselves, and forget religion as part of "dull care." The young folk, in many places, receive their first and last communion at twelve or fourteen, and that is the end of their conformity. A worse feature yet in the domestic manners, resulting from this state of religion, is the fact that girls and boys are brought up very much in the same way, and are thrown promiscuously together, spending their evenings where they choose. Parents have ceased to ask their children—Why were you not at church? Were you at vespers? Were you at mass? and in fact are the first to corrupt their offspring, by their brutal irreligion, and coarse language, and shameless behaviour.[8]

Such is the moral picture of France. The AbbÉ has brightened his mass of shadow with here and there a reflection of light, but there is no mistaking his work for a Claude Lorraine. France is in a moral eclipse, and her portrait presents, of necessity, the chiaro 'scuro of a Rembrandt. One needs no more than these confessions of a French ecclesiastic to account for her false and fickle notions of liberty, and for her interminable Émeutes and revolutions. Yet if Quinet has not wholly invented his assertions, the Conservatism of France is pledged to prescribe as remedies the same old poison from which the disease results. It would take the Christianity of the nation, at its last gasp, and dose it anew with Ultramontanism. They have adopted the sound principle, that Christianity moulds a people to enlightened notions of liberty, but they seem not to know that it does this by acting directly upon the conscience; and hence their political system is spoiled by their fatal substitution, for pure Christianity, of that spurious religion whose great defect is precisely this, that it does not undertake to cleanse and cure the conscience, but only to subject it, mechanically, to irrational authority. Montesquieu, in asserting the importance of Christianity, without question failed to detect this essential defect in Popery, but he instinctively taught his countrymen, by memorable example, to eschew Ultramontanism. In the closing scene of a life which, with all its blemishes, was a great life, and, in comparison with his times, a good one, he accepted with reverence the ministrations of his parish priest, but repulsed from his deathbed, with aversion and disgust, the officious and intrusive Jesuits.[9] De Maistre is more devout than Montesquieu, but he is less jealous of liberty, and his ideas of "what a people ought to will" are limited, if not illiberal. His more moderate ally, Ballanche, has not unjustly characterised him as "not, like Providence, merciful, but, like destiny, inexorable." It is impossible that a Conservatism, of which such is the sovereign genius, should achieve anything for the restoration of such a country as France. I have, indeed, predicted the restoration of the Bourbons, according to de Maistre's principles, by the sheer tenacity of life which belongs to a hereditary claim, and by which it outlasts all other pretensions. But I cannot think that either he or his disciples have done much to bring it about; and still less do I imagine that their system, as a system, can give permanence to the monarchy or prosperity to the state. On the contrary, let Mons. Berryer, or the Comte de Montalembert, attempt the settlement of the kingdom on the theory of the rÉactionnaires, and they will speedily bring it to that full stop which Heaven at last adjudges to princes as well as to people, "who show themselves untutored by calamity, and rebels to experience." They will, at best, prolong the era of revolutions to some indefinite epoch of futurity, and consign the nation to a fever, which will return periodically, like a tertian, and wear it out by shakings.

It will be well, then, if the imperial farce that must precede "the legitimate drama" shall prove somewhat protracted. The Legitimists, meantime, may become convinced of the blunder of the Reaction, and resolve upon a wiser and more sound conservatism. De Maistre hazards some predictions in his works, on which he stakes the soundness of his theories, and for which he challenges derision and contempt to his doctrines, if they fail. The position of Pio Nono, from the very outset of his career, has stultified those theories already; and if he remains permanently where he now is, it will be to good-breeding alone that de Maistre will owe his preservation from the contempt he has invoked, by staking his reputation on the conservative character of that very court of Rome, from which the democratic wildfire, that has inflamed all Europe, has proceeded! In any conceivable settlement of the Roman States, the Pontiff will hardly be to Europe what he has been during the former years of this century; and if he is to sink to a mere patriarchal primate, the grand dream of ultramontanism is dissipated.[10] It is to be hoped, then, that the restoration may be deferred till the Legitimists have been effectually taught the grand fallacy of ultramontane conservatism; and that Henry V. will ascend the throne, cured of the hereditary plague of his immediate ancestors, and willing to revert, for his example, to his great name-sake, Henri Quatre. He will need another Sully to restore France to a sound mind. His cause demands a minister who will not trust it to the tide of impulse on which it will come in, but who will labour with prudence and with foresight, to gain an anchorage before the ebb. Give but a minister to the restoration capable of that kind of patient and practical forecast, which sent Peter to the dock-yards; and let him begin with the parochial schools, to mould a new race of Frenchmen under the influences of true religion; and let him have the seventeen years which Louis Philippe wasted on steam-ships and bastions, and Montpensier marriages; and then, if it be "men that constitute a state," there is yet a future of hope for France. And forgive me for adding, Basil, that if England shall reverse this policy, and make the national schools the sources of disaffection to the national religion—then may she expect to see her Oxford and Cambridge degraded to such seats of sedition as "the College of France," and their ingenuous youth converted from gownsmen into blousemen, under such savans as Quinet. Remember, too, in connexion with what I have written, that Ireland is the most ultramontane of all nations under heaven, and you will be able to estimate the value of government measures for its relief! May God open the eyes of all who seek the prosperity of the British empire to the primary importance of a wholesome national religion, retaining its hold on the national heart, and moulding the national conscience to the grand political wisdom of the proverb—"My son, fear the Lord and the king, and meddle not with them that are given to change." Yours,