ART. V. THE PROSPECTS OF RELIGION AND SOCIETY IN FRANCE.

I. Dieu, Patrie, Liberté. Par JULES SIMON. 14th edition. (Paris, 1883.)

2. Instruction Morale et Civique des Feunes Filles. Par Mdme. H. GREVILLE. 9th edition. (Paris, 1883.)

3. Eléments d'Instruction Morale et Civique. Par GABRIEL COMPAYRE. 55th edition. (Paris, 1883.)

4. L'Instruction Civique à l'Ecole. Par M. PAUL BERT. 12th edition. (Paris, 1883.)

IT has rarely happened that any great social or intellectual movement has taken place on the Continent without its being shared by England, or that any movement has originated in England without its communicating itself in a greater or less degree to the other countries of Europe. In the last century the English deists created habits of thought which repeated and exaggerated themselves both in France and Germany. The 'Catholic Revival,' which produced a Walter Scott, a Keble, and a Newman in one country, gave birth in a neighbouring land to a Chateaubriand, a Lacordaire, and a Montalembert. The great political earthquake of 1848, which shook so many thrones, was not unfelt among ourselves; and to pass from politics to social life, it must, we fear, be owned that the corruptions of the Second Empire have had an effect worse than revolutionary on some sides of English life, on the views (especially of some of our upper classes) on such Divine institutions as marriage and the observance of the Lord's Day; that the purity of our homes has been sullied, that our art, our literature, and our drama have been tainted by influences which the downfall of a corrupt Court set free from their old centre to float across the Channel and reunite themselves, all poison-fraught, in our English atmosphere.

At this moment it may be said that both in France and England the question of secular education is in the air.' While the Church in this country has seen her universities secularized, her grammar schools passing gradually into lay hands, and Board schools tending to rival or neutralize her labours in elementary education, and the young children of her parishes in many cases driven into purely secular schools, a struggle of a still more pronounced character has been going on in France.

With us the Church has been ignored; in France she has been insulted. The struggles of an English incumbent taxing himself and his family 'to keep out the School Board,' commanding, as they do, our fullest sympathy, shrink into littleness, we will not say into nothing, when compared with those undergone by a poor curé on 1,000 francs (about 40%. a year) trying to teach the catechism at odd hours to the children from the walls of whose school the innocent motto, Aimez Dieu, respectez vos parents,' has been effaced, and who are grudged the liberty of bringing their catechism books to school for use afterwards, lest they should in some way infect the building; or that of the poor nun or sister who has the prospect of finding her occupation gone, and herself a burden on the community, after she has spent the best portion of her life in devoted usefulness.

A remarkable book has appeared this year from the pen of M. Jules Simon, entitled Dieu, Patrie, Liberté, in which he gives a sketch of the various fortunes of the French Church, especially with regard to education, during the last hundred years. M. Simon has a strong claim to be heard on this subject. He is, as he himself says, an 'universitaire de cinquante ans'; he is a Liberal and Republican, and a member of the French Senate, and has held for a short time the portfolio of Prime Minister. In his volume we read, what is invariably to be read in any history of France, how one exaggeration produces another, and how Louis XIV. prepared the way for Gambetta, Challemel-Lacour, and Paul Bert. We see the tables turned on the Church which revoked the Edict of Nantes, and her own phrase, 'moral unity,' flung back in her own teeth. 'Thou hast thirsted for blood, thou shalt have thy fill of it,' was the exclamation of the savage queen to Cyrus. You have asked for moral unity, and you shall have it,' the new world of France seems now to be saying to the old. Only, as M. Simon puts it (pp. 251–2):—

'Louis XIV., en revoquant l'Édit de Nantes, n'a pas eu d'autre but que de sauver ce qu'il appelait l'unité morale de la France; et de quelque côté que vous regardiez, vous serez obligé de convenir que la seule différence entre lui et vous, c'est qu'il voulait l'unité dans une affirmation, et que vous la voulez dans une négation.'

As most of our readers are probably aware, there was a period in the Great Revolution itself when the minds of its leaders were far from unfriendly to religion. The Constituent Assembly of 1789, while it abolished tithes among other class privileges, and suppressed all payments to the Roman See, was very far from desiring to suppress religion or the Church.

It had its constructive and philosophic side. It professed its attachment to the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion. When Robespierre attempted to authorize the marriage of priests, he was hooted down. The entire Assembly kept the Fête de la Fédération,' July 14, 1790, by hearing mass said before the King at an altar set up in the Champ-de-Mars, when Talleyrand (one of its members) was celebrant.

Unhappily for France, she was hampered then, as Italy has been in more recent times, by her connexion with the Papacy. One man, indeed, seems to have had an insight into. possibilities which, had they been allowed to become certainties, might have changed the whole future of the country. On January 14, 1791, Mirabeau made use of the following remarkable words:

'If it be true that the Christian ministry (sacerdoce) has been instituted once for all, does not Apostolic power subsist to-day in the bishops as successors of the Apostles to the universality of its primitive constitution? Did not each one among them, at the moment of his consecration, become just what each Apostle became when he received his own at the feet of the Eternal Shepherd of the Church? It follows, then, that bishops are ipso facto entrusted with the regimen. of the universal Church, just as the Apostles were; their mission is actual, immediate, and absolutely independent of all local circumscription. The unction of the Episcopate suffices for their institution, and they have no more need of the sanction of the Roman Pontiff than S. Paul had of S. Peter's.' (These last words were received with deafening applause.)

Camus, Treilhard, and Lanjuinais, M. Simon tells us, displayed their erudition in support of the same cause, and quoted many respectable precedents to prove that the primitive bishops had been elected by the people, without any intervention of the Bishop of Rome. Unhappily, however, France had few theologians; she attempted to gain her ends by purely civil means, and the attempt, as might have been expected, broke down. Reading the history of this period makes us more than ever thankful for our own Reformation, which, by the synodical action of the Church herself, working hand in hand with the State, not only emancipated both Church and country from the control of the Papacy, but made it possible for liberty to be religious, and for religion to be free.

In France the race of State-made bishops and 'constitutional' clergy has not been prosperous or long-lived. Jurors and non-jurors-that is, those who took the oath of allegiance to the constitution and those who declined the oath-were

alike proscribed in the Reign of Terror. The former had earned a double unpopularity, and were even stoned in the streets by women who would undergo the greatest perils to obtain marriage or the baptism of their children from the orthodox clergy. The scaffold ran red with the blood of priests. Churches were desecrated, holy images overthrown. The most sacred objects were derisively paraded in the streets. The venerable and benevolent Bishop of Amiens was imprisoned for thirteen months in company with women of the worst character, and nearly lost his sight in his captivity. The miserable men who conformed' were forced to marry 'avec éclat, avec scandale. Like the guests of Nero, they continued to smile in the very face of ruin.' Many gave up their orders. 'There was,' says M. Simon, 'an avalanche of apostate priests (Nov. 1793), as a few months earlier there had been an avalanche of married ones.' Of all the sad pictures in the Reign of Terror none is sadder than that of the crowds of clergy hurrying up to Paris, eager to proclaim their own disgrace, and treated with contempt by the very men who had extorted the confession from them. 'If we did not honour the priest of error and fanaticism, we are just as far from honouring the priest of incredulity,' exclaimed Danton, as he showed them the door of the Convention-chamber. Robespierre exclaimed, ' Do not fear the robe they used to wear, but their change of skin.'

At length the terrible storm subsided, and the priests crept out of their hiding-places. But with the re-establishment of public worship came back the old difficulties between the jurors and the non-jurors, the latter being of course supported by the Papacy. At length Napoleon extorted from the Holy See the recognition of about ten 'constitutional' bishops (including the well-known Grégoire), as well as the sanction of the alienation of ecclesiastical property, and other provisions of the famous Concordat. Thus religion and the

Papacy were once more practically identified, and France found herself as far as ever from being able to profit by the blessings of the one without suffering from the corruptions of the other.

During the reign of Napoleon, centralization and organization was the order of the day. The same hands which had effaced the provinces with their historical picturesqueness from the map, which introduced the prosaic kilomètre and

It is our privilege to know a lady, still happily surviving among us, who was baptized in a cellar, by a priest disguised in a smock frock, in those troubled times.

kilogramme, and banished the friendly old measures of weight and distance, and substituted a decimal coinage for the écu and the louis d'or of former days, were busy in this department also. Everything was to be brought to a kind of mechanical unity. Twenty-four independent universities, swept away by the Convention, were now replaced by one, around which, as in a kind of solar system, all luminaries were to revolve. For Napoleon did not destroy the Episcopal seminaries and preparatory schools, but insisted on every candidate for holy orders obtaining a university degree, and on the preparatory schools being taught by none but members of the University (p. 125, note).

At the Restoration, however, when the clerical interest was on the crest of the wave, the University underwent the same metamorphosis as the rest of society. It fell under the management of bishops and priests, and-significantly enough -the students were no longer summoned by beat of drum, but by sound of bell, the dress was 'to be of one pattern, but no longer military.' For the moment the cassock had triumphed alike over the soldier's uniform and the philosopher's gown, but its day was soon over. The philosophers had their turn in 1830; and if they resembled the clergy in nothing else, they copied them only too faithfully in their narrow spirit of monopoly. En un mot,' says M. Simon, speaking of the University of those days, 'elle s'accommodait au despotisme à condition de l'exercer.' Thus by one of those curious changes of face which sometimes occur in history, the words liberty of instruction,' which before the Revolution would have been the greatest bugbear to the clerical party, became now the rallying-point of the more thoughtful and far-sighted men among them, such as Montalembert, De Coux, Lacordaire, whose little school in the Rue des Arts was the occasion of a stormy controversy and a debate in the Chambre des Pairs. 'Catholics,' exclaimed Lacordaire (soon to assume the habit and vows of a Dominican), 'grant liberty when you are the masters, that it may not, one day, be refused to yourselves when you cease to be so.' 'Religion needs liberty, and liberty needs religion.' Such was through life the watchword of the courageous, the chivalrous, the devout, and the enlightened Montalembert, whose strong sympathies with what might truly have been called his mother-country, and familiarity with her language and literature, made it almost seem as if the genius of Burke had once more found a voice in him.

Unhappily, however, neither of the two extreme parties