CHAPTER III.

THE REVOLUTION AND RELIGION.

HOSTILITY to Christianity is one of the chief characteristics written upon the history of the Revolution. In the popular movement which immediately preceded it, and from which it directly issued, the clergy of France, as a body, heartily joined. The vast majority of the fifty thousand curés had small cause to love the ancien régime, with its tyrannous abuses and legalised injustice. Even among the Prelates, taken though they were, almost exclusively, from the noble caste, there were not a few strenuous advocates of reform. It was not until the Declaration of the Rights of the Man and the Citizen was adopted by the National Assembly that the anti-Christian inspiration of the Revolution was clearly manifested. The underlying principles of that famous document are Rousseau's doctrines, that goodness, lawlessness and equality are the natural attributes of man: that the ultimate source of sovereignty lies in the personal rights of the separate parties to the social contract: that the

popular will is the supreme fount of justice. These are the direct negation of the Christian doctrines that man is born with a fault, a taint, a vice of nature; that he is born under the law of virtue; that he is born under subjection to the family and to those larger societies which have sprung from the family; that civil authority is of divine appointment, although it has reached those who are clothed with it through the people; that justice is anterior to all experience, wholly independent of the volition. of any man or number of men, eternal, immutable, absolutely binding upon the human race, as upon the totality of existence * There is an entire contrariety between the Declaration of Rights, which

* The following extract from the Brief Caritas, addressed by Pius VI. on the 10th of March, 1791, to Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld and the Bishops of the National Assembly, may well be cited here "Jam cum hominis sit ita sua ratione uti ne supremum auctorem non tantum agnoscere, verum et colere, admirari ad eumque se suaque omnia referre debeat, cumque ipsum subjici jam ab initio majoribus suis necesse fuerit ut ab ipsis regatur atque instituatur, vitamque suam ad rationis, humanitatis religionisque normam instituere valeat; certe ab uniuscujusque ortu irritam constat atque inanem esse jactatam illam inter homines æqualitatem ac libertatem. Necessitate subditi estote (Ad Roman. xiii. 5). Itaque ut homines in civilem societatem coalescere possent, gubernationis forma constitui debuit, per quam jura illa libertatis adstricta sunt sub leges supremamque regnantium potestatem, ex quo consequitur quod S. Augustinus docet in hæc verba: Generale quippe pactum est societatis obedire regibus suis.' Quapropter hæc potestas non tam a sociali contractu quam ab ipso Deo recti justique auctore repetenda est: quod quidem confirmavit Apostolus in superius laudata Epistola: Omnis anima potestatibus sublimioribus subdita sit; non est enim potestas nisi a Deo,” xiii. 1.

refers the evils of the world to defective political machinery, and seeks their remedy in the manufacture of a Constitution, and the teaching of Christianity, that "out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adultery, fornication, thefts, false witness, blasphemies," which are assuredly the chief cause of those evils; that the only spring of all real improvement in humanity is in the recreation of the heart by the subduing of the passions, the purification of the affections, the renewal of the will. In a word, the Revolutionary conception of man and society is materialistic; the Christian is spiritual. The Declaration was supplemented within a year by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. This was an application to the ecclesiastical domain of the Revolutionary dogma of the sovereignty of the people and the omnipotence of the State, as taught in the Contrat Social.* It was a direct negation of that freedom of conscience before human law. upon which, as I showed at length, in the last chapter, the Christian religion is founded. Absolutism, whether the tyrant be one or many-headed, claims dominion over the whole man, denying the value and rights of his spiritual nature, wherein liberty is rooted. To this claim Christianity, especially in the Catholic form of an universal Church, opposes an invincible hindrance. The Civil Constitution was an invitation to the

"Je pensais qu'il appartenait en chaque pays au seul souverain de fixer et le culte et ce dogme intelligible," Du Contrat Social, liv. iv, c, viii. De la Religion Civile.

111.] THE CIVIL CONSTITUTION OF THE CLERGY. 55

French clergy to sacrifice their religion to the Revolution. It was accepted by only three of the whole Episcopate Talleyrand, Loménie de Brienne, and Jarente, men notoriously lubricious in life, and Voltairian in opinion. On the 27th of November, 1790, the National Assembly, "dragged on by the logic of their ideas," as M. Albert Sorel well points out, made a decree requiring all priests to take the oath to the Constitution on pain of dismissal from their office and of prosecution as disturbers of the public peace, if they continued to fulfil it. Thus," remarks the learned historian of the Gallican Church, "the so-called reign of liberty was inaugurated by a deliberate decree of persecution.+" "Those who manufactured the Constitution Civile," he further observes, with entire truth, "were determined that

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* "Le serment prescrit par les articles 21 et 38 de la constitution civile, d'être fidèles à la loi et au Roi, et de maintenir de tout son pouvoir la constitution décrétée par l'Assemblée nationale et acceptée par le Roi,' impliquait l'adhésion aux nouvelles lois ecclésiastiques. Les prêtres qui le refuseraient seraient déchus de leurs droits; ils seraient remplacés, et s'ils s'immisçaient dans leurs anciens fonctions' ils seraient considérés comme perturbateurs du repos public,' et avec eux toutes personnes qui secoaliseraient pour combiner un refus d'obéir aux décrets de l'Assemblée nationale ou pour exciter des oppositions à leur exécution.' Cette assemblée de philosophes se trouvait ainsi entraînée par la logique de ses idées a violer, presque aussitôt après l'avoir décrété, un des principes les plus passionnément réclamés par la philosophie du siècle, la tolérance religieuse." L'Europe et la Révolution Française, par Albert Sorel, 2o Partie, p. 126. The italics are mine.

The Gallican Church and the Revolution, by the Rev. W, Henley Jervis, M.A., Prebendary of Heytesbury, p, 97.

the religious revolution should take root no less decisively than the secular." * The true character

of that religious revolution was speedily manifested, and fully justified the presageful words of Pius VI. in condemning the Civil Constitution.† The most cherished aim of the Revolution, until Napoleon crushed it, for a while, was to abolish the Catholic faith in France.

And that has been its most cherished aim ever since. The spirit which animated the primitive Jacobins still breathes in their successors. "The enemy is Clericalism," M. Gambetta once declared, And by "Clericalism," in the Revolutionary jargon, is meant, primarily, Catholicism: its creed, its worship, even its morality: "la morale est regardée comme une cléricale," a keen-witted Frenchman once observed to me. As we all know, the Revolution, since it has again made head in France, has done its best to discomfit this foe. Hardly a day passes in that country without some fresh injury, some new insult, against Catholicism. Even the bare profession of it constitutes, in practice, an absolute disqualification for public office. *The Gallican Church and the Revolution, by the Rev. W. Henley Jervais, M.A., Prebendary of Heytesbury, p. 119.

"Ex ipsa conventus constitutione facile intelligunt nil aliud ab illa spectari atque agi quam ut aboleretur catholica religio." Brief Caritas.

It may be worth while to give here the following significant extract from a speech delivered at a Masonic banquet at Antwerp by M.