so admitted, and the state became a prey to anarchy, and society itself, three years ago, seemed threatened with utter extinction. It is only by being so admitted again, that society can be reëstablished, and good order confirmed.

It is, then, the church as a spiritual kingdom, the kingdom of God on earth, through which God governs secular kingdoms, and through which secular sovereigns are responsible to him for their exercise of their powers, that we want, on which we must place our dependence, and for which we must contena, if we expect religion to save society and confirm the state. Discipline belongs to the church as much as doctrine, and she bears the keys as well as the word, and her liberty is as much infringed when she is denied the liberty of exercising the power of the keys, as when she is denied. the liberty of teaching, or of celebrating mass. She has authority over all persons, whatever their state or dignity, to bind and loose, and God assures her that whatever she binds or looses on earth shall be bound or loosed in heaven. This power is that which constitutes her a kingdom, and gives her the faculty to govern. Without it she might teach and pray, and advise, and entreat, but could have no power to make her doctrines observed or her precepts obeyed. To deprive her of this power, to prohibit her from fulminating spiritual censures, and binding the violator of God's law, whoever he may be, would be to reduce her to the level of a sect or of a school of philosophy; and to resist the exercise of this terrible power is no less sinful than to deny the truth she teaches. It is by this power especially that she is able to enforce the obedience of subjects to their sovereigns, and the practice of justice by sovereigns to their subjects, and therefore it is only by recognizing this power, and allowing her free scope for its effectual assertion, that she can exercise that guardian care of the state, and have that conservative influence in society, which late events have proved to be so indispensable.

This granted, it is easy to see the wisdom and necessity of the papal constitution of the church. The church is a kingdom, a power, and as such must have, if she is to exercise her authority, a supreme chief. This authority is to be exercised over states as well as over individuals; therefore the church as a government must be catholic, for otherwise it could not govern all nations; it must be one and catholic, otherwise it would be subjected by each sovereign in his own dominions. And this unity and catholicity are im

possible without the monarchical constitution, without its subjection to a single head, with supreme authority over the whole body, prepared at any moment to exercise that authority on any point and against any enemy that may be necessary. This is the point towards which we have been looking from the first, and contains the practical lesson which we wish to impress on the minds of our readers. The church is built on Peter, and its defence is all included in the defence of Peter, as the state is defended in defending its sovereign. Ubi Petrus, ibi ecclesia. But though we have reached the point at which we have been aiming, we must reserve its development and defence to a future number.

THE SPIRITUAL ORDER SUPREME.*

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for July, 1853.]

THESE three volumes by the Abbé Jager furnish, upon the whole, the best and most satisfactory history of the French Revolution, from 1788 to 1793, that we have read, and we have been reading histories of that revolution ever since we can remember. As a history of the church in France, it stops too soon, unless more volumes are to be added; and it is not so full as we could wish in its details of the clergy during the period from the abolition of the Catholic religion to the suppression of the constitutional church by the concordat of 1802, the most glorious period for the clergy of France since the early days of the Gallican church. We want a fuller history of the sufferings and fidelity of the confessors and martyrs among the French clergy, religious, and faithful, from 1792 to 1802, than any we have seen, or, so far as we are aware, has as yet been published. A full history of these martyrs and confessors would be no less edifying than that of the Christians during the persecutions of the early ages, and would prove that, however far France for the moment had gone astray, or however frantic she had

* Histoire de l'Église de France pendant la Révolution. Par M. L'ABBÉ JAGER. Paris: 1852.

become, her heart remained thoroughly Catholic, and that not in vain had she placed herself under the protection of the holy mother of God.

Certainly, prior to 1789, the clergy and religious of France were far from being in all respects an edifying body, and several members of the episcopacy, as well as a large number of the second order of the clergy, were tainted more or less with the new doctrines of the philosophers, and gave much scandal; but when the hour of trial came, it is remarkable how few were found wanting, and seldom, if ever, in any country or in any age,has the church suffered so severe a persecution, in which the constancy and firmness of her children were upon the whole more consoling to her maternal heart. The Catholic heart is not grieved at suffering and martyrdom; it is grieved only by the prevarication or the apostasy of the faithful. Comparatively few of the French clergy of either order prevaricated, and still fewer apostatized. The great body of them listened to the voice of the Holy Father, and chose to suffer imprisonment, exile, and death, rather than desert their faith, and admit the supremacy of the temporal over the spiritual. It was not, as we had been early taught to believe, as royalists, except in rare instances, that the clergy were persecuted; it was as Catholics, and their fidelity was first and foremost fidelity, not to the monarchy, but to Catholicity, not simply to their king, but to their God. This puts for us a new face on the conduct of the revolutionists, and on the constancy and sufferings of the clergy, and commands the highest love and reverence for Catholic France from every Catholic heart.

The deputies of the clergy in the states-general of 1789, especially those chosen from the curés, committed, there is no question, great mistakes; and if they had been more firm in maintaining the rights and interests of their order, it is not impossible that the revolution would have been arrested, and France spared the horrors and bloodshed that followed. But we should not forget that we live after the revolution, and are able to judge of the conduct of all parties as instructed by its example. In 1789 there were only a few who could foresee what a people clamoring for liberty, with the rights of man, benevolence, and brotherly love on their lips, would do when broken loose from the restraints of authority, and taking themselves for their own guides and masters. How could these country curates, who were not without sympathies with the people, who had grievances of

their own to redress, and who knew little of the world cat of their respective parishes, distrust the fair-spoken demagogues, not yet known to be demagogues, who made them fair promises, and seemed to them to be intent only on removing real evils, and regenerating political France? Who could expect them, till their faith as Catholics was directly attacked, to foresee the dangers threatened to religion by the political reforms proposed? Surely religion is not the accomplice of tyranny, and is no supporter of political and social abuses, and what danger then has it to apprehend from correcting these abuses and providing guaranties for public liberty? None in the world, if you attempt it only by lawful means, under the direction of men who have the real interests of religion and society at heart, and in obedience to the call of reason and charity, and not by unconstitutional means, under the direction of infidel philosophers, Jansenistic demagogues, and visionary theorists, and in obedience to the call of revenge, selfish ambition, wild enthusiasm, and Utopian dreams. But this was but imperfectly seen at that time, because there had been no recent experience to enlighten the mass of ecclesiastics, and because for a hundred years the tendency in France had been to regard politics as an independent order, entirely dis tinct and separate from religion. The clergy had accepted and been indoctrinated in the Four Articles of 1682, and were as unprepared to appreciate as they were to withstand the movements of 1789.

The clergy, with some honorable exceptions, certainly betrayed in the beginning the interests of their order; but in this they did no more than had been done by the assembly which put forth the famous Four Articles a hundred years before, and they betrayed their order not now in favor of the king, as did that assembly, but, as they believed, in favor of the nation and of liberty. The nobility, too, were false to their own order, and the king betrayed both nobles and clergy, and the monarchy to boot. It seems to have been one of the misfortunes of the time, that the king, the nobles, and the clergy, looked upon their respective orders as personal matters, rather than constituent elements of French society. Louis XVI. was no fool; he had good natural parts, had been well educated, was sincerely pious, and had a most excellent heart; he loved his people, and there was no sacrifice that he was not willing to make for their good; 'but he could never understand, nor be made to understand,

that the quarrel was not personal, or that it was France, not simply himself and family, he sacrificed in refusing to defend the throne. Not one drop of blood, he said, shall be shed for me or my family. This was well, was noble, for Louis XVI. as a private man, but for him as king it was not well. It was either an abdication of the sovereignty, or else an implied assertion that he was king only for his private benefit. He was not king for his private benefit or that of his family, but for the benefit of France, and it was his duty to defend his rights, not for his own sake, but for the sake of the public good. The rights of the crown were not his private property; he held them as a sacred trust, and was bound to defend them, and to the full extent of his power to transmit them unimpaired to his successor, according to the fundamental constitution of the kingdom. He might have restored and he ought to have restored to the estates of his kingdom the rights which his predecessors had usurped; but to go further was to become himself a revolutionist, a traitor to France. Unhappily, he never understood this, and, unwilling to shed blood in his own personal cause, he would suffer no efficient steps to be taken to protect the monarchy. Louis XIV. claimed the crown as his private property, and usurped the rights of the nation to his own profit; Louis XVI. regarded it equally as his private property, and parted with it to the injury of the nation, and to the profit of nobody. We honor in him the generosity, the humanity, and the self-denial, of the private man, but we are obliged to censure and almost despise the weakness of the sovereign.

The nobility, from far less honorable motives, were faithless to their order. Nobility was an order in the state,. and existed and was supported for a public reason. It had no doubt private rights or privileges which it might surrender, but it had no right to annihilate itself as one of the estates of the kingdom. France was in theory, and had been in practice, a constitutional monarchy. The government consisted of the king and the three estates,-the clergy, the nobility, and the commons,-sitting in separate houses and voting by orders. True, the estates or statesgeneral had not been summoned since 1614, that is, for a hundred and seventy-five years, which was a serious damage; but the summoning of them in 1788 to meet in 1789 indicated the intention to restore the legal constitution of the kingdom to its vigor. The law which required the estates.

VOL. XI-5