J. Napier Brodhead

“ We are invariably led by these gentlemen to believe that all is for the best in the best of republics. When, a fortnight ago, France suddenly realized that she was within sight of a war with her ancient foe on the other side of the Rhine, a thrill of terror passed over the land at the mere thought that while engrossed in the work of dechristianizing France, and hustling monks and nuns up and down the country, the politicians in power had demoralized the army, neglected the navy, and left the frontiers almost entirely unprotected. ”

“ It is, as I have often repeated, the great misfortune of France that people will not concern themselves with politics, and they only begin to interest themselves in a law when it is applied.
Even I, who have followed the phases of the religious persecution with keen interest since four or five years, can hardly wade through these tedious, irksome columns, in which ambiguity reigns supreme. Even M. Briand, the reporter of the law and spokesman of the Government, being questioned closely as to the sense of certain passages, replied “It is” and “It is not” in the same breath. ”

“ Thus France is an industrial company; the ministers are managers appointed by the head partner, the Grand Orient! But the most revolting part of this manifesto is the manner in which the deputies of the “bloc” are whipped into line like a pack of disorderly hounds under the lash of their keeper. “We denounce to our lodges and to all masons present and future the votes of fear, defaillance, cowardice, of a certain number.... We shall have our eyes on them ... and they will find themselves treated as they would have treated those to whom they were bound by interest if not by loyalty.” ”

“ Churches, here and there, have already been profaned by Masonic revelry, the cross has been demolished on every highway, and removed from every school and hospital. The State, disposing of all the power and all the riches of the nation, is at the command of a secret society that is the sworn and avowed enemy of religion. If the Church again come forth victorious from the struggle, stronger and purer through poverty and persecution, “if the Christian Hercules uplift Antæus, son of the earth, into the air and stifle him there, then—patuit Deus.” ”

“ If any one wants to enjoy a clever, graphic pen-picture of French politics, let him read Les morts qui parlent, by M. de Vogué.
The purpose of those in power is, I repeat, to break away completely and for ever from the Catholic religion, with which the French nation is so bound up that its fibres can only be torn out with the last palpitating remnants of national life. “Few greater calamities can befall a nation,” wrote Lecky, “than to cut herself off as France has done from her own past in her great Revolution.” To consummate this calamity is the avowed purpose of this Government. ”

“ If the laws, or at least all important ones, were submitted to untrammelled public vote, then only might we say that the government was truly representative.
In many cases universal suffrage means the tyranny of ignorant, unprincipled majorities, while nowhere can it oppose an effective barrier against the accumulation of immense wealth in a few hands, and the creation of all-powerful oligarchies. When the majorities and the oligarchies come into collision, liberty will succumb. ”

“ The Government has been profuse in its protestations that its object in suppressing the religious Congregations was to protect the secular clergy against their encroachments. But since seventy-two bishops signed a petition to the Chambers on behalf of the Congregations, and are daily raising their voices to denounce the tyranny which has ostracized them, this mask also falls. The right to preach and to teach are corollaries of the right of free speech and free thinking. All liberties, indeed, are inseparably connected, and must stand or fall together. ”

“ Now, as in the fourth century, we are menaced with social dissolution. The barbarians are at our gates, nay, in our midst, and not in France alone, by any means. A ferocious, self-seeking atheistic materialism is disrupting Christendom. And let us not be deceived. Societies are never saved and regenerated except by their generating principle; and the generating principle of Western civilization is Christianity.
Therefore, I repeat, that society will be compelled, in self-defence, to restore Christianity or slavery, in some form; State Socialism perhaps—or perish. ”

“ If death had not cut short Waldeck Rousseau’s career we might witness a machine en arrière policy. It is even possible, now, that a moderate Rouvier-Ribot ministry may succeed the Combes despotism.
But I have no confidence in any palliatives. The evil is too deep-seated. Only by blood and anguish can France be redeemed, and the sooner the crisis comes the better; a few years later it may be too late. This is why I desire the denunciation of the Concordat, for with Gambetta, and all his anti-clerical successors, I think it may be the ruin of the Third Republic. ”

“ Human laws have no sanction except in divine law, and no man has a right to command his fellow-men, except within the limits of natural and of divine law.
The sum of liberty in every community is the sum of its amenity to law, both divine and natural. Hence Plato’s remark that “republics cannot exist without virtue in the people,” and Montesquieu’s assertion that “the vital principle of democratic government is virtue.” All human laws deriving their sanction from divine and natural laws, it follows that liberty must diminish when these laws are violated with impunity. ”

“ It is a great mistake to suppose that these philosophers were seeking the welfare of the masses or the reign of the people, whom no one so thoroughly despised as did Voltaire. The true object of the Revolution, prepared by the encyclopedists, was the destruction of Christianity and its noblest fruit, freedom, in order to establish on the ruins of both the reign of the Omnipotent Infallible State, the statue of gold before which all must fall down and worship or perish. ”

“ When the apostasy of the governments of Christian peoples shall have been consummated, when unlimited divorce, which is successive polygamy, shall be generalized; when monogamy shall vanish from our codes, which forms, with freedom from slavery, the line of demarcation between Western and Eastern civilization—then indeed shall we be ready for the burning.
The modern barbarians are at our gates, nay, in our midst. Godless education and the peculiar political methods of unscrupulous, educated proletariat are rapidly preparing what may be termed government by anarchy. ”

“ The carrying into execution of any of these projects of “Separation,” even the least Jacobin, would render the normal existence of the Catholic Church in France impossible. This has been the aim and purpose of the Third Republic ever since its advent. For, once again, I repeat that Republicanism in France is not a form of government; it is the modus operandi of a secret society, of the same secret society which established a monarchy in Italy, in order to have a pretext for seizing Rome and destroying, if possible, the prestige of the Papacy. ”

“ There is nothing more admirable in the history of Christianity than the conduct of the victims massacred in the convent of the Carmelites, converted into a prison by the Jacobins. Martyrs and confessors were as numerous as in the first centuries of the Church, and from their ashes arose a new French Church purified by poverty and suffering.
Never have institutions of learning and charity under religious direction been so numerous. No country has a clergy more zealous, more learned, more united with the Holy See than that of France to-day. ”

“ I have repeatedly affirmed that France was held firmly in the coils of the Grand Orient, which has packed both Houses with its creatures, thanks to the political apathy of respectable Frenchmen.
The Separation Bill is merely a blind, a slip-knot which can be drawn at any moment to strangle the victim around whose neck it is cast. When his Socialist accomplices of the Left reproached M. Briand with being too liberal, he replied, “If necessary we can always amend the law or make another.” Only two short years ago M. Combes openly pronounced against any project of separation. ”

“ They are not laid bare in their naked hideousness. The glamour of those much-violated principles of 1789, and the catchwords of liberty, equality, and fraternity are used to cover up the dire significance of that event. In a moment of wild delirium, the most illustrious of nations allowed its government to pass into the hands of a band of atheists prepared by Voltaire and his ilk. Christianity was solemnly abjured in the name of the whole nation, and the worship of Reason inaugurated with all the paraphernalia of ritual and the pomp of worship. ”

“ Is this a cause, a presage, or a symptom of national decadence? All three I fear. Nations stand or fall with their governments. They have the government they deserve, and are punished for the evil doings of their rulers! ‘I gave them a king in my wrath,’ was once written of the Jews. Is there sufficient vitality left in the French national constitution to reject the poison which is undermining it, and of which alcoholism, unknown in France fifty years ago, is but the outward and visible sign?” To-day this apostasy, not of the nation, but of the French State, is complete. ”

“ The blow aimed at religious teachers is of peculiar interest at this hour, when Christians, all over the world, are recognizing the immense importance of the religious education of the young, if we would preserve the structure of Western civilization, so laboriously built up during 2000 years, and save its deep foundations from being sapped by the returning tide of barbarism and paganism. For the revolutionary spirit of to-day is simply another version of that renaissance of paganism which culminated in the Protestant revolt. ”

“ A few resolute, capable, bigoted Freemasons are the master minds of the coterie; the others, “the bloc,” just follow suit. If a current of reaction set in to-morrow they would glide with it most gracefully.
It is simply impossible to retrieve the situation in France to-day by any ordinary legal means. To suppose that the people are in sympathy with the Government because they do not overthrow it implies total ignorance of the situation. The voting machinery of the country is falsified, and can no more be relied on than a clock out of gear, which rings out the hours haphazard. ”

“ If all other means fail, the congregations of both sexes occupied in teaching will be suppressed. This is the Government’s programme. There is nothing so bad as the corruption of that which is best. France is still profoundly Catholic, and it is only natural that the struggle between good and evil should be sharp here. The forces of reaction and action are always proportionate. Hence it is that France has always been “the centre of Masonic history,” and of the Goddess Reason’s supreme efforts against Christianity. Her temperament, too, makes her a choice field for experiments. ”

“ The First Republic, under Robespierre, having decreed the abolition of Christianity, immediately substituted theo-philanthropy. But the Third Republic proclaims itself atheist, and insists that the nation shall be made atheist by means of public schools.
Hitherto the words lay, layman, meant in French as in English, simply, not of the clergy; to-day, laïque in France means atheist. L’école laïque means, not a school taught by laymen, but a school of infidelity. Catholic lay or secular schools are still holding their own against the state schools, which are nearly empty in some communes. ”

“ With cynical hypocrisy this Government protests that liberty of teaching is intact, while parents see all the teachers of their own choice proscribed. The rich can send their sons to be educated across the border, but the law of stage scolaire is intended to meet this alternative. Those who have not frequented state schools are to be made pariahs, ineligible for the army, the navy, or any civil function—truly a singular application of the words “Compel them to come in,” which should be inscribed on all the scholar institutions of France to-day. ”

“ THE attitude of the Jacobin government in France towards the religion professed by nine-tenths of the inhabitants is truly instructive. After prating about liberty, fraternity, and equality, and the rights of man for a hundred years, the successors of the revolutionary Constituante are preparing to deal a deathblow at the most sacred rights of the individual, to overstep the most arbitrary acts of any regime, nay of the Inquisition itself. These, at least, only concerned themselves with outward manifestations of personal idiosyncrasies tending to disturb the social order. ”

“ For more than three centuries English writers have repeated that the Protestant revolt was a struggle for liberty of conscience, notwithstanding the incontrovertible fact that all its foremost leaders were bitterly opposed to religious toleration, and that the sects relentlessly persecuted each other, as well as the adherents of the ancient faith.
Protestantism being, intrinsically, the nursery of rationalism, was necessarily a diminution of Christianity, and produced a corresponding diminution of liberty, both personal and civil. ”