French Wars of Religion

“ If the bench and bar of France was strongly attached to the principles of the Catholic religion, the nobility who were hereditary enemies of the legists, whose teachings had for three centuries tended to abridge their feudal rights, out of sheer self-interest, aside from any other motives, now inclined toward the Calvinists. ”

“ But the greatest misfortune to Christianity is that it has been made use of by princes as a pretext for wars of aggression. In fact, nearly all the wars of Europe for the last thousand years have been in some way connected with religion. This is sometimes made a reproach against Christianity, which professes to be founded on peace and self-sacrifice, but the reproach is scarcely just. ”

“ Through the efforts of Leo XIII., followed by those of the French cardinals and bishops, a new spirit, a spirit of conciliation, had indeed grown up in France, to which even the representatives of a Government hitherto hostile had lent their prestige. Nevertheless, it is difficult to define the reasons why these common aspirations of peace, instead of developing into a true religious pacification, ended in a war on religion the most terrible in its significance that France has ever known. ”

“ The stability and peace which seemed to be so firmly established by the brilliant monarchy of Francis I vanished with the terrible outbreak of the Wars of Religion. ”

“ And yet the Christian army, amidst a most frightful state of morals, presented examples of an austere piety. Surrounded by the dangers of war, and harassed by the fatigues of a long pilgrimage, the king of France never neglected the most minute practices of religion. The greater part of the leaders took him for their model, and when in camp, paid more attention to religious processions than to military exercises; so that many warriors actually placed more confidence in their prayers than in their arms. ”

“ But how can they do so when politics in every state in Europe are divorced from Catholic principle, are pagan, and at war with Christianity, and to take part in them they must sacrifice their religion and give up heaven for earth? ”

“ The state has, therefore, been given over to the Enemy of souls, because Catholics were led, through a one-sided asceticism, to neglect to keep it in their own hands, and the church has been suffered to be despoiled, her pontiffs, priests, and religious have been suffered to be massacred, for the lack of a little resolution and energy on the part of Catholics to defend their religion and the sacred rights of their church and of society entrusted to their courage and fidelity. ”

“ The new rôle now begun to be played by these ancient guilds is an interesting phase of the religious wars. If France in the sixteenth century was laboring in the throes of a religious revolution, she was also in a state of industrial transformation. In origin the economic revolution was independent of the Reformation, yet so influential were its social and economic effects upon the Reformation that in a very true sense the religious movement may be said to have been the subordinate one. ”

“ In the conflict that broke out in France at the end of the last century, that storm which swept before it the breakwaters of a world and changed mediæval Europe into that of to-day, religion was not the motive power. Those six hundred men of Marseilles "who knew how to die" were sustained by no religious belief. Those armies which affronted the world in arms had no celestial champions in their ranks. Those iconoclasts, who broke down the barriers that made the good things of the world a forbidden city to all but a caste, had no religious doctrine to work by. ”

“ It is a terrible picture of those days when Catholics and Protestants were struggling for the supremacy, but its dark and repellent details are rendered more endurable by the knowledge in this twentieth century that such wars and such cruelties in the name of religion are not likely to occur again. ”

“ Is not France literally sick and tired of the atheism which surged over the nation at the time of the Revolution? France no longer glories in hard unbelief, and, as far as I know, the French people are simply longing for faith, and, for that matter, are going back to faith. ”

“ The Catholic clergy has made no opposition to the Government which rules France, but the Government for six years has not ceased to persecute the clergy, to weaken Christian institutions, and to prepare the abolition of religion itself. ”

“ In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the leaders of the Reformation and the New Learning began their relentless warfare upon the existing formalism and superstition, and from two different points of attack. After centuries of bloody wars, Protestantism succeeded in displacing Catholicism as the dominant religion over a large part of Northern Europe. ”

“ The church and state have hardly ever possessed more despotic power in any country of modern times, or seemed to all appearances to repose on a more secure foundation, than in France at the time when they were first assailed by the free criticism of the infidels of the eighteenth century. Each had escaped the alterations which had been effected in most other countries. The clergy of France had in the sixteenth century successfully resisted the Reformation, and gained strength by the issue of the civil wars which supervened on it. ”

“ Protestantism in France has never recovered from this blow. But for this massacre, one-half of the nobles of France would have continued Protestant. The reformers would soon have constituted so large a portion of the population, that mutual toleration would have been necessary. Intelligence would have been diffused; religion would have been respected; and, in all probability, the horrors of the French Revolution would have been averted.
God is an avenger. ”

“ Thus a handful of Jansenists, Protestants, Jews, and infidels in France were permitted to establish a reign of terror over twenty-five millions of Catholics, exile their bishops, massacre or banish their priests and religious, suppress religious houses, close the churches, prohibit Catholic worship, abolish religion itself, decree that death is an eternal sleep, and substitute for the worship of the living God the idolatry of an infamous woman, placed upon the altar and adored as the goddess of Reason. ”

“ That the sad effects of the old French revolution produced a reaction in many Catholic minds, as well as in many Protestant minds, in favor of monarchy, is very true; and perhaps the most influential portion of European Catholics, living as they do in the midst of a revolution that makes war on the church, on civil order, on society, on civilization itself, cling to the royal authority as the lesser evil and as their only security, under God, for the future of religion. ”

“ The clerical crisis was not confined to the great cities, so that the last twenty years has shown marked changes in public sentiment, but there are potent signs of a reaction toward free religious life, for France will be church-loving. The typical abbé lives in her fiction as beautifully as does the soldier.
And so I have ventured to name emotion, war, and religion as three significant sub-tones of French life. But there are five other phases of the [Pg 14] French spirit which show out in the short-story, though they do not seem to me so fundamental. ”

“ We are far from being convinced that, if the bishops and clergy had continued to show the energy in supporting the republic that they did in wresting it from the control of the infidels and destructives, they would not have been able to reconstitute French society on a Catholic and a republican basis, to the advantage alike of religion and society. ”

“ Similar things are not less true of the Catholics. For there were zealots and fanatics among them also, who under pretext of religion and patriotism were guilty of great iniquity and heaped up much ill-gotten wealth. ”

“ It shall only be to remark, that all the boasted conquests of our Edwards and our Henrys over the French nation, do not confer such substantial glory on our own country, as she derives from having received, protected, and supported, among multitudes of other sufferers, at a time and under circumstances so peculiarly disadvantageous to herself, three thousand priests, of a nation habitually her enemy, and of a religion intolerant and hostile to her own. ”

“ The Christian martyrs perish in their thousands, setting soul-force against empire-force that Christ may conquer, Christianity prevail. Soul-force does triumph, Christianity does prevail,—but not Christ; the victorious religion becomes a militant and dominant Church and a more fanatically persecuting power than the creed and the empire which it replaced. The very religions organise themselves into powers of mutual strife and battle together fiercely to live, to grow, to possess the world. ”

“ At the same time the masses of the people were suffering from misgovernment, oppressive taxation and excessive privileges enjoyed, by the upper classes. These causes combined with the spread of infidel philosophy and the decay of religious faith brought about the French Revolution at the close of the eighteenth century. The Church was attacked, ecclesiastical property was confiscated; religious orders were suppressed by violence; monks and nuns were turned out of their peaceable abodes by force, and many religious houses were plundered and pulled down. ”

“ English Deism, the product of the reasoning spirit which was stimulated by political events, directed itself against the special revelation of Christianity from the stand-point of the religion of natural reason, and ran a course parallel with the gradual emancipation of the individual from the power of the state. French infidelity, breathing the spirit of materialist philosophy, halted not till it brought its devotees even to atheism, and mingled itself with the great movements of political revolution, which ultimately reconstituted French society. ”

“ In the same way the Social War, which is coming, will turn incidentally upon religion, and be perhaps called a religious war hereafter, but it will not be declared for the sake of faith against unbelief, nor be fought at first by any church, or alliance of churches, against atheism. ”

“ How has it come to pass that a people who poured out their blood as freely as water in testimony and defence of the Catholic religion, whose history has given innumerable examples of the highest form of Christian heroism in ages past, now follows willingly, or at least submits tamely, to the dictation of leaders who are animated with hatred to the Catholic Church, and are bent on the extermination of the Christian faith, and with it of all religion? ”

“ How is it to be accounted for—this impotence of Christianity to affect the policies, politics, legislation and general life of the nations which think their salvation lies in the profession of its creed? How is it that a religion avowedly making peace and long-suffering of injury the corner-stone of its temple has had as its principal outcome war, both the fanaticism of religious war and the avarice of civil war ”

“ But all has been in vain—the attentions, good offices and efforts of our predecessor and ourself. The enemies of religion have succeeded at last in effecting by violence what they have long desired, in defiance of your rights as a Catholic nation and of the wishes of all who think rightly. ”

“ Let, then, no envious enemy injure our happiness, and, after the destruction of the impious power of the tyrants by the might of God our Saviour, let not the spirit of evil overwhelm the divine law with blasphemies: for to me far worse than any war or battle is the civil war of the Church of God--yea, far more fearful than the wars which have waged without. ”

“ How many millions of Christians are now armed and equipped to destroy their fellow-Christians? Who are the men in Europe crying out against war? Who wishes to have the nations disarmed? Is it the church? No; it is the men who do not believe in what they call this religion of peace. When there is a war, and when they make a few thousand widows and orphans, when they strew the plain with dead patriots, then Christians assemble in their churches and sing "Te Deum Laudamus" to God. ”

“ And yet, as our ancestor Christian the printer said in the days of Francis I, a simple decree of two lines only, recognizing in all the right to exercise their cult, while respecting the cult of others, would have avoided the dreadful catastrophes that Catholic intolerance brought upon France for over fifty years. What is the reason that all civil, political or religious reform can be conquered only at the price of blood and of frightful disasters? ”

“ Nothing in France at the present moment is more fatal to the influence of religion than the chance, or the appearance even, of ecclesiastical domination. {77} This chance and this appearance were, under the Restoration, the plague of the Catholic religion and of the French clergy—a plague the grave consequences of which are the more to be deplored as it was neither very deep-seated nor very formidable. ”

“ As she has used her power to act in direct contradiction to her mission, it can surprise no one that she is being brought back to the right path by terrible chastisements. The French Revolution is marked by Satanic traits, which distinguish it from anything ever seen before and possibly from anything that will ever be seen again. Its so-called legislators have issued such a proclamation as this: "The nation supports no religion," words which would almost seem to indicate hatred of the Divine Being. ”