Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 403, May, 1849

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Various. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 403, May, 1849

COLONISATION – MR WAKEFIELD'S THEORY.1

THE REACTION, OR FOREIGN CONSERVATISM

MADAME D'ARBOUVILLE'S "VILLAGE DOCTOR."

NATIONAL EDUCATION IN SCOTLAND

ARARAT AND THE ARMENIAN HIGHLANDS.19

LEGITIMACY IN FRANCE.23

THE COLLEGE. – A SKETCH IN VERSE

JACK MOONLIGHT

MOONLIGHT MEMORIES

AUSTRIA AND HUNGARY

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It is the sage remark of Montesquieu, that, under a government of laws, liberty consists simply in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in freedom from any constraint to do what we ought not to will. The true conservative not only accepts this maxim, but he gives it completeness by prescribing a pure religion as the standard of what a people ought to will, and as the only sober guide of conscience. And this may be added as a corollary, that so long as a free people is substantially Christian, their conscience coinciding with absolute right, their liberty, so far as affected by popular causes, will preserve itself from fatal disorders. Such a people, possessed of liberty, will know it and be content. But where the popular conscience is morbid, they may have liberty without knowing it. They will fancy that they ought to will what they are not permitted to will, and the most wholesome restraints of wise laws will appear tyrannical. For such a people there can be no cure, till they are restored to a healthy conscience. A despotism successfully established over them, and then moderately maintained, and benevolently administered, is the only thing that can save them from self-destruction.

I was not writing at random, then, my Basil, when I said in my last letter that the first want of France is a national conscience. As a nation, the French lack the moral sense. What sign of moral life have they shown for the last fifty years? The root of bitterness in the body politic of France, is the astonishing infidelity of the people. Whatever be the causes, the fact is not to be denied: the land whose crown was once, by courtesy, most Christian, must draw on courtesy and charity too, if it be now called Christian at all. The spirit of unbelief is national. It is the spirit of French literature – of the French press – of the French academy – of the French senate; I had almost added of the French church; and if I hesitate, it is not so much because I doubt the corrupting influences of the French priesthood, as because they are no longer Gallican priests, but simply the emissaries of Ultramontanism. There is no longer a French church. The Revolution made an end of that. When Napoleon, walking at Malmaison, heard the bells of Ruel, he was overpowered with a sense of the value of such associations as they revived in his own heart, and forthwith he opened the churches which had so long been the sepulchres of a nation's faith, convinced that they served a purpose in government, if only as a cheap police. He opened the churches, but he could not restore the church of France. He could do no more than enthrone surviving Ultramontanism in her ancient seats, and that by a manœuvre, which made it a creature and a slave of his ambition. When it revolted, he talked of Gallican liberties, but only for political purposes. Nor did the Restoration do any better. The church of St Louis was defunct. Gallican immunities were indeed asserted on paper; but, in effect, the Jesuits gained the day. The Orleans usurpation carried things further; for the priesthood, severed from the state, became more Ultramontane from apparent necessity, and lost, accordingly, their feeble hold on the remaining respect of the French people. Who was not startled, when the once devout Lamartine talked of "the new Christianity" of Liberty and Equality over the ruins of the Orleans dynasty, and thus betrayed the irreligion into which he had been repelled by the Christianity of French ecclesiastics! Thus always uncongenial to the national character, Ultramontanism has coated, like quicksilver, and eaten away those golden liberties which St Louis consecrated his life to preserve, and with which have perished the life and power of Christianity in France.

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That the Reaction is thus identified with Ultramontanism, is a fact which its leading spirits would be the very last to deny. The necessity of religion to the prosperity of France is their fundamental principle; and religion being, in their minds, inseparable from Romanism, they will not see its defects; and their blind faith, like chloroform, makes them absolutely insensible to the sharp point of the weak spear with which Quinet pierces them. And it is but fair to suppose that Quinet and his colleagues are equally honest in considering Christianity and Ultramontanism synonymous. They see that the old religion of France has become, historically, a corrupt thing, and they propose a fresh Christianity in its place. Of one thing I am sure – they do not over-estimate the political importance of the Council of Trent. Let it be fairly traced in its connexions with kingdoms, with science, with letters, and with the conscience of nations, and it will be seen that Quinet is not far from correct, in taking it as the turning-point of the history of Europe. It produced Ultramontanism, or rather changed it from an abstraction into an organised system; and Ultramontanism, in its new shape, gave birth to the Jesuits. Christendom saw a new creed proposed as the bond of unity, and a new race of apostles propagating it with intrigue and with crime, and, in some places, with fire and sword. In proportion as the states of Europe incorporated Ultramontanism with their political institutions, they withered and perished. Old Romanism was one thing, and modern Ultramontanism another. Kingdoms that flourished while they were but Romanised, have perished since they became Tridentine.

Among English writers this distinction has not been generally made. Coleridge seems to have observed it, and has incidentally employed it in treating of another subject. But foreign literature is full of it, either tacitly implied or openly avowed, in different ways. Ultramontanism is, in Europe, a political and not merely a theological word, – its meaning results from its history. Before the Tridentine epoch, the national churches of Europe were still seven candle-sticks, in which glittered the seven stars of an essential personality and individual completeness. The "Church of Rome" still meant the Roman See, and, vast as were its usurpations over the national churches, it had neither reduced them to absolute unity in theology, nor absorbed their individuality into its own. The Roman Church, as we now understand it, was created by the Council of Trent, by a consolidation of national churches, and the quiet substitution of the creed of Pius IV. for the ancient creeds, as a test of unity. This fact explains the position of the Reformed before and after that extraordinary assembly. Till its final epoch, they had never fully settled their relations to the Papal See. The history of England is full of illustrations of this fact. Old Grostete of Lincoln spurned the authority of the Pope, but continued in all his functions as an English bishop till his death, in the thirteenth century. Wycliffe, in the fourteenth, was still more remarkable for resisting the papal pretensions, yet he died in the full exercise of his pastoral office, while elevating the host at Childermas. Henry VIII. himself had the benefit of masses for his pious soul at Notre Dame; and his friend Erasmus lived on easy terms with the Reformed, and yet never broke with the Vatican. Even the English prayer-book, under Elizabeth, was sanctioned by papal authority, with the proviso of her recognition of the supremacy, and for twelve years of her reign the popish party lived in communion with the Reformed Church of England. During all this period the dogmas of popes were fearlessly controverted by Cisalpine theologians, who still owned their supremacy in a qualified sense, and who boldly appealed to a future council against the decisions of the See of Rome. Ultramontanism had then, indeed, its home beyond the mountains, and when it came bellowing over its barrier, it was often met as "the Tinchel cows the game." But modern Ultramontanism is another thing. It is an organised system, swallowing up the nationalities of constituent churches, and giving them the absolute unity of an individual Roman church, in which Jesuitism is the circulating life-blood, and the Italian consistory the heart and head together. Such was the prodigy hatched during the seventeen years of Tridentine incubation. It appeared at the close of those interminable sessions, so different from all that had been anticipated, that it startled all Europe. It had quietly changed everything, and made Rome the sole church of Southern Europe. Quinet has not failed to present this fact very strongly. "That Council," says he, "had not, like its predecessors, its roots in all nations; it did not assemble about it the representatives of all Christendom. Its spirit was to give full sanction to the idea, which certain popes of the middle ages had established, of their pre-eminence over œcumenical assemblies. Thenceforward, what had been the effect of a particular genius, became the very constitution of the church. The great adroitness consisted in making the change without anywhere speaking of it. The church which was before tempered by assemblies convoked from all the earth, became an absolute monarchy. From that moment the ecclesiastical world is silent. The meeting of councils is closed, no more discussions, no more solemn deliberations; everything is regulated by bulls, letters, and ordinances. Popedom usurps all Christendom; the book of life is shut; for three centuries not one page has been added." One would think the school of the Reaction would feel the force of facts so efficiently urged, even in spite of their towering disgust at the purposes for which they are employed. In fact, their own maxims may be turned against them with great power, in this matter of Ultramontanism. De Maistre, in his argument for unwritten constitutions, speaks of the creeds of the church as furnishing no exception to his rule; for these, he argues, are not codes of belief, but they partake the nature of hymns – they have rhythmical beauty, they are chanted in solemn services, they are confessed to God upon the harp and organ. Now this is indeed true of those three ancient creeds which are still chanted in the service of the Church of England; but the creed of Pius IV., which is the distinguishing creed of the Roman church, is absolutely nothing else than a code of belief, and is the only creed in Christendom which lacks that rhythmical glory which he considers a test of truth! Even Quinet notices this liturgic impotence of the Ultramontane religion. "The Roman church," he says, "has lost in literature, together with the ideal of Christianity, the sentiment of her own poetry. What has become of the burning accents of Ambrose and Paulinus? Urban VIII. writes pagan verses to the Cavalier Berni;3 and instead of Stabat mater or Salutaris hostia, the princes of the church compose mythological sonnets, at the very moment when Luther is thundering Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, that Te Deum of the Reformation."

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