ceptance and support of the imperial government, as it has been accepted and supported by nearly all France, nobody would have blamed them. But a portion of them have done, or permitted to be done in their name, what the government has not attempted, and the country has not accepted; namely, the theoretic rehabilitation of despotism. And this, too, by the very voices and the very pens which for so long a time and so solemnly had professed the theory of liberty, and liberty for all. Whilst the founder of the new empire permitted us to catch a glimpse of liberty in the distant future as the crown of his work, the semi-official organs of the clergy in the press have maintained that this liberty is impossible, illegitimate; that even the word liberty has no place in the vocabulary of a Christian country; that it is necessary neither to ponder nor to discuss rights, but to deny them all; that 'to seek guaranties against power is, in politics, what it is in geometry to seek the quadrature of the circle,' and so every day for five years successively. The very men who, always in the name of the clergy and stipulating for them, in 1848 said, the Republic gives liberty to the Church, the only liberty, the liberty of every body, and the Church will owe it eternal gratitude,' say to-day, that when Catholics claim liberty in a Protestant country, they demand it only for themselves, and they regret not being able to sweep away the whole work of liberal civilization, corrupt to the very core. And they who speak thus have been authorized by the encouragements and approbations which have been lavished upon them, to declare that they have the best and most decisive reason for believing that they follow the true way, and that which the Catholic press ought to take. They thus make in the name of the clergy, whose silence they misinterpret, the saddest palinode of which the nineteenth century has given an example.

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Certainly there was, in 1852, neither motive nor pretext for a religious opposition to the new government; but there was just as little for derogating from the dignity and the independence which for twenty years had characterized the political attitude of the clergy, and which was so easy to reconcile with an honorable and loyal adhesion. There was, above all, neither motive nor pretext for making litter of the principles, institutions, and antecedents which they had recently invoked or applauded; to fulminate anathemas against all modern liberties; to constitute themselves the sole approvers of measures the most excessive; to be rabid against adversaries gagged in advance by official warnings; to exhaust the formulas of an adulation fitted only to excite pity, and most likely of him who is its object, and certainly of those who have been witnesses of it. There was neither motive nor pretext to clap the hands with a servile enthusiasm at the ruin of those rights which they had themselves passionately exercised but recently; to couple with the defence of religion that of the most unpopular theses and the most decried personages in history; to insult the overthrown republic, after having

greeted with acclamation its accession; to forget that it was under its ensigns and by favor of its liberties they were able to re-establish Pius IX. in his government at Rome, to emancipate Catholic instruction, and even to reproach the Republic itself with the prominent place it assigned to bishops in its solemnities. Be tranquil, if the Republic ever returns, it will give you no more of these pretexts for posthumous mockery."-pp. 650, 651.

But, after all, we must not be too severe against the clergy or those who have done so much to place them in a false political position. There are none of us who can boast that we have never committed any mistakes. M. Montalembert himself has had occasion to chant his palinode, and we ourselves have had, on more occasions than one, to chant ours. During the revolutionary epidemic of 1848 and 1849, we all had our fears, and exerted ourselves to save liberty from being destroyed, as it so often has been, by its own excesses. When the Ere Nouvelle was seeking a fusion of Catholics and Democrats, and laboring to erect democracy into a dogma of faith; when even Catholics were found carried away by a revolutionary spirit, and siding with Mazzini against the Holy Father; when all authority except that of demagogues was threatened in its very foundation, and society seemed likely to be given up a prey to anarchy and barbarism; we labored with all the forces we had to re-establish and confirm legitimate order, and, no doubt, used expressions and even arguments that might be cited against us to-day with effect, if no attention be paid to the altered circumstances in which the world is now placed. We have always considered it the part of wisdom to oppose the danger that is most imminent. In 1848, the danger most imminent, for the moment, was from the excesses of what was called liberty, in whose name so many crimes are committed. Intent on warding off that danger, we and our friends were obliged to confine ourselves chiefly to one side of the question, to dwell on the dangers of anarchy, and the need and benefits of authority. But when the revolution was checked as it was in 1849, and order was comparatively safe, we felt that the danger was then from the opposite side, that then we had to protect liberty, not against anarchy, but against despotism. It was necessary, after the defeat of the Hungarians, to change front, and to labor for safeguards against the excesses of

power, as we had labored for safeguards against the excesses of liberty.

But, unhappily, the course we were obliged to take in order to confine the revolution within legitimate bounds, gave an impulse in favor of authority, which the mass of those we addressed, seldom aroused to a sense of danger till it is over, thought they had nothing to do but to continue, although by continuing it after the time, they could only pave the way for the establishment of downright absolutism. The very men, in our own ranks, who in 1848 were disposed to identify Catholicity with democracy, in 1857 are ready to identify it with Cæsarism, and are astonished to find us opposing them now as we opposed them then. They suppose that they are now only carrying out the principles we then held, and look upon us as having not only changed front, but also our principles. This should not surprise or anger us, for there are few men who can comprehend more than one side of a question, or preserve themselves balanced on principles equidistant from an extreme on either hand. The mass of men reason well enough from their premises, but, unhappily, their premises are usually only a partial aspect of truth. Hence, they always swing like a pendulum from one extreme to another; now towards the frightful abyss of anarchy, and now towards the no less frightful abyss of an inexorable despotism. In their minds, notwithstanding all the precautions we took in 1848 to prevent misunderstanding, we, in advocating liberty to-day against Cæsarism, are eating our own words and retracting the warnings we then uttered. It is always so, and it is the grand reason why the world has seen, and why it always will see, so little of well-ordered liberty. Even in our own country liberty is abused, and the tendency on the one hand to licentiousness begets a tendency on the other to the exercise of arbitrary power. He who defends liberty here becomes, in the popular mind, the advocate of license, and he who defends authority and upholds the supremacy of law, becomes practically the advocate of despotism. There is nothing singular or strange in the fact, that the men who had opposed authority in France and were frightened at the danger its overthrow threatened to religion and society, should recoil from their own work, and run now to the opposite extreme of anathematizing all liberty, and of

adulating despotism. We foresaw, at the close of 1849, the reaction, and uttered our word of warning against it; but, of course, in vain; for we could not convince even our most intimate personal friends that the danger was no longer from the excesses of the revolutionary spirit, and most of them remain still unconvinced. We regret the political attitude which has been assumed by, or for, the clergy in France since the beginning of 1852, because it has in the eyes of the non-Catholic world placed our religion itself in a false position. For three hundred years the Catholic religion has appeared to be associated with the cause of absolute monarchy, or rather, with civil despotism. In the sixteenth century it had for its royal and imperial defenders Charles V. and Philip II., both monarchs hostile to all power but their own; in the seventeenth century it had for its crowned champion Louis XIV., who destroyed the last vestige of freedom in France, and made himself the State, and was associated in England, Scotland, and Ireland, with the cause of the unfortunate Stuarts, who labored to concentrate all power in the crown, and who detested the parliamentary freedom of the English nation. So long, and apparently so strictly, have Catholicity and absolutism been associated, that a strong conviction has been produced in the minds of non-Catholics and even of many Catholics, that Catholicity has a natural inclination for despotism, and that the Church is incompatible with liberty. It is the grand objection of the age to our religion, and an objection, though totally unfounded, that is apparently supported by the whole history of the last three hundred years. After the French Revolution of July 1830, a powerful effort was made by the clergy, in France, and several of the younger members of the Catholic nobility, to sever our religion from this apparent alliance, and to prove that its proper element is freedom, not despotism. Their success was great, and the universal Catholic heart responded to their spirit-stirring appeals. So great had been their success, that when the revolution of 1848 broke out, seconded as they had been by the bold measures of Pius IX., hardly an insult was offered to the Catholic religion throughout France or Germany, and save in the Pontifical States, where other passions than love of liberty were at work, the Catholic religion was never, since St. Peter entered Rome,

so free. or so able to speak in her own voice and follow out her own divine instincts. It seemed, for a moment, that the standing objection to the Church was triumphantly refuted, and that she was enabled to relieve herself of the false position in which accidental circumstances had placed her.

But the course adopted by a portion of the clergy in France after the coup d'état, the fulsome eulogies pronounced upon the new power by several eminent French prelates, and the doctrines daily put forth in their name or under their patronage, or, at least, with their acquiescence, have revived the old objection against the Church, and the European liberals are now, to a greater extent than ever before, not only non-Catholics but anti-Catholics. In vain do we repel the objection and write elaborate essays, or deliver eloquent lectures, to prove that our religion is the grand support of civil freedom. Our opponents have only to cite against us the conduct, during the last five years, of the French clergy and the columns of the Univers, as a practical refutation of our essays and lectures. When they add to this the further fact that the sympathy of the whole English-speaking Catholic world is, apparently, with the present imperial régime, and that of all the organs of Catholic opinion out of France, at least so far as known to us, our Review is the only one that refuses that sympathy, and ventures to repel the new-fangled Cæsarism as incompatible with the freedom, the dignity, and the inherent rights of the Church, what have we to reply? All others, until quite recently at least, have been silent, or else have joined in the general chorus of adulation; we know that the Catholic heart beats in unison with our own, but how are we to prove it to non-Catholics with all these appearances against us? We cannot answer with mere words, we must have deeds, and what avails it to point to the deeds of French Catholics from 1830 to 1852, if those deeds are now disowned and repudiated by the accredited organs of Catholic public opinion?

We think our Catholic friends are pursuing a short-sighted policy in suffering Catholicity to become associated in the public mind with the imperial government in France. The substantial gain, not to speak of principle, is nothing, and the loss is immense. The Catholic religion requires me to