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It is not, therefore, strange that the effect of the great outbreak of
Protestantism in one part of Christendom should have been to produce an equally
violent outbreak of Catholic zeal in another. Two reformations were pushed on at
once with equal energy and effect, a reformation of doctrine in the North, a
reformation of manners and discipline in the South. In the course of a single
generation, the whole spirit of the Church of Rome underwent a change. From the
halls of the Vatican to the most secluded hermitage of the Apennines, the great
revival was everywhere felt and seen. All the institutions anciently devised for
the propagation and defense of the faith were furbished up and made efficient.
Fresh engines of still more formidable power were constructed. Everywhere old
religious communities were remodeled and new religious communities called into
existence. Within a year after the death of Leo, the order of Camaldoli was
purified. The Capuchins restored the old Franciscan discipline, the midnight
prayer and the life of silence. The Barnabites and the society of Somasca
devoted themselves to the relief and education of the poor. To the Theatine
order a still higher interest belongs. Its great object was the same with that
of our early Methodists, namely to supply the deficiencies of the parochial
clergy. The Church of Rome, wiser than the Church of England, gave every
countenance to the good work. The members of the new brotherhood preached to
great multitudes in the streets and in the fields, prayed by the beds of the
sick, and administered the last sacraments to the dying. Foremost among them in
zeal and devotion was Gian Pietro Caraffa, afterwards Pope Paul the Fourth. In
the convent of the Theatines at Venice, under the eye of Caraffa, a Spanish
gentleman took up his abode, tended the poor in the hospitals, went about in
rags, starved himself almost to death, and often sallied into the streets,
mounted on stones, and, waving his hat to invite the passers-by, began to preach
in a strange jargon of mingled Castilian and Tuscan. The Theatines were among
the most zealous and rigid of men; but to this enthusiastic neophyte their
discipline seemed lax, and their movements sluggish; for his own mind, naturally
passionate and imaginative, had passed through a training which had given to all
its peculiarities a morbid intensity and energy. In his early life he had been
the very prototype of the hero of Cervantes. The single study of the young
Hidalgo had been chivalrous romance; and his existence had been one gorgeous
day-dream of princesses rescued and infidels subdued. He had chosen a Dulcinea,
"no countess, no duchess,"--these are his own words,--"but one of far higher
station"; and he flattered himself with the hope of laying at her feet the keys
of Moorish castles and the jeweled turbans of Asiatic kings. In the midst of
these visions of martial glory and prosperous love, a severe wound stretched him
on a bed of sickness. His constitution was shattered and he was doomed to be a
cripple for life. The palm of strength, grace, and skill in knightly exercises,
was no longer for him. He could no longer hope to strike down gigantic soldans,
or to find favor in the sight of beautiful women. A new vision then arose in his
mind, and mingled itself with his old delusions in a manner which to most
Englishmen must seem singular, but which those who know how close was the union
between religion and chivalry in Spain will be at no loss to understand. He
would still be a soldier; he would still be a knight errant; but the soldier and
knight errant of the spouse of Christ. He would smite the Great Red Dragon. He
would be the champion of the Woman clothed with the Sun. He would break the
charm under which false prophets held the souls of men in bondage. His restless
spirit led him to the Syrian deserts, and to the chapel of the Holy Sepulcher.
Thence he wandered back to the farthest West, and astonished the convents of
Spain and the schools of France by his penances and vigils. The same lively
imagination which had been employed in picturing the tumult of unreal battles,
and the charms of unreal queens, now peopled his solitude with saints and
angels. The Holy Virgin descended to commune with him. He saw the Savior face to
face with the eye of flesh. Even those mysteries of religion which are the
hardest trial of faith were in his case palpable to sight. It is difficult to
relate without a pitying smile that, in the sacrifice of the mass, he saw
transubstantiation take place, and that, as he stood praying on the steps of the
Church of St. Dominic, he saw the Trinity in Unity, and wept aloud with joy and
wonder. Such was the celebrated Ignatius Loyola, who, in the great Catholic
reaction, bore the same part which Luther bore in the great Protestant movement.
Dissatisfied with the system of the Theatines, the enthusiastic Spaniard turned
his face towards Rome. Poor, obscure, without a patron, without recommendations,
he entered the city where now two princely temples, rich with painting and
many-colored marble, commemorate his great services to the Church; where his
form stands sculptured in massive silver; where his bones, enshrined amidst
jewels, are placed beneath the altar of God. His activity and zeal bore down all
opposition; and under his rule the order of Jesuits began to exist, and grew
rapidly to the full measure of his gigantic powers. With what vehemence, with
what policy, with what exact discipline, with what dauntless courage, with what
self-denial, with what forgetfulness of the dearest private ties, with what
intense and stubborn devotion to a single end, with what unscrupulous laxity and
versatility in the choice of means, the Jesuits fought the battle of their
Church, is written in every page of the annals of Europe during several
generations. In the order of Jesus was concentrated the quintessence of the
Catholic spirit; and the history of the order of Jesus is the history of the
great Catholic reaction. That order possessed itself at once of all the
strongholds which command the public mind, of the pulpit, of the press, of the
confessional, of the academies. Wherever the Jesuit preached, the church was too
small for the audience. The name of Jesuit on a title-page secured the
circulation of a book. It was in the ears of the Jesuit that the powerful, the
noble, and the beautiful, breathed the secret history of their lives. It was at
the feet of the Jesuit that the youth of the higher and middle classes were
brought up from childhood to manhood, from the first rudiments to the courses of
rhetoric and philosophy. Literature and science, lately associated with
infidelity or with heresy, now became the allies of orthodoxy. Dominant in the
South of Europe, the great order soon went forth conquering and to conquer. In
spite of oceans and deserts, of hunger and pestilence, of spies and penal laws,
of dungeons and racks, of gibbets and quartering-blocks, Jesuits were to be
found under every disguise, and in every country; scholars, physicians,
merchants, serving-men; in the hostile Court of Sweden, in the old manor-houses
of Cheshire, among the hovels of Connaught; arguing, instructing, consoling,
stealing away the hearts of the young, animating the courage of the timid,
holding up the crucifix before the eyes of the dying. Nor was it less their
office to plot against the thrones and lives of apostate kings, to spread evil
rumors, to raise tumults, to inflame civil wars, to arm the hand of the
assassin. Inflexible in nothing but in their fidelity to the Church, they were
equally ready to appeal in her cause to the spirit of loyalty and to the spirit
of freedom. Extreme doctrines of obedience and extreme doctrines of liberty, the
right of rulers to misgovern the people, the right of every one of the people to
plunge his knife in the heart of a bad ruler, were inculcated by the same man,
according as he addressed himself to the subject of Philip or to the subject of
Elizabeth. Some described these divines as the most rigid, others as the most
indulgent of spiritual directors; and both descriptions were correct. The truly
devout listened with awe to the high and saintly morality of the Jesuit. The gay
cavalier who had run his rival through the body, the frail beauty who had
forgotten her marriage-vow, found in the Jesuit an easy well-bred man of the
world, who knew how to make allowance for the little irregularities of people of
fashion. The confessor was strict or lax, according to the temper of the
penitent. The first object was to drive no person out of the pale of the Church.
Since there were bad people, it was better that they should be bad Catholics
than bad Protestants. If a person was so unfortunate as to be a bravo, a
libertine, or a gambler, that was no reason for making him a heretic too.
The Old World was not wide enough for this strange activity. The Jesuits invaded
all the countries which the great maritime discoveries of the preceding age had
laid open to European enterprise. They were to be found in the depths of the
Peruvian mines, at the marts of the African slave-caravans, on the shores of the
Spice Islands, in the observatories of China. They made converts in regions
which neither avarice nor curiosity had tempted any of their countrymen to
enter; and preached and disputed in tongues of which no other native of the West
understood a word.
The spirit which appeared so eminently in this order animated the whole Catholic
world. The Court of Rome itself was purified. During the generation which
preceded the Reformation, that Court had been a scandal to the Christian name.
Its annals are black with treason, murder, and incest. Even its more respectable
members were utterly unfit to be ministers of religion. They were men like Leo
the Tenth; men who, with the Latinity of the Augustan age, had acquired its
atheistical and scoffing spirit. They regarded those Christian mysteries, of
which they were stewards, just as the Augur Cicero and the high Pontiff Caesar
regarded the Sibylline books and the pecking of the sacred chickens. Among
themselves, they spoke of the Incarnation, the Eucharist, and the Trinity, in
the same tone in which Cotta and Velleius talked of the oracle of Delphi or the
voice of Faunus in the mountains. Their years glided by in a soft dream of
sensual and intellectual voluptuousness. Choice cookery, delicious wines, lovely
women, hounds, falcons, horses, newly-discovered manuscripts of the classics,
sonnets, and burlesque romances in the sweetest Tuscan, just as licentious as a
fine sense of the graceful would permit, plate from the hand of Benvenuto,
designs for palaces by Michael Angelo, frescoes by Raphael, busts, mosaics, and
gems just dug up from among the ruins of ancient temples and villas, these
things were the delight and even the serious business of their lives. Letters
and the fine arts undoubtedly owe much to this not inelegant sloth. But when the
great stirring of the mind of Europe began, when doctrine after doctrine was
assailed, when nation after nation withdrew from communion with the successor of
St. Peter, it was felt that the Church could not be safely confided to chiefs
whose highest praise was that they were good judges of Latin compositions, of
paintings, and of statues, whose severest studies had a pagan character, and who
were suspected of laughing in secret at the sacraments which they administered,
and of believing no more of the Gospel than of the Morgante Maggiore. Men of a
very different class now rose to the direction of ecclesiastical affairs, men
whose spirit resembled that of Dunstan and of Becket. The Roman Pontiffs
exhibited in their own persons all the austerity of the early anchorites of
Syria. Paul the Fourth brought to the Papal throne the same fervent zeal which
had carried him into the Theatine convent. Pius the Fifth, under his gorgeous
vestments, wore day and night the hair shirt of a simple friar, walked barefoot
in the streets at the head of processions, found, even in the midst of his most
pressing avocations, time for private prayer, often regretted that the public
duties of his station were unfavorable to growth in holiness, and edified his
flock by innumerable instances of humility, charity, and forgiveness of personal
injuries, while at the same time he upheld the authority of his see, and the
unadulterated doctrines of his Church, with all the stubbornness and vehemence
of Hildebrand. Gregory the Thirteenth exerted himself not only to imitate but to
surpass Pius in the severe virtues of his sacred profession. As was the head,
such were the members. The change in the spirit of the Catholic world may be
traced in every walk of literature and of art. It will be at once perceived by
every person who compares the poem of Tasso with that of Ariosto, or the
monuments Of Sixtus the Fifth with those of Leo the Tenth.
But it was not on moral influence alone that the Catholic Church relied. The
civil sword in Spain and Italy was unsparingly employed in her support. The
Inquisition was armed with new powers and inspired with a new energy. If
Protestantism, or the semblance of Protestantism, showed itself in any quarter,
it was instantly met, not by petty, teasing persecution, but by persecution of
that sort which bows down and crushes all but a very few select spirits. Whoever
was suspected of heresy, whatever his rank, his learning, or his reputation,
knew that he must purge himself to the satisfaction of a severe and vigilant
tribunal, or die by fire. Heretical books were sought out and destroyed with
similar rigor. Works which were once in every house were so effectually
suppressed that no copy of them is now to be found in the most extensive
libraries. One book in particular, entitled Of the Benefits of the Death of
Christ, had this fate. It was written in Tuscan, was many times reprinted, and
was eagerly read in every part of Italy. But the inquisitors detected in it the
Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone. They proscribed it; and it is
now as hopelessly lost as the second decade of Livy.
Thus, while the Protestant reformation proceeded rapidly at one extremity of
Europe, the Catholic revival went on as rapidly at the other. About half a
century after the great separation, there were, throughout the North, Protestant
governments and Protestant nations. In the South were governments and nations
actuated by the most intense zeal for the ancient Church. Between these two
hostile regions lay, morally as well as geographically, a great debatable land.
In France, Belgium, Southern Germany, Hungary, and Poland, the contest was still
undecided. The governments of those countries had not renounced their connection
with Rome; but the Protestants were numerous, powerful, bold, and active. In
France, they formed a commonwealth within the realm, held fortresses, were able
to bring great armies into the field, and had treated with their sovereign on
terms of equality. In Poland, the King was still a Catholic; but the Protestants
had the upper hand in the Diet, filled the chief offices in the administration,
and, in the large towns, took possession of the parish churches. "It appeared,"
says the Papal nuncio, "that in Poland, Protestantism would completely supersede
Catholicism." In Bavaria, the state of things was nearly the same. The
Protestants had a majority in the Assembly of the States, and demanded from the
duke concessions in favor of their religion, as the price of their subsidies. In
Transylvania, the House of Austria was unable to prevent the Diet from
confiscating, by one sweeping decree, the estates of the Church. In Austria
Proper it was generally said that only one-thirtieth part of the population
could be counted on as good Catholics. In Belgium the adherents of the new
opinions were reckoned by hundreds of thousands.
The history of the two succeeding generations is the history of the struggle
between Protestantism possessed of the North of Europe, and Catholicism
possessed of the South, for the doubtful territory which lay between. All the
weapons of carnal and of spiritual warfare were employed. Both sides may boast
of great talents and of great virtues. Both have to blush for many follies and
crimes. At first, the chances seemed to be decidedly in favor of Protestantism;
but the victory remained with the Church of Rome. On every point she was
successful. If we overleap, another half century, we find her victorious and
dominant in France, Belgium, Bavaria, Bohemia, Austria, Poland, and Hungary. Nor
has Protestantism, in the course of two hundred years, been able to reconquer
any portion of what was then lost.
It is, moreover, not to be dissembled that this triumph of the Papacy is to be
chiefly attributed, not to the force of arms, but to a great reflux in public
opinion. During the first half century after the commencement of the
Reformation, the current of feeling, in the countries on this side of the Alps
and of the Pyrenees, ran impetuously towards the new doctrines. Then the tide
turned, and rushed as fiercely in the opposite direction. Neither during the one
period, nor during the other, did much depend upon the event of battles or
sieges. The Protestant movement was hardly checked for an instant by the defeat
at Muhlberg. The Catholic reaction went on at full speed in spite of the
destruction of the Armada. It is difficult to say whether the violence of the
first blow or of the recoil was the greater. Fifty years after the Lutheran
separation, Catholicism could scarcely maintain itself on the shores of the
Mediterranean. A hundred years after the separation, Protestantism could
scarcely maintain itself on the shores of the Baltic. The causes of this
memorable turn in human affairs well deserve to be investigated.
The contest between the two parties bore some resemblance to the fencing-match
in Shakespeare; "Laertes wounds Hamlet; then, in scuffling, they change rapiers,
and Hamlet wounds Laertes." The war between Luther and Leo was a war between
firm faith and unbelief, between zeal and apathy, between energy and indolence,
between seriousness and frivolity, between a pure morality and vice. Very
different was the war which degenerate Protestantism had to wage against
regenerate Catholicism. To the debauchees, the poisoners, the atheists, who had
worn the tiara during the generation which preceded the Reformation, had
succeeded Popes who, in religious fervor and severe sanctity of manners, might
bear a comparison with Cyprian or Ambrose. The order of Jesuits alone could show
many men not inferior in sincerity, constancy, courage, and austerity of life,
to the apostles of the Reformation. But while danger had thus called forth in
the bosom of the Church of Rome many of the highest qualities of the Reformers,
the Reformers had contracted some of the corruptions which had been justly
censured in the Church of Rome. They had become lukewarm and worldly. Their
great old leaders had been borne to the grave, and had left no successors. Among
the Protestant princes there was little or no hearty Protestant feeling.
Elizabeth herself was a Protestant rather from policy than from firm conviction.
James the First, in order to effect his favorite object of marrying his son into
one of the great continental houses, was ready to make immense concessions to
Rome, and even to admit a modified primacy in the Pope. Henry the Fourth twice
abjured the reformed doctrines from interested motives. The Elector of Saxony,
the natural head Of the Protestant party in Germany, submitted to become, at the
most important crisis of the struggle, a tool in the hands of the Papists. Among
the Catholic sovereigns, on the other hand, we find a religious zeal often
amounting to fanaticism. Philip the Second was a Papist in a very different
sense from that in which Elizabeth was a Protestant. Maximilian of Bavaria,
brought up under the teaching of the Jesuits, was a fervent missionary wielding
the powers of a prince. The Emperor Ferdinand the Second deliberately put his
throne to hazard over and over again, rather than make the smallest concession
to the spirit of religious innovation. Sigismund of Sweden lost a crown which he
might have preserved if he would have renounced the Catholic faith. In short,
everywhere on the Protestant side we see languor; everywhere on the Catholic
side we see ardor and devotion.
Not only was there, at this time, a much more intense zeal among the Catholics
than among the Protestants; but the whole zeal of the Catholics was directed
against the Protestants, while almost the whole zeal of the Protestants was
directed against each other. Within the Catholic Church there were no serious
disputes on points of doctrine. The decisions of the Council of Trent were
received; and the Jansenian controversy had not yet arisen. The whole force of
Rome was, therefore, effective for the purpose of carrying on the war against
the Reformation. On the other hand, the force which ought to have fought the
battle of the Reformation was exhausted in civil conflict. While Jesuit
preachers, Jesuit confessors, Jesuit teachers of youth, overspread Europe, eager
to expend every faculty of their minds and every drop of their blood in the
cause of their Church, Protestant doctors were confuting, and Protestant rulers
were punishing, sectaries who were just as good Protestants as themselves.
"Cumque superba foret Babylon spolianda tropaeis, Bella geri placuit nullos
habitura triumphos."
In the Palatinate, a Calvinistic prince persecuted the Lutherans. In Saxony, a
Lutheran prince persecuted the Calvinists. Everybody who objected to any of the
articles of the Confession of Augsburg was banished from Sweden. In Scotland,
Melville was disputing with other Protestants on questions of ecclesiastical
government. In England the goals were filled with men, who, though zealous for
the Reformation, did not exactly agree with the Court on all points of
discipline and doctrine. Some were persecuted for denying the tenet of
reprobation; some for not wearing surplices. The Irish people might at that time
have been, in all probability, reclaimed from Popery, at the expense of half the
zeal and activity which Whitgift employed in oppressing Puritans, and Martin
Marprelate in reviling bishops.
As the Catholics in zeal and in union had a great advantage over the
Protestants, so had they also an infinitely superior organization. In truth,
Protestantism, for aggressive purposes, had no organization at all. The Reformed
Churches were mere national Churches. The Church of England existed for England
alone. It was an institution as purely local as the Court of Common Pleas, and
was utterly without any machinery for foreign operations. The Church of
Scotland, in the same manner, existed for Scotland alone. The operations of the
Catholic Church, on the other hand, took in the whole world. Nobody at Lambeth
or at Edinburgh troubled himself about what was doing in Poland or Bavaria. But
Cracow and Munich were at Rome objects of as much interest as the purlieus of
St. John Lateran. Our island, the head of the Protestant interest, did not send
out a single missionary or a single instructor of youth to the scene of the
great spiritual war. Not a single seminary was established here for the purpose
of furnishing a supply of such persons to foreign countries. On the other hand,
Germany, Hungary, and Poland were filled with able and active Catholic
emissaries of Spanish or Italian birth; and colleges for the instruction of the
northern youth were founded at Rome. The spiritual force of Protestantism was a
mere local militia, which might be useful in case of an invasion, but could not
be sent abroad, and could therefore make no conquests. Rome had such a local
militia; but she had also a force disposable at a moment's notice for foreign
service, however dangerous or disagreeable. If it was thought at head-quarters
that a Jesuit at Palermo was qualified by his talents and character to withstand
the Reformers in Lithuania, the order was instantly given and instantly obeyed.
In a month, the faithful servant of the Church was preaching, catechizing,
confessing, beyond the Niemen.
It is impossible to deny that the polity of the Church of Rome is the very
master-piece of human wisdom. In truth, nothing but such a polity could, against
such assaults, have borne up such doctrines. The experience of twelve hundred
eventful years, the ingenuity and patient care of forty generations of
statesmen, have improved that polity to such perfection that, among the
contrivances which have been devised for deceiving and oppressing mankind, it
occupies the highest place. The stronger our conviction that reason and
scripture were decidedly on the side of Protestantism, the greater is the
reluctant admiration with which we regard that system of tactics against which
reason and scripture were employed in vain.
If we went at large into this most interesting subject we should fill volumes.
We will, therefore, at present, advert to only one important part of the policy
of the Church of Rome. She thoroughly understands, what no other Church has ever
understood, how to deal with enthusiasts. In some sects, particularly in infant
sects, enthusiasm is suffered to be rampant. In other sects, particularly in
sects long established and richly endowed, it is regarded with aversion. The
Catholic Church neither submits to enthusiasm nor proscribes it, but uses it.
She considers it as a great moving force which in itself, like the muscular
power of a fine horse, is neither good nor evil, but which may be so directed as
to produce great good or great evil; and she assumes the direction to herself.
It would be absurd to run down a horse like a wolf. It would be still more
absurd to let him run wild, breaking fences, and trampling down passengers. The
rational course is to subjugate his will without impairing his vigor, to teach
him to obey the rein, and then to urge him to full speed. When once he knows his
master, he is valuable in proportion to his strength and spirit. Just such has
been the system of the Church of Rome with regard to enthusiasts. She knows
that, when religious feelings have obtained the complete empire of the mind,
they impart a strange energy, that they raise men above the dominion of pain and
pleasure, that obloquy becomes glory, that death itself is contemplated only as
the beginning of a higher and happier life. She knows that a person in this
state is no object of contempt. He may be vulgar, ignorant, visionary,
extravagant; but he will do and suffer things which it is for her interest that
somebody should do and suffer, yet from which calm and sober-minded men would
shrink. She accordingly enlists him in her service, assigns to him some forlorn
hope, in which intrepidity and impetuosity are more wanted than judgment and
self-command, and sends him forth with her benedictions and her applause.
In England it not infrequently happens that a tinker or coal-heaver hears a
sermon or falls in with a tract which alarms him about the state of his soul. If
he be a man of excitable nerves and strong imagination, he thinks himself given
over to the Evil Power. He doubts whether he has not committed the unpardonable
sin. He imputes every wild fancy that springs up in his mind to the whisper of a
fiend. His sleep is broken by dreams of the great judgment-seat, the open books,
and the unquenchable fire. If, in order to escape from these vexing thoughts, he
flies to amusement or to licentious indulgence, the delusive relief only makes
his misery darker and more hopeless. At length a turn takes place. He is
reconciled to his offended Maker. To borrow the fine imagery of one who had
himself been thus tried, he emerges from the Valley of the Shadow of Death, from
the dark land of gins and snares, of quagmires and precipices, of evil spirits
and ravenous beasts. The sunshine is on his path. He ascends the Delectable
Mountains, and catches from their summit a distant view of the shining city
which is the end of his pilgrimage. Then arises in his mind a natural and surely
not a censurable desire, to impart to others the thoughts of which his own heart
is full, to warn the careless, to comfort those who are troubled in spirit. The
impulse which urges him to devote his whole life to the teaching of religion is
a strong passion in the guise of a duty. He exhorts his neighbors; and, if he be
a man of strong parts, he often does so with great effect. He pleads as if he
were pleading for his life, with tears, and pathetic gestures, and burning
words; and he soon finds with delight, not perhaps wholly unmixed with the alloy
of human infirmity, that his rude eloquence rouses and melts hearers who sleep
very composedly while the rector preaches on the apostolical succession. Zeal
for God, love for his fellow-creatures, pleasure in the exercise of his newly
discovered powers, impel him to become a preacher. He has no quarrel with the
establishment, no objection to its formularies, its government, or its
vestments. He would gladly be admitted among its humblest ministers, but,
admitted or rejected, he feels that his vocation is determined. His orders have
come down to him, not through a long and doubtful series of Arian and Popish
bishops, but direct from on high. His commission is the same that on the
Mountain of Ascension was given to the Eleven. Nor will he, for lack of human
credentials, spare to deliver the glorious message with which he is charged by
the true Head of the Church. For a man thus minded, there is within the pale of
the establishment no place. He has been at no college; he cannot construe a
Greek author or write a Latin theme; and he is told that, if he remains in the
communion of the Church, he must do so as a hearer, and that, if he is resolved
to be a teacher, he must begin by being a schismatic. His choice is soon made.
He harangues on Tower Hill or in Smithfield. A congregation is formed. A license
is obtained. A plain brick building, with a desk and benches, is run up, and
named Ebenezer or Bethel. In a few weeks the Church has lost for ever a hundred
families, not one of which entertained the least scruple about her articles, her
liturgy, her government, or her ceremonies.
Far different is the policy of Rome. The ignorant enthusiast whom the Anglican
Church makes an enemy, and whatever the polite and learned may think, a most
dangerous enemy, the Catholic Church makes a champion. She bids him nurse his
beard, covers him with a gown and hood of coarse dark stuff, ties a rope round
his waist, and sends him forth to teach in her name. He costs her nothing. He
takes not a ducat away from the revenues of her beneficed clergy. He lives by
the alms of those who respect his spiritual character, and are grateful for his
instructions. He preaches, not exactly in the style of Massillon, but in a way
which moves the passions of uneducated hearers; and all his influence is
employed to strengthen the Church of which he is a minister. To that Church he
becomes as strongly attached as any of the cardinals whose scarlet carriages and
liveries crowd the entrance of the palace on the Quirinal. In this way the
Church of Rome unites in herself all the strength of establishment, and all the
strength of dissent. With the utmost pomp of a dominant hierarchy above, she has
all the energy of the voluntary system below. It would be easy to mention very
recent instances in which the hearts of hundreds of thousands, estranged from
her by the selfishness, sloth, and cowardice of the beneficed clergy, have been
brought back by the zeal of the begging friars.
Even for female agency there is a place in her system. To devout women she
assigns spiritual functions, dignities, and magistracies. In our country, if a
noble lady is moved by more than ordinary zeal for the propagation of religion,
the chance is that, though she may disapprove of no doctrine or ceremony of the
Established Church, she will end by giving her name to a new schism. If a pious
and benevolent woman enters the cells of a prison to pray with the most unhappy
and degraded of her own sex, she does so without any authority from the Church.
No line of action is traced out for her; and it is well if the Ordinary does not
complain of her intrusion, and if the Bishop does not shake his head at such
irregular benevolence. At Rome, the Countess of Huntingdon would have a place in
the calendar as St. Selina, and Mrs. Fry would be foundress and first Superior
of the Blessed Order of Sisters of the Goals.
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