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LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
 PURCHASED BY THE 
 MRS. ROBERT LENOX KENNEDY CHURCH HISTORY FUND. 
 
 
 
 BX 945 .W7 1926 
 
 Wright, Cuthberr. 
 
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 THE STORY OF THE | 
 
 Catholic ae 
 
 BY CUTHBERT ‘WRIGHT 
 
 
 
 ALBERT €? CHARLES BONI 
 NEW YORK  ::  MCMXXVI 
 
 
 
Copyright, 1926, by Albert & C harles Bom, Inc, 
 
 Manufactured in the United States of America 
 

 

 
Contents 
 ®rigins [30-1000] 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 1. JESUS in Piece ek eck IN UDe tars Mane Na Seely 3) II 
 
 i. Pau. a ihig Seas ote ain Cah n't, ein aa © 21 
 PLL SLOW TO" EGA RTE 0. heer reir. SRN. SN aaa dhe 27 
 TV BOR OANEZATION dott (eater pei 100, eit Me Stl '5 kee 36 
 
 v. CHRIST AND CHSAR SSE UPL Cie Pe Pome 47 
 MIRAE RES Ye dite cage N Ter eah leet Se gy keg 54 
 vir. Monasticism SPER. COELY tes 68 
 
 The Consummation [1000-1300] 
 
 ITIL En VITR AGE Or Manson ia Wer cern “a NNUne ewes 81 
 Ix. THE CaTHOLIC CHURCH AND THE FEUDAL 
 
 STATE OID thar hh Sata hal BEN Ppt Se th 87 
 
 x. THE ApocaLyPsE OF SainT Louis . . = 104 
 
 xt [Hs ‘CENTURY OF SAINT LOUIS. redo 0 2.7 1tg 
 
 SILOM ART AND THE CHURCH SV mie ae hegre TO 
 
 The Catastrophe [1300-1800] 
 
 Iti MOR CADENUS Vel eam ive WKY yh Minar Mt hah kre 
 LMS ERSO Ny crite WMreoruiet® 9H hee a et ra Tes 
 xv. THe Borcias .. be GMail WAL ech Ey 2 
 STL SU EEL E Rind emi pomond viata hs wie tM Toth t sath iia ie ST" 
 
 xvul. EccLtes1A ANGLICANA . : : : t 183 
 SENATE RSL WEA Tie ML OEAAR tk RE etad Po Tee het? Skeid Oh gene 190 
 xIx. THE Last CRUSADE A : 4 ; 197 
 

 
 Contents 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 xx. THE WuitrE PLuME Poti Dhaene Ree eee 
 xxI. GRANDEUR AND DECLINE OF THE GALLI- 
 
 CAN CHURCH . . : : ; : 221 
 xxl. Ninety-THREE ne NaS fas ete honing i et eh a 
 
 FModern Times [1800-1918] 
 
 xx. RoMANTICISM Vey CEL TE eR cto 
 X&IVs (ULTRAMONTANISM, “00856 0 Ph ear) el we ee 
 SRV. cIVLODERNISM © 0 907 "a P7002 cole ete apes eal ed eae 
 SOVitdio Lt, pak, mth ates Seana tinea ee GAR ota ara) eg eae 
 xxvll. THE CaTHotic CHURCH IN AMERICA .  . 278 
 Unro-Tnis [Asta ty are’ oo ee ts oe es ee 
 APPENDIX: ON THE LiruRGY one a. os 
 
 Giossary or EccLesiasTIcAL TERMS. . 301 
 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE Se heel hah eee 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY SPRL CNETGES NUR ty (ok Le 
 
 
 
Origins 
 [30-1000} 
 
habe 
 vis 
 
 os 
 
 ; 4 i » Ay S a ‘ ( ies 
 AE Hho ae 
 si Le, "5 
 
 eso Se hae 
 
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 b 14 
 
 
 
THE STORY OF THE 
 CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 JESUS 
 
 Tue Christian Church, which even Protestants 
 still like to call “Catholic,” * is said to have been 
 founded about 30 A.p. by Jesus of Nazareth, an 
 obscure Syrian peasant, a Jew, who suffered a vio- 
 lent death at the hands of his more respectable 
 coreligionists. This being has probably provoked 
 more written controversy than any other historic 
 personage, but in plain matter of fact, there is sin- 
 gularly little to be known about him. So little, 
 indeed, that there are those whose studies have led 
 them to deny that he has ever existed. 
 
 But why speak of books and the controversies of 
 scholars? This name, Jesus, has for nineteen cen- 
 turies been the dominating fact in the civilization 
 of the western hemisphere. It remains the still 
 acknowledged center of the elaborate religious 
 radiations which the man Jesus is said to have set 
 in motion. Everywhere in Europe, Asia, America, 
 on the desolate Russian steppe, in the undulant In- 
 
 * “T believe in the Holy Catholic Church” . . . words used in the 
 service of most Protestant bodies. 
 1 
 
12 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 dies, in the heart of the African jungle and the 
 Australian veldt, under the elms of white New 
 England townships, and even in the closed and 
 jealous empires of the far Orient, rises that shame- 
 ful and resplendent symbol of his which the first 
 Christian emperor saw in the evening clouds. The 
 most remote and primitive human group is always 
 first indicated to the traveler by its belfry and its 
 cross. One church is within sound of another, and 
 so on to the extreme limits of the Occident. Often 
 it is the only thing that remains over from the past. 
 In a community all new, or in one newly recon- 
 structed from the devastations of war, it is always 
 the first edifice to rise. In the graveyards that 
 cluster under the shade of each belfry it is the 
 same thing. ‘Each dead man,” says a French 
 writer, ‘“‘brandishes above his tomb the one symbol 
 as if to recall the compact which has assured him 
 his immortality.” All else has perished; even his 
 own body has become indistinguishable from the 
 dead earth which forms his grave; only the Church 
 remains and above his dust the Cross. They pro- 
 claim that on this one essential point—the worship 
 of a god in human form—all those vanished gen- 
 erations, knowing nothing of us or of each other, 
 have agreed. 
 
 The history of the West from the fall of Rome 
 has sprung from a single generating fact—Jesus. 
 He is in European history what the writer of Rev- 
 elation saw him in vision, alpha and omega, the 
 
JESUS 13 
 
 beginning and the end. For his sake men have 
 loved and also hated each other; they have run 
 through the whole gamut of human passions from 
 the ferocious egoism of the brutes to the most ab- 
 solute self-surrender. For ,him~they have made 
 the Crusades, built the basilicas of France and 
 Italy, edified the Summa of Saint Thomas, com- 
 posed the balsamic chants of the Middle Ages. On 
 him has at times depended the destiny of science, 
 beauty, reason. He was and still is the corner- 
 stone in the structure of occidental society. A 
 child, helpless in the arms of his mother, is, with- 
 out his own knowledge, promised to Jesus, bap- 
 tized in his name. And ever afterward it is im- 
 possible for him to efface the mystical brand. 
 “Once a Catholic, always one.” Even should he 
 become the enemy of Jesus he will be so with an 
 inevitable constraint. In the order of ideas, to sum 
 up, Christ is more than great; he is incommen- 
 surable. 
 
 In the order of actual facts he shrinks almost 
 to nothingness. When the believer tests him by 
 the light of his time and country he is singularly 
 reduced in measure. Such a test can be made by 
 any one granted the requisite honesty, the refusal 
 to be dazzled by preconceived ideas. 
 
 In considering Jesus as an historic person, the 
 first difficulty one encounters is the total absence 
 of all references to him in the writings of contem- 
 poraries even of his own race. The best informed 
 
14 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 of them, Josephus, might have mentioned him, but 
 refrained from doing so, ostensibly because Jo- 
 sephus had never heard of him. To the early Chris- 
 tians this anomaly appeared so regrettable that 
 Christian hands added to the text of Josephus a 
 celebrated passage which he who runs may read. 
 Sandwiched naively between an account of the 
 cruelties of Pilate toward the Jews and one of their 
 banishment from Rome by Tiberius, occurs the 
 following: 
 
 ‘c, . Thus ended the revolt. And at this time 
 appeared Jesus, a wise man if indeed he can be 
 called aman. He accomplished marvelous things, 
 was the master of men who receive the truth gladly, 
 and drew many Jews and Greeks after him. He 
 was the Christ. And the sect which received the 
 name of Christian from him still exists. 
 
 “In the same days another terrible misfortune 
 fell on the Jews. .. .” 
 
 Never was a pious fraud introduced with less 
 cunning. Had Josephus written that, it is obvious 
 that he would have been a Christian, and as he 
 was not a Christian, it is obvious that he did not 
 write it. 
 
 Among the Gentile contemporaries of the his- 
 toric Jesus are Pliny the Younger, Tacitus and 
 Suetonius. All three have mentioned him, but only 
 vaguely, and from hearsay, as the founder of an 
 obscure and toublesome sect. 
 
JESUS 15 
 
 There remain, believers will tell us, the four 
 Gospels as irrefutable witnesses to the fact that 
 Jesus was historic. They are considered as having 
 been written by eye-witnesses of Christ’s ministry; 
 two of the writers are said to have been his imme- 
 diate followers. Unfortunately, it is no longer easy 
 to believe that the writers of the Gospel were eye- 
 witnesses or immediate disciples. The Gospels 
 were not even begun till after the first Christian 
 age was over. The oldest of them was written at 
 least twenty years after the Letters of Saint Paul. 
 Only by faith can we accept the authenticity of 
 the Gospels, or even the authenticity of a single 
 line of them.* 
 
 The thing which renders the Gospels so suspect 
 to critics of revealed Christianity is not so much 
 the element of inconsistency or improbability, the 
 element of miracle; it is the striking parallelism 
 between the drama of the Incarnation as set forth 
 therein and certain Hebrew texts composed before 
 the Christian era and familiar to us in the Old 
 Testament. The Scripture has a way of getting 
 fulfilled in the most suspiciously convenient man- 
 ner. The most trivial events are constantly occur- 
 ring for no reason except to corroborate the 
 Prophets. It is a case of the long arm of coinci- 
 dence on a vast and sacred scale. Thus Jesus 
 enters Jerusalem seated on an ass because he had 
 
 * “T should not believe in the Gospels,” said Saint Augustin, gr iy 
 did not have the authority of the Church for doing so.’ 
 
16 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 already been so seen in the Book of Zachariah. He 
 is sold for thirty pieces of silver, this being the 
 sum mentioned in the same Prophet. Moreover, 
 this money is used, both in Prophecy and Gospel, 
 for the same purpose—to buy a potter’s field. 
 They part his garments in Matthew, having al- 
 ready parted them in the twenty-second Psalm. 
 It is useless to multiply these instances; they are 
 too numerous. Sometimes the pious writer goes so 
 far as to put into Christ’s mouth expressions which 
 are textually identical with words composed for 
 the Prophecies or the Psalms centuries before.* 
 
 Such instances are sufficient to indicate that the 
 Evangelists had only to arrange in narrative form 
 the touching drama found all ready for use in the 
 sacred literature of their nation. As for the Fourth 
 Gospel it only serves to show how their efforts, full 
 of inconsistencies and naivetés, could be corrected 
 and synthesized by a cultivated Greek theologian 
 with the gift of style. 
 
 But (it may be said) Jesus must have existed 
 historically, else why the relatively realistic por- - 
 trait of him in the Gospels, a portrait possessing 
 recognizable human characteristics and bearing a 
 human name? To this question the foremost 
 critics of Christ’s historicity are ready with several 
 ingenious explanations. The latter fall into two 
 classes, but one and the other are alike based upon 
 
 * The whole drama of the Passion seems constructed on the sce- 
 nario, so to speak, of Psalm XXII. 
 
JESUS 17 
 
 the alleged existence of a pre-Christian myth of 
 Christ which the first organizers of Christianity 
 had only to add in order to crown the dubious 
 edifice they had already begun. 
 
 (1) The German scholar, Kalthoff, following 
 the indications already laid down by Bauer, postu- 
 lated the existence at Rome of two elements mak- 
 ing for social revolution in a religious disguise— 
 the Gentile proletariat and the Jewish Messianic 
 movement with its old hope of a Savior to redeem 
 Israel. The feeling which had provoked the re- 
 volt under the gladiator, Spartacus, in 74 B.c. had 
 never changed, but its chiefs knew by hard experi- 
 ence that it was useless to oppose themselves to 
 the disciplined force of the legions, hence they were 
 biding their time, and in so doing they found a 
 stimulus in the aspirations of the Jews. Israel 
 had known well, during several centuries, the 
 proper attitude to adopt in the face of oppression, 
 namely, that of passive resistance which sometimes 
 leads to emancipation. In short, according to 
 Kalthoff, Christianity issued from a social move- 
 ment, anterior to the Gospels, anterior also to the 
 touching figure which it created expressly to incar- 
 nate its own obscure sufferings and aspirations. 
 
 (2) The second theory explaining the inven- 
 tion of Jesus is more fascinating, and is largely the 
 work of three Anglo-Saxon scholars, Robertson, 
 Benjamin Smith and Arthur Drews. ‘The last 
 considers Jesus (Joshua) to have been a Pales- 
 
18 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 tinian sun god taken over bodily by the first Chris- 
 tians, and transformed by them into the human 
 personage presented to us in the Gospels. His 
 myth is entirely cosmopolitan; it owes much to 
 Jewish sources, but also to Greek and even to 
 Egyptian ones. He is Hermes, the good messenger 
 and good shepherd; he is also the demigod Jason 
 (The Greek name for Jesus) who has twelve com- 
 panions; above all he is Adonis, for Christianity 
 makes its first notable successes in that region of 
 Asia Minor where the lover of Venus was already 
 adored with strange and poetic rites. When Christ 
 proclaims in the Apocalypse that he is alpha and 
 omega he tells us simply that he is Adonis, for the 
 two letters A and O express the name of this god. 
 Bethlehem, the Savior’s reputed birthplace, was a 
 seat of the Adonaic cult. But the true back- 
 ground of the Christ-legend is the great solar myth 
 which, from the beginning, dominated the religious 
 imagination of the Orient. The entire history of 
 the Savior, the Son of God made man, is nothing 
 but the long voyage of the sun through the zodiac 
 from his birth in the winter solstice to his death and 
 resurrection in the Spring. If further proof were 
 needed that Christianity in its origins was merely 
 a synthesis of pre-Christian myths, it may be added 
 that the Egyptian sun-god Horus was also born of 
 a virgin, announced by a star, recognized at the 
 age of thirty, contended with Satan on a mountain, 
 fished with a miraculous net, fed the multitude 
 
JESUS 19 
 
 with seven loaves, summoned twelve apostles, and 
 was called the Good Shepherd, the Lamb, etc. 
 These and similarly destructive conclusions 
 have been made a hundred times, but, strange to 
 say, even the most radical of those scholars who 
 do accept the historicity of Jesus have persisted 
 in a supplementary conclusion which does not 
 necessarily hold water. This can best be summed 
 up in the words of Loisy, who confessed that “in 
 the year 1894 he was able to accept only one por- 
 tion of the Christian creed, namely, that one Jesus 
 had been crucified under Pontius Pilate.” That at 
 least was certain according to M. Loisy. Ex- 
 panded a little, this means that he, the most thor- 
 ough and uncompromising of biblical critics, 
 believed in 1894 that in the first part of the princi- 
 pate of Tiberius an obscure Jewish agitator did 
 make sufficient stir as to suffer death under Roman 
 law. Armed with this hypothesis, the celebrated 
 Ernest Renan wrote a picturesque realistic novel 
 still well known as La Vie de Jesus which is not 
 half so much the history of Jesus as it is the history 
 of Renan. The Jesus of the great Frenchman is a 
 Syrian aristocrat who seems singularly conversant 
 with the moral and political problems of 1863. He 
 would have been very much at home at the fireside 
 of Michelet or in the salon of Madame Sand. It is 
 magnificent but it zs art, and illustrates the un- 
 deniable superiority of art over nature. Others in 
 our day have added a Marxian color to the fairy 
 
20 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 story. Two Americans, Bouck White and Upton 
 Sinclair, have, I am sure with sincere conviction, 
 given us a Jesus who shares in all the political 
 preoccupations of Mr. Eugene V. Debs. 
 
 And all these people, whether skeptics or social- 
 ists, are working from a conception which is, from 
 the standpoint of facts and proofs, so much thin air. 
 There is not a scrap. of evidence, in any accepted 
 sense of the word, to justify the common concep- 
 tion of an historic Jesus. It is not even enough to 
 say with Loisy: “I know nothing of him save that 
 he existed.”” One must say courageously: I know 
 nothing of him, not even his existence. There is 
 no document which proves positively, I will not say 
 that he was God, but even that he was ever man. 
 
 That is the initial problem which, if not stated 
 and faced, renders any history of the Church which 
 he founded incomplete and almost unnecessary. 
 How is it that an obscure Jew, the very existence of 
 whom is questionable, has been transformed into 
 the alpha and omega of medieval history, the great 
 god of the Occident? 
 
 The foregoing should be read merely as an exposition of the case against 
 
 the existence of the historic Christ. Jt does not represent the author’s own opin- 
 ion, which will become quite obvious if the reader is so patient as to continue 
 the book. It is his belief that the approach to Christ can never be made through 
 dates and documents, since there are none of a thoroughly satisfactory nature. 
 The edition of Josephus recently discovered in Russia may contain insertions fully 
 as misleading as the one quoted above. 
 _ In this connexion it is only fair to add the orthodox Catholic position regard- 
 ing the testimony of the four Gospels. The Church holds that the Gospels are 
 genuine historical documents, (2) that they contain no substantial emendations 
 of geeey (3) that they prove not only the historicity but also the divinity 
 0 esus. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 PAUL 
 
 Tue Letters of Saint Paul form the earliest 
 testimony we possess to the existence of Christian- 
 ity. They have a start of at least twenty years on 
 even the first of the four Gospels. 
 
 Their author was, at any rate, an historic person, 
 that is to say, we have as much positive informa- 
 tion regarding him as we have regarding Shake- 
 speare, which, to be sure, is not a great deal. In 
 the year 51-52 a.p., Claud being Emperor, L. 
 Junius Gallio, Seneca’s brother, being procurator 
 of Achaia, a man calling himself Paul addressed 
 to the Christians of Thessalonica a letter which is 
 the oldest extant document in which the name of 
 Jesus occurs. It occurs side by side with the name 
 of God. 
 
 “Paulus . . . to the assembly of Thessalonicans 
 in God our Father and the Lord Jesus, the Christ. 
 
 ? 
 
 This grammatical relationship between God and 
 Jesus is reasserted more forcibly a little later on: 
 
 “May He our God and our Lord Jesus direct our 
 
 way toward you... .” 
 21 
 
22 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 The absence of a plural form in the English sub- 
 junctive makes for ambiguity, but there is no am- 
 biguity in the Greek.* The verb “direct” remains 
 singular, indicating that its substantive is not two 
 persons but one person. In the vocabulary of Paul 
 God and Jesus do not make a plural; God and Jesus 
 are one. 
 
 Paul is writing two decades, at the very most, 
 after the Crucifixion. Yet this God-Man of his 
 by whom all things were made, belongs evidently 
 to a far different order of ideas from the obscure 
 Hebrew agitator whose real existence is guaranteed 
 us by M. Loisy. 
 
 Of course the deification of a man, even during 
 his lifetime, was nothing new in 52 A.p. It was in 
 that year or thereabouts that the Empress Agrip- 
 pina induced the senate to confer godhead upon her 
 husband Claud, a poor lymphatic creature who 
 never opened his mouth except to talk nonsense. 
 Deified men were as common as thieves in Asia 
 Minor; they very often were thieves. 
 
 But there was one nation at least where the thing 
 was impossible, and that was among the Jews. 
 They had a unique God, Yahveh, a god formless, 
 indivisible, whose image they dared not trace, 
 whose very secret name they dared not invoke. To 
 
 * Paul, of course, wrote in Greek. We have, moreover, the high 
 authority of Mr. H. G. Wells that his Greek was very good. 
 
PAUL 23 
 
 associate with that awful deity, still more to iden- 
 tify with Him, a human being was to the Hebrew 
 mind the last abomination. No one has ever been 
 more venerated by his people than Moses, but as 
 someone has said, the Jews would have suffered 
 themselves to be hacked to pieces rather than admit 
 that Moses was a god. Their long expected Savior 
 was reckoned to come from the household of David; 
 he was not, and could not be, the Son of the Most 
 High. 
 
 Paul was a Jew. More than that, he belonged by 
 origin to the strictest of Jewish sects. And that is 
 the supreme miracle beside which the ones in the 
 Gospel are bagatelles. In his Letters he is speaking 
 of another Jew, living in flesh and blood, a few 
 years before, whom he, Paul, might have known. 
 And this second Jew, having a human name, as 
 common in 52 a.p. as it is to-day in the Mexican 
 Bad Lands,— 
 
 “E:xisted in the form of God, 
 
 But drew no advantage from being the 
 equal of God. 
 
 He emptied himself, 
 
 And took upon him the form of a slave, 
 
 And was made in the likeness of men. . . 
 
 Therefore God hath highly exalted him, 
 
 And given him a name above all other 
 names; 
 
24 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 That at the name of Jesus every knee 
 should bow, 
 
 Of things in heaven, 
 
 And things in earth, 
 
 And things under the earth, 
 
 And that every tongue should confess 
 
 That Jesus Christ is Lord, 
 
 To the glory of God the Father. . . .” 
 
 Let him explain, who can, how a monotheist from 
 the most monotheistic people in history, a Jewish 
 tentmaker of Cilicia, dared to apply these tremen- 
 dous words to his contemporary, a Jewish adven- 
 turer of Galilee. The intellectual energy of scholars 
 has been wasted for centuries upon dates and mira- 
 cles, but I fail to see that they have so much as 
 touched the enigma of Paul’s conversion which 
 seems to me the crux of the whole Christian prob- 
 lem. 
 
 For it is an enigma—this deification of a Jew by 
 another Jew—an unsurmountable enigma, un- 
 less ee 
 
 Unless we choose to accept the orthdox account, 
 and ascribe the conversion of Paul and his organi- 
 zation of the Catholic Church to a direct experi- 
 ence. If we do so accept it, the metaphysic and 
 philosophy which Paul gave the infant Church in 
 the name of Jesus becomes credible, almost ra- 
 tional. That metaphysic and philosophy, the super- 
 
PAUL 25 
 
 structure, so to speak, of Christianity we will 
 consider in the next chapter. For the moment it 
 is enough to point out one fact. Hardly ever does 
 Paul evoke eye witnesses or circumstantial evi- 
 dence to corroborate the positive creed he is 
 preaching in the name of Jesus Christ. One could 
 read through the Epistles from cover to cover and 
 scarcely be reminded a single time that Jesus 
 actually existed in time and space a few years 
 earlier. ‘‘What difference does it make,” says Paul 
 in effect, “whether Jesus was or was not? Jesus zs. 
 What are the odds whether he was the son of Mary 
 or the son of Joseph, or the ‘son’ of David or even 
 the Son of God! He zs God. And the proof that 
 he is God is uniquely in that flash of illumination 
 which blinded me on the road to Damascus, in that 
 voice, never heard perhaps on Galilean land or 
 sea: ‘I am Jesus whom thou persecutest.’ ”’ 
 
 I have not made myself clear thus far if I have 
 failed to indicate that the shoulders of Jesus, as 
 he is commonly seen by well-meaning modernists, 
 are far too frail to have borne even the crushing 
 witness of Paul’s Letters, let alone the weight of 
 the whole Christian fabric. It is not a mere man, 
 the obscure proletarian of M. Loisy or the accom- 
 plished Hegelian of Renan or the reasonable com- 
 munist of Mr. Bernard Shaw, who can explain the 
 fact of the Catholic Church, or even the fact of 
 Paul. It is to put a very low estimate on the 
 
26 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 Christian faith to regard it as the mere progressive 
 deification of a man, especially a man whose very 
 existence cannot be proved. Either Jesus was the 
 living God, as he was experienced in trance by his 
 chief Apostle, or he is nothing. Either we must see 
 him with the eyes of faith, or he is inconceivable. 
 
CHAPTER ITI 
 DOWN TO EARTH 
 
 It was Paul who gave the Church its doctrine, 
 its philosophy. This he promulgated up and down 
 Asia Minor in rapid and repeated journeys to 
 Jerusalem, Macedon, classic Hellas at Athens, 
 where he preached on the Acropolis, and finally 
 to Rome, where he disappears from history. The 
 last word we have of him is from the entertaining 
 author of The Acts of the Apostles who recounts 
 with a capital bourgeois touch that “he dwelt two 
 years in his own hired house and received all that 
 came in to him.” It is probable that he perished 
 in the first imperial persecution of Christians under 
 Nero. Roman Catholics venerate him as one of 
 the two apostolic organizers of the Church at 
 Rome, and have erected a stately church, still out- 
 side the walls, on the site of his supposed execution. 
 
 Paul has been reproached by certain non- 
 Christian writers for deforming the thought of 
 Jesus, for compressing in an iron theology the joy- 
 ous and divine moderation of the Gospels. Two 
 men of genius, Mr. Shaw and Mr. George Moore, 
 
 better equipped as romantic artists than qualified 
 27 
 
28 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 as scholars, have taken a special delight in denounc- 
 ing this pretended opposition between ‘Chris- 
 tianity”’ and the religion of Paul. But, as we have 
 shown, there is no opposition at all in the sense that 
 they mean, since the only authority we have for 
 what Jesus actually thought is in the Gospels, and 
 the latter are posterior to the Letters of Paul by 
 at least two decades. . The Gospels are an after- 
 thought, a narrative commentary embroidered on 
 the bold metaphysic of Paul; the latter cannot be 
 said to contradict what did not previously exist. 
 
 Only the barest outline can be given here of the 
 Christian philosophy as formulated by Paul in his 
 apocalyptic manner. He was one, he said, who 
 owed much to the barbarian_and also to the Greek, 
 and there is more of the former than. the latter in 
 his prose. 
 
 The essence of the Pauline theology is contained 
 in certain articles later called “the symbol of the 
 Apostles,” and still later expanded into the Nicene 
 Creed. 
 
 I believe in God... 
 
 And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of 
 OU) eer. 
 
 Who for us men and for our salvation, 
 
 Came down from heaven, 
 
 And was incarnate by the Spirit of the 
 Virgin Mary, 
 
DOWN TO EARTH 29 
 
 And was made man. 
 
 He was crucified for us under Pontius 
 Pirates as 
 
 And the third day he rose again... . 
 
 The first four strophes, at any rate, would have 
 been corroborated by Paul. They summarize well 
 enough the radiating fact in his theology—the 
 voluntary action on the part of a God-Man which, 
 in some mysterious fashion, “saved” man. 
 
 When we ask from what occult doom or blight 
 we have been delivered centuries before our proper 
 existence, we encounter little in modern religious 
 teaching which is able to enlighten us. The 
 Church, for the most part, has been content to state 
 the Redemption as a formula without attempting to 
 justify it as a reality. Most people feel neither 
 the consciousness of having been saved, nor for that 
 matter, any particular need of salvation. They are 
 misled on one side by the credulity of M. Loisy and 
 on the other by the formalism of their religious 
 teachers. Having been told by the latter that they 
 have been “saved” (it doesn’t much matter from 
 what) they are then informed by M. Loisy and his 
 friends that this salvation took place in Palestine 
 under the principate of Tiberius at precisely three 
 o’clock in the afternoon. After that there is only 
 one obvious retort to be made by the man in the 
 street: “What has it to do with me? It was before 
 
30 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 I was born.”” But the man in the street does not 
 realize, with Saint Paul, nineteen centuries before 
 Einstein, that, so far as God is concerned, time does 
 not exist. 
 
 And then there is the instinct called the universal 
 human conscience which has assailed the insensi- 
 bility even of the man in the street. One thing 
 at least the practice of psychoanalysis has accom- 
 plished; it has restored “original sin” to more than 
 its original place in the drama of the human soul. 
 A few years ago this quaint doctrine was relegated 
 to the limbo of horsehair Calvinism. Now, thanks 
 to the studies of Dr. Freud and his disciples, 
 original sin has been revealed as something so much 
 more ghastly in its nature and devastation than 
 man’s first disobedience and its fruit, that even 
 quite soft and voluptuous people will allow them- 
 selves to be crucified mentally in secret clinics for 
 years at a time in order to get rid of it. People 
 feel that Calvinists are inhuman because they con- 
 demn little children to damnation before they are 
 born, and so they are inhuman, Calvinists being, in 
 this respect, quite modern and nicely scientific in 
 their trend. In a word, they are not Christians, but 
 determinists. Christians know that little children 
 are condemned, sometimes prenatally, and so do 
 psychoanalysts. But neither condemn them for- 
 ever; the psychoanalyst believes in the efficacy 
 of his processes plus the human will; the Christian 
 
DOWN TO EARTH 31 
 
 adds the love and the grace of God. When we 
 realize this proposition we can understand how 
 singularly modern are Paul’s metaphysics; how 
 they square with the most recent and intelligent 
 human experience. Mr. Shaw says that Paul’s 
 trouble was sex, but a greater than Mr. Shaw has 
 shown us that in this obsession Paul is not alone. 
 Whatever the Apostle meant by the “sin” from 
 which the action of Christ has presumably saved 
 us, it corresponded to something not only in his 
 consciousness, but also in everyone’s. 
 
 Toward the middle of the eighteenth century 
 Rousseau muddled this issue, which is perfectly 
 clear and self-evident, by introducing an airy affir- 
 mation to the effect that everyone is born good. 
 Rousseau who, of all people in the world, should 
 have understood frustration, ascribed ‘‘man’s first 
 disobedience and his fall” to poverty or ill-health 
 or clothes or the government of Louis Quinze. To 
 us this romanticism has all the faded charm of an 
 old print or a lost cause. The children of our time 
 are at least wise enough in their generation to have 
 become quite Pauline in their point of departure; 
 it is only their diverging paths which are so widely 
 asunder. We are desperately wicked, or desper- 
 ately miserable (which amounts to the same 
 thing), because, as Paul would have said, we have 
 not put off the old Adam which clothed us when 
 we were born, and even before. Both the Chris- 
 
32 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 tian and the Freudian are united in believing that 
 this original evil can be overcome, stripped from 
 the being like a garment. But the Freudian pre- 
 fers a succession of tortuous-mental crucifixions, 
 and the Christian benefits (perhaps without com- 
 prehending) by the crucifixion of Christ. It is 
 only the Calvinist who is so impressed by the pre- 
 natal flaw, justly called original sin, that he ends 
 by denying altogether the valor of the human will 
 cooperating with the grace of God. 
 
 This grace, in the Christian scheme of things, is 
 conveyed in various ways, but most essentially in 
 a process of which Paul gives the following sum- 
 mary: 
 
 I received of the Lord 
 
 And deliver it to you; 
 
 That the Lord Jesus the night in which he 
 was betrayed, 
 
 Took bread, 
 
 And blessing it broke it, 
 
 And said: Take, eat; this is My Body 
 which is broken for you. | 
 
 Do this 
 
 In remembrance of Me.* 
 
 The redeeming action of Christ, perpetuated in 
 the timeless sacrifice of the Mass, seems to me the 
 basis of the whole Christian theology from which 
 
 * Cora! one 
 
DOWN TO EARTH 33 
 
 all the rest logically, and for the most part reason- 
 ably, proceeds. 
 
 It was not until a period comprised between the 
 year 80 and the year 135 that the Gospels were at 
 length composed. It does not matter much which 
 of them came first. The first three, usually called 
 the Synoptic Gospels, had among their sources a 
 kind of anthology of Christ’s sayings and parables 
 handed on from one to another obscure evangelist.* 
 The Gospel of John, written by a very different 
 sort of man and for a different milieu, seems deeply 
 affected by the Neoplatonic theology which flour- 
 ished at Alexandria. It is thought by several 
 scholars to be a Gnostic book edited by Catholic 
 hands. 
 
 In the Gospels, the ineffable being, hypostasis 
 of the one God, who haunted the imagination of 
 Paul, becomes at last the “lean and strenuous’’ per- 
 sonality who has supplied Messrs. Shaw, Moore and 
 Wells with so many and conflicting conjectures. 
 The redemption of mankind is considered to have 
 taken place in Palestine about forty years prior to 
 the destruction of Jerusalem. By the middle of 
 the second century the Gospels have been accepted 
 by the Catholic cult as the one authentic witness to 
 the historicity of its founder, and are cited by 
 
 *Known as Q from the initial letter of the German word Quelle 
 (source). 
 
34 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 St. Justin Martyr as the “memoirs of the 
 Apostles.” 
 
 By a sort of caprice, the full significance of: 
 which is not clear, the early Church accepted, as an 
 authoritative canon, four records of Christ’s exist- 
 ence only, thereby rejecting several others which 
 contain matter fully as interesting as anything to 
 be found in Matthew or Mark. Sentences like the 
 following from a lost Hebrew Gospel are finer than 
 much in the Synoptics:— 
 
 “Whosoever grieves the spirit of his brother com- 
 mits the greatest sin.” 
 
 “The seeker shall not rest till he find that which 
 he seeks, but when he has found it, he shall wonder, 
 and when he has wondered, he shall be master and 
 when he is master, he shall find rest.” 
 
 Whether they be memoirs or retrospective 
 ‘“‘prophesyings,” the Gospels have a_ sovereign 
 charm which no one with the slightest feeling for 
 human character or language can ignore. ‘The 
 Spirit, third Person of the Trinity, who is believed 
 to have inspired them, must also be that deity who 
 presides at the genesis of all living art. The Fourth 
 Gospel, in particular, containing the opening ode 
 to the Logos, the poem of the Good Shepherd, the 
 matchless prayer of Jesus at the Last Supper, is a 
 work, in certain respects, unsurpassed in world 
 literature. 
 
 Only it is necessary to take the Gospels for what 
 
DOWN TO EARTH 35 
 
 they are, that is as testimony written long after 
 a postulated event. There was a Christian society, 
 a church in existence before its members conceived 
 the idea of inscribing their papers of identification. 
 To regard the Gospels as the point of departure will 
 involve one in all sorts of inextricable confusions; 
 there lies the road to error, Protestantism, heresy, 
 what you will, and the end of it all is the mere pret- 
 tiness of M. Renan or the icy negations of 
 M. Loisy. Christ was conceived as a god by the 
 founders of the faith long before its evangelists 
 defined him as an historic man. He is a god hu- 
 manized; not a man deified. He is the climax of a 
 long work of generation in the minds of men, com- 
 mencing as early as the feudal age in Egypt and 
 culminating at last in the explosion of mystical 
 experiences of which the conversion of Paul is only 
 one. He is not so much the initiator of a cult as 
 the object of acult. He is not the preacher but the 
 God preached. He is not the marabout; he is 
 Allah. The Gospels are not the departure of this 
 mythos; they are the faulty completion of it. 
 
 Christ was a spiritual being, and was so regarded 
 by the Church till the propagation of the Gospels 
 as historic memoirs. I do not attempt to discuss 
 here the nature of spiritual beings. The history 
 of the Church is all I can undertake at this time. 
 It is in a sense His history also, for He has no other 
 definitive biography. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 ORGANIZATION 
 
 Ir used to be a common standpoint among 
 agnostics of a fanciful and determined type, the 
 organization of the primitive Church being so 
 veiled in uncertainty, that it was, on the whole, 
 simpler (and more annoying to the orthodox) to 
 assert that the primitive Church had no organiza- 
 tion at all. This was often said; it is still said; 
 and there was a time when I believed it myself. 
 The position of such critics was summarized in 
 language something like this: — 
 
 The Catholic Church did not spring into being 
 fully accoutered like Minerva from the head of 
 Jove. Jesus, its reputed founder, was an ignorant 
 Syrian artisan who merely developed a Messianic 
 monomania, never imagining that he would be later 
 taken up as the head of a new religion. He was 
 killed before he even conceived of organizing his 
 followers into a definite sect. These followers, act- 
 ing on his assurance that he would come again dur- 
 ing their lifetime, did, however, form a loose sort 
 of fraternal society, rather like the Ethical Culture 
 
 Movement, and indulged in an orgy of revivalism, 
 36 
 
ORGANIZATION 37 
 
 inspirational teaching, social service, and sweetness 
 and light in general. There was no hard-and-fast 
 government, and, of course, no sacraments in the 
 later significance of the term. Naturally, dissen- 
 sions rose among the various culturists calling 
 themselves Christian, and it was only by luck, or, 
 rather, by a wave of snobbery, that the sect denomi- 
 nated Catholic rose to a position in which it could 
 exterminate its rivals. An oriental Cesar selected 
 the Catholic cult as a kind of palace-pet, imposed 
 it by force upon the decadent Roman world as a 
 State-Church, and killed off its competitors. It 
 then fortified its position by inventing various pious 
 prevarications; apostolic succession and the pri- 
 macy of the pope and this and that sacramental 
 mystery cribbed from the Greeks; and thus was 
 equipped for its short-lived domination over men’s 
 wills and affections during the dark Middle Ages. 
 Take it or leave it, this version; it contains, at 
 any rate, a plausible sequence of events which the 
 orthodox version utterly fails to provide. The 
 latter smacks too much of the miraculous element, 
 and miracles have nothing to do with history. 
 Since I fully agree with this last sentence I pro- 
 pose to show that nothing could be more miraculous 
 than the version of the Church’s origin I have just 
 summarized tested in the light of source and record, 
 to say nothing of human probabilities and common 
 sense. This chapter will necessarily be the dullest 
 
38 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 of my narrative, since it involves an immense 
 amount of digging and delving into records to 
 please the people who are enormously impressed 
 by such things as dates and documents. And hav- 
 ing no talent for conjecture or controversy, I may 
 be pardoned by the reader if I stick to the barest 
 outline of facts. In attacking so plausible a posi- 
 tion as the one above outlined, plausibility, indeed, 
 is not enough. The position is simple and logical 
 and complete and all things in fact, but one, and 
 that is it is not true. 
 
 In principio erat Verbum. To begin with the 
 beginning, then, the undoubted founder of Chris- 
 tianity was Christ. It seems an obvious enough 
 truism, but to hear many people, one would sup- 
 pose the founder of Christianity to have been 
 Saint Peter or Paul of Tarsus or the Life-Force or 
 the Will to Believe or some unknown Essene monk. 
 A great deal of far-fetched patter has been talked 
 concerning the religion of Jesus and the religion 
 about Jesus. It is the trump card in the popular 
 Modernist pack, the religion of Jesus being any- 
 thing you happen to like in the Gospels, and the 
 religion about him a Pauline corruption, anti- 
 Jesuist, anti-Christ. One cannot open a book by 
 some highly accomplished moralist like Mr. Shaw 
 or Mr. H. G. Wells without being reminded that 
 Christ never intended to found anything, most 
 certainly not the Church afterward organized in 
 
ORGANIZATION 39 
 
 hisname. An individualist par excellence, he came 
 to save individuals by a highly impractical system 
 of personal morality based upon love. Attractive 
 as this theory is, it does not square with the figure 
 of Christ as presented in the Gospels, and I sup- 
 pose that no one would deny that the Gospels are 
 records, however tardy and obscure. I myself 
 have dismissed them as useless in any discussion of 
 Christ as a historic personage. Once grant, how- 
 ever, that Christ did live, and the Gospels at once 
 become interesting as showing us what early 
 Christians thought about him and what elements 
 of his teaching they put into regular practice. 
 They are not, in short, the first link in the chain, 
 but they are a link and a highly important one. 
 
 In the Gospels the word “church” (ecclesia) is 
 employed twice by Christ, the first time in the cele- 
 brated commission to Peter: “Thou art Peter, and 
 upon this rock I will build my Church, and the 
 gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”” In the 
 Gospels, Christ is represented as providing for the 
 extension of his Church, first by sending out his 
 twelve elect as missionaries, then by sending 
 seventy converts on the same mission. Say that 
 all this is fraudulent interpolation, and one is still 
 faced with the improbability that even an unbal- 
 anced young Nazarene dervish, anticipating an im- 
 pending death and an early end of the world, would 
 not lift a finger to propagate his illusions as exten- 
 
40 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 sively and effectively as possible before the evil 
 days. At all events this is what happened. Chris- 
 tianity appears to have existed already in north 
 Palestinian centers, like Antioch and Cesarea 
 when, on the disappearance of their master, Peter 
 and his comrades found themselves the nucleus of 
 a Christian church at Jerusalem. 
 
 The Apostles do not exactly overwhelm the on- 
 looker with the spiritual fascination and charm 
 which emanated from Jesus, and, consequently, Te 
 Acts of the Apostles, the document which continues 
 the Christian story where the Gospels leave it off, 
 strikes one as an anti-climax up to the moment 
 when both matter and style are heightened into 
 drama by the apparition of Paul. The Jerusalem 
 Apostles seem to have been simple and inferior men, 
 for the most part, slow, unimaginative and rou- 
 tineer. But it is absurd to say, with Mr. Shaw, 
 that the Apostles, on being left to themselves, can- 
 celed Jesus and went back to John the Baptist, 
 and a glance through the Gospels is enough to 
 establish the absurdity. When Christ commands 
 his elect to go out and convert all nations by a 
 symbolic ceremony of initiation by water, the 
 Apostles, in continuing this first precept, can hardly 
 be said to be canceling Christ. When, the night 
 before his death, he takes bread and wine, informs 
 his Apostles that these things contain his divinity, 
 and commands them to continue this rite in his 
 
ORGANIZATION 41 
 
 memory, they cannot be canceling him in so con- 
 tinuing it. When Christ says to them plainly: 
 ““Whosoever’s sins ye remit they are remitted,” and 
 they take him at his word, the consequent practice 
 of absolution may be superfluous or morbid or ab- 
 surd or anything you like, but it cannot, by any 
 stretch of imagination, be called un-Christian. For 
 the benefit of those who say, in the face of this 
 evidence, that sacraments were unknown in the 
 early Church and imitated, only much later, from 
 popular Greek mysteries, I may state that the three 
 described above as found in the Gospels are, in 
 their order, the Catholic Sacraments of Baptism, 
 the Mass and Confession. 
 
 I have named three major Sacraments of the 
 Church, and must now mention a fourth, since upon 
 this last is based the whole organization which is 
 the central subject of this chapter. If the world 
 were not to end for a while, it was obvious to the 
 first Christians that the Church must go on, and if 
 the Church were to go on, the Sacraments must con- 
 tinue to operate at the hands of people as qualified 
 to operate them as the Apostles themselves. It was 
 considered that when Christ employed the second 
 person pronoun he was speaking, not only to Peter 
 or John, as the case might be, but also to a whole 
 multitude of successors through the ages, the 
 mystical body to which he had promised the gift 
 of his Holy Spirit. Consequently, the Sacrament 
 
42 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 of Orders (Apostolic Succession) seems to have 
 been employed right and left at Jerusalem and else- 
 where. Immediately after Christ’s disappearance, 
 the Apostles “laid their hands” upon a certain 
 Matthias to replace the traitor Judas as one of the 
 Twelve, indicating that they, at least, regarded 
 themselves as a central organization, whatever the 
 modern critic thinks that they were. They then 
 ordained seven deacons so that they themselves 
 “might not be servers of tables.” Paul, from his 
 headquarters at Antioch, ordained presbyters in 
 every church that he founded. Thus the Christian 
 Church, in its very cradle at Jerusalem, is revealed 
 as a body possessing both a sacramental system and 
 a hierarchy. The fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. 
 transferred the Jerusalem community to Antioch in 
 Syria, and in Antioch at the beginning of the sec- 
 ond century, as anyone can ascertain for himself 
 who troubles to look up the Letters of Saint 
 Ignatius (110 A.p.) the modern three-fold order of 
 bishops, priests and deacons existed in full force. 
 Put the two dates together, and ask whether it is 
 so unreasonable to suppose that it existed in 
 Jerusalem also. The episcopal and medieval 
 Antichrist is seen to be very close, in point of time, 
 to the apostolic and primitive Christ. 
 
 “The contagion of this superstition,” wrote Pliny 
 two years later, “has penetrated not only the cities 
 but also the villages and countryside.” One must 
 
ORGANIZATION 43 
 
 imagine the eastern Mediterranean as a long lake 
 with three visible shores, the Hellenic-Latin cities 
 facing each other across the water. By the second 
 century the new faith from Palestine had radiated 
 in two principal directions, striking south and west 
 along the coast of Egypt as far as Carthage; north 
 and west through Syria and the Cilician Gates 
 where, carried by Paul, it crossed the A‘gean inlet 
 to Hellas, and thence across a second inlet, the 
 Ionian one, to Italy and the capital of the world. 
 This is perhaps the best moment to sketch the 
 shadowy origins of the institution known later as 
 the Papacy and the Papal Supremacy. Whether 
 one likes it or not, it is one of the oldest institutions 
 in the Christian world. No sooner do we know 
 from Saint Ignatius that one Christian church, by 
 presumption a model for the rest, was governed 
 by bishops, than we unearth another document, 
 slightly earlier, wherein it appears that one of these 
 bishops (of Rome) speaks with the accent of 
 authority to the rest. I refer to the Letters of Saint 
 Clement of Rome (90 a.p.) the Letters, that is, of 
 someone who was very nearly a contemporary of 
 Christ. His first predecessor as Roman Bishop is 
 believed by Catholics to have been Peter who trans- 
 ferred himself from Antioch to Rome at some date 
 during the principate of Nero (54-68). As for the 
 Supremacy, the governance of the Christian world 
 by the Bishops of Rome, his successors, it is justi- 
 
44, STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 fied in two ways, (1) dogmatically, by the commis- 
 sion in the Gospel: “Thou art Peter and upon this 
 rock I will build my Church,” and (2) historically. 
 Among all the primitive Christian centers, Rome, 
 as the capital of the civilized world, became, for an 
 obvious reason, predominant. As the Church be- 
 came more and more identified with the civilized 
 world, it was natural that the capital of the latter 
 should become also the capital of the Church, and 
 that the Bishop of Rome, after the elimination of 
 an emperor in the west, should rule both Church 
 and world. The force of history thus carried the 
 Papacy triumphantly along with an almost geo- 
 metric precision. Eventually the Pope took the 
 ancient title formerly borne by the Cesars,— 
 Pontifex Maximus. It signifies head of the 
 Empire’s religion. 
 
 To sum up:—When agnostics speak of a Catholic 
 cult contending for survival and supremacy with 
 other Christian cults, they may very possibly be 
 right, though up to the second century the burden 
 of proof is decidedly on them. I merely venture 
 to point out that they are wrong in saying that its 
 organization cannot be determined, and that its 
 sacraments are after-thoughts. By its own defini- 
 tion the Christian cult was by 100 A.p. a group of 
 churches federated by the same religion taught 
 them by Christ seventy years previous; a religion 
 involving at least three sacraments, also of Christ’s 
 
ORGANIZATION ! 45 
 
 precept, and carried on by a clergy in a three- 
 fold organization inherited from apostolic times. 
 Finally, over all these ancient churches there was 
 one figure, primus inter pares, who spoke authori- 
 tatively across three seas. 
 
 Early in the second century the personality of 
 this Church was compromised by the movement 
 known as Gnosticism. 
 
 The Gnostics originated in Alexandria, one of 
 the breakwaters where the various mythologies 
 from the Orient came to spend themselves against 
 the western mind. According to these people, the 
 gulf between the infinite and finite, spirit and 
 matter, God and man, was bridged by a succession 
 of divine emanations called eons. Jesus was one 
 of these zons, camouflaged for a few years under 
 the likeness of man. [Docetism] Marcion (c. 
 160) holding the Docetic view that a phantom 
 calling itself Jesus was seen to die on the Cross, 
 attempted to Gnosticize the Church from the in- 
 side. Like all religions of this character, Gnosti- 
 cism was occult and pessimistic. The Fourth Gos- 
 pel is thought by-several to be the Catholic edition 
 of a Marcionite book. The hidden Wisdom 
 (gnosis) was only gradually revealed to the cul- 
 tured and prematurely sad, while its adherents 
 blasphemed the life of this world by endless de- 
 nunciations of matter and sex. The menace in- 
 volved in this curious and fashionable superstition 
 
46 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 consolidated the Catholic cult and stiffened the 
 powers of the Episcopate. Synods, church coun- 
 cils on a minor scale, were held with increasing 
 frequency, and among the faithful there was dis- 
 seminated a formula called the Roman symbol or 
 Apostles’ Creed. The various scattered churches, 
 hitherto conscious of no great need for external 
 conformity so long as they were guided by a com- 
 mon faith in Christ and certain common practices, 
 drew together, and the “great Church,” as its 
 enemy, Celsus, calls it in 177, fought Gnosticism 
 till it died, or, rather, till it shammed death. 
 
 Well before the end of the second century the 
 Christian family took the name Catholic, that is 
 to say, international, universal. 
 
 Our agnostic critic of origins can afford to allow 
 the above description to pass uncontested, con- 
 temptuously reserving his great card, which is that 
 the Church eventually became supreme, not be- 
 cause it was of divine origin, or even because it 
 was sane and holy, but because it was adopted and 
 imposed on the world by no less a person than 
 Divus Cesar. Whether its ultimate supremacy Is 
 really as simply explained as all that, I propose 
 to examine in subsequent chapters. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 CHRIST AND CAESAR 
 
 Tue Cesars had always exercised a creditable 
 prudence in dealing with conquered minorities. 
 Their spiritual descendants, the English (accord- 
 ing to the English) have never shown in India or 
 elsewhere the consideration of even so hard a func- 
 tionary as Pontius Pilate, who kept the golden 
 eagles outside the walls of Jerusalem so that they 
 might not defile the holy city of the Jews with 
 graven images. In a word, the Romans were not 
 cursed with the mania of religious uniformity. So 
 long as their subjects respected those divinities 
 who symbolized the fecund majesty of the Roman 
 state, they were free to worship a whole menagerie 
 of imported gods, conceived in their own taste, 
 and it is just to add that most of them did. Rome 
 harbored rhore little religions than the Middle 
 West of America, and their manifestations were 
 infinitely more picturesque. Christianity itself 
 owes its easy introduction into polite society to 
 this wholesale eclecticism. The religion of the 
 
 Nazarene was after all only one more, and there 
 47 
 
48 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 might be something in it. Even the emperors, 
 official high priests as they were of the Latin cult, 
 shared the apprehension of the poet Baudelaire, 
 who reproved the hilarity of some friends before a 
 hideous and pathetic South Sea idol, saying: 
 “Have a care: it might be the unknown God.” 
 One act of conformity only was required of the 
 alien. As a mark of respect to the visible symbol 
 of the great State which protected him, he was 
 obliged to salute, usually by offering incense, the 
 image of the emperor. It was a gesture hardly 
 more significant than a salute to the national flag, 
 or than rising to the strains of the Star Spangled 
 Banner in a theater. It is perhaps regrettable 
 that the Semitic consciences of the first Christians 
 did not permit them to concede this small polite- 
 ness, for they suffered atrociously as a result of 
 not rendering to Cesar the things that were his. 
 The first persecution, that under Nero, was, 
 however, no fault of theirs. Nero, a cheap mono- 
 maniac and a coward, was suspected of having set 
 the city on fire to while away the tedium of a 
 sultry evening on the Palatine hill. To divert sus- 
 picion from himself, he accused the whole Chris- 
 tian community, the more indiscreet of whose 
 members were always talking about the imminent 
 destruction of the world in flames. 
 / From the year 64 to the year 311, when the 
 government abandoned the struggle, there was per- 
 
CHRIST AND CHSAR 49 
 
 secution of the new cult, most of it, however, 
 sporadic and local in character. One outbreak 
 took place in the Flavian October of the Empire, 
 under the gentle skeptic moralist, Marcus Aurelius. 
 His beautiful wife Faustine, having given him 
 more trouble than all the Christians put together, 
 is said to have ended her days in the consoling 
 shadow of the Cross. This tradition is interesting 
 if only as indicating the progress which the Church 
 had then made in the conversion of the upper 
 classes. It could no longer be accurately called the 
 religion of the poor. 
 
 Walter Pater in his suave philosophic romance, 
 Marius the Epicurean, has a poetic description of 
 the Mass, the “divine service” as it had thus far 
 developed in the Christian assemblies during the 
 Minor Peace of the Church under the Antonines. 
 It is far too long to quote entire, but certain pas- 
 sages are suggestive. 
 
 “It was a sacrifice in its essence—a Sacrifice, it 
 might seem, like the most primitive, natural and 
 enduringly significant of old pagan Sacrifices of 
 the simplest fruits of the earth. . . . Certain por- 
 tions of the bread and wine were selected by the 
 bishop, and thereafter it was with an increasing 
 mysticity and effusion that the rite proceeded. 
 Like an invocation or supplication the antiphonal 
 singing developed from this point into a kind of 
 
50 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 solemn dialogue between the chief ministrant and 
 the whole assisting company— 
 
 Sursum Corda! 
 Habemus ad Dominum. 
 
 Gratias agamus Domino Deo nostro!— 
 
 It was the service especially of young men, stand- 
 ing there in long ranks, arrayed in severe and 
 simple vesture of pure white—a service in which 
 they would seem to be flying for refuge, with their 
 youth itself as a treasure in their hands to be 
 preserved, to one like themselves whom they were 
 also ready to worship. So deep was the emotion 
 that at moments it seemed as if some at least 
 there present perceived the very object of all this 
 pathetic crying drawing near. Throughout the rite 
 there had been a growing sense and assurance of 
 some one coming. 
 
 Ite! Missa est aa ey young deacons. 
 
 The natural soul of worship had at last been sat- 
 isfied as never before.” 
 
 The peace of the Church was rudely disturbed 
 by the cruel persecution of Decius and again by 
 the advent of the Emperor Diocletian (284) who 
 embarked on a life-and-death struggle with the 
 strong young faith. If ever a man did his utmost 
 to exterminate a hostile force it was Diocletian, a 
 Roman of the old school, by no means a con- 
 
CHRIST AND CHSAR 51 
 
 temptible figure. Thousands perished as a result 
 of his supreme effort. Then having divided the 
 Empire into West and East, he retired to an 
 Horatian farm and spent the remainder of his days 
 in cultivating prize vegetables. On his deathbed 
 he is said to have acknowledged the futility of the 
 persecution. 
 
 An early successor to Diocletian was Constan- 
 tine, born in England, on the confines of the Em- 
 pire, at York. He was determined, not only to be 
 a stronger despot than Diocletian, but also not to 
 repeat his capital mistake. Christianity was now 
 the religion, secret or acknowledged, of a sixth of 
 his subjects, but there was a better reason than 
 that for trying it out. The Church was, by this 
 time, truly Catholic, in other words, international. 
 Since the defeat of Mithraism, it was perhaps the 
 one cult in the realm with a justified claim to uni- 
 versality. One could hardly do better than to 
 bring this religion which worked in every part of 
 the Empire under one’s own thumb. Constantine 
 admired, too, the system of episcopacy by which, if 
 one held a handful of bishops, one held the Church. 
 In short, Christianity seemed to him an admirable 
 instrument for fortifying and enforcing Roman 
 unity. There is a pretty story of his having seen 
 the Cross and the words zn hoc signo vinces in the 
 clouds above the Milvian bridge on the eve of a 
 battle, but he had no need of a vision to reénforce 
 
52 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 his common sense which already told him that in 
 this sign he would conquer. He issued an edict of 
 toleration (313). The Pagan cults disappeared, 
 to be immediately replaced by the even more fan- 
 tastic aberrations of the fourth century heretics. 
 The day of Roman toleration was over, and that 
 of Roman uniformity had dawned. But in this 
 first struggle between Church and State the latter 
 had surrendered, only to rule better. 
 
 As early as the reign of Tiberius, the Emperor 
 had investigated the report of some sailors cruising 
 the Greek islands who heard voices crying along 
 the shore, ‘‘Pan is dead.” This time Pan was 
 really slain, if imperial edicts could kill him. There 
 is good reason to suppose, however, that his death 
 was merely feigned. 
 
 The main contention of our Modernist is true 
 then? Is it true that the “great Church” became 
 a State Church because it was imposed upon the 
 Empire as inexorably as conscription? I am afraid 
 that the answer to this convenient contention is 
 .. . not at all. Christianity was not inexorably 
 imposed by Constantine; it was tolerated and 
 adopted in a curious halting fashion by the Em- 
 peror himself, who only on his deathbed consented 
 to be baptized. It was not made obligatory for 
 all citizens till the reign of Theodosius and then 
 only in the east. It is true that the Pagan cults 
 did disappear in an extremely leisurely fashion, 
 
CHRIST AND CHSAR 53 
 
 but their gradual disappearance was due to the 
 force of mode rather than to the mode of force. 
 In the generation following Constantine’s, the 
 Emperor Julian led a rather pathetic return to 
 Paganism, and there is a charming story, which 
 Heine would have liked to exploit, of the last 
 Pagan Emperor discovering the old priest on the 
 steps of a fallen temple with a goose in his lap— 
 the only trace of Paganism that Julian could un- 
 earth. The Modernist asserts that the Catholic 
 cult conquered merely because Divus Cesar 
 wrapped his purple cloak about the Crucified. But 
 the ink on the edict of toleration was hardly dry 
 before the cold and stately shadow of Arius fell 
 upon this incongruous group, and Catholic Chris- 
 tianity found itself once more in battle, not only 
 against a novel and attractive heresy, but against 
 principalities and powers, against Divus Cesar 
 himself, and, as Athanasius said, against the world. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 HERESY 
 
 THE Church appears to have suffered from com- 
 plicated divergencies within its fold, from heresy 
 in short, ever since the first days of the Apostles. 
 At a date anterior to his first missionary journey 
 (c. 47 a.p.), Paul embarked on a bitter contro- 
 versy with the leaders of the Jerusalem Church on 
 the problem presented by Gentile converts to 
 Christianity. The older Apostles, however much 
 or little they were penetrated by the new Gospel, 
 remained in their religious life devout Jews. For 
 this they could plead the example of their master. 
 Jesus, in whatever light one regards him, was ex- 
 ternally a Jew; he was circumcized, preached in 
 the synagogues, apparently as an _ accredited 
 rabbi, worshiped in the Temple, while there were 
 even moments when the old lion of the House of 
 Judah broke through his divinity, as when he 
 rudely told the Syro-Phcenician woman that “‘it 
 was not meet to take the children’s bread and 
 cast it to dogs,” and was only melted by the beauty 
 of her response: ‘‘Truth, Lord, yet the dogs eat 
 
 54 
 
HERESY 55 
 
 of the crumbs that fall from the Master’s table.” 
 His Apostles wished that admittance to the Chris- 
 tian cult be made dependent upon the convert’s 
 acceptance of circumcision, after which he was to 
 be baptized. Paul contended that this surgical 
 operation was superfluous for adult Gentiles, and 
 the Jerusalem Apostles eventually swung around 
 to his side. He thus saved the Church from re- 
 lapsing into an annex of the Jewish Temple; it is 
 not too much to say that he secured its survival. 
 A remnant of irreconcilables lingered on in the old 
 Ebionites seen by Flaubert sitting “aged like 
 mummies” in desert places and saying: ‘We alone 
 have known Him, the carpenter’s Son.” 
 
 But Christianity was oriental in its origin, and 
 even after this first triumph over Semitism the ori- 
 ental mind did not abandon its passion for non- 
 conformity without a struggle. During the third 
 century a new sect pullulated every year, almost 
 every day. One must go to the delirious pages of 
 the Tentation de Saint Antoine for an intimation 
 of the myriad and monstrous cults which from the 
 right and the left assailed all at once the orthodoxy 
 of Rome. Gnosticism which, as we have seen, was 
 the first to come, was the first to go, except as it 
 survived in the curious Catharism of Albi and the 
 French Midi during the Middle Ages. Reinach, in 
 general very hostile to Christian orthodoxy, has 
 observed that the passing of Gnosticism was a good 
 
56 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 riddance for the world since its extravagant meta- 
 physics were dangerous alike to society and to 
 the individual. All one can affirm is that the 
 Gnostics took everything that was already obscure 
 in Christian theology and proceeded to render con- 
 fusion thrice confused. Sophia, who seems to have 
 been a sort of celestial daughter-in-law, engendered 
 the Demiurge who created the world, the Demon 
 and man. Somewhere in this lucid cosmogony 
 came Christ and the Holy Ghost, but it does not 
 greatly matter where, though there is said to be 
 still a Gnostic church with bishops at Paris. The 
 Gnostic scheme, if it had one, was broken up, 
 but fragments of separate insanity survived 
 and took other names. Manes, originally a 
 Gnostic, affected by the old Dualism of Persia, 
 taught that the creator of matter, who 
 was also the Yahveh of the Old Testament, is 
 really the Devil. Christ came to establish a king- 
 dom of pure spirit and redeem us from his yoke. 
 Manes has given his name to the Manichzan cult 
 which flourished in southern France well on into 
 the Middle Ages when it was put down with fire 
 and sword. Montanus, accompanied by two 
 women, preached an unnatural asceticism. Donatus 
 called down the wrath of heaven upon the Chris- 
 tian clergy who had apostasized during the late 
 persecutions. His followers, the Circoncellians, a 
 sort of Bulgar comitadji, clothed in wolfskins, 
 
HERESY 57 
 
 crowned with thorns and brandishing whips, ter- 
 rorized the African Church and sacked monasteries 
 and towns. The Adamites went about completely 
 naked in imitation of the lost purity of Eden. The 
 Valesians mutilated themselves in hatred of the 
 flesh. The Paternians lived in filth in order to 
 dishonor their bodies, made, as they conceived, by 
 Satan. The Messalians brutalized themselves 
 systematically on the ground that all occupation, 
 including that of thought, was a sin. 
 
 In this welter of madness, the Church, the 
 Roman insignia -on its prow, held its difficult 
 course like a ship tossed by opposing waves 
 from this side and that, and all but shattered, but 
 still enduring. Chesterton, in a characteristic 
 passage, compared the Church to a chariot, swerv- 
 ing to right and left so exactly as just to avoid 
 enormous obstacles. It is always easy to fall, he 
 remarks, it is always easy to be a heretic. There 
 are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only 
 one at which one stands. ‘The heavenly chariot 
 flew thundering through the ages; the dull heresies 
 sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but 
 erect,” 
 
 When the madmen one by one disappeared 
 squeaking and gibbering into limbo, they were at 
 once replaced by a far more temperate and dan- 
 gerous type of heretic—the rationalist theologian. 
 Arius was the most influential of these as well as 
 
58 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 the first. He was a deacon in orders, a good- 
 looking and dignified ecclesiastic, much admired by 
 women. The great preoccupation of the new 
 heretic was with the precise nature of the Word, 
 the Logos, the Christ, regarded both by orthodox 
 and dissident as the match which had kindled the 
 conflagration of Christianity. Was the Logos 
 really coequal and coeternal with the Father as 
 the Church said? No, replied Arius, He was cre- 
 ated by the Father, it doesn’t matter when, in 
 time, at all events, and hence He is subordinate 
 to the Father. Though far from affirming that 
 Christ was merely a man, the tendency of Arianism 
 was obviously Socinian. Arius may be regarded as 
 the first Unitarian. 
 
 He found considerable support not alone among 
 theologians, but among the crowd, especially that 
 of recent converts with whom his conception of 
 Christ was popular for its resemblance to that of 
 the demigod in Pagan myths. Through a series 
 of songs which he wrote, like a Byzantine Chaucer, 
 “for sailors, wayfarers and millers,’ the Arian 
 catchwords ran like wildfire through the lower 
 bourgeois and slave classes. It was the first at- 
 tempt on the part of a theologian, truly Modernist, 
 to subordinate everything in Catholic Christianity 
 to the susceptibilities of the man in the street. 
 Babbitt was to be made a good Catholic by a 
 writing down of the dogmas and paradoxes of the 
 
HERESY 59 
 
 Faith for Babbitt’s consumption. The most con- 
 spicuous leader on the orthodox or Trinitarian side 
 was a young deacon of the Church at Alexandria 
 named Athanasius. 
 
 In the year 324 the Emperor Constantine inter- 
 vened. He himself was not a Christian. Insofar 
 as he had any clear religion it was monotheism, 
 but it was a worship of the Persian sun-god, 
 Mithras, so popular in the army, whose effigy ap- 
 peared on Constantine’s coinage till some time 
 after the edict of toleration. But the Arian 
 schism threatened to upset the Emperor’s dearest 
 wish, which was the religious unity of his domin- 
 ions. In the struggle between Arian and Catholic 
 over the actual character and degree of Christ’s 
 divinity he saw nothing but a verbal difficulty 
 about nothing, a form of words, as perhaps it 
 was. Nevertheless he wished the struggle to cease. 
 Accordingly he summoned all the bishops of the 
 Church to meet in a first General Council at Nicea 
 across the Bosphorus from the capital on the 
 nineteenth day of June, 325. 
 
 The Council of Nicea gave the Church the 
 Nicene Creed. Hitherto the varying symbols em- 
 ployed by scattered churches had all been based 
 on the formula quoted in Matthew’s Gospel,* but 
 
 * All power being given me in heaven and earth, go ye and teach 
 all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son 
 and of the Holy Spirit. 
 
60 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 from the second century there had been a tendency 
 to expand this statement so as to guard the faith 
 in the minds of the simple from heretical miscon- 
 structions like those of the Gnostics. The assault 
 of the latter upon the Church gave the Roman 
 symbol, and the Roman symbol, meeting the new 
 assault of the Arians, was lengthened into the 
 Nicene Creed. 
 
 Athanasius, refusing to accept any creed which 
 would include the Arians, held out for the famous 
 homoosion (of one essence) with God, a word 
 which established the complete divinity of Christ. 
 The majority of the Council, though they disliked 
 the rigidity of the definition, finally accepted it, 
 and declared that those who maintained that there 
 was a time when Christ was not, or that He was 
 a created being—these the Catholic and Apostolic 
 Church declared anathema (condemned). 
 
 One thing remains to be said of the Nicene 
 definition, and that is it is wholly incomprehensible. 
 If any one doubts this, let him dip into the myste- 
 rious waters of the Athanasian Creed, an expansion 
 of the Nicene one. 
 
 “Whosoever will be saved,” begins the formula 
 reassuringly, “before all things it is necessary that 
 he hold the Catholic. faith. 
 
 “Which faith,” the creed continues grimly, “ex- 
 cept he do keep it holy and undefiled, without 
 doubt he shall perish everlastingly.” 
 
HERESY 61 
 
 We are then told that Catholics worship one 
 God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, which is all 
 very well for those to whom elementary mathe- 
 matics mean very little, and then comes the crux 
 of the problem, whether Christ as God was co- 
 eternal or not. Athanasius decides, apparently, 
 that he was both at once by the stupefying con- 
 clusion that Christ was “begotten” but not “‘cre- 
 ated.” (Genitum non factum.) 
 
 Any one who is unable to understand the subtle 
 distinction between being begotten and being 
 created is invited to betake himself straightway to 
 everlasting destruction. 
 
 Arius died suddenly while in a latrine, struck 
 down in that undignified posture, said the orth- 
 odox, by the judgment of heaven, but it must not 
 be imagined that his heresy died with him, blown 
 into nothing by the thunders of Athanasius and 
 the patronage of the Catholic party under Con- 
 stantine. That Emperor died in 337, and his im- 
 mediate successors swung around to the popular 
 heresy, always very strong in the provinces. It 
 was Arianism and not the Church which found 
 itself overnight the pet of the purple. Athanasius 
 was banished to the Thebaid; Catholic bishops 
 were deposed by the government; it was the 
 Church which took the dusty road of persecution 
 and unpopularity, and that for a long time. For 
 a while, indeed, it seemed in danger of extinction. 
 
62 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 Generations passed; the last Latin Emperor, a 
 little boy, was lifted from his throne by a shaggy 
 barbarian named Odoacer (476), but the Catholic 
 Church gained nothing by a change of era that 
 seemed to be the end of a world. The Arian 
 heresy was eagerly taken up by the new bar- 
 barian kingdoms, the ancestors of modern states, 
 now rising on the ruins of the Empire, probably 
 because those relatively simple minds were unable 
 to swallow the mystery that three is the same 
 thing as one. Theodoric, Odoacer’s great succes- 
 sor in Italy (493-526), was an Arian with all his 
 court. The agnostic’s final conclusion that the 
 Church only conquered because she was a sort of 
 sacred cow Stalled in the comfortable stables of 
 emperors and governments is a great deal too 
 simple, and it is contradicted by the plain facts of 
 history from the Council of Nicea to the baptism 
 of the orthodox Franks in 496. I would prefer 
 to believe that its survival and ultimate supremacy 
 were indeed a miracle, for miracles from heaven 
 are often more credible than the foolscap ones 
 spun by agnostic historians. No, the Church is 
 naturally a rebel against civil governments, and 
 has always been so. It was a rebel against the 
 Pagan emperors and the Christian ones; a rebel 
 against the barbarian kinglets of the dark age and 
 the German kaisers of the middle one with their 
 mania for meddling, and the Anglo-Norman sov- 
 
HERESY 63 
 
 ereigns with their craze for bureaucratic efficiency. 
 Straight through the maze of medieval and modern 
 times, this eternal opposition is manifested like a 
 light from Nero to Mussolini. “Render unto 
 Cesar the things that are his,’ murmurs the 
 Church, echoing the sublime repartee of its foun- 
 der, and adding on its own account. . . . “But not 
 an inch more.” The instant that the universal 
 Church bends to a single nationalism, as in France 
 from Avignon to Versailles, it declines in propor- 
 tion; when it bends sufficiently low it breaks as in 
 Ninety-Three. Rebellion is one of its marks, more 
 conspicuous indeed than holiness; it is also its 
 chief glory, and it is, in part, to manifest it that 
 I have written this book. 
 
 But I am well in advance of my subject. The 
 Trinity having been affirmed at Nicea there arose 
 Nestorius, who was dissatisfied with the Nicene 
 decision on the ground that it made one Person of 
 Christ, whereas there should be two, a human and 
 a divine. The Council of Ephesus (431) decided 
 rightly that this was the merest pedantry, and 
 Nestorius withdrew to found Churches in Meso- 
 potamia and Persia which actually survive to this 
 day. They have probably forgotten the very name 
 of Nestorius, but, proud of their antiquity, they 
 still hold resolutely aloof both from Rome and the 
 Orthodox Church in the East. 
 
 Then appeared Eutchyes who declared that if 
 
64 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 Christ were only one Person, it stood to reason 
 that He could have only one nature, namely, a 
 divine nature in a human body. This sounded 
 plausible enough, but the Church in a- second 
 Council of Ephesus (449) decided that it was all 
 wrong, and Eutyches in turn withdrew to found 
 the Monophysite Churches of Egypt (Copt), 
 Abyssinia, Syria (Jacobite) and Armenia, which 
 have also survived. The Monophysite heresy was 
 a serious one because it obviously resided on some 
 basis of good sense. Peacemakers calling them- 
 selves Monothelites tried to bridge the gulf be- 
 tween orthodox and monophysite by contending 
 with the former that, while Christ might have two 
 natures, they were united by a single energy or 
 will. This compromise sounded so wildly reason- 
 able that it gained all sorts of adherents, including 
 the eastern Emperor Heraclius, but the Church 
 was no longer after reasonable solutions but the 
 most arbitrary metaphysics and the most rigid 
 definitions. So the poor Monothelites went the 
 way of the rest. They founded the Maronite 
 Church of the Lebanon range, which during the 
 twelfth century was reunited to Rome. ‘Thus the 
 most reasonable of the heresies is the only one 
 which has had no organized survival. 
 
 Orthodoxy was saved, but in the ninth century 
 Rome suffered the most important loss it had yet 
 sustained when a great Church, itself orthodox so 
 
HERESY 65 
 
 far as name could make it, deserted the pope. 
 This was the Church of the Greek, or Eastern, 
 Empire and included the great patriarchates of 
 Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem and Constanti- 
 nople. The Christian unity, which the Papal Su- 
 premacy itself could not divide, was destroyed by 
 a simple grammatical conjunction. The Roman 
 Church had declared that the Holy Spirit pro- 
 ceeded from the Father and the Son; the Eastern 
 Christians could not swallow that “and” which 
 seemed to destroy the equality of the Trinity. 
 Save for a brief interval, the two Catholic families 
 of East and West have remained separated ever 
 since. The opponents of the conjunction ‘‘and”’ 
 are represented to-day by the national Churches 
 of Greece, Russia, the Balkan States and their 
 missionary bodies in the Ottoman Republic and 
 the Near East in general. 
 
 In, those days certain bishops and holy men 
 distinguished themselves by writing against the 
 heretics and thus building up and completing the 
 edifice of Christian theology. The Popes, in ad- 
 dition to canonizing these persons, have honored 
 them with the title of Doctor of the Church. 
 Among them was Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, whose 
 excellent memory still sanctifies the cloisters of 
 Sant’ Ambrogio in that city, and Jerome, a violent 
 fanatic, who eventually buried his violences in the 
 sacred peace of Bethlehem, where he died on holy 
 
66 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 soil. For us the most celebrated of these intel- 
 lectuals is Augustin, Bishop of Hippo, near Car- 
 thage, a distinguished example of the Latin genius 
 in its decadence. He was the first to give expres- 
 sion to the idea which dominated the medieval 
 Church during the thirteenth century, namely, 
 that it was ordained a divine theocracy to rule 
 European society for Europe’s good. “For more 
 than a thousand years this idea of the Church as 
 a sort of vast amphictyony whose members were 
 restrained, even in war, by the idea of a common 
 brotherhood and a common loyalty to the Church 
 and the Papacy, dominated Europe.” The great 
 modern religion which we call nationalism could 
 not lift its head so long as men really believed in 
 a league of nations subordinate in faith and morals 
 to the papal super-state, the Czvitas Dei. This 
 ideal saved the world in the days of the barbarian 
 anarchy; it was certainly what the world needed 
 then; and in our own time of a military capitalism, 
 hardly less anarchic, it is what the world needs 
 now. 
 
 Augustin is chiefly remembered as the author 
 of the poignant and melodious Confessions. The 
 latter are doubtless marred by the over-frequent 
 outbursts of scriptural ejaculation, but for all that, 
 they possess unforgettable passages and phrases. 
 The author’s ‘(O God make me chaste, but not 
 yet,” is one that for some reason sticks in the 
 
HERESY 67 
 
 memory. Augustin, for all his exaggerated repu- 
 tation for austerity, was one of the most human 
 of saints. He was a true psychologist with a pro- 
 found and mystical knowledge of the human heart, 
 who amid the ruins of civilization and the deepen- 
 ing twilight of the dark ages, looked for a city 
 having foundations, whose maker and builder is 
 God, 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 MONASTICISM 
 
 TuHE only solution for the human soul during 
 the dark ages lay in the escape from life. The 
 period was an abyss of desolation in which one 
 by one all the ancient arts and honors of man 
 seemed to disappear. In that twilight of nations 
 Italy alone could still be seen by the afterglow of 
 the Empire, the last rays of the sun that was 
 going down over all the west. Theodoric and his 
 Gothic Kingdom at Ravenna struck a final mo- 
 mentary gleam,* stamped out by the first Lombard 
 ruffian who crossed the border. The heathen bar- 
 barism of the west was soon imitated by the 
 Christian obscurantism of Byzantium. The East- 
 ern Emperor Justinian, who married his mistress 
 and became a devout bourgeois, closed the uni- 
 versity of Athens. In the meantime, Goths, Van- 
 dals, Huns, Lombards and Anglo-Saxons raided 
 Europe. The old world seemed to be rushing down 
 in an agony of despair and dissolution, and no one 
 
 * See the noble churches at Ravenna and those Byzantine frescoes 
 
 so admired by Clive Bell (Art). 
 68 
 
MONASTICISM 69 
 
 was qualified to say that these torments were 
 merely the preliminary throes of a new order, al- 
 most a new unity. 
 
 In this painful transition between two ages 
 monasticism appeared. Intelligent spirits whose 
 religion forbade them to commit suicide took the 
 three vows. Monastic vows had been strenuously 
 practiced a century before by the hermits of the 
 Thebaid who followed Saint Anthony. There is 
 no better description of their existence than is 
 found in the opening lines of Thats: 
 
 “In those days the desert was full of anchorites. 
 On the two banks of the Nile, innumerable cabins 
 built of branches were sown at some distance from 
 each other so that the solitaries who lived in them 
 could dwell isolated and yet aid each other in 
 need. . . . Angels similar to young men came to 
 visit the hermitages, while demons, disguised as 
 Ethiopians or as animals, wandered around the 
 solitaries. When the monks went, at morning, to 
 fill their pitchers at the fountain, they saw the 
 footprints of satyrs and centaurs on the sand. 
 Considered under its spiritual and veritable aspect, 
 the Thebaid was a battlefield where were deliv- 
 ered, at every hour, but especially at night, the 
 marvelous combats of earth and heaven.” 
 
 This tension of the ascetic life experienced by 
 hermits and solitaries was too strained for the 
 free spirits of the west. Saint Benedict (480- 
 
70 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 543), the practical founder of monasticism in 
 Europe, was imbued with the idea that it is not 
 well for man to be alone. He enjoined his fol- 
 lowers to love God and to live reasonable lives. 
 In the mother house of Monte Cassino, the classic 
 landscape at his feet, the famous mountains and 
 gleaming cities in the distance, he was able to 
 synthesize the existence of a patrician, a lover of 
 the soil and its old humanities, a very great saint. 
 The same mystic experiment was effected by the 
 old temples and green cascades of Subiaco, and 
 the regula of Benedict spread throughout bar- 
 barized Europe, transforming it. It is significant 
 that at Monte Cassino Benedict spared a holm of 
 primeval oaks in whose shade the Queen of Love 
 and Beauty had once been worshiped. 
 
 The Benedictines were often men of action, 
 debarred from their natural inclinations by a legit- 
 imate disgust for the world. In a Europe given 
 up to the most abject anthropophagy, in a Church 
 which could barely write her own name, there was 
 no place for them but the cloisters. They were 
 the aristocrats of the dark ages. It is not enough 
 to say that the religious houses were of value be- 
 cause, by a kind of miracle, they preserved for us 
 Pindar and Plato, Virgil and the Anthology; be- 
 cause they unconsciously continued culture. In 
 the period extending from the fifth to the eleventh 
 
MONASTICISM 71 
 
 centuries, they were culture. They were like small 
 sunny islands in the universal welter of things. 
 Nor were their inmates drones. As soon as they 
 had established themselves they set out to re- 
 civilize Europe. Benedictines and Carthusians, 
 Cluniacs and Cistercians, all heralds of the 
 Papacy, make us feel that the Pope, pontifex max- 
 imus, was really, and all unknown to himself, the 
 authentic heir of Cesar in bringing order out of 
 the horrible chaos of the barbarian centuries. 
 Soon a brother of Saint Benedict stood by the 
 rough chair of every athletic savage who disputed 
 for a term some segment of what had once been 
 Rome. The most active missionaries came from 
 Ireland, evangelized by Saint Patrick (450) and 
 called for the present the Island of Saints. Saint 
 Remy converted the Franks (496), Saint Boniface 
 the Germans (689). Hungary was Christianized 
 about 1000, thus opening up in Christian lands a 
 trade route to the East. The conversion of the 
 high prince Vladimir in the tenth century brought 
 all Russia under the wing of the Greek Church. 
 Pope Gregory the Great, while still a deacon, ad- 
 miring the beauty of some Nordic boys exposed as 
 slaves in the crumbling Forum, sighed his cele- 
 brated Non Angli sed Angeli, and years later sent 
 a Benedictine prior, Augustin, to make their little 
 brothers children of Christ. He baptized the 
 Jutish “king” of Kent, and building himself a 
 
72 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 wattled church at Canterbury, became first arch- 
 bishop of the English. The Cross reappeared in 
 the country of our fathers, and the Church in 
 England gave an immediate example of unity 
 which the Saxons were too slow to imitate 
 politically, as they learned to their cost when their 
 thanes perished around King Harold on Hastings 
 hill, and England became a fief of Norman William 
 (1066). Long before this, however, England was 
 more Christian than many parts of the Continent. 
 From the stormy Hebrides to “‘the sunset bounds 
 of Lyonesse,” from the musical solitudes of Yarrow 
 and Annan-water to the Ultima Thule of the an- 
 cient geographers, rose little centers of Catholic 
 civilization against which the drift and foam of 
 their savage environment broke in vain. 
 
 At the same time, with the activities of the 
 Benedictine missionaries, developed the phenom- 
 enon known as the temporal power of the Papacy. 
 Christ had said: “My kingdom is not of this 
 world,” but this totally religious ideal could 
 scarcely maintain itself in the catastrophe of the 
 dark ages. By the very force of history the 
 Church was compelled to occupy itself specific- 
 ally with the things of this world. In its origins, 
 the political function of the Papacy was nothing 
 more or less than a work of charity. In the dis- 
 appearance of a western emperor and during the 
 successive assaults on Italy, known as the bar- 
 
MONASTICISM 73 
 
 barian invasions, the pope found himself obliged 
 to act as a chief of state, if only to mitigate the 
 universal hardness of life during those chaotic 
 times. The incarnation of this apostolic period 
 of the Papacy, when it was a theocracy by neces- 
 sity, was Saint Gregory the Great (590-604), he 
 who had said non Angli sed Angeli, and sent Au- 
 gustin to Christianize the English. His pontificate 
 roughly coincided with the Lombard domination 
 over Italy, when Benedictine, a monk, hidden in his 
 cell on the Ccelian mount, seemed the last hope of 
 a distracted Christendom. 
 
 In the year 800 a Frankish chieftain, Charle- 
 magne, restored order to Italy and, relatively, to 
 Europe by having himself crowned on Christmas 
 Day in St. Peter’s basilica at Rome, first head of 
 the Holy Roman Empire. This event indicated 
 that the moment had come for the pope to lay 
 down the grand temporal role he had by force 
 adopted, and accept in exchange the position of 
 small Italian prince over Rome and the vicinity 
 which the feudal dispensation inaugurated by 
 Charlemagne allotted to him. In return for the 
 almost imperial power which the Papacy had 
 hitherto beneficently wielded and must now abdi- 
 cate, was the temporal sovereignty over the small 
 strip of “‘Peter’s patrimony” thrown to the popes 
 as a sop by the successors of Charlemagne. The 
 avidity with which the pontiffs clung to this morsel 
 
74 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 of territory during the dark ages has been ad- 
 versely commented upon by historians, who fail to 
 understand that the Papacy was once more pro- 
 pelled into an inappropriate political role by the 
 very force of historical accident. ‘The poor suc- 
 cessors of Saint Peter were beleaguered, as it were, 
 in a triangular fashion by three hostile powers— 
 the Holy Roman Emperor, with his pretensions on 
 Italy and the eternal city, the rough Latin barons 
 and the turbulent populace of the commune itself, 
 incited by republican tribunes. Ten times in the 
 course of a century the sovereign pontiff was 
 forced to hide himself in the castle of Sant Angelo, 
 or flee to the Alps. It is no wonder that under 
 this incessant burden of alarms and anguishes the 
 popes were ambitious, not only for themselves, but 
 for the Church, and often unscrupulous in the 
 means adopted to secure her future, which seemed 
 to lie in the uncontested possession of a territory. 
 The theorists who criticize the temporal power 
 from the tranquillity of their own rectories do not 
 realize that it then seemed the one saving plank 
 for the Church in the universal shipwreck of so- 
 ciety. The secular power was the guarantee of 
 religious integrity. The Church was obliged to 
 reign in order not to perish. 
 
 A Benedictine community, Cluny, founded in 
 “the lost kingdom of Burgundy” (910) showed 
 the Papacy the better way. The Cluniac revival 
 
MONASTICISM 75 
 
 dreamed of a pure theocracy under popes stamped 
 with its own image. Here it collided with all those 
 forces hostile to the Papacy we have mentioned 
 above, but chiefly with that curious embodiment 
 of civil unity known as the Holy Roman Empire. 
 Had the latter really been able to restore order 
 to Europe, the Church and the popes would doubt- 
 less have been able to abdicate secular ambitions 
 and devote themselves purely to the government of 
 souls; this will be later the dream of Dante in his 
 De Monarchia. For a time all went well; the im- 
 perial lion and the papal lamb lay down together; 
 but it all ended in a new dismemberment with the 
 successors of Charlemagne and those of Peter 
 snarling at each other among the fragments. 
 France split away from the Empire in 970 under 
 a line of national kings which survived through 
 the centuries until Ninety-Three, when a certain 
 Louis Capet wrote the Swiss “‘to cease firing,’”’ and 
 a few months later put his head under the knife. 
 In the south of France there rose from the ashes of 
 the gnosis a new heretical church, well organized, 
 and, under the circumstances, plausible, based as 
 it was on the dogma that the world of the dark 
 ages was irredeemably evil. Even under its own 
 kings the identity and nationality of France 
 seemed hopelessly submerged in a welter of inde- 
 pendent fiefs, Normandy, Brittany, Anjou, the 
 Duchy of Aquitaine, the County of Toulouse, the 
 
76 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 Kingdom of Arles, etc. As for the German em- 
 perors, they were unable to keep order in their 
 own patrimony, let alone in their more distant fiefs, 
 like Lombardy. Time after time they thundered 
 down the passes of the Alps, reduced the Lombard 
 towns, Milan, Venice and the rest, nominated and 
 invested the German and Italian bishops, and at- 
 tempted to interfere with papal elections. A 
 Cluniac Pope, Nicholas II (1059), put an end to 
 this last abuse by regulating for all time the elec- 
 tion of a new pontiff. He placed it in the hands 
 of the pastors over the most ancient and venerated 
 Roman churches. These persons were hencefor- 
 ward called cardinals; they might be bishops, 
 priests or deacons so far as sacramental “order” 
 was concerned, and collectively they formed the 
 curia or papal court. 
 
 The Catholic Church radiating from the Holy 
 See, and the far-off little island kingdom of Eng- 
 land, furnish the only two examples of decent 
 organization in this early feudal age of evil dis- 
 order. After 1122 bishops were elected by their 
 cathedral clergy (the chapter) though the election 
 had to be ratified by the pope. They were con- 
 secrated by three other bishops, and then en- 
 throned; that is, they took formal possession of 
 their cathedral and see. Thereafter they kept up 
 communication with the Head of the Church by 
 periodical journeys to Rome ad limina A posto- 
 
MONASTICISM 77 
 
 lorum. They in turn selected, from the diaconate, 
 or the seminaries, priests for the various scattered 
 parishes of their sees who were supported by a 
 tithe or tax paid by every member of the parish 
 from the lord down. A proportion of this tax 
 went to the bishop, who was accustomed to for- 
 ward the income from his first year of residence 
 (Annates) to the pope. The whole system was 
 admirably interdependent, and it worked. 
 Elsewhere there was no unity, no central govern- 
 ment, no education, no art or literature, no peace. 
 The dark ages grew steadily darker as they ap- 
 proached dawn, so dark that the European world 
 was seized with an obscure impression that it was 
 unfit to live and was indeed ripe for destruction. 
 Cassandra-voices among the clergy proclaimed, on 
 the basis of some obscure phrase in the Scriptures, 
 that the thousandth year from the Nativity would 
 see the end of all and the second coming of the 
 Incarnate Word upon clouds of judgment. 
 
 We have come a long way from our source—the 
 light that streams upon this Church from the pure 
 and gracious figure of Jesus standing on the other 
 side of the troubled centuries and saying: “My 
 Kingdom is not of this world.” It is even a long 
 way from the half-mythical Apostles, administer- 
 ing the Sacraments in an upper room, to a dis- 
 tracted Bishop of Rome, surrounded by scarlet 
 
78 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 cardinals, contending amid fallen columns and 
 grassy colonnades, with all the forces of dying bar- 
 barism, dawning nationalism, greed, murder and 
 feudal anarchy. At one end of the long chain, 
 the Nazarene; at the other Gregory VII in his 
 lonely palace-church of Lateran. The issue at 
 stake was the evolution of a Church which would 
 unite and. direct the energies of all these half- 
 barbarian nations, and having established its 
 supremacy at their expense, would then return to 
 the spirit of the Gospels and give to the new Eu- 
 rope the gift of peace and reason. A renaissance 
 of art and literature might well follow, for they 
 would be the expression of a consummation, and 
 not, save in a fashion of phrase and drawing, a 
 return to the pagan past. That the Church 
 achieved such a consummation for a season is no 
 less certain than that it failed in the end. The 
 failure is not remarkable. What is remarkable, 
 and even stupefying, is the perversity of its critics 
 who, in the same breath, blame the Church for the 
 attempt, and then denounce it for the failure. 
 
Che Consummation 
 
 [| r000-1300 | 
 

 
CHAPTER VIII 
 THE MIRAGE 
 
 Hap one of those monks discussed in the previ- 
 ous chapter been enabled, like Rip Van Winkle, to 
 doze off toward the end of the tenth century, to 
 sleep safely through the fateful year 1000, and 
 then to wake up suddenly, he might have rubbed 
 his eyes with the sentiment that he was living in 
 another world. The long stagnation of the bar- 
 barian centuries had been broken; a wind of moral 
 enthusiasm was ruffling those dead waters. The 
 force behind this transformation was the primitive 
 emotion of relief. Europe had just come through 
 its millennial crisis. —The Ides of March passed in 
 an agony of foreboding, and nothing untoward 
 took place. This blow to clerical infallibility, far 
 from producing incredulity, roused a revival of 
 almost frenzied enthusiasm. Beautiful romanesque 
 churches sprang up like Troy to the sound of 
 hymns and chants and songs of thanksgiving. 
 There was a burst of energy throughout Europe in 
 which the young fresh Norman race, the sons of 
 Vikings, played an active role. The Norman con- 
 quest of England and the two Sicilies took place 
 during this period. Austere and energetic popes, 
 
 stamped with the image of Cluny, tightened their 
 81 
 
82 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 hold on the reins of a tremendous adventure. And 
 presently the roads of Europe were drumming 
 with the crusaders, glorious as the sun at mid- 
 day, terrible as an army with banners. 
 
 Pilgrimages to the places rendered celebrated 
 by the Gospels were, of course, not uncommon 
 before the Crusades. The pilgrims who returned, 
 or palmers as they were called, were the only 
 persons with any first-hand knowledge of the Near 
 East, but no extraordinary interest was mani- 
 fested in their recitals by the rough barons who 
 preferred to believe the wildest Arabian tales 
 about that fantastic civilization so completely be- 
 yond their ken. The reality of the Orient would 
 have dazzled them more than any vision of it. 
 Ignorance, doubled by indifference, was the normal 
 European attitude toward the East when events 
 occurred that precipitated a blaze of pity and in- 
 dignation producing the Crusades. 
 
 Palestine had been one of the conquests of the 
 Caliph Omar, successor of Mohammed, in his 
 startling extension of Islam from the Arabian 
 desert to the Pyrenees. His successors, the Fati- 
 mite soldans of Egypt, who were the protectors of 
 the Holy Land, treated the Christian immigrants 
 well enough, partly for commercial reasons, partly 
 because the Moslems reverence Jesus far more 
 than most Christians reverence Mohammed. But 
 the situation was altered when a fanatic named 
 
THE MIRAGE 83 
 
 Hakem, himself the son of a Christian girl, seized 
 the power. From his time the Holy Sepulcher 
 could only be approached on condition of defiling 
 it. This together with similar outrages produced 
 the first Crusade. 
 
 That is the concrete historic cause of the Cru- 
 sades, but in this Catholic adventure, which is more 
 than half apocalyptic, one must look for motives 
 more deeply connected with the mysteries of the 
 human heart. Man is naturally a wanderer. The 
 nostalgia for distant lands and other horizons, the 
 call from beyond the mountains, plays an im- 
 portant part in the development of every conscious- 
 ness; it is the basis of all romanticism, religious or 
 literary. Sexuality counts for more in all this than 
 many people suppose. The Greek Emperor Alexis 
 understood this when he extolled to the crusaders 
 the beauty of the Byzantine women. Religion is 
 another Eros which allures and never satisfies. 
 The very barbarian invasions, base scramble as 
 they were, contained this sentiment. The Ger- 
 mans sought in the south Asgard, the home of 
 gods and heroes; they reached Rome, and there, 
 in the ruinous solitude of the capital, they en- 
 countered the white apparition of Jesus. The 
 crusaders, says Michelet, who had suffered such 
 incredible hardships, sustained by the love of Jeru- 
 salem, perceived, on arriving, that the City of God 
 was not by the Brook Kerith or in the stony valley 
 
84 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 of Jehoshaphat. . . “The Arabs were amazed 
 when they saw Godfrey de Bouillon seated in 
 dejection on the ground. ‘Is not the ground good 
 enough,’ said the conqueror sorrowfully, ‘when we 
 shall soon return to it for so long a sleep?’ They 
 withdrew in admiration. The East and the West 
 had understood each other.” 
 
 There is no need to describe the Crusades in de- 
 tail. The first (1095) was an indiscriminate 
 rabble of feudality led by Peter the Hermit, a 
 French monk, and Godfrey de Bouillon, a French 
 nobleman. After an orgy of misconduct in the 
 Greek court and incredible hardships by land and 
 sea, a tithe of the original host reached Jerusalem. 
 There they attested the beauty of Christ’s re- 
 ligion by massacring several hundred Jews and 
 Arabs. They called their conquest the Latin King- 
 dom of Jerusalem. 
 
 The second Crusade (1144) preached unwill- 
 ingly by the famous Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, 
 was placed under the direction of the Emperor 
 Conrad and the pious Louis VII of France, who 
 was accompanied by his gay and beautiful wife, 
 Eleanor of Aquitaine. It was a failure. The third 
 (1190), occasioned by the recapture of Jerusalem, 
 was led by the Emperor Henry VI, Philip Augustus 
 of France and the celebrated Richard Coeur de 
 Léon; it also ended in a fiasco. Islam about this 
 time had been undergoing a kind of Protestant 
 
THE MIRAGE 85 
 
 reform under the Emir Saladin, the Washington 
 of the Moslems, who adhered to the strict letter 
 of the Koran, and regarded Jews, Christians, 
 Mohammedan mystics and free-thinkers with an 
 equal dislike. His dream was not only to repel a 
 Christian crusade but to lead a Moslem one into 
 the heart of Europe. It was a tenable enterprise, 
 and the third Crusade, abortive as it was, may 
 well have saved the west from a holy war con- 
 ducted by this gallant and dangerous enemy. 
 
 Prodigies of war were performed by the lion- 
 hearted one, but his allies were jealous and treach- 
 erous, and he was finally left with a small force 
 in sight of Jerusalem. It is said that he covered 
 his face with his shield at sight of those sparkling 
 towers, saying: “Suffer me not to see Thy holy 
 City, O Lord, since I am not able to deliver it.” 
 
 The astuteness of the Venetians turned the 
 fourth Crusade upon the unfortunate Greek Em- 
 pire, while the fifth (1229) was an amiable gen- 
 tlemen’s agreement between an infidel Emperor, 
 Frederick II, and the soldan of Egypt in virtue 
 of which Jerusalem was restored to the Christians 
 without a drop of bloodshed. This arrangement 
 so disconcerted the medieval mind that on the 
 evening of Frederick’s coronation as German king 
 of Jerusalem, the patriarch made his entrance and 
 laid a papal interdict upon the holy city which had 
 dared to crown the pope’s enemy. 
 
86 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 The Crusades had no particular effect upon 
 Asia, but they had a remarkable one upon the 
 crusaders themselves, and through them upon 
 Europe. They had begun their odyssey with a 
 deep hatred of the Mohammedan and a feeling 
 of cordial expectation regarding the Christians of 
 the Orient, the Greeks, Armenians, etc. Experi- 
 ence taught them to reverse their preconceptions. 
 The Greeks and Armenians betrayed and cheated 
 them, as they have done now and then since, and 
 they discovered that the abhorred Moslem was by 
 nature more of a gentleman than most contempo- 
 rary Christians. It is a discovery which was not 
 unknown during the last war. 
 
 From treating one’s enemy with respect to 
 treating one’s unhappy Christian serfs with even 
 the most elementary humanity was only one step. 
 The poor encountered liberty while seeking Jerusa- 
 lem. The same community of suffering revived in 
 a degree the touching equality of the first Chris- 
 tian centuries, and produced modern democracy, 
 the democracy I mean of Leaves of Grass, not the 
 cheap political formula. Thereafter the serf could 
 look into the eyes of the ruthless man who had 
 been his master and say: I found a cup of water 
 for you in the desert; I shielded you with my body 
 at Jerusalem; together we have known the cama- 
 raderie of the Cross. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE FEUDAL 
 STATE 
 
 INTERWOVEN with the first Crusades there was 
 yet another movement which runs through the 
 early Middle Ages—the eleventh and twelfth cen- 
 turies—and this was the struggle of the Church to 
 save her independence of action from encroach- 
 ments by growing federal governments. Like 
 much in the Middle Ages this movement is of high 
 interest on account of its very duality and contra- 
 dictions; it, too, had passion and right on one side 
 and the other; good contended with good; Church 
 and State had, respectively, their clerics who were 
 pure politicians and their bureaucrats who were 
 saints; and in Becket the Church had a solitary 
 champion who was first one, then the other. In 
 order to trace the struggle properly it is necessary 
 to go back a little and present the reader with a 
 picture of Europe as it was when the false vapor 
 from the year 1000 had rolled away, and the world 
 entered upon its medieval period. 
 
 And first two principles, two powers attempted 
 
 to grapple with the chaos of feudality bequeathed 
 87 
 
88 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 by the dark ages—the Papacy and the Holy Em- 
 pire. Both failed for a season because both were 
 eaten with the disease they desired to combat; 
 the Germanic State, founded by Charlemagne, had 
 become a feudal state, but so had the Church. 
 From the glittering fortalice of Aix, and from the 
 Lateran, emperor and pope looked down a world 
 once mapped and well mapped by the Romans, 
 but which had fallen into a vast disrepair. Over 
 the brown dusty tracks of Gaul and the two hun- 
 dred Germanies the pale threads of imperial roads 
 had one by one broken off, and, dominating their 
 severed intersections, was the solitary donjon and 
 the gallows. No land was without its lord who 
 owned it in effect absolutely, coined money, waged 
 war, did justice or rather injustice, and bequeathed 
 it all to the eldest son, who did likewise. As in the 
 time of Benedict, there seemed no refuge for the 
 civilized but the Church, and the latter’s catho- 
 licity and holiness were menaced and degraded by 
 the Sabbat of environing feudalism. Younger 
 sons who could expect nothing from the eldest but 
 the scraps kept from his dogs took Holy Orders as 
 the one chance of independent survival. They 
 became bishops, abbots, that is to say, barons in 
 cassocks, wolves in sheep’s clothing. ‘‘They skir 
 the country, hunt, fight, bestow blows by way of 
 benison and impose heavy penance with their iron 
 maules.” One German bishop was deposed by 
 
CHURCH AND FEUDAL STATE 89 
 
 his brethren for being insufficiently warlike. One 
 thing only was wanting, and that was that these 
 fighting clerks be married with the legitimate right 
 to leave their holdings to a multitude of little 
 priestlings. This did not fail to come about in 
 certain places. In Brittany there were four mar- 
 ried bishops, their Lordships of Quimper, Vannes, 
 Rennes and Nantes; their children became priests 
 and succeeded their consecrated fathers. One of 
 the reasons why Gregory VII blessed the Norman 
 Conquest of England was that the preponderance 
 of married priests in the Saxon Church had placed 
 that body almost outside the pale of orthodoxy. 
 The day of the universal Church was done if it 
 were about to relapse into the materialism and 
 confusion of a final feudal State. There could be 
 no more Crusades if their paladin was to have his 
 warhorse encumbered by the good wife abreast 
 instead of a shield, and his offspring clinging to the 
 pommel. 
 
 To the debased feudalism of the bishops suc- 
 ceeded the sovereignty of one man—the pope, and 
 Christianity became immaculately reincarnate in 
 a monk. His name was Hildebrand and he is 
 known in history as Gregory VII. Like Chris- 
 tianity’s founder, its reincarnation was a carpen- 
 ter’s son, hardly higher in rank than a serf. He 
 was a pupil of Cluny, imbued with its monastic 
 and theocratic ideas, and when he became Pope 
 
90 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 he put them into immediate and sensational prac- 
 tice. Under Nicholas II he had several times 
 remarked that a married priest was no priest at 
 all, a statement which, when he became Pope, 
 caused the greatest excitement all the way from 
 Rome to the Welsh border. “We prefer,” said 
 the agitated husbands, “to abandon our dioceses, 
 our abbacies and cures. Let the joiner’s son keep 
 our benefices and let us keep our wives.” The 
 joiner’s son smiled in virginal disdain and by an 
 encyclical or two loosed the people on the married 
 priests. Bishops were hustled, beaten up and even 
 mutilated in their own cathedrals. The monk San 
 Pietro Damiani traversed Italy, careless of his 
 life, stripping bare with unparalleled cynicism the 
 vices of the effeminate Church. In a short time 
 all married priests were declared excommunicate, 
 and it was considered no sin to kill them. 
 
 Then in her recovered and savage virginity the 
 Church, headed by this reformer, turned and 
 attacked her brother, the Empire. The latter, 
 during the early Middle Age, really deemed itself 
 another Church. Cesar on occasions donned the 
 dalmatic of the minor orders and reappeared as 
 Pontifex Maximus, chanting the Gospel on high 
 festivals of Aix or Mainz. Moreover, he was, dur- 
 ing the eleventh century, justly considered the 
 only great territorial prince on the European map. 
 Though he could hardly keep order in his Ger- 
 
CHURCH AND FEUDAL STATE 91 
 
 man household, he possessed lands and allies in 
 Cisalpine Gaul and also Transalpine, far on the 
 French side of the Rhine. Though neither holy 
 or Roman the Empire in the early Middle Age 
 was incontestably an Empire, but unwieldy and 
 as disorderly as a beer-house. It was the arch- 
 type of the feudal state, one whose head was 
 not strong enough to keep peace and just strong 
 enough to make trouble. But the confidence of 
 these Franconian and Suabian barbarians who 
 carried the globe and the iron crown was enor- 
 mous. The discovery and study of the Roman 
 law in the second part of the eleventh century 
 added fuel to their pretensions. Here was a sys- 
 tem, ready made, which worked perfectly on paper, 
 where no mention was made of pope or canons, 
 and a great deal was made of the emperor. Had 
 not Charlemagne desired to be the successor of 
 Augustus and Trajan? Armed with this instru- 
 ment of parchment the Holy Roman Emperor at- 
 tempted to rule not only the bodies but the con- 
 sciences of his subjects, and when the Canon Law 
 conflicted with the Roman, he disregarded it. Was 
 he not himself a kind of priest? He was speedily 
 imitated by minor princes; even the Norman kings 
 of far-away little England, the conquest of which 
 had been authorized by Gregory VII, stirred on 
 their rushes, and William Rufus, resisted only by 
 Saint Anselm, stole from the Church, and repented 
 
92 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 in the gusty medieval manner, and stole again. 
 
 The principal cause at stake, now that the 
 emperor could no longer meddle directly with 
 papal investiture, was the investiture of other 
 bishops—those who, as subjects of the Empire, 
 came in the sphere of his authority. The Ger- 
 man bishops might be subjects of the pope in 
 religion; they remained none the less property 
 owners, responsible for their fiefs to no one but 
 the emperor, and to him they were vassals. In 
 every country it was the same; insofar as they 
 were priests they belonged to the pope; insofar 
 as they were property owners they entered into 
 the feudal scheme of things and belonged to the 
 feudal state. The emperor, aided by the Roman 
 law, was trying to make the feudal state into an 
 absolute monarchy. Absolute, that is to say, over 
 this zmperium of clerks who were often very war- 
 like and powerful, and who were partially free 
 men, liberated by their orders from his control. 
 But, on the basis of the feudal relationship, should 
 the emperor seize the additional right to invest 
 the bishops and abbots with ring and crozier, sym- 
 bols of their religious character, they became in 
 soul as well as body his men; the double allegiance 
 became a single one; and the pope lost the right 
 to their loyalty. In every country where there was 
 a king, the Church would cease to exist as an 
 international Church.’ That was the true prob- 
 
CHURCH AND FEUDAL STATE 93 
 
 lem, and it is no wonder that a reformer and nat- 
 ural theocrat like Gregory rushed to defend the 
 Church from what amounted to a sacrifice of 
 identity. 
 
 The Emperor Henry IV, imitated by other 
 princes, openly practiced this important right of 
 investiture and was promptly excommunicated by 
 Gregory. It was a superstitious age; the Emperor 
 repented in the violent manner of the period and 
 spent three days barefoot in the snow before the 
 Pope’s castle at Canossa before the “Servant of 
 God” would admit him to communion. It is not 
 reported that the Emperor died of grip, but as 
 a result of his intransigence the Pope died in exile. 
 “T have loved justice and hated iniquity,” said he 
 in the words of the Psalmist, ‘‘therefore I die in 
 banishment.” ‘The astonishing thing is that the 
 emperor was not the ultimate victor. A compro- 
 mise was patched up called the Concordat of 
 Worms in 1122 whereby the bishops and abbots 
 continued to do homage to the princes for their 
 lands, but the staff and ring they received from 
 their consecrators. The symbolism of the Middle 
 Ages interpreted this agreement as a victory by the 
 shade of Gregory, as indeed it was. 
 
 The second and climactic quarrel, though in 
 reality, the self-same problem, was won over an 
 apparently new issue, in a distant country again 
 by a single man. In 1154 the Angevin Henry II 
 
94 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 became King of England. He was a man of 
 extraordinary energy, a born bureaucrat with his 
 finger in every pie, who only varied eight hours 
 of business by mad intervals of hunting and 
 lechery. This King is remembered by the English 
 as the Justinian of their legal system which is 
 based neither on Canon nor on Roman law, but on 
 the old Anglo-Saxon mores, the customs of the first 
 English tribes. He began an abolition of the fool- 
 ish ordeals which still disgraced English justice 
 in the first Middle Age, and instituted a kind of 
 trial by jury. A man so intent on reforming the 
 whole judicial system could not fail to collide with 
 the one institution which up to date kept its own 
 justice intact, namely, the Catholic Church. 
 
 In the estimation of Henry and his legists the 
 separate Church courts represented a crying scan- 
 dal. First they had sole jurisdiction over priests, 
 and the world “clerk” in the twelfth century was 
 extremely elastic and covered every one having the 
 slightest connection, however remote with religion 
 —students, crusaders, choristers, sacristans, in 
 short all the vaguely literate class. The Church 
 courts, moreover, judged a large variety of cases 
 which to-day are dealt with by civil law, cases 
 involving wills, oaths, contracts, divorce suits, to 
 say nothing of the three medieval crimes of blas- 
 phemy, sorcery and heresy. All this width of 
 jurisdiction was, in Henry’s opinion, utterly un- 
 
CHURCH AND FEUDAL STATE 95 
 
 sound. But his chief grievance against the Church 
 courts was, that wonderful to relate, they were a 
 great deal too lenient. Their gentleness, contrasted 
 with the savage regime of the Norman conquerers, 
 rendered them extremely popular with the subject 
 race and the poor for whom the Church posed as, 
 and often was, the sole protector and friend. 
 
 The King’s fingers fairly burned to bring this in- 
 stitution, at once so arrogant and sweet, into line 
 with his severe judicial reform. Only it was neces- 
 sary to proceed with policy. His closest friend at 
 that time was his Chancellor, a child of the de- 
 spised Saxon race, and a deacon in orders, Thomas 
 a Becket. He was a sympathetic personage, a great 
 lover of hounds and hawks, perhaps a trifle too 
 tactful and sleek. ‘‘Were Becket Primate,” 
 thought the King, “Head of the Church in Eng- 
 land which, under the dispensation of our Holy 
 Father, Alexander III, is almost an independent 
 patriarchate, the Church is mine since Becket is 
 mine.” So he made the supreme mistake of nomi- 
 nating his best friend Archbishop of Canterbury. 
 
 Great was the King’s amazement when he 
 learned that his best friend took his new duties 
 seriously. The worldling and companion of royal 
 pleasures cut down his expenses, wore a hair-shirt, 
 remembered that he was Saxon, and surrounded 
 himself with poor people or with intelligent monks, 
 John of Salisbury, Gerald Cambrensis, Walter Map, 
 
96 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 the last a good man but the author of some of the 
 most swinish satires ever penned against the vices 
 of the clergy. This change of front was very ill- 
 timed, since Henry and his lawyers had just com- 
 pleted the Constitutions of Clarendon. The latter 
 provided that all persons tried by Church courts 
 should be punished as they merited by the cruel 
 Common Law. This meant an end to ecclesiastic 
 mercy. The Constitutions also limited appeals to 
 Rome; this meant an end to ecclesiastic independ- 
 ence. Losing with the power of excommunica- 
 tion the mighty weapon which remained to her, 
 the English Church, cut off from Rome, imprisoned 
 on her island, would lose all sense of universality, 
 of catholicism. Under their air of being nothing at 
 all, the Clarendon Articles represented the most 
 serious frontal attack ever delivered upon the free- 
 dom of the Church, a freedom fraught with 
 potential evils, but essential in the Middle Ages to 
 civilization and progress. At all events they were 
 triumphantly concluded, and Henry sent them to 
 the new Primate to be signed. 
 
 Becket sent them back unsigned. When up- 
 braided by the King, he replied that while a lay- 
 man he had loyally tried to serve the State, and 
 now that he was Primate of the English his first 
 duty was to them and the Church, and to no one 
 else. New to his position, menaced by the King 
 and contending with his own scruples—that ‘“‘in- 
 
CHURCH AND FEUDAL STATE 97 
 
 curable duality of the Middle Age,” its sense of 
 rival allegiance—he at first gave way, and then re- 
 pented his weakness with violence. “Wretch that 
 I am,” he said, “‘I came out of the King’s kennel, 
 not out of the Church; I the lover of mummers and 
 dogs am become the guardian of souls. I am not 
 worthy, and for my unworthiness I am abandoned 
 of God.” The dismay and anger of the King knew 
 no limit; and from that moment the Clarendon 
 Articles became secondary, the chief thing being 
 the ruin of his former favorite. In 1164 he sum- 
 moned him to a Convocation at Northampton. 
 The Archbishop, after saying Mass, the first words 
 of which happened to be: “The princes are met in 
 council to judge me,” proceeded to the court in his 
 pontifical vestments, the archiepiscopal cross going 
 on before. Courtiers threw straw and rushes at 
 him as he passed. He appealed to the Pope and 
 slowly withdrew. That night he gave a great feast 
 for all the poor of the city. When the King’s 
 agents arrived to arrest him they found only the 
 dying lights and empty hall, and learned that the 
 Archbishop had already taken horse toward the 
 Continent. 
 
 The whole medieval world watched the struggle 
 of this one priest for the interests of the Church 
 with indifference tempered by irony. The Pope 
 Alexander III was at that moment at Sens in 
 France where he had fled from the vengeance of 
 
98 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa against whom 
 he had backed the Lombard towns. It did not suit 
 him at such a juncture to offend the most powerful 
 prince of the world next to the Emperor, that is 
 the King of England. The Norman and English 
 bishops of course supported the King with frantic 
 toadyism against their Primate. Becket fought his 
 fight single-handed save for the dubious patronage 
 of his host, Louis VII of France, who wished to 
 redeem by some pious action the fiasco of the 
 second Crusade. The tenacity of Becket wore 
 out even the pious Frank. “What more do you 
 want?” he demanded, after Henry had made some 
 perfidious offers to his late best friend, ‘‘Peace is 
 in your hands.” But Becket was unconvinced, and 
 yielded neither to threats nor to fair words. 
 
 After six years he wrote the King that he was 
 about to return to England, alleging that he could 
 no longer see his church of Canterbury, mother of 
 British churches, despoiled by the Norman vassals 
 among whom Henry had divided the old archdio- 
 cese. In.any event Christmas was nigh, and he 
 wished to celebrate in his own cathedral-church 
 the Midnight Mass of Christ’s happy birth. 
 
 When he approached the shore and the people 
 discerned the glitter of the archiepiscopal cross on 
 the prow they hastened in crowds down to the 
 sands so that they might have his blessing. These 
 Saxons and poor folk seemed to know what was 
 
CHURCH AND FEUDAL STATE 99 
 
 going to happen. Their priests went to meet him 
 at the head of the parish corporations, flanked by 
 banners, and all said that Christ was come to suffer 
 a second time for the Church in England, just as at 
 Jerusalem he had suffered for the universe. The 
 Archbishop arrived at Canterbury in a medley of 
 hymns and the joyous clangor of bells. When he 
 reached his palace he sat down and dictated two 
 letters, one to the Pope asking him to offer the 
 prayers for the dying, the other excommunicating 
 the English bishops who had taken the King’s 
 side in the quarrel. 
 
 When the King, who was in Normandy, heard of 
 this last defiance he fell into one of those famous 
 Angevin spasms which were a mark of his bad 
 family. He threw off his cap, rolled on the ground, 
 literally bit the dust and chewed the rushes into 
 straw. ‘Have I fed cowards in my house all these 
 years,” he moaned as soon as he could speak, “‘that 
 no one will deliver me from this pestilent priest?” 
 Four of his vassals, feeling this to be a challenge 
 to their feudal honor, took him at his word. They 
 took horse for the sea, and that night crossed the 
 Channel. It was the day after Christmas, 1170, 
 eve of the Holy Innocents. 
 
 Becket was told that the town was full of armed 
 men, and was advised by his canons to take sanctu- 
 ary in the cathedral. He made some proud reply 
 to the effect that a church is not a donjon, but 
 
100 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 recalling that it was the hour for the first Vespers 
 of the feast, he prepared to make his entrance into 
 the cathedral. Arrayed in a white cope and a 
 white mitre, the silver cross at his side, and the 
 frightened canons in their snowy mantles preced- 
 ing him, the great Archbishop took his place at his 
 throne in the sanctuary and chanted the first 
 words of the Office: Deus in adjutorium, meum 
 intende. At that moment the mailed feet of the 
 four knights were heard on the flags as they came 
 rapidly up the vast and gloomy nave. A voice ex- 
 claimed: ‘‘Where is the traitor?” The tall figure, 
 illustrious in the sanctuary which alone blazed 
 with lights, made a step forward. ‘‘There is no 
 traitor here,” he said. ‘‘What is your purpose?” — 
 “Your death.”—“T am prepared for it, but I order 
 you in the name of God not to touch my people 
 here.”’ As he said this he received a blow with the 
 flat of the sword. A second blow threw him down 
 and his blood covered the mosaic. Some one 
 kicked the senseless body, and leaving the terrified 
 monks, they went away through the shadows say- 
 ing: “He sought to be king and more than king; 
 let him king it now.” At that instant, as some- 
 times happens in a mild winter, a storm with thun- 
 ders and lightnings burst over the violated church. 
 
 Thus died Becket because he would not sign 
 away the independence of the Catholic Church in 
 his own country, and the Church naturally gained 
 
CHURCH AND FEUDAL STATE 101 
 
 more by this single martyrdom than by centuries 
 of resistance. The Pope, now triumphant over 
 Barbarossa, pretended to be very indignant, but his 
 position as regards the imperial House of Suabia 
 was still too precarious for him to be very hard 
 on the great and terrible English King. As for 
 Henry II he protested his horror and innocence, 
 withdrew the Constitutions of Clarendon and 
 promised to head the third Crusade later under- 
 taken by his son, Richard Coeur de Léon. The 
 Catholic Church in England was immune from gov- 
 ernmental interference till the era of Henry VIII. 
 Becket was canonized, and is known to the world 
 as Saint Thomas of Canterbury. It was to his 
 shrine in that city that the pilgrims traveled in 
 the pages of Chaucer. Up till the Reformation he 
 was the most popular saint in the English calendar. 
 Four hundred years later when the absolute State 
 in the person of Henry VIII broke the Catholic 
 Church in England once and forever, as a prelim- 
 inary to altering its religion, the first doctrinal act 
 of the over-married King was to erase the name of 
 Becket from the Liturgy, because in 1170 he saved 
 the English Church from becoming what he 
 (Henry) was then making it, and what it has re- 
 mained ever since. ~ 
 
 Only thirty years after this victory secured. by 
 a martyrdom, the Church reached its apotheosis 
 when Innocent III was elected to the Papacy. 
 
102 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 The heir to the ever dangerous House of Suabia, 
 the Emperor Frederick II, was a child, and Inno- 
 cent was his tutor. This Pope then proceeded to 
 crush the Albigensian heretics in the south of 
 France, to institute a new and popular type of mo- 
 nasticism, to receive from King John England as 
 a fief of the Holy See and at the Lateran Council 
 to abolish serfdom. ‘The greatest of Catholic cen- 
 turies was inaugurated by the greatest of medieval 
 popes. What could the poor Empire do against 
 this tremendous moral power, lacking territories 
 and arms, strong only in the sentence of excom- 
 munication and the interdict? However, it did 
 its best, and from now on the duel between the 
 two powers becomes bitter, atrocious, mortal. 
 Frederick II became a man, gibed pleasantly at 
 all religions, the Christian in particular, hemmed 
 in the Pope from the north and from the two Sici- 
 lies, and suggested to his brother sovereigns a uni- 
 versal despoilment of the Church. He died with 
 a jeer, and then the Papacy took a terrible revenge 
 upon his children. Their beauty, their genius, 
 their feudal honor, the love and loyalty they 
 evoked, availed them not at all. The air of Rome 
 was fatal to these tragic Hohenstauffens. Freder- 
 ick’s one legitimate son, Conrad, appeared there 
 only to die. His other son, the beautiful King 
 Enzio, perished in an Italian prison, betrayed as he 
 tried to escape by a lock of his fair hair. Little 
 
CHURCH AND FEUDAL STATE 103 
 
 Corradino, last of the family, saw his Sicilian in- 
 heritance given away by Clement IV to Charles 
 of Anjou, the brother of Saint Louis of France. 
 He, a child of fifteen, accompanied by his bosom 
 friend, Frederick of Austria, galloped past Rome in 
 a desperate effort to recover it. The Pope watched 
 the boys pass from the Lateran. “Let the victims 
 go,” was all that he said. Corradino was cap- 
 tured, and contrary to all laws of medieval honor, 
 the child of fifteen was executed by the sbires of 
 Charles of Anjou together with his friend. It 
 was the end of the House of Suabia, the fall of 
 the feudal state. There was no more Holy Empire 
 save in name. Where their lances had glimmered 
 in Alpine glens, now shone a bishop’s staff. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 THE APOCALYPSE OF SAINT LOUIS 
 
 THE failure of the first Crusades did not appear 
 to affect the prestige of the popes who directed 
 them. Never before or since has the Holy See 
 been more elevated in its pretensions and powers 
 than during the thirteenth century, under Inno- 
 cent III. Its elevation, however, was dizzy and 
 deceptive. Raised to a towering height, the Pope 
 saw more clearly the dangers that surrounded him. 
 “The massy fabric, framed of apostles, saints and 
 doctors, planted its roots far into the ground... . 
 but against it beat all the winds both from east and 
 west, from Europe and Asia, from the past and the 
 future.” 
 
 In southern France, side by side with the Catho- 
 lic Church here had arisen another—the Mani- 
 chean—whose holy places were Albi and Toulouse. 
 It was a disconcerting survival of the old antisocial 
 Gnosticism believed to have been crushed in the 
 fourth century. The death-struggle between the 
 two faiths seemed imminent in 1200. Already the 
 
 heretic church was organized, had its bishops, mis- 
 104 
 
APOCALYPSE OF SAINT LOUIS 105 
 
 sioners and general councils. It was sustained by 
 the wealth, the easy-going culture, and gay living 
 of that French Syria, where the beautiful language 
 of oc was spoken. Raymond VI of Toulouse and 
 other meridional princes, whose vices were flattered 
 by the contemptuous indifference of Manicheism 
 to the flesh, openly protected the sectaries and 
 made light of the Papal Supremacy. 
 
 It was not merely that the Midi was becoming 
 rapidly orientalized; the Orient itself was knocking 
 at the gates of Europe. The latter was weary of 
 Crusades, yet never was a Crusade more necessary. 
 A new and terrible people—the Mongols—seemed 
 determined to restore all Asia to the naked beauty 
 of prehistoric life. In northern China alone they 
 had already fired several hundred cities. One wing 
 swept down on Bagdad, and from there, raided 
 Jerusalem. The terror of them filled Europe. In 
 the year 1238 the sailors of Denmark and Frisia 
 dared not leave their wives to pursue the annual 
 herring fishing. Asia Minor expected every day 
 to see those monstrous painted forms and shaggy 
 horses appearing on the horizon. Before this 
 ghastly and common peril, Christian and Mussul- 
 man momentarily joined hands. The Moslem 
 princes sent ambassadors to the Kings of France 
 and England. 
 
 The appeal was taken up by one of the most 
 moving figures in history, the canonized Louis IX. 
 
106 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 That the most Catholic of centuries should have 
 been symbolized in a French king has been a great 
 thing both for the monarchy and for Catholicism. 
 
 Born a few years later than the century, he 
 seemed to have come into a world unworthy of him. 
 He had to bear the heavy inheritance of the here- 
 tic Midi, purchased in 1208 by one of the most 
 horrible wars in history, and transformed into a 
 desert. Where, he might have asked, were the 
 beautiful images of European order designed by 
 Charlemagne and Gregory VII; where were the 
 holy Pontificate of Rome and the Holy Empire? 
 They had become, respectively, Guelph and Ghib- 
 elline, and it is difficult to say which of the two 
 inspired the more horror. 
 
 On his voluptuous terrace at Palermo, sur- 
 rounded by Saracen guards, Jewish doctors, Sici- 
 lian mignons, and concubines of every race, 
 lounged the temporal head of Christendom, re- 
 vising the proofs of his last work which bore the 
 title: Concerning the Tribe of Impostors, with the 
 sub-heading: Moses, Mohammed and Jesus of 
 Nazareth. 
 
 As for the pope, it was difficult to recognize the 
 Savior’s vicar under the savage mask he had car- 
 ried ever since he had crushed the Manicheans. 
 He was not half so much interested in a Crusade 
 against the heathen as in one against the Emperor. 
 To destroy the generation of vipers, as he called 
 
APOCALYPSE OF SAINT LOUIS 107 
 
 the tragic House of Suabia, had become his sole 
 conception. 
 
 In such a world the one object to which a soul 
 like that of Saint Louis could turn was a crusade. 
 All was sick, in the state, the Church, and doubt- 
 less in himself, but on holy soil, all in his person 
 might yet work out its expiation. Jesus, Thou 
 hast died for me: I may yet die for Thee. It is 
 undeniable that this man offered his spotless body 
 and pure soul for the crying sin of his own epoch 
 and his own Church. 
 
 At the same time, with this mysticism went a 
 certain common sense novel in a soldier of the 
 Cross. His plan was an expeditionary force into 
 Egypt to be followed by an emigration which 
 would make that country a base of supplies, point 
 d’appui, in a renewed assault upon Palestine. His 
 policy and even his campaign were retraced by 
 Bonaparte in 1798. 
 
 He first sailed to Cyprus, where he stayed a 
 long time, probably to inure himself to the south- 
 ern climate. There he amused himself by watch- 
 ing the antics of the Mussulman princes, repre- 
 sentatives of the Caliph of Bagdad, the Soldan 
 of Egypt and the Old Man of the Mountain, who 
 came to spy upon the great King of the Franks. 
 What they saw was a slight man with golden hair 
 and beard who jested gently with his companions 
 
108 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 and wore upon his surcoat the scarlet cross of 
 heroic sanctity. His camp was the usual complex 
 of disorders and incongruities. Prostitutes pitched 
 their tents near that of the King. 
 
 At length he embarked for Egypt, and landed 
 near Alexandria, plunging into the shallow water 
 before any of his companions. From there the 
 army marched by slow stages to Mansourah. The 
 vanguard was led by Robert of Artois, the King’s 
 youngest brother, who insisted on trying to take 
 the town without waiting for the King. The 
 Mamelukes had barricaded the narrow streets, 
 and they rained arrows and Greek fire upon the 
 assailants. All perished, including the young 
 prince. | 
 
 In the meantime the King had crossed the Nile 
 and met the Saracens on the other side. In re- 
 counting this moment the good pedestrian prose 
 of Joinville rises almost to the ecstasy of an Arthur- 
 jan epic .. . “The King came up with his battal- 
 ions, and a great sound of shouting and trumpets 
 and cymbals; and he halted on a raised causeway. 
 Never have I seen so fair a knight! For he seemed 
 by the head and shoulders to tower above his 
 people; and on his head was a golden helm, and in 
 his hand a sword of Allemaine.”’ 
 
 In the evening they told him of his brother’s 
 death. He made no answer, ‘‘but big tears fell 
 from his eyes.” Later he said: ‘I know that he is 
 
APOCALYPSE OF SAINT LOUIS 109 
 
 in God, His Paradise” but refrained from adding: 
 “T would that I too were where he is.” 
 
 The rest of this campaign was horrible. There 
 was no chance of going forward, and retreat by 
 land or sea became hourly more difficult. An epi- 
 demic broke out in the camp, and the Saracens, who 
 had vexed the Crusaders continuously by stream 
 and shore, at last drove them into a guét-apens, 
 and the Crusade was over. For a while it was 
 doubtful whether the King himself would escape 
 the general massacre. 
 
 The tragedy of the French King had reached 
 its climax. He had been rejected by Christians, 
 captured, mocked and, as it were, crowned with 
 thorns by the heathen princes. All Islam cele- 
 brated his failure, and there was more than one 
 Christian city, noble Florence, for example, which 
 lit bonfires in honor of the happy event. Louis 
 cared nothing for all this, only for the failure of the 
 Crusade. ‘Had I alone to endure the disgrace and 
 the misfortune,” he said after his release, ‘‘and 
 had not my sins turned to the prejudice of the 
 Church universal, I should be resigned. But alas! 
 All Christendom has fallen through me into dis- 
 grace and confusion.” 
 
 The modern world so dearly loves “the masters 
 of their fate,” the men who get things done; it is 
 incapable of understanding, still less of canonizing, 
 this fatal king with his touch of Hamlet’s malady, 
 
110 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 constantly corrected by the heroic grace of God. 
 Christianity is not the religion of the strong; it 
 is the religion of the weak who will to be strong. 
 Nothing is more fascinating in this complex nature 
 than its unearthly mysticism, continually modified 
 by a sort of sunny good sense and illuminated by a 
 shining justice. He was no sacristan, no stained 
 glass saint, no slave of the priests, and he knew on 
 occasions how to parry the pretensions of clergy- 
 men with a firm malice, declaring that “prud- 
 homme vaut mieux que béguin.” And how this 
 man from the Catholic Middle Age pierces the 
 imbecilities of “one hundred percentism” in the in- 
 structions which he left to the future Philip III: 
 “Dear son, gain the love of thy people for truly I 
 should prefer a Scot coming from Scotland to 
 govern the kingdom well and loyally to thy govern- 
 ing it ill in the face of the world.” 
 
 In the meantime all Syria ran blood. The 
 Mamelukes, the captors of Saint Louis, arrived 
 burning, slaying and bearing of thousands to cap- 
 tivity. One by one the Frankish citadels near the 
 coast—Cesarea, Jaffa, Belfort and Antioch—fell 
 into their hands. 
 
 For the King of France these things were a 
 wound which gave him no peace. To go out there 
 again, to endure once more the agonies of that cam- 
 paign—the heats, the pestilence, the innumerable 
 flies, the certainty of failure, the horror of death— 
 
APOCALYPSE OF SAINT LOUIS 111 
 
 would have dismayed a more robust mind. His 
 mind was supernatural. He could not pray in the 
 glories of the Holy Chapel he had built in honor 
 of Jesus while the Saracens were slaying his broth- 
 ers or forcing them to deny His holy Name. 
 
 Between the viols and the wine, 
 I heard a voice descend: 
 
 Ve kneel and hail me as divine; 
 Therefore my land defend. 
 
 And then the eternal nostalgia of the Holy Land 
 assailed him—the marvelous sadness of the desert, 
 the melancholy of those rocky palisades where at 
 evening the divine Shepherd had walked. He said 
 nothing to his court, but wrote to the Pope that 
 he was about to reassume the Cross. 
 
 The Crusade was unpopular to the last extent. 
 Even the Pope, a clever man and able lawyer, 
 Clement IV, wrote to dissuade Louis from the folly 
 of his last adventure. We are only in 1267, but 
 already the ugly spirit of the coming epoch, the 
 low Middle Ages, was superseding the mystical 
 and chivalrous thirteenth century. No one praised 
 the King, and even his closest friend, his biog- 
 rapher, Joinville, abandoned him. “Of his voyage 
 to Tunis,” wrote the worthy man, “I wish to say 
 nothing, for God be praised, I was not there.” 
 
 Tunis had been selected as an objective because 
 
112 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 Egypt was inaccurately believed to draw its sup- 
 plies from there, and in their ignorance the French 
 thought that one could pass easily from one coun- 
 try to the other. After loitering on the coast some 
 days under a sky of brass, the vanguard advanced 
 on Carthage. All that was left of Rome’s rival 
 was a single fortress garrisoned by two hundred 
 Saracens. These were at once slaughtered, and 
 when the King arrived at evening he found the 
 place choked with dead bodies, an abominable cas- 
 tle standing by itself on a treeless plain, broken 
 here and there by pools of pestilential water. 
 Sickness soon broke out, attacking the King and 
 carrying off his youngest child, a boy, whom he 
 greatly cherished. It was, as Michelet said, a sum- 
 mons from God, a temptation to die. 
 
 “On his last night, the holy king lifted up his 
 hands and said: ‘Beau sire Dieu, have mercy on 
 this people sojourning here, and grant them a safe 
 return, that they may not fall into the hands of 
 their enemies, or be compelled to deny Thy holy 
 Name) (32,7 
 
 And a little later, as he was reposing, they heard 
 him sigh and say in a low voice: “Oh Jerusa- 
 lem ... Jerusalem... .” 
 
 Saint Louis is the complete flower of the Middle 
 Ages at their apogee and their last child. After 
 him there will be no more Crusades, or rather a 
 Crusade will be regarded as a final resort for pro- 
 
APOCALYPSE OF SAINT LOUIS 113 
 
 ducing revenue; considered as a heavenly adven- 
 ture it has outlived its time. The Pisans, with 
 the unfailing practicality which distinguishes their 
 race, will solve the problem by shipping from 
 Palestine a cartload or two of holy earth to be 
 deposited in the Campo Santo; a portion of Judea- 
 at-home, much more accessible, and infinitely 
 more cheap, 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 THE CENTURY OF SAINT LOUIS 
 
 THE epoch of Saint Louis has been called the 
 greatest of centuries. It is certainly the period 
 in which the Catholic spirit consumed itself with 
 its purest flame. By the middle of the thirteenth 
 century the power of the Papacy had attained 
 its consummation. Secure under its beneficent 
 despotism the Church in certain countries had 
 too the air of being very close to the hearts of 
 the people. It was in this century that the en- 
 thusiasm for a new style of architecture raised 
 throughout Europe, but especially in France and 
 England, those miracles of stone and color, the 
 Gothic cathedrals, a mighty expression of com- 
 munal feeling wedded to the genius of artists and 
 the holy ardors of religion. Under their charitable 
 shadow grew up the first associations of learning, 
 the universities. The spirit of the Church pene- 
 trated everywhere, even in the relations of busi- 
 ness and industry. It was surely a great age, but 
 an age which lived upon the heights and only the 
 
 heights were in sunlight. 
 114 
 
THE CENTURY OF SAINT LOUIS 115 
 
 Probably the best criterion of what is good in 
 an epoch is that proposed by Dr. Walsh in his 
 book on the thirteenth century ... “An histori- 
 cal period is great in proportion to the happiness 
 it provides for the greatest number of men.” And 
 yet it is only by a piece of special pleading that 
 the thirteenth century can be made to satisfy this 
 criterion. I doubt if the greatest number of men 
 were very happy during this climactic moment 
 of the Middle Ages, as happy as they were in the 
 Flavian age of the Empire, for example, under the 
 Antonines. If the thirteenth century is ultimately 
 great, it is not because it was conspicuously happy 
 for all its sacerdotal splendor; it is because it 
 produced a great Catholic art under the impetus 
 received from a religious renaissance. The most 
 successful example of individual happiness in his- 
 tory is a product of this century, but he is salient 
 only as he stands out, like the relief of a saint in 
 an old altar-piece, against the darkness of his 
 background. 
 
 He came from those enchanting valleys in the 
 region of the upper Tiber, on the borders of the 
 old Etruscan desert. The Middle Ages was par- 
 ticularly hard for those isolated hill-towns and 
 cantons of Assisi, Perugia, Gubbio and Narni which 
 the popes had erected as a kind of defensive ram- 
 part to protect their own “patrimony” on the 
 north. At the first appeal of Francis thousands of 
 
116 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 souls in this Umbria, so long shut out from its 
 natural inheritance of joy, seemed to awake and 
 expand in a new matutinal season of love and hope. 
 After the year 1209 they could have repeated the 
 old words of the Advent canticle: 
 
 Through the tender mercy of our God, 
 The day-spring from on high hath visited us! 
 
 Francis was the son of a rich bourgeois of Assisi, 
 and his adolescence reveals the same traits one 
 ascribes to the decorative and self-assured young 
 men one used to see lounging with graceful seren- 
 ity on the piazze of Italian towns before the Fascist 
 phenomenon. He was, however, innocently ambi- 
 tious, overflowing with animal vitality, and gay to 
 the point of extravagance. Taken prisoner in one 
 of the neighborhood wars between his city and 
 Perugia, across the valley, he said to his jailer: 
 “What do you think of me?” Then without wait- 
 ing for an answer, ‘Brother, I tell you that one 
 of these days the whole world will adore me.” 
 
 Innocent and amusing words, but also prophetic 
 ones! When he returned to Assisi he found no 
 leisure to prepare for the great moment when all 
 the world would adore him. His days and nights 
 were too preoccupied by all the sports and trivial 
 avocations which absorb an ordinary Italian youth 
 of good instincts and unquenchable high spirits. 
 His very name, Francesco, “the Frenchman,” re- 
 
THE CENTURY OF SAINT LOUIS 117 
 
 veals him as the practician of the gay science just 
 imported across the Alps from the ruined Midi, a 
 maker of sirventes and canzonetti, dedicated to 
 the love of woman and the love of life. At night 
 he promenaded through the city, half undressed, 
 flushed by the light of torches. He thought of 
 nothing but of becoming a great man, of perpetuat- 
 ing the secret of happiness he carried like a falcon 
 in his bosom, of surrounding himself with joyous 
 poets and dear friends, with “the flame of beauti- 
 ful faces.” “I will be a great baron,” he said 
 often. 
 
 Then, imperceptibly, a cloud of disquiet be- 
 gan to obscure his life. The hard egotism of the 
 bourgeois who surrounded him, the miseries of 
 the lepers and fugitive serfs and hopelessly poor, 
 assailed and penetrated even that irrepressibly 
 happy spirit. Pity came, a ghostly figure like that 
 mystical Poverty he is seen to espouse in Giotto’s 
 painting, and laying her finger on the smiling lips, 
 showed him the whole fair tract of the Christian 
 world, not as it appears now to the romantic me- 
 dievalist, but as it was, and is. That smiling val- 
 ley, his own Umbria, bounded by happy hills, 
 enameled with gay and simple flowers, appeared 
 to him suddenly as a true vale of tears, since man 
 alone, amid all that laughing spectacle of nature, 
 seemed disinherited and still a prisoner as if no 
 redemption had ever taken place. Francis de- 
 
118 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 termined to repair this anomaly. His conversion 
 is more striking than those of Huysmans and Tol- 
 stoy, since, in the case of the former, conversion 
 was barely distinguishable from superstitious ego- 
 ism, while the latter, in professing to love the poor 
 a great deal, remained all his life a disillusioned 
 aristocrat. Francis not only went to the poor, 
 he became poor himself; he identified himself, so 
 far as he was humanly possible, with abstract pov- 
 erty. Like the Buddhist prince in the Hindoo 
 mythos, this son of the gods, who had the best 
 reasons for loving life in a Pagan sense, willed to 
 love it in a Christian. And this one fact still 
 distinguished him from almost all the great con- 
 verts and reformers. Christidn gloom was the one 
 element in medieval Christianity impossible for 
 him to assume and incarnate. He embarked on 
 the great adventure of redemption as if it had been 
 a kind of lark. Even the most even-tempered of 
 medieval churchmen, Saint Antonin of Florence, 
 had regarded property as a positive good and pov- 
 erty as evil. Francis made himself little with re- 
 lief, and embraced poverty gayly as if she had 
 been a bride. 
 
 In retelling his familiar story, I have wished to 
 indicate, in passing, the two principal notes of the 
 Franciscan Church which he founded within the 
 Catholic one, and which transformed, to a certain 
 extent, the latter, together with the whole thir- 
 
THE CENTURY OF SAINT LOUIS 119 
 
 teenth century world. These notes are, it seems 
 to me, Christian democracy and the religion of 
 joy. The Catholic Church, under the egis of the 
 Papacy, was at the height of its power in the thir- 
 teenth century. Its theology was crystallizing into 
 the iron scholastic of Saint Thomas Aquinas. It 
 had tasted the blood of heresy in the Albigensian 
 Crusade, and its most questionable institution, the 
 Inquisition, had just been founded to police and 
 enforce a lifeless uniformity. Never again did 
 the Church seem disposed to regard with friendli- 
 ness, of even sufferance, any revolution in religion. 
 By pity and love, Francis effected such a revolu- 
 tion. Without theology or scholastic, and with the 
 blessing of the Pope, he restored primitive Chris- 
 tianity and the Gospel to the lives of men, and in 
 doing so, he rejuvenated and popularized the 
 feudal and monarchical Church. His Franciscans 
 became the leaders of the poor in the universal re- 
 volt against feudalism, the labor movement of the 
 fourteenth century in England, for example. As 
 early as 1210 they intervened between the serfs 
 and the barons of Umbria, and forced the latter 
 to sign a charter of partial emancipation. Even 
 among themselves they revised the monastic ideal, 
 which had been monarchical in its principle like 
 the Church itself. Many of them were not even 
 in orders. They called each other not “father,” 
 but “brother.” Catholics like to say that the 
 
120 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 Church abolished slavery, meaning that after the 
 advent of the Church slaves were no longer called 
 slaves but serfs. But what the Catholic Church 
 failed to do, the Franciscan one accomplished. 
 
 It was well for Francis that he effected such a 
 revolution in Italy itself, the country of light and 
 liberty. In France and the Empire, both just 
 emerging from the barbarous mists of the dark 
 ages, he might have fared like Jeanne d’Arc or 
 John Huss, and gone down in history as a heretic, 
 or as a heretic who has only just been rehabilitated 
 as a saint. For a moment the fate of the Francis- 
 can Church trembled on the knees of those medie- 
 val gods, known as the pope and the curia. Inno- 
 cent III was dubious as to its orthodoxy, but a 
 cardinal, divining the crux of the question, said in 
 the pontifical council: ‘“Holy Father, in rejecting 
 the request of this poor man do we not reject the 
 Gospel of Jesus Christ?” The Pope, acceding, 
 blessed the foundation of the Franciscan Order. 
 He had then a dream in which he saw his basilica of 
 Lateran rocked by a tempest and upheld only by 
 “this poor man” who lent his shoulder to sustain 
 it. This vision was a true prophecy. Everything 
 that was good in Italy—its Catholicism, its poetry 
 and, I would almost say, its art—received their 
 driving force from the Franciscan movement—the 
 liberty of spirit in which Italy treated dogma and 
 discipline, her contempt of formal heresy, the love 
 
THE CENTURY OF SAINT LOUIS 121 
 
 which often carried her to the heights of the Chris- 
 tian ideal, the religion of Giotto, Saint Catherine, 
 Raphael, Philip Neri and Michelangelo finds its 
 first reflection in that of Francis and his regenera- 
 ting work of joy. Machiavelli, who was no friend 
 to monks, wrote the following lines which are a 
 summary of the Franciscan achievement: 
 
 “Tt is necessary that religions renew their youth 
 and return to their first principles; Christianity 
 would be now completely extinguished if Saint 
 Francis had not renewed it and restored it to the 
 hearts of men by the poverty and the example of 
 Jesus Christ; he thus saved the religion that was 
 being compromised by the Church.” 
 
 Finally, Francis restored to Catholicism its prim- 
 itive joy, and thus made possible a vital and revo- 
 lutionary art. He was a true Meridional, and 
 Italian, a poet, and not the least of the flowers 
 which sprang up in his path was the first Italian 
 Renaissance, the creative, the real one. I can 
 never pass that fine, suave, tempered facade of 
 Saint Mary of the Flowers at Florence without 
 evoking the charmed moment in the Renaissance 
 when it paused, gracious as an April morning, be- 
 fore advancing into the lush magnificence of mid- 
 summer. Christian gloom would seem never to 
 have thrown its shadow about those smiling Italian 
 churches since Francis expelled it from the penin- 
 sula by his apostolate of love and joy. One 
 
122 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 feels the same sentiment in the painting of the 
 early Tuscan school, above all in the supreme 
 Giotto, illustrator of the Franciscan legend. Some- 
 thing has changed in Christendom and in Christian 
 art, and if this profound alteration does not eman- 
 ate from the religious renaissance it emanates from 
 nowhere. Observe the frescoes of Pisa or Mon- 
 reale, where the menacing god of the twelfth cen- 
 tury appears on the dull gold of the domes like 
 an Oriental despot, repulsing with a gesture of 
 malediction the unhappy Christian humanity which 
 no longer dared to lay its head upon His shoulder. 
 Then consider the Christ of Giotto and Masaccio, 
 the God of the Franciscans, walking among the 
 flowers, compassionate for the multitude, cherish- 
 ing the unpretentious and the poor. He is the 
 God restored by Francis to the Church which had 
 forgotten him. He is immanent in the lovely Um- 
 brian land, the Galilee of Italy, in the Virgilian 
 hills, the enchanted waters, the beautiful people 
 all of which the divine pantheist assembled and 
 reconciled to Him in his canticle of the sun. Be- 
 fore Francis, the medieval Christian might well 
 avert his eyes, like Saint Bernard, from the danger- 
 ous beauty of woods and fountains, still haunted 
 by sensual phantoms; from the enervating melan- 
 choly of mountains and solitary lakes. The 
 melody of water was like the laughter of girls 
 bathing; the white birch was very lovely as it 
 
THE CENTURY OF SAINT LOUIS 123 
 
 leaned to its reflection in lonely pools, but from a 
 little distance its beauty was that of nudity. 
 
 When music sounds, then changest thou 
 Its silvery to a sultry fire: 
 
 Nor will thine envious heart allow 
 Delight untortured by desire. 
 
 Francis came, and all this complex and ferment 
 of unnatural desire and unnatural austerity was 
 reconciled and stilled. Men worked and created; 
 they loved and worshiped with tranquil hearts. 
 Giotto, the Pisani, the early humanists like Pico 
 and Ficino, harmonized successfully the antique 
 beauty of nature with salvation by the Gospel. 
 Auroral lights ran from cupola to campanile be- 
 cause in sun-intoxicated Umbria a beloved voice 
 had repeated the evangelic affirmation: “I have 
 come that you may have life, and that you may 
 have it more abundantly.” 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 OF ART AND THE CHURCH 
 
 I CAN see a connection between the renaissance 
 of Christian art in the Middle Ages and the result 
 of the year 1000 which uncertainly ushers in the 
 medieval period. Glauber, a chronicler, writing 
 in 1050 of the events which took place in his child- 
 hood, has this to say: “It was as if the world, 
 shaking off its old tatters, hastened to clothe it- 
 self in the white vestures of the Church.” After 
 1000 European art was like one of those new- 
 born babies, deposited by poor women of the 
 Middle Ages in the baskets swinging in church- 
 porches, and who afterward grow up about the 
 sanctuary and in the shadow of the cloister. In 
 the homeless turmoil of that chaotic period, the 
 artist, all uncertain of his own power and his own 
 future, turned to the Catholic Church as to a fos- 
 ter-mother, and she became his only home. 
 
 For an obvious reason architecture was the first 
 art patronized by the Church. She was obliged to 
 find buildings in which to house her sacraments 
 and ceremonies. ‘All religious buildings,” says the 
 
 same Glauber, “all cathedrals, parish churches, 
 124 
 
OF ART AND THE CHURCH 125 
 
 village chantries, were transformed by the faithful 
 after 1000 into something better.”” This “some- 
 thing better’ was the architectural form we call 
 the Romanesque. To trace briefly its develop- 
 ment it is necessary to go back a little. 
 
 The first Christian churches were merely exten- 
 sions of Latin dwelling-houses and public build- 
 ings, particularly the Roman law court or basilica. 
 The latter was a long, simplified building with a 
 flat ceiling and very little window space due to 
 the heat and sunniness of the Latin climate. The 
 monks who occupied these edifices simply rounded 
 the far end into a choir, elevating it from the long 
 nave by a flight of steps. In this raised sanctuary 
 was placed the high altar, partly closed in by col- 
 umns, the whole imitated, in all probability, from 
 examples in pagan temples. What they had then 
 was an authentic Christian church expressed in 
 noble form. The most impressive examples of the 
 basilica church to be found in Europe are Sant’ 
 Apollinare and San Vitale, both in Ravenna, the 
 latter containing that mosaic of the Empress Theo- 
 dora and her court so admired by Mr. Clive Bell. 
 There are those for whom the Church has never 
 improved upon the basilica with its naked and 
 superb finality. Enter some dark afternoon, when 
 the church is still unlighted, St. Paul the Apostle’s 
 in New York City, and see how grand and com- 
 plete can be even the suggestion of this earliest 
 
126 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 Christian architecture long before all the fioretti 
 of subsequent styles were so much as dreamed of. 
 
 Romanesque really added nothing to this funda- 
 mental form save, perhaps, the rounded arch, the 
 campanile, or tall thin tower, and the often elab- 
 orately sculptured portal. The Romanesque 
 churches stayed low in height, thanks to the build- 
 er’s fear of instability.. This is the structural reason 
 why Romanesque fails to ‘‘soar” and ‘‘aspire heav- 
 enward,” to adopt the somewhat sentimental vo- 
 cabulary of Gothic enthusiasts. One also likes to 
 think that there was something charitable and 
 humble in the very principle of those adorable 
 Italian churches which kept them close to the earth, 
 knit with their children. Like the Daughter of 
 Syon in the Song of Songs, they are dark but 
 comely. The Gothic style never flourished in 
 Italy, and when the first Renaissance dawned in the 
 peninsula about 1300, the Romanesque churches 
 took on a fresh life, a new spring. The artists and 
 decorators of the new age, still profoundly Chris- 
 tian in their instincts, took the exteriors and caused 
 them to bloom in soft and temperate colors, like 
 the facades of the Duomo and Santa Maria No- 
 vella at Florence, those gracious milk-white fronts, 
 crisped and dappled with a new and unearthly foli- 
 age. This is the charmed and too ephemeral mo- 
 ment in the Italian Renaissance, so far as archi- 
 tecture is concerned. 
 
OF ART AND THE CHURCH 127 
 
 In the meantime, during the thirteenth century, 
 in France and England, a revolution in Christian 
 architecture had taken place. The Gothic was 
 born. Its essential difference from the style which 
 in western Europe it superseded is the ogive, or 
 pointed arch, substituted for the rounded one. 
 The Romanesque churches had at the outset plain 
 flat ceilings, supported by heavy pillars. If, instead, 
 you have your arches come to a point, and then 
 multiply them indefinitely on and on, the eye is 
 always being charmed and coaxed onward and 
 upward; if you substitute for rounded windows, the 
 one purpose of which is sufficient light, tall taper- 
 ing ones blazing with colored glass, or completing 
 the edifice with a glowing corolla, a mystic rose— 
 it is obvious that you achieve an effect of aerial 
 vastness and mysterious color which wholly dazzled 
 the thirteenth century, and has, at intervals, en- 
 chanted humanity ever since. That famous “as- 
 piration” is more than half achieved by a perilous 
 geometrical device as elementary as that of a con- 
 jurer. Externally, in place of a roof as simple in 
 its outline as that of a cottage, you cause your roof 
 to be denticulated by a multiplicity of pinnacles 
 and spires, and you obtain a general effect un- 
 paralleled in its delicacy in spite of the dangers to 
 structure. This is what Gothic did; it combined a 
 net impression of incomparable grandeur with a 
 fascinating captiousness of detail. But it was too 
 
128 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 good to last. ‘The Greek temple and Roman 
 church had, after all, contained the secret of their 
 structural stability. The Gothic church depended 
 upon props. The appearance of the crutch called 
 the flying buttress marked the beginning of the 
 end. Those flamboyant, or late Gothic churches of 
 the fifteenth century, are almost embarrassing in 
 the slenderness of their structure, and, as some one 
 has said, the Gothic was not so much superseded by 
 the classic revival as crushed by its own inherent 
 frailty. 
 
 Sculpture and painting, the next two arts taken 
 up by the Church, were for some time neglected in 
 the Romanesque and Gothic periods. This can be 
 partly explained by the needs of construction. The 
 earlier churches were too dark, and the later ones 
 too much preoccupied in utilizing structurally 
 every available inch of space to afford any scope 
 for decoration. The Gothic church, however, af- 
 forded certain prized opportunities for the medieval 
 sculptor, called in France the zmagier. One of its 
 objects was a richly crowded exterior decorated 
 with the freest hand so long as the decorations were 
 in relief. Under the transparent disguise of relig- 
 ion, almost everything, short of actual blasphemy, 
 was permitted to the zmagier, and the result was a 
 fantastic, and often outrageous, encyclopedia in 
 stone, the dominant note of which was realistic. 
 Birds, beasts, flora; natural history, science, satire, 
 
OF ART AND THE CHURCH 129 
 
 fantasy; human traits, human passions and human 
 aberrations—everything was depicted with an 
 enormously vital and often diabolic verve. In one 
 thing only is this naturalistic sculpture inferior to 
 the Greek, and that is possibly the absence of 
 serenity, partially due to the fact that it was neces- 
 sarily a sculpture of draped figures, and the depic- 
 tion of nudity was forbidden it. But it lacks 
 nothing in vitality, courage and the sense of life. 
 “This is the worship of Priapus, in which nothing 
 comes amiss, or is to be staggered at, however 
 sensual, for all things are but varied manifestations 
 of life . . . in valleys amid vineyards and foun- 
 tains, among which ‘often the voices of fauns and 
 of gods are heard.’”’ Nothing disconcerts the 
 imagier, not even the supposed sanctity of his mis- 
 sion, and he does not shrink from representing on 
 the portals of the Gate of Heaven the incestuous 
 amours of the patriarch Lot and the silly misdeeds 
 of the Cities of the Plain. 
 
 With the Franciscan renaissance, described in 
 the last chapter, plastic art abandoned the portals 
 and entered the sanctuary itself. Giotto and his 
 friends were not deterred from depicting beside the 
 very altar the earthly pilgrimage of the God-Man 
 in a style for which it is hard to find adequate 
 words, a style simple, homely, popular, realistic, 
 and yet, in the last analysis, so unutterably moving. 
 Remember that, all things considered, Giotto was 
 
130 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 not only the greatest of painters; he was also prac- 
 tically the first, and that the problem confronting 
 him and his successors was not simple. It was, in 
 a word, “‘how to bring heaven down to earth with- 
 out making earth itself seem too heavenly.” Paint- 
 ing, still like a child in the cloisters, had to embody 
 emotions wholly unexpressed and perhaps unknown 
 to Greece or Rome. In the meantime, Christianity 
 had come with its emphasis on suffering and as- 
 piration; the Middle Age had come with its reverie, 
 its dizzy yearning and its perilous achievement. 
 All that had to be expressed. In attempting its 
 expression the painters of the first Renaissance in 
 Italy continued the humanizing apostolate of 
 Francis and restored religion to the people. God 
 was again made man, and then, with the discovery 
 of the classics, it began to dawn in the medieval 
 mind that man too might be a god. The Almighty, 
 says the Psalmist, takes no delight in any man’s 
 legs; but, in the intention of the fourteenth century 
 painters, man should; and he did. The same 
 painter was obliged to depict Venus weeping for 
 her lost lover and Mary weeping for her lost Son; 
 and he did both with an equal and amorous ardor. 
 Something unexpected and, it might be thought, 
 undesired by the Church was disclosed, and that 
 was the beauty of nudity, the nobility of the body 
 of man. What began in candid piety culminated 
 in the classic adoration of anatomy. And what did 
 
OF ART AND THE CHURCH 131 
 
 the Church, the patron of the plastic arts, do at 
 this juncture? The modern and the ill-informed 
 (often the same thing) would like to tell us, and 
 often do tell us, that the Church at once withdrew 
 her skirts and fulminated in reprobation. As a 
 matter of fact, she did nothing of the sort. The 
 Church was then the true Catholic Church, still in 
 her full vigor of mental and spiritual health, and 
 not merely the most ancient and impressive of 
 modern puritan sects. Wavering perhaps on the 
 verge of decadence as she was, she had not, at that 
 date, thrown off one of her most illustrious gifts; 
 namely, the holy spirit of art. Accordingly, she 
 continued to be the chief patron of painting and 
 sculpture, and Michelangelo, who combined both 
 expressions, and is perhaps the most daring and 
 almost insane exponent of anatomy for its own 
 sake, was employed by three successive popes. 
 
 It is fascinating to watch the synthesis, or con- 
 flict, of two opposing things—the pagan serenity 
 and the Christian aspiration—in the canvases of 
 certain of these painters. Benozzo Gozzoli intends 
 in all good faith to tell the story of the Magi, the 
 three eastern kings who came a long way to worship 
 the infant Christ, but it is really the story which 
 interests him more than the Epiphany, and, finally, 
 it is the costumes and play of expression and play 
 of bodies which interest him even more than the 
 story. Yet what priest so unreasonable as to scold 
 
132 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 him for that exquisite odyssey of mountain-pass 
 and bushy dell and trim meadow; of negro king and 
 delightful perky page-boy; of fantastic proces- 
 sional and charming color? It is a whole galleon 
 of delicious, puerile experience; it is his own genius, 
 so original, sparkling and childlike, that he comes 
 to throw at the feet of a Child-God. Donatello 
 happens to love the human body as much as any 
 Greek in the days of Pericles, and the representa- 
 tion of all that Florentine expressiveness, slender 
 muscularity, charm and color he so much loved 
 goes for what? . . . For the service of the Church 
 in whose honor he casts one of his friends as the 
 patron-saint of merry England, while the nearest 
 apprentice he immortalizes as the adolescent 
 David, poet-king of the Catholic liturgy. And Cor- 
 regio? . .. To this day, popular religious illus- 
 tration, even as it is turned out ad nauseam by the 
 machine-made imagination of our poor modern 
 Romanists, dates from that amazing virtuoso who 
 peopled his own Parma, the valley of violets, with 
 wonderful girls and boys. The Church accepted 
 it all—robust animal realism, freakish genius, yes, 
 and even the equivocal yearning and mystery of a 
 Sodoma or a Botticelli, because these artists offered 
 up what was most native in them for the love of 
 God who has given us the priceless gift of beauty 
 that marks us out from the beasts who perish. 
 Leonardo’s John the Baptist is a twin-brother to 
 
OF ART AND THE CHURCH 133 
 
 his Bacchus, a faun from the Syrian deserts, one 
 of those figures from a remote mythology seen with 
 horror by Saint Anthony. (“Satyrs be somewhat 
 like men, but with horns on the forehead.”) Can 
 the word “Repent” on those smiling lips be any- 
 thing but a paradox? Who knows? There is al- 
 ways something ambiguous and unanswered in this 
 strange and compelling art which is its most vital 
 element, its enduring charm. 
 
 All this time the Church had her own inherent 
 art to which all these things—architecture, paint- 
 ing, sculpture,—were accessory, a liturgical and 
 musical symbolism inseparable from her chief cere- 
 mony—the Mass. It may be necessary at this 
 point to explain once more what the Mass is. 
 
 Its roots are in the New Testament. In the 
 Gospels, Jesus, “the night in which He was be- 
 trayed, took bread and wine, and gave them to His 
 disciples saying: ‘This is My Body. This is My 
 Blood. Eat and drink This in remembrance of 
 Me.’ DP) 
 
 It is because Christ told His Church to do what 
 He had done that the Mass exists. The rite, as 
 we have indicated earlier in this book, loomed, 
 at the earliest date, as the chief among the 
 Church’s Sacraments, the center of the whole 
 Catholic system. Gradually throughout the Mid- 
 dle Ages, rising to a climax in the century of 
 Thomas Aquinas, the whole religious and esthetic 
 
134 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 genius of Catholicism revolved about and concen- 
 trated in this supreme Sacrifice as, in Raphael’s 
 fresco, the entire congregation of popes, kings, em- 
 perors, prelates and artists gather in about a bare 
 table on which is enshrined a luminous Host. 
 
 Nothing then in the symbolism of the Church 
 can be explained without reference to the convic- 
 tion expressed in the Mass that God incarnates 
 Himself in bread, as formerly He clothed Himself 
 in flesh. The words of the Gospel: “Let these 
 stones become bread,” are all but literally fulfilled. 
 Cathedrals rise to house fittingly a Wafer; the 
 stone becomes bread; the bread becomes God. 
 The incarnation and passion of Jesus are completed 
 and perpetuated by a third mystery—His trans- 
 substantiation into the humblest and most popu- 
 lar of human symbols. ‘To-day, to-morrow, for- 
 ever, the divine drama is enacted in the church. 
 The latter, cold and inanimate creature of stone, 
 is warmed, transfigured, and itself almost trans- 
 substantiated by the unending miracle played 
 within its walls. It becomes a living organism, a 
 suffering body, a man. The nave, extending its 
 two arms, is Jesus on the Cross; in the distant 
 choir inclining ever so little from the nave, you 
 see His Sacred Head drooping in Its ultimate 
 agony, while mistily the Precious Blood is purple 
 in the deeps of the painted windows. 
 
 In turn, the liturgical drama is elaborated in 
 
OF ART AND THE CHURCH 135 
 
 accord with the natural one enacted outside by 
 the sun and the seasons. “Except a grain of wheat 
 fall into the ground, and die, it shall not bring 
 forth fruit.”” In late autumn, at the moment when 
 the sower scatters his seed in the sere earth, God 
 buries Himself in a human body. The seed, at 
 once God and Man, grows up through the weary 
 winter months; God in Man suffers and dies. Then 
 with the time of lilies, the return of spring, it issues 
 triumphantly from the tomb. And at last, in the 
 time of harvest, ripened by the divine ray which 
 penetrated it from the beginning, it ascends like 
 the Virgin at her Assumption. (15 Aug.) 
 
 Unerringly, and with a genius which touches the 
 soul, the Church accompanies this tremendous 
 drama of nature and spirit in her liturgical year. 
 The latter has been compared to one of those 
 medieval diadems, studded with jewels and crystals 
 which are “the Proper of the Season,” in other 
 words, her ceremonies and above all her music— 
 “the only coronet chiseled in a metal sufficiently 
 precious, an art adequately pure, to place itself 
 upon the brows of a God.” 
 
 The liturgical year commences about the first 
 of December with the four Sundays of Advent, a 
 time of preparation for the birth of Christ on 
 Christmas Day. Shortly before Christmas are sung 
 at Vespers those great Antiphons which appear to 
 concentrate, like the salt of tears, all the yearning 
 
1386 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 and plaintive expectation of the time. . . . “O 
 Sapientia, O Wisdom from on High, reaching from 
 end to end, and sweetly disposing all things, come 
 and teach us the way of prudence. . . . O King 
 of the Nations and Desired One, come and save 
 Thy child whom Thou hast formed out of the 
 slime.” . . . The climax of Advent is Christmas 
 itself, birthday of the Divine Child and the Chris- 
 tian Church, and yet that ineffable note of longing, 
 dominant in the Advent music is not quenched; 
 it can still be heard in one of the most exquisite 
 Hymns of the Breviary, the Jesu Redemptor for 
 the Vespers of Christmas, a melody, plaintive, deli- 
 cate, infinite in its suggestion and vague pathos, 
 like the fall of snowflakes as they seem to lapse 
 in the voices of boys. 
 
 Remember O Creator Lord, 
 That in the Virgin’s spotless womb 
 Thou wast conceived, and in her flesh 
 Thou didst our frailty assume. 
 
 After an interval, unroll the violet-colored Sun- 
 days of Lent when the organs are silent, and no 
 bells or glorias may be heard. And then, just as 
 all nature seems to withhold yet a moment her 
 fruition, we are in Holy Week, ushered in with 
 palms, “while on the tender sky a red cross is 
 seen, and solemn shouts and cries of despair pro- 
 
OF ART AND THE CHURCH 137 
 
 claim the scarlet Hymn of Prudentius, the Vexzilla 
 Regis Prodeunt.” There follow the somber nights 
 when Tenebre, the Office of Shadows, is chanted 
 in churches, unadorned and almost unlighted in 
 honor of the divine Suffering, when between each 
 psalm one of the candles is extinguished, its smoke 
 evaporating under the arches, while the choir utters 
 that marvelous phrase which awakened the des- 
 pairing admiration of Mozart: O Jerusalem, Jeru- 
 salem, turn again to the Lord thy God. 
 
 Two days later and all is changed. The Mass 
 of Holy Saturday, the most exquisite service of 
 the year, is chanted in an atmosphere of subdued 
 joy in which is still the accent of tears; the Easter 
 Alleluia is again heard for the first time in a 
 twelvemonth. Indeed the Gregorian music, on 
 this occasion, assumes a Gothic gayety, borrows in 
 this Alleluia and in the carol, O Fila et Filie, the 
 popular rhythms of the crowd, suggests, as Huys- 
 mans said, “‘the sculptured merriment of ancient 
 porches.”’ On Pentecost, Feast of the Holy Spirit, 
 forty days later, it becomes again solemn and 
 pensive. The vestments of the priests, seen from 
 the far end of a long nave, smolder under the 
 altar lights like red coals under tongues of fire, 
 and one hears again the majestic Veni Creator 
 and the sequence Veni Sancte Spiritus whose 
 rhythm contains a pulsation like that of flames. 
 Finally, at the culmination of the year, at the mo- 
 
138 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 ment when spring becomes summer, there is cele- 
 brated the great Feast of the Sacrament, Corpus 
 Christi, a white and golden festival wherein is 
 concentrated, in a pean of thanksgiving and wor- 
 ship, the central dogma of the Church, her affirma- 
 tion that Jesus Christ is incarnate and enthroned 
 in nature, in the humblest fruits of the earth, 
 bread and wine. 
 
 A marvelous symbolism, doubtless, an incom- 
 parable fund of art, the Church possessed in her 
 great age. To-day, certain of its forms persist, but 
 they are almost everywhere neglected or abused. 
 “To him that hath not, shall be taken away even 
 that which he had.” I have said enough to indi- 
 cate, for instance, that I regard the Gregorian 
 music, that anonymous treasury of melody, as per- 
 haps Catholicism’s greatest claim to esthetic great- 
 ness. “Born of the Church, and bred like one of 
 her own children in the choir-schools of the Middle 
 Ages, plain chant is the mobile and aerial para- 
 phrase of the cathedrals, the fluid interpretation 
 of the canvases of early painters.” Ask any Cath- 
 olic what has happened to the Gregorian chant in 
 our time, and you will be met with blank stares. 
 It is still sung, he will say. Yes, it is still sung, 
 that is, it is either treated as a great bore to be 
 gotten through somehow, or as an antiquated toy 
 to be rendered so artificially as to rob it of all vi- 
 tality; or it is officially bellowed in a manner that 
 
OF ART AND THE CHURCH 139 
 
 suggests gargling; or it is ignored altogether. That, 
 in a few words, is what the modern Catholic 
 Church has done with the chief of its in- 
 herent arts. What the modern Catholic really 
 loves in the way of religious music are vaude- 
 ville and nigger-minstrel tunes. In a _ recent 
 Catholic periodical, a writer referred regret- 
 fully to that glorious Veni Creator for Pentecost 
 sung to the air of De Koven’s O Promise Me; toa 
 Salutaris, a hymn to the Sacrament, that is to say, 
 to Jesus Christ, sung to the tune of Let Me Inhale 
 the Fragrant Breath That Round Thy Lip is Play- 
 ing, etc. Sometimes the priest in the Mass, having 
 finished the Consecration, is obliged to halt the 
 Sacrifice until some miserable old woman in the 
 singers’ gallery has completed her warbling of 
 some musical piggery. Such is Catholic art in the 
 Catholic Church of our time. At one end of the 
 scale you have the thirteenth century which I have 
 just very faultily been attempting to sketch in its 
 architecture, sculpture, painting and music, and 
 at the other, the vile sexless indecencies of Barclay 
 Street and the modern Catholic musicastor who, 
 in his special sphere, seems to me no less vile. It 
 is, let us admit, a somewhat melancholy anti-cli- 
 max for the Church of Gregory the Great and 
 Francis, of Giotto and Palestrina. What is the 
 reason? Paganism, Protestantism, Catholic Reac- 
 tion, Jesuitism, persecution, machinery? It is 
 
140 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 impossible, in a chapter of this scope, to say. But 
 I believe that a Church which has once evolved 
 such an art, such supreme liturgical and musical 
 affirmations, cannot be dead forever in the sphere 
 of these things. One morning Catholic art will 
 rise again for those who have been hopelessly 
 watching its tomb. 
 
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 [1300-1800] 
 
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CHAPTER XIII 
 DECADENCE 
 
 UnpbeER the grand pontificate of Innocent III, 
 patron of the Franciscan movement, the Catholic 
 Church was at the height of its prestige. His 
 immediate successors were men of similar temper, 
 and as the great century drew to an end, the influ- 
 ence of the popes stayed fixed and supreme. Their 
 greatest triumph in the realm of politics was the 
 extinction of their old enemies, the Hohenstaufen 
 emperors of Germany who had hemmed them in 
 from north and south, from Lombardy and the 
 Two Sicilies. When poor little Corradino perished 
 on the scaffold in 1268 and Clement IV gave away 
 his Sicilian patrimony to Charles of Anjou, Saint 
 Louis’ bad brother, Cesar did not venture to rock 
 the boat of Peter for nearly three hundred years. 
 When the attack came, as it shortly did, it came 
 from a very different and eminently orthodox quar- 
 ter, the country of the canonized King of France. 
 The great medieval Empire, planned by Charle- 
 magne and Barbarossa, shrank into mere Austria, 
 ruled by a meek Hapsburg by the grace of the 
 
 popes (1273). The popes desired no unity save 
 143 
 
144 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 the moral unity they had done so much to create 
 in Europe. On the religious side, this unity was 
 for a moment completely realized when Gregory X 
 in 1274 had the satisfaction of seeing the two 
 Catholic families of East and West, the Latin and 
 Greek Churches, united for a moment at his foot- 
 stool. Never had the Papacy seemed stronger or 
 more popular than in 1300, opening year of the 
 new century, when Boniface VIII held the first of 
 the Jubilees or Holy Years. And then, as at the 
 stroke of an invisible signal, it began to decline, 
 and the whole Church with it. 
 
 The subtle change in the European world which 
 now begins is the change from the moral power of 
 a theocratic super-state to the conflicting relation- 
 ships of modern nationalism. Its climax is the 
 Protestant Reform of the sixteenth century—in 
 part, a nationalist revolt against the Latin suprem- 
 acy of the south—and its catastrophe is the French 
 Revolution, two centuries after—a movement 
 which began with the universal rights of man and 
 ended with the universal rights of Bonaparte, 
 resisted only by an aged little Italian in a white 
 cassock. 
 
 At the beginning of the fourteenth century, 
 France and England were no longer half barbarian, 
 or feudal countries. The Catholic and civilizing 
 process had been going on for almost two centuries. 
 In England the Norman and Angevin kings had 
 
DECADENCE 145 
 
 checked feudalism, inherited the first British Em- 
 pire, organized a common law, neither Roman nor 
 ecclesiastic, and recognized a more or less demo- 
 cratic Parliament: which already balanced nicely 
 the power of the executive in a true cooperative 
 State. France had won back most of her posses- 
 sions from England, and now in the fine hands of 
 Philip the Fair, Saint Louis’ grandson, looked 
 jealously across the Channel at Saint George and a 
 little resentfully across the Alps at Saint Peter. 
 Nationalism in its good and bad aspects, with its 
 chevaliers and flags, its martyrs and superstitions, 
 its Armageddons enduring a hundred years, its 
 Jeanne d’Arcs and Queen Elizabeths, had already 
 risen in the souls of these two countries to super- 
 sede the old medieval and Catholic unity which the 
 popes had imposed for two hundred years. Boni- 
 face VIII was scarcely the man to keep this armed 
 peace. 
 
 Whatever motives, fiscal or political, impelled 
 the Pope, that first Jubilee of his in 1300 contained 
 an element of powerful poetry. To convoke all 
 Christendom to the birthday of a new and dubious 
 century, to contemplate as supreme pastor all those 
 thousands and thousands of representative souls 
 come to kneel at the tombs of the Apostles, and 
 this, above all, at a moment when the Church, at 
 its climax, paused a dizzy moment, before its de- 
 cline, was a grand act worthy of a better man. 
 
146 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 There is no wonder that the Pope was carried 
 away completely by his réle. He allowed himself 
 to be carried through this multitude, made up of 
 every nation, the triple tiara on his head, preceded 
 by heralds with golden trumpets who cried: “Here 
 are two swords, the temporal and the spiritual; 
 behold, O Peter, thy successor, and thou, O Christ, 
 Thy Vicar who is above all kings.” 
 
 The response of the kings to this challenge 
 directed against their temporal power was alarm- 
 ingly instantaneous. Philip the Fair had already 
 excluded priests from the French judiciary and 
 composed his parliament entirely of laymen. Con- 
 siderably later, Edward III enacted the statutes 
 of Provisors and Premunire which deprived a papal 
 legate of any administrative authority in the Eng- 
 lish Church. Dante wrote his thesis, De Monarchia 
 in which he regretted the phantom of the Holy 
 Empire and placed his hopes of social peace in the 
 Austrian Cesar instead of in the Italian Pope. 
 
 Meanwhile, a furious quarrel broke out between 
 Boniface and Philip the Fair over the question of 
 whether the French clergy should support the gov- 
 ernment by permitting their vast property to be 
 taxed. Previous squabbles between Church and 
 State had been nothing to this, for this was a dis- 
 agreement over money and money meant more to 
 the fourteenth century than to the preceding one. 
 Money was particularly important to the grandson 
 
DECADENCE 147 
 
 of Saint Louis. He exacted a hundredth, then a 
 fiftieth of the income of clergy and laity alike. 
 Boniface protested in his encyclical Clerecis Laicos 
 where, in the tone of Innocent III, he upheld the 
 immunity of the Church from national interference 
 of any sort, especially with the strong-box. Philip 
 appealed to his Parlement for support, and the 
 French Catholics in a first outburst of that “Galli- 
 can” spirit which some centuries later was to cost 
 them dear, told him to go ahead and defy the Pope. 
 Before Boniface could launch an excommunication, 
 Nogaret, the King’s agent in Italy and Colonna, 
 an Italian condottiere, broke into the Pope’s palace 
 at Anagni, his native town. The bourgeois of 
 Anagni rang the alarm bells, but unwilling or 
 unable to resist, they too joined in the pillage. The 
 pontiff, forewarned, awaited his tormenters with 
 fortitude, arrayed in a white cope, the tiara of the 
 jubilee on his head. Colonna and the man of law 
 insulted and menaced him; the condottiere struck 
 the old man repeatedly with his gauntlet. This 
 is in 1303. Three years before he had been the 
 Pope of the Holy Year who was above all kings. 
 After three days the people of Anagni delivered 
 him, but too late to save his reason. He was borne 
 into the piazza weeping like a child. “If there be 
 any good woman,” he said humbly, ‘who will 
 bestow on me bread and wine, or even a little 
 water, I will give her God’s blessing and mine.” 
 
148 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 Touched by the spectacle, the crowd too wept and 
 cried: ‘‘‘Long live the Holy Father.’ ... All 
 could enter and speak with the Pope as with any 
 poor man.” 
 
 When Boniface died shortly after this, the 
 most Christian King of France decided never again 
 to incur the risk he had run in dislodging the 
 cornerstone of Christian authority. He deter- 
 mined to have a pope of his own, so to speak, on 
 his own ground. Then began, from 1305 to 1418, 
 the so-called Babylonian captivity of the Papacy 
 at Avignon, where the pontiffs, for the most part 
 Frenchmen, elected by French cardinals, were at 
 the complete disposition of the French King. The 
 first of these was a timid scoundrel, Bertrand de 
 Gott, Archbishop of Bordeaux, who took the name 
 of Clement V. His first interview with his master 
 is thus described by the historian Villani and sug- 
 gests the concordat of an American boss with an 
 influential heeler. 
 
 “They heard Mass together and mutually swore 
 secrecy. . . . Then the king raised him, kissed his 
 mouth, and said: ‘The following are the special 
 favors I have to ask of thee; that thou wilt thor- 
 oughly reconcile me with the Church, grant me the 
 tithe of the French clergy for five years, anathe- 
 matize the memory of Pope Boniface and in the 
 creation of new cardinals remember certain friends 
 of mine. As to the last favor, I reserve it for 
 
DECADENCE 149 
 
 another time and place, for it is a great and secret 
 thing.” This “great and secret thing” was nothing 
 less than the destruction and murder of one of 
 the greatest of medieval religious orders. The king 
 coveted the vast wealth of the Temple, and ac- 
 quired it by the simple expedient of burning the 
 Templars on a strange charge. 
 
 The Order of the Holy Temple, a kind of mili- 
 tary monasticism, dated from the first Crusades. 
 It had undergone extreme hardships and performed 
 excellent services in the Saracen wars, but even in 
 those early days its besetting sin was stigmatized 
 by Richard Coeur de Lion, who remarked when 
 dying that he left his luxury to the Cluniacs and 
 his pride to the Templars. After the Crusades be- 
 came a dead issue, the order exemplified in 
 Christendom the eternal crusade of the soul against 
 temptation, the spiritual combat which the Chris- 
 tian wages to his last hour against the enemy 
 within himself. It was thought that nothing too 
 much could be done in the way of privilege and 
 endowment for a body of men which had borne 
 the burden and heat of the wars in the East. Con- 
 sequently it was, in 1307, enormously wealthy, 
 and affiliation with its ranks was sought by the 
 greatest potentates, including Philip the Fair him- 
 self. Finally, the secrecy with which it was 
 wrapped invested it with respect. The Templars 
 were the Freemasons of the Middle Age, and their 
 
150 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 initiations had all the attraction of a powerful 
 secret society in which was mingled a vague but 
 not unpleasant terror. It was said, for instance, 
 that if the King of France found his way into the 
 Temple uninvited, he would never find it out. 
 
 I have already suggested that the Catholic re- 
 ligion in the Middle Ages, far from being the rigid 
 society it afterward became when it had been 
 frightened by the Protestant revolt, was, on the 
 contrary, extremely elastic. The long indulgence 
 accorded to the Albigensian heresy, the bold specu- 
 lations of the Paris schoolmen, the freedom of 
 conscience and joyous individualism created by 
 the Franciscan movement are so many separate 
 strains indicating a far greater liberty of thought 
 and action within the Church than is generally 
 admitted. There is a hint of this eclecticism in the 
 mystical epic of the Graal Quest, the shadowy 
 intimation of a Church within a Church and also 
 beyond it, a hidden and secret church of the initi- 
 ate, a church of the Spirit. It is supposed that the 
 Templars profited by this comparative freedom 
 and abused it. There was, really, a great danger 
 in the pride of the Temple Order, both for the 
 Church, and, ultimately, for itself. There was 
 danger that the neophyte might expect from the 
 Order the revelation of a Christianity different 
 from that offered by the Church of the crowd, or 
 even a different religion. It is even supposed that 
 
DECADENCE 151 
 
 the ambiguous Gnosticism, crushed in the crusade 
 against the Albigeois, survived in this occult com- 
 munity, this dark sanctuary hidden behind the 
 official altar. All this and worse was, at any rate, 
 dragged into the light, thanks to the ingenuity of 
 Philip the Fair’s torturers, and though little con- 
 fidence can be given to confessions extorted by 
 torture, it was precisely in England, where torture 
 was not employed against the Templars, that the 
 most disconcerting revelations came to light. 
 Human nature does not essentially change in its 
 various social revolutions, especially in a body of 
 celibates, half monks, half soldiers, exposed to 
 the temptations of a distant country, a country of 
 slaves whose religion does not exclude the worship 
 of the senses and the utmost exaction of pleasure. 
 The supernatural chivalry of the Templars, their 
 too pure and cold ideal, was not made to sustain 
 them after the failure of the Crusades; left without 
 a mission in the world, they had nothing to fortify 
 them but their excessive pride. And this pride 
 concealed strange impulses, fantastic passions. 
 . . . The associations of a male chivalry, the con- 
 tempt of women, the age-long contact with the 
 burning and tolerant East, where everything is 
 permitted, worked havoc with the reputation of 
 the Order. In England the boys had an unprint- 
 able saying regarding the Templars which they 
 called out publicly to each other in the street. 
 
152 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 It was not, of course, because of mutual prosti- 
 tution and blasphemy that Philip the Fair, fol- 
 lowed by other princes, suppressed the Order, but 
 because it was too rich, and the result of the sup- 
 pression was the income from nine thousand 
 manors which reverted to the state. The most 
 tragic element in this case is that it was once 
 more the Church slain by the Church. In the 
 affair of Boniface VIII the French bishops had 
 followed the King against their spiritual father. 
 The Temple, denounced by the clergy, was finally 
 abolished by the pope. This suicide of Catholic 
 Christendom is nowhere so manifested as in the 
 almost insane lamentations of Dante. Everything 
 in which men had believed — papacy, empire, 
 chivalry, the crusade—seem to be traveling down 
 the same black road to dissolution. The true 
 Middle Ages are already over in the fourteenth 
 century. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 GERSON 
 
 THE time has come in this history for a little 
 comic relief, and the latter is abundantly supplied 
 by the extraordinary doings connected with the 
 so-called Babylonish Captivity of the popes at 
 Avignon, followed by its stranger sequel, the great 
 Schism. We have seen the French Vicar of Christ, 
 Clement V, taking up his residence in the ener- 
 vating city on the Rhone at the bidding of Philip 
 the Fair, meekly anathematizing the memory of his 
 predecessor, sacrificing the Templars, and behav- 
 ing in general as a pontifical valet to the House of 
 France. From Clement’s pontificate to the re- 
 turn of Gregory XI to Rome, seventy years later, 
 Seven French popes “ruled from the wind-swept 
 heights, and in the sunburnt, luxurious palace of 
 this false Rome.” Several of them were good 
 men, but their situation neutralized their personal 
 holiness by identifying them with the Valois mon- 
 archy, a connection which lowered immeasurably 
 the respect due to the Papacy as an international 
 
 force. In the meantime, the true Rome lay deso- 
 153 
 
154 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 late and neglected, or became the battlefield for 
 the visions of poets like Petrarch and of operatic 
 tribunes like Rienzi. 
 
 In 1338 broke out a hundred years’ struggle 
 between the two first nationalist states of Europe, 
 France and England, over a variety of sonorous 
 causes, but, in reality, over wool. Love of money 
 and murder for its sake seem to be the keynotes of 
 the mercantile fourteenth century. The outbreak 
 of the Hundred Years’ War completed the embar- 
 rassment of the Avignonese popes. They were in 
 the position of hired servants to one European 
 power, and against this power half Europe was 
 arrayed, England and the English Church at the 
 head. Their impulse now was to escape from 
 Avignon, “the exceeding high mountain,’”’ where 
 they had yielded to temptation for the sake 
 of a little ease. An exquisite apparition of the 
 late Middle Ages, Saint Catherine of Siena, ap- 
 peared like an angel of peace in their voluptuous 
 palace on the banks of the Rhone, entreating the 
 Pope to return to his patrimony and be again the 
 father of all Christians. Gregory XI yielded, and 
 on January 15, 1377, sailed up the Tiber to Saint 
 Paul’s on the Ostian Way, where the great Apostle 
 had been slain, and so entered the eternal town. 
 The Pontifical Mass was again chanted at the 
 Lateran, mistress and mother of churches, amid 
 the world’s applause. One year later the Pope 
 
GERSON 155 
 
 died, and his death opened an immediate way to 
 the great Schism. Although a successor to the 
 dead Pope was at once elected, the same cardinals 
 who had elected him assembled a little later and 
 bestowed the Papacy upon a disreputable soldier- 
 priest, Robert of Geneva, who returned to 
 Avignon. There were now two supreme pontiffs, 
 an Italian and a French, recognized by the various 
 European powers in accordance with their political 
 sympathies. For France and her immemorial ally, 
 Scotland, the true Vicar of Christ was Robert of 
 Geneva at Avignon. For all who took sides 
 against France in the war the true Pope was at 
 Rome and the best Catholic Ono has since 
 rallied to that view. 
 
 It was generally believed that the disasters of 
 the war were a judgment on France for having 
 introduced schism by the Captivity, and continued 
 it by the recognition of Robert of Geneva. Peace 
 then was the obvious remedy, peace in the Church 
 between Rome and Avignon, by a simultaneous 
 retirement of both claimants; European peace be- 
 tween France and England. This was the con- 
 summation universally desired and on the lips of 
 every one, even the French. Michelet says that it 
 was the common family prayer taught of an eve- 
 ning by mothers to their little ones. Nowhere is 
 this longing more manifested than in the sermons 
 and remarkable personality of a great French 
 
156 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 priest, Jean Gerson, Rector of the Sorbonne, or 
 University of Paris, who was to play a command- 
 ing role in the Counciliar movement which is the 
 subject of this chapter. With what lyricism he 
 celebrates the great gift of peace in one of those 
 hopeful intervals when it was believed that both 
 Popes would retire: 
 
 “‘Allons, allons, sans attarder, 
 Allons de paix le droit sentier. 
 
 Lift up your hearts, my brothers. Give yourselves 
 up in contemplation of the glorious gift of peace. 
 “Veniat pax!” 
 
 France and England were easier to reconcile 
 than was the Papacy. The English may not have 
 desired concord, but their King did; at least 
 Richard II signed, in 1396, a truce with France 
 for twenty-eight years. Then the European 
 princes turned their attention to the Schism. By 
 rights it should have terminated two years before, 
 in 1394, when the French Pope, Robert of Geneva, 
 died. At once the French King, Charles VI, wrote 
 to the cardinals at Avignon to suspend election, 
 but they paid no attention and proceeded to elect 
 a hard-headed Spanish prelate, Pedro de Luna, 
 who became Benedict XIII, making many voluble 
 promises that he would retire just as soon as the 
 peace of the Church made retirement possible. In 
 the meantime, the Roman malcontents picked out 
 
GERSON 157 
 
 an aged Venetian, Gregory XII, who also pledged 
 himself to abdicate at the proper moment. The 
 difficulty was that neither Pope would take the 
 first step. The Schism merely received a fresh 
 lease of life. 
 
 Then began the , extraordinary diplomatic 
 odyssey of Benedict XIII at Avignon. A solemn 
 embassy, headed by the French King’s uncles, the 
 Dukes of Berry, Burgundy and Orleans, and ac- 
 companied by a learned doctor of the Sorbonne, 
 repaired to Avignon to wheedle the Pope into keep- 
 ing his promises. He responded admirably, pro- 
 testing that abdication and the peace of the 
 Church were closest to his heart. For all that, he 
 showed no signs of retiring. After wearing out 
 the princes with fine words, he got rid of them 
 by the simple expedient of burning the bridge 
 connecting Avignon with Villeneuve-le-Pape, 
 where they were staying. The Pope promised to 
 rebuild the bridge, but he never did, and the 
 princes, disliking the prospect of daily conferences 
 by ferry, gave up the struggle and left the Pope 
 master of the field. In Italy also the aged Vene- 
 tian gave every indication of living to a hundred. 
 
 To increase the misery of Christendom, the 
 Hundred Years’ War was now resumed. ‘The 
 English King, Richard II, was unexpectedly de- 
 throned by his cousin, Bolingbroke, and the new 
 dynasty of Lancaster renewed the cruel struggle 
 
158 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 with France this time to the death. France had 
 introduced the Schism; she had failed to repair 
 it; very well, she must pay the price for disrupting 
 Christendom by becoming an English province. 
 So argued that fox-hunting Anglican hero, Henry 
 V, and the nationalist English Church, with her 
 usual disregard for the general interest, patriot- 
 ically followed suit. Shakespeare has hit off the 
 selfishness of the English clergy admirably in the 
 opening scene of his war play, Henry V. Peace 
 which had seemed to dawn a moment was further 
 away than ever. ‘She could not compose the af- 
 fairs of Europe, for she did not dwell in men’s 
 hearts; never were they less pacific, more dis- 
 tracted and divided by pride, violent passions and 
 mutual hates.” 
 
 The European powers were now engaged in 
 tearing each other’s throats and had no time to 
 devote to healing the Schism, so it was the turn 
 of the Church to heal itself. Langenstein, a Ger- 
 man theologian at the Sorbonne, in his Concilium 
 Pacis, written years before, had suggested an as- 
 sembly of the whole Church to decide between 
 the two rival Popes. Both old men were now 
 reduced to the status of fugitives wandering up and 
 down their respective maps, Benedict XIII in 
 southern France, Gregory XII in the Peninsula. 
 The Council of Pisa, which convened in the sol- 
 emn Duomo of that city March 25, 1409, was the 
 
GERSON 159 
 
 first manifestation of the Counciliar Movement 
 to supersede the Papal Supremacy. Its heart and 
 soul was the French priest, Gerson. It was he who 
 advanced the doctrine that the Catholic Church 
 could exist independently of a Pope, and that the 
 latter should be subject to General Councils, 
 similar to those of Nicea, Ephesus and the others 
 in the fourth and fifth centuries. In short, the 
 Papal Supremacy was no longer held the corner- 
 stone of the Church’s Catholicity. How important 
 is this novel point of view expressed by Gerson 
 need not be pointed out. The claim to a real 
 Catholicity on the part of non-Roman Churches 
 to-day, the Greek, the Anglican, etc., rests on no 
 other basis, and Gerson, good Catholic as he was, 
 prepared, in a doctrinal sense, the Protestant revolt 
 more than a century later. The Council of Pisa 
 deposed simultaneously the two old rivals, and 
 elected a Greek Franciscan, Alexander V, in their 
 place. Then occurred an unexpected and comic 
 dilemma. Both the old Popes refused to resign. 
 As if two Popes were not bad enough, there were 
 now three, and this was all that was accomplished 
 by the Council of Pisa. 
 
 Gerson had momentarily failed, but undismayed 
 he worked on, preparing the great Council of Con- 
 stance, which was ‘‘to bind the hands of the chief, 
 recognized as infallible, and proclaim him supreme 
 head of the Church which reserved the right to 
 
160 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 judge him.” The result of his labors, which as- 
 sembled in the little city of Constance November 
 4, 1414, was something more than an ecumenical 
 council; it was a glowing pageant of the Middle 
 Age in embryo. Church and State stood there 
 arrayed in an unforgettable splendor, enhanced by 
 the full sunset of an era which was going down 
 in darkness, offset by a secular magnificence. 
 One hundred thousand persons poured into the 
 small town. There were present cardinals and 
 bishops rustling in scarlet, purple and cloth-of- 
 gold copes, Oriental patriarchs, mitered abbots, 
 doctors of the canon law, generals of the mendicant 
 orders, and, to cap the spectacle, the new holy 
 Roman Emperor in his apostolic robes, holding the 
 scepter and the globe which symbolized the in- 
 heritance of Cesar, the whole civilized world. ‘It 
 was a fair, a camp, a forum of debate, diversified 
 with ceremonial as august as Roman and medieval 
 tradition could prescribe.” 
 
 During the fourth session, Cardinal Zabarella 
 proclaimed the famous decree which declared the 
 Council superior to the pope. Two of the three 
 Popes were deposed, and the remaining one, the 
 aged Venetian, was induced to resign. A neutral, 
 Martin V, was elected, gave the Council his formal 
 approval, and then dissolved it with a sigh of relief 
 on April 22, 1418. Captivity and Schism were 
 alike at anend. As for the old warhorse, Benedict 
 
GERSON 161 
 
 XIII, who had already run kings and councils such 
 a race, he refused to accept the degree of deposi- 
 tion, and withdrew into a Spanish fort, where he 
 braved the Council, judged his judges, saw them 
 pass away as he had seen so many others, and 
 died unconquered at nearly a hundred years of 
 age. 
 
 After the Council, Gerson retired to Lyons, a 
 city, says Michelet, which, with its somber streets 
 that scaled the sky, was a better place of retreat 
 than any solitude of the Tyrol. ‘Here he expiated 
 by monastic docility his long domination over the 
 Church, enjoying the happiness of obeying, the 
 peace of having no longer a will of his own.” It 
 is said that in the latter years of his life he could 
 bear only the company of young children. With 
 them he forgot scholasticism, and learned sim- 
 plicity. ‘Simplicity and purity,” says the /mita- 
 tion, “‘are still two wings by which we can raise 
 ourselves above the world.” 
 
 Peace was thus restored to the Church, but not 
 the purity it had forfeited during this edifying 
 period. The new line of popes continued to live 
 quietly at Rome, modernizing the city and pre- 
 paring there an appropriate setting for the classical 
 Renaissance in its full summer-tide. At the same 
 time with an equal discretion they had an eye to 
 the enlargement of their State, determined that 
 never again they should be reduced to the position 
 
162 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 they had occupied during the Captivity. The 
 temporal power also took a new lease of life during 
 this period. Martin V and his successors, at the 
 beginning of the fifteenth century, prepared the 
 domination of the Borgias and theirs at the cen- 
 tury’s close. 
 
 The Middle Age was definitely at an end. 
 France and England had emerged from the Hun- 
 dred Years’ War absolute monarchies, modern 
 states. The most characteristic creation of 
 medievalism, the Gothic church, was expiring like 
 a charming but elderly coquette, surrounded by all 
 the wildest extravagances of devotion. There is a 
 great charm in these flamboyant churches at Bourg 
 and elsewhere, but it is the charm of languor and 
 ruin; all vitality has exhausted itself and fled from 
 those fantastic forms. Medieval art, rejected and 
 weary, rallies itself in a final effort, and raises its 
 own tomb in the Church of Brou. It is not merely 
 Philibert and Marguerite of Savoy who sleep in 
 that long marble shroud; it is a whole four hundred 
 years, the ancient faith, the lost love, all the hopes 
 and poetry of the past, 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 THE BORGIAS 
 
 “BEHOLD I bring a flood of waters upon the 
 earth . . . O Italy, O Rome, I am going to de- 
 liver you into the hands of a folk who will efface 
 you among the peoples. I see them descending 
 from the mountains like lions a-hungered.”’ 
 
 So prophesied Savonarola from the pulpit of 
 the Duomo at Florence in 1481, and four years 
 later, on the 31st of December, 1484, a French 
 army under Charles VIII entered and occupied 
 the Holy City. The defile of troops was so pro- 
 longed that it ended after nightfall in the light of 
 flambeaux. They had come, ostensibly to support 
 a French claim over the two Sicilies against the 
 Spaniards, but actually to annex the whole penin- 
 sula to the French power, and this with the en- 
 couragement of many Italians who saluted the 
 French King as the moral deliverer of Italy from 
 a pagan renaissance and a pagan pope. The 
 latter, Alexander VI (Borgia), a handsome, 
 affable man of fifty, watched with extreme un- 
 easiness the passing of the deliverer from the 
 
 port-holes of Hadrian’s tomb. | 
 163 
 
164 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 The Borgias were of Spanish origin. One of 
 them, Calixtus III, had amassed an immense for- 
 tune for the purpose of a crusade which never 
 came off. This fortune passed to his nephew, 
 Cardinal Roderigo Borgia, who was thus enabled 
 to purchase the pontifical throne which he ascended 
 as Alexander VI. 
 
 During the previous two centuries the control 
 of the popes, both over the Church and over their 
 own little Roman State, had suffered almost irrep- 
 arably by their captivity in France, and the suc- 
 ceeding breach in Catholicism known as the great 
 Schism. A new era had begun with the election 
 of Martin V at Constance in 1418. From Con- 
 stance to the sack of Rome in 1527 is almost a 
 hundred years. It was the era of triumphant 
 nationalism in politics, of the high Renaissance in 
 the arts; the era of Machiavelli and Michelangelo. 
 During this century the popes took the step of 
 consolidating their position as sovereigns in Italy 
 by extending the papal State through every means, 
 fair and foul. At the same time the contrast 
 between their official character as heads of the 
 Church and their greed and immorality as Italian 
 princes so shocked the European world, particu- 
 larly in the north, that it is one of the contributing 
 causes of the two reformations of the sixteenth 
 century. The Spanish adventurer, Borgia, is 
 usually taken as the culmination and monstrous 
 
THE BORGIAS 165 
 
 symbol of this political expansion and moral depth 
 in the Papacy’s history; so I have taken his name 
 as a heading for this chapter. 
 
 His morals were, after all, not much worse than 
 those of other cardinals, and he was sincerely 
 devoted to the prosperity of the Church, at least 
 in its financial aspect. This did not prevent him 
 from showing a commendable attention to the 
 prosperity of his own family, which was numerous. 
 By his mistress, Donna Vanozza, he had four chil- 
 dren, two of whom, the famous Cesare and Lu- 
 crezia, have been excessively celebrated in scan- 
 dalous history like their parent. Cesare was 
 cardinal-bishop, Duke of the Romagna, and 
 Captain-General of the Church. Lucrezia was 
 popular at Rome for her sweetness of disposition 
 and her piety. The Pope himself was a religious 
 man in his moments. He had a special devotion 
 to purity, restricted to the person of the Blessed 
 Virgin. It was he who instituted the custom, now 
 all but universal, of saluting the Mother of Christ 
 three times a day by ringing a church-bell and 
 murmuring the salutation of the Angel Gabriel. 
 Catholics owe this charming habit to the “mon- 
 ster” for whom they themselves have been as se- 
 vere as any one. It would be curious to have 
 seen the Holy Father, on his way to some sensuous 
 banquet in the apartments of his pious daughter, 
 arrested by the soft peal of a hundred, church-bells 
 
166 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 long enough to murmur: “O Mother of God, pray 
 for us sinners, now and in the hour of death.” 
 
 This memorable pontificate came to crown an 
 astonishing series of bad popes. Paul II, who 
 disliked Greek literature, put to the torture several 
 Roman academicians, suspected of having com- 
 mented the dialogues of Plato. Fortunately he 
 was the last of his breed, at least in this respect, 
 for certain of his successors carried their enthu- 
 siasm for Greek morals to a point which would 
 have astonished Alcibiades. Sixtus IV, a friar by 
 origin of the Order of Saint Francis, closed the 
 Vatican to women, and surrounded himself with 
 pages and mignons. These youths, on attaining 
 their majority, became bishops and cardinals, 
 pastors of the Church. All these worthy pontiffs 
 showed, moreover, a marked tenderness for their 
 own progeny, and their great preoccupation was 
 that of carving from the body of Italy princi- 
 palities for their natural sons. So bent were they 
 upon this business that insecurity and disorder in- 
 creased daily in their own capital. At the death 
 of Innocent VIII, Alexander’s predecessor, violent 
 crimes at Rome averaged a total of two hundred 
 a fortnight. The new Pope had the merit of 
 restoring a little decency to this inferno. He was 
 severe upon crime, except those committed by his 
 own children. 
 
 He was also one of the few men in Italy who 
 
THE BORGIAS 167 
 
 evinced any patriotic emotion at the invasion by 
 the French. It has been suggested that the 
 famous Lorenzo the Magnificent, tyrant of Flor- 
 ence, might have rallied his countrymen against 
 the French, but Lorenzo had died two years before, 
 1484. Florence had fallen into the hands of a 
 mad monk, Savonarola, who disinherited Lorenzo’s 
 three sons; dedicated the Republic to Christ; wel- 
 comed the French as moral crusaders; and heaping 
 together the whole output of the Florentine Renais- 
 sance on which he could lay hand—paintings, 
 manuscripts, busts—burned it in the public square. 
 This sincere fanatic seems to have been mainly 
 inspired by an insane hatred of the Borgia Pope. 
 Alexander tolerated him a long while, as Leo X 
 tolerated Luther, but when the French were safely 
 out of the way, the disillusioned Florentines de- 
 nounced him to the Inquisition, and he was burned 
 as a rebel to the Holy See and a heretic. The first 
 was true in a sense, but it was most unjust to burn 
 him as a heretic. He was a very good Catholic, 
 indeed; in his instinctive hatred of art he was a 
 Catholic of quite a modern type. 
 
 The French and Savonarola out of the way, it 
 was the turn of the Pope, or rather that of his 
 formidable son, the unfrocked Cardinal of Va- 
 lencia. And here it may be necessary to warn the 
 reader against swallowing whole in the manner of 
 that ingenuous and shallow historian, the late 
 
168 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 J. A. Symonds, everything that was written about 
 Alexander by retailers of clerical tittle-tattle, like 
 Burchard and Infessura. In the first place, Alex- 
 ander and his family had the most bitter personal 
 enemies, from Cardinal della Rovere, the Pope’s 
 deadly rival and successor, down to the puritan 
 Savonarola. In the second place, these diarists, 
 these industrious scribes, were Renaissance writers 
 with high literary pretensions and a craze for an- 
 tiquity, a veritable itch to write as closely as pos- 
 sible, like the matchless Suetonius, the divine Dio. 
 The great stock-in-trade of those worthy Latins 
 had been the orgies, the enormities, the picturesque 
 perversions of the Cesars. Very good; if the good 
 Don John Burchard, O.S.B., and the witty In- 
 fessura could not produce a pontiff as luxurious 
 as Hadrian, an Apostle as depraved as Tiberius, 
 they might as well throw away their impotent 
 quills; posterity would have none of them, and 
 the great Goddess of Fame would draw away from 
 them her skirts. One could not survive in those 
 lists without being in the most romantic sense a 
 pretty good liar. 
 
 When all is said about premeditated exaggera- 
 tions, it must be admitted, however, that the Pope 
 Alexander VI and his cardinalitial creatures al- 
 lowed nothing in heaven or earth to stand in the 
 way of a good time. I have always rather liked 
 
THE BORGIAS 169 
 
 this description of a Roman holiday arranged by 
 Pietro Riario, the papal “nephew,” raised at 
 twenty-six to the dignities of Cardinal Patriarch 
 of Constantinople iz partibus infedelium and 
 Archbishop of Florence. The Piazza of the Holy 
 Apostles was partitioned into apartments hung 
 with white and crimson velvets. All the utensils 
 were of silver down to the vilest. The air of this 
 improvised banquet hall was refrigerated by 
 punkas, and on a column in the center stood a boy, 
 completely naked, his body sprinkled with a dust 
 of gold, who poured cool water from an urn. 
 During the dinner, Florentine mummers played an 
 interlude representing Susanna and the Elders, 
 alternating with the Diverting Attempt on the 
 Chaste Joseph by the Wife of Potiphar and the 
 Religious History of Saint John the Baptist and 
 the Daughter of Herodias. The youthful but most 
 eminent Cardinal-Archbishop moved among his 
 guests with the hauteur of a Cesar and the grace 
 of a god. 
 
 Morally, the Papacy reached its nadir during 
 this pontificate. Alexander was, after all, only 
 a brilliant Italian condottiere who used the Church 
 to accomplish his political and personal ends. He 
 made his bastard a Cardinal and then unmade 
 him; his daughter was regent of the Vatican. He 
 gave the newly discovered America to the Span- 
 iard, and through his son attempted to found a 
 
170 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 Borgia dynasty in central Italy. He instituted 
 the Angelus, and established the Censorship, with 
 its corollary, the Index. He made a treaty with 
 the Sultan of Turkey, and entertained the latter’s 
 nephew, Prince Djem, at Rome, where the Su- 
 preme Pontiff and the Moslem princelet with their 
 respective harems held court side by side in the 
 same palace. When Faenza was captured, in 
 1501, the two young Manfredi, Astorre and his 
 brother, were sent on to Rome where rumor cred- 
 ited them with having endured the last outrages. 
 ‘“Astorre, che era minore di dicotto anni, e di 
 forma eccelente . . . saziate la libidine di qual- 
 cuno.” Whether the Pope or Cesare are intended 
 is uncertain, perhaps both. The arts of murder 
 and rapine have never been so nonchalantly exer- 
 cised as by the younger Borgia. When the Pope’s 
 favorite irritated him he stabbed him while the 
 unhappy youth clung for safety to the Pope’s 
 robes, and the blood from the blows repeated by 
 Cesare spurted in the Pope’s face. The next vic- 
 tim was his own brother, the young Duke of 
 Gandia, whose body, perforated with wounds, was 
 discovered in the Tiber by a fisherman and carried 
 before the horrified father. Alexander was an im- 
 possible Pope, but he was not essentially a bad 
 man. He refused food for three days, at the end 
 of which he announced that he was a changed 
 being and begged for the prayers of the curia. 
 
THE BORGIAS 171 
 
 But the same paternal feebleness which had been 
 revolted by the murder caused him to forgive and 
 take back the murderer. For a time the Christian 
 Church was a fief in the hands of Cesare Borgia. 
 
 It is a striking moment, but only a moment. 
 The story that Alexander died from the same 
 poison he had prepared for several of his cardinals 
 seems a little Elizabethan, but die he did, and the 
 Papacy passed into the hands of his bitter enemy. 
 Cesare was chased from Italy, and the House of 
 Borgia never contributed another Pope, though it 
 produced a distinguished saint, Francesco Borgia, 
 General of the Jesuits. 
 
 Julius II was even a worse Christian than Alex- 
 ander in that he loved nothing but war and fight- 
 ing if it were not the Apollo Belvedere. He laid 
 about him right and left, breathing wrath and 
 fire, excommunicating persons and states at the 
 slightest provocation and conducting the siege of 
 Mirandola in person. This pontifice terribile, as 
 the curia called him, was the Bonaparte of the 
 Temporal Power. With the vanity of the born 
 parvenu he wished to be buried in the largest 
 church of Christendom hard by the tomb of his 
 first predecessor, Saint Peter. Accordingly the 
 old basilica, which thirty generations of Catholics 
 had visited, was ruthlessly pulled down, and the 
 Pope called upon the foremost classic architect, 
 
172 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 Bramante, to build him a new and grandiose 
 church. Without gifts, especially from the rich 
 northwest, Bramante could never fulfill the Pope’s 
 mania for grandeur, and these gifts were sought by 
 the system of indulgences, that is, pardons for 
 sins committed in exchange for cash. “Questions 
 of morals, finances, religion, national differences,” 
 says the Catholic historian, Barry, “were brought 
 to a definite and dangerous burning-point by the 
 indulgences sold to erect the new Saint Peter’s.” 
 
 Under Leo X, the successor, came the catastro- 
 phe. He was the youngest of the three Medici, 
 expelled from Florence by Savonarola, a portly 
 and pleasant gentleman, passionately devoted to 
 the fine arts, especially that of living. Reforma- 
 tion was in the air, and since the popes were pre- 
 occupied with statues and chefs rather than with 
 reform, the prospect shifted in the north to a 
 rising wind of revolution. There the late medieval 
 traffic in religious things, and especially the sale 
 of indulgences, had produced the deepest disgust. 
 It was Shaw, I think, who remarked that Anglo- 
 Saxons prefer their salvation at the maximum of 
 cheapness. All this rising rumor of trouble did 
 not affect the urbane Leo. After the ceremonies 
 of encoronation were over he took the arm of a 
 cardinal and backer, remarking with a charming 
 smile: “Well, dear son, since God has given Us 
 
THE BORGIAS 173 
 
 the Papacy, let Us enjoy it.” This contentment 
 was so profound as to be unperturbed by the ad- 
 vent of Luther. ‘Monks’ quarrels,” he said, when 
 he learned that half Germany was irrevocably lost 
 to the Catholic Church. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 LUTHER 
 
 To complete the largest church in the world, 
 Leo X had need of more funds, and to those who 
 gave him money he accorded more indulgences. 
 In 1517 a German monk named Martin Luther, 
 professor of theology at the University of Witten- 
 berg in Saxony, began by attacking the sale of 
 indulgences, and ended by tearing down in north 
 Germany the entire Catholic edifice of sacraments, 
 priests, bishops and Papal Supremacy. 
 
 Before 1517 the Catholic Church had not faced 
 any very serious opposition in the West. The 
 intransigence of feudal princes, like the German 
 Cesars and Philip the Fair, did not involve religion. 
 Heresies like the Hussite and Lollard movements 
 in the fourteenth century were local in character, 
 and with the aid of the civil power, were put down 
 with relative ease. The most formidable of them, 
 the Albigensian Church, was deeply infected with 
 elements that were not Christian at all. But in 
 the Lutheran movement the Church had to face 
 
 an opposition, backed by the civil power, which 
 174 
 
LUTHER 175 
 
 protested against her in the name of her own 
 founders. In fact, Protestantism may be defined 
 as a Christian heresy. 
 
 Luther was its first voice. He was of peasant 
 stock, a monk in his teens, and his point of de- 
 parture was an extremely morbid anxiety about 
 his own soul. From his cloister he looked out 
 to see how other people in Germany carried it 
 off, and what he saw was a panorama of masses, 
 pilgrimages, processions, relic-mongering, pardon- 
 mongering, sounding brass and tinkling cymbals, 
 empty shows and hollow acts. He felt all the dis- 
 gust for the fringes and accidents of Catholicism 
 experienced by a man attempting rather vainly to 
 achieve what William James called a religion of 
 healthy mindedness. The only thing that mat- 
 tered, according to Luther, was an immediate 
 relationship of the soul with Christ; this he called 
 “justification by faith.” All the externals of 
 Catholicism came between a man and its natural 
 objective, and among such externals Luther placed 
 the hierarchy and the sacraments, all but one. A 
 good knowledge of Saint Paul prevented him from 
 altogether throwing over the central doctrine of 
 Catholicism, the real presence of Christ in the 
 Eucharist; none the less he modified it. The 
 bread and wine do not change, he said, but God 
 enters them as fire enters a bar of iron when it is 
 hot. This theory is called consubstantiation. 
 
176 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 “Thus the Catholics ate God without bread; the 
 Lutherans ate God with bread; soon afterwards 
 came the Calvinists, who ate bread without 
 God.” * 
 
 When the German princes and people asked 
 Luther what they were to substitute for a visible 
 Church and an infallible pope as a guide of life, 
 Luther replied that they might substitute the Holy 
 Scriptures, especially the New Testament. If 
 he had told them to substitute himself, like 
 Mohammed, he could not possibly have committed 
 a more illogical error. It is obvious that a man 
 will find in the Bible exactly what he brings to it; 
 in short, that there will be almost as many little 
 religions as there are Bible readers. This is pre- 
 cisely what has happened to Protestantism from 
 Luther on. 
 
 An enthusiasm for the Fathers, especially for 
 Saint Paul, caused Luther to draw from the latter 
 some curious ideas about destiny which led him 
 well along the same insane road that Calvin was 
 to follow to the bitter end. The soul, he said, can 
 only be united to God by a sudden supernatural 
 infusion of grace, obtained by faith. Many souls 
 are not apparently favored in this respect; hence 
 it is obvious that God does not wish every one to 
 be saved, and even damns a few unlucky ones with 
 great complacency. This startling theory did not 
 
 * Voltaire. 
 
LUTHER 177 
 
 chill, however, the enthusiasm of Luther’s German 
 converts, none of whom would admit that they 
 were damned in advance, while the majority was 
 attracted by the prospect of salvation dirt-cheap 
 and even gratis. 
 
 Armed with these doctrinal novelties, Luther 
 presented himself before the Imperial Council at 
 Worms (1521), consisting of the Hapsburg Em- 
 peror, Charles V, the papal legate, and all the 
 principal dignitaries of the Holy Roman Empire. 
 His courage at this moment has been the repeated 
 subject of history and painting, but he knew very 
 well that several great men in the Diet were on 
 his side, and for an excellent cause. The Church 
 was extremely unpopular in Germany for the sim- 
 ple reason that it was extremely rich. If all that 
 mattered in God’s world were justification by faith, 
 then there was no need for the Church, and if 
 there were no need for the Church, its vast wealth 
 could not possibly flow anywhere but into the 
 pockets of the princes. Frederick II had suggested 
 this in the thirteenth century, but it took fully 
 three hundred years to sink in. It is perhaps the 
 most powerful reason for the success of the Refor- 
 mation in Europe. 
 
 Having been given a fair hearing and a chance 
 to retract, Luther was placed under the ban of 
 the Empire by Charles V, who thought, like Con- 
 
178 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 stantine, that there should be only one religion in 
 his vast and clumsily wielded realm. But the 
 Emperor had no sooner departed to his other king- 
 dom of Spain than all north Germany eagerly 
 espoused the Lutheran religion, and the example 
 of north Germany was soon followed by the Scan- 
 dinavian countries. Luther found himself the 
 prophet of the north. _He soon imitated the pope 
 by authorizing the Landgrave of Hesse to commit 
 bigamy. “What no pontiff save Gregory II (726) 
 had dared to do, Luther, who attacked the exces- 
 sive power of the popes, did without any power 
 at all.” * His dispensation was secret, but God 
 moves in a mysterious way in the case of reformers. 
 Meanwhile, the embarrassments of Charles V, 
 who was seriously threatened by the Turks, pre- 
 vented him from acting with energy against the 
 German Reformation. Finally by the Peace of 
 Augsburg (1555), he permitted the Lutheran 
 Church to continue in north Germany on the basis 
 of a referendum where religion was settled by 
 the will of a prince or by the majority of the local 
 population. On this basis Bavaria and the Rhine- 
 land, south Germany in general, have remained 
 Catholic. 
 
 Charles, though himself orthodox, had his own 
 reasons for wishing to conciliate the Lutherans. 
 
 * Voltaire. 
 
LUTHER 179 
 
 Not himself a German, but half Fleming, half 
 Spaniard, he ruled by the accidents of inheritance 
 and election over the greatest stretch of territory 
 since Charlemagne—Spain, Flanders, Spanish 
 America, Austria and the Germanies. He revived 
 and more than revived the Holy Roman Empire 
 of the Middle Ages, before it had reduced itself to 
 the Austria of the Hapsburgs. The hegemony of 
 Charles was opposed by France, and true to its 
 old anti-imperial policy, the Papacy, now under 
 Clement VII, nephew to the urbane Leo, allied 
 itself with France. The flood of waters predicted 
 by Savonarola was now almost ready to engulf 
 the Papacy. By its unwillingness to reform and 
 its ineptitude in politics it was at odds with all 
 the world—the Protestant north and the Catholic 
 south. France, in exchange for a measure of self- 
 government, ‘‘the liberties of the Gallican Church,” 
 was its only friend. Thus Clement VII assisted 
 the progress of Protestantism by aligning himself 
 against the most powerful Catholic power in Eu- 
 rope. Deeply exasperated, the Emperor wrote the 
 Lutheran princes in Germany that they would 
 soon be wanted against the Turk, adding that 
 they would know which Turk he meant. When 
 by his victory over the French at Pavia, in 1525, 
 the road to Rome was opened, he sent a miscel- 
 laneous army of rabid Lutherans, cruel Span- 
 iards and mercenary Swiss under a French traitor, 
 
180 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 the Constable de Bourbon, en route for the eternal 
 town. The misty morning of May 5, 1527, ar- 
 rived, and the Constable ordered the assault. He 
 was killed almost at once, the sculptor Cellini tak- 
 ing a pot at him from Sant’ Angelo, but before 
 two in the afternoon the city was captured. 
 For eight days the sack of Rome continued. 
 Cardinals were tortured to disclose their treasures. 
 Nuns and noble Roman ladies were outraged in 
 the streets. Works of art were rifled or smashed 
 by the Lutheran soldiery. The Pope was a pris- 
 oner. The spirit of the Renaissance fled forever 
 from the desecrated city, and Italy became a 
 “geographic expression” under the Spanish yoke 
 till 1713, when the Spanish yoke was replaced by 
 the Austrian. When after a discreet interval the 
 conqueror arrived in 1530 the Pope met him with 
 tears and promised never to do it again. This 
 new attitude had profound and unexpected effects 
 upon the history of Catholicism in England four 
 years later. In return Charles allowed the Pope 
 to retain the city and the Romagna as states of 
 the Church, but that was all. By this time half of 
 Germany, Scandinavia, part of Switzerland had 
 become Protestant. England and France were 
 expected to go next. Among the principal pro- 
 moters of the Reformation, Clement VII, last of 
 the Renaissance popes, must never be forgotten. 
 
LUTHER 181 
 
 Meanwhile, a logical Frenchman named Calvin 
 had completed what the Apostle of the North had 
 begun. His reformation, which was centralized 
 at Geneva, in Switzerland, was marked by the 
 extreme moral earnestness which we call puritan- 
 ism. Calvinism delighted the large number of 
 people in the world who love to torment every one 
 within reach, including themselves. The fallacy 
 that such people are, in any sense, the pioneers of 
 religious freedom may be indicated by the fact 
 that Calvin burned an amiable gentleman named 
 Servetus who had doubts about the precise nature 
 of Christ’s divinity. The pontiff of Geneva as- 
 serted the predestination of the soul; denied that 
 the Deity could enter into bread and wine; and 
 proscribed all the liturgical ornaments of religion, 
 ceremonies, vestments, music and the like. Luther- 
 anism, as a sort of pale shadow of the Catholic 
 Church, never extended beyond Germany and the 
 Scandinavian states, but the religion of Calvin, 
 thanks to that enjoyable capacity for self-torment 
 above described, was extremely popular, and 
 gained France, Switzerland, Holland, Scotland and 
 even England. It is the religion of the Presbyte- 
 rian Church in Scotland and America, the Re- 
 formed Church of Holland and the Huguenot 
 Church in France. Under Cromwell’s rule it be- 
 came, for a time, the national religion of England 
 as well. 
 
182 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 By the middle of the sixteenth century Cathol- 
 icism seemed to be completely crushed in northern 
 Europe, and even in the south it was rapidly losing 
 ground. Another generation did not pass before 
 the Church not only ceased to lose, but actually 
 regained much that it had lost. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 ECCLESIA ANGLICANA 
 
 THE Church of England* stood in a peculiar 
 relation both to the new movement and to the old 
 religion; it is necessary, then, to consider it in a 
 separate chapter. At the outset, the English peo- 
 ple were not at all inclined to heresy, or even to 
 a separation from the Papacy; but the English 
 ecclesiastic system was not the Catholic faith; 
 and this system, ruined by prosperity, had become, 
 in certain respects, intolerable. As a privileged 
 caste, the English clergy had rendered themselves 
 hateful to the king and the nation by their arro- 
 gance, their inertia and their intrigue. As early 
 as 1512 Cardinal Wolsey, who was certainly no 
 Lutheran, had begun a suppression of the smaller 
 monasteries. 
 
 So matters stood when Henry VIII, in 1527, 
 applied to the Pope for a dispensation to divorce 
 his wife and take another who might be expected 
 to bear him male children. Anxiety about the — 
 succession was the origin of his action, but this 
 was later complicated by the fact that he had 
 
 *In America it is called the Protestant Episcopal Church. 
 183 
 
184 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 fallen in love with a Lutheran maid of honor. 
 His motives, however, were fundamentally so ex- 
 cellent that there is every chance he would have 
 been granted his dispensation had not the reign- 
 ing Pope, Clement VII, been a prisoner in the 
 hands of the Hapsburg Emperor, who was the 
 English Queen’s nephew and champion. He was 
 also the champion of the Catholic Church in the 
 cruel situation which the Church faced as a result 
 of the Protestant revolt in northern Europe, and 
 the sack of Rome described in the last chapter. 
 Were the Pope to offend his all-powerful jailer, 
 who was now his best friend, there was no telling 
 what would happen to him or to the Church. 
 Accordingly he delayed his decision and delayed 
 too long. At the end of five years the Pope still 
 retained the Emperor, but England, save for a 
 short interval, was forever lost to the Holy See. 
 
 In 1534 Henry cut the knot by the Act of 
 Supremacy which declared that the King, not the 
 Pope, was henceforward the real head of the 
 Church in England. It is sometimes said that in 
 doing this Henry founded a new church, that he 
 is the father of the Anglican faith in the same 
 sense that Luther is the founder of the Lutheran 
 one. This statement is obviously ‘untenable. 
 What he did was to establish his own authority 
 over a national Catholic Church which had hith- 
 erto been directed from Rome. The dogma of 
 
ECCLESIA ANGLICANA 185 
 
 royal supremacy was certainly a very dangerous 
 doctrine, and its result has been a certain ambi- 
 guity in the position of the English Church from 
 Henry VIII on. In 1534 the Church remained 
 Catholic because Henry was a Catholic. He sup- 
 pressed with equal severity those who differed 
 with him over the Supremacy and those who dif- 
 fered with the Pope over the Faith. But in suc- 
 ceeding reigns the royal supremacy switched the 
 Church to the Calvinism of Edward, and finally 
 to the semi-Catholicism of Elizabeth. The con- 
 science of the nation limped with violent alacrity 
 to and fro after that of the sovereign. 
 
 The death of Henry VIII in 1547 revealed the 
 worthlessness of his new dogma once it was placed 
 in weak or unworthy hands. The new king was a 
 priggish boy in his teens, completely under the 
 influence of his uncles and of Archbishop Cran- 
 mer, who had Protestant sympathies. The history 
 of this brief and unpleasant reign is that of a con- 
 spiracy on the part of the Protestant faction in 
 the saddle to de-Catholicize the Church in Eng- 
 land. Two prayer books were issued in succession 
 to replace the Catholic missal and breviary; the 
 second, which is decidedly Protestant in tone, has 
 remained the official service book of the English 
 and Episcopal Churches to this day. During this 
 reign Catholics were subjected to a petty but 
 vexatious persecution. Works of art were muti- 
 
186 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 lated; the chantries (altars of the dead) were 
 “converted into pigsties,” as one of the reformers 
 has written with complacency. The famous 
 Stephen Gardiner, Catholic Bishop of Winches- 
 ter, who is, on the whole, one of the worthier fig- 
 ures of this bad reign, reminded his countrymen 
 justly that Luther himself reproved such, these 
 cochonneries, and that “their authors were if pos- 
 sible worse than hogs, and had always been so 
 regarded.” 
 
 The people, as a whole, had no sympathy with 
 sacrilege and outrage, and on the premature death 
 of Edward in 1553 they rallied joyfully to his suc- 
 cessor, the Princess Mary. Unfortunately for the 
 ultimate triumph of the Faith in England, Mary 
 was an intense and morbid Catholic, one of the 
 first products of the Counter-Reformation. She 
 married her cousin, Philip II of Spain, champion 
 of the old faith in Europe, and restored the Papal 
 Supremacy. The character of the reigning Pope, 
 Julius ITI, indicates how little the Papacy had 
 profited by all its recent misfortunes. His first 
 official act was to raise to the cardinalate a favor- 
 ite page to the delight of the Roman humorists who 
 celebrated the simultaneous elevation of the pon- 
 tifical Jupiter and the pontifical Ganymede. He 
 was an amiable man, however, and bent upon con- 
 ciliating the schismatic Church of England. In 
 order to please the English he sent them, as his 
 
ECCLESIA ANGLICANA 187 
 
 legate, a prince of their own blood, an hysterical 
 prelate named Reginald Pole who solemnly ab- 
 solved the realm from all taint of heresy. After 
 this, Mary burned about 300 Protestants, includ- 
 ing three heretical bishops and the Primate Cran- 
 mer. ‘These cruelties disgusted the nation with 
 integral Catholicism. As a matter of fact, the Eng- 
 lish were indifferent to the religious issue. What 
 they wanted was good government and the end of 
 fanaticism, and this is precisely what Mary failed 
 to give them. 
 
 Mary was succeeded in 1558 by the Princess 
 Elizabeth, last of Henry the Ejighth’s three chil- 
 dren. Elizabeth regarded Protestantism and the 
 Papal Supremacy with equal dislike. Her political 
 position forced her to appear the chief of the Prot- 
 estant league of northern Europe, but at heart, as 
 she often said, she was as good a Catholic as the 
 Holy Father, and she desired the English Church 
 to exhibit this double, not to say, hybrid, character. 
 It was necessary to steer an exquisitely even 
 course; to remodel the Church of England in such 
 a way that it should have the name and appearance 
 of Protestant, but the organization and hidden 
 nature of the old religion. Very well hidden it was 
 too. The Papal Supremacy was again quietly 
 dropped. Elizabeth retained the Mass, which was 
 now called the Communion; a belief in the Real 
 Presence without any definition; and the English 
 
188 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 hierarchy, for which she herself had no respect. 
 All the Catholic bishops, with one exception, had 
 indignantly resigned, but this exception is held to 
 suffice to preserve the Sacrament of “Orders”; 
 that is, the mysterious communication of sacerdotal 
 powers to the priesthood. The official position of 
 the Elizabethan Church was contained in the 
 Thirty Nine Articles which are printed at the back 
 of every Episcopal prayer book. They have been 
 thought so Protestant in tone that modern High 
 Churchmen find it convenient either to ignore 
 them altogether, or else to explain that they really 
 do not mean what they say.* 
 
 This profoundly modified Church, which is, as 
 any one can see, the creation of the Crown, received 
 the adherence of most Englishmen. Even the 
 Catholics adhered till recalled to their obedience 
 by a bull of Pius V. From their withdrawal dates 
 the existence of Roman Catholicism as a separate 
 body in England. When the cause of integral Ca- 
 tholicism was identified with that of a rival queen 
 (Mary Stuart) Roman Catholics were vigorously 
 persecuted by Elizabeth in a series of oppressive — 
 statutes called the penal laws. By this time the 
 Counter-Reformation was sending its agents, not- 
 ably the Jesuits, into England, and these unfortu- 
 nate men, whenever they were caught, were barbar- 
 
 * At a recent Convention of the Episcopal Church in this country 
 they have been dropped. 
 
ECCLESIA ANGLICANA 189 
 
 ously tortured as political plotters. Elizabeth 
 always contended that she did not punish for dif- 
 ferences of opinion, merely for offenses against 
 the State, but in 1570 as in 1917, a difference of 
 opinion and crime against the State were counted 
 one and the same thing. The English Church under 
 Elizabeth, whatever may have been its “hidden 
 nature,” had all the air of a Protestant body per- 
 secuting the most innocent adherents of the old 
 religion. In spite of the Queen it remained very 
 Protestant, or, as we would say, “Low,” in tone 
 until the accession of Charles I. Thus Episco- 
 palians have little cause to be proud of ancestors 
 who cruelly persecuted Catholic priests for no other 
 crime than that of keeping alive a religion which 
 they themselves practice, with great satisfaction, in 
 ritualist churches. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 LOYOLA 
 
 AFTER having lost half Europe the Papacy re- 
 signed itself to convoking the great Council of the 
 Church so long desired by moderate reformers like 
 Erasmus. The Council met at Trent on the con- 
 fines between Italy and the Empire in 1545, but 
 its deliberations, several times interrupted, were 
 not finished until 1563. It codified the Catholic 
 faith; asserted the Papal Supremacy; affirmed the 
 dogma of free will; and provided for a thorough 
 house cleaning of clerical abuses. It is the first act 
 in the somber drama of the Counter Reformation, 
 the results and spirit of which we are still feeling. 
 Reinach has been the only one to point out that 
 this reactionary movement was, in a sense, a Prot- 
 estant, not to say puritan, infusion in the veins 
 of the old religion. The obscurantism, the dry and 
 negative spirit, and the exaggerated purity of mod- 
 ern Catholicism in certain quarters, may be 
 attributed to this movement which would have 
 astonished Saint Francis and which contradicts the 
 admirable Italian Catholicism of the thirteenth 
 
 century. 
 190 
 
LOYOLA 191 
 
 In the course of a single generation the whole 
 spirit of the Church underwent a profound change. 
 The popes themselves became good men. The 
 first of these severe but exemplary pontiffs, Mar- 
 cellus IT, regulated the liturgical beauty of Catholic 
 worship and music; it was he who commissioned 
 Palestrina to compose the glorious Mass of Pope 
 Marcellus which represents the apogee of church 
 music In the contrapuntal style. His successor, 
 Pius V, walked barefoot at the head of processions, 
 and impressed the world by innumerable examples 
 of charity, humility and forgiveness of personal 
 injuries. A religious chivalry, consecrated to the 
 battle of the Church against the Protestant north, 
 actuated these popes, and extended throughout 
 their whole following down to their courtiers and 
 men of art. Tasso, the poet of the reaction, con- 
 centrated his epic about the heroic and touching 
 figure of Godfrey de Bouillon, the paladin of the 
 holy wars. 
 
 Among those present at the Council of Trent had 
 been a disabled Spanish soldier of good family, 
 Ignatius Loyola. He was almost totally unedu- 
 cated, except in the fantastic romances of low- 
 Medieval chivalry, parodied by Cervantes in Don 
 Ouixote. His existence had been one gorgeous 
 day-dream of rescued queens and infidels subdued. 
 After his disablement a new vision came to mingle 
 with these fantasies. The Queen of Heaven ap- 
 
192 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 peared to him in dreams and bade him battle for 
 her lost kingdoms, prostrate under the maleficent 
 charms of false prophets. The romantic and 
 baroque Catholicism of later times makes its first 
 appearance in this ardent, disordered, but very 
 human spirit. He associated others with him in 
 these dreams and fevers. When asked to what 
 order or society they belonged they replied invari- 
 ably: “‘To the Society of Jesus.” 
 
 “With what vehemence, with what policy, with 
 what exact discipline, with what dauntless cour- 
 age, with what self-denial, with what forgetfulness 
 of the dearest private ties, with what intense and 
 stubborn devotion to a single end, and with what 
 unscrupulous laxity and versatility in the choice 
 of means, the Jesuits fought the battle of the 
 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 
 . . . 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 pesti- 
 lence, 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; in the hostile court of Sweden, in the old 
 manor-houses of Cheshire, among the hovels of 
 
LOYOLA 193 
 
 Connaught, arguing, instructing, consoling, steal- 
 ing away the hearts of the young, animating the 
 courage of the timid, holding up the crucifix be- 
 fore the eyes of the dying. Nor was it less their 
 office to plot against the thrones and safety 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 obe- 
 dience 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 these 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 allowances for the little irregu- 
 larities of people of fashion. The first object was 
 to drive no person out of the pale of the Church. 
 Since there were bad people, it was better that there 
 
194 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 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 mak- 
 ing him a heretic too.” 
 
 There is no more splendid tribute than this pow- 
 erful passage of a Protestant historian, Macaulay, 
 on the Jesuits. Others have not been so kind to 
 them. Michelet could see nothing but evil in the 
 Order, and absurdly overrated its abilities by 
 associating with them the most sinister and unlikely 
 enterprises, like the murder of Henry IV, its pro- 
 tector. Voltaire, the greatest individual antag- 
 onist who has ever attacked the Church, spoke 
 always very kindly of the fathers who had given 
 him his education. A Catholic Society which can 
 win the approbation of a Voltaire can win any- 
 thing. 
 
 Armed with this invaluable reinforcement, the 
 Papacy prepared to do battle with the Protestants 
 for the still debatable territory, the no man’s land 
 of France, Belgium, south Germany, Poland, Hun- 
 gary and England. The contest between the two 
 powers was only finally decided by the Treaty of 
 Westphalia (1648) which terminated the Thirty 
 Years’ War and gave Europe, for a time, universal 
 peace. The struggle was most typical and intense 
 in England and France and will be described in the 
 next chapters. The great strength of Catholicism 
 was in its unity, in that element of internationalism 
 
LOYOLA 195 
 
 which was, and is, its principal service to society. 
 The great weakness of the Protestant churches was 
 that they were nationalist bodies. Even the Church 
 of England had become an institution as purely 
 local as the county sheriff. The Catholic Church, 
 on the other hand, claimed to be battling for a 
 truth which, in the hands of missionaries like Saint 
 Francis Xavier and Pere Marquette, embraced 
 every one from the pope at Rome to the most re- 
 mote heathen in Japan or the most savage redskin 
 in Canada. This capital difference in the two 
 creeds accounts for the comparative triumph of 
 Catholicism at the close of the memorable and 
 bloody sixteenth century. Driven at the beginning 
 of the century beyond the Alps and the Pyrenees, it 
 had, at the end, driven the Protestant heresy to the 
 shores of the German ocean; and in the coloniza- 
 tion of the two Americas it looked beyond the seas 
 and found new worlds to conquer. 
 
 I do not wish to leave this period without a word 
 for the type of art which is its direct product. The 
 Baroque style, together with the churches, the 
 painting and sculpture where it is displayed, has 
 fallen into general disfavor. The contempt ex- 
 pressed for it by Ruskin and the followers of ‘‘the 
 Gothic Quest” has been passed on to the snobs 
 who never see anything with their own eyes, and 
 to the tourists who never see anything except with 
 those of Baedeker. To counteract this unreflect- 
 
196 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 ing contempt, it is only necessary to remind oneself 
 that the real founder of the despised style is 
 Michelangelo. There is considerable Baroque feel- 
 ing in his Sistine frescoes, as there is in the “As- 
 sumption” of Titian, and, generally, in the paint- 
 ings of the charming Correggio, while “‘the work of 
 that ‘mighty rushing wind,’ Tintoretto,” to quote 
 Mr. Raymond Mortimer,* “already displays that 
 mixture of poetry and realism, of tenderness and 
 violence, of emotion and decorativeness which char- 
 acterized Baroque art.” It gave us in its later 
 phase as good a painter as Domenichino and as 
 good a sculptor as Bernini. Whether one likes it 
 or not, it is the characteristic style of the Counter 
 Reform, and not the least of its merits is that its 
 palaces and gardens, its churches and fountains, are 
 everywhere in modern Rome, and constitute much 
 of the charm of that fascinating city. 
 *In the Dial, December, 1920. 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 THE LAST CRUSADE 
 
 QUEEN ELizABETH of England (1558-1603) is 
 anenigma. A child of the English Renaissance and 
 the feminine incarnation of a narrow nationalism, 
 a freethinker and the organizer of a persecuting 
 church, a bluestocking and a flirt, a lover of men 
 and withal a virgin, a despot who was adored, she 
 fitly sums up an age of tortuous cross-purposes. 
 In none of her relationships, however, is the mys- 
 tery of iniquity more obscure than in the treat- 
 ment of her unfortunate Catholic subjects. 
 
 Henry VIII, Elizabeth’s father, had, as we have 
 seen, separated the Church in England from Rome, 
 but he had made no changes in religion. He initi- 
 ated a schism, if one wills, but the schism was so 
 little a part of the Protestant movement on the 
 Continent that Henry burned all the English Prot- 
 estants on whom he could lay hand. Under his 
 son Edward the tentative of a Protestant State 
 Church was begun. The Episcopal Prayer Book, 
 then devised, contains, indeed, a modification of 
 
 the old faith, but a faith modified is not, necessar- 
 197 
 
198 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 ily, a faith transformed. ‘The Prayer Book con- 
 tains omissions,” wrote the Catholic Bishop Quadra 
 to Pius IV, “but no positive heresies.””’ Edward’s 
 sister, Mary, headed an instant return to the Holy 
 See. When Elizabeth ascended the throne in 1558 
 England was officially a Catholic country in com- 
 munion with Rome. Philip II, the most Catholic 
 King of Spain, was Elizabeth’s brother-in-law. 
 The change which made the official English 
 religion an outlawed cult was exquisitely gradual. 
 The reason for the second break with Rome and 
 the final establishment of the Episcopal Church of 
 England, delicately maneuvered by Elizabeth, must 
 be ascribed in part to motives of feminine vanity. 
 There was much in the Catholic religion she dis- 
 liked as well as much she admired. Notably she 
 hated the theoretic subordination of Catholic 
 states to the Papacy. This clashed with her con- 
 ception of what the absolute State, the new Eng- 
 land, should and must be. Like Constantine she 
 intended to have but one religion in England, and 
 it was to be her own invention. It was pleasing 
 to her a freethinker and a woman to throw out 
 the pope and retain the hierarchy, to abolish the 
 Mass and keep the Communion, to observe Fridays 
 and Lent because it encouraged the fishing, to ban- 
 ish images from her churches and set them up in 
 her chapel, to uphold bishops and insult their 
 wives. The result of these various caprices and 
 
THE LAST CRUSADE 199 
 
 compromises is the mixed Episcopalianism that we 
 know to-day. 
 
 The Roman Catholic population was left abso- 
 lutely to its own devices during this experimental 
 period from 1559 to 1570. When in 1562 they 
 asked whether they might attend the Anglican 
 services, Pius IV replied in the words of Christ 
 that “he who is ashamed of Me, of him the Son 
 of Man shall be ashamed,” but he sent them no 
 priests of their own faith to sustain them. They 
 were cut off both from their Anglican fellow coun- 
 trymen and their own universal Church throughout 
 the world. Naturally they declined numerically. 
 Neither Pius IV nor the Council of Trent, which 
 ended in 1563, nor the Catholic Emperor nor their 
 friend, the King of Spain, did anything for them. 
 English Catholicism was quietly but firmly en 
 couraged to die. 
 
 That it did not die is due to a tactical blunder, 
 followed by a noble and heroic missionary tenta- 
 tive. In 1570 the new Pope, Saint Pius V, calmly 
 and unexpectedly excommunicated Elizabeth and 
 released her Catholic subjects from their obedience. 
 The Borgia in the preceding century had made 
 religion the handmaid of politics. ‘Fra Scarpone”’ 
 reversed the process. It was only to be expected 
 that a man of his temper should effect a complete 
 cleavage between the English Roman Catholics and 
 the followers of Elizabeth’s church, but the bull of 
 
200 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 excommunication reacted disastrously upon the 
 former. Nothing in fact could have been more ill- 
 timed. Two years before, the Catholic heiress to 
 the English crown had arrived, a fugitive, in Eng- 
 land. Elizabeth promptly imprisoned her, but even 
 in imprisonment Mary Stuart was the center of 
 temptation for any romantic Roman Catholic who 
 might imagine, not unnaturally, that he and his 
 Church would be happier under the lovely Queen 
 of Scots than under the Anglican lioness. The wish 
 is father to the act. From 1568 on there was a 
 series of plots on the part of individual Catholics 
 to dethrone Elizabeth and put the queen of hearts 
 in her place. Naturally they roused feeling, and 
 the Pope’s bull arriving at this unfortunate mo- 
 ment roused more feeling. The result was 
 a set of penal statutes passed in Parliament 
 making the exercise of the Catholic religion 
 itself an offense against Elizabeth’s State. It 
 was a crime to say Mass; a slightly lesser crime 
 to hear it. It was a crime, punishable by death, to 
 convert a Protestant to the old religion. It was a 
 crime for a Catholic to travel five miles away from 
 his home. The English government pled, in excuse 
 for its intolerance, that it was protecting itself 
 against the triple danger of a disaffected Catholic 
 minority, spurred to treason by the Pope’s bull, 
 and finding its natural objective in the imprisoned 
 Mary. This is true, but the persecution fell chiefly 
 
THE LAST CRUSADE 201 
 
 upon any number of loyal and innocent Roman 
 Catholics whose only crime was their religion. At 
 the same time it produced the first and Homeric 
 age in the history of Roman Catholicism in Eng- 
 land, considered as a separate Church. Ten years 
 after the Pope’s bull the first missionaries arrived 
 in what was to them a forbidden country. The 
 true heroes of the Church from 1580 to 1588 were 
 not the Pope Sixtus V, anathematizing from 
 the security of the Vatican, nor a handful of 
 intriguants; they were the innocent priests who 
 from 1580 on poured into England from the Eng- 
 lish colleges on the Continent, the Jesuit pupils 
 and seminary students, the “flowers of mar- 
 tyrdom.”’ 
 
 Protestant historians, like Bishop Creighton and 
 Froude, try to lave the memory of the Virgin 
 Queen from the indelible stain of what follows by 
 asserting in Elizabeth’s words that she did not 
 persecute for religious reasons but only for treason, 
 that these missionaries and Jesuits were dangerous 
 plotters, agents for the Pope, Spain and Mary 
 Stuart, preparers of the Armada. This miserable 
 sophistry is easy to expose. Some were undoubt- 
 edly plotters, but the government’s crime was that, 
 like the Ceesars, it identified religion with politics, 
 and every avowed priest was considered ipso facto 
 a political prisoner and treated accordingly. That 
 
202 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 the majority was innocent of political agitation we 
 know from the published instructions given to 
 Jesuit missionaries by their General Aquiviva. 
 “They must not mix themselves up with affairs 
 of state, nor write to Rome about political matters, 
 nor speak, nor allow others to speak, in their pres- 
 ence, against the Queen.” ‘Their only charge, as 
 the Jesuit Campion said before his judges, ‘‘Was 
 to preach the Gospel, to minister the Sacraments, 
 to instruct the simple, to reform sinners, to confute 
 errors, and in brief, to cry alarm spiritual against 
 the proud ignorance wherewith my dear country- 
 men are abused.” 
 
 The whole English mission was animated by this 
 spirit, rivaling that of the primitive Christian mar- 
 tyrs under Nero and Diocletian. Among the better 
 achievements of the Catholic reaction there is 
 nothing grander than the lives of these missionaries, 
 many of them mere boys. When a Frenchman or 
 Spaniard or Italian took orders in the sixteenth 
 century Church he might, nine times out of ten, 
 be influenced by the dream of a career. No such 
 career lay before these doomed Englishmen. Their 
 guerdon was not the mitre, the crozier nor the red 
 hat; it was the cell, the horrible rack, the tumbril 
 surrounded by jeering crowds, the blackness of 
 pain and death. On their walks through Rome 
 during recreation boys from the English College 
 
THE LAST CRUSADE 203 
 
 were saluted by the gentle Saint Philip Neri with 
 the words: Salvete flores martyrum! 
 
 Something worse than death, indeed, awaited 
 them in their own land, that merry and tender 
 Elizabethan England, the country of the sweet 
 Shakespeare and the chivalrous Ferie Queen. 
 When one of them was caught he was sent up to 
 London, and in the presence of the horrible tor- 
 turer, Mr. Topcliffe, was asked the following ques- 
 tions: Did he acknowledge Elizabeth as his lawful 
 queen? Did he believe that the Pope could ex- 
 communicate and depose the Queen? In the event 
 of a Catholic invasion which side would he take, 
 the Queen’s or the Pope’s? 
 
 The first question the priest usually answered 
 in the affirmative; the second evasively on the 
 ground that it was a question for Church Coun- 
 cils to decide; to a third a good Catholic could only 
 answer: If the invasion were for no other cause 
 than to restore the Catholic religion, I would side 
 with the invader—a reply which would certainly 
 send him to the gallows. If he did not answer the 
 first two questions in a manner satisfactory to the 
 judges, he was racked till he spoke out; if he 
 answered the third as a Catholic he was killed; in 
 either case he usually died. In his revolting apol- 
 ogy for torture Lord Burleigh objected that only 
 persons were racked whose guilt was patent, but 
 guilt in the sense of the penal laws included the 
 
204 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 mere fact of being a priest. Among those tortured 
 was a boy, Thomas Sherwood (1578) thirteen years 
 old. The victims themselves ascribed’ their suffer- 
 ings to Protestant fanaticism, plain heresy. “TI 
 blame not so much,” said one, “‘the men who have 
 prepared these things . . . as the heresy which 
 incited men, not naturally cruel, to such hardness 
 of heart against their fellows that they are re- 
 strained from treating them in the cruelest fashion 
 neither by their common nationality, nor educa- 
 tion, nor by their youth, their right to freedom, 
 nor the immunity of their priesthood, nor prayers, 
 nor tears.” It is only fair to add that the Protes- 
 tant victims of Philip the Second’s Inquisition in 
 Spain and the Netherlands could have employed 
 much the same language. In England pardon was 
 sometimes offered if the accused would change his 
 religion. “I thank you heartily,” said one tortured 
 man, “if by going to church I can save my life, all 
 the world will see that I am executed solely for 
 faith and religion, and nothing else.” At length 
 the more intelligent in the government began to 
 see that a code which furnished such martyrs to 
 the Catholic faith was reacting seriously against 
 their own nation and church. They did not stop 
 the persecution, but on the scaffold they merely 
 stopped the victims’ mouths. 
 
 The national sense of fair play was at its lowest 
 
THE LAST CRUSADE 205 
 
 ebb at the very moment when the national genius 
 rose to its supreme height in Marlowe and Shake- 
 speare. And the reason is not so much religious 
 intolerance in which, of course, most of the Catho- 
 lics shared, as it was that the first Anglicans made 
 of the absolute State itself a religion which would 
 brook no rival near the throne, even when that 
 rival came with clean hands and holy purpose. 
 One hundred per cent American Catholics would do 
 well to ponder the history of their Church under 
 Queen Elizabeth. 
 
 All injustice, as Carlyle said, is but natural 
 anarchy, and comes to end, at all events, relaxes. 
 In England the persecution of the Church attained 
 its climax when Elizabeth at last sent her prisoner, 
 Mary Stuart, to the block, and Mary Stuart, the 
 night before her death, willed her English inheri- 
 tence, the Crown, to the King of Spain. Philip II, 
 though universally regarded as the pillar of the 
 Counter Reform, had held off all these years, 
 while his co-religionists were being hunted in Eng- 
 land like dogs, from any show of interference. His 
 timidity and delay had worn out even the Pope. 
 Now that his greed was aroused by Mary Stuart’s 
 legacy he made immediate preparations to invade 
 England, dethrone Elizabeth and restore the 
 Catholic faith by arms. The whole European 
 world, Catholic and Protestant, awaited the result 
 
206 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 breathlessly, understanding that the two reforma- 
 tions, Protestant and Catholic, were being pitted 
 against each other. Rightly or wrongly England 
 was regarded as the cornerstone of the Protestant 
 revolt. However much Elizabeth and her Angli- 
 cans might sniff at the uncouth religious views of 
 Scotch Presbyterians and Dutch Reformers, Eng- 
 land supplied the very backbone of their resistance, 
 and nowhere had the Catholic reaction been more 
 savagely resisted than by Elizabeth and her gov- 
 ernment. If Philip won, the French Huguenots 
 and Dutch rebels would lose their chief support; 
 Lutheran Germany would return to the Church, 
 and the divisions of Christendom would cease. Or 
 so it was supposed. At Easter, 1588, Philip IT 
 spent three hours a day in prayer before the Holy 
 Sacrament, commending to God the result of his 
 enterprise. His standard on the Armada bore the 
 words: Rise, O God, and judge Thy Cause. 
 
 We know the rest; how the huge sea-castles of 
 Don Philip set sail off Corunna, and nosed their 
 way northward till they confronted the stocky Eng- 
 lish fleet in the Channel. We know, too, how the 
 English Roman Catholics behaved when faced with 
 this ultimate challenge to their patriotism. Their 
 patriotism had been the issue all along, or so said 
 Elizabeth’s government, and now in July, 1588, 
 they gave the ultimate lie to their accusers. So 
 long as the Catholic heir had been a woman, perse- 
 
THE LAST CRUSADE 207 
 
 cuted and partly English, there had been found 
 more than one Catholic to plot for her at the cost 
 of what then was technically called treason. But 
 when Mary Stuart was replaced by her unpleasing 
 legatee they rallied around the tyrannical throne as 
 one man, and it was a Catholic, Lord Howard of 
 Effingham, who commanded the fleet which put to 
 flight the Spanish Armada. Fines, imprisonments, 
 the torture and murder of their priests, the 
 attempted suppression of their religion did not 
 deter them when it came to choosing between their 
 female Diocletian and the Spaniard. When the 
 enemy lost heart, cut cable and drifted hopelessly 
 into the Atlantic, Catholic and Protestant gave 
 thanks that while the Counter Reform at its best 
 had not conquered England, the Counter Reform 
 of Philip and the Spanish Inquisition, that is to 
 say, the reaction at its worst, had been put to 
 confusion. 
 
 Even the Pope, Sixtus V, appreciated this dis- 
 tinction better than many modern historians. 
 Philip begged him again and again to invest him 
 formally with the English Crown in the event of 
 victory, but the Pope always put him off, reserv- 
 ing the right to back a better candidate, the King 
 of Scots, for instance, who eventually did succeed 
 Elizabeth in 1603. In this attitude the Pope stood 
 with the future. That the Armada, considered as 
 a Spanish enterprise, failed might be a matter for 
 
208 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 complacency; that it failed as a Catholic one, the 
 ultimate expression of the last of the Crusades, can 
 only be praised on the typically Anglo-Saxon 
 assumption that everything which happens in his- 
 tory is right because it happens, 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 THE WHITE PLUME 
 
 Ir was in France that the spirit of the Catholic 
 reaction appeared at its worst. This is probably 
 due to the fact that the French, often light and 
 volatile on the surface, are constitutionally incap- 
 able of treating any abstract question in a spirit of 
 moderation. The national fanaticism, especially 
 in religion, is revealed in all its bad luster through 
 four centuries from the Bartholomew to the prose- 
 cution of Dreyfus. France produced Calvin, the 
 most radical of the reformers, and the spirit be- 
 queathed by him to the Huguenot sect, though ad- 
 mirable in its fortitude, was also a spirit which 
 demanded all or nothing. On the Catholic side, 
 the French Church and court, morally at their 
 nadir, were none the less fanatical to the last 
 extreme. They were both very Italianized during 
 the reigns of the last Valois, especially the court, 
 whose presiding genius, the Queen-Mother, Cath- 
 erine de Medici, was Florentine and a worthy 
 product of that noble commune. Into the Catholic 
 cause was injected the animus of the vendetta, the 
 
 private duel to the death. The court thought that 
 209 
 
210 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 religion could be saved by the methods, at once 
 trifling and dastardly, of condottieri and neighbor- 
 hood wars, and this spirit is the whole history of 
 the Catholic reaction in France from the Bar- 
 tholomew to the assassination of Henry IV. 
 
 The latter was at once the central and the salu- 
 tary genius in the drama of the religious wars. By 
 origin, the first of the Bourbons was a little Béar- 
 naise princelet, educated with the education of 
 Gargantua, said to have been a portrait of his 
 father; running barefoot with the peasant boys in 
 the pastures of his small Protestant kingdom on the 
 slopes of the Pyrenees. He was the true type of 
 Gascon adventurer after Dumas, gay, shrewd, 
 good-natured, always in love. Volatile and often 
 false, he had nevertheless a great charm of exter- 
 nal goodness which made people love him. The 
 French who fought him thirty years, and accepted 
 him only to kill him later, have always regretted 
 him as “the best of kings.” 
 
 He had need to be good or, at any rate, prudent, 
 for he confronted frightful odds. Two persons 
 stood between him and the French throne; the 
 king, Charles IX, and his brother, the Duke of 
 Anjou, both of whom seemed likely to die with- 
 out children. But after them the whole Catholic 
 reaction, that is to say, the French nation, inter- 
 vened between him and his inheritance. He was 
 a Huguenot, and most of the nation stood ready to 
 
THE WHITE PLUME 211 
 
 disavow their birthright, to become Spanish, rather 
 than submit to a Protestant king. They were 
 Catholics first and Frenchmen second, or rather 
 not at all, and in this they were just the opposite 
 of their English co-religionists. Everything worked 
 to the advantage of Spain, of Philip II. The latter 
 was the recognized champion of Catholic ortho- 
 doxy, had his agents everywhere, and especially in 
 France, where the clergy, the monastic orders, and 
 the very court, ignobly vicious and ignobly poor, 
 were in his pay. His principal tools were the 
 Guises, a powerful feudal family of German extrac- 
 tion who occasionally posed as independent and 
 nationalist, but who could not make a move with- 
 out leaning on the King of Spain. Through their 
 charming niece, Mary Stuart, they had hoped to 
 control Calvinist Scotland, but the Queen of Scots 
 sacrificed Catholicism and kingdom to the Queen 
 of Love, and perished, as we have seen, in an Eng- 
 lish prison. Having lost Scotland, the Guises, at a 
 very early date, conceived the idea of becoming 
 kings of France. 
 
 The Treaty of St. Germain (1570) had ended 
 the first civil war between Catholics and Protes- 
 tants. To cement the peace it was decided to marry 
 the last of the Valois, the Princess Marguerite, to 
 the Protestant heir, Henry of Navarre, and all the 
 Huguenots in France were invited to the wedding. 
 The bridegroom, his cousin the Prince de Condé, 
 
212 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 the venerable Admiral de Coligny, best of the 
 French Protestants, and numerous other gentle- 
 men, the fine flower of the Huguenot party, were 
 quartered together at Paris. At this moment the 
 young king, Charles IX, seemed really to turn 
 toward the holy cause of harmony and toleration, 
 the true French party. He broke with Philip II, 
 listened ardently to the admiral’s patriotic pro- 
 posal of a defensive policy against Spain and the 
 England of Elizabeth, embraced the old man, call- 
 ing him “my father.” It is impossible to believe 
 that Charles IX was insincere at this moment. He 
 was infinitely the best of his bad family, but he 
 was easily impressionable and a little mad. In the 
 meantime, Catherine de Medici and the Duke of 
 Anjou, the guilty mother and the guilty brother, 
 regarded the king’s attitude with consternation. 
 He was already free of Spain, and the next moment 
 it seemed likely that he would escape altogether 
 from his family, and might even turn on them. It 
 was certainly necessary to get rid of the admiral. 
 A brave was hired, who fired on the admiral while 
 the latter was passing from the Louvre to his lodg- 
 ings, wounding him in the arm. Charles IX was 
 furious at the attempt upon the life of the old man. 
 He swore with many terrible oaths that he would 
 requite it upon the conspirators “whoever they 
 might be.” The mother and brother were now in 
 a high state of nerves. It was more than ever nec- 
 
THE WHITE PLUME 213 
 
 essary to get rid of the admiral . . . and then, 
 like a flash of lightning, they conceived the idea of 
 destroying the whole Protestant faction, so con- 
 veniently concentrated at that moment in Paris. 
 Why not? They would thus solve the religious 
 problem by annihilating at one stroke a whole 
 party; in so doing they would disembarrass them- 
 selves of several personal enemies in the classic 
 Italian style, and at the same time strike a valiant 
 blow for the Catholic cause to the satisfaction of 
 the Pope and that of the lay pope, their paymaster, 
 the King of Spain. 
 
 It was a startling enterprise, all the more wicked 
 perhaps because it was planned on the spur of a 
 cowardly moment by a cabal of political criminals 
 without even the bad excuse of religious passion in 
 their favor. Only it was very difficult to gain over 
 the King. They argued with him until ten in the 
 evening (August 23), and the massacre was slated 
 to begin before daylight. Fear, however, is con- 
 tagious, and Charles IX was gradually converted 
 to the base terror of his relatives, who represented 
 that he stood in actual danger from the Huguenots. 
 “Let them all die,” he said finally, ‘‘that not one 
 be left to reproach me.” 
 
 About an hour before dawn a pistol was dis- 
 charged from the Louvre, and the tocsin of the 
 royal parish, St. Germain d’Auxerrois, began to 
 ring. It was the signal for a slaughter which en- 
 
214 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 dured for days. This event has loomed blackly in 
 the imagination of some historians who like to 
 represent it as a product of the Catholic reaction, 
 a purely religious atrocity. This is only true to the 
 extent that the actual work of massacre was exe- 
 cuted by the devout bourgeois of Paris who de- 
 tested the Huguenots, partly on religious, partly on 
 commercial, grounds. In its origin, however, the 
 Bartholomew was a political crime. Its true au- 
 thors were the Queen-Mother and the Duke of 
 Anjou, the future Henry III. The young King of 
 Navarre saved himself by abjuring the Protestant 
 faith. In the ghastly dawn, he and his cousin, the 
 Prince de Condé, were brought before Charles IX, 
 then in a state of insane collapse, and ordered to 
 become Catholics or instantly perish. In view of 
 the circumstances they abjured with alacrity. 
 Shortly after, Henry of Navarre escaped to the 
 south, where he placed himself at the head of his 
 Huguenot forces. His second apostasy did not 
 trouble him once he was safe out of Paris. Charles 
 TX died, prematurely, worn out by all the horrors 
 he had witnessed and permitted. His brother, co- 
 author of the Bartholomew, became the last Valois 
 king of France. 
 
 Henry III was the most intelligent, as he was 
 the most depraved, of the Valois. On neither count 
 did he please his Catholic subjects. He was too 
 astute to pursue the religious war to the ultimate 
 
THE WHITE PLUME 215 
 
 profit of the Guises, while his private life was in 
 shocking contradiction to the austere spirit of the 
 Counter Reform. It was a succession of fantastic 
 debaucheries varied by baroque devotions like the 
 famous processions of the flagellants, in which ten- 
 der youths and maids of honor, half undressed, 
 flogged each other with a certain sensuality in the 
 old streets of Gothic Paris. The king himself was 
 so prematurely used up by these and other ambigu- 
 ous excesses that after three moments of love he 
 took three days of repose. The great Catholic 
 hero of France was the Duke of Guise. He was 
 adored by the populace as much as the king was 
 detested. -Under these circumstances there was 
 formed at Paris the celebrated bourgeois confed- 
 eration known as the Holy League to defend the 
 kingdom against the Huguenot, and particularly 
 against the Huguenot heir. It was composed of 
 mendicants, ruined shopkeepers, cappucini, all the 
 vermin of the convents and the schools. The nat- 
 ural captain of this organization would have been 
 the Duke of Guise, and in his ambitious hands such 
 a body, formed ostensibly to resist the Protestant 
 heir, could be turned profitably against the unpopu- 
 lar king. Henry III, with a flash of his old astute- 
 ness, checked this move momentarily by dominat- 
 ing himself captain of the League, but the citizens 
 saw through his game and rebelled outright. He 
 fled to Blois, where he was joined by the Duke of 
 
216 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 Guise, who thus walked straight into the lion’s 
 mouth, but did so with nonchalance, thinking that 
 the King lacked the spirit to harm him. He mis- 
 calculated, however, for the King, beside himself 
 with impotence and hatred, had the Duke assas- 
 sinated by the swords of his forty-five guardsmen 
 in his bed chamber at Blois. 
 
 When the League learned of the murder of its 
 Christian hero, its agitation knew no limits and no 
 decency. From that moment Henry III ceased to 
 be King of France. The pulpits were filled with 
 furious preachers who thundered against the King’s 
 special predilections in the literal language of 
 Sodom, when it was not that of the gutter. They 
 implored heaven to furnish an assassin who would 
 rid the Catholic kingdom of a Catholic king, the 
 last of his race. Every day some one deserted him 
 for the League. In his desperation between the 
 Protestant devil in the south and the raging sea of 
 Paris, Henry III commended the Catholic reaction 
 to Satan, turned frankly toward the devil, and 
 made an alliance withthe King of Navarre. 
 
 The two Kings met at Plessis, near Tours. 
 Henry of Navarre in his frayed brown pourpoint, 
 the famous white panache in his hat, advanced to 
 meet the King of France and threw himself on 
 his knees. A crowd so great that even the trees 
 were charged with spectators surrounded them. 
 Every one embraced, Catholics and Huguenots, 
 
THE WHITE PLUME 217 
 
 without distinction of faith or faction. After two 
 generations of futile hatred it was a fine moment 
 and one that struck the death-knell of fanaticism. 
 
 At Paris the League continued to breathe fire 
 and flames. It had thrown off all appearance of 
 nationalism and declared openly for the Spaniard. 
 In the convents they said that only a miracle could 
 save them. Three young men, or rather boys in 
 their teens, swore to reénact the rodle of Judith and 
 kill Henry III in his tent, or in-his bed. ‘These 
 suggestions acted strongly on the feeble brain of 
 a young Dominican named Jacques Clement. He 
 bought a long knife, procured letters to Henry 
 III at Saint Cloud, where the King was now be- 
 sieging Paris, and while his victim was reading 
 them, stabbed him. The last of the Valois died in 
 the arms of the King of Navarre, recommending | 
 to the latter his throne. 
 
 Never was there a stranger accession. Half 
 the Catholic noblesse who had hitherto remained 
 loyal to Henry III, on being confronted with the 
 heretic successor, threw their hats on the ground 
 crying: “Plutot mourir!” Moreover, there re- 
 mained Paris, now garrisoned by a Spanish con- 
 tingent, and ready to blow itself up with gun- 
 powder as in the good days of the Commune rather 
 than yield. The only way that Henry could take 
 the wind out of this monstrous bigotry was, as 
 he himself expressed it, “to make the perilous 
 
218 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 leap.” He added, in his characteristic vein, that 
 “Paris was worth a Mass.” In July, 1593, he 
 wrote to his Catholic mistress, Gabrielle d’Estrées, 
 that he was going to be received into the Church. 
 
 A little later, and without disorder, he made his 
 entry into Paris. The people so long bullied by 
 violent imbeciles received him as if he had been 
 the Sun of Justice. ‘There remained, to be sure, 
 another king, namely, the papal legate, who, hav- 
 ing no orders, refused to recognize him. The 
 popes of the period, whatever might have been 
 their personal predilections for France or the cause 
 of peace, were in the position of chaplains to Philip 
 II, and the spite of the latter at losing another 
 kingdom through the well-timed conversion of 
 Henry may be imagined. It was impossible, none 
 the less, for Clement VIII to delay his recognition 
 of the French King forever, and finally, in 1595, 
 the French ambassador was allowed to kneel be- 
 fore the Pope and curia in the Piazza of Saint 
 Peter’s and receive in his master’s name the 
 pontifical absolution. “The Papal See,” says 
 Ranke, “once more appeared, on this occasion, in 
 all the splendor of its ancient authority.” 
 
 This is the end of the religious wars in France. 
 We have dwelt at length on Henry IV because he 
 stood triumphantly between two bad extremes, be- 
 cause, like his contemporary Montaigne, he per- 
 sonified a new and gay type of indifference to the 
 
THE WHITE PLUME 219 
 
 religious issues employed and abused ad nauseam 
 by the Reform and the Counter Reform in France. 
 That famous white plume, which he carried tri- 
 umphantly through two apostasies, is counted by 
 some the white feather of moral defeat; to me it 
 is the symbol of a new hope in a world distracted 
 by the vile intolerance of the sixteenth century. 
 He could not kill the monster by conquest. Mit 
 der Dumhett streichen vergebens die Gotter. But 
 he killed it by skepticism, by kindness, by a flash 
 of the best secular and Voltairian spirit appearing 
 two centuries before its time; and in doing so he 
 killed himself. It is said that during his entry a 
 man, standing in a window, regarded him fixedly 
 and refused to salute him. The King merely 
 laughed and passed on. The Counter Reform 
 never forgave him that laugh which symbolized 
 his real greatness. He was determined to protect 
 his old co-religionists, to keep clean of Spain, to 
 launch three armies in saving Europe from the 
 Hapsburg monarchy, the monarchy of the In- 
 quisition and the auto-da-fe, and all this with a 
 bounty, a sovereign charm, with a laugh. What 
 could the Counter Reform do with such a man but 
 kill him? 
 
 He brought France safely out of the religious 
 hell of the sixteenth century, but by the blind 
 knife of Ravaillac, the blind spirit of the time took 
 its posthumous revenge. And now, thank God, 
 
220 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 we are done with the sixteenth century, with its 
 two reformations, Protestant and Catholic, with 
 Luther and Loyola. It is the century of martyrs 
 and fanatics, hateful to us on either count because 
 the two are usually one and the same. That soli- 
 tary child of this world, Henry IV, was wiser in 
 his generation than all the children of light, 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 
 GRANDEUR AND DECLINE OF THE 
 GALLICAN CHURCH 
 
 Ir seems that we will never be done with the 
 Church in France. The latter is as much in the 
 foreground during the seventeenth as it has been 
 during the sixteenth century. This comes from 
 the fact that nothing relating to France is unim- 
 portant during the sixteen hundreds. Paris, later 
 Versailles, were truly the centers of the universe. 
 The dazzling reign of the Sun-King, Louis XIV 
 (1643-1715), merely completed and gilded the 
 commanding influence inaugurated by the Beéar- 
 nais, and continued by a prince of the Catholic 
 Church, the Cardinal de Richelieu. 
 
 A Jansenist painter, Philippe de Champagne, 
 has given us a fine portrait of “the sphinx in the 
 red robe” which is also, in a way, a portrait of the 
 French Church in the seventeenth century. Save 
 for the cardinalitial scarlet, everything seems gray 
 in this picture. Gray eyes, gray background, fine 
 pallid hands like those of one already dead. Gray 
 
 is the quintessential color of this Church, a Church 
 221 
 
222 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 in which there is the utmost pomp and absolutely 
 no life, a corpse wrapped in gorgeous cerements 
 and sustaining the illusion of vitality even in cold 
 death. Its very austerity, that of the Jansenists, 
 is a kind of rigor mortis. Its very pomp is petrified, 
 speaking in a religious sense. It is notable that 
 at this period they destroyed in a great quantity 
 the colorful and charitable churches of the Gothic 
 age, and substituted ugly conventicles in the new 
 classic style, lacking even the strained vitality of 
 the true baroque; churches resembling bourses 
 and banks. At the same time they smashed the 
 too human glories of medieval stained windows, 
 replacing them by the discolored glass found 
 everywhere to-day in Paris, even at Notre Dame. 
 Crushing facades, white glass, the whole ugly and 
 pretentious esthetic—it 1s the very image of the 
 French Church, yesterday and to-day. It is the 
 mournful official church of bourgeois and function- 
 aries, which filled the rich with Jesuit sermons 
 and picayune devotions, while the poor it sent 
 empty away. } 
 
 The neglect of the poor continued to the Revo- 
 lution and the astonishing vacuity of devotion 
 produced a certain reaction even in France. Saint 
 Vincent de Paul founded the Lazarists and the 
 Sisters of Charity for the general relief of suffering. 
 Another Frenchman, Jean Baptiste de la Salle, 
 organized the Christian Brothers for the education 
 
DECLINE OF THE GALLICAN CHURCH 2238 
 
 of poor boys disdained by the Jesuits, hitherto 
 the only powerful teaching Order. Finally a great 
 churchman, an imbecile in politics, but after all a 
 saint in his way, the Cardinal de Berulle, intro- 
 duced a little Italian sun by the formation of the 
 French Oratory, originally founded at Rome in 
 the preceding century by Saint Philip Neri. The 
 esthetic reform of the liturgy, a little art, a little 
 good music, agreeable and sensible sermons, a 
 trifle “‘broad’’—this is the secret of the Oratory 
 (St. Sulpice) as it will be that of the Paulists in 
 this country. The net result in France, at its best, 
 was a sort of gloomy correctitude. Despite the 
 Oratory, no two things could be more unlike than 
 French Catholicism and the Church in Italy, so 
 colorful, so appealing even in decay, so close to 
 the people. The Gallican Church had other things 
 in its head than to make itself loved. It was 
 preé€minently the Church of the Monarchy and 
 the great bourgeoisie; hence its invincible vul- 
 garity. ‘That pretentious figure of fun, the szzsse 
 or beadle, introduced by France into the mysteries 
 of the sanctuary, is symbolic of this institution— 
 a Church of occasional conformists, of gendarmes 
 and of clerks. 
 
 This Church revealed its innate Protestanism 
 by the violent support which it gave the Monarchy 
 against the rest of Christendom, even the Pope. 
 France prided herself on the fact that, thanks to 
 
224 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 the Gallican liberties, she stood on a very different 
 footing towards the Papacy than did Italy or 
 Spain. The liberties in question were certain 
 national and independent rights of the French 
 Church whose origin was lost in the mists of time. 
 They enabled Louis XIV to appoint bishops and 
 insult Innocent XI in his own capital, at the same 
 time that he was delivering his peaceful and unfor- 
 tunate Protestant subjects to the tender mercies 
 of his dragoons (1685). Henry VIII himself had 
 hardly gone so far. 
 
 A French historian, himself a former priest, has 
 written: ‘‘While the Italian and Spanish theo- 
 logians pushed their dogmatic deductions to the 
 last extremes, while German mystics lost them- 
 selves in redoubtable dreams, the French theo- 
 logians never departed from a certain good sense, 
 and did not cease to pride themselves on a certain 
 erudition and fidelity to the past. Gallicanism 
 was then, relatively speaking, a moderate Ca- 
 tholicism, sensible, virile, moral, whose respectabil- 
 ity was appreciated even by Protestants, and 
 which was even considered by Utopians as the 
 possible field of a chimerical union of Christian 
 churches.” 
 
 This estimate is far too favorable. An institu- 
 tion, however penetrated by ‘‘a certain good 
 sense,” which organized one of the most brutal 
 religious persecutions in history, cannot be said 
 
DECLINE OF THE GALLICAN CHURCH 225 
 
 to be moderate. It cannot be said to be free from 
 redoubtable dreams when it produced Sister Mary 
 Alacoque and the devotion of the Sacred Heart. 
 Gallicanism founded or reformed a few religious 
 communities, and produced a handful of eloquent 
 court preachers, and that is all that can be stated 
 in its favor. 
 
 The Gallican Church emphasized its moderation 
 by persecuting, under the inspiration of the Jes- 
 uits, the only Catholics in France who ventured 
 to think for themselves. I shall not detain the 
 reader by a detailed account of the great Jansenist 
 controversy which convulsed the French Church 
 for nearly two centuries. The Jansenist school, 
 whose Bethlehem was the melancholy hermitage 
 of Port Royal, near Paris, rose to combat the sup- 
 posed laxity of Jesuit morality. 
 
 The Jesuits had recognized the uselessness of 
 turning the clock back to the thirteenth century. 
 Christ had died as much for the modern soldier 
 and courtier and royal mistress as He had for any 
 one else, and what such people required in their 
 religious life was a rough working system, a ready- 
 made code supplied by the most elementary 
 “duties” of the Church—the confessional, the 
 rosary, Holy Communion. Many of the casuists, 
 like Saurez and St. Alphonsus Liguori, whom the 
 Jansenists were never weary of vilifying, were, in 
 their way, profound students of the soul, liberal 
 
226 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 and liberating moralists who purged the air of 
 theological abstractions and terror, and were, very 
 properly, concerned with the spirit rather than 
 the letter of good conduct. The Jesuits, more- 
 over, stressed the Christian and manly dogma of 
 free will against the Jansenist doctrine of “irre- 
 sistible grace,” which suggested Luther. “The 
 Jesuits, with their practical good sense, could not 
 admit such a doctrine because it tended, like 
 Lutheranism, toward the neglect of those good 
 works which benefited the Church and, it must be 
 added, society at large.” The Jansenists were, 
 however, perfectly good Catholics, subjected to a 
 cruel and unnecessary persecution on the part of 
 Louis XIV and his Jesuit confessors. I am no 
 lover of the Port Royal school, but it must be 
 admitted that it produced the patricians of French 
 Catholicism in a bad age, and that its distin- 
 guished and dolorous history commands consider- 
 able respect. The Jansenists also enriched French 
 literature, giving it Pascal and Racine. 
 
 The sect perished about the year 1720 because 
 it yielded to the same vapid miracle mongering, 
 so popular generally in “the Church of good sense.” 
 A Jansenist deacon named Paris, having died in 
 the odor of sanctity, had been buried in the quaint 
 cemetery of St. Médard. The Jansenists an- 
 nounced that prodigies of healing were being 
 enacted at his tomb, and the cemetery was invaded 
 
DECLINE OF THE GALLICAN CHURCH 227 
 
 night and day by a crowd of idlers so that it had 
 to be closed and a guard set at the gate, on which 
 some humorist wrote: “By order of the King it 
 is forbidden to perform any miracle in this place.” 
 
 After the destruction of Port Royal came that 
 of its enemies, the Jesuits. The movement against 
 them began in France as soon as their penitent, 
 the aged Sun-King, was out of the way. Their 
 standard book of moral theology, their beloved 
 “Busenbaum,”’ was burned by the hangman at 
 Paris; there they were first called the enemies of 
 the human race, and their dark reputation, later 
 popularized by insensate anti-clericals like 
 Michelet and Eugene Sue, dates from this period. 
 
 Their first suppression took place in Portugal, 
 where they had offended the all-powerful Minister, 
 M. de Pombal, by their missionary tentative in 
 Paraguay, called by Cunninghame Grahame “an 
 experiment in civilization.” Their old father, 
 Malagrida, was put to death, and the rest of them 
 shipped off with small ceremony to the Papal 
 States. The example of Portugal was speedily 
 followed by the Bourbon government of Spain. 
 Finally the government of Louis XV announced 
 from Versailles that the society was dissolved in 
 French territory. The whole nation exulted; even 
 Voltaire, their defender, pointed sardonically to 
 the ruins of Port Royal and said something pleas- 
 ant about the biter bit. The reigning Pope, 
 
228 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 Clement XIV, tried to protect them, but when 
 the French government made a threatening move 
 toward Avignon, still Papal territory, he saw rea- 
 son, and in 1773 he decreed that the Society of 
 Jesus had ceased to exist. It was only revived by 
 Pius VII after the fall of Napoleon. 
 
 The truth about the Order in its somewhat 
 tortuous progress through the centuries is difficult 
 to establish. My own opinion is that the Jesuits 
 were not prodigies either of virtue or dissimula- 
 tion. Despite their noble history in England under 
 the Elizabethan persecution and their many con- 
 tributions to science and education, they were, as 
 individuals, rather pretentious and _ superficial 
 mediocrities trading on a reputation for astuteness, 
 constantly seeing their finest schemes miscarry 
 and occasionally killing people quite by accident. 
 It is worth noting that they underwent banishment 
 and dissolution without trial or definite charges or 
 any chance to defend themselves. 
 
 Christianity had made such progress in the 
 “Church of a certain good sense” that by the mid- 
 dle of the eighteenth century there were as many as 
 forty thousand avowed atheists in Paris alone. The 
 new assault on the Church, sponsored by the 
 Encyclopedia and the polemics of Voltaire, was, 
 as Macaulay says, something better than mere 
 incredulity. “If the Patriarch of the Holy Philo- 
 sophical Church had contented himself with mak- 
 
DECLINE OF THE GALLICAN CHURCH 229 
 
 ing jokes about Saul’s asses and David’s wives, 
 and with criticizing the poetry of Ezekiel in the 
 same spirit in which he criticized that of Shake- 
 speare,’”’ Rome would have had no more to fear 
 from him than it had to fear from Tom Paine or 
 Colonel Ingersoll. ‘The real strength of the phi- 
 losophers lay in the generous enthusiasm which was 
 hidden beneath their flippancy and their apparent 
 intolerance. They were men who with all their 
 faults, moral and intellectual, desired the improve- 
 ment of the condition of the human race, whose 
 blood boiled at the sight of cruelty, who made 
 manful war with every faculty which they pos- 
 sessed on what they considered abuses, and 
 who on many signal occasions placed themselves 
 gallantly between the powerful and the oppressed. 
 When a youth, guilty only of an indiscretion, was 
 beheaded at Abbeville . . . a voice instantly went 
 forth from the banks of Lake Leman which made 
 itself heard from Moscow to Cadiz and which 
 sentenced the unjust judges to the contempt and 
 detestation of all Europe. The really efficient 
 weapons with which the philosophers assailed the 
 evangelical faith were borrowed from the evan- 
 gelical morality. The ethical and dogmatical 
 parts of the Gospel were turned against each other. 
 On one side was a Church boasting of the purity 
 of a doctrine derived from the Apostles, but dis- 
 graced by the Bartholomew, by the (indirect) 
 
230 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 murder of the best of Kings, by the persecution 
 of the Huguenots and the destruction of Port 
 Royal. On the other side was a sect laughing at 
 the Scriptures, shooting out its tongue at the Sac- 
 raments, but ready to encounter principalities and 
 powers in the cause of justice, mercy and toler- 
 ation.”’ * 
 
 What institution could survive, with all its im- 
 becilities and abuses intact, the annihilating irony 
 of words like these: 
 
 “Transport yourselves with me to the day on 
 which all men will be judged, when God will deal 
 with all according to his works. I see all the dead 
 of former ages, and of our own, stand in His pres- 
 ence. Are you sure that our Creator and Father 
 will say to the wise and virtuous Confucius, to 
 Socrates, to Plato, to the divine Antonines, to 
 Titus, the delight of the human race, and to so 
 many other model men: ‘Go, monsters, and submit 
 to a chastisement infinite in its intensity and dura- 
 tion. And you, my beloved, Jacques Clément, 
 Ravaillac, Damiens, etc.,f who have died with the 
 prescribed formule, come and share my empire 
 and felicity forever.” t 
 
 Thanks above all to the genius of Voltaire and 
 his friends, that glorious Gallican Church, so much 
 more Catholic than the Pope that it made war on 
 
 * Macaulay. 
 + French Catholic fanatics and regicides. 
 ¢ Voltaire: Essay on Toleration. 
 
DECLINE OF THE GALLICAN CHURCH 231 
 
 him, was at so low an ebb on the eve of the Revo- 
 lution that Louis XVI opposed the nomination of 
 Brienne as Archbishop of Paris on the ground that 
 the latter ought at the very least to believe in 
 God. 
 
CHAPTER XXII 
 NINETY-THREE 
 
 Ir is an error to suppose that the great Revolu- 
 tion which completed the eighteenth century and 
 overturned the old order of things in France, ex- 
 ploded from below, or that it was, in its origins, 
 the work of a mob. Ideas seldom manifest them- 
 selves from below. The Revolution was an idea, 
 a philosophy, born in the restless brains of a few 
 intellectuals, and worked out by a combination of 
 liberal nobles, enlightened parliamenteers, and, 
 strange to say, by a part of the clergy. The 
 formula of this new philosophy is contained in the 
 three words which ornament, somewhat ironically, 
 the facades of French public buildings—liberty, 
 equality, fraternity. These are the fundamental 
 “rights of man,” formulated in a spirit of true 
 fanatical French logic by the privileged class and 
 communicated to the middle class. The German 
 Marie Antoinette was not far wrong when she 
 said, alluding to that French noblesse so fatal to 
 her and hers: “These people will ruin us.” 
 
 What unchained the Revolution in 1789 was the 
 
 financial collapse of France. The country con- 
 232 
 
NINETY-THREE 233 
 
 fronted national bankruptcy, a condition which 
 became yearly more hopeless due to all the anti- 
 quated follies and abuses dear to the conservative 
 French heart, due also to all sorts of reckless in- 
 efficiencies, expenditures and sheer waste. Every- 
 thing called for retrenchment, reform and the 
 creation of a sensible constitution by the represen- 
 tatives of the whole nation. The latter had a good 
 opportunity to air their grievances and those of 
 their constituents in the National Assembly which 
 convened at Versailles in May, 1789, and after 
 assisting like the body of good French conformists 
 it was at the Mass of the Holy Spirit, got seriously 
 down to the work of formulating the new con- 
 stitution. In the meantime, it may be said, the 
 country was not rendered any more prosperous by 
 these fine preliminaries. The promulgation of 
 the Rights of Man did not, as by a miracle, pro- 
 duce foodstuffs nor fill the empty treasury. There 
 was only one French corporation which, to all 
 appearances, was pretty well off, and this was the 
 Catholic Church. 
 
 At first glance the Church seemed to have noth- 
 ing to fear from the general overturn. The mass 
 of the parish clergy, the curés, miserably paid, and 
 living so close to the peasant that they shared in 
 a measure the latter’s grievances, were disposed 
 to support the political revolution. Even the 
 great prelates, imbued as many of them were with 
 
234 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 the new spirit, were not generally detested. The 
 clergy remained in this state of nebulous neutrality 
 until a deputy, in the course of argument, let fall 
 the ominous sentence: “The goods of the Church 
 belong to the nation.” 
 
 Since the ecclesiastical estates were valued at 
 four thousand millions of francs, this suggestion 
 took fire instantly, but discussion of the question 
 was interrupted by the sensational episodes of 
 October 5 and 6, 1789, when a mob of hooligans 
 and fishwives arrived at Versailles and compelled 
 the court and Assembly to remove to Paris. Two 
 days later (October 8) the discussion on church 
 property was resumed. The work of regenerating 
 France had gone to the Assembly’s head. Nothing 
 seemed easier than to summon a whole lost At- 
 lantis called the primitive Church from the vasty 
 deeps, and it was not the shadowy Gallican Com- 
 munion which would wave a wand and bid it dis- 
 appear. Mirabeau, answering the clergy’s ob- 
 jections on the question of property, told them 
 loftily that they could not possess for the simple 
 reason that they did not exist. The ecclesiastics 
 gasped. “Precisely,” continued the orator, “‘moral 
 bodies, such as the Church, created by the State, 
 are not bodies in a proper sense of the word like 
 sentient beings. hey have an ideal moral exist- 
 ence conferred: by the State, their creator. The 
 State made them and causes them to live.” He 
 
NINETY-THREE 235 
 
 might have added that when the State withholds its 
 generating breath, they might die, and a good rid- 
 dance. 
 
 The great anticlericals of the Middle Ages, the 
 Hohenstaufens, and Philip the Fair, doubtless 
 stirred in their tombs at such words, rejoicing to 
 see this day. It had taken about two centuries 
 of spiritual vacuity, accompanied by a frantic 
 toadying to the civil power, to bring the French 
 Church to the point when it could be told with a 
 certain justice that it did not exist. 
 
 It must have been pretty clear now to the clergy 
 what they were in for. Dreadful visions of Henry 
 VIII, imitated by the politest people of the world, 
 of dispossession, disestablishment, schism from 
 Rome; of an enforced French patriarchate with its 
 attendant heresies, martyrdoms and_ horrors, 
 loomed before them. Nothing less, in the actual 
 result, satisfied the idealogues of the Assembly. On 
 July 12, 1790, was promulgated the Civil Constitu- 
 tion of the Clergy. Priests were to be elected to 
 their parishes, and bishops to their dioceses. Both 
 orders were to be paid by the State which offered 
 for the first time to the submerged curés a living 
 wage. Clergymen might marry. The convents 
 were suppressed, with the exception of one mother- 
 house to each order; all monks and nuns who with- 
 drew from the religious life received pensions. The 
 whole body of the clergy was compelled to register 
 
236 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 their approval of these resolutions by a solemn 
 oath. 
 
 The fate of the clergy depended on the Pope. 
 In the autumn Pius VI came out flatly against the 
 Civil Constitution, and a majority of the French 
 clergy was forced into a position of open rebellion 
 against the revolutionary government. In making 
 allegiance to the Civil Constitution a test of na- 
 tional loyalty the Assembly committed the mistake 
 of according a fine opportunity to pose as martyrs 
 to a number of worthless ecclesiastics. When 
 required to take the oath a curé, Leclerc, replied 
 simply: “I am a child of the Catholic Church.” 
 This was the attitude of the majority, including 
 most of the prelates. Yet, with the doubtful excep- 
 tion of the marriage of priests, there was nothing 
 specifically anti-Catholic in the Civil Constitution. 
 The Archbishop of Narbonne was nearer the truth 
 when he said years later under Napoleon: “We 
 behaved like true noblemen; for it cannot be said 
 of the majority of us that we acted from motives 
 of religion.” 
 
 From this point things moved quickly. In June, 
 1791, the King and his family attempted to escape 
 from France. They almost reached the frontier, 
 but were stopped at Varennes in the Argonne and 
 brought back. The Constitutional Monarchy be- 
 ing evidently a farce, a coalition, organized by the 
 emigrant nobles and backed with men and money 
 
NINETY-THREE 237 
 
 by Prussia and Austria, prepared to invade France 
 and restore the old régime. The nation watched 
 with accumulating fear and anger their government 
 weeping with one eye and laughing with the other; 
 their king declaring war with tears on the coali- 
 tion, his only hope; and their disaffected Church 
 praying night and day for the defeat of the Revolu- 
 tion by enemy arms. From the standpoint of the 
 national defense it was an impossible situation, 
 and on the 10th of August, 1792, it was ended when 
 an organized mob, directed by the Commune or 
 municipal Paris government, stormed the Tuileries 
 and imprisoned the King and his family in the 
 medieval palace of the Templars, still haunted by 
 memories of that tragic and equivocal Order. 
 Martial visits were made to the homes of every 
 one suspected of sympathizing with the foreign in- 
 vasion, and all well known “aristocrats” and non- 
 juring priests were arrested and shut up in prisons 
 or in churches converted into prisons, the Abbaye, 
 the Carmes, etc. 
 
 In the meanwhile Longwy capitulated to the 
 coalition, followed by the fall of Verdun. The 
 road to Paris appeared open to the enemy. Panic 
 is the cruelest of passions, and on Sunday, the 
 2nd of September, a mob of professional killers, 
 hired by the Commune, broke into the prisons, and 
 after a primitive species of trial, massacred the 
 inmates, including all the priests on whom they 
 
288 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 could lay hands. Any Catholic clergyman who 
 had refused the oath was regarded as a political 
 prisoner, in short a traitor, and killed. 
 
 The new Republican Government was organized 
 early in 1793 amid this atmosphere of terror and 
 murder. It consisted of a national legislature 
 called the Convention; a small executive, the Com- 
 mittee of Public Safety, of which Robespierre soon 
 became the tutelary spirit; and the famous Revo- 
 lutionary Tribunal, with its daily batch of political 
 victims, as a judiciary. The King was executed. 
 The coalition was in course of time hurled back 
 from the frontiers, pursued into its own territories 
 by the banners of the Rights of Man. Until the 
 complete emergence of Robespierre as practical 
 dictator, the real power was the Commune of Paris, 
 which terrorized the city and the national govern- 
 ment. It consisted of a set of sanguinary droles 
 whose heads were completely turned by their 
 awful eminence. The Constituent Assembly had 
 attempted to reorganize religion; the Commune 
 now had a turn at annihilating it altogether. 
 France had never been formally de-Christianized, 
 but due to the fact that a large proportion of the 
 clergy were non-juring and hence out of law, the 
 churches were closed, and the cult was mostly prac- 
 ticed in a subterranean fashion, in catacombs and 
 barns. In the autumn of 1793 the Commune 
 staged an immense costume piece in the Cathedral 
 
NINETY-THREE 239 
 
 of Notre Dame where an actress was enthroned on 
 the high altar as Goddess of Reason to the peal of 
 civic chants with words by Chénier. ‘The cor- 
 responding spectacle at Saint Eustache,” says Mer- 
 cier, the diarist of the Revolution, “offered the 
 vision of a vast tavern. Round the choir stood 
 tables loaded with bottles, sausages, pork-puddings 
 and pastries. The guests flowed in and out through 
 all doors; whosoever presented himself took part 
 of the good things; children of eight, girls as 
 well as boys, put hand to plate in sign of Liberty; 
 they drank also of the bottles, and their prompt in- 
 toxication created laughter... .’ “Other mys- 
 teries,”’ adds Carlyle, “seemingly of a Paphian char- 
 acter we leave under the veil which appropriately 
 stretches itself along the pillars of the aisles.” 
 On becoming dictator the next year, Robespierre 
 put a stop to these pleasing buffooneries. He had 
 been an ecclesiastical lawyer, brought up as a 
 protégé of the Bishop of Arras, and was hence no 
 enemy of the priests. In the late spring of 1794 
 he dedicated the Republic to the Supreme Being, 
 by which he meant the somewhat nebulous divinity 
 of his master, Rousseau, and he did his best to 
 spare the Catholic clergy any violent persecution. 
 All this time some remarkable ecclesiastics had con- 
 tinued to sit and legislate in the Convention, the 
 most notable of whom was the Abbé Grégoire who 
 died a bishop under the Empire. Calm in his place, 
 
240 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 arrayed in his cassock and violet sash, this noble 
 and public-spirited priest had tried throughout to 
 reconcile the Catholic faith with the somewhat 
 horrifying progress of the Revolution. When the 
 Commune’s movement of de-Christianization was 
 in full swing, and “goose Gobel,” Republican Arch- 
 bishop of Paris, together with his cathedral chap- 
 ter, loudly proclaimed themselves atheists, Gré- 
 goire refused to follow them. The government had 
 the good sense to tolerate one Catholic legislator 
 in its midst, saying: “‘We force no one: let Gré- 
 goire consult his conscience.” This he always did 
 through four régimes. Years later, under Napo- 
 leon, an old man in episcopal dress could occa- 
 sionally be seen wandering through the abandoned 
 tennis court at Versailles where the first drama 
 of the Revolution had been enacted. Revolution 
 and war had come and gone, the tyranny of the 
 multitude had been succeeded by that of the one, 
 and still the reign of brotherhood had not come. 
 This superannuated spectator of so much grandeur, 
 terror and decadence was Grégoire. 
 
 The priests did not fare any better for the fall 
 of Robespierre in Thermidor. The Catholic reli- 
 gion could still be practiced only clandestinely. 
 Moreover the fury of Republican anti-clericalism 
 escaped from France, spread over Europe and at- 
 tacked the Papacy. An army left by Bonaparte, 
 who was then in Egypt, invaded the Hapsburg pos- 
 
» NINETY-THREE 241 
 
 sessions in Italy, lit their pipes from altar-candles 
 and imprisoned the Pope in his own palace. Pius 
 VI implored his enemies to let him die where he 
 had lived, but they replied that he could die any- 
 where. They tore the ring of Peter from his trem- 
 bling hand, took him to France, where he died 
 miserably the 14th of August, 1799. 
 
 It was finished then, the Church instituted by 
 the Son of God, watered by the blood of martyrs 
 and Apostles, the religion of the Empire, the tri- 
 umphant theocracy of Gregory and Innocent, the 
 papal super-state of the Middle Ages and the 
 Renaissance. Already shaken by the Protestant 
 revolt, it had gone down in blood and ruin before 
 a handful of men in tricolored sashes. The chain 
 had snapped off at its weakest link. The particu- 
 lar Church which had knelt before the government 
 of the Sun-King, and had bent still lower to the 
 government of a prostitute, had slain itself at the 
 feet of the gentlemen of 793. And the prince of 
 bishops, he who had always resisted the absolute 
 State, whether it called itself Frederick or Philip, 
 Henry or Elizabeth, Louis or Ninety-Three or even 
 “the Little Corporal,” had fallen with his brethren. 
 
 Yet all was not lost. ‘The future of Rome,” 
 said an acute observer, Count von Moltke, “does 
 not depend on Rome itself, but on the direction 
 which religion will take in other countries.” In 
 other continents, he should have added. In 1783 
 
242 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 “the greatest birth of time” had already attained 
 its consummation. The creation of a new state of 
 vast size, of a scope for political and religious expe- 
 riment no less vast, provided a saving plank for the 
 institution which seemed to be drowning as the 
 eighteenth century ended. In America, the Catho- 
 lic Church was free of its old enemy—the absolute 
 State—and there in the person of the Calverts it 
 had already atoned for centuries of intolerance by 
 the first charter of religious toleration. In the 
 American Republic, the State was the people, and 
 the State was never to be lord of the Church. 
 Moreover, since the people were of different reli- 
 gions—Catholic, Anglican, Calvinist, Jew—a single 
 creed could never come to inform and dominate the 
 State. The slate was clean, and the new nation 
 was built up under God upon disestablishment, 
 Cavour’s “free Church in a free State,” a principle 
 embodied in the first amendment to the Constitu- 
 tion. In this Republic, officially non-sectarian and 
 atmospherically Calvinist, the Catholic Church was 
 destined to prosper as she had never prospered in 
 any European country of Catholic stock since the 
 Middle Ages. 
 
 But in Europe everything seemed over. For 
 nearly a year after the capture of Pius VI the 
 Church was without a head. In France it was out- 
 lawed. The noblest edifices from the Gothic period 
 were closed, or turned into Masonic lodges and 
 
NINETY-THREE 243 
 
 banks. In Rome the tricolored flag floated from 
 the top of Sant’ Angelo. In England Catholicism 
 had apparently dived underground forever, save 
 for the presence of exiled French ecclesiastics liv- 
 ing on Anglican alms. In 1799 there was not one 
 public man who would have ventured to say that 
 the Catholic religion was not a lost cause, a faith 
 as extinct as that of the Manichees. This time 
 the milk-white hind seemed definitely dead. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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CHAPTER XXIII 
 ROMANTICISM 
 
 In the first year of the nineteenth century, a 
 stately little gentleman might have been seen 
 brushing his teeth each morning at the windows of 
 his lodging, No. 27 rue Saint Dominque. On the 
 dressing-table lay the proofs of his last book which 
 bore the title: The Genius of Christianity. 'The 
 name of this imposing little man was the Vicomte 
 René de Chateaubriand, popular author of some 
 brilliant political tracts and a couple of flamboyant 
 romances dealing with the noble redskins of the Iro- 
 quois. In literary histories he is known as the 
 father of Romanticism. 
 
 There is no occasion here to deal in detail with 
 M. de Chateaubriand’s book. It has been called 
 epoch-making, but it was rather the epoch which 
 made it. It appeared on Easter Sunday, 1802, the 
 same day that a solemn Te Deum was chanted at 
 Notre Dame in thanksgiving for the Concordat re- 
 establishing the Catholic Church in France and con- 
 cluded with the Pope by the head of the French 
 government, the First Consul, Napoleon Bona- 
 
 parte. 
 247 
 
248 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 Napoleon had need of the Pope and the Church, 
 and was exerting every effort to popularize religion, 
 and incidentally himself as its restorer. Never 
 then did a work on Christianity appear under hap- 
 pier conditions of publicity. “Chateaubriand was 
 able to consider himself with Bonaparte as the 
 restorer of the true faith, and he did not fail to say 
 so.” 
 
 The Genius of Christianity struck the tone of 
 nineteenth century Catholicism, a phase which 
 coincided with the literary movement called Ro- 
 manticism, also inaugurated by Chateaubriand. 
 There is no need to analyze profoundly this great 
 Christian apologist; a few phrases picked at ran- 
 dom suffice to give the atmosphere. When the 
 author speaks of the dogmatic mysteries of the 
 faith, the Trinity for example, he is priceless. .. . 
 “The Trinity was perhaps known to the Egyptians 
 . . . Plato seems conversant with this dogma... . 
 One is able to discover traces of it in the fables 
 of Greek mythology, notably in the three 
 GrECES ee 
 
 As for the Redemption, it is “touching.” The 
 Sacrament of the Real Presence is invested with 
 a “charming” pomp. Elsewhere he emphasizes the 
 influence of the Church upon the arts, on music, 
 painting, architecture, and is the first of his time 
 to mention the despised Gothic churches with ad- 
 miration, thus preparing a profitable theme for 
 
ROMANTICISM 249 
 
 the neo-Christians who succeeded him. To sum 
 up, the author is anxious to disassociate himself 
 from the mere brute faith of the charcoal-burner, 
 and is equally anxious to impress the men of taste 
 and amateurs of style penetrated with the Vol- 
 tairian tradition, for whom he is writing. His 
 apologia is an appeal to the poetic sense, the imag- 
 inative instinct, and his method is to hand out 
 amusing erudition, images, metaphors, descrip- 
 tions, phrases in a word. Thus he is, in a way, 
 responsible for the modern Catholicism of snob- 
 bism and the drawing-room which is an odious 
 thing; he has also produced, even in the Christian 
 pulpit, the literary tone, the Paulist tone, and 
 similar bad tones; in short, he has produced Catho- 
 lic Romanticism. 
 
 What is Romanticism in a Catholic sense? 
 Briefly, it may be described as religious sentiment 
 without faith. It consists in comprehending, re- 
 specting and sensuously enjoying, for their stimu- 
 lating effects, their plastic beauty or their social 
 utility, the dogmas which, at heart, one has ceased 
 to believe. I do not know why I have limited this 
 phenomenon to the nineteenth century as if it had 
 ceased to exist in the twentieth. The presence of 
 MM. Maurras and de Montherlant, of “ritual- 
 ism” and the Gothic Quest, of Chesterton and 
 Belloc, of Catholic dilettantism and Catholic prag- 
 matism generally in our midst, attest that it is a 
 
250 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 spirit which is still active. To-day we have two 
 groups of Catholics—the multitude calling itself 
 “the faithful,” and the Romantics. The latter are 
 Catholic, either because that religion seems to 
 “work” in a social sense, or more often because it 
 titillates their sentimentality. Both types seem 
 equally resentful of criticism and new ideas, even 
 of old ones when the latter have the air of novelty. 
 And, as a result of this nullity, based either on ig- 
 norance or on the intellectual suicide known as 
 pragmatism, the Catholic world has produced no 
 art worth mentioning since the Reformation. The 
 genius of art has so completely abandoned the 
 Church in our time that even its authentic liturgy 
 and its matchless music are everywhere scamped 
 and mistreated. Pulpit dialogues, popular devo- 
 tions and similar catch-penny tricks, borrowed 
 from the Protestants, have replaced in this country 
 the liturgical glories of the missal and breviary, 
 and not even an encyclical of the late Pius X could 
 restore Gregorian chant to anything like its proper 
 place in a Church which prefers to vamp out its 
 services with opera tunes and sweet-stuff. 
 
 The neo-Catholic spirit operated in various 
 ways in different countries during the first half 
 of the nineteenth century. In France there was a 
 liberal Catholic movement during the thirties led 
 by two laymen, Lamennais and the Count de Mon- 
 talembert, and by a Dominican, Lacordaire, which 
 
ROMANTICISM 251 
 
 attempted to continue the dream of Grégoire and 
 the Christians of 793, and reconcile the Catholic 
 faith with the democratic revolution. The move- 
 ment was condemned at Rome; Lamennais left 
 the Church and Lacordaire devoted the remainder 
 of his life to preaching missions and corresponding 
 with his numerous converts. 
 
 In England the rage for ruins and the romances 
 of Sir Walter Scott penetrated even to the Estab- 
 
 lished Church. We have had no occasion to men- 
 tion that body since its final establishment by 
 Queen Elizabeth in 1559. Its claim to be, at least 
 a schismatic, and at most, a perfected branch of 
 the Catholic Church, is our only reason for dis- 
 cussing it finally here. By 1833 when the Oxford 
 Movement commenced it had become a thoroughly 
 Protestantized body. Its single surviving link with 
 the Catholic past—the Apostolic Succession of 
 properly consecrated bishops and priests—was 
 scarcely taken very seriously by the portly indi- 
 viduals in magpies and lawn sleeves who were 
 the bishops of the Establishment. In short, the 
 Church of England seemed to be the net result of 
 revolution and compromise; of the necessities of 
 the State; of the peculiar position and tempera- 
 ment of the Virgin Queen. But to Newman and 
 Pusey, founders of the Oxford Movement, it was 
 something very different. It was, to borrow the 
 vocabulary of Mr. Strachey, . . . “a transcendent 
 
252 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 manifestation of divine power floating down 
 through the ages; a consecrated priesthood stretch- 
 ing back, through the mystic laying on of hands, 
 to the very Godhead; a whole universe of beings 
 brought into communion with the Eternal by means 
 of wafers.” This supernatural and truly Catholic 
 organization, declared the High Church school, 
 had, in the course of time, become enslaved by the 
 civil power, and profoundly withered and corroded 
 by the Protestant spirit. It was the plain duty of 
 Newman and Keble and other bright young men to 
 re-catholicize the English Church, if need be, 
 against its own will; the ultimate result would 
 satisfy at once the Lord and John Bull, and the 
 great shibboleth of that sainted sovereign, Henry 
 VIII, would be realized: Catholicism without 
 Popery. 
 
 This, to the best of my knowledge, is the High 
 Church or Anglo-Catholic theory. It has always 
 met with considerable opposition from the large 
 number of Episcopalians on both continents who 
 regard themselves as Protestants and perversely 
 wish to remain so. Nevertheless, in the course of 
 time, the High Church faction has gradually at- 
 tained an equal, almost a majoritarian, position 
 in the teeth of their unwilling brethren. It has 
 restored one by one various practices of the old 
 faith, such as auricular confession, prayers for the 
 dead, a divine service which, thanks to the restora- 
 
 ) 
 
ROMANTICISM 253 
 
 tion of Catholic ceremonial, is practically the Mass 
 in English, and, finally, the monastic life, repre- 
 sented in this country by the Cowley Fathers, the 
 Order of the Holy Cross and by several communi- 
 ties of nuns. In England, at least, it has done good 
 work among the city poor by palliating their drab 
 existence with a romantic and full-blooded religion 
 very superior to the blankets-and-soup nullity of 
 official Anglicanism. 
 
 After all, it is delightful to consider oneself in 
 full communion with Ambrose and Augustin, Saint 
 Louis and Francis of Assisi, and at the same time 
 to sniff at the pontifical figure whom all these 
 worthies regarded as Christ’s vicegerent on earth 
 The Anglo-Catholics, almost alone among Chris- 
 tian bodies since the Reformation, have been en- 
 abled, by historical accident and the force of their 
 own theory, to eat their cake and have it too. 
 
CHAPTER XXIV 
 ULTRAMONTANISM 
 
 THE opinion that religion of some positive sort 
 is the best guarantee of social order was quite pop- © 
 ular in government circles during the general re- 
 action which succeeded the fall of Napoleon. Even 
 the hybrid coalition which overthrew him was 
 unwillingly persuaded by the Czar of Russia to call 
 itself the Holy Alliance (1815-1830). The “big 
 four” among the powers, only one of whom, Aus- 
 tria, was Catholic, restored to Pius VII Rome and 
 the Papal State which Bonaparte in one of his 
 numerous squabbles with that pontiff had taken 
 away. Orthodox Russia, Lutheran Prussia and 
 Low Church England regarded, this restoration 
 with approval. Better that Antichrist should reign 
 over the Seven Hills than the spirit of Ninety-three. 
 It is due in part to this first and remarkable out- 
 burst of Christian pragmatism even among non- 
 Catholic powers that the Roman Catholic hierarchy 
 was once more triumphantly restored in Victorian 
 England. 
 
 Ever since the religious settlement by Queen 
 
 Elizabeth in 1559 the English Catholics had suf- 
 254 
 
ULTRAMONTANISM 255 
 
 fered from the gravest disabilities. To be sure 
 the more inhuman Penal Laws had become a com- 
 plete dead letter since the seventeenth century, 
 but before 1828 Catholics were still deprived of 
 English citizenship. In that year and the following 
 they were given the right to vote and to hold 
 office. Toward the middle of the century, the 
 head of the Catholic body, a bulky and genial prel- 
 ate, Cardinal Wiseman, erroneously supposed to 
 have inspired Browning’s “Bishop Bloughram,” 
 acting on orders from Rome, divided the English 
 map into dioceses which, to avoid a postal confusion 
 with those of the Establishment, were given new 
 names. This unexpected action on the part of the 
 Papal See did not pass unremarked, either by the 
 English government or the country at large. Queen 
 Victoria uttered, for the twentieth time, the words: 
 “Am I not Queen of England?” while Mr. Glad- 
 stone, then rising in fame, displayed his most poly- 
 syllabic rhetoric in denouncing the evils of ‘“Vati- 
 canism” and “Roman aggressions.” But for all 
 that, the Catholic hierarchy, fortified by some 
 notable conversions at that time from the Anglican 
 fold, became again a visible and recognized fact in 
 English social and religious life. 
 
 In the meanwhile, the States of the Church in 
 Italy were in a rather bad way. Brigandage, petty 
 tyranny and bad sanitation flourished to a strik- 
 ingly inappropriate degree in the patrimony of 
 
256 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 Saint Peter, and on the death of the reigning occu- 
 pant, Gregory XVI in 1846 it was reckoned that 
 there were some 2,000 Romans, either in exile or 
 in prison. 
 
 Gregory XVI was succeeded by one of the young- 
 est of his cardinals, a man of amiable disposition 
 and liberal sympathies, who ascended the papal 
 throne as Pius IX. For a moment the Papacy 
 seemed destined to a new era the like of which 
 had not been known since the early medieval days 
 of Alexander III and the patriotic Lombard league 
 against the German Cesar. The new Pope at once 
 opened the doors of the prisons, issued a liberal 
 constitution to his states, and there were even 
 rumors abroad that he intended to head an Italian 
 confederation to throw off the detested Austrian 
 yoke of Metternich and Francis Joseph. Italy, as 
 everyone knows, had been a “geographical expres- 
 sion” in the beak of the Austrian eagle ever since 
 the fall of Napoleon. Never did the double rdéle 
 of the Papacy afflict its possessor with a crueler 
 embarrassment. As an Italian prince and a liberal, 
 Pio Nono doubtless disliked the Austrian suprem- 
 acy over his native country, but was he not also 
 the father of all Catholics, and was not Austria the 
 foremost Catholic power left in this distracted 
 world? ‘To make war on her would then be tanta- 
 mount to abdicating the international character of 
 the Papacy which is, in the long run, its greatest 
 
ULTRAMONTANISM 257 
 
 strength. Accordingly he hesitated to act, and his _ 
 hesitation was fatal to his popularity. The Ro- © 
 mans, imbued with the spirit of Mazzini and 
 “voung Italy” revolted in 48, and the Pope was 
 forced to flee to Geta, where he placed himself 
 under the protection of his edifying friend, King 
 Bomba of Naples. In the meantime the French 
 Prince-President, Louis Napoleon, who had his rea- 
 sons for wishing to please the French Catholics, 
 decided to intervene in the Pope’s favor. Two 
 years later Pio Nono returned to Rome, a sadder 
 and a wiser man, escorted by French and Austrian 
 bayonets. All his early liberalism had been shaken 
 out of him by his harrowing experience. In 1867 
 Victor Emmanuel, King of Sardinia and Piedmont, 
 who had replaced the Pope as the leader of a unified 
 and revolutionary Italy, was master of the penin- 
 sula, except for the Papal States where the Pope 
 still reigned, less, as Mr. Strachey puts it, by the 
 grace of God than by the grace of Napoleon III. 
 This was the Pope’s political situation on the 
 eve of the Vatican Council which gave us the 
 formal declaration of Papal Infallibility. In pro- 
 portion as his temporal power waned, the more this 
 mystic and authoritative old man desired to rule as 
 absolutely as possible over the wills and consciences 
 of men. The great need of the times, in the opin- 
 ion of the ruling classes at least, was, as I have sug- 
 gested above, authority, and the latter was most 
 
258 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 likely to strike the imaginations of the faithful 
 ‘when embodied vividly in the person of the Pope. 
 ~ Papal Infallibility was by no means a new idea, 
 but it was a new dogma; in other words, something 
 that was hitherto a pious opinion received the char- 
 acter of a revealed truth which it would be a sin 
 for any Catholic to question. In any case, the 
 Papacy was not in the least afraid of new ideas so 
 long as the latter redounded to its own spiritual 
 prestige. John Henry Newman, a convert from 
 subtle Oxford, had shown the “Ultramontanes” 
 as the party of Infallibility was called, the better 
 way. In his Essay on the Development of Chris- 
 tian Doctrine (1845) he introduced the suggestive 
 idea that the Catholic faith was not revealed in 
 its entirety once and for all by its divine Founder, 
 nor by the Apostles and Doctors who succeeded 
 Him. Many things might, as it were, have been 
 left to the free wills of the faithful to work out for 
 themselves, and among these might there not be 
 that bright hidden jewel in the triple crown—Infal- 
 libility. Was not this doctrine obviously implied 
 when Christ enjoined the first pope to “feed his 
 sheep” and to “‘strengthen his brethren.” It might 
 indeed be so, and yet—. Even Newman doubted 
 and drew back, somewhat aghast at the applica- 
 tion of his theories in the Italian hands of Pio 
 Nono and the Ultramontanes. He was as alarmed 
 at the unwelcome success of “doctrinal develop- 
 
ULTRAMONTANISM 259 
 
 ment” at Rome as the late Mr. Wilson might 
 have been had he lived to have seen the 
 progress of his doctrine of the rights of small 
 minorities in the Arabian desert and in Egypt. 
 Moreover, the doctrine of development had a 
 double edge and could cut in two ways. Through 
 the enticing door opened by Newman, Papal In- 
 fallibility walked in, and the Modernists, headed 
 by M. Loisy, in a very short time walked out. 
 
 At this point I cannot resist quoting from Mr. 
 Strachey who has written wittily upon this crisis 
 in the Church’s affairs: 
 
 “Rome was still the capital of the Papal State; 
 she was not yet the capital of Italy. The last 
 hour of this strange dominion had almost struck. 
 As if she knew her doom was upon her the Eternal 
 City arrayed herself to meet it in all her glory. 
 The whole world seemed to be gathered together 
 within her walls. Her streets were filled with 
 crowned heads and Princes of the Church, great 
 ladies and great theologians, artists and friars, dip- 
 lomats and newspaper reporters. Seven thousand 
 bishops were there from all the corners of Chris- 
 tendom, and in all the varieties of ecclesiastical 
 magnificence, in falling lace and sweeping purple 
 and flowing violet veils. Cardinals passed, hatted 
 and robed, in their enormous carriages of state 
 like mysterious painted idols. Then there was a 
 sudden hush; the crowd grew thicker and expecta- 
 
260 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 tion filled the air. Yes! It was he! He was com- 
 ing! The Holy Father! But first there appeared, 
 mounted on a white mule and clothed in a magenta 
 mantle, a grave dignitary bearing aloft a silver 
 cross. The golden coach followed, drawn by six 
 horses gorgeously caparisoned, and within the 
 smiling white-haired Pio Nono scattering his bene- 
 dictions, while the multitude fell on its knees like 
 one man. Such were the daily spectacles of col- 
 ored pomp and of antique solemnity which dazzled 
 the onlooker into a happy forgetfulness of the re- 
 verse side of the Papal dispensation—the nauseat- 
 ing filth of the highways, the cattle stabled in the 
 palaces of the great, and the fever flitting through 
 the ghastly tenements of the poor.” * 
 
 The Vatican Council, of which all this was the 
 introduction, opened in December, 1869, and 
 lasted eight months. | It was the first general Coun- 
 eil of the Church to be held since that of Trent, 
 which had opened the Counter Reform of the six- 
 teenth century. Among other minor questions, the 
 following canon of which I shall have more to say, 
 was laid down by the fathers of 1870: “If any 
 one say that it is not possible by the natural light 
 of human reason to acquire a certain knowledge of 
 the One and True God let him be anathema.” 
 ‘Toward the end of the deliberations regarding In- 
 fallibility, the French government of Napoleon 
 
 * Lytton Strachey: Essay on Cardinal Manning. 
 
ULTRAMONTANISM 261 
 
 III, which disliked the impending definition, de- 
 cided to intervene, but in view of the Franco- 
 Prussian War, which was also impending, the Pope 
 saw that he could afford to laugh at the French 
 government. On July 18, 1870, the Council met 
 for the last time, and Papal Infallibility was de- 
 fined. 
 
 The pope, it was decided, was only infallible 
 when he spoke ex cathedra upon a question relating 
 to faith or morals. Thus His Holiness was by defi- 
 nition precluded from stating infallibly that the 
 weather is cool when it is indubitably eighty in the 
 shade. His infallibility does not extend to matters 
 of fact, only to matters of speculation among which 
 religion stands first. The great obscurity in the 
 definition lies in the precise circumstances under 
 which the Pope speaks ex cathedra. ‘The general 
 impression among Catholics seems to be that he 
 so speaks when surrounded by a general Council 
 similar to the one of 1870 which accepted him as 
 infallible. If this be the case there is little that is 
 revolutionary in Infallibility. 
 
 The next day war was declared between France 
 and Prussia, and a few months later the troops of 
 Victor Emmanuel possessed Rome; the contempo- 
 rary history of Italy as a national power com- 
 menced. The Pope refused to recognize the legal- 
 ity of the new government which deprived him of 
 a temporal power dating from the dark ages. , The 
 
262 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 Italian government offered him every possible 
 guarantee, but up to date the two powers in Italy 
 are Officially unreconciled, and a certain type of 
 Catholic still likes to describe the Pope as “the 
 prisoner of the Vatican.” 
 
CHAPTER XXV 
 MODERNISM 
 
 Pio Nono was succeeded by a tolerant pope, 
 Leo XIII (1878-1903). Ever since the time of 
 Goethe and Kant, the intellectual leadership of 
 Europe had been passing into the hands of the 
 Germans with their somewhat too pronounced pas- 
 sion for literal exactitude, and this transformation 
 of ideas, directed by the German school, was re- 
 flected in the Catholic Church through the move- 
 ment loosely called Modernism. On one side it 
 was an effort to apply the latest standards of 
 scientific and historical criticism to Christian ori- 
 gins; on another side, it was a vague, up-to-date 
 mysticism, tending to exaggerate Newman’s doc- 
 trinal development, and to bring the Catholic faith 
 more in alignment with the shifting spirit of the 
 age. 
 
 In the second year of his pontificate, Leo XIII 
 elevated Newman to the cardinalate, thus seeming 
 to set a seal of sanction upon the innocent and 
 orthodox begetter of the Modernist spirit. At 
 
 the same time there was a rumor that the Pope 
 263 
 
264 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 was on the eve of reconciliation with the Italian 
 government and the House of Savoy, but such 
 rumors were totally unfounded. Leo XIII was 
 quite as convinced as his medieval predecessors 
 that the lost temporal power was essential to the 
 Papacy’s moral independence, and his revolution- 
 ary tendencies were directed upon countries other 
 than his own. The Triple Alliance of Italy with 
 Germany and Austria, coupled with the influence 
 of his Secretary of State, Cardinal Rampolla, who 
 was pro-French, turned the Pope’s attention upon 
 the third Republic, once the ancient kingdom of 
 Clovis and Charlemagne, “‘the eldest daughter of 
 the Roman Church.” He enjoined the French 
 Catholics to abandon their besotted longings after 
 a, lost Bourbon monarchy, and to rally to Republi- 
 can institutions. His encyclicals became increas- 
 ingly more startling for a Pope, their generally lib- 
 eral color being ultimately streaked with a pale 
 tinge of contemporary Socialism. Partly under his 
 influence, a Christian Socialist movement sprang 
 up even in non-Catholic countries like Germany 
 and England, where in the latter instance it found 
 harborage under the wing of the High Church party 
 which was being discouraged and even persecuted 
 by the government. The Populists of Italy and the 
 Centrist party of the German Republic are the off- 
 spring of this movement. 
 
 Leo’s pacific policy towards France was ruined 
 
MODERNISM 265 
 
 as usual by the behavior of a large proportion of 
 the French Catholics. In December, 1894, an 
 Israelite officer, Major Dreyfus, was condemned for 
 treason. Ever since the disaster of 1870, the 
 Army had been the great pet of all classes in the 
 nation; and it was strangely felt that to revise 
 the Dreyfus trial, on the basis of fresh evidence 
 establishing his innocence, would somehow dis- 
 credit the army. It is perhaps an exaggeration 
 to say that the entire French Church threw its 
 influence on the scale of injustice, but if this 
 had really been the case, it would have been 
 wholly in keeping with the Gallican tradition. One 
 religious order, the Assumptionists, a gang of com- 
 mercial monks, reeking with the spirit of the 
 League, did distinguish itself abominably in the 
 campaign to prevent a second trial. The upshot 
 of what was really a reign of terror and almost a 
 civil war, was that Dreyfus was pardoned by Presi- 
 dent Loubet, and regained his rank in 1906. But 
 the behavior of a sufficiently numerous and odi- 
 ously noisy body of French Catholics reacted dis- 
 astrously upon the Church itself. In 1903-1905 
 under the Radical ministry of M. Combes, a law 
 was passed through the Chambers separating the 
 Church from the State and putting an end to 
 Bonaparte’s Concordat of 1802. Another law 
 expelled from France all the contemplative orders 
 and several active ones. Thus the Benedictines, 
 
266 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 for instance, who had done so much for what little 
 intellectual activity and liturgical solemnity exists 
 in the French Church paid the penalty for the 
 “Liguers et moines d’affaires” who had disgraced 
 their religion during the late affair. 
 
 Leo XIII was spared the results of his concilia- 
 tory attitude toward the French government. Dy- 
 ing in 1903, he was succeeded by Cardinal Sarto, 
 a man of humble origin and saintly life, who had 
 been Patriarch of Venice and who became Pius X. 
 Saints are occasionally more dangerous for the 
 peace of the Church than are politicians. — 
 
 In his noble simplicity, his ardor for Catholicism 
 as a religious force and not merely as a system of 
 ecclesiastical politics this Pope was truly excep- 
 tional, and seems to belong to some more apostolic 
 period of history than the era which Léon Daudet 
 has named “the stupid nineteenth century.” The 
 pronouncements of his predecessor had startled 
 the world because of their clever political coloring; 
 those of Pius & displeased the modern Catholic 
 because they were intrinsically religious, and re- 
 ligious, moreover, in the most supernatural sense. 
 They were not a success. The one on the Commun- 
 ion of children, ordaining that they first receive the 
 Eucharist at the age of seven, caused a truculent 
 flutter of actual disloyalty in France. There the 
 curés and bishops had learned to trade on the day 
 
MODERNISM 267 
 
 of the “first Communion” like so many janitors on 
 the day of New Year’s. First Communion was pri- 
 marily a social event for the adolescent, his family 
 and his pastors, involving toilettes, presents, 
 candles, cakes, and no end of ribbons and white 
 icing. The Pope’s encyclical, which injured so 
 much profitable commerce, was very ill received in 
 a country where every grocery store atheist sends 
 his children to the Sacraments twice in a lifetime 
 because it is an expected social gesture. And the 
 effect of the Pope’s moto proprio on the ignominy 
 and reform of Church music has had an even more 
 edifying history. This encyclical reads admirably 
 on paper. There were to be no more comic opera 
 tunes in the sanctuary, no more bellowing of ath- 
 letic basses and female sopranos in a state of heat, 
 no more blasphemies to Almighty God proffered 
 through one of the chief of His arts. But if the 
 reader wishes to know how the encyclical was loy- 
 ally obeyed he has only to attend divine service in 
 almost any Irish-American church of this country 
 among a people which piques itself on its devotion 
 to the cause of religion and the Holy Father. 
 Pius X will be remembered as the pope who de- 
 stroyed Modernism, especially in France. There 
 the leader of the movement, in its rationalist as- 
 pect, was the Abbé Loisy, professor of exegesis at 
 the Catholic Institute at Paris. Strongly influenced 
 
268 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 by Loisy, a well-known prelate, Monsignor d’Hulst 
 published in 1892 a sensible article in which he pro- 
 posed to throw over the infallibility of the Old 
 Testament in scientific and historical matters. Leo 
 XIII, who was still reigning, was not the man to 
 trouble the Church for the sake of the Old Testa- 
 ment, and hence paid no attention either to Loisy 
 or to Mgr. d’Hulst. His successor, however, felt in 
 duty bound to crush the whole Modernist move- 
 ment so far as encyclicals could do it. Loisy had 
 just issued his Church and the Gospel, and a perusal 
 of its devastating contents indicated that nothing 
 from the Person of an historic Christ onward was 
 safe from this most uncompromising of ecclesiasti- 
 cal scholars. In the first chapter of this book, I 
 have tried to indicate why the Modernists were, 
 in my opinion, wrong even if the Pope were not al- 
 together right. As for M. Loisy, he was excom- 
 municated, and has continued to teach tranquilly, 
 drawing large crowds to his lectures at the Collége 
 de France. 
 
 In condemning the movement which attempted 
 to marry the Catholic faith to the fickle Goddess of 
 Reason, the Church, it might be thought, would 
 have wisely relied upon a philosophy of Catholicism 
 based upon faith and faith alone. But such has 
 not been the case. In 1834 Gregory XVI had 
 condemned, with a zeal equal to that of Pius X, 
 the so called ‘‘Fideist” philosophy of an Alsatian 
 
MODERNISM 269 
 
 abbé, Baudain, according to which reason is power- 
 less to establish truth, which may be apprehended 
 by faith alone. Nothing could be more authenti- 
 cally Catholic; indeed, Fideism is, stated in philo- 
 sophic terms, the faith of the multitude, but it 
 swore too much with the spirit of the nineteenth 
 century, the age of Huxley and Matthew Arnold 
 which had made‘a fetich of reason, and condemned 
 it was. The fathers of the Vatican Council in 1870 
 sustained the condemnation by pronouncing anath- 
 ema upon him who said that a certain knowledge 
 of God could not be obtained by reason alone. In 
 Short, as Mr. Strachey observes, it became an ar- 
 ticle of faith that faith is no longer necessary. 
 Time may perhaps show that in condemning the 
 generous human instinct upon which her whole sys- 
 tem is based, the Church has shown herself impru- 
 dent. Reinach has stated that historical criticism 
 of origins has become such a positive science that 
 the Fideists are wrong to dispense with it. Rei- 
 nach is a great deal too sure. Historical criticism 
 is, as yet, so little positive that it is powerless to 
 prove so much as the existence of an historic 
 Christ, let alone to disprove it. Historical criti- 
 cism is similar to that other Goddess of Reason 
 who was never the same two days in succession, 
 who at first the wife of a professor, was replaced 
 on the altar of Notre Dame by an actress. The 
 
270 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 Church, in condemning the only possible philos- 
 ophy of belief, and in continuing to coquette with 
 the will-of-the-wisp called the human reason, might 
 appear to be borrowing the chief weakness of the 
 Modernism which she very rightly condemned, 
 
CHAPTER XXVI 
 1914 
 
 “SOON,” says a character in one of Compton 
 Mackenzie’s novels, “‘will come a great war, and 
 everybody will discover it has come either because 
 people are Christians, or because they are not 
 Christians. . . . The reason why the world is so 
 critical of Christianity after nineteen hundred 
 years is that they have expected it from the start 
 to be a social panacea. God has only offered 
 to the individual the opportunity to perfect him- 
 Selfrals.” 
 
 When the war came, it came without warning 
 except for the relatively few on either side who 
 worked for it and prepared it. For the great mass 
 of people, who had the governments they deserved, 
 it seemed like a cruel and incomprehensible over- 
 throw of the universal worship of common sense 
 without God which dominated the nineteenth cen- 
 tury. The war was unchained, as everyone knows, 
 by a great Catholic prince, His Apostolic Majesty, 
 Francis Joseph of Austria. Apart from this acci- 
 dent, it had no real religious ramifications. Catho- 
 
 lic Austria was allied to Protestant Germany, and 
 271 
 
272 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 to the Ottoman Empire, which was not even Chris- 
 tian. Atheist France, as her enemies liked to call 
 her, was joined with Protestant England and with 
 Russia, still dominated by the decadent Orthodox 
 Church. Pius X made one desperate attempt to 
 avert the struggle through an appeal to Francis 
 Joseph, but his nuncio at Vienna was not even ad- 
 mitted to that cretinous old despot. Then hav- 
 ing witnessed the violation of Belgium and the 
 first raid on Paris by the German army the Pope 
 died and was gathered to his fathers. 
 
 His successor, Benedict XV, immediately buried 
 himself in an impenetrable neutrality. Under the 
 circumstances it is difficult to see what else he could 
 have done. The only way he could have stopped 
 the war, or at any rate demoralized it, was to have 
 commanded all Catholics on either side to lay 
 down their arms, and the modern Papacy is not 
 quite courageous enough for that. Besides, the 
 Papacy has never been officially “pacifist”; it has 
 indulged in too many minor wars of its own to 
 takesoevangelicastand. The Popecontented him- 
 self with the relief of prisoners, of the deported, 
 etc., but he made no public pronouncement upon 
 the greatest moral disaster of modern times, until 
 the winter of 1916 when he unexpectedly for- 
 warded proposals of peace to that other alleged 
 “pontiff of humanity,” the late President Wilson. 
 The latter, who was on the eve of launching his 
 
1914 273 
 
 own nation upon the sea of blood, politely re- 
 jected the proposals, and thereafter the Pope pre- 
 served a profound and prudent silence. The poor 
 man was severely criticized, as it was, especially by 
 adherents of the Entente, first for keeping silent, 
 and then for having spoken in favor of religion and 
 reason. Even Protestants passionately and quite 
 illogically adjured him to act as umpire always on 
 the condition that he referee on their side. Bene- 
 dict XV was, to all appearances, a suave and 
 kindly personage, but scarcely any pope, above all 
 one reigning in such a crisis, has bequeathed of him- 
 self so negative an impression. 
 
 It should have been evident to anyone that 
 Christianity, in any comprehensible sense of the 
 word, had nothing to do with the war, and that 
 those on the side of the Entente who posed as 
 paladins of civilization and the heritage of the 
 Middle Ages against a pagan barbarism were 
 either carried away by martial hysteria or were 
 simply hypocrites. All authentic Christianity had 
 been superseded by a very different passion—-that 
 of nationalism or patriotism. ‘The earth was a 
 babel of clamoring churches, all calling upon the 
 one true God, and adjuring their adherents to kill 
 as many of the enemy as possible in His name. As 
 for the heavens they were silent. No one actually 
 knows, for instance, what Christ taught upon the 
 question of war. What he indubitably said was: 
 
274 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 “Love one another.” If the quintessence of love 
 lies in slaying, blinding, disemboweling one’s polit- 
 ical enemies, then one can still be a Christian and 
 wage war. If not...? The infallible pope 
 might well have pronounced upon this particular 
 matter of faith and morals, but he refrained. 
 
 What is evident is that the more obviously na- 
 tional or Protestant churches made, in the per- 
 son of many notable representatives, obscene spec- 
 tacles of themselves from 1914 to 1918, sparing 
 no effort, on either continent, to render their reli- 
 gion as detestable as possible to an already skepti- 
 cal generation. If Christianity, as a whole, has 
 not been infinitely discredited as a result of the 
 world war it is not the fault of the churches. That 
 of Rome which “blew neither hot nor cold,” has, 
 on the whole come out of the torment best, for the 
 sin of Laodicea is not in the same category with 
 the sin of Judas. 
 
 After all, it is too early to write with any degree 
 of justice about the war. To do that one must 
 have acquired a philosophy. Until then one re- 
 mains in the unfortunate position of the Church 
 which, upon this point, had not yet made up its 
 mind, 
 
CHAPTER XXVII 
 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN AMERICA 
 
 DurING the seventeenth century, Jesuit and 
 Franciscan missions operated in Lower California 
 and along the Great Lakes. But the first Catholic 
 adventure in the New World organized by Eng- 
 lishmen was Maryland, planned by Sir George 
 Calvert, first Lord Baltimore, and executed by 
 his son, Cecil, the second lord. In 1634 they 
 chartered from Charles I a vast estate lying south 
 of the Potomac to its mouth, and established there 
 a small settlement, which they named Saint Mary’s 
 in honor of the Blessed Virgin. The object of the 
 colony was to establish, at a prudent distance from 
 Puritan New England, and in the most temperate 
 and delightful zone of climate along the seaboard, 
 a place where Catholics could dwell in peace from 
 any reénforcement of the penal laws which might 
 threaten them at home. Malignant persecution 
 had taught the followers of Lord Baltimore the 
 beauty of tolerance; accordingly, religious tolera- 
 tion for all Christians was one of the foundation- 
 stones of the colony. ‘Baltimore,’ says Bancroft, 
 
 “was the first to make religious freedom the basis 
 275 
 
276 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 of the State.” The province of Maryland in those 
 early days must have enframed an Arcadian exist- 
 ence for men of good will, environed as it was by 
 an impenetrable morass of militant Calvinism 
 and boundless savagery. Catholics cannot but 
 think with tenderness of that simplified and pure 
 existence before the arrival of the industrial revo- 
 lution, together with factories, teeming towns, 
 commercial strife, noise and all the other beauties 
 of modern civilization. It was at once a copy and 
 an improvement of the old, merry, pre-Reforma- 
 tion England. Once more in an English-speaking 
 land, the burning lights of the old Church streamed 
 out upon the primeval night on the great festivals 
 of the Christian year; and once again the Angelus 
 sounded shyly at the head of the little harbor, and 
 was heard far out upon the bluish waters. Their 
 unhappy coreligionists in England, plagued by 
 Puritan revolution, Puritan rule, Popish panics 
 and no-Popery riots, must have poignantly envied 
 the Maryland Catholics in their patrimony— 
 Deeper than any yearnings after thee 
 Seemed those far-rolling, westward-smiling seas. 
 The American Revolution, separating the colo- 
 nial churches abruptly from the foundations in 
 the old country, produced the American Catholic 
 hierarchy. In order to cause the American Cath- 
 olics no embarrassment in their relations with the 
 new government, the Holy See at once appointed 
 
CATHOLIC CHURCH IN AMERICA 277 
 
 the Reverend John Carroll of Maryland head of 
 the community in the United States, first as pre- 
 fect apostolic, then as Archbishop of Maryland, 
 the first metropolitan See. In 1820, there were 
 only 244,500 Catholics in these States; in 1906, 
 there were 12,079,142. The main source of this 
 enormous growth was emigration from Ireland, 
 Germany, Canada, Bohemia and Poland. Racial, 
 as much as religious, reasons produced the most 
 organized opposition to Catholicism shortly before 
 the Civil War in the ephemeral “Know Nothing” 
 party, which, in this particular aspect, may be re- 
 garded as the ancestor of the Ku-Klux-Klan. The 
 Papacy, ever since 1892, has had an official repre- 
 sentative at Washington called the Apostolic 
 Delegate, usually with the rank of archbishop. 
 The late Cardinal Gibbons was correct in stat- 
 ing that American Catholicism has never produced 
 any important heresies or schisms; it did, however, 
 furnish one original movement which was suffi- 
 ciently important to be condemned mildly at 
 Rome. This was the movement called ‘“Amer- 
 icanism,” “a characteristic glorification of good 
 works, somewhat at the expense of faith,” as well 
 as a reaction against too exclusively foreign influ- 
 ences in the American Church. Certain French 
 clerics, with their customary talent for get- 
 ting the world into trouble, called pontifical 
 attention to ““Americanism” and the doings of the 
 
278 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 “Vankee Church” in general, and arbitrarily con- 
 nected with them the name of one, Father Hecker, 
 an American priest, well known in France. I recall 
 the title of one of these anti-American tracts, writ- 
 ten with true Gallic gall: Father Hecker: Should 
 he be called a Saini? 
 
 Isaac Thomas Hecker was of German origin, 
 and had originally been connected with the famous 
 Brook Farm colony at Concord, Massachusetts, 
 which numbered among its associates Thoreau, 
 Bronson Alcott, and for a time, Emerson. Unable 
 to find any ultimate consolation in the mysteries 
 of New England transcendentalism, Hecker be- 
 came a Catholic, and entered the Redemptorist 
 Order, founded in the eighteenth century by Saint 
 Alphonsus Liguori. His dream was the conver- 
 sion of his adopted country, by American methods, 
 by priests imbued with the American spirit, and 
 unable to effect this dream among the Redemptor- 
 ists who were then largely German, he left them 
 and founded, with papal permission, the Congre- 
 gation of Saint Paul the Apostle, popularly known 
 as the Paulist Fathers. With the aid of the best 
 ecclesiastical architects he could find at that date 
 he erected an imposing church in what was then 
 the hinterland of New York City, above “Hell’s 
 Kitchen,” near the Hudson waterfront. 
 
 The missionary foundations of the new Order 
 spread from ocean to ocean. Their object was two- 
 
CATHOLIC CHURCH IN AMERICA 279 
 
 fold: the conversion of non-Catholic America by 
 the golden arts of persuasion and example, and 
 the reform of public devotion and Church music. 
 Protestants have always vaguely respected and 
 often envied the liturgical splendors of the Cath- 
 olic Church at its best; hence the Paulists were 
 wise even from the proselyting standpoint, to con- 
 centrate upon producing that best in their public 
 ceremonies. It is certain that many people, Catho- 
 lic and non-Catholic, recall regretfully the great 
 days at the New York church under the late Su- 
 perior General, Father Hughes, with their noble 
 services and unadulterated chant. Sic transit 
 Bloria. .° oe." 
 
 During the ugly period of reaction which suc- 
 ceeded the war, we began to hear about the 
 Ku-Klux-Klan, formed to defend American institu- 
 tions against alien influences, by which its organ- 
 izers largely meant Catholic ones. It is difficult to 
 say why one should take seriously an organization 
 bearing such a name, let alone such insignia. 
 That many American Catholics have so taken it, 
 is only another proof of the formidable absence of 
 humor which afflicts the Kelt wherever his religion 
 is concerned. Do these people really imagine that 
 a divinely founded religion nineteen centuries old, 
 the one faith of the west for fourteen hundred 
 
 * See the article on the Paulist church of New York by Wilfred 
 Anthony in Christian Art, June, 1908. 
 
280 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 years, the proud, everlasting Church of countless 
 confessors, apostles, martyrs and holy kings, can 
 be shaken a hair’s breadth by the grotesque agi- 
 tation of a parcel of yokels, rigged out in false 
 noses and bed quilts, and calling themselves 
 Kleagles and Grand Dragons? The Klan would 
 not even merit mention in a serious history were 
 it not that its adherents claim to be defending 
 certain vague American liberties against the 
 Roman menace, whatever that means. No one be- 
 lieves less in clerical interference with liberty than 
 the writer, but one finds that when “the Roman 
 menace” concerns itself with an economic liberty, 
 like birth control, which is none of its business, 
 or with the liberty of literature, which is still less, 
 there is no complaint from the Klan or from any 
 other Protestants of similar mentality? It is only 
 when Catholics manifest the tendency to educate 
 their children in Catholic schools that the Klan 
 emits a loud shriek, followed by cacklings ad 
 nauseum about the sacredness of American insti- 
 tutions and the American dislike of a sacerdotal 
 religion, as if the American’s opinion mattered 
 tuppence on such a point. Now if there is one 
 liberty which may be considered American, and 
 even fundamental, it is the right of parents to edu- 
 cate their children as they see fit. We are not a 
 country so commodious as Sparta or so rash as 
 Russia that we can venture to take education clean 
 
CATHOLIC CHURCH IN AMERICA 281 
 
 out of family hands. We have neither the space, 
 nor the equipment, nor above all the mentality, to 
 make such an experiment anything but a vast dis- 
 aster. If rich people have the right to send their 
 children to costly and useless schools where they 
 learn nothing but sports and social tone, poor 
 Catholics have a still more incontestable right to 
 send their boys and girls to places where they learn 
 something about God and His Truth. 
 
 Certain American Catholics try to vindicate 
 their political loyalty which is more than excellent 
 by an over-emphasis which sounds false and is usu- 
 ally unbecoming. There is no sense in being more 
 patriotic than the pope himself. There is no sense 
 in adopting upon a subject like war, for instance, a 
 language which would have revolted Julius II and 
 disgraced the Kaiser’s chaplains. Hark, for in- 
 stance, to the Rt. Rev. Thomas F. Duggan, Vicar- 
 General of the Diocese of Hartford, Connecticut: 
 
 “War is not un-Christian. Sometimes it is a 
 Christian duty laid upon us by God and man. It 
 is imposed upon us by the Lord, who is the Author 
 of human society, and by man who is the inter- 
 preter of the divine Will... .” 
 
 So ‘‘man” in the person of the Kaiser, the Tsar, 
 the Emperor Francis Joseph, ex-President Poin- 
 care and the late Mr. Wilson, is the interpreter of 
 the divine Will, and dissidents from this idea, 
 which would have shocked Luther, are charitably 
 
282 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 invited by Mgr. Duggan to betake themselves to 
 the nearest federal cell! The expression of this 
 rank Protestantism in the past, would, it is to be 
 feared, have delivered Mgr. Duggan, not to a fed- 
 eral cell, but to the tender mercies of the Inquisi- 
 tion which had a short way with sycophants. His 
 proper place, after all, is neither in a federal cell 
 nor in a heretic prison, and, above all, not in the 
 violet robe of a superior priest; his proper place is 
 in the Ku-Klux-Klan. Where a Church is in 
 decadence, there are the Kleagles gathered to- 
 gether, inside and out. When a representative of 
 the Catholic Church finds it necessary to beslaver 
 the civil government, and profane the name of God 
 in doing so, one can begin to measure the distance 
 between our time and the true Catholic age when 
 the Church withstood the civil power, and some- 
 times vanquished it, and always despised it. 
 
 And then there is something else. Is it the 
 complex sense of inferiority brought on by a long 
 misunderstanding and stupid hostility; is it the 
 “nersecution-mania” inherent in a nation like the 
 Irish, subjected to centuries of injustice, which 
 renders the average American Catholic so self-con- 
 sciously anxious to disassociate himself from every- 
 thing frowned on by hypocrites and smut-hounds? 
 Take the present crusade for “purity” in books 
 and the theater, for instance. What in the names 
 of Chaucer and Rabelais do American Catholics 
 
CATHOLIC CHURCH IN AMERICA 283 
 
 expect to gain by identifying themselves with 
 Censorship, White Lists and all the other current 
 imbecilities in this field? We all know what a 
 really good ‘‘Catholic” book is. It is something 
 one wouldn’t give a dog to worry, let alone a sen- 
 sible child to read. And the Dramatic Editor of 
 the Commonweal pontificates in his column week 
 after week, with the result that when a current 
 play has the slightest pretension to artistic merit, 
 it fails to pass Mr. Skinner’s inspection on the 
 ground that it would not be nice for his youngest 
 daughter (aet. 6), and that when a play is com- 
 pletely and abysmally idiotic, it is always guaran- 
 teed “clean,” whatever that means to a Catholic 
 journalist’s peculiar mind. Now I take Mr. 
 Skinner’s smugness to be very characteristic of the 
 Church in this country in questions of literature 
 and art. In a reaction from the perilous freedoms 
 of the past, which is half Irish, half puritan and 
 wholly uneducated, it is, at present, in the throes 
 of eunuch worship so far as these questions are 
 concerned. And I will allow myself to call the 
 attention of the adorers of impotence to the fact 
 that, in its age of health, the Church patronized 
 and protected every virile manifestation of art, 
 even when the latter bordered on what Mr. Skinner 
 would call the “unclean.”” Chaucer, who was a 
 great Catholic poet, composed lines and situations 
 which could not be recited or reproduced upon any 
 
284 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 American stage at the present time. Rabelais, who 
 has given his name to a certain type of literature, 
 was no Huguenot, let alone free-thinker; he was 
 a priest of the Catholic Church who said his Mass, 
 no doubt with piety, in his parish church at 
 Meudon. Even Petronius, they tell us, may have 
 been a canonized bishop of Bologna. Beccadelli, 
 whose adaptations of classic facetie would drive 
 a modern prelate with shame and sorrow to the 
 grave, dedicated them to a cardinal. ‘“Afneus 
 Silvius” wrote indecent comedies; he was also a 
 Pope, one of the better popes. In short, there was 
 a time when Catholic churchmen were also men. 
 I prefer not to say what a lot of them are now. 
 But in conclusion I will quote a sentence of a 
 Catholic writer, Louis Bertrand, author of a life of 
 Saint Augustin, which effectively sums up the pres- 
 ent American Catholic attitude toward the arts: 
 
 “T claim, without any compromise, the honor of 
 being a Catholic, but it enrages me to see that 
 under the cover of Catholicism, a silly prudery is 
 imposing upon us a literature for namby-pamby 
 little girls, an art without beauty, without man- 
 hood and without sincerity.” 
 
 I have stated what I believe to be a fact, that in 
 the arts the modern Catholic is largely non-pro- 
 ductive, and the reason why he is non-productive 
 is that his attitude toward the arts is one of timid- 
 
CATHOLIC CHURCH IN AMERICA 285 
 
 ity and obscurantism. It would be interesting to 
 analyze the reason for this condition. 
 
 The principal reason may be sought in the edu- 
 cation given to Catholics when they are children, 
 and the lessons of self-effacement inflicted upon 
 them when they are men. All this produces a con- 
 sciousness of inferiority, and a half-conscious in- 
 feriority is soon developed into a real one. 
 
 “You shall not read so-and-so,” says the priest 
 in the pulpit, or the fancy Catholic in his little 
 review,” he is dangerous. Avoid art galleries; they 
 are filled with nudities. Don’t follow this or that 
 scientific course; you will lose your faith. You 
 shall not exert your intelligence in politics; you 
 will be considered a bad American. You shall not. 
 mony Olt Sallanote try xs 
 
 Fear, inferiority, impotence. 
 
 As Huysmans once said, if this system is of a 
 surety insufficient to produce saints, it provides, 
 at any rate, a very fair manufactory of tame 
 geese. 
 
 The only trouble with the Catholic Church in 
 this country is that it is rather nervously attempt- 
 ing to be a department of the American Defense 
 Society or the Purity League. No one can read its 
 history without realizing that its true function in 
 this world is something very different. It is an 
 international and everlasting Church, lifted high 
 above our little systems and pruderies, com- 
 
286 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 pounded of cackle and conceit. And the tempta- 
 tion is strong to say to all these good people: 
 
 “Vou will long outlive the ‘Americanism’ of 
 flag flapping and boob-tickling and all the other 
 contemporary Babbitries. At present, you are 
 being assailed by something which cannot be dig- 
 nified by the name of intolerance, since it is merely 
 congenital imbecility waving a large American 
 flag. Don’t play its game or practice its methods. 
 Cultivate the deep Christian gayety of the ages 
 which is called a sense‘of humor. Don’t be bump- 
 tious about your religion; be proud of it, which 
 is very different, for one of the fruits of love is a 
 golden silence, and silence is the one unbearable 
 retort to fools.” 
 
UNTO THIS LAST 
 
 AND now what does it all mean? And why have 
 written, as objectively as possible, with more than 
 enough of what is called the critical spirit, the his- 
 tory of a church, of the Church? 
 
 Bernard Shaw was severely taken to task for tag- 
 ging his fine play about Joan of Arc with an epi- 
 logue, but an enlightened rereading of the epilogue 
 will convince one that he was justified in writing 
 one, and so, I trust, am I. I am concluding this 
 book on the eve of Christmas, the Christian birth- 
 day, and no reasonable person will object, if in a 
 book on Christianity there appear finally a little 
 Christian propaganda. Like Botticelli, who painted 
 a great picture introducing at the knees of the 
 Divine Infant a long concourse of shepherds, 
 saints, noble gentlemen and by-gone kings, I can- 
 not resist painting in a little of myself in the corner 
 of the canvas. 
 
 For I have tried, up to this point, to make my 
 book simply a picture, or rather a series of pic- 
 tures; to give away their whole case to the agnos- 
 tics from the start; to employ all their pet weapons 
 
 against myself; to state at the outset that the 
 287 
 
288 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 Church exhibits all the scars of human imperfec- 
 tions, violences and compromises; that Christ for 
 whose sake the Church exists cannot be proved 
 even to have lived historically; that nothing can 
 be proved; that the basic axiom of all religion is 
 faith, and nothing but faith. 
 
 Faith is only one panel in the triptych of the 
 evangelic virtues; the others are love and hope, and 
 the greatest of these is love. Without it there is 
 no happiness in this world, or the next. Happiness 
 is still as much the staple of what is to be de- 
 sired as it was in the days of Plato and Epicurus. 
 When we were young we did not consciously feel it 
 to be so; it was our natural element, like the air. 
 Family life, friendship, physical love, the zest for 
 existence itself, were so many delightful avenues 
 by which the soul went out to encounter its future. 
 But time passed; the days drew in about the soul, 
 and presently one became conscious that the admir- 
 able pleasures of this world were not enough; and 
 at last the whole being experienced, like a wound, 
 like a new and mysterious malady, the pang of 
 that disinheritance for which there is no name, 
 that loneliness in the midst of a multitude. There 
 was no recourse for the spirit in men and things 
 because the spirit was without love. Nothing is 
 easier than to feel this abomination of desolation 
 planing over scenes even of the most intense rev- 
 
 elry:— 
 
UNTO THIS LAST 289 
 
 And ah to know not while with friends I sit, 
 And while the purple joy is passed about, 
 Whether ’tis ampler day divinelier lit, 
 Or homeless night without. — 
 
 I can recall a “pagan” rout years ago in New 
 York City on Christmas Eve. Under galleries 
 groaning with the wit, the beauty and the intelli- 
 gence of Bohemia, whirled people in various stages 
 of alcoholic felicity, in the most fantastic and out- 
 rageous disguises imaginable, dancing, drinking, 
 making love, half-secreted from the fires of the 
 electricity and the eyes of the policemen. These 
 people seemed to represent the aggregate of what 
 America has contributed to the science of the good 
 life. Yet they were not witty nor good to look 
 on, nor certainly happy. As ‘‘the purple joy” was 
 more and more passed about, so were the uglier 
 women. Then a little Jew, dressed in a brown 
 gabardine and crowned with paper thorns, mounted 
 a platform and waved over the howling concourse 
 a large cardboard cross. “I am the Light of the 
 World,” he cried. . . . I left the hall and went up- 
 town. The air was exquisitely thin and cold; the 
 sky so overjeweled with stars that they seemed to 
 create a special radiance, a supernatural light over 
 the sleeping city. Near the river, the great church 
 of the Paulist Fathers stood open in the night, a 
 shout of treble beauty coming through its doors, 
 
290 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 and inside all sweet and garnished, illustrious with 
 lights, expectant of the coming Guest. The long 
 shining procession advanced up the aisle, odorous 
 with incense and balsam, the little choristers, chil- 
 dren of the street, were momentarily silent while 
 the men responded in the old carol: 
 
 God rest you, gentle children, 
 May nothing you affright ; 
 
 For Jesus Christ, our Saviour 
 Was born on Christmas night! 
 
 As the Mass proceeded, its every motion, its every 
 phrase seemed to illuminate the obscure distress in 
 which we are bound to be plunged when we try 
 to live without God, without love. “Renew thy- 
 self,’ cried the children’s voices in the Introit, 
 “Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee. 
 Why have the heathen raged together, and the 
 people invented inanity? ...” After the exulta- 
 tion of the Gloria when, in a storm of bells and 
 organs, the full choir proclaimed peace to men of 
 good will, the priest prayed aloud: 
 
 O, God who didst make this most sa- 
 cred night to shine forth with the glory 
 of Him Who ts the Light of the World, 
 grant that he who thus revealed to us has 
 made splendid our path on earth, may be 
 forever our joy and our light in heaven. 
 
UNTO THIS LAST 291 
 
 Then he took bread and wine, fruits of the kindly 
 earth, and having blessed them he said: 
 
 Because by the mystery of God made 
 flesh, a new light hath risen from Thy 
 Brightness to shine in the eyes of our 
 souls, in order that God being visible, 
 we may be borne upward to the love of 
 things invisible, therefore with angels 
 and archangels, with Thrones and Dom- 
 inations, with all the array of the heav- 
 enly Host, we sing:— 
 
 All the choir, men, adolescents, boys, children, 
 cried out the resurgent chorus of the Sanctus, and 
 before its last echo had perished a bell pealed, and 
 the whole assembly, the people in the dim nave, 
 the white-robed choristers, the glistening minis- 
 trants fell on their knees, and in the breathless si- 
 lence, Christ was once more born upon the altar. 
 
 It is for Him that men have reared that incom- 
 parable fabric of worship which speaks to the 
 senses as no other has ever done. It is for Him 
 that His Church has founded that art which, in 
 default of dates and documents, and often even 
 of sanctity, is her living proof. It is for Him that 
 she has invented those chants which by their bal- 
 samic power, their inalienable beauty, disinfect the 
 soul. It is by His virtue that all things good and 
 
292 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 beautiful exist and have their being—bread and 
 wine, burning wax and golden flame, the pure and 
 virile smell of pine and fir, the flowerlike faces of 
 children, the soaring of their voices, purity, ma- 
 ternity, brotherhood. . . . And it is not enough 
 that He dwell apart in the absolute of His Per- 
 fection, in the incommensurable splendor of His 
 infinity. Love begets love, and He must come 
 down into the city which has forgotten Him and 
 enter into bodies eaten up by the follies and the 
 sorrows of life, and be present in souls bankrupt of 
 all grace. 
 
 And even this is not enough. In the ghastly 
 hour when all men have abandoned Him, even his 
 priests; when they have set up obscene and cruel 
 deities in His place, labeled patriotism and coun- 
 try; when all have fled from the accursed frontiers 
 riddled by gas and shell; when boys and men, sac- 
 rificed by their vile rulers are thrown up on the 
 hopeless plain like so much fodder for death; when 
 all men have deserted us, He is still there. By 
 the hands of a few faithful priests, expiating in 
 their persons the crime of their Church and His, he 
 comes again upon dismantled altars in ruined 
 churches; He enters once again into young bodies 
 wasted by sin and shaken by fear; He accompa- 
 nies them even to the last trench; His sweet and 
 everlasting accent penetrates the scream of shells 
 saying: “Lo, I am with you alway even to the 
 
UNTO THIS LAST 293 
 
 - consummation of time”; and He illumines even 
 the shadow of dissolution with an incomparable 
 hope. 
 
 What other religion dares to make such an affir- 
 mation? What can “justification by faith” or a 
 few consoling words from an army chaplain do to 
 speed a poor dying boy in such a moment beside 
 the priest who brings him his God? In vain they 
 have revolted and apostasized, misled by Catholic 
 abuses, or by their own conceits, falling away like 
 the Jews in the Gospel who murmured: “How can 
 this Man give us His Flesh to eat?” and from that 
 time walked no more with Him. And the end of 
 it all is one great apostasy, one vast rejection, not 
 of this mystery or that dogma, but of Christ Him- 
 self, and not all the model settlements and Young 
 Men’s Christian Associations in these States will 
 restore him; only our faith, the faith of our 
 fathers. But I do not wish to end on any note of 
 disparagement for others of good will who call and 
 believe themselves Christians. They follow their 
 own lights, and one bad Catholic is worse than ten 
 just men who need no repentance, for he follows 
 a supernatural light, and his aid is greater than 
 theirs. This book began with Jesus, and must 
 end with Him. He is alpha and omega, the begin- 
 ning and the end, the first and the last. Like the 
 mother of Francois Villon in the ballad we know 
 nothing but this, ‘“‘and in this faith, we wish to live 
 
294. STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 and die.” He can do nothing for those who say 
 “they have need of nothing, and know not that 
 they are wretched and miserable and blind and 
 naked.” It is rather with the poor and unpreten- 
 tious and disinherited of life that He delighted 
 Himself when He was with us in the world; and 
 perhaps also with him who desires to believe, who 
 sees far off the heavenly lights of the Church to 
 which he may never attain, who after all his wan- 
 derings has not yet reached home. 
 
 EXPLICIT 
 
APPENDIX: ON THE LITURGY 
 
 THE Liturgy is the collective name given to the 
 ceremonies of the Catholic Church. There is 
 only one standard liturgy, that of Rome, but the 
 Holy See allows large variations from this stand- 
 ard in the case of Oriental and Uniat Churches, 
 the Grzco-Melchites, Maronites, etc. The advan- 
 tage of a single rite, expressed in a universal lan- 
 guage like Latin, is that any Catholic may find 
 the exact worship to which he is accustomed, even 
 if he travel in an eastward direction from Man- 
 hattan to Japan. The text of the Liturgy is found 
 principally in two official prayer-books, the Missal, 
 containing the order of the Mass with its varia- 
 tions throughout the year, and the Breviary, con- 
 taining the other services, and of these last, only 
 Vespers in the late afternoon and Compline at 
 night are, as a rule, publicly performed in the 
 ordinary church. 
 
 Of all these services the Mass is, obviously, the 
 central one, since it is the only rite instituted by 
 Christ, and it enframes the miracle by which bread 
 
 and wine become the elements of His Body and 
 295 
 
296 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 Blood. It is celebrated once each day before 
 noon by a priest, fasting and in special vestments, 
 before an altar adorned with a crucifix and lighted 
 by two tapers (six at a high mass) but never 
 more. A low Mass in one said. A high, or solemn 
 mass is one chanted to the accompaniment of music 
 and special ceremonial. A pontifical mass is one 
 said or chanted by a bishop. A requiem mass is 
 one said or sung before a burial or on an anni- 
 versary for the repose of asoul. A requiem is often 
 terminated by the ‘‘Absolution” in which the priest, 
 vested in a black cope, sprinkles the catafalque 
 with holy water and censes it, the action being fol- 
 lowed by certain chants and prayers. 
 
 Since the solemn form of the Mass is, usually, 
 the only one that concerns the non-Catholic spec- 
 tator, we may describe it as being formed on six 
 principal parts. It begins with the singing by the 
 choir of three chants, the Introit, the Kyrie and 
 the Gloria, followed by (2) the Prayer of the 
 Sunday or Festival, the reading from one of Saint 
 Paul’s Epistles, and the ceremonial chanting of a 
 passage from the Gospels, accompanied by incense 
 and lights, (3) the chanting of the Nicene Creed 
 by the choir, (4) the Offertory in which the bread 
 and wine are brought up to the altar and the latter 
 is perfumed with incense in preparation for their 
 consecration, (5) the Canon, or Consecration, of 
 
APPENDIX: ON THE LITURGY 297 
 
 these elements which is the climax of the rite, sig- 
 nified to the assistants by the elevation of the 
 Host and Chalice and the ringing of a bell. The 
 Canon terminates in the Lord’s Prayer, the Kiss 
 of Peace and the Communion of priest and people, 
 that is, their reception of the consecrated Bread 
 and Wine. In the Roman Church the Host alone 
 is administered to the people. Sixth, and last, 
 there is the conclusion of the rite, consisting of 
 another prayer called the Post-Communion, the 
 Dismissal and a benediction from the priest at the 
 altar. 
 
 This extremely simple and impressive act of 
 worship differs utterly by its sacrificial and sacra- 
 mental character from the services of the various 
 Protestant sects, but Episcopalians, at least, 
 should have no difficulty in following intelligently 
 a ceremony so very similar to their own Com- 
 munion Service. Thanks to the liturgical tact of 
 the English reformers, the Anglican rite of Com- 
 munion is a partial adaptation of the Roman 
 Mass. 
 
 In the Catholic Church, the liturgical year, be- 
 ginning with Advent in December, is varied 
 throughout by the occurrence of certain com- 
 memorative festivals and holydays, ranged in 
 different degrees of importance: (1) Feasts of our 
 Lord, such ag Christmas, the Circumcision, Easter, 
 Corpus Christi, the Sacred Heart, (2) of our Lady, 
 
298 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 like Candlemas, the Annunciation, the Assumption, 
 the Rosary, (3) of Apostles, Martyrs and Con- 
 fessors of the Church. The colors of vestments, 
 hangings, etc., vary symbolically with these sea- 
 sons and days, white signifying a feast of our 
 Lord or our Lady, red that of a martyr, violet the 
 two penitential seasons of Advent and Lent, and 
 green the days of midsummer and early autumn 
 dedicated to the Trinity with which the Church 
 year comes to a close. 
 
 For the various psalms, chants, canticles and 
 hymns employed in the Mass or the Divine Office, 
 the Church has provided a magnificent fund of 
 melodies, called collectively Gregorian Chant from 
 the name of Saint Gregory the Great (590-604) 
 the Pope believed to have first edited them. The 
 authorship of these melodies is quite unknown; 
 “the true composer of plain chant,” said Huys- 
 mans in a burst of enthusiasm, “‘is God, the Holy 
 Spirit.” Modern settings to the chants proscribed 
 for the Liturgy are, however, permitted by the 
 Holy See so long as they are sufficiently devotional 
 in character. An encyclical of the late Pius X laid 
 down the rules governing composition for the 
 sanctuary on the part of modern musicians. It 
 must respect the text, and refrain from using it 
 as a peg on which to hang musical inventions full 
 of impertinent devices borrowed from the theater 
 
APPENDIX: ON THE LITURGY 299 
 
 and concert hall. Among composers who have 
 written for the Church in more or less the requisite 
 spirit are Palestrina and his school, Arcadelt, 
 César Franck, Gounod, Elgar, and others too 
 numerous to mention.* 
 
 * Probably the two best prayer-books for the Catholic layman or 
 the non-Catholic church-goer are The Roman Missal and The Day 
 Hours of the Church, both edited by the Benedictine nuns of Stan- 
 brook in Worcestershire (New York, P. J. Kenedy and Sons). 
 

 
GLOSSARY OF ECCLESIASTICAL TERMS 
 
 AxBBESS: The superior of a community of nuns. Next in 
 rank comes the Prioress. 
 
 Axssot: The superior of a community of men. The Prior 
 comes next in rank. 
 
 ADVENT: Opening period of the Christian year, including 
 the four Sundays before Christmas. 
 
 ANGELS: Spiritual beings created by God in an ordered 
 hierarchy. 
 
 ANGLICANISM: The religion of the Episcopal Church of 
 England since its final secession from the Papal au- 
 thority in 1559. In the United States it is called the 
 Protestant Episcopal Church. 
 
 APOSTLES’ CREED (Roman Symbol): The earliest and most 
 accepted statement of Christian belief. 
 
 Apostotic DrLEecATE: The Pope’s representative in the 
 United States. 
 
 AposToLtic Succession: The unbroken continuity in the 
 powers of bishops and priests inherited from the 
 Apostles through the Sacrament of Orders. 
 
 ARCHBISHOP (Metropolitan): The difference between a 
 bishop and an archbishop is purely administrative. 
 His field of jurisdiction contains several bishoprics 
 and corresponds to the Roman province. 
 
 AssumPTIon: A belief that the Virgin Mother of Christ on 
 her death was at once transported or “assumed” into 
 eternal life with God. The 15th of August is the 
 festival commemorating this event. 
 
 301 
 
302 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 Baptism: The Sacrament of initiation into the Church by 
 means of water purifying from original sin. 
 
 BENEDICTINES: The oldest surviving order of monks in 
 the Church, founded by St. Benedict about 529. It 
 reformed itself several times under the names of 
 Cluniac, Cistercian and Trappist. The official name is 
 the Order of St. Benedict (O.S.B.). 
 
 BENEDICTION: A brief devotion in which the Host, or con- 
 secrated Bread, is enshrined for adoration and then 
 lifted in a sign of the cross over the people, signifying 
 that Christ Himself in a sacramental form is blessing 
 them. 
 
 BisHop: The highest spiritual entity in the Catholic eccle- 
 siastical system except the Pope, who himself is Bishop 
 of Rome. The sacramental powers of a bishop are to 
 consecrate other bishops, ordain priests and confirm 
 children. His field of jurisdiction is the see or diocese, 
 originally coterminous with a Roman district. 
 
 CatipH: The successor of Mohammed and head of the 
 Mohammedan Church. His capital was originally 
 Bagdad on the Tigris in Mesopotamia and his political 
 powers were shared by two other Moslem princes, the 
 Sultan of Egypt and the Emir of Cordoba in Spain. 
 
 CALVINISM: The second flight of sixteenth century Prot- 
 estantism. A system of doctrine and church govern- 
 ment first formulated by Calvin, which had different 
 names in different countries. Thus in England, Scot- 
 land and America it was Presbyterian, in France 
 Huguenot, in Holland and Germany, Reformed, etc. 
 
 Canon: (1) The Prayer of Consecration in the Mass, (2) a 
 piece of Church legislation, (3) one of a group of 
 priests connected with a cathedral. 
 
GLOSSARY OF ECCLESIASTICAL TERMS 303 
 
 CanonicAt Hours (Divine Office): A set of eight short 
 services to be said daily by all priests and corporately 
 in monastic houses. They are in their order Matins, 
 Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline, 
 
 CANONIZATION: The papal act of declaring a saint. 
 
 CARDINAL: Originally the pastor of one of the primitive 
 churches of Rome, now appointed by the Pope to be 
 a member of his executive. The title, though the high- 
 est papal honor obtainable, is purely administrative and 
 does not imply any spiritual superiority to other 
 bishops. 
 
 CATHEDRAL: The principal church of a diocese where the 
 bishop has his cathedra or chair. 
 
 CuHapTer: Collective name for the clergy of a cathedral or 
 the members of a monastic house. 
 
 CoMMUNION: The act of receiving the consecrated Bread 
 and Wine in the Mass. 
 
 CONFIRMATION: The Sacrament conferred by a bishop to 
 strengthen the profession of the Faith. 
 
 Corpus Curisti: The Thursday after Trinity Sunday kept 
 as a solemn festival in honor of the Blessed Sacrament. 
 
 CouNTER-REFORM (Catholic Reaction): The movement 
 among Catholics commencing with the Council of Trent 
 (ended 1563) to combat Protestantism by an increased 
 energy and austerity in the Catholic Church itself. 
 
 Curia: The whole college of cardinals composing the papal 
 court. 
 
 Dark Acrs: A period of European history dating from the 
 break-up of the Roman Empire by the barbarian in- 
 vasions and ending with the emergence in the eleventh 
 century of the new energies and culture called medieval. 
 
 Deacon: The lowest among the three major orders in the 
 Church. 
 
3804 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 DEAN (Provost): The head or rector of the cathedral clergy 
 or canons under the bishop. In the United States, 
 the Vicar-General. 
 
 Dominicans: An order of preaching friars founded in the 
 thirteenth century by St. Dominic to combat heresy by 
 education and good example. ‘Their official name is 
 Order of Preachers (O.P.). 
 
 EASTER: The Sunday following the full moon of the March 
 equinox and the festival celebrating the resurrection 
 of Christ. It is in a sense parallel to the Pasch or 
 Passover of the Jews. 
 
 EcuMENICAL Councit: A general council of the Church 
 held usually to terminate some crisis or to determine 
 a dogma. The first was that of Nicea in 325, the last 
 was the Vatican Council in 1870. 
 
 EPIscopATE: Collective name for the bishops of the Cath- 
 olic Church. 
 
 Eucuarist: The Real Presence of Christ in the consecrated 
 elements of Bread and Wine. 
 
 Franciscans: An order of friars founded by St. Francis of 
 Assisi in 1209 to bring the Gospel to the poor and 
 afflicted. Its official name is the Order of Friars Minor 
 (O.F.M.) and the Capuchin Fathers are an offshoot. 
 
 GALLICANISM: Name given to the ruling temper of the 
 Catholic Church in France during the seventeenth 
 century which posed as semi-independent of the Pope’s 
 authority. 
 
 Gotuic: Name given to a style of architecture which super- 
 seded the Romanesque, is distinguished by the pointed 
 arch and is seen at its best in the thirteenth century 
 cathedrals of France and England. 
 
GLOSSARY OF ECCLESIASTICAL TERMS 305 
 
 Grace: The regenerating influence or endowment communi- 
 cated to the soul by God. 
 
 GuEetpH: A member of the medieval faction which sup- 
 ported the temporal power of the Popes in the Italian 
 peninsula as opposed to that of the Holy Roman or 
 German Emperors. Ghibelline was the name of the 
 imperial party. 
 
 HEAVEN: The place or condition of eternal reunion with 
 God. 
 
 Hetty: The place or condition of souls which of their free 
 will have rejected God. 
 
 Heresy: The rejection of one or more of Catholic truths 
 as revealed by Christ to the Apostolic Church. 
 
 HicH CHurcHMAN (Anglo-Catholic): An adherent of that 
 party in the English and Episcopal Churches which 
 has retained or revived all or some of the Catholic 
 doctrines with the exception of the papal supremacy. 
 
 Hoty RomMAN Emprre (the Germanies): A political and 
 territorial federation of central and Teutonic Europe 
 founded by the Frankish King Charlemagne in 800 to 
 replace the old Roman Empire in the West. In the 
 Middle Ages it embraced Germany, Austria and parts 
 of Italy, but the actual rule of the Emperor over his 
 more distant fiefs was very loose and became merely 
 nominal. In 1273 the Empire became hereditary in 
 the Hapsburg family, and it was permanently reduced 
 to Austria by Bonaparte in 1803. 
 
 Hoty Week: The final week of Lent, kept with special 
 solemnity as a period commemorating Christ’s Passion 
 and Death. 
 
 Host (Blessed Sacrament): Name given to the wafer 
 changed by consecration into the Body of Christ. 
 
306 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 IMMACULATE CONCEPTION: A belief that the Virgin Mary 
 was preserved from original sin in order to be the 
 fitting) mother of the God-Man. The 8th of December 
 is kept as the annual festival of this doctrine. 
 
 INDULGENCE: A remission of the soul’s temporal expiation 
 in Purgatory for sins committed while on earth. 
 
 INFALLIBILITY: The doctrine that the Pope when he speaks 
 as the head of the Catholic Church on a question 
 affecting faith or morals cannot err. 
 
 INQUISITION (Holy Office): A tribunal for the discovery 
 and prevention of heresy instituted by the Holy See 
 in the thirteenth century. The Roman Inquisition 
 should not be confused with the Spanish one, which, 
 being under political control, was much more cruel. 
 
 IntERDIcT: The solemn excommunication of a nation, pro- 
 hibiting the public exercise of religion. 
 
 JANSENISM (Port Royal): A faction in the French Church 
 during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, stem- 
 ming from Jansen, Flemish bishop of Ypres in the 
 Spanish Netherlands (Belgium). Without being 
 Protestant, the Jansenists were influenced by Prot- 
 estant ideas, and were celebrated for their austerity. 
 
 Jesuits: A religious order founded in the sixteenth century 
 by St. Ignatius Loyola to uphold the papal supremacy 
 and combat Protestantism. Suppressed by Pope 
 Clement XIV on the ground that they had outlived 
 their trustworthiness, they were restored by Pius VII 
 after the fall of Napoleon. 
 
 JUSTIFICATION BY FaITH: The keystone of the Protestant 
 and especially the Lutheran theology to the effect that 
 the soul is saved by a lively faith in the benefits of 
 Christ’s Redemption, and hence has no need of the 
 
GLOSSARY OF ECCLESIASTICAL TERMS 307 
 
 grace derived from the Sacraments or that derived 
 from good actions. 
 
 Last RitTEs (Viaticum): The Sacraments conferred on a 
 dying person, consisting of Penance, Unction and Holy 
 Communion. 
 
 LEGATE (Nuncio): The Pope’s representative in a place 
 other than Rome. 
 
 Lent: A period in the Christian year consisting of the 
 forty days preceding Easter, and employed in absti- 
 nence in memory of Christ’s privations and temptation 
 in the wilderness. 
 
 Locos (hypostasis): The expression or incarnation of God, 
 a word applied by Greek theologians to Christ as the 
 visible God or the mediator between God and man. 
 
 ManicuHetsm (Catharism; Albigensian Church): A heresy 
 flourishing in the thirteenth century, particularly in 
 the French Midi. It considered matter as the creation 
 of the Evil One who is also the Christian God. 
 
 Mass: The principal rite of the Church ordained by Christ 
 to afford the faithful an opportunity to receive and 
 worship bread and wine transubstantiated by the 
 priest’s consecration into Christ’s Body and Blood. 
 
 Mippre Aces: A period in European history beginning 
 with the end of the dark ages about the year 1000 
 and ending with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks 
 in 1453, an event which fully released neo-classic or 
 Renaissance ideals. The medieval ideal was moral 
 unity under the Papacy and it had a noble and typically 
 Catholic culture. 
 
 MopERNISM: A movement in the Catholic Church which 
 came to an head during the first years of our century 
 
808 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 in an attempt to apply the current rationalist methods 
 to the Catholic religion. 
 
 MonstTRANCE: A sun-shaped vessel in which the Host is 
 set up for adoration at the rite of Benediction. (See 
 Benediction. ) 
 
 Mostem (Mussulman; Saracen): A member of the Moham- 
 medan Church, whether Arab, Turk or Moor. 
 
 OrpErs: (1) The several grades or ranks in the original 
 hierarchy of the Church, that is, the bishops, priests 
 and deacons, (2) the Sacrament conferring the specific 
 powers associated with each grade. 
 
 OrtTHopox CHuRcH (Greek Church; Eastern Church): 
 The Catholic Church in the East, divided from the 
 Western, or Latin, Church since the ninth century, when 
 it seceded over the definition of the Trinity and the 
 papal supremacy. 
 
 OxrorpD Movement: A movement in the Episcopal Church 
 of England during the early nineteenth century to 
 turn that body back to Catholicism, exception made 
 for the papal supremacy. The High Church or Anglo- 
 Catholic party in England and the United States is 
 the obvious heir of the Oxford school. 
 
 PATRIARCH: The bishop of one of the original centers of 
 Christianity. 
 
 PENANCE: The Sacrament popularly called Confession 
 conferring absolution through the priest for sins com- 
 mitted. 
 
 PENTECOST (Whitsuntide): A period in the Christian year 
 beginning with Pentecost Sunday fifty days after Easter 
 and commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit on 
 the heads of the Christian community at Jerusalem. 
 
GLOSSARY OF ECCLESIASTICAL TERMS 309 
 
 PLAIN CHANT (Georgian Chant): The traditional music 
 composed anonymously by various hands for those 
 parts of the Liturgy appointed to be sung. Based on 
 a scale other than ours, its melodies seem at first 
 monotonous but actually possess an extraordinary 
 beauty and variety. 
 
 Pope (Supreme Pontiff; Holy Father): The Bishop of 
 Rome and supreme ruler of the Catholic Church under 
 Christ. 
 
 PRAGMATISM: A modern philosophy which holds that truth 
 is to be measured, not absolutely, but by its practical 
 values and results. 
 
 PROTESTANT REFORM (Reformation): A revolt in the six- 
 teenth century on the part of certain European coun- 
 tries of Germanic stock against the papal supremacy 
 and a part or the whole of the Catholic religion. 
 
 Priest: The unit of the ecclesiastical system who may 
 operate all the Sacraments save Orders and Confir- 
 mation. 
 
 Purcatory: The place or condition of departed souls which 
 includes expiation for the sins committed while on 
 earth. 
 
 PurITANISM: The religion of the Calvinist party in the 
 Episcopal Church of England during the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth centuries. It was expelled from the Eng- 
 lish Church on the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 
 and emigrated to America, where in the person of 
 several Protestant sects it is very strong to-day. 
 
 Romanesoue: A noble style of Christian architecture de- 
 rived from Roman forms and characterized by the 
 rounded arch. It is seen at its best in northern and 
 central Italy. 
 
810 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 Rosary: A series of prayers in honor of the Virgin recited 
 with the aid of a string of beads. This custom was 
 inaugurated by St. Dominic in the thirteenth century 
 and the first Sunday in October is kept as a feast in 
 honor of its introduction. 
 
 SACRAMENT: (1) The visible rite, sign or conductor of 
 divine grace to the individual. The four principal Sac- 
 raments of the Church are Baptism, Penance, Orders 
 and the Eucharist, (2) the Host. 
 
 SacreD Heart: A devotion to the human heart of Jesus, 
 considered as the material organ of His divine love. 
 The ninth day after the feast of Corpus Christi is 
 kept in honor of the Sacred Heart. 
 
 SAINT: One who for extraordinary merits is after canon- 
 ization formally commemorated in the Church’s Liturgy 
 and may be invoked by prayer. 
 
 ScHism: Secession from the Papacy and formal separation 
 from communion with the Church. 
 
 Stn: An offense against God which may be either deadly 
 or venial. 
 
 Sout: The spiritual substance which is the principle of 
 life in man and is immortal. 
 
 Sprrit (Holy Spirit; Holy Ghost): The third and myste- 
 rious Person or Aspect of God. 
 
 Summa: The standard compendium of Catholic theology 
 and philosophy, written by the Dominican Saint 
 Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. 
 
 TEMPORAL Power: The sovereignty of the popes over 
 Rome and the adjacent States of the Church which 
 they inherited from the fallen Empire and which was 
 guaranteed to them by Charlemagne. It was taken 
 
GLOSSARY OF ECCLESIASTICAL TERMS 311 
 
 away when Italy became a united kingdom under the 
 House of Savoy in 1870. 
 
 TENEBRAE: The solemn service of Matins and Lauds for the 
 Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of Holy Week, 
 sung in memory of Christ’s Passion and Death. (See 
 Canonical Hours.) 
 
 TRANSUBSTANTIATION: The Catholic doctrine of the Real 
 Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. A belief that the 
 elements of bread and wine are changed by a miracle 
 unperceived by the senses into the substance of His 
 Body and Blood. 
 
 TRINITY: The mystery of three Persons in one God. 
 
 ULTRAMONTANISM: The nineteenth century doctrine of the 
 papal supremacy as opposed to ideas tending to make 
 national churches independent of the Pope’s authority. 
 
 Unction: The Sacrament of anointing a sick or dying 
 person with holy oil. | 
 
 Untat: A member of one of the national churches in 
 eastern Europe or the near Orient which are in com- 
 munion with Rome but are permitted to retain their 
 own rites and usages. 
 

 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 
 
 A.D. 
 30 Alleged Crucifixion of Jesus. 
 51 Appearance of Paul. 
 
 313 Edict of Milan. 
 
 325 Council of Nicea; first “ecumenical” council of the 
 Church. 
 
 379 Battle of Adrianople: Beginning of barbarian in- 
 vasions, 
 
 430 Death of Augustin. 
 
 476 Fall of Western Empire: beginning of temporal 
 
 power of the Pope. 
 
 526 End of Theodoric’s Kingdom at Ravenna; beginning 
 of Dark Ages. 
 
 622 The Hegira; beginning of the Mohammedan era. 
 
 800 Coronation of Charlemagne: beginning of Holy 
 Roman Empire. 
 
 870 Treaty of Mersen; division of Empire into France, 
 Germany and Italy. 
 
 970 Secession of France from Holy Roman Empire. 
 
 1000 Millennial year: beginning of Middle Ages. 
 
 1059 Election of Popes delivered to Cardinals. 
 
 1095 The First Crusade. 
 
 1198-1216 Pontificate of Innocent JII: climax of the Papal 
 Supremacy. 
 
 1210 Foundation of Franciscan Order. 
 
 1270 The Last Crusade. 
 
 1293 Accession of Rudolf of Hapsburg: the Holy Roman 
 Empire becomes Austria. 
 
 313 
 
814 STORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 1300 Jubilee of Boniface VIII. 
 
 1305 Beginning of Babylonian Captivity. 
 
 1378 Beginning of Great Schism. 
 
 1418 Completion of Council of Constance: end of Cap- 
 tivity and Schism. 
 
 1517 Appearance of Luther: beginning of Protestant 
 Reformation. 
 
 1555 Peace of Augsburg, establishing ,Protestantism in 
 North Germany. 
 
 1559 Act of Supremacy reénforced by Elizabeth separating 
 English Church from Rome. 
 
 1563 Completion of Council of Trent: beginning of 
 Counter-Reform. 
 
 1570-1587 Persecution of Roman Catholics in England. 
 
 1588 Defeat of Spanish Armada. 
 
 1648 Peace of Westphalia: end of religious wars. 
 
 1773 Suppression of the Jesuits. 
 
 1789 Beginning of French Revolution. 
 
 1799 Capture of Pius VI by the French. 
 
 1802 Concordat of Napoleon and Pius VIII, reéstablishing 
 the Church in France. 
 
 1828-1829 Catholic emancipation in England. 
 
 1846 Accession of Pius IX. 
 
 ‘1870 Proclamation of Papal Infallibility. 
 
 1870 End of the Temporal Power. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 GENERAL HISTORIES: 
 A Short History of Christianity. By Salomon Reinach. 
 Alzog: Manual of Church History. 
 HISTORIES OF CHRISTIAN IDEAS: 
 Adolph Harnack: History of Dogma. 
 G. P. Fisher: History of Christian Thought. 
 ON THE HISTORICITY OF JESUS: 
 Kalthoff: Was Wissen Wir von Jesus? (Berlin, 1904.) 
 Benjamin Smith: Ecce Deus. (Jena, 1911.) 
 Arthur Drews: Die Christusmyth. (Jena, rgrt.) 
 J. M. Robertson: The Historical Jesus. (London, 
 1916.) 
 Alfred Loisy: Jésus et la Tradition Evangelique. 
 (Paris, 1910.) 
 Charles Guignébert: La Probleme de Jésus. (Paris, 
 1914.) 
 ON THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH; ef seq.: 
 Dean Inge: Saint Paul (Outspoken Essays, London, 
 1920.) 
 Henri Delafosse: La Quatriéme Evangile. (Paris, 
 1925.) 
 A. P. Stanley: The Eastern Church. 
 Comte de Montalembert: The Monks of the West. 
 Ranke: History of the Popes. 
 Oskar Meyer: England and the Catholic Church. 
 Mer. Bernard Ward: The Eve, Dawn and Sequel of 
 Catholic Emancipation in England. 
 315 
 

 
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