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LETTERS TO HIS HOLINESS
HIS HOLINESS— POPE PIUS X.
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LETTERS TO HIS HOLINESS
POPE PIUS X
-W
BY
A MODERNIST
(2nd Edition)
CHICAGO THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY
LONDON AGENTS
KEGAN PAUL. TRENCH. TRUBNER & CO.. Ltd. 1911
Copyright
by
THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO., CHICAGO
1910
CONTENTS
Letter |
I. |
Letter |
II. |
Letter |
III. |
Letter |
IV. |
Letter |
V. |
Letter |
VI. |
Letter |
VII. |
Letter |
VIII. |
Letter |
IX. |
Letter |
X. |
Letter |
XI. |
Letter |
XII. |
Letter |
XIII. |
Letter |
XIV. |
Letter |
XV. |
Letter |
XVI. |
Letter |
XVII. |
PAKT I— LETTERS
PAGE
The need for These Letters 3
The Purpose of Them 7
The Purpose of Them (continued) 10
What is Religion ? 11
The Attitude of the Modern World Towards
Official Catholicism 14
The Papacy and Freedom of Conscience 18
The Inquisition 25
The Inquisition (continued) 34
Can Infallibility Survive the Inquisition?. ... 42
Our Duty of Seeking Truth 46
Has the Papacy Changed Its Attitude Towards
Freedom of Conscience? 50
The Papacy and Representative Government. . 58
Italian Absolutism 63
Roman Legates and "Fathers General". .... 69
Indulgences 85
Worship in Spirit and in Truth 97
The Present Discipline of Celibacy 105
V
vi CONTENTS
PAGE
Letter XVIII. Church and State 130
Letter XIX. Freedom of Intellect 151
Letter XX. The Jesuits and Intellectual Tyranny 172
Letter XXI. The Opportunity of Catholicism 186
PAET II.— FAITH AND CRITICISM.
Chapter I. Phases of Dogmatic Interpretation 195
Chapter II. The Old Testament in New Light 205
Chapter III. Are the Gospels Merely History? 218
Chapter IV. The Theologian in the Synoptics 227
Chapter V. Christ 's Conception of the Kingdom 245
Chapter VI. "What Think Ye of Christ?" 270
Epilogue 276
INTRODUCTION
T^HE author of these letters to his Holiness, Pope Pius •*■ X, is not known to me personally, but I have heard enough about him to form a vivid picture of his char- acter and attitude. My source of information is not limited to Catholics ; in fact, my acquaintance with him is due to a widely known Protestant theologian, who lives in one of our Eastern metropolitan cities.
Judging from what I know, the author is a devout Christian and also a good Catholic in the broad sense of the word. He has been an active priest for many years, and is devoted to his pastoral work. But his piety has suffered severe shocks and he is fretting under the conflict between the ideal he cherishes and the realization with which, to his deep regret, he finds so much fault. The result is a state of mind which can be imagined from these letters to the highest ecclesiastical authority. They are written in the hope that His Holiness will hear the voice crying in the wilderness. If we are not mistaken in the signs of the time, this voice is not isolated. It finds a strong resonance in the minds of many pious Catholics, who realize that it would not be wise to speak out boldly because of the subtle methods of the organized hierarchy, which have hitherto proved very efficient in meeting any attempt at reform. It is easy enough to
vii
Vlll INTRODUCTION
force the discontented out of the church, but the church would scarcely be benefited thereby.
These letters are not intended to create a sensation, but to prepare for a future which, in moments of en- thusiasm, seems near at hand. They have a twofold purpose. On the one hand, our author wants to make the Curia feel its enormous responsibility, and on the other hand, to educate both priest and layman for the work of reconstruction.
The author, in his recent correspondence, expresses the purpose which he has in mind as follows :
"Nothing can be truer than your declaration that one who would work for reform needs to examine his conscience as to his motives. I can say in very solemn truth that before setting to work on the 'Letters' I ex- amined mine. Two years before I put pen to the final writing I made a beginning on them — and tore up what I had written because not yet satisfied that I ought to undertake so grave a responsibility. All the thought that I could bring to the decision, as well as all the coun- sel I could get, preceded the determination to go ahead with the work. So far as I can read the processes of mind and conscience that issued in the decision to write the book, these two considerations were foremost. First, to do a work of education among the priests of the church. I know that body of men well — their nobility, their vague aspirations, their concealed sufferings — and I am convinced to a degree of absolute certainty that the first step toward progress, and a primary need of truth, is to e*1,,**»*te them
INTRODUCTION IX
— to undo, in part, anyhow, the results of a training in self-repression, which begins often when they are chil- dren of fourteen and fifteen — and leaves them for life with crippled personalities and perverted minds. Second- ly, I desired to show — and make the effort, in the second part of the book — that dark and painful as the collapse of a cherished orthodoxy is — still, when criticism has done its worst, it leaves us a splendid Christ to revere, and an immortal spirit to purify and love. I hope that the book is both educational and constructive. I trust it attacks nothing that Truth itself and Progress are not attacking — and that it has something to offer for all that it takes away. At all events, every word of it is written in sincerity, and many words of it were written in feelings which, if possible, are deeper still."
In further comment I may add a word of my own.
I know the attraction which the Catholic church has, and at the same time I know the shortcomings of Prot- estantism. Many Protestants look upon art as pagan, if not as superstitious, while Catholicism has inherited, or rather gradually acquired, the beauty of old paganism. Pope Leo X, when rebuilding St. Peter's, crowned the cross of the aisles with the Pantheon in conscious recognition of his intention to have Christians imbued with the spirit of classical antiquity. This Pope, who was incapable of understanding the zeal of Luther and who is often denounced by Protestants as an infidel and a pagan, was, in his way, a reformer of the church. His love of art, quite in contradiction to the tendencies
X INTRODUCTION
of early Christianity, has become an inheritance of the Roman church, while Protestants, in contrast to Catho- lics, have retained to a great extent a hostile attitude to art. This is especially true of the Puritans.
Both Confessions, Romanism and Protestantism, have pursued their ideals in their own ways. By concentrating their fervor on truth irrespective of consequences, Prot- estant savants have worked out philosophy, science, and Biblical criticism, and have made science the basis of a new and higher civilization. The inheritance of Catholics has been limited to art and mystical devotion, and what- ever may be wrong in it, Protestantism is now ready to broaden and to accept of art what is good and noble. Superstitions, at least so far as belief in legend and literalism is concerned, have in Protestant countries en- tirely lost their hold on the human mind and there is no danger of a relapse. It is time that the two hostile brothers should share their inheritance, and while Prot- estants would welcome art, Catholics might recognize the right of free inquiry and admit to scientific truth a place in their theology.
Should the Roman Catholic church not conform to the demands of the time, should the Curia continue to prevent a reformation so much needed, it is quite prob- able that many pious souls will break away from Rome and originate a genuine Catholic church. There are not a few who cling devoutly to the traditional form of worship, but who are dissatisfied with the narrowness of the old ecclesiastical institutions.
INTRODUCTION XI
The present Catholic church is not Catholic but is Italian, and even Roman. Its first principle is that only an Italian can become Pope, and among the Cardinals few non-Italians are tolerated in order to keep the bal- ance of power in Italy. Will the time ever come when the Roman Catholic church will drop the epithet "Ro- man" and be simply a Catholic church in which Romans, Americans, English and Germans are on a parity?
In case Rome should be impervious to the kindly ad- vice of her sons, would not the natural outcome be a Catholic church independent of Rome?
The situation reminds us of Christ's lamentation over Jerusalem in Luke xix. 41-42: "And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, saying, 'If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace ! but now they are hid from thine eyes.' ' Let the men who have the ear of Pius X read the handwriting on the wall.
P. C.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION
T^ATHER TYRRELL, less than a year before his too early death, said, speaking of Modernism in Amer- ica: "I cannot understand America. With its free- dom and intelligence, its representatives ought to be in the forefront of the Modernist movement. Yet Mod- ernism has produced there hardly an echo. The Church in America is asleep ; and I can conceive nothing that will awaken it, but the production of some book native to the soil, which will raise so loud a cry of reform that all who have ears must hear."
The disappointment expressed in these words has been felt and uttered by practically all the leading Mod- ernists of Europe. On his visit here two years ago, Houtin said that Roman Catholicism in this country was in almost primeval darkness, and all but blind to what shall probably be considered one of the most momentous agitations of Christian history. Loisy in his mild way has wondered at the lack of intellectual activity among American Catholics, and Ehrhardt has expressed himself on the subject in terms of summary contempt, declaring in substance that the Church in America has yet to show the first sign of the possession of scholarship in the face of modern problems.
The astonishment and regret of these men are per-
xiii
XIV AUTHOR S PREFACE
fectly natural. They are engaged in a movement for a religious life which shall be intelligent and free. They are seeking to prove that religion is greater than the formulas which once were thought adequate to express it ; that the life of the spirit is not of so contemptible a value as to be menaced because a text is shown to be spurious, or a devout legend unmasked ; and that in seek- ing religious truth the intelligence of mankind ought not to be submitted to the coercion of any external authority, save the sovereign authority of critical and scientific evi- dence. What was more to be expected then, than that they should look for support to America, and to their co-religionists in America? Whence could a more zealous advocacy of Modernism have rightly been anticipated? To what other country could a movement for emanci- pation, intellectual and spiritual, turn with more confi- dent assurance? The assurance was all the greater, as from among us had appeared Modernism's precursor, Americanism. The late Pope condemned tendencies, which he said existed here, toward an undue independ- ence, a restiveness under venerable restraints, and a general attitude of novelty, of experiment, and of mod- ernizing. And it cannot be doubted that these admo- nitions of January, 1899, were received here with con- siderably more coolness than was to the fancy of the Papal court.
Americanism is a word that connotes patriotism. It seems to embrace all that is indigenous to this republic and is typical of it ; and whatever becomes of Biblical
AUTHOR S PREFACE XV
criticism, or the philosophy of dogmatic conformity, the mass of Catholics in this country will not be un-Amer- ican. So the Testis benevolentice, which laid Rome's solemn disapproval upon Americanism, was not received with enthusiasm, and raised indeed in some quarters a levity not far removed from disdain which fitted ill with the letter's august source. It assuredly loosened rather than tied more firmly the bonds uniting America to Rome.
But before going to the heart of the matter, a word must be said concerning the magnitude of this question of Modernism. It is not a squabble intra parietes, one of the petty ecclesiastical quarrels which the student of large problems can afford to despise. It is fundamentally a great question of spiritual liberty, attended, as advanc- ing liberty nearly always is, with the tragic element of suffering, as men strive to reach forward to the new light of the intellect while not relinquishing the ancient loyalties of the heart. It has brought a crisis perhaps of life and death to the mightiest religious organization that has ever existed among men. It aims at a restatement of the creed, a revolutionary change in the external polity, and a regeneration of the inner spirit of the mother-church of Christendom. Upon the issue of it de- pends, to an extent which those who know the move- ment best are most inclined to magnify, the future place of Roman Catholicism in the history of civilization.
Will the Church, which was once the arbiter of Eu- rope,'turn aside from traditions of secular ambition and
xvi author's preface
authority ? Will the great tribunal which retains its Index, still a power, and its Inquisition, now a shadow, say to the scholar: "I will not interfere with you; be free!" and to the heretic : "I will not anathematize you ; be sincere !" ? Will the institution which, claiming absolute infallibility, has moulded the minds of its devout adherents to total submissiveness, modify its claim, and relax the obedience in which it holds half the civilized world? These are the questions raised by Modernism. This is the crisis which has wrung a cry of terror from the present Pope. And the crisis is of so impressive a magnitude, extending in- deed to other orthodoxies over and beyond the Roman ; it is so full of possibilities for the religious history of the future that the interest in it must appeal not only to the Roman Catholic, but to every man reflective enough to read history in the events that happen before his eyes.
Why then has the Church in the United States taken so small a part in the agitation? Principally for two rea- sons : "First, Modernism, while not wholly, is predomi- nantly, an intellectual movement. It began in Biblical criticism with Loisy, Lagrange, and Minocchi, all under the influence of German scholarship. It pushed its re- searches into the history of dogma and comparative re- ligion, with Cumont, Turmel, and Batiffol. And it ended in philosophy, with an attempt at reconstruction and re- conciliation, under the leadership of Blondel, Laberthon- niere, Le Roy, and Tyrrell. Now any movement of dis- tinctively academic parentage will be slow in penetrating either the clergy or the laity of the Roman Catholic
AUTHOR S PREFACE XVU
Church in America. It is a simple fact that among them critical studies are in a state of infancy. The Catholic University at Washington, the best institution of that Church for furnishing an introduction to the methods of criticism, has only a handful of students, and the pro- fessors have repeatedly deplored the lack of interest in their school. And, to come to the most conspicuous as well as to an absolutely decisive proof that the Church in this country is intellectually backward, in all the voluminous literature of Biblical criticism, the history of dogmas and religions, and the philosophy of religious phenomena, not a single work of competence and au- thority has yet been produced by an American Catholic, and the books that reach even the second class are hardly more than half a dozen.
There are, of course, mitigating circumstances. The clergy here are busy with the rough work of building up a rapidly growing Church ; and — a fact not less im- portant— the Church in this young nation has no tra- ditions of scholarship, no generations of illustrious think- ers and teachers, as Europe has, and in consequence it lacks one of the most powerful inspirations to a life of study and research.
There is another less creditable reason which cannot be ignored. A few years ago at a meeting of Catholic educators in Milwaukee, two papers were read, written by priests who had had long experience in the direction of seminaries, which declared with a frankness that quite stunned the college officials present, especially the Jesuits
XV111 AUTHOR S PREFACE
among them, that the men sent up to the seminaries by Catholic colleges are in a condition of almost scandalous unfitness for prosecuting the higher studies of an ecclesi- astical course. The indictment — for it was nothing less — stated that not only were these candidates deficient in positive erudition, but that they were mentally untrained, unable to grasp a problem, incapable of thinking for themselves, and formulating an independent personal conclusion on a matter of scholarship. The complaint was new only in the daring method of announcing it. It had been made years before in a less public manner, and is made still, by the professors of the Catholic Uni- versity. Obviously a condition thus criticised must change before a fundamentally critical movement like Modern- ism can get a fair start.
Shall it ever be brought home ? We think so ; and be- lieve it will be in the manner suggested in the keen re- mark of Father Tyrrell quoted at the head of this article. The very air and soil of America are favorable to Mod- ernism, as to all other movements that make for intelli- gence, strength, sincerity and independence. We know what the American spirit is in the political and social order. Translate it into the religious order, and you have Modernism at its best and purest.
THE AUTHOR.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
IN the eighteen months since the first publication of these Letters, Pius X has abundantly justified — though the measure was already full — the complaints and remonstrances which they express. The basis of these complaints and remonstrances is that set of ideas and ideals, in the name of which every reformer of modern times has spoken his protest to the Vatican — 'Democracy, Freedom of Intellect, and Freedom of Conscience.
Throughout the year and a half just closed, the Papacy's attitude to these foundations of civilization has been of a hostility so undisguised, a violence so bitter and a contempt so scornful as to cause havoc and consterna- tion within the church itself, and anxiety and outcry among the governments of free states in Europe. Indeed, were we to judge Roman Catholicism by the public enact- ments of its present rulers, it would be difficult not to regard it either as the most decayed of all anachronisms, or as the most dangerous of all survivals from a past that we would fain think dead and buried.
That we should not measure Catholicism by the papal see is a position that is urged repeatedly in this book. But so far as the Papacy is concerned, that it is follow- ing today the same courses of despotism as led to its re- jection by the most progressive nations of the world, and that in consequence human liberty should lift its voice and free states be on their guard against it, the past eighteen months of Vatican history give one proof the
xix
XX PREFACE.
more, and add a final assurance to a conviction that was already certain.
First, as regards Democracy: On the twenty-fifth of August, 1910, appeared the Encyclical, "Notre charge apostolique," suppressing the Catholic society, le Sillon. This organization, established in France by a zealous layman, had for its purpose social reform, the spread of fraternal democracy, and the amicable uniting of all men of good will for the discussion of economic problems, and the duties of conscientious citizenship with regard to them. The Pope condemns it for the following reasons : It cultivated too great and too independent an initiative among the laity ; it brought together Catholics and non- Catholics in too friendly an intercourse ; it sought to break down the barriers of class distinction ; and it dreamed of a future society nobler and kinder than we have now because based on brotherhood and philanthropy.
In condemnation of all this, the Pope declares that even in works of social helpfulness, Roman Catholics must be subservient to the guidance of their bishops ; that it is wrong for Roman Catholics to mingle with non- Catholics in free discussion ; and that there can be no worthy civilization not wholly controlled by the Church {"on n' edifiera pas la societc si I' cglise n'en jette les bases et ne dirige les travaux"). In one word, the encyc- lical pleads for a theocracy which demands automatism from the laity, the supremacy of clericalism, and a deep- ening of those divisions among men which have been created by the spirit of privilege and the spirit of sect.
PREFACE. xxi
As for freedom of intellect, there is hardly any need to go into the details of Rome's recent violations of it. The "committees of vigilance" for the smelling out of liberal- ism have been urged to the vigorous performance of their sinister function ; professors have been obliged to submit to safe censors the text books to be used in their class- rooms ; repeated warnings have been addressed to bishops to dismiss any liberal-minded teacher from their semina- ries, and to ordain to the priesthood no youth who has caught a surreptitious glance at modern scholarship ; and under the solemn sanction of an oath, all the Roman Catholic priests of the world have been driven to declare that now and to the end of their lives, they do not and will not hold those conclusions respecting Christian origins and dogmatic development which the world's independent students are practically unanimous in maintaining.
Let us delay on this oath a moment. According to a "Motu proprio" dated the twenty-ninth of June, 1910, all candidates for the degree of Doctor of Sacred Scrip- ture must solemnly swear that the decrees on biblical matters issued by the Roman see, and the decisions of the Biblical Commission already announced and in future to be announced shall be their "supreme rule and guide and that they shall never depart from them in teaching, in speech or in writing."
Whatever, therefore, the evidence which the future study of these Doctors of Sacred Scripture may discover to them, they have vowed themselves to the end of their lives to reject every liberal opinion. They can never, if
XX11 PREFACE.
true to their oath, believe in the non-Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch or adopt the views of the world's lead- ing scholars respecting Genesis, the Psalms, Isaiah, or the Fourth Gospel. Of course to such men, science is impos- sible ; an impartial mind they cannot pretend to possess ; and the abjuration which they have made of the rights of intelligence and personality is an action essentially de- grading and immoral. It is possible without guilt to sell our bodies into slavery, but our minds, never.
Finally, under date of September the first, 1910, ap- peared the Papal rescript "Sacrorum Antistitum" which orders that the natural sciences shall be but little studied in seminaries ; repeats the command for the expulsion of all Catholic teachers who are in any degree "modo quopiam" infected with liberal ideas, declaring that bish- ops cannot be too urgent and severe in this species of tyranny — "hoc in negotio xxx nimia numquam erit anim- adversio et constantia" : again insists upon the exclusion from Seminaries of all liberal writings even if of Catholic authorship ; puts it upon the conscience of bishops to see that Catholic booksellers shall not be vendors of liberal books; gives warning that meetings and congresses of priests shall be held but rarely if at all, and when held shall be vigilantly watched ; and concludes with imposing on the priests of the world the famous oath against Modernism. In this oath, priests swear to adhere with all their heart to every declaration and condemnation of the Pope's Syllabus and of his encyclical against Mod- ernism ; to maintain that all Roman Catholic dogmas in
PREFACE. XX111
the sense in which they are held today can be reconciled with the faith of the first Christians; and to reject the opinion that a Roman Catholic student of Christian ori- gins or of patristic writings should approach these studies with a perfectly free and unbiased mind, inasmuch as, on the contrary, such a man must ever keep in view the preconceived idea of the truth of the Roman Catholic thesis.
Concerning liberty of conscience, the Pope, in these latter days, has fairly startled the world by the manner in which he has shown his hostility to it. He vehemently protested against the recent Spanish law which consulted common decency to the extent of permitting non-Catholic churches in Spain to post notices of service, and to bear the customary outward signs of a house of worship. And through his secretary of Latin briefs he addressed to the monk Lepicier, author of "De Stabilitate et Progressu Dogmatis," a. commendatory letter which says : "By this work you have given great gratification to the Sovereign Pontiff. . . . Wherefore, the Holy Father congratulates you heartily, and praying that the book may be of great profit to many, lovingly bestows upon you the apostolic benediction." This book which, in this twentieth cen- tury has rejoiced the heart of Pius X, declares (p. 194) that public heretics deserve not merely to be excommu- nicated, but to be killed ("sed etiam dignos esse qui per mortem e vivis auferantur") ; that the power to murder heretics belongs both to the state and the Church (p. 195) ; that the Church has the power of putting to death
XXIV PREFACE.
even repentant heretics (p. 199) ; that we should not shrink from uttering this teaching out of regard for the sentiment of the modern age (p. 201) ; that we should re- member that the church has canonized King Ferdinand III of Castile, and inserts in the breviary these words in praise of him : "He permitted no heretics to dwell in his kingdom, and with his own hands brought wood to the stake for their burning" (p. 202) ; that the Church tolerates heretics now because it is not prudent to kill them (p. 208-209), and finally, that the Pope has the power to depose secular rulers who abandon Catholicism, and to absolve the subjects of such rulers from their allegiance (p. 210).
With sentiments of this sort, and actions in accord with them so far as is feasible, proceeding from the Roman Pontiff, we cannot wonder that some of the best spirits in Roman Catholicism have said farewell to the church of their birth, baptism, and priestly consecration, and have gone forth into intellectual self-respect and spiritual liberty, and into a free if lonely faith which will not oblige them to believe that the honest exercise of
human reason is a sin, and butchery a virtue
In the past year and a half, Salvatore Minocchi, a priest distinguished both for biblical scholarship and for many years of zealous work in promoting higher studies among the Roman Catholics of Italy, has left the Church. So has Pere Rose, the Dominican professor of Scripture at the University of Freiburg. So has the Abbe Dabry who for twenty years was perhaps the foremost leader
PREFACE. XXV
of social democracy among the clergy of France. And through their refusal to take the anti-modernist oath, a number of priests in Europe and some in the United States have uttered their valedictory to Rome. Among the best known of these are Dr. Ferdinand Birkner, professor extraordinary at the university of Munich and dean of the court church of St. Michael ; Professor Held- wein, chaplain of the Bavarian court ; Professors Knoep- fler, Gietl, Walter, Goettberg, and Popp; the brothers Wieland, one a rector in the diocese of Augsburg, the other vice-rector of the seminary of Dillingen ; the Fran- ciscan Pere Hock of Toelz in Bavaria ; and Dr. Scherer, professor at the university of Vienna.
And how strong the spirit of revolt is in a host of priests who still remain in Roman Catholicism, we may see in the letter of protest against the anti-modernist oath sent to every bishop in France by the liberal priests of that country, and in the congratulatory address pre- sented to Signor Nathan, the mayor of Rome, by the modernists of Italy after his anti-clerical speech of the 20th of September, 1910. This latter extraordinary document contains such sentiments as these : "The Vati- can has sought to protest in the name of the Church, against your statements. . . . The Vatican, which has stifled the progress of Christianity, has no right to speak in the name of the Church because the best part of the Church in Italy has no wish to co-operate in the papal programme which is in open conflict with national unity, with the progress of thought, and with the freedom of
XXVI PREFACE.
religious life. ... In the name of all those who aspire for truth in liberty, of all who would see in Christianity a new life, and not an outgrown intellectual system, in the name of all who are confined in the captivity of ecclesiasticism, we take pleasure in expressing to you our boundless gratitude and our entire sympathy."
The crisis in Roman Catholicism is as clear as the sun at noon. It is a crisis produced by the Papacy's hostility, not only to modernism but to modernity. Until the Roman See shall cease to teach that it possesses the right to shed the blood of heretics ; that our democratic age should thrust itself into the shackles of political union with the Italian Curia; and that science and scholarship shall take no forward step not permitted them by the hoary reac- tionism of Vatican theology, the Church will travel fast toward the dissolution of which there have been so many appalling symptoms since the tiara was placed upon the head of Pius X. Until then Roman Catholicism will not only fail to gain accessions among men of modern spirit, but will continue to see many of her own sons, and those the choicest, deserting her for a simplicity, sincerity and liberty which departed from the halls of the Vatican when temporal powers, Italian monopoly, and the temper of absolutism and persecution came in. Until then, too, there will be need for such books as this, which, could Rome but see it, point the way to renewal, vitality, and victory.
The Author.
October, 1911.
FART I— LETTERS
The Need for These Letters
Your Holiness:
It has become unfortunately very rare, it is considered indeed to be not only improper but irreligious, for a sim- ple Christian to offer counsel or remonstrance to his eccle- siastical superiors. However tyrannical and unchristian the acts of Pope or prelate may be, however cruel the suffering he may inflict, the common faithful must raise no voice of protest. When recently the most illustrious laymen of France, among whom were such men as Bru- netiere, Thureau-Dangin, de Vogue and d'Haussonville, earnestly recommended that your Holiness give a loyal trial to the Briand separation-law, and pointed out how uncalled for and disastrous would be the course which it pleased you to adopt, they were roundly scored for the impertinent presumption of giving advice to a Pope. When also the loyal Catholics of Italy, wearied unto very sickness with the Papacy's puerile attitude toward the Italian government, founded their League of National Democracy for the promoting both of patriotism to their country and devotion to their church, they were con- demned and silenced, and their noble project put under ban of anathema. Even should it be that a bishop himself
3
4 LETTERS TO HIS HOLINESS
speak out in conscientious opposition, though in the most respectful terms, to this or that Papal policy, he is con- sidered by the regnant autocracy at Rome as having trans- gressed the limits of the servitude which the Curia has imposed upon mankind. Witness the late bishop of La Rochelle, stricken in his very death-hour by Roman cen- sure, because of his solicitude to mitigate the severity of your Holiness's condemnation of the Separation law. Witness certain of our own American bishops who in- formed Leo XIII ten years ago that his fancied American- ism did not exist here, and thereby came under the high displeasure of the Roman camarilla. Witness the three German bishops who only yesterday, as it were, supported the project of erecting a monument to the pure-minded Christian scholar, Hermann Schell, and received from your Holiness summary disapproval and crushing rebuke. Schell's stainless name is hated at the Vatican ; therefore no Catholic must venerate it. When the Pope speaks let every tongue be still ; when the Pope acts let every head be bowed. If we feel righteous indignation at Roman folly, we must not utter it. Should even our very con- science revolt, we must repress it. Blind, stupid, slavish submission — this alone is left us.
So strongly is Roman coercion riveted upon prelates, priests and people, that the old Catholic independence is lost, the old episcopal dignity sunk to serfdom. Men of candor and strong personality, men who bend the knee to God alone and follow not the tricks of fawning — can such men obtain bishoprics to-day? No, except by acci-
LETTERS TO HIS HOLINESS 5
dent, and a rare accident. Weakness, the inevitable con- sequence of subservience, is the universal result. Weak men are appointed bishops; poor, docile, unintellectual instruments who see no disgrace in being liveried lackeys of Italian congregations, deem it not dishonorable to pro- fess in their official documents that they owe their suc- cessorship to the apostles "to the mercy of the Apostolic See" — Sanctae sedis misericordia — and conceive it to be the highest purpose of episcopal statesmanship to make this year's Peter's Pence more opulent than the last.
It was not always so. Catholicism and Romanism were not always one ; and if to-day we must hold our peace whether Rome does well or ill, time was when the spirit of manhood could coexist with Holy Orders, and not even the might of the Sovereign Pontificate daied to assail it with impunity. To one of your predecessors an Irish monk, Columbanus, wrote the splendid defiance, Si tollis libertatcm, tollis et dignitatem; "if you destroy liberty, you destroy honor". To Pope Eugenius, St. Bernard, another monk, dared to send a sturdy warning against the corruption surrounding the Roman See. Disgusted with the profane pomp displayed by the successors of a Galilean fisherman, the austere Cistercian reminded the head of Western Christendom : "In his saccessisti, non Petro sed Constantino" : "in this you make yourself the successor not of Peter, but of Constantine". (De Consid. Bk. iV-c. 3).
The government of the Church, says Gregory i, in words which we of this time can scarcely believe to be
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the words of a Pope, ought never to crush the right of honorable protest. "Necesse est ut cura regiminis tanta moderaminis arte temperetur, quatenus subditorum mens, cum quaedam recte sentire potuerit, sic in vocis libertatem prodeat, ut tamen libertas in superbiam non erumpat." (De Cura Past. II-8.) So Hilary of Poitiers sturdily con- demned Pope Liberius ; so Catherine of Sienna poured an invective of fire upon the sordid souls of the Curialists of her time ; so Strossmayer told the Vatican Council that the Italianizing of the world must cease if Catholicity is to prosper ; so, to conclude with the first and greatest of such instances, Paul withstood Peter for betraying the spirit and the cause of Christ.
Yes, the sorrowful history of Roman tyranny has been now and then illuminated by spokesmen of freedom. Sim- ple priests and humble monks and weak women have dared to speak their minds to the wearers of the triple crown ; and at intervals the voice of candor has flung its challenge into halls that were better acquainted with the accents of subservience, falsehood, and intrigue. In the spirit of these apostles of truth-telling, the writer of these letters ventures, your Holiness, to commit the impropriety of addressing you. Who I am is of the smallest conse- quence. Suffice it to say that I am an American, pene- trated to the heart with the love and the traditions of my country ; that as an American I cannot tolerate bondage, and must detest whatever man or institution endeavors to check the ever-growing, ever-rising personality of man in its aspirations for larger freedom and more perfect
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truth ; that furthermore, I have been drilled and disci- plined in the Roman system from my youth ; that for years I could see no distinction between Romanism and Catholicism ; but that now after long study and reflec- tion, in the course of which I have tried to follow the highest ideal of Truth which God has permitted me to see, I have come to the conclusion that a Papal power capable in this twentieth century of such infamies as the Syllabus of Pius IX and your own campaign against modernism, is irreconcilable with civilization and is de- structive of the religion of Jesus Christ.
II
The Purpose of These Letters
Your Holiness:
In writing these letters I am deluded by no false hope, no vain expectation. Had I the genius of Pascal, I should no more hope to influence the traditional spirit of the Roman See than that illustrious man in his day hoped to destroy Jesuitism. It goes without saying, that I wish some such words as these of mine might receive impartial consideration in the court over which you preside. Noth- ing is dearer to my heart than that the best traditions of Catholicity — its splendid sanctity, its divine fecundity of heroism, its priceless mysticism, should gain access to the souls of modern men, and sanctify and save them. Yes, Holy Father, I devoutly wish, that you might bear with me even when, overcome by feeling, I speak perhaps too
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harshly of the history of your exalted office. Would that laying every prejudice aside you might say : "Why is the modern world so hostile to Catholicism? Why have the most enlightened nations of history rejected it and set themselves against it? What is the reason? Has it any justification? Can I do anything to correct mistakes and remove antipathies which are ruinous to the cause of Christ ? I will listen to what sincere men would say to me. Their speech may be at times intemperate, but it is easy to overlook that if their intention be upright, and their remonstrance true. These modernist reformers, so hateful to the Curia, are very often of high intelligence and unquestioned probity, and of a truth their number is astonishingly increasing. They are neither fools nor criminals ; they have a mes- sage ; they wish to serve religion. Let me see — me who am beholden to Jesus Christ, how I discharge my shep- herdship, if there be not in these loud cries some appeal to my conscience, some summons to a duty not yet ful- filled. May I not have to incur in my judgment-hour the reproach uttered by holy Bernard to one who wore my tiara : Quousque murmur unwersae terrae, aut dis- simulas aut non avertis! 'How long have you been deaf to the outcry of the whole world !' "
Alas ! there is no ground to hope that either Pope or bishop will thus heed the reformer's cry. Every earnest spirit that in our time has attacked consecrated iniquity or ecclesiastical folly has been bludgeoned. Look at the men who have spoken for pure religion and truth against
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Roman oppression : Gratry, Montefeltro, Gioberti, Mon- talembert, Lamennais, Dollinger, Schell, Murri, Tyrrell, — why extend the list ? — noble names, high-minded men of God, yet every one of them saw his dream dissolve, and died, or will die, forlorn, defeated, hopeless.
No, I have no expectation of succeeding where these great souls have failed. The walls of Jericho collapse no longer at the trumpet call of consecrated men. Save that the Papacy has been deprived of the power to shed blood, its grip upon its remaining adherents was hardly ever more suffocating than in this present day. Its au- tocracy has still a long history before it, and hundreds yet unborn are destined to be added to the lengthy list of its victims. But I do hope in these letters to your Holiness, to help the formation, especially among Ameri- can Catholics, of a public opinion, which will send across the Atlantic some ringing word, some typically American defiance, against the non-representative cabal whose onlv courtesy to us has been the taking of our lavish largesses of money. I do hope to open the eyes of some of our fair-minded priests to the appalling falsifications of their poor pitiable seminary education, and to the mental and spiritual bondage in which, to the grievous injury of character and manhood, they are enslaved. I do hope to express in the name of America, which has thus far been silent, a protest against your frenzied crusade upon the rights of human intelligence. I do hope to tell you frankly why the Church is losing ground every day among civilized and enlightened peoples, and to put it
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before your conscience whether you, who alone can do it, will relieve the momentous situation, will turn your back upon traditions whose history reeks with blood and is foul with corruption, and take as your simple standard: Not the Curia, but Christ !
Ill
The Purpose of These Letters (Continued)
Your Holiness:
It is my purpose to tell you why the modern world rejects and distrusts Roman Catholicism. Until we know the answer to that question Catholics are in a fool's para- dise, their apologetics are inept, their dreams of con- versions only hallucinations, their wider religious activi- ties almost ridiculous. I am aware that in the marvelous mentality of the strict Roman theologian, the question is summarily answered. The most highly enlightened na- tions of the world have cast off Roman Catholicism be- cause they are under the power of Satan, and of his chief instruments, the Free-Masons. Voila! the problem is solved. This solution I have no intention of refuting. It would degrade the intellect of a grown man to discuss it. Merely let me say, Your Holiness, that the educated minds of Germany, France, England, and the United States, have not set the Father of Falsehood upon the altar of the God of Truth ; and that whenever the Cath- olic religion shall appear before them as a purely spiritual society, existing for no other purpose whatsoever than to reproduce the Christ-life upon earth, they will turn to
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her with overflowing hearts, will merge all their differ- ences in a world-wide spiritual brotherhood, and will rec- ognize with new ardor the supreme leadership of Jesus Christ.
But now, and for imperative reasons, as I soon shall point out, they do not regard Roman Catholicism as a purely religious society. They consider it, on its official, on its Roman side, a mischievous political institution that has done its best to wreck civilization in the past, and is still a deadly menace to the civilization of to-day and of the future. They can see nothing resembling Christ in the Roman Curia, and in the Papacy as it functions now. They dread it ; they abhor it. Until it radically changes, until it candidly gives the lie to its past history, they will have no dealings and no patience with it. And the solemn responsibility that rests upon you, and upon those who will come after you, is whether you will save the souls of the modern world, or prefer to save the worthless forms of a dead and rotting theocracy.
IV What Is Religion
Your Holiness:
Before coming to the reasons on which the modern world bases its rejection of Roman Catholicism, let us go back to certain primary principles of religious life and thought. Bear with me while I touch upon a defini- tion or two which a penny catechism furnishes indeed, but in hardly adequate terms. What, after all, is the
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Christian religion? What is the Church of Christ? Re- ligion is the name for our God-obeying, Godward-grow- ing life. Religion means union with Deity, character- culture in the pursuit of infinite Truth, Justice and Love. The Christian religion signifies the type and method of these spiritual relationships as shown forth and taught by Christ. Christianity is God-worship in the Christ- manner ; soul-cultivation after the Christ-model. In a word, the aim of Christianity is to reproduce and perpet- uate the Christ-life. A Christian Church is a brotherhood of Christian disciples ; and that Church will be the best and truest church which teaches in the most pure and perfect way the Christ-life, the Christ-character. It seems too obvious to need remarking, but there is, as we shall see, abundant reason to remark, that Christianity, or the Christ-ideal, can never stand in opposition to morality, to the ideas of goodness, charity, mercy and truth which our Creator has placed within our spirit. Christianity is rather to purify and exalt these ideals. If they are at- tacked, it cannot be Christ that attacks them ; and if it be that someone does attack them in Christ's name, we may straightway know that such a one is consciously or uncon- sciously misrepresenting the Lord in whom all our ideals shine forth divinely, and is an apostate from the perfect standard which he has left us.
Furthermore religion is not the sole activity of man. In all other departments of the higher life, too, we must grow ; we must be forever dropping the less to reach forth for the greater. Growth in Truth and in Liberty is the
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law of the beneficent Providence which has made us men. And just as only a falsification and travesty of Chris- tianity can contradict morality, so only a falsification and travesty of Christianity can contradict these other species of human progress. A true Christian Church therefore must perpetuate the Christ-ideal while never obstructing the higher evolution of mankind, which is as much a part of God's Providence as Christianity itself. Accordingly, the Church must be one, inasmuch as the ideal life which it is its raison d'etre to inculcate, is one ; it must be holy, because its purpose is the sacredest possible to man ; and it must be Catholic ; that is to say, it must further all forms of human development by sanctifying the root and origin of all. If any Church — let us say it once more — ■ does not fulfill this mission, if it officially degrades moral- ity, and obstructs the pathway of the higher human evolu- tion, to that extent it is faithless to the Christ-type, it is renegade to the Christ-teacher, it is a falsehood and an imposition ; and instead of forming men to the Gospel standard, it will turn many of them away in disgust from any religion whatsoever. Can anything be plainer?
I have been using the terms Christ-spirit, Christ-life, Christ-ideal. I trust there is no need for detailed defini- tions here. Surely we know who and what was Jesus. He is the crown and glory of human character. Love of truth, that made Him defy a corrupt hierarchy ; consecra- tion to duty, that led Him to the cross ; gentleness, that crowns him with winning loveliness beyond any other of the sons of men ; mercy, that has let us see that no peni-
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tent or prodigal need despair ; in these, how divinely great and glorious He is ! How He rises above His nation by conceiving the Kingdom as not for the Jews alone, but for the world ! How He scorns the caste-pride of the Pharisees by sitting down to eat with sinners ! How He shatters the antipathies of narrow orthodoxy by put- ting forth as models the heretic leper who returned to give thanks, and the heretic philanthropist on the road to Jericho, who understood God better than Levite or priest ! It were sacrilege to think of Him as brutal ; as striking with cruel fist any face upturned to God ; as grinding any of the little ones He loved beneath the iron heel of tyranny. O Sovereign Pontiff, the standard of men and institutions is not Canon Law, but He, the Mas- ter ; not ancient tradition, but the everlasting God as shin- ing out upon us in the perfect Christ!
V
The Attitude of the Modern World Toward Official
Catholicism
Your Holiness:
In due time I shall bring the subject-matter of the pre- ceding letter to bear upon Papal history. Just now let me recall to you in detail some of the chief reasons for the modern world's refusal to embrace Roman Catholicism. You do not know them, I dare say ; few in the Church over which you hold sovereign dominion appreciate them in any intelligent degree. What with all this fury over
LETTERS TO HIS HOLINESS 15
modernism, what with the puerile orthodox shuddering at Satan and Free-Masonry as the cause of the Church's troubles, the real reasons are persistently and foolishly ignored. Now then, in a candid and downright fashion, let us see what they are.
The enlightened nations of to-day, Holy Father, are decisively in opposition to Roman Catholicism, largely, yes, primarily, because as has been said, they look upon it as the irreconcilable enemy of progress and civilization. The sanctity which appears so often and so brilliantly in the Church, they acknowledge and revere. The intelli- gent American non-Catholic speaks as affectionately as would one of the Catholic household, of the Sisters who sacrifice their lives for the orphans, the aged, and the sick. He bows his head in veneration at heroic names like that of Damien. His Catholic neighbors he esteems according to their worth. Catholic charities he is liberal in helping to support. But over and beyond the diviner side of Catholicism he sees the sinister forms, he reads the foul history of Papacy and Curia. These he abhors. With these as they have been and still are, he cannot, while the world lasts, be reconciled. He regards the political Papacy and the autocracy of the Curia as a menace to human liberty, as destructive of enlightenment and subversive of pure religion. It is as impossible to con- vert Germany, England and America to the Papacy, as to Mohammedanism. The triumph of Islam itself in their judgment would be no more disastrous to mankind than the re-establishment of the sovereignty of medieval Rome.
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I am speaking plainly, but with literal truthfulness. The Papacy and the Curia were the chief reasons for the revolt of the sixteenth century; the Papacy and the Curia are the chief reasons why that revolt is not abated in the twentieth. Now, then, why is there such an atti- tude toward Papal Rome? Is it not wholly unjust? Do not our pious histories inform us that the Papacy has been the savior of civilization ? that the sovereign See of Cath- olic Christendom is a "Holy" See? that there the world's zeal and learning are gloriously concentrated? Is it not pure bigotry, this hostility to the Roman Pontificate?
No, it is not pure bigotry. Neither is it in modernism, nor in the classic sources, Satan and Masonry, that we must find the cause of the ineradicable aversion of the modern world for the See of Rome. That cause lies in the notorious history of that See itself. It has been judged by its fruits, and by its fruits forever and irrevoc- ably condemned. Let us see.
Nations, like invididuals, cherish as most precious the possessions that have cost them most. To-day, at the basis of every free state are certain principles of liberty which have been gained only after centuries of heroic struggle and a dreadful expenditure of heroic blood. These princi- ples of liberty are dearer to every freeman than his life. Sooner will a free country consent to give up the last of its sons to the sword and the last of its homes to the torch, than surrender the emancipating ideas which the slow Providence that overrules history has bestowed upon us. Backward the march of man can never go. Faithless
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to the heritage of freedom mankind can never be unless mankind goes mad. Barbarism shall never overreach civ- ilization ; Death shall never usurp the seat of Life.
The greatest of these principles of liberty is freedom of conscience. The relations of each man's soul with his Creator are a matter solely for each man's conscience, subject to nothing else than the fundamental morality and the social peace which must govern all human activities. Freedom of conscience is the highest of all freedom ; it is the life-principle of every people that deserves to be called civilized. Precious as it is, fundamental as it is, it has been most painfully won. Through blood, and flames, and exile, and all terror, the right to worship Deity as con- science dictates has fought its way. To-day we blush for shame that it should ever have been violated. To-day we look back as to the highest type of heroism upon the exile banned by tyranny, because he would not lie ; to the martyr dying at the stake because he would not bend the knee to what he believed to be falsehood and superstition.
Sovereign Pontiff, do you ask why the Papacy is de- spised and rejected? It is, first of all, because this price- less right of conscience is denied as impious falsehood by your Roman See ; it is because the Papacy's history with regard to it is perhaps the Vilest infamy recorded in the annals of the world.
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VI
The Papacy and Freedom of Conscience
Your Holiness:
Says the fourth ecumenical Lateran council, after having pronounced anathema upon heretics : "We prohibit under pain of anathema, that any one retain or protect them in his house or territory, or have any business dealings with them. And if any one of them die in his sin, no prayers shall be offered for him, and Christian burial shall be denied him". Pope Innocent III, in the same Council, legislates as follows : "Let secular rulers be warned, and if necessary compelled by ecclesiastical censures, to take a public oath to do all in their power to exterminate from their territory all manner of heretics — (universos haere- ticos exterminarc) — who shall have been so designated by the Church. This oath every man shall be obliged to take who enters upon any office of civil power, whether the office be for life or for a limited time. And if a secu- lar ruler, after due warning by the Church, neglects to purge his territory from the filth of heresy (ab haeretica foeditate), let him be excommunicated by the metropolitan archbishop and the bishops of the Province. If thereafter he fails to come to a better mind, let this within the space of one year be told to the Pope, to the end that the Su- preme Pontiff may declare that ruler's subjects absolved from their allegiance, and his territory open to seizure by Catholics, who shall possess it absolutely (absque ulla contradictione) once they have destroyed the heresy there
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existing, and established it in purity of doctrine. This, however, must not interfere with the rights of the chief sovereign, provided he has placed no obstacle to the execu- tion of our law.
"Catholics who engage in a crusade for the extermina- tion of heretics (ad hacreticorum extet -minium), shall be granted that indulgence and that holy privilege which are bestowed upon Crusaders to the Holy Land.
"Heretics, along with those that shelter, defend and support them, we declare to be excommunicated. As soon as any one of such — this is our strict decree (Urmiter statuentes) — becomes thus publicly excommunicated, the penalty upon him, if within a year he neglect to repair his fault, is this: He is under infamy (infamis) ; he cannot fill public office, or share in choosing public officials ; he is not allowed to give testimony in a court of justice ; he is incapable of making a will bequeathing property, or of coming into possession of a bequest to himself ; he can- not exact information upon any matter from others, but he must give information when asked by others. If he is a judge, his sentence is null, and no cases should be brought before him for trial. If he is a lawyer, no one is permitted to hire him (ejus patrocinium nullatenus admit- tatur). If he is a notary, the public documents that he draws up are invalid, being vitiated in their source. Priests must refuse the sacraments to such pestilential wretches (pestilentibus), deny them Christian burial, and scorn to take their alms and offerings. Should any priest act to the contrary, he is to be deprived of his office, and
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never restored to it without a special indult of the Apos- tolic See.
"We will, decree, and strictly command, that in the exe- cution of these laws, bishops be diligent and vigilant. If they are not so, canonical penalties await them. Should any bishop be negligent or lax in purging his diocese of the leaven of heretical wickedness, he shall be deposed from the episcopal office and another put in his place who is both able and willing to destroy heresy".
Says your same predecessor, Innocent III, in his En- cyclical "Vergentis in Senium"'. "In the territories sub- ject to our temporal jurisdiction, we decree that the pos- sessions of heretics shall be confiscated. In other terri- tories we decree that the self-same thing be done by the secular powers and princes ; and if these secular powers and princes are negligent in this respect, it is our will and command that they be compelled to it by ecclesiastical censures, to be imposed without privilege of appeal. For if, according to civil law, the possessions of those capitally convicted of lese majeste are confiscated, so that nought is given to their children except life, and this out of mercy, with how much greater reason ought they to be cut off by ecclesiastical sentence from Christ, our head, and despoiled of all temporal goods, who err in faith and offend Jesus Christ the true Son of God ; since it is far more heinous to injure eternal than earthly majesty. Neither is this law of ours to shrink from despoiling the orthodox children (of heretical parents) on any pretext of mercy whatsoever ; for in many cases, some of them di-
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vinely sanctioned, the children must suffer temporally for their father's fault ; and, according to canon law, punish- ment at times is visited, not only upon the authors of crime, but upon their posterity". (This decree concerning the disinheriting even of Catholic children of heretical parents is embodied in the official canon law of the Roman Church.)
Let us hear still again this Innocent III legislating for the universal Church in his capacity of supreme moral and doctrinal teacher. "We strictly forbid you lawyers and notaries from giving any assistance, counsel or favor to heretics, their supporters or defenders ; from undertak- ing their defence in lawsuits or the defence of any litigants acting under their control ; or from drawing up for them any public instrument or document. If you presume to act contrariwise to this regulation, we decree that you be removed from your calling and subjected to perpetual in- famy." (From "Si adversus vos terra consurgeret" .)
Another Vicar of Jesus Christ, Gregory IX, lays down the law: "If any of the aforesaid (heretics) refuse to perform condign penance after they have been appre- hended, they are to be shut up in prison for life (in per- petuo carcere detrudantur, from Gregory's 'Sicut in uno cor pore' ").
The same Pope goes a step further : "Let all under- stand that they are absolved from allegiance to their civil ruler when he has fallen into manifest heresy, and from all service to any one, no matter how sacredly pledged and promised, if the one to whom the promise has been made
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has fallen into manifest heresy". This extraordinary text is as follows in the original: "Absolutos se noverint a debito fidelitatis domini et totius obsequii quicumque lapsis manifeste in haeresim aliquo pacto quacumque firmitate vallato tenebantur adstricti". Clumsy as this Latin is, its diabolical significance there is no mistaking. The coer- cing of civil rulers to punish and destroy heretics, under penalty of forfeiting their crown, if remiss, became so consistent a practice of the Roman Church that the prin- ciple is set down in the Church's official Canon Law. (Extravagantes. Tit. VII, c-13).
Often quoted (e. g. by the Catholic priests Vacandard and Turmel, see Revue du Clerge Francais, Jan. 15, 1907) are the horrible words of this same Gregory IX on the Church's attitude toward heresy: "It is not fitting that the Apostolic See should withhold its hand from bloodshed, lest it fail in its guardianship of the people of Israel". "Nee enim decuit apostolicam sedem * * * manum suam a sanguine prohibere, ne si secus ageret, non custodire populum Israel videretur". (Letter to the Arch- bishop of Sens, 1234.)
The authority of these citations no man, not even the most dexterous casuist of the school of Gury or Liguori can impeach. They may be found grouped in convenient proximity, along with whole pages of similar legislation, in the classic guide-book for Inquisitors, the Directorium Inquisltorum, of Nicholas Eymeric, the Dominican In- quisitor-General of Aragon (1399), whose exhaustive treatise — exhaustive up to the time of its composition —
LETTERS TO HIS HOLINESS 23
gives us ample information on the anti-heretical decrees of Papal Rome, and on the excellent manner in which the Pope's janissaries carried them into effect.
Let me add here one or two lines from the Corpus Juris, the official law-book of the Papacy :
"We decree that Jews and Saracens shall in every Christian Province wear a special garment which shall publicly mark them off from other people". Decret. Greg. lib. V Tit Vi-c-15.
"If a bishop or other cleric leaves among his heirs any relative who is a heretic, that bishop, even after his death, is to be excommunicated". lb. lib V. Tit VII. c-5, 6.
"If any one presumes to keep heretics in his house or lands, or to carry on business with them, he is to be ex- communicated" lb. c-8.
"The possessions of heretics are to be confiscated. In the Church's territory they are to go to the Church's treasury; in the territory of the Empire, they are to go to the State treasury, even though the heretics have Cath- olic children". lb. c-10.
Paul IV thus legislates concerning Jews : "The Roman Church tolerates Jews as a testimony to the true Chris- tian faith. Now by this our present law, which we de- clare to hold forever (hoc nostra perpetuo valitura con- stitutione) we command that in all the Church's temporal possessions, the Jews shall live in separate quarters, to which there shall be but one road of entrance and one of exit. They shall possess but one synagogue in eacfc
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place ; any synagogues over and above one are to be de- stroyed (demoliri et devastari). Jews shall not own houses or lands (bona immobilia) : Whatever such hold- ings they possess at present they must sell to Christians within a time to be fixed by the magistrates. In order that Jews may be everywhere known as such, beyond pos- sibility of concealment, the men must wear a yellow hat, and the women some other conspicuous sign of the same color. From this no Jew is to be exempt on any pretext of eminent station or of toleration. The Jews who trans- gress these regulations will be considered rebels, and guilty of lese majeste".
The supreme text-book, standard in every Catholic theological school in the world, is the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. In that work we read : "Respect- ing heretics, we have two observations to make : In the first place they are guilty of a sin by which they deserve to be excluded, not only from the Church by excommuni- cation, but from the world by death. * * * In the second place, the Church is merciful unto the conversion of the erring, and does not straightway condemn. It is far more criminal to corrupt the faith which is the life of the soul than to counterfeit the coin of the realm which is a convenience for earthly life. And if counter- feiters and other malefactors are justly put to death by the secular power, for a greater reason may heretics, when convicted of heresy, be not only excommunicated but justly killed.
"In the second place the Church, in her merciful re-
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gaid for the conversion of the erring, does not immedi- ately condemn, but only after a first and a second cor- rection, as the Apostle says: But when the heretic is stubborn, the Church, despairing of his conversion, pro- vides for the safety of others by cutting him off from the Church through sentence of excommunication, and finally by yielding him up to the secular power to be killed (a miindo exterminandum per mortem}.
"Those coming back for the first time from heresy to the Church, the Church not only admits to penance, but even preserves in life ; sometimes she even restores to them ecclesiastical dignities which they may have had before. * * * But when they relapse again into her- esy, it is a sign of inconstancy in faith ; and therefore when they once more come back they are allowed indeed to do penance, but are not free from sentence of death." (Summa-pars 2a 2dae quaest, Xl-art. 3 et 4.)
VII
The Inquisition
Your Holiness:
The attitude of the Papacy toward freedom of con- science, as indicated in the preceding pages, is such as to call down upon the office you hold the execration of man- kind. Any man or any office that has taught that Chris- tian people, who conscientiously worship God and inter- pret the Lord's Gospel in other than the Roman manner, cannot hold property ; that such as they do hold shall be
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plundered by the "faithful" ; that princes who are indul- gent to them shall be deposed ; that the heretic himself shall be as a dog among men, unable to give testimony in court, unable to hire legal help in his necessity, unable to bequeath his savings to his flesh and blood ; and that he is to be immured in prison for life — such a man, or such an office, appealing to the suffrage and support of civilized mankind to-day, must receive no other answer than a Canaanite, returning now to earth after four thou- sand years would receive, who should ask us to worship Baal, and to cast our little children into the burning arms of Moloch. And yet I have not even begun the story of Rome's trampling upon the highest right of man. Papal decrees, and conciliar laws, prescribing confiscation and imprisonment, are only the introductory chapter. We hrve not even glanced as yet upon the enormous ma- chinery designed and empowered by the Papacy for car- rying these regulations into their appalling execution. I have no intention of entering into a detailed history of the Inquisition — the name of this machinery — but I will set down a brief summary of facts leading up to and con- cerning this institution, designed, one would say, in Hell, did one not know that its inventors were Popes. A. D. 1 1 57 — The Council of Rheims orders branding in
the face for heretics. 1166 — This decree adopted by the Council of Oxford. 1 184 — Pope Lucius Ill's decree to the Council of Verona
orders princes to enforce the full penalties against
LETTERS TO HIS HOLINESS 2"]
heretics, under penalty of excommunication, should they be remiss in enforcing them.
1 197 — The burning of heretics first made positive law by Pedro II of Aragon.
1220 — Emperor Frederic II prescribes outlawry and con- fiscation against heretics.
1221-1226 — Legates of Pope Honorius III go to enforce this law into the few Italian cities which were dis- inclined to receive it.
1224 — Frederic II, going a step further, promulgates in Lombardy a law that heretics should be burned, or should, at least, have their tongues cut out.
1230 — This law, inscribed in the Papal registers by Greg- ory IX, whose chief agent in enforcing it was Guala, the Dominican bishop of Brescia.
1 23 1 — Frederic II takes final step, in his famous Sicilian constitutions, of absolutely decreeing death by fire for heretics. Shortly afterward the Emperor ap- plied this Sicilian law to the whole Empire. How quickly the law came to be applied may be under- stood from the fact that in 1233 sixty heretics were burned at Verona, and in 1239, one hundred and eighty-three heretics were burned at Mont-Aime, in France.
1252 — Innocent IV's bull, commanding under threat of excommunication that temporal rulers should en- force all penalties against heretics within five days from their conviction as such. This bull he ordered inserted in the Imperial Statutes for Italy.
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1254 — Innocent IV issues a bull incorporating the most bloody laws of Emperor Frederic II. Inasmuch as this celebrated constitution of Innocent IV, the Ad extir panda, as it is known, became classic in inquisitorial procedure, it will be useful to set forth its leading enactments. It is addressed to all the rulers of Italy, and provides: 1st, that any one may seize a heretic, and despoil him of his property ; 2nd, that every magistrate shall appoint an inquisitorial commission, whose salaries are to be paid by the State ; 3rd, that no law may be passed interfering with these Inquisitors ; 4th, that heretics who will not confess their heresy shall be tortured ; 5th, that the houses of heretics shall be de- molished ; 6th, that the confiscated property of heretics shall be thus divided, one-third to the inquisitors and the bishops, one-third to the city, and one-third to those who aided in the arrest and conviction.
This, as we have noted, was made statute law, and Innocent gave particular instructions to the inquisitors to enforce it, as well as the anti-heretical laws of Fred- eric II.
1265 — Pope Clement IV re-promulgates the Ad extir- panda; Nicholas IV does likewise a quarter-century later. 1259 — Alexander IV re-issues the Ad extir panda. 1265 — Urban IV makes universal the excommunication of civil authorities who impede or delay the operation of the Inquisition. This is incorporated in the Church's Canon Law. Magistrates who fail to exe-
LETTERS TO HIS HOLINESS 2Q
cute the sentence of the Inquisition are not only ex- communicated, but if their negligence continue for a year, they are to be themselves proceeded against for the capital crime of heresy. 1270 — Burning made the legal death-penalty for heretics
in France. 1335 — Pope Benedict XII writes to Edward III of Eng- land, complaining of the fact that the "useful and holy Inquisition" was not yet established in the Eng- lish realm, and urging the king to give the assistance of the secular power to the bishop of Ossory, a Fran- ciscan monster who had already caused some heretics to be burned. In 1401 England established burning as the penalty for heresy. At first the carrying out of the Papal laws against her- esy was committed to the bishops, the jure divino rulers of the Church. Thus the Council of Narbonne, in 1227, ordered bishops to have in every parish of their jurisdic- tion agents for the hunting down of heretics. But the bishops, showing too little of the spirit of murderers, displeased highly the "Holy" See. What the Papacy required was a corps of janissaries, a band of fanatics who would make torture and homicide the subject of their study and the business of their life. Such an or- ganization was ready at hand in the Dominican and Fran- ciscan orders. These, under Pope Gregory IX, entered upon their career as Inquisitors, armed with such author- ity from the Papacy as made bishops, by comparison, quite insignificant personages. This is the first notable
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instance in history of the Papacy's contempt for the pre- sumably divine institution of the episcopate, and of the adoption of religious orders as the Pope's chief instru- mentality in governing the world. Such progress has this procedure now made, that at this day and hour the whole ecumenical body of bishops has not so much weight in the Roman Curia as the generals of half a dozen orders of monks. Bitterly as the bishops complain of their degradation, they have only their own jealousy, pusillanimity and flunkeyism to thank for it.
Armed with the amplest powers which the Papacy has ever delegated to its agents, the Dominicans and Francis- cans swarmed over Europe, setting up the Inquisition everywhere, and everywhere leaving in their track terror, pillage, perjury, delation, torture, woe and death. Over Europe, did I say? Yes, and beyond Europe to the very frontiers of Christianity. For even on missionary out- posts, where barbarians came together to learn the good tidings, the Inquisition was set up to teach them of Jesus, and of His first and greatest commandment, which is Love ! Gregory XI appointed a Dominican Inquisitor for Russia and Armenia ; Urban VI asked the General of the Dominicans to appoint Inquisitors for Armenia, Greece and Tartary ; Nicholas IV allowed the Patriarch of Jerusalem to appoint Inquisitors from the mendicant friars ; Gregory XI empowered the Franciscan provincial in the Holy Land to act as Inquisitor-in-chief for Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Even in Abyssinia we find indicn-
LETTERS TO HIS HOLINESS 31
tions of the tribunal's existence ; and our own continent of America has known the shame and horror of it.
Your Holiness must know the procedure of this insti- tution thus blessed and empowered by your precedessors. When the Inquisitors arrived in a parish, proclamation was made of their presence and purpose. The faithful were commanded to denounce anyone whom they even suspected of the slightest heresy. An indulgence of three years was bestowed on informers, while those who with- held their information were visited with excommunication incurred ipso facto. A man thus delated, very often merely because of having let fall an incautious word, or just as often probably because of a private grudge, was at once arrested and flung into prison. The whole purpose of his trial was to extort a confession of heresy. When he appeared before his monkish judges, the very name of his accuser was concealed from him, and if he persisted in denying his guilt, he was put to torture. Two com- plainants, and in many cases even one, were judged suf- ficient ground for the infliction of torture even upon a man of hitherto unblemished reputation.
This infamous feature of inquisitorial trial was due directly to Pope Innocent IV, as the priest, Vacandard, confesses. Not one, or at most one, of the barbarian nations of Europe made use of torture in legal processes. It was reserved for the earthly representative of Christ to sink to this, the lowest infamy ever reached by man. Frequently the first stage in procuring the confession
2)2 LETTERS TO HIS HOLINESS
required before sentence of conviction could be given, consisted in sending the accused man to prison. At first he was thrust into the common dungeon and there trained spies and specialists in delation, craftily beset him to be- guile him into some direct or indirect acknowledgment of guilt. Should this prove insufficient, he was immured in the durus career, the "cruel prison", a foul hole in which, half starved and bound with chains, he might be expected to come to a better mind. Or if the career and the durus career were judged too slow, or in the event had proved inefficacious, there was left the torture-cham- ber of the holy monks. Into this room the victim — still legally an innocent man, be it remembered — was brought, and put to one or all of the varieties of anguish which the Inquisitors possessed abundant means of inflicting The favorite arguments of this sort were three: greas- ing the victim's feet and thrusting them into the fire; the triangular rack which dislocated the body stretched upon it ; and the hoisting of the man to the ceiling by a rope about his hands, which were tied behind his back, and then letting him fall suddenly to within a few inches of the floor.
Let me interrupt this ghastly story to point out one of those loathsome exhibitions of casuistry with which Roman theology is diseased. The Inquisitors were for- bidden to inflict torture more than once upon the same man for the extortion of confession. Did the Inquisitors quietly accept such a limitation of their august office, their "Holy Office," as their institution is canonically
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styled? Far from it. They were too clever in theology not to know how to keep and break a law at the same time. So they inflicted each species of torture once. Whosoever cannot see that this is torturing a man only once, need but consult any seminarian fresh from his Roman text-books. Or they inflicted torture once for each distinct complaint. Obviously the law of one tor- ture is saved again. Finally by the sublimest of all exer- cise of theological skill, they tortured their man on differ- ent days, not by way of adding a new torture, but only of continuing the old ! "Non ad iterandum, sed ad con- tinuandum," Eymerich, the classic guide of Inquisitors, puts it.
With this putrid casuistry before your eyes, we shall hardly be astonished to read that the Inquisitors after having pronounced capital sentence of heresy upon a man, handed him over to the "secular arm", with the prayer that the civil authorities would not kill him ; whereas, in point of fact, if they failed to kill him, they would be themselves excommunicated and put on trial for their own lives. Neither shall it be a surprise to us to learn that on Papal authority the Inquisitors actually encouraged children to denounce the heretical tendencies of their fathers, and decided that children so acting should not be deprived, despite the law of Innocent III, of a share in their father's confiscated property. Says Inno- cent IV, cited by Vacandard in Revue dn Clerge Francois, April 15, 1906, page 363: "We deem it right that ortho- dox children who reveal the secret heretical perfidy of
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their parents, should not be subjected to loss of inherit- ance." ("Nee quidam a misericordiae finibus duximus excludendum ut si qui paternse hseresis non sequaces, latentem patrum perfidiam revelaverint, quacumque reatus illorum animadversione plectantur, prsedictse punitioni [i. e. loss of inheritance] non subjiceat innocentia filiorum.")
Does your Holiness still wonder why the civilized world abhors the traditional Roman Papacy? Do you think it still necessary in explanation of that abhorrence to saddle Satan and Freemasonry with the responsibility ?
VIII The Inquisition (Continued)
Your Holiness:
How many thousands of lives ended at the Inquisitors' stake; how great a multitude languished in their dun- geons ; how large the number of dislocated, racked and blistered bodies that were carried from their torture- chambers ; how vast the treasure of just possessions they confiscated and pillaged, during the long interval be- tween the beginning of the thirteenth century and the middle of the eighteenth, we cannot accurately tell. Whether such figures as Llorente gives, for example, that in 1482 two thousand persons were burned at Seville alone, be exaggerated or not, I need not pause to deter- mine. Enough for us to know that the Dominican and Franciscan monsters in control of the Inquisition, enor-
LETTERS TO HIS HOLINESS 35
mous as were the powers granted them by the Popes, resorted to the lowest casuistry to enlarge them. Enough for us to know that nearly every timid effort to mitigate the horrors of their tribunal met with their bitter oppo- sition, as when they protested to the Pope against an archbishop of Toulouse in 1350 who had procured some alleviation of the heretic's "durus career". Enough for us to read the words of a king of France who had him- self taken an oath to destroy heresy, protesting in the name of humanity against the butcheries and injustices of the Inquisition. Philippe le Bel is the king, and his complaint is that the Inquisitors at Carcassonne were put- ting wholly innocent people to new ingenuities of torture ("tormenta de novo exquisita") to extort from them accu- sations against both living and dead. Against another Inquisitor, Philippe writes the charge that he is forcing people to confess by terror and the use of incredible tor- ture (inexcogitatis tormentis . . . fatcri compellit).
But had we no other shred of proof of the blood- thirstiness of this Papal tribunal, its achievements in the suppression of witchcraft were enough to damn it for- evermore. Belief in witches and in their malevolence in causing every species of misfortune through alliance with the Prince of night has been solemnly enunciated from the Roman See.
In his celebrated bull, "Summis desiderantes" of 1484, Innocent VIII, supreme teacher of pure religion, tells his contemporaries and posterity that reports of most uncanny goings-on have reached him out of Germany.
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Men and women are holding carnal intercourse with devils — dcemoncs succubi and darinones incubi. These consorts of the damned have acquired alarming power over the laws and general conduct of this universe. By divers incantations, spells, and conjurations, they are de- stroying the fruit of the womb, causing child-abortions and animal-abortions. They are blighting crops, vine- yards and cattle. They mysteriously inflict excruciating torments upon man and beast. They have brought it about that men cannot procreate nor women conceive. Exercised at this widespread deviltry, Innocent says that he is forthwith sending Inquisitors into Germany, who will combat the evil with confiscation, imprisonment and other punishments ("corrigere, incarcerare, punire et initlctare"). He concludes with the fearful words which, so often appended to Inquisitorial authorization, stifled every voice of humanitarian protest. "If any man of any station whatsoever dares to interfere with these Inquisi- tors, he will be excommunicated, suspended if he be a cleric, and laid under interdict if he be in civil authority. Not only these, but other and worse penalties will be in- flicted upon him ("ac alias etiam formidabiliores censuras et p(cnas"y\
The Inquisitors to whom Innocent entrusted the cam- paign against witches were Institoris and Sprenger, both of the order of Dominicans, the latter, author of the Mal- leus MaleHcarum, "Hammer of Witches," perhaps the greatest monument of murderous superstition in human literature. Their activities were a prolonged orgy of
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blood. For one hundred and fifty years the work begun by them went on and resulted in a deadlier devastation than ever stained the soul of Attila or Genghis Khan. One of the Inquisition's champions, Louis of Paramo, tells us with pride that in those one hundred and fifty years the Papal emissaries had burned thirty thousand witches and sorcerers. Only in 1637 did Rome speak a word of chicling against the wild excesses of these monk- butchers of old women, (v. Vacandard in Rev. d„ CI. Francais, March 15, 1906.)
Is there any need of carrying this history of atrocity into further detail? Need I mention the Inquisitorial process against the dead, in which, upon posthumous accusations, the property of men who died in peace and to all appearance even in the bosom of the Church, was confiscated, and their bones dug up and burned? Need I mention specific instances to show that the Papal In- quisition debauched the morality of Europe for five hundred years, teaching the innocence of confiscation, the virtue of delation, and the godliness of murder? Need I show that, because of the Inquisition, the moral sense had been so perverted that butchery became a fea- ture in holiday celebrations, and great lords and great ladies were invited to festivals of torture? An auto-da fe in which many were burned, was held under the In- quisitor-General of Spain, Sarmentio Valladores, in 1695. to celebrate the marriage of Charles II and Marie Louise of Bourbon. Likewise Elizabeth of Valois, daughter
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of the King of France, while still a mere girl, was pres- ent at the burning of several more, on the festival occa- sion of her espousal to Philip II in 1560.
Butchery a sport and torture a play ! behold Sovereign Pontiff, whither peoples have brought up, who have in time past followed where the Roman Shepherd led !
But throughout this whole revolting story, that which causes the student most perplexity and amazement is the attitude of mind, the state of soul, of the Inquisitors themselves. These men were monks; they had re- nounced the world ; they made it their life-profession to follow Christ. To follow Christ ! the merciful Lover of men, the Healer of suffering bodies, the patient Teacher of those that erred ! In His Name they turned the dislo- cating rack ; they flung live coals on bare feet ; they delivered men to the agony of the stake; they plundered property ; they incited children to spy upon their fathers and swear away their lives ! In His name ! Let us listen to one of these monstrosities, one of these prodi- gies, one of these perverts, who could read the sermon on the Mount while the shrieks of a tortured man smote upon his ears. Let us listen to one of the greatest of them, one of the most learned, whose name is to this day a high authority in Moral Theology.
Antonianus Diana, Regular Clerk, was consultor of the Inquisition for the Kingdom of Sicily. In his huge Resolutiones Morales, part the fourth, tract the sixth, we find the following caption : De Tortura in Sanctd Officio Suspect is Vehementer de Hccresi Infer enda
LETTERS TO HIS HOLINESS 39
("Concerning the Infliction of Torture in the Holy Office Upon Those Gravely Suspected of Heresy"). After the manner of theologians of his time, Diana treats his ma- terial in the form of questions and answers. We give a few specimens of his queries and solutions. 1st — Ought Inquisitors to be strongly inclined (proni- ores) to inflict torture?
Yes; "Quia crimen hceresis est occultum ct difhcilis probationis" — because the crime of heresy is occult, and hard to prove. Moreover, of the three Inquisi- torial processes, purgatio, abjaratio and tortura, this last is the most efficacious for getting at the truth, as Pegna and Eymerich teach. 2nd — What proofs of heresy ought the Inquisitors to have before they proceed to torture?
In answer Diana cites several authorities to show that the proofs need be only slight indications (leviora indicia). 3rd — If a man has been tortured once, and new evidence against him comes to hand, may he be tortured again? Yes. 4th — If a man under accusation has run away, is this sufficient reason for torturing him?
Authorities differ; there is ground for both an affirmative and a negative answer. 5th — May torture be inflicted upon children of fourteen years, upon pregnant women, old men, and those sick of fever?
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For the affirmative, Diana cites the following au- thorities : Joseph Sesse, a consultor of the Holy Office (vir doctus, "a learned man," says Diana) ; Castrus Palaus, Eymerich and others. In the nega- tive are Diana himself and Delrius. Women, adds Diana, should not be tortured until forty days after childbirth.
6th — The thirty-fifth Resohitio informs us that in case the accused man is sick, the custom in Sicily is to torture his feet with fire, "ei dabant tormentum ignis in pedes".
7th — If the Inquisitors act upon only a probable opinion in inflicting torture, though there is a more probable opinion forbidding torture in the particular instance, may they be punished for so doing? No.
8th — Tract 7. Resohitio 28. May the Inquisitors pro- ceed against a dead heretic?
Yes ; a dead heretic must be condemned, and his possessions confiscated, even if they have passed out of the hands of the heir. Furthermore, his bones are to be dug up if this be possible. "Haereticus mortuus damandus est, et ejus bona fisco sunt appli- canda, etiamsi devenerint in manus tertii posses- soris".
9th — When Inquisitors disagree with the bishops as to the torture to be inflicted, recourse must be had to the Roman Pontiff.
10th — Tract 8. Resohitio 20. In cases of heresy there
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is no appeal from the sentence of the Inquisition. ib. Res. 26 — If a civil judge will not execute the sentence of the Inquisition the Inquisition may pro- ceed against him as fautor hccresis, "a defender of heresy".
nth — Is the testimony of a man's deadly enemy (inimi- cus capitalis) to be received against him? Generally, no; but in cases of heresy, yes.
1 2th — Res. 43. Are the possessions of heretics turned over to the Inquisitors?
"I speak not," answers Diana, "for other coun- tries, but the Spanish custom is to confiscate to the royal treasury (fisco regio) all the possessions of heretics (omnia bona hcereticornm), because our king, who is a pillar of orthodoxy, (columna fidei), generously supplies the Inquisitors and their agents with whatever the Holy Office requires ("Inquisi- toribus et eorum ministris abunde suppeditat quid- quid necessarium est ad conservationem Sanctse Inquisitionis").
13th — Res. 44- May penitent heretics retain their pos- sessions by Inquisitorial permission?
This question is bitterly controverted (acriter dis- pntatur).
14th — Are the Inquisitors bound to give some share of the goods confiscated from a heretical father to his children ?
A few maintain the affirmative, but many great doctors say, No.
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15th — When a heretic's possessions are confiscated to the treasury, is the treasury bound to pay his debts?
Yes, if the debts were contracted before he fell into heresy.
No, if the debts came after the heresy. Sovereign Pontiff, do you think it to the glory or to the shame of your office — the Christ-vicegerency on earth — that it alone among the institutions of history, whether of savage or civilized men, has made an elaborate science to be seriously studied by learned doctors, out of robbery, hatred, torture and homicide?
IX
Can Infallibility Survive the Inquisition
Your Holiness:
From the facts narrated in the preceding letters, and the texts there cited — facts and texts which are abso- lutely indisputable — there follow some very serious con- sequences. In the first place, we may learn from them at least this primary lesson, that we are not to take blindfold whatever the Roman See puts before us, but we are to subject Papal utterances to the analysis of reason, and to the test of Christ's life and teaching. A primary lesson indeed, but one which the orthodox Catho- lic mind finds it apparently impossible to learn. The idea of Papal authority has grown so huge, so grinding, so blighting, in the Catholic system, that the fundamental rights and duties of personality are destroyed, and the
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light of reason it sometimes seems, trampled to extinc- tion. The Pope says this, a Roman Curialist says that, and lo ! neither reason nor morality must open its eyes ; character must not assert its individuality ; we must be as corpses wearing whatever rags or raiment be put upon us, or as camels kneeling stupidly to have our load in- creased. Had Catholics any adequate idea of person- ality, of initiative, of the laws of life-growth and char- acter-growth, they never would have accepted so essen- tially diseased and destructive a conception. They would have recognized that it is not by such straight- jacketing that God educates the race, but rather by the ventures, vicissitudes and perils of a free mind and an assertive spirit. They would have seen that an obedience pur- chased by the sacrifice of reason is immoral, and a unity demanding automatism from its units, begins by annihi- lating those powers within us which it is the very pur- pose of religion to make vital, vigorous, and perfect. But Catholics are untrained in the way of freedom. Life, growth, initiative, personality, — these are not the words one hears in Catholic schools, or reads in Catholic books, or finds preached from Catholic pulpits ; but onlv obedience, authority, faith, dumb submission, blind accept- ance, the sin of doubt, the pride of intellect. It will be indeed a service rendered if these letters do no more than wake up the intelligence of some few of those who have allowed themselves to be deadened by a false idea of authority, to a sense of the essential dishonor of their present condition. Surely if anything can wake them
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up it is the historic attitude of the Papacy towards liberty of conscience. If Popes through a long space of cen- turies have officially taught theft and bloodshed, it should be in no state of uncritical and ox-like obedience that we receive their words today.
A second result that flows from a study of the Papal teaching that we have seen organically embodied in the Inquisition is still more serious. In the fourth of these letters I adverted to the commonplace truth that Christ's religion cannot contravene morality, and that if any man or society does contravene morality, that man or society is straightway proved to be in contradiction and apostasy to Christ. What, then, in view of the Inquisition, be- comes of the Pope's infallibility? The Popes, as official teachers, as lawgivers of Christendom, have declared, the declarations being to this day written in authoritative Canon Law, that heretics are incapable of holding prop- erty, and that their possessions are to be taken from them without the slightest recompense. Is not this robbery? Can the growing conscience of mankind possibly call it by any other name? The Popes again in their highest official capacity have taught that heretics and witches are to be tortured and killed. Have we any other word for this than brutality and murder? The Popes, once more as the heads of Christendom, have organized, authorized, and supported an institution which for five centuries was a living teacher of cruelty and treachery, and a relent- less agent of barbarity. Were they thereby true or false to Jesus? What if one or two of them made remon-
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strances against the Inquisition's excesses, this puts no new aspect on the question. During those five centuries the massive weight of their teaching and authority encouraged, and more than encouraged, taught and enforced, plunder and bloodshed. In doing so they sub- verted moral principles, they corrupted the moral sense, they violated the Christ-ideal. What becomes of Papal Infallibility? What other conclusion is possible to an open mind than this, that the developing conscience of man, in holding this sort of persecution a crime, is right and in accordance with Christ ; and that the Papacy in maintaining the contrary is wrong and essentially apos- tate to Christ? Must we not in sound reason revise our idea of infallibility, and hold that the Pope is infallible only when he truly interprets the Christ-spirit and the Christ-mind, and that the proximate criterion of his doing so is the collective growing conscience of spirit- ually cultivated men? The very wisest of Papal cham- pions, endeavoring to reconcile Papal infallibility with five centuries of Papal teaching that robbery is right and murder meritorious, have only this apology to offer : Do not judge the past by the present. Those Middle Ages were cruel and the Popes were simply children of their time. How pitiable a plea ! It avails for Protes- tantism, for, bloody as its record, too, has been, Protes- tantism has repented, and acknowledged that in perse- cuting for conscience sake, it committed the worst of sins. But an infallible Papacy that pretends to be divinely safeguarded from ever officially teaching bad
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morality, — how can it be helped by such an argument? If the Papacy has taught corruption only once, not to speak of half a thousand years of it, all is over with infallibility. Infallibility is a transcendental prerogative, absolutely independent of times and seasons and all other sublunary circumstances ; and it is surely a curious fashion of mind that bids us excuse the most evident lapses of a supposed infallibility for a reason with which a true infallibility, by its very nature and essence, can have no relation whatever. The sole escape from this grave conclusion is in upholding the principles of the Inquisition, in canonizing pillage, sanctifying torture, and esteeming the roasting flesh of men who die for con- science a sweet savor unto Jesus. This, a power greater than papacies and principalities has rejected forever, the power of Providentially directed history, the power of maturing conscience, the power of those ideals of the Son of God, which men, having once grown into the comprehension of them, can never cast away.
X
Duty of Seeking Truth
Your Holiness:
I have not, I assure you, gone into this matter of per- secution, nor shall I take up other topics in succeeding letters, either because I find delight in turning over the foul waste-heaps of history, or because I desire to arouse the bigotry of stupid and malicious men. Bigotry is the
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most hideous exhibition that human conduct affords, and I doubt whether certain anti-Catholic forms of it have ever been surpassed for malignity. Intelligent non- Catholics will not be moved to bigotry by anything that I have written or shall write. They are aware that the Papacy and Catholicism are not identical. They know that Catholicism is fruitful in sanctity, charity, and heroism. They need not be reminded that the Catholic laity around them detest as heartily as other men, intol- erance and persecution. All forms of Christian faith have produced Christ-like characters, Catholicism per- haps more than all other forms combined. Bitterness, then, against Catholicism as a spiritual religion, no man, I trust, will take into his soul from these words of mine. Nothing could do more to frustrate my whole purpose than to divert these pages into the service of intoler- ance. Let me again declare what this purpose is.
The Catholic church has reached a crisis in comparison with which every peril of her past history was insignifi- cant. She is now in conflict with ideas. She is now striving to justify herself in the face of science. She is now called to account before the stern tribunal of peoples who have grown to intellectual and ethical maturity. She is now wrestling with the problems of that insistent Freedom, that vast Liberty, that militant Democracy, that sovereign Individuality, into which the modern world has grown. To adopt your own word, O Roman Pontiff, she is in the storm and stress of conflict with Modernism. Never, let me repeat, has the world gone
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back over traversed paths of progress. Never has his- tory permanently reversed its course. Onward, onward, irresistibly swing the marching hosts of men. Thus they fulfil their destiny. Thus God has made provision for their education. Thus must the germs of higher life grow into richer fruit. The past must teach the present, but so teach it that it may grow away from the past to a nobler future. This is life; this is progress; and only in life and progress is there righteousness and truth.
Your letter on modernism defies this universal law. You would arrest the whole movement of the modern spirit. You would put the patristic or the medieval age as a bit into the mouth of this our time and check its course, bring it to full stop, and, with what strength is in you, pull it backward past milestones we had already left behind. You have proclaimed to the world that Catholicism is not "modern," that its face is reversed, that it must and shall coerce the twentieth century within the forms, ideas, and categories of the thirteenth.
It is a crisis of life and death, Holy Father. Every religious man, every man to whom Catholicism has ever been dear — and how dear it has been indeed to the hearts of the modernists you anathematize !— must regard it with consuming solicitude, for scarcely is there a greater peril to souls than the decline and collapse of any ven- erable religious system. Catholicism's decline is now far advanced. Its collapse is absolutely certain unless it cuts off those antagonisms and irreconcilabilities to mod- ern civilization which have been the cause of its wide-
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spread rejection. Frank men are needed, candid speech is needed, to declare to the rulers of the Church what these antagonisms are, and how deep the knife must be driven to remove them.
But the rulers of the Church will pay no heed; and it is hardly more than as a matter of form that in these letters I address them, or you, the greatest of them. My primary purpose is to do a little to educate priests and laity. If I can emancipate some among them from superstition and general mental enslavement ; if I can help them against the day wherein they candidly examine the foundations of their beliefs, to see that whether Papacies must fall or dogmas change, Christ and the Christ-life are immortal; if I can teach them the dis- honor of stubborn prejudice and the beauty of candid Truth, I shall have reached the full measure of my hope. It is unfortunately likely, indeed, that ere this result be reached I shall have caused to many distress, agitation, and perhaps something which they fancy is despair. This is inexpressibly sorrowful, and long withholds the words which conscientious men believe ought to be, and sometime must be spoken. But when has growth in sincerity not been attended with anguish? What cause has inflicted so many pangs of martyrdom as Truth? Did not Christ's own message demand from his first disciples departure from venerable ways, torment of mind, and suffering of soul ? Not otherwise can we grow ; not otherwise may we be worthy to join the disciples and soldiers of Truth.
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This, however, remains as a consolation to those who in these crises of religious experience have seen many another consolation pass away, that they would not change their new illumination of spirit for all that the world can give. To confront Truth face to face ; to have outgrown a narrow and falsifying education ; to have ceased the dishonorable processes of self-sophistica- tion ; to feel no longer bound to apologize for infamy or to palliate superstition ; — this brings with it a sense of spiritual dignity and of intellectual honor, nobler and loftier than anything they have lost. For what is it to have cast away the excesses and the degradations of religion but to have arrived at the pure essence of reli- gion undefiled? What is it to find ourselves obliged to condemn worldly prelacies and tyrannical Curias, but to know that we are nearer to the exacting Ideals that of old were preached in Galilee? Through the cross to the Light ! and no man who has gone wayfaring forth to seek the light has regretted that he had to bear a cross to find it.
XI
Has the Papacy Changed Its Attitude Toward Free- dom of Conscience?
Your Holiness:
It would be ungracious to recall the past attitude of the Papacy toward freedom of conscience, if the Papacy had repented of that attitude, had disavowed and radi-
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cally changed it. The world indeed would hardly credit Rome's repentance unless it gave forth some official and explicit declaration that it was ashamed of the blood upon its pontifical robes, and that henceforth it would recog- nize and respect religious liberty, not as an expedient merely, but as a principle and a truth. If ever retraction and apology be required of any institution, assuredly it is required of that one, the steps to whose throne of world-wide power are built of the bones of murdered men. Blood-guiltiness calls for avowed sorrow and express con- trition, and until Rome shall speak of its Inquisition in the accents of contrition, the world will not forget the past.
But Rome has not repented. It has given not only no proof but no sign that it has changed. Worse than that, its consistent policy down to and including your own pontificate, has furnished evidence unmistakable that it has no intention of changing, that it resents all sug- gestion of change, and that it holds today the principle of persecution as firmly as when it conferred on Tor- quemada authority to murder. Not until liberty of con- science is recognized in principle is there any safeguard against intolerance ; not until there is an end to meas- ures of persecution which now stop short of the prison and the stake only apparently, because not the will but the power to inflict these is lacking, will mankind feel secure in contemplating a possible re-ascendancy of Rome. But Rome to this day officially and uncompromisingly rejects liberty of conscience as a principle. Rome to this day is
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employing what means it dares to subvert that principle and to show its contempt for it.
Instances in proof of this assertion — what proof in- deed does it require? — I need not multiply, but I will give a few. As late as 1794 the Papacy condemned a position of the Synod of Pistoia which declared that the Church should inflict none but spiritual punishments. In 1805 Pius VII, in an instruction to the Papal Nuncio at Vienna, recalls Innocent Ill's iniquitous laws against heretics, and regrets that the time is so evil that they cannot any longer be carried out. Both Gregory XVI and Pius IX bitterly censured, one the Belgian consti- tution of 1832, and the other the Austrian constitution of 1868, for the insertions of provisions allowing liberty of worship. Gregory XVI in the Mirari vos of August 15, 1832, delivers himself of an onslaught against "that vil- lainous notion (pravam Mam notioncm) which has be- come prevalent owing to the deceit of wicked men (improborum frande), that a man can obtain eternal salvation in any faith if only his morals are upright and pure." This Gregory styles "errorem exitiosissimiim," "a most deadly error", and cites against it this damnatory clause of the Athanasian Creed : "It is beyond doubt that whoso holds not the Catholic faith entire and in- violate will eternally perish." Pope Gregory continues : "From this filthy source of indifferentism flows that ab- surd and false idea, or rather madness (deliramentum) that every man's liberty of conscience must be main- tained and vindicated. The highway to this pestilential
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error (pestilentissimo crrori) has been prepared by that full and immoderate freedom of opinion which is now working widespread ruin both in the civil and religious world". This freedom he characterizes as "Pestis reipub- lica prce qualibet capitalior" , "the worst pest that afflicts the state". "It is well known", he writes, "that nations which have been illustrious for wealth, dominion and glorious achievement have fallen because of this one evil, unrestrained liberty of ideas, freedom of speech and itch for revolutionary novelty" (Civitates — hoc uno malo con- cidisse, libertate immodcrata opinionum, licentia cotv- cionum, rerum novandarum cupiditate). One of the chief sources of this mischief is "the liberty of book- publishing, that detestable liberty that can never be exe- crated enough" (deterrima ilia ac nunquam satis exsc- cranda et detcstabilis libertas artis librarian) .
The successor of Gregory XVI, Pius IX, condemns in his famous Syllabus of 1864 the following proposition, which consequently must be refuted in every Catholic theological school, and rejected by such Catholics as fol- low the Papacy blindfolded : "Every man is free to embrace and profess the religion which his reason tells him is true". ("Liberum cuique homini est cam amplccti ct proiiteri religioncm quam rationis lumiiic quis ductus vcram putavcrit" . — Prop. 15.) The same Syllabus con- demns also the following propositions : "The Church has not the power of inflicting violence, nor any temporal power, direct or indirect". ("Ecclesia vis infer endec potestatem non habet, neque potestatem idlam tcmporalem
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directam vel indircctam". Prop. 24.) "In our age it is no longer fitting that the Catholic religion should be the sole religion of the state, to the exclusion of all other faiths" (ceteris quib use unique cultibus exclnsis. Prop. yy). "Therefore it is praiseworthy that it is by law provided in certain Catholic countries that immi- grants shall enjoy the public exercise of their own re- ligion". ("Hine laudabiliter in quibusdam Catholici nominis regionibus lege cautum est ut hominibus illuc immigrantibus liceat publicum proprii cujnsque cultus exercitium habere". Prop. 78.) If the utterances of an institution are to be read in the light of its history, what shall be our judgments of these condemnations uttered in the middle of the nineteenth century by a Papacy that for five centuries enforced them by robbery and murder? What can be the judgment of any open-minded man but this, that though mankind will no longer tolerate the Inquisition in practice, the Papacy still stands committed to the Inquisition in principle? Is it not only by con- temptible sophistry and dishonorable subterfuge — of which of a verity we have had enough in our orthodox commentaries on the Syllabus — that any man can main- tain that the Papacy is not opposed to the highest right of the human soul, and the most fundamental principle of modern civilization? Efforts indeed have been made at sundry times by eminent Catholics to combine perfect loyalty to the Papal See with the recognition of liberty of conscience, but these efforts have lamentably failed. Montalambert in his splendid speech at the Malines con-
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gress declared, thoroughgoing Catholic and Papal cham- pion though he was, that the time had come for a frank acknowledgment of the principle of religious freedom. But Montalambert died broken-hearted under Pius IX's condemnation. Bishop von Ketteler, of Mayence, wrote in 1862 that the Church is totally opposed to inflicting violence upon heretics. Two years later appeared the Syllabus, and von Ketteler, striving pitiably to eat his words, made of himself a spectacle that no candid man can respect. If at this very hour a professor in any Catholic University or Seminary in the world should teach the righteousness of the principle of toleration, he would be deposed as soon as the news of his apostasy arrived in Rome. Let us have done with hypocrisy. Let us cease our lies. Rome has never repented of its bloodshedding, but has gloried in it, and has flung into the teeth of our own age the assertion of its right to punish and to persecute men who worship Deity at altars other than her own. Did not Pius IX, despite the pro- tests of liberal Catholics, canonize Peter Arbues, the Inquisitor-General of Aragon, who was killed in 1485 by men who had been made desperate by his cruelty? Is not Pius V a saint? that gloomy bigot who ordered the Inquisition to be established even on the vessels of the fleet which fought against the Turks? Was not the world scandalized by the Inquisition of the Papal States even in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Inquisitor-General Bertolotti in 1841, and Airaldi in 1856, required under penalty of excommunication that
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all who knew of offenses against ecclesiastical law should reveal them to the Holy Office? According to this de- cree a servant-girl might be excommunicated if, having observed that her employer ate meat on a fast-day, she did not forthwith run to the Inquisitors and inform them of his iniquity. Do not the standard modern works of reference in Canon Law still contain the butcher's code of an Innocent III or a Gregory IX, as de jure, if not de facto, in force? Read, for example, Ferrari's Bibliotheca Juris Canonici. There you will find such propositions as the following: "Civil authorities, though strictly for- bidden to examine the records of Inquisitorial trials, must execute under pain of excommunication the Inqui- sition's sentence". "Heretics must be denounced to the Inquisition under pain of excommunication". "Heretics suffer confiscation of their property from the day on which they fall into heresy (a die commissi criminis)". "Heretical fathers lose paternal authority over their chil- dren". "Impenitent heretics are to be burned: this is the common opinion of the learned (sic communis sen- tentia doctorum)".
But let us end this sickening, this astounding story. We have given enough of it to make clear that the Papacy still thinks that the Inquisition is what the Papal organ, La Civilta Cattolica, styled it in 1855, "a sublime spectacle of social perfection." We have given enough of it to perceive that the proposition of Martin Luther condemned by Leo X, "To burn heretics is against spirit- ual charity", is still dangerously liberal. Unrepentant
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and unreformed, the Papacy stands before the modern world with the millstone of the Inquisition about its neck. Taking back nothing, apologizing for nothing in its blood-red past, the Papacy dares to ask the suffrage and allegiance of civilized men. How little, Sovereign Pontiff, you, your curalists, and your canonists, under- stand of that passionate ardor with which the world today maintains, and of that reverent solicitude with which it respects, the rights of conscience! How little you understand of the scorn with which intelligent men regard the classic argument of your schools against free- dom of worship ! the argument, namely, that unless so- ciety persecutes the heretic, it puts itself in the false position of placing truth and error upon equal terms. As though, forsooth, the discerning of the one true religion — to say nothing of the vast assumption that only one is true — were a self-evident matter! As though truth and error could ever be on equal terms ! As though the human intellect had no capacity of de- tecting error and attaining to truth ! As though not the vital growth of mind but the flames of the Inquisition were God's instrument of spiritual education ! As though the Founder of Christianity had ever taught us a baffling metaphysics, and obliged us to believe it under penalty of confiscation, the durus career, and the stake !
No, Sovereign Pontiff, the children of freedom in this age will not even listen to the arguments for your blood- begotten thesis. You will gain their attention only when you have expressly and officially renounced the teaching,
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and the deeds that followed from it, which have laid a track of cruelty across the history of Christianity. This you will not ; this, according to traditional Papal theology, you cannot do. Then bid farewell to the nations that have revolted against Rome. They will never return. For they hold with Gerson : "Papa non est supra Dei Evangelium" , "The Pope is not above the Gospel of God" ; and with Gerson they trust that "in the faith of Christ a man can save his soul though in the whole world not a Pope could be found."
XII
The Papacy and Representative Government
Your Holiness :
In this endeavor of mine to inform you why the en- lightened nations of today reject the Papacy, and what deep-seated changes the Papacy must undergo before the men of our time will give it the favor of their attention, I have pointed out that the first principle of our civiliza- tion, freedom of conscience, is violated and despised by the official teaching of your See. I come now to the second great principle of civilized society, which is that non-representative autocracies are tyrannical, and repre- sentative government alone is right and just. This sec- ond article in the political and social creed of our time has, like the first, been gained at the cost of struggle, suffering, and unnumbered heroic lives. Slavery, feudal- ism and autocratic monarchy have had their history, a
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long, humiliating and disastrous history. Based upon the idea that almost the entire interest of the state was concentrated about the lord, the baron or the king, they utterly ignored the common man as an independent indi- viduality, vested with the rights of free personal co- operation in the government, and as possessing himself a kind of kingship inasmuch as he is man. The sovereign individuality of every man has no place in the philosophy of autocracy. Were an autocracy to recognize it, it would cease to be an autocracy. The slave was only a chattel ; the feudal serf was merely adscriptus glebes, a thing attached to the soil ; the subject of a non-repre- sentative monarchy is perinde cadaver, like a corpse.
Slowly, with blind gropings and infinite pain, the immortal spirit of man struggled through the dead weight of these tyrannies, and stood at last in the chamber of kings to demand that man, despite his poverty or lowli- ness or illiteracy, and solely because of his manhood received from God, be admitted into a governing fellow- ship with lords and princes and crowned heads in such matters as pertained to the common burdens and the common good. Thus was born Democracy; thus per- ished despotism. Thus began to vanish from the earth the political philosophy which regarded man as a thing, an impersonal unit, an item on the military and tax-lists of kings. Thus rose to power that other philosophy, which is to prevail forever, that not only for religion but for governments, man has an immortal soul, a free spirit, and divine rights. Our own American nationality was
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called to being by the cry: "Non-representative gov- ernment is tyranny," which is only a summary expres- sion of the whole gospel of Democracy, namely, that free personalities should be governed under freedom, and that it is an intolerable indignity that laws should be imposed on freemen without their cooperation or consent.
This world-regenerating idea, Democracy, is, as it were, worshipped by this modern age. There is no measuring the fervor of the loyalty with which we hold it There is no bound or limit to the sacrifices we would make for it. There is no estimating the scorn and anger with which we should regard any man, system, or institution that would subvert or weaken it. Has the Papacy a message for our time? Then do we demand that the Papacy give us an accounting of its attitude towards Democracy, towards representative government, towards that sense of popular rights and national self-respect which Liberty, the mistress of the modern world, has taught us.
Lamentable, truly, is the plight of the Papacy before this demand of Democracy, a demand that must be satis- factorily met before Catholicism can advance one step among civilized men. The Papacy and Democracy ! the Italian Curia and representative government ! the Roman autocracy and Freedom ! How grotesque the juxtapo- sition ! How incongruous an association of'ideas ! Before the insistent Liberty of today, before the sovereign dig- nity of emancipated Individuality, the Papal court stands as practically the last autocracy left on earth. Russia has
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established a Parliament. The Grand Turk, even, has granted a constitutional government to his people. But the Papacy treats with contempt every suggestion that American, English, French and German freemen should, in the sphere of ecclesiastical government, be allowed the privileges of a moujik or a Mussulman.
Your Papal See, Sovereign Pontiff, is the most exclu- sive despotism, the most absolute autocracy, the most humiliating tyranny, that still defies public opinion and outrages the conscience of mankind. Under the rules of that tyranny you may expect the world to return only when the world shall have gone universally insane, and when its present passion for Liberty shall have appeared to it as but a drunken dream. If any anger is ever justi- fied, it is the anger of a freeman upon whose neck presses the heel of a scoffing despotism. If ever we may give way to a bitter temper, it is when a foreign tyrant sends to our free shores the message in the name of God Almighty, that we are slaves. If ever we may rightly speak in the heat of indignation it is when our self- respect is violated by a cabal of irresponsible Italians, who hate our institutions, gird at our freedom, and scorn the courteous petitions we address to them.
If this language is severe, it is high time that some one spoke it. Too long has the resentment against Italianism found no other utterance than the whisperings of timidity. Too long has the Papal Curia had its pride inflated and its lust for domination gratified by the adula- tion of subservient devotees, and the "All's well" of
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flunkey prelates. It is time that some honest man spoke out. It is time that our nation's watchword, "Non-rep- resentative government is tyranny", were addressed to that Papacy which rules us today in the form and spirit of the all-absorbing theocracy of the Middle Ages. The proper persons to utter this warning to Rome are, of course, our Bishops. Our Bishops ! The episcopate was a great office once. Men of independence filled it; men zealous in safeguarding the right of home-rule ; men who feared not to bid Rome take care when Rome encroached upon their province. But now ! There is not a sadder proof of the decline of the ancient spirit beneath the blight of an almighty Papacy, than the pres- ent corps of prelates who claim to be successors of the Apostles. Despotism always produces degradation of character. Tyranny always selects pliable men as its instruments and officials. And of all the deplorable in- stances in history to bear out these propositions the pres- ent manner of acting of the bishops, let us say of France and the United States, is one of the most striking, one of the most shameful. Not from such men will any manly protest come ; not from men who kiss the Holy Father's slipper, put the contributions of their poor in the Holy Father's hand, and run home to tell how paternally the Holy Father received them. Not from men whose idea of scholarship is how to write a dispensation and go through the intricate business of pontifical ceremonial, Not from men who shut themselves up in their houses and take no part in the civic and national discussion and life
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about them. From these no independence, no exhibition of sturdy character. Wherefore it remains for men of humbler station, whose soul is still able to feel indigna- tion against consecrated wrong, it remains for these, it is forced upon these, to become spokesmen of indepen- dence before the autocracy of Rome.
XIII
Italian Absolutism
Your Holiness:
Were a despotism the mildest and most beneficent in the world, it would be intolerable to men of spirit and intelligence. For, however considerate be its treatment of its subjects, the principle upon which it rests, the political philosophy which it embodies, are an insult to developed human nature. There may be no starvation of body under a kindly tyranny, but there is bound to be a starvation of soul. Men may feel no inclination to resent it on the ground of physical suffering, but as men live not by bread alone, they must resent it in behalf of the loftier ideals and higher satisfactions of which it deprives them. Men will be ruled no longer by absentee autocrats and alien legislators. It would then matter little if your Curia were the wisest and most indulgent bureaucracy in the world; the modern age would reject it, not, in our supposition, for its practical operation, but for its despotic principle and constitution. For it is wholly unrepresentative ; it is utterly foreign to prac-
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tically every country but Italy. To every other nation on earth it is an exclusive corporation, it is an alien rule, it is a type of government only one remove from slavery, it is an example of that irresponsible power which civile zation in its evolution towards democracy has outgrown and must cast aside. Italians alone to pass supreme judgment upon our concerns ; Italians alone to revise every important detail of ecclesiastical policy ; Italians alone to suggest or approve whatever legislation we frame for our local needs ; Italians alone as Delegates, dubbed "Apostolic" in nearly every country in the world ; Italians and Italianism everywhere interfering, every- where supreme! If you fancy, Sovereign Pontiff, that our self-respect can rest content in presence of such a situation, you have not begun to know democracy, you have never understood a modern nation's sense of self- respect and independence.
After all, why are Italians thus favored? Are they divinely called to the hegemony of the world, as Israel conceived itself to be? Some ultra-Papists may think so, but ultra-Papists have long since ceased to have the slightest influence in the intellectual domain. Have Italians made of their monopoly such a success as would lead all other nations to yield preeminence to them? Far from it. From the time when Catholicism began to be overlaid with Italianism, Catholicism has been steadily following the path of decline. It is moribund even in that very Italy which should show the greatest benefits of the present regime, if it conferred any bene'
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fits at all. Is it that the members of the Papal camarilla are so free from pre-possessions and follow so compre- hensive a philosophy of government that they are in no clanger of conflicting with the spirit, temper and consti- tutions of other countries? Quite the contrary is the case. No oligarchy on earth is so stubbornly devoted to one narrow theory of administration as the Curia of Rome. By tradition, by study, by training, by an abso- lutely unequalled obstructionism to adaptability or change, the Vatican politicians are not only monarchical but autocratic, not only autocratic but theocratic. What reason on earth, then, justifies their supreme control of England or America? No reason whatever. Every just consideration drawn either from common-sense or politi- cal philosophy leads to the conclusion that the Papal administration is anomalous, monstrous, intolerable. Neither does it bear the least resemblance to a govern- ment founded on the Gospel, wherein we are bidden not to dominate but to serve, not to impose ourselves upon others but to consider others as equally deserving with ourselves. It is to be feared that the Italian Curia insists upon its exclusive character in order to feed a lust for power which, despite its long abiding in fat places, is still voracious, and in order to maintain in defiance of historic evolution the theocracy of Hildebrand and Innocent III.
The considerations just given would call, we say, for a mitigation of Italianism, even were the Papal rule the mildest and most tolerant conceivable. But when we examine its practical operation we are forced to regard
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it as not only degrading in principle, but as infamous in effect; we are constrained to adjudge it a mischief, an insult and a menace to every independent state. To go no further back than the present and the immediately preceding Pontificates, we discover such instances of Rome's tyranny, outrage, and defiance of every idea which a free people cherishes, that we must protest against them, or else confess outright that we are either infants incapable of self-respect, or slaves who never possessed it.
How are our Bishops appointed? Three names are sent to Rome by a small group of the priests of the dio- cese, three by the Bishops of the province in which the vacancy has occurred ; and in case an Archbishop is to be selected, three by the Archbishops of the entire coun- try. Too limited though this suffrage is, its choice should be, on every principle of home-rule, imperative in Rome. One or other of the men named as most worthy of the office should be given it. Any other method of selection a free people cannot understand. Yet, what happens? When the names are submitted, Rome's governing idea is, not whom the people want — what cares Rome for that? — but whom the Curia wants; not who is most ac- ceptable to those whose interests are immediately con- cerned, but who is most acceptable to the foreign Court which refuses to advance any man not in sympathy with its secular, despotic and theocratic ideals. The will of people, priests and bishops counts, as such, for nothing. Popular will in democracy is supreme; in an autocracy
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it has no standing. Hence an autocracy's defiance ; hence a freeman's revolt. The Papacy's defiances have been of late increasing in number and gravity. The revolt, if less apparent, is inevitable.
We have just had two striking illustrations of this sort of despotism in the United States. In the later instance, a man not even mentioned in the lists sent to Rome by priests, provincial bishops, or the body of archbishops, was appointed to one of the largest archdioceses in this country. Why ? Because he was an ultra-Roman ; be- cause he distinguished himself by taking sides against his country on more than one occasion ; because he had the assistance in Rome of a master of intrigue ; because he could be depended upon to be a Roman agent here ; and because, abandoning duties which in very decency should have kept him at his post in America, he spent six months in Rome to supervise the progress of his abominable ambition. Overriding the express will of the priests he was to direct and the prelates with whom he was to associate, selected by a foreign cabal, and ap- pointed by a Pope who is lending himself pitiably to their designs, he established himself in a position which in the circumstances, honor and conscience should have bidden him not to seek. And you marvel, Sovereign Pontiff, that free people do not submit to the Papacy. You lift pious hands in deprecation of the growing menace of Satan and Free Masonry!
Let us pass over similar examples. Let me not en- large, for instance, upon the fate of our so-called Catho-
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lie University at Washington, which appears to be now about to draw its last breath, principally because the curse of Italian tyranny and Roman intrigue fell upon its cradle. Neither will I delay upon^ the affair of "Americanism," in which Rome, absolutely without con- sulting our prelates, proceeded to lecture us concerning certain tendencies which were dangerous, forsooth ! Whether from Rome's point of view the lecture were needed or not, a decent regard for a justly proud and independent people should have counselled the getting of advice and monition from this side of the Atlantic.
Nor would it be more than carrying coals to New- castle to refer to your Holiness's late action with respect to France. There the world looked upon the spectacle of the most eminent laymen in the French Church in vain petitioning you to check your unwarranted severity in meeting the Separation Law. There the world was witness to your angry rejection of a majority-vote of the French Episcopate requesting you to give a fair trial to that law. Not an initiative of loyal Catholic French- men in the present perils of the Church but has been crushed by the Papacy's iron heel. The program of the "democratic" priests has been anathematized ; the con- gresses of priests for discussing the problems of the mod- ern apostolate forbidden ; the efforts of the seminarists for cooperative works of zeal put under the ban. All these were projects of religion attempted by men who knew the need of them for their country. Every one of them has been shattered by your Italian autocrats. And
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should any man who was born free and who intends in spite of Papacies to die free, say a word or write a line of protest, we are treated to another allocution on the evils of these disobedient days, and another supplication to the Virgin to fulfil the office which the Papacy has grotesquely assigned to her, of destroying all the heresies of the world !
Sovereign Pontiff, in intention you are the Servant of Christ; in fact, you are the instrument of the worst despotism in the world. You would make the nations obedient to the Gospel ; but as a first step you demand of them to cast away their inheritance of liberty and bend their foreheads to the dust before a bureaucracy of Italian tyrants. If you cannot see the disaster beneath these contradictions, you are blind to the clearest light of our time. If you dare not abolish the massive autocracy which has begotten them, you are recreant to the first duty of a shepherdship of charity.
XIV
Roman Legates and Fathers General
Your Holiness:
The autocratic centralization of Rome is illustrated by the presence of Papal legates in the chief countries of the world, and in Rome itself by the existence of Generals and ruling senates of the powerful religious orders. Of these two sinister examples of unreligious absolutism it is my purpose to say a few plain words.
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An apostolic, or, not to degrade a noble word, a Papal legate is "quasi persona Papce," a personal representative of the Roman Pontiff. The office began in the days when the Pope conceived himself to be the supreme ruler of the earth, whereof the nations were his feudal appendage, and the kings his vassals. The legates were court func- tionaries to see that all feudal obligations were duly dis- charged to the great lord in Rome. They were the channels through which flowed Romeward, money and se- cret reports, and which conveyed from Rome a fairly con- stant stream of excommunications, interdicts, depositions of monarchs and alienations of kingdoms. They were furthermore the means through which the Papacy de- stroyed local church government, and reduced the an- cient glorious Episcopate to its present condition of ordainers of priests, blessers of chrism, and baptizers of bells. It must be remembered that during the first nine hundred years of Catholicity, Roman tyranny was un- known. It has no place in the golden age of Christian- ity. It is a mischievous modernism, which, however, we are quite in despair of ever seeing condemned. The notion that the Pope must do everything, and, through a "Legatus a latere", be everywhere, could never have been born either of the Gospel or of primitive Christian- ity. It sprang from secularism, theocracy, and the False Decretals, and the chains with which it holds the world in bondage were in great measure fastened by the insti- tution of Papal delegates.
Consider the noble independence of the ancient Church.
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Let us for a moment look back upon it that our tired souls may be refreshed. Every year, according to the decree of Nicaea, two synods were held in every province to legislate for local necessities, to hear complaints, to remove abuses. These meetings were absolutely autono- mous and the men who composed them were free. No servile committee ran to Rome to gain Italian approval of the proposed legislation before the council was held at all. No Papal intruder presided. No Papal signature was needed to give effect to the council's acts. These things are required now ; for not one successor of the Apostles today may open his mouth till Rome nods ; not one of these our bishops, American-born, and citizens of this proud Republic though they are, dares to take an independent step, cannot take an independent step, for all his steps are prescribed to the fraction of an inch by Italian politicians oversea. And as to the election of bishops in the pre-slavery times of Catholicity, let us listen to a description of the manner of it from the pen of a Pope who, though he reigned too early to be an auto- crat, stands a full head above all the autocrats that have succeeded him. Leo I is the Pope, and the words we shall quote are from his epistle to Anastasius, bishop of Thessalonica. He says : "When a bishop is to be elected let that man be chosen whom people and clergy con- cordantly demand (quern cleri plebisque consensus con- corditer postularit) . Should there be a divided suffrage, let the metropolitan decide, and his choice should fall upon the man who is most illustrious for merit and intel-
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lect. No bishop should be appointed to a diocese that does not want him and has not asked for him (tantum nt nidlus invitis et non petentibus ordinetur). When a metropolitan dies, the bishops of the province should assemble in the archepiscopal city so that they may be made acquainted with the wish of all the clergy and all the people (nt omnium clericorum atque omnium civium voluntate discussa). Then let them select one of the priests or deacons of the metropolitan church of whom the priests of the province will give good testimony to you, to the end that you may be pleased with the man that has pleased them." This is democracy ; this is inde- pendence ; this is representative government. With two councils a year in every province, with every considera- tion paid to the will of people and clergy in the election of bishops, with both the councils and the elections free from Roman interference, there was every safeguard for a community's liberty, dignity and self-respect.
But when feudalism and barbarian habits fastened upon Catholicism, freedom disappeared, apparently forever; the faithful, once disciples became vassals ; the bishops were transformed into powerful barons ; and the Pope, from being a spiritual shepherd, placed himself at the apex of the system as temporal sovereign and universal lord. By the eleventh century the people had lost all voice in the naming of bishops. Thereafter provincial councils began to fall into desuetude ; papal delegates frequently presided over them when they were held ; appeals of all kinds consequently were sent to Rome
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instead of to the synod ; the False Decretals carried back to a spurious antiquity the growing pretensions of the Roman bishop ; a new language of excommunication, in- terdict and anathema grew up in Papacy and prelacy; bishops surrendered their immemorial rights to Rome; the crozier was no longer a staff but a bludgeon ; the old rule of love gave way to a regime of terror ; and Catholi- cism, once purely a religion, became a religion plus autocracy, secularity, and all the complicated machinery of a world-wide absolutist government.
Of this absolutism Papal legates, as we have said, were and are the agents. So impudent was their foreignism, so arrogant their use of power, so consuming their appe- tite for money, and so destructive their activity in in- trigue, that learned, spirited and saintly men complained against them and governments were obliged in self- defence to supervise and control them. Ivo of Chartres writes to Pope Paschal : "Inasmuch as the cardinal- legates you send us are only transient among us, not only can they not properly care for the things that ought to be cared for, but they cannot even know them. Many people are therefore complaining . . . that the Apostolic See is less solicitous for the good of its sub- jects than for the fair fortune of itself and its legates (Sedem Apostolicam non subditorum qncerere sanitatem. sed suam aut lateralium suoriim qucerere commodita- tem). Therefore I and my co-religionists, troubled by these murmurs, have determined to write you, loyal sons of the Roman Church as we are, that you entrust the
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legateship to someone this side of the Alps (ut alicui transalpine) legationem Sedis Apostolictz injungatis)". (Ep. 109.) In another letter to the same Pope, Ivo resents the Roman spies and delators who have injured him in Rome. "I have never read or heard up to this time that the Apostolic See was accustomed to condemn an absent man on the testimony of one delator, however exalted his position" (Ep. 219). Likewise wrote Hinc- mar of Rheims to Pope Adrian, who had severely cen- sured Hincmar for having taken sides with Charles the Bald against Lothair : "Your letter to me has been based upon reports ; and whoever has given you the informa- tion, oral or written, on which your letter is based, has lied" (Ep. 27).
The abuses here resented still exist — witness the in- famies of a Satolli in America and a Lorenzelli in France — but the noble spirit of these protests has departed from the episcopate. What work do these foreign delegates accomplish that provincial or national synods could not do vastly better ? What place is there in our free country for these spies with their blacklists of independent and learned priests, of whom they keep Rome informed, lest one of them be named for a bishopric? What proof have we that these Italians understand us ; that they pos- sess more than medieval intelligence ; that they are can- did and straight spoken ; that they are useful for any conceivable need of spiritual religion? Yet no Ivo and no Hincmar speak the needed word of indignation. Silent our episcopate, even when the abominable calumny
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of an Italian legate has laid one of their body in the dust ! Silent, when again from the Roman princeship which his American gold maintains, this same man twice defies and overrides their collective judgment ! Silent always, spirit- less always, servile always, now that Kenrick is no more, Williams is gone and Spalding is in the shadow. Were they not citizens of the United States, one could wish them no fate that they more deserve than to be what they are — the pompous lackeys of the masters they sup- port in Italy.
The position of the Generals of religious orders in Rome is another of the most significant proofs of how Papal centralization Las worked to the degradation of religion. These men are monks, friars, or clerics of various degree and denomination, who have given up their lives ostensibly to poverty, simplicity, lowliness and the spirit of evangelical perfection. They represent the monastic life and tradition. They are the heirs of the cenobites of Egypt, the religious family of Benedict, the clerks of Augustine, the poor brethren of Francis, and various adaptations of these classic types of conventual life. What then are they doing in Rome, the source of power, exalted station, and privilege of every sort? Is it to learn from the Papacy new lessons in humility? Is it to catch from the Curia some higher spirit of poverty and simplicity ? Is it that the Vatican palace, the swarm- ing monsignori, the gorgeous cardinals, or the Swiss Guard have something of the Christ-life to teach that the convent cell cannot discover? The Thebaid monks had
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no Roman senate, yet suffered nothing- thereby in sanc- tity. St. Benedict sent no representative to the Papal See, yet his is called the golden age of the monastic life. St. Francis of a surety would have stripped the habit from the back of any of his monks who suggested that the order would gain many favors and ample faculties if it had someone with ready access to the Pope's ear; yet Francis knew something of the duties and the dangers of the religious state. Why is it that these powerful Father-Generals are clustered about the Pope? It is because the spirit of domination, the sense of centraliza- tion, the tone and temper of absolutism, which the Papacy's example has produced, have penetrated and perverted monasticism, and made religious orders a men- ace to liberty and intelligence. Beyond question religious orders are schools of sanctity and still are fruitful in holy and heroic souls. With them on their spiritual side, just as with the Catholic Church on its spiritual side, I have no quarrel. Against them as agencies for developing the inner life I have never said, nor ever shall say, any word. But because the orders following Papal prece- dent, have a huge and menacing political and secular side, and because in this department of their activity they are false to the Gospel and a scandal to Christianity, I feel constrained to bear witness against them, and to aid in the formation of a public opinion which shall in time destroy the secular in them that the spiritual may more truly live. These miniature Curias, these Popes in little, whether black, brown or white, of the great orders, exist about
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the Vatican very largely for purposes of aggrandize- ment and intrigue. They are perpetually begging the Pope for new monopolies of piety, new confraternities, new scapulars, new medals, new indulgences. Should one order by some coup d'etat gain this or that Papal privilege, at once the others flock about the Pope to demand that an equivalent favor be bestowed on them. The Jesuits have complete control of the League of the Sacred Heart, and the heavenly treasures thereto apper- taining. The Dominicans hold in fee simple the Rosary Society. The Scapular confraternity is the prize of the Carmelites ; and to the Franciscans have been made over, after a bitter fight with the Capuchins, the privileges of the Stations of the Cross.
Were it to happen that the Benedictines, for example, presumed to take a hand in directing the operations and dividing the enormous profits of the League of the Sacred Heart; or that the Jesuits encroached upon the domain of the Rosary Society, — which, by the way, they actually attempted, but got a reproof for their audacity, — the wheels would hum in Rome. The Roman Congregations and the Holy Father himself would be petitioned by the aggrieved monopolists, and reminded that Pope so-and- so in rescript such-and-such, transferred to them exclu- sive rights over this particular province of the graces of God Almighty. So watchful are they against being over- reached by one another that Rome has equivalently extended to all the great orders privileges which originally were conferred upon only one. Thus, if the Jesuits have
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Ignatius-water, the Benedictines enjoy a miraculous medal — think of Benedict's disciples descending so low! If innumerable indulgences may be gained by visiting a Franciscan church on a special day in the year, equal indulgences may be won by visiting a Benedictine church on another, or a Carmelite church on still another; if the Carmelites promise you a stunning aggregate of indul- gences for wearing the scapular, the Dominicans assure you of even more marvelous ones by carrying the beads in your pocket. So the sordid competition goes on, until the Papal documents granting to the orders commenda- tions, favors and immunities have been put into hug« collections properly classified as "Bullarium Domini > canum", "Bullarium Carmelitanum", and so on. A race for privilege, a jealous vigilance over one another, an unholy traffic, and an abominable intrigue — these seem to be among the chief purposes for which the monks oi the present day have set up establishments about the Papal court.
If, Sovereign Pontiff, you were to abolish every onf. of the monastic senate-houses in your Papal city, and send back every member of them to his proper place in cell, study, or pulpit ; if you were to annihilate these dis- gusting spiritual monopolies out of which our modern monks are gaining gold and glory; if you were to put an end to these high courts of intrigue and these dan- gerous centralizations of power, you would do a service to pure religion such as has not come from the Papacy in a thousand years.
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The history of the Jesuits during the latter half of the sixteenth century illustrates how well these vast cor- porations have learned an unholy lesson from the Papacy, and how disastrous and mischievous their work can be. Under the lead of Father Parsons, one of the arch- plotters of history, they gained control of the English seminaries in Europe, reduced the secular priests of Eng- land to the position of menials, prevented the appoint- ment of an English bishop who would of course have checked their high-handed overlordship, put the English Catholics under suspicion of foreignism and disloyalty, and were incessantly active in bringing it about that Spain and the Papacy declare war on the English realm. When the diocesan priests of England petitioned Rome for a bishop, Parsons persuaded the Pope to send an arch-priest instead ; and to this office was appointed Blackwell, who was a characterless tool in the hands of Parsons. The secular priests sent two deputies to the Pope to protest against Blackwell's neglect of their in- terests and his utter subservience to the Jesuits. Where- upon the Jesuits anticipated their arrival in Rome with defamatory letters denouncing them as fomentors of schism, and succeeded so well that when the envoys reached the Papal city they were flung into prison and placed in the custody of Parsons, who for four months subjected them to indignity and insult. The Jesuits were given charge of the Roman seminary where Eng- lish lads were preparing for the mission in their own country, and set up there a spy-system which was so
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odious that the students rose in rebellion. "If such spies were in Oxford," writes Dr. Ely, "they would be plucked in pieces." Every insidious attempt was made to incul- cate in the hearts of these British boys hatred and dis- loyalty to their country. Thirty-seven students banded together in revolt against the Jesuits, to only ten on the side of their teachers. Let it be remembered to the ever- lasting honor of these noble little Englishmen that when a cardinal sent by the Pope posted a proclamation in the college bidding them to be obedient to their pre- ceptors, they tore the document to pieces. Despite the fact that Parsons had taken an oath on his arrival in England that his mission was purely spiritual and had nothing to do with politics, we find him within six months a perjurer, in active communication with the Spanish ambassador plotting the downfall and deposition of Elizabeth. When the Armada, preceded by Pius V's stupid and criminal deposition of Elizabeth, sailed to the attack on English liberties, Parsons, by written and spoken word, urged Catholic Englishmen that it was their Christian and Catholic duty to fight against their sover- eign, which to their credit they refused to do. Again in the succeeding reign Parsons wrote his work on the English succession, maintaining that James I should be deposed and the crown given to the Infanta of Spain. Two years later he brought out another work, in which he lays down rules of procedure to be followed when Catholicism should again be supreme in England. One of his points is that in that day the Inquisition must be
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established. Worn out by these detestable plots and dis- loyalties, a group of Catholic English gentlemen, one year after this last-mentioned book had been published, sent a protest against the Jesuits to Pope Clement VIII. Their complaints are : That whoever obey not every Jesuit command, "shall be censured either as apostates or Heretics, or tainted at least with some infection of Heresie" ; that "nothing is holie that they have not sanc- tified, no doctrine Catholick and sound that cometh not from them" ; that the Jesuits despise and disparage other priests ; that money given them is never seen again ; that "the expenses of one Jesuit were able to mayntayne twentie priests plentifully and richly" ; that they steal for their own order candidates for the English mission ; that they have injured Douai ; that they have entered among the Catholic prisoners at Wisbeach and brought dissen- sion where before there had been peace; that they fawn on the noble and rich, and get themselves remembered in wills ; that they take away the good names of priests ; and that their equivocation is a public scandal, "inso- much as they are commonly held nowadays as great lyars". Yet so convinced is a religious order that even its dishonorable acts have divine approval that Father Agazzari, rector of the English College in Rome, wrote to Parsons in 1596, remarking on the course of Provi- dence in bringing about the unexpected death of many who were out of harmony with the Society in the con- duct of English affairs. Referring to Cardinal Allen, he says: "So long as Allen walked aright in this mat-
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ter in union with, and fidelity to, the Company, as he used to do, God preserved, prospered and exalted him. But when he began to leave this path, in a moment the threads of his plans and life were cut short together" (Douai Diaries P. xcviii.).
It would be very easy to narrate similar mischiefs per- petrated by the Jesuits, as, for example, their persecu- tion of the Venerable Palafox in Mexico, and Bishop Pardo in Manila ; their opposition to the Papal confirm- ation of Vincent de Paul's Congregation, or their in- trigues against the University of Louvain. But let the one instance just sketched suffice to show the danger of centralized power in a great religious order, and the loss that afflicts religion when monks are banded to- gether into a vast and conceited federation, whose aims are largely selfish and whose methods are in great measure Machiavellian. It is unfortunate, indeed, for religion that the Jesuits have not heeded the prophetic warning- written by one of their visitors to the province of upper Germany in 1596, the very date of Parson's "Memorial of the Reformation in England". This visitor, in his "Memorial Concerning the Better Observance of Rule", writes as follows : "The holy Ignatius gave warning against mingling in worldly business. The plainest ex- amples and experiences have taught us that God is not with us in such affairs. At all times when our members, even though asked and constrained thereto, not only by priests but even by Popes, have shared in such matters, the thing has had an evil ending; and for the Society
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this yielding has resulted in much shame and no manner of edification either for Catholics or heretics. Even the present Pope has publicly made it a matter of reproach to us, and through the Pope, it is piously held that God speaks, as through His vicar, that we have immersed ourselves in the affairs of princes and kingdoms, and wish to rule the world's conscience according to our ideas. Thus it came to pass that the last General Con- gregation (1593-4) in a vigorous decree has bidden us to hold ourselves aloof from such business. And if after so many sad results we do not end in becoming pru- dent, it is to be feared that some day we shall feel many grievous strokes of the chastising hand of God."
Holy Father, what liberties can be safely trusted to a Papacy in itself so absolute, and surrounded by these lesser absolutisms? Go back to that forgotten Gospel, and that perverted Christ! See if in His pure, spiritual and saving word there is aught to justify these exasper- ating violations of the world's growing freedom, enlarg- ing independence, and righteous zeal for liberty. See if it be a thing approved by Him that the Providential evo- lution of humanity in the ideals of democracy be ob- structed by the offensive absolutism that now rules from Rome. Examine history, and see whether the scandal of ambition, avarice, nepotism and brutality that lie so black a shadow on the history of your pontifical office, be not directly due to a departure from the ancient sim- ple ways, and to a following after royalty and universal dominion. Yes, Roman Pontiff, there can be no doubt
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whatever that the Papacy has so clothed itself with the robes of Caesar that beneath them the world's eye can no longer discern the Christ.
Will you change all this? Dare you speak the quick- ening word that shall sweep away your Roman legates, your Latin monopoly, your Italian despotism, and re- store Catholicity to a free spiritual brotherhood, gov- erned by its local synods once more, appointing its own rulers as of old, and obliged no longer to hear the taunt of the modern age that we are Italian serfs, and our bishops only acolytes of a foreign prelate?
Will you give us the ancient independence? Will you turn aside from idolatry of power? Will you prove that Catholicism is not bound to decaying forms of non-rep- resentative monarchy? Will you renovate monasticism? Will you destroy Rome's hideous secularities, that scan- dalize the world, and make spirituality not only supreme but alone in Catholicism?
Again must we answer: No hope! It is the lesson of the history of all attempted reform : No hope ! All that is left to spiritual men is to disentangle the religious, the mystical, the divine in Catholicism from the Roman, the secular, the despotic, and go their own way towards God ; abandoning the expectation of a Christian unity which is visible, and working as best they can for that unseen unity of spirit which is not to be bodied forth in visible form until every travesty of religion, and every perversion of Christ shall have passed away from the earth forever.
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XV
Indulgences
Your Holiness:
The destruction of personality in one department means the actual or the potential destruction of it in all departments. Take away from man his personal, vital initiative in matters of government, and you have begun to make him mechanical and formal in morality, and superstitious in religion. For a mechanical morality and a superstitious religion cannot long exist in a soul that grows from within ; that is trained to be conscious of re- sponsibility, that is disciplined by the sense of individual freedom unto life's supreme purpose of character-con- struction. On the other hand, if individuality is cribbed, cabined and confined, it results in a religion that is not based on the bed-rock of individual conscience, private responsibility and personal endeavor; but is ever seeking imputed righteousness, magical means of grace, and ex- ternal substitutes for the soul's own effort. A man that weakly relies on someone else to do the whole business of government will weakly rely on somebody or some- thing else to transact the business of his salvation. A man whose entire and infallible gospel is Authority, and who avows that through thick or thin he is going to let authority provide for everything, think of everything and do everything, in the fancy that Authority dispenses him from thinking, and subverts the whole God-ordained
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scheme of human evolution, that man is a parasite; and his religion will be parasitic, too.
Authority is good only when it bespeaks co-opera- tive effort. It is the most deadly pest in the moral world when it overrides co-operative effort, and silences in- stead of evoking the common intelligence and the com- mon individuality of the governed. And a religion which so conceives its function of authority as to make its subjects lean on some exterior support to the detriment of interior endeavor, is producing a low grade of char- acter, a sleeping-sickness of the soul, a weak and moon- faced kind of spirituality which breathes of incapacity and disease.
Especially in the modern age is such a religion doomed to death. Personality, and therefore reality, are everything in these days of ours. Shams, magic, parades, and nostrums are outgrown. What does it mean for- character? How does it invigorate personality? To what extent will it build up a high and sturdy individual- ity that is grown in the soil of freedom and responsibility ? These are the questions we are asking of a religion that appeals for allegiance nowadays. Salvation by im- putation ; salvation vicariously ; salvation by doing rather than by being, is of the past. Salvation by character, by the inward majesty of lonely spiritual upbuilding, is of the present and the future. The king's touch cures scrofula no longer. Only the purifying of one's own blood from its sources will do it. Neither shall we be saved though we were buried beneath somebody else's "mer-
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its'" ; only the toilsome labor of the god-like Self shall save us. So believes the present intelligence of man long. en- slaved to a confidence in king's touches and transferred righteousnesses. So will believe the future, and with ever- growing clearness and intensity of conviction.
Because this spiritual attitude proceeds from a high conception of individuality, the Papacy seems utterly un- able to comprehend it. Regarding its subjects not as emancipated personalities, but as wilted, sapless stalks, to bend in whatsoever direction the great god Authority breathes upon them, it ignores that vital inwardness of religion, in which alone lies godliness, if there is any godliness, and buries us fathoms deep with the "merits" of dead Saints, with wonder-working formulas, with sal- vation-producing badges, with punishment-acquitting in- dulgences. Carry beads in your pocket and thousands of years of indulgence are imparted to you, representing an acquittal of that punishment which your sins deserve. Wear a bit of cloth about the neck and full remission, nay, unnumbered full remissions of punishment are prom- ised you. Say certain ejaculatory prayers, and hun- dreds of days of indulgences are gained. Visit a Fran- ciscan Church on a certain day, a Jesuit Church on an- other, a Servite Church on another, and scores of full acquittals of sin-punishment are held out to you. Whereas, should you say other forms of prayers in themselves equally good, or visit a church in charge of a mere secular priest, these enormous remissions, these multiplied centuries of indulgences are not gained at all.
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If of two men of equal spiritual value, one wears a scap- ular, but the other has inadvertently omitted the wearing of it, number one, notwithstanding the character-equality of both, will be out of Purgatory long before number two. To these utterly external gestures, motions and garments, a transcendental value is attached which can belong to nothing in the world but private worth and personal effort. It is a degradation of religion which is wrong in principle ; since when we go before God for judgment — if we be permitted to discern divine justice through the sole analogy possible to us, namely, human justice — we shall be assigned to that lot or station in the world of spirits which our character, our essential worth, as individuals, irrespective of our ejaculations, our clothes, or our trinkets, deserves. And it is disastrous in practice, since it supersedes being by doing; since it is a species of magic ; since it encourages superstition ; since it endangers the only morality worthy the name — the morality of self-effort, self-responsibility.
Awful in sublimity and sacredness as are the relations of an immortal Soul with Deity, the Papacy's theory and practice of indulgences have degraded them by a super- stition, irreverence, bargaining and trafficking, which I venture to say no heathen religion has ever surpassed. The Popes have encouraged religious orders in a scan- dalous scramble for these favors. They have granted them for purely worldly purposes and purely secular ac- tions ; they have authorized a most unholy commerce in them ; they have poured them out so prodigally that
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we can make neither sense nor reason out of the wild welter of them ; they have not hearkened to the petitions of disgusted men, who have implored them to check this abominable abuse.
Needless to say, neither the Gospel nor primitive Christianity gives any countenance either to the doc- trine or to the present practice of indulgences. The ar- gument that the text, "Whatsoever you shall bind" etc., and that the letters given by the martyrs to the lapsed, prove the evangelical origin and the early use of indul- gences, a man cannot, without losing his self-respect, even stoop to refute.
Indulgences really began in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. They began very humbly, too, for then it was a great thing if a Pope granted an indulgence of seven days ; and a year's indulgence was an altogether unusual allowance. But the Crusades and the religious orders opened the flood-gates, the money feature opened them still wider, and with Indulgences have we ever since been scandalized and suffocated. Forty days' indulgence has been given for being present at an auto-da-fe; another for carrying wood to the stake of a condemned heretic ; a plenary for assisting the Inquisition to hunt heretics ; a plenary to contributors to the Crusades ; fifty days for kissing the foot of St. Peter's statue in the Vatican ; one hundred days for each use of holy water. Benedict XIV granted a plenary to the members of the royal family in Vienna for every visit they made to the Church of the Canons Regular near the palace. Urban
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VI ordered England to go to war with France because France supported his rival, Clement VII, and promised indulgences to the volunteers. John XXIII did likewise in announcing a crusade against Naples for supporting the anti-pope Gregory. Leo X held out a plenary to all who would pray at High Mass for King Francis I. In 1835 Gregory XVI gave fifty days' indulgence to the builders of a road to a Franciscan Church, for every day's work spent upon it. The "Stations" in Rome are so enriched that^ according to the computation of the eminent authority, Ferraris, one may there gain in one year forty-nine plenaries and more than one and one- half million years of partials. Eight hundred plenaries are attached to St. Peter's. The indulgence of the "via crucis" no man can calculate. By authority of Pius
VII and Pius IX, every step of the Scala Santa has an indulgence of nine thousand years and nine thousand quarantines. The "Scala Santa" is absurdly supposed to be the stairway to Pilate's house, which Christ ascend- ed at his trial. The little church of the Portiuncula was, on the strength of a spurious vision of St. Francis, en- riched with a new form of indulgence, the totics quoties; that is, those who visited it on its great festival in August, gained a plenary indulgence each time they entered. The totics quoties, once started on its way, was too fine a favor not to travel far. So in a short time the "totics quoties" plenary was vouchsafed to every Franciscan Church on Portiuncula-day. The other orders, of course, clamored for their totics quoties, and the toties quoties
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was theirs. You get it in a Dominican Church on the feast of the Rosary ; in a Servite Church on the third Sunday in September, the feast of the Seven Dolors ; and by grant of Your Holiness, in a Benedictine Church on the second of November. By visiting the Servite Church at Florence you gain, by favor of Leo X, an indulgence of a thousand years. Moreover, Servite Churches enjoy twenty-seven plenaries a year for visits on special days, and Jesuit Churches twenty-two.
Ample as are these heavenly treasures made over to the Orders by Rome, they have proceeded to forge still others. The Franciscans have had certainly three collec- tions of fabricated indulgences condemned, the Carmel- ites four, the Premonstratensions, Benedictines and Jes- uits at least one each. Unfortunately only a portion of their falsifications have come under the ban. Others still flourish and are pontifically enriched with the marvelous favors of the God of Truth. The Carmelite, or ordinary brown scapular, brings vast indulgences to its wearer, and moreover, according to current ideas propagated first by the Carmelites, but now advanced by nearly all priests who consider that scapular-wearing is salutary, it is a protection against danger, and insures salvation to those that die with it. This scapular is based upon an apparition to the English Carmelite General, Simon Stock, wherein the Blessed Virgin gave him the scapular with the command to spread it everywhere, and with the huge promises of divine blessing that are still related to us.
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Hardly a fiction in history is so destitute of founda- tion. As is the case with the House of Loretto, it was not until generations after the supposed event that the least mention of it was made. A clumsier forgery hard- ly exists; yet Launoy, for attacking it along with other venerable and profitable myths, was put on the Index. The very fact that the story is of Carmelite origin were almost enough to disprove it, if disproof is needed. For the members of that order have been probably the most shameless forgers that history records, as every one familiar with its effort to obtain Papal confirmation is well aware. Yet the scapular which rests upon a lie has grown into a thing of vast magnitude. Indeed, a Cath- olic who does not wear it is looked upon askance ; he is almost sure to be a modernist. Even the monstrous superstition of the so-called Sabbatine privilege, accord- ing to which it is maintained that the Mother of Christ descends every Saturday into Purgatory to deliver the souls of such scapular-wearers as she may find there, has never been condemned. In all probability the Sabbatine Bull vouching for the truth of this thing is a forgery. But two Popes, when directly questioned about the wild blasphemy of the privilege, have not only not rejected it, but by cautious shuffling have given a quasi-sanction to it. The Theatines have a blue scapular, the authority for which is a nun's vision, and it rejoices in sixty-four plenaries a year, besides a toties quoties that is offered on the most trivial terms. The Lazarists have a red scapu- lar— the product of a nun's vision again ; and on the
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authority of another nun's rather banal colloquies with the Son of God, Who certainly does not talk in these apparitions as He talks in the Gospel, the Jesuits have built up the colossal fabric of the League of the Sacred Heart. The Margaret Mary revelations, on which this Sacred Heart League is founded, culminates in the char- acter-destroying, God-degrading ''promise", that who- ever receives Communion on nine successive first Fri- days will thereby infallibly be saved.
A particularly offensive feature of these indulgences is that most of them the Pope makes applicable to the souls in Purgatory, thus offering, as it were, a bait to the holiest sentiment of the human heart. Thus those nine thousand years and nine thousand quarantines for every step of the Scala Santa are transferable to the departed. Worse than all else, in this respect, is the "privileged altar". By special grant a Pope promises that if Mass is said at any altar to which he attaches this privilege — and there is one such altar in nearly every large church, — the soul for whom the Mass is offered is straightway released from Purgatory. It is true, theologians say that we cannot know whether God fulfills the promise or not ; but there is the Papal promise, there is the privi- leged altar, and there are the superstition and the trifling with the fond affections of simple people tc which it gives rise.
We can hardly persuade ourselves that we are deal- ing with a Christian religion when we see the solemn pundits of the Congregation of Indulgences deciding
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that the Carmelite scapular must be of woven wool. Lost are all those tens of thousands of years' indulgences, lost all the connoted remissions of sin-punishment if it should be by ill fortuity made of cotton ! Lost, too, the incalculable indulgences of the stations of the Cross if the crosses above the Stations be of iron and not of wood ! Well may we put the question that Carlyle quotes from Milton : "Do you think the living God is a buzzard idol, to be approached in such a manner?"
The Crusade indulgences and immunities in Spain have a sickening history. These are sold to the poor peasantry, and a huge percentage of the income goes to the Spanish crown. Pius V maintaining, as well he might, that this Cruzada, as the indulgence is called, had become a scandal refused to renew it. "Many," he says, "are made more prone to sin by believing that they gain the remission of so many and great sins by the payment of a trifling sum" (quando tot ct tantorum delictorwm remissionem certo et vilissimo pretio acquirere posse confidant) .
Yet this same Pius took back his fine refusal, and ac- corded the Indulgence when Phillip II refused to enter the league against the Turks unless the Pope restored this blasphemous source of revenue to the Spanish crown. The Cruzada has been granted every twelve years down to our day, and its net annual return is computed at five hundred thousand dollars.
The enormities of this superstition, sacrilege and si- mony, lie wholly with the Papacy. Warnings have re-
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peatedly been given, and as often ignored. Of nothing else in the world is the Papacy so heedless as of its own scandals. The Council of Constance protested against the abuse of indulgences. So did the Council of Trent. So did every commission de reformanda Ecclesia of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. So did Gerson and many another hopeless heart.
Naught else is needed to show the uselessness of all protests, and all scandals, than your own pontificate, Pius X. For not within the memory of living men have indulgences been so bewildering and meaningless in their prodigality as under your regime. Every poor fanatic that writes a prayer or invents an ejaculation is sure to be rewarded by your Holiness with all the indulgences requested. Prayers for deaf-mutes, prayers to our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament, to St. Rita, to St. Joseph and to other inhabitants of the ghostly world too numerous to mention have been poured out upon us laden with in- dulgences, until the pure exercise of interior religion, character-affecting religion, is in danger of being sti- fled by Pharisaism. The black monks of St. Benedict have obtained that the faithful may gain a toties quoties for visiting Benedictine churches on All Soul's Day, and that whoso wears a St. Benedict medal may attain the same privilege for visiting any church whatever on that festival. Upon the granting of this, the Camaldo- lese monks besought your Holiness to extend the favor to churches in control of other Benedictines than the black- robed ones. This, too, was graciously vouchsafed. You
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have conceded fifty-six plenaries a year to lay folk who belong to the third order of St. Dominic. You have augmented the long list of Sacred Heart indulgences. You have enriched with similar treasures the Francis- cans' Crown of Seven Joys of our Lady. You have attached indulgences to the medal of the Pius Union of the Children of Mary. And you have again set us wondering whether we are dealing with heathenism or Christianity, by granting, upon petition of the Master General of the Dominican Order, an indulgence of forty thousand five hundred years once a year, to such as merely carry the Rosary beads in their pocket.
Where, in all this mad mathematics, is there aught of the religion of Jesus ? How discover beneath this pagan superstition and Pharisaic formalism a single element that purifies character or contains a suggestion of spirit- ual worship? How does it differ from the revolving barrel of the Buddhist, or the mummery of a medicine- man ? Can these rushings in and out of a church to gain the toties quoties, these chatterings of ejaculations, these wearings of cloth badges and carrying of bone beads, be a reasonable service to the awful Infinite? Are not such goings-on irreverent, indeed, almost sacrilegious before the Almighty Presence? Did Christ, in the remotest manner, ever countenance them? And are they edifying exhibitions from Christ's leading representative, in these days above all, when men are seeking a religion that is based on eternal verities and true realities?
Holy Father, it would seem that not only do you not know modern men, but that you have a grotesque con-
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ception of the everlasting God. For surely when some noble spiritual understanding of Him enters a man's soul and fills it with religious awe, there is an end of toties quoties profanations, and room only for a wor- ship which is in spirit and in truth. Book-keeping gods, amulet-pleasing gods are gone. The One Infinite, sus- taining all things and breathing divine messages to the spirit of man, remains. Him alone will humanity worship forevermore.
XVI
Worship in Spirit and in Truth
Your Holiness :
The evidences of superstition, of a religion of amulets, charms, and relics, may be seen wherever Roman Cathol- icism has set its foot. I have no intention whatever of inveighing against that inevitable superstition which will always be found among the uncultivated. Despite the best efforts of enlightened teachers, a certain amount of this will persist until it is dissipated by the slow proc- ess of intellectual and spiritual refinement. But when we find superstition grown into a huge mass among typi- cally Catholic countries ; when we see the spirit of super- stition pervading popular and official devotion ; when we find Catholic literature saturated with it, the Catholic mind prone to it, and Rome itself encouraging it, we are in presence of something more than an accidental and su^ perficial abuse. We are confronted by a deep-rooted dis-
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ease, a criminal perversion, a universal scandal. For such conditions could exist only by official disregard for the highest and purest worship, and official counte- nance for those pagan survivals which debase the lofty faith of Christ. If everywhere we come upon lust for miracle, extravagant devotion to saints, voracity for relics, trust in charms, and find that so far from there being any authoritative voice raised against these things, there is rather condemnation — as in your encyclical on modernism — for the few reformers who do oppose them, no other conclusion is possible but that Papal Rome is responsible for a degradation of that sentiment of the soul which above all other sentiments it is iniquity to de- grade.
One of the main purposes of these letters is to inform your Holiness why the modern mind is so estranged from Catholicism. In pursuance of that purpose I can- not avoid speaking of the subject matter of this present letter, for the superstitions of which I am making men- tion have far more to do with that estrangement than the classic iniquities of Free Masonry. I am sure it would result in great good if your Holiness and the members of your Roman congregations could associate for a few years with such non-Catholics as we have in America. Consider their errors as many and as fatal as you will, nevertheless you might learn at least the rudiments of a useful lesson from the simplicity of their worship, the cleanness of their devotion from extravagance and superstition, and the directness and unclouded purity of
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tlreir relations with God and Christ. Could you stand by their side while contemplating the shrieking Neapol- itans on the feast of St. Januarius, or while looking upon a crowd of devotees before a relic of St. Ann, or again while beholding the pageantry of a pontifical Mass, or still again while witnessing the blessing of the oils on Holy Thursday, you might feel as many of us have felt on similar occasions, that whatever they have lost in ceremonial, they are somewhat nearer than Catholics are, to that worship of Deity which was celebrated be- neath the skies of Galilee, when Jesus led the Twelve in prayer. You might furthermore be led to reflect that a people thus imbued with the spirit of religious simplicity and directness cannot be drawn to Catholicity so long as it is arrayed in its present motley garments of shrines, relics, special devotions, spiritless pomp and dead lan- guages. Beneath these tawdry vulgarities there is in- deed a precious treasure of genuine religion, but who can discern the valuable if blinded by the worthless ?
It is not pleasant to reflect that if the pagan Greeks venerated the hair of Medusa, the lyre of Orpheus and the vessels of Agamemnon, a Christian people are quite on a line with them in prostrating before a mythical wristbone of St. Ann, or the rod of Moses, still kept in St. John Lateran, or the breath of Christ at Genoa, or the window through which the Angel Gabriel entered the house of Mary, or the disgusting relic of St. Bartholo- mew, once revered at Treves. Neither could it ever serve any conceivable benefit to religion that high honors
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have been paid to twenty different bodies of John the Baptist, eighteen of St. Paul, six heads of Ignatius Mar- tyr, sixty fingers of St. Jerome, forty holy shrouds, and seven hundred thorns from the sacred crown. Nor can intelligent people be profitably present at a mass or office of St. Josaphat when they know that he is none other than Buddha; or at a panegyric of St. Veronica, when they are aware that orginally she was the Gnostic prin- ciple of generation. It is difficult, too, to arouse devotion to St. Apollinaris, a lineal descendant of Apollo, or to Cosmas and Damian, who have succeeded to the place of Castor and Pollux. And if these venerable frauds are to be indulgently treated on the ground of their an- tiquity, what of the dismissal of Mgr. Duchesne from the Catholic Institute at Paris because he disproved the absurd legends respecting the Christian origins of France? What of your own anger against Canon Chev- alier for pulverizing the Pope-protected myth of the house of Loretto? What of your Cardinal Vicar sol- emnly approving in 1906 an association for promoting devotion to St. Philumena, whom every archeologist in the world knows to be a downright invention? What, finally, of your recent condemnation of those modernist reformers who, on purely historical grounds, show the baselessness of many a famous relic and many a wide- spread devotion? These, Holy Father, are scandals to the world, as well as degradations of piety, and it- be- tokens neither love of truth nor care for souls that you are responsible for them.
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Efforts towards simplicity and away from unreality in the Church's devotional life have been attempted by many modernists in the last two centuries, but both the efforts and the authors of them have gone the way of all reform and all reformers. The Synod of Pistoia pleaded for worship in the vernacular, and was con- demned. Rather than allow the faithful that direct co- operation in divine worship which the early Christians enjoyed, and which gives to Protestant service so much attractiveness and sincerity, the Papacy compels them to be mere spectators at a show. The priest is as aloof from Catholic congregations in the acts of his ministry as were the pagan priests from theirs. The instinctive need of genuine worship to express itself in words is held in check ; the very understanding of the prayers and petitions at the altar is either obscured or destroyed by the use of an ancient language. And if the function is "solemn", the sentiment of worship is itself annihilated by incensings, marchings, and a puzzling perplexity of maneuverings. In certain ceremonies, a pontifical mass, the dedication of a church, the baptizing of a bell, the blessings of oils, and some others, what with the gro- tesque vestments, the senseless sprinklings, the unintelli- gible chanting, the putting on and taking off of hats, the kissing of rings and thuribles and cruets, it is impos- sible to be devout, and most assuredly it is impossible to discern anything of the spirit of the New Testament. Yet to every plea for sincerity, reality and truth in the great matter of common worship, Rome turns a scornful
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and angry face. A Cardinal Manning may implore Catholics to stop chanting litanies and chattering ro- saries, lest they scandalize Protestants ; a bishop Bona- melli may protest against the sickening vulgarity of picturing and worshiping Christ's physical heart; other earnest men may speak out against such blasphemous nonsense as "Sweet Heart of Mary, be my salvation" ! or such orgies of superstition as the devotion to St. An- thony, but all in vain. Fostered and encouraged by a Papacy whose tenure of existence depends upon exter- nalism and perishes with growing personality, these ex- cesses and degradations of religion are secure beyond any power of reformer or Modernist to destroy them.
The heathenish credulity to which all this leads, was startlingly and shamefully illustrated when the Curia from top to bottom credited the insane revelations of the pretended priestess of Satan, Diana Vaughan, and Leo XIII sent to her his august and apostolic benediction. That the leaders of a spiritual religion should be so sat- urated with superstition as to be led into this colossal hoax, is a fair warning of what medal-religion, badge- worship, and relic-piety may produce. But the Papacy never learns. Though the exposure of Diana Vaughan is of yesterday, your Holiness encourages the Philu- mena-myth and grants forty thousand five hundred years' indulgence a year for carrying the beads.
However, it is not for the sake of these abuses stand- ing alone that I speak of them, but for the sake of the fundamental Roman error out of which they all proceed,
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and by which they are perpetuated. This error lies in misapprehension and ignorance of developed human personality. Not personality, but conformity ; not the outgrowth of free character, but the constant submission to grinding authority, is the gospel according to the Vatican. Personality seeks reality ; it means immanent vigor, vital growth. Conformity implies externalism, posture, regularity. Authority, Roman authority, signi- fies not being, but doing ; not thinking as a man, but fol- lowing as a sheep. Personality looks for the character- element in all things — Rome demands the military ele- ment. Personality submits when reason and conscience, that is the rational Self, so order. Rome requires that Self shall not exercise Self-hood, but shall coerce itself on the instant to the behest of authority. Nations built on the foundation of free personality will and must be, direct, simple, truthful in their religion, and will throw off every feature of religion which is unfavorable to Self-development, makes men passive instead of active, spectators instead of co-operators, machines instead of human beings. On the other hand a religion of excessive authority regards not truth but submission as primary. If it approves a devotion, it is impertinent to ask if the devotion have a basis in truth. If it gives a decision, it is revolutionary to inquire if conscience can approve it. Resistance it does not educate, but excommunicates. Free inquiry it anathematizes. To scholarship it sets up as a standard, not the discovery of truth, whether favor- able or unfavorable to authority, but the repression of
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every intellectual curiosity which might endanger the es- tablished order. It follows inevitably, we have but to open our eyes to see it, that the peoples most devoted to such a religion will be backward in enlightenment, not of the first rank in civilization, mechanical in religion, and superstitious in devotion. Superstitious in devotion, I say, for the obvious reason, that when men are not trained to demand the character-element in worship, they will sink back upon the mechanical-element. They will replace vital endeavor by the leaning upon some external saving process, or some outward salvation-conferring thing — the very essence of superstition.
It is not then, your Holiness, merely by condemning any particular excess, such as discouraging miraculous medals, Loretto houses and bones of St. Ann, though even this you refuse to do, but by renovating the entire spirit of your Papal system, that you can gratify your- self with the hope of ever winning the modern world to Catholicism. Not until free personality takes its place in the Catholic mind, not till character becomes honored in Catholic practice and worship, not till mechanism is replaced by individuality, automatic obedi- ence by endeavor, and the Papacy's military discipline by Christ's inward kingdom, can there be aught but de- feat and dissolution in the prospect of the Papacy.
In conclusion let me say that this letter may suggest to your Holiness an explanation of the fact that a ma- jority of the men in Italy, France, Spain and Mexico, turn away from Catholicism as soon as they grow to
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maturity, and turn away from it all the more decisively if they have received a modicum of education.
XVII
The Present Discipline of Celibacy
Your Holiness:
The subject of this letter is clerical celibacy as it is at present enforced in the Roman Catholic Church. Treating as I have been of the rights of personality, and of Rome's iron tyranny with regard to them, I cannot omit this topic, delicate and perhaps dangerous as it is. For in no other matter has Rome shown a more brutal despotism and a more wicked superstition. Efforts there have been by both priesthood and laity from the days of Hildebrand to our own, to mitigate the present discipline of celibacy ; but, as in all other move- ments towards a more spiritual religion and a more rational rule, Rome has uttered its anathema, and loaded the reformer with foul insinuation and public disgrace. Gregory XVI in the "Mirari Vos," of 1832, spits venom "against that most filthy conspiracy (foedissimam con- jurationem) against clerical celibacy, which is growing every day, owing to the agitations of the abandoned philosophers of our time, and of some members even of the priesthood, who, forgetful of their person and vocation, and carried away by sensuality (blanditiis abrepti voluptatum), have dared to obtain from civil rulers public and repeated petitions against this most
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holy discipline." Pius IX likewise characterizes priests who have spoken in favor of this reform, as men "over- come by sensuality and impurity." It is a curious wit- ness to the pruriency of the Romanized mind that one cannot speak one's convictions on a matter of purely ecclesiastical discipline, without being branded as a blackguard. It is strange too that a man should be stigmatized as a sensualist, who happens to agree on this point with the author of the first epistle to Timothy, with the Church's practice in its first glorious age, and with that wise celibate who dissuaded the Council of Nicaea from imposing celibacy in the manner which prevails now. But to this it has come that a decent man exposes himself to the attacks of the filthy, from Pope to peasant, if he ventures to utter what study and experience have taught him in this matter. Upon a man of honor, conscious of cleanness, jealous of in- tegrity, these furious and foul incriminations inflict a most grievous pain. But some one must take up the re- former's cause, someone who is convinced that the present mode of enforcing celibacy is in principle wild superstition and in practice an appalling disaster. And since in these letters I am giving voice to reform, let me speak for reform on this point also, though in doing so I must be the recipient of that very Christ-like Papal charity which consigns me to the company of rakes and voluptuaries.
Celibacy is one of those features of religion that can- not be understood until something is known of what
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may be called their natural history. It is a survival of primitive religion, and has its basis in one of those fan- tastic aberrations which make the history of uncivilized and semi-civilized religions so fascinating, so curious, and so wild. True, Christianity from the beginning, and the New Testament itself, regarded celibacy as essen- tially and intrinsically higher than marriage, which they tolerate as hardly anything else than a concession to the animal nature of man. But Christianity in this respect as in so many others, was influenced by that vast accumu- lation of ideas which ethnic religions had been deposit- ing for thousands of years. Christianity it must be kept in mind, is not totally unrelated to the general history of religion. It was born and was originally propagated in the midst of a society through which flowed religious currents that took their rise in ancient Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Asia Minor, Greece and Rome, and had to touch these currents. Not only so, but from the very fact of its being a religion it is not without kinship with the religions of barbarians and savages. Let no one think this shocking. I hold as firmly as any other man, that Christianity is the divinest form of faith that humanity can know. But this cannot blind one to the obvious, nay to the necessary fact, that it owes much to pre-existing faiths, and that in moving through the Graeco-Roman world its garments caught both some of the luster and some of the stains of the contiguous civilization. It could not otherwise live among men, nor occupy a place, in human history. Why, as soon as Christianity was
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preached to the Greek world, Chrst had to be announced no longer as Messiah, for this was a Jewish idea utterly uninteresting if not unintelligible to non-Jews, but as Logos, the Word of God, the Son of God. What is this but undergoing adaptation, so as to fit in with pre-exist- ing conceptions? Now this process of absorbing ex- traneous elements is immensely wider and deeper than most of us imagine. It is a process indeed which appears in the most conspicuous and undeniable manner in ritual, devotion, theology and dogma. All these have traces of pre-Christian, and pagan thought. Some of these in- fluences are sound, others are unsound, but deny them we cannot. Let me suggest a few striking resemblances between Christianity and other religions. They will serve as a basis for a better understanding of this subject of celibacy.
Christianity possesses an elaborate devil-doctrine. The New Testament is full of possession-cases, and attributes physical ills to the indwelling demon. Men were or- dained in the early church and are ordained to-day to the office of exorcists, drivers-out of evil spirits. Now these ideas at which the modern world is inclined to smile, are as old as humanity.
Uncultivated man lives in abiding terror of malignant powers. Every misfortune is due to them. Every step brings one into peril of them. They must be charmed, coaxed or driven away by men especially set apart to that holy office. So we find the world over just such a demonology, in essential features, as is contained in the
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New Testament, and in Catholic faith and practice. In Australia the natives on the occasion of pestilence, or other misfortunes, go about beating the ground with clubs to drive away the devils that have caused the mischief. In the Celebes the exorcism takes the form of armed men, pounding the earth with their weapons while the priests, bearing holy fire, march nine times around each afflicted house. The Esquimaux fire guns, hoping thus to terrify the dark spirits. In Guinea the priests exorcise by sprinkling rum, the devil that has produced barrenness in a woman. The Guinea negroes have a solemn eight-day exorcism every year. The Australians too have annual devil expulsions. The lights at a Chinese wedding are in dacmonis terrorem. Among the Cherokees, seven exorcists beat the obsessed house with rods. In Greece insanity and epilepsy were attributed to the foul fiend. The very word epilepsy — €ni\r]\(/K (seizing) shows this. The Romans too had their devils and their exorcists. In Babylonia the exorcists formed a powerful order of priests who had their books of sacred formulas which the candidate for their office was obliged to study and learn. Among the material agencies in Babylonian exorcism were fire, holy water and holy oil. Finally the Zoroastrian religion, which had so great an influence on late Judaism and early Christianity, had a demonology of immense pro- portions. Now when we see Christianity born to the inheritance of this universal religious conception, when we find the Gospels attributing sickness to devils, St,
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Paul declaring that the very air is full of them, and early Christianity setting up a body of ministers to expel them, shall we be so stubborn as to say that Christianity was uninfluenced by extraneous ideas? The world of devils, the swarming myriads of them have disappeared. We now call in not the exorcist but the physician to an epileptic. We no longer believe that devils inhabit "dry places" — a peculiarly Oriental idea, born out of dread for the mysterious awesomeness of the desert. The once busy exorcists in the church, have now absolutely noth- ing in the way of exorcism to do. In other words, we have grown away from a New Testament notion which we perceive was sprung from superstition and pre- Christian paganism.
Associated with belief in all-pervading bad spirits is the idea of good guardian-spirits, guardian angels. This too is not of Christian origin. The Australian savage believes that the first man he kills becomes his guardian, taking up residence near his liver. The African and Mongolian offer food and drink to their patron-spirits. The Caribs held that each man had a ghostly guardian who accompanied him all through this life and the next. The North American Indians and the Araucanians of Chile had a similar faith.
The Romans were devoted to their genius natalis, whose image they kept, and worshipped on their birthday with incense and song. And according to Menander every man has his good demon. The instance of the admonish- ing Saifjiwv of Socrates is a striking case to the point.
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Catholicism has feasts of the dead, and prayers for them and to them. The practice prevailed before Cathol- icism was born. The Kol tribes pray to the dead for help. The Chinese have elaborate festivals of the dead, and even feasts for the neglected dead. Feasts are made at graves in India, Madagascar and West Africa, some- what in the manner of the early Christian feasts at the graves of martyrs. The Tasmanians beseech the dead to cure sickness. In divers necessities the dead are in- voked in Ceylon, Guinea and Siam. According to Zulu theology the dead preside over the issue of war. The Karen tribes celebrate a great festival of the departed in December, the Bengalese and West Africans at har- vest-time, the Haiti negroes at the end of the year, and the East Africans in November. The Romans hallowed the memory of the dead at the Feralia and Lemuralia in February and May. The Persian Zoroastrians held solemn services for the deceased on the third and seventh day after death.
The ceremonial cutting of the hair is the first step in Holy Orders according to the ritual of the Catholic Church. A mysterious regard for the hair is a wide- spread feature in primitive superstition. The Frankish kings never cut their hair. Nor did the Aztec priests. The priests of the Celebes considered it sacrilege to cut their hair during the time of their sacerdotal functions. A Malay will not cut his hair during his wife's pregnancy. A Maori is tabooed as being under unseen influences for some days after his hair-cutting. The hair of the
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Talutians is buried in the temple. The priests of south- west Africa offer sacrifices to the shorn locks of the king. The tresses of the Vestal virgins were hung on the lotus- tree. The Marquesans, as also the ancient Saxons, did not cut their hair while under a vow of revenge, a super- stition which calls to mind the Nazarite vow of the Old Testament.
The practice of fasting too, belongs to aboriginal re- ligion. Its purpose on the beginning seems to have been to become possessed of a divine spirit, this possession being directly prepared for, it was thought, by the giddi- ness and weakness caused by the fast. The North Amer- ican Indian Medicine-men were prodigious fasters. In Haiti a postulant for the sorcerer's office undergoes fasting as a primary part of his novitiate. A Zulu medi- cine-man makes ready for his communication with the divine spirit by fasting and flagellation. The priest of Guiana practices the same mortification. The Pythian priestess at Delphi fasted before she prophesied. None have ever surpassed the Indian Yogi for fasting. The Medicine-man of the Winnebagos fasted for three days before he was invested with the plenary powers of his office.
The Catholic Church has holy water, and various forms of purification. These too are an inheritance from the immemorial past. The Yumanos of Brazil sprinkled a child with a decoction from holy herbs. In New Zealand the priest sprinkled or immersed the child on the eighth day after birth. In Sarac the infant three days
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from birth was washed in holy water. The Mandingo baptism took place three days after birth and consisted in the priest's spitting three times upon the child's face. In Guinea the head man of the village sprinkles the infant and gives it a name. The Hottentots pour water upon both mother and child. The Basuto priest pre- pares holy water with which he asperses the people at public purification. A Peruvian child was ceremonially bathed after birth and the water buried while the priest recited charms. The Inca of Peru confessed his sins, and then bathed in the river, saying: "O River, receive the sins I have this day confessed to the sun, and carry them to the sea." Another Peruvian custom was that the nurse first implored the god to descend into the water with which the child was to be washed, that the evil might be driven out of him. Lustration was a daily ceremony in Aztec Mexico. The religious laving of children prevails in Japan, China and Mongolia. In Thibet the lama blesses the water, immerses the child three times and gives it a name. The Romans had the custom of lustration and name-giving. At the doors of a Greek house of mourning was placed water that those coming out from the presence of death might purify themselves. Before the Roman temples was set a holy- water vessel with a sprinkler. Evidently many of the Romans attributed a sin-forgiving efficacy to this water for Ovid reproves them for the superstition.
The use of incense is of neither Christian nor Jewish origin. Herodotus tells us that the Babylonians burned
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a thousand talents' worth of incense on the yearly festival of Bel before the god's golden altar. Three times a day the Egyptian priests entered the temple to burn incense before the god. Incense was in daily use before the Aztec altars, and was, or is, employed in the liturgy of the Greeks, Romans, Chinese and Zulus.
The Catholic priest "churches" women, that is, gives them a special blessing after childbirth. This is a di- rect inheritance from the Levitical law which regarded women at such time as unclean. The Jews got this horrible and abominable idea from pagan sources ; for throughout the world we find heathen religions account- ing women after childbirth as "unclean," that is, according to the original meaning of the term, dangerous, taboo, under potent influences of evil. Many savages will not even look upon a woman during the time of her puri- fication, lest the evil spirits about her will enter them and cause them to waste away.
Even a notion which looms so large in our theology as vicarious atonement had thoroughly penetrated the minds of men, before Christian influences could possibly have reached them. That understanding of personality and individual responsibility of which these letters have had so much to say is of late advent into the human mind. In lower stages of civilization men look for some- one else to bear their stripes and assume their sins. Thus among the California Indians, a band of men dressed up as devils every seventh year, and were driven forth, — all evils going with them, — by the infuriated people. A
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similar custom exists in Queensland and the Mandan Islands. In Nigeria two men were killed to take away the sins of the tribe. In the Greek colony of Marseilles, when pestilence arose, a man was clothed in sacred gar- ments and driven off, the people praying that all their ills might be upon his head. The Athenians sacrificed a man during plague, and every year in the month of May put to death two victims for the people. In no heathen re- ligion does this subversive superstition descend lower than in the custom thus described in the Old Testament : "And he shall take of the congregation of the children of Israel two he-goats for a sin-offering and one ram for a burnt- offering. . . . And (Aaron) shall take the goats, and set them before the Lord at the door of the tent of meet- ing. And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats, one lot for the Lord and the other lot for Azazel. And Aaron shall present the goat upon which the lot fell for the Lord and offer him for a sin-offering. But the goat on which the lot fell for Azazel shall be set alive before the Lord, to make atonement for him, to send him away for Azazel into the wilderness. . . . And when (Aaron) hath made an end of atoning for the holy place, and the tent of meeting and the altar, he shall present the live goat; and Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the in- iquities of the children of Israel and all their transgres- sions, even all their sins, and he shall put them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a man that is in readiness into the wilderness ; and the
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goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities into a soli- tary land." — (Leviticus, c-16.)
To go a step further, we must acknowledge that the killing of a special representative or incarnation of Deity and his subsequent resurrection occupied a remarkably large place in pre-Christian theology, and were particu- larly important in Asia Minor and Greece at the very period when Christian theology began to take shape there. The Aztecs had the custom of giving the name of a god to a man at certain times, dressing him to an exact re- semblance of the god-image, worshipping him, and then killing and eating him. Again at one of their Spring festivals, near the time of our Easter, a young man was made the god Tezcatlitcoa. For a year he was adored as such. Then, on the festival day of the succeeding year, he was led into the temple, and a priest cut out his heart and offered it to the sun. The ceremony concluded with the eating of the divine victim's legs and arms. The Aztecs, moreover, whose religion is one of the most in- teresting in the world, celebrated a great annual feast of Toci, the mother of the gods, at which a woman who had sometime previously been given the goddess' name was beheaded. All these victims were flayed, and the priests clothed themselves with their skins, and came out before the people, whereat all cried : "Behold our Gods !" The Egyptians celebrated the death of divine Osiris, with five days of mourning, followed by a day of joy and pageantry with processions bearing the god's image. The great spring-festival in Phrygia was in com-
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memoration of Attis, one account of whom says he was born of a virgin, who conceived by putting a ripe almond in her bosom. For three days his death was mourned ; on the fourth, his resurrection was exultantly celebrated. The Adonis mysteries in Syria were very similar to this. The Cretans held a biennial festival in honor of Dionysus, one story of whom says that after his tragic death he descended into Hades to bring back his mother Semele, and then ascended into Heaven. The Greeks also held high festival in memory of Proserpine's return from the kingdom of Pluto. In the Attis mysteries when the priest appeared bearing a light, to announce the god's resurrec- tion, the people said : "Have confidence, believers, in God the savior ; for he will be our salvation from evil."
dappeire, /xv(TTai tov Otov (Ttawfxevov ecrrai yap ijfUV £K ttovwv crwTrjpia.
The killing of the king, as a special incarnation of divinity was widespread in the ancient world ; though in the process of time, a substitute victim came to be im- molated. Thus in upper Egypt the regular government was suspended for three days in September, every town chose a ruler who assumed kingly honors, even going into the palace and pretending to depose the real king. On the fourth day he was sentenced to death. At the wonderful Babylonian carnival of the Sacaea, a criminal was arrayed in royal robes, entered the palace as its sovereign, and took possession even of the king's concu- bines. After a few days he was put to death either upon the gallows or a cross.
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In many religions, very notably in the Oriental and Greek mystery-cults that flourished about the cradle of Christianity, the incorporation of the god with the be- liever was effected by a sacramental eating of the god. Even among the Creek Indians we find a suggestion of this. Just before the Creek festival of the first fruits of the new harvest, they extinguished every fire in the vil- lage, and destroyed the remnants of the food of the pre- ceding year. The warriors then went to the public square for a fast of two nights and a day, after which they drank an emetic and a purgative that they might be wholly clean for the new divine food of first fruits. The fast over, the priest lit the new fire and placed it on the altar. To the holy fire-spirit some of the first fruits were offered, and the priest made announcement that the new fire atoned for all the sins of the past year. Whereupon the women carried the new fire to their hearths, cooked the first fruits over it, and the ceremony ended with a joyous feast.
The Aztecs had two extraordinarily interesting god- eating days, one in May, the other in December. Two days before the May festival, the virgins of the convent made an image of the god in dough. This was carried to the temple on the festival, preceded by the virgins — sisters of the god Vitzilipuztli, they were called — clad in white and wearing crowns of maize. The god was brought into the temple while the people stood about in awe, and placed in a bower of roses. At its foot were heaped a large number of smaller breads made of the
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same dough as the idol. Then ensued a stately proces- sion, the priests and ministers wearing divers holy gar- ments and bedecked with flowers. The breads were solemnly blessed and worshipped. At mid-day the entire village, having fasted rigidly up to this, partook of the holy elements, in a spirit of profound worship. Even the children shared in the communion, and morsels were taken to the sick. In the December celebration, an image of the god Huitzilopachtli, made of seeds that had been kneaded with the blood of children, was placed upon the altar and incensed by the king. On the following day a priest drove a knife into the image, to kill the god. The heart was cut out and given to the king. After this all males, but no women, partook of the fragments. The Aztec name for this ceremony signifies, "God is eaten."
The Egyptians killed the bull-god Apis, and the divine ram of Amon every year. A remarkable pyramid-text gives us to understand that union with godhead through eating was a familiar idea to the Egyptians. This text thus describes how a deceased Pharaoh became a god: "His servants bound the gods with ropes, dragged them down, transpierced their throat, disemboweled them and cooked them in kettles. And the Pharaoh devoured their strength and ate their souls. The greatest gods formed his breakfast, the gods of middle degree his dinner, and the lowest gods his supper. ... He became an heir of power, above all other heirs, he became the Lord of heaven ... he ate the wisdom of each god," etc.
But it is in the Graeco-Oriental mystery-cults that we
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find the most extraordinary aspirations after this organic union with Divinity. "Come to me Lord Hermes," says a prayer in a papyrus in the British Museum, "as a child comes into the womb of its mother." (Cf. Kenyon Cox: "Greek Papyri in the British Museum.") "Thou art I," it goes on, "and I am Thou. Thy name is mine ; mine is Thine. I am thy image." Oneness with godhead is a constant theme and aspiration with the Neo-Platonists.
And this union, this OzovpyiK-rj evwo-is, was achieved in the mysteries by a sacramental meal. The holy liquid taken in the Mithraic sacrament conferred a glorious immortality, as did likewise the bull's blood which was so important an element in the sacramental system of Mithraism. Divine union through a religious meal was obtained also in the mysteries of Attis, Samothrace and Dionysus. And the theory is all but proved, that the earliest idea underlying animal sacrifices is union with the god through eating the flesh of the divine animal.
I have instanced these analogies between Christianity and other religions, and the list might be greatly length- ened, not to insist that resemblance implies dependence in every case, but merely to establish a statement made earlier in this letter, that Christianity found men already richly furnished with religious beliefs and practices of which it took unto itself a large number, highly purifying some, and leaving others in all their pagan crudity and falseness. Few men of cultivated minds will not regret that we have holy water for driving away the devils, as the Romans, Zoroastrians and Babylonians had; or that
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the Church keeps on heathenishly considering women unclean after they have gone through the travail of ma- ternity, which, to civilized men, makes them sacred ; or that blessed candles are officially declared to be a safe- guard against demons ; or that such prominence is given to so puerile an adjunct as the divers forms of holy oil. On the other hand, though the Mithraists and initiates of Attis had a form of baptism and eucharist, the re- ligious mind takes no offense that similar sacraments exist in Christianity. For these things, so expressive of, and so adapted to the highest needs of the soul, are worthy in themselves, and, rationally understood, are a support and encouragement of religious life. The other things, — devil-terrifying water and candles, belief that motherhood involves uncleanness, and all such, are abominable superstitions, — and whether we find them in the Bible or not, the mature mind and spirit of man cannot tolerate them.
The conclusion then being, as I think fair minds will consider perfectly clear, that Christianity has adopted certain pre-existing pagan ideas, some degraded and some noble, I come now to the matter of celibacy, which as now enforced, I maintain is among the most revolting survivals of pagan superstition, and one of the worst brutalities of Papal Rome. Two very primitive ideas lie at the basis of the religious practice of celibacy ; the first, that offerings which cost most to the giver are most pleasing to the gods ; the second, that the sexual relation is pre-eminently sacrum, i. e., attended with spirit-influ-
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ences, and likely under certain conditions to result in great evil. Sacrum in the sense of dangerous, obnoxious to unseen powers, is the basic idea of "unclean." Con- tinence therefore as a precious gift to the gods, and sec- ondly as avoiding uncleanness, in the primitive sense of the word, became a widespread custom ; for savage and semi-savage man believes that his gods must be pro- pitiated at whatever cost to himself, and has an awesome respect for the taboo. Thus we find a widely prevailing custom of sacrificing the first-born not only of animals but of men. Every first-born child in Israel belonged to the Lord and had to be redeemed by a temple offering, no doubt a mitigation of a primitive Hebrew custom of slaying the child, as we may gather from the incident of Abraham and Isaac. So the sacrifice of the entire grati- fication of the sexual impulse was held to be an offering of high value to the gods.
Total or partial continence for one or other of the two reasons just mentioned is world-wide. To give only a very few instances ; during prayers for rain in Java, the householders and their servants remained continent. The Natchez Indian observed the same discipline for six months after his first scalp. The Australian warriors are continent during war. The priest of Southeast Africa must be continent a month before the sacrifice to the hair of the king. The prophetesses of Argos were bound to chastity ; and the institution of virgins among the Ro- mans and the Aztecs is well known. Even the supreme sacrifice of celibacy, — the revolting rite of castration, —
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prevailed to an enormous extent in the old pagan world. It was common in the cult of Astarte, Bellona, Dea Syria, Attis and Cybele. Those who imposed this pen- ance upon themselves were generally young men who thus consecrated themselves as they thought, in all purity and generosity to the service of the god.
The consecration of Egyptian priests was expressed by circumcision, which probably was only a mitigation of a far more grievous mutilation in earlier times. So fre- quent became self-castration in the Graeco-Oriental mys- teries, that Roman law had to take cognizance of it, and under Domitian the practice was legally forbidden. Had we no other information upon the extent of this species of asceticism in the Roman world, the constant reference to it in the literature of the period would be enough to prove that it had become an evil of menacing proportions. Were the subject one which admitted of quotations con- cerning it, I might fill more than one page with relevant matter from Juvenal, Catullus, Martial, Prudentius, and others. But I will content myself with the following few words from the Christian "Passion of St. Sym- phorianus": "in cujus sacris excisas corporum vires cas- trati adolescentes infaustae imagini exultantes illidunt, et exsecrandum facinus pro grandi sacrificio ducitis."
In the very regions then in which Christian belief be- gan to take fixed shape, and at the same time also, the idea, sprung from superstition, had gained not only a place, but a pre-enlinent place, that the higher consecra- tion to divine service demanded absolute continence.
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Coming now to the land itself where Christianity began, we discover that here too the notion had got itself as- sociated with the loftier piety. For although virginity for its own sake is utterly repugnant to the Old Testament, belief in it had entered Judaism from extraneous sources in an age of notable religious syncretism, and had become a cardinal doctrine of the Essenes, who in the time of our Lord enjoyed a great reputation for sanctity. The one or two texts on the matter attributed to Christ are very guarded, are so moderate indeed that they cannot possibly be fairly invoked in support of the present Roman disci- pline ; but, if we take them as Christ's real words, they leave no doubt that he held to the Essenian view. I shall discuss in another letter the very delicate question as to how far we are absolutely bound by all the words at- tributed to our Lord. For the present let me say, I trust not irreverently, that the Founder of our religion held to an extreme and impossible asceticism. Certainly if the world took "no thought of tomorrow," and flung it- self into the arms of Providence hoping that God would feed men as He feeds the sparrows of the air, and clothe them as He clothes the lilies of the field, there would be an end of civilization. And, furthermore, primitive Christianity, St. Paul in a notable degree and our Lord Himself, if the eschatology of the Gospels be His, were under the impression which also was taken over from pre-existing Jewish ideas, that the end of the world and the glorious advent of the heavenly Messianic era were close at hand. They believed in those days that "this
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generation shall not pass till these things be" ; that, "Some standing here shall not taste death till the King- dom of Heaven come"; that, "Watch, and pray, for ye know not the day nor the hour," was a final warning; that, "We that are alive, that are left unto the coming of the Lord, shall in nowise precede them that are fallen asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from Heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trump of God ; and the dead in Christ shall rise first ; then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air," were words as of the last moments of the eleventh hour. No wonder those who thus believed counseled utter disregard of all things earthly, and preached a pov- erty, an improvidence and a disregard for marriage which do not fit in with an age that looks no longer for a thaumaturgic catastrophe, falling stars, darkened suns, an archangel's trumpet and the Messiah descending through the air.
Must we not admit that possibly in this matter of celibacy, as with the original Christian demonology and the apostolic expectation of the world's end, we are con- fronted by a pagan or semi-pagan survival? Must we not conclude that the question as to the value of celibacy is to be decided, not by the greatly-to-be-suspected ideas of a cruder age, but by the common-sense of civilized and spiritual men of to-day? And submitting the ques- tion to common-sense, what shall we say of it? If the will of God is expressed in nature at all, it is beyond
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question His will that marriage is the normal and nat- ural state of man. All agree on this. Furthermore, is it not clear that marriage is essentially a higher life than celibacy? I am abscinding from external and accidental considerations which in particular cases may make celibacy the nobler choice, as when a man or a woman sacrifices the hope of marriage at the call of some urgent duty of charity or mercy. But taking the two states of life in themselves, what conceivable suggestion of nature or light of reason gives us the slightest ground for es- teeming virginity the higher? How can we rationally escape from the conclusion that a life and condition of sterility, with its extreme liability to sourness and selfish- ness, do not possess the social or the ethical value of a life and condition which are in the highest sense of the word productive ; which hallow human existence with its divinest affections ; which ennoble character with a con- stant appeal to unselfish devotion ; and which, greatest of all, rest upon no aberration of primitive superstition, or mistaken eschatology, but upon almost the plainest ex- pression of the sovereign Will by which mankind is gov- erned ? God has created the father ; superstition has pro- duced the eunuch.
Celibacy is a sacrifice made for God, it will be said. But what religious value attaches to asceticism merely as asceticism? We might make it a sacrifice for God if we slew our relatives as the Phoenicians did ; or if we slashed ourselves with knives as the priests of Cybele did. Whv has not Christianity taken over these sacrifices? It had
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every whit as good a reason for doing so as for taking over celibacy. Indeed if sacrifice as such, pain for its own sake, penance as penance, be good, it would have been on the whole perhaps less revolting to have kept the penitential knives of the mystery-initiates and permitted to priests the holiest joy and the noblest responsibility that human life affords.
The sole possible reason for retaining celibacy is the belief that unholiness, uncleanness, and a kind of degra- dation are inseparable from marriage. The literature of Roman Catholic asceticism, the words of Hildebrand and Peter Damianus who did so much to enforce the present discipline, and even the brief quotations given in the first part of this letter from Gregory XVI and Pius IX prove this abundantly. Because the priesthood is clean, it can have nothing to do with marriage, which is dirty. There is the real Roman -argument, notwithstanding that Rome considers marriage a sacrament. This constant and dis- gusting preoccupation with the merely physical, this in- ability to regard the higher offices of wedded life, we are certain to discover in every Roman reasoning upon this subject. Such an attitude is Manichaeism, a survival of heathen taboo, a relic of one of the worst superstitions that ever misled mankind. Besides it is hardly less than a blasphemy against the Author of nature, not a single knowable expression of whose will is favorable to the idea that marriage is debasing, and celibacy intrinsically the higher state of life.
But when we come down from the question in princi-
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pie to the question in present practice we are at a loss to understand how even an iron fanatic like Hildebrand could ever have imposed so shameful a tyranny upon in- telligent men. The Church takes a boy postulant at the age of early adolescence, the age of romance, highly col- ored dreams, and aspiration for self-sacrifice, shuts him up in a petit seminaire, sends him thence in his twentieth or twenty-second year into a grand seminaire, where his imagination is fed upon an unreal asceticism, and every healthy acquaintance with life as it is, is denied him ; and when he is twenty-three or four binds upon him an ir- revocable obligation of celibacy for the rest of his life. It is preposterous to say that this ignorant boy, who has been for from five or ten years under a most unnatural training, knows what he is doing when he takes that vow. Later, when in mature manhood he is crushed by loneliness, wearied of a life and death struggle with his own heart, and it may be weakened in his faith, then and only then he knows what he has done when it is eter- nally too late. Primary dictate of justice and humanity as it is, that he be allowed honorably to retire from an office and an obligation for which time has proved him to be unfitted, Rome absolutely refuses to release him. He must, if he is too noble to be a secret criminal, either leave the priesthood, becoming thereby a victim of foul orthodox vituperation, or remain a priest with nought before him but a ruined life, a broken heart, a Sahara of sorrow, and at last most welcome death. I do not pre- tend to say that all priests, or the majority of priests,
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suffer this disillusion. I know that a great many of them, even after years of priesthood, would gladly choose their state again had they to live life over. But there are enough of disillusioned, of noble men whose lives are wrecked, but who stand steadfast amid the ruins, so as not to wound those they love ; there are enough of these to justify us in our indignation against a despotism which entices an unknowing youth into a superstitious vow, and then mocks his fruitless agony when he dis- covers that he should never have taken it. Let Rome retain its celibate clergy if it wishes to cling to that superstition, but every sentiment of honor and justice demands that those men should be delivered from the yoke whom it is crushing into misery and despair.
The wish and prayer of every lover of humanity should be that the Roman clergy be educated. They fancy that they are educated now. They imagine that their seminary syllogisms are the last word of science and that the tide of human knowledge has not risen since Thomas of Aquin died. They abandon their reason that Rome may think for them. They inquire no further when an Italian congregation utters an oracle. They make their mo- tions, crosses and genuflections, and never ask what is the basis of that set of traditional ideas which they call their faith. They are men with minds, but minds in chains. When the day will come that they grasp the full understanding of their own personality, search man- fully into their beliefs and official practices to see if any of them be lies, superstitions and brutalities, read beyond
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the tawdry text-books of a dishonest curriculum into the vast province of modern research, and bring every Ro- man teaching to the test of reason, history and con- science ; then will the central citadel of spiritual tyranny in this world be shaken. Then will the paganism and brutality which Rome has carried down from supersti- tious and cruel ages to hang as a millstone about the neck of our own, be broken forever. Then for many thousands will a weight be lifted from the conscience and a cloud from the mind, and life and personality will go forth freely into the ways of normal and orderly develop- ment ordained for them by God.
XVIII
Church and State
Your Holiness:
There is a third pillar-principle on which our American civilization rests, and which all civilized peoples must sooner or later put into the foundations of their state, that we behold the Papacy rejecting and doing its ut- most to cast out into the rubbish-heap of error. This principle is that there should be no official union between civil rulers and hierarchial or priestly rulers. No Church, regarded as a visible organization, should be united with the State. Another lesson this, of mankind's great Teacher, Liberty; another step forward in historic evo- lution ; another achievement of triumphant Democracv. To sacrifice this feature of our constitution; to give of-
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ficial recognition to one sole Church making its ministers state functionaries, and its maintenance a thing of gov- ernmental appropriation would be setting back the clock of time by centuries, would be abandoning the essential spirit of our free Republic, would be in one word, im- possible while a handful of Americans remained on this continent.
Yet this principle the Papacy declares to be godless. A state not united with the Church is in germ an athe- istic state, is the classic argument. Must we discuss so puerile a sophistry ? Is not a state truly Christian whose civilization and laws take reverent cognizance of the Christian spirit? Is it not Christian when it promotes justice, cherishes peace, elevates its colonies and leaves the human conscience free? Is it not Christian when its rulers enter upon their office with a solemn recognition of Deity and of their heavy responsibility to Him? Is it not Christian when it puts no obstacle in the way of any religion or philanthropy? Is it not Christian when it invokes divine favor upon its Congresses and legislatures ? Is it not Christian when it provides its simple seamen and common soldiers with every facility for worship? Is it not Christian when it recalls its people on one day in the year to the thought of their duty to the God of nations? Is it not better to have this interior union with the Gospel than political union with an Italian Curia? Or is Christianity constituted by a Concordat? Is it Atheism not to have in Washington a nuncio arrayed like Solomon? Does the difference between a religious
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and unreligious state consist in the government's payment or non-payment of bishops' salaries, and its entering or non-entering into Vatican intrigues? Let us have done with these Church-and-State arguments. Not one of them but is contemptible ; not one but degrades the essen- tial spirituality of the religion of Christ.
We need not give many examples of Papal theology on this point. Let it be simply stated that the Papacy con- demns uncompromisingly the principle of separation, and permits no Catholic to advocate it : The Syllabus of Pius IX reprobates in its fifty-fifth proposition the thesis that church and state should be separated. "Ecclesia a statu, statitsque ab ecclesia sejitngendus est." Of similar tone is the seventy-seventh condemnation already quoted : "In our age it is no longer fitting that the Catholic re- ligion should be the one sole religion of the state, to the exclusion of all others." Leo XIII impudently warned American Catholics that our country's government is imperfect because of its policy of separation. And you, Pius X, have most offensively thrust it into the face of civilization that the Papacy still maintains and will ever maintain its traditional doctrine of official, political union. Your Encyclical to the French — "Vehementer Nos" — declares: "That church and state should be sep- arated is a most false and pernicious doctrine (falsissima maximcque pemiciosa sententia). Wherefore the Roman Pontiffs have not omitted to refute and condemn it as occasion arose." The Encyclical quotes the simile of Leo XIII that church and state should be united as soul
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and body ; and avers that a state which severs the union, acts against justice and right, "contra omne jus fasque." And we have seen you condemn the venerable bishop Bonamelli of Cremona for maintaining in his Lenten pastoral of 1906 that the time had come to recognize the benefits conferred upon religion by separation of church and state. "A regime of separation," wrote the bishop, "will be accompanied with some disadvantages ; but it will result in greater simplicity and candor of character, in a deeper faith, in a sincerer piety, in a more manly and independent religion. . . . Whoso endeavors now to impose religion by force, by weight of authority, by moral coercion, offends and irritates the conscience of men, and effects the precise contrary of his purpose. A frank ac- ceptance of the policy of separation will certainly, with- out injuring any of the inviolable rights of truth, have a beneficent influence upon heretical, schismatic, or unbe- lieving governments and peoples. . . . The struggle of to-day is wholly moral, not material, and victory will rest with him who shall have fought most bravely be- neath the banner of Freedom, universal Freedom. This is the great advantage of our new age, the age of church and state separation, the age of liberty for all (E il grande vantaggio del nuovo periodo di scparazione dcllo Stato dalla Chiesa, 0 Libertd per tutti). For these words the bishop was rebuked, and is held a sort of modernist, by a Papacy which will not tolerate, will not — as the "Ve- hcmcnter nos" just said — cease to anathematize the cry of the age, "Libertd per tutti" (Liberty for all!).
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Here then is the Romanized Catholic Church appeal- ing to the American people, asking them to embrace its teachings, as the pure Gospel of Christ, and yet saying: ' Not only have I a theological, but a political creed. Of that political creed one of the tenets is that church and state should be united. The opposite opinion is a damn- able error — falsissima, maximeque perniciosa sententia. Therefore you Americans, ere you adopt my soul-saving doctrines, ere you perfectly find Christ, must most firmly hold that your Constitution is fatally defective, since it is opposed to union of church and state." What shall we say of this be we Catholics or not? What can we say except this: that it is akin to blasphemy that a religion should have any political creed whatsoever; that a re- ligion that finds the kingdom of souls insufficient, but seeks other kingdoms whereof nuncios and concordats and legates a latere are prime features, is, to the extent that it is committed to this, false and putrescent; that a religion which demands a weakening of loyalty to country before it baptizes us unto salvation is obstructing the cause of Christ ; and that such a religion, or at least that institution in it which is responsible for this scandal, is under the anathema of Him whose Kingdom was not of this world. In God's name what is a religion for but souls, spirit-perfection, Christ-character building among men ? A church that puts secular obstacles in the way of this, its only mission and sole excuse for being, commits a sin against the Son of God, like that of an adulterer against his marriage vows. What business has a religion
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with the harlotry of politics ? What right has it to fling into our free faces a corpse out of the dead-house of theocratic feudalism, and say to us : Unless you hold to this form of a state I will not forgive your sins, permit you to look upon the Lord Jesus, or approach the infinite God! To such has the Papacy descended! It will let souls go whither they will before it surrenders its church and state doctrine. It cares not if the world emptied itself into Hell, it will not surrender its Inquisition-doc- trine. It looks on unconcerned while its own Italy in patriotic revolt against it, is flinging aside all religion; it will not surrender its temporal power doctrine. Yet the Papacy is true to Christ ! The Papacy as the guide of the world's conscience and morality is infallible! True to Christ! To Christ, to whom souls were all, whose kingdom was of things unseen, whose whole Gospel is fulfilled in two words, Love and Service! Degraded rather must we say it is, until beneath its tiara and en- folded by its jeweled copes, apostasy, though by a per- version of spiritual intelligence it may be unconscious apostasy ; degraded from a primitive purity and a high vocation, until its sad estate reminds us of another hierarchy and another pontificate to which and to whose lackeys and theologians were spoken the only indignant words that ever fell from the lips that uttered them: "Whited Sepulchres!"
Were it not true that, as has been remarked, the Papacy takes less heed of its own scandals than of any- thing else on earth, one would fain think that Rome
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would at least quietly drop this church-and-state teach- ing, out of very shame for the foul history through which that teaching has passed. For no heathen subjugator of nations, no Roman Caesar looking forward to divine honors after death, has ever paraded before the world with such lust for dominion and such omnipotent preten- sions as the Roman Pontiffs, vicars of Him who had not where to lay His head, successors of a Hebrew fisher- man, who, even after his elevation to the primacy — if he ever received it — had it to say, "Silver and gold I have none." Claiming the ownership of the earth, reducing kings to vassalage, dethroning them at will, handing over kingdoms and territories to whom it fancied, building up a Canon Law and a theology which fashioned its claims to world-sovereignty into the semblance of a science, levy- ing armies, achieving conquests, giving itself up to secu- larly, perfidy and intrigue, — to this has the Papacy with its church-and-state and temporal-power doctrines de- scended; with this unrejected and unrepented of, it comes before us to-day, and asks us to entrust to it our intelli- gence, our independence and our liberties !
The Papal office once was spiritual, and steadfastly re- fused to follow the seduction of temporal dominion and royal alliance. The early Popes, whose like have not since been seen, knew nothing of any lordship over kings, or any power to destroy nations by annulling the sub- ject's allegiance ; but recognized and respected their duty to their reigning sovereign, held themselves in civil mat- ters as simple citizens, and loyally fulfilled the duties of
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common patriotism. "Obey God in our person and we shall obey God in yours," writes Pope Symmachus to the Emperor Anastasius. To the Emperor Michael III, Pope Nicholas I says : "Under the law of the Gospel, the em- peror cannot usurp the rights of the Pontiff, nor the Pontiff the power of the Emperor." The pope further on expresses this sane and spiritual proposition which is now a heresy: "Thus each of these two orders (Papacy and kingship) finds itself safeguarded against the pride which would be engendered by the union of the two dignities" (Labbe tom-IV. col-1232). Another ancient Pope implicitly anathematized by his successors is Greg- ory II, who thus instructs Leo the Isaurian : "As the Pontiffs placed in the government of the Church do not intrude into the affairs of state, so the emperors likewise ought not to intrude into the affairs of the Church. As the Pope has no right to extend his inspection over the palace, nor to bestow royal dignities, so the Emperor should not extend his over the Churches, nor interfere in clerical elections, nor consecrate and administer sacra- ments. . . . It is necessary that each of us remain in the station to which God has called him." Not to weary the reader with citations, let me conclude with these words of Pope Gregory the Great. Gregory at the Emperor's request had just published in Italy a law which Gregory himself considered unjust. As an obedient subject, however, he did as requested and thus discloses to the Emperor his mind in the matter. "As subject to your command (ego quiddem jussioni subjectus) I have
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had this law proclaimed in various countries, but by let- ter I have informed your most Serene Majesties that the law is not pleasing to Almighty God. On both sides then my duty is done. I have obeyed my sovereign {imp era- tori obedientiam pracbui) and I have not by silence be- trayed what I believe to be the interest of God" (pro Deo quod sensi minime tacui). (Migne P. L. ap. Greg. Mag. Ill, col. 665.)
To this temper of obedience, these examples of loyalty, this chaste fidelity to the Gospel, was to succeed a very riot of secular dominion and despotic pride. Days came and still are with us, when the Popes — surely no fitter representatives of Christ than Gregory the Great — con- sidered it intolerable to obey, and infamous to be even in civil concerns, the subjects of any state. Rising to the topmost step of European feudalism they planted there the standard of earth-ownership. They grew gluttonous there with the world for their banquet-table. They be- came drunken there with the heady liquors of ambi- tion. They demanded union of State and Papacy, which means subjugation of State to Papacy — and their cry to-day for union of State and Papacy is but an echo of or a longing for that orgy of irreligion.
Gregory VII, one of the first creators of a Papacy made pagan, of Caesaro-Papism as it is most justly styled, ordered his legatees in France in 1081 to see to it that every house in France paid annually to St. Peter, one denarius. This, says Gregory, is an ancient duty first im- posed by Charlemagne, who having overcome the Saxons
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by St. Peter's help, offered his conquest to St. Peter. Gregory, here, as is evident to any one who understands feudal language, considers France and Saxony as belong- ing to St. Peter, and the denarius is the fealty-contribu- tion to the Roman See. This interpretation is borne out by Gregory IX and Innocent IV. This Gregory IX, of whom we have seen much already in the matter of the Inquisition, writes to Emperor Frederick II in October, 1236: "It is notorious that Constantine, to whom be- longed universal monarchy, wished that the Vicar of Christ and Prince of the Apostles . . . should also possess the government of corporeal things in the whole world. He thought that he to whom God had confided the care of heavenly things should rule earthly things. Therefore he gave in perpetuity to the Roman Pontiff the imperial sceptre and insignia, with Rome and all its province, and the empire itself, considering it infamous that in the place where the head of the Christian religion had been stationed by the heavenly sovereign, an earthly sovereign should exercise any power. . . . When the Church, imposing the yoke on Charlamagne, transferred the seat of Empire to Germany ; when it called your predecessors and yourself to sit upon the imperial throne ; zvhen it conceded to you on the day of your coronation the pozver of the sivord, it diminished not in the least the substance of its jurisdiction." (Huillard-Brehalles: Hist, diplom., Fred. II, t. IV.)
This huge structure of argument as proof of the Pope's dominion over empires and emperors is based upon the
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spurious donation of Constantine. Nor is Gregory IX by any means alone in this monstrous abuse of a myth. Innocent IV at the Council of Lyons in 1245 dwelt fondly upon the idea that the Pope's ownership of the Constan- tinian Donation is but a visible sign of his sovereign do- minion over the whole world. In an encyclical published shortly after the close of the Council, Innocent goes still further: "Outside the church there is no building save for Hell, and there exists no power ordained of God. It is wrong then, and shows ignorance of the origin cf things, to imagine that the Apostolic See's rule over secu- lar matters dates only from Constantine. Before him this power was already in the Holy See in virtue of the na- ture and essence of the See. Succeeding to Jesus Christ, who is at once the true king and true priest, according to the order of Melchisedech, the Popes have received sov- ereignty not only pontifical but royal, and the Empire not only of heaven but of earth. Constantine merely resigned into the hands of the Church a power which he used "with- out right when he was outside her pale. Once admitted into the Church, he obtained, by the concession of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, authority ivhich only then became legitimate. Secular rulers exercising their authority are only using a power which has been transferred to them, and which remains latent and potential in the bosom of the Church."
This text of Pope Innocent, only one expression of the immense Papal tradition on which the Church and State doctrine is based, has been modified and mistranslated
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by M. Gosselin, the champion of the secular sovereignty of the Papacy, according to the charge of Mgr. Baudril- lart, now Rector of the Catholic University of Paris. Pope Boniface VIII, under whom the world's revolt against Papal despotism began to take definite steps, gives us another instance of the Papal tradition concerning the respective rights of Church and State. He says in re- gard to the Election of Ladislas as King of Hungary: "The Roman Pontiff, constituted by God above kings and kingdoms, is the supreme hierarch of the Church militant, and has obtained principality over all mortal men." (Ro- manus Pontifcx super reges et regna constitutus a Deo, in Ecclesia militanti hierarcha summus existit, et super omnes mortales obtinens principatnm, sedensque in solio juducii, etc.) This Boniface in his celebrated bull, Unam Sanetam," develops the classic idea of the two swords. According to this conception, God has ordained two prin- cipalities on earth typified by the secular sword and the spiritual sword — that is, Kingship and Papacy. But of these two swords the lower is in subordination to the higher. King is under Pope, and the secular sword must be wielded for the Church's progress whenever the Ro- man Pontiff invokes it. The bull contains the following definition : "We declare, define, establish and decree that every human creature, under the rigid necessity of saving his soul, must be subject to the Roman Pontiff." (Porro subesse Romano Pontifici omnem humanam creaturam declaramus, definiinus, dicimus, et pronunciamus, omnino- esse de necessitate salutis.) In his "Ansculta Fill" Boni-
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face takes to task King Phillippe le Bel of France in a manner which discloses plainly that Boniface considered himself as the sovereign of the French.
The present rector of the Catholic University of Paris, after having cited these and other like pronouncements of the Roman See, comes to this conclusion, which as- suredly no honest mind can evade, but which it is to his credit to acknowledge: "I .believe it is incontestably clear from Papal acts and documents beginning with Gregory VII, that the Popes desired to place themselves at the head of the feudal system." (Je crois qu'il ressort incontestablemcnt des documents et des actes pontiiicaux qu' a partir de Grcgoire VII, les papcs ont tres reellement vouht sc placer a la tcte de la hierarchic fcodale.)
Having seen the officially announced Papal theory of civil and pontifical sovereignty, let us glance at a few instances of how the Roman See put it into practice.
Innocent III ordered a crusade against Count Raymond of Toulouse, with the result that a great part of Ray- mond's territory passed into the possession of the Pope's powerful plunderers. Raymond at the Lateran Council of 121 5 requested the restoration of these lands. The Pope with a majority of the bishops decided that the conquered portions of his domain should be withdrawn from him forever and given over to Simon de Montfort, that leader of the crusade; while the unconquered por- tions should be given in whole or in part to the son of Raymond, if on coming of age he should be found worthy. Innocent III, as everybody knows, held in fief-
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possession the realm of England, it having been made over to him by the despicable Lackland. Upon Magna Charta, the great charter of modern liberties, Innocent pronounced the following malediction : "In the name of God Almighty, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and by au- thority of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, after hav- ing taken counsel with our brothers, we wholly reject and condemn this charter." (Ex parte Dei Omnipotentis, Patris et Filii ct Spiritus Sancti, anctoritatc quoque beatorum Petri et Pauli Apostalorum, ejus ac nostra, de communi fratrum nostrorum consilio, compositioncm hujusmodi reprobamus penitus et damnamus.) Pope Martin IV excommunicated and interdicted King Pedro of Arragon for having asserted his hereditary right to Sicily, after that island had risen in 1282 against King Charles. The Pope deprived Pedro of his kingdom and presented it, on condition of a yearly tribute to the Papacy, to Charles of Valois. Not satisfied even with these outrages, this Vicar of the Prince of Peace declared a crusade against Pedro, and promised that all who should die therein fighting under the Papal banner should re- ceive the indulgence of the Holy Land Crusaders. Ma- homet is by no means alone in stimulating fanatics to bloodshed by holding out the joys of Paradise to those that fall. Pope Clement IV in 1205 sold millions of South Italians to Charles of Anjou for a yearly tribute of eight hundred ounces of gold, neglect in the payment of which would incur excommunication and interdict. In 1296, Phillippe le Bel of France requested of the clergy
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of his kingdom the payment of their share of the public taxes. Pope Boniface straightway wrote against him the bull "Clericis laicos" — a document as subversive of society as the "Unam Sanctam" itself — in which he forbade the king under penalty of interdict and deposition to levy this tax. The archbishop of Rheims, after counsel with the bishops and abbots of his province, wrote to Boniface a lively remonstrance in which he says that Frenchmen were finding these Papal interventions prejudicial to the rights of their sovereign. Wherefore he begs the Pontiff to let the French church alone in the enjoyment of its liberties and in loyalty to constituted authority. Two centuries later France and Venice formed a coalition for the dismemberment of the kingdom of Naples. Pope Alexander VI became the third party to the infamy on the stipulation that when Imola, Forli, Faenza and Pesaro were conquered, they should be given to his illegitimate son, Caesar Borgia. This pact having been agreed upon, Alexander on the twenty-fifth of June, 1501, issued a bull deposing Federigo, King of Naples, and dividing his terri- tory between France and Spain. But the League of Cambray of 1508 touches the lowest depth of wickedness to which the Church-and-State doctrine has ever dragged the Papal office. The parties to the League were the Em- peror Maximilian, Louis XII of France, the King of Spain, and Pope Julius II. The object of this band of buccaneers was the destruction and dismemberment of the Kingdom of Venice. The Pope claimed as his share of the pillage, Ravenna, Cernia, Faenza and Rimini.
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Against overwhelming odds Venice fought nobly for her life ; but foreseeing the inevitable end she offered to the Pope the four territories he lusted after, if only he would desist from the war. Julius not only refused but laid Venice under the appalling punishment of interdict. The proud little state collapsed at last, and was parceled among the thieves according to the agreement. Leo X long after feudalism had passed away shows how the idea of earth-ownership clings to the papal mind, when, not as arbiter in any dispute, but merely as world-suzerain, he granted to the King of Portugal permission to possess all kingdoms and islands of the far East which he had wrested from the infidel, and all he would in future thus acquire, even though up to that time unknown and un- discovered. As late as 1570 we see Pius V, now a canon- ized saint, deposing Queen Elizabeth, and absolving all her subjects from their allegiance. It may be well for Catholics who look upon Elizabeth as a monster because of her persecutions, to remember that the blood of Catho- lic martyrs shed in her reign rests upon Saint Pius V's soul more than on hers. I am not defending her in her brutalities. But historical justice requires us to take into account that the Pope had done all that was in him to make Catholicism one with treason ; that in England there was a nest of Jesuitical intriguers aiming at the Queen's dethronement and the subjugation of England to Spain ; and that a most formidable plot to assassinate Elizabeth had been formed by the Duke of Guise, the archbishop of Scotland, and the Papal nuncio at Paris. Since we are
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not certain that the Pope himself knew of the plot, we may trust that despite appearances he was not a party to it.
I will conclude these instances of dangerous Papal pre- tensions with a mention of Clement V, the first of the Avignon Popes. In his "Pastoralis" of March, 13 14, Clement thus refers to a sentence of Henry VII of Naples against Robert, a vassal of the Roman See : "We annul it in virtue of the incontestable supremacy which the Holy See possesses over the Empire, and of the right which belongs to the head of the Church, to administer the Em- pire during an interregnum, and by that plentitude of power which the successor of St. Peter has received from Jesus Christ, King of Kings, and Lord of Lords." Let us add as the natural complement to this incident that John XXII, the successor of Clement, ordered the com- petitors for the Imperial crown, Frederick of Austria and Louis of Bavaria, to resign all power and submit their claims to him. Upon their refusal the Pope excommuni- cated them, declared the throne vacant, confirmed the nomination of Robert of Naples as Imperial Vicar, and demanded that all who held office by appointment of the late emperor should resign, under pain of excommunica- tion and interdict. In 1323 he absolved the subjects of Louis of Bavaria from their allegiance.
My intention has not been to give a complete list of the dangerous abuses proceeding from theories of Church-and-State and Papal world-sovereignty. Many instances of deposition of kings, levying of unnecessary
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and vindictive wars and cruel collection of taxes in sup- port of the Papacy's secular ambition, I have not even mentioned. I have had in mind simply to set forth a few examples of the great Papal tradition on Church and State, with the ultimate purpose of opening the eyes of Catholics, now so obstinately closed, to the reasons for the modern world's rejection of the Roman Papacy. True, the absolutism exercised by the Papacy before the Reformation may have been in certain cases beneficial. True also, the time has gone forever when the Pope can depose kings. But for all that, when the Popes to-day insist on union of Church and State, we must turn back to history to discover what the Popes made of it, when they enjoyed it under conditions which Roman Curialists still fondly regard as ideal. The Church-and-State history of the Papacy has formed a theological tradition, and out of that tradition the Papacy has never emerged, never given the least sign of emancipation. Has not the world then ample ground for its distrust and dread? Can we be sure that the Papacy would be substantially changed in its dealing with states to-day, if we gave it its former power? Or rather are we not certain that there would be but little change? Have we not seen that, despite the outrages of Papal despotism, the Syllabus of Pius IX condemns the proposition that the Roman Pontiffs have transgressed the limits of their power and usurped the rights of princes? (Pr. 23.) If, then, Catholics are sol- emnly forbidden to hold that the "Unam Sanctam," the "Clericis laicos," the "Ausculta fili," the League of Cam-
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bray, and divers depositions of kings and proclamations of bloody wars, constitute a transgression of the limits of Papal power, what possible conclusion remains to us but this : that the Papacy of old is in spirit and intent the Papacy of to-day, and that, did we yield ourselves up to it, we might be visited at any day with what France suf- fered under Boniface VIII, Louis of Bavaria under John XXII, England under Innocent III, Aragon under Mar- tin IV, Naples under Alexander VI, and Venice under Julius II? Have we not seen an instruction issued by Propaganda in 1883 condemning the collection of money then going on in Ireland to pay the mortgage on Par- nell's Wicklow estate? Said Propaganda: "It must be evident to your lordships that the collection called the Parnell Testimonial Fund cannot be approved by this sacred Congregation, and consequently it cannot be tol- erated that any ecclesiastic, much less a bishop, should take any part whatsoever in recommending or promoting it." No wonder that Michael Davitt, Catholic though he is, should write: "The interferences of Rome in Irish affairs of a non-religious nature have been invariably antagonistic and injurious either in their direct motives or indirect consequences. Ireland in fact has been treated as if she stood in the relation of a great and temporal fief of the Holy See." And again : "It always happens that this influence [of Rome] is thrown into the scale against the movements in which the Irish people seek to redress their social or political wrongs. . . . Those in fact who know the trend and purpose of Vatican policy in
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relation to the British Empire are aware that no Ulster Orangeman looks in his bigoted ignorance with more dislike on Home Rule for Ireland than do the learned and ever-watchful members of the Sacred College of Propaganda. (The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, pp. 407 ff.)
Have we not seen again Gregory XVI, in an encyclical to the Poles, bid that sorely-tried people to lay down their arms against their Russian oppressors? Have we not seen the same Pope refuse Poles admission into Papal territory unless they could show passports from the Muscovite tyrants against whom Poland was then in the field ? Have we not seen your Holiness, Pius X, sending a similar admonition to Poland when a few years ago an uprising against Russia seemed to be imminent? Have we not seen you anathematizing, and as far as possible annulling, a law passed by France, a law supported by an overwhelming majority of the French electorate, and declared by the most eminent lay Catholics and a majority of the episcopate of the nation to be at least deserving of a loyal trial? Have we not heard you uttering in full consistory the following words which startle us with reminiscences of the third Innocent and the fifth Pius : "It is our strict duty to direct all men without exception, according to the rules and standards of morality, in pri- vate life and in public life, in the social order and in the political order; and thus to direct not only the gov- erned but rulers as well." (E nostro stretto dovere dirigere gli uomini tutti e singoli, secondo le norme e le
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regole dell' onesta, nella vita privata e nella pubblica, anche nel campo sociale e politico, e non solamente i sud- diti, ma ancora gli imperanti" ; quoted in the Civiltd Cat- tolica, Oct. 6, 1906.) Alas, that we must so thoroughly distrust the Papacy's "rules and standards of morality !"
With these instances of Papal theory and practice be- fore our eyes, and with that massive tradition of Papal autocracy looming out of the past, how can we say that the doctrine of Church and State is now only an academic question, and that with the passing of the Middle Ages, the danger of Papal interference also disappeared? Rather must we not say that dreams of mediaeval world- dominion still haunt the heads of the Italian Curia ; that even now the Popes possess the look and gesture of sov- ereigns of heaven and earth ; and that the vigilance of the modern world against a recrudescence of Vatican theo- cracy, is based upon the soundest instinct of patriotism and the plainest lessons of history.
In this Church-and-State matter, as in the others that we have discussed, the reform demanded of Roman Catholicism by the world's conscience is no child's play. Such idle decrees and useless commissions as were devised to check the revolt of the sixteenth century would be but a mockery adding weight to the indictment already drawn up against a Papacy that has been definitely condemned. Sovereign Pontiff, will you dare to thrust the knife into the cancer? Will you dare to look squarely in the face the reasons which justify the attitude of civilization to- wards Rome ? Will you dare to cleanse your office, your
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theology, your law, and make of your See a spiritual shep- herdship, and a spiritual shepherdship alone? Will you dare to attempt the sublime venture of announcing that the Papacy repents of the sins and the apostasies to Christ which it has kept unconfessed so long; that it abandons temporalities and secularities, and will henceforth forever, in meekeness, in sympathy, in poverty, in sincerity, pursue the sole divine vocation of witnessing to things unseen, of representing to the uplifted eyes of men the traits and aspect of that Christ at whose feet alone men lay down their thrones and their liberties, their consciences and their hearts ?
"I, bone, quo virtus tua te vocat. I, pede fausto, Grandia laturus meritorum prsemia! Quid stas?" Not to be ! Alas, no ! Not from you the cry of contrition :
"Eheu ! cicatricum et sceleris pudet Fratrumque" —
XIX
Freedom of Intellect
Your Holiness:
A fourth principle which is imbedded in the structure of modern society is freedom of intellect, liberty for the students and scholars of the world to carry on their re- searches, and publish their methods and conclusions. Days were when this freedom, no less than freedom from religious persecution, and freedom from tyrannical the- ocracies was set at naught. Theological systems in all
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ages from ancient Egypt and Chaldea to modern Islam and Rome detest the innovator. Their basis is tradition, their method coercion, their motto : "Nil innovetur nisi quod traditum est", in the words of an early Roman bishop, or, in the words of his latest successor, "No mod- ernism" ! The old Babylonian exorcists would summarily condemn the rash lover of novelties who presumed to change the established formulas of incantation. The Egyptian priesthood fought bitterly against the quasi- monotheistic reforms of Amenhotep IV. The old- fashioned Mohammedans of today have set their faces against their young men's studying in European schools. The Jewish priestly caste of Graeco-Roman times anathe- matized the Greek learning of men like Philo. And in similar spirit the Papal autocracy, at this hour, is absorbed in the Augean labor of cleansing Catholicism from a phi- losophy which does not fit four-square with Thomas Aquinas, and from an exegesis which presumes to go beyond the erudition of Venerable Bede. Priesthoods and theocracies indeed have ever been the most powerful foes with which learning has had to contend ; whereas lifeless conservatism and hoary superstition have had in them their connatural allies. It may, however, mitigate the severity of my censure to reflect that such a condition has prevailed because every theology conceives itself to be the masterpiece of the Infinite God, and every hierarchy the authorized rulers of men in the name of the Most High.
But today the truth-loving and truth-seeking intellect
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of man acknowledges no coercion in the pursuit of its ideal. Least of all is it inclined to tolerate hierarchical co- ercion, the history of which, from Egypt to the Vatican, is filled with brutalities, stupidities and falsehoods. God has commissioned no hierarchy to say "Halt" ! to human reason. He has authorized no pontiff to declare venerable forms and ancient usages immune from the scrutiny of honest intellects. A knowing mind and a deathless desire to push it into every province of the knowable, has the Almighty Spirit given to man, to be guided and governed only by that intellectual conscience — perhaps the most imperious phase of conscience — love for truth. Were the mass of men so constituted as to sit content with conscious falsehood, were we totally depraved so that we should take a perverted pleasure in mendacity, as the Papacy seems to think we are, then indeed might the Wisdom that rules all have given us over to the cozening of a protec- tive hierarchy. Only in such a case He should have had to guarantee that hierarchy with more evident signs oi infallibility than the Vatican censors have ever shown.
But, since we are not fashioned after this type, since we cannot abide a lie, since the whole scheme of this uni- verse is to make Truth, however slow its conquests, pre- vail at last, then may He wisely leave us as He has left us to hew our way toward the light under the discipline of labor, under the wholesome penance of acknowledging past mistakes, and under the inspiration that the ideal for which we struggle is divine and its triumph sure.
There is certainly danger in the free exercise of intel-
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lect. But where is there no danger except in a tomb? There is danger in having a conscience ; danger in free- will ; danger in being men ; danger in being created at all. A life without danger is a life without any dignity or moral value whatsoever. Would any man prefer to an immortal soul with eternal dangers, the existence of an oyster buried securely in the mud? It is by venture and peril that God educates the race. One man or one generation may be led astray and fall into grievous error. But another man or generation will discover the error and make of it a new milestone on the way to Truth. What more energetic element is there in our love for Truth than the recollection of mistakes which formerly beguiled us, and the jealous vigilance with which we take precautions against being deceived again? Better is the danger that attends the free search for Truth than that death of the aspiring mind which is inflicted by closing whole provinces of investigation and setting on guard before them a mitred hierarchy to see that we shall not enter. In the one case we have but a temporary aberra- tion of our godlike Truth-seeking impulse which itself remains uninjured. In the other that impulse in its root and essence is attacked and stricken.
Now the idea that certain departments of human thought are absolutely forbidden to candid examina- tion is repeatedly announced and enforced from Rome. "Love of novelty", "seeking to know too much", "un- bridled liberty of research", "temerity in the use of intellect", "audacity of inquiry", are phrases that one
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may be certain of finding in the frequent Papal lamen- tations "on the evils of the day". In your own letter on Modernism you quote from Pius IX: "Philosophy must not search into the high mysteries of God, but piously and humbly revere them" ; and from Gregory IX : "Some among you swollen, bladder-like, with vanity, are endeavoring by profane novelty to trans- gress the boundaries established by the Fathers" ; and this from Gregory XVI : "Heartily to be deplored is that madness of human reason whereby men are giving themselves to novelties, and, against the Apostolic warning, are seeking to know more than it behooves them to know, and are presumptuously imagining that truth is to be sought outside the Catholic Church, in which it is found without even the slightest stain of error". This last citation your Holiness prefaces with the observation that curiosity and pride are remotely the twin causes of Modernism ; and curiosity, you de- clare, "unless it be wisely restrained, suffices for the explanation of every manner of error". Intellectual curiosity, it is true, you would not censure did it con- fine itself to Canon Law, liturgy, numismatics and botany. But the instant it proceeds freely to scrutinize the validity of dogmatic formulas, the history of doc- trine, and the evolution of religion, you lift your Papal rod and cry : "Beware ! In these questions you must not think, but submit without thinking to the Fathers of the primitive, and the scholastics of the medieval Church". And if in disregard of your mandate, sin-
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cere and capable students apply themselves to the study of these fundamental matters, they are said to be aban- doned to pride, and are guilty of a blasphemous curi- osity. It is not pride or curiosity in the approved theo- logians to tell us with finality how the Infinite Deity is constituted; how He foreknows and foreordains; how angels traverse space; what Christ was thinking and planning in the womb of His mother ; and how ma- terial qualities can exist without any correlated matter to exist in. This farrago of transcendental imperti- nence is not curiosity, not "seeking to know more than it behooveth to know". But when a scholar investigates the Synoptic problem, studies the early history of pen- ance, or inquires- whether Papal Infallibility and the Immaculate Conception were known to St. Paul or Justin Martyr; that is curiosity and the deadly sin of pride.
And what tribunal is it that thus holds human reason in a strait and narrow path? What conspicuous marks does it possess of a supernatural ability to lead us into all truth, and to check our knowing-impulse lest we fall into error? It is no other tribunal than that Roman Papacy which debauched the morality of the world for five centuries by teaching that to rob a heretic of every farthing was an innocent act; which organized the most efficient murder-corps that the world has ever seen ; which deposed kings and disposed of kingdoms as fancy or ambition moved it ; which condemned belief in the existence of antipodes ; which made it formal
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heresy to hold that the earth goes round the sun ; which has struggled savagely against every advance of human thought from Francis Bacon to Alfred Loisy ; which has inscribed on its Index practically every book that marks a new era for human intellect in the last three centuries ; which fell headlong into the hoax of Diana Vaughan and her devil-worship; which grants over forty thou- sand years' indulgence a year for carrying in one's pocket fifty-nine beads strung on a chain ; which propa- gates devotions to saints whom all scholars of such sub- jects know never to have existed ; which has made divers badges originating in absurd revelations vehicles of heavenly benedictions ; which has shown itself so hostile to science, and so favorable to superstition, that the nations which still acknowledge its supremacy are the lowest in intelligence, and the most primitive in worship of the civilized world. With these guarantees the Papacy demands that the profound and specialized scholarship of this age shall surrender itself uncon- ditionally into its hands, and submit its methods and conclusions to a congregation of Italian scholastics. The demand is sublimely ridiculous. Think of it ! the scholars of the modern world, men so passionately con- secrated to study that they count as little the sacrifice of their life should their science require it, blindfolding and prostrating themselves before a Curia that holds to St. Philumena, the house of Loretto, Diana Vaughan, and Our Lady of Guadaloupe !
The persecution of intellect by the Congregation of
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the Index and the allied agencies of censorship in the Roman Church, has been as deadly as the persecution of conscience by the Inquisition. Especially those mod- ern studies which are concerned with the various branches of historical criticism and research, — biblical science and the history of beliefs in particular — have had to fight and still are fighting their way in the Roman Catholic Church against an incessant stream of de- nunciations, degradations, excommunications and anathe- mas. We are not likely to forget the martyrs of the Inquisition's faggots. But let us hold in equally faith- ful remembrance that host of silent students who, in order to push forward the frontier of human knowledge, and lead us nearer to the divine Ideal of Truth, have borne and are bearing the hatred and the curse of Rome. Let us keep their memory green. Driven forth, many of them, from their ancestral faith; forbidden access to the altar before which they gladly consecrated their lives; deposed from stations of honor and hunted into solitude; persecuted with the scorn and often the cal- umny of the orthodox even after death,— they stand be- fore us, not the haughty sciolists you describe, Sovereign Pontiff, but Truth's dearest disciples, whose one fault was that they neither could lie, nor hold back such Truth as it was given them to see. Pride is their sin, you say. Pride, because they cannot give the lie to the life-long labors of their study at the command of an angry bishop who has never learned the alphabet of their science; pride, because they protest that an
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anathema cannot destroy a fact, nor a refusal of the Sac- raments answer an argument ; pride, because in the face of dishonor, and with broken hearts, they are honest enough to say : "I can do no otherwise, so help me God". Pride, you insist. Very well ; but perhaps be- fore the Searcher of hearts, the issue between the scholar who painstakingly examines every step of his way lest his foot rest on any other foundation than evidence and truth, and the pontiff who assumes to judge before he knows, and is instant to persecute rather than prone to admonish, will be decided in quite another way.
Let us take a typical instance of a scholar-victim, that we may see in a concrete case, how a man can love Truth and how a hierarchy can hate it. The glorious founder of the science of biblical criticism, perhaps the most liberating science in the history of the world, was Rich- ard Simon, priest of the Congregation of the Oratory, who died really a martyr to candor and scholarship in 1712. Richard Simon, as is the case with Alfred Loisy, illustrated humble birth by brilliant genius. From almost the beginning of his ecclesiastical course he threw himself ardently into Oriental studies, and distinguished himself not only by intellectual acumen but by intellectual hon- esty. He had a passion for sources, for original docu- ments, for evidence at first hand. The scientific method appears in him in a high degree, that method which looks behind tradition and beyond received opinions for facts, all ascertainable facts. In those days such a tem- per of mind was a wonderful thing. For the scientific.
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method had hardly yet been born. Augustine and Jerome were then no more questioned than Scripture itself. And so dominated was positive science by the- ological prepossessions, that learned teachers discussed what species of animals spoke before and after Balaam's ass; and even the two Buxtorfs held that the Hebrew accents were of divine origin, and the vowel-points in- spired. In 1678 appeared Simon's Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament, which brought to minds thus held in bondage the light of sound method and scientific criti- cism. In that work Simon maintained that Moses did not write the whole Pentateuch, that the styles of the various books of the Old Testament exhibit the indi- viduality and the general mental complexion of the sev- eral authors, and that the text furthermore often gives evidence of having been gone over by a hand later than that of its original author. He openly questioned the absoluteness of Jerome's authority as critic and trans- lator, and, in an age when men were flung into chains in Spain for not giving sufficient respect to the Vulgate, he pointed out many errors in that version. Protestants attacked him ; Catholics cried out against him ; the Ora- torians expelled him ; above all Bossuet set out to ruin him. At Bossuet's instigation the State condemned the work, the police destroyed three hundred copies, and in 1683 it was put on the Index. Undaunted, the great stu- dent brought out a critical history of the New Testa- ment, in which he disputed the Pauline authorship of Hebrews, drew attention to the dubiousness of the inci-
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dent of the adulterous woman in the Fourth Gospel, remarked that the narrative of the bloody sweat and the comforting angel was lacking in many ancient manu- scripts, proved that the Old Testament citations in the New were often allegorical rather than literally perti- nent, and declared that I John V, 7, was a text desti- tute of critical authority. In 1702 he translated the New Testament. Against this work Bossuet let loose that im- perious scorn of his which so disfigures him. Utterly unacquainted with criticism, Bossuet based his attack on the ground of tradition and theology, those lordly ideas which give fine opportunity for rhetoric and decla- mation, but are impatient of the minute scholarship of the trained critic. The work was condemned, and Bos- suet drove home the condemnation by calling Simon a Socinian, a Semi-Pelagian, a destroyer of Scripture, a despiser of the Fathers, a contemner of theology whose translation destroyed the proof of original sin, cast doubt on the damnation of unbaptized infants, and was through- out a mass of impieties. Simon retired to Dieppe, and feeling that his end was near, and dreading lest after his death his manuscripts would be altered and perverted by his life-long foes, he carried outside the walls of the city his notes and unpublished writings, the precious result of half a century of incessant study, and set fire to them. If ever a history of the progress of Truth is written, it will have no sadder chapter than the one which describes this scene, — the aged scholar, alone in the dead of night, watching the destruction of his life's accumu-
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lated knowledge. But perhaps his tears and the agony of his. heart were solaced by the reflection that those flames would light up the face of Truth to whole gen- erations yet to come, and would make visible to all man- kind the hideous visage of that tyranny that had hounded him to death. Overcome by grief and agitation, he re- turned to the city and fell into a fever from which he was unable, and it may be, unwilling, to recover.
The method which Richard Simon followed is the foundation of biblical science today ; his conclusions, so far as they went, a more ample criticism has proved to be true ; but his name is still anathema at Rome, and only the liberal and modernist Catholic dares to speak of him with respect and veneration. For how shall Rome not hate the father when she persecutes the chil- dren? The Richard Simons of every succeeding age, and of our own, have met the great Oratorian's fate, re- ceiving from Science the laurel wreath of merit, and eliciting from Rome spiteful malediction and brutal pun- ishment. You, Pius X, have shown yourself the worst enemy to human intelligence that even the Papacy can boast within the memory of living men. The lists of your scholarly victims and of your obstructive decisions are almost as great in number as the weeks of your pontifi- cate. You have condemned Loisy, LeRoy, Laberthon- niere, Denis, Viollet, Fogazzaro, Dimnet ; directly or indi- rectly you have suspended Tyrrell, Murri, Minnochi ; deposed Fracassini, Turmel, Battifol, Gennochi, Klein ; censured von Hugel and II Rinnovamento ; anathema-
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tized the Lega Democratica Nazionale ; put an end to clerical congresses ; and stopped the publication of Demoin, Studi Religiosi, La Vie Catholique, La Justice Social, La Revue de I'Histoire et de Litterature Re- ligieuses, and doubtless, if the whole truth were known, The New York Review. Under you the Biblical Com- mission has issued such preposterous decisions, rejected by a practical unanimity of modern scholars, and even by the most eminent members of the Commission itself, as that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, Isaiah the entire book associated with his name, and the Apostle John the Fourth Gospel. Under you has fallen an iron age upon Catholic scholarship. Von Hummelauer has been blamed for his study of inspiration ; Poels for a similar work ; Condamin has been refused the Imprimatur for his introduction to Isaiah, Lagrange for his volume on Genesis. You have issued a Syllabus, many of whose propositions, rejected by you as false, are part of the very alphabet of critical scholarship. You have sent forth an Encyclical on modernism which closes the door in the face of science, and opens a highway to the most brutal persecution. In that document you command superiors of seminaries to allow their students no books or magazines which will reflect the scholarship of the day. You order bishops to ordain no studious candi- date who is suspected of leaning toward the conclusions of the world's most eminent scholars. You strictly en- join upon bishops to expel from the schools subject to them, any teacher who may come under the same sus-
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picion. You stringently require of the Episcopate that they appoint a "vigilance committee" in every diocese to hunt out and denounce modernist Catholics, this com- mittee to report to Rome under oath every three years. You have declared that the mad decisions of the Biblical Commission bind in conscience. You have given forth the edict that all contradictors and gainsayers of your Syllabus, and your Encyclical "Pascendi" , incur excom- munication reserved to the Roman Pontiff. You have left untried no expedient for separating Catholics into a mass of illiterates unacquainted with the scholarship of the last hundred years, and closed in by an opaque curtain of medieval exegesis and scholastic theology.
And if we ask who is this Pontiff who defies the laborious acquisitions of four generations of illustrious scholars, who makes it, so far as his words can, impos- sible for a Catholic to study Scripture, the history of doctrine, the science of religion, and philosophy, we must answer : He is a product of an Italian seminary of fifty years ago, who is an absolute stranger to the sciences he condemns. He knows nothing of biblical criticism. He entered his pontificate ignorant of every modern language but Italian. He is unread in philosophy, in historical theology, in modern psychology. He is the man who has flung out indulgences in torrents. He is the man who granted in a special brief under his own signature to the Master-General of the Dominicans, forty thousand five hundred years indulgence a year for car- rying beads. He is a man who encourages devotion to
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the non-existent St. Philumena, who rebuked Bishop Bonomelli for a pastoral advocating disunion of Church and State, and was wroth with Canon Chevalier for show- ing the absurdity of the House of Loretto myth. He is the man, finally, who wrote these words in 1904, words which are as ridiculous as were ever addressed to an age of enlightenment : "The Hebrew patriarchs were ac- quainted with the doctrine of the Immaculate Concep- tion and found consolation in thinking of Mary in the critical moments of their lives". (7 patriarchi ebrei erano famigliari con la dottrina dell' Immaculata, e trovovano consolazione nel pensiero di Maria nelle ore solcnne dclla loro vita.) I would wish to indulge in no severer words of rebuke than the occasion calls for, but surely it is not too much to say that independent scholarship never suf- fered a more impertinent attack than that now in progress under your direction. Had you condemned the accom- plishments of modern engineers and surgeons, and for- bidden Catholics to ride in steam-cars or to be put under an anesthetic, you would not have done a more reaction- ary and absurd thing than you have done in laying under your malediction the vast creative work of critical studies, and in prohibiting us from reading the books that are moving the world. Does your policy of sweeping con- demnation, of deposing professors, of keeping modern works out of supposed institutions of learning, suggest a Church that fears no truth and welcomes every acces- sion of human knowledge, or a Church that dreads the light, and trembles before the scrutiny of inquiring
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minds? If that "Catholic Philosophy" that you insist upon is so conspicuously victorious, why are Catholics forbidden to read Kant or Laberthonniere? If Catholic theology is so evidently true that only pride and sinful curiosity can question it, why do you keep Harnack and LeRoy out of seminary libraries? If Catholic exegesis has no worthier opponent than the "delir amenta" of fools, whence this panic at the mention of the name of Loisy? Your actions and your decrees, Roman Pontiff, are only too suggestive of a convention once held by the stage- coach drivers of England, who, at the time of the intro- duction of steam-engines, solemnly protested against this pernicious novelty and voted that it must be suppressed. The Index and the Inquisition are the Roman Congre- gations which execute the Pope's condemnatory decisions. The Inquisition is that tribunal which passed the edict on the 24th of February, 1616, that it was formal heresy (sententiam formaliter hcereticam) to maintain that the sun is immovable and that the earth goes round it; and that it was theologically erroneous and philosophically absurd to hold that the earth has a daily rotation on its axis. On the 22nd of June, 1633, there came another decree from the Inquisition condemning Galileo, and reiterating a condemnation of 1616 against Copernicus, and adding: "And in order to suppress teachings so deadly, and to make it impossible for them to spread further, to the grave detriment of Catholic truth, a de- cree is issued by the holy Congregation of the Index according to which the books which contain these teach-
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ings [the Copernican astronomy] are forbidden, and these teachings themselves are declared to be false and utterly opposed to the holy and divine Scriptures." Galileo at the age of seventy appeared before the Inquisition in full session, retracted and renounced the conclusions of his life-long study, and received as a penance for the crime of founding modern astronomy, the seven penitential psalms, to be said once a week for three years. On the 5th of March, 1616, the Index condemned Copernicus' De Revoliitionibus Orbium Celestium, and a letter of the Carmelite Foscarini which upheld the Copernican astronomy. The Index, on the 10th of May, 1619, pro- hibited Kepler's Epitome Astronomies Copernicce, and later editions of the Index added the words : "condemned also are all books teaching the mobility of the earth and the immobility of the sun." Foscarini, we may note, was put in prison by Cardinal Caraffa, Archbishop of Naples. In 1757 the prohibition of "all books teaching the mobility of the earth and the immobility of the sun" was repealed. But only in 1822 was it decided by the Inquisition that books might be printed in Rome which taught these two propositions. Two years before, the Master of the Sacred Palace had refused the "imprima- tur" to the "Elements of Optics and Astronomy", writ- ten by a professor of the Sapienza, Guiseppe Settele, because the book taught that the Copernican astronomy was demonstrated. When the book did appear, it con- tained a note by the theological censors, which thus speaks of modern astronomy: "A system which seems
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to contradict the literal sense of Holy Scripture, and which, moreover, has not only no substantial proofs in its favor but involves gross errors, can be maintained by no Catholic who holds to the rule that we may not depart from the literal sense of Scripture unless we see clearly that such literal sense would lead to absurdity. The condemnation of this system is also based on its philosophical absurdities, etc." Finally, in 1835, the Index struck from its list the condemnation of Coper- nicus, Kepler, Foscarini and Galileo. It is decidedly unfortunate that Rome lifts its anathema from the con- clusions of scholarship only when the rest of mankind has been following them for two hundred years. Pos- sibly two hundred years from now the Papacy will permit Catholics to hold that Moses did not write the Penta- teuch, nor Isaiah all the prophecies attributed to him. But it is to be feared that the patience of intelligent mem- bers of the Roman Catholic Church cannot endure so long.
The Inquisition in our own day has distinguished itself by solemnly forbidding Catholic schools to teach that the text of the "Three Heavenly Witnesses" (I John V, 7) is spurious, although there is not an independent scholar in the world that, after studying this text, regards it as genuine. So ridiculous was this decree that Rome dares not interfere even when Catholics disregard it, and it stands beside the condemnation of heliocentric astronomy as an impressive witness to the ignorant obscurantism, and bitter hostility to Truth, of the Roman
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Curia which summons to its tribunal, and visits with anathema, the highest scholarship of the world.
The Bible itself has not been spared by Rome and those that learned their lessons from Rome. A synod held in Toulouse in 1229 decreed that the laity should not possess Bibles. The psalter and the breviary were allowed them, but no more. A local council at Beziers, in 1246, decided that the laity should have no theological books, and clerics none in the vernacular. In 1276, James I, of Aragon, forbade the possessing of the Old or New Testament in Spanish. Such as already had them, whether layfolk or clerics, were obliged to give them up, or come under suspicion of heresy. This law was renewed by later kings, and confirmed by Pope Paul II. Ferdinand and Isabella attached severe penalties to either the translating or the owning of a vernacular Bible. In 1530, Henry VIII of England, still a dutiful child of the Church, de- creed, with the advice of his prelates, that the reading of the Bible should be only by permission of superiors. Fer- nando Valdes, Archbishop of Seville, and Inquisitor-Gen- eral, issued an Index in 1551 which forbade the Old and New Testaments in Spanish or any vernacular idiom. So rigidly enforced was this law that when a Spanish Fran- ciscan brought out a book of selections from Scripture it was condemned by the Index of Sandoval, in 1612 and 1614. The Spanish Index and the Antwerp Index con- demned a translation of some psalms, and the Lamenta- tions, in 1543; and Lope de Vega was obliged to elimi- nate from his "Shepherd of Bethlehem" translations of
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the Magnificat, the Benedictus, the Nunc Dimittis, and the Miserere. The Portuguese Index, in 1624, prohibited books that contained long passages from the Bible. No Catholic Bible in Portuguese appeared until 1778. The Index of the Sorbonne, 1 541- 1543, tells us that vernacular Bible-reading is highly dangerous, and points to the Wal- densians and the Albigeois in proof of the statement. In Italy the Scriptures were widely read in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; but in 1564 Pius IV forbade ver- nacular Bibles, and dense ignorance of Scripture pre- vailed, at least until 1757, when Benedict XIV revoked the prohibition. The spirit of hostility had by no means died out at that late date, however, for when the Abate Martini brought out an Italian version (1769- 1776), a vigorous effort was made to put the work on the Index. The attempt failed ; though, even when Pius VI — to his honor be it said — made Martini archbishop of Florence, the base endeavor continued. In 1640 the Inquisitor- General and confessor to the King of Spain, Antonio de Sotomayor, archbishop of Damascus, published an Index which absolutely forbade vernacular Bibles and books of the Gospels and Epistles. To set aside scruples, this Index naively adds, Bibles in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Chaldaic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Persian and Arabic do not come under this condemnation. The Index of Pope Pius IV (1559) ordered that no vernacular Bibles be printed, read, or possessed, without the written permission of the Roman Inquisition. The fourth rule of the Tridentine In- dex declares that more evil than good results from indi#-
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criminate Bible-reading, on account of the temerity of human nature, and therefore the command is given that permission to read Holy Writ must be obtained from a bishop or an Inquisitor, which permission shall be in writing and conceded only upon the advice of pastors and confessors. But, if any persons presume to read the Bible in the vernacular without this authorization they cannot be absolved until they go before the bishop; and such book-dealers as have sold Bibles to those that had no written permission shall give the money thus received to the bishop, who shall devote it to pious uses, and shall perform whatever penance the bishop enjoins. Pope Alexander VII put on the Index vernacular Bibles (Biblia vulgari quoc unique idiomate conscripta). From 1664 till 1758, nearly one hundred years, this prohibition re- mained in force until revoked by Benedict XIV. This latter Pope suspended the Tridentine rule requirng per- mission to read the Scriptures. Later Popes have not hindered, and some have even encouraged, the reading of the Bible ; but now and then the old opposition appears. Thus, in 1845, the archbishop of Mechlin legislated : "We renew the prohibition of Bible-reading in the vernacular without the permission of the bishop or confessor". And in 1713 Clement XI condemned the following proposition: "The Lord's day should be sanctified by holy reading, especially of Sacred Scripture. It is wrong to wish to restrain Christians from this reading." Propositions of similar import were included in the condemnations of the Synod of Pistoia in 1794.
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The hostility to enlightenment and scholarship, Sover- eign Pontiff, which appears throughout the history of Roman censorship, must cease, if the Church has any desire to retain within her fold men who receive a modern education. Further and further the world of students and intellectual leaders is receding from Catholicity. Catholics are in danger of becoming a Church of the ignorant. Certainly you are doing your best to make it so. It is only by throwing open the door to scholar- ship, by encouraging independent students instead of con- demning them, by beginning at once the necessary work of adapting Catholicism to the ascertained results of criti- cal research, that the ancient Church can live. You might take the first step toward such a consummation by associating with your Italian Index-censors a group of students who have been trained in modern universities. This would destroy the Index ; but men generally live longer after a tumor has been cut out of them.
XX
The Jesuits and Intellectual Tyranny
Your Holiness:
The hostility to scholarship manifested in your Roman censorship, appears, as is only natural, in the methods and results of Catholic education. Certainly it is no matter for astonishment that, with modernist books re- moved from their shelves, and modernist professors ex- pelled from their chairs, Catholic schools are in a condi-
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tion of conspicuous inferiority. Think of calling an institution by the noble name of university which will depose a teacher who thinks that Moses did not write the Pentateuch ! A penitentiary for the intellect ; a train- ing-ground for bigotry, a nest of Italian theology, — call it by these names, but out of respect for the God of Truth, call it not a university. A university is a school for the canvassing of all views ; is dedicated to inde- pendent research ; and cherishes as the prime condition of self-preservation, freedom for the intellect of both pupil and professor. But when you say to a student: "Stop those researches into Isaiah, for they are leading you to a conviction of the multiple authorship of that book ; and you know the Biblical commission binds in conscience. If you dare to publish your study of the Fourth Gospel, in which you point out the vital differences between the Joannine Christ and the Synoptic Christ, you will be put on the Index. Abandon those patristic investigations, for the evidence is leading you toward the opinion that the ante-Nicene Christians did not consider Christ to be sub- stantially equal to God the Father, and you will be con- demned for holding that. Turn your mind to some other study than philosophy, for you are beginning to believe that scholastic psychology is too intellectualistic and offi- cial, and does not rest on a profound knowledge of the vital elements of personality ; and remember the fate of Laberthonniere!" When you, Roman Pontiff, address this sort of language to a student, then scholarship is im- possible, research is killed, and your "universities" become
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ridiculous in the eyes of modern men. And it is precisely to this condition that you have reduced Catholics. High schools and falsifying seminaries are all that remain to them. The Jesuits, whose reputation for scholarship is one of the most extraordinary delusions of the pious, may teach Latin grammar, and a philosophy which ex- plodes the Critique of Pure Reason in three lines ; pro- fessors of theology may discuss with Thomas Aquinas whether more men or women would have been born had there been no fall of man ; teachers of scripture may main- tain with Hetzenauer that no amount of evidence avails as much as a decision of an Italian Congregation ; but as for creative scholarship, as for the discovery of new truth, this belongs only to schools that are free. You have made it impossible in the institutions which run after your favor instead of seeking Truth.
Let us look into the case of those Jesuits who are re- puted to be a body in possession of impressive learning, and have the direction of the majority, probably, of Catho- lic colleges. Let us see whether the law that governs them, and the methods imposed upon them and through them upon their students, are such as are apt to educate scholars or to produce only a mediocre type of bigot. In their earliest days the Jesuits were noted for the liberty and the profundity of their scholarship. They appeared so independent and open-minded, by comparison with the older orders, that Richard Simon, who certainly knew what academic dignity and freedom meant, tired not of praising them, and even thought of applying for
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admission into their company. Those were the clays when the Jesuits produced a Maldonatus and a Petavius, names, the like of which have not appeared in their history for nearly three hundred years. But in 1623 the Jesuits turned aside from the standards of independent research, and have been ever since, and in growing measure, the upholders of rigidity, the persecutors of scholars, and the chief instruments of the Papacy's rule of iron. In that year, 1623, came out the famous letter of the General Aquaviva, De observanda ratione studiorum, deque doc- trina S. Thomce," in which the former liberty of opinion was deplored and stringent orders were given that there should be an end of it. "Let no one imagine," says Aquaviva, "that he has general liberty to adopt opinions which he may find in books written by members of the Society, even when such books have been published with the permission of superiors. For, over and above the fact that many of those books appeared before the Society had established definite rules concerning studies, our Generals have ever resisted the former freedom (ejusmodi libertati minquam swmxmi propositi non restiterunt) and even in our own time have expressed the wish frequently and publicly that, with regard to certain books, our cen- sors had been more careful and more severe."
From Aquaviva to to-day Jesuit censorship has been "careful and severe." Men who follow not the iron uni- formity of the Society's fixed opinions in philosophy and theology are dismissed from professorships, and kept un- der incessant vigilance. It is a fine rule for an army, it is
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an admirable discipline for a pententiary ; but it means the death of scholarship. And it is indeed impressive to note that the greatest men, intellectually, in Jesuit history, were either dead before Aquaviva's letter or died soon after it. Maldonatus died in 1583; Toletus in 1596; Molina in 1601 ; Vasquez in 1604; Sanchez in 1610; Suarez in 1617; Bellarmine in 162 1 ; Lessius in 1623; Laymann in 1625 ; and Petavius in 1652. Their equals have not arisen since in the celebrated Society, for scholar- ship and mental bondage are incompatible. The Jesuit Constitutions order that, "Divergent teachings shall not be permitted, either in preaching, or lecturing, or writ- ing." And the fifth General Congregation of the Society declared that the Fathers-delegate who met for the pur- pose of approving the Ratio Stitdiorum believed it should be a fundamental rule — tamquam fundamentum — "that the Society should follow a uniform set of opinions." And again the Constitutions, as though taking the last precaution against unshackled scholarship, decree : "Even in regard to opinions in which Catholic doctors are at variance care must be taken that the rule of the Society be uniformity." Finally in our own day Leo XIII took the final step which commits the Jesuits forever to a rigidity which cannot make them other than slaves and incompetents to whom it must be a species of outrage to entrust the minds of young men. In his brief, Gravissime Nos, December 30, 1892, Leo binds the Jesuits to the philosophical system of Thomas Aquinas and to an abso- lute intellectual despotism. Were the directions of this
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brief applied to the schools of the whole world, the age of semi-barbarism would be upon us in a generation. Bet- ter than any comment will be the words of this criminal and infamous document themselves. I give a few of the notable passages:
"For the obtaining, therefore, of that degree of con- cord and charity which he held up before the Society, St. Ignatius well perceived the inadequacy of the prevalent and approved custom of tolerating divergent opinions,, according to the saying, 'In doubtful things, liberty' ; and he deemed it necessary to exclude these varieties of opinion in the Society and expressly forbade them. Hence it is a rule in the Society to ask a candidate, before he takes his vows, 'whether he is prepared to set aside his own judgment, and to think as the Society commands' (Num paratus fuerit ad judicium suum submittendum, sentiendumque ut fuerit constitutum in Societate).
"Therefore, the character and written laws of the So- ciety have excluded that freedom of thinking which many enjoy outside it. * * * For although a Jesuit who would adopt certain views which were both highly prob- able (valde probabilius) and enjoyed the patronage of learned names, would be acquitted indeed of novelty, temerity or error ; still, if these views were not in accord with the Society's prescribed teaching, he would certainly offend against that one sole standard of opinion which has been so greatly desired and so highly commended. Whoever examines the rules of the Society concerning study must see clearly that the teaching of St. Thomas,
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not only in theology but in philosophy, is to be followed absolutely." The Pope adds that the philosophy of Aquinas means the philosophy of Aristotle, and quotes the following rule from the sixteenth General Congregation of the Jesuits ; "Since the Society has adopted the phi- losophy of Aristotle, as being more useful to theology, that philosophy must be rigidly adhered to." Leo con- tinues : "Unless the philosophy adopted in the Society be according to the mind and plan of the Angelic Doctor, it cannot subserve that Scholastic theology which all are bound to follow. * * * It is obvious then that whoso differs in a point of theology from St. Thomas, violates by this very fact that uniformity of opinion which Igna- tius ('Legifer Pater') constantly commanded should pre- vail." The "liberal" Pontiff then gives warning to the Jesuits against such of their doctors as may have departed from St. Thomas : "The greatest care must be taken lest from study of the writings of these great doctors there result, not a help to the strengthening of Thomastic teaching, but the disaster of infringing upon uniformity of opinion. This uniformity cannot be hoped for unless the Society adhere to one author and only one (nisi Societatis alumni auctori adhcereant uni)." Here follows a lecture to the Jesuits, admonishing them that they must not try to interpret their constitutions in such a way as will permit them to depart from Thomism in small mat- ters, or to feel free in questions on which Aquinas himself is ambiguous. "Let no one by vain reasonings persuade himself that the opinions of the Angelic Doctor are am-
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biguous. And as for these points of which he may not have treated, his principles and leading ideas must be sedulously studied, so that the solution arrived at may be nowise out of harmony with them. Pertinent to this matter is that rule of the twenty-third Congregation : 'We give solemn warning to our professors — both of theology and philosophy, and to our scholastics, — that they do not venture, in an overweening confidence in their own judg- ment, to put forth temerariously, and without advice, new interpretations of theirs which they fancy express the genuine teaching of St. Thomas.' ' In answer to a ques- tion whether a Jesuit may not adopt an opinion which, though slightly varying from strict Thomism, is yet taught in some Catholic universities, the Pope answers, that, ow- ing to his enforcement of the Thomistic standard, there are no such universities. Then follows the astounding conclusion of the letter : "Let the governors of the So- ciety not doubt that in their office of choosing professors, their authority is strengthened by Ours. Let them then show favor and grant promotion to such as they see of a submissive spirit in the study of St. Thomas. But those whom they know to be disinclined to Thomism they must exclude from professorships, and allow no respect of per- sons to hinder them from doing so. * * * We decree that this, Our Brief, shall be held in the entire Society of Jesus, as the definite and perpetual law govern- ing the choice of opinions ; * * * that copies of it be given to such of the Society as are or will be rulers, prefects of studies, teachers of theology and philosophy,
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and book-censors ; that as soon as it shall be received, and every year thereafter at the resumption of studies, it be publicly read in the refectory, in all colleges or other houses of the Society where philosophy and theology is taught. We decree, moreover, that the regulations laid down in this Brief shall be in force forever — (Ea omnia rata Urmaqne in omne tempus pcrmaneant) — and we here and now declare null and void any future attempt to change them, from whomsoever it proceed."
Comment is unnecessary here. Whoever does not per- ceive that this document is a high crime against human personality, and an infamous outrage upon Truth, knows nothing whatever of either personality or Truth. Let me simply draw attention to the type of method and the class of men that are educating young men in Catholic col- leges and seminaries. Teachers formed upon the Papal standard simply cannot be disciples of Truth, or in posses- sion of elementary intellectual honesty. If I am sworn and vowed to Aquinas or any other man, so that I cannot fairly study any system but his, and have pledged myself never to adopt a view divergent from his, I have committed a suicide of intellect and of conscience, and I am grotesquely unfit to assume the office of training young minds to love and search for Truth. Intellectual immorality lies and must lie at the basis of Catholic education, until the idolatry of Italian Popes shall disappear. A second result that follows from these Roman standards is incompetence in Catholic schools. That incompetence is conspicuous indeed. The Catholic universities of the world are as
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inferior to the free universities as is the civilization of Arabia to that of the United States. From institutions wherein Truth and not an Italian bishop dictates methods, are proceeding publications which add every year to the sum of human knowledge. From Catholic universities we get either sterility and silence, or desperate efforts to up- hold ancient theses which are doomed to die. If, occa- sionally, a Catholic scholar shows himself to be in the front rank of critical research, we may predict his deposi- tion with the same certainty as we should calculate the next eclipse of the sun. There are Loisy, Turmel, Batiffol, Rose, Fracasini and Genocchi in our own day to prove it. From our Catholic University at Washing- ton not one work of high critical value in twenty years ! From our so celebrated American Jesuits not one publica- tion, even of the second rank of critical scholarship, in two hundred years ! We can hardly wonder that a decline in writers and scholars has often been noted as coincident with the incoming of the Jesuits as teachers. This has been particularly observed in Prague, Vienna and Ingol- stadt. Ingolstadt was famous until the Jesuits took charge of it. Then fell mediocrity like a curse. In phi- losophy, which is their pride and boast, there is no society of scholars so miserably represented by thinkers of the first rank. In exegesis and biblical criticism, they are a Sahara of unproductiveness. In literature and critical study of the classics to which they are presumed to be devoted, they have observed their vow of poverty well. Their art and architecture are the scandal of these depart-
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ments of fine taste. Montalembert has expressed his amazement that their training results in so vast a medi- ocrity. Mohler says of them: "Dogmatic theology in their hands becomes lost in an empty skeleton of abstrac- tions, while moral theology has suffered an especially harmful influence from them." Their chief contribution to the science of morals Las been that excessive subtlety, that conscience-killing casuistry which Pascal holds up to reprobation in his immortal Letters. Mabillon, that mighty Benedictine scholar, has this to say of the casuistry of which the Jesuits are the parents : "Casuistry is the worst offspring of scholasticism. So many subtleties have been introduced into Moral Theology that men, by over- subtilising have gone beyond the bounds of reason ; and to our sorrow we see that the ethics of the heathen puts this new casuistry to shame." De Ranee, the founder of La Trappe speaks still more severely : "The moral teaching of most Molinists is so corrupt, their principles are so opposed to the holiness of the Gospel, and to all the rules and counsels which Jesus has given in His own word or through His Saints, that nothing hurts me more than to see my name used to authorize views which from my heart I detest. * * * If God have not mercy on the world, and bring to naught the energy with which men are working to destroy true principles, and set up others which are not true, the evil will grow even greater, and we shall soon see universal ruin." Finally, let us say, the inferiority of the Jesuits even in the literature of de- votion, is known to the world. They are the chief sup-
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porters of special devotions, of arithmetical piety, of debilitating excess in what is called spiritual direction, and of the ghastly vulgarity of worshiping a physical, fleshy heart.
It appears then, Roman Pontiff, that the decrees of the Papacy and the methods of the Index, along with their success in bringing about a military uniformity of opinion, have been tragically efficient also in producing within the Catholic Church an organized intellectual tyranny, a universal mental dishonesty, and a woeful edu- cational sterility. The situation illustrates what I have already said, that the aim of an autocratic hierarchy is not to seek Truth, but to preserve its own traditional ideas and prepossessions. Where in Pontifical docu- ments concerning study, or in Index-condemnations, can we find one word of exhortation to a candid search for Truth ? Anathemas against independent research are common enough. Warnings not to depart from medi- eval scholastics and ancient fathers are never lacking. But the following of Truth whithersoever it leads us, — nothing at all of this. Intellectual sincerity, and respect for the world's earnest endeavor to grow in Truth, I defy anyone to discover in all the vast tomes of the Roman Bullarium, and the Decreta of the Roman Con- gregations. But contempt for the achievements of criti- cism and non-Thomistic philosophy, and bigoted scorn for every species of modernism, as though the greatest scholars of our own time, and many of the mightiest thinkers of all time were scoundrels and fools — this, one
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may find on nearly every page of Vatican literature. This, on the part of a Roman autocracy which has con- demned the fundamental truth of modern astronomy as formal heresy, supported the insane revelations of Diana Vaughan, propagated spurious devotions and confirmed monstrous superstitions, wears not the look of a di- vinely safeguarded depository of the complete truth of God, but resembles rather a desperate conspiracy to check the diffusion of intelligence among men.
The fruits of intellectual despotism are and must be intellectual decay. Needs have arisen in past time and are pressing hard upon us now, for men of the freest mind, and the amplest scholarship to defend religion against assaults which threaten it with disaster ; and to adapt religion to the exigencies which have arisen as investigation has developed. Such men, your Roman and Papal policy has made impossible in the Catholic Church. Not a single adherent of Rome stands forth as preeminent from the controversy with the Jansenists. Arnauld and Pascal are the incomparable intellects of that dispute. Not a single adherent of Rome appears as aught but a puny adversary against Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists. Not a single adherent of Rome en- tered the lists with even respectable ability against Kant. Not a single adherent of Rome lives in history as a worthy opponent to Darwin. Not a single adherent of Rome distinguished himself as more than mediocre when Strauss and Renan flung their firebrands upon the world. Not a single adherent of Rome in good standing today
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in exegesis, the history of dogma and the study of religions, is worthy to be named upon the same page with Holtzmann, Wellhausen, Harnack and Frazer. Bitter and humiliating as the confession is, it must be made, and whether it is made or not, the voice of history is loud with it, that the Roman persecution of scholars, insistence upon following one medieval theorist, as though he were the omniscient God, and anathematizing of the perfected methods and sure results of modern research, have produced barrenness, an appalling barren- ness, which leads the master-minds of today to consider Roman Catholicism as simply a negligible factor in all departments of critical investigation. To such a pass has it come indeed that unless a Catholic defends false and superstitious legends, argues for hopelessly battered theses, and twists history where truth might hurt the Papacy, he is looked upon askance, is the object of quiet whisperings if not open denunciation, to the effect that he is a liberal, and rests as a burden upon the conscience of his bishop, as one infected with modernism. Cardinal Newman said as much half a century ago when, in answer to someone who urged him to undertake the publication of an historical review, he wrote : "Nothing could be better than an historical review, but who could bear it? Unless one doctored all one's facts, one would be thought a bad Catholic" (quoted in the Dublin Review for January, 1907, and a short time before in the Jesuit periodical, The Month}. It is not from such methods, your Holiness, that the scholarship of today will be over-
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thrown, or the good-will of intelligent men conciliated. Rather it is from such methods that we shall have Biblical Commissions flagrantly defying the critical intellect of the world, and Roman Popes covering Catholics with humiliation by solemnly declaring that the Hebrew patri- archs delighted in the contemplation of the Virgin Mary, and believed in the Immaculate Conception.
XXI
The Opportunity of Catholicism
Your Holiness:
I have now finished the first and greater part of my task, which is to set forth frankly the reasons for that antipathy to Rome which has been for three centuries so striking a feature in the religious life of the most progressive and enlightened nations of the world. I have tried to show, what I think must be obvious to every man of sound sense, that this antipathy does not rest on blind bigotry or unreasonable malice, but is based upon the notorious past history and the perfectly evident present policy of the Roman See. The Papal and Italian autocracy is considered by the world to be in theoretical and practical hostility to the main principles of modern civilization — to freedom of conscience, democracy, re- spect for individual personality, and liberty of intellect. How it is that peoples who were once in union with Rome have arrived at so momentous a change of con-
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viction, the foregoing letters, I think, will help toward explaining.
Holy Father, if you have any desire to emerge out of the darkness of inexcusable sophistication which sur- rounds you, and look honestly at reality, these letters, or any other similar expression of candid criticism, may help you in no small degree. If you wish to make Catholicism respectable, and avert from it the ruin and death which now appear inevitable, is it possible for you not to see that no other means will avail to this end than the spiritualizing, and, let us not shrink from the word, the modernizing of the Church? If the Catholic religion is to continue holding to persecution in principle, to the present doctrine of church and state, to Italian abso- lutism, to the prevailing attitude toward indulgences and other superstitions, and to its war of extermination upon critical scholars, then may we as well begin to write its epitaph ; then may those honest students who, in the teeth of despair have been faintly hoping for some spiritualiz- ing change, as well go forth into exile, and seek peace in a strange land, since peace and even honor are becom- ing impossible in what they loved as home.
That the changes which spirituality and scholarship de- mand from Roman Catholicism are profound and even perilous, there can be no denying. The perplexity in- deed is awful. To remain as of old means certain death ; to obey the summons of Reform may mean distress and scandal to many, and great injury to some. But surely we cannot lessen the gravity of the situation by not
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thinking of it. Think of it we must in prudence ; pro- vide for it we must in conscience. The adaptations called for need not after all, be the work of a day. Only let the Roman Church begin to show even common courtesy to our civilization, and in this, small as it is, we shall recognize the beginning of a better day, a sign of life in the midst of death. Let Catholics be allowed to hold that freedom of conscience is an inalienable right of man. Let some Pope speak out a brave word of exe- cration upon the Inquisition. Let there be liberty for Catholic professors to teach that union of Church and State is not demanded by the Christian religion as an ideal. Let indulgences and all other heathenism be abol- ished. Let a representative government, autonomous local synods, and home-rule generally, supersede the present Italian and Papal despotism. Let scholars hold the modernist views as to the nature of dogma and the function of authority. Above all — and this is the one condition which will prevent these concessions from resulting in any great measure of harm — let the whole endeavor of the Church and hierarchy be to promote the Christ-ideal on earth. Roman Pontiff, too seldom have you and your predecessors lifted the hand of healing; too often the brutal fist of tyranny. Go out among the poor. Fling aside these apostate ambitions for a Papal kingdom. Strip off the Church's death-clothes of for- malism, intrigue, pomp, superstition. Turn the vast en- ergies of official Catholicism toward simplicity, fraternity, sympathy. Preach the Christ-life. Live the Christ-life.
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Enkindle over all the earth a sacred and consuming fire of devotion to Jesus the meek Child of the Infinite. Unloose the captive aspirations of mankind, by showing them a divinity of service and a Deity of love to which men would be consecrated wholly, if they but saw it clearly. Not intellectual but spiritual is the religious problem of the world. Whether Moses wrote a Jewish law or John a Christian gospel is of utterly insignificant interest. The -Christ-life we know. The Christ we possess and worship. God is within us to love. God awaits us as Judge. Life is divinely beautiful and sa- credly serious. What need we more? Let these truths grow from more to more. Let the Church's beauty, as the beauty of the King's daughters, be from within ! Let vain philosophies and hoary bigotries be forever buried — and only human service and heavenly love remain upon the altars of our faith! Oh! then will the Church be God's kingdom: then will no barriers of men's making divide into hostile sections the children of the Infinite Father, the kinsmen of the immortal Christ.
Towards this lighting of the new fire of a purified religion, towards this spiritual confederation of the world in devotion to one another and to God, the Papacy and Catholicism could contribute incalculable assistance. But whither the vision of that consummation flies, hope refuses to follow. In collision with the actual state of Roman Catholicism, our dreams are shattered into frag- ments. The Papacy will not change. The old divisions and antipathies have yet long to live. And the day is
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still far distant when men shall see that pure religion and spiritual worship rest not upon meaningless trans- cendental metaphysics, but upon the living Presence of Deity without us and within. Let me cease then, even as a formality to address an unheeding hierarchy, and say the few words that I have still to speak in this letter to the earnest and religious men who may have followed me thus far.
In the first place, it is incumbent upon me in common fairness to say that the criticisms and animadversions of the preceding pages concern only official, Papal, Roman Catholicism. The soul of the Catholic or any other Church they do not touch at all. The contribution to the world's religious experience which has been made by the sanctity, heroism and poetry of Catholicism has been of incalculable value. Whatever be the ultimate form of the religion of civilized mankind, that religion must take many of its elements, and these perhaps its best, from the mother-church of Christendom. Let no one then fail to perceive the distinction made in these letters between Romanism as an autocracy and Catholicism as a religion, and include in the reprobation of the one the high spiritual merit of the other.
In the second place, I would have my non-Catholic readers to bear in mind that Catholics no less than they, repudiate, or would if they knew them, the destructive principles of the Italian Curia. But Catholics do not know them. Catholics, taken as a body, believe in toler- ation as a principle, disunion of church and state as a
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principle, and freedom of research as a principle. They are bnt little aware of the extent to which these funda- mental ideas of the civilized world are rejected by the official leaders of their church. Moreover, enlightened Catholics do not approve, but are disgusted with the superstitions and follies which it has pleased the hier- archy to tolerate and encourage. I am convinced that I shall do a service to Truth and to undefiled religion, if I help toward strengthening in this class of Catholics the desire and the determination to speak out boldly for re- form. Reform in the Roman communion is always from the people ; never, until the coercion of public opinion becomes irresistible, from Curias and Popes.
A courageous and intelligent laity is the sole hope for a better day. Meantime the non-Catholics of our country may assist toward so desirable a result if, refraining from so vulgar and un-christian a sin as bigotry, they foster the spirit of fraternity and good-will. Thus quietly work- ing for the removal of the stupid antipathies which have so long divided us, they will deepen that conviction, already so dear to the American mind, that soul and character are above decrees, encyclicals, and even creeds ; and will so strengthen the bonds of human brotherhood and Christian fellowship, that every theology which is an obstacle to brotherhood and fellowship will fall to pieces, and be buried with the hideous hatreds and crimi- nal dissensions of the past. It is love that will conquer enmity. It is the spread of the spirit of brotherhood, of service, and of insistence upon the essential simplicities
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of Christ, that will gain the victory over exclusive or- thodoxies and vindictive theologies. We may all profit- ably keep in mind that if we worthily fulfil the twofold duty of holding ourselves true to the Infinite Ideal of all our hopes, aspirations and affections, and of seeking op- portunities of kind and merciful service to one another, we are obeying the law and the prophets wholly. Let this but come to pass, and whatever becomes of hier- archies, Christ shall reign among men.
To Catholics one word. Two duties and responsibili- ties confront us : To seek Truth candidly, honestly, bravely, and to cultivate in ourselves and as far as pos- sible in others, that form of religious living which best answers to the standards of Truth, and best develops and elevates the free personality within us. With Truth set before an upright mind, and the Christ-ideal before a reverent heart, the result of religious thought and investigation cannot but be salutary and safe.
PART II— FAITH AND CRITICISM
CHAPTER I
Phases of Dogmatic Interpretation
"OEFORE concluding these letters I feel that I should — say a few words on a graver subject than I have yet treated — the subject, namely, of doctrinal ideas as af- fected by modern criticism. Delicate as this matter is, no present or future movement of reform within the Catholic Church can, in reason, avoid touching it. With terrible urgency a doctrinal crisis is thrusting itself upon us, and face it we must. The late encyclical on modern- ism with the Papal allocutions and addresses on the same topic have brought the trouble to a head ; and it devolves upon modernists to prove that the changed views of exegesis and theology which study has forced upon them, have a far different foundation than the incurable itch for novelty and the reckless temper of irreverent criticism with which they are reproached. Moreover, it is my hope that, while conceding much to the researches of modern scholars, I may speak some reassuring word to those that have been disturbed by their study of Chris- tian origins and Catholic dogma, and point out to them that the essential spirit and teaching of religion are abso- lutely unharmed by the freest and fullest investigation. I am convinced that while criticism has damaged tradi- tional theology almost beyond recognition, it has left not
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a scar on the beautiful face of religion. Perhaps some who are undergoing the distress of disentangling theology and religion and are still perplexed to know whether the unsettling of the one be not the downfall of the other, may be encouraged and set right by the simple word of one who has passed through a similar trial.
We have been brought up in the idea that God's revelation was given to man closed up as it were in a box, or series of boxes. God revealed how the world was created, and how man fell. God revealed the Deca- logue, and the vast system of liturgical law contained in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. God revealed the knowledge, and inspired the predictions of the coming Messiah. With the advent of the new covenant, God through Christ left on earth in charge of His church a body of doctrine, which, just as the Lord delivered it, and the apostles preached it, exists today in the belief- system of Roman Catholicism. Inasmuch as the Bible contains the record of these successive vouchsafings of the Divine Mind, the Bible, taken of course ad literam, was examined for texts in proof of the various Christian dogmas. Whenever the literal sense of Scripture bore but remotely upon the doctrine to be supported, recourse was had at first to a fantastic system of allegory, in order that in one way, if not in another, Christian tenets be shown to exist in at least one of the boxes that make up the Biblical revelation. Thus Clement of Rome makes Rahab's scarlet cord a prophetic witness to Christ's blood- redemption (c-12). Thus the Epistle of Barnabas finds
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a momentous prefigurement in the circumcision by Abra- ham of his three hundred and eighteen servants. For 318 may be expressed by the Greek letters T-I-H. T represents the cross ; and IH are the first two letters of Jesus, spelled in Greek. This reasoning is adopted also by Clement of Alexandria, Ambrose, Augustine, and Hilary. In like manner Justin discovers the twelve apos- tles in the twelve bells on the robes of the Jewish high- priest. St. Augustine bases a foundation for the four cardinal virtues in the four rivers of Eden. Even so late as the middle of the fifteenth century, Tostatus discerns a proof of the Trinity in the three apostles who beheld the Transfiguration, and also in Shem, Ham and Japheth.
Now the very existence of an allegorical school is proof that the literal meaning of scripture was considered to be somewhat deficient as a demonstration of dogma. I do not give this as the raison d'etre of allegorical inter- pretation, but certainly one of the motives for its wide diffusion was that it forced Scripture to maintain what Scripture unforced would either not maintain at all, or maintain inadequately.
As time went on, the slender foundation in the Bible for certain beliefs, and the obvious weakness of the alle- gorical method, led apologists to contend that Scripture was not the sole source of theological proof, but that we must supplement it by unwritten apostolic tradition. So when dogmas like that of the Immaculate Conception or the sacramental character of matrimony could not be proved from the written word, the unwritten word was
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appealed to and the world was challenged to gainsay it. In our day this device in its turn was found wanting, and the development-theory came in under the patronage of a great name. According to this conception, the greater truths of doctrine contain implied within them, or attached to them in the way of necessary corollaries, other truths which theological study gradually discovers and ecclesiastical authority officially proclaims. Thus, as theological reflection took in the profounder implica- tions of Christ's divinity, it came to be seen that the God-man's mother must be absolutely sinless, even to the extent of freedom from that inculpable sin in which all descendants of Adam are born. The Immaculate Conception — to confine ourselves fo this example — was from the beginning a part of the "deposit" of Christian faith. But at first it was hidden beneath the more fun- damental truth of the Lord's divinity, to be brought forth and placed upon its own feet, as it were, only after the Christian mind had explored the full meaning of the central fact of orthodox theology.
Finally some modernists maintain that both the un- written-tradition-theory and the development-hypothesis fall to the ground, the one because it cannot stand the test of history, the other because it is out of accord with experience and life. The expansion of dogma, they hold, is not due to expert reasoners and syllogism-makers, but to the corporate growing life of Christian souls. Dogmas are not a result of ratiocination, but of living; not the conclusions of an argument, but the term of vital spiritual
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processes. Men have arrived at belief in Christ's divin- ity not by dialectics, but by beholding Him with the soul's eye, living His life, and experiencing His power to bless and sanctify and save them. Theological rea- soning they admit is useful and inevitable, but Christian living comes first. Men lived by the divine Christ, before Nicaea defined the hypostatic union. Men would have continued to live by the divine Christ had the words hypostasis, substantia and subsistentia never been known in philosophy. It is not because of Nicaea that we follow Christ, but because of Christ Himself. Moreover, when theology, whether by the voice of doctors, Popes, or coun- cils, gives philosophical and intellectualistic formulation to a doctrine that had been already lived for generations, and perhaps for centuries before, it gives and must give that formulation in the language of current philosophy. And as no philosophy can be assured to us as a final and exhaustive philosophy, but must, in the nature of human thought, be largely conjectural and provisional, the dog- matic formulas which adopt the ideas and the termi- nology of a particular philosophy must, as formulas, be also conjectural and provisional, and cannot possibly be final.
For example, the divine Christ was known and lived as such, before the Christian Church could satisfactorily and concordantly express Christ's divineness in philosophical terms. Then came Nicaea, which formulates the Christ- divineness in highly technical language taken over from the philosophy of Aristotle. It declared that Christ is a
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God-Person who added to His God-nature a man-nature, this man-nature, however, not possessing a man-person, as all other man-natures do, but being crowned by the God-Person of the Christ Deity. That is, Christ, though having a human nature, has not a human personality ; but His Deity-Personality takes into His Deity-Nature a hu- man nature in hypostatic union. This is far more intri- cate than the "Christ is the Son of God", of Mark's gos- pel, or the "Christ is God revealed to us", of the apostolic Fathers. But were it only more intricate, no great matter. Besides being intricate, what becomes of the Nicsean defi- nition to a man who either is baffled and perplexed by Aristotelian terminology, or wholly rejects it? Here is a man, let us say, to whom Christ is the divine righteous- ness and goodness, exhibited humanwise, but who scorns the Aristotelian psychology and metaphysics, believing that "substance", "person", "nature", are terms too transcendental to be of the slightest use as vehicles of re- ligious teaching ; or it may be, thinking that modern psychology has so immensely broadened the concept of personality as to make Aristotle's closed-compartment category a pitiably primitive representation of reality. If such a man cannot find room in his mind for the terms of the Nicasan definition, far from being helped by it, he is vexed and distressed by it. Yet he says, "Christ is divine" ; and that proposition may come from a mind and heart that are utterly devoted to the Son of God. The inward faith in and appreciation of Christ's divineness are his soul's life ; but the philosophical system in which the
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official formula is delivered to him, shocks and disturbs his intellect. Must we say, "That man cannot belong to Christ because he does not belong to Aristotle" ? That would be absurd. What, in reason, we must say, is : "That man lives by Christ's divineness — and that is the great thing after all. If he cannot accept the intellectual- istic expression which it pleased the bishops of Nicaea to proclaim, there is no harm in that. The vital truth is im- mortal, the technical formulation of it is transitory. Let him, if he cares to formulate intellectually what he is living spirtually, find a formula that agrees with his own philosophy and general modes of thought. This formula too, will be transitory, but his interior life, which is bound to God through Christ, is not transitory, but is a mani- festation of essential and eternal religion and truth".
There appears then to be a substantial basis for the opinion that dogmatic formulas are not fixed but flexible, and that religous experience is a more fundamental factor than theological speculation in the expansion of dogma.
Still another class of modernists, however, must be con- sidered. These maintain that the religious problem is hardly more than touched, even when this new view of dogmatic definitions is demonstrated. For we have re- maining for our study, the nature of religious experience and growth itself, and the question of how far this expe- rience and growth in the Christian body corporate, must be controlled by true philosophy and thorough historical criticism. For religious experience can be accumulated upon a false historical foundation, and dogmatic systems
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can expand toward error as well as toward Truth. Not all growth is sound growth ; and in the matter of creeds mere development is not the test of health, but develop- ment in the right direction, development which the trained intelligence can pronounce true. Antecedent therefore to all other questions is this : Does theology give us a conception of Christ and of His teachings which a critical study of His life can approve ; and does it present us a view of the universe which the mature and educated mind can accept ? This question it is all the more vitally neces- sary to study, because the history of religions shows clearly that theologies, in growing from simplicity to complexity, practically always incorporate a new error with every additional inch of stature. The founders of religions, for example, are magnified by legend, as the living memories of them disappear. If a religion has a written Bible, marvelous stories of its divine authorship are sure to arise. Spurious traditions come to the sur- face and are made the basis of new doctrines by that omnipresent worker, the theologian. Rites are invested with an efficacy probably undreamt of by their originators. Miracles accumulate ; prophecies are brought to light ; and in general, a great apparatus of mystery, dogma and de- votion, which is of later and purely human elaboration, comes to be considered as aboriginal and divine.
This is development ; this is religious experience ; but, whatever its spiritual value may have been, perhaps to millions, it cannot persist when Truth summons it to its austere tribunal and rejects it. This critical research
PHASES OF DOGMATIC INTERPRETATION 203
then into the history and origins of doctrine is precisely the discipline and the sole discipline, by which we may discover what is faulty, legendary and extravagant, in the claims of any theology, even of Christian theology. The results of applying this method to Christianity, as a scheme of doctrine, may be illustrated in the following examples.
CHAPTER II The Old Testament in .New Light
A N open-minded study of the Old Testament proves "^^ indisputably that the old ideas of revelation, as a package handed down from heaven to earth, and of in- spiration as a divine safeguarding of the Biblical author against the influences of myth, legend and superstition, are untenable. The Bible is demonstrated both by internal criticism and by the method of comparative religious study, to be the product of slow and often extremely faulty hu- man elaboration, and to contain many of the grosser re- ligious elements of the ages in which its several books were written. Not that there are not in it conspicuous signs of an overruling Providence. In no nation is there lacking evidence of God's illumination, and of His Will to lead men from lower to higher life, from baser to more pure religion. Certainly in Hebrew history the devout mind will realize the work of the Power that governs men, in the sublime term of Israel's religious evolution — the ethical monotheism of the prophets. But, while we may fully and most reverently admit this Providence in the development of Judaism, we still are bound to take cognizance of the fact that the Jewish people, in the laborious processes of growth toward the idea and ideal of prophetism, passed through religious experiences, and adopted many forms of
205
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belief, rite and legend, in which we perceive the ordinary vicissitudes and the common laws of growth of all other religious movements. The Bible, which contains the record of these vicissitudes, is by the very fact of con- taining them, one of the most human books in the world. Divine we do not deny it to be ; but divine, in the old orthodox sense which would force us to believe that God is the author of it, thereby lifting it entirely above the normal lot and condition of religious scriptures, so that we must take it literally, and account each book, chapter, and even verse, as divinely guaranteed, it is in these days simply impossible for an educated man to consider it. Centuries before a word of Hebrew literature was written, Palestine had been saturated with the religious ideas of the greatest nation of remote antiquity, Babylonia. Babylonian influence was predominant in Palestine from about 3000 B. C. to 1500 B. C, and thither came the legends, myths, cosmogony, and general theology which had been elaborated into a vast system and an enormous literature in the Tigris-Euphrates valley. Before tribes of later civilization — such as the Canaanites and the He- brews— had speculated upon the origin of the world, the nature of men and gods, and the problems of suffering, sin, and death, the Babylonians had set their minds to these questions and had produced concerning them a huge body of mythological doctrine from which it was inevit- able that the ruder clans which grew up in a Babylonian atmosphere should borrow. The very names of Canaanite places and Hebrew personages disclose often a Babylonian
THE OLD TESTAMENT IN NEW LIGHT 20J
origin. Jeru-salem is derived from the Babylonian god Salman ; Ashtarte, from the goddess Ishtar ; Nebo and Sinai, from the gods Nebo and Sin ; Samson and Beth Shemesh, from the sun-god Shamash ; Milkah and Sarah, the names of the wives of Nabor and Abraham, from the goddesses attendant upon Sin. Abraham itself is Babylonian ; so are Jacob and Joseph, originally Yaqub-el and Yasup-el ; and Mordecai and Esther are but slightly changed from Marduk and Ishtar, two of the greatest Mesapotomian divinities.
But ideas, as well as names, were taken over from Babylon. There is a Babylonian flood-story, from which the Noah narrative is most evidently adopted. Ut-napish- tim — the Babylonian Noah — is told by the gods to build an ark against the coming disaster of a mighty deluge. The measurements of the vessel are minutely detailed. Into it*Ut-mapishtim brings "the seed of all living things". When the rain ceases he sends out a dove which returns to the ark ; then a swallow, which also comes back ; and finally, a raven, which does not reappear, in token that the catastrophe is over and the flood receding. Ut-napish- tim lands at last and straightway offers sacrifice to the gods. The creation-account of Genesis is hardly less evi- dently influenced from the same source. According to the older cosmogony the god Marduk slays the chaos- monster Tiamat, and makes the earth and the heavens out of her divided body.
Apsu and Mummu are other names for Tiamat. Tehom. the Genesis word for the primeval chaos, and tohu and
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bohu, the Hebrew "waste" and "void," are fairly clear analogies to all this, there being, no doubt whatever about the derivation of Tehom from Tiamat. If Genesis says God made man according to His image, and formed the human body out of earth, Babylonian theology centuries before was familiar with the same ideas. The great Gilgamesh epic tells us that Gilgamesh was created in the image of the god Anu, and formed out of earth. An- other creation by the god Ea is thus described on the eleventh tablet of the same poem :
"Ea in his wise heart formed an image ; He created Asu-su-na-mir".
And again, we are informed in the sixth tablet of the creation-epic, that Marduk created man by mingling his own divine blood with clay.
The story of the fall of man is of momentous im- portance because of the huge structure of Christian the- ology that rests upon it. It is to be feared that it, too, no less than almost all the other earlier portions of Gene- sis, is little more than an adoption of a Babylonian myth. Why, indeed, should we make an exception of this par- ticular narrative, inserted as it is in the midst of accounts which Catholic scholars themselves are forced to admit have their foundation in Mesopotamian mythology? Ac- cording to Genesis the first man was forbidden to eat of a certain tree in Eden which was a "tree of the knowledge of good and evil". There is not the slightest reason for thinking that this command was a test of obedience. God
THE OLD TESTAMENT IN NEW LIGHT 2CX)
simply did not wish man to obtain that secret of His own, the mysterious knowledge of good and evil. God was jealous of man, lest man become a god. This is flatly stated in Genesis iii 22 sq., when God said, after the fate- ful fruit had been eaten : "Behold the man has become as one of us, to know good and evil ; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat and live forever, therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So He drove out the man ; and He placed at the East of the garden of Eden the Cherubim, and the flame of a sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." Whoever does not see in this God's jealousy to prevent man from becoming a god, by gaining immortality ; and does not perceive in it also a poor primitive attempt of uncultivated reason to answer the question, "Why is it that we are not, like the gods, immortal ?" is strangely uninfluenced by the results of the study of religious origins. The whole narration is con- spicuously Babylonian. In the first place, Eden is a Babylonian word. Two of the four rivers of Eden are, in the text of Genesis itself: "Hiddekel, that is, which goeth in front of Assyria. And the fourth river is Eu- phrates." (ii. 14.) No less Babylonian are the ideas tran- scribed in our form of the story. The Babylonian gods, too, were jealous lest man "become as one of us". They too had a plant whose fruit conferred immortality. They too dealt with men who came very near to eating of this "tree of life", but failed, and were reduced to the common
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lot of suffering, labor, and death. When the mythical hero Adapa was summoned into the presence of the great god Anu, Adapa was told by his father, the benevolent Ea, that Anu would offer him "the food of death", and the "water of death" ; and warned him to refuse them. But, in the event, Anu was pleased with Adapa, and offered him the "food of life", and the "water of life". Poor Adapa, thinking that, as his father had admonished, this food and water were unto death, would not eat or drink, and so lost his opportunity of becoming immortal and had to undergo the fate of all mortality. "Why must we die"? is the problem of the Adapa-myth, as of the Eden-story. The problem occurs again in the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh-poem. Gilgamesh goes to Ut- napishtim, the divinized man who was saved from the deluge, and asks him how he had managed to attain the immortality of the gods. Gilgamesh is looking for an escape from death and an agony of desire underlies his question.
"Which of the gods allowed you to enter the company [of gods] ? * * * In my bed-chamber sits death." Ut-napishtim answers :
"I will reveal to you, Gilgamesh, a secret word ; A word of mystery will I speak to you".
"The word of mystery", is to the effect that a plant which will confer immortality, a "tree of life", in the words of Genesis, grows beneath the waters. Gilgamesh, at once, leaps into the water and finds the plant. In joy he cries out:
THE OLD TESTAMENT IN NEW LIGHT 211
"This is a renowned plant.
By it man obtains the breath of life.
I will take it back to Erech . . . \ will eat of it.
Its name is 'The old made young',
I will eat it, and I will return to my youth."
But, alas ! while Gilgamesh is bathing, a serpent crawls up to "the plant of immortality" which had been left on the bank, and bears it away.
"A serpent perceives the odor of the plant, He crawls up, and takes it away ; And going away leaves an evil thing [or curse]."
Gilgamesh, on discovering his loss, begins to feel the premonitions of decay and death.
"Why are my bones fatigued? Why is the blood destroyed in my heart ?"
Adapa had to die because he ate not of the "food of life", and drank not of the "water of life." Gilgamesh had to die because the serpent stole his plant, whose name is "the old made young". And the primitive Hebrew thinker, speculating on the same problem of death, based his explanation on the Babylonian solution which had been devised many centuries before him, and said that our mortal limitations — labor and toil in the sweat of our brows, the agony of women in childbirth, and at last, our returning to dust — are due to God's preventing Adam from eating of the "tree of life" in Eden, lest he "become
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as one of us." It is safe indeed to say, that had the Babylonian originals of the Genesis-legends been known to early Christianity, our doctrines of original sin and blood-redemption would wear a vastly different aspect, and St. Paul would never have introduced — for Christ gives the Pauline conception not a syllable of approval — his Rabbinical theology which bases the primary purpose of Christ's advent and death upon what is said to have happened in Eden.
The classic Babylonian story of Marduk's cleaving the monster Tiamat finds more than one echo in the Bible. Says Job: "By his understanding he smiteth through Rahab . . . His hand hath pierced the swift ser- pent" (xxvi :i2-i3). And again : "Behold now Behemoth ... his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the muscles of his belly. He waveth his tail like a cedar. The sinews of his thighs are knit together. His bones are as tubes of brass. His limbs are like bars of iron. . . . He only that made him can make his sword to approach unto him." (xI:i-5 sq.) In Isaiah we read: "Awake, awake: put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake as in the days of old, the generations of ancient times. Art thou not it that cut Rahab in pieces, that pierced the dragon" ?(li. 9 sq.) And in the last book of our Scriptures, the dragon that was cast from Heaven is a lineal descendant of Tiamat.
We must not take too radical a view of these and many other Babylonian borrowings. We must keep ever in mind that the Hebrews in incorporating into their religion
THE OLD TESTAMENT IN NEW LIGHT 213
and literature so many elements from the rich theology of the older people, cleansed them from the gross poly- theism in which they were originally imbedded, and made them vehicles of monotheistic and sometimes of high ethical teaching. Beyond question, the monotheism of the prophets is the noblest expression of religious truth outside Christianity, and no one can well blame us for regarding it as the result of a special Providence of the Most High. But, on the other hand, we cannot blind ourselves to the fact that ethical monotheism was reached in Israel only after a slow religious evolution, during which many a myth and superstition was believed and practiced, and was thought to be the revelation of the Almighty. Can anyone now believe that Jehovah was prevented from killing Moses only because Zipporah flung the bloody foreskin of her son at God's feet? (Ex. iv) ; that Jehovah would not let Moses see His face, but only his back parts? (Ex. xxxiii) ; that two sons of Aaron were consumed with fire because they offered "strange incense" to Jehovah? (Lev. x) ; that lepers were cleansed when the Jewish priests touched with oil and blood the tip of their right ear, the thumb of their right hand, and the great toe of their right foot? (Lev. xiv) ; that the sins of the people were forgiven by loading a scapegoat with the transgressions, and driving him forth? (Lev. xiv) ; that when an animal was killed, its blood, unless offered to Jehovah, was imputed to the killer? (Lev. xvii) ; that a sin with a betrothed maid-slave was for- given by butchering a ram? (Lev. xvii) ; that God for
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bade men to look upon the corpse of their father and mother? (Num. vi) ; that the Infinite commanded a man to be murdered who was caught gathering sticks on the Sabbath? (Num. xv) ; that the Creator of the universe told Moses that the Israelites must put fringes on their coats? or that He sanctioned the wild superstition of the ordeal as told in the fifth chapter of Numbers?
These, and many other similar barbarities, show that Jewish literature and religion have undergone the opera- tion of universal law — evolution, growth, from lower to higher, from superstition to spiritual purity, and, above all, for this is the fundamental thing, from a grosser to a nobler idea of God. Only a tribal, paltry, parochial con- cept of Deity could possibly have attributed to Him the appalling irreverences and puerile nonsense of which there are so many instances in the Pentateuch and in the legal books. From a deity who walks in the cool of the evening, flings stones from heaven on an army and cuts to pieces a monster of the deep, Israel slowly grew to the knowledge of the God of righteousness taught by the prophets, and the God of love announced in the glad tid- ings of the greatest Prophet of Israel and the world.
The idea of man as well as the idea of God was of slow development among this Hebrew people, whose religion we have been taught to regard as a creation, ex abrupto, by the Almighty. The true immortality of the soul was unknown to the early Jews, and appears in the Bible only after the exile. Sheol was the lot of all souls, good and bad. Sheol, as was precisely the case
THE OLD TESTAMENT IN NEW LIGHT 215
in Babylonia, had no ethical gradations whatsoever, no reward for virtue, no punishment for sin. It was simply a dark dismal cave where the departed spirits possessed a half-existence as in a world of ghosts and shadows, a world that was wholly dismal and full of mournfulness. It is by way of necessary accord with this conception that the older portions of the Old Testament contain no reference to a higher human destiny in another world or to a vindication of divine goodness and justice beyond the grave. God's rewards were here and now, and con- sisted in rich herds, large families, and physical well- being. Earthly misfortune, sickness, poverty and trouble were signs of God's anger, and proofs that sin had been committed. Not until the Jews returned to Palestine under Cyrus do they exhibit traces of understanding any ethical scheme which goes beyond the scope of earthly existence. And in the opinion of a great majority of scholars, an opinion for which assuredly there is a most impressive mass of evidence, they derived this higher and nobler belief from the Persians with whom they had just been so closely associated. Doubtless in the course of time the pure teachings of prophetism would have produced the notion of true immortality; but the proba- bility which is all but a certainty, remains, that Judaism got the idea from Zoroastrianism, which had an exalted eschatology, and took almost a Christian view of the gravity and awfulness of the judgment which follows death.
Let me conclude these remarks upon the enormous
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development of which even a religion and a literature, believed to be divine, are susceptible, with a few words upon the manner in which a later faith can be read back into earlier history and based upon a great man who, in point of fact, had, and could have had no possible con- nection with it.
We have a life of King David in the second book of Samuel, written not long after David's time, and another in the second book of Chronicles composed after the exile. In the narration as Samuel gives it, we are fa- vored with no indications of the ceremonial prescrip- tions of the Levitical law, and with no mention of the Levites, for the excellent reason that neither the one nor the other then existed. But the author of post-exilic 2 Chronicles, wishing to impress upon us the Mosaic origin of the full temple-service, makes it appear that the entire system of Levitical ritual was known to the great king, and that solicitude for it was about the most prominent characteristic of his life. Thus the earlier book tells us that when David removed the ark from the house of Aminadab, he provided for it an escort of thirty thousand picked men of Israel. The later narration, correcting this detail under theological preoccupation, would have us believe that David sent Levites to bear the ark, for, of course, "none ought to carry the ark of God but the Levites." Again Chronicles sets forth that David gathered together thirty-eight thousand Levites and organized them into regular service-courses, a point on which, by the necessity of the case, the more authentic
THE OLD TESTAMENT IN NEW LIGHT 217
biography is silent. Not to leave the impression, which would be somewhat of a scandal to an orthodoxy which was endeavoring to push back its origins to Moses, that David was ignorant even of the lower details of the ritual, Chronicles pictures the great hero of Israel as appointing the very musicians and doorkeepers of Yah- weh's house. And whereas 2 Samuel puts into dying David's mouth an address to his son Solomon which says nothing of temple worship, but contains counsels far less edifying, Chronicles would have it appear that the aged sovereign's valedictory was wholly taken up with minute directions for the new temple, and meticu- lous advice respecting its porch, upper room, inner cham- ber, mercy-seat, vessels, tables, lamps and candlesticks. Thus it is everywhere in the history of religions. Theologies always grow beyond the prevision of the founders of them ; but theologians never like to admit that the developments of religion were not foreseen and provided for by the original father or fathers of the faith. Hence the effort to throw back into the early scripture or upon the founder of a religion, the growths of later times. On the one hand, a religion that lives must ex- pand ; and on the other hand, the veneration given the founder .requires that his authority be the immediate foundation of every article of the creed. This is too obvious and elementary to call for further elucidation. The preceding comparison of 2 Samuel and 2 Chronicles shows it clearly enough.
CHAPTER III
Are the Gospels Merely History?
S~* HRIST and His message were preached as a religion ^-^ before they were written about as a history. The apostles announced the kingdom of God, described the conditions for entering it, and proved that Christ was Messiah. Secondly, though it was a point of capital im- portance, they endeavored to show that Christ's ignomin- ious death was no obstacle to His Messiahship, since it was an essential part of the plan of God, and since the shame of Calvary and the gloom of the grave were glorified by the triumph of the resurrection. With the earthly life of our Lord the public preaching of the apostles was concerned hardly at all. We have a fairly full statement of St. Paul's message, yet we look in vain either in Acts or in his epistles for any picture of Christ's life among men, or any notable quotations of the Master's words. "Accept Jesus as the Messiah of God. We declare to you that He rose from the dead. Be baptized in His name. Prepare by righteousness for his return." That in substance was the evangel of the Twelve. To declare in detail what Christ did in Galilee and what in Judea, what journeys He took, what words He spoke, what miracles He did, what controversies He engaged in, and what colloquies He held with His apostles, was no part
218
ARE THE GOSPELS MERELY HISTORY 2IO,
at all of the first Christian preaching. All those matters pertain to biography, and Christianity began with an announcement of the kingdom of God, and its Messianic King.
But the need of some sort of biography of the Lord was soon felt, and this for more than one reason. Our Gospels came into being not only in response to the natural wish of the early believers to possess a life of their Master; but also out of the exigencies of instruc- tion and controversy. There had to be for the edifica- tion and confirmation of converts, detailed proofs of the heavenly dignity of Christ, of His wonderful power and of His God-appointed Messiahship. And furthermore, there had to be a permanent arsenal of argument against the constant attacks of the Jews. So, after many pre- liminary and partial attempts at Gospel-making, referred to in Luke's prologue, appeared at last during a period from forty to seventy years after Christ's death, the fourfold biography of the Christian canon. The Gos- pels are biographies indeed, and historical documents, but they are colored by the preoccupation of their authors to edify, to confirm the faith, and to refute argument. That they should disclose this preoccupation is not only natural but inevitable. It is a simple impossibility that the evangelists, writing so long after the events they describe, should not have been in some measure influenced by the vicissitudes and controversies of the intervening time. It is absurd to suppose that in that age, in the prevailing circumstances, and in the temper of mind
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then universal, they should have written their sketches of Jesus, as a critic trained in the methods and spirit of modern research writes a history, dispassionately exam- ining documents, relentlessly seeking for sources, and incessantly vigilant against vouching for statements not proved up to the hilt. That sort of historian had not then been born, and those ideals of history-writing had no place in the mental temperament of the early Chris- tians. Luke indeed tells us that he had traced "the course of all things accurately from the first" ; but it would be only wasting time to prove that we must not infer from this that Luke made use of the methods of the critical historian. He did not make use of them because he did not know them.
It should not then astonish us to find reflected in the Gospels some results of the forty to seventy years of Christian development which had taken place before they were composed. We should think it not at all extraordi- nary if they reveal, upon close examination, a consider- able growth in doctrine, an idealization of the original facts, an apologetic bias, and even some results of Chris- tian imagination, in the shape of legend. The Gospels would not be products of their time, they would be psychologically inexplicable if they had not these fea- tures. Let it be enough for us to know that beneath inevitable imperfections, a divine message and a divine Character are clearly enough perceptible; and that in these we may find salvation.
Let me instance, as a first indication of that evolution
ARE THE GOSPELS MERELY HISTORY 221
of which the Gospels themselves are witness, the differ- ence between the fourth gospel and the first three, a difference which makes it necessary for modern students to examine the Synoptics apart, since it is impossible to reconcile them with the fourth. For brevity I will speak of the Synoptics as S. and the fourth Gospel as J. They differ, then, in the. following points:
i. S. describes the ministry of Jesus as wholly carried on in Galilee (except for a visit to Decapolis, and the Perean mission given in Luke) up to the time of the journey to Judea, which ended in the crucifixion. J. as- signs the greater part of the public ministry to Judea and its neighborhood.
2. J. alone mentions several persons of so great an importance that, on the supposition of their being actual historical characters, it is inconceivable that none of the earlier Gospels should have said one word about them. These persons are Nathaniel, Nicodemus and Lazarus.
3. J. has no narrative of Peter's confession at Csesarea Philippi, of Christ's baptism, transfiguration, temptation, agony in the garden, or desolation of soul on the cross.
4. The synagogue scenes so frequent in S. have dis- appeared (except in vi 59) in J.
5. S. gives a highly conspicuous place in Christ's teaching to eschatological ideas — the catastrophe of the world's end, and the final judgment. J. has nothing of this.
6. S. has twenty miracles, J. seven, and these seven very peculiarly treated. Every one of them is wrought
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in order to bring out some new claim of Christ, some fresh proof of His divine Person and mission. This is a miracle-scheme which does not fit in at all with tht miracle-narratives of S., as a few minutes' comparative study will show. Moreover, the common, ever-recur- ring miracles in S. are worked upon those possessed of devils. J. has no possession-cases. Furthermore, there appears in J. a disposition to augment the miracle in order that Christ's easy exercise of stupendous power may shine forth most strikingly. Thus, while in S. Christ raises Jairus' daughter (though according to the text itself we cannot say that the girl was really dead) and the widow's son, these miracles took place very soon after death. The widow's son, according to Oriental custom, may have been carried out to burial on the very day of his death. But Lazarus is raised, as told in J., when he had been four days dead. The peculiar em- phasis of the "four days" lies in this, that it was a Jewish belief that the soul hovers near the body for three days. Again, while our Lord heals the blind in S., J. makes Him give sight to one "born blind". Finally, this tendency of J. to intensify miracles is seen in the amaz- ing instance at Cana, when water was turned to wine. Of all the Gospel miracles none causes more offense to the spiritual sense than this. For the trivial reason that the wine had failed, which could have happened only after considerable conviviality, and with no enquiry as to whether the small supply that would still be needed might not have been easily procured, the Sort of God
ARE THE GOSPELS MERELY HISTORY 22$
performs the overwhelming miracle of turning several great jugs of water into wine ! It requires surely no expert knowledge of higher criticism, but only a reverent idea of God, to perceive that this narrative could have arisen only from that lust for miracle which primitive peoples always display, and from an apologetic purpose of throwing into the strongest possible belief the wonder- working power of Christ.
7. S. furnishes us with a fairly normal view of our Lord's developing career and work. He takes up the Baptist preaching of this kingdom, goes through his native Galilee meeting with success, arousing hostility, working miracles and instructing disciples. While the devils recognize Him from the first as Messiah, even the apostles do not, and it is not until the great incident at Caesarea Philippi that they answer aright the question : Who do you say that I am? Beneath all this we can dis- cern a natural progression in the work and conscious- ness of Christ, from the day in which, along with other hearers of the Baptist, he went down into the Jordan to be baptized, to the day when, having apparently grown into a profound conviction that He was God's mes- senger to inaugurate the Messianic era, He accepted the title of the Expected of Israel. But in J. there is no normal development at all in Christ's career. The Bap- tist hails Him as Lamb of God, at the first sight of Him. Andrew sees in Him the Messiah on a similarly slight acquaintance, and before Christ has truly begun His ministry; and the Messiahship which in S. the Lord
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keeps so carefully concealed, He reveals early in His public life to a peasant-woman of Samaria.
8. Above all other differences, the weightiest and least possible to reconcile are those presented by Christ's message and the mode of uttering it. In S. parables are constant. In J. they are almost entirely missing. In S. the great words and ideas on which turns practically the whole preaching theme of Jesus are "repent", "re- pentance"; and "kingdom of God" (Heaven). This last phrase occurs eighty times in S. ; twice in J. S. repre- sents the Lord as uttering short, pithy, gnomic sayings, and artless exhortations to spiritual purity, love of God and man, mercy, long-suffering and trust in the heavenly Father. J. gives us instead, elaborate long speeches, the themes of which are frequently high abstractions, such as "Life", "Light", "Truth", "Death", "Darkness". "Faith" in S. means trust in God. "Faith" in J. means belief in the God-sent Christ; and in violent contradic- tion to S., this belief-faith is based upon the "signs" which Jesus works primarily to produce it. A com- parative study of the Lord's message in S. and in J. convinces one that it is a psychological impossibility that the Christ of the Snyoptics could have spoken the dis- courses of the fourth Gospel.
A closer study of J. will also make it reasonably plain that this whole gospel is constructed not as an historical life of Christ, but as a proof that Jesus is the Logos of God. From the very first sentence He is Logos, and to the last verse he moves forward as a divinity, to whom
ARE THE GOSPELS MERELY HISTORY 225
the development and the human touches of the Synoptics are utterly inapplicable.
Since the Lord never called Himself Logos, the '"Word" of God, we may enquire where the author of the fourth Gospel got the word and the idea. There can be only one reasonable answer. He got it from Greek philosophy, especially as represented in Philo. Plato had conceived that there exists a world of pure ideas which are the archetypes of earthly existence. The Stoics applied the very term Logos to the Reason that rules the world. Philo, believing that the eternal Abso- lute could not directly work on so low an element as our world, imagined as media through which He rules it, a set of "energies" or "ideas", at the head of which is Logos. The Philonic Logos is a combination of the late- Jewish "Wisdom", and the Stoic "Reason-working-in- the-world". Philo speaks of this Logos in extraordinary terms. He calls it the oldest or first-born Son of God ; the oldest angel; the Beginning; the Word or Name of God; the Archetype of creation; the second God, DEU- TEROS THEOS; the Vehicle of revelation; Ambassa- dor ; Representative ; High Priest ; Intercessor ; Advo- cate; Mediator. He says that Logos is the principle of all that is good in men ; that only as Logos dwells in the soul may we overcome evil and be saved. Logos is the soul's heavenly bread or manna ; the soul's wine and drink; the soul's teacher and physician. Wisdom and Logos come into the soul as into a temple of God. Logos is "neither unbegotten as God is, nor begotten as
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we are. Logos stands between contradictories, on the one hand as an assurance to the Creator that the race of men shall never wholly fall away; and on the other as a hope unto men that the gracious God shall never allow His work to be destroyed."
I am far from saying so unscholarly a thing as that there are no differences between the Logos of Philo and the Logos of the fourth Gospel. I simply main- tain that since the Gospel is built about a Philonic theme and since it expressly states its apologetic purpose in the words : "These are written that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God," we cannot take it au pied de la lettre as a history of Jesus, but must admit that it represents a later stage of Christianity than the Christianity of Mark, and mingles with the record of our Lord's life both a quasi-philosophical apologetic, and ideas which were foreign to the Christ of history. The sublimity of this Gospel, and its high usefulness for the spiritual and mystical life, even its truthfulness in giving expression to the loftier meaning of the Person and mis- sion of Jesus, every Christian will gladly and gratefully acknowledge. It is a priceless book. But not without serious reserve can we take it as a transcript of the words and deeds of the Prophet of Nazareth.
CHAPTER IV
The Theologian in the Synoptics
f~* OMING to the Synoptics, we are obliged to admit ^■^ that here too we find evidences that apologetic, con- troversy, and devout legend have overlaid the history of Jesus, and that we must in consequence employ our best powers of critical scrutiny to discern the genuine message and the true personality of our Lord. Mark is the earliest of our Gospels — of this there is no longer doubt among students of Christian origins — and, by comparing certain remarkable test-passages of this Gospel with the parallel texts of the later Matthew and Luke, we can hardly fail to see that apologetic interests have frequently modified Mark's more primitive narrations. Matthew and Luke, it must be remembered, knew and used Mark. No po- sition of critical scholarship is more abundantly proved than this.
i. Mk. i. 32, "they brought all that were sick and He healed many" ; Matt. viii. 16 changes the less credit- able "many" to "all" ; Lk. iv. 40 to "everyone".
2. Mk. iv. 36 "and other boats were with him". The parallels in Matt, and Lk. omit this phrase ; for how could those other boats have weathered the storm when the apostles' boat was saved only by the miracle of stilling the tempest ?
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3. Mk. vi. 5. "He could do no mighty work there, etc. ; Matt. xiii. 58, "He did not many mighty works there.
4. Mk. vii. 32. sq. describes Christ healing the man who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech, by using spittle and groaning. Matt., who follows Mk. im- mediately before and immediately after, leaves out this miracle, presumably because it implies effort on the part of Christ.
5. Mk. vii. 22. again tells of Christ curing the blind man of Bethsaida, as bringing him out of the village, spitting in his eyes and asking him if he saw. The man said he beheld men as trees walking. Again Christ laid hands on the man's eyes, and "he looked steadfastly and was restored." Matt., who once more is one with Mk., both just before and just after this narration, says noth- ing of the miracle, doubtless for the same reason as be- fore.
6. Mk. xi. 20. narrates that the fig-tree that had been cursed was found withered the next morning. Matt., for obvious reason^, says it was withered immediately.
7. Mk. i. 12. "The Spirit driveth him forth", ck/SoXXu, Matt, and Lk., with a more developed Christ- ology, thought this an indignity and softened the verb into "was led by the Spirit", and "was led in the spirit".
8. Mk. iii. 5. "When He had looked round about on them with anger"; Matt, and Lk. make no mention of anger, which, evidently, they thought unworthy of Christ, although Lk., a clear proof that Mk.'s text lay before him, uses the same participle as Mark, TreptjSXe^a/Aevos.
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9. Mk. iii. 21. narrates the extraordinary incident of Christ's friends seeking to lay hold of him, thinking that He was mad; Matt, and Lk., being further from the facts, but nearer to theology, omit so discreditable a hap- pening.
10. Mk. vi. 3. "Is not this the carpenter?" Lk. leaves out the hardly favorable question altogether; Matt, softens it into "Is not this the carpenter's son?"
11. Mk. vi. 48. describing Christ walking on the water toward His disciples, says: "And He would have passed by them"; Matt, and Lk. give the incident without this phrase, which might imply that Christ was unwilling to help the disciples.
12. Mk. x. 14, uses the very harsh word ^yavaKi-ijo-ev, "He was moved with indignation," to describe our Lord's feeling against the disciples who were pushing back the children ; Matt, and Lk., in the interest of edification, say nothing of Christ's anger.
13. Mk. xi. 13. says that Christ, being hungry, ap- proached a fig-tree "if haply He might find anything thereon" ; but there was no fruit, because in Mk.'s words, "it was not the season for figs". These last words the exigencies of theology force Matt, and Lk. to omit, as implying ignorance in Christ. The cursing, of this fig- tree, let me remark, is an impossibility. Christ was not the sport of puerile vindictiveness.
14. Mk. x. 35. tells of the sons of Zebedee, James and John, coming to our Lord to ask that when He comes in glory one may sit on His right hand and one on the
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left. Matt., considering this ambition unworthy of apostles, puts the request into the mouth of the mother of the brothers. But, by an oversight, he thus resumes copying Mark in the answer made by Christ: "Ye know not what ye ask", words which show very clearly that the petition was put by the apostles and that the Lord's reply was addressed to them.
To help such as may wish to study these parallels, I will give here in the order in which they have just been set forth, the references to Mk., and the corresponding altered texts in Matt, and Lk.
1. Mk. i. 32; Matt. viii. 16; Lk. iv. 40.
2. Mk. iv. 36; Matt. viii. 23, 24; Lk. viii. 23 sq.
3. Mk. vi. 5 ; Matt. xiii. 58.
4. Mk. vii. 32 ; omitted in Matt. xv.
5. Mk. viii. 22 ; omitted in Matt. xvi.
6. Mk. xi. 20; Matt. xxi. 20.
7. Mk. i. 12 ; Matt. iv. 1 ; Lk. iv. I.
8. Mk. iii. 5 ; Matt. xii. 9 sq. ; Lk. vi. 10.
9. Mk. iii. 21 ; omitted in Matt. xii. and Lk. xi.
10. Mk. vi. 3 ; Matt. xiii. 55.
11. Mk. vi. 48; the unpleasant phrase omitted in xiv. 25, 26.
12. Mk. v. 14; Matt. xix. 13; Lk. xviii. 15, 16.
13. Mk. xi. 13; Matt. xxi. 19.
14. Mk. x. 35 ; Matt. xx. 20.
Surely one is justified in saying that it would be a dull mind that did not see in these parallel texts, evidences of a later hand going over the earlier narration in the
THE SYNOPTICS 23 1
interest of Christian apologetics. And once we perceive this, can we be blamed for using our best powers of critical investigation to penetrate beneath these much to be suspected modifications, in order to arrive at the primitive and authentic history of Jesus as He was? Interesting as it is to trace the growing Christology of the first, second and third generations after Christ, the first necessity, both for our intellect and our faith, is to go back of doctrinal development, and stand as near as possible to the Lord and Teacher of our souls. This is not an easy task, for the apologetic and theological tend- ency of even the Synoptics is far greater than I have yet indicated. Until, however, we adequately appre- ciate this tendency, and bring ourselves to see how far it extended, there is a cloud between us and the real Christ, and there is a danger that we shall misapprehend some of the essential features of His Person and purpose.
The genealogies given in the first and third Gospels are a striking proof that our canonical biographies of Jesus are not mere history, but argumentative and theo- logically colored history. As a fervent faith fastened upon the Person of the Lord, it was moved by the im- pulse behind all faiths, to exalt its Founder, to crown Him with all human prestige, and all divine glory, and set Him, so to speak, in the forefront of men, and on the right hand of God. Although Christ never claims descent from David, and in the sole passage which refers to the matter (Mk. xii. 35 ; Matt. xxii. 41 ; Lk. xx. 41) seems to argue that it is not necessary that Messiah should be of
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the great king's line, still it was an ineradicable conviction of the Jews that Messiah should be of Davidic stock, and hence of Davidic stock the genealogies make Him. These genealogies must be considered unfortunate, for not only are they irreconcilable one with another, but, by giving Joseph's descent instead of Mary's, they are a formid- able argument against the virgin-birth. For what would it avail to Christ, that Joseph was of royal lineage, if between Christ and Joseph there was only a purely legal and external relationship and no bond of blood? There is reason indeed for thinking that the genealogies which, from the nature of the case must be a very early composition, originally contradicted the virgin-birth. In one of the most ancient manuscripts of the New Testa- ment in existence, the Syriac Sinaitic, discovered a few years ago, the genealogy ends thus : "Jacob begot Joseph ; Joseph to whom was espoused the Virgin Mary, begot Jesus who is called the Christ". Some of the old- est manuscripts of the pre-Vulgate Latin Testament contain the bizarre reading: "The Virgin Mary begot Jesus", which certainly looks like a later modification of a primitive text that resembled the disturbing one of the Syriac Sinaitic. In any event Luke's list rests upon the naive idea that the Old Testament genealogies quite span the entire history of mankind. Had our present knowledge of the antiquity of the human race been possessed by the first generation of Christians, a genealogy carrying back Christ's ancestry to the first man would never have been written. It is only too plain
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that the very beginning of Matthew's Gospel and the corresponding section of Luke are theological apologetic and not history.
The entire Gospel indeed that goes under the name of Matthew is preoccupied with the apologetic purpose of showing how perfectly Old Testament prophecy is ful- filled in Christ. The birth in Bethlehem, the flight into Egypt, the dwelling in Nazareth, Christ's power over disease, His entry into Jerusalem, His arrest, and several other incidents are "that it might be fulfilled". And beyond question certain of these alleged prophecies have no proper reference to our Lord at all, those for instance that refer to the Egyptian sojourn and the dwelling in Nazareth. In one case Matthew, to designate the un- known author of this Gospel by the traditional name, in his straining after prophecy-fulfillment is led into an error which, did it occur in a profane book, we should be permitted to call ludicrous. Mark, Luke and John describe our Lord as entering Jerusalem on Palm Sun- day, riding upon a colt. Matthew more suo, looks in this simple incident for a "that it might be fulfilled", and hits upon the following text of Zachary: "Behold thy King cometh unto thee, meek and riding upon an ass ; and upon a colt, the foal of an ass". Obviously the prophetic text means not two animals but only one. The reduplication is quite after the manner of the Hebraic Strophe-form. Matthew, however, interprets it ad literam, and conforms his narration to this erroneous notion, with the grotesque result that he makes our Lord
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enter the city riding upon two animals. "And the disciples went, and did even as Jesus appointed them, and brought the ass and the colt, and put on them their garments; and He sat thereon". (Matt. xxi. 5-7.)
Matthew it is, and he alone, who gives us the famous text : "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church", etc. We have very weighty reasons for suspecting that these words were never spoken by our Lord. So tremendous is the import of this text, in direct connection as it is with one of the most momentous incidents in Christ's career — His first authentic outspoken claim to Messiahship in presence of the apostles — that it is hard indeed to understand why Mark and Luke, who also describe the great scene at Caesarea Philippi, give no suggestion of it whatever. Mark's account is : "He asked his disciples saying unto them : Who do men say that I am ? And they told him saying, John the Baptist ; and others Elijah ; but others, one of the prophets. And He asked them: But who say ye that I am? Peter answereth and saith unto Him : Thou art the Christ. And He charged them that they should tell no man of him". Luke says: "And He asked them saying: Who do the multitudes say that I am? And they answering said : John the Baptist ; but others say Elijah : and others that one of the old prophets is risen again. And He said unto them: But who say ye that I am? And Peter answering said : The Christ of God. But He charged them, and commanded them to tell this to no
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man" In Matthew we have, after Christ's final ques- tion : "And Simon Peter answered and said : Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus an- swered and said unto him : Blessed art thou Simon Bar- Jonah ; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father who is in heaven. And I also say unto thee that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church ; and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it. I will give unto thee the keys of the king- dom of heaven ; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven ; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Then charged He the disciples that they should tell no man that He was the Christ".
Before I formally consider this Petrine text, let me remark incidentally, that if it is genuine, it seriously weakens the historical value of the fourth Gospel. For according to John, Andrew in the very beginning of Christ's ministry, recognizes Him as Messiah, and speaks of Him as such to his brother Simon Peter. "He [Andrew] findeth first his own brother Simon, and saith unto him: We have found the Messiah, which is, being interpreted, Christ". It is too obvious that if Peter knew of the Messiahship of Jesus at that early date and by that human means, he could not later, at Caesarea Philippi, have been so prodigiously rewarded for his Messianic confession, nor could it have been said that "flesh and blood" had not revealed it to him.
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But the fourth Gospel apart, since it is a theological speculation about Christ rather than a history of Him, let us take up the "Thou art Peter" text.
Immediately following Peter's great confession, Matthew and Mark tell of his remonstrating with Christ for predicting the passion and death in Jerusalem. Christ turns upon him saying, as Matthew gives the words, closely following Mark, "Get thee behind me Satan. Thou art a stumbling-block unto me; for thou mindest not the things of God, but the things of men". Such a rebuke, merely as a rebuke, might have little or no bearing on the immediately preceding texts in which Peter is so marvelously rewarded. But could there be a more startling contrast than that between : "Flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee ; but my Father who is in heaven", and "Thou mindest not the things of God, but the things of men?" We may well ask if it is pos- sible that Christ could have rebuked Peter for being so carnally-minded, and of so unspiritual a judgment that he minded not the "things of God", if just before, the Lord had accredited him with a knowledge, and a spiritual intuition above the capacity of flesh and blood, and bestowed on him by way of revelation from Al- mighty God. It is hardly in accord with the normal processes of the human mind that Christ should have so soon turned from the glow and exaltation of His ac- knowledgment that Peter was in communion with Deity, to the bitter censure of him as a man who was not Godward-minded at all.
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I have already spoken of the extraordinary silence of Mark and Luke concerning this text. The insecurity of an argumentum ex silentio is notorious ; but here it possesses certain features which give it impressive force. It would be a small matter if Mark and Luke simply omitted an incident which Matthew describes ; but the case in point is far more serious than that. Mark and Luke as well as Matthew tell the story of the Mes- sianic confession ; but, if Matthew be correct, they leave out the very element which overshadows all other elements in its importance both for that hour at Caesarea Philippi, and for all future time. If under these cir- cumstances, Luke, and above all Mark, the earliest of the three, knowingly and deliberately mutilated the history of the incident by cutting off from it its most striking and momentous feature, it is an omission which is abso- lutely inexplicable. Reducing the problem to these sim- ple terms : Which is more likely, that this text was not known to Mark and does not belong to the primiiiv^e tradition, or that it does belong to the primitive tradition, and was deliberately dropped by Mark? Most independent students will unquestionably support the former alterna- tive.
The text itself wears the look of having been super- posed upon the Marcan narrative by the final redactor of our first Gospel. Mark concludes his account with the words : "And He charged them that they should tell no man of Him". Luke ends thus : "And he charged them and commanded them to tell this to no man". The
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"tell no man of Him" of Mark, and the "tell this to no man" of Luke are so closely joined to what goes before that they are a normal ending of the story, and clearly refer to Christ's acceptance of Messiahship. But Matthew, having thrust into the narrative the long parenthesis of "Thou art Peter" etc. cannot conclude in this natural, and apparently primitive manner. Mark's "of Him", and Luke's "this", would be ambiguous with him, so far would they be separated from the antecedent fact that they refer to. So Matthew closes his account with: "Then charged He the disciples that they should tell no man that He was the Christ". This may seem a small matter, but to one trained in critical processes, it is far from being insignificant.
If the text was not known to the earliest tradition about Christ, whence did it come? We cannot of course answer with certainty, but there is a probability which is at least as strong as any that stands in favor of the text as genuine, that it arose out of the controversy in the early Church between the Judaizing and the Pauline Christians. Every one knows that at the very outset of Christianity, the most vital question before the new faith was whether it was bound by the Jewish law, or was free from it. The first Jerusalem converts went to the temple as of old, practiced circumcision and all other precepts of the Law, and, except that they recognized Jesus as Messiah, and waited in high expectation for His second coming, they were but slightly distinguishable from the other Jews around them. Paul saved Christianity from
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becoming merely a Jewish sect. He declared that right- eousness came not from the works of the Law, but from faith in Christ, and that the Gospel meant liberty from the ancient rites of Judaism. How bitterly he was op- posed by the "false brethren", Judaizing Christians who denied his right to the apostolic office, and accounted his "law of liberty" a sacrilege, his own letters bear witness. James was a rigid Judaizer, and Peter also was closely connected with that party. Peter was probably re- garded as the leader of the apostles. Christ Himself seems to have made him so. With Peter therefore, who certainly did not wish to lead a faction, the Judaizers associated themselves and kept up an attack upon Paul of which we have more than one trace in early Christian literature. The most dramatic incident known to us of this momentous discord, is the open conflict between Peter and Paul at Antioch which the Epistle to the Galatians describes. If the Judaizers exalted Peter, "the apostle of the circumcision", the Gentiles exalted Paul, "the apostle of the uncircumcized" ; and the question which was the greater, was, we may be sure, a frequent topic of debate among the first believers. The Judaizers were naturally strongest in Jerusalem and throughout Palestine, and there the insistence on Peter's supremacy was most vehement. Is it not a well-grounded proba- bility that it was there, and for the reasons just men- tioned, that the story arose of Peter's having been so wonderfully empowered by the Lord that Paul must be considered, in comparison, but a secondary personage?
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Matthew's Gospel is pre-eminently Palestinian and most colored by Jewish modes of thought, and it is quite in the natural order of things that it should contain the legend which the non-Palestinian Mark and Luke have not. This probability is strengthened by the fact that Matthew shows throughout a notable disposition to put Peter forward. In giving the list of the apostles, he alone calls Simon Peter the "first". He alone gives the incident of Peter's walking upon the water, and of his rescue by Christ's stretching forth His hand and taking hold of him, a narrative which wears a very dubious look indeed. Matthew xv. 15 makes Peter ask Christ to explain the parable ; whereas in the parallel of the earlier Mark (vii. 17) "His disciples asked of Him the parable". Matthew alone has the story of Peter's finding the shekel in the fish's mouth. He alone thrusts forward Peter as asking: "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him?" Christ answers: "Until seven times" etc., which is a variation of a text in Luke (xvii. 3, 4) that is totally unconnected with Peter. And finally Matthew alone, of course, con- tains the mighty text which we are considering now. Two or three occasions there are indeed in which Mark or Luke mention Peter, where Matthew in his parallel passages does not mention him. But taking the first Gospel as a whole, we must regard it as attributing im- mensely more to the leader of the Apostles than the other Gospels attribute to him — a fact which, for the reason
THE SYNOPTICS 24I
already stated, bears directly on the probability of a Judaizing origin of xvi. 17-19.
Finally the word "Church" in this Petrine text would be enough, if not actually to condemn it, at least to make as careful in examining it. "Church" occurs only twice in the Gospels, both times in Matthew. The other in- stance is that in which Christ is made to say that an erring brother, who has resisted fraternal correction, shall be reported to the "Church" (xvii. 17). The word was not unknown to the Jews of Our Lord's time ; but, as employed in Matthew, it is so extremely likely to be a reflection of a faith which had undergone at least a full generation of development, that we have only too much reason to suspect it. The idea of a Church as we understand it would have been utterly unintelligible to the disciples — perhaps even, as we shall see later, to Christ Himself — at the time when these words are said to have been spoken. The disciples towards the close of their Lord's ministry, and equally conspicuously after His resurrection, believed in the imminent advent of the Messianic kingdom. The world they thought was soon to end, the great judgment transacted, and the glorious era of Messiah's reign begun. Men in this state of mind could have no possible comprehension of a Church ; and surely if Christ often thought it necessary to explain to them very simple parables, He should not have suddenly dropped upon them this new, unconnected, and wholly nnprepared-for idea, and said no word as to what it meant.
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For reasons of this tenor, the critical scholars of the New Testament are preponderatingly against the genu- ineness of Matthew xvi. 17-19. The more we study the matter, the more we shall be inclined to agree with them.
It would be both interesting and profitable to go at greater length into this matter of the traces of a later time which are contained in the Gospels, but merely to have called attention to the fact suffices for my present purpose. It would be particularly illuminating to investi- gate the birth-stories of Matthew and Luke, where we see devout legend growing under our very eyes, as a comparative study of the two narratives will show ; or to make the Trinity text of Matthew a basis for a study of the doctrine, certainly never taught by Christ, of the tri- Personal Deity. But since my object just now is simply to call attention to the fact that we must, in reading the Gospels, penetrate beneath the deposits left by developing doctrine, if we would know the authentic good-tidings of the Lord; and since this object has, I believe, been sufficiently achieved, it is time now to see what Christ's message was before the progress of the years and the growth of theological thought reacted upon and modi- fied it.
One word however, before I treat of this. In apply- ing these critical methods to the Gospel-narrative, it must not be supposed that modern students either ex- plicitly or implicitly accuse the evangelists of bad faith. To imagine that our four canonical biographers of Christ could not have yielded to a theological or apologetic ten-
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dency without consciously falsifying, would be a very crude mistake which no one at all familiar with the history of religions could make. Religious legends grow out of the impulse of faith ; they are not the fabrications of cold calculation. It is often hard to discover clearly whence or how they arise. They simply appear. They are an inevitable product of the devout fancy of primitive believers everywhere. And in an age when critical his- tory is unknown, a great many of them will survive, become widespread, and perhaps be enshrined in litera- ture. Likewise it is simply inevitable that in similar cir- cumstances, doctrines which appear late will be thrown back into an earlier period and fastened upon a great religious founder. "What is he ?" and "What did he say and do?" are the sole questions which preside over the researches of a modern critical biographer. "What must he have been? What must he have said and done?" is rather the standpoint of the theological biographer. The authors of our first and third Gospels were conscious of no fault whatever, when they changed e. g., Mark's primi- tive: "He healed many", to "He healed all", and "He healed everyone" ; or when they omit the discreditable incident contained in the earliest tradition, that the Lord's friends sought to restrain Him, thinking Him mad. Nor were they guilty of falsehood in accepting the story of Christ's birth at Bethlehem with all the dreams, celestial visitations and mighty miracles which then and just be- fore then, occurred. We understand that Jesus was born at Nazareth, and perceive that His later life gives a
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practically decisive denial to the fancy that He was marked out from His cradle as the object of a series of public prodigies. But surely we can regard sympathetic- ally the faith of the early believers whose state of mind was that Messiah, as of David's line, must have been born in David's city, and could not have entered the world as an ordinary child of man, but must have been attended with many signs of divine favor. All this indi- cates the normal processes of early religious thought. So when we, whose methods and temperament are less primitive, seek to lift the veil of legend and apologetic, we thereby accuse no one of falsehood, and we may, even in using the most searching instruments of criticism, be as reverent according to our light, as were ever evangelist and theologian according to theirs.
CHAPTER V.
Christ's conception of the kingdom.
"P VERY rightly ordered investigation into the message of Jesus must begin with the "Kingdom of heaven (God)". The "Kingdom" is the constant theme of Christ's preaching, from the first utterance of His public ministry, "The Kingdom of God is at hand", to the last words spoken before He left the supper-table for the mount of Olives : "Verily I say unto you, I will no more drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God" (Mark. xiv. 25) ; or as Luke has it, "I will not drink from henceforth of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God shall come" (Luke xx-ii. 18). This fundamental certainty we possess, that Jesus announced the kingdom, and that the kingdom, with the conditions for entering it, is the sum and sub- stance, the soul and essence of His preaching. If we know the original meaning of the Kingdom, we shall know Jesus. With the object of bringing as much light as possible to bear upon this Gospel-theme, I will give a brief sketch of its history in Jewish thought.
The Jews emerged from the exile with a new and pro- foundly important belief. This was that the world is under the dominion of a personal devil, Satan, who fights against God and oppresses God's elect; and that this era
245
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of evil will continue until Messiah comes to cast down Satan, to destroy evil, and to establish the kingdom of God. Some preparation there was doubtless for this belief in the apparently pre-exilic idea of Yom Yahwe — the day of Yahwe. But the distance between the earlier notion of the "Day", and that of the "new heavens and the new earth", of pseudo-Isaiah, or the "Malkuth" of Daniel is very great indeed. The old "Day of Yahwe", was nearly always conceived simply as the time when Yahwe in His wrath would destroy the enemies of Israel. The vaster conception of a mighty world-drama in which God, through Messiah, fights victoriously against this "World" or "age", olam, and establishes on the ruins of the present heavens and earth, a pure and perfect king- dom for His saints, may have been a normal development from certain ideas in Amos and Hosea ; or it may have drawn its new elements from the wonderful religion of Zoroaster, with which the Jews had come into close con- tact during the exile.
The fundamental principle of Zoroastrian theology was dualism. There was a kingdom of good under the leadership of the great god Ahura Mazda, and a kingdom of evil, of which the chieftain was Ahriman, the Persian Satan. The constant conflict between these ghostly powers was to culminate in a mighty battle at the end of the world. Ahriman and his evil legions will then fight against the Amesha Spentas, the Persian archangels, and all the good spirits of Ahura Mazda. God's foremost captain in this tremendous war will be the Savior,
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Sraoshyant, who will be born of a virgin. With Ahura Mazda, Sraoshyant will at last destroy Ahriman and the great serpent Azhi ; and then will purity and righteous- ness reign forever in Ahura Mazda's kingdom. "At the world's end Thou shalt come with thy holy Spirit, O Wise One, and with Thy kingdom", says a Zoroastrian Yasna; and again: "When punishment is visited upon evil-doers, then O Mazda, will thy kingdom come through the good Spirit".
While I do not wish to speak too decisively on a mat- ter which is still controverted, it is a conservative state- ment to make, that modern scholarship is convinced that Persian theology exercised a notable influence on Jewish beliefs ; and is strongly disposed to attribute a great part of post-exilic Jewish eschatology to Zoroastrian sources. Certainly after their contact with the Persians, the Jews show a great development of Messiahism, and in their new idea of a world of sin under a personal devil, they manifest a most impressive resemblance to the cardinal tenet of the Zoroastrian creed.
From the time of the composition of the later parts of Isaiah, to the downfall of Jerusalem, 70 A. D., Messiah- ism was, in the words of Baldensperger, the passion of Judaism. Conquered and oppressed by the Gentile, the Jews lifted up their eyes to Messiah who would save them. They let their imagination revel in pictures of the woe and destruction that would come upon the enemies of God. They dwelt, as did later the mediaeval monks, upon the awful judgment which should close the history
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of this evil world. They took comfort in the contempla- tion of the saints' everlasting rest ; and they kindled in the midst of their race the hope, the ardent expectation, that these things would soon come to pass. A great apocalyptic, or as we may fitly term it, Messianic, litera- ture arose as a product of this mighty desire. The book of Daniel is the most typical instance of it among the canonical books ; but outside the Bible, books of similar spirit were composed, and, as was the case with Daniel, had a profound influence upon popular ideas. Among these non-canonical, pre-Christian Jewish apocalypses, the most significant are the book of Enoch, whose various parts date from nearly 200 B. C. for the earliest to about 70 B. C. for the latest ; the third book of Sibylline Oracles between 130 and 30 B. C. ; the Psalms of Solomon 70-40 B. C. ; and the Apocalypses of Ezra and Baruch, about the beginning of the Christian era. Out of this literature let me give a few examples of the hope that stirred in Jewish breasts, when Christ came upon the scene of history.
1. The renovation of the world: "For behold I create new heavens and a new earth . . . Behold I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy . . . the voice of weeping shall no more be heard in her, nor the voice of crying (Isaiah lxv. 17, 18).
2. The last tribulation : "And there shall be a time of trouble such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time" (Dan. xii. 1). The book of Enoch gives the following among the "signs" of that awful day
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of Messiah's judgment : Commotion throughout the earth ; shortening of the year ; the moon and sun not shining at their proper times ; miscarriages ; father and son, brother and brother will be struck down together (Enoch lxxx. ; xcii., cii. 80; 92-102). The Ezra- apocalypse has the following description : "See, the day cometh when the earth-dwellers will be seized with a mighty fear . . . Unrighteousness will wax strong . . . The sun will shine by night and the moon by day. Blood will flow from trees . . . The nations will be in agitation ; the doors of heaven in disorder . . . Women will bring forth untimely births : . . . The trumpet will sound. All men will hear it and will tremble . . . Then will great troubles fall upon men ; they shall wage war upon one another — city upon city, place upon place, people upon people, kingdom upon kingdom" (4 Ez. v.-xiii). Says the Apocalypse of Baruch : "Everyone that survives the war shall die by earthquake ; everyone that survives the earthquake shall burn in the fire ; everyone that sur- vives the fire shall perish of famine ; and all who pass through these dangers . . . shall be given into the hands of my Servant Messiah (lxx.).
Woe to those then living (Ez. 13) ; It is a day of wrath (Bar. 48) ; The stars will fall from heaven (Enoch 41, 43, 69 Ps. Sol. 1810 Ez. 6) ; Friend will turn against friend (Ez. 5, 6) ; There will be rains and no frosts (Sib. Or. 3539) ; Kindred will fight with kindred (Bar. 70 En. 100) ; There will be revolutions and wars (En. 99 — Sib. Or. 3G60-5-361) . Swords will appear in heaven
25O FAITH AND CRITICISM
(Sib. Or. 3) ; Fire from heaven will kill men (Sib. Or.
.,635 r376\
3. Messiah's Precursor. The Samaritans expected that Moses would come again. Rabbi Johanan b. Sakkai taught that Moses would come with Elijah. Ezra and Baruch say Enoch and Elijah will reappear.
But in Rabbinic theology the great Precursor is Elijah. The doctors of the law taught that Elijah must appear before Messiah can come. The Jerusalem Targum on Exodus xl. 10, calls Elijah the high priest who will be sent at the end of the exile. The Yalkut Schimeoni says: "When the Holy One — blessed be He! — shall re- deem Israel, three days before Messiah comes Elijah shall appear". Again the expectation was that Jeremiah or some other of the great prophets would prepare Mes- siah's way.
4. Messiah's advent: Messiah will come before the great judgment. Enoch xc. 90, is an exception to this, assigning the promised one's appearance after the judg- ment. He shall be called the Son of Man (Enoch). He existed before the creation of the world (Enoch, 4 Ezra). He is the Just one who will punish sinners (Enoch 38). He will judge from the throne of God (Enoch 45). He will go through heaven and earth to gather his elect (En. 45). "I saw another whose face was as the face of a man, full of meekness. . . . This is the Son of Man who possesses righteousness, in whom dwells right- eousness; who will reveal all hidden things" (En. 46). The Son of Man was known to God before the creation
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of the sun and stars. He will be a staff to the just, the light of peoples, and the hope of troubled hearts. For this was he elected before the world was made ; and he will be before God forever. The wisdom of the Lord of Spirits reveals him to the just. In his name will they be saved. He is the avenger (or redeemer?) of their lives. The wicked will disappear from before his face as straw in the fire (En. 48). In him dwells the spirit of wisdom and the power of righteousness (En. 49). Repentance must be the preparation for Messiah (En. 50). Soon will come a holy king who will rule the world (Sib. Or. 3363). Before the birth of Pharaoh, the last Goel (i. e. Messiah) was born (Beresch rabba 85). "Happy the hour when Messiah was created ; happy the womb that bears him ; happy they that behold him ; happy the eyes that are worthy to look upon him (Pesikta 149) : "When thou seest a man rise from the heart of the sea, he it is whom the Most High has appointed by whom He will redeem the world" (4 Ez. 13).
5. The great judgment : "With a loud voice God will speak to the whole people that devise vain things, and judgment will come upon them from the Mighty God, and they will all be driven by the immortal Hand. Swords of fire will fall from heaven upon the earth. Great torches will fall blazing amongst men. In that day the earth will be shaken by the immortal Hand. The fishes of the sea, the beasts of the land, the numberless birds, the souls of men and the sea will tremble before the immortal Face, and there will be woe . . . The walls
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elaborately built by wicked men will collapse, because the wicked have not acknowledged the law of the Great God, nor His judgment . . . God will judge them all . . . There will be cries of woe and shrieks of conflict over the earth while men are gathering together . . . He Him- self, the mighty Eternal God has bidden me to prophesy these things. It will not be unfulfilled — " (Sib. Or. 3669sq). The Most High will rise up in that day of judg- ment, and hold judgment upon all sinners. He will set His holy angels as guardians over the just, to guard them as the apple of their eye, until He makes an end of all wickedness and all sin" (Ap. Baruch, 100). The deeds of men are written in heavenly books (En. 48, 89, 90. Jubilees). Messiah judges from the throne of God (En. 45). The dead will come to judgment (En. 51, Dan. 12). "I saw the host of punishing angels holding whips and chains of iron and brass" (En. 56). The mighty and the wicked will be cast down, and all the elect will gather to the Son of Man (En. 61-62). The fallen angels and the apostate Jews shall be flung into a pit of fire (En.).
6. When will these things be? "Hope and sigh for the judgment, for you shall be as the angels of heaven for joy" (En. 104). The Great "end" was to come soon: the kingdom of God and Messiah was near. "May the Holy One come in our day !" was a frequent ejaculation of the rabbis. In the nature of things, late Judaism must have looked for a speedy advent of the Holy One. For not only the relief of the Jews, but God's honor was
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at stake. Yahwe had from of old promised His elect people the benedictions of His divine favor. Yet be- hold ! Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome, in quick suc- cession had utterly cast down and trampled upon the chosen children of God. What had become of Yahwe's promises? The temptation to scepticism was terrible; and sceptics had arisen and were every day growing more numerous in Israel. But in the face of Sadducean scoffing, the apocalyptic writers and zealots raised their cry that the day was at hand. The just, they said, are praying for it (En.). The angels are beseeching for it (En.). God will hasten the end, and shorten the time (Baruch 54, 83). The hours will run quicker (Bar. 30). The end will be at "the appointed time" (Dan. n35, Ez. 620) ; in the fulness of time (Bar. 40). It will be pre- ceded by "signs", and the just will recognize these signs. Daniel, Enoch and the Assumptio Moysis go into calcula- tions as to when the end will be. The Rabbis did not as a rule favor these too definite forecastings ; and encour- aged the belief that no one knew the hour but God. But the people were on edge for Messiah's appearance. Apocalyptic ideas had wide popularity and influence. False Christs arose and stimulated the great hope to a fever of desire. The zealot Hiskea after the death of Herod raised the cry : "Down with Rome ! We have no king but God!" Other pseudo- Messiahs took the names of prophets. Some called the people to the desert where they would see wonders wrought by God (Josephus, B. J. 11250; A. J. xx. 16/). Under Festus, an impostor
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promised to bring redemption (A. J. xx. 188), and ac- cording to Josephus the Jews were incited to their final disastrous insurrection against Rome by an oracle which assured them that the time had come when one of their race should rule the world (B. J. vi. 312). Finally under Hadrian came the well-known flaming out of Messianic enthusiasm, when Bar-Chochba, "Son of a star", made his claim to be the Anointed, and was hailed as Messiah by even Akiba, one of the most illustrious doctors of the Jews. Even the pagans could not fail to notice this stir in Israel. Tacitus writes that the conviction prevailed in the East, "tit valesceret Oriens, profecti Judaea rerum potirentur" (Hist. v. 13).
This then is the immediate background of the Gospel : The kingdom of God is near. Elijah the Precursor will soon announce Messiah. Messiah, pre-existent with God, will come to destroy the wicked and to reign in peace among the just. There will be mighty "signs" betoken- ing the end of this evil world, and the approach of the general judgment. Stars will fall ; the sun and moon will shine unnaturally; there will be fire and war and earthquake ; woe to those with child, for children shall be misbegotten! the dead will rise to judgment; the wicked will be flung into pools of fire. Repent, the day is near!
Such was the condition of mind among the Jews, when Christ appeared ; a condition created and intensified by a current of apocalyptic ideas which represented a de- graded but still sublime form of prophetism, and sprang
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immediately from the sorrows and the shame of subju- gated Israel. It was practically inevitable that a devout Jew of that time should share these expectations, just as to take a remote similitude — it was inevitable that a high- souled New Englander of half a century ago, who had grown up in an atmosphere of abolitionism, should be- lieve and hope that the hour of negro emancipation was about to strike. Those expectations were in the air. Jehovah's honor was bound up with the fulfillment of them. The ancient prophecies suggested them. The anxiety of the people's hearts was a sign that the time was near. So far then ought we to be from regarding a devout son of the Israel of that day who was inflamed with his nation's holiest hope, as a victim of foolish hallucination, that we should rather look upon him with reverence as one devoted to an Ideal, and a divine Ideal. Only accidentally, after all, would such a man be in error ; and the error itself was not of his making, but was humanly speaking unavoidable. His hope, his zeal, his hunger and thirst for God's righteous kingdom, were true and sacred, and such as may give a lesson to every later age. His mistaking the accidental conditions and the time of the kingdom's advent is of small importance in itself, and need not detract at all from whatever spiritual message he might have announced.
Out of the midst of Messiah-expecting Israel came John the Baptist. He unquestionably preached the apocalyptic message that the great day was near. "Re- pent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Even
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now is the axe laid on the root of the trees. There cometh He that is mightier than I . . . whose fan is in his hand thoroughly to cleanse his threshing-floor, and to gather the wheat into his garner ; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. Ye offspring of vipers who warned you to flee from the wrath to come"? These words, taken in connection with the antecedents and environment of the preacher, and studied in the light of the crowds that thronged to the Jordan — "Then went out unto him Jerusalem and all Judaea and all the regions round about Jordan" — and of the eager questions put by the people who "were in expectation", "whether haply he were Messiah", prove conclusively that John and his followers shared the belief of that day that the "kingdom" was "at hand", and "the wrath to come" approaching.
One of those that went down into the waters of the Jordan to receive the baptism of John was Jesus of Nazareth, an action of our Lord's which shows that He entered with sympathy into the message of the Precursor. Shortly afterward when John, having been put in prison, could preach no more, "Jesus came into Galilee, preach- ing the Gospel of God, and saying: The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent ye, and believe in the Gospel" (Mark i. 14, 15). "From that time began Jesus to preach, and to say : "Repent ye, for the kingdom of God is at hand" (Matt. iv. 17). From this time until the end of His life, our Lord took over from the Old Testament, from the apocalypses, and from the Baptist, the idea of the kingdom, and made it the
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257
sovereign thought, though divinely purifying it, of the Christian Gospel.
Was Christ too under the impression that the King- dom, in an eschatological sense, was at hand? Did He think that the world was soon to end, and God's judg- ment to come amid catastrophes of nature and woes of men? Did He in preaching the kingdom look down through an indefinite course of future history; or did He expect that the glory of the Messianic era would flash forth from the clouds of heaven in His own life- time or shortly after? These questions are important — though I think too great an importance can be given them — and must be answered according to the evidence.
I will set forth the main texts bearing upon the prob- lem, and later endeavor to draw such conclusions as they seem to warrant.
1. "Now after that John was delivered up, Jesus came into Galilee preaching the Gospel of God, and saying: The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent ye". Mk. i. 14, 15 cf. Matt. iv. 17.
2. Charging the Twelve as they set out on their first mission Jesus said : "And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand". "Go not into any way of the Gentiles, and enter not into any city of the Samari- tans; but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel".
"Verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone through the cities of Israel till the Son of Man come". Matt. x. 7> 5, 6, 23.
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3. "Whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of man also shall be ashamed of him when He comes with the glory of His father, and with the holy angels". Mk. viii. 38.
4. "He said to the multitudes also: When ye see a cloud rising in the west, straightway ye say: There cometh a shower; and so it cometh to pass. And when ye see a south wind blowing, ye say: there will be a scorching heat; and it cometh to pass. Ye hypocrites, ye know how to interpret the face of the earth and the heavens ; but how is it that ye know not how to interpret this time?" Lk. xii. 54, 56; Matt. xvi. 2, 3.
5. "And they [the disciples] kept the saying, ques- tioning among themselves what the rising again from the dead should mean. And they asked Him saying: The scribes say that Elijah must first come. And He said unto them: Elijah indeed cometh first, and restoreth all things . . . But I say unto you that Elijah is come". Mk. ix. 10-13. cf. ; Matt. xvii. 10-12.
6. "Now from the fig-tree learn her parable : when her branch is now become tender, and putteth forth its leaves, ye know that' the summer is nigh. Even so ye also when ye see these things [the darkening of the sun, the falling of the stars, and the coming of the Son of man in clouds with glory] coming to pass, know ye that He is nigh, even at the doors. Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass away until all these things be accomplished . . . But of that day or that hour
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knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father. Take heed ; watch and pray, for ye know not when the time is . . . Watch therefore, for ye know not when the lord of the house cometh, whether at even or at midnight or at cock-crowing or in the morning ; lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And what I say unto you I say unto all : Watch". Mk. xiii. "But take heed to yourselves lest haply your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness, and cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly as a snare, for so it shall come upon all them that dwell on the face of all the earth. But watch ye at every season, making supplication that ye may prevail to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man". Lk. xxi. "And as were the days of Noah, so shall be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days which were before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage until the day that Noah entered the ark, and they knew not until the flood came and took them all away ; so shall be the coming of the Son of Man . . . Watch therefore for ye know not on what day your Lord cometh . . . Therefore be ye also ready, for in an hour that ye think not, the Son of man cometh". Matt. xxiv.
7. "But at midnight there is a cry : Behold the bride- groom ! Come ye forth to meet him . . . And while they went away to buy, the bridegroom came, and they that were ready went in with him to the marriage-feast, and the door was shut. Afterward come also the other
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virgins saying, Lord, Lord, open to us. But he an- swered and said : Verily I say unto you, I know you not. Watch therefore, for ye know not the day nor the hour". Matt. xxiv.
8. "But know this, that if the master of the house had known in what hour the thief was coming, he would have watched, and would not have left his house to be broken through. Be ye also ready ; for at an hour that ye think not, the Son of man cometh". Lk. xii. 39, 40.
9. "Fear not little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom". Lk. xii. 32.
10. "And shall not God avenge His elect who cry to Him day and night, and He is long-suffering over them. I say unto you that He will avenge them speedily. How- beit when the Son of man cometh shall He find faith on earth?" Lk. xviii. 7, 8.
11. "Let your loins be girded about and your lamps burning, and be ye yourselves like unto men looking for their lord when he shall return from the marriage-feast, that when he cometh and knocketh, they may straightway open unto him". Lk. xii. 35, 36.
12. The sower is the Son of man ; the reapers are the angels. "He that has ears to hear, let him hear". Matt. xiii. 43.
13. "Verily I say unto you, there be some here of them that stand by which shall in no wise taste death, till they see the kingdom of God come with power". Mk. ix. 1.
14. "That the blood of all the prophets which was
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shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of 'this generation; from the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zachariah . . . Yea, I say unto you it shall be re- quired of this generation". Lk. xi. 50, 51.
15. "Whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words, of him shall the Son of man be ashamed when He cometh in His own glory, and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. But I tell you of a truth, There be some of them that stand here which shall in no wise taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God". Lk. ix. 26, 27 ; Matt. xvi. 28.
16. "With desire have I desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer. For I say unto you I will not eat it until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God ... I will not drink henceforth of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God shall come". Lk. xxii. 15. "Verily I say unto you, I will no more drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God". Mk. xiv. 25 ; "until I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom". Matt.
17. "The high priest asked Him and saith unto Him: Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed ? And Jesus said : I am ; and ye shall see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming with the clouds of heaven". Mk. xiv. 61-62 ; Matt. xxvi. 63, 64.
18. "And as He sat on the mount of Olives the disciples came unto Him privately saying: Tell us when shall these things be, and what shall be the sign of thy ooming; and of the end of the world. And Jesus an-
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swered and said . . . Many shall come in my name say- ing I am the Christ ... Ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars . . . Nations shall rise against nation . . . there shall be famines and earthquakes in divers places . . . they shall kill you ; you shall be hated of all nations for my name's sake. Many false prophets shall arise . . . And this Gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world for a testimony unto all the nations, and then shall the end come. When ye see the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place . . . then let them that are in Judea flee unto the moun- tains . . . woe unto them that are with child . . . then shall be great tribulation . . . there shall arise false Christs ... if they shall say unto you Behold, he is in the wilderness, go not forth! Behold, he is in the inner chambers! believe it not. For as the lightning cometh forth from the East and is seen even unto the West, so shall be the coming of the Son of man . . . But im- mediately after the tribulation of those days the sun shall be darkened and the moon shall not give her light and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken and then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven . . . and they shall see the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send forth His angels with a great sound of a trumpet and they shall gather together His elect . . . Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all these things be accomplished . . . But of that day and hour no one
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knoweth not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only". Matt. xxiv. cf. ; Mark xiii. ; Lk. xxi. These texts I transcribe just as our Gospels give them. Into the question of the genuineness of some of them I will not enter, since it would be beside my present purpose. Certainly some of the passages of the last made citation were not spoken by our Lord ; but taken as they are, the foregoing excerpts embody substantially the eschatological teaching of the Gospels, and as such, what conclusions respecting the important question with which we began, do they warrant ? I venture to think that they substantiate the following positions :
1. Our Lord was preoccupied to a high degree with the end of the present "world", the judgment following upon that catastrophe, and the advent in glory and power of Messiah, and the Messianic kingdom.
2. Our Lord seems to share the profound conviction of His time and of his Precursor, that those mighty events were near, very near. The very fact that He thought of them so much, that He spoke of them almost constantly, and that in direct reference to them He uttered His most solemn warnings and startling vaticina- tions, proves that He believed them to be already "at the door", hanging over the heads of "this generation", as close at hand as are the signs of a storm to the tempest behind them. That our Lord should have so spoken, and been so absorbed in the thought of the world's end and the glorious coming of the Son of man, if these divine manifestations were, in His mind, two,
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ten or twenty thousand years in the future, wears the look of a simple impossibility. If we add to this, the consideration of the immediate environment in which Christ grew up, penetrated as it was with just such eschatological ideas as His words express, we have the best of reason for at least respecting those students and scholars who hold that Christ was under the impression of His contemporaries that the end of the world and the coming of the Messianic era were imminent.
3. Our Lord distinguished two "moments" in the Messianic advent. The first is humble, inconspicuous, and seen only by those that have faith. The second will be the resplendent thaumaturgy of the approach of the Son of man in clouds and with His angels. The former of course refers to His own appearance among men. He was a peasant, the son of a carpenter ; His disciples were poor; His converts few. How could He be Messiah? Christ's answer is : "The kingdom cometh not with observation" ; it is as leaven hid in three measures of meal ; as a mustard-seed which is the least of seeds. But the Son of man will soon come not in lowliness, but with majesty. Some of those that stood listening to Him should not taste death till the kingdom come. The day of that victorious appearance is meanwhile to be an object of prayer and desire. "Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven". "Thy kingdom come !"
4. To this abiding conviction of Christ that the king- dom was at hand may be attributed a certain part of the Gospel's apparently impossible asceticism. That we
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should give up all earthly care ; that we should take no thought for food or raiment ; that we should disregard the holiest affections of the human heart, are counsels which would, if carried out by the majority of men, de- stroy civilization utterly. They can be understood as rational only when they are viewed from the standpoint of a faith which saw all that was earthly crumbling away before the on-coming of a new heaven and a new earth.
5. Our Lord is widely separated from those seers of Israel, from Daniel to fourth Ezra, who entered into precise calculations as to when the great end would come. The day and the hour no man knew. The angels knew it not ; nor did even the Son. But that it would come to pass within the life-time of many that saw and heard Him, His own words expressly declare.
6. In the earlier part of our Lord's ministry, the evi- dence seems to bear out the assertion that He did not regard His own death as intervening before the great consummation. He seems to have looked for the Mes- sianic "day" at almost any hour. When He sent out the disciples on their first mission He ordered them not to go among Gentiles or Samaritans, for they should not have finished the cities of Israel before Messiah would come in glory. His success in healing the possessed immensely confirmed this expectation. It was funda- mental in the Jewish belief of the time, that Messiah would destroy the kingdom of Satan. When therefore Christ expelled Satan from afflicted bodies, it was a striking proof that the Messianic age had come. Christ
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says so Himself. "If I by the spirit of God cast out devils, then is the kingdom of God come among you" (Matt. xii. 28; Lk. xi. 20). And when the disciples returned from their mission with the thrilling news that the devils were subject to them in His name, Christ, as we may say, fell into an ecstasy of victory. He rejoiced in the Holy Spirit, and said: "I beheld Satan falling as lightning from heaven" (Lk. x.). With Satan cast down, Messiah who had conquered him, must soon enter into the glory of the new kingdom, for the de- throning of the one must mean the speedy crowning of the other. But as Christ's ministry went forward, and encountered failure, hardness of heart, hypocrisy and the impregnable power of the Pharisees ; as finally it became clear that Jerusalem which had killed the prophets would also kill the Galilean prophet; the Lord, with His in- vincible trust in the Father, looked upon His threatened death as part of the Providential scheme, and predicted that soon after He should die, He would come in the majesty of Messiah glorified. In those closing days of His career on earth it was, that He addressed Jerusalem. "Behold I say unto you : Ye shall not see me henceforth till ye shall say: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord!" (Matt, xxiii. 39). At the last supper, rising in sublime confidence above the darkness and agony that were closing in about Him, He said: "I will not eat it [this passover] until it be fulfilled in the king- dom of God. I will not drink henceforth of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in
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my Father's kingdom". And at the trial He warned the high priest: "Ye shall see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming with the clouds of heaven". I state this opinion that Christ came to con- sider His death as a necessary immediate preparation for the "coming with the clouds of heaven" ; while recog- nizing it as possible that He looked forward to the event as about to happen even before His enemies could send Him to the cross. The awful words : "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me !" go far towards supporting such an inference.
7. The one or two texts, such as that which says that the Gospel must be preached to all nations before the end come, which appear directly to contradict this ex- pectation of our Lord in an imminent advent of the Messianic kingdom, have but a dubious standing in face of the massive evidence of practically the entire Gospel to the contrary. These isolated texts probably arose among believers to explain the delay in Messiah's glorious coming.
A practically conclusive demonstration that the Lord believed in and taught the near advent of Messiah's reign is, that primitive Christianity passionately shared this conviction. The fourth Gospel tells us that the early Christians believed that Christ had said that the Messiah would return in glory before the beloved disciple died. When that hope was disappointed, those who had trusted in it had to be admonished that "Jesus said not unto him that he should not die ; but : If I will that he tarry till I
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come, what is that to thee?" St. Paul voices the same great hope: "When Christ who is your life shall be mani- fested, then shall ye also with Him be manifested in glory" (Col. iii. 4) ; "We that are alive, that are left unto the coming of the Lord, shall in no wise precede them that are fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God. Then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air". "But con- cerning the times and the seasons, Brethren, ye have no need that aught be written unto you. For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. When they are saying: Peace and safety ; then suddenly destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child, and they shall in no wise escape. But ye brethren are not in darkness that that day should overtake you as a thief ... so then let us not sleep as do the rest, but let us watch and be sober". "May your spirit and soul and body be pre- served entire without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ . . . Faithful is he that calleth you who will also do it" (1 Thess. iv. and v.). Second Thessalonians is an answer to the murmurings and doubts so frequent in the eaily Christian communities, as month followed month, and year followed year, and still the Lord came not. "Be patient therefore Brethren until the coming of the Lord ... Be ye also patient; Stablish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand . . . Be-
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hold the judge standeth before the doors" (James v.). Doubters and scoffers are themselves made a sign of the "last day" in the second epistle attributed to St. Peter. "In the last days mockers shall come with mockery, walk- ing after their own lusts and saying: Where is the promise of his coming? for from the day that our fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. . . . But forget not this one thing, Beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some count slackness ; but is long-suffering toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to re- pentance. But the day of the Lord will come as a thief, in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall be dissolved with a fervent heat, and the earth and the works that are therein shall be burned up. . . . What manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy living and godliness, looking for, and earnestly desiring the coming of the day of God . . . According to His promise we look for new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness" (2 Peter iii.). And the Apocalypse after a detailed description of the end of the world says : "Behold I come quickly". "I, Jesus, have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things for the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, the bright, the morning star. And the spirit and the bride say ! Come. And he that heareth, let him say, Come". "He which testifieth these things saith : Yea! I come quickly. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus"! (xii.).
CHAPTER VI. "What Think Ye of Christ?"
DO those sincere students of the Gospel who feel con- strained by stress of evidence to hold that Christ was under the impression that the end of the world was near, thereby destroy His authority, and remove Him from the spiritual headship of humanity? So their orthodox critics incessantly charge. We are accused of making our Lord a senseless fanatic, the victim of the wildest delusions that ever misled an unstable brain ; of removing from Him every right to honor, reverence, and even respect; and of destroying the very foundation of spiritual life, for that foundation is and can be none other than Christ Jesus. Some criticisms go even further, and at least imply that if a single point of the Catholic creed be found mistaken, it is all over with morality, and nothing is left but animal gratification, a purposeless life, and a hopeless death.
This last imputation — to notice it first — can find lodg- ing only in minds that have never had a glimmer of understanding of what religion and the human Spirit mean. Were never a Bible written nor a Church estab- lished, not one ray would be lessened in the resplendent divinity of duty ; not one accent would be lost of the constraining voice of conscience. We need no written
270
"what think ye of christ" 271
page and no prophet's word to understand that virtue is our nobility and sin our shame. Whether tongues cease, or prophecies fail, or oracles be dumb, we knew that our heart's aspiration and our conscience's clear demands, are toward that Ideal which men call God. Could we read these our higher destinies and duties written by a divine hand in letters of fire across the sky, we should not be more sure of them, and ought not to be more im- pressed by them, than when we scan them in the solemn warnings and the holy affections which are within. No man is more to be pitied than one who throws the whole venture of his life's purpose and end upon the interpreta- tion of a text or the correctness of a theology. As though, forsooth ! his own soul were dumb, his heart lifeless, his conscience inarticulate. Though towards such a one we should feel not indignation but pity, still we cannot forbear sharing the resentful impatience of Matthew Arnold:
"Man is blind because of sin,
Revelation makes him sure; Without that who looks within,
Looks in vain, for all's obscure".
Nay, look closer into man !
Tell me, can you find indeed Nothing sure, no moral plan
Clear prescribed, without your creed?
272 FAITH AND CRITICISM
"No, I nothing can perceive!
Without that all's dark for men. That or nothing I believe".
For God's sake, believe it then!
No, the foundation of religion is not destroyed, the basis of morality not disturbed, the gravity of our life's responsibility not impaired, whatever become of books and formulas. In the immortal spirit of man is the immortal message of man's God-sonship. Whoso reads it not there, will but feebly discover it elsewhere.
Does this new interpretation of Christ dethrone Him from a place of primacy as the Teacher of our souls ?
Unquestionably it is a momentous departure from venerable views. It certainly implies that we cannot look upon the Prophet of Galilee as the very absolute infinite eternal Deity. But when did he ever say that He was? Not once. A wholly unique place in God's designs, a peculiar privilege of divine filiation, He claimed. But that He was the everlasting God ! He never made so awful a pretension. That meek child of the Father, that candid, trustful, courageous, humble Personality — are we not justified in saying that He would have repelled the suggestion that he was God Almighty as a fearful blasphemy ?
God was His life, His love, His enthusiasm. To God He prayed: to God He lifted up His sigh of zeal, and His cry of agony. But that He was God, that awful
"WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST'' 273
Infinite beyond the spaces of the stars, and beneath the foundations of the world, — impossible !
Can we understand what our words mean, when we say that the baby in Mary's arms was the Absolute ? that the carpenter's apprentice was the Creator of heaven and earth? that the man who said He knew not the hour of judgment, for the Father alone knew it; who in the anguish of Gethsemane prayed that not His will but God's be done ; who in that awful collapse of human strength upon the cross cried that God had forsaken Him ; can we understand what our words mean, when we say that He Himself was the Eternal to whom He prayed for strength, and unto whom He groaned in deso- lation? To maintain this is not only a hopeless scandal to our intellect, but the most grievous shock to our spiritual sense. Lift Jesus as high as we may; grant Him a union with the Godhead such as no other man may share ; kneel before Him as showing forth to us the moral perfection of Deity, so far as a created nature can ; but Infinity, Omnipotence, Omniscience, these He Himself has disclaimed.
Of what avail to us could Jesus be if He were very God? How could His temptation sustain us in ours; His prayer be a model for ours ; His disappointments, sorrows and sufferings bring any relief to ours ; if in these experiences of heart and soul and body, He en- joyed the happiness of infinite beatitude all the time? This would reduce His whole life to a kind of panto- mime. Temptation could mean nothing for Him. Suf-
274 FAITH AND CRITICISM
fering coexistent with Deity's boundless blessedness is incomprehensible. Supplication, discouragement and dis- tress in one who possesses the fulness of infinite being, can be but a dumb show, which contains not the slightest rational meaning for our finite lives.
But Jesus as the foremost of God's prophets and the sovereign spirit among humanity's saints and martyrs; Jesus as our brother, has a meaning and a divine meaning for us. What though, reacted upon, as all human exist- ence is, by environment and current ideas, He accepted the belief that the "new heavens and the new earth" were near, and interpreted (if He did so) His leadership and His message in terms of His nation's theology, as mes- sianic ; how small a thing is that extrinsic feature of His Gospel, in comparison with the absolute and everlasting value of His life and spiritual teaching. The early Greek converts themselves, to whom Messiahism was meaning- less, disregarded these Jewish elements in Christ and con- ceived Him after the Hellenic manner, as the Logos of God. Why then may not we likewise disregard them? Why may not we in our turn look upon Him in the more human mode of developed religious understanding, and hail Him as our divinest Witness to things spiritual and unseen, the holiest Preacher of human charity, the ever- living bond of human brotherhood? He teaches us the divinity of love ; trust in a Father-Spirit to whom we, His wayfaring children, may kneel, firm in the confidence that He hears the suppliant's cry and accepts the peni- tent's contrition; mercy toward the afflicted; gentleness
"what think ye of christ" 275
toward all; purity of heart; cleanness of thought; no- bility of motive; attention to the hidden springs of ac- tion rather than to external demeanor ; responsibility to a righteous Deity ; hope that God and goodness will in the end prevail against hypocrisy, brutality and sin ; enthu- siasm for lofty purposes which earthly standards cannot appreciate nor carnal senses see; courage that is estab- lished upon the pillars of eternity; charity that scorns the boundaries of race and caste and orthodoxy ; unselfish service that would bid us take the cloak from our own back to clothe the naked, and give the bread from our own table to feed the hungry ; and over all and inter- fusing all, the spirit of reverence, mysticism and prayer, whereby we live as before the Father's face, and as not forgetful of the just judgment of God.
This is the divine Gospel of Jesus — a Gospel which, had He never uttered it in words, we could read in His incomparable life. This is why He is the glory of humanity and the most holy creation of Almighty God. This is why we cling to Him; why He cannot cease forever to be the object of the highest loyalty and the most tender love of human hearts. He is our Christ, our Anointed. We have given our lives to Him, as our Leader, Captain, best-beloved Lord. In separating our- selves from theological theories concerning Him to which we think His authentic utterances give no support, we do not separate ourselves from Him as He was in reality and in truth. He still is ours as Teacher and Savior, though we cannot believe that He came to give a blood-
276 FAITH AND CRITICISM
satisfaction for the sin of Adam, whom He never men- tioned ; and though we deem it intellectually incompre- hensible and ethically impossible that the sovereign pur- pose of His life — again unwarranted by any word of His — was as a God-Son to "satisfy" a God-Father's jus- tice and wrath by suffering for transgressions of which He was wholly innocent.
Christ remains, though these poor primitive theories fall — and remain He must while humanity can worship goodness, and believe in the soul's intimations and intu- itions of the world unseen.
Epilogue.
It may occur to some that there is a notable incon- sistency in these letters. For whereas, in the first part of them I urge reforms that are merely of discipline and administration, I express views in the latter part which openly conflict with theological standards of faith. What possible interest can I have, it may be asked, in acci- dental reforms, when I have made shipwreck of ortho- doxy itself? Suppose the Church made all the changes in non-essential points which are here suggested, it would not bring her one step nearer the more vital modi- fication of dogma for which I have just been arguing.
This last statement I absolutely reject — and in reject- ing it I think I avoid the inconsistent position which may appear on the surface. In pleading for charity, justice and simplicity in official Roman Catholicism, I profoundly believe that I am thereby urging the first step of a process
EPILOGUE 277
that must end with destroying the existing rigidity of dogma. As has been said already, the ultimate solution of our present religious difficulties lies not in criticism, history, philosophy, theology or any other intellectual exercise in which contention is endless and agreement impossible. It lies rather in the development of spiritual life. With growth in the apprehension of spiritual values, in the understanding of the true and essential function of religion, the accidental outgrowths and the subsidiary by-products with which religion is still unfortunately confused and entangled, will disappear. When God, Christ, and the soul of man, are made the all-in-all of religion, we shall be one, because we shall have reached the fundamental and the sole ground of concord. We are divided now, because human elaborations of theology, human conjectures, human ambitions, human antipathies sunder us. But these things cannot withstand the ma- ture and perfect religious sense. Some of them must wholly fall away, and the others be reduced to their proper category of the provisional, temporary, and non- essential. The day that shall see mankind conceding the holy name of religion to naught else than love of God and man, undefiled worship, and unselfish service, will also witness the downfall of the poor system in which we have fondly fancied we could confine the Eternal. The more we contemplate Love, Truth and Service, the more we shall wonder that we could ever have confined these ideals to the forms of philosophies, theologies and hierarchies.
278 FAITH AND CRITICISM
In urging, therefore, disciplinary and administrative reforms in the Roman Catholic division of Christendom, I have been aiming all along at the higher and holier end of hewing away the intellectual barriers which, to the most grievous injury of pure religion, are keeping Chris- tians apart. Let charity but reign in the province of religion, superstition be cast aside, and secularity abol- ished, and I am convinced that dogmatic formulas, as finalities, will follow them in the course of time. The cleansing of the spiritual sense to the extent of enabling it to see that true religion must dispense with supersti- tion and brutality, will also purify it in due season to the extent of revealing to it that our relations with Deity are too interior and too lofty to be shackled by the the- ologies of past ages immeasurably less enlightened than our own. Time was when the representatives of religion declared that God commanded men to denounce their neighbor to the Inquisition, to steal his property, and to put him to death. The widening and deepening of human charity has put an end to these atrocities. Again have there been ages when the official vicegerents of high heaven have bidden nations in the name of God to depose their sovereigns at the nod of a Pope. The growth of freedom has abolished that. Today from the same seat of ecclesiastical authority the discredited voice speaks once more, commanding us to reject modern scholarship, and to confine our intellects forever to the metaphysics of the Nicsean theologians of the fourth century, and of the Tridentine speculators of the sixteenth. With the
EPILOGUE 279
deadly certainty of human evolution, this dictate, too, must fall and pass away before the majesty of indepen- dent Truth. And as religion in its immortal and essential elements shone only the more brilliantly with the death of the Inquisition. and the downfall of the deposing power, so will it still exist, and be of fairer countenance than ever, when it emerges from its grave-clothes of theology, and speaks its compelling word from the spirit of God to the spirit of man.
This last step in the long evolution of religion will be hastened by every plea for fraternity, by every protest against tyranny, by every denunciation of superstition. Wherever there is a notable good-fellowship between Catholic and Protestant, there inevitably results, though, it may be, unconsciously to those directly concerned, a diminution of the importance of their respective theolo- gies, and a recognition that with God sincerity and an upright conscience are of incomparably vaster importance than the official formulas of creeds. The logical end of this will be the placing of religion upon its proper basis of personality and character, and the considering of dog- matic metaphysics as merely subsidiary and unessential.
In urging then, Popes, Curias and hierarchies, to cast aside their ancient tyranny, to abandon secular ambitions, to destroy superstitions, and to use their great power for the promotion of philanthropy, brotherhood, the cultiva- tion of character, freedom social and freedom intellectual, I am convinced, as I have said, that I am recommending a great and necessary advance toward the day when
28o FAITH AND CRITICISM
transcendental speculations on the Inscrutable will domi- nate and divide us no longer; but the eternal principles of undefiled religion and Christ's blessed spirit will unite us in a federation of kinship to one another, and of son- ship to God, freed forevermore from the dissensions born of creeds, and so often consummated at the stake, and going forward together in concord and peace, toward the divine event to which the whole creation moves.
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