man is called upon by the categorical imperative within him to do the right, not because it is predominantly pleasurable, not because, as yesterday, when, actuated and impelled by the warm glow of devotion, the spontaneity of his being pressed in that direction, but simply because it is what his higher nature prompts, and what he feels that God approves. Virtue and holiness have still some attractive power of their own, but merely as pleasurable they are quite unequal to cope with the more vehement urgency of worldly desire; and, if they are to prevail, man by an anti-impulsive effort must co-operate with God, and show by that effort, which is always more or less painful, that he freely obeys the Divine injunction and freely responds to the Divine invitation. The influx into the soul of Divine possibilities has its source in the grace of God, but the acceptance and approbation of this higher life rests finally with the worthy exercise of man's high faculty of moral choice, and so the human is not wholly merged and lost in the Divine, but the true personality and responsibility of man remains intact.

Such is our author's position. We submit that he has done good service in explaining and defending that doctrine of Free. will which he maintains-and, we think, rightly-to be indispensable to a true Philosophy of Theism.

CHARLES B. UPTON.

ART. IX.-The Eve of Disestablishment in France and its Antecedents.

The question of the separation of Church and State is one which presents itself with so much urgency to thoughtful minds in our day, that it cannot be set aside. It is forced upon us by what we may call the logic of history, by which we do not mean the inexorable fatalism of the pantheist, but the sequence of cause and effect, determined mainly by man's free agency. The growing recognition of the complete neutrality of the State in matters of religion; the vindication not only of religious liberty, but of religious equality; the ever widening diversity of opinions both concerning philosophy and religion-all these influences which are to be traced in different degrees throughout the whole Continent of Europe, tend in the direction of disestablishment.

Our aim in the present paper is to show what is the exact

phase which this great question has assumed in France under the Third Republic-first in the domain of politics, and then among the various Churches still connected with the State. There is every indication that we are on the verge of Disestablishment. There may be great differences of opinion as to the rightness or wrongness of this sudden change; but in whatever aspect we regard it, it cannot fail to hasten the accomplishment of one of the most important reforms of our

age.

I.

We must take first a brief review of the antecedents of the present crisis. It is scarcely needful to remind the reader that up to the time of the French Revolution, Church and State were closely united in France, and formed as it were one sole and undivided power. This was emphatically the case after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 when religious unity was restored by the most odious persecution. This fusion of the two powers was made all the more complete by the opposition offered by the Church of France to the Papacy. Under the name of Gallicanism it jealously guarded all its peculiar rights and liberties; and by the close of the old régime, these had become more and more identified with the supremacy of the king, who, as eldest son of the Church, held the sword to smite down its adversaries. The French Revolution in its first phase in 1789 was satisfied with very incomplete reforms in the relations of Church and State. It did indeed proclaim religious liberty, but it did not go so far as religious equality; for it instituted a national Church to which it gave a civil constitution. Its idea, no doubt, was to secure a clergy subservient to its bidding and reflecting its image, as under the old monarchy. To attain this end, the great Constituent Assembly did not scruple to transform itself into a Council, and to remodel the constitution of the Church. It decided that the clergy should be appointed by popular election, and not by papal investiture, and that they should be required to take the civil oath. This was a complete subversion of the whole Catholic discipline, and provoked the most determined opposition, thus imperilling the whole of the new order of things. The Constituent Assembly had taken possession of the immense wealth of the old Church, and the only compensation it made was to tax the budget of the State with the salary of the new or constitutional clergy, as they were called. The advocates of the

union of the two powers maintain that the budget of worship is an inextinguishable debt which the State in France owes as compensation for the alienation of the property of the ancient Church of France, so that the union of Church and State is practically indissoluble. This claim cannot be sustained. As a matter of fact, the Republic proclaimed disestablishment in 1793, and thus swept away the tradition of the budget of public worship. There is no law by which a nation can be compelled to drag the institutions of the past after it like a clog, under penalty of finding its progress stopped altogether. That which is just and reasonable is that fair compensation should be given to the people of any age in which a great reform is accomplished, so that they may not be crushed under its pressure, or be made to bear alone the burden of accumulated abuses. But when once this fair compensation has been given by means of equitable transitional measures, the debt of the past is cancelled, and the nation may go boldly forward in the path of progress.

The separation of Church and State was decreed by the Convention in 1795 (year III. of the Republic). This step was taken abruptly, without any compensation offered, and under conditions altogether unfavourable; for the Government of the country was hostile to all religion, and the distress prevailing was terrible after all that the nation had gone through. Yet such is the vitality of religion when thrown upon its own resources, that public worship was voluntarily re-established in 38,000 parishes, and the Gallican Church, which had the largest number of adherents, entered upon a most interesting religious reformation, the incontestable proofs of which remain in the records of its two Councils held in Paris. The chief influence in the Gallican Church at this time was that of Bishop Grégoire. He was at once an earnest Christian and a sincere patriot, and had borne himself bravely, first in his defence of the Republic against the Royalist clergy, and then in the defence of the faith against the atheistic terrorists.

It is well known how Napoleon I. stepped in to put an end to this healthy voluntaryism, which took so kindly to the upturned soil of France, in which the national calamities seemed to have made deep the furrows for the Divine seed. The great despot could not brook that one little hill of liberty should break the dead level of universal subjection. Especially was he averse to the liberty of souls, the most persistent and obtrusive of all. As Madame de Stäel has truly said, 'He wished to have a clergy as he had chamberlains, at his beck and call,'

In 1802, by dint of threats and promises, he concluded with the Holy Father the famous Concordat, by which, in exchange for the subsidy and protection of the State, he exacted from the clergy complete submission to his government. He further obtained from the Pope the reorganization of the episcopal hierarchy in accordance with his designs-that is, by introducing into it certain old constitutional priests, though to Rome this was as the abomination of desolation. The 'Mémoires' of Cardinal Gonzalez, and Count d'Haussonville's book on the same subject, which is the highest possible authority, bring before us a whole series of transactions between Napoleon and the Papal Court, in which fraud contends with violence for the mastery; and yet, after all this, Napoleon added, of his own initiative, a postscriptum to the Concordat by the legislation of Germinal Year X. This postscriptum forged the last link in the chain of clerical bondage. The clergy was to be allowed no direct communication with the Pope. All briefs from Rome were to be subjected to the censorship of the State. Heavy penalties were attached to any infraction of this Draconian law. The Protestant church and the Jewish synagogue were soon absorbed into this organization, which was naturally less oppressive to them than to the Catholic Church, since neither of them stood in any relation to a foreign power.

It is notorious that this Concordat, which was to give peace to the country, only engendered strife between Church and State; and that the new Constantine showed himself as intolerant as the old, of all priests who did not receive his commands with docility. The foremost of these offenders was the unhappy Pope Pius VII. himself, whom Napoleon dragged from one prison to another, till the sudden downfall of the First Empire gave him back his liberty.

The regime of the Concordat remained intact under the restoration of the Bourbons, in spite of an abortive attempt in 1817 to re-establish the exclusive privileges of the Catholic Church. It began, however, to be assailed by the Ultramontane party, which, under the leadership of its brilliant and impassioned orator, the Abbé de Lamennais, acquired new and extensive influence. Lamennais could not brook the subordination of the Church to the State. After the Revolution of 1830 he went further, and, with his young disciples, Lacordaire and Montalembert, he started the journal L'Avenir, which endeavoured to effect a reconciliation between the Catholic Church and free institutions. The attempt was as futile as it was sincere; and in 1832 Gregory XIII. taught

Lamennais

He

him, by the severe condemnation passed upon him in the Encyclical, that between Rome and liberty, especially religious liberty, the opposition is radical and absolute. would not let himself be crushed by the papal anathema. rose up indignant, and vindicated his position in two books throbbing with fervid eloquence, Les Affaires de Rome,' and 'Les Paroles d'un Croyant.' His two young disciples, Lacordaire and Montalembert, only submitted partially to the Encyclical, for they held fast their liberal opinions. They had received from Lamennais the grand idea of the independence of the Church, and they never ceased to attack the system of the Corcordat and to demand religious liberty in its widest applications as most favourable to the development of their Church.

The Papacy, satisfied with having condemned the principle of liberty, was disposed to wink at its applications, which were, indeed, its only hope, for it was evident that since the Revolution of 1830, the Catholic Church could never again hope to enjoy its ancient privileges, and, if it regained its power at all, it must be through the reign of liberty. Thus the principle of the separation of Church and State gradually gained ground even in the Catholic Church, which found itself perpetually held in check by the restrictions of the Concordat, whether it sought liberty of teaching in all grades, or the restoration of its old religious orders.

Nothing, however, was further from the thoughts of the two great political parties, between whom the power alternated under the July monarchy, than the idea of the separation of Church and State. The conservative party, under its eminent leader M. Guizot, was so far from recognizing the independence of religion in relation to the State, that it did not even allow any liberty of worship outside the system of the Concordat, and in spite of the vigorous protests of the liberal party, insisted that no meeting of unauthorized religious bodies could be held without previous sanction from the State.

The liberal party also endorsed the Concordat. M. Thiers, in his great history of the First Empire, eulogized it in every aspect. It was in his view a master stroke of the genius of the First Consul to have placed religion entirely under the control of the State. There were, indeed, two politicians who on this subject, were in advance of their age. One was De Tocqueville, who had become convinced by his visit to the United States that the only way of reconciling religion with liberty was the separation of Church and State. The other