ART. VIII.-Poland: Her Religious History and Prospects. The Polish Captivity. By SUTHERLAND EDWARDS. TWO vols. London: W. H. Allen & Co. 1863.

Vicissitudes de l'Eglise Catholique des deux Rites en Pologne et en Russie. Paris, 1843. 2 tomes. Avant-propos par le COMTE DE MONTALEMBERT.

FEW countries can boast of a history fraught with more melancholy interest than Poland. It is not merely that, low as she has now fallen, she once stood high among the nations of Europe, with a king of her own choice, a proud race of nobles and heroes, and an army flushed with a thousand victories. It is not that she once owned a domain stretching from the Vistula to the Baltic, comprising Lithuania, Hungary, and Bohemia, and could boast of a series of conquests comprehending Sweden, Tartary, and Muscovy itself; for even Russia, which now tramples her in the dust, was at one time all but added as an appanage to the throne of Poland. Similar instances of fallen greatness are not rare in the history of ancient nations; but the singular fact in the case of Poland is, that, vanquished, torn in pieces, bound and bleeding at every pore, she retains to this day, as fresh and unbroken as ever, her spirit of national independence. Other nationalities have crouched, practically or nominally at least, under the yoke of their conquerors. Poland, like some haughty prince, proscribed, confiscated, imprisoned, has ever refused to own the authority of her oppressors, and stalks in sullen majesty over the soil which they would make her prison, but which she claims as her property. Every effort has been made to crush this national spirit; her kingdom has been partitioned; she has been denuded of all her ancient rights; attempts have been made to change her language, her religion, her customs; she has been forbidden to sing her native songs, or to wear her national garb. But all in vain; the Pole will neither become an Austrian, nor a Prussian, nor a Russian; he will speak in no other than his mother tongue; he will chaunt his plaintive national melodies, which sound more like litanies than lyrics, in some sequestered dell, or behind some convent wall; or, if permitted to walk in procession, he will appear personified in a populace, marching with tapers in their hands, and with one voice reciting the hymn: "Holy Lord God, God Almighty, God Immortal, have mercy upon us! Be pleased to give us back our native land. Holy Virgin Mary, Queen of Poland, pray for us !" Or, if her children should gather ominously in one of the squares of Warsaw, and some Russian official should ask, as Gortschakoff once asked, in the tones of an angry bear, "What do you want?" the only reply, uttered in a wail of anguish, will be, "We want our

country!" This is no factious spirit, kindled by designing demagogues, no passing emotion evoked by outrage. True that of late, stung to madness by insults beyond human endurance, Poland has once and again sprung to her feet; and, shaking her chains in the face of her head-gaoler, has attempted to gain her freedom by force of arms. In these attempts she has hitherto failed; and, after the sad occurrences from 1830 to 1848, it did appear that the Polish cause had been finally lost. But these were only the fitful eruptions of a volcanic fire which burns deep down in the national soul, and which the "many waters" of oppression will never quench. In Germany, we understand, she has passed into a proverb; for there, when anybody insists on attempting some hopeless enterprise, his friend will say, with a smile, "Well, Poland is not lost yet!" Her present position, viewed in its relations to the past, bids fair to turn into seriousness the saying that has been used in derision. The German proverb may now be capped by another common in Poland, that " you may strip a Pole of his cloak, and of his coat and waistcoat; but if you offer to strip him of his shirt, he will take back the whole." It is certainly the general conviction, not among enthusiasts merely, but among our oldest and wisest politicians, that Poland will live again; the visionaries now are those who believe in the continuance of the present order of things in that unhappy country.

But the interest connected with Poland does not rest merely on her political misfortunes. It becomes intensified in no ordinary degree when we consider how these have been entwined all along with her religious history. It is a common but complete mistake to suppose that Poland has been a thoroughly Catholic country, in the sense of having been a blind unquestioning disciple of the Roman Church. Romish writers have, of course, uniformly claimed her as their own, and down to the present day the Pope has called her his "dearest Polish republic, the nation so orthodox and so glorious by its faith." What is more, the Ultramontane party, with Montalembert as its literary exponent, maintains that "the security and integrity of the Catholic religion, are identified with the maintenance of the political state of Poland." We need hardly say that, had Russia not been the aggressor, had the Roman not stumbled upon a rival in the Greek Church, we should have had fewer elegiac strains from Rome over the partition of Poland, and might never likely have beheld the odd contretemps of Popes pleading for national freedom. At no period, however, has Poland been remarkable for religious bigotry. The national temperament is adverse to it. The natives of Sarmatia, as ancient Poland was called, have ever borne and still retain the distinctive features of their Oriental origin.

Sombre, thoughtful, contemplative, they are less addicted to superstition than to mystic speculation; their religion partakes more of the sentimental than either of the dogmatic or the ritualistic element; and if attached on any side of their natures to the Roman Catholic forms, it is more through the imagination than either through faith or affection. If the Pole is an idolator, the god of his idolatry is his country; his native land is the idol at whose shrine he pours out his devoutest homage. Religion is valued mainly as supplying a sublime allegory of national triumph, or as furnishing graceful trappings to national woe. The mass affords a fair pretext for celebrating the memory of the glorious dead, and the Virgin is venerated much less as the Mother of God than as " the Queen of Poland."

In the earlier records of Polish history, examples are not wanting of the spirit which we have indicated. The conversion of Poland to Christianity may be traced back to the ninth century. The first who carried the glad tidings to the Slavonian nations of Moravia and Bohemia, and afterwards to Poland, were two brothers, named Cyrillus and Methodius, natives of Thessalonica. These missionaries, embued with the true spirit of their religion in its Oriental form, and superior to the worldly policy which too often actuated the emissaries of Rome, translated the Scriptures into the Slavonian, with which they were familiar; and, besides instructing the people, conducted the whole service of the Church in the vernacular tongue, dispensed the communion in both kinds, and introduced other customs of the Greek Church, among which was the marriage of the clergy, who, according to the rules of that church, were not only permitted but enjoined to marry. This preservation of the national language, and its use in the sacred service, which continued down to the fourteenth century, together with the free institutions of the country, go far to account for the distinct nationality by which Poland has so long been distinguished. One of their queens, Hedvige of Anjou, who flourished about the close of that century, is indebted for the high place which she holds to this day in the memory of the Poles, not more for her piety and virtues than for having been the patroness of the liturgy in the national language. As the power of Rome increased, every effort was made to supplant these early insti

*

• Historical Sketch of the Reformation in Poland, by Count Valerian Krasinski, vol. i. 33. The author of this work, published in two volumes (1838-1840), was a Polish Protestant, of high family, of great learning, and most amiable character. His various works on his native country, to which we have been much indebted, being published at a time when the public interest in Poland was at a low ebb, attracted little notice. We knew the author, and a finer specimen of the Christian, the scholar, and the gentleman, we have seldom met with.

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tutions. The consequence was a perpetual struggle between the supremacy of Rome and the national independence. The monarchs of Poland were jealous of a foreign authority intermeddling with their own; the nobles eyed with suspicion the ascendancy of the clergy; and even many of the clerical order, though acknowledging the Pope as the head of the Church, opposed his authority on many points, more especially the celibacy of the priests, an ordinance to which they finally submitted in Poland with more reluctance than in any other country.

As in our own country, these contests rose occasionally to such a pitch as to terminate in blood. The quarrel between king Boleslav the dauntless, and Stanislaw, bishop of Cracow, was a contest between the temporal and spiritual powers very similar to that between king Henry II. and Thomas à Beckett. According to the old story, the Polish monarch slew the prelate with his own hands at the foot of the altar; the more modern version would have it, that the bishop died by a judicial decree, but adds, that after death his head was chopped off and his body cut into pieces. When Casimir the Great was excommunicated by the Pope, in the fourteenth century, for reforming abuses among the clergy, the ecclesiastic who ventured to notify it to the sovereign was seized by the people and drowned. In the same century, one named John Pirnensis began to preach that the Pope was antichrist, and Rome the synagogue of Satan. Multitudes embraced his opinions; whereupon the Inquisition at Cracow commissioned one of their number to extirpate the heresy. The inhabitants of Breslau who had become disciples of Pirnensis, rose as one man against the inquisitor and put him to death. His cloak, stuck through with knives and stiff with gore, was long exhibited as a relic.

These conflicts between the clerical and secular powers, which generally ended in the triumph of the latter, prove the feeble hold which the papal sway had over the Polish people. The thunder of the Vatican, which shook to their very foundations the thrones of western Europe, fell harmless in Poland, where the spirit of independence revolted against implicit submission either to temporal or spiritual authority; where the king himself was only permitted to rule according to law; where the Diet, as the supreme senate was termed, could issue its rokosh, or decree of armed resistance against the unconstitutional mandates of the sovereign, and the veto of a single member could dissolve the Diet. It thus appears that, long before the reformation, Poland was ripe for welcoming a free gospel and a reformed church. For this she was still further prepared by the extensive spread of the Hussite doctrines. At the

Council of Constance, the Polish nobility protested against the execution of John Huss. And after that execrable event, the doctrines of the Bohemian reformer, which coincided with those of Wickliffe, from whom he derived them, were propagated by his followers with such success, that the historians of Poland are at some loss to explain how they should have failed to become universally adopted.

The Reformation of Luther was rapidly communicated to Poland, which had frequent intercourse with Germany, and more particularly with Wittemberg, where many of the youths of the Polish nobility resorted for their education. Dantzic, the chief town of Prussian Poland, was the first to welcome the new doctrines; and the first protestant sermon was preached there in 1523, by one John Hegge, surnamed Winkelblack. Attempts were made by the clergy to arrest the progress of the new heresy, by proclaiming a royal edict against it, and by laying fetters on the press and on education; but these proved unsuccessful, for in 1539 the liberty of the press was established by a royal ordinance, and the Diet formally granted licence to all Polish subjects to study in foreign universities. The king, Sigismund I., noble, upright, and brave, but of an easy, luxurious temper, refused to execute with rigour the edicts which the clergy extorted from him; on being pressed to imitate the example of Henry VIII. of England, whose writings against Luther had then procured him from the Pope the title of Defender of the Faith, he replied, in a tone that savoured of the religious indifference which characterised some of the learned at that period, "Henry may write against Martin as he pleases, but I beg he will allow me to remain monarch of the goats as well as of the sheep." During the reign of Sigismund, the numbers of the reformed received an important accession by the immigration of the Bohemian brethren, amounting to a thousand souls, who had been compelled by persecution to leave their native country.

Thus there was every prospect, at the commencement of the Reformation, that Poland would speedily become a Protestant country. The prospect seemed all the brighter, from the liberal spirit which distinguished the adherents of the Church of Rome. Poland sent no representatives to the Council of Trent.

The accession of Sigismund Augustus, in 1540, was attended by one of those anomalies on the part of the Polish Protestants, to which so many of their misfortunes may be traced. The young prince, shortly before his father's death, struck with the beauty and accomplishments of Barbara Radziwill, a lady of rank, had contracted a secret marriage with her, which, on ascending the throne, he honourably acknowledged. The relatives of Barbara openly professed the reformed opinions; and her brother,