surrounded him in Russia a mixture of philosophism, Germanism, Protestantism, and illuminism, which seemed to him to announce a dark future for religion, except so far as this darkness was relieved by numerous conversions to Roman Catholicism. But we ought to let him speak for himself:

'Science, newly arrived here, is commencing its first exploit, which is to take religion by the throat. The conquests of the Protestant spirit, throughout all that portion of the clergy which is acquainted with French and Latin, are incredible. People talk about the Greek Church; the Russian Church is no more Greek than it is Syrian or Armenian; it is an isolated church under a civil head, just like the Church of England. If the patriarch of Constantinople were to dream of giving an order here he would be thought mad; and mad he would indeed be to attempt it. In this state of things, the London Bible Society has come fishing in Russia. This society spent last year 42,0007. It was proposed to open a branch here, and the offer was at once accepted, for the Russian is even more greedy of novelties than the Frenchman, with whom he has many points of resemblance. Persons of the highest respectability have become members, and amongst them the Russian and the Catholic archbishops.'

To the plan of 'sowing Bibles broadcast in the vulgar tongue, without distinction of persons and without explanation,' the Catholic Church has always, as is well known, been resolutely opposed. In Russia, says Joseph de Maistre,—

'A single ancient version-nay, a few lines only of this versionwrongly interpreted by popular fanaticism, have sufficed to create the Russian rascolnics (sectaries), that vast ulcer which eats into the national religion and spreads further every day. What will it be when a simple people, taking things absolutely by the letter, shall possess the Bible in the vulgar tongue in all the variety of the Bible versions?'

of

But it was as 'a Protestant enterprise' conducting men towards le riénisme Protestant,' Protestant nothingism, that the Bible Society called forth Joseph de Maistre's deepest enmity. The Society was in his eyes, respectable as might be many its members and excellent as might be their intentions, in real truth nothing more nor less than a Socinian machine for the overthrow of all ecclesiastical authority.' As a Protestant enterprise, he maintained, it moved infallibly towards the sure goal of Protestantism, towards Socinianism or Deism, as people then called it ;-in other words, dogmatic decay. With penetrating eye, with the acuteness of a trained observer and the joy of a bitter enemy, Joseph de Maistre saw the ruin, the certain and ever-increasing ruin, upon the Continent, of dogmatic and orthodox Protestantism. Protestantism was no longer a religion, he said, it was become a mere negation :

There

There is not a point of Christian faith which Protestantism has not attacked and destroyed in the minds of its partizans. What was sure to happen has happened; this unblessed system has allied itself with philosophism, which is indebted to it for its most dangerous weapons; and these two enemies of all religious belief have exercised so fatal an influence, that those fair regions of Europe where they prevail may be said to have no longer any religion at all.'

And therefore the Russian Church, which was fast imbibing 'the venom of Germanism and Protestantism,' and bidding fair to become professedly Protestant, would probably announce itself Protestant at a time when there were no Protestants left anywhere else.

In his keen, bold, unsparing criticism of continental Protestantism Joseph de Maistre is wonderfully successful. What we must never forget is that his own Catholicism, by virtue of which he thinks himself entitled to treat Protestantism thus disdainfully, and on which he affects to stand as on a rock, is an hypothesis arbitrary, artificial, and unavailing. Always therefore, in watching Joseph de Maistre attack and rout his adversaries, a good critic will have the feeling, that the ultimate fate of the day is not yet by any means fully visible, that the battle is not really won. It is as with Joseph de Maistre's haughty airs of defiance and contempt of middle-class and popular opinion. 'What is a nation, my good friend? The sovereign and the aristocracy. We must weigh voices, not count them. A hundred shopkeepers of Genoa would go for less with me, as to what is to be judged expedient or inexpedient for the community, than the family of Brignola alone.' The mind of the hundred shopkeepers may be indeed but, as Bacon says, ' a poor and shrunken thing'; but whoever shall imperiously substitute for it the mind of the House of Brignola, will find the resource artificial and insufficient.

The tendency to Protestantism was favoured in Russia by another tendency, also Germanic in its origin, and which was powerfully influential in the highest quarters-illuminism. Illuminism, says Joseph de Maistre, has for its ideal a kind of transcendental and universal Christianity; it conceives Christianity to have been transformed and disfigured by priests, and is extremely unfavourable to hierarchies and their claims; it looks upon Christendom as a collection of sects differing on many points, but all of them united at bottom in something good, which is fundamental Christianity. The adherents of this illuminism were very numerous at St. Petersburg and Moscow. The Emperor Alexander himself was profoundly imbued with it. The extraordinary Convention of Paris, in which 'Austria, Prussia,

Prussia, and Russia, after the defeat of Napoleon, solemnly declared their adherence to a universal Christianity, was a concession to the enthusiasm of Alexander for this ideal. The Emperor Alexander,' writes Joseph de Maistre, with his universal Christianity, his fundamental dogmas, and his Bible Society, may be sure that he is on the high road to the destruction of Christianity.' But the Emperor's subjects seemed much inclined to accompany him, and even the Catholic Archbishop joined, as we have already seen, the Bible Society, and when Rome expressed disapprobation and insisted on his leaving it, he took no notice. The picture of this Catholic dignitary, the Archbishop of Mohileff, who must indeed have been a curiosity, is in Joseph de Maistre's raciest manner. "The Archbishop of Mohileff is Sestrintzewitz, a man eighty years old; formerly a Protestant, then an officer of hussars, finally a Catholic bishop. It was he who said one day, as he saw the Emperor pass: "That is my Pope!""

In illuminism, however, and also in the dogmatic decay of Protestantism, there was much out of which Catholicism could make its profit:

The friends of illuminism swarm at St. Petersburg and Moscow; I know an immense number of them. And you are not to think that everything which they say and write is bad; on the contrary, they have some very sound notions, and,-what will surprise you, perhaps, -they tend towards us Catholics in two ways. First, their own clergy has no influence over their minds; they hold their clergy in utter contempt, and accordingly no longer listen to it; if they do not yet listen to our clergy, at any rate they respect it, and even go so far as to own that it has better retained the primitive spirit. Secondly, the Catholic mystics having much that is in agreement with the ideas which these illuminati have formed concerning internal religion, they have plunged head over ears into the reading of this class of authors. They will read nothing but St. Theresa, St. Francis of Sales, Fénelon, Madame Guyon, &c. Now it is impossible they should steep themselves in influences of this kind without being drawn considerably nearer to us; and in fact a great enemy of the Catholic religion said the other day, "What annoys me is, that all this illuminism will end in Catholicism.""

The secret societies, therefore, the centres of illuminism, which in Catholic countries are objectionable, are in nonCatholic countries useful:

Let them be. They are coming our way, all of them, but by a spiral line resulting from an invisible attraction towards the centre, modified by a strong though less potent action of pride, which continually draws them all it can from their direct course. These societies, besides, are detestable in Catholic communities, because they

attack

attack our fundamental principle of authority; but in non-Catholic nations I consider them to be of infinite use, because they keep fresh and alive the religious fibre in man, and preserve his spirit from Protestant nothingism."

Philosophism and Protestantism, on their part, too, serve the Catholic Church :

'From the moment that science makes its entry into a non-Catholic country, there is a division in the community; the mass will roll towards Deism, whilst a certain body draw near to us. In all Protestant countries, there is not a man of real intelligence left who is a Protestant; all are Socinians, except that band of persons, more or less numerous, whose conversion to Catholicism makes so much noise at present.'

6

So much noise did it make that Joseph de Maistre quitted Russia in consequence. Amidst the ferment of the new religious movement came a crop of sudden and unexpected conversions to Roman Catholicism. The multiplicity and rapidity of these conversions, principally in the highest rank of society, was, says Joseph de Maistre, an admirable spectacle.' They enraged the Minister of Public Worship, Prince Alexander Gallitzin; they greatly disturbed the Emperor himself, to whose autocracy the unbending attitude of the Church of Rome was unfamiliar and unpleasant, while its high doctrine of 'Extra ecclesiam nulla salus' went clean contrary to his notions of a universal Christianity. The Jesuits, whose connection with these conversions. was evident, were in 1816 by imperial ukase expelled from St. Petersburg, and their schools were closed. Joseph de Maistre's intimacy with the Jesuits made him suspected of complicity, and the Emperor commissioned one of his ministers to request an explanation from him upon the subject. Joseph de Maistre replied that he had never induced one of his Imperial Majesty's subjects to change his religion, but that, if any of them had happened to confide to him their intention to change it, he could not in honour and conscience have told them that they were wrong. The Emperor received the explanation with acquiescence, and continued to treat the Sardinian Envoy with the same courtesy and distinction as before. But Joseph de Maistre felt that his position at St. Petersburg could no longer be quite what it had been-perfectly free from all constraint and perfectly agreeable; and he made up his mind to quit a place which had become dear to him, and where he at one time thought of ending his days. He requested his government to recal him, and in 1817 he returned, as has been mentioned, to pass the last years of his life at Turin.

Vol. 148.-No. 296.

2 H

He

He left amongst his papers the sketch of a conclusion to be added to his 'Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg,' and with a passage from this conclusion we may fitly end our record of his comments on Russia and the Russian people :

'To my dying day I shall never cease to bear Russia in memory and to pray for her welfare. Her welfare will be a constant object of my thoughts. What will become of you amidst the general unsettlement of men's minds? and how will you manage to blend so many diverse elements which within a short space of time have collected amongst you? Blind faith, grossly superstitious ceremonies, philosophical doctrines, illuminism, the spirit of liberty, passive obedience, the hut and the palace, the refinements of luxury and the rudeness of savage life-what will come out of all these elements set in motion by that turn for novelty which is perhaps the most striking trait in your character, and which, urging you incessantly in the pursuit of new objects, makes you disgusted with what you possess? You dislike living in any house but one that you have just bought. From laws down to ribbons, everything has to follow the untiring wheel of your changes. Nevertheless consider the nations which cover the globe; it is the contrary system which has made them famous. In the tenacious Englishman you have a proof of it; his sovereigns still take pride in bearing the titles which they received from the Popes, so hard is it to detach this people from its old institutions. And yet what people surpasses the English in might, in unity, in national glory? Do you wish to be as great as you are powerful? follow, then, this example given you by England, set yourselves steadily against the rage you have for novelty and change, alike in the smallest things and in the greatest. You say, "My father died in this house, therefore I must sell it." Say rather: "He died here, therefore sell it I cannot." Have done with all your ignoble lath and plaster; God has given you granite and iron; use these gifts of God, and build for eternity. One looks in vain for monuments amongst you; one would say that you had an aversion to them. If you do nothing for time, what is time likely to do for you? As for the sciences, they will come if they are to come; are you made for them? we shall see. Meanwhile, you start, like all the nations of the world, with poetry and letters; your fine language is capable of anything; let your talents ripen without impatience. Your case is but that of all other nations; your warriors and statesmen have come before your scientific era. Strogonoff, who gave you Siberia; Suwarow, who made your arms famous throughout the world, were of no academy; better have no academy than have to fill it with foreigners. Your time, if it is really to come, will come naturally and without efforts."

If only, until the time of Russia is fully come, we could have relays of note-takers like Joseph de Maistre, to report progress every quarter or half century!

ART.