clergy as salaried functionaries of the State. The act by which Waldeck Rousseau recently decreed the suppression of the stipends of certain bishops was wholly arbitrary, and, moreover, the violation of an organic law. It was the partial repudiation of a public debt, quite as dishonourable as if the payment of interest of three per cent bonds were withheld from certain bondholders.

The position of Protestant and Jewish ministers in France is entirely different. They do receive salaries which are purely gratuitous. The Revolutionists did not trouble them, and they had no part in the Concordat of 1801. We may say that the French Revolution was appeased, but it is not over by any means. No nation less well founded and grounded could have withstood as France has done the shocks and upheavals of a century.

To this day France is still profoundly Catholic, in spite of the millions of public money expended in so-called non-sectarian primary schools and colleges. Travellers stroll into French churches, in summer, at High Mass on Sundays at 9.30 or 10.30 generally, and because they find a very small congregation at this service they report that the churches are deserted and religion fast dying out. They ignore the fact that in these churches low masses have been said hourly since 5 a.m., so that people may comply with their duty, and then go off on their outing. Lyon has many large beautiful old churches, and many handsome new ones. Yet not one of them could contain all their parishioners if they wished to attend the same service.

For nearly twenty-five years the Government has been running its educational machine at immense cost, compelling the French to support schools they will not patronize, as well as those of their own choice. Nevertheless, State colleges and primary schools are so neglected that laws are being devised to compel parents to send their children to them. If all other means fail, the congregations of both sexes occupied in teaching will be suppressed. This is the Government’s programme. There is nothing so bad as the corruption of that which is best. France is still profoundly Catholic, and it is only natural that the struggle between good and evil should be sharp here. The forces of reaction and action are always proportionate. Hence it is that France has always been “the centre of Masonic history,” and of the Goddess Reason’s supreme efforts against Christianity. Her temperament, too, makes her a choice field for experiments.

We can therefore understand M. Waldeck Rousseau’s indignation when so many bishops openly expressed their sympathy with and admiration for the Assumptionist Fathers who were condemned recently—and condemned for what crime? For being an unauthorized association of more than twenty persons, when there are hundreds of other similar associations at the present moment.

Briefly stated, the present phase of the Church in France is simply the nineteenth-century phase of the struggles of Investiture in the Middle Ages; the secular power seeking to have and to dominate a national Church, whose ministers are to be nothing but state functionaries, bound to serve and to support the Government. This was the old pagan ideal, and every portion of the Church that has renounced allegiance to Rome has fallen into this condition. In England, in Russia, in the Byzantine Empire, in Turkey, in Africa—wherever there is a national Church—it is little better than a department of State. The Gallican Church narrowly escaped a similar fate in the days of Louis XIV. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy was another desperate and abortive attempt to nationalize and secularize the Church in France. Gloriously, too, her clergy expiated their momentary Gallican insubordination. All over France they were guillotined, drowned, and exiled, and imprisoned, en masse, rather than submit to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. There is nothing more admirable in the history of Christianity than the conduct of the victims massacred in the convent of the Carmelites, converted into a prison by the Jacobins. Martyrs and confessors were as numerous as in the first centuries of the Church, and from their ashes arose a new French Church purified by poverty and suffering.

Never have institutions of learning and charity under religious direction been so numerous. No country has a clergy more zealous, more learned, more united with the Holy See than that of France to-day. No wonder then that the powers of darkness are devising means to destroy the new structure, so zealously and so laboriously raised on the ruins accumulated by the Revolution of 1790.

“Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar among the people.” Violent measures would rouse French Catholics from their political apathy. The Government cannot afford to do this. Religious liberty must be destroyed by degrees—and herein lies the danger.

THE TWO CAMPS

May 25th, 1900.

TO the thoughtful and sympathetic observer, France presents a singular spectacle of duality—two camps and two standards are confronting each other, neo-paganism and Christianity. By Christianity I mean, of course, Catholicism, for though there may be good Protestants, who adhere to some of the truths of revealed religion, such a thing as a good pervert French Protestant is a lusus naturæ, practically non-existent. It is a notorious fact that Protestants in France as elsewhere in Europe are, as a rule, absolutely indifferent in religious matters since they have ceased to be persecuted, and in many cases they have become the enemies of revealed religion.

All civilization, all redemption from barbarism, is fostered and developed around a sanctuary. Consecrated hands have, in every instance, laid the corner stone of the social edifice. The Church, the school-house, the university, the courts of justice—these are the normal steps by which societies, cities, and nations have advanced in the Old World out of barbarism and chaos since the overthrow of the Roman Empire. Of France this is pre-eminently true. Hundreds of villages and towns bear the names of holy missionary monks who built first a cell, and then a monastery around a chapel, which became the centre of a village, that grew in time to be a city. We see the same thing all over Europe and in the British Isles. Gibbon says that the French bishops made the French monarchy as bees construct a honeycomb. Like every institution that bears a religious imprint, this monarchy was long-lived. Those who descant so volubly on the flightiness of the French people, always overturning their government and never satisfied with the one they have, would do well to reflect that the French monarchy lasted some fourteen centuries. When this monarchy was overthrown by the assassination of Louis XVI there was formed a vortex in which were engulfed millions of human lives. Not that I consider a monarchical or any special form of government indispensable to France’s prosperity. There is, however, one essential condition. The generating principle of the French nation was the Catholic Faith. Without it, France would no longer be herself. She would disintegrate interiorly, and dismemberment and decadence would follow. France is still profoundly Catholic, in spite of the prodigious efforts made since the days of Voltaire and Tom Paine by numerous native and alien religious vandals, whose prostituted intellects were garnished from the storehouse of centuries of Christian culture. She will always be this or nothing. For any one who knows France, historically and psychologically, it is preposterous to think of a substitute creed, corresponding to any of the various shreds of Christianity, which do duty for religion under the name of some one or other of the multitudinous Protestant sects.

France, I repeat, will always be Catholic or nothing. But the Government is on