understand, however, the real religious situation in France it is necessary to recognise the principles at issue between the French Government and the Vatican. To grasp these effectively we must go back a long wayeven to the year 1789. Between religion and the world, or, let us say, between the Church and the State, history teaches us-even if we had not our Lord's own forecast of the relations to be expected-that there must at times arise difficulties more or less grave. Three solutions only of the relation between them are possible. (1) There may be a national religion; (2) or a concordat between the Holy See and the State; or (3) complete separation. All these three solutions have been tried in France since the year 1789.

The first-the nationalisation of the Church-was tried in the revolutionary period of 1790-95, and of course it failed utterly for obvious reasons. The civil constitution of the clergy was drawn up in full accord with the principles of the Revolution then in vogue. France had professedly gone back to the pagan world for its patterns and its models, and the official conception of religion, derived therefrom, was that it was a function of the State. There was to be a pontifex as there was to be a consul, and the priest was to be a moral officer, a preaching magistrate, a "fonctionnaire" with a State licence and a State position, set apart to work in the State department of religion. The scheme failed, mainly because the designers took no account of the fact that all real religion was essentially something apart from the natural order. All history teaches us plainly that religion must exist, and always has existed, only in so far as it corresponds to a need of humanity which the state has no power to satisfy. If in 1790 the Catholic

U

Church could have allowed itself to be absorbed into the State in the way proposed, it would have lost its vital principle. It would have ceased to be the Catholic Church. "It would have ceased to be a faith, or indeed even a thought or sentiment, and have become a mere fashion."

"From 1790 to 1795," says that acute writer and eminent member of the Academie Française, M. Emile Faguet," the clergy and the constituents were entirely wrong in their idea of a Church." They were wrong precisely because they did not understand that religion has to do with country and not with government, and that the functions of the government are not the same as those of "the country." The Catholic religion, precisely because it is Catholic, is universal, and is the same religion existing in all countries. It assumes national characteristics, it is true, in different countries: it is Spanish in Spain, English in England, Italian in Italy, and American in the United States of America. It is, however, the same religion in all countries for this reason: if it be Catholic, religion as religion can be fashioned and formed by no government; it cannot be cast in any one stereotyped mould; it can never be made into an official department of any one State.

The third solution-separation of Church and State —was tried in A.D. 1795. The idea had indeed always been prominent during the period of the Revolution, but when the actual separation came, the religious régime of the Directoire lasted only two and a half years. After a brief period for consideration and experiment, Napoleon I in 1801 entered into the Concordat with Pius VII, about which we have lately heard much, and by which the government of the Church in France is still regulated. Some such agreement between the Pope and the

temporal rulers of France was of course nothing new. In one form or other, indeed, it had existed from the time of the great Saint Louis. The treaty between Francis I and Pope Leo X as to the government of the Church in France, endeavoured to remove all ordinary causes of friction by a careful and well-defined division of the purely spiritual sphere from those temporal adjuncts necessary to a Church endowed with great possessions. Even up to the eve of the Great Revolution this method of solving difficulties which might arise between Church and State was in force, and it was found in practice to work well. In reality it is to the existence of this ancient concordat that M. Hanotaux the statesman, diplomatist, and historian, attributes the fact that France was saved to the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, when the great religious revolt of the Reformation involved so many other countries.

In coming to his agreement with the Holy See about the government of the Church in 1801, Napoleon was certainly not actuated by any love for the religion of his country. To him it was a mere matter of State politics. It was pressingly necessary, for instance, to wipe out that great debt which the nation owed to the Church on account of the confiscations of ecclesiastical property in the Revolution. This settlement required the Pope's direct sanction, and the writing-off, or remission of the greater part of this amount was the price paid by the Church for that measure of protection to religion, secured by the Concordat. It must be remembered that the guaranteed, though slender, stipends promised to be paid to the clergy by the State formed but a small fraction of the old ecclesiastical revenues. Napoleon, too, thought he saw in the Concordat a means of riveting on

the hands of the priests the chains which already bound them to the government and fettered their freedom of action. Had he been dealing with any human institution this crafty plan for keeping the Church in servitude would in all probability have succeeded. Looking back, however, over the century that has passed, it must strike any reflecting mind how wonderful has been the action and progress of the Church of France in spite of its legalised bonds. Napoleon hoped to find in the clergy so governed, hampered in their action, and kept intentionally in practical poverty, what he called his “gendarmerie spirituelle"-his moral policemen-whose duty and whose interest it would be to support his new imperial throne. And certainly the Church of France during the nineteenth century, in ceasing to be rich, in being kept dependent upon the miserable State stipends allotted to the clergy, has indeed lost much of its freedom. Its clergy indeed would have become-or let us say might have become-the mere functionaries of the government, which Napoleon had looked for, but for the fact that for spiritual purposes they had in Rome and the Pope a rallying point, outside the limits of their own kingdom. As the direct, though unforeseen, result of Napoleon's policy they, in fact, became more and more part of the great cosmopolitan body of the Church Catholic. Their very servitude and their poverty are at least sufficient to account for this most significant fact— that the very name “Gallican Church" has now become obsolete, and has passed into the domain of the ecclesiastical archaeologist.

Whether under the Empire, the Monarchy, or the Republic, the great Church of France during the nineteenth century has done its duties as well, and as conscientiously,

as before the Revolution. Its work, however, has not been accomplished in peace. At times the Church has had to fight for the very principles of its existence, as it will now again have to do with vigour and determination. The Church of Christ has always claimed, and will always claim, liberty to speak, to write, and to teach. In no other way could it fulfil its divine mission. It could not help doing this: and in so acting it necessarily defied the omnipotence claimed by the State, whenever it endeavoured to stop its freedom of action in all such matters as pertained to its spiritual mission. In one thing, for instance, its protests and struggles were necessary for its very life, and at times this brought about great conflicts in the first half of the last century. "Liberty of association," about which we have heard so much during the past years, did not really exist in a legal sense in France, and the Church's action was greatly hampered by this. "Association," says a great French writer, who is not a Catholic, "is the form and indeed the essence of the Church's life. By definition, and etymology even, the Church is an association." The Church in France existed indeed legally as a body, but in the view and theory of the secular government it existed merely as a body of officials belonging to one administration regulated by the State. No association, whether for spreading the faith, for promoting good works, for purposes even of edification or teaching, was contemplated by the law, although the Church never ceased for a moment to vindicate for herself and to claim this liberty "as essential to her development, her life and her very existence." Beyond this the clergy claimed full liberty to teach. Why should they not do so? As citizens, priests, according to every principle of freedom and