through a thousand avenues they cannot guard, the outraged thought will reach the hearts of his subjects, rekindle in them the old Gallic fire, the old Gallic love of freedom, and the old Gallic scorn of chains and slavery. Not yet are Frenchmen prepared to sink into the passive obedience that marks the subjects of oriental despots.

The article by M. Montalembert, which we have cited, was called forth by a recent declaration of the council of state, condemning the venerable bishop of Moulins for an act of ecclesiastical discipline towards one of his priests, an act within his episcopal competency, and for which he was responsible only to his ecclesiastical superiors. When the first consul published in 1802 the concordat conceded to France by the Holy Father in 1801, he annexed to it of his own accord, without consultation with the Holy Father, certain organic articles, among which was one authorizing an appeal from the ecclesiastical courts to the civil, termed Appel comme d'Abus. The pope on their first appearance protested against these organic articles, and they have never been accepted or submitted to by the church. To concede the right of appeal from the ecclesiastical courts to the civil, that is, from the church to the state, would be to surrender to the state the independence of the church in her own. sphere, to subvert her essential constitution, to render it impossible for her to enforce her discipline in the spiritual order on her own subjects, and in principle, to bring the spiritual power into complete subjection to the temporal. Hence the canons of the church have always prohibited ecclesiastics from appealing from ecclesiastical censures to the state courts for redress. By the canons of the church in France such an appeal by a priest incurs excommunication. The Abbé Martinet, a priest of the diocese of Moulins, having refused to conform to these canons, his bishop suspended him from his clerical functions. From this act of the bishop an appeal in behalf of the priest was taken to the council of state, which entertained it, and declared the bishop guilty of an abuse. The council of state thus declares the organic articles of the first empire, which were no part of the concordat conceded to the first consul by the Holy Father, and which had become obsolete, to be in full force in the second empire. The council ground their declaration against the bishop on the decree of Napoleon I., February 5, 1810, reviving the edict of Louis XIV. proclaiming the four articles of the French clergy, in 1682,

and declaring that edict the general law of France. By the declaration of the council of state in the case of the bishop of Moulins, reviving that decree, the edict of Louis XIV. is declared to be in force in 1857; and by that edict the four articles are ordered to be enregistered by all the courts of parliament, and all the subjects of the king are forbidden to teach in their houses, colleges, or seminaries, or to write any thing contrary to the doctrine contained in them. It is, furthermore, ordered that all who shall thenceforth be charged to teach theology in the several colleges and universities, shall subscribe to those articles, and no one shall be licensed as a bachelor in theology or canon law, or receive the degree of doctor, until after having maintained in one of his theses the doctrine they contain. This edict, rendered in 1682, against which the popes have uniformly protested, and which it is said Louis XIV. revoked, is, according to the council of state, the present law of France, and consequently every Catholic teaching any thing contrary to those infamous four articles is liable to a legal prosecution under the paternal government of Napoleon III.

The case of the bishop of Moulins, M. Montalembert contends, and justly, transcends all former precedents. In all the cases that have heretofore been carried by appeal from the ecclesiastical courts to the council of state, the dispute has been between the church and the state, or virtually a case of conflicting jurisdiction; but in this case the original dispute was not between the bishop and the civil magistrate, but between the bishop and one of his own ecclesiastics, touching a matter of purely ecclesiastical discipline. The assumption of appellate jurisdiction in such a case by the council of state is, in principle, the assumption by the emperor of the highest and essential prerogatives of the papacy; by it he is virtually declared the supreme teacher and governor of the church in his empire,-in principle all that was claimed by Henry VIII. of England. Catholicity, according to the declaration of the French clergy, involving, as we have shown on more occasions than one, the supremacy of the state in spirituals, or political atheism, is the only Catholicity legally tolerated in France. Frenchmen may be Catholics, according to the four articles drawn up by order of the monarch and imposed by the civil power, but they are legally forbidden to be Catholics, as the pope is a Catholic. The French Catholic must teach and believe, at least teach, that the council is above the

pope, and that the judgments of the pope are reformable, till they have received the assent of the church.

What renders this restriction on Catholicity so much the more reprehensible, is the well-known fact mentioned by M. Montalembert, that there is no law in France that requires a man to believe even in God, or that prohibits him from assailing the divinity of our blessed Lord. All religions, all except the Catholic religion, are free in France; Protestants, Jews, infidels, are free to profess and defend their peculiar beliefs or unbeliefs. The irreligious press in France is perfectly free to attack the church on every side, in her authority, her dogmas, her morals, her ritual, her usages, her discipline; and the most widely-circulated journals in the empire are doing it daily, without one word of warning from the police. But the Catholic press, the moment it ventures to offer a manly, temperate, and perfectly loyal defence of the rights and independence of the church in her own order, is visited by an avertissement from the imperial police. All this, too, under a nominally, and, as his admirers at home and abroad pretend, a practically Catholic sovereign; eulogized by men who draw on their imagination for their facts as the protector and defender of Catholic interests throughout the world. Here is a refutation of those silly anecdotes circulating amongst Catholics in and out of France, as proofs of the emperor's devotion to Catholic interests, and which have so often been repeated against us, as a full reply to our expressions of distrust of his imperial majesty, in relation to the freedom of the

church.

It is well known that we have been almost alone among Catholics in Great Britain and the United States, in our uniform distrust, from the first, of the emperor's disposition in regard to the freedom and independence of the church in his empire. We have obtained no echo to our expression of this distrust among English-speaking Catholics; they have seemed in their horror of socialism to have hailed the emperor as a deliverer, and to be half prepared to identify the Catholic cause with that of French imperialism. It has almost been regarded in certain quarters as a want of the true Catholic spirit to doubt the imperial parvenu, or to intimate that after all he might prove but a broken reed for Catholics to lean upon. Nothing but a panic fear of the threatened socialist or red-republican revolution can account for their blindness or obliviousness. The traditions of the

French monarchy from Louis XIV., the traditions of the first empire, the antecedents of the nephew of his uncle, his affiliation with the insurgents against Gregory XVI., his letter, when president, to Colonel Edgar Ney, stating his policy with regard to the restoration of the Holy Father and the government of the pontifical states, all were well calculated, one would suppose, to awaken distrust, and to force upon the most confiding the conviction that he would be disposed to serve the Catholic cause no further than he could make it subservient to his own purposes. What Catholic could confide in the loyal intentions towards the church of the emperor, who projected, as a reward of honor to his brave soldiers fighting in the Crimea, a medal with the device of three hearts united in one, intended to symbolize the union of Catholicity, Protestantism, and Mahometanism?

It is but simple justice, however, to the emperor, to say that he has never professed to be the friend of the freedom and independence of the church. No word have we heard from his lips that implied that he either understood or desired that freedom and independence. We have heard of no authentic act of his that indicated any disposition on his part to be the defender or protector of Catholic interests, or to depart from the policy towards the church pursued by his uncle; and we are aware of no act of his towards religion that has shown any other regard for it than that dictated by state policy. Religious interests have suffered terribly in France since the reëstablishment of the empire, and the church does not occupy, by any means, so free, so commanding, or so secure a position under the imperial régime as she did under the republican régime of 1848. The emperor has granted some pecuniary aid to particular churches, has given seats in his senate to certain ecclesiastical dignitaries, has assigned to bishops and priests an honorable place in his fêtes, and in processions on gala days, and permitted his almoners and chaplains to make a grand parade of certain harmless devotions calculated to charm the idle, please the sentimental, and captivate the dévotes; but he has taken good care to give to the church no substantial freedom, no positive security for the future, and to keep all effective power, whether in church or state, in his own hands. So far as the civil law can do it, he has confined the church within the narrowest limits possible without absolute schisin, and made her free action and develop

ment in the empire dependent on his own will and pleasure. And yet there are Catholics even in our own country, that look upon him as entitled to the confidence and gratitude of the Catholic world.

In this country Catholics have been misled by the conduct of a portion of the French bishops and clergy. A certain number of French prelates, long held in reverence as the champions of religious freedom and independence, lavished in the summer and autumn of 1852 praises on the prince-president, which are rarely deserved by mortal man, and Catholics have very naturally concluded that they knew what they were about, and, therefore, that they must have received assurances that were not vouchsafed to the world at large. The policy pursued by the Univers, very generally supported by the French clergy, of denouncing the old parliamentary champions of Catholic interests, also contributed not a little to the same conclusion. The Univers, indeed, has little direct influence in this country, but through the so-called Catholic organs of Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States, and prominent individuals who read and admire it, it has had a very commanding influence, and we doubt if there had been such a burst of indignation against us, if we had questioned the infallibility of the pope, as there was a few years since for questioning that of M. Louis Veuillot. It is with no pleasure that we speak disparagingly of the Univers. We go heart and hand with it in the repudiation of Gallicanism, and the assertion of the plenary authority of the Holy See. But, unhappily, it has seen proper to couple its championship of the papal supremacy with the defence of modern cæsarism, and true Voltairian sneers at parliamentary government and its defenders. Its chief editor sent us a few months since his reply to the Count de Falloux on the Parti Catholique, accompanied by a kind and respectful note, evidently conceived in a conciliatory spirit. We have never been able to repel any overtures, even of a bitter enemy, to peace. We therefore read M. Louis Veuillot's reply with softened feelings, and with every wish to find the estimate we had formed of him unjust. But we have been disappointed. His reply does not satisfy us. It is in great part irrelevant, violent, and unjust, and its perusal has left upon our mind the painful impression that justice and candor towards opponents are virtues that he has yet to acquire. He manifests the temper and breeding of a fanatic, and seems to act