Imatges de pàgina
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strength of will, Gregory VII., - and yet he failed to prolong it. One hundred and fifty years afterwards, the gigantic attempt had become but the dim record of a past never to return. With the .successors of Innocent III. began the decline of the Papacy; it ceased to infuse life into humanity. A hundred years later, and the Church had become scandalously corrupt in the higher spheres of its hierarchy, persecuting and superstitious in the lower. A hundred years later it was the ally, and in one hundred more the servant of Cæsar, and had lost one half of Europe.

From that time forward it has unceasingly declined, until it has sunk to the thing we now behold it ;- disinherited of all power of inspiration over civilization; the impotent negation of all movement, of all liberty, of all development of science or life; destitute of all sense of duty, power of sacrifice, or faith in its own destiny; held up by foreign bayonets; trembling before the face of the peoples, and forsaken by humanity, which is seeking the path of progress elsewhere.

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The Papacy has lost all moral basis, aim, sanction, and source of action at the present day. Its source of action in the past was derived from a conception of heaven since changed, — from a notion of life since proved imperfect, — from a conception of the moral law inferior to that of the new epoch in course of initiation, from a solution of the eternal problem of the relation between man and God since rejected by the human heart, intellect, conscience, and tradition.

The dogma itself which the Church once represented is exhausted and consumed. It no longer inspires faith, no longer has power to unite or direct the human race.

The time of a new dogma is approaching, which will re-link earth with heaven in a vaster synthesis, fruitful of new and harmonious life.

It is for this that the Papacy expires. And it is our duty to declare this, without hypocritical reticence, or formulæ of speech, which, feigning to attack and

venerate at one and the same time, do but parcel out, not solve the problem; because the future cannot be fully revealed until the past is entombed, and by weakly prolonging the delay we run the risk of introducing gangrene into the wound.

The formula of life and of the law of life from which the Papacy derived its existence and its mission was that of the fall of man and his redemption. The logical and inevitable consequences of this formula were: —

The doctrine of the necessity of mediation between man and God;

The belief in a direct, immediate, and immutable revelation, and hence in a privileged class, - naturally destined to centralize in one individual, the office of which was to preserve that revelation inviolate;

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The inefficacy of man's own efforts to achieve his own redemption, and the consequent substitution of unlimited faith in the Mediator, for works, — hence grace and predestination more or less explicitly substituted for free-will;

The separation of the human race into the elect and the non-elect;

The salvation of the one, and the eternal damnation of the other; and, above all,

The duality between earth and heaven, between the ideal and the real, between the aim set before man and a world condemned to anathema by the fall, and incapable, through the imperfection of its finite elements, of affording him the means of realizing that aim.

In fact, the religious synthesis which succeeded Polytheism did not contemplate, nor did the historical succession of the epochs allow it to contemplate, any conception of life embracing more than the individual; it offered the individual a means of salvation in despite of the egotism, tyranny, and corruption by which he is surrounded on earth, and which no individual effort could hope to overcome; it came to declare to him, The world is adverse to thee; renounce the world and put thy faith in Christ; this will lead thee to heaven.

The new formula of life and its law - unknown at that day, but revealed to us in our own day by our knowledge of the tradition of humanity, confirmed by the voice of individual conscience, by the intuition of genius and the grand results of scientific research may be summed up in the single word Progress, which we now know to be, by Divine decree, the inherent tendency of human nature, whether manifested in the individual or the collective being, and destined, more or less speedily, but inevitably, to be evolved in time and space.

conception of the slow, continuous pro-
gress of the human Ego throughout an
indefinite series of existences, for the
idea of an impossible perfection to be
achieved in the course of one brief ex-
istence; it presents an absolutely new.
view of the mission of man upon earth,
and puts an end to the antagonism be-
tween earth and heaven, by teaching
us that this world is an abode given to
man wherein he is bound to merit sal-
vation by his own works, and hence
enforces the necessity of endeavoring,
by thought, by action, and by sacrifice,
to transform the world, — the duty of

The logical consequences of the new realizing our ideal here below, as formula are:

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The substitution of the idea of a law for the idea of a Mediator; the idea of a continuous educational revelation for that of an immediate arbitrary revelation;

The apostolate of genius and virtue, and of the great collective intuitions of the peoples, when roused to enthusiastic action in the service of a truth, substituted for the privilege of a priestly class; The sanctity of tradition, as the depository of the progress already achieved; and the sanctity of individual conscience, alike the pledge and the means of all future progress;

Works, sanctified by faith, substituted for mere faith alone, as the criterion of merit and means of salvation.

The new formula of life cancels the dogma of grace, which is the negation of that capacity of perfectibility granted to all men; as well as that of predestination, which is the negation of free-will, and that of eternity of punishment, which is the negation of the divine element existing in every human soul.

far as in us lies, for the benefit of future generations, and of reducing to an earthly fact as much as may be of the kingdom - the conception — of God.

The religious synthesis which is slowly but infallibly taking the place. of the synthesis of the past comprehends a new term, the continuous collective life of humanity; and this alone is sufficient to change the aim, the method, and the moral law of our existence.

All links with heaven broken, and useless to the earth, which is ready to hail the proclamation of a new dogma, the Papacy has no longer any raison d'être. Once useful and holy, it is now a lie, a source only of corruption and immorality.

Once useful and holy, I say, because, had it not been for the unity of moral life in which we were held for more than eight centuries by the Papacy,. we should not now have been prepared to realize the new unity to come; had it not been for the dogma of human equality in heaven, we should not now The new formula substitutes the have been prepared to proclaim the

* This sacred word, which sums up the dogma of the future, has been uttered by every school, but misunderstood by the majority. Materialists have usurped the use of it, to express man's ever-increasing power over the productive forces of the earth; and men of science, to indicate that accumulation of farts discovered and submitted to analysis which has led us to a better knowledge of secondary causes. Few understand it as the expression of a providential conception or design, inseparable from our human life and foundation of our moral law. VOL. XX. 8 NO. 117.

dogma of human equality on earth. And I declare it a lie and a source of immorality at the present day, because every great institution becomes such if it seeks to perpetuate its authority after its mission is fulfilled. The substitution of the enslavement for the slaughter of the conquered foe was a step towards progress, as was the sub

stitution of servitude for slavery. The formation of the Bourgeoise class was a progress from servitude. But he who at the present day should attempt to recede towards slavery and servitude, and presumptuously endeavor to perpetuate the exclusion of the proletarian from the rights and benefits of the social organization, would prove himself the enemy of all civilization, past and future, and a teacher of immorality.

It is therefore the duty of all those amongst us who have it at heart to win the city of the future and the triumph of truth, to make war, not only upon the temporal power, who should dare deny that to the admitted representative of God on earth? - but upon the Papacy itself. It is therefore our duty to go back to the dogma upon which the institution is founded, and to show that that dogma has become insufficient and unequal to the moral wants, aspirations, and dawning faith of humanity.

They who at the present day attack the Prince of Rome, and yet profess to venerate the Pope, and to be sincere Catholics, are either guilty of flagrant contradiction, or are hypocrites.

They who profess to reduce the problem to the realization of a free Church in a free State are either influenced by a fatal timidity, or destitute of every spark of moral conviction.

The separation of Church and State is good as a weapon of defence against the corruptions of a Church no longer worthy the name. It is-like all the programmes of mere liberty- an implicit declaration that the institution against which we are compelled to invoke either our individual or collective rights is corrupt, and destined to perish.

Individual or collective rights may be justly invoked against the authority of a religious institution as a remedial measure in a period of transition; just as it may occasionally be necessary to isolate a special locality for a given time, in order to protect others from infection. But the cause must be explicitly declared. By declaring it, you educate the country to look beyond the

temporary measure,—to look forward to a return to a normal state of things, and to study the positive organic principle destined to govern that normal state. By keeping silence, you accustom the mass to disjoin the moral from the political, theory from practice, the ideal from the real, heaven from earth.

When once all belief in the past synthesis shall be extinct, and faith in the new synthesis established, the State itself will be elected into a Church; it will incarnate in itself a religious principle, and become the representative of the moral law in the various manifestations of life.

So long as it is separate from the State, the Church will always conspire to reconquer power over it in the interest of the past dogma. If separated from all collective and avowed faith by a negative policy, such as that adopted by the atheistic and indifferent French Parliament, the State will fall a prey to the anarchical doctrine of the sovereignty of the individual, and the worship of interest; it will sink into egotism and the adoration of the accomplished fact, and hence, inevitably, into despotism, as a remedy for the evils of anarchy.

For an example of this among modern nations, we have only to look at France.

III.

On the other hand, in opposition to the Papacy, but itself a source of no less corruption, stands materialism.

Materialism, the philosophy of all expiring epochs and peoples in decay, is, historically speaking, an old phenomenon, inseparable from the death of a religious dogma. It is the reaction of those superficial intellects which, incapable of taking a comprehensive view of the life of humanity, and tracing and deducing its essential characteristics from tradition, deny the religious ideal itself, instead of simply affirming the death of one of its incarnations.

Luther compared the human mind to

a drunken peasant, who, falling from one side of his horse, and set straight on his seat by one desirous of helping him, instantly falls again on the other side. The simile—if limited to periods of transition is most just. The youth of Italy, suddenly emancipated from the servile education of more than three centuries, and intoxicated with their moral liberty, find themselves in the presence of a Church destitute of all mission, virtue, love for the people, or adoration of truth or progress, destitute even of faith in itself. They see that the existing dogma is in flagrant contradiction of the ruling idea that governs all the aspirations of the epoch, and that its conception of divinity is inferior to that revealed by science, human conscience, philosophy, and the improved conception of life acquired by the study of the tradition of humanity, unknown to man previously to the discovery of his Eastern origin. Therefore, in order they believe to establish their moral freedom radically and forever, they reject alike all idea of a church, a dogma, and a God.

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Philosophically speaking, the unreflecting exaggerations of men who have just risen up in rebellion do not portend any serious damage to human progress. These errors are a mere repetition of what has always taken place at the decay and death of every dogma, and will as they always have done sooner or later wear away. The day will come when our Italian youth will discover that, just as reasonably as they, not content with denying the Christian dogma, proceed to deny the existence of a God, and the religious life of humanity, their ancestors might have proceeded, from their denial and rejection of the feudal system, to the rejection of every form of social organization, or have declared art extinct forever during the transition period when the Greek form of art had ceased to correspond to those aspirations of the human mind which prepared the way for the cathedrals of the Middle Ages and the Christian school of art.

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Art, society, religion, all these are faculties inseparable from human life itself, progressive as life itself, and eternal as life itself. Every epoch of humanity has had and will have its own social, artistic, and religious expression. In every epoch man will ask of tradition and of conscience whence he came, and to what goal he is bound; he will ask through what paths that goal is to be reached, and seek to solve the problem suggested by the existence within him of a conception of the Infinite, and of an ideal impossible of realization in the finite conditions of his earthly existence. He will, from time to time, adopt a different solution, in proportion as the horizon of tradition is progressively enlarged, and the human conscience enlightened; but assuredly it will never be a mere negation.

Philosophically speaking, materialism is based upon a singular but constant confusion of two things radically distinct; - life, and its successive modes of manifestation; the Ego, and the organs by which it is revealed in a visible form to the external world, the nonEgo. The men who, having succeeded in analyzing the instruments by means of which life is made manifest in a series of successive finite phenomena, imagine that they have acquired a proof of the materiality of life itself, resemble the poor fool, who, having chemically analyzed the ink with which a poem was written, imagines he has penetrated the secret of the genius that composed it.

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man conscience and intuition, to limit themselves to the mechanism of analytical observation, and substitute their narrow, undirected physiology for biology and psychology, if then, finding themselves unable by that imperfect method to comprehend the primary laws and origin of things, they childishly deny the existence of such laws, and declare all humanity before their time to have been deluded and incapable, so be it. Nor should I, had Italy been a nation for half a century, have regarded their doctrines as fraught with any real danger. Humanity will not abandon its appointed path for them; and to hear them in an age in which the discoveries of all great thinkers combine to demonstrate the existence of an intelligent preordained law of unity and progress - spouting materialism in the name of science, because they have skimmed a volume of Vogt, or attended a lecture by Moleschott, might rather move one to amusement than anger.

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But Italy is not a nation; she is only in the way to become one. And the present is therefore a moment of grave importance; for, even as the first examples set before infancy, so the first lessons taught to a people emerging from a long past of error and corruption, and hesitating as to the choice of its future, may be of serious import. The doctrines of federalism, which, if preached in France at the present day, would be but an innocent Utopia, threatened the dissolution of the country during the first years of the Revolution. They laid bare the path for foreign conquest, and roused the Mountain to bloody and terrible means of repression.

Such for us are the wretched doctrines of which I speak. Fate has set before us a great and holy mission, which, if we fail to accomplish it now, may be postponed for half a century. Every delay, every error, may be fatal. And the people through whom we have to work are uneducated, liable to accept any error which wears a semblance of war against the past, and in danger,

from their long habit of slavery, of relapsing into egotism.

Now the tendency of the doctrines of materialism is to lead the mass to egotism through the path of interest. Therefore it grieves me to hear them preached by many worthy but inconsiderate young men amongst us; and I conjure them, by all they hold most sacred, to meditate deeply the moral consequences of the doctrines they preach, and especially to study their effect in the case of a neighboring nation, which carried negation to the extreme during the past century, and which we behold at the present day utterly corrupted by the worship of temporary and material interest, disinherited of all noble activity, and sunk in the degradation and infamy of slavery.

Every error is a crime in those whose duty it is to watch over the cradle of a nation.

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Either we must accept the sovereignty of an aim prescribed by conscience, in which all the individuals composing a nation are bound to unite, and the pursuit of which constitutes the nationality of a given people among the many of which humanity is composed, aim recognized by them all, and superior to them all, and therefore religious; or we must accept the sovereignty of the right, arbitrarily defined, of each nation, and its practical consequences, the pursuit by each individual of his own interest and his own well-being, the satisfaction of his own desires, and the impossibility of any sovereign duty, to which all the citizens, from those who govern down to the humblest of the governed, owe obedience and sacrifice.

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