CHAPTER XI.

The French Revolution.

THE French Revolution was the offspring of infidelity. The tyranny of Louis the Fourteenth, one of those monarchs whom Providence gives in its wrath to nations destined to fall, had expelled Protestantism by the revocation of the edict of Nantes, in 1683. The first punishment of this act of consummate treachery was a general war, which broke down the military character of France, extinguished its alliances, devastated its provinces, and sent the gray hairs of the persecutor to the grave, loaded with useless remorse, with the scorn of his people, and the universal disdain of Europe.

But the sterner punishment was to come, in the degeneracy of the national religion. From the hour in which Protestantism was exiled, the Gallican church ran a race of precipitate corruption. It had lost the great check; and it cast away at once its remaining morals, and its literature. The Jansenists, a feeble reflection of Calvinism, were assailed by the Jesuits, the concentrated subtlety and fierceness of popery. But the struggle between the domineering and the weak always excites the sympathy of man; and the whole intelligent body of France were summoned by the contest to examine into the rights of both: they were found equally groundless. The arguments of the Jesuits were the dungeon and the sword. The arguments of the Jansenists were pretended miracles, the hysteric follies of nuns, and the artificial enthusiasm of hirelings. and impostors. Common sense turned from both the controversialists with equal scorn.

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The Jesuits finally trampled down their adversaries; but they had scarcely time to feel their triumph when ruin fell upon themselves. Their ambition had prompted them to the lofty insolence of mastering the thrones of Europe. Conspiracy and assassination were the, means. Kings at length took the alarm; and by a simultaneous resolution the Jesuits were overthrown, amid the general rejoicing of mankind.

But when the national eye was no longer distracted by the minor conflict of the sects, it was raised with new-born astonishment to the enormous fabric of the Gallican church itself. All France suddenly rang with one uproar of scorn and abhorrence at the inordinate power, the shameless corruption, the contemptible fictions, and the repulsive mummeries of the establishment. Like the prophet, the people had been led within the curtains of the dark chambers, and seen the secret abominations of the shrine; but not with the righteous indignation of the prophet, but with the malignant joy of accusers who triumphed in their power of blackening all religion with the smoke of its abuses, they proclaimed the discovery to the world.

It is not to be forgotten, as an illustration of one of the greatest moral truths, that the French church found that guilt is weakness. It was utterly unequal to face the day of peril. It still had, hung up in its halls, the whole consecrated armour in which it once defied the hostility of kings and people, the sword with which it had cloven down the diadem, and the shield with which it had blunted, for ages, every lance of the chivalry of freedom. But the nerve and muscle that might have borne them were long withered by indolence and vice. The "falchion of Scanderbeg was there, but where was the arm of Scanderbeg?" The merciless warrior was now the "lean and slippered pantaloon;" while his assailant had started up from the serf into the strong-limbed savage,

wild with insolent revenge, and ravening for blood and plunder.

It is among the most memorable facts of intellectual decline, that of the forty thousand clergy of France, not one man of conspicuous ability was roused by the imminent danger of his church. Like a flock of sheep, they relied on their numbers; and the infidel drove them before him like a flock of sheep. While the battlements of their gigantic church were rocking in every blast, there was no sign of manly precaution, none of generous self-exposure for the common cause, and scarcely any even of that wise suspicion which is the strength of the weak. They took it for granted that the church would last their time, and were comforted.

The pride of the day was distinction in literature; but the whole ecclesiastical body of France saw the race run, without an effort for the prize. They sat wrapped in their old recollections, on the benches of the amphitheatre, and looked on, without alarm, while a new generation of mankind were trying their athletic limbs, and stimulating their young ambition, in the arena where they had once been unrivalled. Raynal, and the few clerics who distinguished themselves by authorship, were avowed deists or atheists; and ostentatious of their complete, if not contemptuous, separation from the establishment.

The last light of ecclesiastical literature had glimmered from the cells of Port Royal; but, with the fall of the Jansenists, "middle and utter darkness" came. During half a century no work of public utility, none of popular estimation, none of genius, none which evinced loftiness of spirit, vigour of understanding, or depth of knowledge had been produced by a churchman.

The consequence was inevitable and fatal. The old awe of the church's power was changed into contempt for its understanding. Ten thousand rents

were made in the fabric, still they let no light upon the voluntary slumberers within. The revolutionary roar echoed through all its chambers, but it stirred no champion of the altar. The high ecclesiastics relied upon their connexion with the court, their rank, and the formal homage of their officials; shields of gossamer against the pike and firebrand of the people. The inferior priesthood, consigned to. obscurity, shrank in their villages into cumberers of the earth, or were irritated into rebels. The feeble contracted themselves within the drowsy round of their prescribed duties; the daring brooded over the national discontents and their own, until they heard the trumpet sounding to every angry heart and form of ill in France, and came forth, a gloomy and desperate tribe, trampling their images and altars under foot, and waving the torch in the front of the grand insurrection.

The partition of Poland, in 1773, had insulted the public honour and the Christian feeling of Europe. No act of ambition had ever sprung more directly from the spontaneous evil of the human heart. The destruction of an impotent throne, and the havoc of a helpless nation, were destitute of all the ordinary pretexts of state necessity. The country poor, the people half barbarian, the government already powerless for all objects of aggression, Poland had long been incapable of giving rise to fear; but it excited the deadliest and most unrelenting passion of all that make a serpent's nest of the human heart-covetousness. Prussia, Russia, and Austria entered into the foulest conspiracy against a nation on record, and tore Poland limb from limb. But while the blood of her unfortunate people was still red upon their hands, they were to be punished by the aggression of a power unheard of in the history of vengeance, the impetuous power of popular phrensy; France, bursting from her old dungeon, and wild, furious, and revengeful as ever was unchained madness,-at

once inflicting agonies on herself, and destruction on all in her path,-was let loose against them, a naked shape of evil, brandishing its fetters, and spreading terror and desolation through the world.

Christianity was maligned for the guilt of the royal conspirators against Poland. But the three were open infidels; Frederic from his selfishness and perfidy, Catherine from her personal profligacy, and Joseph from his frigid metaphysics and perhaps disordered mind. But the charge came in the exact time to give the last sting to the growing hostility of the continent against sceptre and shrine. The short interval of quiet that followed the partition was only a preparative for that accumulation of calamity which France was to bring upon mankind; a cataract of living fire, checked on its height for the moment, only to rush down with irresistible ruin.

France first cleared herself of the encumbrances of her government and priesthood; tore to the earth palace and monastery, château and chapel; mowed down, with a desperate hand, her nobles and her clergy, and tossed their remnants to all the winds of heaven; and then sent out her fourteen armies to lay waste every surrounding state; the new Saracens of Europe, carrying their doctrine at the sword's point, and demanding that all should be converts or captives,-republicanism the policy and the religion of mankind."

It was in no presumptuous desire to guide the wrath of Heaven, that men looked for some terrible retribution on the conspirators against Poland; nor was it without that awe, in which the religious mind listens while the thunders of eternal justice are rolling above the world, that they saw a providential vengeance in the prostration of the three guilty kingdoms; in the fugitive monarchs, broken armies, and subjugated capitals of Prussia, Russia, and Austria. But the work bore all the evidences that establish to the human understanding the agency of