POPERY AND SOCIALISM

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 23, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 49.

POPERY AND SOCIALISM.

The situation is farther complicated by another and very formidable fact. A new foe to liberty has suddenly sprung up in the leading countries of Europe. I refer to that atheistic socialism which has had so rapid and portentous a development of late, in France, in Italy, and more especially in Germany, and even in Russia. I remember the historian Ranke, whom I had the privilege of meeting in Berlin sixteen years ago, describing it to me as a church-rising against the church. His description was not untruthful; for socialism has a creed after a fashion, and its devotees are knit together by a sacred bond, the belief even that as the children of one mother, Nature, to wit, all things are a common heritage. Socialism, like the Papacy, attacks the modern State, but it attacks it from a different point. It would remodel the world through the preliminary process of destroying it. It seeks to abolish property, overturn government, and extinguish the idea of a personal God.

One would think that so terrible a programme of reform would find but few adherents in so educated a country as Germany. And yet it is otherwise. At the parliamentary election of nineteen years ago, less than a score of socialist votes were enrolled in the city of Berlin. At next election, not fewer than 36,000 such votes were tendered, and at the election of 1877, the number of socialist votes in the city of Berlin alone had risen to 56,000. The number of socialists in Germany is estimated at about half a million (450,000). This fact may well cause serious alarm on the part of every friend of order. And yet, when one thinks of the religious condition of Germany, one cannot well see how it can be otherwise. Half its people, speaking generally, never open the Bible, never go to church, never come under the influence of religious ordinances. Here is a vast void at the heart of the German nation, and what can rush in to fill that void, but just some such atheistic system as we see filling it.

This vastly enhances the dangers of the situation. We behold the European world falling asunder, dividing into two great camps. On the one side we have the Governments and their friends; on the other, communism and its adherents. The ultramontanes are sure to come in between the two, and to play the same game they have been playing of late years in the British Senate. The Papacy will ally itself now with the one and now with the other, just as it may subserve its own interests for the moment. It will serve both parties that it may betray and destroy both, and remain in the end master of the situation. It will go to the kings, and it will say to them, "These men will uproot everything. Neither order, nor property, nor religion, will they leave standing. I alone can save you from their fury. But in order that I may be able to save you, you must renew your former concordats with me. You must give free scope to my canon law in your kingdoms; you must give all liberty to my bishops and priests in dealing with your subjects. If you do that, I will tame these wild spirits; I will speedily quell these revolted masses, and lay them bound in chains at the foot of your thrones. But if you decline my bargain I shall retire, and then the deluge will inevitably roll in and overwhelm you."

If the governments of Europe, in the hope of escaping the danger, should cast themselves into the arms of the Papacy, their alliance with the ultramontanes will bring Europe again under a great despotism. If, on the other hand, the kings should repel the advances of the Papacy, and the ultramontanes combine their power with the communists, the attack on law and order will become yet more formidable, and will be pushed on with persistent and vengeful vigor. The church of Rome will show that she knows how to chastise those who will not permit her to rule them, and destroy those who decline to be saved by her. A great revolution will flow over Europe. And the Papacy having flung throne and law into the abyss, the ultramontanes will grapple with the communists, and either conquer or be conquered by them.