The Papacy; Its Position, Policy, and Prospects.—No. 3.
WE see another yet more unmistakable sign that Rome, like Job's war-horse, scents the coming battle, in the revival of orders and confraternities. Numerous religious orders have been resuscitated of late, and almost all of them partake of a military character. Among these may be mentioned in particular the Order of St. Dominic. To the Order of St. Dominic was committed in an especial manner the task of rooting out heresy and heretics, their chief weapons being the sword; in other words, the Inquisition. It was the hordes of St. Dominic that overran the south of France, and swept away the young Protestantism of the thirteenth century in a tempest of fire and blood; and when we see that order again called out, we take it that it is for service, and that the possibility is not unthought of, of sweeping away the Protestant liberties of the nineteenth century by a similar stroke, and of re-enacting in modern Christendom the scenes of slaughter and rapine which were witnessed in Provence and Languedoc in the middle ages. This vast military organization is subdivided into other orders, all of which are armed with the sword as the main instrument of their work. There is the confraternity of the "Sacred Heart," supposed to number a million of members; there is the "Militia of Jesus Christ;" there is the "Crusade of St. Peter." The very names breathe of war. They are borrowed from ages of violence, and they portend times of bloodshed. Beside the societies already named there is another in the French army, called the Legion of St. Maurice. It is an army within an army, and the priest is its general. The resuscitation of these orders plainly shows that war is the ultimate resort which Rome has in her eye. The one idea of all these societies is the doctrine of the syllabus, and their one aim is the "restoration of the Christian state"—in other words, the wreck of modern society, and the subjection of the world to the rule of the Vatican. ONE TREMENDOUS MECHANISM.
There is another weapon for the coming conflict to which I can refer in only a single sentence—a space altogether disproportioned to its transcendent importance: I refer to the infallibility. The infallibility it is that gathers up all the instrumentalities I have just enumerated, and combines them into one tremendous mechanism, and makes the working of that mechanism so swift and crushing. It strikes with the promptitude and power of omnipotence. Take a moment's survey of it. At the summit sits the Pope, divine and infallible. Immediately below the pontiff come some thousand bishops, all of whom are sworn to obey him; below the bishops come hundreds of thousands of priests, and hundreds of thousands of monks and nuns, with a machinery of schools, colleges, and confessionals. Below the priests come millions and millions of devotees, dispersed over all the countries of the globe. From the mount of infallibility goes forth the fiat. It descends to the rank below; these send it on to the more numerous rank below them, and these to the yet more numerous rank below them; and thus it goes on, widening and widening, till it sets a world in motion. Of all these millions the Pope is the master. But has the Pope himself no master? Yes, he has a master, and that master is the Society of Jesus. Behind his throne stand in shadow the sons of Loyola. The Pope is simply the mouth through which the Jesuits speak, the hand by which they execute their deeds; and be the crime to which they prompt ever so enormous, he must issue the order for its perpetration, or prepare the robe and ring which are used at the funeral of Popes. The Pope cannot abdicate. The man who once sits down in the fatal chair of Peter can never again leave it, for should he descend from his throne he would find a Jesuit waiting for him with a cup of poison at the foot of the steps.