succeeded in repressing; but it did not effectively destroy their commercial power. They were far more numerous in proportion to the population than they are to-day, and they had behind them the active sympathy of the Protestant and Jewish commercial societies of Holland, beyond the Rhine, and in England. These, then, are the elements of the problem as the eighteenth century opens. A very strong central government, which, by defending the small man, is creating a great body of independent citizens an alliance between all forms of this strong government and the Catholic Church, which alliance masks under its external order the very rapid growth of indifference or antagonism to the spirit of the faith, a rapid decay in the moral prestige of the hierarchy and the religious orders, and at the same time the presence of a very large wealthy and actively commercial body of Huguenots whose every effort was anti-Catholic. For more than the lifetime of a man, for nearly the whole of a century, this state of affairs, already mature, continued to grow old. The lifeless, mechanical part of it went on unchanged. Most of the living element in it made against the Catholic atmosphere in society. The best writing, the best thinking, and the best talking was either upon matters indifferent to the Church, or was actively hostile to it. Criticism, that ever active force without which neither an art nor a society can live, found ready to hand for its exploits the large, inert, and apparently secure body of "Church and State "-a mass of rules, officials, and set customs which no one, not even the critics, thought could be overthrown, and which, therefore, were attacked with the greater zeal, because the attackers did not conceive that any great change destructive to the comfort of their own lives could come about. How long this state of affairs might have continued undisturbed, it is difficult to say. It could not have continued for ever, but something was happening which was bound to terminate it, which was affecting its very root, and this something was the accident that befell the monarchy. That institution presupposed a fairly regular succession of average men. There might be gaps in minorities, or in the illness or incompetence of a particular monarch, but these gaps would be tided over in the normal course of things, just as a bad series of years are tided over in an established system of commerce. As it happened, the French monarchy in the eighteenth century went through a quite exceptional crisis, for which none of its framers or supporters could have bargained. Just when the hardening of its VOL. XCVIII.-30 structure through old age and through the completion of its scheme in every detail imperilled its survival, that institution happened to come into hands which failed it. When Louis XIV. died the heir to the throne was his great-grandson, a little boy of five years old. So first of all there came a very long minority, following upon habits of luxury among the governing classes, fostered by sixty full years of splendor at the Court. Then when the boy (Louis XV.) was grown to be a man, he turned out to be a man devoid of initiative. He was a great gentleman, he had no inconsiderable personal dignity; he was courageous enough and not disorderly in temper. But he lacked all those springs of personal effort which can preserve a man from sensuality or, even if he is sensual, direct him towards the necessary daily effort which we should all exercise, and which the personal head of a highly centralized state must exercise or perish. His vices, which were those common enough to kings, were on this account enormously exaggerated in the public eye, and when he had passed midde age, they made him appear contemptible. He was already fifty-three when, at the end of an unsuccessful war, France saw herself humiliated by her rivals; he died in his sixtyfifth year, leaving the institution of the monarchy upon which all the old régime depended seriously, and perhaps irretrievably rottened. The only thing that could have saved it, was the advent of some vigorous character to replace the dead man. Of such happy accidents the past history of the monarchy was full, although it is true it had never gone through so prolonged a crisis as this, but as luck would have it, his grandson and successor, Louis XVI., was a young man almost absurdly unfitted for that particular moment. There was a nervous weakness in him of a very grave kind, hidden under a large unwieldy body. His young wife, energetic and quite foreign, completed the disaster, and it was under his nominal rule that the machinery of the monarchy began to cease working. The symptoms were most apparent on the financial side; every experiment was tried before summoning the old National Parliament to prop up the breakdown; they failed, and that Parliament was summoned in 1789. What followed was the great Revolution. How it suddenly revealed the true political and religious state of the country, the new gulf which it happened to dig between the official machinery of the Church and the mass of the people, and its consequent effect upon the religious life of France in our time, I will make the subject of my next paper. THE ORIGINAL DIARIES OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT. BY BERTRAND L. CONWAY, C.S.P. HE Goerres Society, which represents the best modern German scholarship, has well merited the praise of Popes Leo XIII. and Pius X. for undertaking to publish all the original documents relating to the Council of Trent.* This monumental work will be completed in thirteen splendid quartos of some thousand pages each, three of which (vols. i., ii., and v.) have already been published. For nearly three centuries our knowledge of the inner workings of the Council of Trent has been obtained principally from either the prejudiced and unreliable History of the Council of Trent by the apostate Servite, Fra Paolo Sarpi (London, 1619), and the polemical treatise published to refute it by the Jesuit Cardinal, Sforza Pallavicino (Rome, 1656). Neither of these writers were capable of writing an objective, impartial history. For as Calenzio says: "Neither Pallavicino nor Sarpi possessed the true historical spirit, which is bent solely upon discovering the truth, and setting it forth in all clearness and honesty. Sarpi wrote to attack the Church, and Pallavicino to defend her at all costs." Bossuet wrote of Sarpi: "He was a Protestant under a religious habit, who said Mass without believing in it, and who remained in a Church which he considered idolatrous." Pallavicino, in a letter to the Marchese Durazzo, June 2, 1657, says of his own work: My history is in great part apologetic in tone. In fact it is more of a book of polemics than a history properly so-called. I aim at refuting my adversary by showing his ignorance and deceit, and hope to win the confidence of my readers by proving to them that I am well informed. I would have them highly esteem both the rulers of the Church and those who presided over the Council," etc. § Bishop Hefele, in his well-known History of the Councils of the *Concilium Tridentinum Diariorum, Actorum, Epistolarum, Tractatuum Nova Collectio (The Council of Trent, a new Collection of Its Diaries, Acts, Epistles, and Treatises). Edidit Societas Goerresiana. St. Louis, Mo.: B. Herder. Price of Vol. I., $18.00. 66 tIstoria del Concilio di Trento. p. 117. Esame critico-litterario delle opere riguardanti la storia del concilio di Trento, §Littere del Pallavicino, p. 71. Venice, 1669. Church, declared only forty years ago that he would not dare write the history of the Council of Trent, not only because of his age and the heavy burden of the episcopate, but because he could not obtain access to the original Acta of the Council written by Angelo Massarelli, its secretary-general.* The very year (1874) in which Bishop Hefele made this statement, Father Theiner, the Prefect of the Vatican Archives, published his Acta genuina Concilii Tridentini (two volumes), but this edition did not pretend to give all the critical documents, and even those that were given were not published in full. He paid no attention whatever to the editing of the other documents so essential to a clear understanding of the Council, such as the diaries of the secretary-general, the letters of the legates, the Cardinals of the Curia, the bishops and the foreign ambassadors. Some may ask what is the use of publishing such an enormous amount of original material, when any scholar competent to write a history of the Council could read the manuscripts himself? As a matter of fact, no one man would be able to read all the original documents, which are scattered in hundreds of public and private libraries in Italy, Spain, Hungary, Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, and England. But even if one man could have mastered all this material—it would take him fifty years of continuous work— we would still be doubtful about his critical estimate of the various documents, which are frequently colored by writers who favor politically either Spain, France, or the Holy See. Before the opening of the Vatican Archives to the world by Pope Leo XIII., it was impossible for any scholar, Catholic or nonCatholic, to obtain access to many of the most important original documents. Not only the Roman See, but all the governments of Europe for centuries guarded most jealously their State documents. We know that even Pallavicino, who was chosen by the General of his order to defend the Council against the attacks of Sarpi, was not allowed to see the documents himself, but had to be content with excerpts expressly made by two of the custodians of the Vatican library, Conteloro and Centoflorino, and submit his work to the strictest possible censorship before publication. Oderico Raynaldi, continuing three centuries later the Annals of Baronius, suffered the same restrictions. Ranke wrote in 1836 that a new history of the Council of Trent was absolutely necessary, but he was utterly skeptical about *Conciliengeschichte, vol. ii., praef., p. vii. Freiburg, 1874. its ever being accomplished. He wrote in his Roman Papacy: "That those who could do it have no wish to see it done, and those anxious to do it do not possess the means.' As a matter of fact, however, we know that it was the original intention of the Roman pontiffs to publish everything relating to the Council. We learn this from two letters that Cardinal Cervino, afterwards Pope Marcellus II. (1555), wrote to Massarelli, November 12 and December 1, 1548. He acknowledges the receipt of two volumes of the decrees, and urges his correspondent to arrange carefully the Acta of the Council in view of their being printed. Moreover the manuscripts of the Acta in the Vatican Archives are marked "imprimenda "—to be printed. That they were not printed de facto was due first to the sudden death of Massarelli, July 16, 1566,‡ and, second, to the well-founded conviction that the enemies of the Church would use them everywhere for the purpose of anti-Catholic polemics. There were no Protestant scholars in that day either competent or willing to write a true history of the Council of Trent, which they knew was held chiefly to condemn the errors of Protestantism. They would simply have used the Acta to frame new charges against the Church and its rulers. Many non-Catholic writers, who blame the Pope severely for not having published all the documents on the Council in the Vatican Archives, in reality justify by their conduct the Roman authorities. For they prove by their writings that they do not care so much for the records in themselves, as for the acts or sayings of the prelates which can be used against the Church. They take special delight, for instance, in calling attention to the sermon preached before the Council by a layman, Count Nogarola, December 26, 1545;§ the dancing of the bishops at the citadel of Trent on March 3, 1546;|| the scandalous speech of Father Diruta, preacher of the Cardinal of Trent, May 1, 1546; the unseemly quarrel between an Italian and a Greek bishop, in which one pulled the other's beard, July 7, 1546,** and certain sarcastic remarks spoken in anger by some exasperated prelate in defence of his own views or the socalled rights of his sovereign.†† When Father Theiner published his edition of the Acta, nonCatholics accused him of omitting intentionally all that might militate against the Church, although he really did his utmost to write objective history. He was seriously hampered by a rigorous *Die Römischen Päpste, vol. iii., p. 289. Page lxxix. § Page 360. [Page 543. **Page 90. †Pages 809, 813. ††Pages 99, 100, 133, 326, 383, 477, 535, etc. |