At this time there begins within the Catholic Church itself a short process of fermentation (to which Joseph de Maistre's and Lamennais' feud with Gallicanism belongs), which in the course of a score of years produces the hitherto unknown phenomenon of perfect unity among Catholics. Catholicism and submission to Rome become one and the same thing. And another, kindred phenomenon, quite as unheard of, is witnessed in our century. Religious unity spreads even beyond the bounds of the Roman Catholic Church. The Protestant Church holds out its hand to the Catholic, which in days gone by it had abominated as the Babylonian whore. Glancing at the later religious development of the century, we find that in our days the difference between orthodox Protestantism and Catholicism is only an apparent difference, only the difference between faith in the infallibility of the Bible and faith in the infallibility of the Pope. The Protestants reject the reason of the eighteenth and the scientific criticism of the nineteenth century; they go back to the creeds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and do not consider even these orthodox enough; Luther is too advanced for them. Schleiermacher is regarded as a free-thinker by orthodox Germany; Bossuet's attitude is reprobated by French Catholics. He is considered a heretic, in as far as he asserted the independence of the French church. We remember that Joseph de Maistre disapproved of him. Even Montalembert, in his book on the interests of Catholicism in the nineteenth century, mentions him in a condemnatory tone. But the movement does not stop here. The contributors to the Catholic newspapers and periodicals take to writing historical articles which constitute a regular crusade against the great pagan geniuses who founded the civilisation of Europe, such as Pindar, Plato, Virgil. In Danish literature we have an equivalent in Grundtvig's earliest historical pronouncements.[3] Hence Montalembert, in the work just referred to, is able to declare triumphantly: "Lying history, parodied history, declamatory history, as written by Voltaire, Dulaure, and Schiller, the men who educated our fathers, would hardly be put up with to-day, even in a feuilleton." A glance through Lamennais' letters is sufficient to persuade us that one great cause of the Revolution of July was the behaviour of the clerical party. The Jesuits acted as the storming force of fanaticism. Missionaries, whose fervent faith was due to their gross ignorance, were sent to all parts of the country. They sometimes converted whole regiments at a time, and these were then led by their officers in a body to the altar.
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Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, Vol. III (of 6) The Reaction in France — Part 211
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