EXPATRIATION OF MORISCOES.

31

her Catholic Church;* that civilization has been retarded in Italy and in Ireland by similar agency; and, in a general way, that the increase of wealth, enterprise, and intelligence has been greater north of the boundary established by the peace of Westphalia than south of it: nevertheless the geographical frontier between the two religions, as then agreed upon, has scarcely been changed at all from that day to this. So far as the comparative numbers of Protestants and Romanists have varied since that peace was made, the variation has been in favor of the Roman Catholic Church. Even in countries the most thor

* The extermination of the Albigenses, even the St. Bartholomew massacres, dwindle to petty proportion before the giant wrong perpetrated, at the instigation of the Spanish Church, in the expatriation of the Moriscoes, the unhappy remnant of the Moorish nation. "About one million of the most industrious inhabitants of Spain were hunted out like wild beasts, because the sincerity of their religious opinions was doubtful."--BUCKLE, History of Civilization (New York Ed. 1862), vol. ii. p. 49. Countless thousands were butchered on the road to Africa, and hundreds of thousands more perished, when cast loose on a savage coast, by the swords of the Bedouins and by famine in the desert. The scarcely credible particulars of this wholesale outrage and of the ruin to Spanish prosperity and power that followed it, will be found, with ample authentication, in the chapter from which I have quoted. Never was nation so terribly and so speedily punished as Spain for one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever perpetrated by a people claiming to be civilized.

See, for a few important words in this connection, Darwin's Descent of Man, vol. i. pp. 171, 172: (New York Ed.)

According to the best modern statistical authorities there were in the year 1868-out of the total population of the world, numbering 1,375,000,000

Total number of Catholics.

195,434,000

Total number of Protestants.

100,835,000

And, in Europe, the totals for the same year were:

More than two Catholics, it will be observed, to every Protestant, in Europe to-day.

And besides the Catholics proper (who alone are reckoned above),

32

INROADS OF ROMANISM IN GREAT BRITAIN

oughly Protestant and in our own times, the inroads of Cathol icism on the prevailing faith have been such as must arouse, in thoughtful minds, grave reflections. In a third of a century, to wit from 1833 to 1867, the number of Catholic churches in Great Britain had more than doubled, while the number of Catholic seminaries had increased upward of five-fold. Up to the year 1833-the year when the great Tractarian movement had birth in Oxford-there was not in the British Isles a single convent or one Catholic school: but within thirty-four years thereafter there were founded in Great Britain nearly three hundred of the former, and nearly four hundred and fifty of the latter. Surely a very noteworthy progress made in the present age and in the most Protestant country of the world, by the Church of Rome! *

But it is in our own country, above every other, that the recent gains of Romanism upon Protestantism are the most remarkable. At the close of the two centuries and a half that elapsed from the first settlement of Virginia to the year 1859, the number of Catholics in the United States had run up to two

there are the members of the Eastern phase of Catholicism, agreeing with the Western in a general way, even on the subject of the infallible authority of the Church, except that they restrict that infallible authority to the Ecumenical Councils. (Hagenbach's History of Doctrines, vol. ii. p. 234.) In 1868 they outnumbered the Protestants in Europe, there being, in that quarter of the world—

Total included in Greek and other Eastern Churches... 69,782,000. At the present time, therefore, less than one fourth of the Christians in Europe are Protestant.

For these and other details see Schem's Ecclesiastical Almanac for 1869 (noticed in a subsequent note), pp. 81, 82, etc.

* In the Report for the year 1867-8 of the Scottish Reformation Society (founded in Scotland, in 1850, to "resist the aggressions of Catholicism"), tables are given, showing the exact numbers, which sum up as follows:

AND IN THE UNITED STATES.

33

millions and a half only: but at the end of the nine years that succeeded (namely in 1868), that number had doubled. Twelve years ago they were but a twelfth part of our population; to-day they constitute, probably, more than a seventh.

If we suppose the two great divisions of the Christian Church, respectively, to go on increasing among us at the same ratic for four terms of nine years each from 1868, the Catholics of the United States would, at the end of that time, exceed the Protestants in number by several millions.*

How wonderful, if one admits that Reason and Scripture were on the side of the Reformers, is all this! From the usual Protestant standpoint, how beset with difficulties in explanation!

§ 3. INADEQUATE CAUSES SUGGESTING THEMSELVES.

Some minor causes bearing on this ebb and flow of opinion, yet accessory only, one readily perceives. The startling progress of the Lutheran movement, even during the first decade or two, convinced the astute Court of Rome, that thorough

* Schem's "Ecclesiastical Year-book" for 1860, and his Ecclesiastical Almanac for 1869, both published in this country by a most painstaking German statistician, professor of Hebrew in Dickinson College, have the well-earned reputation of being the most trustworthy documents extant among us on the subject of modern religious statistics. In the first of these (at page 14) I find

Number of Protestants in the United States in 1859... 21,000,000 Number of Catholics in the United States in 1859....... 2,500,000 And in the second (at page 81)

Number of Protestants in the United States in 1868... 27,000,000 Number of Catholics in the United States in 1868....... 5,000,000 Showing that the Catholics had increased, in the nine years from 1859 to 1868, one hundred per cent., while the Protestants had increased, in the same time, less than twenty-nine per cent.

Those who will verify the calculation of future increase, supposing it to continue at the same relative ratio for four terms of nine years each, commencing with the year 1868, will find that in 1904, that is in thirty.

34

REFORMATION IN CHURCH OF ROME,

reformation within could alone enable it to resist the giant Reformation without. This conviction showed itself in the changed character of the Pontiffs chosen. Before the standard of heresy was raised on the banks of the Elbe, it had been a Sixtus IV., with his inhumanity and his unblushing nepotism; an Alexander VI., with his sensuality, and those children of his, the infamous Borgias; at best, the elegant luxury and lavish prodigality of a Leo X. But when the storm from Wittenberg swept over the land, and the time of need came, then there succeeded to these the corrective influence of such men as Paul III., earnest,* intelligent, and sagacious, and Paul IV., austere, impulsive, inflexible, and ruled by a single devotion, that of restoring to its primitive purity the ancient faith. And more home-reaching than the power of any Pope was the influence of a man† as remarkable in his way as the great Reformer himself; unlike him as one man could well be to another, yet as fiercely in earnest, as indissolubly wedded, body and soul, to one idea. As Luther was the animating spirit of the reformatory movement, so was Loyola of the reactionary one. And, for a time, the sway exercised over the religious mind of Europe and its dependencies, by the Spaniard, with his intensity and his asceticism, was little less than that which the stubborn and warm-hearted German exerted.

three years from to-day, there would be eighty millions of Catholics to less than seventy-five millions of Protestants, in the American Union.

It is very far from being my belief that any such result is compatible with the spirit of God's economy and the ceaseless march of human progBut to avert it, some religious influences that have been at work for three hundred years must undergo radical change.

ress.

* This Pontiff, expressing to the Emperor Charles V., in 1537, his determination to carry out internal reform in the Church, writes: "Sarà con effetto, e non con parole." It was to be in deeds, not words.

+ Ignatius Loyola's public career commenced twenty years later than Martin Luther's. The bull establishing the new Order was granted, at Loyola's earnest instance, by Pope Paul III., in 1540. The Order of Jesus was suppressed in 1773, but restored in 1814: in each case by Papal authority.

WITH ITS DRAWBACKS.

35

These things are to be taken into account; but do we find in them a solution of the difficulty? If the vices of the Papacy were weeded out, its errors of opinion remained. If Popes like the third and fourth Paul and Pius V., and Gregory XIII.,* sustained the honor and the cause of the Catholic Church: if Loyola and his coadjutors gave to it their fortunes and their lives,† were there not, opposed to these, Luther and Calvin and Melancthon and Zwingli, and a host of other apostles of the Reformation, as able and as devoted workers as any of which Catholicism could boast?

The sword, indeed, was used against the innovators: but persecution, unless its severity tend toward extermination, is in

* The last two, however, Pius and Gregory, with the drawback of an inhuman spirit of persecution. Pius V. complained that the leader of the French Catholics, Count Santafiore, failed to obey the command he had given him to take no Huguenot prisoner, but "instantly to kill every heretic that fell into his hands." Here are his biographer's own words: "Pio si dolsi del Conte che non avesse il comandamento di lui osservato d' ammazzar subito qualunque heretico gli fosse venuto alle mani."— Vita di Pio V., by CATENA.

When the news of the massacre of St. Bartholomew (1573) reached Gregory XIII., he celebrated that great event by a solemn procession to San Luigi. I can find no foundation for the apology, sometimes offered by Catholics for this; namely, that Gregory was ignorant at the time, that it was a general massacre. It is incredible that a religious movement involving the death, it is said, of fifty thousand heretics (RANKE, Histor. Polit. Zeitschrift, II. iii.), should not have been known in its true character, and at the earliest day, to so well-served and well-informed a court as that of Rome; to say nothing of the fact that the Romish Church has always held it a right and a duty to suppress heresy, if need be, by the death-penalty.

+ It is to be borne in mind also, that the stern discipline and incisive austerity of the order of Jesus faded, ere long, into a spirit of compromise with the vices and even the crimes of the age. Speaking of the Jesuits in the middle of the seventeenth century, Ranke says: "The spirit which once animated them had fallen before the temptations and influences of the world, and their sole endeavor now was to make themselves necessary to mankind, let the means be what they might.

The secret operations of that awful tribunal which is established