GLIMPSES OF DIVINE WORK IN THE MISSION-FIELD.

2. FRANCE IN AMERICA

From France in France, which we have briefly glanced at, it is natural to turn to her children in foreign lands, and among these, above all, to Canada, her ancient colony, and where a large province still perpetuates her language and her religion. Is there any thing hopeful to say of this, perhaps one of the most obedient parts of the pope's dominions ? For there the shock of revolution which is yet felt in the mother-country hardly reached, and the very disaster, as it might seem, which subjected a Romanist population to a Protestant power shielded the papacy under a toleration it would never have practiced, and a faithfulness to compact it has never shown.

Rome, Cardinal Gibbons assures us, believes in toleration; and there is no doubt she does so under Protestant governments, and wherever it means toleration for herself. Such was the case in the vaunted constitution of Maryland as a British colony. But Rome has openly and solemnly anathematized " those who assert the liberty of conscience and religious worship" (Papal Encyclical, Dec. 8, 1864), and declares "the absurd and erroneous doctrines or ravings in defense of liberty of conscience are a most pestilential error, a pest of all others to be dreaded in the State" (Papal Encyclical, Aug. 15, 1854). And a prelate of her own has assured us that "religious liberty is merely endured until the opposite can be carried into effect without peril to the Catholic world"(Bishop O'Connor of Pittsburgh).

That popery knows how to use toleration wisely for her own interests, no one that has inquired doubts; and Canada, now smarting under the rein corporation of the Jesuits, and compensation made to them, is witness of this to her cost. A struggle is commencing there, for which Rome has been long gathering her forces and putting them in position all over North America, with all the generalship of a profound strategist.

But we have not now to do with this, grave as is its importance. For us, the soldiers of the pope are men, and as such, of the number of those for whom Christ died, and our interest now is in what has been done or is doing among these French in Canada in the salvation of souls. In answering this, I shall draw mainly from a book now in its tenth edition, and therefore not by any means new, the history of the beginning of a movement which has been going on for over thirty years, but with which many are yet little acquainted, however well the name of the chief instrument used by God is known. I refer to "Father" Chiniquy, still familiarly so styled, and his "Fifty Years in the Church of Rome."

The book is a clear, bold, and terrible delineation of Romanism viewed from inside,-a picture which ought to rouse us, if any thing can, to a sense of the spiritual need of the millions enthralled in its fearful bondage, and to earnest and constant effort for their deliverance. They are found on every side of us, needing no journey to a foreign land to seek, and no study of a foreign tongue in order to address ourselves to them. Yet how little is done ! or attempted to be done ! The easy claim for them that they are Christians, because they profess allegiance to Christ, dulls the many into indifference, which on their side is at least not reciprocated. For them, we are outside the pale of salvation. They at least realize a difference which it is our shame, with the open Bibles of which we boast in our hands, that we can make so little of. History, too, is lost upon us, because we are simple enough to believe that with changed times Rome too is changed. And she is changed indeed, and is changing:only from bad to worse; the long descent ever steeper, till the pit swallows her up! "Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth " !

Mr. Chiniquy's book is like the opening of a sepulcher, indeed is the exposure of a living corruption, which is worse than that of death can be. Decency revolts at some of the details, and Rome, he tells us, counts upon her loathsomeness as too great to be exhibited in its full reality. But the light is not defiled by what it exposes, and there needs to be told what God permitted our author doubtless to go through his twenty-five years of priesthood, that he might thoroughly know and reveal.

These fifty years in the church of Rome illustrate indeed the strength of the system which could retain so long one lacking in neither courage nor acuteness. In his father's house the Bible even was read, and his first chapter recounts the effort of the priest, at that time useless, to remove it from it. "To the Bible, read on my mother's knees," he declares, " Thou knowest, O God, I owe by Thy infinite mercy the knowledge of the truth to-day:that Bible had sent to my young heart and intelligence rays of light which all the sophisms and dark errors of Rome could never completely extinguish."

One of the first horrors that popery had for him came, when yet a mere child, in the shape of the confessional,- a torture and a pollution both in one. Henceforth it was to be a specter dogging his heels continually. The nameless and filthy questionings as to unknown and scarce conceivable impurities, forced to be answered fully under penalty of mortal sin, and which he finally had to force on others ; the sins following too commonly, and growing out of this defilement; the malignant, devilish wickedness of a system which foreknows and provides for the iniquity which it unrelentingly presses upon its victims:all this in the most startling ways the book reveals. It can only remind one vividly of that atrocity of the canon law:"If the pope should become neglectful of his own salvation, and of that of other men, and so lost to all good that he draws down with himself innumerable people by heaps into hell, and plunges them with himself into eternal torments, yet no mortal man may presume to reprehend him, forasmuch as he is judge of all, and is judged of no one."* *Decreti, pars i, distinct, xi, can. 6:(The Papacy, by Dr. Wylie, p. 134.*

This is Rome, which deliberately sends its celibate priests into this slough of immorality, exposing them to every temptation, calculating upon their fall, insuring them what secrecy and immunity it can, until "the reign of the priest" becomes, to use the language of a Roman Catholic, " the reign of corruption and of the most barefaced immorality under the mask of the most refined hypocrisy:it is the degradation of our wives, the prostitution of our daughters " (p. 34).

Mr. Chiniquy assures us that there are multitudes of women who will rather die in what they are taught is mortal sin than answer the impure questions which are proposed in the confessional. " Not hundreds, but thousands of times, I have heard from the lips of dying girls, as well as married women, the awful words,' I am forever lost! All my past confessions and communions have been so many sacrileges. I have never dared to answer correctly the questions of my confessors. Shame has sealed my lips and damned my soul.'

As to the priests, it was the testimony of the bishop of Chicago to our author, "The conduct of the priests of this diocese is such that, should I follow the regulations of the canon, I would be forced to interdict all my priests with the exception of you and two or three others. They are all either notorious drunkards or given to public or secret concubinage. … I do not think that ten of them believe in God" (p. 559). A very similar statement he represents as having been made as to his own diocese, by the bishop of Quebec (p. 192).

And no wonder ! Read the account of their education and preparation for the priesthood, and it is easily explained. " It is the avowed desire of Rome to have public education in the hands of the Jesuits. She says every where that they are the best, the model teachers. Why so? Because they more boldly and successfully than any other of her teachers aim at the destruction of the intelligence and conscience of her pupils." The teaching of Loyola is well known :"That we may in all things attain the truth, that we may not err in any thing, we ought ever to hold as a fixed principle that what I see white I believe to be black if the superior authorities of the church define it to be so."

Liguori, a Romish saint, and an eminent teacher, adds in "The Nun Sanctified :" "Blessed Egidius used to say that it is more meritorious to obey man for the love of God than God Himself. It may be added that there is more certainty of doing the will of God by obedience to your superior than by obedience to Jesus Christ, should He appear in person and give His commands. St. Philip de Neri used to say that the religious shall be most certain of not having to render an account of the actions performed through obedience; for these the superiors only who commanded them shall be held accountable."

" To study theology in the church of Rome," says Mr. Chiniquy, "signifies to learn to speak falsely, to deceive, to commit robbery, to perjure one's self. …. I know that Roman Catholics will bravely and squarely deny what I now say. . . Nevertheless they may rest assured it is true, and my proof will be irrefutable. . . . My witnesses are even infallible. They are none other than the Roman Catholic theologians themselves, approved by infallible proofs" (p. 119). He then quotes abundantly for his purpose, but the lack of space will not permit my following him.

All through his studies he shows how reason and conscience (both stout Protestants) had to be continually beaten into submission to superior authority. The final vow, "I will never interpret the Holy Scriptures except according to the unanimous consent of the Holy Fathers," fell upon him like a thunderbolt. He had not, any more than the other students, "given a single hour yet to the serious study of the holy fathers." "I know many priests," says one, " and not a single one of them has ever studied the holy fathers; they have not even got them in their libraries. We will probably walk in their footsteps. It may be that not a single volume of the holy fathers will ever fall into our hands. In the name of common sense, how can we swear that we will follow the sentiments of men of whom we know absolutely nothing, and about whom it is more than probable we will never know any thing, except by mere vague hearsay?"

Chiniquy himself had deeper trouble in his knowledge than in his ignorance. He was aware, by what he had learned of church-history, that there were " public disputes of holy fathers among themselves on almost every subject of Christianity."

"During the months," he goes on, "which elapsed between that hard-fought though lost battle and the solemn hour of my priestly ordination, I did all I could do to subdue and annihilate my thoughts on the subject. My hope was that I had entirely succeeded. But, to my dismay, reason suddenly awoke, as from a long sleep, when I had perjured myself, as every priest has to do. A thrill of horror and shame ran through all my frame in spite of myself. In my inmost soul a cry was heard from my wounded conscience, 'You annihilate the Word of God.'"

What wonder if infidels and immoral men are thus abundantly manufactured ? It is the legitimate result of such a process; and the immorality every where he bears witness to. Led by the representations of the superior of a monastery to escape from what he saw in others and feared for himself in the ranks of the secular clergy, he enrolled himself among the Oblates of Mary Immaculate at Longueuil, only to hear from one of the best among them this answer to the question, "Where is the spiritual advantage of the regular clergy over the secular?"-

" The only advantage I see is that the regular clergy give themselves with more impunity to every kind of debauch and licentiousness than the secular. The monks, being concealed from the eyes of the public, inside the walls of the monastery, where nobody, or at least very few people have any access, are more easily conquered by the devil, and more firmly kept in his chains, than the secular priests. The sharp eyes of the public, and the daily intercourse the secular priests have with their relations and parishioners,' form a powerful and salutary restraint upon the bad inclinations of our depraved nature. In the monastery there is no restraint, except the childish and ridiculous punishment of retreats, kissing of the floor or of the feet. . . . There is surely more hypocrisy and selfishness among the regular than the secular clergy. . , . Behind the thick and dark walls of the monastery or the nunnery, what has the fallen monk or nun to fear?"

Thus universal is the corruption of Rome. We cannot wonder that twice over the torch of the incendiary has reduced to ashes the electrotype plates and many volumes of Mr. Chiniquy's book. Nor have they spared the writer, as we shall see. We have now the happier task of tracing the steps by which he himself, and with him many thousands more, have been brought by God into gospel light and liberty.

( To be continued.)