Revival in

A leading part in promoting the revivals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania was taken by three preachers of the family of Tennent. William Tennent, the eldest of them, established New Jersey. a "log college" at Neshaminy, twenty miles north of Philadelphia. This seminary was the parent of Princeton College. His sons, Gilbert and William, were both forcible preachers, and both the former especially-co-operated actively with Whitefield in his evangelistic efforts. In that region, as in New England, ecclesiastical division was one concomitant of the revivals. The Presbyterians, among whom the influence of the Scottish and Irish element was prevalent, charged the revival preachers with being enthusiasts, for setting up emotional criteria of regeneration, and for pronouncing unconverted such ministers and people as they judged not to meet this subjective test. The conservatives complained, also, of the irruption of the itinerant preachers into parishes where they were not invited, and accused them of fomenting divisions and contentions. The adherents of this party were termed the "old side." The champions of the revival, among whom New England influences were prevalent, were styled the "new side," or "new lights." The dispute went on until it caused a division between synods, which continued from 1745 to 1758. In New England, disturbances and dissensions of a grave character arose. 66 Separatists," who affirmed that they were not edified Effects of the by the preaching in the parish churches, formed, in pargreat revival. ticular in Eastern Connecticut, distinct congregations. An attempt was made to suppress by law these divisive movements. The uncharitable denunciation of ministers who were deemed to be frigid in their piety, and kindred extravagances, brought reproach on the eminent promoters of the revival. Whitefield himself was unjustly believed to be bent on the displacing of the regular ministers of the old school, and the substitution for them of ministers from abroad. Between his first and second visits to New England, various associations of ministers in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and the two colleges, Harvard and Yale, protested against any further countenance of him on the part of the clergy and the churches. He outlived, however, this disfavor, and in his later visits, after the second, was welcomed by many who had before treated him with coldness. With the fruits of the revival Edwards himself was not wholly satisfied. He saw that there was much unhealthy excitement. He found, to his grief, that many converts fell away. He never ceased, however, to consider the movement as, on the whole, a genuine and most beneficent work

66

of God's grace. Many were of the same opinion, while many, whose Calvinism was of a moderate type, and who found extravagances of doctrine as well as of emotion in the new lights," held that a preponderance of evil had resulted, and referred to the time of "the great revival" as the "late period of enthusiasm.” This phrase was employed by President Ezra Stiles, of Yale College, the most learned man of that period in New England, a man of high reputation and estimable character, but not in theological sympathy with Edwards and with the school which had sprung up under his leadership. Dr. Charles Chauncey, a distinguished Congregational divine in Boston, and more of a latitudinarian than Stiles, opposed all itinerant preaching, and thought that the main effect produced by the revival was "a commotion in the passions."

CHAPTER IV.

THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE PERIOD OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE FALL OF NAPOLEON.

State of the
Church and

the clergy in
France.

THE French Revolution was an uprising against the privileged classes the king, the nobles, and the clergy. The Church held an immense amount of land, seigniorial control over a multitude of peasants, besides a vast income from tithes and from other sources. They partook to the full of that deep corruption of the nobility which was one of the main provocations to the great revolt. Prelates lived at a distance from their dioceses, and expended their revenues in indolence and luxurious pleasures. The common priests, as a rule, were ignorant and ill-paid. The Church had in its hands the whole management of education. The Church had supported the tyranny of the Bourbon kings. The lack of religious earnestness on the part of its rulers had left an open course for the progress of free-thinking. Under them, religion had wellnigh lost its power among the middle and lower classes of the French population. The Church had helped to drive the Huguenots from the land, and, in this way among others, to deprive the nation of the moral and conservative forces which might have held back the revolutionary party from the excesses into which it plunged. Many of the leading ecclesiastics had themselves imbibed the spirit of infidelity. Some of them were quite ready to doff their robes and to figure as champions of human rights and of the sovereignty of the people.

The Revolu

Church.

It was the impoverishment of the public treasury which made necessary the convoking of the States-General in 1789. The Church, with its immense wealth, could not fail to be an tion and the immediate object of attention. After preliminary levies on ecclesiastical property, it was finally, on motion of Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun, all confiscated. Ecclesiastics, it was ordained, should receive a fixed stipend from the public coffers. The astute Talleyrand, through all the political changes that followed, until after the elevation of Louis Philippe to the throne in 1830, continued to play a prominent part. The absorption of the Church property was followed by the abolishing of the cloisters and the re lease, by legal enactment, of all monks and nuns from their vows. The dioceses were completely remodelled, and their boundaries conformed to the new departments into which the kingdom was divided. Each was to have its bishop, independent of every other. Bishops and pastors were to be chosen by the people. There was to be, however, no rupture of the tie between the French Church and the papacy. To these measures the pope and a great portion of the clergy were naturally hostile. The requirement that the clergy should swear allegiance to the new constitution brought on a collision. The pope, in 1791, issued a bull which put under the ban all priests who had taken the required oath. This bull was not published in France, or heeded by the government. The clergy were broken into two classes-those who complied with the law and took the oath, and the recusant prelates and priests who, with the nobility, emigrated in large numbers from the country. On the 21st of September, 1792, the National Convention proclaimed France a republic. In January, 1793, they condemned the king, Louis XVI., to death. The emigration of the nobles and priests, and the aggressive measures of the foreign powers for the suppression of the republic, infused a fanatical violence into the minds of the ardent revolutionists. The Catholic religion was forthe Catholic mally abolished, as being hostile to the French Republic. A new calendar was instituted, beginning with the date of the birth of the new republic. In the room of the week, there was a division of time into periods of ten days. So the Lord's Day was no longer to continue as a day of rest or of religious observances. The climax was put upon these anti-Christian proceedings when a profligate woman, representing the Goddess of Reason, in the midst of a great concourse in the ancient cathedral of Notre Dame, was enthroned as an object of homage. So far were the populace carried in this delirium of impiety. Atheism was sentimental

Abolition of

religion.

as well as savage. In these movements clergymen participated. Gobet, Bishop of Paris, with his vicar-generals appeared before the National Convention, with the avowal that they had heretofore deceived the people, but that hereafter they would take their place among the worshippers of freedom and equality. The wild march of irreligion received a check from an unexpected quarter. In the midst of the Reign of Terror, Robespierre, who was a deist, caused a decree to be issued to the effect that the French nation acknowledges a Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul. The fall of Robespierre and the accession to power of the Directory put a stop for the time to meddling with religious affairs on the part of the government. It is a curious fact that the instincts prompting to worship could not be wholly stifled, even when the institutions of religion had been trodden in the dust. A sect of deists, called Theophilanthropists, sprang up, who numbered twenty thousand in Paris, and were found in other cities. In Paris they occupied ten churches. Their creed was the obligation to love God and man. But their zeal soon died out. In 1802 they were excluded by the Consuls from the national churches.

Pius VI.;

Repablic.

In 1791 the National Assembly had annexed the papal districts of Avignon and Venaissin to the French dominion. The pope, Pius VI., protested against this seizure. He united with the Roman the allied sovereigns who were leagued against France. The victories of Napoleon in Italy compelled Pius, in 1797, to agree to the Peace of Tolentino, where he resigned his title to the countries wrested from him, gave up to the new Cisalpine Republic, founded by Napoleon, Bologna, Ferrara, and Romagna, agreed to pay thirty million livres, and allowed the French to strip Rome of precious manuscripts and works of art. These went to Paris among the trophies of the conqueror. The republican feeling in the papal kingdom was used by the French to advance their own purposes. In 1797 an insurrection in Rome, in which a French general lost his life, was seized on by the Directory as a pretext for occupying the papal territory. In the following year a Roman Republic was proclaimed. The pope was carried away as a captive, and not long after (August 29. 1799) he died at Valence in France. With the establishment of the Consulate, the efforts of Napoleon to build up religious institutions anew from their ruins began. In all his measures he was careful to guard the supremacy of the civil power and of himself as its head, and to confine papal prerogatives within narrow bounds.

Religious institutions

under Napoleon.

Conflict of Napolcon with Pius VII.

In 1801 he concluded a concordat with Pope Pius VII., in which the Catholic religion was declared to be the religion of a majority of the French people, and as such placed under the protection of the government. The emigrant clergy were to renounce all claim to the offices which they had left. In order to put an end to the distinction between the two classes of priests, all the priests were to resign their places, and to be reappointed. Archbishops and bishops were to be appointed by the government. To them the pope was to grant canonical institution. The rights which had belonged to the kings of France were to inhere in the Consuls. The next year (1802) Napoleon promulgated certain organic laws of the Church. They were shaped according to the old principles of Gallican freedom. Decrees of the popes, and even of general councils, were not to be published in France without the placet of the government. As a defence against ecclesiastical courts, there might be a resort to civil tribunals. Monastic orders were abolished. All teachers in the seminaries were to subscribe to the declaration of the French clergy in 1682. Notwithstanding the opposition of the pope to these enactments, he came to Paris, in 1804, to crown Napoleon. When, however, several years after (1808), the emperor went so far as to demand the creation of a Patriarch of France, to be appointed by himself, required the introduction of his legal code into the papal kingdom, the abolition of cloisters and of the rule of clerical celibacy, and required the pope to join him in the league against England and to close his ports against the enemy, Pius VII. refused compliance. As a penalty, in 1809 his states were annexed to the French Empire. A papal bull of excommunication against all unrighteous assailants of the Holy See was issued, and Napoleon was privately informed that he was included among them. The pope was carried as a prisoner, first to Savona, and then into France. Under these trying circumstances Pius VII. maintained his position with firmness. Twenty-seven bishoprics in France were vacant. A sect of "pure Catholics," adherents of the pope, was arising, who were obliged to hold their services in secret. Napoleon deprived Pius VII. of the cardinals, and even of his private secretary. The proceedings of the emperor in relation to the calling of a national synod, which met on June 17, 1811, and reassembled, after being once dissolved by the imperious sovereign, induced the pope to make large concessions. He was brought to Fontainebleau, and was roughly treated by Napoleon after his return from Russia, in 1812. At length there was a preliminary agree