that eternal design, sustained by infinite power, cannot rest without effect. He whose it is to bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades, to loose the bands of Orion, to bring forth Mazzaroth in his season, to guide Arcturus with his sons, who knows the ordinances of heaven, and sets the dominion thereof in the earth, rules also the course of civilization. So that humanity is accomplishing a necessary destiny, and yet is composed of beings really free-free to choose the better or the worse, as they will. Hence the part, the vast part, which error and crime play in human affairs. The race, like the individual, has its days of sickness, its years of wandering out of the way, its periods in which no advance is made, its periods of going back. It seems to me that the fourteenth century with its hundred years' war, the sixteenth century with anarchy in consciences and absolutism on thrones, the eighteenth century with its libertinism of intellect and morals, are so many aberrations of modern society, just as I discern the tokens of its return to the truc path in the admirable impulse of 1789, which indeed was swiftly turned aside from its rightful course, but which brought the nations back to the principles of Christian public right. In these periods of disorder the Supreme Disposer of events leaves persons sovereign over their own actions; but He has His hand upon societies. He has appointed them their bounds which they shall not pass, and there He awaits them to bring them back by painful and dark wanderings nearer to that perfection which, for a moment, they have forgotten. The history of progress is not the history of man only, but of God respecting the liberty of men, and doing invincibly His work by their free hands, almost always without their knowledge and oftentimes in their despite.

Such is the true theory of the progress of society according to this profound and eloquent thinker, whom I gladly follow. It is a theory which must of necessity offend those professors of physics, just now so influential in the world, who do not believe in God; who see in man merely an animal "endowed with a memory of appearances and facts;" who deny the distinction between the senses and the intellect, which to me is the beginning of all philosophy; who, as "the priests of Science," following the precedents of antique Paganism, after due inspection of the entrails of their canine and other victims, immolated to that questionable divinity, smite with solemn ex cathedra anathema "the intellectual whoredom of spiritualism;" who conceive of civilization as the diffusion of material comfort and religious unbelief; who "make of the soul a gas, and of the next world a coffin." With such I do not here contend, for I see not what first principles we have in common which are applicable to the matter in hand. But to those who recognize the Divine existence as a reality, and the first of realities, I submit that this doctrine of progress will the more strongly commend itself the more closely it is studied; and that of such progress great men are the main instruments. And to me it seems clear that we owe to Gregory the rescue of liberty of conscience-the first and most precious of all our

* I am quoting Ozaram, but with full assent.

liberties-in that moment of the history of the modern world when it was in greatest danger of perishing. He preserved it, in his day, by the only means possible in that day, and in the only form possible. He has made the task of those who have subsequently fought and suffered for it, if not less arduous, at least more hopeful. This was the work which he did for the new nationalities, in their most plastic period-a work never, as I believe, to be undone, whether by the pride of kings or the madness of peoples.

66

"O passi graviora, dabit Deus his quoque finem."

"But Gregory went too far." It would be no great argument against him if this were true. "Omnis Pontifex ex hominibus assumptus circumdatus est infirmitate." Every Pontiff taken from among men is encompassed with infirmity: and this Pontiff was eminently human. The weakness incident to our mortal state dims and falsifies our vision. "Larger other eyes than ours" are needed to discern the exact bounds which should regulate our action. But, apart from this consideration, it may be noted that the historians and publicists who have judged Gregory most harshly have for the most part forgotten that he must be judged, not by the principles of the nineteenth century, but by the principles of the eleventh. Take, for example, his assertion of the deposing power, so great a stumblingblock to the modern mind. Now what is certain about the deposing power is that it was no invention of Gregory's, but part of the public law which he was called upon to administer as the common father and supreme judge of Christendom, and that it was the principal and most efficacious check upon monarchical violence and oppression. His predecessors had spoken of the Divine testimonies before kings as loftily as he. The second Gregory had released Italy from its allegiance to a heretical Emperor. Pope Zachary had deposed Chilperic, or, at the least, had ratified his deposition and the substitution of Pepin as king. But in fact the so-called deposing power was, strictly speaking, only an incident which attended upon excommunication. It was contrary to the spirit, to the universal sentiment, of an age of faith that a Catholic people should serve an excommunicated monarch. In earlier times even the bishops of the several Christian nations took upon themselves to exclude princes from Church membership, and to release their subjects from fealty, as in the remarkable instance where the French prelates assembled at Compiègne laid under ecclesiastical censures Louis le Débonnaire and pronounced him deposed. The same centralizing tendency, which, as Christendom was formed round the Apostolic chair, reserved to the Supreme Pontiff the power of canonization, anciently vested in each member of the Episcopate, reserved to him also the right to excommunicate princes. And this right was the safeguard of their subjects. For it must ever be remembered that in the medieval public order the notion of absolute and irresponsible monarchy had no place. The authority of kings rested everywhere upon constitutional pacts, varying in form, but the same in substance.

It was limited, fiduciary, and liable to be forfeited for grave infringement of the laws which they had sworn to administer, of the rights which they had sworn to respect, of the duties which they had sworn to perform. And of monarchs so transgressing, according to the public law which had gradually grown up and was in force in Gregory's time, the Pope was the judge. Hence, the Apostolic Chair was the safeguard of right, the help of the helpless, the refuge of the oppressed. It was also, if I may so speak, a permanent court of international arbitration, and so the nexus of the public order of Europe. And I do not think that any impartial student of the acts of those who sat therein, from Gregory's time to the time of the Great Schism, will deny that, upon the whole, they rose to the height of their mission. The world has changed all that now. Christendom has disappeared, and with it the conception of a supreme tribunal judging among the nations by a recognized right and a Divine prerogative. Europe has gone back to that mutually balanced fear (rò àvτíñaλov dios) which the greatest of ancient historians apparently regarded as the only bond of States. The deposing power has been replaced by "the right of insurrection," supplemented by the regicidal scaffold, the assassin's dagger or bomb. It may be questioned whether the change is wholly for the

better.

So much as to the general question of the deposing power. For the rest it cannot be doubted that Gregory was carried by the tide of events further than he had intended to go-that from vindicating the spiritualty against the encroachments of feudalism, he was led to use feudalism as an instrument to bring the Empire into subjection to the Papacy, to make its head "the man" of the Pope. This was natural; nay, inevitable. His work was done in his own day, and primarily for his own day, and by the means which lay ready to his hand; he could find no other. And so, in dealing with other potentates than the Emperor, the tie of fealty by which he sought to bind them to the Holy See was no new device of his. He found it existing; all he did was to strengthen it. And his policy has been amply justified by the event, for it contributed more than anything else to preserve national independence and to foster national development. Upon this subject Cardinal Hergenröther has some extremely just observations. "It is an unfounded assertion," this very judicious writer remarks, "that Gregory VII. treated all princes as vassals of the Holy See. It was neither unusual nor uncommon for princes to place themselves and their dominions under the protection of St. Peter. There was a universal subjection of States in matters of religion, but beyond this, in many instances, a special subjection founded on various titles, generally the personal desire of the ruling prince. They dedicated themselves to the Prince of the Apostles, or to some other Saint, or to some holy place, and made themselves tributary thereto. This subjection served to show that a prince placed under the protection of Heaven and the Saints was independent of any earthly power. Certain it is, that the Popes acted

in this matter on no widespread, deep-laid political scheme, inherited by one from the other. Things took shape spontaneously, fashioned by impending dangers, by the spirit of chivalry, or by religious enthusiasm.”*

"Religious enthusiasm :" it is the key of the enigma. And many a writer of our own times, surveying the great figure of Gregory, and finding here a sufficient account of him and his work, labels him as a fanatic, and dismisses him as unworthy of further consideration from "modern thought." It is, as I know well, a heavy charge in the age in which we live. As a powerful French novelist puts it, "Nous avons appris à peser le pour et le contre, et nous avons appris que la vérité n'est qu'une nuance. Après cela le moyen de se fanatiser!" But Gregory lived eight hundred years before this sublime discovery. There were no nuances in his mind. On the one side was justice, which he loved; on the other iniquity, which he hated. For him it was the whiteness of snow or the redness of scarlet. If this is fanaticism, he was a fanatic. But his fanaticism was informed by the widest and most comprehensive discernment of the needs of his age; a discernment that made of him a great educational reformer, a great liturgical reformer, and one of the founders of that vast system of canon law which, amid the chaotic mass of feudal customs, some barbarous, some ridiculous, all narrow, preserved the broad scientific principles and rules of the Roman jurisconsults, and rendered them available for the needs of mediaval society. It was a fanaticism, too, consistent with the truest liberality to those without the Christian pale, "who believe and confess, though in a different way, one God, and daily praise and adore Him, as the Creator of all ages, and the Governor of the world," the true Light" that enlighteneth every man that cometh therein," "without whom we cannot do or think anything that is good." Gregory was a fanatic, as St. Ambrose, St. Anselm, Savonarola were fanatics; as Moses, Gotama, Mohammed were fanatics; nay as He, the fount of grace and truth, was a fanatic, of whom the judgment of the cool and cautious intellects of His day was, " He hath a devil, and is mad." The reproach of Gregory is the reproach of Christ, and herein is the secret of his success. The cool and cautious intellects pass away, and the "little dust of praise" stirred by admiring contemporaries soon falls, and for the most part serves but to hide their tombs; "their memorial is perished with them." Great enthusiasms are the strongest and most enduring things in the world. "La solidité d'une construction est en proportion de la somme de vérité, de sacrifices, de dévouement qu'on a déposé dans ses bases. Les fanatiques seuls fondent quelque chose."§

"Catholic Church and Christian State," vol. i. pp. 401-9 (Eng. Tr.).

+ Cherbuliez : Ladislas Bolski."

W. S. LILLY.

I am quoting from his striking letter-the last in the Third Book of his Epistles-to Anzir [Anazir, the Saracen Prince of Mauritania Sitiphensis.

§ Renan : Cenférences d'Angleterre,” p. 94.

MEDICAL WOMEN FOR INDIA.

THE

HE message of the Maharanee of Punna, sent through Miss Beilby to the Queen, under the impression that a royal lady who was grieved when a bridge broke, and a train with its human freight was hurled into the waters, would be sure to feel for those women in India whose condition, for want of women doctors to minister to them in their sickness, was "far worse" than that of the people who were thus miserably killed, and that she would, as Empress of India, send out skilful and trained medical women to her suffering subjects and dependants, as she had already sent out medical men, is an appeal from the womanhood of India to the womanhood and manhood of England which the country will do well not to disregard. Rendered into Western and constitutional language, it is a demand on Government for a new public service, and for a recognition of the right of Indian women to have their so-called prejudices-we would say their natural modest shrinking from doctors of the male sex-which religion and custom alike consecrate, respected and not outraged. Reason, propriety, and that tolerance of national usage which has been the rule followed by Government in all dealings with our Indian fellow-subjects, point to the substitution of medical women for medical men in all the institutions subsidized by Government for the treatment of native women. The cry of impracticability will probably at once be raised; we hope, however, to show, by a review of the existing Indian medical service, that that service has been a failure mainly because it could not reach the women, and that this is preeminently a fitting time for the Government to consider the pressing need of the women of India, and the means of meeting it, in connection with the reforms and the retrenchments which are being effected in the service, and the possibility thus afforded of organizing a service of medical women without any large amount of new machinery, and at no great additional expense.