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Entering the lower church at the bottom of the great flight of steps which leads from the upper door, you seem to push at least into the very heart of Catholicism. For the first minutes after leaving the clearer gloom you catch nothing but a vista of low black columns closed by the great fantastic cage surrounding the altar, which is thus placed, by your impression, in a sort of gorgeous cavern.
Even now, twenty thousand were secretly pledged to rise at the bidding of certain chieftains resident among them; noble by birth, warmly attached to the Reformed religion, and devoted to Orange. These gentlemen were perfectly conscious that a reaction was to be attempted in favor of Don John and of Catholicism, through the agency of the newly-appointed governor of Flanders.
What a great Protestant power has arisen in northern Germany to awe and keep in check not Catholicism merely, but such a hyperborean giant as Russia in its daring encroachments. But for Prussia, Russia might have extended her conquests to the south as well as to the west. But for the Thirty Years' War, no such empire as Prussia would have been probable, or perhaps possible.
She was fond of music, and on her first Sunday she could not resist the temptation to hear a mass by Mozart in Saint Mary's, Moorfields. She was overpowered, and something moved in her soul which she had never felt in the church at home. She worshipped at Saint Mary's several times afterwards, and her friend rallied her on conversion to Roman Catholicism. 'It is the music, Kate.
Helena, it is true, he asserted that the choice of Catholicism or Protestantism was entirely open to him in 1801, and that the nation would have followed him in either direction: but his religious policy, if carefully examined, shows no sign of wavering on this subject, though he once or twice made a strategic diversion towards Geneva, when Rome showed too firm a front.
To the few who, throughout those troublous times, had kept a feeling of veneration for their religion, this religion had become one of abnegation and martyrdom. A spirit of uncompromising Jansenism seemed to call forth sacrifices and renunciation, whereas the happy-go-lucky Catholicism of the past century had only suggested an easy, flowered path, to a comfortable, well-upholstered heaven.
The Bill caused much irritation in Protestant New England, which saw some malicious design in the establishment of Roman Catholicism on its borders. The Continental Congress of 1775 denounced the Quebec Act, and even the Declaration of Independence has something to say about it. It is obvious that Nairne disliked the Bill.
The truth would seem to be that while corruption of every sort, and especially political corruption, was destroying the empire, the importance of Christianity was vastly increasing. The great quarrel was really that between Catholicism and heresy. This was a living issue while the cause of the empire as a political entity was already dead.
The Palatinate was conquered, and the Electorate was transferred by Imperial fiat to Maximilian of Bavaria, the head of the Catholic League, whereby a majority was given to the Catholics in the hitherto equally-divided College of Electors. An Imperial Edict of Restitution went forth, restoring to Catholicism all that it had lost by conversion within the last seventy years.
Both parties, however, were largely devoted to the Anglican Church; and when James II, after four years of misrule, attempted to establish a national Catholicism by intrigues which aroused the protest of the Pope as well as of Parliament, then Whigs and Tories, Catholics and Protestants, united in England's last great revolution.
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