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Updated: June 17, 2025
Opposite the spacious mission grounds the worshippers were gathering beneath two gnarled banian-trees, giant-like in height and spread. Behind them a long hedge of bananas bordered the cocoanut plantation of the church, and across the narrow road rose the chapel, the priests' residence and the nuns' house, with several school buildings now empty because of the French anti-clerical law.
In January, 1307, the parliament, whose anti-clerical policy has already been recounted, assembled at Carlisle, and remained in session until March. With the spring, Brace crossed over from Ireland, and re-appeared in his own lands in the south-west.
The consistent opposition which the Catholic Church offered to revolutionary violence and her sympathy with constitutionally-expressed Parliamentary agitation have resulted in an anti-clerical colour which this new movement has acquired, and to this, force is added by the measure of strength which it has gained among a certain number of young Protestants in Belfast, whose fathers must turn in their graves at this reversal of opinion on a question which was to them a chose jugée, a veritable article of faith.
This is the only country of Christendom in which there is no anti-clerical party, and hence no constant and effective criticism of clerical pretension and corruption. The result is that all of the churches reach out for tyranny among us, and that most of them that show any numerical strength already exercise it.
Then the anti-clerical party, with the Syndaco at the head, is bourgeois and respectable as far as the middle-aged people are concerned, banal, respectable, shut off as by a wall from the clerical people. The young anti-clericals are the young bloods of the place, the men who gather every night in the more expensive and less-respectable cafe.
The clergy were much more particular about ceremonial observances and ecclesiastical privileges than about the morals either of themselves or of their flocks. But as yet there was no sign of a coming Reformation. Lollardry, it is true, had never been killed; its anti-clerical propaganda was by no means inactive.
A combination of circumstances has caused writers almost unanimously to extol his merits and to ignore his crimes. British historians naturally favour the ally of the Seven Years’ War. Russian and Austrian writers are indulgent to the accomplice of the partition of Poland. Anti-clerical writers glorify the Atheist. Military writers extol the soldier. Political writers extol the statesman.
Of course the English too have their gallant chaplains, but they are men of the officer caste, they are just young officers with peculiar collars; not men among men, as are the French priests. There can be no doubt that the behaviour of the French priests in this war has enormously diminished anti-clerical bitterness in France.
Wendover, in spite of his philosophy, had never been proof all his life against an anti-clerical instinct worthy almost of a Paris municipal councillor.
The word "God," which Crispi sometimes used, was singularly out of place. It was a question rather of bringing the popular classes to prosperity, self-consciousness, participation in political life. Campaigns against illiteracy, all kinds of social legislation, the elimination of the clergy from the public schools, which must be secular and anti-clerical!
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