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Updated: May 29, 2025
Maur, brought thither in the Norman troubles by fugitive monks from Anjou, and the monastery is better known to history under the name of St. Maur des Fossés. The entrails of our own Henry V. were buried there. Rabelais, before its secularisation, was one of its canons, and Catherine de' Medicis once possessed a château on its site.
So also the abolition of privileges, the secularisation of church property, the equalisation of legal punishment, the abrogation of barbarous laws, the liberation of slaves; all these things, which stirred even the most corrupt and apathetic minds of the late eighteenth century, seemed merely so much declamation to Alfieri.
Licences to beg were at that time granted to deserving persons; and it is noticeable that this measure was in a few years followed by the petition to Henry IV. for the secularisation of ecclesiastical property. Thus early in our history had the regular clergy forgotten the nature of their mission, and the object for which the administration of the nation's charities had been committed to them.
Allying itself with the voluntary spirit, caught from the Scottish Free Church movement in 1843, it took the shape of a fanatical opposition to everything in the nature of a public provision for the support of religion; and the cry was raised for the 'Secularisation of the Clergy Reserves. Eagerly taken up, as was natural, by the Ultra-radicals, or 'Clear-grits, the cry was echoed by a considerable section of the old Tory party, from motives which it is less easy to analyse; and so violent was the feeling that it threatened to sweep away at one stroke all the endowments in question, without regard to vested interests, and without even waiting for the repeal of the Imperial Act by which these endowments were guaranteed.
And from one point of view the secularisation of life served but to emphasise the dependence of religion upon the occurrence of these abnormal conditions. For the more surely the phenomena of nature and of social life were brought within the scope of a scientific generalisation, the more people began to look for the life of religion in conditions that were removed from the normal.
I have never been able to make up my mind whether such secularisation of a church wall is the expression of anti-clerical antipathies, or of a clerical common-sense peculiarly French in its practical and unblushing acceptance of the elementary facts of life. But about Cassel I am not so sure.
With the further secularisation of Man's life, the need for religion to make effective the control of Nature, by pointing out to it its own ideal and so co-ordinating and organising all its forces, will gradually make itself felt, and the regeneration of religion will at last have begun.
Now, when secularisation has replaced sequestration, it seems to me that the Italian Government ought to continue the literary and archaeological work of the monks, as it has substituted itself in their proprietary rights; just as, after the French Revolution, the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres carried on the immense work of the clerics of the Congregation de St.-Maur.
It is an old adage that much will have more. The Australian working man is the best fed, the best paid, the best housed, and the least worked of all the workers of the world. In the great towns house rent is dear, much dearer than it has a right to be in so new and so wide a country. This is the consequence of the rush for secularisation and the ensuing neglect of the resources of the land.
The Roman Catholics and members of all Protestant sects eventually demanded the secularisation of the reserves for educational or other public purposes, or the application of the funds to the use of all religious creeds.
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