"Are they compatible with canonical rules?" Extremists, under the leadership of Count Albert de Mun and M. Jacques Pion, said no, and urged both clergy and laity to ignore the law. Moderate laymen of the greatest personal eminence, like Messieurs d'Haussonville, Brunetière and Anatole Leroy Beaulieu, said yes, and more than twenty of them framed a memorial to the hierarchy of France, urging episcopal authorization for the forming of these associations. The Bishops of France, however, were disposed to wait until the Holy Father should pronounce a final decision in this matter. Beyond his encyclical (which we will presently consider) condemning the principle of the law, the Pope preferred to wait until after the parliamentary elections of May 6 and 20, 1906, to learn from the outcome the political complexion of the next Chamber of Deputies and the consequent chances of modifications in the law in a more liberal sense. From the agitation over the taking of inventories not a few in France and in Rome hoped for a virtual repudiation by a majority of the voters of the law of separation.

Meanwhile, it was clear from the terms of the law as adopted December 9, 1905, that in default of associations for the maintenance of public worship, the exercises of public worship will be interdicted. Article eighteen of the law of separation not alone authorizes, but imperatively prescribes the formation of these associations, with their conditions specified in detail by articles 19, 21, 22 and 23, relative to their composition, financial management, etc. If these associations should not be formed or are constituted outside the conditions of the law, the legal consequence would be that parish buildings and parochial funds can be claimed by the communes for the purpose of devoting them to secular works of charitable assistance; as to the cathedrals and churches, confiscation by the State, department or commune would seem to be their predestined fate. The law has not been limited to a regulation of the forms of religious associations; it has also regulated the liberty of reunion for the exercises of religion. Reunions for public worship cannot be held except in premises belonging to or rather held by an association for the maintenance of religion; where no such associations exist there can be no premises legally devoted to these exercises and every public reunion will become impossible. As regards Protestant churches and congregations of Israelites, the question has already been settled by the formation of these associations, organized or being organized according to the provisions of the law. The Catholic hierarchy arranged for a plenary reunion or episcopal conference to take place after the parliamentary elections to consider the whole situation and to report to the Holy See any decision or opinions that might develop from this conference. The law allows the Church until December

9, 1906, for the formation of associations for the maintenance of public worship. Several prelates have pointed out the difficulties of their formation and successful operation. For the least infraction of the complex rules which regulate them they can be dissolved and all the goods that they will have inherited from the present trustees of the churches will be taken away from the parish. In a collective letter the Cardinals of France have declared: "These associations, organized outside of all authority of the Bishops and of the rectors, are by that same feature the negation of the organization of the Church and a venture that is formally schismatic. The essential vice of the associations for public worship is to create an association purely lay to impose it upon the Catholic Church."

In his encyclical of February, 1906, His Holiness Pope Pius X. has condemned the principles underlying the law and justly stigmatized it as the crowning act of a long series of aggressive governmental attacks upon religion. With ringing emphasis the encyclical declares:

"We reprove and we condemn the law voted in France upon the separation of the Church and of the State as profoundly offensive as regards God, whom it officially disowns in laying down as a principle that the Republic did not recognize any religion. We reprove and condemn it as violating the natural law, the law of nations and public fidelity due to treaties; as contrary to the divine constitution of the Church, to her essential rights and to her liberty; as subverting justice and trampling under foot the rights of property that the Church has acquired by multiplied titles and besides in virtue of the Concordat. We reprove and condemn it as gravely offensive for the dignity of this Apostolic See, for our person, for the episcopate, for the clergy and for all French Catholics."

The encyclical contains a splendid arraignment of the whole series of anti-religious French legislative acts, of which the law of separation is the culmination, recalling that:

"You have seen violated the sanctity and inviolability of Christian marriage by legislative dispositions in formal contradiction with. them; secularization of the schools and hospitals; wresting clerics from their studies and from ecclesiastical discipline to constrain them to military service; dispersion and despoilment of the religious congregations and the reduction generally of their members to the most utter destitution. Other legal measures have followed that you all know; they have abrogated the law which ordered public prayers at the beginning of each parliamentary session and at the reopening of the courts; suppressed the signs of mourning, traditional on shipboard, on Good Friday; effaced from the judicial oath that which it comprised of a religious character; banished from court rooms,

from the schools, from the army and navy, finally, from all public establishments, every act or every emblem which was able in any fashion whatsoever to recall religion. These measures and others yet, which little by little separated in fact the Church from the State, were nothing else than landmarks placed in the aim of attaining to complete and official separation; their promoters themselves have not hesitated to recognize it openly and on many occasions!"

Yet every measure restrictive of the rights of religion and the liberty of the Church adopted since 1871 has received a virtual endorsement at the hand of a majority of the voters of France. Almost every one (perhaps all) of those who voted for a separation of the churches from the State has been reëlected to the Chamber of Deputies in the parliamentary elections recently held, and the antireligious elements rejoice in an increased majority in the Chamber that will now rule the destinies of France.

A decision from the Holy See authorizing or prohibiting the formation of "associations for public worship" will be rendered perhaps before these lines appear in print. Upon that decision rests in a very large measure the fate of the Catholic religion in France.

The future of the French as a people has perhaps been foreshadowed with perfect accuracy by the Emperor of Germany. During his last visit to Rome His Imperial Majesty declared: "We do not dream of attacking France. Leave the French alone and they will destroy themselves, for a nation without God is lost."

F. W. PARSONS.

THE SHRINE OF SAINT EDWARD THE CONFESSOR.

I'

I.

T IS an English Benedictine who reminds us that in the old days Westminster Abbey was more than the great pile we all visit and long to know. "Then as now it was the burial place of the mighty and renowned, the scene of great historical events; but it was, besides, the church of a famous monastery, the home of solemn daily and nightly worship of the Most High, the dwelling place of the Living God, the shrine of a glorious saint." That sad shell of greatness has indeed lost the sacramental presence; it is only a crumb of comfort, yet it is comfort to a history loving Catholic, that the last clause quoted still holds true. St. Edward the Confessor, despite many vicissitudes, still sleeps in his own reërected

abbey, and though diminished, battered and in part altered, his shrine still guards his dust. The double circumstance is unusual and marks a continuity of nearly seven and a half centuries. English law made war on the relics of all accounted worthy of religious veneration. SS. William of York, John of Beverley, Richard of Chichester and Thomas of Hereford were spared by accident, but their beautiful shrines are gone; St. Frides wide, abbess and tradi

tional foundress of Oxford, very probably lies yet in her renamed Cathedral Church of Christ, where fragments of her shrine have been recovered and carefully pieced together, as St. Alban's, too, have been in his own minster; but certified shrine and saint together, out of all the treasured saints and shrines of medieval England, are to be found in London's precious abbey alone. If St. Edward's body reposes to-day in the tabernacle of frayed stone and dim glass

mosaic which has stood where it stands since the translation of 1269, the immunity accorded to him and to it was doubtless a tribute not to his holiness, but to his royalty and the enforced respect in which

all royalty was held by the generation who trembled under the Tudors. It is difficult otherwise to account for the preservation of the whole lower half of the shrine. We know how roods all over