书城公版The Origins of Contemporary France
19097600001102

第1102章

[68] Had Hitler and Lenin read this, which is likely, then they would have fashion their youth party programmes accordingly!! Kthe Catholic faith in France today (in 1999) is nearly extinguished with only 14seminaries and only a few hundred young men yearly entering these.(SR.)[69] Abbé Bougaud, ibid., p. 135. (Opinion of the archbishop of Aix, Ibid., p. 38.) "I know a lower seminary in which a class en quatrième (8th grade US.) of 44 pupils furnished only 4 priests, 40 having dropped out on the way. . . . I have been informed that a large college in Paris, conducted by priests and containing 400 pupils, turned out in ten years but one of an ecclesiastical calling." -"Moniteur," March, 14, 1865. (Speech in the Senate by Cardinal Bonnechose.) "With us, discipline begins at an early age, first in the lower seminary and then in the upper seminary. . . . Other nations envy us our seminaries. They have not succeeded in establishing any like them. They cannot keep pupils so long; their pupils enter their seminaries only as day scholars."[70] Old-fashioned name for the 11th grade in a French high school.

(SR.)

[71] "Histoire de M. Emery," by Abbé Elie Méric, I., 15, 17. "From 1786 onwards, plays written by the 'les philosophes," by the 'Robertuis' and the Laon community; they were excluded from the great seminary where they ought never to have been admitted." This reform was effected by the new director, M. Emery, and met with such opposition that it almost cost him his life.

[72] M. de Talleyrand, "Mémoires," vol. i. (Concerning one of his gallantries.) "The superiors might have had some Suspicion, . . . but Abbé couturier had shown them how to shut their eyes. He had taught them not to reprove a young seminarist whom they believed destined to a high position, who might become coadjutor at Rheims, perhaps a cardinal, perhaps minister, minister de la feuille - who knows?"[73] "Diary in France," by Christopher Wordsworth, D.D. 1845.

(Weakness of the course of study at Saint-Sulpice.) "There is no regular course of lectures on ecclesiastical history." - There is still at the present day no special course of Greek for learning to read the New Testament in the original. - "Le clergé fran?ais en 1890"(by an anonymous ecclesiastic), pp.24-38. "High and substantial service is lacking with us. . . . For a long time, the candidates for the episcopacy are exempt by a papal bull from the title of doctor." -In the seminary there are discussions in barbarous Latin, antiquated subjects, with the spouting of disjointed bits of text: "They have not learned how to think. . . Their science is good for mothing; they have no means or methods even for learning. . . . The Testament of Christ is what they are most ignorant of. . . . A priest who devotes himself to study is regarded either as a pure speculator unfit for the government, or with an ambition which nothing can satisfy, or again an odd, ill-humored, ill-balanced person; we live under the empire of this stupid prejudice, . . . We have archeologists, assyriologists, geologists, philologists and other one-sided savants. The philosophers, theologians, historians, and canonists have become rare."[74] "Journal d'un voyage en France," by Th. W. Allies, 1845, p.38.

(Table of daily exercises in Saint-Sulpice furnished by Abbé Caron, former secretary to the archbishop of Paris.) - Cf. in "Volupté," by Saint-Beuve, the same table furnished by Lacordaire.

[75] "Manreze du prêtre," by the Rev. Father Caussette, I., 82.

[76] Ibid., I., 48. "Out of 360 meditations made by a priest during the year, 300 of them are arid." We have the testimony of Abbéd'Astros on the efficacy of prayers committed to memory, who was in prison for three years under the first empire and without any books.

"I knew the psalms by heart and, thanks to this converse with God, which escaped the jailor, I was never troubled by boredom."[77] As with the "Frères des écoles Chrétiennes," whose society has the most members.