The Sun.
London, England, 1859-10-20 00:00:00

THE MONTARA CASE.

The protest of the English clergy and laity
against the seizure and detention of a Jewish child
by the Church of Rome on the pretence of a surrep-
titious baptism in infancy is one to command the
respect of any ordinary Power. A stranger might
not very readily understand how several hundred
names could either represent the public opinion of
this country, or amount to a tribunal qualified to
pronounce on a legal or a spiritual question. Of
course, too, the Church of Rome will easily dispose
.of the authority of our bishops and other dignita-
ries. We, however, know at home, and it is also
known by every statesman in Europe at all com-
petent to advise upon European affairs, that these
several hundred names represent just the qualities
that make England a great nation. They are the
names of men who form their opinions deliberately,
without fear, passion, self-interest, or prejudice,
and who arc prepared to take their stand on their
opinions so formed. England is pre-eminently a
school of right. It is not only a place where a man
may enjoy his own without molestation, but also a
place where he may learn what is his own, how far
he ms.y advance his claims, and where he must stop
short at the rightful domain of his neighbour. Here
we learn to know and respect the rights of con-
science, the rights of private judgment, the rights
of society, the rights of the public, and the rights
of every man, whether he advances a humble plea
for existence, or demands our surrender to a pre-
ternatural summons. In fact, we possess among
ourselves, and in the Very heart of our society, all
the various elements which elsewhere set State
against State, and, as each prevails, form the dis-
tinctive character of Governments and dynasties.
So nowhere is it better known and practised what
to render to the powers that be, and what to Him
who is over all. The men who have subscribed
this protest are no more actuated by hostility to the
Papacy than they are by any undue tenderness to
those of the Jewish persuasion. But they know
what is due between man and man. They know
on what principles alone either Papists or Jews can
exist without an utter disruption of society. They
know, also, that there are spiritual questions, and
that spirits al claims address themselves to the
spirit or inner nature of man. They know, there-
fore' that all attempts to assert spirftual rights by
fraud or by font., by secret conspiracy, by invasions
and surprises upon the rights of nature—by cap-
tures, abductions, concealments, and other acts of
brigandage, are as much outrages as the irruption
of an armed mob into a quiet household, into a
palace, a church, or a Garden of Gethsemane.
Probably, however, the last thing that the sub-
scribers expect is that their protest will have any
effect, or that Rome will surrender to the ?naked
voice of reason and humanity the prey she has
once branded as her own. No doubt, this is all
according to the stiffest precedents of the Roman
Church. The child was baptised. It is a Chris-
tian. It is a child of the Church. It owes
obedience to the Holy See. It cannot be left in the
hands of the unbeliever. By this time,- too, as is
asserted, the child itself has become an intelligent
and conscientious Christian, and enters .fully and
cordially into the train of reasoning which has
separated it from its natural friends and pro-
tectors. Such logic is irresistible, and we have
only to wish that no one of the clergymen and
other gentlemen who have entered their protest
may ever have to argue the question with Car-
dinal Antonelli and the cells of Sau Pietro-in-
Vincolo. We have no doubt whatever that the
conclusion of the controversy would be signal and
disastrous. The subscribers, however, are fully
a.waie of all this. They know that thc:e is no
withstanding the logic of Rome. But we beg
the partisans and admirers of Rome to observe
that this is the very reason why most of them
hold themselves bound to do their utmost to strip
Rome of every vestige of temporal power. It is
because they sec that Rome has a logic, a mode
of reisoning, a policy, and a rule of her own.
It is because Rome is utterly proof against the
principles on which human society alone can exist.
They know that, had Rome the power or the
encouragement, she wouid at once make preten-
sions certain to array half the civilised world in
arms against the other. In this island we are
all of one opinion as to the result of the widest

and most formidable struggle ; but we have no
wish to see Europe devastated, her fields ravaged,
her cities destroyed, and her population brutalised
by a Holy War made in the name of mercy and
peace for the winning of souls. Hence it is that
we resist claims that can only be permitted with
such dangerous consequences. The fact that Ro-
man logic tends irresistibly to such, a consum-
mation is enough for us. The professors of that
logic tell us that we have no weapons that can
dint its shield or foil its thrust. They assure us
it pursues a course of its own that no art of
ours can disturb. We see what it must lead to,
so we give it no terms; we resist it altogether.
Yet Rome is full of complaints ; no tongue so
sweetly pathetic, so tenderly remonstrant. Her
cry is always for her children that have been de-
ceived and seduced, and whom she longs to recall
from the precipices they play upon by the most
touching demonstrations of her motherly feeling. To
read her letters and rescripts, her pastorals and
missives, one would suppose her only ill-used, in-
sulted, defrauded, and persecuted by all the arts
of human treachery or violence. It was difficult
to read the Papal lament over the defection and
crimes of the .21,.'milian cities without some sort of
passive sympathy for the parent deserted by
her children. 13ut if one had permitted a
mere instinct to carry one further, and even to
wish success to the armies in the field against the
rebels, it must soon have occurred to the memory
that Rome recognises neither natural feel-
ings, nor political duties, nor laws of G)d or man,
when they conflict with her claims. She can
secretly stamp a • bond of allegiance on an un-
conscious babe, and in due time wrest the unwitting
convert from the arms of its natural guardians.
She can pronounce nature itself in its highest and
purest form a crime in the face of her own higher
ordinance, and banish father, mother; sister, brother,
and all that nature has ordained, if they presume
to stand between the priest and—we cannot say the
people—the child. Why, then, need we concern
ourselves with the spiritual yearnings of an ima-
ginary parent over her rebellious children, when
we see the reality before us ? Like various other
potentates more or less deserving of our sympathy,
Pio Nono has lost a considerable portion of his tem-
poral dominions. The Sultan, the King of Holland,
and now the Emperor of Austria, have all been suf-
ferers in this way; and their cases can hardly be
thought so bad as that of several other Sovereigns
who have lost their thrones altogether, and retired
to private life—that private life which affords so
many examples of more terrible disasters. None
of these misfortunes, however, so that they are con-
fined to the loss of thrones, cities, or territories, can
rank with the grief of a parent robbed of his child.
We have only to suppose the case of a devout Roman
Catholic whose child has been kidnapped and carried
off to Morocco or Constantinople, there to be brought
up in the religion of the Prophet, the lord or the
inmate of a harem, and we can estimate the sorrow
of the Mortaras. It is not for us to say by the light
of our own revelation that there is ruin in one case
and salvation in the other. That is not the ques-
tion. This is a case in which our plain duty is to
do as we would be done by, and to respect the feel-
ings which our own hearts teach us to be human
and sacred. Rome will doubtless persist ; she
always does persist ; but her persistence in what we
all believe to be a crime nuinst the first laws of
nature comes very opportunely to c/ eck any weak
regrets for the general rush of her flock out of her
temporal pale.— Times.

Amidst all the convulsions which Europe has
undergone foe the last thousand years one Power
alone has, in spite of some interruptions, held its
ground, and never shrunk from asserting its pre-
rogatives. With a tenacity that ha.: no parallel in
history, the Pope hasnever ceased to claim supremacy
over all Powers in the world, whether temporal or
spiritual. lie has not been very successful of late
years with the temporal Powers ; for there is not a
kingdom in Europe in which his bulls can be rro-
mulgated without the license of the civil adminis-
tration. But by all but a few countries in Europe,
and those not populous, his claims to be the Vice-
gerent on Earth of the Most High have been