As early as the month of October, 1814, M. de Broglie, bishop of Ghent, had addressed a memorial to the congress of Vienna, in which he demanded authority to assemble the principal persons of Belgium, to deliberate upon their interests, and to form a solemn compact with the prince that should be chosen for them, which should have for its principal end, the maintenance of the Catholic religion inviolable in all its rights; the demand came too late, as the treaty of London, of the 20th of June, had already decided every thing.

The 28th of July, 1815, the diocesan bishops addressed a protest to the king, of which the following is an extract:

"Sire, We are obliged unceasingly to warn the people committed to our care, against all doctrines in opposition to those of the Catholic Church. This we cannot neglect without betraying one of our most sacred duties. And in case Your Majesty were to uphold and to protect, in virtue of a fundamental law of the state, the public profession and the propagation of these doctrines, to the progress of which we are bound to oppose ourselves, with all the eagerness and activity which the Catholic Church expects from our ministry, we should thus find ourselves in formal opposition with the laws of the state, and with the measures Your Majesty might take to maintain them, and in spite of all our efforts for the preservation of peace, the public tranquillity might find itself compromised.

"And since, according to article 136 of the projected new constitution, the public exercise of any worship may be prevented, if there be any danger of its being the occasion of disturbance to public peace, it follows that the free exercise of our religion might be suppressed in these provinces."

The 2nd of August, 1815, the bishop of Ghent addressed to his clergy, and to the faithful of his diocese, a pastoral instruction, of which the following extracts are specimens :

"Liberty is by (art. 196) guaranteed to all forms of worship, by the laws of the state, and (art. 198) adds that every subject of the king is admissible to any of the offices of the state, without distinction of belief. Were you to approve of such a law, you would be thereby sanctioning the dreadful principle that all religions are equally true, and that it is as possible to be saved in one as in another."

The bishop then remarks, that, by the admission of persons without distinction of faith,

"That sooner or later very important offices in this portion of the kingdom would come to be filled by persons of a religion different from our own. Who cannot see at the first glance the

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probable consequences of such a result? Our dearest interests, those of the Holy Catholic Church, her laws, her morality, and her discipline, would be in their hands.

In virtue of the authority entrusted to us by the Church, we solemnly protest against the adoption and the insertion of the forementioned articles in the new constitution of the kingdom, and we forbid all of our diocese who are and may be chosen representatives, to give any adherence to them whatever upon any pretext whatsoever."

The bishop of Tournai addressed a similar pastoral to his diocese, dated the 11th of August, and the bishop of Namur had prepared a similar one, which, however, was seized by the police in the hands of the printer, and the whole edition destroyed, a step which was regarded as a somewhat ominous interpretation of the clause in the new constitution which guaranteed the liberty of the press.

The king having, notwithstanding its rejection by the majority, declared by his decree of the 24th of August, that the new constitution had been formerly accepted; the bishops jointly published their doctrinal judgment upon it, in which the following passages were found:

"It is to fulfil one of the most essential duties of our Episcopate, and to discharge an obligation to our people, that has been strictly imposed upon us by the Church, that we have judged it necessary to declare that no persons of our dioceses can, without betraying the dearest interests of our religion, and rendering themselves guilty of a great crime, take the different oaths prescribed by the constitution, in which the party taking them is bound to observe and support the new law, or to assist towards procuring its observance."

"To swear," observes one of the Bishops in his remarks on the new law, "to obey or to maintain a law, which attributes to the Sovereign, and that to a sovereign who does not profess our holy religion, the right to dispose of the public instruction, that is, of the higher, middle, and lower schools, is to abandon to his discretion the public instruction in all its branches, and shamefully to betray the dearest interests of the Catholic Church. In fact, by means of a law expressed in such general terms, what limit can there be to the powers of the monarch, and what Bishop is there who would not have just reason to fear, according to the text of the law, an invasion of his own most sacred rights over the instruction of his Diocese, and especially over the upper and middle schools, destined to receive the Church Students and to form their principles?"

Upon (art 2.) the Bishop remarked, "that to swear to regard as obligatory until it be otherwise enacted, and to maintain all the laws now in force, would be to concur to the eventual execution of many anticatholic and unjust laws, contained in the civil and penal code of the former French government, which enact many severe penalties against ministers of the Gospel who are faithful to their duties."

The most dangerous person in the eyes of the Dutch court, and the man who had most exasperated it by his active and indefatigable resistance, was M. de Broglie, bishop of Ghent, descendant of an ancient and noble family in France: endowed with great abilities and talents as a preacher, and remarkable for his faith and exemplary piety, he was looked up to in his diocese with general confidence and esteem. He partook somewhat of the man of the world, the lord and the courtier, but the character of the priest notwithstanding predominated. Having been in the outset Almoner-in-ordinary to the emperor Napoleon, and subsequently named to the bishopric of Acqui, in Piedmont, he was for some time a professed admirer of Napoleon, but, when later on in his career, Napoleon, blinded by ambition, began to ill-treat the Pope, M. de Broglie showed him the most determined resistance. He refused the decoration of the legion of honour, in order to avoid an oath that would have bound him to defend the integrity of the empire, to which Napoleon had now annexed the states of the Pope.

When Napoleon, in a council assembled at Paris in 1811, had decreed that the nomination of the bishops should be vested in the chief personage of the state, and that the Pope should be bound to proceed to institution six months after receiving notice of the nomination, and in case of a refusal on his part, the metropolitan should proceed in his place, M. de Broglie, then bishop of Ghent, was among the few to raise his voice to oppose this impious aggression of the temporal power against the most sacred rights of the Pontiff. Whereupon the wrath of the emperor burst upon the bishop; he was seized in his palace, imprisoned in Vincennes, and from thence removed to the isle of St. Margaret. The vicars general and canons were seized, the episcopal seminary suppressed, the students drafted into the army, and M. de Broglie came out of prison only when the allies took possession of Belgium in 1814.

The king having met with so determined a resistance on the part of the bishops, began to see even more clearly than at the commencement of his reign, how justly he had

regarded the Catholic Church as the great obstacle in the way of his policy, and hence he determined to take every measure to sap the church, and to render it pliable to his designs. With this view, in 1817, he selected M. de Mean, in whose character, as appears from the sequel, he seems to have been happily deceived, to be presented to the Pope for the vacant archbishopric of Mechlin. But the Sovereign Pontiff, who had already, in a letter of 1st of May, 1816, approved of the conduct of the bishops touching the oaths prescribed by the constitution, refused to send the necessary bulls, unless the oath of adherence to the constitution were modified. Whereupon M. de Mean, who had already taken the oath, made haste to announce, (May 18th, 1817,) that in swearing to protect all the religious communions in the state, that is, the persons who compose them, taken collectively or individually, he had meant merely a civil protection, without thereby approving directly or indirectly the maxims that they professed, and which the catholic religion forbids. The Pope was content with this explanation, requiring merely that it should be published in the newspapers, in consequence of which M. de Mean published it in the journals of the 28th of July following, and henceforward the most scrupulous Catholics felt no difficulty in taking the oath. From this time the greatest court was paid to the new Archbishop, as greater condescension was expected from him than from the other bishops, and all kinds of seductions were tried upon him. However, in the end, M. de Mean fell into disgrace at court, and becoming more and more importuned by the government, he discovered that the time for compliments was gone by, and began to show that he felt himself a bishop.

Shortly after the nomination of the Archbishop, the king desiring to disembarrass himself of the Bishop of Ghent, directed a suit to be commenced against him, on which he was contemptuously styled "Maurice de Broglie," without any allusion to his dignity as bishop, and several different offences were laid to his charge. On the 9th of October, the court condemned the bishop, who had refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the temporal court, as contumacious, to banishment and the costs of proceedings, and charged the procureur-general to see the decree of the court carried into execution, conformably to article 472 of the Penal Code.

"On this sentence, L'observateur Belge,' a newspaper distinguished by no partiality to the Catholic cause, remarked, People would have taken the man for a fool or worse, who in the year 1814 would have thought it possible that before 1818, a bishop could be condemned in Belgium, under a prince not a Catholic, by a secular tribunal, to the punishment proper to a criminal, for having, together with his colleagues, subscribed and published a doctrinal decision on the question of the lawfulness or unlawfulness of an oath, for having written two letters to the pope relatively to certain public prayers that the prince was supposed to require, for having received an answer conformable to the wishes of the government, and having given it immediate publicity, with the double advantage of tranquillizing the minds of the people, and of justifying the demand of the government by the solemu public act in which he acquiesced in it.

"Much less could it have been thought that, without necessity or utility, and against all reason, there should have been thrown into the manner of executing the sentence, all that could be devised in the way of ignominy to the person of the accused, of outrage to the religion of which he is a minister, and of insult to a people that has remained faithful to the Creed of their fathers."

The ignominy here alluded to, was the following: there were at that time in the prison of Ghent, two felons, condemned to perpetual hard labour, Joseph Vervaet, and Joseph Schietecat. The former had been condemned on the 11th November, and the other on the 18th, and their sentence contained the additional item of a public branding, and exposition in the pillory. By art. 373 of the criminal code, each criminal should have undergone his punishment three full days after it was passed, that is, for the former on the 15th, and for the second on the 22nd. By article 470 of the same code, the extract of the judgment passed against M. de Broglie for not appearing, was to be affixed to a gallows within the three days of its being passed, i. e. from the 9th to the 11th, in the public marketplace. But, with the view of making the sentence as ignominious as possible, and to associate the bishop with the worst malefactors, the 19th of November was chosen, as being market-day at Ghent, and the two thieves were brought out for that day, delaying the sentence for the one, and accelerating it for the other, in order that the writ of M. de Broglie's condemnation might be seen by all the inhabitants, exposed between two of the worst criminals-unwittingly exposing him to the same treatment that a Roman governor and a blinded people had inflicted upon his divine