unforeseen was never better verified than in the resurrection,
as it were out of the grave, during the last forty years of the
Roman Catholic religion. In my own boyhood it hung about some
few ancient English families like a ghost of the past. They
preserved their creed as an heirloom which tradition rather than
conviction made sacred to them. A convert from Protestantism to
Popery would have been as great a monster as a convert to
Buddhism or Odin worship. ‘Believe in the Pope!’ said Dr.
Arnold. ‘I should as soon believe in Jupiter’” (p. 93).
This is undoubtedly, in the main, a true picture of the result of three
centuries of apostasy in England. As for Dr. Arnold, that learned
gentleman probably understated his belief. He would, if anything, much
sooner have believed in Jupiter than in the Pope. It would be
interesting to know what he thought of, say, George IV., as the supreme
head of the church of which Dr. Arnold was so distinguished an ornament,
or of Queen Victoria. He is as good an example as any of modern refined
and intellectual paganism, and his distinguished son is but the natural
outcome of the influence of such a man’s character and teachings, as in
another way was John Stuart Mill of _his_ father.
“The singular change which we have witnessed and are still witnessing,”
pursues Mr. Froude, “is not due to freshly-discovered evidence of the
truth of what had been abandoned as superstition” (p. 93). In this, of
course, we quite agree with Mr. Froude, though, perhaps, not exactly in
the manner he would wish. The truth is the same to-day as it ever was.
Superstition is the same to-day as it ever was. Without going into the
matter very deeply just here, we merely hint that Mr. Froude’s “singular
change” may not be quite so singular as he imagines. The change to which
he alludes is the return of a great body of the English-speaking people
to or towards what for three centuries England and England’s colonies
had been educated to consider superstition, darkness, idolatry even.
Certainly Rome has not changed within this period, as it will be seen
Mr. Froude, with passionate vehemence, insists. We only throw out the
hint, then, that possibly what was abandoned as superstition turns out
on closer inspection not to have been superstition at all. Truth may be
slow in coming, but once come it is very hard to close one’s eyes to it.
For men who have eyes there is no exercise so healthy and manful as
honestly to face a great difficulty. The modern keen spirit of
investigation we are far from considering an unmixed evil, if, indeed,
it be an evil at all. The closest inquiry is compatible with the firmest
and most whole-hearted faith. The objections of sceptics to the
doctrines of the church are, when not borrowed from the objections of
the doctors of the church, puny in comparison with them. On men,
however, who do not believe at all, the spirit of inquiry, when united
to earnestness of purpose, is working good. Many nowadays, who have
every whit as profound a distrust of Catholicity as Mr. Froude, are not
content with taking for granted all that they have been taught to
believe of Catholics and Catholicity. They go to Rome; walk about in it,
read it, study it, much as they would enter upon the investigation of a
disputed question in science; and, having examined to their hearts’
content, many of them stay in Rome, while most come back with at least
respect for what they formerly detested and abhorred.
It is impossible even to mention a few of the names of distinguished
Catholics within the century, many of them converts, and not be struck
by their mental and moral eminence. The world cannot afford to sneer at
men like Görres, Count von Stolberg, Frederic Schlegel, Hürter, Ozanam,
Lacordaire, Montalembert, Louis Veuillot, Balmez, O’Connell, Brownson,
Ives, Anderson, Bayley, Wiseman, Newman, Manning, Faber, Ward, Marshall,
Allies, Mivart, and a host of others almost equally eminent, who were
born leaders of men or of thought, who came from many lands, who filled
every kind of position, and who, led by many different lights,
traversing many stormy and dark and difficult ways, came at last to
Rome, to rest there to the end as loyal and faithful children of the
church. It is men like these who ennoble the human race and who leave a
rich legacy of thought and act to all peoples and to all time. To say
that such men, most of whom came from without, went deliberately over to
the old “superstition” because it was superstition will not do. They
found what they had esteemed darkness to be light.
This modern spirit of investigation has done and is doing another great
service to the Catholic cause: it is helping to unravel the tangled
skein of history, to explore dark places and drag buried truth to light.
Lingard’s _History of England_, for instance, really worked, or more
properly began, a revolution in English thought—a revolution which,
unconsciously, Scott’s novels and poems helped greatly to popularize.
The work set on foot by Lingard and the method adopted have been well
followed up by others, and by non-Catholics. Men came to try and look at
things dispassionately and fairly. The result was that certain rooted
English opinions and prejudices began slowly to give way. The “glorious
Reformation,” for instance, and the “great Reformers” in England
appeared on closer inspection to be neither quite so “glorious” nor
quite so “great” as before. It requires very exceptional mental, not to
say moral, courage nowadays to present Henry VIII. as a reformer of
religion, or “good Queen Bess” as really good, or as one whose “lordly
nature was the pride of all true-hearted Englishmen.”[71] And like in
character to the leaders were those who went with them in their measures
of reform. The Reformation itself has come to be regarded by all
intelligent minds, whatever be their estimate of Catholicity, as at
least not an unmixed good. “The religious reform,” says Guizot,[72]
“which was the revolution of the sixteenth century has already been
submitted to the test of time, and of great social and intellectual
perils. It brought with it much suffering to the human race, it gave
rise to great errors and great crimes, and was developed amidst cruel
wars and the most deplorable troubles and disturbances. These facts,
which we learn both from its partisans and opponents, cannot be
contested, and they form the account which history lays to the charge of
the event.” The constant revelations coming to light through the
publication of secret papers and such like make it perfectly plain that
reform, to have been at all effectual, should have begun with the
“Reformers” themselves. As an evidence of how thoroughly the sham and
rottenness of the Reformation have been exposed, we find Sanders’
much-derided _Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism_ now accepted on
all sides as only too true.
Certain it is that a great idol of English Protestantism, if not quite
overthrown, has been very much battered and bruised of late by
iconoclasts who in other days would have knelt and worshipped before it.
Protestant England is built on the Protestant Reformation; but if that
turns out to have been on its religious side so very bad an affair, what
becomes of those who pinned their faith to it? That is a thought that is
working in men’s minds, and working good. That reform was needed in the
church and kingdom of England prior to the Reformation no man will
dispute. But real reformation should not be a sweeping out of one devil
to introduce seven more unclean.
While the truth of history was thus slowly forcing its way out, there
came a sudden shock to the mind of the English people—a shock so severe
and stunning in its first effects as almost to lead to a reaction and a
turning again into the old ruts. This was the deliberate desertion of
all pretensions to alliance with the early church by some of the
leaders—“the ablest” Mr. Froude styles them—of the Tractarian movement.
These became converts to the Catholic faith, and, in the slang of the
day, “went over to Rome.”
The falling away of these men from the Anglican Church can only be
likened to a revolution, a yielding of some buttress of the British
Constitution, which was thought to be as impregnable, as solid, as
lasting as England itself. And yet “the intellect which saw the
falsehood of the papal pretensions in the sixteenth century sees it only
more clearly in the nineteenth,” says Mr. Froude. Possibly enough; a
distinction, however, is to be drawn at “intellect.”
“More than ever the assumptions of the Holy See are perceived to rest on
error or on fraud. The doctrines of the Catholic Church have gained only
increased improbability from the advance of knowledge. Her history, in
the light of critical science, is a tissue of legend woven by the devout
imagination.”
We have thus far only quoted from the first of fifty-four pages, and
already we pause to take breath. Mr. Froude has a peculiar manner of
putting things. Such wholesale and sweeping assertions are only to be
answered in a volume or by a simple denial. Of course, if the Catholic
Church _is_ all that Mr. Froude unhesitatingly sets her down to be,
there is an end of the whole question. In that case the “revival of
Romanism” is really a grave danger to the world; nay, the very existence
of “Romanism”—_i.e._, of Catholicity—is a menace to human society. If
the “papal pretensions” are “falsehood”; if “the assumptions of the Holy
See” “rest on error and fraud”; if “the doctrines of the Catholic Church
have gained only increased improbability from the advance of knowledge”;
and if “her history is a tissue of legend,” men who commit themselves to
the defence of such a monstrosity set themselves at once beyond the pale
of civilization. Were Mr. Froude writing of the Turks or of the Mormons
he could scarcely use language more strongly condemnatory. It is
probable that, with his generous impulses, he would find “extenuating
circumstances,” did he think any needed, for Mormon or Turk, which he
could not concede to a Catholic.
When Mr. Froude visited this country recently on his ill-judged and, to
him, disastrous mission—for a mission he called it—a critic (in the New
York _World_, we believe) described his style, very happily it seemed to
us, as feminine. Women are not supposed to sit down to serious questions
of wide and general import as calmly and judiciously as men. They argue
from the heart rather than the head. They like or they dislike, and woe
betide the person or the cause that they dislike! Argument is thrown
away on them. They make the most astounding statements with the easiest
confidence; they have a happy faculty of inventing facts; they
contradict themselves with placid unconsciousness, and everybody else
with scornful rigor; for logic they have not so much a disregard as a
profound contempt, and take refuge from its assaults in thin-edged
satire. This, of course, is only true of them when they are out of their
sphere and dealing with matters for which they have a constitutional
incapacity.
Mr. Froude, however, is just this. Take any one sentence of those last
quoted; look at it calmly; weigh it in the balance, and what do we find?
Take this one: “The doctrines of the Catholic Church have gained only
increased improbability from the advance of knowledge.” With this
confident statement he leaves the matter. There is no doubt, no
hesitation, no reservation at all on his part. A reasonable man will ask
himself, however: “Is this stupendous statement true?” “The doctrines of
the Catholic Church! What! all of them?” Apparently so; Mr. Froude, at
least, makes no exception. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
Creator of heaven and earth,” is the primary article of the Catholic
Creed. Has that only “gained increased improbability from the advance of
knowledge”? Mr. Froude would hardly say so; indeed, in more places than
one he takes occasion to sneer at the modern scientific gospel. Even if
Mr. Froude himself said so, his Protestant readers who make any
pretensions to Christian faith would scarcely agree with him. Belief in
the Trinity of God is another doctrine of the Catholic Church; in Jesus
Christ the God-Man, the Redeemer of the world; in the Holy Ghost; in the
resurrection of the body and life everlasting. All these are doctrines
of the Catholic Church. Does Mr. Froude pretend to say that they have
all been swept away by “the advance of knowledge”? If he did not mean to
say this—as, indeed, we believe he did not—why did he say it? What are
we to think of him? Is this sober writing and a right manner of
approaching a serious question? In p. 93 he tells us that “the doctrines
of the Catholic Church have gained only increased improbability from the
advance of knowledge.” In p. 95 he has already forgotten himself, and
tells us that “the Protestant churches are no less witnesses to the
immortal nature of the soul, and the awful future which lies before it,
_than the Catholic Church_,” which is the strongest kind of concession
of what he had just before denied; and forgetting himself again, he
tells us in a third place (p. 141) that the Protestant ministers “are at
present the _sole_ surviving representatives of true religion in the
world.” This is only one of a multitude of instances in which Mr. Froude
allows himself to run away with himself. Passion and prejudice narrow
his mental vision, until at times it becomes so diseased as to result in
moral as well as mental obliquity.
The same thing is observable in the sentence immediately following the
passage last quoted: “Liberty, spiritual and political, has thriven in
spite of her [the Catholic Church’s] most desperate opposition, till it
has invaded every government in the world, and has penetrated at last
even the territories of the popes themselves” (p. 94).
Even Mr. Froude cannot absolutely blind himself to facts; at least, he
cannot alter them. He may hate the Catholic Church as much as he
pleases—and it pleases him to hate her very much—but the fact of his
hatred cannot convert the persecution of her children into “liberty,
spiritual and political.” Nor are we at all begging the question in
giving the name of persecution to the treatment that Catholics are
receiving at the hands, if not of “every government of the world,” at
least of those previously enumerated. It is the word, as we shall show,
applied to the anti-Catholic legislation in Germany by candid
Protestants, countrymen of Mr. Froude, too, who hate the church and the
Pope just as resolutely as he, but with more apparent show of reason. It
is too late in the day to argue about this matter. There is no longer
question to an honest mind as to whether the Catholics in Germany are or
are not persecuted. There may still be question as to whether or not the
persecution be necessary, but there is no dispute as to the fact. To
talk of the “spiritual liberty” of Catholics in Germany to-day is simply
to talk nonsense. But, lest there should be any possible doubt regarding
the matter, it may be as well to freshen men’s memories a little on a
point that is intimately connected with our whole subject; for what
covers Germany covers every land where the struggle between the Catholic
Church and the state is being waged.
The organs of English opinion have been very faithful in their
allegiance to Prince Bismarck, who is such an experienced cultivator of
public opinion. They are the bitter foes of the Papacy and the Catholic
Church. Nevertheless, they have some pretensions to principle, and, when
there is no escape out of the difficulty, call white white, and black
black. At all events they do not always call black white. In Germany,
then, according to Mr. Froude, “liberty, spiritual and political, has
thriven in spite of the Catholic Church’s most desperate opposition.”
While the struggle of the German government with the Catholics had as
yet not much more than half begun the English _Pall Mall Gazette_
discovered that
“There is no parallel in history to the experiment which the
German statesmen are resolutely bent on trying, except the
memorable achievement of Englishmen under the guidance of Henry
VIII.... Like all these measures, the new law concerning the
education of ecclesiastical functionaries, which is the most
striking of the number, will apply to all sects indifferently,
but, in its application to the Roman Catholic priesthood, it
almost takes one’s breath away.”
It may be only natural to find the apologist of Henry VIII. and
Elizabeth describing the revival in modern times of “the memorable
achievement of Englishmen” under Henry VIII. as “liberty, spiritual and
political.” Yet the same “experiment” takes away the breath, not only of
so cool a journal as the _Pall Mall Gazette_, but of a much cooler and
more influential journal still.
“The measures now in the German Parliament, and likely to become
law,” says the London _Times_, “amount to a secular organization
so complete as not to leave the Pope a soul, a place, an hour,
that he can call entirely his own. Germany asserts for the civil
power the control of all education, the imposition of its own
conditions on entrance to either civil or ecclesiastical office,
the administration of all discipline, and at every point the
right to confine religious teachers and preachers to purely
doctrinal and moral topics. Henceforth there is to be neither
priest, nor bishop, nor cardinal, nor teacher, nor preacher, nor
proclamation, nor public act, nor penalty, nor anything that man
can hear, do, or say for the soul’s good of man in Germany,
without the proper authorization, mark, and livery of the
emperor.”
Mr. Froude is perfectly correct in saying that such measures have been
carried “in spite of the church’s most desperate opposition,” but
whether he is equally correct in styling the same thing “liberty,”
spiritual or political, we leave to the judgment of honest readers. The
London _Spectator_, writing at the same period, was in sore trouble as
to the event.
“Is an age of the world,” it asks, “in which few men know what
is truth or whether there be truth, one in which you would ask
statesmen to determine its limits? We suspect that a race of
statesmen armed with such powers as Prussia is now giving to her
officials would soon cease to show their present temperance and
sobriety, and grow into a caste of civilian ecclesiastics of
harder, drier, and lower mould than any of the ecclesiastics
they had to put down.... To our minds the absolutism of the
Vatican Council is a trifling danger compared with the growing
absolutism of the democratic temper which is now being pushed
into almost every department of human conduct.”
We shall have occasion to show the results of the work of these
“civilian ecclesiastics” on the Protestant Church in Germany,
particularly in Prussia. Even at this early stage of the struggle the
London _Times_ confessed:
“We do not anticipate any retrogression in the development of
Prussia, but it seems inevitable that there should be some check
in the progress of change, some slackening in the audacity of
legislation, some disposition to rest and be thankful.”
Of the same measure the Prussian correspondent of the London _Times_
wrote:
“The Catholic dignitaries are not the only ecclesiastics opposed
to the bill. The new measures applying not only to the Catholic
Church, but to all religious communities recognized by the
state, the Ober-Kirchenrath, or Supreme Consistory of the
Protestant Church in the old provinces, has also thought fit to
caution the crown against the enactment of these sweeping
innovations.”
“The official papers openly accuse the Protestant clergy of
becoming the allies of the Ultramontanes,” says the _Pall Mall
Gazette_ (April 12, 1873). “Herr Von Gerlach no longer stands
alone as a Protestant opponent of the chancellor’s policy.”
“This rough-and-ready method of expelling Ultramontane
influences ‘by a fork’ can hardly fail to suggest to a looker-on
the probability that, like similar methods of expelling nature,
it may lead to a reaction. Downright persecution of this sort
(we are speaking now simply of the Jesuit law), unless it is
very thorough indeed—more thorough than is well possible in the
nineteenth century—usually defeats itself,” says the _Saturday
Review_.
But why multiply quotations? Surely those given are enough to show that
the leading organs of English opinion, representing every stripe of
thought, are quite agreed as to what name should be given to what Mr.
Froude calls the “liberty, spiritual and political,” in Germany. We
leave the case confidently in their hands; and Mr. Froude apparently
thinks the verdict has gone against him. He deplores the fact that “free
England and free America ... affect to think that the Jesuits are an
injured body, and clamor against Prince Bismarck’s tyranny. Truly, we
are an enlightened generation” (p. 136).
What is here true of Germany is true also of Russia, Austria (in great
measure), Italy, Switzerland, and other lands. So that if Catholicity is
really reviving, as Mr. Froude alleges, it is reviving under the very
shadow of death, and in face of the combined opposition of the most
powerful governments. A revival under such circumstances ought to extort
the admiration of Mr. Froude, who is as true a hero-worshipper as
Carlyle, even if he be about equally happy in his selection of heroes.
In the “Preliminary” to _The English in Ireland_ Mr. Froude propounds
his theories of might and right:
“A natural right to liberty, irrespective of the ability to
defend it, exists in nations as much as, and no more than, it
exists in individuals.... In a world in which we are made to
depend so largely for our well-being on the conduct of our
neighbors, and yet are created infinitely unequal in ability and
worthiness of character, _the superior part has a natural right
to govern; the inferior part has a natural right to be
governed_; and a rude but adequate test of superiority and
inferiority is provided in the relative strength of the
different orders of human beings. Among wild beasts and savages
might constitutes right. Among reasonable beings right is for
ever tending to create might” (vol. i. pp. 1, 2).
As we are not now examining Mr. Froude’s theories on government, we only
call attention to the very hazy nature of the views here expressed on a
subject which of all things should be clear and definite. He uses the
word _right_ without telling us what he means by it, whether or not it
has an absolute meaning and force. He speaks of “the superior part” and
“the inferior part” without informing us in what sense the terms are
used. Superior in what? Inferior in what? To any rational mind it is
plain that, just because of the inequality of human beings “in ability
and worthiness of character,” there must, under a divine dispensation,
which Mr. Froude does not deny, be absolute rules of right and wrong for
all alike, a moral code which shall extend to and determine all rights,
natural or acquired. If not this, right and wrong become convertible
terms, and right and might of course follow suit, which is really the
outcome of Mr. Froude’s theory—a doctrine that impregnates and inspires
all his writings.
“There neither is nor can be an inherent privilege in any person
or set of persons to live unworthily at their own wills, _when
they can be led or driven into more honorable courses_; and the
rights of man—_if such rights there be_—are not to liberty, but
to wise direction and control” (p. 2).
A very plausible-looking doctrine, but a very dangerous one as here laid
down. An example will serve to show the mischievous and vicious nature
of it. According to Mr. Froude, to be a Catholic is “to live
unworthily.” The comment suggests itself.
“Individuals cannot be independent, or society cannot exist.... The
individual has to sacrifice his independence to his family, the family
to the tribe,” etc. Why so? Would it not be truer as well as nobler to
say that the individual _uses_ his independence for his family?
“Necessity and common danger drive families into alliance for
self-defence; the smaller circles of independence lose
themselves in ampler areas; and those who refuse to conform to
the new authority are either required to take themselves
elsewhere, or, if they remain and persist in disobedience, may
be treated as criminals” (p. 4).
Quite independent of the nature and claims of the “new authority,” so
far as Mr. Froude enlightens us.