contradictory scarcely need to be pointed out. “The Protestant,” says
Mr. Froude, “finding three centuries ago that the institution called
the Church was teaching falsehood, refused to pin his faith upon the
Church’s sleeve thenceforward. He has relied on his own judgment, and
times come when he is perplexed.” The whole story is told here. It was
too late in the day to find that “the Church was teaching falsehood.”
The Christian Church can err or it cannot err. There is room for no
_via media_ here. If it can err, it could have erred just as easily in
the first century as in the fifteenth or sixteenth. If it could err at
all there is no necessary reason to suppose that it ever was right;
there is no belief to be placed in the promise of Christ; there is no
belief to be placed in Christ himself more than in any other man. And
again, if it could err, who was right, and who was going to set it
right? The church being abandoned as a teacher of falsehood, there is
no hope of escape from constant perplexity to the Christian mind; for
the Bible itself, being left to private judgment, is of course open to
any interpretation that private judgment may be pleased to extract from
it. And this in itself is destruction, quite apart from the assaults of
hostile criticism. To make the church at all, or at any time, or by any
possibility a teacher of falsehood is to strike the divinity from it
and convert it into a human institution of the most monstrous
assumptions and absurd pretensions.
This is Protestantism, which never had any spiritual life in itself. It
was from the beginning, as it still is, a convenient and very powerful
political agent, as was Mahometanism. Mr. Froude says very truly, what
all men are coming to say, that “there is no real alternative between
the Catholic Church and atheism” (p. 100), which leaves Mr. Froude and
his fellow-Protestants in a pleasant position.
In the general perplexity of the Protestant mind “the Romanist,” as Mr.
Froude graciously puts it, “has availed himself of the opportunity.”
“His church stands as a visible thing, which appears [appeals?]
to the imagination as well as the reason. The vexed soul, weary
of its doubts, and too impatient to wait till it pleases God to
clear away the clouds, demands a certainty on which it can
repose—never to ask a question more. By an effort of will
which, while claiming the name of faith, is in reality a want
of faith, it seizes the Catholic system as a whole. Foregoing
the use of the natural reason for evermore, it accepts the word
of a spiritual director as an answer to every difficulty, and
finds, as it supposes, the peace for which it longed, as the
body which is drugged with opium ceases to feel pain” (p. 101).
Such is Mr. Froude’s picture of conversion to the Catholic faith. A man
is drugged into Catholicity, and remains drugged to the end of the
chapter. Whenever a gleam of his lost reason returns he hurries to the
confessional box; his “spiritual director” administers another dose,
and the drowsy patient slumbers away again content. We do not pretend
to Mr. Froude’s singular gift of prescience which enables him to read
so readily the hearts of thousands of men and women who to all the
world save Mr. Froude are intellectually and morally strong. He has
traced their secret emotions and followed them up even into the
confessional box. He has seen the opiate administered and satisfied
himself of the process. To ordinary persons the conversion of a man to
the Catholic faith is the result of a long and most painful struggle
which only the strongest conviction of right can bring about. Leaving
him there, deprived of “the use of the natural reason for evermore,”
let us see what becomes of those who retain the use of their natural
reason and all the noble gifts and faculties that accompany it.
Protestants alone see clearly the roads to heaven and hell, according
to Mr. Froude; which road do they take?
We have seen the position of their preachers. Were we not deprived of
“our natural reason for evermore,” we should describe that position as
most pitiable, where it is not dishonest and intellectually immoral.
The God of Protestantism, if we believe its expounders, is truly a
strange being. He teaches everything, or he teaches nothing, with equal
facility and pleasing variety. He teaches that there are three persons
in one God; he teaches no such doctrine. He teaches that Christ is
truly God and truly man; he is rather doubtful about the matter. He
teaches the eternity of punishment; he teaches no such monstrous
doctrine. He commands that all men be baptized in the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, if they would enter the
kingdom of heaven; he does not know of the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Ghost. His views of baptism and its necessity are rather mixed.
There is no baptism unless a man is wholly immersed. It is just as good
a baptism if a man’s feet be immersed. It is equally good if water be
poured on a man’s head. A man is just as fit for the kingdom of heaven,
and just as good a Christian, if he be not baptized at all. God teaches
that the Blessed Sacrament is really and truly the body and blood of
Christ, and to be adored. He teaches that it is only a figure of
Christ, and that to adore it is to commit the sin of idolatry. He
teaches that man has free-will; he teaches that man has not free-will,
and that all he can do is worthless, heaven or hell being portioned out
for him from all eternity quite apart from his own endeavor. He teaches
that good works as well as faith in him are necessary for salvation; he
teaches that faith alone is necessary, and that provided a man believe
right he may do wrong. And so on _ad infinitum_ down to the grossest
and most abhorrent tenets.
But this is Protestantism, or reliance on one’s “own judgment.” One’s
own judgment is very apt to favor one’s own self. One’s own judgment
makes a god of self, and right and wrong matters of whim, appetite, and
inclination. Let us see its outcome as pictured by Mr. Froude.
In section iv. of his study he considers the “Causes of Weakness in
Modern Protestant Churches.” The words “modern” and “churches” are
themselves contradictory of unity and of a church built on Christ. He
sets out by drawing a glowing picture of what the early “Reformers” did
and what they were, which we may let pass as not immediately bearing on
our present purpose. “After the middle of the seventeenth century,” he
says (p. 111), “Protestantism ceased to be aggressive.”
... “As it became established it adapted itself to the world,
laid aside its harshness, confined itself more and more to the
enforcement of particular doctrines, and abandoned, at first
tacitly and afterward deliberately, the pretence to interfere
with private life or practical business.”
Is this true? Did Protestantism cease to be aggressive after the middle
of the seventeenth century? We have already said that Mr. Froude was
generally the best refutation of Mr. Froude. He shall be his own judge.
Did Protestantism cease to be aggressive in Ireland, for instance,
after the middle of the seventeenth century? We might bring many
unimpeachable witnesses on the stand to prove our point. Mr. Froude
will suffice for us, and we quote him at some length because his words
here set forth in the strongest contrast what Protestantism can do to
degrade a people, and what Catholicity can do to lift a people out of
the slough of degradation. Herein we see the spirits of both in deadly
conflict, and the lesson of the struggle is a lesson for to-day, when
the same spirits are locked again in strife.
Writing not of the middle of the seventeenth, but of the beginning of
the eighteenth, century (1709), Mr. Froude thus describes the second
Act against Popery in Ireland:
“The code of law which was designed to transfer the entire soil
of Ireland to members of the Established Church, and reduce the
Catholics to landless dependents, was finally completed.... By
the new act every settlement, every lease on lives, every
conveyance made by a Catholic owner since 1704, by which any
Protestant or Protestants had been injured,[104] was declared
void, and the loop-holes were closed by which the act of that
year had been evaded. To defeat Protestant heirs, Catholics had
concealed the true value of their property. Children were now
enabled to compel their fathers to produce their title-deeds
and make a clear confession. Catholic gentlemen had pretended
conversion to qualify themselves for being magistrates and
sheriffs, for being admitted to the bar, or for holding a seat
in Parliament, while their children were being bred up secretly
in the old faith. The education of their families was made a
test of sincerity, and those whose sons were not brought up as
churchmen remained under the disabilities.
“Nor, if words could hinder it, were the acts directed against
the priests to be any more trifled with. Fifty pounds reward
was now offered for the conviction of any Catholic archbishop,
bishop, or vicar-general; twenty pounds reward for the
conviction of friar, Jesuit, or unregistered parish priest....
It was now made penal for a priest to officiate anywhere except
in the parish church for which he was registered, and the last
rivet was driven into the chain by the compulsory imposition of
the Abjuration Oath, which every priest was made to swear at
his registration. As if this was not enough, any two
magistrates received power to summon any or every Irish subject
above the age of sixteen, to offer him the oath, and to commit
him to prison if he refused it. They might also, if he was a
Catholic, ask him where he last heard Mass, and by whom it was
celebrated. If the priest officiating was found to have been
unregistered he was liable to be transported.
“A fatal clause was added that any Protestant whatever who
discovered and was able to prove before a Protestant jury the
existence of any purchase or lease of which a Catholic was to
have secretly the advantage, should himself be put in
possession of the property which was the subject of the fraud”
(pp. 332–334).[105]
Even Mr. Froude cannot help remarking on this last clause that “the
evasion of a law so contrived that every unscrupulous scoundrel in
Ireland was its self-constituted guardian became impossible”; and he
adds with gratifying frankness: “That it was unjust in itself never
occurred as a passing emotion to any Protestant in the two kingdoms,
not even to Swift, who speaks approvingly of what he deems must be the
inevitable result.”
Writing still of the Penal Laws, he says that “the practice of the
courts” in regard to them “was a very school of lying and a discipline
of evasion. No laws could have been invented, perhaps, more ingeniously
demoralizing” (p. 374).
Writing of a period still later in the eighteenth century, after the
Protestant emigration and the ruin of Irish trade and industry had been
brought about by English legislation, he thus describes the condition
of the Irish peasant class, who composed the bulk of the population:
“The tenants were forbidden in their leases to break or plough
the soil. The people, no longer employed, were driven away into
holes and corners, and eked out a wretched subsistence by
potato gardens, or by keeping starving cattle of their own on
the neglected bogs. Their numbers increased, for they married
early, and they were no longer liable, as in the old times, to
be killed off like dogs in forays. They grew up in compulsory
idleness, encouraged once more in their inherited dislike of
labor, and enured to wretchedness and hunger; and, on every
failure of the potato crop, hundreds of thousands were
starving.”
Horrible as such a picture is, it is but a faint sketch of the reality.
All readers of Irish history know it, and no student of English
legislation should forget or pass over that dark chapter in England’s
history. Our own readers have seen the whole system vividly sketched in
these pages recently in the series of papers on “English Rule in
Ireland.” What, in human nature and human possibilities, was to become
of a people thus submitted to so long and unbending and systematic a
course of degradation? They had nothing left but their faith, and the
eternal truth of the promise that this is the victory which overcometh
the world; and that our faith shall make us free was never more
gloriously and wondrously made manifest than in the case of the Irish
people.
Ignorance was made compulsory by this Protestant government. The
statute law of Ireland forbade Catholics to open schools or to teach in
them. The Irish people, of all peoples, have ever had a craving for
knowledge. What was left to them to do?
“The Catholics,” says Mr. Froude, “with the same steady courage
and unremitting zeal with which they had maintained and
multiplied the number of their priests, had established open
schools in places like Killarney, where the law was a
dead-letter. In the more accessible counties, where open
defiance was dangerous, they extemporized class teachers under
ruined walls or in the dry ditches by the roadside, where
ragged urchins, in the midst of their poverty, learnt English
and the elements of arithmetic, and even to read and construe
Ovid and Virgil. With institutions which showed a vitality so
singular and so spontaneous repressive acts of Parliament
contended in vain.”
Ignorance is esteemed to be the prolific mother of vice. The social
condition of the Irish people was made as bad as legislation could make
it. Where was the room for morality in such a case? In vainly trying to
explain away that most brutal project of law for the mutilation of the
Irish priests, Mr. Froude says (vol. i. p. 557): “They (the Lord
Lieutenant and Privy Council) did propose, not that all the Catholic
clergy in Ireland, as Plowden says, but that unregistered priests and
friars coming in from abroad, should be liable to castration”; and he
adds in a note:
“Not, certainly, as implying a charge of immorality. Amidst the
multitude of accusations which I have seen brought against the
Irish priests of the last century, I have never, save in a
single instance, encountered a charge of unchastity. Rather the
exceptional and signal purity of Irish Catholic women of the
lower class, unparalleled probably in the civilized world, and
not characteristic of the race, which in the sixteenth century
was no less distinguished for licentiousness, must be
attributed wholly and entirely to the influence of the Catholic
clergy.”
Mr. Froude cannot be wholly generous and honest in a matter of this
kind, but what is true in this is sufficient for our purpose without
inquiring into what is false. It is plain from his own words that the
one thing that saved the Irish people from perdition, body and soul,
was their Catholic faith. Yet this is the man who, having thus
testified to the rival effects of Catholicity and Protestantism on a
people, has the effrontery to tell us in the “Revival of Romanism” that
“If by this [conversions] or any other cause the Catholic
Church anywhere recovers her ascendency, she will again exhibit
the detestable features which have invariably attended her
supremacy. Her rule will once more be found incompatible either
with justice or intellectual growth, and our children will be
forced to recover by some fresh struggle the ground which our
forefathers conquered for us, and which we by our pusillanimity
surrendered” (p. 103).
With his own testimony before us we may well ask in amazement, Of which
church is he writing? It would seem as though Heaven, which through all
ages has looked down upon and permitted martyrdom for the faith, had in
this instance called upon, not a tender virgin or a strong youth, not
an old man tottering into the grave or an innocent child, to step into
the arena and offer up their life and blood for the cause of Christ,
but a whole people. And the martyrdom of this people was not for a day
or an hour; it was the slow torture of centuries. A legacy of martyrdom
was “bequeathed from bleeding sire to son.” Life was hopeless to the
Irish people under the Penal Laws; the world a wide prison; the earth a
grave. They could only lift their eyes and hearts to heaven and wait
patiently for merciful death to come. This was the supreme test of
faith to a noble and passionate race, as it was faith’s supremest
testimony. No work of the saints, no writings of the fathers, no
Heaven-illumined mind ever brought to the aid of faith stronger reason
for conviction than this. As words pale before deeds, as the blood of a
martyr speaks more loudly to men, and cries more clamorously to heaven,
than all that divine philosophy can utter or inspired poet sing, so the
attitude of the Irish people, so opposed to all the instincts of their
quick and passionate nature, bore the very noblest testimony to the
reality of the Christian religion. A world looked down into that dark
arena and waited for some sign of faltering in the victim, for some
sign of pity in the persecutor. Neither came. The victim refused to die
or sacrifice to the gods; the persecutor to relent. The struggle ended
at length through the sheer weariness of the latter, and brighter times
came because darker could not be devised.
Faith conquered. The Irish people arose from its grave, and at once
spread abroad over the world to preach the Gospel and to plant the
church which for two centuries it had watered with its blood. The Act
of Catholic Emancipation was the first real sign of resurrection, and
that was only passed in 1829.
So much for Protestantism having “ceased to be aggressive after the
middle of the seventeenth century.” How aggressive are certain
Protestant powers to-day all men know.
Another thing happened to Protestantism after the middle of the
seventeenth century:
“It no longer produced men conspicuously nobler and better than
Romanism,” says Mr. Froude, “and therefore it no longer made
converts. As it became established, it adapted itself to the
world, laid aside its harshness, confined itself more and more
to the enforcement of particular doctrines” (of no doctrines in
particular, we should be inclined to say), “and abandoned, at
first tacitly and afterward deliberately, the pretence to
interfere with private life or practical business.”
In plainer words, Protestantism, having secured its place in this
world, left the next world to take care of itself, and left men free to
go to the devil or not just as they pleased. Mr. Froude faithfully
pictures the result:
“Thus Protestant countries are no longer able to boast of any
special or remarkable moral standard; and the effect of the
creed on the imagination is analogously impaired. Protestant
nations show more energy than Catholic nations because the mind
is left more free, and the intellect is undisturbed by the
authoritative instilment of false principles” (p. 111).
This strikes us as a very easy manner of begging a very important
question. However, we are less concerned now with Mr. Froude’s
Catholics than with his Protestants.
“But,” he goes on, “Protestant nations have been guilty, as
nations, of enormous crimes. Protestant individuals, who
profess the soundest of creeds, seem, in their conduct, to have
no creed at all, beyond a conviction that pleasure is pleasant,
and that money will purchase it. Political corruption grows up;
sharp practice in trade grows up—dishonest speculations, short
weights and measures, and adulteration of food. The commercial
and political Protestant world, on both sides of the Atlantic,
has accepted a code of action from which morality has been
banished; and the clergy have for the most part sat silent, and
occupy themselves in carving and polishing into completeness
their schemes of doctrinal salvation. They shrink from
offending the wealthy members of their congregation.” (We
believe we heard concordant testimony to this from
distinguished members of the late Protestant Episcopalian
Convention and Congress.) “They withdraw into the affairs of
the other world, and leave the present world to the men of
business and the devil.”
Mr. Froude having thus placidly handed Protestantism over to the devil,
we might as well leave it there, as the devil is proverbially reported
to know and take care of his own. And certainly, if Protestantism be
only half what Mr. Froude depicts it, it is the devil’s, and a more
active and fruitful agent of evil he could not well desire. One thing
is beyond dispute: if Protestantism be what so ardent an advocate as
Mr. Froude says it is, it is high time for a change. It is time for
some one or something to step in and dispute the devil’s absolute
sovereignty. If this is the result of the Protestant mind being “left
more free” than the Catholic, the sooner such freedom is curtailed the
better. It is the freedom of lethargy and license which has yielded up
even the little that it had of real freedom and truth to its own child,
Materialism, the modern name for paganism.
“They” (the Protestant clergy), says Mr. Froude, “have allowed
the Gospel to be superseded by the new formulas of political
economy. This so-called science is the most barefaced attempt
that has ever yet been openly made on this earth to regulate
human society without God or recognition of the moral law. The
clergy have allowed it to grow up, to take possession of the
air, to penetrate schools and colleges, to control the actions
of legislatures, without even so much as opening their lips in
remonstrance.”
Yes, because they had nothing better to offer in its place. And this
Mr. Froude advances with much truth as one of the causes of the
“Revival of Romanism”:
“I once ventured,” he tells us, “to say to a leading
Evangelical preacher in London that I thought the clergy were
much to blame in these matters. If the diseases of society were
unapproachable by human law, the clergy might at least keep
their congregations from forgetting that there was a law of
another kind which in some shape or other would enforce itself.
He told me very plainly that he did not look on it as part of
his duty. He could not save the world, nor would he try. The
world lay in wickedness, and would lie in wickedness to the
end. His business was to save out of it individual souls by
working on their spiritual emotions, and bringing them to what
he called the truth. As to what men should do or not do, how
they should occupy themselves, how and how far they might enjoy
themselves, on what principles they should carry on their daily
work—on these and similar subjects he had nothing to say.
“I needed no more to explain to me why Evangelical preachers
were losing their hold on the more robust intellects, or why
Catholics, who at least offered something which at intervals
might remind men that they had souls, should have power to win
away into their fold many a tender conscience which needed
detailed support and guidance” (pp. 112–113).
One ray of light in the universal darkness now enshrouding
Protestantism shines before the eyes of Mr. Froude. It falls on the
present German Empire. Here at least the weary watchman crying out the
hours of heaven may call “All is well” to the sleepers. Here
Protestantism had its true birth; here it finds its true home. In this
blessed land lies hope and salvation for a lost world. But the picture
is so graphic that we give it in Mr. Froude’s own words:
“As the present state of France,” he says, “is the measure of
the value of the Catholic revival, so Northern Germany,
spiritually, socially, and politically, is the measure of the
power of consistent Protestantism. Germany was the cradle of
the Reformation. In Germany it moves forward to its manhood;
and there, and not elsewhere, will be found the intellectual
solution of the speculative perplexities which are now dividing
and bewildering us” (pp. 130–131).
“Luther was the root in which the intellect of the modern
Germans took its rise. In the spirit of Luther this mental
development has gone forward ever since. The seed changes its
form when it develops leaves and flowers. But the leaves and
flowers are in the seed, and the thoughts of the Germany of
to-day lay in germs in the great reformer. Thus Luther has
remained through later history the idol of the nation whom he
saved. The disputes between religion and science, so baneful in
their effects elsewhere, have risen into differences there, but
never into quarrels” (p. 132).
“Protestant Germany stands almost alone, with hands and head
alike clear. Her theology is undergoing change. Her piety
remains unshaken. Protestant she is, Protestant she means to
be.... By the mere weight of superior worth the Protestant
states have established their ascendency over Catholic Austria
and Bavaria, and compel them, whether they will or not, to turn
their faces from darkness to light.[106] ... German religion
may be summed up in the word which is at once the foundation
and the superstructure of all religion—Duty! No people anywhere
or at any time have understood better the meaning of duty; and
to say that is to say all” (pp. 134–135).