many Protestants, who thought that they believed in the right of
private judgment, showed much less tolerance than he. Against the
timid faith which feared the light, against the false morality which
would do evil that good might come, Acton waged incessant war. Truth,
morality, and justice could not in his eyes be inconsistent with the
doctrines of the Church. If they appeared to be so, it must be because
the doctrines were erroneously expressed or imperfectly understood. To
identify the Church with a cause, with a party, with anything lower
than morality and religion, was a betrayal of duty and a surrender of
the fortress. The policy of the _Home and Foreign Review_, as
expounded by the editor, was to leave the domains of faith and
ecclesiastical government alone, but on all other matters to seek the
highest attainable certainty. The progress of political right {xxxiii}
and scientific knowledge, the development of freedom in the state and
of truth in literature, were its objects. Here for the time the
quarrel rested. It is not to be supposed that Pius the Ninth and his
advisers were satisfied with this lucid and pungent exposition of
Liberal principles. But Wiseman had learned from experience that the
interests of Catholicism in England were not promoted by a policy of
aggression, and he was aware that Sir John Acton spoke for most of
those Catholics who did not belong to the extreme or Ultramontane
school. For nearly two years Sir John remained editor of the _Home and
Foreign Review_. Then the final thunderbolt was launched by a higher
power than Wiseman. At the Congress of Munich in 1863 Acton's friend
and teacher, Professor Doellinger, delivered an eloquent plea for the
union of Christendom, lamenting the want of dogmatic standards among
Protestants, and at the same time urging Catholics "to replace the
mediaeval analytical method by the principle of historical development,
and to encounter scientific error with scientific weapons" (_Edinburgh
Review_, No. 404, page 513). Sir John Acton attended this congress,
and reported its proceedings to his _Review_. In March 1864 the Pope
addressed a brief to the Archbishop of Munich, in which he declared
that the opinions of Catholic writers were subject to the authority of
the Roman congregations. After this Acton felt that it was useless to
continue the struggle, or to carry on the _Home and Foreign Review_.
In a farewell article, entitled "Conflicts with Rome," he explained
that he was equally unable to admit the doctrines of the brief or to
dispute the authority which proclaimed them. In these circumstances he
had only one course to take. He could not abandon principles he
sincerely held. He could not reject the judgment of the Holy See
without committing the sin of apostasy. "The principles had not ceased
to be true, nor the authority to be legitimate, because the two were in
contradiction." {xxxiv} He could only sacrifice the _Home and Foreign
Review_. He regretted its discontinuance, because, while there were
plenty of magazines to represent science apart from religion, and
religion apart from science, it had been his special object to exhibit
the two in union. But he had no alternative, if he were to preserve
his intellectual honesty and also his loyalty to the Church.
It would have been difficult to emerge with more credit from a
peculiarly painful and delicate position. The article, and with it the
last number of the _Review_, appeared in April 1864, when Sir John
Acton was thirty years of age. The surpassing prudence which
accompanied him from boyhood through life had no connection with
weakness nor timidity. It resulted from a very rare faculty of
apprehending all aspects of a question at once, and of keeping them
separate in his mind. In this same year 1864 Acton told one of his
parliamentary friends, now Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, that he had
never felt the slightest doubt about any dogma of the Catholic, meaning
the Roman Catholic, Church. A time was to come when his faith would be
more severely tried. But, independent as he had always been, Acton was
not formed by nature to be a leader of revolts. Moral or intellectual
anarchy was the last thing he desired. If he had been brought up a
Protestant, he would probably have remained one. In that case,
however, he would have seen the danger of private interpretation even
more clearly than the perils of dogmatic despotism. He would have
asked, if, as Bishop Butler says, we must judge of revelation itself by
reason, whose reason it was to be.
At the close of the year 1864, the tenth anniversary of the date on
which he had himself proclaimed the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin
as a dogma, the Pope issued his Encyclical Letter against modern
thought. In the Syllabus of Errors which this epistle condemned, Pius
the Ninth, who had once been reckoned a {xxxv} Liberal, included the
heresy that the Holy See ought to seek reconciliation with progress,
with Liberalism, and with modern thought. He further pronounced that
the Catholic religion should be the exclusive religion of the State;
and that liberty of worship, and freedom of the Press, promoted moral
corruption and religious indifference. There was, he added, no hope
for the eternal salvation of those who did not belong to the true
Church. Although Sir John Acton had had some share in provoking the
publication of the Syllabus, he made no reply. He had withdrawn from
the controversy without surrendering either his faith as a Catholic or
his principles as a man.
In 1865 Acton's connection with the House of Commons ceased, and in the
same year he married a Bavarian lady, the eldest daughter of Count
Arco-Valley. From this time too he abandoned the practice of regular
editing and reviewing, nor did he write again for avowedly Catholic
organs, though he was throughout the remainder of his life an
occasional contributor to secular organs on historical and theological
subjects. The popular idea that he wrote little, and passed his whole
time in reading or talking, is erroneous. That he did not put out much
in his own name is true. But the list of his anonymous articles fills
more than twenty pages of an octavo volume, and their variety is quite
as remarkable as their number. He read every new German book of the
smallest importance. In the _Home and Foreign Review_ alone there are
more than seventy critical notices from his pen. The pen, however, was
not the only instrument by which he imparted to others some fragments
from his vast stores of knowledge. To his neighbours, one can hardly
call them his constituents, in the little town of Bridgnorth, he
delivered several lectures, now out of print and scarce, which for
range and quality must have been very different from {xxxvi} anything
his audience had heard before. The first, delivered on the 18th of
January 1866, when he was still supposed to be Member for the borough,
is now only to be found in the _Bridgnorth Journal_ for the 20th. Its
subject is "The Civil War in America: Its Place in History." Nothing
can be more characteristic than the tone and temper of this discourse.
Though dated only a few months after the fall of Richmond, when, as
Acton says in one of these letters, he "broke his heart over the
surrender of Lee," it is as calm and judicial, not to say as dry, as if
he were investigating an antiquarian problem. Its dryness never
becomes dulness. Unless, however, the Literary and Scientific
Institution of Bridgnorth was far above the ordinary level of such
bodies, they must have been puzzled and perplexed by the paradoxical
subtlety which traced the causes of the war back to the birth of the
American Constitution. "Slavery," he said, "was not the cause of
secession, but the reason of its failure." Then what was the cause of
secession? According to Sir John Acton, it was the failure of
Jefferson, Hamilton, and their colleagues to provide against the
omnipotence of the majority, which he regarded as inconsistent with
true freedom. They might have answered, if they could have been heard,
that they had made the method of choosing a President indirect, and had
given the Supreme Court control even over Congress itself. The first
expedient had, no doubt, entirely failed, and the electoral college was
a mere machine for registering the popular vote. But the Supreme Court
was a substantial reality, and it had before the war decided that a
fugitive slave could be reclaimed by his master even in a free State.
Nobody will now dispute Sir John Acton's proposition that by the middle
of the nineteenth century slavery was an anachronism. Yet, if the
Southern States had been more instead of less numerous than the
Northern, {xxxvii} they would have probably won, and they would then
undoubtedly have set up a great Slave Power in the heart of western
civilisation. The immediate, or proximate, cause of hostilities was
not slavery, but the claim of South Carolina to secede from the Union.
Not till the third year of the war did Lincoln proclaim the abolition
of slavery. Yet without slavery there would have been no war. If not
the _causa causans_, it was the _causa sine qua non_. The value of Sir
John Acton's lecture lies chiefly in the ability with which he dissects
the American Constitution, and indicates, sometimes in the words of its
authors, its weak points. Whatever may be thought of his constructive
faculty, his critical acumen was not surpassed by any of his less
learned contemporaries.
In 1867, and the early part of 1868, Sir John Acton wrote regularly for
the _Chronicle_, a weekly paper of high repute during its brief
existence, contributing a narrative of current events in Italy during
the period of Mentana and the second French occupation of Rome. On the
10th of March 1868 he lectured again at Bridgnorth on the Rise and Fall
of the Mexican Empire.[1] This is in my opinion the best popular
lecture that Acton ever gave, and I do not know where I could lay my
hands on a better. It is clear, spirited, eloquent, and so perfectly
well arranged that the whole story of Louis Napoleon's Mexican
Expedition, with its plausible pretext, and its miserable failure, was
told, not meagrely but completely, in the compass of an hour. The
joint intervention of England, France, and Spain in the affairs of
Mexico did not last long. Its object, like the object of the
Anglo-German intervention in Venezuela, was to obtain redress for
injuries to European residents, and payment of debts {xxxviii} due to
subjects of the three Powers. England and Spain soon discovered that
the French Emperor had quite other designs, being minded to substitute
a Mexican Empire for the Mexican Republic. Sir John Acton explained
why in his opinion, which has not been justified by experience, Mexico
was unable to stand alone. "A society so constituted could not make a
nation. There was no middle class, no impulse to industry, no common
civilisation, no public spirit, no sense of patriotism. The Indians
were not suffered to acquire wealth or knowledge, and every class was
kept in ignorance and in rigorous exclusion; when therefore the
Mexicans made themselves independent, the difficulty was to throw off
not the bondage but the nonage in which they had been held, and to
overcome the mental incapacity, the want of enterprise, the want of
combination among themselves, and of the enlightenment which comes from
intercourse with other nations. They formed a Republic after the model
of their more fortunate neighbours, and accepted those principles which
are so inflexible in their consequences, and so unrelenting in their
consistency." Between the Mexican Republic and the Republic of the
United States there is no doubt all the difference between Alexander
the Coppersmith and Alexander the Great. But Benito Juarez was both a
better and an abler man than Acton gave him credit for being, and his
successor, Porfirio Diaz, proved himself to be a most efficient ruler.
A Civil War in Mexico, simultaneous with Civil War in the United
States, gave Napoleon the opportunity he wanted. The one furnished a
pretext, the other removed a barrier, and it was not till long after
the Austrian Archduke Maximilian had been put upon his pinchbeck throne
that President Johnson was in a position to order the French troops out
of the American Continent. The poor Archduke himself, basely deserted
by the unscrupulous potentate who had sent him to his {xxxix} doom,
showed a chivalrous honour and an unselfish courage that fully justify
Acton's description of him as "almost the noblest of his race." The
lecture describes the pathetic isolation of Maximilian in a passage of
singular power. "There was nothing for him to look forward to in
Europe. No public career was open to the man who had failed so
signally in an enterprise of his own seeking. His position in Austria,
which had been difficult before, would be intolerable now. He had
quarrelled with his family, with his Church, and with the protector to
whose temptations he had hearkened. And for him there was to be no
more the happiness of the domestic hearth.[2] In Mexico there were no
hopes to live for, but there was still a cause in which it would be
glorious to die. There were friends whom he could not leave to perish
in expiation of measures which had been his work. He knew what the
vengeance of the victors would be. He knew that those who had been
most faithful to him would be most surely slaughtered; and he deemed
that he, who had never been seen on a field of battle, had no right to
fly without fighting. Probably he felt that when a monarch cannot
preserve his throne, nothing becomes him better than to make his grave
beneath its ruins." Sir John Acton closed his lecture with the
expression of a hope that the United States would not undertake the
government of Mexico. "A confederacy," he observed, "loses its true
character when it rules over dependencies; and a democracy lives a
threatened life that admits millions of a strange and inferior race
which it can neither assimilate nor absorb." The warning was unneeded,
for the days of American Imperialism were not yet. But the words have
a perennial wisdom which the new owners of the Philippines might find
it worth their while to consider.
Sir John Acton stood again for Bridgnorth, this {xl} time
unsuccessfully, at the General Election of November, 1868. His
personal friend and political leader, Mr. Gladstone, became Prime
Minister in December of the same year, and his first legislative work
was the disestablishment of the Irish Church. With this policy Sir
John Acton, not as a Catholic, but as a Liberal, was in full and
complete sympathy. He regarded it as "no isolated fact, but an
indication of a change which is beginning to affect all the nations of
Christendom, and bears witness to the consciousness that political
obligation is determined, not by arbitrary maxims of expediency, but by
definite and consistent principles." "The political connection," he
added, that is, the Liberal party, "which, in spite of many errors and
shortcomings, has been identified with the development of our
constitutional liberties, and with the advance of science in our
legislation, has entered on a new phase of its existence. And it
follows a wise and resolute leader, at whose call the nation has
arisen, for the first time in history, to the full height of its
imperial vocation" (_Edinburgh Review_, No. 404, p. 516).
Although, as has been said, Acton held that the two great political
questions of the time were first the relations of the Church with the
State, and secondly, the reform of the Land Laws, events were impending
which affected him for a time far more deeply than either. Believing,
as he did, that "the full exposition of truth is the great object for
which the existence of mankind is prolonged on earth," he could not
allow the Papal Syllabus to deter him from following truth with all the
knowledge and ability he could command. The _Chronicle_, for which he
had written so often, came to an end in 1868. But the same editor, Mr.
Wetherell, took over next year the _North British Review_, to which
Acton contributed a learned essay on the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew,
marshalling the facts in favour of {xli} the theory that the murder of
the Huguenots had been premeditated at Rome. Researches such as these,
and the consequences which they involved, were not congenial to the
Vatican, nor to the personally amiable, dogmatically unbending Pontiff
who was still under the protection of foreign bayonets. But to no one
was Acton's freedom of speculation and inquiry more repugnant than to
the able and ambitious prelate who had succeeded Wiseman as Catholic
Archbishop of Westminster. Dr. Manning was at that time a rigid
supporter of extreme Ultramontane doctrine, and of authority as opposed
to freedom in opinion. With the ardent zeal of a convert, and a
convert, as his recent appointment (1865) showed, much in favour at
Rome, he strove to suppress the religious independence of the English
Catholics. But an historical controversy with Acton was a serious
affair. It resembled nothing so much as going in for a public
examination with a reasonable certainty of being plucked, and that
prospect did not smile upon dignified ecclesiastics impressed with a
due sense of their own importance. Moreover, Manning was already
absorbed in a policy which would put down moral and intellectual
rebellion in the Church of Rome once for all.
So early as the 8th of December 1867 the Pope had signed a Bull,
convening the whole episcopate of his Church to an [OE]cumenical
Council at Rome in the same month of 1869. Although it was not
officially stated, it was perfectly well known, that the object of the
Council was to proclaim the infallibility of the still Sovereign
Pontiff. A famous book, emanating from Munich, "The Pope and the
Council," by "Janus," which from the Catholic point of view combated
the doctrine of Infallibility, received appreciative notice from Lord
Acton in the _North British Review_. This magazine, though
short-lived, and never very widely circulated, appealed more
successfully than any of its {xlii} contemporaries to the lettered and
learned class. Some of its articles, such as the essays of Thomas Hill
Green, the Hegelian philosopher of Balliol, occupy a permanent place in
the literature of metaphysics. The article on "The Pope and the
Council" was therefore sure to be read by those who, by voice or pen,
exercise an influence over the minds of others. The reviewer did not
mince his words. He pointed out to the bishops that they had already
committed themselves to a very grave extent. In 1854 they had allowed
the Pope to proclaim a new dogma, the Immaculate Conception. In 1862
nearly all of them had pronounced in favour of the temporal power. In
1864 they accepted the Syllabus. In 1867 they expressed their
willingness to believe whatever the Pope might teach them. "Janus" had
passed lightly over the Council of Trent, the subject of a work by Fra
Paolo Sarpi which Macaulay considered second only in historical value
to the books of Thucydides. Lord Acton, who had much in common with
Fra Paolo, expressed his own view with unmistakable energy and force.
"The Council of Trent," he said, "impressed on the Church the stamp of
an intolerant age, and perpetuated by its decrees the spirit of an
austere immorality." It should be the object of the forthcoming
Council to reform, to remodel, and to adapt the work which had been
done at Trent.
What actually happened was very different from that which Acton
desired, though not very different from what he expected. Sir John
went to Rome some time before the opening of the Council, full of
interest in the result, and full of sympathy with the distinguished
minority who were prepared to resist the forging of fresh chains upon
their freedom. Among this minority the most conspicuous was
Monseigneur Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, whose tragic death at the
hands of the Commune encircled his name with the halo of a martyr and a
saint. "The Archbishop of {xliii} Paris," wrote Acton, "had taken no
hostile step in reference to the Council, but he was feared the most of
all the men expected at Rome. The Pope had refused to make him a
Cardinal, and had written to him a letter of reproof, such as has
seldom been received by a bishop. It was felt that he was hostile, not
episodically to a single measure, but to the peculiar spirit of this
pontificate. He had none of the conventional prejudices and assumed
antipathy which are congenial to the hierarchical mind. He was without
pathos or affectation, and he had good sense, a perfect temper, and an
intolerable wit" (_Edinburgh Review_, No. 404, page 521). By the end
of December 1869 Darboy had exacted a promise that the dogma of
Infallibility would not be proclaimed by acclamation, so as to take the
majority by surprise. Lord Acton wrote frequent reports of the Council
and its proceedings, chiefly to Mr. Gladstone and Professor Doellinger,
some of which were afterwards collected and published as the "Letters
of Quirinus" in the _Allgemeine Zeitung_. Lord Acton considered that
the cause of the minority was lost when, on the 24th of April 1870, the
Council adopted the Supplement to the First Decree. This was to the
effect that the judgments of the Holy See must be observed, even when
they proscribe opinions not actually heretical. Lord Acton's comment
upon this vote of the episcopal majority does not lack incisiveness.
"They might," he wrote, "conceivably contrive to bind and limit
dogmatic infallibility with conditions so stringent as to evade many of
the objections taken from the examples of history; but in requiring
submission to Papal decrees on matters not articles of faith, they were
approving that of which they knew the character; they were confirming,
without let or question, a power they saw in daily exercise; they were
investing with new authority the existing bulls, and giving unqualified
sanction to the inquisitor and the index, to the murder {xliv} of
heretics and the deposing of kings. They approved what they were
called on to reform, and blessed with their lips what their hearts knew
to be accursed."
A private letter to Mr. Gladstone, written a month before the first
meeting of the Council, shows how gloomy were Lord Acton's
apprehensions. "Everything," he says, "is prepared here for the
production of Papal infallibility, and the plan of operations is
already laid down in a way which shows an attentive study of Sarpi's
'History of the Council of Trent.' They are sure of a large majority."
A majority, however, would scarcely do. [OE]cumenical Councils, if not
absolutely unanimous, are supposed to attain that moral unanimity which
the insignificance of a minority implies. The attitude of the French,
and still more of the German and Austro-Hungarian bishops, inspired the
Vatican with some alarm. Darboy and Dupanloup were names known and
esteemed throughout the Catholic world. Bishops Strossmayer and
Hefele, the latter a man of prodigious learning, were still more
strongly opposed to the Papal policy than their French colleagues.
Against the expediency of promulgating the doctrine there was a
resolute and well-organised mass of opinion in the Council. There were
few prepared to call the doctrine itself false, and therefore ready to
resist it in the last extremity. To drive a wedge between the majority
of the minority and the minority of the minority was the obvious
tactics of the Pope and his Ultramontane advisers. "If the Court of
Rome is defeated," Lord Acton wrote, "it can only be by men of
principle and of science." He believed that a letter from Mr.
Gladstone, dealing with the secular side of the question, and with the
effect which the decree would have upon the future of English and Irish
Catholics, might do much to counteract the influence of Manning. It
was impossible for the English Premier to interfere directly with the
{xlv} affairs of another Church. But he allowed Lord Acton to state
what he thought about the effects of Ultramontanism on the prospects of
educational measures in England. Lord Acton estimated that the bishops
opposed to the expediency of the dogma were about two hundred in
number, while only as many score would vote against its truth.