the Pope the sole right of making decrees and defining dogmas. To this
the Council submitted. "The sole legislative authority," Lord Acton
wrote on the 1st of January 1870, "has been abandoned to the Pope. It
includes the right of issuing dogmatic decrees, and involves the
possession of all the Infallibility which the Church claims." "We have
to meet," he added, "an organised conspiracy to establish a power which
would be the most formidable enemy of liberty as well as science
throughout the world. It can only be met and defeated through the
Episcopate, and the Episcopate is exceedingly helpless." So it proved.
But Lord Acton, besides helping the minority with the resources of his
knowledge and the power of his logic, endeavoured to invoke the secular
arm. He was sanguine enough to hope that, as the Pope had
anathematised modern civilisation and progress, the governments of
Catholic and even of Protestant countries would take some steps in
self-defence. The opposition in the Council, he held, was "almost sure
to prevail if it were supported, and almost sure to be crushed if it
were not." The change of Ministry in France at the beginning of 1870,
and the substitution of M. Ollivier for M. Rouher, alarmed the Vatican,
although the French ambassador, the Marquis de Banneville, declared
that there would be no change of policy. De Banneville was wrong. The
new French Government announced that if the dogma were carried the
French troops would be recalled, although Cardinal Antonelli assured
Count Daru, {xlvi} the French Minister for Foreign Affairs, that the
Council was purely theological, and had nothing to do with secular
affairs. The threat, however, had no effect. The Pope had gone too
far to recede, and the forces of the opposition became daily weaker.
There was no hope, and no future, for those bishops who set themselves
against the majority of their colleagues and the head of their Church.
Except in France, they could not look for the protection of the
Government, and the French Emperor was a bruised reed. "Two days ago,"
wrote Lord Acton on the 16th of February, "a definite message was sent
by the Emperor to Cardinal Antonelli, in which the Emperor declared
that he could not afford to have a schism in France, where all the
_employe_ class, all the literary class, and even the Faubourg St.
Germain are against the Infallibility of the Pope. He added that it
would dissolve all the engagements existing between France and Rome."
But Antonelli, a remarkably shrewd specimen of the Italian diplomatist,
calculated that if the bishops yielded, the rest of the practising
Catholics would follow them. In another passage of the same most
interesting letter Lord Acton says that the _Schema de Ecclesia_,
already adopted by the Council, "makes civil legislation on all points
of contract, marriage, education, clerical universities, mortmain, even
on many questions of taxation and common law, subject to the
legislation of the Church, which would simply be the arbitrary will of
the Pope. Most assuredly no man accepting such a code could be a loyal
subject, or fit for the enjoyment of political privileges. In this
sense the French bishops have written to the French Government, and
that is what they ask me to write to you." How deep an impression this
letter made upon Mr. Gladstone's mind became apparent when, a few years
afterwards, he entered into controversy with the Church of Rome.
Strange as it may seem, these Gallican prelates appealed through Lord
Acton to the Government {xlvii} of the Queen, seeing "no human remedy
for this peril other than the intervention of the Powers." But the
British Government could not have acted, even in concert with France,
unless they had been prepared to face a storm of indignation,
Protestant as well as Catholic, which no British interest required them
to encounter.
After the decree of Infallibility had been produced, the German
prelates made an important protest against bishops without sees,
chiefly Roman Monsignori, being allowed to vote, and also complained,
in words furnished by Lord Acton himself, that the claim to enact
dogmas by a majority endangered the freedom, as well as the
universality, of the Council. But "the minority were in great
confusion and uncertainty, and disposed to rely on external help."
That help they never received. Lord Acton put the danger as strongly
as he could. Catholics, he declared, would "at once become
irredeemable enemies of civil and religious liberty. They would have
to profess a false system of morality, and to repudiate literary and
scientific sincerity. They would be as dangerous to civil society in
the school as in the State." But between Catholics who held that with
such matters it would be profane for any Protestant to meddle, and
Protestants who rejoiced that now at last the Catholics were coming out
in their true colours, the Cabinet, if they had taken Lord Acton's
advice, would have had an uneasy, and barely defensible, position. So
what Acton calls "this insane enterprise" of conferring upon the Pope
an unconditional and unlimited infallibility was suffered to proceed
without any political remonstrance from England. Mr. Odo Russell,
afterwards Lord Ampthill, Lord John's nephew, was instructed to keep
the Foreign Office informed of what happened the Council, but his
information was much less copious than Lord Acton's. He was not
instructed to do anything more, and officially he was a member of the
Legation at Florence. While other governments {xlviii} did nothing,
the Italian Government, in Lord Acton's opinion, made matters worse.
Their measures of what he called confiscation against the property of
the Church would, he thought, prevent some Italian bishops from voting
in the minority who would otherwise have been disposed to do so. Yet,
if Lord Acton were right in his description of the Papal policy, he
could hardly have been surprised that Liberal governments in Catholic
countries should regard the Church as an enemy.
On the 15th of March 1870, a curious protest was presented to the
Council by some bishops of the United Kingdom. The substance of it is
thus described by Lord Acton: "They state that the English and Irish
Catholics obtained their emancipation, and the full privileges of
citizenship, by solemn and repeated declarations that their religion
did not teach the dogma now proposed; that these declarations made by
the bishops, and permitted by Rome, are, in fact, the conditions under
which Catholics are allowed to sit in Parliament, and to hold offices
of trust and responsibility under the Crown; and that they cannot be
forgotten or overlooked by us without dishonour." Lord Acton
complained bitterly of France because she maintained the temporal power
of the Pope, and excluded Italians from their national capital, by her
troops, while yet she would not attempt to restrain him from abusing
the jurisdiction she enabled him to exercise. "The religious houses
are suppressed, the schools of divinity reduced, the priesthood almost
starved, because France is determined to keep the Pope on his despotic
throne. It is a policy which degrades the Italian Government in the
eyes of the nation, nurses the revolutionary passion, and hinders the
independence of the country, and which can no longer be defended on the
score of religious liberty. The French Protectorate has become as
odious to Catholicism as to the {xlix} Italian State, and it is about
to prove as pernicious to other countries as it is to Italy." When a
division was taken on the dogma of Infallibility, 451 bishops voted
with the Pope, 88 against him, and 62 for further inquiry. Then the
minority gave up the struggle, and when, on the 18th of July, three
days after the declaration of war between France and Germany, the
principle was formally defined, only two bishops resisted the
acclamation of 533. A few weeks later the French troops left Rome, and
the temporal power was at an end.
Such was the miserably futile result of the Opposition led by Darboy,
Dupanloup, Rauscher, Schwartzenberg, Kenrick, Conolly, Hefele, and
Strossmayer. They were borne down by the dead weight of numbers, and
the traditional authority of the Holy See. Catholics were offered the
choice of submission or excommunication. The official head of the
English Catholics, Manning, was among the most zealous supporters of
the Papacy. Newman deeply deplored, but humbly submitted. So even did
Strossmayer, the brave and eloquent Croat, who had been shouted down at
the Council in violent and abusive language when he denied that
Protestantism was the source of Atheism, and pleaded for the old
Catholic rule of unanimity. Doellinger, challenged by the Archbishop of
Munich to accept the decree, refused, and was cut off, like Spinoza, to
his eternal honour, from the congregation of the faithful. Lord Acton,
on the other hand, the stay and support of the minority throughout the
Council and before it, was not molested, perhaps because he was a
layman, perhaps because he was a peer.
While he was at Rome, in November 1869, Acton had received from Mr.
Gladstone, and accepted, the offer of a barony. For a young man of
thirty-five this was a great and most unusual distinction. It was {l}
made all the greater by the fact that his name occurred in the first
list of such recommendations submitted by the Prime Minister to the
Queen. At that time the general public hardly knew Sir John Acton's
name. But he had all the usual qualifications for a peerage, except
wealth, being connected with the aristocracy by birth and marriage, the
head of an old English family, and the inheritor of an old English
baronetcy, who had gained six years' political experience in the House
of Commons. "His character," Mr. Gladstone wrote to the Queen, "is of
the first order, and he is one of the most learned and accomplished,
though one of the most modest and unassuming, men of the day" (Morley's
"Life of Gladstone," ii. 430). No praise could be better deserved, or
expressed with more studious moderation. Lord Acton pursued in the
House of Lords the same silent course that he had adopted in the House
of Commons. He remained, unlike many peers of Mr. Gladstone's
creation, faithful to the Liberal party, at that time, and for so many
years afterwards, led by his step-father, Lord Granville.
Lord Acton was made an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy by the University
of Munich in 1872, the last year of the _North British Review_, after
which he ceased to write regularly for the Press. In 1873 a very
different honour was in contemplation. He had been consulted by Lord
Granville upon the European situation, then regarded as critical, and
showed such remarkable knowledge of it that the idea of sending him as
Ambassador to Berlin was seriously entertained (_Edinburgh Review_, No.
404, page 528). The appointment would in many ways have been
desirable, and in some unexceptionable. For Lord Acton was a born
diplomatist, and, though the German Emperor was a Protestant, half the
empire was Catholic. But the prize was apparently thought too high for
a man outside the diplomatic service who had filled no {li} other post
under the Crown. Lord Acton remained at home, and in 1874 found
himself suddenly once again in the thick of a theological battle. The
echoes of the Vatican Council, and of Papal pretensions, seemed to have
died away, when, in November 1874, Mr. Gladstone, freed from the
trammels of office, and regarding his leadership of the Liberal party
as near its close, startled the world by a pamphlet on "The Vatican
Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance." He had previously, in
an article on "Ritualism," contributed to the _Contemporary Review_,
expressed his opinion that Romanising in the Church of England was
least to be feared at a moment "when Rome had substituted for the proud
boast of _semper eadem_ a policy of violence and change in faith; when
she had refurbished and paraded anew every rusty tool she was fondly
thought to have disused; when no one could become her convert without
renouncing his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty
and duty at the mercy of another; and when she had equally repudiated
modern thought and ancient history." While in this frame of mind, Mr.
Gladstone paid a visit to Munich, and had many long talks with the
venerable Professor Doellinger. The spectacle of a man so wise, pious,
learned, and holy under the ban of the Church seems to have kindled in
him a burning indignation against the authors of the Vatican decrees.
He wrote a pamphlet, and informed Lord Acton from Hawarden in October
that he meant to publish it. Lord Acton deprecated this step. He was
far nearer to Mr. Gladstone in opinion than he was to the Court of
Rome. But he had no desire to see the subject reopened, knowing that
the withdrawal of the decrees was impossible, and fearing that public
opinion might be dangerously excited against his fellow-Catholics by so
powerful an onslaught. He did not sufficiently allow for the great
progress in the direction of tolerance made since the passing of the
Ecclesiastical {lii} Titles Act, which Mr. Gladstone himself had
repealed three years before. The pamphlet appeared in November 1874,
and more than a hundred thousand copies of it were sold. The English
Catholics were disturbed. Some were indignant, and some were alarmed.
But in the end they were none the worse. On the contrary, Mr.
Gladstone did them a service by giving them an opportunity to declare
that they were, and always would be, as loyal and patriotic as their
Protestant countrymen. It is impossible not to trace in Mr.
Gladstone's pamphlet, as in the passage already cited from the
_Contemporary Review_, the effect of Lord Acton's letters from Rome in
1870. The substance of the argument is that the Catholics obtained
emancipation by denying that Papal infallibility was a dogma of their
Church, and that the Power which had changed their faith might change
their allegiance. The Vatican decrees reversed the policy of Clement
the Fourteenth, who, by overthrowing the supremacy of the Jesuits, had
"levelled in the dust the deadliest foes that mental and moral liberty
had ever known." Equality of civil rights should be maintained without
regard for religious differences. But Mr. Gladstone thought himself
entitled to ask the Catholics of England and Ireland whether they would
assist in the re-erection of the temporal power by force. Many were
the answers to this famous pamphlet. The most eloquent was Newman's.
The most hostile was Manning's. The most interesting was Acton's. It
is characteristic of Lord Acton's courage and candour that he should
have answered at all. He was regarded at Rome with something more than
suspicion, and nobody quite understood why he had escaped the fate of
Doellinger. There was nothing that Mr. Gladstone could say of the
decrees too strongly condemnatory to command his assent. But his
invincible integrity of mind would not allow him, for the sake of his
own peace, to acquiesce in the practical conclusions {liii} which Mr.
Gladstone drew from irrefragable premises. In several letters written
for the _Times_, one of them addressed personally to Mr. Gladstone,
Lord Acton gave the only reply which could in the circumstances be
given. Mr. Gladstone's reasoning was unassailable in argument. But
man is not a logical animal. People are sometimes better than their
principles, sometimes worse, very seldom consistent. As Mr. Gladstone
himself had said a few years before, "The limit of possible variation
between character and opinion--aye, between character and belief--is
widening and will widen." Lord Acton, with all his subtlety and all
his learning, could only take refuge in the old and familiar truth that
what a man will do cannot be inferred from what he believes. The
_Corpus Juris_, he said (_Times_, November 9, 1874), makes the murder
of Protestants lawful. Pius the Fifth justified the assassination of
Elizabeth. Gregory the Thirteenth condoned, or rather applauded, the
massacre of Saint Bartholomew (_Times_, November 24). Was it therefore
fair to assume that all Catholics who accepted the Vatican decrees, or
even all Ultramontanes, were potential murderers? "Communion with
Rome," he said at the same time, "is dearer to me than life." He
concluded his letters in dignified and moving sentences, which made a
deep and just impression upon Catholics and Protestants alike. "It
would be well if men had never fallen into the temptation of
suppressing truth and encouraging error for the better security of
religion. Our Church stands, and our faith should stand, not on the
virtues of men, but on the surer ground of an institution and a
guidance that are divine. I should dishonour and betray the Church if
I entertained a suspicion that the evidence of religion could be
weakened or the authority of councils sapped by a knowledge of the
facts with which I have been dealing, or of others which are not less
grievous or less certain because they remain untold." It was not to be
supposed that {liv} this language would give satisfaction to the
dominant party in the Church of Rome, which had already been much tried
by Lord Acton's energy behind the scenes during the Vatican Council.
An apology which was more injurious than the attack added fuel to the
flames. "If I am excommunicated," he wrote to Mr. Gladstone from
Aldenham on the 19th of December 1874, "I should rather say when I am."
Yet he was not. He satisfied his bishop, Browne of Shrewsbury, that he
was dogmatically sound, and that it would have been inconsistent with
his argument to attack the Vatican decrees. He had indeed accepted
them as the foundation of his case. What he wanted to show was that
neither the Jesuits nor the Inquisition, neither false doctrines nor
bad Popes, had made Catholics indifferent to the moral law. Manning,
now a Cardinal, was not so easily contented as Bishop Browne, or as
Bishop Clifford, who also absolved Lord Acton. His haughty and
commanding temper had been stimulated by promotion, and by the favour
of the Pope. It was one of his most cherished aims to humble the pride
of the old Catholic families, and make them feel the discipline of the
Church. He wrote three letters to Lord Acton, and received, it need
scarcely be said, the most courteous replies, which left him as wise as
he was before. But he went no further, and the correspondence was
never published. Manning was not without prudence, and he shrank from
proceeding to extremities with a man whose intellect was as keen as
his, and whose knowledge was vastly superior. It would not have cost
Lord Acton much research to produce a summary account of the
Inquisition, or a biographical sketch of selected Popes, which would
have done more to prove the soundness of his position than to edify the
Christian world. The new cardinal, if he had indulged in an historical
controversy with "Quirinus," might have emerged from it with less
credit to himself than amusement to the learned society of Europe. For
{lv} these, or for other reasons, he concluded to leave Lord Acton
alone.
Henceforth, Lord Acton abandoned theological polemics, and devoted
himself to his true life, the life of a student. He loved truth too
much to love controversy for its own sake, and he was conscious that,
though he had escaped penalties, orthodox Catholics would not receive
his arguments without prejudice. Mr. Gladstone wrote another pamphlet,
in which, while maintaining his own position, he accepted the loyal
assurances of the Catholics as sincere, and with that the controversy
ceased. But in June 1876 Lord Acton wrote him a private letter, which
contains the clearest statement of his own opinion upon Ultramontanism
and Ultramontanes. "I have tried in vain," he wrote, "to reconcile
myself to your opinion that Ultramontanism really exists as a definite
and genuine system of religious faith, providing its own solutions of
ethical and metaphysical problems, and satisfying the conscience and
the intellect of conscientious and intelligent men. It has never been
my fortune to meet with an esoteric Ultramontane--I mean, putting aside
the ignorant mass, and those who are incapable of reasoning, that I do
not know of a religious and educated Catholic who really believes that
the See of Rome is a safe guide to salvation.... In short, I do not
believe there are Catholics who, sincerely and intelligently, believe
that Rome is right and that Doellinger is wrong. And therefore I think
you are too hard on Ultramontanes, or too gentle with Ultramontanism.
You say, for instance, that it promotes untruthfulness. I don't think
that is fair. It not only promotes, it inculcates, distinct mendacity
and deceitfulness. In certain cases it is made a duty to lie. But
those who teach this doctrine do not become habitual liars in other
things."
With this plain and straightforward language we may leave Lord Acton as
a theologian, and pass to {lvi} other aspects of his busy life. His
great work should have been, and was intended to be, a History of
Liberty. For that purpose his library at Aldenham was collected, and
to frame different definitions of liberty was one of his favourite
pastimes. He loved liberty with all the ardour of Milton, and
investigated it with all the science of Locke. Even Liberalism, which
may be thought an inferior thing, was with him "the beginning of real
religion, a condition of interior Catholicism" (Acton to Gladstone,
March 22, 1891). This History was never written, nor even begun. All
that there is of it, all that there ever was of it, except books and
notes, materials for others to use, consists of two lectures delivered
at Bridgnorth in the year 1877. One was called "The History of Freedom
in Antiquity," and the other "The History of Freedom in Christianity."
These lectures are exceedingly rare, and the only copies I have seen
are in the British Museum. If the audience listened to them with
pleasure, and absorbed them with ease, they had intellects of unusual
calibre, and employed them to the best advantage. Read carefully and
at leisure, they are full of suggestion and of insight. Their fault is
that, in homely phrase, they pour a quart of liquor into a pint pot.
They are so much crowded with names and references, that to follow the
chief thread of the argument is made needlessly hard. "It would be
easy," the Bridgnorth Institute was told, "to point out a paragraph in
St. Augustine, or a sentence of Grotius, that outweighs in influence
the Acts of fifty Parliaments; and our case owes more to Cicero and
Seneca, to Vinet and Tocqueville, than to the laws of Lycurgus, or the
five codes of France." The sentence and the paragraph should have been
pointed out. Something should have been said, if not about Vinet and
Tocqueville, at least about Cicero and Seneca. A geographer may have
too many names in his map, and a learned man may condense his knowledge
until it has {lvii} no meaning for those who know less than himself.
But, on the other hand, these lectures contain passages at once lucid
and worth their weight in gold, which could only have come from a mind
at once acute, meditative, and well stored. Such, for instance, is the
declaration, "By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be
protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of
authority and majorities, custom and opinion." "Liberty," proceeds the
lecturer, "is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the
highest political end.... A generous spirit prefers that his country
should be poor, and weak, and of no account, but free, rather than
powerful, prosperous, and enslaved. It is better to be the citizen of
a humble commonwealth in the Alps than a subject of the superb
autocracy that overshadows half of Asia and of Europe." This will seem
a hard saying to many, and it is indeed far removed from the sensual
idolatry of mere size that vulgarises modern Imperialism. But it was
with Lord Acton a fundamental principle, and it is not the size of
Periclean Athens, or of Elizabethan England, which made them
imperishably great. "It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it
is worse to be oppressed by a majority." Worse, because more
desperate, with less hope of rebellion, or escape. We must look, Lord
Acton warns us, to substance and essence, not to form and outward show.
The martyrdom of Socrates was the act of a free Republic, and it was
Caaesar who liberated Rome from the tyranny of Republican institutions.
The fault of the classical State was that it tried to be Church and
State in one, and thus infringed upon individualism by regulating
religion. The three things wanting in ancient liberty were
representative government, emancipation of slaves, and freedom of
conscience. In Christian times Thomas Aquinas anticipated the theory
of the Whig Revolution. The worst enemy of freedom in modern times was
that mock hero of sham greatness, {lviii} Louis Quatorze. The only
known forms of liberty are Republics and Constitutional Monarchies.
"It was from America that the plain ideas that men ought to mind their
own business, and that the nation is responsible to Heaven for the acts
of the State, ideas long locked in the breast of solitary thinkers and
hidden away in Latin folios, burst forth like a conqueror upon the
world they were destined to transform under the title of the Rights of
Man." Ever since his visit to America in the days of President Pierce,
if not before, Acton had made a special study of the American
Constitution in its strength and its weakness, in the amplitude of its
safeguards, and in its fatal want of elasticity. A Monarchy cannot be
too constitutional. But a too constitutional Republic is a difficult
machine to work. England, said a French critic, is a Republic with an
hereditary President: the United States are a Monarchy with an elected
King.