the Queen is to live, I took pains to ascertain what is doing for her
safety. The Vice-Consul is a singularly intelligent and practical man,
and I saw with satisfaction that the peculiar drawbacks are fully
understood. Every precaution will be taken, without attracting
attention, or being perceived by the Queen herself.
I shall not get credit for my loyalty, for it caused me to miss a
meeting which was held here, during my absence, to vote an address.
But I was rewarded by finding Green, the historian, at Mentone, in good
spirits--but in bad health--and I spent an interesting hour with him.
Gardiner tells me that I understand nothing about the question, that
the Jesuit was only a conspirator and intriguer, and that "John
Inglesant" is abominably overrated. So let us wait for Fraser, with
open and {129} unsettled minds. Brewer published in 1839 "The Court of
James I.," being the Memoirs of Goodman, Bp. of Gloucester, possibly
not the book in question, but one that would make the situation clear
to the intelligent reader. Green, who does not agree, much, with
Gardiner, tells me that he has made great sacrifices by adhering to
Irvingism, and that he has still to struggle with extreme poverty.
Being one of the two or three most solid historians in England, he has
to teach at an inferior girls' school. He has had the misfortune to
lose several children, as well as his first wife. Do you know his
Outline of English History? I make my children read it, to keep out
----. I wonder what the numerous Wickhams will learn history in. I am
so glad that I have a new friend of the same kind as those I like so
much.
As Mr. Gladstone has had various correspondence with Mivart, it may
interest him to know that that very distinguished philosopher, the most
eminent man of science our Church has had in England, was constrained
to decline election at the Athenaeum, being certain of blackballs, by
reason of his quarrel with the Darwinians. In the hope that the
Committee may elect him, he wishes to be put down in the books again;
and he asks me to propose him. As I have never spoken to him in my
life, it is against the rule; but I have agreed to do it, in
acknowledgment of his unquestioned eminence and because of Mr.
Gladstone's weakness for him, which I, otherwise, do not share. The
wicked Sclater, vendor of Jumbo, is the Seconder.
Even without knowing the conversation with Gibson, who seems to me a
most able specimen of his kind, the attitude taken up towards the Lords
seems to me {130} in all ways excellent. As to Bradlaugh, as he is
there, I wish the amendment[168] had succeeded--for I have not read the
_Nineteenth Century_.[169] But have you seen in the _Century_--once
_Scribner_--Bryce on Disraeli? It is a good paper.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: _Cannes March 21, 1882_]
In the middle of John Inglesant came the enclosed,[170] which I return,
with dismay. The impression given seems to be that by speaking of
dogmatic danger in England, and of moral danger in Rome, I ingeniously
laid a silent imputation of heterodoxy on Anglicans, whilst implying
that we are free at least from that suspicion; so that I thought of
1882 whilst I spoke of 1640, and meant controversy, though pretending
to write history.
The reward of history is that it releases and relieves us from present
strife. My only endeavour was to recall what might have occurred two
centuries and a half ago, to a sincere and upright priest, that is, to
one who studied to detach his mind from its habitual surroundings, to
look behind his own scenes, to stand apart with Archimedes, to practise
the _doute methodique_ of Descartes, to discern prejudice from faith
and sympathy from truth. There was no such problem, and I know now
that my zeal was wasted on a personage whose notion of religion was not
worth inquiry. But I was not pleading a cause. I scarcely venture to
make points against the religion of other people, from a curious
experience that they have more to say than I know, and from a sense
that it is safer to reserve {131} censure for one's own, which one
understands more intimately, having a share of responsibility and
action.
It would have been more accurate to sacrifice my antithesis by
referring to doctrinal trouble as well as moral risk on our side. If I
did not do so--I have no recollection of my words--the reason may be
that I am too deeply impressed with the moral risk to have the other
very present to my mind. Encountering an associate of Guy Fawkes and
Ravaillac, I do not stop to ask what he makes of the Apocrypha, or how
far he goes with the Athanasian Creed. I believe that our internal
conflicts spring from indifference to sin, and not from a religious
idea. A speculative Ultramontanism separate from theories of tyranny,
mendacity, and murder, keeping honestly clear of the Jesuit with his
lies, of the Dominican with his fagots, of the Popes with their
massacres, has not yet been brought to light. Doellinger, who thinks of
nothing else, has never been able to define it, and I do not know how
to distinguish a Vaticanist of that sort, a Vaticanist in a state of
grace, from a Catholic.
Let me supply my omission by declaring that my hypothetical divine
would not have found all the moral evil in one quarter, and ambiguous
doctrine only in the other. I dare say he would think that in England
too little was done for the spiritual life, and, unless he had a taste
for Donne, that devotional literature was backward; and he might even
agree with Thorndike that the neglect of the discipline of penance
threatened the Church with ruin. In like manner, he would not view
with favour some of the dogmatic theology that flourished amongst his
friends. He might, for instance, deem that Molinism or Jansenism,
neither of them yet {132} approved or rejected, but severally dominant
in many lands, were false systems, and that, between the two, a
Catholic doctrine of grace was hard to find. He would be aware that
Rome still cherished the idea that roused Luther, that, by committing a
sin one may save a soul; and he would perhaps conclude, with a famous
Jesuit of his day, that Luther did well to attack it.
Of the instances suggested, one, the Cultus of the Blessed Virgin, was
partly of later growth and would not seriously disturb a contemporary
of Charles the First. It does not offend in the older, classical
literature of the Church, in the Imitation, the Exposition, the
Pensees, or the Petit Careme. Sixty years ago, a priest who is still
living was sent as Chaplain to Alton Towers. At Evening Prayers, when
he began the Litany of Loretto, Lord Shrewsbury rose from his knees and
told him that they never recited it. He was a man, as the "Life of
Panizzi" shows, without an idea of his own.
Images would probably impress him as a danger to be warded, rather, I
think, than Transubstantiation. Here the difficulty that strikes a
dialectician hardly reaches the people. Many Catholics are practically
conscious of no difference from the higher Anglican or Lutheran view of
the Real Presence. Hegel's argument, that a mouse which had nibbled a
Host would become an object of adoration, would strike nine laymen out
of ten as a poor joke. I know not whether the confusion of thought was
greater then or less; but he would remember so many cases of
Protestants ready to conform on no harder condition than the concession
of the Cup that his scruples would be likely to melt. Montagu saying
that he knew no Roman tenet he {133} would not subscribe, unless it
were Transubstantiation, would have made him wonder why a
Catholic-minded prelate should be more stiffnecked than the unbending
Lutherans or fiercer Bohemians.
But whatever the dogmatic perils he might apprehend, he would meet them
in the same spirit of charitable construction he had employed on the
other side. I will presume that he took the oath of allegiance, for,
in 1635, the Jesuits allowed their penitents to take it. He would even
admit the Royal Supremacy, like Father Caron, as not exceeding the
prerogative of Kings in France and Spain. He would drop the imputation
of schism, seeing that Bramhall wrote that there was no formed
difference with the Church of Rome about any point of faith. Finding
that an Archbishop denied any necessary articles of faith beyond the
Apostles' Creed, he would regard the 39 Articles as Hall,
Chillingworth, Bramhall, Stillingfleet, and, according to Bull, all
that are well advised, considered them--pious opinions which no man was
obliged to believe. With Bossuet, he would acknowledge the force of
the case in favour of Anglican orders, and with Richard Simon he would
admit that the Caroline divines had not their equals in his own Church,
and would revere them as the strongest enemies of the specific heresies
of Luther and Calvin, as the force that would sap the fabric against
which Rome still contended in vain. If he heard that there was a
bishop who begged prayers for his soul, another who tolerated the
Invocation of Saints, a third who allowed Seven Sacraments, and so on,
he might be willing to believe, with Davenport, that the chasm was
filled that had separated England from Trent.
To reach that point of conciliation it would be {134} necessary to make
the best of everything, so far as could be without sophistry, violence,
or concealment. And the same rule of favourable interpretation would
be applied by the same man to his own Theology. He would be bound by
the limits of Richelieu's proposals, and would keep within the lines of
Bossuet, and those which Spinola afterwards drew, with the assent of
Pope and General.
He would have been confirmed in this method by the response it drew
from such eminent Protestants as Grotius, Bramhall, La Bastide,
Praetorius, Fabricius, and Leibniz. Their judgment would have
encouraged him to abide in his own communion, and would have taught him
that he was as safe as his friend on the other side. The same
impartiality would have led to the same result. There were even
Protestant divines who sanctioned conversions to Rome.
The last time I saw Count Arnim he asked about Newman's Vatican
defence. I said that he had explained the decrees away by declaring
that he meant no defence of persecution and tyrannicide. That was a
canon of interpretation strong enough to blow any other ingredient into
gas. Arnim objected that Newman's manipulations were not accepted at
Rome. Just then he became a Cardinal, and so they were indirectly
sanctioned.
I endow my seventeenth-century divine with the ingenuity and the
integrity of Newman. Having given England the benefit of No. 90, he
would gild Rome with the answer to the Expostulation. Shutting one eye
to the Articles, like Chillingworth, he would, like Spinola, shut the
other to the Council of Trent. Having expounded Anglo-Catholicism by
the light of Bramhall, he would, in the same spirit, choose {135}
Cassander, Bossuet, Corker as genuine exponents of Roman Catholicism,
and he could do both without insincerity or surrender.
Don't let me make too much of that passage in Newman. He defended the
Syllabus, and the Syllabus justified all those atrocities. Pius the
Fifth held that it was sound Catholic doctrine that any man may stab a
heretic condemned by Rome, and that every man is a heretic who attacks
the papal prerogatives. Borromeo wrote a letter for the purpose of
causing a few Protestants to be murdered. Newman is an avowed admirer
of Saint Pius and Saint Charles, and of the pontiffs who canonised
them. This, and the like of this, is the reason of my deep aversion
for him.
There is not time for Shorthouse to-day. I will tell you about him as
soon as I can.
[Sidenote: _Cannes March 20-22, 1882_]
Wickham lent me John Inglesant yesterday, and I finished it before
bedtime. I have read nothing more thoughtful and suggestive since
Middlemarch, and I could fill with honest praise the pages I am going
to blacken with complaint. But if I had access to the author, with
privilege of free and indiscreet speech, it would seem a worthier
tribute to his temper and ability to lay my litany of doubts before
him. Not having it, I submit my questionings to yourself, as the
warmest admirer of his work. Probably the difficulties which occur to
me have been raised already in reviews which you have read. For
instance:--
I. 29. Inglesant's name does not appear in the trials of the
Protestants. Did the Marian persecution rage in Wilts?
73, 74. Here is a Puritan party in Parliament and a {136} scheme to
pervert its leaders, in August 1637. No Parliament had sat for eight
years.
83. Juan Valdes was not a papist but a Protestant.
90. Would Foxe be the favourite and characteristic author of such
Arminians as the Ferrars?
101. The Mass is the strongest of all the motives that lead men to
Rome.--I really doubt it, for I remember more instances of men
attracted by our orders, by authority, unity, confession.
107. Hobbes thinks it is the consecrating power by which a priest, in
the hour of death, can save a soul.--He should have said, the power of
absolution.
207. Something similar to the feeling in England during the Sepoy
rebellion. Read: Mutiny. This is an understatement. The Irish
massacre was more appalling to the imagination because it was nearer
and of vaster reported proportions. A respectable writer who lived in
Ireland believes that there were 300,000 victims.
272. Charles contrasted most favourably with his judges, whose sole
motive was self. Ludlow's Memoirs, and other sources, show that
something was at work besides selfish fears. The men perhaps were no
better for that. They may even have been worse, inasmuch as the higher
and better part of them served as the motive of crime. Carnot may have
been as infamous as Barere; but it is unjust to tar them with the same
brush.
277. Eustace loses his suppers with the French King--Louis was eleven
years old.
279, 312. I don't remember the term Quakers in current use as early as
January 1650, but very soon after.
327. In opposition to this, the Jesuits about the {137} time of the
Reformation came forward with what was called a new doctrine.--The book
in question came out in 1588.
Vol. I. 339. II. 12. Legate and nuncio are treated as the same thing.
They are as different as Praetor and Dictator.
II. 3. The learning of the Fathers was not what it had been a century
ago.--These Fathers must be Italian monks generally, or else the
Jesuits. It is not true of either. The Jesuits had no very eminent
scholars in the first generation. Salmeron, the most noted, lived to
be told by Bellarmin that his books would take a good deal of
retouching before going to press. The middle of the seventeenth
century, especially the second quarter, was the golden age of Jesuit
learning, when their supremacy was uncontested. The Benedictines did
not begin to rival them quite so early as Cressy says, I. 334.
4. Chigi is never di Chigi, and the pope's sister-in-law was called
Olimpia Maidalchini.
106. An age or two ago the priestly government was better. Yet
Machiavelli brings much the same accusation against it in his time.
138. Some confusion as to the name of the English College.
272. The steps of the Trinita were hardly built then. There might be
more of these little scruples, and, by themselves, they do not build up
a strong misgiving. The picture may be true in spite of slips in
accessary detail. But is the picture true, I will not say
controversially, but historically? There are glaring faults in it, not
open to dispute or controversy, and I will begin with these.
Inglesant comes to Rome about 1654, where Molinos {138} has already
resided some years; and he then attends to the business of the Duke of
Umbria. Umbria is Urbino. The last Duke of Urbino died nearly forty
years before Molinos settled in Rome. Inglesant is present at the
condemnation of Molinos, and afterwards visits Worcester, in Charles
the Second's reign--II. 369. Charles the Second had been dead two
years when Molinos was condemned.
In the pontificate of Alexander the Seventh, we hear all at once that
Molinos is arrested, and are told of a meeting, at the Chigi palace, of
persons belonging to the time of Innocent the Eleventh. II. 333.
Without a single word, we are carried over three pontificates and an
interval of thirty years.
The Jesuit who is so hopeful of Anglican re-union that he will not
allow his favourite pupil to join the Church of Rome is called Sancta
Clara. There was a Father Sancta Clara in those days, who is
peculiarly well remembered among English Catholics as the greatest
writer we had between Stapleton and Newman, less acute than the one,
less eloquent than the other, more learned than either; remarkable for
opinions so conciliatory as to resemble those of his imaginary
namesake, and to make him the originator and suggester of No. XC.;
remarkable also for the extreme difficulty of getting his books. But
he was a Franciscan, not a Jesuit, a scholar, not an intriguer; and his
name was not Hall, but Davenport.
This is surely a wilful and wanton confusion of persons, times, and
things. It destroys confidence in the writer's carefulness or
knowledge, gives a tone of unreality, and makes one feel that the whole
is out of keeping.
The book depicts the religious strivings of the age {139} so far as the
hero would come in contact with them, keeping a sort of syncretism[171]
in view. Some of the most remarkable currents of thought are left out
of sight, and others, which were not within reach, are introduced by a
tyrannical use of time and space. The Rosicrucians can hardly have
been talked about in England within twenty years after the Fama
appeared. The Quietists had not appeared in Rome under Innocent the
Tenth. The wonderful teaching of Bohme, which did reach us under
Charles the First, is not alluded to; and Inglesant lives in the same
house with Van Helmont, and never discovers that he is more than a
physician. The most intense religious force of all that which
prevailed during Inglesant's English career, Independency, is nowhere
named, as well as I remember. The writer does not differentiate
Puritans. He lumps Arminian with Predestinarian, the man who looks on
Schism with the horror felt by Baxter and the man who made Schism a
principle of organisation. Monarchy, he tells us, was restored because
the Puritans hated the tyranny of Cromwell. It was restored, because
Presbyterians would not stand being oppressed by Congregationalists;
and for another reason which was discovered by Harrington,[172] and may
still be discovered in his Works. We are introduced to Hobbes and to
More--Hobbes much better drawn than More--but we never meet
Chillingworth, and though at one time very near to Hammond we do not
hear him. Ussher offering terms to Presbyterians, Baxter seeking for
peace with Prelacy, Bramhall holding out a hand to Gallicans, Leighton
consorting with Jansenists--all this good and {140} apt material is
disdained. Instead of the original thinkers among the English
Catholics--Barnes, Holden, Davenport, White, Caron, Serjeant,
Walshe--we have only Cressy, by way of a foil to the Jesuits, and with
a vague reminiscence of a page in the writings of an Edgbaston
neighbour. Of the efforts making in France and Holland to mitigate
Calvinism, and in Germany to tone down the dogma of Augsburg, not a
word. Lutherans only appear in order to be saddled with a doctrine by
which they would be sorry to stand or fall. Jansenism, odious,
probably, to the author, is not displayed; and the definition of the
Oratorian spirit as contrasted with Benedictine and Jesuit, is quite
inadequate.
Mysticism and High Church Anglicanism are so highly favoured that the
hero, when the Jesuit relaxes his grasp, acquiesces in both. At Rome
he is a hearty Molinosist. Driven from Rome he is a hearty Anglican.
Perhaps Malebranche or Fenelon might have facilitated the transition
from Petrucci to Norris and Nelson and Ken. But there is no
transition. The passage is made by the help of no subtler agency than
a Newhaven smack. The thing is unexplained, inartistic, inorganic, but
quite consistent with the drifting nature of Inglesant. Coming to more
debatable ground I proceed with greater diffidence: Who sat for the
profane and sceptical Cardinal? There is some likeness to Retz,
without his genius or any premonition of the change which, in
Inglesant's time, came over him. But it would be an unpardonable error
to paint an Italian prelate with colours owned by a Frenchman. I
suspect the author of having no authority for this description, both
because his account of the Conclave is so superficial, and for the
following reason. Rinuccini, {141} alluding to persecution, goes back
a century for an example, to a foreign country and a hostile church.
One later instance occurs to his company, but he rejects it.
Evidently, he thinks that there is nothing of the sort nearer at hand.
If, he says, they once commenced to burn at Rome, they would not know
where to stop.
An account of Catholicism which assumes that, in the middle of the
seventeenth century, Rome had not commenced to burn, is an account
which studiously avoids the real and tragic issues of the time. The
part of Hamlet is omitted, by desire. For when Rinuccini spoke, the
fires of the Roman Inquisition were, indeed, extinct, but had been
extinguished in his lifetime, under the preceding pontificate, having
burnt for nearly a century. Familiar instances must have been
remembered by his hearers; and they had read in the most famous
theological treatise of the last generation, by what gradation of
torments a Protestant ought to die. They knew that whoever obstructed
the execution of that law forfeited his life, that the murder of a
heretic was not only permitted but rewarded, that it was a virtuous
deed to slaughter Protestant men and women, until they were all
exterminated.
To keep these abominations out of sight is the same offence as to
describe the Revolution without the guillotine. The reader knows no
more than old Caspar what it was all about.
There was no mystery about these practices, no scruple, and no
concealment. Although never repudiated, and although retrospectively
sanctioned by the Syllabus, they fell into desuetude, under pressure
from France, and from Protestant Europe. But they were defended, more
or less boldly, down to the peace of {142} Westphalia.[173] The most
famous Jesuits countenanced them, and were bound to countenance them,
for the papacy had, by a series of books approved and of acts done,
identified itself with the system, and the Jesuits were identified with
the cause of the papacy. A Gallican was not quite so deeply
compromised. He might say that these are the crimes and teaching of
the Court, not of the Church, of Rome; and he was on his guard to
restrict the influence and to disparage the example of the popes.
Nevertheless, to say: If you believe the books which Rome commends; if
you accept the doctrines which Rome imposes under pain of death and
damnation; if you do the deeds she requires, and imitate the lives she
proposes as your patterns, you will be probably hanged in this world,
and assuredly damned in the next--this would have sounded like derision
even in the mouth of Pascal or Bossuet. To a Jesuit it was impossible.
He existed in order to sustain the credit of the Popes. He wished the
world to think well of them. They were a tower of strength, an object
of pride to every member of the Society. He was obliged to swallow
them whole. Therefore, though he might wear the mask of Lancelot
Andrews or William Wilberforce, within it was a lining of Saint Just.
It is this combination of an eager sense of duty, zeal for sacrifice,
and love of virtue, with the deadly taint of a conscience perverted by
authority, that makes them so odious to touch and so curious to study.