ensue in consequence of the abuses of the Church. For the duty and
necessity of removing these abuses has always been recognised; and
only the difficulty of the thing, the not always unjustifiable fear
lest the wheat should be pulled up with the tares, prevented for a
time the Reformation, which was accomplished in the Church and
through her. Separation on account merely of abuses in ecclesiastical
life, when the doctrine is the same, is rejected as criminal by the
Protestants as well as by us. It is, therefore, for doctrine's sake
that the separation occurred; and the general discontent of the
people, the weakening of ecclesiastical authority by the existence of
abuses, only facilitated the adoption of the new doctrines. But now
on one side some of these defects and evils in the life of the Church
have disappeared; the others have greatly diminished since the
reforming movement; and on the other side, the principal doctrines
for which they separated, and on the truth of which, and their
necessity for salvation, the right and duty of secession was based,
are given up by Protestant science, deprived of their Scriptural
basis by exegesis, or at least made very uncertain by the opposition
of the most eminent Protestant divines. Meanwhile we live in hopes,
comforting ourselves with the conviction that history, or that
process of development in Europe which is being accomplished before
our eyes, as well in society and politics as in religion, is the
powerful ally of the friends of ecclesiastical union; and we hold out
our hands to Christians on the other side for a combined war of
resistance against the destructive movements of the age.
There are two circumstances which make us fear that the work will not be
received in the spirit in which it is written, and that its object will
not immediately be attained. The first of these is the extraordinary
effect which was produced by the declaration which the author made on
the occasion of the late assembly of the Catholic associations of
Germany at Munich. He stated simply, what is understood by every
Catholic out of Italy, and intelligible to every reasonable Protestant,
that the freedom of the Church imperatively requires that, in order to
protect the Pope from the perils which menace him, particularly in our
age, he should possess a sovereignty not merely nominal, and that his
right to his dominions is as good as that of all other legitimate
sovereigns. In point of fact, this expression of opinion, which occurs
even in the garbled reports of the lectures, leaves all those questions
on which it is possible for serious and dispassionate men to be divided
entirely open. It does not determine whether there was any excuse for
the disaffection of the Papal subjects; whether the security afforded by
a more extensive dominion is greater than the increased difficulty of
administration under the conditions inherited from the French
occupation; whether an organised system of tribute or domains might be
sufficient, in conjunction with a more restricted territory; whether the
actual loss of power is or is not likely to improve a misfortune for
religion. The storm of applause with which these words, simply
expressing that in which all agree, were received, must have suggested
to the speaker that his countrymen in general are unprepared to believe
that one, who has no other aspiration in his life and his works than the
advancement of the Catholic religion, can speak without a reverent awe
of the temporal government, or can witness without dismay its impending
fall. They must have persuaded themselves that not only the details, but
the substance of his lectures had been entirely misreported, and that
his views were as free from novelty as destitute of offence. It is hard
to believe that such persons will be able to reconcile themselves to the
fearless and straightforward spirit in which the first of Church
historians discusses the history of his own age.
Another consideration, almost equally significant with the attitude of
the great mass of Catholics, is the silence of the minority who agree
with Doellinger. Those earnest Catholics who, in their Italian
patriotism, insist on the possibility of reconciling the liberty of the
Holy See with the establishment of an ideal unity, Passaglia, Tosti,
the followers of Gioberti, and the disciples of Rosmini, have not
hesitated to utter openly their honest but most inconceivable
persuasion. But on the German side of the Alps, where no political
agitation affects the religious judgment, or drives men into disputes,
those eminent thinkers who agree with Doellinger are withheld by various
considerations from publishing their views. Sometimes it is the
hopelessness of making an impression, sometimes the grave inconvenience
of withstanding the current of opinion that makes them keep silence; and
their silence leaves those who habitually follow them not only without
means of expressing their views, but often without decided views to
express. The same influences which deprive Doellinger of the open support
of these natural allies will impede the success of his work, until
events have outstripped ideas, and until men awake to the discovery that
what they refused to anticipate or to prepare for, is already
accomplished.
Piety sometimes gives birth to scruples, and faith to superstition, when
they are not directed by wisdom and knowledge. One source of the
difficulty of which we are speaking is as much a defect of faith as a
defect of knowledge. Just as it is difficult for some Catholics to
believe that the supreme spiritual authority on earth could ever be in
unworthy hands, so they find it hard to reconcile the reverence due to
the Vicar of Christ, and the promises made to him, with the
acknowledgment of intolerable abuses in his temporal administration. It
is a comfort to make the best of the case, to draw conclusions from the
exaggerations, the inventions, and the malice of the accusers against
the justice of the accusation, and in favour of the accused. It is a
temptation to our weakness and to our consciences to defend the Pope as
we would defend ourselves--with the same care and zeal, with the same
uneasy secret consciousness that there are weak points in the case which
can best be concealed by diverting attention from them. What the defence
gains in energy it loses in sincerity; the cause of the Church, which is
the cause of truth, is mixed up and confused with human elements, and
is injured by a degrading alliance. In this way even piety may lead to
immorality, and devotion to the Pope may lead away from God.
The position of perpetual antagonism to a spirit which we abhor; the
knowledge that the clamour against the temporal power is, in very many
instances, inspired by hatred of the spiritual authority; the
indignation at the impure motives mixed up with the movement--all these
things easily blind Catholics to the fact that our attachment to the
Pope as our spiritual Head, our notion that his civil sovereignty is a
safeguard of his freedom, are the real motives of our disposition to
deny the truth of the accusations made against his government. It is
hard to believe that imputations which take the form of insults, and
which strike at the Church through the State, are well founded, and to
distinguish the design and the occasion from the facts. It is, perhaps,
more than we can expect of men, that, after defending the Pope as a
sovereign, because he is a pontiff, and adopting against his enemies the
policy of unconditional defence, they will consent to adopt a view which
corroborates to a great extent the assertions they have combated, and
implicitly condemns their tactics. It is natural to oppose one extreme
by another; and those who avoid both easily appear to be capitulating
with error. The effects of this spirit of opposition are not confined to
those who are engaged in resisting the No-popery party in England, or
the revolution in Italy. The fate of the temporal power hangs neither on
the Italian ministry nor on English influence, but on the decision of
the Emperor of the French; and the loudest maintainers of the rights of
the Holy See are among that party who have been the most zealous
adversaries of the Imperial system. The French Catholics behold in the
Roman policy of the emperor a scheme for obtaining over the Church a
power of which they would be the first victims. Their religious freedom
is in jeopardy while he has the fate of the Pope in his hands. That
which is elsewhere simply a manifestation of opinion and a moral
influence is in France an active interference and a political power.
They alone among Catholic subjects can bring a pressure to bear on him
who has had the initiative in the Italian movement. They fear by silence
to incur a responsibility for criminal acts. For them it is a season for
action, and the time has not yet come when they can speak with judicial
impartiality, or with the freedom of history, or determine how far, in
the pursuit of his ambitious ends, Napoleon III. is the instrument of
Providence, or how far, without any merit of his own, he is likely to
fulfil the expectations of those who see in him a new Constantine.
Whilst they maintain this unequal war, they naturally identify the
rights of the Church with her interests; and the wrongs of the Pope are
before their eyes so as to eclipse the realities of the Roman
government. The most vehement and one-sided of those who have dwelt
exclusively on the crimes of the Revolution and the justice of the Papal
cause, the Bishop of Orleans for instance, or Count de Montalembert,
might without inconsistency, and doubtless would without hesitation,
subscribe to almost every word in Doellinger's work; but in the position
they have taken they would probably deem such adhesion a great
rhetorical error, and fatal to the effect of their own writings. There
is, therefore, an allowance to be made, which is by no means a reproach,
for the peculiar situation of the Catholics in France.
When Christine of Sweden was observed to gaze long and intently at the
statue of Truth in Rome, a court-like prelate observed that this
admiration for Truth did her honour, as it was seldom shared by persons
in her station. "That," said the Queen, "is because truths are not all
made of marble." Men are seldom zealous for an idea in which they do not
perceive some reflection of themselves, in which they have not embarked
some portion of their individuality, or which they cannot connect with
some subjective purpose of their own. It is often more easy to
sympathise with a person in whose opposite views we discern a weakness
corresponding to our own, than with one who unsympathetically avoids to
colour the objectivity of truth, and is guided in his judgment by
facts, not by wishes. We endeavoured not many months ago to show how
remote the theology of Catholic Germany is in its scientific spirit from
that of other countries, and how far asunder are science and policy. The
same method applied to the events of our own day must be yet more
startling, and for a time we can scarcely anticipate that the author of
this work will escape an apparent isolation between the reserve of those
who share his views, but are not free to speak, and the foregone
conclusions of most of those who have already spoken. But a book which
treats of contemporary events in accordance with the signs of the time,
not with the aspirations of men, possesses in time itself an invincible
auxiliary. When the lesson which this great writer draws from the
example of the mediaeval Popes has borne its fruit; when the purpose for
which he has written is attained, and the freedom of the Holy See from
revolutionary aggression and arbitrary protection is recovered by the
heroic determination to abandon that which in the course of events has
ceased to be a basis of independence--he will be the first, but no
longer the only, proclaimer of new ideas, and he will not have written
in vain.
The Christian religion, as it addresses and adapts itself to all
mankind, bears towards the varieties of national character a relation of
which there was no example in the religions of antiquity, and which
heresy repudiates and inevitably seeks to destroy. For heresy, like
paganism, is national, and dependent both on the particular disposition
of the people and on the government of the State. It is identified with
definite local conditions, and moulded by national and political
peculiarities. Catholicity alone is universal in its character and
mission, and independent of those circumstances by which States are
established, and nations are distinguished from each other. Even Rome
had not so far extended her limits, nor so thoroughly subjugated and
amalgamated the races that obeyed her, as to secure the Church from the
natural reaction of national spirit against a religion which claimed a
universality beyond even that of the Imperial power. The first and most
terrible assault of ethnicism was in Persia, where Christianity appeared
as a Roman, and therefore a foreign and a hostile, system. As the Empire
gradually declined, and the nationalities, no longer oppressed beneath a
vigorous central force, began to revive, the heresies, by a natural
affinity, associated themselves with them. The Donatist schism, in which
no other country joined, was an attempt of the African people to
establish a separate national Church. Later on, the Egyptians adopted
the Monophysite heresy as the national faith, which has survived to this
day in the Coptic Church. In Armenia similar causes produced like
effects.
In the twelfth century--not, as is commonly supposed, in the time of
Photius and Cerularius, for religious communion continued to subsist
between the Latins and the Greeks at Constantinople till about the time
of Innocent III., but after the Crusades had embittered the antagonism
between East and West--another great national separation occurred. In
the Eastern Empire the communion with Rome was hateful to the two chief
authorities. The patriarch was ambitious to extend his own absolute
jurisdiction over the whole Empire, the emperor wished to increase that
power as the instrument of his own: out of this threefold combination of
interests sprang the Byzantine system. It was founded on the
ecclesiastical as well as civil despotism of the emperor, and on the
exclusive pride of the people in its nationality; that is, on those
things which are most essentially opposed to the Catholic spirit, and to
the nature of a universal Church. In consequence of the schism, the
sovereign became supreme over the canons of the Church and the laws of
the State; and to this imperial papacy the Archbishop of Thessalonica,
in the beginning of the fifteenth century, justly attributes the ruin
and degradation of the Empire. Like the Eastern schism, the schism of
the West in the fourteenth century arose from the predominance of
national interests in the Church: it proceeded from the endeavour to
convert the Holy See into a possession of the French people and a
subject of the French crown. Again, not long after, the Hussite
revolution sprang from the union of a new doctrine with the old
antipathy of the Bohemians for the Germans, which had begun in times
when the boundaries of Christianity ran between the two nations, and
which led to a strictly national separation, which has not yet exhausted
its political effects. Though the Reformation had not its origin in
national feelings, yet they became a powerful instrument in the hands of
Luther, and ultimately prevailed over the purely theological elements of
the movement.
The Lutheran system was looked on by the Germans with patriotic pride as
the native fruit, and especial achievement of the genius of their
country, and it was adopted out of Germany only by the kindred races of
Scandinavia. In every other land to which it has been transplanted by
the migrations of this century, Lutheranism appears as eradicated from
its congenial soil, loses gradually its distinctive features, and
becomes assimilated to the more consolatory system of Geneva. Calvinism
exhibited from the first no traces of the influence of national
character, and to this it owes its greater extension; whilst in the
third form of Protestantism, the Anglican Church, nationality is the
predominant characteristic. In whatever country and in whatever form
Protestantism has prevailed, it has always carried out the principle of
separation and local limitation by seeking to subject itself to the
civil power, and to confine the Church within the jurisdiction of the
State. It is dependent not so much on national character as on political
authority, and has grafted itself rather on the State than on the
people. But the institution which Christ founded in order to collect all
nations together in one fold under one shepherd, while tolerating and
respecting the natural historical distinctions of nations and of States,
endeavours to reconcile antagonism, and to smooth away barriers between
them, instead of estranging them by artificial differences, and erecting
new obstacles to their harmony. The Church can neither submit as a
whole to the influence of a particular people, nor impose on one the
features or the habits of another; for she is exalted in her catholicity
above the differences of race, and above the claims of political power.
At once the most firm and the most flexible institution in the world,
she is all things to all nations--educating each in her own spirit,
without violence to its nature, and assimilating it to herself without
prejudice to the originality of its native character. Whilst she thus
transforms them, not by reducing them to a uniform type, but by raising
them towards a common elevation, she receives from them services in
return. Each healthy and vigorous nation that is converted is a dynamic
as well as a numerical increase in the resources of the Church, by
bringing an accession of new and peculiar qualities, as well as of
quantity and numbers. So far from seeking sameness, or flourishing only
in one atmosphere, she is enriched and strengthened by all the varieties
of national character and intellect. In the mission of the Catholic
Church, each nation has its function, which its own position and nature
indicate and enable it to fulfil. Thus the extinct nations of antiquity
survive in the beneficial action they continue to exert within her, and
she still feels and acknowledges the influence of the African or of the
Cappadocian mind.
The condition of this immunity from the predominant influence of
national and political divisions, and of this indifference to the
attachment of particular States and races,--the security of unity and
universality,--consists in the existence of a single, supreme,
independent head. The primacy is the bulwark, or rather the
corner-stone, of Catholicism; without it, there would be as many
churches as there are nations or States. Not one of those who have
denounced the Papacy as a usurpation has ever attempted to show that the
condition which its absence necessarily involves is theologically
desirable, or that it is the will of God. It remains the most radical
and conspicuous distinction between the Catholic Church and the sects.
Those who attempt to do without it are compelled to argue that there is
no earthly office divinely appointed for the government of the Church,
and that nobody has received the mission to conduct ecclesiastical
affairs, and to preserve the divine order in religion. The several local
churches may have an earthly ruler, but for the whole Church of Christ
there is no such protection. Christ, therefore, is the only head they
acknowledge, and they must necessarily declare separation, isolation,
and discord to be a principle and the normal condition of His Church.
The rejection of the primacy of St. Peter has driven men on to a
slippery course, where all the steps are downwards. The Greeks first
proclaimed that they recognised no Pope, that each patriarch ruled over
a portion of the Church. The Anglicans rejected both Pope and patriarch,
and admitted no ecclesiastical order higher than the Episcopate. Foreign
Protestanism refused to tolerate even bishops, or any authority but the
parish clergy under the supremacy of the ruler of the land. Then the
sects abolished the local jurisdiction of the parish clergy, and
retained only preachers. At length the ministry was rejected as an
office altogether, and the Quakers made each individual his own prophet,
priest, and doctor.
The Papacy, that unique institution, the Crown of the Catholic system,
exhibits in its history the constant working of that law which is at the
foundation of the life of the Church, the law of continuous organic
development. It shared the vicissitudes of the Church, and had its part
in everything which influences the course and mode of her existence. In
early times it grew in silence and obscurity, its features were rarely
and imperfectly distinguishable; but even then the Popes exerted their
authority in all directions, and while the wisdom with which it was
exercised was often questioned, the right itself was undisputed. So long
as the Roman Empire upheld in its strong framework and kept together the
Church, which was confined mostly within its bounds, and checked with
the stern discipline of a uniform law the manifestations of national and
local divergence, the interference of the Holy See was less frequently
required, and the reins of Church government did not need to be tightly
drawn. When a new order of States emerged from the chaos of the great
migration, the Papacy, which alone stood erect amid the ruins of the
empire, became the centre of a new system and the moderator of a new
code. The long contest with the Germanic empire exhausted the political
power both of the empire and of the Papacy, and the position of the Holy
See, in the midst of a multitude of equal States, became more difficult
and more unfavourable. The Popes were forced to rely on the protection
of France, their supremacy over the States was at an end, and the
resistance of the nations commenced. The schism, the opposition of the
general Councils, the circumstances which plunged the Holy See into the
intrigues of Italian politics, and at last the Reformation, hastened the
decline of that extensive social and political power, the echoes and
reminiscences of which occasioned disaster and repulse whenever an
attempt was made to exercise it Ever since the Tridentine age, the Popes
have confined themselves more and more exclusively to the religious
domain; and here the Holy See is as powerful and as free at the present
day as at any previous period of its history. The perils and the
difficulties which surround it arise from temporal concerns,--from the
state of Italy, and from the possessions of the pontifical dominions.