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Catholicism . . , 
 
 Roman and Anglican 
 
CATHOLICISM: Roman and 
 Anglican • By A. M. Fairbaim 
 M.A. D.D. LL.D. Principal of Mansfield 
 College Oxford caS <i« a$ 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 LONDON: HODDER AND 
 STOUGHTON ^ ^ 27 
 PATERNOSTER ROW 1899 
 
F3 
 
 S7^t!er &' Tanner, The Sehvood Printing Works, Frame, and London. 
 

 TO 
 
 My Friends and Colleagues 
 
 THE TUTORS OF 
 MANSFIELD COLLEGE OXFORD 
 
 746336 
 
Contents 
 
 I 
 
 PAGES 
 
 THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION . 1-47 
 § I. Distinction between Religion and Church . . 1-9 
 
 1. The Churches as means ; Religion as end. 
 
 2. Have the Churches fulfilled their mission ? 
 
 § 2. Relation between Theology and Polity . . 9-14 
 
 1. Methods of study. 
 
 2. The idea of Religion fundamental. 
 
 § 3. The Idea of Religion 14-22 
 
 1. Analysis of Religion. 
 
 2. Principles involved. 
 
 i. Determinative idea, the idea of God. 
 ii. Causal idea, God's relation to man. 
 iii. The religious man and society as realizing this 
 relation. 
 
 3. Religion lives in the light of eternity. 
 
 § 4. The Ideal of Religion embodied in Jesus Christ . 22-32 
 
 1. The contrast vi^ith the priest and scribe. 
 
 2. Love of God and love of man. 
 
 3. The Kingdom of God and its citizens. 
 
 5. The Ideal of Christ and the Christian Churches 32-40 
 
 1. The ideal of the Anglican Revival. 
 
 2. Criticism of this as an interpretation of the religious 
 
 ideal. 
 
 3. Good ecclesiasticism, bad Christianity. 
 
 § 6. How the Ideal is to be realized . . , , 40-47 
 
 1. The conversion of man. 
 
 2. The regeneration of the race. 
 
 II 
 
 CATHOLICISM AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 48-93 
 § I. The Question to be discussed 48-51 
 
 §2. The need of a Relevant Apology for the Faith 51-61 
 
 1. Apologetic must recognize current principles of thought. 
 
 2. Modern doubt the creation of honest inquiry. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 § 3. Deism and Apologetics in Catholic France and 
 
 Protestant England 61-72 
 
 1. Scepticism victorious in France ; Apologetics in 
 
 England. 
 
 2. Political and religious questions identified in France, 
 
 distinct in England. 
 
 3. Doubt still most radical in Catholic countries. 
 
 4. Roman Catholic apologetic for religion must be an 
 
 apologetic for the Church. 
 
 §4. The Anglo-Catholic Movement and Religion in 
 
 England 72-80 
 
 1. Universal influence of the movement. 
 
 2. The regeneration of the English Church. 
 
 3. Catholicism Anglicized. 
 
 § 5. Whether the Catholic Apology was equal to 
 
 THE need 80-93 
 
 1. The movement did a true apologetic work. 
 
 2. Defects of the apologetic. 
 
 3. The apologetic that might have been. 
 . 4. The failure of the apologetic. 
 
 Ill 
 CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT . . 94-140 
 § I. The Catholic Revival as the Counter-Revo- 
 
 LUTION 96- 1 II 
 
 1. The literary, political, and religious aspects. 
 
 2. The new Catholic apologetic. 
 
 i. Theoretical : authority the basis of religion. 
 ii. Historical : the Church as the maker of civili- 
 zation. 
 
 3. Irrelevance of the apologetic. 
 
 § 2. The English Counterpart of the Continental 
 
 Revival 111-116 
 
 1. Its basis also the authority of the Church. 
 
 2. Its peculiarity its personal nature. 
 
 § 3. Philosophical Scepticism as the Apology for 
 
 Ecclesiastical Authority .... 116-130 
 
 1. Cardinal Newman the representative Catholic apolo- 
 
 gist. 
 
 2. Theism identified with Catholicism, and based on 
 
 conscience. 
 
 3. Distrust of the reason. 
 
 4. The nature of man divided against itself. 
 
 § 4. Whether the Scepticism or the Authority be 
 
 valid 130-140 
 
 1. The exercise of intellect beneficial to religion. 
 
 2. Submission to authority the victory of unbelief. 
 
 3. Distrust of reason an arraignment of God. 
 
CONTENTS ix 
 
 IV 
 
 PAGES 
 
 CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM . . 141-204 
 
 § I. The Ideas of God, Religion, and the Church . 143-150 
 
 1. Two constantly opposed conceptions of God. 
 
 2. Newman's doctrine of religion false to history. 
 
 3. Man's relation to God ever less direct. 
 
 § 2. The Roman as the Catholic Church . . . 151-156 
 
 1. The appeal of the Roman Church to the imaginationi 
 
 2. Has she a right to make it ? 
 
 § 3. Whether it be possible to conceive Catholicism 
 AS a development from the Religion of 
 Christ 157-167 
 
 1. Scepticism the basis of a mechanical supernaturalism. 
 
 2. True and false ideas of development. 
 
 3. The historical method must begin by finding the 
 
 primary form. 
 
 § 4. How THE Priesthood came into the Religion . 167-175 
 
 1. The religion of the New Testament non-sacerdotal. 
 
 2, The introduction of the priestly idea due to the in- 
 
 fluence of the older religions and the Old Testa- 
 ment. 
 
 § 5. How the Church became a Monarchy . . 175-184 
 
 1. No infallible supremacy known to the New Testa- 
 
 ment. 
 
 2. The Roman empire organized the Church. 
 
 3. Imperial supremacy became papal, infallibility. 
 
 §6. The Ideas which organized the System . . 184-190 
 
 1. The unifying ideal came from Neo-Platonism. 
 
 2. Affinities between Plato's Republic and the Roman 
 
 Church. 
 
 § 7. Catholicism in History 190-198 
 
 1. The historical achievement of the Roman Church. 
 
 2. Its disservice to the Christian religion. 
 
 3. The significance of modern history. 
 
 § 8. Catholicism no sufficient organ for the Chris- 
 tian Religion 198-204 
 
 1. The supernaturalism of Catholicism marvellous, not 
 
 mysterious. 
 
 2. Its radical defect the want of a true supernaturalism. 
 
 REASON AND RELIGION 205-236 
 
 § I. The Philosophical Scepticism of Cardinal New- 
 man . . 206-214 
 
 1. The reason a ratiocinative instrument. 
 
 2. It is therefore unable to construe religious truth. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGES 
 
 § 2. Correlation of the Subjective and Objective 
 
 Scepticism 214-222 
 
 1. The reason cannot find God in nature. 
 
 2. What are the axioms of religion ? 
 
 § 3. The Dialectical Movement towards Certainty 222-226 
 
 1. Incompetence of reason. 
 
 2. Reason and religion remain apart. 
 
 § 4. Reason and Authority in Religion . . . 226-236 
 
 1. Significance of Cardinal Newman. 
 
 2. Authority of the Church, and of Christ and the 
 
 Bible, contrasted. 
 
 VI 
 
 CARDINAL MANNING AND THE CATHOLIC RE 
 
 VIVAL 237-280 
 
 § I. The Biography 237-243 
 
 1. Its nature. 
 
 2. Its worth. 
 
 § 2. The Character of the Man 243-253 
 
 1. A political craftsman in the arena of faith and reason. 
 
 2. The diplomacy of his conversion. 
 
 3. The opinions of those who knew him. 
 
 § 3. His Conversion, its Process and Reasons . . 253-260 
 
 1. Its reasons : their origin and significance for him. 
 
 2. The logical process of his conversion and its limita- 
 
 tions. 
 
 § 4. His Policy within the Roman Church . . 260-265 
 
 1. The contrast between the Roman society and its 
 
 Tractarian converts. 
 
 2. Manning's policy and aims. 
 
 § 5. Manning as Roman Churchman under Pius IX. 265-275 
 
 1. His ideal the sovereignty of the Pope in English 
 
 Catholicism. 
 
 2. Newman's Oxford scheme. 
 
 3. The Vatican Council. 
 
 § 6. Manning under Leo XIII. more English, less 
 
 Roman 276-280 
 
 1. Manning's later days. 
 
 2. The lessons of the Catholic Revival. 
 
 VII 
 ANGLO-CATHOLICISM : THE OLD AND THE NEW . 281-348 
 
 § I. The Outer Factors of the Revival . . . 284-296 
 
 1. The separation in idea of the civil and the eccle- 
 
 siastical. 
 
 2. The High Church party and the Evangelicals. 
 
 3. Romanticism. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 §2. 
 
 §3- 
 
 §4. 
 
 §5- 
 
 §6. 
 
 §7. 
 
 §8. 
 
 The 
 I. 
 2. 
 3- 
 
 The 
 
 2. 
 
 The 
 I. 
 2. 
 
 The 
 I. 
 
 2. 
 
 The 
 I. 
 2. 
 
 The 
 I. 
 
 2. 
 The 
 
 2. 
 
 Makers of the Revival 
 
 Keble. 
 
 Newman. 
 
 Pusey 
 
 Anglo-Catholic Theory 
 
 The authority of the Church. 
 The lack of historical spirit. 
 
 Anglo-Catholics and Literature. 
 Its lack of representation in poetry. 
 Its small achievement (Newman excepted) in 
 religious thought. 
 
 Anglican and the Broad Church 
 The Broad Church ideal of a National Church. 
 The way in which the Broad Church helped the 
 Anglo-Catholic movement. 
 
 Theological Idea in the Anglican Mind . 
 The doctrine of the Incarnation made central. 
 The influence of the new idea. 
 
 Theological Idea in the Church. 
 The Church conceived as ** naturally of a piece with 
 
 the Incarnation." 
 The change in the idea of authority. 
 
 Church and the Age 
 
 The Age is a trying one for the Anglo-Catholic 
 
 theory. 
 Sacerdotalism is less than Christianity. 
 
 VIII 
 THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF" . . . . 
 
 § I. The Statesman as Divine 
 
 1. Historic instances. 
 
 2. Mr. Balfour's purpose. 
 
 § 2. The Critical Philosopher as Positive Theologian 
 
 1. The defects of the criticism of Transcendentalism. 
 
 2. The criticism of " Naturalism." 
 
 3. Mr. Balfour's attitude not, like Hume's, philosophic 
 
 doubt, but doubt of philosophy. 
 
 4. Philosophic Scepticism no help to Faith. 
 
 § 3. The Philosophy of Theology .... 
 
 1. The problem of Religion : Mr. Balfour's method. 
 
 2. What Mr. Balfour means by authority. 
 
 3. Criticism of Mr. Balfour's theory. 
 
 i. Reason must be distinguished from reasoning, 
 ii. Is authority non-rational ? 
 iii. Reason is ever modifying belief, 
 iv. Can psychological climate justify belief ? 
 § 4. The Theology of the Philosopher , , 
 
 PAGES 
 296-307 
 
 307-312 
 312-318 
 
 318-323 
 
 324-330 
 
 330-335 
 335-348 
 
 349-388 
 351-359 
 
 359-371 
 
 371-384 
 
 384-388 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 IX 
 
 SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 
 
 § I. The Cambridge Scholars and Divines. 
 I. Lightfoot, Westcott, and Hort contrasted. 
 
 PAGES 
 
 389-436 
 393-406 
 
 2. What made them a School. 
 
 §2. The Oxford Scholars and Divines . . . 406-429 
 
 i. Benjamin Jowett 406-412 
 
 ii. Edwin Hatch 413-429 
 
 1. The Bampton Lectures. 
 
 2. The Hibbert Lectures. 
 
 3. Hatch and his Critics 
 
 §3. Comparison as regards Mind 
 Hort and Hatch 
 
 1. Hort preferred silence to possible error 
 
 contrary. 
 
 2. Hort read Christianity as the interpretation of the 
 
 universe. 
 
 3. Hatch confined himself to pure historical inquiry. 
 
 and Methods of 
 Hatch the 
 
 429-436 
 
 X 
 
 OXFORD AND JOWETT 437-4S1 
 
 § I. Oxford University and Colleges. . . . 439-446 
 
 1. The end of the college is the culture of men : 'jf 
 
 the university, the cultivation of learning. 
 
 2. Oxford in the eighteenth century : the supremacy 
 
 of the colleges fatal to both scholarship and 
 culture, 
 
 § 2. Oxford and its Sons in Two Centuries . . 446-455 
 
 1. The change that came with the nineteenth century. 
 
 2. The Oxford movement. 
 
 3. Broad Churchmen and men of Literature. 
 
 § 3- Jowett as Reformer in University and College 455-460 
 
 1. His despair of the University. 
 
 2. His success in the College. 
 
 §4. Jowett as Scholar and Thinker .... 460-468 
 
 1. His lack of interest in scholarship and dislike of 
 
 metaphysics. 
 
 2. How this separated him from Maurice, but attracted 
 
 him to Plato. 
 
 3. Comparison of Jowett and Mark Pattison. 
 
 § 5. Jowett as Theologian and Churchman . . 468-481 
 
 1. His religious reserve. 
 
 2. His attitude to subscription. 
 
 3. His idealism in religion. 
 
 4. Jowett contrasted with Dean Stanley. 
 
 5. His persistence and its success. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 THE Studies collected in this volume may fairly 
 claim to be neither sporadic nor occasional 
 essays, but chapters of a coherent and progressive 
 work. While written at different times, they are 
 yet products of continuous reading and reflexion on 
 the problems they discuss. They have all been care- 
 fully revised, here abridged, there enlarged, but they 
 have not been recast, nor have the notes of time and 
 circumstance been erased. 
 
 The natural history of a book may have no great 
 significance for any one except the man whose 
 history it is. But there are cases where, apart from 
 it, the true inwardness of the book may be hidden 
 from the reader. Now what drew the author to the 
 field which he seeks here in part to explore was a 
 double interest — a religious and a philosophical, the 
 one being the direct outcome of the other. On the 
 religious side he was attracted by the men who had 
 been the makers and leaders of the Catholic Revival, 
 by what appeared their spirit of devotion, their sin- 
 cerity, their simplicity of purpose and honesty of 
 belief in an age of intellectual complexity, unrest, 
 and change. They were picturesque figures, had 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 stood out from the prosaic commonplace of the 
 modern day ; they had loved the sound of the battle, 
 had known how to handle their weapons, and how to 
 smite and slay and not spare. They appealed to his 
 imagination, lived amid something of the glamour 
 which magnifies and adorns, and they illustrated the 
 heroism that can at once contend for victory and 
 live unvanquished amid and after defeat. He feels 
 as if reverence for the men who have striven and 
 suffered for the faith ran in his blood. The heroes of 
 his boyish dreams were saints, and the saints heroes 
 who had, by being faithful unto death, consecrated 
 the hills and moorlands he loves. And the Church- 
 men he had been taught to honour were not those 
 who walked in prosperous places and lived in com- 
 fort with well-trained and conformable consciences ; 
 but those who had been too rigorous and veracious 
 of soul to profess a belief they did not hold. And 
 when in comparative youth he came upon Newman's 
 Apologia, it seemed as if he had come upon a man 
 of the ancient heroic strain. He was blind to the 
 transcendent art of the book, to its apologetic pur- 
 pose, to the imagination which had idealized its 
 author even to himself; he only felt the passionate 
 conviction of the man, his obedience to the inexor- 
 able logic which through the intellect ruled his will. 
 Hence came the desire to know more intimately this 
 marvellous personality and the men who surrounded 
 him, who influenced him, whom he influenced, the ideas 
 and aims they had in common, the cause for which 
 
INTRODUCTION- 
 
 they suffered, and the ends for which they strove. 
 But with the increase of knowledge came a discovery 
 that qualified the religious sympathy. Why did their 
 spirit express itself in the way it did, assume a form 
 and follow methods which were not only a protest 
 against all that the author's heroes, saints, and martyrs 
 had suffered for, but a denial of their heroism and 
 saintliness, and a reduction of themselves to vulgar 
 schismatics and of their beliefs to profane heresies ? 
 The more the men were approached from this side, 
 the more the picturesque colour faded from their 
 faces ; and the more they appeared as victims of 
 sectarian spites, ill-informed, prejudiced, and violent, 
 darkened by qualities which neither literary genius, 
 nor spiritual passion, nor religious emotion and aims 
 could dispossess of their intrinsic meanness. 
 
 The consequence was the formulation of a most 
 interesting problem, though, unhappily, a problem of 
 an order too common in religious history : — How was 
 it that intellectual or even ecclesiastical differences 
 could so pervert the judgment as to make men unjust 
 to a piety so pure and noble as to be a reproof to 
 their own ? Did not this signify a moral defect, a 
 blindness which could not but dim the clearness or 
 lessen the sureness of their spiritual vision ? And this 
 vexing question became still more distressing when 
 it appeared that their own minds were not so simple 
 or so lucid and constant as had seemed. Some of 
 the " Tracts," and books like Froude's Remains^ had 
 much in them to shock old-fashioned prejudices : and, 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 of course, there are occasions when such prejudices 
 ought to be shocked. But here was a moral per- 
 versity which would not be just to good causes and 
 better men. And in those early years, before the 
 imagination had idealized the Oxford men and move- 
 ment, when the work was rough and the weapons 
 were even as the work, the persons who were thus 
 unjust showed themselves greatly in need of the 
 charity which thinks no evil, judges gently, and 
 hopes much. The man who looks back at them 
 through the serener atmosphere of to-day wonders 
 that they suffered so much ; the man who comes 
 to them through the literature of the times may 
 well wonder that they suffered so little and prevailed 
 so completely. For they not only wrote with cal- 
 culated vehemence, but they boldly practised " eco- 
 nomies," held back what they ought to have stated, 
 revealed their minds and purpose as those they 
 wished to lead were able to bear it ; counselled 
 " reserve " and other things which men they inso- 
 lently assailed or despised would have scorned to 
 do. It was a point which touched the writer closely ; 
 it moved him then and moves- him now. Men 
 whose saintliness was to him a matter of experience, 
 of whom he could not think without, so to speak, 
 uncovering his soul as if in the presence of the 
 most Holy, were too near God and too like God 
 to be fit subjects of opprobrium by persons who 
 seemed so possessed of our commoner mortal frailties. 
 The religious interest thus passed naturally over 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 into the philosophical. Why should a mind open to 
 truth be insensible to justice? Why should those 
 zealous for religion judge so falsely those who were 
 as religious as themselves, and who may have suf- 
 fered infinitely more for conscience' sake ? The 
 question was more than a problem in casuistry ; it 
 involved principles that carried one down to the 
 very roots of things — the attitude of the mind to 
 religion as a whole, to God as truth and as right- 
 eousness. But though this determined the philo- 
 sophical problem in its earliest form, it did not by 
 any means fix its latest. On the contrary, it has 
 never ceased to keep enlarging and growing in com- 
 plexity. We are face to face with all the forces 
 which make for differentiation in religion, tendencies 
 which, by throwing the emphasis now on its intel- 
 lectual and now on its ethical side, here on its social 
 and political, there on its historical and traditional 
 elements, create new parties and new sects. And 
 we have seen in our own lifetime these tendencies 
 produce their ancient and invariable results ; and 
 these Studies may be taken as a contribution to the 
 discussion of this subject by the help of material 
 which contemporary men and movements have sup- 
 plied. The author is not so vain as to think that 
 his contribution is more than a very partial handling 
 of the questions he would fain have discussed ; but 
 he can say with perfect truth that he has honestly 
 laboured to understand the men, and to render such 
 an account of them, the tendencies amid which they 
 
xviii INTRODUCTION 
 
 lived, and the movement they helped to create and 
 to guide, as need shame neither truth nor charity. 
 He may also plead that while these Studies have 
 everywhere had a very positive end in view, they 
 have not been written with a controversial purpose. 
 He has not attempted, indeed, to write with colour- 
 less neutrality, for it has not been granted to him 
 on such questions to feel neutral or to be colour- 
 less. But it is a mistake to imagine that a man with- 
 out convictions can comprehend convinced men : the 
 men who are best radically disqualified for criticism 
 being only of two sorts, (a) those who think there is 
 no truth worth believing or contending for ; and (/S) 
 those who so hold their own beliefs as to see no reason 
 and recognize no truth in the beliefs of other men. 
 From these disqualifications the writer would like, 
 were he at all able, to keep himself tolerably free. 
 
 In preparing these Studies for the press the author 
 has had frequent occasion to review his own earlier 
 judgments. This is a process which it is good for 
 a man to have now and then to undergo, especially 
 as it is the most excellent, because the most effec- 
 tive, of all methods for teaching him humility. But 
 in the present instance he feels that as regards his 
 graver judgments on men, tendencies, and prin- 
 ciples, which he can truthfully say were slowly, 
 laboriously, and painfully reached, he has little to 
 modify and nothing to cancel or recall. In parti- 
 cular he would specify — 
 
 (a) The conclusions reached on the part intel- 
 
INTRODUCTION xix 
 
 lectual scepticism played in the development of 
 Newman's mind and faith. There has been in our 
 century no character more difficult of analysis, no 
 intellect at once loftier and narrower, no greater 
 adept at reasoning or thinker more arbitrary in 
 selecting and defining the premisses from which he 
 reasoned ; no one who was more transcendently and 
 transparently sincere or so acutely sophistical, or 
 who had in such a degree the faculty for both logical 
 and moral analysis and the incapacity or distaste 
 for the higher speculation. His passion for certitude 
 was equalled only by his inability to find it in any 
 way save by the sacrifice of his intellectual pride ; and 
 there was nothing in which he gloried more than 
 the invincible logic which drove him to what was 
 at once the surrender and the realization of self. 
 
 (/Q) The analysis of the course and tendency of 
 the Catholic movement, especially in its effects on 
 the mind and status of the Anglican clergy. It has 
 been nothing short of a calamity to the English 
 Church that her claims to be Catholic have been made 
 to turn so much on the question of orders : for it has 
 disturbed the whole balance of the Anglican system, 
 and changed the ministry from being its means of 
 service into being its pillar and ground of truth. The 
 immense emphasis which has been laid upon the 
 apostolic descent of the priesthood, has created a 
 body which can only live by every priest feeling as 
 if he were himself invested with apostolic authority. 
 They have pleaded that they were a Catholic Church 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 because they had an apostolic ministry ; but it was 
 easier to argue that their ministry was apostolic 
 than to organize Catholic unity and order. The 
 Anglican Church is here almost the exact opposite 
 of the Roman. There is no one the Church of 
 Rome more profoundly distrusts than the indepen- 
 dent priest, no one whose existence it has contrived 
 to make so impossible within its ample but clearly 
 drawn borders. From the humblest parish priest 
 right up through bishop and archbishop to the Pope 
 himself, the dependence of the lower on the higher 
 office is consistent and complete. Rome is specially 
 careful of the priest in the act and article of abso- 
 lution ; it fears the confessional even while it lives 
 to a large extent by the powers it gives. And so 
 it has jealously surrounded the penitent with a 
 means of protection against the confessor, and it 
 has with equal jealousy imposed upon the confessor 
 limitations he may not overstep, and responsibilities 
 he must not forget. But the Anglican priest is free 
 from the canonical laws which bind the Roman, and 
 he can work his inexperienced will, and often does 
 work it, not simply within the parish or congrega- 
 tion, but even within the more sacred sanctuary 
 formed by the souls of its most pious members. 
 For the Anglican episcopate, even more than the 
 priesthood, is not as the Roman. It is in a cardinal 
 degree civil both as to its origin and as to the terms 
 on which it exercises jurisdiction and discipline. 
 The Bishop has to think not simply of administering 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 a canon law, but much more of those secular courts, 
 juridical in mind, legal in spirit and in method, 
 civil in sanction and in source, that may be called 
 upon to review, modify, or even disallow his judg- 
 ment. And as he knows he can never act as if he 
 were a purely ecclesiastical authority, he has become 
 a master in the art of inaction, which tempts the 
 more convinced or daring of his clergy to become 
 masters in the art of doing as they list. The re- 
 sult is an episcopate burdened with administrative 
 functions, but almost void of authority, judicial and 
 disciplinary. And as if out of sheer love of an 
 ironical situation, those of the clergy who have 
 most pleaded for an apostolical episcopate as the 
 condition of Catholic unity, defer least to the epis- 
 copal voice. Thus after the Primate had spoken 
 out with remarkable courage on the questions most 
 keenly debated in the Anglican Church, an Anglo- 
 Catholic priest, typical in his devotion, in his piety, 
 in his self-denial and self-assertion, wrote to the 
 public prints to say that it was of vital importance 
 to realize that these primatial charges were " merely 
 the words of a single Anglican, however learned, 
 however exalted, however revered, and cannot in 
 any sense bind the conscience of any other Angli- 
 can." And he adds, " One can hardly imagine what 
 the Church of England would have been to-day, if 
 at any other period of her existence the ipse dixit 
 of the Primate, or indeed of the whole Episcopate," 
 had been regarded as more than " the mind of m- 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 dividual prelates." It would be hard to discover 
 a more extreme form of Protestantism. It is indi- 
 vidualism so pronounced as to be a personal rather 
 than congregational independency. For this inde- 
 pendence of the bishop finds its parallel in the in- 
 dependence of the parish ; the writers who have 
 most exhaustively proved the ministry apostolic are 
 least able to discover who or what the laity are, 
 whether they are only " communicants," or " all 
 baptized and confirmed persons." And so the one 
 clear and certain divine order in the Church is the 
 priesthood ; and they, emancipated from the rule of 
 the bishops on the one hand, and the control of 
 the laity on the other, are free to follow the authority 
 which belongs to their descent. And this is the 
 high Catholicism which the Anglican has realized. 
 
 (7) Since the criticism of Mr. Balfour's Founda- 
 tions of Belief was written. Professor Seth Pringle- 
 Patteson has published his genial and kindly 
 interpretation of that ingenious book. He has said 
 the most and best that can be said in its defence. 
 But he will not misunderstand me if I claim the 
 right of a criticized critic to say that his essay seems 
 to me an excellent example of hineinerkldrung, 
 and saves Mr. Balfour's argument by sacrificing 
 much of his competence as a philosophical writer. 
 And this appears a rather harder measure than ought 
 to be dealt out to so very capable a student in the 
 field of philosophy. 
 
 The scope of the book is not so large as the title 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 may seem to suggest. Catholicism, even as qualified 
 by Roman, does not here denote the Church of 
 Rome. Its system is not here in dispute. Were it 
 so, the work would have been quite other than it is, 
 both as regards matter and form. What is meant 
 is the Catholicism which grew out of the Anglican 
 Revival — the movement, with its Roman afifinities 
 and ideals, which began in Oxford, and has so pro- 
 foundly modified the religious temper and practices 
 of the English Church and people. 
 
 It only remains to add a single word of gratitude 
 to the editor of the Contemporary Review, where 
 these chapters originally appeared, for his kind con- 
 sent to their republication. 
 
I 
 
 THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF 
 RELIGION 
 
 § I. The Distinction between Religion and Church 
 
 I. A I ^HE people of England seem to be at last 
 X awakening to the truth that to have a 
 church or churches is not the same thing as to have 
 a religion. Churches are, that religion may be 
 realized : but it does not follow that to multiply or 
 enlarge churches is to realize religion. On the 
 contrary, it is possible by having too much church 
 to have too little religion ; the most perfectly or- 
 ganized and administered ecclesiasticism may but 
 effectually imprison the living Spirit of God. The 
 churches are the means, but religion is the end ; 
 and if they, instead of being well content to be and 
 to be held means, good in the degree of their fitness 
 and efficiency, regard and give themselves out as 
 ends, then they become simply the most irreligious 
 of institutions, mischievous exactly in proportion 
 to their strength. Religion is too rich and varied a 
 thing to be capable of incorporation in any one church, 
 or even in all the churches ; and the church that 
 claims to be able to embody it, whether for a people 
 
 I 
 
:;^. -»-.;.- . ^. ^ CATHOLICISM 
 
 or for humanity, simply shows the poverty and 
 impotence of its own religious ideal. It is a small 
 thing, nay more an easy thing, for a church to make 
 out its historical continuity and catholicity — that is 
 only a matter of deft criticism and courageous argu- 
 ment ; but it is a great thing for any church to have 
 created or to be creating a society correspondent 
 to the ideal of Christ. 
 
 Now, the truth that seems to be breaking upon 
 the English people is this — that they have still to 
 set about the realization of this ideal, and that to 
 accomplish it they must take some higher and nobler 
 way than the ancient method of founding and main- 
 taining churches. What makes us feel so distant 
 from the religion of Christ, is not the amount of 
 belligerent and most audible unbelief, both of the 
 critical and uncritical order ; nor the relatively, and 
 to many good people dishearten ingly, small number 
 of church-goers ; nor the failure of missionary zeal 
 to keep pace with the increase of the population and 
 its aggregation in large towns ; nor the number and 
 quality of the bodies that describe themselves as 
 churches, but other no less honourable bodies as 
 sects ; nor the decline in the churches of the love 
 that seeks to emulate, and the growth of the envy 
 that loves to disparage ; but something more radical 
 than any one of these, or even than all of them — the 
 small degree in which the Christian ideal has been 
 and is the constitutive and regulative idea of the 
 State and society in England. We have suddenly 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION 3 
 
 become conscious that our legislation and civiliza- 
 tion have been too little penetrated by the spirit of 
 Christ, while so pervaded and dominated by the 
 spirit of selfishness, that they have been making hea- 
 thens faster and more effectually than the churches 
 have been able to make Christians. The people feel 
 that the Church, satisfied with what the State has 
 done for it^ has failed to stand by them in their dumb 
 quest after a fuller justice and a fairer freedom ; and 
 that they but do as they have been done by, when 
 they forsake the society which forsook them in their 
 sorest need. It is easy to be indiscriminate, to 
 speak without measure as to the rights of property 
 being the wrongs of man ; but evidences, too many 
 to be enumerated, prove that property and privilege 
 have been so conceived and guarded as to help in 
 the production of certain great social disasters and 
 dangers. The idea that the men who could best 
 assert their rights had the most rights to assert, has 
 been too potent a factor in the creation of our social 
 order, and may yet beget a reaction of the sort men 
 call revolution. The converse, indeed, were more of 
 a Christian principle — those least able to assert their 
 rights have, if not most rights to be asserted, most 
 need for their assertion ; for the things they claim in 
 weakness are the duties of those in power. And as 
 the religion which Christ revealed and embodied is 
 most jealous about the performance of these duties, 
 the church that neglects their enforcement abdicates _/ 
 its truest social function. And it is because there has 
 
CATHOLICISM 
 
 been such neglect in England that we are face to face 
 with so many grave problems — political, social, re- 
 ligious. We have in our midst outcast masses, 
 multitudes who have lapsed into something worse 
 than heathenism, into merest savagery; and have 
 done so, not through lack of religious agencies, but 
 simply through lack of religion, the absence or in- 
 action of the higher Christian ideals in the mind, 
 heart, and conscience of the body politic. The worst 
 depravity, because the least open to reproof or 
 change, is not the depravity of the individual, but of 
 the class or State ; and the churches, while doing 
 zealous battle against the less, have too much for- 
 gotten the greater. And now it is seen that neglect 
 brings the inevitable retribution. Our outcast are our 
 lapsed classes ; and it is easier to teach religion to the 
 heathen than to restore the lapsed. There is less 
 hope of a debased civilization than of the rudest and 
 frankest naturalism. 
 
 The judgment expressed in these sentences may 
 be thought too sweeping ; yet, however much he may 
 be inclined to qualify it, no thoughtful Christian man 
 can regard the religious condition of the English 
 people with a light or satisfied heart. Of course, a 
 determined optimism can find much to say in its own 
 behalf It can reckon up the sums spent on build- 
 ing churches, supplementing stipends, founding and 
 maintaining religious houses and institutions, pro- 
 secuting missionary enterprises at home and abroad ; 
 and may victoriously argue that these sums are so 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION 5 
 
 immense as to prove the spirit of faith to be a living 
 and zealous spirit, devoted and self-sacrificing. It 
 can also appeal to the multitude of beneficent agencies 
 and benevolent institutions worked by the churches ; 
 and may veraciously enough affirm that without 
 them the hand of charity and generous helpfulness 
 would be almost, if not altogether, paralyzed. I am 
 far from wishing either to question these facts or to 
 deny the inference which may be most fairly drawn 
 from them ; but the point lies here : Grant the facts 
 and the inference to be alike true, ought they to 
 satisfy the Christian conscience? or ought not that 
 conscience — in the face of the destitution, depravity, 
 utter and shameless godlessness, which exist in spite 
 of all the expenditure and efforts of the churches — 
 to be filled with deep dissatisfaction ? For what do 
 these evils mean ? That our society is to the degree 
 that they exist not only imperfectly Christian, but 
 really un-Christian ; that, so far as they were pre- 
 ventable, Church and State have alike been forgetful 
 of their highest obligations, or unequal to their 
 performance. To cure an evil is a less excellent 
 thing than to prevent it ; and few things fill the 
 heart with deeper pity than the thought that there 
 are evils which ought not to have been, and would 
 not have been, if the Christian religion had so reigned 
 as to be sovereign in this realm. This is a sad and 
 humiliating reflection to men who believe that 
 Christianity is of God, instituted by Him that His 
 will might be done on earth as it is done in heaven. 
 
CATHOLICISM 
 
 Centuries indeed are little to God ; but they are 
 much to man. The thousand years that are but a 
 moment in the presence of His Eternal Being, are a 
 large fraction of the period allotted to humanity. 
 Loss of good is to it an irretrievable loss ; and the 
 happiness of ages to come can never bless hapless 
 ages that have passed and perished. And if Chris- 
 tianity has, in the course of its history, not done all 
 the good it was intended to do, and therefore ought 
 to have done, then the result has been an absolute 
 loss to man ; the possible best has not been reached 
 by him, the best possible has not been done by it. 
 
 2. Now, one main reason why our religion meets 
 with so much neglect and opposition is that it has 
 not prevented, or remedied in the measure man had 
 a right to expect of it, the evils from which he suffers. 
 Our modern Socialisms, Nihilisms, Secularisms, and 
 such-like, have not lived without a cause. In the 
 polemical method and by the polemical spirit they 
 can be easily dealt with ; in the supple and dexterous 
 hands of an apologetical protagonist they can be made 
 to look void of intellectual strength, full of political 
 and economical immoralities. But it is a small thine 
 to expose their mental or moral crudities — that in no 
 way ends their being or prevents their rise ; it is a 
 greater thing to inquire. Why are they? — what are 
 the causes and conditions of their existence ? — for to 
 ask this, may be to find a way to prevent their 
 formation and growth. They are but symptoms of 
 a disease ; cure the disease, and the symptoms will 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION 7 
 
 cease. Now, these Nihilisms and Secularisms of 
 ours have been born of the sense of evils religion 
 ought to have mitigated or remedied, but has not. 
 In despair of help from their natural helper, men 
 have taken counsel with despair. In our anti- 
 religious movements there is a dangerous fanaticism, 
 the child of passion, not of thought. The unbelief ^ 
 the churches have to fear is not a thing of the 
 critical or rebellious reason, but of the hate begotten 
 of disappointed hopes. And because the hopes were 
 legitimate, the disappointment is natural. The poor 
 were right in expecting help from religion, in believ- 
 ing that its mission was to lift them out of their 
 poverty, to make an end of the charities that are the 
 luxuries of the rich and the miseries of the poor, and 
 to create a society where freedom, justice, and plenty 
 were to reign. But the people are wrong in making 
 their revolt against religion, rather than against the 
 causes and conditions which have hindered its 
 realization. What they need is, not its destruction, 
 but its emancipation ; to destroy it were to destroy 
 the only foundation on which a society, which shall 
 be a free and ordered brotherhood, can be built ; to 
 emancipate it were to set all its ideal principles free 
 for creative and incorporative action in society and 
 the State. An order that is not moral can only be 
 one based on force and maintained by despotism ; an 
 order that is moral must be based on religion and 
 maintained by the principles that create and work 
 through free men. -^ 
 
8 CATHOLICISM 
 
 Here, then, there is raised a question of the deepest 
 interest : How, or under what conditions, can religion 
 be made most active and authoritative among a 
 people ? What agencies or forms do its ideals need 
 that they may work most creatively and towards 
 completest embodiment ? This is a question not con- 
 cerned with the relations of Church and State, but 
 with the far more radical and determinative relations 
 of Church and Religion. There are no controversies 
 so wearisome and infructuous as our ecclesiastical, 
 but no problems of so vital and universal interest 
 as our religious ; and here we so touch the heart 
 of the matter that our ecclesiastical is sublimed 
 into our most living religious question. In seeking 
 the reasons why the State, the civilization, and the 
 society of England are not so Christian as they 
 ought to be, we cannot escape asking whether 
 blame attaches to the churches ? Proofs of historical 
 continuity and catholicity are but sad playthings 
 for the ingenious intellect, when urged in behalf 
 of churches confronted by such invincible evidences 
 of failure as are the miseries, the sins, the poverty 
 and want, the heathenisms and civilized savageries 
 of to-day. To find the causes of this failure in 
 the wickedness of man, were to make it stronger 
 than the religion ; to find them in the religion, were 
 to charge it with inherent weakness. But to seek 
 these causes in the churches, is to ask whether they 
 have fulfilled their mission, and whether they have 
 understood the mission they were meant to fulfil : 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION 9 
 
 in other words, whether they have been so possessed 
 with the ideal of religion as to live for it and it only, 
 as to interpret it in the fittest forms and speech, 
 and work for its realization in the best possible 
 ways. In these questions we have our more im- 
 mediate problem stated. 
 
 § II. The Relation between Theology and Polity 
 
 I. Our problem raises indeed the question as to 
 the polity of the Church, but not in a form that 
 requires here detailed discussion. We postpone to 
 a later chapter any attempt at historical criticism 
 or adjudication between the claims of the rival 
 systems. All that is here necessary, is to determine 
 the relation between the religious ideal and the 
 political form, which is the vehicle or medium 
 through which the ideal is translated into reality. 
 The vital questions in religion relate either to theo- 
 logy or polity ; and these form so real and living 
 a unity that the latter may be regarded as the 
 organism or body through which the life or spirit 
 of the former is expressed and realized in the field 
 of personal and collective history. In theology the 
 main matter is, how are we to conceive the truth ? 
 But in polity, how can we best translate it into 
 concrete and living forms? In theology we are 
 concerned with the ideal contents and aims of 
 religion ; but in polity with the means and methods 
 for their realization. If the place and relation of 
 ecclesiastical polity be so conceived, then its funda- 
 
10 CATHOLICISM 
 
 mental questions will touch the ideal on the one 
 hand, and the actual on the other ; will bring us 
 face to face on the one side with the idea of religion, 
 and on the other with the forms in which it can 
 best be embodied, the institutions through which 
 it can be most completely realized. For a polity 
 to fail to understand the spirit and purpose of 
 religion, is to fail throughout ; to succeed anywhere 
 it must succeed here. To express a true theology in 
 a living polity is, as it were, to charge a system with 
 the quickening and plastic potencies that can make 
 man live after the mind and as the image of God. 
 But if theology and polity be so related, then 
 the one must be studied and interpreted through 
 the other ; because it is necessary that they in 
 character and quality correspond throughout. Out 
 of the idea of the religion the notion of the polity 
 ought to grow ; to find the idea is to determine the 
 notion. This point of view will enable us the better 
 either to appraise or comprehend the more familiar 
 methods followed in discussions on this field. These 
 methods, which, though distinct, do not necessarily 
 exclude each other, may be described as the Biblical, 
 the Philosophical, the Political, and the Historical ; 
 but each of them assumes or implies some under- 
 lying and determinative conception which gives to 
 its arguments all their relevance or cogency. This 
 deeper conception indeed determines the method to 
 be used, whether one or more is to be followed, and 
 on which the stress is to lie. Thus the Biblical 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION 1 1 
 
 method, building on a large doctrine as to the Bible 
 and the significance of the institutions it describes, 
 either makes the Mosaic state the ' ideal which 
 religious men ought to seek resolutely to realize in 
 a hagiocracy or hierocracy ; or it erects the apostolic 
 churches into the perfect and permanent model 
 which all future Christian societies ought to copy 
 and reproduce. By this method the polities of Rome 
 and Geneva, of the Anglican and the Independent 
 communities, have alike been defended. The Philo- 
 sophical method, implying an exactly antithetical 
 Biblical doctrine, works constructively from a given 
 principle or series of premisses, say the idea of law 
 or order, which may be made to vindicate a papal, 
 episcopal, or presbyterian polity, according as the 
 thinker conceives the monarchical, the aristocratical, 
 or the republican to be the most perfect form of 
 government, most able to create order, to exercise 
 and develop the noblest life. The Political method 
 is indifferent or even hostile to all arguments that 
 assume an absolute standard or permanent divine 
 rule, and builds on expediency and prescriptive right. 
 It was the characteristic creation of the eighteenth 
 century, which, as became an age that had lost all 
 faith in the Ideal, cultivated the happy optimism 
 that identified the actual with the rational ; and, as 
 a consequence, resisted all change as bad, standing 
 strong in the conviction that there was no proof of 
 right like the fact of possession. But there are many 
 lofty and proud spirits who hate expediency, and 
 
12 CATHOLICISM 
 
 believe that in matters of religion the only valid 
 rights are divine ; and to them the historical method 
 has offered a more excellent and agreeable way. 
 They have formulated to themselves, on the one 
 side, a narrow theory of history ; and, on the other, 
 as the mental basis of all their work, a large super- 
 naturalism, which made light of impossibilities and 
 turned so much of the religious society as was 
 constituted on given political lines, and stood in a 
 given succession, into the one church of Christ. And 
 they have then, by the help of a minute and curious, 
 though not scientific or open-minded scholarship, 
 laboured to represent this church of theirs as in- 
 stituted of God, governed and inspired by Him, 
 secured from the moment of creation till now in 
 continuous being and activity by the orders and 
 instruments, symbols and sacraments that were the 
 conditions of His presence and the media of His 
 grace. 
 
 2. Now these differences of method are not arbitrary 
 or accidental ; they are the result of the underlying 
 differences of thought or belief, of theology and the 
 religious ideal. As this is, so must the polity be ; 
 it is the men who have no religious ideal that have 
 no ideal of polity, who, without any preference for 
 what ought to be, accept what is and defend it as 
 altogether of man — which is to them quite as good as 
 being altogether of God. The men, indeed, who have 
 most differed in method have often seemed to agree 
 in end ; those who have used, and those who have 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION 1 3 
 
 most deeply despised, the argument from expediency 
 have stood often together within the pale of the same 
 church, exponents and defenders of the same polity. 
 But the association was accidental, the agreement 
 only apparent, masking the utmost distance and 
 dissonance of spirit. The church defended by argu- 
 ments from expediency is no city of God, no ideal of 
 the Eternal realized in time ; the church defended by 
 the claims of divine right and authority must be of 
 divine institution and guidance, to be a church at all. 
 The man who sees in the church a department of the 
 State, and the man who regards it as a direct and 
 miraculous creation of God, miraculously governed, 
 may by the irony of circumstances be ecclesiastical 
 brethren ; but in the region of fundamental belief 
 they are absolutely opposed, their only possible atti- 
 tude to each other being one of radical disagreement 
 and contradiction. 
 
 This, then, brings out the point to be here empha- 
 sized : in all such discussions the really cardinal matter is 
 the underlying conception, the determinative principle 
 or idea, the idea of religion. The ultimate questions 
 in ecclesiastical polity are religious. What have to be 
 dealt with are not so much opposed political systems 
 as religious conceptions fundamentally different and 
 distinct. But this position involves another: the 
 fundamental is the creative and regulative, or consti- 
 tutive idea. And this means that the church must 
 be construed through the religion, not the religion 
 through the church. The one must harmonize with 
 
14 CATHOLICISM 
 
 the other ; but the creative and normative idea is the 
 religion, the church the created and accordant. And 
 the latter must agree with the former, in order that 
 it may be its interpreter, the agent or medium for its 
 realization. But this again determines the order of 
 our subsequent discussions : we must discover and 
 define the idea of religion that we may find the ideal 
 which has to be realized. And once we have found 
 it, we shall be in a position to discuss and, if possible, 
 determine what kind or order of polity or institution 
 will best work its realization. 
 
 § III. The Idea of Religion 
 I. Of the idea or nature of religion an exhaustive 
 discussion is not here possible ; the doctrine and its 
 implicates must simply be stated in the most general 
 way. Well, then, religion is here conceived neither 
 as knowledge, whether described with Jacobi as faith, 
 or with Schelling as intuition, or with Hegel as 
 thought ; nor as feeling, whether it be, as with 
 Schleiermacher, the feeling of dependence, or, as with 
 the author of Natural Religion^ of admiration, or, as 
 with Mr. Herbert Spencer, of wonder ; nor as a sort 
 of transfigured morality, whether it be represented 
 with Lessing, as a species of objective conscience, 
 meant to hasten the birth and action of the subjective, 
 or with Kant, as duty apprehended as a divine 
 command, or with Matthew Arnold, as " morality 
 touched by emotion." Religion is no one of these, 
 yet it is all of these — and something more. Each of 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION 1 5 
 
 these definitions is simple only so long as there is no 
 analysis ; but under analysis they one and all become 
 as complex as the very notion they seek to define. 
 Religion, indeed, is too large and rich a thing to 
 be defined by any single term or reduced to any 
 single element, whether intellectual, emotional, or 
 moral ; it too completely covers and comprehends the 
 whole nature of man to be denoted by a name 
 borrowed from a section of his experience, or from 
 one department of his rational activity. And so one 
 may say that these definitions, taken together, would 
 give a better idea of religion than taken singly or 
 in isolation. There can be no religion withour* 
 thought, for a man must conceive an object before 
 he can sustain any rational relation to it ; not to 
 think, is to be without reason, and where no reason 
 is, no religion can be. Nor can it be without feeling, 
 for feeling, though distinguishable, is inseparable 
 from thought. If we think, we must feel ; if we feel, 
 we are conscious first of ourselves as subject, and 
 next of a not-ourselves or object ; and it depends on 
 how we conceive the object whether our feeling be 
 one of dependence, admiration, or wonder, or an 
 emotion higher and comprehensive of all the three. 
 Nor can religion exist apart from conduct or con- 
 science ; for man cannot conceive himself standing 
 in relation to a supernatural or a supreme power, 
 without feeling himself constrained to act either in 
 harmony with it or in opposition to it, and as subject 
 to its judgment either of approval or the reverse. 
 
r6 CATHOLICISM 
 
 And this involves the direct discipline of the moral 
 nature and the exercise of the moral judgment. 
 
 Where the product includes in an equal degree 
 intellectual, emotional, and moral elements, it cannot 
 be traced to the sole causation of either the intellect, 
 or the heart, or the conscience. We must find, then, 
 a notion of religion large enough to comprehend these 
 varied elements, able also to bind them into organic 
 and living unity. Now, if we look out for the most 
 general characteristic common to all faiths, we would 
 say that in religion man conceives and realizes him- 
 self not as a mere sensuous and mortal individual, 
 but as spirit, and conscious spirit, who has overcome, 
 or who is endeavouring to overcome, the contradic- 
 tions within his own nature, and between it and the 
 order or system under and within which he lives. 
 But so to conceive himself is to be for himself not 
 simply a transitory detached or isolated individual, 
 but a unit who is a member of an organic whole, a 
 being with universal affinities, and relations both to 
 the seen and the unseen — whether the unseen be con- 
 ceived as the magic present in a fetish, or as collective 
 humanity in its past, present, and future, or as an 
 unknown force, or as a known and living God. It is 
 hence not necessary that religion be theistic, to be so 
 conceived ; it is meanwhile only necessary to see that 
 man so conceiving himself and his relations is re- 
 ligious. But so conceived, religion becomes the con- 
 scious relation of man as spirit to the creative and 
 universal and regnant Spirit, under whatever form he 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION 1 7 
 
 may conceive Him ; in other and homelier and more 
 perfect words, religion is the relation realized by the 
 man who knows the love of God, loves God, and 
 feels bound to express his love in the fittest and 
 surest ways. Here thought, feeling, and conduct are 
 all contained, and stand in living and inseparable 
 unity. He who loves God knows God, lives in / 
 harmony with the will he loves, and for its ends. ^ 
 
 2. But it is necessary that some of the more sig- 
 nificant principles implied in this position be made 
 explicit. 
 
 i. The determinative idea in religion is the idea of 
 God. A religion always is as its deity is — indeed, 
 the former is but the latter become explicit, as it were 
 the explicated idea of Him. As the one is conceived, 
 the other must be through and through. A religion 
 is perfect in the degree that its conception of God is 
 perfect ; it is the way in which a church thinks of 
 God that determines its religious place and power, 
 whether it be a standing or a falling church. And 
 so where God is conceived as the Absolutely Good, 
 as if He were the personalized moral energy of the 
 universe working beneficently on behalf of each and 
 of all, there the religion ought to be as if it were the 
 organized beneficence of humanity, the power that 
 works by divine inspiration for human good. For a 
 religion not to be as its God is, is to be a thing of 
 falsest nature, a satire on sincerity, a contradiction to 
 the very idea of the truth. 
 
 ii. The primary and causal relation in religion is 
 
 . 2 
 
l8 CATHOLICISM 
 
 not man's to God, but God's to man. His action 
 precedes and underlies ours. For Him to be is to 
 act ; wherever He is He is active, and His action 
 may be silent, but is never stayed or inoperative. 
 Hence God's relation to man is the basis of man's 
 relation to God ; and religion is but man become so 
 conscious of this prior relation as to live in harmony 
 with it, as to attempt to realize the life and ideals and 
 ends that come through it. But this involves the 
 counterpart and complement of the first principle — 
 viz., that a religious man always is as his God is, an 
 image or miniature of Him, a form realizing in time 
 the thought of the Eternal. But so construed he 
 becomes not simply a person related to God, but a 
 vehicle of the divine ideas, an organ or agent of the 
 divine purposes. A nature that touches the divine, 
 and exists through it, must be penetrated and moved 
 by it ; but to be so penetrated and moved is to exist 
 and to work for ends that are God's, though they may 
 be ends that can only be realized through man. The 
 religious individual is really the minister of a uni- 
 versal purpose, a temporal agent of the Eternal will. 
 
 iii. The function or end of the religious man is to 
 be a minister or vehicle of the divine purposes : and so 
 the function or office of religion is to qualify man for 
 this work. To perform it he must have a nature 
 more or less open to God, and stand, so to speak, 
 in a relation of reciprocity with Him. The worst 
 atheism is that which reduces all God's action in the 
 world to interference or miracle. The supernatural- 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION 1 9 
 
 ism which limits His grace and truth to a single 
 church, however universal it may claim to be, pro- 
 fanely expels Him from nature and humanity. 
 There is a sense in which the highest ecclesiasticism 
 is the worst theism ; it lives largely by its denial or 
 limitation of Deity. Nature is, because God every- 
 where acts ; religion is, because He is the ever- 
 working Spirit. In the field of nature He acts 
 through forces ; in the field of history He acts 
 through persons, and the persons who best serve Him 
 are religious men, ?>., the men who so love the divine 
 will as to labour to bring everything in themselves 
 and in society into harmony with it. Such men 
 know that they are not saved for their own sakes 
 merely, but for man's ; that to be religious is simply 
 to become a means for the ends of God. For God 
 governs man through men ; great and good person- 
 alities are the chiefest works of Providence, the agen- 
 cies through which it accomplishes its noblest moral 
 results. There is no contribution to the common 
 good like a good man ; through him the mind of the 
 race is lifted, its progress effected, something done 
 towards the embodiment of the divine ideas, the 
 realization of the divine order. It is in religion as in 
 music. Nature is full of musical voices, of simple 
 notes that sound melodiously in every ear ; but out 
 of these the cultured and quickened imagination of 
 the master can create harmonies such as Nature never 
 has created or can create — can in his Oratorio weave 
 sounds into symphonies so wondrous that they seem 
 
20 CATHOLICISM 
 
 like the speech of the gods suddenly breaking arti- 
 culate upon the ear of man, speaking of passions, 
 hopes, fears, joys too tumultuous and vast for the 
 human tongue to utter ; or opening and interpreting 
 for mortals a world where, remote from discord or 
 dissonance, thought and being move as to the state- 
 liest music. So in the spiritual sphere the real and 
 holy religious person is the master spirit, making 
 audible to others the harmonies his imagination is 
 the first to hear. In him the truths and ideas of God, 
 as yet indistinctly seen or partially heard by the 
 multitude, are embodied, become as it were incarnate 
 and articulate, assume a visible and strenuous form 
 that they may inspire men to nobler deeds, and show 
 them how to create a higher manhood and purer 
 society. For these two stand indissolubly together ; 
 the most distinctly personal is still a collective good, 
 reduces the amount of evil in the world, augments 
 the forces that contend against it. The better a 
 man is, the more he feels the burden and the pain of 
 sorrow, the mightier his ambition to help in the 
 creation of a happier and a more perfect state. And 
 as his most individual are still universal ends, he 
 must seek the help of the like-minded, attempt to 
 organize the good against the evil in the world. 
 Thus, as religious men multiply, the enthusiasm of 
 pity is sure to increase, the energies directed against 
 sin and suffering are certain to grow more victorious. 
 Every man possessed of the Spirit of God feels the 
 divine passion in the presence of sin : and so in him 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OE RELIGION 21 
 
 and his society, to the degree of their capacity, the 
 redeeming energies of God may be said to work. 
 The end of the Church is the salvation of the world, 
 its redemption from the pain under which it has 
 travailed from creation until now. 
 
 3. Let us see, then, whither our analysis of the idea 
 of religion has conducted us : — Religion is essentially 
 a relation of harmonious activity with the will of 
 God ; the man who realizes this relation is a religious 
 man, the society which exists through and for its 
 realization is a religious society. So understood, 
 religion may be regarded, on the one side, as God's 
 method or way of working out His beneficent 
 purposes ; on the other, as man's following the way 
 that he may fulfil the ends of God. Through religion 
 God creates the order, works the progress, and 
 achieves the good of mankind ; and His agent or 
 organ throughout is the religious man and society. 
 From this point of view, everything that makes for 
 human happiness and wholeness is of religion ; what- 
 ever fears man's growth in freedom, in culture, in 
 science, in everything meant by progress and civili- 
 zation, may be ecclesiastical, but is not religious. 
 The organized society that seeks to enforce respect 
 for its orders, observance of its ritual, participation in 
 its worship, submission to its authority by invoking 
 the terrors of the world to come, may be a church, 
 but is not a religion. The distinctive note of the 
 latter is that it looks at the duties of the moment in 
 the light of eternity, the character and needs of the 
 
22 CATHOLICISM 
 
 individual as in the presence of the universal and in 
 relation to the imperishable ; and it does this not 
 that it may despise time and the individual, but that 
 it may magnify both ; not that it may enfeeble, but 
 that it may enlarge and strengthen duty ; not that it 
 may weaken the worth of character or make light of 
 human need, but that it may lend a mightier import 
 to the one, and give a vaster reach to the other. 
 The men who live as for eternity, believing that the 
 problem of their being is, in harmony with the will 
 of their Creator, to work out the ultimate order and 
 good of the universe, live under the noblest and 
 humanest inspiration possible to man. And this is 
 the inspiration given by religion ; to have it is to 
 breathe the thoughtful breath that comes of a living 
 faith. But this idea of religion requires, as a clear 
 necessity, that the polity which seeks to articulate 
 and incorporate and realize it be a polity that allows 
 the religious society to live under the inspiration of 
 its own ideals, under the control of its own truths, 
 obedient to its own laws, altogether as a society 
 whose energies and ends are all religious and all of 
 God. 
 
 § IV. The Ideal of Religion Embodied in Jesus 
 Christ 
 
 But so far the discussion has been almost purely 
 deductive ; and so it may be as well to confirm and 
 illustrate the conclusion from the inductive or histor- 
 ical side. To discuss the abstract idea of religion is 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION 23 
 
 a small thing ; it is a greater to look at it as em- 
 bodied and expressed in the supreme religious 
 personality of the race. In Jesus Christ what we 
 term the ideal was realized, perfect religion became 
 a living and articulate reality. Through His only- 
 begotten Son, God declared what He meant and 
 what He means man to be. 
 
 I. We must interpret Christ's idea of religion 
 through His life. That life was one of remarkable 
 simplicity, but still more remarkable significance. 
 There were in His day two traditional ideals of the 
 religious life, the priest's and the scribe's ; but His did 
 not conform to either. The priest's made the temple, 
 with its worship and priesthood, the great factor of 
 religion ; in the temple God was to be found, the 
 way into His presence was through His priests, the 
 method of winning His favour or obtaining pardon 
 was by their sacrifices. The holy man was the man 
 who came often to the temple and made generous use 
 of its priesthood, places, articles and modes of worship. 
 Worship conducted by authorized persons within the 
 sacred place and in the established way, became the 
 very essence of religion ; and the priesthood them- 
 selves are our witnesses as to how completely their 
 ceremonial had swallowed up God's moral law. The 
 ideal of the scribes was different, yet akin ; it was 
 made up of rules, constituted by regulations as to the 
 doing and ordering of the sensuous things of life. It 
 observed days and months and seasons, was great 
 in fasts and alms, in times and modes of prayer. It 
 
24 CATHOLICISM 
 
 found great merit in phylacteries and in the reading 
 of the Scriptures ; it was devotedly loyal to the 
 unwritten law, which was formed of ancient custom, 
 the decisions of the great synagogue or council of 
 their church, and the wisdom of the fathers. Know- 
 ledge of this law was the most esteemed learning, and 
 the esteem was expressed in a notable way ; the man 
 wise enough to interpret the law made laws by his 
 interpretations. And so the holy man of the scribe 
 forgot no sacred day or solemn time, neglected no 
 fast, gave alms of all he had, prayed by book, wor- 
 shipped according to rule, and otherwise toiled and 
 comported himself as became a man who lived by a 
 written and traditional code. Excellent men they 
 were — honest, scrupulous, faithful in the minutest 
 things, only forgetful that the kingdom and truth of 
 God were infinitely wider than their law. And here 
 the kinship of the ideals appears ; both could make 
 scrupulous, neither could make magnanimous, men. 
 Each had had its heroes, who had suffered, and even 
 died, in defence of altar and ritual, or through fidelity 
 to all the ordinances of the law ; but neither had 
 produced a man possessed of the enthusiasm of 
 humanity, full of holy passion for the universal or 
 humane moral ends of God. The man who has the 
 strength of fanaticism in things sacerdotal is by this 
 very fact made a stranger to the spirit and inspiration 
 of true religion. 
 
 For let us look at Jesus in relation to the priest 
 and the scribe. His ideal stood in so sharp an 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION 2$ 
 
 antithesis to theirs that He was unintelligible to both, 
 was regarded and treated by both as an absolute 
 enemy. In the eye of the scribe He was a religious 
 alien, standing outside the continuity and catholicity 
 of Jewish tradition and doctrine ; in the eye of the 
 priest He broke the unity of the order and worship 
 established of old by God, consecrated by law and 
 custom, possessed of divine authority, the very 
 symbol of the national life and condition of the 
 people's well-being. His home was in Galilee, remote 
 from the city of the religion where the priest was the 
 ruler and the sacerdotal was also the civil law. When 
 He visited their city the priests could not understand 
 Him, for His temple and worship were spiritual, His 
 God was a Father who made sacrifices to save men, 
 and did not need incense and sacrifices and burnt- 
 offerings to become propitious towards them. And 
 so they knew not what to do with Him, knew only 
 how to hate Him, and how to glut their hate in the 
 infamy and death of the cross. In the province 
 where He familiarly lived, the distance of the priest 
 and the presence of the Gentile made the atmosphere 
 clearer, ritual law and custom less rigid ; and so it 
 was more favourable to a religious development 
 regulated throughout by the spontaneous and normal 
 action of His own ideal. But here He met the 
 Pharisee and the scribe, and their relation to Him 
 was one of radical contradiction and fretful collision, 
 proceeding from their fanatical devotion to the 
 traditions of the fathers and their consequent inability 
 
26 CA THOLICISM 
 
 to understand His spirit and His truth. In His 
 daily and familiar life they found none of the custom- 
 ary signs of religion — fasting, alms, the phylactery, 
 stated forms and times and places for prayer, cere- 
 monial cleanliness, punctilious observance of the 
 Sabbath law and customs ; nay, they found not only 
 these absent, but a conduct that seemed studiously to 
 offend — kindly speech to Gentiles, association with 
 publicans and sinners, unheard-of liberty allowed to 
 His disciples and claimed for Himself on the Sab- 
 bath ; and the right to do all this vindicated by the 
 denial of the authority of tradition and the elders, 
 and by the assertion of His own. It was to these 
 scrupulous and conscientious men all very sad, even 
 awful ; and so they judged Him a profane person, 
 acting from no other purpose or motive than to 
 destroy the law and the prophets. As later the 
 Christians, too religious to be understood of the 
 heathen, were judged to be men without religion, and 
 condemned as atheists ; so Christ, without any of the 
 notes distinctive of sacerdotal and legal piety, was 
 deemed altogether impious and declared worthy of 
 death. 
 
 2. But to the men He called and made clear of 
 eye and open of vision, the real secret of His spirit 
 stood disclosed. They saw that the denials were the 
 accidents of His life ; but the affirmation of a new 
 religious ideal was its essence. Of this ideal the 
 prophets had dreamed, but He made it an articulate 
 reality. God was to Him what He had never yet 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION .27 
 
 been to man — a living Father, loving, loved, in 
 whom He was embosomed, through whom and to 
 whom He lived. He knew no moment without His 
 presence ; suffered no grief the Father did not share ; 
 tasted no joy He did not send ; spoke no word that 
 was not of Him ; did no act that was not obedience 
 to His will. Where the relation was so immediately 
 filial and beautiful, the mediation of a priest would 
 have been an impertinence, the use of his sacrifices 
 and forms an estrangement — the coming of a cold, 
 dark cloud between the radiant soul of the Son and 
 the gracious face of the Father. Where true love 
 lives it must use its own speech, speak in its own 
 name, and feel that it must touch and, as it were, 
 hold with its own hands the higher love that loved it 
 into being. And because He stood so related to the 
 Father, He and the Father had one love, one work, 
 one will, one end. To see Him was to see the 
 Father ; His working was the Father's. Through 
 Him God lived among men ; the glory men beheld 
 in Him was the glory of the Only Begotten, the 
 incarnated grace and truth. And so this love of God 
 was love of man ; in the Son of Man the Father of 
 men served His children, and humanity came to 
 know its God and the things in which He delighted. 
 The best service of God was a ministry that redeemed 
 from sin, a sacrifice that saved from death. The 
 wonderful thing in religion was not what man gave 
 to God, but what God gave to man — the good, the 
 truth, the love — the way in which He bore his sins and 
 
28 CATHOLICISM 
 
 carried his sorrows, made human guilt an occasion 
 for divine pity, and the cure of hate the work of love. 
 What God is among His worlds Jesus was among 
 men. He is the mind and heart of God personalized 
 for humanity ; His universal ideal realized. And after 
 what manner did this realized ideal live? As em- 
 bodied compassion, beneficence, truth, love, working 
 for the complete redemption of men. Every kind of 
 evil was to Him a misery from which He could not but 
 seek to save. Disease He loved to cure ; poverty He 
 pitied, doing His utmost to create the temper before 
 which it should cease ; the common afflictions of man 
 touched Him with sympathy, subdued Him to tears. 
 But what moved Him most was moral evil — the sight 
 of man in the hands of sin ; and in order to save him 
 from it, He took an altogether new way. He dis- 
 missed the venerable methods and impotent formal- 
 isms of the priest and the scribe ; and went in among 
 the guilty, that He might in the very heart of their 
 guilt awaken the love of good and of God. He did 
 not feel that He condescended, only that His love 
 was a sweet compulsion to save ; they did not feel 
 His condescension, only the goodness that was too 
 pure for their sin to sully, that so thought of their 
 good as to win their souls for God. And the result 
 was altogether wonderful. The laws of the scribe and 
 the religion of the priest had only divided men — had 
 made good and evil accidents of custom, not qualities 
 and states of the living person, had cured no sinner, 
 had only created fictitious sins, the more damning 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION 2g 
 
 that they were so false. But the new spirit and way 
 of Christ found the common manhood of men, united 
 them, made sin moral, change from it possible, 
 even a duty ; made religion seem like the concen- 
 trated and organized moral energy of God work- 
 ing redemptively through men on behalf of man. 
 There never was a grander or more fruitful revolution 
 of thought, more needed on earth, more manifestly 
 of heaven. He who accomplished it was indeed a 
 Redeemer ; through Him religion ceased to be an 
 affair of the priest or the magistrate, transacted in 
 the temple and conducted by a ceremonial which was 
 prescribed by law ; and became the supreme concern 
 of man, covering his whole life, working in every way 
 for his amelioration, satisfied with nothing less than 
 the perfect virtue and happiness alike of the indi- 
 vidual and the race — in simple truth, God's own 
 method for realizing in man His ideal of humanity. 
 
 3. As Jesus lived He taught ; His teaching but 
 articulated the ideal He embodied in His character 
 and life. One thing in that teaching is most remark- 
 able — the complete absence of sacerdotal ideas, the 
 non-recognition of those customs and elements men 
 had been wont to think essential to religion. He 
 spoke of Himself as a teacher, never as a priest; 
 assumed no priestly office, performed no priestly 
 function, breathed an atmosphere that had no sacer- 
 dotal odour, that was full only of the largest and most 
 fragrant humanity. He instituted no sacerdotal office 
 or rite, appointed no man to any sacerdotal duty, 
 
30 CATHOLICISM 
 
 sent His disciples forth to be teachers or preachers, 
 made no man of them a priest, created no order of 
 priesthood to which any man could belong. Worship 
 to Him was a matter of the Spirit ; it needed no 
 consecrated place or person — needed only the heart 
 of the son to be real before the Father. The best 
 worship was obedience ; the man perfect as God is 
 perfect was the man who pleased God. His beati- 
 tudes were all reserved for ethical qualities of mind, 
 were never promised on any ceremonial or sacerdotal 
 condition. His good man was " poor in spirit," 
 "meek," " merciful," "pure in heart," "hungering after 
 righteousness," " a peacemaker." In describing His 
 ideal of goodness He found its antitheses in the 
 ideals of the temple and tradition. His example of 
 universal benevolence was " the good Samaritan " ; its 
 contradiction the priest and the Levite. True prayer 
 was illustrated by the penitent publican, false by the 
 formal Pharisee. The parables that vindicated His 
 treatment of sinners enforced the high doctrine that 
 nothing was so agreeable to God as their salvation, 
 that the mission of the godlike was to seek and save 
 them. The duty that summarized all others was love 
 to God ; the man that loved most obeyed best — for he 
 could not but obey. To love God was to love man, 
 to love the Divine Spirit was to do a divine part, to 
 be pitiful, to forgive as God forgives, to bear ill and 
 do good, to act unto others in a godlike way that 
 they might be won to godlike conduct. And He did 
 not conceive good men as isolated — they formed a 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION 3 1 
 
 society, a kingdom. The citizens of His kingdom 
 were the men who heard His voice and followed His 
 way. God reigned in and over them, and they 
 existed for His ends, to create good and overcome 
 evil. The kingdom they constituted was " of heaven," 
 opposed in source and nature to those founded in the 
 despotisms and iniquities of earth ; and also " of 
 God," proceeded from the Creator and Sovereign of 
 man, that His own high order might be realized. 
 Such being its nature, it could be incorporated in 
 no polity, organized under no local forms, into no 
 national or temporal system ; it was a " kingdom 
 of the truth," and all who were of the truth belonged 
 to it. It was a sublime idea ; the good and holy of 
 every land and race were gathered into a glorious 
 fellowship, dwelt together, however far apart or 
 mutually unknown, as citizens of the same Eternal 
 City, with all their scattered energies so unified by 
 the will of God as to be co-ordinated and co-operant 
 factors of human progress and happiness. Men have 
 not yet risen to the clear and full comprehension of 
 this ideal ; and the tardiest in reaching it are those 
 organized polities or institutions which boast them- 
 selves sole possessors of Christ's truth and life. 
 
 The meaning of Christ's person and teaching for 
 our thesis is too evident to need detailed discussion. 
 To Christian men He is the normal and normative 
 religious person — 2>., the person whose living is 
 their law, who made the standard to which they 
 ought to conform, and who distributes the influences 
 
32 CATHOLICISM 
 
 creative of conformity. Now, in Him religion was 
 a perfect relation to God expressed in speech and 
 action creative of a perfect humanity, a humanity 
 made through knowledge of God obedient to Him. 
 As embodied in Him, religion was in the presence 
 of sin and sorrow a holy passion, a suffering unto 
 sacrifice due to a love that identified the sinless 
 Seeker with the sinner He sought ; but in the 
 presence of the salvability of man, it was an enthu- 
 siasm of redemption, the victorious working of the 
 Spirit that can spare no evil and can be pleased 
 with no good that falls short of the perfection 
 which can alone satisfy God. So understood, religion 
 is man's living in loving and holy harmony with 
 the will of God ; and its work, the creation of a 
 humanity that shall in all its persons, relations, 
 and institutions, express and realize this harmony. 
 
 § V. The Ideal of Christ and the Christian Churches 
 
 Such then is the ideal of the religion of Christ ; 
 we have now to discuss briefly the relation of the 
 churches to it. 
 
 I. Our fundamental principle here is this : The 
 churches exist by the religion, and for it ; the religion 
 does not exist because of the churches, or for them. 
 The religion is the creative, the church the created 
 idea; and here, as everywhere, the law ought to 
 be valid, that the measure of truth for the created 
 idea is that it shall harmonize with and truly 
 express the creative. The churches must be 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION 33 
 
 construed through the religion, not the religion 
 through the churches. It \s true independently 
 of them, but they are right only as they are in 
 nature and character throughout accordant with it 
 Now this accordancy may be tested in two ways: 
 either by comparing the two ideals, that of the 
 church and that of the religion, or by the simple 
 historical inquiry, Has the church made the people 
 among whom it has lived fulfil, individually and 
 collectively, Christ's ideal, or approximate to the 
 fulfilment of it? The latter is a grave question 
 for all the churches. The degree in which they 
 have worked this realization is the measure of 
 their success ; the degree in which they have not, 
 is the measure of their failure. 
 
 It would lead into a region I am most anxious 
 to avoid, were any attempt here made at detailed 
 comparative criticism of the ecclesiastical and the 
 religious ideal. Our purpose is more positive, by 
 discussing the religious to show what the ecclesi- 
 astical ought to be. Yet it may emphasize this 
 purpose and illustrate the idea which underlies it, 
 if we look in the light of our previous discussions 
 at the spirit and motives which produced the 
 Anglican revival of sixty years ago. That revival 
 WcLs at its birth distinctly doctrinal or ideal, and 
 though it used history to support and commend 
 its idea, it did so at first in faith rather than with 
 knowledge. The success that attended this use was 
 more due to a courage that walked fearlessly into 
 
 3 
 
34 CATHOLICISM 
 
 the unknown than to any clear light of science. 
 When one turns to the tracts and treatises of the 
 period, one wonders, when regard is had to the 
 historical material and the method of handling it, 
 at the extraordinary effects they produced. Keble, 
 Newman, and Pusey are indeed illustrious names ; 
 at no time has the church of England or the 
 University of Oxford had names more venerated 
 or worthier of honour. But the work they did was 
 accomplished through what they brought to history, 
 not through what they found in it ; at least, through 
 what they found only so far as it was the vehicle 
 of what they brought. The movement they in- 
 augurated may be described as a movement for the 
 recovery of the lost or forgotten ideal of the Anglican 
 church. They, at the bidding of conscience, worked 
 out the ideal from their own consciousnesses, and 
 then they made inroads into history, in search 
 of the means of realization, though their researches 
 and labours were, in the case of many, to have a 
 tragic effect upon the ideal. Still the motive or 
 spring of their endeavour was the wish to call into 
 being a nobler faith, the belief that their church 
 was one of apostolic descent, of continuous life, 
 supernatural endowment and divine authority. 
 
 In order that they might evoke and vivify this 
 faith, they tried to enrich the church of to-day 
 with the wealth of all her yesterdays, to adorn her 
 age with the grace of her youth and the fruitful 
 strength of her maturity. And so they recalled the 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION 35 
 
 memories of her illustrious saints and fathers, woke 
 into speech the long silent wisdom of her divines 
 and teachers, searched out and restored her ancient 
 treasuries of devotion, her richest and sweetest forms 
 for the service of God. They studied how to make 
 again significant and symbolical, or, as they loved 
 to think, beautiful with holiness, her homes and 
 temples of worship ; how to deepen the mystery and 
 enhance the efficacy of her sacraments ; how to invest 
 with all needed virtue and authority her orders 
 and her offices — in a word, how to make her live 
 to the eye of the imagination as to the eye of faith 
 arrayed in all the grace of her Lord, clothed in all 
 the dignity and loveliness of the historical " Holy 
 Catholic and Apostolic Church." The ideal was 
 at once winsome and majestic, well fitted to awe 
 into reverence and inspire with the enthusiasm of 
 devotion. It came like a revelation to an age weary 
 of a hard and pragmatic evangelicalism, with its 
 prosaic spirit, narrow interests and formal methods 
 of reconciling God and man. It appealed to the 
 imagination which Romanticism had touched and 
 quickened, doing for the church what the poetry 
 of Wordsworth had done for nature, and the novels 
 of Scott for the national history. A new notion 
 of religion came through the new idea, and the men 
 it penetrated and held were like men possessed of 
 a new spirit of worship, a seemlier, a more reverent 
 and holy sense of God. We need not wonder at 
 its victories ; man would have been more ignoble 
 
36 CATHOLICISM 
 
 than he is if he had remained insensible to its 
 charm. Happily, for human nature and progress, 
 there is no law more sure in its operation than 
 this — that a belief ennobles in proportion to its own 
 nobility; what has no intrinsic goodness can never 
 evoke enthusiasm for good. 
 
 2. But it is not enough to construe the Anglican 
 ideal through the notion of the church ; it is neces- 
 sary to study and criticise it through the idea of the 
 religion. This is not only to change the point of 
 view, but it is to assume a much higher one ; for 
 religion being greater than the church, a rich and 
 sublime ecclesiastical may be a poor and mean 
 religious ideal. The question here, then, is — whether 
 the Anglican ideal did really articulate and faithfully 
 interpret the religion of Christ: whether it trans- 
 lated into visible speech and living form for the 
 people and state of England His mind as to His 
 society or kingdom. Here the main point of the 
 problem does not relate to a great clerical and sacer- 
 dotal corporation, instituted for the maintenance and 
 realization of worship ; but to a society that claims 
 to embody and to work for the completer embodi- 
 ment in everything and in every one of the order and 
 ideas of God, of the spirit and truth of Christ. This 
 is a larger, grander, and harder matter than the 
 creation of a clerical corporation, and implies two 
 things : on the one side, a clear and complete com- 
 prehension of the idea of the religion, and on the 
 other, a full and sufficient articulation of the same in 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION 37 
 
 the institutions and agencies needed to its reali- 
 zation. Now when we analyze the principles or 
 elements that underlie the Anglican ideal, what do 
 we find ? A singularly imperfect and narrow idea of 
 religion, supported by an equally narrow and one- 
 sided theory as to human nature, as to history and 
 providence, as to God and man in themselves and in 
 their mutual relations. On the one side, the ideal 
 rested on the twin pillars of a great doubt and a 
 great fear. It doubted the presence of God in 
 humanity, the actiyity and reality of His grace 
 outside the limits of a constituted church, and apart 
 from sacramental persons, instruments and symbols. 
 It doubted the sanity of the reason He had given, 
 thought that this reason had so little affinity with its 
 Maker as to be ever tending away from Him, its 
 bent by nature being from God rather than to God. 
 And so it was possessed of the great fear that the 
 reason, freed from the authority and guardian care of 
 an organized and apostolic church, i.e. clergy, would 
 infallibly break from the control of His law and His 
 truth. It thus made man an atheist by nature, 
 and so confined divine influence to artificial and 
 ordained channels as to make the common life, which 
 most needs to be illumined and ennobled by the 
 divine, either vacant of God or alien from Him. 
 And so it enriched the church by impoverishing 
 humanity, what it took from the one being its loftiest 
 ideals, what it gave to the other being but their 
 sensuous and baser counterfeits. On the other and 
 
38 CATHOLICISM 
 
 more positive side, this ideal implied principles that 
 had no place in the mind of Christ, or any real 
 affinity to His free and gracious spirit. Its most 
 beautiful quality was its reverence ; it was possessed 
 by the enthusiasm of devotion ; but even here it 
 knew too little of His joyous and sweet spon- 
 taneity, the glad and trustful filial spirit that loved 
 immediate speech and fellowship with the Father. 
 Then its ideal of duty was too ecclesiastical to be 
 His, was without His large beneficence and healthful 
 humanity. Its knowledge of Him was mediaeval, not 
 primitive ; the Christ it knew was the Christ of 
 mystery and sacraments, not the Christ of Nature and 
 of God. He did not love tradition, did not believe 
 in the sanctity of formularies, in the holiness of fasts, 
 the sin and apostasy of all who refused to conform 
 to the priestly law or order. And what He did not 
 love for Himself, He could not love for His people ; 
 what displeased Him in Judaism, He could not be 
 pleased to see crystallized round Himself. The 
 living man, the conscious home and son of God, 
 with love breaking into spontaneous speech and filial 
 act, was more to Him than the orderly observance of 
 ritual, or than the stateliest worship of the temple. 
 His ideal of worship was filial love expressed in filial 
 speech and conduct; and this love made all places 
 sacred, all times holy, all service religious, all actions 
 duties done to the Father in heaven. There never 
 was a humaner or saner ideal, one that so consecrated 
 and elevated the whole man, so penetrated and trans- 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION 39 
 
 figured his whole life. Its essential elements were all 
 natural, and in no degree sacerdotal, traditional, or 
 ecclesiastical ; where man knew God as the Fathet- 
 and himself as a son, worship could not but be ; not 
 elsewhere or in other sort was worship possible. 
 
 3. Now, it is by this vaster and grander yet simpler 
 ideal that the Anglican must be measured ; it must 
 fulfil the idea of Christ to be a true ideal for a 
 Christian church. We may not draw conclusions 
 that only a detailed comparison, running along many 
 lines, would warrant ; but two sayings, an Anglican 
 and a Christian, may be compared. Here is the 
 Anglican : " There is a well-known sect, which denies 
 both Baptism and the Lord's Supper. A churchman 
 must believe its members to be altogether external to 
 the fold of Christ. Whatever benevolent work they 
 may be able to show, still, if we receive the church 
 doctrine concerning the means generally necessary 
 to salvation, we must consider such persons to be 
 mere heathens, except in knowledge." ^ That is the 
 church's doctrine. Here is Christ's : ^ " Whosoever 
 shall do the will of My Father which is in heaven, 
 the same is My brother, and sister, and mother." In 
 the light of Christ's doctrine the church's looks hard, 
 and mean, and false enough. A theory that has to 
 make mere heathens of some of the most beautiful 
 and devoted spirits that have adorned the religion 
 
 ^J. H. Newman, Via Media.wol ii., pp. 29-30 (1877). 
 3 Matt. xii. 50. 
 
40 CATHOLICISM 
 
 and promoted the philanthropies of modern times, 
 may be good ecclesiasticism, but it is bad Christi- 
 anity. The difference between the doctrines is the 
 difference between two ideals, that of the Son of Man 
 and that of the Son of the church. If the Anglican 
 revival has sublimed and softened and enriched our 
 worship, it has also narrowed and hardened and 
 impoverished our religion. Sensuous excellence may 
 be the most serious of spiritual defects ; and a 
 political system which suppresses or misconceives 
 essential elements in the religious ideal wants the 
 most distinctive note of truth. 
 
 § VI. How the Ideal is to be Realized 
 
 I. We return then to our fundamental principle : 
 The churches exist for the religion, and ought to be 
 as it is, agencies and institutions for its realization, 
 good only as adapted to this end. The character of 
 a religion is determined by its idea of God ; the 
 constitution, action, and ambitions of a church are 
 determined by its ideal of religion. To be unfaithful 
 to any element in the latter is to be without the 
 highest kind of catholicity, catholicity as regards the 
 truth. The glory of the Christian religion is its 
 conception of God. He is the common Father and 
 Sovereign, benevolent and beneficent, gracious yet 
 righteous. He loves all men, and wills their good ; 
 hates sin and contends against it with all His 
 energies. He finds His highest beatitude in the 
 happiness of the creature, but makes holiness the 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION 4 1 
 
 condition of happiness. To create holiness that 
 happiness may be realized, is the aim of the divine 
 moral government ; in making for righteousness it 
 makes for the highest good of the universe. But 
 the religion that articulates this conception must 
 be as if it were the moral forces of mankind 
 organized and inspired of God, for the creation 
 of holy happiness and happy holiness. And the 
 churches that interpret the religion must have 
 this as their supreme end, the regnant idea that 
 determines the range and modes of their activities. 
 No element or province of good can be alien to 
 them ; whatever tends to bring in a more perfect 
 order is their proper work, whatever tends to delay 
 or defeat its coming is their proper enemy. They 
 are associations for worship : for the societies that are 
 to carry out God's purposes must depend on Him 
 and stand with Him in living fellowship and sym- 
 pathy. But their worship is only a means, not an 
 end ; it is meant to create a gentler and more 
 reverent spirit, a holier passion of benevolence, a 
 more exalted moral enthusiasm, not simply to soothe 
 and satisfy the soul. They are homes of instruction : 
 for men must be informed of the truth if they are to 
 be formed by it. But the instruction is in order to 
 better living, to nobler and more efficient action in 
 the way of Christ and for the ends of His kingdom. 
 In Him all the churches find their ideal religious 
 person ; to create Christlike men and to realize in 
 society an order and law worthy of Him, is their 
 
42 CATHOLICISM 
 
 mission. To fulfil it they must work as He worked, 
 by love, by gentleness, by speaking the truth, by 
 creating a manhood that praises God and a brother- 
 hood that rejoices man ; by bearing the sins and 
 carrying the sorrows of men till the life of sorrow 
 and the being of sin shall cease ; by unweariedness in 
 well-doing increasing the number of good men and 
 the quality of their goodness, so making earth in 
 an ever brighter degree the home of a redeemed 
 humanity. Churches that do not work for these ends 
 are not churches of Christ's religion ; those that work 
 for them by fittest means, and so to best issues, are 
 the most Christian of churches. 
 
 The range thus opened up to the activity of the 
 churches is immense; it is co-extensive with the 
 needs of society and man. Their primary duty is to 
 the individual ; with him they must begin. Good 
 persons are the most efficient factors of good ; what 
 makes the most good men does the most good to 
 man. Now, religion has in a unique degree the 
 power of conversion ; we may say, indeed, it is the 
 sole possessor of this power. Any great ambition or 
 affection may exalt, or even in a sense purify, a man ; 
 but a man must have a certain largeness and eleva- 
 tion of nature before he can feel it. Love of art or 
 science, literary, political and other ambition, may 
 persuade a man to live both purely and laboriously ; 
 but the nature to which they appeal must be already 
 a noble nature. The arts and sciences do not so 
 much elevate man as witness to his elevation. But 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION 43 
 
 religion has an altogether peculiar power : it can 
 touch the bad man, find the good m him, so possess 
 as to transform his nature, making him in all things 
 the servant of righteousness. Now, this power the 
 churches ought to labour to exercise in the highest 
 possible degree. They ought to burn with a passion 
 for souls, be consumed with the desire to save. This 
 does not mean the ambition for numbers, but the 
 enthusiasm for the religious change which is a moral 
 regeneration. To the extent that a profession of 
 religion does not carry with it purity, chastity, truth 
 — in a word, integrity of moral nature — it is an evil 
 and not a good. The churches must bring together 
 faith and conduct, translate the ideal of their Master 
 into the living of their disciples, if they are to live to 
 purpose and grow in power. 
 
 2. This, then, is their primary duty — to save men ; 
 but their first is not their last. Saved men are 
 means, not ends ; they are saved that they may save, 
 i.e. work out the moral regeneration of the race. 
 The churches that convert most men, and best use 
 the men they have converted, realize religion in the 
 most efficient way. It is the work of these men, 
 instructed and inspired by their churches, to carry 
 their high principles everywhere and into everything. 
 They are not to conserve the actual, but to create 
 the ideal, to labour along all lines that promise the 
 amelioration of the human lot. They may think the 
 world bad, but it is capable of being mended, and to 
 mend it is the very reason of their being. The 
 
44 CATHOLICISM 
 
 churches ought to be the mothers of strenuous 
 philanthropists, encouraging their sons to labour 
 among the men who make crime, and against the 
 conditions that make criminals ; in the hospitals 
 where the diseased are tended, and against the slums 
 where they are bred ; in the charities where the poor 
 are helped, and against the poverty and the causes of 
 the poverty that make the charities necessary. They 
 ought to be the teachers of statesmen, and demand 
 that the nation, in all its legislation and in all its 
 conduct, home or foreign, shall follow the righteous- 
 ness that alone exalteth, recognizing no law as good, 
 no action as honourable, that denies or offends 
 Christian principle. They ought to be the weightiest 
 preachers of economic doctrine, building on the 
 principles of Christian brotherhood and equity an 
 ideal industrial society, where all should work and 
 all work be honoured ; where wealth, without any 
 schemes of violent and wrongful division, should by 
 the action of moral laws through moral men be so 
 distributed as to create a State where poverty was 
 unknown and charity was unneeded. They ought, 
 too, to be the great mothers and guardians of social 
 purity, fearing not to rebuke the sins of class and 
 caste, of idleness and luxury, bending their energies 
 to the creation of a loftier ideal of manhood and 
 womanhood, a chivalrous chastity of thought and 
 conduct that should, were it only by the courage of 
 innocence, rebuke or shame into silence the lower 
 passions and lusts. Were the churches to forget all 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION 45 
 
 their sectional jealousies in the grand remembrance 
 of their high mission to further the common good, 
 were they to lose the mean political and sacerdotal 
 ambitions that have narrowed and materialized the 
 prouder and more historic of them, in a sublime 
 moral enthusiasm for the realization of the religious 
 ideal, they would become possessed of a power which 
 could be described only as a baptism of the Holy 
 Ghost and of fire. The paralysis of the churches in 
 the religious sphere is due to the narrowness of their 
 spirit and aims. They have been contented with too 
 little ; they need to make a reality of their faith and 
 its laws for the whole life of society and man. 
 
 It need not be said that this is not meant to be a 
 plea for an extension of ecclesiastical jurisdiction ; 
 on the contrary, that would seem to me a simple 
 calamity. Nor is there any argument on behalf of 
 the supremacy of the church over the civil courts in 
 matters ecclesiastical ; on the contrary, these judicial 
 conflicts but show to me the disastrous depravation 
 of our idea of religion. There is nothing that has so 
 hindered the supremacy of religion as the struggle 
 for ecclesiastical supremacy. The ecclesiastic is not 
 made by his function a religious man ; his position 
 rather makes him but a statesman of narrower 
 interests, with ambitions circumscribed by the limits 
 of his society. To allow ecclesiastics to rule the 
 nation is, as history has so often calamitously proved, 
 but to sacrifice the people to a class. That is the 
 best civil polity which secures at once perfect order 
 
46 CATHOLICISM 
 
 and perfect freedom, the highest happiness and the 
 most happiness to its people ; and that is the best 
 ecclesiastical polity which develops, exercises and 
 organizes to the highest degree, in the wisest ways, 
 and for most beneficent ends, the moral and spiritual 
 energies of the religion and of the religious. And so 
 what is here pleaded for is the sovereignty of religion, 
 the reign through the reason over the conscience of 
 the beliefs, truths, ideas that constitute it. What is 
 needed to this reign is a teacher who can interpret the 
 meaning of a God who is a moral Sovereign, for the 
 whole nature, the whole life, and the whole duty of 
 man. Such a teacher the churches ought to be : but 
 to be it they must be in Novalis' phrase, here used 
 in all reverence, Gottgetrunkene^ possessed by an un- 
 resting and inextinguishable passion for His moral 
 ends, for the creation of an order that shall in its 
 measure fitly express or reflect His eternal ideal. 
 Within the Christian conception of God there lies for 
 the Christian religion a world of unexhausted possi- 
 bilities. Only when it has been fully construed will 
 theology be perfected, only when it has been so 
 applied as to order and regulate the life, individual 
 and collective, will religion be realized. Once this 
 idea has become the inspiration of the church, it will 
 look back with shame on the days of the old eccle- 
 siasticism when it lived in bondage to the letter ; and 
 it will contrast, in large joyfulness, the freedom that 
 allows its people to build by spiritual methods and 
 through moral agencies " the City of the living God," 
 
THE CHURCHES AND THE IDEAL OF RELIGION 47 
 
 with the liberty they knew and loved of old, the 
 liberty of so manipulating the past as to make it 
 approve the present. Then working, not under the 
 belittling burden of an exhausted yet authoritative 
 past, but for the future and under the inspiration 
 of the sublimest of all ideals, they will become fit 
 vehicles for the religion that alone possesses the 
 secret for promoting without cessation human pro- 
 gress and human good. The abstractions of Posi- 
 tivism are potent and significant only to the studious 
 enthusiast ; but the moral energies of religion are for 
 all men engines of mightiest dynamic power. They 
 enlarge the individual life with universal ideals ; they 
 lift time into the stream of an eternal purpose 
 and fill it with eternal issues ; and they make the 
 simplest moral act great as a real factor in the 
 evolution of a higher order and an immortal character. 
 To the imagination that has been touched by the 
 real ideal of religion, the fervid prophesyings of our 
 modern Agnostics and Positivists are but the tamest 
 and earthliest of dreams. 
 
 March, 1884. 
 
11 
 
 CATHOLICISM AND THE APOLOGY FOR 
 THE FAITH 
 
 § I. The Question to be Discussed 
 
 IF the highest function of the Christian church 
 be so to interpret the Christian faith as to 
 secure the progressive realization of the Christian 
 religion, then it becomes a question of the most 
 vital interest : — Has any one of the many bodies 
 claiming the name of church proved itself to be 
 supremely efficient in the exposition and vindication 
 of the faith? On this point there may be many 
 differences of opinion, but as to one thing there 
 can be no doubt ; of all the churches in Christendom 
 the Roman Catholic is, in all matters or questions 
 affecting the faith, the most conscious of her own 
 sufficiency. She has proclaimed it in every possible 
 form, has decreed herself infallible, had tried to live 
 up to her decree even before she had formally 
 passed it, and has proudly moved among the churches, 
 challenging them to submit to claims they cannot 
 surpass and dare not attempt to rival. We assume, 
 of course, the sincerity of the Roman Catholic 
 church, and her honest belief in this the most 
 
 48 
 
AND THE APOLOGY POk THE FAITH 49 
 
 stupendous of all claims ever made by any society, 
 especially a society which at once addresses the 
 reason and stands at the judgment seat of history ; 
 and we proceed to inquire whether her behaviour 
 as she lives in our midst at all corresponds to her 
 claims. In other words, our question is. To what 
 extent has the Catholic movement in England helped 
 the English mind to a higher and more satisfactory 
 doctrine of religion than could have been found 
 outside or apart from it ? To what degree has it, 
 in an age, if not of denial, yet of transition and 
 the inquiry which leans to doubt, contributed at 
 once to conserve and quicken the Christian faith ; 
 to make it credible to living minds, real to the men 
 who feel that their religious beliefs are the dearest 
 to the heart, but the hardest to the intellect, and 
 the least practical or relevant to the life? These 
 are questions it is easy to ask, but very difficult to 
 discuss judicially or even judiciously ; while the most 
 difficult thing of all is to find a just and sufficient 
 answer. Underneath all such questions others still 
 more fundamental lie, and the principles implied 
 in the deeper must always regulate the criticism 
 and determination of the more superficial. The 
 writer is clearly conscious that his attitude to religion 
 and our religious problems is one, and the attitude 
 of the Roman Catholic another and very different ; 
 and it would be simple impertinence in him to ignore 
 the difference, or enforce his own canons of criticism 
 on the Catholic mind. He does not mean to 
 
 4 
 
60 CATHOLICISM 
 
 judge those who have found refuge and peace in 
 Catholicism — indeed, he would not do so if he could. 
 If it has made its converts happier and better men, 
 it has done a work for which all good men ought 
 to be grateful. But the question that now concerns 
 us in no way relates to the sufficiency of Catholicism 
 for Catholics, but to the adequacy and relevance 
 of what may be termed its special apologetic to 
 the spirits possessed and oppressed by the problems 
 of the time. The power of Catholicism to satisfy 
 convinced religious men in search of the best 
 organized and most authoritative Christianity, is one 
 thing ; and its ability to answer the questions and 
 win the faith of the perplexed and critical mind, 
 is another thing altogether. This is a matter we 
 are all free to discuss, nay, every man concerned 
 for the future of faith is bound to discuss it ; and 
 the frankest will always be the fairest discussion. 
 
 Of course, it may be said, and said quite truly, 
 that the infallibility of the Roman church does not 
 guarantee the infallibility of her ministers, doctors, 
 or divines, or even the moral integrity and intel- 
 lectual sufficiency of every movement that may be 
 described as Catholic. This may at once be granted, 
 but it only reduces the significance and impairs the 
 competence of the infallibility which can render so 
 little service to those who most need it. We shall 
 meet this question again, and for the present confine 
 ourselves to the problem: — How far have thinkers 
 and teachers who have been either the ordained and 
 
AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 5 1 
 
 recognized ministers of an infallible church, or the 
 unauthorized exponents of her faith, supplied living 
 thought with a cogent and relevant apologetic for 
 religion ? 
 
 §11. The Need of a Relevant Apology for the Faith 
 
 I. In order to an intelligent discussion of this 
 question, it may be as well to explain what is 
 here meant by a relevant apologetic. It means not 
 a mere defence of the faith, a marshalling of 
 evidences, a method or process of proof, but such 
 a constructive interpretation and presentation of 
 Religion as shall make it stand before the living 
 reason as a coherent and intelligible thing. Evi- 
 dences may admit of no answer, and yet produce 
 no conviction : if the things they are meant to prove 
 have no reality or adequate meaning to thought, 
 no concrete rationality for reason, they may be 
 multiplied to almost any extent without gathering 
 weight or begetting belief. Men lose faith in re- 
 ligious truth not so much through a failure in its 
 evidences as through a failure in its relevance ; in 
 other words, the terms in which it has been inter- 
 preted cease to be credible either by ceasing to be 
 intelligible or by falling out of harmony with the 
 logical basis and methods of living mind. Of course 
 it may not seem fair to illustrate a point by the 
 words of one who is but an echo of other minds ; 
 but the reflection in a mirror often reveals more of 
 the original than may be discovered by the searching 
 
52 CATHOLICISM 
 
 scrutiny of the naked eye. Well, Mr. Lilly — and 
 the remark summarizes a wonderful deal of Catholic 
 argumentation — meets some very grave objections 
 to Christianity by saying, " in the light of reason, 
 man has in strictness no rights against God."^ Now 
 that is not an answer, but a confession that no 
 answer can be given. It means that if there were 
 a sovereign being against whom man had rights, 
 that being would, in the given circumstances, be in 
 the wrong. And such a defence is the worst indict- 
 ment of Providence. Looked at in the clear light of 
 reason, man has rights against God. To be made, is 
 to be invested with rights ; to create, is for the creator 
 to assume duties. I do not like such modes of speech, 
 but an argument like Mr. Lilly's compels their use. 
 I prefer to say that God's ways towards men are 
 regulated, not by what He owes to men, but by what 
 He owes to Himself But so to conceive the matter 
 is to affirm, if not " man's rights against God," yet 
 God's high duties towards man — which means here, 
 that the justification of God's ways must proceed 
 on a far loftier and truer principle than either the 
 denial or the affirmation of the creature's rights, 
 viz., on the principle that the Divine nature is a 
 law to the Divine will, and that that nature is 
 perfect reason, righteousness and love. 
 
 A relevant apologetic, then, may be described as 
 one which, by the use of rational principles and 
 methods, satisfies the reason as to the truth 
 
 * Ancient Religion and Modern Thought^ p. 261. 
 
AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 53 
 
 of things it had doubted or even denied, and which 
 addresses it as if it were honest and reasoned honestly 
 concerning their truth and were constantly in search of 
 it. Now every age has its own mental habits, which 
 imply common principles, fixed processes of inquiry 
 and proof, and modes of apprehending and handling 
 questions ; and these affect man's attitude to every 
 matter of thought and belief. An idea like evolution, 
 for example, changes, not only our notion of the mode 
 in which nature does her work, but also the way in 
 which we study alike her works and her manner of 
 working, the methods by which we inquire into the 
 phenomena of life, the order and facts of history, 
 the appearance and meaning of man. It causes, 
 in a word, such a revolution in our basal conceptions 
 as to demand, in order to mental wholeness and 
 harmony, that they and their related beliefs be re- 
 stated or reformulated. In a period of transition 
 faith is difficult, because religious ideas at once resist 
 formal change and seem to suffer more from it than 
 empirical or scientific ; and men hastily or fearfull)' 
 conclude that the change which is glorifying science 
 will abolish religion. On the one side it stands, 
 by its theistic idea, so related to nature as to feel 
 every variation in men's notions concerning the 
 creative cause, method, purpose or tendency ; and 
 on the other side, it is by its beliefs, institutions 
 and life, so related to history as to be sensitive to 
 every new historical doctrine, discovery, or process 
 of inquiry. Hence, when the cosmic idea has 
 
54 CATHOLICISM 
 
 changed its form, while the reh'gious has not, when 
 a new conception reigns in every department of 
 history save the religious, the chronic difficulties 
 between Science and Religion become to many 
 minds insurmountable, and they cease to believe 
 simply because Religion has ceased to be intellectu- 
 ally relevant — i.e., to belong to the living and grow- 
 ing body of truth, which at once possesses and 
 inspires living mind. Men so situated are men 
 whom no mustering of conventional evidences can 
 convince ; to reach or even touch them, apologetic 
 thought must seek to construe Religion as scientific 
 thought has construed nature and history. What 
 can make men feel at harmony with themselves and 
 their universe, will always be the system most open 
 to successful proof; what cannot accomplish this, 
 no mass of probable or other evidence will save 
 from ultimate disbelief 
 
 It would lead us much too far to illustrate, with 
 all the needed detail, the principles now stated ; 
 but two works will show what is meant. The De 
 Civitate Dei is perhaps the greatest work in the 
 whole region of Christian apologetics. Yet its form 
 and argument were determined by the conditions 
 and questions of Augustine's own day ; these must 
 be understood before its significance and force can 
 be felt. The ideas of the time, heathen and 
 Christian, political, social, philosophical, religious, 
 its conflicts, fears, hopes, despairs, must be recalled. 
 The student must fill his imagination with the Roman 
 
AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 55 
 
 ideal of the Eternal City ; he must realize what 
 may be described as its apotheosis by the Latin 
 peoples, the degree in which it was a city at once 
 sacred and imperial, venerable, august, invincible, 
 queen for centuries of civilized man, sole mother of 
 the law that ruled him and the order he loved, 
 invested with a more awful sanctity than any re- 
 ligious city ; nay, as the embodiment of the Roman, 
 the symbol of a universal, religion, and of one that 
 out of ceaseless war had called universal peace. 
 Once he has made this worship of Rome live in his 
 consciousness, he must conceive the consternation, 
 the horror and shame, that must have seized the 
 Romans when they saw their city stormed and 
 plundered by the barbarians, and the consequent 
 indignation and hate which broke out in the Pagan 
 charge : — " This ruin is but the last and highest 
 achievement of the new religion ! " Augustine's 
 apology was the answer to this passion, and to the 
 belief by which it lived ; and the answer was as 
 splendid as complete. The new religion was con- 
 ceived and represented as a new city, a diviner and 
 more eternal Rome, which transcended the old as 
 heaven transcends the earth ; which came not from 
 a people, but from God ; which was created not of 
 human ambition and hate, but of divine grace and 
 love ; which comprehended not a few nations, but the 
 race ; which produced no evil, and fostered no wrong, 
 but formed all the virtues and embraced all truth, — a 
 city destined to growth, but not to decay, whose 
 
56 CATHOLICISM 
 
 building might indeed proceed in time, but whose con- 
 tinuance was to be unto eternity. Beside the Civitas 
 Dei the Civitas Romana was made to seem a feverish 
 and shadowy and inglorious dream ; the ideal of the 
 celestial rebuked by its very divineness the poor 
 reality of the earthly city. The power of the apology 
 lay in its being a constructive presentation of the 
 Christian religion in a form relevant to the men 
 and the moment ; their knowledge of the city that 
 was perishing constituted the very capability to 
 which Augustine appealed. And so accurately does 
 his work in its method and argument reflect the 
 spirit and ideals, the disillusionment and alarms of 
 the times, that the man who does not live through 
 them and in them will never see its meaning or 
 feel its power. 
 
 Take, again, Butler's Analogy. It was a most 
 relevant book ; its relevance was the secret of its 
 strength, and is the secret of its weakness. On its 
 every page, in its every paragraph, we hear the 
 controversies of the time ; the freethinker, the deist, 
 the airy rationalist, who will have a religion without 
 mystery and without miracle, appear and deploy 
 their arguments ; but only that they may be judicially 
 analyzed, reduced to their true insignificance, and 
 finally translated into proofs tending to justify faith 
 in the revealed religion they had been used to 
 condemn. Some things Butler did once for all. 
 His method ; his doctrine of nature and man ; his 
 proof of the religious worth and work of conscience ; 
 
AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 57 
 
 his demonstration that religion when most accom- 
 modated to the standard of a conventional and 
 unimaginative rationalism, becomes only the less 
 reasonable, beset with graver and more insoluble 
 difficulties ; the way he used the facts of life to 
 illustrate and verify certain truths of faith, like the 
 doctrines of substitution and atonement, — are now 
 inalienable possessions of constructive Christian 
 thought. Yet the strength of his argument, taken 
 as a whole, was due to the use of principles common 
 to the belief and unbelief of the day. Grant those 
 principles, and the Analogy is one of the most 
 marvellous structures of solid, cumulative, convincing 
 argumentation ever built by the mind of man ; deny 
 those principles, and while the work remains a 
 monument of dialectical genius, it has lost its power 
 to convince. And they are explicitly denied by 
 systems that now confront us ; the unbelief of our 
 day is more radical than the unbelief of Butler's ; 
 and, in some degree, we have to thank him for its 
 being so. He showed it the necessity of increasing 
 its negations if it was to remain negative at all. 
 Hence our living apologetic must begin without any 
 help from those common principles which were 
 the basis of Butler's work ; it must get even nearer 
 the rock, seek a stronger and broader foundation, 
 if it would construct an argument as relevant to 
 our day as the Analogy was to his. And whatever 
 it does, it must not seek to relieve the difficulties of 
 revealed religion by deepening those that sit upon the 
 
58 CATHOLICISM 
 
 face of nature; rather it must illumine and trans- 
 figure the darkness of nature by the light of 
 revelation. Religion has need to penetrate and 
 exalt both nature and man with her own trans- 
 cendental ideals, that men may have a new sense 
 of the value of life, and win a new heart for braver 
 and nobler living. 
 
 2. But now there is another point that must 
 be emphasized : — the need for constructive religious 
 thought does not so much arise from the specu- 
 lations and criticisms of a few active intellects 
 without the churches, as from a common intellectual 
 tendency or drift which causes a shaking and 
 unrest, a sense of insecurity and change, within 
 them. This is what tempts men either to break 
 with the old beliefs, or to doubt them, or to demand 
 that they shall be clothed in new forms or that 
 from the old forms a new spirit shall come forth. 
 The churches are now face to face with the gravest 
 questions that have confronted Christianity since her 
 life began ; questions not simply doctrinal, political, 
 or social, but fundamental and final, — whether men 
 are to be Christians any more, or even in any 
 tolerable sense theists. These questions exhale, as 
 it were, the intellectual difficulties which diffuse 
 themselves everywhere, stealing into the best dis- 
 ciplined homes, penetrating the most rigorously 
 organized and jealously guarded churches, pervading 
 the atmosphere in which thought lives and breathes, 
 touching our finest spirits with the slow paralysis 
 
AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 59 
 
 of doubt, or the hesitancy which is the death of 
 all enthusiasm. The men have not created the 
 difficulties or raised the doubts ; on the contrary, 
 the doubts and difficulties have sought and found 
 the men ; they are creations of the time, and spring 
 from the characteristics and achievements of its 
 thought, its wider knowledge, its vaster outlook, 
 its new methods of interpreting nature and history, 
 its deeper insight into the way of nature's working, 
 and into the affinities of man and his universe. 
 They are utterly misunderstood when traced to an 
 evil heart of unbelief, or to some taint or sin of 
 will, or to any other source than honesty and integrity 
 of intellect, — the determination to be as clear and 
 scrupulous in the realm of spirit and faith as in 
 the region of experience and experiment. Scientists 
 who have studied nature and become so possessed 
 by the ideas of law and energy, continuity and 
 development, as to feel unable to reconcile them 
 with their older ideas of God and His creative 
 method, are men whom the churches are bound to 
 help to a solution. Scholars trained in the newest 
 critical methods, literary and historical, cannot forget 
 them when they turn to the study of the Bible, 
 and of Hebrew and Christian history ; and cannot 
 pursue them in these fields without raising questions 
 they have a right to submit to the churches, and to 
 require the churches frankly and honestly to answer. 
 Mr. Lilly's vindication of the attitude of his church 
 to the "higher criticism" seems to me her severest 
 
60 CATHOLICISM 
 
 condemnation. She is to "wait until the higher 
 criticism" has really established something certain, 
 and then she will consider how far the " traditional 
 thesis" taught in her schools should be modified 
 in consequence.^ There is here the abdication 
 of the highest functions of the church ; she ceases 
 to be the teacher of truth, and leaves it to men, 
 whom she bans the while, to be its discoverers ; 
 and then the truths they have with pain discovered 
 and with loss established she will reconcile to her 
 tradition. In harmony with this, he — with special 
 reference to the question, what would happen to a 
 Catholic priest who should teach his people certain 
 critical conclusions, some of them conclusions certain 
 enough — says, such a one "would richly deserve 
 suspension," for " his business is to watch for men's 
 souls, not to unsettle their faith." ^ But his business 
 ought to be to teach the truth ; and if in the process 
 faith is unsettled, it will only be to the greater 
 saving of the soul. The primary right of every man 
 is to the truth, and the best truth his teachers 
 can give him ; the primary duty of the teacher, 
 especially of the collective teacher called the church, 
 is to communicate the truth, not speaking with 
 authority or certainty where certainty is not. A 
 church that is true and the infallible teacher of 
 truth and guardian of souls, can in no way so 
 well justify its claim and its being as by teaching 
 
 "^Ancient Reli^on and Modern Thought^ p. 279. '^Ib., p. 278. 
 
AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 6 1 
 
 the truth to souls perplexed. These souls are seeking 
 the truth, and would be saved by it ; but they 
 are simply mocked if a church says to them, " Find 
 out for yourself without any help from me the 
 truth on those critical and historical questions which 
 are matters of life and death for you, and, to speak 
 honestly, for myself also ; and then I will tell you 
 how this truth is to be reconciled with my 'tra- 
 ditional thesis.'" It would hardly be possible to 
 conceive a more helpless or ignoble attitude on 
 the part of man or church. For the men whose 
 doubts come from brave thought and honest inquiry 
 have the highest claim on the best consideration 
 and clearest light of all the churches and all their 
 thinkers. Doubt never appears without reason ; 
 and the removal of the reason is the only real 
 way to the removal of the doubt. The churches 
 that do nothing to reach and purify the source 
 only help to muddle the stream. 
 
 §111. Deism and Apologetics in Catholic France and 
 in Protestant England 
 
 I. Constructive apologetic is thus at once the 
 highest work of living religious thought, and the 
 common duty of all the churches. In it the Roman 
 Catholic must bear its part. It is too wise to trust 
 here to its infallible authority, matchless organization, 
 rigorous discipline, and jealously guarded education ; 
 indeed, experience has thoroughly well taught it 
 how little these are able to keep down the critical 
 
62 CATHOLICISM 
 
 and sceptical spirit among its laity, or even, as 
 certain cases have flagrantly proved, to keep it 
 out from the ranks of its clergy. It is but natural 
 that the church which most taxes faith should 
 most provoke unbelief; but it ought not to follow- 
 that the claims that most challenge criticism are 
 claims that can as little recognize as bear the 
 criticism they challenge. It is the simple and 
 sober truth to say that no church has begotten 
 so much doubt and disbelief as the church of 
 Rome. And she has begotten it, not by the 
 demand she makes on faith, but by her inability 
 to justify the demand. History bears here an in- 
 dubitable and incorruptible witness. Of the Middle 
 Ages we need not speak ; or of the Renaissance, 
 when the educated intellect of Italy almost ceased 
 to be Christian, and became at once sceptical 
 and pagan ; or of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 centuries, with such notable figures as Giordano 
 Bruno and Vanini, and tendencies so significant 
 as those impersonated in Montaigne, Bodin, and 
 Charron. But we may glance at our own and the 
 previous century. The eighteenth was the century 
 of Rationalism : and it is customary to credit England 
 with being its nursery and home, where, as Deism, 
 it assumed its most anti-Christian and aggressive 
 form. But English Deism was, from a literary 
 point of view, a poor and vapid thing compared 
 with the Free Thought of the France whence Pro- 
 testantism and Jansenism had been expelled that 
 
AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 63 
 
 the Catholicism of Rome might have it all its 
 own way. In England Deism had a host of obscure 
 writers, now well-nigh forgotten, irrepressible men 
 like Toland, men of mediocre ability and culture 
 like Anthony Collins, vulgar men like Chubb, 
 irritated and disagreeable men like Matthew Tindal 
 who conformed that he might enjoy his Oxford 
 fellowship and wrote anonymously that he might 
 relieve his conscience. But it can reckon only two 
 names illustrious in literature, Hume and Gibbon ; 
 the one embodying his scepticism in the subtlest 
 of English philosophies, the other distilling his into 
 the stateliest history in the English tongue. But 
 the active intellects of France, the men who give 
 name and character to the century, were either 
 sceptical or infidel. It opens with Bayle, once a 
 Jesuit convert, the father of critical Rationalism. 
 The man who stands above all others, and shadows 
 all beneath, is Voltaire, a Jesuit pupil. The men 
 who form and express the mind of Paris, then the 
 head and heart of France, are Diderot, D'Alembert, 
 and the other Encyclopaedists ; the lion of its salons 
 is Rousseau. And while the literature of France 
 was vehemently anti- Christian, the church of France 
 was not strenuously apologetic, as was the English 
 church. Here, men like Addison, most classical 
 and pure and elegant of English essayists ; Clarke, 
 most metaphysical and in logic adventurous of 
 English divines ; Butler, Anglican Bishop and Chris- 
 tian Apologist, who had the utmost curiosity to 
 
64 CATHOLICISM 
 
 know what was said, in order that he might ascer- 
 tain whether it was true ; Berkeley, a philosopher 
 as lucid and graceful in style as he was subtle 
 in argument; Law, a man whose apologetic power 
 was only surpassed by his passion for the holier 
 mysticism ; Bentley, greatest of English scholars, 
 yet master of a pen that could bite as if it were 
 a living creature ; and many names hardly less great, 
 like Warburton, Lardner, Paley — made Christian 
 thought, even as a mere matter of literature, dis- 
 tinguished beside Deism. But in France the power 
 of resistance was so feeble that no one would think 
 of naming the churchmen alongside the men of 
 letters, their most illustrious name, Malebranche, 
 belonging, so far as philosophical and literary activity 
 is concerned, rather to the seventeenth than the 
 eighteenth century. 
 
 2. But it were a grave mistake to conceive the 
 defence of the Christian Faith, or, indeed, of any 
 religion, as merely a work of literature ; it is a much 
 larger and more serious thing. The course of the 
 Deist controversy in England forms an even more 
 remarkable contrast to the history of the parallel 
 movement in France, than do the men engaged in it. 
 The two movements were indeed closely related ; the 
 English was, in a sense, the source of the French 
 Deism. The bosom at which both were suckled was 
 the philosophy of Locke; but of the children the 
 English was the elder and formative, the French was 
 the younger and more imitative, though incalculably 
 
AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 65 
 
 the more potent. Voltaire did not deduce his Deism 
 directly from Locke ; he learned it from disciples 
 less reverent and more audacious than the master. 
 Nothing 50 astonished him during his English resi- 
 dence as the freedom with which religion was treated. 
 He found, just as Butler did, that unbelief was fashion- 
 able : " Christianity was not so much as a subject of 
 inquiry;" it had been "at length discovered to be 
 fictitious." So Mr. Toland had proved that " Chris- 
 tianity was not mysterious." "The Sect of Free 
 Thinkers " was the church of the wits, the synagogue 
 of the socially select. Anthony Collins discoursed of 
 their wisdom, and it needed the audacity of a Bentley 
 to satirize their freedom as "thinking and judging 
 as you find," " which every inhabitant of bedlam 
 practises every day, as much as any of our illustrious 
 sect." To him, indeed, their wise men were "idiot 
 evangelists"; but to Voltaire they represented letters, 
 culture, the men of sense. Bolingbroke, Pope's 
 "guide, philosopher, and friend," became Voltaire's 
 master in Deism ; and he went home to France to 
 preach what he had learned in England, with very 
 different results from those that followed here. In 
 England the victory was with the apologists ; in 
 France with the assailants of the faith. It was not 
 simply that in England Deism was intellectually out- 
 matched, while in France it had all the superiority 
 of mind. The English deist, notwithstanding the 
 general inferiority already noted, had still men who 
 were, in the matter of intellect, the equals of the 
 
 5 
 
66 CATHOLICISM 
 
 English apologist. Hume was more subtle than 
 Butler. Gibbon was more learned and ponderous 
 than Lardner or Paley. Tom Paine was a greater 
 master of English and of argument than Beattie. 
 Yet, in spite of the number and social strength of 
 their opponents, the apologists triumphed ; when the 
 century ended the Christian religion was far more 
 strongly entrenched in the reason and heart of the 
 English people than it had been when the century 
 began. But in France there was another story. 
 When the century opened it was still the great age 
 of Louis XIV., where the Church was as illustrious in 
 intellect, in learning, and in eloquence, as the State 
 was in regal dignity, in military prowess, and in 
 skilful statesmanship. When the century closed the 
 Revolution had come, the terror had followed. King- 
 dom and Church had together perished. And to this 
 catastrophe no cause had contributed more potently 
 than the French movement which corresponded to 
 the English Deism. 
 
 Now why this remarkable difference ? To examine 
 all its roots and reasons would carry us much too far. 
 But the main reason is one which is not without its 
 bearing on our argument. In England the political 
 and social conditions were such that the religious was 
 not a civil question, but rather one intellectual and 
 ethical. The State had ceased to expect uniformity 
 of worship and belief, and was ceasing to enforce it 
 by civil disabilities and pains. The first step towards 
 toleration had been taken ; and Parliament had prac- 
 
AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 67 
 
 tically recognized that the civil and the ecclesiastical 
 society, the State and the Church, were not identical 
 and coextensive. And it so happened that the 
 political situation, especially as concerned the king- 
 ship, was such as to reduce to silence the only party 
 in the State who could have resisted the principle of 
 liberty. The old High Churchman, who believed in 
 the divine right of the king and the duty of passive 
 obedience, could not preach his doctrine in the face 
 of the Hanoverian succession, or apply it to a 
 sovereign who reigned by the will of the people and 
 not of right divine. And so for the first time in 
 English history since "the spacious days of great 
 Elizabeth," religion had ceased to be a civil concern, 
 and become the concern of the religious, a matter for 
 the reason and the conscience, for the mind and the 
 heart. And thus it was freely discussed, tested on 
 its own merits, argued for, argued against, tried by 
 logic, proved by evidence, dealt with as if it were of 
 all subjects the one most germane to the intellect, the 
 one thing absolutely common and accessible to all 
 men. And the result stands written broad upon the 
 face of the century : in a fair argument and on a free 
 field religion easily and completely won. 
 
 But the situation in France was exactly the con- 
 verse. In 1688 toleration began its reign with Dutch 
 William in England ; in 1685 Louis XIV. revoked 
 the Edict of Nantes, and began the reign of in- 
 tolerance. The Roman Church and the French 
 State were henceforward so bound together as to be 
 
68 CA THOLICISM 
 
 in a sense one body breathing fateful breath. There 
 was no greater enemy of civil freedom than the 
 Church ; no more vigilant foe of religious liberty than 
 the State. Each confirmed the other in the policy 
 that was most disastrous to its good. And so it 
 happened that the free-thinking spirit which had 
 returned from England incarnated in Voltaire, saw 
 that it could not teach religion without offending the 
 State ; and so it had to strike at the State in order to 
 get at the religion which had become the very soul 
 of the tyrannical sway. And there was no lack of 
 provocation to assault. In popular feeling, dislike of 
 Voltaire, the mocker, has hidden ^from us how much 
 there was to justify his mockery, and what really just 
 and great ends it was often used to serve. We forget 
 that he was no mere spirit who denied, but one who 
 strongly affirmed where affirmation was at once most 
 necessary and most dangerous. He who loves free- 
 dom ought never to forget the services Voltaire 
 rendered to the cause he loves. On behalf of Jean 
 Calas, and in the name of justice and truth, he fought 
 the whole collective bigotry of France, and prevailed. 
 He confronted a church that in the age of Louis the 
 Well-Beloved dared to persecute, even though so 
 many of her priests and princes had ceased to 
 believe ; and by his arguments, his scorn, his bold 
 mockery, he gained, almost single-handed, his 
 splendid victory. And here was the real reason 
 why in France reasonableness in religion or con- 
 structive religious thought never had a chance, or if 
 
AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 69 
 
 it had, never was able to use it. The tongue of the 
 church was tied, she had to defend the indefensible, 
 and so was silent ; while the assault was delivered 
 against the whole broad face of two flagrant offenders 
 whose alliance made them appear as one : a State 
 that, in its anxiety to repress a liberty which the 
 church feared, forgot its own people ; and a church 
 that, in its desire to sanction and support a State 
 which tried so hard to serve it, neglected its own 
 duties and was faithless to the very end of its being. 
 It was the civil independence of the question they 
 discussed that made English positive thought so 
 completely victorious ; it was the league of the 
 Roman Church and the autocratic State in France, 
 so mischievous to the good of both, so provocative 
 in both of evil, that contributed to their common and 
 disastrous overthrow. The policy which the church 
 either directed or approved was fatal to the faith its 
 infallibility had been invoked to define and defend. 
 
 3. And it is now as then ; it is Catholic countries 
 that show the most radical revolt of the intellect 
 from Religion, and a revolt not at one point, but at 
 all. In Belgium the conflict is going on under our 
 very eyes, political on the surface, religious beneath 
 it ; in Italy, where thought is most active, the claims 
 and dogmas of the church are handled most freely ; 
 even in Spain political aspirations are wedded to 
 ecclesiastical denials. There is no country in which 
 unbelief is so strong and so vindictive as in France, 
 so much a passion of hate, a fanaticism or zealotry 
 
70 CATHOLICISM 
 
 against, if not Religion, yet the church that claims 
 to be its authoritative vehicle and exponent. The 
 anti-clericals of the nineteenth century are more 
 extreme than the encyclopaedists of the eighteenth ; 
 the resolute and rough-handed antagonism of the 
 Senate and the workshop has superseded the fine 
 criticism of the study, and the delicate yet well-spiced 
 raillery of the salon. The very priesthood is not proof 
 against the negative spirit ; the new political ideal 
 steals the heart of a Lamennais from Rome, while 
 German criticism turns the most hopeful pupil of 
 Saint Sulpice into the freest and most famed critic of 
 the creative Person and period of Christianity. No 
 church has had such splendid opportunities as the 
 Catholic ; everything that the most perfect organiza- 
 tion and the complete control of rulers and their 
 agencies could do for her and the faith she carried, 
 has been done. And if she has yet allowed Free 
 Thought, so often in its worst and extremest forms, 
 to spring up all round her, it is evident that she of 
 all churches most needs a relevant and living apolo- 
 getic. She must reconcile the intellects that have 
 revolted from her, or lose them utterly ; and the 
 only way of reconciliation is the way of reason and 
 argument. Grant belief in the papal claims, and 
 authority and infallibility are powerful weapons. 
 Create doubt or denial of them, and they are but 
 empty words — the speech of exaggerated feebleness. 
 Where they can only speak their claims, they but 
 provoke to ridicule ; where these claims can appear 
 
AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 7 1 
 
 as political or social forces, they beget the revolu- 
 tionary and retributive fanaticism, the hate inspired 
 by fear, which is so distinctive of unbelief in the 
 Catholic countries. If, then, Catholicism is to win 
 the revolted intellect, it must use reasonable speech ; 
 and the more reasonable it is, the more irresistible 
 it will be. Protestantism frankly appeals to the 
 reason, and so is bound to persuade it ; Catholicism 
 must humbly lay aside its high claims, and convince 
 the reason before it can rule it. And so in either 
 case a rational apologetic is necessary, though in the 
 Catholic case, as there is so much more to prove, the 
 proof must be correspondingly great and commanding. 
 4. It will not, I hope, be supposed that there is 
 here any attempt at a tu quoque. It were an ex- 
 pedient fit only for a poor controversialist to excuse 
 the weakness of the Protestant churches by charg- 
 ing the Roman Catholic with impotence ; or to hide 
 the failure of the Catholic to hold or control her 
 peoples, by magnifying the feebleness of the Protes- 
 tant. What is really intended is to emphasize this 
 point : — the burden and responsibilities of the con- 
 flict with unbelief lie on all the churches, and no 
 one can say to the other, " the work is thine, not 
 mine " ; or, with a more petulant insolence, " it is mine, 
 and not thine." This duty, indeed, they have all on 
 occasion been forward to recognize, and we rejoice 
 to see men like Vives the Catholic, Pascal the Jansen- 
 ist, Grotius the Arminian, Leibnitz the Lutheran, 
 Butler the Anglican, Lardner the Presbyterian, 
 
72 CATHOLICISM 
 
 Schleiermacher the German Evangelical, and Martin- 
 eau the Unitarian, united in unconscious harmony 
 in doing for their several generations the same order 
 of work. Yet it is necessary to make a distinction : 
 an apology for Religion is not the same thing as an 
 apology for a church ; nay, more — the best apologies 
 for Religion have been in no respect apologies for 
 specific churches. But, while the distinction is clear, 
 a separation is not in every case possible. If the 
 church is held to be the embodiment of the Religion, 
 so necessary to it that the Religion were impossible 
 without it, then the only complete and sufficient 
 apology for the Religion is an apology for the church. 
 And this is what we have a right to expect from 
 Roman Catholicism ; what is an insufficient vindi- 
 cation of its claims as a church is, from its own 
 point of view, an inadequate defence of the Christian 
 Religion. For to the Catholic his church is his 
 religion ; the two are not distinct and separable, 
 but one and indivisible ; and therefore the apology 
 which leaves the church unjustified leaves the Re- 
 ligion altogether condemned. That is a grave aspect 
 of the matter, burdening Roman Catholicism and 
 the Catholic with the heaviest responsibility church 
 or man could bear ; and it is the aspect which gives 
 significance to the question here proposed for dis- 
 cussion, viz., whether Catholic thought in England 
 has given such an interpretation and defence of 
 Religion as to make it more true and intelligible 
 and real to critical and perplexed and doubting minds, 
 
AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 73 
 
 § IV. The Anglo- Catholic Movement and Religion 
 in England 
 I. Catholicism in England cannot be discussed 
 apart from that Anglo-Catholic movement which 
 did so much to revive it. As to the ecclesiastico- 
 religious effects of that movement, there is no need 
 for discussion. These are on all sides visible 
 enough. Its ideal of worship has modified the 
 practice of all the churches, even of those most 
 hostile to its ideal of Religion. The religious spirit 
 of England is, in all its sections and varieties, sweeter 
 to-day than it was forty years ago, more open to the 
 ministries of art and the graciousness of order, 
 possessed of a larger sense of " the community of 
 the saints," the kinship and continuity of the 
 Christian society in all ages. Even Scotland has 
 been touched with a strange softness, Presbyterian 
 worship has grown less bald, organs and liturgies 
 have found a home in the land and church of Knox, 
 and some of the more susceptible sons of the 
 Covenant have been visited by the ideal of a Church 
 at once British and Catholic, where prelate and 
 presbyter should dwell together in unity. On the 
 other hand, it must be confessed that something of 
 the old sterner Puritan conscience against priest- 
 hoods and all their symbols and ways, has been 
 evoked ; and in a sense not true of any time between 
 now and the period of Laud, two ideals of Religion, 
 each the radical contradiction of the other, stand 
 face to face in England, and contend under the 
 
74 CATHOLICISM 
 
 varied masks supplied by our theological, ecclesiastical, 
 and even political controversies. The one ideal is 
 sensuous and sacerdotal, and seeks, by the way it 
 construes and emphasizes the idea of the Church, 
 to secularize the State, with all our daily activities 
 and occupations ; the other ideal is spiritual and 
 ethical, and seeks, by the way it construes and 
 emphasizes the idea of Religion, to transform and 
 transfigure the State, to sanctify all that belongs to 
 the common life of man. The fundamental question 
 is, whether an organized church which is, alike in 
 history and administration, not in the civil but in 
 the ecclesiastical sense, a political institution, — or a 
 spiritual faith, which is in its nature a regenerative 
 and regnant moral energy for the whole man, is to 
 prevail. And the more obvious this question becomes, 
 the more the issues are simplified, and men are 
 forced to determine whether they are to be ruled by 
 a church or governed by a Religion. The move- 
 ment which has made or is making our people 
 conscious of this vital issue, has rendered an extra- 
 ordinary service to the men and churches of to-day. 
 2. But the most remarkable ecclesiastico-religious 
 results achieved by Anglo-Catholicism are those 
 to be found within the two churches chiefly con- 
 cerned, the Anglican and the Roman. Though so 
 many of the men who inaugurated and represented 
 the movement left the English church, yet the spirit 
 they had created, and many of the men they had 
 inspired, remained within her. And the Anglo- 
 
AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 75 
 
 Catholic ideal has continued to live and work with- 
 in her like a regenerative spirit, has filled all her 
 sons, even the most resistant, with new ambitions, 
 has both narrowed and broadened her affections and 
 aims, has changed old antipathies into new sym- 
 pathies, has made her devouter in worship and more 
 devoted alike in her practical action and ideal ends. 
 Rome is judged with more perfect charity. Dissenters 
 are judged with more rigorous severity. Unity is 
 loved, and historical continuity coveted, as the con- 
 dition and channel of the most potent and needed 
 graces. The freedom and independence of the 
 church has become a watchword, Erastianism a 
 hated and unholy thing. The Sovereignty of the 
 Redeemer has become a living faith, and the symbols 
 that speak of His presence and work and activity 
 are invested with a solemn and sacramental and 
 even sacrificial significance ; while the acts that re- 
 cognize His Deity and express man's devotion, are 
 performed with a new sense of awe and reverence. 
 The worship has grown at once statelier and more 
 expressive ; men have become more conscious of its 
 beauty and its power, have come to feel how com- 
 pletely it can articulate their needs, satisfy and 
 uplift their souls, bring them into the company of the 
 saintly dead and into communion "with the Eternal. 
 The English church has a deeper sense of sin and 
 a greater love for sinners, and seeks to use her 
 symbolism and her service to bring Christ and His 
 salvation nearer to the hearts and consciences of 
 
76 CATHOLICISM 
 
 men. The Catholic ideal may be to many sensuous, 
 poor through the very wealth of its symbolism, a 
 materialized and so depraved translation of the idea 
 of the Kingdom, which must ever remain " of 
 Heaven," that it may reign over earth ; but, what- 
 ever it may be to such, no one can deny that it has 
 been to the church of England a spirit of life and 
 energy. It is, especially when the historical grounds 
 on which it rests are considered, a splendid example 
 of the power of faith, and of the creative and trans- 
 figurative force of the religious imagination. From 
 this point of view it has, indeed, a most pathetic 
 side ; but its pathos need not blind us to the wonder- 
 ful things it has accomplished, though it may make 
 us wonder at the power which has accomplished 
 them. Yet we need not wonder, for of old God 
 chose the things that were not, to bring to nought 
 the things that were. 
 
 3. And on Catholicism itself the Anglo-Catholic 
 movement has acted no less potently. It has 
 changed its spirit and attitude to the English people, 
 and the English people's to it : has indeed, in a sense 
 unknown since the Reformation, made Roman 
 Catholicism English. Catholic emancipation supplied 
 one of the conditions of the change, but the Oxford 
 movement, and its issues, accomplished it. What 
 Cardinal Newman describes as " the Protestant view 
 of the Catholic Church" is an example of the remark- 
 able limitation of his genius, his inability to under- 
 stand where he does not sympathize. The " view," 
 
AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 77 
 
 though, no doubt, veraciously reminiscent, is but a 
 series of prejudices, all the more vulgar that they 
 were those of cultured men. What the true view is 
 does not here concern us ; only this : the English 
 view was very much what the course of history had 
 made it. Catholicism had been anti-English : in its 
 interests foreign potentates had threatened England, 
 and had tried to execute their threats ; Catholics had 
 plotted against Elizabeth, and against the first James ; 
 they had fought for absolutism under his son, had 
 stood by the later Stuarts, and had intrigued for their 
 return. Catholicism, in countries where the royal 
 might threaten the papal supremacy, had, by the 
 mouth of men like Suarez and Mariana, preached 
 strong doctrines as to the duties of kings and the 
 rights of peoples. But in the later seventeenth century 
 in England — where it had everything to hope from the 
 prince, and nothing from the people — its loyalty was 
 to the ruler, who promised or seemed to promise to 
 govern in its interests, not to the law or to the ruled. 
 Indeed, nothing is so indicative of the blindness which 
 has happened to the Roman church — and it is but a 
 form of the fatal intellectual incompetence which falls 
 upon all communities that live by an over-central- 
 ized sovereignty — as its fatuous faith in reigning 
 authorities, and its inability to understand and 
 control that on which all authority must ultimately 
 rest, viz., the mind and heart and will of the people. 
 To this there may be the proverbial exception, 
 which proves the rule ; but as to the fact of the rule, 
 
78 CATHOLICISM 
 
 the student of modern history will be the last person 
 to doubt. And largely because of this rule the 
 English Catholics lived as aliens in the land, under 
 heavy civil disabilities, with the home of their 
 religious interest and the source of their religious 
 inspiration elsewhere. Time brought amelioration ; 
 Spain fell, and could launch no second Armada, 
 raise no army England need fear ; the Stuarts were 
 expelled, and France was soon too completely broken 
 to have either the will or the power to interfere on 
 their behalf Freed from fear of invasion or rebellion, 
 the attitude of England changed. She became 
 tolerant, came to understand what civil and religious 
 liberty meant, celebrated — moved in great measure by 
 the persuasion of the men most radically opposed 
 to Catholicism — one memorable moment in her 
 process of learning by " Catholic Emancipation." 
 Liberty allowed a completer incorporation with the 
 English people, a new baptism in the English spirit, a 
 healthier, because a freer, profession of faith. And 
 this had been prepared for from within. The saintly 
 Challoner and the brave Milner had quickened 
 Catholic religious zeal ; Lingard, with notable erudi- 
 tion and independence, had made English history its 
 apology ; and Cardinal Wiseman improved the new 
 day that had dawned by an apologetic of rare skill 
 and eloquence. But the foreign taint still clung to 
 Catholicism ; it wanted English character and breed- 
 ing, national traditions and aspirations. Even 
 Wiseman was but an Italian priest, a professor from 
 
AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 79 
 
 Rome, Irish by descent, Spanish by birth. What it 
 wanted the Oxford movement gave, a distinctively 
 English quality and aspect. The men carried over 
 to Rome had received the most typical English 
 education, their leader was the greatest living master 
 of the English tongue. They had been nursed in 
 Anglican traditions, were, some of them, learned 
 Anglican divines, who could not forget their learning 
 or change their blood and breeding with their church, 
 or cancel and cast out the ancient inheritance they 
 had so long possessed and loved. They were 
 Catholics of an altogether new type ; their memories 
 and instincts were not of a persecuted sect, hated 
 and alien in England, but of a church proudly and 
 consciously English ; the superstructure of their faith 
 and life might be Roman, but the basis was Anglican, 
 and the superstructure had to be accommodated to the 
 basis, not the basis to the superstructure. Cardinal 
 Newman does not build on Thomas Aquinas or 
 Bellarmine or Bossuet ; they only supply the but- 
 tresses and pillars, the arches and gargoyles of his 
 faith : his fundamental principles are those of Butler ; 
 he reasons when he is gravest, fullest of conviction 
 and most anxious to convince, in the methods and on 
 the premisses of the Analogy. For polemical purposes 
 he is all the better a Catholic for having been an 
 Anglican ; and, indeed, in a very real sense, he did 
 not cease to be an Anglican when he became a 
 Roman Catholic. And it is this persistence of the 
 primitive type that has been the strength of the 
 
80 CATHOLICISM 
 
 derivative. Though the men went to Rome, they yet 
 remained English ; the principles that carried them 
 had been educed and developed within the Anglican 
 church and in its interests ; and so men and princi- 
 ples alike tended to naturalize Catholicism on the 
 one hand, and to beget a patient and respectful 
 hearing for it on the other. People wished to believe 
 that men they admired and loved had acted with 
 reason and had accepted what was reasonable ; the 
 old attitude to Romanism ceased, and a public, well 
 disposed for conviction, invited the best efforts of men 
 so well able to convince. 
 
 § V. Whether the Catholic Apology was equal 
 to the Need 
 
 I. Now, whether Catholicism has profited by this 
 extraordinary change, and the gains that caused it, 
 as much as she hoped to do, or as she might and even 
 ought to have done, or whether her once high hopes 
 have been dashed with bitterest disappointment, is 
 not a matter that concerns us. But here is a matter 
 that does — the movement that made Religion more 
 real and living to a large number of cultivated men 
 did a true interpretative and so apologetic work. It 
 is a blunder of the worst kind to imagine that any 
 one form of Christianity can be served by any other 
 being made ridiculous. It belongs to the madness 
 of the sectary, whether Catholic or anti-Catholic, to 
 believe that his own system grows more sane as 
 others are made to seem less rational. But the 
 
AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAIIH 81 
 
 Protestant ought to be as pleased to discover the 
 reason in Catholicism, as the Catholic to find the 
 truth in Protestantism ; what makes either ridiculous 
 makes the other less credible. For if there is differ- 
 ence there is also agreement ; and while the difference 
 is in man's relation to the truth, the agreement is in 
 the most cardinal of the truths that stand related 
 to man. If Christ lives within Catholicism, He ought 
 to seem the more wonderful, and it the less odious to 
 the Protestant ; if within Protestantism, He ought to 
 appear the more gracious, and it the less void of 
 grace and truth to the Catholic. Unmeasured speech 
 is either insincere or unveracious ; and the worst 
 unveracity is the one that denies good to be where 
 both good and God are. Now, the movement that 
 made many men better Christians by making them 
 Catholics, did a good deed for Religion. By showing 
 that there was reason in Catholicism it made history 
 more reasonable ; it made, too, the honesty, saintliness, 
 intellectual integrity and thoroughness of many 
 schoolmen and thinkers more intelligible, and evoked 
 the charity that dared to love and admire where 
 religious and intellectual differences were deepest. 
 There were, indeed, more irenical influences in the 
 movement than the men who conducted it either 
 imagined or desired. 
 
 2. But when we have said all that can be justly 
 or even generously said in praise of the ecclesi- 
 astico-religious effects of this movement, have we 
 said enough? England had some claim on the 
 
 6 
 
82 CA THOLICISM 
 
 men who led it, and so had the Christian Re- 
 ligion. England had done something for the men, 
 had borne, nursed, reared, educated them ; had en- 
 dowed them with her best learning, the wealth 
 of her choicest teachers, the noble inheritance of 
 her traditions and aspirations. The Christian Re- 
 ligion had quickened and cultivated them, had in- 
 spired them with high faith and lofty ideals, had 
 given them a splendid opportunity for service and 
 equal ability to serve. The land and the faith that 
 had so entreated them, had a right to expect from 
 them a correspondent measure of help. They stood 
 at the breaking of a day that dawned with abun- 
 dant promise of new life ; yet with the certainty of 
 all the difficulties new life ever encounters, and must 
 overcome or die. The century of hard rationalism 
 was ended ; its Deism, Free Thought, Encyclopaed- 
 ism. Materialized Religion, and Secularized Church 
 had perished in revolution ; and in revolution, and 
 through it, the spirit of the new age had been born. 
 In philosophy a constructive, though critical, Tran- 
 scendentalism replaced the subtle and barren Em- 
 piricism that by the mouth of the sceptic Hume had 
 confessed that it knew not what man or nature 
 was, whence they had come or whither they tended. 
 In literature the genius of Goethe had created an 
 ideal of culture that seemed higher and completer 
 than the ideal of religion. Byron had assailed the 
 old moral and social conventionalisms, magnifying 
 independence of them into, if not the chief virtue, 
 
AMD THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 83 
 
 yet the best note of the nobler manhood. Shelley 
 had given clear and musical voice to the passion for 
 freedom and hatred of the hoary despotisms that 
 had hindered the progress and marred the happi- 
 ness of man. Wordsworth had made nature radiant 
 with the light of indwelling spirit ; Scott had evolved 
 from the past visions of chivalry and nobleness to 
 rebuke, to cheer, and to inspire the present ; Cole- 
 ridge had made the speculative reason and the crea- 
 tive imagination become as sisters ministrant to faith ; 
 everywhere a brighter, more genial and reasonable 
 spirit possessed man. In politics the old dynastic 
 and despotic ambitions had fallen before the up- 
 risen peoples ; they were possessed by a new sense 
 of brotherhood, a passion for ordered freedom, for 
 justice, for the reign of the law that would spoil 
 oppression, secure to each his rights, and require 
 from all their duties. In such an hour of regenera- 
 tion and the activity of the regenerated, Religion 
 could not be allowed to escape change ; the day 
 of humdrum respectability was over. It was not 
 enough that the church should stand by the throne, 
 indifferent to the character of him who filled it ; it 
 must feel the new spirit, and either open its heart 
 to it or by shutting the door against it seal its own 
 doom. And when the new spirit knocked at the 
 door of the English church, her then most potent 
 and active sons knew not what better thing to 
 do than to evoke an ancient ecclesiastical ideal to 
 answer and withstand it. And it was out of this 
 
84 CATHOLICISM 
 
 appeal to a tried and vanquished past against a 
 living present, that the Anglo-Catholic movement 
 was born. It was less the child of a great love than 
 of a great hate, hatred of what its spokesman and 
 founder called " Liberalism." What he so called he 
 never understood ; his hatred was too absolute to 
 allow him to get near enough to see it as it was. 
 He was a poet, and had the poet's genius and 
 passion ; where he did not love he could not under- 
 stand ; what he hated he held before his imagina- 
 tion, and took a sort of Dantesque pleasure in 
 making it hideous enough to justify his hate. This 
 abhorred " Liberalism " might have had a threaten- 
 ing front to mole-eyed prerogative and privilege ; 
 but the eye of the spiritual ought to have read its 
 heart, seen the probabilities of danger, but the in- 
 finite possibilities of good — its hatred of wrong, its 
 love of justice, its desire for sweeter manners, purer 
 laws, its purpose to create a wealthier, happier and 
 freer state. And the spirit that so discerned would 
 have helped by bringing Religion into " Liberalism " 
 to make " Liberalism " religious. But John Henry 
 Newman saw nothing of the enthusiasm of righteous- 
 ness and humanity that was in its heart ; saw only 
 its superficial antagonisms, to political injustice, to 
 ecclesiastical privilege, to the venerable but mischie- 
 vous, because richly endowed, inutilities of Church 
 and State ; and so he faced it as if it were the very 
 demon of revolution, the fraudulent disguise of Athe- 
 ism and impiety. To counteract it he did not fall 
 
AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 85 
 
 back on the Christianity of Christ — that was too 
 closely allied to the thing he hated ; but he tried 
 to recall the lost ideal of an authoritative church, 
 the teacher, interpreter, and embodiment of Religion. 
 His bulwark against " Liberalism " was authority ; 
 the organized illiberalism of a body ecclesiastical. 
 The ghost of a mediaeval church was evoked to 
 exorcise the resurgent spirit of Christ in man. 
 
 That was a most calamitous choice, the loss of a 
 golden opportunity for the highest service. New- 
 man, though not the most gifted religious teacher 
 of the century, had in him above any man of his 
 day the quickening spirit, the power to search the 
 conscience, to rouse the heart, to fire the imagina- 
 tion, to move the will. He was without the specu- 
 lative genius of Coleridge ; the swift insight that 
 could read the heart of a mystery ; the mental hero- 
 ism that could explore every part of an opposed 
 system ; the chivalry that could entreat it nobly ; the 
 synthetic mind that could resist the fascination of 
 false antitheses and antagonisms ; the constructive 
 intellect that could bring into order and unity ele- 
 ments that seemed to hasty and shallow thinkers 
 chaotic and hostile. But he had, in a far more emi- 
 nent degree, the qualities that teach and persuade 
 men ; a concentration of purpose ; an intensity, even 
 as it were a singleness, of conviction'; a moral passion, 
 a prophetic fervour, which yet clothed itself in the 
 most graceful speech ; a strength and skill of spiritual 
 inquisition or analysis, enabling him to reach the 
 
86 CATHOLICISM 
 
 inmost recesses of the heart and probe the sensitive 
 secrets of the conscience ; a humour now grim and 
 fierce, now playful and tender ; an imagination that 
 often dominated, yet always served his intellect, and 
 was most restrained when most indulged, its pic- 
 tures but making his meaning more clear and dis- 
 tinct. He had not the large charity of Maurice, the 
 power to read the system through the man and 
 make the man illustrate the system, finding the 
 good in both. Indeed, especially in his early days, 
 he could not differ without disliking : dissent from 
 a man's opinions rose almost into personal contempt 
 or even hate of the man. Nor had he the massive 
 and human-hearted manhood of Arnold, who ever 
 loved persons and humanity more than systems and 
 things ; while of Newman it may be said, he valued 
 persons only as they were the representatives of sys- 
 tems and typical of things. Nor had he Whately's 
 sober integrity of mind, the English sagacity that 
 liked to look things straight in the face and see them 
 as they were. But he had as none of these had, as 
 no man in this century has had, command over the 
 English people through his command over the Eng- 
 lish tongue ; the enthusiasm of a reformer who be- 
 lieved in the absolute sufficiency of the reform he 
 was conducting; who lived, thought, spoke like a 
 man who had a mission ; and whose mission it was 
 to reclaim the people of England for their church 
 and their God. And the gift he had he could not 
 exercise without moving men ; they rallied to him 
 
AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 87 
 
 or recoiled from him ; his speech made disciples, 
 agitated his church, filled it with strong hopes and 
 strange fears, raised high expectations at Rome, and 
 made England resound with the noise and confusion 
 of long silent controversies. When we look into 
 those disturbed times, the thing that most strikes 
 and abides with us is, the presence and personality 
 of the man that moved them. 
 
 3. We may, then, represent the matter thus : — 
 the formative period of Newman's life, 1 826-1 833, 
 and the decade that followed, may be described as 
 a period during which men were waiting for a rele- 
 vant constructive interpretation of the Religion of 
 Christ. The revolutionary forces were spent, con- 
 structive forces were at work in every region of 
 thought and life ; and they needed but the electric 
 touch of a great religious ideal to be unified and 
 made ministrant to Religion. The old monarchical 
 and oligarchical theories having perished, the Philo- 
 sophical Radicals were seeking, with but poor suc- 
 cess, a new basis for politics, that they might 
 determine what was the chief good'; and new -methods 
 in legislation, that they might promote and secure 
 the greatest happiness of the greatest number. John 
 Stuart Mill had just escaped from the dogmatic Em- 
 piricism of his father ; had been spiritually awakened 
 by the poetry of Wordsworth and the philosophy of 
 Coleridge ; and was looking about for a faith by 
 which to order his life. Charles Darwin was just 
 beginning to watch the methods of nature and to 
 
f 
 
 88 CATHOLICISM 
 
 learn how to interpret her ; and while Newman was 
 making verses and gathering impulses in the Medi- 
 terranean, he was away in the Beagle exploring many 
 seas and lands. In the "loneliest nook in Britain," 
 under the shadow of hills and within sight of moor- 
 lands consecrated by the heroism and martyrdoms 
 of his Covenanting forefathers, Thomas Carlyle was 
 doing his strenuous best to wed the thoughts that had 
 come to him from German literature and philosophy, 
 with the substance and spirit of his ancestral faith ; 
 the effort taking visible shape in the egoistic ideal- 
 ism of his Sartor Resartus, and leading him to look 
 into man and his recent history with the eyes that 
 were to see in the French Revolution the tragedy 
 of retribution and righteousness. Transcendental 
 Idealism was in full career in Germany ; Hegel and 
 Schleiermacher were lecturing in Berlin, the one ap- 
 plying his philosophy to the explication of religion 
 and history, the other his criticism to the documents, 
 facts, and doctrines of the Christian faith ; while in 
 Tubingen, Strauss was combining and developing 
 the two, with results that were to break upon the 
 alarmed world in a certain Leben Jesu. In France, 
 Saint Simon had developed his Nouveau Christian- 
 isme^ pleading that Religion might be more an 
 energy directing all " social forces towards the moral 
 and physical amelioration of the class which is at 
 once the most numerous and the most poor " : and 
 Comte had begun the Cours de Philosophie Positive^ 
 explaining how the theological and metaphysical 
 
AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 89 
 
 states had been passed, and the final and positive 
 state had come ; and what were the new ideas of 
 Society, of God, and of ReHgion on which it was 
 to rest. Everywhere the struggle was towards posi- 
 tive ideas, constructive ideals, such an interpretation 
 of man's nature, history, and universe, as would 
 tend to a more perfect organization of society and 
 a better ordering of life. It was indeed a splendid 
 moment for an Apologist built after the manner of 
 Augustine, with his insight into the actualities of 
 the present and the possibilities of the future, with 
 his belief in God and truth, the infinite adaptability 
 and comprehensiveness, imperial authority and per- 
 vasive spirit of Religion. He would have seized 
 the new ideas, translated them into their Christian 
 equivalents, realizing, elevating, vivifying, organizing 
 them by the act of translation. He would have 
 found that every attempt to find law and order in 
 nature, to discover method and progress in creation, 
 without leap or gap, violence or interference, whether 
 with Hegel, by the evolution of the transcendental 
 idea, or, what was indeed only the empirical side of 
 the same, with Darwin, by the gradation and blend- 
 ing of genera and species, — was no attempt to expel 
 God from nature, but only to make nature more 
 perfectly express Him, and be more wholly His. He 
 would have welcomed every endeavour to read anew 
 the past of man, to find law in it, to discover the 
 affinities of thought and custom and belief— as evi- 
 dence that men were at last awakening to the truth 
 
90 CATHOLICISM 
 
 that the race was a vast whole, a mighty organism, 
 whose parts lived in and through each other, and were 
 bound to live each for the other and all for the whole ; 
 and an organism which lived and grew not simply 
 by intercourse and conflict with its environment, but 
 under the reign and for the ends of a universal 
 Reason, an omnipresent Providence. He would have 
 seen in the ambition for freedom ; for more and more 
 equitably distributed wealth ; for a more perfect state, 
 a society where the hated inequalities of the past had 
 ceased, and a true human brotherhood was realized — 
 an ambition inspired by Christ, the direct fruit of His 
 humane and beneficent spirit. And he would have 
 hailed the love, which was even becoming a worship 
 of humanity, as proof that the first principles of 
 " the kingdom of God " were at last beginning to be 
 understood. And this relation to the new thought 
 would have determined his apology. It would not 
 have invoked the authority of a church that, what- 
 ever its claims, had proved its impotence by the 
 inexorable process of history in the indubitable 
 language of fact ; but it would have said : — " This 
 awakening is of God, and must be accepted as His, 
 not dealt with as if it were the devil's. These new 
 ideas of order in nature and history, of social justice 
 and human rights, those ambitions for a larger good 
 which * Liberalism ' so ill expresses, and Socialism 
 so badly embodies and fails to realize — are all of 
 Christ ; they mean that men are getting ready to 
 understand the idea of His Kingdom. It compre- 
 
AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 9 1 
 
 hends, for it created these new ideas ; into its lan- 
 guage they must be translated, that they may find 
 their most perfect forms, live in the organism and 
 possess the energy that will enable them to do their 
 work. The progress of man and the Church of God 
 are two kindred things ; all true knowledge is know- 
 ledge of truth, and truth is holy ; to know it is to 
 be made better, more like what God meant man to 
 be. Let knowledge grow — whatever truth science dis- 
 covers religion blesses and appropriates ; let research, 
 whether as physical investigation or historical criticism, 
 pursue her quest ; for love of truth is love of God, and 
 the more we find of it, the more we know of Him." 
 
 4. What has just been said is meant to indicate 
 what would have been the attitude of a really con- 
 structive Christian thinker in face of the new and 
 nascent thought. He would have recognized as 
 Christian, and claimed for Christianity, the new 
 spirit, with all its nobler truths, ideals, aims. What 
 belongs of right to the Christian Religion ought to 
 be incorporated with it ; what is so incorporated 
 can never become a facile and deadly weapon in the 
 hands of the enemy. But Newman's attitude was 
 precisely the opposite. Change was in the air; he 
 felt it, feared it, hated it. He idealized the past, he 
 disliked the present, and he trembled for the future. 
 His only hope was in a return to the past, and to 
 a past which had never existed save in the imagination 
 of the romancer. What he hated and resisted he 
 did not take the trouble to understand. He was in 
 
92 CA THOLICISM 
 
 this respect a conspicuous contrast to his friends, 
 Hugh James Rose and Edward Bouverie Pusey, 
 especially the latter, who, in his memorable, though, 
 unhappily, afterwards recalled reply to the famous 
 sermons of the former against German Rationalism, 
 showed thorough knowledge of the older Continental 
 criticism, — though, as it turned out, the knowledge 
 was not his own, — as well as the chivalry that could 
 dare to speak the truth concerning it. But one 
 seeks in vain in Newman's early writings — poems, 
 essays, articles, pamphlets, tracts — for any sign or 
 phrase indicative of real comprehension of the forces 
 he opposed. He does not comprehend their real 
 nature or drift ; what reasons they have for their 
 being, what good they have in them, what truth ; 
 what wrongs to redress, what rights to achieve : he 
 only feels that they are inimical to his ideals. There 
 is no evidence that he ever tried to place himself 
 in the position of the philosophical radical, or the 
 rational critic, or the constructive socialist, or the 
 absolute idealist ; and look at his and their questions 
 through their eyes and from their standpoint. He 
 hated them and their works too utterly to attempt 
 to do so — perhaps he was haunted by a great doubt 
 as to what might happen if he did ; but the result 
 was, he resisted he knew not what, and knew not 
 how to resist it. As a simple matter of fact, he 
 resisted it in the least effectual way. He emphasized 
 the church idea, the historical continuity, sanctity, 
 authority, rights, prerogatives and powers of the 
 
AND THE APOLOGY FOR THE FAITH 93 
 
 organized society or body which called itself here 
 the Anglican, there the Catholic church. The idea 
 grew on him ; the more he claimed for the church, 
 the more he had to claim ; the more he set it in 
 opposition to the movement and tendencies of living 
 thought, the more absolute and divine he had to 
 make its authority. The logic of the situation was 
 inexorable, — if the church alone could save man 
 from the spirit embodied in " Liberalism," then it 
 must be a divine and infallible church, the vicar 
 and voice of God on earth. But the logic of the 
 situation was one, and the logic of history another 
 and tragically different. In the past Catholic au- 
 thority had bent like the rush in the river before 
 the stream and tendency of thought ; if it had had 
 divine rights it had been without divine wisdom ; 
 men and countries it had owned, it had been un- 
 able to hold ; and for centuries the noblest life, 
 the best minds, the highest and purest literatures of 
 Europe had stood outside its pale. And what had 
 been, was to be. Newman went to Rome, and car- 
 ried with him, or drew after him, men who accepted 
 his principles ; but the " Liberalism " he hated went 
 its way, all the mightier and more victorious for the 
 kind of barrier he had tried to build against it. 
 He succeeded wonderfully in making Roman Catho- 
 lics of Anglicans ; but he failed in the apologetic that 
 saves the infidel, and baptizes the spirit of a rational 
 and revolutionary age into the faith of Christ. 
 February^ 1885. 
 
Ill 
 
 CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 
 
 THE Catholic Revival ought not to be conceived 
 as a mere English or insular movement : so 
 far as English, it was rather like a wave which reached 
 our shores from a larger continental flood. It took 
 indeed, here, a form and character of its own ; but 
 it would be a grave mistake to regard it as isolated, 
 or as simply the creation of a few able and resolute 
 men. That was what it seemed to many contem- 
 porary critics, but it was nothing so accidental and 
 arbitrary. The men who led it were, in a sense, 
 spokesmen of a common intellectual and religious 
 tendency. The revival they effected was part of the 
 general European reaction against the Illumination 
 and the Revolution. The reaction was not simple 
 but complex, at once religious, intellectual and 
 political ; a recoil of the conservative spirit from the 
 new ideals that had been so suddenly translated into 
 portentous realities. And it was marked everywhere 
 by the same hatred of the eighteenth century and all 
 its works, embodied everywhere the same hopes and 
 fears, expressed the same motives and ends. On the 
 
 84 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 95 
 
 one side stood the revolutionary theses, the rights of 
 reason and of man, the watchwords " liberty, equality, 
 fraternity " ; and these were construed not in their 
 high ideal sense, but through the accidents and 
 atrocities, the terror and ruin that had attended the 
 attempt at realization. On the other side the 
 reaction emphasized its own antitheses — the rights 
 of the community before those of the individual ; 
 the rights of God and of the sovereigns, spiritual and 
 civil, He had appointed, above those of the reason and 
 the peoples ; authority as the only sufficient basis 
 of order ; and order as the condition necessary to 
 the highest common good. But not satisfied with 
 opposing antitheses to theses, it became concrete 
 and practical ; confronted the recent revolutionary 
 frenzy, its passion for iconoclasm and violent 
 change, with an idealized mediaeval history ; at- 
 tempted to resuscitate and realize its ideals ; and 
 in order to this, invested the church — which was 
 its most splendid and persistent creation — with the 
 authority that was held to be alone able to revive 
 religion and create order, curb and turn back the 
 loosened and lawless forces which had achieved 
 the revolt. This radical contradiction, ideal and 
 historical, seemed at once the surest and the most 
 direct way to victory ; but to build a dam across a 
 river is not to arrest the gathering or change the 
 course of its waters, as the men who securely pitch 
 their tents in the shelter of the dam will be the first 
 to experience. 
 
96 CATHOLICISM 
 
 § I. The Catholic Revival as the Counter-Revolution. 
 
 The Catholic revival was the principal phase or 
 feature of this reaction, and the literature that was 
 its most operative factor may be described as the 
 literature of the new Catholic Apologetic.^ Our 
 reference to its distinctive principles and work must 
 be brief. 
 
 I. The reaction was a complex movement, at once 
 literary, political, religious. In literature it appeared 
 as Romanticism, in politics as .legitimate and theo- 
 cratic theory, in religion as Ultramontanism. These 
 three were but different phases or expressions of the 
 one spirit ; and they may be said to represent the 
 organization of the more conservative instincts 
 against the new agencies of progress and change. 
 The oneness of the spirit is evident from the ease 
 with which its phases melted or passed into each 
 other. Romanticism was a revolt against the reign 
 
 ' What is here described as the literature of the new Catholic 
 Apologetic, may be held as represented by the following : — 
 Joseph de Maistre : LEglise Gallicane (Ed. 1882), Les Soirees 
 de Saint Petersbourg (Ed. 1874), Du Pape (Ed. 1819). De 
 Bonald : Th^orie du Pouvoir Politique et Religieux dans 
 la Societd Civile^ La Legislation Pritnitive (Ed. 18 19). 
 Chateaubriand : Genie du Christianisme (Ed. 1802). Lamen- 
 nais : Essai sur V hidifference en Matiere de Religion (Ed. 
 1859). This literature may be said to be devoted to the 
 exposition of the function of Catholicism in an age of revolution, 
 and so represents what we have termed the new Apologetic. 
 Good examples of the older are :— Houteville : La Religion 
 Chret. prouve'e par les fails (1740). 3 vols. Bergier : Traits 
 His tori que et Doginalique de la Vraie Religion (1780). 12 vols. 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 97 
 
 of the classical and rational spirit In literature, with 
 its intense individualism, its severe sense of justice 
 and of personal rights. The Romantic movement 
 rose outside Catholicism, was indeed German in its 
 origin and had its source in the strenuous Protestant 
 soul of Herder ; but it received full development at 
 the hands of men like the Schlegels, Tieck, and 
 Novalis, who loved the realm of the imagination, 
 and hated the rationalism that had expelled miracle 
 from nature, and mystery from man, making the 
 universe the home of prosaic commonplace. They 
 disliked the cold classicism of Goethe and even the 
 warmer humanism of Schiller ; and said : " Poetry 
 and religion are one. Man needs an imagination to 
 interpret the universe, and he is happy only as he 
 has a universe peopled by it and for it. These three 
 — poetry, religion and imagination — are one, and are 
 never found singly. When man has most religion 
 he has also most poetry and is fullest of imagination ; 
 and the times when he had these three divine graces 
 in the highest degree were the mediaeval." And so 
 they glorified these times, edited their ballads and 
 romances, praised their ideal of life and duty, their 
 bravery, courtesy, devotion ; their indifference to the 
 market and the exchange, their loyalty to beauty 
 and honour and religion, their glorious Gothic archi- 
 tecture, with the faith it at once embodied, illustrated 
 and made illustrious. Admiration for the past, 
 though it was a past that was a pure creature of 
 the imagination, easily became belief in the church 
 
 7 
 
9^ CATHOLICISM 
 
 that claimed it as its own ; and so Romanticism in 
 men like Stolberg, Friedrich Schlegel, and Werner, 
 passed by a natural gradation into Catholicism. 
 
 The reaction in politics was conducted in a still 
 more courageous and thorough spirit, for it was 
 directly polemical, a guerre a outrance. It was as 
 specifically French, or, let us say, Latin, in origin 
 and form, in atmosphere and purpose, as Romanticism 
 had been German. Authority must be made divine 
 if the rights of man were to be denied and his reason 
 subdued and governed ; but the dynastic idea had 
 been too rudely broken to be capable of again stand- 
 ing up, and in its own name claiming divine authority. 
 Its hour of weakness was the church's opportunity ; 
 it alone had braved the storm, it had been shaken 
 but it had stood, manifestly, not in its own strength, 
 but in God's. In the lurid light of the anarchy Rome 
 was seen to have a mission ; as the seat and home of 
 supreme authority, in her ancient role of the Eternal 
 City, universal, immutable, infallible, she could stand 
 forward as the saviour of society, now gone or going 
 to destruction for want of its most Christian kings. 
 She was the church God had founded, had super- 
 naturally endowed and guided, had made the sole 
 bearer and teacher of His truth, and had graced and 
 crowned with an Infallible Head. Here was an 
 authority so awful, so august, and so inviolable as 
 to be alone able to end the conflict of rival rights, 
 and restore order by enforcing the one universal duty 
 — obedience. If divine authority was to rule in the 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 99 
 
 State, it must be got through the church. Round 
 her, therefore, the broken fragments of the ancient 
 order crystallized ; to her the resolute spirits that 
 headed the counter-revolution rallied with sure pre- 
 science of her power, ideal and actual ; and called 
 upon the whole army of her supernatural claims and 
 beliefs and sanctions for help in the new crusade. 
 Joseph de Maistre formulated his hierocratic doctrine, 
 making the Papal at once guarantee and condition 
 the royal power. De Bonald wove the political into 
 the religious revelation, ascribing sole sovereignty to 
 God, but building upon it the Pope's, and upon his 
 the king's. Chateaubriand described Christian Rome 
 as being for the modern what Pagan Rome had 
 been for the ancient world — the universal bond of 
 nations, instructing in duty, defending from oppres- 
 sion. Lamennais argued that without authority there 
 could be no religion, that it was the foundation of all 
 society and morality, and that it alone enfranchized 
 man by making him obedient, so harmonizing all 
 intelligences and wills. And thus the Roman 
 church, as the supreme authority, was conceived 
 as the principle of order, the centre of political as 
 well as religious stability ; the only divine rights 
 were those she sanctioned ; in her strength kings 
 reigned, and through obedience to her man was 
 happy and God honoured. 
 
 2. The Counter-Revolution thus gave Catholicism 
 a splendid opportunity for a new Apologetic ; sum- 
 moned it to occupy a more important and command- 
 
100 CATHOLICISM 
 
 ing position than it had held since the Renaissance. 
 The Apologetic may be described as the principle of 
 authority done into a philosophy which explained 
 the past and promised to save the present. It may 
 be said to have consisted of two parts, a theoretical 
 and an historical — the first being a vindication of 
 authority as the only sure basis of religion, and, con- 
 sequently, the only solid ground and guarantee of 
 order ; the second being a justification of the Roman 
 church as it had lived and acted in history. 
 
 i. The theoretical apologetic was on the positive 
 side a philosophy of religion, society, and history ; on 
 the negative, an absolute contradiction of the modern 
 philosophies, the governing principles or ideas of the 
 modern mind. The Apologists saw that the Revolu- 
 tion had not been an accident, but a logical issue 
 from the premisses of the sixteenth century ; i.e.^ it 
 was an attempt to realize a political ideal correlative 
 and correspondent to the ideal of religious freedom. 
 The anarchy, the bloodshed, the social misery and 
 ruin, were held to be the direct result of the movement 
 which Luther had instituted ; to this, along many lines, 
 it had been inevitably tending ; in this, its true 
 character stood revealed. What appeared before the 
 Revolution as innocent abstractions, or speculations 
 that flattered human pride in the degree that they 
 exercised human reason, appeared after it as disinte- 
 grative forces capable of doing the most disastrous 
 work. It was not a question of Catholicism against 
 Protestantism, but of Catholicism against the modern 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT „ lOI 
 
 movement as a whole. Humanity must be .turned, 
 back in its course three centuries that society rrrigh"^ be ' 
 saved. The Hterary revolt of the fifteenth century, 
 the religious revolt of the sixteenth, the philosophical 
 systems of the seventeenth, the political revolution 
 of the eighteenth, were all parts of a whole, successive 
 steps in the dread argument that had been fulfilling 
 itself in history. To deal with this in the most 
 radical way, modern philosophy, as supplying the 
 principles and premisses, was fiercely attacked. It 
 was not necessary that it should be understood or be 
 treated with justice and truth ; it was only necessary 
 that it should be overturned and deprived of all its 
 spoils. De Maistre, with what in him may have been 
 a holy fury, but what in more worldly men would 
 have been delirious unveracity, assailed both the 
 philosophers and their philosophies, discrediting the 
 systems through their authors. Bacon was a pre- 
 sumptuous and profane scientific charlatan, whose 
 bad philosophy was the fit expression of his bad 
 morality. "Contempt of Locke was the beginning 
 of knowledge." ^ Hume " was perhaps the most 
 dangerous and the guiltiest of all those baleful 
 writers who will for ever accuse the last century 
 before posterity." ^ Voltaire " was a man Paris 
 crowned, but Sodom would have banished." ^ Even 
 Herder was described as " the genteel (Jtonnete) 
 comedian who preached the gospel in the pulpit 
 
 * Soirees, vol. i., p. 442. ' Ibid., p. 403. ^ Ibid., p. 243. 
 
102 CATHOLICISM 
 
 and pantheism in his writings." ^ Lamennais argued 
 that the 'philosophies and the heresies had one prin- 
 ciple, "la souverainete de la raison humaine," the 
 end whereof was universal disbelief. ^ Admit it, and 
 from the end there was no escape ; the inevitable 
 way was from heresy to deism, from deism to 
 atheism, from atheism to universal scepticism. 
 Hence, by an exhaustive process, the necessary 
 conclusion was reached : we must have authority if 
 we are to have faith ; the true religion is that which 
 rests on the greatest visible authority, which from 
 sheer lack of actual or possible claimants can be no 
 other than Rome. The variations of philosophers as 
 of Protestants proved their want of truth ; the con- 
 sistencies and harmonies of Catholics proved their 
 possession of it. Authority being the creative and 
 fundamental principle in religion, to despise or deny 
 it was sin — order was Heaven's first law ; contempt 
 of authority was man's first disobedience. The 
 systems that denied it were not simply false, they 
 were evil ; at once causes and fruits of sin. Of sin 
 and its inexorable penalties, the new Apologetic had 
 much to say ; sin explained the revolt, the Revolution 
 illustrated the penalty. To end the revolt the church 
 must triumph ; and its victory would be the creation, 
 not of religion only, but of order, of a stable, con- 
 tented, happy society. But, as Lamennais was des- 
 tined later fatefully to discover, if authority was to 
 
 ^ Soirees^ vol. i. , p. 25 8. * Essai sur V Indifference^ vol. i v., pp. 242-3. 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IO3 
 
 rule at all, it must rule everywhere, in both Church 
 and State ; if freedom reigned in either, it would 
 reign in both. So de Maistre saw and victoriously 
 argued : both authorities are of God, but the spiritual 
 is the higher ; the king's does not qualify the Pope's, 
 but the Pope's limits the king's. Power may be 
 limited from above, but not from below ; the subjects 
 rriay not judge the sovereign, or impose conditions on 
 him, but he may be judged by the Pope, and the 
 judge of the Pope is God. Absolute authority thus, 
 as political, personified in the king, confronted revolu- 
 tion ; and as spiritual, personified in the Pope, con- 
 fronted the Protestant reason ; and by its strength 
 religion was to be saved, society re-constituted, order 
 created, and humanity made obedient to God. 
 
 ii. But it was not enough to be critical and theo- 
 retical ; it was no less necessary to show the fine 
 correspondence of the theory with history, the 
 speculation with fact. And so the discussion be- 
 came historical ; the church was exhibited as the 
 maker of civilization, the mother of the arts and 
 sciences, the creator of the humanities, the enemy 
 of vice, the nurse of virtue, the home of all the 
 graces. When the Roman empire fell the church 
 mitigated the miseries, lessened the evils, conserved 
 the good that but for her would have perished in 
 the ruins. When the young peoples came pouring 
 into the older states, she received them into her 
 bosom, tamed them, organized their energies, built 
 them into a new order and new civilization. She 
 
104 CATHOLICISM 
 
 protected its tender years ; hers was the arm which 
 turned back the Moor, the Saracen, and the Turk. 
 In her the conquered peoples had their true and 
 strongest friend ; the conquerors, a common sovereign 
 who ruled their fierce wills into obedience and hu- 
 manity. The church united the divided nations, 
 created out of a multitude of turbulent tribes a 
 brotherhood of peoples, made the hostile kingdoms 
 become a single Christendom. Modern Europe 
 without the church were inconceivable; whatever 
 most distinguishes her, whatever she most admires, 
 she owes to the church. The church has put her 
 stamp on the literature of every modern people ; 
 the drama rose out of her miracle plays ; it was 
 her faith that bade the first and greatest of modern 
 epics live, and that will not let it die. Art was 
 her peculiar creation ; she inspired the genius of 
 the builder, and he built the large faith he lived 
 by into cathedral and monastery ; her vivid and 
 fruitful imagination formed the painter, and the 
 wondrous beauty of his work but witnesses to the 
 sublimity of her spirit and the truth of her beliefs. 
 Her mysteries, the sacraments, and miracles that 
 offend the prosaic rationalism of a godless age, dis- 
 close their true significance, their power at once 
 to awe, to humble, and to uplift, when seen reflected 
 in the mirror of mediaeval art. Science, too, the 
 church had made ; her sons loved, and cultivated, 
 and enlarged it when the world was dark, and kings 
 and nobles lived but for war and plunder. All 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IO5 
 
 beneficent and ameliorative agencies were of her 
 making : hospitals, charities, schools, colleges, the 
 laws that shielded the serf from the savagery of his 
 master. For all this, and kindred work, her very- 
 constitution qualified her. The clergy had no land, 
 no home, no worldly affections, no secular care, 
 were separated to her service, consecrated wholly 
 to her ends, which were those of man's highest good. 
 Her very organization showed her to be the bearer 
 and organ of divine truth, throughout adapted to 
 secure its recognition and realization among men. 
 For above all stood the supreme Pontiff, the spiritual 
 Sovereign, source of unity, law, order, directing the 
 energies, formulating the judgments, determining the 
 faith of the church ; so much the Vicar of God as 
 to be His audible voice ; gifted with speech that 
 he might control kings and command peoples, main- 
 tain religion, and compel obedience. What the 
 church had been the church would continue to be ; 
 she had saved Europe when Rome perished, and 
 would save it again even though it were out of 
 the very jaws of the destroyer. 
 
 3. In this outline the hierocratic Apologetic is 
 briefly but not unfairly or inaccurately represented. 
 The historical part was at once confirmatory and 
 illustrative of the theoretical. And so far as it was 
 true to history it did a needed service. It did not 
 indeed speak the whole truth, nay, it left much of 
 the truth unspoken. Its past was largely a creation 
 of the imagination ; or a reality so highly idealized 
 
I06 CATHOLICISM 
 
 as to have become the likeness of a vision. One 
 thing indeed must not be forgotten, viz., that the 
 objective and historical mode of viewing and re- 
 presenting the church and its work in the Middle 
 Ages rose outside Catholicism ; was due to liberal 
 and scientific thought, not to ecclesiastical and 
 polemical. To it, looking only from the historical 
 point of view, it seemed hardly possible to exaggerate 
 the obligations of Europe to Catholicism. The 
 Catholic church in the Middle Ages had nobly 
 served humanity ; moderated for the old world the 
 miseries of dissolution, moderated for the new the 
 perhaps still greater miseries of organization and 
 evolution. But suppose we grant, not the vigorously 
 historical and scientific view &f the mediaeval church, 
 but the highly imaginative and richly coloured 
 picture of those Catholic romances, what then ? Why, 
 this justice to mediaeval must not make us unjust 
 to modern history. The question is, not what the 
 Catholic church had done in the early or middle 
 centuries, but what it has done in the modern world. 
 An organization that had served and saved a society 
 penetrated with pagan ideas, may be little qualified 
 to serve a society possessed and moved by Christian 
 ideals. Laws good for childhood may be bad for 
 manhood ; what makes a man of a child is excellent, 
 but what makes a child of a man is evil. The 
 Apologists were as weak in the modern as they 
 were strong in the mediaeval question. In the one 
 case, they were eloquent and philosophic about the 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IO7 
 
 church and its work ; in the other, they were re- 
 proachful and severe concerning the pride and 
 wickedness of man, though he was no prouder or 
 more wicked than the men who had been in either 
 pagan or mediaeval times. They did not see that 
 there was an absolute change in the conditions ; in 
 the earlier period it was the secular empire that 
 had broken down, but in the later the breakdown was 
 in the spiritual. In the days of the decadence of 
 imperial Rome and in those of the barbarian invasions 
 and the formation of the European States, the church 
 had indeed been an ameliorative agency and an archi- 
 tectonic power ; but in the days of the Reformation 
 and the Revolution it was the church that had 
 fallen into feebleness and become a disintegrative 
 force. The Europe she claimed to be alone able 
 to reorganize and restore, was the very Europe 
 that her own hands had disorganized. Chaos had 
 come into the world because she had not been 
 able to govern it. She was in the place of the 
 Roman Empire, while the modern spirit was claim- 
 ing to occupy the place that had once been hers 
 The Pope was the new Julian ; de Maistre the 
 new Libanius. As a simple matter of fact, the 
 very revolt of the intellect was the gravest possible 
 reflection on th^ capacity of the church. The in- 
 tellect had been in subjection for centuries ; to allow 
 it to escape implied infirmity in the ruler, deficiency 
 in wisdom, inefficiency of energy and will. The 
 claim of infallibility is a tremendous claim, not be- 
 
I08 CATHOLICISM 
 
 cause of what it requires from man, but because 
 of what it demands in and from the church. In- 
 fallibiHty in truth is significant when conjoined with 
 infallibility in wisdom ; but the one without the other 
 is significant only of the incapacity which springs from 
 uncorrected faculties. And when infallibility in mat- 
 ters of opinion is conjoined with the most pitiful 
 fallibility in conduct, the situation becomes worse 
 than absurd. To be under an authority so ill- 
 balanced and so badly guided where guidance is most 
 necessary, is like being under a creator, almighty 
 but not all-wise ; to possess it is, as it were, to have 
 the mechanical gift, the skill to make instruments ; 
 but not the political, the power to handle and govern 
 men. For if the revolt of the sixteenth century 
 were a sin, the men who achieved it were not the 
 only sinners — still guiltier was the church that made 
 it possible, and allowed it to become actual. During 
 centuries she had been supreme ; hers had been 
 the hands that made the men, hers the mind that 
 made Europe ; and if the issue of all her doings 
 and endeavours were the revolt, could she be guilt- 
 less, or as wise as she must be to make her in- 
 fallibility of any avail, or make it anything more than 
 an ability to do great things if she only knew how ? 
 But more : why had the Revolution happened ? 
 and why amid so much hideous terror and blood ? 
 Modern philosophy was not altogether or alone to 
 blame ; neither was suppressed and expatriated 
 Protestantism, The men were sons of France, 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT I09 
 
 France was the eldest son of the church, and the 
 son ruled as the church had taught him, with results 
 dreadful to both. The responsibility for the horrors 
 of the Revolution does not lie with its principles, 
 but with its causes ; and who will now say that to 
 these causes the church did not powerfully con- 
 tribute ? But if she were a contributary cause, what 
 becomes of her claim to the sole ability to organize 
 and order the modern, because she had ordered 
 and organized the mediaeval world ? To be a cause 
 of the evil can hardly be regarded as guarantee- 
 ing the possession of the power to cure it. The 
 philosophy of history is guided in its judgments by 
 rigorous and impartial principles. It cannot, merely 
 in the interest of dogma or sect, accord or deny 
 honour to a church ; but the honour it accords at 
 one period may be changed into deepest blame at 
 another. The very reasons that lead it to praise 
 the work and services of early and mediaeval 
 Catholicism, compel it to hold the later Catholicism 
 mainly responsible for evils the Revolution was 
 needed to cure. 
 
 If the historical doctrine was no good philosophy 
 of history, still less was the theoretical a good 
 philosophy of religion. To base religion on author- 
 ity is the most fatal of all scepticisms. The argu- 
 ments that prove it, prove man possessed of an 
 inherent and ineradicable atheism of nature. But 
 what is to be said on this point can better be said 
 later on. Enough to remark here, the new Apolo- 
 
110 CATHOLICISM 
 
 getic was an apologetic for Catholicism, not for 
 Christianity. Its interest was the church, not the 
 religion, at least the religion only so far as identical 
 or co-extensive with the church. This gave to it 
 its two most distinctive characteristics — it was 
 political or sociological and historical. It was a 
 theory of society and the State illustrated by specific 
 periods and events in history. It was a speculation 
 as to the best methods for the creation and main- 
 tenance of order. De Maistre, as has been well 
 said, was a publicist, and looked at the whole matter 
 from the publicist's point of view. He was a sort 
 of ecclesiasticized Hobbes, with the strength, courage, 
 keenness, directness, and, we may add, coarseness 
 of the original ; only with the Pope substituted for 
 the king. But even so, the hierocratic system had 
 its place, and did a not unneeded or ignoble work. 
 It did for the Papacy what Hobbes had done for the 
 Monarchy, formulated a theory of government where 
 order was created by absolute authority being given 
 to the one, and absolute subjection to the many. 
 Both marked the reaction that succeeded revolu- 
 tion, though in the one case the revolution was 
 religious, an attempted reign of the saints ; in the 
 other secular, an attempted reign of reason. It was 
 no less characteristic that the theory opposed to 
 the religious revolution based authority on might, 
 but the theory opposed to the secular based might on 
 authority. Hobbes' king created the church, but de 
 Maistre's church created the king. Yet each is 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT III 
 
 explained by its occasion. The Restoration would 
 have been incomplete without the Leviathan ; the 
 Catholic revival and the Counter-revolution would 
 have lacked theoretical justification without Ultra- 
 montanism. 
 §11. The English Counterpart of tJie Continental 
 
 Revival 
 I. We must now pass from the Continental to 
 the English Catholic movement. The conditions 
 in the two cases were altogether different. In 
 France the Revolution had been swift, imperious, 
 destructive ; but in England the genius of the people, 
 their prosaic sagacity and insular pride, sobered 
 and disciplined by the long struggle towards com- 
 pleter freedom, first held it at bay, then graduated 
 its approach, and, at last, peacefully and legally 
 accomplished it. Hence the Catholic revival could 
 not appear here as the counter-revolution, as the 
 source and ground of order to a disordered State ; 
 for order reigned, and our very revolutions had 
 increased rather than disturbed it. Indeed, our com- 
 bined freedom and order had so perplexed and 
 bewildered the hierocratic theorists, that de Bonald 
 calmly dismissed from consideration the English 
 people, because they were, " mainly on account of 
 their defects, by far the most backward of civilized 
 peoples," and de Maistre described our constitution 
 as " an insular peculiarity utterly unworthy of imita- 
 tion." But even here the forces of change were active, 
 and their movement was the more resistless that it 
 
112 CATHOLICISM 
 
 was so regulated and, as it were, so constitutional. 
 These forces were not simply in the air but im- 
 manent in the English nature, embedded in the 
 customs and habits, laws and institutions, mind and 
 method of the people. They were forces universal 
 and supreme ; governing the men who governed. 
 While they appeared political, they were really 
 religious ; they threatened the Church even more 
 than the State ; they questioned the accepted prin- 
 ciples, doctrines, facts, and authorities in religion, 
 much more severely than the ancient and established 
 customs and methods in politics. In their collective 
 and corporate character these forces constituted 
 what was termed " Liberalism," which was the milder 
 but more fatal English equivalent for the fiercer but 
 less insidious Gallican " Revolution." If, then, they 
 were held to be forces mischievous in character, 
 evil in tendency, and ruinous in result, to resist 
 them was a most manifest and absolute duty. But 
 how ? The Sovereign could not, for the Sovereign 
 was simply the greatest subject in the realm, the 
 creation of its laws ; nor could the Parliament, for 
 it was but the nation in Council ; nor could the 
 church, for the church was the people's, rather than 
 the people the church's. There was nothing then 
 to hinder the people, were they so minded, from 
 going so far wrong as even to abolish the law and 
 worship of God. It was necessary, therefore, to dis- 
 cover an authority able to bridle and govern the 
 forces of change. God was the supreme authority ; 
 
CATHOLICISM AJ^D RELIGIOUS THOUGHT II3 
 
 the church in which He lived and through which 
 He worked was His visible presence ; in it, there- 
 fore, the Divine authority must dwell. Of this 
 the English people had hitherto been negligent or 
 unconscious ; only here and there a Catholic divine 
 had understood and believed ; but once make it 
 thoroughly evident, and men, no longer ignorantly 
 free to believe and worship as they pleased, will 
 feel bound to hold the faith and obey the law of God. 
 This was, in brief, the genesis of the Anglican 
 movement. While formally and'incidentally affected 
 by many collateral influences — the romances of 
 Scott, which supplied it with an idealized past, and 
 inspired the passion still further to idealize it ; the 
 speculation of Coleridge, which touched it with 
 mysticism, and imparted, in some degree, the gift 
 of spiritual insight ; the poetry of Wordsworth, which 
 revealed the symbolical and sacramental significance 
 of common things — yet it was essentially an en- 
 deavour, in a period when political change threatened 
 to affect religious institutions, to find a stable re- 
 ligious ground on which to build the faith, an ab- 
 solute authority by which to govern the life, first of 
 the individual, next of the nation. It assumed that 
 the truth of God did not live in the common reason, 
 or His authority reign in the collective conscience ; 
 and that, without a special organ or vehicle for their 
 transmission and embodiment, they could not con- 
 tinue to live and reign at all. It thought that if 
 the State touched even the abuses of the church, 
 
 8 
 
114 CATHOLICISM 
 
 it would act profanely ; and it desired therefore to 
 make the church inviolable by the State. What 
 was needed to set a limit to the forces of encroach- 
 ment and aggression was an authority — valid, visible, 
 supreme. To be supreme, it must be religious ; to 
 be visible, it must be a realized polity or constituted 
 society ; to be valid, it must have independent legis- 
 lative and efficient executive powers. With these 
 attributes the Anglican church was invested, but 
 they were too immense for her ; she bent and failed 
 beneath the burden. Her weakness but set off the 
 strength of Catholicism. What the one church 
 could not bear, was the very vital principle of the 
 other ; she had for centuries been testifying her 
 possession of it to the perverse and incredulous 
 English people. The ancient cause of offence be- 
 came the new feature of commendation ; and those 
 who felt that they could not believe and be Christian 
 without authority, found in her bosom the authority 
 they needed. 
 
 2. The English Catholic movement, then, was 
 distinguished from the Continental by its being more 
 personal and religious in character, aiming at reform 
 and resistance rather than counter-revolution. The 
 publicist view did not exist here ; the conditions did 
 not call for it. But what national events occasioned 
 in France, personal experiences accomplished in 
 England, though they were experiences of disquiet 
 in the face of forces which Europe had learned to 
 dread. Still the arena of action and change was 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT II5 
 
 mainly subjective, in minds that had feared the un- 
 settling influence of the critical and progressive ten- 
 dencies then active, and were alarmed for religion 
 in the degree that they loved it. The revolution 
 that was dreaded was internal, in the region of 
 thought and belief. Superficial readers of the 
 Apologia have wondered at the determinative 
 influence attributed to such incidents as the Jeru- 
 salem Bishopric ; but, in truth, nothing could be 
 more just than the place assigned to it, or more 
 impressive and significant. It was not only a fact 
 fatal to a theory; but Newman's mind had become 
 hyper-sensitive, it had lost the sense of proportion ; 
 little things troubled even more than large ; and his 
 doctrine of the church had become so nearly equiva- 
 lent to the truth of religion, that what touched the 
 one seemed to threaten the other with ruin and 
 disaster. It had become a matter of personal neces- 
 sity that he should find an immutable and infallible 
 church, in order that he might have a stable and 
 true religion. This need was altogether distinctive 
 of him and the men he moved, and belongs rather 
 to their natural history than to the nation's. It did 
 not rise out of the native conservatism of the English 
 people, seeking to find the religious principle or con- 
 stitutional doctrine that could best resist the tides 
 of revolutionary thought and action ; but it rose in 
 the spirits and out of the experiences of men who 
 believed that religion could not be saved, either for 
 themselves or the people, unless in the strength of 
 
Il6 CATHOLICISM 
 
 a greater and more efficient authority than any their 
 church knew or could allow. Hence the English 
 Catholic movement proceeded from and expressed 
 the religious necessities of persons, not the needs of 
 the State or the aspirations of the people. And 
 what it was^ it is — a thoroughly individual movement, 
 with less national promise now than it had at first ; 
 and, what we may term its fundamental principle — 
 an organized authority as the basis of Religion, and 
 this authority as embodied in the infallible church 
 of Rome — was formulated to satisfy these individual 
 needs. What we have now to consider is the validity 
 and constructive value of this principle, as repre- 
 sented and interpreted by modern English, as dis- 
 tinguished from Continental, Catholicism. 
 
 § III. Philosophical Scepticism as the Apology for 
 Ecclesiastical Authority 
 I. Cardinal Newman^ is here, beyond question, the 
 
 * If the subject had been Apologetics by English Catholics, 
 instead of, as it really is, English Catholicism as an Apologetic, 
 there are many men I should have liked gratefully to review, 
 such as Cardinal Wiseman, Dr. Ward, Father Dalgairns, a 
 thinker of exquisite subtlety and refinement, Mr. St. George 
 Mivart, Father Harper, and others hardly less worthy of 
 regard. The extensive work of the last, The Metaphysics of 
 the School (Macmillan & Co., 3 vols., 1879-84), deserves a 
 more careful criticism than it has yet received. Its worth for 
 the historical student is considerable : but its polemical, critical, 
 and constructive parts, though most painstaking and laborious, 
 are of another order and quality than the expository. Thomas 
 Aquinas is indeed more real and intelligible in his own Latin 
 than in any English exposition. He is in the one case a living 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT II7 
 
 representative man, and so it is through him that we 
 must construe and criticise the principle. Its ac- 
 ceptance was a necessity to his own faith ; he has 
 done more than any living man to make it a neces- 
 sity to the faith of others. He is here regarded 
 under only one aspect, as the disciple and defender 
 of Roman Catholic authority, that he may be the 
 better and more victorious a Christian Apologist. 
 We have the right so to regard him. Disciples have 
 represented him as the foremost apologist of the 
 day ; his Apologia was the recognition of his own 
 significance, the history was the justification of " his 
 religious opinions." There is no man living whose 
 works are so thoroughly autobiographical ; they are 
 but various illustrations of his own principle — in 
 
 teacher, handling relevant problems, holding his own place in 
 history, determining much both of the form and matter of later 
 thought ; but in the other case he is only an adapted teacher, 
 not very capable of the sort of adaptation he has received, 
 rather lustily resisting it, justly refusing to be forced to shed 
 light on problems that had not emerged in his own day. 
 Descartes, Hume, and Kant ar« not to be so answered and 
 superseded ; their questions underlie the " Metaphysics of the 
 School," determining alike their possibility and worth, and 
 Father Harper's criticisms are incidental and verbal rather than 
 material and real. He must go to work in a more radical 
 fashion, both in the criticism of modern philosophy and the 
 adaptation of the schoolman, before he can effect either the dis- 
 placement of the one or the substitution of the other. Yet we 
 gladly acknowledge that the increased attention, so largely due 
 to the present Pope, which has now for many years been paid in 
 Catholic schools to Thomas Aquinas is a most hopeful sign for 
 Catholicism. 
 
1 8 CATHOLICISM 
 
 religious inquiry egotism may be true modesty.^ 
 There is as much autobiography in, to mention no 
 others, the Sermons^ the Discourses to Mixed Con- 
 gregations^ the Development of Christian Doctrine, 
 Present Position of Catholics in England, the Letters 
 to Dr. Pusey and to the Duke of Norfolk, and the 
 Grammar of Assent, as in the Apologia. Indeed, the 
 Apologia loses half its significance when read alone ; 
 it needs to be studied in the light of the works, tracts, 
 essays, lectures, histories and treatises, chronologi- 
 cally arranged. Conscious revelation of self, even 
 when most careful and scrupulous, hides even more 
 than it reveals ; it is the unconscious and undesigned 
 that testify more truly of a man. Newman was 
 always supremely conscious of two beings — God and 
 himself — and his works are a history of his successive 
 attempts to determine and adjust the relations be- 
 tween these two. This is significant ; in the heart 
 of this chief of English Catholics there is an in- 
 tense individualism — indeed, it was the strength of 
 his individualism that made a Catholic of him. The 
 Apologia is the history of an individual mind ; the 
 Grammar of Assent is its dialectic — i.e., the transla- 
 tion of the causes and course of the changes which 
 the history records, into logical forms and reasoned 
 processes. But this exactly defines the worth and 
 describes the range of Newman's apologetic work 
 — it is distinctively individual — first explicative of 
 
 1 Grammar of Assent^ p. 384 (fifth ed.). Cf. Mr. Lilly's 
 Ancient Religion and Modern Thought p. 48. 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT II9 
 
 himself, and then cogent for men who start with his 
 ecclesiastical assumptions and are troubled with his 
 spiritual experiences and perplexities ; not for those 
 outside the churches, seeking for a reasoned and a 
 reasonable belief 
 
 In order to a radical and just discussion, it will be 
 necessary to discover, if possible, Newman's ultimate 
 ideas or the regulative principles of his thought ; for 
 they determine not only his ratiocination, but his 
 mode of viewing things, and the kind and quality of 
 the arguments that weigh with him. He is by nature 
 a poet, by necessity rather than choice a meta- 
 physician and historian. Truth finds him through 
 the imagination, is real only as it comes to him in 
 image and breathing form, a being instinct with life. 
 And so he hates the abstract and loves the concrete ; 
 a truth grows real to him only when it is so em- 
 bodied as to speak to the imagination and fill it. He 
 is ill at ease when the discussion carries him into the 
 region of abstract principles ; he is happy only when 
 he can handle what his intellect conceives to be the 
 actual. For the same reason he is averse to historical 
 criticism. No man had ever less of the analytical 
 and judicial spirit, that must search and sift and 
 separate till the original and unadorned fact be 
 found. He can well understand the love that 
 idealizes the past ; he cannot so well understand the 
 love that is so bent on the truth as to be able to 
 analyze and sacrifice the dearest traditions and be- 
 liefs to reach it. He loves the past which fills and 
 
120 CATHOLICISM 
 
 satisfies the imagination, not the one dissected and 
 disclosed by the critical reason. Now, these charac- 
 teristics make it a difficult, almost a cruel, thing to 
 attempt to reach the ultimate principles that govern 
 his thought. His is a mind to be handled as he 
 loves to handle things, imaginatively and in the 
 concrete, not coldly analyzed ; but unless his govern- 
 ing ideas are reached, neither his mind nor his 
 method can be understood. 
 
 2. The true starting-point for the critical analysis 
 and appraisement of Newman's apologetic work is 
 the famous passage — 
 
 " I came to the conclusion that there was no medium, in 
 true philosophy, between Atheism and Catholicity, and that a 
 perfectly consistent mind, under those circumstances in which 
 it finds itself here below, must embrace either the one or the 
 other. And I hold this still : I am a Catholic by virtue of 
 my believing in a God ; and if I am asked why I believe in 
 a God, I answer that it is because I believe in myself, for I 
 feel it impossible to believe in my own existence (and of that 
 fact I am quite sure) without believing also in the existence of 
 Him, who lives as a Personal, All-seeing, All-judging Being in 
 my conscience." * 
 
 The points here noteworthy are — (i) Atheism and 
 Catholicism are to his own mind the only logical 
 alternatives ; (2) he is a Catholic because a Theist ; 
 and (3) a Theist, because he believes in his own 
 existence, and hears God speak in his conscience. 
 Now, in a case like this, it is a matter of moment to 
 see how the principle and the ultimate deduction are 
 
 ' Apologia^ p. 198 (ed. 1883). 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 121 
 
 related — the process by which he passes from con- 
 science to God, and from God to Catholicism. It 
 may be true that " he has not confined the defence 
 of his own creed to the proposition that it is the 
 only possible alternative to Atheism " ; ^ but it is 
 certainly true that he believes it to be the only real 
 alternative, and his belief looks ever and again 
 through the joints and fissures of his cumulative 
 argument, especially as pursued and presented in 
 his great dialectic work. The position, a Catholic 
 because a Theist, really means, when translated out 
 of its purely individualistic form, a Catholic in order 
 that he may continue a Theist ; for, as Dr. Newman 
 conceives the matter, Catholicism, though it did not 
 create Theism, is yet necessary to its continuance 
 as a belief " Outside the Catholic Church, things 
 are tending to Atheism in one shape or another." ^ 
 The Catholic church is the one " face to face an- 
 tagonist," able " to withstand and baffle the fierce 
 energy of passion and the all-corroding, all-dissolving 
 scepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries." ^ 
 As Dr. Newman conceives the matter, Catholicism 
 is for the race as for the individual, the only alter- 
 native to Atheism, the necessities that govern the 
 individual governing also the collective experience. 
 Without Catholicism, faith in God could not continue 
 to live. There is, therefore, in spite of the con- 
 
 ^ Mr. Lilly's letter, Grammar of Assent^ p. 500. 
 * Apologia^ p. 244. * Ibid.^ p. 243 . 
 
122 CATHOLICISM 
 
 science, so much latent Atheism in the nature, and, 
 especially, the reason of man, that without an or- 
 ganization, miraculously created and governed, God 
 would be driven out of human belief and reverence. 
 A theory of this sort may in a high degree honour 
 the church, but in the same degree it dishonours 
 God. If "the Church's infallibility" be "a provision 
 adapted by the mercy of the Creator to preserve 
 Religion in the world," ^ then the provision has been 
 not only, as the history of European thought testifies, 
 singularly ill-adapted to its end ; but it implies a 
 strange defect in the original constitution of the world, 
 and a still stranger limitation, alike in the intensive 
 and extensive sense, of the divine relation to it. 
 
 The relation between Theism and Catholicism 
 being so conceived, the one must be made to in- 
 volve the other ; the Theism becomes the implicit 
 Catholicism, the Catholicism the explicit Theism. 
 The question here is, not why the Theism needs the 
 Catholicism, but how Catholicism is involved in and 
 evolved from the Theism ? The questions are re- 
 lated : for if the how can be found, the why will at 
 once become apparent. Yet it is necessary to hold 
 them distinct, for only so can we get at those ulti- 
 mate principles or ideas we are here in search of It 
 seems, at first, curious that the Theism, which does 
 not need Catholicism for its creation, should need it 
 for its continuance. One would have thought that 
 what existed before it, and independently of it, could 
 
 * Apologia, p. 245. 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT I23 
 
 exist without it ; but this is the very thing the posi- 
 tion will not allow. Theism must grow into Catho- 
 licism or die, become Pantheism, or Atheism, or 
 something equally bad and unlike the original. If 
 we ask, why ? the answer is more or less rhetorical, 
 a survey of modern schools and tendencies of 
 thought ; and a comparison of their conflict and 
 varieties of opinion, with the certainty, harmony, and 
 tenacity of Catholic belief. But if we ask, how the 
 one involves and leads up to the other? we shall 
 find that it was really and only due to the concatena- 
 tion of ideas in Newman's own mind. What made 
 him, because a Theist, become a Catholic ? There was 
 nothing generic, or common, or logical in the process, 
 to give it validity apart from the assumptions and 
 peculiar history of the man himself. 
 
 But, to pursue the analysis, it is evident that the 
 answer to the question. What made him because a 
 Theist become a Catholic ? depends on the answer 
 to a still prior question, Why is he a Theist ? What 
 is the basis and reason of his Theism ? He tells us 
 that he came to rest in the thought of two, and two 
 only, absolute and luminously self-evident beings, him- 
 self and God.^ But why was the being of God as 
 certain and luminous to him as his own ? Through 
 conscience, which he holds to be the theistic and 
 religious faculty or organ in man.^ " Were it not 
 for the voice, speaking so clearly in my conscience 
 
 ^ Apologia^ p. 4. 
 
 "^ Grammar of Assent pp. 105-110, 389 (fifth ed.). 
 
124 CATHOLICISM 
 
 and my heart, I should be an Atheist, or a Pantheist, 
 or a Polytheist when I look into the world." ^ " As 
 we have our initial knowledge of the universe through 
 sense, so do we in the first instance begin to learn 
 about its Lord and God from conscience." ^ In each 
 case the knowledge is instinctive ; " the office which 
 the senses directly fulfil as regards creation," is in- 
 directly fulfilled by the sense of moral obligation as 
 regards the Creator.^ It is therefore conscience not 
 as " moral sense," but as " sense of duty," as " magis- 
 terial dictate," which " impresses the imagination 
 with the picture of a supreme Governor, a judge, 
 holy, just, powerful, all-seeing, retributive." * As a 
 consequence " conscience teaches us, not only that 
 God is, but what He is " ; " we learn from its infor- 
 mations to conceive of the Almighty, primarily, not 
 as a God of wisdom, of knowledge, of power, of 
 benevolence, but as a God of justice and judgment." 
 " The special attribute under which it brings Him 
 before us, to which it subordinates all other attri- 
 butes, is that of justice — retributive justice." ^ The 
 " creative principle " and the contents of religion 
 necessarily correspond ; the correlative of the " magis- 
 terial dictate " within, is the dictating magistrate 
 without. 
 
 Conscience, then, is the theistic and religious 
 
 * Apologia, p. 241. * Grammar of Assent, p. 63. 
 3 Ibid,, p. 104. •* Ibid,, pp. 105-110. 
 
 * Ibid., pp. 390-39 !• 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 1 25 
 
 faculty ; but what of the intellect, the reason ? While 
 " the unaided reason, when correctly exercised, leads 
 to a belief in God, in the immortality of the soul, 
 and in a future retribution," " the faculty of reason," 
 considered " actually and historically," tends " to- 
 wards a simple unbelief in matters of religion." 
 The intellect is " aggressive, capricious, untrust- 
 worthy " ; its " immense energy " must be smitten 
 hard and thrown back by an infallible authority, if 
 Religion is to be saved. Its action in religious 
 matters is corrosive, dissolving, sceptical.^ Hence 
 while the conscience creates religion, the reason 
 tends to create unbelief; the one is on the one side 
 of God, the other against Him. Of course he speaks 
 of " reason as it acts in fact and concretely in fallen 
 man " ; but the conscience he speaks of is also the 
 active and actual "in fallen man." If sin puts either, 
 it must put both, out of court ; what does not dis- 
 qualify the one as a witness, ought not to be used 
 to stop the mouth of the other. 
 
 3. But why is so different a measure meted out 
 to the two faculties ? The reason must be sought in 
 Dr. Newman's underlying philosophy. That philo- 
 sophy may be described as one empirical and scep- 
 tical, qualified by a peculiar religious experience. 
 He has a deep distrust of the intellect ; he dare not 
 trust his own, for he does not know where it might 
 
 * Apologia^ pp. 243-246. Cf. Discourses to Mixed Congre- 
 gations^ p. 283. 
 
126 CATHOLICISM 
 
 lead him, and he will not trust any other man's. 
 The mind " must be broken in to the belief of a 
 power above it " ; to recognize the Creator is to have 
 its "stiff neck" bent.^ The real problem of the 
 Grammar of Assent is, How, without the consent 
 and warrant of the reason, to justify the being of 
 religion, and faith in that infallible church which 
 alone realizes it.^ The whole book is pervaded by 
 the intensest philosophical scepticism ; this supplies 
 its motify determines its problem, necessitates its dis- 
 tinctions, rules over the succession and gradation of 
 its arguments. His doctrine of assents, his distinc- 
 tion into notional and real — which itself involves a 
 philosophy of the most empirical individualism — his 
 criticism of Locke, his theories of inference, certitude, 
 and the illative sense, all mean the same thing.^ 
 
 * Discourses to Mixed Congregations ^ pp. 275, 276. 
 
 * Mr. Froude, in a for him rather innocent way, describes 
 the Grammar as " an attempt to prove that there is no reason- 
 able standing-ground between Atheism and submission to the 
 Holy See." — Short Studies^ second series, p. Z"}). If he had 
 said — " a book intended to show how a sceptic in philosophy 
 could, in the matter of Religion, find no standing-ground," etc., 
 etc., he would have been nearer the truth. 
 
 * The philosophical scepticism is, of course, implicit, not ex- 
 plicit. From the latter he has tried carefully to guard him- 
 self; cf. Gram., 64. In this connection the paragraphs, pp. 60, 
 61, which the late Dr. Ward thought a veiled attack on himself, 
 ought to be studied : cf. Philosophical Theism^ vol. i., pp. 30, 31. 
 The two men were alike in their religious profession, but not in 
 their philosophical principles. The sort of analysis in which 
 Dr. Ward delighted, was not agreeable to Dr. Newman ; it 
 savoured too much of the abstract and a priori to please so 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 127 
 
 His aim is to withdraw religion and the proofs con- 
 cerning it from the region of reason and reasoning 
 into the realm of conscience and imagination, where 
 the reasons that reign may satisfy personal experi- 
 ence without having objective validity, or being able 
 to bear the criticism that tests it. And so he feels 
 " it is a great question whether Atheism is not as 
 philosophically consistent with the phenomena of the 
 physical world, taken by themselves, as the doctrine 
 of a creative and sovereign Power." This is the 
 expression of real and deep philosophic doubt, which 
 is not in any way mitigated by the plea that he 
 does not " deny the validity of the argument from 
 design in its place." ^ Neither did John Stuart 
 Mill. 
 
 We are now in a position to see why to Dr. New- 
 man Theism involves Catholicism. It does so for two 
 reasons, springing respectively out of his doctrines 
 of the conscience and of reason. He interprets con- 
 science as the consciousness of a " magisterial dic- 
 tate," the echo within the breast of an authoritative 
 voice speaking without it ; and to him the legitimate 
 deduction is the organization of the authority in an 
 infallible church, and the articulation of the voice 
 through its infallible head. But the other is the 
 
 great a lover of the concrete and experimental. And Dr. 
 Ward's trust in his faculties and their avouchments, came 
 nearer a belief in the sufficiency of reason than Dr. Newman 
 liked to go. 
 
 * University Sermons^ p. 194. Cf. Mr. Lilly, p. 99. 
 
128 CATHOLICISM 
 
 more imperative reason : the intellect is not to be 
 trusted ; left to themselves the conscience may suc- 
 ceed at first, but the intellect prevails at last. There 
 is no possible escape. " Unlearn Catholicism," and 
 the " infallible succession " is, " Protestant, Unitarian, 
 Deist, Pantheist, Sceptic." ^ The " formal proofs " 
 for the being of God may amount to " an irrefragable 
 demonstration against the Freethinker and the Scep- 
 tic" ; but they are able so " to invalidate that proof" 
 as to " afford a plausible, though not a real, excuse 
 for doubting about it." And without Catholicism 
 the doubt is invincible. " When a man does not 
 believe in the church, there is nothing in reason to 
 keep him from doubting the being of a God." 
 "There is nothing between it (the church) and 
 Scepticism, when men exert their reason freely." ^ 
 
 4. Atheism and Catholicism are then to Dr. New- 
 man the only possible logical alternatives, because, if 
 we are not driven by the inner and ethical authority, 
 i.e. conscience, to rest in an infallible outer authority, 
 ue, the Roman church, we must follow whither the 
 intellect leads, and make the facilis descensus Averni. 
 
 * Discourses to Mixed Congregations ^ p. 283. Cardinal New- 
 man here but repeats Lamennais. It is interesting to com- 
 pare the agreements of the Essai sur V Indifference with the 
 Gratntnar and the Apologia. They differ in some important 
 respects, but in one fundamental point they agree — their philo- 
 sophical basis for the dogma of authority is the most absolute 
 of all scepticism — doubt of the sanity and divine contents of 
 human reason. They believe in its native and ineradicable 
 Atheism. * Ibid., pp. 262, 263, 283. 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT l2C) 
 
 But what sort of basis have we here for Theism ? and 
 what sort of Catholicism have we built on it ? The 
 nature of man is divided, and its two parts set in 
 contradiction and antagonism to each other. The 
 conscience is " the aboriginal vicar of Christ, a pro- 
 phet in its informations, a monarch in its peremp- 
 toriness, a priest in its blessings and anathemas ; " ^ 
 but the reason is critical, sceptical, infidel, even 
 atheistic. This division of nature is the death of 
 natural proof; it is a confession that proof is im- 
 possible. He may recognize "the formal proofs on 
 which the being of a God rests " ; but his recogni- 
 tion must be criticized in the light of his fundamental 
 principle. It is to him entirely illegitimate. Con- 
 science he holds to be authoritative, but not reason. 
 He deduces Religion from conscience, but leaves 
 reason to be crushed and subdued by authority. 
 Now to build Religion on a doctrine that implies 
 the radical antagonism of these two, is to make 
 their reconciliation impossible to Religion ; the one 
 must be sacrificed to the other if man is ever to have 
 peace. The Catholicism that achieves this may be 
 extensive, but is not intensive ; it may be political and 
 local, but is not ideal and human ; it may be external- 
 ized authority, but is not externalized reason. It 
 may include all men, but it does not include the 
 whole man. But more : the reason within man im- 
 
 ^ Letter to the Duke of Norfolk. — Anglican Difficulties^ voL 
 ii. p. 248. 
 
 9 
 
13^ CATHOLICISM 
 
 plies the reason without him ; he develops into a 
 rational being because he lives in a rational world. 
 To leave the theistic contents of the reason unexpli- 
 cated, is to leave the theistic reason of the world 
 unexplored and unrecognized ; only as they are con- 
 ceived in their correspondent and reciprocal relations 
 can we have a Theism satisfactory to the whole 
 nature of man and explicative of the system to 
 which he belongs. It is only through reason we find 
 an argument of universal validity ; but Cardinal 
 Newman's doctrine is the purest individualism. The 
 deliverance of his conscience avails for himself — can 
 avail for no other ; it has interest as a fact of personal 
 testimony, but has no value as a ground of general 
 belief It is significant, too, as to the temper of his 
 own mind ; in his intellect as he knows it, in his 
 reason as he interprets it, he finds no Religion, no 
 evidence for the being of God : he dare not trust or 
 follow it, for its bent is sceptical ; and so he has to 
 invoke the voice of authority to silence and to com- 
 mand. The need he discovered in history for an in- 
 fallible church, he had first found in his own breast. 
 
 § IV. Whether either the Scepticism or the Authority 
 be Valid 
 
 Detailed criticism of Newman's position, with 
 its various assumptions and complex confusion of 
 thought, is, of course, here impossible ; but it is hardly 
 possible to conceive a worse basis for a constructive 
 Theism, especially in a critical and sceptical age. It 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT I3I 
 
 turns Catholicism into a new and feebler Protestant- 
 ism, one directed against the modern movement of 
 mind. The Freethinker sacrifices religion to reason 
 in one way, by declaring that his individual mind is 
 the measure of religious truth ; the Catholic does it 
 in another way, by declaring that unless religion come 
 under the aegis of his church, it will assuredly perish 
 before the corrosive action of the intellect. Each 
 position is an awful degradation of religion, but the 
 latter is the greater ; for the intellect will not, indeed 
 cannot, cease to be active and critical, and what is 
 declared incapable of resisting its criticism is handed 
 over to death. There is surely a nobler Catholicism 
 than this, one not of Rome, but of man, based, not on 
 the excommunication of the reason, but on the recon- 
 ciliation of the whole nature, intellect, conscience, 
 heart, will, to God and His truth. 
 
 I. In Cardinal Newman's position, those elements 
 that belong to his Apology for Theism must be dis- 
 tinguished from those that belong to his Apology for 
 Catholicism. They are not only distinct, but incom- 
 patible. Theism is so rooted in his being, that he 
 must believe in God because he believes in his own 
 existence ; but, on the other hand, his reason is so 
 inimical to Theism that if he had not become a 
 Catholic, he must have become an Atheist. Now, 
 this is an important psychological fact, a valuable 
 testimony concerning personal experience ; but when 
 it is erected into a dialectic position and elaborated 
 into an Apology for Catholicism, as the only possible 
 
132 CATHOLICISM 
 
 permanent form of the Christian Religion, the matter 
 is altogether changed. It is then necessary to say, 
 the position is at once philosophically false and 
 historically inaccurate. To exercise the intellect 
 is to serve God ; Religion has been most vital 
 and most vigorous when the intellect was most 
 critically concerned with it. This is a simple histori- 
 cal fact. In the Apologia ^ it is said : " No truth, 
 however sacred, can stand against it (the faculty of 
 reason), in the long run " : and the illustration is, the 
 pagan world when our Lord came. But the intellect 
 in the ancient world ennobled and spiritualized Reli- 
 gion ; the period of its greatest activity in Greece 
 was also the period when the religious faith became 
 purest and strongest. The poets made its gods more 
 august, moral, judicial. Plato made its ideas sub- 
 limer, purged its mythology, transfigured the theistic 
 conception, made the world articulate the perfect 
 reason, and time sleep in the bosom of eternity. The 
 Stoics, by finding a moral order in the universe and a 
 moral nature in man, breathed a new ethical spirit 
 into both their religion and their race. In the ancient 
 world the activity of the intellect in the field of 
 religious knowledge was the life of Religion ; and 
 when it ceased to be active. Religion ceased to live. 
 In the days of our Lord, the places where the intel- 
 lect was most active were also the places where 
 Religion was most real. 
 
 » Page 243. 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 1 33 
 
 And what was true of the ancient, is true of the 
 modern world. The activity of the intellect in Re- 
 ligion has been altogether beneficent ; its criticism has 
 been but the prelude to construction ; what has died 
 under its analysis has but made room for higher 
 forms of thought and larger modes of life. Did space 
 allow, illustration were easy and abundant, especially 
 from the highest of all regions — the action of specu- 
 lation on the idea of God. To take the strongest 
 illustration, it is no paradox to say, the system of 
 Spinoza was, from the standpoint of the Christian 
 Religion, a greater benefit to Europe than any — I had 
 almost said than all the conversions to Catholicism in 
 the seventeenth century, whether of kings like James 
 II., or men of letters like John Dry den. For it raised 
 the problem of Theism to a higher platform, directly 
 tended to enlarge and ennoble the conception of God, 
 to enrich the idea of Religion, to promote the study 
 and criticism and appreciation of its work in history ; 
 placing it in a higher relation to the nature and action 
 of God on the one hand, and the spirit and life of 
 man on the other. When Newman says that, with- 
 out Catholicism, we must proceed " in a dreadful but 
 infallible succession," from Protestantism through 
 Deism or Pantheism to Scepticism, or that " outside 
 the Catholic Church things are tending to Atheism in 
 one shape or other," he writes mere rhetoric. The 
 statement might be reversed ; the " infallible succes- 
 sion " might be charged upon Catholicism with quite 
 as much truth and charity, or rather with more 
 
134 CATHOLICISM 
 
 historical warrant and justification. Pantheism was 
 known in the Golden Age of Catholicism, the Middle 
 Ages ; to it must be reckoned the systems of Scotus 
 Erigena, Meister Eckhardt, the Dominican, as well as 
 whole Schools of Mystics ; the man who revived it, 
 Spinoza's forerunner, if not master, was another 
 Dominican, Giordano Bruno. The most pronounced 
 modern materialism was developed in Catholic 
 P>ance ; certain of its earliest masters were Catholic 
 dignitaries. One of the earliest martyrs to Atheism 
 was the pupil of Catholic Divines, the whilom priest 
 Vanini. The Deism of eighteenth-century England 
 was innocence compared with the revived paganism 
 of fifteenth-century Italy. The man whom Buckle 
 selected for special praise as having been the first to 
 apply the rationalist method to morals and to history, 
 had been a Catholic priest and preacher. Catholicism 
 converted Bayle, but only to make a more utter 
 sceptic of him ; converted Gibbon, but only to see 
 him recoil into completer infidelity.^ All this may be 
 poor enough, but it is after Newman's manner. Over 
 against his charge, "outside Catholicism things are 
 tending to Atheism," I place this as the simple record 
 of fact, verifiable by all who choose to pursue the 
 necessary inquiries — inside Catholicism things have 
 
 * I hesitated long about Gibbon ; but after carefully weighing 
 the statement in the " autobiography," and one or two signifi- 
 cant passages in the Decline and Fall, I determined to let his 
 name stand. Yet the argument does not depend on one or two 
 names : it represents tendencies operative through centuries. 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 1 35 
 
 tended, and still, wherever mind is active, do tend, to 
 the completest negation. If his argument be held 
 equal to the proof of the need of infallibility, mine 
 must be held to prove its perfect insufficiency. Men 
 may need it, but it is not adequate to their needs ; 
 and an inadequate infallibility is certainly near of kin 
 to common fallibility. The arguments are parallel, 
 but the cases are not. Catholicism professes to be 
 able by its authority to do what history has proved it 
 unable to accomplish, and so is justly chargeable with 
 the most serious incompetency ; but Protestantism, 
 making no claim to authority, professing indeed to be 
 quite without it, may justly refuse to bear the respon- 
 sibility of failure. Incompetency in a system like 
 the Roman is the most invincible disproof of claim ; 
 the competence that comes of supernatural gifts and 
 authority is no part of Protestantism. 
 
 2. But Cardinal Newman's position raises another 
 question, whether an infallible authority, such as he 
 attributes to the Church and Pope of Rome, and 
 exercised for the purposes he describes, would be a 
 help or a hindrance to Religion? Would it make 
 Religion more or less possible, more or less stable 
 and real ? Differences on such matters are, as a rule, 
 apprehended in their superficial aspects rather than 
 in their determinative principles and causes. One of 
 these is the idea of Religion ; it is one thing to me, 
 another to Cardinal Newman. The Catholic criticizes 
 Protestantism as if it were or professed to be a sort 
 of substitute for Catholicism ; but it is not this, and 
 
136 CATHOLICISM 
 
 never can become it. They are not simply opposites, 
 but incommensurables. The one represents an organ- 
 ized and finely articulated hierarchical system, legis- 
 lative, administrative, administered, able to compre- 
 hend men and nations, and cover the whole life from 
 the cradle to the grave ; but the other denotes only 
 an attitude of mind or the principle that regulates it. 
 Catholicism claims to be a Religion ; Protestantism 
 cannot be truly or justly described as making any such 
 claim, or as seeking to be allowed to make it. It is 
 simply the assertion of a right to perform a duty, the 
 right of every man to fulfil the holiest and most 
 imperial of his duties, that of knowing and believing 
 the God who made his reason, of worshipping and 
 serving the God who speaks in his conscience. It is 
 significant as the contradiction and antithesis to a 
 system of collectivism, which hindered the clear sense 
 of personal relation and responsibility to God ; but 
 the creation of this sense was the work of God alone, 
 and its realization in Religion was due to His con- 
 tinued and gracious activity among men. Protestan- 
 tism is thus only an attempt to make religion 
 possible, to create the conditions that will permit and 
 require the Religion of Christ to become actual. It 
 implies the being of this Religion, but neither creates 
 it, nor represents it, nor embodies it ; only insists on 
 removing whatever hinders God and man, or man 
 and the Religion, coming face to face, that it may be 
 realized in and through his spirit. It may be con- 
 strued to signify the supremacy of reason, and so it 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT I37 
 
 does ; but this only means the supremacy of the 
 truth, or, in religious speech, the sovereignty of God. 
 The reason, indeed, is not particular, individual, 
 arbitrary, but universal, law-abiding, reasonable — the 
 thought which cannot think without following the 
 laws of its own being, and cannot follow them with- 
 out finding the truth. The whole truth may not be 
 found, but what is found is reality, divine and 
 sovereign to the man who finds it. 
 
 In a certain sense, submission to Catholicism is the 
 victory of unbelief; the man who accepts authority 
 because he dare not trust his intellect, lest it lead him 
 into Atheism, is vanquished by the Atheism he fears. 
 He unconsciously subscribes to the impious principle, 
 that the God he believes, has given him so godless a 
 reason that were he to follow it, it would lead him to 
 a faith without God. Now, there is more religion in 
 facing the consequences than in turning away from 
 them ; for the man who faces the consequences 
 remains truer to the truth, obeys the most immediate 
 and inexorable law of God, that given in his own 
 being. I can understand the man who says : " I do 
 not wish to be either a Pantheist or Agnostic ; but I 
 must be what the best thought and light within me — 
 beams as they are of the universal and eternal — 
 determine ; and if they conduct me to either Panthe- 
 ism or Agnosticism, then to either I will go, obedient 
 to the laws under which I live and think." But I 
 cannot so well understand or admire the man who 
 says : " If I follow my reason, it will make an Atheist 
 
138 CATHOLICISM 
 
 or a Sceptic of me ; therefore, I will flee for refuge 
 to the arms of infallible authority." There is a har- 
 mony, and so a religion, in the one nature that is 
 absent from the other ; the one has faced the issues, 
 and knows them ; the other has evaded their touch, 
 and is haunted by possibilities he cannot but fear. 
 There is victory, even in defeat, to the man who has 
 dared the conflict ; there is defeat, even in the rest he 
 wins, to the man who, that he may keep a whole skin, 
 turns and runs from the battle. 
 
 3. But there is another and still deeper differ- 
 ence, the conception of the Reason. Here the ideas 
 are again opposite and incommensurable. Dr. New- 
 man's language seems to me often almost impious, a 
 positive arraignment of the God who gave man his 
 intellect. I may say, and the saying need not be 
 misunderstood, reason is to me as holy as his church 
 is to him. It is too godlike to be inimical to God; 
 scepticism is not the essence but the accident of its 
 activity. It is critical when confronted by authority 
 or authoritative formulae, and it ought to be critical 
 then ; but its history does not record the growth of 
 scepticism, rather narrates the expansion and eleva- 
 tion of belief Reason, while realized in individuals, 
 is universal ; while conditioned in its working, it is 
 transcendental in its nature and worth ; while it acts 
 in and through millions of natural agents, it has a 
 supernatural source and end. It represents law, while 
 authority represents the violation of law ; the one ex- 
 presses an order instituted of God, but the other 
 
CATHOLICISM AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 1 39 
 
 man's most violent attempt at its suspension or super- 
 session. Hence reason is here conceived as essen- 
 tially architectonic ; its action, where most analytical, 
 is always with a view to a more perfect synthesis. It 
 cannot realize its idea, or be itself, without being con- 
 structive. Every attempt to do justice to it has 
 emphasized this as belonging to its very essence, that 
 without which it could not be reason. Take, for 
 example, Kant. He and Newman have been com- 
 pared or rather contrasted as, respectively, the one the 
 source of modern scepticism and agnosticism, and the 
 other the ideal teacher of religion. But the positions 
 ought to be reversed ; Kant is the great teacher of 
 faith, Newman, in the region of the reason or the in- 
 tellect, is the master of scepticism. Kant's reason was 
 architectonic, made nature, supplied the forms and the 
 conditions of thought by which alone she was inter- 
 pretable and interpreted. Reason was a latent or 
 implicit universe, real in its very ideality, so deter- 
 mining phenomena as to constitute a cosmos. But 
 where Kant treads firmly, Newman walks feebly, 
 speaks of instinct and presumption, and feels as if he 
 dare not trust reason with nature, lest he have to trust 
 her with more. Kant, indeed, does not allow that the 
 mere or pure reason, which is equal to the interpreta- 
 tion of nature, is equal to the cognition of God ; and 
 he builds, like Newman, his argument for the Divine 
 existence on conscience. But to him conscience is 
 still reason, all the more that it uses the " categorical 
 imperative," and his argument, unlike Newman's, is 
 
1 40 CA THOLICISM 
 
 reasoned ; it is not the mere echo of a " magisterial 
 dictate," but is based on a universal principle, and 
 articulates a complete theory of moral sovereignty 
 and government. Kant's moral religion was *at once 
 natural and transcendental ; Newman's is positive 
 and legislative. The former was inseparable from the 
 ideal of humanity ; but the latter is institutional, 
 comes ab extra. Kant's position is the vindication of 
 faith through nature ; Newman's is the surrender of 
 nature to unbelief. For with Kant the practical is 
 not the contradiction of the pure reason ; the one is 
 but the supplement of the other. They are conceived 
 by their author not as mutually independent, still less 
 as opposed, but as so constituting a unity and a syn- 
 thesis that what the one does for nature the other 
 does for eternity and God. But Newman finds such 
 a dualism in nature that he has to introduce a Deus 
 ex machi7ia to rectify it. Conscience demands God, 
 but reason will not allow the faith in Him to live ; and 
 so an infallible church is called in to determine the 
 issue, confirm and support the conscience, and 
 " preserve religion in the world " by so restraining 
 " the freedom of thought " as " to rescue it from its 
 own suicidal excesses." ^ This may be a good 
 excuse for authority, but it is a bad apology for faith. 
 He who places the rational nature of man on the side 
 of Atheism, that he may the better defend a church, 
 saves the church at the expense of religion and God. 
 
 * Apol. 245. 
 May, 1885. 
 
IV 
 
 CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL 
 CRITICISM 
 
 THE criticism of the intellectual or speculative 
 bases of any institution is criticism of the 
 institution ; the reasons that are thought to justify 
 its existence describe its character. As men conceive 
 God, they conceive Religion ; and as Religion is 
 conceived, so is the Church. Cardinal Newman^ has 
 affirmed that the ultimate question between Catholi- 
 cism and Protestantism is not one of history or indi- 
 vidual doctrine, but of first principles. He is right, 
 only his principle, whether the Church be or be not 
 a continuous miracle, is not primary enough. A 
 miracle by becoming continuous ceases to be miracu- 
 lous ; a supernatural which has descended into the 
 bosom of the natural becomes part of its order, and 
 must be handled like the other forces and phenomena 
 of history. Below the question as to the Church lies 
 this other and deeper — What is God ? and what His 
 relations to man and man's to Him ? or, How are we 
 to conceive God, and how represent His rule and 
 redemption of man ? It is this radical issue which 
 
 ^ Present Position of Catholics in England^ lect. vii. 
 
 141 
 
142 CATHOLICISM 
 
 gives living interest to ancient controversies, lifting 
 them from the noisy field of ecclesiastical polemics 
 to the serener heights of spiritual and speculative 
 thought. 
 
 Now, if the idea of God be conceived as the idea 
 really determinative of our religious controversies, it 
 is evident that the discussion in the preceding essay 
 as to its genesis and proofs, must be incomplete until 
 supplemented by a discussion as to its expression or 
 realization in history. These are parts of a whole, 
 and so absolute is the need of harmony between the 
 parts that we may say this : To determine the idea of 
 God is to fix the standpoint from which history is to 
 be studied and interpreted, while in the interpretation 
 of history we are but explicating and testing our 
 conception of God. If the idea of God in theology 
 be mean, the idea of His action in history cannot be 
 noble ; while, conversely, an adequate notion of His 
 method and movement in history demands a corres- 
 pondent notion of His character and ends. If we 
 conceive Him as in the same sense and degree the 
 Father and Sovereign of every man, willing good to 
 each, evil to none, equal in His love and care for all, 
 impartial and universal as law, while personal and 
 particular as mercy, — then we cannot allow either 
 Him or His truth to be so much the exclusive pos- 
 session of a given society, that its history is the 
 history of His mind or revelation, and of His purposes 
 and ways. But if we believe that He has committed 
 His truth, His spirit, and His redemptive agencies to 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1 43 
 
 the keeping of a peculiar and pre-eminent church, then 
 we shall regard its history as the history of His special 
 action or providence, all who are without it being 
 judged by and through it, as if it were His visible and 
 articulate sovereignty. Now this, in the very degree 
 that it gives an exalted idea of the church, represents 
 a mean idea of God ; an historical institution is en- 
 nobled, but the immensest and most august of human 
 beliefs is narrowed and depraved. In a true sense, 
 therefore, we explicate our theistic idea when we 
 attempt to explain not the mere phenomena of 
 nature, but the immense and complex procession of 
 forces, persons, institutions, and events, which we call 
 the history of man. Our philosophy of history is but 
 our conception of God evolved and articulated. 
 
 § I. The Ideas of God, Religion, and the Church 
 
 I. This fundamental principle determines the point 
 at which our discussion must be resumed — the Idea of 
 Religion. This idea stands, as it were, intermediate 
 between the ideas of God and the Church, and their 
 mutual relations may be thus described : — Religion is 
 the realization, in the regions of thought, feeling, and 
 action, of the idea of God ; while the Church is the 
 idea of Religion articulated or built into a social 
 organism, whose life is lived on the field of history. 
 What this means will be better understood by-and- 
 by. Meanwhile we note, the three ideas must corres- 
 pond in character and quality ; the Religion ever is 
 as the God is, and the Church as the Religion. The 
 
144 CATHOLICISM 
 
 radical differences are those of the theistic idea ; it is 
 not the beHef, but the conception, of God that most 
 decisively differentiates men. That He is, most men 
 believe ; where they mainly differ is concerning what 
 He is. 
 
 In the sphere of thought their differences are ex- 
 pressed in the various theistic philosophies — dualistic, 
 monistic, transcendental, immanent ; but in Religion 
 they are represented by the various churches and 
 societies that embody distinct ideals of life and duty, 
 authority and obedience, worship and conduct. 
 Politics express fundamental beliefs — are, indeed, but 
 those beliefs applied to the regulation of civil life and 
 the organization of society. Men who are of one 
 faith may not be of one Religion ; they may have one 
 name for the object of worship, yet differ in their 
 notion of the object ; and to differ here is to differ 
 radically and throughout. There is a conception of 
 God that makes a great propitiatory and mediatorial 
 church a necessity ; and there is a conception of 
 Him that will not allow any such institution to stand 
 between Him and man. The controversy between 
 these antithetical notions is not of yesterday, but is 
 as old as Religion, dating from the moment when 
 men began to speak of and worship God. In all the 
 ancient faiths the priestly Deity was one, and the 
 Deity of spirit and thought another ; they might 
 agree in name, but they differed in nature and 
 character. In Judaism, the God of the priesthood 
 loved the official sanctities, the temple, the altar, the 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1 45 
 
 sacrifice, the incense, the priest and his garments and 
 bells and breastplate, the sabbath, the new moon, the 
 feast, and the solemn assembly. But the God of 
 prophecy loved the moral and spiritual sanctities, the 
 living temple, the whole people constituted a priest- 
 hood unto Jehovah, the sacrifices of the broken spirit 
 and the contrite heart, the law written within, the 
 worship expressed in obedience, the obedience that 
 consisted in doing justly, loving mercy, and walking 
 humbly with God. In India the sacerdotal Deity 
 was the ground and cause of caste, and the root of a 
 religion without morality ; while the attempt to tran- 
 scend so mean a notion produced the philosophies, 
 pantheistic and pessimistic, and provoked the nega- 
 tions which became Buddhism. In Greece the Re- 
 ligion of the temple and the priesthood knew no 
 ethical Deity, and had no ethical spirit, lived by faith 
 in myths and legends, by the practice of mediation, 
 by processions and ceremonial observances, by the 
 grace of the oracle which men consulted when they 
 wished nature helped by the supernatural. But the 
 Deity of the Academy and the Porch was morally 
 beautiful, true, and good ; and their ideal of Religion 
 was so ethical as to be offended and affronted by the 
 myths and customs of the priestly order. Measured 
 by the standard of this order, Socrates was, because of 
 his faith in a purer God, pronounced guilty and worthy 
 of death ; in presence of its moral perversions and 
 impotences Plato was forced to plead for a purged 
 mythology and a new and nobler priesthood and the 
 
 10 
 
146 CATHOLICISM 
 
 Stoic was driven to attempt to translate the ancient 
 beliefs into the symbols of a hidden philosophy. And 
 these are but typical cases, illustrating a conflict 
 every historical Religion has known, and the Christian 
 could not escape. Within it, as within every other, 
 two conceptions of Deity have had to contend for the 
 mastery ; and it is certain that the contest did not be- 
 gin with the sixteenth century, and will not end with 
 the nineteenth. However much disguised as a ques- 
 tion now in philosophy, now in polity, ecclesiastical 
 or civil, here as a controversy of churches, there as a 
 collision of peoples, yet the fundamental and deter- 
 minative problem has ever remained one and the same 
 — What is God ? and what His relation to man and 
 man's to Him ? 
 
 2. The idea of God, then, determines the religious 
 ideal. Religion being but the form in which the idea 
 appears in the sphere of the real, and living, and 
 related. And in Cardinal Newman the two so 
 correspond as to reflect and repeat each other. His 
 religion is as his Theism is : both proceed from 
 conscience and have their qualities determined by it. 
 God appears as Judge, and Religion " is founded in 
 one way or other on the sense of sin."^ Hence, out 
 of the sense of sin and the fear of the righteous and 
 judicial God, whose absence or estrangement from 
 the world so pierces the soul and bewilders the reason, 
 he educes those mediations, priesthoods, sacrifices, 
 theories of future and even eternal penalties, which he 
 
 ^ Grammar of Assent^ p. 392. 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1 47 
 
 holds to be the essential characteristics of all the 
 Natural Religions. Now, his doctrine of Religion is 
 as little true to history as we found his Theism to be 
 true to reason and thought. It is characteristic of 
 Newman that his favourite authority for the qualities 
 and features of Natural Religion is Lucretius, which 
 is very much as if one were to quote Voltaire as our 
 most veracious and trustworthy witness touching 
 the nature and action of Christianity. As a simple 
 matter of fact, the Religion Lucretius so hated, and 
 described as so hateful, was in the highest degree 
 artificial — a product of many and even malign 
 influences, of various and even hostile civilizations. 
 There are cycles of faiths which have sacerdotal ideas 
 and expiatory rites, and there are also cycles of faiths 
 where they can hardly be said to be known ; but 
 even where most emphasized and observed they do 
 not imply such a consciousness of guilt as Cardinal 
 Newman imagines and describes. Indeed, if the 
 history of Religions prove anything, it is that they 
 are not " founded on the sense of sin," and do not 
 regard God, primarily, as the impersonation of " re- 
 tributive justice." It were truer to say that, as a rule 
 (there are, of course, exceptions), the pre- and extra- 
 Christian Religions are unmoral ; and that the sense 
 of sin is the direct creation of Christianity, including, 
 of course, its historical forerunner. And the older or 
 more natural the Religions, the brighter they are, and 
 the less darkened or oppressed by the consciousness 
 of guilt. The Vedic deities are mainly deities of the 
 
148 CATHOLICISM 
 
 light; there is nothing that so Httle troubles the 
 Homeric gods as the austere duties of justice and 
 judgment. But the inaccurate psychology of the 
 Theism is here reflected in the inaccurate history. 
 Since the reason was released from all duties, and the 
 conscience made " the creative principle," the histori- 
 cal Religions had to be represented as processions or 
 projections from the conscience. This false view of 
 Natural Religion is carried over into Revealed, to 
 the consequent darkening and degradation of both. 
 For Christianity is conceived to be " simply an 
 addition to " the Religion of Nature, the ideas of the 
 one being neither superseded nor contradicted, but 
 recognized and incorporated by the other.^ Thus as 
 the natural was conceived to be, the spiritual is repre- 
 sented as being ; those features and qualities that have 
 been determined beforehand as essential to Religion 
 are transferred bodily to Christianity, and it is inter- 
 preted through them and in their light. The idea is 
 not deduced from the sources, but conveyed into 
 them, with the result that the Religion they contain 
 appears only as the exaggerated shadow of the 
 writer's own ideal. 
 
 3. But the idea of Religion is only preliminary, 
 the main matter is its historical realization. Out of 
 many passages, we may select two to illustrate how 
 Cardinal Newman makes the transition from Natural 
 to Revealed Religion, and thence to his doctrine of 
 the Church, or simply to Christianity in history. 
 
 1 Grammar of Assent^ p. 388. 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1 49 
 
 " Revelation begins where Natural Religion fails. The Re- 
 ligion of Nature is a mere inchoation, and needs a complement 
 — it can have but one complement, and that very complement 
 is Christianity." * 
 
 "Revelation consists in the manifestation of the Invisible 
 Divine Power, or in the substitution of the Voice of a Lawgiver 
 for the Voice of Conscience. The supremacy of conscience is 
 the essence of Natural Religion ; the supremacy of Apostle, or 
 Pope, or Church, or Bishop, is the essence of Revealed ; and 
 when such external authority is taken away, the mind falls back 
 upon that inward guide which it possessed even before Revela- 
 tion was vouchsafed." ^ 
 
 So reason, dismissed from Natural, has no place in 
 Revealed Religion ; authority reigns in both. Re- 
 ligion issues from it and ends in it ; begins in the 
 Divine authority speaking as an internal voice, termi- 
 nates in the same authority externalized and made 
 visible in an articulate Lawgiver. It is created, so 
 to speak, by legislation ; and the more positive, i.e. 
 statutory, forensic, external the legislation is, it is held 
 to be the more excellent, authoritative, and adequate. 
 Religion becomes a matter of precept and rule, 
 casuistry and ritual. Conscience is the prophet and 
 forerunner of the church, which at once fulfils the 
 prophecy and supersedes the prophet. But the 
 
 * Grammar of Assent^ p. 486. It is curious how completely 
 Deistic is Newman's doctrine both of religion and of the 
 relation of the two religions, the natural and the supernatural. 
 He stands here exactly where the eighteenth century stood 
 and reproduces its limitations and distinctions with uncon- 
 scious, perhaps, but most notable accuracy. 
 
 ^ Development of Christian Doctrine^ c. ii. § 2, p. 124 (second 
 edition). 
 
1 50 CA THOLICISM 
 
 creation of the individual conscience is an indivi- 
 dualistic religion, which has its character only the 
 more emphasized that it appears disguised as a 
 Catholicism. The false philosophy makes the idea 
 of Religion defective ; the defective idea of Religion 
 leads to the misinterpretation of both its nature and 
 action in history. It is so interpreted that man's 
 relation to God grows ever less personal and direct, 
 ever more formal and mediated ; and, as a conse- 
 quence, the historical process must represent man as 
 growing into, rather than out of, those symbols and 
 sanctions and mediations which Lessing conceived to 
 belong to the childhood rather than the manhood of 
 the race. The authority of God, with its correlative 
 in the dependence and obedience of man, is indeed 
 the essence of Religion ; but this authority, simply 
 because God's, can never become external, or be 
 embodied in Pope, or Church, or Bishop. For the 
 moment it were thus embodied.it would be so limited 
 and conditioned as to cease to be absolute ; it would 
 have to speak in the terms and work by the methods 
 of a human institution rather than on the lines and 
 in the ways of an infinite law. If true Religion be 
 the worship of the Father in spirit and in truth, then 
 it is this worship, and not submission to Pope or 
 Church, that is the primary duty or true characteristic 
 of the religious man. And the more filial the man 
 the more perfect the worship ; the purer he is in 
 spirit the fuller he is of the truth. 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM I5I 
 
 § II. The Roman as tJie Catholic Church 
 
 The matter then stands thus : — There are three 
 ideas, God, Religion, and the Church ; and these three 
 are so related that the second and third may be 
 regarded as progressive explications of the first.^ 
 According to Cardinal Newman, conscience appre- 
 hends God as Judge ; Religion is founded on man's 
 consciousness and confession of offence against Him ; 
 and the Church at once embodies God's authority as 
 Judge, and satisfies man's need of expiation. Unless 
 God were so apprehended Religion could not be so 
 defined ; and unless God and Religion were so un- 
 derstood the Church could not be conceived as 
 authoritative and mediatorial. The correspondence 
 between the ideas of God and Religion has thus its 
 counterpart and complement in the correspondence 
 between the ideas of religion and the religious 
 society, the elements held necessary to the one being 
 represented and realized by the other. What the 
 religious idea declares to be needful to the pleasing 
 of God, must exist in the society and be provided 
 for by it ; what is said to be of the essence of 
 Religion must be possessed or affirmed by the 
 Church. 
 
 I. Now, if this be true, one thing is evident : the 
 narrower and more exclusive the religious idea, the 
 easier it is to find a society that has realized it ; but 
 the fuller, the richer, and more comprehensive the 
 
 * Cf. ante, p. 17. 
 
152 CATHOLICISM 
 
 idea, the less possible is it to find such a society. 
 A magnificent ideal for a Church may be a mean 
 ideal for a Religion ; what makes a Catholic institu- 
 tion splendid may cover a spiritual and universal 
 faith with shame. The greater indeed ought never 
 to be measured by the less ; the less ought to be 
 studied and valued through the greater. This means : 
 the Church ought to be criticised and judged through 
 the Religion, not the Religion through the Church. 
 The Church is good in the degree that it articulates 
 and realizes the vital elements in the Religion ; bad 
 in the degree that it fails to do so. I freely acknow- 
 ledge the pre-eminence of Catholicism as an his- 
 torical institution ; here she is without a rival or a 
 peer. If to be at once the most permanent and 
 extensive, the most plastic and inflexible, ecclesi- 
 astical organization, were the same thing as to be 
 the most perfect embodiment and vehicle of Religion, 
 then the claim of Catholicism were simply indis- 
 putable. The man in search of an authoritative 
 church may not hesitate ; once let him assume that 
 a visible and audible authority is of the essence of 
 Religion, and he has no choice ; he must become, 
 or get himself reckoned, a Catholic. The Roman 
 church assails his understanding with invincible 
 logic, and appeals to his imagination with irresistible 
 charms. Her sons say proudly to him : " She alone 
 is catholic, continuous, venerable, august, the very 
 Church Christ founded and His Apostles instituted 
 and organized. She possesses all the attributes and 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1 53 
 
 notes of catholicity — an unbroken apostolic succes- 
 sion, a constant tradition, an infallible Chair, unity, 
 sanctity, truth, an inviolable priesthood, a holy sacri- 
 fice, and efficacious sacraments. The Protestant 
 Churches are but of yesterday, without the authority, 
 the truth, or the ministries that can reconcile man 
 to God ; they are only a multitude of warring sects 
 whose confused voices but protest their own in- 
 sufficiency, whose impotence almost atones for their 
 sin of schism by the way it sets off the might, the 
 majesty, and the unity of Rome In contrast, she 
 stands where her Master placed her, on the rock, 
 endowed with the prerogatives and powers He gave ; 
 and against her the gates of hell shall not prevail. 
 Supernatural grace is hers and miracle ; it watched 
 over her cradle, has followed her in all her ways 
 through all her centuries, and has not forsaken her 
 even yet. She is not like Protestantism, a concession 
 to the negative spirit, an unholy compromise with 
 naturalism. Everything about her is positive and 
 transcendent ; she is the bearer of Divine truth, the 
 representative of the Divine order, the Supernatural 
 living in the very heart and before the v^y face of 
 the Natural. The saints, too, are hers, and the man 
 she receives joins their communion, enjoys their 
 goodly fellowship, feels their influence, participates 
 in their merits and the blessings they distribute. 
 Their earthly life made the past of the Church 
 illustrious ; their heavenly activity binds the visible 
 and invisible into unity, and lifts time into eternity. 
 
154 CATHOLICISM 
 
 To honour the saints is to honour sanctity ; the 
 Church which teaches man to love the holy helps 
 him to love holiness. And the Fathers are hers ; 
 their labours, sufferings, martyrdoms, were for her 
 sake ; she treasures their words and their works ; 
 her sons alone are able to say, " Athanasius and 
 Chrysostom, Cyprian and Augustine, Anselm and 
 Bernard, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus are ours, 
 their wealth is our inheritance, at their feet we learn 
 filial reverence and Divine wisdom." But rich as she 
 is in persons, she is richer in truth, her worship is a 
 glorious sacrament, her mysteries are a great deep. 
 Hidden sanctities and meanings surround man ; the 
 sacramental principle invests the simplest things, acts, 
 and rites with an awful yet most blissful significance, 
 turns all worship now into a Divine parable which 
 speaks the deep things of God, now into a medium 
 of His gracious and consolatory approach to men and 
 man's awed and contrite, hopeful and prevailing, 
 approach to Him. Symbols are deeper than words, 
 speak when words become silent, gain where words 
 lose in meaning ; and so in hours of holiest worship 
 the Church teaches by symbols truths language may 
 not utter. And yet she knows better than any other 
 how to use reasonable speech ; the Fathers and 
 doctors of theology have been hers. For every 
 possible difficulty of the reason, or the heart, or 
 the conscience, she has not one, but a thousand 
 solutions. If men are gentle of heart, and do not 
 like to think that all men without the Church must 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 155 
 
 be lost, distinctions are made as to the body and 
 soul of the Church, as to kinds and degrees of 
 ignorance, softening stern doctrines into tenderness. 
 If they have difficulties about Infallibility, whether 
 due to papal sins and blunders in the past, or free- 
 dom in the present, or progress in the future, they 
 can easily be obviated by methods of interpretation 
 and known and noted constitutional limitations. In 
 the Church alone has casuistry become a science 
 so perfect as to have a law and a cure for every 
 real or possible case of conscience ; in her schools 
 theology has become a completed science, which has 
 systematized her body of truth, explicated her reason, 
 justified her being and her claims. And so the 
 Catholic Church is, in a sense altogether her own, 
 not only an ecclesiastical institution, but a Religion, 
 a system able to guide the conscience, satisfy the 
 heart, regulate the conduct, adjust and determine the 
 relations of God and man." 
 
 2. Now this sublime and august Catholicism may 
 well and easily be victorious in its appeal to the pious 
 imagination ; but it is one thing to be sublime and 
 august as an institution, and quite another thing to 
 be true and credible as a Religion. Our concern 
 here is not with the appeal of Catholicism, but with 
 its right to make it ; not with its sufficiency for the 
 men who grant its premisses, but with its relation to 
 the Religion it professes to represent and realize ; 
 whether it be or be not equal to its complete and 
 veracious representation, whether it do or do not 
 
156 CATHOLICISM 
 
 possess energies equal to its realization in man and 
 society. The Catholic church did not create the 
 Religion, but was created by it ; and it is the func- 
 tion of historical criticism to discover and determine 
 the methods and factors of the process which created 
 the church. The questions involved are many and 
 intricate, but they may be said to reduce themselves 
 to two : first, the historical relations of the created 
 institution or church, and the creative Religion ; and, 
 secondly, the adequacy of the institution to the inter- 
 pretation of the Religion and to the fulfilment of its 
 purposes. The questions are indivisible, but distinct. 
 If the institution be so related to the Religion as 
 to be identical or interchangeable with it, the question 
 of adequacy is, ipso factOy settled ; though even then 
 the adequacy of the church to the work of a Religion 
 will remain to be discussed. We may distinguish 
 the questions thus : the one concerns the genesis of 
 Catholicism, how and by what historical process and 
 causes it came to be ; but the other concerns its be- 
 haviour and action in history — whether it has lived 
 and acted as a Society which incorporates the mind 
 and serves the ends of Jesus Christ. The two ques- 
 tions combined relate to what may be termed the 
 philosophy of Catholicism, but the former alone can 
 determine whether this must be held identical with a 
 philosophy of the Christian Religion. 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1 57 
 
 § III. Whether it be Possible to Conceive Catholicism 
 as a Development from the Religion of Christ 
 
 The fundamental and decisive question then is 
 as to the relation of Catholicism to the Religion of 
 Christ. The question is at once historical and com- 
 parative — historical in so far as the connection of the 
 systems is concerned ; comparative in so far as the 
 one supplies the norm by which the other must be 
 measured and criticised. The Religion of Christ 
 must not be judged by Catholicism, but Catholicism 
 by the Religion of Christ. 
 
 I. The differences between these relate at once to 
 the form and the matter of faith, both to the political 
 organization of the church and the religious ideal 
 it embodies. What these differences are may appear 
 in the course of the discussion. It is enough to say 
 here that they are too radical to be ignored, and too 
 flagrant to be overlooked. Protestant writers have 
 emphasized them, and Catholic theologians have pro- 
 posed various theories in explanation. These differ- 
 ences constituted in Newman's earlier period the 
 supreme obstacle to his entering the church of Rome ; 
 and the theory by which the obstacle was surmounted 
 and the differences explained is expounded in the 
 book that marks the crisis in his career.^ The book 
 
 * An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine^ 1846 
 (second edition). The history of the theory of development 
 in Roman Catholic apologetics is a very interesting one, and 
 well illustrates the obligations of Catholic to what is called 
 
158 CATHOLICISM 
 
 stands in a sort of mediatory relation to his earlier 
 and later works ; in it the logic which had hitherto 
 governed his mind reaches its consistent conclusion, 
 and in it the doctrines of the later works are implicit. 
 Studied in their light, sentences that were enigmatical 
 to its contemporary critics become strangely lumi- 
 nous. As in the Apologia and the Grammar^ a 
 natural scepticism forms the basis and justification 
 of a mechanical supernaturalism. Its thesis may be 
 stated thus : to prove how, since reason or nature has 
 forsaken God and been forsaken of Him, a miraculous 
 and infallible church is a necessity to faith. The 
 philosophical scepticism determines the definitions, 
 gives point and force to the arguments, presents the 
 real, though here unformulated, alternative. Atheism 
 or Catholicity. "Corruption" is but a figurative name 
 for the " infallible Protestant succession " ; it is " that 
 state of development which undoes its previous ad- 
 vances," " a process ending in dissolution of the body 
 of thought and usage which was bound up as it were 
 
 " non-Catholic " thought. I had meant to compare the French, 
 German, and English forms of this theory, and show how these 
 had been affected by the historical and philosophical specu- 
 lations of their respective countries. De Maistre, Moehler, 
 Goerres, and Newman are well-known names ; but Carov^, 
 Gengler, Giinther, though he and his school found small favour 
 at Rome, and Staudenmaier no less deserve mention. The 
 comparative neglect that seems to have fallen on a more 
 remarkable man than any of these, Franz Baader, is not credit- 
 able to the Church that owned him. The unacknowledged 
 obligations of Newman to French Catholic or neo-Catholic 
 writers, would be an interesting theme for analytic criticism. 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1 59 
 
 in one system," "the destruction of the norm or 
 type." ^ Development is " the germination, growth, 
 and perfection of some living, that is influential, truth, 
 or apparent truth, in the minds of men during a suffi- 
 cient period." ^ These definitions, which but express 
 the art of the logician who so frames his premisses as 
 to make his conclusion inevitable, mean, of course, 
 simply this : outside Catholicism there reigns corrup- 
 tion, or the tendency to Atheism ; inside it, there 
 proceeds development, or there exists a living body 
 of truth, a real and expansive Religion. But the 
 artificiality of the definitions, their unreality as his- 
 torical doctrines, and their insufficiency for the argu- 
 ment, soon become apparent. For neither the funda- 
 mental principle nor the dogmatic purpose can allow 
 growth to be any real or sufficient note of truth ; an 
 authority is needed to discover and ratify it. The 
 only healthy growth is one supernaturally conducted 
 and authenticated, and without this authentication the 
 truth could not be known. For unless the develop- 
 ment proceeded "under the eye" of the external author- 
 ity, which is the only sure and unerring judge of what 
 is true and what is false, we should not know what to 
 believe and what to reject. And so infallibility must 
 appear to guarantee the revelation ; though, as infalli- 
 bility can only be conceived as revelation in exercise, 
 the function is rather curious than convincing. And 
 it is still more curious that the idea of infallibility, 
 
 1 pp. 62, 63. 2 p^ yj^ 
 
I60 CATHOLICISM 
 
 which is the clearest as it is the most recent example 
 of development within the Roman church, should be 
 exempted from the operation of the law, and con- 
 ceived as from the very beginning the duly consti- 
 tuted final authoritative court of appeal in all matters 
 of faith. It is thus essentially a "provision" or ex- 
 pedient for retaining God in our knowledge, and was 
 made necessary by the metaphysical doubt which 
 would, left alone, have acted as a solvent of faith. 
 And this simply means that God being lost from 
 nature and history, an artificial or mechanical, as 
 distinguished from a supernatural, method has to 
 be devised for bringing Him back. Newman holds 
 " there can be no combination on the basis of truth 
 without an organ of truth " ; but his organ is an organi- 
 zation, with the natural history, the modi vivendi et 
 operandi proper to one. He does not say, " There 
 are no eternal truths " : but he does say, " There are 
 none sufficiently commanding to be the basis of 
 public union and action. The only general persua- 
 sive in matters of conduct is authority." ^ If Religion 
 is to live, " there is absolute need of a spiritual supre- 
 macy," or " a supreme authority ruling and reconciling 
 individual judgments by a Divine right and a recog- 
 nized wisdom." ^ Metaphysical scepticism may seem 
 a curious basis for belief in what has been called the 
 most supernatural form of Christianity ; but it is New- 
 man's. ^ 
 
 * p. 128. ^ p. 127. 
 
 * For a more detailed exposition and criticism of Newman's 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM l6l 
 
 2. But we have had enough of the philosophical 
 question, which is here of interest only as showing 
 the logical coherence and continuity of ideas in 
 Newman's own mind. We must discuss with more 
 care and in fuller detail the historical thesis : How 
 does this infallible Catholic church stand related to 
 the Religion of Jesus Christ ? The reply, as con- 
 ceived by the Catholic, is, the two are one ; the 
 Church is the Religion. Why, then, do they so differ ? 
 Why do we find so many things in Catholicism that 
 we do not find in the Religion ? The answer of the 
 Catholic is — the differences are those of growth and 
 logical evolution ; they are notes and evidences of 
 life, due to the continuous and divinely guided expan- 
 sion of the organism that came into being nineteen 
 centuries ago. The theory of development is thus 
 an " hypothesis to account for a difficulty " ^ — the 
 procession or evolution of Catholicism from what was 
 in so many respects radically unlike it, primitive 
 Christianity. But the theory was not simply a 
 method of explaining the differences between the 
 religion which Christ created and the church which 
 the Pope governs ; it was, on the one hand, an 
 apology for Catholicism, and on the other, for the 
 man who had been compelled to embrace it. The book 
 was in the strictest possible sense an earlier Apologia 
 pro vita sua. But polemical purpose is a serious 
 
 doctrine of development, and a more adequate discussion of 
 the subject as a whole, see The Place of Christ in Modern Theo- 
 logy ^ pp. 25 ff. 1 Development of Christian Doctrine^ p. 27. 
 
 ir 
 
1 62 CATHOLICISM 
 
 obstacle to scientific discussion. History, as Newman 
 handles it, is but dialectic, a method of establishing 
 a dogma or making good a proposition. No man 
 could be less the ideal critic, or constructive historian, 
 than he, or be more deft in the use of historical 
 material for controversial ends. As he conceived the 
 matter, his " Development of Doctrine " ought to 
 have been a philosophy, not only of Catholicism, but 
 of Christianity. But it is too completely without the 
 critical and scientific spirit to be either. What he 
 termed "development" was not what either philo- 
 sophy or Science means when it uses the word. For 
 he refused to apply the process to the collective result, 
 keeping out of its hands the infallibility, which, as 
 the most abnormal and least intrinsic organ or faculty, 
 had the greatest need to be explained ; and he con- 
 ceived the process in a merely logical rather than a 
 really natural and scientific way. Now, let us " grant 
 the principle of development, but demand that it be 
 philosophically stated and rigorously applied. To 
 speak in the current phraseology, we must have the 
 organism, but also the environment ; and these must be 
 studied and exhibited in their mutual intercourse and 
 reciprocal action, the elements they respectively con- 
 tribute to the result being carefully distinguished and 
 appraised. The organism may modify the environ- 
 ment, but the environment may still more radically 
 modify and even vary the organism. The degree 
 and incidence of change is not to be settled before- 
 hand by a series of purely a priori definitions and 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1 63 
 
 tests, like Newman's sacred seven/ but by actual 
 observation of the process, analysis of its conditions, 
 discovery of its factors, determination of the path and 
 rate of movement." 
 
 The problem, then, as to the evolution of the 
 Church, the headship of the Supreme Pontiff, and his 
 ex Cathedra infallibility, is historical, and soluble 
 only by the methods of historical research, which 
 does not begin by a priori definitions and determina- 
 tions of one class of growths as " corruptions," and 
 another as " developments," but simply observes the 
 process, the factors, and the results. Hence we must 
 do two things, (a) find the germ, viz., the body or 
 system of truth, in its primitive or least developed state, 
 and (/8) study the successive conditions under which it 
 lived, their action on it, its action on them. The germ 
 is simple, but the conditions are complex and varied. 
 It is a new Religion : but it lives surrounded by a 
 multitude of ancient Religions, on the soil, within 
 the atmosphere, under the light, amid the customs, 
 memories, manners, associations they had created. It 
 is a body of beliefs : but the beliefs are construed 
 and formulated into doctrines in cities where philo- 
 sophy had been studied, often by men who had been 
 
 ^ The " tests of true development " are : " the preservation of 
 the idea " ; " continuity of principles " ; " power of assimila- 
 tion " ; " early anticipation " ; " logical sequence " ; " preser- 
 vative additions " ; " chronic continuance " (pp. 64 ff.). These 
 are but so many principles of prejudgment. So independent is 
 he of historical method that he does not condescend to any 
 critical search after " the idea " that was to be preserved. 
 
1 64 CATHOLICISM 
 
 trained in the schools, or had felt the influence of 
 Hellenic or Hellenistic, Latin or Oriental speculation. 
 The thought of the most catholic Father bears on its 
 face the image of his time, and the superscription of 
 his place. Clement, Origen, and Athanasius are men 
 of Alexandria, with problems that differ according to 
 their differing ages ; but they are as distinctively sons 
 of their city as Philo, Ammonius, or Plotinus. They 
 speak, as it were, in its idiom, and have their minds, 
 methods of exegesis and argument, modes of thought 
 and doctrinal apprehension saturated with its spirit. 
 In the making of Augustine Plato has been as power- 
 ful as Paul ; and, if the Kingdom of God suggested 
 his ideal civitas, imperial Rome determined its form. 
 Then the Religion could not act and extend without 
 a polity ; but as it grew on the soil of Judaism, lived 
 in Greek cities and within the Roman Empire, first 
 under its ban, and then, in the very moment of its 
 dissolution, in alliance with it, the political type was 
 not uniform, but followed the model which prevailed 
 in its successive homes. Its base was Jewish, its 
 middle stratum Greek ; but its upper and final, imperial 
 and Roman. In its earliest form Christianity might 
 be described as a Religion which had stooped to use 
 the simplest polity ; but in its Roman form it might 
 be more correctly described as a polity which had 
 appropriated the name of a Religion. For after the 
 Church had lived among Jews, Greeks, and Romans, 
 and had affected, and been affected by, their respec- 
 tive faiths, philosophies, and polities, penetrated and 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1 65 
 
 modified as they all were by Oriental elements, it 
 was no longer the simple and rudimentary structure 
 known to the Apostles ; it had become a highly 
 developed and skilfully articulated organism, capable 
 not only of independent political life, but of imperial 
 or sovereign action. And so when Roman Caesar 
 ceased to rule the West, the Roman Bishop became 
 his substitute and successor. It was as organized by 
 the spirit and genius of the ancient Empire that Chris- 
 tianity met the newer peoples. It thus appeared to 
 them the representative at once of the new Religion, 
 the Roman State, and the old civilization ; and so 
 entered into conditions favourable to further develop- 
 ments, especially of the imperial order. The environ- 
 ment was thus ceaselessly changing, now from internal, 
 now from external, now from concurrent causes ; and 
 its every change affected and varied the organism. 
 Movement is complex, development is conditioned ; 
 has its causes, but also its occasions ; its laws, but 
 also its circumstances. The organism cannot be 
 isolated from its environment, but must be studied in 
 and through it. The mighty fabric of the Roman 
 church is a development ; no man will question it ; 
 but the significance of the development for the sys- 
 tem, for Religion, and for history, must be determined, 
 not by a series of arbitrary tests, but by the rigorous 
 methods of historical analysis and criticism. 
 
 3. If, then, we follow the historical method, our first 
 duty will be to find the primary form, the organism 
 in its aboriginal state. Newman, indeed, does not 
 
1 66 CA THOLICISM 
 
 trouble himself to discover this form ; but starts with an 
 imaginary picture, marked by manifold inaccuracies, 
 painted without the slightest reference to the sources 
 or what in them is material. The student of develop- 
 ment, however, must begin at the beginning — with 
 the New Testament ideal of Religion. Tradition 
 cannot be here trusted ; literature alone can. Tradi- 
 tion is uncertain, unfixed ; its tendency is to grow, to 
 mingle early and late, to throw the emphasis on the 
 most recent, to fuse in the heated crucible of the 
 imagination the marvellous and the unreal with the 
 actual and the real. But the written abides ; its 
 words do not change, do not augment the history 
 with fact or marvel, only become, as men grow 
 critical, more luminous, veracious, graphic, able to set 
 man, however distant in time, like an ear- and eye- 
 witness, face to face with the things he reads. And 
 here our literary sources are clear, credible, truthful. 
 We know the first century as we do not know the 
 second, or even the third. The founding of the 
 Religion is a more legible page of history than the 
 organization of the church ; the earlier throws more 
 light on the later period than the later on the earlier. 
 Indeed, we may say the earlier history is written 
 in lines of living light. If, then, we are to follow 
 the only method valid in historical science, we must 
 begin with our oldest written sources ; on every 
 matter connected with the first or parent form, the 
 real starting - point of the evolutional process, their 
 authority must be held final. This is no dogma of 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1 67 
 
 Protestantism, but a simple necessity of scientific 
 method, which is here, too, the method of nature and 
 assured knowledge. Light lies on the threshold ; it 
 is only after we have crossed it that the shadows 
 begin to thicken. 
 
 § IV. How the Priesthood came into the Religion 
 
 I. Now, what is the New Testament ideal of 
 Religion ? Its material or determinative conception 
 is, as we have already argued, the doctrine of God. 
 " He appears primarily, not, as Newman so strenuously 
 argued, as a God of judgment and justice, but of 
 mercy and grace, the Father of man, who needs not 
 to be appeased, but is gracious, propitious, finds the 
 Propitiator, provides the propitiation. His own Son 
 is the one Sacrifice, Priest, and Mediator, appointed 
 of God to achieve the reconciliation of man. Men 
 are God's sons ; filial love is their primary duty, 
 fraternal love their common and equal obligation. 
 Worship does not depend on sacred persons, places, 
 or rites, but is a thing of spirit and truth. The best 
 prayer is secret and personal ; the man who best 
 pleases God is not the scrupulous Pharisee, but the 
 penitent publican. Measured by the standard of a 
 sacerdotal Religion, Jesus was not a pious person ; 
 He spoke no word, did no act, that implied a priest- 
 hood for His people. He enforced no sacerdotal 
 observance, instituted no sacerdotal order, promul- 
 gated no sacerdotal law ; but simply required that 
 His people should be perfect as their Father in 
 
1 68 CA THOLICISM 
 
 heaven is perfect. And so what He founded was a 
 society to realize His own ideal, a Kingdom of heaven, 
 spiritual, eternal, which came without observation ; 
 a realm where the will of God is law, and the law 
 is love, and the citizens are the loving and the 
 obedient." The fact is too remarkable, too charac- 
 teristic and essential to the mind of Jesus to 
 be described as accidental, or as due to His 
 assumption of these things as understood. On the 
 contrary we have to note His most careful and even 
 scrupulous abstention from the use of all terms 
 that could imply the continuance of any priesthood 
 within His Church. The abstention must have been 
 difficult ; indeed, nothing could have been harder than 
 to avoid the use of terms which were on all men's lips 
 when they spoke about religion. Yet the only use 
 He made of the term "temple" was to apply it to His 
 body. He never gave the name of priest either to 
 Himself or to any disciple. The only sacrifice He 
 asked man to offer was the mercy which God 
 loved. These abstentions therefore are express and 
 designed ; a priesthood with its offices was no part of 
 His mind and purpose. And as with His own mind, 
 so was it in the Apostolic Church and in the 
 Apostolic epistles. The people the apostles represent 
 and address, the society they describe, may have in 
 its collective being a priestly character, but is without 
 an official priesthood. It has " apostles," " prophets," 
 "overseers" or "bishops," "elders," "pastors," 
 " teachers," " ministers " or " deacons," " evangelists " ; 
 but it has no " priests," and no man, or body of men, 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1 69 
 
 who bear the name, hold the place, exercise the 
 functions, or fulfil the duties of the priest, or the 
 priesthood, as they were known in ancient Religions. 
 It has no temple, save either the living Saviour or the 
 living man ; it asks from men no sacrifices, save those 
 of the spirit and the life ; it has no sensuous sanctities. 
 " Its Founder who, we repeat, never called Himself 
 a priest, stood to the priesthood of His land and time 
 in radical antagonism ; the writers who apply to Him 
 the name High Priest, and describe His work as a 
 sacrifice, carefully deny any similar name to any class 
 of His people, and decline to attach any similar idea 
 to any of their acts or instruments of worship. And 
 this may be said to represent on the negative side the 
 absolutely new and distinctive character of the 
 Religion of Christ. It stood among the ancient 
 faiths as a strange and extraordinary thing — a 
 priestless Religion, without the symbols, sacrifices, 
 ceremonies, officials, hitherto held, save by prophetic 
 Hebraism, to be the religious all in all. And it so 
 stood, because its God did not need to be propitiated, 
 but was propitious, supplying the only Priest and 
 Sacrifice equal to His honour, and the sins and wants 
 of man. In that hour God became a new being to 
 man, and man knew himself to be more than a mere 
 creature and subject — a son of the living God." ^ 
 
 2. Here, then, is the aboriginal germ — a Religion 
 without a priesthood, or any provision for it ; as such 
 
 * The Place of Christ in Modern Theology^ pp. 48, 49. 
 
170 CATHOLICISM 
 
 an exception among the Religions and an anomaly 
 to men ; and because of its anomalous character, lay- 
 ing its earliest professors open to the odious charge 
 of Atheism. But Catholicism is here the precise 
 opposite of this aboriginal Religion, this Christianity 
 of Christ and His apostles. The priesthood is essen- 
 tial to it ; without the priesthood it could have no 
 existence, no Saviour present in its services, no mass, 
 no sacraments, no confessional ; ina word, no worship 
 for God, no comfort and no command for man. Here, 
 then, is the first point for the historic inquirer : How 
 and whence came the idea and office of the priest- 
 hood into Christianity? Was it evolved from within, or 
 incorporated from without? Was it a latent organ or 
 capability legitimately evoked in the original, or was it 
 a foreign or superadded element due to the conditions 
 under which the organism lived? Without attempting 
 an exhaustive discussion of these questions, it will be 
 enough to say that the sacerdotal idea has a perfectly 
 distinct history of its own ; the date of its first 
 appearance in the Church can be fixed, its rise can be 
 traced, its growth measured, its action on the sub- 
 stance and organization of Christianity analyzed and 
 exhibited. The New Testament did not know it, and 
 in the second as in the first century it is still un- 
 known ; but the tendencies creative of it are active. 
 The apologists labour strenuously to explain how 
 Christianity, though without the sacerdotalism charac- 
 teristic of all the then licit or recognized worships, is 
 yet a Religion. In the Didache the prophet has 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM IJl 
 
 displaced the Priest.^ Ignatius may have high 
 episcopal, but he has no sacerdotal ideas ; and of these 
 his friend Polycarp is also free. To Justin Martyr, 
 Christians were the true high-priestly race ; they offer 
 the sacrifices well-pleasing to God.^ With Irenaeus 
 the sacerdotal dignity is the portion of the just ; and 
 the sanctified heart, the holy life, faith, obedience, 
 righteousness, are the sacrifices God loves.' The 
 choicest altar was the service of the needy ; to 
 minister to man was to sacrifice to God. There was 
 no order possessed of the exclusive right to officiate 
 in things sacred, exercising their functions by virtue 
 of some inalienable grace. The layman might 
 baptize or celebrate the Eucharist ; there was " liberty 
 of prophesying " ; the individual society or church 
 could exercise discipline, could even institute or 
 depose its officers. But as the second century ended 
 and the third opened, significant signs of change 
 begin to appear. Tertullian in Africa speaks of the 
 " Ordo sacerdotalis " and the " Sacerdotalia munera " ; 
 and describes the bishop as " summus sacerdos " and 
 " pontifex maximus."* Hippolytus in Italy claims 
 for himself, as successor of the Apostles, the high- 
 priesthood ; ^ while Origen in Alexandria, though he 
 
 * Chap. xiii. 3 ; cf. Clemens Rom. chapp. xl., xliii., xliv. 
 
 ^ Dial, chapp. cxiv.-cxvii. ; cf. Apol. i. chapp. Ixvi., Ixvii. 
 ^ Adv. Omn. Haeres. book iv. chapp. viii. 3, xvii. 4 ; bk. v. c. 
 xxxiv. 3. 
 
 * De Exh. Cast 7 ; De Praescr, Haer. 41 ; De Baptis. 17 ', De 
 
 Pudic. I. 
 ^ Refut. Omn. Hcer. i. Proem. 
 
172 CATHOLICISM 
 
 holds to the universal priesthood and spiritual 
 sacrifices/ also indicates the likeness of the new 
 ministers to the ancient priests and Levites.* By the 
 middle of the century the hands of Cyprian have 
 clothed the new clergy in the dignities of the old 
 priesthood, and provided them with appropriate sacri- 
 ficial functions and intercessory duties. "The develop- 
 ment was not complete, but it was begun. The ancient 
 ideal died hard ; reminiscences of it may be found in 
 Augustine, in Leo the Great, even in Aquinas, nay, in 
 the very Catholicism of to-day ; but they only help to 
 illustrate the continuity of the evolutional process and 
 measure the vastness of the change." ^ 
 
 Now, why was it that the sacerdotal element 
 appeared so suddenly and grew so rapidly? What 
 were the causes of its so sudden genesis and growth ? 
 In the Religion as instituted by Jesus Christ, taught 
 and practised by His Apostles, received and observed 
 by their disciples, it had no place ; and so its rise 
 could not be due to any process of logical and 
 immanent evolution, of detached and self-regulated 
 development. But what was not possible to the 
 isolated, was necessary to the conditioned organism. 
 The Religion was new, but humanity was old ; and, if 
 the new lived within the bosom of the old, it was by 
 a process of mutual assimilation, the new pervading 
 
 * Homil. in Lev. ix. 9, 10 (Ed. Lom. vol. ix. pp. 360-364). 
 
 * In Evang. loh. torn. i. 3 (Ed. Lom. vol. i. p. 9). 
 ' The Place of Christ in Modern Theology^ p. 105. 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1 73 
 
 and changing the old, but the old also penetrating 
 and modifying the new. " Men found it easier to 
 adjust the Religion to themselves than themselves 
 to the Religion. Their minds were not sheets of 
 clean white paper on which its truths could be clearly 
 written, but pages crowded with the records, habits, 
 customs, beliefs, of immemorial yesterdays ; and the 
 lines of the new could not but often mingle and blend 
 with those of the ancient writing. A Religion without 
 a priesthood was what no man had known ; a sacred 
 order on earth seemed as necessary to worship as the 
 very being of the gods in heaven. The temple was 
 the centre of the State, but it was idle without a 
 priesthood, and without it the oracle was dumb."^ 
 How, then, were men, inured by age-long custom and 
 tradition to priestly Religions, able all at once to 
 construe and realize one altogether priestless ? They 
 were helped at first by two things : its very strange- 
 ness, its absolute antithesis to the familiar and 
 received ; and, next, by its appearing as a new opinion 
 or belief which spread by teaching and discourse, or 
 as a system of philosophy and social help rather than 
 as an organized worship. But the more its character 
 as a Religion became established and defined, the 
 more men tended to interpret it through the old 
 Religions, seeking in it the elements they had known 
 in them. 
 
 And the historical relations of the Christian Faith, 
 
 * The Place of Christ in Modern Theology^ p. io6. 
 
174 CATHOLICISM 
 
 as child and heir of Judaism, intensified this tend- 
 ency. It had come to fulfil the Law and the 
 Prophets ; the New Testament did not exist because 
 of the Old, but the Old had existed for the sake of the 
 New. Christianity was no accident, was indeed older 
 than creation, had been designed from eternity, and 
 appeared as the result and goal of all past history ; 
 but it was no mere continuation of what had been, 
 was rather as its end, its supersession and fulfilment. 
 The sub-apostolic Fathers and apologists more or 
 less consistently maintained this, the apostolic posi- 
 tion. They argued with the Jew, that the anticipa- 
 tions of Christ in the Old Testament were evidences 
 of His truth ; and with the Greek, that the relation of 
 the New Testament to the Old proved Christianity 
 to be the result of a Divine purpose running through 
 the ages. But the parallel of the Testaments easily 
 became absolute, a forgetfulness of their essential 
 differences. The use of the Old to authenticate the 
 New tended to invest the Old with equal or even 
 greater authority, especially as, alongside the incom- 
 pleteness of the Christian canon, the Hebrew Scrip- 
 tures stood canonically complete. They were the 
 sacred books of Jews and Christians alike, authorita- 
 tive for both, revered and believed by both, held by 
 both to be regulative of faith and conduct, affording 
 to both the one solid common ground of discussion 
 and argument. And so, as was natural, these Scrip- 
 tures lost in historical but gained in religious and 
 ecclesiastical significance ; became less a record of 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 175 
 
 what had been, and more a norm or principle regula- 
 tive of what ought to be. Indeed, it is the simple 
 truth to say that they were a far more active and 
 efficient factor in the organization of the Church than 
 even the apostolic writings. For these latter were 
 but the memorials of missionaries and missionary 
 churches : but the former exhibited a realized 
 Religion, what was conceived as pre-Christian Christi- 
 anity. The old Religion had its priesthood, the new 
 had its clergy, and so these two were made parallel. 
 Once they had been made parallel, it was necessary 
 to do the same for the worships ; and once they were 
 assimilated, the New Testament ceased to fulfil the 
 Old, the Old reigned in the New. And this is what 
 Cyprian shows us ; he represents the victory of the 
 older Religions, the rejuvenescence of Judaism, the 
 entrance of the hieratic idea into the Kingdom of 
 Christ, changing it into a kingdom of priests. Invet- 
 erate and invariable association demanded and 
 worked the change, but the relation of the Jewish and 
 Christian Scriptures supplied the opportunity and 
 forms for its accomplishment. Without the univer- 
 sal sacerdotalism it would not have been necessary ; 
 without the historical relation it would not have been 
 possible ; the co-existence and co-operation of the 
 two made it not only natural, but inevitable. 
 
 § V. How the Church Became a Monarchy 
 
 I. The rise and growth of the sacerdotal idea in 
 Christianity can, then, be explained by the principle 
 
176 ' CATHOLICISM 
 
 of development, but it must be development scienti- 
 fically interpreted and historically applied. The idea 
 then appears as the creation, not of the isolated or 
 detached, but of the related organism, or simply of 
 the environment within which it lives and moves. 
 Yet this is only the beginning of the evolutionary 
 process. Hand in hand with the change in the idea 
 and functions of the ministry comes a change in its 
 place and in the relation which it bears to the 
 Church. And here, in order to see the process in its 
 completeness, we must study it from within as 
 well as from without ; in other words, in relation to 
 what may be termed the articulation of the organism 
 — or the organization of the Christian society. 
 Catholic polity is one. New Testament polity another; 
 they are not only dissimilars, but opposites. The 
 rise of the monarchical and imperial polity, i.e.^ the 
 Catholic papacy, within the Christian Church, is 
 explicable on the ground of a conditioned or natural 
 development, but not of one unconditioned or super- 
 natural. Accept the supernaturalism of Catholic dog- 
 matics, and the rise of the infallible headship does 
 not admit of explanation ; but apply to it the scien- 
 tific analysis of the historical method, and it stands 
 explained. For what on this matter is the testimony 
 of the oldest literature ? There is no evidence that 
 Jesus ever created, or thought of creating, an 
 organized society. There is no idea He so little 
 emphasizes as the idea of the Church. The use of 
 the term is attributed to Him but twice — once it 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM ly^ 
 
 occurs in the local or congregational sense, and once 
 in the universal ; but only so as to define His own 
 sole activity and supremacy. His familiar idea is the 
 Kingdom of God or of heaven ; but this Kingdom is 
 without organization, and incapable of being organ- 
 ized ; indeed, though the ideas rriay here and there 
 coincide, it is essentially the contrary and contrast 
 of what is now understood as the Catholic church, 
 whether Roman or Anglican. Further, in the 
 Church of the New Testament the politico- 
 monarchical idea does not exist ; there is no shadow^ 
 or anticipation, or prophecy of- it. The churches are 
 not organized, do not constitute a formal unity, have 
 a fraternal but no corporate relation, have no 
 common or even local hierarchy ; they are divided by 
 differences that preclude the very idea of an official 
 infallible head. Supremacy belongs to no man ; 
 there is no bishop, in the modern sense, over any 
 church, or over the whole Church ; no recognition of 
 Rome as a seat of authority, the only holy or pre- 
 eminent city being Jerusalem. The question as to 
 Peter is very significant. He may be the rock on 
 which the Church is to be built ; the promises made 
 to him may be taken in the highest possible sense ; 
 but what then ? There is no evidence that what was 
 promised to him was assured to his successors, no 
 evidence that he had any successors, least of all that 
 his successors, if he had any, were the bishops of 
 Rome, or that Rome in any way entered into the 
 thought of Jesus. Indeed, so far as the New Testa- 
 
 12 
 
178 CATHOLICISM 
 
 ment is concerned, there is no evidence that Peter 
 ever was in Rome, or had any relation to it, or held 
 any office or did any work in connection with the 
 Roman church. Some things concerning him we 
 do certainly know — that he was an apostle of the 
 circumcision ; lived and preached many years in 
 Jerusalem ; was there a man of reputation and a pillar ; 
 visited Antioch, where he at first befriended the 
 Gentiles, then withdrew and was publicly rebuked by 
 Paul. That is our last clear, authentic glimpse of 
 him. Whether the Babylon, whence he sent an epistle 
 by no means either cosmopolitan or catholic, but 
 expressly provincial and particular, was the city really 
 so named or a metaphor for Rome, is a point on which 
 scholars have differed ; and is at least too uncertain 
 to admit of clear and final decision. On the other 
 hand, Paul's successive homes stand as full in the 
 light as Peter's retreat into the darkness ; from him 
 we know something of Rome and its church. He 
 addressed to it his greatest epistle, visited it, suffered 
 imprisonment in the city, dated from it various 
 letters ; but never, either in the epistle sent to Rome 
 or in those sent from it, though he mentions many 
 persons, most of them mere obscure names to us, does 
 he either directly or implicitly allude to Peter. This 
 is a remarkable fact ; no mere conventional argument 
 from silence ; for Paul was a man scrupulous in his 
 courtesies, plain-spoken in his polemics, incapable of 
 omitting from his record what would have been the 
 most illustrious name of the local church, especially 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1 79 
 
 as it was one he had so expressly used in his contro- 
 versial epistles. Now, what does all this signify ? 
 Papal infallibility, head and crown as it is of the 
 Catholic system, is the most tremendous claim ever 
 made by any man or body of men ; and so it, of 
 all claims, ought to have the most indubitable 
 historical basis. But an indubitable historical basis 
 is precisely the thing it wants. From the point of 
 view of authentic contemporary literature the evi- 
 dence is altogether against both the primacy and 
 Roman episcopacy of Peter. The question is capable 
 of being argued only when tradition is introduced. 
 And the tradition, though ancient, is neither apostolic 
 nor primitive — can, indeed, hardly be placed earlier 
 than a century after the event, though it soon 
 becomes uniform and general. The case is arguable, 
 but it is no more. The tradition may be true, but it 
 must remain doubtful, the reasons that justify the 
 doubt proving the absolute unimportance of Peter 
 and his Roman bishopric to New Testament Reli- 
 gion. Doubtful history is a rather insecure founda- 
 tion for the most awful and august of sovereignties. 
 2. This point has been selected not for critical dis- 
 cussion, but simply the better to illustrate the fact 
 that the Catholic system does not lie within the field 
 of apostolic Christianity. Its rise belongs to the 
 period when the organism was living within its 
 environment, and struggling for existence against the 
 imperial system by following the lines of the imperial 
 organization. Its history cannot here be written, 
 
I80 CATHOLICISM 
 
 though the materials for it exist — it being possible to 
 make every step in the process lie open to the clear 
 light of day. Within the Christian societies various 
 ideals of polity lived, Jewish, Greek, Roman ; ideals 
 derived from the synagogue, the free city, and the 
 school ; the voluntary, the industrial, or the benevolent 
 association ; and these were by-and-by joined by 
 ideals that came of Hebrew, Egyptian, and Syrian 
 asceticism, touched and modified by influences from 
 the further East. The Church was confronted and 
 resisted by an immense organized power ; what 
 unified and directed its energies contributed to its 
 success in the struggle. What conflict made neces- 
 sary, made conflict easier and victory more possible, 
 if not more sure. Each congregation had its presid- 
 ing officer, who soon came to represent its unity and 
 embody its authority ; then to act for it ; then to act 
 along with the kindred officers of his province or dis- 
 trict ; then along with them to form an order or body ; 
 and, finally, the corporate unity, which the internal 
 growth had made possible, was achieved by the action 
 and influence of the State, the civil unity being the 
 condition procreative both of the ideal and the reality 
 of the ecclesiastical. The more the official order 
 became separate from the non-official, the more 
 sacerdotal it grew in character ; the growth of the 
 clerical idea within the Church prepared the way for 
 the entrance of the priestly, and the coalescence or 
 fusion of the two ideas worked a revolution both in 
 the Church and the Religion. The clergy became 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM l8l 
 
 the Church ; the Church the Religion ; and the Re- 
 h'gion a transformed Roman empire — with the Pope 
 for emperor, bishops for procurators, and the priest- 
 hood for the magistrates and legionaries that levied 
 the taxes, enforced the laws, upheld the unity, and 
 maintained the peace of the civilized world. 
 
 3. How it could have happened, why, indeed, it 
 could not but happen, that the Roman State should 
 so organize the Roman church as to change its Caesar 
 Augustus into the Holy Father, is a question of large 
 import, though capable of a reasonable and accurate 
 solution. The Emperor was Pontifex Maximus, 
 head of the pagan church as well as of the pagan 
 State. The two were identical ; the imperial will was 
 as supreme in religious as in civil affairs. If the 
 Emperor decreed that he was divine, and that his 
 statue must receive the honour due to a God, a man 
 could disobey or defy it with impunity as little as he 
 could commit any civil crime. It was, indeed, a 
 serious form of high treason ; and this was the 
 justification of the successive persecutions. It was an 
 anomaly, quite unintelligible to the ancient pagan 
 mind, that a man, a citizen of a State, should refuse 
 to do honour to the State's gods in accordance with 
 the State's laws or the will of its head. But this pre- 
 cisely was what the Christian refused to do ; and 
 by his refusal he shocked the rulers and judges of 
 the ancient world, provoking them to those penal 
 measures we call martyrdoms, but the Roman called 
 vindications of authority. The system was thus rooted 
 
1 82 CA THOLICISM 
 
 in immemorial custom and law ; but when the Emperor 
 was converted, a new order of things came to be. 
 The change that happened to the man affected the 
 office. He and his world assumed, though there 
 were noble and notable exceptions, that the imperial 
 power and functions shared in the conversion of 
 the imperial person ; i.e. he became in the Christian 
 Church what he had been in the Roman State, a 
 spiritual as well as civil head. He could in the 
 new as in the old act as Pontifex Maximus, call a 
 council, open it, intervene in its affairs, promulgate 
 and enforce its decrees, reward the obedient, punish 
 the disobedient. Hence the man who disagreed with 
 the Emperor was persecuted as much after the con- 
 version of Constantine as he was before it. Patri- 
 archs like Athanasius were banished or recalled, 
 deposed or re-instated, according to the good 
 pleasure of the court. Bishops became courtiers ; 
 intrigued for friends or against foes ; and words such 
 as Tertullian had applied to the severities of a pagan 
 Emperor, were now with more reason applied to those 
 of emperors who professed to be Christian. In the 
 East the system existed in fullest force ; but in the 
 West the imperial was first qualified, then balanced, 
 and finally eclipsed by the ecclesiastical power. In the 
 East the papal was no match for the civil authority ; 
 in the West the civil ceased to be a match for the 
 papal. The more the papal jurisdiction was limited 
 in the East, the higher grew the spiritual claims of 
 the Emperor ; the more the Emperor forsook the 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1 83 
 
 West, the more imperial became the Episcopal Chair 
 of Rome. And so there was a mutual transference 
 of functions : the ecclesiastical was imperialized, the 
 imperial was ecclesiasticized. The Pope represents 
 an older and more august authority than the 
 apostolic ; he is the heir of the men who, from the 
 Eternal City, governed the civilized world. The 
 deity which was ascribed to them has, changed in 
 form but unchanged in essence, descended to him. 
 The apotheosis their State experienced, his has 
 also undergone. For papal infallibility is but 
 imperial supremacy transfigured and spiritualized. 
 Sovereignty is infallibility in the region of law ; 
 infallibility is sovereignty in the region of opinion. 
 The king, who is the source of law, can do no 
 wrong; the Pope, who defines, sanctions, and pro- 
 claims dogma, can commit no error. Infallibility is 
 thus the interpretation, in the terms of forensic 
 jurisprudence or civil monarchy, of a spiritual head- 
 ship, or supremacy in the realm of belief as distin- 
 guished from conduct. It came to the Pope as the 
 successor of Caesar. The Catholic church thus could 
 not have been without Christianity, but still less could 
 it have been without Roman imperialism. It owes 
 its life to the one, but its distinctive organization it 
 owes to the other. The very forces that disorganized 
 the civil body helped to organize the ecclesiastical. 
 Apart from Rome, and Rome decadent — with the 
 imperial ideal and organism, but without the imperial 
 spirit — Catholicism could never have come to be. If 
 
184 CATHOLICISM 
 
 the Latin church had passed the first five centuries of 
 its existence under an Oriental despotism or amid free 
 Greek cities, its structure would have been altogether 
 different. It seemed to vanquish the empire, but the 
 empire, by assimilating it, survived in it. The name 
 that distinguished the dynasty was the name of 
 Christ : but the form under which its power or 
 monarchy was constituted was the form of Caesar. 
 
 § VI. The Ideas which Organized the System 
 
 I. So far we have been concerned with the condi- 
 tions and process of outer organization ; but there is 
 a deeper and more vital question — What were the 
 organizing ideas ? and whence came they? Catholi- 
 cism is not a mere aggregation of atoms, but the 
 articulation of an idea, the embodiment of a trans- 
 cendental ideal. What is termed its supernaturalism 
 is but this ideal translated into dogma, and then 
 worked into a reasoned system. Its natural history 
 is too vast a subject to be here analytically handled, 
 or even touched, especially as it would involve the 
 discussion of the relation of Christianity to ancient 
 thought. The organic doctrines of Christianity and 
 the organizing ideas of Catholicism are different and 
 distinct. The former proceed by a synthetic process 
 from the Religion of Christ, and can be analytically 
 resolved into it ; but the latter are of foreign, though 
 not necessarily of alien, origin, taken up into the body 
 of doctrine and becoming there factors of develop- 
 ment and variation. Christianity found the world 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1 85 
 
 expectant ; the thought it was to change began by 
 changing it. The philosophy it was able to overcome 
 as an enemy it could not so easily resist as a friend. 
 To forsake an error is not to be purged from it ; 
 though Augustine renounced Manicheism, yet his 
 early dualism subtly penetrates all his later thought. 
 And so the heresy that forced the church to formu- 
 late its doctrine did not leave it with the old purity of 
 faith or simplicity of polity. Gnosticism was van- 
 quished, but not annihilated ; its antithesis of matter 
 and spirit, found a footing in the new society and 
 modified its ideal of life, making it less surely con- 
 scious of the unity of the secular and eternal. 
 Ebionitism was defeated, but the mind that cultivated 
 poverty for the increase of Religion lived on, and 
 even gained an ampler and freer field for its exercise. 
 Jewish asceticism, Syrian and Egyptian, did not long 
 survive the Jewish state ; but it did not die till its 
 ideas and example had touched and affected the 
 church. Yet these were but incidental influences; 
 the most plastic came from the revived philosophies, 
 the Stoic, Pythagorean, and Platonic. Similar ques- 
 tions were debated in the academies and the cateche- 
 tical schools, and their ideas and disciplines were also 
 akin. Alexandrian philosophy, as much as Alexan- 
 drian theology, had its doctrine of God, of the 
 Trinity, faith, spiritual or allegorical interpretation, 
 bodily mortification, supernatural enlightenment, and 
 final reward ; and if the rivals did not copy, they at 
 least stimulated and developed each other. It is 
 
1 86 CA THOLICISM 
 
 significant that the earlier influence was metaphysical 
 and theological, but the later ecclesiastical and 
 mystic, or political and sacramentarian. In the third 
 and fourth centuries the great questions were those 
 touching the Godhead ; how God was to be conceived ; 
 how He was related to the world ; how to man, Chris- 
 tian and heathen ; what Father and Son signified, and 
 what Word and Spirit ; how the One could be the 
 manifold, and because the manifold, be, while the 
 One, the All-loving and the All-efficient, the home of 
 all perfection and the centre of all energy. But in 
 the fifth and sixth centuries the great questions were 
 those touching the Church, its idea, orders, people 
 discipline, sacraments, the mystic allegories of nature 
 and grace. This change meant many things, but 
 mainly this : — Ecclesiastical organization had pro- 
 ceeded so far, that it was necessary to find for it a 
 speculative basis and unifying ideal. With every 
 change, indeed, in the organism, there had been a 
 correlative change in the collective consciousness ; 
 the development of new organs and energies had 
 developed new ideas and activities ; but what was 
 now needed was a conception that should unite all 
 the parts into an harmonious and homogeneous 
 system. And to this result Neo-Platonic thought 
 powerfully contributed. Augustine came to Paul 
 from the study of Plato, and he more than any man 
 Platonized the Paul he studied and the ideal of the 
 Church he depicted and maintained. Synesius had 
 been a Christian while a Platonist, and remained a 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1 87 
 
 Platonist after he had become a Christian. The 
 Pseudo-Dionysius represents the Neo-Platonic prin- 
 ciples and interpretative method applied to the 
 Catholic system : *^ symbolism reigns in heaven and 
 on earth, a celestial hierarchy holds the approaches to 
 God above, an ecclesiastical hierarchy guards and 
 regulates them below; and men are graduated 
 according to the degree of their initiation in the holy 
 mysteries which at once reveal and conceal the in- 
 effable Godhead. No book exercised a mightier 
 influence on Catholicism, did more on the one hand 
 to foster its mysticism, on the other to develop 
 its sacerdotalism. It moulded in an equal degree 
 men so dissimilar as Scotus Erigena and Thomas 
 Aquinas, Hugo of St. Victor and Albertus Mag- 
 nus, Grosseteste and Dante ; and yet it was but 
 Neo-Platonism made to speak with the Catholic 
 tongue." ^ 
 
 2. It is therefore due to no mere accident or 
 curious coincidence that so many affinities exist 
 between Plato's Republic and the Roman Church. 
 They differ, indeed, in many respects fundamentally ; 
 the one is philosophical and an ideal, the other is 
 religious and a reality ; but the kinship is manifest 
 enough, especially if the Republic be studied in the 
 Neo-Platonic spirit and method. Each reposes on a 
 transcendentalism that makes the actual exist through 
 and for the ideal ; yet so in opposition to it, that a 
 special order is needed to secure its realization. Each 
 
 ^ The Place of Christy etc., p. 109. 
 
1 88 CA THOLICISM 
 
 is an institution founded for the creation of virtue or 
 obedience ; and has as its function and end the making 
 of this life the way to a better, or the discipline of its 
 citizens for a higher and more perfect state of being. 
 Each is possessed with the same sense of the august 
 sanctity of the whole ; the individual is nothing apart 
 from it, has no good save in and through and from it ; 
 he is altogether its, and is to have his whole life 
 regulated by its laws and for its ends. Each has the 
 same need for a sacred or special order : in the 
 Republic the philosopher is king, for he alone knows 
 the idea, or stands in the secret of God, and so is 
 alone able so to organize and administer the laws as 
 to secure its realization ; and in the Church the priest 
 reigns, the man Divinely appointed to speak to men 
 concerning God, and reconcile them to Him. In 
 each the idealism is the basis of a despotism : the 
 authority of the sacred order is absolute, the multi- 
 tude may not rebel against the custodians of the 
 truth ; they must remain supreme and infallible if the 
 ideal is to be realized. Each has a similar attitude to 
 the home and family ; in the Republic the man must 
 be without a home that he may the better serve the 
 State ; in the Church the man who would be its 
 minister must be without family or home. The com- 
 munity of goods in the one has its counterpart in the 
 vows of personal poverty, in alliance with corporate 
 wealth, in the other ; in each the individual derives 
 all his good from the whole, and the whole has com- 
 mand over the all of the individual. These are but 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 189 
 
 the rough outlines of a parallel which might be indefi- 
 nitely extended and minutely illustrated. But what is 
 significant is this : the differences, so far as ideal — 
 which of course is not to forget that the one system 
 is speculative, while the other is historical — may be 
 described as, in the main, those that distinguished 
 Platonic from Neo-Platonic thought — ?>., differences 
 due to the penetration of the original philosophic 
 ideal with mystic, hierarchic, theurgic, and ascetical 
 elements. The Catholic church is the Platonic 
 kingdom of philosophers transformed into a kingdom 
 of priests. 
 
 The conclusion, then, is this : — The principle of 
 development, analytically applied to the catholic 
 system, proves that the parent form or aboriginal 
 germ — the ideal and society of Jesus — was by its 
 environments modified in a twofold direction. First, 
 from the ancient Religions, Jewish and pagan, it 
 received the notion of the priesthood, with all its 
 accessories ; and so became sacerdotal. And, secondly, 
 from the Roman empire, working on the material of 
 its primitive Judaeo-Hellenic polity, it received the 
 dream and function of Roman supremacy; and so 
 became catholic, papal, and infallible. Once it had 
 been so modified and developed, it became, largely 
 through current politico-religious speculation, pos- 
 sessed of the organizing ideas needed to give it 
 intellectual consistency and completeness, making an 
 historical system the body of a universal ideal. But 
 this conclusion brings us to our second main ques- 
 
1 90 CA THOLICISM 
 
 tion — the adequacy of the church or institution to 
 the Religion and its purposes. Adequacy may be 
 here interpreted in a double sense, as either historical 
 efficiency, or as ideal sufficiency ; or, in other words, 
 as adequacy for work, or adequacy to the spirit and 
 matter of the Religion. Something must be said as 
 regards each of these. 
 
 § VII. Catholicism in History 
 
 I. There is here no desire to question the efficiency 
 and historical achievements of the Roman Church. 
 It is to us no creation of craft or subtlety, human or 
 diabolical, no Man of Sin, Scarlet Woman, or shame- 
 less Antichrist, but a veritable creature of God and 
 manifest minister of His providence. The energies 
 evolved in the struggle for existence enabled it at 
 once to survive and be victorious. They were con- 
 ditions of service, and as such necessary. Thus the 
 rise of the sacerdotal idea may be conceived as, on 
 the one hand, a process of interpenetration, and, on 
 the other, mediation and reconcilement. It is the one 
 because the other ; the old and the new faiths inter- 
 penetrate that the new Religion may the better win 
 and master the ancient mind. Catholicism is the 
 interpretation of the Christian idea in the terms and 
 through the associations of the ancient faiths, and as 
 such represents on the largest scale the continuity of 
 Religion in history. Its work was a needed work, for 
 man is incapable of transitions at once sudden and 
 absolute ; the construction of Christianity through the 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM I9I 
 
 media of the older Religions was a necessary prelude 
 to its construction by a spirit and through a con- 
 sciousness of its own creation. The absolute ideal 
 had, in order to be intelligible, to use constituted and 
 familiar vehicles ; but only that it might win the 
 opportunity of fashioning vehicles worthier of its 
 nature and fitter for its end. 
 
 The political element, again, especially as domi- 
 nated and directed by the great organizing ideas, 
 had its own special function ; it mediated between 
 the ancient empires of force and the new empires 
 of the spirit. The Pope stood when Caesar fell ; and 
 became, in a sense higher than Caesar had ever 
 been — master of the world. In those days of 
 anarchy, when the military, legislative, judicial, fiscal, 
 and municipal system of the empire had completely 
 broken down, when the barbarians had seized its 
 provinces and wasted its cities, and were contending 
 with each other at once for plunder and supremacy, 
 the ecclesiastical was the only universal sovereignty 
 possible. And the sovereignty the Roman church 
 was called to exercise, it exercised, on the whole, 
 beneficently ; it worked for order, justice, and civiliza- 
 tion. Its association with the empire had made it 
 imperial ; its religious ideal made it at once author- 
 itative and humane. While it owed its ambition for 
 supremacy to Caesar, it owed its enthusiasm for 
 humanity to Christ. And so, while it succeeded, it did 
 not repeat the empire ; its sovereignty had another 
 basis, and was exercised by other means for other ends. 
 
192 CA THOLICISM 
 
 The church was, in a sense Rome could never be, 
 " the Eternal City " ; in it eternity took bodily shape 
 before the eyes of men ; and so a vaster meaning 
 came into life, ennobling the men that lived it, 
 dignifying all its affairs. Men were not to it divided 
 into a multitude of alien races ; all were to it spirits 
 and immortal, responsible to it, for whom it was 
 responsible to God. It represented, therefore, a 
 new idea of sovereignty, a grander and more awful 
 majesty, an empire that lived by faith in the moral 
 and immortal worth of man, for his good and the 
 glory of God. To say that, out of the chaos Rome 
 left, it created order, is to say a small and inadequate 
 thing ; it created a new ideal of government, made 
 man another being to the Sovereign and the 
 Sovereign another being to man. Before it, had 
 been the reign of might ; after and through it was 
 to be the reign of the Spirit. 
 
 2. It is impossible, then, to regard the history of 
 Catholicism as equal to the history of Christianity ; 
 it is at once much more and much less. It is much 
 more : for by many of its ideals, institutions, and 
 associations it represents the continuity of the ancient 
 and modern worlds, their kinship and community 
 in matters of faith and worship ; and it is much 
 less, for much of the best work Christianity has 
 done, both in earlier and in later times, has been 
 done without it and in spite of it. There is nothing 
 so little historical as the spirit that identifies 
 Christianity and Catholicism, or that sees in the latter 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1 93 
 
 either the creation of Jesus Christ or the sole vehicle 
 of His truth. It has indeed rendered eminent 
 services to our race and our Religion ; these demand 
 and deserve our gratitude. The Catholicism of the 
 Catholic church is large, but there is one still 
 larger, the note and possession of no church, but 
 of all the churches — the Catholicism of the Christian 
 Religion. According to it, the truth preserved by 
 any or each is the property of all ; the holiness or 
 beneficence of one is a common heritage, enriching 
 the whole family of the faith. The saints of 
 Catholicism are not Roman, but Christian ; the 
 achievements of Protestantism came not of protest- 
 ing, but of loyalty to conscience and to God. And 
 the right attitude to both is to say : — Since they 
 are due to the inspiration of the one Spirit, they 
 belong to the universalism of Christ, not to the 
 specialism of the churches. From this point of 
 view I claim to be as much as any Catholic, heir 
 to all that is Christian in Catholicism ; and the 
 claim is not in any way affected by either absolute 
 negation or qualified assent from the Catholic's side. 
 Whatever is of Christ in his system can be in no 
 respect alien to what is of Christ in me and mine. 
 True Catholicism must be as comprehensive as the 
 action of God ; whatever is less, but expresses the 
 particularism of man. 
 
 But if Catholicism has served our race and our 
 Religion, it has also done both eminent disservice; 
 and this alike by what it has and what it has not 
 
 13 
 
194 CA THOLICISM 
 
 achieved. It has impoverished Christian history, 
 has made it less rich and varied than it ought to 
 have been in ideals of life, faith, and society. The 
 suppression of Montanism was not an unmixed 
 good, indeed in many respects not a good at all ; 
 for in it much that was most characteristic and 
 primitive in Christianity died. Donatism had its 
 own right to be ; emphasized elements in the Religion, 
 Catholicism had no room for or did no justice to. 
 But a greater evil than the monotony it introduced 
 into the Christian ideal was its failure to realize 
 its own. It was potent in its earlier period, when 
 a necessity to Religion and man ; but impotent 
 in its later, when man, having outgrown it, needed 
 Religion presented in a freer form, a nobler and 
 more congenial vehicle. In the hands of Rome 
 Christianity had come so near its death that the 
 Reformation, was a necessity to its life. The two 
 centuries before it had been like a desert, studded, 
 indeed, as all who love mysticism thankfully re- 
 member, with beautiful oases of faith and devotion. 
 But the main stream of tendency within the Catholic 
 church did not then make for godliness. I do 
 not mean to reproach it with men like the Borgias ; 
 all churches have had their share of bad men; 
 and we have heard more than enough of them, 
 though the thing is most pitiful when wicked men 
 become officially infallible. But what I do mean 
 to say is this : Religion in the fifteenth century was 
 the creation of the Roman church, and Italy was 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1 95 
 
 then without a Religion, or, worse, had one that 
 aggravated rather than lessened the evil. The Italian 
 states were bad, the church was no better ; the moral 
 depravity was encouraged by the intellectual scep- 
 ticism; the sensuous licence was reflected in the 
 religious. Extenuating circumstances may be dis- 
 covered ; the conflicts with the German emperors, 
 the French kings, and the free cities ; the subtle 
 influences of the Renaissance, Moorish philosophy, 
 and Jewish learning. But these neither alter nor 
 explain the facts. Religion was the church's province, 
 in it she had reigned for centuries without a rival ; yet 
 her infallibility in doctrine had been so mated with 
 inefficiency in conduct, as to result in the completest 
 breakdown in the matter of faith and morals Christian 
 Europe has ever known. The supernatural and the 
 natural gifts were so ill-assorted that the one did 
 more than neutralize the other ; their joint action 
 made the evil of the times more inveterate and acute. 
 The authority of the church forbade the reform of the 
 church, and the act that broke her unity saved our 
 religion. 
 
 3. But it is impossible to end here ; modern history 
 is as significant as ancient. Catholics reproach 
 Protestants with being blind to the meaning of the 
 centuries that lie between the first and the sixteenth. 
 But there is a Roman counterpart to this Protestant 
 neglect. The centuries that have elapsed since the 
 fifteenth ended, have been without doubt the most 
 eventful, fruitful, momentous in the history of man ; 
 
196 CATHOLICISM 
 
 and their history has been the history of Christian 
 peoples. The record of their material progress has 
 been a record of marvels. America has been dis- 
 covered, colonized, peopled ; Asia has been opened 
 up, almost conquered and annexed ; Africa has 
 been explored, and is being pierced and penetrated 
 on all sides ; and in the Australasian continent 
 and islands the seeds of new States have been 
 plentifully sown. The European States, with certain 
 significant exceptions, are mightier than they were 
 four centuries ago, better ordered, more moral, more 
 populous, freer, wealthier ; and the poorest of the 
 countries have become rich and full of comforts as 
 compared with Europe in the days of the Black 
 Death. But what part has Christianity had in the 
 making of modern civilization? Not much, if it 
 and the Catholic church be identical. The conquests 
 and colonizations effected by Catholic states have, 
 so far as order, progress, and human well-being are 
 concerned, been chapters of disaster and failure. The 
 progressive peoples have been the non-Catholic ; from 
 them have proceeded the noblest of the ameliorative 
 principles and actions of the period. They have 
 been the least troubled with revolution ; have had 
 the most happy, well-ordered commonwealths ; have 
 enjoyed most freedom ; have most successfully 
 laboured to temper justice with mercy, to make 
 judgment remedial, to enlarge the area of rights, 
 and to raise the ideal of duty. And the same 
 peoples have been pre-eminent in the realms of 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1 97 
 
 thought and spirit, been most deeply and devoutly 
 exercised by the problems concerning man and 
 his destiny. God has not been sparing of His gifts 
 of great men to those who sit outside Catholicism. 
 The Elizabethan dramatists, greatest of moderns 
 in their own order, were the poets of the English 
 people in the heroic moment of their reaction 
 against Rome. Milton was the poet of a still more 
 radical revolution. Cowper and Burns, Wordsworth 
 and Coleridge, Tennyson and Browning, Scott and 
 Carlyle, represent the inspiration and aspiration of 
 the same people. Herder and Lessing, Schiller and 
 Goethe, were not products of Catholicism. The 
 most splendid cycle of thinkers since the Platonic 
 age in Greece, was that which began with Kant and 
 ended with Hegel, sons of Protestant Germany. It 
 is needless to multiply names. What we wish to 
 know is this — the relation of Christianity to this 
 whole complex movement called progress or modern 
 civilization. Our modern world has had more of 
 God in it than the mediaeval, and He is there 
 because of the Religion we call Christianity. But 
 were we to identify the Religion with the Roman 
 church, we should have to regard our world as 
 in progressive apostasy from Him. But its apostasy 
 means His desertion ; and a world forsaken of its 
 God would be poorer in its good than ours has 
 been ; while a God who could, even in the interests 
 of an infallible church, forsake any part of His 
 World, especially a part that had been so strenuously 
 
198 CATHOLICISM 
 
 feeling after Him that it might know His truth 
 and do His will, would be less Divine than we 
 believe our God to be. We will not allow either 
 the truth or the sufficiency of the religious idea 
 that would deny God to any man, or make Him the 
 special possession of any church. For the Atheism 
 that denies, is less impious than the Atheism that 
 limits His presence, that dares in its pride to say, 
 " He is so mine that you must belong to me in 
 order to belong to Him ; and what you have of 
 Him is by my grace and through my act." That 
 vain Atheism God has in these last centuries caused 
 His very providence to contradict and reprove. 
 For it were a strange and satirical theodicy that 
 should exhibit God as working poverty and revolu- 
 tion in the nations that had accepted or been 
 forced to accept the authority of His own infallible 
 church ; while sending fulness of life, and grace, 
 and freedom into those that had deserted and dis- 
 owned it. 
 
 § Vni. Catholicism no Sufficient Organ for the 
 Christian Religion 
 
 This brings us to the ideal sufficiency of Catholi- 
 cism : the question whether it be a vehicle equal to 
 the spirit and matter of the Christian Religion, the 
 alone fully qualified interpreter of its truth to our 
 age. This is the really fundamental question, and 
 has been so implied in every issue raised, that in 
 what still remains to be said we must be severely brief. 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM I99 
 
 I. Catholicism claims to present the completest 
 faith in God, and to do the amplest justice to the 
 mysteries of faith and the realities of Religion. 
 The supernaturalism on which it is grounded is 
 indeed marvellous, but it is not mysterious. Cardinal 
 Newman, using the mysteries of nature to justify 
 those of the Church, says,^ " If I must submit my 
 reason to mysteries, it does not much matter whether 
 it is a mystery more or a mystery less." But it may 
 matter in an infinite degree ; whether it does matter 
 depends on the source and character of the mysteries. 
 The true mystery is a thing of nature ; history neither 
 made it nor can show how it was made ; reason finds 
 it and cannot elude it, for it is bound up with the 
 being of the reason and the system that holds and 
 unfolds it. But a false mystery is only a marvel, a 
 belief with a remarkable history ; without ground in 
 nature or reason in thought ; but bound up with the 
 being of an institution, explicable through it, yet 
 helping to explain it. The mystery is at once im- 
 manent and universal ; has its roots in the universe 
 that confronts man, its reason in the man that con- 
 fronts the universe; and through it life is invested 
 with all its meaning and all its grandeur. But the 
 marvel is occasional and particular, has no meaning 
 apart from the institution through and for which it 
 exists, while the institution has no majesty apart 
 from it. The mystery exercises reason, but the 
 
 * Sermons to Mixed Congregations, p. 275. 
 
200 CATHOLICISM 
 
 marvel taxes faith ; and so, while authority may be 
 based on the mysteries of reason, the marvels of 
 faith must be based on authority. The supernatural- 
 ism native to the Christian Religion is mysterious, 
 for in it nature and man may lie embosomed, com- 
 prehended, uncomprehending ; but the supernatural- 
 ism of Rome is without mystery, for while it is 
 sufficient to the needs of Catholicism, it is inadequate 
 to the idea of God, or the ideals of His providence 
 and kingdom. It has, too, a natural history of its 
 own ; its most transcendent dogmas need but to be 
 studied through their history to be thoroughly in- 
 telligible. Belief in them may be the measure of 
 submission to the authority on which they rest ; but 
 it in no way indicates the attitude of the mind to 
 those ultimate beliefs which are the true mysteries of 
 thought and the universe. Nay, a man's faith in the 
 supernatural may be all the less real that his faith in 
 Catholic dogma is strong; it may be faith in the 
 church and its determinations, not in God and His 
 living Spirit. If God is known and approached 
 through the church, then it is not so much God as 
 the church that is believed ; for its people can know 
 Him only through the terms it approves, and ap- 
 proach Him only on the conditions it prescribes. 
 But to bind God to a church, and distribute and 
 determine His truth through its decrees, is a bad 
 supernaturalism ; it is to bring the Almighty within 
 the limits of an historical institution, and then to 
 argue that the limitation is credible because it makes 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 201 
 
 the institution so divine, justifies its claims, and 
 explains its prerogatives. This, I repeat, may be 
 marvellous, but it is not mysterious ; it may make 
 the institution remarkable, but it does not make 
 Religion divine. The more organized authority 
 becomes, the more exigent, imperative, imperious, it 
 grows ; in a word, the more it is incorporated in a 
 church, the more the church tends to supersede God, 
 and to become His substitute. The centre of gravity 
 is, as it were, changed ; the church experiences a 
 kind of apotheosis, God suffers a sort of political 
 incarnation. It so holds the approaches to Him 
 that it is not so much in His hands as He is in its ; 
 and in the very degree that it possesses Him, nature 
 and man are deprived of His presence. The special 
 Theism of the church ends in a more awful Atheism 
 of the universe. 
 
 2. Indeed, the radical defect of Catholicism seems 
 to me its want of a true supernaturalism, and even 
 fundamental incompatibility with one. It is through- 
 out conceived in the interests of the church rather 
 than in the interests of Religion and humanity. 
 The Catholic church is built on a conception of 
 Deity that is not Christ's; it dispenses His grace and 
 distributes His truth to those outside its pale on 
 terms, in modes and quantities, that involve the 
 negation of His holiest attributes and divinest 
 qualities — the scholastic distinctions which most 
 incline to charity being but an aggravation of the 
 offence. And even to those within its pale the 
 
202 CATHOLICISM 
 
 representation of Him is imperfect : the church has 
 determined the idea of God ; the idea of God has 
 not been allowed to determine the idea and spirit 
 of the church. There is no Religion so generous as 
 the Religion of the New Testament. God as He 
 appears there is the universal Father, and all men 
 are His sons ; between Him and them no institution 
 or church can be allowed to stand, the only Priest 
 or Mediator being the Christ. The Apostles burn 
 with holy passion against every " middle wall of 
 partition," or whatever would limit the grace and 
 activity of God. He is the God of both Jew and 
 Gentile, " in Him all live and move and have their 
 being," " in every nation he that feareth God and 
 worketh righteousness is accepted of Him." In the 
 early Church this was the doctrine of men like Justin 
 Martyr and Clement of Alexandria ; but, as the idea 
 of the Catholic church rose, the remoter, the more 
 formal and circumscribed, were God's relations to men 
 conceived to be. The greater the emphasis laid on the 
 priesthood and mediation, with their associated ideas 
 and instruments, the less general became His influ- 
 ence and the less immediate intercourse with Him ; 
 and, as He lost, the intermediaries gained in reality 
 to faith. The very notion of Religion was revolu- 
 tionized, ceased to have the spiritual immediacy, the 
 ethical breadth and intensity, the filial love and 
 peace, the human purity and gentleness, of Jesus ; and 
 became more akin to the ancient sacerdotal and 
 ceremonial worships. The great enemy of God is 
 
CATHOLICISM AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM 203 
 
 the idea of the church and its priesthood. Nothing 
 has so estranged men from Him as the claim to be 
 alone able to reconcile Him and them. The most 
 clamant need of our day is to recover the religious 
 idea of Jesus : and the only way to recover it is to 
 think of God as He was declared to be by the only- 
 begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father. 
 
 But it may be well, before this discussion ends, that 
 we recall its purpose : viz., to inquire concerning, not 
 the truth of rival churches, but the form in which 
 the Christian Faith can best be presented to our age. 
 Religious men are face to face with serious issues, 
 and are burdened with grave responsibilities. The 
 difficulties of belief are great, but the consciousness 
 of them is greater ; they spring not so much from 
 the new knowledge as the changed estimate and 
 conditions of life. Men are so possessed and op- 
 pressed by the labour needed to win the means of 
 living, that they have not sufficient energy of mind 
 to weigh or to master the deeper mysteries of life, 
 and so are prepared to allow either authority to 
 affirm their faith or criticism to dissolve it. In such 
 an age Catholicism may have its place, and make its 
 converts ; and it is no purpose of ours to take it from 
 them or them from it. But if it claims to be the one 
 real, sufficient, and relevant form of the Christian 
 Religion, then the truth must be spoken. Not in 
 and through it, is Religion to be realized in an age 
 of thought, in a world of freedom, progress, order, 
 and activity. Its doctrine of authority and the 
 
204 CATHOLICISM 
 
 church IS a direct provocation to scepticism ; its idea 
 of Religion is an impoverishment of the ideal that 
 came in the Kingdom of heaven. Faith can come 
 by its rights only as it fulfils its duties to reason. 
 And the church that alone has a right to live, is the 
 church that, by finding in God the most humanity, 
 most fills humanity with God ; and so works for the 
 establishment of that Kingdom which was founded 
 by the Son, and is governed by the Father, of man. 
 July, 1885. 
 
REASON AND RELIGION 
 
 [To so much of the criticism in the foregoing essays as referred 
 to his philosophical scepticism, Cardinal Newman rephed in a 
 paper entitled, "The Development of Religious Error," in the 
 Contemporary Review^ for October, 1885. The reply was so 
 characteristic of the writer and of his art and method in con- 
 troversy that, had it been open to me, I should have liked to 
 reproduce it here ; and also a supplement, privately printed 
 later, written in better temper and in a more reasonable vein. 
 The rejoinder, at least so much of it as concerned the Car- 
 dinal's substantial criticism, appears in this essay.] 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN, in his reply to me, 
 has done two things — he has repudiated and 
 denounced what my criticism never affirmed, and 
 he has contributed new material illustrative of the 
 very thesis it maintained. He has represented me 
 as describing him as " a hidden sceptic," ^ and as 
 " thinking, living, professing, acting upon a wide- 
 stretching, all-reaching platform of religious scep- 
 ticism." ^ I never did anything of the sort ; it 
 would require an energy and irony of invec- 
 tive equal to the Cardinal's own, to describe the 
 fatuous folly of the man who would venture to make 
 any such charge. What he was charged with, and 
 
 * Contemporary Review^ October, 1885, p. 457. ' Ibid.y p. 466. 
 
 205 
 
206 CATHOLICISM 
 
 in terms so careful and guarded as ought to have 
 excluded all possible misconception, was " metaphysi- 
 cal" or "philosophical" scepticism. This did not 
 mean that he was other than sincere in word and 
 spirit, especially in all that concerned his religious 
 convictions — his good faith in all his beliefs is, and 
 ever has been, manifest to all honest men ; but it 
 meant what it said, that he so conceived the intellect 
 that its natural attitude to religious truth was sceptical 
 and nescient. Scepticism in philosophy means a 
 system which affirms either, subjectively, the im- 
 potence of the reason for the discovery of the truth, 
 or, objectively, the inaccessibility of truth to the 
 reason; and such a scepticism, while it logically 
 involves the completest negation of knowledge, has 
 before now been made the basis of a pseudo-super- 
 naturalism, or plea for an infallible authority, that 
 must reveal and authenticate truth, if truth is ever to 
 become or remain man's. This was the scepticism 
 with which Cardinal Newman was charged, and it 
 was held significant, not simply for his personal 
 history, but also for the movement so inseparably 
 connected with his name. And his last paper is as 
 signal an illustration of its presence and action as is 
 to be found in all his writings. 
 
 § L The Philosophical Scepticism of Cardinal 
 Newman 
 
 I. Dr. Newman's reply, then, which relates to the 
 single point of the philosophical scepticism, is so 
 
REASON AND RELIGION 207 
 
 without relevance to the original criticism, save in the 
 way of illustration and confirmation, that it may be 
 well to attempt to make the real point at issue clear 
 and explicit. He speaks of me as having been 
 " misled by the epithets which he had attached in 
 the Apologia to the Reason."^ The epithets had 
 nothing whatever to do with the matter ; all turned 
 on the substantive or material idea. The criticism 
 was simply an endeavour to determine, on the one 
 hand, how Cardinal Newman conceived the Reason 
 and the Conscience in themselves and in relation to 
 the knowledge of God ; and, on the other hand, how 
 these conceptions affected or regulated the movement 
 of his mind from Theism to Catholicism. Stated in 
 another form, the question is this : How is knowledge 
 of religious truth possible ? What are the subjective 
 conditions of its genesis and continuance? How 
 and whence does man get those principles which 
 are the bases of all his thinking concerning religion ? 
 and in what relations do they and the Reason, at 
 first, and throughout their respective histories, stand 
 to each other? It is the old problem, under its 
 highest and most complex aspect, as to the grounds 
 and conditions of knowledge, how it is ever or any- 
 where possible. The older Empiricism said : All 
 knowledge is resolvable into sensuous impressions 
 and the ideas which are their faint image or copy. 
 There are no ideas in the mind till the senses have 
 
 * Contemporary Review^ p. 460. 
 
208 CATHOLICISM 
 
 conveyed them in ; it is but a sheet of white paper 
 till the outer universe has by the finger of sense 
 written on it those mysterious hieroglyphs which 
 constitute our intelligible world. But the critical 
 Transcendentalism replied : The impression explains 
 nothing — must itself be explained : how is it that it 
 becomes rational, an intelligible thing? The mind 
 and the sheet of white paper differ thus — the paper 
 receives the character, but the mind reads it ; indeed 
 the character would have no being save in and 
 through the reading of the mind. It is clear, there- 
 fore, that we must get before and below the impres- 
 sion to the thought, which is, by its forms and 
 categories, the interpreter of the impression, the 
 condition of its being intelligible. Without a con- 
 stitutive and interpretative Reason, the world that 
 speaks to the senses would be no reasonable world. 
 
 Now, Cardinal Newman may be described as, by 
 virtue of his doctrine of the Reason, an empiricist in 
 the province of religious truth. It involves precisely 
 the same attitude to religion that Hume's philosophy 
 involved to the reality of the outer world, to causation 
 and to personal identity. What Hume did by means 
 of association, Newman does by means of authority. 
 The reason is, as he is fond of saying, "a mere 
 instrument," unfurnished by nature, without religious 
 contents or function, till faith or conscience has con- 
 veyed into it the ideas or assumptions which are the 
 premisses of its processes ; and with religious character 
 only as these processes are conducted in obedience 
 
kEASON AND RELIGION 20^ 
 
 to the moral sense or other spiritual authority. It is 
 to him no constitutive or architectonic faculty, with 
 religious truth so in it, that it is bound to seek and 
 to conceive religious truth without it ; but it is as 
 regards Religion simply idle or vacant till it has 
 received and accepted the deliverances of conscience, 
 which stand to it much as Hume conceived his 
 "impressions" and their corresponding "ideas" to 
 stand related to mind and knowledge. But, then, to 
 a reason so constituted and construed how is religious 
 knowledge possible? How can religion, as such, 
 have any existence, or religious truth any reality? 
 What works as a mere instrument never handles 
 what it works in ; the things remain outside it, and 
 have no place or standing within its being. And 
 hence my contention was, and is, that to conceive 
 reason as Dr. Newman does, is to deny to it the 
 knowledge of God, and so to save faith by the help 
 of a deeper unbelief 
 
 I repeat, then : the doctrine of the reason Cardinal 
 Newman stated in the Contemporary for October is 
 precisely the doctrine on which my criticism was 
 based ; and it is essentially, in the philosophical 
 sense, a sceptical doctrine. But let us see how he 
 formulates it. Here is what may be regarded as his 
 earliest statement, with his later notes appended : — ^ 
 
 ^ University Sermons^ p. 55. The notes are added : for here, 
 as elsewhere throughout the volume, they are significant by 
 their very limitations. They may qualify the text, explain a 
 term or a phrase, protest against a given inference or result j 
 
 14 
 
210 CATHOLICISM 
 
 "There is no necessary connexion between the intellectual 
 and moral principles of our nature ^ ; on religious subjects we 
 may prove anything or overthrow anything, and can arrive at 
 truth but accidentally, if we merely investigate by what is 
 commonly called Reason,' which is in such matters but the 
 instrument at best, in the hands of the legitimate judge, 
 spiritual discernment." 
 
 Here is his latest statement, which will be found in 
 everything material identical with the earliest : — 
 
 " In its versatility, its illimitable range, its subtlety, its power 
 of concentrating many ideas on one point, it (the reason) is for 
 the acquisition of knowledge all-important or rather necessary ; 
 with this drawback, however, in its ordinary use, that in every 
 exercise of it, it depends for success upon the assumption ol 
 prior acts similar to that which it has itself involved, and there- 
 fore is reliable only conditionally. Its process is a passing 
 from an antecedent to a consequent, and according as the start 
 so is the issue. In the province of religion, if it be under the 
 happy guidance of the moral sense, and with teachings which 
 are not only assumptions in form, but certainties, it will arrive 
 at indisputable truth, and then the house is at peace ; but if it 
 be in the hands of enemies, who are under the delusion that its 
 arbitrary assumptions are self-evident axioms, the reasoning 
 will start from false premisses, and the mind will be in a state 
 of melancholy disorder. But in no case need the reasoning 
 faculty itself be to blame or responsible, except if viewed as 
 identical with the assumptions of which it is the instrument. I 
 
 but they never either modify or alter the radical doctrine. 
 These notes are needed to elucidate the criticism, for nothing 
 has been more helpful to it than a minute and comparative 
 study of them. 
 
 * * That is, as found in individuals, in the concrete.' 
 
 * 'Because we may be reasoning from wrong principles, 
 principles unsuitable to the subject-matter reasoned upon. 
 Thus, the moral sense or " spiritual discernment " must supply 
 us with the assumptions to be used as premisses in religious 
 inquiry.' 
 
REASON AND RELIGION 211 
 
 repeat, it is but an instrument ; as such I have viewed it, and 
 no one but Dr. Fairbairn would say as he does — that the bad 
 employment of a faculty was a ' division,' a * contradiction,' and 
 * a radical antagonism of nature,' and ' the death of the natural 
 proof of a God."^ 
 
 2. Now, I do not wish to be minute in my criti- 
 cism, and argue that if reason, " in every exercise of 
 it, depends for success on the assumption of prior 
 acts similar to that which it has itself involved," then 
 the genesis and very being of reason are inconceiv- 
 able, for we are landed in the notion of an infinite 
 series. As to Hume man was a succession or series 
 of "impressions and ideas," so to Newman reason, 
 as mere faculty of reasoning, is a series of "ante- 
 cedents and consequents " ; the difficulty in both 
 cases is the same, to find how the series began, and 
 how, having begun, it has developed into what it is. 
 But without resorting to minute analysis, we may 
 begin with the last sentence of the above quotation ; 
 and concerning it, it is enough to say. Dr. Fairbairn 
 never said any such thing, or, meaning what he did 
 and does, could have said it. His criticism referred 
 not to the employment of the faculty, but to the 
 doctrine of the faculty, which determined its use ; 
 and this latest statement seems expressly designed 
 to elucidate and justify the criticism. For reason, as 
 
 * Contemporary Review^ pp. 459, 460. A few more instances 
 from the University Sermons, of Dr. Newman's use of the term 
 Reason, may be added to those he has himself given ; they 
 ought to be studied with the Catholic Notes, pp. 58, § 4 ; 60, 61, 
 § 7 ; 65, 67, 70, ^z, 88, 179, 194, 195, 214, 215. 
 
212 CATHOLICISM 
 
 here described, is condemned, in all that concerns the 
 higher problems and fundamental verities of thought, 
 to incapacity and impotence. It is emptied of those 
 constitutive and constructive qualities that make it a 
 reason ; and by being reduced to a mere ratiocinative 
 instrument, its very ability to handle religious prin- 
 ciples, even in a ratiocinative process, is denied. For 
 the reasoning process, to be valid, must proceed from 
 principles valid to the reason ; but to be so valid 
 they must be more than deliverances or assumptions 
 coming to it ab extra; they must have a root in its 
 own nature, and be inseparable from the very being 
 of thought. To use principles truly, one must be able 
 to judge concerning their truth : and how can a reason 
 truly and justly act, even as a mere instrument of 
 inference, on the basis of premisses it neither found, 
 nor framed, nor verified, being indeed so constituted 
 as to be unable to do any one of these things? 
 Reason, then, can be ratiocinative only as it is con- 
 stitutive ; we must have truth of thought, that we 
 may know or possess truth of being. The getting 
 of principles is a more vital matter than the reasoning 
 concerning them ; and if the constitutive or formula- 
 tive and determinative factor be made not only 
 distinct from the dialectic and deductive, but inde- 
 pendent of it, how can they ever be made to agree, 
 save by the subordination or enslavement of the one 
 to the other ? And even then they will not agree : for 
 the principles cannot signify the same thing to facul- 
 ties that are not only distinct, but, as realized in the 
 
REASON' AND RELIGION 21 3 
 
 living person, without "necessary connexion." The 
 dictate of the conscience changes its nature when it 
 becomes the axiom of the reason ; the " categorical 
 imperative " ceases to be, the moment it is translated 
 into a speculative or intellectual truth. It may — nay, 
 it must — be true that the man who is deaf to the 
 voice of conscience cannot reason rightly in religious 
 matters; but it is no less true that the man who 
 doubts or misuses his reason cannot hear or be en- 
 lightened by his conscience. The only justification 
 of Cardinal Newman's doctrine would have been the 
 reduction of conscience and reason to a higher unity ; 
 his last condemnation is his distinction and division 
 of the faculties, for it involves our nature in a dualism 
 which makes real knowledge of religious truth im- 
 possible. There is unity neither in the man who 
 knows nor in the truth as known. For, make a 
 present of true premisses to a faculty merely ratio- 
 cinative, and they will be to it only as algebraic 
 symbols, not as truths of religion ; its deductive 
 process may be correct, but it will have no religious 
 character. But to a reason without religious char- 
 acter, unable to construe religious truths for what 
 they really are, there can be no legitimate reasoning 
 concerning religion ; truth is inaccessible to it, and it 
 is incompetent to the discovery and determination of 
 truth. This is philosophical scepticism ; and if, to 
 avoid the logical issue, the truth denied to the reason 
 is granted to the conscience, and is, on its simple 
 authority, to be accepted as a " magisterial dictate," 
 
214 CATHOLICISM 
 
 then a " division," or " radical antagonism of nature," 
 is introduced, which is "the death of the natural 
 proof" for the being of a God, and of all the primary 
 truths of religion. This, and no other, was my 
 original criticism of Cardinal Newman : and this, 
 confirmed and illustrated by his latest statement, is 
 my criticism still. 
 
 § II. Correlation of the Subjective and Objective 
 Scepticism 
 I. Now, this very doctrine of the reason, with its 
 varied limitations and applications, is the heart and 
 essence of the whole matter; it is, in the proper 
 philosophical sense, both empirical and sceptical. It 
 is a doctrine of impotence ; the reason is by its 
 very nature disqualified from ever attaining the 
 knowledge of religious truth, as religious. It is a 
 doctrine of nescience ; for religious knowledge is, from 
 its very nature, unable to get within, and be really 
 assimilated by, a reason which is a mere inferen- 
 tial or syllogistic instrument. Dr. Newman is very 
 angry at my speaking of his " ultimate ideas, or the 
 regulative principles of his thought," or simply his 
 " underlying philosophy " ; and he declares that from 
 " leading ideas " and " fundamental principles " he 
 has " all through his life shrunk, as sophistical and 
 misleading." ^ Well, it may be so : and if it is so, 
 many things that have been a perplexity to people 
 would be explained. But it is possible that if Dr. 
 
 * Contemporary Review ^ p. 467. 
 
REASON AND RELIGION 215 
 
 Newman had been described as a person without 
 " fundamental " or " regulative principles," he would 
 have been angrier still, and with more reason. How- 
 ever, the matter need not be any further disputed ; 
 what was meant by his " underlying philosophy " is 
 just this doctrine which he has anew stated and 
 maintained. What was meant by it as a "regu- 
 lative principle of his thought," was that it exercised 
 over his mind, its dialectic and dialectical method, 
 precisely the sort of influence he has endeavoured 
 to explain and illustrate. Now, what I ventured to 
 say before, I am by the new light the more em- 
 boldened to repeat — that this fundamental principle 
 determined, in a way not written in the Apologia^ 
 his whole inner history. He not only doubted the 
 reason, but he mocked and scorned all who sought 
 to enlist it in the service of religion.^ It was to him 
 no witness or oracle of God, but simply a servant, 
 
 * See, for example, as applying the principles of the Uni- 
 versity Serjnons to contemporary mind and literature, the fol- 
 lowing Essays : — Introduction of Rationalistic Principles into 
 Revealed Religion (1835). This is practically a review, hard 
 and unsympathetic, of Jacob Abbott and Thomas Erskine of 
 Linlathen. Apostolical Tradition (1836); Milmafis View of 
 Christianity {\%\\\ 2i review of his "most dangerous and in- 
 sidious" History; Private fudgment (1841). This latter is, 
 in particular, instructive and suggestive. These are reprinted 
 in the Essays Critical and Historical. Another, and even 
 more illustrative paper, is " The Tam worth Reading-room," in 
 Discussions and Arguments, art. iv. This contains the famous 
 letters of " Catholicus " against Sir Robert Peel and Lord 
 Brougham. 
 
2l6 CATHOLICISM 
 
 whose duty was to obey, and whose only virtue was 
 obedience. Here, from the critical year 1841, is a 
 significant passage, one out of many, illustrative of 
 how little the empirical and instrumental reason, as 
 he conceived it, had of God, and how little it could 
 find Him in the Nature it was called to interpret : — 
 
 "The whole framework of nature is confessedly a tissue of 
 antecedents and consequents ; we may refer all things forward 
 to design, or backwards on a physical cause. Laplace is said 
 to have considered he had a formula which solved all the 
 motions of the solar system ; shall we say that those motions 
 came from this formula or from a Divine Fiat ? Shall we have 
 recourse for our theory to physics or to theology ? Shall we 
 assume Matter and its necessary properties to be eternal, or 
 Mind with its divine attributes ? Does the sun shine to warm 
 the earth, or is the earth warmed because the sun shines ? The 
 one hypothesis will solve the phenomena as well as the other. 
 Say not it is but a puzzle in argument, and no one ever felt it in 
 fact. So far from it, I believe that the study of nature, when 
 religious feeling is away, leads the mind, rightly or wrongly, to 
 acquiesce in the atheistical theory, as the simplest and easiest. 
 It is but parallel to that tendency in anatomical studies, which 
 no one will deny, to solve all the phenomena of the human 
 frame into material elements and powers, and to dispense with 
 the soul. To those who are conscious of matter, but not con- 
 scious of mind, it seems more rational to refer all things to one 
 origin, such as they know, than to assume the existence of a 
 second origin, such as they know not. It is religion, then, which 
 suggests to science its true conclusions ; the facts come from 
 knowledge, but the principles come of faith." ^ 
 
 * "The Tam worth Reading-room:" Discussions and Argu- 
 ments.^ pp. 299, 300 (4th ed.). To this remarkable passage 
 Dr. Newman has appended the following note : — " This is too 
 absolute, if it is to be taken to mean that the legitimate, and 
 what may be called the objective conclusion from the fact of 
 
REASON AND RELIGION 217 
 
 In this passage, where statement and argument 
 are alike logical results of the implied philosophy 
 of mind, the attitude of the intellectual sceptic is 
 admirably stated ; either alternative is consonant to 
 reason, though the negative is rather the more con- 
 sonant. If reason stands alone, the conclusion will 
 be nescience. It is all a matter of feeling or faith ; 
 if it be away, "the study of Nature" will lead to 
 acquiescence " in the atheistical theory " ; \i it be 
 present, the reference will be to the being of God. 
 Dr. Newman elsewhere quotes a doctrine which 
 Hume " has well propounded," though he did it but 
 " in irony " : — " Our most holy religion is founded 
 on faith^ not on reason."^ The irony of Hume 
 is the good faith of Newman ; while their creeds 
 so differ, their philosophies so agree, that if the 
 sceptic had ever attempted an apology for religion, 
 he would have made it in the manner and on the 
 lines and with all the implicates and inferences of 
 the Catholic. 
 
 2. Nature, then, had not simply to the logical and 
 inferential reason, but even, so far as he allowed it, 
 to the constructive and interpretative, no necessary 
 theistic meaning. As he himself says, " Take the 
 
 Nature, viewed in the concrete, is not in favour of the Being 
 and Providence of God " (vide Essay on Assent, pp. 336, 345, 
 369 ; and Univ. Serin. , p. 194). But this, like the other 
 Catholic Notes, changes the doctrine in no material respect ; 
 it simply protests what the author did not wish to mean. 
 * University Sermons, p. 60. 
 
2 1 8 CA THOLICISM 
 
 system of nature by itself, detached from the axioms 
 of religion, and I am willing to confess — nay, I have 
 been expressly urging — that it does not force us to 
 take it for more than a system." ^ Whence, now, the 
 axioms of religion which were needed to make our 
 view of nature theistic ? As they had no ground 
 in the reason, they had to be given — i.e.^ received 
 on the authority either of conscience or of revela- 
 tion. If it accepted their dicta^ it was religious ; if 
 it was without or averse to them, it was atheistic. 
 This is the thesis of the most remarkable of his 
 University Sermons ; it comes out in his account of 
 what he calls the Divinity of Traditionary Religion, 
 which explains what is true in the various faiths, by 
 all men having had "more or less the guidance of 
 tradition, in addition to those internal notions of 
 right and wrong which the Spirit has put into the 
 heart of each individual." ^ It appears, too, instruc- 
 tively in his doctrine of private judgment, whose 
 province he defines as being to exercise itself upon 
 this simple question, "What and where is the 
 Church ? " We are not to think of gaining religious 
 truth for ourselves by our "private examination," 
 but ought only to ask, " Who is God's prophet, and 
 where? Who is to be considered the voice of the 
 Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church? "^ It ob- 
 
 * Discussions and Arguments^ p. 302. The italics are his own. 
 
 • The Arians of the Fotirth Century^ pp. 79, 80 (4th ed.). 
 
 ' Private Judgment {\Z&f\). Essays Critical and Historical^ 
 vol. ii., pp. 353-355 (5th ed.). 
 
REASON AND RELIGION 219 
 
 tained its perfect and logical expression in the argu- 
 ment which proved an infallible authority necessary 
 alike to the being of religion and the church : — 
 
 " As the essence of all religion is authority and obedience, so 
 the distinction between natural religion and revealed lies in 
 this, that the one has a subjective authority and the other 
 an objective. Revelation consists in the manifestation of the 
 Invisible Divine Power, or in the substitution of the voice of 
 a Lawgiver for the voice of conscience. The supremacy of 
 conscience is the essence of natural religion : the supremacy 
 of Apostle, or Pope, or Church, or Bishop, is the essence of 
 revealed ; and when such external authority is taken away, the 
 mind falls back again upon that inward guide which it possessed 
 even before Revelation was vouchsafed. Thus, what conscience 
 is in the system of nature, such is the voice of Scripture, or ot 
 the Church, or of the Holy See, as we may determine it, in the 
 system of Revelation. It may be objected, indeed, that con- 
 science is not infallible ; it is true, but still it is ever to be 
 obeyed. And this is just the prerogative which controversialists 
 assign to the See of St. Peter ; it is not in all cases infallible, 
 it may err beyond its special province, but it has ever in all 
 cases a claim on our obedience." ^ 
 
 Now, these are only the logical sequences in the 
 process which compelled Dr. Newman to hold Catho- 
 licism and Atheism the only real alternatives ; but 
 the compulsion came at every point from what he 
 must allow me to call his " underlying philosophy," 
 or simply, his doctrine, which made the reason a 
 mere ratiocinative faculty or deductive instrument, 
 by nature void of God, and never able to know 
 
 * The D ev el op me?it of Doctrine^ pp. 124-125 (2nd ed.). 
 
220 CATHOLICISM 
 
 Him directly or for itself.^ Its knowledge of re- 
 ligion being always indirect and inferential, "on 
 grounds given," the supreme difficulty was with " the 
 grounds " ; how to get them, then how to have them 
 accepted, ratified, and obeyed. They were always 
 giving way beneath analysis, or being departed from, 
 or being superseded by " false," or " wrong," or " secu- 
 lar " premisses, which indeed ever seemed to be more 
 easy of acceptance than the religious : in short, his 
 principles of reasoning had no organic connection 
 with the principles of knowledge or reason. Reason 
 to him had so little in it of the truth, that it was 
 as ready to become the instrument of "the false 
 prophet " as of the true ; to speak for the one was 
 as congenial to its nature as to speak for the other. 
 And so its natural inability was the source and basis 
 of its historical hostility to religion ; the more it 
 was degraded into an instrument, the more it re- 
 venged its degradation by becoming unstable, in- 
 tractable, inimical. The more critical, "aggressive," 
 or " captious " the reason became, the more imperious 
 had to become the authority which supplied it with 
 the " assumptions " or " axioms of religion " ; and, 
 as was inevitable, the more imperious the authority 
 grew, the more " rebellious " grew the reason. The 
 result was the one he has so well described in the 
 now classic passage : " He came to the conclusion 
 
 ^ "The knowledge of God is the highest function of our 
 nature, and as regards that knowledge, reason only holds the 
 place of an instrument." (Note in University Sermons^ p. 7.) 
 
REASON AND RELIGION 221 
 
 that there was no medium in true philosophy be- 
 tween Atheism and Catholicity."^ But it was the 
 philosophy that did it all, and on its truth depends 
 the validity of the conclusion. Where reason is 
 conceived as a mere instrument, so by nature with- 
 out the knowledge of God that all it ever knows 
 or determines concerning Him must proceed from 
 principles given " on the simple word of the Divine 
 Informant," named now Conscience, now Tradition, 
 and now the Church, then the alternatives — absolute 
 authority or absolute negation — are inexorable. Nay, 
 more, this doctrine, as is so well illustrated by his 
 latest utterance, with its despair of all secular forces 
 and its blind hope in ecclesiastical, is doubly deter- 
 minative : it yields the theory, on the one hand, of 
 the Church, and on the other of " the False Prophet," 
 or " human society," by whose action *' error spreads 
 and becomes an authority." The subjective is re- 
 flected in an objective dualism ; the authoritative 
 church has its counterpart and contradiction in the 
 authoritative world ; each succeeds, as it has its pre- 
 misses or assumptions accepted by the reason as data 
 for reasoning. And thus the notion that loses the 
 immanence of God from the reason, loses the active 
 presence of God from the collective history and 
 society of man. The scepticism of the theory on its 
 subjective side has its correlative in the false super- 
 naturalism of the objective ; to dispossess reason of 
 its divine contents is to deprive man, in his concrete 
 
 * Apologia^ p. 198. 
 
222 CATHOLICISM 
 
 historical being, of the natural presence and know- 
 ledge of God, and to limit God's action and activity 
 to means that are all the more mechanical that they 
 are conceived and described as supernatural. 
 
 § III. The Dialectical Movement towards Certitude 
 
 I. So far we have been concerned with Newman's 
 doctrine of the reason — first in its intrinsic, and next 
 in what may be termed its biographical significance ; 
 now we must consider whether it has any dialectic 
 or apologetic worth. He has as a matter of course 
 challenged my interpretation of the Grammar of 
 Assent ; and another critic of my criticism thinks 
 it " wanting in insight," and " decidedly, though not 
 intentionally, unjust," due to my not having thrown 
 myself " into the spirit of the work," or " viewed it 
 from within." Now, it was because the work was 
 criticised from the most internal of all standpoints, 
 the biographical, that the criticism was what it was. 
 The work cannot be understood alone ; it were simply 
 unintelligible to the man who did not know the writer 
 and his history. It is, in a far deeper sense than the 
 book that bears the title, a later — as the " Develop- 
 ment " was an earlier ^ — Apologia pro Vita Sua ; 
 and is as remarkable for what it does not, as for what 
 it does state and attempt. It holds the place in 
 Newman's collective works that the Logic does in 
 Mill's. In the Logic^ Mill applies his metaphysical 
 / doctrine to the discovery and determination of truth ; 
 
 * Ante^ p. 158. 
 
REASON AND RELIGION 223 
 
 in the Grammar^ Newman uses his philosophical 
 doctrine to explain and vindicate the processes that 
 involve and justify religious belief. He explains, 
 indeed, his object as not " to set forth the arguments 
 which issue in the belief " of certain doctrines ; " but 
 to investigate what it is to believe in them, what the 
 mind does, what it contemplates, when it makes an 
 act of faith." ^ But he confesses that to show what it 
 is to believe, is, in a measure, to show " why we be- 
 lieve " ; the one problem, indeed, is but the other in its 
 most radical form. Now, the argument from first to 
 last, and in all its stages, reposes on Cardinal New- 
 man's distinctive doctrine of the incompetence of the 
 reason ; its inability to be more than a formal instru- 
 ment is the keynote of the book. Reason is to him 
 individual; "every one who reasons is his own centre, 
 and no expedient for attaining a common measure of 
 minds can reverse this truth." ^ In discussing " first 
 principles," or " the propositions with which we start 
 in reasoning on any given subject-matter," he says : — 
 
 "Sometimes our trust in our powers of reasoning and memory 
 — that is, our implicit assent to their telling truly — is treated as 
 a first principle ; but we cannot properly be said to have any 
 trust in them as faculties. At most we trust in particular acts 
 of memory and reasoning. We are sure there was a yesterday, 
 and that we did this or that in it ; we are sure that three times 
 six is eighteen, and that the diagonal of a square is longer than 
 the side. So far as this we may be said to trust the mental act 
 by which the object of our assent is verified ; but in doing so 
 we imply no recognition of a general power or faculty, or of any 
 
 * Grammar of Assent^ p. 99. * Idtd.^ p. 345. 
 
224 CATHOLICISM 
 
 capability or aflfection of our minds, over and above the particu- 
 lar act. We know, indeed, that we have a faculty by which we 
 remember, as we know we have a faculty by which we breathe ; 
 but we gain this knowledge by abstraction or inference from its 
 particular acts, not by direct experience. Nor do we trust in 
 the faculty of memory or reasoning as such, even after that we 
 have inferred its existence ; for its acts are often inaccurate, nor 
 do we invariably assent to them." * 
 
 Now, it were a curious point to determine how trust 
 of a " particular act " is possible without trust of the 
 faculty that performs it. If we know a given act to 
 be true, we must have a standard of truth ; it is 
 through the truthfulness of the faculty that we know 
 the falsity or truth of its " particular acts." But the 
 significance of the passage does not lie in its in- 
 consistencies, but in its positive doctrine. Reason is 
 but an instrument, a faculty of reasoning, trustworthy 
 in particular acts, not trustworthy throughout. Being 
 so restricted a faculty, we owe to it little, not even 
 the knowledge " that there are things existing ex- 
 ternal to ourselves." That is due to " an instinct " 
 which we have in common with " the brute creation," 
 and "the gift of reason is not a condition of its 
 existence." ^ As with the belief in an external world, 
 so with the belief in God ; reason has nothing to do 
 with either. " We begin to learn about God from 
 conscience." ^ " Now certainly the thought of God, 
 as theists entertain it, is not gained by an instinctive 
 association of His presence with any sensible pheno- 
 
 * Grammar of Assent^ pp. 60, 6i. 
 
 * Ibid.^ PP- 61, 62. * Ibid.^ p. 63. 
 
REASON AND RELIGION 225 
 
 mena ; but the office which the senses directly fulfil 
 as regards creation, that devolves directly on certain 
 of our mental phenomena as regards the Creator. 
 Those phenomena are found in the sense of moral 
 obligation." ^ 
 
 2. Here, then, on the one hand, we have the im- 
 potent and instrumental reason, which can never get 
 to God, and is to be trusted only in "particular acts"; 
 and, on the other hand, the capable and authoritative 
 conscience, in which God directly is, and which is to 
 be implicitly obeyed. And this dualism penetrates 
 and pervades the whole book : its argument may be 
 said to be the logical articulation of the doubt which 
 one faculty creates and another faculty corrects. This 
 curious dualism is expressed in the distinctions be- 
 tween "notional and real apprehension," "notional 
 and real assent," and between " inference and assent" ; 
 and it underlies the cardinal doctrine of the " illative 
 sense." ^ That doctrine means that religion can never 
 be handled on universal principles by a reason that 
 may truly be termed universal ; but must be left to 
 the man so compacted of conscience and imagination 
 as to have a sense for religion and for the determina- 
 tion of religious questions. If the idea of the reason 
 
 * Grammar of Assent^ pp. 103, 104. 
 
 * It is impossible to summarize here, or illustrate in needed 
 detail, the significant positions in the chapters on Assent, Certi- 
 tude, Inference, and the Illative Sense : an opportunity of de- 
 veloping their metaphysical basis, and illustrating its bearing 
 on the argument, may yet be furnished. 
 
 15 
 
226 CATHOLICISM 
 
 had been larger and worthier, or if the relation be- 
 tween the reason and the conscience had been more 
 organically conceived, so that the two had appeared 
 as a unity, the whole argumentative structure, and 
 the principles on which it is built, would have been 
 different. As it is, religion never gets inside the 
 reason, nor the reason inside religion. They are but 
 formally related, never really or vitally connected. 
 Dr. Newman may have a perfect right to limit the 
 province and define the idea of reason in his own 
 way ; but then, the exercise of the right has laid him 
 open to a criticism which apparently he has not un- 
 derstood, and which certainly he has said nothing to 
 invalidate. If the reason plays no part in the genesis 
 of the idea of God, it can play no part in its proof 
 But this position involves the converse ; the idea of 
 God and the proofs of His being can never be real 
 possessions of the reason. They remain without it, 
 grounds or premisses for its dialectical exercise ; they 
 do not live within it, principles and laws of its very 
 life. The philosophy that so construes the reason as 
 to involve these consequences, is sceptical ; and this 
 is the philosophy of " The Grammar of Assent." 
 
 § IV. Reason and Authority in Religion 
 
 I. But what significance has this extended criticism 
 of Cardinal Newman ? I have been warned not to 
 identify him with the Catholic church ; for it cannot 
 be identified with "any individual genius however 
 
REASON AND RELIGION 227 
 
 great." ^ I never did nor ever meant so to identify 
 him. The Catholic church is greater than any theo- 
 logian, but a theologian may' also be greater than 
 the Catholic church. The Fathers do not belong to 
 Rome, but to Christendom. Rome may have been in 
 them, but more than Rome was there ; elements larger 
 and richer than she was able to assimilate. The 
 earlier Greek Fathers had a nobler catholicity than 
 she has reached ; the men of the heroic age of the 
 Greek church had another and more generous an- 
 thropology, a freer and loftier ecclesiology than hers. 
 Augustine, too, was greater than Catholicism ; for 
 while its developments have done the amplest justice 
 to his ecclesiastical doctrine, they have failed to do 
 
 * Dr. Barry in the Contemporary Review^ November, 1885, 
 p. 662. I have expressly wished to avoid making any reference 
 to this paper, which was notably free from innuendo and in- 
 tentional misstatements. But in some respects it was open to 
 the charge of inacc uracy. The writer quite misapprehended 
 Kant's position, and, as a consequence, the argument which 
 was based upon it. He also represented me (p. 657) as saying : 
 — "That religion must be emancipated from the churches, 
 since these have, on the whole, 'become simply the most 
 irreligious of institutions, mischievous in the very degree of 
 their power.' " Now here is the rather tame original of this 
 rash and atrocious deliverance :—" The churches are the 
 means, but Religion is the end ; and if they, instead of being 
 well content to be and to be held means, good in the degree of 
 their fitness and efficiency, regard and give themselves out as 
 ends, then they become simply the most irreligious of institu- 
 tions, mischievous in the very degree of their power." (Cf. 
 ante^ P- !•) 
 
228 CATHOLICISM 
 
 equal justice to his theological. The official theology 
 of Rome has more semi-Pelagian than Augustinian 
 elements ; the Augsburg Confession expresses in its 
 doctrine of sin more truly and nearly the mind of 
 Augustine, than the Tridentine Canons ; and Calvin 
 is a better and more faithful exponent of him than 
 either Bellarmine or Petavius. The Schoolmen, too, 
 are in many ways ours : they are, in the widest sense, 
 catholic divines : the exclusive property of no church, 
 but the common possession of all. Nor would I 
 identify too closely any modern official or apologetic 
 divine with Catholicism. It has its own history of 
 variations, as vast and quite as conflicting as those of 
 Protestantism ; and it would be no grateful task to 
 write it. The distinction between Rome and Cardinal 
 Newman has been explicit all through this criticism ; 
 is necessary indeed to its force, and was emphasized 
 by the contrast between the causes of the Catholic 
 revival in England and on the Continent. But he 
 was selected as the leader and representative of that 
 revival in the special form it here assumed ; at once 
 its real author and true embodiment, the man without 
 whom it either would not have been, or could not have 
 been what it was. If it is to be understood and criti- 
 cally appraised, it must be through the man that made 
 it. The causes and influences that determined his 
 mind belong, as it were, to its very essence — help us 
 to see what meaning and worth it has for the spirit 
 and thought of our time. He has told us by act 
 and speech, in every variety of subtle argument and 
 
REASON AND RELIGION 229 
 
 eloquent phrase, that CathoHcism is the only secure 
 and open haven for the doubt-driven and storm-tossed 
 soul ; that without it the faith and hope of the Chris- 
 tian centuries must be engulphed by the rising tides 
 of negation and godlessness. But when we examine 
 the reasons for his act and for his peculiar speech, or 
 the bases of his argument and apologies, we find that 
 they proceed from as deep a scepticism as the one he 
 invites us to escape. He has lost God out of the 
 reason and the realm of the reasonable, and thinks 
 He is to be got back only as a Deus ex machind. To 
 build a supernatural faith on a natural impotence, 
 seems to us a suicidal proceeding. We prefer to find 
 God where he has not found Him, and build faith on 
 the sanity of a human reason which is full of God 
 and akin to the divine. 
 
 2. But before passing from this subject it may be 
 as well to allude to a question which has been made 
 to play a great part in this and similar discussions, 
 viz., in what relation does authority stand on the one 
 hand to religion, and on the other to reason ? It was 
 soberly said, as if it were a true or a relevant thing 
 to say, that this criticism of Cardinal Newman was an 
 assault " upon authority itself, considered as the basis 
 of revealed religion." It is not at all obvious how 
 even the most mordant criticism of a theory which 
 made the natural incompetence, or aversion of the 
 intellect to the knowledge of God, the apology for a 
 stupendous miraculous mechanism for keeping this 
 knowledge alive — should be an assault upon either 
 
230 CATHOLICISM 
 
 authority or revealed religion. What is obvious is 
 the exact opposite : that there is no plea for authority- 
 like that to be found in an intellect so sane and 
 rational and conscious of its supernatural qualities 
 and relations that it must seek God, feel after if 
 haply it may find Him. But then the authority that 
 corroborates and develops the native godliness of the 
 mind, will be very different from the authority needed 
 to maintain God in the face of the mind's native 
 godlessness. Hence it seems to me mere inconse- 
 quence and irrelevance of thought to argue in this 
 fashion : " There is no argument against an infallible 
 Church that may not be directly turned against a 
 visible Christ." " If a dogmatic Church is unreason- 
 able, a dogmatic or inspired Christ is unnecessary." ^ 
 In other words, the argument is in effect this : " If you 
 admit the authority of Christ, you admit in principle 
 the very thing you have been arguing against. Your 
 position, therefore, is illogical, and from it there are 
 only two logical issues : either^ maintain your polemic 
 against authority as embodied in Rome, and reduce 
 it to consistency and completeness by denying the 
 authority of Christ ; or^ maintain the authority of 
 Christ, and follow the principle to its legitimate and 
 complete and most august expression in the Church 
 of Rome. " 
 
 But this argument is vitiated by two initial assump- 
 tions — (a) that I have been arguing against authority 
 
 * Contemporary Review^ Nov., 1885, p. 600. 
 
REASON AND RELIGION 23 1 
 
 in religion. On the contrary, what has been argued 
 against is the paralogism which proved man's need 
 of authority by an elaborate demonstration of his 
 inability to see or to use his sight. The blind man 
 cannot always choose his guides, and so may select 
 one even blinder than himself, with the result that 
 both will fall into the inevitable ditch. My argument 
 has been in behalf of vision, not against authority, 
 and a vision that can trust all the more completely 
 that it can see while it believes. But (/5) the second 
 assumption is, that the two authorities — Christ's and 
 Rome's — are in nature and quality identical and 
 equivalent. While in both cases the one word is 
 used, it expresses two distinct and even opposed 
 notions. There is no sense in which Rome is an 
 authority that Christ is one ; and no sense in which 
 Christ is an authority that Rome is one. He is an 
 authority in the sense that conscience is ; it is an 
 authority in the sense that the law and the legisla- 
 ture are authorities. His authority is personal, moral, 
 living ; its is organized, definitive, determinative, ad- 
 ministrative. The authority which springs from a 
 person, and is exercised through conscience, is the 
 basis of freedom ; but the authority of a judicial 
 tribunal or determinative conclave is its limitation or 
 even abrogation. The one presents matter for in- 
 terpretation and belief; but the other decides what is 
 to be believed, and in what sense. The attribute or 
 essential characteristic of Christ's authority as exer- 
 cised and accepted, is Sovereignty ; but the attribute 
 
23 2 CA TBOLICISM 
 
 and note of the papal authority is Infallibility. Christ 
 is not infallible in the papal sense, and the papal 
 authority is not sovereign in the sense predicated of 
 Christ. Christ defines no dogma, formulates no ex 
 cathedrd judgment concerning the mode in which His 
 own person and the relation of the two natures must 
 be conceived, or concerning the rank and conception 
 of His mother, or indeed on any of those things on 
 which Rome has most authoritatively spoken ; while 
 the methods of Rome in enforcing her decrees are 
 those of a legal or judicial or institutional sovereignty. 
 So absolute is the difference and so emphatic the 
 contrast between the two authorities, that we may 
 say, to allow the sovereignty of Christ is to dis- 
 allow the infallibility of Rome ; and to accept the 
 latter is to exchange a moral supremacy, which per- 
 mits no secular expediencies or diplomacies, for one 
 legal and economical, which must be now rigid and 
 now elastic, as the public interests or the expedi- 
 encies of the hour may demand. If, then, there is 
 to be argument from the principle of authority, it 
 must conduct to an entirely different conclusion from 
 the one offered by these crude alternatives. If we 
 accept authority as embodied in Rome, we cannot 
 admit it as personalized in Christ ; if we admit it as 
 personalized in Christ, we cannot accept it as em- 
 bodied in Rome. That we admit His, is no argument 
 why we should admit another ; but rather why no 
 other should be admitted, especially as that other is 
 entirely distinct in nature, opposite in kind, and 
 
REASON AND RELIGION 233 
 
 incompatible in action. To seek to supplement 
 Christ's authority by the Church's, is to pass from 
 the freedom of a moral sovereignty to the bondage of 
 a judicial infallibility. And so the most conclusive 
 argument against an infallible church is a sovereign 
 Christ. 
 
 There is thus a twofold difference between what 
 we may term spiritual or religious and ecclesiastical 
 or political authority in the matter of faith : (a) sub- 
 jective, expressed in the agreement or correspondence 
 of authority and thought, rather than in the suppres- 
 sion or contradiction of thought by authority : and 
 (/8) objective, the difference between Christ and the 
 church, making them as authorities altogether differ- 
 ent. They can be compared only to be contrasted, 
 and are related as the incompatible and the mutually 
 exclusive. And this relation is due not to the an- 
 tagonism of rival or opposed authorities akin in 
 order or nature, but to the radical difference or 
 essential incompatibility in character and kind of 
 the authorities themselves. Authority as organized, 
 legal, definitive, judicially and officially infallible, 
 embodied in an episcopate or conclave or church, is 
 one thing ; and the authority, personal, moral, re- 
 ligious, which Jesus claimed, is another thing alto- 
 gether. And the very arguments which proved the 
 former a violation of God's own order, prove the 
 latter its highest expression or manifestation. I 
 cannot allow, indeed, that authority in the Roman 
 sense of the term is " the basis of revealed religion " : 
 
234 CA THOLICISM 
 
 but I hold, on the contrary, that the basis of all religion 
 is Revelation. Without the presence and action of 
 God in nature, through reason and on man, I could 
 not conceive religion as existing at all. That it 
 exists anywhere is to me evidence that God has been 
 active there, seeking man, as man has been seeking 
 Him. Whatever truth is at any place or any mo- 
 ment found, comes from God, and reveals the God 
 from whom it comes. But all His truth comes 
 through persons, and the degree and quality of truth 
 that so comes is the measure of the persons' au- 
 thority. Belief is not grounded on authority, but 
 authority is realized through belief Christ's words 
 become authoritative through faith ; faith does not 
 come because His words are authoritative. His 
 sovereignty is felt to be legitimate and absolute, be- 
 cause His absolute truth is recognized ; and to this 
 recognition, authority, in the Roman sense, not only 
 does not contribute, but is through and through 
 opposed. To believe in Christ because of the 
 church's decrees and determinations, is to believe in 
 the church, not in Christ, and to accept its infalli- 
 bility instead of His sovereignty. The authority 
 based on truth as believed and loved, is in harmony 
 with reason ; the political authority that claims to be 
 the basis and infallible judge of truth, is contrary to it. 
 And the distinction just drawn holds as much of 
 the Bible and the church, as of Christ and the 
 church. The Bible never was to Protestants an 
 authority in the same or even in a kindred sense with 
 
REASON AND RELIGION 235 
 
 that in which Rome was an authority to Romanists. 
 The difference comes out in its most manifest form 
 in the so-called principle or doctrine of private judg- 
 ment ; which means that the Bible was, by its very 
 nature, not a body of formal ex cathedra determina- 
 tions, but, as it were, the home and source of the 
 material that was to be determined by the living 
 Christian spirit, as illumined and guided by the in- 
 dwelling Spirit of God — the testimonium Spiritus 
 Sancti externum sealed by the testimonium Spiritus 
 Sancti internum. To this position the exercise of per- 
 sonal thought was a necessity ; truth could be authori- 
 tative only as it was believed, and belief was possible 
 only as the mind was convinced and satisfied. This 
 does not mean that men must follow an argumenta- 
 tive process before they can believe : but it does mean 
 that it is always their right, and, in certain cases, it 
 may be their manifest duty so to do. In saying this 
 we say that religion is truth, and has as truth nothing 
 to fear from the freest exercise of the reason, though 
 much to fear from the partial or prejudiced or slug- 
 gish intellect ; that the only authority possible to it, 
 or the persons who bring and realize it, is the 
 sovereignty that comes of its and their imperial and 
 imperative truth. Such an attitude seems to me the 
 only attitude that has living faith either in God or 
 religion, either in Christ or His kingdom. If I read 
 His mind aright. He would rather have His Church 
 live face to face and contend hand to hand with the 
 questioning and critical reason, than see it hedged 
 
236 CATHOLICISM 
 
 round by the most peremptory and invulnerable in- 
 fallibility. It is too wide and too comprehensive to 
 be so hedged in : for now, as of old, God does not 
 leave Himself anywhere without a witness. His 
 lines have gone out through all the earth, and His 
 word to the end of the world. 
 December^ 1885. 
 
VI 
 
 CARDINAL MANNING AND THE 
 CATHOLIC REVIVAL 
 
 § I. The Biography 
 
 I. A >TR. PURCELL'S Life of Cardinal Manning^ 
 JL V A is a book which awakens the most oppo- 
 site feelings, and the most contradictory judgments. 
 Its author has been a sort of inverted Balaam : called 
 in to bless the Cardinal, he has yet, in the view of his 
 admirers and friends, cursed him altogether. Then, 
 his literary offences are too many and too flagrant to 
 allow the mere critic to speak well of his book. He 
 is certainly no master in the craft of letters ; style 
 he knows not ; order, chronology, easy and correct 
 reference, continuity of narrative, consecutiveness of 
 thought, economy in the use of material, coherence 
 and vividness of portraiture, are things to which he 
 has not attained. He is a laborious biographer, but 
 an inaccurate writer, manifestly unacquainted with 
 the religious history of our times, unable on this 
 
 * Life of Cardinal Mafining, Archbishop of Westminster. By 
 Edmund Sheridan Purcell, Member of the Roman Academy 
 of Letters. London : Macmillan & Co., 1895. 
 
 237 
 
238 CATHOLICISM 
 
 account to interpret many of his own documents or 
 deal intelligently with the characters, careers, and 
 opinions of many of the persons who crowd his 
 pages. The book is thus difficult to read, a sore tax 
 on one's patience, a continual trial to one's temper, 
 mocking during perusal all attempts at a fair and 
 balanced judgment. But when one has finished the 
 book, and retreated from it far enough to see it in 
 perspective, and as a whole, some very remarkable 
 qualities begin to show themselves. It is, perhaps, 
 rather a frank than an honest book, written by a man 
 whose lack of insight is redeemed by a sort of blunt 
 courage, guided by a rather robust common-sense. 
 He is anxious to be just, yet does not quite foresee 
 the effects of his justice. His judgments are at once 
 candid and naTve, the judgments of a man who has 
 lived in a very narrow circle, has mistaken its whis- 
 pers for the murmur of the world, and has published, 
 to the dismay of multitudes, the gossip it likes to 
 talk but does not love to print. In its light he has 
 studied his documents, and inquired at his living 
 sources ; and then he has laboriously poured out the 
 results in this book, which, though a marvel of cumu- 
 lative and skilled awkwardnesses, yet leaves us with 
 a distinct and breathing image of its hero, who is 
 certainly no pallid shadow, but an actual person, all 
 too concrete and articulate. This is no small merit, 
 and rare enough in modern biography to deserve 
 cordial praise. 
 
 But the value of the book does not lie in the text 
 
CARDINAL MANNING AND CATHOLIC REVIVAL 239 
 
 of its author, but in the original documents it con- 
 tains. The question as to the right or wrong of their 
 publication is not one for me to discuss ; what is 
 obvious is that access to first-hand authorities is 
 always a gain to historical knowledge. Cardinal 
 Manning was neither a recluse nor a private citizen, 
 but a man who lived for more than half a century in 
 the full blaze of the public eye. From the first he 
 was a conspicuous figure, the leader of an army ; a 
 man of strong loves and intense hates, who handled 
 too many men, fought too many battles both in the 
 dark and in the day — in a word, was too much a force 
 working for change and conflict — to be commemorated 
 in a biography which should be at once innocuous 
 and veracious. If his life had caused no alarm or 
 given no offence, it might have been edifying, but 
 would not have been informing ; for it would have told 
 us nothing of the secrets of his character, or the 
 springs of his conduct, or the reasons of his policy. 
 But he was too much the sum of certain great 
 moments and events to be dealt with as a delicate 
 plant, or hidden within the murky atmosphere of 
 circumspect commonplace. More harm is done by 
 the diplomatic suppression of the truth than by its 
 frank publication ; the one is the way of wisdom, the 
 other of discretion ; and the promise is that wisdom, 
 not discretion, shall be justified of her children. 
 
 Of course, I feel that the character of a lost leader 
 is not a thing to be lightly dealt with. While he 
 lives his reputation is his own ; but after his death it 
 
240 CATHOLICISM 
 
 becomes man's, every blot upon it being a stain, as it 
 were, upon our common good. It can never be to 
 the advantage of religion that any religious man 
 should be dispraised. The heroes of Protestantism 
 are no reproach to Catholicism ; the saints, the 
 Catholic Church reveres, the Protestant Church grows 
 better by admiring. There is nothing that so proves 
 poverty of soul as the tendency, so common in eccle- 
 siastical controversy, to make our own plain features 
 look comely by darkening the fairer features of 
 another face. Mr. Gladstone, addressing Manning in 
 his Anglican days, says : " Your character is a part 
 of the property of the Church and of the truth in the 
 Church, and must be husbanded for the sake of the 
 association with that truth." ^ This is even more true 
 to-day than it was then, and in a larger sense than 
 was at first intended. In his good name all churches 
 share ; and any shadow of reproach that falls on him 
 will send a chill through the heart of all our good. 
 But then, to attempt an analysis of his character in 
 relation to his work is to do him no dishonour ; what 
 the man did, depended upon what he was ; and so 
 we study him only that we may the better watch the 
 evolution of a movement in which he was a potent 
 factor. 
 
 2. What is here termed the Catholic Revival began 
 with three men, whose spirit it may be said to have 
 incarnated : — Hurrell Froude, who was its impulsive 
 
 ^ Vol. i., p. 269. 
 
CARDINAL MANNING AND CATHOLIC REVIVAL 2^1 
 
 force ; John Henry Newman, who embodied its intel- 
 lectual and ethical energy ; and John Keble, who 
 created the atmosphere of emotion or sentiment 
 within which it lived and by which it was nourished. 
 But while these men presided over its birth, its later 
 fortunes were shaped within the Anglican Church 
 mainly by Dr. Pusey, and within the Roman Church 
 mainly by Cardinal Manning. The significance of 
 the personal factor has been recognized by every 
 serious student of the movement, and most of all by 
 its leaders themselves. The earliest expression of 
 this feeling is Hurrell Froude's Remains ; the most 
 classical is Newman's Apologia \ the largest is the 
 recently finished Life of Pusey ; and the latest, this 
 Life of Cardinal Mannings which is, in its original 
 documents, so largely the work of his own hands. Of 
 these, the Apologia has the greatest personal value, 
 but the least historical worth. It is neither a bio- 
 graphy nor an autobiography, but simply what it 
 professes to be, a dialectical apology for a life by the 
 man who had lived it. The real history is not there, 
 but only a history idealized — all the more completely 
 that the ideal represents a reality seen in retrospect, 
 and under the transfiguring light of a superlative 
 ratiocinative genius, whose imagination made his 
 successive experiences like steps in the logical 
 process which led him from a dubious to an assured 
 and infallible faith. But a man's history is too com- 
 plex a thing to be done into any dialectic, even 
 though it be the supreme feat of the most dexterous 
 
 i6 
 
2^2 CATHOLICISM 
 
 dialectician of his age. The mistakes, the falterings, 
 the lapses, the blind gropings, the ignorances, the 
 confusions, the unreasoning likes and dislikes which 
 marked the actual way of the man are lost sight of, 
 forgotten, or softened out of all significance ; the end 
 being made to illuminate the beginning rather than 
 the beginning to explain the end. Froude's Remains^ 
 on the other hand, have even more historical than 
 personal worth. Here we see the man as he actually 
 lived, the circle he lived in, how they thought and 
 spoke, believed and acted. The men are intensely 
 sincere, but curiously superficial ; where most thor- 
 oughly in earnest, there most audaciously ignorant, 
 full of the inconsiderate speech which came of 
 hatreds they were too impatient to justify and too 
 prejudiced to be ashamed of. In the Remains^ in the 
 Tracts, and in the private correspondence, when we 
 can get it unexpurgated, the real men live ; and 
 history must know the real man before it can con- 
 strue the man idealized. Now this Life of Manning 
 is full of the same sort of documents as Froude's 
 Remains. We have not all we could wish, but we 
 have enough to be grateful for. We have the man in 
 his every-day habit, in the flesh-and-blood reality of 
 his ecclesiastical being ; and we can interpret him in 
 terms we owe altogether to himself, or to the men he 
 worked with, and for, and through. We are admit- 
 ted into his secret soul, we hear his solemn confes- 
 sions or astute suggestions to the men he trusted ; and 
 then we have the records of the public policy which 
 
CARDINAL MANNING AND CATHOLIC REVIVAL 243 
 
 now contradicted and now carried out his inner mind. 
 What this biography does, no other and later bio- 
 graphy can ever undo ; for what gives it character is 
 not what the author writes, but what he publishes. 
 The picture is not, indeed, quite complete ; some of 
 Manning's most characteristic letters, written at the 
 crisis of his career, perished under his own hand. By 
 the same hand certain of his diaries and memoranda 
 have, as a rule at the most critical places or in con- 
 nection with the most decisive events, been expur- 
 gated, amended, adjusted to reminiscence, adapted to 
 history ; but, happily, the untouched originals reflect 
 the living man. And it is the man as he lived, and 
 not the man apologetically idealized, which explains 
 the history he contributed to make. 
 
 § II. The Character of the Man 
 
 In attempting an estimate and analysis of Man- 
 ning's character in relation to his work, we shall, as 
 far as possible, confine ourselves to the documents 
 our author has published. We cannot, indeed, en- 
 tirely dismiss the author from our minds, nor would 
 it be just to do so. His very attitude is significant, 
 and has been assumed not according to his original 
 bias, but against it. It is apparent that he began as 
 an admirer, that he did not mean to be unfriendly, 
 and that he believes, in the heart of him, that his 
 hero could stand being painted as he really was, 
 warts and all. If he is to be held responsible for 
 the use of the materials entrusted to him, we ought 
 
244 CATHOLICISM 
 
 also to remember that the responsibility for much in 
 his tone of mind and for many of his judgments, lies 
 with the materials themselves. 
 
 I. Well, then, looked at in the light of the docu- 
 ments here published and the inner history they 
 unfold, we may say Manning's character seems, 
 though strong, neither subtle nor complex. Subtlety 
 was too little the note of his mind to be the dis- 
 tinction of his conduct. His ends were clearly and 
 eagerly conceived : and his means, though often un- 
 derhand, were, as a rule, obvious and simple, their 
 efficiency lying in the strength of his will rather 
 than in their delicate fitness. While fond of intrigue, 
 he was too self-conscious to hide his designs from 
 the observant. His characteristic qualities appear 
 very early in his career. As a boy he was averse 
 to real and serious study ^ and, happily, without the 
 curse of precocity; but he had ambition, claiming 
 as his motto Aut Ccesar aut Nullus^ only his am- 
 bitions were as yet neither intellectual nor academic. 
 He found fame at Oxford in the Union, and once 
 he became famous, men said, " Manning is self-con- 
 scious even in his nightcap." ^ He " drew into his 
 orbit a certain number of satellites," assumed " omni- 
 science," and " spoke as one having authority," now 
 and then to the disaster of his claims^ His reminis- 
 cences seem to show that, even in later life, he had 
 
 * i. 28, 48. 3 i. 30. 
 
 ^ The words of Sir Francis Doyle, i. 46-7. 
 
CARDINAL MANNING AND CATHOLIC REVIVAL 245 
 
 more interest in himself than in any of his school- 
 fellows.i These were, in a boy, natural traits ; they 
 indicate a nature which by attempting to conceal 
 only the more revealed itself ; but the traits natural 
 in a boy may grow into much less innocuous qualities 
 in a man. Possibly Manning suffered through his 
 whole career from the want of an early period of 
 storm and stress, especially those higher and more 
 tragic religious experiences which do so much to 
 purify the character. Accident, rather than neces- 
 sity, drove him into the church ; compulsion of cir- 
 cumstances more than the vocation which will not 
 hear a " Nay." 2 He knew nothing of the fierce 
 intellectual conflicts which vexed the reason of 
 Newman, and made his sermons, lectures, and tracts 
 like the cries of a soul in travail. He did not enter 
 the ministry by the way of sorrow, and so was not 
 redeemed and made fit for it by suffering. Comfort 
 surrounded him from the first ; he glided easily into 
 high position ; even death was kindly, and removed 
 obstacles from his path ; but, while his tact is excel- 
 lent, his intellect remains unawakened. He was a 
 churchman whose conduct was guided by policy, 
 rather than a thinker mastered by convictions. His 
 biographer notes with satisfaction that he served 
 under four bishops, and, while he agreed with none. 
 
 ' 1. i». 
 
 ^ On this point there was a good deal of romancing later, 
 but the contemporary evidence justifies the statement in the 
 text. See i. 86-97. 
 
246 CATHOLICISM 
 
 he made himself agreeable to all, and as nearly as 
 possible indispensable. He behaved as one who 
 sympathized with the Tractarians, not as one who 
 believed with them ; but in the day of trial it is the 
 man who believes, not the man who sympathizes, 
 that endures. Hence came those early relations to 
 Newman which left no memories Newman cared to 
 record. Hence came those extraordinary vacillations 
 of policy, resented by many as duplicities of conduct, 
 represented by his High Church professions and 
 strongly Protestant charges ; his Fifth of November 
 sermon, and private, though rejected, visit to New- 
 man at Littlemore ; his studied neutrality as to the 
 professorship of poetry, and his uneasy and, for 
 awhile, anxiously uncertain action on Ward's degrada- 
 tion. To the same cause may be traced a series of 
 incidents less easily explained or defended. There 
 is his concern about the trivial personal matters of 
 the sub-almonership and the preachership at Lin- 
 coln's Inn, in contrast with his unconcern about the 
 loss of Newman and the grave disasters it threatened 
 to the English church.^ But his judgment as to the 
 character and motives of the seceders was more 
 extraordinary than even his unconcern. Mr. Glad- 
 stone asked Manning, amid the consternation caused 
 by the many conversions to Catholicism, what he 
 considered " the common bond of union, the common 
 principle, which led men of intellect so different, of 
 
 * i. 310-12. 
 
CARDINAL MANNING AND CATHOLIC REVIVAL 247 
 
 such opposite characters, acting under circumstances 
 so various, to come to one and the same conclu- 
 sion." ^ Manning's answer, which " surprised beyond 
 measure and startled " his interlocutor, was this : 
 " Their common bond is their want of truth." The 
 one common characteristic of the men was surely 
 their passionate sincerity, witnessed by the sacrifices 
 they made to conviction and conscience ; but Man- 
 ning's answer shows not so much a want of honesty 
 or charity as of insight and intelligence — his com- 
 plete puzzlement of mind as he faced conduct which 
 nothing in his own experience could as yet interpret. 
 And the same bewildered and ineffective mind is 
 reflected in all the correspondence of this period. 
 Nor, as we shall yet see, did he ever escape from 
 this inability. The timidity which is the mark of 
 certain intellectual limitations governed even his most 
 audacious policies. He was a political craftsman in 
 the arena of faith and reason, and his trust in ma- 
 chinery was as great as his distrust of mind. This 
 was the root of his lifelong antagonism not only 
 to Newman, but to all Newman's name stood for 
 Catholicism never meant to the two men the same 
 thing ; they never were Catholics in the same sense ; 
 their relations were not simply those of contraries, 
 but of antipathies based on intellectual differences. 
 Their feud was not a thing of policy, or even of prin- 
 ciple, but of nature and character. 
 
 i. 318. 
 
248 CATHOLICISM 
 
 2. These mental and ethical qualities are well illus- 
 trated in what we may term the diplomacy of his 
 conversion — Le.y the policy which made his outer 
 history in the years which preceded it so strange a 
 contrast to his inner or spiritual history. It is, on 
 any construction we may please to put upon it, 
 melancholy as well as "startling" to find Manning, 
 as his biographer says, "speaking concurrently for 
 years with a double voice " ; ^ but it was by no means 
 out of keeping with his character, as some of those 
 who had good occasion to know him understood it. 
 The facts stand out in the clear language of his own 
 diaries and letters, and in those of his correspondents. 
 In August, 1846, he wrote to Mr. Gladstone: ** I 
 have a fear, amounting to a belief, that the Church 
 of England must split asunder." ^ Entries in his 
 diary of the same date show what he means : the 
 Church of England is organically diseased, because 
 separated from the Church Universal and from the 
 chair of Peter, and is, for certain specified reasons, 
 functionally diseased as well.^ In an earlier month — 
 May — he had confessed to himself "an extensively 
 changed feeling towards the Church of Rome," and 
 most serious doubts as to the Church of England.* 
 In 1847 his doubts became more positive, and so do 
 the beliefs which look to Rome; two things which 
 it alone can satisfy, seem to him necessary to the 
 church — infallibility and the unity of the episcopate.^ 
 
 1 i. 463. 2 i. 317. ' i. 483- ' i. 485. ' i. 467-73- 
 
CARDINAL MANNING AND CATHOLIC REVIVAL 249 
 
 In the pathetic letters, under the seal, from this time 
 onward to his conversion in 185 1, confession of his 
 inward mind is made to Laprimaudaye and Robert 
 Wilberforce. Now, no man can handle these letters 
 otherwise than tenderly ; to the man who has known 
 a great intellectual and spiritual crisis they will be 
 sacred epistles, the record of a soul's tragedy, still 
 agitated with sorrow and damp with the sweat as 
 of blood. But, unhappily, they are profaned and 
 shamed by the position in which they are made to 
 stand ; yet they must stand there if history is to 
 speak the truth. It was no reproach to Manning 
 that he should hesitate ; it would have been a real 
 reproach had he been precipitate. The issues were 
 too grave, the possibilities of mistake too many and 
 serious, the feelings, the hopes, the fears involved too 
 high and solemn, to allow a sensitive and honourable 
 man to be other than painfully and laboriously de- 
 liberate. But this on one condition : that he be silent 
 and use no public speech that contradicted his private 
 thoughts or mocked his own personal experiences. 
 And this condition Manning did not observe, nay, he 
 flagrantly violated. While confessing under the seal 
 of secrecy his utter disbeliefs, he yet in his charges 
 and sermons, in his letters to penitents and friends, 
 spoke or wrote like a man who never knew a doubt. 
 While he openly, as it were in the ecclesiastical 
 forum, argued in July, 1848, as to Hampden, that 
 "no man is a heretic to us who is not a heretic to 
 the Church " ; that to the Church Hampden was no 
 
250 CATHOLICISM 
 
 heretic, for it had not tried and judged him ; and that 
 his " public subscription of the Catholic creeds," as a 
 bishop, had purged him from the charge of heresy ^ — 
 he had yet, in the March of the same year, privately 
 written to Robert Wilberforce : " I do believe Hamp- 
 den to be heretical in substance and in principle. It 
 makes it worse to me to find that fact palliated or 
 doubted." ^ His public attitude was well represented 
 by an answer he gave earlier to Mrs. Lockhart : 
 " But, Mr. Archdeacon, are you quite sure of the 
 validity of Anglican orders ? " " Am I sure of the 
 existence of God ? " he replied.^ Even more signifi- 
 cant was his conduct to Mr. Gladstone. The two 
 had been intimate, even confidential friends ; he had, 
 in the phrase quoted above, hinted his doubts, but 
 had found no sympathetic response, had received 
 instead an emphatic contradiction ; and was thereafter, 
 throughout what seemed the frankest correspondence 
 and intercourse, silent as to his secret mind till the 
 Gorham Judgment made a convenient season for 
 speech. These letters of his were returned to him, 
 and " had, so far as could be ascertained, been de- 
 stroyed by the Cardinal not long before his death." 
 Mr. Gladstone is reported to have said, when he 
 heard of the correspondence, so unlike that with him- 
 self, with Robert Wilberforce, and the destruction of 
 his own : " I won't say Manning was insincere, God 
 forbid ! But he was not simple and straightforward " * 
 
 1 i. 478-9. « i. 514. 3 -^ ^^^ 4 i^ ^5^ 
 
CARDINAL MANNING AND CATHOLIC REVIVAL 25 1 
 
 — a judgment which cannot be called in any sense 
 uncharitable. 
 
 3. It would be a radical misapprehension to regard 
 this diplomacy as an accident, an exception to his 
 normal character, due simply to the bewilderment 
 of a perturbed and distracted mind. The conduct 
 represented a real and permanent quality, as it were 
 a grain or bent of nature, which came out on critical 
 occasions, and made intimacy with him to many 
 difficult, to some impossible. Thus Canon Oakeley, 
 who knew him both as Anglican and as Catholic, 
 wrote of him when appointed Archbishop of West- 
 minster : " I wish I could confide in him as much 
 as I like him." ^ So, too, Newman writes to Oakeley: 
 " The only serious cause of any distance which may 
 exist between the Archbishop and myself is the diffi- 
 culty I have in implicitly confiding in him."^ And 
 this feeling receives new meaning in the character- 
 istic colour and phrasing of Newman's answer, de- 
 clining Manning's request for an interview in order 
 to mutual explanations, and, if possible, reconcilia- 
 tion : — 
 
 " I say frankly, then, and as a duty of friendship, that it \i.e.^ 
 my feeling to you] is a distressing mistrust, which now for four 
 years past I have been unable in prudence to dismiss from my 
 mind, and which is but my own share of a general feeling 
 (though men are slow to express it, especially to your immediate 
 friends) that you are difficult to understand. I wish I could 
 get myself to believe that the fault was my own, and that your 
 words, your bearing, and your implications ought (to have), 
 
 * ii. 256. ' ii. 327. 
 
252 CATHOLICISM 
 
 though they have not, served to prepare me for your acts. 
 
 " No explanations ofifered by you at present in such a meet- 
 ing could go to the root of the difficulty, as I have suggested it. 
 . . . It is only as time goes on that new deeds can reverse 
 the old. There is no short cut to a restoration of confidence, 
 when confidence has been seriously damaged." * 
 
 No one will say that these are lightly used or 
 malicious words ; they evidently express a judgment 
 at once well weighed and reluctant. And it was a 
 judgment in which many shared. Soon after his 
 conversion, in the year 1853 or 1854, while he was 
 studying theology in Rome, the very man who later 
 became his serviceable friend at the Vatican inquired, 
 with evident reference to him, " half in jest, half in 
 earnest," " whether a man who was already manoeu- 
 vring for a mitre would make any the worse a bishop 
 for that ? " ^ After he had returned to England and 
 begun work as a Catholic priest, the then President 
 of Ushaw is reported as saying of him : " I hate that 
 man, he is such a forward piece," ^ meaning that he 
 was already seeking to thrust himself through and 
 past his brother pawns to an important and com- 
 manding place on the ecclesiastical chessboard. 
 During the Vatican Council it was said of him : 
 "There is no better hand than Manning's at draw- 
 ing the long bow." * It was characteristic of him, 
 too, to seek relief at the hands of the Pope from 
 the oath of secrecy, that he might coach Mr. Ode 
 
 * ii. 305-6 ; see also 329-30, * ii. 17 note. 
 
 ^ ii. 79. ^ ii. 431. 
 
CARDINAL MANNING AND CATHOLIC REVIVAL 253 
 
 Russell in the version of the Council's affairs which 
 he wished to reach the English Government and 
 public.^ The man is the same man under all these 
 conditions, whether it be in ecclesiastical or personal 
 matters : the management of Wiseman, the policy of 
 the Holy See, the displacement of Errington, the 
 control of the Chapter, or the deliberations of the 
 bishops : the way of Providence is made smoother 
 and more sure by the help of a little human diplo- 
 macy. Diplomacy is always double-voiced : and the 
 ear addressed has to learn how to discern by accent 
 which voice speaks the more truly, or rather the less 
 falsely. And there are regions and affairs where it 
 is in place, and there are others where it is not ; and 
 one would think that the least suitable of all regions 
 was the church, and the least appropriate of all 
 affairs the decrees and policies of the infallible Chair. 
 Yet here we are made to see it prevail, with all its 
 hateful accessories of intrigue and cajolery, flattery of 
 hopes and play upon fears. And the curious thing 
 is, that while the diplomacy and the agent were 
 known, the result was accepted with a public silence 
 and submission which speaks of the most wonderful 
 discipline in the world. 
 
 § III. His Conversion: its Process and Reasons 
 
 I. But, of course, this analysis of Manning's 
 methods or executive policies does not carry us very 
 
 * ii- 433. 
 
254 CATHOLICISM 
 
 far ; the man had deeper and better things in him 
 than can be thus reached and revealed. We must, 
 if possible, get down to his ultimate convictions or 
 fundamental beliefs, and discover both the attitude 
 of his mind to them and the conditions of their 
 validity to his mind. It is only in this region that 
 we can find the motives that governed him, and the 
 forms under which duty appeared to his conscience. 
 That duty did appear to him in a most imperious 
 form, is a point too obvious to need to be argued. 
 Only beliefs and motives of irresistible potency could 
 have forced him out of the church of England. 
 Every inferior motive, all that could be compre- 
 hended under the world and the flesh, was on the 
 side of his staying. By going he had almost every- 
 thing to lose, and there was no certain promise of 
 any compensating gain. It could not be said that 
 he was attracted to Rome by friendships ; for the 
 men who had gone before him he had no peculiar 
 affection, with them he had no special affinity, and 
 their conversion had not been a very manifest suc- 
 cess. We must believe, therefore, that he changed 
 under intellectual and moral compulsion ; like Luther, 
 he could do no other. But this only the more em- 
 phasizes the problem : What, then, were his reasons, 
 his motives ? We have no cause to doubt the truth 
 of his own statement — it was the ideas of the unity 
 and the infallibility of the church ; and the conviction 
 that these could be found in the Roman, but not 
 in the Anglican communion. But we have, in con- 
 
CARDINAL MANNING AND CATHOLIC REVIVAL 255 
 
 sequence, a twofold problem : How did he come by 
 these ideas ? And what did they mean to him ? 
 
 He said that the idea of unity began to take 
 possession of him about 1835, infallibility about 
 1837-38 •} but, at first, he conceived both under forms 
 which upheld against Rome. The idea of unity 
 seemed to follow from the Apostolic Ministry and 
 its necessity to the Church ; where the one was, the 
 other could not but be. And because the Anglican 
 Ministry was apostolic, the Church was the same, 
 and so its unity was assured. The idea of infalli- 
 bility followed from the perpetual presence and office 
 of the Holy Spirit in the Church ; where He abode 
 in the plenitude of His illuminative power error could 
 not be, the truth must be absolute. These two ideas 
 seemed, then, to him ultimate ; but they involved as 
 their necessary consequence the independence and 
 autonomy of the Church. If its unity lived in an 
 apostolical episcopate, and was realized through it, 
 then the episcopate must be a self-perpetuating body, 
 deriving its being from its Apostolic Source, and 
 holding its authority directly under its Spiritual 
 Head. If the infallibility was real, then the Church 
 must be free ; for if it could not use its own voice, 
 but must either be silent at the bidding of the State, 
 or speak in terms the State prescribed, it would have 
 but a dumb infallibility, which were of all things the 
 most fatuous and impotent. But a series of incidents 
 
 * i. 470- 
 
256 CATHOLICISM 
 
 forced upon Manning the unwelcome conclusion that 
 there was within the English church no room for 
 the realization or exercise of his two fundamental 
 ideas. If there was any man both the High and 
 the Low Church regarded as heretical, it was Hamp- 
 den ; but while both had the most ample will to 
 convict him of heresy both were powerless to do it ; 
 the strong hand of the State shut their mouths, and 
 placed him where it willed. If there was anything 
 more capable than another of disproving at one and 
 the same time the apostolicity of the ministry, which 
 was the condition of unity, and the infallibility of the 
 church as the home of the Holy Ghost, it was the 
 act of the State in putting a man so unanimously 
 adjudged heretical into the episcopate. The con- 
 fusion and controversies of the time did not allow 
 Manning for a moment to feel free from this ubi- 
 quitous and inexorable civil power, whose violent 
 hands reached everywhere, and touched at every 
 point his most sacred convictions. If he thought of 
 the episcopate as the sine qua non of unity, the State 
 mocked his faith by co-operating with a schismatical 
 body in founding a Jerusalem bishopric, and frocking 
 its new bishop. If he argued that the church had 
 the power to interpret its own creed and enforce its 
 own discipline, the State was at hand with the 
 Gorham Judgment to prove his whole elaborate 
 argument a series of logical illusions. By slow de- 
 grees he found himself deprived of every alternative, 
 and reluctantly forced to the conclusion that if these 
 
CARDINAL MANNING AND CATHOLIC REVIVAL 257 
 
 two ideas, as he had conceived and defined them, 
 were notes of the true Church, he must seek it else- 
 where than in the church of England. 
 
 2. Such seems to have been the process, stated in 
 its most naked and simple form, by which Manning's 
 conversion was effected ; but of course it was a much 
 more complex process than this. It did not move 
 in a straight line, but was zigzag and circuitous^ 
 deflected by fresh currents of thought and emotionj 
 by new views of policy, and by the changes incident 
 to an agitated and distressful day. Vacillations are 
 not duplicities ; variations of mood are not changes of 
 part. There is, in the English mind, no deeper, of 
 more common and characteristic conviction than the 
 belief in the sanity of the State ; the belief in the 
 sanctity of the Church is not so distinctive and 
 inveterate. The Churchman acquires the one, but 
 the Englishman is born with the other. It is the 
 instinctive basis of his jealous guardianship of the 
 supremacy of the Crown which, in its essential idea, 
 represents the place and function of the laity in the 
 church. It means that, in the view of the English 
 people, it is they, and neither the priesthood nor the 
 episcopate, singly or combined, who constitute the 
 English church, and are the guarantees of both its 
 unity and continuity. And we can well believe that 
 this idea, though in a blind way, now and then seized 
 Manning, and explains some of his most strenuous 
 Protestant utterances, which were visions of a larger 
 and more historical Church than the ecclesiastical 
 
 17 
 
258 CATHOLICISM 
 
 mind of his day had conceived. But these were 
 contradicted by experiences of another order. Civil 
 action in the rehgious sphere seems, to the ecclesi- 
 astical mind, harsh and insolent; and, in troublous 
 times, sensitive are imperious consciences. And 
 Manning's conscience was here sensitive, for his 
 deepest convictions were on the side of freedom for 
 the church, and they were quickened in suffering. 
 Then, again, his Continental wanderings, and long 
 residence at Rome, counted for much. He was, when 
 in a most susceptible mood, isolated from England 
 with all the coercive force of its traditions, social 
 customs, and ambitions ; and set in the very heart 
 of new and potent influences, which made him feel 
 what it was to live and worship in a Church-state 
 as distinguished from a State-church. The end of 
 it all was that change became inevitable ; he waited 
 but a fit occasion, and this the Gorham Judgment 
 supplied ; under the shadow it so conveniently cast, 
 he passed from the Anglican to the Roman church. 
 
 If this analysis of the logical process of his con- 
 version be even approximately correct, it places us 
 in a position to appraise its significance. Within its 
 limits the process was one of marked logical cogency ; 
 but the limits were marvellously narrow. The thing 
 it most nearly resembles is a procession of the blind 
 between two blank walls. The man argued his way 
 to his conclusion with the very slenderest intellectual 
 outfit, if, indeed, considering the problems at issue, 
 he could be said to have had any such outfit at 
 
CARDINAL MANNING AND CATHOLIC REVIVAL 259 
 
 all. There was a wealth of reasoning, but a paucity 
 of reasons ; and it is reasons that justify, and make 
 a great thing mean or a mean thing great. There 
 is no evidence that he had even conceived what 
 infallibility meant ; how it had ever come to be the 
 attribute of one church ; what the claim to it 
 involved ; or how the claim harmonized with its 
 history. In his charges and sermons, and in the 
 letters and memoranda here published, there are the 
 usual current commonplaces, now of the Protestant, 
 now of the Anglican, and now of the Roman order ; 
 but there are no signs of an awakened intelligence, 
 of a man thinking in grim earnest, challenging com- 
 monplaces, getting behind them, resolving them into 
 their component parts, compelling them to give up 
 the reason of their existence, to tell why they claim 
 to be believed. For this man scholars have lived 
 and inquired in vain ; for him problems which touch 
 the very heart of the formulae he plays with, have 
 no being. He does not know of their existence, he 
 cannot understand the men who do know that they 
 are and what they mean. As a consequence, his 
 whole conception of religion is formal ; emptiness 
 and shallowness mark it from first to last. There 
 never was a biography of a great Father of the 
 church — so full of letters written in supreme crises 
 of his own and his church's history — that is yet so 
 void of mystery, so vacant of awe, so without the 
 traces of struggle after the everlasting rock on which 
 truth stands, so without the infinite yearning to- 
 
260 CATHOLICISM 
 
 wards the light, which is as the face of God. And 
 this is due to no defect in the biographer, but to 
 the character of the original documents he publishes. 
 These things are not written in the mere love of 
 being severe, but in wonder and regret, and out of 
 deep conviction. The logic of Manning's conversion 
 was the logic of an unawakened intellect ; and as 
 it was, so also was his policy as a father and prince 
 of the church. 
 
 I IV. His Policy within the Roman Church 
 
 I, But now we must proceed to an even more 
 delicate and difficult question — his policy and career 
 within the Roman church. And here we may be 
 allowed to remark that in those days a conversion 
 was a critical event both for the convert and the 
 society he entered ; and the more eminent the 
 convert the more critical the event, for it was the 
 fuller of dangerous possibilities. The Anglicans who 
 reasoned themselves into Catholicism knew nothing 
 of it as an actual and operative system. It was to 
 many, in a sense, a mere algebraic symbol ; they had 
 assigned to it a definite value, and reasoned convinc- 
 ingly from it as a fixed quantity or stable standard. 
 And the danger was that the convert might find the 
 actual Catholicism a contradiction of his ideal, and, in 
 the despair of disillusionment, take some rash and 
 irreparable step. It is a matter of history that some 
 entered only to return ; it is an open secret that many 
 remained, among whom we may number the greatest 
 
CARDINAL MANNING AND CATHOLIC REVIVAL 26 1 
 
 convert of them all, in discomfort, disappointment, and 
 despondency, even while cherishing the faith they had 
 embraced. But the dangers to Catholicism were as 
 real as those to the converts. They were, as a whole, 
 personalities of no ordinary kind, men to be reckoned 
 with. They were all men who had lived in contro- 
 versy, and been convinced by it. Some were men of 
 strong characters ; a few were men of fine intellects 
 and ripe scholarship ; one was a man of real talent, of 
 strong will, and exceptional angularity ; another was 
 a man of rare genius. They had been nursed in 
 a proud and aristocratic church, had been trained in 
 an exclusive and conservative university ; they were 
 accustomed to a society which did homage to their 
 culture, and they bore themselves as men who took 
 life seriously and knew that they were seriously taken. 
 And it was by no means certain that the men who 
 had defied the authorities of their mother church 
 would submit to those of their adopted communion. 
 For within- it there was much to offend and even 
 shock. The culture was not so fine, the tone was the 
 tone of a sect, with the feeling at its heart that in the 
 eye of English law it was mere Dissent, and that it 
 had lived its life apart, separated by the penal legisla- 
 tion of centuries from the main stream of the nation. 
 To find themselves within a society of this kind was 
 no small trial to the Oxford Tractarians ; to find it a 
 society as much divided by jealousies and feuds as 
 the one they had left, was a sorer trial still. It was a 
 question whether the new men would transform the 
 
262 CATHOLICISM 
 
 old society, or the society subdue the men. What is 
 certain to-day is that the possibiHties of good which 
 entered with the men were, if at all, in a very doubt- 
 ful degree realized ; while the possibilities of evil, 
 thanks to the men mainly concerned, were in no 
 small degree averted. 
 
 2. If now we continue from this point our study 
 of Manning, we must note two things — the mind he 
 brought into Catholicism and the mind he found 
 there. His mind we have seen in part : it was formal 
 rather than creative, more rhetorical than speculative, 
 more political than philosophical, convinced that the 
 cardinal notes and necessities of the church were a 
 political unity and an official infallibility. He was, 
 indeed, one of the least intellectual of men ; and so his 
 rational interests were always subordinate to his 
 social or political, using these terms in their proper 
 rather than their conventional sense. He could 
 understand enthusiasm for institutions, but not for 
 ideas. He could never have written The Idea of a 
 University^ or The Present Position of Catholics in 
 England^ or the Apologia pro Vita Sud^ or The 
 Grammar of Assent. He could not understand the 
 man who wrote these books ; or why they should have 
 such an extraordinary influence ; or why multitudes 
 of men who had no belief in Catholicism should so 
 admire their author. It all seemed to him evidence 
 of an "anti-Roman" spirit in Newman,^ of a proud 
 
 * ii. 323. 
 
CARDINAL MANNING AND CATHOLIC REVIVAL 263 
 
 intellect, unfaithful to the Holy See, exercising itself 
 in dialectical gymnastics to the delectation of English 
 Rationalism ! His eyes looked for help in an entirely 
 opposite quarter. The church he had entered was 
 the Roman, and Rome meant the Pope ; and his 
 supremacy was the infallibility which he was in 
 search of, and without which he conceived the church 
 could not be. In practical working a complaisant 
 Pope was to prove a very convenient tool, and the 
 actual infallibility a very different thing from the 
 ideal. 
 
 The mind within English Catholicism was very 
 unlike what he had anticipated. It was by no means 
 a united or harmonious mind, or distinguished by 
 anything really catholic or large. He found a laity 
 " without Catholic instincts," worldly, selfish, and 
 self-indulgent, all they cared about being "the key 
 to Grosvenor Square " ; yet this is not surprising, 
 considering Monsignor Talbot's definition of their 
 proper function. " What is the province of the laity ? 
 To hunt, to shoot, to entertain ? These matters they 
 understand, but to meddle with ecclesiastical matters 
 they have no right at all."^ And the clergy were 
 even as the laity ; " malcontent bishops, insubordinate 
 chapters," everywhere " disloyalty to the Holy See," 
 and " the taint of Gallicanism." The " Old Catholics " 
 were not inspired by " zeal for religion, for the greater 
 glory of God, and the salvation of souls," but by 
 
 » ii. 318, 
 
264 CATHOLICISM 
 
 "jealousy and prejudice against the converts." The 
 candidates for Holy Orders were "a shifting and 
 discordant body, living under no rule." He and his 
 principal Roman correspondent agree in the belief 
 that " until the old generation of bishops and priests 
 is removed no great progress of religion can be 
 expected in England." It was no wonder that, as 
 his biographer says, " Manning took a pessimist view 
 of the state of Catholicism in England," and " was at 
 that time a pessimist of the deepest dye." ^ It would 
 have been almost a miracle if he had been anything 
 else ; but much of his discontent was no doubt 
 disillusionment. He may have expected to find a 
 Catholicism which corresponded to his ideal of an 
 infallible church ; and he had found instead one 
 which corresponded to the ideas of a provincial sect, 
 which had suffered much from penal laws, but more 
 from the narrow and insulated life it had been 
 compelled to live. It was now that Manning's 
 character showed itself as it had never shown itself 
 before. It was not in him to submit and obey as 
 Newman had done, to go where he was sent, lecture 
 where he was told, teach or preach under humble or 
 under public conditions as he was required, and 
 redeem himself from the neglect of the community he 
 had sacrificed so much to enter by commanding the 
 respect of those that were without. Manning, on the 
 contrary, knew his strength, and resolved to rule, that 
 
 ' ij. 88-9. 
 
CARDINAL MANNING AND CATHOLIC REVIVAL 265 
 
 he might reorganize what he called the " Church in 
 England." Catholicism was not to him, as to New- 
 man, an ideal system, full of mystic meanings, to be 
 loved for the truth's sake, to be accepted as it was for 
 the peace it gave to the intellect, and as God's own 
 contrivance for keeping His truth alive in the world. 
 It was to him, rather, a practical system, a machine 
 to be worked, an agency to be made efficient and 
 effective, an army to be ordered and officered, drilled 
 and disciplined, for the conquest of England. With 
 splendid courage, he turned himself to this work ; and 
 with no less splendid audacity and the political skill 
 which results from a fine blending of direct strength 
 and adroit diplomacy, he proceeded to do it. And, 
 great as his success undoubtedly was, it would have 
 been infinitely greater if Catholicism, and if Christian- 
 ity, had not both been more and different from what 
 he conceived them to be. 
 
 § V. Manning as Roman Churchman under 
 Pius IX 
 
 Manning's Catholic career may be said to fall into 
 two periods, marked by two distinct tendencies, if not 
 governed by two very different ideals : the period 
 under the pontificate of Pius IX., from 1851 to 1878, 
 and the period under the pontificate of Leo XIII., 
 from 1878 to 1892. All that our space permits is to 
 indicate the respects in which these tendencies dif- 
 fered and their significance. 
 
 I. Manning's policy, or method of dealing with the 
 
266 CATHOLICISM 
 
 emergency which we have just described, admirably 
 expressed his mind, and was adapted to the situation 
 as he saw it. In EngHsh Catholicism and the minds 
 that ruled it he had no faith. He said, its spirit is 
 "anti-Roman and anti-Papal," and so divided that 
 " our work is hindered by domestic strife." ^ His cure 
 was to increase the authority of the Holy See, to 
 deepen the respect for it, to make the Pope, not in 
 name only, but in deed and in truth, sovereign in 
 English Catholicism. What this meant he well knew; 
 it meant the success of the man who could best 
 please the Vatican, or who had most influence with 
 the men who shaped its policy. I do not say that 
 Manning put it to himself in this bald form ; on the 
 contrary, it was with him a matter of both conscience 
 and faith. He did believe not so much in an infallible 
 Church as in an infallible Papacy ; and he thought 
 that this signified a Pope who did not simply reign, 
 but governed. Also as a practical statesman he 
 could not but see that the one chance of making 
 English Catholicism cease to be local and provincial, 
 was by penetrating and commanding it by the mind 
 which dwelt at the heart of Catholic Christendom. 
 But the reality as he found it and as he used it was 
 an ironical counterfeit of the ideal ; and the marvel- 
 lous thing in the correspondence now before us, is that 
 the ideal is nowhere, the ironical counterfeit every- 
 where ; and it walks abroad naked and unashamed. 
 
 » ii. 8i. 
 
CARDINAL MANNING AND CATHOLIC REVIVAL 267 
 
 We see Propaganda sitting in council, its decisions 
 anticipated, prejudiced, prejudged by its individual 
 members being got at, primed, and prepossessed. 
 We see the old Pope, potent yet feeble, shrewd and 
 humorous, obstinate and self-willed, yet easily suscep- 
 tible to influence by those about his person and in the 
 secret of his character and foibles. We see the 
 chamberlain, Monsignor Talbot, a willing and astute 
 go-between, avid of gossip, violent in his judgments 
 and dislikes, jealous for the papal autocracy, yet 
 feeling the need of manipulating the autocrat in a 
 very common human way ; keeping his correspondent 
 informed of all that passed at the Vatican — who came, 
 who went, what was said, and whether doubted or 
 believed, or how taken ; very anxious to hear what 
 was going on in England that he might put things in 
 their proper light and proportions before the pontifical 
 patient. Then we see his English correspondent. 
 Manning himself, playing many parts, always deft, 
 pointed, impressive, full of schemes and suggestions ; 
 telling who helped and who hindered ; how this bishop 
 or that chapter was to be circumvented or induced 
 to do things they did not mean to do. It is, under 
 certain aspects, a deplorable correspondence : for it 
 unfolds a tale of sordid backstairs intrigues, is full 
 of hinted hates and unjustified suspicions, and the 
 stratagems and policies devised and followed by 
 those who would use the authorities at the centre 
 as instruments for effecting their own will at the 
 circumference. I do not wonder that the successor 
 
268 CATHOLICISM 
 
 of Manning has stigmatized the publication of the 
 book which contains this correspondence as a crime. 
 To one sitting in his seat and burdened with his 
 responsibiHties it could seem nothing else. But it can 
 hardly be described as private correspondence ; on the 
 contrary, the letters have all the value and function of 
 public despatches. They were written by men who 
 were not simply friends, but officials in a great church. 
 They affected the policy of a famous court ; they 
 determined vexed ecclesiastical questions ; and decided 
 matters affecting the happiness, the status, the charac- 
 ter of some eminent and many influential men. I do 
 not see how they could have been suppressed, if the 
 biography was to have any veracity or historical 
 value whatever. For here we see Manning at work 
 on the Catholic revival ; and are led to the sources of 
 events which puzzled many, though they might be 
 open secrets to the initiated. Mr. Purcell says : 
 " Monsignor Talbot played no mean part in the 
 management of Catholic affairs in England." It 
 was easy " to a man of such infinite tact and skill as 
 Manning to gain supreme influence over Mgr. Talbot. 
 If Mgr. Talbot had the ear of the Pope, the tongue 
 which spoke in whispers was not Talbot's." ^ Of 
 course not ; Talbot persuaded the Pope, Manning 
 persuaded Talbot; and so the papal policy which 
 he carried out in England was, while nominally 
 the Pope's, yet really his own. 
 
 ii. 87. 
 
CARDINAL MANNING AND CATHOLIC REVIVAL 269 
 
 2. Into the forms, incidents, and developments 
 of this poHcy I will not enter : for to analyze and 
 describe it would be a piece of work too utterly 
 distasteful to be done justly or well. Any one who 
 wants to know how chapters were counter-worked 
 or superseded, how a coadjutor and designated 
 successor to Wiseman was, in spite of powerful 
 connections and the sanctions of order and custom, 
 unseated and set aside by the direct act of the 
 Pope, or as he himself, according to Manning, 
 described it, "II colpo di stato di Dominiddio " ; ^ 
 how bishops were sketched, discounted, outwitted ; 
 how the Catholic press was handled and judged 
 when unfriendly, and how the more important organs 
 were got possession of and made to speak as the 
 potent cardinal willed — such a one has but to study 
 the correspondence now published, and he will see 
 the whole system in operation. But there is one 
 event too significant to be thus passed over — the 
 treatment of Newman and his Oxford scheme. Into 
 the relations between the two men it is not necessary 
 to enter. Their tempers were incompatible, their 
 minds dissimilar, their characters different ; in a 
 word, they were so unlike as to be mutually unin- 
 telligible, with a sort of innate capability of inter- 
 despising each other. This was intensified by the 
 similarities of their histories, but the dissimilarities 
 of their fortunes. If any one man was the cause 
 
 * ii. 95- 
 
2 70 CA THOLICISM 
 
 of the movement to Rome, it was Newman. His 
 logic made it seem to many inevitable; and then 
 with a proud but reluctant humility, which, whatever 
 we may think of his reasons, we can only admire, 
 he bowed his own lordly head, and submitted to 
 enter the church of Rome by the lowliest door. 
 And the places assigned him, and the duties laid 
 upon him, were such as became his submission rather 
 than his eminence. Manning followed six years 
 later, and within fourteen years he was Archbishop 
 of Westminster and head of the English Catholics ; 
 while Newman was to the chamberlain who had 
 the ear of the Pope "the most dangerous man in 
 England," ^ a man who had never " acquired the 
 Catholic instincts."^ Manning, too, thought him 
 dangerous, the type of "a worldly Catholicism," 
 which would " have the world on its side " ; he con- 
 sidered the friends who grew enthusiastic over the 
 Apologia as " literally playing the fool " ; ^ and 
 said that " the Anglicans regarded it as a plea for 
 remaining as they are."* 
 
 But these are not the significant things. Almost 
 as good a case could be made out against Newman 
 for his attitude to Manning, as against Manning 
 for his attitude to Newman. Neither shows well, 
 especially when they fall into amenities of the feline 
 order.^ What is significant is their alternative 
 
 Mi. 318. ' ii. 323, note. ^ ii. 206. ■* ii. 323. 
 
 * Newman ends his correspondence relative to the pro- 
 posed interview thus : " I purpose to say seven Masses for 
 
CARDINAL MANNING AND CATHOLIC REVIVAL 27 1 
 
 policies as to Oxford and the Universities. Newman 
 proposed to found a Catholic Hall or Oratory at 
 Oxford, secured land for this purpose, and got the 
 provisional approval of his ecclesiastical superior. 
 He may have been guided by his instincts. He 
 must have yearned for Oxford as the thirsty traveller 
 for the well-watered oasis. There he had lived a 
 life he could never forget ; influence had there been 
 his, and honour ; there he had found the friends 
 who were bound to him by hoops of steel ; his spirit 
 had quickened theirs and they had quickened his 
 spirit in return, making his blood run warmer and 
 his pulse beat faster ; in a sense, all his friendships 
 then and always, were made either in or through 
 Oxford. It was then, by a necessity of nature, 
 interpreted by experience, that he turned to his old 
 home, possessed of the feeling that where the passion 
 of his life had been suffered, and its sacrifice accom- 
 plished, there, if only his church would send him, 
 he could most victoriously do the work of conciliation 
 and conversion. And among the wise and powerful 
 in his church a cognate feeling prevailed. The 
 Anglican converts had made obvious the need of 
 
 your intention amid the difficulties and anxieties of your 
 ecclesiastical duties." But Manning, not to be outdone 
 in ironical innuendo, retorts : " I shall have great pleasure 
 in saying one Mass every month for your intention during 
 the present year." So have we heard arrogant and self- 
 conscious superiority, mistaking itself for piety, threaten to 
 pray for the soul of a meek and saintly man. 
 
272 CATHOLICISM 
 
 English culture to the success of Catholicism in 
 England. It was too alien, too foreign to flourish 
 on our insular soil ; it wanted the sentiment, the 
 taste, the attitude to public and domestic questions ; 
 in a word, the consciousness which makes a man 
 English, a person capable of understanding and 
 being understood of the people. The wiser and 
 larger Catholics felt, too, that the more public life 
 and high careers in the State opened to their sons, 
 the more was it necessary that they should be 
 educated and disciplined in the schools and univer- 
 sities of the nation ; and they no doubt also believed 
 that, in their freer and fuller contact with the centres 
 of living thought, Catholicism would give while it 
 got, and influence all the more that it was being 
 influenced. Indeed, considering the man they had, 
 his name and his history, it seemed as if the very 
 voice of God called them to go where he was ready 
 to lead. But this was not the view of the man 
 who was then shaping the public policy of Catholi- 
 cism. The question rose in the last year of 
 Wiseman's life, indeed only four or five months 
 before his death, when the ruling mind was the mind 
 that was to reign after him. Manning threw his 
 whole weight into the opposition, used all his skill 
 to defeat Newman. The common and characteristic 
 method was pursued. Rome was fully informed of 
 Newman's defects ; his anti-Roman tendencies ; the 
 danger of sending him to Oxford ; the danger of 
 indulging those who wanted him to go ; the certainty 
 
CARDINAL MANNING AND CATHOLIC REVIVAL 273 
 
 if he went, that he would attract the sons of 
 rich Catholics after him, and they would be 
 " protestantized," " de-catholicized," in a word, made 
 more English and less Roman. Propaganda de- 
 liberated. Cardinal Reisach came and investigated ; 
 was taken to Oxford, shown over the ground by 
 an opponent of the scheme ; was taken to Birming- 
 ham, interviewed various persons, some young and 
 quite inexperienced, but was not allowed to see 
 Newman,^ who complained that he, "who had 
 certainly as great a claim as any one to have an 
 opinion, had not been allowed to give one." And 
 so the well-informed Cardinal was sent off, while 
 a following letter vouched for his competency, 
 saying that he had seen and understood all that 
 was going on in England. The affair ended in the 
 only way possible ; but what is even more significant 
 to us than the method of the victors, is their reasons. 
 They are reasons of alarm, of fear of both light 
 and freedom. They imply the most amazing dis- 
 trust of Catholicism, of its ability to hold its own 
 in the face of a university which it does not itself 
 control. There is no sense of any special mission 
 to the science and education, to the intellect and 
 culture, of England. There is no feeling that it is 
 possible so to teach their youth as to enable them 
 to brave the fierce light which the living academic 
 mind casts upon all creeds ; or that it is better for 
 
 * ii. 314. 
 
 18 
 
274 CATHOLICISM 
 
 a man to know what his opponent believes than 
 to grow up in ignorance of it ; or that the man 
 who has not understood another church has not 
 believed his own. The reasons are all of the 
 narrowest order, and where most emphasized, show 
 the essential uncatholicity of this Catholicism. It 
 must be Roman ; cannot be allowed to become 
 English lest it cease to be papal. Yet a system 
 which has no place in it for the most distinctive 
 and preservative characteristics of a people and a 
 state, is the last system that can claim catholicity 
 as its special attribute. 
 
 3. The event that is by many considered the 
 crowning success of Manning's career is the part 
 he played in the Vatican Council. That is a larger 
 question than we can here discuss. But there are 
 a few things that may be said concerning it. His 
 advocacy of the Council and its decree was typical 
 of his whole attitude of mind. It epitomized, as 
 it were, his intellectual and spiritual defects. His 
 religion was more political than reasonable, more 
 legal than ethical, more a creation of positive law 
 than a thing of spirit and truth. It shows, as almost 
 nothing else did, the extraordinary limitations of 
 his thought. He never saw the decree of Infallibility 
 as it seemed to other minds, more capable and 
 more learned. He rather gloried that the ignorant 
 and foolish had prevailed over the wise and prudent. 
 Here, on the one side, was he, a comparatively 
 recent convert to Catholicism, no scholar in the 
 
CARDINAL MANNING AND CATHOLIC REVIVAL 275 
 
 proper sense of the term, no theologian, not well 
 acquainted with the history of the church or its 
 thought, quite without the scientific spirit, or the 
 ability to read with critical insight the events and 
 forces which had created the church he adorned ; 
 and with him a host of bishops from the more 
 backward regions of Catholicism, though, of course, 
 not unrelieved with some of another sort. And, 
 on the other side, were a multitude of great scholars, 
 learned theologians, lifelong devout Catholics who 
 knew, as he did not, the genius, the career, the 
 achievements, the possibilities, and the claims of 
 Rome. And yet their differences never appear for 
 a moment to start within him a doubt of his position 
 or policy; and he goes forward, manoeuvring in 
 his own gay fashion, as if the gravest and most 
 tremendous of all possible questions could be settled 
 in the same way as the affairs of his own diocese. 
 And his alarmist pleas as to the need of arresting 
 revolution by the decree of Infallibility are, alike in 
 principle and in policy, exactly on the level of his 
 arguments against going to Oxford. The thought 
 or the religion that is afraid to go into the univer- 
 sities of a country will never convince its reason 
 or command its conscience. The church that 
 expects to stop the revolution by passing a decree 
 which declares its head infallible, is like the child 
 who stands on his castle of sand and defies the 
 tide to rise above the rampart he has built. 
 
276 CATHOLICISM 
 
 § VI. Manning under Leo XIII., more English, less 
 Roman 
 
 I, But his life was not destined to end in the 
 moment of victory. Nemesis had in store for him 
 something more tragic, yet better. The second 
 period of his catholic life came, and with it came 
 another mind and policy, His correspondent at 
 Rome passed away ; the old Pope died, and another 
 filled his place. With the changed men came 
 changed relations in Italy and in England. A new 
 spirit reigned at the Vatican, and the forces he 
 had long commanded from Westminster began to 
 break from his control. The change was signified 
 by the honour which came to Newman, connected 
 with which is a tale we would rather not attempt 
 to tell. But the effect on Manning was remarkable ; 
 he became less Roman and more English. He 
 threw himself with extraordinary energy and 
 enthusiasm into public and social movements. He 
 became more of a zealot in temperance, more 
 of a social reformer, more of an English states- 
 man, forward in every public question and work 
 of beneficence. And he became jealous of the 
 very power he had once so loved to invoke 
 and use, saying that " I hardly know in Rome 
 a man, high or low, who understands the con- 
 dition of the church in the British Empire."^ 
 And as there, so here. He complained that he was 
 
CARDINAL MANNING AND CATHOLIC REVIVAL 277 
 
 left alone, that " Catholics took no interest in Catholic 
 affairs of a public character";^ that the Catholic 
 clergy were "mischievously wanting" in attempts 
 " to share and promote the civil life of the people." 
 And he said that they failed because they did not 
 take the work of preaching seriously ; because they 
 had in their midst a reaction against the popular 
 use of " the Holy Scriptures " ; because they had no 
 " perception or consciousness " of the reality in the 
 spiritual life of England, or the meaning of the fact 
 that " all the great works of charity in England have 
 had their beginning out of the Church " ; because they 
 laid too much stress on " Sacramentalism," priests 
 being in "danger of becoming Mass-priests, or 
 Sacrament-mongers " ; because the clergy are too 
 official and have the vanity and weakness of 
 officialism ; and because they are too controversial 
 and forget the truth that "destruction builds up 
 nothing."^ I have found his Hindrances to the 
 Spread of Catholicism in England^ from which the 
 above points are taken, impressive and pathetic 
 reading. They were written in the summer of 1890, 
 and show how the old man was feeling as he neared 
 the end. The mind is more childlike, more wistful, 
 more alive to natural good, less strenuous for 
 ecclesiastical pre-eminence, full of the great con- 
 viction that the church can conquer only through 
 the love and service of her sons. I am happy to 
 find these notes standing where they do. They 
 show that to the old man had come a saner and 
 
278 CATHOLICISM 
 
 a nobler mind. He does not now rage at his own 
 people as anti-Roman and anti-Papal ; he speaks 
 no more of infallibility, looks no more to Italy for 
 light and salvation ; but feels that Catholicism has 
 much to learn of England, and must know and 
 love her virtues better before it can hope to win 
 her faith. We must not call the events that worked 
 this change tragic ; rather let us say they were the 
 fruits of the Spirit of grace. 
 
 2. The writing of this essay has not been a pleasant 
 task. Deep as is the difference which divides the 
 writer from Manning and his church, it would have 
 been infinitely more agreeable to write of him in 
 another strain. But the study of the documents pub- 
 lished in this book left him no option but to write as 
 he has done, or not to write at all. He is grateful 
 therefore to be able to strike at the end a note of 
 cordial admiration. Manning was a vigorous ad- 
 ministrator, a man of policies and methods, who was 
 determined to have work done in his own way ; but 
 he was not always as careful as he ought to have 
 been about the means he used. His early inclination 
 to politics was a real expression of nature ; for his 
 aptitudes were for the service of the State rather than 
 the Church, and he loved and served the Church as if 
 it were a State. He had the ambition that place 
 satisfied, and that could not be happy without place ; 
 power he loved more than fame, and if he sometimes 
 gained it by ignoble arts, he yet used it for more 
 noble ends. He was a man success improved ; and 
 when the temptations which appealed to his lower 
 
CARDINAL MANNING AND CATHOLIC REVIVAL 279 
 
 instincts were removed, he showed in his age some of 
 those finer quaHties of nature and character which we 
 miss in his strong and aggressive manhood. 
 
 With the passing of Manning the time has come 
 for gathering up the lessons of what is called the 
 Oxford Movement and the Catholic Revival which it 
 is said to have effected. That cannot be attempted 
 here and now ; but one or two things are obvious 
 enough. It has not done, at least as yet, for the 
 Roman Catholic church all that was either feared or 
 hoped. It has made the English people kindlier to 
 Catholics, but not to Roman Catholicism. For this 
 Catholicism has itself greatly to blame. It did not 
 know the time of its visitation. It doubted where it 
 ought to have believed, and believed where it ought 
 to have doubted. It sacrificed the Church to the 
 Papacy, and lost England through its belief in Rome 
 and its use of Roman methods. This book is full 
 of evidence that a Catholicism seated at Rome, or, 
 indeed, with a head localized anywhere, can never 
 again govern the world. To rule the Middle Ages 
 was a relatively simple thing ; Europe, Southern and 
 Western, was but a little place, homogeneous, with all 
 its parts easily reached, and all its forces so concen- 
 trated as to be easily controlled. But the Christian 
 world to-day is another matter; vast, populous, diver- 
 sified, full of many minds, and of minds touched with 
 a freedom that ecclesiastical authority cannot bind. 
 Government of such a world from a single centre has 
 ceased to be any longer possible : all that survives of 
 it is appearance and make-believe. For the centre 
 
280 CATHOLICISM 
 
 must be got to do as the circumference requires ; and 
 so the authorities in the provinces negotiate and 
 intrigue at the capital, that their will may be done 
 there, in order that what seems its will may be done 
 within their borders. Then, the attitude of Catho- 
 licism to thought is a radical weakness. The less 
 it can mingle with the world in the free marts of 
 knowledge, the less will the world mind what it says. 
 The authority that does not speak reasonable things, 
 reason will not hear. And Catholic thought taken as 
 a whole is a peculiarly sectional thing, apologetical, 
 polemical, standing outside the large movements of 
 modern literature and science. Within Catholicism 
 itself, then, there seems to us no promise of victory 
 over the mind, or control over the destinies, of our 
 people. But it is possible that forces outside the 
 Catholic ranks may repeat by-and-by the story of fifty 
 years ago. As the danger of the Low Church party 
 was its affinity with Dissent, the danger of the High 
 Church is its affinity with Rome : and affinity has a 
 trick of turning into identity. But one thing is certain. 
 The English people are, and intend to remain, masters 
 of their own religion in their own churches ; and they, 
 and not the clergy, will be the arbiters of our des- 
 tinies. Manning found the English Catholic laity too 
 strong even for him, and in the other churches the 
 laity are — well, the English people ; and in religion, 
 as in other things, they are a people who have, when 
 the need arises, a masterful way of settling matters 
 according to their own mind. 
 March, 1896. 
 
VII 
 
 ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— THE OLD AND 
 THE NEW 
 
 THE book* which has suggested this discussion 
 may be described as a new series of " Tracts 
 for the Times " ; but the " Times " have changed, and 
 with them the " Tracts." The noise of battle is not 
 in the new as in the old ; the writers have been born 
 in the age of " sweet reasonableness " ; they do not 
 indignantly address an apostate church, or an impious 
 State, but seek gently to succour a " distressed faith," 
 loving the faith and pitying its distress. They 
 believe that " the epoch in which we live is one 
 of profound transformation, intellectual and social, 
 abounding in new needs, new points of view, new 
 questions, and certain therefore to involve great 
 changes in the outlying departments of theology." 
 The qualification is careful, but more easily made 
 than applied ; a change in the circumference of a 
 circle changes the circle all the same. "Theology," it 
 is confessed, " must take a new development " ; but 
 
 ^ Lux MimdL A Series of Studies in the Religion of the 
 Incarnation. Edited by Charles Gore, M.A., Principal of 
 Pusey House, Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. London : 
 John Murray. 
 
282 CA THOLICISM 
 
 " a new development," though it be of but a single 
 organ, affects the whole organism, all its parts in all 
 their relations, internal and external. " To such a 
 development these studies attempt to be a contri- 
 bution." The writers are men of learning, piety, 
 and sincerity, " servants of the Catholic Creed and 
 Church " ; but they are also believers in evolution and 
 in theology as a living science. The combination is 
 excellent. " The Creed and Church " are the organ- 
 ism, the men are its living energies, the forces and 
 conditions of the time are the environment ; and if 
 the thoughts generated in the environment penetrate, 
 quicken and modify the energies of the organism, we 
 may contentedly leave the new life to reckon with the 
 old restrictions. 
 
 A book like this is suggestive of many things, 
 especially of the changes that have happened within 
 the last sixty years. In 1833 the first issue of the 
 " Tracts " began, breathing the courage, defiance, and 
 furious despair of a forlorn hope ; in 1 890, the men 
 who have replaced the old leaders are within the 
 citadel, victorious, proposing their own terms of peace. 
 The revolution has come full cycle round, which 
 means the counter-revolution is at hand. It were a 
 curious question, why, in what is fancied to be a 
 critical and sceptical age, so extraordinary a revolu- 
 tion has been achieved. Perhaps this very critical 
 scepticism has helped to achieve it. Sceptical are 
 always credulous ages ; the more radical the disbelief 
 in things fundamental, the easier the belief in things 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 283 
 
 accidental ; where faith in God is hardly possible, 
 acceptance of an ancient historical church may be 
 as agreeable as it is convenient. It belongs to the 
 region of the phenomenal, it lives in the field of 
 experience ; and so men who think God too transcen- 
 dental for belief, may conceive the church as real 
 enough to be deferentially treated. The thing is 
 perfectly natural : what has died to the reason may 
 live all the more tenderly in reminiscence. Make a 
 thing beautiful to such persons, and it becomes attrac- 
 tive, which is an altogether different matter from its 
 being true or credible. But one thing is clear, the real 
 cause of success has been faith ; for victories are won 
 only by men of convinced minds. In this case they 
 have been mocked, ridiculed, and have looked ridicu- 
 lous ; but they have been in earnest, and have pre- 
 vailed. Over them our modern Samuel Butlers have 
 made merry, collecting the materials for a new 
 Hudibras, richer than the old in the grotesqueries 
 of sartorial pietism, and the too consciously conscien- 
 tious scrupulosities of the well-applauded martyr for a 
 rite or a robe ; only in this case the robe is not the 
 livery of " the scarlet woman," or the deadly splen- 
 dours of the "Babylonish garment," but the very 
 garniture, the sacred and seemly vestments of the 
 truth of God. The situation is full of exquisite irony ; 
 the delusion of the old hyper-Calvinist, who was sure 
 Dnly of two things, his own election and the reproba- 
 tion of the immense multitude, becomes seemly and 
 sane beside its modern parallel — the superb egotism 
 
284 CATHOLICISM 
 
 which enables many excellent but most commonplace 
 men to believe that their order, whose constituents 
 are often selected and formed in a most perfunctory- 
 way, is necessary to the Church of God, and has com- 
 mand over the channels and the instruments of His 
 grace. If Englishmen had their old sense of humour, 
 the notion could not live for a single hour ; and where 
 humour fails, so coarse a thing as ridicule has no 
 chance of success. For ridicule is the test of truth 
 only to men who fear laughter more than God. Men 
 like Samuel Butler see a very little way into the heart 
 of things — nay, do not see the things that lie on the 
 surface as they really are. The man who has a genius 
 for caricature has a bad eye for character ; he who is 
 always in search of the ridiculous never finds the 
 truth. So Anglo-Catholicism, if it is to be understood, 
 must be studied from within as well as from without ; 
 in relation indeed to the forces that created its oppor- 
 tunity and conditioned its progress, but also as it lives 
 in the minds and to the imaginations of the men who 
 have been its chiefs and spokesmen. 
 
 § I. The Outer Factors of the Revival 
 
 The Anglo-Catholic revival may be said to have 
 been in its origin the product 01 three main factors : 
 Liberalism, the inadequacy of the old church parties 
 to the new situation, and the spirit of Romanticism in 
 religion. The political conditions supplied the provo- 
 cative or occasional cause ; the inability of the exist- 
 ing ecclesiastical parties to deal with the emergency 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 285 
 
 supplied the opportunity ; while the Romanticist ten- 
 dency in literature supplied the new temper, method, 
 standpoint, and order of ideas. Our remarks on these 
 points must be of the briefest. 
 
 I. It is usual to make 1833, the year when the issue 
 of the Tracts began, the beginning also of the 
 ecclesiastical revival, though for a few years before 
 then the waters had been gathering underground. 
 Liberalism just then seemed victorious all along the 
 line, and had effected changes that were as to the 
 English State constitutional, but as to the English 
 Church revolutional. The Deists of the eighteenth 
 century had died, though only to return to life as 
 Philosophical Radicals, learned in economics, in edu- 
 cation, in theoretical politics, in methods to promote 
 the greatest happiness of the greatest number, though 
 the greatest number was largely middle class, and the 
 happiness was more akin to social comfort than moral 
 beatitude. The Roman Catholics, just emancipated, 
 were still suffering from the social proscription which 
 in England is the worst sort of religious disability ; 
 and seemed a people with memories but without 
 hopes, with illustrious names but without leaders, 
 enfeebled by having lived so long as aliens amid their 
 own flesh and blood. The Dissenters, strengthened 
 by their recent enfranchisement, and as it were legiti- 
 mated by the State, were demanding still ampler 
 rights, freer education, and universities that knew no 
 church, and were also mustering and marshalling the 
 energies that were largely to determine the march of 
 
286 CATHOLICISM 
 
 reform. The Episcopal Church was the grand bul- 
 wark against Rome, and stood in very different 
 relations to the two forms of dissent, the Catholic and 
 the Protestant : to the one it stood as became a bul- 
 wark, absolutely opposed ; but to the other its relation 
 was rather mixed. One church party was, for theo- 
 logical reasons, sympathetic ; but another was, for 
 ecclesiastical reasons, at once tolerant and disdainful — 
 feeling as to a superfluous auxiliary, which would 
 exist and assist without either its existence or assist- 
 ance being wanted. 
 
 The effect, then, of the political changes had been 
 twofold. They had, on the one hand, broadened the 
 basis of the English State, made the terms of citizen- 
 ship distinctively civil, and incorporated or affiliated 
 classes that had hitherto been dealt with as aliens. 
 But, on the other hand, they had worked for the 
 English church what can only be described as a 
 revolution. For up till now it had been, and indeed 
 still is, more easy to distinguish Church and State 
 ideally than actually ; the English constitution may be 
 said to have recognized their formal difference, but to 
 have affirmed their material identity. Parliament is, 
 in theory, the English people assembled for purposes 
 of legislation ; the English church is, in idea, the same 
 people associated for the purpose of worship. The 
 supreme legislative authority for both Church and 
 State is one and the same. Our great ecclesiastical 
 laws are, as regards source and sanction, civil ; our 
 civil authorities appoint the men who fill our great 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 287 
 
 ecclesiastical offices. Civil penalties follow the viola- 
 tion of ecclesiastical laws, and our ultimate ecclesias- 
 tical tribunals are all civil. The Act of Uniformity 
 was passed and enforced by the civil power, and under 
 it dissent was a civil offence punished by civil and 
 political penalties. The same power determined at 
 once the books to be subscribed, the persons who were 
 to subscribe them, and the terms of the subscription. 
 The practice was intelligible and logical enough on 
 the theory that Church and State were, though 
 formally different, materially identical ; each was the 
 same thing viewed under a different aspect, the civil 
 legislature being at the same time in its own right also 
 the ecclesiastical. So long as the theory even toler- 
 ably corresponded with fact, the system could be made 
 to work ; but once Church and State ceased to be, and 
 to be considered as being, co-extensive, the system 
 became at once illogical, unreal, and impracticable. 
 Now, the Acts which emancipated the Catholics and 
 abolished the Tests, declared that for the State dissent, 
 whether Catholic or Protestant, had ceased to exist ; 
 that to a man as a citizen, it could no longer apply 
 the categories of Conformist or Nonconformis ; in 
 other words, it might be a State with a Church, but 
 had ceased to be a State that was, or tried to be, a 
 Church. Nor did this change stand alone ; it involved 
 another more flagrant, if not so radical. Dissenters, 
 Catholic and Protestant, had not only by the State 
 been abolished for the State ; but they could sit in 
 Parliament, and perform all the functions of legislators 
 
288 CATHOLICISM 
 
 without any irritating condition of occasional con- 
 formity, or pledge to respect what they did not believe. 
 And as Parliament was the supreme Legislature for 
 the Church as well as for the State, it happened that 
 men whose distinctive note was dissent from the 
 church, were, by a constitutional change which en- 
 larged and benefited the State, invested with legisla- 
 tive authority over the church they dissented from ; 
 and men the church could not truthfully recognize as 
 fully or adequately Christian, became, by civil action 
 and on civil grounds, lawgivers for the very church 
 that refused them recognition. The anomalies in the 
 situation were many ; but to the State they were only 
 such as were inseparable from its progress out of a 
 mixed civil and ecclesiastical society into a society 
 purely and simply civil ; though to the church they 
 were fundamental contradictions of its very idea as 
 national, and as such ought to have been felt intoler- 
 able. And the inexorable logic of the situation soon 
 became manifest. The Whigs were in the ascendant, 
 with ample opportunity to gratify their traditional 
 disbelief in church claims and their hereditary love 
 of church lands, especially as a means of creating a 
 patriotic aristocracy. The Royal Commission on 
 Ecclesiastical Revenues was appointed, the bishops 
 were advised to set their house in order, and almost 
 the half of the Irish Sees were suppressed. The out- 
 look was not hopeful, and in the church camp there 
 was rage not unmingled with despair. 
 
 2. Within the English church the old varieties 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM-OLD AND NEW 289 
 
 of thought and policy prevailed, but all were charac- 
 terized by the same unfitness for the new circum- 
 stances. The High Church was at its driest ; the old 
 chivalrous loyalties had become impossible ; and, 
 unexalted by any new ideal, its character had deteri- 
 orated. It was like an ancient dame whose pride is 
 sustained by inveterate prejudices and the recollection 
 of conquests in a time too remote to be pleasantly 
 remembered. Its original theory had been built on 
 the royal prerogative : the divine right of the king 
 had defined and determined the right of his church 
 to be the church of his people ; its authority within 
 the State was a form of his, and men could not secede 
 from the church without being disloyal to the king. 
 It was a perfectly intelligible theory, and as coherent 
 as it was intelligible, but then its primary premiss 
 was the king's divine right ; once the premiss had 
 been disproved or made impossible by events, the 
 theory ceased to be either intelligible or coherent. 
 And disproof had come in the most cogent form : first, 
 and most disastrously in the revolution of 1688 ; next, 
 and permanently, in the Hanoverian succession. 
 But a life without reason is never a happy life : what 
 obstinacy keeps alive demoralizes the obstinacy by 
 which it lives ; and so throughout a good half of the 
 eighteenth century the High Church party hated the 
 reigning dynasty, plotted treason in its heart, and was 
 depraved by the treason it plotted. And when the 
 reconciliation came, it came not by the theory being 
 so modified as to suit a constitutional king, but by an 
 
 ^9 
 
290 CATHOLICISM 
 
 attempted adaptation of the king to the theory. 
 Now, a party out of harmony with the fundamental 
 tendencies and principles of a State, can never so live 
 within the State as to be either an efficient or a 
 beneficent factor in its development. The forces that 
 make for change are forces it does not understand, 
 and so cannot control. And so it happened that with 
 the utmost will to resist, the High Church party was 
 without either the strength or the faculty for resist- 
 ance. 
 
 Of the Broad Church, only this need here be said : 
 it was inchoate, perplexed, struggling out of its old 
 formal latitudinarian policy into the new spirit, with- 
 out, however, having found for its idea a form suitable 
 to the century. The Evangelicals, on the other hand, 
 seemed fuller of energy and promise, represented 
 what might then have been termed the type of religion 
 most characteristic of the English people. On the 
 intellectual side it was timid, born^^ formal, closed. 
 Its hatred of rationalism turned into fear of reason ; 
 it lived within its narrow tidy garden, cut its trees of 
 knowledge into Dutch figures, arranged its flower- 
 beds on geometrical lines, but was careful never to 
 look over the hedge or allow any fresh seeds from the 
 outer world to take root within its borders. Yet by a 
 curious necessity the spirit of an age lives even in the 
 strongest reaction against it ; and to the formal 
 rationalism of the eighteenth century the Evangelical 
 revival owed its violently conventional theology, the 
 foolhardiness which could represent the relations of 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 29 1 
 
 God and man by a series of formulated and reasoned 
 abstractions. But whatever may be said of its 
 theology, the heart of its piety was sound ; it might 
 be narrow, but it was deep and genuine. Men who 
 did not know it, took offence at its manner of speech 
 touching the more awful mysteries of being, and 
 sneered at it as ^/^^r-worldliness. But no piety was 
 ever more healthily and actively humane. Face to 
 face with a corruption that might appal even the 
 society of to-day, it pleaded for purity of manners 
 and created a social conscience and moral shame 
 where for centuries they had been asleep. In an age 
 which knew no duty of rich to poor, or of educated 
 to ignorant — save the duty of standing as far off as 
 possible and leaving them in their vice and filth, 
 passions and poverty — it awakened an enthusiasm 
 for their souls and a love for their outcast children, 
 which yet was so blended with love of their bodies 
 and their homes as to coin the now familiar proverb, 
 so characteristic of the then Evangelical faith, 
 "Cleanliness is next to godliness." In a time when 
 humanity was unknown in the prison, and a merciless 
 law became even criminal in its dealings with the 
 guilty. Evangelical, and indeed specifically Dissent- 
 ing piety (John Howard was an Independent, Mr. 
 Fry was a Friend) began the more than Herculean 
 work of reforming the prisons and Christianizing the 
 law. In a period when the less civilized races were 
 regarded only as chattels, or as a means of replenish- 
 ing the coffers or gratifying the ambitions or even the 
 
292 CATHOLICISM 
 
 passions of the more civilized, the same piety — in spite 
 of the mockery of clerical wits, and the scorn of the 
 New Anglicans, who could not love the wretched 
 " niggers," because they " concentrated in themselves 
 all the whiggery, dissent, cant, and abomination that 
 had been ranged on their side," ^ in spite, too, of the 
 antagonism of statesmen and of all interested classes — 
 taught the English people to consider the conquered 
 Hindu, the enslaved negro, the savage African or 
 South Sea Islander, as a soul to be saved. And so it 
 created in England and America the enthusiasm that 
 emancipated the slave and helped to form the rudi- 
 ments of a conscience, if not a heart, in the callous 
 bosom of English politics, and even in the still harder 
 and emptier bosom of English commerce. Nay, 
 Evangelical piety must not be defamed in the home of 
 its birth ; it was the very reverse of other-^ox\^\y ^ 
 intensely practical, brotherly, benevolent, beneficent, 
 though somewhat prudential in the means it used to 
 gain its most magnanimous ends. He who speaks 
 in its dispraise, either does not know it or feels no 
 gratitude for good achieved. Happy will it be for 
 Anglo-Catholicism, which we may, in contradistinction 
 to the Evangelical, term the ritual and sacerdotal 
 revival, if, once it has run its inevitable course, men 
 can trace but half as much of human good to its 
 inspiration. Great are the things it has aehieved for 
 the idea of the church, for the restoration, which too 
 often means the desecration, of churches, for the 
 
 * Hurrell Froude, Remains^ part i. vol. i. p. 382. 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM—OLD AND NEW 293 
 
 elaboration of worship and the adornment of the 
 priest ; but the final measure of its efficiency will be 
 what it accomplishes for the souls and lives of men. 
 
 But two things disqualified the Evangelicals for 
 adequate dealing with the emergency — their intellec- 
 tual timidity and their want of any sufficient idea of 
 the church. These two were intimately related ; 
 their theology was too narrowly individualistic, too 
 much a reasoned method of saving single souls, to 
 admit easily, or without fracture, those larger views 
 of God, the universe and man, needed to guide a 
 great society in a crisis, or, as it were, in the very 
 article of revolution. They did not sufficiently feel 
 that the Church was a sort of spiritual Fatherland, 
 within which they had been born, through which they 
 lived, for whose very dust they could love to die- 
 The Evangelicals have often been described as the 
 successors and representatives of the Puritans within 
 the Anglican church, but here they were their very 
 opposites. The Puritan theology was remarkable for 
 its high and catholic doctrine of the Church, so con- 
 ceiving the sovereignty of the Redeemer that the 
 body in which he lived and over which He reigned 
 could never be dependent on any State or subordinate 
 to any civil power whatever. The high Anglican 
 rather than the Evangelical has here been the Puri- 
 tan's heir, though the Anglican has lowered the 
 splendid idea he inherited by giving it a less noble 
 and a less catholic expression. It was the want of 
 such a vivifying and commanding idea that lost the 
 
294 CATHOLICISM 
 
 Evangelical the leadership of the Church in its hour 
 of storm and crisis. 
 
 3. So far, then, it seemed as if the battle against 
 vigorous and victorious Liberalism must be fought on 
 the lines so abhorred of the old High Church, the lines 
 of the latitudinarian utilities. Church and State were 
 allies, their union was due to a contract or compact, 
 by which the Church received so much pay and privi- 
 lege, and the State so much service and sanction. To 
 argue the question on this ground was to be defeated ; 
 there was no principle in it, only the meanest expe- 
 diences, profits to be determined by the utilitarian 
 calculus, with contract broken when profits ended. 
 It was at this moment that Romanticism assumed an 
 ecclesiastical form, and emerged, changed in name, 
 but unchanged in essence, as Anglo-Catholicism. 
 
 Romanticism may be described as the literary spirit 
 which, born partly in the frenzy of the Revolution, 
 and partly in the recoil from it, executed in the early 
 decades of this century summary vengeance upon the 
 rationalism of the last. It was not English merely, 
 but European ; it had achieved great things on the 
 Continent before it took shape here. In France it 
 produced Chateaubriand, whose rhapsodical Genie was 
 at once a coup de theatre et d'autel ; Joseph de Maistre 
 and the hierocratic school, with their idealization of 
 the Papacy. In Germany, it blossomed into the 
 Stolbergs and the Schlegels, who preached the duty 
 of a flight from the present to the past, and believed 
 that they preserved faith by indulging imagination. 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 295 
 
 Through the philosophical theologians and critical 
 historians in the Catholic faculties of schools like 
 Tiibtngen and Munich, as represented by Moehler 
 and DoUinger, it entered theology, furnishing Roman 
 Catholicism with a new and potent apologetic, and 
 the Anglican with a no less potent source of inspira- 
 tion and guidance. Its characteristic was an imagina- 
 tive handling of its material, especially mediaevalism 
 and its survivals, with a view to a richer and happier 
 whole of life. Rationalism was an optimism which 
 glorified its own enlightened age, and pitied the 
 ignorance and superstition of the earlier men ; but 
 Romanticism was an idealism which wished to tran- 
 scend the present it disliked, by returning, either with 
 Wordsworth to a severe simplicity, all the more 
 refined that it was so rustic and natural, or, as with 
 Scott, to the gallant days of chivalry and the rule of 
 the highly born and bred. All were subjective, each 
 used a different medium for the expression of him- 
 self; but the characteristic thing was the self that was 
 expressed, not the medium employed. The Lake 
 poets sang in praise of Nature, but it was the Nature 
 of the poet's dream, sleeping in the light that never 
 was on sea or shore. Scott loved to picture the past, 
 but his was the past of the poet's fancy ; not the hard, 
 grim world, where men struggled with existence and 
 for it, but an idealized arena, where noble birth meant 
 noble being ; and only a villain or a hypocrite could 
 lift a hand, even for freedom, against a head that was 
 crowned. In this use of the imagination there was 
 
296 CATHOLICISM 
 
 more truth, but less reality, than there had been in tfie 
 cold and analytic methods of the previous century. 
 Rationalism, for want of the historical imaginacion, 
 sacrificed the past to theory. Romanticism, for want 
 of the critical faculty, sacrificed history to the past. 
 What one finds in the elegant yet careless pages of 
 Hume, is a record of events that once happened, 
 written by a man who has never conceived so as to 
 realize the events he describes ; what one finds in the 
 vivid pages of Scott is a living picture of the past, 
 but of a past that had never lived. This is the very 
 essence of Romanticism, the imaginative interpreta- 
 tion of nature or history : but it is only the form 
 that is natural or historical, the substance or spirit is 
 altogether the interpreter's own. 
 
 § II. The Makers of the Revival 
 
 1. Now it was this Romanticist tendency that was 
 the positive factor of Anglo-Catholicism. While the 
 other two sets of circumstances supplied respectively 
 the occasion and the opportunity, this gave the crea- 
 tive impulse ; it was the spirit that quickened. The 
 men in whom it took shape and found speech were 
 three — Keble, Newman, Pusey. Perhaps we ought 
 to name a fourth, Hurrell Froude ; but he lives in 
 Newman. He was the swiftest, most daring spirit of 
 them all ; his thought is hot, as it were, with the 
 fever that shortened his days ; his words are suffused 
 as with a hectic flush, and we must judge him rather 
 as one who moved men to achieve than by his own 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 297 
 
 actual achievements. The three we have named were 
 in a rare degree complementary of each other ; they 
 were respectively poet, thinker, and scholar, and each 
 contributed to the movement according to his kind. 
 Keble was a splendid instance of the truth that a 
 man who makes the songs of a people does more 
 than the man who makes their laws. His hymns are 
 a perfect lyric expression of the Romanticist ten- 
 dency ; in them the mood of the moment speaks its 
 devoutest feelings in fittest form. This was the 
 secret of their power. They are without the passion 
 of the mystic, the infinite hunger of the soul that 
 would live for God, after the God it cannot live 
 without, the desire to transcend all media, win the 
 immediate divine vision, and lose self in its supreme 
 bliss ; rather are they the sweet and mellow fruit of 
 " pious meditation fancy-fed," which loves means as 
 means, feels joy in their use, in reading their mean- 
 ing, in being subdued by their gentle discipline ; and 
 which loves God all the better for the seemliness and 
 stateliness of the way we get to Him. Keble learned 
 of Wordsworth to love nature, to read it as a veiled 
 parable, or embodied allegory, spoken by God and 
 heard by the soul ; he learned of Scott to love the 
 past, and seek in it his ideals. His love of God 
 became love of his own church, of what she had 
 been, what she was, and, above all, of what she ought 
 to be; of her ancient monuments, her venerable in- 
 stitutions, her stately ceremonial, her saints and her 
 saints' days. And by his sweet, meditative, poetic 
 
298 CATHOLICISM 
 
 gift he made what he loved seem lovely. What 
 ecclesiastical polemics, parochial activity, and sacer- 
 dotal ritual never could have accomplished, his hymns 
 achieved ; indeed, they not only made those others 
 possible, but even necessary, creating for them that 
 disposition, that readiness to receive, to learn, and to 
 trust, which is, according to Newman, the greater 
 part of faith. It is by sure instinct that the name of 
 Keble has been seized as the name most typical of 
 the Anglo-Catholic revival. He caught the prevailing 
 sentiment, and translated it into a form at once poetic 
 and religious ; and by so doing he turned a rising tide 
 or tendency into the service of his party and his church. 
 But the secret of his strength may become the source 
 of their weakness. The man of pious and meditative 
 fancy may evoke the historical spirit, and make the 
 present beautiful in the light of an idealized past ; 
 but when the appeal is to history, scientific criticism 
 becomes the ultimate judge, and, though its judg- 
 ments are slow, they are inexorable as those of God. 
 
 2. Newman was more rarely gifted than Keble, but 
 his gifts, though of a rarer and higher order, were less 
 pure in quality. He had in a far higher degree the 
 poet's temper, and more of his insight, creative genius 
 and passion. It was his misfortune to be an ecclesi- 
 astic in a stormy crisis, and indeed to be of the crisis 
 the foremost and characteristic polemic. He had a 
 subtle and analytic intellect ; but dialectical rather 
 than speculative, discursive and critical rather than 
 synthetic and constructive. He had more of the 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 299 
 
 mystic's nature and intensity than Keble ; the 
 passion for God burned in his spirit like a fire, im- 
 pelled him as by an awful necessity to the Infinite, 
 yet divided him from it by a still more awful dis- 
 tance. He loved to seek everywhere for symbols of 
 the divine, which would at once assure him of the 
 Eternal Presence, and help him to gain more con- 
 scious access to it ; yet he had the genuine mystic's 
 feeling that all means were inadequate, and so 
 divisive ; as mediative they held the spirit out of 
 the immediate Presence, and not only shaded but 
 obscured its glory. Hence he had none of Keble's 
 love of means as means ; he had too much imagina- 
 tion to be satisfied with the sensuous seemliness, the 
 Laudian " beauty of holiness," which pleased Keble's 
 fine and fastidious, but feebler fancy ; what he wanted 
 was to stand face to face with God himself, and to 
 find a way to Him as sure as his own need for Him 
 was deep and real. But to find such a way, never an 
 easy thing, was to one situated and constituted like 
 Newman peculiarly hard. For as deep and ineradi- 
 cable as his passion for God was his scepticism of 
 reason, which is, in the last analysis, the subtlest of 
 all scepticisms as to God.^ And it is the least toler- 
 
 ^ This interpretation of Newman is admirably illustrated by 
 Mr. Hutton, Modern Guides of English Thought in Matters of 
 Faith^ pp. 78 ff. The conclusion was not intended, but is only 
 on that account the more significant. " It is, I think, profound 
 pity for the restlessness and insatiability of human reason 
 
300 CATHOLICISM 
 
 able, because the most paralysing, to the man with 
 the spirit and temper of the mystic. To believe in 
 God, yet to doubt His real presence in the reason, is 
 to be impelled to imagine that what in man has most 
 of God is also remotest from Him, and most com- 
 pletely out of His control ; and so the inexorable 
 logic of the situation forces the man, if he does not 
 surrender his doubt of the reason, either to surrender 
 all certainty and all reality in his knowledge of God, 
 or to end the conflict by calling in some violent 
 mechanical expedient, such indeed as Newman was 
 slowly but irresistibly driven to adopt. Whence this 
 sceptical tendency came in Newman's case is a 
 question we have already in part discussed ; but 
 here we may say he owed it, partly, perhaps mainly, 
 to native intellectual qualities, partly, to his place in 
 the reaction against Rationalism, and, partly, to an 
 author he greatly loves to praise, who possibly repre- 
 sents the greatest mental influence he came under, 
 Butler. The reaction against Rationalism was in 
 Newman more a matter of imagination than of 
 reason ; and he hated and disowned its results with- 
 out transcending its philosophy. As a consequence, 
 he shared in the common inheritance of our modern 
 English thought, that doubt of the reason which has 
 become in the more consistent philosophies either a 
 reasoned doubt, or, what is the same thing adapted 
 
 only the superficial expression of the deeper scepticism, which 
 so doubts " God's Spirit as revealed in conscience and reason," 
 as to require an infallible institution for their control. 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 3OI 
 
 to a positive and scientific age, a reasoned nescience. 
 And to the difficulties or antinomies of his thought 
 Butler more than any man awoke him. The under- 
 lying or material idea of the Analogy, what may 
 be termed the theory of the correspendence of the 
 physical and spiritual realms, especially when further 
 qualified by the influence of Keble, gave indeed to 
 Newman his grand constructive principle, the notion 
 of the sacramental symbolism of Nature ; but its 
 formal and regulative maxim, " Probability is the 
 guide of life," was more creative of disturbance and 
 perplexity. For to a man of his temper, mental 
 integrity, and theistic passion, as sure of God's being 
 as of his own, it must have seemed a sort of irony to 
 make such a maxim the judicial and determinative 
 principle in a religious argument. It may be said 
 to have formulated his master problem — How is it 
 possible to build on probable evidence the certitude 
 of faith ? or, How, by a method of probabilities, can 
 the existence, if not of necessary, yet of infallible 
 truth, be proved ? Indeed, Butler's probability, which 
 was not without similar tendencies in his own case, 
 determined the search which landed Newman in 
 Papal infallibility. 
 
 We have, then, to imagine Newman, with his mystic 
 passion, his philosophical scepticism, and his apolo- 
 getical maxim, called to face the disintegrative and 
 aggressive forces of his time. He could face them in 
 strength only by maintaining his intellectual integrity ; 
 and from the antinomies of his thought there were 
 
302 CATHOLICISM 
 
 only two possible ways of escape, either by a higher 
 philosophy or a higher authority. And of these two 
 each was exclusive of the other. If the way by 
 philosophy had been chosen, then the process of re- 
 conciliation would have been immanent and natural ; 
 the antitheses of the formal understanding would have 
 been overcome by the synthesis of the transcendental 
 reason. But to choose the way of authority was to 
 deny that any natural process of reconciliation was 
 possible, and to seek to silence the inward dissonances 
 by the sound of an outward voice ; and, of course, 
 the deeper the dissonances grew, the more authorita- 
 tive had the voice to be made. For many reasons — 
 constitutional, educational, circumstantial, social — the 
 philosophical way was not selected ; and Newman be- 
 gan his wonderful polemical career a mystic in faith, 
 a sceptic in philosophy, a seeker after an authority 
 able to subdue the scepticism and vindicate the faith. 
 His power, studied in connection with his marvellous 
 literary faculty and intense religious sincerity, is ex- 
 plicable enough ; but, regarded as a question in philo- 
 sophical criticism, it is more complex and difficult of 
 analysis. No man has more thoroughly understood 
 the men of his age ; no man of genius ever less com- 
 prehended the problems of his time, or contributed 
 less to their solution. It is remarkable, considering 
 his immense productivity, and the range and kind of 
 subjects he has handled, how few constructive princi- 
 ples, speculative and historical, can be found in his 
 works. The critical philosophy he does not seem to 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 303 
 
 have cared to understand. Modern criticism, as re- 
 gards both principles and methods, he never tried to 
 master, or even, objectively, to conceive. The scien- 
 tific treatment of history is too alien to his spirit and 
 aims to be comprehended by him. His one consider- 
 able historical work ^ is but an overgrown p®lemical 
 pamphlet — a treatise on the controversies of his own 
 times disguised as a history. His Doctrine of Develop- 
 ment ^ is not original ; and its thesis, so far from being 
 the equivalent of evolution, is its antithesis and con- 
 tradiction. It may be logic applied to dogma, but is 
 not science applied to history. His most consider- 
 able, at once philosophical and apologetical work,^ 
 may be described as a treatise on the necessity of the 
 personal equation in religion : it ignores what is 
 primary and universal in the reason, that it may build 
 on what is specific and acquired in the individual. 
 But it is no paradox to say, those very elements of 
 his philosophical weakness have been sources of his 
 literary and controversial strength. The very severity 
 of the conflict in his own spirit has given him the 
 profoundest sense of any thinker in our day of the 
 perplexities of living man — the bewilderments of 
 thought, motive, and conscience that come of limited 
 and passionful being, bound by law yet in revolt 
 against the law that binds it. Convictions the more 
 strenuous that they were formulated in conflict and 
 
 ^ The Avians of the Fourth Century (1833). 
 
 ^ An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). 
 
 ^ The Grammar of Assent (1870). 
 
304 CATHOLICISM 
 
 have been held amid controversies, internal and ex- 
 ternal ; a piety that is nothing less than a genius for 
 religion ; an intense imagination, using the instruments 
 of subtle dialectic, and clothing argument in speech 
 of wondrous grace and force, have enabled him to 
 address with unequalled, often irresistible, power, men 
 who could be reached most easily through the con- 
 science or imagination. Such men he has awed, sub- 
 dued, converted, though by a process that silenced or 
 overpowered rather than convinced the reason. And 
 the process he has pursued without, is but the counter- 
 part of the process he had before pursued within. 
 Truth has never been to him so much an object for 
 quest or question as for acceptance. Intellectual 
 difference has been a sort of moral offence, and he 
 has reasoned as if the men who held the principles 
 he hated must themselves be odious. Hence came 
 what Blanco White called his " deceiving pride," and 
 his resolute sacrifice of old friends to new views. 
 Hence, too, the temper I will not call intolerant, but 
 so severely and logically authoritative that, to quote 
 Blanco White again, " he would, as sure as he lives, 
 persecute to the death, if he had the direction of the 
 civil power for a dozen years." These are the invari- 
 able characteristics of the man who bases a faith of 
 authority on a scepticism of the reason. Newman, 
 with all that he stands for, represents the struggle of 
 English empiricism to remain empirical, and yet be- 
 come imaginative and religious. 
 
 3. But the scholar of the band was as notable in 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 305 
 
 his own order as the poet and thinker were in theirs. 
 Pusey, indeed, was less a scholar than a schoolman, 
 these two being distinguishable thus : the scholar 
 loves learning, and uses it as an instrument for the 
 discovery of truth, while the schoolman is a learned 
 man who uses his learning as a means of proving an 
 assumed or formulated position. The scholar studies 
 that he may cultivate mind, develop and exercise the 
 humanities : but the schoolman searches that he may 
 find authorities to verify his axioms and justify his 
 definitions. The scholar aims at objectivity, seeing 
 things as they really were, how and why they hap- 
 pened, whither tended, and what achieved ; but the 
 schoolman is throughout governed by subjectivity, 
 brings his system to history, and pursues his re- 
 searches that history may be made to furnish evidence 
 of the system he brings. Now Pusey had the mak- 
 ing of a scholar in him, though he never became what 
 he could have been. He had a susceptible, sym- 
 pathetic, assimilative mind, combined with a certain 
 largeness of nature that at once qualified him to un- 
 derstand man and distinguished him as a man men 
 could trust. His famous Inquiry into the Probable 
 Causes of Germa?t Rationalism admirably illustrates 
 his mental qualities, especially the susceptible and 
 assimilative. It is full of his German teachers,^ their 
 spirit, method, materials, though all has passed through 
 
 * For what the Inquiry owed to Tholuck, and his judgment 
 on the use made of his material, seeWitte's DasLeben Tholuck's 
 vol. ii., pp. 242, 243. 
 
 20 
 
306 CA THOLICISM 
 
 a conservative English mind, wise and honest enough 
 to defend a cause by being just to the cause it opposed. 
 But in Oxford, Keble and Newman superseded Tho- 
 luck, and Pusey passed from the scientific to a local 
 and insular standpoint, the scholar became the school- 
 man. What he was to the new movement Newman 
 has testified ; he brought to it the dignity of high 
 academic office and social rank, weight of character, 
 counsel, judicial faculty and speech, the service of 
 vast erudition, and reverence for the sources his erudi- 
 tion explored. He had precisely the qualities most 
 needed to consolidate and guide the party. Keble's 
 fancy had idealized the church and its past, had 
 made its worship poetical, had touched its services 
 with fine and well-ordered emotion. Newman's genius 
 had filled the church with new meaning and new 
 ideals, his eloquence had pealed through it like the 
 notes of a mighty organ waking long silent echoes, 
 and had kindled in men a new enthusiasm for their 
 transfigured church. And now Pusey's erudition came 
 to search the Fathers and the Anglican divines for 
 evidence that the new was the old, and based on 
 venerable and invariable tradition. Keble was loved, 
 Newman admired, but Pusey trusted. Keble moved 
 in an atmosphere of reverence and emotion ; difference 
 in his case did not breed dislike ; the very men who 
 most disagreed with his theology were most subdued 
 by his hymns. Newman was even more feared than 
 admired ; the men who followed doubted, uncertain 
 whither he might lead ; the men who resisted disliked, 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM^OLD AND NEW 307 
 
 certain that he tended with increasing momentum 
 whither they did not mean to go. But Pusey had 
 Newman's strength of conviction without his danger- 
 ous genius ; he was conservative not because sceptical, 
 but because convinced ; he loved his church in the 
 concrete, and he lived to prove that she embodied the 
 " quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus credi- 
 tum est." On any dubious or questioned point he 
 was ready to bring determinative evidence from his 
 recondite lore ; on any critical occasion he was no 
 less ready to use the pulpit of St. Mary's as a plat- 
 form for the issue of a manifesto. And so the move- 
 ment others created, Pusey controlled ; and in his 
 hands its character became fixed as a creation or 
 Renaissance of Romanticism conditioned and tem- 
 pered by scholasticism. 
 
 § III. The Anglo-Catholic Theory 
 
 I. To these men, then, the progress of events in 
 literature and philosophy on the one hand, and in 
 Church and State on the other, combined to set the 
 problem : How can the Church be rescued from the 
 hands of a State penetrated and commanded by 
 " Liberalism," and be elevated into an authority able 
 to regulate faith and conscience, to control reason 
 and society ? What Newman named " Liberalism " was 
 a single force disguised in many forms, rationalism 
 in religion, revolution or reform in politics, Eras- 
 tianism and latitudinarianism in church. It was the 
 spirit of change, negation, disintegration, destruction. 
 
308 CATHOLICISM 
 
 The church must destroy it, or it would destroy the 
 church, and with it faith in God, godliness, religion. 
 To save the church, two things were necessary — to 
 invest it with divine authority and all the rights 
 flowing from it ; and to set it strong in its authority 
 and rights over against the apostate State on the 
 one hand, and the rebellious reason on the other. 
 With sure instinct the New Anglicans began by 
 assailing the Reformation. The Puritans had dis- 
 approved and opposed the royal authority, because 
 it arrested and restrained the Reformation ; but the 
 Anglican hated the Reformation, because it had been 
 effected by the royal authority. In the old days, 
 when the king reigned by the grace of God and 
 through the zealous spirits of the Episcopal bench, 
 the Anglican had loved the royal supremacy, and 
 soundly punished the Puritan for denying it : but 
 when, in the process of constitutional change, the 
 royal supremacy became only the form or mask of 
 parliamentary power and control, which in its turn 
 was but the instrument of the hated " Liberalism," 
 — then the Anglican became as convinced as the 
 Puritan of the excellence of independency.^ The 
 
 * It is instructive to see how similar ideas under similar con- 
 ditions demand for their expression similar terms. Thus the 
 earliest treatise from the High Church point of view on this 
 subject is Charles Leslie's ; the title runs : " The case of the 
 Regale and of the Pontificate stated, in a Conference concern- 
 ing the Independency of the Church upon any power on earth, 
 in the exercise of her purely Spiritual power and authority." 
 This exactly reproduces the very idea, in what is almost exactly 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 309 
 
 secular arm in touching had wronged the church; 
 and while the men who did it, and those who suffered 
 it to be done, were alike reproached, she was pic- 
 tured as the gracious mother of peoples, with her 
 heroic yet saintly sons, and clinging yet stately 
 daughters about her, creating literature, civilization, 
 art, and whatever made life rich and beautiful, 
 and remaining benignant, though forlorn, in the 
 midst of a greedy and graceless posterity, blind to 
 her beauty, and forgetful of her beneficence. But 
 Newman touched a higher strain ; his genius scorned 
 to ask aid from sentiment ; he called upon the 
 church to become militant and equip herself in the 
 armour of her divine attributes. The State might 
 suppress bishoprics, but bishops were independent of 
 the State ; they were before it, existed by a higher 
 right, were of apostolical descent and authority, stood 
 in a divine order which the State had not made and 
 could not unmake. And as with the bishops, so 
 with the clergy ; their orders were sacred, inalienable, 
 instituted of God, and upheld by Him. And their 
 functions corresponded to their authority ; to them 
 had been committed the keys of the kingdom ; they 
 could bind and loose, and were by their commission 
 empowered to act in their Master's name. In their 
 
 their own phraseology, as to the relation of Church and State 
 held by those who were the ancestors of the later " Indepen- 
 dents." Indeed, the Anglican " autonomy of the Church "is 
 but the Puritan independency, or rather a single aspect of it, 
 and the Presbyterian " Crown rights of the Redeemer." 
 
310 CA THOLICISM 
 
 hands too, and in theirs only, were the sacraments, 
 and " the sacraments, not preaching, are the sources 
 of divine grace." The sacred order was the condi- 
 tion of the church's being, and the factor of its 
 efficiency ; where the authorized priest was not, the 
 sacraments could not be ; and no sacraments meant 
 no church, no life communicated by Baptism and 
 maintained by the Eucharist. And the church 
 which ministered life by her sacraments, guarded, 
 defined, and interpreted truth by her authority ; for 
 to the being and belief of the truth, an authoritative 
 interpreter was even more necessary than an in- 
 spired source. And this was to be found in tradition, 
 not indeed as collected and preserved by Rome, but 
 as contained in the Fathers, and as gathered from 
 them by Anglican scholars and divines. Rome was 
 corrupt, but catholic ; the Protestant churches were 
 corrupt and sectarian ; but the church of the Fathers 
 was catholic and pure ; and after it the Anglican 
 was fashioned, and tried to walk in its light and read 
 the truth with its eyes. And so a proud, coherent, 
 and courageous theory of the Church stood up to 
 confront and dare the State ; to rebuke it as of the 
 earth, to speak to it as with the voice of heaven, to 
 command it to revere and obey where it had thought 
 it could compel and rule. 
 
 2. It is no part of my purpose to criticize the 
 Anglican theory ; it was the work of men who made 
 an impassioned appeal to history, but were utterly 
 void of the historical spirit. The past they loved 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM-OLD AND NEW 311 
 
 and studied was a past of detached fragments, violent 
 divisions, broken and delimited in the most arbitrary 
 way. Their canon, " quod semper, quod ubique, 
 quod ab omnibus creditum est," they honoured in 
 speech rather than observance ; the " semper " did 
 not mean " always," or the " ubique " everywhere^ 
 or the " ab omnibus " by all ; but only such times, 
 places and men, or even such parts and sections of 
 times, places and men, as could be made to suit or 
 prove the theory. Then, for an authority to be of 
 any use in the region of truth, it must be authori- 
 tative, accessible, self-consistent and explicit ; but 
 this authority was not one of these things — it was 
 only the voice of these very simple, very positive, 
 unscientific, and often mistaken men. Their supreme 
 difficulty, which broke down the transcendent genius 
 of the party, was to get their own church to speak 
 their mind ; and they were even less successful with 
 the Fathers than with their church. There is no 
 more splendid example anywhere of how completely 
 a professedly historical movement can be indepen- 
 dent of historical truth. The Tractarians in this 
 respect present a remarkable contrast to the Re- 
 formers. Calvin in his treatment of doctrine was 
 nothing if not historical ; the Tractarians in their 
 treatment of history were nothing if not dogmatic. 
 They were traditional but not historical, while the 
 Reformers were historical but not traditional. The 
 Reformers courageously, if not always thoroughly, 
 rejected tradition and authority that they might 
 
312 CA THOLICISM 
 
 reach the mind and realize the ideal of the Christ 
 of history ; but the Tractarians, with no less courage, 
 tried to adapt the historical mind and bend the 
 historical ideal to authority and tradition. Truth is 
 patient, and suffers much at the hands of sincere 
 men ; but she always comes by her own at last. 
 
 § IV. The Anglo- Catholics and Literature 
 
 I. What has been the result of the Anglo-Catholic 
 revival? If the success of a religious movement is 
 to be measured by its power to penetrate with its 
 own spirit, to persuade and reconcile to religion the 
 best intellects of a country, then even its most 
 devoted advocates can hardly say that Anglo-Catholi- 
 cism has succeeded. While at first championed by 
 the greatest literary genius and master of dialectic 
 who has in this century concerned himself with 
 theology, it is marvellous how little it has touched 
 our characteristic and creative minds ; with these 
 neither Roman nor Anglican Catholicism has ac- 
 complished anything. Take the poets, who alike 
 as regards period and place ought to have been most 
 accessible and susceptible to the Catholic spirit and 
 influence. Arthur Hugh Clough was educated at 
 Balliol, and elected to a Fellowship at Oriel in the 
 days when Newman reigned in St. Mary's ; and he 
 is considered by the most competent of our critics 
 to be " the truest expression in verse of the moral 
 and intellectual tendencies of the period in which he 
 lived." He is fascinated by Newman and held by 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM-OLD AND NEW 313 
 
 him for a while, but only that he may learn how- 
 little there is behind the subtle and persuasive elo- 
 quence to satisfy a mind possessed with the passion 
 for veracity ; and he is driven by the recoil into the 
 anxious uncertainties where " the music of his rustic 
 lute " lost " its happy country tone," 
 
 "And learnt a stormy note 
 Of men contention-tost, of men who groan." 
 
 Matthew Arnold, son of a father who made Eng- 
 land love breadth of view and truth in history, 
 studied, learned, and suffered with the Thyrsis he so 
 deeply yet so sweetly mourned ; like him he became 
 a poet, jealous of truth in thought and word, and 
 like him, too, faced the problem and the men of the 
 hour ; but he did not dare to trust as guides for the 
 present men too credulous of the past to read its 
 truths aright. Too well he learned the bitter moral 
 of all their arguing, and concluded : " If authority be 
 necessary to faith, then an impossible authority 
 makes faith impossible " ; and he turned from Oxford 
 to learn of Weimar — 
 
 " The end is everywhere, 
 Art still has truth, take refuge there." 
 
 William Morris, formed in the Oxford of a later 
 day, when in the calm that follows conflict Anglo- 
 Catholicism reigned, could find in it no satisfying 
 veracious ideal of truth, of art or of life ; and he went 
 instead to the wild Scandinavian and distant Greek 
 mythologies for the forms in which to impersonate 
 
314 CATHOLICISM 
 
 his faith and hope. Swinburne, who had the hot 
 imagination that easily kindled to noble dreams of 
 liberty and human good, could find no promise in 
 the crimson sunset glories which Anglo-Catholicism 
 loved ; and he turned passionately towards what 
 seemed to him the east and the sunrise. But it was 
 not only those younger sons of Oxford who had in 
 a measure " the vision and the faculty divine," that 
 the new Catholicism failed to touch ; it touched as 
 little the maturer and richer imaginations of the two 
 men who will ever remain the representative poets 
 of the Victorian era. Tennyson has been essentially 
 a religious genius ; the doubts, the fears, the thought 
 perplexed by evil, by suffering, by a nature cruel in 
 her very harmonies, by the presence of wicked men 
 and the distance of a helpful God, the faith victorious 
 in the very face of sin and death, certain that some- 
 how "good will be the final goal of ill," have all 
 received from him rich and musical expression. But 
 his ideals are not those of mediaeval or modern 
 Catholicism ; they may be clothed in forms borrowed 
 from a far-off world of mythical chivalry ; but it is 
 not a priest's world ; it is one of men all the more 
 saintly that they are kings, warriors, statesmen, a 
 world of fair women and goodly men. Browning, 
 who was as essentially a religious poet as Tennyson, 
 and indeed, though no writer of hymns, as a poet 
 more profoundly, penetratively, and comprehensively 
 religious than Keble, bears throughout in his sym- 
 pathies — in his love of liberty, in his hopeful trust in 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM-OLD AND NEW 315 
 
 man, in his belief in God as the All-loving as well 
 as the All-great, who through the thunder speaks with 
 human voice — the marks and fruits of his Puritan 
 birth and breeding. But the sensuous seemliness of 
 Anglo-Catholicism had no charms for him ; it had 
 too little spiritual sublimity, stood too remote from 
 the heart of things, had too little fellowship with the 
 whole truth of God, and all the infinite needs and 
 aspirations of man. He had seen, too, the outwork- 
 ing of its ideas ; had studied their action and 
 character in history ; and his curious lore and large 
 experience helped him to many a fit yet quaint 
 form in which to embody what he had discovered 
 or observed. Browning more than any man has 
 deepened the faith of our age in the Eternal ; but 
 he has also, more than any man, made us conscious 
 of the evil of fancying that we can transmute our 
 ephemeral polities and shallow symbols into the 
 infallible and unchangeable speech of God. 
 
 2. This failure of Anglo-Catholicism to touch our 
 higher literature is both remarkable and instructive. 
 It has had and has its minor poets, a goodly 
 multitude ; but even their poetry has been mainly 
 reminiscent and sentimental, not spontaneous and 
 imaginative. Indeed, this has been its characteristic 
 in all periods of its being ; writers of hymns, quaint, 
 devout, beautiful, melodious, it has always had, but 
 never poets of the imagination ; if it has ever taken 
 possession of such, it has paralyzed the poet in them, 
 as witness Wordsworth and his ecclesiastical sonnets. 
 
3l6 CATHOLICISM 
 
 In this stands expressed some of its essential 
 characteristics. Within the rich and complicated and 
 splendidly dight folds of the Spenserian allegories, 
 there lives much of the brawny Puritan mind and 
 purpose. The same mind, and the faith it lived 
 by, made the noblest epic and the most perfect 
 classical drama in the speech of our English people. 
 No man will claim John Dryden as a religious poet, 
 though he forced poetry into the ignoble strife of 
 ecclesiastical politics, and made it the mean apologist 
 of royal and papal designs. Deism lisped in num- 
 bers through the lips of Catholic Pope ; and the 
 Evangelical Revival inspired the gentle soul of 
 Cowper to verse, always genial and graceful, and 
 often gay. But Anglo-Catholic poetry, measured by 
 the Puritan, is remarkable for nothing so much as 
 its imaginative poverty, its inability to create a 
 literature that shall adequately embody the true 
 and the sublime. And this has its parallel in the 
 theology of the past half-century. Newman, of 
 course, stands alone — Catholic still, but Anglican 
 no more. Apart from him, what names represent 
 the most potent forces in theology and the higher 
 religious thought ? Of all preachers, Frederick 
 Robertson has most moved the mind and conscience 
 of this generation ; but though an Oxford man of 
 the time when the Tracts were at their n%ightiest, he 
 escaped from their toils with a rare love of reality, 
 an abhorrence of all false sanctities, a dread of all 
 violence offered in the name of authority to reason. 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 317 
 
 Frederick Maurice was a personality of rare charm, 
 with a soul ever turned towards the light, with a 
 large range of vision, and a love of love and light 
 that makes him the most mystical thinker of our 
 century ; yet his whole life was one sustained protest 
 against the attempt to incorporate the religion of 
 Christ in a sentimental and sacramental symbolism. 
 There has been in our generation no writer in 
 religious history so picturesque, no churchman so 
 bold in speech and in action, so possessed of a broad 
 and inclusive ideal of the national church as Arthur 
 Stanley ; but he lived and died as the resolute 
 antagonist of those Catholic schemes that so laboured 
 to sectionalize the church he loved. Of another, 
 though lower, order was Charles Kingsley ; but he 
 was in his earlier period full of generous impulses, 
 philanthropies, socialisms, quick and fertile at em- 
 bodying his ameliorative dreams in attractive fiction ; 
 and he was possessed with what can only be 
 described as a great terror lest the rising tide of 
 sacerdotalism should drown what was most ethical 
 and historical in the life of the English people. If 
 Oxford has had within this period a scholar who 
 could be named a Humanist, it was Mark Pattison. 
 But, though he fell under the spell of Newman — and 
 indeed for him the spell was never broken — yet to 
 him the Catholic theory became ever more incredible 
 and false, and the system ever more mischievous in 
 its working, fatal to freedom, learning, and all the 
 fair humanities. It may, too, be allowed to me 
 
3l8 CATHOLICISM 
 
 to allude to one, though the grass above his grave 
 is not yet green, who, of all recent Oxford men, 
 most fulfilled the ideal of the scholar in theology ; 
 and applied in a spirit as reverent as it was 
 thorough the scientific method to the history of 
 ecclesiastical institutions. But there was no man 
 who so strongly believed, or was so armed with 
 proofs to support his belief, that Anglo-Catholicism 
 was utterly unhistorical, as Edwin Hatch. It is 
 needless to multiply names ; it is not in literature 
 nor yet in theology that the movement has hitherto 
 achieved success.^ Perhaps success here is not 
 possible to it; the signal of victory would be the 
 sign of decease. 
 
 § V. The Anglican and the Broad Church 
 
 But this has brought us face to face with another 
 and no less interesting problem, or rather series of 
 problems. How does it happen that the party . that 
 has been so active and so eminent in literature has 
 accomplished so little in religion, while the party 
 that has accomplished most in religion has been less 
 eminent in literature? For two things seem mani- 
 fest and beyond dispute — the decay, pointing to 
 
 * We do not forget distinguished names in connection with 
 the Anglo-Catholic school. It has had, and still has, learned 
 historians and men of fine literary gifts ; but to have noticed 
 these would have taken us beyond the limits defined by our 
 problem. What was intended was to measure influence by the 
 major rather than the minor intellects. 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM-OLD AND NEW 319 
 
 approaching extinction, of the Broad Church, and 
 the revival and growing dominancy of the High. 
 It may seem more dubious to say, a main condition 
 of the success achieved by the High Church has 
 been the literary activity and efficiency of the Broad ; 
 but, paradoxical though it may sound, this represents 
 the sober historical truth. Why it has so happened 
 is a question we must discuss in order to get a fuller 
 view of the situation. 
 
 I. The same events that had occasioned the rise 
 of Anglo-Catholicism determined the being of the 
 modern Broad Church. The latter was due to an 
 attempt to adapt the Church to the new conditions 
 by broadening it as the State had been broadened. 
 Its fundamental notion was not their ideal difference, 
 but their material identity. The Broad Church has 
 throughout its history been dominated, though not 
 always clearly or consciously, by Arnold's idea, which 
 was also Hooker's, of the coincidence and co-exten- 
 sion of Church and State. The idea is at once 
 English and historical ; it implies a far deeper sense 
 than the other party possesses, of the continuity of 
 history and the unity of the institutions created and 
 mantained by the English people both before and 
 since the Reformation. The idea underlying the 
 old legislation was right, but the legislation was in 
 spirit and method wrong, calculated to defeat rather 
 than fulfil its idea. What was necessary was to 
 realize the idea by changing the legislation. Parlia- 
 ment had made civil rights independent of ecclesias- 
 
320 CATHOLICISM 
 
 tical tests ; tests ought now to be so construed as to 
 guard rather than invade religious freedom and 
 ecclesiastical privilege. The Act of Uniformity had 
 but created division and established variety ; it was 
 time to attempt, by an Act of comprehension, to 
 legalize variety and create unity. The idea was thus, 
 through the State to reconstitute and reunite the 
 church, as by the State the church had been broken 
 and divided. Comprehension and relaxed subscrip- 
 tion were to undo what uniformity and enforced 
 subscription had done. The Broad Church was thus 
 the very opposite of the Anglo-Catholic ; while the 
 one emphasized difference till it became indepen- 
 dency, the other accentuated coincidence and relation 
 till they became identity. The primary element in 
 the one idea was, — the English people constitute the 
 English church ; the primary element in the other 
 idea was, — the Anglican church constitutes the 
 religion the English people are bound to confess 
 and obey. The one conceived the church as 
 national, able to be, only as it included and was 
 realized by the nation ; the other conceived the 
 church as of divine authority, because of divine 
 institution, able to fulfil its mission only by enforcing 
 its claims. In the one case, not establishment, but 
 incorporation with the State or in the civil constitution 
 was of the very essence of the church as English 
 and national ; in the other case, control of the church 
 by the State was held to be alien to its very idea as 
 a society divinely founded and ruled. The parties 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 32 1 
 
 differed in their conception of the church, but still 
 more in their notion of religion. To the Anglican, 
 in a very real sense, church was religion, that without 
 which religion could not be acceptable to God, or 
 sufficient for man ; to the Broad Churchman the two 
 were separable, religion being inward, spiritual, a 
 matter of heart or conscience, while church was a 
 means for its cultivation, good in proportion to its suit- 
 ability and efficiency. In polity and dogma, ritual 
 and symbol, the Anglican could hardly distinguish 
 between accidental and essential — all was of God, 
 and all was sacred ; but in all these things his 
 opponent saw the creations of custom or law, to be 
 upheld or dismissed as expediency or advantage 
 might determine. In a word, to the one the church 
 was a creation of God, instituting religion ; but to the 
 other the church was an institution of man, though 
 religion was an inspiration of God. 
 
 2. Now these differences were radical, and deter- 
 mined in each case the mental attitude and action on 
 all religious questions. The Broad Church attitude 
 tended to become critical, acutely conscious of the 
 inconvenience of a too positive mind and institutions 
 too authoritative to be capable of adaptation to the 
 new conditions of thought and policy. Civil legisla- 
 tion was conceived as able to accomplish what was 
 impossible to it ; while the differences that divided, 
 the agreements or affinities that united men, were 
 conceived more from without than from within, from 
 the standpoint of the State rather than of the Church. 
 
 21 
 
322 CATHOLICISM 
 
 Hence, there was superabundant criticism of things 
 positive, the dogmas which authority had formulated 
 and enforced, the institutions it created and upheld. 
 The criticism struck the Evangelical most heavily, 
 for his faith was of the fixed and frigid type that 
 most invites criticism. The Pauline Epistles were 
 translated into a speech and resolved into ideas that 
 were not his ; his theories of justification and atone- 
 ment were assailed at once from the historical, 
 exegetical, and speculative points of view ; his doc- 
 trine of inspiration was discredited and made un- 
 tenable, and his conception of the church dismissed 
 as arbitrary and insufficient. But to hit the Evan- 
 gelical so hard was to do the utmost possible service 
 to the Anglican. It disabled, pre-occupied, paralyzed 
 his most resolute adversary, thinned his ranks, 
 blunted his weapons, deprived him of the convictions 
 that give courage. Then the Broad Church criticism, 
 while making no impression on the Anglican, ap- 
 pealed to the sort of minds the Evangelicals had 
 been most able to influence, surrounded them with 
 an atmosphere, begot in them a tendency within and 
 before which the old Evangelical formulae could not 
 vigorously live; and yet it did nothing to provide 
 new homes or agencies for the generation and direc- 
 tion of religious life. The Broad Church is only the 
 name of a tendency, but the Anglo-Catholic denotes 
 a party, well officered, well led, disciplined, organized, 
 and inspired by a great idea. The representative 
 men within the former have all been marked by a 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 323 
 
 certain severe individualism ; they have attracted 
 disciples, but have not formed schools. Arnold was 
 a man of intense ethical passion, and to it he owed 
 what we may call the most transcendent personal 
 influence of our century ; Maurice was a thinker 
 seeking to translate Christian ideas into the terms 
 of a Neo-Platonic idealism ; Arthur Stanley was a 
 charming irenical personality, fertile of schemes for 
 reconciling our divided religious society ; but neither 
 they nor any of their allies had the enthusiasm of the 
 sect. They loved a church as broad and as varied 
 as the English people, but would neither do nor at- 
 tempt anything that threatened to narrow its breadth 
 or harass it into a prosaic uniformity. And their 
 positive qualities helped the Anglican even more 
 than their negative. They loved liberty, used the 
 liberty they loved, but preached toleration even of 
 the intolerant. They were impatient of formulae, but 
 patient of aggressive difference ; they resisted every 
 attempt to restrict freedom, but encouraged attempts 
 at its extension and exercise. Hence they helped at 
 once to create room for Anglo - Catholic develop- 
 ments and to lessen the forces of resistance. Their 
 intellectual activity made the English mind tolerant 
 to the most varied forms of belief and worship ; which 
 means that they prepared the way and the oppor- 
 tunity for the men who believed that theirs was the 
 only form of divine sufficiency and authority. 
 
324 CA THOLICISM 
 
 § VI. The Theological Idea in the Anglican Mind 
 
 I. But while the Broad Church was thus securing 
 for it an easier path and a freer field, the Anglo- 
 Catholics were gathering momentum and growing 
 more missionary and theological. The Tracts had 
 been mainly historical and ecclesiastical ; only in a 
 very minor degree doctrinal and religious. They 
 had been more concerned with the archaeology than 
 the theology of the church ; but the work of Arch- 
 deacon Wilberforce on the Incarnation forced theo- 
 logy to the front with most significant results. This 
 work is an expansion of a section in Moehler's Sym- 
 boliky which, in its turn, is an application of the 
 Hegelian idea to the Catholic church. The idea, 
 indeed, is much older than Hegel, but its modern 
 form is due to him. Schelling formulated the no- 
 tion : the incarnation of God is an incarnation from 
 eternity. Hegel expressed the notion in the terms 
 of the philosophy of history ; Moehler translated it 
 into a philosophy of Catholicism ; and apparently its 
 changeful career is not yet ended. It was said of 
 Petavius, that he so penetrated Catholicism with the 
 Protestant spirit that his very apology for the Catho- 
 lic system was a victory for Protestantism ; at least 
 this much is true, that in handling dogma he was 
 the liberal, and Bull, his great Anglican opponent, 
 the conservative. Now if we substitute Hegelian for 
 Protestant, we may say much the same of Moehler. 
 It is curious that the fundamental idea of Moehler 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 325 
 
 was also the fundamental idea of Strauss,^ with this 
 difference : Strauss universalized, but Moehler sec- 
 tionalized the idea. Strauss transferred the predi- 
 cates of Christ to Man, conceived humanity as the 
 Son of God, born of the invisible Father and visible 
 Mother ; as eternal, sinless, feeble, suffering, dying in 
 its members, but in its collective being risen, reigning, 
 immortal, infallible, and divine. But Moehler re- 
 stricted the divine predicates to the Catholic church ; 
 it was the abiding incarnation of Christ, the Son of 
 God continuously appearing in human form among 
 men, with an existence ever renewed, a being eter- 
 nally rejuvenescent. Strauss' notion expressed a 
 consistent Pantheism ; humanity was the incarnation 
 of the divine, represented the process by which the 
 impersonal All created persons, passed from subjec- 
 tive to objective being, and was realized in the realm 
 of conscious existence. But Moehler's expressed what 
 we may term an ecclesio-theism, which represented 
 the church as the form in which God existed for the 
 world, and through which the world could reach God. 
 The church was thus conceived as arrayed in all 
 the attributes and possessed of all the functions of 
 the Son of God. The notion was audacious, and 
 destined to achieve victories in a field Moehler had 
 never dreamed of; it was adopted by Wilberforce, 
 though stated without the sharp precision which dis- 
 
 ^ Moehler, of course, was the elder and earlier. The Sym- 
 bolik was published in 1832, the Leben Jesii in 1835. 
 
326 CATHOLICISM 
 
 tinguished Moehler. The incarnation is the central 
 dogma of Christianity ; Christ as incarnate is, on one 
 side, the pattern and representative of humanity ; on 
 the other, the mediator between God and man — at 
 once the one sacrifice for sin and the one channel of 
 divine grace. The church is His body mystical ; to 
 be united to it is to be united to Him. It is, as it 
 were, His organized presence, exercising His functions 
 as Mediator and Saviour. It is impossible to tell 
 "whether men are joined to Christ by being joined 
 to His Church, or joined to His Church by being 
 joined to Him. The two relations hang inseparably 
 together." Hence the value of the sacraments : 
 they " bind to Him," make us " participate in His 
 presence," communicate to us His man's nature, in- 
 corporate us in His body mystical, "the renewed 
 race " which He " has been pleased to identify 
 with Himself." They are, therefore, the primary and 
 essential means of grace on which all others depend ; 
 they work our unity with the incarnate Son of God, 
 and through Him with the Father. 
 
 2. Now the significance of this work lies here ; it 
 supplied the Anglo-Catholic movement with a dog- 
 matic basis ; placed it, as it were, under the control 
 of a defining and determining idea. Most of the 
 positions had been maintained before ; what Wilber- 
 force gave was a co-ordinating and unifying principle. 
 This changed the whole outlook ; the question did 
 not need to be debated as one of Patristic or Angli- 
 can archaeology ; it had a philosophy ; its reason was 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 327 
 
 one with the reason of the incarnation. The church 
 was, as it were, the Son of God articulated in sacra- 
 ments, explicated in symbols, organized into a visible 
 body politic for the exercise of His mediation on 
 earth. This- dogmatic idea created the new Ritualism 
 as distinguished from the old Tractarianism ; and 
 changed the centre of gravity from a dubious ques- 
 tion in ecclesiastical history, discussed with learning, 
 but without science, to a fact of faith or living re- 
 ligious belief. Ritualism may be described as the 
 evangelical idea done into the institutions and rites 
 of a sacerdotal Church. The idea remains, and is 
 the same, but its vehicle is changed. To speak with 
 Hegel, the Begriff is translated back into the Vor- 
 stellung^ the spiritual truth is rendered into a sensu- 
 ous picture. Ritual is dogma in symbol ; dogma is 
 articulated ritual. Justification is as necessary as 
 ever, but it is conditioned on the sacraments rather 
 than on faith. Regeneration is still held, but it is 
 worked by an outward act rather than an inward 
 process. Where the pure preaching of the word 
 once stood, the due administration of the sacraments 
 now stands. To it an authorized priesthood is neces- 
 sary ; without it there can be no Eucharist, in other 
 hands the Supper is no sacrament or efficacious 
 means of grace. In order to a valid priesthood there 
 must be a constitutive authority — the bishops who 
 stand in the apostolical succession ; and a constitutive 
 act — ordination at their hands. The chain is com- 
 plete : without the apostolical authority no bishop ; 
 
328 CATHOLICISM 
 
 without the bishop no priest ; without the priest no 
 sacrament ; without the sacraments no church ; with- 
 out the church no moans of grace, no mediation or 
 reconciliation through Christ of man with God. Two 
 things are essential to the church, the clergy and 
 the sacraments ; and of these the clergy are the 
 greater, for without them the full sacraments cannot 
 be, while the sacraments cannot but be where they 
 are. They are therefore in a most real sense of the 
 essence of the church, while the people are but an 
 accident ; the clergy represent its formal or normative 
 authority — 2>., they are the regulative principle of its 
 being, give status to the people, do not find in them 
 the condition and warrant of their own existence. 
 But, so construed, the theory is less a doctrine of the 
 church than of its officers ; it is not the Christian 
 Society or people or commonwealth constituting its 
 officers or priesthood, but the priesthood constituting 
 the people. In its Anglican form the Apostolical 
 Succession of the clergy, or the bishops who ordain 
 the clergy, is a denial of the Apostolical descent of 
 the Church. And so, it is not too much to say, the 
 greater the emphasis which is thrown upon the idea 
 of the clergy, the meaner becomes the idea of the 
 Church ; and so we may add, that here the Broad 
 Church has a nobler idea than the Anglo-Catholic. 
 To resolve the English church into the Christian 
 people of England is to show a right conception of 
 the place of the people within it ; but to resolve it 
 into a hierarchy or hierocracy, with its instruments 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 329 
 
 and dependencies, is utterly to misconceive the rela- 
 tion of the society and its organs. 
 
 Yet even under these conditions the evangelical 
 idea has proved its energy ; the men who have con- 
 strued their church and their order through their 
 Christology, have been of another spirit than the men 
 who construed them through Patristic and Anglican 
 tradition as interpreted by an impossible canon. 
 The change is so marked, that, did we know only the 
 first stage of the process and the last, we could not 
 believe that they were moments in the life of the 
 same party. Ritualism, while the most superficial, 
 is the least characteristic sign of the change ; one 
 deeper and more real, is the supersession of the old 
 aristocratic spirit by one humaner and more demo- 
 cratic. The new men are possessed, as the old were 
 not, by missionary zeal, by the passion to reach and 
 reclaim the masses, by the endeavour to make the 
 church the attractive home of the people, and the 
 people the obedient sons of the church. The re- 
 ligious polemics of the older men were often inspired 
 by the intensest political antipathy to " Liberalism " 
 and all its works, even when these were philanthropic 
 or remedial. But the new men are distinguished 
 by a progressive spirit, which has tempted the more 
 forward to grapple, in the interests of the poor, with 
 our graver social problems, and even to help in their 
 practical solution. Of course the country has 
 changed at once with the party and because of it ; 
 while common tendencies have been at work in both, 
 
33C> CATHdLICISM 
 
 shaping their respective activities, and modifying 
 their mutual relations. The sense of responsibility 
 to the people, which is a tribute levied by their acces- 
 sion to power, has, of course, penetrated what used to 
 be called the governing classes ; the men who serve 
 the State live under a more jealous criticism, and the 
 men who minister in the Church have become more 
 conscious of duties, parochial and national. But, for 
 the clergy, the Anglo-Catholic revival has given at 
 once form and sanction to this new consciousness of 
 duty ; it has made them, while more priestly, more 
 evangelical, ministers of a more ornate service, 
 studiously seeking to help worship by a richer sym- 
 bolism, and to teach dogma by a more elaborate 
 ceremonial. Under their hands the church has be- 
 come a new institution, more active, more aggressive, 
 making claims that would have bewildered or amused 
 the men of fifty years ago. But while merely 
 academic claims are heard with scorn, claims sup- 
 ported by devoted lives, and illustrated by fulfilled 
 duties, are, even when doubted, patiently endured. 
 The clergy believe that in their hands are the in- 
 struments of life ; and they multiply symbols and 
 administer sacraments as men who possess and dis- 
 tribute the grace that saves. 
 
 § VII. The Theological Idea in the Church 
 
 I. But we must now attempt to discover and de- 
 fine in what respects the theological idea has affected 
 and changed the conception of the church in the 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 33 1 
 
 newer Anglo-Catholicism, so as to distinguish it from 
 the older. We may say, then, that the new men are 
 less Anglican and more catholic than the old, using 
 the term catholic in its proper and not in the Roman 
 sense. Their church, while no less political or in- 
 stitutional, is more ideal ; they conceive it more 
 through a dogma or a philosophy than through a 
 fixed and provincial, or limited, tradition. The old 
 and the new agree in identifying what may be 
 described as a given framework of the church with 
 its essence ; they agree as to its polity, the value and 
 function of its sacraments, the origin, necessity, gra- 
 dation, and succession of its orders. These things 
 must be, that the church may be ; whatever may be 
 changed or transcended, they must stand. In all its 
 forms Anglo-Catholicism is a theory as to the neces- 
 sity of a specific ministry to the church, not of the 
 church to any ministry. But these points of agree- 
 ment only emphasize the point of difference, with all 
 that follows from it. This point may be stated thus : 
 the determinative principle of the older men was 
 historical — tradition ; but the determinative principle 
 of the younger men is metaphysical — a doctrine. 
 What we may term the immanent idea is in each 
 case different ; in the one it was an objective model, 
 or specific authority — certain Fathers as interpreted 
 by certain Anglican divines ; but in the other it is an 
 underlying philosophy or theology, which penetrates 
 and modifies the whole conception of the Church, 
 and governs the methods and use of historical proof. 
 
332 CATHOLICISM 
 
 This philosophy or theology may be conveniently 
 described, though by a species of synecdoche, as the 
 notion of the church in its Catholic or Anglican 
 sense as " naturally of a piece with the Incarna- 
 tion " ; ^ in other words, the church is so construed 
 through the Incarnation as to experience a kind of 
 apotheosis, or to become " a new and higher mode " 
 of the profgundest mystery known to the Christian 
 Faith. The poetry in the sublime and beautiful 
 image of Paul, — the Church is the body of Christ, — is, 
 for the benefit of an institution, turned into the most 
 prosaic of prose. Truths that relate to the thean- 
 thropic Person, His sanctity. His sovereignty over 
 mind. His authority over conscience through belief, 
 become predicable of a church with a specific organi- 
 zation, which, as continuing the work of the Founder, 
 is the only recognised way of man reaching God or 
 God reaching man. " Access to God " is free to a 
 man, provided he belongs to the one body ; " fellow- 
 ship with God " is possible " only through member- 
 ship in the one body and by dependence on social 
 sacraments," " of which ordained ministers are the 
 appointed instruments." ^ And so the church, taken 
 as strictly an episcopal and sacerdotal institution, 
 becomes the mystical and " Spirit-bearing " body,^ 
 created and inhabited by Christ, and possessed of all 
 
 * Gore, The Church and the Ministry^ p. 64 ; Lux Mundi^ 
 
 p. 367. 
 
 * Gore, The Church and the Ministry^ pp. 93, 94. 
 ^ Lux Mundi, p. 321. 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 333 
 
 the energies, capabilities, and functions of a living 
 organism. It may be conceived as a colossal in- 
 dividual, whose years are centuries, whose life is 
 continuous, and who alone is able, by virtue of its 
 apostolic descent and proper administration of sacra- 
 ments, to articulate and realize Christ's presence on 
 earth. 
 
 2. So much for the determinative idea translated 
 into an ecclesiastical and institutional form ; now a 
 word or two as to its action on Anglo-Catholicism. 
 For one thing, the point of emphasis was changed ; 
 it passed from the Patristic period to the church as a 
 unity, living, catholic, continuous. The change was, 
 as it were, from the idea of the law that ruled the 
 body, to the idea of the body that made the law. 
 The church in a sense superseded the Fathers, and 
 though Apostolic and Patristic voices are still heard 
 with reverence, it is less as independent authorities and 
 more as organs through which the society has spoken ; 
 they must be canonized that they may have authority. 
 But this change involves another. The authority the 
 older men appealed to was specific and concrete, 
 — antiquity as understood by recognized Anglican 
 scholars ; but the authority of the younger men is 
 more general and ideal, either a composite abstraction 
 spoken of in historical terms as "the Catholic 
 Church," or a series of selected opinions called " the 
 Catholic Tradition." By the very terms of the appeal 
 and the logical necessities of the situation, the 
 authority appealed to is masked and made but an 
 
334 CA THOLICISM 
 
 echo of the appealing voice ; for an eclectic Catholi- 
 cism is the most arbitrary of individualisms. It is but 
 subjective tendencies or judgments done into oecu- 
 menical formulae. The man who speaks is for the 
 time being "the Catholic Church"; the thing he 
 believes is " the Catholic Tradition." And under the 
 use of concrete terms he hides a pure abstraction, 
 which has nothing corresponding to it in the whole 
 field of history. If the usage and connotation be 
 carefully analyzed, we shall find that what it really 
 denotes is the merest " private judgment " enunciating 
 its own deliverances and definitions as decrees of the 
 catholic church. And this involves another differ- 
 ence : the older men defended dogma by institutions, 
 the younger defend institutions by dogma ; which 
 means that the attitude of the mind to the ideal con- 
 tents of religion and to the intellectual tendencies of 
 the age has changed. The old attitude to reason was 
 hostile, the new is friendly ; the older men had the 
 idea of an authority that must be obeyed, but the 
 younger have the idea of an authority that must be 
 adapted to living thought. The " Anglicans " laboured 
 so to organize the church after a definite ideal, that 
 it might the more effectually resist the modern spirit : 
 but the new " Catholics " endeavour so to construe 
 the traditional creed as to make it incorporate the 
 ideas of the age. The " Anglican " idea of the 
 church was more concrete, and its conception of 
 authority more defined ; while the " Catholic " idea 
 of authority is more elastic, and of the church, on the 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM-OLD AND NEW 335 
 
 intellectual side, more flexible — so much so, that it is 
 conceived as able to assimilate all new material, to 
 welcome and give place to all new knowledge.^ In a 
 word, a new philosophy, and, as a consequence, a new 
 theology, has penetrated the Anglican system : and, 
 though old terms and positions survive, the philo- 
 sophy has just to be allowed to do its work, and the 
 new will not be as the old. 
 
 § VIII. The Church and the Age 
 
 My purpose has been analytical and historical 
 rather than critical ; and I shall not here attempt a 
 criticism, either philosophical or historical, of the 
 theory whose growth has been described.^ But I 
 may venture, in conclusion, to raise two practical 
 points which seem to deserve discussion. 
 
 I. The church may have a message to the age, but 
 the age has also a message to the church. And it is 
 possible that in the age's message there may be most 
 of the voice of God. To the being and character of 
 the age the church has contributed ; and has there- 
 fore its own share of responsibility for what the age 
 is. In every period its one clear duty is this — to 
 turn for living men the idealities of religion into the 
 realities of being. Hence the question which our age 
 addresses to the church may be stated thus : — Is 
 there any power within you that can make the Chris- 
 
 ^ Lux Mundi^ Preface, p. ix. 
 
 * But see a?ite, pp. 167 ff. ; and the concluding chapters of 
 the Place of Christy etc. 
 
336 CATHOLICISM 
 
 tian Faith credible to the living reason and authori- 
 tative to the living conscience ? Are you able to 
 make it so to pervade the atmosphere we breathe, 
 and impregnate the soil on which we grow, as to be, 
 as if by a natural process, incorporated into our 
 being, or as to become the determinative factor of 
 our personal characters, ideals, ends, and ot our 
 collective customs, institutions, laws ? To have such 
 a problem so stated is to feel rebuked and humbled. 
 We are in the nineteenth century of the Christian 
 era ; for almost all these centuries Christianity has 
 lived on our soil, for the greater part of them we have 
 been formally and ostensibly Christian. Yet we are 
 faced by problems which imply that there are whole 
 provinces of our national and social life where Chris- 
 tianity as a religion has little place and less power, 
 and a multitude of minds for whom it has as a Faith 
 no reality, no credibility, and no authority. At such 
 a moment to profess pessimism were to confess to 
 defeat ; but to cultivate optimism were to prepare for 
 extinction. No man who believes in the Christian 
 religion can despair of its success ; no man who loves 
 his people can be satisfied with their state, or per- 
 suade himself that it proves the sufficiency of the 
 church or churches which have been charged with the 
 realization of the religion. Class interests, passions, 
 prejudices, still reign untempered by love ; they have 
 grown more bitter and dangerous since they have 
 come to contend hand to hand, foot to foot, for the 
 seat of sovereignty. The rebellion arms can quell 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM—OLD AND NEW 337 
 
 may be easily ended ; but the slow revolution worked 
 by inexorable law mocks at arms or dynastic forces, 
 and can be changed into a beneficent process only by 
 the gracious energies of religion. Such a revolution is 
 even now in process ; but has religion so penetrated 
 the people by whom it is being accomplished that 
 the church can watch its completion with a light 
 heart and an easy conscience? Our political prob- 
 lems are grave, but our economical are graver, and 
 still more grave are our social. Towards the solution 
 of the economical many natural factors are co-oper- 
 ating ; the intellects and energies engaged in the 
 industries are, by combinations, councils, arbitrations, 
 and enlarged education, by securing the more equal 
 and equitable distribution of wealth, contributing to 
 the creation of happier conditions. But in the solu- 
 tion of our social problems the supreme factor is the 
 religious, the factor that fashions upright, honourable, 
 beneficent men, that substitutes the reign of ordering 
 love for Rousseau's social contract or the iron hand 
 of Hobbes' strong man. Of all States, a democratic 
 most needs virtue, integrity, disinterestedness of mo- 
 tive, sanity of intellect, and inflexibility of moral will 
 in its governors and guides ; but while we cultivate 
 politics with passion, do we not leave the creation 
 of the politician to chance ? Have our people been 
 constrained to conceive that the office of the states- 
 man is not less sacred than the office of the church- 
 man, and demands, because of its greater perils and 
 more manifold temptations, a more enlightened con- 
 
 22 
 
338 CATHOLICISM 
 
 science and a larger endowment of grace ? Few 
 things are more disastrous to a society than the sub- 
 stitution of conventional for moral standards of 
 judgment ; and is it too much to say that the society 
 most purely ecclesiastical is also the most thoroughly 
 conventional ? Immoralities live as they have never 
 lived before in the public eye, and the scandals of the 
 West End do more to debauch the national con- 
 science than all the sordid vice and gaunt poverty of 
 the East. We seem to have reached a state where 
 evil has more solidarity than good : rich and poor 
 meet together and understand each other more in 
 their vices than in their religion, which ought to have 
 destroyed their vices, root and branch. But within 
 the community there lives this difference : the rich 
 have the gift of oblivion in a higher degree than the 
 poor. The easy conscience of society sweetly for- 
 gives the man who has sown his wild oats, but the 
 retentive memory of the people does not so readily 
 forget the ruin he may have worked in the process. 
 These, and things like these, formulate grave problems 
 for the church. How have they come to be ? How 
 is their being to be ended ? The higher the theory 
 of the church the deeper ought to be the notion of 
 its responsibility ; the greater our idea of its power 
 and its function, the more sternly must we judge its 
 failure. Wisdom is justified by her works : but if 
 the works are not there, or there in an altogether 
 inadequate degree, what becomes of the justification ? 
 But the deepest and most pathetic appeal which 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 339 
 
 our age can make to the church concerns the ques- 
 tion of what it is to believe. The living intellect and 
 the historical faith have somehow drifted, if not 
 asunder, yet out of relation : and where truth does not 
 live to the reason it can have no authority for the 
 conscience. The characteristic of the age is here 
 not so much unbelief as a want of belief, so ex- 
 tensively and uniformly diffused as to represent a 
 common tendency rather than specific causes. It is 
 distributed through all classes, and is peculiar to 
 none, though it receives in each characteristic expres- 
 sion. Among the less skilled labourers it is simply 
 indifference ; poverty shows no mercy to ideals, 
 thinking that what brings no amelioration is entitled 
 to no reverence. The man who with hungry mouths 
 to feed struggles with failing strength to feed them, 
 will not long continue to find comfort in contem- 
 plating the beauty and sufficiency of abstract truth. 
 The response of the poor to a religion which has no 
 concern or cure for poverty, is neglect of the religion. 
 Again, the hard-headed artisan has difficulties of 
 another and more varied order, and they grow with 
 his rather moody and defiant independence. He is 
 proud, sensitive to small things, especially if touched 
 with affront or condescension or disdain, and con- 
 scious of a manhood too honourable to brook those 
 class and caste distinctions that are often only the 
 more emphasized by the circumstances and conven- 
 tions of common worship. Or he brings a vigorous 
 intellect, all the severer in its logic for being without 
 
340 CATHOLICISM 
 
 formal culture, to bear on formulae that have survived 
 their occasion or lost their original sense, and yet 
 have in his mind continued to be identified with the 
 essence of religion ; and he forthwith resolves the 
 formulae and the religion into a series of fantastic 
 absurdities, which only folly or knavery or the blind- 
 est self-interest can tempt men to believe. The 
 parson or preacher he regards with lofty scorn as 
 the mercenary impersonation of all the superstitions 
 he most despises ; and his most effective and offensive 
 weapons of assault he draws from the Old Testament 
 Scriptures, conceived as so inspired that every word, 
 character, and event is due to the direct action of 
 the Almighty. In the educated classes similar types 
 of unbelief, often in still cruder forms, are represented ; 
 only here fashion and current tendencies account for 
 more. The fleshly materialism of our gilded youth, 
 too gross to care for any intellectual justification, is 
 an utterly vile thing ; while noble purposes may live 
 within and speak through the reason and conscience 
 of the secularist artisan. The doubt that is too in- 
 dolent to reason or to be reasoned with, or that is 
 indulged as a private intellectual luxury, or that is 
 used to give point and flavour to an otherwise vacu- 
 ous cynicism ; the agnosticism that speaks the language 
 of one set, and the pessimism that repeats the for- 
 mulae of another ; the cultivated indifference that 
 treats as bad form every allusion to religion ; the 
 culture that believes in translating dogma into the 
 language of the club or the coterie; the scientific 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 34 1 
 
 temper that despises religion, or benevolently deals 
 with it as if it were a thing for weak or dishonest 
 intellects, because it does not follow the processes or 
 attain the results of some science misdescribed as 
 exact — these and many similar phases of floating 
 opinion may be found in society and in literature. 
 They are easily over-estimated, easily under-esti- 
 mated, and still more easily misconceived. Singly 
 they may be insignificant, but collectively their sig- 
 nificance is immense. They mean that the unsettle- 
 ment of belief is general ; that men cannot think, 
 or speak, in the society of the thoughtful, without 
 feeling it ; that in religious matters it is true cour- 
 tesy to assume difference, and avoid speech : and 
 that it is only reasonable to suppose that every new 
 science will be in conflict with the old faith. But 
 the fateful agitation is not the superficial ; it is rather 
 the deeper movement of thought that throws up 
 and throws out the bubbles and eddies of the surface. 
 The old conception of nature and man, of the uni- 
 verse and its history, is breaking up ; a new concep- 
 tion is making its way into the collective conscious- 
 ness and becoming the regulative principle of all 
 its thinking ; with the inevitable result that religious 
 beliefs, if they are to live, must undergo a correspon- 
 dent transformation. Our most real and radical 
 scientific enquiries raise questions as to creation, 
 the Creator and His mode of working, as to man 
 and his origin, the being of sin, the birth of re- 
 ligion, the reality of progress ; our most rigorous 
 
342 CATHOLICISM 
 
 and fruitful historical enquiries deal with the gene- 
 sis of social and religious institutions, the evolu- 
 tion of thought, the formation and growth, now of 
 mythologies, now of theologies ; the place and 
 composition of religious books, the appearance and 
 action of religious personalities ; and these in the 
 most inexorable way compel men, if they would 
 be reasonable while religious, to ask how the new 
 methods affect their own beliefs. The scientific 
 temper of to-day may be described as a passion to 
 explore and explain origins, and to find out the 
 reason and method of a thing's becoming ; and it 
 is so universal that no belief or institution can es- 
 cape the enquiry, how, when, and why it came to 
 be. This means that the ultimate problem of a 
 church is not to explain the faith it has authorita- 
 tively defined, but to vindicate the process by which 
 it became possessed of the authority to define it, 
 the competence to enforce what it has defined. 
 Hence the final word of our age to Anglo-Catholi- 
 cism, and all modes of verifying theology or realiz- 
 ing religion by authoritative institutions is this : 
 What claims to authenticate our most fundamental 
 beliefs must have nothing dubious about its own title 
 deeds. 
 
 It is possible to speak in this way, simply because 
 above all other facts this fact is evident : that the 
 Christian religion has not been so interpreted by the 
 societies or churches in England whose mission it is 
 to realize it, as to have penetrated, possessed and com- 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 343 
 
 manded the English people. We are still far from the 
 kingdom of heaven ; and of all evidences of truth, alike 
 as regards a man and a society, the most infallible 
 is the ancient canon, " By their fruits ye shall know 
 them." This is not to be construed as a word of 
 reproach against the English church as a church. 
 The writer feels that there is nothing less noble or 
 more despicable than the mutual reproaches of re- 
 ligious men and societies, or the memory too mind- 
 ful of past faults, and too forgetful of present duties, 
 especially those of charity and truth. But what he 
 means is this, that those who claim that a given 
 church is the one and only divinely created and 
 guided church of Christ for the English people, 
 are not dealt with seriously unless their church be 
 required to have lived up to its character, and have 
 proved it through its works. There is no tribute to a 
 man or institution like the demand that he or it be 
 no less or no worse than his or its claims. Now, it is 
 not too much to say, in the face of what has been 
 said, that the church has not made its supernatural 
 character obvious by its works ; and for an insti- 
 tution that must be supernatural to be anything 
 at all, this is certainly a serious circumstance. If 
 its character and claims are things that have still, 
 after all these centuries of opportunity and endea- 
 vour, to be proved by an argumentative and eviden- 
 tial process, then the process must be cogent indeed, 
 sufficient at least to satisfy a reason both scientific 
 and reverent. An age which deeply revares good 
 
344 ^^ THOLICISM 
 
 things well done, but is dubious and slow of con- 
 viction as to high abstract claims, is a trying age 
 for a system or a society whose claims are mainly 
 abstract, and whose evidences are not very apparent 
 in the realm of the real. 
 
 2. If the church is to serve the age, it must be by 
 embodying more of the mind and ideal of the Master. 
 It must be the church in His sense and for His ends. 
 We have already seen something of the claims made 
 by the Anglo-Catholics on behalf of the church as 
 they conceive it. It- is Christ's Spirit-bearing body, 
 "the special and covenanted sphere of His regular 
 and uniform operations." ^ The Church has a finality 
 which belongs to its very essence, " expressed in the 
 once for all delivered faith, in the fulness of the once 
 for all given grace, in the Visible Society once for all 
 instituted," " and in a once for all empowered and 
 commissioned ministry." ^ By virtue of the first it is 
 the custodian and interpreter of the truth ; by virtue 
 of the second it possesses the Sacraments, which are 
 instruments for the communication of grace ; because 
 of the third the Church is a political unity into which 
 man must be incorporated to be truly and effectually 
 saved ; in the fourth "the instrument of unity" is sup- 
 plied, " and no man can share her (the Church's) 
 fellowship except in acceptance of the offices of her 
 ministry." ^ Now, of these the last is the greatest and 
 
 * Lux Mundiy pp. 312, 322. 
 
 * The Church and the Ministry, pp. 64, 65. 
 3 Ibid. p. 86. 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM-OLD AND NEW 345 
 
 most essential. Though it may be argued, all are alike 
 necessary and distinction between necessities cannot 
 be drawn ; yet here this distinction exists, the apos- 
 tolic ministry is the condition through which the other 
 things are ; it is primary, they are secondary and 
 sequent ; without it there can be no unity, no sacra- 
 mental grace, no authoritative transmission and defi- 
 nition of truth ; with it these things cannot but be. 
 
 Now, into this question I will not enter further 
 than to say : the divine right of a clergy is no more 
 friendly to a happy, an ordered, an efficient church, 
 than is the divine right of a king conducive to a free 
 and progressive State. To make the kingship the 
 constitutive factor of a State, and the clergy or the 
 episcopate the constitutive factor in the church, is 
 to degrade equally the ideas of Church and State. 
 And it is here justified by assigning to the clergy 
 a place and a function quite unknown to the New 
 Testament. " There is a most exact correspondence 
 between the ministerial office and the nature of the 
 religion, or the offices of the church and its essential 
 character. Sacerdotalism means that an office is 
 conceived to be so sacrosanct, and so necessary to 
 man's worship of God, and God' s access to man, 
 that without it there can be no perfect worship on the 
 one side, and no adequate or regular communication 
 of life on the other. It means that the priest, as 
 a priest, and not as a person, and his instruments 
 as his, or as used by him, are the only authorized 
 and divinely constituted media through which God 
 
346 CATHOLICISM 
 
 reaches man and man God, or through which the 
 recognized and approved intercourse of the creature 
 with the Creator can proceed. Now, in the New 
 Testament no such ideas are associated with the 
 ministry, or with any person appointed to it. No 
 man bears the priest's name, or professes his func- 
 tions ; the studious avoidance of the name by men 
 who were steeped in the associations of sacerdotal 
 worship is most significant ; and so is the care with 
 which they translate sacerdotal customs and ideas into 
 their spiritual antitypes. The priesthood ceases to 
 be official by being made universal." The Christian 
 society is a priesthood,^ and the sacrifices it offers 
 are spiritual,^ the living man,^ the gifts and bene- 
 ficences which are acceptable to God,* and the praise 
 which He loves.^ The temple is no longer the build- 
 ing where the priest officiates, conducts his proces- 
 sions, and indulges in his ceremonial, but it is the 
 Man^ and the Society.'' The virtues enjoined are 
 not of the old sacerdotal sort, but ethical, inner, 
 human — faith, hope, love, the obedience that is so 
 pleasing to God because so helpful to man. " The life 
 of the communities is not bound by any priestly rules 
 or observances,^ but by the new laws of love. The 
 Church and its ministry, therefore, correspond through- 
 out ; the ministry is one of persuasion, that seeks to 
 
 * Apoc. i. 6 ; V. lo ; xx. 6. * i Pet. ii. 5. 
 3 Rom. xii. i ; Phil. ii. 17. ^ Phil. Iv. 18 ; Heb. xiii. 16. 
 ^Heb. xiii. 15. ® i Cor. vi. 19. ^ i Cor. iii. 16, 17. 
 ^Gal. iv. 9, 10; Col. ii. 16-23. 
 
ANGLO-CATHOLICISM— OLD AND NEW 347 
 
 move the will through the conscience, and both through 
 the reason and heart ; that cares in the new and 
 gracious way of brotherhood for the poor, the sick, the 
 ignorant, the suffering, the sinful, and attempts to 
 help, to love, to win by sweet reasonableness ; while 
 the Church is a society which seeks to realize the 
 beautiful ideal of a family of God, or a household of 
 faith, or a brotherhood of man. There is no place for 
 the priest or his office ; his sensuous sanctities are 
 unknown, and, instead, there is the kingdom of God, 
 and the endeavour to do His will. The rise of the 
 sacerdotal Orders is a question for later history ; it 
 marks a long descent from the Apostolic age, but is 
 certainly no thing of Apostolic descent." ^ 
 
 Many questions remain which we dare not here and 
 now attempt to touch. The Church lives, and moves, 
 and has its being in Christ ; but the churches have as 
 conditions of their being what used to be called the 
 pure Word of God and the Sacraments. We are 
 strictly within the lines of historical truth when we 
 say that without the Word no church can come into 
 being, and without it none can continue. Every 
 Apostolic Church was created by the preaching of 
 the Word, and lived only as the creative became the 
 preservative agency. As to the Sacraments, we shall 
 only say, once they became the acts and instruments 
 of a priest they lost their original sense, and were 
 changed from the possessions and seals and symbols 
 
 * The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, pp. 533, 534. 
 
348 CATHOLICISM 
 
 of the community into the appendices and articles 
 of an office. The most inveterate schismatic is the 
 person or the party that draws round himself or itself 
 a circle, and says, "within this is the sphere of 
 God's * covenanted mercies ' ; all without is the 
 region of the uncovenanted. We are the Catholic 
 Church ; all beyond is the province of the Sectaries 
 and the Sects." There is nothing in all history so 
 intensely schismatic as this pseudo-Catholicism ; it is 
 the vanity of the Sectary in its worst possible form. 
 And those who believe that the Church of God is as 
 broad and as free as the Mercy of God, may well be 
 forgiven if they speak plainly and frankly about any 
 and every attempt to bind it to a provincial polity, 
 and to make it seem less large and less gracious than 
 the action of God in history has proved it to be. 
 
 March, 1890. 
 February^ 189 1. 
 
VIII 
 
 "THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF "^ 
 
 THE appearance of the statesman as a theologian 
 is a matter of interest not only to theologians, 
 but also to the State. It speaks of interests which 
 have all the greater significance for this world that 
 they embrace another and larger, and of ideals which 
 are potent in making character and governing both 
 private conduct and public policy. What indeed 
 distinguishes the statesman from the man of affairs is 
 not skill in the expediencies of the moment, but the 
 possession of a lofty idealism. Plato has told us 
 that only the statesman under the inspiration of the 
 kingly Muse can implant in the souls he governs 
 the Idea, which is a divine principle, of the noble, 
 and the just, and the good ; while not till philosophers 
 were kings, and political power was wedded to 
 philosophy, could his ideal city live and behold the 
 light of the sun. Aristotle was doubtful whether 
 kings were an advantage to States, but he was clear 
 that they ought to be chosen for their merit, or 
 
 ^ The Foundations of Belief : being Notes Introductory to the 
 Study of Theology. By the Right Hon. Arthur James Balfour. 
 London : Longmans. 1895. 
 
 349 
 
350 CATHOLICISM 
 
 personal life and conduct : while the statesman might 
 be considered as much a lover of virtue as the 
 philosopher, since it was the note alike of the wise 
 State and wise man to regulate life according to the 
 best end. It is well now and then to be recalled to 
 the ancient idea that the State is, alike in basis and 
 aim, essentially an ethical society ; and that virtue 
 and ethical knowledge in the statesman are necessary 
 to order and progress in the State. Our tendency for 
 the moment is to substitute material for moral well- 
 being, to conceive comfort as the highest good and 
 poverty as the last evil. To be poor or to endure 
 hardness is to be thought incapable of being personally 
 happy or of contributing to the common happiness. 
 If Diogenes were to appear among us with his tub, 
 he would be told that before he could be heard or be 
 regarded as other than an object of charity, he must 
 have a more desirable dwelling, exchange his sack for 
 respectable broad-cloth, and demand of Alexander 
 not only that he get out of the sun, but actually dispel 
 the smoke or the fog that was intercepting its beams. 
 If Epictetus were to set up as a teacher of morals, he 
 would be assured that he could not be a philosopher 
 while he continued a slave, or think worthily while 
 his labour was another's. We ought, then, to wel- 
 come a book which shows us that we have a states- 
 man who at least thinks as deeply of ethical as of 
 material well-being, and who spends his quiet days 
 not simply on brown moors or breezy links, but in 
 attempting to lay anew, broad and deep and strong, 
 
''THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF'' 35 1 
 
 " the foundations " of the beliefs on which he con- 
 ceives society to rest. 
 
 § I. The Statesman as Divine 
 I. It does not indeed always follow that the states- 
 man who studies theology either applies his religion 
 to the State or serves it by his studies. We all 
 remember Gibbon's^ famous aphorism as to "the 
 various modes of worship which prevailed in the 
 Roman world " being " considered by the people, as 
 equally true ; by the philosopher, as equally false ; 
 and by the magistrate, as equally useful." But if the 
 philosopher chanced to be also a magistrate, his use 
 of the religion he held to be false was more a tribute 
 to the expediencies of government than to the in- 
 tegrity of philosophy. Cicero, too, as orator and 
 statesman, praised the popular religion, and played 
 the role of sincere believer, fervently recounting the 
 miracles it had accomplished on behalf of himself and 
 the Republic ; but as a philosopher we find him in 
 his treatises flouting this same religion with lordly 
 disdain. Marcus Aurelius appears in his Medita- 
 tions as the typical Roman saint, the ideal man of 
 the Stoics embodied in breathing flesh and blood ; but 
 he stands in history as one of the chief persecutors of 
 the Christian Church, leaving to us the hard problem 
 of reconciling the tolerant philosopher with the in- 
 tolerant Emperor. In the long roll of English kings 
 two stand out as eminent and learned theologians, 
 Henry VIII. and James I. To the fcwrmer we owe, 
 
 * Decline and Fall^ chap. ii. i. 
 
352 CATHOLICISM 
 
 among other things, the famous book against Luther, 
 the Assertio Septein Sacranientorum^ which procured 
 for its author and his successors the proud title of 
 " Fidei Defensor " ; to the latter, among other things, 
 the Basilikon Doron, which declared that he hated 
 " no man more than a proud Puritan " — a being 
 no king could suffer, unless indeed " for trying of 
 his patience, as Socrates did an evil wife" — and 
 the Apology for the Oath of Allegiance^ which ex- 
 plained his theory of kingcraft in the province of 
 religion. But he would be a bold man who should 
 assert of Henry that he was one of the most just and 
 magnanimous of kings, or of James that he was one 
 of the wisest. Still there is no principle which 
 English history more illustrates than this, that 
 problems, even in passing politics, are best under- 
 stood when looked at in the light of large ideas and 
 high aims. If we are unable to name Bacon a states- 
 man, yet we cannot forget that he was the most 
 eminent English philosopher of his day, — to say, as 
 some have said, of all time, is to speak foolishly. 
 Clarendon, once chancellor of the kingdom, has given 
 us a history, not unconcerned with church and 
 religion, that will live as long as the English tongue. 
 Last century Bolingbroke discoursed through five 
 prolix volumes on sundry matters, philosophical and 
 theological, including such congenial themes as " the 
 folly and presumption of philosophers, especially in 
 matters of the first philosophy," and " authority in 
 matters of religion; " and "Alexander Pope, Esquire," 
 
''THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELTEF'' 353 
 
 to whom the essays and letters were addressed, did 
 the system of his " friend and genius," the " master 
 of the poet and the song," into the polished measure 
 and empty optimism of the Essay on Man, But, 
 though Bolingbroke professed deism and upheld the 
 church, yet we may reckon it among the kind things 
 of Providence that he had not the opportunity of 
 realizing his " Idea of a Patriot King," or maintain- 
 ing as a statesman the church he did not believe 
 in as a man. In this century, statecraft and theology 
 have often gone hand in hand. In France, Joseph 
 de Maistre led the counter-revolution, and evoked 
 the papacy as the spirit which was to reduce to 
 order the chaos of loose and lawless wills ; the Due 
 de Broglie described the early, that he might inform 
 and defend the living, church ; Guizot, when relieved 
 by the Second Empire from the service of the citizen 
 king, occupied himself with the interpretation of 
 Evangelical Christianity and the revival of French 
 Protestantism ; while Jules Simon had edited Des- 
 cartes^ and vindicated La Religion Naturelle^ before 
 he was known as a politician and minister. Nearer 
 ourselves stand statesmen who were scholars, and 
 minded the affairs of the State all the better that 
 they did not neglect their own studies. We remem- 
 ber that one English Prime Minister of Queen 
 Victoria translated Homer ; another, the " little great 
 man " who " knew that he was right " — Earl Russell, 
 — was almost as active in literature as in politics ; 
 a third, Lord Beaconsfield was the author of some 
 
 23 
 
354 CATHOLICISM 
 
 of the cleverest, most brilliant, audacious, and ma- 
 licious novels of the time ; but novels as they were, 
 they were yet full of social, political, and ecclesias- 
 tical theory. And to-day the most venerable of 
 English statesmen has also been throughout his long 
 life an eager and prolific theologian. He began his 
 career as a sort of lay divine, claiming for his church 
 a higher place, more independent authority and in- 
 defeasible rights, than even her official heads had 
 then either the courage or the faith to affirm. In his 
 maturer manhood classical studies absorbed him, 
 and we had those delightful excursions into the 
 world of Homer and the Homeric poems, which 
 were all the more instructive that they were in 
 character so entirely distinct from the performances 
 of the mere scholar. If he had not what the 
 youngest scholar thought the only, because the 
 newest, scientific method of inquiry into the date, 
 the composition, the authorship, and the mythology 
 of the Homeric poems, he yet showed an unrivalled 
 mastery of the text and a familiarity with the world 
 it described and illustrated, which was all his own. 
 And now in his later days he returns — though one 
 may say from a maturer and higher point of view — 
 to his earlier interests. It is less the political form 
 and idea of religion, and more the metaphysical and 
 ethical contents — z>., the truth of it — that interest 
 him. There is a certain fitness in the man who 
 began his life as an apologist for a given theory of 
 the church in the State, ending his life as the editor 
 
''THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF'' 355 
 
 of the greatest of all the apologies of the Christian re- 
 ligion ever written in the English tongue. And now, 
 just as many have been feeling how the withdrawal 
 of a mind accustomed to study the State through 
 the large and luminous atmosphere of religion, had 
 impoverished politics, a younger statesman descends 
 into the arena and boldly challenges attention and 
 criticism by his Notes Introductory to the Study of 
 Theology. And what can a theologian do but ask, 
 Whither does this Introduction lead — into theology ? 
 or whither ? 
 
 2. Mr. Balfour here repeats and expands his older 
 book,* developing and applying its principles. And 
 we may at once say, the old book is the best intro- 
 duction to the new, and is, indeed, necessary to its 
 complete elucidation. The new work is distinguished 
 by many admirable qualities, is at once lucid and 
 subtle, brilliant and eloquent, always grave, yet often 
 lighted up with flashes of a nimble though ironical 
 humour, with a delicate yet elastic style, excellently 
 suited to the deft and sinuous movement of the 
 thought. If to be well put were to be victoriously 
 argued, this would indeed be a cogent book ; but I 
 must frankly, even at the very outset, confess that to 
 one reader at least it has been a deep disappoint- 
 ment. The early chapters awakened high hope ; 
 their form threw over one a sort of spell ; but the 
 
 * A Defence of Philosophic Doubt : being an Essay on the 
 Foundations oj Beliefs 1879. 
 
356 CATHOLICISM 
 
 spell slowly faded, and pleasure turned to pain, as the 
 underlying philosophy was seen to be shifting sand 
 rather than solid rock, and what could its unstable 
 weakness do but fracture the whole frail superstruc- 
 ture ? The farther the reading proceeded, the less 
 satisfactory the argument seemed. The criticism 
 that had appeared so pleasantly potent at the begin- 
 ning, became sadly impotent at the middle, and mis- 
 chievously inadequate or irrelevant at the end. This 
 was a conclusion most reluctantly reached ; but 
 whether justly reached, it will be for the readers of 
 both the book and this essay to determine. 
 
 It is, I hope, not necessary to say how thoroughly 
 I sympathize with Mr. Balfour's purpose, and how 
 entirely I admire the motives of his book and the 
 ability by which it is everywhere distinguished. As 
 one whose work and interests lie altogether in the do- 
 main of theology, I would welcome the incursion into 
 it of this brilliant amateur. For so far as it relates to 
 theology, properly so-called, it is an amateur's book, 
 and as such it ought to be judged. It is difficult, for 
 example, to conceive that any one whose knowledge 
 was first-hand, especially if possessed of a philosophic 
 and scientific mind, could have written the note on 
 pp. 278-9 as to the decisions of the early Church 
 relative to the doctrine of the Trinity. The very 
 thing that the creeds were not, was " the negation of 
 explanations." They were framed by men who had 
 elaborated doctrines which were theories concerning 
 the highest mysteries, and their decisions were defi- 
 
" THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF'' 357 
 
 nitions which were expressly intended to affirm their 
 own and exclude other and opposed doctrines. The 
 symbols both of Nicaea, and Chalcedon are distin- 
 guished by terms as strictly technical as any terms 
 in either philosophy or science ; and, indeed, the 
 great struggle at Nicaea, which it needed all the 
 subtlety of Athanasius and all the authority of the 
 Emperor to overcome, was against the introduction 
 into a symbol of terms and phrases which had been 
 coined and used in the schools, but had not hitherto 
 been sanctioned by the Church. In other words, the 
 terms were exactly what Mr. Balfour says they were 
 not — " of the nature of explanations " ; they expressed 
 theories, embodied definitions, affirmed one doctrine 
 and denied another, and were for this very reason 
 introduced, and for the same reason strenuously 
 resisted. But if in historical theology he shows the 
 mind and art of the amateur, it must not be under- 
 stood to mean that his appearance as a philosophical 
 theologian is held to be unwarranted. On the con- 
 trary, there is no field of inquiry where a fresh and 
 well-disciplined mind may be of more real service, 
 especially if he be in thought and language neither 
 derivative nor conventional. And there are sections 
 or borders of the field where a man of Mr. Balfour's 
 knowledge and speculative capacity is absolutely in 
 place ; and it is with such a section that his book is 
 mainly concerned. The men who are in this field, as 
 it were, common day labourers, may well feel cheered 
 and exhilarated at the appearance amongst them of 
 an occasional workman so effective in form and so 
 
358 CATHOLICISM 
 
 dexterous in the use of his tools as is this last comer, 
 who so happily combines the capacities of the philo- 
 sopher and the statesman. 
 
 Mr. Balfour well defines his initial position, which 
 also implies the function he is best able to fulfil, in 
 the sentence : " The decisive battles of theology are 
 fought beyond its frontiers. It is not over purely 
 religious controversies that the cause of religion is 
 lost or won. The judgments we shall form on its 
 special problems are commonly settled for us by our 
 general mode of looking at the Universe." ^ This, 
 of course, means that theology is implicit in philo- 
 sophy, or philosophy explicit in theology. As the 
 late Sir William Hamilton used to say, every question 
 which emerges in theology has before emerged in 
 philosophy. So the philosopher can render no greater 
 service to theology than the discussion in his own 
 free way and province of those principles which 
 determine its problems. But I wonder that Mr. 
 Balfour failed to feel how fatal to his theological 
 purpose is his want of an explicit philosophy. With- 
 out a positive philosophy how is a positive theology 
 possible ? The " mode of looking at the universe " 
 which is to determine our attitude to theology, will 
 not be created by a negative criticism of philosophical 
 or scientific ideas ; this is more likely to leave us in 
 an attitude of vacant expectancy, where perception is 
 blind and conception empty, than in one of intelligent 
 receptivity. One may deeply sympathize with Mr. 
 
 * The Foundations of Belief pp. 2, 3. 
 
''THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF'' 359 
 
 Balfour's purpose, and be all the more deeply regret- 
 ful that he has, by his peculiar method, done so much 
 to defeat it. But this is to anticipate a criticism 
 which has still to be made good. 
 
 The book, though divided into four parts, really 
 falls into three main divisions, which we may dis- 
 tinguish as the critical, the transitional, and the 
 positive or constructive. In the critical, Mr. Balfour 
 discusses and dismisses as philosophically inadequate 
 both the empirical and the transcendental theories of 
 knowing and being, especially as regards those ideas 
 which are held to be the assured and necessary prin- 
 ciples for the interpretation of man and nature. In 
 the transitional he discovers and emphasizes what he 
 holds to be a group of neglected factors in the forma- 
 tion of belief. In the positive, he attempts a pro- 
 visional justification and unification of beliefs. What 
 is to be here said will deal with these three divisions 
 in succession. 
 
 § II. The Critical Philosopher as Positive Theologian 
 
 I. The critical discussion, which runs irregularly 
 through the entire book, though it is more systemati- 
 cally dealt with in Parts I. and II., is applied to four 
 provinces — two philosophical, empiricism and trans- 
 cendental idealism — and two theological, the older 
 rationalism and its corrective yet counterpart, the 
 older apologetic and rationalistic orthodoxy. The 
 latter two need not concern us, though they are 
 perhaps more kindly handled than as tendencies 
 
36o Catholicism 
 
 historically effete they altogether deserved to be. 
 Nor need we concern ourselves with the discussion on 
 Transcendental Idealism. It is not very serious and 
 in no respect thorough, nor is it marked by the 
 author's usual subtlety and grasp ; while it really 
 stands outside the argument, which has not been 
 " arranged " " with overt or tacit reference to that 
 system" (p. 6). Only two things need be said: (i) 
 Mr. Balfour fails to recognize the conspicuous services 
 this Idealism has rendered to the cause he champions ; 
 and the recognition might very well have been as- 
 sociated with the name of the late Professor T. H. 
 Green, whose position is mainly here criticized. To 
 see what these services have been, we have only to 
 remember the controversies of from twenty to twenty- 
 five years ago, when, under the impulse given to 
 pamphysicism by evolution, agnosticism became 
 belligerent and constructive ; and the doctrine that 
 <* matter had the promise and potency of every form 
 and quality of life," was preached with eloquent 
 assurance from the chair of the British Association — 
 and then compare that most electrical atmosphere 
 with the very different " psychological climate " we 
 now enjoy. If to-day our empirics cultivate a 
 modesty which was then unknown, if they are more 
 conscious of the limitations and impotence of their 
 physico-metaphysical theories, it is largely due to the 
 criticism of the Idealism which is here so cavalierly 
 dismissed. (2) This Idealism is not to be understood 
 from the subjective point of view emphasized by Mr. 
 
''THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF'' 36 1 
 
 Balfour. He fails to apprehend its objective signifi- 
 cance, its ability to explain those problems in the 
 history of mind which remain in his hands the most 
 hopeless of puzzles. The one philosophy which has 
 done even approximate justice to the religions of man 
 and the nature by which they are, certainly deserved 
 juster treatment in a book concerned with the 
 "foundations of belief." It reveals, at least, an im- 
 perfect sense of the gravity and range of the most 
 serious attempt yet made to solve these problems. 
 
 2. But the author's serious and perfectly tireless 
 criticism is concentrated on what he terms " Natural- 
 ism." ^ His dexterity in dealing with it is mar- 
 vellous ; he argues against it, he examines its psy- 
 chological data, analyzes its logical principles and 
 processes, tests it by man, measures it by nature, and 
 finds it, in all its fundamental doctrines, either impos- 
 sible, or unveracious, or self-contradictory. Its creed 
 is composed of two elements : " The one positive^ 
 consisting, broadly speaking, of the teaching con- 
 tained in the general body of the natural sciences ; 
 the other negative^ expressed in the doctrine that 
 beyond these limits, wherever they may happen to lie, 
 nothing is, and nothing can be, known." ^ One would 
 have expected him to be rather more careful in his 
 definition. What is here described as the positive 
 element does not belong to Naturalism in any special 
 or even in any tolerable sense at all ; and what is 
 termed the negative is really the only positive 
 
 * p. 6. ^ p. 92. 
 
362 CATHOLICISM 
 
 element. For what constitutes " Naturalism " but the 
 affirmation that beyond the limits of nature, as it 
 exists to sense, " nothing is, and nothing can be, 
 known " ? The " Natural Sciences " have nothing to 
 do with it ; it existed before they were as they 
 are now ; they exist now where it is denied ; it 
 exists to-day where they are known only in 
 part.^ Nobody knows better than Mr. Balfour 
 that the most distinguished names in Natural Science 
 are those of men as averse to " Naturalism " as he 
 himself is. And this double definition was an argu- 
 mentative as well as an historical blunder ; it forces 
 him to become, as it were, a scientific agnostic, in 
 order that he may the better refute metaphysical 
 agnosticism ; and to become a fictitious character is 
 certainly not the most effectual way of ending fiction. 
 Nor is he a happy warrior who in battle strikes at 
 friends as well as foes ; in the result he may slay 
 what he most of all wishes to save alive. 
 
 The Naturalism he thus defines he discusses from 
 two points of view : the personal and practical, and 
 the psychological and speculative. Under the first 
 aspect, he shows its insufficiency to man as an ethical, 
 aesthetic, and rational being. This is, to my thinking, 
 his far most satisfactory piece of work ; for it I have 
 nothing but praise. In Part I., which deals with it, 
 his dialectical and literary qualities are seen at their 
 
 * That Mr. Balfour is perfectly well aware of the distinction 
 is obvious (see p. 134); but in his reasoning he often allows it 
 to seem as if he forgot it. 
 
''THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF'' 363 
 
 best. Under the second aspect he shows that Nat- 
 uralism is psychologically unjustified and specula- 
 tively incoherent ; its theory of knowing contradicts 
 its theory of being. His arguments are not new ; 
 they are the commonplaces of transcendental criti- 
 cism ; but they are vigorously put and strikingly 
 illustrated and applied. The experience which sup- 
 plies Naturalism with its premisses, is not a thing of 
 nature ; ^ nor are these premisses in the strict sense 
 true to nature. " The most immediate experiences 
 carry with them no inherent guarantee of their vera- 
 city." " Habitual inaccuracy " attends " the cognitive 
 leap through perception to object." "Our perceptions, 
 regarded as psychological results," are, " regarded as 
 sources of information, not merely occasionally in- 
 accurate, but habitually mendacious." ^ As a con- 
 sequence, " science owes its being to an erroneous 
 view as to what kind of information it is that our 
 experiences directly convey to us."^ Nay, more, 
 " Out of a succession of individual experiences, such 
 a fundamental scientific principle as causation cannot 
 be " reasonably extracted." ^ The conclusion there- 
 fore is — "A philosophy which depends for its pre- 
 misses in the last resort upon the particulars revealed 
 
 * p. 108. ^ p. III. 
 
 ^ p. 118. Cf. Philosophic Doubt ^ p. 287. "Science is a sys- 
 tem of belief which, for anything we can allege to the contrary, 
 is wholly without proof. The inferences by which it is arrived 
 at are erroneous ; the premisses on which it rests are un- 
 proved." '' P- 119- 
 
364 CATHOLICISM 
 
 to US in perceptive experience alone, is one that 
 cannot rationally be accepted." ^ 
 
 Now, why this elaborate analysis and refutation of 
 empiricism? It serves various ends, negative and 
 positive. It is only by "an effectual criticism of 
 empiricism " that Naturalism can be effectually de- 
 stroyed,^ and the admission compelled that we are 
 " as yet without a satisfactory philosophy." ^ Doubts 
 are started " as to the theoretic validity of certain uni- 
 versally accepted beliefs," * in order that a scientific 
 standard may cease to be used as " sole test of truth." ^ 
 Beliefs that are so open to doubt cannot be logically 
 held to make other beliefs doubtful ; the weapon 
 sceptical criticism has blunted, has lost its power to 
 kill or even to wound. The result is that our ethical 
 and religious ideas have nothing to fear at the hands 
 of those termed scientific ; their provinces differ, and, 
 as regards the right to be, the one class has no ad- 
 vantage over the other. They are in many respects 
 parallel, yet, in a sense, inter-independent. " Philoso- 
 phic Doubt " as to " an independent outer world " is 
 possible ; but " for all practical purposes " the belief in 
 it " should be accepted with a credence which is im- 
 mediate and unwavering." ^ Similarly doubt may be 
 possible as to theological and ethical beliefs ; yet they 
 ought to be accepted as necessary to the satisfaction 
 of human needs and the regulation of conduct. Both 
 
 p. 133. p. 134. ' pp. 246, 247. ^ p. 246. 
 
 6 
 
 p. 23^ 
 
''THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF'' 365 
 
 classes of belief are alike " symbolic " ; " the world 
 as represented to us by science, can no more be per- 
 ceived or imagined than the Deity as represented by 
 theology." ^ Our idea of Deity is no more anthro- 
 pomorphic than our idea of the external world. ^ 
 Our knowledge of matter is no more direct than our 
 knowledge of Deity.^ So ideas that are alike sym- 
 bolic and alike open to sceptical criticism agree in a 
 kind of unity ; neither can claim pre-eminence or be 
 used to discredit or disprove the other. 
 
 3. The cogency of the criticism is undeniable ; its 
 usefulness, within limits and properly balanced and 
 qualified, may be undoubted ; but what precisely does 
 it accomplish in Mr. Balfour's hands, and how does 
 it serve his purpose in regard to the " foundations of 
 belief" ? He himself recognizes its thoroughly scepti- 
 cal character, not only so far as empirical theory but 
 even so far as fundamental scientific ideas are con- 
 cerned.* His two books are indeed models of mor- 
 dant scepticism. He has said of his earlier book 
 that " the title has attracted more interest than the 
 contents," ^ but the title is hardly just to the contents 
 or their interest. It is not so much a "defence of 
 philosophic doubt " as critical doubt of all the philo- 
 sophies. These two are not only different, but almost 
 opposite things ; " philosophic doubt " is more posi- 
 
 ^ Philosophic Doubt ^ p. 245. ^ Ib.^ p. 246. ^ lb., p. 258. 
 * F. B., pp. 245, 246 ; cf. Philosophic Doubt, pp. 287, 293. 
 ^ Essays and Addi'esses, p. 284. 
 
366 CATHOLICISM 
 
 tive in character than doubt of philosophy. Hume is 
 the typical exponent of " philosophic doubt," but he 
 is in some respects much more positive and even 
 constructive than Mr. Balfour. He accepted the 
 current philosophical doctrine of his day : Locke's 
 "ideas of sensation," Berkeley's "ideas of sense," were 
 his "impressions"; while, we may add in passing, the 
 familiar " phenomena " of our contemporary thought, 
 and Mr. Herbert Spencer's "vivid manifestations of 
 the unknown," may be regarded as their living repre- 
 sentatives, if not strict equivalents. Locke's " ideas 
 of reflection," Berkeley's " ideas of imagination," were 
 Hume's " ideas," which were echoes or reminiscences 
 of the impression, true in the measure that they re- 
 peated it, false in the degree they omitted any feature 
 of their original. Now, Hume did not trouble him- 
 self with Descartes' speculative deduction of being 
 from thought, with his innate ideas and occasional 
 causes ; nor with Spinoza's substance with its two 
 attributes of extension and thought ; nor with Leib- 
 nitz's monads and pre-established harmony, or his 
 pregnant hint that the intellect was needed to interpret 
 the impressions which the senses conveyed in from 
 without. On the contrary, he resolutely left philoso- 
 phical criticism alone ; and, assuming the premisses of 
 the home or native philosophy, turned to the problem 
 they set him. He saw quite as clearly as our author 
 sees, that if " impressions " were ultimate, the origin 
 of all knowledge and its only authentic elements, 
 then those fundamental beliefs by which we inter- 
 
''THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF'' 367 
 
 preted both man and nature had no warrant in 
 reason. Every ''impression" was of a single or in- 
 dividual thing, a subjective experience which could 
 tell nothing of the reality or nature of the objective 
 world, its system or coherence, its causation or con- 
 tinuity, or of the continued personal being of the 
 subjective. What caused and what experienced the 
 " impressions " were alike unknown : nor were we 
 endowed by nature with any faculty or instrument 
 sufficient for their discovery. But Hume was at once 
 too subtle and too speculative to remain satisfied with 
 so purely negative a conclusion ; and so he boldly 
 essayed to explain how beliefs that had no warrant 
 from nature yet naturally came to be. His problem 
 was twofold : How did a fleeting succession of sub- 
 jective " impressions " come to suggest and to seem 
 a permanent and ordered outer world? And how 
 could a stream of ideas in perpetual flux, and suc- 
 ceeding each other with inconceivable rapidity, come 
 to bear the appearance of a continuous personal and 
 conscious self? The solution lay in the mystic words 
 " association " and " custom " ; association was per- 
 sonal, individual, the tendency to join together in 
 thought things perceived together in sense, to con- 
 ceive as inseparable, objects invariably associated in 
 perception ; but custom was collective — association 
 worked into a habit at once common and personal. 
 Now, Hume's scepticism, so construed, cannot, what- 
 ever we may think of its intellectual or philosophical 
 validity, be denied a positive character. His forma- 
 
368 CATHOLICISM 
 
 tion of ideas or beliefs by association or custom, 
 whether arbitrary, illicit, or accidental, was a philoso- 
 phic theory of knowledge adapted to a special, though 
 current and common, psychology. His speculative 
 sincerity may be doubted, even when his speculative 
 genius is admired ; ^ but his philosophy was a theory 
 intended to account for beliefs which, however unreal, 
 had all the appearance and served all the purposes of 
 realities. But Mr. Balfour, while more critical, is less 
 positive than Hume. He may not be sceptical in his 
 results ; but he is so much so in his argumentative 
 process as to leave us without any premisses that 
 can justify his conclusions. His book is the work of 
 a man who has "always found it easier to satisfy him- 
 self of the insufficiency of Naturalism than of the 
 absolute sufficiency of any" other system of thought; ^ 
 and what he gives is cogent destructive criticism, 
 unredressed by any equally cogent constructive argu- 
 ment. In other words, he vindicates his own prin- 
 ciples by invalidating those of other people ; but he 
 does not explicate or justify the principles on which 
 he builds his superstructure, or discover the basis on 
 which they ultimately rest. Hume was sceptical both 
 in his premisses and in his conclusion, though positive 
 in his method ; but Mr. Balfour, though positive in 
 his conclusion, is negative in his method, and un- 
 critical as to his premisses. He dismisses, by a 
 
 * Foundations of Belief, p. 96. Cf. Philosophic Dotibt, pp. 
 85, 86. ^ Foundations of Belief p. 92. 
 
''THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF'' 369 
 
 searching critical process, our current philosophies, 
 empirical and transcendental ; then confesses he has 
 no effectual substitute to offer ; and finally offers a 
 provisional theory for the unification of beliefs which 
 throws into the most startling relief all the sceptical 
 elements in his own criticism. 
 
 4. This criticism need not perhaps be further elabo- 
 rated, but it is necessary that its precise point and 
 purpose be not missed. There is no complaint that 
 Mr. Balfour's criticism of empiricism is destructive ; 
 the more thorough he can make it in this respect the 
 more wholesome will it be. The objection is to its 
 purely sceptical character ; it creates doubt, it does 
 nothing more. It does not make the formation of 
 belief more intelligible, the process of knowledge 
 more conceivable, its results more real, or its conclu- 
 sions more trustworthy. It involves all these things 
 in deeper doubt ; it turns the relation of mind to 
 nature and of nature to mind into a hopeless maze, 
 and creates suspicion as to the truth and reality of 
 knowledge. And this cannot be done at one point 
 of our intellectual being without affecting every other. 
 Scepticism is a double-edged weapon, and very dan- 
 gerous in audacious hands. If faith in one class of 
 beliefs is broken down, the result is more likely to be 
 that all classes will suffer than that any one class will 
 specially benefit. Doubt of the veracity of mind m 
 its simplest operations, has a subtle way of becoming 
 doubt all round. Certainly faith is not made more 
 possible by the processes and products of mind being 
 
 24 
 
3 70 CA THOLICISM 
 
 made less intelligible and real. The want of a 
 constructive philosophy, an architectonic idea and 
 method, is a fatal want in a book which aims at the 
 conservation of belief Descartes' universal doubt 
 was not doubt, and was not universal ; it was a pro- 
 cess of digging down to what the thinker believed to 
 be solid rock, in order that he might build upon 
 thought a system which thought could clearly con- 
 ceive : i.e.^ the critical process was necessary to the 
 architectural purpose — was, indeed, the first stage in 
 its realization. So, too, the Transcendental Idealism, 
 which is here so episodically criticized, may handle 
 Empiricism quite as caustically as our author ; but it 
 does so that it may discover the real factors or posi- 
 tive conditions of knowledge. Its aim is to make the 
 universe more intelligible to man, and man more in- 
 telligible to himself; to show the subjective reason 
 and the objective rationality in such reciprocal action 
 and correspondence as to make the process of know- 
 ledge a solution of the problem of being. The theory 
 may be true or it may be false, but, at least, it is 
 positive : for it so uses the transcendental factor in 
 knowledge, viz., the interpreting reason, as to discover 
 and determine the real ultimate of being, viz., the inter- 
 preted reason, and to make the thought which unites 
 these a veracious and rational process. But Mr. 
 Balfour's method is purely sceptical ; he leaves mind 
 bewildered in the face of nature, unable to trust its 
 perceptions, unable to determine what is truth, unable 
 to feel any reality in knowledge. By this means he 
 
" THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF'' 37 1 
 
 may have made the fundamental ideas of science too 
 doubtful to be used against faith ; but what is the only 
 logical deduction possible from the principles which 
 he has used his sceptical method to obtain ? Why, 
 this : — Since error creeps into all our thought, and 
 uncertainty surrounds all our knowledge of nature, 
 how can we know that there is any truth anywhere, in 
 any premiss or in any argument, any certainty in any 
 knowledge, any reality in any belief? If such be the 
 result of his sceptical criticism, where is the advan- 
 tage to faith ? For what does it represent in thought 
 save the method of the blind Samson, who sacrificed 
 himself in order that he might the more effectually 
 bury the Philistines under the ruins of their own 
 temple ? 
 
 § III. The Philosophy of Theology 
 
 So far we have been concerned with what may 
 be termed fundamental philosophical theory ; we 
 have now to proceed to its application to religious 
 or theological belief 
 
 I. And here I may say, Mr. Balfour seems to me 
 to have no adequate sense of the range and com- 
 plexity of the problem he has set for himself ; that 
 is nothing less than to find a positive philosophy 
 of religious beliefs. And this he is all the more 
 bound to find, that his destructive criticism has been 
 so merciless and so complete. But this problem 
 cannot be discussed simply as if it were a matter 
 of individual experience, or a question of con- 
 
372 CA THOLICISM 
 
 temporary thought. There is nothing at once so 
 universal and so particular, so uniform and so varied, 
 as religion. Man everywhere possesses and professes 
 it, yet it is never in any two countries, with any 
 two peoples, or even any two persons, exactly the 
 same thing. There are, therefore, two distinct yet 
 cognate questions : Why are religious beliefs at once 
 so invariable and so varied ? Why do they every- 
 where emerge, and yet everywhere assume some 
 specific local form ? It is evident that the special 
 function of the philosophy of religion is to explain 
 at once why religious belief is so universal and 
 uniform, and religious beliefs so multiform and 
 varied. The causes that produce it must be common 
 and continuous in their action ; but the conditions 
 that produce variation, local and occasional. The 
 creative factor can never cease to operate, otherwise 
 the belief would cease to live ; and were the modify- 
 ing conditions to become inactive, all beliefs would 
 tend to a monotony of character or sameness of form. 
 The one question is wholly philosophical, the other 
 is partly philosophical and partly historical ; and 
 taken together they signify that the only scientific 
 and satisfactory method of enquiry and discussion is 
 the constant correlation of the permanent factor of 
 belief with its varying forms, in order to the discovery 
 of the reason at once of its continuous life and con- 
 stant change. Now, what one most of all misses in 
 this book is the sense that there is such a problem, 
 that it is initial to all philosophical theology, that 
 
''THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF'' 373 
 
 till it be discussed neither the bed nor the material 
 for any foundation for belief has been found. One 
 is surprised to find Mr. Balfour distinguishing as 
 he does between "causes" and " reasons " of belief; 
 in the only sense tolerable in such a discussion, 
 " causes " are " reasons," and reason is cause. In a 
 scientific theory of the genesis of knowledge we find 
 its justification ; in a philosophical explanation of 
 the origin of belief we have its vindication. The 
 very process which, consciously and analytically pur- 
 sued by the individual, justifies his theism, produces, 
 when spontaneously and synthetically pursued by 
 the race, the beliefs which have organized and built 
 up its religions. 
 
 But we must take Mr. Balfour on his own terms ; 
 we have no right to demand his acceptance of ours. 
 Well, then, let us grant that his sceptical criticism 
 has been completely victorious ; empiricism is van- 
 quished, and its scientific ideas so paralyzed that 
 they can no longer be used as tests or standards to 
 determine the credibility or incredibility of theo- 
 logical beliefs. What then ? The beliefs are there. 
 What are they ? How did they come to be ? How 
 are they to be justified ? He has proved scientific 
 ideas to be so incapable of proof as to be without 
 normative value or force in the ethical and religious 
 realm, but he has not proved theological beliefs to 
 be true ; on the contrary, he has pursued a method 
 which compels us to approach them in an attitude 
 of doubt or even negation. The radical scepticism 
 
374 CATHOLICISM 
 
 which has created doubt of one class of beliefs, has 
 created a presumption against the truth of the other 
 class. But what do we find here? A sudden re- 
 versal of the method before pursued, and no attempt 
 made to compel the beliefs to give an account of 
 themselves, to justify their being, or to examine their 
 form and contents in the light of their source. The 
 whilom sceptic becomes curiously credulous, while 
 he skilfully does not see the questions which he can 
 neither discuss nor answer frankly and explicitly ; 
 but he offers an instructive substitute for a dis- 
 cussion. There is a titular inquiry into the " Causes 
 of Experience." ^ What are these " causes " ? The 
 most diligent search through the book has left me 
 still with the question, but without any answer. 
 This, of course, may be purely my fault, but the fruits 
 of the search are worth recording. " Naturalism " is 
 dismissed ; what, then, is to be our system ? Not 
 dualism, "a natural world immediately subject to 
 causation, and a spiritual world immediately subject 
 to God." This is "a patchwork scheme of belief," 
 " a rough and ready expedient " for escaping from 
 " the rigid limits of a too narrow system," excellent 
 in a measure, and not to be hastily condemned, but 
 clearly a system in which many find it " difficult or 
 impossible to acquiesce." ^ To those who " ask for 
 a philosophy which shall give rational unity to an 
 adequate creed " he answers, " I have it not to give." ^ 
 
 ^ Part III. chap. i. ^ pp ^36, 187. ^ pp. 187, 188. 
 
" THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF'' 375 
 
 Instead, "provisionally restricting himself to the 
 scientific point of view," he forbears "to consider 
 beliefs from the side of proof," and " surveys them 
 for a season from the side of origin only, and in 
 relation to the causes which gave them birth." ^ 
 This is excellent ; the best philosophy of belief is 
 an adequate theory of its origin, though we note 
 that the forbearance from proof is here logical, or 
 rather inevitable ; the sceptical criticism had made 
 any other course simply impossible, especially any 
 course involving rational proof What, then, is the 
 cause or origin of "the apparatus of belief" (a most 
 significant phrase) " which we find actually connected 
 with the higher scientific, social, and spiritual life of 
 the race " ? ^ The causes are many, " presuppose the 
 beliefs of perception " (the very perception which had 
 been proved so habitually inaccurate and menda- 
 cious), " memory, and expectation in their elementary 
 shape," and " an organism fitted for their hospitable 
 reception by ages of ancestral preparation." We 
 may note, in passing, how empirical and scientific this 
 mode of speech is ; but " these conditions " (not 
 causes^ it will be seen), " are clearly not enough " ; 
 there must be "an appropriate environment," and 
 within this is "a group of causes" (not conditions), 
 " so important in their collective operation " as to 
 demand " detailed notice." The name of this group 
 is " authority," and our immediate concern is with 
 it as " a non-rational cause of belief" 
 1 p. 188. 2 p 1^3 
 
376 CATHOLICISM 
 
 2. Now, our first question here is, What does Mr. 
 Balfour mean by " Authority " ? It is a large word, 
 denotes varied things, connotes many ideas. It has 
 one sense in literature, another in science, another 
 in law, still another in religion ; in the realm of 
 opinion it denotes the right to define and the power 
 to enforce belief ; in the sphere of action, the right 
 to prescribe conduct and to exact obedience. It has 
 been conceived as both personal and impersonal, 
 vested in the one case in a society like the church, 
 or in a body of beliefs like tradition, or a written 
 word like the Sacred Scriptures ; or, in the other 
 case, in either an invisible Head like our Lord, or 
 in a visible head like the Pope. Now, in what sense 
 does Mr. Balfour use the term ? He says it is " a 
 word which transports us into a stormy tract of 
 speculation nearly adjacent to theology " ; ^ it may 
 be too much to say it " has been for three centuries 
 the main battlefield of new thoughts and old," but 
 we can contrast it with reason, its " rival and oppo- 
 nent." ^ " We are acted upon by authority," but 
 when " we reason " we act, we produce.^ When it is 
 so described we seem to be dealing with authority 
 in its special religious sense, as legislative over 
 opinion, and judicial as regards conduct ; but this 
 soon turns out to be a mistake. For under one 
 aspect it is the Zeitgeist^ the spirit of the age ; then 
 it appears as a " psychological atmosphere," or 
 
 * p. 194. ' PP- 195, 219. ' p. 203. 
 
''THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF'' 377 
 
 " climate," favourable to some, unfavourable to other 
 beliefs ; ^ then it assumes the shape of " custom, 
 education, public opinion, family, party, or Church " ; ^ 
 in a, for Mr. Balfour, curious antithesis, " the equities 
 of reason " are opposed to " the expediencies of au- 
 thority " ; ^ and finally, it is said to " stand for that 
 group of non-rational causes, moral, social, and educa- 
 tional, which produces its results by psychic processes 
 other than reasoning,"^ and in this sense it is con- 
 trasted with "Papal infallibility." ^ What, then, 
 does he mean by " authority " ? Why, exactly what 
 Hume meant by " custom " ; what Mr. Spencer might 
 describe as the accumulated and transmitted experi- 
 ence of the race, of the State, or of the family. It 
 is an explanation of belief by means of a "non- 
 rational cause" ;^ in Hume's phrase, it is "belief 
 engendered upon custom," which custom he would, 
 in turn, have termed the creation of " a certain kind 
 of accident " — i.e.^ a result which was " non-rational," 
 or for which he could give no reason. We may 
 understand why Hume should tell us that the 
 " ultimate cause of the impression is perfectly inex- 
 plicable by human reason," that reason itself is only 
 
 ^ p. 206. * p. 213. ^ p. 215. ^ p. 219. ^ pp. 223 ff. 
 
 ^ In Philosophic Doubt Mr. Balfour seemed prepared to apply 
 his theory to theological as well as to other beliefs : " The 
 progress of knowledge has led us rather to diminish our esti- 
 mate of the part which reasons as opposed to other causes have 
 played in the formation of creeds ; for it has shown that these 
 reasons are themselves the results of non-rational antecedents," 
 pp. 200, 201. 
 
378 CATHOLICISM 
 
 " an unintelligible instinct," that " belief is an act of 
 the mind arising from custom," which is " the founda- 
 tion of all our judgments " — for that was scepticism 
 logically applied to all classes of beliefs. But what 
 we do not understand is how custom, though trans- 
 muted into " authority," should be able to save one 
 class of beliefs, while criticism is free to inflict upon 
 another the sentence of intellectual death. What 
 seems plain is that Mr. Balfour has, by emptying 
 the reason, or normal nature of man, of all construc- 
 tive ideas, emptied it also of all the higher beliefs, 
 and so has to invent a special agency or method for 
 their introduction. In other words, the sceptical 
 criticism has evoked its inevitable Nemesis — i.e.^ has 
 divorced thought as completely from God as percep- 
 tion from the realities of nature ; and so has made, 
 in Mr. Balfour's own words, " certitude the child of 
 custom,"^ only custom has undergone baptism and 
 appears as " authority," the demure mother of Chris- 
 tian beliefs. 
 
 3. Now, on this very curious theory, which is also 
 most instructive, especially so far as it illustrates 
 Mr. Balfour's own mind and attitude to theology, I 
 have some criticisms to offer. 
 
 i. What is the " reason " to which " authority " is 
 here opposed ? It seems to be not so much 
 " reason," as ratiocination. The use and interchange 
 of terms in this chapter is indeed a perplexing, but 
 
 ^ p. 164. 
 
''THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF'' 379 
 
 highly educative study. We have "reason," "we 
 reason " ; " reasoning," gliding out and in of sentences 
 and taking each other's places as if they were strict 
 synonyms. Now ratiocination may denote an activity 
 or exercise or process of the reason, but it is not 
 reason ; and is in no sense the antithesis of authority, 
 under which, as scholasticism shows, it may live and 
 operate with quite preternatural acuteness and suc- 
 cess. If these opposed terms had been carefully 
 discriminated and defined, we should have been 
 spared this chapter. 
 
 ii. It is curious that the author, in dealing with a 
 matter so fundamental to his argument, should never 
 raise the question, how this authority, or custom, or 
 group of causes " of psychic processes," acting within 
 our psychological environment, came to be. To 
 what kind or class of factors or agencies does it owe 
 its existence? He describes it as "a non-rational 
 cause of belief": but what is it itself — a creation of 
 reason, a result of purpose, or a non-rational effect of 
 a non-rational cause ? If reason made it, how can it 
 be truly described as "anon-rational cause of belief ' ? 
 If reason did not make it, what did ? Accident or 
 chance? But these terms denote the worst sort of 
 Agnosticism ; they are the kind of words which a 
 moment of puzzled incompetence surprised out of 
 sceptic Hume, and so they are alien to the mind 
 which comes to lead us into the inner court of theo- 
 logy. The question as to the source or cause of the 
 authority is determinative of its nature and character. 
 
380 CATHOLICISM 
 
 One would think that if it be a " rational effect/' it 
 could not be a "non-rational cause" of a thing so 
 rational as ethical and religious belief. And the 
 greater the function authority has in history and in 
 the formation of mind, the less can we conceive it 
 as a non-rational factor of rational things ; otherwise 
 the forces which govern man will cease to be either 
 theistic or ethical. And the puzzlement is increased 
 by some of Mn Balfour's own phrases. His 
 "authority" assumes various most rational forms; 
 " the spirit of the age," which is just the intellectual 
 atmosphere created by its living thought ; parental 
 discipline, which is surely the action of rational will 
 upon rational will ; education, which is the more 
 mature acting by means of rational instruments on 
 the less mature mind ; custom, which is a mode of 
 intelligent action become habitual and common.^ 
 What acts under these forms and conditions is surely 
 incorrectly described as " a non-rational cause of 
 belief." The phrase seems, therefore, to me either 
 insignificant or absurd. If what is here termed 
 authority, viz., our organized ethical ideals, intellec- 
 tual habits, and social instincts in their organizing 
 action, have a rational cause — and unless this be 
 granted we depose Providence for accident — then it 
 must be rational when it becomes a cause of beliefs. 
 And, whatever their cause, what are beliefs? Non- 
 
 ^ Mr. Balfour in one place explains "authority" by "the 
 non-rational action of mind on mind" (p. 238). Sentences of 
 this order cause one's ideas to get a little mixed. 
 
" THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF'' 38 1 
 
 rational effects? If so, what are the things whose 
 being Mr. Balfour would justify, but blind creations 
 of a blind cause, which man must with his growth in 
 reason get progressively rid of? 
 
 iii. It is also curious that Mr. Balfour did not raise 
 the question as to the relation of the individual to 
 these beliefs of non-rational origin. Man is ever 
 modifying his environment by his action on it ; which 
 means that this so-called authority is ever in process 
 of change, being, as it w^re, ever called to account 
 and compelled to adapt itself to the new mind and 
 its new forms of belief or modes of thought ; and this 
 further means that the person whom the authority 
 forms, in turn reforms the authority. For the life of 
 the belief is quite as significant as its origin. If its 
 origin is non-rational, it lives its life in a rational 
 medium, and has to accept the conditions under 
 which life there is possible. And surely it is more 
 philosophical to bring the causes of the origin and 
 the conditions of the maintenance of life into har- 
 mony, than to set them at war with each other. We 
 must also remember that the life of the belief within 
 the reason ever acts as a modifying force on the 
 environment. Mr. Balfour knows the distinction 
 which the Roman jurists drew between jus naturale 
 and jus civile^ and the use they made of the former 
 to affect the latter. The jus civile was statutory, 
 established and fixed law — so to speak, the actual 
 legal environment ; the jus naturale was ideal, the 
 principle of justice and equity immanent in the man, 
 
382 CATHOLICISM 
 
 yet, with the progress of his ethical culture, growing 
 ever more articulate. And the great jurists of the 
 second and third centuries, who were also for the 
 most part Stoics, so applied the ideal of law within, 
 to the actual law without, as to compel the actual to 
 embody the ideal, at least in as perfect a degree as 
 we are ever likely to see in time. And precisely the 
 same action is ever going on in the region of belief. 
 Whatever may be its origin, thought is a potent 
 factor in its modification ; and on its harmony with 
 thought its continued life depends. A " non-rational 
 cause" is no explanation of the being of a rational 
 thing ; and we may be certain that in the last 
 analysis the real source can never be different in 
 kind from the cause which secures continuance. 
 
 iv. The most curious point of all is this : Mr. 
 Balfour never raises the question as to whether the 
 authority which causes the belief justifies the belief it 
 causes. This surely was for his purpose the most 
 vital point in his problem ; apart from it, his cause 
 was without character or logical function. The real 
 question he set himself to answer was this : What 
 are we to think of Christian theology and the prin- 
 ciples on which it is built? It is not any or every 
 religious belief that he seeks to justify ; it is our 
 specifically Christian beliefs. He has made his 
 appeal to authority, which is " the spirit of the age," 
 our "psychological climate," public opinion, custom, 
 family, party. Church ; but these are all the most 
 variable of things. Our " psychological climates " are 
 
''THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF'' 383 
 
 more numerous, varied, and changeable than our 
 geographical ; the extremes are greater, the grada- 
 tions steeper, and the variations more sudden. Mr. 
 Balfour is a statesman as well as a philosopher, and 
 he will not think me impertinent if the point be 
 illustrated by his own position and experience. He 
 is by descent and family a Scotchman, but by educa- 
 tion and political place an Englishman ; the " psycho- 
 logical climate " in Scotland is Presbyterian ; in 
 England, Episcopalian : does his double nationality 
 duplicate his beliefs? Does it justify his being a 
 Calvinist and Presbyterian north of the Tweed, an 
 Arminian and an Anglican south of it ? Are the 
 proper beliefs of a man those of his "psychological 
 climate?" or is this "climate" a justification for the 
 beliefs ? or has it no significance for their character ? 
 But this is an innocent comparison, involving what 
 may be thought no very radical difference. Well, 
 then, Mr. Balfour, as a statesman, has helped to 
 govern India ; and he may one day be at home the 
 responsible minister for it, or even go out there to be 
 the representative of his Sovereign. Its "psycho- 
 logical climate," customs, education, public opinion — 
 in a word, " authority " — is very unlike ours : what of 
 the beliefs it causes? What is their truth, their 
 validity, their value and warrant ? The question is 
 not simply curious ; it is vital. If authority is in- 
 voked to explain belief, how do the beliefs it explains 
 stand related to theology and theological truth ? Is 
 religion to become a theory of " climate ? " And is 
 
384 CATHOLICISM 
 
 all idea of a religion true for all places, all times, and 
 all men, to be allowed to fall to the ground ? This 
 would be indeed a strange result to follow from a 
 philosophically conservative attempt to lay " the 
 foundations of belief." Yet it recalls the attempt 
 of another conservative and sceptical philosopher to 
 make the " psychological " coincide with the civil or 
 national, if not with the geographical, climate ; it 
 exactly repeats the theory of Hobbes, with im- 
 personal authority substituted for the personal king. 
 We were not surprised at it in his case, for he had a 
 frankness which was so blunt as to leave no room for 
 surprise ; but we do wonder at finding it in so acute 
 a critic of " Naturalism," and so strenuous an upholder 
 of theology, as Mr. Arthur Balfour. 
 
 * § IV. The Theology of the Philosopher 
 
 But it is more than time we passed to the con- 
 structive part of the work, if constructive it can be 
 called. Here it is more difficult to criticize, for the 
 points of agreement and difference are in these later 
 chapters so intricately intermixed. His argument 
 has about it the waywardness of genius ; it halts in 
 unexpected places, turns back upon itself, breaks into 
 felicitous asides, diverges into delightsome by-paths 
 The book indeed is redeemed by its digressions ; 
 without them it would have seemed a mere exercise 
 in cunning sword-play, but with them it has all the 
 appearance of an army of victorious arguments 
 marching into the battle. Were battles won by 
 
''THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF'' 385 
 
 gallant bearing, gay banners, and martial music, our 
 author would deserve to be saluted as a victor indeed. 
 What, then, is the method and principle of the 
 constructive argument? It starts with the pro- 
 visional scheme for the unification of beliefs ; and 
 here the definition of faith is significant " Faith or 
 assurance, which, if not in excess of reason, is at least 
 independent of it, seems to be a necessity in every 
 great department of knowledge which touches on 
 action." ^ In this sense it belongs in an equal degree, 
 at once to science and theology, to ethics and 
 religion ; and while the belief in an outer world is 
 more universal and inevitable than any single 
 religious belief, yet "these peculiarities have no 
 import. They exist, but they are irrelevant." For 
 man is a being of needs as well as of sense-percep- 
 tions ; and his needs require ethical ideals and religious 
 beliefs for their satisfaction. And just as in every 
 belief which has its origin in perception, we assume 
 some kind of harmony between ourselves and the 
 outer universe ; so a like harmony ought to be 
 assumed between "that universe and our higher 
 needs." ^ What strikes one in this rather rudimen- 
 tary equation of beliefs, is its unreasoned character, 
 indeed the utterly illogical and unphilosophical pro- 
 cedure by which it has been accomplished. Nothing 
 could be more different than the measure which is 
 meted out to the two orders of beliefs respectively. 
 The one class has been analyzed, criticized, satirized, 
 
 p. 240. * p. 247. 
 
 25 
 
386 CATHOLICISM 
 
 beaten and buffeted in every possible way ; the other 
 class is allowed to enter without any kind of question, 
 or any attempt to examine either its subjective 
 warrant or objective validity. But this difference is 
 a serious confession, either of the incompetence of the 
 philosophy to justify the beliefs, or of the incapability 
 of the beliefs to be justified. It is an acknowledg- 
 ment that they cannot bear to be reasoned about, but 
 live in a region of emotion or instinct, of feeling and 
 impulse. This is of all positions the most intellec- 
 tually dangerous, especially when the basis for it has 
 been laid in philosophical scepticism. For feeling is 
 an individual thing, living an unstable and dependent 
 life, noble only as it is penetrated by the intellect and 
 governed by the conscience. A distinguished German 
 thinker, whose philosophy was even as Mr. Balfour's, 
 described himself as a heathen according to the 
 intellect, but a Christian according to the heart. 
 And where such a schism has been introduced into 
 the nature, the old heathen is certain to prove himself 
 subtler and stronger than the young Christian. 
 
 Mr. Balfour, indeed, maintains that the relation 
 between our " needs " and their satisfaction is not as 
 " purely subjective in character " as that between " a 
 desire and its fulfilment." The correspondence is 
 that between " the immutable verities of the unseen 
 world," and " these characteristics of our nature, which 
 we recognize as that in us which, though not neces- 
 sarily the strongest, is the highest." ^ But what are 
 
 ^ p. 248. 
 
''THE FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF'' 387 
 
 these " characteristics " ? What faculty in us corre- 
 sponds to verity in the universe? Is it not reason or 
 thought, the faculty by which we know rather than 
 feel ? He had everything to gain by as free a use of 
 the critical method on the source, the form, and the 
 matter of religious beliefs, as on the basis and truth 
 of scientific ideas ; by his failure to use it he leaves 
 to the beliefs an unjustified existence, introduces a 
 hopeless schism between knowledge and faith, and 
 tends to reduce religion to a mere consuetudinary 
 and institutional system. Indeed, the notion that 
 religion — though not religious ideas — is the creature 
 of custom, the thing of " psychological atmosphere " 
 or political "-climate," is the historical correlative of 
 his fundamental philosophy ; and, though incompletely 
 developed, it lurks in all the constructive parts of the 
 book, notably in his theories of " authority " and of 
 " beliefs and formulas." 
 
 But I would not part from the book and its author 
 without expressing anew my admiration of its spirit, 
 and of his purpose and endeavour. It is a remark- 
 able achievement for a statesman ; and gives to the 
 State the happy assurance that a mind which may 
 yet control its destinies, has visions of higher and 
 more enduring things than the strife of parties, the 
 collision of interests, or the jealousies of classes. We 
 live by faith ; and this faith is here often fitly and 
 finely expressed. To his belief in a God capable of 
 "preferential action"; in an inspiration "limited to no 
 age, to no country, to no people " ; in an incarnation 
 
388 CATHOLICISM 
 
 which may transcend science, but is "the abiding 
 place of the highest reality " ; in Christianity, as a 
 religion so "effectually fitted to minister to our 
 ethical needs" as to be made even more credible 
 by the mystery of evil, which it so forcibly recognizes 
 that it may the more victoriously overcome — I en- 
 tirely and heartily subscribe. My criticism has 
 concerned not so much the end he has reached, as 
 his mode of reaching it. The way of faith is in 
 these days hard enough ; it need not be made more 
 difficult ; and it becomes those who believe that the 
 highest truth of reason is one with the highest object 
 of faith, to make it clear that, in their view at least, a 
 true theology can never be built on a sceptical philo- 
 sophy, and that only the thought which trusts the 
 reason can truly vindicate faith in the God who 
 gave it. 
 
 April, 1895. 
 
IX 
 
 SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 
 
 THE heaviest loss which theology has sustained 
 within the past decade seems to me, even 
 after the lapse of more than seven softening years, to 
 have been the sudden and premature death of Edwin 
 Hatch. Within his own communion more eminent 
 churchmen, and scholars of equal or even higher name, 
 have died ; but each, in a sense that was not at all 
 true of Hatch, either had finished his work or was 
 more a loss to his church than to theology. Light- 
 foot, a son of the same school, though of another 
 university, only a month later followed him to the 
 grave ; and he had by his learned labours built 
 himself an enduring monument, worthy, alike as 
 regards magnitude and quality, of the most heroic 
 age of English scholarship. In the following year 
 two distinguished churchmen died : Canon Liddon, 
 whose fine piety and noble eloquence made him 
 while he lived a potent influence both within and 
 beyond the Anglican communion ; and Dean Church, 
 who preferred to remain a dean when he might have 
 been an archbishop, and who was perhaps more a 
 
390 CATHOLICISM 
 
 man of letters than a theologian, with the keen 
 literary temper, and a tense nature which the love 
 of the old humanities rather cultivated than subdued. 
 Two years later Hort died, leaving behind work 
 much less in quantity than Lightfoot's, but marked 
 by rarer and more stimulating qualities, and a band 
 of eager disciples, quickened to activity by regret at 
 the stores of knowledge and the energy of construc- 
 tive thought which had perished with the master. 
 In 1893, about a year after Hort, death claimed 
 another victim, Benjamin Jowett, though he indeed 
 " came to the grave in a full age, like as a shock of 
 corn Cometh in his season." He had made his name 
 in theology, but had for years forsaken what he had 
 found to be its unquiet ways for the serener atmo- 
 sphere of classical scholarship and philosophy, and 
 had in consequence become, though in a narrower 
 region, an intenser and less resistible power, because 
 a power more intangible. He was the most distin- 
 guished figure in the Oxford of his day, the one name 
 that created a new mythology and attracted to itself 
 the most picturesque elements in the old, affecting 
 belief the more potently that his public silence and 
 his sphinx-like utterances in private compelled, in 
 order to the interpretation of his mind, a free use 
 of the young academic imagination. There was 
 indeed a peculiar pathos about his closing days ; 
 though he was a most social man, loving society and 
 loved by it, yet he was one of the loneliest of men. 
 He was the last Broad Churchman of the old school, 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 39 1 
 
 ?>., he was a Christian whose Church was the State, 
 whose beliefs were more akin to humanism than to 
 dogma and the creeds, oecumenical or particular, 
 whose love was for civil society and sanctity ; while 
 be feared priestly claims and despised the show and 
 the make-believe of sacerdotal religion. He was one 
 of the rare characters who could be cynical without 
 being bitter, who could be audacious in speech while 
 he seemed most innocent and bland ; and, though he 
 looked with a wonder, not untouched with pain, at 
 the ancient comrades who had risen in the church by 
 falling in the faith, he was yet able to retain affection 
 even where he had ceased to feel intellectual respect. 
 When he died, Oxford and England were the poorer 
 for the loss of one who had served the church by 
 being true to himself. 
 
 The two men we have described as " distinguished 
 churchmen " lie outside the scope of this paper. 
 Neither was, in the strict sense of the term, a theo- 
 logian. Canon Liddon was a man of strong religious 
 convictions and eloquent speech ; he believed in- 
 tensely, thought earnestly, and reasoned concerning 
 his beliefs with a sort of impassioned logic that was 
 very impressive when it had a large and strenuously 
 sincere personality behind it. But neither as thinker 
 nor as critic and scholar did he make to the theology 
 of his age any contribution that will outlast his 
 personal influence. And even before he died, his 
 influence had, just because of his intellectual limita- 
 tions, suffered, even within his own party in his own 
 
392 CA THOLICISM 
 
 church, what may be alternatively described as re- 
 striction or eclipse. He had built on tradition, and 
 when tradition manifestly failed as a basis of doctrine 
 and was forsaken by the more clear-sighted of his 
 pupils, he felt as if the whole structure of faith had 
 broken up beneath him. What we may term his 
 farewell to the pulpit was fitly spoken in St. Mary's, 
 Oxford, and was little else than a forlorn apology for 
 an impossible position. Dean Church, again, had 
 a keen and sympathetic intellect, a quick and assimi- 
 lative mind, which came of his literary instincts and 
 made him the very converse of Liddon ; one capable 
 of appreciating new points of view, adopting and 
 adapting them to older forms of thought, and of 
 securing for them, by vigour and grace of exposition, 
 acceptance and recognition. He was by nature and 
 capacity a Vermittler^ and he did his work with most 
 excellent discrimination. He understood Darwin 
 and appreciated evolution ; he had a critical intellect, 
 knew that criticism was inevitable, and saw how its 
 sting could be drawn by some of its results being 
 appropriated. And he wrote with the strength and 
 moderation of one who stood fast in the conviction, 
 that the old could best be preserved by taking to 
 itself as much of the new as it could absorb without 
 danger to its distinctive character and claims. But 
 most of his work was provisional and occasional, and 
 had a sort of periodical character about it ; as it was 
 done to meet an emergency, its significance passed 
 away with the emergency it satisfied. His essay on 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 393 
 
 Dante is perhaps the most perfect thing he ever did ; 
 while his book on Anselm shows how he could write 
 on a great theologian and find his theology — which, 
 after all, was his great claim to name and fame — the 
 least attractive or significant thing about him. What 
 he achieved instead was a most genial appreciation of 
 one churchman by another. 
 
 § I. The Cambridge Scholars and Divines 
 
 We turn then to the four scholars who were 
 theologians as distinguished from churchmen : and 
 of them, two were typical of Cambridge, and two 
 no less typical of Oxford. This is not a study in 
 academic types ; but the difference in these univer- 
 sities is a basis for a classification which is not 
 altogether unjust to character. It will be most 
 convenient to begin with the Cambridge men. But 
 we can hardly think of the two who have died, 
 without thinking of a third, who, happily, still lives, 
 though in a sphere which, unhappily, forbids the 
 expectation of much further theological work from 
 his hand. 
 
 I. Lightfoot, Westcott, and Hort represent the 
 nearest thing to a triumvirate in learning any Eng- 
 lish university has known, at least in our century ; 
 possibly too, the nearest approach to a distinct 
 tendency or school, since the days of the Cambridge 
 Platonists, Whichcote, Cudworth, and More. Each 
 in his own way was a genuine son of his university, 
 enhancing its reputation by embodying its historical 
 
394 ^^ THOLICISM 
 
 character and distinctive genius. Lightfoot was a 
 scholar whose learning recalled that of his illustrious 
 namesake of the seventeenth century ; while his 
 energy in controversy and mastery of his weapons 
 reminded one now of Whitgift and now of Bentley. 
 He was, indeed, altogether too massive and sincere 
 to stoop to the arts and language of Elizabeth's 
 famous archbishop, though, in explanation, it ought 
 to be remembered that in these respects the distance 
 between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century 
 is simply immeasurable ; and his manhood was too 
 large and sane and kindly to allow him to flay an 
 opponent in the merciless manner of P hileleutherus 
 Lipsiensis, He had, as his criticism of Supernatural 
 Religion showed, all Bentley's power to hit an oppo- 
 nent hard and straight, though, happily, without his 
 marvellous ingenuity in quarrelling with his friends 
 and provoking quarrels where he need have none. He 
 had, too, if not all his fine scholarship, yet his rare 
 critical genius, and, again happily, without the 
 eccentricity of mind that made the greatest English 
 scholar of his century the worst judge of English 
 literature. 
 
 Dr. Westcott we here think of as the Cambridge 
 professor with a very distinct message to his age, and 
 not as the Bishop of Durham. We now know that 
 he combines in a rare degree the natures of the 
 speculative and the practical man, the dreamer and 
 the realist, the intellect that can see visions and the 
 will that can realize the visions he has seen. But, 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 395 
 
 meanwhile, we forget the administrator and think 
 only of the scholar, who seemed almost like a 
 Cambridge Neo-Platonist strayed out of the seven- 
 teenth century into our own ; yet with most charac- 
 teristic differences. These we may indicate rather 
 than define thus : He was a Neo-Platonist of the 
 ecclesiastical rather than of the classical Renaissance. 
 He did not so much seek to find the Church in 
 philosophy as philosophy in the Church ; he came 
 to his Platonism through Clement and Origen, not 
 through Plotinus and Numenius ; and so it tended 
 to be sacramental more than symbolical, to be 
 allegorical in thought and expression, in art and 
 history ; which means that he was in intellect less 
 rational than emotional and intuitive. His system, 
 which is only another name for the attitude of his 
 mind, was more Biblical than classical, deduced from 
 John and the Hebrews, not from Plato and the 
 Academy. But though the form was changed, yet 
 it held the old spirit. The idealism was not the 
 less real that it found its material in the Gospels 
 and Epistles, instead of in philosophical treatises ; 
 and that it was developed in commentaries on the 
 books of the New Testament, and not on all the 
 mythologies. 
 
 Hort, again, was more the pure scholar and critic 
 than either of the other two. And so he was too 
 conscious of the possibilities of error and the limita- 
 tions of knowledge, to reach the clear-cut and assured 
 conclusions of Lightfoot ; too much alive to the 
 
396 CATHOLICISM 
 
 complexities of thought and the inadequacies of 
 human speech, to be as prolific and facile a writer 
 as Westcott. We know Hort, indeed, only from his 
 works, and especially from his Life and Letters \ 
 but in this we are far from singular ; for it may be 
 said of the men who knew him in the flesh and were 
 thought to be his friends, that only one, his twin 
 soul, or it may be two, knew him in any other way. 
 Before fame had idealized him, and turned his very 
 peculiarities into notes of distinction, he was to 
 swift and obvious academic wit, but Hortus siccus. 
 He has been described by the most competent of 
 living hands, and a hand made competent no less 
 by love and reverence for his memory than by 
 knowledge of his work, as "our greatest English 
 theologian of the century," yet as " a man of humble 
 mind " and " inexorable sincerity." ^ If unable to 
 accept without qualification all that is implied in 
 the first statement, yet, as one who knew him only 
 from afar, I may be allowed brief space for a few 
 sentences of appreciation and regret. For his charac- 
 ter and history appeal in a signal degree to a man 
 whose main interests lie in theology. Academic 
 distinction came earlier to the other two than to 
 him ; and they had in due season the highest 
 ecclesiastical preferment, which was, of course, in 
 
 * The Rev. Dr. Sanday, in the American Journal of Theology y 
 pp. 95-117. 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 397 
 
 both cases unsolicited, and certainly not beyond 
 their deserts ; while Hort was never more than a 
 humble parish priest, though no man appreciated 
 more than he the dignity of his office. But he so 
 used his quiet and comparative seclusion as to 
 qualify himself for the very highest work — nay, to 
 do work of the very highest order. There is safety 
 for some men in an early escape from the university, 
 especially if it be an escape to the obscurity where 
 independence can be cultivated, congenial work 
 undertaken, and the problems of the time wrestled 
 with in a spirit and with a labour becoming their 
 gravity. For my own part, I never know whether 
 to congratulate or condole with a young scholar 
 who gains a fellowship or holds a tutorship which 
 keeps him up at the university. It may deprive 
 him of the opportunity he needs to develop the 
 best that is within him. The atmosphere of the 
 common room may be stimulating, but it is not 
 always bracing ; and it may tend to the creation 
 of that most impotent of tempers and most de- 
 pressing of habits, academic conventionalism. It 
 was thus a real gain to Hort that he for so long 
 escaped not only promotion in the church but even 
 office in the university. But in due season there 
 came to him what may be described as an honour 
 and an office which was all his own. He became 
 the ideal of a band of younger scholars, a sort of 
 unconscious mentor, a literary conscience which 
 exacted independence, accuracy, and the patient 
 
398 CATHOLICISM 
 
 search for truth. We do not know any modern 
 English scholar who was so much a hero to scholars, 
 so progressively loved and admired and trusted. On 
 his immense resources the obscurest could draw, and 
 could be certain of meeting no repulse. His silence 
 was at once a cause of perplexity and a source of 
 power, for men wished that he would speak so as 
 to solve their problems, or to help them to a solu- 
 tion ; yet they felt that before the silence of one 
 who had inquired so long, who knew and had 
 thought so much, they could only cultivate the 
 reverence and the spirit he had so splendidly 
 exemplified. And so the young scholars he in- 
 fluenced are keeping his memory green by attempting 
 to become even such as he was, or such as he would 
 have approved. 
 
 2. What distinguished these men and made them 
 amid all their differences a unity, members of the 
 same family, or varieties of a single type, was the 
 formal attitude of their minds, or, in other words, 
 their apprehension of theology as a problem in 
 literature rather than in history. Of course their 
 attitude was not in all respects or at all points 
 uniform, but this was its general character. Light- 
 foot settled the Ignatian controversy for, at least, 
 our generation. That was his great achievement, 
 where his really great qualities showed themselves 
 in their most perfect form. His Clement and Poly- 
 carp are not unworthy to stand alongside his 
 Ignatius, though his work, especially as regards 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 399 
 
 Clement, was not so finished as he himself could 
 have wished it to be. But as his distinguished 
 successor has justly and soberly said — his edition 
 of the Apostolic Fathers is " a monument of learning, 
 sagacity, and judgment unsurpassed in the present 
 age." ^ His Pauline Epistles are not nearly so 
 successful ; there is often a curious hardness in his 
 tone, his exegesis is not seldom marked by imperfect 
 sympathy and defective insight. The man who was 
 both by friendship and knowledge most capable of 
 judging him, said of these Commentaries : " The 
 prevailing characteristic is masculine good sense 
 unaccompanied by either the insight or the delusion 
 of subtlety." ^ In matters of thought he had what 
 seems a very curious, but is a very common com- 
 bination of qualities, a real love of positive dogma 
 with little interest in the history of doctrine, or much 
 real comprehension of its inner meaning. But it is 
 in dealing with literary and critical questions, as 
 distinguished from questions historical and exegeti- 
 cal, that his true power appears. He does not so 
 much construe history, as compel us to find room 
 in any future attempt at construction for documents 
 he has proved to be authentic, and for the facts 
 they describe. This, of course, must be taken as a 
 general statement which admits of being variously 
 qualified, as by the ability for historical criticism 
 
 * The Apostolic Fathers^ pt. i. Prefatory note, p. vi. 
 
 * Hort in Diet, of National Biography. 
 
400 CATHOLICISM 
 
 SO clearly exhibited in his dissertation on The 
 Christian Ministry^ and his remarkable and illu- 
 minative discussion of the martyrdom of Ignatius ; 
 but in the broad sense it is, if not quite adequate, 
 yet true. 
 
 I have found it no easy thing to write these sen- 
 tences concerning a man whose memory is so revered 
 and whose work is so pre-eminent in its own order ; 
 but unless the limitations of the workman be recog- 
 nized, his work is certain to be falsely valued. Dr. 
 Sanday, writing under the sense of recent loss, con- 
 fessed that Lightfoot's mind was not naturally 
 " metaphysical," that he was without the " metaphy- 
 sical fervour, the delight in the contemplation of 
 mysteries " combined " with strong, clear, logical 
 thinking," which distinguished Cyril of Alexandria. 
 " But few Englishmen have this ; and Bishop Light- 
 foot was English to the backbone." ^ And with this 
 judgment Hort agreed. " Lightfoot," he said, " is 
 not speculative enough or eager enough to be a 
 leader of thought." ^ His " mental interests lay 
 almost exclusively in concrete facts or written words. 
 He never seemed to care for any generalization. No 
 one can with advantage be everything ; and he 
 gained much by what was surely a limitation."^ 
 Indeed, Lightfoot's mind was severe and rigorous, 
 and had a certain vigorous native belligerency, which 
 
 * English Historical Review^ vol. v. p. 214. 
 
 ^ Life and Letters of F. /. A, Hort^ vol. ii. p. 89. * Ibid.^ 410. 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 40I 
 
 Hort described as " its correspondence to the preva- 
 lent English habit of mind, by which he gained 
 enormously in ready access to English people of all 
 sorts." ^ And these are the very qualities and 
 limitations which stamped with its formal character 
 all his work. 
 
 Westcott, on the other hand, has more of a 
 mystical nature than Lightfoot, though it would 
 be incorrect to say that he was more metaphysical. 
 His mind has more affinity with literature and 
 criticism than with philosophy and history. He is 
 a contemplative rather than a speculative thinker. 
 He is an idealist who loves the sources where he 
 finds the lights that give him life ; he is not a 
 dialectician who loves to discover and follow and 
 weave together the sequences of thought. It was 
 real affinity that attracted him to " John " ; a similar, 
 though a less complete, affinity that drew him to 
 " Hebrews." To his peculiar idealism Alexandria 
 is more congenial than Athens, and the personal 
 equation limits the insight and the range of his 
 interpretative power. His mind can hardly be 
 described as pellucid ; he loves the twilight which 
 subdues the stronger colours and softens the harsher 
 or more rigid outlines. In his discussions in literary 
 or historical criticism he manages often to leave a sort 
 of unsatisfied feeling, as if the mind had not got 
 fairly face to face with the facts, but had instead 
 
 * Life and Letters of F. /, A. Horty vol. ii. p. 411. 
 
 26 
 
402 iCATHOLICISM 
 
 looked at them through a haze, which flooded the 
 scene with more harmonizing effects than would 
 have come from the pitiless light of day. But 
 while as a thinker he appeals to a comparatively 
 restricted class, as a textual critic, Le.^ in the region 
 where he deals with the most formal and exact 
 of all literary studies, he has as his audience the 
 whole of the learned world. He can speak as a man 
 of science, and classify and marshal his authorities, 
 and where they are in conflict decide between them 
 for reasons the competent can understand and will 
 either approve or condemn. And so his great con- 
 tribution, though it is not his alone, to the theology 
 of the age — as pre-eminent in its own order as 
 Lightfoot's great work was in its — is a Greek text 
 of the New Testament. And the name which stands 
 on the title-page indissolubly associated with his is 
 Hort's. They were indeed par nobile fratrum, and 
 the text which bears their joint names is the fit 
 monument of their brotherhood. But the precedency 
 in name and in honour will only be fully known and 
 determined when the letters which passed between 
 the two, while the work was in progress, have seen 
 the light. 
 
 What has been said as to Westcott applies, 
 mutatis mutandisy partially to Hort ; but it needs to 
 be qualified by being enlarged. He was a man of 
 rarer, in some respects of higher qualities than either 
 of his compeers. His nature was more complex, 
 and, in obedience to something wiser than instinct, 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 403 
 
 he had given his varied faculties a no less varied 
 discipline. He was long remembered at Cambridge 
 as the Man of four Triposes — mathematical, classical, 
 the natural and the moral sciences. This was a 
 dangerous beginning, and might well have signified 
 a fatal facility for drudgery, but no capacity for 
 better things. In Hort's case, however, it expressed 
 a real demand of nature. It did not tempt him 
 either to sacrifice his life to his academic reputation, 
 or to try to become an expert in all or any of his 
 tripos subjects : but it saved him from the limitations 
 of the mere scholar, the sectionalism of the mere 
 man of science, the abstract idealism of the mere 
 metaphysician, while it drilled him into the habits 
 of accuracy and methods of research which were the 
 factors of his later efficiency. His regard for facts, 
 however trivial, his love of research, his faculty of 
 delicate discrimination and classification, his sym- 
 pathy with the spirit of discovery, his mental 
 hospitality, the welcome he was ever ready to offer 
 to a theory which promised to shed new light on 
 old things, his eagerness to discover causes and 
 conditions of variation or of relations between old 
 and new forms, different or cognate, in nature or in 
 history, in morphology or in MSS., sprang out of 
 a discipline which had been at once philological, 
 scientific, and philosophical. The mental attitude 
 which is thought to be typical of the apologetic 
 divine — the attitude which looks upon every new 
 discovery or theory in science as a masked danger 
 
404 CATHOLICISM 
 
 to faith, and deals with it as such — was utterly alien 
 to him. He was always on the outlook for fresh 
 truth, for new ways of viewing and interpreting men 
 and things. On the morrow of its appearance he 
 hailed The Origin of Species as, " in spite of its 
 difficulties," an " unanswerable " book. But, while 
 the university drilled him, his intellectual quicken- 
 ing came from personal teachers, notably Newman 
 Coleridge, and Maurice. They made the ideal 
 elements of his mind, the regulative principles of 
 his thought ; yet their application, the realm in 
 which he moved as a thinker, was specifically his 
 own. It was the history of primitive Christianity, 
 construed not simply for its own sake or in its more 
 phenomenal being, but rather as the parable of the 
 universe, the mystery in whose interpretation all 
 time was interpreted. 
 
 In a quite exceptional degree Hort's own intel- 
 lectual problems were those of the early Church ; 
 and in him the great thoughts of the second and 
 third centuries seemed to be re-incarnated. To him 
 the doctrine of the Logos was no mere orthodox 
 dogma, but a living belief, a whole philosophy of 
 being. In its light he read the texts, the early 
 Church, its literature and its creeds. But while the 
 thought that lived in him was ancient, the man it 
 lived in was modern, looking upon the problem of 
 the universe through eyes that science had trained 
 and that philosophy had opened, yet with a mind 
 which faith had illumined. It was this which 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 405 
 
 created the atmosphere that surrounded both the man 
 and his work, which filled with the enthusiasm of hope 
 the disciples who got near enough to catch some 
 glimpse of the things he saw in the light he saw them 
 under. And yet it helps to explain why he found 
 speech so hard as to be well-nigh impossible. There is 
 something singularly pathetic in the volumes which 
 have been so lovingly edited and published since his 
 death. They are, indeed, but shadowy fragments 
 of a once vivid mind, as it were half articulate words 
 from lips which seemed silent for ever. When these 
 posthumous volumes are read through the Life and 
 Letters we see this ; that Hort's inability to write 
 what would satisfy himself sprang from the conflict 
 of two tendencies within him — the scientific and the 
 speculative ; and the conflict was the more acute 
 that the speculative stood at the end, and the 
 scientific was the way which led up to it. Of all 
 rare combinations, that of the scholar and the 
 thinker is the rarest ; and, curiously, it is often a 
 paralyzing combination, especially when each of the 
 two so retains its integrity that the scholar insists on 
 all his facts being reckoned with, and the thinker 
 that every several fact must have its place and 
 reason. And we see in Hort's Hiilsean Lectures — 
 long brooded over, printed in part, carried about for 
 years, revised, re-revised, growing to him ever less 
 adequate — the thinker struggling after this immense 
 co-ordination. His son says " he viewed all the move- 
 ments of the time in connection with theology." He 
 
406 CATHOLICISM 
 
 did more than this; he construed through theology 
 all nature and history. In his system he wanted to 
 find a place for the documents and institutions and 
 persons of the Church ; but also for the religions and 
 civilizations of the world, as well as for the dis- 
 coveries of science. Without physics theology was 
 incomplete; without theology all the speculations 
 and discoveries of man had no unity. And the 
 unification was to be carried out by a process of 
 verification. The experience of man was at once to 
 authenticate and justify the truth of God. And so 
 he believed that freedom was as necessary to theology 
 as authority to religion. 
 
 § II. The Oxford Scholars and Divines 
 i. Benjamin Jowett 
 
 I. Of the two Oxford scholars named above, 
 neither may seem comparable as theologians to these 
 three eminent members of the sister university. But 
 we must distinguish. As to the late Master of Bal- 
 liol two things have to be remembered — he forsook 
 theology early, and he occupied, first as tutor and 
 then as head of his college, positions that were little 
 friendly to the vocation of the scholar or the cultiva- 
 tion of the higher learning. But it is easy to be here 
 unjust. The very force of his personality and his 
 success as an administrator and educator helped to 
 obscure Jowett's higher qualities and achievements. 
 And the clouds that did so much to hide his real 
 character were not always lined with silver ; they 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 407 
 
 were often very dark and earth-born indeed, whether 
 due to the undergraduate imagination, which dearly 
 loves the mythical, or to the ecclesiastical, which has 
 the art of invoking unconscious invention to justify 
 dislike. The Oxford of his early manhood was a 
 stormy place, not kindly to the golden mean, or what 
 is fabled as the academic calm of philosophic mind ; 
 and too narrow to allow the hostile forces free play, 
 it compelled the men who embodied them so to jostle 
 each other, or even so to collide, as to transform 
 intellectual difference into personal heat. The his- 
 tory of what is known as " the Oxford movement " 
 has still to be written ; of books dealing with it, 
 more than one has earned a name which once fell 
 from the late Master, " a reservoir of posthumous 
 spites." The worship of fictitious heroes is an easy 
 and common cult, but is not noble or elevating ; and 
 it has had free scope and full exercise among the 
 Tractarian men. In no circle of men in modern 
 days have there been more extravagant loyalties or 
 violent hates ; and the hates were not always al- 
 lowed to perish with their occasion — they survived 
 among the men who became " Catholics " and did 
 not altogether die among the men who remained 
 "Anglicans." And exaggerated praise or immoderate 
 admiration is as little just as extravagant blame. 
 John Henry Newman has been made to live before 
 the imagination of the multitude as the most typical 
 Oxford man of the century. As a matter of fact, he 
 is typical, not of Oxford, but of a school that has 
 
408 CATHOLICISM 
 
 now and then attempted to find there a home. The 
 men typical of Oxford, as a home of learning and 
 knowledge, are Roger Bacon, the interpreter of na- 
 ture ; Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, the one 
 the most critical, the other the most speculative, of 
 Schoolmen ; Cardinal Wolsey, statesman and munifi- 
 cent patron of letters ; Dean Colet, student of Scrip- 
 ture and founder of a great school, selecting for his 
 trustees, as Erasmus says, " married laymen of honest 
 reputation," because he had observed generally " that 
 such persons were more conscientious and honest 
 than priests " ; Richard Hooker, stateliest of English 
 prose writers as well as most judicious of divines ; 
 John Hales, " the ever memorable," who loved 
 breadth and hated the ecclesiastical tyranny which 
 created schism ; William Chillingworth, who tried 
 Catholicism only to return into a larger and 
 thorougher Protestantism ; John Selden, jurist, 
 scholar, and historian ; John Hampden and John 
 Pym, English statesmen ; Edward Pococke, Oriental- 
 ist, the last representative of an illustrious race of 
 scholars who made the English name famous in 
 Europe ; Joseph Butler, philosopher and divine ; John 
 Wesley, preacher and organizer; Charles Wesley, 
 preacher and poet ; Adam Smith, moral philosopher 
 and economist — founder, indeed, of the modern 
 science of economics ; William Hamilton, metaphy- 
 sician and man of learning ; Thomas Arnold, school- 
 master, historian, and man of affairs— these are the 
 men most typical of Oxford, representing all that is 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 409 
 
 finest in her culture and truest in her handiwork, and 
 most beneficent in the contributions she has made 
 to the common weal. But under the spell and pas- 
 sion of Newman she renounced the serenity in 
 which she loved to walk and to meditate, and turned 
 her home into a sort of fiery furnace, glowing with 
 sevenfold heat ; and the youth that were then cast 
 therein had to be made of good stuff, if they were to 
 walk in the midst of it unsinged and undismayed. 
 And there were men, though they were few and elect, 
 who stood the fiery trial, and came out of the furnace 
 without so much as the smell of fire upon their gar- 
 ments. It was, indeed, a brave thing to keep a quiet 
 soul in those days of quick speech, which yet was 
 not quick enough for the feeling it would fain ex- 
 press. But the young academic Liberals were gal- 
 lant men, the very chivalry of their time — Arthur 
 Stanley, Benjamin Jowett, Arthur Hugh Clough 
 Matthew Arnold, and we may name other two, 
 though their course was more troubled and less 
 straight, Mark Pattison and James Anthony Froude. 
 These men have not been made saints or heroes of ; 
 their party is too critical to be apt at canonization, 
 while, to speak the blunt truth, one, or possibly two, 
 were of too mixed material to be built after the 
 heroic model or made into a heroic form. But 
 Jowett was certainly compacted of the finest stuff; 
 struggle did not fret him, nor, what is a far rarer 
 thing, did petty persecution sour. He had to suffer 
 the martyrdom of silence, but he bore it like a 
 
410 CATHOLICISM 
 
 man ; and when he found speech, he spoke like one 
 who did not know or feel that his lips had been sealed. 
 2. We have to remember these things if we would 
 understand what Jowett did in theology, or the spirit 
 he did it in. The work which he did in this field, 
 the commentary on certain Pauline Epistles, with its 
 incorporated essays, appeared just ten years after the 
 Tractarian movement had culminated in the seces- 
 sion of Newman ; but between it and the Develop- 
 ment of Doctrine, which marked the event, the dis- 
 tance must be measured by centuries rather than by 
 years. It was a most modern book, puzzling by its 
 very modernity, misunderstood because it was so new 
 and strange a thing in sacred criticism and exegesis. 
 It was subtle, penetrated by intense religious feeling, 
 often distinguished by lucid elegance of form and 
 phrase, yet with the frequent lapses in the sequence 
 of his thought which marked all Jowett's work to 
 the very end. What bewildered the student was its 
 absolute freedom from tradition ; and the curious 
 thing was that the old scholastic tradition had not 
 been argued down, analyzed — an airy nothing — or 
 otherwise forcibly expelled ; it simply was not, and 
 for the author seemed not to have been. Paul ap- 
 peared to be lifted bodily out of the world in which 
 learned interpretation, held in the leading-strings of 
 theological formulae, had for ages made him live and 
 move, and placed back in a simpler and roomier 
 world, where thought was more fluid and less fixed. 
 Men did not know what to make of this Paul ; he 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 4II 
 
 was too much of a real man, and too little of the 
 scholastic theologian to whom they had grown ac- 
 customed. They thought he had been simplified out 
 of existence and did not see the profound insight of 
 this new presentation, how cunningly he had been 
 unclothed, how deftly re-clothed in his hidden and 
 forgotten raiment. We might describe the commen- 
 tary as, in one sense classical, in another sense his- 
 torical, in a third sense secular, understanding that 
 term in its true and literal meaning. It was classical 
 as distinguished from theological ; the Epistles read 
 as literature, for themselves and in order to the dis- 
 covery of their thought, their writer, the forces that 
 made him, the influences that surrounded him, the 
 character that moulded his conduct, and the men 
 whose friendship or hostility affected his opinions 
 and helped to determine his policy. It was historical 
 as distinguished from traditional : the canons of the 
 schools counted for nothing, but the world the man 
 moved in was thoroughly realized ; that world 
 Jewish, Hellenistic, Greek, Roman, was made to re- 
 live for the interpreter ; then the mode which the 
 man had of using the Book he best knew and most 
 used was studied, and the forms of thought which 
 were his rather than ours subtly analyzed and deter- 
 mined. It was secular as opposed to isolated and 
 sectional : Paul and his books were part of the age 
 in which they lived, shared the life and reflected the 
 experience of their own time ; his relation to the 
 Twelve and to the Churches were explained and 
 
412 CATHOLICISM 
 
 illustrated by the action of kindred personalities in 
 distant times but similar circumstances. Luther and 
 Calvin, Wesley and Whitefield were summoned to 
 show how Paul and Apollos, or Paul and Peter might 
 differ in theology, yet preach in the same church or 
 address the same people. Philo was re-embodied 
 that he might express the ideas which were current 
 in the Judaism that Paul knew. The work was that 
 of a comparatively young man, yet one who had far 
 passed the age of paradox and crude originality, and 
 who lived under conditions where continuous study 
 and concentrated thought are least of all possible ; 
 but it deserves to be called a book which marked, if 
 it did not make, a new era. It was a book which 
 owed much to Baur's Pmikis^ though it had an 
 originality of its own ; it was English and not 
 German, for it was less ridden by theory and stood 
 more soberly face to face with fact. It showed more 
 creative and constructive power than any of Light- 
 foot's Commentaries ; and as it represented only the 
 firstfruits of Jowett's labours in this field — though 
 alas, the firstfruits were destined to be also the last ! 
 — one may almost venture the prophecy that if he 
 had not turned from theology to classics he would 
 have done here the work for which England was 
 waiting; and by supplying the Broad Church with 
 a basis at once Biblical and reasonable, he might 
 have saved it from the extinction which he lived to 
 see it experience.^ 
 
 * Cf. Hort's judgment. "Certainly his (Lightfoot's) doctrinal 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 413 
 
 ii. Edzvin Hatch 
 
 I. But we turn from Jowett to the younger scholar 
 whose work suggested this paper, Edwin Hatch. 
 Of his hard struggle for a foothold and even a 
 livelihood, of his long unrecognised merit and un- 
 rewarded labours, I will not venture to speak. For 
 years, even after he had attained European fame, 
 he was allowed to hold the office of Vice-Principal 
 of St. Mary Hall, which may fitly be described 
 as the least of all the cities of Judah ; and even 
 at one time he was forced to undergo the exhausting 
 and depressing drudgery of taking private pupils. 
 When University recognition did come, it was 
 parcelled out in small offices, which in most cases 
 involved the maximum of uncongenial toil. These 
 things are said only that they may indicate the 
 difficulties under which he did his work ; but they 
 were difficulties that neither broke his temper nor 
 abated his resolution, though, without doubt, they 
 overtaxed his strength and shortened his life. One 
 thing more of a personal nature I will dare to say. 
 
 comments are far from satisfying me. They belong far too 
 much to the mere Protestant version of St. Paul's thoughts, 
 however Christianised and rationalised. One misses the real 
 attempt to fathom St. Paul's own mind and to compare it with 
 the facts of life which one finds in Jowett." And again, 
 "Doctrinal questions are almost entirely avoided, as Lightfoot 
 means to keep them for Romans. However, that is certainly 
 the weakest point of the book ; and Jowett's notes and essays, 
 with all their perversities, are still an indispensable supple- 
 ment." — Life and Letters of F.J. A, Hort^ vol. ii. pp. 79, 35. 
 
414 CATHOLICISM 
 
 He did not escape the ordinary misjudgment that 
 falls to the men who take their own line in theo- 
 logical inquiry. Men who were party leaders did 
 not love him, and, conscious of his at one time 
 almost unbefriended loneliness, they did not care 
 to conceal their dislike. But, though we had much 
 intercourse and many confidences, I never heard 
 him speak one unkind or ungenerous word of any 
 man among those from whom he had suffered 
 many things. I well remember how an old friend 
 of mine met him at first with some reluctance and 
 much misgiving, because he had been accustomed 
 to hear him described by certain ecclesiastical 
 opponents, one, in particular, whose name occurs 
 elsewhere in this paper, as a man of "a cold and 
 hard nature," of "a rationalistic temper," "without 
 faith in the supernatural " or " feeling for historical 
 continuity in the Church." But my friend, being 
 himself a man of fine character and open eye, 
 learned in the course of a few days' progressively 
 intimate companionship how utterly Hatch had 
 been misconceived and belied. These are things 
 I had no intention of saying when I began this 
 paper, but a man's work can never be really under- 
 stood unless it be read through his character. 
 
 Hatch was not a scholar in the sense and degree 
 in which Lightfoot was one, though his Essays 
 in Biblical Greek and the Concordance to the 
 Septuaginty which he planned, organized the work 
 for and did so much to carry through, show how 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 415 
 
 much he could have accomplished in the field of 
 constructive scholarship. But Hatch was strong 
 where Lightfoot and Westcott are weak, in using 
 literature for the interpretation of history, in analyzing 
 the forces that determine its course, shape its 
 institutions, formulate its beliefs, create its tendencies, 
 regulate its thinking, in a word, govern its develop- 
 ment. It is doubtful whether in the delicacy and 
 success with which he handled and explained the 
 most complex phenomena in early ecclesiastical 
 history, he had a superior or even a peer. His 
 method was scientific, at once analytic and com- 
 parative, though, in order to its appreciation, it was 
 necessary to see him at work. He was, in the 
 strict sense, as an historical inquirer without dog- 
 matic assumptions. The Church as it lived and 
 moved, took shape, and grew into an organic 
 structure, was something to be explained ; and the 
 only thing which could be regarded as an explanation 
 must come through an analysis of the forces and 
 conditions which had made it. To say that it 
 was, in its political and organized or in its social 
 and secular being, a supernatural creation, was to 
 lift it out of the category of things with which 
 the scientific student of history could deal ; and 
 such supernatural power could be logically invoked 
 only when every normal and intelligible cause had 
 been tried and failed. To postulate a miraculous 
 cause when historical causes were discoverable and 
 sufficient, was a most needless multiplication of 
 
4 1 6 CJ THOL ICISM 
 
 hypotheses. In harmony with this principle, he 
 proceeded to examine the structure, and the several 
 forms or stages through which it passed, in relation 
 to the various conditions under which, and forces 
 amid which, it lived and grew ; in order that he 
 might discover whether there were any cause or 
 causes which could account for its organization by 
 a normal historical process. He began with the 
 ministry, for it was the most obvious point for him 
 to begin at. He lived face to face with a theory 
 of it on which a most portentous series of claims 
 was based ; and he was, as it were, every day of 
 his life challenged to accept or contradict the theory. 
 It was characteristic of him to seize on elements 
 and aspects of the idea and functions of the original 
 Christian society which had been overlooked or 
 neglected by ecclesiastical writers. The Church 
 which history revealed to him was not simply a 
 new organ for worship, equipped with the officials, 
 ritual, and authority needed to establish an appro- 
 priate cult; but it was rather a ministry of benefi- 
 cence, a society charged to create a new social 
 order, where the distinction of bond and free should 
 cease, and to exercise those charities which made 
 the poor share in the abundance of the rich. He 
 examined the guilds and religious associations of 
 the Graeco-Roman world ; he compared their con- 
 stitution with the constitution of the Church, and 
 found analogies that made it probable that the 
 new Christian societies were not dissimilar from 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 417 
 
 the old associations. Then he examined the Jewish 
 communities, found special features in their adminis- 
 tration, "elders" who^ formed a "synedrion," or 
 local court, which had many points of similarity 
 with the Roman municipalities, and these, in their 
 union, became transformed into the council of the 
 Church. The process was then analyzed by which 
 the bishop rose to supremacy, the clergy and laity 
 came to be differentiated, and the Church organized 
 on the lines of the empire. It was a study in 
 ecclesiastical biology, the formation of the clerical 
 orders dealt with as a problem in natural history. 
 And its success may be measured by two things — 
 the violence with which it was assailed, on the one 
 side, and the admiration with which the most 
 competent and dispassioned judges received it, on 
 the other. One thing must have been peculiarly 
 gratifying to Hatch — the letter which in the Sep- 
 tember of 1886 he received from Hort: 
 
 " On the question of organisation, I imagine that we agree 
 more than we differ ; but some of your language is not such 
 as I should naturally use. I quite go with you in condemning 
 the refusal of fellowship with sister Churches merely because 
 they make no use of some elements of organisation assumed 
 to be jure divino essential. But it seems to me that the 
 rejection of theoretical and practical exclusiveness clears the 
 ground for the recognition of at least the possibility that other 
 kinds of (relative) jus divinum may be brought to light by 
 history and experience. In organisation, as in other things, 
 all Churches have much, I think, to learn from each other, 
 the Church of England as much as any. It does not follow 
 that organisation ought to be everywhere identical. But it 
 
 27 
 
4l8 CATHOLICISM 
 
 may well turn out that there are some elements or principles 
 of organisation which cannot anywhere be cast aside without 
 injury ; and, at all events, each Church has need to ask how 
 far its peculiarities may be mere gratuitous defects, not right 
 adaptations to its own special circumstances." ^ 
 
 What this means is obvious enough ; it showed that 
 Hatch stood no longer alone. The man he regarded 
 as in the region of literary and historical criticism 
 the most capable, detached, and constructive intellect 
 of the English Church, substantially agreed with 
 him. To Hort, as to him, a special organization 
 was not of the esse^ though it might be of the bene 
 esse of the Church ; it did not forbid " fellowship 
 with sister Churches," or justify "theoretical and 
 practical exclusiveness." What Hort desiderated 
 was " practical tolerance and practical brotherliness " ; 
 and he regretted that "Anglican prejudice and 
 exclusive theory " barred the way, but felt that 
 even these "needed tender handling if their power 
 is to be sapped."^ Reflection and research had 
 effected a revolution in the quondam High Church- 
 man which his son and biographer has not appreci- 
 ated or even perceived. 
 
 2 But Hatch did not imagine that to trace the 
 organization of the ministry was to explain the 
 Church. On the contrary, the Church represented 
 to him a most complex growth, and was a highly 
 complicated structure. As he conceived the matter, 
 it was not explained at any point unless it was 
 
 * Hort's Life and Letters^ ii. p. 357. « Ibid, p. 358, 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 419 
 
 explained at all. The Bampton Lectures were but 
 a small section of a much greater whole ; they did 
 not express his complete view or cover the field 
 within which he had pursued his researches. They 
 were not his solution of the problem, but only a 
 step towards it. The Hibbert Lectures carried the 
 problem another step forward, but in the mind 
 of their author no more than a single step. Their 
 special question was as to "the influence of Greek 
 ideas and usages upon the Christian Church " ; but 
 the question had so many ramifications and raised 
 so many issues that adequate discussion of any 
 one, let alone all, within the limits allowed him, 
 was simply impossible. As it was, the ease and 
 force of his exposition enabled him to perform a 
 task that would have been to any less well-furnished 
 mind simply impossible. He analyzed the medium 
 or soil in which Christianity had to live when it 
 became the religion of the Gentiles. The mind 
 that assimilated also transformed the religion, and 
 the transformation was only explicable through the 
 mind that accomplished it. He sketched the Greek 
 mind as it was in the first and second centuries of 
 our era, how it was educated and exercised, what 
 its interests were, and what sort of life it led ; and 
 he indicated the relation in which the habit of 
 mind created by the vagrant philosophers, who 
 speculated and argued in public and preached so 
 as to gratify curiosity, tickle the fancy, and exercise 
 the understanding, stood to the new system which 
 
420 CA THOLICISM 
 
 came to claim belief in ways so instructively analogous 
 to the old. He examined the methods of exegesis 
 which had been used to extract reason from Greek 
 mythology and to reconcile Moses and Plato, and 
 which in due season became in the hands of the 
 Fathers now a weapon of apology, now a means 
 of proving doctrine, and now the instrument of 
 bringing the New Testament out of the Old. He 
 analyzed the action of philosophy on the Greek 
 mind, and traced its influence on the tendency to 
 speculate and define in the region of belief. He 
 showed the distinction between Greek and Christian 
 ethics, and indicated how the Greek penetrated, 
 changed, in some respects superseded, the Christian. 
 Then he traced how the region of theology proper, 
 man's intellectual interpretation of God as the 
 highest and most real Being, was invaded by the 
 metaphysical Greek mind, with its inherited instincts, 
 its well-disciplined habits, and its elaborate ter- 
 minology ; with the result that the faith of the Church 
 in a living personal God was transmuted into a 
 series of abstract yet rigorously defined dogmas. 
 The Greek mysteries, it was further argued, had 
 affected the Christian sacraments, changing them 
 from their simple primitive sense and purpose to 
 acts and ceremonies akin to those associated with 
 the ancient secret cults. The result of the whole 
 was the transformation of the original basis of the 
 Christian society, and a correspondent change in 
 the whole structure it supported, 
 
SOME RECEIPT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 4^1 
 
 Immense and intricate as the problem was, it by no 
 means adequately or fairly represented the question 
 he had put to himself, and the material he had col- 
 lected for its discussion. He did not imagine that the 
 Church had been explained when, as in the Bampton 
 and Hibbert Lectures, the forces contributing to the 
 formation of its ministry, the formulation of its creed, 
 the rise of its mysteries, and the evolution of its ethics 
 had been analyzed and described. Other and quite 
 as integral elements in its constitution had still to be 
 reckoned with. The action of Roman law, of the 
 civil organization of the empire and its administration, 
 of its religious legislation and institutions, had still to 
 be traced. There was the constitution of the Church, 
 catholic and provincial, national and parochial, the 
 functions and powers of councils and synods as 
 affected by the imperial system, now independent of 
 the emperor, now dependent upon him, and the whole 
 remarkable body of legislation called the Canon Law 
 to be explained. There were also to be traced the 
 changes which the growth and application, the con- 
 solidation and codification of this law effected in the 
 discipline, in the internal organization and the exter- 
 nal policy, both of provincial Churches and the 
 Roman Church. And in the light thus shed it be- 
 came more possible to discover the state and 
 influence of the localities where given synodical or 
 conciliar canons had been framed ; to watch the 
 development of the clerical orders and the definition 
 of their authority ; to study the methods of the 
 
422 CA THOLICISM 
 
 Church in dealing with offences, ecclesiastical and 
 moral, lay and clerical, the manners, conduct, vices of 
 special classes, places, and times, the relation and 
 reciprocal action of Church and State, with the in- 
 creasing emphasis on the monarchical idea in the one, 
 and the changes due to the weakness or the strength 
 of the imperial or regal power in the other ; to ascer- 
 tain the attitude of city to surrounding country, and 
 of province to capital, with its correlative action in the 
 creation of diocesan episcopacy. And he had made 
 large researches and collected considerable material 
 towards a history of these things, though nothing 
 more than the merest hints as to his conclusions and 
 fragments of his work ever saw the light. 
 
 3. These are dry records of the streams of fertilizing 
 light which he poured into dark places well known to 
 scholasticism, dead and living, but all too seldom 
 visited by science. In his hands the study of Canon 
 Law, as some of us remember it, was distinguished by 
 vivid reality. He made one see the Church as she 
 lived in the age when the special canons, whether of 
 a council or a synod, which he was at the time study- 
 ing, were framed, the age she lived in, the difficulties 
 she had to meet, and her mode of meeting them. 
 And the study was always comparative ; the new 
 canons were examined in relation to the old, and the 
 action of the whole on the constitution and history 
 of the Church carefully traced. By his method he 
 made us see, as if it were going on under our very 
 eyes, the whole process of organic change, which 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 423 
 
 transformed the free Christian societies of Syria, 
 Greece, and Italy, into a new empire, ecclesiastical 
 and Roman. He did not describe the process with 
 Harnack as the secularization of the Church or with 
 Sohm as its naturalization ^ (" the natural man is a 
 born Catholic," " Church Law has risen from the 
 overpowering desire of the natural man for a legally 
 constituted, catholicized Church ") ; but the process 
 certainly appeared as one of progressive alienation 
 from the primitive ideal. Nor did Canon Law ex- 
 haust his question. Over against it stood two very 
 different classes of phenomena, one in the region of 
 opinion, represented by the Heresies, another in the 
 region of emotion and worship, represented by the 
 Liturgies. The growth of legislation made the Church 
 partake more and more of a political character, and 
 heresy appear more and more as a political crime ; 
 and I have no more instructive recollection than a 
 private discussion with Hatch, in which he illustrated 
 the influence which the ideas Augustine had derived 
 from these two sources — the political idea of the 
 Church and the criminal character of heresy — had on 
 his mind and system. His discussions of the Liturgies 
 brought him into a deeper and more sacred region ; 
 but he so handled the question as to make the 
 Liturgies illustrate the growth at once of religious 
 
 * Outlines of Church History^ pp. 35, 36. This position is 
 most elaborately and learnedly worked out in Sohm's great work 
 on Kirchenrecht^ vol. i. 
 
424 CATHOLICISM 
 
 ideas and of customs, especially as concerned the 
 relations of clergy and people. 
 
 The whole of the question he had set himself to 
 solve he was never able to discuss publicly, or even 
 in his university lectures. And so much as he did 
 publicly discuss was in a form that hardly enabled 
 him to do justice to his mind. What I have called 
 the immense and intricate problem of the " Hibbert 
 Lectures " was treated in a book of only 3 50 pages, 
 originally given as a series of twelve lectures, each 
 being of about an hour's duration. Looked at thus, 
 the attempt might seem to say more for Hatch's 
 courage than for his discretion. But he knew him- 
 self so well, felt so much the brevity and uncertainty 
 of life, believed so thoroughly that truth could best 
 be served by early and frank discussion, that he did 
 not feel as if he had any choice. And the death 
 which came so soon and sadly showed that he was 
 wise. But he felt strongly that his argument de- 
 pended for its cogency on its evidence, that the 
 evidence was cumulative, and that its strength could 
 only be fully appreciated when its lines had all been 
 drawn out and mustered and marshalled in force. It 
 was, therefore, signally unfortunate that his theory 
 and its proof came out, as it were, piece-meal, 
 especially as his style and manner of exposition 
 increased the evil. He threw himself upon his 
 subject, laboured at its elucidation, seemed to think 
 of it alone, and of how best to compel others to think 
 of it as he did. The result was a fine lucidity, a 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 425 
 
 brisk incisiveness and cogency, which made it easy to 
 follow his meaning, though it hid from the polemical 
 or the undiscerning much of his implied but unex- 
 pressed mind. As a result, he had more than his 
 share of misconception and irrelevant criticism. His 
 theory of the ministry was criticized from assumptions 
 as to his beliefs which he would not have admitted ; 
 and on the basis of a localization of the divine energy 
 and an externalization of the means of grace which 
 he would have vehemently denied. His opponents 
 spoke as if he did not believe in the supernatural 
 character of the Church : while, as a matter of fact, his 
 supernatural was larger than theirs, not limited and 
 defined by external organs, but expressed in the 
 whole of history and in the lives of men. His 
 purpose was as positive as any problem in science ; it 
 was to seek from history an answer to this question : 
 How and why has the Church, as a whole and in its 
 several parts, become what it is ? But his critics — 
 though only so far as they were English, his Conti- 
 nental critics understood him better — assumed his 
 purpose to be polemical or controversial, and not 
 merely historical and scientific ; and they answered 
 him as the person they assumed him to be. He 
 spoke of himself as having " ventured as a pioneer 
 into comparatively unexplored ground," and con- 
 fessed that he had no doubt " made the mistakes of a 
 pioneer " ; but he was handled as if his inquiries were 
 a process of dogmatic affirmation towards a pre- 
 destined conclusion. It was complained that he 
 
4^6 CATHOLICISM 
 
 neglected " central and positive evidence in favour of 
 what is external, suggestive, and subsidiary " : when, 
 as a simple matter of fact, his evidence was as 
 " central " as it could be for his own purpose, though 
 his purpose was not that of his critics. The very- 
 title of his Hibbert Lectures, the " Influence of Greek 
 Ideas on the Church," was forgotten ; and he was 
 rebuked as if he had meant that Greek ideas had 
 created as well as helped in the formulation of 
 Christian doctrine. His contention that the Nicene 
 Creed was due to the influence of " Greek meta- 
 physics " was answered by the obvious commonplace, 
 that " Christianity became metaphysical simply and 
 only because man was rational." ^ But so to argue 
 was to answer what he had never questioned, and 
 contradict what he had never affirmed. He had said 
 nothing about metaphysics in general ; but about a 
 special school or type of metaphysics, to wit, " Greek 
 metaphysics" — i.e.^ the school philosophies of the 
 patristic period, with their elaborate technical termino- 
 logies and scholastic methods. And his problem was 
 to inquire how far these had contributed to the be- 
 coming of " the metaphysical creed," which stands in 
 the forefront of the Christianity of the fourth century. 
 The process of production, with its several factors, the 
 worth of the product, the value of its form, and the 
 sufficiency of the form to the ineffable beliefs it would 
 express, are all distinct questions. Dr. Hatch under- 
 
 * Gore, Bampton Lectures^ p. 21. 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 427 
 
 took to deal with only one of these, and it was no very 
 relevant reply to deal with him as if he had denied 
 one of the most flagrant facts of human nature. 
 
 It lies outside my purpose to examine the criti- 
 cisms, relevant and irrelevant, made upon his method 
 or his argument ; but as I have said so much, I may 
 as well say one word more. Canon Gore complains 
 that Hatch, in his book on the Influence of Greek 
 Ideas, left out of consideration the theology of the 
 Apostolic writers.^ It is so very obvious a criticism 
 that one would have expected an acute critic like 
 Canon Gore to have jealously questioned himself 
 before making it. Surely, if Dr. Hatch's purpose 
 had been, as Dr. Gore supposed, a polemic against 
 doctrine, and not simply, as it was, an historical 
 inquiry into "the influence of Greek Ideas and 
 Usages on the Christian Church," he could not have 
 made a more extraordinary blunder than the omis- 
 sion for which he is censured. It would have been 
 a sort of unconditional surrender of himself into the 
 hands of the enemy. But for his purpose such an 
 inquiry was not necessary, though it seems to me 
 that it would, if it had been prosecuted, have enor- 
 mously strengthened his contention. He did not 
 analyze the Sermon on the Mount, though he intro- 
 duced his subject by an allusion to it. He did 
 not attempt an exhibition of the theology of Jesus, 
 though from Dr. Gore's point of view this ought to 
 
 * Gore, B amp ton Lectures, pp. 99, 100. 
 
428 Catholicism 
 
 have been a much more serious omission than even 
 his neglect of " the theology of the Apostolic writers." 
 His work, in reality, begins outside and after the 
 New Testament, though he is never forgetful of its 
 being. It is a matter the student of the primitive 
 Church can hardly be ignorant of, that the develop- 
 ment of doctrine does not begin where the New 
 Testament ends ; it begins, not behind it, but with- 
 out it ; though, perhaps, after it, yet on a lower level, 
 amid influences less strong and less noble than those 
 of the Apostolic circle. It starts with tradition, with 
 confused memories, with blind and stumbling endea- 
 vours to comprehend what was said and believed 
 among the multitude, not what had been written and 
 explained by the Apostles. The New Testament 
 might be written at the end of the Apostolic age, 
 but its material had not been assimilated by such 
 Christian mind as then was, had not been fused in 
 the fire of experience, refined by the labour of the 
 intellect or stamped by the hands of thought. Hort 
 would have taught Dr. Gore that a written revelation 
 without " discipular experience " is but a virgin mine 
 rich in unwrought wealth. To deal, therefore, with 
 the sub- Apostolic age as if it had, or had used, the 
 New Testament, as we have it, or as we use it ; or to 
 speak as if the Pauline or the Johannine theology 
 had worked itself into the collective consciousness 
 and become intelligible as a reasonable system or 
 even as an oral tradition — is not to exhibit the his- 
 torical or scientific spirit, or to show critical compre- 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 429 
 
 hension of the man who has followed it. The age 
 when " Greek ideas and usages " began to exercise 
 their influence on Christian thought, was an age when 
 for that thought the theology of the New Testament, 
 as we understand the term, could not be said to be. 
 And when it did begin to be, the mind that came 
 to the New Testament was one penetrated by those 
 very Greek ideas whose influence it was the function 
 of the historian to trace. Hence the " leaving out of 
 consideration the theology of the Apostolic writers " 
 seems to us to have been due to a scientific apprecia- 
 tion of the problem ; the criticism of the omission 
 to be due to the absence in the critic of a like 
 scientific appreciation and critical sense. In Hatch's 
 own words, he was concerned, not with the " spiritual 
 revelation" which the Apostolical communities had 
 " accepted," but with " the influences " which enabled 
 them to translate what had been thus " accepted " 
 into " an intellectual conviction." 
 
 § HI. Comparison as regards Mind and Methods of 
 Drs. Hort and Hatch 
 
 I. It is not my purpose to attempt any com- 
 parative estimate of the men whose work has been 
 here passed in hurried review. Indeed, only two of 
 them can be fairly compared — Hort and Hatch. 
 They had many points of resemblance, but possibly 
 more of difference ; and the differences were the 
 more characteristic. Hort was the more courageous 
 thinker, Hatch the more adventurous inquirer. Hort 
 
430 CATHOLICISM 
 
 suffered permanently from the inability to give exact 
 or adequate expression to his mind ; Hatch had 
 much of the passion of the explorer, who rejoices in 
 the double delight of making discoveries and telling 
 of the discoveries he has made. Hort was fastidious 
 to the last degree; he feared lest he might err, for 
 to his scrupulous intellect the possibilities of error 
 were infinite ; he feared to afifirm a position lest he 
 should fail to prove it, or lest, on further research, 
 his proofs should turn out false. But Hatch was too 
 much a master at once of historical analysis and 
 constructive synthesis to be deterred by the inade- 
 quacy of the tools he must employ, or even by any 
 defect of skill on his own part in handling them. 
 He was as much alive as Hort to the possibilities of 
 error, but believed that it was better to run the risk 
 of erring than to leave great questions undiscussed ; 
 for the way to success lay through failure. He saw 
 as much as Hort the value of good texts, but he also 
 saw that it was the duty of science to work with the 
 materials it had at hand ; to wait till its materials 
 were better was the very way to postpone their im- 
 provement, was to allow religious inquiry to stagnate, 
 and to cause the methods of research into the past 
 of theology and the Church to fall out of relation to 
 the whole living body of the historical sciences. As 
 a result, little as Hatch accomplished compared with 
 the work he had designed, his published work bears 
 a fairer proportion to his mind as a whole than what 
 Hort has left behind. Hatch did nothing that was 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 43 1 
 
 in its order so satisfactory and thorough as Hort's 
 work on the text of the New Testament; on the 
 other hand, Hort has not started so many questions 
 or done so much as Hatch to suggest new problems 
 and new methods to the workers in the field of 
 ecclesiastical history. 
 
 2. But we shall better see the significance and 
 the difference of the two men if we try to seize 
 what we may term their fundamental and regulative 
 ideas. The passion of Hort, we may say, was to 
 conceive Christianity from within, to discover its 
 intrinsic quality and capability, the power by which 
 it penetrated man and worked out its idea or pur- 
 pose. We must here speak with caution and reserve, 
 especially as the material for the interpretation of 
 his mind is scanty ; and it has the double disad- 
 vantage of being as a whole incomplete, almost 
 chaotic, while single parts have been elaborated with 
 often repeated toil. As he said, " Beliefs worth call- 
 ing beliefs must be purchased with the sweat of the 
 brow." His idea is embodied, or, let us say, has 
 suffered a sort of incarnation, in the evangelical 
 history. That history is a parable which sets out 
 the mysteries of being ; in it the inmost truths as 
 to God and the universe have so become flesh and 
 dwelt among us, that we may even in its visible 
 things behold the glory of the invisible idea. The 
 centre of the system is Jesus Christ ; in Him the 
 whole mystery of God and nature is epitomized, 
 interpreted, realized. His significance for man is 
 
432 CATHOLICISM 
 
 measured by man's experience of Him ; the larger 
 and deeper the experience the richer the significance. 
 In the early Church there was a difference between 
 the disciples being present with the Master and the 
 Master being present with the disciples. The record 
 of the former state is in the Synoptists ; the record 
 of the latter is in John. In the Synoptists we see 
 the disciples learning from association with the 
 Master ; in John we see the disciple, all the more 
 a disciple that he is an apostle, enriched in thought 
 because richer in experience, teaching what he has 
 learned through the Master having taken him into 
 association with Himself. The Fourth Gospel is, 
 therefore, neither a supplement nor a correction to 
 the other three ; it is their interpretation, nay, it is 
 the interpretation of the universe, not in the abstract 
 unities of philosophy — which represents "a corpse 
 god, not a living God " — but in the concrete per- 
 sonalities of religion. All its terms are vivid with 
 reality, "spirit," "light," "love," "way," "truth," 
 "life." In these terms God is conceived, and they 
 are the terms which articulate Christ. " He is not 
 a supplement to belief in God, but the only sure 
 foundation of it." " Impersonal names are dilutions 
 of the truth meeting the weakness of human facul- 
 ties " ; even of God " the personal mode of expres- 
 sion alone is strictly true." God read through Christ 
 ceases to be a silent mystery, the darksome back- 
 ground of our col^xtive insolubilities, and appears 
 as light, and life, and love. These things were 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 433 
 
 realized for time in Christ ; through Him they are 
 realized in us ; as they are realized in us we are 
 united to God, the living point of unity being the Per- 
 son who creatively embodied what we are to realize. 
 
 This is not a speculative dream, it is a process of 
 experience verified in the life of the disciples, of the 
 Church, and of the individual. These three ex' 
 periences repeat and complete each other ; that of 
 the disciples is reflected in the Church, that of the 
 Church in the man. The more inchoate the ex- 
 perience, individual or collective, the more confused 
 and the less adequate our apprehension of the divine. 
 " There is a truth within us, to use the language of 
 Scripture, a perfect inward ordering, as of a trans- 
 parent crystal, by which alone the perfect faithful 
 image of truth without us is brought within our ken."_ 
 The pure in heart see God ; and to create this vision 
 is the function of all we co-ordinate under the term 
 Church. To the eye that can see it, there is here a 
 large philosophy both of religion and of history. 
 The end of all things is the inward vision, but it is 
 late in being reached, and to it many things are 
 necessary that are yet not of it. Outward forms, 
 tradition, systems may be methods of discipline to 
 be used and valued as such, with seasons and 
 functions of their own ; but in character they are 
 provisional and transitional. The natural expression 
 of this mood was a large catholicity, to which a 
 political Catholicism grew less and less congenial. 
 As his thoughts deepened they widened, and out- 
 
 2^ 
 
434 CA THOLICISM 
 
 ward matters he had emphasized in earlier life be- 
 came much less prominent in his later life. " There 
 is," said he, " no * Christianity as it is,' but a multi- 
 tude of Christianities, each of which covers but a 
 small part of what is believed in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury ; while this as a whole excludes much that has 
 been believed in past centuries, and the sum of the 
 whole covers but a part of the contents of the Bible." 
 
 " Christianity consists of the most central and 
 significant truth concerning the universe, intelligible 
 only in connection with other truth not obviously 
 Christian, and accepted by many not Christians." 
 " The history of the Church, if it could ever be truly 
 written, would be the most composite of all histories, 
 since it would have to set forth the progress of every 
 element of humanity since its invisible Head was 
 revealed." These broad principles followed from his 
 fundamental conception of the place and function of 
 Christ, and the " discipular experience " by which 
 alone He could be interpreted ; and they show how 
 far he had travelled from the days when he " could 
 almost worship Newman" and imagined himself a 
 High Churchman somewhat in Newman's sense. 
 
 3. Hatch, on the other hand, had a more purely 
 intellectual conception, one more distinctly inter- 
 pretable, whether by himself or others. He was not 
 a mystic. Nature was not to him a parable, nor was 
 history an allegory which could be read back into its 
 divine realities by the eye which had learned the 
 secret. But he was indeed a very positive thinker, 
 
SOME RECENT ENGLISH THEOLOGIANS 435 
 
 and was for this reason inclined to regard with some- 
 thing severer than impatience those who took acci- 
 dents of time and place for the very essence of 
 eternal things. God was to him the Spirit who 
 manifested Himself in history through the spirits of 
 men. Character was His creation ; ethical distinc- 
 tions were the most real of things, moral qualities 
 the most sacred. God, as He conceived Him, was 
 too catholic in character, too varied in His activities, 
 too rich in grace to be confined to one society, or 
 to be represented as making certain artificially 
 created orders of men the covenanted channels of 
 His mercies. The charities and simple beneficences of 
 the early Church seemed to him worthier of the divine 
 than the priestly claims of Cyprian or the offices of 
 the Roman priesthood. To use political distinctions 
 to circumscribe the society of God, was opposed as an 
 unjustifiable interference with His modes of action. 
 But he was scrupulously anxious to avoid the specu- 
 lative determination of history. He would not and 
 did not determine beforehand what the Church was, 
 but he conceived his function to be one of strict 
 historical inquiry. Hence his real contribution to 
 theology was his problem and his method. His 
 problem was : How had the Church — understanding 
 under that term all the institutions, usages, and be- 
 liefs which the Christian society had created as at 
 once an expression of its life and the means of its 
 maintenance — come to be? And his method was 
 by an exhaustive historical and comparative analy- 
 
436 CATHOLICISM 
 
 sis to discover how far the home in which it Hved, 
 the conditions under which it thought, the forces 
 which worked for or worked against it, were respon- 
 sible for the formation and development of its 
 peculiar organization. In other words, it was the 
 application of a rigorously scientific method to a 
 field which science had seldom been allowed to ex- 
 plore. He was permitted to state his problem and 
 illustrate his method only in part, and to reach con- 
 clusions which were so far tentative as they were due 
 to a process which was incomplete. But he fell as 
 the " pioneer " falls, who has opened the way to 
 disciples that have learned his secret and are eager 
 to follow in his footsteps. 
 
 But here our study of these English theologians 
 must end. They have shown us that the race of the 
 great scholars who were great divines, has not yet 
 ceased in England. They were men who were loyal 
 sons of their country and their Church ; they have 
 enriched the English mind, adorned the English 
 universities, enhanced the reputation of English 
 scholars, and made even the Christian religion more 
 honourable and more credible, by the consecration 
 of all their powers to the investigation of her history, 
 the study and elucidation of her literature, and the 
 exposition of her beliefs. May not the men of 
 whom these things can be said assure us that the 
 race of the noble and the godly has not yet perished 
 from the earth ? 
 
 March, 1897. 
 
X 
 
 OXFORD AND JOWETT 
 
 WHILE the Life of the late Master of Balliol * 
 is the work of two minds, it has throughout 
 the unity of one spirit, and shows everywhere the 
 hand of a filial affection, fine yet discriminative. It 
 is well and even gracefully written, with a reserve he 
 would have approved, a moderation and an accuracy 
 he would have commended. It is tender and appre- 
 ciative without being blind, judicial without being cen- 
 sorious, reverent without adulation or idolatry. Its 
 errors are but trivial, and mainly in matters of personal 
 detail ; its omissions are inconsiderable, and its chief 
 defect a too uniform smoothness which has tempted 
 its authors to mask some ancient fires, which are not 
 yet extinguished, and touch lightly characteristics that 
 ought to have been clearly filled in. There are no 
 " blazing indiscretions," which makes it, indeed, all 
 the truer a mirror of the man ; for though Jowett was 
 audacious, he was never indiscreet. If he did a bold 
 thing — and he did many — it was not by impulse or by 
 accident, but of set purpose ; and he was too wise ever 
 
 ^ The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, M.A., Master of 
 Balliol College, Oxford. By Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Camp- 
 bell. Two Volumes. London : John Murray, 1897. 
 
 437 
 
438 CATHOLICISM 
 
 to explain it or to apologize for it, being well content 
 to leave it to be justified or condemned by the results. 
 His correspondence and memoranda are peculiarly in- 
 structive, and open up unexpected glimpses into the 
 beliefs and ideals that were the springs of his action. 
 The mind revealed in his letters and note-books is 
 so pure, the aims so high and generous, the life so 
 unselfish, the spirit so silent as to its own sorrows, 
 while so tender and sympathetic to those of others, 
 that even the men who are most alien from his creed 
 and his policy may well feel compelled to respect the 
 man. Still the biography is, if we may say so, too 
 biographical, and lacks background. We are not 
 made to see the world the man lived in, or to measure 
 the forces he resisted and overcame. Much of his 
 most characteristic work was indeed imperceptible 
 and incalculable. The qualities and acts which 
 made him to so many a loved and revered memory 
 stand written in the lives of men. He was great as 
 the head of a college, because he was quick at dis- 
 covering and apt at educing what was most excellent 
 in its sons. Only those who can read this biography 
 in the light of the living background they form, will 
 be able to see the central figure in its real propor- 
 tions, adjusted, as it were, to scale. 
 
 Jowett was certainly a man who deserved to have 
 his biography written. He contributed more to form 
 the mind and character of his age than many men 
 who occupied more conspicuous positions. He fought 
 a battle that was the more splendidly successful that 
 
OXFORD AND JOWETT 439 
 
 it was SO long without the outward signs and spoils 
 of victory. It was not that he had transcendent gifts 
 in any one direction ; nay, in most respects he eould 
 be easily surpassed. As a scholar he had superiors 
 both in his own and in the sister university ; as a 
 philosophical thinker he was eclipsed by some even 
 of his own disciples ; as a theologian he early fell out 
 of the race, and though to the last wistfully anxious 
 to take up the running, grew progressively unfit to do 
 it ; as an administrator of the university he had the 
 defects of a man whose ends and means were too 
 much his own to be easily adjusted to the temper and 
 ways of an assembly which can only be deliberative 
 by being critical. But when every deduction has 
 been made, it will still remain true that the late 
 Master of Balliol was the most potent academic per- 
 sonality which Oxford, at least, has known in this 
 century. To have been this, was to be a person 
 whose memory, especially as regards the elements 
 and secrets of power, ought not to be willingly let die. 
 
 § I. Oxford University and Colleges 
 
 Jowett is not a man that can be studied apart from 
 the Oxford of his day : and as that is an Oxford 
 which is of large and varied significance, we may be 
 forgiven if we preface our criticism of the man by 
 some remarks as to his university. 
 
 I. When he entered Oxford it was less a university 
 than a city of colleges, which had the differences, 
 jealousies, antagonisms of societies that were at once 
 
440 CATHOLICISM 
 
 neighbours and rivals, rather than the homogeneity 
 and harmony of a corporate body whose several 
 parts are members one of another. Oxford has, to 
 the outside imagination, a remarkable unity of 
 character ; but, to inside experience, a remarkable 
 variety of temper and tendencies. Each college has 
 its own traditions, methods, capabilities, ambitions, 
 develops distinctive qualities in its men, and appeals 
 to its special constituency ; with the result that it 
 affects the university more than it is affected by it. 
 The college is a small and exclusive society, with a 
 completer and more direct control over its men than 
 is possible to the university ; it deals with them more 
 as boys and less as men, interprets the status pupil- 
 laris more rigorously, enforces discipline more easily, 
 is less open to new ideas, and is more concerned with 
 the practical function or use of knowledge than with 
 its expansion. The college tutor has more the 
 charge of men, and exercises in a very real sense the 
 cure of souls ; but the university professor has more 
 the care of a subject, a field or a province of know- 
 ledge which it is his duty to cultivate and enlarge. 
 The more a tutor feels the men he has in charge, the 
 less will he have of the scholar's mind ; the more the 
 professor tills his field, the less can he charge himself 
 with the care of men. But the very difference of 
 college and university makes each essential to the 
 other. Their combined functions may be described 
 as the cultivation of learning and the formation of 
 men, or the communication of knowledge and the 
 
OXFORD AND JOWETT 44 1 
 
 culture of character. And these functions are, while 
 distinct, yet not separate or even separable. It is 
 by the communication of knowledge that men are 
 formed and character cultivated. Men live the more 
 nobly that they have been trained to think the 
 thoughts of the great masters of mind and morals in 
 the language they themselves used. And they feel 
 the more humble, teachable, and reverent before the 
 mysteries of being, that they have learned to love 
 and obey nature in order that they might discover 
 her secret. It is in this that the difference lies 
 between a university and a learned society — the one 
 cultivates knowledge that it may discipline men, the 
 other prosecutes discovery that it may enlarge 
 science. The society seeks knowledge for its own 
 sake, but the university seeks it for the purpose of 
 evolving the humanity latent in man. Each may 
 equally pursue learning and encourage research, but 
 it must always be with this fundamental difference of 
 end. And it is here where college and university so 
 well supplement each other ; the college, by its cul- 
 ture of men, keeping the university from sinking into 
 a mere learned society ; the university, by its cultiva- 
 tion of learning, giving to the college a larger atmos- 
 phere and more liberal mind. 
 
 The ideal academic state, then, would be one where 
 the forces represented by the university and the 
 college existed in a condition of equilibrium and 
 constant interaction. And Oxford, in its twofold 
 character of a university and a city of colleges, stood 
 
442 CA TIIOLICISM 
 
 in an unrivalled position for realizing the ideal 
 academic state. But in order to this it was necessary 
 that neither character should devour or enervate the 
 other. Of course, it might be possible, were the two 
 functions separable, to argue that it is better to form 
 character than to cultivate knowledge. The men 
 whom the university contributes to Church and 
 State, to literature and art, to medicine and science, 
 are a more solid test of academic competence than 
 the books she directly produces, the discoveries made 
 within her laboratories, or the ideas and doctrines 
 stamped with her name. But, as a matter of fact, 
 these two things go invariably together. Where 
 intellect is not active, education can never be effi- 
 cient ; unless knowledge be loved, character will not 
 be cultivated. In other words, the college can never 
 do its work unless inspired by the university, nor the 
 university fulfil its end without the help of the college. 
 2. It is significant that during the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, when the colleges were most exclusive and the 
 university almost moribund, the sterility of the 
 studies which Oxford pursued had its fit counterpart 
 in the sort of men she produced ; for her most illus- 
 trious sons then, were either the men who owed her 
 least, or those she was least inclined to acknowledge. 
 Of the Oxford men in that century three stand easily 
 foremost in literary fame — Butler, Gibbon, Johnson ; 
 but it would be hard to find men for whom the uni- 
 versity did less. Butler was no raw schoolboy when 
 he entered Oriel, but a man who had been formed 
 
OXFORD AND JOWETT 443 
 
 under one of the most influential teachers of his age, 
 if we measure the teacher's power by the eminence of 
 his pupils. We know that the problems that were 
 later to occupy Butler's mind had, before his coming 
 to Oxford, greatly exercised his thought ; and we 
 also know that he went down, on taking his degree, 
 without either his college or the university in any 
 way recognizing his eminence. It need not surprise 
 us, therefore, that we find so little trace of Oxford in 
 either the Sermons or the Analogy^ or that she did 
 not learn to appreciate or use them until they had 
 been well studied and appreciated elsewhere. He 
 appealed more to the Scottish intellect than to the 
 English understanding; and men so dissimilar as 
 Thomas Reid and David Hume, Adam Smith and 
 Dugald Stewart, Thomas Brown and Thomas Chal- 
 mers, united in owning him a master in metaphysics 
 and ethics, and in helping to make his name famous 
 in his own school. Gibbon, again, acknowledged 
 " no obligation to the University of Oxford," which, 
 he said, with less than his usual prescience, would " as 
 cheerfully renounce me for a son as I am willing to 
 disclaim her for a mother." He entered Magdalen 
 " with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a 
 doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a school- 
 boy would have been ashamed " ; and he spent there 
 " the fourteen most idle and unprofitable months of 
 his whole life." It is no lovely or attractive picture 
 which he paints of college and university ; in the one, 
 the conversation of the dons " stagnated in a round 
 
444 CATHOLICISM 
 
 of college business, Tory politics, personal anecdotes, 
 and private scandal " ; in the other, " the public pro- 
 fessors have for these many years given up altogether 
 even the pretence of teaching." Yet so deeply 
 rooted were this state and these abuses in " law and 
 prejudice, that even the omnipotence of Parliament 
 would shrink from an inquiry into " them. Samuel 
 Johnson, after two years' residence, went down with- 
 out a degree : and though later, as became an exu- 
 berant Jacobite, he idealized the place, its memories, 
 and its idolatries, no man knew better than he how 
 little it had done for him, or how it would have 
 spoiled him had he been absorbed in its dreary 
 routine. And so he was angry that, on the very eve 
 of its publication, the Master of his own college 
 would not order a copy of the Dictionary^ or speak 
 about it, or even invite its author to dinner ; and he 
 said in his wrath : " There lives a man who lives by 
 the revenues of literature, and he will not move a 
 finger to support it." And when he met his old 
 friend and rival, Meeke, whose " superiority " he used 
 to feel unable to bear, Johnson could not help lament- 
 ing that a man " of such excellent parts " had been 
 " Lost in a convent's solitary gloom." 
 And if the sons who achieved most eminence 
 in literature were those who owed her least, the 
 men she most harassed and despised were those 
 who accomplished most for religion. The story of 
 the Methodists at Oxford is too familiar a tale to 
 bear repeating, but I may add, as one of its less 
 
OXFORD AND JOWETT 445 
 
 recognized incidents, that the evil system and associa- 
 tions of the old servitorship left for life their ignoble 
 stamp on the soul of Whitefield. 
 
 Of course, it must not be inferred that we conceive 
 college or university to have been as black as, say. 
 Gibbon or Whitefield painted it. On the contrary, 
 we do not forget either the learning of Bingham, 
 though it is only just to remember that he was 
 compelled to resign his fellowship and leave Oxford ; 
 or " the classic elegance " of Lowth, what he did 
 for Hebrew poetry, or his fine vindication of the 
 university against the insults of Warburton ; or the 
 genial insight and healthy piety of Home, who not 
 only commented on the Psalms, but broke into verse 
 to describe " weeping London's crowded streets " 
 and "grand parade of woe as Garrick's funeral 
 passed," and who, in the Olla Podrida, gave this 
 characteristic apology for Johnson : " To reject 
 wisdom, because the person of him who communi- 
 cates it is uncouth, and his manners are inelegant 
 — what is it but to throw away a pine-apple, and 
 assign for a reason the roughness of its coat ? " And 
 we ought also to remember that in one region of 
 thought Oxford even then showed her old intellectual 
 activity, producing several eminent jurists, like Black- 
 stone and the two Scotts, who later became respec- 
 tively Lords Stowell and Eldon. But when every 
 possible deduction has been made, we may certainly 
 say, during the eighteenth century the poverty of 
 Oxford in learning was truly reflected in her poverty 
 
446 CATHOLICISM 
 
 in men. The supremacy of the colleges was fatal 
 to both scholarship and culture. 
 
 § II. Oxford and its -Sons in Two Centuries 
 
 I. The Oxford of the nineteenth century stands 
 out in striking contrast to the Oxford of the 
 eighteenth. The attempt which from the middle 
 of the century onwards was so strenuously made 
 to resuscitate the university without depressing the 
 colleges, has had its counterpart in the activity 
 which each has displayed in its most characteristic 
 field. In the region of thought Oxford has, on the 
 whole, produced no work of such relative eminence 
 as Butler's ; in history, nothing that can be com- 
 pared to Gibbon's ; in literature, no man that lives 
 in the imagination like Johnson. But there has been, 
 on the whole, a much more uniform and disciplined 
 mental activity. The university has not, indeed, 
 been without creative thinkers in philosophy, and 
 writers in history who have a fair title to the term 
 "classical." Nor has it been deficient in learning, 
 both of the older and newer order. Yet what is 
 remarkable is that its performances on the arena 
 of the intellect have been surpassed by its produc- 
 tivity in the field of character and life. Into the 
 causes of this double change we need not inquire, 
 though certain of them are obvious enough. For 
 one thing, Oxford has lived much more in the life 
 of the nation, has been a sort of epitome or centre 
 in which all the forces that have moved the day have 
 
OXFORD AND JOWETT 447 
 
 been intensified by being concentrated. It has not, 
 like the Oxford of the eighteenth century, cultivated 
 treason in its heart, and been proudly disloyal to 
 the reigning House through loyalty to a House that 
 could not govern ; nor has it, because it could not 
 continue Jacobite, sullenly turned Tory, as the most 
 agreeable form in which it could maintain its aloof- 
 ness from the outside world. On the contrary, no 
 place agrees less with Matthew Arnold's description 
 of Oxford than Oxford herself It is only to the 
 poet's fancy that she can seem " the home of lost 
 causes, forsaken beliefs, unpopular names, and im- 
 possible loyalties." She has been no " adorable 
 dreamer," but, on the whole, a matron of excellent 
 worldliness, who, naturally indeed, retains her " in- 
 effable charm " to the reminiscent imagination or 
 the mind that sees her from afar. There has been 
 no spot less serene, or more scorched by fierce 
 intellectual fires. Where mind is young, thought 
 must be active : the place where youth is perennial 
 can never grow old. And Oxford has for our 
 generation such infinite significance, because within 
 her borders so much of the unending conflict of the 
 new mind with the old has been fought. And the 
 conflict has been prolific in heroes, whose monuments, 
 in the shape of their biographies, stand thick upon 
 the field. They are a multitude even more signifi- 
 cant for their quality than for their number. In 
 the first quarter of the century the change begins. 
 Coplestone feels in a dim way the dawn of the 
 
448 CATHOLICISM 
 
 new era, and attempts by manipulation of terms, 
 by the use of an ingenious but not very profound 
 philosophy, to awaken the young mind to it and 
 create room for it within the old forms. His pupil 
 and admirer, Richard Whately, continues and perfects 
 the process, acting, as Newman said later, on his 
 younger contempories "like a bright June sun 
 tempered by a March north-easter." Into the Oriel 
 which Coplestone had quickened there came, in 
 Thomas Arnold, a larger and humaner nature, with 
 an outlook into history that promised to do for 
 ancient Rome what Gibbon had done for "the 
 Decline and Fall." Another sign of the coming 
 change was the rise of learned philosophers like 
 Hamilton, men of letters like Gibson Lockhart, and 
 exuberant and imaginative athletes like John 
 Wilson. Then into the rather exhausted ecclesias- 
 tical traditions of the university came Blanco White, 
 with his practical experience of Romanism, vivified 
 by the moral passion and the sceptical intellect which 
 had made continuance within it an impossibility 
 to him. 
 
 2. But with the second quarter of the century, 
 what is regarded as the most characteristic Oxford 
 movement of the century began. Its causes were 
 many and complex. One cause was the fear lest 
 political change should do for the Church in this 
 century what it had done for the Monarchy in the 
 last ; and spare the divine right of the clergy as 
 little as it had spared the divine right of the king. 
 
OXFORD AND JOWETT 449 
 
 Another was the association of political liberalism 
 on the Continent with a negative rationalism which 
 threatened death to the higher ideals of man and the 
 State. A third was romanticism, which idealized 
 a past it did not know, in order to find its realization 
 in a present to which it was alien. But deeper than 
 these, the factor that moved and unified it all, was 
 the splendid sincerity of a few men and the tran- 
 scendent genius of one man. Now that we stand 
 at a distance sufficient to enable us to see the men 
 in true perspective, we are impressed both by their 
 extraordinary intellectual limitations and the eleva- 
 tion of their moral and religious aims. The late 
 Dean Church is right in regarding the motive of the 
 men as " the love of holiness " ; but in religious 
 conflicts the ways and the words of the men are 
 seldom as holy as their motives or their ends. We 
 may thus say that the interest of the Oxford Move- 
 ment lay in its men. If knowledge or if intellectual 
 veracity had been the conditions of success, they 
 could not have succeeded ; but the instinct which 
 made its great leader issue in his early days R. H. 
 Froude's Remains as a sort of impersonated pro- 
 gramme, and in his later the Apologia pro Vita Sua^ 
 was an instinct which came of the insight of genius. 
 
 And here, if we may digress for a moment into 
 a question which is not so irrelevant as it may seem, 
 we may say that, in one sense, Newman's great 
 contribution to the age is — the interpretation of 
 Newman. He is the greatest subjective writer of 
 
 29 
 
45<5 CATHOLICISM 
 
 our age ; his power over it is but the fascination 
 exercised by his revelation of himself. In his more 
 scholastic treatises — in his dogmatic works, in his 
 attempts at historical writing — his strained subtleties, 
 his violent prejudices, his wilfulness, and his often 
 startling pettiness, make him one of the authors a 
 dispassionate student finds it hardest to read. But 
 the moment his own experience is distilled into a 
 sermon, or tract, or book, his peculiar and often 
 almost irresistible fascination appears. His Present 
 Position of Catholics in England is a sort of earlier 
 Apologia ; in it speaks the proud consciousness of 
 a man who knew the English feeling to Catholics, 
 and met it and rebuked it with lofty irony. His 
 Letter to the Duke of Norfolk may be described as 
 a later Apologia^ written by a man who could not 
 but stay in a system he must believe infallible ; yet 
 stayed because he was able so to conceive what he 
 must believe, that he could, when convenient, qualify 
 out of existence the infallibility which guaranteed 
 his belief, or at least prevent it becoming too intru- 
 sive and troublesome. In his Idea of a University^ 
 ideals and experiences which he owed to his loved, 
 lost, Oxford are embalmed. In his Grammar of 
 Assent, in a greater degree than in the Apologia, 
 his own mental history is analyzed and described. 
 The hymn which for the multitude most preserves 
 his name, owes its exquisite beauty and charm to 
 its being so perfect an expression of a mood that 
 was the man. But it is the Apologia that conquered 
 
OXFORD AND JOWETT 45 1 
 
 for Newman the reverence of the younger generation, 
 and left them no choice but to beUeve in his sincerity 
 and do honour to his motives. It is doubtful if there 
 is anything in literature to compare with it. Here 
 is a man who has practically determined the judg- 
 ment of an age concerning himself, who has so 
 interpreted himself as he was to himself as to compel 
 his own day and his own people to accept the in- 
 terpretation. Yet the man was a poet, and the poet's 
 autobiography can never have Wahrheit without 
 Dicktungy were it only because what has passed 
 through the imagination is transfigured in the 
 passage. The unconscious or the undesigned is ever 
 the truest autobiography ; and even more than in 
 any Apologia^ the true Newman may be discovered 
 in the books that come, as it were, unbidden out 
 of his spirit, and seem still to throb as if they had 
 within them the very breath of life. 
 
 It has not been the fortune of the other men of 
 that time to be so splendidly transfigured and, as it 
 were, embalmed for posterity in fragrant spices. But 
 they have received all that loving hands, uncom- 
 manded by genius, could give them. John Keble 
 has, perhaps, been happy in the brevity of his biogra- 
 phers ; but his name may remain all the more loved 
 that it lives as an ideal rather than a being clothed in 
 the coldest black and white. The voluminous Life 
 of Pusey is all too pathetically faithful to his morbid 
 nature, so curiously compounded of mystic emotion 
 and pugnacious obstinacy. The two brothers-in-law, 
 
452 CATHOLICISM 
 
 Samuel Wilberforce and Henry Manning, have 
 issued from the hands of their biographers as rather 
 wounded and wingless seraphs ; while Ward, even in 
 the hands of skilful and filial affection, appears as 
 one who took himself more seriously than a sober 
 and critical world will ever be persuaded to take him. 
 But when all possible deductions have been made, it 
 will remain true, that the University which produced 
 these men did a greater thing for England and the 
 Church than either the Church or England has as yet 
 been able to conceive. 
 
 3. But over against the Tractarians stands another 
 and no less imposing army of Oxford men. Tait, 
 sober, cautious, essentially Presbyterian in temper, 
 doubtful of new things, yet most wishful to find a 
 modus Vivendi for old and new, is a good type of a 
 man who keeps the middle path and seeks safety in 
 moderation. Next to him comes Stanley, who may 
 be described as in a way a Broad Church Newman, 
 without his self-consciousness, his subtle and corrosive 
 scepticism in thought, his passionate imagination and 
 mystic feeling, whose ideal is a mixed and organized 
 State, as distinct from a graded and governed and 
 obedient Church. Stanley was an ideal biographer, 
 as Newman was a master of idealized autobiography ; 
 and the Life of Thomas Arnold by the one may well 
 challenge in the eyes of posterity comparison with 
 the apologetic " Life " of the other by himself One 
 thing Arnold, as Stanley represented him, and 
 Stanley himself, did in a quite singular and intense 
 
OXFORD AND JOWETT 453 
 
 degree — viz., reconciled minds that would otherwise 
 have remained radically alien from the English 
 Church. Justice in this respect has never been done 
 to either of the two men. The Anglican Revival 
 has been ungrateful to its most distinguished and 
 effectual friends. Their idea of a Church as compre- 
 hensive as the State, tolerant of differences, zealous 
 for a liberal education, which the clergy might share 
 but must not control ; devoted to religion, yet aiming 
 at the secular weal of all men and the reconciliation 
 of all classes to each other and to God — made its 
 way into the hearts of multitudes who had lived 
 alienated from the Church in thought and feeling, 
 and supplied an ideal which they believed could be 
 realized in modern England. This idea made many 
 gentle to the Church of Arnold and Stanley, who 
 would have contended to the bitter end against the 
 Church of Newman and Pusey. The Anglican Revi- 
 val has, because of this idea and the men who were its 
 sponsors, managed to penetrate where it could never 
 have gone by itself ; and these distinguished fathers 
 of the Broad Church ought never to be forgotten by 
 those who have so largely entered into their labours. 
 
 But it is not simply ecclesiastical men that Oxford 
 has produced. I have but to raise my eyes to certain 
 shelves in my library, and there stand names dis- 
 tinguished in literature, in politics and in the service 
 of the State. There are the Memoirs of Mark 
 Pattison, who would have been a kindly and loved 
 man if he had only permitted himself to follow 
 
454 CATHOLICISM 
 
 nature ; and beside him is Conington, whom he did 
 not love, and Henry Nettleship, who loved him, edited 
 him, and cultivated in kindred spirit the old Litei^ce 
 Humaniores, Near him stands T. H. Green, with his 
 works edited and his life written by another Nettle- 
 ship, who also all too soon was lost to philosophy and 
 learning. And beside them is a book which speaks 
 of Arnold Toynbee — the Industrial Revolution. In 
 the domain of purer letters. A, H. Clough sings a 
 song of yearning and of a hope that is close akin to 
 despair ; Matthew Arnold girds at imaginary Philis- 
 tines in the most Philistinian manner and mood, 
 attempts to interpret a literature whose charm he 
 feels, but whose mysteries and problems he has failed 
 to master, while he allows his better self to escape 
 in polished and graceful verse. John Addington 
 Symonds discourses of Greek poetry and of the Italian 
 Renaissance ; and affords us glimpses into a sin- 
 gularly brave and hopeful spirit, defying disease to 
 arrest his work. And beside him stands William 
 Morris, who began as " the idle singer of an empty 
 day," and ended as the seeker and seer of a new and 
 higher social order. John Nichol, too, is there, a man 
 whom all men loved and all believed equal to greater 
 things than any he ever managed to do. And of 
 these we cannot think, without recalling the names of 
 men who had it in them to achieve as great things as 
 they did, but who fell before they had achieved. As 
 distinguished in their own order stand the statesmen, 
 even more numerous than the men of letters, exhibit- 
 
OXFORD AND JOWETT 455 
 
 ing that beautiful compound, so distinctive of our 
 English public life, of the statesmen who have not 
 ceased to be students ; and who have known how to 
 beguile the tedium of the Senate or the Civil Service 
 or the Bench by the cultivation of literature, prevent- 
 ing deterioration of mind in administrative work or in 
 party strife by maintaining the studies which had been 
 delightsomely pursued in the Oxford of their youth. 
 
 § III. Jowett as Reformer in University and College 
 
 I. Into this Oxford, then, just when the Tractarian 
 turmoil was at its fiercest, and the consequent cycle 
 of academic change was about to begin, came Benja- 
 min Jowett. What we have now to understand is the 
 reciprocal action of Oxford on him and his on Oxford 
 during his almost sixty years of residence. To it he 
 devoted his life. He regretted that so many of her 
 most capable sons forsook the university for the 
 wider world ; he deplored, in particular, that Stanley 
 preferred the Deanery of Westminster to his Oxford 
 Professorship, for he believed that higher oppor- 
 tunities and a finer field could be found in the 
 university than even in the Abbey where England 
 has loved to bury her most honoured dead. He 
 himself did not feel the fret and the worry and the 
 distraction that make continued residence to so many 
 impossible. Indeed, his own social tastes, his love of 
 varied society, his desire to have it influence the 
 university and the university to influence it, made him 
 the man who has perhaps done more than any other 
 
456 CA THOL ICISM 
 
 to make life in Oxford harder to the student and less 
 kindly to study than even it was before. However 
 that may be, it is clear that he rightly appreciated 
 the value of Oxford as a sphere of influence, certain 
 to repay lifelong service ; and no man who studies 
 his life can deny that he was right. 
 
 His residence, I have said, began at a time when it 
 was becoming obvious that reform must lay its com- 
 pelling hand on Oxford. One of her most eminent 
 sons had subjected the studies of the English univer- 
 sities to a most merciless criticism. Ecclesiastical 
 strife, and its mischievous effects upon both the mind 
 and work of the university, had showed that the 
 terms of life within it must be changed. Universal 
 subscription had proved positively disastrous ; the 
 abuses which it had created, the opportunities it gave, 
 when ecclesiastical passions ran high, to rankest 
 injustice, had been proved in the experience of all 
 reasonable men. Then increased knowledge of the 
 Continental, and especially of the German universi- 
 ties, had created the most wholesome feeling of envy 
 and of self-criticism. The work done by poorly paid 
 German professors, their enthusiasm for science, the 
 success with which they had cultivated the higher 
 scholarship, their philosophical activity and indus- 
 trious erudition, had made those who had come to 
 know them feel how much Oxford had to learn, and 
 how far she was behind in the work of science and 
 research. In this work, men like Dr. Pusey, and still 
 more his brother Philip, had been forerunners. But 
 
OXFORD AND JOWETT 457 
 
 in Tait and Stanley it took practical shape ; and an 
 agitation began in Oxford which meant that the 
 university must be resuscitated and a new order of 
 things instituted, or rather an old order restored. 
 This seemed at first a simpler thing than it was soon 
 found to be. The colleges had practically eaten up 
 the university ; and it was no easy matter to find how 
 they could be got to disgorge, or how the disjecta 
 membra could be built into a homogeneous structure. 
 It was thought that the system of professorships 
 might be revived and extended, that new branches of 
 knowledge might be added to its studies, new schools 
 created, the university more adequately equipped for 
 learning and research. And it was hoped that thus 
 Oxford might be adapted to modern conditions and 
 needs. Then there were multitudes outside the 
 university seeking admission ; and there was within 
 a corresponding desire to find terms which would 
 make the entrance of fresher minds possible and 
 their assimilation real. 
 
 Now Jowett sympathized with these views only in 
 part. While from the first an advocate of university 
 reform, he could hardly be called an efficient univer- 
 sity reformer ; on the contrary, his policy was in 
 many respects unwise and his action mischievous. 
 He served Oxford by what he did for Balliol. He 
 showed not what a university ought to be, but what a 
 college could do for the university. His policy and 
 ideals were not so much those that become a uni- 
 versity as those proper to a college ; his qualities, 
 
458 CATHOLICISM 
 
 intellectual, moral, and administrative, were of a kind 
 that acted with intense force within the restricted 
 area of the college, but would have wasted and spent 
 themselves fruitlessly in the larger arena of the 
 university. He had what may be described as the 
 tutorial character, but not the professorial mind. 
 His character was more powerful to influence than 
 to please ; his prelections pleased more than they 
 influenced. And so, true to his nature, he had more 
 faith in the college than belief in the university ; he 
 believed more in examinations than in lectures. 
 Personal superintendence seemed to him a more vital 
 matter than the dubious learning of the class-room, 
 or the inchoate erudition of a not always coherent or 
 lucid lecturer. But what probably weighed with him 
 still more was the practical difficulty of shaping the 
 policy of a university whose ultimate authority was 
 a Convocation composed of members who could be 
 summoned from the uttermost parts of the kingdom, 
 and who in many cases were not qualified to discuss 
 the question on which they were convened to vote. 
 Reason governs as little in academic as in parlia- 
 mentary politics. And in a body which was not 
 educated by experience or even frequent discussion, 
 but only came together on special occasions to do a 
 special thing, great questions could never be seriously 
 considered ; and were more likely to be settled by 
 gusts of passion than by deliberative reason, or by 
 arguments more whimsically subtle than morally 
 and intellectually cogent. In such a case unreason is 
 
OXFORD AND JOWETT 459 
 
 surer to reign than reasonableness. And Jowett had 
 known Convocation summoned to do the most high- 
 handed things, and had seen it do them. And so he 
 came to doubt its competence and to expect no re- 
 form in a body over which Convocation remained in 
 a sense legislatively supreme. In this he was by no 
 means singular, for even in Stanley's " Life " we find 
 an ironical account of its proceedings illustrated by a 
 letter to the Times, with the characteristic signature, 
 " An M.A. who abhors Convocation." 
 
 2. But while to Jowett the university was an in- 
 tractable body, the college was, if not a manageable 
 society, yet a society where it was possible for a 
 potent individual to accomplish something. And it 
 was characteristic of Jowett to refuse to lessen his 
 personal influence by forcing it to attempt what it 
 could not perform. And so his energies and am- 
 bitions concentrated themselves upon his college. 
 Balliol was to him wife and child, home and family. 
 He lived for it, gave himself up to it. It used to be 
 said that whatever uncertainty there was as to the 
 Master's faith, there was none as to his belief in 
 Balliol. He watched its undergraduates with the 
 keenest and most jealous eyes ; he followed their 
 later careers with the solicitude of a parent, appreci- 
 ative of every act and achievement which reflected 
 honour on the college. He laboured unweariedly to 
 make it famous ; replenished its ranks from the 
 capable among all sorts and conditions of men ; 
 carried out his dream of university extension, which 
 
460 CATHOLICISM 
 
 was to secure to poorer students the advantages of 
 tuition without the expenses of in-college residence, 
 and rigorously enforced his method of personal 
 discipline and superintendence. He gave generously 
 from his own resources, and persuaded his friends to 
 give generously from theirs. While no lover of 
 aestheticism, he pressed music into the service of the 
 college, and made the Sunday evening concert a new 
 educative agency. While no devotee of athleticism, 
 he supplied the college with a field where its young 
 barbarians could play. On the one side, he dealt 
 with Balliol as if it were a school ; on the other, as if 
 it were a university ; with the result that, though he 
 stepped into a great inheritance when he became 
 Master, he yet left to his successor the inheritance 
 vastly enlarged and enhanced. It was indeed a high 
 achievement to make and to keep, in a period when 
 new studies meant new expenditure, one of the 
 poorer colleges in the university the college whose 
 scholarships were " the blue ribbon " for which 
 English public schools eagerly competed, and on 
 whose books the men most ambitious of academic 
 distinction were eager to enrol their names. 
 
 § IV. J owe It as Scholar and Thinker 
 
 But we must look beyond the Master of Balliol, and 
 consider other sides of his picturesque personality. 
 
 I. I have already said that his chief claim to re- 
 membrance will not rest on his scholarship. He had, 
 indeed, many fine intellectual qualities, but they were 
 
OXFORD AND JO WE TT 46 1 
 
 literary rather than scientific, critical and discursive 
 rather than philosophical. He thought by intuition, 
 rather than by any process of ratiocination. In 
 scholarship, properly so called, he had only a remote 
 interest ; for its severer methods he had a positive 
 distaste ; for its history he had little appreciation, and 
 few of its great names appealed either to his admir- 
 ation or respect. This rather curious defect comes 
 out in the biography in a very characteristic way — 
 the paucity of letters to scholars, or concerned with 
 scholarship. There are many letters to scholarly 
 pupils and friends, but few on questions of purely 
 scientific or philosophical interest. He writes to 
 many distinguished people, both men and women. 
 His letters are full of wisdom, whether secular or 
 spiritual, of fine feeling, of delicate insight, of a high 
 sense both of his own duty and of theirs. They 
 express a large conception of the significance of life 
 and its possibilities, and the obligation common to 
 himself and his correspondents to make the most out 
 of it. These letters cannot do other than raise the 
 general idea of the man. He was often suspected of 
 paying too assiduous court to the great, and of loving 
 to surround himself with persons of name. He 
 would, in a sense, have pleaded guilty to the charge, 
 for he had a keen perception of the immense possi- 
 bilities associated with station. He felt that an 
 aristocracy of rank which was also an aristocracy of 
 intellect and character had opportunities such as 
 wer^ granted to no other class ; and he frankly 
 
462 CA THOLICISM 
 
 cultivated the society that he held to promise most 
 for the culture and character of the State. But 
 certainly no man ever lay less open to the charge of 
 toadying to the great. If their advisers had always 
 been as honest, yet delicate and sensitive, in advice, 
 their lives would have accomplished more for the 
 common good. We are, therefore, not at all surprised 
 at the number of letters to women in high places ; 
 and I confess that if his circle had been larger, and 
 his letters always as charming and simple and sincere, 
 it would have been the better for those who seem 
 destined to become ever more potent forces in our 
 public life. But what does surprise one is that he 
 seems to care so little for learning ; that his corre- 
 spondence has so little to do with it or with the 
 learned. It is remarkable that the man who was the 
 head of Balliol, a representative Oxford scholar, 
 should yet have had so small intercourse with the 
 scholars either of Great Britain or the Continent, and 
 have been so little concerned in the discussions, the 
 investigations, the discoveries, the controversies, that 
 during his long and active life agitated the world of 
 letters. 
 
 I have called this want of interest in learning and 
 the learned characteristic of the man, and so it was. 
 Though a student of Plato, yet Platonic scholarship 
 did not interest him, and for its history he had some- 
 thing that may almost be described as aversion. It 
 never seemed to him like a real chapter in the history 
 of the human mind, significant both of its growth and 
 
OXFORD AND JOWETT 463 
 
 of the influence of the great master on whose interpre- 
 tation he himself so long and so genially laboured. 
 He was impatient with the older scholarship, because 
 its methods were so unlike his own, and seemed to 
 him violent and subjective. Yet subjectivity was the 
 very note of his own work, and made his Platonic 
 studies and dissertations so largely a reflection of 
 himself. He disliked systematic thinking in whatever 
 field. He feared metaphysics, deplored their fascina- 
 tion for the young mind, regretted their reign within 
 his own college, even under a man he so much 
 admired and loved as T. H. Green. He warned so 
 distinguished a philosopher as his successor in the 
 mastership against a too devoted cultivation of meta- 
 physics. He dreaded their effect on literature and 
 on knowledge, which he somehow persuaded himself 
 to regard as injuriously affected by constructive and 
 systematic thinking. The continuity which was so 
 alien to his own habits of thought, he suspected when 
 it was incorporated in men who loved thought all the 
 more that it was concatenated and could be expressed 
 in a progressive dialectic. 
 
 2. The same defect is seen in his relation, or rather 
 want of relation, to the more speculative spirits and 
 tendencies of his own time. This is most apparent in 
 regrard to one with whose aims he had much in 
 common, Frederick Maurice. They were contem- 
 poraries, and engaged, though not always for the 
 same reasons, in the controversies which made for 
 freedom and comprehension ; but so far as Jowett is 
 
464 CA THOLICISM 
 
 concerned Maurice might as well never have been. 
 The mysticism, the neo-Platonic idealism, the passion 
 for the universal and positive, of the latter, provoked 
 something more than impatience in the former ; the 
 more that, though both were alike English, they were 
 divided by almost racial antipathies. Even where 
 their aims agreed, their methods and means differed. 
 Maurice influenced men on their spiritual and ethical 
 side, but Jowett on the intellectual. The one 
 developed moral enthusiasm, but the other tended to 
 repress it. The socialism of Maurice was a generous 
 endeavour to save those wronged or neglected by 
 society, and to ameliorate their lot ; but the work 
 among the masses which Jowett commended to his 
 young men was more as an agency for their own 
 education. It is no less curious that Mansel and Mill 
 are unknown both to his correspondence and his 
 table-talk ; though the former was once a potent 
 person alike in the thought, the politics, and the 
 society of the university, more justly celebrated for 
 \v\?>jeux (T esprit than for his learning or his philosophy ; 
 and the latter was a great authority in its schools. 
 Hegel indeed he had studied, and had " gained more 
 from him than from any other philosopher" ; but it 
 was from his historical rather than speculative side. 
 And to Comte he had a positive aversion. 
 
 It was this very quality of mind that attracted 
 him to Plato ; and it was also the secret of his 
 imperfect sympathy with Aristotle. He disliked the 
 logical rigour, the intellectual formalism, the ency- 
 
OXFORD AND JOWETT 465 
 
 clopaedic and systematic temper, in a word, the 
 scholasticism of the one ; he delighted in the imagi- 
 native freedom, the variety, the inconclusiveness, the 
 habit which discussed rather than solved problems, 
 which he found in the other. The spirit in Plato 
 which shed light on all things without finally adju- 
 dicating on any, was the very spirit that Jowett 
 loved. The impersonated and suggestive discussion 
 suited him ; it exercised mind and cultivated the 
 mind by its exercise. It supplied views of life, of 
 society, and the State, that interested, illumined, 
 educated. It enabled him to turn Plato into an 
 English and modern classic, and to make him a 
 centre round which thought could freely play. What 
 he gave us was indeed Jowett's Plato rather than 
 the Plato of history, of philosophy, or of classical 
 scholarship. 
 
 3. We may better illustrate at once the action 
 and effect of Jowett's mental characteristics by com- 
 paring him with a contemporary with whom he had 
 much in common, but still more in difference — Mark 
 Pattison. Both were academic Liberals, but with 
 such radical differences as expressed fundamental 
 unlikeness. The academic ideal of Pattison was a 
 university consecrated to research ; but Jowett's was 
 a college devoted to the discipline and the culture 
 of mind. Pattison had a horror of the mental habits, 
 the formal drill, and shallow omniscience created 
 by examinations ; but Jowett had immense faith in 
 their educational function and efficiency. Both were 
 
 30 
 
466 CATHOLICISM 
 
 theological Liberals, but Pattison's Liberalism was 
 historical and critical, Jowett's was personal and 
 intuitive. Both passed through the Tractarian storm, 
 and its fires scorched Pattison, while they hardly 
 warmed the atmosphere about the soul of Jowett. 
 It added to the pessimistic nature of the one a 
 deeper element of disappointment, but it left the 
 sunny optimism of the other unshadowed and un- 
 disturbed. Both were successful tutors, and were 
 disappointed in their first expectation of the head- 
 ship of their respective colleges. The disappoint- 
 ment, added to the loss of his earlier faith, 
 permanently embittered Pattison ; but it only made 
 Jowett a more potent because a more self-contained 
 and silent man. Yet these external coincidences 
 are significant only in so far as they indicate internal 
 differences, which had their more characteristic ex- 
 pression in the region of their studies and the style 
 of their work. Pattison had more the mind and 
 temper of the scholar, Jowett of the man of letters. 
 The history of scholarship was a matter of extra- 
 ordinary interest to Pattison ; he loved to see the 
 action of intellectual forces in any given time, to 
 analyze the ideas and expound the method of other 
 ages than his own ; to trace the behaviour of societies 
 which embodied systems, of tendencies which ex- 
 pressed prevailing habits of mind. But neither the 
 history nor the archaeology of thought had any real 
 or living interest for Jowett. Mind was to him too 
 individual a thing to have a collective history or 
 
OXFORD AND JOWETT 467 
 
 to make its antecedents worthy of scientific investi- 
 gation and construction. Pattison loved the great 
 scholars of the past. The labours, the struggles, 
 the poverty, the wanderings of Casaubon directly 
 appealed to him ; the Stephenses and the Scaligers 
 were names he loved ; the parts they had played 
 in the revival of letters, in the development of 
 printing, in editing the classics and advancing 
 classical scholarship, made them, as it were, men 
 of flesh and blood to his imagination. The Patristic 
 labours of the Benedictines, the classical erudition 
 of the Jesuits, their use of it for their revolutionary 
 and reactionary purposes, their mode of assailing 
 scholars that were not of their Order, and discredit- 
 ing by invented scandal the work of men they could 
 not pervert ; the apostasy of Lipsius, the pomposity 
 of Salmasius, and the ferocity of Milton, all interested 
 him, and were pressed into the illustration of the 
 history and the growth of European scholarship. 
 But Jowett had no feeling for the heroes of hu- 
 manism ; their method was not his ; their implements 
 were less perfect than his own ; their interpretations 
 were often grotesque ; and he was too conscious of 
 the difference of mind and times, and too much 
 interested in classical literature for its own sake, to 
 care much for the men who had contributed to the 
 making of it intelligible. Even in his own country 
 and in his own subject this was true. The Cam- 
 bridge Platonists lay almost altogether outside the 
 region of his sympathies. Bentley, as Professor 
 
468 CATHOLICISM 
 
 Campbell says, seemed to Jowett " wanting in judg- 
 ment, which is the first element in criticism " ; he 
 was only an example " of the baneful influence which 
 a great philologer, like a great philosopher, may 
 have on whole generations of his followers." He 
 was, " upon the whole, a man who kept bad company 
 in literature."^ Selden, indeed, he greatly admired. 
 But it was not the Selden of the De Jure Naturali 
 et Gentium^ nor the Selden of the De Diis Syris\ 
 rather it was the Selden of the " Table Talk," who 
 supplied him with such aphorisms as, doctrine in 
 theology is " rhetoric turned into logic," and the 
 Authorized Version of the Bible is " the best trans- 
 lation in the world." And so, too, he loved Samuel 
 Johnson, whose criticism of life and of men, of 
 books and of manners, made him a man after 
 Jowett's own heart. 
 
 § V. Jowett as Theologian and Churchman 
 
 I. The mental qualities which regulated his judg- 
 ments and achievements in the field of scholarship 
 determined also his attitude to religious and theo- 
 logical questions. He had an intensely religious 
 nature. He was a man capable of doing his duty 
 with almost stoic severity ; but his duty was apt 
 to be conceived under rather peculiar and personal 
 forms. There is no truer thing said by Professor 
 Lewis Campbell than this : " What Jowett said of 
 
 1 "Life,"ii. i86. 
 
OXFORD AND JOWETT 469 
 
 Greek literature became more and more applicable 
 to himself: * Under the marble exterior was con- 
 cealed a soul thrilling with spiritual emotion.'"^ 
 He progressively realized the truth of Aristotle's 
 words, " Pure thought alone is ineffectual." But the 
 feelings and imagination in him had to contend 
 against a singularly shy and yet emotional temper ; 
 there was nothing he could so little do as unbosom 
 himself, even to his dearest friends, as to what was 
 deepest in his heart. Very early he says to Dr. 
 Greenhill : " Why I don't write to you oftener is 
 that I do not like writing about religion ; and it 
 seems so cold and prosy to write to an intimate 
 friend about anything else." ^ This difficulty in- 
 creased rather than lessened with the progress of 
 the years. But several incidents narrated in the 
 " Life " show his simple and tender piety, such as 
 his going to Sir Henry Acland when he was ill 
 and reading to him " in that small voice, which once 
 heard was never forgot," the fourteenth chapter of St. 
 John ; or the scene, pathetic in its sacred simplicity, 
 at the deathbed of Archbishop Tait. But I may 
 be allowed to tell, because it is so significant of 
 both men, one little incident which is not told in 
 the " Life." ^ When Robert Browning was staying 
 with him on, I think, his very last visit, he learned, 
 when it was too late to attend, that the Master had 
 
 1 i. 388. ^ i. 109. 
 
 ' It is told, somewhat imperfectly, in Hon. Lionel A. Tolle- 
 mache's Benjamin J owett^ p. 21. 
 
\ 470 CATHOLICISM 
 
 conducted, as he greatly loved to do, a religious 
 service for the college servants. Browning was met 
 by a friend walking in the Garden Quadrangle 
 greatly agitated, and he said to him, " The Master 
 is the very soul of goodness ; yet he makes me 
 quite indignant. He is hospitality itself; he will 
 eat with me, talk with me, walk with me, read with 
 me, take me into his very bosom ; but one thing 
 he will not do, he will not />ray with me." But 
 this inability, which Browning so much regretted, 
 came from a native shyness which much intercourse 
 with men had deepened, and which the fear of being 
 irreligious even in religion, or of seeming to mean 
 more than he actually said, had intensified. But 
 just because intimate speech on the mysteries and 
 higher experiences of religion was so difficult to 
 himself, he was a hard critic of those who found 
 it easy. Thus he says : " I never hear a sermon of 
 which it is possible to conceive that the writer has 
 a serious belief about things ; if you could but cross- 
 examine him, he would perjure himself every other 
 sentence."^ He was anxious to be veracious in 
 what he himself said, and dreaded very early in his 
 career the too great stress which " the ordinary 
 divinity of the day " " laid on words," creating " a 
 sort of theological slang," which was held to be of 
 "the fundamentals of the Christian faith." He 
 quotes, with approval, in a letter to Stanley, the 
 
 i. 153. 
 
OXFORD AND /OWETT 47 1 
 
 words of a lady who had said to him : " We Liberals 
 should not talk about freedom, but about truth — 
 that is the flag under which we fight." ^ 
 
 2. It is easy to misunderstand Jowett's attitude 
 towards Subscription, and to be unjust to him on 
 the ground of it. In order to a proper appreciation 
 of his attitude two things have to be remembered 
 — the mental habit which we have already described, 
 and his own personal experiences. The long en- 
 forcement of Subscription at the universities had a 
 most injurious effect upon the mental integrity of 
 the subscribers. The mischief began at a very early 
 date. Boys who could not possibly know the mean- 
 ing of the act had to subscribe ; they must in almost 
 every case have done it as a simple matter of 
 academic form ; but the doing of it at all was an 
 initial vice accentuated at every stage in the aca- 
 demic career. Many of the men who subscribed as 
 a condition of holding a fellowship did it intending 
 to do with the articles of belief very much as they 
 meant to do with the statutes of the college — adapt 
 them as far as they legally could to existing con- 
 ditions. There was thus begotten in the minds of 
 the more thoughtful the worst of all attitudes to 
 religious belief — that of giving a formal assent to 
 what was understood not to represent internal con- 
 viction. This mischief was immensely aggravated 
 by the miserable partisan politics which governed 
 
472 CJ THOLICISM 
 
 the university during the major part of Jowett's 
 career, and which had, by means of tests, instituted 
 an " abominable system of terrorism." He had seen 
 Subscription used by the aggressive Tractarians to 
 damage Hampden. He had seen men who had 
 resisted Hampden's elevation to the bishopric solac- 
 ing their souls with the idea that his act of 
 Subscription cancelled their obligation to further 
 resistance. He had seen the same weapon of Sub- 
 scription turned against the very Tractarian party 
 which had made it so powerful an instrument of 
 offence, and he had witnessed this misuse culminate 
 in the comic tragedy of the degradation of Ward. 
 He had seen " all Balliol, as usual, furious " ^ over 
 the giving of an honorary degree to the then 
 American Minister, because he had been a Socinian 
 clergyman. And later in his own experience it was 
 turned into the means of inflicting cruel humiliation 
 on a proud and sensitive spirit ; for he was com- 
 pelled to re-subscribe before being allowed to enter 
 on his Professorship. And this was done at the 
 instance of men who were in certain respects as 
 faithless to the Articles as he was himself, and as 
 little scrupulous in their interpretation of their obli- 
 gations when the literal sense seemed contrary to 
 their convictions. The subtleties of '' Tract XC." 
 show how fast and loose the ultra-orthodox, when 
 their own views were at stake, could play with the 
 
 ^ Church, Life and Letters^ 43. 
 
OXFORD AND JOVVETT 473 
 
 very formula which they could not allow their op- 
 ponents any latitude in interpreting. The slicing, 
 as it were, of the Articles, which is not uncommon 
 even now, was then a fully perfected art ; with the 
 aggravation that the men who did it most effectually 
 in their own interests, were the least tolerant to the 
 men who attempted the same thing, but because 
 of another conscience. The whole attitude was, 
 therefore, that of the legalist rather than of the 
 moralist ; formulae which were meant to express 
 high truths were construed as effete statutes to which 
 conscientious acquiescence could not be expected. 
 
 3. This is said, of course, in explanation of Jowett's 
 attitude, not in justification of it. He and his oppo- 
 nents were alike latitudinarian — he in one direction, 
 they in another. Nor did his attitude imply indiffer- 
 ence to theology, for in it he had from the first very 
 great interest. He early wished to see a theological 
 school founded in the university, though, by a curious 
 Nemesis, when it was founded, he was excluded from 
 the theological board. His reason was that he wished 
 to see the clergy trained in the university rather than 
 in diocesan colleges. And he held that the more 
 liberal the education, the more liberal would be the 
 clerical thought : for the highest theory of the office 
 was held by the men who had the least fitness for it. 
 For the clerical order, as such, he had no admiration ; 
 he rather thought that "loyalty to the clergy was 
 treachery to the Church." He was, if one may say 
 so, a rigorous individualist in religion ; he loved to 
 
474 CATHOLICISM 
 
 elaborate his own belief, to let his mind play upon 
 history and dogmas, and to translate them into the 
 ideals which could regulate his life. In a letter he 
 describes " the true basis of religion as the life and 
 death of Christ " ; but what that means he straight- 
 way proceeds to explain thus : " The life and death 
 of Christ in the soul, the imitation of Christ ; the 
 inspiration of Christ ; the sacrifice of self; the being 
 in the world, but not of it ; the union with God 
 and the will of God such as Christ had." ^ He con- 
 ceived the ideal as the essential element in religion. 
 Christ was to him an ideal rather than a reality : a 
 name that denoted an object of reverence and thought, 
 rather than any historical person. This is perhaps 
 putting it more sharply than he himself would have 
 done, though he has stated his position with almost 
 equal precision. He wanted to see the personal 
 Christ become an ideal Christ, and this pass into 
 the idea of Goodness.^ But he was not a man that 
 inconsistencies terrified. He had moods that needed 
 only the ideal, and moods that craved for the 
 historical ; but he loved to find himself in the 
 Gospels, just as he liked to make Plato the vehicle 
 and medium of his own thought. It is one of the 
 points where the action of a loved author may be 
 subtly seen in similar manifestations in the most 
 opposite of minds. Jowett had too sane an intellect 
 to allegorize ; but Plato taught him to idealize. He 
 
 * ii. 273. 2 ij i^^ 
 
OXFORD AND JOWETT 475 
 
 learned a mysticism that made him independent of 
 history, but dependent on the ideas which were the 
 ultimate realities of his life. 
 
 4. As Pattison exhibited a contrast to Jowett's 
 attitude to scholarship, so we may find in Dean 
 Stanley a contrast to his attitude to theology. The 
 affinities with Stanley, both in thought and aim, were 
 far more intimate than those he had with Pattison. 
 They formed, indeed, as near a parallel to Jonathan 
 and David as modern conditions permit of. They 
 had almost everything in common — they thought 
 together, planned together, travelled together, worked 
 together. They were in constant consultation about 
 the most intimate matters of private belief and public 
 conduct. Their friendship, indeed, was almost ideal : 
 but in its unity it represented characteristic and 
 fundamental differences. Stanley's was a picturesque 
 mind ; he had, as it were, a sensuous imagination ; its 
 images came through the senses, and were clothed in 
 the raiment the senses supplied. Where allegory and 
 analogy stood to Newman, history and geography 
 stood to Stanley. But he did not use them as the 
 true romanticist did. He loved to people a place with 
 the figures of the past ; but the more unlike these 
 figures were, the more picturesque the contrast they 
 offered to each other, the more attractive did they 
 seem to Stanley. If we may so distinguish, we may 
 say that he was a cosmopolitical rather than a medi- 
 aeval romanticist. For him romance lay not in the 
 imagined chivalry of a time behind us, though it was 
 
476 CATHOLICISM 
 
 a time that had never been ; but rather in the dis- 
 similarities of the persons, the times, and the causes 
 he could bring together and combine or contrast in 
 the strong light and shade of his pictorial pages. 
 
 But the creations of the sensuous imagination did 
 not appeal to Jowett. Pictorial history was to him a 
 weariness — almost, indeed, a childishness. While he 
 had no love for the sensuous image, he had an intense 
 love for the ideal. He delighted to translate a cruder 
 into a riper conception, an inchoate into a simple and 
 classic thought. But this was not the most funda- 
 mental distinction between the two friends. Stanley 
 was a born warrior ; he was a man with a mission, 
 and the mission was one which could be carried out 
 only by an aggressive policy. He had inherited 
 Arnold's great idea, and wanted the Church to be 
 co-extensive with the State, as varied, as rich in the 
 elements and persons it comprehended. All the fine 
 figures which he loved in the past he rejoiced to co- 
 ordinate in an ideal unity, which he would fain have 
 translated in the present into the practical unity of 
 an organized religious society. So he laboured to 
 modify Subscription, that it might cease to be a 
 barrier to the conscientious Dissenter ; and he strove 
 to make Westminster Abbey not simply the tomb of 
 English heroes and saints, but the home of English 
 religion, where the representatives of its varied sec- 
 tions and societies could meet in worship and partici- 
 pate in the common sacraments of their religion. 
 But Jowett had no mission to be progressive or 
 
OXFORD AND JOWETT 477 
 
 polemical in behalf of those who stood outside the 
 society to which he belonged. He could hardly 
 understand why a man should make difficulties about 
 Subscription, when it had become too conventional a 
 thing to be taken seriously. It seemed to him more 
 than a trifle foolish — indeed, only a sort of illiberal 
 scrupulosity — to stand aloof from the National 
 Church because you did not agree with its creed. 
 As a matter of fact, nobody did agree with that creed. 
 Time and use had modified Subscription sufficiently 
 to ease the tender conscience of its pain. 
 
 This, indeed, is putting it more sharply than is 
 quite just, if it be understood to apply to academic as 
 well as ecclesiastical tests. He looked at things as 
 they were, found men possessed of differences, and in 
 order to make the university national, which tests pre- 
 vented it being, he came to urge their abolition. But 
 in the ecclesiastical sphere his attitude was rather 
 " use your liberty," than " make liberty a consti- 
 tutional and legal thing." It would hardly be too 
 much to say that Jowett never understood either the 
 Dissenter or Dissent, though nothing could exceed 
 his personal kindness and consideration to the Dissen- 
 ters he knew, or anything be stronger than his deter- 
 mination that men, whether in the university or in the 
 college, should have their due, irrespective of creed. 
 He was perhaps, in the heart of him, inclined to think 
 that to be scrupulous about Conformity was to make 
 much ado about nothing. The pathos of the Dissen- 
 ter's position did not appeal to him. He had difficulty 
 
478 CATHOLICISM 
 
 in conceiving that a man might have an absorbing 
 desire to be a member of a great university, and yet 
 feel under an imperious obligation to refuse member- 
 ship on the only terms that were then possible. He 
 had in his secret mind the suspicion that Dissent was 
 a sort of obstinacy, an illiberal rigour and vigour of 
 mind that education would soften and finally elimi- 
 nate. We are often less patient with those who agree 
 with us in part than with those who wholly differ 
 from us. Social toleration of a Dissenter is probably 
 a rarer thing than social toleration of an infidel or an 
 agnostic. The one is a vulgar middle-class form of 
 religion ; the other implies some intellectual distinc- 
 tion and independence. This attitude was not with- 
 out a parallel in Jowett's own experience. When he 
 was most suspected and persecuted, a friend called to 
 tell him that the orthodox felt more kindly to Con- 
 greve and the thoroughgoing Positivists than to him. 
 But in nothing did he so show himself the philosopher, 
 as in the equanimity with which he bore suspicion 
 and isolation. 
 
 These sentences must not be construed to mean any 
 lack of appreciation of Jowett's services to the cause 
 of freedom, whether in the college or the university. 
 These services were varied, distinguished, and effec- 
 tual. It is, indeed, one thing to be opposed to tests, 
 and quite another either to understand or to appre- 
 ciate the action of a man who will endure serious civil 
 or social or academic loss rather than submit his con- 
 science to their yoke. But Jowett's merit lies not so 
 
OXFORD AND JOWETT 479 
 
 much in the region of theory as of practice ; he was 
 much more than an advocate of abolition ; he honestly 
 tried to act justly towards the idea of an open college 
 and a free university. This is by no means so easy a 
 thing as it may look : and it is especially hard in the 
 case of one who is head of a college, which is by its 
 very history, constitution, and traditions a closer and 
 more rigid society than the university of which it is a 
 component part. The repeal of tests may be a simple 
 legislative process, but the enforcement, even of the 
 repealed tests, may be regarded by men of a certain 
 order of conscientiousness as an administrative expe- 
 dient, which they feel bound in some form to follow. 
 One of the last things that the head, or even in cer- 
 tain cases the tutor, of a college with the history and 
 antecedents of the Oxford colleges, may be able to 
 realize, is that his college has ceased to be an ecclesi- 
 astical institution, and has become a place of educa- 
 tion open to men of all churches and all creeds. 
 Jowett was far too honourable a man ever so to abuse 
 his academic position as to use it for the purpose of 
 winning ingenuous minds from their ancestral faith. 
 On this point illustration would be easy and grateful, 
 but it must suffice simply to say that he seems to me 
 to have been an academic statesman and administra- 
 tor who knew how and 
 
 "when to take 
 Occasion by the hand, and make 
 The bounds of freedom wider yet." 
 
 5. But the contrast to Stanley suggests another 
 
480 CATHOLICISM 
 
 and most distinctive characteristic. Jowett was one 
 of the most persistent of men, though one of the least 
 polemical. If he found his way barred, or if to sur- 
 mount the bar threatened to be too toilsome a pro- 
 cess, he turned aside to seek a passage by some other 
 way. He had such a feeling for the conditions of 
 moral influence, that he would not dissipate it by 
 allowing it to break against obstacles that were for 
 the moment irremovable. He preferred to go round 
 the mountain rather than scale the heights. Thus 
 when the storm was raised, first by his Epistles of 
 Paul, and next by his essay in Essays and Reviews^ 
 he simply dropped theology for the time being and 
 turned to Plato and philosophy. So, too, when he 
 missed the Mastership and found the college uncon- 
 genial, he forsook the Hall and the common-room, 
 lived much alone, devoted himself to his work and to 
 his pupils, preparing for the day when he could 
 emerge from his seclusion and play a more command- 
 ing part in the college. So, too, in the matter of his 
 Professorship, he felt keenly the insults to which he 
 was exposed both in assuming the Chair and when 
 refused the salary that was his due ; but he devoted 
 himself to the duties of his Chair, leaving chivalrous 
 friends to champion his cause. And his method was 
 as well suited to his ultimate success as to his imme- 
 diate peace of mind. 
 
 But enough has been said to indicate Jowett's place 
 and function in the making of modern Oxford. He 
 was an educator rather than a scholar, a man of 
 
OXFORD AND JOWETT ' 481 
 
 letters rather than a man of learning. He is distin- 
 guished at once by the comparative feebleness of his 
 scientific interest and the intensity of his interest in 
 persons. He was an enthusiast for the creation of 
 the best men for the service of the Church and State ; 
 and he believed that there was no place for their 
 creation equal to a well-equipped, well-governed, and 
 well-disciplined college, where the most cultured 
 minds of the present introduced the learners to the 
 classical literatures of the past. And he lived to 
 make the college he ruled what he conceived a college 
 ought to be. It was a noble ambition nobly carried 
 out. And the attitude of his own mind qualified him 
 for the work he elected to do. He educated by sug- 
 gestion and criticism rather than system and con- 
 struction, stimulated by questioning rather than 
 informed by instruction. But, whatever may be 
 thought of his educational method or his literary 
 work, one thing is certain — he will be remembered 
 above all his contemporaries as the man who lived 
 for his college, and made it a supreme force in the 
 academic life of the nineteenth century. 
 June, 1897. 
 
 ButUr &» Tanner, The Selivood Printing Works, Frame, and London 
 
 31 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 The Person of Christ and the 
 Philosophy of Religion 
 
 Demy 8vo, cloth, 128. 
 
 The Place of Christ in Modern 
 Theology 
 
 Eighth Bdition. 8vo, cloth, 12s. 
 
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 The Dean of Gloucester, in the Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 ** His work is, without doubt, one of the most valuable and com- 
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 generation. " — Spectator. 
 
 " Dr. Fairbairn starts from the principle that Christian theology 
 must be based on the consciousness of Christ ; and from the fact that 
 the historical Christ is only now, nineteen centuries after His appear- 
 ance on earth, being recovered for human knowledge and faith. . . . 
 A more vivid summary of Church history has never been given. With 
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 where displays." — Scotsman. 
 
 London : HODDER & STOUGHTON, 27, Paternoster Row. 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
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 Studies in the Life of Christ 
 
 Contents : 
 
 The Historical Conditions. — The Narratives of the Birth and Infancy. — 
 The Growth and Education of Jesus : His Personality. — The 
 Baptist and the Christ.— The Temptation of Christ.— The New 
 Teacher : the Kingdom of Heaven. — Galilee, Judea, Samaria. — 
 The Master and the Disciples. — The Earlier Miracles. — ^Jesus and 
 the Jews. — The Later Teaching. — The Later Miracles. — ^Jericho 
 and Jerusalem. — Gethsemane. — The Betrayer. — The Chief Priests. 
 — The Trial. — The Crucifixion. — The Resurrection. 
 
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 ployed to hide want of thought or poverty of thought, but the noble 
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 finest extremities. " — Expositor. 
 
 ** Strong, fresh, and vigorous thinking, set forth with great clearness 
 and lucidity, characterizes the entire book, and makes this a veritably 
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 ** An important and massive contribution to a department of Christian 
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 ocean seems yet to be open to the inquirer. The profound thinker 
 appears on every page." — Catholic Presbyterian. 
 
 * ' One of the most valuable contributions to Christian Theology that 
 has appeared. We find in rare conbination, intellect of the highest 
 order, the gift of spiritual discernment, large and accurate scholarship, 
 vivid imagination, and the power of using words in the most artistic 
 manner. We are aware that this is high praise, but it is deliberately 
 and we think deservedly given." — Christian. 
 
 *• Full of profound thought, the fruit evidently of long and ripe study, 
 not only of the great theme itself, but of the best setting in which to 
 place it. Dr. Fairbairn is eminently successful, and the work we regard 
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 ever and anon into a rare beauty." — Methodist Recorder. 
 
 " It scarcely need be said that these studies from Dr. Fairbairn's pen 
 are full of spiritual penetration, profound philosophy of moral life, and 
 literary beauty. Devout in feeling, and evangelical in theological 
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 London : HODDER & STOUGHTON, 27, Paternoster Row. 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 Sixth Edition. Price 7s. 6d. 
 
 The City of God 
 
 A SERIES OF DISCUSSIONS IN RELIGION 
 
 Contents : — Faith and Modern Thought. — Theism and Science. — 
 Man and Religion. — God and Israel. — The Problem of Job. — Man 
 and God. — The Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith. — Christ 
 in History.— The Riches of Christ's Poverty.— The Quest of the 
 Chief Good.— Love of Christ.— The City of God. 
 
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 meditating to give it a third perusal." — Contemporary Review. 
 
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 ment and much vigorous thought, and an admirable comprehension of 
 the great questions which are being discussed in our day with eagerness 
 and bated breath. " — Scotsman. 
 
 " We have read many of the truly brilliant passages of this volume 
 with thrilling deUght. The theology is orthodox, the logic is accurate, 
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 lacks vigour." — Literary World. 
 
 ** It contains some of the best work he has yet given to the world, 
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 gion. " — Expositor. 
 
 ** The object of the author is to satisfy that * spirit of restless inquiry,' 
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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 Eleventh Thousand. Crown Svo, cloth, 38. 6d. 
 
 Religion in History and in 
 Modern Life 
 
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 clamation, in moving men." — Christian Leader. 
 
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 the other the best bit of sound, manly, religious common sense that 
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