Outspoken Essays Part 9

Nor is there any strong body of educated laymen, such as exists in the Protestant Churches, who could influence the Papacy in the direction of Liberalism. Not only are the laity taught that their province is to obey, and never to call in question the decisions of ecclesiastics, but the large majority of thoughtful laymen have already severed their connection with the Church, and take no interest in projects for its reform. Everything points to a complete victory for the Jesuits and the orthodox party; and, much as we may regret the stifling of free discussion, and the expulsion of earnest and conscientious thinkers from the Church which they love, it is difficult to see how any other policy could be adopted.

Of the Modernists, a few will secede, others will remain in the Church, though in open revolt against the Vatican; but the majority will be silenced, and will make a lip-submission to authority. The disastrous results of the rebellion, and of the means taken to crush it, will be apparent in the deterioration of the priesthood. Modern thought, it will be said, has now been definitely condemned by the Church; war has been openly declared against progress. Many who, before the crisis of the last few years, believed it possible to enter the Roman Catholic priesthood without any sacrifice of intellectual honesty, will in the future find it impossible to do so. We may expect to see this result most palpable in France, where men think logically, and are but little influenced by custom and prejudice. Unless the Republican Government blows the dying embers into a blaze by unjust persecution, it is to be feared that Catholicism in that country may soon become 'une quant.i.te negligeable.' The prospects of the Church in Italy and Spain do not seem very much better. In fact the only comfort which we can suggest to those who regret the decline of an august inst.i.tution, is that decadent autocracies have often shown an astonishing toughness. But as head of the universal Church, in any true sense of the word, Rome has finished her life.

A more vital question, for those at least who are Christians, but not Roman Catholics, is in what shape the Christian religion will emerge from the a.s.saults upon traditional beliefs which science and historical criticism are pressing home. We have given our reasons for rejecting the Modernist attempt at reconstruction. In the first place, we do not feel that we are required by sane criticism to surrender nearly all that M.

Loisy has surrendered. We believe that the kingdom of G.o.d which Christ preached was something much more than a patriotic dream. We believe that He did speak as never man spake, so that those who heard Him were convinced that He was more than man. We believe, in short, that the object of our worship was a historical figure. Nothing has yet come to light, or is likely to come to light, which prevents us from identifying the Christ of history with the Christ of faith, or the Christ of experience.

But, if too much is surrendered on one side, too much is taken back on the other. The contention that the progress of knowledge has left the traditional beliefs and cultus of Catholics untouched is untenable. It is not too much to say that the whole edifice of supernaturalistic dualism under which Catholic piety has sheltered itself for fifteen hundred years has fallen in ruins to the ground. There is still enough superst.i.tion left to win a certain vogue for miraculous cures at Lourdes, and split hailstones at Remiremont. But that kind of religion is doomed, and will not survive three generations of sound secular education given equally to both s.e.xes. The craving for signs and wonders--that broad road which attracts so many converts and wins so rapid a success--leads religion at last to its destruction, as Christ seems to have warned His own disciples. Science has been the slowly advancing Nemesis which has overtaken a barbarised and paganised Christianity. She has come with a winnowing fan in her hand, and she will not stop till she has thoroughly purged her floor. She has left us the divine Christ, whatever may be the truth about certain mysterious events in His human life. But a.s.suredly she has not left us the right to offer wheedling prayers to a mythical Queen of Heaven; she has not left us the right to believe in such puerile stories as the Madonna-stamp on hailstones, in order to induce a comfortably pious state of mind.

The dualism alleged to exist between faith and knowledge will not serve.

Man is one, and reality is one; there can no more be two 'orders of reality' not affecting each other than there can be two faculties in the human mind working independently of each other. The universe which is interpreted to us by our understanding is not unreal, nor are its laws pliant to our wills, as the pragmatists do vainly talk. It is a divinely ordered system, which includes man, the roof and crown of things, and Christ, in whom is revealed to us its inner character and meaning. It is not the province of faith either to flout scientific knowledge, or to contaminate the material on which science works by intercalating what M.

Le Roy calls 'transhistorical symbols'--myths in fact--which do not become true by being recognised as false, as the new apologetic seems to suggest. Faith is not the born storyteller of Modernist theology. Faith is, on the practical side, just the resolution to stand or fall by the n.o.blest hypothesis; and, on the intellectual side, it is a progressive initiation, by experiment which ends in experience, into the unity of the good, the true, and the beautiful, founded on the inner a.s.surance that these three attributes of the divine nature have one source and conduct to one goal.

The Modernists are right in finding the primary principle of faith in the depths of our undivided personality. They are right in teaching that faith develops and comes into its own only through the activity of the whole man. They are right in denying the name of faith to correct opinion, which may leave the character untouched. As Hartley Coleridge says:

'Think not the faith by which the just shall live Is a dead creed, a map correct of heaven, Far less a feeling fond and fugitive, A thoughtless gift, withdrawn as soon as given.

It is an affirmation and an act That bids eternal truth be present fact.'

For all this we are grateful to them. But we maintain that the future of Christianity is in the hands of those who insist that faith and knowledge must be confronted with each other till they have made up their quarrel. The crisis of faith cannot be dealt with by establishing a _modus vivendi_ between scepticism and superst.i.tion. That is all that Modernism offers us; and it will not do. Rather we will believe, with Clement of Alexandria, that piste he gnhosist, gnosthe de he phistist.

If this confidence in the reality of things hoped for and the hopefulness of things real be well-founded, we must wait in patience for the coming of the wise master-builders who will construct a more truly Catholic Church out of the fragments of the old, with the help of the material now being collected by philosophers, psychologists, historians, and scientists of all creeds and countries. When the time comes for this building to rise, the contributions of the Modernists will not be described as wood, hay, or stubble. They have done valuable service to biblical criticism, and in other branches, which will be always recognised. But the building will not (we venture to prophesy) be erected on their plan, nor by their Church. History shows few examples of the rejuvenescence of decayed autocracies. Nor is our generation likely to see much of the reconstruction. The churches, as inst.i.tutions, will continue for some time to show apparent weakness; and other moralising and civilising agencies will do much of their work. But, since there never has been a time when the character of Christ and the ethics which he taught have been held in higher honour than the present, there is every reason to expect that the next 'Age of Faith,' when it comes, will be of a more genuinely Christian type than the last.

FOOTNOTES:

[50] Bishop Creighton always emphasised this view of Roman Catholicism. 'The Roman Church,' he wrote, 'is the most complete expression of Erastianism, for it is not a Church at all, but a state in its organisation; and the worst form of state--an autocracy.' (_Life and Letters_, ii. 375.)

[51] In contrast with 'henotheism' or 'monolatry,' such as the worship of the early Hebrews.

[52] 'Nunc defecit certa successio in omnibus ecclesiis apostolicis, praeterquam in Romana, et ideo ex testimonio huius solius ecclesiae sumi potest certum argumentum ad probandas apostolicas traditiones.' Bellarmine, _De Verbo Dei scripto et non scripto_, IV, ix, 10.

[53] Bellarmine, _De Laicis_, III, xxi, 22.

[54]: Santayana, _Return in Religion_, p. 108.

[55] Tertullian, _De Virg. Vel_., 1.

[56] Encyclical of October 27, 1901.

[57] In _The Programme of Modernism_, and _Quello che vogliamo_.

[58] _The Programme of Modernism_, p. 16.

[59] _The Programme of Modernism_, pp. 50-54.

[60] Loisy, _Simples Reflexions_, p. 168.

[61] _Ibid. L'evangile et l'eglise_, pp. 3-5.

[62] _Ibid. Les evangiles Synoptiques_, p. 119.

[63] _Ibid_.

[64] _Ibid_. p. 143.

[65] _Ibid_. pp. 138, 139.

[66] _Ibid_. p. 104.

[67] Loisy, _Les evangiles Synoptiques_, p. 166.

[68] _Ibid_. p. 169.

[69] _Ibid. Le Quatrieme evangile_, pa.s.sim.

[70] Loisy, _Les evangiles Synoptiques_, p. 214.

[71] _Ibid_. p. 218.

[72] Loisy, _Les evangiles Synoptiques_, p. 223.

[73] _The Programme of Modernism_, pp. 82, 83.

[74] _Ibid_. p. 90.

[75] Loisy, _Simples Reflexions_, p. 211.

[76] Laberthonniere, _Le Realisme Chretien et l'Idealisme Grec,_ pp. 44, 45.

[77] _Malachi_, ii. 6.

[78] Le Roy, _Dogme et Critique_, p. 26.

[79] _Lex Orandi_, p. 165 (abridged).

[80] This is not carelessness on the part of the writer.

Paulsen also says (_Introduction to Philosophy_, p. 112), 4 It is impossible to separate feeling and willing from each other.... Only in the highest stage of psychical life, in man, does a partial separation of feeling from willing occur.' But it is the highest stage of psychical life, the human, with which we are alone concerned; and in this stage it is both possible and necessary to distinguish between feeling and willing. Some Voluntarists, hard pressed by facts, try to make 'will' cover the whole of conscious and subconscious life, with the exception of logical reasoning, which is excluded as a sort of pariah!

[81] Mgr. Moyes, in _The Nineteenth Century_, December, 1907.

CARDINAL NEWMAN

(1912)

The life of Newman was divided into two nearly equal portions by his change of religion in October 1845. For the earlier half of his career we have long had his own narrative; and Newman is a prince of autobiographers. It was his wish that the 'Apologia' should be the final and authoritative account of his life in the Church of England, and of the steps by which he was led to transfer his allegiance to another communion. The voluminous literature of the Tractarian movement, which includes large collections of Newman's own letters, has confirmed the accuracy of his narrative, and has made any further description of that strange episode in English University life superfluous. With the 'Apologia' and Dean Church's 'Oxford Movement' before him, the reader needs no more. Mr. Wilfrid Ward has therefore been well advised to adhere loyally to the Cardinal's wishes, by confining himself to the last half of Newman's life, after a brief summary of his childhood, youth, and middle age till 1845. Nevertheless, it is misleading to give the t.i.tle 'The Life of Cardinal Newman' to a work which is only, as it were, the second volume of a biography. There are very few men, however long-lived, who have not done much of their best work before the age of forty-five, and Newman was certainly not one of the exceptions. From every point of view, except that of the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical historian, Newman's Anglican career was far more interesting and important than his residence at Birmingham. He will live in history, not as the recluse of Edgbaston, nor as the wearer of the Cardinal's hat which fell to his lot, almost too late to save the credit of the Vatican, when he had pa.s.sed the normal limit of human life, but as the real founder and leader of nineteenth century Anglo-Catholicism, the movement which he created and then tried in vain to destroy. The projects and failures and successes of his later life seem very pale and almost petty when compared with the activities of the years while he was making a chapter of English history. His greatest book, though it was written many years after his secession, is the record of a drama which ended in the interview with Father Dominic the Pa.s.sionist. It is 'The History of my Religious Opinions'; and after 1845 his religious opinions had, as he says himself, no further history. The incomparable style which will give him a permanent place among the masters of English prose was the product of his life at Oxford, where he lived in a society of highly cultivated men, whose writings show many of the same excellences as his own. Newman's English is only the Oriel manner at its best. Such an instrument could hardly have been forged at the Birmingham Oratory, where his a.s.sociates, who had followed him from Littlemore, were of such an inferior type that Mark Pattison, who knew them, was surprised that he could be satisfied with their company. His best sermons and his best poetry belong to his Anglican period. 'The Dream of Gerontius,' with all its tender grace, is far less virile than 'Lead, kindly Light,' and other short poems of his youth. Moreover, his record as a Roman ecclesiastic is one of almost unrelieved failure. If he had died eighteen years after his secession, when he already looked upon himself as an old man whose course was nearly run, he would have been regarded as one who had sacrificed a great career in the Church of England for neglect and obscurity. From the first he was distrusted by the 'Old Catholics' (the old Roman Catholic families in England), and suspected at the Vatican, where Talbot a.s.siduously represented him as 'the most dangerous man in England.' When Manning, Archdeacon of Chichester, followed his example and joined the Roman Church, Newman was confronted with a still more subtle and relentless opponent, whose hostility was never relaxed till the accession of a Liberal Pope made it no longer possible to resist the bestowal of tardy honours upon a feeble octogenarian. The recognition came in time to soothe his decline, but too late to enable him to leave his mark upon the administration of the Roman Church.

The main events in a very uneventful career are narrated at length in Mr. Ward's volumes. After his 'conversion' Newman first resided in a small community at Maryvale (Oscott) but soon left it on a journey to Rome, where he spent some time at the Collegio di Propaganda, and had a foretaste of the distrust with which Pius IX and his advisers always regarded him. His plan at this time was to found a theological seminary at Maryvale; and in this scheme he had the support of Wiseman, the ablest Roman ecclesiastic in the United Kingdom. But the 'Essay on Development,' with its unscholastic language and unfamiliar line of apologetic, seriously alarmed the theologians at Rome; and Newman, accepting the first of many rebuffs, abandoned this project in favour of another. He resolved to join the Oratorians, an order founded by St.