The Catholic World Volume I Part 41

MY DEAR FRIEND,--I do not know why twelve years of silence should forbid my calling you still by the name we used both to give and to accept of old. Aristotle says indeed--

[Greek text]

but he did not know the basis and the affections of a Christian friendship such as that to which--though I acknowledge in myself no claim to it--you were so kind as to admit me. Silence and suspension of communications cannot prevail against the kindliness and confidence which springs from such years and such events as once united us.

Contentions and variances might indeed more seriously try and strain such a friendship. But, though we have been both parted and opposed, there has been between us neither variance nor contention. We have both been in the field indeed where a warfare has been waging, but, happily, we have not met in contest. Sometimes we have been very near to each other, and have even felt the opposition of each other's will and hand; but I believe on neither side has there ever been a word or an act which has left a needless wound. That I should have grieved and displeased you is inevitable. The simple fact of my submitting to the Catholic Church must have done so, much more the duties which bind me as a pastor. If, in the discharge of that office, I have given you or any one either pain or wound by personal faults in the manner of its discharge, I should be open to just censure. If the displeasure arise only from the substance of my duties, "necessity is laid upon me," and you would be the last to blame me.

You will perhaps be surprised at my beginning thus to write to you. I will at once tell you why I do so. Yesterday I saw, for the first time, your pamphlet on the legal force of the Judgment of the Privy Council, and I found my name often in its pages. I have nothing to complain of in the way you use it. And I trust that in this reply you will feel that I have not forgotten your example. But your mention of me, and of old days, kindled in me a strong desire to pour out many things which have been for years rising in my mind. I have long wished for the occasion to do so, but I {290} have always felt that it is more fitting to take than to make such an occasion: and as your kindness has made it, I will take it.

But before I enter upon the subject of this letter I wish to say a few words of yourself, and of some others whom I am wont to cla.s.s with you.

Among the many challenges to controversy and public disputation which it has been my fortune to receive, and, I may add, my happiness to refuse, in the last twelve or thirteen years, one was sent me last autumn at Bath. It was the only one to which, for a moment, I was tempted to write a reply. The challenger paid me compliments on my honesty in leaving the Church of England, denouncing those who, holding my principles, still eat its bread. I was almost induced to write a few words to say that my old friends and I are parted because we hold principles which are irreconcileable; that I once held what they hold now, and was then united with them; that they have never held what I hold now, and therefore we are separated; that they are as honest in the Church of England now as I was once; and that our separation was my own act in abandoning as untenable the Anglican Church and its rule of faith, Scripture and antiquity, which you and they hold still, and in submitting to the voice of the Catholic and Roman Church at this hour, which I believe to be the sole authoritative interpreter of Scripture and of antiquity. This principle no friend known to me in the Church of England has ever accepted. In all these years, both in England and in foreign countries, and on occasions both private and public, and with persons of every condition, I have borne this witness for you and for others.

I felt no little indignation at what seemed to me the insincerity of my correspondent, but on reflection I felt that silence was the best answer.

I will now turn to your pamphlet, and to the subject of this letter.

You speak at the outset of "the jubilee of triumph among half-believers" on the occasion of the late Judgment of the Crown in Council; and you add, "A cla.s.s of believers joined in the triumph. And while I know that a very earnest body of Roman Catholics rejoice in all the workings of G.o.d the Holy Ghost in the Church of England (whatever they think of her), and are saddened in what weakens her who is, in G.o.d's hands, the great bulwark against infidelity in this land, others seemed to be in an ecstasy of triumph at this victory of Satan." [Footnote 55] Now, I will not ask where you intended to cla.s.s me. But as an anonymous critic of a pamphlet lately published by me accused me of rejoicing in your troubles, and another more recently--with a want of candor visible in every line of the attack-- accused me of being "merry" over these miseries of the Church of England, I think the time is made for me to declare how I regard the Church of England, and events like these; and I know no one to whom I would rather address what I Have to say than to yourself.

[Footnote 55: "Legal Force of the Judgment of the Privy Council," by the Rev. E. B. Pusey, D.D., pp. 3, 4.]

I will, then, say at once:

1. That I rejoice with all my heart in all the workings of the Holy Ghost in the Church of England.

2. That I lament whensoever what remains of truth in it gives way before unbelief.

3. That I rejoice whensoever what is imperfect in it is unfolded into a more perfect truth.

4. But that I cannot regard the Church of England as "the great bulwark against infidelity in this land," for reasons which I will give in their place.

1. First, then, I will say what I believe of the Church of England, and why I rejoice in every working of the Holy Spirit in it. And I do this the more gladly because I have been sometimes grieved at hearing, and once at even seeing in a handwriting which I reverence with affection, the {291} statement that Catholics--or at least the worst of Catholics called converts--deny the validity of Anglican baptism, regard our own past spiritual life as a mockery, look upon our departed parents as heathen, and deny the operations of the Holy Spirit in those who are out of the Church. I do not believe that those who say such things have ever read the Condemned Propositions, or are aware that a Catholic who so spoke would come under the weight of at least two pontifical censures, and the decrees of at least two general councils.

I need not, however, do more than remind you that, according to the faith and theology of the Catholic Church, the operations of the Holy Spirit of G.o.d have been from the beginning of the world co-extensive with the whole human race. [Footnote 56]

[Footnote 56: Suarez, _De Divina Gratia_. Pars Secunda, lib. iv., c.

viii. xi. xii. Ripalda, _De Ente Supenaturali_, lib. i., disp. xx., s. xii. and s. xxii. Viva, _Cursus Theol_., pars iii., disp. i., quaest. v. iii.]

Believing, then, in the operations of the Holy Spirit, even among the nations of the world who have neither the revelation of the faith nor the sacraments, how much more must we believe his presence and grace in those who are regenerate by water and the Holy Ghost? It would be impertinent for me to say to you--whose name first became celebrated for a tract on baptism, which, notwithstanding certain imperfections inseparable from a work written when and where you wrote it, is in substance deep, true, and elevating--that baptism, if rightly administered with the due form and matter, is always 'valid by whatsoever hand it may be given. [Footnote 57]

[Footnote 57: _Concil. Florent. Decretum Eugenii IV. Mansi Concil._, tom, xviii. 547. "In casu autem necessitatis non solum sacerdos vel diaconus sed etiam laicus vel mulier, immo etiam paga.n.u.s et haereticus baptizare potest, dummodo formam servet Ecclesiae, et facere intendat quod facit Ecclesia." The Council of Trent repeats this under anathema, Sess. vii., can. iv.: "Si quis dixerit Baptismum qui etiam datur ab haereticis in Nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, c.u.m intentione esse verum Baptismum, anathema sit." See also Bellarm. _Controversial, De Baptismo_, lib. i., c.]

Let me, then, say at once

1. That in denying the Church of England to be the Catholic Church, or any part of it, or in any divine and true sense a church at all, and in denying the validity of its absolutions and its orders, no Catholic ever denies the workings of the Spirit of G.o.d or the operations of grace in it.

2. That in affirming the workings of grace in the Church of England, no Catholic ever thereby affirms that it possesses the character of a church.

They who most inflexibly deny to it the character of a church affirm most explicitly the presence and the operations of grace among its people, and that for the following reasons:

In the judgment of the Catholic Church, a baptized people is no longer in the state of nature, but is admitted to a state of supernatural grace. And though I believe the number of those who have never been baptized to be very great in England, and to be increasing every year, nevertheless I believe the English people, as a ma.s.s, to be a Baptized people. I say the number of the unbaptized is great, because there are many causes which contribute to produce this result. First, the imperfect, and therefore invalid, administration of baptism through the carelessness of the administrators. You, perhaps, think that this is exaggerated, through an erroneous belief of Catholics as to the extent of such carelessness among the Protestant ministers, both in and out of the Church of England. It is, however, undeniable, as I know from the evidence of eye-witnesses, that such carelessness has, in times past, been great and frequent. This I consider the least, but a sufficient, reason for believing that many have never been baptized.

Add to this, negligence caused by the formal disbelief of baptismal regeneration in a large number of Protestant ministers. There are, however, two other reasons far more direct. The one is the studied rejection, as a point of religious profession, of the practice of infant baptism. Many therefore grow up without baptism who in adult life, for various causes, never seek it. {292} The other, the sinful unbelief and neglect of parents in every cla.s.s of the English people, who often leave whole families of children to grow up without baptism.

Of the fact that many have never been baptized, I, or any Catholic priest actively employed in England, can bear witness. There are few among us who have not had to baptize grown people of every condition, poor and rich; and, of children, often whole families together. There has indeed been, in the last thirty years, a revival of care in the administration of baptism on the part of the Anglican ministers, and of attention on the part of parents in bringing their children to be baptized; but this reaction is by no means proportionate to the neglect, which on the other side has been extending. My fear is that, after all, the number of persons unbaptized in England is greater at this moment than at any previous time.

Still the English people as a body are baptized, and therefore elevated to the order of supernatural grace. Every infant, and also every adult baptized, having the necessary dispositions, is thereby placed in a state of justification; and, if they die without committing any mortal sin, would certainly be saved. They are also, in the sight of the Church, Catholics. St. Augustine says, "Ecclesia etiam inter eos qui foris sunt per baptismum generat suos." A mortal sin of any kind, including _prava voluntatis electio_, the perverse election of the will, by which in riper years such persons chose for themselves, notwithstanding sufficient light, heresy instead of the true faith, and schism instead of the unity of the Church, would indeed deprive them of their state of grace. But before such act of self-privation all such people are regarded by the Catholic Church as in the way of eternal life. With perfect confidence of faith, we extend the shelter of this truth over the millions of infants and young children who every year pa.s.s to their Heavenly Father. We extend it also in hope to many more who grow up in their baptismal grace.

Catholic missionaries in this country have often a.s.sured me of a fact, attested also by my own experience, that they have received into the Church persons grown to adult life, in whom their baptismal grace was still preserved. Now how can we then be supposed to regard such persons as no better than heathens? To ascribe the good lives of such persons to the power of nature would be Pelagianism. To deny their goodness, would be Jansenism. And, with such a consciousness, how could any one regard his past spiritual life in the Church of England as a mockery? I have no deeper conviction than that the grace of the Holy Spirit was with me from my earliest consciousness. Though at the time, perhaps, I knew it not as I know it now, yet I can clearly perceive the order and chain of grace by which G.o.d mercifully led me onward from childhood to the age of twenty years. From that time the interior workings of his light and grace, which continued through all my life, till the hour in which that light and grace had its perfect work, to which all its operations had been converging, in submission to the fulness of truth of the Spirit of the Church of G.o.d, is a reality as profoundly certain, intimate, and sensible to me now as that I live. Never have I by the lightest word breathed a doubt of this fact in the divine order of grace. Never have I allowed any one who has come to me for guidance or instruction to harbor a doubt of the past workings of grace in them. It would be not only a sin of ingrat.i.tude, but a sin against truth. The working of the Holy Spirit in individual souls is, as I have said, as old as the fall of man, and as wide as the human race. It is not we who ever breathe or harbor a doubt of this. It is rather they who accuse us of it. Because, to believe such an error possible in others shows how little consciousness there must be of the true doctrine of grace in themselves. And such, I am forced {293} to add, is my belief, because I know by experience how inadequately I understood the doctrine of grace until I learned it of the Catholic Church. And I trace the same inadequate conception of the workings of grace in almost every Anglican writer I know, not excepting even those who are nearest to the truth.

But, further, our theologians teach, not only that the state of baptismal innocence exists, and may be preserved out of the Church, but that they who in good faith are out of it, if they shall correspond with the grace they have already received, will receive an increase or augmentation of grace. [Footnote 58] I do not for a moment doubt that there are to be found among the English people individuals who practise in a high degree the four cardinal virtues, and in no small degree, though with the limits and blemishes inseparable from their state, the three theological virtues of faith, [Footnote 59] hope, and charity, infused into them in their baptism. I do not think, my dear friend, in all that I have said or written in the last fourteen years, that you can find a word implying so much as a doubt of the workings of the Holy Spirit among all the baptized who are separated from the Catholic Church.

[Footnote 58: Suarez, _De Div. Gratia_, lib. iv., c. xi. Ripalda, _De Ente Supernaturali_, lib. i., disp. xx., sect. xii. _et seq. S.

Alphonsi Theol. Moral._, lib. i., tract, 1. 5, 6. ]

[Footnote 59: De Lugo, _De Virtute divinae Fidei_, disp. xvii., sect. iv, v. Viva, _Cursus Theol._, p. iv., disp. iv., quaest. iii. 7.]

I will go further still. The doctrine, "_Extra ecclesiam nulla salus_"

is to be interpreted both by dogmatic and by moral theology. As a dogma, theologians teach that many belong to the Church who are out of its visible unity; [Footnote 60] as a moral truth, that to be out of the Church is no personal sin, except to those who sin in being out of it. That is, they will be lost, not because they are _geographically_ out of it, but because they are _culpably_ out of it. And they who are culpably out of it are those who know--or might, and therefore ought to, know--that it is their duty to submit to it. The Church teaches that men may be _inculpably_ out of its pale. Now they are inculpably out of it who are and have always been either physically or morally unable to see their obligation to submit to it. And they only are culpably out of it who are both physically and morally able to know that it is G.o.d's will they should submit to the Church; and either knowing it will not obey that knowledge, or, not knowing it, are culpable for that ignorance. I will say then at once, that we apply this benign law of our Divine Master as far as possible to the English people. First, it is applicable in the letter to the whole mult.i.tude of those baptized persons who are under the age of reason. Secondly, to all who are in good faith, of whatsoever age they be: such as a great many of the poor and unlettered, to whom it is often physically, and very often morally, impossible to judge which is the true revelation or Church of G.o.d. I say physically, because in these three hundred years the Catholic Church has been so swept off the face of England that nine or ten generations of men have lived and died without the faith being so much as proposed to them, or the Church ever visible to them; and I say morally, because the great majority of the poor, from lifelong prejudice, are often incapable of judging in a question so far removed from the primary truths of conscience and Christianity. Of such simple persons it may be said that, _infantibus aequiparantur_, they are to be cla.s.sed morally with infants. Again, to these may be added the unlearned in all cla.s.ses, among whom many have no contact with the Catholic Church, or with Catholic books. Under this head will come a great number of wives and daughters, whose freedom of religious inquiry and religious thought is unjustly {294} limited or suspended by the authority of parents and husbands. Add, lastly, the large cla.s.s who have been studiously brought up, with all the dominant authority of the English tradition of three hundred years, to believe sincerely, and without a doubt, that the Catholic Church is corrupt, has changed the doctrines of the faith, and that the author of the Reformation is the Spirit of holiness and truth. It may seem incredible to some that such an illusion exists. But it is credible to me, because for nearly forty years of my life I was fully possessed by this erroneous belief. To all such persons it is morally difficult in no small degree to discover the falsehood of this illusion. All the better parts of their nature are engaged in its support: dutifulness, self-mistrust, submission, respect for others older, better, more learned than themselves, all combine to form a false conscience of the duty to refuse to hear anything against "the religion of their fathers," "the church of their baptism," or to read anything which could unsettle them. Such people are told that it is their duty to extinguish a doubt against the Church of England, as they would extinguish a temptation against their virtue. A conscience so subdued and held in subjection exercises true virtues upon a false object, and renders to a human authority the submissive trust which is due only to the divine voice of the Church of G.o.d.

[Footnote 60: See Perrone _Praelect. Theolog_., pars i., c. ii. 1, 2:

"Omnes et soli justi pertinent ad Ecclesiae animam."

"Ad Christi Ecclesiae corpus spectant fideles omnes tam justi quam peccatores."

St. Augustine expresses these two propositions in six words, "Multae oves foris, multi lupi intus." St. Aug., tom, iii., p. ii.

600.]

One last point I will add. I believe that the people of England were not all guilty of the first acts of heresy and schism by which they were separated from the Catholic unity and faith. They were robbed of it. In many places they rose in arms for it. The children, the poor, the unlearned at that time, were certainly innocent: much more the next generation. They were born into a state of privation. They knew no better. No choice was before them. They made no perverse act of the will in remaining where they were born. Every successive generation was still less culpable, in proportion as they were born into a greater privation, and under the dominion of a tradition of error already grown strong. For three centuries they have been born further and further out of the truth, and their culpability is perpetually diminishing; and as they were pa.s.sively borne onward in the course of the English separation, the moral responsibility for the past is proportionately less.

The divine law is peremptory--"to him who knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin." [Footnote 61] Every divine truth, as it shines in upon us, lays its obligation on our conscience to believe and to obey it. When the divine authority of the Church manifests itself to our intellect, it lays its jurisdiction upon our conscience to submit to it. To refuse is an act of infidelity, and the least act of infidelity in its measure expels faith; one mortal act of it will expel the habit of faith altogether. [Footnote 62] Every such act of infidelity grieves the Holy Ghost by a direct opposition to his divine voice speaking through the Church; the habit of such opposition is one of the six sins against the Holy Ghost defined as "impugning the known truth." All that I have said above in no way modifies the absolute and vital necessity of submitting to the Catholic Church as the only way of salvation to those who know it, by the revelation of G.o.d, to be such. But I must not attempt now to treat of this point.

[Footnote 61: St. James iv. 17. ]

[Footnote 62: De Lugo, _De Virtute Fidel Divinae_, disp. xvii., sect. iv. 53 _et seq_. ]

Nevertheless for the reasons above given we make the largest allowance for all who are in invincible ignorance; always supposing that there is a preparation of heart to embrace the truth when they see it, at any cost, a desire to know it, and a faithful use of the means of knowing it, such as study, docility, prayer, and the like. But I do not now enter into the case of the educated or the learned, or of those who have liberty of mind and means of inquiry. I cannot cla.s.s them under {295} the above enumeration of those who are inculpably out of the truth. I leave them, therefore, to the only Judge of all men.

Lastly, I will not here attempt to estimate how far all I have said is being modified by the liberation and expansion of the Catholic Church in England during the last thirty years. It is certain that the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy, with the universal tumult which published it to the whole world, still more by its steady, wide-spread, and penetrating action throughout England, is taking away every year the plea of invincible ignorance.

It is certain, however, that to those who, being in invincible ignorance, faithfully co-operate with the grace they have received, an augmentation of grace is given; and this at once places the English people, so far as they come within the limits of these conditions, in a state of supernatural grace, even though they be out of the visible unity of the Church. I do not now enter into the question of the state of those who fall from baptismal grace by mortal sin, or of the great difficulty and uncertainty of their restoration. This would lead me too far; and it lies beyond the limits of this letter.

It must not, however, be forgotten, for a moment, that this applies to the whole English people, of all forms of Christianity, or, as it is called, of all denominations. What I have said does not recognize the grace _of_ the Church of England as such. The working of grace _in_ the Church of England is a truth we joyfully hold and always teach. But we as joyfully recognize the working of the Holy Spirit among Dissenters of every kind. Indeed, I must say that I am far more able to a.s.sure myself of the invincible ignorance of Dissenters as a ma.s.s than of Anglicans as a ma.s.s. They are far more deprived of what survived of Catholic truth; far more distant from the idea of a Church; far more traditionally opposed to it by the prejudice of education; I must add, for the most part, far more simple in their belief in the person and pa.s.sion of our Divine Lord. Their piety is more like the personal service of disciples to a personal Master than the Anglican piety, which has always been more dim and distant from this central light of souls. Witness Jeremy Taylor's works, much as I have loved them, compared with Baxter's, or even those of Andrews compared with Leighton's, who was formed by the Kirk of Scotland.

I do not here forget all you have done to provide ascetical and devotional books for the use of the Church of England, both by your own writings, and, may I not say it, from your neighbor's vineyard?

With truth, then, I can say that I rejoice in all the operations of the Holy Spirit out of the Catholic Church, whether in the Anglican or other Protestant bodies; not that those communions are thereby invested with any supernatural character, but because more souls, I trust, are saved. If I have a greater joy over these workings of grace in the Church of England, it is only because more that are dear to me are in it, for whom every day I never fail to pray. These graces to individuals were given before the Church was founded, and are given still out of its unity. They are no more tokens of an ecclesiastical character, or a sacramental power in the Church of England, than in the Kirk of Scotland, or in the Wesleyan connexion; they prove only the manifold grace of G.o.d, which, after all the sins of men, and in the midst of all the ruins he has made, still works in the souls for whom Christ died. Such, then, is our estimate of the Church of England in regard to the grace that works not _by_ it, nor _through_ it, but _in_ it and among those who, without faults of their own, are detained by it from the true Church of their baptism.

And here it is necessary to guard against a possible misuse of what I have said. Let no one imagine that he may still continue in the Church of England because G.o.d has. .h.i.therto mercifully bestowed his grace upon {296} him. As I have shown, this is no evidence that salvation is to be had _by_ the Church of England. It is an axiom that _to those who do all they can G.o.d never refuses his grace_. He bestows it that he may lead them on from grace to grace, and from truth to truth, until they enter the full and perfect light of faith in his only true fold. The grace they have received, therefore, was given, not to detain them in the Church of England, but to call them out of it. The grace of their past life lays on them the obligation of seeking and submitting to the perfect truth. G.o.d would "have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth." [Footnote 63] But his Church is an eminent doctrine, and member of that truth; and all grace given out of the Church is given in order to bring men into the Church, wheresoever the Church is present to them. If they refuse to submit to the Church they resist the divine intention of the graces they have hitherto received, and are thereby in grave danger of losing them, as we see too often in men who once were on the threshold of the Church, and now are in rationalism, or in states of which I desire to say no more.

[Footnote 63: 1 Tim. ii. 4.]