The History of Freedom Part 26

Liberal defenders of a government which made a principle of persecution had to decide whether they approved or condemned it. Where was their liberality in one case, or their catholicity in the other? It was the simple art of their adversaries to press this point, and to make the most of it; and a French priest took upon him to declare that intolerance, far from being a hidden shame, was a pride and a glory: "L'Eglise regarde l'Inquisition comme l'apogee de la civilisation chretienne, comme le fruit naturel des epoques de foi et de catholicisme national." Gratry took the other side so strongly that there would have been a tumult at the Sorbonne, if he had said from his chair what he wrote in his book; and certain pa.s.sages were struck out of the printed text by the cautious archbishop's reviser. He was one of those French divines who had taken in fuel at Munich, and he welcomed _Kirche und Kirchen_: "Quant au livre du docteur Dollinger sur la Papaute, c'est, selon moi, le livre decisif. C'est un chef-d'oeuvre admirable a plusieurs egards, et qui est destine a produire un bien incalculable et a fixer l'opinion sur ce sujet; c'est ainsi que le juge aussi M. de Montalembert. Le docteur Dollinger nous a rendu a tous un grand service." This was not the first impression of Montalembert. He deplored the Odeon lectures as usurping functions divinely a.s.signed not to professors, but to the episcopate, as a grief for friends and a joy for enemies. When the volume came he still objected to the policy, to the chapter on England, and to the cold treatment of Sixtus V. At last he admired without reserve. Nothing better had been written since Bossuet; the judgment on the Roman government, though severe, was just, and contained no more than the truth. There was not a word which he would not be able to sign. A change was going on in his position and his affections, as he came to regard toleration as the supreme affair. At Malines he solemnly declared that the Inquisitor was as horrible as the Terrorist, and made no distinction in favour of death inflicted for religion against death for political motives: "Les buchers allumes par une main catholique me font autant d'horreur que les echafauds ou les Protestants ont immole tant de martyrs." Wiseman, having heard him once, was not present on the second day; but the Belgian cardinal a.s.sured him that he had spoken like a sound divine. He described Dupanloup's defence of the Syllabus as a masterpiece of eloquent subterfuge, and repudiated his _interpretations equivoques_. A journey to Spain in 1865 made him more vehement than ever; although, from that time, the political opposition inflamed him less. He did not find imperialism intolerable.

His wrath was fixed on the things of which Spain had reminded him: "C'est la qu'il faut aller pour voir ce que le catholicisme exclusif a su faire d'une des plus grandes et des plus heroques nations de la terre.--Je rapporte un surcroit d'horreur pour les doctrines fanatiques et absolutistes qui ont cours aujourd'hui chez les catholiques du monde entier." In 1866 it became difficult, by the aid of others, to overcome Falloux's resistance to the admission of an article in the _Correspondant_, and by the end of the year his friends were unanimous to exclude him. An essay on Spain, his last work--"dernier soupir de mon ame indignee et attristee"--was, by Dupanloup's advice, not allowed to appear. Repelled by those whom he now designated as spurious, servile, and prevaricating liberals, he turned to the powerful German with whom he thought himself in sympathy. He had applauded him for dealing with one thing at a time, in his book on Rome: "Vous avez bien fait de ne rien dire de l'absolutisme spirituel, quant a present. _Sat prata biberunt_. Le reste viendra en son temps." He avowed that spiritual autocracy is worse than political; that evil pa.s.sions which had triumphed in the State were triumphant in the Church; that to send human beings to the stake, with a crucifix before them, was the act of a monster or a maniac. He was dying; but whilst he turned his face to the wall, lamenting that he had lived too long, he wished for one more conference with the old friend with whom, thirty-five years before, in a less anxious time, he had discussed the theme of religion and liberty.

This was in February 1867; and for several years he had endeavoured to teach Dollinger his clear-cut antagonism, and to kindle in him something of his gloomy and pa.s.sionate fervour, on the one point on which all depended.

Dollinger arrived slowly at the contemplation of deeper issues than that of churchmen or laymen in political offices, of Roman or German pupils in theological chairs. After seeing Baron Arnim, in 1865, he lost the hope of saving the papal government, and ceased to care about the things he had contended for in 1861; and a time came when he thought it difficult to give up the temporal power, and yet revere the Holy See. He wrote to Montalembert that his illusions were failing: "Ich bin sehr ernuchtert.--Es ist so vieles in der Kirche anders gekommen, als ich es mir vor 20-30 Jahren gedacht, und rosenfarbig ausgemalt hatte." He learnt to speak of spiritual despotism almost in the words of his friend. The point of junction between the two orders of ideas is the use of fire for the enforcement of religion on which the French were laying all their stress: "In Frankreich bewegt sich der Gegensatz blos auf dem socialpolitischen Gebiete, nicht auf dem theologisch-wissenschaftlichen, weil es dort genau genommen eine theologische Wissenschaft nicht gibt"

(16th October 1865). The Syllabus had not permanently fixed his attention upon it. Two years later, the matter was put more definitely, and he found himself, with little real preparation, turning from antiquarian curiosities, and brought face to face with the radical question of life and death. If ever his literary career was influenced by his French alliances, by a.s.sociation with men in the throng, for whom politics decided, and all the learning of the schools did not avail, the moment was when he resolved to write on the Inquisition.

The popular account which he drew up appeared in the newspapers in the summer of 1867; and although he did not mean to burn his ships, his position as an official defender of the Holy See was practically at an end. He wrote rapidly, at short notice, and not in the steady course of progressive acquisition. Ficker and Winkelmann have since given a different narrative of the step by which the Inquisition came into existence; and the praise of Gregory X., as a man sincerely religious who kept aloof, was a mark of haste. In the work which he was using, there was no act by that pontiff; but if he had had time to look deeper he would not have found him, in this respect, different from his contemporaries. There is no uncertainty as to the author's feeling towards the infliction of torture and death for religion, and the purpose of his treatise is to prevent the nailing of the Catholic colours to the stake. The spirit is that of the early lectures, in which he said: "Diese Schutzgewalt der Kirche ist rein geistlich. Sie kann also auch einen solchen offentlichen hartnackigen und sonst unheilbaren Gegner der Kirche nur seiner rein geistlichen kirchlichen Rechte berauben." Compared with the sweeping vehemence of the Frenchmen who preceded, the restrained moderation of language, the abstinence from the use of general terms, leaves us in doubt how far the condemnation extended, and whether he did more, in fact, than deplore a deviation from the doctrine of the first centuries. "Kurz darauf trat ein Umschwung ein, den man wohl einen Abfall von der alten Lehre nennen darf, und der sich ausnimmt, als ob die Kaiser die Lehrmeister der Bischofe geworden seien." He never entirely separated himself in principle from the promoters, the agents, the apologists. He did not believe, with Hefele, that the spirit survives, that there are men, not content with eternal flames, who are ready to light up new Smithfields.

Many of the defenders were his intimate friends. The most conspicuous was the only colleague who addressed him with the familiar German _Du_.

Speaking of two or three men, of whom one, Martens, had specially attacked the false liberalism which sees no good in the Inquisition, he wrote: "Sie werden sich noch erinnern ... wie hoch ich solche Manner stelle." He differed from them widely, but he differed academically; and this was not the polish or precaution of a man who knows that to a.s.sail character is to degrade and to betray one's cause. The change in his own opinions was always before him. Although convinced that he had been wrong in many of the ideas and facts with which he started, he was also satisfied that he had been as sincere and true to his lights in 1835 as in 1865. There was no secret about the Inquisition, and its observances were published and republished in fifty books; but in his early days he had not read them, and there was not a German, from Basel to Konigsberg, who could have faced a _viva voce_ in the _Directorium_ or the _a.r.s.enale_, or who had ever read Percin or Paramo. If Lacordaire disconnected St. Dominic from the practice of persecution, Dollinger had done the same thing before him.

Weit entfernt, wie man ihm wohl vorgeworfen hat, sich dabei Gewalt und Verfolgung zu erlauben, oder gar der Stifter der Inquisition zu werden, wirkte er, nicht den Irrenden, sondern den Irrthum befehdend, nur durch ruhige Belehrung und Erorterung.

If Newman, a much more cautious disputant, thought it substantial truth to say that Rome never burnt heretics, there were things as false in his own early writings. If Mohler, in the religious wars, diverted attention from Catholic to Protestant atrocities, he took the example from his friend's book, which he was reviewing. There may be startling matter in Locatus and Pegna, but they were officials writing under the strictest censorship, and n.o.body can tell when they express their own private thoughts. There is a copy of Suarez on which a priest has written the marginal e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n: "Mon Dieu, ayez pitie de nous!" But Suarez had to send the ma.n.u.script of his most aggressive book to Rome for revision, and Dollinger used to insist, on the testimony of his secretary, in Walton's _Lives_, that he disavowed and detested the interpolations that came back.

The French group, unlike him in spirit and motive, but dealing with the same opponents, judged them freely, and gave imperative utterance to their judgments. While Dollinger said of Veuillot that he meant well, but did much good and much evil, Montalembert called him a hypocrite: "L'Univers, en declarant tous les jours qu'il ne veut pas d'autre liberte que la sienne, justifie tout ce que nos pires ennemis ont jamais dit sur la mauvaise foi et l'hypocrisie des polemistes chretiens."

Lacordaire wrote to a hostile bishop: "L'Univers est a mes yeux la negation de tout esprit chretien et de tout bon sens humain. Ma consolation au milieu de si grandes miseres morales est de vivre solitaire, occupe d'une oeuvre que Dieu benit, et de protester par mon silence, et de temps en temps par mes paroles, contre la plus grande insolence qui se soit encore autorisee au nom de Jesus-Christ." Gratry was a man of more gentle nature, but his tone is the same: "Esprits faux ou nuls, consciences intellectuelles faussees par l'habitude de l'apologie sans franchise: _partemque ejus c.u.m hypocritis ponet_.--Cette ecole est bien en verite une ecole de mensonge.--C'est cette ecole qui est depuis des siecles, et surtout en ce siecle, l'opprobre de notre cause et le fleau de la religion. Voila notre ennemi commun; voila l'ennemi de l'Eglise."

Dollinger never understood party divisions in this tragic way. He was provided with religious explanations for the living and the dead; and his maxims in regard to contemporaries governed and attenuated his view of every historical problem. For the writers of his acquaintance who were unfaltering advocates of the Holy Office, for Philips and Gams, and for Theiner, who expiated devious pa.s.sages of early youth, amongst other penitential works, with large volumes in honour of Gregory XIII., he had always the same mode of defence: "Mir begegnet es noch jede Woche, da.s.s ich irgend einem Irrthum, mitunter einem lange gepflegten, entsage, ihn mir gleichsam aus der Brust herausreissen muss. Da sollte man freilich hochst duldsam und nachsichtig gegen fremde Irrthumer werden" (5th October 1866). He writes in the same terms to another correspondent sixteen years later: "Mein ganzes Leben ist ein successives Abstreifen von Irrthumern gewesen, von Irrthumern, die ich mit Zahigkeit festhielt, gewaltsam gegen die mir aufdammernde bessere Erkenntniss mich stemmend; und doch meine ich sagen zu durfen, da.s.s ich dabei nicht _dishonest_ war. Darf ich andre verurtheilen _in eodem luto mec.u.m haerentes_?" He regretted as he grew old the hardness and severity of early days, and applied the same inconclusive deduction from his own experience to the past. After comparing Baronius and Bellarmine with Bossuet and Arnauld he goes on: "Wenn ich solche Manner auf einem Irrthum treffe, so sage ich mir: 'Wenn Du damals gelebt, und an seiner Stelle gestanden warest, hattest Du nicht den allegingn Wahn getheilt; und er, wenn er die Dir zu Theil gewordenen Erkenntnissmittel besessen, wurde er nicht besseren Gebrauch davon gemacht haben, die Wahrheit nicht fruher erkannt und bekannt haben, als Du?'"

He sometimes distrusted his favourite argument of ignorance and early prepossessions, and felt that there was presumption and unreality in tendering such explanations to men like the Bollandist De Buck, De Rossi, whom the Inst.i.tute elected in preference to Mommsen, or Windischmann, whom he himself had been accused of bringing forward as a rival to Mohler. He would say that knowledge may be a burden and not a light, that the faculty of doing justice to the past is among the rarest of moral and intellectual gifts: "Man kann viel wissen, viele Notizen im Kopf haben, ohne das rechte wissenschaftliche Verstandniss, ohne den historischen Sinn. Dieser ist, wie Sie wohl wissen, gar nicht so haufig; und we er fehlt, da fehlt auch, scheint mir, die volle Verantwortlichkeit fur das gewusste."

In 1879 he prepared materials for a paper on the Ma.s.sacre of St.

Bartholomew. Here he was breaking new ground, and verging on that which it was the policy and the aspiration of his life to avoid. Many a man who gives no tears to Cranmer, Servetus, or Bruno, who thinks it just that the laws should be obeyed, who deems that actions done by order are excused, and that legality implies morality, will draw the line at midnight murder and wholesale extermination. The deed wrought at Paris and in forty towns of France in 1572, the arguments which produced it, the arguments which justified it, left no room for the mists of mitigation and compromise. The pa.s.sage from the age of Gregory IX. to that of Gregory XIII., from the Crusades to the wars of Religion, brought his whole system into jeopardy. The historian who was at the heels of the divine in 1861, and level with him in 1867, would have come to the front. The discourse was never delivered, never composed. But the subject of toleration was absent no more from his thoughts, filling s.p.a.ce once occupied by Julian of Eclanum and Duns Scotus, the Variata and the Five Propositions. To the last days of 1889 he was engaged in following the doctrines of intolerance back to their root, from Innocent III. to the Council of Rheims, from Nicholas I. to St. Augustine, narrowing the sphere of individual responsibility, defending agents, and multiplying degrees so as to make them imperceptible. Before the writings of Priscillian were published by the Vienna Academy the nature of their strange contents was disclosed. It then appeared that a copy of the _Codex unicus_ had been sent to Dollinger from Wurzburg years before; and that he had never adverted to the fact that the burning of heretics came, fully armed, from the brain of one man, and was the invention of a heretic who became its first victim.

At Rome he discussed the council of Trent with Theiner, and tried to obtain permission for him to publish the original acts. Pius IX.

objected that none of his predecessors had allowed it, and Theiner answered that none of them had defined the Immaculate Conception. In a paper which Dollinger drew up, he observed that Pallavicini cannot convince; that far from proving the case against the artful Servite, the pettiness of his charges indicates that he has no graver fault to find; so that nothing but the production of the official texts can enforce or disprove the imputation that Trent was a scene of tyranny and intrigue.

His private belief then was that the papers would disprove the imputation and vindicate the council. When Theiner found it possible to publish his _Acta Authentica_, Dollinger also printed several private diaries, chiefly from Mendham's collection at the Bodleian. But the correspondence between Rome and the legates is still, in its integrity, kept back. The two friends had examined it; both were persuaded that it was decisive; but they judged that it decided in opposite ways. Theiner, the official guardian of the records, had been forbidden to communicate them during the Vatican Council; and he deemed the concealment prudent.

What pa.s.sed in Rome under Pius IX. would, he averred, suffer by comparison. According to Dollinger, the suppressed papers told against Trent.

Wenn wir nicht allen unseren henotischen Hoffnungen entsagen und uns nicht in schweren Konflikt mit der alten (vormittel-alterigen) Kirche bringen wollen, werden wir doch auch da das Korrektiv des Vincentianischen Prinzips (_semper, ubique, ab omnibus_) zur Anwendung bringen mussen.

After his last visit to the Marciana he thought more favourably of Father Paul, sharing the admiration which Venetians feel for the greatest writer of the Republic, and falling little short of the judgments which Macaulay inscribed, after each perusal, in the copy at Inveraray. Apart from his chief work he thought him a great historian, and he rejected the suspicion that he professed a religion which he did not believe. He even fancied that the ma.n.u.script, which in fact was forwarded with much secrecy to Archbishop Abbot, was published against his will. The intermediate seekers, who seem to skirt the border, such as Grotius, Ussher, Praetorius, and the other celebrated Venetian, De Dominis, interested him deeply, in connection with the subject of Irenics, and the religious problem was part motive of his incessant study of Shakespeare, both in early life, and when he meditated joining in the debate between Simpson, Rio, Bernays, and the _Edinburgh Review_.

His estimate of his own work was low. He wished to be remembered as a man who had written certain books, but who had not written many more.

His collections constantly prompted new and attractive schemes, but his way was strewn with promise unperformed, and abandoned from want of concentration. He would not write with imperfect materials, and to him the materials were always imperfect. Perpetually engaged in going over his own life and reconsidering his conclusions, he was not depressed by unfinished work. When a sanguine friend hoped that all the contents of his hundred note-books would come into use, he answered that perhaps they might, if he lived for a hundred and fifty years. He seldom wrote a book without compulsion, or the aid of energetic a.s.sistants. The account of mediaeval sects, dated 1890, was on the stocks for half a century. The discourse on the Templars, delivered at his last appearance in public, had been always before him since a conversation with Michelet about the year 1841. Fifty-six years lay between his text to the _Paradiso_ of Cornelius and his last return to Dante.

When he began to fix his mind on the const.i.tutional history of the Church, he proposed to write, first, on the times of Innocent XI. It was the age he knew best, in which there was most interest, most material, most ability, when divines were national cla.s.sics, and presented many distinct types of religious thought, when biblical and historical science was founded, and Catholicism was presented in its most winning guise. The character of Odescalchi impressed him, by his earnestness in sustaining a strict morality. Fragments of this projected work reappeared in his lectures on Louis XIV., and in his last publication on the Casuists. The lectures betray the decline of the tranquil idealism which had been the admiration and despair of friends. Opposition to Rome had made him, like his ultramontane allies in France, more indulgent to the ancient Gallican enemy. He now had to expose the vice of that system, which never roused the king's conscience, and served for sixty years, from the remonstrance of Caussin to the anonymous warning of Fenelon, as the convenient sanction of absolutism. In the work on seventeenth-century ethics, which is his farthest, the moral point of view prevails over every other, and conscience usurps the place of theology, canon law, and scholarship. This was his tribute to a new phase of literature, the last he was to see, which was beginning to put ethical knowledge above metaphysics and politics, as the central range of human progress. Morality, veracity, the proper atmosphere of ideal history, became the paramount interest.

When he was proposed for a degree, the most eloquent lips at Oxford, silenced for ever whilst I write this page, pointed to his excellence in those things which are the merit of Germans. "Quaecunque in Germanorum indole admiranda atque imitanda fere censemus, ea in Doellingero maxime splendent." The patriotic quality was recognised in the address of the Berlin professors, who say that by upholding the independence of the national thought, whilst he enriched it with the best treasure of other lands, he realised the ideal of the historian. He became more German in extreme old age, and less impressive in his idiomatic French and English than in his own language. The lamentations of men he thought good judges, Mazade and Taine, and the first of literary critics, Montegut, diluted somewhat his admiration for the country of St. Bernard and Bossuet. In spite of politics, his feeling for English character, for the moral quality of English literature, never changed; and he told his own people that their faults are not only very near indeed to their virtues, but are sometimes more apparent to the observer. The belief in the fixity and influence of national type, confirmed by his authorities, Ganganelli and Mohler, continued to determine his judgments. In his last letter to Mr. Gladstone, he ill.u.s.trated the Irish question by means of a chronicle describing Ireland a thousand years ago.

Everybody has felt that his power was out of proportion to his work, and that he knew too much to write. It was so much better to hear him than to read all his books, that the memory of what he was will pa.s.s away with the children whom he loved. Hefele called him the first theologian in Germany, and Hofler said that he surpa.s.sed all men in the knowledge of historical literature; but Hefele was the bishop of his predilection, and Hofler had been fifty years his friend, and is the last survivor of the group which once made Munich the capital of citramontane Catholicity. Martensen, the most brilliant of Episcopalian divines, describes him as he talked with equal knowledge and certainty of every age, and understood all characters and all situations as if he had lived in the midst of them. The best ecclesiastical historian now living is the fittest judge of the great ecclesiastical historian who is dead.

Harnack has a.s.signed causes which limited his greatness as a writer, perhaps even as a thinker; but he has declared that no man had the same knowledge and intelligence of history in general, and of religious history which is its most essential element, and he affirms, what some have doubted, that he possessed the rare faculty of entering into alien thought. None of those who knew Professor Dollinger best, who knew him in the third quarter of the century, to which he belonged by the full fruition of his powers and the completeness of his knowledge, will ever qualify these judgments. It is right to add that, in spite of boundless reading, there was no lumber in his mind, and in spite of his cla.s.sical learning, little ornament. Among the men to be commemorated here, he stands alone. Throughout the measureless distance which he traversed, his movement was against his wishes, in pursuit of no purpose, in obedience to no theory, under no attraction but historical research alone. It was given to him to form his philosophy of history on the largest induction ever available to man; and whilst he owed more to divinity than any other historian, he owed more to history than any other divine.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 338: _English Historical Review_,1890.]

XII

CARDINAL WISEMAN AND THE HOME AND FOREIGN REVIEW[339]

It is one of the conditions inseparable from a public career to be often misunderstood, and sometimes judged unfairly even when understood the best. No one who has watched the formation of public opinion will be disposed to attribute all the unjust judgments which a.s.sail him to the malice of individuals, or to imagine that he can prevent misconceptions or vindicate his good name by words alone. He knows that even where he has committed no errors he must pay tribute to the fallibility of mankind, and that where he is in fault he must also pay tribute to his own. This is a natural law; and the purer a man's conscience is, and the more single his aim, the less eager will he be to evade it, or to defend himself from its penalties.

The man whose career is bound up with that of some school or party will estimate the value of his opponents' censures by the worth which he attributes to the undiscriminating praise of his friends; but he who has devoted himself to the development of principles which will not always bend to the dictates of expediency will have no such short way of dealing with objections. His independence will frequently and inexorably demand the sacrifice of interests to truth--of what is politic to what is right; and, whenever he makes that sacrifice, he will appear a traitor to those whom he is most anxious to serve, while his act will be hailed by those who are farthest from sharing his opinions as a proof of secret sympathy, and harbinger of future alliance. Thus, the censure which he incurs will most often come from those whose views are essentially his own; and the very matter which calls it forth will be that which elicits the applause of adversaries who cannot bring themselves to believe either in the truth of his opinions, in the integrity of his motives, or in the sincerity of his aims.

There are few men living whose career has been more persistently misinterpreted, more bitterly a.s.sailed, or more ignorantly judged, than the ill.u.s.trious person who is the head in England of the Church to which we belong, Cardinal Wiseman has been for many years the chief object of the attacks of those who have desired to injure or degrade our community. He is not only the canonical chief of English Catholics, but his ability, and the devotion of his life to their cause, have made him their best representative and their most powerful champion. No prelate in Christendom is more fully trusted by the Holy See, or exercises a more extensive personal influence, or enjoys so wide a literary renown.

Upon him, therefore, intolerance and fanaticism have concentrated their malice. He has had to bear the brunt of that hatred which the holiness of Catholicism inspires in its enemies; and the man who has never been found wanting when the cause of the Church was at stake may boast, with a not unworthy pride, of the indifference with which he has encountered the personal slander of a hostile press.

The Catholics of this country are attached to Cardinal Wiseman by warmer feelings and more personal ties than those of merely ecclesiastical subordination. It has been his privilege to gather the spiritual fruits of the Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation Act; and the history of English Catholicism has been, for a whole generation, bound up with his name. That immense change in the internal condition of the Church in England which distinguishes our days from the time of Milner has grown up under his influence, and has been in great part his work. We owe it to him that we have been brought into closer intercourse with Rome, and into contact with the rest of Europe. By his preaching and his spiritual direction he has transformed the devotions of our people; while his lectures and writings have made Protestants familiar with Catholic ideas, and have given Catholics a deeper insight into their own religion. As a controversialist he influenced the Oxford movement more deeply than any other Catholic. As director of the chief literary organ of Catholics during a quarter of a century he rendered services to our literature, and overcame difficulties, which none are in a better position to appreciate than those who are engaged in a similar work. And as President of Oscott, he acquired the enduring grat.i.tude of hundreds who owed to his guidance the best portion of their training.

These personal relations with English Catholics, which have made him a stranger to none and a benefactor to all, have at the same time given him an authority of peculiar weight amongst them. With less unity of view and tradition than their brethren in other lands, they were accustomed, in common with the rest of Englishmen, to judge more independently and to speak more freely than is often possible in countries more exclusively Catholic. Their minds are not all cast in the same mould, nor their ideas derived from the same stock; but all alike, from bishop to layman, identify their cause with that of the Cardinal, and feel that, in the midst of a hostile people, no diversity of opinion ought to interfere with unity of action, no variety of interest with ident.i.ty of feeling, no controversy with the universal reverence which is due to the position and character of the Archbishop of Westminster.

In this spirit the Catholic body have received Cardinal Wiseman's latest publication--his "Reply to the Address of his Clergy on his return from Rome." He speaks in it of the great a.s.semblage of the Episcopate, and of their address to the Holy Father. Among the bishops there present he was the most conspicuous, and he was President of the Commission to which the preparation of their address was intrusted. No account of it, therefore, can be more authentic than that which he is able to give. The reserve imposed by his office, and by the distinguished part he had to bear, has been to some extent neutralised by the necessity of refuting false and exaggerated rumours which were circulated soon after the meeting, and particularly two articles which appeared in _The Patrie_ on the 4th and 5th of July, and in which it was stated that the address written by Cardinal Wiseman contained "most violent attacks on all the fundamental principles of modern society."

After replying in detail to the untruths of this newspaper, the Cardinal proceeds as follows:--

With far greater pain I feel compelled to advert to a covert insinuation of the same charges, in a publication avowedly Catholic, and edited in my own diocese, consequently canonically subject to my correction. Should such a misstatement, made under my own eyes, be pa.s.sed over by me, it might be surmised that it could not be contradicted; and whether chronologically it preceded or followed the French account it evidently becomes my duty to notice it, as French bishops have considered it theirs to correct the inaccuracies of their native writers.

Otherwise, in a few years, we might find reference made, as to a recognised Catholic authority, for the current and unreproved statement of what occurred at Rome, to _The Home and Foreign Review_.

And that in a matter on which reprehension would have been doubly expected, if merited. In its first number the Address, which has, I believe, wonderfully escaped the censure of Protestant and infidel journals, is thus spoken of: "This Address is said to be a compromise between one which took the violent course of recommending that major excommunication should be at once p.r.o.nounced against the chief enemies of the temporal power by name, and one still more moderate than the present" (_The Home and Foreign Review_, p. 264). Now this very charge about recommending excommunication is the one made by the French paper against my Address. But, leaving to the writer the chance of an error, in this application of his words, I am bound to correct it, to whomever it refers. He speaks of only two addresses: the distinction between them implies severe censure on one. I a.s.sure you that neither contained the recommendation or the sentiment alluded to.

My Brethren, I repeat that it pains me to have to contradict the repet.i.tion, in my own diocese, of foreign accusations, without the smallest pains taken to verify or disprove them with means at hand.

But this can hardly excite surprise in us who know the antecedents of that journal under another name, the absence for years of all reserve or reverence in its treatment of persons or of things deemed sacred, its grazing over the very edges of the most perilous abysses of error, and its habitual preferences of uncatholic to catholic instincts, tendencies, and motives. In uttering these sad thoughts, and entreating you to warn your people, and especially the young, against such dangerous leadership, believe me I am only obeying a higher direction than my own impulses, and acting under much more solemn sanctions. Nor shall I stand alone in this unhappily necessary correction.

But let us pa.s.s to more cheerful and consoling thoughts. If my connection with the preparation of the Address, from my having held, though unworthy, office in its Committee, enables and authorises me to rebut false charges against it, it has further bestowed upon me the privilege of personal contact with a body of men who justly represented the entire Episcopate, and would have represented it with equal advantage in any other period of the Church. I know not who selected them, nor do I venture to say that many other equal committees of eighteen could not have been extracted from the remainder. I think they might; but I must say that a singular wisdom seemed to me to have presided over the actual, whatever might have been any other possible, choice.

Deliberations more minute, more mutually respectful, more courteous, or at the same time more straightforward and unflinching, could hardly have been carried on. More learning in theology and canon law, more deep religious feeling, a graver sense of the responsibility laid upon the Commission, or a more scrupulous regard to the claims of justice, and no less of mercy, could scarcely have been exhibited.

Its spirit was one of mildness, of gentleness, and of reverence to all who rightly claimed it. "Violent courses," invitations to "draw the sword and rush on enemies," or to deal about "the major excommunication by name," I deliberately a.s.sure you, were never mentioned, never insinuated, and I think I may say, never thought of by any one in that Council. In the sketches proposed by several, there was not a harsh or disrespectful word about any sovereign or government; in anything I ever humbly proposed, there was not a single allusion to "King or Kaiser."

Our duty to the Cardinal and our duty to our readers alike forbid us to pa.s.s by these remarks without notice. Silence would imply either that we admitted the charge, or that we disregarded the censure; and each of these suppositions would probably be welcome to the enemies of our common cause, while both of them are, in fact, untrue. The impossibility of silence, however, involves the necessity of our stating the facts on which charges so definite and so formidable have been founded. In doing so, we shall endeavour both to exhibit the true sequence of events, and to explain the origin of the Cardinal's misapprehension; and in this way we shall reply to the charges made against us.

But we must first explicitly declare, as we have already implied, that in the Cardinal's support and approbation of our work we should recognise an aid more valuable to the cause we are engaged in than the utmost support which could be afforded to us by any other person; and that we cannot consider the terms he has used respecting us otherwise than as a misfortune to be profoundly regretted, and a blow which might seriously impair our power to do service to religion.

A Catholic Review which is deprived of the countenance of the ecclesiastical authorities is placed in an abnormal position. A germ of distrust is planted in the ground where the good seed should grow; the support which the suspected organ endeavours to lend to the Church is repudiated by the ecclesiastical rulers; and its influence in Protestant society, as an expositor of Catholic ideas, is in danger of being destroyed, because its exposition of them may be declared unsound and unfair, even when it represents them most faithfully and defends them most successfully. The most devoted efforts of its conductors are liable to be misconstrued, and perversely turned either against the Church or against the _Review_ itself; its best works are infected with the suspicion with which it is regarded, and its merits become almost more perilous than its faults.

These considerations could not have been overlooked by the Cardinal when he resolved to take a step which threatened to paralyse one of the few organs of Catholic opinion in England. Yet he took that step. If an enemy had done this, it would have been enough to vindicate ourselves, and to leave the burden of an unjust accusation to be borne by its author. But since it has been done by an ecclesiastical superior, with entire foresight of the grave consequences of the act, it has become necessary for us, in addition, to explain the circ.u.mstances by which he was led into a course we have so much reason to deplore, and to show how an erroneous and unjust opinion could arise in the mind of one whom obvious motives would have disposed to make the best use of a publication, the conductors of which are labouring to serve the community he governs, and desired and endeavoured to obtain his sanction for their work. If we were unable to reconcile these two necessities,--if we were compelled to choose between a forbearance dishonourable to ourselves, and a refutation injurious to the Cardinal, we should be placed in a painful and almost inextricable difficulty. For a Catholic who defends himself at the expense of an ecclesiastical superior sacrifices that which is generally of more public value than his own fair fame; and an English Catholic who casts back on Cardinal Wiseman the blame unjustly thrown on himself, hurts a reputation which belongs to the whole body, and disgraces the entire community of Catholics. By such a course, a Review which exists only for public objects would stultify its own position and injure its own cause, and _The Home and Foreign Review_ has no object to attain, and no views to advance, except objects and views in which the Catholic Church is interested. The ends for which it labours, according to its light and ability, are ends by which the Church cannot but gain; the doctrine it receives, and the authority it obeys, are none other than those which command the acceptance and submission of the Cardinal himself. It desires to enjoy his support; it has no end to gain by opposing him. But we are not in this painful dilemma. We can show that the accusations of the Cardinal are unjust; and, at the same time, we can explain how naturally the suppositions on which they are founded have arisen, by giving a distinct and ample statement of our own principles and position.

The complaint which the Cardinal makes against us contains, substantially, five charges: (1) that we made a misstatement, affirming something historically false to be historically true; (2) that the falsehood consists in the statement that only two addresses were proposed in the Commission--one violent, the other very moderate,--and that the address finally adopted was a compromise between these two; (3) that we insinuated that the Cardinal himself was the author of the violent address; (4) that we cast, by implication, a severe censure on that address and its author; and (5) that our narrative was derived from the same sources, and inspired by the same motives, as that given in _The Patrie_,--for the Cardinal distinctly connects the two accounts, and quotes pa.s.sages indifferently from both, in such a way that words which we never used might by a superficial reader be supposed to be ours.

To these charges our reply is as follows: (1) We gave the statement of which the Cardinal complains as a mere rumour current on any good authority at the time of our publication, and we employed every means in our power to test its accuracy, though the only other narratives which had then reached England were, as the Cardinal says (p. 9), too "partial and perverted" to enable us to sift it to the bottom. We stated that a rumour was current, not that its purport was true. (2) We did not speak of "only two addresses" actually submitted to the Commission. We supposed the report to mean, that of the three possible forms of address, two extreme and one mean, each of which actually had partisans in the Commission, the middle or moderate form was the one finally adopted. (3) We had no suspicion that the Cardinal had proposed any violent address at all; we did not know that such a proposal had been, or was about to be, attributed to him; and there was no connection whatever between him and it either in our mind or in our language. (4) We implied no censure either on the course proposed or on its proposer, still less on the Cardinal personally. (5) The articles in _The Patrie_ first appeared--and that in France--some days after our Review was in the hands of the public; we know nothing of the authority on which their statements were founded, and we have not the least sympathy either with the politics or the motives of that newspaper.

This reply would be enough for our own defence; but it is right that we should show, on the other side, how it came to pa.s.s that the Cardinal was led to subject our words to that construction which we have so much reason to regret. Reading them by the light of his own knowledge, and through the medium of the false reports which afterwards arose with regard to himself, his interpretation of them may easily have appeared both plausible and likely. For there were more draft addresses than one: one was his; the actual address was a compromise between them, and he had been falsely accused of, and severely censured for, proposing violent courses in his address. Knowing this, he was tempted to suspect a covert allusion to himself under our words, and the chronological relation between our own article and those of _The Patrie_ was easily forgotten, or made nugatory by the supposition of their both being derived from the same sources of information.

But this will be made clearer by the following narrative of facts: A Commission was appointed to draw up the address of the bishops; Cardinal Wiseman, its president, proposed a draft address, which was not obnoxious to any of the criticisms made on any other draft, and is, in substance, the basis of the address as it was ultimately settled. It was favourably received by the Commission; but, after some deliberation, its final adoption was postponed.