CHAPTER IV: THE POLITICAL THEORY OF THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL348

I

With the passage of the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829, a body of men who had been for too long excluded from political privilege became once more citizens of the State.³⁴⁹ The grounds for their exclusion had been, for the most part, based upon a single fact.

It was, prejudice apart, emphatically a question of unity of alle­giance which had lain at the root of the Catholic difficulty.

The supporters of the Catholics realised quite clearly that the fun­damental question was that of the nature of the State. Plunkett urged that their exclusion on religious grounds ‘was calculated to impress an

opinion that religion was only an instrument for State purposes.'³⁶³ The constitution was to him essentially secular in its nature. His attitude was very like that of Penn and the Tolerationists of the seventeenth century. As to the latter it seemed evident that ‘religion is no part of the old English government,'³⁶⁴ so to Plunkeit the law enjoined certain duties, and whoever performed those duties was entitled to the privileges of citizenship.³⁶⁵ Canning admitted that there had been a time when Catho­lic and Protestant had struggled ‘to see which should wed the State and make her exclusively its own. But the time of combat had passed—the Catholics tendered a willing submission... the Protestant religion. and the Constitution were inseparably united' so that no danger need be apprehended from Catholic antagonism to the Church of England.'³⁶⁶ And Sidney Smith, who perhaps more than any other writer made. plain to humble men the Catholic argument,³⁶⁷ went directly to the charge of divided allegiance as the root of the matter. The Catholics were charged with owing allegiance to one who might dethrone kings, and were them­selves bound to destroy heretics.

The attitude of the Catholic authorities was in no wise different from that of their Protestant supporters. From the early days of the struggle, they tried to make it plain that, whatever their connexion with the Church of Rome, the loyalty they owed the British Crown in civil affairs was unexcepted and entire. ‘We acknowledge,' wrote the Vicars Apostolic of England in 18 1 3,³⁷⁰ ‘that we owe to the State a proof of our civil allegiance and security against all treasonable designs. You (the Catholic laity) in common with us... have given to our country the stron­gest proofs of civil allegiance, and an abhorrence of all treasonable de­signs by the profession of your religious principles, by the solemn oaths you have taken with unquestionable sincerity, and by the known loyalty of your conduct.... We are all British-born subjects, and as such we feel an interest and a glory in the security and prosperity of our country. We can no more betray our country than our religion.' This is a sufficiently clear pronouncement. Yet two years later O'Connell made an even more striking repudiation of any claim of the Pope to temporal allegiance. “I deny,' he said³⁷¹ ‘the doctrine that the Pope has any temporal authority, directly or indirectly, in Ireland, we have all denied that doctrine on oath, and we would die to resist it.' ‘I know of no foreign prince,' he went on to, assert,³⁷² ‘whom, in temporal matters the Catholics of Ire­land would more decidedly resist than the Pope.' Nor did Charles But­ler—whose great legal powers give to his declaration a peculiar value— speak otherwise. ‘If the Pope,' said the pamphlet reprinted by him,³⁷³ ‘should pretend to dissolve or dispense with his Majesty's subjects from their allegiance, on account of heresy or schism, such dispensation would be vain and null; and all Catholic subjects notwithstanding such dispen­sation or absolution, would still be bound in conscience to defend their king and country at the hazard of their lives and fortunes (as far as Protestants would be bound) even against the Pope himself, in case he should invade the nation.' To the same effect was the petition of the Catholic Board to the king.

It is obviously a political question as to the nature of sovereignty that is at the bottom of this discussion; and the attitude of Parliament, on the one hand, and of the Catholics on the other, to the problem of security against Roman aggression throws this aspect of emancipation into very striking relief. The fear clearly is that the nature of their reli­gious allegiance will compel Catholics to endanger the Protestant na­ture of the State. Means must therefore be had to make the government sufficiently in control of Catholic loyalty as to guard against that risk. In Grattan's Bill of1813 a long oath of loyalty was inserted by Canning intended to secure Great Britain against Roman interference. A Board of Commission, selected from distinguished Catholics, was to be cho­sen and was to accept all appointees to vacant bishoprics in the Roman Church, and to examine all documents from Rome before admitting them into the country.³⁷⁹ But this measure raised in its turn a curious problem. While it did not hurt the implicit Gallicanism of men like But­ler, it was unalterably opposed by the redoubtable Milner and by the Irish bishops. It was, said the latter,³⁸⁰ ‘utterly incompatible with the discipline of the Roman Catholic Church and with the free exercise of our religion,' since it involved the admission that the State had the right to interfere with the internal affairs of the Church. The bill, said Milner,³⁸¹ ‘was contrived with a heart and malice which none but the spirits of wickedness in high places... could have suggested to undermine and wither the fair trees of the English and Irish Catholic Churches.' Nor would he admit the rescript of Monsignor Quaranotti, the sub-prefect of Propaganda, who, in the enforced absence of the Pope as Napoleon's prisoner, approved the proposal.³⁸² O'Connell even went so far as to assert that not even the Pope himself would make him admit such an invasion of Catholic integrity.³⁸³ ‘The Catholics of Ireland,' said the Dublin Daily Chronicle,³⁸⁴ ‘will not recognise any of its acts as binding and obligatory.., they have distinctly and on their solemn oaths pro­tested against the recognition of any foreign temporal authority.' By 1817, it was clear that Catholic opinion would tolerate neither the royal approval of bishops, nor the regulation of ecclesiastical intercourse with Rome.³⁸⁵

The reason is sufficiently plain. The Roman Catholic Church has always claimed that the Church is itself a perfect society, and as such it could hardly acknowledge the supremacy of the State. Milner, indeed, from this standpoint insisted, and logically, that no Catholic could swear undivided allegiance to the temporal sovereign ‘as there might always be occasions when the authority of the State might be at variance with that of the Church';³⁸⁶ and he seems to have objected to the limited sense in which the Catholics interpreted allegiance. Securities of any kind seemed to him ‘Bills of Pains and Penalties' which struck at the root of Catholic independence, and he actually organised a petition against a Relief Bill of Plunkett's on this ground.³⁸⁷ His position seems to have won the support of the Roman authorities, who expressed surprise and sorrow that the laity of the Church should have presented a petition to the king ‘in which they have protested that they acknowledge in no one but himself any power or authority, either civil, spiritual or ecclesiasti­cal' and emphasised their opinion that such an attitude would be ‘un­lawful and schismatical.'³⁸⁸ The reason of this attitude becomes clear from a note of Bishop Milner's on what he understood allegiance to mean under the laws of England. It is not to allegiance itself ‘which means nothing more than the duty which a subject owes to the Prince or State under which he lives' that he objected, but, ‘as it is gathered from the laws of the country which invested the king with the power of ex­communication, or cutting off from the body of Christ, and of reforming all heresies, and, therefore, of judging of them.'³⁸⁹ It was thus against the theoretical limitations upon all bodies not the State which is implied in the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty that he made his protest. He could owe allegiance to the State only so far as it did not conflict with the loyalty his Church had the right to demand.

A twofold tendency within the Catholic fold was clear thus early. Men like Butler were Gallican in their attitude,³⁹⁰ willing to combine with the Unitarians to secure emancipation on the broad basis of a gen­eral religious toleration;³⁹¹ while others, like Milner, were profoundly Ultramontane in temper. It was with the first body of thought that gen­eral English sentiment allied itself. ‘You will consider,' said the Speech from the throne announcing the Relief Bill,³⁹² ‘whether the removal of these disabilities can be effected consistently with the full and perma­nent security of our establishments in Church and State.' It was the knowledge at Rome that this feeling must be respected which had pre­vented the recognition of the Jesuits in England;³⁹³ and when, in 1815, Cardinal Gonsalvi had visited England he had, in deference to public sentiment, not only put aside the ordinary robes of his office, but had been most careful to avoid all questions of precedence.³⁹⁴ For the old prejudices were far from dead. As late as 1827, Arthur Hallam told Mr. Gladstone how the gibes in ‘King John' against the Pope had met with eager applause; and the Oxford bedmakers thought separation might be preferable to emancipating the Catholics.³⁹⁵ When the Bill actually came, the concession to this sentiment was apparent. The oath was of the most drastic nature, and prevented any Catholic from attempting to secure a change in the character of the State.³⁹⁶ The Catholics were forbidden to take the names of Protestant sees for their bishoprics—a clause which, ignored in Ireland, was in England to lead to serious trouble.³⁹⁷ Catho­lics were forbidden from religious celebration outside a church or pri­vate house, and from wearing the habits of their orders.³⁹⁸ The Jesuits were prohibited from entrance into England.³⁹⁹ On the more negative side, Catholics were not to hold certain offices, nor were they to have direct concern with religious appointments.⁴⁰⁰ Gifts to religious orders were made void,⁴⁰¹ and the rule against tracts for superstitious purposes was sufficient to invalidate such bequests as one for masses or prayer for the repose of souls.⁴⁰² It is perhaps worth noting that in the year before the passage of the Relief Act, a bequest for inculcating the doc­trine of the Pope's supremacy was declared illegal;⁴⁰³ and it was not until 1836 that a Roman Catholic marriage became valid in the eyes of the law.⁴⁰⁴

The Relief Act clearly bears upon its face the marks of the difficult circumstances under which it was passed. It is evident that most En­glishmen suspected the Catholic religion of sapping the foundations of civic loyalty; and the Act rather lulled than removed that suspicion. The securities were plainly enough the mark of a fear that the sovereignty of the Crown might suffer impairment; for if, as Plunket had stated fifteen years before, the ‘true principles ofthe Constitution' were ‘the safety of the Established Church and of the Protestant throne,'⁴⁰⁵ ‘and if no con­cession not consistent with these could be yielded, it was clear not only that religious proselytisation must be circumscribed but also that enthu­siasts would hesitate to suffer such a limitation of religious freedom as was here implied. Certainly Bishop Doyle's way out ofthe impasse was more casuistically ingenious than politically logical.⁴⁰⁶

The fact of the matter is that, as is usually the case, English practice was better than English theory. The Irish difficulty apart⁴⁰⁷—and only complete emancipation could be its solution—to the attitude of men like Charles Butler it was scarcely possible even for the most bigoted of Protestants to take political exception. He admitted the authority of com­mon law and statute law, both of which he had himself illuminated by his profound learning. He did not hesitate to accept the claims of consti­tuted jurisdiction in all civil and religious matters that did not touch his conscience. He repudiated the temporal supremacy of the Pope. To have excluded him from the exercise of political power when, without its possession, he had been for so long loyal to the British Crown, would have been to create an allegiance which no thinking man could accept. The Catholic had been ‘a marked man and a plotting sectary'⁴⁰⁸ in the eyes of the populace for more than two hundred years, yet he had not attempted the destruction of an oppressive State. Emancipation came as the half-unwilling and half- accomplished recognition ofthe error inher­ent in a theory of sovereignty which, because it makes political outcasts of those whose intimate beliefs it fails to control, is at war with all the deeper realities of human life.

II

If the Papacy, as Thomas Hobbes so scornfully remarked, be no more than the ‘ghost of the Holy Roman Empire sitting crowned upon the ruins thereof,' it has not seldom possessed sufficient substantiality to cause Englishmen some vigorous tremors. Whatever its defects, Ultramontanism has, at any rate in its broader form, the merit of a re­spectable pedigree. Nor has the attitude of England to its demands changed very greatly in the centuries since the Reformation Parliament bestowed on the omnivorous Henry the attributes of papal sovereignty.⁴⁰⁹ But an Anglican usurpation was not likely to decrease the pretensions of that organism of which changelessness was the proud boast. The claims of Gregory VII and Boniface VIII may have slumbered; but dead they were not. Certainly to the divines of the seventeenth century it was the supreme merit of the Reformation that it prevented an allegiance to the sovereign which had been heretofore precarious because divided.⁴¹⁰ But the condition of its removal was a narrow and uncritical antago­nism to whatever savoured of Roman practice. The penalisation of the Catholic religion turned it once more into a secret society—mistakenly since the Armada had sufficiently proved the implicit Gallicanism of the English Catholics. Nevertheless it was true that they owed allegiance to an ecclesiastical monarch who claimed the deposing power. Men never forgot the Bull of Pius V, and they were determined not to endure a repetition of his offence. So that when an enlightened opinion at length admitted of a fair measure of toleration, it was upon conditions that the boon was extended. The fear of Rome was far from dead; it was rather the suspicion of the English Catholics that had been removed and the latter were to find how easily the lightest indiscretion might fan those suspicions once more into flame.

The twenty years succeeding emancipation were used by the Catho­lics in reaping the harvest that had been so long and so painfully sow- ing.⁴¹¹ They were not unfortunate in their position. Englishmen discov­ered that the Catholic gentry had virtues very similar to their own. The reputation of statesmen like Montalembert, the history of thinkers like Schlegel, and, from 1846, the suspected liberalism of Pius IX, but, above all, the influence of the Oxford Movement and the skilful social ability of Cardinal Wiseman, were all bound to add greatly to the prestige of their situation. People began with interested amazement to hear O'Connell declare that the Catholic Church had ever been on the side of democ­racy,⁴¹² and the corrosive sublimate of which Hurrell Froude‘s mind was mainly composed assisted in the dissolution of Newman‘s evan­gelical suspicions.⁴¹³ The Napoleonic adventure, moreover, had done much to check men's fears of a Catholic revival. The political edifice of the temporal power seemed less secure than at any former time in mod­ern history. The things of which De Maistre did not lightly dream, the Symbolik of Mohler, the grave charm of the Munich reaction—all these might logically lead to a reformulation of the Catholic political system, but it was a reformation of which men had ceased to be afraid.⁴¹⁴ Newman, Manning, Gladstone—all of them visited Rome in the full vigour of early manhood; but if they were historically impressed, they were in nowise religiously convinced.⁴¹⁵ And even the rosy optimism of Pius IX was quite early to expect the fall of the temporal power.⁴¹⁶

Then, suddenly, there came a change. From an attitude of watchful waiting, Wiseman, who in 1847 had become pro-Vicar Apostolic of the London district, assumed a critical offensive. In the Dublin Review he had an admirable means of propaganda—and that the more important since it was an age when men still read theology with interested acumen. A skilful controversialist, he followed the fortunes ofthe Oxford Move­ment with unfailing eagerness; nor had he failed to contribute his obser­vations. An article on the Donatist schism in 1839 had perhaps done more than any other single event to convince Newman that the ‘via me­dia' was untenable.⁴¹⁷ He perhaps did more, as Mr. Ward reminds us, to reawaken Englishmen to the historic significance of his Church than any other Catholic of the age.⁴¹⁸ It was the beginning of the Romeward movement. The folly of Oxford completed in W. G. Ward a process that logic had already begun. Dalgairns, St. John and Richard Stanton fol­lowed, while Newman, as Dean Stanley caustically put it, ‘had recourse to whispering, like the slave of Midas, his secret to the reeds.'⁴¹⁹ Then he, too, went and with his conversion a flood-gate of proselytisation seemed open. The secession, says Mr. Lecky,⁴²⁰ ‘was quite unparalleled in magnitude since that which had taken place under the Stuarts.' It was no wonder that Wiseman rejoiced. The accession of so strong a body of intelligence seemed to synchronise naturally with his plans for broaden­ing the basis of English Catholic culture.⁴²¹ Then in 1846 came the elec­tion of the new pope and the dawn, as men thought, of a new liberal Catholicism. It seemed clear to Wiseman and his colleagues that this was a time for action. On a visit to Rome in 1847,⁴²² he first broached his plans for the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England. There were good reasons for his plan; though at the time the antagonism of Cardinal Acton and the excitement of the crisis at Rome was sufficient to delay any action, Wiseman himself was able to secure the exercise of Lord Palinerston's influence against Austria and the despatch of an un­official but important envoy—Lord Minto—to the papal Curia.⁴²³ Though the negotiations for the hierarchy were in abeyance, they were by no means forgotten. By 1848 the Papacy was convinced; and Lord John Russell, on behalf of the English government, had made public announcement that though he would not assist, at any rate he would not interfere.⁴²⁴ In 1850 the expected event took place. Wiseman was cre­ated Cardinal-Archbishop of Westminster and the Pope's brief of Sep­tember 29 re-established the hierarchy.⁴²⁵ In his famous Pastoral of October 7, ‘from out of the Flaminian Gate' Wiseman, dramatically perhaps, but with an intelligible pride, announced the event to the Catho­lics of England.

He had anticipated no storm. It had seemed to. him that the matter was one of no more than Catholic concern, the announcement of a met­ropolitan that the method of internal ecclesiastical administration had been changed. Yet he had, perhaps, been supremely unfortunate in the method of reporting he chose to adopt. Himself a man of exuberant temperament, it was with some genial bombast that the good news was told. ‘So that at present' ran the Pastoral,⁴²⁶ ‘and till such time as the Holy See shall think fit otherwise to provide, we govern, and shall con­tinue to govern, the counties of Middlesex, Hertford and Essex as Ordi­nary thereof, and those of Surrey, Sussex, Kent, Berkshire and Hamp­shire, with the islands annexed, as Administrator with Ordinary juris­diction.' He was, of course, doing no more than marking the confines of his ecclesiastical jurisdiction. But it was not thus that his action was interpreted. The claim of government was at once taken in its fullest and most literal sense. The Pope was claiming to supersede Queen Victoria; nothing less than her supersession was intended. He was the new Hildebrand aiming at a new Canossa. ‘We can only receive it,' said the Times,⁴²⁷ ‘as an audacious and conspicuous display of pretensions to resume the absolute spiritual dominion of this island, which Rome has never abandoned.' Nor did the Times alone fan the flame of popular resentment. In an extraordinary letter to the Bishop of Durham, Lord John Russell gave full rein to his feelings. ‘There is an assumption of power in all the documents which have come from Rome,' he wrote,⁴²⁸ ‘a pretension to supremacy over the realm of England, and a claim to sole and undivided sway which is inconsistent with the Queen's su­premacy, with the rights of our bishops and clergy, and with the spiri­tual independence of the nation as asserted even in. Roman Catholic times.' But the pretensions would be resisted. ‘No foreign prince or potentate will be permitted to fasten his fetters upon a nation which has so long and so nobly vindicated its right to freedom of opinion.' The legal position of Dr. Wiseman would be considered and due steps taken to enforce the law.

For four months England luxuriated in a recrudescence of all its ancient prejudices. The Lord Chancellor quoted King John at the Guildhall. Bishops vied with one another in the choice of extravagant epithets and addressed a petition of loyalty and remonstrance to the Queen. In reply the sovereign was made to assure them of her ‘determi­nation to uphold alike the rights of my crown and the independence of my people against all aggressions and encroachments of any foreign power.'⁴²⁹ Meetings of protest were held all over the country; every­where, too, since Russell's letter happily coincided with Guy Fawkes' Day, Pope and Cardinal were committed in effigy to the flames. Crowds broke the windows of Roman Catholic churches. So serious did the feeling become that the Catholic authorities were doubtful if it was wise for Wiseman to return.⁴³⁰

But the Cardinal was equal to the occasion. He hurried back to England and immediately issued an able ‘Appeal to the English Nation' which not only did much to quieten public sentiment but even was suc­cessful in procuring a reluctant retractation from the Times.⁴³¹ In a skil­ful letter Disraeli sneered gracefully at the whole affair, while Mr. Roe­buck publicly rebuked Russell as the successor of Lord George Gor- don.⁴³² Wiseman himself, in certain lectures at St. George's Cathedral, explained the decree in detail and in circumstance. What, perhaps, did most to assuage popular indignation was the passage of the Ecclesiasti­cal Titles Bill which received the Royal Assent in August, 1851. The declaration that Roman Catholics should not assume titles of bishoprics under penalty of fine nor publish papal bulls seemed to act like a sooth­ing charm.⁴³³ By the end of 1851 the excitement had entirely disap­peared.

The episode is perhaps more theoretically than practically impor­tant. It is clear that to the majority of Englishmen the effect of the new Ultramontanism was to invade the integrity of English sovereignty. ‘The day is coming,' said the Edinburgh Review,⁴³⁴ ‘when either the Ultra­montane theory, as developed by such writers as De Maistre, will be universal and paramount, or the theory ofthe infallibility and supremacy of the Church of Rome will crumble to atoms. The theory of a divided allegiance the nations will at length find untenable.' Lord Shaftesbury seems particularly to have feared the introduction of the Roman Canon law. ‘Do you know what the Canon law is?' he asked a great meeting.⁴³⁵ ‘It is a law incompatible with the civil law of this realm; it is subversive of all religious liberty; it permits—nay, enjoins—persecution of heresy, it elevates the Pope as God, and asserts that he is superior to all human and national laws. We deny synodal action to our own Church—shall we allow it to a rival and hostile body?' A section of Catholic opinion seems to have concurred in these views. ‘The late bold and clearly ex­pressed edict of the Court of Rome,' wrote Lord Beaumont,⁴³⁶ ‘can not be received or accepted by English Roman Catholics without a violation oftheir duties as citizens.' ‘I should think,' said the Duke ofNorfolk,⁴³⁷ ‘that many must feel, as we do, that Ultramontane opinions are totally incompatible with allegiance to our Sovereign and with our Constitu­tion.' Though Macaulay himself had no fear of the Bull, some of his friends were ‘angry and alarmed' and he did not regret their fright ‘for such fright is an additional security for us against that execrable super- stition.⁴³⁸ Mr. Gladstone seems to have disapproved with vehemence of the papal action but desired to draw a distinction between the action of Rome and the attitude of the English Catholics.⁴³⁹

It is clearly the old argument against Catholic emancipation clothed in a newer garb. The demand from Catholics is for an undiluted loyalty, and it is believed that such loyalty is incompatible with their spiritual allegiance. The answer made by the Catholics is masterly alike in form and substance. It is admitted by Wiseman that for the Pope to appoint Catholic bishops in England is a virtual denial of the royal supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs. But he correctly pointed out that this denial was not confined to members of the Catholic faith. ‘The royal supremacy,' he wrote,⁴⁴⁰ ‘is no more admitted by the Scotch Kirk, by Baptists, Meth­odists, Quakers, Independents, Presbyterians, Unitarians and other Dis­senters than by the Catholics.' He quoted Lord Lyndhurst to the effect that so long as no mischievous temporal consequences ensue from Catho­lic recognition of the papal supremacy, it was lawful for them to hold that belief. ‘If the law,' said Lord Lyndhurst,⁴⁴¹ ‘allowed the doctrines and discipline of the Roman Catholic Church, it should be allowed to be carried on perfectly and properly.' Not to do so was a practical refusal of religious toleration. ‘To have told Catholics,' Lord Lyndhurst added,⁴⁴² “you have perfect religious liberty, but you shall not teach that the Church can not err; or, you have complete toleration but you must not presume to believe holy orders to be a sacrament” would have been nugatory and tyrannical.' Wiseman was able to show that Lord John Russell himself had admitted that the introduction of papal bulls was essential to Church discipline. ‘There are certain Bulls of the Pope,' Russell had told the House of Commons,⁴⁴³ ‘which are absolutely necessary for the appoint­ment of Bishops and pastors belonging to the Roman Catholic Church. It would be quite impossible to prevent the introduction of such Bulls.' But this was all that Wiseman had brought. And his case was strength­ened by the fact that in Canada the local governments admitted the titu­lar creations of the colonial hierarchy and had incorporated them by name in acts of Parliament.⁴⁴⁴ He very pertinently enquired what dis­tinction existed between the papal act of1850 and the creation by Act of Parliament of the Anglo-Prussian bishopric of Jerusalem. ‘Suppose,' asked Wiseman,⁴⁴⁵ ‘his Majesty of Abyssinia or the Emir Beshir had pronounced this to be an intrusion “inconsistent with the rights of bish­ops and clergy and with the spiritual independence of the nation” how much would this country have cared ?' The ground he took in the St. George's Cathedral lectures was exactly similar. People complained that ‘it was the, State in every department which was invaded... the Crown was wounded in its prerogative, its supremacy, its right to allegiance, its very sovereignty... suppose that any one had told you six months ago that the Bishop of Rome had it in his power to throw this vast empire into convulsions; to upheave by the breath of his nostrils the granite foundations of the noble British constitution; to shake to its basis the throne of our gracious Queen... you would have laughed to scorn the man who would have presumed to tell you that he had such tremendous power. And if, by way of jest, or through curiosity, you had asked the fanatic who told you so by what wonderful machinery, by what magical agency' he could do all this; and he had answered you “by a scrap of paper, wherein he should desire the Catholic districts of England to be henceforth called dioceses, and the Bishop of Trachis to be called Bishop of Beverley and the Bishop of Tloa to be called Bishop of Liverpool,” you would, I am sure, have considered the man little better than an idiot who asserted or believed in such effects from such a cause.'⁴⁴⁶ Nor was he alone in his contempt for this agitation. Roebuck pointed out to Lord John Russell that if Catholic allegiance was divided as he asserted, the issue of a papal bull dividing England into dioceses would in nowise alter their situation. ‘Let us, if we will,' he wrote,⁴⁴⁷ ‘fulminate an Act of Parliament against the Catholics; does any one suppose that their faith will be in the slightest affected thereby? We can not make people loyal by Act of Parliament; we can not by excluding certain names, keep out the doctrines ofthe Catholic religion.' This practical limitation on a theoretical power was ably insisted upon by the Westminster Re­view. It pointed out that the claim of the Catholic Church to be a heaven- appointed body made it theoretically impossible for a human organisation to live upon amicable terms with it. ‘Those who wield the sceptre of the Most High,' it urged,⁴⁴⁸ ‘will pay small heed to the baton of the con­stable. Where the Almighty reigns what room will there be for the police magistrate? and where Omniscience directs, for debates in Parliament? What natural function can fail to undergo eclipse where the mystic shadow of the supernatural traverses the air?' But the wide claims of the imagination suffer diminution amid the stress of everyday life. ‘De jure," as it wisely suggested,⁴⁴⁹ ‘the divine commission extends to every­thing and might absorb this planet into the Papal State; de facto it in­cludes what it can, and stops where it must.' And amid its gibes and protests the Edinburgh was constrained to admit⁴⁵⁰ that ‘we do not for a moment question either the loyalty or the patriotism of the mass of our Roman Catholic fellow-subjects. We believe that, whether consistently or not, they would be as ready as were their Roman Catholic ancestors, or as are their Protestant contemporaries, to resist any aggression on the civil or political supremacy of England.' But, as Professor Dicey has admitted,⁴⁵¹ no absolute theory of sovereignty can ever be consistent since it is always subject to the opinions of those it commands. And it is immensely difficult to understand why the Catholics should have been subject to a political logic which never has and never will be put into operation.

The argument for the Roman Catholic upon the basis of toleration seems well-nigh unanswerable. ‘It is a mockery of toleration,' said the Westminster Review,⁴⁵² ‘to permit people to believe in a divine corpora­tion, and then to refuse them their corporate offices.' Sir George Bowyer, in an exceedingly able pamphlet, pointed out that ‘the Pope has only created certain offices in a Church which is, in the eye of the law a dissenting body, and as much a voluntary society as any other incorpo­rated body enjoying no legal privileges or franchises. And the theologi­cal claims of our Church do not alter the case. They belong to religion, and are within the inviolable rights of liberty of conscience over which no human power can exercise jurisdiction.'⁴⁵³ They were doing no more than attend to the internal organisation of the Church. They submitted to the law ‘as good Englishmen and loyal subjects... but we claim full liberty so long as we do not infringe the law and the rights of our fellow- countrymen.'⁴⁵⁴ It was ridiculous to talk of toleration if this was not the case. ‘If we are not allowed by law to hold a doctrine,' he said,⁴⁵⁵ ‘with­out which we should cease to be Roman Catholics, it obviously and inevitably follows that the law does not permit us to be Roman Catho­lics at all, which is absurd. Persecute us, drive us out of the realm alto­gether and into perpetual banishment, but do not hold out to us the delusive phantom of an apparent toleration, and then deny us the liberty to hold that doctrine on which the very existence of our Church, as the Catholic Church... most undeniably depends.' And Roebuck pointed out that dangerous consequences would ensue from this lack of tolera­tion. ‘Will not Catholics in Ireland,' he asked,⁴⁵⁶ ‘assert their own pre­eminence in that country and insist upon equality at least in the baneful right of persecution?' Mr. Bright had no doubts about the policy of Russell's government. Lord John's speech, he said, would have been ‘very good if delivered some three hundred years ago,' and he denounced the measure as ‘nothing better than a sham.'⁴⁵⁷ But he opposed it on higher and more splendid grounds. ‘The course on which the noble Lord has been so recklessly dragging us,' he told the House of Commons,⁴⁵⁸ ‘is fruitful in discord, hatred, religious animosities—it has separated Ireland from this country, has withdrawn her national sympathies from us, and has done an amount of mischief which the legislation of the next ten years can not entirely, if at all, abate. The noble Lord has drawn up an indictment against eight millions of his countrymen; he has increased the power of the Pope over the Roman Catholics, for he has drawn closer the bonds between them and their Church, and the head of their Church. The noble Lord has quoted Queen Elizabeth and the great men of the Commonwealth, as though it were necessary now to adopt the principles which prevailed almost universally two hundred years ago. Does the noble Lord forget that we are the true ancients, that we stand on the shoulders of our forefathers and can see further?' It was, how­ever, reserved for Mr. Gladstone in a speech which Lord Morley has placed among his ‘three or four most conspicuous masterpieces' to make plain the essential wrongness of the government measure. ‘Recollect,' he reminded the House,⁴⁵⁹ ‘that Europe and the whole of the civilised world look to England at this moment not less, no, but even more than ever they looked to her before, as the mistress and guide of nations in regard to the great work of civil legislation. Show, I beseech you—have the courage to show the pope of Rome, and his cardinals, and his Church, that England, too, as well as Rome has her semper eadem, and that when she had once adopted some great principle of legislation, which is destined to influence the national character, to draw the dividing lines of her policy for ages to come and to affect the whole nature of her influ­ence and her standing among the nations of the world—show that when she has done this slowly and done it deliberately, she has done it once for all; and that she will no more retrace her steps than the river which bathes this giant city can ‘flow back upon its source.' The character of England is in our hands. Let us feel the responsibility that belongs to us, and let us rely on it; if to-day we make this step backwards it is one which hereafter we shall have to retrace with pain. We can not change the ‘profound and resistless tendencies of the age towards religious lib­erty. It is our business to guide and control their application; do this you may, but to endeavour to turn them backwards is the sport of children, done by the hands of men, and every effort you may make in that direc­tion will recoil upon you in disaster and disgrace.' Rarely have the prin­ciples of religious toleration been more splendidly vindicated with a more profound sense of the issues at stake. ‘O'u se refugiera la liberte religieuse," wrote de Tocqueville to Senior,⁴⁶⁰ ‘si on la chasse de l'Angleterre?' It was fortunate for the good sense of Englishmen that their practice was an advance upon their precept. The act was never put into operation. ‘The weapon that had been forged in this blazing furnace by these clumsy armourers proved blunt and useless; the law was from the first a dead letter, and it was struck out of the statute book in 1871 in Mr. Gladstone's own administration.'⁴⁶¹

It is of interest to go back to the summer of 1850, when the first of English theologians was explaining to the Church he had deserted the principles of that which had gained his powerful allegiance. The essen­tial point of his effort was the demonstration that Church and State ought to be separate organisations, that the one can not rightly invade the province of the other. ‘The life of a plant,' he wrote,⁴⁶² ‘is not the same as the life of an animated being, and the life of the body is not the same as the life of the intellect; nor is the life of the intellect the same as the life of grace; nor is the life of the Church the same as the life of the State.' It was this distinction the movement of1833 had endeavoured to emphasise; but, as he conceived it was foreign to the spirit of the Na­tional Church. For that organisation is not its own mistress, it is nothing but the creature of the State. It is not, like the Catholic Church, a perfect society living a life of its own. When the test of separateness is applied, it is seen at once to fail. What is the test? ‘We know,' he argued,⁴⁶³ ‘that it is the property of life to be impatient of any foreign substance in the body to which it belongs. It will be sovereign in its own domain, and it conflicts with what it can not assimilate into itself, and is irritated and disordered until it has expelled it.' The Church of Rome fulfils this test of separate identity, for over itself it is essentially sovereign. It has, as Mohler argued, its own special character and genius, stamped infallibly in its every act.⁴⁶⁴ With the heresy of Erastus which, politically, is the Royal Supremacy, it can make no alliance of any kind. ‘Erastianism, then,' he said,⁴⁶⁵ ‘was the one heresy which practically cut at the root of all revealed truth.... dogma would be sacrificed to expedience, sacra­ments would be rationalised, perfection would be ridiculed, if she was made the slave of the State.' It was here that Anglicanism essentially was distinguished from the ideals of Rome as the Oxford Movement gave expression to them. For while the Establishment desired nothing more than to be ‘the creature of Statesmen,' the ambition of the Tractarians was to force it to self-action. It was not ‘contented to be the mere creation of the State, as schoolmasters and teachers may be, as soldiers or magistrates, or other public officers.'⁴⁶⁶ The Roman Church could not but regard the question of ecclesiastical liberty as the funda­mental question. Her independence was no theological question to be proved by theological argument. ‘If the Church is independent of the State in things spiritual,' he scornfully said,⁴⁶⁷ ‘it is not simply because Bishop Pearson has extolled her powers in his exposition of the Creed, though divines are brought forward as authorities too; but by reason of “the force of that article of our belief, the one Catholic and Apostolic Church.”' The source of her power is a divine mystery which, because reason may not penetrate it, that reason may never resolve. She has her unvarying principles and dogmas which do not change with the shifting sands of time. Nor is the Catholic Church a national church since that must, man's nature being what it is, be necessarily Erastian. For if the Church be Erastian it can not be independent; yet her independence is the very root of her nature. ‘You hold and rightly hold,' he told his audience,⁴⁶⁸ ‘that the Church is a sovereign and self-sustaining power in the same sense in which any temporal State is such. She is sufficient for herself; she is absolutely independent in her own sphere; she has irre­sponsible control over her subjects in religious matters; she makes laws for them of her own authority, and enforces obedience on them as the tenure of their membership with her.' He admits that membership of the Church will coincide, in many cases, with membership of the State; but the distinction is nevertheless clear. ‘There is no necessary coincidence in their particular application and resulting details, in the one and the other polity, just as the good of the soul is not always the good of the body; and much more so is this the case, considering there is no divine direction promised to the State, to preserve it from human passion and human weakness.'⁴⁶⁹

Difficulties, of course, abound; and Newman does not fail to recognise their existence. ‘It is not enough,' he says,⁴⁷⁰ ‘for the State that things should be done, unless it has the doing of them itself; it abhors a double jurisdiction, and what it calls a divided allegiance; aut Caesar aut nullus is its motto, nor does it willingly accept of any com­promise. All power is founded, as it is often said, on public opinion; for the State to allow the existence of a collateral and rival authority is to weaken its own.' Clearly, if the State desires to be an Austinian sover­eign, collision is inevitable, and Newman admits that the State is physi­cally the superior power. The problem then becomes the search for means whereby the Church ‘may be able to do her divinely appointed work without let or hindrance' from an organisation that has been ‘ever jeal­ous of her, and has persecuted her from without and bribed her from within.' One way, he decides can alone be found. ‘If the State would but keep within its own province, it would find the Church its truest ally and best benefactor.' Her principles are the principles of the State. ‘She upholds obedience to the magistrate; she recognises his office as from God; she is the preacher of peace, the sanction of law, the first element of order, and the safeguard of morality, and that without possible vacil­lation or failure; she may be fully trusted; she is a sure friend, for she is defectible and undying.'⁴⁷¹ He urges this the more strongly since the Church is anxious to avoid collision. The quarrel of Becket and Henry, with its appeals and counter appeals, its legatine commission, its papal rebukes of the Saint, seems to him the proof of its forbearance.⁴⁷² He contrasts that humility and patience with what seems to him the proud Gallicanism of Louis XIV and the insolent Byzantinism of Joseph II.'⁴⁷³ They recognised the value of controlled religion to the State. ‘The State wishes to make its subjects peaceful and obedient; and there is nothing more fitted to effect this object than religion.'⁴⁷⁴ For the Church that aims at universality this is, of course, an impossible attitude. However disguised, it is still Erastianism; and it is the nature of the Catholic Church to be proof against that heresy.⁴⁷⁵ He reinforces that conclusion by urging that the Church has a mission fundamentally distinct from that of any other society. It is on the ground of ‘tangible benefits' that the State claims the loyalty of its subjects;⁴⁷⁶ but the Church is the sole guardian of a truth which none but her children may understand. ‘She is the organ and oracle, and nothing else, of a supernatural doctrine, which is independent of individuals, given to her once and for all,... and which is simply necessary to the salvation of every one of us... hence, requir­ing, from the nature of the case, organs special to itself, made for the purpose, whether for entering into its fulness, or carrying it out in deed.⁴⁷⁷

Here, surely, is the basis upon which the Hierarchy of1851 was re­established. The bare statement does less than the merest justice to the splendid eloquence with which it was adumbrated. The theory is not original with Newman; its origins are to be found in the fifth century of the Christian era. Confronted by difficulties which were not in essence distinct from those which had called forth the Durham letter from Russell, Gelasius I had constructed a theory of Church and State of which the main characteristic is the dualism for which Newman had argued. Felix II had already urged the Emperor Zeno to leave ecclesiastical affairs to the ecclesiastical authorities;⁴⁷⁸ and Gelasius added, as Newman would have added, that while the imperial authority was divine, it does not extend to control of the Church.⁴⁷⁹ Gelasius points out that there was a time—witness Melchisedech and the Pontifex Maximus—when Church and State were capable of identification; but with the coming of Christ, the two were separated and to each distinct functions were assigned.⁴⁸⁰ Within its sphere each power is supreme, nor should it suffer interfer­ence with its independence. The theory exercised a profound influence upon medieval thought. In the ninth century it was the basis of the epis­copal definition sent to Lewis the Pius;⁴⁸¹ it was accepted by Hincmar of Rheims.⁴⁸² But already the incidence of the theory had changed. Where Gelasius found the two societies in the world, the bishops saw but one Church,⁴⁸³ and the obvious inference, when there came the struggle be­tween Papacy and empire, was to argue the inferiority of the secular branch. This is, of course, but fitfully apparent in the ninth century, when papal pretensions are almost at their minimum;⁴⁸⁴ but when it is apparent in the letters of court favourites like Alcuin,⁴⁸⁵ its reality is hardly to be doubted. And in the claim that the priest is responsible to God for the acts of kings there is room for illimitable expansion.⁴⁸⁶ And when the problem of delimitation becomes difficult it was inevitable that use should be made of the implicit elasticity of the Gelasian theory. Mr. Carlyle has pointed out the irony with which Stephen of Tournai repeats the tradition he had inherited.⁴⁸⁷ We can not here narrate the transformation which the views of Gelasius were to undergo in the hands of men like Hildebrand and Boniface VIII. Certainly the attempt at du­alism was given up. The Church wins its victory only to promote a return, fostered by the revival of the study of Roman law in the eleventh century,⁴⁸⁸ and the birth of nationalism in the fifteenth, to the older and better conception.⁴⁸⁹ Newman's attitude, as it was evinced in his Diffi­culties of Anglicans seems to represent the end of the reaction against Hildebrandinism—the end, because, with the revival ofthe Jesuit power, the official theory of the papal Curia becomes once more monistic in character.⁴⁹⁰

A rigid adherence to Newman's attitude was compatible enough with the utmost loyalty the English crown could have desired. If it is true, as a Catholic historian a little maliciously reports,⁴⁹¹ that when Queen Victoria read Cardinal Wiseman's Pastoral she remarked, ‘Am I Queen of England or am I not?', she showed a lamentable misunder­standing of the nature of sovereignty. Hume had long ago emphasised the dependence even ofthe most despotic power on public opinion; and the wise remark ofthe Westminster reviewer that the divine commission ‘includes what it can and stops where it must'⁴⁹² might have suggested the obvious limits to Wiseman's claims. As a fact, it is clear enough that the Cardinal did not himself intend—whatever he may ultimately or secretly have desired—any more than the fullest spiritual jurisdiction permitted by the peculiar organisation of the papal Curia. The English challenge to that claim was, in effect, a denial of the right of private judgment in religious matters. It was an old objection. Underlying it was the ancient desire for unity, perhaps, also, for uniformity, of which Dante's De Monarchia is so supreme an expression. To the Protestant statesman of the mid-Victorian age, the single society which Hildebrand envisaged had become the English State. The ecclesiastical ideal Cavour had embraced seemed to him open to the most grave theoretical advan­tages even while he practically admitted its completest consequences. But a genius for political abstractions is perhaps no part of the English heritage.

III

The establishment of the Hierarchy in England coincided with perhaps the greatest change in the character of the Papacy since the Council of Trent.⁴⁹³ The failure of Rosmini's mission and the murder of Rossi⁴⁹⁴ seem to have convinced the Pope that the Jesuits might, after all, be right, and henceforward there were but fitful gleams of his ancient liber­alism. The assassination of the minister was followed by the flight to Gaeta and the attainment of Antonelli to supreme power. The use of the latter synchronised with the condemnation of Rosmini which Antonelli seems to have thought essential to his security.⁴⁹⁵ Pius' interest in re­form seemed almost immediately to vanish. It was said openly by the Pontiff and his minister that there was no compatibility possible be­tween the spiritual supremacy of Rome and the gift of a free constitu­tion to the Papal States.⁴⁹⁶ As the Romans mockingly but truly said, it was a Pio nono secondo who returned to Rome.⁴⁹⁷ Simultaneously the General of the Jesuit Order, Father Roothaan, came back from volun­tary exile, and the publication of the notorious Civiltiä Cattolica was begun.⁴⁹⁸ Within six months, the restoration of the English hierarchy followed. The imprisonment of Franceso Madiai and the prohibition of a new edition of Muratori showed clearly how thoroughgoing was the reaction.⁴⁹⁹ Two years later Pius, already more bold than his reactionary predecessor, promulgated the dogma of the Immaculate Conception,⁵⁰⁰ which Schräder was later to interpret as the inferential claim of papal infallibility.⁵⁰¹ Pius had already embarked on the path which led directly to the catastrophe of 1870.

It was inevitable that English Catholicism should respond to the eddies of this reaction. Nor was the ground unprepared. W. G. Ward's genial remark that he would ‘like a new Papal Bull every morning with my Times at breakfast'⁵⁰² was in fact symptomatic of a whole philoso­phy. It is possible to trace two, and perhaps three, definite schools of thought among English Catholics of the time. Ward himself, and Man­ning also when he came to a position of influence in the Church of his adoption, was thoroughly in sympathy with the reactionary ideas of continental Ultramontanism.⁵⁰³ It seemed to him that between thorough­going skepticism on the one hand, and an equally uncompromising con­servatism on the other there could be no alternative. His political phi­losophy was that of De Maistre, and he would have asserted with the latter that it was Rome which gave its stability to the Christian world.⁵⁰⁴ De Maistre identified sovereignty with infallibility,⁵⁰⁵ and Ward would have followed him blindly in that striking claim. He himself, in the Dublin Review of which in 1859 he became editor,⁵⁰⁶ devoted his energies to combating religious liberalism in every shape and form. He believed whole-heartedly ‘in shutting the intellect within the sacred influences which the Church supplies, in order to preserve it from error. The free­dom which leads to anarchy is the danger; the surrender to restraint and authority is the safeguard.'⁵⁰⁷ ‘It is obvious that such an attitude must have led very easily and naturally to Ultramontanism. It was the more inevitable where the thinker was, once his premises had been reached, so rigorous a logician as Ward. Nor did he confine his doctrine to reli­gion alone. He could not separate out the realms of thought. The world had to be drummed into subjection and the universal supremacy of the Pope was the weapon with which the change was to be effected. Few men have had so genuine and whole-hearted a belief in the medieval theocracy as Mr. Ward. A friend called him a ‘theopolitician’ and the epithet was literally true.⁵⁰⁸ The Holy Roman Empire most nearly achieved his ideal. He admired the ‘civil intolerance of heresy.’ In that time ‘it was the civil ruler’s highest function to co-operate with the Church in preserving unshaken the firm conviction of Catholic truth, and in preserving unsullied the purity and unearthliness of Catholic sentiment.’ But that day has passed and the Church has lost its hold on the minds and hearts of men. ‘They give far more of their obedience to the Church than of their loyalty and affection; they give to her, and to God whose representative she is, but a divided allegiance.’⁵⁰⁹ So the unity of the Church’s sovereignty is broken with the onset of liberalism. An aggres­sive campaign was essential if the enemy was to be defeated.⁵¹⁰ In the true ethics of Catholicism it could bear no part.

The school of ecclesiastical thought most antagonistic to Ward was nobly represented by Lord Acton. To the study of a man who so strenu­ously devoted a whole life to the understanding of liberty it is difficult to approach without emotion. Acton’s life was spent in repelling at once the claims either of Church or State to a unique sovereignty over the minds of men. He saw that a State which attempts the control of eccle­siastical authority is virtually denying the right of religious freedom.⁵¹¹ He no less equally and thoroughly condemned the whole effort of the Catholic Church after religious uniformity.⁵¹² He saw the inevitability of a certain convergence between Church and State. ‘She can not,’ he wrote of the Church,⁵¹³ ‘permanently ignore the acts and character of the State or escape its notice. While she preaches submission to authori­ties ordained by God, her nature, not her interest, compels her to exert an involuntary influence upon them. The jealousy so often exhibited by government is not without reason, for the free action of the Church is the test of the free constitution of the State, and without that free consti­tution there must necessarily be either persecution or revolution. Be­tween the settled organisation of Catholicism and every form of arbi­trary power there is an incompatibility which must terminate in conflict. In a State which possesses no security for authority or freedom, the Church must either fight or succumb.' The Catholic Church was thus a weapon in the search for liberty. Toleration was an essential part of its method. ‘Persecution is the vice of particular religions,' he argued;⁵¹⁴ ‘and the misfortune of particular stages of political society. It is the resource by which States that would be subverted by religious liberty escape the more dangerous alternative of imposing religious disabili­ties. The exclusion of a part of the community by reason of its faith from the full benefit of the law is a danger and disadvantage to every State, however highly organised its constitution may otherwise be. But the actual existence of a religious party differing in faith from the ma­jority is dangerous only to a State very imperfectly organised. Disabili­ties are always a danger. Multiplicity of religions is only dangerous to States of an inferior type.' Ultimately and fundamentally the object of the Church and the State was not dissimilar. It was this essentially which prohibited the possibility of intolerance. Nor should the Church attempt to enslave the secular organ. ‘The direct subservience of the State to religious ends,' he said,'⁵¹⁵ ‘would imply despotism and persecution just as much as the pagan supremacy of civil over religious authority.'

These, it is clear, are the watchwords of liberalism. Nor did he hesi­tate to draw from them certain obvious conclusions. The Papacy must suit its activities to the needs of the age. The plenitudo potestatis of Boniface VIII was no universal right which defied the problem oftime. ‘The political power of the Holy See,' he wrote,⁵¹⁶ ‘was never a univer­sal right of jurisdiction over States, but a special and positive right, which it is as absurd to censure as to fear or to regret at the present time. Directly, it extended only over territories which were held by feudal tenure of the Pope, like the Sicilian monarchy. Elsewhere the authority was indirect, not political but religious, and its political consequences were due to the laws of the land.' He points out that the Pope can not interfere between the Crown and its subjects. ‘The idea of the Pope stepping between a State and the allegiance of its subjects is a mere misapprehension. The instrument of his authority is the law, and the law resides in the State.' The old notion of a right to depose was fundamen­tally at variance with the nature of ecclesiastical authority. ‘A moral, and, a fortiori, a spiritual authority moves and lives only in an atmo­sphere of freedom.'⁵¹⁷ A control over every sphere of life it was not possible for the Church to claim. The spiritual world was hers; ‘but the ethical and intellectual offices of the Church, as distinct from her spiri­tual office,’ are not hers exclusively or peculiarly.”⁵¹⁸ The worlds of politics and intelligence move on lines parallel to that of the spirit. The latter dare not challenge their right. ‘A political law or a scientific truth may be perilous to the morals or the faith of individuals, but it can not on this ground be resisted by the Church.... A discovery may be made in science which will shake the faith of thousands, yet religion can not refute it or object to it.’ ‘Within their respective spheres,’ he said again,⁵¹⁹ ‘politics can determine what rights are just, science what truths are cer­tain... they have become, not tools to be used by religion for her own interests, but conditions which she must observe in her actions and ar­guments.’ The attempt to put truth into blinkers which W. G. Ward so vehemently condoned seemed to him a profound mistake. It was making principles of no more than temporary value. Nor, in the end, was any­thing gained. ‘They have betrayed duties more sacred than the privi­leges for which they fought,’ he said in eloquent condemnation of the Ultramontane School,⁵²⁰ ‘they have lied before God and man; they have been divided into factions by the supposed interests of the Church, when they ought to have been united by her principles and her doctrines; and against themselves they have justified those grave accusations of false­hood, insincerity, indifference to civil rights, and contempt for civil au­thorities which are uttered with such profound injustice against the Church.’ ‘Modern Society,’ he urged,⁵²¹ ‘has developed no security for freedom, no instrument of progress, no means of arriving at truth, which we look upon with indifference or suspicion.’

It is clearly a concordat with modern society that he is proposing, and perhaps no finer defence of religious liberty has ever been penned.⁵²² No less is it obvious that the proposal was utterly out of harmony with the dominant Catholicism ofthe time. Acton’s own journalistic experi­ences were sufficient proof of the antithesis,⁵²³ The very article in which his most eloquent defence of liberalism appeared was itself an announce­ment that those enterprises were concluded.⁵²⁴ For the alliance between scholarship and Catholic theology for which his whole life was so mov­ing a plea was exactly the antithesis of that which the ecclesiastical authorities were willing to admit. His liberalism dethroned the Church from its position of universal sovereignty. It asked that control be sur­rendered over all save the sphere of the spirit. But this was to make an end of the ‘intellectual captivity’ which Ward and Manning deemed so essential. It was to expose the Catholic to disturbing influences he was perhaps unfitted to encounter. It gave a loophole to that ‘thatige skepsis’ of which the consequences could be seen in men like Darwin and Huxley. But its intellectual dangers apart, it contained implications which could never be admitted. The papal dominions apart, it entirely nullified the dream of a territorial sovereignty for Rome. It suggested that there was a system of rights in which heretics might be entitled to share. It drew a distinction between religious and political salvation. It implied the ex­istence of a moral code to which the Roman Church, as any ordinary, and human, institution was subject. It gave to the laws of men a validity in their own sphere no' less absolute than that which the Church had urged its own dogmas could alone enjoy. It was, in fact, the negation of every dogma of the Ultramontane belief. Nor did Acton take pains to conceal his antagonism. Ultramontanism seemed to him politically dan­gerous and—he would perhaps have identified the two—morally cor­rupt. ‘A speculative Ultramontanism,’ he wrote many years later,⁵²⁵ ‘sepa­rate from theories of tyranny, mendacity, and murder, keeping honestly clear of the Jesuit with his lies, of the Dominican with his fagots, of the Popes with their massacres, has not yet been brought to light.’ It was obviously no more than a moral influence in the sphere of politics that Acton desired for his religion. He seems to have regarded it, in England at least, as a voluntary and dissenting sect, which, if in his eyes it en­shrined the truth, might yet be held by others untrue, and could not force itself upon an unwilling people.⁵²⁶ But so to believe in the age of Pius IX was to invite the onset of ecclesiastical tragedy.

The position of Newman is most difficult, at any rate before 1870, to understand.⁵²⁷ The implicit liberalism of his Difficulties of Anglicans has already been noted. He was sympathetic towards Acton in his jour­nalistic difficulties. His struggle for a freer Catholic education suggests an acceptance of some of the most fundamental of liberal ideas.⁵²⁸ His antagonism to Manning is one of the most famous episodes in his ca­reer. Yet his liberalism is always wavering and hesitant, hedged about by subtle reservations and implied doubts so that it is dangerous to affix to him the label of any party. The attitude of W. G. Ward he stigmatised as ‘preposterous,’⁵²⁹ yet he did not hesitate to accept the Encyclical of 1864. He believed in papal infallibility because, seemingly, he did not deem it could be dangerous; ‘I am confident,’ he told Pusey,⁵³⁰ ‘that it must be so limited practically that it will leave things as they are.’ To the latter he defended the Jesuits—the main weapon in the service of reaction.⁵³¹ He had written a famous article in the Rambler on the place of the laity in the Catholic Church which struck a serious blow at the notion of despotic ecclesiasticism.⁵³² He hated passionately the extreme Ultramontane views of Ward and Louis Veuillot,⁵³³ which seemed to him to commit Catholic theology to a view entirely out of accord with historic tradition. Yet he insisted always on the necessity of implicit loyalty to the Pope. ‘As a matter of Principle,' he wrote to Pusey,⁵³⁴ ‘the Pope must have universal jurisdiction' because otherwise there would be no bond of unity in the Church. ‘An honorary head,' he said,⁵³⁵ ‘call him primate, or premier duke, does not affect the real force, or enter into the essence of a political body and is not worth contending about.' Yet at the same time that he endorsed this virtual Austinianism he noted the limitations in practice. ‘His abstract power is not a practical fact.... I observe it is not so much even an abstract doctrine as it is a principle; by which I mean something far more subtle and intimately connected with our system itself than a doctrine, so as not to be contained in the written law, but to be, like the common law of the land, or rather the principles of the Constitution, contained in the very idea of our being what we are.'⁵³⁶ It is perhaps not difficult to understand why the abstractly logi­cal mind ofWard should have been puzzled by the tortuous subtleties of Newman's attitude. He does, in fact, seem, on occasion, to have been rather the master, than the servant of truth.

IV

At Rome there were few hesitations. The dogmatisation of the Immacu­late Conception was essentially a Jesuit victory,⁵³⁷ and it was the Jesuits who were the main upholders of papal infallibility.⁵³⁸ Ten years after its promulgation, on the eighth of December, 1864, came the Encyclical Quanta Cura, and its accompanying Syllabus of errors.⁵³⁹ In these Pius virtually declared war on modern society. The encyclical condemned the application of naturalism to civil society, liberty of conscience, the right of public worship, the freedom ofthe press. Communism was con­demned as a ‘destructive errors; excommunication was launched against those who should attack either the rights or the property ofthe Church.⁵⁴⁰ But striking as was the papal brief, it was almost weak by the side of the formidable Syllabus. Theological questions apart, the denunciations wandered boldly into the civil sphere. It was no longer permissible to argue that either popes or councils had exceeded their power;⁵⁴¹ that the Church could not avail herself of force or of direct or indirect temporal power;⁵⁴² that National Churches could be established;⁵⁴³ that the civil law ought to prevail in a contest between Church and State;⁵⁴⁴ that Church and State should be separated;⁵⁴⁵ that the civil authority may pronounce marriages dissolved;⁵⁴⁶ that a civil contract can constitute a true mar­riage;⁵⁴⁷ that the Catholic religion need no longer be the only religion of the State;⁵⁴⁸ and, finally, there came the last and most tremendous of anathemas against the thought that the Roman Pontiff could or should reconcile himself with progress, liberalism and modern civilisation.⁵⁴⁹

The promulgation of this tremendous indictment had not been made without opposition or careful thought. The task had occupied four able theologians of the Curia almost ten years.⁵⁵⁰ Dupanloup had urged Antonelli to withhold it on the ground that trouble would be bound to follow its publication; and the Archbishop of Tours had given similar advice.⁵⁵¹ It was probably the growth of liberal Catholicism in France and Belgium which finally provoked its promulgation. In the Congress of Malines in 1863, Montalembert had read a brilliant essay on a ‘Free Church in a Free State' and had been immediately delated to Rome.⁵⁵² The publication of most of the Syllabus in France was actually prohib­ited by the French government.⁵⁵³ In England, Newman insisted that the document did not come from the Pope;⁵⁵⁴ but W. G. Ward immediately accepted it as infallible, and seems to have rejoiced in the variety of subjects with which it dealt.⁵⁵⁵ It seems probable that Newman's view was the more correct; for Lord Acton has pointed out that the officials of the Curia emphasised the informality of the Syllabus and that Pius himself did not dare to repudiate the minimising interpretations.⁵⁵⁶ But when all the explanations had been made, the document still remained as a forcible and thoroughgoing challenge.

A yet more striking determination was to come. Even before the issue of the Syllabus, his decision to effect the restoration of the papal power had made Pius convinced of the necessity of a General Coun- cil.⁵⁵⁷ The need ofthe Church, doctrinally, politically, intellectually, was immense, and the decision was in a high degree intelligible. Nor was care lacking to obtain a general consensus of ecclesiastical opinion be­fore any decisive step was taken.⁵⁵⁸ By 1867, Pius had finally made up his mind; and some of the bishops who were at Rome for the celebration of the eighteenth celebration of St. Peter urged the need for a definition ofpapal infallibility. ‘To proclaim the Pope infallible,' says Lord Acton,⁵⁵⁹ ‘was their compendious security against hostile States and Churches, against human liberty and authority, against disintegrating tolerance, and rationalising science, against error and sin.' Even at the time when the dogma of the Immaculate Conception had been promulgated, the idea of infallibility had been in Pius' mind.⁵⁶⁰ Manning, then in Rome, had taken a vow to devote his utmost efforts to secure the publication of the new dogma; and on his return to England he began to move Catholic opinion in that direction.⁵⁶¹ The Jesuits, of course, were whole- heartedly enthusiastic; and the presence of three of their leading members upon the dogmatic commission seemed to point to the direction in which af­fairs would trend.⁵⁶²

The determination was not made known without grave misgivings on the part of those outside the Ultramontane party. Manning tells us that Baron Hübner, then Austrian ambassador at Rome, felt it would injure the Church;⁵⁶³ even the ecclesiastically minded Ollivier feared that the omission of an invitation to the sovereigns of Europe was tanta­mount to the separation of Church and State.⁵⁶⁴ Prince Hohenlohe, then foreign minister of Bavaria, urged the governments of Europe to inter­vene;⁵⁶⁵ and the publication of Janus' Pope and the Council gave the liberal Catholics possession of an overwhelming historical indictment against the projected definition which neither the action ofthe Index nor the reply of Hergenrother could adequately efface. Hefele, greater as a historian than as a bishop, condemned infallibility in a stinging phrase.⁵⁶⁶ In England, Newman did not conceal his fears. He stimulated Father Ryder to write a trenchant attack on Ward's extremism, and personally identified his views with those of the pamphlet.⁵⁶⁷ He urged a friend to discuss the condemnation of Pope Honorius, one of the crucial cases in the argument against infallibility.⁵⁶⁸ The dogma itself he regarded not as certain but as probable and ‘anyhow it... must be fenced round and limited by conditions.'⁵⁶⁹ While he did not doubt that what the General Council pronounced would be the word of God, ‘still we may,' he wrote to Canon Walker,⁵⁷⁰ ‘well feel indignant at the intrigue, trickery and imperiousness which is the human side of its history—and it seems a dereliction of duty not to do one's part to meet them.' He criticised with scornful indignation the ‘‘ΰβρις όρ θίων κνώδαλών, the arrogant ipse dixit of various persons who would crush every opinion in theology which is not theirs,'⁵⁷¹ and elsewhere he stigmatised the extreme Ultramontanes as an ‘insolent and aggressive faction.'⁵⁷² He prayed ‘those great early Doctors of the Church... to avert so great a calamity. If it is God's will that the Pope's infallibility should be defined, then it is his blessed will to throw back the times and moments of that triumph He has destined for His Kingdom.'⁵⁷³ What is done, he told Ambrose de Lisle,⁵⁷⁴ ‘I will accept as a fact; but until then, I will believe it impos­sible.' Nor did he like the atmosphere in which the proposed definition was enshrouded. ‘To outsiders like me,' he told Father Whitty,⁵⁷⁵ ‘it would seem as if a grave dogmatic question was being treated merely as a move in ecclesiastical politics,' and he pointed out its effect in causing a recrudescence of anti-Catholic sentiment in England. It is clear that Newman was absolutely convinced of the impolicy of the Jesuits' deci­sion even while he was prepared loyally to abide by its consequences.

Protests of all kinds, were, however, unavailing; and after some stormy scenes the Council passed the dogma on the eighteenth of July, 1870.⁵⁷⁶ Amid the horrors of the Franco-German War and the almost immediate fall of Rome men perhaps hardly realised that the event had come to pass. It had, of course, its tremendous consequences. The ex­communication of Dollinger deprived the Church of its greatest living historian;⁵⁷⁷ and if Hefele submitted it was permissible to doubt whether he believed.⁵⁷⁸ Infallibility did not prevent the confiscation of Church property in Italy,⁵⁷⁹ and in Germany it gave birth to the famous Faick Laws. Bavaria did not permit the publication of the Bull which an­nounced the definition on the ground that priests could no longer be loyal subjects ofthe Crown.⁵⁸⁰ France was too occupied with its internal reconstruction to pay much attention to the change; and, in any case, nationalistic sentiment would probably have been sufficient to prevent any action similar to that of Germany. It was on political and diplomatic grounds that the publication of Veuillot's paper, L ’Univers, was forbid- den.⁵⁸¹

In England, for the moment, the definition made little stir. States­men were more interested in the Franco-German War, and its possible relation to Belgium to give heed to the politics of ecclesiasticism. Mea­sures like the Education and Land Bills were more than sufficient to absorb their attention. But in 1873, Mr. Gladstone's Irish University Bill failed and the Irish Catholic bishops were mainly responsible for its failure.⁵⁸² In the next year Mr. Gladstone retired from the leadership of the Liberal party, and, in his leisure, had the opportunity to renew his acquaintance with Dr. Dollinger. Not unnaturally he studied anew the problem of infallibility and he could not help being moved to indigna­tion at the sufferings of a man whose only faults were his scholarship and his honesty. With Mr. Gladstone, thought was commensurate with action. On his return to England he launched a bitter attack on the Ritu­alist movement in the Anglican Church. He traced its existence to the new and vaunting pretensions of the Roman Curia. It has, he wrote,⁵⁸³ ‘substituted for the proud boast of semper eadem a policy of violence and change of faith... when no one can become her convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another.'

These were hard words, and it was perhaps not unnatural that they should have aroused keen resentment.⁵⁸⁴ But it was not Mr. Gladstone's habit to shrink from justifying his conclusions. In his Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance he explained at length the causes which had led to his angry outburst. The Church of Rome, he argued, occupied a position essentially different from all other churches. While they loyally accepted the sovereignty of the State in return for their religious freedom, the Church of Rome, like the medieval Church, de­sired to lord it over the world.⁵⁸⁵ That desire might be resisted as of old were not Rome now fighting with new weapons; for she had made a claim to the acceptance of her demands incompatible either with civil right or the duty of obedience.⁵⁸⁶ He urges that in the Syllabus of1864, ‘Rome has refurbished and paraded anew every rusty tool she was fondly thought to have disused.'⁵⁸⁷ The effect of this novelty is to bring once more into the field of discussion certain civil questions which must be answered differently from the reply given at the time of Catholic eman­cipation. He points out that the strength of antagonism to Catholic liber­ties ‘had lain' in the allegation that it was not possible for the consistent Roman Catholic to pay to the Crown of this country an entire alle­giance, and that the admission of persons, thus self-disabled, to Parlia­ment, was inconsistent with the safety of State and nation.'⁵⁸⁸ But satis­factory assurances were given, and the emphatic denial of civil respon­sibility to the Pope made by men like Bishop Doyle, the declaration of the Vicars Apostolic, and the Hierarchy, was sufficient to make men accept as a limitation in theory what was inevitably necessary as a limi­tation in practice.⁵⁸⁹ But the situation, in Mr. Gladstone's view, had now changed. ‘Since that time,' he wrote,⁵⁹⁰ ‘all these propositions have been reversed. The Pope's infallibility, when he speaks ex cathedra on faith and morals, has been declared, with the assent of the Bishops of the Roman Church, to be an article of faith, binding on the conscience of every Christian; his claim to the obedience of his spiritual subjects has been declared in like manner without any practical limit or reserve; and his supremacy, without any reserve of civil rights, has been similarly affirmed to include everything which relates to the discipline and gov­ernment of the Church throughout the world. And these doctrines, we now know on the highest authority, it is of necessity for salvation to believe.'

This seemed to him a claim to universal sovereignty. It would of necessity involve the State no less than the individual. The medieval history of the Papacy showed how easily the gap between individual and corporate difficulty might be bridged. There were cases of national protest and the Papacy did not always emerge successful from the con­flict. Yet, on the whole, a theory of separate spheres, such as was the basis of the Roman Catholic Relief Act, was worked out—a theory for which it seems that Mr. Gladstone did not hesitate to claim divine sanc­tion.⁵⁹¹ But ofthis an end had been made. The stern demand for absolute obedience ‘swept into the papal net whole multitudes of facts, whole systems of government, prevailing, though in different degrees, in every country in the world.'⁵⁹² It denied the severance of Church and State even while it asserted the superiority ofthe former organisation. It drew within the ecclesiastical domain much of what had formerly been deemed matter for the State's decision. The result was that ‘this new version of the principles of the papal Church inexorably binds its members to the admission of these exorbitant claims, without any refuge or reservation on behalf of their duty to the Crown.'⁵⁹³ The civil loyalty of Catholics was thus made impossible since their ecclesiastical sovereign had claimed the rights of their temporal sovereign also.

If this was a logical deduction from the Decree of1870 two conclu­sions seemed to Mr. Gladstone to follow. Either the Catholics must re­ject the possible civic interpretation of the new dogma, or the assur­ances of the twenties must be repeated. For the claims had substance behind them. It was true that the Court of Rome could neither secure an invasion of England, or fulfil the visions of Gregory VII.⁵⁹⁴ But a con­test with civic authority Rome was determined to have, and the result of the Falck Laws seemed to him to demonstrate that she was merely fight­ing her enemies one by one.⁵⁹⁵ The events in Germany and the intransigeant policy of Rome in Italy seemed to him to portend danger of no mean kind. It was a serious incentive to European wars because the possible disaffection of Roman Catholic subjects might hinder the action of the State.⁵⁹⁶ He seems to suggest that the type of influence which the Dogma of Infallibility of1870 is bound to extend was shown in the influence of the Irish prelates over the Nationalist members in 1873.⁵⁹⁷ The attitude of converts to Rome seems to him fraught with danger. The phrase ‘a Catholic first, an Englishman afterward' seems to him now to mean ‘that the “convert” intends, in case of conflict be­tween the Queen and the Pope, to follow the Pope, and let the Queen shift for herself; which happily, she well can do.'⁵⁹⁸ Before 1870 Mr. Gladstone felt that he could ask for religious liberty ‘for whatsoever be the follies of ecclesiastical power in his Church, the Church itself, has not required of him, with binding authority, to assent to any principles inconsistent with his civil duty.'⁵⁹⁹ But of that consolation he has been deprived even though he will continue to urge the necessity of toleration. For, at bottom, he believes in the loyalty of English Catholics. What they did in the sixteenth century they will, he hopes, do in the nineteenth. He hopes it, and expects that it will be so. And into the hateful path of religious persecution England will not be drawn by the ‘myrmidons of the Apostolic Chamber.'⁶⁰⁰

If it is in no sense an original thesis, it is, at all events, an ably argued one, and it derived a peculiar significance when maintained by the most important of English statesmen. The whole point of Mr. Gladstone's thesis was in his emphasis on the novelty of the position in which English Catholics had been placed: they had before been able truthfully to make declaration of their loyalty; now they were compelled to make choice between Queen and Pope. But, as a fact, Mr. Gladstone's argument was vitiated by exactly the same fallacies as those which, half a century before, had been used to defeat Catholic emancipation. He depicted Vaticanism as an attack on the sovereignty of the State. The sphere of the latter body was invaded if the implications of papal infal­libility were fulfilled. But that was in its turn to imply that the claims were possible of fulfilment, and of this Mr. Gladstone himself made emphatic denial. It was exactly that old problem of a unified allegiance which, as Sydney Smith had so whimsically shown, no man can have if his interests are of a varied character.⁶⁰¹ It was not very serious that Pius IX should make claim to the lordship of the world if he could not make good his pretensions. If Catholics did not obey the Papacy in the sixteenth or in the seventeenth century, when the reality of its power was a far more powerful tradition with men, it was hardly likely that they would bow to it in the nineteenth, when its temporal possessions were gone and it stood as a forlorn ghost of a glory which now adorned a novel and secular power. To a claim of spiritual supremacy Mr. Gladstone could raise no objection; he had himself often enough lamented the Erastianism of the English State.⁶⁰² If, as it seemed, the spiritual de­mand was justified, and the temporal was unimportant, Mr. Gladstone was fighting a shadow. The sovereignty he feared had no more than a historic interest. It depended, as he must have realised, on the consent of men; and there was no evidence that that consent could in any danger­ous degree be obtained.

The answers to Mr. Gladstone’s pamphlets were varying in nature, and perhaps of a greater interest than his own attack. Manning at once declared that the decrees ‘have in no jot or tittle changed either the obli­gations or the conditions of civil allegiance’ of Catholics whose ‘civil allegiance is as undivided as that of all Christians, and of all men who recognise a divine or moral natural law’; but he was careful to emphasise that ‘the civil allegiance of no man is unlimited, and therefore the civil allegiance of all men who believe in God, and are governed by con­science, is in that sense divided.’⁶⁰³ Lord Acton pointed out that the claims of the Ultramontane school had a far longer history than Mr. Gladstone cared to admit, and he wisely, if a little sardonically, sug­gested that to repel the demand of the Pope needed a little more than ‘a written demonstration.’⁶⁰⁴ ‘The fact is,’ said Lord Emly, one of the most distinguished of Catholic laymen,⁶⁰⁵ we should deal with a Pope’s or­ders to be disloyal as Stephen Langton and the Barons of Runnymede dealt with a similar order.’ Lord Camoys and Mr. Henry Petre spoke in similar fashion.⁶⁰⁶ Nor were Protestants wanting to repudiate Mr. Gladstone’s contentions. His assumptions appeared to the Edinburgh Review entirely erroneous. ‘English Roman Catholics,’ it wrote,⁶⁰⁷ ‘are quite as loyal now as they were in the days of Lord Howard of Effingham and the Spanish Armada... all men in some degree hold a divided alle­giance to conscience and the law. A Quaker who refuses to take an oath... A Nonconformist who refuses to pay a Church rate,... the High Church party in England, are continually setting the law at defiance. We think these conscientious people are mistaken, but we do not accuse them of throwing off their allegiance,’ and, in an admirable sentence it pointed out that ‘Catholics do and can give their consciences the benefit ofthe great “nevertheless.”⁶⁰⁸ The Times, while pointing out that certain claims of Dr. Manning would ‘possess the power of determining for Queen Victoria and her subjects the bounds of their mutual obligations,’ did not fear the claims. ‘The guns may look, very formidable,’ it ar­gued,⁶⁰⁹ ‘but they require men to fire them; and if the word of command should ever be given, the obedience rendered to it will be too irregular to produce any dangerous result.’ Father Reilly protested that a truly di­vine religion could not possibly make its members disloyal subjects of

society.⁶¹⁰ Clearly, here, the notion of an absolute sovereignty is disre­garded altogether. Your sovereign obtains what obedience he can, and it seems to be admitted that the judgment, or the conscience, of men, is in truth the actual arbiter of events.

Yet different interpretations were not wanting. W. G. Ward boldly stated that the Bull Unam Sanctam was his ideal and that he had ‘no other wish than that its doctrines may find acceptance in Europe.'⁶¹¹ The ground of his attitude is quite evident. A Catholic theocracy on earth was his ideal and without the absolute supremacy of the Pope it seemed to him that anarchy would follow.⁶¹² Ambrose de Lisle, on the other hand, thought ‘it dangerous and untrue' thus to assert the superi­ority ofthe ecclesiastical to the civil power, or to suggest that the former defined the limits of the latter.⁶¹³ The distinguished historian Thirlwall echoed with grave concern Mr. Gladstone's theories. ‘It has now be­come impossible,' he said,⁶¹⁴ ‘for a Roman Catholic, consistently with the first principles of his religion, to be a loyal subject of any govern­ment which is not itself subject to the Pope.' Canon Oakeley, one of the most distinguished of the Newmanite converts, argued that the Syllabus and its consequences embodied no more than the natural consequences of the Oxford Movement. ‘There is not,' he told Mr. Gladstone,⁶¹⁵ ‘one of the popular maxims condemned in the Syllabus which such men as Mr. Keble and Mr. Hurrell Froude would not have held in utter detesta­tion,' and he argued for the dutiful reception of the Vatican decrees. But the two fullest answers, on the Ultramontane side, to Mr. Gladstone, came from Manning, and his subordinate, Monsignor Capel. Cardinal Manning, in his brief note to the Times, had already explained that the civil allegiance of Catholics was unimpaired by the promulgation of the dogma. He now explained the grounds upon which his assertion was based. He pointed out again that no allegiance is undivided. ‘Every moral being,' he wrote,⁶¹⁶ ‘is under two authorities, human and divine. The child is under the authority of parents, and the authority of God; the subject is under the authority of the Civil State and the divine authority of natural or revealed religion. Unless we claim infallibility for the State, its acts must be liable to revision and resistance by natural conscience. An unlimited obedience to parents or to States would generate a race of unlimited monsters.' So far he had done no more than to give an admi­rable criticism of Austinianism. But he proceeded to questions of a dif­ferent kind. He urged that to allow complete liberty of conscience was virtually to allow anarchy and against this the Church must provide corporate protection. The sixty-third proposition of the Syllabus ad­judged anathema against him who rebelled against legitimate princes. ‘The political conscience of Catholics,' he said,⁶¹⁷ ‘is not left to the individual judgment alone. It is guided by the whole Christian morality, by the greatest system of ethical legislation the world has ever seen, the Canon Law and the Moral Theology of the Catholic Church.' But this was virtually to admit that the Church controlled the Catholic as a citi­zen, which was exactly the position against which Mr. Gladstone had made his protest. Nor did Manning stop here. While he admitted that, within his own sphere, the State was a perfect and supreme society, he denied that it was the highest society on earth;⁶¹⁸ the Church was higher than the State because it had a higher aim and was therefore supreme above the State. What did that supremacy imply One thing only to his mind: that the Church only can fix the limits of its own jurisdiction;⁶¹⁹ and he admitted that if it can fix the limits of its own jurisdiction, it can fix the limits of all other jurisdictions. From this, as he conceived, two consequences followed: the Church did not concern itself with temporal matters, and in all things which hinder or promote the eternal happiness of men, the Church has a power to judge and enforce.'⁶²⁰

It will perhaps be admitted that the argument is more controver­sially interesting than historically accurate. Its truth can only be main­tained by giving to the word ‘eternal' a connotation which includes all temporal things. But temporal things had been adjudged the province of the State, and on that basis Manning had suggested that if each organisation kept to its rightful sphere, collision was impossible. He did not doubt which was the offender. ‘Modern Liberalism,' he wrote in 1877,⁶²¹ ‘is the Caesarism of the State. Liberalism seems to believe that “all power in heaven and on earth” was given to it—that the State has power to define the limits of its own jurisdiction and also those of the Church. All sin and blasphemy against God is forgiven to men. There is only one unpardonable sin. Any one who speaks a word against the omnipotence of the State is disloyal, and shall never be forgiven.' So thoroughgoing a criticism leaves no doubt as to the direction in which Manning's sympathies lay. Theoretically, it seems clear that his attitude lays itself open to the objections urged by Mr. Gladstone. If only the Church could define the limits of her jurisdiction, and if she chose, as under Gregory VII and Innocent III, the medieval Church seems to have chosen, to interfere with every possible domain of civilised life, then collision between Church and State was not merely possible but inevi­table. That, in fact, was the central problem of Ultramontanism. It pos­tulated a theocracy of which the Pope was the Austinian sovereign. It could hardly then be surprised if those out of sympathy with Catholic ideals showed themselves unwilling to admit such unlimited power. Cardinal Manning, indeed, when confronted with the facts, seems to have been driven to that conclusion. ‘The first principles of morals,' he wrote in a very striking paragraph,⁶²² ‘forbid the extension of the su­preme judicial power of the Church on such a civil order as that of England. When it was de facto subject to the Church, England had, by its own free will, accepted the laws of the Church. It can never again be subject to such laws except on the same condition—namely, by its own free will. Till then the highest laws of morality render the exercise of such Pontifical acts in England impossible.' It is difficult to see exactly why this should be the case unless the Austianism for which Manning had previously contended becomes impossible. For whereas he had ar­gued for a papal sovereignty based upon Divine Right, now he does not ask for its exercise except upon the basis of human consent to its activi­ties. In such a connotation the Austinian spectre is more formidable in appearance than in reality.

Monsignor Capel went even further in the direction of an extreme interpretation than Manning. His historical disquisition it is probably unnecessary at this date to treat with any seriousness; it is in his politi­cal theses that the interest of his pamphlet lies.⁶²³ He explains that God has established on earth three powers, paternal, civil and spiritual. ‘Each of these powers is supreme and independent in its own province; has full and free activity in its own order; preserves its own autonomy; and ought never to be absorbed by either ofthe other powers.'⁶²⁴ We have, in fact, a kind of Presbyterian doctrine of three kingdoms instead of two, and since allegiance to each is absolute, the theory is really, on the sur­face at least, a theory of toleration and liberty. But then Monsignor Capel begins to introduce curious limitations. He explains that the Spiri­tual Power is pre-eminent over the other two not only because of ‘its nobler end and greater empire, but also in its very nature'; for that rea­son ‘it is manifest that this power is not exercised directly in its own sphere, but likewise indirectly over the actions of the other two powers. In this sense, it is supreme, and the other powers are subordinate to it.'⁶²⁵ So that the freedom and independence of which he had previously spoken are not really existent. He explains the cause of this seeming contradiction. ‘The Church has held,' he writes,⁶²⁶ ‘that politics, or the science which treats ofthe State, must necessarily, from its ethical char­acter, present many points of contact with revealed truth. The principles on which it is based flow from the natural law. They can never, there­fore, be in real contradiction with the precepts of the divine and positive law. Hence the State, if it only remain true to its fundamental principles, must ever be in the completest harmony with the Church and Revela­tion. Now so long as this harmony continues, the Church has neither call nor right to interfere with politics, for earthly politics do not fall within her jurisdiction. The moment, however, the State becomes un­faithful to its principles, and contravenes the divine and positive law, that moment it is the Church's right and duty, as the guardian of re­vealed truth, to interfere, and to proclaim to the State the truths which it has ignored, and to condemn the erroneous maxims which it has adopted.' So that, in the last analysis, the Ultramontanism of which Capel was representative is only willing to allow the State its freedom so long as its actions meet with the approval of the Church. It goes back to medieval ideas, and reduces politics to a branch of theological study of the truth of which it is necessarily and obviously the sole arbiter.⁶²⁷ So that we ultimately have a State that finds the expression of its freedom in com­pliance with the wishes of the Church; and the Church, we are told, has judged of the conduct of States as a consequence of the universal desire of nations.⁶²⁸ It is perfectly clear, therefore, that Monsignor Capel's theories of the Church make it logically impossible to hold the idea of separate supremacies which he had previously put forward; for a su­premacy that is not supreme seems rather to belong to a Looking-Glass world than to a well-reasoned political treatise. It was essentially to bring out the implications of this Ultramontanism, historically and po­litically, that Dollinger had written his Pope and the Council and Mr. Gladstone his pamphlet. Logically, Monsignor Capel, like Manning, virtually admits the main conclusions at which Mr. Gladstone arrived, and in theory their conclusions led exactly to that questionable loyalty of which he spoke as established by the new dogma. Where both he and they were in error was in their regarding an Austinian sovereignty as a working hypothesis. Theoretically admirable, in practice it would not work. Mr. Frederic Harrison made this abundantly clear in an admi­rable letter. ‘Exeter Hall denounced the opium war, he wrote,⁶²⁹ some of our civil and military officers are under the inspiration of Exeter Hall; therefore we may expect them to desert to the enemy in a possible war with China. These exercises of irritating logic are as easy as they are puerile. If every opinion a man may hold is to be followed out to what we think its logical result, and every man is to be supposed in any di­lemma which our ingenuity can frame, every man is a rebel.' The pity was that the advocates of Ultramontanism did not see the application of these remarks no less to their own demands upon the minimisers of their own faith, than to the criticism passed upon them by Mr. Gladstone. For the fact is, that in any contest between life and logic, it is not logic that is successful. It required a man whose philosophic outlook was essen­tially based upon this realisation to understand the actual nature of the debate. Newman's Grammar of Assent, then but four years old, was above all things a study of the psychology of mental processes, and a demonstration that certain dormant conceptions, when once aroused, would justify convictions for which no logic could adequately account.⁶³⁰ But the line between belief and action was not very wide and it required but a step to transfer the ideas of the philosophical volume to the politi­cal arena. Quite early in the controversy with Mr. Gladstone he deter­mined to speak out his mind, and though his ‘old fingers'—he was then seventy-three—‘did not move quick,' he seems to have worked with astonishing rapidity.⁶³¹ The Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, ⁶³² the Apolo­gia apart, was Newman's masterpiece. Its profound psychology, its subtlety, its humour, its loyalty to his friends, its whimsical castigation of his enemies, place it in a class by itself of the controversy of which it formed a part. But it is more than a piece of ephemeral argument. It remains with some remarks of Sir Henry Maine and a few brilliant dicta of F. W. Maitland as perhaps the profoundest discussion of the nature of obedience and of sovereignty to be found in the English language. In the reply to his critics which Mr. Gladstone published it is clear that of this argument alone did he take serious account.⁶³³ For Newman, even apart from his theology, was an able political thinker who had devoted the twelve years of his connexion with the Oxford Movement to the study of the problem of sovereignty in its acutest phase—that of Church and State. The pamphlet, in a sense, was the summation of his life's work. He seems to have felt that the clouds which had gathered about so much of his early life were now dispersing and that he might hope, if not for justification, at any rate for peace.⁶³⁴ And it is difficult not to feel that the service he rendered to his Church upon this occasion was closely connected with the bestowal of that honour which was his official vindi­cation. But in the hearts of Englishmen it was a vindication he did not need. Newman was quick to see that the central problem was the rela­tions of sovereignty to allegiance on the one hand, and to conscience on the other. The Pope was sovereign and infallible, said Mr. Gladstone; therefore no British subject can be at once loyal to the Crown and a Catholic. But Newman at once points out that there are degrees of obe­dience and that they determine the nature of sovereignty. Mr. Gladstone, as he said, objected to the ‘supreme direction' exercised by the Pope over Catholics.⁶³⁵ But Newman urges that the State, through the law, makes a precisely similar claim. ‘The State,' he said,⁶³⁶ ‘as well as the Church, has the power at its will of imposing laws upon us, laws bear­ing on our moral duties, our daily conduct, affecting our actions in vari­ous ways, and circumscribing our liberties; yet no one would say that the Law, after all, with all its power in the abstract, and its executive vigour in fact, interferes either with our comfort or our conscience.' But the papal activity is less than this. ‘ At first sight,' Newman says,⁶³⁷ ‘I have not known where to look for instances of his actual interposition in our private affairs.' The fact is that, of necessity, whatever be the claims of the Papacy, it can in practice do no more than lay down perfectly general laws and trust to the good sense of Catholics for their wise application to the facts of any particular case.⁶³⁸ And he goes on to show how Catholic loyalty to the Pope must receive limitation in the event. ‘Suppose England,' he wrote,⁶³⁹ ‘were to send her ironclads to support Italy against the Pope and his allies, English Catholics would be very indignant, they would take part with the Pope before the war began, they would use all constitutional means to hinder it; but who believes that when they were once in the war, their action would be anything else than prayers and exertions for a termination?' In so diffi­cult a case, in fact, Catholics would do no more than play the perfectly constitutional part of an opposition in Parliament, as did John Bright during the Crimean war. But what, Newman asks, would Catholics do if a direct command from the Pope came actively to oppose their coun­try? If, for example, Parliament forced Catholics to attend Protestant service weekly, and the Pope told Catholics to disobey the law, he would obey the Pope. To Mr. Gladstone's argument that such a case is impos­sible he replies by admitting it, and, almost in Mr. Harrison's words he points out the obvious circumscription to which an absolute obedience is subject.⁶⁴⁰ He would not obey the Pope if, as a Privy Councillor, he was ordered to give acknowledgment to a Prince of Wales who became a Roman Catholic. He would not obey the Pope if, when a soldier or sailor, the Pope ordered all Catholics to retire from the services. In ex­treme cases, in brief, that is ‘when his conscience could not be recon­ciled to any of the courses of action proposed to him by others,' he will follow the dictates of his conscience as men like Turrecremata and Bellarmine have alike argued he must do.⁶⁴¹ For such a demand of abso­lute obedience ‘would be transgressing the laws of human nature and human society' since ‘there is no rule in this world without exceptions.'⁶⁴² He is careful to point out that this is not the doctrine of private judgment as held by Protestants; for while with the latter private judgment is the arbiter of common events, with him it is decisive only ‘in very extraor­dinary and rare, nay, impossible cases' The term ‘conscience' must not be misunderstood. ‘Conscience is not a longsighted selfishness, nor a desire to be consistent with oneself, but it is a messenger from Him who, in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil and teaches and rules us by his representatives.'⁶⁴³ Such a freedom of conscience no Pope dare deny; did he do so ‘it would be a suicidal act. He would be cutting the ground from under his feet... on the law of conscience and its sacred­ness are founded both his authority in theory and power in fact.'⁶⁴⁴ If he trampled on the consciences of men thus conceived he would meet his due reward. And conscience thus conceived is the real abiter of conduct. Nor can it collide with infallibility. For the one, he says, quoting St. Thomas, is engaged only with immediate things while infallibility deals with general propositions.⁶⁴⁵ And he is careful to point out that the Pope ‘is not infallible in his laws, nor in his commands, nor in his acts of state, nor in his administration, nor in his public policy.'⁶⁴⁶ He is infal­lible only when he speaks ex cathedra in the name of the Church; and it is a difficult theological problem to decide when he does so speak. Newman feels certain that the essence of Catholic doctrine is the duty of obeying conscience ‘at all hazards.”⁶⁴⁷ ‘If I am obliged,' runs his strik­ing conclusion,⁶⁴⁸ ‘to bring religion into after-dinner toasts (which in­deed does not seem quite the thing), I shall drink—to the Pope if you please—still to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.'

The argument seems complete. Man should do that which he deems morally right, and the only obedience he can render is the obedience consonant with his ethical standards. Clearly in such a view the sover­eign ofAustin, the superior who always receives submission to his views, is an unthinkable thing. He is unthinkable because so long as men live they will vary in opinion on fundamental questions, and varying will follow their individual bent. Whether so minimising an interpretation represents with any accuracy the policy of Rome is another and very different question.⁶⁴⁹ Certainly one may doubt whether it would have met with the approval of il diavolo del' Concilio, Manning. For it de­prives the Pope of his sovereignty at exactly the point where it is most needed—the crucial instance where it might be put to the test of the event. It is a theory of liberty since it bases power and obedience on the consent of men. In such a view, for instance, Newman has not the right to doubt the morality of Dollinger’s secession; for the highest motives— as was universally admitted—actuated the great historian in the course he took. Certain words of Mr. Gladstone, when he closed this momen­tous debate, contain a truth of profound importance. ‘It may be true,’ he said,⁶⁵⁰ ‘that the men of good systems are worse than their principles, and the men ofbad systems better than their principles.’ Theories which depend for their translation into terms of the event upon an irrevocable certainty in human nature are psychologically fallacious. Men, for the most part, have an unknown factor in their every political equation. Dogma may dream that it has extinguished right at law, and it yet will be found to suffer defeat. Divine right does not prevent the execution of kings. So long as our theories have to validate themselves in practice we may perhaps fear little the remorselessness of their logic. For human nature has evolved its separate guarantees.

V

The problem of Church and State is in reality, as Mr. Figgis has so ably argued,⁶⁵¹ but part of the larger problem of the nature of civil society. To distrust the old theory of sovereignty is to strive towards a greater free­dom. We have been perhaps too frankly worshippers of the State. Be­fore it we have prostrated ourselves in speechless admiration, deeming its nature matter, for the most part, beyond our concern. The result has been the implicit acceptance of a certain grim Hegelianism which has swept us unprotestingly on into the vortex of a great All which is more than ourselves. Its goodness we might not deny. We live, so we are told, but for its sake and in its life and are otherwise non-existent. So the State has become a kind of modern Baal to which the citizen must bow a heedless knee. It has not been seen, or perhaps has been too truly seen, that the death of argument lies in genuflexion.⁶⁵²

It is an inadequate attitude thus to perpetrate a meaningless unifor­mity of outlook. Societies are persons as men are persons. They have— the word matters but little—their ethos, character, nature, identity. They are born to live within the pale of human fellowship. They may be wrong, as men and women are wrong, and the rules of human conduct which the processes of evolution have developed for the individual must be applied to them also. It is no answer to assert the theoretical infallibility of the State to us who possess the record of history. To acquiesce in its sin, to judge of it by criteria other than those of individual action, is to place authority before truth. The sovereignty of the State will pass, as the divine right of kings has had its day. It has been no more than a sword forged in one of the mightiest of political conflicts. It has been a victorious sword but it must be replaced by newer weapons. No dogma can hope for immortality since we live in an age of readjustment and of reconstruction.

There is an etching of Brangwyn's in which the artist has depicted the break-up of a discarded vessel. It lies on its side, dominating the picture. It overawes by its impressiveness, by its suggestion of a mighty past. One sees it as a stage in the evolution of sea-craft, a vessel which, in its day, was a very giant of human invention. Then it enabled those who piloted it through unknown and uncharted seas to do voyage of service and discovery. But it is at length cast aside. Vessels built on principles more consonant with modern knowledge take its place. So, with its past splendour borne clearly in mind, it is held to have served its purpose. What it has been, what it has accomplished, is remembered by those who plan the evolution of that science of which it is part; whatever there is in it of good, goes to the making of its successor. So should it be with the dogmas of political thought. At a time when the organisation of the State was the essential need, the dogma of its moral sovereignty was of the highest value. But newer knowledge has come, and with it the need of change. And it is sheer tragedy that men should be unwilling to realise that the majesty of the State is in nowise diminished by a frank recognition of its imperfections. The State, like man, ceases to be hu­man when it is exalted into Godhead. We dare not so exalt it lest we be imprisoned by the errors of the past. For it is ours to hand down un­dimmed the torch of conscious life.