THE PAPAL ENCYCLICAL.
THE managers of the Roman Church are evidently alarmed, probably not without reason. The modern spirit, the essence of which is that all dogmatic statements, whether in religion or science or politics, must be tried before the tribunal of human reason enlightened by tangible evidence, is diffusing itself in all quarters like an atmosphere, and among those quarters is the great body of the younger priesthood. They are unable not to read, and whatever they read, books, news- papers, or theological treatises, is penetrated with the same tendency,—i.e., to appeal to the right of public judgment, not indeed as being superior to revelation, but as the only instrument through which revelation can be accepted, or denied, or weighed. Those who prevail at Rome, whether Jesuits, or pietists, or mere reactionaries, believe that this spirit will ultimately prove fatal, if not to Christianity—and we must remember that they are for the most part honest in their timidities—at least to the full authority of the Church to which they are more devoted than to Christianity itself, and they cast about for the means of arresting the spread of the contagion. They have no longer the power of employing the secular arm. They cannot to any considerable degree direct the stream of secular patronage,—indeed, in France their favour is fatal to promotion. They are driven back, therefore, upon their moral armoury, and their mode of employing it is to anathematise all teaching in which the taint of " modernism " can be traced as dangerous to the soul and to the Church. In the Encyclical of the 16th inst. the Pope, whose mental capacity is very like that of an old-fashioned English rector, is induced, either by the Jesuits, as some say, or by his own internal convic- tions, as others say, to proscribe absolutely all books and newspapers and periodicals infected with " modernism " —which is, his Holiness declares, " the synthesis of all heresies "—and to prohibit all teaching and all teachers in Roman Catholic schools or Universities which or who may be "poisoned " by its influence. Its energy is tremendous, and the Bishops must therefore establish, each in his own diocese, a censorship of all publications, so that nothing shall be perused. by the faithful which has not received previous episcopal sanction. They must prohibit any ecclesiastic from contributing articles to any periodicals which have not been previously " supervised," and must " tear from the hands " of all students all " bad books,"—that is, being interpreted, all books which the Bishops judge to be evil in their effect. The world of print is to be turned into one vast bibliotkeque rose. This is going very far on the road of obscurantism, for not only is private judgment condemned, but the materials for forming private judgments are to be confiscated. The Pope even goes the length of raising a single philosophy, that of St. Thomas Aquinas, into " a sacred science," and, though he does not actually ban all other philosophies, he does say that this one should be studied to the disuse of any other which may be full of disputable propositions. The old scholastic philosophy, in fact, is declared supreme in the entire region of thought.
Apart from the merit of the end, this does not appear a very wise method of attaining it. It will, to begin with, make it doubly difficult for the advocates of Roman Catholic Universities in Roman Catholic countries, among whom we reckon ourselves, heartily to deny that the Roman Catholic Church prefers ignorance to knowledge and is afraid that free discussion will of itself be fatal to the faith. Every bitter Orangeman in Ireland, for example, will find a new weapon placed in his hands, and will affirm with new fervour that no Roman Catholic University can possibly increase the intelligence of the young. Its teachers are ordered in advance not to be intelligent. It is true that the Pope promises to found some " great institution " which, with the help of all Catholic philosophers, shall " favour and help, with Catholic truth for its light and for its guide, the progress of everything that can be called true science or erudition." But as his Holiness has already declared that there is no true science or valuable erudition which is not in accord with the scholastic philosophy, the new institution will not help human intelligence much.
What will be the real effect of this Encyclical? Beyond increasing the manufacture of hypocritical Professors, we should say very little. The Bishops will, of course, obey orders ; but they cannot found or manage effective censor- ships without lay assistance, and the laity will take little notice of commands which, whether justifiable or otherwise, are inconsistent with the first object of modern teaching. The young ecclesiastics whom the Pope obviously fears will quietly and with apologies disobey orders, declaring to themselves that such orders only mark the immense weight of a reactionary party in the counsels of the Vatican ; or if they are in part obeyed—and in Spanish America they may be—they will only deepen the greatest danger of the Church,—the cleavage between layman and ecclesiastic, and the belief of the former that the teaching of the latter is only professional, having little relation to the facts of life, and none to the useful grooves of progressive thought. The Roman Catholic Church never had the control of education so perfectly as just before the outburst of the French Revolution showed that the Church was despised as well as detested, and that revolt from the seminary teaching had been driven by repression into the path of fierce negation, extending not only to denial of the authority of the Church, but to that of the being of a God. Avee votre Etre Supreme vous commences a m'embeter. That was the thought which dominated all who at that period threw off the Church of Rome. It was hardly so good for the world as Protes- tantism, even if we admit that Protestantism includes in the right of private judgment the right of total unbelief. Of course while the world, even the white world, contains so solid and, so to speak, magnificent a mass of ignorance, an Encyclical like this must have some effect, but the effect cannot be that which the Pope desires. We do not doubt for an instant that he sincerely desires to guide the thoughts at least of those who believe in him into strictly Christian channels ; but in prohibiting free study and the free use of intelligence he is to the extent of his authority weakening the keenest weapons that any Church can use against the total unbeliever. Pius X. was said just before his eleCtion to have expressed doubts of its effect, and cultivated Roman Catholics may well fear that his doubts were warranted by his perception that in the present situation of all Churches the necessity for wisdom has become greater, and not less. The one point in his favour is the absence of an alternative through which the human necessity for a creed might in a way be satisfied. Unhappily, the Roman Catholic races have a fixed distaste for Protestantism, and a Catholicism which shall not be Papal or obscurantist is becoming year by year more difficult to think out.
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