22 MAY 1920, Page 19

GEORGE. TYRRELL'S LETTERS.*

THE war diverted attention from the controversies in which Father Tyrrell played so prominent a part ; and to some it may seem that his name comes to us out of a vanished world. But Miss Petre has done well to publish this- selection from hie correspondence. He was a many-sided man, and his letters reflect his many-sidedness ; while, though it found an unkindly soil in the Church of its origin, the movement which he repre- sented has struck root elsewhere. " My own work, which I regard as done, has been to raise a question which I have failed. to answer. I think it may be the destiny of the Churoh of England to answer it" Failing this, the Christian Fatherland is larger, and has other skits.

That Modernism broke down on its original ground is not surprising ; those who hoped that it would transform Catholi- cism, hyphenated or unhyphenated, were the victims of what has been called " the wish to believe." What was it, asks M. Emile Faguet, that Lamennais proposed to the Church ? This that she should renounce her historical tradition, and with it the most numerous, the most devoted, the most vigorous, and

• George Tyrrell's Letters. Edited by 3f. 1S. Metre. London: T. Yiih , unwin. ties. nen.1

the most vital of her f011owing. " C'est a. quoi sine eglise, pas plus qu'un parti, ne renonce pas." At times Tyrrell saw that this was true of Modernism : " It is a desperate and dangerous remedy, and has come too late." A Modernized, or Liberalized, Church would make no appeal to the rank-and-file of Roman Catholics ; to " the docile priest-worshipping crowds of dear old Ireland," to those of whom M. Faguet speaks as " les esprits autoritaires, conservateurs, misoneistes." And the system bleeds to death of a cut finger " whereas thou hatest to be reformed." Hence the Terror. The theologians are desperate : " the sense of power is slipping from their senile hands." Nor is " the insolent and aggressive faction," which Newman denounced in 1870, confined to Rome. We find Tyrrell writing to Lord Halifax (1903) :— " The extreme ecclesiasticism' of some of your priests, more Roman than Rome itself, fills me with dismay. I say to myself, These men would burn me at the stake for an evan- gelical.' To that sort of Catholicism may England never be converted ! "

And to another Anglican correspondent :-

" Of course I think of the Roman Church as more irretrievably lied to dead positions than her sister Churches. Possibly the Church of England may be able to accept the results of history, and yet retain the substance of her Catholicism, i.e., she may have room for Modernism. I hope so. But my growing im- pression is that the instinct of the Athelstan Riley, Spencer- Jones, and Halifax schools is, like that of Pius X., wise in its generation. There is a rude philosophy in the folly of the anti- Modernist campaign. The principles that take the Pentateuch from Moses have ended, because they must, in taking the Fourth Gospel from John, etc. ; Modernism is a defiance of the parable. The bottles will burst,' says Christ. ' They will not burst,' says the Modernist. The best way to keep the old bottles is to stick to the old wine."

He had a biting tongue, and 'Ascii indignatio versum :- " I have the horrors on me, and feel tangled in the arms of some marine polypus or giant octopus. The Church sits on my soul like a nightmare, and the oppression is maddening ; much more since these revelations of bad faith and cruel men- dacity. I do not wonder that to Savonarola and the mediaeval mystics Rome seemed Anti-Christ. . . . The grotesque in- sincerity of my position as a Jesuit appals me at times."

But the worst tyrannies are those to which we condemn our- selves—" the misery is that Rome is at once Christ and Anti- Christ ; wheat an tares ; a double-faced Janus looking heaven- wards and hellwards "—and a man is often his own gaoler; while, though detachment is easy for those who stand at a distance from an evil system, it is difficult for those who are near it. Who so fierce against Judaism as St. Paul, or against Pharisaism as Jesus ? The iron had entered into their souls :-

"Nothing can be done till the Roman Church is converted to Christianity. There is more hope of the Jews." " The mentality of a man like Merry del Val is as strange to one as that of a Fiji islander. If I wanted to convert him I shouldn't know where to begin."

" Compared with the average of his predecessors, Pius X. is a morally respectable Pope ; and he sincerely believes that he is doing God's work. But . . . sincerity is not the whole of morality ' • nor is a sincere devil-worshipper aught but a devil. The Jahveh of the Pentateuch was an image and criterion of the badness as well as of the goodness of Israel. I would say the same of the God of Calvin or of Pius X. Cod is the evening shadow of man's soul—its grotesque prolongation."

The Synod of Dort was too much for the Calvinism of " the ever-memorable Mr. John Hales, of Eton " ; there he bid John Calvin good-night, as he often told." It would have been better for Tyrrell had he been able to follow Hales's example ; there are cases in which divorce is the lesser of two evils. And the tie which held him to Rome, while conscientious, was neither reasonable nor religious :— " I doubt more and more if there be an honest Via Media with clearly defined limits, such as W. Ward is trying to tinker up out of Newman. I find three millstones with which Catholi- cism is weighted to destruction ; and yet, cut them away, and what remains ? They are; first, the political conception of the Church as embodied in ' the Court of Rome,' and the claim to temporal power ; secondly, the ' Protection ' system, which adapts the environment to the organism and not conversely, and is embodied in Jesuitism ; thirdly, the tyranny of theo- logical schools as embodied in Scholasticism. But Catholicism, minus Politics, Jesuitism, and Scholasticism, equals Protest- antism ; and with that equation I am not quite satisfied."

This dissatisfaction was temperamental ; and it was at once his strength and his weakness that he was a temperamental man. " An incurable mystic, with a Voltairean mind," is his descrip-

don of himself. On the former of these two sides he felt the evotional weakness of Protestantism—" Who can doubt.," he asks, " that Zwinglian rationalism has as a fact weakened and impoverished devotion and spiritual life "—and missed the real inwardness of the Reformation : he was in this respect a

Galatian ; and, if he was not bewitched by others, he was influenced by a certain auto-suggestion, and bewitched himself.

Yet he saw through his own fallacy :-

" There are reasons for. being a Romanist, provided. one is allowed to live and breathe in peace. Yet the Church is but a means to the great end of living ; not that end itself. Should membership obstruct the end, it defeats its purpose."

This liberty was refused him. But there is an appeal. And his last words on the matter were : "I am glad that God is to judge me, and not any of His servants" (a month before his death).