CARDINAL WISEMAN AND ENGLISH LIBERALISM. D R. NEWMAN, in the very
interesting apology for his life which he is now putting forth, has the candour to confess that the great Oxford current which drifted himself and so many others ultimately to the haven of the Roman Church took its rise in a steady hatred of all Liberalism. He and his friends believed Liberalism to be the antagonist principle to faith, and at one time he held its progress to be one of the "notes" of the appearance of Anti-Christ. Liberalism not only loves freedom for its own sake, but believes freedom to be the way to truth and unity; the Anglican party believed freedom to be the way to error and discord, and held that the only guarantee of truth was the authoritative govern- ment of a visible and divine power to which it was intended that human freedom should submit itself; and human virtue submit itself gladly. And that principle once fairly accepted ought no doubt to lead its disciples not only to Rome but to the political as well as ecclesiastical creed of Rome. Cardinal Wiseman does not like admissions quite so candid. He knows that the Roman Church has owed much to the English Liberals, and he is too good a politician to break openly and violently with the party from which he has received some great obligations, and to which he hopes yet to owe obligations greater still. Yet not the less does his recent pastoral show in all its force the natural antagonism between the very principle of the Roman Catholic Church and the principles of Liberalism in all their various development. He wishes to make the pastoral only an effective diatribe against the greatness of the Anglican hierarchy, and their inability to suppress heresy, or even to hate it personally as they ought. He does really make it a very powerful manifesto against the whole genius and faith of Liberals of every kind—ecclesiastical, political, or intellectual ; and we believe that the sooner the Liberal party in this country take the hint, and while giving their hearty aid to all efforts to secure the rights of the Roman Catholics, teach themselves to expect no aid in return on any question of principle, the less likely they are to lean on a broken reed.
The thought which runs through the whole of Cardinal Wiseman's pastoral is that loyalty to visible constituted autho- rity is the first and fundamental duty of man; that the scien- tific intellect should be kept well in hand, so as not even to admit conclusions which threaten constituted ecclesiastical traditions with contradiction ; that the conscience should be kept well in hand, so as not even to admit moral conclusions which threaten ruin to constituted authorities, either political or ecclesiastical ;—nay, that even the critical faculty, when employed on the sources of sacred truth itself, should be kept well in hand, so as not to admit the natural conclusions, however rigorously deduced from those sources, if they threaten a collision with the dogmatic decisions of the Church. Now, we say that Liberalism, on the other hand, though it is not as Dr. Newman calls it, essentially antinomian,—though it recognizes moral law as at the basis of the whole constitution of the world, and positive law as a practical benefit to man,— denies the claims of mere authority wherever it can get some- thing better than authority, internal conviction. It refuses to fetter the scientific intellect on matters properly within the domain of science, and asks for scientific evidence in order to reach scientific truth. It refuses to fetter the conscience of men in deference to either political or ecclesiastical authority, and maintains that such a prostration of the conscience is dis- loyalty to the only invisible authority under the naive of loyalty to a visible power. It refuses to fetter the critical faculty on questions of true criticism, even though bound up with sacred matters, because it believes the earnest exercise of that faculty to be the divinely appointed method of reaching critical certainty. Such is the contrast : let us illustrate it by the questions to which Cardinal Wiseman has referred in this pastoral.
The Cardinal begins with attacking not the hasty genera- lizations of modern science,—that might be fair, —but even the state of mind which is willing to be guided in scientific questions by scientific evidence, and which does not feel an overwhelming predisposition to disbelieve every scientific conclusion which is supposed to be hostile to the traditions of the Church and the scientific assumptions of the Bible. Temporal science, he tells us, shall "revise its wisdom" and bring it " into harmony with the moral evidences which support and surround revelation." Most assuredly we do not believe that temporal science can endanger revelation. We hold re- velation to be as much a part of the divine order as temporal science itself, and a grander part of it, but no honest liberal will admit that temporal science ought to revise its wisdom because its most certain and cautious conclusiona seem to be in conflict with misconceptions embedded as it were in the crust of ievelation or of ecclesiastical tradition. For example the Cardinal, taking aim at the Dar- winian theory, rashly, heedlessly, and dangerously stakes the whole truth of Revelation on that theory being utterly false :— "No, if science, as now read by too many, says true, there was no time when God could have created man ; no moment in which he could have impressed on him His own divine image. The human race, according to this version, springs from some scarcely organized rudiment of matter, which gradually went on, through millions of ages unfolding its means and powers of life, till, having passed through various brutish improvements, it reached the state of existence which immediately preceded the human ; providing for our inheritance—for our fathers the matured intelligence, for our mothers the ripened graces, of the ape, or the baboon r The matter is plainly one for scientific evidence, not for authoritative decision. It is about as logical to say that man could not have been created in God's image because he is the final term in a series of closely-linked and gradually self- approximating creative efforts, as it is to assert that God can- not do by a universal method what He can do by a special act,—that He cannot do the more divine act, though he can do the less. However, with the argument we have nothing to ; we quote the passage only to illustrate the deep hostility of Romanism to science so long as science chooses to touch subjects which involve the assumptions of an infallible divinity. The true Roman faith would assign science a few limited fields to work in where she could not easily come across the reigning assumptions of the existing Church— would give her leave to dabble perhaps in botany, and mineralogy, and mathematics ; but it would prohibit her from establishing laws of nature and inquiring into the constitu- tion of the solar system, from tracing back the secrets of Time in geology,—from examining the minuter links of life in nature. In these matters science must tread under direction, or not at all; the intellect must be forbidden to inquire on intellectual grounds what has been settled on ecclesiastical grounds. The Liberal faith, on the contrary, says that God has given us intellectual clues that our intellects may follow them out, and that if they lead us to different results from those we had arrived at, as we supposed through His own teaching, we.must weigh carefully the trustworthiness of the two methods, and abandon, as not His teaching, that which is supported by the less and the less trustworthy evidence. Roman- ism demands the sacrifice of reason to authority. The Liberal faith assigns far more divine authority to genuine science than to the vague popular assumptions bsed by prophets who spoke for another purpose even though we know that for that purpose they spoke under the inspiration of God. But next the Cardinal demands that even the conscience of men shall submit itself to the authoritative condemnations not only of the Church, but of the State. He taunts the English nation, and especially the English Episcopate, with their reception of Garibaldi, and while he insinuates Garibaldi's rebellion against his Sovereign, of which at Aspromonte he was certainly not guilty, as one reason for his taunt, and his advocacy of a coup d'etat and an absolute dictatorship in Italy as another—not, we conclude, a sin in Cardinal Wise- man's own estimation, but what he thinks the English Catholics may so regard,—he rests all the force of his con- demnation on Garibaldi's supposed infidelity, which he shows by very questionable, and webelieve wholly inadequate evidence. But, admitting the passage quoted from Garibaldi's address to the people of England to mean what the Cardinal apparently wishes it to mean,—what is the covert assumption which he makes ?—that a soldier who has suffered more, with more pure disinterestedness, and with more magnificent results, for his country than any other living, ought to be avoided as a leper because he has the misfortune to be an unbeliever— that the testimony (assuming it to be true) which proves him an unbeliever should outweigh in men's minds all the testimony proving him to be a high-minded and generous patriot,—that the absence of the divine gift of faith should induce men to ignore the presence of the divine gift of lofty virtue and self-sacrifice. Here, again, we say Liberal faith emphatically justifies, and more than justifies, the Bishops who gave their hands to Garibaldi, even if they gave them knowing that they took the hand of a total unbeliever. A true Liberal will not allow his deepest moral impressions of great, and we may even say holy, gifts to be extinguished because there are other religious impressions less favourable. "The tree is known by its fruits," and when some of the fruits are purer and sweeter than any which grow even of ordinary faith, how can we allow the principle of autho- rity to persuade us that the absence of faith in this man is a justification for anything except humiliation that Christian faith so seldom produces a type of character so exalted as was produced here by a divine influence that had not yet flowered in faith ?
Finally, the Cardinal of course attacks the Bishops vehe- mently for their inaction in the matter of the heresiarchs Dr. Williams, Mr. Wilson, and the Bishop of Natal. He speaks with enthusiasm of the dogmas impugned, giving us, by the way, a curious piece of information—that Simon Magus and Felix the Governor of Jadffla were both intimidated by the dogma of everlasting punishments, and could not have been otherwise intimidated, though he does not tell us how it resulted in either case. But he speaks with scorn of the Bishops who have allowed these dogmas to be impugned without synodic action. • The English Church, he says, "feels within itself that want of power to act out- wardly, which instinct makes us feel when in the presence of a wide chasm, that our frame would refuse to obey our will if this impelled us forward over it, and that our attempt to leap it must end in an ignominious fall." This is, we imagine, a true enough description of the state of mind of some of the Bishops who thought a synodical condemnation right, but certain to be inoperative, even if it could be brought about. It is by no means true, we imagine, of the most Liberal, and perhaps too the most profoundly Christian among them, who do not think the authoritative method the true one on queations of either spiritual or intellectual evidence. They hold that the true Christian and the true critic will arrive at far truer conclusions by the use of his own spiritual and intellectual faculties without those as cathedra dogmatic decisions which only substitute the authority of a party vote that can scarcely be swayed by the really determining con- siderations, for the authority of God Himself on the con- science and on the understanding.
Cardinal Wiseman has done good by reminding us that the vital principles of the Roman Church and of the Liberal party are in conflict as permanent and deadly as the Oromasdes and Ahrimanes of the Persian mythology—not of course that the Roman Catholics are as men any more or less noble than the Liberals, but that their principle of thought is to Liberal faith what darkness is to light. We trust the Liberals may often aid the Roman Catholics. We trust also that the true Liberal will never count on their returning that aid.
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