BOOKS.
WILLIAM GEORGE WARD AND THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL.* [SECOND NOTICE.1 To those who feel any interest in the great story of the Catholic Church,—and the man must be singularly destitute of the sympathies to which even Terence confessed in saying, ." Homo sum et nihil humani a me alienum puto," who has none,—this book, in its clear and terse and often very in- teresting analysis of the different lines of thought in different Catholic countries which brought the Church to the declaration of Papal infallibility in 1870, and kept it back from claiming the kind and extent of infallibility which Mr. Ward had claimed for the Papacy in the course of the vehe- ment controversy which preceded the Vatican Council, will be profoundly interesting. To any one who believes that Revelation necessarily implies some final human authority on the question what is and what is not contained in Revelation, Mr. Ward's view of the proper value and use of that authority would seem, on the first blush of the case at all events, much the most straightforward and natural. If there be an in- fallible earthly authority on the most important of all human concerns, it is not very easy to conceive that the persons in whom that authority is lodged can be regarded as without weighty claims on the attention of Catholics, even when they do not pretend to be exercising the right of infal- lible judgment. There was, however, a whole school of Catholics, both German and English, who maintained that while the final infallibility of the Church was unquestion- able, the preliminary utterances which proceeded from the thief counsellors of the 'Vatican, were entirely without importance or even interest for Roman Catholic theologians. As Mr. Ward put the case, with his usual epigrammatic force, in his polemic against the chief writers of the minimising school which was then represented in England by the Home and Foreign Review :—" Such men regard the Church's rulers much as they might regard Balaam'a ass; they are made the
organs of a divine utterance at certain very wide intervals, but are otherwise below the ordinary level of humanity in their apprehension of God's works and ways." In other words, we suppose, when the rulers of the Church do not speak under the immediate direction of divine Provi- dence, the minimising Catholics see no more reason for study- ing what those rulers do say, with attention and reverence, than Balaam would have seen for listening earnestly and humbly to his ass's ordinary bray. To believers in infallibility, that should certainly be a far more incredible view than any which Mr. Ward put forth on the opposite side of the question. There is nothing intrinsically unreasonable in the belief of the Infallibiliat that you ought to be able to infer something from the preliminary utterances of an oracle of divine truth, as to what the drift of the subsequent and infallible utterance is likely to be. To speak of the Church as the pillar and ground of the truth, and yet to regard all the unstudied utter- ances of those who are commissioned to declare that truth, as mere irrelevant babble, is a paradox far more startling than any of Mr. Ward's. It is hard to imagine a greater violation of all analogy than to contend that the same tree whose rare occasional fruits are absolutely divine certainties, produces
* William George Ward and the Catholic Revival. By Wilfrid Ward, London 2 Macmillan and Co.
under more ordinary conditions nothing but a host of insig- nificant, frivolous, and misleading irrelevancies. Surely Ward's assumption that even the most casually considered utterances of the power which is, at its best, guaranteed, in his view, against all error, if such a power there be, are worthy of the most reverent study, is far more natural than this complete indifference to the ordinary language of an authority which is declared sometimes to be the voice of Providence itself. Mr. Ward's wish for a new Papal Bull every morning at breakfast with his Times, was, we conceive, the legitimate result of his convictions. He really believed that even if all such utterances were not absolutely free from error, you might see in all of them the natural operation of the causes which, when working under the most finely adjusted conditions, excluded even the possibility of mistake. To him, therefore, it appeared only too obvious that if there be in the world a spring of supernatural truth, even though that spring may not always be perfectly pure, those who love truth can hardly be too eager to drink at that spring.
Mr. Wilfrid Ward, however, traces very vividly the reasons why this view of the matter was not accepted by many of even the most reverent of Catholics, and was ultimately rejected by the Vatican Council itself, greatly to Mr. ISTard's dismay. Baron Friedrich von Hfigel, whose subtle and admirable study of Mr. Ward is given towards the close of this book, represents him as rushing out bareheaded on to Hampstead Heath, when assured that the Council had made as clean a sweep of the ultra-Infallibilists, as it had of the party which wanted to get rid of infallibility altogether. The view of the cautions Infalli- billets was that the Church of Rome is only guaranteed from error in its final determination of what was, or was not, con- tained in the original " deposit" of revealed truth ; that it requires very long and careful study of the mind of the Church and of the hold which all parts of the original revelation had taken of that mind, before this can be made clear ; and, in a word, that infallibility is not a miraculous gift that can be invoked at discretion, but the crown of a long process of faithful discrimination, which takes the fullest account of all the ordinary criteria of truth, before it attempts to give a final judgment on what was, and what was not, committed to the custody of the Church when the Revelation was first given. The view of all the Infalli. bilists is that the Roman See is not in any sense an inspired, but only a providentially guided governing power. And the cautious Infallibiliats held it to be of the very essence of that providential guidance that the utmost care should be displayed in avoiding haste and premature judgment. They thought that too great eagerness, much more, any- thing like voracity for infallible utterances, is contrary to the very genius of that patient questioning of the mind of the Church as to the deposit confided to its care, without which there would be no inerrancy. And therefore, though Mr. Ward was held to be perfectly right in regarding all the pre- liminary warnings and precautions of the Roman authorities with deference and even reverence, as forbidding premature judgment, the cautious party thought him quite wrong in assuming with the confidence which he actually displayed, that the ultimate judgment would be in exactly the same key with these preliminary and pro tempore decisions. Long suspense of judgment and elaborate interrogation of the mind of the Church was, in Cardinal Newman's opinion, of the very essence of the gift of infallibility itself; and, indeed, what we outsiders should say, in derogation of the Church's procedure, is that that suspense of judgment and that painstaking interroga- tion has not usually been displayed in anything like adequate measure, but that Mr. Ward's almost voracious craving for a display of infallibility has only too often been in the ascendant. However, we are not here proposing in the least to criticise the Roman Catholic conception, but only to show how far it differed from Mr. Ward's, and why it was that he felt in the end so disappointed with the definition, that he rushed bare- headed on to Hampstead Heath, when Baron Friedrich von Hugel reported to him the deliberate opinion of a shrewd authority, that the Vatican definition had made quite as clean a sweep of his view as it had of that of his most inveterate opponents. Nothing can, to our minds, be more interesting than Mr. Wilfrid Ward's review of the various currents of opinion amongst the French and German, no less than amongst the English, Catholics on the subject of Papal infallibility. The account of De Bonald's view of Tradi-
tionaliem is, indeed, quite essential to any one who wishes to understand the attitude of Cardinal Newman as distinct from the attitude of Mr. Ward. Dr. Newman thought that cautious and habitual adherence to the tendency of ecclesiastical tradi- tion, as it was modified from time to time by the consciousness of the Church, was of the very substance of the Church's infalli- bility. Mr. Ward seems to have thought that the Church could not, if it would, decide in any other than the traditional spirit, and therefore that the sooner and the oftener her deci- sions were elicited, the better it would be for Roman Catholics at large. The difference seems but slight, but it really in- volved a very considerable difference between them, both in spirit and method.
But to return to Mr. Ward the man, who told Dr. Newman that ever since they had taken different lines on the great controversy of the day, he had felt like " an intellectual orphan." There is no sketch, either of the theologian or the man, so subtle and graphic as that which Baron von Hugel gives in his most impressive letter, from which we must make a striking extract, including mention of an incident to which we have already referred
Indeed, it was this state of tension of mind and nerve which struck me from the first as a concomitant, more probably a part- cause, of his special strength and special weakness. His separate courses at dinner, served in quick succession so as to avoid all delay ; his sensitiveness to the vibration of the ground caused by one's approaching the part of the terrace on which, im- mediately after his dinner, he would be playing chess ; his insisting upon getting out and crossing on foot a foot-bridge, when his carriage forded a shallow brook ; and, later on, by the time our friendship had ripened into close intimacy, his suddenly breaking off in the midst of a sentence with an excuse me, only a ton minutes' nap,' and then and there throwing himself on our drawing- room sofa, and, at the end of that time, waking up refreshed and vigorous ; all this, with numberless other little symptoms, meant one and the same thing,—an overwrought brain and overstrung nerves. It was the same mentally. His inability to remain for an instant without definite occupation or amusement for his mind, or to conceive that any living being could so remain ; his calling his youngest daughter into his study, with the explanation, Margaret, do attend to poor Fish, amuse the poor dog, he is so dull, so bored !' his incapacity for imagining that a man could keep simply neutral in his estimate of a stranger, and could possibly avoid definitely holding him to be bad, if he did not definitely hold him to be good, when of course neutrality is really all that is strictly possible, and all that is expected of us ; his `imploring' Father O'Reilly, in his reviews of the latter's thoroughly historical Church and State articles, to take sides clearly on this and that minor point, as such declaration was of vital importance, when the real point would be, not the require- ments of logic or of life, but the amount and nature of the evidence available ; his instinctive shrinking and turning away—as rapidly as if a live coal had fallen upon his hand—from some discussion I was retailing to him from one of Dr. Lightfoot's dissertations, a discussion on a point of admittedly minor importance, as soon as it became clear to him that it did not even profess to lead beyond suspense or probability ; and, in a somewhat different direction, his rushing out of our house bareheaded on my repeating to him, under pressure, the remark of a clerical friend, that he considered the Vatican Council had made a clean sweep of the Extreme Right as well as of the Extreme Left : all this hangs well together, and spells a man who could affirm and who could deny, but who could not suspend, who could revolutionise, but who could hardly reform his judgment."
No passage in the book gives a more vigorous outline of Mr. Ward's personality than this, and the truth of the sketch is con- firmed by almost every page. Ward was always trying to evade difficulties which it is not given to human enterprise to evade, sometimes in relation to physical matters, sometimes in relation to spiritual. With that curious inability of his to remain without definite solutions for any pnoblem which deeply concerned him, the rapid transitions of his mind from one series of odd arrangements to another equally odd, was at times almost grotesque. Dean Goulburn's inimitable account of his elabo- rate preparations for falling off his horse without hurting himself in the riding-school which he had built for this very purpose, illustrates most vividly the sudden vibrations of his
mind between absorbing interest in the terrors of his riding- exercise, and his still more absorbing interest in surmounting the difficulties implied in the existence in man of a strictly limited free-will. But a, still more humorous illustration of his eagerness to reach definite views concerning himself,
in this case by the help of his confessor, is given early in this most amusing book :— " Before long his difficulties from poverty were at an end. His Pnele died towards the end of September, 1849, and Mr. Ward inherited his property in the Isle of Wight, which was entailed on, him by his grandfather. I found myself,' ho said, in the position of that class of the community on which I had expended most abuse—of a large landed proprietor.' He used to say that during his uncle's last illness he felt a scruple of conscience at his inability to repress a wish that the end might be speedy. He consulted a priest who lived in the neighbourhood as to how far his feeling was a faulty one. The priest suggested the customary considerations. ' It is quite enough that you should feel a certain regret at the prospect of your uncle's death,' he said, though you may be pleased to inherit his property.' But Mr. Ward's candour was not to be beaten. I feel no regret whatever at the prospect,' he insisted. Well, you must have a certain wish, quite apart from other consequences, that he might be spared.'—' No ; not the slightest ! I never cared for him in the least.'—' Your poor uncle has been suffering—your spirits fall a little at all events when you hear he is worse On the con- trary, they rise.' The priest began to fear that he was dealing with a reprobate. Good heavens,' he said suddenly, ' you would not do anything to hasten his death, would you ? ' The roar of laughter with which his penitent received the question was sufficient answer."
Evidently that priest did not succeed in helping Mr. Ward to any clearer light as to the dubious nature of his own "spon- taneous impulse." Never was there a man so absolutely candid with himself as Mr. Ward. Never was there one so discontented with himself when even his candour was incompetent to the task of solving the problems which his conscience set him. No wonder he coveted the guidance of some clear and definite authority. But the lesson of this vivid biography is that even when he had got all the guidance of that kind that was at his disposal in the most authoritative of all the Churches, his craving was but half satisfied. He could not endure living in half-lights. And yet in half•lights the soul, even of such an one as William George Ward, is mostly doomed to live.
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