THE COUNCIL OF THE VATICAN.
THE Pope has lived to fulfil the desire of his heart. The great Council met on Wednesday, and was attended by about 800 qualified members, and it immediately proceeded to justify the Pope's step in calling it together by approving,— unanimously, we believe, and without discussion,—of the summons. Whatever we may think of the present weakness of Roman Catholicism, however much to the disadvantage of Pio Nono we may consider the historical comparison which may be drawn between him and some of his mostfamous predecessors, —the great Leo, to whose language he appeals as the first notable historical assertion of the dogmatic power he claims, or the still more imperious Hildebrand,—it is impossible to doubt that the (Ecumenical Council of the Vatican will probably prove one of the great landmarks of European history for all time, .or that it will immortalize, whether for evil or good, the Pope who had faith enough in his own avowed principles to assemble such a Council, after an interregnum of three hundred years. The Roman Catholic Church boasts undoubtedly far the most ancient origin of any historical power now existing in Europe ; yet very few would deem it as hale and vigorous as its younger competitors ; it has been roughly jostled out of the _greater part of its temporal dominions by the infant power of Italy, and has not been able to make its displeasure even seriously felt ; it has just seen its most devoted servant plucked down from the throne of Spain, and has barely made a stand for her or her dynasty ; it has been coolly set at naught by the Czar of Russia, and has only had strength to utter a feeble protest in return ; it has been compelled to accept oven from the devout Emperor of Austria terms which are abhorrent to its whole soul, and yet it must put up with the affront, and even now receives the Austrian Ambassador with the old cordiality ; it has been snubbed by the little and thoroughly 131tramontane State of Bavaria, and snubbed with- out the opportunity of retaliation or retribution ; in France it has long been held in severe cheek by the Prince who is responsible for the independence of the Pope himself ; in a word, there is not a country in Europe where it any longer clictates to the Sovereign or pretends to guide the resolves of the secular power. In such an emergency there was cer- tainly courage and mettle in the heart of the man who could -summon its representatives from all the corners of the earth to tell each other their fears and their hopes,—for the Pope must have had a deep conviction that their fears would -vanish before the irresistible evidence of a Divine Spirit moving in the Church at large, and their hopes grow into certainty under the fostering influences of so great a surge of ecclesiastical sympathy, or he would hardly have called the Council together at all. And to believe this honestly, in the face of the history of former (Ecumenical Councils, with their Eerce battles of interest and squabbles of official precedence, must have been very difficult. There is scarcely a Council, from that of Nictea to that of Constance, the history of which can be pleasant reading to the infallibilist. Antonelli, doubt- less, has dreaded all along that the Council will be an oppor- tunity for the mutual confession of profound misgivings and discontents, and perhaps end in replacing widespread but insulated feelings of discouragement by a great shock of popular panic. And so it may well prove ; but it may happen in either of two ways. Were the Pope's influence to receive a great check ; were the tendency of his recent dog- matic decisions to be virtually called in question ; were the bodily assumption of the Virgin to be ignored ; were the Gallican party to gain the ascendant ; were the German Bishops, who wish to open the way for a mutual under- standing between the infallible Church and the spirit of fallible Criticism and even purely human Science, to get a great triumph ; were the only enthusiasts for Romanism whom the modern world can count to be sent to their homes in something like disgrace, with an o3cumenical veto on their aspirations, it is quite possible that a certain spirit of lassitude and indifference would fall on the Roman Church all the world over. Even those Bishops who are most anxious now to check the dangerously enthusiastic spirit which is developing itself, might go home with a secret sense that though they had conquered, they had conquered in the name of the indifference and prudence of the world, rather than of the faith and supernatural light of the Church, and with a secret doubt in their souls whether the same logic by which they had conquered would not have warranted something much more revolutionary, something like an abdication of the Church's right to assert any living divine authority at all,— something like a surrender of everything beyond a grand historical inheritance and a consequent position of great moral influence and dignity. Thus the victory of the very party which Cardinal Antonelli is said to favour might very well end in verifying his fears. On the other hand, they may be verified from the opposite issue,—the issue which he doubtless anti- cipates with the greater dread. If the enthusiasts of the Church conquer; if the tendency of the recent Roman decisions be approved and developed by the Council ; if the Syllabus be countersigned by the authority of the assembled pre- lates; if the bodily assumption of the Virgin be de- fined ; if the fire of zeal by which the reigning Pontiff has been long consumed be fanned into a flame ; if the Council do not separate till they have declared that the Pope is by divine ordinance the true mouth-piece of the Church, and that his deliberate dogmatic teaching is the teaching of the Holy Ghost,—then it is probable enough that discouragement and reaction, the secret doubt and the pallor of indifference, will be for a time merged in a momentary flash of enthusiasm and ecclesiastical exultation ; but that the chill will come later, and with all the greater shock, when the glow of enthusiasm is over, and the Bishops separate to find their flocks sturdily supporting monarchs who are rebellious sons of the Church, carrying by acclamation marriage laws which the Church anathematizes, insisting on Concordats which are little better than acts of defiance, investigating new sciences which the Church condemns as inconsistent with her inspired records, clamouring for an education which she cannot sanction, and jealously guarding a liberty of action which, in principle, she abhors. When they think of the gallant old man whom they
have solemnly pronounced to be the mouthpiece of the Holy Ghost, and find that his inspired heart and mind absolutely ignore the whole region of mental and moral activity in which their people live, and into some sort of contact with which they are compelled to come every day, they will hardly be able to suppress the thought that the most solemn act of their lives has been something equivalent to an elaborate decision that the head of one of the greatest of earthly institutions has
been empowered by God to pronounce infallibly upon all that is taking place in one of the most distant of the stars, but unfortunately not empowered to explain its practical bearing on anything that happens now and here.
We hold, then, that the work of the next half-year,—for it seems likely that the Council cannot well break up before St.
Peter's Day, June 29, 1870,—whether it gives the Roman enthusiasts or the Roman diplomatists a triumph, can hardly fail to be a time pregnant with fate for the Roman Church, and therefore for the civilized world,—for it is hardly possible to over-estimate the great effects which may follow from the collapse of such a historical power as she has exercised for centuries, and the semblance of which at least she exercises still. Let us remember that hers is the only spiritual power in the world which assumes or attempts to be cosmopolitan.
The Eastern religions no longer affect to be propagandist. Mahometanism, once so aggressive, is the most stationary of all. The national Christian Churches are bounded by race, and look with despair on ;..he problem of adapting themselves to the genius of a new people. Anglicanism indeed is high of heart in its attempt to convert "the heathen" wherever English colonies prepare the way; but Anglicanism does not even assert that it has a mission to Germans, or Italians, or Frenchmen, or Russians. The only Church in the earth which really believes in its own power quite to overstep all the boundaries of race and the facilities of political opportunity, is the Roman Church. No other would ever have ventured to parcel out Protestant England into dioceses. No other would have dared to demand submission from the universal earth-subduing and earth-subdued Yankee. Infirm and crippled though she be, the Roman Church is still the only one who has the courage to be cosmopolitan, and claim the right to link nation with nation, and literature with literature. We assembled a Council two years ago from a breadth of earth over which it was proudly said that the sun never sets ; but its " fathers " were all men of one stock and one tongue, and when they had met together, they wisely ventured on nothing further than the issue of a meaningless epistle, something in the style of a spurious letter by Clement of Rome. The Bishops now assembled in Rome are of all languages, and would find it impossible to understand even that voice of the Holy Ghost which is supposed to speak to them through the Council, but for the influence of the Church itself in im- posing a certain crude knowledge of Latin,—often of the very slenderest,—on the clergy of all lands,—Asiatic, African, European, American, Australian. Such an assembly is, at least, an extraordinary testimony to the cosmopolitanism of the great Church which seems trembling to its fall ; and who can doubt that that fall, whenever it comes, will be followed by a great temporary loosening of the faith in human unity,— in spite of the electric telegraph,—by a deepening of the chasm between nation and nation, by the loss of at least a most potent spell over the imagination of the world,—by a contraction of the spiritual ideal of every Church ? This ideal even Protestants, even Sceptics, even Positivists have owed, and have owned that they owed, to the Roman Church, the only Church which has really succeeded in uniting the bond between any one ecclesiastical centre and the distant circum- ference of human intelligence and energy.
But if the consequence of the collapse of Romanism would be in this way a loss of power to the human race, think only of the gain of power which would result from the final death of sacerdotal ideas,—for where would they linger effectually if they were once extinguished in the bosom of the Roman com- munion I—from the final blow to the system of arbitrary authority exercised over the intellect and the conscience, from the new life which would flow into a faith and science resting on the steady accumulation of moral and intel- lectual facts and the personal life of the conscience in Christ,—from the final triumph of moral and intellectual order and freedom. It would doubtless be a new life subject to great anarchy at first ; but the old authoritative systems have themselves been of late little more than anarchy just kept under by the authority of prescription and tradition ; and we can only hope for the new order from the complete recogni- tion that it is to have no arbitrary or capricious foun- dation. Whoever underrates the effect of the collapse of the Roman system on the world, has failed to see how the magic of its influence and the splendour of its history have really dominated the imagination of every authoritative system,—the evangelical literalism not excluded,—in the Christian world. The private judgment' of Protestants has hitherto been a mere compromise between the law of conscience and the "law of the spirit of life in Jesus Christ" on the one hand, and the haunting conception of a final human infallibility, attainable somewhere,—the where not exactly speci- fied,—on the other. It seems to us likely enough that the first grand and positive definition of human infallibility, will be the signal for the first universal and logical insurrection against it.
But it would be quite unfair to the Roman Church for any writer who asserts and even zealously maintains his own, no less than her fallibility, not to admit that there may be a reverse to this picture,—that it might by possibility happen that this great act of faith in Pio Nono,—for an act of faith it undoubtedly is,—might result in a great temporary reanima- tion of the Church over which he rules. Suppose the centre of infallibility really defined as in the Pope, and suppose the definition really accepted with enthusiasm by a consider- able portion,—the only genuinely enthusiastic portion,—of the Roman Church, and suppose Pio Nono to be almost imme- diately followed by a Pope of great genius as well as great virtues, might he not well be, in the hands of God, the instrument of wonderful and most salutary reforms ? Might we not, for instance, yet owe to his influence something like that federation of the great Powers of the world for the settlement of international differences, and the extinc- tion of opportunities for war, of which a mind so utterly Protestant as Cobden's dreamed I What magic influence might not be exercised by a Pope commanding the enthusiasm of Roman Catholic nations as an infallible doctor, and the sincere admiration and respect of all civilized nations what- ever ? Might he not exterminate slavery, refine and mellow the vulgarity of modern democracy, curb and chasten the selfishness of modern aristocracy, bridge over the terrible chasms of European society, exercise a certain spell over the- consciences even of Protestant monarchs, and, in a word, give, even to those of us who renounced his claim to personal infallibility as a blasphemous error which only the charm of so great a history as that of Rome could excuse, our best and completest conception of the Vicegerent of Christ upon earth ? We can at least conceive it. We know of no monopoly of Divine favour for Protestants, and we should be well pleased if the sunset of the
Church of Rome were to prove, under the favour of Providence, as glorious as its dawn. The Bishops assembling at Rome are, no doubt, entering on a work of great danger and peril. "Into the jaws of death rode the eight hundred," is a line not quite inapplicable to their enter- prise. That this perilous adventure will, sooner or later, end. in defeat, final defeat to the principle of their Church, we cannot as Protestants entertain a doubt. May it be one not without true honour and glory to themselves,—and not without a great amount of good to the world, arising as well from what they necessarily fail in, as also from what they may incidentally achieve.
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