TOPICS OF TITS DAY.
MR. GLADSTONE'S " P-XPOSTITLATION."
GLADSTONE'S genius is great, but it is a little injured by a quality which rarely belongs to men of genius, and seldom strengthens, though it sometimes serves them,—ingenuity. The " political expostulation " which he has just published contains one or two very fine sayings ; much that it was very natural and right, and not a little which it was in the highest degree desirable for him to say ; but the effect of these declarations is to some extent diminished by the too great ingenuity of the reasons which he assigns for his expostulation, by the extreme quaintness of the practical object which he proposes to himself in publishing it, by the untenable character of the historical view on which he seems to take his stand as justifying Parliament's liberal treatment of Roman Catholics, and by the superfluous acrimony of certain expres- sions, pardonable had they been used in debate, but hardly defensible in a great statesman's carefully written and corrected work, applied by him to a Church which may cease to be altogether, but while it exists, can hardly be otherwise than it is in relation to the characteristics which excite his indignation.
It was perfectly right and even wise for Mr. Gladstone to set forth clearly those immense pretensions of the Roman Church which the decrees of the Vatican Council have consolidated and either imposed, or rendered it at any time possible for the Church to impose, as rules obligatory on the consciences of all her loyal subjects. It was perfectly right and even wise for him to point out how alien such pretensions are to the spirit of any faith which finds its central point in the individual conscience. It was more than right and wise, it was drawing a fresh tie between him and the great majority of his country- men and his political followers, to give us the fine sentences in which he declares the " stifling of conscience and conviction " to be a kind of " moral murder," and protests against the notion that a limitation of the defining infallibility of Rome to the sphere of "faith and morals," can be regarded, in fact, any limitation at all. The intellectual stronghold of Pro- testantism has rarely been described in finer words than those in which Mr. Gladstone tells us that he cares not "to ask if there be dregs and tatters of human life such as can escape from the description and boundary of ' morals.' I submit that Duty is a power which rises with us in the morning and goes to rest with us at night. It is co-extensive with the action of our intelligence. It is the shadow which cleaves to us, go where we will, and which only leaves us when we leave the light of life," [and, we should think, by the way, not even then]. Again, ictr. Gladstone is within his province, and is discharging his duty as a statesman, when he explains his reason for believing that, under certain not very impossible, perhaps even not improbable contingencies, Rome might deem it wise to make a supreme effort to restore--the temporal power, and that such an effort might involve a use of the most dangerous and objectionable of all her claims,—the abstract right she maintains to alienate the civil allegiance of Catholics from States hostile to that hopeless enterprise. In all this we go heartily with Mr. Gladstone, and regard what he says as both a sound and seasonable justification of his asser- tion that it is a dream to fear the success of either Ritualists or Jesuits in re-converting England to the Roman faith. But when he appears to intimate that the concession of Catholic privileges by Parliament was really justified by the partly politic and partly accidental moderation of the Church of Rome at the time they were conceded, and that modern statesmen can fitly reproach Rome for assuming another tone, —one much more in keeping, by the way, with her whole history ; when, again, he appears to indulge a serious belief that Roman ratholics, bound as they are by an CEcumenical Council of the Church, will disavow that Council for the purpose of vindicating the assurances of Dr. Doyle and his colleagues in 1825 ;—and lastly, when he makes use of words quite needless to his purpose, and certain to rankle in the hearts of the Roman Catholics, like that, for instance, concerning " the degradation of the episcopal order" of the Latin Church, or that which accuses the Catholics of discharging their spiritual responsibilities by " power of attorney," or, again, that which compares the in- fluence won by Rome's large claims, to the popularity gained by the immense promises of advertising tradesmen,—we think Mr. Gladstone, for the moment, puts off the exalted impartiality of the statesman, and accepts the position of a counsel for the plaintiff arguing for a verdict before a jury whom it is desirable to excite, in order to convince. And we
cannot but regret that a moral and intellectual position so noble and so proof against assault as Mr. Gladstone's, should be weakened by these mistakes.
To our minds, the Vatican Council simply assumed on behalf of the Pope, while it consolidated and publicly imposed on all believers, an authority which had been virtually supreme in the Church of Rome for centuries previous to its formal enunciation. It did not so much alter, as formally publish the com- mon belief as to the centre of power in that Church. If English. statesmen only conceded the Catholic claims on the strength of statements made, and no doubt honestly made, by a few Bishops and Vicars Apostolic at an epoch of low vitality in all Churches, they were not up to their work, and deserved the disappointment which Mr. Gladstone appears to feel. The true reasons for conceding these claims were quite independent of such temporary accidents, being such as these,—that penalties placed on the sincere confession of a creed however dangerous, are sure to make that creed more dangerous ; that the Civil power has a position of far greater moral advantage if it waits for a practical in- fraction of its proper authority before attempting to punish, than if it makes the profession of opinion penal ; that men hardly know what they really believe and what they don't till they come to test it by action ; and finally, that it is impossible to govern either Protestants or Roman Catholics strongly and equitably, while the former possess vast privi- leges which are denied to the latter. These were the true reasons which rendered Catholic emancipation an impera- tive duty, and would equally have rendered it an imperative duty, if Dr. Doyle and his colleagues had proclaimed with all their might the principles which Archbishop Manning and Cardinal Cullen proclaim now. Very likely,, if they had done so, that great measure would have been indefinitely postponed. But its postponement would have been a great calamity for Protestants and Catholics alike_ And for a statesman who appears, like Mr. Gladstone, to hold this, to go back upon Dr. Doyle's assurances in a spirit of almost querulous disappointment, seems to us, we confess, trivial. Is it only the Roman Church which has lately been driven back on its central idea Have not all Churches shown the same tendency V And is it manly to deplore a change- of attitude in Rome which has been accompanied by a. corresponding change of attitude in almost every Church in Christendom ? Rather is not such a change of attitude good. evidence that Rome, like other Churches, obeys a spirit of the Age, and is not semper eadem ; that she re- laxes her claim to authority "in one generation, and reasserts it in another ; that she loses her proud conscious- ness of infallibility when other Churches lose their con- tentiousness, and regains it only in the heat of controversy In any case, considering the position taken by Mr. Gladstone at the close of his pamphlet, it is hardly on the admissions of Dr. Doyle and the Irish Bishops of 1825, that he ought to found so grave and solemn an " expostulation." Again, it seems to us the most wild and visionary of hopes which Mr. Glad- stone gravely expresses, when he describes it as his object to elicit from the Roman Catholics of the Empire- either a repudiation of the Vatican decrees, or a declaration that, if ever called upon to renounce their civil allegiance, they would disobey the call. As to the first demand, they could only concede it by disavowing their Church. As to the second, they would probably declare it a mere insult on their chief pastor to anticipate in that way a summons which many of them would think it impossible for him to issue, and which the remainder would think it their duty, if in any great ecclesias- tical exigency he did issue it, to obey. In dealing with claims like the Roman Catholic, the statesman's only true plan is first to ward off every unnecessary occasion of collision between the Church and the State by strict justice ; and then, if, in spite of this, the collision comes, to deal with the emergency promptly and peremptorily when it arises. That a great many Roman Catholics, if called upon by their Church to defy the laws of the British State for a grand ecclesiastical end, would really disobey the call, we heartily believe ; but to disobey in an emergency in which the conscience of the citizen is thoroughly roused, is one thing, while to promise beforehand to disobey, when no such call is anticipated or considered possible, is quite another. We have no doubt at all that the Pope maintains the abstract right even to depose Queen Victoria, for what he deems sufficient reason, though he is very unlikely to use it. We have no doubt, too, that a few desperate Ultramontanes would regard such an exercise of power, if it ever occurred, as really controlling their consciences, while many would be utterly shocked by it,
and driven rather to defy the authority of the Church and the Pope ; but we see • no reasonable pretext at all for dis- counting now the sensational measures appropriate to so tremendous an emergency, holding with Lord Derby (is it not I) that in all such improbable cases, cure is much better than prevention, and infinitely better than that helpless attempt at prevention which alone we could really make. Finally, most of all we hold that if Mr. Gladstone did really entertain some feeble hope of persuading the Roman Catholics of this Empire to disavow either the Vatican Council or some of its possible consequences, he was making a very serious mistake in girding at their episcopate as "degraded " and their Pontiff as pursuing the policy of a vulgar advertiser. You do not sting for the purpose of persuasion ; the only moral effect of a sting is to inspire anger or fear.
Above all, we regret the influence which this pamphlet must exercise in Prussia, where it has already been received,—quite erroneously no doubt,—as a vindication by Mr. Gladstone of the policy of the Falck laws. Indeed the Standard of Monday, by including, of course inadvertently, a corollary of its own from Mr. Gladstone's statements, within the inverted commas which marked the quotation, made him explicitly approve those laws, and the blunder only shows how little guarded his " expostulation " really is. That his own policy has been one long and noble protest against such foolish and pernicious laws, and that he holds to that policy in this very pamphlet as firmly as ever, will do nothing to convince the Germans that had he been a German, he would not have approved Prince Bismarck's action. In fact, Mr. Gladstone himaclf reserves his judgment on that point, though we do not doubt for a moment that if he ever had to deliver his judgment on it, he would deliver it, and deliver it strongly, on the right side. None the less,—so stupid is mankind,—his name will be here- after claimed as an authority on both sides :—for the side of courage and justice by his true followers in Great Britain, and for the side of fear and persecution by Prince Bismarck's adherents in Germany.
It seems to us, therefore, that the political effects of this publication will be of a very mixed, and needlessly mixed, char- acter. It contains a noble protest on behalf of the sacredness of individual conviction, and of the final authority of the individual conscience. It is an unanswerable demonstration of the civil dangers inherent in submission to an absolute Church. It must clear Mr. Gladstone of the suspicion of Rornaniaing with all sensible men, for ever. So far all is well. But it apparently places the justice done nearly half-a-century ago to Roman - Catholics on a most insecure, feeble, and untenable ground.
- It raises imaginary hopes of a kind which seem to us almost childish as well as delusive. And it lends to one of the greatest political blunders and worst religious offences of the present day at least a shadow of authority from a spotless and illustrious name.
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