CARDINAL WISEMAN'S ROMAN CATHOLICISM. rpHE late Cardinal Wiseman is reported
to have professed _1 before the last administration of extreme unction that he had never entertained a single doubt on any point in any article of the Catholic creed in his life, and any one who reads his books and compares them with those even of Roman Catholics of the
Oxford school, can well believe this surprising, this almost amazing assertion. To many an English Protestant it would seem almost equivalent to saying that he had never adequately believed any article of the Catholic creed in his life, for we are so accustomed to the kind of belief which realizes most intimately all that can be urged on the other side,—we are so accustomed to pass through doubt to faith, to live in view of divine truths which seem too great for history and for man, till they sink into the mind we know not how, and are grasped with a tenacity almost in direct proportion to the previous impossibility of apprehending them,— that to us " never to have had a doubt" is almost like never having had an insight into the startling disproportion between the mental littleness, and poverty, and insignificant hurry, of human life, and the Eternal Will from whose great acts we derive our only solution of the enigma. But without reference to the explanation, unmean- ing to us, which the Roman theology always presses on us,— namely, that in that communion alone is there the grace adequate to the annihilation of all doubt from the tenderest infancy to the last thought of mature age,—we can well believe that what Cardinal Wiseman said of himself was true without thinking him the better,—probably not even in the highest sense the happier,— for the total absence of that shadow.
The truth is, we believe, that the Roman Catholic system exerts on those who are fully exposed to its power from their earliest infancy an influence not unlike that of a despotic Court on the courtiers who attend it. It familiarizes them by its masses with the act of handling, as they are taught, the Divine Majesty, just as the earthly Court familiarizes its courtiers with the physical presence of human majesty ; and it familiarizes them with the sense of the great power which has established and spread abroad so widely the system of minute observances which it exacts, without giving any proportionate discrimination of the nature of that power. The pre- sence of an absolute Authority once physically realized deadens all
the play of men's mind in connection with it, and the baldness which marks the extinction of the delicate exploring instincts of the spiritual intellect, almost always results from the successful domina- tion of a faith which takes toll rather from the symbolic actions of man, than from his thoughts. The Roman Catholic by birth and education, the Roman Catholic who has never used or wished to use the right of finding his God because his minutest actions had always involved an assertion of absolute familiarity with God's actions and laws, has too often a sort of staring, half-vacant religious manner and expression, as of one whose mind has been blunted by seeing without understanding, by taking part in a routine of mystery of which all the bloom has been worn off through external familiarity with the detail, and inability to reach the core. There was something of this about the late Cardinal's strong face and writings. They give one the idea of a nature bronzed by constant exposure to a glaring creed. There is no graduation, no delicate discrimination about his thought. The infallible Church swallows up his own personal faith, obliterates his own personal relations. He writes, as almost all native-born Roman Catholics write, of faith, as if it had nothing to do with trust, but were a knowledge of certain processes perpetually going on in the supernatural world, —as if it did not imply any special relation between the spirit of man and God, but were a new sense conveying physical knowledge of a series of divine operations similar, though in a different plane, to the succession of the seasons, and simply requiring the regula- tion of human actions according to that knowledge. Hear how he describes in a recent and very characteristic sermon the horror of " unworthy communion." It reads less like the anguish of Christian remorse than the physical repulsion of the Brahmin for contami- nating substances :— " For supposing, my friends, that when Nicodemus and Joseph took down that sacred Body from the Cross, they had not, as their feelings naturally impelled them, laid it in a new and clean monument, in which no one had been placed, but had been compelled by the Jews to cast it into the common grave of malefactors, do not the feelings of a Christian recoil with horror from the contemplation of that virginal flesh, born of Mary, and exempted from the law of seeing corruption, flung into the charnel-house, amidst the impure remains and loathsome carcases of the vilest of men; and while one can contemplate it gashed and torn and pierced and braised even while alive, does not one shrink with disgust from imagining the possibility of such contamination ? And yet, what would this have been, compared with the frightful descent of the living Christ., with His soul no loss than His divinity united to His body, through that mouth which, in the words of the prophet, is truly an open sepulchre, into the abode of a corruption, and an uncleanness far beyond what I have described, a living, a stirring, a conscious mass of sin ? Oh! the saints have been permitted to see our Lord straggling with horror against passing the lips of a sacrilegious receiver, and drawing back from stepping over the threshold of such an impure abode But there He must needs enter in, and for a while remain amidst its disgust- ing inmates. The Son of God must stay awhile, because you will have it so, with the enemies whom He died to overcome ; the Holy One must be the companion, because you have doomed Him to it, of the uncleanest spirits ; the living God must be shut up, because such is your impious pleasure, with the children of Satan. And this horrible crime is committed by you, under the form and semblance of a solemn religious act—the holiest rite of your service and duty to Him ! And you retire after this, and are cheerful and mirthful, and walk with men, yes, with virtuous men, as though naught had befallen you! And you think you shall be happy and prosper, and have length of days, and a peaceful end, and perhaps a place one day in heaven !"
And this is the really characteristic expression of Cardinal Wise- man's religious nature, reflecting a strong but glazed sense of divine mysteries, a disposition to humble the human conscience by fixing its glance on symbols far beyond its grasp, to exhaust its discrimi- nating power as soon as possible by bringing a strong light and im- pressive pictorial effect to dazzle it into submission. This of course is always the Roman Catholic, often the Protestant line of orthodox thought ; but with Cardinal Wiseman and the true Romanists, as distinguished from the converts from Protestantism, there is a sincere incapacity for delicate spiritual discrimination which rises, as with the horny, unsensitive hand of physical labour, from the habit of using the religious nature habitually in symbolic and ceremonial actions rather than in contemplative and spiritual worship. Dr. Newman has described with wonderful power the essential differ- ence between the Roman and the Protestant conception of wor- ship :—
" The idea of worship in the Catholic Church,' Willis replied, is different from the idea of it in your Church, for in truth the religions are different. Don't deceive yourself, my dear Bateman,' he said, tenderly ; 'it is not that ours is your religion carried a little farther, —a little too far, as you would say. No, they differ in kind, not in degree ; ours is one religion, yours another. ..... . . I declare, to me,' he said, and he clasped his hands on his knees, and looked forward as if soliloquizing, 'to me nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overcoming as tho mass, said as it is among us. I could attend masses for ever and not be tired. It is not a mere form of words,—it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth. It is not the invocation merely, but, if I dare use the word, the evoca- tion of the Eternal. He becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood before whom angels bow and devils tremble. This is that awful event which is the end and is the interpretation of every part of the solemnity. Words are necessary, but as means, not as ends ; they are not mere addresses to the throne of grace, they are instruments of what is far higher,—of consecration, of sacrifice. They hurry on as if impatient to fulfil their mission. Quickly they go, the whole is quick ; for they are all parts of one integral action. Quickly they go, for they are awful words of sacrifice, they are a work too great to delay upon ; as when it was said in the beginning, 'What thou doest, do quickly.' Quickly they pass ; for the Lord Jesus goes with them as He passed along the lake in the days of his flesh, quickly calling first one and then another. • Quickly they: pass ; because as the lightning which shineth from one part of the heaven into the other, so is the coming of the Son of man. Quickly they pass ; for they are the words of the Lord descending in 'the cloud, and proclaiming the name of the Lord as He passes by, 'The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant- in goodness and truth.' And as Moses on the mountain, so we, too,
make haste and bow our heads to the earth. and worship.' So we, all around, each in his place, look out for the great Advent, waiting for the moving of the water.' "
And in Dr. Newman, who was all his youth and a great part of his manhood a Protestant, whose Romanism is even now strongly marked by the subjective spirit of his early Protestantism, this characteristic of the Roman worship, while it has given a great support to his imagination, has not in any way blunted or case- hardened his spiritual nature. But with the born Romanist it is different. Once let it be part of your creed that human actions dispose, if we may use the word reverently, of God,—once let penitence and prayer be swallowed up in the more important • sacraments " which " evoke the Eternal," and worship begins to be a process effected by the habitual side of the mind,—and the reviving power of religious meditation to be applied rather to call up a scenic delineation of the effect and spectacle of human actions, than to attain any deeper insight into their spirit. Protestants of course are far from free from the tendency to hard, habitual, routine worship. Still they know that this is not worship. The Romanists believe it is. If Christ be " evoked " on the altar, even though their minds do not enter into the meaning of the act, they benefit,--ex opere operate, as theysay, if not ex opera operands, —and if the wonderful effect be duly produced how is it possible to avoid turning leas attention to the communion between God and their own hearts.
It is this tendency, we believe, which defines the true eccle- siastical type represented by Cardinal Wiseman. A man whose life is absorbed by religion in the Protestant sense can scarcely be 'decidedly a ' man of the world,' for his mind is not given to public actions, but to private contemplations and beneficence. But a great Catholic prelate is even officially and by education one whose thoughts dwell on great spiritual pageants and acts of delegated power, on invocation, consecrations, exorcisms, and other grand ceremonials which are to his creed more than ceremonials—signals of might. This gives, and cannot but give, a certain ambitiousness of thought to the Roman ecclesiastics which assimilates them closer to (spurious) statesmen than Protestant divines can ever approach. The Roman ecclesiastic is in theory a spiritual politician, a minister of God much more nearly in the sense in which we speak of a King's constitutional minister, than in the sense in which Christ used the term as equivalent to a servant. Cardinal Wiseman was in this sense, too, conspicuously a Roman ecclesiastic. He believed that he wielded spiritual powers, and was conscious of doing so ; and to external observers this seemed far more of the essence of the man than the acts of trust and searchings for truth which Protestants connect with the spiritual office. If we would know the true significance of the Roman Church, we should look for it not in Protestants who have joined the Church, but in ecclesiastics, like Cardinal Wiseman, who have breathed its air from the cradle to the grave.
Previous page
