DR DOLLINGER.
rilHERE was something very English in Dr. Dollinger's illogical pertinacity in holding his own position on points of detail, in spite of the inconsistency of that position on points of detail with the logic of his general creed. He was, in fact, more tenacious of what his historical learning had taught him, than he was of the a priori position which he had previously assumed,—namely, that &true Church must be infallible, and that his Church was actually infallible. No one had taught this more distinctly than Dr. Dollinger. Yet first he found one erroneous drift in the practical teaching of his Church, then he found another, and then when at last his Church formally declared that the true providential guarantee of her infallibility ex- tended only to the Papal definition of any dogma touching faith and morals promulgated with a view to teach the Church, he ignored that decree, though it was sanctioned by one of the most unanimous as well as one of the most numerously attended of her Councils, and preferred to submit to excommunication rather than to profess his acceptance of it. And. then later he came, we believe, to declare that he was no more bound by the decrees of the Council of Trent than he was by the decrees of the Council of the Vatican. None the less he always submitted to the disciplinary authority of the Church, even after he had renounced virtually her dogmatic authority. He never celebrated mass or assumed any of the functions of a priest after his excommunication. In other words, he obeyed the Church in matters in which no one had ever claimed for her that she could not err, after he had ceased to obey her in matters in which he had formerly taught that she could not err, and in which, so far as we know, he had. only in his latter years taught that she could err by explicitly rejecting the decrees of one or two General Councils. All this sounds to us very English. The piecemeal repudiation of the Church's authority without any general repudiation of it,—the mode in which that piecemeal repudiation began, namely, in disapproval of the manner in which the temporal authority was used, and in the wish to see the Church deprived of all civil government,—the irritation with which the course taken by Pio None in the controversy concerning the Syllabus was watched,—and, finally, the practical deference paid to an authority which had already been defied, when the decree of excommunication was obeyed,—all this surely was English both in its positive and. its negative aspects. Indeed, we suspect that there is more than one English Old Catholic whose conduct has been precisely similar to that of Dr. Dollinger. No one has even for a moment doubted Dr, Dollinger's piety and dis- interestedness. He was certainly not an ambitious man. Even when he was virtually leading the Old Catholics, he shrank as much as possible into a corner. He never cared to be conspicuous. He seemed to have no vanity to hurt. His conduct could only be explained by genuine conscien- tiousness, and by genuine conscientiousness of a kind which is surer as to the course of duty on a matter of detail than it is as to general principles. It was on a matter of detail, the bad government of the State subject to the Pope's temporal rule, that Dr. Diillinger first became aware of his differences with the Papal policy. It was on the details of the relations between the secular power of other States and the ecclesias- tical power of the Pope, that that difference developed itself; and it was on the question of detail, whether or not individual Popes had erred in defining doctrines pertaining to faith and morals that Dr. Dollinger found himself unable to submit to the Council of the Vatican. His grasp of this kind of question was surer and firmer than his grasp of the more general principles of Church authority. And it would seem even that his habit of deference to the Church's authority in concrete detail, like an explicit decree of excommunication, was more deeply rooted in him than his habit of deference to the Church's larger and vaguer authority when asking submission to her definitive decrees. When she said to him, Don't celebrate mass any more,' he seems to have regarded himself as more bound to obey her than when she said to him, Believe what I tell you.'
We conjecture that what Dr. Dollinger inclined to think was, that the Catholic Church stood in the uttermost need of reform at the end of the fifteenth century, that the reform it needed was very ill-conceived by Luther (to whom, however, as a Roman Catholic he is exceptionally fair), and that though the schism which took place was a schism founded a great deal too much on doctrinal issues, and a great deal too little on practical issues, the Church was so much crippled by the breaking away of the Protes- tant communities that it has never again wielded the same authority as it wielded before the crisis. It is remarkable that though he denied that he and his colleagues were bound by the Council of Trent, he never, so far as we know, questioned the authority of previous Councils ; so that we must regard his ultimate position as probably involving the notion that the Church lost the unity which alone rendered her doctrinally infallible by her inadequate reforms at the time of the Council of Ttent. But though this was his ultimate position, he clearly never adopted it with any confidence till the Council of the Vatican had, as he supposed, endorsed and confirmed the mistakes which the Council of Trent inaugurated. The real puzzle is to understand why, with such convictions as these, Dr. Dollinger regarded himself as bound to obey the dis- ciplinary rules of Rome. We suppose that that is to be explained by his profound belief in Church organisation and authority, and his impression that no other Church had succeeded to the authority which the Church of Rome had to some extent abused. But explain it how you will, Dr. Diillinger's position was certainly paradoxical, bowing as he did to the moral authority of a Church which was, in his opinion, so crippled by its own default, that for some three centuries it has had no working organ of dogmatic infallibility, and is very unlikely to have one again that would command Dr. Diillinger's assent, for centuries to come. To any one who has any great respect for what Napoleon III. used to call the logic of facts, it would. seem a good deal easier to disbelieve in the infallibility of any Church, than to believe in an infallibility which, by the misconduct of a Church, could be rendered inoperative for centuries together.
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