MONSIGNORE CAPEL ON THE PATRISTICO- PROTESTANTS.
DR. NEWS A.N told the Anglo-Catholics at least two-and- twenty years ago what they must become if they continued to play their curious pranks of counterfeit Romanism within the pale of the Church of England. " You will no longer," he said, "be Anglo-Catholics, but Patristico-Protestants. You will be obliged to frame a religion for yourselves, and then to main- tain it is that very truth, pure and celestial, which the Apostles promulgated. You will be induced of necessity to put together some speculation of your own, and then to fancy it of importance enough to din it into the ears of your neighbours, to plague the world with it, and if you have success, to convulse your own com- munion with the imperious inculcation of doctrines which you can never engraft upon it." And again, "Who makes the concessions to Catholics which you do, yet remains separate from them? Who among Anglican authorities could speak of Penance as a sacrament as you do? Who of them encourages, much less insists upon auricular confession as you? or makes fasting an obligation? or uses the crucifix and the rosary ? or re- serves the consecrated bread ? or believes in miracles as ex- isting in your communion ? or administers, as I believe you do, Extreme Unction? In some points you prefer Rome, in others Greece, in others England, in others Scotland ; and of that pre- ference your own private judgment is the ultimate sanction. What am I to say to conduct so preposterous ? Say you go by any authority whatever, and I shall know where to find you, and I shall respect you. Swear by any school or religion, old or modern, by Ronge's Church, or the Evangelical Alliance, nay, by your- selves, and I shall know what you mean, and will listen to you. But do not come to me with the latest fashion of opinion which the world has seen, and protest to me that it is the oldest. Do not come to me at this time of day with views palpably new, isolated, original, sui geeeris, warranted old neither by Christian nor unbeliever, and challenge me to answer what I really have not the patience to read. Life is not long enough for such trifles. . . . Nor pretend that you are but executing the sacred duty of defend- ing your own communion. Your Church does not thank you for a defence which she has no dream of appropriating. You innovate on her professions of doctrine, and then you bid us love her for your innovations. You cling to her for what she denounces, and you almost anathematize us for taking a step which you would please her best by taking also. You call it restless, impatient, amdutiful in us to do what she would have us do, and you think it a loving and confiding course to believe, not her, but you."
So wrote Dr. Newman in 1850, and Monsignore Capel only last Sunday was commenting in the Roman Catholic Pro-Cathedral at Kensington in very much the same spirit on the antics of the party which has, as Dr. Newman prophesied, distinguished itself in the meantime by the caprices of its obedience and the arbi- trariness of its authority, which has fallen so much in love with the idea of authority in the abstract as to initiate and carry through a rebellion against all such authorities in the concrete as were set over it ; and like that far mightier revolution which bore witness to liberty by filling the prisons, and to fraternity by massacre, and to equality by despotism, has shown its deference for the Apostolic succession by defying the Bishops, and its value for trite Apostolic humility by imposing on the consciences of the laity spiritual prescriptions far more drastic and absolute than any other Church in Christendom has ever heard of. Monsignore Capers address, no doubt, had a Roman Catholic drift. He was not un- willing to contrast the comparative liberty of the Roman Catholic laity with the theatrical servitude in which these experimentalising priests among the Patristico-Protestants bind the wills of those who submit themselves to their guidance. He was anxious to compare the comparative moderation of the authority which is not of to-day or yesterday, but has a tradition of centuries behind it, with the violence of this brand-new regime of self-created sacer: dotalism. But whatever his motive and arriere pensie, the lesson he gave to these advocates of capricious submission to laws of their own choosing, and capricious imposition of an authority of their own in- vention, was not the less good. It was Dr. Newman's lesson illus- trated by time and pointed byflagrant examples. If you want to find violent forms of spiritual rule, go where it is new-born, self-willed, and free from the restraint of custom and the limits of a sys- tematic gradation. If you want to find obedience which is almost slavish, combined with rebellion that is almost vindictive, go where there is no limit to the spirit of obedience except the caprice which suggested it, and no constitutional principle by which the resistance
to authority may be regulated and controlled. Monsignore Capel asserts, —and all one hears of the eccentricities of the Ritualist movement would support his assertion that the Ritualist clergy dictate to their people whom they should see, whom they should know, and even whether they should, or should not, hold inter- course with their own friends and relations. " He knew people were held in a servitude in this respect that was to him simply appalling" [no doubt, more because of its heretical origin than its extent]. " Were he to read to the congregation letters in his possession written on those very points by people who were becoming Catholics" [there, no doubt, is the sting], "he felt sure each person present would declare he could scarcely believe what was said. There was this abyss between the Catholics and the Ritualists. The former had an authority and submitted to it ; they believed in an authority ; but the Ritualists believed it not, because they were bound to take authority from themselves." To say the Ritualists do not believe in the authority they invent for themselves is most likely a blunder. People are apt to be very much in love with the authority which represents self-will, and are easily deluded by its fascinations. But certainly it is worth some consideration why this mock- Romanism out-Romanises Rome itself in its austerities and observances, while differing from Rome so very widely in the fiery disrespect with which it treats its constitutional rulers, because they do not rule as it desires to be ruled.
And that brings us back to Dr. Newman's phrase for them " Pat- ristico-Protestants." These Ritualists are not in search of a human custodian and organ of revealed truth, any more than we are. They are no believers at all in a divinely-superintended Institution which has truth committed to it, that it, and it alone, really under- stands. They believe that they can find truth by its own light, —and that, when they have found it, all who are blind to it, whether they be above them in the ecclesiastical order or not, are undeserving of deference from those who see it. They are not, it is true, Protestants in the sense of protesting against the superstitions which were thrown off at the Reformation. On the contrary, they protest strongly against the disuse of those usages. But they are Protes- tants in the sense of going entirely by their own spiritual, and moral, and intellectual judgment in deciding what it is right to think and what it is right to do. True, they claim to go by the usages of the Primitive Church ; but, as Monsignore Capel shows, they exceed those usages in every direction whenever they see a rite which takes their fancy. They respect neither their Bishops nor the Prayer-Book, if these warn them against adoration of the elements or intercession for the dead, or enforcing the practice of auricular confession. It is the supposed intrinsic beauty and fascination of these rites which
captivate them, and neither rubrics nor episcopal voices have the slightest power to withhold them. They invoke the Virgin and the Saints not because they can show that up to any particular age the practice was universal, but because it strikes them as an affect- ing practice, which softens the heart and brings them aid at critical moments. They celebrate the " three hours' agony," as Monaignore Capel pointed out, not because there is a vestige of such a practice in antiquity, still less in our Prayer-Book, but because it seems to them to conduce to edification. They not only go by private judgment in all this, but by a private judgment which has more highly elaborated testa and affinities than any religious private judgment which was ever known before. The ordinary tendency of private judgment is of course to simplify, because it is usually much easier to see objections to an old practice than to see reasons for a new. But these Patristico-Protestants pro- test infavour of everything which gives them anewimpulse of imagi- native adoration, and see no objections except to anything that re- strains their ardour for thefeelings to which religious ceremoniesgive rise. In short, they love authority not at all for itself, but only as the excuse for more religious procedure, more picture, and more emotion. They are Protestants, not against superstition, but against rationalism, and they are patris- tical only because the early Fathers (whom they greatly sur- pass in their ritualism) happened to be less reasoning and more pictorial and emotional than our own age. It is sympathy with the Fathers, not reverence for them, which makes them appear to appeal to patristic authority. The Roman Catholics are far more rationalist than the Ritualist, for Romanists found their ritualism upon the theory of a divine but developing jurisdiction. They do what the Church tells them because it tells them, and not because they can see at a glance that this rite softens the heart and that rite raises the devotion. They cling by an institution and confess their inability to judge for themselves of anything beyond this,— that that institution is their best guide. But the Patristico-Pro- testants, though they disavow reason, find no substitute for it in any institution. What they call ' authority' is really a highly organ- ised form of imitative experiment. They adopt freely all sorts of hints from Churches which they would think it a sin to obey. They borrow patterns of devotion of which they would bitterly resent the imposition. They mean by authority their own standard of devout taste ;—to subject themselves to a law of their own, taken on eclectic principles from all the Churches ; —which is not even as much as the French soldiers mean when they demand the right to choose their own officers, for the latter do at least agree to be guided by men whose decisions they cannot really foresee at the time of the election, but the Patristico- Protestants submit themselves to no discretion anywhere, but choose their own rules and defy their ecclesiastical superiors. Choosing by the taste and fancy, instead of by the reason, is not less Protestant, and a great deal more risky, than common private judgment, for after all, the reason is the judicial faculty which can apply a standard to the tastes, while the tastes cannot measure the reason by anything in themselves. We should be disposed to say that there are no Protestants at all in whom the self-will of religious feeling goes so far as with the Ritualists. Roman Catholics may delight to reason, and Protestants may delight to obey, but this Patristico-Protestantism is irrational self-will,—a characteristic which contains the chief weakness to which Protestants are liable in happy combination with the chief weakness to which Romanists are liable, and is destitute of the peculiar strength of both.
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