CORRESPONDENCE.

THE NEW LIBERAL CATHOLICISM.

[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."]

desire to draw attention to the remarkable exposition of the new spirit of Liberal Catholicism which is contained

in a book by Dr. Joseph Muller, entitled " Der Reformkatholi-

zismus,"• lately published in Zurich. This book has already created a great deal of interest among Roman Catholics,

for it shows that side by side with the reactionary tendencies which have become so prominent in connection with the Dreyfus case there exists a progressive movement of no little vigour. Before, however, dealing with the book in detail, let me say something as to the general conditions of the problems with which it is concerned.

The observer of Catholicism from without is apt to credit it with considerably greater internal unity than it actually pos- sesses; and this not in the province of practice and policy only, but in that of opinion and belief. Dogma, in the West at least, has always bad a tendency to become matter of sub- mission to authority rather than of speculative or formal assent. Not that this attitude towards received standards in- volves a feigned or non-natural allegiance to the Church by which they are imposed. It is one thing to echo the cynical sentiment of the poet,-

" Expedit ease deos; et ut expedit ease putemus "; it is another to recognise that symbolism is inseparable from language, and, indeed, from expression; and that, as the greatest divine of our century reminds us, in a religion which embraces large and separate classes of adherents there is, and must be, to a certain extent an exoteric and an esoteric teaching. No two minds, probably, apprehend the same idea in precisely identical fashion : behind the formula lies the interpretation ; it is always possible to come to terms with a dogmatic decree. In the Catholic Church, then, and even among the Catholic clergy, there have been found at all times men of Liberal, perhaps of Latitudinarian, temper. Relatively, no doubt, their number is small ; they have little or no claim to be considered representative ; they are for the most part without ecclesiastical office or rank. But they are the inheritors of a great tradition : the Church, though she may not always approve, has neither the will nor the power to exclude them; their position de jure and de facto is secure.

For practical purposes, however, this Liberalism of the study is ineffectual. It provides for individual freedom of thought : it is powerless to act, directly at least, either on the masses or on ecclesiastical authority ; to promote actively the cause of reform. Academic air is not congenial to popular movements : ideas, if they are tc translate them- selves into action, must come into the open and commend themselves to the average man. There are signs that the forces which make for progress in Catholicism are moving in this direction. The Americanist controversy, certain recent decisions of the Roman Congregations, especially those of the Inquisition and the Index, the encouragement given for political purposes in high ecclesiastical quarters to the odious form of hysteria known as Anti-Semitism, have given rise to widespread dissatisfaction and distrust. To these sentiments " Der Reformkatholizismus," the work which forms the subject of this letter, gives emphatic utterance. The stand- point of the author is not in all respects scientific ; the book has obvious faults of temper and taste. But those defects rather increase than diminish its significance, as showing that the convictions and sympathies which inspire it are passing from the doctrinaire to the man in the street.

The increase of Catholicism is commonly assumed as a fact both by friends and foes. There is reason, however, to suspect that this advance is less real than apparent ; that the increase of plant and staff is out of proportion to the results actually achieved. The statistics given by Dr. Muller with regard to Germany are certainly startling. In Prussia, in 1895, eighteen

• Der Reformkathohrismus. Von Dr. Josef Haller. Zurich : Verlag von Caesar Schmidt. (3 marks 80 pig.] thousand persons passed from the Catholic to the Protestant, as opposed to two thousand from the Protestant to the Catholic Church. In Saxony 85 per cent. of the children of mixed marriages are Protestant. In the city of Cologne, in 1894, three hundred and twenty-two Catholics became Protestants, and sixty Jews ; in the diocese, during the period between 1872 and 1891, the Catholic population in. creased to the extent of 42, the Protestant to that of 84 per cent. In what is now the German Empire the loss to Catholicism during the present century is estimated at a million ; in Alsace-Lorraine, since the German occupation, at a hundred thousand souls. More disastrous even than this numerical shrinkage is the inferiority of Catholics in education, and consequently in fortune and social standing. This inferiority may be measured by the relative proportion of Catholics and Protestants attending the higher schools. In the Grand Duchy of Baden this is as one to two; in other German States a little, but not much, larger. [For fuller figures see Schell, " Der Satholizismus ale Prinzip des Fortschritts," 6.) Such statements are in a high degree disquieting, and that they should have attracted the attention of the authorities of the Church both in Germany and at Rome is natural enough. What is less easy to account for is the nature of the attention which they received. To silence those who tell us wholesome, if un- flattering, truths is to substitute force for reason. The Church, instead of putting Professor Schell's works on the Index, world have done well to remember that faithful are the wounds of a friend.

It is to this ostrich-like policy on the part of its rulers that the intellectual and moral impoverishment of Catholicism is due.. The strength of the Church lies in her appeal to the imagination and the affections ; her antiquity, her uni- versality, the anodynes for bruised hearts and burdened consciences of which she, and she perhaps alone, has the secret, make her a power, and, most will grant, a beneficent power, among men. But a religious system whioh is not based on knowledge has in it the seeds of dissolution; the head of the statue may be golden, the feet are clay. It would be too much to assert that Catholicism and knowledge are ultimately irreconcilable : history has shown, and not once only, the adaptiveness and recuperative power of the Church. But seldom has the antagonism between the two been more marked than at present. The attitude of the Pontiff to the new Rome finds its parallel in that of the Church to the world of modern thought and action; both sit apart in self-imposed isolation; both speak to men in unaccustomed accents and with a strange tongue. The last few years have brought more than one disappointment to those who hoped most from the present Pontificate: the bones, like those in the vision of the prophet, are exceeding dry. Anything like scientific theology is out of the question, as things stand, in the Roman Communion ; the most guarded expression of opinion unwelcome to those in authority, the slightest

indication of divergence from the prejudices of the most illiterate section of the priesthood, is repressed with an iron hand. Any one can govern, it is said, in a state of siege ; but a state of siege is a government in which no civilised com- munity will permanently acquiesce.

Dr. Milller's book is a plea for liberty and rational reform. Educate, be says in effect ; give greater freedom of thought and speech ; reform abuses,—the Index, the excessive in- fluence of the religions orders, the violence of political faction, the fanaticism of the so-called religious Press. The sub- stitution of a University course for the seminary training of the clergy, the banishment of Scholasticism to the limbo of outworn philosophies, the replacing of mediaeval by modern methods in education, the honest facing of difficulties, the recognition of new knowledge in philosophy, history, and criticism, the vindication for Theology of her place as the central science acted upon by, and in vital contact with, the other aciencee,—this is his demand, and the demand of those for whom he speaks.

Such demands have been made before, and rejected; and those who made them, a Lamennais, a Dollinger, have been driven out of the Church. There is this difference, it may be replied, between the two cases, that while then the efforts of the Liberals were concentrated upon one point, now they are brought to bear upon the defence of the position as a whole,

and so in a sense cover the entire field of thought and feeling; the advance is all along the line. The Reformation, on its best side, was a protest not against this or that abuse, but a revolt of the human conscience against what was felt to be falsehood and corruption, the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place. The same may be said in its measure of the Liberal Catholicism of to-day. Is there not a cause ? By their fruits you shall know them ; the part played by Clericalism in and outside France in the Dreyfus tragedy argues a deep-seated internal rottenness ; an equal absence of sanity and of moral sense. A protest against these things and the system which produces them cannot be fruitless or without result. Suppress it in one quarter, it will break out in another ; silence it, and a hundred tongues for the one that you have silenced will take up the strain. One thing the Liberals of to-day will not do ; warned by the experience of their forerunners, they will not let themselves be forced into schism. Separation from the Church, this, they believe, is ,the one radical irremediable error : they have seen its con- sequences,—isolation, sterility, and decay. " The more clearly the disintegration of the Reformed Churches comes to light, • the more confident I am that the religion of the future will be a purified Catholicism in which the worthier and more spiritual elements of Protestantism will take their place. Then will the promise of the Gospel be fulfilled: `there shall be one fold and one shepherd.'" (II. 159.)—I am, Sir, &c., CATHOLICUS.