BOOKS.
AN OPEN LETTER TO PLUS X.*
Mn. JOHN MURRAY has just published under the title What We Want an open letter to Pius X. by " a Group of Priests." The letter was written in Italian, and has been translated into English by Mr. A. Leslie Lilley, vicar of St. Mary's, Paddington Green, together with the Papal discourse which called it forth. To the ordinary Protestant this letter, indited by priests, is simply amazing. The Holy Father is taken to task and taught his duty in a manner so unsparing as to suggest that the writers have already arrogated to themselves in full the Protestant right of private judgment. Yet they are, they say, true Roman Catholics, with a great fear of schism, * (1) What We Want : an Open Letter to Pius X. from a Group of Priests. Translated by. A. Leslie Lilley. London : John Murray. [2s. net.]— (2) Through Scylla and Charybdis; or, The Old Theology and the Neu. By George T3rrell. London : Lougmans and Co. j5s. net.
and no tendency to that misty neo-Catholicism which reduces religion to an indefinable emotion. In their eyes " religion, far from being a vague, mystical feeling which soothes the spirit and isolates it in a barren egoism, is a Divine reality, which kindles into life and exalts the souls of men, and, knitting them together in a bond of common brotherhood, directs their life towards a supreme and common goal." For us, they continue, " Christianity is the highest expression of religion thus conceived, and of Christianity in its turn we consider Roman Catholicism to be the amplest realisation." Yet they maintain, and they ask leave to teach, that other religions outside Roman Catholicism, outside Christianity even, are also revelations of God to the human soul. The Ch u rch, they argue, should now in the present year of grace abandon her old coercive methods. She should permit her sons to criticise the Scriptures. The evolution of dogma is an evident historical fact ; and as to theology, though it must always exist, " it has varied from age to age, and can and must change in our time also, assimilating its culture, if Christianity still wishes to answer to the spiritual demands of our time." To imitate the Fathers means, they declare, not to adopt of necessity their opinions and ideas, but to "penetrate into their spirit, to consider their work in relation to their time and to the men with whom they lived, to live in our turn after this spirit, and act according to it in relation to our time and our con- temporaries." Reasonable men in these days, they say, cannot be asked to give in their "adhesion to certain assertions determined by the blind faith of souls, however holy." For instance, they cannot adhere " to what you [Pius X.]
yourself affirmed in the Encyclical of October 27th, 1904,—
viz., that the Hebrew patriarchs were familiar with the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and found consolation in the thought of Mary in the solemn moments of their life.'" The churches, they say, are becoming empty—the men are reduced to a mere handful, the women and children are becoming fewer and fewer—not, as they believe, because the soul of the Latin world is satisfied with materialism, but because the Roman Catholic Church is regarded as the enemy both of science and democracy. The Pope, they affirm, has thrown in his lot with a political party, and has taken up an obstinately obscurantist attitude. "Christianity of itself transcends every political party as it transcends every current metaphysic whatever," but "in order that it may live it needs to assimilate, through both the one and the other, the civilisation that surrounds it." How, they ask, are they to win the masses back if they are to declare democracy to be the negation of Christianity, and how are they to induce men to accept the eternal truths of Christianity if they may only teach them in a form so antiquated as to be to the modern mind incomprehensible ? "Christianity exists in the world," they declare, " as a law of Love and Truth. It is love and truth that inspire those two factors of modern civilisation— science and democracy. That we may make it Christian we have welcomed them, seeking to make them our own, without reserve, without fear, without excessive concern for the past." Is the Pope aware, they ask him, how the ordinary demagogue makes use of Papal political prejudice to estrange the masses from the Church ? Is Pius X. afraid of the Socialists ? Let him help his priests to make them reasonable Christians and his fears will be groundless. With intense earnestness, and not without bitterness, they reproach the Pope for hindering every man who is trying to destroy the antagonism between the Roman Church and science, the Roman Church and the masses. Specially they reproach him with the condemnation of the English priest, Father George Tyrrell, who was expelled from the Order of Jesus for a private letter to a friend in religions distress, and whose general conclusions they share.
Father Tyrrell's last book, lately published, Through Scylla and Charybdis, lies before us, and throws light upon both the dogmatic and the political position of these priests. It is a difficult book to sum up, either by quotation or synopsis. It deals with the difference between revelation and theology, and leaves the reader with the impression that in Father Tyrrell's
mind dogma can now only be accepted metaphorically, as the changing expression of the truth,—as if one were to say, for instance, that remorse is a revelation and hell a metaphor, forgiveness a revelation and absolution a metaphor :—
" In the creed of the Church," we read, "there survives for us, as gold in the ore, the spontaneous self-expression of the most primitive, and yet most vigorous, stage of her spiritual life, clothed in the now largely obsolete forms and categories of that day ; while in her dogmatic theology, which is professedly but the further definition and the extension of that creed, we have the product, not merely of apologetic and theological ingenuity, but also of the spirit of Christianity struggling to adjust the forms of the past to the religious needs of the present."
One more quotation and we have done :— " One thing, at least, is certain, that democracy has come to stay ; that to the generations of the near future any other con- ception of authority will be simply unthinkable; that if the authority of Popes, Councils, and Bishops cannot be reinterpreted in that sense, it is as irrevocably doomed as the theologies of man's childhood. The receptivity of the general mind is a fact that priesthoods have to reckon with, and always do reckon with in the long run. They cease to say, nay, they cease to believe that to which the general ear has become permanently deaf. They would fain seem to lead, but, in fact, they follow the spirit in its developments. To command Nature, man must obey it ; to command the general mind, priesthoods must obey it. If they assail it, if they fling themselves against that rock, they, and not it, shall be bruised ; if it turn against them and fall upon them, it shall grind them to powder."
The question of the significance of the heresy—for heresy it plainly is—of these able, earnest, and noble advocates of a new Reformation within the Roman Church is largely a numerical question. Are there many priests who agree with them ? M. Sabatier has been telling us for months past that among the younger men their name is legion. If the great French divine is not mistaken, and if the number of those who agree with them bears any appreciable proportion to that of their orthodox opponents, then the Church of Rome is face to face with the most critical moment of her life. The prayer of the good and the wise must be that she will make a choice which will lead her sons to the pure air of truth and liberty, and not condemn them to the stifling prison of spiritual error and spiritual oppression. Unhappily no encouragement is forth- coming from the Vatican, which in the new Encyclical com- mented on elsewhere proposes to meet the crisis in a temper of stubborn and uncompromising obscurantism.
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