LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
BISHOP BAINES ON INFALLIBILITY.
(TO TER EDITOR OF TER SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—I am sorry to be obliged to make any further claim on your space. I shall take care to avoid doing so on any point already ruled by you in my favour. But your correspondent "C.," whose courteous and serious letter is entitled to all my re- spect, challenges my opinion on two points. He asks me what I have to say as to Mr. Grattan's statement in 1810 that the Irish Catholics had declared in the terms of the Irish Oath of 1793 that the l'apal Infallibility was not an "article of faith." Some six times over at least, I do believe, have I dealt in your columns with this particular point. I know what the impene- trability of invincible ignorance is. I do not wish to accuse your correspondent of ordinary ignorance—even of the previous con- ditions of a controversy in which it has pleased him at this late stage to take a line all his own. But surely I might have hoped that the distinction between a generally received doctrine and an authoritatively defined dogma,--between a commonly accepted public opinion (as Protestants would phrase it) and a binding article (in the sense in which Acts of Parliament use the word "article," as, for example, the Thirty-nine Articles of Faith, or the Articles of War),—surely this distinction between the terms of the proposed English and accepted Irish Catholic Oath ought to be obvious enough to your correspondent to excuse me from going over again for his edification explanations which I have so often given. The case of Bishop Baines is quite another affair. Your correspondent asks bow can I account for his statement in 1824, as quoted by Mr. Gladstone,—" In England or Ireland I do not believe that any Catholic maintains the Infallibility of the Pope." I have simply to say, as to Dr. Baines, that be was a per- son of notoriously peculiar opinions, and, moreover, of a very eccentric and extravagant way of expressing them. The expres- sion quoted was very nearly as absurd in the time of Bishop Milner as it would be in the time of Cardinal Manning. Dr. Baines and Dr. Milner were contemporaries, and Dr. Milner was not only an English Vicar-Apostolic, but was agent for the Irish Bishops. He bad, therefore, peculiar oppor- tunities of knowing the true mind of the Episcopate in those days ; and he said, with all the publicity and solem- nity attaching to a Pastoral (your correspondent will find the passage cited in Dean Philpotts's letter* proving that the English Catholics of 1824 were flagrantly Iufallibilist) "There is not a single prelate in England or Ireland who is not firmly resolved to reject the four Articles of the Gallican Church, commonly called the Gallican Liberties. We are very far from finding fault with the partisans of the Articles, but we think we see in these Articles the germ of all the present mi.chief, and to be brief, we are determined not to subscribe to the Articles." Your correspondent speaks at the commencement of his letter of Infallibility in a Gallican sense. He might as well speak of the Trinity in a Unitarian sense. The whole controversy of Ultra- montane against Gallican, at last happily closed, with the pious and joyous consent of all Churches—of none more than the Gallican—has for nearly two centuries revolved round the fourth Gallican Article, "That the decisions of the Pope on points of faith are not infallible, unless they be attended with the consent of the Church,"—that is to say, that the Pope, per se, is not infallible at all. I shall not follow your correspondent in his attempt to connect other questions of Pontifical power with Infallibility. There would be no end to this discussion if I were to do so.
Your correspondent may ask me how be is to reconcile the commentary or mar words of the two Vicars-Apostolic. They cannot be reconciled.
testant champion of the day. They stand to testify that we did not deceive Parliament, which is Mr. Gladstone's main charge I against us. All that can be said for Dr. Baines is that he is I it was the fashion to describe the supposed minority who believed would not hear it, may be counted on one's fingers.
"Letters to C. Butler," p. 155. New Edition. J. Murray. 1886.
comparatively trivial and temporary moment,—how many men of great political wisdom, experience, and veracity are there in England who utterly denied the possibility of a Conservative reaction on the very eve of the election of last year ? Yet that reaction was a great fact in the political order, and had the masses of the big English boroughs at its back.
I am thankful for the aid your correspondent, "An English Catholic," has given me. He exaggerates, I think, a little the im- portance attached by the English Catholics in 1791 to other points besides Infallibility. They objected to the phraseology of the Oath on other grounds, as Archbishop Troy, an excellent historical witness, states, and an amended form of oath was substi- tuted to meet their scruples on those points. But they objected altogether to the clause concerning Infallibility, which had been the real cause of the "alarming division" of which Dr. Troy speaks, and Parliament in consequence declined to ask them to make any statement whatsoever on oath as to Infallibility. I am sure your correspondent agrees with me that such conduct forms a most honourable link in the tradition of the English Catholics
as to the doctrine.—I am, Sir, &c., AN IRISH CANHOLIC.
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