A POET OF THE COUNTER- REFORMATION
SIR,—It is idle to speculate how far individuals professing the same faith hold identical philo- sophic concepts. God alone knows that. Mr. Little and I can only discuss professions.
I had a normal Anglican upbringing. The clergymen who taught me at school and at home were devout men of broad education, in no way cranky or extreme in their views. Every one of them frankly repudiated most of the doctrines to which the Marian martyrs attached greatest importance.
My Roman Catholic children arc taught the full faith of Robert Southwell; in some respects a fuller and more precise faith than that of the martyrs of the third century, for ,in the economy of revelation dogma develops from the vague to the definite.
The Roman Catholic Church does not claim infallibility for all its members. It is th,erefore neither surprising nor significant that dif- ferences of opinion should exist on theological problems before they arc decided by authority.
Mr. Little poses three questions which admit of answers so simple that I wonder he could not find them without recourse to your columns. On Papal infallibility Southaven was guided by his friend Bellarmine: 'The Pope is infallible not only when teaching the doc- trines of faith, but also when prescribing.for the universal Church those precepts of morality which are necessary to salvation,' (De Romano Ponti !ice, lib. iv, cap. 5.) This was the teaching of all the Jesuit martyrs. It is sub- stantially the definition of 1870.
Southwell composed poems on both the Conception and the Assumption of Our Lady (Poetical Works. 1856, pp. 105 and 162) which unambiguously imply the doctrines as they have since been defined.—Yours faithfully,
EVELYN WAUGH
Piers Court, Stinchcombe, Near Mosley, Glos
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