THE DISCIPLINE OF OBEDIENCE.
THERE is one point in the Catholic system of " religious " life which has always been something of a puzzle to us, and that is the physical compulsion which the Church, wherever it is completely dominant, has never hesitated to authorize, thus producing among other evils a rooted suspicion in heretical minds of the meaning of conventual discipline. Any such practice is of course easily explained by ultra-Protestants, who hold that Rome is perpetually intent on wickedness for wickedness' sake, and believe that she imprisons pauper monks for some mysterious advantage to be obtained from their duresse, but moderate people are aware that Rome adheres to her admitted theories very rigidly. It is very questionable, for instance, whether the seal of Confession has ever been really broken, one or two historic stories to the contrary notwithstanding,—whether outside Rome itself, where the actual Government happens to be identical with the ecclesiastics before whom cases of conscience may lawfully be laid, such a case has ever been known to occur. At least, if such have occurred it is a little odd that populations who believe any evil of priests should abstain from this particular scandal, that the very men who distrust confessors most. should confess without hesitation, that.a witness like Henrietta Caracciolo, a cool, sensible aristocrat who broke her vows, should consider herself perfectly safe in sending any letter however dangerous, to any ecclesiastic however powerful, with the word " Cone fiteor " above it. So, too, Rome, in spite of many temptations, has never swerved from her claims to universality, never yielded to any form of race hatred, never hesitated for an instant to assert that any Aztec, any negro, any man not an idiot might become a priest, and as such be entitled to all the privileges of the hierarchy. " How ugly thou art, may brother!" remarked Pio None the other day to a negro prelate, but he would have defended the validity of his ordinations against all the world. But in this matter of compulsion Rome seems false to her own theory, which is that obedience, to be a true act of discipline, must be willing ; that the suppression of the carnal will to the behests of another human being prepares the " religions" to merge his will completely in that of God, the latter a form of sacrifice in defence of which she has to plead the direct example of Christ. But that suppression clearly must be an act of the mind, undisturbed by external fear, and it ought, if it is to be perfect, to be an act done without palpable evidence to the performer of a conflict within himself. Rome has never, we believe, quite sanctioned the Jesuit formula about obedience to a superior, that it should be perinde ac cadaver, holding always, in theory at all events, that obedience to the Church is above obedience to any confessor or any ecclesiastical authority ; but that she does teach the glory of complete surrender of the will to the Church and its representatives, when voluntarily made, is undoubted. That is her form of applying the belief which crops up in almost every creed, that the natural man is bad and needs subjection, the creed of Clapham aswell as Rome, of the Stoic before either of them were heard of, and of the Ilindoo ascetic before Zeno had begun to teach. But compulsion is not part of her theory, and we never could quite comprehend how the practice came to vary from it so widely. The popular notion that Rome keeps a monk a monk lest he should betray the secrets of the cloister is prejudiced nonsense, for, not to mention that thousands of unfrocked monks wandering about the world have not betrayed anything except the pettiness of monastic life, the theory of Rome, at all events, is that there is nothing to betray. No doubt she holds that a man may justifiably be saved in spite of himself, the real idea on which she persecutes and seizes " little Mortaras," and no doubt for a monk to break his vows is mortal sin ; but then Rome is not in her theories so unspiritual as Englishmen fancy, and would never dream of denying that the true sin is in the mental decision to break them, over which physical coercion has no power, though, nevertheless, she would not hesitate to apply it where she safely could.
It is waste of time, we imagine, to prove to Protestant readers that no spiritual grace can be implanted by external force, though some of the advocates of eternal punishment seem unconsciously in need of such proof ; but it may be worth while, we imagine, to examine whether, apart from physical compulsion, the idea implied in the phrase " the discipline of obedience" is correct. A great many Protestants think it is ; we question if there is a convent among the hundreds now rising in all Protestant countries in which it is not more or lees acknowledged as the basis of order, and badly as the proposal usually works, it is one which it is extremely difficult to answer. Clearly, whether man be naturally bad or no, self-control, the dominance of the enlightened will over mere impulses, whether physical or intellectual, must be a good thing. To deny that, as Heinrich Heine was sometimes half inclined to do, is to deny that it is a good thing for the hand to obey the eye, the feet to follow the signal of the mind, is to assume paralysis as the most healthy of conditions. To produce and sustain that dominance it is as necessary to exercise it as it is to exercise any other quality, and there is prima facie no method of exercising it so effectual as habitual obedience to the order of another human being ; no act, in other words, which seems so difficult, and therefore when performed frequently brings the muscles of the will into such perfect training. Soldiers assert that as determinately as monks, Carlyle as well as the corps of writing-masters — to whom each generation owes so much of its circulating coin of wisdom—and it may be counted among the accepted axioms of the world. If it is true, the Roman system, apart from physical compulsion, which is an accidental excrescence, would seem also to be true, for Rome merely carries out the idea to its logical conclusion that the more painful or humiliating the successive acts of obedience, the better the training and the higher the resulting grace. Scrubbing floors with brushes of insufficient bristle seems, no doubt, a very ludicrous discipline, or to the average English mind, which thinks labour honourable in the abstract, but in the concrete humiliating, it may seem degrading ; but what if scrubbing was just the thing Miss Saurin had difficulty in bringing herself to do? There is not much self-control required to obey pleasant orders, and the habit once established, they ought, on the theory, like gymnastic exercises, to be made gradually more difficult till volition has at last become supreme to secure submission ; and the difficulty of obedience, we all know, is in precise proportion to the humiliation involved. Still the plan, as we saw in the Saurin trial, does
not work altogether satisfactorily, Rome herself is compelled to admit that some have and some have not " vocation," and the rest of mankind is inclined to doubt whether a vocation to be proved by deriving grace from the discipline of obedience is not exceedingly rare. The theory, though apparently coherent, must be weak somewhere, for no theory of religious life confessedly `, inapplicable to the infinite majority of mankind can be of much value to humanity ; and the point to ascertain is where the weakness exists. We suspect it lies not in the theory, but in the method, in the fact, forgotten by Carlyle and the copy-books, as by the founders of monastic orders, that all acts of obedience, even of mental obedience, if constantly repeated, tend to become mechanical, to cease to be truly voluntary, to become as valueless for the education of the will as if extorted by external coercion. The will is not in training, but asleep. We see that in armies. So far from an old private making the best officer, as he ought to do if the monastic method of training were correct, he makes a decidedly bad one, and this mainly from a certain deficiency of self-control. Obedience to an officer with him has become a mechanical habit, and it becomes so also after a time with men of the " religious " training. Their minds spring to " attention " as the command is uttered, and the power of the will, which was to have been increased, becomes, on the whole, rather less than it was before the training was begun. Miss Saurin, in time, might have brought herself to a capacity not only of carrying dirty dusters on her head, but of carrying them willingly, but the• obedience would not in the end have been voluntary or beneficial.. She would have been no nearer that attitude of absolute, unquestioning, unrepining submission to the Almighty which it is the object of all this training to produce, would probably have been less near it, the habit of obedience producing, as we constantly see in soldiers, an extreme reluctance to obey on any matters not habitual. Dugald Dalgetty fires up quicker than most undisciplined men, and the soldier in all countries tends to be the most lawless of citizens. The " habit of the camp " is a euphemism for lawlessness, yet if the conventual system were sound, the camp, with its strict and ever repeated acts of obedience, should be a school of law. The mind, to benefit by such training, must, we suspect, perform a double function, must command as well as obey, not assign obedience to itself, as in monasteries, and command to another. If it were not so, why free-will at all ? for no training could be so perfect as the constant and unending obedience involved in Necessity, if once recognized as the suprems law. It is in the fight with ourselves, when the will is well awake and free, that the secret of training lies, and even that had better not be carried too far. We may strengthen the will till it overrides the intellect ; rises to that unnatural strength which as often precedes mania, till it seems to act as a separate power and the sufferer is himself aware that resistance is useless, that the will has snapped down upon the subject, and can no longer be trusted to act in accord with the rest of the mental faculties.. That we may rise by obedience is true ; but by obedience to our own highest perceptions, to the internal revelation, not by obedience to another individual will, an obedience sure to become either mechanical or unreal.
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