TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE INSIDE OF THE ROMAN CONFLICT.
NvE confess we gaze into the inside of the Roman con- troversy with a mixture of fascination and fear,— fascination because the culmination of so long and stately a process of historical development as that of the Roman Church in this battle which is now waging as to the true centre of infallibility, is one which cannot but fascinate any mind capable of comprehending it, while the very refinements of the discussion,—the "infinitely little" extremities into which this infinitely great issue tends to branch and blossom,—have a special attractiveness of their own ;—fear because there is a pecu- liar terror to our minds in the unspeakable confusion of the his- torical details over which this great Catholic controversy as to the very title-deeds of the faith of so many millions spreads itself. For, of course, we must assume, looking at the conflict
extra, that if once a definite and incontestable case of doctri- nal error publicly taught by a Pope, or of doctrinal contradic- tion to the public teaching of any other Pope, could be proved against the Papal party, they and all their millions of followers would lose at one stroke the whole pedestal of their faith,—while if, on the other hand, what seems likely enough to be now impending over the Liberal Catholics, any definite and incontestable case of contradiction between the teaching of the whole Catholic Church in one age and what they have uniformly held to be its teaching in another age should be proved, so as to convince the minds of any of this party, then these last would, in their turn, lose the pedestal of their faith. —for then their test of infallibility would have failed. For either party to stake so much on the issue of a historical con- troversy, the fate of which might be determined, or, at least, would be determined to a sincerely open and investigating mind, (say,) by the discovery of a MS. of the eighth century, or the decision of a Church Council in December next, has, to us, in it something of the painful interest of the gaming-table. Of course, we know that both parties alike will say that, though it is the only possible method of controversy to discuss these historical details, yet their assurance of the Church's infallibility,—in their totally different conceptions of it,—rests upon something very different from these historical surveys, upon an inward teaching of the Holy Spirit much more luminous and simple. And we are profoundly thankful if it is so. Still, both opponents (dike cannot have this sort of evidence for opposite conceptions of infallibility, and, therefore, either one party or the other must be liable to the shock of finding the pedestal of its faith finally struck from under it. When the danger of sinking is so immediate and momentous, there is necessarily both fascination and fear in watching the straws at which both parties eagerly catch,—the battles which they wage over the heresy of an Honorius, or the weakness of a Pope Vigilius in declaring a book orthodox one year and heretical the next,—the anxious distinctions which they take between Papal errors publicly professed "as to particular facts depending on the information and testimony of men," and Papal errors in the public teaching of doctrine, the former of which even the Ultramontanes admit to be possible, while they regard the Pope as protected by divine decree against the latter. Is it possible, we ask ourselves, that any faith really hangs on these fine threads of distinction and evidence, which a breath might break ? Whether it is possible or not, it is quite impossible not to follow the combatants into the finest of their subtle issues with a good deal of wonder and not a little awe.
And we confess that, weighing the two parties in the scales in the best way we poor " externs " can, our sympathy does not, on the whole, lean to the Laodiceans or " liberal " Catholics, so ably, if somewhat onesidedly, represented by Janus. We are perfectly aware that if Dr. Manning and his party carry the Council with them, as we suspect they will, and if England should ever again fall politically under the influence of the Pope, we should probably have to endure for the good of our souls a great deal of that painful discipline which the Popes have so often advocated, as in the Bull in Ccenft Domini for instance, and which is more or less clearly implied as proper for the Church to use in many of the propositions of the Syllabus. Certainly the Spectator in its present form would hardly long survive such a regime. On the other hand, it is quite conceivable that if the party of Janus carry the Council with them, and were to carry that great reform of the Church which they propose, and which is to reform completely away some twelve or thirteen
centuries of its history at least,—England might then be recon- verted to Roman Catholicism without quite so much fear of a new Holy Inquisition, and a new campaign against modern civilization. So much we admit at once. But then, if England were ever to become again Roman Catholic as a whole, so new and strong an argument would be furnished against Protestantism that we should not be very careful concerning- the special fruits of Protestantism, and should be disposed to think that modern civilization and science had been, as the Pope evidently deems them, spiritual mistakes. And it is certainly even harder to suppose that the historical web of twelve centuries could be unripped, and a divine system of Catholicism restored which has been defeated and: paralyzed for so long as that—a system not founded on authority like the popular Romanism, and not founded on individual conviction like all Protestant faiths, but founded on the assumed infallibility of a widely scattered body of believers, of which it is the chief recommendation that it is all but impossible ever to apply to it a clear and distinct test,— it is even harder, we say, to suppose this, than it is to suppose that the existing Romanism itself might be really divine. Al least, the latter has this 'note' of divinity ;—like Aaron's rod, it has swallowed up hitherto all other forms of 'infallible' Christianity. If the liberal Catholicism of Janus and hie friends is an infallible system, it is an infallible system which has succumbed at once to a false pretence of infallibility on one side, and an openly admitted fallibility on the other. Now, infallibility which is beaten for centuries both by a sham infallibility and by admitted incapacity for true infallibility, is infallibility of a very novel kind, very difficult to imagine. It looks at the first glance very like a rather specially fallible kind of fallibility with a taste for calling itself by grand names. If Janus and his friends are right, no paradox of the Christian faith is half as great as theirs, which maintains that the true infallibility of the Church has not only lain perdu for cen- turies, but has been impersonated by a growth of falsehood without any interposition on the part of the divine source of infallibility. That, we confess,—with all our respect for the wish of the authors of " Janus " to enter a protest on behalf of liberty and civilization,—we do find an hypothesis somewhat hard even to listen to. A dumb infallibility that cannot find its voice for centuries even to contradict the potent and ostentatious error which takes its name in vain,—is that a sort of divine authority to which human reason will willingly go into captivity ? But we might sympathize with the authors of "Janus," in spite of their utterly untenable intellectual position, if they seemed to us to have any clear advantage in moral earnestness, and simplicity over their opponents. Bat, while there is certainly a school of Ultramontanes that simply and profoundly believes in the infallibility of the Pope, in spite of all the critical and historical difficulties which the Liberals ably parade, and sometimes even over-state, we find it hard to believe that the latter believe cordially in any Church infallibility at all. That they are sincerely attached to the patristic theology and are not crypto-sceptics is obvious enough. But looking to the numerous and difficult conditions which they insist upon as indispensable to any mode of ascertaining•what the infallible teaching of the Church,—so long suppressed,— really is, and the triumph with which they prove that Councils held, or to be held, under far less disturbing influ- ences than the first Council of Ephesus for example (univer- sally held as ecumenical), fail to satisfy those conditions, we can hardly help suspecting that their attitude of mind in relation to the difficulty of ascertaining the infallible judgment of the Church on any theological point, strongly resembles that expressed in Dr. Johnson's celebrated dictum as to the 'difficult' piece of music which he had just heard, "Difficult! madam,—I wish it had been impossible!" The Liberal Catholics seem to us, in short, to be crypto-Anglicans, who reluctantly accept, in addition to Anglicanism, the abstract principle of a dogmatic infallibility inherent in their Church, —an infallibility bound over, however, under the heaviest possible recognizances never to appear and claim the authority it ought to have.
Contrasting the two historical views of the Roman Catholic Church presented in Dr. Manning's pastoral on the one hand, and the manifesto of Janus on the other hand,—each seems to have its own peculiar strength and peculiar weakness. Dr. Manning's strength consists, of course, in exhibiting the natural, inevitable, and, in point of fact, historical drift towards the monarchical form, of a Church which started with the assumption of a divine grace propagated downwards from the apostolate,—for even Janus has to admit the naturalness and necessity of the Roman primacy, though he contends for the substantial equality of all bishops. Dr. Manning makes the most of the promise assumed to be given to Peter as the Rock, of the prayer offered for Peter, "I have prayed for thee that thy strength fail not," and of the exhortation which followed that prayer, "When thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren,"—a command which he considers to involve a sanction of the monarchical principle as amongst the Apostles, at least to this extent, that strength is to go out from Peter to his brethen, and consequently that "what Peter was to the Apostles the Pontiffs are to the Bishops ; what they have in part, he has in plenitude." Tracing this in the history, Dr. Manning has no difficulty in showing the early claims built upon it by the Roman See ; the frequent disposition to acknowledge these claims ; the gradual growth of a belief, first, that the special diocese of Rome itself was specially preserved from heresy, next, that what was true of the diocese was necessarily true of the Bishop who ruled it ; lastly, that the Bishop of Rome was held to be the head of the whole Church, who could not but speak its true mind and declare its true doctrine. Dr. Manning makes a strong point of the hesitation among the French Bishops them- selves when the Gallican movement was pressed upon them by the King of France in 1682, and shows how inconsistent were the Gallican articles with the action of the episcopate a very short time before and a very short time after they were passed. In a word, Dr. Manning is very strong in showing the natural growth of the Papal doctrine and its wide prevalence in later times. On the other hand, his opponents are very .strong, and he is very weak, in dealing with the many clear and visible blunders and waverings of the infallible teacher. Did not the subtlety of the Romanizing school wisely and necessarily pare down their claim of infallibility to the public teaching of moral or theological doctrine with the view of requiring the assent of the Church, and so manage -to exclude Papal judgments passed on a number of matters of fact, blunders as to forged documents, and several questionable oases of apologies for heretics,—they would have no locus standi at all. But, then, all these exclusions thin away sadly the grandeur of the conception itself,—for it is hard indeed if a Pope's blunder cannot be shown to have turned more or less on a question of fact, and not to have been one of purely doctrinal teaching. The strength of Dr. Manning's case is in showing how naturally, and gradually, and regularly the principle of a visible, authoritative, and infallible Church led to the concentration of authority and infallibility, in the Primate of that Church. Its weakness is in dealing with the positive evidences of error, mutability, and ignorance in the Popes,—a side of the subject which the Archbishop is .not sorry to avoid. The strength of the Liberal Catholic critics is in arraying this positive evidence,—their weakness, in the unwise attempt to make forgery, falsification, and un- scrupulous ambition play too important a part in a process which was a strictly natural development of the authoritative principle of the Church from the beginning, and to ignore the ,plentiful indications that authority was forced upon Rome by the inner currents of faith, quite as much as arrogated to itself by Rome.
How the Ultramontanes will satisfy themselves that any .tecumenical decision can refute the historical evidences against hesitating, shortsighted, and blundering Popes we are at a loss to know. And how the Liberals will satisfy themselves that .any decision unfavourable to their views is clearly non-cecumeni- cal we are equally at a loss to know, that is, if any historical (Ecumenical Council at all is to stand its ground. With the opposite cases thus intellectually and morally balanced, we confess that we incline to wish to see the Roman principle .developed to its natural issue,—to see Roman Catholicism at last in possession of its perfect machinery. The simple and sincere Ultramontanes,—who are a great deal more numerous, we suspect, than the simple and sincere Roman Catholic xeformers,—like all earnest men, cannot but be benefited by see- ing their principles operating to their full extent. Nor will the :simple and sincere reformers fail to learn something, if they are only taught how very few people there are in the world intellec- tually capable of the subtlety of belief in an infallibility which Ins never for centuries attained an articulate voice, but has been positively driven from the field by ignorance, error, and pretence. We expect the Papal party to win because it is the logical party, the party in the direct line of doctrinal succes- sion to the principles which have gained ground from year to year and century to century. We rather hope it may win, because if it does we shall be at the beginning of the end. A teacher accepted as infallible with millions hanging on his words, will speak and act in a way which can hardly fail of coming into direct conflict with the voice and will of God. If that does not couch the eyes of the faithful, certainly a further disappointment and a longer delay would not do so,— would only add to the fervour of their hope and zeal.
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