A large new Roman Catholic church was erected in Burnley, and opened with an imposing ceremony. There was at that time a belief that the power of the Pope might one day be re-established in our country, and the great results of the Reformation either wholly sacrificed or placed in the greatest jeopardy. Protestants were called upon to defend these conquests, and in order to qualify themselves for this great duty it was necessary that they should make themselves thoroughly acquainted with the great controversy between the pure Church to which it was their own happiness to belong, and that corrupt association which called itself Catholicism. I had rather a bold and combative disposition, and was by no means unwilling to take a share in the battle.
All went well for a time. The spirit of inquiry is not considered an evil spirit so long as it only leads to agreement with established doctrines, and as an advanced form of Protestantism was preached in Burnley Church, I was at liberty to think boldly enough, provided I did not go beyond that particular stage of thought. Not having as yet any disposition to go beyond, I did not at all realize what a very small degree of intellectual liberty my teachers were really disposed to allow me.
One occasion I remember distinctly. Mr. Bardsley was at Hollins, where he spent the evening with us, and in the course of conversation, as he was leaning on the chimney-piece, he spoke about German Neology, which I had never heard of before, so I asked what it was, and he described it as a dreadful doctrine which attributed no more inspiration to sacred than to profane writers. The ladies were shocked and scandalized by the bare mention of such a doctrine, but the effect on me was very different. The next day, in my private meditations, I began to wonder what were the evidences by which it was determined that some writers were inspired and infallible, and what critics had settled the question. The orthodox reader will say that in a perplexity of this kind I had nothing to do but carry my difficulty to a clergyman. This is exactly what I did, and the clergyman was Mr. Bardsley himself.
He was full of kindness to me, and took the trouble to write a long paper on the subject, which must have cost him fully two days' work,—a paper in which he gave a full account of the Canon of Scripture from the Evangelical point of view. The effect on me was most discouraging, for the result amounted merely to this, that certain Councils of the Church had recognized the Divine inspiration of certain books, just as certain authoritative critics might recognize the profane inspiration of poets. After reading the paper with the utmost care I felt so embarrassed about it that (with the awkwardness of youth) I did not even write to thank the amiable author who had taken so much trouble to help me, and I only thanked him briefly on meeting him at a friend's house, where it was impossible to avoid the interchange of a few words.
This autobiography is not intended to be a book of controversy, so I shall carefully avoid the details of religious changes and give only results. I do not think that anything in my life was ever more decisive than the receipt of that long communication from Mr. Bardsley. The day before receiving it I was in doubt, but the day after I felt perfectly satisfied that the Divine inspiration of the books known to Englishmen as the "Scriptures" rested simply on the opinion, of different bodies of theologians who had held meetings which were called Councils. The only difference between these Councils and those of the Church of Rome was, that these were represented as having taken place earlier, before the Church was so much divided; but it did not seem at all evident that the members of the earlier Councils were men of a higher stamp, intellectually, than those who composed the distinctly Roman Catholic Councils, nor was there any evidence that the Holy Spirit had been with those earlier Councils, though it afterwards withdrew itself from the later.
The Protestant reader will perhaps kindly bear with me whilst I give the reasons why I ceased to be a Protestant, after having been so earnest and zealous in that form of the Christian faith. It appeared to me—I do not say it is, but it appeared to me, and appears to me still—that Protestantism is an uncritical belief in the decisions of the Church down to a date which I do not pretend to fix exactly, and an equally uncritical scepticism, a scepticism of the most unreceptive kind, with regard to all opinions professed and all events said to have taken place in the more recent centuries of ecclesiastical history. The Church of Rome, on the other hand, seemed nearer in temper to the temper of the past, and was more decidedly a continuation, though evidently at the same time an amplification, of the early Christian habits of thinking and believing.
With this altered view of the subject the alternative that presented itself to me was that which presented itself to the brothers Newman, and if I had found it necessary to my happiness to belong to a visible Church of some kind, and if devotional feelings had been stronger than the desire for mental independence, I should have joined the Church of Rome.
There were, indeed, two or three strong temptations to that course. My family had been a Catholic family in the past, and had sacrificed much for the Church of Rome when she was laboring under oppression; for a Hamerton to return to her would therefore have been quite in accordance with those romantic sentiments about distant ancestors which were at that time very strong in me. Besides this, I had all the feeling for the august ceremonial of the Catholic Church which is found in the writer who most influenced me, Sir Walter Scott; and there was already a certain consciousness of artistic necessities and congruities which made me dimly aware that if you admit the glories of ecclesiastical architecture, it is only the asceticism of Puritan rebellion against art that can deny magnificence to ritual. I had occasionally, though rarely, been present at High Mass, and had felt a certain elevating influence, and if I had said to myself, "Religion is only a poem by which the soul is raised to the contemplation of the Eternal Mysteries," then I could have dreamed vaguely in this contemplation better, perhaps, in the Roman Catholic Church than in any other. But my English and Protestant education was against a religion of dreaming. An English Protestant may have his poetical side, may be capable of feeling poetry that is frankly avowed to be such—may read Tennyson's "Eve of St. Agnes" or Scott's "Hymn to the Virgin" with almost complete imaginative sympathy; but he expects to believe his religion as firmly as he believes in the existence of the British Islands. Such, at least, was the matter-of-fact temper that belonged to Protestantism in those days. In more recent times a more hazy religion has become fashionable.
My decision, therefore, for some time was to remain in a provisional condition of prolonged inquiry. I read a great deal on both sides, and constantly prayed for light, following regularly the external services of the Church of England. Here the subject may be left for the present.
The reader is to imagine me as a youth who no longer believed in the special inspiration of the Scriptures, or in their infallibility, but who was still a Christian as thousands of "liberal" Church people in the present day are Christians.