Again, Father Oldcorne had to remember, besides the ideal standard that his vocation imposed upon him, the practical standard which was the unwritten law that guided the conscience of the best of the average Catholics in that period of their intolerable sufferings.[A] For it is a fact of human nature that every man seeks to instruct his conscience by some objective rule or
standard of Truth and Right; but that instincts and emotions oftentimes finally rule men rather than reason and argumentative proof.
[A] The English papists groaned under the following persecution: — The poor were practically liable to be fined (and therefore sold up “stick and pin”) one shilling every time they absented themselves from their parish church. The richer members of the community were compelled to pay £20 per lunar month. Many of the English nobility, gentry, and yeomanry were ruined by this; indeed the Catholics must have been very rich on the whole to hold out as long as they did. It was the Government authorities (Clerical and Lay) that did the persecuting; individual Protestants often sought to mitigate the miseries of their fellow-countrymen from whom they differed in religion. Being reconciled to the See of Rome was death, and to be a popish priest was by the terrible Statute 27 Eliz. to be “a traitor” and to be liable to be hanged, cut down alive, bowelled, and quartered. To say Mass was to be liable to a fine of 200 marks and imprisonment for life (a mark was 13s. 4d.). To hear Mass was to be liable to a fine of 100 marks and imprisonment for life. To harbour a priest was death and forfeiture of property.
It was, furthermore, incumbent upon Oldcorne to recollect that more harm than good is frequently occasioned in this entangled world by an unseasonable, indiscriminate, “heroic” application of abstract principles (faultless in themselves) to the varied and perplexing circumstances of man’s terrestrial life.
To illustrate my propositions: It is worth while remembering that even so lofty a soul as Mrs. Ambrose Rookwood evidently regarded her husband, primarily, as a sufferer for conscience sake, and only secondarily, if at all, as a repentant sacrilegious traitor and murderer in desire, who was suffering condign punishment and paying the just penalty of his ruthless crimes.
No doubt special allowances have to be made for this poor woman, inasmuch as her husband and children were all the world to her. But still the following recorded statement proves that the tendency was for even the best of the average English Catholics of that day, of whom Mrs. Rookwood is a fair type and specimen, to centre their sympathies on the wrong-doers rather than on the wronged.
This was natural enough; for man’s disposition is to be led by his unconscious instincts and emotional
sympathies rather than by drawn-out reason and cool argument, as has been mentioned above.
It was the bounden duty of Oldcorne to hold that disposition strictly in check and to keep himself absolutely master of the tendency. But, on this being assured, he was bound likewise to remember that the tendency existed, and that he lived in a world not of angels, nor of machines, but of men — of men indeed who were not totally depraved, nor utterly corrupt, yet who were sorely wounded and weakened in intellect, heart, and will.
The crying want of the present day — as of Oldcorne’s day — is not only for men but for men who are statesmen. And no man can be a statesman unless he has a wide and profound knowledge of human nature, and who, while he pities human nature and loves it, never makes the mistake of expecting too much from it. In other words, we require men who are humanists and humorists, as I cannot but think was the character of Edward Oldcorne.