Let no susceptibilities, puritan, protestant, anglican, or other, be startled if we observe that Rome is, and may long be, in some important respects, the centre of the Christian world. It is indeed a centre which repels as well as attracts; which probably repels even more than it attracts; but which, whether repelling or attracting, influences.—-Gladstone (1875).
I
One question, as the reader by this time well knows, living deepest in Mr. Gladstone's heart and mind from his first book in 1838 onwards, was the relation of the churches to modern society. English statesmen are wont to be either blind to the existence of such a question, or else they seek an easy refuge from it in a perfunctory erastianism, sometimes intellectually refined, sometimes a little brutish, but always shallow. In all the three great branches of Christianity, the Latin, the Greek or orthodox, the protestant, Mr. Gladstone's interest was incessant, sincere, and profound. It covered their theology, their organisation, their history and principles of growth, the bearings of their system upon individual character and social well-being all over Europe. He was one of the very few public men capable of discerning that the fall of the temporal power of the pope marked a more startling change and a profounder crisis in human history, than the unification of Italy, the unification of Germany, the reconstructed republic in France, perhaps even than the preservation of the American union. He knew the force of ideas in the world; he realised the vast transformations that had in their succession swept over the minds of men since cardinal dogmas had been established; he comprehended the motion in [pg 508] articles of faith, as men made their “voyagings through strange seas of thought”; he was alive to the fact that moral crises brought on by change in intellectual outlook and temperature, are of deeper concern than questions of territory, or dynasty, or form of government. The moral crisis is what reaches furthest and matters most. A movement of the first magnitude was accentuated by Pius IX., when by the Syllabus of 1864 he challenged modern society in all its foundations, its aims, its principles, in the whole range of its ideals. Some called this daring ultimatum the gravest event since the French uprising in 1789. The Syllabus prepared the way for a more elaborately organised operation on behalf of papal authority. The train was secretly laid for a grand reaction, a grand re-installation of the Christian faith.[314]
The Two Schools
The pope had been despoiled of territory, his sway within the walls of Rome itself was in constant danger, his most powerful protector north of the Alps had been weakened and humiliated by protestant Prussia. He was now to be compensated for his calamities by a majestic demonstration of his hold upon the spiritual allegiance of millions of adherents in every portion of the habitable globe. The twentieth ecumenical council assembled in St. Peter's at Rome on December 8, 1869. In this gathering of catholic prelates from both hemispheres, two antagonistic schools confronted one another. The ultramontanes held that the revolutionary welter and confusion of the modern world could only be healed by solemn affirmation of the principle of sovereign authority lodged in an infallible pope, with absolute power to define by that apostolic authority what ought to be held as articles of faith or morals. The assumptions, the standards, the ruling types of the modern age, they boldly encountered with rigid iteration of maxims of old time, imposing obedience and submission to a fixed social order and a divinely commissioned hierarchy. Inflexibility was to be the single watchword by which the church could recover a world that, from Naples even to Mexico, seemed to be rapidly drifting away from her. The [pg 509] opposing school took other ground. Perhaps they saw that supremacy is one thing, and infallibility another thing quite different. The liberal catholics did not contest the dogma of papal infallibility; they questioned the expediency of its proclamation; they were for associating ideas of religion with ideas of liberty; they were not for extending the domain of miracle and the supernatural.
Then as in the old historic councils, influence of race and nation had decisive effects. It could not be otherwise in what was in essence a conflict between a centralised doctrinal authority on the one hand, and the inextinguishable tendency towards national churches on the other. The Italian bishops went with the pope. The Germans, as of old they had been for emperor against priest, were now on the side of freedom against what certain of them did not hesitate to call tyranny and fraud. Some of the ablest of the French were true to Gallican tradition and resisted the decree. Among the most active and uncompromising of all the ultramontane party was our English Manning.[315]
II
At the end of November 1869, Acton had written to Mr. Gladstone from Rome. “Your letter is a very sad one,” Mr. Gladstone answered. “I feel as deep and real an interest in the affairs of other Christian communions as in my own; and most of all in the case of the most famous of them all, and the one within which the largest number of Christian souls find their spiritual food.” Before Manning left for Rome, an amiable correspondence took place between Mr. Gladstone and him. “How sad it is for us both”—this was Mr. Gladstone's starting-point—“considering our personal relations, that we should now be in this predicament, that the things which the one looks to as the salvation of faith and church, the other regards as their destruction.”
To Mr. Odo Russell, now the informal agent of the British government in Rome, the prime minister wrote:—
It is curious that Manning has so greatly changed his character. When he was archdeacon with us, all his strength was [pg 510] thought to lie in a governing faculty, and in its wise moderation. Now he is ever quoted as the ultra of ultras, and he seems greatly to have overshot his mark. The odds seem to be that the child yet unborn will rue the calling of this council. For if the best result arrive in the triumph of the fallibilitarians, will not even this be a considerable shock to the credit and working efficacy of the papal system? You must really be all eyes and ears, a very Argus in both organs, until the occasion has gone by.