V
Publication Of The Pamphlet
The pamphlet[320] appeared in November, and was meant for an argument that the decree of infallibility aimed a deadly blow at the old historic, scientific, and moderate school; it was a degradation of the episcopal order; it carried to its furthest point that spirit of absolutist centralisation, which [pg 516] in its excesses is as fatal to vigorous life in the church, as in the state; it overthrew the principle not even denied by the council of Trent in the sixteenth century, that the pope and his judgments were triable by the assembled representatives of the Christian world.
Thrice in history it seemed as if the constitutional party in the church was about to triumph: at the council of Constance in the fifteenth century; in the conflict between the French episcopate and Innocent xi. in the days of Bossuet; and thirdly, when Clement xiv., exactly a hundred years before now, dealt with the Jesuits and “levelled in the dust the deadliest foes that mental and moral liberty have ever known.” From July 1870 all this had passed away, and the constitutional party had seen its death-warrant signed and sealed. The “myrmidons of the apostolic chamber” had committed their church to revolutionary measures. The vast new claims were lodged in the reign of a pontiff, who by the dark Syllabus of 1864 had condemned free speech, a free press, liberty of conscience, toleration of nonconformity, the free study of civil and philosophic things independently of church authority, marriage unless sacramentally contracted, and all definition by the state of the civil rights of the church.
The Pamphlet
“It has been a favourite purpose of my life,” Mr. Gladstone said, “not to conjure up, but to conjure down, public alarms. I am not now going to pretend that either foreign foe or domestic treason can, at the bidding of the court of Rome, disturb these peaceful shores. But although such fears may be visionary, it is more visionary still to suppose for one moment that the claims of Gregory vii., of Innocent iii., and of Boniface viii. have been disinterred in the nineteenth century, like hideous mummies picked out of Egyptian sarcophagi, in the interests of archæology, or without a definite and practical aim.” What, then, was the clear and foregone purpose behind the parade of all these astonishing reassertions? The first was—by claims to infallibility in creed, to the prerogative of miracles, to dominion over the unseen world—to satisfy spiritual appetites, sharpened into reaction and made morbid by “the levity of the destructive speculations so widely current, and the notable hardihood of the [pg 517] anti-Christian writing of the day.” This alone, however, would not explain the deliberate provocation of all the “risks of so daring a raid upon the civil sphere.” The answer was to be found in the favourite design, hardly a secret design, of restoring by the road of force when any favourable opportunity should arise, and of re-erecting, the terrestrial throne of the popedom, “even if it could only be re-erected on the ashes of the city, and amidst the whitening bones of the people.”
And this brings the writer to the immediate practical aspects of his tract. “If the baleful power which is expressed by the phrase Curia Romana, and not at all adequately rendered in its historic force by the usual English equivalent ‘Court of Rome,’ really entertains the scheme, it doubtless counts on the support in every country of an organised and devoted party; which, when it can command the scales of political power, will promote interference, and while it is in a minority, will work for securing neutrality. As the peace of Europe may be in jeopardy, and as the duties even of England, as one of its constabulary authorities, might come to be in question, it would be most interesting to know the mental attitude of our Roman catholic fellow-countrymen in England and Ireland with reference to the subject; and it seems to be one on which we are entitled to solicit information.” Too commonly the spirit of the convert was to be expressed by the notorious words, “a catholic first, an Englishman afterwards”—words that properly convey no more than a truism, “for every Christian must seek to place his religion even before his country in his inner heart; but very far from a truism in the sense in which we have been led to construe them.” This, indeed, was a new and very real “papal aggression.” For himself, Mr. Gladstone said, it should not shake his allegiance to “the rule of maintaining equal civil rights irrespectively of religious differences.” Had he not given conclusive indications of that view, by supporting in parliament as a minister since the council, the repeal in 1871 of the law against ecclesiastical titles, whose enactment he had opposed twenty years before?
That the pamphlet should create intense excitement, was inevitable from the place of the writer in the public eye, [pg 518] from the extraordinary vehemence of the attack, and above all from the unquenchable fascination of the topic. Whether the excitement in the country was more than superficial; whether most readers fathomed the deep issues as they stood, not between catholic and protestant, but between catholic and catholic within the fold; whether in fastening upon the civil allegiance of English Romanists Mr. Gladstone took the true point against Vaticanism—these are questions that we need not here discuss. The central proposition made a cruel dilemma for a large class of the subjects of the Queen; for the choice assigned to them by assuming stringent logic was between being bad citizens if they submitted to the decree of papal infallibility, and bad catholics if they did not. Protestant logicians wrote to Mr. Gladstone that if his contention were good, we ought now to repeal catholic emancipation and again clap on the fetters. Syllogisms in action are but stupid things after all, unless they are checked by a tincture of what seems paradox.[321] Apart from the particular issue in his Vatican pamphlet, Mr. Gladstone believed himself to be but following his own main track in life and thought in his assault upon “a policy which declines to acknowledge the high place assigned to liberty in the counsels of Providence, and which upon the pretext of the abuse that like every other good she suffers, expels her from its system.”
Among the names that he was never willing to discuss with me—Machiavelli, for instance—was Joseph de Maistre, the hardiest, most adventurous, most ingenious, and incisive of all the speculative champions of European reaction.[322] In the pages of de Maistre he might have found the reasoned base on which the ultramontane creed may be supposed to rest. He would have found liberty depicted less as a blessing than a scourge; even Bossuet denounced as a heretic with dubious chances of salvation, for his struggle on behalf of a national church against Roman centralisation; the old [pg 519] Greeks held up to odium as a race of talkers, frivolous, light, and born incorrigible dividers. In dealing with de Maistre, Mr. Gladstone would have had a foeman worthier of his powerful steel than the authors of the Syllabus, Schema, Postulatum, and all the rest of what he called the Vaticanism of 1870. But here, as always, he was man of action, and wrote for a specific though perhaps a fugitive purpose.