Protestants, on the other hand, maintain the right of each one to interpret for himself, according to the best of his private judgment, the Revelation which God has given to man. The liberty of the human mind is therefore unfettered by any human authority. In this all sects are agreed. Some, indeed, believe that the Church has authority to teach, and some reject this opinion; but all maintain that there is no obligation in conscience to accept her teaching. She has not the gift of infallibility. Just as individuals may fall into error, so too may the Church herself fall into error. Her teaching may be true, or it may be false; each one is to judge for himself. The only check upon the freedom of thought is the Divine Message sent to us from on High, and recorded in the pages of Holy Writ.
We maintain, of course, that the Catholic system which we have just explained is true, and the Protestant system false. If we were engaged in controversy with a Protestant, it would be our duty at once to establish and to defend our doctrine; to demonstrate that the Church of Christ is infallible, and that the right of private judgment is contrary alike to the teaching of Scripture and to the dictates of common sense. But in the case before us, there is no call for proof: Mr. Justice Keogh is a Catholic. It remains then only to examine if the language of his address is not calculated to convey an opinion quite inconsistent with the faith which he professes.
The question we wish to raise is simply this: “Does the address [pg 453] before us admit that the human mind in the pursuit of truth should be restrained by the authoritative definitions of the Catholic Church, or does it rather exclude this restraint?” Now, in the first place, it is to be remembered that this restriction of intellectual freedom is denied by all Protestants in this country, and maintained by all Catholics. When a lecturer, then, addressing a mixed audience, in a written discourse, tells them that “all men have a right to exercise their intellectual faculties unrestrained”, do not the circumstances of the case fix upon his words a Protestant signification? Will not his hearers naturally say that he has chosen the Protestant side of the controversy, and not the Catholic? Again, according to the Protestant doctrine, each one is at liberty to construct a system of religious belief for himself: according to the Catholic doctrine, every one should accept the tenets of his faith on the authority of the Church. Now we are told in the address, that all men have “a right to determine for themselves what is truth and what is falsehood”. Has this phraseology a Catholic or a Protestant complexion? Lastly, the lecturer exhorts his hearers to go themselves to the pages of Milton, there to learn the doctrine of intellectual freedom. It will, therefore, naturally be supposed, that the doctrine is defended by the lecturer in the same sense in which it is defended by the poet. Now Milton denied again and again, not in his writings only, but also by his acts, that the Church has any right to interfere with the speculations of the human mind. It is evident, therefore, that the language of Mr. Justice Keogh, whether considered in itself, or understood by the light of the context, is incompatible with the principles of the Catholic Religion.
Freedom of thought is not enough: freedom of speech is also an essential dogma of the new philosophy. We are assured that all men have a right “to circulate their thoughts from one to another, from land to land, from tribe to tribe, from nation to nation, free as ‘the winds that from four quarters blow’; to raise their thoughts, and to pour forth their words above the level of vulgar superstition, unrestricted by any illiberal or illiterate licenser”. Accordingly, amongst the various prose works of Milton, there is one which our lecturer selects for especial commendation. It is entitled: Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing. This little tract is distinguished, no doubt, for its learning, wit, and eloquence; but these high qualities are devoted to the defence of opinions which we cannot accept. The book and its principles are thus introduced to his audience by Mr. Justice Keogh:
“If all the works he produced were cancelled and forgotten ... yet give one in hand, the treatise for the liberty of unlicensed printing, [pg 454]the Areopagitica, and I would boldly maintain, not only that he had satisfied every call which his country could make on the most devoted of her sons, but that he had vindicated their rights and sustained his own reputation in the greatest pen writing in the English language. He wished, as he tells us in this treatise, to deliver the press from the restraints with which it was incumbered, that the power of determining what ought to be published and what suppressed, might no longer be entrusted to captious lawyers or knavish priests, or even grave chancellors and venerable chief justices.... I shall give you, even at the risk of trying your patience, some extracts from this treatise; but first let me tell you, that it establishes in the clearest way, not only that Milton was the fast friend of toleration, but that the charges of being an enemy of all order and of all monarchy, so industriously made against him, are without foundation.... And then he gives expression to this noble sentiment, fit to be engraven in letters of gold. Let statesmen hear it, and tyrants, civil and ecclesiastical, dwell upon it: ‘Although I dispraise not the defence of just immunities, yet love my peace better, if that were all, give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely, according to conscience, above all liberties’. I cannot bring myself to hurry over this noble tract. I have read it over again and again; I read it years and years ago, and often since, and now again, for the purpose of addressing you; and the oftener I read it, the more I take it to my heart. If such be its effect upon me, as I fondly hope it may be upon many of you”, etc.
Notwithstanding this ardent and enthusiastic declaration, we yet think it would be unfair to impute to the learned lecturer every casual expression or even every deliberate opinion set forth in the speech he so much admires. It is, however, clear that he adopts as his own at least the main features of the doctrine enunciated, and the general character of the argument by which it is defended. This doctrine may be explained in two words: unbounded liberty, on the one hand, to publish and to circulate all manner of opinions; unbounded liberty, on the other, to read all manner of books. The State, it is contended, has no right to forbid, or to repress, those publications which are dangerous to the welfare of society; neither has the Church a right to forbid or to repress those publications which are hostile to the spiritual interests of the faithful. These views we believe to be false and pernicious both as regards the power of the State and the power of the Church. It is, however, under the latter aspect alone that we propose to consider the subject.
The pastors of the Church have received a divine command to guard the integrity of faith and to watch over the purity of morals. Therefore have they also received from God that authority which is necessary for the due fulfilment of this high charge. And such is the authority to prohibit and, as far as [pg 455] may be, to repress those publications of which the only tendency is to introduce error and to disseminate vice. For it is impossible to preserve truth incorrupt in a community, if error may be circulated without restriction, dressed up in the delusive garb of sophistry; it is impossible to preserve morals pure, if vice may be freely exhibited in the most seductive and alluring forms. A great writer and a wise philosopher, Samuel Johnson, even though a Protestant, had the vigour of mind to seize this important principle, which he has expressed with a singular felicity of diction and an epigrammatic power peculiarly his own: “If every murmurer at government”, he says, “may diffuse discontent, there can be no peace; and if every sceptic in theology may teach his follies, there can be no religion”.[3]
We confess indeed that this is a question full of difficulty to members of the Protestant Church. They believe that each one has a right to judge for himself what is true and what is false: and it is not easy to see how this right can be exercised, unless each one be free to examine every form of belief, every variety of error. But we are at a loss to understand how a Catholic should go astray on a subject so plain. From the earliest ages the Catholic Church has ever claimed and exercised the right to condemn and prohibit those books which are contrary to faith and dangerous to morals. Now it would be an error in doctrine to suppose that the Catholic Church could claim such a right if she had not received it from her Divine Founder.
If we pass from the doctrine of Milton to his arguments, we shall have much greater reason to wonder how it should have come to pass that we are asked, by a Catholic lecturer, to accept his views. He does not defend the circulation of bad books as a necessary evil, which it is inexpedient or impossible to check. On the contrary, he maintains it is a positive good, which ought to be encouraged. According to his notion, the promiscuous reading of bad books is the furnace in which our love for truth and virtue is to be tried. There can be no merit in truth, he argues, for him who is not acquainted with error; there can be no merit in virtue for him who is not familiar with vice. These are sentiments so utterly repugnant to the common instincts of our nature, that we could not believe they came from our illustrious poet, if his own words did not bear witness against him:—
“As, therefore, the state of man now is, what wisdom can there he to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, [pg 456]that never sallies out and seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for notwithstanding dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world; we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue, therefore, which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure.... Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely and with less danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity, than by reading all manner of tractates, and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read”.[4]