It is not without its advantages to know what views the occupant of an Irish see so distinguished, is led to take, of the Church to which seventy-seven out of every hundred Irishmen belong, with all the convictions of their intellects, and all the love of their hearts. It seems to us that his theory is not likely to satisfy any party; it goes too far to please some, and stops short too soon to be agreeable to others. But what strikes us most of all in it is the fatal inconsistency of its parts. Of this the very book to which it serves as preface is proof enough. Dr. Trench's position is this. He tells his Protestant readers that whereas in the medieval Church there was a good church, and an evil, all the good has found its resting place in Protestantism, all the evil in tyrannical Rome. Whatever of good, of holy, of pure, has ever been said or done within the Church, Protestants are the rightful inheritors of it all. From the treasury of the Church before the Reformation he proposes to draw, and to collect in this work what his readers may live on and love, and what he is confident will prove wholesome nourishment for their souls. He would set before them the feelings of the Church during these thousand years of her existence, and would summon from afar, from remote ages, “voices in which they may utter and embody the deepest things of their hearts”. Such, he assures them, are the voices of the writers whose poems have found a place in his [pg 059] book. Now, if we are to understand that the two ante-Reformation Churches stood out quite distinctly, one from the other, in open antagonism, like Jerusalem and Babylon, each having its own position more or less clearly defined, we should naturally expect to find in Dr. Trench's book the thoughts and words only of the Reformers before the Reformation, of the men, that is, who never bent the knee to Baal, but ever cherished in their hearts the true doctrine of salvation. If his own theory be worth anything, he must have recourse for his present purposes, to that one of the two Churches which alone has been perpetuated, victorious after conflict, in Protestantism. Where else shall he find sympathies that answer to those of Protestants? But he does not do so. For in the beginning of his preface he tells us that he has not admitted each and all of the works of the authors whose productions he inserts. He tells us that he has carefully excluded from his collection “all hymns which in any way imply the Romish doctrine of transubstantiation”, or, “which involve any creature-worship, or speak of the Mother of our Lord in any other language than that which Scripture has sanctioned, and our Church adopted”, or which “ask of the suffrages of the Saints”? These certainly are not the doctrines which have been perpetuated in Protestantism.
His own practice, therefore, is inconsistent with his theory, if that theory means to assert the existence of two Churches in the middle age, distinctly antagonistic, one to the other.
The only escape from this tangle is to reply, that Dr. Trench, although he may find two Churches in the bosom of the middle-age Church, does not, however, place between them a separation so sharp as to suppose the Church of good absolutely without evil, nor the Church of evil altogether destitute of good. In each there is good and some mixture of evil: error relieved by a vein of truth. His favourite authors, by whose labours he wishes to make his readers profit, are, in this last hypothesis, men who are subject to the influence of both Churches; men who belong partly to each in turn, whose doctrines are a pitiable admixture of truth with falsehood—who, in one word, are visited both by “airs from Heaven and blasts from Hell”. At times they say what all, even Protestants, may treasure up in their hearts, to live on and love; at times, again, they are made to utter what all should reject and condemn, as so many snares for unwary feet. We shall say nothing of the difficulty the mind feels in accepting such a description of the position of these writers, nor of the task we have to persuade ourselves that those who teach belief in deadly heresies to be essential to salvation, can be, at the same time, the chosen tabernacles wherein the pure spirit of real piety can ever take up its abode. Such was not [pg 060] the feeling of the ancient Church. We ask, instead, who are the men upon whose writings Dr. Trench would sit in judgment, “to sunder between the holy and profane”, to distinguish between the errors and the truth, to decide what we are “to take warning from and to shun, what to live upon and love”. With the exception of the two, Alard and Buttmann, all are men highly honoured by the whole Catholic world, and all, without exception, are praised for their excelling virtues by Dr. Trench himself. Among the twenty-three names we read with reverence those of Saint Ambrose, Saint Bonaventure, Venerable Bede, Saint Bernard, Saint Peter Damian, Thomas a-Kempis, Peter the Venerable, Jacopone, and others of great reputation for sanctity and learning. These are the men whose writings Dr. Trench is to parcel out into two portions; this to be venerated as sacred, that to be condemned as profane. It needs great faith in the censor, to accept readily his decision in such a case. What test does he undertake to apply? what criterion is to influence his choice? Why does he cast away the poems which celebrate St. Peter as Prince of the Apostles, and approve of those that extol St. Paul? Why should he style Adam of St. Victor's hymn on the Blessed Virgin an exaggeration, and quote as edifying his Laus S. Scripturae? Why are St. Bonaventure's pieces in honour of Mary visited with censure, and his lines In Passione Domini made the theme of praise? Dr. Trench gives us his reasons very plainly. “If our position mean anything”, says he (page x.), “we are bound to believe that to us, having the Word and the Spirit, the power has been given to distinguish things which differ.... It is our duty to believe that to us, that to each generation which humbly and earnestly seeks, will be given that enlightening spirit, by whose aid it shall be enabled to read aright the past realizations of God's divine idea in the wise and historic Church of successive ages, and to distinguish the human imperfections, blemishes, and errors, from the divine truth which they obscured and overlaid, but which they could not destroy, being, one day, rather to be destroyed by it”. That is to say, we, as Protestants, in virtue of our position as such, are able by the light of the Holy Spirit to discern true from false doctrine, the fruits of the good Church from the fruits of the evil Church. This enlightening Spirit will be given to each generation which humbly and earnestly seeks it. But, we ask, what are we to believe concerning the working of the same enlightening Spirit in the hearts of the holy men whose exquisitely devotional writings Dr. Trench sets before us? Were they men of humility and earnestness? If they were not, Dr. Trench's book appears under false colours, and is not a book of edification. And if they were, as they certainly were, who is Dr. Trench [pg 061] that he should take it on himself to condemn those who enjoyed the very same light which he claims for himself? And why should we not then rather believe that as these holy men had, on his own showing, the spirit of God, Dr. Trench, in condemning their doctrine does in truth condemn what is the doctrine of the Church of the Holy Spirit.
The theory is therefore as inconsistent as on historical grounds it is false. Such as it is, however, the conclusions we may draw from it are of great importance.
1. Dr. Trench declares that, both by omitting and by thinning, he has carefully removed from his selection, all doctrine implying transubstantiation, the cultus of the Blessed Virgin, the invocation of saints, and the veneration of the cross. Now, as the great bulk of the poems he publishes belong to the middle ages, strictly so called, it follows, on Dr. Trench's authority, that these doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church were held long before the Reformation, and that the Church was already in possession when Luther came.
2. Since he tells us (page vi) that he has counted inadmissible poems which breathe a spirit foreign to that tone of piety which the English Church desires to cherish in her children, it follows that the spirit of piety in the Church of old is not the same as that in the present Church of England. Now in such cases the presumption is against novelty.
3. Dr. Trench (page vii) reminds his readers that it is unfair to try the theological language of the middle ages by the greater strictness and accuracy rendered necessary by the struggle, of the Reformation. A man who holds a doctrine implicitly and in a confused manner, is likely to use words which he would correct if the doctrine were put before him in accurate form. This is a sound principle, and one constantly employed by Catholic theologians, when they have to deal with an objection urged by Protestants from some obscure or equivocal passage of a Father. It is satisfactory to be able for the future to claim for its use the high authority of Dr. Trench.
4. A special assistance of the Holy Spirit is claimed for all those who humbly and earnestly invoke him. This assistance is to enable those blessed with it to distinguish between error and divine truth. Is this happy privilege to be exercised either independently, without the direction of the ministers of the Church, or is it one of the graces peculiar to the pastoral office? In the former case, every fanatical sectary may judge in matters of religion as securely as if he had the whole world on his side. In the latter case, it would be interesting to know how much does this privilege differ from the infallibility claimed by the Catholic Church.
5. Finally, the contradictions inherent to the whole theory are most clearly to be seen in the following passage about the noble lines which Hildebert, Archbishop of Tours, in the beginning of the twelfth century, places on the lip of the city of Rome:
“I have not inserted these lines”, says Dr. Trench, “in the body of this collection, lest I might seem to claim for them that entire sympathy which I am very far from doing. Yet, believing as we may, and, to give any meaning to a large period of Church history, we must, that Papal Rome of the middle ages had a work of God to accomplish for the taming of a violent and brutal world, in the midst of which she often lifted up the only voice which was anywhere heard in behalf of righteousness and truth—all of which we may believe, with the fullest sense that her dominion was an unrighteous usurpation, however overruled for good to Christendom, which could then take no higher blessing—believing this, we may freely admire these lines, so nobly telling of that true strength of spiritual power, which may be perfected in the utmost weakness of all other power. It is the city of Rome which speaks: