The Progress of the Century

by Unknown

The Catholic Church had come out to America in evil companionship with Spanish conquest. Together with the Spanish colonies she decayed, and her history during the past century in South America appears to have been that of a miserable decline which could add nothing to religious thought or history. Mexican liberalism, under the presidency of Juarez, cast off allegiance to her, and a priest dared not show himself in the dress of his order on the street. In French Canada the Catholic Church has reigned over a simple peasantry, her own from the beginning, thoroughly submissive to the priesthood, willing to give freely of its little store for the building of churches which tower over the hamlet, and sufficiently firm in its faith to throng to the fane of St. Anne Beaupré for miracles of healing. She has kept the habitant ignorant and unprogressive, but made him, after her rule, moral, insisting on early marriage, on remarriage, controlling his habits and amusements with an almost Puritan strictness. Probably French Canada has been as good and as happy as anything the Catholic Church had to show. The priesthood was of the Gallican school. It lived on good terms with the state, though in French Canada the state was a conqueror. From fear of New England Puritanism it had kept its people loyal to Great Britain during the Revolutionary war. From fear of French atheism it kept its people loyal to Great Britain during the war with France. It sang Te Deum for Trafalgar. So things were till the other day. But then came the Jesuit. He got back, from the subserviency of the Canadian politicians, the lands which he had lost after the conquest and the suppression of his Order. He supplanted the Gallicans, captured the hierarchy and prevailed over the great Sulpician Monastery in a struggle for the pastorate of Montreal. Other influences have of late been working for change in a direction neither Gallican nor Jesuit. Railroads have broken into the rural seclusion which favored the ascendency of the priest. Popular education has made some way. Newspapers have increased in number and are more read. The peasant has been growing restive under the burden of tithe and fabrique. Many of the habitants go into the Northern States of the Union for work, and return to their own country bringing with them republican ideas. Americans who have been shunning continental union from dread of French-Canadian popery may lay aside their fears.

It was a critical moment for the Catholic Church when she undertook to extend her domain to the American Republic. She had there to encounter a genius radically opposed to her own. The remnant of Catholic Maryland could do little to help her on her landing. But she came in force with the flood of Irish, and afterwards of South German, emigration. How far she has been successful in holding these her lieges would be a question difficult to decide, as it would involve a rather impalpable distinction between formal membership and zealous attachment. That she loses the zealous attachment of a great part of them in two or three generations, and that of the South Germans more quickly than that of the Irish, is what you are commonly told. Conversions of native Americans flying from the distractions of controversy to the repose of unity under authority there have been, but the number probably has not been large. In America, as in England, Ritualism has served Roman Catholicism as a tender. The critical question was how the religion of the Middle Ages could succeed in making itself at home under the roof of a democratic republic, the animating spirit of which was freedom, intellectual and spiritual as well as political, while the wit of its people was proverbially keen and their nationality was jealous as well as strong. The Papacy may call itself universal; in reality, it is Italian. During its sojourn in the French dominions the Popes were French; otherwise they have been Italians, native or domiciled, with the single exception of the Flemish Adrian VI., thrust into the chair of St. Peter by his pupil, Charles V., and by the Italians treated with contumely as an alien intruder. The great majority of the Cardinals always has been and still is Italian. National susceptibilities, therefore, were pretty sure to be aroused. In meeting the difficulties of her new situation Rome has shown a certain measure of pliability. She has not thrust the intolerance and obscurantism of the encyclical in the face of the disciples of Jefferson. She has paid all due homage to republican institutions, alien though they are to her own spirit, as her uniform action in European politics hitherto has proved. She has made little show of relics. She has abstained from miracles. The adoration of Mary and the saints, though of course fully maintained, appears to be less prominent. Compared with the mediæval cathedral and its multiplicity of side chapels, altars, and images, the cathedral at New York strikes one as the temple of a somewhat rationalized version. Against Puritan intolerance of Popery, if any remnant of it remained, the Catholic vote has been a sufficient safeguard. To part of the American people, especially to wealthy New York, the purple of the cardinalate and the pomp of Catholic worship have of late been by no means uncongenial. Yet between the spirit of American nationality, even in the most devout Catholic, and that of the Jesuit or the native liegeman of Rome, there cannot fail to be an opposition more or less acute, though it may be hidden as far as possible under a decent veil. This was seen in the case of Father Hecker, who had begun his career as a Socialist at Brook Farm, and, as a convert to Catholicism, founded a missionary order, the keynote of which was that “man’s life in the natural and secular order of things is marching towards freedom and personal independence.” This he described as a radical change, and a radical change it undoubtedly was from the sentiments and the system of Loyola. Condemnation by Rome could not fail to follow. Education has evidently been the scene of a subterranean conflict between the Jesuit and the more liberal, or, what is much the same thing, the more American section. The American and liberal head of a college has been deposed, under decorous pretences, it is true, but still deposed. Envoys have come out from Rome to arbitrate and compose. Some of the Catholic prelates, it appears, are very willing to show their liberality by co-operating in charitable work with the clergy of Protestant churches; others decline that association. One prelate, at all events, is an active politician and a conspicuous worshipper of the flag. Others strictly confine themselves to the ecclesiastical sphere. The laity in general seem to take little account of these variations, regarding them rather as personal peculiarities than as divisions of the Church. In the American or any other branch of the Roman Catholic Church freedom of inquiry and advance in thought are of course impossible. Nothing is possible but immobility, or reaction such as that of the Syllabus. Dr. Brownson, like Hecker, a convert, showed after his conversion something of the spirit of free inquiry belonging to his former state, though rather in the line of philosophy than in that of theology, properly speaking. But if he ever departed from orthodoxy he returned to it and made a perfectly edifying end.

In our survey of the religious world we are apt to leave out of sight a fourth part or more of Christendom. When the Anglican Bishops some years ago were challenged to say whether they were or were not in communion with the Eastern Church, that is with the Church of Russia, their answer was in effect that the Eastern Church was so remote that they could not tell. The Russian Church has been and is, in truth, remote from the life, the progress, the thought, and the controversies of the other members of Christendom. It has passed through no crisis, undergone no change analogous either to the Reformation or to the Roman Catholic reaction. Such conflicts or controversies as it has had have been ceremonial, not doctrinal or spiritual. Its great reformer, if he can be so called, Nicon, was a thorough-going ceremonialist and initiated no doctrinal innovation. The movement of its non-conformists, the Starovers, is not a counterpart of that of Protestant non-conformists, but a ritualistic reaction. It differs theologically from the Roman Catholic and the Anglican churches on the article in the Creed respecting the procession of the Holy Ghost. But its more practical grounds of difference probably are its abhorrence of images and of instrumental music and its practice of baptism by immersion. It is more sacramental than the Roman Catholic Church, administering the Eucharist as well as baptism to infants. While it abhors images, it adores pictures, provided they are archaic and not works of art, having an instinctive perception of the tendency of art to open the door for humanity. But it is less sacerdotal, compulsory marriage of the clergy, instead of celibacy, being its rule. Monastic it is, but its monachism is of the Eastern and eremitic type, not like the active monachism of the Franciscan, the Dominican, or the Jesuit. The Russian Church is intensely national, a character stamped upon it by the long struggle for independence against the Mohammedan Tartars. The head of the nation is the head of the Church. The Czar is Pope, as the Emperor practically was of that Byzantine Church of which the Russian Church is the daughter. He presides over the ecclesiastical councils. The abolition of the Patriarchate removed the last rival of his power. Peter the Great, when asked to restore the office, exclaimed, “I am your Patriarch,” flung down his hunting knife on the table, and said, “There is your Patriarch.”

Attempts have been made both by Gallicans and Anglicans to negotiate a union with the Eastern Church as a counterpoise to the Papacy. But they have been baffled by the intense nationality and antiquated ritualism rather than by the difference about an article in the Athanasian Creed. The upshot has been the intellectual immobility of the Russian Church, whose compartment in the theological history of the last century is a blank.

Such is the position in which at the close of the last century Christendom seems to have stood. Outside the pale of reason—of reason; we do not say of truth—were the Roman Catholic and Eastern Churches; the Roman Catholic Church resting on tradition, sacerdotal authority, and belief in present miracles; the Eastern Church supported by tradition, sacerdotal authority, nationality, and the power of the Czar. Scepticism had not eaten into a Church, preserved, like that of Russia, by its isolation and intellectual torpor; though some wild sects had been generated, and Nihilism, threatening with destruction the Church as well as the state, had appeared on the scene. Into the Roman Catholic Church scepticism had eaten deeply, and had detached from her, or was rapidly detaching, the intellect of educated nations, while she seemed resolutely to bid defiance to reason by her Syllabus, her declaration of Papal infallibility, her proclamation of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. Outside the pale of traditional authority and amenable to reason stood the Protestant Churches, urgently pressed by a question as to the sufficiency of the evidences of supernatural Christianity, above all, of its vital and fundamental doctrines: the Fall of Man, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection. The Anglican Church, a fabric of policy compounded of Catholicism without a Pope and Biblical Protestantism, was in the throes of a struggle between those two elements, largely antiquarian and of little importance compared with the vital question as to the evidences of revelation and the divinity of Christ.

In the Protestant churches generally æstheticism had prevailed. Even the most austere of them had introduced Church art, flowers, and tasteful music; a tendency which, with the increased craving for rhetorical novelty in the pulpit, seemed to show that the simple Word of God and the glad tidings of salvation were losing their power and that human attractions were needed to bring congregations together.

The last proposal had been that dogma, including the belief in the divinity of Christ, having become untenable should be abandoned, and that there should be formed a Christian Church with a ritual and sacraments, but without the Christian creed, though still looking up to Christ as its founder and teacher; an organization which, having no definite object and being held together only by individual fancy, would not be likely to last long.

The task now imposed on the liegemen of reason seems to be that of reviewing reverently, but freely and impartially, the evidences both of supernatural Christianity and of theism, frankly rejecting what is untenable, and if possible laying new and sounder foundations in its place. To estimate the gravity of the crisis we have only to consider to how great an extent our civilization has hitherto rested on religion. It may be found that after all our being is an insoluble mystery. If it is, we can only acquiesce and make the best of our present habitation; but who can say what the advance of knowledge may bring forth? Effort seems to be the law of our nature, and if continued it may lead to heights beyond our present ken. In any event, unless our inmost nature lies to us, to cling to the untenable is worse than useless; there can be no salvation for us but in truth.

Goldwin Smith.

THE END