Nor has Mr. Lecky fairly represented the doctrine of eternal punishment in itself. To contemplate the infliction of pain naturally produces, he says, a callousness and hardness of feeling. This statement embodies only a half truth, and the reasoning founded on it is in the highest degree fallacious. When the Catholics of ancient times contemplated the anguish of the lost, the habits which they endeavoured to form were habits of horror for the sin which entailed that anguish. There is a great difference between thus actively contemplating suffering, and beholding it merely in a passive manner, and with a view to some other end. The surgical operator, the public executioner, the soldier, who look at it in this latter light, may and do in time become hardened and indifferent. But it is far otherwise in the former case; and there is a great difference between reflecting on the pains of others, and reflecting on the pains which may one day be our own. It is reasonable and natural to suppose, and is found to be in reality the case, that one who contemplates the sufferings of others merely and purely as of others, and habitually avoids referring them in any way to himself, will in the end become hard and cruel. But the very essence of sympathy consists in an unconscious association of ourselves with others in their sufferings. The Calvinist, therefore, the believer in "assurance," who fancies himself to be one of the elect, and from his security safely thinks of all the torments of the reprobate as things in which it would be sinful for him even for a moment to imagine that he can have part, may but grow callous at the thought of hell—may even delight to think of it, and revel in the representation of the anguish there. But such a spirit is altogether opposed to the whole bent of Catholic meditation on that subject. The Catholic, when he meditates on these torments, thinks of them as of others, only that the thought may more vividly come home to himself; he thinks of them as of what he may one day have to endure. And again, the thought of our own personal suffering can make us hard and firm only when we consider it as a thing not to be avoided, but to be braved. It is almost a truism to say, that those men are of all the most soft and timid, who are continually representing to themselves means of escape from vividly imagined dangers. And no Catholic would meditate on these torments that he might nerve himself to brave them, but that he might seek means to avoid them. Catholics, of course, accept, on the ground of God's Word, that awful doctrine of our faith which we are now contemplating. So far as they argue for it from reason at all, they say that this doctrine is the necessary sanction of the moral law; and the force of that argument will be felt by none more strongly than by Catholics themselves, who, from holding the existence both of a future temporal and of a future eternal punishment for sin, are better able to judge what effects would be likely to be produced, if hell were, in the common teaching, resolved into a kind of purgatory. But it must never be forgotten that in the Catholic religion the doctrine of eternal punishment, is taught under certain accompanying conditions, which intimately affect its practical bearing. The first of these conditions is the doctrine of purgatory, of which M. Comte thus speaks:
Il serait facile de reconnaître que l'institution, si amèrement critiquée, du purgatoire fut, au contraire, très-heureusement introduite, dans la pratique sociale du Catholicisme, à titre d'indispensable correctif fondamental de l'eternité des peines futures; oar, autrement, cette éternité, sans laquelle les prescriptions religieuses ne pouvaient être efficaces, eût évidemment déterminé souvent ou un relâchement funeste, ou un effroyable désespoir, égalemeut dangereux l'un et l'autre pour l'individu et pour la société, et entre lesquels le génie Catholique est parvenu à organiser cette ingénieuse issue, qui permettait de graduer immédiatement, avec une scrupuleuse précision, l'application effective du procédé religieux aux convenances de chaque cas réel. [Footnote 28]
[Footnote 28: Philosophie Positive, vol. v. p. 269 (Ed. 1864).]
In reading this quotation, it must be remembered that M. Comte was not a Catholic, and regarded the Catholic Church as merely a human institution. But, the truths to which that unhappy thinker here draws attention, are so evident, that they hardly require proof. If the sole future punishment of sin be believed to be an eternal punishment, such as is that of hell, it is not difficult to perceive what effects will follow. The timid, and those who are naturally religiously minded, will form a gloomy and austere notion of religion, which will produce some of the effects noted by Mr. Lecky, and in the end, by provoking a necessary reaction, work the destruction of all religion whatever. Those, on the contrary, who are irreligiously inclined, will be still further moved to give up all ideas of religion as impracticable, and will be disgusted by its tone and spirit; while the doctrine of eternal punishment will lose its force by being applied to light and trivial offences.
But we must also notice another condition of the realization of this doctrine; which is provided in the Catholic system; and which, like that of purgatory, has been rather neglected by Protestantism. It has been noticed by some writers that the sacramental system of the church provides an admirable safeguard, and one in an especial manner necessary in the middle ages, against outbreaks of fanaticism. According to the teaching of the Catholic Church, the sacraments are the great means, channels, and conditions of grace. And this produces a system and an order, a definite method of procedure in the spiritual life, which, assisted by the ascetical and mystical theology so minutely cultivated, abundantly directs enthusiasm and represses fanaticism. And we do not doubt that if Protestantism, with its doctrine of private judgment and private direction, had been the form of Christianity existing in the middle ages, Christianity would have sunk into a condition of which paganism and the Gnostic heresies alone afford a parallel. But this sacramental system has also another, though a co-ordinate effect. Grace is insensible and unfelt, to confound it with the natural religious feelings and emotions is to make religion no longer a discipline and a duty, but a sentiment. And because it is unfelt, it is necessary that it should ordinarily be given through some external and sensible rite, in order to ward off undue and pernicious doubt and anxiety. Now, according to Catholic teaching, while, on the one hand, it is impossible for any one to know with absolute certainty what is his spiritual state before God; on the other hand, the doctrine of confession and absolution supplies all with a means of knowing, with a greater of less amount of probability, what their real condition is. On the morally beneficial tendency of the first part of this teaching it is unnecessary to dilate, and any scrupulosity or vain terror which, if it stood alone, it might excite, is amply provided against by the second. And thus, through the correlative doctrines of purgatory, of the consequent distinction between mortal and venial sins, of confession and absolution, and by means of its moral theology, Catholicism provides that the doctrine of eternal punishment shall press with greater or less force, exactly as its influence is more or less required. It does not leave the believer to the diseased imaginations of his own mind, but provides an external code to which he must submit, and an external direction by which he will be guided. It provides a means by which he may know whether he is or is not in a state of sin, and a definite remedy whereby he may extricate himself from it; while it holds out a hope of salvation to all, and teaches that no man ever existed whose case was so desperate that he could not, if he co-operated with grace, as he has the power of co-operating, look for pardon. With the heretical sects the case is widely different. The very name of Calvinism calls up associations on which it would be painful to dwell. The conjunction of the doctrines of eternal punishment and necessitarianism must always, even where these doctrines are but to a very inadequate extent realized, produce a type of religious thought and feeling as repulsive as it is degrading. Of this it would be superfluous to speak. But Protestantism repudiates the practice of confession and the doctrine of absolution. Then, indeed, wherever the eternity of punishment was realized, it produced a diseased and unhealthy state of mind. Anxiety, doubt, terror, were necessarily the predominating feelings in the minds of men; an anxiety which could be calmed no longer now that there was no confessional, and a doubt which admitted of no direction now that each man had to be almost entirely his own counsellor, while all were faltering and divided as to the "direction of the ways of life." The "doctrine of final assurance" was, indeed, put forward to remedy the evil. But that doctrine only served to aggravate it. For to one class of minds it only supplied a new cause of terror; and to another it gave a very fruitful occasion of cultivating a disposition perhaps the most detestably proud, callous, and selfish, which has ever appeared among mankind.
We must not, however, be supposed to deny that, through causes the character of which may partially be gathered from the preceding remarks, the doctrine of eternal punishment was very prominent in the middle ages. And how, it will be asked, did the church of those ages meet this extraordinary prominence? To have met it by merely insisting on the blessedness of heaven, would obviously have been most inadequate. Our natural constitution, and the circumstances of our life here, are such that our ideas of happiness, and especially of permanent happiness, are, as it has often been urged, far less definite and far less acute than our ideas of pain; and for this reason it has been wisely brought about that what has been made known to us of the blessedness of heaven is far less definite and complete, than is what we know of the punishment of the wicked. But for this very reason, the prominence of the doctrine of their eternal punishment could not be efficaciously met by insisting on this blessedness. But there is another set of ideas and feelings directly opposed to the despair and unmitigated fear which would be produced by the sole contemplation of the torments of the lost; and it is a set of ideas and feelings which nowhere find so natural a home as in Catholicism. From the manner in which the doctrine of the Incarnation is dwelt on in the Catholic system, and from the consequently almost human character which is given to the love of God and to the contemplation of the divine perfections as set forth in Christ, there results an ardor, an intensity, an active continuity of that love, which is simply incomprehensible to those who are external to the machinery of the Catholic Church. If it be asked, then, how did the church of those times meet the extraordinary, development of the doctrine we have been considering, the answer is patent to the most superficial reader of the mediaeval saints and theologians. They met it by an, at least, equal development of the doctrine of divine love. St. Bernard, Hugo of St. Victor, St. Anselm, all especially breathe in their works this sweet and devout spirit. The writings of St. Bernard, and those passages of such exquisitely tender devotion which occur in the writings of St. Augustine, became, in particular, the texts on which succeeding writers expanded and dilated. A spirit of meekness and tenderness of devotion, an intense and fervid love of God, are the themes on which they peculiarly delight to dwell, and the virtues on which they peculiarly love to insist. It was this age that produced the Imitation; toward the close of it appeared the Paradisus Animae: and whoever was the actual author of the former work, it possesses remarkable affinity with the spirit and even the style of Gerson. Nor was this temper of mind confined to purely mystical writers. The writings of St. Francis of Assisi, of St. Bridget, St. Catherine of Sienna, and others, attest, indeed, that the type of sanctity was, in some sense, changing under its influence; but it passed on to the great theological teachers of the age. St. Thomas of Aquino, the best and greatest of them all, lived and struggled in the very midst of the conflict with infidelity which was then agitating the church, and yet even he found time to write a number of short spiritual treatises which display the most tender and the most delicate devotion. This is especially seen in his book De Beatitudine. Richard of St. Victor wrote a work De Gradibus Violentae Charitatis, "On the degrees of violent charity." St. Bonaventure received the name of "The Seraphic Doctor" from the ardor of his piety; the titles of a few of his works—De Septem Itineribus AEternitatis, Stimulus Amoris, Amatorium, Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum—will be sufficient to show its character. The tender and loving spirit which those great doctors manifested in their devotion, broke out also in their correspondence with their friends, as may be perceived even from the extracts from the letters and sermons of certain of them which the Count de Montalembert has inserted in his Monks of the West. Other momenta of a more general nature show the operation of the same tendency. For the first time detailed lives of our blessed Lord came into general circulation. Devotion to the passion assumed a far more prominent position than before; of the spirit which animated it we have a most touching example in the little book attributed to St. Juliana of Norwich. The Canticle of Canticles suddenly took a place in the affections of the pious, which even in the primitive church it had never known. St. Bernard composed on it his celebrated Sermones super Cantica, St. Bonaventure and Richard of St. Victor both wrote commentaries on it; St. Thomas has left us two, and it was while dictating the second of these that he passed out of this world, celebrating the blessedness of divine love. Nor can we altogether omit to notice three devotions, two of which certainly exercised a very considerable influence. In an age in which the spirit of love and devotion to our blessed Lord had assumed such large proportions, in which the doctrine of the Incarnation was for the first time completely treated in a scientific manner, and in which the subject of original sin was more profoundly investigated, and the questions concerning the Immaculate Conception consequently began to be cleared up and to assume a definite form and coherence, it was natural that a great devotion should manifest itself to our Blessed Lady. And of the tendency and the effects of this devotion Mr. Lecky has himself spoken. The character of the devotion to St. Joseph, also, is sufficiently well known, and it was first, we believe, treated at length by Albertus Magnus. Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament was to an indefinite extent stimulated by the institution of the Feast of Corpus Christi; and it, of a truth, is a devotion which of all others breathes a spirit of tenderness and of love.
We can now only make a few concluding remarks. We have already given a general estimate of the work, on a few points of which we have here touched; for we considered it better to speak of two or three connected subjects more fully, than to distract ourselves and our readers by flying comments on the many and very diverse subjects there treated. We have only explicitly to add what we have before implied, that we consider it a very dangerous book. It is all the more dangerous, because Mr. Lecky is not a furious fanatic; because of his spurious candor; because of his partial admissions; because of his engaging style. And in an age like the present, when the dogmatic principle is so bitterly attacked by those without, and sits so lightly on the necks even of believers, it is exceedingly dangerous. For, as was to be expected, it sets the dogmatic principle utterly at defiance, and from beginning to end is a continued protest against it. Mr. Lecky's idea of education, and his theory of the manner of formation of religious opinions, are alike thoroughly opposed to it. In education he would have the bare principles of morality only, as far as possible, inculcated; dogma, as far as possible, excluded; and if any amount of dogmatic teaching is unavoidably admitted, it is to be taught only so as to rest as lightly as possible on the mind, and with the proviso that the opinions then taught will have to be reconsidered in after life. With respect to the formation of religious opinions, his book teaches a kind of Hegelianism. Society is continually changing, and the best thing we can do is to follow the most advanced minds in society. There is an everlasting process, in which we can never be sure that we have definitely attained to the truth. The end of this, of course, is to make all opinions uncertain. We may know what we like best, or what the tendencies of society incline it and us to believe; but we can never, as to religious opinions, know what is objectively true.
It is not very difficult to discover what is the nature of this process which is called rationalism. In former times the religious spirit predominated over the secular; but from a variety of causes, and in particular on account of the immense development of secular science since the time of Bacon and Descartes, the secular scientific spirit has since predominated over the religious. And rationalism is merely one of the results of this predominance; a consequence of the application to religious subjects of secular habits of thought. This may manifest itself, now in one way, now in another; in the denial now of transubstantiation, now of the doctrine of the Trinity; but its root and origin is the same: it tends (and this quite takes the romance out of it) to the elimination of the religious ideas, and it is strengthened by whatever strengthens what we have called the secular scientific, or weakens the religious, spirit. Hence that dislike of authority and that over-clouding of the moral character of religious truth; hence that distaste for the miraculous and the mysterious, and that tendency to put into the background, and even to deny, the doctrine of grace; and if the internal wants of those who have just "escaped from the wilderness of Christianity, and still have some of the thorns and brambles sticking to their clothes," make it necessary that something should be substituted for that which is being taken away—a baseless and often unreal sentimentalism is substituted for honest religious duty and earnest devotion. It is only too much to be feared that the world will educate itself out of this also; and that, in the case of those who refuse submission to the Catholic Church, the secular spirit will more and more grow toward its full ascendancy, and therefore toward a total extinction of the already weakened religious ideas.