"He saw no danger in the great influence which Methodism has acquired over the colored people, did he?"
"No; and he forgot to mention that the Catholic Church is almost the only one in America which has never been tainted by the intrusion of politics. Well, I was going on to say that, with all Mr. Mumford's prejudices and absurdities, he had the honesty to acknowledge that the Catholic Church is really entitled to the gratitude of mankind, and declared that he was glad it had secured some foothold in America, 'to act as a restraint upon the intolerance of the Protestant churches.'"
"I am afraid that you rather exaggerate the importance of admissions like these. They are so often made merely for rhetorical effect! They are little patches of light artfully thrown into the picture to heighten the effect of the shadows."
"I know that I don't refer to them as proofs of a willingness to examine the nature and grounds of Catholic doctrine, though I believe that there is much more of such willingness than there used to be, but as an evidence that a spirit of fairness and good-breeding is beginning to prevail in religious controversy; and from that spirit I cannot but expect good results."
"So far I have no doubt you are right; and one of the good results, it seems to me, must be the gradual extinction (or possibly the reform) of denominational newspapers of the old bludgeon-school. The Observer must go out of fashion whenever reason comes in. There will be no room for the religious brawlers when those who differ in creed learn to talk over their differences in a common-sense way. Don't you think there is a change in the tone of the press already?"
"The secular press certainly has improved wonderfully in its treatment of Catholics. About the religious periodicals I am not so sure: some of them are tamer than they were formerly, but the old stand-bys lash their tails as furiously as ever, and the less they are heeded the louder they roar. But that is only natural. You see the same thing at the theatres. When a play ceases to draw very well, the single combats become doubly fierce and the red-fire is frequent. The violence of the denominational organs must not be taken as an evidence of the sentiment of society. If they really led the opinions of their readers, we should have an anti-Catholic crusade every year. I wonder if you have noticed, however, that some of the Protestant religious papers which have usually been mild in their tone have been roused of late to an unaccustomed bitterness against us?"
"Yes, and I hardly know how to account for it."
"I think the explanation is this. The calm discussion of Catholic questions, as we said before, must logically lead to the discovery of Catholic truth. There are Protestant writers who see this and do not want to see it. They perceive whither the current is bearing them, and they struggle against it. They rail at the church by way of protest against the growth of an unwelcome, dimly foreseen conviction, as an encouragement to their tottering unbelief, just as boys whistle to keep up their courage. Have you ever seen a dying sinner try to fight off death? It is in some such hopeless effort as his that The Liberal Christian and a few other journals are now engaged. I do not say that they understand this themselves. I do not charge them with absolutely resisting the progress of conviction, or, to speak more exactly, the resistance is instinctive rather than voluntary; but they feel or suspect, perhaps without fully comprehending, that, if they keep on as they are going, they must come pretty soon to the Catholic Church, and that provokes them. The Liberal Christian, you know, is edited by Dr. Bellows, an accomplished gentleman, who was thought some years ago to exhibit a decided leaning toward the church. I am not prepared to say whether this supposition was correct or not; but it is certain that he saw more clearly and exposed more boldly the inherent defects and logical tendencies of Protestantism than any other Protestant I can remember, and in one of his published sermons he declared that Unitarians (his own sect) had more sympathy with Catholicism than with any other form of religion. It might seem strange to find him among the foremost revilers of that very Catholicism; but my theory explains it. The hostility which glistens in his letters and runs mad, sometimes, in the miscellaneous columns of his paper, is the revolt of his Protestantism against the progress of unwelcome ideas—an effort of his unregenerate nature, so to speak, to throw off something which does not agree with it. Ah! how many men have trod in the same path he is now following, and have been led by it to the bitter waters of disappointment! He saw the fatal gulf into which the Protestant bodies were plunging. He felt that hunger of the spirit which nothing but the church of God ever satisfies. He raised a cry for help, and when he found that there was no help except from the Holy Catholic Church, he turned his back upon her, and bound himself down once more with the narrow bonds of what is called Unitarian 'liberalism.' And now, of course, he misses no opportunity of declaring his detestation of the succor which he has refused. He has failed in his aspirations after a mock church, and naturally he vents his disappointment on the real one. He fancies that he is moved by principle, when he is really instigated by pique. He imagines that he is an earnest, honest seeker after an answer to what he well terms 'the dumb wants of the religious times,' when he is—but I have no business to judge his motives. That is God's affair. We must presume that he is courageous and sincere, and that whenever he finds the right road he will boldly walk in it. Nine years ago, Dr. Bellows delivered an address before the alumni of the Harvard Divinity School, on 'The Suspense of Faith,' which was generally supposed to indicate his wish to engraft a ritual and a priesthood upon the Unitarian denomination, bringing it perhaps nearer to Episcopalianism than to any other system of worship. There was no such thought in his mind, I am sure; though his sentiments, had they been acted upon, might have led many men through Episcopalianism into the Catholic Church. I will not weary you with the whole of it; but let me read a few lines which have a special application to what we have been saying. He is trying to account for the fact that Unitarianism is in a posture of pause and self-distrust and he says: 'If, with logical desperation, we ultimate the tendencies of Protestantism, and allow even the malice of its enemies to flash light upon their direction, we may see that the sufficiency of the Scriptures turns out to be the self-sufficiency of man, and the right of private judgment an absolute independence of Bible or church. No creed but the Scriptures, practically abolishes all Scriptures but those on the human heart; nothing between a man's conscience and his God, vacates the church; and with the church, the Holy Ghost, whose function is usurped by private reason: the church lapses into what are called religious institutions, these into Congregationalism, and Congregationalism into individualism—and the logical end is the abandonment of the church as an independent institution, the denial of Christianity as a supernatural revelation, and the extinction of worship as a separate interest. There is no pretence that Protestantism, as a body, has reached this, or intends this, or would not honestly and earnestly repudiate it; but that its most logical product is at this point, it is not easy to deny. Nay, that these are the tendencies of Protestantism is very apparent.' When he comes to speak of Unitarianism as the representative and most logical exponent of Protestantism, he expresses himself in a still more remarkable way. Religion, he thinks, like everything else in the world, has been constantly making progress, and Unitarianism has always been in the van. Now this progress seemed to have reached its limit; there is a pause, a partial recoil, in some cases a turning back to the formalism and ritual worship of Rome, in others a headlong rush into the abyss of pure rationalism. In fact, Dr. Bellows believes that to create an equilibrium in the relations between God and man, two opposing forces are in operation—a centrifugal force, which drives man away from submission to divine authority, that he may develop his own liberty and functions of the will, and a centripetal force, which leads him to worship and obedience. These are represented respectively by Protestantism and Catholicism, and he seems to think them destined to alternate—perhaps for all time, though about this his meaning is not very clear. 'Is it not plain,' he says, 'that, as Protestants of the Protestants, we are at the apogee of our orbit; that in us the centrifugal epoch of humanity has, for this swing of the pendulum at least, reached its bound? For one cycle we have come, I think, nearly to the end of our self-directing, self-asserting, self-developing, self-culturing faculties; to the end of our honest interest in this necessary alternate movement.'"
"That means, if it means anything that Protestantism has done its work, at least for the present age; that it has accomplished all it can; and there is nothing left for man but a return to the centripetal force, or to the Catholic Church."
"Exactly: that would be the logical complement of the position he assumed in the curious discourse from which I have been quoting; but the misery is that he had not the courage to be logical. Ah! how well I remember the impression produced at the time by that sad, sad cry of weariness and disappointment which went up from his pulpit when he perceived that the toil, and speculation, and uneasiness of years had brought him to no goal; that he had developed man's faculties without finding a use for them; that he had achieved an intellectual freedom without knowing what to do with it; that, as he well expressed it himself, 'there was no more road in the direction he had been going.' Many, as we have seen, when they reached that point on their journey whence this whole dismal prospect was visible, turned back to the church which their fathers had forsaken, and there found peace; and Dr. Bellows had stated so boldly the miseries of his own situation that it was no wonder people thought he too would follow that course. But he set himself about finding a new road, imagining a new church which was to arise at no distant day, and combine the most conservative of liturgies with the most radical of creeds. It was to be constituted on strictly centripetal principles. Speculation having proved empty, worship was to be essayed as a change. Doubt being but sorry fare for a hungry soul, there was to be a good deal of faith, and preaching not being a gift of all men, place was to be made for prayer. What that church was to be, how it was to arise, and when it was to make its appearance, he did not pretend to say. But it must come soon, because 'the yearning for a settled and externalized faith' was too strong to be left unsatisfied. It was to be, I must suppose, a mingling of the revelations of our Saviour with the dreams of Luther, Calvin, Fox, and Swedenborg; because, as Dr. Bellows says in one of his lectures, 'the religious man who has no vacillations in his views, who is not sometimes inclined to Calvinism, sometimes to Rationalism, sometimes to Catholicism, sometimes to Quakerism, has an imperfect activity, a dull imagination, and a timid love of truth; for all these faiths have embodied great and interesting spiritual facts which the free and earnest explorer will encounter in his own experience, and find more vividly portrayed in the history of these sects than in himself.' It was to possess a fixed creed, but nobody was expected to believe in it, for 'inconsistencies of opinion' are to be expected of everybody, and doubt, fear, and scepticism are actually desirable, provided they are 'the work of one's own mental and spiritual activity, and not of mere passive acquiescence in the forces that one encounters from without.' It was to be a true church, of course, yet a false church also; because Dr. Bellows declares that 'truth is too large to be surrounded by any one man or any one party,' and there are always two great parties in religion as there are in politics, 'and each has part of the truth in its keeping;' so that, of course, neither can be wholly right. He wanted his church to be a historical church, for Christianity is a historical religion, and 'a faith stripped of historic reality, disunited from its original facts and persons, does not promise to live and work in the human heart and life.' He seemed to have forgotten that history is the growth of time, and cannot be conferred upon a new-born infant. The future church must have rites and ceremonies, for without them religion hardly 'touches our daily habits and ordinary career,' and is, like Unitarianism, 'an unhoused, unnatural, and disembodied faith.' It must be a visible church, yet without a priesthood; a divinely instituted church, yet without authority; receiving its doctrines by divine revelations, yet only true in part; eternal, yet changeable, I am not surprised that Dr. Bellows has not yet found it."