Wonders will never cease. A few years since, the present pope, willing to do honor to a great nation, conferred on one of its subjects the highest dignity in his gift. The new cardinal was a man honored alike in England and America for his learning and ability, as well as for his never departing from the strict line of his priestly and episcopal functions. One would have supposed that the English government and people would have felt flattered, and that the English sovereign, who is queen not only of certain Protestant Englishmen, but of a mass of Catholic subjects who cannot number much less than twenty millions, would, while thanking his holiness, have hinted that her twenty millions should have more than one representative in the Sacred College. Instead of this sensible course, a period of insanity ensued—England frothed, England foamed, England grew rabid.
To judge by this book, England is actually becoming sane. The author seems to feel that England is slighted because she has no cardinal. "There has recently been a creation of cardinals, and, though some disappointment may have been caused by the omission of an eminent English name from those so honored, the extraordinary claims of one of the most active of Roman Catholic prelates are not likely to be overlooked by so discriminating a pontiff as Pio Nono."
Mr. Williams here, in two goodly octavos, gives the lives of the English cardinals, from Robert le Poule to Wolsey, as he conceives it; and a rapid examination of the whole, and careful scrutiny of portions, leads us to the judgment that seldom has a work been attempted by a man so utterly unfitted for the task. As though his proper task did not afford him a field sufficiently large, he gives an introduction of eighty pages on the Papacy, the Anglo-Saxon Church, and the Anglo-Norman Church. The whole history of the church down to the Reformation is thus treated of, and to the mighty undertaking he brings only the usual superficial reading of our time, with a more than ordinary amount of religious flippancy, and false and prejudiced views of Catholic dogma, practice, polity, and life. There is not a silly slander against the church that he does not adopt and give, with all the gravity imaginable, as undisputed fact, not even deigning to quote vaguely any of his second-hand authorities or modern treatises, while, to make a parade of his learning, he gives us a four-line note in Greek to support his opinion as to a topographical question as immaterial to the history of the English cardinals as a discussion on the Zulu language would be. As instances of his utter unfitness, we might refer to his treatment of such points as St. Gregory VII., Pope Joan, and the institution of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.
What his own religious stand-point may be is not easily decided. He lays down (p. 146) that Christ's divinity is his humanity; that the idea of the Good Shepherd, put forward by our Lord and ever deemed so typical of him, was of pagan origin, (p. 8,) and, from the note on the same page, that the church, as founded by Christ, was a grand failure. He maintains, too, that the Christianity, as introduced into England, was and is only the old paganism, the names of the days of the week settling the question, (p. 24.) On one point only he seems clear and positive, and this is, that on general principles popes must always be wrong, and that to deny anything they lay down must be pre-eminently right.
As a specimen of his style, take the following: "The Good Shepherd was the recognized emblem of the divine Founder of their religion, but as the community enlarged it required a human director." We are left in doubt whether this community of primitive Christians required this human director as a new emblem, or a new founder, or a new religion. He proceeds: "He who by his superior sanctity gained authority as well as admiration was invested with that character. His flock became a church, and he undertook its spiritual management in the capacity of presbyter." This is a very pretty fable, but he fails to give us any authority. An expression of our Lord shows that church authority began at the other end: "Non vos me elegistis; sed ego elegi vos, et posui vos ut eatis," "You did not elect me, (your God and Redeemer,) but I picked you out and set you up to go and teach." And they did go and did teach, and such as listened to their teaching and became their disciples became Christians with human directors from the outset.
During the period covered properly by these volumes, from the beginning of the twelfth to that of the fifteenth centuries, England had comparatively few cardinals; English kings seemed to have cared little to exercise any influence on papal councils, and never sought to obtain for an English prince an honor given to members of many reigning families. The English cardinals whose names at once suggest themselves are Cardinal Nicholas Breakspear, (subsequently Pope Adrian IV.,) Cardinal Stephen Langton, Cardinal Beaufort, and Cardinal Wolsey. Of all except the first, the general idea in men's minds is drawn less from history than from Shakespeare. Of these especially, really well-written lives, with sketches of the less known and less important English cardinals, would indeed be a valuable addition; but such Mr. Williams's book certainly is not.
In beginning his life of Adrian IV., he quotes Matthew of Paris, who makes him son of Robert de Camera, said by William of Newburgh to have been a poor scholar; then cites Camden's statement that he was born at Langley, near St. Alban's; but he slips in a charge, hunted up in the filth of the wretched Bale, that he was illegitimate; as though the assertion of such a man, in the most virulent stage of the Reformation abuse, could be authority as to a fact of a period so long past. Even Fuller, as he admits, with all his readiness to belittle the papacy, only "insinuates that he was an illegitimate son." Yet Mr. Williams, on the assertion of a Bale and the insinuation of a Fuller, says, "There is reason to believe that he was the natural son of a priest," and on this supposition he proceeds to erect his whole superstructure.
From such a writer no book can emanate that any man can read who does not wilfully wish to be misled.