This urgent call to a more intensely spiritual life will touch Christian hearts. But the pamphlet foresees an objection. Does not this development of our faculties and of our initiative under the divine influence expose us to some of the dangers of Protestantism? Do we not run the risk of the appearance of strong individualities who, filled with their own ideas, will think themselves more enlightened than the church, and so be seduced into disobeying her authority?
This eternal question of the relation of liberty to authority! Catholics say to Protestants: “Liberty without the control of the divine authority of the church leads insensibly to the destruction of Christianity.” Protestants reply: “Authority amongst you has stifled liberty. You have preserved the letter of the dogmas; but spiritual life perishes under your formalism.” We are not estimating the weight of these reproaches; we merely state the danger. The solution of the religious problem consists in avoiding either extreme.
No Catholic is at liberty to doubt that the Holy Spirit acts directly in the soul of every Christian, and at the same time acts in another way, indirect, but no less precious, by means of the authority of the church. Cardinal Manning has written two treatises on this subject, one on the external, the other on the internal, working of the Holy Spirit. It is these two workings which Father Hecker endeavors to connect in a lofty synthesis, and this is the main object of his work.
The first step of the synthesis is the statement that it is one and the same spirit which works, whether by external authority or by the interior impulse of the soul, and that these two workings, issuing from a common principle, must agree in their exercise and blend in their final result. The liberty of the soul should not dispute the authority of the church, because that authority is divine; the church, on the other hand, cannot oppress the liberty of the soul, because that liberty is also divine. The second step is to prove that the interior action of the Holy Spirit in the soul alone accomplishes our inward sanctification and our union with God. The authority of the church, and, generally, the external observances of religion, having only for their aim to second this interior action, authority and external practices occupy only a secondary and subordinate place in the Catholic system, contrary to the notion of Protestants, who accuse us of sacrificing Jesus Christ to the church, and of limiting Christianity to her external action. The completion of the synthesis is in the following: The individual has not received for his interior life the promise of infallibility; it is to Peter and his successors—that is to say, to the church—that Jesus Christ has conceded this privilege. The Christian thus cannot be sure of possessing the Holy Spirit, excepting in so far as he is in union with the infallible church, and that union is the certain sign that the union of the two workings of the Holy Spirit is realized in him.
We have no doubt that this theory is one of the most remarkable theological and philosophical conceptions of our age. Father Hecker is no innovator, but he seizes scattered ideas and gathers them into a sheaf of luminous rays; and this operation, which seems so simple, is the result of thirty years’ laborious meditation. One must read the pamphlet itself to appreciate its worth. The more we are versed in the problems which agitate contemporary religious thought, the better we shall understand the importance of what it inculcates.
We shall briefly dispose of the application the author makes of his synthesis. One most ingenious one is that Protestantism, by denying the authority of the church, obliges her to put forth all her strength in its defence.
If Luther had attacked liberty, the church would have taken another attitude, and would have defended with no less energy the free and direct action of the Holy Spirit in souls. It is this necessary defence of divine authority which gave birth to the Jesuit order, and which explains the special spirit which animates that society. If, however, the defence of assailed authority has been, for three centuries, the principal preoccupation of the church, she has not on that account neglected the interior life of souls. It is sufficient to name the spirituality, so deep and so intense, of S. Philip Neri, S. Francis of Sales, S. John of the Cross, and S. Teresa. Moreover, does not the support of authority contribute to the free life of souls by maintaining the infallible criterion for testing, in cases of doubt, the true inspirations of the Holy Spirit?
The church, in these days, resembles a nation which marches to its frontiers to repel the invasion of the foreigner and protect its national life; its victory secured, it recalls its forces to the centre, to continue with security and ardor the development of that same life.
According to Father Hecker, the church was in the last extremity of peril. He sees in the proclamation of the infallibility of the Pope the completion of the development of authority provoked by the Reformation, and believes that nothing now remains but its application.
If, since the XVIth century, external action has predominated in the church, without, however, ever becoming exclusive, so now the internal working will predominate, always leaving to the external its legitimate share. Only, this new phase will be, in a way, more normal than the preceding, because, in religion as in man, the internal infinitely surpasses the external, without, however, annihilating it, as does Protestantism. This internal is the essence of Christianity; it is the kingdom of heaven within us, and whose frontiers it is our duty to extend. It is the treasure, the hidden pearl, the grain of mustard-seed, of the Gospel. It is to this interior of the soul that our Lord addressed the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. The external church—the priesthood, the worship, the sacraments—are only means divinely instituted to help the weakness of man to rise to the worship in spirit and in truth announced by our Saviour to the Samaritan woman. And the time has come for a fuller expansion of this internal life, for the more general development of the spirit of S. Francis of Sales and of the other saints of whom we spoke above.