Mr. Froude, however, is just this. Take any one sentence of those last quoted; look at it calmly; weigh it in the balance, and what do we find? Take this one: “The doctrines of the Catholic Church have gained only increased improbability from the advance of knowledge.” With this confident statement he leaves the matter. There is no doubt, no hesitation, no reservation at all on his part. A reasonable man will ask himself, however: “Is this stupendous statement true?” “The doctrines of the Catholic Church! What! all of them?” Apparently so; Mr. Froude, at least, makes no exception. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth,” is the primary article of the Catholic Creed. Has that only “gained increased improbability from the advance of knowledge”? Mr. Froude would hardly say so; indeed, in more places than one he takes occasion to sneer at the modern scientific gospel. Even if Mr. Froude himself said so, his Protestant readers who make any pretensions to Christian faith would scarcely agree with him. Belief in the Trinity of God is another doctrine of the Catholic Church; in Jesus Christ the God-Man, the Redeemer of the world; in the Holy Ghost; in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. All these are doctrines of the Catholic Church. Does Mr. Froude pretend to say that they have all been swept away by “the advance of knowledge”? If he did not mean to say this—as, indeed, we believe he did not—why did he say it? What are we to think of him? Is this sober writing and a right manner of approaching a serious question? In p. 93 he tells us that “the doctrines of the Catholic Church have gained only increased improbability from the advance of knowledge.” In p. 95 he has already forgotten himself, and tells us that “the Protestant churches are no less witnesses to the immortal nature of the soul, and the awful future which lies before it, than the Catholic Church,” which is the strongest kind of concession of what he had just before denied; and forgetting himself again, he tells us in a third place (p. 141) that the Protestant ministers “are at present the sole surviving representatives of true religion in the world.” This is only one of a multitude of instances in which Mr. Froude allows himself to run away with himself. Passion and prejudice narrow his mental vision, until at times it becomes so diseased as to result in moral as well as mental obliquity.
The same thing is observable in the sentence immediately following the passage last quoted: “Liberty, spiritual and political, has thriven in spite of her [the Catholic Church’s] most desperate opposition, till it has invaded every government in the world, and has penetrated at last even the territories of the popes themselves” (p. 94).
Even Mr. Froude cannot absolutely blind himself to facts; at least, he cannot alter them. He may hate the Catholic Church as much as he pleases—and it pleases him to hate her very much—but the fact of his hatred cannot convert the persecution of her children into “liberty, spiritual and political.” Nor are we at all begging the question in giving the name of persecution to the treatment that Catholics are receiving at the hands, if not of “every government of the world,” at least of those previously enumerated. It is the word, as we shall show, applied to the anti-Catholic legislation in Germany by candid Protestants, countrymen of Mr. Froude, too, who hate the church and the Pope just as resolutely as he, but with more apparent show of reason. It is too late in the day to argue about this matter. There is no longer question to an honest mind as to whether the Catholics in Germany are or are not persecuted. There may still be question as to whether or not the persecution be necessary, but there is no dispute as to the fact. To talk of the “spiritual liberty” of Catholics in Germany to-day is simply to talk nonsense. But, lest there should be any possible doubt regarding the matter, it may be as well to freshen men’s memories a little on a point that is intimately connected with our whole subject; for what covers Germany covers every land where the struggle between the Catholic Church and the state is being waged.
The organs of English opinion have been very faithful in their allegiance to Prince Bismarck, who is such an experienced cultivator of public opinion. They are the bitter foes of the Papacy and the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, they have some pretensions to principle, and, when there is no escape out of the difficulty, call white white, and black black. At all events they do not always call black white. In Germany, then, according to Mr. Froude, “liberty, spiritual and political, has thriven in spite of the Catholic Church’s most desperate opposition.” While the struggle of the German government with the Catholics had as yet not much more than half begun the English Pall Mall Gazette discovered that
“There is no parallel in history to the experiment which the German statesmen are resolutely bent on trying, except the memorable achievement of Englishmen under the guidance of Henry VIII.... Like all these measures, the new law concerning the education of ecclesiastical functionaries, which is the most striking of the number, will apply to all sects indifferently, but, in its application to the Roman Catholic priesthood, it almost takes one’s breath away.”
It may be only natural to find the apologist of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth describing the revival in modern times of “the memorable achievement of Englishmen” under Henry VIII. as “liberty, spiritual and political.” Yet the same “experiment” takes away the breath, not only of so cool a journal as the Pall Mall Gazette, but of a much cooler and more influential journal still.
“The measures now in the German Parliament, and likely to become law,” says the London Times, “amount to a secular organization so complete as not to leave the Pope a soul, a place, an hour, that he can call entirely his own. Germany asserts for the civil power the control of all education, the imposition of its own conditions on entrance to either civil or ecclesiastical office, the administration of all discipline, and at every point the right to confine religious teachers and preachers to purely doctrinal and moral topics. Henceforth there is to be neither priest, nor bishop, nor cardinal, nor teacher, nor preacher, nor proclamation, nor public act, nor penalty, nor anything that man can hear, do, or say for the soul’s good of man in Germany, without the proper authorization, mark, and livery of the emperor.”
Mr. Froude is perfectly correct in saying that such measures have been carried “in spite of the church’s most desperate opposition,” but whether he is equally correct in styling the same thing “liberty,” spiritual or political, we leave to the judgment of honest readers. The London Spectator, writing at the same period, was in sore trouble as to the event.
“Is an age of the world,” it asks, “in which few men know what is truth or whether there be truth, one in which you would ask statesmen to determine its limits? We suspect that a race of statesmen armed with such powers as Prussia is now giving to her officials would soon cease to show their present temperance and sobriety, and grow into a caste of civilian ecclesiastics of harder, drier, and lower mould than any of the ecclesiastics they had to put down.... To our minds the absolutism of the Vatican Council is a trifling danger compared with the growing absolutism of the democratic temper which is now being pushed into almost every department of human conduct.”
We shall have occasion to show the results of the work of these “civilian ecclesiastics” on the Protestant Church in Germany, particularly in Prussia. Even at this early stage of the struggle the London Times confessed: