Here are you whom we thought dead and buried under your weight of superstition, idolatry, absurdity, and fraud, an old fossil of mediæval times, deserted, neglected, despised, and contemned by the intelligence, wealth, and worth of the age, suddenly leaping into new life, and by a single miraculous stride coming right abreast of, if not ahead of, your foes. What have we that you have not? Energy is ours, yet you surpass us. Numbers are ours; you are stealing them from us. Knowledge and learning are ours; your teachers put ours to shame. We stole your sees, your cathedrals, your monasteries, your convents, your schools, your universities—all that you had of beautiful, and holy, and intellectual. You ask them not back, but set to work to build them anew. Ours is stolen property; yours is built on the free offerings of the poor. We invaded the domain of English literature; it was all ours; we poisoned its wells to you; we invented the newspaper to perpetuate the falsehoods that we wove about you. You have found an antidote to the poison; you win over our brightest intellects; you make a literature of your own which we are compelled to admire and read. You face us at every turn, and we may as well confess that you beat us at many.
This is really Mr. Froude’s picture, not ours. His words mean this or nothing. Will it not occur to anybody that for a church built on “superstition,” “falsehood,” “fraud,” “error,” “a tissue of legend,” etc., etc., Mr. Froude’s is indeed a strange showing—so strange that if the church were the direct opposite of all that he asserts it to be, it could hardly hope for more signal or deserved success? Does it ever occur to Mr. Froude that he may by some remote possibility be mistaken in his estimate of the Catholic Church? that it, if not right altogether, may at least be righter than he thinks?
To some minds, to many and to greater and broader minds than Mr. Froude’s, the doubt has suggested itself. Some, like Macaulay, face it, acknowledge the wonder of it, make no attempt to explain the wonder, and stand without for ever, still wondering. Others draw nearer and examine more closely, and finally enter in. Here is how Mr. Froude views it:
“What is the meaning of so strange a phenomenon? Is the progress of which we hear so much less real than we thought? Does knowledge grow more shallow as the surface widens? Is it that science is creeping like the snake upon the ground, eating dust and bringing forth materialism? that the Catholic Church, in spite of her errors, keeps alive the consciousness of our spiritual being and the hope and expectation of immortality? 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. Why is Protestantism standing still while Rome is advancing? Why does Rome count her converts from among the evangelicals by tens, while she loses to them, but here and there, an exceptional and unimportant unit?” (p. 95).
Mr. Froude has put questions here each of which would take a volume to answer. We leave them to be pondered over by those for whom they are chiefly intended, and of whose conscientious consideration they are well worthy. For ourselves, we can have no doubt as to the answer to be given to each, but we are more concerned at present with Mr. Froude’s reply.
First among the causes which he assigns as having “united to bring about such a state of things” is the Tractarian movement in the Anglican Church, resulting from the “latitudinarianism of the then (1832) popular Whig philosophy.”
“The Whigs believed that Catholics had changed their nature and had grown liberal, and had insisted on emancipating them. The Tractarians looked on emancipation as the fruit of a spirit which was destroying Christianity, and would terminate at last in atheism. They imagined that, by reasserting the authority of the Anglican Church, they could at once stem the encroachments of popery and arrest the progress of infidelity. Both Whigs and Tractarians were deceiving themselves. The Catholic Church is unchanging as the Ethiopian’s skin, and remains, for good and evil, the same to-day as yesterday.”
Yes; “the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever” is the church of God. It cannot be the church of God and be otherwise. If there was any deception Mr. Froude lays it at the right door. These men were “deceiving themselves.” The church gave no intimation of change, made no promises, held out no concessions, thought of no compromise in matter of teaching. She cannot do so; it is not in her power to do so.
It was the liberal philosophy that was chiefly instrumental in bringing the change about. Men had to choose between the fixed doctrines of the Catholic Church and the shifting doctrines and intolerable pretensions of the Anglican Church. They rejected both; they rejected revelation; they looked at man himself, and attached to him certain natural rights which are as well expressed in our Declaration of Independence as anywhere. They would, if they could, strike out the Catholics, as was attempted here. But it was impossible. They could not do it and be true to themselves and their principles. If liberty of thought, freedom of conscience, and the right to worship or not to worship God in your own way be natural rights of man, they necessarily attach to all, whether a man call himself Catholic, Protestant, Jew, or Nihilist. It is a political and practical impossibility in these days of divided and clashing beliefs to profess liberty, yet seal the door to any special form of worship; and Catholicity of all beliefs is dreaded, because, when free and untrammelled, it has the tendency and the force to assimilate and receive all into its bosom. The result of this partial concession of freedom to Catholicity in England is thus pictured by Mr. Froude:
“The Tractarians’ principles led the ablest of them into that very fold against which they had imagined themselves the most efficient of barriers. From the day in which they established their party in the Anglican communion a steady stream of converts has passed through it into the Catholic ranks; while the Whigs, in carrying emancipation, gave the Catholics political power, and with power the respect and weight in the outer world which in free countries always attends it.”