MR. FROUDE ON THE DECLINE OF PROTESTANTISM.[[102]]
We have seen what Mr. Froude thinks of the “Revival of Romanism.” Let us now see what he has to say on a subject nearer his heart—the decline of Protestantism.
He has much to say; and, to use an ordinary phrase, he makes no bones about saying it. At the outset we would dispose of what seems a fair objection. If, it may be urged, you make Mr. Froude so very untrustworthy a witness against Catholics and the Catholic Church, why should he not be equally untrustworthy when assailing Protestantism?
The objection is more plausible than real. Mr. Froude is a professed Protestant. In the cause of Protestantism he is earnest even to aggressiveness. He believes in and loves it with all his heart and soul, as really as he disbelieves in and detests Catholicity. He can say nothing that is too good of the early Protestant Reformers and of their “Reform.” He doubts about nothing, apologizes for nothing, attempts to palliate nothing either in the Reformers or their Reform. He sees nothing in either to apologize for or to palliate. He can only regret that, so far as Protestant belief and work and workers go, the nineteenth century is not as the sixteenth. He is altogether on his own ground here; and we submit that the testimony of such a man in such a matter is of value, the more so when it is confirmed to-day by concurrent Protestant testimony on all sides. The only difference between Mr. Froude and the great mass of non-Catholic writers on this subject is that he is more frank than they, and lays his finger unshrinkingly on very tender Protestant spots.
Of the actual state of Protestantism he has little that is good or hopeful to say, with one notable exception—North Germany—which will be considered later on. Protestantism to-day Mr. Froude finds weak-kneed as well as weak-headed. It has not that aggressive strength of the early teachers and preachers of Reform. The modern teachers have lost that pronounced faith in themselves and in their doctrines, that burning zeal, that fierce hatred of Catholicity, of falsehood, and of sham, that Mr. Froude is pleased to discover in the early Reformers.
“Religion speaks with command,” he says very rightly. It “lays down a set of doctrines, and says, ‘Believe these at your soul’s peril.’ A certain peremptoriness being thus of the essence of the thing, those religious teachers will always command most confidence who dare most to speak in positive tones.” All of which is, of course, most true.
Speaking “in positive tones,” however, does not necessarily imply a divine mission, or even an erroneous sense of a divine mission. It may be bluster; it may be calculated lying; it may be the mistaken enthusiasm of a weak intellect and fervid imagination. To be real it must stand the severest tests. Of a man who asserts his mission from heaven as a teacher of religion something more than his own word is demanded, however positive that word may be. In the preaching and the teaching of the truth there is in all ages a unity of voice, a community of feeling and of purpose, a singleness of eye, of aim, of method, a union of heart and of soul, that is unmistakable and carries conviction with it. There is no change in it; no fleck or flaw. What is new agrees with what is old; is generally a consequence flowing out of the old. It preaches only one God and one law from the beginning. It never contradicts itself; it never narrows or broadens its moral lines to suit the convenience or the whim of persons or of nationalities. It never compromises with humanity. It enlightens the intellect while appealing to the heart of man. It makes no divisions between men or nations; no special code for this or for that. It is awful in its inflexibility; majestic in its calm; eternal in its vigilance; “the same, yesterday, to-day, and for ever.” This is living Truth; this is God’s; and he who speaks the word of God is known by these signs.
Mr. Froude is at a loss to find this spirit now abroad in the world. The nearest approach to it he finds, oddly enough for him, in the Catholic Church. But, of course, that is owing to some devilish ingenuity of which the Catholic Church alone has the secret. As for Protestants, “it is no secret,” he says, “that of late years Protestant divines have spoken with less boldness, with less clearness and confidence, than their predecessors of the last generation.” “They are not to be blamed for it,” he adds, and we quite agree with him. “Their intellectual position has grown in many ways perplexed. Science and historical criticism have shaken positions which used to be thought unassailable” (p. 99). We pointed out one of those “positions”—the Protestant Reformation in England—but that is not in the contemplation of Mr. Froude. To him, even if to him alone, that position still stands, “unassailable.”
“Doctrines once thought to carry their own evidence with them in their inherent fitness for man’s needs have become, for some reason or other, less conclusively obvious. The state of mind to which they were addressed has been altered—altered in some way either for the worse or for the better. And where the evangelical theology retains its hold, it is rather as something which it is unbecoming to doubt than as a body of living truth which penetrates and vitalizes the heart” (p. 99).