It is to be regretted that Mr. Froude does not specify these “doctrines.” He fails to do so in any place, and in such matters, as indeed in all, there is nothing like accuracy in order to arrive at a clear understanding of what is wrong. Some of them, however, may be easily guessed at. In these days it would be hard to discover what precise “doctrines” “evangelical” or any but Catholic theologians do hold, if hard pushed and driven to make an explicit statement of what they do and what they do not believe. The expression “evangelical theology” may help to enlighten us as to Mr. Froude’s meaning. That we take to mean a theology based on the Bible as the first, final, and only guide to man’s knowledge of God and all implied in that knowledge. This view of his meaning is confirmed by another passage (p. 100), wherein, contrasting the doctrinal position of the Catholic and Protestant, he says:
“It” (the Catholic Church) “stands precisely on the same foundation on which the Protestant religion stands—on the truth of the Gospel history. Before we can believe the Gospel history we must appeal to the consciousness of God’s existence, which is written on the hearts of us all.”
There is a mistake here which will be obvious to any instructed reader. There is no more reason “to appeal to the consciousness of God’s existence” for the truth of “the Gospel history” than for the truth of any other history. As a history, history it is and no more, to be judged as to its accuracy on the known laws of historical criticism. It contains a written record of events, and stands or falls on the truth of what it records, just as does Mr. Froude’s own history. If it can be shown that it is false, there is an end of it; false it is, and no man is bound to believe it. The foundation of Protestantism, as Mr. Froude very rightly says, stands “on the truth of the Gospel history”—that is, on the Bible, and the Bible alone. Christ, however, did not build his church on the Bible, but on Peter, the chief of the apostles: “I say to thee, Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Those are very plain, strong, and unmistakable words; and in their comprehension lies a fundamental difference between Catholics and Protestants.
Out of this difference comes a singular effect, more noticeable in these than in former days. Catholics reverence the Bible more really because more truly than do Protestants. Over-reverence is irreverence. They never made the mistake of accepting the Bible as the foundation of Christ’s church, any more than in human affairs we should take a history of a commonwealth, with the digest of its laws, the sayings of some of its wise men, their documents to their contemporaries and to posterity, as the commonwealth itself. Protestants withdrew from the body of the church, which may have had, and had, sore spots and diseased members; they took up the written record and said: Here are the laws; here are the words of Christ; here are the sayings of the fathers; here is truth; here let us build our church anew—each one judging for himself as to what the church was and ought to be. Difficulties that were essential to such a position and that are obvious at sight arose at once and continued all the way down, until at last, in these days of all others, there sprang up in the very bosom of Protestantism a school of assailants of the Bible itself. This is the school of modern scientists, which rejects revelation, rejects God, rejects the truth of the Bible history, rejects Christ—rejects, in a word, everything, save what approves itself to it by so-called positive testimony. Hence arises the perplexity of the “intellectual position” of Protestant divines, which Mr. Froude notices. The very foundation of their creed is questioned, and questioned at every inch. So, until everything is satisfactorily cleared up and the “scientists” absolutely refuted, Protestantism is in a state of dissolution. It has no foundation on which to stand, while Catholics have their living church, to which they adhered steadfastly from the very beginning, which existed, and was called into being, entirely independent of the Bible, and which would have been what it is had the Bible never been written at all. So that, per impossibile, even were the Bible shown to be false, it would not affect the fundamental Catholic position. Of course we do not intimate for a moment that the Bible is false, and that the scientists can prove anything against it. We only bring forward this instance of an essential difference between Catholics and Protestants, and the effect of it on their minds, as showing the reason why Catholics take the criticism of the new school of inquirers very calmly, while the result of this criticism on Protestants is disastrous.
Catholics are just as steadfast in their belief as they ever were; Protestants are daily becoming less and less so. Inquiry, or “criticism,” as it is called, while it strengthens, if possible, Catholicity, destroys Protestantism. Truth can stand all things. “Science and historical criticism have shaken positions which used to be thought unassailable” by Protestants, who find themselves in the false position of being compelled to question or reject as false what their fathers pinned their faith to—Germany always excepted, according to Mr. Froude. It is a hard thing indeed to preach and teach as divine truth a doctrine, or by our very profession to subscribe to a doctrine, which in our heart we doubt about or disbelieve. This is a moral phenomenon which Protestantism presents to us every day, and in no one of its infinite branches more conspicuously than in the Anglican.
If men are preaching what they disbelieve or are in grave doubt about, it is simply natural that “where truth” (or what was taken for truth) “was once flashed out like lightning, and attended with oratorical thunders, it is now uttered with comparative feebleness.”
“The most honest, perhaps, are the most uncomfortable and most hesitating, while those who speak most boldly are often affecting a confidence which in their hearts they do not feel” (p. 99). “From some cause, it seems they” (Protestant preachers) “dare not speak, they dare not think, like their fathers. Too many of them condescend to borrow the weapons of their adversaries. They are not looking for what is true; they are looking for arguments to defend positions which they know to be indefensible. Their sermons are sometimes sophistical, sometimes cold and mechanical, sometimes honestly diffident. Any way, they are without warmth and cannot give what they do not possess” (p. 100).
This is a very heavy indictment; we leave to others to judge of its truth. It is a mistake, however, to draw the line at “their fathers.” These men are what their fathers have made them. The characteristics that mark the present teachers of Protestantism run down the whole line of the Protestant tradition. Incoherency and inconsistency, not to use harsher terms, necessarily stamped Protestantism from the first.[[103]] These characteristics are only more apparent to-day because the constant fire of criticism has exposed and brought them more prominently into view.
The practical results of teaching what is necessarily and inherently contradictory scarcely need to be pointed out. “The Protestant,” says Mr. Froude, “finding three centuries ago that the institution called the Church was teaching falsehood, refused to pin his faith upon the Church’s sleeve thenceforward. He has relied on his own judgment, and times come when he is perplexed.” The whole story is told here. It was too late in the day to find that “the Church was teaching falsehood.” The Christian Church can err or it cannot err. There is room for no via media here. If it can err, it could have erred just as easily in the first century as in the fifteenth or sixteenth. If it could err at all there is no necessary reason to suppose that it ever was right; there is no belief to be placed in the promise of Christ; there is no belief to be placed in Christ himself more than in any other man. And again, if it could err, who was right, and who was going to set it right? The church being abandoned as a teacher of falsehood, there is no hope of escape from constant perplexity to the Christian mind; for the Bible itself, being left to private judgment, is of course open to any interpretation that private judgment may be pleased to extract from it. And this in itself is destruction, quite apart from the assaults of hostile criticism. To make the church at all, or at any time, or by any possibility a teacher of falsehood is to strike the divinity from it and convert it into a human institution of the most monstrous assumptions and absurd pretensions.
This is Protestantism, which never had any spiritual life in itself. It was from the beginning, as it still is, a convenient and very powerful political agent, as was Mahometanism. Mr. Froude says very truly, what all men are coming to say, that “there is no real alternative between the Catholic Church and atheism” (p. 100), which leaves Mr. Froude and his fellow-Protestants in a pleasant position.