“Thus Protestant countries are no longer able to boast of any special or remarkable moral standard; and the effect of the creed on the imagination is analogously impaired. Protestant nations show more energy than Catholic nations because the mind is left more free, and the intellect is undisturbed by the authoritative instilment of false principles” (p. 111).
This strikes us as a very easy manner of begging a very important question. However, we are less concerned now with Mr. Froude’s Catholics than with his Protestants.
“But,” he goes on, “Protestant nations have been guilty, as nations, of enormous crimes. Protestant individuals, who profess the soundest of creeds, seem, in their conduct, to have no creed at all, beyond a conviction that pleasure is pleasant, and that money will purchase it. Political corruption grows up; sharp practice in trade grows up—dishonest speculations, short weights and measures, and adulteration of food. The commercial and political Protestant world, on both sides of the Atlantic, has accepted a code of action from which morality has been banished; and the clergy have for the most part sat silent, and occupy themselves in carving and polishing into completeness their schemes of doctrinal salvation. They shrink from offending the wealthy members of their congregation.” (We believe we heard concordant testimony to this from distinguished members of the late Protestant Episcopalian Convention and Congress.) “They withdraw into the affairs of the other world, and leave the present world to the men of business and the devil.”
Mr. Froude having thus placidly handed Protestantism over to the devil, we might as well leave it there, as the devil is proverbially reported to know and take care of his own. And certainly, if Protestantism be only half what Mr. Froude depicts it, it is the devil’s, and a more active and fruitful agent of evil he could not well desire. One thing is beyond dispute: if Protestantism be what so ardent an advocate as Mr. Froude says it is, it is high time for a change. It is time for some one or something to step in and dispute the devil’s absolute sovereignty. If this is the result of the Protestant mind being “left more free” than the Catholic, the sooner such freedom is curtailed the better. It is the freedom of lethargy and license which has yielded up even the little that it had of real freedom and truth to its own child, Materialism, the modern name for paganism.
“They” (the Protestant clergy), says Mr. Froude, “have allowed the Gospel to be superseded by the new formulas of political economy. This so-called science is the most barefaced attempt that has ever yet been openly made on this earth to regulate human society without God or recognition of the moral law. The clergy have allowed it to grow up, to take possession of the air, to penetrate schools and colleges, to control the actions of legislatures, without even so much as opening their lips in remonstrance.”
Yes, because they had nothing better to offer in its place. And this Mr. Froude advances with much truth as one of the causes of the “Revival of Romanism”:
“I once ventured,” he tells us, “to say to a leading Evangelical preacher in London that I thought the clergy were much to blame in these matters. If the diseases of society were unapproachable by human law, the clergy might at least keep their congregations from forgetting that there was a law of another kind which in some shape or other would enforce itself. He told me very plainly that he did not look on it as part of his duty. He could not save the world, nor would he try. The world lay in wickedness, and would lie in wickedness to the end. His business was to save out of it individual souls by working on their spiritual emotions, and bringing them to what he called the truth. As to what men should do or not do, how they should occupy themselves, how and how far they might enjoy themselves, on what principles they should carry on their daily work—on these and similar subjects he had nothing to say.
“I needed no more to explain to me why Evangelical preachers were losing their hold on the more robust intellects, or why Catholics, who at least offered something which at intervals might remind men that they had souls, should have power to win away into their fold many a tender conscience which needed detailed support and guidance” (pp. 112–113).
One ray of light in the universal darkness now enshrouding Protestantism shines before the eyes of Mr. Froude. It falls on the present German Empire. Here at least the weary watchman crying out the hours of heaven may call “All is well” to the sleepers. Here Protestantism had its true birth; here it finds its true home. In this blessed land lies hope and salvation for a lost world. But the picture is so graphic that we give it in Mr. Froude’s own words:
“As the present state of France,” he says, “is the measure of the value of the Catholic revival, so Northern Germany, spiritually, socially, and politically, is the measure of the power of consistent Protestantism. Germany was the cradle of the Reformation. In Germany it moves forward to its manhood; and there, and not elsewhere, will be found the intellectual solution of the speculative perplexities which are now dividing and bewildering us” (pp. 130–131).