And this brings me to the consideration of Disraeli’s ideas regarding the Latin Church, the immortal Rome, “that great confederacy which has so much influenced the human race, and which has yet to play perhaps a mighty part in the fortunes of the world.”
This imperial form of Theocracy exercised for him, both imaginatively and historically, an enormous attraction. Its special appeal to the Latin and Celtic races; its unbroken phalanx of organisation; its immemorial persistence of policy; its creative combination of spirituality with art, of purity with beauty; its union of ideals beyond and above the world with the mechanism of empires; its blend of contrasts, of solemn softness with sombre control, of charm with coldness, of callousness with charity, of loneliness with society, of curse and comfort; its theoretic espousal of theological free will with the practical denial of it in action, and of outward pomp with inward simplicity; its watchful intimacies with every moment of life—the way in which, as he puts it in Contarini, it “... produces in” its “dazzling processions and sacred festivals an effect upon the business of the day;” its guardianship of the weak, the erring, and the poor; its nursing motherhood of doubt and despair; its insidious captivation of the will and intellect; its power to recall and continue the spirits of the centuries, to absorb schism and rebaptise it union; its claims to obliterate the past for the penitent; to keep all things old and make all things new; its great deeds and its great heroes; these elements and many more, that have cooped Jews in Ghettos while blazoning the proud inscription in front of St. Peter’s, Vicit Leo de tribu Juda,—all these opposites enchant even when they fail to enchain the mind and the feelings. They have linked the Vatican and the Palatine, the see to the throne, the tiara to the diadem. They have transfigured, while maintaining, pagan rites and customs, till “Madre Natura” reappears with a halo, the very shrines of the Madonna repeat the antique pattern of those dedicated to the Lares and Penates, and the procession of waxen images in Southern Italy but perpetuates another and an older ceremony. The Roman Church has been the most consistent educator, the greatest organiser, the most universal legislator of the last thousand years. It has attained uncompromising ends unswervingly pursued by compromises the most subtle and the most skilful. Nor is the esoteric doctrine which recalls the Eleusinian Mysteries, and enables the initiated to regard forms comprehensible by the multitude as merely popular symbols of higher truths, without a certain glamour of its own. Disraeli’s father had penned a treatise on the Jesuits, and their history had been deeply studied by the son. I can still recall the unconscious tone of ironical appreciation with which one of those “professors,” “capable of effecting a great influence on the youth of England,” informed me that when he met Disraeli, “he spoke to me of the Jesuits.” Both the two factors in himself which I have mentioned, the sense of mystery and the impulse to control, are precisely the atmosphere of the Papal Church. There was, therefore, to some extent the attraction of affinity. But the Papacy appealed to him imaginatively, not theologically, as it did to his great rival. I recollect being told by a member of the symposium that Gladstone once discussed deep into the night at Hawarden what form of Christianity would eventually survive and prevail. Three chosen friends agreed with him that it would be Romanism, the establisher and not the establishment, the supernational and not the national, theocratic and not (as Disraeli makes one of his characters describe the Church of England) “parliamentary Christianity.”
Not so Disraeli. Its political influences, its “clamour for toleration,” its “labour for supremacy,”[106] its warping limitations, its prying priestcraft, its humble haughtiness, its casuistic candour, its centralising forces fatal to Northern liberty, the ban placed on free discussion and free intercourse, its proclamation of the uniformity rather than of the unity of human nature, and above all its admixture of paganism, were the drawbacks that repelled him. “The tradition of the Anglican Church was powerful,” he observes, adverting to that “mistake and misfortune” of Newman’s desertion. “Resting on the Church of Jerusalem, modified by the divine school of Galilee, it would have found that rock of truth which Providence, by the instrumentality of the Semitic race, had promised to St. Peter. Instead of that, the seceders sought refuge in mediæval superstitions which are generally the embodiments of pagan ceremonies and creeds.”[107]
The spell of Romanism is an incident in Contarini Fleming. The spell, but also the perils of Romanism, its bewitchment of judgment and of conscience, its repugnance to free politics and independent wills, its arrogance of inspiration, its monopolies, its burdens of enjoined etiquette, form the theme of Lothair. He cannot bind himself to the danger, yet how adorable is its source! How firm the rock on which it is founded, when it is not of offence! How certain the conclusions, if only the premises can be conceded!
“Religion is civilisation,” said the Cardinal—“the highest: it is a reclamation of man from savageness by the Almighty. What the world calls civilisation, as distinguished from religion, is a retrograde movement, and will ultimately lead us back to the barbarism from which we have escaped. For instance, you talk of progress: what is the chief social movement of all the centuries that three centuries ago separated from the unity of the Church of Christ? The rejection of the Sacrament of Christian matrimony. The introduction of the law of divorce, which is, in fact, only a middle term to the abolition of marriage. What does that mean? The extinction of the home and household on which God has rested civilisation. If there be no home, the child belongs to the State, not to the parent. The State educates the child, and without religion, because the State in a country of progress acknowledges no religion.[108] For every man is not only to think as he likes, but to write and speak as he likes.... And this system which would substitute for domestic sentiment and Divine belief the unlimited and licentious action of human intelligence and will, is called progress. What is it but a revolt against God?”
What religious intelligence would not endorse these truths! But let us now listen to the other side, that of “other-worldliness,” of “the conversion—or conquest of England,” though the allusions to “Corybantic Christianity” are not without justice.
“There is only one Church and one Religion,” said the Cardinal; “all other forms and phrases are mere phantasms, without root or substance or coherency. Look at that unhappy Germany, once so proud of its Reformation.... Look at this unfortunate land, divided, subdivided, parcelled out in infinite schism, with new oracles every day, and each more distinguished for the narrowness of his intellect or the loudness of his lungs; once the land of saints and scholars, and people in pious pilgrimages, and finding always solace and support in the Divine offices of an ever-present Church; which were a true, though a faint type of the beautiful future that awaited man. Why, only three centuries of this rebellion against the Most High have produced ... an anarchy of opinion, throwing out every monstrous and fantastic form, from a caricature of the Greek Philosophy to a revival of Feticism.... The Church of England is not the Church of the English. Its fate is sealed. It will soon become a sect, and all sects are fantastic. It will adopt new dogmas, or it will abjure old ones; anything to distinguish it from the Non-conforming herd in which nevertheless it will be its fate to merge....”
“I cannot admit,” replied the Cardinal, “that the Church is in antagonism with political freedom. On the contrary, in my opinion, there can be no political freedom which is not founded on Divine authority; otherwise it can be at the best but a specious phantom of licence inevitably terminating in anarchy. The rights and liberties of the people of Ireland have no advocate except the Church, because there political freedom is founded on Divine authority; but if you mean by political freedom the schemes of the illuminati and the Freemasons, which perpetually torture the Continent, all the dark conspiracies of the secret societies, then I admit the Church is in antagonism with such aspirations after liberty; those aspirations, in fact, are blasphemy and plunder. And if the Church were to be destroyed, Europe would be divided between the atheist and the communist.”
This last opinion is Disraeli’s own. None knew better, or realised more, the disintegrating terrors of the secret societies, the propaganda of desperation served by desperadoes and exploited by soldiers of fortune.
Disraeli appreciated and often testified that Roman Christianity had pre-eminently spiritualised the once undecayed Latin races. To its services and ideals he always paid the deepest homage; for some of them he displayed an evident affection. Nowhere has the higher aspiration of Romanism been portrayed more touchingly than in the person of “Clare Arundel.” The description in that book of the Tenebræ vibrates with delicate emotion. In the same book he foresees the erection on the site of slums of the stately fane which now adorns Westminster. His public utterances on Ireland, on the Maynooth question, and many others, his ardent championship of the bill which secured the offices of his priest for the Catholic prisoner, showed not only respect, but a sympathy and conversance with Roman affairs passing that of ordinary statesmen. But, as a statesman, he also realised that the Roman Church was not only hostile to the Anglo-Saxon instincts, but has always claimed a despotic temporal dominion; and he also realised not only the earlier and far-reaching designs of Cardinal Wiseman, but the later diplomacies of a definite scheme for the capture, now that absolutism is on the wane, of democracy. Rome means to be the sole absolutism that shall survive. What Disraeli dreaded and countervailed was the new-fangled alliance, not only between Radicalism, but between Liberalism and Romanism. In Ireland, as I shall show, a peculiar phase of the design was apparent, and what Rome had manœuvred she came to deplore and even to struggle to prevent. In Lothair, “Monsignor Berwick,” Antonelli’s ultramontane disciple, is made to say of “Churchill,” the leader of Irish Nationalism, “For the chance of subverting the Anglican establishment, he is favouring a policy which will subvert religion itself.”