"Ah! I dare to affirm that so much devotion to Rome and to the Catholic world gives to the Church of France the right to be trusted, to be heard." He adds, anticipating his arrival in Rome, "I shall no sooner touch the sacred ground, no sooner kiss the tomb of the Apostles, than I shall feel myself in peace, out of the battle, in the midst of an assembly presided over by a father and composed of brethren. There the noises will all die away, the rash interferences will cease, the indiscretions will disappear, the winds and waves will be calmed down."
The statement, frequently repeated, that Bishop Dupanloup in this letter admitted the doctrine, and contested only the opportuneness of defining it, is incorrect. This was pointed out at the time by Dr. Reusch, of Bonn, in the Literaturblatt. Dupanloup once or twice says that he will not touch the question of its truth, one way or the other. He never, directly or indirectly, indicates belief in it. Many of his arguments more than indirectly oppose the very substance of the doctrine. He plainly feels that it is unscriptural, uncatholic, and unwise; but he knows that it is and has long been gospel in Rome.
Bishop Dupanloup was replied to by Archbishop Deschamps, of Malines. Monsignor Deschamps was following the straight path to the purple. He roundly lectured Dupanloup. "Why should not that trouble me which rejoices the enemies of the faith and of the Church?" "You have committed an error, Monsignor," he says, repeatedly. He correctly states that Dupanloup has not confined himself to the question of opportuneness. "You have handled the principal question, ... your fears have disturbed your vision."[168] Dupanloup prepared a rejoinder to Deschamps, but was prevented from publishing it by circumstances which taught him that in leaving France for Rome he had not passed from disturbance to tranquillity, but from regulated conflict to all-triumphant violence, compelling inaction, unless action was on its own side. In Rome, where any movement of an ecclesiastic is often accounted for by the prospect of some ribbon, robe, or perquisite, it was freely said that Napoleon had promised Dupanloup the archbishopric of Lyons if he would head the Gallicans. An English paper repeated this Roman scandal, fathering it on well informed circles. Certain circles are always well informed as to the motives of men who oppose them.
The pastoral from the banks of the Thames forms a contrast to that from the banks of the Loire. True, Archbishop Manning no longer speaks of the extinction of Protestantism, or the restoration of the Pope's dominion over the East, as probable effects of the Council. He even shows some dawning consciousness that the war which he had announced in 1867 with a light heart, would not be carried through so lightly. In the earlier part of his treatise he more than once coolly speaks of the bishops as being unanimous in the belief of Papal infallibility! Before the conclusion, Bishop Maret's work extorts the admission that he must now call that doctrine Ultramontane, which two years before, he had asserted to be Catholic. He none the less eagerly presses for the carrying out of the programme. The Church is far too large. She permits differences of belief, which are not only unseemly, but dangerous. After an outbreak of questioning thought and conflicting will, such as had been occasioned by a simple demand for only one or two new dogmas, tighter and tighter binding up seems to Dr. Manning to be not merely becoming, but even necessary.
While panting for additional fetters for his own Church, he speaks of Protestants as sighing for something beyond insular narrowness. In fact, it would seem as if he had no perception of the difference between a big sect and a large creed, or of the possible harmony between a local organization and a universal brotherhood. There is no insular narrowness, much less Pontine-Marsh narrowness, in the definition of a Church given by the English Church, whereby she marks her relation to all other Churches. That definition is large, catholic, and scriptural. It leaves the English Churchman free from any obligation to unchurch other Christians, and therefore he may rest and be thankful, when others feel bound, by the narrowness of their sect, to unchurch him. The Church of Christ was catholic when she could number only one hundred and thirty adherents in the whole world. She will never become more catholic than she was then. No sect can increase its catholicity by adding millions of ignorant and bigoted people, and calling them Christians.
Dr. Manning resented, as a sort of rebellion, objections taken against multiplying terms of membership, and adding new conditions of salvation. To him every increase of narrowness seemed an increase of unity. If there are men in the English Church sighing in a similar way for bonds and anathemas which, thank God! our island does not forge, they are not the men inspired by the catholic creed of their own Church, but men infected by the municipal creed of the Popes.
Like Dupanloup, Archbishop Manning made an attack and provoked a retort. He denounced the historical school of theologians in Germany, and especially in Munich, and was pitilessly cut up by Friedrich, in the Literaturblatt. The Archbishop, like Auguste Comte, had reached a point in the development of theory when it was necessary that it should conquer history. Preparatory to the attack on the Catholic Faculty of Munich, he writes in mother English matter like the following (p. 10): "The day is past for appeals to antiquity. If Christianity and the Christian Scriptures are to be maintained in controversy against sceptical criticism, the unbroken, world-wide witness of the Catholic Church must be invoked."
A number of equally exposed positions are taken up in face of the Liberal Catholic scholars, and that with all the contempt which official power often feels for reasoning power—
"They who, under the pretensions of historical criticism, deny the witness of the Catholic Church to be the maximum of evidence, even in a historical sense, likewise ruin the foundation of moral certainty in respect to Christianity altogether" (p. 125). "No historical certainty can be called science except only by courtesy. It is time that the pretensions of 'historical science' and 'scientific historians' be reduced to their proper sphere and limits. And this the Council will do, not by contention or anathema, but by the words 'It hath seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us'" (id.).