"opponents would scornfully say, We do not fear the sentences of the Pontiffs; but after many and various dissimulations, it has become evident at last that"—(the italics are our own)—"every Catholic, whose actions are ruled by the faith he professes, is a born enemy of the State, since he finds himself bound in conscience to contribute, as far as in him lies, to the subjection of all nations and kings to the Roman Pontiff".
On these solemn grounds they formally demand that the question whether our Lord did or did not commit power over kings and nations to Peter and to his successors shall be directly proposed to the Council and examined in every aspect. In order that the Fathers may not be called without adequate preparation to decide a question the consequences of which must profoundly affect the relations of the Church and civil society, they demand further that this point shall be brought on for discussion before that infallibility. Their petition was not addressed to the Pontiff in person, but to the Presiding Cardinals.
No efforts made since, or which may be made hereafter, can erase this record of the views of the bishops at the time in question. Their conduct since the Council proves that for themselves, as individuals, conviction is lost in submission. For the dogma has conquered history. With the German bishops submission passed beyond silence, and proceeded as far as deliberately certifying to the public as ancient views and sincere ones the very views which they had secretly shown to be innovations and pretences, alien to ancient teaching and to their own belief. God's two priceless jewels, conscience and conviction, are here sent to the bottom of the stagnant pool of submission to a human king. It is by contemplating such a course of conduct in men with a position to hold in the eye of the sun, that we learn the force of such words as those of Vitelleschi, when he says that the frequent collision in Catholic countries between a man's civil conscience and his ecclesiastical one is the reason why so often there is no conscience at all. And men such as these German bishops are the moral guides of millions! and out of millions so guided States have to be built up, and men have to be fitted for the judgment of Him who requireth truth in the inward parts! And Vitelleschi evidently thinks that, in a moral point of view, the German bishops were the best!
Gossip in Rome spoke of Dr. Manning as burning with impatience at the delays which had been interposed in the way of the forthcoming dogma. Baron Arnim told Freidrich how it was said that the Archbishop prophesied that the governments would be annihilated for their resistance to it.[370] Quirinus speaks of the Archbishop as expecting a wonderful dispensation of the Holy Ghost to follow the promulgation of the dogma, and to smooth the way of the Church in her regeneration of the nations. Whatever may have been the amount of correctness in these details, the fact remains that at that moment a mind which had attracted notice to itself as urging Englishmen to Rome for unity, was bitterly complained of by Liberal Catholics as being the very genius of contraction and division, urging their Church either to beat them down or to cast them out—to make herself too narrow for them, and to tell them that they should be endured only on new conditions.
At the same time a cry came from our own shores. It was the voice of one who had made himself conspicuous by alluring Englishmen towards Rome for certainty, and on whose spirit the shadow of a new and dark uncertainty was now settling down—uncertainty as to the future source of doctrinal truth; uncertainty as to the doctrinal authority of existing documents; uncertainty, in fine, as to what had been, and as to what was to be, the oracle; uncertainty as to the future work of God. At the same moment when Dr. Manning was accused by Roman Catholics of violating the old terms of unity, Dr. Newman was turned into a warning to Protestants as a victim of uncertainty. When describing how he and his party fared when first, after shifting from the rock of Holy Scripture, they settled on another foundation, which they called Anglicanism or the Via Media, Dr. Newman had said:—
There they found a haven of rest; thence they looked out on the troubled surge of human opinion and upon the crazy vessels which were labouring without chart or compass upon it. Judge, then, of their dismay when, according to the Arabian tale, on their striking their anchor into the supposed soil, lighting their fires on it, and fixing in it the poles of their tents, suddenly the island began to move, to heave, to splash, to frisk to and fro, to dive, and at the last to swim away, spouting out inhospitable jets of water upon the credulous mariners who had made it their home.[371]
We can hardly doubt that some English parson who in his youth had for a moment felt attracted by the notion of unity and certainty, by the charm of vestments, processions, and banners, thanked God on the morning after he had read the following letter, when he looked at the family Bible, that he had not left the solid ground and set up a tent on what Dr. Newman and his Anglicans told people was solid ground, but which proved to be the sporting and frisking monster that he himself described. Ay, and perhaps some Cornish miner, as he went down into his darkness, happy in his Saviour—a Saviour who seemed to come nearer to him as day and man, as home and the fair sky, went farther away—so happy that he hummed—
In darkest shades, if Thou appear,
My dawning is begun:
Thou art my soul's bright morning star,
And Thou my rising sun—
perhaps this miner put up a prayer for the poor gentleman in Birmingham who was in such uncertainty about what might be his creed by next Christmas, and yet knew no better than to beg of Augustine and Ambrose to prevail upon the Almighty not to let His Church tell out all the truth about the Vicar whom the gentleman fancied that He had set over her, but to cause her to practise reserve, or to speak in non-natural senses.
To avoid contamination by impure authorities we shall follow only the Civiltá in its narrative of the Newman incident.[372] The Standard stated that Dr. Newman, in a letter to his bishop, then absent in Rome, had called the promoters of infallibility an insolent and aggressive faction, and had prayed to God to avert from His Church the threatening danger. The Weekly Register declared itself authorized by a personal friend of Dr. Newman to give the most absolute denial to this deliberate fiction. Dr. Newman himself wrote to the Standard to deny that he had written to his bishop and called the promoters of infallibility an insolent and aggressive faction. Yet, after Dr. Newman's method, there were words and words about it. Soon appeared in the Standard a second letter from him, confessing that he had been informed from London that several copies of his letter existed in that city, containing the affirmation which he had denied. He now said that, before sending his contradiction, he had looked at the notes of the letter to his bishop, and had not found the words "insolent and aggressive faction." But he confessed that since learning that several people in London had those words in their possession, he had looked again and found them. He added that by the faction he did not mean that large number of bishops who had declared in favour of infallibility, nor yet the Jesuits. He meant a collection of persons of different countries, ranks, and conditions in the Church.