The Life of William Ewart Gladstone Volume II Part 44

Chapter II. Vaticanism. (1874-1875)

Let no susceptibilities, puritan, protestant, anglican, or other, be startled if we observe that Rome is, and may long be, in some important respects, the centre of the Christian world. It is indeed a centre which repels as well as attracts; which probably repels even more than it attracts; but which, whether repelling or attracting, influences.--GLADSTONE (1875).

I

One question, as the reader by this time well knows, living deepest in Mr.

Gladstone's heart and mind from his first book in 1838 onwards, was the relation of the churches to modern society. English statesmen are wont to be either blind to the existence of such a question, or else they seek an easy refuge from it in a perfunctory erastianism, sometimes intellectually refined, sometimes a little brutish, but always shallow. In all the three great branches of Christianity, the Latin, the Greek or orthodox, the protestant, Mr. Gladstone's interest was incessant, sincere, and profound.

It covered their theology, their organisation, their history and principles of growth, the bearings of their system upon individual character and social well-being all over Europe. He was one of the very few public men capable of discerning that the fall of the temporal power of the pope marked a more startling change and a profounder crisis in human history, than the unification of Italy, the unification of Germany, the reconstructed republic in France, perhaps even than the preservation of the American union. He knew the force of ideas in the world; he realised the vast transformations that had in their succession swept over the minds of men since cardinal dogmas had been established; he comprehended the motion in articles of faith, as men made their "voyagings through strange seas of thought"; he was alive to the fact that moral crises brought on by change in intellectual outlook and temperature, are of deeper concern than questions of territory, or dynasty, or form of government. The moral crisis is what reaches furthest and matters most. A movement of the first magnitude was accentuated by Pius IX., when by the Syllabus of 1864 he challenged modern society in all its foundations, its aims, its principles, in the whole range of its ideals. Some called this daring ultimatum the gravest event since the French uprising in 1789. The Syllabus prepared the way for a more elaborately organised operation on behalf of papal authority. The train was secretly laid for a grand reaction, a grand re-installation of the Christian faith.(314)

(M161) The pope had been despoiled of territory, his sway within the walls of Rome itself was in constant danger, his most powerful protector north of the Alps had been weakened and humiliated by protestant Prussia. He was now to be compensated for his calamities by a majestic demonstration of his hold upon the spiritual allegiance of millions of adherents in every portion of the habitable globe. The twentieth ec.u.menical council a.s.sembled in St. Peter's at Rome on December 8, 1869. In this gathering of catholic prelates from both hemispheres, two antagonistic schools confronted one another. The ultramontanes held that the revolutionary welter and confusion of the modern world could only be healed by solemn affirmation of the principle of sovereign authority lodged in an infallible pope, with absolute power to define by that apostolic authority what ought to be held as articles of faith or morals. The a.s.sumptions, the standards, the ruling types of the modern age, they boldly encountered with rigid iteration of maxims of old time, imposing obedience and submission to a fixed social order and a divinely commissioned hierarchy. Inflexibility was to be the single watchword by which the church could recover a world that, from Naples even to Mexico, seemed to be rapidly drifting away from her. The opposing school took other ground. Perhaps they saw that supremacy is one thing, and infallibility another thing quite different. The liberal catholics did not contest the dogma of papal infallibility; they questioned the expediency of its proclamation; they were for a.s.sociating ideas of religion with ideas of liberty; they were not for extending the domain of miracle and the supernatural.

Then as in the old historic councils, influence of race and nation had decisive effects. It could not be otherwise in what was in essence a conflict between a centralised doctrinal authority on the one hand, and the inextinguishable tendency towards national churches on the other. The Italian bishops went with the pope. The Germans, as of old they had been for emperor against priest, were now on the side of freedom against what certain of them did not hesitate to call tyranny and fraud. Some of the ablest of the French were true to Gallican tradition and resisted the decree. Among the most active and uncompromising of all the ultramontane party was our English Manning.(315)

II

At the end of November 1869, Acton had written to Mr. Gladstone from Rome.

"Your letter is a very sad one," Mr. Gladstone answered. "I feel as deep and real an interest in the affairs of other Christian communions as in my own; and most of all in the case of the most famous of them all, and the one within which the largest number of Christian souls find their spiritual food." Before Manning left for Rome, an amiable correspondence took place between Mr. Gladstone and him. "How sad it is for us both"-this was Mr. Gladstone's starting-point-"considering our personal relations, that we should now be in this predicament, that the things which the one looks to as the salvation of faith and church, the other regards as their destruction."

To Mr. Odo Russell, now the informal agent of the British government in Rome, the prime minister wrote:-

It is curious that Manning has so greatly changed his character.

When he was archdeacon with us, all his strength was thought to lie in a governing faculty, and in its wise moderation. Now he is ever quoted as the _ultra_ of ultras, and he seems greatly to have overshot his mark. The odds seem to be that the child yet unborn will rue the calling of this council. For if the best result arrive in the triumph of the fallibilitarians, will not even this be a considerable shock to the credit and working efficacy of the papal system? You must really be _all_ eyes and ears, a very Argus in both organs, until the occasion has gone by.

As for the issue of the council, Acton, having Mr. Odo Russell in agreement with him, from the first conveyed to Mr. Gladstone his opinion that the pope would prevail.

The only hope in my mind, said Mr. Gladstone in reply, is that there may be a real minority, and that it may speak plainly. A few bold men would easily insure themselves a n.o.ble immortality. But will _any_ have the courage? The Italian government have one and only one method in their hands of fighting the pope: and that is to run, against nomination from Rome, the old and more popular methods of choosing bishops by clerical election, with the _approbation of the flock_.(316) Unless they resort to this they can do nothing.

All the accounts from Rome, he tells Lacaita (Jan. 2, 1870), are as bad as possible. For the first time in my life, I shall now be obliged to talk about popery; for it would be a scandal to call the religion they are manufacturing at Rome by the same name as that of Pascal, or of Bossuet, or of Ganganelli. The truth is that ultramontanism is an anti-social power, and never has it more undisguisedly a.s.sumed that character than in the Syllabus.

(M162) The French government wrote despatches of mild protest but said nothing of withdrawing their garrison. Mr. Gladstone and Lord Clarendon were for informing the Roman court that they were cognizant of the French despatches, and approved of their tenour. The Queen and the cabinet, however, were entirely averse to meddling with the council, and nothing was done officially. This did not prevent Mr. Gladstone from telling Archbishop Manning what impediments would be placed in the way of Irish legislation by the state of English feeling as to the Syllabus and other papal proceedings. "_My_ feelings and convictions," he says (April 16), "are as you well know decidedly with your 'opposition,' which I believe to be contending for the religious and civil interests of mankind against influences highly disastrous and menacing to both. But the prevailing opinion is that it is better to let those influences take their course, and work out the damage which they will naturally and surely entail upon the see of Rome and upon what is bound to it." In parliament there was an utter aversion to the Roman policy, and he gives instances, noting even a change of opinion about the Irish land bill. "What I have described is no matter of speculation. I know it by actual and daily touch. I am glad you have moved me to state it in some detail. It is to me matter of profound grief, especially as regards land in Ireland."

To Lord Acton:-

Of all the prelates at Rome, none have a finer opportunity, to none is a more crucial test now applied, than to those of the United States. For if there, where there is nothing of covenant, of restraint, or of equivalent between the church and the state, the propositions of the Syllabus are still to have the countenance of the episcopate, it becomes really a little difficult to maintain in argument the civil rights of such persons to toleration, however conclusive be the argument of policy in favour of granting it. I can hardly bring myself to speculate or care on what particular day the foregone conclusion is to be finally adopted. My grief is sincere and deep, but it is at the whole thing, so ruinous in its consequences as they concern faith. In my view, the size of the minority, though important, is not nearly so important as the question whether there will be a minority at all.

There was a minority. In a division taken at a late stage, 451 composed the majority, 88 resisted, and 62 were for a new examination. Then the minority turned their backs on Rome; and on July 18 the definition of infallibility was acclaimed in St. Peter's in presence of the pope by 533 against 2.

Mr. Gladstone is very glad when Clarendon instructs Mr. Russell to turn his back on the festivities at Rome. "The whole proceeding has been monstrous, and it will hereafter become one of the laughing-stocks of history. The fanaticism of the middle ages is really sober compared with that of the nineteenth century." "The proclamation of Infallibility," he said to Bishop Moriarty, "I must own I look upon as the most portentous (taking them singly), of all events in the history of the Christian church."

III

The next day, as we know, war was declared by France against Germany, the French garrison left Rome, and on September 20 the Italians marched in.

A month before the war broke out, Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Clarendon: "I would avoid any official support of the Italian application to France for the evacuation of Rome, by saying that this country had always abstained from mixing in that question; and that we were the more induced to persevere in that policy from being well convinced that the French government is perfectly aware that in this country the occupation of any part of the pontifical territories by French troops is regarded with regret, pain, and disapproval. Further, that those who most strongly entertain these sentiments, are generally the persons who most highly value, and have most striven to promote, the good understanding between France and England."

The occupation of Rome by the Italian government brought upon Mr.

Gladstone various demands and movements from different parts of the country. His cabinet agreed that the proper course was to decline all interference with a view to the restoration of the temporal power, though they accepted the task of promoting, by means of friendly representations, arrangements to secure the pontiff's freedom and becoming support. Then some of his presbyterian friends asked him why he should even do so much as this, when he would take no such steps for the moderator of the free church. Now consider, Mr. Gladstone replied: "the pope is a sovereign who was in lawful possession of large revenues, and who had charged himself with the support of a body of cardinals, ministers, nuncios, servants, and guards out of those revenues. He has been dispossessed, not for any fault of his own, but because clerical dominion was deemed intolerable. In the maintenance of the pope and his court, followers and agents, six millions of our fellow-subjects or thereabouts are deeply interested; and they are making demands upon us which we are forced to decline. But I should for one be ashamed to deny that there are the strongest equitable claims upon the Italian government growing out of the past state of things; that in these equitable claims the six millions I speak of have a real interest and share; and as the matter is international, and they have no _locus standi_ with the Italian government, it is our part so far to plead their cause if need be."

IV

(M163) Four years elapsed before Mr. Gladstone was in a position to follow up his strong opinions on the injury done, as he believed, to human liberty by the Vatican decrees. But the great debate between ultramontanes and old catholics was followed by him with an interest that never slackened. In September 1874 he went to Munich, and we can hardly be wrong in ascribing to that visit the famous tract which was to make so lively a stir before the end of the year. His princ.i.p.al object was to communicate with Dr. Dollinger, and this object, he tells Mrs. Gladstone, was fully gained. "I think," he says, "I have spent two-thirds of my whole time with Dr. Dollinger, who is indeed a most remarkable man, and it makes my blood run cold to think of _his_ being excommunicated in his venerable but, thank G.o.d, hale and strong old age. In conversation we have covered a wide field. I know no one with whose mode of viewing and handling religious matters I more cordially agree.... He is wonderful, and simple as a child."

"I think it was in 1874," Dollinger afterwards mentioned, "that I remember Gladstone's paying me a visit at six o'clock in the evening. We began talking on political and theological subjects, and became, both of us, so engrossed with the conversation, that it was two o'clock at night when I left the room to fetch a book from my library bearing on the matter in hand. I returned with it in a few minutes, and found him deep in a volume he had drawn out of his pocket-true to his principle of never losing time-during my momentary absence."(317) "In the course of a walk out of Munich in the travelling season of 1874," Mr. Gladstone wrote sixteen years later, "Dr. Dollinger told me that he was engaged in the work of retrial through the whole circle of his Latin teaching and knowledge. The results were tested in his proceedings at Bonn, when he attempted to establish a _formula concordiae_ upon the questions which most gravely divided Christendom."(318) Among other topics Mr. Gladstone commended to his mentor the idea of a republication in a series, of the best works of those whom he would call the Henotic or Eirenic writers on the differences that separate Christians and churches from one another. He also read Pichler on the theology of Leibnitz, not without suspicion that it was rather Pichler than Leibnitz. But neither Leibnitz nor Pichler was really in his mind.

After the session of 1874, when the public ear and mind had been possessed by the word Ritualism, he had as usual sought a vent in a magazine article for the thoughts with which he was teeming.(319) He speaks with some disdain of the question whether a handful of the clergy are or are not engaged in "an utterly hopeless and visionary effort to Romanise the church and people of England." At no time, he says, since the sanguinary reign of Mary has such a scheme been possible. Least of all, he proceeds, could the scheme have life in it "when Rome has subst.i.tuted for the proud boast of _semper eadem_ a policy of violence and change in faith; when she has refurbished and paraded anew every rusty tool she was fondly thought to have disused; when no one can become her convert, without renouncing his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another; and when she has equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history." If these strong words expressed his state of mind before he went abroad, we may readily imagine how the Bavarian air would fan the flame.

Though Dr. Dollinger himself-"so inaccessible to religious pa.s.sions"-was not aware of the purpose of his English friend, there can be little doubt that Mr. Gladstone returned from Munich with the same degree of internal ferment as that which had possessed his mind on his return from Naples three-and-twenty years before. In October he writes to Lord Acton from Hawarden:-

What you have said on the subject of ultramontanism and of the mode in which it should be handled, appears to me to be as wise and as good as is possible. It is really a case for hitting hard, but for hitting the right men. In anything I say or do on the subject, I would wish heartily and simply to conform to the spirit of your words. But I feel myself drawn onwards. Indeed some of your words help to draw me. The question with me now is whether I shall or shall not publish a tract which I have written, and of which the t.i.tle would probably be, "The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance: a Political Expostulation." I incline to think that I ought to publish it. If it were in your power and will to run over here for a night or two I should seek to profit by your counsel, and should ask you to read as much of the MS. as your patience would endure. A more substantial attraction would be that I could go over much of my long and interesting conversations with Dollinger.

V

(M164) The pamphlet(320) appeared in November, and was meant for an argument that the decree of infallibility aimed a deadly blow at the old historic, scientific, and moderate school; it was a degradation of the episcopal order; it carried to its furthest point that spirit of absolutist centralisation, which in its excesses is as fatal to vigorous life in the church, as in the state; it overthrew the principle not even denied by the council of Trent in the sixteenth century, that the pope and his judgments were triable by the a.s.sembled representatives of the Christian world.

Thrice in history it seemed as if the const.i.tutional party in the church was about to triumph: at the council of Constance in the fifteenth century; in the conflict between the French episcopate and Innocent XI. in the days of Bossuet; and thirdly, when Clement XIV., exactly a hundred years before now, dealt with the Jesuits and "levelled in the dust the deadliest foes that mental and moral liberty have ever known." From July 1870 all this had pa.s.sed away, and the const.i.tutional party had seen its death-warrant signed and sealed. The "myrmidons of the apostolic chamber"

had committed their church to revolutionary measures. The vast new claims were lodged in the reign of a pontiff, who by the dark Syllabus of 1864 had condemned free speech, a free press, liberty of conscience, toleration of nonconformity, the free study of civil and philosophic things independently of church authority, marriage unless sacramentally contracted, and all definition by the state of the civil rights of the church.

(M165) "It has been a favourite purpose of my life," Mr. Gladstone said, "not to conjure up, but to conjure down, public alarms. I am not now going to pretend that either foreign foe or domestic treason can, at the bidding of the court of Rome, disturb these peaceful sh.o.r.es. But although such fears may be visionary, it is more visionary still to suppose for one moment that the claims of Gregory VII., of Innocent III., and of Boniface VIII. have been disinterred in the nineteenth century, like hideous mummies picked out of Egyptian sarcophagi, in the interests of archaeology, or without a definite and practical aim." What, then, was the clear and foregone purpose behind the parade of all these astonis.h.i.+ng rea.s.sertions?

The first was-by claims to infallibility in creed, to the prerogative of miracles, to dominion over the unseen world-to satisfy spiritual appet.i.tes, sharpened into reaction and made morbid by "the levity of the destructive speculations so widely current, and the notable hardihood of the anti-Christian writing of the day." This alone, however, would not explain the deliberate provocation of all the "risks of so daring a raid upon the civil sphere." The answer was to be found in the favourite design, hardly a secret design, of restoring by the road of force when any favourable opportunity should arise, and of re-erecting, the terrestrial throne of the popedom, "even if it could only be re-erected on the ashes of the city, and amidst the whitening bones of the people."

And this brings the writer to the immediate practical aspects of his tract. "If the baleful power which is expressed by the phrase _Curia Romana_, and not at all adequately rendered in its historic force by the usual English equivalent 'Court of Rome,' really entertains the scheme, it doubtless counts on the support in every country of an organised and devoted party; which, when it can command the scales of political power, will promote interference, and while it is in a minority, will work for securing neutrality. As the peace of Europe may be in jeopardy, and as the duties even of England, as one of its constabulary authorities, might come to be in question, it would be most interesting to know the mental att.i.tude of our Roman catholic fellow-countrymen in England and Ireland with reference to the subject; and it seems to be one on which we are ent.i.tled to solicit information." Too commonly the spirit of the convert was to be expressed by the notorious words, "a catholic first, an Englishman afterwards"-words that properly convey no more than a truism, "for every Christian must seek to place his religion even before his country in his inner heart; but very far from a truism in the sense in which we have been led to construe them." This, indeed, was a new and very real "papal aggression." For himself, Mr. Gladstone said, it should not shake his allegiance to "the rule of maintaining equal civil rights irrespectively of religious differences." Had he not given conclusive indications of that view, by supporting in parliament as a minister since the council, the repeal in 1871 of the law against ecclesiastical t.i.tles, whose enactment he had opposed twenty years before?