CARDINAL MANNING'S STRING OF "BEADS."
ARDINAL MANNING preached a remarkable sermon in
Manchester last Sunday, when reopening the Church of St. Augustine. He pressed home with great vigour the favourite principle of the Roman Catholics,—that any really divine re- velation implies also a permanent divine guarantee of some kind against misconceptions and misinterpretations of that revelation. Indeed, he made use of a vivid, and perhaps a rather dangerously graphic, image to enforce his meaning. Urging on his hearers that every repudiation of the authority of the Roman See had resulted in. doctrinal "confusion, contention, contradiction," and the "wasting and perishing" of every germ of divine truth re- tained by those who had separated themselves from the Church, he remarked that "little by little men found it impossible for beads to hang together without a thread, and having denied the divine authority upon which all truth rested, having broken the thread upon which all these jewels of divine truth were strung, having denied the divine authority of the Church, they began to lose and reject doctrine after doctrine," till at last they were left in. the pure rationalism which accepts no truth which human reason is not itself competent to demonstrate. That is a fresh as well as a vigorous image. Most English Protestants might accept it at once, as putting in strong relief not only the strength, but the weakness of the Roman Church. We might well say, Yes, the Church strings its doctrines and decisions together, just as you would thread beads on a string. A Council meets, and a new doctrine is added which immediately becomes binding on Catholic consciences, even though pious Catholics yesterday rejected it as a paradox. As a new saint is added, to the Calendar, or a new holy place is downed with a special indulgence, and is placed upon the pilgrims' catalogue, so new doctrines are annexed to the long string of previous doctrines, the principle of unity being, at least for the conscience of the believer, simply the outward string of ecclesiastical authority on which all alike are strung, and not any necessity for demonstrating the inward and organic unity of them all. Let the string break, and the doctrines all roll away in different directions, like the beads off a necklace, for they hung together by no mutual attraction of one for the other, but solely by the word of the authoritative Church which was the voucher for one and all alike.' We are quite aware that Cardinal Manning would warmly repudiate this inference from his image. He would say, of course, that though to the human reason, when it sets itself up as judge of these su.pernatural things, the inner bonds which keep truth together are liable to disappear, and the various articles of faith to seem to be no better united than the beads on a rosary by the skiing which connects them, yet that the mind of the Church grasped the unity and integrity of the truth before formulating the individual doctrines by virtue of which that whole was reduced into the human form of creeds and confessions. But though the Cardinal would certainly say this, he leaves it open to Protestants to reply, —' If this be so, why do you, then, attach so exclusive an import- ance to the authority of the Church as the guarantee of truth? If it is possible to recognise directly the links between this and that divine truth, why does not the Church rest her case on this spiritual evidence, instead of appealing to her barren authority as the one string which can alone keep together the various jewels of her crown?' And in point of fact, the real drift of the Cardinal's sermon on "Jesus Christ and him Crucified " was pre- cisely this,—that spiritual allegiance to Christ is not nearly enough for the health of the soul without adding to it humility of attitude towards the Roman Catholic Church as &teacher, whereas humility of attitude towards the Roman Catholic Church as a teacher is enough for the soul, and will necessarily include all that is requisite in relation to the feeling towards the person of Christ. Yet this 'position seems to us to involve, even from the Roman Catho- lic's point of view, a paradox at least as striking as that which the Cardinal was trying to press home to Protestants in his sermon of last Sunday. What he wished to make Protestants believe was that they or their intellectual posterity must neces- sarily, in the natural order of things, come to throw off their be- lief in Christ, for want of a final authority by which to interpret and harmonise their conceptions of revealed truth. But what he will certainly make them believe is, that the divine attraction which has so often made men, to use St. Paul's strong expression,
"know nothing save Jesus Christ and him crucified," is entirely insufficient for the purposes of Roman Catholic Christianity, since a great part of Cardinal Manning's sermon was devoted to proving that this state of mind, which he admitted to have prevailed in many Protestant Churches in a particular stage of their develop- ment, and which he called "pietism," is the certain parent of the rationalism by which it has frequently been succeeded. In other words, the true Christian, as Roman Catholics think, must come to the Church first, and to Christ only as the Church directs, or he will not go straight at all. It is not the personal attitude to Christ which is the string to keep the beads of doctrine together, but the personal attitude towards the infallible Church ; while the personal relation to Christ is only one of the beads, even though it be the most important of all, which is so strung. If you go obediently to the Church, say the Roman Catholics, you are sure of the right relation to the Head of the Church. But if you only go obediently to the Head of the Church, so far from being sure of the right relation to the Church, Tou may, perhaps, be almost sure of the wrong ; you may be on the straight road to rationalism, like the Pietists of the German, and the Puritans of the English Reformation.
The truth is, that nothing is easier than to show that to cling close to an organised and continuous external autho- rity is the best chance for ensuring a certain amount of doctrinal continuity and identity of language in expressing the thoughts of the human mind on themes so great as those of a divine revelation,—though nothing is so hard as to ahow that a submission of that kind was ever demanded from the first generation of believers, or could have been implied in the common spiritual fascination which drew all alike into one com- munity of faith. Every rational observer will agree, to a great .extent, with Cardinal Manning, when he insists that Protestantism has, in fact, disintegrated Christian dogma, and that it was indeed -quite inevitable that it should do so. When minds of all shades of moral and intellectual culture begin to try to form their own impressions of a body of teaching so mysterious and so infinitely above us as the Christian revelation, it is inevitable that all kinds of intellectual confusion will result. But whether that is an argument either, on the one hand, in favour of an infallible human authority on the subject, or, on the other hand, against the possibility of reaching any final result at all, is quite another question. As to the former question, it seems to us that the most orthodox of Roman Catholics themselves have gone through, or will have to go through, just the same sort of intellectual and moral fermentations as we heretics have gone through or are going through, before they can come to accept really and spiritu- ally any one of the dogmatic truths which they have previously held on mere authority ; and we suspect that in all ages there has been quite as much real difference between the faith of the believers on authority and the believers on spiritual evidence, inside the orthodox Church, as between the faith of the orthodox Church- man inside, and the heretics outside. You can't get rid of the real inward difference between a child who accepts a statement on authority, and a man who knows whyhe believes it, by merely insist- ing that the two accept the same creed. And as to the second question, —whether an argument against the possibility of all solid conviction can be founded on the apparent disintegration which Christian faith undergoes when it is submitted to the test of each individual conscience, reason, and judgment,—surely it is sufficient to say that if any of the various beads of dogma are really not merely strung on an external thread of authority, but are organically related to -each other in the divine nature of things, there is every reason in the world why we should ultimately agree in recognising this, and recognise it all the sooner for the hopeless fracture of that string of merely external authority from which so few Christians have as yet disentangled the spiritual elements of their creed. It seems to us that the history of revelation has been from the first the history of a real divine enlightenment of the human race, confused by the difficulties which necessarily attended the attempt to provide security for the continuous preservation and identification of what they had thus learnt in gleams and flashes. The Jewish Church was certainly ao far from an infallible Church, that the prophets, who were not officials of that Church, were sent expressly to keep the regular officials from distorting and hiding the very truths they were intended to proclaim. The early Christian Church was so far from an infallible Church, that the three leading Apostles were all at different times sharply rebuked for their utter misap- prehension of the spiritual truth they were sent to teach. Instead of revealing an authority on the thread of which certain 'beads' of dogmatic truth were to be strung, there is hardly a word in the Gospels which could even suggest a continuous historical authority at all. The person and character of Christ are set forth in every sort of light and steeped in every kind of glory, and that is all Certainly 'Pietism,' as Cardinal Manning calls it, has a much stronger case than Ecclesiasticism, in the story of the acts and discourses of Christ. That for centuries uniformity of profes- sion covered a vast deal of the widest possible divergence in the real apprehension of the facts of revelation, is certainly true ; and the acceptance of a creed on the mere authority of the Church was always as different from what is properly meant by belief, as the child's belief in an aeronomical truth announced to him by his elders, from the astronomer's belief in it. Cardinal Manning's view of Christianity no doubt has the advantage of presenting a string of historical continuity on which the beads of his con- fession are strung, but it has the great disadvantage that it looks far less like the Christianity of the Gospels than almost any Protestant view that could be named. The 'thread' on which he hangs his beads was not spun then. It took a long his- torical development to spin any such thread for the beads of Christian belief. The primary Christian view of Christ as him- self the sum of Christianity, which Cardinal Manning regards, not without some justice, as the parent of modern rationalism,— though it is a rationalism which will ultimately lead back to the belief from which it started,—is, we believe, wholly incompatible with the Roman Catholic view of submission to the Church as the only safe approach to God. The theory which makes the string of authority more important than any of the doctrinal beads it contains is a theory which necessarily subordinates the spirit to the understanding, the conscience to the intellect, the affections to the judgment of the disciple. And that is a theory which, however much there may be to be said in favour of it from various points of view, has hardly even a vestige of support in the primitive records of the Christian revelation.
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