MR. LILLY'S NEW BOOK.* THE interesting and able book which
Mr. Lilly has just pub- lished,—the book of a Roman Catholic, though a very candid Roman Catholic,—falls into two very distinct divisions. The first part examines the "claim of Christianity" to be the religion of the world, as compared with the similar claim advanced by Buddhism and Mahommedanism. Mr. Lilly characterises Christianity as being at once a religion and a Church. As a religion it claims to be an "oracle of divine truth superseding all other modes of faith, a system of moral discipline for mankind, transforming every human relation by its remedies for sin and its incentives to goodness, the guardian of that tree of life whose leaves are for the healing of the nations." As a Church it claims to be "a polity, perfect and complete in itself, of which the bonds are not race, language, nor local contiguity, but spiritual beliefs and affections, hopes and fears ; a divine State—Oivitas Det—counting its subjects in all lands a Kingdom, not indeed of this world, but in it; and so of necessity brought into close and constant relations with the Kingdoms of this world." Buddhism and Mahommedanism have also put forth a similar claim to universality, and Mr. Lilly devotes a chapter to each. He points out with great force the decadent condition of Buddhism, and prints some extremely important letters from Cardinal Newman and Mr. Rhys Davids on the subject of the alleged derivation of parts of the Gospel narrative from earlier Buddhist legends. The groundlessness of the allega- tion, in Mr. Davids's opinion, is a fact of unquestionable importance. In dealing extremely temperately and fairly with the claims of Mahommedanism, Mr. Lilly emphasises the fact that it is essentially the religion of a low civilisation. Its destruction of family life, its failure to recognise the worth of woman, its patent ethical defects, are fatal to its claim to embody and direct--as a true religion should do— the teachings of conscience.
All this is interesting and valuable, and is developed with Mr. Lilly's usual rhetorical force and point. It will win much more unqualified assent than the latter part of his book as regards the specific conclusions advocated. But it is the latter part of the work—in which he deals with the distinctive claims of the Catholic Church in communion with Rome— which will excite the deepest interest and arrest the widest attention. And in this part Mr. Lilly's gifts as a student of history are seen to advantage, though we cannot regard his argument as one at all calculated to meet the most effective Protestant criticism. Still, his power of uniting habits—so. often opposed—of pregnant generalisation and yet of candid recognition of exceptions, his discernment of the strong points of his own case, and yet his frank admission of anomaly, have seldom been seen to greater advantage. It is difficult for any reader, however little he may be inclined to make common cause in our own day with the Communion of Rome, to read these pages without a pang of deep regret that the great idea of the Church as a single and organised society, was shattered in so large a section of Christendom by the gross abuses of the Mediaival Church ; or to feel otherwise than in sympathy with Erasmus when he proclaimed that "sects and sohisms had ever been his special abhorrence," and refused absolutely to make the sine of men in Rome or elsewhere, a sufficient, pretext for rebellion against the final authority of the Ecciesick. Mr. Lilly to a great extent disarms the critic by his account of the scandals of the Papacy, and of the need for reformation. It is possible enough that zealots on his own side will accuse him of understating their ease; but his argument has all the more of that kind of persuasiveness which is found in the resolute eschewing of special pleading.
Mr. Lilly traces the persistence of the idea of the Mites Doi, throughout the fluctuating fortunes and changing posi- tion of the Roman Church and Papal See. This was, he holds, the primary conception of the Church of the martyrs in the early centuries; it is the primary conception of the Roman Church in the nineteenth century. " It was not as a set of theological beliefs held by individual persons," he * rho Claims of Chrietianitv. By William S. Lilly. Loudon; Chapman and Hall. 1894. writes, "but as a church, that the new religion was the object of persecution. The Imperial Government hated it as a rival, and vigorously endeavoured to exterminate it. The endeavour failed. The might of Rome yielded to the invincible nation' which Christianity had created. The Empire decayed. The Church grew." The alliance between the Civitae Dei and the Christian State in the Middle Ages forms the theme of a valuable chapter,—the two centuries and a half from the pontificate of Gregory VII. to that of Bonif ace VIII. being the nearest approach to the realisation of the great Ideal of a Christian State under the predominant influ- ence of the Universal Church. It is in this union, and in the consequent claim of the ruling powers to legislate for the spiritual as well as the temporal interests of the community, that we find the explanation of medisoval "intolerance." "To generations," writes Mr. Lilly, "which regarded religion as the prime objective fact of life, the bond of social and political order, heresy must have presented itself in a very different aspect from that which it wears in an age of religious individualism." The strength, the nobility of ethos, the unity of organisation which followed on this state of things, are insisted on by Mr. Lilly; but he is not blind to its shortcomings and limitations. The decay of Papal greatness and virtue from the pontificate of Boniface VIII. onwards, the disastrous dependence of the Papacy on the French crown during the sojourn at Avignon, an approach to the obliteration of the great " note " of unity during the time of the Antipopes, are frankly admitted. The subsequent transformation of Christendom under the Renais- sance—the great "breaking loose of the human faculties," as Mill has called it—is suggestively touched on,—when the Church was no longer the mistress of learning and the prin- ciple of unity for the western nations. And then we pass to the period of the Reformation, with the contemporaneous Counter-reformation in the Church of Rome itself which aroused the enthusiasm of one so little interested in theolo- gical movements as Macaulay.
From Mr. Lilly's point of view we think that his candid recognition of the failures of the Papacy and Roman Church makes the testimony of history to the persistence in her of her ideal of the Civitas Dei, and to the value of that ideal in rela- tion to successive epochs, the more impressive. The figure of Alexander VI., in all its hideousness, throws the light of con- trast very vividly on the extraordinary work of the Jesuits in the succeeding century. The intense and self-abandoning de- votion of that body—resembling only that of the founders of a new religion—stands out with the greater effect after we have studied such a picture of the decay of morality on the Papal throne. The end of the fifteenth century was a period at which devotees of the Roman Church had need to avail themselves of Mr. Lilly's reminder that the Pope's prerogative as vicar of Christ is not necessarily extended one inch beyond that of preservation from error, when he speaks as the mouth- piece of the Ecclegia, as declaring officially which is the faith of the Church. And yet the sixteenth century saw a depth of religious life in Rome rarely surpassed. And, similarly, Mr. Lilly's recognition of the blots in the Roman Church of the last century, will make his readers weigh with all the more attention his forecast for the future. He considers that the most important public function of the Catholic Church in the times that are coming upon us, will be to champion the rights of conscience against the tyranny of an anti-Christian State,— a function which Protestants will regard as all the more likely to be effectively discharged, if the Church has finally lost her supremacy over other forms of Christianity, and with it her strong leaning to active persecution. The Church which Mr. Lilly delights to call supreme is only trustworthy as regards charity, when she is shut in on all sides by power- ful rivals. The recent history of the Church in France especially gives vividness and significance to this view of things. Mr. Lilly shows that the New Liberalism, far from "maintaining an attitude of benevolent neutrality to all forms of faith," really "decrees injustice as a law, and seeks to impose upon people, through a compulsory system of primary education and otherwise, the irreligion of the State." One is reminded by Mr. Lilly's grave warning of Tennyson's fine line on the spurious freedom of the modern creed :— " Freedom free to slay herself, and dying while they shout her name."
It is against this tyrannical enforcement of Liberalism as a dogmatic creed that the Catholic Church's noblest mission— we should add, the mission of all the Churches—is to be directed. But the Catholic Church never understood that mission till she lost the dictatorial power which she still in theory claims. He writes on this subject as follows :— " What then are the prospects of the Catholic Church in this now age ? Well, it seems to me that every year which passes over us, brings out more and more clearly the essential need of a universal spiritual polity, such as the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church alone, presents. The tendency everywhere is to strengthen the State against the individual. This is a theme on which Mill uttered many words of warning in his interesting book on Liberty. And before Mr. Spencer there has arisen the vision of an impending socialistic administration," a regime of status," a revival of despotism,' with the mass of the people controlled by grades of officials.' Where, except in the Catholic Church, is there an organised spiritual polity which can stand forth as the champion of the rights of conscience, of the liberty of the spiritual order against the overweening power of the dechristianised State P The Greek Church is in abject sub- jection to the Sultan'in Turkey, to the Czar in Russia, Since the martyrdom of Nicon no stirrings of independent life have been visible in it. The Evangelical Church of Prussia is the creation of King Frederick William III., who, in 1817, formed it out of the Lutheran and Calvinistic Communions hitherto existing side by side in his territories, and endowed it with formularies of his own composition, but left it without a definite creed. The other Protestant Churches in Germany have a like origin, and are in a like condition. Assuredly not one of them would venture to question the dictates of the Government in matters of religion. How should they, when 'a breath can make them, as a breath has made ' ? The Anglican Establishment, no doubt, occupies a worthier and more dignified position than any other Communion which issued from the Reformation. This is due to two causes. In the first place, the Church of England has preserved the episcopal form of government, and thereby has, to some extent, retained an organic character. Again, Henry VIII. was a far better instructed theologian than Luther or Calvin. And although Anglicanism, to its great loss, has departed largely from the doctrinal standard prescribed by that Prince, it has yet in the event preserved a larger amount of Catholic teaching than any other of the 'reformed' confessions. But the Catholic Church alone possesses the note of universality, she alone is endowed with the independence of a spiritual empire, extending throughout the kingdoms of this world, but subject to none of them And it is precisely this characteristic which renders her an effective check on the usurpations of the State in the domain of conscience. Recent history supplies an instance which admirably illustrates what I am writing. What communion but the Catholic could have successfully resisted the whole power of the Prussian Monarchy, wielded by a statesman of the energy and determina- tion of Prince von Bismarck? The knowledge that they were members of a world-wide spiritual empire, the consciousness of the sympathies of their brethren in all lands, the material help which poured in upon them from many nations, upheld the hands and strengthened the hearts of the Catholics of Germany through the great tribulation of the Kuiturkampf from which they at last victoriously issued. Prince von Bismarck in entering upon that ignoble persecution made one great mistake. He judged Catholic bishops and priests by the standard of Protestant court chaplains. He forgot that Catholic populations were not accustomed, like Protestants, to take their religion from the State. He forgot the ecumenical character of the spiritual polity which he attacked : its hierarchy an organic whole through the Papacy—the Saeramentum Unitatis : its subjects prepared to resist, at any sacrifice, the de- mand that they should render unto Omar the things that are God's. He utterly failed in detaching the German Catholic clergy from the Pope, or the German Catholic people from their clergy. Not a single chapter would fill the place of a deposed bishop ; not a single parish would avail itself of the power given by the Falk laws to elect a new pastor in the place of its imprisoned or exiled priest. It appears to me, then, that in this New Age the office of the Catholic Church in vindicating the rights of conscience, the prerogatives of the spiritual order, the immunities of the City of God, will be of even more importance to mankind than in the
Primitive and Medieval Ages I see no prospect that the Catholic Church will again hold the position in Europe which she held in the Middle Ages : that the Pope will once more occupy the great international office assigned him in the canon law. But it is well conceivable that in the New Age, which is even now upon us, the Pontiff's moral influence will be of unparalleled great- ness, as from his seat by the tomb of the Apostles he surveys his ecumenical charge, and
' Listening to the inner flow of things, Speaks to the ago out of eternity : '
reproving the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment : maintaining the divine testimonies before kings and democracies upholding the rights of conscience and of the moral law, amid the social tyrannies, the national jealousies, the political animosities, which will doubtless be the staple of future history, as they are of past."
We have thought it best to confine ourselves in the main to an account of some of Mr. Lilly's chief positions, rather than give an elaborate criticism of them. But it is essential to point out that the Catholic Church has failed most profoundly exactly where it has wielded the most unqualified power. Readers of the Spectator need not be reminded that our own standpoint is in many respects very different. There is a reverse side to his picture of the Reformation, which makes many, who like ourselves would have agreed in the abstract -with the unwillingness of Erasmus to break up Catholic unity, consider that such an abstract principle was unequal to meeting the concrete facts of the time. Still, it is well for all of us to study what is admirable in Catholic ideals, even if we do not admit that they have been realised ; and we may sympathise with Mr. Lilly's hope that the Roman Church will be an effective force in the struggle which is before us against the tin-Christian tendency of the age, even if we are unable to think that she is competent to deal with the situation as a whole. We believe and trust that she will be a valuable ally ; and those who wish for a more sanguine estimate will do well to turn to Mr. Lilly's lucid exposition of her work in the past and of her prospects for the future. The book is certainly one of the most interesting and suggestive that the author has yet written.
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