AN ENGLISH ECCLESIASTIC IN ROME.*
WE would recommend this book most earnestly to any English layman proud of his culture and knowledge of men, and confident in the toleration which an extended experience must always produce. He will find it a crucial test of his acquired catholicity of spirit. If he can read it without a feeling of scorn for the writer and the system he represents, can perceive that Mr. Burgon is really a scholar and an acute observer, can comprehend that the mind which so offends him is the ontturn and ultimate result of a special system of training, the flower, as it were, of English ecclesiasticism, and therefore to be studied without annoyance, like an abnormal disease, or strange anatomical specimen, then he may, for the future, relywith confidence onh is philosophical temperament. He is competent to form a fair opinion on fetichism, or Siva worship, or the effects of cannibalism, or the moral influence of polygamy, or Dr. Cummings's eloquence, or the reason for the existence of gents, or any other subject on which an irrepressible and almost instinctive dislike usually prevents a tolerant and therefore accurate judgment. Here is a man who has published a thick octavo, containing his experience of Rome, acquired apparently in 1860, in which there is not one word on the Papal Government, or the Roman people, or the tone of Roman society, or the human hopes and fears which must have been seething and boiling round him, while he was deep in evidences of the comparative antiquity of the "English breviary." It is not that he is writing on another subject, and therefore avoids allusions to all topics of human interest ; there is not the smallest allusion to them—not the most casual half-strangled remark. For all Mr. Burgon appears to have seen, he might have been living in a city in the desert interesting for its traces of an old ecclesiastical system, but as apart from the affairs of the eighteenth century as Mecca or Palmyra. This, moreover, is not the result of dulness or want of observation. Mr. Burgon is a man with the keenest of eyes for an obscure inscription or a possible Christian symbol, with a sharp glance for the externals of Roman worship, and their effect on worshippers, and with no deficient sense of humour or pathos. But he lives in a world of his own, as many English ecclesiastics do—as Dr. Plumptre did when he mistook "Vanity Fair" for "something in the style of the 'Pilgrim's Progress.'" To those who believe in active movement and strong thought, and the vitality of the gospel of Christ, it seems rather a contemptible world, a world occupied very much with ecclesiastical fopperies, questions whether this or that service has been rightly omitted or added to, whether the Roman or English cult is the more antique, whether ugly little scratches on old tiles are Romanist or Christian, whether the lish Ritual" produces more or less devoutness than the Roman habit of bespattering oneself with salted water. Yet, after all, that is not the true or the just view. There are minds, thousands of them, which think it extremelyimportant to prove that Christianity did not become Romanist till 280, instead of 260, as commonly supposed, which are really comforted by bearing there is no sign of Mariolatry in the catacombs, and consequently a presumption that that form of human imbecility did not commence till the fourth century, which are the happier for believing that antiquity supports Anglicanism, and does not quite support the worship which is commonly considered the older. 'Five-sixths of mankind still believe that any creed which claims to be true must be also a cult, a ritual compelling certain observances and modes of worship, in themselves as important as the doctrines they were originally intended to embalm, and if the same idea crops up periodically in England, why should we wonder or despise? If any human being can be brought nearer to God by a conviction that Anglicanism adheres more closely to the ancient breviary than Romanism does, why should he not revel in the abundance of fact and argument which Mr. Burgon has collected for him? He could not have a more single-eyed or incorruptible guide. Mr. Burgon tells his readers some six-and-twenty times, or once in each of the letters which make up th book, that he has no Romanizing tendencies ; he so detests the special dogma of intramontanism, that " the colunin which commemorates the uncatholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception gave • Letters from ROM! to Friends in Ektittrod By the Rev. J. W. Bergen, MA. John Murray.
him so much pain that be used always to try to look the other way;" and he has a positive half-humorous, half-malicious pleasure in proving that everything in Rome is comparatively modern. He is always thinking of the parish church at home, and trying to get hints for the English ritual, and comparing the two sets of services, and exalting the one he prefers as that of the purer and more ancient Church. He even thinks it necessary to argue that the multitude of churches in Rome do not prove its superior religious tone, because, to make any comparison fair, we mast take in the churches of the country districts, and because in Rome itself the buildings are of a debased Romanesque architecture. The fact that the Italian people, "stimulated to piety" by centpries of ceremonial, are the only non-religious people in Europe,—we do not mean irreligious, but the only people who care nothing about theological questions—does not strike his mind as an argument.
Indeed, he would probably deny it, for his judgment seems to be that, although the Roman services are only of yesterday, though antiquity is on our side, though the Ronush doctors have departed from the "Order of the Services" which the English Church has retained, and though she does not give them the ancient Breviary services which the Anglican Church does, still there is a great deal of devotion in Rome. He says of the people, it -was "impossible not to be struck by their reverence and the devotedness of their demeanour." Two incidental proofs of this state of mind "affected him even to tears." In one, scores of poor women bowed before an image of the Virgin and Child "bedizened with finery," dipped their fingers in a little lamp by its side, and then rubbed their children's faces with the oil. "A more busy scene or a more devout ceremony cannot be imagined." We wonder if Mr. Burgon would call a flindoo devout when he does exactly the same thing? In the other instance, a poor countrywoman entered the church while a sermon was goMg on, prayed, curtseyed eo the crucifix with something between love and reverence?' and walked oat, dropping a coin into the poor-box, and dipping her fingers twice into the holy water. "It was very heathenish — but it was very beautiful." The prayer, of course, might or might not be earnest; bat if the word superstition does not describe the rest of that "touching incident," what was it invented for ? Mr. Bergen, however, feels differently. He thinks it impossible to "hear the hundred little bells which from a hundred turrets make the whole atmosphere musical towards the dawn of day, without acknowledging that there is zeal in that ancient city, though 'not according to-knowledge? . . . It is impossible to turn over the pages of the Diario Romano without being reminded that religion (I say not pure religion), is the very business of the place." There are more bells going in most Russian 'cities, and as for the almanacks, the one current among the Hindoos has half a dozen deities for every day in the year. What has all this to do with piety? Yet that it is piety Mr. Burgon distinctly asserts. It is his object, he says, to describe the means by which Rome keeps up the spiritual life of her people: " How then will it fare with us when, in a Roman Catholic country, we behold the unlettered hind bowing' himself devoutly before the image of CHRIST crucified or even before that of the Blessed Virgin ? The piety of the individual we shall, I suppose, recognize with unfeigned pleasure." If that act do indicate individual piety, if there be no distinction between devoutness and careful attention to a ritual, it in short, the evidence of holiness be not love to God and to his creatures, instead of mere attention to certain observances, why have we quitted Rome? Mr. Burgon's proofs of the devotion of the Roman people really amount only to this, that a certain portion of them, under the strong compression of a governing priesthood, go diligently through certain ceremonials, —a fact which, if accompanied by holiness of life, might be a mark of a devout spirit, but, without, has no religious meaning whatever. Of the effect of all these "stimulants to piety" on Roman lives, Mr. Burgon tells us nothing. He records the worshippers' attitudes and looks, and all, in fact, that is emotional, very keenly, and often in very rhythmical sentences ; but of the practical he says nothing, good, bad, or indifferent. We do not mean that he is favourable to Roman doctrine. Mr. Burgon is as orthodox upon the worship the Virgin, purgatory, &c., as beseems the most -rigid of English clergymen; bat it is on the ceremoniaf alone that he passes an original judgment, and it is distinctly that of an ecclesiastic. The Romam external system produces occasionally warm emotional expressions of devotion, and is therefore, in its degree, good.
On the point-of the Romish deviations from the antique service, we must leave it to Catholics to make the best defence they can. They may prove that matins ought to be celebrated over-night, as Mr. Burgon says they often are, because is is inconvenient -to get up very early, and the Host cannot be eaten till they are said, or that fifty other changes are within the authority of the Church, and confine ourselves to the writer's account of the testimony of the catacombs. He has examined them carefully, and has proved to his own satisfaction, and we confess to oars, that the early -Christians did not worship the Virgin, or attribute any particular primacy to St. Peter, or conceal the marriage of their priests, or worship saints, or believe in purgatory, or use the crucifix. As Christ, by the admission of all alike, did none of these things, the proofs seem to us, except from an historical point of view, infinitely unimportant; but the're are minds on which tradition has all the effect of argument, and to such Mr. Burgon's evidence, that early tradition is against Rome, will seem pleasant and consolatory. They may well believe in his testimony, for his bias, like that of all men who can accept a ritual as important, is slightly the other way.
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