CORRESPONDENCE.
Rat. WARD ON THE CATHOLIC POSITIOIT.
[To THZ EDITOR OF THE " SPECTALTOR.n] SIB.,—Mr. Wilfrid Ward closes his Life of Cardinal Wiseman with a chapter entitled "The Exclusive Church and the Zeitgeist," in which he states, explains, and defends the two chief controversial positions upheld by Wiseman, and subse- quently expounded more fully by Cardinal Newman. These eminent theologians maintained, he says, the claim of the Church in communion with the Papacy to be the one exclu- sive Church, which has never included varieties of opinion, being the sole guardian of the Christian Revelation, appointed to determine the true lines of its exposition face to face with the advance of human thought. Secondly, they advocated within the Church a policy of conciliation, and of assimilating all that is worthy, in the civilisations in which from time to time it finds itself.
Mr. Ward proceeds to touch upon the "obvious objections" to this theory of exclusiveness. He admits that it implies, at first sight, a claim on the part of one of many contending religious parties to a monopoly of truth, but he replies that this has been an obvious objection against Christianity itself from the beginning. Another difficulty is that the theory insists on verbal exactitude of doctrinal definitions, whereby minutia of language might appear to be reckoned more important than larger moral considerations of peace, goodwill toward men, and charitable toleration. "Carlyle used to laugh at the dispute between the Orthodox and the Semi-Arians as a quarrel over a diphthong." To this later objection Mr. Ward's reply, if his premisses be granted, is effective. He shows that as speculative activity increased, and as various doctrines began to prevail regarding divine things, the Church was necessarily obliged to use more precise language in order to preserve uniformity of dogma, and to shut out subtle heretical deviations. Some unscientific expressions, which passed current at an earlier stage, when the finer issues of .controversy did not press for determination, were sifted out later and declared heretical. "All civilised communities draw up, as they grow, with increasing precision, the rules which experience shows to be necessary to their protection;" and so the Church gradually protected its doctrines by stricter formula. In short, the process is likened to the building up of a body of civil law by successive statutes and legal decisions. The earlier doctrinal interpretations may not have been wholly wrong—did, indeed, contain some truth ; but Mr. Ward maintains that it was for the Church, as it was for the Courts -of Law, to adjust, define, and limit them according to changing needs and circumstance, since plainly by no other method could identity of doctrine and administrative continuity be preserved. In this sense the appeal to antiquity, so often made by the Reformed Churches, has ever been disallowed ; for that is like appealing, before a temporal Court, to the rough and informal rulings of an earlier age, when nice legal points were not pushed so sharply, or argued no closely. Upon this system the Church has always pre- scribed its own definitions as terms of communion, which if any local religious body accepted, it was within the Church, otherwise it was outside; and so the question was in each instance one of fact, on which argument was inadmissible. And upon no other system, according to Wiseman and Newman, is it possible to maintain unbroken unity of doctrine. Herein they are probably right, although it is another question whether Catholicity—the rigid enforcement
But Mr. Ward further argues that even if a heretic be protesting against some real abuse within the Church, or urging some point that has truth in it, yet if he takes a rebellious course of action, or presses his point at the wrong moment, he is properly condemnable. Here again he draws his analogy from State administration; a man may be con- tending against political abuses, yet if he does it in a way likely to provoke disaffection or revolt, he is guilty of sedition, and may be justly punished. In like manner, Mr. Ward argues, "if an organised spiritual polity is a great protection to society," the heretic is committing the sin of rebellion. The heretic may have a truth in his mind ; but the Church rules a formula to protect wider interests which may be assailed by insisting on the truth out of season. His reason- ing, true or false, has been held to be dangerous to the com- munity; it is incompatible with Unity of Polity. And further, not only in the interests of dogmatic uniformity, but also in the interest of truth, is it necessary to check certain lines of inquiry, because analytic reasoning, the pro. found scrutiny of grounds of belief, leads ultimately to scepticism in faith as in morals ; it destroys the broad, practical conclusions of every-day life, and therefore the Church peremptorily orders the inquirer to stop. "The fundamental assumptions are somewhat parallel in the action of human society in dealing with the beliefs of practical life, and in the Church's treatment of the religions beliefs of which she is the guardian." Our belief in an ex- ternal world is based upon the habitual interpretation of our sensations, and on what is actually found to work in practice. So with the decisions of the Church, we bow to them because they are in practice beneficial to our moral life ; and in either case, the average man would lose rather than gain by going behind "practical beliefs." It is true, he adds, that the conditions of human existence secure the every-day beliefs from demolition by the man of science, that he cannot persuade us to modify them until his scientific theory is incontestably proved, and that the Church doctrines can never be brought to this simple test. "You may, for example, disbelieve the Trinity and no harm ensues." But that only makes spiritual disbelief more insidiously dangerous ; and finally, the Church's real defence for sup- pressing it lies in her "appeal to the prolonged experience of society that to deny her the authority claimed will ultimately be to destroy the normal means of preserving religious faith, and that without religion society perishes." If this is indeed the confirmed experience of society, that an organised spiritual polity is a great protection, and that to deny Rome's infallible authority is to perish, there is, of course, nothing more to be said. But the whole argument from analogy between State rule and Church rule depends on the truth of this assertion ; and whence comes the experience upon which it is founded ? We all know that the nations which left the Roman Communion in the sixteenth century are by no means on the verge of social dissolution, are, in fact, stronger at this moment than the Latin peoples who remained in the Papacy, and are at least not inferior to them intellectually or morally. The truth is that this appeal to experience has no stronger basis than the petitio principii which runs through the whole argument that Mr. Ward founds upon his parallel between the laws passed by a State for the preservation of society, and the peremptory rulings of the Church on disputed questions of theology. Undoubtedly such rulings do operate, for those who submit to them, pre- cisely like the decisions of a supreme Law Court ; nor is there any practical difference between infallibility and (for example) the Judicial Committee of the Queen's Privy Council, since the final order, right or wrong, must be accepted by those subject to the jurisdiction. But the real strength of the analogy still depends entirely on the assumption that just as human society cannot exist without a sovereign power to make and execute laws, so it has vital need of a supreme ruler in the spiritual domain; and not for one country alone, but for all Christendom. This is the media val conception of the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church universal, which has always meant despotism in temporal government, and still more so in things spiritual. The record of history, which shows that great empires are dangerous to civil liberty, is far stronger and more decisive against vast ecclesiastical dominations, proving that they have always been fatal to the intellectual freedom which is the lifeblood of national development. Under either regime, spiritual or temporal, the benevolent despot inevitably lapses into the irresponsible tyrant. For just as the autocratic ruler is obliged to suppress discussion or ill-timed protests lest they should grow into disaffection, and to put down opposition lest it should lead to rebellion, so the infallible Church must, as Mr. Ward explains, strictly limit discussion, extirpate germs of dissent as the root of heresy, and condemn unseasonable truths from an instinctive foreknowledge of their logical consequences. We have here, in short, the autocratic system which Englishmen discarded some three centuries ago, having deliberately preferred the watchwords of civil and religious liberty. Moreover, there is a very substantial distinction between civil and ecclesiastical sovereignty, to be found in the nature of the things with which each deals respectively. When a Legislature or a Judge places some limit on liberty of speech or action, it is done upon considerations of fact, intelligible to all who care to examine them,—the social interests concerned are clear and tangible, and whether the measure or decision be right or wrong, can be surely tested, in the long-run, by the working of it. No such practical criterion can be applied to dogmatic rulings in restraint of opinion, where the only in- terest that is demonstrably affected by discussion is unity of doctrine throughout all Christendom; for on national Churches Rome pronounces her anathema. I do not underrate the importance of religious uniformity within a Communion, but whether Rome's claim to universal dictatorship be worth maintaining at the expense of truth, however unwelcome and unpalatable, and to the detriment of intellectual freedom, how- ever moderately claimed, is a question to which the English people have long ago replied by a resolute negative. It should be remembered that to the great schism of the six- teenth century Rome, quite as much as any other Church, owes her gradual reformation. She has latterly been en- deavouring to recover her lost dominion by a judicious attitude of comparative reasonableness and moderation, and of readiness to assimilate culture, to accept criticism, and generally to shape her course by the signs of the times. But if ever her ascendency were restored in Western Christendom, her unchangeable principles would compel her to alter this policy, with the result that the less submissive nations would again break away, to begin over again the old contest for intellectual emancipation. LAICUS.
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