THE POPE'S LETTER TO ENGLISHMEN. T HE Pope's letter to the
English people is a singularly touching and genial, we had almost said a singularly innocent, one. Leo XIII. writes like the most venerable and the most affectionate of fathers who has no more insight into the special attitude of his children's minds than a mother has into the perplexities of her first child. Browning makes his great Pope open a soliloquy in these dignified words :— "Once more upon this earth of God's, While twilight lasts and time wherein to work, I take this staff with my uncertain hand And stay my six and four-score years, my due Labour and sorrow on His judgment-seat, And forthwith think, speak, act in place of Him,— The Pope for Christ."
And the present Pope commences in a no less humbly dignified strain, addressing, however, only "those amongst them who seek the kingdom of Christ in the unity of the faith." But he hardly knows how few there are amongst the English seekers after the kingdom of Christ to whom " the unity of the faith" now means anything but a very distant and rather dim ideal. That is the first embarrass- rr ent which most of us will feel as we read the Pope's affec- tionate and touching, and above all, simple, and yet, for most of us, unpractical words. How can a nation whose mcst believing people have been fed on private judgment till they can hardly realise that conviction is conviction at all unless it has worked its way into the individual heart by being specially fitted, as it were, to the very form and stature of an individual intelligence, enter into the mind of one who regards Christ's religion as a creed given en bloc to a whole family of nations by the authority which alone had full access to the divine type and form of the original revelation,—a type and form to which the individual mind must adapt itself, rather than adapt the creed which it appropriates ? The Pope's view of our interior condition is a very sincere and natural, but a very inexperienced, view. He assumes in the most natural way that what we all pray for is the same kind of faith which St. Augustine originally gave to our Saxon forefathers. He assumes, we imagine, that if we could but get a glimpse of the mind of the Venerable Bede, for instance, we should all be eager to accept that glimpse as decisive for our own faith. He assumes that we all believe ),s profoundly in intercessory prayer as he and the Fathers believe in it, and especially in the intercessory prayer of the chief Roman Catholic saints, with the blessed Virgin at the head of them. He seems to be entirely unaware that appeals to the Virgin Mary to plead for us are regarded by the great mass of the English people as idolatrous, and, above all, he is as unconscious as a child that the promise of indulgences, addressed, of course, not to Protestants, but to faithful Catholics, as the reward for their intercessions on behalf of those who are not Catholics, will act as a red rag acts on a bull, and almost frighten those who are even ritualistically, not to say Roman Catholically, inclined, into a kind of ecclesiastical convulsion fit. If the good old Pope had only been able to hint that, perhaps, after all, the conception of an " in- dulgence " had never been examined and approved by the infallible authority of the Church, and that it might even yet be discouraged, if not condemned by that infallible authority, he might really have impressed deeply a certain section of the English Church ; but as of course be not only could not give any such hint, but never entertained the remotest notion of any concession of the kind, the concluding passage of his address can only be described as a thunderbolt that might have even been intended,—though, of course, it was not intended,—to defeat entirely his own purpose.
In all probability the Pope has not the least idea that the great majority of earnest Christians among the English people have fought their way to a belief which holds on to their own minds by virtue of its special adaptation to the needs which nearly four centuries of hesitation and doubt have developed in this people's minds, and that these are needs which hardly include that craving for some authoritative assurance of the meaning and drift of the Gospel from a central organ of revelation, which Augustine found among our Saxon forefathers. The Pope looks upon faith as a pious submission to the developed creed which the history and traditions and practical institutions of the Roman Church, have formed amongst the Roman Catholic laity. He does not consider that for nearly four centuries the English people have been critically comparing that creed with the creed contained in the epistles of St. Paul and that embodied in the worship of the Church of Jerusalem, and discovering not a few radical discrepancies, as well, unfortunately, as a great many other and more funda- mental discrepancies between the creed and worship of the primitive Church, and the current assumptions of modern criticism and science. It is quite true, and a truth for which we may thank God heartily, that the story of Christ's life, crucifixion, and resurrection has overcome most of these doubts and hesitations, and founded as deep a belief in Revelation as any that Rome ever received and transmitted. But this is by no means the kind of belief that would acquiesce in all the habits and assumptions of the Roman Church during the fifteen centuries or so that separate us from the primitive Church ; and we fear it must be admitted that the last thing a pious English Christian would be likely to admit, would be that the intercessory prayers of „ the earlier saints, with the Blessed Virgin at their head, would be more likely to produce a pious and rational faith in his mind, than all the discipline which his own mind would go through under the general name of exercise of private judgment. What is certain is that a belief, often wholesome enough, often excessive and almost super- stitious, in the power of a man to find a true creed for himself, has grown up amongst us, and has done a great deal to undermine that absolute faith in the virtual omni- potence of intercessory prayer on which the greater part of the Pope's letter is really based.
'What, then, will be the result of the Pope's letter on the English people ? To far the greater number even of the best Christians among us, it will be equivalent to an assurance that the Roman Church persists, and must persist, in doctrines which have most profoundly puzzled and repelled us. To almost all of us we hope it will bring a cordial feeling that after all the Pope is a good, and a sincere, and a very devout man, and no more the Man of Sin or Anti-Christ, or the Beast in Revela- tions, than he is the direct mouthpiece of our Lord. It will, we think and hope, tend to produce a friendly and cordial relation between the Roman Catholic Church and the various English Protestant Churches ; but as for tending to "the unity of the faith" in any other sense than that, we do not believe that it can have that effect at all. It will shake the passionate dread of the Roman Catholics which still exists in England, but it will tend to narrow the very great alienation of heart, much more than of mind, which still exists between us. And perhaps it may enable us to co-operate more heartily with the Catholics in all genuinely good work than for many cen- turies we have been able to co-operate. We think the letter must tend towards further extinguishing that really superstitious horror of the Catholic Church, which still undoubtedly exists among us, though that horror has long been on the decline.
Previous page
