IN THEIR BEARING ON CIVIL ALLEGIANCE.

9

This list is now perhaps sufficiently extended, although I have as yet not touched the decrees of 1870. But, before quitting it, I must offer three observations on what it contains.

Firstly. I do not place all the Propositions in one and the same category; for there are a portion of them which, as far as I can judge, might, by the combined aid of favourable construction and vigorous explanation, be brought within bounds. And I hold that favourable construction of the terms used in controversies is the right general rule. But this can only be so, when construction is an open question. When the author of certain propositions claims, as in the case before us, a sole and unlimited power to interpret them in such manner and by such rules as he may from time to time think fit, the only defence for all others concerned is at once to judge for themselves, how much of unreason or of mischief the words, naturally understood, may contain. Secondly. It may appear, upon a hasty perusal, that neither the infliction of penalty in life, limb, liberty, or goods, on disobedient members of the Christian Church, nor the title to depose sovereigns, and release subjects from their allegiance, with all its revolting consequences, has been here reaffirmed. In terms, there is no mention of them; but in the substance of the propositions, I grieve to say, they are beyond doubt included. For it is notorious that they have been declared and decreed by "Rome," that is to say by Popes and Papal Councils; and the stringent condemnations of the Syllabus include all those who hold that Popes and Papal Councils (declared ecumenical) have transgressed the just limits of their power, or usurped the rights of princes. What have been their opinions and decrees about persecution I need hardly say; and indeed the right to employ physical force is even here undisguisedly claimed (No. 7).

Even while I am writing, I am reminded, from an unquestionable source, of the words of Pope Pius IX. himself on the deposing power. I add only a few italics; the words appear as given in a translation, without the original :

"The present Pontiff used these words in replying to the address from the Academia of the Catholic Religion (July 21, 1873):

"There are many errors regarding the Infallibility: but the most malicious of all is that which includes, in that dogma, the right of deposing sovereigns, and declaring the people no longer bound by the obligation of fidelity. This right has now and again, in critical circumstances, been exercised by the Pontiffs: but it has nothing to do with Papal Infallibility. Its origin was not the infallibility, but the authority of the Pope. This authority, in accordance with public right, which was then vigorous, and with the acquiescence of all Christian nations, who reverenced in the Pope the supreme Judge of the Christian Commonwealth, extended so far as to pass judgment, even in civil affairs, on the acts of Princes and of Nations.'"*

Lastly. I must observe that these are not mere opinions of the Pope himself, nor even are they opinions which he might paternally

'Civilization and the See of Rome.' By Lord Robert Montagu, Dublin, 1874. A Lecture delivered under the auspices of the Catholic Union of Ireland. I have a little misgiving about the version: but not of a nature to affect the substance.

recommend to the pious consideration of the faithful. With the promulgation of his opinions is unhappily combined, in the Encyclical Letter, which virtually, though not expressly, includes the whole, a command to all his spiritual children (from which command we the disobedient children are in no way excluded) to hold them.

Itaque omnes et singulas pravas opiniones et doctrinas singillatim hisce literis commemoratas auctoritate nostrâ Apostolicâ reprobamus, proscribimus, atque damnamus; easque ab omnibus Catholicæ Ecclesiæ filiis, veluti reprobatas, proscriptas, atque damnatas omnino haberi volumus et mandamus" (a). Encycl. Dec. 8, 1864.

And the decrees of 1870 will presently show us, what they establish as the binding force of the mandate thus conveyed to the Christian world.

IV. THE THIRD PROPOSITION.

I now pass to the operation of these extraordinary declarations on personal and private duty.

When the cup of endurance, which had so long been filling, began, with the council of the Vatican in 1870, to overflow, the most famous and learned living theologian of the Roman Communion, Dr. von Döllinger, long the foremost champion of his Church, refused compliance, and submitted, with his temper undisturbed and his freedom unimpaired, to the extreme and most painful penalty of excommunication. With him, many of the most learned and respected theologians of the Roman Communion in Germany underwent the same sentence. The very few, who elsewhere (I do not speak of Switzerland) suffered in like manner, deserve an admiration rising in proportion to their fewness. It seems as though Germany, from which Luther blew the mighty trumpet that even now echoes through the land, still retained her primacy in the domain of conscience, still supplied the centuria prærogativa of the great comitia of the world.

But let no man wonder or complain. Without imputing to anyone the moral murder, for such it is, of stifling conscience and conviction, I for one cannot be surprised that the fermentation, which is working through the mind of the Latin Church, has as yet (elsewhere than in Germany) but in few instances come to the surface. By the mass of mankind, it is morally impossible that questions such as these can be adequately examined; so it ever has been, and so in the main it will continue, until the principles of manufacturing machinery shall have been applied, and with analogous results, to intellectual and moral processes. Followers they are and must be, and in a certain sense ought to be. But what as to the leaders of society, the men of education and of leisure? I will try to suggest some answer in few words. A change of religious profession is under all circumstances a great and awful thing. Much more is the question, however, between conflicting, or apparently conflicting, duties arduous, when the religion of a man has been changed for him, over his head, and without the very least of his participation. Far be it then from me to make any Roman Catholic, except the great hierarchic Power, and those who have egged (a) For translation of this passage, see p. 33, third page of cover.

IN THEIR BEARING ON CIVIL ALLEGIANCE.

11 it on, responsible for the portentous proceedings which we have witnessed. My conviction is that, even of those who may not shake off the yoke, multitudes will vindicate at any rate their loyalty at the expense of the consistency, which perhaps in difficult matters of religion few among us perfectly maintain. But this belongs to the future; for the present, nothing could in my opinion be more unjust than to hold the members of the Roman Church in general already responsible for the recent innovations. The duty of observers, who think the claims involved in these decrees arrogant and false, and such as not even impotence real or supposed ought to shield from criticism, is frankly to state the case, and, by way of friendly challenge, to intreat their Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen to replace themselves in the position which five-and-forty years ago this nation, by the voice and action of its Parliament, declared its belief that they held.

Upon a strict re-examination of the language, as apart from the substance of my Third Proposition, I find it faulty, inasmuch as it seems to imply that a "convert" now joining the Papal Church, not only gives up certain rights and duties of freedom, but surrenders them by a conscious and deliberate act. What I have less accurately said that he renounced, I might have more accurately said that he forfeited. To speak strictly, the claim now made upon him by the authority, which he solemnly and with the highest responsibility acknowledges, requires him to surrender his mental and moral freedom, and to place his loyalty and civil duty at the mercy of another. There may have been, and may be, persons who in their sanguine trust will not shrink from this result, and will console themselves with the notion that their loyalty and civil duty are to be committed to the custody of one much wiser than themselves. But I am sure that there are also "converts" who, when they perceive, will by word and act reject, the consequence which relentless logic draws for them. If, however, my proposition be true, there is no escape from the dilemma. Is it then true, or is it not true, that Rome requires a convert, who now joins her, to forfeit his moral and mental freedom, and to place his loyalty and civil duty at the mercy of another?

In order to place this matter in as clear a light as I can, it will be necessary to go back a little upon our recent history.

A century ago we began to relax that system of penal laws against Roman Catholics, at once pettifogging, base, and cruel, which Mr. Burke has scathed and blasted with his immortal eloquence.

When this process had reached the point, at which the question was whether they should be admitted into Parliament, there arose a great and prolonged national controversy; and some men, who at no time of their lives were narrow-minded, such as Sir Robert Peel, the Minister, resisted the concession. The arguments in its favour were obvious and strong, and they ultimately prevailed. But the strength of the opposing party had lain in the allegation that, from the nature and claims of the Papal power, it was not possible for the consistent Roman Catholic to pay to the crown of this country an entire allegiance, and that the admission of persons, thus self-disabled, to Parliament was inconsistent with the safety of the State and nation; which

had not very long before, it may be observed, emerged from a struggle for existence.

An answer to this argument was indispensable; and it was supplied mainly from two sources. The Josephine laws, then still subsisting in the Austrian empire, and the arrangements which had been made after the peace of 1815 by Prussia and the German States with Pius VII. and Consalvi, proved that the Papal Court could submit to circumstances, and could allow material restraints even upon the exercise of its ecclesiastical prerogatives. Here, then, was a reply in the sense of the phrase solvitur ambulando. Much information of this class was collected for the information of Parliament and the country.† But there were also measures taken to learn, from the highest Roman Catholic authorities of this country, what was the exact situation of the members of that communion with respect to some of the better known exorbitancies of Papal assumption. Did the Pope claim any temporal jurisdiction? Did he still pretend to the exercise of a power to depose kings, release subjects from their allegiance, and incite them to revolt? Was faith to be kept with heretics? Did the Church still teach the doctrines of persecution? Now, to no one of these questions could the answer really be of the smallest immediate moment to this powerful and solidly compacted kingdom. They were topics selected by way of sample; and the intention was to elicit declarations showing generally that the fangs of the medieval Popedom had been drawn, and its claws torn away; that the Roman system, however strict in its dogma, was perfectly compatible with civil liberty, and with the institutions of a free State moulded on a different religious basis from its

own.

Answers in abundance were obtained, tending to show that the doctrines of deposition and persecution, of keeping no faith with heretics, and of universal dominion, were obsolete beyond revival; that every assurance could be given respecting them, except such as required the shame of a formal retractation; that they were in effect mere bugbears, unworthy to be taken into account by a nation, which prided itself on being made up of practical men.

But it was unquestionably felt that something more than the renunciation of these particular opinions was necessary in order to secure the full concession of civil rights to Roman Catholics. As to their individual loyalty, a State disposed to generous or candid interpretation had no reason to be uneasy. It was only with regard to requisitions, which might be made on them from another quarter, that apprehension could exist. It was reasonable that England

See the work of Count dal Pozzo on the Austrian Ecclesiastical Law.' London: Murray, 1827. The Leopoldine Laws in Tuscany may also be mentioned.

† See Report from the Select Committee appointed to report the nature and substance of the Laws and Ordinances existing in Foreign States, respecting the regulation of their Roman Catholic subjects in Ecclesiastical matters, and their intercourse with the See of Rome, or any other Foreign Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction,' Printed for the House of Commons in 1816 and 1817. Reprinted 1851.

should desire to know not only what the Pope* might do for himself, but to what demands, by the constitution of their Church, they were liable; and how far it was possible that such demands could touch their civil duty. The theory which placed every human being, in things spiritual and things temporal, at the feet of the Roman Pontiff, had not been an idolum specûs, a mere theory of the chamber. Brainpower never surpassed in the political history of the world had been devoted for centuries to the single purpose of working it into the practice of Christendom; had in the West achieved for an impossible problem a partial success; and had in the East punished the obstinate independence of the Church by that Latin conquest of Constantinople, which effectually prepared the way for the downfall of the Eastern empire, and the establishment of the Turks in Europe. What was really material therefore was, not whether the Papal chair laid claim to this or that particular power, but whether it laid claim to some power that included them all, and whether that claim had received such sanction from the authorities of the Latin Church, that there remained within her borders absolutely no tenable standing-ground from which war against it could be maintained. Did the Pope then claim infallibility? Or did he, either without infallibility or with it (and if with it so much the worse), claim an universal obedience from his flock? And were these claims, either or both, affirmed in his Church by authority which even the least Papal of the members of that Church must admit to be binding upon conscience?

The two first of these questions were covered by the third. And well it was that they were so covered. For to them no satisfactory answer could even then be given. The Popes had kept up, with comparatively little intermission, for well-nigh a thousand years their claim to dogmatic infallibility; and had, at periods within the same tract of time, often enough made, and never retracted, that other claim which is theoretically less but practically larger; their claim to an obedience virtually universal from the baptised members of the Church. To the third question it was fortunately more practicable to prescribe a satisfactory reply. It was well known that, in the days of its glory and intellectual power, the great Gallican Church had not only not admitted, but had denied Papal infallibility, and had declared that the local laws and usages of the Church could not be set aside by the will of the Pontiff. Nay, further, it was believed that in the main these had been, down to the close of the last century, the prevailing opinions of the Cisalpine Churches in communion with Rome. The Council of Constance had in act as well as word shown that the Pope's judgments, and the Pope himself, were triable by the assembled representatives of the Christian world. And the Council of Trent, notwithstanding the predominance in it of Italian and Roman influences, if it had not denied, yet had not affirmed either proposition.

At that period the eminent and able Bishop Doyle did not scruple to write as follows: "We are taunted with the proceedings of Popes. What, my Lord, have we Catholics to do with the proceedings of Popes, or why should we be made accountable for them?"-Essay on the Catholie Claims.' To Lord Liverpool, 1826, p. 111.