PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY 322 384 TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check. or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & GAY. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. From The Contemporary Review. THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY ARRAIGNED BEFORE THE NINETEENTH. A STUDY ON THE REFORMATION. In monte saxum: sed vetant leges Jovis. IN the month of October, 1850, was kindled a strong political excitement, which ran through this island in all its districts, and gave birth to the measure, at once defiant and impotent, which, under the name of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act, encumbered the statute-book for a quarter of a century, and then silently closed its unwept existence. Public susceptibility had been quickened at the time by a number of secessions from the Church of England to the Church of Rome, large in relation to the previous rarity of such occurrences, and important from the high character of the seceders, and the talents of many, as well as the fine and subtle genius of one, among them. It happened that I had occasion to travel by post in the centre of France at the period when the stir began. Resting for Sunday at Roanne, I attended the paroisse; and heard an earnest preacher on the triumphs of the Church. His capital point was, that these triumphs were in no way confined to the earlier centuries: they were even now as conspicuous as ever; at the very time when he addressed them the great fortress of heresy was crumbling away, and the people of England were returning in crowds within the one true fold of Christ. Is the worthy preacher now alive? Has he observed the currents of the religious and the ecclesiastical world? What does he think of his description, and of the prediction which it involved? Is be satisfied with the statistics of conversion? Or does he look deeper than statistics, which can at best speak only for the hour that is? Does he dive into causes, and, estimating moral and mental resource in all its deep diversities, does he still see in the opening future that golden harvest, with the glow of which his vision was then delighted? As for the statistics, they are obstinately stationary. The fraction of Roman Catholics in the population of this country, as computed from the yearly returns of mar riages, has for a generation past been between five and four per cent.; and, out of this small portion, by far the larger part, probably not less than five-sixths, are of Irish birth. The slight variation observable has, on the whole, been rather downwards than upwards. The fraction itself, which approached five per cent. in 1854, now rises little above four. There is, in short, no sign that an impression has been made on the mass of the British nation. This is especially remarkable on two grounds. First, that a new lodgment has really been effected in the body of the aristocracy. Now, high station is in this country a capital element of attractive power. Fully half a score of peers, or heirs apparent to peerages, have, within forty years, joined the Latin communion; and have carried thither in several cases the weight of high character, in one or two that of noted abilities or accomplishments. But, secondly, these years have beyond all question effected an enormous augmentation in the arguing and teaching capacity of the Anglo-Roman body. I do not speak of merely mechanical appliances, as buildings. It is probable, that the secessions have multiplied at least fivefold the stock of educated ability and learning, available for all its purposes. The aggregate addition might perhaps claim to be equivalent in force to the entire body of honormen at Oxford or Cambridge for several years. The zeal of the seceders has been even more conspicuous than their talents. Yet this great afflux of missionary energy has entirely failed to mark the work of propagandism either by an increase of relative numbers, or, as every observer must admit, by an augmentation of civil, political, or social force. Upon this curious state of things, a French priest, the Abbé Martin,* looks in a state of mind more curious still. For him, and for those on this side the water who may have prompted him, the whole argument in the Roman controversy is on one side. Though there has been a great historical controversy, worked out, during many centuries, in many countries, What Hinders the Ritualists from Becoming Roman Catholics? By the Abbé Martin. Contemporary Review, August, 1878, pp. 113-136. was such as to raise a fair presumption that so many teachers would surely be followed by a corresponding multitude of the taught, and to afford at once temptation and excuse for many an unwary and precipitate anticipation. The general proposition announced by the abbé at the outset seems to be this: that a portion of the English Church much resembles the Latin Church in ritual, usage, and doctrine, and it is therefore matter of astonishment that the resemblance does not merge into identity; in other words, that they do not enter the papal fold. Now, it may relieve the abbé's mind of a portion of the pain of this astonishment if he asks himself another question: it is this. There is another body, whose ritual and doctrine is deemed by his own communion to be very much closer to its own, than those of any portion of the Church of England. The ritual and doctrine of the Eastern Church have received from the Latin Church an acknowledgment it has never granted to any Anglican faction or section whatsoever; it is admitted that, in these capital points, that Church stands unassailable. Accordingly, it is only impeached on the charge of schism, a charge which the Eastern polemics retort in a manner highly inconvenient to the defend through the most disturbed and complex human action, and often, as all candid men allow, through the vilest human instruments, and through means equivocally good or unequivocally bad, yet this is not one of the matters in which real weights lie in the opposite scales of argument, and we have to be led by the "probable evidence" which is "the guide of life." The case on his side is as clear as a little rill of water, a couple of inches deep. Then these Ritualists, of whom the abbé writes, have gone so provokingly near him; and yet, like the asymptote of the parabola, they will not touch him. They seem to hug and scrape the boundary, and yet refuse to pass it. So the abbe and his friends are as men standing under a tree, whose branches bend under a weight of golden fruit; and they shake the tree with all their might, yet, he says, the apples will not fall. Or they are like a professor of a popular natural science in his lectureroom, with all his paraphernalia around him his explanation is clear, his description of what he is about to do has not a shadow of a doubt upon it; but, when he comes to his experiment, his instrument will not work, and he finds that there is something wrong. If Mr. Babbage's calculating machine had given him an erroneous result, he would at once have sus-ers of the Filioque, the supremacy, and pected a fundamental error in his adjust ment of the parts; but this is the very last thing that would occur to the abbé or his friends. No unkind or discourteous word, indeed, drops from his pen. The glove he wears in his helmet is perfumed "sweet as damask roses." * He has all manner of reasons to excuse these Ritualists; reasons of unconscious, concealed interest, of feeling, of tradition. But his article is entirely subjective; all on the men, nothing on the question. Anything and everything suggests itself to him, except that he finds no reason great or small, lying in the heart and essence of the case itself; a supposition, which the self-centred certainty of the Roman Church forbids any of her sons to entertain. And certainly his case is so far a hard one, that the rush of converts forty, thirty, and twenty years ago • Winter's Tale, iv. 3. the infallibility. Now the abbé must be aware not only of the admitted nearness of the Easterns to the Roman patterns, but also of the fact that nothing is so rare as a theological or ecclesiastical conversion from among them to the Latin communion. He may, then, do well to take the beam of the non-conversion of Greeks and Russians out of his eye before he troubles himself so seriously with the mote of the non-conversion of Ritualists. The abbé is not coherent in his account of these Ritualists. At one time (C. R. pp. 113, 126) they do not truly belong to the Church of England; at another (p. 125) they "only continue the traditions of Anglicanism under a rather more subtle and dangerous guise." Which of these is the abbé's meaning? Perhaps, though it might seem difficult, he holds by both. If, then, these Ritualists are people who have found out a form of Angli canism "rather more subtle," i.e. difficult to submit. And yet not on the ground for an opponent to grapple with, and which the abbé Martin, exhibiting herein "rather more dangerous," i.e. to the Ro- a want of acquaintance with the state of man controversialist, is it any great won- opinion and feeling among us, appears to der that they should remain in the imagine. He thinks that the people of communion where they may think, as they this country in general suppose the Roman are indeed assured by the abbé, they have Catholic religion to be "a tissue of error found out new means of making good the and iniquity" (pp. 117, 118). In this idea positions held by their fathers for a term I believe he does them great injustice. now of three and a half centuries? But, Among the only admissible witnesses, in truth, this article is not an argument namely, men thoughtful and trained, the merely about Ritualists, as the term is great Latin Church as often perhaps recommonly understood among us: The ceives more than justice, as less. In her point of the weapon is directed towards vastness, in her continuity, and in the close them; but the blade is one which cuts cohesion of her clergy, she has great and down together all, under whatever name, telling advantages. These, let me add, who are either unable to recognize the are enhanced by the aspect of unity and paramount claims of the actual Roman standard of zeal which, in this country, Church, or resolutely determined to repel existing as a small and marked sect, she them. While the abbé cannot under-exhibits even in her lay members. Bestand but I hope my reference to the Eastern Church may have advanced him at least one step towards understanding how there can be a Ritualist, who is not a Romanist, so neither can he, in the same page (113), comprehend how there can be a Protestant who is not a rationalist. In both cases alike, he sees the fact, but he cannot unravel the question how it comes about. Into any of the specialities attaching to the name of Ritualist, or the name of Protestant, I will not enter. I pass by the men, and go to the case. The appeal which I wish to recognize, is really a broader one, on more open ground, in fresher air. - Es machte mir zu eng, ich musste fort.* It is an appeal to all the disobedient; and it summons them to repent and to obey. What the abbé does not understand is the fact presented rudely, but substantially, by the statistics I have cited: the incompatibility, be it for good or be it for evil, of the English mind with the Roman claims, and the system which those claims introduce. Now, to this system, whether under the name of Rome or of ritual, or whatever other name, I hold it perfectly certain that this nation will, at least until it has undergone an extensive moral as well as theological transformation, decline • Schiller's "Wallenstein." yond all doubt, partly as fact and partly as idea, she makes a most powerful appeal to the imagination, by the side of the little fenced-in "Anglican paddock," as Mr. Dowden has happily denominated the system which resulted from English action on Church matters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Gregory VII., Innocent III., Thomas à Becket, are great and imposing figures to us all; but Archbishop Laud, who was the Gregory VII. or the Innocent III., or the Thomas à Becket, of our little paddock, seems to take hold of nobody's imagination, and has been set down by Macaulay before his millions of readers as an individual truly contemptible. Our bishops are indeed peers of Parliament; but they have as good as ceased to take part in its debates, except on matters relating to the paddock. Their incomes are carefully regulated by statute, and I believe most properly and becomingly laid out; but they do not partake much of the ideal, even in the sense in which the ideal may be recognized in the eighty and sixty thousand a year inherited at this day by some of the AustroSclavonian prelates from the Middle Ages. Luther, quarried out of the rock rather than shaped out of the marble, the Huguenots, the Puritans these, among them, have taken up the imaginative sides of the great reforming movement. They exhibit all its poetry; Anglicanism shows little |