FAITH AND UNFAITH.

N looking back to the beginning of any great

IN

schism of thought it is often difficult to understand why so vast importance attached to what now seem trifles; the parties which opposed each other with the utmost vehemence said much the same thing, "only in slightly different words." The strifes of the schoolmen are held to be mere phrases; it is hard for any who are outside the pale of the Churches to see wherein lies the essential variance between the Catholic and the Lutheran doctrine of the Eucharist; a devout Churchman or Wesleyan of these days does not easily understand the grounds of separation in the last century, or, indeed, the precise point at which the "Methodists" ceased to be a stricter section within the Established Church. The currents of thought are like those of rivers rising in the same watershed; no reason is evident why they should not take the same direction, only when their later course is considered we see how wide was the ultimate distance involved in their earliest channels.

The

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The wish, on the one hand, to change, and, on the other, to refuse all change of that which has once been defined, is instinctive. There are in the one case the dim stirrings of life, such as take place in the spring long before the feelings are conscious of alteration in climatic conditions, or

"Even as the prisoned silver, dead and dumb,

Shrinks at cold winter's footfall ere he come;"

in the other the mind is no less sensitive. Without in any degree underestimating the great controversies in the early centuries of our era, while the rule of faith was forming, or those others when the scholastic philosophy issued from the shock of opposing forces, we may safely assert that, from the time that the Church arose to develop the monotheism of Judaea and supplant the religions of heathendom, no such event took place in the Western, or civilised world, as that which on its secular side is called the Renascence, and on the religious side the Reformation. To the movement the Church could not, and did not, as a whole, object. The new learning, if it were true, could not only not conflict with truth, but would throw many side lights on it. Sciolism and stupidity, the dark shadows which attend the light of knowledge, were alone to be disliked and dreaded. The greatest and holiest minds recognised the need of reform in high places and in low; in the luxury of some popes and the laxity of friars much called

for

for amendment, somewhat for radical change and destruction. Perhaps this could not have come wholly from within. Outside resistance and criticism are always good for the criticised, if not for the critic, just as now the very fact of living in the light of opposition makes the Catholic Church more fair, morally and socially, in England, than, let us say, in Madeira. But, however this may be, the Renascence and the Reformation had hardly begun, when the Church instinctively knew that liberty would soon grow into license, and separation would become destruction. Erasmus made merry over pilgrimages, and Ulrich von Hutten over the meagre Latinity of certain monks; but though they fell out among themselves, and though no one would ever have attempted to justify much of what is told, not untruthfully, in the Peregrinatio religionis ergo, or the amazing ignorance of Pfefferkorn in the Epistolae obscurorum virorum, the Church looked askance on both reformers, even on him who remained within, as on him who definitely withdrew from the pale of salvation.

Assault on dogma was implicitly involved in opposition to abuses even when the assailants were unable to recognise that they doubted dogma at all. Each party soon called the other antichristian, but there was a difference in the meaning with which the term was used. The Protestants asserted that the pure teaching of Jesus had been overlaid by a multitude of useless ceremonies, and that, if these

were

were stripped off, the underlying truth would again be manifest, while, as regarded the hierarchy, they thought they recognised the mystical opponent of Jesus of whom the Apocalypse had spoken. But they could not mean that Christ was nominally or implicitly assailed by a Church which had his image on every altar, claimed to preserve his body in every tabernacle, to consecrate and consume it daily, whose whole ecclesiastical year was founded on the life of Christ, whose very saints, even if, as their enemies said, they had taken his place, were saints only in, and because of, their relation to him. But the Catholics meant far more than this; that the new spirit of revolt had implicitly in it the denial of Christ, and ultimately of God; that if the premisses of the reformers were accepted, then logically followed the downfall of all faith in Christ, in God, and in the supernatural, and of course the utter abandonment of the name and office of a Church. In the material destruction of roods, in the denial of the doctrine of the Mass, this was, they thought, involved, and that which was to their enemies a figure of rhetoric was to them a very bald, but terrible truth when they used the word antichristian.

Yet even then, and in the heat of controversy, it was scarce seen whereunto the difference would grow. The Protestant parties expected to keep to the end large portions of faith and ritual which gradually dropped from them; the Catholics scarce

thought