Occasional Papers by R.W. Church

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And he appeals from them, as authorities, to a list of much more sober
and modest writers, though, it may be, the names of all of them are not
familiar to the public. He enumerates as the "chief authors of the
passing generation," "Cardinal Wiseman, Dr. Ullathorne, Dr. Lingard,
Mr. Tierney, Dr. Oliver, Dr. Rock, Dr. Waterworth, Dr. Husenbeth, Mr.
Flanagan." If these well-practised and circumspect veterans in the
ancient controversy are not original and brilliant, at least they are
safe; and Dr. Newman will not allow the flighty intellectualism which
takes more hold of modern readers to usurp their place, and for himself
he sturdily and bluffly declines to give up his old standing-ground for
any one:--

I cannot, then, without remonstrance, allow you to identify the
doctrine of our Oxford friends in question, on the two subjects I
have mentioned, with the present spirit or the prospective creed
of Catholics; or to assume, as you do, that because they are
thoroughgoing and relentless in their statements, therefore they
are the harbingers of a new age, when to show a deference for
Antiquity will be thought little else than a mistake. For myself,
hopeless as you consider it, I am not ashamed still to take my
stand upon the Fathers, and do not mean to budge. The history of
their time is not yet an old almanac to me. Of course I maintain
the value and authority of the "Schola," as one of the _loci
theologici_; still I sympathise with Petavius in preferring to its
"contentious and subtle theology" that "more elegant and fruitful
teaching which is moulded after the image of erudite antiquity."
The Fathers made me a Catholic, and I am not going to kick down
the ladder by which I ascended into the Church. It is a ladder
quite as serviceable for that purpose now as it was twenty years
ago. Though I hold, as you remark, a process of development in
Apostolic truth as time goes on, such development does not
supersede the Fathers, but explains and completes them.

Is he right in saying that he is not responsible as a Roman Catholic
for the extravagances that Dr. Pusey dwells upon? He is, it seems to
us, and he is not. No doubt the Roman Catholic system is in practice a
wide one, and he has a right, which we are glad to see that he is
disposed to exercise, to maintain the claims of moderation and
soberness, and to decline to submit his judgment to the fashionable
theories of the hour. A stand made for independence and good sense
against the pressure of an exacting and overbearing dogmatism is a good
thing for everybody, though made in a camp with which we have nothing
to do. He goes far enough, indeed, as it is. Still, it is something
that a great writer, of whose genius and religious feeling Englishmen
will one day be even prouder than they are now, should disconnect
himself from the extreme follies of his party, and attempt to represent
what is the nobler and more elevated side of the system to which he has
attached himself. But it seems to us much more difficult for him to
release his cause from complicity with the doctrines which he dislikes
and fears. We have no doubt that he is not alone, and that there are
numbers of his English brethren who are provoked and ashamed at the
self-complacent arrogance and childish folly shown in exaggerating and
caricaturing doctrines which are, in the eyes of most Englishmen,
extravagant enough in themselves. But the question is whether he or the
innovators represent the true character and tendencies of their
religious system. It must be remembered that with a jealous and touchy
Government, like that of the Roman Church, which professes the duty and
boasts of the power to put down all dangerous ideas and language, mere
tolerance means much. Dr. Newman speaks as an Englishman when he writes
thus:--

This is specially the case with great ideas. You may stifle them;
or you may refuse them elbow-room; or you may torment them with
your continual meddling; or you may let them have free course and
range, and be content, instead of anticipating their excesses, to
expose and restrain those excesses after they have occurred. But
you have only this alternative; and for myself, I prefer much,
wherever it is possible, to be first generous and then just; to
grant full liberty of thought, and to call it to account when
abused.

But that has never been the principle of his Church. At least, the
liberty which it has allowed has been a most one-sided liberty. It has
been the liberty to go any length in developing the favourite opinions
about the power of the Pope, or some popular form of devotion; but as
to other ideas, not so congenial, "great" ones and little ones too, the
lists of the Roman Index bear witness to the sensitive vigilance which
took alarm even at remote danger. And those whose pride it is that they
are ever ready and able to stop all going astray must be held
responsible for the going astray which they do not stop, especially
when it coincides with what they wish and like.

But these extreme writers do not dream of tolerance. They stoutly and
boldly maintain that they but interpret in the only natural and
consistent manner the mind of their Church; and no public or official
contradiction meets them. There may be a disapproving opinion in their
own body, but it does not show itself. The disclaimer of even such a
man as Dr. Newman is in the highest degree guarded and qualified. They
are the people who can excite attention and gain a hearing, though it
be an adverse one. They have the power to make themselves the most
prominent and accredited representatives of their creed, and, if
thoroughgoing boldness and ability are apt to attract the growth of
thought and conviction, they are those who are likely to mould its
future form. Sober prudent people may prefer the caution of Dr.
Newman's "chief authors," but to the world outside most of these will
be little more than names, and the advanced party, which talks most
strongly about the Pope's infallibility and devotion to St. Mary, has
this to say for itself. Popular feeling everywhere in the Roman
communion appears to go with it, and authority both in Rome and in
England shelters and sanctions it. Nothing can be more clearly and
forcibly stated than the following assertions of the unimpeachable
claim of "dominant opinions" in the Roman Catholic system by the
highest Roman Catholic authority in England. "It is an ill-advised
overture of peace," writes Archbishop Manning,

to assail the popular, prevalent, and dominant opinions,
devotions, and doctrines of the Catholic Church with hostile
criticism.... The presence and assistance of the Holy Ghost, which
secures the Church within the sphere of faith and morals, invests
it also with instincts and a discernment which preside over its
worship and doctrines, its practices and customs. We may be sure
that whatever is prevalent in the Church, under the eye of its
public authority, practised by the people, and not censured by its
pastors, is at least conformable to faith and innocent as to
morals. Whosoever rises up to condemn such practices and opinions
thereby convicts himself of the private spirit which is the root
of heresy. But if it be ill-advised to assail the mind of the
Church, it is still more so to oppose its visible Head. There can
be no doubt that the Sovereign Pontiff has declared the same
opinion as to the temporal power as that which is censured in
others, and that he defined the Immaculate Conception, and that he
believes in his own infallibility. If these things be our
reproach, we share it with the Vicar of Jesus Christ. They are not
our private opinions, nor the tenets of a school, but the mind of
the Pontiff, as they were of his predecessors, as they will be of
those who come after him.--Archbishop Manning's _Pastoral_, pp.
64-66, 1866.

To maintain his liberty against extreme opinions generally is one of
Dr. Newman's objects in writing his letter; the other is to state
distinctly what he holds and what he does not hold, as regards the
subject on which Dr. Pusey's appeal has naturally made so deep an
impression:--

I do so, because you say, as I myself have said in former years,
that "That vast system as to the Blessed Virgin ... to all of us
has been the special _crux_ of the Roman system" (p. 101). Here, I
say, as on other points, the Fathers are enough for me. I do not
wish to say more than they, and will not say less. You, I know,
will profess the same; and thus we can join issue on a clear and
broad principle, and may hope to come to some intelligible result.
We are to have a treatise on the subject of Our Lady soon from the
pen of the Most Rev. Prelate; but that cannot interfere with such
a mere argument from the Fathers as that to which I shall confine
myself here. Nor, indeed, as regards that argument itself, do I
profess to be offering you any new matter, any facts which have
not been used by others,--by great divines, as Petavius, by living
writers, nay, by myself on other occasions. I write afresh,
nevertheless, and that for three reasons--first, because I wish to
contribute to the accurate statement and the full exposition of
the argument in question; next, because I may gain a more patient
hearing than has sometimes been granted to better men than myself;
lastly, because there just now seems a call on me, under my
circumstances, to avow plainly what I do and what I do not hold
about the Blessed Virgin, that others may know, did they come to
stand where I stand, what they would and what they would not be
bound to hold concerning her.

If this "vast system" is a _crux_ to any one, we cannot think that even
Dr. Newman's explanation will make it easier. He himself recoils, as
any Englishman of sense and common feeling must, at the wild
extravagances into which this devotion has run. But he accepts and
defends, on the most precarious grounds, the whole system of thought
out of which they have sprung by no very violent process of growth. He
cannot, of course, stop short of accepting the definition of the
Immaculate Conception as an article of faith, and, though he
emphatically condemns, with a warmth and energy of which no one can
doubt the sincerity, a number of revolting consequences drawn from the
theology of which that dogma is the expression, he is obliged to defend
everything up to that. For a professed disciple of the Fathers this is
not easy. If anything is certain, it is that the place which the
Blessed Virgin occupies in the Roman Catholic system--popular or
authoritative, if it is possible fairly to urge such a distinction in a
system which boasts of all-embracing authority--is something perfectly
different from anything known in the first four centuries. In all the
voluminous writings on theology which remain from them we may look in
vain for any traces of that feeling which finds words in the common
hymn, "_Ave, marls Stella_" and which makes her fill so large a space
in the teaching and devotion of the Roman Church. Dr. Newman attempts
to meet this difficulty by a distinction. The doctrine, he says, was
there, the same then as now; it is only the feelings, behaviour, and
usages, the practical consequences naturally springing from the
doctrine, which have varied or grown:--

I fully grant that the _devotion_ towards the Blessed Virgin has
increased among Catholics with the progress of centuries. I do not
allow that the _doctrine_ concerning her has undergone a growth,
for I believe it has been in substance one and the same from the
beginning.

There is, doubtless, such a distinction, though whether available for
Dr. Newman's purpose is another matter. But when we recollect that
modern "doctrine," besides defining the Immaculate Conception, places
her next in glory to the Throne of God, and makes her the Queen of
Heaven, and the all-prevailing intercessor with her Son, the assertion
as to "doctrine" is a bold one. It rests, as it seems to us, simply on
Dr. Newman identifying his own inferences from the language of the
ancient writers whom he quotes with the language itself. They say a
certain thing--that Mary is the "second Eve." Dr. Newman, with all the
theology and all the controversies of eighteen centuries in his mind,
deduces from this statement a number of refined consequences as to her
sinlessness, and greatness, and reward, which seem to him to flow from
it, and says that it means all these consequences. Mr. Ruskin somewhere
quotes the language of an "eminent Academician," who remarks, in answer
to some criticism on a picture, "that if you look for curves, you will
see curves; and if you look for angles, you will see angles." So it is
here. The very dogma of the Immaculate Conception itself Dr. Newman
sees indissolubly involved in the "rudimentary teaching" which insists
on the parallelism between Eve and Mary:--

Was not Mary as fully endowed as Eve?... If Eve was (as Bishop
Bull and others maintain) raised above human nature by that
indwelling moral gift which we call grace, is it rash to say that
Mary had a greater grace?... And if Eve had this supernatural
inward gift given her from the moment of her personal existence,
is it possible to deny that Mary, too, had this gift from the very
first moment of her personal existence? I do not know how to
resist this inference:--well, this is simply and literally the
doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. I say the doctrine of the
Immaculate Conception is in its substance this, and nothing more
or less than this (putting aside the question of degrees of
grace), and it really does seem to me bound up in that doctrine of
the Fathers, that Mary is the second Eve.

It seems obvious to remark that the Fathers are not even alleged to
have themselves drawn this irresistible inference; and next, that even
if it be drawn, there is a long interval between it and the elevation
of the Mother of Jesus Christ to the place to which modern Roman
doctrine raises her. Possibly, the Fathers might have said, as many
people will say now, that, in a matter of this kind, it is idle to draw
inferences when we are, in reality, utterly without the knowledge to
make them worth anything. At any rate, if they had drawn them, we
should have found some traces of it in their writings, and we find
none. We find abundance of poetical addresses and rhetorical
amplification, which makes it all the more remarkable that the plain
dogmatic view of her position, which is accepted by the Roman Church,
does not appear in them. We only find a "rudimentary doctrine," which,
naturally enough, gives the Blessed Virgin a very high and sacred place
in the economy of the Incarnation. But how does the doctrine, as it is
found in even their rhetorical passages, go a step beyond what would be
accepted by any sober reader of the New Testament? They speak of what
she was; they do not presume to say what she is. What Protestant could
have the slightest difficulty in saying not only what Justin says, and
Tertullian copies from him, and Irenaeus enlarges upon, but what Dr.
Newman himself says of her awful and solitary dignity, always excepting
the groundless assumption which, from her office in this world takes
for granted, first her sinlessness, and then a still higher office in
the next? We do not think that, as a matter of literary criticism, Dr.
Newman is fair in his argument from the Fathers. He lays great stress
on Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Irenaeus, as three independent
witnesses from different parts of the world; whereas it is obvious that
Tertullian at any rate copies almost literally from Justin Martyr, and
it is impossible to compare a mere incidental point of rhetorical, or,
if it be so, argumentative illustration, occurring once or twice in a
long treatise, with a doctrine, such as that of the Incarnation itself,
on which the whole treatise is built, and of which it is full. The
wonder is, indeed, that the Fathers, considering how much they wrote,
said so little of her; scarcely less is it a wonder, then, that the New
Testament says so little, but from this little the only reason which
would prevent a Protestant reader of the New Testament from accepting
the highest statement of her historical dignity is the reaction from
the development of them into the consequences which have been notorious
for centuries in the unreformed Churches. Protestants, left to
themselves, are certainly not prone to undervalue the saints of
Scripture; it has been the presence of the great system of popular
worship confronting them which has tied their tongues in this matter.
Yet Anglican theologians like Mr. Keble, popular poets like Wordsworth,
broad Churchmen like Mr. Robertson, have said things which even Roman
Catholics might quote as expressions of their feeling. But Dr. Newman
must know that many things may be put, and put most truly, into the
form of poetical expression which will not bear hardening into a dogma.
A Protestant may accept and even amplify the ideas suggested by
Scripture about the Blessed Virgin; but he may feel that he cannot tell
how the Redeemer was preserved from sinful taint; what was the grace
bestowed on His mother; or what was the reward and prerogative which
ensued to her. But it is just these questions which the Roman doctrine
undertakes to answer without a shadow of doubt, and which Dr. Newman
implies that the theology of the Fathers answered as unambiguously.

But from what has happened in the history of religion, we do not think
that Protestants in general who do not shrink from high language about
Abraham, Moses, or David, would find anything unnatural or
objectionable in the language of the early Christian writers about the
Mother of our Lord, though possibly it might not be their own; but the
interval from this language to that certain knowledge of her present
office in the economy of grace which is implied in what Dr. Newman
considers the "doctrine" about her is a very long one. The step to the
modern "devotion" in its most chastened form is longer still. We cannot
follow the subtle train of argument which says that because the
"doctrine" of the second century called her the "second Eve," therefore
the devotion which sets her upon the altars of Christendom in the
nineteenth is a right development of the doctrine. What is wanted is
not the internal thread of the process, but the proof and confirmation
from without that it was the right process; and this link is just what
is wanting, except on a supposition which begs the question. It is
conceivable that this step from "doctrine" to "devotion" may have been
a mistake. It is conceivable that the "doctrine" may have been held in
the highest form without leading to the devotion; for Dr. Newman, of
course, thinks that Athanasius and Augustine held "the doctrine," yet,
as he says, "we have no proof that Athanasius himself had any special
devotion to the Blessed Virgin," and in another place he repeats his
doubts whether St. Chrysostom or St. Athanasius invoked her; "nay," he
adds, "I should like to know whether St. Augustine, in all his
voluminous writings, invokes her once." What has to be shown is, that
this step was not a mistake; that it was inevitable and legitimate.

"This being the faith of the Fathers about the Blessed Virgin," says
Dr. Newman, "we need not wonder that it should in no long time be
transmuted into devotion." The Fathers expressed a historical fact
about her in the term [Greek: Theotokos]; therefore, argues the later
view, she is the source of our present grace now. It is the _rationale_
of this inference, which is not an immediate or obvious one, which is
wanted. And Dr. Newman gives it us in the words of Bishop Butler:--

Christianity is eminently an objective religion. For the most part
it tells us of persons and facts in simple words, and leaves the
announcement to produce its effect on such hearts as are prepared
to receive it. This, at least, is its general character; and
Butler recognises it as such in his _Analogy_, when speaking of
the Second and Third Persons of the Holy Trinity:--"The internal
worship," he says, "to the Son and Holy Ghost is no farther matter
of pure revealed command than as the relations they stand in to us
are matters of pure revelation; but the relations being known, the
obligations to such internal worship are _obligations of reason
arising out of those relations themselves_."

We acknowledge the pertinency of the quotation. So true is it that "the
relations being known," the obligations of worship arise of themselves
from these relations, that if the present relation of the Blessed
Virgin to mankind has always been considered to be what modern Roman
theology considers it, it is simply inconceivable that devotion to her
should not have been universal long before St. Athanasius and St.
Augustine; and equally inconceivable, to take Dr. Newman's remarkable
illustration, that if the real position of St. Joseph is next to her,
it should have been reserved for the nineteenth century, if not,
indeed, to find it out, at least to acknowledge it; but the whole
question is about the fact of the "relations" themselves. If we believe
that the Second and Third Persons are God, we do not want to be told to
worship them. But such a relation as Dr. Newman supposes in the case of
the Blessed Virgin does not flow of itself from the idea contained, for
instance, in the word [Greek: Theotokos], and even if it did, we should
still want to be told, in the case of a creature, and remembering the
known jealousy of religion of even the semblance of creature worship,
what _are_ the "religious regards," which, not flowing from the nature
of the case, but needing to be distinctly authorised, are right and
binding.

The question is of a dogmatic and a popular system. We most fully admit
that, with Dr. Newman or any other of the numberless well-trained and
excellent men in the Roman Church, the homage to the Mother does not
interfere with the absolutely different honour rendered to the Son. We
readily acknowledge the elevating and refining beauty of that
character, of which the Virgin Mother is the type, and the services
which that ideal has rendered to mankind, though we must emphatically
say that a man need not be a Roman Catholic to feel and to express the
charm of that moral beauty. But here we have a doctrine as definite and
precise as any doctrine can be, and a great system of popular devotion,
giving a character to a great religious communion. Dr. Newman is not
merely developing and illustrating an idea: he is asserting a definite
revealed fact about the unseen world, and defending its consequences in
a very concrete and practical shape. And the real point is what proof
has he given us that this is a revealed fact; that it is so, and that
we have the means of knowing it? He has given us certain language of
the early writers, which he says is a tradition, though it is only what
any Protestant might have been led to by reading his Bible. But between
that language, taken at its highest, and the belief and practice which
his Church maintains, there is a great gap. The "Second Eve," the
[Greek: Theotokos], are names of high dignity; but enlarge upon them as
we may, there is between them and the modern "Regina Coeli" an interval
which nothing but direct divine revelation can possibly fill; and of
this divine revelation the only evidence is the fact that there is the
doctrine. So awful and central an article of belief needs corresponding
proof. In Dr. Newman's eloquent pages we have much collateral thought
on the subject--sometimes instinct with his delicacy of perception and
depth of feeling, sometimes strangely over-refined and irrelevant, but
always fresh and instructive, whether to teach or to warn. The one
thing which is missing in them is direct proof.

He does not satisfy us, but he does greatly interest us in his way of
dealing with the practical consequences of his doctrine, in the
manifold development of devotion in his communion. What he tells us
reveals two things. By this devotion he is at once greatly attracted,
and he is deeply shocked. No one can doubt the enthusiasm with which he
has thrown himself into that devotion, an enthusiasm which, if it was
at one time more vehement and defiant than it is now, is still a most
intense element in his religious convictions. Nor do we feel entitled
to say that in him it interferes with religious ideas and feelings of a
higher order, which we are accustomed to suppose imperilled by it. It
leads him, indeed, to say things which astonish us, not so much by
their extreme language as by the absence, as it seems to us, of any
ground to say them at all. It forces him into a championship for
statements, in defending which the utmost that can be done is to frame
ingenious pleas, or to send back a vigorous retort. It tempts him at
times to depart from his generally broad and fair way of viewing
things, as when he meets the charge that the Son is forgotten for the
Mother, not merely by a denial, but by the rejoinder that when the
Mother is not honoured as the Roman Church honours her the honour of
the Son fails. It would have been better not to have reprinted the
following extract from a former work, even though it were singled out
for approval by the late Cardinal. The italics are his own:--

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