Apologia pro vita sua being a history of his religious opinions
the Church of Rome from the badges of Antichrist, in which Protestants
would invest her, if she deliberately takes up her position in the very
quarter, whither we have cast them, when we took them off from her.
Antichrist is described as the [Greek: anomos], as exalting himself
above the yoke of religion and law. The spirit of lawlessness came in
with the Reformation, and Liberalism is its offspring.
"And now I fear I am going to pain you by telling you, that you consider
the approaches in doctrine on our part towards you, closer than they
really are. I cannot help repeating what I have many times said in
print, that your services and devotions to St. Mary in matter of fact do
most deeply pain me. I am only stating it as a fact.
"Again, I have nowhere said that I can accept the decrees of Trent
throughout, nor implied it. The doctrine of Transubstantiation is a
great difficulty with me, as being, as I think, not primitive. Nor have
I said that our Articles in all respects admit of a Roman
interpretation; the very word 'Transubstantiation' is disowned in them.
"Thus, you see, it is not merely on grounds of expedience that we do not
join you. There are positive difficulties in the way of it. And, even if
there were not, we shall have no divine warrant for doing so, while we
think that the Church of England is a branch of the true Church, and
that intercommunion with the rest of Christendom is necessary, not for
the life of a particular Church, but for its health only. I have never
disguised that there are actual circumstances in the Church of Rome,
which pain me much; of the removal of these I see no chance, while we
join you one by one; but if our Church were prepared for a union, she
might make her terms; she might gain the cup; she might protest against
the extreme honours paid to St. Mary; she might make some explanation of
the doctrine of Transubstantiation. I am not prepared to say that a
reform in other branches of the Roman Church would be necessary for our
uniting with them, however desirable in itself, so that we were allowed
to make a reform in our own country. We do not look towards Rome as
believing that its communion is infallible, but that union is a duty."
6. The following letter was occasioned by the present made to me of a
book by the friend to whom it is written; more will be said on the
subject of it presently:--
"Nov. 22, 1842. I only wish that your Church were more known among us by
such writings. You will not interest us in her, till we see her, not in
politics, but in her true functions of exhorting, teaching, and guiding.
I wish there were a chance of making the leading men among you
understand, what I believe is no novel thought to yourself. It is not by
learned discussions, or acute arguments, or reports of miracles, that
the heart of England can be gained. It is by men 'approving themselves,'
like the Apostle, 'ministers of Christ.'
"As to your question, whether the Volume you have sent is not calculated
to remove my apprehensions that another gospel is substituted for the
true one in your practical instructions, before I can answer it in any
way, I ought to know how far the Sermons which it comprises are
_selected_ from a number, or whether they are the whole, or such as the
whole, which have been published of the author's. I assure you, or at
least I trust, that, if it is ever clearly brought home to me that I
have been wrong in what I have said on this subject, my public avowal of
that conviction will only be a question of time with me.
"If, however, you saw our Church as we see it, you would easily
understand that such a change of feeling, did it take place, would have
no necessary tendency, which you seem to expect, to draw a person from
the Church of England to that of Rome. There is a divine life among us,
clearly manifested, in spite of all our disorders, which is as great a
note of the Church, as any can be. Why should we seek our Lord's
presence elsewhere, when He vouchsafes it to us where we are? What
_call_ have we to change our communion?
"Roman Catholics will find this to be the state of things in time to
come, whatever promise they may fancy there is of a large secession to
their Church. This man or that may leave us, but there will be no
general movement. There is, indeed, an incipient movement of our
_Church_ towards yours, and this your leading men are doing all they can
to frustrate by their unwearied efforts at all risks to carry off
individuals. When will they know their position, and embrace a larger
and wiser policy?"
§ 2.
The letter which I have last inserted, is addressed to my dear friend,
Dr. Russell, the present President of Maynooth. He had, perhaps, more to
do with my conversion than any one else. He called upon me, in passing
through Oxford in the summer of 1841, and I think I took him over some
of the buildings of the University. He called again another summer, on
his way from Dublin to London. I do not recollect that he said a word on
the subject of religion on either occasion. He sent me at different
times several letters; he was always gentle, mild, unobtrusive,
uncontroversial. He let me alone. He also gave me one or two books.
Veron's Rule of Faith and some Treatises of the Wallenburghs was one; a
volume of St. Alfonso Liguori's Sermons was another; and it is to those
Sermons that my letter to Dr. Russell relates.
Now it must be observed that the writings of St. Alfonso, as I knew them
by the extracts commonly made from them, prejudiced me as much against
the Roman Church as any thing else, on account of what was called their
"Mariolatry;" but there was nothing of the kind in this book. I wrote to
ask Dr. Russell whether any thing had been left out in the translation;
he answered that there certainly were omissions in one Sermon about the
Blessed Virgin. This omission, in the case of a book intended for
Catholics, at least showed that such passages as are found in the works
of Italian Authors were not acceptable to every part of the Catholic
world. Such devotional manifestations in honour of our Lady had been my
great _crux_ as regards Catholicism; I say frankly, I do not fully enter
into them now; I trust I do not love her the less, because I cannot
enter into them. They may be fully explained and defended; but sentiment
and taste do not run with logic: they are suitable for Italy, but they
are not suitable for England. But, over and above England, my own case
was special; from a boy I had been led to consider that my Maker and I,
His creature, were the two beings, luminously such, _in rerum naturâ_. I
will not here speculate, however, about my own feelings. Only this I
know full well now, and did not know then, that the Catholic Church
allows no image of any sort, material or immaterial, no dogmatic symbol,
no rite, no sacrament, no Saint, not even the Blessed Virgin herself, to
come between the soul and its Creator. It is face to face, "solus cum
solo," in all matters between man and his God. He alone creates; He
alone has redeemed; before His awful eyes we go in death; in the vision
of Him is our eternal beatitude.
1. Solus cum solo:--I recollect but indistinctly what I gained from the
Volume of which I have been speaking; but it must have been something
considerable. At least I had got a key to a difficulty; in these
Sermons, (or rather heads of sermons, as they seem to be, taken down by
a hearer,) there is much of what would be called legendary illustration;
but the substance of them is plain, practical, awful preaching upon the
great truths of salvation. What I can speak of with greater confidence
is the effect produced on me a little later by studying the Exercises of
St. Ignatius. For here again, in a matter consisting in the purest and
most direct acts of religion,--in the intercourse between God and the
soul, during a season of recollection, of repentance, of good
resolution, of inquiry into vocation,--the soul was "sola cum solo;"
there was no cloud interposed between the creature and the Object of his
faith and love. The command practically enforced was, "My son, give Me
thy heart." The devotions then to Angels and Saints as little interfered
with the incommunicable glory of the Eternal, as the love which we bear
our friends and relations, our tender human sympathies, are inconsistent
with that supreme homage of the heart to the Unseen, which really does
but sanctify and exalt, not jealously destroy, what is of earth. At a
later date Dr. Russell sent me a large bundle of penny or half-penny
books of devotion, of all sorts, as they are found in the booksellers'
shops at Rome; and, on looking them over, I was quite astonished to find
how different they were from what I had fancied, how little there was in
them to which I could really object. I have given an account of them in
my Essay on the Development of Doctrine. Dr. Russell sent me St.
Alfonso's book at the end of 1842; however, it was still a long time
before I got over my difficulty, on the score of the devotions paid to
the Saints; perhaps, as I judge from a letter I have turned up, it was
some way into 1844 before I could be said fully to have got over it.
2. I am not sure that I did not also at this time feel the force of
another consideration. The idea of the Blessed Virgin was as it were
_magnified_ in the Church of Rome, as time went on,--but so were all the
Christian ideas; as that of the Blessed Eucharist. The whole scene of
pale, faint, distant Apostolic Christianity is seen in Rome, as through
a telescope or magnifier. The harmony of the whole, however, is of
course what it was. It is unfair then to take one Roman idea, that of
the Blessed Virgin, out of what may be called its context.
3. Thus I am brought to the principle of development of doctrine in the
Christian Church, to which I gave my mind at the end of 1842. I had made
mention of it in the passage, which I quoted many pages back (vide p.
111), in "Home Thoughts Abroad," published in 1836; and even at an
earlier date I had introduced it into my History of the Arians in 1832;
nor had I ever lost sight of it in my speculations. And it is certainly
recognized in the Treatise of Vincent of Lerins, which has so often been
taken as the basis of Anglicanism. In 1843 I began to consider it
attentively; I made it the subject of my last University Sermon on
February 2; and the general view to which I came is stated thus in a
letter to a friend of the date of July 14, 1844;--it will be observed
that, now as before, my _issue_ is still Creed _versus_ Church:--
"The kind of considerations which weighs with me are such as the
following:--1. I am far more certain (according to the Fathers) that we
_are_ in a state of culpable separation, _than_ that developments do
_not_ exist under the Gospel, and that the Roman developments are not
the true ones. 2. I am far more certain, that _our_ (modern) doctrines
are wrong, _than_ that the _Roman_ (modern) doctrines are wrong. 3.
Granting that the Roman (special) doctrines are not found drawn out in
the early Church, yet I think there is sufficient trace of them in it,
to recommend and prove them, _on the hypothesis_ of the Church having a
divine guidance, though not sufficient to prove them by itself. So that
the question simply turns on the nature of the promise of the Spirit,
made to the Church. 4. The proof of the Roman (modern) doctrine is as
strong (or stronger) in Antiquity, as that of certain doctrines which
both we and Romans hold: e.g. there is more of evidence in Antiquity for
the necessity of Unity, than for the Apostolical Succession; for the
Supremacy of the See of Rome, than for the Presence in the Eucharist;
for the practice of Invocation, than for certain books in the present