Apologia pro vita sua being a history of his religious opinions
economical reserve, no delicacy or prudence. "Ye must be born again," is
the simple, direct form of words which she uses after her Divine Master:
"your whole nature must be re-born; your passions, and your affections,
and your aims, and your conscience, and your will, must all be bathed in
a new element, and reconsecrated to your Maker,--and, the last not the
least, your intellect." It was for repeating these points of her
teaching in my own way, that certain passages of one of my Volumes have
been brought into the general accusation which has been made against my
religious opinions. The writer has said that I was demented if I
believed, and unprincipled if I did not believe, in my own statement,
that a lazy, ragged, filthy, story-telling beggar-woman, if chaste,
sober, cheerful, and religious, had a prospect of heaven, such as was
absolutely closed to an accomplished statesman, or lawyer, or noble, be
he ever so just, upright, generous, honourable, and conscientious,
unless he had also some portion of the divine Christian graces;--yet I
should have thought myself defended from criticism by the words which
our Lord used to the chief priests, "The publicans and harlots go into
the kingdom of God before you." And I was subjected again to the same
alternative of imputations, for having ventured to say that consent to
an unchaste wish was indefinitely more heinous than any lie viewed apart
from its causes, its motives, and its consequences: though a lie, viewed
under the limitation of these conditions, is a random utterance, an
almost outward act, not directly from the heart, however disgraceful and
despicable it may be, however prejudicial to the social contract,
however deserving of public reprobation; whereas we have the express
words of our Lord to the doctrine that "whoso looketh on a woman to lust
after her, hath committed adultery with her already in his heart." On
the strength of these texts, I have surely as much right to believe in
these doctrines which have caused so much surprise, as to believe in
original sin, or that there is a supernatural revelation, or that a
Divine Person suffered, or that punishment is eternal.
Passing now from what I have called the preamble of that grant of power,
which is made to the Church, to that power itself, Infallibility, I
premise two brief remarks:--1. on the one hand, I am not here
determining any thing about the essential seat of that power, because
that is a question doctrinal, not historical and practical; 2. nor, on
the other hand, am I extending the direct subject-matter, over which
that power of Infallibility has jurisdiction, beyond religious
opinion:--and now as to the power itself.
This power, viewed in its fulness, is as tremendous as the giant evil
which has called for it. It claims, when brought into exercise but in
the legitimate manner, for otherwise of course it is but quiescent, to
know for certain the very meaning of every portion of that Divine
Message in detail, which was committed by our Lord to His Apostles. It
claims to know its own limits, and to decide what it can determine
absolutely and what it cannot. It claims, moreover, to have a hold upon
statements not directly religious, so far as this,--to determine whether
they indirectly relate to religion, and, according to its own definitive
judgment, to pronounce whether or not, in a particular case, they are
simply consistent with revealed truth. It claims to decide
magisterially, whether as within its own province or not, that such and
such statements are or are not prejudicial to the _Depositum_ of faith,
in their spirit or in their consequences, and to allow them, or condemn
and forbid them, accordingly. It claims to impose silence at will on any
matters, or controversies, of doctrine, which on its own _ipse dixit_,
it pronounces to be dangerous, or inexpedient, or inopportune. It claims
that, whatever may be the judgment of Catholics upon such acts, these
acts should be received by them with those outward marks of reverence,
submission, and loyalty, which Englishmen, for instance, pay to the
presence of their sovereign, without expressing any criticism on them on
the ground that in their matter they are inexpedient, or in their manner
violent or harsh. And lastly, it claims to have the right of inflicting
spiritual punishment, of cutting off from the ordinary channels of the
divine life, and of simply excommunicating, those who refuse to submit
themselves to its formal declarations. Such is the infallibility lodged
in the Catholic Church, viewed in the concrete, as clothed and
surrounded by the appendages of its high sovereignty: it is, to repeat
what I said above, a supereminent prodigious power sent upon earth to
encounter and master a giant evil.
And now, having thus described it, I profess my own absolute submission
to its claim. I believe the whole revealed dogma as taught by the
Apostles, as committed by the Apostles to the Church; and as declared by
the Church to me. I receive it, as it is infallibly interpreted by the
authority to whom it is thus committed, and (implicitly) as it shall be,
in like manner, further interpreted by that same authority till the end
of time. I submit, moreover, to the universally received traditions of
the Church, in which lies the matter of those new dogmatic definitions
which are from time to time made, and which in all times are the
clothing and the illustration of the Catholic dogma as already defined.
And I submit myself to those other decisions of the Holy See,
theological or not, through the organs which it has itself appointed,
which, waiving the question of their infallibility, on the lowest ground
come to me with a claim to be accepted and obeyed. Also, I consider
that, gradually and in the course of ages, Catholic inquiry has taken
certain definite shapes, and has thrown itself into the form of a
science, with a method and a phraseology of its own, under the
intellectual handling of great minds, such as St. Athanasius, St.
Augustine, and St. Thomas; and I feel no temptation at all to break in
pieces the great legacy of thought thus committed to us for these latter
days.
All this being considered as the profession which I make _ex animo_, as
for myself, so also on the part of the Catholic body, as far as I know
it, it will at first sight be said that the restless intellect of our
common humanity is utterly weighed down, to the repression of all
independent effort and action whatever, so that, if this is to be the
mode of bringing it into order, it is brought into order only to be
destroyed. But this is far from the result, far from what I conceive to
be the intention of that high Providence who has provided a great remedy
for a great evil,--far from borne out by the history of the conflict
between Infallibility and Reason in the past, and the prospect of it in
the future. The energy of the human intellect "does from opposition
grow;" it thrives and is joyous, with a tough elastic strength, under
the terrible blows of the divinely-fashioned weapon, and is never so
much itself as when it has lately been overthrown. It is the custom with
Protestant writers to consider that, whereas there are two great
principles in action in the history of religion, Authority and Private
Judgment, they have all the Private Judgment to themselves, and we have
the full inheritance and the superincumbent oppression of Authority. But
this is not so; it is the vast Catholic body itself, and it only, which
affords an arena for both combatants in that awful, never-dying duel. It
is necessary for the very life of religion, viewed in its large
operations and its history, that the warfare should be incessantly
carried on. Every exercise of Infallibility is brought out into act by
an intense and varied operation of the Reason, both as its ally and as
its opponent, and provokes again, when it has done its work, a re-action
of Reason against it; and, as in a civil polity the State exists and
endures by means of the rivalry and collision, the encroachments and
defeats of its constituent parts, so in like manner Catholic Christendom
is no simple exhibition of religious absolutism, but presents a
continuous picture of Authority and Private Judgment alternately
advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of the tide;--it is a vast
assemblage of human beings with wilful intellects and wild passions,
brought together into one by the beauty and the Majesty of a Superhuman
Power,--into what may be called a large reformatory or training-school,
not as if into a hospital or into a prison, not in order to be sent to
bed, not to be buried alive, but (if I may change my metaphor) brought
together as if into some moral factory, for the melting, refining, and
moulding, by an incessant, noisy process, of the raw material of human
nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purposes.
St. Paul says in one place that his Apostolical power is given him to
edification, and not to destruction. There can be no better account of
the Infallibility of the Church. It is a supply for a need, and it does
not go beyond that need. Its object is, and its effect also, not to
enfeeble the freedom or vigour of human thought in religious
speculation, but to resist and control its extravagance. What have been
its great works? All of them in the distinct province of theology:--to
put down Arianism, Eutychianism, Pelagianism, Manichæism, Lutheranism,
Jansenism. Such is the broad result of its action in the past;--and now
as to the securities which are given us that so it ever will act in time
to come.
First, Infallibility cannot act outside of a definite circle of thought,
and it must in all its decisions, or _definitions_, as they are called,
profess to be keeping within it. The great truths of the moral law, of
natural religion, and of Apostolical faith, are both its boundary and
its foundation. It must not go beyond them, and it must ever appeal to
them. Both its subject-matter, and its articles in that subject-matter,
are fixed. And it must ever profess to be guided by Scripture and by
tradition. It must refer to the particular Apostolic truth which it is
enforcing, or (what is called) _defining_. Nothing, then, can be
presented to me, in time to come, as part of the faith, but what I ought
already to have received, and hitherto have been kept from receiving,
(if so,) merely because it has not been brought home to me. Nothing can
be imposed upon me different in kind from what I hold already,--much
less contrary to it. The new truth which is promulgated, if it is to be
called new, must be at least homogeneous, cognate, implicit, viewed
relatively to the old truth. It must be what I may even have guessed, or
wished, to be included in the Apostolic revelation; and at least it will
be of such a character, that my thoughts readily concur in it or
coalesce with it, as soon as I hear it. Perhaps I and others actually
have always believed it, and the only question which is now decided in
my behalf, is, that I have henceforth the satisfaction of having to
believe, that I have only been holding all along what the Apostles held
before me.
Let me take the doctrine which Protestants consider our greatest
difficulty, that of the Immaculate Conception. Here I entreat the reader
to recollect my main drift, which is this. I have no difficulty in
receiving the doctrine; and that, because it so intimately harmonizes
with that circle of recognized dogmatic truths, into which it has been
recently received;--but if _I_ have no difficulty, why may not another
have no difficulty also? why may not a hundred? a thousand? Now I am
sure that Catholics in general have not any intellectual difficulty at
all on the subject of the Immaculate Conception; and that there is no