Mussulmans princes and people who stood loyally and faithfully by the British Government in the moment of its greatest tribulation-the soldiers who serve in such large numbers in Her Majesty's army, I am certain his views are not shared by those who are actually concerned with the government of the country. Ever since the disappearance of the Timuride dynasty, the Mahommedans of India have transferred their whole-hearted loyalty to the British Crown. It would be disastrous indeed if the ravings of fanatics were to give rise to an impression among them that the English hated their religion.

I do not wish to prolong this discussion further. I think I have said enough to convince thinking and right-minded people that, as always, there are two sides to the question, and that judgment should not be pronounced against Islâm or Islâmists on rancorous and partisan statements without a full and fair hearing of the case on the Moslem side, which has not as yet been accorded to them.

So far as I am concerned, I must consider the controversy closed. I have no objection to enter the lists in a just cause against any gentleman-lay or cleric-Anglo-Armenian or otherwise; but the language of personal vituperation is a weapon I do not care to employ, and I shall not again descend into the arena of polemics with Canon Mac Coll.

AMEER ALI.

THE RIGIDITY OF ROME

AN acute observer has remarked that a novel of the time,' to be successful, should put into concrete form some phase of the 'time spirit.' Men should find in it the definite expression of what has been vaguely dwelling in their own minds. I think it may be said similarly that Dr. Jessopp's recent somewhat contemptuous comparison of the papacy to the Celestial Empire expresses (in an exaggerated form) a thought which is vaguely in the minds of many. It conveys just that conception of the papacy which makes many Englishmen impatient at the bare phrase 'reunion with Rome.' Many who have a personal respect for Leo XIII. and are not insensible to a certain rigid strength in the papal power, or even to the value of continental Catholicism as a breakwater against the running flood of Anarchism and Socialism, refuse even to consider seriously the claims which the papacy makes in its own behalf. As a matter of political expediency the papacy may be utilised. It may even be approached, as China might, in a spirit of conciliation—as a power which might still on occasion prove a valuable ally. But to take seriously the claims of the Roman See as a whole is like contemplating the possibility of a reign of pigtails and mandarins in Europe. The Immaculate Conception and Papal Infallibility remain as standing reminders that an acceptance of such claims is not only impossible to realise, but absurd to think of.

That a fusion between English religious thought, with its existing preconceptions, and the Papal Church as it now is, is simply out of the question, few will be found to deny. And if we add that the man of the world in the days of Justin Martyr would have held truly that any fusion of the 'pernicious' Oriental' superstition' known as Christianity with the then existing civilisation of Imperial Rome was out of the question, it is not because the cases are parallel, but only to remind ourselves that potent spiritual forces may be held very cheap even by highly civilised men of the world. What seems and is out of the question in one generation may, where living and powerful forces are concerned forces which can work wonderful changes, whether in the sphere of adaptation or of destruction-come eventually into the

1 See Nineteenth Century for June.

region of practical politics. Without saying that this is a reason for maintaining seriously that the union of all Christians under the papal obedience is a probability in the future, it is a useful reminder that to arrive at the eventual possibilities of the case, we must go somewhat beyond the so-called common-sense judgment of men of the world. In such men the instinctive sense of the existing state of things is strong and accurate; but their realisation of the nature of the true forces at work, and of their ultimate effects, is often proportionally defective.

And Dr. Jessopp's analogy itself brings out strikingly both the excellence and the defect of such practical judgments. It would be difficult to express more forcibly (with the additional vividness given by caricature) the mutual relation between the average Englishman and the papacy, than by comparing it to that of a European with the Chinese civilisation. And yet it would be difficult to give a falser idea of the forces really at work, which must be estimated in forecasting the future. Both Empires, Papal and Celestial, are apparently self-contained and self-sufficient, dealing in their daily life with a different class of ideals and aims from any with which Englishmen are familiar, refusing to acknowledge an inferiority which seems to Englishmen obvious-nay, each in its special sphere incurring the imputation that it is haughty, unbending, uncompromising. Both Empires are ruled by a supreme authority which strikes outsiders as autocratic and exacting. Both are in occasional contact with the surrounding civilisations-forces to be reckoned with by them, yet in the opinion of their critics learning little from them and assimilating still less.

2

So much for the apparent similarity in the present. But how far are these features of present resemblance significant for the future? If you point to the marble statue on the Pincian Hill in Rome, which is supposed to be a perfect likeness to Savonarola at the age of thirty, and argue that because the bust was very like him and will never change, therefore Savonarola could never have altered, or grown, or assimilated food and oxygen, or responded to the conditions surrounding his life, the reasoning is obviously defective. The resemblance between him and the statue was external and temporary. The same living forces which made him the manner of man from which the statue was copied, must later on have made him grow unlike it again. And if we look at the supposed resemblance in type between the Papal Church and the Chinese Empire, we find (even apart from the obvious caricature involved) something of the same

sort.

Briefly, the Chinese Empire is, as the writer to whom I refer reminds us, rigid and exclusive for the reasons which have made it so for four thousand years. Self-contained immobility is, as Dr. Jessopp 2 I speak from memory as to the age represented.

explains, its genius. The Papal Church, on the other hand, would seem in part to owe the rigidity which impresses its critics (paradoxical as it may sound) to its very adaptability. Rigidity and exclusiveness were in their degree the indispensable means of adapting itself to a critical situation-of withstanding the widespread revolt of the sixteenth century against the principles of its constitution.

To appreciate this difference let us read Dr. Jessopp's account of the genius of the Chinese civilisation. While enjoying an unbroken peace and liberty,' he writes, it held itself aloof from all other nations of the world; ' it 'engaged in the study of its own literature,' and was in all things self-contained and self-supporting.' And the typical representative of this exclusive system is the mysterious emperor' who 'dwells apart in a kind of sacred isolation, still regarded by his subjects as king of kings and lord of lords, still asking for nothing but that he should be left alone and undisturbed.' This is no enemy's account of the Chinese civilisation. The preservation of an unalloyed local tradition in culture and manners is the boast of the Chinaman, even when he has had the opportunity of comparing himself with the best products of European education. Some of my readers may remember the warning of an eminent Chinaman of our own time-Marquis Tseng-to a Chinese diplomatist who was accredited to a European Embassy. Your great difficulty,' he said, 'will be to conceal your contempt for the barbarous ways of the Europeans; but you must learn to do it, else you will never be successful in

your career." The Church, on the other hand, has been exclusive, not from choice in time of peace, but from necessity in time of war. The polity she has striven to defend was the outcome not of insensibility to the civilisations around her, but of her own power of assimilation with the genius and intellect of various places and epochs. Her schools have at different times blended with all that was best in Platonic and Aristotelian thought, Jewish and Arabian speculation. The doctrine of the Divine Word,' writes Cardinal Newman, 'is Platonic; the doctrine of the Incarnation is Indian; of a divine kingdom is Judaie; of angels and demons is Magian.' The metaphysic of the schools is Aristotelian; their natural theology largely based on the philosophy of a Jew. The avowed aim of the Roman Church at the Reformation was the preservation of the living organism of the Church universal, which had thus embodied, in its teaching and traditions, so much of the intellectual and spiritual life of Europe and the East. One of its characteristics which impressed such students of Church history as Wiseman and Newman was that very power of assimilation which Dr. Jessopp now denies to it. Cardinal Wiseman has remarked that it reflected in great measure the intellectual character of each successive age; 3 and Cardinal Newman in a suggestive essay has maintained

" This point is suggestively treated in the Inaugural Lecture delivered by Cardinal Wiseman in 1862 before the Catholic Academia.

that from the very beginning the Church constantly claimed and assimilated the truths presented to her by the schools and peoples with which she came in contact.

Wherever she went (he writes), in trouble or in triumph, still she was a living spirit, the mind and voice of the Most High: sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions,' claiming to herself what they said rightly, correcting their errors, supplying their defects, completing their beginnings, expanding their surmises, and thus gradually by means of them enlarging the range and refining the sense of her own teaching. So far, then, from her creed being of doubtful origin because it resembles foreign theologies, we hold that one special way in which Providence has imparted divine knowledge to us has been by enabling her to draw and collect it together out of the world.

The intellectual adaptability involved in this assimilative power was notably shown in the scholastic movement of the thirteenth century. The peripatetic philosophy and the dialectical method, so fiercely denounced by St. Bernard in his contests with Abelard, so much disliked and suspected by the fathers, became fused with the very theology of the Church. Aristotle, the bête noire of the early Christian doctors, became an authority almost as supreme in philosophy as were the inspired writers in divinity. The natural theology of Rabbi Moyses-as St. Thomas styles the Jewish thinker Maimonides-was adopted in its most characteristic features by Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas.5

The organism of the Church, which was thus the outcome on its intellectual side of the fusion of various phases of civilisation with the unchanging essence of the divine revelation, was directly attacked at the Reformation. Luther did not, like a Savonarola, or even in his measure an Erasmus, aim at mere reform within her pale, in the light of the truest spiritual and ethical genius of the time. He attacked the very principle of unity. To preserve its very existence the Church had to resist the Reformers à outrance. The papacy was for nearly three hundred years in a state of war.

We have, then, to ask whether an attitude which in the Chinaman is a manifestation of his own rigid and self-contained genius, may not be in the Papal Church the adaptation to a state of war of an organism which is neither unduly rigid nor self-contained; whether the very traces its theology bears of fusion with the thought proper to many times, places, and civilisations, are not standing records of a character diametrically opposed to that of the self-sufficient and narrow Chinaman. And, further, the very fact that this external appearance of rigidity impresses English critics as so

The early fathers had shown an extreme aversion to Aristotle. I do not know who of them could endure him.' (Newman, Idea of an University, 4th ed. p. 470.) 5 The extent of the obligations of St. Thomas Aquinas to Maimonides is drawn out in Dr. Guttmann's Das Verhältniss des Thomas von Aquinas zum Judenthum, &c. Göttingen, 1891.