Berkeley, Law, Waterland, Warburton, Lardner, Paley, made Christian thought, even as a mere matter of literature, distinguished beside Deism, but in France the power of resistance was so feeble, that no one would think of naming the Fathers of the Church alongside the men of letters, the most illustrious name of the century, Malebranche, belonging, so far as philosophical and literary activity is concerned, rather to the seventeenth.

And it is now as then; it is Catholic countries that show the most radical revolt of the intellect from Religion, and a revolt not at one point, but at all. In Belgium the conflict is going on under our very eyes, political on the surface, religious beneath it; in Italy, where thought is most active, the claims and dogmas of the Church are handled most freely; even in Spain political aspirations are wedded to ecclesiastical denials. There is no country in which unbelief is so strong and so vindictive as in France, so much a passion of hate, a fanaticism or zealotry against, if not Religion, yet the Church that claims to be its authoritative vehicle and exponent. The anticlericals of the nineteenth century far eclipse the encyclopédists of the eighteenth; the resolute and rough-handed antagonism of the Senate and the workshop has superseded the fine criticism of the study, and the delicate yet well-spiced raillery of the salon. The very priesthood is not proof against the negative spirit; the new political ideal steals the heart of a Lamennais from Rome, while German criticism turns the most hopeful pupil of Saint Sulpice into the freest and most famed critic of the creative Person and period of Christianity. No Church has had such splendid opportunities as the Catholic; everything that the most perfect organization and the complete control of rulers and their agencies could do for her and the faith she carried, has been done; and if she has yet allowed Free Thought, so often in its worst and extremest forms, to spring up all round her, it is evident that she of all Churches most needs a relevant and living apologetic. She must reconcile the intellects that have revolted from her, or lose them utterly; and the only way of reconciliation is the way of reason and argument. Grant belief in the papal claims, and authority and infallibility are powerful weapons. Create doubt or denial, and they are but empty words-the speech of exaggerated feebleness. Where they can only speak their claims, they but provoke to ridicule; where these claims can appear as political or social forces, they beget the revolutionary and retributive fanaticism, the hate inspired by fear, which is so distinctive of unbelief in the Catholic countries. If, then, Catholicism is to win the revolted intellect, it must use reasonable speech, and the more reasonable it is the more irresistible it will be. Protestantism frankly appeals to the reason, and so is bound to persuade it; Catholicism must humbly lay aside its high claims, and convince the reason before it can rule it, and so in either case a

rational apologetic is necessary, though in the Catholic case, as there is so much more to prove, the proof must be correspondingly great and commanding.

2. It will not, I hope, be supposed that there is here any attempt at a tu quoque. It were an expedient fit only for a poor controversialist to excuse the weakness of the Protestant Churches by charging the Roman Catholic with impotence, or to hide the failure of the Catholic to hold or control her peoples by magnifying the feebleness of the Protestant. What is intended is simply to emphasize this point:the burden and responsibilities of the conflict with unbelief lies on all the Churches, and no one can say to the other, "the work is thine, not mine." This duty, indeed, they have all on occasion been forward to recognize, and we rejoice to see men like Vives the Catholic, Pascal the Jansenist, Grotius the Arminian, Leibnitz the Lutheran, Butler the Anglican, Lardner the Presbyterian, and Schleiermacher the German Evangelical, united in unconscious harmony in doing for their several generations the same order of work. Yet it is necessary to make a distinction: an apology for Religion is not the same thing as an apology for a Church; nay, more, the best apologies for Religion have been in no respect apologies for specific Churches. Yet, while the distinction is clear, a separation is not in every case possible. If the Church is held to be the embodiment of the Religion, so necessary to it that the Religion were impossible without it, then the only complete and sufficient apology for the Religion is an apology for the Church. And this is what we have a right to expect from Roman Catholicism; what is an insufficient vindication of its claims as a Church is, from its own point of view, an inadequate defence of the Christian Religion. That is a grave aspect of the matter, burdening Roman Catholicism and Catholics with the heaviest responsibility Church or man could bear, and it is the aspect which gives significance to the question here proposed for discussion, viz., whether Catholic apologetic thought in England has given such an interpretation and defence of Religion as to make it more true and intelligible and real to critical and perplexed and doubting minds.

III,

1. Catholicism in England cannot be discussed apart from that Anglo-Catholic movement which did so much to revive it. As to the ecclesiastico-religious effects of that movement, there is no need for discussion. These are on all sides visible enough. Its ideal of worship has modified the practice of all the Churches, even of those most hostile to its ideal of Religion. The religious spirit of England is, in all its sections and varieties, sweeter to-day than it was forty years ago, more open to the ministries of art and the graciousness of order, possessed of a larger sense of " the community

of the saints," the kinship and continuity of the Christian society in all ages. Even Scotland has been touched with a strange softness, Presbyterian worship has grown less bald, organs and liturgies have found a home in the land and Church of Knox, and some of the more susceptible sons of the Covenant have been visited by the ideal of a Church at once British and Catholic, where prelate and presbyter should dwell together in unity. On the other hand, it must be confessed, that something of the old sterner Puritan conscience against priesthoods, and all their symbols and ways, has been evoked; and in a sense not true of any time between now and the period of Laud, two ideals of Religion, each the radical contradiction of the other, stand face to face in England, and contend under the varied masks supplied by our theological, ecclesiastical, and even political controversies. The one ideal is sensuous and sacerdotal, and seeks, by the way it construes and emphasizes the idea of the Church, to secularize the State, with all our daily activities and occupations; the other ideal is spiritual and ethical, and seeks, by the way it construes and emphasizes the idea of Religion, to transform and transfigure the state, to sanctify all that belongs to the common life of man. fundamental question is, whether an organized Church which is, alike in history and administration, not in the civil, but in the ecclesiastical sense, a political institution,—or a spiritual faith, which is in its nature a regenerative and regnant moral energy for the whole man, is to prevail; and the more obvious this question becomes, the more the issues are simplified, and men are forced to determine, whether they are to be ruled by a Church or governed by a Religion. The movement that has made or is making our people conscious of this vital issue, has rendered an extraordinary service to the men and Churches of to-day.

The

2. But the most remarkable ecclesiastico-religious results achieved by Anglo-Catholicism are those to be found within the two Churches chiefly concerned, the Anglican and the Roman. Though so many of the men who inaugurated and represented the movement left the English Church, yet the spirit they had created, and many of the men they had inspired, remained within her. And the AngloCatholic ideal has continued to live and work within her like a regenerative spirit, has filled all her sons, even the most resistant, with new ambitions, has both narrowed and broadened her affections and aims, changed old antipathies into new sympathies, made her devouter in worship, and more devoted alike in her practical action and ideal ends. Rome is judged with more perfect charity, Dissenters are judged with more rigorous severity. Unity is loved, and historical continuity coveted, as the condition and channel of the most potent and needed graces. The freedom and independence of the Church has become a watchword, Erastianism a hated and unholy

thing. The Sovereignty of the Redeemer has become a living faith, and the symbols that speak of His presence, and work, and activity are invested with a solemn and sacramental and even sacrificial significance, while the acts that recognize His Deity and express man's devotion are performed with a new sense of awe and reverence. The worship has grown at once statelier and more expressive, men have become more conscious of its beauty and its power, have come to feel how completely it can articulate their needs, satisfy and uplift their souls, bring them into the company of the saintly dead and into communion with the Eternal. The Church has a deeper sense of sin and a greater love for sinners, and seeks to use her symbolism and her service to bring Christ and His salvation nearer to the hearts and consciences of men. The Catholic ideal may be to many sensuous, poor through the very wealth of its symbolism, a materialized and so depraved translation of the idea of the Kingdom, which must ever remain "of Heaven," that it may reign over earth; but, whatever it may be to such, no one can deny that it has been to the Church of England a spirit of life and energy. It is, especially when the historical grounds on which it rests are considered, a splendid example of the power of faith, and of the creative and transfigurative force of the religious imagination. From this point of view it has, indeed, a most pathetic side; but its pathos need not blind us to the wonderful things it has accomplished, though it may make us wonder at the power which has accomplished them. Yet we need not wonder, for of old God "chose the things that were not to bring to nought the things that were."

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3. But it is on Catholicism that the Anglo-Catholic Movement has acted most potently. It has changed its spirit and attitude to the English people, and the English people's to it, has indeed, in a sense unknown since the Reformation, made Roman Catholicism English. Catholic emancipation supplied one of the conditions of the change, but the Oxford Movement, and its issues, accomplished it. What Cardinal Newman describes as "the Protestant view of the Catholic Church" is an example of the remarkable limitations of his genius, his inability to understand where he does not sympathize; the view," though, no doubt, veraciously reminiscent, is but a series of prejudices, all the more vulgar that they were those of the cultured. What the true view is does not here concern us; only this the English view was very much what the course of history had made it. Catholicism had been anti-English: in its interests foreign potentates had threatened England, and had tried to execute their threats; Catholics had plotted against Elizabeth, against the first James, had fought for absolutism under his son, had stood by the later Stuarts, and had intrigued for their return. Catholicism, in countries where the royal might threaten the papal supremacy, had, by the mouth

of men like Suarez and Mariana, preached strong doctrines as to the duties of kings and the rights of peoples; but in seventeenth-century England, where it had everything to hope from the prince, and nothing from the people, its loyalty was to the ruler, not to the law or the ruled. And so the Catholics lived as aliens in the land, under heavy civil disabilities, with the home of their religious interest and the source of their religious inspiration elsewhere. Time brought amelioration; Spain fell, and could launch no second Armada, raise no army England need fear; the Stuarts were expelled, and France was soon too completely broken to have either the will or the power to interfere on their behalf. Freed from fear of invasion or rebellion, the attitude of England changed. She became tolerant, came to understand what civil and religious liberty meant, celebrated, largely by persuasion of the men most radically opposed to Catholicism, one memorable moment in her process of learning by "Catholic Emancipation." Liberty allowed a completer incorporation with the English people, a new baptism in the English spirit, a healthier, because a freer, profession of faith. And this had been prepared for from within; the saintly Challoner and the brave Milner had quickened its religious zeal; Lingard, with notable erudition and independence, had made English history its apology; and Dr. Wiseman improved the new day that had dawned by an apologetic of rare skill and eloquence. But the foreign taint still clung to Catholicism, it wanted English character and breeding, national traditions and aspirations. Even Dr. Wiseman was but an Italian priest, a professor from Rome, Irish by descent, Spanish by birth. What it wanted the Oxford Movement gave, a distinctively English quality and aspect. The men it carried over to Rome had received the most typical English education, their leader was the greatest living master of the English tongue. They had been nursed in Anglican traditions, were some of them learned Anglican divines, who could not forget their learning, or change their blood and breeding with their Church, or cancel and cast out the ancient inheritance they had so long possessed and loved. They were Catholics of an altogether new type, their memories and instincts were not of a persecuted sect, hated and alien in England, but of a Church proudly and consciously English; the superstructure of their faith and life might be Roman, but the basis was Anglican, and the superstructure had to be accommodated to the basis, not the basis to the superstructure. Cardinal Newman does not build on Thomas Aquinas or Bellarmine or Bossuet; they only supply the buttresses and pillars, the arches and gargoyles of his faith: his fundamental principles are those of Butler, he reasons when he is gravest, fullest of conviction and most anxious to convince, in the methods and on the premisses of the Analogy. For polemical purposes he is all the better a Catholic