of that proposition, and while he remained of that mind how could he have honestly professed his acceptance of the dogma? The appeal was not to his faith, but to his reason. It was, as he said himself, like asking him to believe that two and two make five. But there is an ambiguity in the word "infallible," and the writer in the Spectator uses it in a sense in which Dr. Döllinger never accepted it, either before or after the Vatican Council. In the most Roman period of his life he was no believer in the Ultramontane doctrine of infallibility, whether of the pope alone, or of the pope as head and organ of the Church collectively. The Ultramontane view is that bishops are not witnesses of the faith handed down among their flocks from generation to generation; but that by consecration they are admitted to the ecclesia docens as doctors and judges, and are thus entrusted supernaturally with the custody of the true faith. So that when they assemble in œcumenical council they are not witnesses of the traditional and immemorial faith of their flocks, but of the faith as it came to them supernaturally in the line of their consecration. Dr. Döllinger never held that view. To him the infallibility of the Church had always meant a concensus of historical testimony. The function of bishops in an ecumenical council was to bear witness severally to the faith handed down in their dioceses. If there was more unanimity in this testimony, it was held to afford decisive proof that the doctrine thus attested was part of the original deposit. But councils had to deliberate as well as to bear witness; to track error to its lair and expose it as well as to testify to the truth; and it was therefore believed that the promise to "guide them into all truth" was not personal to the Apostles, but was made officially through them to the Church at large. It was not enough, for instance, at the Council of Nicea that the bishops there assembled should have each delivered the traditional doctrine of his see on the subject of our Lord's divinity. For Arius did not deny the divinity of Christ in express terms. He disguised his denial of it by sophistry so subtle that it required uncom mon skill and dexterity to refute him; and it was illuminating guidance of this kind that was promised to the Church, not an infused grace at the consecration of each bishop for the purpose of endowing him with the custody of the faith. Others again, like Joseph de Maistre,* have explained papal infallibility as if it merely meant the power of giving a decision which is final and from which there can be no appeal; the same in the spiritual order that sovereignty is in the civil order. The infallibility defined in the Vatican decree is different in kind from this. The infallible decisions of the Roman pontiff are said to be "irreformable." This is a fundamental distinction. In civil government the sovereign power for the time being has supreme jurisdiction over the past as well as over the present. It can reform and revoke past decisions as well as lay down the law for the present. The analogy suggested by De Maistre therefore breaks down on the threshold of the argument. Nor is this all. There never was a time when Dr. Döllinger 'admitted the irreformability of any ecclesiastical decisions, be they papal or conciliar. He always held that one cecumenical council could review and amend (as indeed some did) the acts of another. Moreover, the Vatican definition declares that the ex cathedrâ decisions of the pope are not only "irreformable," but are so" of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church." According to Cardinal Manning,† this means, and indeed it is the obvious meaning, that "the whole episcopate gathered in council is not infallible without its head. But the head is always infallible by himself. This divine assistance is his special prerogative depending on God alone." The Vatican definition therefore "ascribes to the pontifical acts ex cathedrâ, in faith or morals, an intrinsic infallibility; and secondly, it excludes from them all influx of any other cause of such intrinsic infallibil. ity." "I need not add," says the cardinal, "that by these words many forms of error are excluded; as, first, the theory that the joint action of the episcopate congregated in council is necessary to the infallibility of the pontiff; secondly, that the consent of the episcopate dispersed is required; thirdly, that if not the express at least the * L'un et l'autre expriment cette haute puissance qui les domine toutes, dont toutes les autres dérivent, qui gouverne et n'est pas gouvernée, qui juge et n'est pas jugée. Quand nous disons qui l'Eglise est infaillible nous ne demandons pour elle, il est bien essentiel de l'observer, aucun privilege particulier; nous demandons seulment qu'elle jouisse du droit commun à toutes les souverainetés possible qui toutes agissent nécessairement comme infaillibles; car tout gouvernement est absolu; et du moment où l'on peut lui résister sous prétexte d'erreur ou d'injustice, il n'existe plus. (Du Pape c. i., pp. 15-16.) + The Vatican Council and its Definitions, pp. 90-92. tacit assent of the episcopate is needed. | ning, for example, uses two arguments,* once ? the fall of Honorius, what then? Does This is the doctrine which Dr. Döllinger was required to believe, not as an article of divine truth revealed to the fathers of the Vatican Council, but as an article of faith always held "from the beginning." How was he to believe it consistently with his historical convictions? How was it reconcilable with the facts of history-with the fact of general councils, for example? If the Roman pontiff, as teacher of the Church, is infallible when he speaks ex cathedra on faith or morals, why were councils summoned at all to decide what the pope could have decided independently of them? Why the long sessions and heated disputations of Nicæa, Chalcedon, Ephesus, and the rest, if the pope could by the fiat of his infallible prerogative have settled the matter at In those days of difficult and dangerous travelling and precarious postal communication, to withdraw the bishops of Christendom for months from their But Cardinal Manning's own view is sees was a serious evil to the Church at that Honorius needs no defence. His lanlarge. Would it have been incurred with- guage is "entirely orthodox, though, in the out necessary cause? And where was the use of language, he wrote as was usual necessary cause if the pope could decide before the condemnation of Monothethe matter infallibly of himself, "and not lism,t and not as it became necessary from the consent of the Church"? Nay, afterwards. It is an anachronism and an why was the Vatican Council called to de- injustice to censure his language used beclare the pope's infallibility, if infallibility fore that condemnation, as it might be belongs intrinsically to his office by lineal just to censure it after the condemnation heritage from Peter? Why proclaim as a had been made." Let us see what is new dogma what is declared to have al- involved in this argument. Being appealed ways been a necessary article in the cre- to by the Monothelite patriarch Sergius, denda of the Church? And why did the of Constantinople, Honorius adopted and Church for eighteen centuries, by its ap- sanctioned in a public document the techpeal to the general council, practically nical formula of the Monothelites, and deny the pope's alleged prerogative of set-pronounced it a dogma of the Church. tling all controversies on faith or morals "independently of the Church "? These are specimens of the questions which Dr. Döllinger found barring his way to belief in the Vatican dogma. I have often heard him say that there were several objections to the dogma which were singly decisive against it, to say nothing of the cumulative force of the whole mass. Like Hefele, he regarded the case of Honorius as alone conclusive. And indeed it is not easy to see how that objec tion can be removed. The attempts that have been made to surmount it have really increased the difficulty. Cardinal Man His letter is extant in Greek and Latin, and his words can bear but one interpretation. Confessing our Lord's incarnation, he asserted that he had one will only, and denied that he had two. For this Honorius was condemned and excommunicated in a council (A.D. 680) admitted as cecumenical in East and West. Two subsequent councils repeated the anathema, and every succeeding pope down to The Vatican Council, pp. 116-118. † Cardinal Manning would find it hard to prove that the Monothelite language of Honorius was ever common among orthodox theologians. The Vatican Council, p. 223. 66 the eleventh century, in a solemn oath at his accession, gave his adhesion to the council which condemned Honorius, and pronounced an anathema on that pope as an abettor of heresy. In other words, a series of popes, for more than three centuries, publicly admitted that a council can sit in judgment on a pope, and condemn him for heresy; and in particular that Pope Honorius was justly condemned for heresy. Individual popes, moreover (Leo II., for example), denounced Honorius as a heretic in very energetic language. If then, "it is," as Cardinal Manning tells us, an anachronism and an injustice to censure his [Honorius's] language," the anachronism and injustice have been committed by three general councils and a multitude of popes. To save the infallibility of Honorius, therefore, is to sacrifice that of the popes who condemned him as a heretic. I do not see a way of escape from that dilemma. I know, on the other hand, that the case of Honorius presents no difficulty to sincere, able, and learned believers in papal infallibility. I cannot understand their state of mind, and they will probably consider me too biassed to appreciate their reasoning. But Dr. Döllinger's natural bias was in favor of believing what the Roman Church taught; and it was not without a painful wrench that he faced excommunication rather than profess belief in what he believed to be untrue. The controversy on papal infallibility naturally forced Dr. Döllinger to reconsider his position generally, and the conclusion at which he arrived was that no council could be received as cecumenical, consequently as binding on the whole Church, since the last council recognized as œcumenical by both East and West. That opened up a number of questions which he set himself to study with the ardor and diligence of a man who knew the magnitude of the task and the precarious tenure of a life which had already passed its threescore years and ten. He began to re-study ecclesiastical history afresh from the earliest ages, in order to trace the genesis of the cardinal errors which have afflicted the Church and done so much harm to the Christian religion. It is to be hoped that he left materials for his monumental work in so forward a state that some of his disciples may be able to arrange them for publication. His plan was to apportion certain collateral and illustrative subjects to the investigation of scholars working under his own guidance, while he reserved for his own pen the unravelling of the papacy along the whole course of its development. How completely he had reconsidered his whole attitude on ecclesiastical subjects will be apparent from a bare and crude sketch of a treatise on the Church, which he wrote down for me five years ago, with the expression of a wish that I would undertake it in conjunction with some eminent men, English and German, whom he named. Mr. Gladstone had often expressed to me the wish that a new and revised edition should be published of Palmer's "Treatise on the Church of Christ" - a book which Cardinal Newman, since he became a Roman Catholic, has characterized as the ablest exposition of the position of the Church of England that has appeared since the Reformation. At last I undertook to edit a new edition of Palmer's book, and consulted Dr. Döllinger. He agreed in Mr. Gladstone's and Cardinal Newman's opinion of Palmer's book. "English theological literature," he wrote, "possesses nothing comparable to it, or which could replace it. The study of such a work should be an indispensable requisite for every candidate for holy orders." The lines on which it was proposed to bring out the new edition of Palmer's work are indicated in the following extract from a letter which Mr. Gladstone wrote to me on the subject: I What I want to have, on the basis of Palmer's book, is a setting forth, according to the methods which theological science provides, of the Civitas Dei, the city set on a hill, and Apostolic Church, fortsetzung der Fleischthe pillar and ground of truth, the Catholic werdung, exhibited not as against Nonconformists, nor even principally as against the aggressive Church of Rome, but as a positive dispensation, a form divinely given to the religious idea, which challenges with authority, but agreeably to reason, the assent of the rational and right-minded man, in competition want some solid scientific work, which shall with all other claimants on that assent. historical or institutional Christianity to take its chance in the mêlée of systems, dogmatic and undogmatic, revealed and unrevealed, particularist, pagan, secular, antitheistic, or other, which marks the age. Having spent more than fifty years of adult life [this was written some years ago] in this mêlée, I find the method I describe the most rational of all, and I wish that there should be a textbook of it for the help of doubtful or uninstructed minds. Also that this text-book, founded on the principle I have described, should apply the principle, for the benefit of Englishmen, to the case of the English Church, under the shadow of which our lot is providentially cast. set up After some progress had been made in the revision of Palmer's book, it was found that parts of it would have to be entirely re-written, and much of it, which events particularly the Vatican Council and its consequences - had rendered obsolete, would have to be omitted. While this was going on I often went to Munich to consult Dr. Döllinger. He was so kind as to give me a room in his library for study, close to that in which he sat himself; so that he was always at hand to help me. While thus engaged one day, five years ago, he advised me to content myself with a revision of Palmer up to date, and devote myself, with the aid of some scholars whom he named, to the composition of an entirely new book. In the course of the afternoon he handed me a rough sketch of the kind of book which he thought would be useful, filling up the sketch, to some extent, during a long walk in the environs of Munich. I reproduce the sketch here literally as Dr. Döllinger gave it to me:— GENERAL OUTLINE. Matters to be treated more historically than systematically and polemically: Periods (a) A.D. 324; (b) A.D. 680; (c) Middle Ages, down to the beginning of the thirteenth century; (d) the time of developed scholasticism, when the authoritative works were written by Papal commandment, or imposed as binding law by the Popes and the religious Orders-Alexander of Hales, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus; (e) the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries till the dawn of the Reformation, 1517; (f) the Council of Trent; (g) the period of Jesuitical domination; the changes in dogma, morals, and general spirit of the Church, introduced by that Order. Consequently seven_successive surveys of the state of dogma. The date of the rising of each new dogma can generally be fixed very accurately. Doctrine of development, as it is taught by the Fathers and the scholastics (principally Vincentius Lirinensis,and Thomas Aquinas), to be carefully distinguished from Newman's system. Doctrines, where the change is particularly momentous and fraught with far-reaching consequences i. Authority of the Bible and Tradition. 2. Penitence and Absolution (attrition or contrition). 3. Making marriage a Sacrament, and consequently entirely and exclusively a matter of Papal legislation. 4. The all-engrossing worship of the Blessed Virgin. 5. The virtue of faith, as it is taught in the New Testament (justifying faith), changed into an act of passive and blind LIVING AGE. VOL. LXX. 3592 obedience to the Church, or rather (since 1870) to the Pope. 6. The great change of the doctrine of grace by Augustine and the canons of the Eleventh Council of Orange; whereas the Greek Church preserved the ancient doctrine. 7. Change in the idea of sacrifice in the Eucharist. (Compare Johnson's work and that of Benedict XIV. De Missa.) Original independence of National Church. The Church of Armenia-of Persia—of Abys sinia (Ethiopia)—(it has never been in. communion with Rome and the Western Church); the Church of Ireland (Culdees), which was in the twelfth century; the old Scotch Church independent down to the time of St. Malachy, (Columba); the African Church — the Spanish Church, where the subjection to Rome was introduced from France at the end of the eleventh century, by means of the monks of Cluny. The changes in doctrine and practice since the fifth century are mainly hierarchical, calculated to make the Laity more dependent and multiply gifts, offerings, taxes. on the services of the Clergy, and to increase Blind obedience to the Church, developed in its perfection by the Jesuits, and perverting conscience and moral judgment. Institutions directly immoral or grossly superstitious: (1) The Interdict, based on the idea that the Hierarchy can punish the innocent instead of the guilty. (2) Ordeals (direct intervention of God in human judicial trials) countenanced, consecrated by the Church. (3) The extension of Exorcism to cases of all kinds, generally confounding any case of mental disease, lunacy, or uncommon malady with demoniacal pos session. Changes in doctrine: (a) Chiliasm or Millennium doctrine of Wordsworth, showing the toleration of the Primitive Church. (b) The fall of Satan and the demons. The earlier doctrine of the Fathers of the second and third century was rejected, and a new one (fall by pride) introduced towards the end of the fourth century. (c) Change in the doctrine respecting the authority of Councils (St. Augustine, Gregory of Rome). St. Augustine said that one Council could correct another. Gregory compared the first four Councils to the four Evangelists, and negatived the competency of one Ecumenical Council to amend another. (d) Change respecting the worship of angels, fables and lies (apparition of St. Michael, etc.) by which it was established. (e) Change respecting the state of souls "The earlier doctrine" was that the fall of the angels was due to sensuality, Sons of God," mentioned in Gen. vi. 1-4, being angels. On of children running out of cottages or From The Nineteenth Century. BY W. E. GLADSTONE. Dr. Döllinger was penetrated with the conviction that the great obstacle to the spread of Christianity was the divided state of Christendom, and he gathered together in Bonn, in 1874 and 1875, representatives of the Oriental Anglican, and American Churches, together with representative Nonconformists, to discuss in a friendly way the differences which divided them. Want of space forbids my going into that episode of Dr. Döllinger's busy and fruitful life. Those who were present, as I was, at the second Bonn Conference can never forget the tact, learning, courtesy, intellectual resource and agility, and exuberant vitality of its venerable president, Dr. von Döllinger. He was then seventy-one years of age, but there was not a man among us more alert in body, and none half so alert in mind. the last day of the Conference he delivered an address on the main questions which divide Christendom. It was a marvellous ON BOOKS AND THE HOUSING OF THEM. exhibition, both intellectually and physically. He spoke for five hours three hours before luncheon and two hours after this point seemed to taste a little of deIN the old age of his intellect (which at luncheon. He never used a note, and never hesitated. He stood all the while doctrine of immortality has recently lost crepitude), Strauss declared that the in the middle of the room, and looked as the assistance of a passable argument, inasfresh and vigorous at the close of his ad- much as it has been discovered that the dress as if he had been doing nothing in stars are inhabited; for where, he asks, particular. He was a man of splendid could room now be found for such a mulphysique; slim, wiry, with what Mr. Glad- titude of souls? Again, in view of the stone has aptly described as a "thatch of hair, which began to show streaks of tion for this earth, some people have becurrent estimates of prospective populagrey only within the last few years. He was a very early riser at 5 A.M. till the gun to entertain alarm for the probable condition of England (if not Great Britain) last few years. He breakfasted at eight, when she gets (say) the seventy millions, and dined at one; after which he touched that are allotted to her against six or eight nothing. He was hard at work in his hundred millions for the United States. study, when not receiving visitors, till We have heard in some systems of the about four or five in the afternoon, when he took a long walk, and charmed any one idea of any pressure from any quarter pressure of population upon food; but the who had the privilege of being his companion, with his conversation. He seldom upon space is hardly yet familiar. Still, I studied after his return from his walk, been struck with the naïve simplicity of suppose that many a reader must have and went to bed early. I am disposed the hyperbole of St. John,t perhaps a always to think well of a man of whom children and animals are fond. I don't solitary unit of its kind in the New Testathink I ever took a walk with Dr. Döl-ment: "the which if they should be writlinger without being touched by the sight world itself could not contain the books ten every one, I suppose that even the ↑ I.e., the change from anointing with a view to recovery to anointing in extremis, where there is no hope of recovery. that should be written." * In Der alte und der neue Glaube. † xxi. 25. 2 |