55

To the Same

February 17, 1901.

I only got your letter this afternoon as I was not here last night. I am sorry if what I said upset you, yet I am not sorry I said it. I don't think you could be received while your mind remains in the state it always has been whenever you have discussed or written on the question to me. How can you commit your soul to the care of a Church whose first and chiefest claim is to be divine, to teach with divine authority, who claims for herself, and for herself alone, all those startling words of our Lord-'If he neglect to hear the Church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a Publican.' 'He that receiveth you receiveth Me,' etc. etc.—and yet constantly find fault with small details of her methods and constantly compare to her disparagement those of other communions. Certainly, as Newman says, the Church that has been on earth two thousand years has collected some of the dust of earth upon the skirts of her garment, yet that garment is ' of wrought gold.' Certainly you will find many of her children formalists and trivial, and in many places you will find that the clergy are not as zealous and enthusiastic as the best of the High Church clergy, who belong to a movement still in its fervour. Unless you come, therefore, with your faith in her so strong that it stands independent of the people you may be thrown with, and even independent of any formalism or lack of zeal amongst the clergy, you would never find the peace you seek. Surely such things as slackness of individuals, or, what is sometimes more trying, the laying stress upon the least important things ought not to be things to dwell upon or to upset-especially for you coming

as you do from a Church where the holiest doctrines are denied, and all one's feelings of reverence constantly outraged. You keep yourself from realising all this by practically confining yourself to one parish, and closing your eyes to what is all around you. There are but few churches where you could go to Confession, many where your sense of reverence would be shocked if you went to Communion. What are individual carelessnesses, etc., compared to those which eat the very heart out of the English Church. Can you not rise to the fact that you will not get on this side of the grave any religion which has not something in it, or in its members, which may jar? You will certainly find none where you have greater width and liberty for your own soul (and consequently for the souls of others) than in Rome. I constantly feel that one has all the heart can long for or the imagination dream of. Yet the very liberty tolerates what suits some temperaments and jars on others. Many Italian devotions I should not like, but I am never asked to like, to use, or even personally to endorse them, but why should I not allow to an Italian the liberty he allows me ?

Some four or five years ago a lady whom I had known well became a Catholic-a year or two before I did. She had lost all faith in the English Church, and she thought, I suppose, that she had full faith in Rome, but, even while being received, she said she did not approve, and could not understand, either the Communion in one kind, or the devotions to our Lady. She was received, having to risk and suffer much for what she did. Yet she always kept worrying on these two points, looking out, with an almost unconscious instinct for all exaggerations in devotions to our Lady, and the inevitable result was that in less than two years she returned to the English Church. I tell you

all this for I am so afraid of your taking the step before you get your mind into the proper attitude towards Rome.

'Whosoever shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.' Those who do so enter find in it truly a joy unspeakable and full of glory.

As to the Papacy. The Anglican answer is, as they would say, based on historical grounds. They say we do not find the Roman claim brought forward in its fullness till the fourth century, and after that there are again and again difficulties which Rome must explain. The Anglican studies history with his mind already full of the idea that the power of Rome grew, partly from its political position and partly by ecclesiastical concession and partly by Papal aggression. Starting with this principle Anglicans say they find it [the papal claim] unsubstantiated by history. The Catholic begins the study of history with his mind full of the idea that the authority of the Papacy is divinethat any ecclesiastical legislation only declared how the divinely given authority was to be exercised (just as it declared the limits of Episcopal jurisdiction), and that Papal aggression so-called was the exercise of a claim based always upon an authority not ecclesiastically conceded, but divinely given.

So you see. Here are two systems [the believer in] each beginning with the mind prejudiced (if you like to use the word) on one side or another. They turn to history, and each claims to find in history what he goes to history, expecting to find. In answer, therefore, I think one might ask, can our Lord have left so grave and serious a question to be based solely upon the study of history? No historian ever yet wrote without colouring history with his own mind. Döllinger—a great historian-after he broke with the Church, said

he would have to write his whole history over again! That seemed to me to show how little worth the historical argument standing alone can have.

To the poor the Gospel is preached.' I confess I have neither time nor talents nor sufficient power of historical criticism to be able to prove my faith from history. How can I tell that my mind is not warped in one direction or the other to begin with? Therefore, there must be some other way of getting at the truth, and I think that other way is to take the Church as you and I find it to-day. Here is Rome with the Papacy, so to speak, in possession. She claims that the Papacy is divine. She quotes the words of our Lord which could not be stronger or clearer if He did mean what Rome says He meant. She points to ages of the past in which the holiest of her children submitted and suffered in submitting to the Pope's authority as divine. She bids you look round, wherever the Papacy is not there is just that lack which the Papacy supplies-discipline, unity, freedom from secular interference. She says: All this works so well and the lack of it causes so much injury to the Church, that one might suppose beforehand that our Lord would not have left us to supply what He could leave supplied, and nothing but the belief that the authority of the Pope is divine would work. Men of all countries and ages would not yield except to a divine authority, and this authority is so declared by our Lord in words that are hard to explain otherwise.' As I think I said to you the other day-either they mean what they imply, or they mean nothing. Our Lord who saw beforehand the history of the Church used them, knowing they would be misunderstood (if Rome is wrong), and selecting words that certainly were calculated to mislead, and, moreover, those who take them literally find that they do produce the effect

they imply a rock of strength, coherence, and unity.

I do not by any means imply that we are not to study history, and that history does not bear witness to the Church; but I do mean to say that such study is not the ordinary way to get at the truth, and also that the Church must be the interpreter of her own history. You would, for instance, trust an English history written by an Englishman more than one written by a Frenchman, because the Englishman breathes English tradition and is in a living system, and in the present has the key to the meaning of the past. You would not trust a history of the English Church written by a Unitarian as much as you would one written by an Anglican, because the Unitarian begins with what you believe to be a wrong bias. So the living, teaching Church of to-day, through the traditions and institutions of to-day, interprets the past. To me now, after a short four years in the Church, the arguments from antiquity of Anglicans seem extraordinarily trivial. The Church, on the Roman principle, is to-day as much the Church and as good a teacher as she was in the time of St. Cyprian. Her power of teaching depends, not on her memory of the past, but on the indwelling Spirit, Who is to guide her always into all truth.

It would be better if you could come and have a talk-writing is unsatisfactory. Remember to be able to find peace as a Catholic you must not only have lost faith in the English Church, but-a very different thing you must have a firm faith in Rome; and she certainly does inspire faith in her children when they are true to her.