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\\THY RITUALISTS DO NOT 'BECOME
ROMAN CATHOLICS.



They scarcely rise, whose merit lies by hardship pressed at home,
But sorer far their troubles are, who try their luck in Rome."

" Haud facile emergunt, quarum virtutibus obstat
Res angusta domi, sed Romæ durior illis
Conatus.'

]UVENALIS, Sat. iii. I64.



WHY RITUALISTS' DO NOT BECOME

ROMAN CATHOLICS

.

A REPLY TO THE ABBE MARTIN

By RICHARD FREDERICK LITTLEDALE

LL.D., D.C.L.

(Repruzted, with additions andcorrections-from the" Contemporary Revie-d!")

SECOND EDITION.-THIRD THOUSAND

STRAHAN AND COMPANY LIMITED

34 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON



Printed by Hazell, Watson, and Viney, London and Aylesbury.



WHY RITUALISTS DO NOT BECOME

ROMAN CATHOLICS.

THE Church of England, like the Eng�ish 'Constitution,and not a few other national products, is of such a
complex nature, and so perplexing as a problem even to
Englishmen who have not given special attention to its
history and peculiarities, that it is not wonderful to find
almost total misconception, where there is not mere blank
ignorance, prevalent concerning it amongst foreigners in
general, but little aided in their search after information by
the commoner sort of Anglican chapels and chaplains on
the Continent. When, therefore, a foreign ecclesiastic is
found like the Abbé Martin, who has not contented himself
with accepting without inquiry the popular caricatures of
the Anglican system, but has evidently given much time and
pains to study the question at first hand and independently,
his views and criticisms are entitled to a degree of attention
and respect which cannot be often accorded to the stereo­

typed objections of the ordinary French or Italian con­
troversialist. And the query he has put in the Contemporary
Re'lJiew for August 1878 is undoubtedly entitled to a reply,
which I will now attempt to give.
I may be pardoned for remarking at the outset that to

myself and others who tried to read between the lines of a
former communication by the Abbé Martin to another
Review" in the previous February on a cognate subject, it
appeared that he was in truth uttering a veiled censure on

* The Nine/eenth Century.



6 The Ritualists and Roman Cathoùcism,

the policy and language of the Ultramontane faction now
dominant in the Church of France. And it is just possible,
it seems to me now, that his meaning was sufficiently obvious
to those in authority to draw forth a hint of the expediency
of purging himself from the suspicion of too much liberality
and toleration, viewed as disaffection, by means of a pole­
mical diversion against the Church of England, which we
have just seen made in no incapable fashion.
For it must not be forgotten that the Abbé Martin's

paper, albeit nominally dealing with Ritualists alone, is
really a quasi-retractation of that earlier essay, shaped into
a clever indictment against the English Church in general,
as undeserving. the attachment and allegiance of its mem­
bers, and as being in truth so manifest a failure, if not im­
posture, that no men so far versed in theology and in
ecclesiastical history. as the Ritualist leaders are, can possibly
put any faith in its claims, or resist in their heatts the·over­
whelming evidence in favour of the Church of Rome, so
that they must in consequence be held back by motives
more or less ignoble from acknowledging and following out
their inner convictions. This assumption underlies. the
whole article, and no courteousness of mere phrase avails to
cloak its real character, on which some further light is thrown
by a series of Lectures on Ritualism, but lately published
by the Rev. Fr. Gallwey, S.J., to which I shall have occasion
to advert slightly hereafter.
I must begin by traversing the position taken up by the

Abbé Martin in his introductory remarks, wherein, after
sketching graphically enough the unrestful, inquiring,
anarchic temper of the present day, and the rival action of
the two great religious currents of thought, he assumes that
when the goal of Rome-Catholicism, as he names it-has
been attained, the problem of the age has been solved in

Q�e direction at least, and truth with rest acqu.red by those



The Ritualùts and Roman CathrJùcùm. 7

who have so ended their wanderings. I wish to point out

that he arrives at this demonstration by leaving all Roman

Catholic countries and populations out of account, and

confining himself to those communities which are
outside

the pale of the Latin obedience, Doubtless
it is true

enough that the massive conservatism of the
Roman Church

exercises a powerful attraction on those who are weary and

bewildered with the conflicts of opinion, theistic and

atheistic, in Protestantism, and who are ready to turn to the
Vatican as the one haven where the strife of tongues is

hushed in submission to a voice which asserts its own in

fallibility. But what of the religious and mental
condition

of the once docile children of the Latin Church? What
of

France, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Italy, even Belgium itself?

Suppose some particular region were extolled by physicians
as a health-resort of exceptional virtues, and the many cures

effected by even a brief sojourn there were trumpeted every­
where; what would be the effect on public opinion of a

discovery that the indigenous population was stunted,

unhealthy, and constantly thinned by emigration in search

of health, and by the very diseases for which their home
was alleged as a specific? Clearly, the value of Roman
Catholicism as a remedy for the spiritual ailments of our

time must be tested, not by the mere handful of proselytes
who declare themselves to have found their cure there, and

who, as often as not, really mean no more than that they
have given up thinking about the problems which once

occupied their attention, and are content to sit in the dark

without any longer calling for candles, but by the power it
exercises in checking the generation of doubt amongst its

own children. And the broad fact is that the Latin area of

absolute infidelity and of revolt from the Roman. aspect of

Christianity contains at least twice as large a number of
millions as is to be found ranked under the banners of Pro-



8 The Ritualists and Roman Catholicism,

testant scepticism. Not to go further than France itself, it
is speaking within bounds to say that the Abbé will find
three disbelievers in Christianity amongst his own fellow­
countrymen for everyone he could discover in England.
And this not because of any such confusing rivalry of sects
as may be pleaded amongst us, seeing that Roman Catholics
in France are more than 98 per cent. of the population,
and that the tiny Protestant minority was diminished further
between the census periods of 1866 and 1872; while the
Italian ratio is 99i per cent., Spain has about one Protestant
in every three hundred of the population, and Portugal one
in every eight thousand. There is consequently no such
simpIe issue existing as he alleges, for the alienation from
Christianity is most intense in those countries where the
Roman Church has exercised undisputed monopoly ever
since the dawn of the Reformation; and it is therefore
wholly misleading to assure us that if we desire to escape
the advance of Rationalism, there is a safe refuge to be
found in the Roman obedience; and to represent the wide­
spread apathy and indifference to theological speculation
which characterizes the vast majority of the Roman Catholic
clergy, and practically the whole body of the laity, as
identical with the attainment of religious certitude on all
debateable questions. I am not, even ia thought, charging
the Abbé with designed misrepresentation, but I believe
him to labour under that very disadvantage of traditional
and prejudiced education which he assigns as the main
cause of Ritualist impenitence, and that to a far greater
degree than those whom he criticizes.
For, while he is quite right in alleging that a violent and

mainly unreasoning prejudice against Roman Catholicism,
which Dr. Newman has termed the "Great Protestant
Tradition," has long existed amongst Englishmen, chiefly of
the less cultured classes, he appears not to have observed,



The RÙualists and Roman Catholicism. 9

first, that this tradition is bifurcated, and consists far more

largely in glorifying the characters and defending the acts of
the chief promoters of the Reformation under the Tudors

than in directly censuring or vilifying Roman Catholicism;
and next, that there is a positive historical basis for much
of the distrust and disapproval which takes the latter form;
and notably in respect of those Seminary priests who were
executed under Elizabeth for high treason, and for plotting
the Queen's murder.* The Abbé groups together as amongst
the stock themes of Protestant reproach, and apparently as

equally unjustifiable for use in argument, the Massacre of
St. Bartholomew, the Inquisition, the Dragonnades, and the
False Decretals. He tells us that "the Catholic Church is

not responsible for the faults committed by her children; that
she has. disavowed all the crimes committed in her name;
that she has denounced every abuse of things sacred," etc.
I accept his own repudiation, but does he seriously mean to
tell us that he can appeal to any genuine, authoritative, and
efficacious repudiation of all those things by the rulers of the
Roman Church? I have at this moment before me, as I

write, an exact copy in silver, made by the facsimilist em­
ployed at the British Museum, of the medal struck at Rome,
in honour of the St. Bartholomew. It bears on the obverse

the bust of the then reigning Pope, with the inscription
"
GREGORIVS XIII. PONT. MAX. AN.!.;" on the reverse, three

dead bodies lying amidst scattered weapons on the ground,
one armed soldier with broken sword just falling, two
figures taking to flight, and, most conspicuous of all, a
winged and aureoled angel, with a cross in the left hand
and a drawn sword in the right, advancing swiftly to stab
one of the fugitives in the back, the legend being "VGO­
NOTTORVM STRAGES, 1572." I remember that one of the
* See the letter of Lord Acton (a Roman Catholic peer) in the

Times, Nov. 24, 1874.



'IO The R£tuaNsts and Roman Cathol£cism.

last important public acts of Pius IX. was to canonize
Peter d'Arbues, a man of whose personal character for
holiness absolutely nothing is known, and whose one claim
to notice is that he was slain by the friends of some vic­
tims to his ruthlessness as an inquisitor; and I have never
yet found any formal disclaimer or censure of the Holy
Office for its acts in Spain. As to the Dragonnades, it is
true that Innocent XI. expressed no approval of them, but
neither did he censure them, and St. Simon, whom I have
just consulted, declares that he was on far too bad terms
with Louis XIV., by reason of the dispute as to the regale
and the four Gallican Articles of 1682, to be inclined to
bless what he regarded as a mere political measure to sup­
press a civil difficulty. But when the last of the Dragon­
nades began, at the date of the .Cevenol revolt of 1703,
not only did the French bishops preach a crusade against
the heretics, but Clement XI. granted a plenary indulgence
to all Catholics who should take up arms ·for that purpose,
and the barbarous atrocities committed by those volun­
teers, who styled themselves Enfants de la Croix, were
something startling even in that intolerant era. '*" As to the
False Decretals, the Abbé Martin is so far right that their
factitious character is now admitted in all companies where
it would be useless to maintain the contrary thesis; but I
have before me the Ultramontane"Dictionnaire des Sciences
Ecclésiastiques," by the Abbé J. B. Glaire (Paris, 1868), in
which I find gravely laid down that
" It is quite wrongly that many historians, theologians, and

canonists have asserted that they [the False DecretalsJ had
overthrown all the ancient discipline of the Church. The
thoughts, the principles, the rules, the teachings, and the
counsels they contain are excellent; they are a tissue of passages
borrowed from Scripture, from the Fathers of the Church, from

*" Lavallée, "Histoire des Français," live IlL, sec. ii., chap. v., § xi.



The R£tualùts and Roman Cathoiiciss», I I

Councils, from ecclesiastical writers, from the legislation of the
Emperors, in sum, from special and competent authorities, from
the Council of Elvira, held in 305, to the Council of Paris in the

year 829."

But there is a much graver fact yet to be adduced than this

attempted rehabilitation, which is, that though a large por­
tion of the Roman Canon Law and of the Papal claims has
absolutely no other basis whatever than these False Deere­
tals, nothing has been given up or even modified since or
because of the exposure of the forgery-which must have
been known from the very first at Rome, as these Decretals
were never in the archives there. I apprehend that if
the Abbé Martin knew some landed proprietor who was
in possession of an estate unjustly obtained by his grand­
father by forging a will to the exclusion of the lawful heirs,
he would not rate the grandson's honesty very high if he
were to say,

" Oh yes, I know my grandfather did forge the
will, and got the estate that. way; and it is very candid and
noble of me to say so. But it happened seventy years ago,
and the property has. been in our family ever since, while
the other people are either dead or not stirring in the matter,
so I shall hold on still." -)(-

No doubt, it would be a very partial and misleading view
to take of the Roman Church that these and like matters

* The Abbé Martin has replied that the Pope was misled by false
information as to the character of the St. Bartholomew, and ordered the

rejoicings in mistake; but afterwards disapproved of it. This the Abbé
alleges on the authority of "historians." What historians, and where,
and what proofs do they offer equivalent to my proof from the medal?
Did Gregory XIII. disapprove as clearly and publicly as he approved?
And where does this plea in his defence leave Infallibility, for this
matter is within the sphere of morals? As to the Abbé's reply on the
Decretals, it is made possible only by his omission of the words above
[" a large portion of the Roman Canon Law and of"], which seriously
qualify the sentence, easily controvertible in their absence..



I 2 The Ritualists and Roman CatholiC£sm.

constitute the whole of her system and actual working; but
so long as repudiation of them is left to private unofficial
persons, while authority is at best silent, and more often
approving, the Abbé Martin is not quite logical in requiring
that our acknowledgment of the personal virtues of indi­
vidual Roman Catholics, and our admission of them to
equality in civil rights by the repeal of all disabling penal
laws, shall be taken to' involve confession that we were
entirely in the wrong in our judgment as to the working of
the Roman Church when it can have its own way.
Once more, the Abbé deceives himself as to the scope,

intentions, and desires of the Association for Promoting the
Unity of Christendom. In his eyes. it denotes loss of sym­
pathy with the English Church, and ardent desire for fellow­
ship and absorption in Rome. But just .as he uses the
phrase " Catholicism" as interchangeable and identical with
Romanism (and most curiously alleges that Ritualists object
to call themselves. Catholics), so he here instinctively narrows
the range of Christendom in the same manner. The aim of
the A. P. U. C. is to bring about the reunion of all now
divided Christians, beginning first with the four old histori­
cal Churches, Greek, Armenian, Latin, and English, but
going on to include all Protestant bodies which still hold by
the Creeds. And the proof that the idea of the Association
is not what the Abbé supposes is to be found in the fact
that a Papal Rescript, promulged by Cardinal Patrizi in
1864, at the instance of a leading convert, directed all
Roman Catholics to abandon its membership as altogether
infected with heresy, and necessarily leading to latitudinarian
indifference in religion. The continued existence of the'
A. P. U. C. in the face of such a rebuff as this proves that
the Ritualists are no more inclined to accept the Roman

programme of reunion than Rome was to allow that of the
Association.



The R£tualùts and Roman Catholù:ism. 13

The truth is that the Abbé Martin, with all his pains­
taking diligence, is thirty years in the rear of English Church
history. According to his view, sheer ignorance is the main
deterrent of wholesale conversion, and as this ignorance
disappears gradually before the light of inquiry, and the
Roman Church becomes daily better known, the prospects
of the Holy See will brighten in England. Now, what he
augurs for the future really belongs to the domain of the
past-I will add, of the unreturnable. In the first revulsion
of the discovery how unlike the real Church of Rome is to
the traditional Protestant bugbear, what treasures are en­
shrined in her liturgical books, her hymnody, her devotional
treatises, with the revived taste for mediæval art and litera­
ture, the power of appreciating the saints she has reared
and the missions she has established, everything belonging
to her seemed enveloped ill a golden cloud of glory; and
entranced devotees, in most cases repelled by the scandals
and abuses of the Church of England, which they were close
enough to see accurately, and driven further still by the
bitter hostility of their ecclesiastical superiors, flocked eagerly
into that which seemed to them a very Land, of Promise.
Men famous for learning, for ability, for zeal, for piety,
abandoned the Church of England in crowds, and two great
epochs of secession, in 1844 and 185 I, seemed to foreshadow
the drain of all the true vitality to be found amongst us into
an alien stream." These men threw themselves into their

* An indiscreet list of "Rome's Recruits "-rightly so termed, for
very few ever became veteran soldiers, and most never got out of the

goose-step-lately published, calls for serious modification of this
sentence. The total number of lay converts of both sexes (almost equally
divided) from the educated classes of the whole United Kingdom,
reckoning in Dissenters, between 1826 and 1878 inclusive, was about
1860, and of clergy 342. Only ten per cent. of the clergy and two
per cent. of the laity were persons of any intellectual mark.



14 The R£tualùts and Roman Cathoùcism:

new system with fervid enthusiasm, and have themselves or
by their pupils been for thirty years busied in controverting
publicly and privately that Protestant tradition of which the
Abbé Martin complains, and have at any rate succeeded in
making the Anglo-Roman community a much more pro­
minent, noticeable, and influential member of the English
body politic than it had been since the accession of Elizabeth.
But how has that operated in the interests of proselytism?
Thus, that since the year 1857 scarcely one clergyman of
intellectual distinction or personal influence sufficient to
produce so much as a passing ripple on the surface of Church
life by his secession, has quitted the communion of England
for that of Rome. It is not merely that the seceders have
been numerically much fewer than in the earlier period, but
that they have been personally and collectively insignificant
and unregretted. Clearly, there is a flaw in the Abbé's
reasoning here, and it is, to say the least, more than likely
that the greatly increased knowledge now possessed by
English Churchmen of the real character ofpractical Roman­
ism helps to deter them from seceding, because they know
that the difficulties and abuses they must encounter in their
new communion are certainly as great as those they are
familiar with at home, and probably greater; with this ad­
ditional consideration, to which no light weight attaches,
that they see the visible progress of wholesome reform in
the Church of England, the steady abatement of nuisances,
extinction of abuses, establishment of new or revival of
disused agencies for good; while they perceive that in the
Roman Church, contrariwise, the man who chafes against
scandals may not even hope to see them removed, but must
choose sullen and dumb acquiescence, or else the title of
" bad Catholic," as his reward for remonstrance.
I come now to consider the three reasons which the Abbé

Martin has assigned as mainly deterring Ritualists from



I

� I

The R£tualz'sts and Roman Cathol£czSm. 15

entering the Roman Church. And first he places interested
motives. Now as to this, the reply seems to me very con­
clusive. The Church of England may be compared to a
great scalene triangle, bounded on its longest side by the
other ancient historical Churches of Christendom, with
which its polity and doctrine have the largest amount of
common matter; on the second side by so-called Orthodox
Protestantism; and on the shortest side by Rationalism.
Necessarily, those who occupy the actual frontier line in any
of these three directions are under the temptation to cross
into the adjoining territory, and so to transgress their own
assigned limits. As a fact, the thing does happen, and has
happened, now and for three centuries past. Some leakage
in each direction is to be looked for, so long as human
nature continues what it is. But although there have
been, at the lowest computation, proportionably as many
Evangelical clergymen in our time whose sympathies were
entirely with Dissent, and Broad Churchmen who pre­
ferred Unitarianism and Deism, as High Churchmen
who leant towards Rome, it is only the last-named who
have had to any practical extent the courage of their
opinions, and readiness to make great sacrifices in order
to follow their consciences. I am unable, speaking under
correction, to name ten men in either of the two former
schools who have abandoned their clerical position under
circumstances involving them in poverty, but those of the
third section who went out to begin life over again with
no settled prospects can be counted by the hundred. And
as to be a pronounced Ritualist now is to voluntarily
abandon all hopes of professional advancement; to be
pelted with defamatory epithets by Bishops, newspapers, and
parliamentary orators; to be at the mercy of any three "lewd
fellows of the baser sort" whom a wealthy and unscrupulous
faction may hire as spies, informers, and prosecutors; to be

\



16 The Ritualists and Roman Cathoticism,

the sport of biassed tribunals which (as the Lord Chief
Justice has explained) do not care to observe even the
forms of law, not to say the spirit of equity, when dealing
with him; to give his days and nights for many years to­
gether to unremitting and unrewarded toil, and in a great
proportion of instances to derive either nothing at all or
the barest pittance from his calling,-I see no reason for
believing that the spirit of self-sacrifice is less awake and
vigorous now than it was in 185 I, or that the call of con­
science, were it in the direction of Rome, would be less
courageously obeyed. It would be difficult indeed to find at
this moment ten Ritualists of mark who gain anything by
their connexion with the Established Church, while nothing
would be easier than to count many who not only derive
nought from ecclesiastical funds, but. freely pour their own
private resources into the treasury of the Church. As to
the married clergy, it is a notable proof of the strength of
habitual prejudice that the Abbé Martin does not see how
his reference to this subject causes a really sound and
tenable argument against the Roman Church to present
itself. According to his view, a married English clergyman
who begins to doubt the validity of his position is gravely
in error if he allow his family ties to affect his decision
at all.
He quite fails to take account of this aspect of the

question: that a married clergyman becoming a Roman
Catholic can never hope to be.employed in ecclesiastical
work again. He may be, as one whom I knew well was,
an unusually profound and brilliant preacher j he may be a
wise and skilful director of consciences j he may be an

indefatigable visitor of the sick and aged; he may be heart
and soul, in every fibre of his body, in every cell of his
brain, an ecclesiastic, a minister of God, and yearning to
spend and be spent in His service. But Rome can and



The Rz"tualists and Roman CatholiczSm. 17

will give him nothing to do (though she has acknowledged
the permissibility of a married clergy in the Uniat Churches) ;
she condemns him perforce to lay communion; to the
continuous breach of pledges made solemnly to God, and
not to this or that particular human society; to be a house­
decorator, as in one instance known to me; a low-comedy
reciter and author, as in another; a mere loafer about
billiard-rooms and the like, as a third I could name, and so
forth. Is not a broad fact in the direction of deterioration
Ìike this, so abject a failure in utilizing material far superior
to the average hedge-priest, and lifted morally much above the
celibate clergy of Spanish and Portuguese America, not to
probe sores nearer home, entirely against the Abbé Martin's
reasoning? What is the special attraction in being told,
"Because you have entered into a state of life which the
Church accounts as holy, and done so by means of a
Christian sacrament, you shall not be permitted to serve
God any longer, but must be expelled from His ministry
(though the Prince of the Apostles, St. Peter himself, was
chosen to his office as a married man), while persons who are
more than suspected of immorality, but who have not
formed any hallowed domestic ties, may be found by scores
and hundreds amongst our clergy?" No doubt it looks
very specious to urge secession upon married clergymen on
the plea that the very completeness of the sacrifice it in­
volves points it out as the higher way, and therefore to be
followed; but I have much reason to believe that in not a
few instances the motive which has prompted the secession
of such men has been the wish to be permanently free from
the moral and religious checks cf the clerical profession,
and to be at liberty to adopt uncensured the habits of a fast
layman; while as regards the destruction of worldly pros­
pects, considered as a test of sincerity and as a proof of
being in the right way, the Abbé must see that a Roman

2



I 8 The R£tualists and Roman Cathaàasm,

Catholic clergyman who should think it right to get married,
as a forcible protest against the unhealthy working of the
law of celibacy, would ruin himself just as effectually, and,
by parity of reasoning, would be bound in conscience to do
so. It is a mere matter of detail to add that the induction
as to the Eves who hold back our ecclesiastical Adams
from the right path is imperfect, for several Ritualist leaders
are unmarried men; others have private incomes, and spend
far more on the Church than they have ever received from
its funds, and in some instances Eve has plucked the
forbidden fruit alone, and has gone over to the Roman
Church, leaving Adam behind unseduced, but with the
difficulties of his position indefinitely aggravated.
Let us come now to the motives of sentiment or feeling,

next alleged as deterrents. These are, the Abbé tells us,
vanity, self-love, affection. Vanity prevents a man from
resigning a leading position, and forfeiting the regard of a
large congregation which he has drawn together; self-love
represents as a disgrace the painful avowal of having been
in error for" thirty, forty, fifty years," and of having helped
to mislead others during that time, while to follow con­
science and reason rather than passion and interest, through
pain and humiliation, to the great and noble goal of con­
version, is a difficult thing, though an evidence of upright­
ness and force of character; and' lastly, the close ties of
personal friendship, nowhere so strong as in England, and
regard for a Church which "represents all that is beautiful,
noble, grand,. which has produced so many great writers, has
formed so many noble characters, is so blended with the
whole national life of the people, that it has become, as it
were, the living embodiment of every high and holy thought,
memory, purpose, life," prevent a man from abandoning
that which has "blessed his cradle, moulded his young life,
appealed in after-years to his generosity and to his heart, to



The R£tual£sts and Roman Catholicisrn. 19

aid in ameliorating and reforming society, which is, in short,
his mother and bosom friend." All this tempts them, we
are told, to deceive themselves, to resist conscience, to avoid
sacrifices, and to endeavour to think it their duty to stay
where they are, continuing to reform a communion on which,
in these latter days, Providence has seemed to' pour down
blessings. Accordingly, they invent theories of the "primi­
tive and undivided Church," of "branches of the Church,"
of the origin of Christianity, and of the character of the
Reformation in England, and so forth, spending time, money,
effort, learning, in propping up systems which have no foun­
dation in fact, and are perpetually contradicted by history.
Well, as regards the two former reasons here assigned, the

same reply is obvious as that made to the earlier count of
the indictment, as to interested motives. Men did go out
thirty years ago under just the circumstances detailed, did
forsake important spheres of labour and attached congre­
gations, did confess' themselves to have been blind leaders
of the blind, did pass through the disgrace and humiliation
of conversion. What has there been in the thirty years since
to make the position of advanced High Churchmen in the
clerical ranks personally easier than it was then, so as to
lull them into the morbid repose of a drugged eonscience ?
Has the offence of the cross ceased for them? does their

religion walk now in silver slippers, and no longer barefoot
along a flinty road? The answer is plain, that they are still
the one school which is, yet reviled and baited on all sides,
and not less now, after its loyalty and its wisdom have been
proved by forty years of brilliant and unexampled Church
revival, due absolutely and indivisibly to its unaided toil,
than when it first broke the slumbers of an episcopate reared
in Hanoverian traditions, and desiring nothing less than to
be forced J:o confront new problems, and essay paths untried
for ten generations.



20 The Ritualists and Roman Catholicism.

Were all this changed, were its unparalleled services to
the Church of England (which, to use the phrase of the
Pall Mall Gazette, it has made "interesting") frankly
recognized, and were simple toleration granted to its mem­
bers, not to say gratitude, rewards, dignities, showered upon
them, it would be plausible, even if it were unjust, to
suggest that vanity and self-interest keep them where they
are. But denounced by one of their ecclesiastical rulers as
" conspirators," by another as guilty of " anomia," by a third
as "traitors," who are to be "squeezed �ut,"-the accusers
in all three cases being men who have, to say the least, not
been zealous champions of the English Church, whether
doctrine, discipline, or morals, be taken into account;­
pointedly excluded from even the minor distinctions and
prizes of the Church, and harassed by incessant worrying,
from the petty baiting of ill-conditioned parishioners to the
unconstitutional and lawless ukases of the revived Star

Chamber, their lines have not fallen in such pleasant places
as to tempt them to remain where they are for an·y cause
save that of duty. They have practically far more to bear
than their predecessors who seceded in despair of reform in
1844 and 185 I; and I submit that the Abbé Martin is not
justified by facts in assuming that their consciences are
duller and their self-sacrifice less than was the case with
members of the same school thirty years ago.
There is, besides, another rejoinder which rebuts the

argument. By speaking of men who have been in the
advanced High Church ranks for" thirty, forty, fifty years,"
the Abbé has barred' himself from considering the case of
the younger members of the Ritualist school, those who
have been born into a comparatively late stage of the move­
ment, and know nothing personally of its earlier struggles,
vicissitudes, and conquests. He is dealing with men of
fifty, sixty, and seventy years of age. Now, th(simple fact



The Rituaùsts and Roman Catholicism. 2 I

is that while men of the "mere Anglican" type have, in a
great multitude of cases, remained all these several terms of
years exactly at their starting-point of 1828, 1838, 1848, and
have never progressed an inch, even in power of compre­
hending the religious changes of the times; contrariwise,
every Ritualist clergyman over fifty years of age-I might
almost say everyone over forty-has had to confess himself
to have been in error, to acknowledge that he has begun
only at a comparatively late period to realize the logical
necessities of his doctrinal position, to apologize to his
people and to the Church at large for having been so long
halting between two opinions, and to expose himself to
ridicule, misrepresentation, and positive suffering in de­
fence of these his finally matured convictions. And l
may cite, in illustration, names made familiar by recent
events-Mr. Bennett, Mr. Rodwell, Mr. Pelham Dale, Mr.
Ben Oliel, and last, but very far from least, Archdeacon
Denison, whose " Notes of My Life" I recommend to the
Abbé Martin's attentive perusal.
I do not propose to traverse the main outlines of the

third clause in this count of the Abbé's indictment, that
which deals with the clinging affection felt by Englishmen for
their national Church. But I would ask him, if it be really
an institution such as he has described it in the paragraphs
I 'have honestly summarized without inserting a syllable of
my own, does it not look very much as if God Almighty
were in the plot against the Roman mission in England? Is
there any other religious communion in the world, outside
the Latin pale, to which the Abbé Martin thinks such
language of unwilling eulogy fairly applicable, any other so
startlingly like a real Church as to deceive the very elect?
Nay, could he truly say so much for the Latin Church itself
at this· moment in Portugal, in Austria, in Bavaria, Ìn'
Mexico, in Brazil? Surely, on his own showing, even if the



:! 2 The Ritualists and Roman Cathoùcism,

Ritualists be in error when yielding to the glamour of such
an unique society, their mistake is a noble and pardonable
one, and not justly to be qualified. with the injurious motives
he has ascribed to them. Those of us who have least

sympathy with the Lacedæmonian policy can yet admire
that old saying of the Laconian mother to her son going to
battle., S7raprav �ÀaXfs, ravrav KdO"fLEt. '*
It is true that in his very next paragraphs the Abbé Martin

assails the Church of England forcibly, and holds the reverse
of the medal up to public view. He complains, as indeed
Fr. Gallwey does also, of Ritualism as a more "subtle and
dangerous" form of the Anglican tradition (by which I
understand him to mean that it is a more effectual barrier

against secession, which is perfectly true in fact), and speaks
of the seductiveness of its picture of the Church as originally
a federation of patriarchates, and of Catholicity as the basis
of all true doctrine; but, he asks, what are these save
specious and delusive semblances and mirages, which, when
closely examined, prove contrary to the Gospel, and to the
practice of primitive ages, and even to reason and good
sense? And then, in a sentence I do not pretend to under­
stand, he adds, this theory "has produced the Eastern
Churches, almost all of them dead or dying for the last
many centuries; it has produced the Church of England,
which is to-day that which it has been often described in
language not more severe than just, as 'a monstrous
anomaly,' a 'monstrous failure,' a 'stupendous self-contra­
diction,' a ' practical failure,' a ' scene of utter disorder,' etc."
I would fain say a few words on this paragraph, before I

proceed to cite the yet more trenchant phrases in which the
indictment shifts from the Ritualists to the Church of Eng­
land as a whole. As regards the theory that the Christian
Church was organized at an early time in the form of a

*'
"Sparta is thy lot, adorn her."



The Rz"tuaHsts and Roman Catholicism. 23

federation of patriarchates, I fail to see how it can be con­
trary to the Gospel, for the obvious reason that all four
Gospels end their narrative at a date anterior to the formal
organization of the Christian Church, as something apart
from and independent of Judaism, while even the Acts and
Epistles scarcely carry us down to the first beginnings of a
diocesan episcopate, discoverable in the Pastoral Epistles,
But the Abbé Martin knows as well as I do that the idea he

dismisses so airily was not merely present to the minds of
those eminent divines of early Christendom who defined the
Creed and shaped the polity of the Church, but that it is
actually embodied with singular precision of statement in
the sixth Canon of the CEcumenical Council of Nicæa; the
second and third Canons of the CEcumenical Council of

Constantinople; implicitly, though not verbally, in the eighth
Canon of the Œcumenical Council of Ephesus; and in the

twenty-eighth Canon of the CEcumenical Council of Chal­
cedon; those four chief synods of ancient Christendom of
which St. Gregory the Great, in language nowand for many
centuries embodied in the Roman Canon Law, says: "As
the four books of the Holy Gospel, so I acknowledge that I
receive and venerate the Four Councils: to wit, the
Nicene, . . . the Constantinopolitan, . . . further, the first
of Ephesus, . . . and also Chalcedon. . . . I embrace
them with entire devotion, I maintain them with the fullest

approval, because upon these, as on a squared stone, the

building of the Holy Faith arises, and in them consists the
rule for each man's life and conduct" (Lib. I. Regest. Epist.
xxiv. cited in Corpus Juris Canonici, Decret. I. xv. 2).
And each Pope at his coronation is obliged to swear that he
will keep the teaching of these four Councils, "usque ad
unun: apicem immutilata servari" '*' (Decret. I. xvi. 8). Thus
we have the reiterated and unanimous consent and tradition

* "To be kept intact, even to a single tittle."



24 The Rz"tualists and Roman Catholicism.

of the whole Catholic Church against the Papal monarchy
of to-day. As to Catholicity of doctrine, rather than sub­
mission to the Roman Pontiff, being the basis of Christian
solidarity in the Church, I now adduce another authority,
by which the Abbé Martin is equally bound. The Fathers
of the Council of Trent, in their Decree on the Symbol of
Faith, enacted in the third session, February 4th, 1546, speak
thus: "Wherefore it [the Council] has decided to have
set forth, in the very same words as those wherein it is read
'in all churches, the Symbol of Faith which the Holy Roman
.Church uses, as that first principle wherein all who profess
the Christian faith necessarily agree, and the firm and only
foundation against which the gates ofhellshall never pre7)ail,
which is-not St. Peter as the Rock, and the Pope as his
heir, but-of this sort: ' I believe in one God the Father
Almighty,' etc.,"-the Nicene Creed being quoted in full.
What he means by the Anglican theory (which to his

mind must implya post-Reformation date) having produced
the Eastern Churches, which are older than Rome itself, I
confess I do .not understand. Perhaps what he does mean
is, that if these Churches, which in early Christian days
were far more populous, important, and full of intellectual
life, than the depopulated provinces which then composed
the small Roman patriarchate, had submitted to the Roman
claims, yielded up their primeval independence, and re­
cognized the Pope, not the Creed, as the centre and bond
of Christian union, the course of history would have been
signally altered, and Islam would not have displaced Chris­
tianity in so many Oriental regions. If this be what the
Abbé intends, I have only to say that it belongs to the
sphere of unsupported conjecture, and not to that of ascer­
tained fact, capable of serving as material for solid argument.
His charge against the English Church collectively, is

that it works badly, and never so badly as when it puts forth a



The Ritualists and Roman Catholicism. 25

little fresh life and vigour; that the bishops for three hundred
years past have never proved equal to their duty, notably just
now, and for the last fifty years-a proposition I, for one, do
not dream of disputing; that there has never been quietness,
peace, and order in the Church of England save when tied
hand and foot by the civil power, and when the Sovereign
has gagged bishops and Convocation, and brought about
thereby an interval of order and peace, which is also that of
nothingness; that every attempt to infuse new life has pro­
duced schisms and convulsions which have nearly destroyed
the Church; that even now Ritualism, and Ritualism alone, is
compromising the very existenceof the Establishment; while
the universal condemnation of the efforts of Ritualists in the
direction of Catholicism, despite the acknowledged zeal, self­
denial, and devotedness which mark them, show that they
are working against the very principles of Anglicanism itself.
I must be permitted to offer my compliments to the Abbé

for the skill and adroitness with which these cuts and thrusts
are made. It is a real intellectual pleasure to contrast his
delicate rapier-play with the clumsy bludgeon-flourishing of
Mr. Edward Jenkins, for example. But he is wasting his
science of fence by assailing the wrong persons. To show
the purely insular Churchman, the mere Anglican, that there
are grave faults, startling anomalies, and notorious abuses of
theory and practice in a communion which he has taught
himself to regard as an improved edition of Apostolic
Christianity, is effective enough; but the whole raison d'ét��e
of the Ritualist movement-taking it in the widest sense as
denoting the energizing vanguard of the entire Catholic
Revival.in each stage of its forty years' onward progress-is
the reform of abuses and the development of efficiency in
the Church of England. I doubt .if the Abbé Martin can
tell us anything in this direction which Ritualists do not
know already; but if he can unearth any scandal, or disclose



�6 The Ritualists and Roman Catholicism.

any weak point which has escaped their detection, I can
assure him that they will thank him for his help, and simply
remark, "Here is another piece of work cut out for us."
Before touching on the Abbé's broader charges against

Anglicanism, it is desirable to correct two errors of fact into
which he has pardonably fallen. In the first place, it is not
only incorrect to say that Ritualism is the single cause of
the present peril of the Establishment, but it is not even
indirectly one of the causes. The Abbé is so far right in
making the statement that it has been made before, and
that very loudly, by two classes of persons. In the first
place, the extreme Puritan school has incessantly repeated
it to the Bishops, whom it believes to be collectively much
more concerned for the Establishment than for the Church,
in order that they may be induced to employ severer
measures of repression against the Ritualists, in the hope of
thereby maintaining their own civil privileges; and in the
next place, the Bishops have in many instances repeated it
in their turn, with the hope of inducing the moderate High
Church school: which is conservative above all things, to
join them in the raid upon Ritualists, regarded as the
bringers-in of revolutionary change. But if he will look
into the facts for himself, he will notice that the agitation for
Disestablishment is due to causes which are operating in
every country where there is an Established Church; that
the main influence at work here and now is Nonconformist
hostility to the very notion of any State Church, quickened
by the sense of social inferiority which Dissenters feel and
resent very keenly; that the particular shape the agitation is
taking at present has nothing whatever to do with Ritual­
ism, but is a struggle of Nonconformists for superior burial
rights over the clergy in the churchyards of the Establish­
ment-superior, not merely equal, in these salient respects:
free choice of the bodies to be interred, free choice of the



The Ritualists and Roman LàthoNcisn-z. 27

person to officiate, free choice of the service to be used,
whereas the Church is tied down strictly by law in all
three-with avowed intention to claim similarly superior
rights in the churches, declared to be national property,
when the churchyards have been conquered; and, finally,
that the three branches of the Anglican communion in
which disestablishment has already been effected, Ireland,
Canada, and the West Indies, are all markedly non-ritual­

istic, while all things point to the Presbyterian Establishment
in Scotland as the next subject for operation. Doubtless it

is true enough that a small section of the Ritualists has been

so aggrieved by the recent lawless encroachments of the
civil power on the spiritual domain, that it is now lending
its aid to the forces at work to separate Church and State,
but it has come up as a late ally. In the next place, the

Abbé, when alleging that Ritualists are working against
Anglicanism itself, and cannot justify their position, does
but echo, .as he truly says, a whole chorus of English ob­

jectors, from the Bishops downwards, who assert the very
same thing; and it is not surprising that he should use
such a weapon when put into his hand. I might traverse
the statement generally by simply replying that the cardinal

principle of Anglicanism, as laid down in formulary after

formulary, in Prayer Book, Articles, Canons, Acts of
Parlia­

ment, and so forth, whether sincerely or not, is appeal to
the early Church of the first five centuries as the standard
of doctrine and practice, and that Ritualists are trying to
make this appeal a fact and not a theory. But I will take

up broader ground, and put the matter to a practical issue.
The Abbé will admit, as a logician, that enfeeblement or
failure must be the unvarying result of any course of action
which conflicts with the requirements and nature of the

body acted on. Let an agriculturist use a dry and thirsty
soil for crops which need abundant moisture, such as rice ;



28 The Rùuaùsts and Roman Catho/icism,

let him feed his graminivorous animals on meat; let him
sow his corn when the ground is bound hard as iron with
keen frost, and what will come of it? Now Ritualism, in
that extended sense of which I have previously spoken,
has been at work for more than forty years in the Church of
England, and has grown from very small beginnings to be
the most active and energizing of its factors. If it have
been an alien and hostile element, the results of its in­
troduction must needs be marked enfeeblement and decay
of the whole body it has affected. But the precise contrary
is the most patent of facts. It is not Ritualists alone who
say so, but their most embittered and persistent enemies
and detractors. In the opening sentences of the joint
Allocution against the Ritualists put forth by all the English
archbishops and bishops, save those of Durham and Sarum,
on March rst, 1875, they say: "We acknowledge, humbly
and thankfully, the mercies vouchsafed by Almighty God
to the Church of England. By His blessing on the labours
of the clergy and laity, our Church has of late been enabled
in a marvellous manner to promote His glory and to ad­
vance His kingdom, both at home and abroad. If we
judge by external signs,-the churches built, restored, and
endowed during the last forty years�· the new parishes
formed in that time, especially in our great towns and
cities; the vast sums of money voluntarily contributed for
the promotion of religious education ; the extension of the
Church in the colonies and in foreign countries, including
the foundation of more than fifty new sees; the great
increase in the number of persons of all classes who by
prayers and labour assist in the work of converting souls to
Christ,-all bear witness to the zeal and earnestness of the
clergy and laity 'of the English Church." And then, more
suo, they turn round in the very next paragraph to revile
and blacken the only people who have brought this state of



The Rùuaùsts and Roman Catholicism. 29'

things about. Next, there has been a representative gather­
ing of the Low Church clergy held yearly for the last half­
century, and known as the Islington Conference. In several
recent meetings of that assembly, one or other of the
speakers has adverted to the marvellous change for the
better which has come over the whole Church of England
as a corporate institution, and has incidentally brought in
the date of the revival as about forty years in operation.
Now, the only new factor which was introduced at that
period was the Oxford movement of 1833, which has been
influencing the country ever since. The Broad Church
school had its innings from the death of Queen Anne till
the French Revolution, and as nearly as possible killed the
Church of England in its religious aspect, besides making it
a very sink of jobs and abuses. The Evangelical school,
taking its rise after Wesley and Whitefield had made its work
easy, did a great deal for the revival of personal religion,
yet not only essayed no corporate reforms whatever within
the Church, but actually created modern Dissent, which it
fostered, till, from one-seventh at most of th� population, as
it was at the close of the last century, it is now about three­

eighths, and the most powerful rival and thwarter of the
Church. And the large central mass then, as now, and as
always, was mainly inert, and quite incapable of originating
movement. Therefore it follows that the present conspicuous
revival is due exclusively to the forlorn hope of the High
Church school; and the inference from this fact must be
drawn in one of two ways. Either Ritualism is the only
true and genuine Anglicanism, under which alone the Church
of England can really thrive and prosper; or it is so much
better, tested by its results, than Anglicanism, that it ought,
on the mere ground of practical expediency, to be substituted
for it. The Ritualists themselves take the former view, and
the objection to the latter is that already stated, that an



30 The Ritualzsts and ROJtzan Cathol£czsm.

element out of harmony with the body into which it IS m­
troduced cannot tend to the strength or healthy develop­
ment of that body.
Now to return to the Abbes charges against the Church

of England generally, as a monstrous anomaly and failure,
which never knows order and quiet save in drowsy trance,
which buys life at the price of schism and disorder. I would
ask the reader, in the first place, to compare this language
with that which I have cited above, as to the fascination
exerted by the English Church upon its' sincere adherents,
and to see how far the two are capable of being reconciled
when placed side by side. Nobody cared about the Church
of England, save as a source of income, when it was in
Broad Church hands a hundred years ago; few people cared
about it in the earlier part of this' century, and Cobbett's

"Legacy to Parsons" wi1l help to tell why; but the at­
tractiveness ahout it now is that it does work, and that with
marked vigour, under exceptional disabilities imposed from
without; while its anomalies, like those of the English Con­
stitution itself, are due to an intricate series of counter­

checks, preventing more evil and friction than they cause,
but which are, I well know, peculiarly unintelligible and
exasperating to the French mind, which attaches far more
value to symmetry of construction than to efficiency of

working, just as in French literature finish of style is set
incomparably above intrinsic weight of matter. But I desire
to point out that the circumstance to which the Abbé draws
particular attention as the one fatal blot peculiar to the
Church of England, that it never is quiet and orderly with­
out being half-dead, and that whenever it is alive and
vigorous, it is also full of strife and disturbance, holds good
of the Church Universal all through ecclesiastical history,
from the earliest times down to our own day. The three
great eras of Church life and' of theological literature-the



The Rdualists and Roman Cathoiicism, 3 I

fourth, the period which bridges the twelfth and thirteenth,
and the sixteenth centuries-are all times of conflict. The
golden age of the later French Church was when Louis XIV.,
aided by Bossuet and De Marca, was struggling to wrest
the rigate from the Pope, was dealing with bishoprics
and the like in a far more high-handed fashion than Queen
Elizabeth ever ventured to do, and when the Jansenist con­
troversy was occupying all the keenest intellects in his
kingdom; while the first half of the third century, the tenth,
and the eighteenth, the three chief eras of ecclesiastical
peace, are the least active and honourable in the annals
of Christendom. The Abbé has come upon a general law,
and has thought to restrict its incidence to one solitary
example.
Next in order of the charge comes the statement of the

intellectual reasons which the Abbé regards as deterrents.
He is far less clear and precise on this head than on the
two former, and the sum of what he has got to say is that
Ritualists do not look at [Roman] Catholicism as a whole,
so as to get a full view of its harmonious unity and other
transcendent merits, but take it piecemeal, and so do not
see the true connexion of its parts; that they do not read
history with the predetermination to disbelieve everything
alleged against Rome, to make the fullest allowances for
incontestable objections, as due to individual faults, not to
corporate blamewo

. 1;�
��,-that is, that they wrongly fail

to do in the case of Rome what he forbids them to do in
the case of England,-and to acknowledge as the inevitable
conclusion that not only does the Roman Church work well,
but that it is the only communion which does work well.
To my apprehension, this passage, which I have abridged,

but not consciously coloured, is not in the least a statement
of the intellectual reasons which impede secession; it is a
complaint that Ritualists do not enter on the inquiry .by



32 The Ritualùts and Roman Catholidsm.

" sacrificing their intellect," and begging the question' they
are supposed to be proving; it is, in short, an averment
that they have no business to have any intellectual reasons
at all against conversion. I should be glad to have the
process of survey which the Abbé suggests somewhat more
clearly indicated, as also the observatory from which the
bird's-eye view he recommends can be obtained, for I can­
not discover the least clue to either in his remarks. As to
the main issue raised here, I will touch on it by-and-by.
He does, however, adduce in a subsequent division of

his argument a real intellectual difficulty, which he has
classified separately, under the head of moral and discipli­
nary questions: namely, the Roman doctrine of Authority.
And here, while putting his finger with prompt accuracy on
the weakest point of Anglicanism, its laxity of discipline, he
is yet conscious that he, as a Frenchman, in magnifying
authority as the root-principle of all religion, views the
matter from a standpoint· widely different from that of
Englishmen, accustomed to constitutional liberty, a plant
which has never thriven in France, and of which France
has never even had a near view, save under the huckstering,
priggish, and Philistine rule of Louis Philippe. The truth
is, not only that every Frenchman regards government as an
end and good in itself, and the citizen first and chiefly as a
governable entity; but that modern Roman theology, forsak­
ing even mediæval teaching, has come round to the Lutheran
heresy of the total and unmixed depravity of human nature,
and goes on the principle that the smallest relaxation of re­
straint on the intellect straightway brings in unbelief, and
the slightest liberty of the will means vice; so that the only
way to keep the Church and Society from chaos and dissolu­
tion is to tie everyone up tight, except a very few rulers and
a few more spies, and to let both rulers and spies feel that
they are watched and punishable in their turn. What this



The Rùualists and Roman CatholiczSm. 33

comes to in Roman Catholic school discipline the Hon. and
Rev. William Petre has been telling the English public
lately; what it comes to in the ecclesiastical and political
spheres I will cite from the pregnant words of Pomponio
Leto, which are believed to convey the sentiments of the
late Cardinal Nobili-Vitelleschi, since an Italian prelate can­
not be charged with viewing the question through the spec­
tacles of an impenitent English Liberal like myself
Pomponio Leto, asking why it is that Catholic societies

exclusively in modern times are agitated by the spirit of
violent, brutal, and envious revolution, from which Germany,
England, Switzerland, and America are free, declares that the
only possible answer is the exaggeration of the principle of Au...
thority, forcibly inculcated by the Latin Church ever since the
Reformation, and still more since the French Revolution.

"This thirst for authority, called forth in the first instance by
the insubordination of the age, and kept up with the view of
maintaining order and unity in the Church, too often results in
destroying the first and impairing the second. . .. Moreover, the
excessive use ofauthority in relation to the masses has the result
of weakening and sometimes of suppressing the working or
individual consciences, by absorbing their sense of personal re...
sponsibility in the sole conscience of Church authority, and
so the perception of good and evil ceases to be personal and
spontaneous. . . . It often happens that the Catholic, unless
gifted with unusual superiority of mind, has no knowledge oj'
good and evil other than that which he derives from the external
authority, which in many cases is represented by any chance
individual. . . . The consequence of such an excessive sub­
mission to authority is that the human conscience, being often
ill-guided, is likely to go astray; at any rate, having never
learnt to judge for itself, it loses the capacity for so doing,
"grows gradually weaker, and at last becomes impotent. . . .
The recoil from such a despotism in the present day frequently
throws the pupils of the Jesuits into revolutionary excesses.

3



34 The Ritualists and Roman Catholicism.

Hence arise the subtleties, the mental compromises, and.
the disingenuousness, too frequently met with amongst our
people. . . . All countries governed by the Ultra- Catholic
régime are without any appreciation of the real nature of
authority, which is alternately adored with servility and sub­
jected to outrage."*

The Abbé complains because English journals still quote
the words of Cardinal De Bonnechose in the Senate, though
uttered more than a dozen years ago,

" My clergy is a regi­
ment; when I say, March, it marches." Surely, the point
is not how long ago they were uttered, but their truth;
whether they did not compress into epigram the whole policy
of the French episcopate, and whether that policy has not
remained unaltered since, to the serious injury of the French
Church. And in a clever but thoroughly unsubstantial
defence of that Church as it now is, he has made certain
statements which I am going to dispute. He says first,
that if the Church were left free by the State to act, the
ecclesiastical despotism now existing would be relaxed, and
the old provisions of the Canon Law touching collation to
benefices and the irremovability of the clergy would be re­
stored. I reply (I) that the existing state of affairs is due
to the plot of Pius VII. with Napoleon I. against the liber­
ties of the Gallican Church, and therefore has the highest
possible Roman Catholic sanction; (2) that the same policy
is being carried out more and more in the Anglo-Roman
body, where the State does not meddle at all; (3) that the
Bishops in Belgium habitually extort bonds of resignation
from the beneficed clergy; t (4) that the Vatican decrees,
by annulling episcopal independence, and giving the Pope
* Otto Mesi a Roma: Febbrajo.
+ The Abbé Martin says that if this be true at all of Belgium, it is

only an isolated fact, and not the usual practice. He offers no disproof,
and I therefore simply record his protest.



The Ritualists and Roman Catholicism. 35

direct and immediate jurisdiction in every diocese, have
extended the very same principle much more widely, and
in a higher sphere, so that it is now an integral part of the
whole Roman system.
When he urges that the unpopularity of the Church in

France, as contrasted with the popularity of tbe Church in
England, is due to the firmer attitude of the former in never
paltering with the right, or sacrificing its independence, I
simply ask him if he remember-he cannot forget-how
and why it was that the French clergy, when Louis Napoleon
was making his way to imperial power through treason and
massacre, and when their decision might have turned the
wavering scale, blessed the Man of December, and won for
themselves the undying hatred of his victims and their
friends? Was it not a bargain as to the occupation of
Rome, entered into with certain bishops, who then put the
screw on their subordinates? And it is still believed that
the disastrous war of 187o was prompted by clerical intrigue
far more than by dynastic motives; so that the clergy are

•

even now much more unpopula. than the Empire.
And as to the peasant level of the French clergy, and the

excuse that the absence of gentlemen from their body is
merely in consequence of the similar disappearance of gen­
tlemen from democratized civil society, I really must say
that the Abbé is playing with us, and relying on our unfa­
miliarity with the France of to-day. It was a remark of a
duke elected as a deputy to the Assembly not long ago that
he never met so many brother-dukes in his life as he did

amongst his colleagues; and whatever may be the effect of
the abolition of privileges, and of the rise of a shoddy aristo­
cracy, with sham names and forged titles, now swarming in
every department of France, nevertheless the fact is that
the noblesse are still a very powerful factor, numerically and
influentially, in French rural society, and not without their



36 The Rtiualists and Roman
Catholicism.

weight in all save the Radical manufacturing
centres. There

are sixty thousand (?) French priests out of a
total of a

hundred and fifty thousand ecclesiastics j and on any
reason­

able estimate of the proportion of gentlefolks in the nation,

there ought to be at least three or four
thousand priests

drawn from the higher social grades. As a fact, it
would

be difficult to find ten, outside the Jesuit body. Nay, the

Abbé Bougaud's statistics now tell us that so
far from the

nobility alone being absent from the French
clerical ranks,

there is scarcely a fraction of the priesthood
drawn from

the middle class, whether professional or commercial,
and

that even the supply of peasants has fallen off to
such

an extent that every diocese in France save
Paris is under­

manned; that three thousand benefices
are vacant and

cannot be filled, and that three thousand parishes
besides

have neither priests nor church. It is to be observed
that

the case is not in the least that the gradual democrati­

zation of French society, as the Abbé puts it, preventing

hereditary wealth, pulls down great families,
but that their

now poor scions may still be
found amongst the clergy. It

is that none butpeasants, whose forefathers have
been peasants

before them, and some of the very lowest of
the trading class,

can be had at all; none even from the lower
middle class.

And as to the poverty of the clergy causing this,
what that

proves is that the laity of one of the
richest countries in the

world do not love their clergy enough to supplement, with

voluntary offerings, the meagre stipends
of the State.* Two

more remarks may fitly end this negative portion of my

reply: first, that I must offer the
correction that English

Ritualists are not so enamoured of the practical working of

Infallibility in the Roman Church
as to desire its intro-

* The average income of the
Free Kirk minister in poor Scotland,

raised entirely by voluntary offerings, is at least eight
times that of the

average curé in wealthy France.



The Ritualists and Roman Catholicism. 37

duction here, any more than English Liberals covet the
institutions of Spanish-American republics in exchange for
their own monarchical form of government; and next, that

the Abbé has laid undue stress on the circumstance that

Dr. Pusey has translated and adapted a work on confession

by Mgr. Gaume. The truth is that Ritualists, in consider­

ing how they may best strengthen and adom the Church
of England, act in the spirit of the old Peruvians, who held
that gold, wherever or with whomsoever found, belonged to
the Sun-God and the Inca. The modern Ritualist is entirely
free from the strait-laced prejudices of his Anglican brother,
and is perfectly ready to take a hint or adopt a useful
addition from any quarter whatsoever, and does not care a
straw whether a Roman cardinal or a Baptist minister be its
original parent; whether it be a Jesuit invention, like the
Ignatian retreat, or a Nonconformist one, like the mothers'
meeting; no more thinking himself bound to copy every­
thing where he has found something, than his countrymen
feel any obligation to import Chinese manners into England
along with their tea.
It will not be inexpedient, for the sake of narrowing the

issue, to preface the positive division of this reply by stating
what the reasons are why some few Ritualists, clerical and

lay, do become Roman Catholics, before explaining the
reasons why the main body do not. I have had unusual
facilities for coming to distinct conclusions on this subject,
having had much conversation with persons who have after­
wards seceded, besides having read most of the manifestoes
which the seceders have in a great number of cases pub­
lished, either as their own justification, or in the hope that
the arguments which prevailed with themselves may equally
influence others. And first, I always find that the waverer
who is sure to go to Rome is he, and especially she, who knows
almost nothing of the Church of England, and absolutely



38 The R£tualists and Roman Catholic£sm.

nothing of the Church of Rome; while I have never yet, in
the whole course of my experience, known one person who
has been brought over to the Church of Rome as the result
of such a dispassionate, historical, and theological course of
study of its claims and system as the Abbé Martin recom­
mends to the Ritualists. I am not asserting the thing to
be impossible in itself. That would be begging the whole
question at issue. I am merely stating the fact for what it
is worth, and do not forget that Cardinal Manning, who is
probably more familiar than any man living with the art of
proselytism, has denounced the "appeal to history" in
questions of religion as "heresy and treason "-a tolerably
sufficient proof as to the sort of evidence he thinks disco­
verable by that process. And by " history" here is meant
Church history, Church documents, liturgies, creeds, canons,
and the like. It is not an appeal to something external,
against the Church, but an appeal to the Church herself,
as to whether she really does teach what is tendered now
as her true doctrine. So, when we find that the Church of
past days condemned some Popes as heretics, and deposed
others as heretics and traitors;" and that this action was
acquiesced in as right and valid, the Church herself tells us
that Papal Infallibility is a modern fraud, and not her doc­
trine. We are submitting to the whole Catholic Church
in recognizing these facts, just as we are submitting to
General Councils in rejecting Cardinal Manning's Nestorian
heresy on the cultus of the Sacred Heart-a devotion, by­
the-by, borrowed by Fr. la Condamine from the Independent
preacher, Thomas Goodwin, chaplain to Oliver Cromwell !
I should classify nearly all the converts with whom I have

had any acquaintance under three heads: (I) those who
have seceded from causes of temperament; (2) those who
* E.g., John XII., Benedict IX., Gregory VI., Gregory XII., and

John XXIII.



The Ritualists and Roman Catholicism. 39

have done so from sentimental motives; and (3) those who
have gone on what I may call practical grounds.
By the first class I mean persons like the late F. W. Faber,

to whom, from their natural disposition, the Roman system
is powerfully attractive; who make no pretence at all of
inquiry into its merits, but accept it eagerly because they
like it; just as they might like oysters or pastry, without
caring to know anything about the nutritive value of those
articles of food. So, too, there are minds whose bias is just
in the opposite direction, which are innately Evangelical or
Rationalist in tone, and are never easy till they find their con­
genial atmosphere: in which alone they can breathe with com­
fort to themselves. But there is no evidential value in cases

of this sort, and they form but a small percentage of the.
whole.

_,
I may illustrate the next class by a story lance found in

··some Roman Catholic book of religious anecdotes, whose
name I have forgotten. A married pair-they were French
Protestants-were driving in an open carriage through a
street where the gentleman had some business to transact.
He pulled up at the door he wanted, which happened to be
just opposite a beautiful old Gothic church, and entered
the house, leaving his wife behind in the carriage for about
twenty minutes. When he returned, she said to' him,

" My
dear, I am a Catholic, and desire to be received into the
One Church. I have been looking across at that lovely
building there, and am convinced that the religion which
its builders professed must be the true one, and far supe­
rior to that of the people who built our Protestant temple."
And accordingly she was received within a few days, fol­
lowed, if my .memory be not at fault, by her husband,
overpowered by the cogency of the lady's argument. It is
something that the building did not happen to be the
cathedral of Cordova, or the Jumna Musjid of Delhi, for



40 The R£tualists and Roman Catholic£sm.

then the pair might have turned Mohammedans.* There is
so much which is august and stately, so much which is
graceful and picturesque, so much which is profound and
mysterious, so much which is heroic and romantic, in the
history and aspect of the Church of Rome, that minds
which have more imagination than judgment, more emo­
tion than logic, are apt to be carried away by the sheer
impulse of admiration, and to believe on trust that what
held good of the twelfth century, for instance, is equally
discoverable now; that the exceptional splendours which
have arrested their attention are mere average specimens of
pervading glory. I can do no better here than quote the
words of one who in his degree did as much as anyone to
foster this mode of thought, the late Augustus Welby Pugin,
written long after he became a Roman Catholic :-
"All anterior to the Reformation is regarded and described

as a sort of Utopia-pleasant meadows, happy peasants, merry
England-according to Cobbett; bread cheap and beef for
nothing, all holy monks, all holy priests-holy everybody.
Such charity, and such hospitality, and such unity, when every
man was a Catholic. I once believed in Utopia myself, but when
tested by stern facts and history, it all melts away like a dream."t
The sentimental attraction takes, however, a comparative

form more frequently than a positive one; by which I mean
that persons who are keenly alive to certain obvious faults
in the Church of England, often weak just where Rome is
strong, are indisposed either to make the best of these
defects, or to labour personally for their correction; but
* A learned correspondent has pointed out the original of this story

to me in St. Simon's" Memoirs" (1704), as referring to M. and Mme.
Chardon, and there the process of conversion is much slower. But I
have given the incident just as I found it, edited anew for the edification
of the faithful.

t Pugin's "Earnest Address on the Establishment of the Hierarchy,"
185°·



The Ritualists and Roman Catholicism. 4 I

secede for the sake of finding the contradictory of that which
has displeased them, and that without inquiring whether it
is really to be had where they seek it, or whether there may
not be counterbalancing disadvantages of which they are
unaware. The commonest -of all these motives is the notion

carefully inculcated by Roman controversialists, and 'accepted
without examination by the mass of ordinary people, that
there is absolute harmony and unity of doctrinal teaching
within the Roman pale, as contrasted with the strife and
conflict of opinions in the Church of England. Theolo­
gians who have tested the matter know better, of course, but
they are always a slender minority j and are heard with sur­
prise when they state, from accurate knowledge, that there
is great variety, and even conflict, of teaching in the Roman
Church, on grace and free-will, on purgatory, on indulgences,
on the Holy Eucharist,* and even on Papal Infallibility itself,
which was to have settled everything. There are probably
as many Calvinists (for instance) among Roman Catholics
now as in all the rest of Christendom put together. Or seces­
sion may be due to weariness at being worried, and scolded,
and hustled, and rabbled, whether as cleric or laic, for diver­

gence from the standards of popular English irreligion j but
this is·akin to a boy'S enlisting as a soldier when made un­
comfortable at home. Chief of all the sentimental reasons,

however, is disgust at the almost unbroken and unvaried
misconduct of the collective English Bishops-too like that
of the courtier prelates during the Arian struggle of the
fourth century-their lack of moral courage, their servility
to the civil power, nay, to mere popular opinion, however
crude, ignorant, and even openly irreligious j and, above

* E.g., the Roman Church teaches a "supra-local" Presence in
the Eucharist (Cone. Trid. sess. xiii. cap. I). Fr. Gallwey, in "An
Hour before my Crucifix," teaches a local one, "imprisoned in the
Sacred Host."



42 The R£tualz"sts and Roman Catholicism.

all, their uniform failure to regard themselves and to act
as the natural heads, and therefore as the natural leaders,
champions, and protectors, of the clerical body, as the
Judges do for the Bar, and the Horse Guards does for the
army. For, whereas they have been given temporal rank
and wealth expressly and only that they �ay be inde­
pendent, and may confront the rich and noble of secular
society on equal terms, in defence of the Church and the
clergy; in practice they treat these privileges as retainers
on behalf of the laity, in return for which they are to act
as spies and whippers-in over the clergy: to dragoon them
into submission whenever, and on whatever ground, any
of the laity choose to disapprove of their conduct.
I am simply putting down here complaints which have

been made to myself, and which have usually been directed
far more against Bishops who lay claim to High Churchman-

.

ship than against open and professed Evangelicals who know
no better. The charge is not, so far as I have ever heard
it made, that the Bishops do not encourage and lead the
Catholic Revival, instead of always acting as drags upon its
wheels; much less that they, like the Crown, will not pro­
mote Ritualists (since these regard themselves as the con­
stitutional Opposition, not yet entitled to the good things of
the Ministry); but that they never come forward to correct
any popular misapprehension, to allay any wild panic, of
which the clergy are the objects, but themselves swell the
chorus of vituperation at the top of their voices, lest they
should incur any share of the passing unpopularity. This
was notably the case when the Public Worship Regulation
Act was being debated, and also quite lately when the
storm was raging about the "Priest in Absolution." Not
one Bishop had the boldness to say plainly that the Church
of England teaches auricular confession in its Prayer-Book,
and that clergymen who were simply carrying out its direc-



The Ritualists and Roman -Cathoiiciss»: 43

tions, are more honest, loyal, and consistent, than those who
not merely neglected but reviled the practice, and ought
accordingly to be let alone. What is perhaps worse in this
connexion was that the specific charge made at the time was
that certain Ritualistic clergymen had wantonly put a book,
declared to be obscene, into public circulation, the actual
fact being that they had bought up the book with the ex­
press purpose of withdrawing it from circulation, and that
so effectually, that the copy which Lord Redesdale produced
as his brief in the House of Lords had, as Mr. Collette, the
well-known Evangelical solicitor and controversialist, has
ncautiously told us, to be-- well, informally conveyed, by
the person to whom its publicity is due. The story has
been denied since, but it came from a friendly pen, and has
every mark of probability about it. Now, not only did no
Bishop attempt to rebut the false accusation, but several of
them repeated it, although a fully authenticated statement of
the facts was in the hands of each of them. And lastly in this
category, the complaint is often heard that Ritualism, which
is at the worst a devout and earnest movement, erring if you
please, but ardently Christian and missionary, is the only kind
of clerical action with which a Bishop will interfere penally.
Open depravation of Christianity itself in the pulpit, personal
immorality of life, daring nonconformity in public worship,
gross neglect of pastoral duties, illegally exacted fees for
gratuitous offices, deliberate sordidness and irreverence in the
ministration of sacraments; all these I have myself known to
have been laid before bishop after bishop, with no result what­
ever save a snubbing to the complainant, while the slightest
hint of Ritualism was sure to meet with immediate atten­
tion and expression of readiness to suppress and punish it
if possible. That sort of thing sends men over to Rome.
It may seem somewhat curious if I put, as I now do,

doubts as to the validity of Anglican Orders, as to the



44 The R£tual£Sts and Roman Cathoiicism,

canonical jurisdiction of the English Episcopate, and, above
all, as to the fatal character of the interference of the State,
whether in Parliament or in the Law Courts, in the spiritual
domain, under the head of sentimental reasons for secession,
as they certainly have caused many to secede. But I do so
because my experience is that they are almost never the
original moving causes, but are simply caught up subse­
quently, in nineteen cases out of twenty, as a justification for
seceding, by those who have first been carried away by their
emotions, and then try to persuade themselves and others
that they have been actuated by reason and study alone, an
assumption disproved by ten minutes' conversation with any
one versed in the subjects named, and by the fact that the
seceders never so much as inquire whether things are any
better in these respects in the Roman Church, but take on
trust there what they demand to have proved here by tests
which are asked for in no other case. For instance, people
have come to me much upset by having been told by Mgr.
Capel and others that the Ordinal used for the consecration
of Bishops in England between 1552 and 1662 is an invalid
form, because it does not specify the episcopal office at the
actual time of laying on of hands (as the present one does) ;
so that the necessary intention was absent, and no more than
confirmation need be implied. They were NOT told that in an
earlier place the intention of the rite is declared to be to do to
the bishop elect whatever Christ did in commissioning the
Twelve Apostles, and the Apostles in turn when sending out
SS. Paul and Barnabas; and still less, that the very omission
complained of is in the existing Roman Pontifical itself, whose
form is "Accipe Spiritum Sanctum," and no more; nay,
that in the Roman ordination ofpriests the Bishop isforbidden
to say anything when laying on hands, though the essence of
the ordination (Conc. iv. Carth..can. 3) consists therein. "*
* This fact refutes another cavil sometimes brought against the English



The Ritualists and Roman Catholicism. 45

Last come the practical reasons. These rank under three

clearly marked heads. First is the wish to be free from

clerical obligations, and to enjoy the unrestraint of layman­

ship. This, though not covering a very large number
of

cases, does unquestionably account for an appreciable
fraction. Next,-and this chiefly affects lay folk,-residence
in some part of the country not yet covered by the rising
waters of the Catholic Revival, or where neglect, sordid­

ness, or a narrow and illiterate Puritanism, are still domi­

nant. It has often happened that persons who have found

religious privileges, which ought to be accessible to every
member of the Church, denied even to their earnest

Ordinal. It is said that, even if we have Bishops, we have no priests,
because the essence of the priestly office is to offer sacrifice, whereas no

express reference to this is
found in the English Ordinal; while the

Roman, and most others, have a clause conferring this power. But, if

a priest "must of necessity have somewhat to offer," then the authority
to do this must needs be included in the commission, "Receive the Holy
Ghost for the office and work of a priest in the Church of God" (as the

Anglican form runs), because that which confers the fulness of any
office confers all authority comprised under that office. And, as a Roman

priest is actually ordained without any words at all, he must obtain the

power of sacrificing long before any mention of it occurs in the Roman

Ordinal,-for this obvious reason, that if he be not a priest from the
moment the Bishop's hands have been laid on him, he is a mere layman
or deacon still when the commission to sacrifice is given him later on in
the rite, and so is not capable of receiving it, and does not in fact receive

it; because the modern (thirteenth century) ceremony with which it is
bestowed is no part of the ordination proper, but a mere late ornamental

accretion thereon. And further, if it be necessary to specify the details of

every gradewhen conferring it, then the Roman Church has no Bishops, for

the powers ofconfirming and ordaining, distinctive of the episcopal order,
are not bestowed by name in its Ordinal for the consecration of Bishops,
but are merely incidentally touched on and grouped with the power of

baptizing, open to all laymen, of offering, common to all priests, and

expounding, permitted to all preachers, as things which a Bishop ought
to do.



46 The Rùualists and Romdn Catholicism.

entreaty, who have been shocked and revolted by wanton
irreverence and profanity. in word and act by some clergy­
man, nearly certain to be condoned by his Bishop if invoked;
or equally alienated by the timorous refusal of an incum­
bent to do what he knows and confesses to be his duty,
lest he should compromise himself; have cut the knot by
secession, even though involving themselves in the difficulty
of having to make long journeys, at infrequent intervals,
to obtain their new ministrations. And finally in this cate­
gory come what are in my experience the immense majority
of cases, namely, those who, from motives of sheer mental
laziness and sloth, and of unwillingness to face the spiritual
problems of the day for themselves, go out of a communion
which bids them "prove all things, and hold fast that which
is good,"-just as the Founder and first Apostles of Christi­
anity appealed to the reason of their hearers, and to proofs
which they offered them, not to their own authority, as the
ground for accepting the Gospel *-into one whose easier
counsel is to use their intellect only so long and so far as it
may lead them into the haven ofRome, and thenceforward to
abandon all the trouble and sin of thinking, which will be
much better done for them by the Church, acting through the
agency of a qualified director. I am bold to say that this is,
beyond all others, the chief motive and incentive to secession
so far as I have ever been able to examine and test the mat­
ter. What its moral value is, I leave my readers to decide.
I now come to offer my own account, by no means

minutely exhaustive, of Ritualistic stubbornness and tenacity
in continuing within a Church whose rulers either actively
persecute or passively disapprove men of that school, in
which they receive. hard blows and scanty or no pay, where
every man's tongue and hand are against them.
* S. Luke xxiv. 27 ; S. John ii. II, iii. 2, v. 36, x. 25 ; Acts vi.

8-10, viii. 35, xvii. 2, II; I Peter iii. 15.



The R£tualt"sts and Roman Cathol£àsm. 47

I. The first and most obvious consideration is that Ritual­

ists find themselves by no act or choice of their own, but by
the circumstances of their birth, education, and surroundings,
members of the Church of England-a Church, by-the-by,
which always lay outside the limits of the original Roman
Patriarchate, never authoritatively nor canonically extended,

*

and which at no time, pace the Abbé Martin, accepted the
" laws" of the Roman Catholic Church, if by that term the
Roman Canon Law be intended-and that the presumption
so far is that it is God's will that they should stay where He
has placed them. Of course this argument can be met by
the objection that the same holds good of the most degraded
paganries in the world, and that, on this showing, men
ought to remain Thugs or cannibals. But the conditions of
change are very unlike in the several cases. Roman Catholi­
cism, take it at its best, is only a variety, and not a very
remote variety, of the same creed and polity already held
by English Churchmen, and is not at 3:11 so plainly and
obviously a step upward and for the better as any form of
Christianity is when compared with savage cults. It is a
question of degree, not of kind. If it can prove its claims,
well and good; but the contention of the ordinary Roman
controversialist is that the presumption must be always held
to be in favour of Rome, and the burden of proof lie with
those who dispute her title, not with those who press it.
This, however, is the reverse of the process in all other
cases of claim by outsiders, and it is not the duty of English
Churchmen, any more than it is of Italian or Spanish
Churchmen, to take for granted that their position is unten­
able, and to help in proving it such. As well call on the
owner of an old entailed estate to give up possession to

* Nay, barred from such extension by Canon VIII. of the General
Council of Ephesus.



48 The Rdualz'sts and Roman Catholicism,

any claimant who may allege a flaw in the title-deeds,
without clearly establishing his own superior right.

2. Next comes the fact acknowledged by several candid
Roman Catholics, by Welby Pugin, by Dr. Newman, and
by the Abbé Martin himself in that former paper of his
on Ritualism, that the Church of England, whatever its
defects may be, is the great "breakwater" against the pro­
gress of infidelity in this country, and is thus discharging
an important national work more successfully by far, be it
said with submission, than the Latin Church is doing in
France, Spain, and Italy. Ther� is no proof, to say the
least, that a transfer of allegiance, by removing a number
of stones, would strengthen this breakwater, or help to
erect another as serviceable. For no fact is better esta­
blished than the scantiness, poverty, and ineffectiveness of
Roman Catholic apologetic literature or efforts against
Rationalism and infidelity. If the Abbé Martin cite Dr.
Pusey's version of Mgr. Gaume's manual on confession, as
showing how England is forced to borrow from Rome, I
would refer him in turn to the "Démonstratipns Evangé­
liques" of the Abbé Migne, where he will find the Anglican
names of Locke, Burnet, Leslie, Clarke, Stanhope, Tillot­
son, Warburton, Bentley, Lyttelton, Butler, Porteus, Milner,
Paley, and Buckland, to cite no more, in the list of authors
included, and remind him further that at the epoch of the
great Deistical assault on Christianity in the last century, it
was England, not Rome, which routed the assailants, who
learnt their lessons from the Roman-sprung Socinians and
the Jesuit-taught Descartes; while if there be any eminent
and successful Roman apologists for Christianity against the
newer forms of unbelief living now, I am not fortunate
enough to be acquainted with their names, save the possible
exceptions of Hettinger and Reusch.

3. There is, so far as I can see, no evidence that the



The R£tualists and Roman Cathoiicisrn, 49
Roman Church in her own lands is doing what I may call
aggressive missionary work at all so vigorously or success­
fully 'as the Church of England. I do not forget that in
France the evil wrought by the disastrous interlude of
Atheism under the first Republic has never yet been wholly
undone; but no such plea can be entered in palliation of
the Church's failure in the two great southern peninsulas;
and the Abbé's plea, that the revived Paganism of the
Renascence is to blame, even if we accept it for Italy,­
where, however, the living presence of the Pope ought
to have been more than a counterbalance-will not account
for Spain and Portugal. The educated classes are in open
revolt everywhere; the boasted hold on the lower classes,
as Fenianism in Ireland, and Garibaldism in Naples and
Sicily have demonstrated, is precarious in the extreme.
Even here in England, despite of proselytism, aided by
Irish and Continental immigration, the Roman Church, as
the marriage returns prove, does not hold its own, and
cannot maintain its natural ratio of increase (4 '50 per cent.)
compared with the total population, -)f. lavish though it be in
establishing clerical plant. Still less is it effective as a mis ...
sionary agency amongst those unattached waifs and strays
who profess no creed, nor does it practically influence the
Dissenting bodies, and, indeed, its Welsh mission is a com­
plete and abject failure. On the other hand, I myself
ministered for years to a congregation of which the majority
had been Methodists, Baptists, and Independents, and I
* The ratio of Roman Catholic marriages to the total number was

2'65 per cent, in 1848. Then came the great wave of Irish immigra­
tion, which sent the rate up to 4'26 in 1851. The No-Popery agitation
of that year showed its result in 1853 by a rate of 5 '09. Under Ritualism,
it dwindled in 1874 to 4'00 per cent., and the Public Worship Act has
raised it again to 4'26, the proportion of 1851 ; 4'50 would be its natural
ratio now.

4



50 The Ritualists :md
Roman Catholicism.

know of several others similar in various towns. It is not ri.

very unreasonable
deduction from these premises that the

Roman Church, from whatever cause, cannot do the work

in England that Ritualists can and do.

4. Not only does the missionary Roman Church in Great

Britain fail, except so far as it poaches on Anglican pre­

serves, but its value as a moral educator is open
to grave

question. Those who are familiar with its system are
aware

that the amount of direct control and influence exercised by
its clergy over those who in any practical way admit

their

claims is very much greater than that which Anglican or

Protestant ministers commonly enjoy. But in England the

number of Roman Catholics convicted of criminal offences is

enormously out of proportion to their ratio of the population,
and very far exceeds that of the Church

of England, though
the latter is held accountable for everyone who does not

definitely avow himself as a member of another
communion.*"

And in Ireland no reasonable doubt exists that if the Roman

clergy chose to deal as promptly and forcibly with agrarian
murders (exclusively a Roman Catholic crime) as they do

with mixed marriages, or with voting for the wrong candi­

dates at elections, they could destroy that combination of

'" There are about 1,000,000 Roman Catholics in England and Wales,

out of 24,000,000 = 4' 50 per cent (Mr. Ravenstein, in his
Denomina­

tional Statistics, says that they were 982,000 in 1866). But the
criminal

Protestant children, boys and girls, detained in English reformatories

on Dec. 31st, 1877, were 4,289, and the Roman
Catholic ones 1,346,

or more than 24 per cent. of the whole number, i.e., nearly
six times

their proper ratio. The adult
Roman Catholics in three metropolitan

prisons, whose returns I have seen, vary from
16 to 22! per cent. of the

whole number. Yet, while there is but one Anglican clergyman (23,000)

for every 1,044 of the whole population for
which the Established Church

is responsible, there is a Roman Catholic priest (1903)
for every 525 of

his co-religionists in England and Wales, without counting
members of

active religious orders of both sexes, who have greatly increased
of late

years, and share the work.



The Ritualz"sts and Roman Catholicism. 5 I

the peasantry to shelter assassins which makes their capture
and conviction well-nigh impossible. Orangemen are bad
enough, Heaven knows, but at least they do not shoot their
opponents from behind a hedge. The deduction from these
facts is that the Roman clergy-either cannot or will not press
the moral law adequately on their flocks. Why should a
Ritualist, who does press it, sit down humbly at the feet of
such teachers to learn their method?

5. Next, it is to be remembered that the Emancipation
Act, which helped to draw the English Roman Catholics
out of their long retirement, very shortly preceded the
Oxford movement; and since that time, notably since the
impetus given them by the convert element, they have been
familiar figures in general society. We know all about them
now, they are no longer shrouded in mystery; and the
impression they create, on the whole (I have no wish to
word it offensively), although the Roman Church shows at
its very best in England, where it is forced to be cautious
and moderate, is not that of superiority to English Church
people. They were asleep and inactive till the converts, won
by no zeal, energy, or devotion of theirs, woke them up;
their whole active element even now is chiefly convert.
They are distinctly more narrow, apathetic, and negative,
more incapable of interest in higher thought, even on re­
ligious topics, less earnest and willing-apart from those
who devote themselves directly to clerical or conventual
life-to work in and for their Church. Indeed, the com­
plaint I hear from Roman Catholics is, "We can get money
enough for almost any scheme we start, but they drop
through one after another, because we cannot get the men."
My own belief is that the fault of this, too, lies with the
Latin clergy, in their craving to officialize everything, and to
keep the reins of power in their own hands, reducing the
laity to mere passivity. Ritualists, whose strength lies in a



52 The Ritualists and Roman
Cathol£cism.

attached and co-operating laity, do not see how they would

gain by the wholesale clericalization which would
follow on

submission to Rome.

6. I come now to a sorer place, but I am bound to probe
it. Our general experience, and (as I am assured by com­

petent information) that of the Roman Catholic clergy
them­

selves, is that conversion to Rome involves,
in a large

majority of instances, sudden, serious, and permanent
intel...

lectual and moral deterioration, especially as to the quality
of truthfulness. I allow the exceptions to the full. I count

not a few converts amongst my own personal friends;
there

is one convert at least, clarum et uenerabiie nomen, who en­

joys, in his long enforced retreat at Edgbaston,
a far higher

degree of love and reverence amongst us Anglicans
than he

receives from his present co-religionists. And I grant that

where Roman Catholicism is the first form of belief to
make

a serious impression on a previously careless person,
there

is improvement; only, this is equally true of Plymouth
Brethrenism. But the broad fact is as I say, and the most

conspicuous example of all is the best proof of it.
I had

the moral beauty of conversion brought home to me
not

very long ago by learning that an educated professional
man

of my acquaintance, within forty-eight
hours after he was

received, with all a neophyte's tender graces
still freshly

clinging round him, was locked up for getting
drunk and

assaulting the police; a thing which had never happened
in

his Anglican days. I will cite another instance,
which I

regard as graver, because deliberate,
and adopted under

very high Roman authority and counsel
indeed. A Sister­

hood with which I had some relations of occasional service

was got at and tampered with, so that
about two-thirds of

the whole body seceded in mass to the Roman
Church.

Of course, as usual in such communities,' the property,

whether realty or personalty, belonged to all the
members



The Rz"tual£sts and Roman Catholicism. 53

jointly. Each had a common right and interest in it, and
most of it had been given to the Sisters on the faith of being
an Anglican body. But the seceders took everything, the
whole of the furniture, bedding, linen, plate, glass, books,
etc., except a few English Bibles and some personal articles
which could be directly identified, and summarily turned the
non-seceders out of the house, to shift for themselves as
best they might. This was not all. The bills for the past
quarter came in soon after, for the meat, bread, groceries,
and the like, which the whole community had been con-
"suming. The seceders refused to pay any part whatever of
the debts, though they had consumed the far larger share of
the goods, alleging that they, as Catholics, were not bound
to pay the debts of Protestants. It was not long after the
Saurin v. Starr trial that all this happened, and the Superior'
of the steadfast minority consulted the Superior-general of
her society, asking her what she should do.

" Your claim,"
was the noble Christian .reply, "would stand good at once
in law, but it is better that you should put up with the loss
than give the world the sorry sight of Sisters quarrelling
with one another about money." Which does the Abbé
Martin prefer of these two lines of conduct, of which the
former, I must repeat, was not spontaneous like the latter,
but advised by very highly-placed Roman ecclesiastics in­
deed? I could add many more similar facts, well-nigh as
telling, but I have said enough to show that the new convert
does not necessarily rise into a higher moral sphere. As for
the intellectual question, one fact with which experience
makes me familiar, is that the very first thing most new con­
verts do is to sell off all their books,-not merely those
Anglican volumes which have perhaps ceased to be useful;
but general literature, and even Roman Catholic theology
itself. *" This I have noticed scores of times; as also that most
* A Roman Catholic complained in the Tablet of Dec. 28th, 1878,



54 The R£tual£sts and Roman Catho/icism.

lay male converts sink into cold religious indifference, scarcely
distinguishable from scepticism, to which not a few pass on.

7. Once more, Ritualists fail to see that fellowship in the
Roman Church has proved any warrant or safeguard against
doctrinal or moral error in the past. The English Church
has, at the worst, originated but two sects,

* Quakers and
Methodists: of whom the former have won an honourable

name for unbroken peacefulness and unremitting charity ;
while the lattee have diverged less from Catholic standards
of doctrine than almost any other large Protestant body.
But Rome not only has caused the separation of the East,
and the revolt of all Northern Europe, but is the parent or

grandparent of every other Western sect, from Socinians to
Mormons inclusive, save the secret remnant of the Albi­

gensian Gnostics, and even they were largely recruited from
the Franciscans of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

It is all very well to quote: "They went out from us, but
they were not of us. For if they had been of us, they
would no doubt have' remained with us" (I St. John ii. 19,
Douai version) j but an infallible society which cannot pre­
vent formidable schisms and heresies from growing in its
own bosom, and issuing thence to spread themselves out­
side, does not seem to possess any clear advantage over a
fallible one, which has never given ris e to one-fiftieth of the
mischief, even if charged with that wrought here in England
by ex-Roman bishops and priests, under pretext of reforma­
tion, in Tudor days.

that the reading Roman Catholic public in London, as estimated by a
leading Roman Catholic publisher, consists of no more than six hundred
persons. This must mean, not only that most original Roman Catholics
have not hitherto been readers, but that most converts give up reading.
* Plymouth Brethrenism arose in Ireland, and its original parent,

the learned John Walker, became a Presbyterian before he founded the
sect whence Mr. Darby borrowed his chief ideas.



The R£tua!£sts and Roman Catholicism. 55

8. An issue which is broader and more visible than any
yet discussed is the wonderful revival of the Church of

England itself under Ritualist influence, to which the Abbé
Martin has borne generous testimony in that other paper of
his, wherein he observes quite truly that the most striking
peculiarity about it is that, unlike all merely sectional move­
ments, this one has been and is powerful not only within its
own immediate area, nay, its own communion, but is telling
strongly on the separatist bodies themselves. His words
are:-

" The rising tide is not limited to the members of the Anglican
Church; it has even extended to the Dissenting communities,
and to the Wesleyans in particular, . . . . . . and it is not one
of the least curious and least consoling symptoms, that we find
the most implacable enemies of Ritualism carried away by the
movement which they wish to oppose. Progress is made in
everything: in doctrine, in worship, in charitable works and
institutions, and in religious practices; all have been drawn
into the Anglo-Catholic current."

Now, a Christian can explain an unparalleled and varied
movement like this only on the hypothesis of Divine grace.
That grace, as theologians agree, may be ordinary or extra­
ordinary in its channels and manifestations. If it be ordi­
nary here in England, then it must prove that the Church
of England is a true Catholic body, drawing grace from valid
Orders and sacraments, to abandon which would be schism.
If it be extraordinary, then God is dealing with us by
miracle, and under a special dispensation, as when He sent
Elijah and Elisha to minister in the northern kingdom of
Israel, with no hint in their teaching that its citizens were
bound to go south and be reconciled to the High Priest in
Jerusalem; and it is our duty to wait God's pleasure so long
as He is plainly working amongst us, nay, with us as His



56 The Rùual£sts and Roman Cathoùciss«,

instruments; and not to go elsewhere, with, to say the least,
small prospect of finding the like tokens of spiritual revival;
and none at all of being allowed to undertake like reforms
of evils, which is the special work God has given us to do.

9. On this follows a consideration which is perhaps even
weightier. While the English Church has during forty
years been drawing ever closer to ancient standards of belief
and practice-very much as still needs to be done-the
Church of Rome has, contrariwise, not only made a brand­
new creed with-to cite Bishop Maret (Du Concile General,
ii., 37 5)-only one article, "I believe in the Pope"
(whereas Ritualists prefer a religion more than eight years
old), besides upsetting the moral law by making Liguori a
Doctor of the Church, and his" probabilism" her accredited
doctrine,* but has been deteriorating into gross and puerile
superstition (Montalembert called it "idolatry") of the most
mechanical type during the same period. The popular
cults which, eagerly pushed on by authority, have well-nigh
supplanted the religion of the Missal and Breviary, are as
thoroughly Pagan in spirit as the revived culture-worship
which is the last gospel of Materialism. I tabulated some
results of inquiries I made on this head in a paper on

* By" probabilism" is meant the doctrine that it is permissible in
morals to follow a less probable opinion which makes aga£nst the strict
observance of the law, rather than a more probable opinion which
makes for that observance. For example, a man of superior rank
makes a promise of marriage to a woman of lower station, and confirms
it with an oath. He seduces her, and then retracts his promise. The
casuists are divided as to the lawfulness of such retractation, but in

general allow it. Liguori, summing up the arguments on both sides,
lays down that the man is not in the least bound to marry the seduced
woman in case his family should think the match disgraceful, for that
makes his oath £pso facto null, as being about an unlawful thing.­
Theol. Moral. 4. v. 644. Similarly, Liguori sanctions a witness on oath
in a trial denying that the defendant committed the act charged, if in



The Ritualz"sts and Roman CafholiczSm. 57

'Ultramontane Popular Literature in the Contemporary Review
for January 1876, and those who would like a convenient
manual of the subject may be referred to "L'Arsenal de la
Dévotion, Notes pour servir à l'Histoire des Superstitions,"
par Paul Parfait (Paris, Georges Decaux). Old-fashioned Eng­
lish Roman Catholics were much exercised in their minds

thirty years ago by the new-fangled Italian devotions and
cults thrust upon them, some of which Dr. Newman has
described as "like a bad dream," but even such a dream is
a Paradisiac vision compared with the ghastly nightmares I
refer to. And they are not merely tolerated, as erroneous
opinions and practices in the Church of England may be,
but directly encouraged and forced on by authority, which
could at once suppress them if it chose, by reason of its
coercive discipline, so that the Roman Church is guilty of
heresy, where the English is guilty, at worst, of negligence.
Now, I do not profess to say what is the duty of a born

the witness's opinion the act is not itself wrong (e.g. agrarian murder in
Ireland), unless the proof be so strong already as to make the judge's
questions concerning it "legitimate." -Ib. 4. ii. 154; 5. iii. 268-270.
So, too, a man may lawfully bribe a judge, if he think he will get his
own just rights thereby; and the laws against such bribery are to be
interpreted as directed only against attempts to secure an unjust sentence"
-Ib. 5. iii. 212. Theft is dealt with in much the same fashion; as for
instance, it is the current" probable" opinion that it is venial to steal
small sums from very rich men who do not miss them.-Scavini,
Theol. Mor., VII., ii. 4; Liguori, Opus Moral., iii. 519-527. The
Congregation of Rites decreed in 1803 that "in all the writings of
Alfonso de' Liguori there was not a word that could be justly found
fault with." By his elevation to the rank of Doctor of the Church still
more is implied,-namely, that it is not lawful to contradict his teaching
in any particular, because he did not merely teach t'n the Church, but
taught the Church itself.-Benedict XIV., De 'Canonizatione, iv. 2;
xi. I Io It is clear that there is thus no fixed moral law now recognized
in the Roman Church, for every layman may follow the laxest counsel
of any director, and every director may follow the laxest opinion o
.any casuist.



58 The R£tual£sts and Roman Catholù-z"sm.

Roman Catholic, who finds these things in his Church
under high sanction, and who knows that he is expected to
be at least silent concerning them, if he cannot openly yield
them his assent. But there is no question at all that
an English clergyman voluntarily taking office in a Church
which permits such usages and tenets to be recommended
to the faithful, becomes as guilty and responsible as if he
had invented them everyone himself And I, for one, have
no mind for such accountability.

IO. Thus, not only has the Church of Rome lost all se­

curity for faith, by putting doctrinal truth at the mercy of
the caprice of one man, who may be, as predecessors of his
have been, insane, wicked, or heretical, yet can now, even
when not speaking ex cathedra (and therefore not infallibly,
even on Ultramontane principles) practically force any error
into a hundred thousand pulpits during his whole ponti­
ficate, if not longer; and lost all security for morals, by the
acceptance of Probabilism j but owing to the doctrine of
Intention (Cone. Trid. sess. vii. can. 11), no Roman Catholic
can entertain more than a bare hope that any valid
Sacrament is ever administered in his Church. He can ..

not be sure of the Orders of the Bishop who confirms,
or of the Priest who confesses, him, of the genuineness
of any Mass, Absolution, Baptism, or other rite performed
by the clergy. Nor is this a mere Anglican cavil; it is
openly confessed by Perrone (De Sacramentis, iii. 129), who,
after saying that in consequence of the doctrine of Intention
"disquiet must necessarily arise in the mind as to whether one
has been baptized, or has had any other sacrament validly
conferred," goes on to allege that in these cases" moral cer­
tainty must suffice;" that is, as consultation of Bellarmine's
exactly similar teaching shows us,

-)(. the absence of any sure

* Bellarmine says: "Nor can anyone be certain, with the certitude
of faith, that he receives a true Sacrament, because a Sacrament cannot



The Rduàlùts and Roman Cathoiicissn, 59

warrant at all, and having to make up one's mind to do
without it. So, then, one great dissuasive from joining the
Church of Rome is that it now offers much less certainty
of any kind to its adherents than any other old historical

Christian Church.
I I. Further, no one can be reconciled to the Roman

Church without (a) submitting to one thing which involves
express disobedience to a Divine command, the refusal of
the Eucharistic chalice to the laity,-an innovation dating
only from June 15, 1415-s0 that the lay convert cuts
himself off for life from whatever special g!ace or benefit
is derivable thence, and the convert who takes Orders binds
himself to mutilate the administration of the Sacrament;
(b) accepting the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception,
which, however innocent it might be as a mere speculative
opinion, explicitly contradicts the well-nigh unanimous
teaching of ancient Christendom," and (c) the tenet of Papal
Infallibility, which all who have even cursorily examined
the evidence know to be a shameless and indefensible fig­
ment, repudiated till the other day by many of the greatest
Roman Catholic divines, and whose recent promulgation
cost the Roman Church many of her most distinguished

be validated without the intention of the minister, and no man can see
another's intention.ò=Drsrtrr. CONTROV. De Justif. III. viii. 5.
* The Abbé Martin denies this statement. I formally reaffirm it,

rom personal study of the question, pursued in the course of writing
commentaries on Holy Scripture. The strongest passage I have found
in its favour is that where St. Augustine says that he had rather not
enter on the question (De Nat. et Grat. 36), thereby implying that it
he did enter on it he would be forced to decide it negatively, as in
fact he does elsewhere (Enarr. z"n Ps. xxxiv. 3). And to those who
cannot examine the matter for themselves, it suffices to say that up to
1854 the great Dominican Order, the special champion of orthodoxy,
always opposed the dogma, while its chief defenders were found in
that fruitful nest of wild heresy, the Franciscan Order.



60 The R£tualz"sts and Roman Catholicism.

and faithful sons. Some ten years back, a fervent Catholic
was arguing with a Protestant on the claims of the Roman
Church as evidenced by the great men she continues to
produce and attach, and he cited as palmary instances three
living names, the first that of a theologian of rare learning,
acumen, orthodoxy, and lofty personal character; the
second that of a famous lawyer and canonist; the third that
of a brilliantly eloquent preacher. They were Dollinger,
Schulte, and Hyacinthe. We are bound to keep the faith
once delivered to the saints, and these unhappy accretions
under the late disastrous Pontificate are no part of that faith,
while its last achievement makes the permanence of any
ancient dogma whatever in the Roman Church altogether
precarious for the future.

12. Next in order comes that very principle, the lack of
which is constantly urged against the Ritualists by all their
opponents, and notably by the Abbé Martin himself and
Father Gallwey, namely, respect for constitutional authority.
In the Roman Church this is gone, deliberately abolished
by the suicidal act of the bishops at the Vatican Council,
which did away with the rights of the whole over a mere
part, and substituted a sheer human despotism, held in
check, no doubt, but not by recognized and lawful means,
for a Divine order. In the English Church authority is
dormant and in abeyance, partly from civil encroachments,
partly from episcopal unfaithfulness, but it is being struggled
for and will be won back, and then put on a firm constitu­
tional basis. The Ritualist view is that old Aristotelian one

(Pol. iii. 12), that the whole Church binds the local Church,
that the law is above the executive, that autocracy and
personal caprice have no place in a true Christian polity.
.And the first step towards recovery now being made is the
.re-establishment of diocesan synods, the most ancient
tribunals known to the Church Catholic, which, I need



The R£tualists and Roman Catholicism. 6 I

hardly remind the Abbé Martin, have been systematically
neglected by the Latin episcopate, despite the injunctions
of many Councils, for the last seven centuries, and have

now been made practically superfluous by the decrees of

1870. Constitutional order, hateful alike to despots and to

mobs, such is the authority we recognize and will obey; but
it is in England, not in Rome, far less in an outlying de­

pendency and mere colony of Rome in England, that we
must seek it.*

13. Once more, if the Roman Church be indeed
so far

superior to the English, its distinctive merits ought at once
to shine more clearly in, and be more powerfully influential

over, its clerical members. I will ask the Abbé Martin
to

tell us whether he sincerely thinks the moral standard of the
Latin clergy to be as high as that of the English. It is true
that there is too much domesticity and too little missionary
zeal in the average Anglican parsonage. But what of the
relative numbers of black sheep? My own inquiries, made
in no unfriendly spirit, have received very gloomy replies
indeed from earnest Roman Catholics. And it is matter

of notoriety that the prelates of the Roman Curia, who
drink daily at the very fountain-head of Ultramontane in

..

spiration, are about as unspiritual a body of men as can be
found anywhere. Of what highly-placed Anglican dignitary
is it possible to say truly what everyone said uncontra­
dicted of two men who lately held the second post in Latin

Christendom, as ministers of the Priest-King of a professedly

* The Abbé Martin defends" the infallible and divine authority of

the Church to teach" as "the basis of the Catholic system." So do
we. But what say the Vatican decrees? That in faith

and morals

" the definitions of the Roman Pontiff are irreformable of themselves,
and notfrom the consent of the Church." Pope Honorius 1. gave such a
definition once, and the Sixth General Council consequently decreed
" Anathema to Honorius the heretic, Pope of Old Rome,"



62 The Rituçdzsts and Roman Catholicism.

spiritual.realm, Cardinals Antonelli and Franchi, to cite no
others ? And, to touch on another side of the same topic,
I learn that, without counting ecclesiastics degraded or inter­
dicted as a punishment for misconduct, at least one hundred
French priests, and a still larger number of Italian ones,
abandon their clerical life yearly, and retire into a lay posi­
tion. This, even allowing for the far smaller numbers of
the Anglican clergy, is about ten or twelve times the ratio
of such secessions here, albeit encouraged by law since 1870,
and argues, I apprehend, either loss of faith, despair of re­
form, or at the very least, thorough disenchantment with
the Latin Church when seen too close. Ritualists think

that the communion which holds the affection and loyalty
of its own officers more surely is likely to be the healthier
of the two.

14. There is, besides, the constantly recurring proof of
bad faith in nearly all Roman controversy. My own ex­
perience of it is large, and I am continually met, not merely
by marks of disingenuous artifice in proselytism, nor yet by
biassed premises and illogical conclusions, which may be
set down to unintentional error, but by unquestionably mis­
leading statements as to matters of historical fact, garbled
quotations, incorrect renderings, unverifiable references, and
the like, proceeding from persons whom I believe to be
quite well aware of the real truth. '*' I have no reason to

* Two recent examplès will suffice as fair average ones. I. Cardinal
Manning, in his "True History of the Vatican Council," p. 67, alleges
that the book called"Janus" appeared in Germany in the year 1868, and
first formally announced the "fable" that Papal infallibility was to be
defined by acclamation. The date of the preface of the first edition of
"Janus" is JUly 1869. The facts are (a) that this scheme was devised
as far back as the canonization of the Japanese martyrs in 1867;
(b) that it was suggested again by the French correspondent's letter in
the official Papal organ, the Civiltà Cattolica, on February 6th, 1869,
about five months before ." Janus" appeared; (c) that Mgr. Plantier,



The R£tualists and Roman Cathoiiciss«, 63·

suppose the experience of others who take nothing for
granted, but insist on testing every statement, to be differ­
ent from my own. And the natural conclusion is that if

the cause could be adequately supported by true evidence,
there would be no inducement to manufacture that which

is false. Ritualists do not find it necessa!y to use such

weapons in arguing with their proselytes or opponents, and
are therefore justified in believing their position to be morally
stronger than the Roman one, though far less imposing, just
as a mere humble earthwork surpasses in military value a
vast and stately mediæval castle, which one modern siege­
piece could easily destroy.

15. Last of all, I would end with one word. The Abbé
Martin has spoken truly in saying that the lack of enthusiasm
and of the heroic and apostolic spirit has been' the most
crying defect of the Church of England. He has generously
said that Ritualists have got just this very apostolic spirit.
There is no doubt at this moment that Roman Catholics in

England, and especially Roman Catholic clergymen, are
much safer from hostility and molestation than the Ritualist
ecclesiastic, who is the one exception made to the equal

Bishop of Nimes, delivered on March 26th� 1869, a Charge in which he
urged the definition of infallibility by acclamation, the second (Paris)
edition of which was most favourably reviewed in the Cz'viltà of JUly
17th, 1869 (VII. vii. 210). 2. Fr. Gallwey, in his fourth "Lecture on
Ritualism" (pp. 127, 128), says:

" Going backwards century by century,
you arrive at length at the memorable day when, standing on the shore
ofthe typical Lake of Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth said to Simon Peter the
fisherman, 'Feed My sheep; feed My lambs.' For' thou art the rock,
and on this rock I will build My Church, and to thee will I give the
keys of the kingdom of heaven.'" This audacious falsification of the
Word of God is not due to the Douai version; which runs thus:­
"Thou art Peter," etc. So that Fr. Gallwey has deliberately falsified
the words of Christ Himself, from which it may be conjectured how
he treats other inconvenient documentary evidence.



64 The Rduaùsts and Roman CatholiczSm.

protection and incidence of the law. For a Ritualist to
become a Roman Catholic, is to pass from the van of battle
to the rear, to exchange the cross for the olive-branch. On
any theory of Christian conflict, of self-sacrifice and devotion,
his nobler and truer post is where the blows are falling
thickest, for in that part of the battle is the King.

Hazell, Watson, and Viney, Printers, London and Aylesbury.