Schools.CatholicChildren.ProtestantChildren.2,454with Catholic teachers.373,756none2,483with Catholic teachers.321,64124,3811,106with Protestant teachers only29,722114,726184with Protestant teachers only.none.18,702131with mixed teachers.13,69013,305
[Footnote 113]
[Footnote 113:Report of National Board of Education, 1866.Report of Meeting of Clergy of Dublin, 18th Dec. 1867, p. 14.]
In England, grants are made from time to time by the Privy Council of the Queen toward defraying the expenses of Catholic poor-schools, for it is only in a hobbling way that public opinion in this country moves toward religious and political equality. The oppression of minorities by majorities has been in vogue so many centuries, that the Houses of Parliament can with difficulty be induced to administer even-handed justice to all. The Poor-School Committee, composed entirely of Catholic noblemen and gentlemen, conducts the affairs of Catholic poor-schools with the concurrence of the bishops and clergy. The schools which are subsidized by government are subject also to government inspection. But this causes no inconvenience, because the inspectors are Catholics, approved by the bishops, and comfortably salaried by the state.
The reformatory schools are most useful and interesting institutions. They date from 1854, when a law was passed to the effect that juvenile offenders should, after a few weeks of imprisonment, complete their term of punishment in a reformatory approved by the secretary of state for the Home Department. By the exertions of Cardinal Wiseman and others, reformatories were established for Catholic children, in order that they might be kept separate from those of other religions, and be duly instructed by Brothers of Mercy, or other pious and charitable persons, under the direction of a priest. Reformatory schools have been followed by schools of industry, to which magistrates send vagrant children, found by the police in the streets without shelter or home. These schools also are recognized by the secretary of state, and the members of the Conferences of St. Vincent of Paul watch over the children's interests and provide, as far as may be, for their welfare.
Allied to these are such schools as St. Vincent's Home for destitute boys, at Hammersmith, [Footnote 114] where eighty poor boys are boarded, clothed, and educated for four shillings a week each, with thirty shillings on entrance for outfit, etc. The Catholics of England do not wait till they become a rich and powerful body before they engage in extensive works of charity. On the contrary, the number of their charitable institutions is immense, considered in proportion to their means.
[Footnote 114: Now removed to Fulham.]
During the Crimean war the want of Catholic chaplains in the army was felt painfully. Soldiers and sailors are, of all men, most careless about their souls, and Catholic soldiers were doubly abandoned in the hour of sickness and death, having no minister but a Protestant one to attend them, while in his ministrations they had no faith. A few volunteer chaplains were therefore allowed to accompany the troops, and this has led to their being regularly appointed, and to such chaplains being placed on an equality with the Protestant in rank, salary, and retiring pensions. Vessels, also, are moored in the great harbors and prepared for Catholic worship. A chaplain is specially appointed to the service of such ships, and to provide for the Catholic sailors' spiritual wants. The spirit of the Irish tar is no longer vexed with the thought that he must live, fight, and perhaps die for a government which abhors his religion, and deprives him of its consolations. The captains of men of war in the neighborhood of the floating churches just spoken of, are obliged to see that the Catholic seamen attend Mass, and are not now, as formerly, compelled to assist at the Church of England prayers. The field of labor of Catholic army chaplains gradually extends; besides being attached to many home stations, such as Aldershot, Chatham, Portsea, Woolwich, etc., they are found in foreign stations also, such as Bermuda, Halifax, Mauritius, New-Zealand, St. Helena, and Malta. The Catholic chaplains, it may be added, live on the best terms with the officers and with the Protestant clergymen in the same barracks. "We never interfere with each other," said one of the former a few days since to the writer; "indeed, for my part, I would not think of trying to convert the Protestants; I would rather spend all my time in striving to convert the Catholics. I am sure that, out of every hundred of our own men, there are eighty that need to be converted."
The prisons and union work-houses also, which used to be the scenes of so much injustice toward Catholic prisoners, paupers, and children, [Footnote 115] have now assumed a more liberal and Christian aspect.
[Footnote 115:The Workhouse Question. Lamp, Aug. 19, 1865.]
Chaplains are appointed to the larger houses of correction to minister to Catholic inmates, and Catholic children in the workhouses enjoy the benefits of instruction in the religion of their parents. There is in theCatholic Directory, which appears annually, a list of the charitable institutions in each diocese, and nothing can be more cheering and hopeful than the view it presents. Thus, in theDirectoryfor 1866, we find in the Diocese of Westminster alone 3 Almhouses; 1 Asylum for Aged Poor; 1 Home for Aged Females; 1 Hospital served by Sisters of Mercy; 1 House of Mercy for Servants out of Place; 1 Night Refuge; 1 St. Vincent of Paul's Shoe-Black Brigade; 2 Refuges for Penitents; 1 Reformatory School for Boys; 7 Industrial Schools for Boys, and 11 for Girls.The impression made on society by these admirable institutions is very great. They receive much countenance and support from non-Catholics; they instruct and console the ignorant and afflicted members of our own body; they call forth an abundance of self-denying labor and charity on the part of our own people, and tend more powerfully than any arguments to propagate the ancient faith. They prove that our religion emanates from a God of love, that we are not mere political schemers nor superstitious devotees, but sober-minded, practical Christians, battling with sin, and relieving misery in every shape. The English public is peculiarly alive to the services of Sisters devoted to works of Charity. You cannot walk through the streets now, or travel by railway, without meeting them, and everywhere they are respected. Their costume provokes no ridicule, their youth and good looks (if such they have) are secure from insult. Their crucifix and beads are badges of which all know the import, and involuntary blessings attend their steps. They are, in their way, the apostles of England. Their devotion to the sick and wounded in the Crimea won for them the favor even of their foes. Few will refuse them alms when they ask it for the poor. They are types of self-sacrifice, daughters of consolation, angel visitants. They impersonate the Gospel. Many of them come from abroad, from France, Italy, and Belgium, impelled by an invincible desire for the conversion of England. Their looks bespeak their mission no less than their garb. They are calm, collected, gentle. Children yearn toward them with instinctive fondness, and vice itself is shamed by their silent purity. The names of their several orders tell plainly on what their hearts are fixed. They belong to the "Good Shepherd;" they are the "Faithful Companions of Jesus;" they are handmaids of the "Holy Child Jesus," of "Notre Dame de Sion," of "Jesus in the Temple," of "Marie Reparatrice." They are "Sisters of Mercy," of "Providence," of "the Poor," of "Nazareth," of "Penance," of the "Holy Family," of "St. Joseph," of "St. Paul," of "the Cross." They address themselves to the heart rather than to the understanding, but they are not on that account less powerful instruments in the work of social improvement. They have broken down many of the barriers which prejudice had raised against the Catholic religion, and helped more than any logical triumph to subdue the hostility and soften the language of the press.
That mighty engine is, on the whole, an auxiliary to the Catholic cause in England. If it promulgates many falsehoods respecting us, it is almost always ready to publish their confutation also. It reproduces our primate's pastorals and all other documents of public interest that emanate from our bishops. It helps us, in the main, in the battle we are fighting for the attainment of equal political privileges, and employs the pens of many Catholic writers. No respectable periodical taboos a contributor because he is a Catholic, nor excludes him from its staff if his writing be up to the required mark, and his conduct in reference to controversial matters be discreet. Many non-Catholic journals are edited or sub-edited by Catholics, and this accounts in part for the altered tone of the press toward us of late.
Our own literature has recently been marked by fewer controversial books and pamphlets than it was some twenty years ago. Then, every convert of distinction, when admitted into the church, thought it incumbent on him to publish those reasons which had influenced him most powerfully in so momentous a change. The library tables in Catholic families were covered by the writings of Wiseman, Newman, Faber, Renouf, Lewis, Dodsworth, Northcote, Allies, Ward, and Thompson. Each presented his plea for Catholicism from a different point of view, and each added something to the aggregate of arguments derived from Scripture and antiquity. The controversy is now taking another turn. The church's historical ground is less violently contested, and she is drawing from her inexhaustible armory weapons to meet subtler foes. She faces the sceptic; she probes liberalism with Ithnriel's spear; she establishes from the very nature of things the necessity of an infallible standard of faith and morals. She draws up her line of arguments with a more compact front and extended wings. She appears at the same time more unbending and more liberal. She recognizes more freely and joyfully than ever the workings of the Holy Spirit in communions external to her pale, while she insists with extraordinary earnestness on her exclusive possession of the entire and incorrupt deposit of the faith. Such was the purport of a remarkable letter addressed to the Rev. Dr. Pusey by Dr. Manning, now Archbishop of Westminster, in 1864. Never were orthodoxy and liberality more happily united than in this pamphlet. Never did a Catholic prelate and divine make larger admissions without sacrificing a particle of Catholic theology. It is marked by the charity of an apostle and the accuracy of a logician. The same remarks apply to the archbishop's work onEngland ana Christendom. "We will venture to say that there is no one Roman Catholic writer of eminence in the world who has spoken more emphatically than he—we doubt if there is one who has spoken with equal emphasis—on the piety and salvability of persons external to the visible church." [Footnote 116]
[Footnote 116:Dublin Review, July, 1867, p. 110]
The life of Catholicism in England is evinced by its numerous associations. In every place where it has taken root, Catholics enrol themselves in societies, confraternities, or institutes for social, intellectual, and religious purposes. In no diocese do these flourish more than in that of Westminster. The Archbishop personally promotes social intercourse by throwing open his drawing-rooms every Tuesday evening, during the London season, to such gentlemen as may think proper to attend his receptions. There, may be met, from time to time, prelates from distant countries, ambassadors, members of parliament, noblemen, heads of colleges, artists, men of science, converts, and old Catholics, with now and then a non-Catholic guest, whom curiosity, respect for the primate, or yearning toward a calumniated church, draws into company to which he is little used. The Stafford Club is another centre of union, comprising about 300 members, and including among them a large part of the titled and moneyed Catholics of England, Wales, and Scotland. The archbishops and bishops of England and Ireland areex-officiohonorary members, and they frequently avail themselves of the privilege. A middle class club has lately been opened in the city under the primate's patronage, and at this lectures are delivered, to which, as well as to all other advantages, non-Catholic members are admissible.The only condition required of such members is, that they shall observe the rules of courtesy, and abstain (together with Catholic members) from unbecoming controversy on religious and political questions. Lecturing is not so popular a form of instruction in England as in the United States, yet it is much more generally in vogue than it was, and it is destined, we believe, to exert a wide influence hereafter in propagating anew the Catholic faith through the British empire.
What we need and hope for is the reaction of Catholic Ireland on Catholic England. Centuries of cruel misgovernment have retarded the civilization of that unhappy country, and the loss which it sustains is not its only, but also ours. In knowledge, education, manners, commerce, industry, liberty, in all that constitutes national maturity, it is behind England. Reading, lecturing, mental activity, in Ireland are all in the back ground; and consequently the church, which there keeps alive the faith in the heart of a peasant and small farmer population, does not act indirectly on English Catholic society with that force which would belong to it under more favorable circumstances. "The centuries which have ripened England and Scotland with flower and fruit, have swept over Ireland in withering and desolation;" [Footnote 117] she has therefore little to give us, much to receive from us. If England had been bountiful to her, she would, in return, have been bountiful to England. If we had shared with Ireland our material prosperity, she would now be imparting to us more spiritual blessings, communication between the two churches would be more brisk, and their relations would be marked by more complete unity of feeling and purpose.
[Footnote 117: Archbishop Manning's Letter to Earl Grey. p. 17.]
The time is probably drawing near when this healthy and reciprocal action of the Irish and English Catholic Church will be fully restored. If England is to retain Ireland at all as a part of the empire, it must be by establishing equal laws, repealing all penal enactments against Catholics and their religion, resolving the national system of education into denominational schools, disestablishing and disendowing the Protestant Church, and placing on Irish landlords such restrictions in the tenure of land as will secure the tenant from misery and hopeless serfdom. She must stanch the bleeding wounds of emigration, and wipe away the tears of ages. Then, and then only, can we hope to see Ireland a prosperous nation, her people thrifty and happy, her civilization raised to a level with other Christian countries of Europe, and her church putting forth all its native might to console and instruct its own congregations, and to aid in the work of recovering England to the faith of the Apostles. Political and social degradation, such as that which afflicts Ireland, is incompatible with a free and flourishing church, with a high moral tone, religious zeal, and exemplary lives on the part of its victims. Cottiers, and "tenants at will" of absentee landlords, having no security that their outlay is their own, and that they will ever reap the advantage of it; barely earning their potatoes and buttermilk by the sweat of their brow, and looking wistfully across the Atlantic to the comparative wealth and luxury enjoyed by five millions of their fellow-countrymen in America; liable at any moment to be evicted for political motives, or that their rent may be raised; galled and maddened by the remembrance of 50,000 evictions in one year; [Footnote 118] such persons, we say, deprived of the protection of the law, must be more than human if they do not in many instances prove themselves lawless. But the day of redress is at hand, we trust. May the day of retribution be averted!
[Footnote 118: 1849.Butt's Land Tenure in Ireland, p. 34.]
It is, perhaps, matter for regret that English Catholics have now no political leader. Since the voice of Daniel O'Connell was hushed by death, no representative of their interests in parliament has appeared gifted with genius and eloquence of a commanding order. Mr. Pope Hennessy has been excluded from the House of Commons by his Irish constituents in consequence of his conservative principles, which are not popular among them, and has accepted the governorship of Labuan. His talents are thus almost lost to the Catholic cause; and though there are more than thirty Catholic members in the Commons, their influence is not what it should be. It is neutralized by the many Irish Protestant members who represent landed interests; and valuable as are the services of Mr. Maguire, Mr. Monsell, Mr. Blake, and Major O'Reilly, it is to Protestant rather than to Catholic champions that we look now for advocacy of Irish tenant claims, and the redress of Irish wrongs. In the House of Lords we are most feebly represented. Out of twenty-six Catholic peers, seventeen only have seats, and none of these are distinguished as debaters. [Footnote 119]
[Footnote 119: SeeLord Mahon's Hist. of England, vol. i. p. 16.]
In the time of Charles II. the Catholic peerage was more numerous than it is now in proportion to the commoners. Long after that period, also, the lords and gentry held a higher position than was in harmony with the scanty number of their poorer co-religionists. Indeed, we have not yet recovered the blow which was inflicted on us by the expulsion of the peers [Footnote 120] under the rule of a sovereign who was even then a Catholic by conviction, and avowed himself such on the bed of death. But though the heads of old Catholic families in England do not, as a rule, shine as public characters, they have a title to respect which none others can claim. They represent those who suffered a long period of banishment for conscience' sake, treasuring in their hearts a faith more precious than courtly splendor. For this they were outcasts and pariahs, bowed beneath invidious disabilities and penal laws, deprived of all the material advantages which spring from good education, brilliant careers, and fine prospects. Despair of this world had become a part of their inheritance, and it is no wonder that their successors to this day are somewhat rustic and unskilled in the ways of cabinets and courts.
[Footnote 120:Flanagan's English and Irish History, p. 665.]
The Catholic revival, in short, in England—a revival of whose reality and strength we daily see the proofs—is not to be ascribed to external causes. No zealous autocrat, no lordly oligarchy, no foreign invasion, no laws, no concordats, have brought it about. Everything was against it, and everything seems now to favor it. Penal statutes, as decided and almost as deadly as those of the Caesars, forbade it; the Revolution of 1688 excluded from the throne any sovereign professing it; George III. fought against it as stoutly and more successfully than he did against the American Colonies; Pitt succumbed in his efforts to obtain for it some measure of justice; Fox abandoned its cause politically as hopeless; [Footnote 121] and the Grenville cabinet, with all the talents, was dismissed, because it planned a trifling concession to Catholic officers in the army and navy.
[Footnote 121: Pellew.Life of Lord Sidmouth, ii. 435.Jesse's George III. iii. 476.]
George IV., like his father, frowned on Catholic emancipation, and yielded to it only under the pressure of a threatened rebellion. But though political privileges were granted to Catholics, it was deemed impossible that their dark, decrepit superstition should ever regain its footing in England. The book of common prayer witnessed against it; the preface to the Protestant Scriptures called its head antichrist; a thousand and ten thousand pulpits thundered against it Sunday after Sunday; dissenters scorned and trampled on it as the worn-out garments of the Babylonish harlot; millions of tracts and volumes pointed out its supposed errors, and cart-loads and ship-loads of Bibles were dispersed through the land as antidotes to its poison. Yet it spread. It triumphed over obloquy. It appealed in its defence to that very Bible which was believed to condemn it. It courted inquiry. It asserted its own divinity. It baffled the law, bent the will of kings and parliaments, scattered the arguments of its enemies like chaff, and advanced steadily as the tide, sapping every dam, and levelling every breakwater that opposed its flow. In the bosom of the adverse church it found advocates, and in almost every family it made converts. New concessions are made to it in every session of parliament; higher and higher offices in the state and in the magistracy are entrusted to its members; the paltry restrictions which yet remain in force will soon be swept away, and having once obtained social and political equality, we have not the remotest doubt that it will obtain, also, superiority approaching as near to supremacy as will be consistent with the liberty of every other portion of society.
There is an increasing disposition among sectarians in England to make common cause with Catholics on a variety of grounds. One of these grounds has already been mentioned. They would willingly see national education everywhere made purely denominational, and many of those among them who are strongly attached to their own particular form of belief would concur with the Catholic primate in asking that the schools endowed by the state may, in each place, be given over to the majority, whether Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, or Dissenting, and that schools required by the minority may be supported on the voluntary system. [Footnote 122] There is, however, a difficulty in this proposal which would give rise to endless jangling. In some places there is no majority, religious persuasions are equally divided. In others the majority is small and fluctuating. What is the majority this month may be the minority in the next. How could their rival claims to endowment be adjusted in such cases?
[Footnote 122: Letter to Earl Grey, p. 20.]
But again, there is a growing disposition among religious men of all denominations to make common cause with the Catholic Church in her warfare against infidelity and social crime, particularly drunkenness. Their ministers now are constantly coming in contact with our priests, sitting with them on committees, and speaking side by side with them on platforms on subjects affecting the general weal. They are beginning to recognize the great fact that our war with infidelity is not of yesterday, that we have from age to age maintained the fundamental truths of revelation in the face of a world of scoffers, and that if the banner of the cross could fall from our hands, it would lie in the dust.Ritualists imitate our solemn rites; sedate churchmen have a friendly feeling toward us because we hold the apostolic succession; Biblical scholars in all sects defer to us as the mediaeval guardians and copyists of the Bible; Low-Churchmen endorse our doctrines of grace; Dissenters hold out to us "the right hand of fellowship," because we also are non-conformists as regards the Established Church; and even Quakers [Footnote 123] see in us some hopeful features when they hear us declare that we are affiliated in spirit to all who desire to know and obey the truth, and who err only through invincible ignorance.
[Footnote 123: See speech of Mr. Bright in the House of Commons, March 13th, 1868.]
As time goes on, they will give us more credit for spiritual acumen. They will see how justly we have estimated the claims of each successive pretender to religious inspiration and knowledge of divine mysteries. They will ratify our decision on theismsof this as of former centuries. They will admit, for example, that we have divined the true nature of animal magnetism, with all those extraordinary phenomena which perplex so many minds in England and elsewhere. To some persons these manifestations appear wholly impostures, to others they seem real and useful, and to others again, indifferent, absurd, and unworthy of attention. The church, on the contrary, after sifting the evidence adduced concerning them, pronounces them real in many instances, useless, unlawful, and Satanic. Theologians like Perrone and Ballerini have devoted long attention to them, and laid bare their wickedness in its most deadly aspects. Under a mask of mingled absurdity and terror, they reveal just so much of the invisible world as may deceive and ruin souls. They are horrible mimicries of the angelic and spiritual economy of the church. In all these phases of mesmerism, somnambulism, clairvoyance, table-turning, table-rapping, and evocation of spirits, they testify to the truth of divine revelation in respect to the spiritual world. So far they are of some advantage, for the evil one is always rendering involuntary homage to the Gospel which he seeks to pervert. But in exchange for this, they draw deluded multitudes away from the true and lawful way of holding communion with the dead, piercing the mysteries of the world unseen, obtaining divine guidance, mental illumination, cure of bodily infirmities, signal answers to prayer, visions, ecstasies, and knowledge of future events. From none of these things are the faithful debarred in the church, but in spiritism, or demon-worship, they are attracted to them in ways which are generally fatal to their morals and their faith. We have heard from an intimate ally of Mr. Home, now a convert to the Catholic Church, that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred those who put themselves in communication with spirits by means of table-speaking, lose their belief in the Christian religion and adopt a loose mode of life. The political grievances of which English and Irish Catholics have still to complain, are of old not of recent origin. They belong to a system now virtually exploded, and if our statute-book were atabula rasathey could not be written in it again. There is full proof of this in the fact that Great Britain legislates for her colonies more justly than for Ireland, or even for England. In Sydney and Melbourne, in Australia, there are Catholic colleges endowed by the government, and in Canada there is an endowed Catholic University. Yet Ireland, with 4,500,000 Catholics, has hitherto asked in vain for the like favors.The colonies, moreover, are not burdened with a Protestant establishment, but lie open to the exertions of Catholic and Protestant missionaries alike, who receive from the state equal encouragement and occasional subsidies. The consequence is, that in almost every colonial dependency of Great Britain the true church is in full activity, and gives ample proof of her divine mission. The following table of our episcopate will show how wide is the field of action afforded to it by the tolerant system which England has pursued of late years. If she had not at the Reformation fallen from the faith, there would not perhaps at this moment be an idol temple in the world. If she should ever return as a nation to the fold of Christ, her mighty influence may, with the help of other Christian people, suffice to break in pieces every fetish and exorcise the races possessed by demons. The figures here given are of the year 1867; and it may be observed that in all the twenty vicariates of India, Burma, and Siam there was an increase of the Catholic population over the preceding year, with the exception only of those which are under the Portuguese Archbishop of Goa. In his province there was a small decrease. [Footnote 124]
[Footnote 124:Catholic Directory1868, p. 19 to 26.]
ArchbishopsBishopsVicarsApostolicEngland112...Ireland424...Scotland......3MaltaGozoGibraltar...21QuebecHalifaxOregonBritish ColumbiaHarbor GraceSt. John's, Newfoundland2172West-Indies112Africa...14India, Burma,......20Australia110...0New Zealand...2...Total96932
ArchbishopsBishopsVicarsApostolicEngland112...Ireland424...Scotland......3MaltaGozoGibraltar...21QuebecHalifaxOregonBritish ColumbiaHarbor GraceSt. John's, Newfoundland2172West-Indies112Africa...14India, Burma,......20Australia110...0New Zealand...2...Total96932
From this it appears that there are now no Catholics in the British empire invested with the episcopal office. The number is little short of that of the Anglican Bishops, with all the power and influence of the state, and a vast Protestant population to give effect to their exertions. Yet, poor and comparatively unaided as our bishops are, the results of their labors in the colonies and among the heathen far exceed anything which rival missionaries can boast. As to the Russian clergy, their torpor in regard to idolatrous nations has often been commented on, and they are strictly forbidden by imperial edicts to endeavor to make converts among them. [Footnote 125] It is therefore with Protestant missionaries only that we have to vie, and these, through their disunion, lose, in great measure, the fruits of their zeal. The two millions sterlingper annum, which their societies in the British isles alone expend, [Footnote 126] do not enable them to make head against the rapid extension of the Catholic faith. In China, India, Ceylon, the Antipodes, Oceanica, Africa, the Levant, Syria, Armenia, and America, they have signally failed in converting the heathen, and in rivalling the happy results of Catholic missions. [Footnote 127]
[Footnote 125: Wagner'sTravels in Persia, vol. il. 204.]
[Footnote 126:The Times, April 19, 1860]
[Footnote 127: Marshall'sChristian. Missions, vol. i. 9-15.]
Every Catholic nation is a vast missionary society, and if England had been such to this day, her Indian possessions would be basking in the full light of the gospel. But, alas! how awfully has she betrayed her trust. The speeches of Burke, the lives of Clive and Hastings, bear witness against her. Rapine and cruelty marked the earlier stages of her Indian government.During long years she left the Indians to their idols, and then recruited her treasury by a tax laid upon them, and commanded her troops to pay homage to the demons of the land. Her efforts for their conversion, if they can be called hers, are feeble and unsystematic, while Catholic missions in every part of British India are steadily conducted on a uniform plan. Eleven years ago there were about a million Catholics in the wide territory, and the spirit which guided S. François Xavier, Robert de' Nobili, John de Bretto, and Laynez, prospered the work of their hands. Since that time the Madras Catholic Directories show that constant progress has been made. In some dioceses from 500 to 1000 souls are reclaimed annually from Hindooism, Mohammedanism, and Armenian sects. The lives of the converts are often most edifying, and though much ignorance and superstition has to be weeded out of them, they show forth on the whole the glory of Him who has called them out of darkness into marvellous light. Registries of adult baptisms being kept at each of the stations, it is easy to ascertain the progress made. In 1859, 2614 adults in the province of Madura were received into the church, and the native college of Negapatam, frequented by young men of high caste only, had produced seven priests, eight theological students, a large number of catechists and school-masters, with several government officers. The Jesuit fathers had founded five orphanages and three hospitals, beside convents of Carmelite and Franciscan nuns, where Hindoo women, under the constraining influence of divine grace, led devout and austere lives. [Footnote 128] It has hitherto been the policy of our rulers to avoid interfering with the religion of the natives, [Footnote 129] but the time, we may hope, is at hand when more righteous and merciful principles will prevail in the councils of state.
By promoting schism, England delays the conversion of the heathen. Friends and foes alike testify to the inefficacy of English Protestant missions. They can destroy faith, but never inspire it; and those who desire to read the true records of the triumph of the cross in heathen lands, and especially in the dominions of Great Britain, must seek them, not in the publications of London Missionary Societies, but in the Annals of the Propagation of the Faith, and the writings of Mr. Marshall and Father Strickland. [Footnote 130]
[Footnote 128:Mission de Madurt, par L. Saint Cyr, S.J. (1859.)][Footnote 129: Marshall'sChristian Missions, vol. i. 412-419.][Footnote 130:Catholic Missions in Southern Indiato 1865.]
The present Earl Grey, though an Anglican, once said to a gentleman from whom we heard it, that he wished, for his part, that Catholic bishops only were supported in the colonies by the English government; for that they alone, in his opinion, were actuated by pure motives and self-sacrificing zeal. Earl Grey does not stand alone in his truly liberal sentiments. Indeed, it is wonderful how generous and enlightened many of our statesmen have become suddenly, since the Fenians have threatened their English homes. Impossible as it is for us to defend their conspiracy, it seems to bear out the assertion that no people ever obtained their rights by mere remonstrance and petition. The injustice of maintaining a Protestant establishment in Catholic Ireland now flashes upon our rulers like light from heaven, though they have been told of it before a thousand times. Now they are as eager for its destruction as they were for its support. Now they see the matter as all Europe, all the civilized world except themselves, saw ft long ago.Now they quote with approval the question proposed by Sir Robert Peel: "This missionary church of yours, with all that wealth and power could do for her, can she in two hundred years show a balance of two hundred converts?" Now they endorse the opinion of Goldwin Smith, that "No Roman Catholic mission has ever done so much for Roman Catholicism in any nation as the Protestant establishment has done for it in Ireland." [Footnote 131] It has, to use Mr. Bright's words, "made Roman Catholicism in Ireland not only a faith, but absolutely a patriotism." It has made the Irish "more intensely Roman than the members of their church are found to be in almost any other kingdom in Europe." [Footnote 132] "Don't talk to me of its being a church!" exclaimed Burke. "It is a wholesale robbery." "It is an anomaly of so gross a kind," said Lord Brougham, just thirty years ago, "that it outrages every principle of common sense. ... It cannot be upheld unless the tide of knowledge should turn back." "Irish Toryism," wrote John Sterling, in 1842, "is the downright proclamation of brutal injustice, and that in the name of God and the Bible!" All this English statesmen, who long obstinately resisted truth and justice, now see and acknowledge from a conviction too prompt to have been inspired by anything but fear. Terror has been known to turn the hair gray in a night, and to fill the mind with wisdom in a day. In saying this, however, we do not mean to express any approval of Fenianism, knowing it, as we do, to be a detestable conspiracy, secret, unlawful, and condemned by the church.
[Footnote 131: Letter inMorning Star, March 30, 1868.]
[Footnote 132: Speech in the House of Commons, March 31.]
The disestablishment of the Irish Protestant Church will directly affect the condition of the Catholics in England. It will place their Irish brethren on a social level with Protestants, and thus add to the respectability of the entire body of Catholics in the three kingdoms. It will diminish the number and influence of those Irish Protestant clergymen who cross the channel year by year to declaim on the platforms of our halls and assemblies against the supposed corruption of the Church of Rome. It will remove ten thousand heart-burnings from the people of Ireland, and enable them, though differing in religion in some districts, to live together in peace and harmony. It will increase self-respect in both sections of the community—in the Protestant, because they will no longer be grasping oppressors; in the Catholic, because they will no longer be fleeced and oppressed. The relative merits of their creeds will then have to be discussed on even ground, and no weapons but those of the sanctuary will avail in the fight. The voluntary system by which their ministers will be supported will throw them entirely upon their moral resources, and every adscititious aid in propagating their belief will be happily rescinded. The settlement of the Irish Church question will soon be followed by legal improvement in the condition of tenants as regards their landlords; and thus the two crying evils of our Irish administration being redressed, speculation will be encouraged, commerce will thrive, fortunes will be made, emigration will be arrested, and emigrants recalled. The church of Catholics will share in the general prosperity, and chapels now little better than mud hovels will be razed to the ground to make room for buildings stately and fair as the collegiate churches of Windsor, Middleham, and Brecon, in the olden time, or as the Priory of Stone, the Orphanage of Norwood, and the College of St. Cuthbert, near Durham, at the present day.
There is at this moment a concurrence of events favorable to the Catholic religion in the British empire, such as never was seen before since the Reformation. No fires of Smithfield, no renegade queen like Elizabeth, no Spanish Armada, no Gunpowder Plot, no Puritan ascendency, no despotic house of Stuart, no Pretender, no Titus Oates, no French or other foreign invasion, no Lord George Gordon, no rebellion like that of Robert Emmett and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, is looming in the distance, marring the prospect, and nearing us to turn hope into despair. Even Fenian outbreaks are, we believe, anticipated and virtually undone. Every sun that shines is ripening the harvest, and were it not that the enemy is more busy than ever in sowing tares, we might expect that within a century the whole, or at least the larger part, of the population of the three kingdoms would be included in the domain of the church.
What we have most to dread is the spread of unbelief in its subtlest and most engaging form. It comes among us with stealthy tread, and with the smile of hypocrisy on its face. It professes respect for the Christian religion, but with homage on its lips carries contempt in its heart. It regards all religions as superstitious, and the Christian as the best among bad ones. It pervades every branch of our non-Catholic literature, and offers fruit slightly poisoned to every lip. It combats dogma and the supernatural in every shape, appeals in all things to the senses, sets up humanity as its idol, and studiously confounds the distinction between right and wrong. It maintains the authority of Scripture, provided all that is supernatural and miraculous be eliminated. It reveres Jesus Christ when placed by the side of "the mild and honest Aurelius, Cakya Mouni, [Footnote 133] and the sweet and humble Spinoza." [Footnote 134] It cites as examples of men "most filled with the spirit of God," Moses, Christ, Mohammed, Vincent of Paul, andVoltaire. [Footnote 135] It inscribes the name of Christ on volutes in tapestried drawing-rooms, [Footnote 136] together with those of Socrates, Columbus, Luther, and Washington. It affirms that "we can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion," [Footnote 137] and that "no one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that, as a thinker, it ishis first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead." [Footnote 137 (sic)] It approves of "hearty good-will evinced toward all persistence of endeavor, whether the object of that persistence begood or evilaccording to moral or religious standards," and it is drawn strongly into sympathy with such poets as Robert Browning in their "keen love for humanity as such, a love which is displayed towardweakness and evilas much as toward strength and goodness, provided only the attribute be human." [Footnote 138] Such sympathy with all that is human it accounts "divine." It worships, in short, the creature more than the Creator; it feels no need of grace, and still less of atonement. It relapses, consciously or unconsciously, into the frozen zone where Comte reigns supreme master of a system of icy negatives called philosophy—negatives the more specious because veiled under the term positivism—where all but facts attested by the senses must be renounced, and all final causes, all supernatural intervention, scattered to the wind. [Footnote 139]
[Footnote 133: The fourth Buddha.][Footnote 134: Renan.Vie de Jesus][Footnote 135:Autobiography of Garibaldi. Edited by Alexandre Dumas.][Footnote 136: In Victor Hugo's House in Guernsey. See hisWilliam Shakespeare, p. 568.][Footnote 137: John Stuart Mill onLiberty, p. 19.][Footnote 138: John T. Nettleship'sEssays on Robert Browning. Preface.][Footnote 139:Cours de Philosophie Positive, 1839.Politique Positiviste, 1851-4.]
Toward this the Protestant mind in England is daily tending with increasing proneness, that portion only excepted which looks upward toward Catholic ritual and dogma. Its presence is more and more apparent among educated men, in Parliament, the universities, the learned professions, the reviews and journals of the day. It is an enemy that meets us in every walk, and is more difficult to grapple with than any definite form of error. It objects not merely to this or that part of our Creed, as Lutheran s and Calvinists did on their first appearing, but it meets usin liminewith doubts which pagans would have been ashamed to profess. Even writers on the whole Christian, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, have aided in forming it; but Neology, Strauss, Comte, Mill, Carlyle, Sterling, Hugo, have brought it in like a flood. Mazzini propounds it openly inMacmillan's Magazine, while theSaturday Reviewand thePall Mall Gazetteadapt it weekly and daily to the palate of the million. Not that the free-thinkers are agreed together; they often jeer at each other. "Singular what gospels men will believe," cries Carlyle, [Footnote 140] "even gospels according to Jean Jacques." Butthisis the language of each, "Adieu, O church; thy road is that way, mine is this. ... What we are goingtois abundantly obscure; but what all men are goingfromis very plain." [Footnote 141]
[Footnote 140: Thomas Carlyle'sFrench Revolution, ii. 70.][Footnote 141: Carlyle'sLife of Sterling, p. 286.]
These, then, are the two great antagonists, the Catholic Church and Infidelity in its last and most popular shape of Positivism. People in England are choosing their sides, and drawing nearer and nearer to one or the other of these champions. Minor differences are merging into the broad features which distinguish the two. To the positivism of Comte there stands opposed the positivism of the Church. She alone speaks positively, authoritatively, uniformly, and permanently, respecting the invisible world, the First Cause, the revelation of God in Christ, in the Gospel, the Scriptures, and the Church. She bears witness at the same time of God and of herself, and even those who cannot accept her testimony admit that of all the enemies of infidelity her presence is the most imposing, and her language the most unwavering and distinct. None can accuse her of hostility to science, for the Holy See in this, as in all past ages, has repeatedly declared with what favor it looks on really scientific labors. "It isimpudentlybruited abroad," wrote Pius IX. to M. Mahon de Monaghan, [Footnote 142] "that the Catholic religion and the Roman pontificate are adverse to civilization and progress, and therefore to the happiness which may thence be expected." "Rome," says theDublin Review, [Footnote 143] "does not aim directly at material well-being; she does not teach astronomy or dynamics; she propounds no system of induction; she invents neither printing-press, steam-engines, nor telegraphs; but she so raises man above the brute, curbs his passions, improves his understanding, instils into him principles of duty and a sense of responsibility, so hallows his ambition and kindles his desire for the good of his kind and the progress of humanity, that, under her influence, he acquires insensibly an aptitude for the successful pursuit even of physical science, such as no other teacher could impart.
[Footnote 142: SeeRome et la Civilisation. Paris, 1863.][Footnote 143: April, 1866, pp. 299, 301.]