thought to hear again: the charge of being a danger to the State; the argument that our religious professions are not consistent with perfect loyalty to our country, that if we are perfectly correct Catholics we cannot be perfectly reliable citizens.

There is an answer to this charge which many Catholics are making with perfect ease. They are declaring their repudiation of the line of conduct followed by the Irish clergy; they are confessing their disappointment at the absence of any sign of disapproval, on the part of the Holy See, of German violence and pride and ambition. But this answer is not adequate or sufficient. It is an answer dependent on their policy and conviction in regard to the practical questions at issue; it is not an answer to the objection by which they are confronted. Were they inclined to doubt the wisdom or the justice of the Conscription Bill for Ireland, they would not meet the charge in the way that they have done.

As I have said, it is an old accusation with which we are dealing; one that has been rebutted in various ways, denied by Catholics, despised and condemned by Protestants, but it has never been satisfactorily quashed; nor will the spectre be finally laid to rest until both accusers and accused realize how fundamental are the principles involved.

English dread of Roman Catholicism-that dread which beset and delayed the process of Emancipation-is grounded on the belief that the absolutist monarchical form of the Roman Catholic Church is a menace to State authority. Even the spiritual power of the Pope might complicate our political life, but the danger is tenfold greater from the fact that the Pope claims temporal as well as spiritual authority, and a kind of super-temporal authority into the bargain. He is, as all Catholics admit, their supreme spiritual ruler; he is also a temporal sovereign in claim and desire, if not in fact; he is, lastly, and this is the point of greatest moment, a ruler who maintains the right to prescribe political conduct in so far as it may subserve spiritual ends; to claim Catholics as subjects to the Papacy in addition to their character as citizens of the State to which they belong.

Now England is the first country in the world to recognize the rights of conscience; and perhaps, for this very reason, is the country in which the misgivings which thus

arise would become most acute. For what is the position, if Catholics were to grant the full creed of Ultramontanism as the English mind here conceives it? The position is that, as all persons of religious mind will admit, a spiritual duty is higher than a political one. Hence, given that our religious duty as Catholics is found to conflict with our national duty as Englishmen; given that the lord of our souls asks of us something contrary to the demands of our civil rulers; our conscience will teach us to obey the former rather than the latter. Hence, says the Englishman, we are not always to be trusted, for, if we do as we think we ought to do, we are morally bound to be politically untrustworthy.

It follows that Catholics can give no final and satisfactory answer to the charge that periodically confronts them without a more serious examination of their real belief in these matters. The question of Ultramontanism, in its extreme form, has to be faced, and, with it, the whole question of religious and ecclesiastical authority. We can be content with vague ideas on the subject until we are brought in contact with a live and concrete difficulty; until the question of authority, and its limits, affects our own lives and interests, and not merely the ideas and convictions of others, or fields of knowledge and life in which we have no part or interest.

We shall find, when we examine the subject more deeply, that it is not only in religious matters that the problem exists; that a certain Ultramontanism has a part in political as well as religious life; that there, too, the problem has been neglected, to the injury of our political welfare. We shall find, in fact, that ideas are more influential than the English mind perceives, and that they will make their way to the surface in the shape of physical forces when their spiritual import is not recognized.

Let us now glance through the history of Roman Catholicism in a non-Catholic England, and see how this charge of disloyalty has worked itself out; often forgotten, frequently repudiated, but never finally dissolved.

Setting aside the more brutal personal motives of Henry VIII., the severance from Rome was begun and completed in resentment at foreign interference, and from the ambition to make our kingdom a perfectly self-contained State. Ultramontane influences have been so persistently exercised over the

Catholic mind in England, since 1870, that few English Catholics now realize how much less plain and defined was the position of the Holy See in relation to the Church in England when Sir Thomas More died rather than deny the Papal Supremacy, than it has now become.

One of the noblest and most pathetic features of his attitude was its undogmatic character. He would not condemn the opinion contrary to his own; he endeavoured to win no one to his side; but he refused to say anything but what he deemed right and true.

By an irony of fate it was the king who first confirmed his belief in a doctrine which the king afterwards required him to repudiate:

'I was myself sometime not of the mind that the primacy of that See should be begun by the institution of God, until that I read in that matter those things that the King's Highness had written in his most famous book against the heresies of Martin Luther. At the first reading whereof I moved the King's Highness either to leave out that point, or else to touch it more slenderly, for doubt of such things as after might hap to fall in question between His Highness and some Pope, as between princes and popes divers times have done..

'But surely after that I had read his Grace's book therein, and so many other things as I have seen in that point . . . I have not read in any approved doctor of the Church that a temporal lord could or ought to be head of the spirituality..

'I say further that your statute is ill made, because you have sworn never to do anything against the Church, which, through all Christendom, is one and undivided, and you have no authority, without the common consent of all Christians, to make a law or Act of Parliament or Council against the union of Christendom.'

The two great principles which More here sets forth are, first, the distinction between spiritual and temporal authority, and the importance of that distinction; secondly, that of the union and solidarity of Christendom, a union that would be sacrificed by any branch of the Church that set up a supreme and final authority of its own and repudiated the common head and ruler.

The characteristic English dread of Roman Catholicism is grounded on the suspicion of any admixture of spiritual authority in temporal affairs; the danger that presented itself to the mind of Sir Thomas More was that of the lessening of the spiritual character of religion by the influence of temporal

authority. The specifically English dislike of the intrusion of any foreign element into national affairs inspired the ambition to form a State that should be as independent in ecclesiastical as in political matters; the belief that the universal character of Christianity could not be reconciled with the national character of a separate Church inspired Sir Thomas More's distrust of such a scheme. Never was there an Englishman of more truly English temper, never was there a Catholic more stalwart in his Catholicism, yet this Englishman died for his opposition to the first making of an English Church, and this Catholic died the loyal subject of his king, the lover of his native land. Yet he died under a charge of treason, and from then, onwards, this was the charge that Protestant Englishmen brought against their Roman Catholic countrymen, until their final emancipation, and even afterwards. They might declare their loyalty as often as they chose, but they were told that they had another master in the Pope, and that even though this master were spiritual, and not temporal, yet he was but a man, and was, at the same time, the lord of their conscience, and therefore the lord of their conduct. Hence it became the ever-recurring task of English Catholics to prove that the authority of the Pope had nothing to do with their life as citizens, and that their religious obedience to the Head of their Church could not conflict with their political duty to their sovereign.

The question was, as I have said, more open to discussion in those days than it now seems to the ordinary Catholic mind. The position of the Holy See was less defined, the claims of the English Church were more ambiguous. Furthermore, as has always been the case in religious warfare, there were other than purely religious questions at stake. In the first instance, the marriage of Henry VIII. with Anne Boleyn had raised the question of lawful succession, and later on a like complication arose in regard to the Stuarts. There was thus, in the mind of Protestant rulers, a valid excuse for uneasiness and suspicion. Religious discontent could find a pretext for rebellion which would not exist where the dynastic succession was entirely without flaw.

Yet, apart from these incidental aggravations, the distrust of English Catholics was politically grounded on the above stated charge of double and conflicting allegiance; the case

of Sir Thomas More was the case of subsequent Catholicism in England. In 1870, when dynastic disputes had long been laid to rest, the old accusation recurred in all its force, and was once more set forth by the pen of a Liberal statesman.

Glancing through the history of Roman Catholicism in England, from the time of Sir Thomas More, it is worth while to note a few salient examples of this theme, and to see how the charge was met by English Catholics.* First let us note the Bull issued by Pope Paul III., who, having inflicted the sentence of spiritual excommunication on King Henry VIII., proceeded to carry his action into the temporal domain by declaring him deposed from his throne, and absolving his subjects from their allegiance. Sir Thomas More was not alive to express an opinion on this event, but his double profession of spiritual independence and political loyalty leave us in no doubt as to what that opinion would have been.

Next we may note the oath prescribed in the reign of Elizabeth to every civil servant of the queen, who had to declare that:

'the queen's highness is the only supreme governor of this realm... as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things, or causes, as temporal; and that no foreign prince, person, prelate, state or potentate, hath or ought to have any jurisdiction, power, superiority, pre-eminence or authority, ecclesiastical or spiritual, within this realm; and therefore I do utterly renounce and forsake all foreign jurisdictions, powers, superiorities and authorities, and do promise that, from henceforth, I shall bear faith and true allegiance to the queen's highness,' etc., etc.†

Of this oath Charles Butler writes:

'It has been sometimes contended that the pre-eminence, spiritual authority and spiritual jurisdiction, mentioned in the acts which conferred the supremacy upon Elizabeth, ought to be understood to denote only that pre-eminence, supremacy and jurisdiction which the clergy or their courts receive from the state; and that the clauses in the acts, which deny the supremacy of the pope, were intended only to deny his right to that temporal power which the state, in consequence of its alliance with the Church, had conferred upon him.

Those who contend for this construction of the oath cite

*These historical notes are drawn from the Memoirs of Charles Butler.

↑ 'Historical Memoirs. Vol. I. p. 156.