that of the curious Greek, interested for their own sake in life and mind. The Chthonian deities were not his.

'I cannot remember any time of my childhood, or afterwards, when the fear of hell or desire of heaven had the slightest practical effect on my conduct, one way or the other. Even now (1901) it never enters into my calculations as an effectual motive; nor have I, as a Catholic, ever cared or tried to gain an "indulgence"' (i, 22).

His sensibility was extreme: he could not take the life even of an insect;-'when I lift a worm from my path, I say, "So may God deal with me." "Your heavenly Father careth for them," gives me warrant for my folly on this point; and I do not care to amend.' His naturesense was strong; and he received impressions on the side of art more readily than on that of science. The sea, restless, loud-voiced, and almost human in its changing moods, meant more to him than the remote and silent stars. Like all sensitive children, he led a secret life, the key to which only he who lives it possesses. Language is the setting of common and organised experience; what is personal is inarticulate, and falls still-born, unless a certain Socratic midwifery is at hand. It is for the teacher to supply this; in Tyrrell's case no teacher with the requisite gift presented himself at the critical time. He outgrew the 'picture-religion' of childhood, and found nothing to replace it. The invisible world offered no reality to his awakening reason.

'If I wanted to excuse myself, I should say that the truth had never really been presented for my belief; that I identified it with the absurd anthropomorphisms of my babyhood, which my first reason instinctively assigned to the region of fairy-tales; that no one tried to show me the difference between the symbols and the realities symbolised. I fancy that much unbelief is due to this confusion; and that what men deny is not God, but some preposterous idol of their imagination' (i, 71).

To bring home to them this distinction is the problem of religious thought and the work of the religious teacher. But its difficulties, at least in our generation, are such as it is impossible to overstate.

His first interest in religion was intellectual. The Irish Protestantism in which he was brought up was

not inspiring, and he did not separate its form from its substance; to the last, when he spoke of Protestantism, he gave the impression of not knowing what Protestantism is. Anglican ecclesiasticism offered an escape; but the path was slippery, and the first steps meant more than he knew. The starting-point given, the logic of ideas was easy; and it was checked neither by the experience of life nor by the positive knowledge which might have controlled it, and served as a reductio ad absurdum of the conclusions to which it led. The notion of system took possession of him. My first interest was in the very fringe and extreme outskirts of Christianity; and from these I was driven by force and need of consistency to its centre and core' (i, 102). Never was a better illustration of what may be called the fallacy of logic. The more accurately we reason from uncriticised premises, the further we are led from the truth. For him, given the point of departure, the process meant Rome. This, he believed, involved intellectual suicide.' But it was the goal to which Anglicanism of the ecclesiastical type was an impeded movement (i, 104). A mind such as his at the time, speculative rather than devout, acute rather than well-informed or disciplined, was bound to reach it. Whether he would find it more than a temporary halting-place remained to be seen.

A theologian might argue, with a certain plausibility, that by his own showing he was never a Catholic except in name. He would be faced by not a few embarrassing consequences; but it must be admitted that Tyrrell's Catholicism was of an exceptional type. Certainly the Gods exist,' says the prophetess in the Symposium,' 'but they exist in a manner peculiar to themselves.' This distinction must be borne in mind when his Catholicism is insisted upon. He was a Catholic-the 'Reflections on Catholicism' in 'Scylla and Charybdis' are perhaps the most subtle apologetic for Romanism ever penned-but he was one in a way peculiar to himself. It can hardly be maintained that a man who ' entirely denied the cecumenical authority of the exclusively Western Councils of Trent and the Vatican (ii, 383) was in any sense a Papal or Roman Catholic; it is difficult to think that the author of Mediævalism'

་

was, in the sense in which the word would be used, say, by Lord Halifax, a Catholic at all. He compared 'spiritual things with spiritual'; and his language could be as iconoclastic as that of Knox or Luther; the worst of a Catholic church is' (he would say) 'that everything in it is a lie.' To make such words the premise of a syllogism would, of course, be misleading. The idea that underlay the symbolism of Catholicism was dear to him; what he meant was that this symbolism was often outworn, and concealed rather than revealed the idea. 'I should miss the facile absolution round the corner,' said a friend who had come near to finding the Roman system impossible. 'If you can believe that it does you any good,' was the dry answer. These things were the work of men's hands. 'Be not afraid of them, for they cannot do evil; neither is it in them to do good.'

He exchanged English for Latin Christianity, as so many have done, on a misunderstanding. And if we ask, 'To what purpose was this waste?' we may remember that he did a work in the Roman Church which could not have been done outside it, and which probably no one but he could have done. If his own life was broken in the process, he would not, we may believe, have taken this over-seriously. Caution was not one of his gifts; and of other-worldliness,' the besetting sin of pietism and pietists, he was frankly contemptuous. I am well satisfied with my destiny as a wheel in God's mill, and find sufficient reward in the interests of life, its ups and even its downs; nor would I willingly purchase so dull a thing as personal safety at the sacrifice of such entertaining dangers.' This was very rare, very fine, and, from one point of view, very perilous; he lived dangerously, and on the edge of things. To those for whom religion centres in the individual, his course will seem that of a wandering star; and, indeed, it may be doubted whether the joy and peace in believing' which lesser men experience were his. He would not perhaps have paid what is ordinarily their price. I could not bear to think that there were faith or moral difficulties pressing on others of which I knew nothing, and that I owed my stability to any sort of ignorance or half-view' (ii, 96). His underlying doubts were never entirely dissipated; the ghost was there, and would rise at

times'; and, after all, my theistic doubts had never been quite slain' (i, 113, 225). The explanation was that he had begun at the wrong end. Theism is the foundation of Christianity; and, for Catholics, Christianity of Catholicism. For him this order had been inverted; the triangle stood on its apex, not its base. Hence a radical insecurity; the house was built on sand.

'I, in my dark and crooked way, almost began with Catholicism, and was forced back, in spite of myself, to theism, practical and speculative, in the effort to find a basis for a system that hung mid-air save for the scaffolding of mixed motives which made me cling to it blindly, in spite of a deepdown sense of instability. . . . I sometimes think that, had I, in early years, heard nothing at all about religion, I should have sooner come to the truth than was possible when my mind was blocked up with symbolic notions that I could not rightly credit, nor my instructors explain' (i, 112).

His own salvation he never considered as more than 'a slight probability'; in his inner life as in his outer he was the leader of a forlorn hope. It is not for those who seek the safety of lower paths to throw this in his teeth. Yet he had abandoned the common life to lead it; the conflict of duties had led him from the high road into a bye-lane. And retrospect was bitter; nature reasserted herself and claimed her own.

In 1879 he came to England with his friend, Robert Dolling. Dolling had an exceptional power of dealing with rough material, but neither his methods nor his associates commended themselves to Tyrrell's more fastidious taste. Ritualism of the shop-boy type repelled him. Take those things hence,' is his comment, and make not my Father's house a playground for fools' (i, 151). He had little taste even for Roman functions; the ceremonial seemed to him barbaric, the priests vulgar and coarse (i, 135). But here, at least, was the real thing. If Rome were true, Ritualism was a counterfeit ; if false, it was a sham of a sham. In a few weeks' time he had been 'received' by a Jesuit; and his connexion with the Order, we must take leave to call it his illomened connexion, had begun. 'Here was post-haste, and no mistake; from start to goal, from post to finish, in twenty-four hours. I had come out that afternoon with

no intention of being received; I returned a papist and half a Jesuit' (i, 162). He was a boy of eighteen, impressionable, temperamental, and young for his years. The intentions of those concerned need not be questioned. But is spiritual kidnapping too strong a word for the facts? He believed, he tells us, that the Society was moving with the sun, and not against it'; that its members were 'keenly alive to the religious problems of their age, and devoted before all things to the reconciliation of faith and knowledge' (ii, 463-4). Never, surely, did the wish to believe carry any human mind further from the credible! It was clear that nothing but disaster could come of an association resting on so grotesque a misconception of fact.

The English Jesuits, however, are scarcely representative of the distinctive characteristics of their Order. The days of Robert Persons and Edward Petre are over; and, though the policy of Pius X has led, in the Society as elsewhere, to a certain rise in the ecclesiastical temperature, this has been imposed from without, and is unlikely to survive the present Pontificate. Exceptions could, no doubt, be found, but the temper of the English province is moderate; and, had the local superiors been free to act upon their own judgment in the Tyrrell case, it is probable that matters would have been peaceably arranged. But their hand was forced by Rome; and their position, it must be admitted, was not easy. Temperament is out of place in a religious order; and in Tyrrell the temperament was the man. A friendly critic has hazarded the suggestion that he enjoyed himself hugely in his controversies with his superiors.' It may have been so; he was a born fighter, and his every blow told. The General, a stiff Spanish official, was as indifferent, it is safe to say, to the personal issues involved in the controversy as he was ignorant of its significance; the English Provincials, less ignorant and more sympathetic, were genuinely perplexed and distressed. The attitude both of the Irishman and the Spaniard lay outside their experience. But their instinctive question to each would have been that of Melbourne, 'Why can't you let it alone?'

6

His happiest time in the Society was an interlude of a few months spent in Crete under the late Father Henry Schomberg Kerr, an ex-captain R.N., and a man whom to