Tyrrell was not of their number. He had started on a road that had no turning; the end might be reached sooner or later, but it could be foreseen. For Catholicism represents an arrested development; to develop is, however unconsciously, to have left it behind. The successive stages of the conflict are of personal rather than general interest. His final break with his Order was the outcome of the famous Letter to a Professor' (1906)*; his excommunication followed his outspoken criticism of the Encyclical Pascendi' in the Times.'† In each case, as in that of Father Benecke, in Eleanor,' what he had said was 'what every educated man in Europe knows to be true.' That, as a Catholic and a priest, he was not in a position to say it may be admitted. But the admission is of doubtful benefit to orthodoxy; fact is the measure of dogma, not dogma of fact. The inevitableness of the end does not, however, justify either the means taken to precipitate it or the action of those who bring it about. These must be judged on their own merits; the impression left by the tactics of the authorities both at Rome and in England is painful in the extreme. Valde timeo ne aliæ molestiæ te maneant post ipsam secularizationem, quas fortasse neque suspicaris quæ necessario consequentur tuum novum statum et relationem cum auctoritate ecclesiastica,' wrote General on November 25, 1905 (ii, 244); it is impossible to doubt that the successive stages of the tragedy were deliberately planned. 'Agnosco stylum Curiæ Romanæ,' said Sarpi when stabbed by an assassin. The weapons employed against Tyrrell were subtler; their aim was the soul. No petty slight, no pin-prick which could exasperate a sensitive temper was spared him; he was attacked in person and through his friends. And his assailants were unseen; there was a conspiracy of silence (ii, 298-9). He was referred from one authority to another; everyone in turn endeavoured to shift the responsibility for the measures taken on to other shoulders-Jesuit to bishop, bishop to Jesuit, Rome to England and England to Rome. It is possible that some of those concerned acted under pressure and with a certain reluctance. The excuse is a * Since published under the title of A Much-Abused Letter.' Long1907. † September 30 and October 1, 1907. mans, poor one. Vaughan would have been more ruthless,' said one who had followed the matter in detail; but one would have forgiven him, because one would have known that he was sincere.' Wavering Anglicans will do well to mark the contrast between Protestant and Catholic standards; the life of Tyrrell-and the same may be said of that of Newman-is a powerful dissuasive from Rome. That he suffered acutely is certain; if this were the object aimed at, it was attained. 'The look of suffering and desolation that marked him during the first months after his severance from religious life and the rights of the priesthood was impressed, not only on his face, but on his entire frame, and will not easily be forgotten by friends who saw him at the time. There was something of the child in his nature and appearance; and in seeing him one thought of a child cast adrift in wind and rain and cold' (ii, 284). ་ He complained little; but it was impossible that certain obvious comparisons should not force themselves upon him at times it makes me very angry when I think of the sort of men who are allowed to say mass' (ii, 307). On the other hand, there was a natural reaction, intensified by certain developments of Vatican policy. ... 'I have felt the moral badness of Rome and the Curia so deeply and acutely these late years that I cannot take active service, as a priest, under such a canaille. . . . The Montagnini and Benigni * revelations have extinguished every spark of respect for the present personnel of the Roman See.' ('Life,' ii, 340.) It cannot be denied that his insistent logic had led him far, not only from the formal teaching of Rome, but from the received orthodoxy of the Churches. He separated criticism from authority, theology from religion; the two were in different kinds, and he carried out this separation with a disregard of consequences which may seem to some to ignore the difference be * Mgr Carlo Montagnini, an agent formerly attached to the Paris Nunciature, the publication of whose papers (1907) threw a significant light on Roman diplomacy (cf. the Nation,' April 13, 27, and May 4, 1907). Mgr Umberto Benigni, a prelate who has rendered important services to the Vatican during the Modernist controversy by his singularly adroit management of the Press. tween pure and applied science. In England, in particular, a certain distrust of Modernism showed itself as soon as it was seen-Englishmen, it may be remarked, took a long time to see it-that Modernism was part of the European mind-movement, and not merely a protest against the Pope. Tyrrell, however, was not English; and he had been subjected to a strain of which Englishmen have, happily, little experience. The bow had been stretched to snapping point; hence the violence of the recoil. To many it seemed that his 'vues synthétiques,' to borrow M. Loisy's phrase,* placed religion in a truer perspective than any in which it has been presented to our generation; he had at once the sense of the past, in which Protestantism is so often wanting, and that of the present, in which Catholicism necessarily fails. His apologetic is, therefore, of the first consequence-Newman's, with all its brilliancy, is the merest sophistry in comparison-but they mistake who think that it can be exploited in the interest of the Catholic, perhaps of any, Church. Never for a moment did Rome so misconceive it; from the first the Infallible gave no uncertain sound. Here is, and will always be, the Achilles' heel of the Catholic reformer. Speaking of De Maistre's criticism of Jansenism, Sainte-Beuve says: 'Il faut en convenir, il entame tout d'abord la place par le côté faible, par le côté non soutenable, par cette thèse dérisoire .... qui consiste à se prétendre catholique romain mordicus, comme on dit, et malgré Rome.' And again, 'Si c'était par habilité, par tactique politique, je le concevrais encore; mais, je le crains, pour eux c'était conviction entêtée: en ce cas— qu'on me passe le mot-c'est bête !' † The words might have been written yesterday. That men so able and so acute as those against whom they were directed, and those to whom, in our own time, they may be applied, should so completely have misconceived the situation, is a striking illustration of the part played by the subjective factor in human judgments. The distance between the actual Church and the Modernist ideal is, in itself, no barrier to the realisation of the latter; greater gulfs have been bridged. But an institution is limited by the law of its being. This, in the case of the Roman + Simples Réflexions p. 19, 'Port Royal, iii, 230, 93. Church, is infallibility; and infallibility means the arrest of life and the exclusion of change. This is the rock on which Modernism was broken; and on which every attempt at reform from within must necessarily break. The older Liberal Catholics believed that Rome might yet come to terms with the modern world; and, though the proposition that it could and ought to do so was condemned by the Syllabus of 1864, Harnack, writing of the Vatican Council, suggests that the weapon forged in 1870 may yet be the means of releasing the Church from the dead-weight of the past. Tyrrell saw more clearly. 'No sane Modernist thinks it for a moment,' he said; it seemed to him the most fantastic of dreams. He was aware that his position required justification. 'May I ask you to pray for me?' (he wrote in 1908 to the Old Catholic Bishop Herzog). The position I occupy is one of great spiritual danger and difficulty; but, so far, it seems imposed on me in the interest of others. Nothing would gratify Rome more than my overt secession to the Anglican or Old Catholic Church; and that gratification would be based on a right instinct that by such secession I had justified her position and facilitated her designs.' (Life,' ii, 384.) Other reasons against this course, 'not the sophistical reasons of popular controversy '-these he called traps for the ignorant-are given in Christianity at the Cross-roads. Opinions will differ as to their value; they will perhaps weigh more with those who view the matter from within than with those who view it from without. But under them all lay a predisposition; and this counts for more than argument. Argument comes from without. It finds itself in you indeed-or it fails to convince; but the external element, though assimilated, is not overcome. But a predisposition is yourself. If you want to change a man's religious or political opinions, go to work not at them-this is waste of time-but at his orientation. If Catholicism stands for the poetry of life to him, and Protestantism for the prose, then, supposing him a poet, no arguments will convince him; he will be a Catholic, disprove the Pope as you will. This is the key to much of the modern Catholic propaganda. The dogmatic basis has fallen into the background. The less said of it, it is felt, the better; it is accepted, nominally enough, not for its own sake, but as a condition of something of an other order-the romance of life, the totality of human experience, which (the suggestion is) is embodied in Catholicism, and ultimately in the Church of Rome. It is an extreme case of refraction. Not till the medium ceases to show the facts thus refracted can they be seen as they are. Now Tyrrell was obsessed by the idea of Catholicism. He believed that this idea could be embodied to a greater degree than, as experience shows, is possible. His temperament required a synthesis; and he was slow to think that, at present at least, no synthesis could be effected-that a spirit, a direction, a method must suffice. The Catholic and Roman Church contained, in the poorest and shabbiest of earthen vessels' indeed, this heavenly treasure; it stood, he thought, 'for the oldest and widest body of corporate Christian experience, the closest approximation, so far attained, to the still far distant ideal of a Catholic Church' (ii, 444). The shores of this heavenly country were, like those of Ausonia, 'semper cedentia retro'; conceived as a polity, it was a dream. He would not, perhaps, have denied this. And it is difficult to resist the conclusion that his idea of the Church struggled with limitations and contradictions which it never wholly succeeded in over-stepping; that the key to the grandiose conception of Catholicism is a spiritual unity in which differences are retained, but overcome. Stanley's fine paraphrase of Arndt's poem strikes a truer note. To the question Where is the Christian Fatherland?' it answers, "Thy Fatherland is wheresoe'er Christ's spirit breathes a holier air; Where round God's throne His just ones stand- His state of 'suspension mid-air' could hardly have been lasting; the motives which led him to adopt it grew weaker year by year. Apathy on the one hand and unbelief on the other made havoc in the Modernist ranks. The movement might have been in the Roman Church what the development of a scientific theology has been in the Reformed Churches-a refuge for many from |