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.

6

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?'

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

know was to respect. The atmosphere of the college at Malta, to which he was transferred, was different.

'I was unutterably shocked and disgusted by the general tone of the community; by the utter absence of all I had expected to find, and the presence of much that I should have deemed incredible. The dormitories were patrolled in soft slippers by night; the playground, the galleries, the outdoor offices watched with detective eyes. . . . To me it was quite new, and every sign of it was suggestive. The air seemed laden with sin and the suspicion of sin. As for the Society's spiritual standards and methods, these now attracted me less than ever. I thought, then as now, that the methods of prayer and examination were wooden, mechanical, and unreal; and though some of those whom I had met were good and lovable, I could not see that this was in any way a product of the system, since the most observant seemed the most disagreeable and the least charitable' (i, 183, 190, 191). Was it worth while to have come so far to find so little ? Was not this the lesson of the whole-that the Church' is not a problem to be solved by the individual, but, like nationality, a thing given-a foundation on which to build?

The Master of the Novices, under whom he was eventually placed, was the late Father John Morris. He was a man to whom many owe much; and, if Tyrrell's picture of him is unpleasing, it must be remembered that it is one of the paradoxes of the religious' life that this important post, perhaps the most important of the posts to be filled, falls so frequently in the distribution of offices to an incompetent or unsuitable person. By his novices, at least, he was feared rather than loved.

'He had a rasping and caustic manner, and a smile that ill became the natural severity of his features; and, like so many keenly sensitive people, he knew exactly how and where to wound, and was rather fond of displaying his skill. I have seen novices looking pale and ill with fright while awaiting their turn to go in to him for confession, or manifestation, or direction, or some other spiritual torture' (i, 201, 208).

The relations between the two were what might have been expected; Tyrrell's career in the Society all but came to a premature close. For him its Shibboleth remained Sibboleth: 'he could not frame to pronounce it

right.' He resented being slain at the fords of Jordan, and escaped by the skin of his teeth. Happier had it been otherwise! If you do not leave now, you will only give the Society trouble later on,' was Father Morris's warning to him; and he would add, when quoting it, 'Morris was right after all.' The thought must often have presented itself to those placed as he was then and later, How is it that the same position affects men so differently? that one is taken, and another left? Take Father Henry Kerr. It would be impossible to find a more honourable, sincere and manly character. Why can I not do as he does? a man of another type will ask himself; and will often suffer acutely from the suspicion of some secret flaw or weakness in himself which makes him falter where others stand. The answer is that the matter is one of temperament and outlook, not of character. Men of unspeculative and uncritical mind are untouched by questions which for others cut at the very root of action and moral life. Je vois autour de moi des hommes purs et simples auxquels le christianisme a suffi pour les rendre vertueux et heureux; mais j'ai remarqué que nul d'entre eux n'a la faculté critique.' With his mother's death (1884) the Autobiography ends. 'All these lesser troubles are submerged by the memories of one that had nothing to do with these self-induced, artificial interests, but with those which spring from our God-given natural affections, and which even Jesuit asceticism can never wholly uproot' (i, 278).

Here, rather than in the desolating scorice of ecclesiastical and theological controversy speaks the underlying, the real man.

The first chapter of Vol. II (the Life), 'Character and Temperament,' is a psychological appreciation worthy to rank with the Autobiography. It has been the writer's ambition that the man should stand out in her pages

'just such as he was, with his strength and his weakness, his greatness and his littleness, his sweetness and his bitterness, his utter truthfulness and what he himself calls his " duplicity," his generosity and his ruthlessness, his tenderness and

*

Renan, Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse,' p. 383.

his hardness, his faith and his scepticism. If the sum total be displeasing to a few, his biographer may regret it, but I know that he would not' (ii, 2).

Tyrrell was a man of strong views, which he expressed, on occasions, strongly. He was intolerant of convention, and would have scouted the notion that his 'position' limited his freedom either of thought or speech. His sayings were often startling enough. Speaking of the unwholesome sentiment too often encouraged by the confessional, 'If I had daughters,' he said, ' and if I let them go to confession at all-which is doubtful-I should make them go to a drunken priest, that there might be no nonsense of this kind'; and, of his relations with the Society, 'I am like a man who has married believing his wife to be a virgin, and has found out that she is not.' But these ebullitions were on the surface; a certain insight into the unseen was the anchorage of his soul. With it-the two are near akin -went a singular detachment not only from material things, but from the shadows cast by them-reputation, influence, the praise of man. Here he was peculiarly unEnglish. These things left him indifferent; he lived on another plane. He did not speak easily, or often, of religion; he disliked gush and was suspicious of anything like unreality; he left this side of himself to be inferred. He possessed what Renan calls 'le discernement des nuances'; but his mind, subtle as it was, was direct. He could be silent; but, if he spoke, he made his meaning unmistakably, sometimes disconcertingly plain. Nor was he a respecter of persons. The action of the Pope to Bonomelli is so purely worldly in its motive, and so cruel and brutal in its manner, that we must regard him as gone over to the potestas tenebrarum,' he writes (ii, 265); and to an English bishop who, he thought, had provoked one of his clergy into leaving the Church-' God will ask his soul at your feeble hands.' He did not suffer fools gladly.' He was intolerant of flattery; to approach him as an oracle was the surest way to make him withdraw into his shell. To Liberal Catholics of the political type he was an incalculable element. He was built on lines too different from theirs to make co-operation, or even understanding, possible. The more educated, temporising ultramontanism' (he writes), that shrinks from an inop