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yet more marked difference between esoteric and exoteric knowledge is not accorded to the occupant of the Papal throne. In the ancient mysteries, there are many grounds for concluding, the aspirant was led on to a point where he was informed that all which up to that time he had been taught to hold with a literal faith was shadowy and symbolic. Sacred legends, sacred emblems, sacred places, the images, names, and persons of the gods themselves, were but symbolical of fragments of a deeper central truth-the truth of the One in whom all live, and breathe, and have their being. In one of the orders of knightly monks that fought for the Holy Land, and attained a sort of sovereign power in Europe (unless the Templars are much maligned), a somewhat similar secret doctrine was ultimately inculcated. And in a more ancient and widely disseminated order of men, associated for purposes of human welfare and brotherly charity, the entrance to which is surrounded by many curious precautions and pledges to secrecy, it is said that in the highest grades all oaths are relaxed, all promises retraced, and the Master Mason is left to the sole control of his own sense of honour and of propriety as to what he shall say and of what he shall be silent. It is very hard to regard the conduct of Pius the Ninth, at the crisis to which we have referred, without the suspicion that some special light of this nature was shed on his counsel, or guided that of his real advisers. Unless this be the case, his conduct must be regarded as purely imbecile and fatuous that of a spoiled child, and not that of a man of the most ordinary common sense. If he felt, in very truth, that he and his predecessors wielded

that tremendous spiritual power which they so loudly boast, and the limits of which they are so anxious to extend, or, indeed, to declare to be beyond the bounds of earth-it is inconceivable that he should not have grasped, with secret exultation if with outward hesitation, an offer that would have secured such a basis for the conduct of his rule of the Church as no Pope before his time could even have dreamed of attaining. The idea that a petty Italian sovereignty, the possession of which entailed rather humiliation, from the meanness of its extent, than increase of pontifical dignity, could give to the Pope such a status as that above indicated, may be dismissed from serious question. The sovereign of Rome had before now seen the city sacked by the troops of the Constable de Bourbon. That sovereignty had led to the seizure and shameful deportation of Pius the Seventh as well as of Clement the Seventh. It had subjected Pius the Ninth to the patronage of what he would himself be apt to term the scum of the French Revolution. Could an intelligent Pontiff hesitate for one moment, unless it were from the intimate conviction that the pontificate was a magnificent imposture, the charge of the Keys was a lucrative fable, and that the spiritual power was a splendid dream, to the delusive nature of which no human being could be so thoroughly awake as the Pontiff himself?

Whether Pius the Ninth was or was not the depositary of so tremendous a secret, we have no opinion to offer. If he were, to his memory is due that honour which is accorded to the brave, unflinching, and persevering defender of a position which he knows to be untenable, but which he will surrender only with his life. If he

were not, his character should be shortly summed up in a significant and disrespectful monosyllable. But leaving, perforce, this great question unsolved, there can be no doubt that, in other respects, Pius the Ninth has proved not only a sore saint for the Church of Rome, but a signal impugner of the authority, and impairer of the hope, of Christianity.

For a tree is known by its fruits. It may be the case, at times, that men will take fungus for fruit; but it is hard to prove that such has been the case with the developments given, in concrete form, to the floating faith of the Catholic obedience, by the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, by the Syllabus, and by the declaration of Papal Infallibility. In all cases where men of earnest faith, after long exercise of their minds, have split off from the Catholic unity, and have led other men so to split, the comfort that they have laid to their souls has been the idea that they reverted to the teaching of an earlier and purer age of the Church. Such was the hope of Luther, who dreamed that the Bible could be its own interpreter; that the possession of a book rendered a teacher unnecessary; that laws could work, and enforce themselves, without organised and authoritative ministers. Such has been the dream of Newman, of Döllinger, of Pusey. But in each of them, and of all similar cases, occurs the same terrible gap-a gap which has to be leaped, for it cannot be bridged. The claim of the historic Church is submitted to private judgment. To a man born in a certain obedience, and content to live and to die in the faith of his fathers, this question need not arise. In every great heretic-using the word in its original, and not in its abusive sense-it does. If authority be

once so impeached as to be submitted to private arbitration, its awful sanction is gone. Luther may lop off this; Döllinger that; Pusey proposes to substitute something else; the vital unity is broken. The destructive element of literary criticism once admitted, nothing remains, in the logic of events, but the exhaustive testing of all dogma by the same powerful solvent.

As to the probable result of such a process, when once exhaustively carried out, opinions of course differ very widely. In the anticipation of one school of earnest and able men, that result would be the reconsolidation of a perfect Catholic unity. In the view of others, it would be a free league of independent and partially differing religious communities.

In the

expectation of a third class of thinkers, it would leave unshaken very little of modern Christianity but the name. But whatever might be the positive result, the negative consequence would be certain. The principle of unquestioned authority would have received its death blow. The claim to represent Peter, the rock on which the Church was built, and in his name to rule and to legislate, giving account to no man, would be at an end. A Pope who was but the highest teacher of a scientific theology (supposing such a reconstruction of faith to be possible) would be altogether different personage from one who claimed to be chosen and moved by the Holy Ghost, and to utter the dicta of infallible truth.

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The actions of Pius the Ninth since, to borrow the idea of Mr. Trollope, he turned his thoughts from the condition of being a great king to that of being a great Pope, have all tended to increase this menacing peril to the Church. On all those points where eccle

siastical and scientific tendencies come most apparently into collision, the Syllabus has directed the full light of day. It has forced on the minds of men the solution of questions which they might never themselves have raised, and from the discussion of which the Church, assuredly, can derive neither power nor prestige. And it has done this with the certain, and almost the sole, result of producing a wide-spread irritation both within and without the Church. Thus with regard to the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, the definition of which was the first attempt to render generally obligatory_on the Catholic Church matters that the wisdom of her greatest rulers had been content to leave under the shadow of scholastic learning, the Pope challenged trouble. To those to whose minds the notion that the Virgin Mary had been from the earliest moment of her existence exempt from all human frailty brought a mystic comfort, the private teaching of the Church gave all the aid that could be desired. To those who felt that the very formulation of such a question was a sorrowful abuse of the faculty of articulate speech, and that the attempt to define it as a dogma was a negation of the wholesome action of the human mind, the proclamation of Pius the Ninth only proved the incompatibility of Catholic dogma and common sense. To this perilous issue has tended all the subsequent train of action-the Syllabus and the proceedings of the Council; in a recent account of which an English Cardinal has shewn so cynical an appreciation of the intelligence of his readers, not to say so remarkable an absence of respect for what should be the central characteristic of an historian. In each and all of these sinister proceedings has

been

betrayed a systematic endeavour, to use the words of Mr. Trollope, "to cause a doctrine, involving a more grovelling, more degrading, and more dangerous superstition than any which the 'ages of faith' had invented or tolerated, to be adopted as a constituent part of the Catholic faith." It has been a policy of combat, and already the world at large is more perplexed as to the origin of such a policy than doubtful as to its tendency and ultimate result.

The Constitutions of Loyola do not justify the historian in attributing to the chiefs of the Order of Jesus such a doctrine as wasbefore referred to, and illustrated by the history of the_earlier religious Order of the Temple. None of their works, as far as accessible to ordinary research, directly justify such an attribution. But we have only to recall the great name of Pascal to remind the reader to what results the moral teaching of the Order has long been held to tend. The history of the Jesuit missions, both in India and in Paraguay, is enough to shew that the Constitutions do not reveal the motive principles of the Order. The fact of the repeated suppression and banishment of a body of priests of such high culture and such educational activity, not only by Catholic princes, but even by Popes, is one of extreme significance. In committing the Papacy to an internecine struggle with all that the human mind holds to be of the province of ascertainable certitude as to truth, the Order of Jesus has presented to the world an enigma darker than any which has arisen from any former part of their eventful history.

The personal character of PopePius the Ninth becomes a matter of supreme insignificance when compared to the course of the great drama in which he has been, first,

an over-parted actor, and then an unconscious puppet. Nor has his been the case of a well-meaning fanatic, so confident in the truth of his own views that he has courted the light of investigation and the judgment of his contemporaries. We have lately had forced on our attention, by lectures, by lithographic correspondence, by advertised wager, and by legal trial, the dogma that the earth is flat. But Parallax proposed methods, though they told against him, by which to determine that what he stated to be the case was ascertainably correct. Pius the Ninth has stirred up against the Church, as constituted under his infallible headship, every element of human progress and of human civilisation. He has courted, and even forced discussion. But when it arises he can only reply, " Anathema sit." If this policy be, on the part of his advisers, that of a genuine despair -a sense that nothing can ever hereafter be hoped for by them except from the comparatively few who will give themselves up, body and soul, sicut ac cadaver, to this direction, it is intelligible, and even, to some extent, self-consistent. But unless a deep despair, founded on a dreadful and uncommunicable knowledge of the intimate untruth of their exoteric teaching, possess the counsellors of the Papacy, the conduct of the Pope since his return from Naples to Rome has been marked by a fatuous imbecility that might well have earned him the reputation of being a most signal jettatore-one whose eye was indeed evil, and which had done its mischief on the Church.

During what has appeared to be the long last agony of Pius the Ninth, there has been much stir as to some alteration in the law of Papal Conclave. The idea has been, and it has not been un

natural, that the secret counsellors of the Vatican would strain every effort to secure the succession of a Pope who would carry on, or at all events who would not reverse, the headlong race to ruin through which the Catholic Church has been urged during this pontificate. Of the wish to effect this, and of the power of the wishers to obtain any sort of aid or sanction that Pope Pius could give, there is little room to doubt. The counteracting influence is fear of the extreme danger which would be incurred by any such proceedings-danger, not to the actors, but to the Papacy. What feveror plague is to the human body, is in the body of the Church called schism. And schism, to a Roman Cardinal, means division of obedience as to the Pope. Of all evils that can afflict the Church, according to her great doctors, that of a disputed Papacy is the greatest. To prevent the recurrence of such an event, the law regulating the election of the Pope has been elaborated with the most anxious. care, amended with the maturest experience, and found to work. with admirable regularity, as far as that main object is concerned,. for centuries. It is not conceivable that any men should be so insane (unless, indeed, they were traitors in disguise) as to attempt in any way to proclaim a new Pope who had not the legal sanction of the suffrages of twothirds of the Cardinals who should enter into conclave on the decease of Pius the Ninth. The utmost that could be attempted, with any chance of success, would be to surprise a majority. As to this, there is a consideration to be urged which may probably have been well discussed in camera at Rome, but which has not attracted attention elsewhere. It is now thirty-one years since a Conclave

has been held, and the men left alive who have any personal experience of the ordering of such a solemnity are few. During that thirty-one years a change of such magnitude has occurred in Europe that the Court of Rome would find a full justification-if Rome at any time recognised change as a condition of human existence-in making a certain alteration in the law of Conclave. As that law has long stood, the space of nine days, which are occupied by the funeral solemnities for the late Pope, are allowed to intervene before the Cardinals enter the Conclave. Once entered, a Pope may be created in a moment, by the rare, but not unexampled, process of adoration.

However small the

number of the Cardinals present, the majority of two-thirds of them holds the tiara at its disposal. It is difficult to doubt that the Papal Court, which has a private reason for every public ordinance, fixed that delay of nine days with the purpose of allowing all the Italian Cardinals, and none of those who resided beyond the Alps, to be present at the opening of the Conclave. Divided as these prelates might be between themselves, yet the great object of excluding a French or a German Pope would give them a point of union-and at least an opportunity for such an accord was afforded by the existing law, under circumstances which no longer exist. For by the furrowing of Europe during this long pontificate by railways, and the binding together of all the episcopal cities by the wires of the electric telegraph, the time formerly required for sending notice of the death of the Pope is annihilated, and the time required for the journey of the distant Cardinals to Rome on the receipt of that summons, is immensely reduced. A Conclave

opened four and twenty hours after the death of the Pope would not now give the Italian Cardinals a greater start over their transalpine brethren than was afforded to them, before the introduction of steam locomotion, by the prescribed nine days of delay.

In that respect, then, there is a real and sound reason for the holding of a Conclave presenti cadavere, supposing the alteration of the law to have been made with due deliberation and formality. But it is hardly to be expected that a vote could be, even by this means, surprised. Interests are too personal, opinions too pronounced, Italian ecclesiastics, too wary, too timid, too accustomed to demand time for reflection, to render the success of a coup d'état of this nature probable. As to that, however, no one out of Rome, and very few persons in Rome, have the means of forming an opinion. In the hotbed of intrigue which precedes and accompanies a Conclave, the information of even the best informed loses its value if it is three hours old. It would be absurd to offer any prediction as to the issue of a Conclave. It may last an hour, it may last days, it may last weeks. That every provision which astute cunning can suggest will be-has been-made to secure such a successor of Pius the Ninth as would probably be found in Cardinal Apazzo, there can be no doubt. That the risk of schism must, to some extent, paralyse the energy of the party of the Syllabus, is probable, and that if it has not this effect a schism will ensue, is yet more probable. The whole question may be solved before these lines leave the hands of the printer's compositor; it may drag on until their argument is almost forgotten by those who read it. But sooner or later, for good or for evil, the Conclave that elects

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