Part 23

The very existence of the Roman priest, the compensation for all he does or suffers, depends on that half-hour of the day when he meets his Lord. What an inexpressible privilege to have been preserved to, nay, almost enjoined upon, all her ministers. And how could the monk and the nun live but on the continual food of the Holy Eucharist, and the steadfast contemplation of the Incarnation? England has banished the monk and the nun, and popularly, in spite of her formularies, accounts the priesthood more than half a heresy; she has no provision among her institutions for the Christian Brother and the Sister of Charity, though her poor are perishing for lack of the bread of heaven, and her sick dying in uninstructed heathenism, and her young carried about with every blast of doctrine, ever learning and never coming to the knowledge of the truth. And together with those self-denying orders, which bear witness to the exuberant life welling forth out of the depth of the Church of Christ, England has banished the dogma of the Real Presence, not indeed from her theory, but still from being that vital and pervading practical truth which should animate and reward the labours of every day, and turn into consolation all the sorrows of humanity.

O that the Spirit of God might breathe the life of every day's practical action into those ancient Catholic formularies which are at present a reproach to our degeneracy! O that our deep and large chancels of old time, the figure of our buried Lord's sepulchre, might once more be the Bridechamber, where the risen Saviour descending should hold daily communing with His Church!

Most intimately connected with the dogma of the Incarnation, and its symbol, the Real Presence, is that of the Intercession of all Saints, especially of the Blessed Mother of God: nay, this may be said to be the continuation and carrying out of the Real Presence, so that wherever that is truly and heartfully believed, this will be, within due bounds, cherished and practised. For the truth that our Lord has assumed our flesh, and communicates that flesh to His true believers, leads directly to the faith that they who are departed and at rest with Him, and delivered from all stain of sin, do indeed "live and reign" with Him, and have power with God. And if this be true of the least saint, who by the mercy of God has been thought worthy of the Beatific Presence, in how much higher a degree is it true of Her, to whom by the assumption of her pure flesh Christ was brought so inconceivably near? And shall not we who are engaged in so weary a conflict call upon all saints, and Her especially, to aid and befriend us? "O ye spirits and souls of the righteous, bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him for ever!" Yea, praise Him, and magnify Him, by praying and interceding for us, who, high as ye are, and low as we, you exalted to glory, and we buffeted by the flesh, and led into error in the spirit, are yet your brethren by virtue of the Flesh and Blood of the Incarnate God, which made you what you are, which is the earnest to us of being one day what you are. Praise and magnify the common Lord who bought us, by supplicating larger supplies of His grace on us His suffering members. And may not we ask you, who dwell in sight of the Eternal Throne, but who once, like ourselves, bore the burden and heat of the day in this earthly wilderness, may we not ask you to turn your regards on us, to intercede for us before Him, whose members you are in glory, and we in trial? Of the redeemed family one part is with God and one on earth. Is there to be no communion between them, when one part most needs the aid of the other? Is this derogating from the glory of Christ? What a strange perversion of error which can so esteem it! Surely it is a sense, a spiritual touch, as it were, of the "cloud of witnesses," which inspirits Catholic hearts to win the battle, which enables the most lonely to feel that he is not alone, that he is encompassed and aided by heavenly hosts. Accordingly the intercession of saints, especially of the Blessed Virgin Mother, is a living truth in Catholic countries: it accompanies the doctrine of the Real Presence, and works in subservience to it. Doubtless where the former is not vividly held, the latter will be repudiated, and, perhaps, counted idolatrous. It would, indeed, be wholly out of proportion with the cold creed of the Unitarian or the Sectary: it might lead those to fall down and worship at the feet of a servant who did not behold in that servant the one image of the Lord, the seal and impress of the only Begotten, which claims all glory for the Lord of glory.

And a concomitant of the true doctrine of the priesthood is that system of confession which is the nerve and sinew of religion in Catholic countries. The English prayer-book says of every individual priest, "whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained." Here is the whole Catholic doctrine stated. Now this the Roman Church not only says, but acts upon. And its strength lies, accordingly, not in anything that meets the eye, gorgeous cope, or chasuble, or procession, or majestic ceremonies symbolising awful doctrines; not in anything that meets the ear, whether chanted psalm, or litany, or sermon touching the feelings, or subduing the understanding; though all these it has, its strength lies deeper in the hidden tribunal of conscience. The good Christian is not he who attends mass or sermon, but he who keeps his conscience clean from the attacks of sin, who, overtaken in a fault, has straightway indignation upon himself, and submits himself to the discipline which Christ has appointed for restoring him. The efficacy of the pastor must entirely depend on the knowledge of his people's state, and his power to correct their sins, and to guide them in their penitence. How he can possibly have this knowledge, or power, or guide them at all without special confession, I see not: nor how he can ever exercise the power conveyed to him at his ordination, and lodged by Christ in His Church for ever. This is the true bond between the pastor and his flock: the true maintainer of discipline, and instrument of restoration. Accordingly, in Catholic countries, we see the priest truly respected, cherished, and obeyed _by his flock_, however much he may earn the dislike and suspicion of the worldly and unconverted: in Protestant countries we see the pastoral office a nonentity; the shepherd of his flock is virtually a preacher of sermons. He knows the plague is ravaging them, but they will not bear the touch of his hand: he must see them perish one by one, but they will not let him help them: when mortification has begun, then he is called in to witness a hopeless dissolution, or to speak peace, peace, where there is no peace.

The dogma of the Incarnation and the Real Presence has again the closest affinity with that of the Priesthood. Christ is present in His Church, for the Priest in the tribunal of penitence is as God Himself. How vain, how worse than blasphemous, would be the attempt to absolve from sin,--surely the maddest infringement of Divine Power which mortal ever imagined,--had not He, the partner of our flesh and blood, said, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost: whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them, and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained;" and "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." No blasphemy can approach the Church's blasphemy, if it be not God's truth; and if it be, so deeply touching the secret springs of discipline, in what state is a branch of the Church of Christ, which utterly neglects this truth in practice, and allows it with impunity to be denied, and derided, and calumniated? Whose children from their infancy have scarcely ever heard it? Whose full-grown men turn from it in all the hardness of rebellious manhood? And if it be what it is, either a Divine Power, or a diabolic deceit, can that be at once the Gospel, which has it and which has it not?

Here then, again, we have no new thing to take up with, but simply to practise what we already solemnly profess.

Thus the perpetual recurrence to the doctrine of the Real Presence, the prominence given to the Intercession of Saints, especially of the Blessed Virgin, and the real putting forth of apostolic power in the tribunal of penitence, are striking features in the Roman Communion. By these she proves that she has living power as a portion of Christ's Church, by living upon and dealing with the most awful powers: as she holds the true doctrine, "Believe that this is so, because I say it, and I say it because it has come to me from Christ through His Apostles," so she exhibits the convincing proof of her mission: "Believe that I am the Church, for behold me exercising the supernatural powers of the Church." This is that inward proof which convinces, which is nothing technical, merely intellectual, or matter of argument, but like St. Augustine's "Securè judicat orbis terrarum,"--"A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid." And the Anglican portion must prove, in act as well as in theory, her identity with this of Rome, from whom she has her succession, and with that other great Oriental Communion, the joint-witness herein of Catholic truth and practice. Her prayer-book has the deepest accordance with the Catholic system. Will she in act continue to put a false interpretation on the words of her own formularies, or will she read them practically in the sense of those from whom she took them?

Among minor things, which yet we have suffered loss and harm in giving up, may be reckoned the custom of crossing with holy water on entering a church, with hearts as directed, full of reverend thoughts, and of "trust in the merits of Jesus Christ," and the custom of bowing on passing the altar. It is sad to contrast the manner in which English abroad and at home enter the House of God with the reverence shown by the right-minded in Catholic communities. A still more to be regretted omission is that of the Crucifix, which might, with much edification, appear prominently at least in one part of the church, over the rood-screen or over the altar. How often, in France or Italy, passing some retired village, or at a turn in the road, may one admire a Crucifix, large as life, sanctifying the village green, or making a shrine of some leafy recess? How often does the tedious ascent of a hill bring to mind, by its wayside memorials, the hill of scorn up which He, our only hope, slowly toiled in suffering? Is it not a tenderness to the tired wayfaring man to bring before his thoughts the very form of Him in whom all labour is made sweet? Who that has climbed the rocky stairs of the S. Gothard pass has not felt refreshed and inspirited by the Cross crowning the heights which look down on the last valley of the Italian side? As the way before him becomes narrower and steeper, frowning in arid desolation, and shut in as it seems on all sides, that Cross is to Christian thought a sign and token, that through the sternest valley and up the hardest height there is yet a way, though we see not our path before us. In faith the traveller goes on till height after height is won, and terrace after terrace surmounted, and the one road opens before him. Shall then the English labourer, doomed beyond most others to be a hewer of wood and drawer of water, be deprived of the aid of those symbols which shall tell him that this too may be made the way of salvation? Has his duller eye and less imaginative thought less need of the painting and the sculpture to inform them? Has he become more reverential since remembrances of his Saviour have been put out of his sight? Does his bearing in the House of God show a more chastened and humbled spirit of contrition since the Rood has been taken from before his eyes on which the God-Man was portrayed in suffering? What!--are those who deem it almost the whole of religion to put forward continually the sacrifice of the Cross, consistent in removing carefully out of sight the visible representation of that sacrifice? Is every memorial of our redemption to be scrupulously swept away from the face of the country?--nay, even from the interior of our churches? Out upon that detestable puritanism, devoid alike of heart and imagination, which has so successfully laboured to take away from England--once pre-eminently the isle of faith and love--every outward characteristic of a Christian land. I am, with shame, obliged to feel and confess that a pious Roman Catholic, coming to England, so far from being touched by the purity of our faith, or the warmth of our love, would probably be shocked at every step by a subtle irreverence, which has affected our whole tone of thought and mode of action in holy things. It is become the atmosphere which we breathe, by which even the instinct of the true Christian mind is so deadened, that it cannot be aware, without going out of it, how much we have lost

On the other hand, there are parts of the Roman discipline which have struck me very unfavourably. First, the employment of the Latin language in all the administration of sacraments, and in most of the public services. That in the middle ages, before modern languages had attained order, consistency, and beauty, and while they still appeared mere hewings of Latin by the barbaric sword, ecclesiastics should have been unwilling to desecrate, as it were, so solemn a service as the Mass, by rendering it into misshapen ever-changing sounds, I can well conceive. But this state of things has long passed away: nor can I imagine how a devout population can endure to have the Psalms of David chanted, and the most holy and most beautiful form of words which ever was put together, recited in a tongue they understand not. Even those who can fully enter into the stateliness and imperishable beauty of the Latin tongue must surely feel it a grievous disadvantage, that devotions, which should carry the whole heart with them, are not presented through the medium of that mother tongue, the accents of which speak to every man's heart by the force of a thousand nameless associations, as those of no other tongue can. How, indeed, in country parishes, where there is little music, interest can be kept up in the services, I do not understand. It is true the Sacrifice of the Mass does not depend on the language by enunciating which it is consummated; but was that sublime harmony of thoughts and words the most elevating intended to be inaudible? For even at a Low Mass, when I had the book before me, and the officiating priest at the distance of ten feet, the whole Canon of the Mass was inaudible. In a chanted Mass it is out of the question distinguishing any words. I should feel this more than I can express. Besides that it gives scoffers the pretext of saying that the Roman Church aims at making her services a mere spectacle, or mainly a spectacle,--an infamous calumny indeed, but which this unhappy locking up her praises and prayers in the Latin tongue tends to substantiate. Sure I am that if the Anglo-German race be ever restored to the communion of the Latin Church, as I fervently pray that mercy may be reserved for them by God, this custom as regards _them_ must be changed. It is a matter of discipline, merely, of course; or, whatever I might be tempted to think of it, I should not so speak.

Again the reservation of the cup to the sacrificing priest, an admitted innovation and exercise of authority, is one for which I can see no adequate reason. And though the doctrine of concomitancy seems involved in that of the Real Presence, and I, for one, should recoil with horror from the thought that almost every one in the Latin Communion has been for ages deprived of the participation of the chief Sacrament, and though one may allow that this custom was very prevalent before it was enacted, and arose out of reverence, and renders the administration of the Sacrament much easier, still I cannot reconcile myself to the necessity of it. Granting that power exists in the Church to order it in case of necessity, wherein lies that necessity? In case of a reconciliation this point must surely be granted, as it was granted to the grand Duke of Bavaria, though he was induced not to avail himself of the grant.

Preachers in the Roman Church use no book: it seems the people would not tolerate a written discourse. The result is, that sermons are much more rhetorical, and rather appeal to the affections and feelings than to the understanding. The French mind certainly would not endure the sort of cut and dried essay which is often given in England; yet an appreciation of logical order and sound reasoning is the very characteristic of the French mind. More southern nations would still less enter into the style of preaching in vogue with ourselves. I think it is a grave question whether the faculty of expressing one's thoughts in public without book should not be made a part of every priest's education. The ancient Fathers all did so. Is not our own the only portion of the Church where a contrary practice prevails? And dangerous as it would be for the generality of Anglican priests to attempt to speak on grave points of doctrine without their book before them, yet surely by a special education the power may be acquired to combine accuracy of thought with readiness of expression. Orthodoxy has no natural connexion with a written sermon. At least the power of illustrating any given subject without book is a precious means of influence. And what is the priest without influence?

No more interesting spectacle is there in the world, to my eyes, than the aspect and attitude of the French Church. Fifty years after such an overthrow as no other Church ever survived, behold forty thousand priests at work, under eighty bishops, in the great task of winning back their country to the faith. Despoiled of all territorial power, of all political authority as priests, of the possession even in fee of a single church, parsonage, or palace; reduced to a state of even apostolical poverty, and receiving a miserable salary paid as to merchants' clerks by the government; with a temporal power jealous of all spiritual influence, and the whole mind of the nation infected with infidelity--year after year they are winning ground, they are making themselves felt; they present a front before which even the tyranny of centralisation pauses in its career, counts ever and anon the cost of the conflict, and recoils from its aggression. In the very midst of the corruptions of Paris we are told that fifty thousand converts, the pure gold of the Church, exist as a centre which is ever drawing more around them. Infidelity itself talks of the religious movement, and fears it, and would fain expel its most tried and valorous champions--two hundred destitute men, who begin their profession by the renunciation of their goods. How is all this done? What power is this which makes its way against such tremendous odds? If any fact was ever patent in history, it is this--let us not be ashamed to own it--_it is the power of the Cross_. The bishop, residing in a palace which he has not the funds even to keep in repair, with a smaller income than a little tradesman or a country attorney, has no other channel for his cares and affections than those five hundred priests, who, with the pay of day-labourers, yet charged with the intimate knowledge and perilous guidance of souls, look up to him as their head and support, their defender and champion. And in every village there is one at least, linked to earth but by a spiritual tie, a member of a great hierarchy, through whom the Redeemer rules visibly on the earth. He is cut off from almost all participation of temporal things, but the larger is his portion of things spiritual: he reflects, in his degree, the true Melchizedek. Removed from us but by a narrow strait we see bishops at 400_l._ a year, archbishops at 600_l._, bound to celibacy, truly ruling their clergy, serrying their ranks against the enemy, and fearing nothing, were it but that they have nothing to lose; standing, where the bishop ought to stand, in the first ranks against the attacks of infidelity.

There, again, the priest detached from all human ties, representing in his life already that state where they neither marry nor are given in marriage, in his spiritual character greater than all other men, in his temporal condition lower than most.

Consider now the duties and habits of our own Church, in its present practical working, by the side of this of France. In the one, every bishop and priest offers daily the tremendous Sacrifice. Daily he has to appear in that most awful presence, where nothing unclean can stand: daily he is armed against those spiritual conflicts, for himself and others, which he has to undergo, receiving "the holy Bread of eternal life and the Cup of everlasting salvation." In the other, the priest at rare intervals, in the vast majority of instances only once a month, approaches the Source of life and health. But what is the inward condition under which each approaches it? The one is under complete spiritual guidance, taught, as a first element of spiritual life, that constant and rigorous self-examination must be practised, and for every sin willingly committed after baptism penance be undergone and confession made: the other, left to himself in that work most perilous to human frailty, the conduct of one's own spiritual state; nor, again, that thus left to himself, he can work by a chart in which the hidden shoals are pointed out, and his progress noted. All, on the contrary, in this inward life, so unspeakably important, is left a blank. How can he guide others who has never been taught to guide himself, or submit himself to another's guidance? For as to the duties of the priest, in these two Churches--in the one, the very main duty, which is far more important than all others, is the secret guiding of consciences, laden with guilt and in various degrees of purification: all public ministrations are immensely inferior in importance to this. Whereas in the other Church, it is these public ministrations which alone exist in any degree of efficiency. Not one Anglican priest in a hundred has ever been called to receive a confession, or unfold the terms of reconciliation to a guilty soul. Indeed so much is this the case, that the notion of the priest in most parishes is extinct: it is the minister and the preacher who have taken his place. Again, in the one Church a compact body of doctrine and a line of preaching are set forth in the catechismus ad parochos: in the other, it frequently happens that two adjoining priests are at issue on the very first principles of Christian doctrine; whether, for instance, there be or be not a Christian priesthood; whether there be or be not grace in the sacraments. Again, in the one Church, for the more devoted spirits religious orders and councils of perfection exist, and celibacy is the condition of all superior spiritual vocations; in the other it is yet in practice doubtful, whether councils of perfection are not inventions of the Evil One, and whether the putting forth of celibacy as meritorious be not an infringement of the one Sacrifice offered on the Cross.