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THE MONTH

Per menses singulos reddens fructum suum,

et folia ligni ad sanitatem gentium.

(Apoc. xxii. 2.)

VOL. CXLI.
JANUARY —JUNE.
1923-

^LONGMANS, GREEN, AND Co.
LONDON, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA,

/
/ '

MADRAS, AND NEW YORK.

----

[Editorial Offices, 31 Farm Street, Berkeley Square, London, W. 1.]

j All rights of translation and reproduction reserved.

22

,

LOUIS PASTEUR

I

greatness of that which you have accomplished against this
terrible malady............ If this were your only claim on humanity j
you would deserve its eternal gratitude. You can therefore
understand that medicine and surgery, are eager on this great
occasion to offer you the profound homage of their admiration
and of their gratitude.
-

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Pasteur, with much emotion, spoke a few words, and then
a speech was read for him by his son. He said: “ The future :
will belong to those who have done most for suffering
humanity” He urged young men to consider: “What have
I done for my education? What have I done for my country?” r
so that on nearing the grand goal each might be entitled i
to say: “ I have done what I could. ” One present remarked: [
“ It was a unique spectacle, in which a great man was, in |
Shakespeare’s phrase, ‘ carried in triumph on the hearts i
of all.’”
J
When the end of his life approached, indeed, on the very
day of his death, he piously received the Last Sacraments. |
He turned to his devoted disciples who were near him. “Où !
en êtes-vous?” he exclaimed. “ Que faites vous?” And then |
he murmured his favourite words, “Il faut travailler.” His 1
biographer tells us : “ One of his hands lay in that of Madame j
Pasteur’s; the other held a crucifix. In this room, which' |
had something of the simplicity of a monk’s cell, on Satur- |
day, September 28, 1895, surrounded by his family and his |
disciples, he gently passed away.”
i
France gave him a national funeral.
|
The service in Notre Dame, presided over by Cardinal I
Richard, was attended by a great multitude of people, ί
Representatives of many universities, wearing the gown and |
bright-coloured silk hood of their degree, were there ; judges i
in red robes, soldiers in glittering uniforms, ambassadors, *
princes, and many famous people, assembled to do him ·
honour. The streets were lined by regiments of soldiersJ
But more impressive than this funereal pomp was the pro-i
found silence which manifested the grief of a great nation |
at the passing of a benefactor of the human race.
J- R. CORMACK.

THE FALLACY OF “ REUNION ”
HE common non-Catholic.notion of the Church of
Christ is that it exists, indeed, but in a divided state :
hence on all sides earnest Christians are striving for
“reunion.” There are those, of course, who think that per­
fect identity of belief is not an attainable, nor indeed a desir­
able, ideal, and that each " Church ” contributes some aspect
of Truth which is not realized in the rest. But even
they aspire to some sort of Federation which shall enable
Christianity to present a united front to the non-Christian
world. The purport of the following pages is to emphasize
the fact that these views are all false, and that unless
they are abandoned in favour of the truth no real progress
towards unity can be made. And the truth is that the Church
of Christ cannot be, is not and never has been divided, that
she alone possesses the whole'deposit of revelation, that there­
fore, there can be no question of reunion with her but only of
union, and that that union can only be attained by submis­
sion to her ruling and teaching. It is a pity that this, which
is the Catholic standpoint, is not always clearly maintained
by Catholics ; it is a grievous pity that the issues should
be obscured by a disastrously mistaken tactic. Let me say
at the outset that I leave altogether alone the question of
Anglican good faith and all the more readily, since the fact
that Anglicanism is hostile and its mentality anti-Catholic
is the gist of my contention. At the same time, to sup­
pose good faith universal among our separated brethren is,
in view of Church history, an assumption of doubtful wisdom.
However, in spite of their utter illogic, it is both reasonable
and charitable to credit the great majority with' good faith.
Personal experience and the testimony of Catholics intimately
acquainted with prominent Anglicans go far to confinn this.
It is none the less true, I am convinced, that anything like
compromise is the very reverse of true charity towards them.
A letter in the Catholic Times of November 11,-1922, puts
it very well:

T

There may be a difference of opinion about Lord Halifax.
His Lordship has been for fifty years a member of the English
Church—a Protestant Church without apostolic orders, as every

24

THE FALLACY OF “REUNION”

Catholic knows from the infallible teaching of Pope Leo XIII.
The members of his Church look upon him as a saint and rejoice
to think he has been the means of keeping a great number from
becoming Catholics. Why? Because they, like Lord Halifax,
would rather follow their own opinion and think they know better
than the successor of Peter.
,The true need, I venture to suggest, is that expressed by,
Cardinal Newman on one occasion when he wished to make
his hearers anxious about their souls. If it be replied that
the austerity of advanced Anglicans puts most Catholics to
shame, the answer is not far to seek. “Even were it so,
austerity is no substitute for obedience, which is better than
sacrifice.” “ Behold in the day of your fast your own will is
found.” The contumacious opponent of St. Gregory at Con­
stantinople was named John the Faster. Again, to quote
St. Boniface’s epistles, “ What profit is there in the treasure
of good works if they are wrought outside the Catholic
Church.”1 To be “ Catholic-minded ” is no substitute for
the obedience it seems to imply.
By their persistent refusal of obedience to the Vicar of
Christ, High Anglicans are risking their eternal salvation.
True charity would tell them so frankly and not encourage
any delusions about Ecclesia Anglicana, or “daughter
Churches.” The Anglican Church is the daughter not of
Rome, but of Elizabeth, a new body formed out of apostates
from Rome, a body that never was united with Rome. Re·
union with Rome is therefore a fallacy.
Its authors, in fact, were often outspokenly exultant at
the open breach of continuity ! As for example, Dr. Fulke:
“With all our heart we abhorre, defye, detest and spit at
your stinking greasie anti-christian orders.”’ Again, nearly
twenty years before this electioneering tirade,· Dr. Pilking­
ton, Elizabeth’s Bishop of Durham; is equally explicit : “ In
Durham I grant the Bishop that now is, and his predecessor,
were not of one religion in divers points, nor made Bishops
after one fashion. This hath neither cruche nor mitre, never
swore against his Prince his allegiance to thé Pope; this
hath neither power to christen bells, nor hallow chalices and
1 “ Quid enim prosunt bonorum operum emolumenta si extra Catholicam
gerantur Ecclesiam”: quoted by Kenelm Digby, Mores Catholici, book 2, ch.
iii. (1844), Vol. I. p. 126.
* A Retentive to Stay, etc., London, 1580, p. 69, quoted in Mgr. A. S.
Barnes’ Bishop Bartow and Anglican Orders, 1922, p. 154.

THE FALLACY OF “ REUNION ”

25

super-altars, &c. as the other had, and with gladness praises
God that keeps him from such filthiness. ... God defend
all good people from such religion and bishops.”1 In the
same year (1561), the chief fabricator of the Elizabethan
settlement, Sir William Cecil, the future Lord Burghley,
adds to a list of persons indicted at the Essex assizes a num­
ber of names and endorses—“Prisoners for Mass.” 2 Again,
it were impossible to be more explicit, and Cecil, if any man,
“ kenned the biggin ” of the Church of England.
, It is not difficult to pile instance on instance ; an excellent
collection of such authoritative pronouncements may be found
in Dom Norbert Birt’s Tuie Line of Cleavage under Eliza­
beth (C.T.S.), and the remarkably impious proceedings by
which the change was enforced are accurately set forth in
the same writer’s The Elizabethan Settlement, But preju­
dice is proof against historical fact, denying the plain infer­
ence where it is unable to deny the fact itself. People who
are history-proof as to the past and fact-proof as to the
present are more likely to be “killed with kindness ” than
to be cured with flattery.
Independent Protestants have no delusions as to the
change. Writing in 1871, Ruskin says: “This farmer
(Thomas More) . . . is one of the sternest Roman Catho­
lics of his stem time.”3

,

•

Low Churchmen like Bishop Henson, sceptics like Mr.
Birrell, hold the same language. The latter’s declaration
regarding the Holy Sacrifice has become a household word,
but I would call attention to another less known yet farseeing utterance of his, which is very significant in these days
of eugenics, birth control, health visitors, and the like:
There is a sense in which it is quite true, what another Cardinal
(Manning) has said about Ultramontanes, Anglicans, and
Orthodox Dissenters all being in the same boat. . ... They all
have their martyrologies—the bright roll-call of those who have
defied Cæsar even unto death, or, at all events, gaol. They all,
therefore, put something above the State, and apply tests other
than those recognized in our law courts. . . . . The Romanist,
of course, has to bear the first brunt, and is the most obnoxious
to the State; but he must be slow of comprehension and void of
imagination who cannot conceive of circumstances arising in this
« The Burning of St. Peal's, Wks. Parker Soc., p. 586.
* Catholic Record Soc. Pabl., Vol. I. p. 52.
3 Tors.,VII.

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26

THE FALLACT OF “REUNION”

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country, when the State should assert it to be its duty to violate
what even Protestants believe to be the moral law of God. Therefore, in opposing Ultramontanism .... care ought to be taken
by those who are not prepared to go all lengths with Cæsar, to
select their weapons of attack, not from his armoury, but their
own.1

i

Writing about the same time, an excellent Catholic scholar,
now unjustly neglected, clinches the point :

How odd it is that people who believe in a personal God and
a future state can rebel against the only living authority they
have for it I They are like fractious children trying to upset
their bread and milk, and still more like a truant boy throwing
mud at his mother.2

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In these days some would have us, out of respect for the
zeal and earnestness of High Church folk, to close our eyes
to the measureless evils wrought by the Anglican Establish­
ment, the multitude of Catholics to whom its loaves and
fishes have been a fatal temptation, even though wilful prose­
lytism has utterly ceased, and view without strong condemnation the barefaced attempt to steal the name and place of
the Bride of Christ, after the failure of superhuman efforts,
prolonged for centuries, to destroy her I To do this we must
in effect encourage the notion, impiously false, that the
Church is divided, give occasion for the enemy, fore-Christian and after-Christian, to blaspheme, indulge ourselves and
the Anglicans in hopes dangerously delusive, and that at the
very , time when the need is most urgent to insist upon unity
and authority.
The Oxford Movement began some ninety years ago, a
sufficiently long period to justify a judgment by its results. It
has certainly not leavened England with Catholicism and it
certainly has kept back great numbers of individuals from
the true Church. Indeed, this has been, in practice, its main
pursuit. To say, after ninety years’ testing, that this move­
ment is one which Catholics should regard with tender solicitude is grievously to mistake its tendencies.
It will not be amiss, perhaps, to refresh our memories with
the verdict, very different from that now fashionable, of a
number of eminent Catholics regarding High Anglican
activities of the past. We are not convinced that the leopard
has changed its spots.
* Obiter Dicta, The Via Media.
· E. H. Deting, The Lady of Raven’s Combe, iii.

THE FALLACY OF « REUNION ”

27

The Anglican is essentially a formalist; he is a man of half
ideas, half principles; he never dare carry out an argument to
its logical conclusion; he says “ two and two ” but dare not finish
the formula by adding the words “make four”; and in this
pruning of reason consists his via media.” 1

Father Faber was at times very severe:
To see grown-up children, book in hand, playing at Mass ....
revelling in Catholic sentiment instead of offering the acceptable
sacrifice of hardship and austerity ; this is fearful, indeed a
sickening development of the peculiar iniquity of the time, a
masterpiece of Satan’s craft. This is not the way to become
Catholic again, it is only a profaner kind of Protestantism than
any we have seen hitherto.*
Father Gallwey, in his Lectures on Ritualism (1874),’
made very plain his fears that intellectual pride and bad
faith, the spirit of Arius and Wycliffe, were rife in the move­
ment at that time :
It is precisely because with their whole hearts they reject sub­
mission to the Catholic Church that they labour so zealously to
introduce as quickly as possible all Catholic doctrine and every
Roman rite into the cathedrals and churches of England . . . .
it is by no means unlikely that they may have the melancholy
privilege of succeeding in their design .... they are anxious
to take away all pretext for secession to Rome?

Father Coleridge fully shared this view:

These leaders will teach, in the face of day, truths on the
denial of which their communion was built, and for refusing to
deny which hundreds of Catholics have suffered in life and limb.
• · . . But they have no thoughts more foreign to their minds,
no desire less congenial to their hearts, than the thought of return­
ing to charity, the thought of placing themselves once more in
the obedience of the Church, the desire once more to find them­
selves happy and rejoicing children of Him whom Our Lord has
appointed to be the Chief Shepherd of the Fold.

And the consequence of this obduracy:
Alas I such movements are among the choicest and rarest gifts
that God can bestow upon a nation and a generation outside
His Church, and on their issue may probably depend the whole
» Rambler, Sept., »850, p. 187.
» Quoted in Truth (N.Y.), June, 1912, p. 26.
’ P. 14. I made further quotations from these Lectures in a paper on
Ritualism in the Catholic Review, July 9, t9>4·

THE FALLACY OF “REUNION"

ί

future of the country in which they appear, and through that of
millions of souls.1

|
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28

Another Jesuit convert, one whose memory is held in bene­
diction, gave us an interpretation of that movement which
has always convinced me as the true one:

.What happens to most educated men in the course of their
lifetime happened to Oxford when Mr. Newman became a
Catholic. Oxford looked on and listened, and having listened,
turned away and thenceforward has drifted slowly, surely,
steadily, in the direction of an ever-growing indifferentism. The
memoirs of the late Rector of Lincoln give us a good illustration
of the effect on an individual mind of drawing near to the light,
and then deliberately turning away.2

These are opinions not lightly to be ignored and more
in accordance with observable facts than those now some of
us hold. With them agree Kenelm Digby, Godfrey Raupert,’
and Mgr. J. S. Vaughan, who says “ they dare not face the
facts, and prefer to live in a fool’s paradise, thereby running
the risk of a dénouement too terrible to contemplate.”4 Even
the gentle Oratorian Father Ryder satirized the amazing per­
version of history that attempted to represent as Mass-priests
the Protestant ministers who tormented our dying martyrs
with their pestering blasphemies, the very newest view, New­
man said, presented to us as the very oldest!
So far from winning the mass of the nation for Catholic­
ism, Anglicanism has in the opinion of many shrewd observers
indirectly aided the anti-Christian movement. The author
of Protestant Journalism cites Montalembert :5
As long as they refuse to obey the Pope, the English press
permits them to hold any private opinion, however un-Protestant,
and English Rationalists acknowledge them' as allies. The
latter evidently agree with Montalembert, when he said of High
Church Anglicans : “ These men, I am convinced, will always
prove the worst enemies of the Church, more so than infidels
themselves.”

I find a good example of this effectual co-operation in
the career of Père Hyacinthe:
■ * The Return of the King, 1883, p. 107.
» Ft. Richard Clarke, S.J., in The Month, July, 1885.
> Back to Rome, p. 14, 1903.
« Catholic Review, Jan. 1913, p· 18.
s P. 51, 1874, from Memoirs of Coant de Montalembert, by Mrs. Oliphant,
Vol. II. ch. x. p. 35.

THE FALLACY OF “REUNION"

29

He founded the Catholic Gallican Church of Paris, and with
the aid of money supplied him from England, notably by the
Archbishop of Canterbury, Bishop Wordsworth of Lincoln, and
Dean Stanley, he carried on his religious services in a building
formerly used as a theatre, which he purchased for the purpose.
But despite his assistance, and despite all the efforts used by M,
Loyson to court publicity and to push his ideas, the undertaking
was constantly on the verge of financial catastrophe.1
The Church of England, as represented by Bishop Gore of
Oxford, is internally rationalistic and modernist, externally,
aesthetic and ritualistic.2
The practice of Ritualism has long ceased to be a sign
of tendencies towards Catholic belief; witness the case of
the Rev. Percy Dearmer. But I wonder whether Catholics
who speak of reunion realize that modernism may consist
not only with rood screens and riddels, and mediaeval Lenten
array, but also with claims to possess the Mass and to reserve
the Blessed Sacrament. It is in no spirit of hostility that
I refer to the teaching of the Rev. Conrad Noel, a brave man
and zealous according to his lights, but a man prominent
amongst those rationalists who deny the Divinity of our
Lord. Posing as a “ Catholic,” this modernist in his People s
Life of Jesus, appearing serially in the Crusader, abandons
the very foundations of Christianity and treats Christ as
merely human. Yet he aims at restoring Catholicity by
means of his Crusade I Are we to sympathize with his
efforts?
Greetings sent to Geneva in 1909, or the appearance of
the Archbishop of Canterbury in Calvin’s pulpit in 1922,
the Church Congress at Sheffield last October, the recorded
words and deeds of many Anglicans, clearly contradict the
strange delusion that as a rule the High Church party is'really
“Catholic-minded.” It is as wilful as the most individual­
istic Protestant : it hates authority.
'
To imagine that Lord Halifax speaks for the Anglican
Church is to shut one’s eyes. Instead of the old Low, Broad
and High Church types, are we not rather confronted to-day,
generally speaking, by “ all the various indefinite shades of
Hegelianism, pseudo-mysticism and positivism, blended with
an extraordinary medley of scientific dogmas that have
gradually and insistently been imported into the realm of
• Ths Month, June, 1895, p. 245: italics mine.
* Fr. C. E. Rivers in The Tablet, 33rd March, 1913.

30

THE FALLACY OF “ REUNION”

Protestant theology”?1 But even this description is hardly
adequate to the extraordinary display at Sheffield.
For practical conclusion, bearing in mind the history of
Ambrose Phillips de Lisle, devoted and fervent but for a time
misled, and the movement with which he was associated
(singularly resembling the present one), we may well adopt
the words of the late Father Clarke, S.J. :
Most Catholics have encountered from time to time Anglicans
who have sought to fraternise with us on the common ground of
dogmatic belief. They urge us to take part with them against
the common foe who is threatening to sweep away all religion
whatsoever. .... It seems a little hard to tell these well-inten­
tioned. well-meaning people, acting in good faith, that between
us and them there is a great gulf fixed, that they really belong
to the ranks of the enemy whom they desire th repel, that they
are, however unwillingly, his allies and friends, -promoting his
interest and furthering his cause. Yet it is no true kindness
to put this antagonism in the background, and, though we ought
to guard against any uncourteous or offensive rejection of their
advances, yet we should never forget the fundamental opposition
which exists between our religion and theirs; that we are as
Catholics the children of light, while they are as non-Catholics the
children of darkness ; that as regards principles they are our
enemies no less than the open unbeliever, and though we are glad
to recognize in them a happy inconsistency, which causes them
to profess a dogmatic belief where a dogmatic belief is logically
untenable, yet to ally ourselves with them would be no less a
treachery to our Faith, than a certain method of involving our­
selves in the destruction impending over them.8
These grave words are as true now as they were thirty­
seven years ago, although Anglicanism has been wonderfully
Catholicized in the meantime. For it has not crossed the
gulf which yawns between Authority and Private Judgment,
between a living infallible Teacher and doctrinal inde­
pendence.
h. e. g. rope.

‘ Dr. Aveling in Dublin Review, Oct. 1905, p. 339·
* The Month, Sept. 1885, p. 1.

MYSTICISM, FALSE AND TRUE
OR some years past mysticism has been in great
vogue. According to Miss Underhill this was to be
expected and is quite natural. The nineteenth cen­
tury was a period of great expansion and progress in science,
the arts, literature and politics ; and after such a period it
was to be expected that a period of renewed interest in
mysticism would succeed. For mysticism is humanity’s
finest flower, it is the product at which all the great creative
epochs of the race have aimed.
A Catholic holds that true mysticism is not a product of
nature but of grace. Nature may indeed furnish the occasion
for the manifestation of grace. And so he would prefer
to explain the modem interest in mysticism as a revolt of
the spiritual nature of man aided by grace against the secu­
larism and materialism of the age. He would consider that
the fact that mysticism also flourished in the sixteenth century
confirmed his contention. Undoubtedly the fifteenth and six­
teenth centuries were periods of great expansion, but they
were also periods of great religious and moral depravity.
But God did not leave Himself without witnesses then; it
may be that He does not wish to leave Himself without wit­
nesses now, and on this account has inspired the renewed
interest in mysticism.
However this may be, Catholics are always interested in
the spiritual life, a term which they prefer to mysticism'.
They are interested to see how St. Augustine, Dionysius the
Areopagite, Richard of St. Victor, St. Teresa, St. John of the
Cross, and innumerable other heroes of theirs, are studied
and quoted by modem non-Catholic writers on mysticism.
Many of these writers display abundant industry and learn­
ing. Although they generally give the pre-eminence to
great Catholic mystics like St. Teresa and St. John of the
Cross, yet they class with them, as belonging to the same
category, pagan philosophers such as Plato and Plotinus,
eastern sages of China and India, and men like Jacob Boehme
and XVilliam Blake. They usually show want of insight into
Catholic doctrine, and detect similarity of teaching where
little or none exists. I will quote one or two instances of
what I mean. Professor Rufus M. Jones writes :

F