THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC QUARTERLY REVIEW. Vol. V.-OCTOBER, 1880.-No. 20. THE FREE THOUGHT IN ENGLAND. HREE causes postpone in England the triumph of wild ideas. over such as are traditional and decorous. The first is the long habit of Constitutionalism, which gives free play to individual opinions, and so dissipates their energy and extravagance. The second is the "respectable" Established Church, which being interwoven by clerical marriages with the middle classes, keeps up the sentiment of Christianity throughout the country. And the third is a certain staidness of natural character which objects to being disturbed by mere chimeras. It is undeniable that in England there is just as much free thought as there is in Germany, in Russia, or anywhere else; but there is no distemper of revolt, no rudeness of irreligion, still less any combination to upset. Tranquillity of indifference is the prevailing phase. "There may be, or there may not be, infallible truth, but it is too difficult an inquiry to be gone into," is the popular English phase of free thought. In conversation there is immense energy of dispute, but the energy is dissipated by conversation. What Tcherniscerski said of the Russian modern temperament is perhaps equally true of the modern English: "The rising generation shows a great tendency for idleness, and a great liking for conversation and discussions. It has two defects it is too easily excited, and never thoroughly investigates a subject." But the excitement in the English temperament seldom goes beyond words; it does not take form in blows or in conspiracies. This is, perhaps, as much due both to political and religious accidents—that is, to the institutions of the country -as it is due to the normally British dislike for being disturbed VOL. V.-37 4 without practical gain. Nor does any fact in English history shake this estimate. Thus, we must not look upon the Reformation as being English in tone, for it was purely political and compulsory. Nor must we regard the Cromwell outbreak as being English in tone, for it was evanescent in spirit and circumstance. Besides, both these wild epochs were quasi-Christian. It must be remembered, to the great credit of the English people, that their revolutions have been professedly religious. Professed skepticism has never once made a revolt. There has been always the affectation of religious conviction at the bottom of the most disorderly absurdities. No section of English people has ever put forth such a programme as that which Herzen presumed to promulgate in 1848: "Liberty will have no peace till all that is religious and political has become simply human, and submissive to criticism and negation. . . . . Our work is to demolish all faith, to remove existing hope in what is old, and to destroy all prejudices without concessions or mercy." The truth is that it would be impossible for such a programme to find approvers unless Socialism and Nihilism had joined hands. Political Nihilism could not possibly prevail unless Socialism had first prepared the way. It is invariably the Nihilism of the moral order which develops the Nihilism of the political order. Victor Hugo has called French Socialism Nihilism, and no doubt he is to a certain extent right. The death of the moral order is the death of every other order. But in England there has never been the death of the moral order. There have been frantic outbursts of anti-Catholicism and Puritanism; there have been hideous politico-religious persecutions; but there has never been revolutionary Socialism. This is a grand gain to English credit. It is also a grand promise for the English future. Modern thought, as it pompously styles itself, may loosen the links of the religious life; but the past shows that, though the English may become crazy, they are not likely to renounce Christianity. It would be a mistake to suppose that the growth of free thought in England is due to greater study, greater learning. It is due, to tell the truth, to simple laziness. Free thought is not intellectual, it is slothful. It is the cutting the intellect loose from nine-tenths of those restraints which even the natural laws of creation prove divine. This disposition necessarily involves pride and vanity, and therefore a diseased moral state. The two great restraints which the Catholic Church has always supplied against the wayward conceits of free thought are ecclesiastical authority and "supernaturalism," the latter being indeed the raison d'être of the former, and the two being divinely inseparable. But though free thought has not dared to do away with authority,-in certain abstract or theoretical forms,-it has stripped authority of that one only sovereign grace which rendered it at once dignified and beautiful. If we recognize authority as conferred by the Creator, we feel honored in submitting ourselves to it; but if we recognize authority as conferred only by ourselves, we look down on it with paternal complacency. This is what the Socialists do; what all freethinkers do, more or less; what every class of Protestant Christian must always do, though in a very different sense to the freethinker. Protestantism is only free thought in regard to interpretation, for it admits the infallibility of Revelation; it accepts the authority of the lawgiver, but insists on interpreting His law; and though logically such free thought leads to skepticism, happily few Protestants are logicians. Those Protestants who have the misfortune to be logicians, develop necessarily more or less into skeptics. This development has now ripened in the higher classes, that is, in the classes which are educated; and since few men have the energy to become Catholics, they fall back on the indolence of freethinking. At Oxford there is quite as much tree thought as there is at Berlin, or St. Petersburg; but the refinements of education, and the interests of social life, keep it scholarly, tranquil, well-bred. This is equally true of the teachers and the taught. What Dr. Jowett, the Master of Baliol, meant by that sentence. (which he preached to the undergraduates at St. Mary's): "The time is coming when we must be Christians indeed, if we are to be at all; for conventional Christianity is beginning to pass away," was simply this, that all ecclesiastical authority might be rejected by every member of his Church. He affirmed this, when he added: "I think therefore we had better put aside this vexed question of miracles, as not belonging to our time, and also as tending to raise an irreconcilable quarrel between revelation and science;" and he further affirmed it by speaking of God, less as a person than as an abstraction; resting content with the exquisite beauty of the divine idea; precisely in the same way as the Buddhist or the Parsee might speak of the beauty of holiness. This is the rankest degree of free thought which is even possible for a Master," who professes to be also an Anglican clergyman. Yet it is as common among the clergy as among the laity. It is rampant among the Oxford undergraduates. Huber, who tells us that our English Universities were "a bequest from Catholic to Protestant England," and who adds that "later times cannot produce a concentration of men, eminent in all the learning and science of the age, such as Oxford and Cambridge poured forth in the ninth century, mightily influencing the intellectual development of all Western Christendom," would probably have thought that modern masters of Baliol were hardly worthy of their Catholic predecessors. But the "conventional Christianity," which Dr. Jowett disesteemed, but which was the only Christianity he understood, has not only passed away from Oxford life, but has been replaced by a cold, heartless skepticism. The Oxford Commissioners told us several years ago that the tendency of Oxford philosophy was skepticism; and that happy was he who, after three years of residence, could still believe in the divinity of Christ. This is indeed inevitable, when the Oxford heads of houses may preach that "the question of miracles should be put aside," that God is a beautiful idea, and that the only way to make sure of being a Christian is to judge all Christian doctrines for oneself. It is not easy to find anything to admire in the intellectual or moral aspects of free thought. Perhaps its least inviting phase is its love of ignorance. When Goethe said, "I know not myself, and God forbid I should," he probably meant that he did not wish to know the littleness of even the highest intellectual achievements. But the formula in which most freethinkers would express their sentiments would be: "I know little of myself; and as to God, I am content to know less." Free thought is not the product of the passionate longing to know God, but the desire to remain in tranquil ignorance of Him. It is a combination of indifference and pride. If a man is a Catholic he must conform to certain duties; he must obey both with his mind and with his body; he must. submit his mental and moral being to a certain discipline of habit, which habit is just a little above nature. But if he is a freethinker he may sit in his armchair, never go to early Mass, or to confession, never bridle his interior thought or interior yearning, but may live like a gentlemanly heathen. And it is obviously affectation to affirm that such free thought is either aspiring or sincere. As was said just above, free thought is simply laziness; it is not intellectual, it is slothful. For even when it takes the Rationalist form, such form is the gratification of vanity; it is not the hard work of the subjection of the will, the hard work of the contemplative or the ascetic; nor is it the hard work of the true Christian philosopher, who aims at synthesis of every branch of true knowledge; it is the indulgence of the caprices of the intellect, without the faintest moral object, nor any charitable one. No good was ever done by the writings of a freethinker, no heart was ever rendered less unhappy, no sorrow was ever solaced, no character uplifted, no immortal aspiration implanted. Grovelling, burrowing, undermining, and wrecking are the unlovely aspirations of the freethinker. He has no care if, in the presence of young persons, he says things which may shatter Christian hope, and sow the seeds of a life's loosening or misgiving. He has no care if, to show off his superior knowledge,-about some fragment of material lore,-he writes a book which half-educated young men will adopt as their apology for heathenism. He is brutally unthinking, inhumanly selfish, without instinct of love or compassion. Slothfulness in the moral nature, and vanity in the intellectual, with cruelty towards the whole world save his own sect, are the unlovable characteristics of his vocation. Individually there are amiable freethinkers; but collectively they are the enemies of mankind. They are also the enemies of their own happiness. It is totally impossible for any man to be happy whose mind is disjointed or out of harmony. And it must be said that want of harmony is the most conspicuous of the defects of every man who professes to be a freethinker. Such men see only bits of creation, disjecta membra of the unities of the universe, isolated purposes and judgments; they do not consider the whole, nor even a half. It is perfectly true that the Catholic Christian alone can enjoy the appreciation of perfect harmony; because he alone knows the fitness of the supernatural to the wants of the natural life. Catholicism is the sublime fulness of reparation for all the injuries wrought by sin on the natural order. Yet freethinkers are to blame for not studying the Catholic philosophy so as to master its intellectual harmony. They will persist in judging the things that are of God by their own meagre standard of human evidence. Take one example-that of recent magazine articles, written to cast doubt on the Resurrection. The writers speak of the evidence as insufficient; wholly ignoring the perfect harmony of its spirit with the spirit of the whole Gospel teaching. They complain that the supernatural is not natural, and that Divine faith is not made easy as human credence. In short, they ignore the harmonies of the supernatural. In the same way the freethinkers write on what they call the Petrine claims; and muddle together the accidents of purely natural disorder with the divine unity of institution and story. This comes from want of appreciation of harmony, from a natural preference for fragments to unities; whereas, the Catholic, knowing the harmony of the Christian philosophy, can put the fragments of human disorder into their proper place. In private life it is not easy Catholic to make answer to the objections of the free talker, because the Catholic has to explain that there are three laws,—or rather three lines of different effects of different causes,-those of nature, of sin, and of grace; and that these three run concurrently yet transversely, and are to be harmonized solely by Catholic philosophy. It is the fragmentary state of mind of the freethinker which it is so difficult to argue with or to influence; not the philosophy which is built on the whole, but the philosophy which is built on little bits. Yet the freethinkers always argue as if they for a |