As the student in question remarked, the disinclination of able university men to take Orders, long notable, is increasing at an accelerating rate; and the less able men, when once they have resolved upon that course, begin to starve their intellectual life, on the plea that intellect is rather a hindrance than an auxiliary to true religion. When once they are on this inclined plane, it may almost be said that the issue is fatally certain. A teacher intellectually unfitted to teach must needs find some exterior prop. A century ago the easiest prop was Biblical infallibility; at the present moment it is Catholicity. Once the short way with all objections was: "I have it on the word of the Holy Ghost; you have only to look at such and such a text." Nowadays it is equally tempting: "I have it on the word of an inerrant Church; you have only to look at such and such a manual, published by such and such a society or theological firm of unsullied catholic reputation." From this there must some day come a terrible reaction, and that day may be nearer than we think.

The Great War, unquestionably, gave a real impetus both to Anglo-Catholicism and to Roman Catholicism. These had no monopoly of devoted priesthood, but certainly they had many devoted priests; and their religion, like that of the Bible-Christian of the past, is emphatically an emergency religion. To the man who was going over the top in five minutes, and might be dead or mangled five minutes afterwards, the Clapham School could say: Believe at this moment in the Lord Jesus Christ, and your place will be with the Dying Thief." Similarly the Catholic can say: Armed with Repentance, Confession and priestly Absolution, you are safe." There was no leisure, in the years 1914-1918, for those arguments and balanced reflections which, in all ages, have rightly occupied all thinking men's minds with regard to God and Eternity. The large majority, who ponder very little on these things all their lives, but who often think with proportionate intensity in moments of great crisis, needed a religion which could be administered in tabloid form under pressure of instant death. We need not doubt, therefore, the essential accuracy of the yearly figures of conversions published by the Roman Catholic Church, or the considerable truth underlying Father Underhill's claim for Anglo-Catholicism (p. 9): "Ever since the Catholic revival began we were waiting for the proof of the power of our method, a proof which would be decisive

VOL. 243. NO. 495.

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and convincing, and now we have got it." We have seen (he proceeds) how our pupils went through the war, " and we are in a position to claim that, wherever the Church of England may have failed, the Catholic method has not failed." We need not doubt the action here, but neither must we ignore the probabilities of reaction. It has often been pointed out that, however correct may be the Roman Catholic figures of yearly conversions, the official statistics of civilized countries inexorably contradict any theory of general Roman Catholic increase over a whole generation, in proportion with the general increase of population. The leakage, it is sometimes openly confessed, is more abundant than the tributary streams; and, whatever ground any creed may have gained under stress of war, it must lose this, and more than this, in the long reflective days of comparative peace, if it is mainly emotional and ceremonial and if it rests upon an insecure intellectual foundation.

This, it seems to many of us, is the case with AngloCatholicism, and this is so by the fault, active or passive, of the majority among those whose hierarchical authority, or whose official position as teachers, entitles the nation to look to them for courage and foresight. There is probably not a bishop of to-day who could read without a blush those replies to "Essays and Reviews" which were published semi-officially in the lifetime of many among us, and in which Bishop Wilberforce (of Oxford) confesses himself inclined to "the explanation which sees in [the movement which has given birth to Essays and Reviews'] the first stealing over the sky of the lurid lights which shall be shed profusely over the great anti-Christ (p. 11). Wilberforce's disastrous conflict with Huxley is as notorious, and will probably be as long remembered in England as to take examples from widely different fields-Kingsley's blunders against Newman, and the papal blunder against Galileo.

Yet, if we are not mistaken, this present blindness is almost as great which permits the old catchword of Inspiration to be supplanted by the revived catchword of Catholicity. Of Inspiration we may certainly say that even the highest Anglican authorities, in 1862, "never seriously endeavoured to make up their minds on those disputed questions." And it may be shown, I think, that similar "intellectual sloth and indecision "underlie the movement which has transferred Anglican allegiance from

one shibboleth to another. Bishops and professors and heads of seminaries have suffered Apostolical Succession, the Deposit of Faith and Catholic Doctrine, to become the ordinary currency of Anglican theology, without either making up their own minds, or deputing teachers to clear the public mind, as to what these phrases really mean, and how far they are true in history or experience. For many years the cry from the pulpits has been : "Listen to the Teaching Church"; yet nobody attempts any definition which will show us clearly which of two contending bishops, or even, in some cases, which of two contending religious denominations, is speaking for or against " the Teaching Church."

One of the oldest and most distinguished of living Anglicans, J. M. Wilson, successively Senior Wrangler and Headmaster of Clifton, Archdeacon of Rochdale and Canon of Worcester, preached in 1910 a university sermon in which he appealed for a fresh examination of the historical basis of Catholicism-Roman and Anglican. Professor Swete, recognising the urgency of such an appeal from such a source, chose the six ablest scholars whom he could raise from what may be called the Conservative side to answer this challenge. The average reader would probably be astounded to find that six able men could manage to write 408 pages, yet to tell him so little about that which is the real question for all of us who are not merely academic specialists: "What evidence have we for the existence of a clearly-recognisable Teaching Church, instituted by Christ and marked off from the general mass of Christians, and for the unique operation of the Holy Spirit in this Church through an uninterrupted Apostolical Succession?"

To clear the discussion, we may oppose to this claim of a clearly-recognisable and inerrant Teaching Church the idea which is probably more or less explicit in the minds of most people who claim to be Christians, yet cannot admit the Catholic claims. These would point out that, when Christ was approached by John the Baptist's disciples with a categorical question as to His own Messiahship, He carefully avoided a dogmatic answer, and compelled these prospective adherents to think the question out for themselves. He offered them no "deposit of faith," but demanded that they should (under God) find each his own faith by honestly facing such evidence as was available. From this, and from other indications of the same sort, we conclude that

God has left Christianity to arrive at success or failure in proportion as it follows the ordinary laws of this universe; that the society, like the individual, will draw nearer to God, or drift farther away, in proportion as it honestly strives after God or relaxes its struggle; and therefore that it has not altogether escaped the fate of all other societies in this world. This theory does not banish God from history; on the contrary, it shows Him rewarding desert with success and unworthiness with failure. Neither does it dishonour the Church; for the man who really wants God will catch at all helpful companionship in his search, and will be the last to imagine that he can reach the Kingdom of Heaven in selfish isolation. But it does repudiate those fundamental assumptions which distinguish Catholicism from other creeds. Therefore our ecclesiastical superiors, who know well that the man in the street is often very sceptical as to Catholic claims, are morally bound to assure themselves and the public, so far as human effort can compass reasonable assurance, that three-quarters of the fashionable Church teaching at this moment is not built upon sand.

If they could have seen this problem as clearly as a man of science or of business would at once envisage it, then it might long ago have been brought to a practical solution. One party in the scientific world, let us suppose, holds that a certain breed of cattle has remained absolutely untainted, by a unique concatenation of circumstances, for 1900 years; another party holds that its pedigree does not essentially differ from that of several other breeds. As soon as the conflicting theses were clearly defined, would not eager research and open discussion at once begin? And would not this research, whatever other lines it might take, follow two immediately obvious directions: (1) How far does surviving evidence from the past bear out this confessedly unique claim? and (2) how far do these cattle, as we see them among us to-day, actually contrast with other breeds in exceptional purity? On those lines the discussion would probably be neither more nor less violent than the discussion in the purely scientific world upon the Origin of Species, and it would probably end equally soon in a practical agreement, among the majority of specialists, upon the main points of dispute.

Let us now apply this method to the Catholic claim. First, do surviving historical documents go to prove that Catholicism,

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in the past, actually claimed and made good the unique position now attributed to it? And, secondly, does its present position among other creeds mark it out, not merely as a possible primus inter pares, but as a society differing radically from all other associations in the world?

With regard to the first point, we have no explicit statement in those earliest writings to which both parties attach unique authority, i.e., the Bible. The evidence upon which Catholics rely is entirely inferential, and would seem to be at least counterbalanced, if not distinctly overbalanced, by Christ's attitude towards John the Baptist's disciples and other similar indications. True, the written Bible is not all. The Church has laid great stress upon tradition; though never, I believe, as against the Bible. Orthodoxy has always admitted that even Creeds and Acts of General Councils and authoritative Definitions of Faith have not quite the authority of the God-written Word. The medieval Church held the plenary inspiration of the Bible as firmly, perhaps, as any religious denomination has ever held it. Aquinas, for instance, teaches that the author of Holy Writ is God, in whose power it is to signify His meaning, not by words only (as man also can do), but also by things themselves. It follows, as the first consequence of this authorship, that the Holy Scriptures can never contain an untruth in their literal sense; rather, we must believe all that stands in the Bible as God's Word. For not only all that relates to matters of faith and morals, but its historical contents also are truths for which God stands sponsor. Therefore, if (for instance) anyone said that Samuel was not the son of Elkanah, it would follow that the Divine Scriptures would be false, which would be to contradict the Faith, however indirectly. The Council of Trent, in its fourth session, characterised the Old and New Testament as "dictated either orally by Christ, or by the Holy Ghost." Thus the Bible contains writings of religious value so unique that no others can be mentioned in the same breath; it is a book designed by the Holy Spirit to reveal God's way of salvation to all mankind. Where, then, may we find this unique book, this all-important Bible? Christendom suffered that primary and essential question to lie under dispute, without any attempt at a complete official answer, for fifteen

*Sum. Theol." Ia q. I. art X; q. XXXII. art. IV.