MODERNISM : ITS ORIGIN AND TENDENCIES. 



129 



opinion.* If there is any one fact more indelibly stamped 

 than another on the pages of Church History, it is tliat 

 the Papal claims, from their first appearance to the days of 

 the Vatican Council, have been based on a succession of 

 the most daring outrages on individual freedom, on consistent 

 and continuous appeals to force instead of logic. It is true that 

 little stress is laid in our days on such facts as those of the 

 statute Be Hcrctico Comhurendo in this land and the Inquisition 

 on the Continent. Most of us who are not Eonian Catholics 

 feel bound to hope — some of us rather " against hope," I am 

 afiaid — that those methods of producing and securing faith 

 are disapproved now by our brethren of the Eoman Church, 

 and so we have ceased to press them. But when we hear 

 of the " historical development of the Catholic Church," we 

 must surely admit that the claims of the Papacy were enforced 

 by tire and faggot, 1:)y plots and assassinations, by " wars and 

 rumours of wars," that ihe Papacy has never disavowed the 

 use of such means, and that its authority has been founded 

 rather on them tlian on the free verdict of the Christian Church. 

 1 do not deny that Christianity may and will develop. But 

 such a development must proceed by fair and reasonable 

 processes. I must hold that the methods of the Papacy have 

 to the last been neither fair nor reasonable, and that the full 

 and healthy development of religious belief has been, and will 

 be impossible as long as those claims continue to be recognized. 

 " He that letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way." 

 ^^'or can I understand how any development can possibly be a 

 satisfactory one unless the Ortliodox Churches of the East, and 

 those at least of the Protestants who accept the ancient faith of 

 Christendom, and who are, therefore, as good Catholics, if not 

 better, than the members of the Church to which T)r. Tyrrell 

 8till belongs, are allowed to contribute their quota to it. Even 

 from those who reject the Cathohc Faith altogether we may 

 learn a good deal as to the most convincing way of stating it. 



Cardinal Xewman, it is true, based his secession to Eome on 

 a theory of development. But that development was neither 

 logical nor natural. That is to say, it was neither the result of 

 the application of the reason to the words of Clnist and His 

 first Apostles and ministers, as handed down to subsequent ages 

 in the Christian Society, nor the result of natural forces, such as 

 develop the plant from the seed, the child into the man, or the 

 growth of the Universal Churcli of Christ as she exists to-day, 



See " Letter,"' p. 62. 



