pastoral allows that, e.g., the Holy Office may condemn an opinion to-day as false, and later may allow that it was true; not merely that it was unproven before and now proven-for that might be the case with an infallible decision. In fact the Holy Office may make mistakes. There is, after all, no such thing as a quasi-infallible, a nearly infallible decision. A miss here is as good as a mile; the difference between yea and nay is infinite. Is it, then, possible that we should interiorly assent to a decision, knowing at the time that the same authority which proposes it to our belief has often reversed similar decisions, and may reverse this? Plainly such an assent can be only conditional and probable, in no sense final. But of this and similar limitations there is no indication in the pastoral, just because the Sacred Congregation or the local bishop, no less than the Pope, is a 'Divine Teacher,' of whom it has been said: 'He that heareth you beareth Me.'

Even as regards external submission and respectful silence surely there must be some limit. It is vain to appeal to the authorities of the Church against the authorities of the Church; and history tells us how often the very highest ecclesiastical authorities have made mistakes, and have been tyrannical and unjust, lording it over clergy and laity like the kings of the Gentiles,' and how from the nature of the case the correction has come from the public opinion of Christendom, stirred up, many a time, by canonised saints. Extraordinary diseases call for extraordinary remedies; the extravagances of absolutism will justify what under just and constitutional government were unpardonable rebellion.

But this 'religious assent,' interior and exterior, is a duty insisted on by all who allow any sort of teaching-authority to the Christian Church; such, for example, as is claimed by the Church of England, which, though disclaiming infallibility, at least in its isolation, and as separate from the rest of Christendom, does, none the less, profess to be a 'religious tribunal capable of teaching,' not 'with unerring certainty,' but with just that kind of fallible authority which the pastoral claims for local episcopates or for the Roman congregations. The complaint is that, according to the pastoral, this non-infallible teaching-authority is based on arguments and exegeses which would deprive it of all limitation, and make it practically indistinguishable from infallible or œcumenical authority. If the bishop is a 'Divine Teacher,' if he is Christ, the submission due to his mind and will is simply absolute and unqualified.

Another very obscure point is the relation of the laity and the lower clergy-the Ecclesia discens to the Ecclesia docens. Here the pastoral implies such a relationship as exists between two distinct moral personalities or corporations. The Ecclesia discens is conceived as wholly passive and receptive, and the Ecclesia docens as active and communicative; they are related literally as sheep and

shepherd; as beings of a different order, with different, if not divergent, interests. As before, the mind and will of the Church is conceived as residing in the Pope, united, for solemnity's sake (not for validity's), with the Episcopate. There the faith is deposited; there it is to be studied and elaborated; and then the results of this thought and study are to be transmitted to the passive, unthinking Ecclesia discens, which takes no active share in this vital function of her Divine Teacher.' The guidance into all truth promised to the Church had reference directly and immediately to the Ecclesia docens, and only through it to the Ecclesia discens. In no sense, therefore, does the safeguarding and elaboration of the faith take place in the mind of the laity or the lower clergy.

Now this view ill coheres with what is said so admirably elsewhere in the pastoral in regard to devotions and practices of religion, which, it is admitted, for the most part originate with the laity, and are only guided, or approved, or checked by the Ecclesia docens. Historically, it is evident that doctrines and beliefs are but the theoretical implications of devotions; that all through the lex orandi has been the lex credendi-in a word, that religious progress has been the work of those who have lived and practised the religion; that change has originated from below, and has been only criticised and formulated from above. If this be so, then the relation of the Ecclesia discens and docens is not mechanical, but organic; it is the whole Church that thinks and wills and acts, though it is through the Ecclesia docens that her thought is gathered up, scrutinised, formulated, and imposed as law upon all. It is not a part, but the whole Church, which is the organ of the Holy Ghost.

These two views of the matter are hopelessly irreconcilable, and therefore the intending convert' should be told very plainly which he is expected to hold. If the former, then the layman's duty is very simple: he has to repeat the prescribed formulas, to perform the prescribed duties, and leave all the rest to the clergy. There is not only no call upon him for any initiative of mind, will or action, but a positive duty of keeping as quiet as possible; he has no share in the active life of the Church; 'movetur, non movet;' he pays his fare, and takes his seat as so much ballast in the boat of Peter, while the clergy pull him across the ferry. If the latter, then he himself has to pull, and pull hard, though in subordination to those above him. 'I call you not servants, but friends,' says Christ to His disciples; and the reason assigned is their sympathetic and intelligent participation in His designs, as contrasted with the dull mechanical obedience of the unwilling slave. And if the Apostle bids the Episcopate to rule the faithful, he also warns them of the danger of 'lording it over the flock,' after the fashion of the 'kings of the Gentiles.' And, according as we take one view or the other

of this question, shall we judge to what extent the rulers of the Church ought to test and gauge (without necessarily being governed by) the mind of the laity. If the operation of the Holy Ghost permeates to these extremities of the ecclesiastic organism; if their thoughts and tendencies are integral factors of the general mind of the Church, they ought manifestly to be taken into account. If, however, only the Ecclesia docens be the direct organ of Divine guidance, then the opinions and wishes of the laity are wholly irrelevant, and their criticisms of their 'Divine Teachers' little short of blasphemies, as the pastoral seems to imply. Here, again, a plain answer is wanted to a plain question: Which of these conceptions is the true one? No one claims for the laity or the lower clergy a right to teach or decide, but only a right to speak and to be listened to. Christ as a child gave us the true ideal of 'docility' when He was found in the midst of the doctors, not teaching them, but hearing them, and asking them questions; but the pastoral implies that such interrogation is constructive disloyalty.

It is a matter of real curiosity to know what answer the AngloRoman bishops could give to these questions. No doubt there are members of the Roman Communion inclined to commend their religion to outsiders by a process of 'paring down;' by holding out hopes that things may be explained away. And it is to be feared that some of Rome's recruits have not entered into that fold by the open door, but have climbed up some other secret way; they have not taken the Divine Teacher' view in all its simplicity, but have seasoned it too liberally with salt. After all, it is not what this or that liberal or semi-liberal member of the Roman Church may say that matters, but what their united Episcopate says. And this pastoral brings the question to a sharp and clear issue. It will make many an intending or actual recruit pause, and ask whether after all there is so much to choose between these two evils: on the one side authority weakened to the verge of anarchy; on the other, authority carried to the extravagances of unqualified absolutism. Assuredly authority, and obedience, its correlative, are the remedies for the chief ills of this distracted world, civil and ecclesiastical; but absolutism is not authority, and slavery is not obedience, and yet the distinction is ignored in the pastoral of the Roman Catholic bishops.

It is a common superstition of the uncritical and of a certain section of Protestant controversialists to put every evil down to the Jesuits; but there is a true and sober sense in which the evil in question may, without offence, be characterised by the name of Jesuitism, to distinguish it from that sane and liberty-respecting Catholicism of which it is the perversion. All progress is the result of a series of ever-lessening oscillations from side to side of the golden mean of truth. The revolt of the Reformation gave birth and impetus to the reaction of Jesuitism. The founder of that Order

put the gospel of authority and obedience into the hands of his followers, and if the letter of his own teaching be free from demonstrable extravagance, it cannot be denied that the tradition which grew up about it was saturated with the 'Divine Teacher' fallacy, which is here criticised, and that it made use of exactly the same exegesis upon which that fallacy is founded. He that heareth you heareth me' was preached as the revealed basis not only of that obedience due to the inspired Apostles of Christ, but of that to be rendered to all rulers and superiors, civil and ecclesiastical. Had not the Apostle said that servants were to obey their master sicut Domino? So much emphasis was to be laid everywhere on the divine nature of all lawfully constituted authority that little or no attention was given to insisting on the limits and conditions under which it was divine. Consult the ascetical works emanating from that Order, and it will be seen how their treatment of the duty of obedience makes straight for this unqualified absolutism; the superior is God, and there is an end of the matter; on his side nothing but rights; on the other, nothing but duties, or, rather, one all-comprehensive duty, namely, passive, mechanical, uncriticising obedience.

When we consider the paramount influence in the post-Reformation Roman Church of the Order which shaped and fostered this tradition; the manner in which its ascetic, moral and dogmatic theology has been passively accepted and assimilated by the less energetic elements of that Church; the way in which its influence has permeated other religious orders and congregations, especially the more modern; and how, at least indirectly, and often directly, its methods and teaching have controlled the education of the secular clergy, it is not unreasonable to call this conception of authority which is here criticised by the name of Jesuitism. Thanks to the struggles of the defeated minority at the Vatican Council, the Roman Church seems just barely to have escaped setting her seal on that system; but all her subsequent developments have been in the direction of this 'Divine Teacher' fallacy.

No thoughtful man who understands the point can for a moment think of submission to Rome until he has received a clear and decisive answer to the questions raised by the pastoral. Many, no doubt, have taken the step and will take it in all good faith, without a suspicion of what they are committing themselves to. But it will not be the fault of the Anglo-Roman bishops. They at least have not attempted (as the ardent proselytiser usually does) to 'pare down' their doctrine of absolutism, or to make any comforting distinctions or limitations, or to hold out hopes of future modifications. And for this they deserve hearty thanks. However disposed we might be to accept the Roman Church as a divinely assisted teacher, as a slightly more definite and developed form of ancient Catholicism

with its sane respect for law and liberty, for the rights of subjects as well as for the rights of rulers, we are not at all disposed to accept Jesuitism (in the sense explained), or to acknowledge the Church to be literally a 'Divine Teacher,' teaching just as Christ taught, or even as St. Peter, or even as Moses on Mount Sinai.

us, of the Roman

In one way at least the evils, as they seem to system may appear more curable than our own. It may be easier. to pull down than to build up; easier to shorten a garment that is too long than to lengthen one that is too short; and in the interests of Christendom we would gladly credit those who bid us hope that there may be a 'paring down' of excrescences in some future not so far off as to be irrelevant. But we must also credit our own eyes, and put facts before hypotheses. Facts do not point to a growth of soberer views as to the extent of that little brief authority' with which Christ has entrusted frail men, who need every constitutional check and safeguard if they are not to become intoxicated to their own destruction and that of their subjects. And the Nemesis will not tarry. This very 'liberalism' against which the pastoral is directed is the first-fruits of that harvest of general revolt which absolutism has sown and which absolutism must reap. As detail after detail of teachings, extravagantly ascribed to the 'Divine Teacher,' melts away under the light of history and sober criticism, the whole authority of that Church will be discredited in the eyes of her children; and as all distinction between gold and ore, grain and chaff, vessel and content has been obliterated and banned by authority, those who reject anything will reject the whole indiscriminately, for all equally rests on the authority of 'the Divine Teacher.'

We may freely credit the Roman bishops and those of our own Communion with a disinterested desire to bring about unity by what seems to them a timely insistence on the principle of authority; we may agree that the remedy is to be sought in that quarter. But it must be in a clear, intelligent understanding of authority, its bases and its limits. Else their action will be like that of the hen whose ducklings take to the water-well-meant but ineffectual and noisy remonstrance. Both Episcopates seem in some danger of giving themselves away by the issue of excited and ill-considered utterances, and the result bids fair to be disastrous to that very confidence which it is their aim to secure.

In a document recently presented to the Bishop of Chichester, which represents a wider feeling than that of the single congregation from which it emanates, it is stated that recent action of the English Episcopate is tending to shake the confidence of many in the Church of England, and to expose them to the temptation of seceding from her Communion, or else from sheer despair of falling into utter