William Arthur

“ The Infallible gives forth the first oracle in his now acknowledged plenitude of power. Does it sound like "the word of God," at whose potent spell a disordered world will rise to new order and repose, or like that of an old man chiding the absent bishops who had not adorned the triumph of the day?
This exalted authority of the Roman Pontiff, venerable brethren, does not oppress, but assists; does not destroy, but builds up and often confirms in dignity, unites in affection, and strengthens and protects the rights of brethren—that is, of the bishops. ”

“ All round the Catholic horizon, in the literature of the new dominion, one object looms up out of clouds of hazy words, dilates before the imagination of the devout, and towers till others are dwarfed; and this object is the Crusade of St. Peter. Lads with old blood in their veins are learning how glorious it will be to lead a charge or to command a division in the greatest of all Crusades, for the most glorious of all restorations; and poor lads are learning how they that smite like Peter Jong will win in death the palm of the martyr. ”

“ There in a nutshell lies the whole theory of a direct government as against one by proxy; of a father's government of adult sons, as against a master's government of slaves through upper servants; of one all-watching love, and one all-working care, as against an imperial reclusion that leaves affairs to departmental divinities. "Our Father which art in heaven," deeper is Thy love to the least of us, more tender and closer far than could be that of any patron whom we might set up! In numbering the hairs of our heads, no Vicar dost Thou employ! ”

“ If so, and if mankind would endure it, well might the door of the Council be regarded as the entrance to a new world. But whether future ages will reckon it as the entrance to a new world or not, we are about to see that it was indeed the entrance to an arena on which was to be witnessed a process of revolution from above and a struggle of priest with priest,—a process as instructive, a struggle as curious, as any that our age has produced, among its many transformations of polity and redistributions of power. ”

“ May He who has given to our nation the blessings of free prayer, free preaching, free writing, free speech, and free assembly, with their wholesome fruit of equal laws, tempered power, and moderated liberty, grant that this humble labour may in some measure contribute to make those inestimable boons dearer than ever to the hearts of our people, and that it may contribute also to place them in a position more readily to foil every endeavour to snatch those boons or to steal them away from us and from mankind! ”

“ The Pope is not a power among men to be venerated like another. But he is a power altogether divine. He is the propounder and teacher of the law of the Lord in the whole universe; he is the supreme leader of the nations to guide them in the way of eternal salvation; he is the common father and universal guardian of the whole human species in the name of God.... The treasures of revelation, the treasures of truth, the treasures of righteousness, the treasures of supernatural graces upon earth, have been deposited by God in the hands of one man, who is the sole dispenser and keeper of them. ”

“ The broad denial of the right of the State to define or limit the rights of the Church, without distinction, is meant to cover, and, to Vaticanists, does cover, the right of the Church to define the limits of her own authority as to its domain and as to its exercise, and consequently the right to define the limits of the authority of the State, both as to its sphere and its exercise.
Yet, what is, at first sight, simpler to superficial readers than denying the right of the State to define the rights of a Church? It is a right of a Church to believe, to pray, to worship, and to preach. ”

“ God's two priceless jewels, conscience and conviction, are here sent to the bottom of the stagnant pool of submission to a human king. It is by contemplating such a course of conduct in men with a position to hold in the eye of the sun, that we learn the force of such words as those of Vitelleschi, when he says that the frequent collision in Catholic countries between a man's civil conscience and his ecclesiastical one is the reason why so often there is no conscience at all. And men such as these German bishops are the moral guides of millions! ”

“ The people are civil and apparently industrious, but the energy of the children goes out in begging. The decay and dirt which conquer all, furnish to an English eye a plain instance of material progress—matter gaining upon mind. The palace is neither kept up nor abandoned as a ruin, but, as if to set the town an example of thriftless filth, it is used partly for an aesthetic exhibition, containing as it does one wonderful mosaic, with frescoes and portraits of the Pope and Cardinals of the family, and is partly given up to—matter. ”

“ Will personal and independent infallibility raise again from the grave the extinct Churches on the African shores? or will it awake out of sleep that East which once bloomed with so many talents and virtues? Will it be easier for our brethren, the Vicars Apostolic, to bring back Pagans, Mohammedans, and Schismatics, to the Catholic faith, if they teach them that the Pope is infallible by himself? Will the definition encourage and animate Protestants, and other heretics, to draw near to the Roman Church, laying aside all their prejudices and animosities? ”

“ Great dangers still threaten the Church. Remember that in your regiment you stand, not merely as soldiers marching side by side; you also represent a principle before the world, the principle of the voluntary and disinterested defence of the Holy See. You are the nucleus around which will unite in the hour of danger the prayers, the succours, and the hopes of the Catholic world. Be, then, true soldiers of God. You have not merely duties, you have even a mission, and you will not fulfil it without union, discipline, moral conduct, and military instruction. ”

“ May this realm hereafter afford an example of laws being evermore ameliorated under the leavening influence of the kingdom which cannot be moved, of manners ever becoming purer, and of blest contentment growing, year after year, in households over every one of which shall hover the more than earthly charm of domestic bliss, hallowed at the family altar! And may the remote descendants of Victoria and Albert reign, in the love of God and in the love of man, as Christian princes over a happy Christian people, and age after age may the throne be established in righteousness! ”

“ It remains to be seen whether the plants springing from seeds that quickly fall from a free Bible, a free soul, a free pulpit, and a free press, will die crushed as poison plants under the sandals of the monk, or whether they will yet flourish like grass of the earth, and the fruit of them shall shake like Lebanon, when fakir and monk shall together be remembered among the things that fatally decay in the shade of a growth which, though at first the least of herbs, becomes afterwards the greatest of all trees. ”

“ Nature and art seem to have combined to make the house dirty. Here, on the contrary, the ground is as dry as a board, the air bright, the walls of warm-coloured stone, the sky lofty, luminous and blue. Nature has done everything to suggest cleanliness, and also to reward it with such brilliant effect as we can only see in the brightest moments which summer lights up within our English homes. ”

“ Coming up amid the decline and corruption of an empire older, richer, and more populous than had been the empire of Rome, the East India Company, in a couple of generations, made a nation out of some hundreds of States among which had raged yearly conflicts. That nation still contains many thrones, but within its circle, and in spite of their jealousies, no less than two hundred and forty millions of men, a family immensely greater than Rome ever cursed with war or blessed with law, now live in peace and freedom such as were unknown to the ages which had aforetime passed over their country. ”

“ In manners, it tended to make men servile in a lower position and arrogant in a higher; in politics, it tended to make them either slaves or despots; in religion, it tended to make them either unbelieving or superstitious. Is it part of the penalty of Rome that barbaric forms should linger at its Court, when the spirit of Christianity has banished them from the Courts of Christian kings? Our own monarch, at the head of her two hundred and eighty millions, is too good a Christian to make her subject Rajahs, as a spectacle for her commons and her troops, come and fall down and kiss her foot. ”

“ The Church pardons error, but she cannot subject herself to the obstinately erring will, but must destroy its dominion and its tyranny. She, as the teacher of the truth, cannot conclude a peace with such a will. She cannot lift it up to the throne beside her, she cannot share her dominion with it. Understood in its proper and true signification, heresy is a frightful crime. Do the heathen blaspheme God out of ignorance? Heresy tears truth to pieces consciously. Did the Jews crucify Christ according to the flesh? Heresy fastens the Church, His mystical body, to the cross. ”

“ But when Victor Emmanuel repeats this blunder in a form more completely providing for future Papal power, he digs a grave under the feet of his own dynasty. To Italians, unhappily, a great hypocrisy may be a great triumph of skill; they smile at principles, admire shifts, and are wondrously clever at them. In politics, till they found the principle of constitutional monarchy, they, in spite of all their shifts, floundered between fruitless conspiracy and repression—never ending, still beginning. In religion they want what in politics they have found, a principle and a basis. ”

“ Human unity is larger and nobler than one throne will ever shadow, and so is Christian unity. The lust of uniformity that erected the Inquisition, fettered the Press, sentenced free opinion and free speech to death, reformed the Decalogue, and laid bonds upon the Bible, has never given a nation rest, and has only been an [Pg 190] endless source of division and scepticism. Azeglio, in the same breath in which he speaks of this "unity," calls Italy "the ancient land of doubt," where even at the time of the Reformation people thought little of Rome and nothing of Geneva. ”

“ Beust in Vienna, Hohenlohe in Munich, Ollivier in Paris, were not tranquil like the priest in Rome. Sooner or later they would all be engulfed in the stormy sea of revolution—all but the Church and the Pope. The Syllabus would abide for ever, and with it the Canons of the Vatican Council.... The Pope has proved by facts that he knows how to govern better than any other sovereign. We defy any emperor whatever to govern a country fourteen years as Pope Pius IX has governed Rome. ”

“ In those sixty years the three great Protestant powers—England, Prussia, and America—have not drawn the sword one against the other. The smaller Protestant powers have not fought among themselves. No Protestant capital has undergone a foreign occupation. With the exception of America, no Protestant State has been desolated by civil war. No Protestant army has been given to military insurrection, or has, in the day of trial, proved untrue. No Protestant sovereign has been expelled by his own people. No Protestant President of a Republic has been executed, or exiled, or condemned as a traitor. ”

“ They will hereafter, more than heretofore, send forth into every region under heaven their happy sons, bearing the glorious gospel of the blessed God, and with swift feet running to tell to all men the way of salvation. In England, in Ireland, and in Scotland; in every place where our own blood flows in the [Pg 712] veins of kinsmen; in every broad State of the Transatlantic Union; in every thriving colony that boasts the British name—may the Churches dwell together in unity—may the people grow in wisdom, in virtue, and in faith! ”

“ In the Bull of Convocation the Pope had spoken of his intentions for the general benefit of society. In the Bull of Suspension it appeared that the particular society which best knew him and his remedies had spewed them out of her mouth. After having for many centuries had experience of his spiritual supremacy and temporal power, Italy had mournful proofs that they were socially evil. No land in Europe could produce a record of any dynasty which had so often brought into it foreign armies, to beat its people down, and to keep them under. ”

“ To wish modern society, or any Christian born in that society and destined to live in it, to esteem the condition of Spain under Isabella II more highly than that of England under Victoria, and to wish this in the name of the Catholic Church, in the name of the party of order in Europe, is to impute to that party and to that Church the saddest of responsibilities, and the most menacing. ”