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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 87

Rome's Recruits. — Second List

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Rome's Recruits.

Second List.

Last week we gave a first list of converts to Catholicism, which, as we said at the time, had no claim to be complete. To-day we add a supplementary list, and next week we propose to publish the whole, with corrections and additions, as a Supplement to The Whitehall Review. If any new evidence were needed of the widespread and intense interest taken in contemporary theological thought, it would be abundantly afforded by the reception given to our last week's illustration of so important a phase of it. Every post has contributed to the question a budget of letters. Those from our Protestant correspondents do not breathe any anger against the men and women who changed one Church for another; and those which come from Catholic sources exhibit no irreverence towards the Anglican Church—no elation over the number and the influence of such as have ceased to acknowledge her claims. Certainly, toleration has made rapid strides since Doddridge wrote, a little more than a century ago: "The growth of Popery gives a general and just alarm" since Bishop Gibson published his "Preservation against Popery and since, as Mr. Lecky records in his latest work, a fashion which had arisen among ladies of wearing Capuchin cloaks was gravely reprehended, on the ground that it was teaching men "to view the cowl not only with patience but complacency." The severest comment on "convertism" which our publication has called forth comes from a Protestant Countess, who says she is glad we have "shown up the weak-minded ones," but says it so pleasantly that the most morose among the "faithful" could not positively take offence.

From Roman Catholics in general, and converts in particular, we have received scores of communications, correcting and adding to the list; these will appear in due turn, and for all of them we here take occasion to express our acknowledgements Among the side lights thrown on the Romeward and Ritualist movements by the publication of the List, it is a signficant fact that some of the High Church papers show decided symptoms of a desire to keep its existence, as far as possible, in the dark. Having long contended that Ritualism is a religion in it itself and not merely a make-believe, with Rome for its only legitimate issue, it would be a suicidal policy on their part to call attention to the vast amount of evidence pointing to a very different conclusion which we have been able to bring together. Not that all shades of prior religious thought are not represented in the list. Low Church and Broad Church, as well as High Church, contribute their quota,—and among those who never belonged to the Establishment, but flung themselves straight from the arms of Dissent into the bosom of the "Mother and Mistress of page 19 Churches," are wilom Methodists, Jews, Baptists, and Quakers.

The list was not intended to comprise the names of ladies, unless, by some accident, they were already prominently and publicly known in their character as converts. The fact, however, that a large number of ladies' names has been forwarded to us, indicating, in all cases at any rate, a local importance such as makes privacy impossible, has led us, in the present number, to modify the rule. For although the Romeward movement has been on the whole more distinctly a masculine one than theological movements have generally been in England, the "devout female sex" (as the Roman breviary as it) has contributed a strong contingent of amazons to the general body of recruits. It has gathered its forces principally from what might have been regarded as the sheltered homes of pious, traditional, happy, and useful Anglicanism—from rectories and parsonages of the country. The parson has gone over in his fifties, but the parson's wife and daughter have gone over in their hundreds; and it is not too much to say that among the "martyrs by the pang without the palm" to the claims of Rome, these ladies have had the hardest, as the obscurest share. Estrangement from husbands and fathers, enforced separation from children, with the severe yet lessor evils of loss of fortune and of social standing, have been the lot of a larger number of educated English-women than the world dreams of. If the female members of a layman's family take the grave step of a formal change of faith they need not, as a rule, lose home or kindred; theological feeling seldom run so high as to render a break-up necessary; but it is inevitably otherwise when the priestess herself disowns and denounces the sacerdotal claims of her lord. Her rebellion is not agairst his Church or his Articles merely—conjugal and paternal affection might endure thus far; but it is a far more intimate, personal, and intolerable protest against his orders, his precepts, his sermons—and a protest so publicly made that not only a natural self-love but a necessary ministerial dignity seems to demand the expulsion of the otherwise faithful wife, the otherwise dutiful daughter. The thing is not pleasant to think of, but it is very common. No one, for instance, who has lived in Italy, especially in Florence or Rome, is unfamiliar with the figure of the solitary English Catholic lady, who lives in a straitened seclusion, who haunts the churches, who pitches her easel before a favourite Raphael, and manufactures repeated copies of Fra Angelica's angels, turning to hard account the one accomplishment of her school-days which can now be utilized for the purpose of bread-winning. And in London the same class literally abounds—although it finds little representation in our list.

It would be a task of too great magnitude to attempt, in these pages, to determine the chief motives that have led multitudes of men and women from England to Rome. "Conversions" are emphatically individual affairs; but, before leaving the subject, we may quote from a letter adressed to us by a clergyman of page break twenty-one years' standing, whose case gives a clue to many more:

Having a private income of my own, I cannot lay claim to much, of that fighting against "starvation" that you truly speak of in some other cases. It was a loss to me of some £200 a year and the regard of all my relations except one family. However, I have succeeded in "living it down" to a great extent. It was with me and my wife a pure case of conscience. It was evident to us after diligent study and reflection that it was impossible to believe that the Church of England was really what was originally supposed—a "true branch of the Catholic Church,"—for a multitude of reasons, chiefly because there was no visible head—no definite creed—every clergyman being at liberty to preach pretty much what he liked. I was convinced likewise that she was thoroughly Lutheran in Spirit—that her prayer-book could not fairly be said to countenance anything like Sacerdotalism, but that, on the contrary, she had eliminated from the formularies which were based on the breviary and missal everything that could be construed in that direction. For which reason, though always a high churchman, I had stoutly objected to wearing the "vestments," and never did wear them.

The future historian of the nineteenth century, if he be a writer of the Lecky school, will have to devote a chapter to the consideration of the questions at which we can only hint; and he will find, ready to hand, much material for his purpose in the current numbers of The Whitehall Review.