The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 87
Rome's Recruits
Rome's Recruits.
The world, as Sir Henry Taylor has said, does not know its greatest men as long as they are in it; neither, let us add, does it measure the significance of contemporary events. Among the many incidents of to-day, political, moral, and social, which we hardly take the trouble to note, but which will be important items of the history our descendants learn, few will be treated as more momentous than that Homeward movement which for the last forty years has swept on, silently yet swiftly, in our midst. The list which we print in another column of some of these proselytes will contribute to a better realisation of an important tendency of current religious thought, and will be of interest to Protestants and Catholics alike, though on very different grounds. Compiled without any official aid, it is merely such as any little knot of converts are able to make out from among their own acquaintance, and it has, therefore, no claim to be other than incomplete. Moreover, although there have, of course, been continuous reversions to Romanism ever since the days of Henry VIII., and not merely, as some suppose, since the birth of Tractarianism in 1835, our list is necessarily limited to the names of those known only to our own generation; and, whereas the Roman Church boasts an especial mission to the poor, and can count its converts among the lower orders by the thousand, it was obviously impossible to extend our roll beyond the confines of that class to whose actions the advantages of birth or education lend a certain degree of responsibility and weight.
Mr. Gladstone is very fond of telling his friends that at the time of Dr. Newman's secession, feeling seriously troubled, he ran down to Lavington and opened his mind to his friend the Rector." "Tell me," he said to the then staunchly Protestant Archdeacon Manning, "are we to take each separate conversion to Rome as a separate testimony to Romanism, or is there any one characteristic, peculiar to all the converts, that will afford a common explanation of their change?" "There is," replied the Archdeacon, in his calm, incisive way; "they have all one common characteristic—a want of truth." Before six years were over the speaker so fully retracted this dogmatic dictum by his own secession, that no one, we suppose, would venture on its serious repetition now. Other attempts to interpret by some single idiosyncrasy or weakness a whole set of conversions have all as signally failed. It could not well be love of power or of fame that led Dr. Newman to exchange the Oxford that adored him for the Birmingham that knows him not; that tempted Cardinal Manning to step aside from the open path that led easily on to Lambeth Palace and a seat in the Lords; that weighed with a hundred rectors and vicars—such as Oakeley and Faber and Bathurst—who left fat livings and certain promotion to to labour as obscure parish priests amongst the ignorant and the poor; that brought the noblest of earth's sons and daughters—with such titles as Norfolk, Argyll, Leeds, Buccleuch, Hamilton, Ripon, Bute, Londonderry, Lothian, Qneensberry, Denbigh, Gainsborough, and Herbert—to bow before the lowliest ministers of the lowly; or that lead poets like Coventry Patmore and Aubrey de Vere to adopt a creed that put them out of harmony with the temper of their time. It was not "love of ecclesias-ticism" that made Henry Wilberforce, Edward Walford, Lord Charles Thyne, Mr. Oxenham, and a hundred more, leave the cure of souls in the Anglican system to join a Church where, from one canse or another, they could never rise above the level of the laity. It was no want of learning or disinclination to weigh evidence that led men like the author of "The Apologia," and Mr. Allies, after years of controversy, to change one creed for another. Pecuniary gain could hardly be the ground on which clergymen with wives and families gave up their emoluments to fight against starvation as best they could, with strange weapons, which one, at least, to our certain knowledge, weilded so ill that he sought at last for shelter in a workhouse; and love of money cannot be the conduct-gauge of a company that includes Thomas Henry, who became a priest of the old faith rather than a worldling millionaire; and George Lane Fox, that eldest son of Yorkshire's greatest gentleman, the Squire of Bramham, of whose enthusiastic zeal and charity his co-religionists are proud to speak. It was not any want of hereditary Protestant traditions, careful training, and strong family ties that allowed nearly all the Wilberforces, the descendants of Sir Walter Scott, the Lock-harts, Dr. Arnold's eldest son, Father Coleridge (brother of the Judge), Miss Stanley (daughter of the Bishop and sister of the Dean), William Palmer (brother of the Chancellor), the Bowrings, Miss Gladstone (sister of the ex-Premier), Lady Charles Thynne, Mrs Pye (both of them daughters of bishops), and many more, to dritt away from the old moorings. Nor did they, in most cases, scale St. Peter's bark without infinite suspence, heartache, and difficulty. The hot impulse of youth might possibly be urged to explain away the conversion of Ambrose de Lisle when an Eton boy; and the stagnation of age to account for that of the octogenarian, Sir Bouchier Wrey; but every intervening stage oi life is represented in the list. Nor can it be said that this Catholic revival has its origin in a dilettante antiquarianism, or in the dreams of bookworms, brought up in a university and unfamiliar with practical life, for some of its most ardent disciples are gathered from the ranks of gay Guardsmen, and many a whilom soldier and salior son of England has doffed his uniform to don the cowl of the monk and the cassock of the priest. Men of recog- nised learning in truth are there, such as Paley, Professor of Classics at Cambridge; Pr feasor Barff, the chemist; Seager, Assistant Professor of Hebrew at Oxford; and legal men, eminent as Serjeant Bellasis, or as Edward Badeley, Hope Scott, Mr. Aspinall, and Mr. Bagshawe—Queen's Counsel all four of them; but everything is not grave and weighty where F. O. Burnand is, and Arthur A'Becket, and Arthur Sketchley—a Protestant curate in the olden time. Nor can "silliness," as Exeter Hall supposes, be laid at the door of the ladies who have elected to become daughters of the Holy Roman Church. Ae-laide Procter, the poetess; Elizabeth Thompson, the military painter; Lady Georgiana Fullerton; Lady Gertrude Douglas, author of "Linked Lives," and many more whose names cannot find place on our list, because they are not publicly known, though familiar indeed wherever suffering is to be tended and misery consoled are not exactly those to whom "silly women" would seem to be an applicable term. It is evident, therefore, that on none of these grounds can we flatter ourselves that we have discovered a key to the Homeward movement—how pleasant soever that discovery might be to our Protestantism. And why, after all, need we look for such a key or care to find it, further than in conscience? Protestantism can afiord to be generously just to her foes, from whom she only asks in return an equal toleration.
Lord Beaconsfield, not long ago, declared that Dr. Newman's secession had inflicted "a blow on the Church from which she still reels;" and it is easy to understand the loss which the Anglican Archidiaconate has sustained in Cardinal Manning; nevertheless, wo do not think that Anglicans need fear that any serious damage has been done to the Establishment by desertions to Rome, numerous and influental as they are. In a communion of millions, the units, or even the hundreds, are not easily missed; and the list of learned and pious men that remain is glorious and long. To the Roman communion, on the other hand, the new acquisitions have been obviously a gain, both socially and intellectually. The priest whose uncouthness made him an unwelcome guest wherever refinement had a home belonged to a race that is now almost, if not quite, extinct; and the Catholic laity, emerging from the dark holes and corners where they had long crouched to escape, if possible, the contempt that followed their footsteps in the open day, became intelligent apostles of culture, lovers of letters, and polished men of the world. There is hardly a single English noble family that has not given one or more of its members to the Roman Church, and the intercourse thus opened between the two formerly uncommunicating camps has resulted in a feeling of mutual good-will and friendliness, which the gteatest intellects and largest hearts on either side cordially encourage. And when we remember that this culture among Roman Catholics, resulting from "convertism," is a benefit not only to themselves, but also to the State, of which they are numerically so important a part, and to Society, which some of their members so eminently adorn, we do not not suppose that enlightened Protestantism is at all inclined to grudge, as the price of such happy results, the respectful alienation of even some thousands of her sons.