Alarming Developments of Romanism

By Joseph Hocking

Back in the last century Cardinal Manning gave an important charge to his clergy concerning the work of Romanism in England. This is what he said : "It is good, reverend brethren, for us to be here in England. If ever there was a land in which work is to be done and perhaps much to suffer, it is here. I shall not say too much if I say that we have to subjugate and subdue, to conquer and to rule an imperial race; we have to do with a will which reigns throughout the world as the will of old Rome reigned once; we have to bend or break that will which nations and kingdoms have found invincible and inflexible. Were heresy conquered in England, it would be conquered throughout the world. All its lines meet here, and therefore in England the Church of God must be gathered in its strength."

That call has been obeyed, as the following facts will show. In 1851 there were 958 priests in Great Britain; in 1908 there were 4,193. In 1851 there were 683 churches, chapels, and stations; in 1908 there were 2,137. In 1851 there were 70 monasteries and nunneries; in 1908 there were 1,131.

These figures represent an united, determined effort to pervert England, for they are more important than appears on the surface. The monasteries and nunneries, for example, represent educational institutions by which Protestants, attracted by ridiculously low fees, are tempted to send their children. They represent an organisation with millions of members and untold wealth. They represent activities too numerous to mention. These activities are seen in the Catholic Truth Society, which issues millions of pamphlets, nearly all of which misrepresent Protestantism and glorify Romanism. They are seen in the placing of Romanist pressmen in nearly every important newspaper in Great Britain. Literary editors, news editors, are often Romanists, who naturally use their influence in favour of their Church. They are seen in Parliament, they are seen in various other forms.

How far they have succeeded it is impossible to say. In point of actual numbers they have made but little headway. Fifty years ago there were 1,500,000 Romanists in Great Britain, of which 200,000 were English. From all I can gather those numbers are but little altered. But this tells little; we have page 2 to get a little deeper. Their work is, comparatively speaking, only just begun, and as we shall see presently.

Mark you I am not objecting to their work. They have a perfect right, believing as they do, to seek to win England back to Rome. Nevertheless there are certain facts which I would bring before you which I think demands our serious consideration. And please remember that my time will allow me only to touch on what seems to me the most striking features. I must leave you to amplify for yourselves.

First let me refer a moment to the Press. I need not enlarge as to the power of the Press, or to urge that what millions are daily accustomed to read, must affect their mental outlook. Let us remember that Romanists form an insignificant portion of our population, and yet consider the prominence given to Roman Catholic news, especially in everything that is favourable to it. Items insignificant in themselves are dressed up in the most alluring form. Scarcely a day passes without this taking place, while Protestant news takes a subsidiary place. Let Father Vaughan declare that Protestantism is dying, and behold it is copied in almost every newspaper. Let him go from Newcastle to Plymouth, and he is fully reported. Let Dr. Horton go to those same towns and proclaim what England owes to Protestantism, and he is not reported at all or discussed by half a dozen unattractive lines.

Archbishop Bourne states that no less than ninety-two papers were represented at the late Eucharistic Conference, and in the daily papers which I read the story of that Conference was given in terms of fulsome adulation, suggesting that the articles were inspired from headquarters. It might seem indeed to the ordinary reader that the Catholic claims were conceded, and that Christ our Lord had, for 300 years, been banished from England, and that the Roman Cardinals had brought him back to take possession of our country.

I do not for a moment hint that there is any collusion between the editors of our newspapers and the Roman Church. I am only urging that that Church has seen to it that those favourable to their interests are placed on every great newspaper.

Let Father Vaughan tell a story to an East End audience, full of ridiculous nonsense, as was evidenced in the London newspapers on Wednesday last, and he is reported in extenso; but let some Protestant divine, whose shoes intellectually, and from the standpoint of scholarship, he is not worthy to stoop down and unloose, give a Protestant lecture, and he is unnoticed. No wonder that Father Vaughan said to a Daily Mail reporter on June 28, 1906 : "Let me tell you how deeply I am indebted to the Daily Mail and the Press generally for the generous, handsome way I have been reported."

Here, then, is a fact patent to the eyes of all who will take page 3 the trouble to look. The Romanists have gone far to capture the Press of Protestant England. After having been the bitterest enemies to the dissemination of light, they are now using what Protestantism has made possible for the advancement of their own Church.

Mind, I do not blame the Romanists for this, rather I admire them. All the same, one cannot help asking what Protestants are doing to tell the country the real inwardness of such a conference as that held at Westminster.

There is another thing to which I would draw your attention. I said just now that in 1851 there were 70 monastic institutions in Great Britain; in 1908 there were 1,131. Please remember that there must be many thousands of people in them. Of these 1,131, 813 are for women. When a woman enters as a nun she vows away her liberty, she vows absolute obedience. She has to confess her inmost thoughts. If she desires liberty she has to confess it, and suffer penance. She is taught to obey her Mother Superior as she would obey God Himself. She is hedged around by rules, and the whole influence of her training is to crush and to subjugate the will.

In connection with these places are industrial homes, reformatories, laundries, and the like, where thousands of people, in the main young girls, are employed, but the ordinary Factory Acts do not apply to them.

Now the story of monastic institutions is among the blackest in history. They have been the centre of intrigue, impurity, and treason. They have been in past years expelled from land after land. Roman Catholic countries have refused to have them. This has lately been urged upon us with great force. The French Government demanded proper regulation and supervision of Religious Houses in that country. Those Houses refused to comply with the law, so they came to England. We, as a Protestant country, give a home to those whom Roman Catholic countries declare to be a danger. I do not object to this, dangerous though it may be. I am too strong a Protestant to refuse a place of refuge to those who think differently from me. But—and it is a great but—they should be under proper rule and supervision. Other nations refused them. Spain insisted on laws similar to those of France; Portugal refused them; Austria, Germany, Italy gave them no welcome. England alone received them. Well, what are the conditions which obtain? How many inmates there are in these places we do not know, we cannot know. As Sir Godfrey Lushington, formerly Under Secretary for Home Affairs, said in the National Review, May, 1903, "In practice religious houses are shrouded in secrecy. No one knows anything about them. The Home Office does not. Nor does the Local Government Board. Nor does Dublin Castle. Nor does Somerset page 4 House. The census gives no statistics showing the total number of religious houses and their locality, or the number of nuns, or the number of penitents, or the number of inmates." Now these are weighty words. As a matter of fact, convents are sealed houses. In them are thousands of our fellow-creatures. Most of them enter in youth when their natures are most susceptible to influence. They are strictly guarded. Obedience is one of the great laws of life. A ghastly curse rests on all those who dare to run away. They are taught to destroy all human affection. Do they wish to come into the world again? We do not know, cannot know, except on some rare occasion one happens to escape. They are under the dominion of a confessor, whom to disobey is regarded as sin. A few days ago a nun escaped from a convent in Essex. When she was overtaken by pursuers she cried out in agony. But she escaped. Of course the Roman Catholics have sought to gloss over the facts. They say she might have got away any time. But can any one believe it who reads the story? I make no charge of cruelty, immorality, or crime. But I assert that anything can be done, children can be born, and women can die, there can be cruelty, crime, outrage, and yet no one has the right to know anything about it. A convent is a sealed house, and its secrets in most cases remain secrets.

And yet, is it not a fact that, besides these, practically every public institution of every sort—asylum, prison, reformatory—is open to public inspection? Why is it that Rome should so rule our land that convents, monasteries, and the industrial institutions associated with that Church, should be exempt? The public has a Right to Know that all is well within these prison houses, especially in view of their history, ancient and modern.

Well, what is the state of affairs? Attempt after attempt has been made to obtain inquiry, only to fail. Only a few months ago a memorial containing nearly a million signatures were brought to the House of Commons demanding inquiry, but the question is shelved.

Let me give you a little modern history :—

In June, 1906, Mr. T. L. Corbett moved for leave to introduce a Bill "to appoint Commissioners to inquire as to the growth in numbers of Conventual and Monastic Institutions in Great Britain and Ireland, and whether any further regulations of such institutions are required."

A modest demand, surely.

This was defeated by 231 against 72.

In June, 1907, he brought the same proposal. It was carried by a majority of 4, 125 against 121.

In 1908 he again moved his motion, and it was lost.

And why has this been vetoed and shelved time after time? Because of the influence of the Roman Catholics, and because page 5 political expediency is regarded as of greater importance than the welfare of human lives.

Surely the time has come when we should demand laws to be placed on our statute-book whereby this unholy compact with Rome should be brought to an end.

Another alarming fact for consideration is that our Established Church can no longer be called Protestant. To a large extent it repudiates the name. In proof of this I will give only two quotations. Says the late Cardinal Vaughan, when speaking on the conversion of England : "I heard some one whisper, 'You are dreaming. Your talk of the conversion of England is childish babble. You are not two, out of the twenty-seven millions of population. You misread their strong Protestantism.'" "To this I reply," he says, "Compare the onetime attitude of England towards the Church with her attitude to-day. The population has changed. The very establishment which was set up in rivalry to the Church has changed its tone and temper. In the Church of England many of the churches are often distinguishable only with extreme difficulty from those belonging to the Church of Rome. The doctrines of the Catholic Church, which had been rejected and condemned as blasphemous, superstitious, and fond inventions, have been re-examined, and taken back one by one, until the Thirty-nine Articles have been banished as the rule of faith. And what is still more remarkable is that the movement has been stronger than the rankest Protestantism, stronger than the Bishops, stronger than the lawyers and the legislature. A spasmodic protest, a useless prosecution, a delphic judgment, and the movement continues and spreads, lodging itself in Anglican houses and convents, churches, and even cathedrals, until it is rapidly covering the country."

This is strong language, and it is only part of the truth. A vast number of the clergy of the Church of England are betraying the Protestantism of the country, while our elephantine Liberal majority, with its 180 so-called stalwart Free Churchmen, stand supinely by doing nothing. No wonder Father Vaughan declares that Protestantism as a fighting force is dead.

The other quotation to which I referred is from a lecture given by Father Hugh Benson, son of the late Archbishop of Canterbury, one time clergyman of the Church of England, and a member of the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield, one of several similar institutions belonging to the Church of England. Some months ago Father Hugh Benson, now a Catholic priest, gave a lecture in Liverpool, in which he told the story of his conversion to Rome, and what part the teaching of this Church of England Monastery had in it. He says : "We had what we believed to be Mass; we observed silence during page 6 the greater part of the day; we wore a certain habit with a girdle, and some wore a biretta; we used the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, supplementing it with a great part of the Catholic Breviary, and I, for years before I became a Catholic, recited my Rosary every day. We taught the doctrine of Confession, and I can tell you that at the conclusion of the missions I conducted, I used to hear far more confessions than I have heard as a Catholic priest.

"On practically every point except the supremacy of the Pope we believed the teaching of the Catholic Church, taught most of its doctrines, as thousands of Anglican clergy are doing to-day; and it is this teaching that is building the bridge over which Anglicans will come over to the true fold."

I have only this to say about this quotation. If the battle between Protestantism and Popery is to be fought over again, let it be done fairly and in the open field. Let us know where we are. It is bad enough to fight a system, aided by the Press and politics of the country; but it is worse when those sworn to maintain the Reformed teaching of our land, and taking the pay and prestige of the nation to disseminate the teaching of the New Testament, are, instead, betraying those principles which they are sworn to defend.

There is but one other alarming development that I have time to mention, and that is the endeavour to tamper with the King's Coronation Oath. This may at first sight seem insignificant; in reality it is a striking sign of the times. A century ago the suggestion would have been repudiated with scorn; to-day it is advocated by those to whom we looked for better things. I know that plausible statements are made; I know we are told that the Oath is an insult to our fellow Christians. In answer to this I wish to say two or three things.

First, if our Coronation Oath is an insult to the Romanists, what of the oath which Princess Ena had to make when she became the wife of a Spanish king? If this stood alone, I should not have mentioned it, but when taken in conjunction with what follows, is of importance.

Second, I would ask you to consider the history of that Oath. It did not exist without serious reasons. It was framed to save the nation from forces which would have destroyed its liberties and dragged it back into past slavery.

And, third, I would draw your attention to a serious consideration. When you are dealing with Rome you are not dealing with a body like other religious bodies. Rome does not desire religious equality. She Demands Supremacy. Mr. Gladstone made this clear in his "Vatican Decrees." He says : "All other Christian bodies are content with freedom in their own domain. Orientals, Lutherans, Calvinists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Nonconformists, one and all in the page 7 present day, contentedly and thankfully accept the benefits of civil order; they never contend that the State is not its own master, . . . but not so the leaders of the Roman Church."

Mr. Gladstone clearly shows that Papal Infallibility means that every Catholic owes allegiance first to the Pope and to the State afterwards. Roman Catholicism is not only a religious organisation, it is essentially a great political body; and it demands absolute obedience, not only in religious matters, but in matters of State, to him who sits in the so-called Chair of Peter. And the Pope demands, as the very essence of the system of Popery, obedience not only in religion but in civil matters.

In the light of that thought, then, it becomes a very dangerous thing to tamper with the Coronation Oath. It opens the door to abuses which we all desire to avoid.

But whether I am right or wrong in this, the whole question shows the aggressiveness of Romanism.

You have a huge organisation, eager, alert, uncompromising, determined to convert England. She is working in a thousand ways, she never confesses defeat, and she believes she will conquer. Moreover, in order to conquer she is using all the artillery of the greatest organisation in the world.

You have an Established Church, nominally Protestant, but really riddled with Romanism. It, in large measure, scorns the name of Protestant, and is filled with Societies the avowed purpose of which is to lead England to Rome.

You have the huge engine of the Press utilised to do Rome's work.

You have convents and monasteries dotted all over the country, the heads of which are using them as a means of disseminating their faith. You have innumerable schools, well equipped, where modern languages are taught by native teachers, and so ridiculously cheap that Protestants are induced to send their children.

You have a matchless audacity, an insidious power which demands everything and concedes nothing. You have an apparently insignificant minority, dictating terms to what seems an overwhelming majority. If you doubt this, think of the Education Act of 1902, when Protestantism suffered the greatest humiliation and disgrace since the days of Bloody Mary.

You have, in short, an earnest, enthusiastic determined Romanism on the one hand, and a comparatively indifferent Protestantism on the other.

Do we desire for Romanism to come back? If we wish England to become like the South of Ireland; if we desire to sink into the retrograde and moribund condition of Spain; if page break we desire to drift into atheism like France or Italy; or if we desire our Press, our Parliament, our consciences, our best life, to be placed under the tyranny and terrorism of priestism; if we desire to drift into the power of a merciless, tyrannous, and soul-poisoning hierarchy, which has cursed every country on which she has laid her hand in power, let us be indifferent about the faith and the freedom which our fathers won for us.

Let me, in closing, indicate what steps I think we as a Free Church Council should take.

1.	Should not a great Protestant demonstration form a part of our programme at our meetings each year? If our enthusiasm needs to be fanned into a flame, is not this an effective means of doing it?
2.	Should we not send out an urgent request to all the ministers of all our Churches to see to it that all the children associated with our Churches should be instructed in the history and principles of our faith? Every Romanist child is carefully grounded in his faith, can we say the same of our Protestant children?
3.	Should not our Press be more and more utilised for the dissemination of distinctly Protestant literature?
4.	Should not pressure be brought to bear upon our so-called Nonconformist members of Parliament, urging them to safeguard our faith, by checking the legislation which means the placing of more and more power in the hands of Rome, a power which will be used for the cursing of our country?
5.	Should we not send out a band of our best scholars, speakers, and lecturers, whose business it shall be to educate the people of the country in the story of the Great Reformation and in the principles to which we owe all that is holiest and best in our national life? We are often taunted that only the ignorant and the blatant fanatics are aggressive Protestants, should we not make such a taunt impossible?

For let us remember, and with this I close, we have nothing of which we need be ashamed. There is nothing more glorious in the history of the world since the times of the Acts of the Apostles, than the story of Protestantism. The men who fought our battles were heroes, they stood before kings, and fearless of death defied the power of Popes and Councils, they lifted up the lamp of truth in the darkest ages, and they broke the shackles which bound the nations. All that is most blessed in our life to-day we owe to the Great Reformation truths, for in that great movement lay the seeds from which have come forth a harvest that has fed the best life of the world.