Rome visibly before them in many a Protestant home in England and in
America. Now, all this is a very great merit. To have posed a great
historical problem, at a time when it was very faintly grasped, and to
have sent it ringing across the English-speaking world in such a form
that he who runs may read--nay, he who rides, he who sails, he who
watches sheep or stock _must_ read--this is a real and signal service
conferred on literature and on thought. Compare this solid sense with
Carlyle's ribaldry about "the three-hatted Papa," "pig's wash,"
"servants of the Devil," "this accursed nightmare," and the rest of his
execrations--and we see the difference between the sane judgment of the
man of the world and the prejudices of intolerant fanaticism.
But, unfortunately, Macaulay, having stated in majestic antitheses his
problem of "the unchangeable Church," makes no attempt to provide us
with a solution. This splendid eulogium is not meant to convert us to
Catholicism--very far from it. Macaulay was no Catholic, and had only
a sort of literary admiration for the Papacy. As Mr. Cotter Morison
has shown, he leaves the problem just where he found it, and such
theories as he offers are not quite trustworthy. He does not suggest
that the Catholic Church is permanent because it possesses truth: but,
rather, because men's ideas of truth are a matter of idiosyncrasy or
digestion. The whole essay is not a very safe guide to the history of
Protestantism or of Catholicism, though it is full of brilliant points
and sensible assertions. And in the end our essayist, the rebel from
his Puritan traditions, and the close ally of sceptical Gallios, after
forty pages of learned _pros_ and _cons_, declares that he will not say
more for fear of "exciting angry feelings." He rather sneers at
Protestant fervour: he declaims grand sentences about Catholic fervour.
He will not declare for either of them; and it does not seem to matter
much in the long run for which men declare, provided they can be kept
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