tagonisms, but with complementary principles, merging into each other by imperceptible gradations, and that balance and harmony in social life can only be secured when in the application of these principles reason takes the place of routine and toleration the place of asperity.

A

CHAPTER XVIII

NATIONALITY AND RELIGION

LACK of the sense for practical affairs and hence

a constitutional inability to afford safe direction through the labyrinth of politics have, with little justification, been alleged against Matthew Arnold, and alleged with such assumption of certitude that the reader who goes to him with prejudiced mind may be apt, in sheer reaction, to estimate his political philosophy and prescience even beyond their deserts. Few men who have influenced public thought during the past generation have realised with equal clearness the vital part which religion plays in the problem of the government of nations, and none has approached that problem in relation to Ireland in a truer spirit of liberality and broad-mindedness. "All roads,' says the proverb, 'lead to Rome,' and one finds in like manner that all questions raise the question of religion. Questions of good government, social harmony, education, civilisation, come forth and ask to be considered; and very soon it appears that we cannot possibly treat them without returning to treat of re

ligion." So he writes in his essay on Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism. The same conviction of the direct bearing of religion upon the amenity of social life which prompted his attack upon the Puritan outposts of English Philistinism led him also to seek in the transformation of Roman Catholic education in Ireland the solution of the problem of Home Rule.

In touching this question I am conscious of a dangerous contact with issues which still retain an unhappy capacity for disharmony, a capacity not merely to divide but to inflame men's minds, with issues which might seem fated to demonstrate how partial is the influence of the spirit of accommodation even in the political life of a country whose very constitution is a patchwork of compromises. Yet injustice would be done to Arnold's scheme of public policy if his attitude towards the still open questions of Irish government and Roman Catholic education, controversial though they are, were quite ignored.

There are open to Protestants two ways of judging Roman Catholicism; we may call them variously the conventional and the rational, or the polemical and the historical. The one way is to regard Roman Catholicism dogmatically as a system of folly, superstition, and fraud, to assume that a religion which traces an unbroken chain of continuity back to the remotest period of organised Christianity, and which now offers all the hope, light, guidance, and consolation they receive in life to the vast majority of Christian believers, is rooted

in immeasurable error and falsity; hence that all the good it has done in the world, all the saintly lives it has produced, all the sacred literature, all the sacrifice and effort, all the wonderful system of religious and philanthropic works and institutions it has called into being, that these all owe their inspiration to a gigantic imposture. That is one judgment of Roman Catholicism and the Roman Catholic Church, and it is held today as tenaciously, if not as widely and as openly, as in the days of Puritan ascendency, and of course amongst the modern representatives of that type of religious thought.

If one were to mete to those who hold this view their own justice, it would be necessary to call this the specifically atheistic view, since it implies the denial of Divine Providence in the regulation of mankind's spiritual concerns.

The other view as little attributes to Roman Catholicism the possession of absolute truth as it attributes to it a basis of absolute error. Regarding Roman Catholicism as a historical expression of Christianity equally valid with Protestantism,-as "an essay in religion," "an approximation," to use Arnold's recurring phrases,-it respects its great world-mission and reveres its antiquity on the one hand, yet on the other hand it recognises that it has, as from the fact of its antiquity was inevitable, gathered around it and retained more credulity and fallacy than incumbers the rival faith. Judging Roman Catholicism as a factor of the utmost

moment in civilisation, it notes how it has met the needs of countless generations of men and women in a way which no other religion could have done, and that to-day, as in the most distant past, its special place in the world is created for it by the persistence of those intellectual and spiritual characteristics to which the Roman Church ministers with peculiar efficacy.

It was natural that a man of Arnold's breadth of culture should see Roman Catholicism from its best and most winning side, and that, while under no delusions either as to its strong or its weak points, he should be fully conscious of its significance as a religious force. "We shall always appear insolent and unjust in the sight of a religion's adherents, so long as we look at it from the negative side only, and not on that attractive side by which they see it themselves." This admirable principle, which he lays down in the Preface to his book upon the Higher Schools of France, he never forgot when judging Roman Catholicism. He complains, indeed, that Protestants too often regard "what is prodigious, mischievous, impossible in Catholicism rather than what is natural, amiable, likely to endure. It is by this natural and better side that we should accustom ourselves to consider Catholicism, and we cannot conceive this side too simply." What in Roman Catholicism specially appealed to him were the tradition of unity which it represents, its singular charm for the heart and the imagination, its strong hold upon the human conscience, and its peculiar susceptibility to the claims