e play. The
alienation both of the intellectual and civil life from organised
religion is grave. That the Roman Church occupies in England to-day a
position more favourable than in almost any nation on the Continent, and
better than it occupied in England at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, is due in large measure to the general influence of the
movement with which we have been dealing. The Anglican Church was at the
beginning of the nineteenth century preponderantly evangelical,
low-church and conscious of itself as Protestant. At the beginning of
the twentieth it is dominantly ritualistic and disposed to minimise its
relation to the Reformation. This resurgence of Catholic principles is
another effect of the movement of which we speak. Other factors must
have wrought for this result besides the body of arguments which Newman
and his compeers offered. The argument itself, the mere intellectual
factor, is not adequate. There is an inherent contradiction in the
effort to ground in reason an authority which is to take the place of
reason. Yet round and round this circle all the labours of John Henry
Newman go. Cardinal Manning felt this. The victory of the Church was not
to be won by argument. It is well known that Newman opposed the decree
of infallibility. It cannot be said that upon this point his arguments
had great weight. If one assumes that truth comes to us externally
through representatives of God, and if the truth is that which they
assert, then in the last analysis what they assert is truth. If one has
given in to such authority because one distrusts his reason, then it is
querulous to complain that the deliverances of authority do not comport
with reason. There may be, of course, the greatest interest in the
struggle as to the instance in which this authority is to be lodged.
This interest attaches to the age-long struggle between Pope and
Council. It attaches to the dramatic struggle of Doellinger, Dupanloup,
Lord Acton and the rest, in 1870. Once the Church has spoken there is,
for the advocate of authoritative religion, no logic but to submit.

Similarly as to the _Encyclical_ and _Syllabus of Errors_ of 1864, which
forecast the present conflict concerning Modernism. The _Syllabus_ had a
different atmosphere from that which any Englishman in the sixties would
have given it. Had not Newman, however, made passionate warfare on the
liberalism of the modern world? Was it not merely a question of degrees?