Part 21 (2/2)

Thenceforward the character of Luther and the Reformers will no more be dragged forward in the pulpit. The clergy, mindful of the saying, _interficite errores, diligite homines_, will always conduct themselves towards members of other Churches in conformity with the rules of charity, and will therefore a.s.sume, in all cases where there are no clear proofs to the contrary, the _bona fides_ of opponents.

They will never forget that no man is convinced and won over by bitter words and violent attacks, but that every one is rather repelled by them. Warned by the words of the Epistle to the Romans (xiv, 13), they will be more careful than heretofore to give to their separate brethren no scandal, no grounds of accusation against the Church. Accordingly, in popular instruction and in religious life, they will always make the great truths of salvation the centre of all their teaching: they will not treat secondary things in life and doctrine as though they were of the first importance; but, on the contrary, they will keep alive in the people the consciousness that such things are but means to an end, and are only of inferior consequence and subsidiary value.

Until that day shall dawn upon Germany, it is our duty as Catholics, in the words of Cardinal Diepenbrock, ”to bear the religious separation in a spirit of penance for guilt incurred in common.” We must acknowledge that here also G.o.d has caused much good as well as much evil to proceed from the errors of men, from the contests and pa.s.sions of the sixteenth century; that the anxiety of the German nation to see the intolerable abuses and scandals in the Church removed was fully justified, and sprang from the better qualities of our people, and from their moral indignation at the desecration and corruption of holy things, which were degraded to selfish and hypocritical purposes.

We do not refuse to admit that the great separation, and the storms and sufferings connected with it, was an awful judgment upon Catholic Christendom, which clergy and laity had but too well deserved--a judgment which has had an improving and salutary effect. The great conflict of intellects has purified the European atmosphere, has impelled the human mind on to new courses, and has promoted a rich scientific and literary life. Protestant theology, with its restless spirit of inquiry, has gone along by the side of the Catholic, exciting and awakening, warning and vivifying; and every eminent Catholic divine in Germany will gladly admit that he owes much to the writings of Protestant scholars.

We must also acknowledge that in the Church the rust of abuses and of a mechanical superst.i.tion is always forming afresh; that the spiritual in religion is sometimes materialised, and therefore degraded, deformed, and applied to their own loss, by the servants of the Church, through their indolence and want of intelligence, and by the people, through their ignorance. The true spirit of reform most, therefore, never depart from the Church, but must periodically break out with renovating strength, and penetrate the mind and the will of the clergy. In this sense we do not refuse to admit the justice of a call to penance, when it proceeds from those who are not of us,--that is, of a warning carefully to examine our religious life and pastoral conduct, and to remedy what is found defective.

At the same time it must not be forgotten that the separation did not ensue in consequence of the abuses of the Church. For the duty and necessity of removing these abuses has always been recognised; and only the difficulty of the thing, the not always unjustifiable fear lest the wheat should be pulled up with the tares, prevented for a time the Reformation, which was accomplished in the Church and through her. Separation on account merely of abuses in ecclesiastical life, when the doctrine is the same, is rejected as criminal by the Protestants as well as by us. It is, therefore, for doctrine's sake that the separation occurred; and the general discontent of the people, the weakening of ecclesiastical authority by the existence of abuses, only facilitated the adoption of the new doctrines. But now on one side some of these defects and evils in the life of the Church have disappeared; the others have greatly diminished since the reforming movement; and on the other side, the princ.i.p.al doctrines for which they separated, and on the truth of which, and their necessity for salvation, the right and duty of secession was based, are given up by Protestant science, deprived of their Scriptural basis by exegesis, or at least made very uncertain by the opposition of the most eminent Protestant divines. Meanwhile we live in hopes, comforting ourselves with the conviction that history, or that process of development in Europe which is being accomplished before our eyes, as well in society and politics as in religion, is the powerful ally of the friends of ecclesiastical union; and we hold out our hands to Christians on the other side for a combined war of resistance against the destructive movements of the age.

There are two circ.u.mstances which make us fear that the work will not be received in the spirit in which it is written, and that its object will not immediately be attained. The first of these is the extraordinary effect which was produced by the declaration which the author made on the occasion of the late a.s.sembly of the Catholic a.s.sociations of Germany at Munich. He stated simply, what is understood by every Catholic out of Italy, and intelligible to every reasonable Protestant, that the freedom of the Church imperatively requires that, in order to protect the Pope from the perils which menace him, particularly in our age, he should possess a sovereignty not merely nominal, and that his right to his dominions is as good as that of all other legitimate sovereigns. In point of fact, this expression of opinion, which occurs even in the garbled reports of the lectures, leaves all those questions on which it is possible for serious and dispa.s.sionate men to be divided entirely open. It does not determine whether there was any excuse for the disaffection of the Papal subjects; whether the security afforded by a more extensive dominion is greater than the increased difficulty of administration under the conditions inherited from the French occupation; whether an organised system of tribute or domains might be sufficient, in conjunction with a more restricted territory; whether the actual loss of power is or is not likely to improve a misfortune for religion. The storm of applause with which these words, simply expressing that in which all agree, were received, must have suggested to the speaker that his countrymen in general are unprepared to believe that one, who has no other aspiration in his life and his works than the advancement of the Catholic religion, can speak without a reverent awe of the temporal government, or can witness without dismay its impending fall. They must have persuaded themselves that not only the details, but the substance of his lectures had been entirely misreported, and that his views were as free from novelty as dest.i.tute of offence. It is hard to believe that such persons will be able to reconcile themselves to the fearless and straightforward spirit in which the first of Church historians discusses the history of his own age.

Another consideration, almost equally significant with the att.i.tude of the great ma.s.s of Catholics, is the silence of the minority who agree with Dollinger. Those earnest Catholics who, in their Italian patriotism, insist on the possibility of reconciling the liberty of the Holy See with the establishment of an ideal unity, Pa.s.saglia, Tosti, the followers of Gioberti, and the disciples of Rosmini, have not hesitated to utter openly their honest but most inconceivable persuasion. But on the German side of the Alps, where no political agitation affects the religious judgment, or drives men into disputes, those eminent thinkers who agree with Dollinger are withheld by various considerations from publis.h.i.+ng their views. Sometimes it is the hopelessness of making an impression, sometimes the grave inconvenience of withstanding the current of opinion that makes them keep silence; and their silence leaves those who habitually follow them not only without means of expressing their views, but often without decided views to express. The same influences which deprive Dollinger of the open support of these natural allies will impede the success of his work, until events have outstripped ideas, and until men awake to the discovery that what they refused to antic.i.p.ate or to prepare for, is already accomplished.

Piety sometimes gives birth to scruples, and faith to superst.i.tion, when they are not directed by wisdom and knowledge. One source of the difficulty of which we are speaking is as much a defect of faith as a defect of knowledge. Just as it is difficult for some Catholics to believe that the supreme spiritual authority on earth could ever be in unworthy hands, so they find it hard to reconcile the reverence due to the Vicar of Christ, and the promises made to him, with the acknowledgment of intolerable abuses in his temporal administration. It is a comfort to make the best of the case, to draw conclusions from the exaggerations, the inventions, and the malice of the accusers against the justice of the accusation, and in favour of the accused. It is a temptation to our weakness and to our consciences to defend the Pope as we would defend ourselves--with the same care and zeal, with the same uneasy secret consciousness that there are weak points in the case which can best be concealed by diverting attention from them. What the defence gains in energy it loses in sincerity; the cause of the Church, which is the cause of truth, is mixed up and confused with human elements, and is injured by a degrading alliance. In this way even piety may lead to immorality, and devotion to the Pope may lead away from G.o.d.

The position of perpetual antagonism to a spirit which we abhor; the knowledge that the clamour against the temporal power is, in very many instances, inspired by hatred of the spiritual authority; the indignation at the impure motives mixed up with the movement--all these things easily blind Catholics to the fact that our attachment to the Pope as our spiritual Head, our notion that his civil sovereignty is a safeguard of his freedom, are the real motives of our disposition to deny the truth of the accusations made against his government. It is hard to believe that imputations which take the form of insults, and which strike at the Church through the State, are well founded, and to distinguish the design and the occasion from the facts. It is, perhaps, more than we can expect of men, that, after defending the Pope as a sovereign, because he is a pontiff, and adopting against his enemies the policy of unconditional defence, they will consent to adopt a view which corroborates to a great extent the a.s.sertions they have combated, and implicitly condemns their tactics. It is natural to oppose one extreme by another; and those who avoid both easily appear to be capitulating with error. The effects of this spirit of opposition are not confined to those who are engaged in resisting the No-popery party in England, or the revolution in Italy. The fate of the temporal power hangs neither on the Italian ministry nor on English influence, but on the decision of the Emperor of the French; and the loudest maintainers of the rights of the Holy See are among that party who have been the most zealous adversaries of the Imperial system. The French Catholics behold in the Roman policy of the emperor a scheme for obtaining over the Church a power of which they would be the first victims. Their religious freedom is in jeopardy while he has the fate of the Pope in his hands. That which is elsewhere simply a manifestation of opinion and a moral influence is in France an active interference and a political power.

They alone among Catholic subjects can bring a pressure to bear on him who has had the initiative in the Italian movement. They fear by silence to incur a responsibility for criminal acts. For them it is a season for action, and the time has not yet come when they can speak with judicial impartiality, or with the freedom of history, or determine how far, in the pursuit of his ambitious ends, Napoleon III. is the instrument of Providence, or how far, without any merit of his own, he is likely to fulfil the expectations of those who see in him a new Constantine.

Whilst they maintain this unequal war, they naturally identify the rights of the Church with her interests; and the wrongs of the Pope are before their eyes so as to eclipse the realities of the Roman government. The most vehement and one-sided of those who have dwelt exclusively on the crimes of the Revolution and the justice of the Papal cause, the Bishop of Orleans for instance, or Count de Montalembert, might without inconsistency, and doubtless would without hesitation, subscribe to almost every word in Dollinger's work; but in the position they have taken they would probably deem such adhesion a great rhetorical error, and fatal to the effect of their own writings. There is, therefore, an allowance to be made, which is by no means a reproach, for the peculiar situation of the Catholics in France.

When Christine of Sweden was observed to gaze long and intently at the statue of Truth in Rome, a court-like prelate observed that this admiration for Truth did her honour, as it was seldom shared by persons in her station. ”That,” said the Queen, ”is because truths are not all made of marble.” Men are seldom zealous for an idea in which they do not perceive some reflection of themselves, in which they have not embarked some portion of their individuality, or which they cannot connect with some subjective purpose of their own. It is often more easy to sympathise with a person in whose opposite views we discern a weakness corresponding to our own, than with one who unsympathetically avoids to colour the objectivity of truth, and is guided in his judgment by facts, not by wishes. We endeavoured not many months ago to show how remote the theology of Catholic Germany is in its scientific spirit from that of other countries, and how far asunder are science and policy. The same method applied to the events of our own day must be yet more startling, and for a time we can scarcely antic.i.p.ate that the author of this work will escape an apparent isolation between the reserve of those who share his views, but are not free to speak, and the foregone conclusions of most of those who have already spoken. But a book which treats of contemporary events in accordance with the signs of the time, not with the aspirations of men, possesses in time itself an invincible auxiliary. When the lesson which this great writer draws from the example of the mediaeval Popes has borne its fruit; when the purpose for which he has written is attained, and the freedom of the Holy See from revolutionary aggression and arbitrary protection is recovered by the heroic determination to abandon that which in the course of events has ceased to be a basis of independence--he will be the first, but no longer the only, proclaimer of new ideas, and he will not have written in vain.

The Christian religion, as it addresses and adapts itself to all mankind, bears towards the varieties of national character a relation of which there was no example in the religions of antiquity, and which heresy repudiates and inevitably seeks to destroy. For heresy, like paganism, is national, and dependent both on the particular disposition of the people and on the government of the State. It is identified with definite local conditions, and moulded by national and political peculiarities. Catholicity alone is universal in its character and mission, and independent of those circ.u.mstances by which States are established, and nations are distinguished from each other. Even Rome had not so far extended her limits, nor so thoroughly subjugated and amalgamated the races that obeyed her, as to secure the Church from the natural reaction of national spirit against a religion which claimed a universality beyond even that of the Imperial power. The first and most terrible a.s.sault of ethnicism was in Persia, where Christianity appeared as a Roman, and therefore a foreign and a hostile, system. As the Empire gradually declined, and the nationalities, no longer oppressed beneath a vigorous central force, began to revive, the heresies, by a natural affinity, a.s.sociated themselves with them. The Donatist schism, in which no other country joined, was an attempt of the African people to establish a separate national Church. Later on, the Egyptians adopted the Monophysite heresy as the national faith, which has survived to this day in the Coptic Church. In Armenia similar causes produced like effects.

In the twelfth century--not, as is commonly supposed, in the time of Photius and Cerularius, for religious communion continued to subsist between the Latins and the Greeks at Constantinople till about the time of Innocent III., but after the Crusades had embittered the antagonism between East and West--another great national separation occurred. In the Eastern Empire the communion with Rome was hateful to the two chief authorities. The patriarch was ambitious to extend his own absolute jurisdiction over the whole Empire, the emperor wished to increase that power as the instrument of his own: out of this threefold combination of interests sprang the Byzantine system. It was founded on the ecclesiastical as well as civil despotism of the emperor, and on the exclusive pride of the people in its nationality; that is, on those things which are most essentially opposed to the Catholic spirit, and to the nature of a universal Church. In consequence of the schism, the sovereign became supreme over the canons of the Church and the laws of the State; and to this imperial papacy the Archbishop of Thessalonica, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, justly attributes the ruin and degradation of the Empire. Like the Eastern schism, the schism of the West in the fourteenth century arose from the predominance of national interests in the Church: it proceeded from the endeavour to convert the Holy See into a possession of the French people and a subject of the French crown. Again, not long after, the Hussite revolution sprang from the union of a new doctrine with the old antipathy of the Bohemians for the Germans, which had begun in times when the boundaries of Christianity ran between the two nations, and which led to a strictly national separation, which has not yet exhausted its political effects. Though the Reformation had not its origin in national feelings, yet they became a powerful instrument in the hands of Luther, and ultimately prevailed over the purely theological elements of the movement.

The Lutheran system was looked on by the Germans with patriotic pride as the native fruit, and especial achievement of the genius of their country, and it was adopted out of Germany only by the kindred races of Scandinavia. In every other land to which it has been transplanted by the migrations of this century, Lutheranism appears as eradicated from its congenial soil, loses gradually its distinctive features, and becomes a.s.similated to the more consolatory system of Geneva. Calvinism exhibited from the first no traces of the influence of national character, and to this it owes its greater extension; whilst in the third form of Protestantism, the Anglican Church, nationality is the predominant characteristic. In whatever country and in whatever form Protestantism has prevailed, it has always carried out the principle of separation and local limitation by seeking to subject itself to the civil power, and to confine the Church within the jurisdiction of the State. It is dependent not so much on national character as on political authority, and has grafted itself rather on the State than on the people. But the inst.i.tution which Christ founded in order to collect all nations together in one fold under one shepherd, while tolerating and respecting the natural historical distinctions of nations and of States, endeavours to reconcile antagonism, and to smooth away barriers between them, instead of estranging them by artificial differences, and erecting new obstacles to their harmony. The Church can neither submit as a whole to the influence of a particular people, nor impose on one the features or the habits of another; for she is exalted in her catholicity above the differences of race, and above the claims of political power.

At once the most firm and the most flexible inst.i.tution in the world, she is all things to all nations--educating each in her own spirit, without violence to its nature, and a.s.similating it to herself without prejudice to the originality of its native character. Whilst she thus transforms them, not by reducing them to a uniform type, but by raising them towards a common elevation, she receives from them services in return. Each healthy and vigorous nation that is converted is a dynamic as well as a numerical increase in the resources of the Church, by bringing an accession of new and peculiar qualities, as well as of quant.i.ty and numbers. So far from seeking sameness, or flouris.h.i.+ng only in one atmosphere, she is enriched and strengthened by all the varieties of national character and intellect. In the mission of the Catholic Church, each nation has its function, which its own position and nature indicate and enable it to fulfil. Thus the extinct nations of antiquity survive in the beneficial action they continue to exert within her, and she still feels and acknowledges the influence of the African or of the Cappadocian mind.

The condition of this immunity from the predominant influence of national and political divisions, and of this indifference to the attachment of particular States and races,--the security of unity and universality,--consists in the existence of a single, supreme, independent head. The primacy is the bulwark, or rather the corner-stone, of Catholicism; without it, there would be as many churches as there are nations or States. Not one of those who have denounced the Papacy as a usurpation has ever attempted to show that the condition which its absence necessarily involves is theologically desirable, or that it is the will of G.o.d. It remains the most radical and conspicuous distinction between the Catholic Church and the sects.

Those who attempt to do without it are compelled to argue that there is no earthly office divinely appointed for the government of the Church, and that n.o.body has received the mission to conduct ecclesiastical affairs, and to preserve the divine order in religion. The several local churches may have an earthly ruler, but for the whole Church of Christ there is no such protection. Christ, therefore, is the only head they acknowledge, and they must necessarily declare separation, isolation, and discord to be a principle and the normal condition of His Church.

The rejection of the primacy of St. Peter has driven men on to a slippery course, where all the steps are downwards. The Greeks first proclaimed that they recognised no Pope, that each patriarch ruled over a portion of the Church. The Anglicans rejected both Pope and patriarch, and admitted no ecclesiastical order higher than the Episcopate. Foreign Protestanism refused to tolerate even bishops, or any authority but the parish clergy under the supremacy of the ruler of the land. Then the sects abolished the local jurisdiction of the parish clergy, and retained only preachers. At length the ministry was rejected as an office altogether, and the Quakers made each individual his own prophet, priest, and doctor.

The Papacy, that unique inst.i.tution, the Crown of the Catholic system, exhibits in its history the constant working of that law which is at the foundation of the life of the Church, the law of continuous organic development. It shared the vicissitudes of the Church, and had its part in everything which influences the course and mode of her existence. In early times it grew in silence and obscurity, its features were rarely and imperfectly distinguishable; but even then the Popes exerted their authority in all directions, and while the wisdom with which it was exercised was often questioned, the right itself was undisputed. So long as the Roman Empire upheld in its strong framework and kept together the Church, which was confined mostly within its bounds, and checked with the stern discipline of a uniform law the manifestations of national and local divergence, the interference of the Holy See was less frequently required, and the reins of Church government did not need to be tightly drawn. When a new order of States emerged from the chaos of the great migration, the Papacy, which alone stood erect amid the ruins of the empire, became the centre of a new system and the moderator of a new code. The long contest with the Germanic empire exhausted the political power both of the empire and of the Papacy, and the position of the Holy See, in the midst of a mult.i.tude of equal States, became more difficult and more unfavourable. The Popes were forced to rely on the protection of France, their supremacy over the States was at an end, and the resistance of the nations commenced. The schism, the opposition of the general Councils, the circ.u.mstances which plunged the Holy See into the intrigues of Italian politics, and at last the Reformation, hastened the decline of that extensive social and political power, the echoes and reminiscences of which occasioned disaster and repulse whenever an attempt was made to exercise it Ever since the Tridentine age, the Popes have confined themselves more and more exclusively to the religious domain; and here the Holy See is as powerful and as free at the present day as at any previous period of its history. The perils and the difficulties which surround it arise from temporal concerns,--from the state of Italy, and from the possessions of the pontifical dominions.

As the Church advances towards fulness and maturity in her forms, bringing forward her exhaustless resources, and calling into existence a wealth of new elements,--societies, corporations, and inst.i.tutions,--so is the need more deeply felt for a powerful supreme guide to keep them all in health and harmony, to direct them in their various spheres, and in their several ways towards the common ends and purposes of all, and thus to provide against decay, variance, and confusion. Such an office the Primacy alone can discharge, and the importance of the Papacy increases as the organisation of the Church is more complete. One of its most important but most delicate duties is to act as an independent, impartial, and dispa.s.sionate mediator between the churches and the governments of the different States, and between the conflicting claims and contradictory idiosyncrasies of the various nations. Yet, though the Papacy is so obviously an essential part of a Church whose mission is to all mankind, it is the chosen object of attack both to enemies of Catholicism and to discontented Catholics. Serious and learned men complain of its tyranny, and say that it claims universal dominion, and watches for an opportunity of obtaining it; and yet, in reality, there is no power on earth whose action is restricted by more sacred and irresistible bonds than that of the Holy See. It is only by the closest fidelity to the laws and tradition of the Church that the Popes are able to secure the obedience and the confidence of Catholics. Pius VII., who, by sweeping away the ancient church of France, and depriving thirty-seven protesting bishops of their sees, committed the most arbitrary act ever done by a Pope, has himself described the rules which guided the exercise of his authority:--

The nature and const.i.tution of the Catholic Church impose on the Pope, who is the head of the Church, certain limits which he cannot transgress.... The Bishops of Rome have never believed that they could tolerate any alteration in those portions of the discipline which are directly ordained by Jesus Christ; or in those which, by their nature, are connected with dogma, or in those which heretics a.s.sail in support of their innovations.

The chief points urged against the ambition of Rome are the claim of the deposing Power, according to the theory that all kinds of power are united in the Church, and the protest against the Peace of Westphalia, the basis of the public law and political order of modern Europe. It is enough to cite one of the many authorities which may be cited in refutation of the first objection. Cardinal Antonelli, Prefect of Propaganda, states in his letter to the Irish bishops, 1791, that ”the See of Rome has never taught that faith is not to be kept with those of another religion, or that an oath sworn to kings who are separated from the Catholic communion may be broken, or that the Pope is permitted to touch their temporal rights and possessions.” The Bull in which Boniface VIII. set up the theory of the supremacy of the spiritual over the secular power was retracted soon after his death.

The protest of Innocent X. against the Peace of Westphalia is one of the glories of the Papacy. That peace was concluded on an unchristian and tyrannical principle, introduced by the Reformation, that the subjects may be compelled to follow the religion of the ruler. This was very different in principle and in effect from the intolerance of the ages of faith, when prince and people were members of one religion, and all were agreed that no other could be permitted in the State. Every heresy that arose in the Middle Ages involved revolutionary consequences, and would inevitably have overthrown State and society, as well as Church, wherever it prevailed. The Albigenses, who provoked the cruel legislation against heretics, and who were exterminated by fire and sword, were the Socialists of those days. They a.s.sailed the fundamental inst.i.tutions of society, marriage, family, and property, and their triumph would have plunged Europe into the barbarism and licence of pagan times. The principles of the Waldenses and the Lollards were likewise incompatible with European civilisation. In those days the law relating to religion was the same for all. The Pope as well as the king would have lost his crown if he had fallen into heresy. During a thousand years, from the fall of Rome to the appearance of Luther, no Catholic prince ever made an attempt to introduce a new religion into his dominions, or to abandon the old. But the Reformation taught that this was the supreme duty of princes; whilst Luther declared that in matters of faith the individual is above every authority, and that a child could understand the Scriptures better than Popes or Councils, he taught at the same time, with an inconsistency which he never attempted to remove, that it is the duty of the civil power to exterminate popery, to set up the Gospel, and to suppress every other religion.

The result was a despotism such as the world had never seen. It was worse than the Byzantine system; for there no attempt was made to change the faith of the people. The Protestant princes exercised an ecclesiastical authority more arbitrary than the Pope had ever possessed; for the papal authority can only be used to maintain an existing doctrine, whilst theirs was aggressive and wholly unlimited.

Possessing the power to command, and to alter in religion, they naturally acquired by degrees a corresponding absolutism in the civil order. The consistories, the office by which the sovereign ruled the Church, were the commencement of bureaucratic centralisation. A great lawyer of those days says, that after the treaties of Westphalia had recognised the territorial supremacy over religion, the business of administration in the German States increased tenfold. Whilst that system remained in its integrity, there could be no peaceful neighbourhood between Catholics and Protestants. From this point of view, the protest of the Pope was entirely justified. So far from having been made in the spirit of the mediaeval authority, which would have been fatal to the work of the Congress, it was never used by any Catholic prince to invalidate the treaties. They took advantage of the law in their own territories to exercise the _jus reformandi_. It was not possible for them to tolerate a body which still refused to tolerate the Catholic religion by the side of its own, which accordingly eradicated it wherever it had the means, and whose theory made the existence of every religion depend on the power and the will of the sovereign. A system which so resolutely denied that two religions could coexist in the same State, put every attempt at mutual toleration out of the question. The Reformation was a great movement against the freedom of conscience--an effort to subject it to a new authority, the arbitrary initiative of a prince who might differ in religion from all his subjects. The extermination of obstinate Catholics was a matter of course; Melanchthon insisted that the Anabaptists should be put to death, and Beza was of opinion that Anti-Trinitarians ought to be executed, even after recantation. But no Lutheran could complain when the secular arm converted him into a Calvinist. ”Your conscience is in error,” he would say, ”but under the circ.u.mstances you are not only justified, but compelled, on my own principles, to act as you do.”[336]

<script>