I was unutterably shocked and disgusted by the general tone of the community; by the utter absence of all I had expected to find, and the presence of much that I should have deemed incredible. . . . The dormitories were patrolled in soft slippers by night; the playground, the galleries, the outdoor offices watched with detective eyes. . . . To me it was quite new, and every sign of it was suggestive. The air seemed laden with sin and the suspicion of sin. As for the Society's spiritual standards and methods, these now attracted me less than ever. I thought, then as now, that the methods of prayer and examination were wooden, mechanical, and unreal; and though some of those whom I had met were good and lovable, I could not see that this was in any way a product of the system, since the most observant seemed the most disagreeable and the least charitable.1 Was it worth while to have come so far to find so little ? Was not this the lesson of the whole-that 'the Church is not a problem to be solved by the individual, but, like nationality, a thing given-a foundation on which to build? The Master of the Novices, under whom he was eventually placed, was the late Father John Morris. He was a man to whom many owe much; and, if Tyrrell's picture of him is unpleasing, it must be remembered that it is one of the paradoxes of the religious' life that this important post-perhaps the most important of the posts to be filled-falls so frequently in the distribution of offices to an incompetent or unsuitable person. By his novices, at least, he was feared rather than loved. He had a rasping and caustic manner, and a smile that ill became the natural severity of his features; and, like so many keenly sensitive people, he knew exactly how and where to wound, and was rather fond of displaying his skill. I have seen novices looking pale and ill with fright while awaiting their turn to go in to him for confession, or manifestation, or direction, or some other spiritual torture.2 The relations between the two were what might have been expected; Tyrrell's career in the Society all but came to a premature close. For him its Shibboleth remained Sibboleth: he could not frame to pronounce it right.' He resented being slain at the fords of Jordan, and escaped by the skin of his teeth. Happier had it been otherwise! 'If you do not leave now, you will only give the Society trouble later on,' was Father Morris's warning to him; and he would add, when quoting it, 'Morris was right after all.' The thought must often have presented itself to those placed as he was then and later, How is it that the same position affects men so differently that one is taken, and another left? Take Father Henry Kerr. It would be impossible to find a more honourable, sincere and manly character. Why can I not do as he does? a man of another type will ask himself; and will often suffer acutely from the suspicion of some secret flaw or weakness in himself which makes him falter where others stand. The answer is that the matter is one of temperament and outlook, not of character. Men of unspeculative and uncritical mind are untouched by questions which for others cut at the very root of action and moral life. Je vois autour de moi des hommes purs et simples auxquels le christianisme a suffi pour les rendre vertueux et heureux; mais j'ai remarqué que nul d'entre eux n'a la faculté critique.' With his mother's death (1884) the Autobiography ends. All these lesser troubles are submerged by the memories of one that had nothing to do with these self-induced, artificial interests, but with those which spring from our God-given natural affections, and which even Jesuit asceticism can never wholly uproot.2 Here, rather than in the desolating scoria of ecclesiastical and theological controversy, speaks the underlying, the real man. The first chapter of vol. ii (the Life), 'Character and 1 Renan, Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse, p. 383. Temperament,' is a psychological appreciation worthy to rank with the Autobiography. It has been the writer's ambition that the man should stand out in her pages just such as he was, with his strength and his weakness, his greatness and his littleness, his sweetness and his bitterness, his utter truthfulness and what he himself calls his duplicity,' his generosity and his ruthlessness, his tenderness and his hardness, his faith and his scepticism. If the sum total be displeasing to a few, his biographer may regret it, but I know that he would not.1 Tyrrell was a man of strong views, which he expressed, on occasions, strongly. He was intolerant of convention, and would have scouted the notion that his position limited his freedom either of thought or speech. His sayings were often startling enough. Speaking of the unwholesome sentiment too often encouraged by the confessional, If I had daughters,' he said, and if I let them go to confession at all-which is doubtful-I should make them go to a drunken priest, that there might be no nonsense of this kind'; and, of his relations with the Society, 'I am like a man who has married believing his wife to be a virgin, and has found out that she is not.' But these ebullitions were on the surface; a certain insight into the unseen was the anchorage of his soul. With it-the two are near akin-went a singular detachment not only from material things, but from the shadows cast by them -reputation, influence, the praise of man. Here he was peculiarly un-English. These things left him indifferent; he lived on another plane. He did not speak easily, or often, of religion; he disliked gush and was suspicious of anything like unreality; he left this side of himself to be inferred. He possessed what Renan calls 'le discernement des nuances'; but his mind, subtle as it was, was direct. He could be silent; but, if he spoke, he made his meaning unmistakably, sometimes disconcertingly plain. Nor was he a respecter of persons. The action of the Pope to Bonomelli is so purely worldly in its motive, and so cruel 1 Petre, Autobiography and Life of George Tyrrell, ii. 2. 1 and brutal in its manner, that we must regard him as gone over to the potestas tenebrarum,' he writes; and to an English bishop who, he thought, had provoked one of his clergy into leaving the Church: 'God will ask his soul at your feeble hands.' He did not 'suffer fools gladly.' He was intolerant of flattery; to approach him as an oracle was the surest way to make him withdraw into his shell. To Liberal Catholics of the political type he was an incalculable element. He was built on lines too different from theirs to make co-operation, or even understanding, possible. The more educated, temporising Ultramontanism' (he writes), that shrinks from an inopportune pressing of principles the world has unfortunately outgrown; that loves to rub shoulders cautiously with science and democracy; that would make a change of circumstances and opportunities pass for a more tolerant spirit,' 2 was not to his mind. Injustice and tyranny roused his indignation; his fierceness against clericalism was less intellectual than moral. With the ineffectual protest of the pietist or the politician against controversy he had little sympathy. He thought it a pose, and an insincere one; errors must be contradicted and truth upheld. And, as a controversialist, he could be vehement. Those who, like Cardinal Mercier, crossed swords with him, had reason to regret their temerity; since Newman there has been no such master of the craft as he. For him, the battle of Modernism, in which he took so prominent a part, was not one of correct against incorrect opinion, but of right against wrong, of the truth against a lie. And he fought not for his own hand, but for the larger interests compromised by that all-permeating mendacity which is the most alarming feature of the present ecclesiastical crisis.' Those Modernists who put their trust in the spread of truth will labour in vain unless they first labour for the spread of truthfulness. . . . What would it avail to sweep the accumulated dust and cobwebs of centuries out of the house of God; 1 Petre, Autobiography and Life of George Tyrrell, ii. 265. 2 Mediavalism, p. 153. to purge our liturgy of fables and legends; to make a bonfire of our falsified histories, our forged decretals, our spurious relics; to clear off the mountainous debts to truth and candour incurred by our ancestors in the supposed interests of edification-what would it avail to exterminate those swarming legions of lies, if we still keep the spirit that breeds them? . . . The only infallible guardian of truth is the spirit of truthfulness. Not till the world learns to look to Rome as the home of truthfulness and straight dealing will it ever learn to look to her as the citadel of truth.1 'Il ne faut jamais' (says a recent writer) 'exiger des prêtres la sincérité; quand elle est dans leur tempérament, ils rompent tôt ou tard avec l'Église, qui ne peut plus se servir d'eux.' 2 Hence the tragedy of his last years. The time, however, when he suffered most was not when he was in conflict with his Order, nor even when he was, finally, deprived of Mass and the Sacraments, but when, some years earlier, he had to face the questions raised by the miraculous element in the Gospel history. Was this a record of events, or the setting of an idea? A critical conclusion, he knew, could not be met by a dogmatic argument; yet the gracious traditions, shrined in art and endeared by association, lay very near his heart. He knew no peace till he had reconciled fact and feeling. The rest was not indeed indifferent, but secondary; and he would have assented readily enough to Gottfried Arnold's, maxim that the true Church in every generation is to be found with those who have just been excommunicated from the actual Church.' From the first there had been a life and an originality in him which suggested a larger atmosphere than that either of his Order or of the Roman Church. 'The man who wrote that book will not die a Jesuit,' said a shrewd observer, on reading 'Nova et Vetera.' The work contained nothing inconsistent with the strictest orthodoxy. But the difference of temper between it and, say, Rodriguez or De Ponte is unmistakable; they look different ways. He developed rapidly, passing through 1 Mediævalism, p. 181. 2 Houtin, Autour d'un Prêtre marié, p. 327. |