Modern Rome... is not the only place where the traditions of the old Empire, its principles, provisions, and practices, have been held in honour; they have been retained, they have been maintained in substance, as the basis of European civilization down to this day, and notably among ourselves. In the Anglican establishment the king took the place of the Pope; but the Pope's principles kept possession.... [T]he old idea of a Christian Polity was still in force. It was a first principle with England that there was one true religion... that it came of direct Revelation, that it was to be supported to the disadvantage, to say the least, of other religions, of private judgment, of personal conscience....
....Men of the present generation, born in the new civilization, are shocked to witness in the abiding Papal system the words, ways, and works of their grandfathers. In my own lifetime has that old world been alive, and has gone its way. Who will say that the plea of conscience was as effectual, sixty years ago, as it is now in England, for the toleration of every sort of fancy religion? Had the Press always that wonderful elbow-room which it has now? Might public gatherings be held, and speeches made, and republicanism avowed in the time of the Regency, as is now possible? Were the thoroughfares open to monster processions at that date, and the squares and parks at the mercy of Sunday manifestations? Could savants in that day insinuate in scientific assemblies what their hearers mistook for atheism, and artisans practise it in the centres of political action? Could public prints day after day, or week after week, carry on a war against religion, natural and revealed, as now is the case? No; law or public opinion would not suffer it....
When I was young the State had a conscience, and the Chief Justice of the day pronounced, not as a point of obsolete law, but as an energetic, living truth, that Christianity was the law of the land....
Such was the position of free opinion and dissenting worship in England till quite a recent date, when one after another the various disabilities which I have been recounting, and many others besides, melted away, like snow at spring-tide; and we all wonder how they could ever have been in force.... The State in past time had a conscience.... The State ought to have a conscience.... The Pope has denounced the sentiment that he ought to come to terms with "progress, liberalism, and the new civilization." I have no thought at all of disputing his words. I leave the great problem to the future. God will guide other Popes to act when Pius goes, as He has guided him. No one can dislike the democratic principle more than I do. No one mourns, for instance, more than I, over the state of Oxford, given up, alas! to "liberalism and progress"... but what can we do? All I know is, that Toryism, that is, loyalty to persons, "springs immortal in the human breast"; that religion is a spiritual loyalty; and that Catholicity is the only divine form of religion. And thus, in centuries to come, there may be found out some way of uniting what is free in the new structure of society with what is authoritative in the old, without any base compromise with "Progress" and "Liberalism."
....Blackstone is careful to show how much more liberty the law allowed to the subject in his day, how much less severe it was in its safeguards against abuse, than it had used to be; but he never pretends that it is conceivable that liberty should have no boundary at all. The very idea of political society is based upon the principle that each member of it gives up a portion of his natural liberty for advantages which are greater than that liberty....
We Catholics, on our part, are denied liberty of our religion by English law in various ways, but we do not complain, because a limit must be put to even innocent liberties, and we acquiesce in it for the social compensations which we gain on the whole. Our school boys cannot play cricket on Sunday, not even in country places, for fear of being taken before a magistrate and fined. In Scotland we cannot play music on Sundays. Here we cannot sound a bell for church. I have had before now a lawyer's authority for saying that a religious procession is illegal even within our own premises. Till the last year or two we could not call our Bishops by the titles which our Religion gave them. A mandate from the Home Secretary obliged us to put off our cassocks when we went out of doors.... Why is not all this as much an outrage on our conscience as the prohibition upon Protestants at Rome, Naples, and Malaga, before the late political changes....
....I say seriously Mr. Gladstone's accusation of us avails quite as much against Blackstone's four volumes, against laws in general, against the social contract, as against the Pope. What the Pope has said, I will show presently: first let us see what the statute book has to tell us about the present state of English liberty of speech, of the press, and of worship.
First, as to public speaking and meetings: — do we allow of seditious language, or of insult to the sovereign, or his representatives?...
Then, again, as to the Press, there are two modes of bridling it, one before the printed matter is published, the other after. The former is the method of censorship, the latter that of the law of libel. Each is a restriction on the liberty of the Press. We prefer the latter....
Lastly, liberty of worship.... The ritualistic party [of the Church of England], in the free exercise of their rights... have, at their own expense, built churches for worship after their own way; and, on the other hand, Parliament and the newspapers are attempting to put them down....
