Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub

place, and of course I can give you no information. I try to administer my Department as well as I can, but feel that I am of little use outside of it, and that to be considered as a responsible member of an administration is as unjust as it is natural [?]. If my service here is useful I shall thank God, who enables me to be useful: but it is far from agreeable or in my judgment creditable to be the head of a Department under existing circumstances.

"My notion of an administration is a President supreme under the Constitution and Laws; Heads of Departments capable and faithful in their several administrations and fit to be counsellors of the Chief Magistrate; measures gravely and fully considered by all and determined on after such consideration by the Head and then vigorously executed by concert of all. Light and heat focalized."

In reply to a letter of E. D. Mansfield, Mr. Chase wrote on October 27, 1863:

". . . And why do you talk about a Cabinet? Blair is Postmaster-General, but not a member of the Cabinet, for there is no Cabinet to be a member of. You have been in Washington and know that each Head of a Department is expected to 'run his own machine,' as Mr. Lincoln expresses it. And each runs his machine without any help of the others pretty much as he pleases; and no one knows except as a matter of news what either of the others is doing."

In a letter to Horace Greeley about the same time (October 9) Chase wrote:

"There is no such thing in Washington as an administration in the accepted sense of that word. There is a Heptarchy or seven administrations-State, Treasury, War, Navy, Interior, Post Office, Law. All except the third are left almost absolutely to their several Heads, each of whom is expected to 'run his machine' as well as he can. The war comes under a divided jurisdiction. The President, Mr. Stanton and General Halleck each take part in the conduct of military operations, as well as in the organization and administration of the army. Nobody else has more than an incidental and casual influence."

"How idle it seems for me to speculate on military affairs," Mr. Chase concluded

a letter to David Dudley Field on June 30, 1863. "The President consults only Stanton and Halleck in the management of the war. I look on from the outside and as well as I can furnish the means. In my own Department I live by work-in the others by faith only. But I exercise faith, not forgetting hope and charity."

After Lee was allowed to recross the Potomac on the retreat from the battlefield of Gettysburg, Mr. Chase, on July 15, 1863, wrote to Senator William Sprague of Rhode Island, now affianced to his daughter Kate:

"We were all terribly disappointed by the news yesterday that Lee had escaped with the whole remainder of his army and all his artillery and baggage. The President came into my room and told me of it, about two yesterday afternoon. He was more grieved and indignant than I have ever seen him. Ever since the battle of Gettysburg he had been urging on Halleck the importance of promptitude and vigilance, and of activity. His sole fear has been lest Lee's army should get away. He was annoyed by the tone of Meade's address to his troops, which insisted [?] that the main object conceived by him was the repulse of the enemy's invasion. He saw the same idea in Meade's despatches and did all he could (except take the responsibility) to make him understand that it was the rout of Lee's army, not its mere expulsion from Pennsylvania, which was desired. And now his worst fears were realized. Lee's army gone and no blow struck. I reminded him that the last time he came to my room it was very much in the same frame of mind, when he had just received despatches from Hurlbut* that Grant had been defeated and his army captured at Jackson; and that I then told him that daylight always came before darkness, and that all we had to do was to gather new forces and persevere. He thought the cases not exactly similar and I agreed, but insisted that the difference was on our side, for had Grant been in fact defeated the case would have been much worse with us than now.

"Since this interview with the President I have learned that Meade called a council *Major-General Stephen A. Hurlbut. Manifestly one of many false reports inevitable in such a time of civil disturb

ance.

of his corps commanders on Saturday or Sunday evening-that Slocum, Sedgwick, French and one or two more opposed a battle, while Howard, Wadsworth and Pleasanton decidedly favored it-that the debate was warm and earnest that Meade's judgment was with the minority, but his desire with the majority-that the army consequently lay idle all day Sunday when Lee was crossing the river some six or eight miles off, Meade knowing nothing of it-and that Monday morning they found all gone and clear across.

for my part I yet put most faith in Hooker."

Mr. Chase's disappointment was as great as Lincoln's and he expressed it in letters to his friends in vivid words. He wrote to George Wilkes on July 23d:

"In your general views as to the campaign which resulted in the passage-so glorious to us-of the Potomac by Lee's army I quite concur. When he advanced into Maryland I wrote to several, and said to more, 'God has delivered him into our hands.' And so he had; but Man did

"Meade's laurels are badly stained; not take the gift."

THE MAN WHO CAME*

By Edwin Arlington Robinson

A FLYING word from here and there
Had sown the name at which we sneered,

But soon the name was everywhere,

To be reviled and then revered:

A presence to be loved and feared,
We cannot hide it, or deny

That we, the gentlemen who jeered,
May be forgotten by and by.

He came when days were perilous
And hearts of men were sore beguiled;
And having made his note of us,
He pondered and was reconciled.

Was ever master yet so mild

As he, and so untamable?

We doubted, even when he smiled,

Not knowing what he knew so well.

He knew that undeceiving fate

Would shame us whom he served unsought;

He knew that he must wince and wait

The jest of those for whom he fought;

He knew devoutly what he thought

Of us and of our ridicule;

He knew that we must all be taught
Like little children in a school.

* Supposed to have been written not long after the Civil War.

We gave a glamour to the task

That he encountered and saw through,
But little of us did he ask,

And little did we ever do.

And what appears if we review

The season when we railed and chaffed?

It is the face of one who knew

That we were learning while we laughed.

The face that in our vision feels
Again the venom that we flung,
Transfigured to the world reveals
The vigilance to which we clung.
Shrewd, ragged, harassed, and among
The mysteries that are untold,

The face we see was never young

Nor could it ever have been old.

For he, to whom we had applied
Our shopman's test of age and worth,
Was elemental when he died,

As he was ancient at his birth:

The saddest among kings of earth,
Bowed with a galling crown, this man
Met rancor with a cryptic mirth,
Laconic-and Olympian.

The love, the grandeur, and the fame
Are bounded by the world alone;

The calm, the smouldering, and the flame
Of awful patience were his own:

With him they are forever flown
Past all our fond self-shadowings,
Wherewith we cumber the Unknown
As with inept, Icarian wings.

For we were not as other men:
'Twas ours to soar and his to see;

But we are coming down again,

And we shall come down pleasantly;
Nor shall we longer disagree
On what it is to be sublime,
But flourish in our perigee
And have one Titan at a time.

MODERNISM

By Newman Smyth

NE key-note runs through many variations of modernism; it is a clear call for the rejuvenation of Roman Catholicism. The modernists, or Neo-Catholics, as they are beginning to call themselves, believe that the Church can harmonize its teachings with the thought of this age. The most ancient Church can survive by becoming the most modern. The living Church is forever young. The modernists remember that scholasticism, which the Vatican now would enforce, was a new theology in its day-a philosophy fitted to its time. But for the hierarchy to bind mediævalism on Christian faith would be to wrap it in a cerement; the modernists would arm it "with the weapons of the time."

To rejuvenate Catholicism-this in one word is the battle cry of the New Catholics. For this cause Fogazzaro's Saint went to Rome. In this hope a group of Italian priests-scholars, historians, young men wrote their noble appeal to the Pope, "What we want." For this end, when Pius X refused to heed their cry, they flung to the whole world their reply, "The Programme of the Modernists." This ideal of a renewed Catholicism it is that holds them steadfast as reformers within the Church even while its hierarchy would cast them out as apostates. In this faith, when threatened with excommunication, they confess, "We are ready to suffer." In this abiding sense of their fellowship with the Church of yesterday and of to-morrow they refuse to withdraw themselves from the Church of to-day. Hence it is that from many different quarters is heard the common rallying call-Reform within the Roman Church.

This note distinguishes this movement not only from the Protestant Reformation, but also from the Old Catholic secession of our times. In the sixteenth century the world was ready for revolution, but not ripe for quiet religious evolution. Protestantism must needs come and take its king

dom by violence; and when in 1870 the later growth of papal absolutism culminated in the Vatican decree of infallibility, the German scholarship which had arrayed in vain early Church history against it, was forced to break forthwith from Rome, or to deny itself. It was an ecclesiastical duel within circumscribed limits. Can these modernists do otherwise? Can they escape the same logic of events that compelled Professor Döllinger, the great scholar and leader of the Old Catholics, reluctantly to see his own protest issue in the Old Catholic schism? Time will show.

There are two considerations which are enough to justify the present determination of the Neo-Catholics to labor and to wait for the renewal of the Roman Church. One is the fact that the religious conditions of this century are not those of any preceding age. Evolution is the order of our times alike in political, economic, social and religious life. It is one of the striking and reassuring signs of our times that the underlying will of the people is to reform but not to destroy their whole inheritance from the past.

The other consideration-and it is of distinctive significance is that modernism is not compelled, like the Old Catholic Church, to split off from Rome at a single divisive point of doctrine. NeoCatholicism was not at first a dogmatic challenge; rather it was an excursion of investigating minds out into the open country. The modernists would seek until they find the vitalizing truth at the source of all the rites and dogmas of the Church. They would come not to destroy but to fulfil the law and the prophets of the Roman Church. "We are not rebels," those Italian priests say to the Pope. In France the Abbé Loisy declares, "I have always regarded it as a duty to remain in the Church." Tyrrell in England says that he abhors "runaway solutions."

When charged with inconsistency and weakness in not tearing themselves at once free from Rome, they remind us that the Apostolic community continued to frequent

the Hebrew temple, and to mingle their prayers with those of the people faithful to Moses, although their new faith was different from that of the circumcision. "We follow at all times," these Italian modernists say, "the practice of the Catholic worship together with the people; we celebrate the rites, we live in the midst of the same religious life, although our belief is different, our ideality changed." They can allow no papal ban to separate them from their spiritual fellowship in the Church of their devotion and hope. Some of them possibly may be driven by persecutions into hopeless renunciation of it; but the Abbé Loisy spoke for their common spirit and predominant purpose when he declared himself to be a Catholic still; although when an absolute surrender of the conclusions of his lifelong studies of the Scriptures was demanded of him by Cardinal Merry del Val, he answered with a courageous sincerity: "My spirit is as incapable of living in the intellectual atmosphere of the Encyclical as my lungs are of breathing at the bottom of the sea." The NeoCatholics conceive their mission to be not that of the Baptist to lay the axe at the root of the tree; they find their providential call interpreted in the Gospel parable of the leaven, and they believe that modernism is the ferment which in due time shall make of the whole lump of Romanism fresh bread of life for the people.

In this abiding loyalty of spirit to the Catholic Church lies the strength of the modernists. Their position may be regarded as exposed and precarious; but so long as they can hold it, there can be no question of its strategic importance. If driven from it, they might become another sect soon to be brought to a standstill, like the present Old Catholic Church; refusing to surrender this position, they remain a reformatory power confronting the very citadel of pontifical sovereignty.

This outbreak of modernism within the Roman pale has taken the Protestant world generally by surprise. It would be a mistake, however, to regard it as an affair of to-day, having but yesterday its origin. It has long been growing in quiet places. Without observation the seeds of it have been scattered far and wide. Indeed we have to go back to the first half of the last century to find in Roman Catholic writings

the early springs of this movement; its present increasing volume is the confluence of many tendencies from the past, the fulness of influences that are now flowing together from widely distant sources.

It would be equally a mistake to presume that modernism is but a reflection of Protestant thought among Roman Catholics. On the contrary, Catholic scholars have beaten from their own laborious studies the oil for its lamp. Protestant and Catholic scholars, it is true, have toiled of late years in friendly intercourse, especially in the fields of early Christian history and Biblical criticism. They have drawn together from common sources of modern philosophy and science. In some German universities a promising fraternity between Protestant and Catholic faculties has been springing up, which now the blow of ultramontane authority would cut down. But while mutual appreciation and sympathy are growing between liberal Catholicism and progressive Protestantism, it is also true that Neo-Catholicism has struck its roots down deeply into its own soil, and its natural fruitage is not another Protestantism. These modernists, indeed, in their house of bondage, are not slow to recognize the splendid service of Protestantism to intellectual liberty. But to them. Protestantism has presented Christianity as an individual religious experience, while they regard it as essentially a social fact. Protestantism, they say, is individualistic; Catholicism is universalistic. Protestantism affirms the absolute right of private judgment; they would not deny its final authority for the individual; but for the Church the directive authority lies ultimately in the collective conscience of the whole body of believers. Extremes meet; and they protest against the present claim. of the sole authority of a single man, the Pope, as in itself an extreme of Protestant individualism, un-Scriptural, unhistorical, and un-Catholic. They look for a truer Catholicism, in which there shall be secured to the individual mind full working freedom while in the growth and welfare of the one body of believers, the Church, spiritual authority shall be realized in the organic control of the whole over the parts. This is not a new Protestantism, although it may have in store for all Protestant bodies a much-needed contribution.

« НазадПродовжити »