orp. Christ.

NOTES.

NOTE A. ON PAGE 14.

LIBERALISM.

I have been asked to explain more fully what it is I mean by
"Liberalism," because merely to call it the Anti-dogmatic Principle is
to tell very little about it. An explanation is the more necessary,
because such good Catholics and distinguished writers as Count
Montalembert and Father Lacordaire use the word in a favorable sense,
and claim to be Liberals themselves. "The only singularity," says the
former of the two in describing his friend, "was his Liberalism. By a
phenomenon, at that time unheard of, this convert, this seminarist, this
confessor of nuns, was just as stubborn a liberal, as in the days when
he was a student and a barrister."--Life (transl.), p. 19.

I do not believe that it is possible for me to differ in any important
matter from two men whom I so highly admire. In their general line of
thought and conduct I enthusiastically concur, and consider them to be
before their age. And it would be strange indeed if I did not read with
a special interest, in M. de Montalembert's beautiful volume, of the
unselfish aims, the thwarted projects, the unrequited toils, the grand
and tender resignation of Lacordaire. If I hesitate to adopt their
language about Liberalism, I impute the necessity of such hesitation to
some differences between us in the use of words or in the circumstances
of country; and thus I reconcile myself to remaining faithful to my own
conception of it, though I cannot have their voices to give force to
mine. Speaking then in my own way, I proceed to explain what I meant as
a Protestant by Liberalism, and to do so in connexion with the
circumstances under which that system of opinion came before me at
Oxford.

If I might presume to contrast Lacordaire and myself, I should say, that
we had been both of us inconsistent;--he, a Catholic, in calling himself
a Liberal; I, a Protestant, in being an Anti-liberal; and moreover, that
the cause of this inconsistency had been in both cases one and the same.
That is, we were both of us such good conservatives, as to take up with
what we happened to find established in our respective countries, at the
time when we came into active life. Toryism was the creed of Oxford; he
inherited, and made the best of, the French Revolution.

When, in the beginning of the present century, not very long before my
own time, after many years of moral and intellectual declension, the
University of Oxford