The disastrous effect of the excommunication of Döllinger may have made Authority cautious in the exercise of this deadly weapon. Acton indeed submitted; but Manning's misgivings seem more than justified. It is difficult to define the sense in which Acton became a believer in the new Decree. "He remained all his life," says Bryce,[1] "a faithful member of the Roman Communion, while adhering to the views which he advocated in 1870."
It is quite true that Acton was not an Anglican; he was still less a Protestant. He never joined the old Catholic movement, and is said to have dissuaded his friends from taking that course. But it is certain that he was never an Ultramontane. The distinction he drew between Catholic and Roman elements in the Church helps to explain his own position. He was a Catholic as opposed to the modern Roman type.
If, as Pius IX. asserted, Catholic and Ultramontane are synonymous, then Acton's position was precarious. But their identity is what he persistently and firmly denied. He considered Ultramontanism as an unhappy and mischievous influence perverting truths and ignoring history, speculative in its origin, and injurious in its results. He was well aware, his historic insight made it clearer to him than to many, that the school he resented was a long-standing disease; that its presence could be traced for centuries, if in a less pronounced and virulent form than to-day. But the long-standing nature of the disease did not shake his faith in the certainty of a remedy, and a removal sooner or later. He did not, it has been well said, identify the long-lived with the eternal.
Sooner or later then, Ultramontanism, according to
- ↑ Biographical Studies, pp. 385, 386.
