Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

THE AGE OF REVOLUTION(1801-1890). The rest found a compromise resting-place as 'ritualists'within the Anglican Church, which they claimed to be a true CatholicChurch, and attempted, to the horror of 'low' and 'broad' churchmen,to garnish with vestments, incense and other popish abominations.The new converts were a puzzle to the traditionally Catholic noble andgentle families, who took their religion as a family badge, and to themass of Irish immigrant labourers who increasingly formed the bulk ofBritish Catholicism; nor was their noble zeal wholly appreciated by thecareful and realistic ecclesiastical officials of the Vatican. But sincethey came from excellent families, and the conversion of the upperclasses might well herald the conversion of the lower, they were welcomedas a heartening sign of the Church's power to conquer.Yet even within organized religion—at least within the RomanCatholic, Protestant and Jewish kind—the sappers and miners ofliberalism were at work. In the Roman Church their chief field ofaction was France, and their most important figure, Hugues-Felicit£-Robert de Lamennais (1782-1854), who moved successively fromromantic conservatism, to a revolutionary idealization of the peoplewhich brought him close to socialism. Lamennais's Paroles d'un Crqyant(1834) created uproar among governments, who scarcely expected tobe stabbed in the back with so reliable a weapon of the status quodefence as Catholicism, and he was soon condemned by Rome. LiberalCatholicism, however, survived in France, always a country receptiveto trends in the Church slightly at variance with those in Rome. InItaly also the powerful revolutionary current of the 1830s and 1840spulled some Catholic thinkers into its eddies, such as Rosmini andGioberti (1801-52), the champion of the liberal Italy united by thePope. However, the main body of the Church was militantly and increasinglyanti-liberal.Protestant minorities and sects naturally stood far closer to liberalism,at any rate in politics: to be a French Huguenot virtually meant to beat the very least a moderate liberal. (Guizot, Louis Philippe's PrimeMinister, was one.) Protestant State churches like the Anglican and theLutheran were politically more conservative, but their theologieswere rather less resistant to the corrosion of biblical scholarship andrationalist enquiry. The Jews, of course, were exposed to the full forceof the liberal current. After all, they owed their political and socialemancipation entirely to it. Cultural assimilation was the goal of allemancipated Jews. The most extreme among the evolu^s abandonedtheir old religion for Christian conformity or agnosticism, like thefather of Karl Marx or the poet Heinrich Heine (who discovered, however,that Jews do not cease to be Jews at least for the outside world232