Disraeli - A Study in Personality and Ideas by Walter Sydney Sichel

Author:Walter Sydney Sichel [Sichel, Walter Sydney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: anboco
Published: 2017-01-06T23:00:00+00:00

“The basis on which God has willed that His revelation should rest in the world is the testimony of the Catholic Church, which, if considered only as a human historical witness of its own origin, constitution, and authority, affords the highest and most enduring evidence for the facts and contents of the Christian religion. If this be denied, there is no such thing as history. But the Catholic Church is not only a human and historical witness of its own origin, constitution, and authority, it is also a supernatural and Divine witness, which can neither fail nor err. When it œcumenically speaks, it is not merely the voice of the Father of the World; it declares ‘ what it hath seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us.’”

No wonder that “Lothair,” sitting down in the crisis of his life by the moonlit Coliseum, muses in a rhapsody of the magnetism for opposed causes of the genius of the spot, strangely anticipating Zola’s contrast between the new Italian “Orlando” and the old Italian “Boccanera.”

“Theodora lived for Rome and died for Rome. And the Cardinal, born and bred an English gentleman, with many hopes and honours, had renounced his religion and, it might be said, his country, for Rome; and his race for three hundred years had given, for the same cause, honour, and broad estates, and unhesitating lives. And these very people were influenced by different motives, and thought they were devoting themselves to opposite ends. But still it was Rome; Republican or Cæsarian, papal or pagan, it still was Rome.”

I have shown the sources, as I believe, of Disraeli’s convictions. He was the first to dwell on those problems of race which are now recognised. His derided “Asian mystery” has been amply justified. His view of the “Caucasian” is that of subsequent science. Writing nearly forty years after he had mooted his ideas, he observed: “familiar as we all are now with such themes ... the difficulty and hazard of touching for the first time on such topics cannot now be easily appreciated.” His beliefs were racial, and depended on the clue of race to history. Their applications, however, were national. For he knew that race is only an element among the shared associations and common language, customs and history, that make up that ideal assembly which is called a nation; and he also knew that mere communication is not communion; that the rapidity of increased methods of material intercourse will never extinguish the slow, but certain, fires of race discord, which can only “consume its own smoke” through the free fusion of nationality.

His own race he cleared from prejudice, and proudly displayed as a potent, if sometimes hidden, force throughout the world. His praise and illustration of its endowments, its strength by virtue of its purity of strain, its tenacity and power of organisation, its veiled ramifications among the mainsprings that move Governments and alter systems, no longer raise a smile; and if they did, they would certainly

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