Lord Acton and the Catholic Reviews

Extract

A Variety of books recently published on Lord Acton’s historical and political ideas testifies to a general Acton revival. His preoccupation with the safeguards of liberty in the modem State and with the problems of power has rightly been found to have a special relevance to our own times; more so than it had to the comparatively tranquil days of Acton’s own generation. But, as so often happens when people set out to discover a prophet, he defies the seekers. Rare are those wise men who follow a star, expecting to find a king, and recognize at once what they really find. In Lord Acton’s case, too, there has been a good deal of shooting at crows and hitting of pigeons, and when the controversial dust stirred up by the Acton revivalists has settled, it may be discovered that his real greatness was not primarily that of the historian or political thinker at all, important and stimulating as his ideas are. It will be found that he was not a Liberal Catholic but a Catholic Liberal, which is a very different thing; that his political and historical ideas are not the expected panacea for our own ills, but need recasting in the contemporary moulds. But Abbot Gasquet’s judgment will then not have been invalidated; it was that Acton’s greatest claim to the attention of a later generation lies in his work as a Catholic journalist and editor, and in the part he played in the mid-nineteenth century, at a critical period in the history of English Catholics.