In the judgment of the Catholic Church, a baptised people is no longer in the state of nature, but is admitted to a state of supernatural grace.
[he goes on to lament the fact that many in England are not being baptized for various reasons]
Still, the English people as a body are baptised, and therefore elevated to the order of supernatural grace. Every infant, and also every adult baptised, having the necessary dispositions, is thereby placed in a state of justification; and, if they die without committing any mortal sin, would certainly be saved. They are also, in the sight of the Church, Catholics. St. Augustine says, “Ecclesia etiam inter eos qui foris sunt per baptismum generat suos.”
[he goes onto argue that they only are outside the Church through culpable heresy]
And they who are culpably out of it are those who know—or might, and therefore ought to, know —that it is their duty to submit to it. The Church teaches that men may be inculpably out of its pale. Now they are inculpably out of it who are, and have always been, either physically or morally unable to see their obligation to submit to it. And they only are culpably out of it who are both physically and morally able to know that it is God’s will they should submit to the Church; and either knowing it will not obey that knowledge, or, not knowing it, are culpable for that ignorance. I will say, then, that we hopefully apply this benign law of our Divine Master as far as possible to the English people. First, it is applicable in the letter to the whole multitude of those baptised persons who are under the age of reason. Secondly, to all who are in good faith, of whatsoever age they be: such as a great many of the poor and unlettered, to whom it is often physically, and very often morally, impossible to judge which is the true revelation or the true Church of God. I say physically, because in these three hundred years the Catholic Church has been so swept off the face of England that nine or ten generations of men have lived and died without the Faith being so much as proposed to them, or the Church ever visible to them; and I say morally, because the great majority of the poor, from lifelong prejudice, are often incapable of judging in questions so removed from the primary truths of conscience and Christianity. Of such simple persons it may be said that infantibus cequiparanttir, they are to be classed morally with infants. Again, to these may be added the unlearned in all classes, among whom many have no contact with the Catholic Church, or with Catholic books. Under this head will come a great number of wives and daughters, whose freedom of religious inquiry and religious thought is unjustly limited or suspended by the authority of parents and husbands. Add, lastly, the large class who have been studiously brought up, with all the dominant authority of the English tradition of three hundred years, to believe sincerely, and without a doubt, that the Catholic Church is corrupt, has changed the doctrines of the Faith, and that the author of the Reformation is the Spirit of holiness and truth. It may seem incredible to some that such an illusion exists. But it is credible to me, because for nearly forty years of my life I was fully possessed by this erroneous belief. To all such persons it is morally difficult in no small degree to discover the falsehood of this illusion. All the better parts of their nature are engaged in its support: dutifulness, self-mistrust, submission, respect for others older, better, more learned than themselves, all combine to form a false conscience, and the duty to refuse to hear anything against “the religion of their fathers,” “the Church of their baptism,” or to read anything which could unsettle them. Such people are told that it is their duty to extinguish a doubt against the Church of England, as they would extinguish a temptation against their virtue. A conscience so subdued and held in subjection exercises true virtues upon a false object, and renders to a human authority the submissive trust which is due only to the Divine voice of the Church of God.
Still further, I believe that the people of England were not all guilty of the first acts of heresy and schism by which they were separated from the Catholic unity and faith. They were robbed of it. In many places they rose in arms for it. The children, the poor, the unlearned at that time, were certainly innocent: much more the next generation. They were born into a state of privation. They knew no better. No choice was before them. They made no perverse act of the will in remaining where they were born. Every successive generation was still less culpable, in proportion as they were born into a greater privation, and under the dominion of a tradition of error already grown strong. For three centuries they have been born further and further out of the truth, and their culpability is perpetually diminishing; and as they were passively borne onward in the course of the English separation, the moral responsibility for the past is proportionately less.
