From the INTRODUCTION.
IN my own inward history this book ends a painful process of necessary readjustment, and I feel as one who, after much uncertainty, has at last chosen a path that is clear, however difficult and uninviting in many ways.
Thus Father Tyrrell wrote to a friend on June 27th, 1903, in regard to The Church and the Future, which he had printed privately under the pseudonym Hilaire Bourdon, and which was being circulated with great reserve and discretion. There was, during his literary career, a short period during which it was necessary that his advice to those in need should be anonymous or pseudonymous.
The reason for this course of action was, as his friends knew, that he was, at that time, deliberately attempting to accommodate his life to a position which was becoming daily more strained and difficult. So long as he remained in the Society of Jesus, he was bound to have regard for the feelings, traditions and official welfare of the order: but, on the other hand, he was pressed by another and conflicting class of obligations towards those amongst whom his true lot was cast, to whom his service was still more imperatively owing I speak of those who had turned to him, as they could turn to no other, in their spiritual necessities; of those who had been sent to him, in many instances, by his ecclesiastical superiors; and who now demanded that they should not be abandoned in the middle of the stream, because others, sitting comfortably on the bank, disapproved of the make of rope which he was throwing to them. To give some idea of the difficulties of this kind with which he was beset I quote from a letter he wrote me in the November of 1901, after a few days spent in London.
I could not live in London, he said, a famine-stricken city, and I a poor wretch with a false repute of bread in my pocket, and every one tearing after me for a bite. Perhaps in this wilderness one may learn at last to turn stones into bread, but till then I am better out of the way, unheard and unseen.
I hesitate to say that he was in a false position, because the expression is too uncertain in its meaning. If a false position be one in which a man is bound to act falsely, then the words are certainly not applicable to Father Tyrrell s position any more than they were applicable to that of Newman at Littlemore ; at that rate we should all have to act falsely so soon as we perceived truths which we were not yet prepared to utter. If, on the contrary, the words only signify that, in certain complicated situations, it is extremely difficult to avoid some appearance of falseness, then we may admit the description, while justifying the state it denotes.
We shall be told that the plain man, the man in the street (who is often credited with coarser perceptions than he really owns) cannot understand such subtleties ; if you have lost faith in a position it is time to leave it ; Father Tyrrell, it will be said, had two honest alternatives before him, to leave the Jesuits or to keep silence, whereas he did neither....