Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/553

 College, he emerged in 1885 an ardent Thomist, and returned to the college at Malta, where he was employed as a school-master. Then followed, at St. Beuno's College, North Wales, the usual four years' theological course; which ended, he was ordained priest on 20 Sept. 1891, and served his tertianship at Manresa House in 1891-2. The next two years he spent in mission work at Oxford, Preston, and St. Helens; after which he lectured on philosophy at St. Mary's Hall, Stonyhurst, until his transference in 1896 to the literary staff at Farm Street, London. During Ins residence in London he produced three works of unimpeachable orthodoxy, viz. 'Nova et Vetera : Informal Meditations' (1897; 3rd edit. 1900); 'Hard Sayings: a Selection of Meditations and Studies' (1898); and 'External Religion: its Use and Abuse ' (1899). His views, no doubt, had been gradually broadening, but an article on Hell, entitled 'A Perverted Devotion,' which he contributed to the 'Weekly Register,' 16 December 1899, was the first unmistakable indication of the change. It raised a storm which compelled his retirement to the Mission House of his order at Richmond, Yorkshire, where he continued to reside in great seclusion so long as he remained a Jesuit. There he completed 'Oil and Wine' (1902; new edit. 1907) and 'Lex Orandi' (1903), the latter, the last of his works that bears the imprimatur, being an expansion of a pamphlet written under the pseudonym Dr. Ernest Engels and entitled 'Religion as a Factor of Life.' A sequel, 'Lex Credendi,' also appeared in 1906. In these two volumes the influence of the pragmatic school of philosophy is apparent, though Tyrrell resented being classed with the Pragmatists. 'The Church and the Future,' a translation privately printed about this time of an essay of a strongly liberal character, which he had written in French under the pseudonym Hilaire Bourdon, retained its pseudonymity until after Tyrrell's death; but the wide circulation incautiously given to a privately printed 'Letter to a Professor of Axithropology,' in which he dealt with the relations between faith and culture, brought about the final crisis in Tyrrell's relations with his order. Some passages from the 'Letter,' not altogether accurate but substantially authentic, were printed in the 'Corriere della Sera' of Slilan, 1 Jan. 1906. The authorship of the 'Letter' was imputed to Tyrrell, and as the passages in question amounted to an acknowledgment of the total untenability of the position of conservative Catholicism, and Tyrrell was unable to disavow them, he was dismissed from the Society of Jesus (February 1906). The subsequent publication of the peccant opuscule under the title 'A much abused Letter' (1906), with copious annotations by Tyrrell, completed his estrangement from the church. Unable to obtain episcopal recognition, he thenceforth resided chiefly at Storrington, Sussex, immersed in literary work. In 1907 the Vatican fulminated against modernism in the decree 'Lamentabili' (2 July) and the encyclical 'Pascendi' (8 Sept.), to which Tyrrell replied in two powerful and pungent letters to 'The Times' (30 Sept., 1 Oct.). This temerity brought upon him the minor excommunication, with reservation of his case to Rome. Meanwhile he recorded the development of his religious opinions in 'Through Scylla and Charybdis; or the Old Theology and the New' (1907), a work which thus corresponds to Newman's 'Apologia.' In 1908 Cardinal Mercier, archbishop of Mahnes, made modernism and Tyrrell as its protagonist the subject of an attack in his Lenten pastoral, which TyrreU repelled with great animation in a volume entitled 'Medievalism' (1908). This work was followed by 'Christianity at the Cross-Roads' (1909), in which he essayed to vindicate his essential fidelity to the 'idea' of Catholicism. It was hardly finished, when he was disabled by a severe illness, which terminated in his death at Storrington on 15 July 1909. As his case was reserved to Rome, and he had made no sign of retractation, the bishop of Southwark prohibited his interment with catholic rites. The funeral therefore took place on 21 July at the parish cemetery, Storrington, where his friend. Abbe Bremond, officiated, paid an eloquent tribute to his great qualities of mind and character, and blessed his grave.

The cardinal principle of Tyrrell's modernism is the strict delimitation of the contiguous provinces of revelation and theology. By revelation he means the evolution of religious experience as such. In his view that evolution, initiated by the deeper self-reflection commonly called mysticism, by man's recognition of himself as a being transcending space and time, and by his consequent inability to 'rest but in a conscious relation to the Universal and Eternal,' reached its final consummation in the spiritual life which Christ communicated to His apostles, and