Dr. Johnson's Catholic Friends

Extract

Thomas Carlyle never could pass by the church of St. Clement Danes without thinking with admiration and awe of Samuel Johnson ‘in the era of Voltaire’ purifying his soul within its walls, full of genuine devotion, sometimes in fear and darkness, at others in patience and quiet hope, but ever with intense and burning conviction. ‘Religion,’ says Mr. Birrell, ‘was to Johnson an awful thing; he never learned to take his ease on Zion. Yet is his trembling piety and utter sincerity a true haven of refuge for the student of the heartless scepticism of the eighteenth century.’

It is a singular fact that for more than forty years Samuel Johnson dwelt within a stone’s throw of the most venerated and conspicuous English Catholic of his day. They must inevitably often have passed each other in the street. But they lived in totally distinct worlds, and we can hardly presume that Dr. Johnson and Bishop Challoner ever exchanged a single word. Yet had they very many acquaintances in common.

Pages, volumes almost, have been written regarding Johnson’s sympathy with Catholic doctrine and practice. He frequently stood up for Catholics : he would refute objections, brush aside prejudices, weigh everything in the scales of his sturdy common-sense. His attitude in this respect was far in advance of that of his contemporaries, and this is doubtless the secret of the reverence with which so many children of the Church have regarded him in later generations.

But we question if it has ever quite been realised how very many Catholics he personally knew. Considering how Catholics in those days of the Penal Laws shrank from observation, kept