The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Catholic Church and conversion
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The Catholic Church and conversion
Author: G. K. Chesterton
Release date: June 15, 2025 [eBook #76305]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926
Credits: Tim Lindell, Matthew Everett and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND CONVERSION ***
THE CALVERT SERIES
HILAIRE BELLOC, _General Editor_
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND
CONVERSION
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE CALVERT SERIES
HILAIRE BELLOC, _General Editor_
-------
_Belloc_: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND HISTORY
_Chesterton_: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND CONVERSION
_McNabb_: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND PHILOSOPHY
_Ward_: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE APPEAL TO REASON
_Windle_: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND ITS REACTIONS WITH SCIENCE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
AND CONVERSION
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1927
_All rights reserved_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nihil Obstat
Arthur J. Scanlan, S. T. D.
Censor Librorum.
Imprimatur
Patrick Cardinal Hayes
✠Archbishop, New York.
New York, September 16, 1926.
Copyright, 1926,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
-------
Set up and electrotyped.
Published November, 1926.
Reprinted, April, 1927.
September, 1927.
_Printed in the United States of America by_
THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
EDITOR’S NOTE
It is with diffidence that anyone born into the Faith can approach the
tremendous subject of Conversion. Indeed, it is easier for one still
quite unacquainted with the Faith to approach that subject than it is
for one who has had the advantage of the Faith from childhood. There is
at once a sort of impertinence in approaching an experience other than
one’s own (necessarily more imperfectly grasped), and an ignorance of
the matter. Those born into the Faith very often go through an
experience of their own parallel to, and in some way resembling, that
experience whereby original strangers to the Faith come to see it and to
accept it. Those born into the Faith often, I say, go through an
experience of scepticism in youth, as the years proceed, and it is still
a common phenomenon (though not so often to be observed as it was a
lifetime ago) for men of the Catholic culture, acquainted with the
Church from childhood, to leave it in early manhood and never to return.
But it is nowadays a still more frequent phenomenon—and it is to this
that I allude—for those to whom scepticism so strongly appealed in youth
to discover, by an experience of men and of reality in all its varied
forms, that the transcendental truths they had been taught in childhood
have the highest claims upon their matured reason.
This experience of the born Catholic may, I repeat, be called in a
certain sense a phenomenon of conversion. But it differs from conversion
properly so called, which rather signifies the gradual discovery and
acceptance of the Catholic Church by men and women who began life with
no conception of its existence: for whom it had been during their
formative years no more than a name, perhaps despised, and certainly
corresponding to no known reality.
Such men and women converts are perhaps the chief factors in the
increasing vigor of the Catholic Church in our time. The admiration
which the born Catholic feels for their action is exactly consonant to
that which the Church in its earlier days showed to the martyrs. For the
word “martyr” means “witness.” The phenomenon of conversion apparent in
every class, affecting every type of character, is the great modern
_witness_ to the truth of the claim of the Faith; to the fact that the
Faith is reality, and that in it alone is the repose of reality to be
found.
In proportion as men know less and less of the subject, in that
proportion do they conceive that the entrants into the City of God are
of one type, and in that proportion do they attempt some simple
definition of the mind which ultimately accepts Catholicism. They will
call it a desire for security; or an attraction of the senses such as is
exercised by music or by verse. Or they will ascribe it to that
particular sort of weakness (present in many minds) whereby they are
easily dominated and changed in mood by the action of another.
A very little experience of typical converts in our time makes nonsense
of such theories. Men and women enter by every conceivable gate, after
every conceivable process of slow intellectual examination, of shock, of
vision, of moral trial and even of merely intellectual process. They
enter through the action of expanded experience. Some obtain this
through travel, some through a reading of history beyond their fellows,
some through personal accidents of life. And not only are the avenues of
approach to the Faith infinite in number (though all converging; as must
be so, since truth is one and error infinitely divided), but the
individual types in whom the process of conversion may be observed
differ in every conceivable fashion. When you have predicated of one
what emotion or what reasoning process brought him into the fold, and
you attempt to apply your predicate exactly to another, you will find a
misfit. The cynic enters, and so does the sentimentalist; and the fool
enters and so does the wise man; the perpetual questioner and doubter
and the man too easily accepting immediate authority—they each enter
after his kind. You come across an entry into the Catholic Church
undoubtedly due to the spectacle, admiration and imitation of some great
character observed. Next day you come across an entry into the Catholic
Church out of complete loneliness, and you are astonished to find the
convert still ignorant of the great mass of the Catholic effect on
character. And yet again, immediately after, you will find a totally
different third type, the man who enters not from loneliness, nor from
the effect of another mind, but who comes in out of contempt for the
insufficiency or the evil by which he has been surrounded.
The Church is the natural home of the Human Spirit.
The truth is that if you seek for an explanation of the phenomenon of
conversion under any system which bases that phenomenon on illusion, you
arrive at no answer to your question. If you imagine conversion to
proceed from this or that or the other erroneous or particular limited
and insufficient cause, you will soon discover it to be inexplicable.
There is only one explanation of the phenomenon—a phenomenon always
present, but particularly arresting to the educated man outside the
Catholic Church in the English-speaking countries—there is only one
explanation which will account for the multiplicity of such entries and
for the infinitely varied quality of the minds attracted by the great
change; and that explanation is that the Catholic Church is reality. If
a distant mountain may be mistaken for a cloud by many, but is
recognised for a stable part of the world (its outline fixed and its
quality permanent) by every sort of observer, and among these especially
by men famous for their interest in the debate, for their acuteness of
vision and for their earlier doubts, the overwhelming presumption is
that the thing seen is a piece of objective reality. Fifty men on
shipboard strain their eyes for land. Five, then ten, then twenty, make
the land-fall and recognise it and establish it for their fellows. To
the remainder, who see it not or who think it a bank of fog, there is
replied the detail of the outline, the character of the points
recognised, and that by the most varied and therefore convergent and
convincing witnesses—by some who do not desire that land should be there
at all, by some who dread its approach, as well as those who are glad to
find it, by some who have long most ridiculed the idea that it was land
at all—and it is in this convergence of witnesses that we have one out
of the innumerable proofs upon which the rational basis of our religion
reposes.—_The Editor._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY: A NEW RELIGION 15
II. THE OBVIOUS BLUNDERS 27
III. THE REAL OBSTACLES 49
IV. THE WORLD INSIDE OUT 75
V. THE EXCEPTION PROVES THE RULE 93
VI. A NOTE ON PRESENT PROSPECTS 111
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTORY
A NEW RELIGION
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND
CONVERSION
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY: A NEW RELIGION
The Catholic faith used to be called the Old Religion; but at the
present moment it has a recognized place among the New Religions. This
has nothing to do with its truth or falsehood; but it is a fact that has
a great deal to do with the understanding of the modern world.
It would be very undesirable that modern men should accept Catholicism
merely as a novelty; but it is a novelty. It does act upon its existing
environment with the peculiar force and freshness of a novelty. Even
those who denounce it generally denounce it as a novelty; as an
innovation and not merely a survival. They talk of the “advanced” party
in the Church of England; they talk of the “aggression” of the Church of
Rome. When they talk of an Extremist they are as likely to mean a
Ritualist as a Socialist. Given any normal respectable Protestant
family, Anglican or Puritan, in England or America, we shall find that
Catholicism is actually for practical purposes treated as a new
religion, that is, a revolution. It is not a survival. It is not in that
sense an antiquity. It does not necessarily owe anything to tradition.
In places where tradition can do nothing for it, in places where all the
tradition is against it, it is intruding on its own merits; not as a
tradition but a truth. The father of some such Anglican or American
Puritan family will find, very often, that all his children are breaking
away from his own more or less Christian compromise (regarded as normal
in the nineteenth century) and going off in various directions after
various faiths or fashions which he would call fads. One of his sons
will become a Socialist and hang up a portrait of Lenin; one of his
daughters will become a Spiritualist and play with a planchette; another
daughter will go over to Christian Science and it is quite likely that
another son will go over to Rome. The point is, for the moment, that
from the point of view of the father, and even in a sense of the family,
all these things act after the manner of new religions, of great
movements, of enthusiasms that carry young people off their feet and
leave older people bewildered or annoyed. Catholicism indeed, even more
than the others, is often spoken of as if it were actually one of the
wild passions of youth. Optimistic aunts and uncles say that the youth
will “get over it,” as if it were a childish love affair or that
unfortunate business with the barmaid. Darker and sterner aunts and
uncles, perhaps at a rather earlier period, used actually to talk about
it as an indecent indulgence, as if its literature were literally a sort
of pornography. Newman remarks quite naturally, as if there were nothing
odd about it at the time, that an undergraduate found with an ascetic
manual or a book of monastic meditations was under a sort of cloud or
taint, as having been caught with “a bad book” in his possession. He had
been wallowing in the sensual pleasure of Nones or inflaming his lusts
by contemplating an incorrect number of candles. It is perhaps no longer
the custom to regard conversion as a form of dissipation; but it is
still common to regard conversion as a form of revolt. And as regards
the established convention of much of the modern world, it is a revolt.
The worthy merchant of the middle class, the worthy farmer of the Middle
West, when he sends his son to college, does now feel a faint alarm lest
the boy should fall among thieves, in the sense of Communists; but he
has the same sort of fear lest he should fall among Catholics.
Now he has no fear lest he should fall among Calvinists. He has no fear
that his children will become seventeenth-century Supralapsarians,
however much he may dislike that doctrine. He is not even particularly
troubled by the possibility of their adopting the extreme solifidian
conceptions once common among some of the more extravagant Methodists.
He is not likely to await with terror the telegram that will inform him
that his son has become a Fifth-Monarchy man, any more than that he has
joined the Albigensians. He does not exactly lie awake at night
wondering whether Tom at Oxford has become a Lutheran any more than a
Lollard. All these religions he dimly recognises as dead religions; or
at any rate as old religions. And he is only frightened of new
religions. He is only frightened of those fresh, provocative,
paradoxical new notions that fly to the young people’s heads. But
amongst these dangerous juvenile attractions he does in practice class
the freshness and novelty of Rome.
Now this is rather odd; because Rome is not so very new. Among these
annoying new religions, one is rather an old religion; but it is the
only old religion that is so new. When it was originally and really new,
no doubt a Roman father often found himself in the same position as the
Anglican or Puritan father. He too might find all his children going
strange ways and deserting the household gods and the sacred temple of
the Capitol. He too might find that one of those children had joined the
Christians in their Ecclesia and possibly in their Catacombs. But he
would have found that, of his other children, one cared for nothing but
the Mysteries of Orpheus, another was inclined to follow Mithras,
another was a Neo-Pythagorean who had learned vegetarianism from the
Hindoos, and so on. Though the Roman father, unlike the Victorian
father, might have the pleasure of exercising the _patria potestas_ and
cutting off the heads of all the heretics, he could not cut off the
stream of all the heresies. Only by this time most of the streams have
run rather dry. It is now seldom necessary for the anxious parent to
warn his children against the undesirable society of the Bull of
Mithras, or even to wean him from the exclusive contemplation of
Orpheus; and though we have vegetarians always with us, they mostly know
more about proteids than about Pythagoras. But that other youthful
extravagance is still youthful. That other new religion is once again
new. That one fleeting fashion has refused to fleet; and that ancient
bit of modernity is still modern. It is still to the Protestant parent
now exactly what it was to the pagan parent then. We might say simply
that it is a nuisance; but anyhow it is a novelty. It is not simply what
the father is used to, or even what the son is used to. It is coming in
as something fresh and disturbing, whether as it came to the Greeks who
were always seeking some new thing, or as it came to the shepherds who
first heard the cry upon the hills of the good news that our language
calls the Gospel. We can explain the fact of the Greeks in the time of
St. Paul regarding it as a new thing, because it was a new thing. But
who will explain why it is still as new to the last of the converts as
it was to the first of the shepherds? It is as if a man a hundred years
old entered the Olympian games among the young Greek athletes; which
would surely have been the basis of a Greek legend. There is something
almost as legendary about the religion that is two thousand years old
now appearing as a rival of the new religions. That is what has to be
explained and cannot be explained away; nothing can turn the legend into
a myth. We have seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears this
great modern quarrel between young Catholics and old Protestants; and it
is the first step to recognise in any study of modern conversion.
I am not going to talk about numbers and statistics, though I may say
something about them later. The first fact to realise is a difference of
substance which falsifies all the difference of size. The great majority
of Protestant bodies to-day, whether they are strong or weak, are not
strengthened in this particular fashion; by the actual attraction of
their new followers to their old doctrines. A young man will suddenly
become a Catholic priest, or even a Catholic monk, because he has a
spontaneous and even impatient personal enthusiasm for the doctrine of
Virginity as it appeared to St. Catherine or St. Clare. But how many men
become Baptist ministers because they have a personal horror of the idea
of an innocent infant coming unconsciously to Christ? How many honest
Presbyterian ministers in Scotland really want to go back to John Knox,
as a Catholic mystic might want to go back to John of the Cross? These
men inherit positions which they feel they can hold with reasonable
consistency and general agreement; but they do inherit them. For them
religion is tradition. We Catholics naturally do not sneer at tradition;
but we say that in this case it is really tradition and nothing else.
Not one man in a hundred of these people would ever have joined his
present communion if he had been born outside it. Not one man in a
thousand of them would have invented anything like his church formulas
if they had not been laid down for him. None of them has any real reason
for being in their own particular church, whatever good reason they may
still have for being outside ours. In other words, the old creed of
their communion has ceased to function as a fresh and stimulating idea.
It is at best a motto or a war cry and at the worst a catchword. But it
is not meeting contemporary ideas like a contemporary idea. In their
time and in their turn we believe that those other contemporary ideas
will also prove their mortality by having also become mottoes and
catchwords and traditions. A century or two hence Spiritualism may be a
tradition and Socialism may be a tradition and Christian Science may be
a tradition. But Catholicism will not be a tradition. It will still be a
nuisance and a new and dangerous thing.
These are the general considerations which govern any personal study of
conversion to the Catholic faith. The Church has defended tradition in a
time which stupidly denied and despised tradition. But that is simply
because the Church is always the only thing defending whatever is at the
moment stupidly despised. It is already beginning to appear as the only
champion of reason in the twentieth century, as it was the only champion
of tradition in the nineteenth. We know that the higher mathematics is
trying to deny that two and two make four and the higher mysticism to
imagine something that is beyond good and evil. Amid all these
anti-rational philosophies, ours will remain the only rational
philosophy. In the same spirit the Church did indeed point out the value
of tradition to a time which treated it as quite valueless. The
nineteenth-century neglect of tradition and mania for mere documents
were altogether nonsensical. They amounted to saying that men always
tell lies to children but men never make mistakes in books. But though
our sympathies are traditional because they are human, it is not that
part of the thing which stamps it as divine. The mark of the Faith is
not tradition; it is conversion. It is the miracle by which men find
truth in spite of tradition and often with the rending of all the roots
of humanity.
It is with the nature of this process that I propose to deal; and it is
difficult to deal with it without introducing something of a personal
element. My own is only a very trivial case but naturally it is the case
I know best; and I shall be compelled in the pages that follow to take
many illustrations from it. I have therefore thought it well to put
first this general note on the nature of the movement in my time; to
show that I am well aware that it is a very much larger and even a very
much later movement than is implied in describing my own life or
generation. I believe it will be more and more an issue for the rising
generation and for the generation after that, as they discover the
actual alternative in the awful actualities of our time. And Catholics
when they stand up together and sing “Faith of our Fathers” may realise
almost with amusement that they might well be singing “Faith of our
Children.” And in many cases the return has been so recent as almost to
deserve the description of a Children’s Crusade.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE OBVIOUS BLUNDERS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER II
THE OBVIOUS BLUNDERS
I have noted that Catholicism really is in the twentieth century what it
was in the second century; it is the New Religion. Indeed its very
antiquity preserves an attitude of novelty. I have always thought it
striking and even stirring that in the venerable invocation of the
“Tantum Ergo,” which for us seems to come loaded with accumulated ages,
there is still the language of innovation; of the antique document that
must yield to a new rite. For us the hymn is something of an antique
document itself. But the rite is always new.
But if a convert is to write of conversion he must try to retrace his
steps out of that shrine back into that ultimate wilderness where he
once really believed that this eternal youth was only the “Old
Religion.” It is a thing exceedingly difficult to do and not often done
well, and I for one have little hope of doing it even tolerably well.
The difficulty was expressed to me by another convert who said, “I
cannot explain why I am a Catholic; because now that I am a Catholic I
cannot imagine myself as anything else.” Nevertheless, it is right to
make the imaginative effort. It is not bigotry to be certain we are
right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly
have gone wrong. It is my duty to try to understand what H. G. Wells can
possibly mean when he says that the mediæval Church did not care for
education but only for imposing dogmas; it is my duty to speculate
(however darkly) on what can have made an intelligent man like Arnold
Bennett stone-blind to all the plainest facts about Spain; it is my duty
to find if I can the thread of connected thought in George Moore’s
various condemnations of Catholic Ireland; and it is equally my duty to
labour till I understand the strange mental state of G. K. Chesterton
when he really assumed that the Catholic Church was a sort of ruined
abbey, almost as deserted as Stonehenge.
I must say first that, in my own case, it was at worst a matter of
slights rather than slanders. Many converts far more important than I
have had to wrestle with a hundred devils of howling falsehood; with a
swarm of lies and libels. I owe it to the liberal and Universalist
atmosphere of my family, of Stopford Brooke and the Unitarian preachers
they followed, that I was always just sufficiently enlightened to be out
of the reach of Maria Monk. Nevertheless, as this is but a private
privilege for which I have to be thankful, it is necessary to say
something of what I might be tempted to call the obvious slanders, but
that better men than I have not always seen that the slander was
obvious. I do not think that they exercise much influence on the
generation that is younger than mine. The worst temptation of the most
pagan youth is not so much to denounce monks for breaking their vow as
to wonder at them for keeping it. But there is a state of transition
that must be allowed for in which a vague Protestant prejudice would
rather like to have it both ways. There is still a sort of woolly-minded
philistine who would be content to consider a friar a knave for his
unchastity and a fool for his chastity. In other words, these dying
calumnies are dying but not dead; and there are still enough people who
may still be held back by such crude and clumsy obstacles that it is
necessary to some extent to clear them away. After that we can consider
what may be called the real obstacles, the real difficulties we find,
which, as a fact, are generally the very opposite of the difficulties we
are told about. But let us consider the evidence of all these things
being black, before we go on to the inconvenient fact of their being
white.
The usual protest of the Protestant, that the Church of Rome is afraid
of the Bible, did not, as I shall explain in a moment, have any great
terrors for me at any time. This was by no merit of my own, but by the
accident of my age and situation. For I grew up in a world in which the
Protestants, who had just proved that Rome did not believe the Bible,
were excitedly discovering that they did not believe the Bible
themselves. Some of them even tried to combine the two condemnations and
say that they were steps of progress. The next step in progress
consisted in a man kicking his father for having locked up a book of
such beauty and value, a book which the son then proceeded to tear into
a thousand pieces. I early discovered that progress is worse than
Protestantism so far as stupidity is concerned. But most of the
free-thinkers who were friends of mine happened to think sufficiently
freely to see that the Higher Criticism was much more of an attack on
Protestant Bible-worship than on Roman authority. Anyhow, my family and
friends were more concerned with the opening of the book of Darwin than
the book of Daniel; and most of them regarded the Hebrew Scriptures as
if they were Hittite sculptures. But, even then, it would seem odd to
worship the sculptures as gods and then smash them as idols and still go
on blaming somebody else for not having worshipped them enough. But here
again it is hard for me to know how far my own experience is
representative, or whether it would not be well to say more of these
purely Protestant prejudices and doubts than I, from my own experience,
am able to say.
The Church is a house with a hundred gates; and no two men enter at
exactly the same angle. Mine was at least as much Agnostic as Anglican,
though I accepted for a time the borderland of Anglicanism; but only on
the assumption that it could really be Anglo-Catholicism. There is a
distinction of ultimate intention there which in the vague English
atmosphere is often missed. It is not a difference of degree but of
definite aim. There are High Churchmen as much as Low Churchmen who are
concerned first and last to save the Church of England. Some of them
think it can be saved by calling it Catholic, or making it Catholic, or
believing that it is Catholic; but _that_ is what they want to save. But
I did not start out with the idea of saving the English Church, but of
finding the Catholic Church. If the two were one, so much the better;
but I had never conceived of Catholicism as a sort of showy attribute or
attraction to be tacked on to my own national body, but as the inmost
soul of the true body, wherever it might be. It might be said that
Anglo-Catholicism was simply my own uncompleted conversion to
Catholicism. But it was from a position originally much more detached
and indefinite that I had been converted, an atmosphere if not agnostic
at least pantheistic or Unitarian. To this I owe the fact that I find it
very difficult to take some of the Protestant propositions even
seriously. What is any man who has been in the real outer world, for
instance, to make of the everlasting cry that Catholic traditions are
condemned by the Bible? It indicates a jumble of topsy-turvy tests and
tail-foremost arguments, of which I never could at any time see the
sense. The ordinary sensible sceptic or pagan is standing in the street
(in the supreme character of the man in the street) and he sees a
procession go by of the priests of some strange cult, carrying their
object of worship under a canopy, some of them wearing high head-dresses
and carrying symbolical staffs, others carrying scrolls and sacred
records, others carrying sacred images and lighted candles before them,
others sacred relics in caskets or cases, and so on. I can understand
the spectator saying, “This is all hocus-pocus”; I can even understand
him, in moments of irritation, breaking up the procession, throwing down
the images, tearing up the scrolls, dancing on the priests and anything
else that might express that general view. I can understand his saying,
“Your croziers are bosh, your candles are bosh, your statues and scrolls
and relics and all the rest of it are bosh.” But in what conceivable
frame of mind does he rush in to select one particular scroll of the
scriptures of this one particular group (a scroll which had always
belonged to them and been a part of their hocus-pocus, if it was
hocus-pocus); why in the world should the man in the street say that one
particular scroll was _not_ bosh, but was the one and only truth by
which all the other things were to be condemned? Why should it not be as
superstitious to worship the scrolls as the statues, of that one
particular procession? Why should it not be as reasonable to preserve
the statues as the scrolls, by the tenets of that particular creed? To
say to the priests, “Your statues and scrolls are condemned by our
common sense,” is sensible. To say, “Your statues are condemned by your
scrolls, and we are going to worship one part of your procession and
wreck the rest,” is not sensible from any standpoint, least of all that
of the man in the street.
Similarly, I could never take seriously the fear of the priest, as of
something unnatural and unholy; a dangerous man in the home. Why should
a man who wanted to be wicked encumber himself with special and
elaborate promises to be good? There might sometimes be a reason for a
priest being a profligate. But what was the reason for a profligate
being a priest? There are many more lucrative walks of life in which a
person with such shining talents for vice and villainy might have made a
brighter use of his gifts. Why should a man encumber himself with vows
that nobody could expect him to take and he did not himself expect to
keep? Would any man make himself poor in order that he might become
avaricious; or take a vow of chastity frightfully difficult to keep in
order to get into a little more trouble when he did not keep it? All
that early and sensational picture of the sins of Rome always seemed to
me silly even when I was a boy or an unbeliever; and I cannot describe
how I passed out of it because I was never in it. I remember asking some
friends at Cambridge, people of the Puritan tradition, why in the world
they were so afraid of Papists; why a priest in somebody’s house was a
peril or an Irish servant the beginning of a pestilence. I asked them
why they could not simply disagree with Papists and say so, as they did
with Theosophists or Anarchists. They seemed at once pleased and shocked
with my daring, as if I had undertaken to convert a burglar or tame a
mad dog. Perhaps their alarm was really wiser than my bravado. Anyhow, I
had not then the most shadowy notion that the burglar would convert me.
That, however, I am inclined to think, is the subconscious intuition in
the whole business. It must either mean that they suspect that our
religion has something about it so wrong that the hint of it is bad for
anybody; or else that it has something so right that the presence of it
would convert anybody. To do them justice, I think most of them darkly
suspect the second and not the first.
A shade more plausible than the notion that Popish priests merely seek
after evil was the notion that they are exceptionally ready to seek good
by means of evil. In vulgar language, it is the notion that if they are
not sensual they are always sly. To dissipate this is a mere matter of
experience; but before I had any experience I had seen some objections
to the thing even in theory. The theory attributed to the Jesuits was
very often almost identical with the practice adopted by nearly
everybody I knew. Everybody in society practised verbal economies,
equivocations and often direct fictions, without any sense of essential
falsehood. Every gentleman was expected to say he would be delighted to
dine with a bore; every lady said that somebody else’s baby was
beautiful if she thought it as ugly as sin; for they did not think it a
sin to avoid saying ugly things. This might be right or wrong; but it
was absurd to pillory half a dozen Popish priests for a crime committed
daily by half a million Protestant laymen. The only difference was that
the Jesuits had been worried enough about the matter to try to make
rules and limitations saving as much verbal veracity as possible;
whereas the happy Protestants were not worried about it at all, but told
lies from morning to night as merrily and innocently as the birds sing
in the trees. The fact is, of course, that the modern world is full of
an utterly lawless casuistry because the Jesuits were prevented from
making a lawful casuistry. But every man is a casuist or a lunatic.
It is true that this general truth was hidden from many by certain
definite assertions. I can only call them, in simple language,
Protestant lies about Catholic lying. The men who repeated them were not
necessarily lying, because they were repeating. But the statements were
of the same lucid and precise order as a statement that the Pope has
three legs or that Rome is situated at the North Pole. There is no more
doubt about their nature than that. One of them, for instance, is the
positive statement, once heard everywhere and still heard often: “Roman
Catholics are taught that anything is lawful if done for the good of the
Church.” This is not the fact; and there is an end of it. It refers to a
definite statement of an institution whose statements are very definite;
and it can be proved to be totally false. Here as always the critics
cannot see that they are trying to have it both ways. They are always
complaining that our creed is cut and dried; that we are told what to
believe and must believe nothing else; that it is all written down for
us in bulls and confessions of faith. In so far as this is true, it
brings a matter like this to the point of legal and literal truth, which
can be tested; and so tested, it is a lie. But even here I was saved at
a very early stage by noticing a curious fact. I noticed that those who
were most ready to blame priests for relying on rigid formulas seldom
took the trouble to find out what the formulas were. I happened to pick
up some of the amusing pamphlets of James Britten, as I might have
picked up any other pamphlets of any other propaganda; but they set me
on the track of that delightful branch of literature which he called
Protestant Fiction. I found some of that fiction on my own account,
dipping into novels by Joseph Hocking and others. I am only concerned
with them here to illustrate this particular and curious fact about
exactitude. I could not understand why these romancers never took the
trouble to find out a few elementary facts about the thing they
denounced. The facts might easily have helped the denunciation, where
the fictions discredited it. There were any number of real Catholic
doctrines I should then have thought disgraceful to the Church. There
are any number which I can still easily imagine being made to look
disgraceful to the Church. But the enemies of the Church never found
these real rocks of offence. They never looked for them. They never
looked for anything. They seemed to have simply made up out of their own
heads a number of phrases, such as a Scarlet Woman of deficient
intellect might be supposed to launch on the world; and left it at that.
Boundless freedom reigned; it was not treated as if it were a question
of fact at all. A priest might say anything about the Faith; because a
Protestant might say anything about the priest. These novels were padded
with pronouncements like this one, for instance, which I happen to
remember: “Disobeying a priest is the one sin for which there is no
absolution. We term it a reserved case.” Now obviously a man writing
like that is simply imagining what might exist; it has never occurred to
him to go and ask if it does exist. He has heard the phrase “a reserved
case” and considers, in a poetic reverie, what he shall make it mean. He
does not go and ask the nearest priest what it does mean. He does not
look it up in an encyclopædia or any ordinary work of reference. There
is no doubt about the fact that it simply means a case reserved for
ecclesiastical superiors and not to be settled finally by the priest.
That may be a fact to be denounced; but anyhow it is a fact. But the man
much prefers to denounce his own fancy. Any manual would tell him that
there is no sin “for which there is no absolution”; not disobeying the
priest; not assassinating the Pope. It would be easy to find out these
facts and quite easy to base a Protestant invective upon them. It
puzzled me very much, even at that early stage, to imagine why people
bringing controversial charges against a powerful and prominent
institution should thus neglect to test their own case, and should draw
in this random way on their own imagination. It did not make me any more
inclined to be a Catholic; in those days the very idea of such a thing
would have seemed crazy. But it did save me from swallowing all the
solid and solemn assertion about what Jesuits said and did. I did not
accept quite so completely as others the well-ascertained and widely
accepted fact that “Roman Catholics may do anything for the good of the
Church”; because I had already learned to smile at equally accepted
truths like “Disobeying a priest is the one sin for which there is no
absolution.” I never dreamed that the Roman religion was true; but I
knew that its accusers, for some reason or other, were curiously
inaccurate.
It is strange to me to go back to these things now, and to think that I
ever took them even as seriously as that. But I was not very serious
even then; and certainly I was not serious long. The last lingering
shadow of the Jesuit, gliding behind curtains and concealing himself in
cupboards, faded from my young life about the time when I first caught a
distant glimpse of the late Father Bernard Vaughan. He was the only
Jesuit I ever knew in those days; and as you could generally hear him
half a mile away, he seemed to be ill-selected for the duties of a
curtain-glider. It has always struck me as curious that this Jesuit
raised a storm by refusing to be Jesuitical (in the journalese sense I
mean), by refusing to substitute smooth equivocation and verbal evasion
for a brute fact. Because he talked about “killing Germans” when Germans
had to be killed, all our shifty and shamefaced morality was shocked at
him. And none of those protesting Protestants took thought for a moment
to realise that they were showing all the shuffling insincerity they
attributed to the Jesuits, and the Jesuit was showing all the plain
candour that they claimed for the Protestant.
I could give a great many other instances besides these I have given of
the hidden Bible, the profligate priest or the treacherous Jesuit. I
could go steadily through the list of all these more old-fashioned
charges against Rome and show how they affected me, or rather why they
did not affect me. But my only purpose here is to point out, as a
preliminary, that they did not affect me at all. I had all the
difficulties that a heathen would have had in becoming a Catholic in the
fourth century. I had very few of the difficulties that a Protestant
had, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth. And I owe this to men whose
memories I shall always honour; to my father and his circle and the
literary tradition of men like George Macdonald and the Universalists of
the Victorian Age. If I was born on the wrong side of the Roman wall, at
least I was not born on the wrong side of the No Popery quarrel; and if
I did not inherit a fully civilised faith, neither did I inherit a
barbarian feud. The people I was born amongst wished to be just to
Catholics if they did not always understand them; and I should be very
thankless if I did not record of them that (like a very much more
valuable convert) I can say I was born free.
I will add one example to illustrate this point, because it leads us on
to larger matters. After a long time—I might almost say after a
lifetime—I have at last begun to realise what the worthy Liberal or
Socialist of Balham or Battersea really means when he says he is an
Internationalist and that humanity should be preferred to the narrowness
of nations. It dawned on me quite suddenly, after I had talked to such a
man for many hours, that of course he had really been brought up to
believe that God’s Englishmen were the Chosen Race. Very likely his
father or uncle actually thought they were the lost Ten Tribes. Anyhow,
everything from his daily paper to his weekly sermon assumed that they
were the salt of the earth, and especially that they were the salt of
the sea. His people had never thought outside their British nationality.
They lived in an Empire on which the sun never set, or possibly never
rose. Their Church was emphatically the Church of England—even if it was
a chapel. Their religion was the Bible that went everywhere with the
Union Jack. And when I realised that, I realised the whole story. That
was why they were excited by the exceedingly dull theory of the
Internationalist. That was why the brotherhood of nations, which to me
was a truism, to them was a trumpet. That was why it seemed such a
thrilling paradox to say that we must love foreigners; it had in it the
divine paradox that we must love enemies. That was why the
Internationalist was always planning deputations and visits to foreign
capitals and heart-to-heart talks and hands across the sea. It was the
marvel of discovering that foreigners had hands, let alone hearts. There
was in that excitement a sort of stifled cry: “Look! Frenchmen also have
two legs! See! Germans have noses in the same place as we!” Now a
Catholic, especially a born Catholic, can never understand that
attitude, because from the first his whole religion is rooted in the
unity of the race of Adam, the one and only Chosen Race. He is loyal to
his own country; indeed he is generally ardently loyal to it, such local
affections being in other ways very natural to his religious life, with
its shrines and relics. But just as the relic follows upon the religion,
so the local loyalty follows on the universal brotherhood of all men.
The Catholic says, “Of course we must love all men; but what do all men
love? They love their lands, their lawful boundaries, the memories of
their fathers. That is the justification of being national, that it is
normal.” But the Protestant patriot really never thought of any
patriotism except his own. In that sense Protestantism is patriotism.
But unfortunately it is only patriotism. It starts with it and never
gets beyond it. We start with mankind and go beyond it to all the varied
loves and traditions of mankind. There never was a more illuminating
flash than that which lit up the last moment of one of the most glorious
of English Protestants; one of the most Protestant and one of the most
English. For that is the meaning of that phrase of Nurse Cavell, herself
the noblest martyr of our modern religion of nationality, when the very
shaft of the white sun of death shone deep into her mind and she cried
aloud, like one who had just discovered something, “I see now that
patriotism is not enough.”
There was this in common between the Catholics to whom I have come and
the Liberals among whom I was born: neither of them would ever have
imagined for a moment that patriotism was enough. But that insular
idealism by which that great lady lived really had taught her
unconsciously from childhood that patriotism _was_ enough. Not seldom
has the English lady appeared in history as a heroine; but generally as
facing and defying strangers or savages, not specially as feeling them
as fellows and equals. Those last words of the English martyr in Belgium
have often been quoted by mere cosmopolitans; but cosmopolitans are the
last people really to understand them. _They_ are generally trying to
prove, not that patriotism is not enough, but that it is a great deal
too much. The point is here that hundreds of the most heroic and
high-minded people in Protestant countries have really assumed that it
is enough to be a patriot. The most careless and cynical of Catholics
knows better; and so did the most vague and visionary of Universalists.
Of all the Protestant difficulties, which I here find it hard to
imagine, this is perhaps the most common and in many ways commendable:
the fact that the normal British subject begins by being so very
British. By accident I did not. The tradition I heard in my youth, the
simple, the too simple truths inherited from Priestly and Martineau, had
in them something of that grand generalisation upon men as men which, in
the first of those great figures, faced the howling Jingoism of the
French Wars and defied even the legend of Trafalgar. It is to that
tradition that I owe the fact, whether it be an advantage or a
disadvantage, that I cannot worthily analyse the very heroic virtues of
a Plymouth Brother whose only centre is Plymouth. For that rationalism,
defective as it was, began long ago in the same central civilisation in
which the Church herself began; if it has ended in the Church it began
long ago in the Republic: in a world where all these flags and frontiers
were unknown; where all these state establishments and national sects
were unthinkable; a vast cosmopolitan cosmos that had never heard the
name of England, or conceived the image of a kingdom separate and at
war; in that vast pagan peace which was the matrix of all these
mysteries, which had forgotten the free cities and had not dreamed of
the small nationalities; which knew only humanity, the _humanum genus_,
and the name of Rome.
The Catholic Church loves nations as she loves men; because they are her
children. But they certainly are her children, in the sense that they
are secondary to her in time and process of production. This is, as it
happens, a very good example of a fallacy that often confuses discussion
about the convert. The same people who call the convert a pervert, and
especially a traitor to patriotism, very often use the other catchword
to the effect that he is forced to believe this or that. But it is not
really a question of what a man is made to believe but of what he must
believe; what he cannot help believing. He cannot disbelieve in an
elephant when he has seen one; and he cannot treat the Church as a child
when he has discovered that she is his mother. She is not only his
mother but his country’s mother in being much older and more aboriginal
than his country. She is such a mother not in sentimental feeling but in
historical fact. He cannot think one thing when he knows the contrary
thing. He cannot think that Christianity was invented by Penda of
Mercia, who sent missionaries to the heathen Augustine and the rude and
barbarous Gregory. He cannot think that the Church first rose in the
middle of the British Empire, and not of the Roman Empire. He cannot
think that England existed, with cricket and fox-hunting and the
Jacobean translation all complete, when Rome was founded or when Christ
was born. It is no good talking about his being “free” to believe these
things. He is exactly as free to believe them as he is to believe that a
horse has feathers or that the sun is pea green. He cannot believe them
when once he fully realises them; and among such things is the notion
that the national claim upon a good patriot is in its nature more
absolute, ancient and authoritative than the claim of the whole
religious culture which first mapped out its territories and anointed
its kings. That religious culture does indeed encourage him to fight to
the last for his country, as for his family. But that is because the
religious culture is generous and imaginative and humane and knows that
men must have intimate and individual ties. But those secondary
loyalties are secondary in time and logic to the law of universal
morality which justifies them. And if the patriot is such a fool as to
force the issue against that universal tradition from which his own
patriotism descends, if he presses his claim to priority over the
primitive law of the whole earth—then he will have brought it on himself
if he is answered with the pulverising plainness of the Book of Job. As
God said to the man, “Where were you when the foundations of the world
were laid?” We might well say to the nation, “Where were you when the
foundations of the Church were laid?” And the nation will not know in
the least what to answer—if it should wish to answer—but will be forced
to put its hand upon its mouth, if only like one who yawns and falls
asleep.
I have taken this particular case of patriotism because it concerns at
least an emotion in which I profoundly believe and happen to feel
strongly. I have always done my best to defend it; though I have
sometimes become suspect by sympathising with other people’s patriotism
besides my own. But I cannot see how it can be defended except as part
of a larger morality; and the Catholic morality happens to be one of the
very few large moralities now ready to defend it. But the Church defends
it as one of the duties of men and not as the whole duty of man; as it
was in the Prussian theory of the State and too often in the British
theory of the Empire. And for this the Catholic rests, exactly as the
Universalist Unitarian rested, upon the actual fact of a human unity
anterior to all these healthy and natural human divisions. But it is
absurd to treat the Church as a novel conspiracy attacking the State,
when the State was only recently a novel experiment arising within the
Church. It is absurd to forget that the Church itself received the first
loyalties of men who had not yet even conceived the notion of founding
such a national and separate state; that the Faith really was not only
the faith of our fathers, but the faith of our fathers before they had
even named our fatherland.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE REAL OBSTACLES
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER III
THE REAL OBSTACLES
In the last chapter I have dealt in a preliminary fashion with the
Protestant case in the conventional controversial sense. I have dealt
with the objections which I suspected very early of being prejudices and
which I now know to be prejudices. I have dealt last and at the greatest
length with what I believe to be the noblest of all the prejudices of
Protestantism: that which is simply founded on patriotism. I do not
think patriotism is necessarily prejudice; but I am quite sure it must
be prejudice and nothing else but prejudice, unless it is covered by
some common morality. And a patriotism that does not allow other people
to be patriots is not a morality but an immorality. Even such a tribal
prejudice, however, is a more respectable thing than most of the rags
and tatters of stale slander and muddleheadedness which I am obliged to
put first as the official policy of the opposition to the Church. These
stale stories seem to count for a great deal with people who are
resolved to keep far away from the Church. I do not believe they ever
counted with anybody who had begun to draw near to it. When a man really
sees the Church, even if he dislikes what he sees, he does not see what
he had expected to dislike. Even if he wants to slay it he is no longer
able to slander it; though he hates it at sight, what he sees is not
what he looked to see; in that place he may gain a new passion but he
loses his old prejudice. There drops from him the holy armour of his
invincible ignorance; he can never be so stupid again. If he has a ready
mind he can doubtless set his new reasons in some sort of order and even
attempt to link them with his lost tradition. But the thing he hates is
there; and the last chapter was wholly devoted to the study of things
that are not there.
The real reasons are almost the opposite of the recognised reasons. The
real difficulties are almost the opposite of the recognised
difficulties. This is connected, of course, with a general fact, now so
large and obvious but still not clearly comprehended and confessed. The
whole case of Protestantism against Catholicism has been turned clean
round and is facing the contrary way. On practically every single point
on which the Reformation accused the Church, the modern world has not
only acquitted the Church of the crime, but has actually charged it with
the opposite crime. It is as if the reformers had mobbed the Pope for
being a miser, and then the court had not only acquitted him but had
censured him for his extravagance in scattering money among the mob. The
principle of modern Protestantism seems to be that so long as we go on
shouting “To hell with the Pope” there is room for the widest
differences of opinion about whether he should go to the hell of the
misers or the hell of the spendthrifts. This is what is meant by a broad
basis for Christianity and the statement that there is room for many
different opinions side by side. When the reformer says that the
principles of the Reformation give freedom to different points of view,
he means that they give freedom to the Universalist to curse Rome for
having too much predestination and to the Calvinist to curse her for
having too little. He means that in that happy family there is a place
for the No Popery man who finds Purgatory too tender-hearted and also
for the other No Popery man who finds Hell too harsh. He means that the
same description can somehow be made to cover the Tolstoyan who blames
priests because they permit patriotism and the Diehard who blames
priests because they represent Internationalism. After all, the
essential aim of true Christianity is that priests should be blamed; and
who are we that we should set narrow dogmatic limits to the various ways
in which various temperaments may desire to blame them? Why should we
allow a cold difficulty of the logician, technically called a
contradiction in terms, to stand between us and the warm and broadening
human brotherhood of all who are full of sincere and unaffected dislike
of their neighbours? Religion is of the heart, not of the head; and as
long as all our hearts are full of a hatred for everything that our
fathers loved, we can go on flatly contradicting each other for ever
about what there is to be hated.
Such is the larger and more liberal modern attack upon the Church. It is
quite inconsistent with the old doctrinal attack; but it does not
propose to lose the advantages arising from any sort of attack. But in a
somewhat analogous fashion, it will be found that the real difficulties
of a modern convert are almost the direct contrary of those which were
alleged by the more ancient Protestants. Protestant pamphlets do not
touch even remotely any of the real hesitations that he feels; and even
Catholic pamphlets have often been concerned too much with answering the
Protestant pamphlets. Indeed, the only sense in which the priests and
propagandists of Catholicism can really be said to be behind the times
is that they sometimes go on flogging a dead horse and killing a heresy
long after it has killed itself. But even that is, properly understood,
a fault on the side of chivalry. The preacher, and even the persecutor,
really takes the heresy more seriously than it is seen ultimately to
deserve; the inquisitor has more respect for the heresy than the
heretics have. Still, it is true that the grounds of suspicion or fear
that do really fill the convert, and sometimes paralyse him at the very
point of conversion, have really nothing in the world to do with this
old crop of crude slanders and fallacies, and are often the very
inversion of them.
The short way of putting it is to say that he is no longer afraid of the
vices but very much afraid of the virtues of Catholicism. For instance,
he has forgotten all about the old nonsense of the cunning lies of the
confessional, in his lively and legitimate alarm of the truthfulness of
the confessional. He does not recoil from its insincerity but from its
sincerity; nor is he necessarily insincere in doing so. Realism is
really a rock of offence; it is not at all unnatural to shrink from it;
and most modern realists only manage to like it because they are careful
to be realistic about other people. He is near enough to the sacrament
of penance to have discovered its realism and not near enough to have
yet discovered its reasonableness and its common sense. Most of those
who have gone through this experience have a certain right to say, like
the old soldier to his ignorant comrade, “Yes, I was afraid; and if you
were half as much afraid, you would run away.” Perhaps it is just as
well that people go through this stage before discovering how very
little there is to be afraid of. In any case, I will say little more of
that example here, having a feeling that absolution, like death and
marriage, is a thing that a man ought to find out for himself. It will
be enough to say that this is perhaps the supreme example of the fact
that the Faith is a paradox that measures more within than without. If
that be true of the smallest church, it is truer still of the yet
smaller confessional-box, that is like a church within a church. It is
almost a good thing that nobody outside should know what gigantic
generosity, and even geniality, can be locked up in a box, as the
legendary casket held the heart of the giant. It is a satisfaction, and
almost a joke, that it is only in a dark corner and a cramped space that
any man can discover that mountain of magnanimity.
It is the same with all the other points of attack, especially the old
ones. The man who has come so far as that along the road has long left
behind him the notion that the priest will force him to abandon his
will. But he is not unreasonably dismayed at the extent to which he may
have to use his will. He is not frightened because, after taking this
drug, he will be henceforward irresponsible. But he is very much
frightened because he will be responsible. He will have somebody to be
responsible to and he will know what he is responsible for; two
uncomfortable conditions which his more fortunate fellow-creatures have
nowadays entirely escaped. There are of course many other examples of
the same principle: that there is indeed an interval of acute doubt,
which is, strictly speaking, rather fear than doubt, since in some cases
at least (as I shall point out elsewhere) there is actually least doubt
when there is most fear.
But anyhow, the doubts are hardly ever of the sort suggested by ordinary
anti-Catholic propaganda; and it is surely time that such propagandists
brought themselves more in touch with the real problem. The Catholic is
scarcely ever frightened of the Protestant picture of Catholicism; but
he is sometimes frightened of the Catholic picture of Catholicism; which
may be a good reason for not disproportionately stressing the difficult
or puzzling parts of the scheme. For the convert’s sake, it should also
be remembered that one foolish word from inside does more harm than a
hundred thousand foolish words from outside. The latter he has already
learned to expect, like a blind hail or rain beating upon the Ark; but
the voices from within, even the most casual and accidental, he is
already prepared to regard as holy or more than human; and though this
is unfair to people who only profess to be human beings, it is a fact
that Catholics ought to remember. There is many a convert who has
reached a stage at which no word from any Protestant or pagan could any
longer hold him back. Only the word of a Catholic can keep him from
Catholicism.
It is quite false, in my experience, to say that Jesuits, or any other
Roman priests, pester and persecute people in order to proselytise.
Nobody has any notion of what the whole story is about, who does not
know that, through those long and dark and indecisive days, it is the
man who persecutes himself. The apparent inaction of the priest may be
something like the statuesque stillness of the angler; and such an
attitude is not unnatural in the functions of a fisher of men. But it is
very seldom impatient or premature and the person acted upon is quite
lonely enough to realise that it is nothing merely external that is
tugging at his liberty. The laity are probably less wise; for in most
communions the ecclesiastical layman is more ecclesiastical than is good
for his health, and certainly much more ecclesiastical than the
ecclesiastics. My experience is that the amateur is generally much more
angry than the professional; and if he expresses his irritation at the
slow process of conversion, or the inconsistencies of the intermediate
condition, he may do a great deal of harm, of the kind that he least
intends to do. I know in my own case that I always experienced a slight
setback whenever some irresponsible individual interposed to urge me on.
It is worth while, for practical reasons, to testify to such experience,
because it may guide the convert when he in his turn begins converting.
Our enemies no longer really know how to attack the faith; but that is
no reason why we should not know how to defend it.
Yet even that one trivial or incidental caution carries with it a
reminder of what has been already noted: I mean the fact that whatever
be the Catholic’s worries, they are the very contrary of the
Protestant’s warnings. Merely as a matter of personal experience, I have
been led to note here that it is not generally the priest, but much more
often the layman, who rather too ostentatiously compasses sea and land
to make one proselyte. All the creepy and uncanny whispers about the
horror of having the priest in the home, as if he were a sort of vampire
or a monster intrinsically different from mankind, vanishes with the
smallest experience of the militant layman. The priest does his job, but
it is much more his secular co-religionist who is disposed to explain it
and talk about it. I do not object to laymen proselytising; for I never
could see, even when I was practically a pagan, why a man should not
urge his own opinions if he liked and that opinion as much as any other.
I am not likely to complain of the evangelising energy of Mr. Hilaire
Belloc or Mr. Eric Gill; if only because I owe to it the most
intelligent talks of my youth. But it is that sort of man who
proselytises in that sort of way; and the conventional caricature is
wrong again when it always represents him in a cassock. Catholicism is
not spread by any particular professional tricks or tones or secret
signs or ceremonies. Catholicism is spread by Catholics; but not
certainly, in private life at least, merely by Catholic priests. I
merely give this here out of a hundred examples, as showing once again
that the old traditional version of the terrors of Popery was almost
always wrong, even where it might possibly have been right. A man may
say if he likes that Catholicism is the enemy; and he may be stating
from his point of view a profound spiritual truth. But if he says that
Clericalism is the enemy, he is repeating a catchword.
It is my experience that the convert commonly passes through three
stages or states of mind. The first is when he imagines himself to be
entirely detached, or even to be entirely indifferent, but in the old
sense of the term, as when the Prayer Book talks of judges who will
truly and indifferently administer justice. Some flippant modern person
would probably agree that our judges administer justice very
indifferently. But the older meaning was legitimate and even logical and
it is that which is applicable here. The first phase is that of the
young philosopher who feels that he ought to be fair to the Church of
Rome. He wishes to do it justice; but chiefly because he sees that it
suffers injustice. I remember that when I was first on the _Daily News_,
the great Liberal organ of the Nonconformists, I took the trouble to
draw up a list of fifteen falsehoods which I found out, by my own
personal knowledge, in a denunciation of Rome by Messrs. Horton and
Hocking. I noted, for instance, that it was nonsense to say that the
Covenanters fought for religious liberty when the Covenant denounced
religious toleration; that it was false to say the Church only asked for
orthodoxy and was indifferent to morality, since, if this was true of
anybody, it was obviously true of the supporters of salvation by faith
and not of salvation by works; that it was absurd to say that Catholics
introduced a horrible sophistry of saying that a man might sometimes
tell a lie, since every sane man knows he would tell a lie to save a
child from Chinese torturers; that it missed the whole point, in this
connection, to quote Ward’s phrase, “Make up your mind that you are
justified in lying and then lie like a trooper,” for Ward’s argument was
against equivocation or what people call Jesuitry. He meant, “When the
child really is hiding in the cupboard and the Chinese torturers really
are chasing him with red-hot pincers, then (and then only) be sure that
you are right to deceive and do not hesitate to lie; but do not stoop to
equivocate. Do not bother yourself to say, “The child is in a wooden
house not far from here,” meaning the cupboard; but say the child is in
Chiswick or Chimbora zoo, or anywhere you choose.” I find I made
elaborate notes of all these arguments all that long time ago, merely
for the logical pleasure of disentangling an intellectual injustice. I
had no more idea of becoming a Catholic than of becoming a cannibal. I
imagined that I was merely pointing out that justice should be done even
to cannibals. I imagined that I was noting certain fallacies partly for
the fun of the thing and partly for a certain feeling of loyalty to the
truth of things. But as a matter of fact, looking back on these notes
(which I never published), it seems to me that I took a tremendous
amount of trouble about it if I really regarded it as a trifle; and
taking trouble has certainly never been a particular weakness of mine.
It seems to me that something was already working subconsciously to keep
me more interested in fallacies about this particular topic than in
fallacies about Free Trade or Female Suffrage or the House of Lords.
Anyhow, that is the first stage in my own case and I think in many other
cases; the stage of simply wishing to protect Papists from slander and
oppression, not (consciously at least) because they hold any particular
truth, but because they suffer from a particular accumulation of
falsehood. The second stage is that in which the convert begins to be
conscious not only of the falsehood but the truth, and is enormously
excited to find that there is far more of it than he would ever have
expected. This is not so much a stage as a progress; and it goes on
pretty rapidly but often for a long time. It consists in discovering
what a very large number of lively and interesting ideas there are in
the Catholic philosophy, that a great many of them commend themselves at
once to his sympathies, and that even those which he would not accept
have something to be said for them justifying their acceptance. This
process, which may be called discovering the Catholic Church, is perhaps
the most pleasant and straightforward part of the business; easier than
joining the Catholic Church and much easier than trying to live the
Catholic life. It is like discovering a new continent full of strange
flowers and fantastic animals, which is at once wild and hospitable. To
give anything like a full account of that process would simply be to
discuss about half a hundred Catholic ideas and institutions in turn. I
might remark that much of it consists of the act of translation; of
discovering the real meaning of words, which the Church uses rightly and
the world uses wrongly. For instance, the convert discovers that
“scandal” does not mean “gossip”; and the sin of causing it does not
mean that it is always wicked to set silly old women wagging their
tongues. Scandal means scandal, what it originally meant in Greek and
Latin; the tripping up of somebody else when he is trying to be good. Or
he will discover that phrases like “counsel of perfection” or “venial
sin,” which mean nothing at all in the newspapers, mean something quite
intelligent and interesting in the manuals of moral theology. He begins
to realise that it is the secular world that spoils the sense of words;
and he catches an exciting glimpse of the real case for the iron
immortality of the Latin Mass. It is not a question between a dead
language and a living language, in the sense of an everlasting language.
It is a question between a dead language and a dying language; an
inevitably degenerating language. It is these numberless glimpses of
great ideas, that have been hidden from the convert by the prejudices of
his provincial culture, that constitute the adventurous and varied
second stage of the conversion. It is, broadly speaking, the stage in
which the man is unconsciously trying to be converted. And the third
stage is perhaps the truest and the most terrible. It is that in which
the man is trying not to be converted.
He has come too near to the truth, and has forgotten that truth is a
magnet, with the powers of attraction and repulsion. He is filled with a
sort of fear, which makes him feel like a fool who has been patronising
“Popery” when he ought to have been awakening to the reality of Rome. He
discovers a strange and alarming fact, which is perhaps implied in
Newman’s interesting lecture on Blanco White and the two ways of
attacking Catholicism. Anyhow, it is a truth that Newman and every other
convert has probably found in one form or another. It is impossible to
be just to the Catholic Church. The moment men cease to pull against it
they feel a tug towards it. The moment they cease to shout it down they
begin to listen to it with pleasure. The moment they try to be fair to
it they begin to be fond of it. But when that affection has passed a
certain point it begins to take on the tragic and menacing grandeur of a
great love affair. The man has exactly the same sense of having
committed or compromised himself; of having been in a sense entrapped,
even if he is glad to be entrapped. But for a considerable time he is
not so much glad as simply terrified. It may be that this real
psychological experience has been misunderstood by stupider people and
is responsible for all that remains of the legend that Rome is a mere
trap. But that legend misses the whole point of the psychology. It is
not the Pope who has set the trap or the priests who have baited it. The
whole point of the position is that the trap is simply the truth. The
whole point is that the man himself has made his way towards the trap of
truth, and not the trap that has run after the man. All steps except the
last step he has taken eagerly on his own account, out of interest in
the truth; and even the last step, or the last stage, only alarms him
because it is so very true. If I may refer once more to a personal
experience, I may say that I for one was never less troubled by doubts
than in the last phase, when I was troubled by fears. Before that final
delay I had been detached and ready to regard all sorts of doctrines
with an open mind. Since that delay has ended in decision, I have had
all sorts of changes in mere mood; and I think I sympathise with doubts
and difficulties more than I did before. But I had no doubts or
difficulties just before. I had only fears; fears of something that had
the finality and simplicity of suicide. But the more I thrust the thing
into the back of my mind, the more certain I grew of what Thing it was.
And by a paradox that does not frighten me now in the least, it may be
that I shall never again have such absolute assurance that the thing is
true as I had when I made my last effort to deny it.
There is a postscript or smaller point to be added here to this paradox;
which I know that many will misunderstand. Becoming a Catholic broadens
the mind. It especially broadens the mind about the reasons for becoming
a Catholic. Standing in the centre where all roads meet, a man can look
down each of the roads in turn and realise that they come from all
points of the heavens. As long as he is still marching along his own
road, that is the only road that can be seen, or sometimes even
imagined. For instance, many a man who is not yet a Catholic calls
himself a Mediævalist. But a man who is only a Mediævalist is very much
broadened by becoming a Catholic. I am myself a Mediævalist, in the
sense that I think modern life has a great deal to learn from mediæval
life; that Guilds are a better social system than Capitalism; that
friars are far less offensive than philanthropists. But I am a much more
reasonable and moderate Mediævalist than I was when I was only a
Mediævalist. For instance, I felt it necessary to be perpetually pitting
Gothic architecture against Greek architecture, because it was necessary
to back up Christians against pagans. But now I am in no such fuss and I
know what Coventry Patmore meant when he said calmly that it would have
been quite as Catholic to decorate his mantelpiece with the Venus of
Milo as with the Virgin. As a Mediævalist I am still proudest of the
Gothic; but as a Catholic I am proud of the Baroque. That intensity
which seems almost narrow because it comes to the point, like a mediæval
window, is very representative of that last concentration that comes
just before conversion. At the last moment of all, the convert often
feels as if he were looking through a leper’s window. He is looking
through a little crack or crooked hole that seems to grow smaller as he
stares at it; but it is an opening that looks towards the Altar. Only,
when he has entered the Church, he finds that the Church is much larger
inside than it is outside. He has left behind him the lop-sidedness of
lepers’ windows and even in a sense the narrowness of Gothic doors; and
he is under vast domes as open as the Renaissance and as universal as
the Republic of the world. He can say in a sense unknown to all modern
men certain ancient and serene words: _Romanus civis sum_; I am not a
slave.
The point for the moment, however, is that there is generally an
interval of intense nervousness, to say the least of it, before this
normal heritage is reached. To a certain extent it is a fear which
attaches to all sharp and irrevocable decisions; it is suggested in all
the old jokes about the shakiness of the bridegroom at the wedding or
the recruit who takes the shilling and gets drunk partly to celebrate,
but partly also to forget it. But it is the fear of a fuller sacrament
and a mightier army. He has, by the nature of the case, left a long way
behind him the mere clumsy idea that the sacrament will poison him or
the army will kill him. He has probably passed the point, though he does
generally pass it at some time, when he wonders whether the whole
business is an extraordinarily intelligent and ingenious confidence
trick. He is not now in the condition which may be called the last phase
of real doubt. I mean that in which he wondered whether the thing that
everybody told him was too bad to be tolerable, is not too good to be
true. Here again the recurrent principle is present; and the obstacle is
the very opposite of that which Protestant propaganda has pointed out.
If he still has the notion of being trapped, he has no longer any notion
of being tricked. He is not afraid of finding the Church out, but rather
of the Church finding him out.
This note on the stages of conversion is necessarily very negative and
inadequate. There is in the last second of time or hair’s breadth of
space, before the iron leaps to the magnet, an abyss full of all the
unfathomable forces of the universe. The space between doing and not
doing such a thing is so tiny and so vast. It is only possible here to
give the reasons for Catholicism, not the cause of Catholicism. I have
tried to suggest here some of the enlightenments and experiences which
gradually teach those who have been taught to think ill of the Church to
begin to think well of her. That anything described as so bad should
turn out to be so good is itself a rather arresting process having a
savour of something sensational and strange. To come to curse and remain
to bless, to come to scoff and remain to pray, is always welcome in a
spirit of wonder and the glow of an unexpected good.
But it is one thing to conclude that Catholicism is good and another to
conclude that it is right. It is one thing to conclude that it is right
and another to conclude that it is always right. I had never believed
the tradition that it was diabolical; I had soon come to doubt the idea
that it was inhuman, but that would only have left me with the obvious
inference that it was human. It is a considerable step from that to the
inference that it is divine. When we come to that conviction of divine
authority, we come to the more mysterious matter of divine aid. In other
words, we come to the unfathomable idea of grace and the gift of faith;
and I have not the smallest intention of attempting to fathom it. It is
a theological question of the utmost complexity; and it is one thing to
feel it as a fact and another to define it as a truth. One or two points
about the preliminary dispositions that prepare the mind for it are all
that need be indicated here. To begin with, there is one sense in which
the blackest bigots are really the best philosophers. The Church really
is like Antichrist in the sense that it is as unique as Christ. Indeed,
if it be not Christ it probably is Antichrist; but certainly it is not
Moses or Mahomet or Buddha or Plato or Pythagoras. The more we see of
humanity, the more we sympathise with humanity, the more we shall see
that when it is simply human it is simply heathen; and the names of its
particular local gods or tribal prophets or highly respectable sages are
a secondary matter compared with that human and heathen character. In
the old paganism of Europe, in the existing paganism of Asia, there have
been gods and priests and prophets and sages of all sorts; but not
another institution of this sort. The pagan cults die very slowly; they
do not return very rapidly. They do not make the sort of claim that is
made at a crisis; and then make the same claim again and again at crisis
after crisis throughout the whole history of the earth. All that people
fear in the Church, all that they hate in her, all against which they
most harden their hearts and sometimes (one is tempted to say) thicken
their heads, all that has made people consciously and unconsciously
treat the Catholic Church as a _peril_, is the evidence that there is
something here that we cannot look on at languidly and with detachment,
as we might look on at Hottentots dancing at the new moon or Chinamen
burning paper in porcelain temples. The Chinaman and the tourist can be
on the best of terms on a basis of mutual scorn. But in the duel of the
Church and the world is no such shield of contempt. The Church will not
consent to scorn the soul of a coolie or even a tourist; and the measure
of the madness with which men hate her is but their vain attempt to
despise.
Another element, far more deep and delicate and hard to describe, is the
immediate connection of what is most awful and archaic with what is most
intimate and individual. It is a miracle in itself that anything so huge
and historic in date and design should be so fresh in the affections. It
is as if a man found his own parlour and fireside in the heart of the
Great Pyramid. It is as if a child’s favourite doll turned out to be the
oldest sacred image in the world, worshipped in Chaldea or Nineveh. It
is as if a girl to whom a man made love in a garden were also, in some
dark and double fashion, a statue standing for ever in a square. It is
just here that all those things which were regarded as weakness come in
as the fulness of strength. Everything that men called sentimental in
Roman Catholic religion, its keepsakes, its small flowers and almost
tawdry trinkets, its figures with merciful gestures and gentle eyes, its
avowedly popular pathos and all that Matthew Arnold meant by
Christianity with its “relieving tears”—all this is a sign of sensitive
and vivid vitality in anything so vast and settled and systematic. There
is nothing quite like this warmth, as in the warmth of Christmas, amid
ancient hills hoary with such snows of antiquity. It can address even
God Almighty with diminutives. In all its varied vestments it wears its
Sacred Heart upon its sleeve. But to those who know that it is full of
these lively affections, like little leaping flames, there is something
of almost ironic satisfaction in the stark and primitive size of the
thing, like some prehistoric monster; in its spires and mitres like the
horns of giant herds or its colossal cornerstones like the four feet of
an elephant. It would be easy to write a merely artistic study of the
strange externals of the Roman religion, which should make it seem as
uncouth and unearthly as Aztec or African religion. It would be easy to
talk of it as if it were really some sort of mammoth or monster
elephant, older than the Ice Age, towering over the Stone Age; his very
lines traced, it would seem, in the earthquakes or landslides of some
older creation, his very organs and outer texture akin to unrecorded
patterns of vegetation and air and light—the last residuum of a lost
world. But the prehistoric monster is in the Zoölogical Gardens and not
in the Natural History Museum. The extinct animal is still alive. And
anything outlandish and unfamiliar in its form accentuates the startling
naturalness and familiarity of its mind, as if the Sphinx began suddenly
to talk of the topics of the hour. The super-elephant is not only a tame
animal but a pet; and a young child shall lead him.
This antithesis between all that is formidable and remote and all that
is personally relevant and realistically tender is another of those
converging impressions which meet in the moment of conviction. But of
all these things, that come nearest to the actual transition of the gift
of faith, it is far harder to write than of the rationalistic and
historical preliminaries of the enquiry. It is only with those
preliminary dispositions towards the truth that I claim to deal here. In
the chapters that follow I propose to touch upon two of the larger
considerations of this class, not because they are in themselves any
larger than many other immense aspects of so mighty a theme, but because
they happen to balance each other and form a sort of antithesis very
typical of all Catholic truth. In the first of the two chapters I shall
try to point out how it is that when we praise the Church for her
greatness we do not merely mean her largeness but, in a rather notable
and unique sense, her universality. We mean her power of being cosmos
and containing other things. And in the second chapter I shall point out
what may seem to disturb this truth but really balances it. I mean the
fact that we value the Church because she is a Church Militant; and
sometimes even because she militates against ourselves. She is something
more than the cosmos, in the sense of completed nature or completed
human nature. She proves that she is something more by sometimes being
right where they are wrong. These two aspects must be considered
separately, though they come together to form the full conviction that
comes just before conversion. But in this chapter I have merely noted
down a few points or stages of the conversion considered as a practical
process; and especially those three stages of it through which many a
Protestant or Agnostic must have passed. Many a man, looking back
cheerfully on them now, will not be annoyed if I call the first,
patronising the Church; and the second, discovering the Church; and the
third, running away from the Church. When those three phases are over, a
larger truth begins to come into sight; it is much too large to describe
and we will proceed to describe it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE WORLD INSIDE OUT
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IV
THE WORLD INSIDE OUT
The first fallacy about the Catholic Church is the idea that it is a
church. I mean that it is a church in the sense in which the
Nonconformist newspapers talk about The Churches. I do not intend any
expression of contempt about The Churches; nor is it an expression of
contempt to say that it would be more convenient to call them the sects.
This is true in a much deeper and more sympathetic sense than may at
first appear; but to begin with, it is certainly true in a perfectly
plain and historical sense, which has nothing to do with sympathy at
all. Thus, for instance, I have much more sympathy for small
nationalities than I have for small sects. But it is simply a historical
fact that the Roman Empire was the Empire and that it was not a small
nationality. And it is simply a historical fact that the Roman Church is
the Church and is not a sect. Nor is there anything narrow or
unreasonable in saying that the Church is the Church. It may be a good
thing that the Roman Empire broke up into nations; but it certainly was
not one of the nations into which it broke up. And even a person who
thinks it fortunate that the Church broke up into sects ought to be able
to distinguish between the little things he likes and the big thing he
has broken. As a matter of fact, in the case of things so large, so
unique and so creative of the culture about them as were the Roman
Empire and the Roman Church, it is not controversial but simply correct
to confine the one word to the one example. Everybody who originally
used the word “Empire” used it of that Empire; everybody who used the
word “Ecclesia” used it of that Ecclesia. There may have been similar
things in other places, but they could not be called by the same name
for the simple reason that they were not named in the same language. We
know what we mean by a Roman Emperor; we can if we like talk of a
Chinese Emperor, just as we can if we like take a particular sort of a
Mandarin and say he is equivalent to a Marquis. But we never can be
certain that he is exactly equivalent; for the thing we are thinking
about is peculiar to our own history and in that sense stands alone. Now
in that, if in no other sense, the Catholic Church stands alone. It does
not merely belong to a class of Christian churches. It does not merely
belong to a class of human religions. Considered quite coldly and
impartially, as by a man from the moon, it is much more _sui generis_
than that. It is, if the critic chooses to think so, the ruin of an
attempt at a Universal Religion which was bound to fail. But calling the
wreckers to break up a ship does not turn the ship into one of its own
timbers; and cutting Poland up into three pieces does not make Poland
the same as Posen.
But in a much more profound and philosophical sense this notion that the
Church is one of the sects is the great fallacy of the whole affair. It
is a matter more psychological and more difficult to describe. But it is
perhaps the most sensational of the silent upheavals or reversals in the
mind that constitute the revolution called conversion. Every man
conceives himself as moving about in a cosmos of some kind; and the man
of the days of my youth walked about in a kind of vast and airy Crystal
Palace in which there were exhibits set side by side. The cosmos, being
made of glass and iron, was partly transparent and partly colourless;
anyhow, there was something negative about it; arching over all our
heads, a roof as remote as a sky, it seemed to be impartial and
impersonal. Our attention was fixed on the exhibits, which were all
carefully ticketed and arranged in rows; for it was the age of science.
Here stood all the religions in a row—the churches or sects or whatever
we called them; and towards the end of the row there was a particularly
dingy and dismal one, with a pointed roof half fallen in and pointed
windows most broken with stones by passers-by; and we were told that
this particular exhibit was the Roman Catholic Church. Some of us were
sorry for it and even fancied it had been rather badly used; most of us
regarded it as dirty and disreputable; a few of us even pointed out that
many details in the ruin were artistically beautiful or architecturally
important. But most people preferred to deal at other and more
business-like booths; at the Quaker shop of Peace and Plenty or the
Salvation Army store where the showman beats the big drum outside. Now
conversion consists very largely, on its intellectual side, in the
discovery that all that picture of equal creeds inside an indifferent
cosmos is quite false. It is not a question of comparing the merits and
defects of the Quaker meeting-house set beside the Catholic cathedral.
It is the Quaker meeting-house that is inside the Catholic cathedral; it
is the Catholic cathedral that covers everything like the vault of the
Crystal Palace; and it is when we look up at the vast distant dome
covering all the exhibits that we trace the Gothic roof and the pointed
windows. In other words, Quakerism is but a temporary form of Quietism
which has arisen technically outside the Church as the Quietism of
Fenelon appeared technically inside the Church. But both were in
themselves temporary and would have, like Fenelon, sooner or later to
return to the Church in order to live. The principle of life in all
these variations of Protestantism, in so far as it is not a principle of
death, consists of what remained in them of Catholic Christendom; and to
Catholic Christendom they have always returned to be recharged with
vitality. I know that this will sound like a statement to be challenged;
but it is true. The return of Catholic ideas to the separated parts of
Christendom was often indeed indirect. But though the influence came
through many centres, it always came from one. It came through the
Romantic Movement, a glimpse of the mere picturesqueness of mediævalism;
but it is something more than an accident that Romances, like Romance
languages, are named after Rome. Or it came through the instinctive
reaction of old-fashioned people like Johnson or Scott or Cobbett,
wishing to save old elements that had originally been Catholic against a
progress that was merely Capitalist. But it led them to denounce that
Capitalist progress and become, like Cobbett, practical foes of
Protestantism without being practising followers of Catholicism. Or it
came from the Pre-Raphaelites or the opening of continental art and
culture by Matthew Arnold and Morris and Ruskin and the rest. But
examine the actual make-up of the mind of a good Quaker or
Congregational minister at this moment, and compare it with the mind of
such a dissenter in the Little Bethel before such culture came. And you
will see how much of his health and happiness he owes to Ruskin and what
Ruskin owed to Giotto; to Morris and what Morris owed to Chaucer; to
fine scholars of his own school like Philip Wicksteed, and what they owe
to Dante and St. Thomas. Such a man will still sometimes talk of the
Middle Ages as the Dark Ages. But the Dark Ages have improved the
wallpaper on his wall and the dress on his wife and all the whole dingy
and vulgar life which he lived in the days of Stiggins and Brother
Tadger. For he also is a Christian and lives only by the life of
Christendom.
It is not easy to express this enormous inversion which I have here
tried to suggest in the image of a world turned inside out. I mean that
the thing which had been stared at as a small something swells out and
swallows everything. Christendom is in the literal sense a continent. We
come to feel that it contains everything, even the things in revolt
against itself. But it is perhaps the most towering intellectual
transformation of all and the one that it is hardest to undo even for
the sake of argument. It is almost impossible even in imagination to
reverse that reversal. Another way of putting it is to say that we have
come to regard all these historical figures as characters in Catholic
history, even if they are not Catholics. And in a certain sense, the
historical as distinct from the theological sense, they never do cease
to be Catholic. They are not people who have really created something
entirely new, until they actually pass the border of reason and create
more or less crazy nightmares. But nightmares do not last; and most of
them even now are in various stages of waking up. Protestants are
Catholics gone wrong; that is what is really meant by saying they are
Christians. Sometimes they have gone very wrong; but not often have they
gone right ahead with their own particular wrong. Thus a Calvinist is a
Catholic obsessed with the Catholic idea of the sovereignty of God. But
when he makes it mean that God wishes particular people to be damned, we
may say with all restraint that he has become a rather morbid Catholic.
In point of fact he is a diseased Catholic; and the disease left to
itself would be death or madness. But, as a matter of fact, the disease
did not last long, and is itself now practically dead. But every step he
takes back towards humanity is a step back towards Catholicism. Thus a
Quaker is a Catholic obsessed with the Catholic idea of gentle
simplicity and truth. But when he made it mean that it is a lie to say
“you” and an act of idolatry to take off your hat to a lady, it is not
too much to say that whether or not he had a hat off, he certainly had a
tile loose. But as a matter of fact he himself found it necessary to
dispense with the eccentricity (and the hat) and to leave the straight
road that would have led him to a lunatic asylum. Only every step he
takes back towards common sense is a step back towards Catholicism. In
so far as he was right he was a Catholic; and in so far as he was wrong
he has not himself been able to remain a Protestant.
To us, therefore, it is henceforth impossible to think of the Quaker as
a figure at the beginning of a new Quaker history or the Calvinist as
the founder of a new Calvinistic world. It is quite obvious to us that
they are simply characters in our own Catholic history, only characters
who caused a great deal of trouble by trying to do something that we
could do better and that they did not really do at all. Now some may
suppose that this can be maintained of the older sects like Calvinists
and Quakers, but cannot be maintained of modern movements like those of
Socialists or Spiritualists. But they will be quite wrong. The covering
or continental character of the Church applies just as much to modern
manias as to the old religious manias; it applies quite as much to
Materialists or Spiritualists as to Puritans. In all of them you find
that some Catholic dogma is, first, taken for granted; then exaggerated
into an error; and then generally reacted against and rejected as an
error, bringing the individual in question a few steps back again on the
homeward road. And this is almost always the mark of such a heretic;
that while he will wildly question any other Catholic dogma, he never
dreams of questioning his own favourite Catholic dogma and does not even
seem to know that it could be questioned. It never occurred to the
Calvinist that anybody might use his liberty to deny or limit the divine
omnipotence, or to the Quaker that anyone could question the supremacy
of simplicity. That is exactly the situation of the Socialist.
Bolshevism and every shade of any such theory of brotherhood is based
upon one unfathomably mystical Catholic dogma; the equality of men. The
Communists stake everything on the equality of man, as the Calvinists
staked everything on the omnipotence of God. They ride it to death as
the others rode their dogma to death, turning their horse into a
nightmare. But it never seems to occur to them that some people do not
believe in the Catholic dogma of the mystical equality of men. Yet there
are many, even among Christians, who are so heretical as to question it.
The Socialists get into a great tangle when they try to apply it; they
compromise with their own ideals; they modify their own doctrine; and so
find themselves, like the Quakers and the Calvinists, after all their
extreme extravagances, a day’s march nearer Rome.
In short, the story of these sects is not one of straight lines striking
outwards and onwards, though if it were they would all be striking in
different directions. It is a pattern of curves continually returning
into the continent and common life of their and our civilisation; and
the summary of that civilisation and central sanity is the philosophy of
the Catholic Church. To us, Spiritualists are men studying the existence
of spirits, in a brief and blinding oblivion of the existence of evil
spirits. They are, as it were, people just educated enough to have heard
of ghosts but not educated enough to have heard of witches. If the evil
spirits succeed in stopping their education and stunting their minds,
they may of course go on for ever repeating silly messages from Plato
and doggerel verses from Milton. But if they do go a step or two
further, instead of marking time on the borderland, their next step will
be to learn what the Church could have taught. To us, Christian
Scientists are simply people with one idea, which they have never learnt
to balance and combine with all the other ideas. That is why the wealthy
business man so often becomes a Christian Scientist. He is not used to
ideas and one idea goes to his head, like one glass of wine to a
starving man. But the Catholic Church is used to living with ideas and
walks among all those very dangerous wild beasts with the poise and the
lifted head of a lion-tamer. The Christian Scientist can go on
monotonously repeating his one idea and remain a Christian Scientist.
But if ever he really goes on to any other ideas, he will be so much the
nearer to being a Catholic.
When the convert has once seen the world like that, with one balance of
ideas and a number of other ideas that have left it and lost their
balance, he does not in fact experience any of the inconveniences that
he might reasonably have feared before that silent but stunning
revolution. He is not worried by being told that there is something in
Spiritualism or something in Christian Science. He knows there is
something in everything. But he is moved by the more impressive fact
that he finds everything in something. And he is quite sure that if
these investigators really are looking for everything, and not merely
looking for anything, they will be more and more likely to look for it
in the same place. In that sense he is far less worried about them than
he was when he thought that one or other of them might be the only
person having any sort of communication with the higher mysteries and
obviously rather capable of making a mess of it. He is no more likely to
be overawed by the fact that Mrs. Eddy achieved spiritual healing or Mr.
Home achieved bodily levitation than a fully dressed gentleman in Bond
Street would be overawed by the top-hat on the head of a naked savage. A
top-hat may be a good hat but it is a bad costume. And a magnetic trick
may be a sufficient sensation but it is a very insufficient philosophy.
He is no more envious of a Bolshevist for making a revolution than of a
beaver for making a dam; for he knows his own civilisation can make
things on a pattern not quite so simple or so monotonous. But he
believes this of his civilisation and his religion and not merely of
himself. There is nothing supercilious about his attitude; because he is
well aware that he has only scratched the surface of the spiritual
estate that is now open to him. In other words, the convert does not in
the least abandon investigation or even adventure. He does not think he
knows everything, nor has he lost curiosity about the things he does not
know. But experience has taught him that he will find nearly everything
somewhere inside that estate and that a very large number of people are
finding next to nothing outside it. For the estate is not only a formal
garden or an ordered farm; there is plenty of hunting and fishing on it,
and, as the phrase goes, very good sport.
For this is one of the very queerest of the common delusions about what
happens to the convert. In some muddled way people have confused the
natural remarks of converts, about having found moral peace, with some
idea of their having found mental rest, in the sense of mental inaction.
They might as well say that a man who has completely recovered his
health, after an attack of palsy or St. Vitus’ dance, signalises his
healthy state by sitting absolutely still like a stone. Recovering his
health means recovering his power of moving in the right way as distinct
from the wrong way; but he will probably move a great deal more than
before. To become a Catholic is not to leave off thinking, but to learn
how to think. It is so in exactly the same sense in which to recover
from palsy is not to leave off moving but to learn how to move. The
Catholic convert has for the first time a starting-point for straight
and strenuous thinking. He has for the first time a way of testing the
truth in any question that he raises. As the world goes, especially at
present, it is the other people, the heathen and the heretics, who seem
to have every virtue except the power of connected thought. There was
indeed a brief period when a small minority did some hard thinking on
the heathen or heretical side. It barely lasted from the time of
Voltaire to the time of Huxley. It has now entirely disappeared. What is
now called free thought is valued, not because it is free thought, but
because it is freedom from thought; because it is free thoughtlessness.
Nothing is more amusing to the convert, when his conversion has been
complete for some time, than to hear the speculations about when or
whether he will repent of the conversion; when he will be sick of it,
how long he will stand it, at what stage of his external exasperation he
will start up and say he can bear it no more. For all this is founded on
that optical illusion about the outside and the inside which I have
tried to sketch in this chapter. The outsiders, stand by and see, or
think they see, the convert entering with bowed head a sort of small
temple which they are convinced is fitted up inside like a prison, if
not a torture-chamber. But all they really know about it is that he has
passed through a door. They do not know that he has not gone into the
inner darkness, but out into the broad daylight. It is he who is, in the
beautiful and beatific sense of the word, an outsider. He does not want
to go into a larger room, because he does not know of any larger room to
go into. He knows of a large number of much smaller rooms, each of which
is labelled as being very large; but he is quite sure he would be
cramped in any of them. Each of them professes to be a complete cosmos
or scheme of all things; but then so does the cosmos of the Clapham Sect
or the Clapton Agapemone. Each of them is supposed to be domed with the
sky or painted inside with all the stars. But each of these cosmic
systems or machines seems to him much smaller and even much simpler than
the broad and balanced universe in which he lives. One of them is
labelled Agnostic; but he knows by experience that it has not really
even the freedom of ignorance. It is a wheel that must always go round
without a single jolt of miraculous interruption—a circle that must not
be squared by any higher mathematics of mysticism; a machine that must
be scoured as clean of all spirits as if it were the avowed machine of
materialism. In living in a world with two orders, the supernatural and
the natural, the convert feels he is living in a larger world and does
not feel any temptation to crawl back into a smaller one. One of them is
labelled Theosophical or Buddhistic; but he knows by experience that it
is only the same sort of wearisome wheel used for spiritual things
instead of material things. Living in a world where he is free to do
anything, even to go to the devil, he does not see why he should tie
himself to the wheel of a mere destiny. One of them is labelled
Humanitarian; but he knows that such humanitarians have really far less
experience of humanity. He knows that they are thinking almost entirely
of men as they are at this moment in modern cities, and have nothing
like the huge human interest of what began by being preached to
legionaries in Palestine and is still being preached to peasants in
China. So clear is this perception that I have sometimes put it to
myself, as something between a melancholy meditation and a joke. “Where
_should_ I go now, if I did leave the Catholic Church?” I certainly
would not go to any of those little social sects which only express one
idea at a time, because that idea happens to be fashionable at the
moment. The best I could hope for would be to wander away into the woods
and become, not a Pantheist (for that is also a limitation and a bore)
but rather a pagan, in the mood to cry out that some particular mountain
peak or flowering fruit tree was sacred and a thing to be worshipped.
That at least would be beginning all over again; but it would bring me
back to the same problem in the end. If it was reasonable to have a
sacred tree it was not unreasonable to have a sacred crucifix; and if
the god was to be found on one peak he may as reasonably be found under
one spire. To find a new religion is sooner or later to have found one;
and why should I have been discontented with the one I had found?
Especially, as I said in the first words of this essay, when it is the
one old religion which seems capable of remaining new.
I know very well that if I went upon that journey I should either
despair or return; and that none of the trees would ever be a substitute
for the real sacred tree. Paganism is better than pantheism, for
paganism is free to imagine divinities, while pantheism is forced to
pretend, in a priggish way, that all things are equally divine. But I
should not imagine any divinity that was sufficiently divine. I seem to
know that weary return through the woodlands; for I think in some
symbolic fashion I have walked that road before. For as I have tried to
confess here without excessive egotism, I think I am the sort of man who
came to Christ from Pan and Dionysus and not from Luther or Laud; that
the conversion I understand is that of the pagan and not the Puritan;
and upon that antique conversion is founded the whole world that we
know. It is a transformation far more vast and tremendous than anything
that has been meant for many years past, at least in England and
America, by a sectarian controversy or a doctrinal division. On the
height of that ancient empire and that international experience,
humanity had a vision. It has not had another; but only quarrels about
that one. Paganism was the largest thing in the world and Christianity
was larger; and everything else has been comparatively small.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE EXCEPTION PROVES THE RULE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER V
THE EXCEPTION PROVES THE RULE
The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the
degrading slavery of being a child of his age. I have compared it with
the New Religions; but this is exactly where it differs from the New
Religions. The New Religions are in many ways suited to the new
conditions; but they are only suited to the new conditions. When those
conditions shall have changed in only a century or so, the points upon
which alone they insist at present will have become almost pointless. If
the Faith has all the freshness of a new religion, it has all the
richness of an old religion; it has especially all the reserves of an
old religion. So far as that is concerned, its antiquity is alone a
great advantage, and especially a great advantage for purposes of
renovation and youth. It is only by the analogy of animal bodies that we
suppose that old things must be stiff. It is a mere metaphor from bones
and arteries. In an intellectual sense old things are flexible. Above
all, they are various and have many alternatives to offer. There is a
sort of rotation of crops in religious history; and old fields can lie
fallow for a while and then be worked again. But when the new religion
or any such notion has sown its one crop of wild oats, which the wind
generally blows away, it is barren. A thing as old as the Catholic
Church has an accumulated armoury and treasury to choose from; it can
pick and choose among the centuries and brings one age to the rescue of
another. It can call in the old world to redress the balance of the new.
Anyhow, the New Religions are suited to the new world; and this is their
most damning defect. Each religion is produced by contemporary causes
that can be clearly pointed out. Socialism is a reaction against
Capitalism. Spiritualism is a reaction against Materialism; it is also
in its intensified form merely the trail of the tragedy of the Great
War. But there is a somewhat more subtle sense in which the very fitness
of the new creeds makes them unfit; their very acceptability makes them
inacceptable. Thus they all profess to be progressive because the
peculiar boast of their peculiar period was progress; they claim to be
democratic because our political system still rather pathetically claims
to be democratic. They rushed to a reconciliation with science, which
was often only a premature surrender to science. They hastily divested
themselves of anything considered dowdy or old-fashioned in the way of
vesture or symbol. They claimed to have bright services and cheery
sermons; the churches competed with the cinemas; the churches even
became cinemas. In its more moderate form the mood was merely one of
praising natural pleasures, such as the enjoyment of nature and even the
enjoyment of human nature. These are excellent things and this is an
excellent liberty; and yet it has its limitations.
We do not really want a religion that is right where we are right. What
we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong. In these current
fashions it is not really a question of the religion allowing us
liberty; but (at the best) of the liberty allowing us a religion. These
people merely take the modern mood, with much in it that is amiable and
much that is anarchical and much that is merely dull and obvious, and
then require any creed to be cut down to fit that mood. But the mood
would exist even without the creed. They say they want a religion to be
social, when they would be social without any religion. They say they
want a religion to be practical, when they would be practical without
any religion. They say they want a religion acceptable to science, when
they would accept the science even if they did not accept the religion.
They say they want a religion like this because they are like this
already. They say they want it, when they mean that they could do
without it.
It is a very different matter when a religion, in the real sense of a
binding thing, binds men to their morality when it is not identical with
their mood. It is very different when some of the saints preached social
reconciliation to fierce and raging factions who could hardly bear the
sight of each others’ faces. It was a very different thing when charity
was preached to pagans who really did not believe in it; just as it is a
very different thing now, when chastity is preached to new pagans who do
not believe in it. It is in those cases that we get the real grapple of
religion; and it is in those cases that we get the peculiar and solitary
triumph of the Catholic faith. It is not in merely being right when we
are right, as in being cheerful or hopeful or humane. It is in having
been right when we were wrong, and in the fact coming back upon us
afterwards like a boomerang. One word that tells us what we do not know
outweighs a thousand words that tell us what we do know. And the thing
is all the more striking if we not only did not know it but could not
believe it. It may seem a paradox to say that the truth teaches us more
by the words we reject than by the words we receive. Yet the paradox is
a parable of the simplest sort and familiar to us all; any example might
be given of it. If a man tells us to avoid public houses, we think him a
tiresome though perhaps a well-intentioned old party. If he tells us to
use public houses, we recognise that he has a higher morality and
presents an ideal that is indeed lofty, but perhaps a little too simple
and obvious to need defence. But if a man tells us to avoid the one
particular public house called The Pig and Whistle, on the left hand as
you turn round by the pond, the direction may seem very dogmatic and
arbitrary and showing insufficient process of argument. But if we then
fling ourselves into The Pig and Whistle and are immediately poisoned
with the gin or smothered in the feather-bed and robbed of our money, we
recognise that the man who advised us did know something about it and
had a cultivated and scientific knowledge of the public houses of the
district. We think it even more, as we emerge half-murdered from The Pig
and Whistle, if we originally rejected his warning as a silly
superstition. The warning itself is almost more impressive if it was not
justified by reasons, but only by results. There is something very
notable about a thing which is arbitrary when it is also accurate. We
may very easily forget, even while we fulfil, the advice that we thought
was self-evident sense. But nothing can measure our mystical and
unfathomable reverence for the advice that we thought was nonsense.
As will be seen in a moment, I do not mean in the least that the
Catholic Church is arbitrary in the sense of never giving reasons; but I
do mean that the convert is profoundly affected by the fact that, even
when he did not see the reason, he lived to see that it was reasonable.
But there is something even more singular than this, which it will be
well to note as a part of the convert’s experience. In many cases, as a
matter of fact, he did originally have a glimpse of the reasons, even if
he did not reason about them; but they were forgotten in the interlude
when reason was clouded by rationalism. The point is not very easy to
explain, and I shall be obliged to take merely personal examples in
order to explain it. I mean that we have often had a premonition as well
as a warning; and the fact often comes back to us after we have
disregarded both. It is worth noting in connection with conversion,
because the convert is often obstructed by a catchword which says that
the Church crushes the conscience. The Church does not crush any man’s
conscience. It is the man who crushes his conscience and then finds out
that it was right, when he has almost forgotten that he had one.
I will take two examples out of the new movements: Socialism and
Spiritualism. Now it is perfectly true that when I first began to think
seriously about Socialism, I was a Socialist. But it is equally true,
and more important than it sounds, that before I had ever heard of
Socialism I was a strong anti-Socialist. I was what has since been
called a Distributist, though I did not know it. When I was a child and
dreamed the usual dreams about kings and clowns and robbers and
policemen, I always conceived all contentment and dignity as consisting
in something compact and personal; in being king of the castle or
captain of the pirate ship or the man who owned the shop or the robber
who was safe in the cavern. As I passed through boyhood I always
imagined battles for justice as being the defence of special walls and
houses and high defiant shrines; and I embodied some of those crude but
coloured visions in a story called _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_. All
this happened, in fancy at least, when I had never heard of Socialism
and was a much better judge of it.
Shades of the prison-house began to close and with them came a merely
mechanical discussion as to how we were all to get out of prison. _Then_
indeed, in the darkness of the dungeon, was heard the voice of Mr.
Sidney Webb, telling us that we could only conceivably get out of our
Capitalist captivity with the patent Chubb key of Collectivism. Or to
use a more exact metaphor, he told us that we could only escape from our
dark and filthy cells of industrial slavery by melting all our private
latchkeys into one gigantic latchkey as large as a battering ram. We did
not really like giving up our little private keys or local attachments
or love of our own possessions; but we were quite convinced that social
justice must be done somehow and could only be done socialistically. I
therefore became a Socialist in the old days of the Fabian Society; and
so I think did everybody else worth talking about—except the Catholics.
And the Catholics were an insignificant handful, the dregs of a dead
religion, essentially a superstition. About this time appeared the
Encyclical on Labour by Leo XIII; and nobody in our really well-informed
world took much notice of it. Certainly the Pope spoke as strongly as
any Socialist could speak when he said that Capitalism “laid on the
toiling millions a yoke little better than slavery.” But as the Pope was
not a Socialist it was obvious that he had not read the right Socialist
books and pamphlets; and we could not expect the poor old gentleman to
know what every young man knew by this time—that Socialism was
inevitable. That was a long time ago, and by a gradual process, mostly
practical and political, which I have no intention of describing here,
most of us began to realise that Socialism was not inevitable; that it
was not really popular; that it was not the only way, or even the right
way, of restoring the rights of the poor. We have come to the conclusion
that the obvious cure for private property being given to the few is to
see that it is given to the many; not to see that it is taken away from
everybody or given in trust to the dear good politicians. Then, having
discovered that fact as a fact, we look back at Leo XIII and discover in
his old and dated document, of which we took no notice at the time, that
he was saying then exactly what we are saying now. “As many as possible
of the working classes should become owners.” That is what I mean by the
justification of arbitrary warning. If the Pope had said then exactly
what we said and wanted him to say, we should not have really reverenced
him then and we should have entirely repudiated him afterwards. He would
only have marched with the million who accepted Fabianism; and with them
he would have marched away. But when he saw a distinction we did not see
then, and do see now, that distinction is decisive. It marks a
disagreement more convincing than a hundred agreements. It is not that
he was right when we were right, but that he was right when we were
wrong.
The superficial critic of these things, noting that I am no longer a
Socialist, will always say, “Of course, you are a Catholic and you are
not allowed to be a Socialist.” To which I answer emphatically, No. That
is missing the whole point. The Church anticipated my experience; but it
was experience and not only obedience. I am quite sure now from merely
living in this world, and seeing something of Catholic peasants as well
as Collectivist officials, that it is happier and healthier for most men
to become owners than for them to give up all ownership to those
officials. I do not follow the State Socialist in his extreme belief in
the State; but I have not ceased to be credulous about the State merely
because I have become credulous about the Church. I believe less in the
State because I know more of the statesmen. I cannot believe small
property to be impossible after I have seen it. I cannot believe State
management to be impeccable after I have seen it. It is not any
authority, except what St. Thomas calls the authority of the senses,
which tells me that the mere community of goods is a solution that is
too much of a simplification. The Church has taught me, but I could not
unteach myself; I have learned because I have lived, and I could not
unlearn it. If I ceased to be a Catholic I could not again be a
Communist.
As it happens, my story was almost exactly the same in connection with
Spiritualism. There again I was modern when I was young, but not when I
was very young. While I had a vague but innocent nursery religion still
hanging about me, I regarded the first signs of these psychic and
psychological things with mere repugnance. I hated the whole notion of
mesmerism and magnetic tricks with the mind; I loathed their bulging
eyes and stiff attitudes and unnatural trances and the whole bag of
tricks. When I saw a girl I admired set down to crystal-gazing, I was
furious; I hardly knew why. Then came the period when I wanted to know
why, when I examined my own reasons and found I had none. I saw that it
was inconsistent in science to revere research and forbid psychical
research. I saw that men of science were more and more accepting these
things and I went along with my scientific age. I was never exactly a
Spiritualist, but I almost always defended Spiritualism. I experimented
with a planchette, quite enough to convince myself finally that some
things do happen that are not in the ordinary sense natural. I have
since come to think, for reasons that would require too much space to
detail, that it is not so much supernatural as unnatural and even
anti-natural. I believe the experiments were bad for me; I believe they
are bad for the other experimentalists. But I found out the fact long
before I found out the Catholic Church or the Catholic view of that
question. Only, as I have said, when I do find it out, I find it rather
impressive; for it is not the religion that was right when I was right,
but the religion that was right when I was wrong.
But I wish to note about both those cases that the common cant in the
matter is emphatically not true. It is not true that the Church crushed
my natural conscience; it is not true that the Church asked me to give
up my individual ideal. It is not true that Collectivism was ever my
_ideal_. I do not believe it was ever really anybody else’s ideal. It
was not an ideal but a compromise; it was a concession to practical
economists who told us that we could not prevent poverty except by
something uncommonly like slavery. State Socialism never came natural to
us; it never convinced us that it was natural; it convinced us that it
was necessary. In exactly the same way Spiritualism never came as
something natural but only as something necessary. Each told us that it
was _the only way_ into the promised land, in the one case of a future
life and the other of life in the future. We did not like government
departments and tickets and registers; but we were told there was no
other way of reaching a better society. We did not like dark rooms and
dubious mediums and ladies tied up with rope, but we were told there was
no other way to reach a better world. We were ready to crawl down a
municipal drain-pipe or through a spiritual sewer, because it was the
only way to better things; the only way even to prove that there were
better things. But the drain-pipe had never figured in our dreams like a
tower of ivory or a house of gold, or even like the robbers’ tower of
our romantic boyhood or the solid and comfortable house of our matured
experience. The Faith had not only been true all along, but it had been
true to the first and the last things, to our unspoilt instincts and our
conclusive experience; and it had condemned nothing but an interlude of
intellectual snobbishness and surrender to the persuasions of pedantry.
It had condemned nothing but what we ourselves should have come to
condemn, though we might have condemned it too late.
The Church therefore never made my individual ideal impossible; it would
be truer to say that she was the first to make it possible. The
Encyclical’s ideal had been much nearer my own instinct than the ideal I
had consented to substitute for it. The Catholic suspicion of
table-rapping was much more like my own original suspicion than it was
like my own subsequent surrender. But in those two cases it is surely
clear that the Catholic Church plays exactly the part that she professes
to play: something that knows what we cannot be expected to know, but
should probably accept if we really knew it. I am not in this case, any
more than in the greater part of this study, referring to the things
that are really best worth knowing. The supernatural truths are
connected with the mystery of grace and are a matter for theologians;
admittedly a rather delicate and difficult matter even for them. But
though the transcendental truths are the most important they are not
those that best illustrate this particular point, which concerns the
decisions which can be more or less tested by experience. And of all
those things that can be tested by experience I could tell the same
story: that there was a time when I thought the Catholic doctrine was
meaningless, but that even that was not the very earliest time, which
was a time of greater simplicity, when I had a sort of glimpse of the
meaning though I had never even heard of the doctrine. The world
deceived me and the Church would at any time have undeceived me. The
thing that a man may really shed at last like a superstition is the
fashion of this world that passes away.
I could give many other examples, but I fear they would inevitably tend
to be egotistical examples. Throughout this brief study I am under the
double difficulty that all roads lead to Rome, but that each pilgrim is
tempted to talk as if all roads had been like his own road. I could
write a great deal, for instance, about my early wrestlings with the
rather ridiculous dilemma which was put to me in my youth by the
optimist and the pessimist. I promptly and properly refused to be a
pessimist; and I therefore fell into the way of calling myself an
optimist. Now I should not call myself either, and what is more
important I can see that virtue may be entangled in both. But I think it
is entangled; and I think that an older and simpler truth can loosen the
tangle. But the point in the present connection is this; that before I
had ever heard of optimists or pessimists I was something much more like
what I am now than could be covered by either of those two pedantic
words. In my childhood I assumed that cheerfulness was a good thing, but
I also assumed that it was a bad thing not to protest against things
that are really bad. After an interlude of intellectual formalism and
false antithesis, I have come back to being able to think what I could
then only feel. But I have realised that the protest can rise to a much
more divine indignation and that the cheerfulness is but a faint
suggestion of a much more divine joy. It is not so much that I have
found I was wrong as that I have found out why I was right.
In this we find the supreme example of the exception that proves the
rule. The rule, of which I have given a rough outline in the previous
chapter, is that the Catholic philosophy is a universal philosophy found
to fit anywhere with human nature and the nature of things. But even
when it does not fit in with human nature it is found in the long run to
favour something yet more fitting. It generally suits us, but where it
does not suit us we learn to suit it, so long as we are alive enough to
learn anything. In the rare cases where a reasonable man can really say
that it cuts across his intelligence, it will generally be found that it
is true, not only to truth, but even to his deepest instinct for truth.
Education does not cease with conversion, but rather begins. The man
does not cease to study because he has become convinced that certain
things are worth studying; and these things include not only the
orthodox values but even the orthodox vetoes. Strangely enough, in a
sense, the forbidden fruit is often more fruitful than the free. It is
more fruitful in the sense of a fascinating botanical study of why it is
really poisonous. Thus, for the sake of an example, all healthy people
have an instinct against usury; and the Church has only confirmed that
instinct. But to learn how to define usury, to study what it is and to
argue why it is wrong, is to have a liberal education, not only in
political economy, but in the philosophy of Aristotle and the history of
the Councils of Lateran. There almost always is a human reason for all
the merely human advice given by the Church to humanity; and to find out
the principle of the thing is, among other things, one of the keenest of
intellectual pleasures. But in any case the fact remains that the Church
is right in the main in being tolerant in the main; but that where she
is intolerant she is most right and even most reasonable. Adam lived in
a garden where a thousand mercies were granted to him; but the one
inhibition was the greatest mercy of all.
In the same way, let the convert, or still more the semi-convert, face
any one fact that does seem to him to deface the Catholic scheme as a
falsehood; and if he faces it long enough he will probably find that it
is the greatest truth of all. I have found this myself in that extreme
logic of free will which is found in the fallen angels and the
possibility of perdition. Such things are altogether beyond my
imagination, but the lines of logic go out towards them in my reason.
Indeed, I can undertake to justify the whole Catholic theology, if I be
granted to start with the supreme sacredness and value of two things:
Reason and Liberty. It is an illuminating comment on current
anti-Catholic talk that they are the two things which most people
imagine to be forbidden to Catholics.
But the best way of putting what I mean is to repeat what I have already
said, in connection with the satisfying scope of Catholic universality.
I cannot picture these theological ultimates and I have not the
authority or learning to define them. But I still put the matter to
myself thus: Supposing I were so miserable as to lose the Faith, could I
go back to that cheap charity and crude optimism which says that every
sin is a blunder, that evil cannot conquer or does not even exist? I
could no more go back to those cushioned chapels than a man who has
regained his sanity would willingly go back to a padded cell. I might
cease to believe in a God of any kind; but I could not cease to think
that a God who had made men and angels free was finer than one who
coerced them into comfort. I might cease to believe in a future life of
any kind; but I could not cease to think it was a finer doctrine that we
choose and make our future life than that it is fitted out for us like
an hotel and we are taken there in a celestial omnibus as compulsory as
a Black Maria. I know that Catholicism is too large for me, and I have
not yet explored its beautiful or terrible truths. But I know that
Universalism is too small for me; and I could not creep back into that
dull safety, who have looked on the dizzy vision of liberty.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A NOTE ON PRESENT PROSPECTS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VI
A NOTE ON PRESENT PROSPECTS
On reconsidering these notes I find them to be far too personal; yet I
do not know how any conception of conversion can be anything else. I do
not profess to have any particular knowledge about the actual conditions
and calculations of the Catholic movement at the moment. I do not
believe that anybody else has any knowledge of what it will be like the
next moment. Statistics are generally misleading and predictions are
practically always false. But there is always a certain faint tradition
of the thing called common sense; and so long as a glimmer of it
remains, in spite of all journalism and State instruction, it is
possible to appreciate what we call a reality. Nobody in his five wits
will deny that at this moment conversion is a reality. Everybody knows
that his own social circle, which fifty years ago would have been a firm
territory of Protestantism, perhaps hardening into rationalism or
indifference but doing even that slowly and without conscious
convulsion, has just lately shown a curious disposition to collapse
softly and suddenly, first in one unexpected place and then in another,
making great holes in that solid land and letting up the leaping flames
of what was counted an extinct volcano. It is in everybody’s experience,
whether he is sad or glad or mad or merely indifferent, that these
conversions seem to come of themselves in the most curious and
apparently accidental quarters; Tom’s wife, Harry’s brother, Fanny’s
funny sister-in-law who went on the stage, Sam’s eccentric uncle who
studied military strategy—of each of these isolated souls we hear
suddenly that it is isolated no longer. It is one with the souls
militant and triumphant.
Against these things (which we know as facts and do not merely read as
statistics) there is admittedly something to be set. It is what is
commonly called leakage; and with a paragraph upon this point I will
close these pages. Father Ronald Knox, with that felicity that is so
good that the wit almost seems like good luck, has remarked that the
Catholic Church really does have to get on by hook or crook. That is, by
the hook of the fisherman and the crook of the shepherd; and it is the
hook that has to catch the convert and the crook that has to keep him.
He said in this connection that the conversions to the Church just now
were so numerous that they would be obvious and overwhelming, like a
landslide, if it were not that they were neutralised in mere numbers, or
rather lessened in their full claim of numbers, by a certain amount of
falling away in other directions. Now the first fact to realise is that
it is in other directions, in totally different directions. Some people,
especially young people, abandon practising Catholicism. But none of
them abandon it for Protestantism. All of them practically abandon it
for paganism. Most of them abandon it for something that is really
rather too simple to be called an _ism_ of any kind. They abandon it for
things and not theories; and when they do have theories they may
sometimes be Bolshevist theories or Futurist theories, but they are
practically never the theological theories of Protestantism. I will not
say they leave Catholicism for beer and skittles; for Catholicism has
never discouraged those Christian institutions as Protestantism
sometimes has. They leave it to have a high old time; and considering
what a muddle we have made of modern morality, they can hardly be
blamed. But this reaction, which is only that of a section, is in its
nature a reaction of the young and as such I do not think it will last.
I know it is the cant phrase of the old rationalists that their reason
prevents a return to the Faith, but it is false: it is no longer reason
but rather passion.
This may sound a sweeping statement, but if it be examined it will be
found not unjust, and certainly not unsympathetic. Nothing is more
notable if we really study the characteristics of the rising generation
than the fact that they are _not_ acting upon any exact and definite
philosophy, such as those which have made the revolutions of the past.
If they are anarchical, they are not anarchist. The dogmatic anarchism
of the middle of the nineteenth century is not the creed they hold, or
even the excuse they offer. They have a considerable negative revolt
against religion, a negative revolt against negative morality. They have
a feeling, which is not unreasonable, that to commit themselves to the
Catholic citizenship is to take responsibilities that continually act as
restraints. But they do not maintain anything like a contrary system of
spiritual citizenship, or moral responsibility. For instance, it is
perfectly natural that they should want to act naturally. But they do
not want to act naturally according to any intellectual theory of the
reliability of Nature. On the contrary, their young and brilliant
literary representatives are very prone to press upon us the crudity and
cruelty of Nature. That is the moral of Mr. Aldous Huxley, and of many
others. State to them any of the consistent theories of the supreme
claim of Nature upon us, such as the pantheistic idea of God in all
natural things; or the Nietzschean theory that nature is evolving
something with superior claims to our own; or any other definable
defence of the natural process itself, and they will almost certainly
reject it as something unproved or exploded. They do not want to have an
exact imitation of the laws of the physical universe; they want to have
their own way, a much more intelligible desire. But the result is that
they are, after all, at a disadvantage in face of those other young
people who have satisfied their reason by a scheme that makes the
universe reasonable.
For that is the very simple explanation of the affair. In so far as
there is really a secession among the young, it is but a part of the
same process as that conversion of the young, of which I wrote in the
first chapter. The rising generation sees the real issue; and those who
are ready for it rally, and those who are not ready for it scatter. But
there can be but one end to a war between a solid and a scattered army.
It is not a controversy between two philosophies, as was the Catholic
and the Calvinist, or the Catholic and the Materialist. It is a
controversy between philosophers and philanderers. I do not say it in
contempt; I have much more sympathy with the person who leaves the
Church for a love affair than with one who leaves it for a long-winded
German theory to prove that God is evil or that children are a sort of
morbid monkey. But the very laws of life are against the endurance of a
revolt that rests on nothing but natural passion; it is bound to change
in its proportion with the coming of experience; and, at the worst, it
will become a battle between bad Catholics and good Catholics, with the
great dome over all.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcriber’s Notes
• Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
• Typographical errors were silently corrected.
• Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when
a predominant form was found in this book.
• Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND CONVERSION ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
