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Page 11
"You Catholics," he tells us, "are far too hard on sin and not nearly
indulgent enough towards poor human nature. Let me take as an instance
the sins of the flesh. Now here is a set of desires implanted by God or
Nature (as you choose to name the Power behind life) for wise and
indeed essential purposes. These desires are probably the very fiercest
known to man and certainly the most alluring; and human nature is, as we
know, an extraordinarily inconsistent and vacillating thing. Now I am
aware that the abuse of these passions leads to disaster and that Nature
has her inexorable laws and penalties; but you Catholics add a new
horror to life by an absurd and irrational insistence on the offence
that this abuse causes before God. For not only do you fiercely denounce
the "acts of sin," as you name them, but you presume to go deeper still
to the very desire itself, as it would seem. You are unpractical and
cruel enough to say that the very thought of sin deliberately
entertained can cut off the soul that indulges in it from the favour of
God.
"Or, to go further, consider the impossible ideals which you hold up
with regard to matrimony. These ideals have a certain beauty of their
own to persons who can embrace them; they may perhaps be, to use a
Catholic phrase, Counsels of Perfection; but it is merely ludicrous to
insist upon them as rules of conduct for all mankind. Human Nature is
human nature. You cannot bind the many by the dreams of the few.
"Or, to take a wider view altogether, consider the general standards you
hold up to us in the lives of your saints. These saints appear to the
ordinary common-place man as simply not admirable at all. It does not
seem to us admirable that St. Aloysius should scarcely lift his eyes
from the ground, or that St. Teresa should shut herself up in a cell, or
that St. Francis should scourge himself with briers for fear of
committing sin. That kind of attitude is too fantastically fastidious
altogether. You Catholics seem to aim at a standard that is simply not
desirable; both your ends and your methods are equally inhuman and
equally unsuitable for the world we have to live in. True religion is
surely something far more sensible than this; true religion should not
strain and strive after the impossible, should not seek to improve human
nature by a process of mutilation. You have excellent aims in some
respects and excellent methods in others, but in supreme demands you go
beyond the mark altogether. We Pagans neither agree with your morality
nor admire those whom you claim as your successes. If you were less holy
and more natural, less idealistic and more practical, you would be of a
greater service to the world which you desire to help. Religion should
be a sturdy, virile growth; not the delicate hot-house blossom which you
make it."
The second charge comes from the Puritan. "Catholicism is not holy
enough to be the Church of Jesus Christ; for see how terribly easy she
is to those who outrage and _crucify Him afresh!_ Perhaps it may not be
true after all, as we used to think, that the Catholic priest actually
gives leave to his penitents to commit sin; but the extraordinary ease
with which absolution is given comes very nearly to the same thing. So
far from this Church having elevated the human race, she has actually
lowered its standards by her attitude towards those of her children who
disobey God's Laws.
"And consider what some of these children of hers have been! Are there
any criminals in history so monumental as Catholic criminals? Have any
men ever fallen so low as, let us say, the Borgia family of the Middle
Ages, as Gilles de Rais and a score of others, as men and women who were
perhaps in their faith 'good Catholics' enough, yet in their lives a
mere disgrace to humanity? Look at the Latin countries with their
passionate records of crime, at the sexual immorality of France or
Spain; the turbulence and thriftlessness of Ireland, the ignorant
brutality of Catholic England. Are there any other denominations of
Christendom that exhibit such deplorable specimens as the runaway nuns,
the apostate priests, the vicious Popes of Catholicism? How is it that
tales are told of the iniquities of Catholicism such as are told of no
other of the sects of Christendom? Allow for all the exaggeration you
like, all the prejudice of historians, all the spitefulness of enemies,
yet there surely remains sufficient Catholic criminality to show that at
the best the Church is no better than any other religious body, and at
the worst, infinitely worse. The Catholic Church, then, is not holy
enough to be the Church of Jesus Christ."
II. When we turn to the Gospels we find that these two charges are, as a
matter of fact, precisely among those which were brought against our
Divine Lord.
First, undoubtedly, He was hated for His Holiness. Who can doubt that
the terrific standard of morality which He preached--the Catholic
preaching of which also is one of the charges of the Pagan--was a
principal cause of His rejection. For it was He, after all, who first
proclaimed that the laws of God bind not only action but thought; it was
He who first pronounced that man to be a murderer and an adulterer who
in his heart willed these sins; it was He who summed up the standard of
Christianity as a standard of perfection, _Be you perfect, as your
Father in Heaven is perfect;_ who bade men aspire to be as good as God!
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