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Page 12
It was His Holiness, then, that first drew on Him the hostility of the
world--that radiant white-hot sanctity in which His Sacred Humanity went
clothed. _Which of you convinceth me of sin?... Let him that is without
sin amongst you cast the first stone at her!_ These were words that
pierced the smooth formalism of the Scribe and the Pharisee and awoke an
undying hatred. It was this, surely, that led up irresistibly to the
final rejection of Him at the bar of Pilate and the choice of Barabbas
in His place. "_Not this man!_ not this piece of stainless Perfection!
Not this Sanctity that reveals all hearts, _but Barabbas_, that
comfortable sinner so like ourselves! This robber in whose company we
feel at ease! This murderer whose life, at any rate, is in no
reproachful contrast to our own!" Jesus Christ was found too holy for
the world.
But He was found, too, not holy enough. And it is this explicit charge
that is brought against Him again and again. It was dreadful to those
keepers of the Law that this Preacher of Righteousness should sit with
publicans and sinners; that this Prophet should allow such a woman as
Magdalen to touch Him. If this man were indeed a Prophet, He could not
bear the contact of sinners; if He were indeed zealous for God's
Kingdom, He could not suffer the presence of so many who were its
enemies. Yet He sits there at Zacchaeus' table, silent and smiling,
instead of crying on the roof to fall in; He calls Matthew from the
tax-office instead of blasting him and it together; He handles the leper
whom God's own Law pronounces unclean.
III. These, then, are the charges brought against the disciples of
Christ, as against the Master, and it is undeniable that there is truth
in them both.
It is true that the Catholic Church preaches a morality that is utterly
beyond the reach of human nature left to itself; that her standards are
standards of perfection, and that she prefers even the lowest rung of
the supernatural ladder to the highest rung of the natural.
And it is also true, without doubt, that the fallen or the unfaithful
Catholic is an infinitely more degraded member of humanity than the
fallen Pagan or Protestant; that the monumental criminals of history are
Catholic criminals, and that the monsters of the world--Henry VIII for
example, sacrilegious, murderer, and adulterer; Martin Luther, whose
printed table-talk is unfit for any respectable house; Queen Elizabeth,
perjurer, tyrant, and unchaste--were persons who had had all that the
Catholic Church could give them: the standards of her teaching, the
guidance of her discipline, and the grace of her sacraments. What, then,
is the reconciliation of this Paradox?
(1) First the Catholic Church is Divine. She dwells, that is to say, in
heavenly places; she looks always upon the Face of God; she holds
enshrined in her heart the Sacred Humanity of Jesus Christ and the
stainless perfection of that Immaculate Mother from whom that Humanity
was drawn. How is it conceivable, then, that she should be content with
any standard short of perfection? If she were a Society evolved from
below--a merely human Society that is to say--she could never advance
beyond those standards to which in the past her noblest children have
climbed. But since there dwells in her the Supernatural--since Mary was
endowed from on high with a gift to which no human being could ascend,
since the Sun of Justice Himself came down from the heavens to lead a
human life under human terms--how can she ever again be content with
anything short of that height from which these came?
(2) But she is also human, dwelling herself in the midst of humanity,
placed here in the world for the express object of gathering into
herself and of sanctifying by her graces that very world which has
fallen from God. These outcasts and these sinners are the very material
on which she has to work; these waste products of human life, these
marred types and specimens of humanity have no hope at all except in
her.
For, first, she desires if she can--and she has often been
able--actually to raise these, first to sanctity and then to her own
altars; it is for her and her only to _raise the poor from the dunghill
and to set them with the princes_. She sets before the Magdalen and the
thief, then, nothing less but her own standard of perfection.
Yet though in one sense she is satisfied with nothing lower than this,
in another sense she is satisfied with almost infinitely nothing. If she
can but bring the sinner within the very edge of grace; if she can but
draw from the dying murderer one cry of contrition; if she can but turn
his eyes with one look of love to the crucifix, her labours are a
thousand times repaid; for, if she has not brought him to the head of
sanctity, she has at least brought him to its foot and set him there
beneath that ladder of the supernatural which reaches from hell to
heaven.
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