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Page 21
Yet even now Reason's work is not done, though its scope in future is
changed. Reason no longer examines whether He be God; Faith has
accepted it: yet Reason has to be as active as ever; for Reason now must
begin with all its might the task of understanding His Revelation. Faith
has given them, so to speak, casket after casket of jewels; every word
that Jesus Christ henceforth speaks to them is a very mine of treasure,
absolutely true since He is known to be a Divine Teacher Who has given
it. And Reason now begins her new work, not of justifying Faith, but, so
to say, of interpreting it; not of examining His claims, since these
have been once for all accepted, but of examining, understanding, and
assimilating all that He reveals.
III. Turn now to Catholicism.
It is the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church only, that acts as
did Jesus Christ and offers an adequate object to Reason and Faith
alike. For, first, it is evident that if Christ intended His Revelation
to last through all time, He must have designed a means by which it
should last, an Authority that should declare and preserve it as He
Himself delivered it. And next, it is evident that since the Catholic
Church alone even claims that prerogative, clearly and coherently, her
right to represent that Authority is in proportion to the clearness and
coherence of her claim. Or, again, she advances in support of that claim
precisely those same credentials as did He: she points to her miracles,
her achievements, the fulfilment of prophecy, the unity of her teaching,
the appeal to men's moral sense--all of them appeals to Reason, and
appeals which lead up, as did His, to the supreme claim, which He also
made, to demand an Act of Faith in herself as a Divine Teacher.
For she alone demands it. Other denominations of Christendom point to a
Book, or to the writings of Fathers, or to the example of their members,
and she too does these things. But it is she alone who appeals to these
things not as final in themselves, not as constituting in themselves a
final court of appeal, but as indicating as that court of appeal her own
Living Voice. _Believe me, for the works' sake_, she too says. "Use your
reason to the full to examine my credentials; study prophecy, history,
the Fathers--study my claims in any realm in which your intellect is
competent--and then see if it is not after all supremely reasonable for
Reason to abdicate that particular throne on which she has sat so long
and to seat Faith there instead? Certainly follow your Reason and use
your private judgment, for at present you have no other guide; and then,
please God, aided by Faith, Reason will itself bow before Faith, and
take her own place henceforth, not on the throne, but on the steps that
lead to it."
Is Reason, then, to be silent henceforth? Why, the whole of theology
gives the answer. Did Newman cease to think when he became a Catholic?
Did Thomas Aquinas resign his intellect when he devoted himself to
study? Not for one instant is Reason silent. On the contrary, she is
active as never before. Certainly she is no longer occupied in
examining as to whether the Church is divine, but instead she is busied,
with incredible labours, in examining what follows from that fact, in
sorting the new treasures that are opened to her with the dawn of
Revelation upon her eyes, in arranging, deducting, and understanding the
details and structure of the astonishing Vision of Truth. And more, she
is as inviolate as ever. For never can there be presented to her one
article of Faith that gives the lie to her own nature, since Revelation
and Reason cannot contradict one the other. She has learned, indeed,
that the mysteries of God often transcend her powers, that she cannot
fathom the infinite with the finite; yet never for one moment is she
bidden to evacuate her own position or believe that which she perceives
to be untrue. She has learned her limitations, and with that has come to
understand her inviolable rights.
See, then, how the features of Christ look out through the lineaments of
His Church. She alone dares to claim an act of Divine Faith in herself,
since it is He Who speaks in her Voice. She alone, since she is Divine,
bids the wisest men _become as little children_ at her feet and endows
little children with the wisdom of the ancients. Yet, on the other hand,
in her magnificent Humanity, she has produced through the exercise of
illuminated human Reason such a wealth of theology as the world has
never seen. Is it any wonder that the world thinks both her Faith and
Reason alike too extreme? For her Faith rises from her Divinity and her
Reason from her Humanity; and such an outpouring of Divinity and such an
emphatic Humanity, such a superb confidence in God's revelation and such
untiring labours upon the contents of that Revelation, are altogether
beyond the imagination of a world that in reality, fears both Faith and
Reason alike.
At her feet, and hers only, then, do the wisest and the simple kneel
together--St. Thomas and the child, St. Augustine and the "charcoal
burner"; as diverse, in their humanity, as men can be; as united in the
light of Divinity as only those can be who have found it.
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