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Page 22
So, then, she goes forward to victory. "First use your reason," she
cries to the world, "to see whether I be not Divine! Then, impelled by
Reason and aided by Grace, rise to Faith. Then once more call up your
Reason, to verify and understand those mysteries which you accept as
true. And so, little by little, vistas of truth will open about you and
doctrines glow with an undreamed-of light. So Faith will be interpreted
by Reason and Reason hold up the hands of Faith, until you come indeed
to the unveiled vision of the Truth whose feet already you grasp in love
and adoration; until you see, face to face in Heaven, Him Who is at once
the Giver of Reason and the _Author of Faith_."
VII
AUTHORITY AND LIBERTY
_The truth shall make you free_.--JOHN VIII. 32.
_Bringing into captivity every understanding to the obedience of
Christ_.--II COR. X. 5.
We have already considered in outline the relations between Faith and
Reason; how each, in its own province, is supreme and how each, in its
turn, supports and ratifies the other. We pass on to a development of
that theme, springing almost immediately out of it, namely, the
relations between Authority and Liberty. And we will begin that
consideration, as before, as it is illustrated by the accusations of the
world against the Church. Briefly they are stated as follows.
I. Freedom, we are told, is the note of Christianity as laid down in the
Gospels, in both discipline and doctrine. Jesus Christ came into the
world largely for this very purpose, to substitute the New Law for the
Old and thereby to free men from the complicated theology and the
minutia of religious routine which characterized men's attempts to
reduce that Old Law to practice. The Old Law may or may not have been
perfectly adapted, when first it was given, to the needs of God's
people in the early stages of Jewish civilization; but at any rate it is
certain, from a hundred texts in the Gospel, that Jesus Christ in His
day found it an intolerable slavery laid upon the religious life of the
people. Theology had degenerated into an incredible hair-splitting
system of dogma, and discipline had degenerated into a multitude of
irritating observances.
Jesus Christ, then, in the place of all this, preached a Creed that was
essentially simple, and simultaneously substituted for the elaborate
ceremonialism of the Pharisees the spirit of liberty. The dogma that He
preached was little more than that God is the Father of all and that all
men therefore are brothers; "discipline" in the ordinary sense of the
word is practically absent from the Gospel, and as for ceremonial there
is none, except such as is necessary for the performance of the two
extremely simple rites that He instituted, Baptism and the Lord's
Supper.
Now this supposed spirit of liberty, we are informed, is to-day to be
found only in Protestantism. In that system, if it can strictly be
called one, and in that system only, may a man exercise that freedom
which was secured to him by Jesus Christ. First, in doctrine, he may
choose, weigh, and examine for himself, within the wide limits which
alone Christ laid down, those doctrines or hopes which commend
themselves to his intellect; and next, in matters of discipline, again,
he may choose for himself those ways of life and action that he may
find helpful to his spiritual development. He may worship, for example,
in any church that he prefers, attend those services and those only
which commend themselves to his taste; he may eat or not eat this or
that food, as he likes, and order his day, generally, as it pleases him.
And all this, we are informed, is of the very spirit of New Testament
Christianity. _The Truth has made him free_, as Christ Himself promised.
The Catholic Church, on the other hand, is essentially a Church of
slavery. First, in discipline, an enormous weight of observances and
duties is laid upon her children, comparable only to the Pharisaic
system. The Catholic must worship in this church and not in that, in
this manner and not in the other. He must observe places and days and
times, and that not only in religious matters but in secular. He must
eat this food on this day and that on the other; he must frequent the
sacraments at specified periods; he must perform certain actions and
refrain from others, and that in matters in themselves indifferent.
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