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Page 23
In dogma, too, no less is the burden that he must bear. Not only are the
simple words of Christ developed into a vast theological system by the
Church's officials, but the whole of this system is laid, as of faith,
down to its minutest details, on the shoulders of the unhappy believer.
He may not choose between this or that theory of the mode of Christ's
Presence in the Eucharist; he must accept precisely that, and no other,
which his Church has elaborated.
In fact, in doctrine and in discipline alike, the Church has gone back
to precisely that old reign of tyranny which Christ abolished. The
Catholic, unlike the Protestant who has retained the spirit of liberty,
finds himself in the same case as that under which Israel itself once
groaned. He is a slave and not a child; he binds his own limbs, as the
old phrase says, by his act of faith and puts the other end of the chain
into the hands of the priest. Such, in outline, is the charge against
us.
* * * * *
Now much of it is so false that it needs no refutation. It is, for
example, entirely false that New Testament theology is simple. It is far
more true to say that, compared with the systematized theology of the
Church, it is bewilderingly complex and puzzling, and how complex and
puzzling it is, is indicated by the hundreds of creeds which Protestants
have made out of it, each creed claiming, respectively, to be its one
and only proper interpretation. Men have only come to think it "simple"
in modern days by desperately eliminating from it every element on which
all Protestants are not agreed. The residuum is indeed "simple." Only it
is not the New Testament theology! Dogmas such as that of the Blessed
Trinity, of the Procession of the Holy Ghost, of the nature of grace and
of sin--these, whether as held by orthodox or unorthodox, are at any
rate not simple, and it is merely untrue to say that Christ made no
statements on these points, however they may be understood. Further, it
is merely untrue to say that Protestant theology is "simple"; it is
every whit as elaborate as Catholic theology and considerably more
complex in those points in which Protestant divines are not agreed. The
controversies on Justification in which such men as Calvin and Luther,
with their disciples, continually engaged are fully as complicated as
any disputations on Grace between Jesuits and Dominicans.
Yet the general contention is plain enough--that on the whole the
Catholic is bound to believe a certain set of dogmas, while the
Protestant is free to accept or reject them. Therefore, it is argued,
the Protestant is "free" and the Catholic is not. And this brings us
straight to the consideration of the relations between Authority and
Liberty.
II. What, then, is Religious Liberty? It is necessary to begin by
forming some idea as to what it is that is meant by the word in other
than religious matters.
Very briefly it may be said that an individual enjoys social liberty
when he is able to obey and to use the laws and powers of his true
nature, and that a community enjoys it when all its members are able to
do so without interfering unduly one with the other. The more complete
is this ability, the more perfect is Liberty.
A remarkable paradox at once presents itself--that Liberty can only be
secured by Laws. Where there are no laws, or too few, to secure it,
slavery immediately appears, no less surely than when there are too
many; for the stronger individuals are, by the absence of law, enabled
to tyrannize over the weaker. Even the vast and complex legislation of
our own days is designed to increase and not to fetter liberty, and its
greater complexity is necessitated by the greater complexity and the
more numerous interrelationships of modern society. Laws, of course, may
be unwise or excessively minute or deliberately enslaving; yet this does
not affect the point that for all that Laws are necessary to the
preservation of Liberty. Merchants, women and children, and citizens
generally, can only enjoy rightful liberty if they are protected by
laws. Only that man is free, then, who is most carefully guarded.
In the same manner Scientific Liberty does not consist in the absence of
knowledge, or of scientific dogmas, but in their presence. We are
surrounded by innumerable facts of nature, and that man is free who is
fully aware of those which affect his own life. It is true, for example,
that two and two make four, and that heavy bodies tend to fall towards
the centre of the earth; and it can only be a very superficial thinker
who considers that to be ignorant of these facts is to be free from the
enslaving dogmas of them. If I am ignorant of them I am, of course, in a
sense at liberty to believe that two and two make five, and to jump off
the roof of my house; yet this is not Liberty at all in the sense in
which reasonable people use the word, since my knowledge of the laws
enables me to be effective and, in fact, to survive in the midst of a
world where they happen to be true. That man, then, is more truly "free"
whose intellect is informed of and submits to these laws, than is the
man whose intellect is unaware of them. Marconi's intellect submits to
the laws of lightning and he is thereby enabled to avail himself of
them. Ajax is unaware of them and is accordingly destroyed by their
action.
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