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Page 39
Our physicians cannot heal us, they can merely ward off death for a
little. Our statesmen cannot establish an eternal federation, they can
but help to hold a crumbling society together for a little longer. Our
civilization cannot really evolve an immortal superman, it can but
render ordinary humanity a little less mortal, temporarily and in
outward appearance. Death, then, in the world's opinion, is the duellist
who is bound to win. We may parry, evade, leap aside for a little; we
may even advance upon him and seem to threaten his very existence; our
energies, in fact, must be concentrated upon this conflict if we are to
survive at all. But it is only in seeming, at the best. The moment must
come when, driven back to the last barrier, our last defence falters ...
and Death has only to wipe his sword.
Now the attitude of the Catholic Church towards Death is not only the
most violent reversal of the world's policy, but the most paradoxical,
too, of all her methods. For, while the world attempts to keep Death at
arm's length, the Church strives to embrace him. Where the world draws
his sword to meet Death's assault, the Church spreads her heart only to
receive it. She is in love with Death, she pursues him, honours him,
extols Him. She places over her altars not a Risen Christ, but a dying
One.
_If thou wilt be perfect_, she cries to the individual soul, _give up
all that thou hast and follow me_. "Give up all that makes life worth
living, strip thyself of every advantage that sustains thy life, of all
that makes thee effective." It is this that is her supreme appeal, not
indeed uttered, with all its corollaries, to all her children, but to
those only that desire perfection. Yet to all, in a sense, the appeal is
there. _Die daily_, die to self, mortify, yield, give in. If _any man
will save his life, he must lose it_.
So too, in her dealings with society, is her policy judged suicidal by a
world that is in love with its own kind of life. It is suicidal, cries
that world, to relinquish in France all on which the temporal life of
the Church depends; for how can that society survive which renounces the
very means of existence? It is suicidal to demand the virgin life of the
noblest of her children, suicidal to desert the monarchical cause of one
country, and to set herself in opposition to the Republican ideals of
another. For even she, after all, is human and must conform to human
conditions. Even she, however august her claims, must make terms with
the world if she desires to live in it.
And this comment has been made upon her actions in every age. She
condemned Arius, when a little compromise might surely have been found;
and lost half her children. She condemned Luther and lost Germany;
Elizabeth, and lost England. At every crisis she has made the wrong
choice, she has yielded when she should have resisted, resisted when she
should have yielded. The wonder is that she survives at all.
Yes, that is the wonder. _As dying, behold she lives_!
II. The answer of course is easy. It is that she simply does not desire
the kind of life which the world reckons alone to be life. To her that
is not life at all. She desires of course to survive as a human society,
and she is assured that she always shall so survive. Yet it is not on
the ordinary terms of ordinary society that she desires survival. It is
not a _natural_ life of which she is ambitious, a life that draws its
strength from human conditions and human environment, a life, therefore,
that waxes and wanes with those human conditions and ultimately meets
their fate, but a _supernatural_ life that draws its strength from God.
And she recognizes, as one of the most fundamental paradoxes of all,
that such a life can be gained and held only through what the world
calls "death."
She does not, then, want merely the life of a prosperous human state,
whether monarchy or republic. There are times indeed in her history when
such an accompaniment to her real existence is useful to her
effectiveness; and she has, of course, the right, as have other
societies, to earthly dominions that may have been won and presented to
her by her children. Or through her ministers, as in Paraguay, she may
administer for a while the ordinary civil affairs of men who choose to
be loyal to her government. Yet if, for one instant, such a
responsibility were really to threaten her spiritual effectiveness--if,
that is, the choice were really presented to her between spiritual and
temporal dominion--she would let all the kingdoms of the world go in an
instant, to retain her kingdom from God; she would gladly _suffer the
loss of all things_ to retain Christ.
And how is it possible to deny for one instant that her success has been
startling and overwhelming--this fructification of Life by Death.
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