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Page 4
I. (i) Just as we have already imagined a well-disposed inquirer
approaching for the first time the problems of the Gospel, so let us now
again imagine such a man, in whom the dawn of faith has begun,
encountering the record of Catholicism.
At first all seems to him Divine. He sees, for example, how singularly
unique she is, how unlike to all other human societies. Other societies
depend for their very existence upon a congenial human environment; she
flourishes in the most uncongenial. Other societies have their day and
pass down to dissolution and corruption; she alone knows no corruption.
Other dynasties rise and fall; the dynasty of Peter the Fisherman
remains unmoved. Other causes wax and wane with the worldly influence
which they can command; she is usually most effective when her earthly
interest is at the lowest ebb.
Or again, he falls in love with her Divine beauty and perceives even in
her meanest acts a grace which he cannot understand. He notices with
wonder how she takes human mortal things--a perishing pagan language, a
debased architecture, an infant science or philosophy--and infuses into
them her own immortality. She takes the superstitions of a country-side
and, retaining their "accidents," transubstantiates them into truth; the
customs or rites of a pagan society, and makes them the symbols of a
living worship. And into all she infuses a spirit that is all her own--a
spirit of delicate grace and beauty of which she alone has the secret.
It is her Divinity, then, that he sees, and rightly. But, wrongly, he
draws certain one-sided conclusions. If she is so perfect, he argues (at
least subconsciously), she can be nothing else than perfect; if she is
so Divine she can be in no sense human. Her pontiffs must all be saints,
her priests shining lights, her people stars in her firmament. If she is
Divine, her policy must be unerring, her acts all gracious, her lightest
movements inspired. There must be no brutality anywhere, no
self-seeking, no ambition, no instability. How should there be, since
she is Divine?
Such are his first instincts. And then, little by little, his
disillusionment begins.
For, as he studies her record more deeply, he begins to encounter
evidences of her Humanity. He reads history, and he discovers here and
there a pontiff who but little in his moral character resembles Him
Whose Vicar he is. He meets an apostate priest; he hears of some
savagery committed in Christ's name; he talks with a convert who has
returned complacently to the City of Confusion; there is gleefully
related to him the history of a family who has kept the faith all
through the period of persecution and lost it in the era of toleration.
And he is shaken and dismayed. "How can these be in a Society that is
Divine? I had _trusted_ that it had been_ She _who should have redeemed
Israel;_ _and now--_!"
(ii) Another man approaches the record of Catholicism from the opposite
direction. To him she is a human society and nothing more; and he finds,
indeed, a thousand corroborations of his theory. He views her amazing
success in the first ages of Christianity--the rapid propagation of her
tenets and the growth of her influence--and sees behind these things
nothing more than the fortunate circumstance of the existence of the
Roman Empire. Or he notices the sudden and rapid rise of the power of
the Roman pontiff and explains this by the happy chance that moved the
centre of empire to the east and left in Rome an old prestige and an
empty throne. He sees how the Church has profited by the divisions in
Europe; how she has inherited the old Latin genius for law and order;
and he finds in these things an explanation of her unity and of her
claim to rule princes and kings. She is to him just human, and no more.
There is not, at first sight, a phenomenon of her life for which he
cannot find a human explanation. She is interesting, as a result of
innumerable complicated forces; she is venerable, as the oldest coherent
society in Europe; she has the advantage of Italian diplomacy; she has
been shrewd, unweary, and persevering. But she is no more.
And then, as he goes deeper, he begins to encounter phenomena which do
not fall so easily under his compact little theories. If she is merely
human, why do not the laws of all other human societies appear to affect
her too? Why is it that she alone shows no incline towards dissolution
and decay? Why has not she too split up into the component parts of
which she is welded? How is it that she has preserved a unity of which
all earthly unities are but shadows? Or he meets with the phenomena of
her sanctity and begins to perceive that the difference between the
character she produces in her saints and the character of the noblest of
those who do not submit to her is one of kind and not merely of degree.
If she is merely mediaeval, how is it that she commands such allegiance
as that which is paid to her in modern America? If she is merely
European, how is it that she alone can deal with the Oriental on his own
terms? If she is merely the result of temporal circumstances, how is it
that her spiritual influence shows no sign of waning when the forces
that helped to build her are dispersed?
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