THE CATHOLIC CHURCH and English letters both lost a many-sided genius when 
Ronald Knox died in 1957. His epitaph might well have been, as someone 
suggested: "R.I.P. Ronald Knox, translator of the Holy Bible and author of 
'The Viaduct Murder.' "

Son of an Anglican bishop, Ronald Knox gave evidence of an ecclesiastical 
and literary bent almost from the cradle. At an age when most children are 
just learning to read, Knox was composing Greek and Latin epigrams. One 
triumph followed another at Eton and at Oxford. As a matter of course 
Oxonians came to credit him with every anonymous witticism. In 1912 he was 
ordained a clergyman in the Church of England. With his immense gifts and 
impeccable clerical background it was considered inevitable that he would 
one day be Archbishop of Canterbury.

It was not to be. He entered the Catholic Church in 1917 and received Holy 
Orders two years later. After a spell of teaching at the Westminster 
diocesan seminary he returned to a singularly fruitful thirteen years as 
chaplain to the Catholic students at Oxford. The English hierarchy then 
commissioned the great work of his life, the new translation of the Bible. 
He retired in 1939 to the Shropshire home of Lord Acton, to emerge nine 
years later after having produced what is widely regarded as the most 
elegant modern rendering of Holy Scripture.

Thus the statistics. What were the qualities that moved the London Times to 
call him "one of the outstanding figures of his generation"? His erudition-
-the Bible was but one facet of it--was immense and profound, the more 
attractive and impressive because carried so lightly. His wit-- legendary 
even in his youth--was born of a mind that was probing, subtle, and razor-
sharp. He was among the foremost literary stylists of our century; no less 
an authority than Evelyn Waugh has said that he considers him and Max 
Beerbohm the two finest modern writers of English.

And his versatility was awesome. He published some dozen collections of 
sermons, the most famous of which, "The Mass in Slow Motion," reveals his 
knack of delivering the kind of talk that could captivate schoolgirls and 
at the same time win the plaudits of bishops and theologians. As a kind of 
adjunct to his Bible translation he wrote several commentaries. He is also 
the author of seven murder mysteries, many works of controversy, and 
perhaps the most intellectual of all modern accounts of conversion, "A 
Spiritual Aeneid."

His satires are a special delight. "Barchester Pilgrimage" out-Trollopes 
Trollope, demonstrating the Knoxian flair for capturing the most delicate 
nuances in the styles of other writers--a gift he was later to put to more 
significant use in translating the Bible. "Essays in Satire" has fun with 
many of the more pretentious humbugs of modern religion, scholarship, and 
literature. Memories of the Future ("being memoirs of the years 1915-72, 
written in the year 1988 by Opal, Lady Porstock") is a hilarious travesty 
on social, intellectual, and religious folly. "Let Dons Delight" is a 
highly amusing, literarily breath-taking "tour de force" among professors 
in an Oxford common room at fifty-year intervals from 1588 to 1938. The 
characterizations are superb, each reflecting currents of thought and even 
developments in the language, and all done with unfailing wit. It is a 
remarkable book, one which only Knox could have written.

His own favorite, "Enthusiasm," has been hailed by Evelyn Waugh as the 
great literary masterpiece of our century. It is the history of a recurrent 
religious aberration, the strong sense of direct divine guidance that has 
bemused many an ardent Christian through the centuries. The subject, such a 
rich mine of eccentricity, must have appealed hugely to Knox's fine sense 
of the ridiculous, yet his balance and sympathetic insight add a dimension 
of depth to a theme that in this book receives its first mature treatment.

The present volume, a masterly exposition of Catholic doctrine, is being 
reprinted here for the fifth time--eloquent tribute to its enduring value. 
The theme is timeless yet urgent, and it has never in our day been 
presented so brilliantly.



THE BELIEF OF CATHOLICS

RONALD KNOX 

Nihil obstat: GEORGIUS D. SMITH, S. Th.D., Censor Deputatus

Imprimatur: EDM. CAN. SURMONT, Vic. Gen. Westmonasterii, die 28 Julii 1927


PREFACE

It may easily be felt that a Catholic apologist does best to put himself on 
the defensive, in days so unfriendly as these towards the general outlook 
of Catholicism. Thus, there are philosophers who question the adequacy of 
thought itself as a method of arriving at speculative truth, there are 
psychologists who deny the reality of human free will; there are 
anthropologists who would explain away religion as an illusion of the 
nursery; and meanwhile, aiming their shafts more directly at the Church to 
which I belong, historians are for ever turning up flaws in our title-
deeds, and prophets of the age arraign our narrow outlook before the 
tribunal of human progress. To meet any one of these assaults upon its own 
ground would need a book at least as long as this. I have not the 
qualifications, if I had the whim, to pick up such gauntlets; journalism 
has docketed the world for us long since, and no author is allowed to try 
conclusions with a specialist unless he is fortified with a whole array of 
letters after his name in works of reference. This book, then, is an 
attempt to write constructive apologetic, to assert a claim; and if the 
specialist feels inclined, as doubtless he will, to buttonhole me here and 
there with the demand for fuller explanations, I must offer him the 
discourtesy of hurrying on; there is no space for them.

Neither, unfortunately, am I a theologian, and it follows that the theses 
here put forward, apart from the brevity which circumstances impose upon 
them, are put forward in crude language, without niceties of definition. 
But I have been asked to state "what I believe"; and, in so far as this 
series is intended to include human documents, my own contribution will be 
all the better, I take it, for the want of academic precision. Let my 
convictions be untidy in their arrangement, loose in their expression; at 
least they are genuine.

THE OLD PALACE, OXFORD, July 1927.


PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION

So many Protestant controversialists have seen fit to misrepresent me by 
printing extracts from pages 203 and 204 of the earlier edition, torn from 
their context with an array of dots and falsifying the general sense of the 
passage, that I have decided to alter two sentences; not by way of 
withdrawing anything I have said, but by way of making it clear beyond the 
possibility of mistake. Or is this hoping for too much? In any case, 
apologists who are confronted with what I wrote in 1927 will do well to 
insist that the objector shall do me the justice to quote from the new 
edition.


CONTENTS

I. The Modern Distaste For Religion

II. The Shop Window

III. Telling The First Lie

IV. The God Who Hides Himself

V. The Catholic Notion Of God

VI. The Seed-Ground Of Revelation

VII. The Christian Evidences

VIII. Our Lord's Claim Stated

IX. Our Lord's Claim Justified

X. Where Protestantism Goes Wrong

XI. The Foundation Of The Church

XII. The Object And The Act Of Faith

XIII. The Air Catholics Breathe

XIV. The Truths Catholics Hold

XV. The Rules Catholics Acknowledge

XVI. The Strength Catholics Receive

XVII. The Ambitions Catholics Honour

XVIII. Catholics And Those Outside

XIX. Catholicism And The Future



THE BELIEF OF CATHOLICS


I. The Modern Distaste for Religion

In a too crowded age--I refer, not to the multiplication of mortal lives, 
but to the multiplicity of human interests--it is an uneasy business to 
estimate tendencies or to prophesy developments. So many agitators, 
publicists, and quack physicians, each with his own platform and his own 
audience, din into our ears the importance of a thousand rival or 
unconnected movements, so ruled by chance is the sub-editor's preference 
for this or that head-line, the loyalty of the public towards the 
catchwords it favoured yesterday, that a wise man might well ask to be 
excused the task of pronouncing upon the chaos, or of guessing the outcome. 
Last century, for instance, one thing seemed luminously clear, that 
Liberalism was advancing, and was bound to advance, in a constant ratio of 
progress. Does Europe, does England, ratify that opinion now? And if there 
has been a reaction, is the defeat final or temporary? Which of the modern 
movements are genuine currents, which the backwash of a flood? Which of our 
modern evils are symptoms, and which are organic diseases? Which of our 
modern results are the true offspring of an age, which are sports and 
freaks of history? Historians of to-morrow, excuse our frantic guess-work 
in your clearer vision.

Amidst the tangle, one strand seems to define itself-- within the last 
hundred years, within the last fifty years, within the last twenty-five 
years, the force of religion, as a factor in English public life, has 
steadily and visibly declined. I do not mean that a careless and external 
diagnosis would detect the change. Within the last few years we have seen, 
perhaps, a greater output of religious discussion in public print than any 
age since the Reformation. But this itch for religious discussion, which is 
peculiarly British, is not really an encouraging symptom. Men do not talk 
about their health when their health is strongest; a nation does not talk 
about its religion when its religion is flourishing. Statistics, it is 
true, may be misleading, but they are the thermometer of change. And any 
statistical comparison I have ever undertaken, or seen undertaken, seems to 
yield the same result--namely, that the area of lives visibly affected by 
habits of religion shrinks from decade to decade, and almost from year to 
year. To take an instance at random--Trollope, in his "Vicar of 
Bullhampton" ( published in 1870), writes of a London population "not a 
fourth of whom attend divine service." Is it not the impression most of us 
would record, after a Sunday morning spent in the metropolis, that to-day 
we should have to write "a tenth" instead of "a fourth"?

I was told the other day of a more exact calculation, made in a more 
particular field, but not, to my mind, less significant. A statistician 
went through the records of the old boys from one of our greatest public 
schools, jotting down the number of those who adopted Holy Orders as their 
vocation in life. His observations began with 1860, and finished, 
necessarily, in the first decade of the present century. He marked off the 
period into spaces of five years, and found that in each five years the 
number of those who were ordained was perceptibly smaller than in the 
period immediately preceding it. In the first of the periods the ratio of 
clerical vocations was sixteen per cent.; in the last, it was something 
over three per cent. In short, within a space of forty-five years the ideal 
of the Christian ministry had lost four-fifths of its popularity.

It will be said, only among the expensively educated classes. True, the old 
sources of supply were not the only sources of supply, and it may be all 
the better for a Church to have a ministry recruited from the people. But 
the facts in themselves are surely suggestive. It is difficult not to 
suppose that there has been some change in the atmosphere of England--a 
change, perhaps, more easily and more acutely felt in the admirably 
ventilated dormitories of our public schools than elsewhere. It would be 
absurd to suppose that the falling-off in clerical vocations is the result 
of mere accident; uncharitable to suppose that it corresponded to a 
decrease in the value of clerical incomes, in the prestige of the clerical 
state. You must consider that the old public schools hand on a tradition of 
English citizenship, of which English Churchmanship is an integral part; 
that the appeal of the recruiting sergeant is seldom long absent from their 
chapel sermons; that clerical heroes are constantly held up to the 
admiration of these youthful audiences, and clerical ambitions extolled. 
If, in spite of all this, that clergy which was once the "stupor mundi" now 
finds it hard to fill up the gaps in its files, can we doubt that there has 
been a modification in the public attitude towards religion?

Nor is the shortage of clergy unaccompanied by a shortage of laity. A mere 
glance at the official figures issued by the various religious bodies 
reveals the nakedness of our church pews. The Church of England, judging 
from its baptismal register, still numbers some twenty-five millions of 
nominal members; but its Easter Communions are less than a tenth of this 
total. Even when we make allowance for children who are not yet of 
communicant age, it is difficult to suppose that the effective membership 
of the Anglican Church constitutes one-tenth of the English population. 
Neither the Church of England nor any Nonconformist body registers any 
increase of membership which keeps pace with the annual birth-rate; some of 
them have to register a net loss, not only of ministers, but of chapels and 
of Sunday scholars. What hopes can be conceived that religion continues to 
be a real force in a nation which has so feeble a grasp on Church 
membership as this?

I know it is said that Church membership is one thing, and religion 
another. Optimists will almost be prepared to claim that it is a healthy 
sign, this breaking away from the tests and shibboleths of the past; men 
are more reluctant, they explain, to give in their names to this "-ism" or 
that, precisely in proportion as their own religious lives are firmly 
rooted and plentifully nourished. All that is excellently said; and few 
will dispute that it is possible to be a Theist, and indeed a Christian in 
the broader, modern sense of the word, without subscribing to a creed or 
offering your prayers in a church. But can any sensible person delude 
himself into the idea that a decline of organised religion does not mean, 
"pro tan" to, a decline of religion altogether? For twenty people who will 
tell you that they can get all the religion they want without going to the 
parsons for it, is there one who ever offers a prayer, or consciously makes 
an act of love to Almighty God? There is a mystical temperament which finds 
itself best in isolation, but it is a rare and a delicate growth. The 
ordinary man, being a social animal, is social also in his religious 
instincts. If he is in earnest about the business of his own spiritual 
life, he instinctively crowds up against his fellows for warmth; worships 
in the same building with them, and writes down his name on a common 
subscription list. He does this the more readily in a country where he has 
so wide a variety of denominations amongst which he can choose, some of 
them applying the least exacting of tests even to communicant membership. 
If we were really growing more religious, should not at least the gleanings 
of that harvest tell upon the statistics of organised religion? In default 
of the gleanings, who will convince us of the harvest?

The main causes of this decline, so far as causes need to be adduced for 
the defection of human wills, are manifest enough. Undoubtedly popular 
education and the spread of newspaper culture must be credited, in part, 
with the result: some of us would say that the mass of the people is now 
growing out of its old superstitions in the light of new knowledge; some of 
us would see, rather, the effect of reiterated catchwords upon minds 
trained to read but not trained to think. The industrial development of the 
country has added its influence, partly by focusing men's thoughts upon 
their material interests, partly by setting up, in England as elsewhere, a 
reaction against old faiths and old loyalties, crudely conceived as old-
fashioned. Further, the modern facilities for pleasurable enjoyment have 
killed, in great part, the relish for eternity. I do not know that this 
influence has been given its proper importance hitherto. Mass production 
has made luxury cheap; steam travel, motor-cars, and the penny post have 
brought it to our doors; anesthetics and the other triumphs of medicine 
have mitigated the penalties which attach to it. And the same causes which 
have multiplied pleasure have multiplied preoccupation. A rush age cannot 
be a reflective age.

So much for the pew; meanwhile, what has been happening in the pulpit?

It would not be true, think, to say that dogma is less preached to-day than 
it was a hundred years ago. The rise of Wesleyanism and the Evangelical 
Movement had, indeed, put an end by then to the long indifference of the 
latitudinarian age. But Wesleyanism and Evangelicism were interested only 
in a handful of dogmas which concerned their own particular scheme of 
salvation. On the other hand, men did believe in the Bible, not as "given 
of God to convey to us in many parts and in divers manners the revelation 
of himself," but as inspired in an intelligible sense. And with the rise of 
the Oxford Movement this belief in Scripture was fortified by a confident 
appeal, unsound in its method but sincere in its purpose, to the deposit of 
Christian tradition. But during the last fifty years and more, the 
fundamental dogmas of the Christian religion have been subjected, more and 
more, to criticism, or interpretation, and to restatement. Would a diocesan 
Bishop have dared in the middle of the nineteenth century, to express in a 
newspaper article his disbelief in eternal punishment? Would the rector of 
a much-frequented London church have preached, and afterwards published, a 
sermon in which he recommended the remarriage of divorced persons? Would 
the whole Bench of Bishops have been prepared to alter, in the Baptismal 
Service, the statement that every child is conceived and born in sin? 
Appraise the tendency as you will; welcome or regret its influence; but 
only disingenuity can deny that the tendency is there, and is apparently 
constant. You do not believe what your grandfathers believed, and have no 
reason to hope that your grandsons will believe what you do.

In the early days of the Tractarian Movement it looked, for a time, as if 
this decline of dogma might be arrested by force; as if the invading germ 
of modernism might be expelled from within. Even seventy years back, or 
little more, in the days of Pusey, Burgon, Mansell, Denison, and Liddon, 
there was a vigorous outcry whenever countenance was shown to the first 
whispers of infidelity. Not so long ago, a collection of essays appeared, 
written by representative High Churchmen, so unguarded in certain points, 
particularly in its attitude towards Scripture, that any one of the five 
champions I have just mentioned would certainly have clamoured for its 
condemnation. It seems as if the modern High Church party were content to 
insist on the adoption of ceremonies and devotions such as are found in 
Catholic countries, and no longer concerned themselves with safeguarding, 
if they can still be safeguarded, the doctrines of Catholic antiquity. Nor 
do they merely tolerate in others the expression of views which their 
fathers would have branded as unorthodox; they themselves, more and more, 
are becoming infected by the contagion of their surroundings, and lose the 
substance of theology while they embrace its shadow. And still, by a 
pathetic error, they cherish the dream of reunion, when it must be clear to 
any prudent mind that the gulf between Rome and Canterbury never stood so 
wide as it stands to-day.

The ministers of the Free Churches will hardly, I suppose, be concerned to 
deny that in this matter they are abreast, if not ahead, of their Anglican 
rivals. Less retarded by the trammels of antiquity, less apprehensive of 
schism, more accustomed to recognise in religious innovation the influence 
of the Holy Spirit, they are free to catch the wind of the moment and sink 
their nets where the fishing seems best. The very titles of their 
discourses, as you see them pasted up Sunday after Sunday on the chapel 
notice-boards--high-flown, literary titles, such as tickle the ear of the 
passers-by--contrast strangely with the old, stern message of Baxter and 
Wesley--sin, hell, love, grace, faith, and conversion. I have myself seen 
such a chapel bill which promised first a comfortable seat, then good 
music, then a hearty welcome, and last of all, as if it were an 
afterthought, a "Gospel message." It is hardly to be expected that those 
who approached their prospective audience in so accommodating a spirit 
should expound much of dogma in their pulpits--dogma, so much vilified in 
the newspapers, so little palatable to the man in the street.

It appears, then, that the two processes are going on side by side, the 
decline of Church membership and the decline of dogma; the evacuation of 
the pew and the jettisoning of cargo from the pulpit. I have been at pains 
to adduce instances of the fact, though indeed it was hardly necessary, for 
the two tendencies are pretty generally admitted; the one openly deplored, 
the other openly defended. Are the two processes interrelated? And, if so, 
does the decline of Church membership cause the decline of dogma, or result 
from it, or is it a parallel symptom? Reflection shows, I think, that there 
is truth in all three suggestions.

To some extent, the decline of Church membership causes the decline of 
dogma. Obviously, the grievance of the man in the street against organised 
religion is partly an intellectual one. Other influences may prevail to 
keep him away from Church; as, a general unreasoning dislike towards all 
forms of authority, or absorption in pleasures and in worldly distractions. 
But the reason he alleges, at any rate, for his nonattendance is commonly 
his inability to believe "the stuff the parsons preach." What wonder if 
this attitude makes the preacher reconsider his message? He would blame 
himself if he allowed souls to lose contact with religion through undue 
insistence on any doctrine that was not true--or even not certainly true--
or even not theologically important. Hence comes the impetus to take stock 
afresh of his own theological position; is he really convinced of the 
truth, the certainty, the importance of such and such a doctrine? He is 
bound, indeed, to declare the whole counsel of God. But what is the whole 
counsel of God? If he could accept the inerrancy of Scripture, like his 
fathers before him, he would have at least a chart to guide him. But he has 
no ground for believing in the inerrancy of Scripture, unless it be 
guaranteed to him by the Church. What Church? His Church? If the Church of 
England be meant, or "a fortiori" any of the Nonconformist bodies, he can 
find no help in such a refuge; for a religious connection which claims no 
infallibility for itself can hardly be justified in investing the Bible 
with inerrancy! If, on the contrary, he appeals to the Catholic Church, he 
knows that he is appealing to a tribunal by whose judgments he himself does 
not abide. Somehow, then, he has to construct his own theology for himself, 
and to take responsibility for the construction; in doing so, would he be 
human if he were not influenced a little by the unbelief of those about 
him, by those unfilled pews which reproach him, Sunday by Sunday, with 
preaching a message unacceptable to the spirit of the age?

I do not mean to suggest that the desire to meet infidelity half-way is the 
sole or even the main cause responsible for the loose theology of our time. 
No preacher would deliberately judge the credibility of his message by the 
credulity of his audience. But the prevalent irreligion of the age does 
exercise a continual unconscious pressure upon the pulpit; it makes 
preachers hesitate to affirm doctrines whose affirmation would be 
unpopular. And a doctrine which has ceased to be affirmed is doomed, like a 
disused organ, to atrophy.

That modernism among the clergy and scepticism among the laity are to some 
extent parallel effects of the same causes, hardly needs demonstration. The 
confident assertions of the philosopher, the scientist, the historian--that 
truth is relative, not absolute; that we can no longer believe in Genesis; 
that Christianity descends straight from the heathen mystery religions--
will differ in their effect on different minds. One man will say, quite 
simply, "Then it's no good believing in Christianity any longer"; another 
will prefer to consider how the abiding truth of Christianity can best be 
reconciled with these apparently discouraging notions, how best restated in 
the light of these recent additions to human knowledge. Sometimes it is a 
matter of training and outlook; A is already looking out for, nay, is 
almost prepared to welcome, an excuse for abandoning his old religious 
ideas; B would sooner bid farewell to reason itself than impugn the 
veracity of the Church which has nourished him. Sometimes it is a matter of 
temperament; the world may be divided (amongst other convenient 
dichotomies) into the people who take it or leave it and the people who 
split the difference. Sometimes there is a real intellectual struggle in 
one conscientious mind as to whether any accommodation can consistently be 
made between the new truth and the old tradition.

It must not be supposed that we have finished with materialism. Yesterday, 
it was the concept of Evolution that was in the air. To one mind, it seemed 
a disproof of the very basis of religious truth; it had knocked the bottom 
out of Christianity. To another mind, this same concept of Evolution seemed 
a convenient solder for patching up the holes in a leaky system; apply its 
doctrines to the Christian faith, and it would begin to hold water once 
more. To-day the rage is for psychology; to some minds the new psychology 
has already destroyed, or is beginning to destroy, the whole notion of free 
will. Others, within the Christian camp, are beginning to take up the 
jargon of the new empiricism and apply it to the problems of religion, not 
less joyfully than their fathers did yesterday. What is one man's poison is 
another man's drug.

In a sense, then, the decline of Church membership explains the decline of 
dogma. In a sense, it is a parallel effect of the same causes. But there is 
a sense, also, in which the decline of dogma explains the decline of Church 
membership.

Such a suggestion is, of course, clean contrary to the fashionable 
platitudes of our day. When "the failure of the Churches" is discussed in 
public print, our well-meaning advisers always insist, with a somewhat 
wearying reiteration, on the need for a more comprehensive Christianity, 
which shall get away from forms and ceremonies, from dogmas and creeds, and 
shall concentrate its attention upon those elementary principles of life 
and devotion which all Christians have at heart. Each prophet who thus 
enlightens us makes the curious assumption, apparently, that he is the 
first person who has ever suggested anything of the kind. As a matter of 
fact, the brazen lungs of Fleet Street have been shouting these same 
directions at us for a quarter of a century past. And have "the Churches" 
taken no notice? On the contrary, as I have suggested above, the pilots of 
our storm-tossed denominations have lost no opportunity of lightening ship 
by jettisoning every point of doctrine that seemed questionable, and 
therefore unessential; hell has been abolished, and sin very nearly; the 
Old Testament is never alluded to but with a torrent of disclaimers, and 
miracle with an apologetic grimace. Preachers of the rival sects have 
exchanged pulpits; "joint services" have been held on occasions of public 
importance; even the inauguration of a new Anglican cathedral cannot take 
place nowadays without a fraternisation of the Christianities. In hundreds 
of churches and chapels everything has been done that could be done to meet 
this modern latitudinarian demand. And the result?

The result is that as long as a man is a good preacher, a good organiser, 
or an arresting personality, he can always achieve a certain local 
following; and among this local following a reputation for broad-mindedness 
stands him in good stead. But the ordinary man who does not go to church is 
quite unaffected by the process. He thinks no better of Christianity for 
its efforts to be undogmatic. It is not that he makes any articulate reply 
to these overtures; he simply ignores them. Nothing, I believe, has 
contributed more powerfully to the recent successes of the "Anglo-Catholic" 
movement than the conviction, gradually borne in upon the clergy, that the 
latitudinarian appeal, as a matter of experience, does not attract. Dogmas 
may fly out at the window but congregations do not come in at the door.

So much, as a matter of daily experience, will hardly be gainsaid. What 
follows is more controversial; indeed, it is a thesis which hardly admits 
of exact proof. It seems to me that (let us say) seven in ten of our 
fellow-countrymen, if they give a thought to the matter at all, think the 
worse, not the better, of our modem leaders for their willingness to throw 
dogma overboard to the wolves of unbelief. They are scandalised, rather 
than impressed, by the theological chaos which two generations of 
controversy have left behind them. It is the common assumption of all these 
modem prophets, whatever their school, that religious truth is something 
not yet determined, something which is being gradually established by a 
slow process of testing and research. They boast of their indecisions; they 
parade their dissensions; it shows (they say) a healthy spirit of fearless 
inquiry, this freedom from the incubus of tradition. Such sentiments evoke, 
I believe, no echo of applause outside their own immediate circles. The 
uneasy impression is left on the average citizen that "the parsons do not 
know their own business"; that disagreements between sect and sect are 
more, not less disedifying when either side hastens to explain that the 
disagreement is over externals, rather than essentials; that if 
Christianity is still in process of formulation after twenty centuries, it 
must be an uncommonly elusive affair. The average citizen expects any 
religion which makes claims upon him to be a revealed religion; and if the 
doctrine of Christianity is a revealed doctrine, why all this perennial 
need of discussion and restatement? Why should a divine structure send in 
continual bills for alterations and repairs? Moreover, he is a little 
suspicious of these modern concessions, these attempts to meet him half-
way. Is the stock (he asks in his commercial way) really a sound 
investment, when those who hold it are so anxious to unload it on any 
terms?

It is not only the theological speculations of the modem Christianities 
which produce this sense of uneasiness. It is the whole accommodating 
attitude taken up by the religions of to-day and their professors--
accommodating, and for that reason, not reassuring. It is an infinitely 
small point, but does the abandonment, total or partial, of the clerical 
garb by some modem clergymen really make the laity feel more at home with 
them? Does it not rather create the suspicion that they are ashamed of 
being what they are? Distrust may even be aroused, sometimes, by the modem 
sympathy of official Anglicanism for the movement towards democracy; to 
some minds, it comes too late to be impressive. The gesture made by "the 
Churches" at the time of the General Strike was, I fully believe, the 
result of a sincere desire for the national well-being. But this confidence 
was not everywhere felt; many preferred to think it dictated by panic, 
rather than by genuine concern. Even in matters of grave and practical 
moral import, representatives of the Christian bodies have, before now, 
given forth an uncertain sound, and affirmed the traditional ethics of 
Christianity with a minority protest. Most outside critics sympathised, no 
doubt, with the minority; but it is questionable whether they felt much 
respect for a religion whose spokesmen could differ so fundamentally.

Do the Churches know their own mind, or even their own minds? That is, in 
effect, the question which bewilders men to-day far more than any strictly 
theological problem. I do not mean that the ordinary Englishman is for ever 
worrying about the question; the sad truth is that he lacks the necessary 
interest in religious matters altogether. You will only catch occasional 
glimpses of his attitude; but they are, to my mind, unmistakable. "Let the 
Churches make up their own mind what they believe," he says, "and then come 
and tell me." Meanwhile, there is no sign that such an event is probable. 
The present effort to unify belief and practice within the Church of 
England is the heir to a long line of failures. The Anglo-Catholic party 
has a solidarity that is only external; it is based on a compromise, and 
its unity is that of a party, not that of a creed. This generation will 
die, and the next, before "the Churches" can present the nation with a 
common programme.

We have no precedent by which to forecast the outcome of the present 
situation. The pulse of religion has beaten low enough in England before 
now, but there has never, before this last century, been a time at which so 
many of our fellow-countrymen made no response to its movements. In the 
worst of the latitudinarian days the embers of belief were kept alive, not 
smothered, by the ashes of indifference. The Bible was never so little 
believed as it is to-day; I doubt if it was ever so little read. The 
optimism of the religious temperament will continually find new grounds for 
confidence; will hail local successes, and welcome the suggestion of 
untried remedies; but there is no sign, yet, of a rally, no distant foot-
fall of the Prodigal's return. Organised religion has shrunk, and is still 
shrinking, at once in the content of its message and in the area of its 
appeal.


II. THE SHOP WINDOW

It so happens that there is one religious body in the country which 
registers a yearly increase in its membership more than proportionate to 
the national birth-rate. It so happens that there is one religious body in 
the country which does not alter its message to suit the shifting fashions 
of human thought, which gives no sign of yielding to modern outcries under 
the severest pressure from public opinion. It so happens that the body 
alluded to is in either case the same, the Catholic Church.

I am not instituting a precarious inference from the popularity of my own 
religion to its truth. No inference is more easy, none is, commonly, more 
fallacious. I am simply trying to account for the fact, which is an 
observable fact to any unprejudiced critic, that the Catholic Church has, 
at the moment, a readier hearing and a better all-round reception among the 
mass of Englishmen than it has had since its voice was smothered by 
persecution--it seemed, finally--two hundred and fifty years ago. In 
contrast with the general religious conditions which I have attempted to 
depict in the last chapter, men's attention is directed towards us, either 
because our pulpits still give forth the same sound, or because our pews 
are filling instead of emptying, or because a comparison of these two facts 
seems to them significant. I am not optimist enough to exaggerate the 
tendency. I fancy it is still true that the mass of the population thinks 
of us as something quite off the map; conceives our pomp of yesterday as 
one with Nineveh and Tyre. But as Catholic churches spring into being all 
over the country, as Catholic activities demand a larger publicity even 
from that highly conventional institution, the daily press, we appear to 
provide the bewildered Englishman sometimes with a criticism, sometimes 
with a solution, of the religious problems which distract our times.

It is difficult to form any idea of the neglect, nay, of the contempt into 
which the Catholic name had fallen in England towards the end of the 
eighteenth century, before the French Revolution, the Oxford conversions, 
and the Irish immigration had strengthened our position. I do not mean 
politically; the 'Forty-five, and memories of the 'Forty-five, still made 
us formidable to our fellow-countrymen. But Catholicism as an intellectual 
system seemed, I suppose, no more possible to the Englishmen of the 
eighteenth century than the principles of the Thug or the Doukhobor. So far 
removed was it from the intellectual compass of the age, that those who 
professed it--in our country, a particularly hardheaded set of men--were 
assumed to be fanatics, drugged by the influence of some strange wave of 
religious emotion; it was not conceived possible that calm deliberation, 
that reasoned calculation, could lead a man to conclusions so 
unfashionable. In an age which hated enthusiasm, Catholicism was the 
"reductio ad absurdum" of enthusiasm; and there is pleasant reading to be 
found in the magazines of the period, where the early fervours of 
Wesleyanism are compared to those of "Popery," and condemned by the 
comparison. Two Wesleyan preachers, at Brighton, I think, were actually 
said to have been recognised by passers-by as members of the Society of 
Jesus. Faded Chloes and Clorindas, how you despised us.

In our day, antipathy to Catholicism is still abundantly manifested. Wills 
are drawn up in which the heir forfeits his rights if he should make his 
submission to Rome; and when a conversion does take place, at least in 
those highest and lowest social strata in which prejudice dies hard, it is 
usually the signal for a chorus of irascible comment. But, when the 
concrete case does not arise, it is wonderful how much Platonic admiration 
is shown nowadays for the Catholic system, once so contemned; it is 
wonderful how often the velleity (as the schoolmen say) to become a 
Catholic is found among highly educated and highly cultivated people, who 
never in fact come near to the point of submission. Allowance must be made 
for kind-heartedness and natural politeness; but this explanation cannot be 
accepted as the sole explanation; you hardly ever meet an intelligent 
person who does not admire us for something. He would so like to be a 
Catholic (he says) for the sake of points A, B, and C in our system, if 
only points D, E, and F did not interpose an insuperable barrier.

And, although such language is often on the lips of men who have never 
seriously considered whether submission to the Church is, or ever could be, 
possible for them, there are lives in which the nostalgia for Rome makes 
tragedy. Such a craving was Florence Nightingale's; such was W. H. 
Mallock's, though indeed he did have a priest at his death bed. At this 
moment, without stopping to think of names, I can recall three men of good 
family and exceptional ability who have died, within the last decade or so, 
outside the Church, although their familiar friends knew that they were 
longing to become Catholics if they could. Such intellects, like moths 
singeing their wings round a candle, cannot keep away from the thought of 
Catholicism, however often it repels them. It drives them away from every 
other form of religion, as hopeless love for a married woman may keep a man 
a bachelor; they will not put up with second-best substitutes. There is an 
attraction about the Catholic Church, not merely for the pigeon-headed 
"devot" or the paradoxical undergraduate, but for penetrating minds and 
justly balanced temperaments.

I propose in this chapter to disentangle some of the various elements in 
the appeal of which I have been speaking. I have called it the Shop Window, 
because I believe that there is, I will not say a large body of people, but 
a considerable body of people, whom you may easily liken to a crowd of 
small boys outside a confectioner's shop, flattening their noses against 
the pane and feasting, in imagination only, upon the good things they see 
there--but they have no money to get in. Just so these Platonic admirers, 
these would-be converts, look longingly towards Catholicism for the 
satisfaction each of his own need; now and again, perhaps (it notoriously 
happens in shop windows) mistaking some accidental glory of the Church for 
a more perfect thing than it is. The elders, in hearing Helen's suit, must 
needs make allowance for the siren sweetness of her voice. So he who 
undertakes to investigate the claims of the Catholic Church is naturally on 
his guard lest his judgment should be biased unconsciously in its favour. 
At least we shall avoid unconscious bias if, from the outset, we tabulate 
the various attractions which the Church has for various minds, put them 
out (as it were) in the shop window, and take a good look at them. They 
talk of the "lure" of Rome; in this chapter, at any rate, the net shall be 
spread honestly in the sight of the bird.

Of all the features in the Catholic system which appeal powerfully to men's 
minds at the present moment, the least, assuredly, is the mere beauty of 
her external adornment- the merely aesthetic effect of vestments made in 
art stuffs, of blazing candles, of gold and silver altar furniture, of lace 
and flowers. Chloe and Clorinda did feel, I think, a sneaking attraction 
towards these Romish bedizenments, tempered, of course, by a strong moral 
reprobation. In our day, their appeal is of the slightest. If for no other 
reason, because these characteristics of our own system are easily imitable 
and have been freely imitated. It is, perhaps fortunately, no longer 
necessary to betake yourself to Catholic churches in order to glut your 
senses with artistic appreciation of ceremonial. Our High Church friends do 
it as well or better- their churches provide, as it were, a mimic Riviera 
on the soil of home to suit these sickly temperaments. Mere beauty, mere 
pageantry, is no speciality of ours, and no appreciable boast.

But there is something else underlying the pomp of our ceremonial which 
makes, I think, a more powerful impression, though one far more difficult 
to analyse. I mean the sense of mystery. The effect of long distances, of 
tapers flickering in the heart of an altar far away, of slow silences 
interrupted by sudden bursts of sound, of voices coming from unseen 
quarters, of doors opening unexpectedly, of figures moving to and fro over 
a business unintelligible to the spectator, of long chants in a language 
which he does not hear, or does not understand, of tingling bells, and 
incense-smoke caught in the shifting lights of a high-windowed building--
the effect, I say, of all this upon the visitor who has no opportunity and 
no wish to "follow the service" is to breed an atmosphere of solemn mystery 
which works, not upon his senses, but upon his imagination. In this 
respect, Catholic ceremonial does not lend itself so readily to imitation. 
The intrusion of English, or any other intelligible tongue, breaks the 
spell of mystery with its too familiar cadences. And yet you will meet with 
elements of all this in some of the old cathedrals; you will meet it in 
King's Chapel, at Cambridge, if you stand outside the screen and listen to 
the chanting on the farther side of it. Conversely, in a small and ill-
built Catholic church you will miss the illusion.

Our crude forefathers had a name for all this; they called it hocus-pocus. 
The moderns, or at least the more religiously disposed among them, have 
formed a very different judgment. To them this illusion is "the sense of 
worship"; it proves, with reasons of the heart, not of the intellect, that 
man is born for something higher than materialism. This sense of 
unapproachableness, is it not evidence that there is an Unapproachable, 
whom yet our finite minds must needs labour to approach? I confess that I 
cannot find it in my heart to agree fully with either criticism. 
Mystification, mummery for mummery's sake, exasperates me beyond speech; 
and I have never been able to understand my countrymen's partiality for 
Masonic and quasi-Masonic ritual. but in Catholic churches the effect is an 
accidental one; we do not deliberately mystify; on the contrary, our modern 
tendency encourages the laity to know what is being done, and even, by the 
aid of translations, to follow what is being said. If anybody prefers to 
cultivate the sense of mystery, by all means let him. But it is a very 
tenuous argument that can be derived from the impressions so received, in 
favour either of Christianity or of Catholicism.

From a different angle, the outside observer is apt to conceive of 
Catholicism as being at least a business-like religion. The ministers of 
most Christian denominations affect he finds, a slowness of walk and of 
movement while they are in church- they talk either in deliberately earnest 
tones or in a kind of professional drawl; their enunciation, their 
gestures, even the look on their faces is expressive of unction. Nay, even 
out of church, he detects (or thinks he detects) a certain professionalism 
of manner, a "parsonified air," which repels him. It seems to him that he 
finds, among the other Christianities, a deliberate attempt to be 
impressive- and, Briton-like, he suspects unreality behind these calculated 
"demarches." Good wine, he reminds himself, needs no bush; and if there 
were really any truth behind the doctrines which these teachers profess, 
they would not be so desperately anxious to parade their conviction of it. 
Whereas, if he has strayed into a Catholic church, he finds these airs of 
professionalism absent; there are no unnatural tones in the voice, there is 
no obtrusive deliberation of manner; the priest goes about his work with 
the briskness, the matter-of-factness, of a shopkeeper or an operating 
surgeon; the whole performance seems to be, for the initiated, something 
quite natural, something which they take for granted. And, though it may 
all mean to him no more than the liturgy of mumbo-jumbo, he is favourably 
impressed with the convictions of men and women who can thus hold commerce 
with the other world without inhuman deportment. "They seem to know what 
they are about, these people," is his criticism; and perhaps there is 
something in it.

So far I have been assuming that our inquirer has not been content to learn 
about the Church by hearsay, but has attended Catholic services, if only as 
part of his experiences during foreign travel. But indeed it is possible, 
without any first-hand contact, to find your imagination dwelling wistfully 
on the thought of the Catholic Church. Alone among the Christianities, it 
is capable of taking rank, even in isolation, as one of the great religions 
of the world. Take it vertically or horizontally, that is, historically or 
geographically, it is a vast edifice; like the Great Pyramid, it will 
challenge your attention from a distance, and set you wondering how human 
workmanship (as you suppose it to be) can spread so wide and so defy the 
centuries. Nor is it any megalomania, any spirit of religious jingoism, 
that makes us long to claim membership in such an institution. To belong to 
a small sect may have its attractions, may prove a sop to pride, or an 
incentive to fanaticism. But the normal man, less self-confident in his 
opinions, asks for company; he would not, if possible, have the whole world 
disagreeing with him. He will at least envisage the possibility that the 
majority may be right, though it be beyond the seas, or even beyond the 
grave.

Let us look at the historical character of Catholicism first. It is 
convenient, no doubt, to call oneself a Christian, and even (by a modern 
metaphor) to call oneself "a Catholic," without feeling responsible for the 
whole chequered past of Christendom- without making oneself an accessory to 
the fires of Smuthfield, or being tarred with the brush of Torquemada. 
Happy is the nation (it has been said) which has no past; and a Church of 
yesterday enjoys the advantages which that dictum implies. To be tied to no 
dead hand of tradition, bowed down by no cumbrous legacies of antiquity, 
leaves the mind more free for speculation, and the heart for adventure. But 
in disclaiming the dead, you are yourself disclaimed by the dead. If you 
are not prepared to blush for Alexander the Sixth, it is childishly 
inconsistent to take pride in the memory of Saint Francis. You may claim a 
kind of sentimental connection with the Christianity of earlier ages, but 
not a historic, not a vital continuity. The Fathers of the early Church may 
be your models and your heroes, but they are no genuine part of your 
ancestry.

It is not everybody who has a sense of history--I mean, a feeling for our 
past. Indeed, there is a kind of modern coxcombry which takes delight in 
belittling the achievements of the human genius by comparing them with the 
long, vacant centuries which preceded history itself. But it is hard to see 
how those who are accustomed to live in the past, those whose blood is 
thrilled by Agincourt, those who feel the greatness of the classical 
tradition, can be so incurious as to their own spiritual origins. More and 
more, I think, as the changing conditions of modem society cut us off from 
the memory of old things; as customs die out, and property changes hands, 
and our language loses its virility, and even (perhaps) the power of the 
Empire we live in sinks in the scale of political values, men will look 
towards the Catholic Church, if only as the repository of long traditions, 
the undying, unmoved spectator of the thousand phases and fashions that 
have passed over our restless world. I may be wrong, but it seems to me 
that it is already happening; that the reaction from all this silly worship 
of the future is predisposing men's minds towards the Catholic claim.

And if the longevity of the Church attracts some, its world-wide diffusion 
has an even greater influence. It is true that Protestant controversialists 
have made efforts to explain away this geographical universality, 
insinuating that Catholicism, so far from being the religion of Europe, is 
only the religion of the Latin races--amongst whom, by a slight strain of 
ethnographical principle, it is necessary to include the Irish, the Poles, 
and the Hungarians. But the attempt is from the first a desperate one; 
Holland is two-fifths Catholic, and it was only the first world war, with 
its consequent territorial adjustments, that prevented the German Empire 
from showing, as it must have shown in a few more years, a majority of 
Catholic citizens. All the redistribution of Europe at and since 
Versailles, never conceived in a spirit friendly to Catholic interests, has 
failed to obscure the fact that Catholicism pervades Europe; meanwhile, 
recent events have done much to rob the schismatic Eastern Churches of 
their political solidarity and of their spiritual prestige. Catholicism is 
admittedly the most successful of the missionary religions, and its growth 
in the New World is sufficiently attested by the alarm of its ill-wishers. 
Whoever wishes to find men of his own faith wherever there are men of his 
own species, if he does not actually wish to be a Catholic, must at least 
wish that he were a Catholic.

But even these glories of the Church are accidental glories. It was not 
immemorial, it was not worldwide, on the Day of Pentecost. There is another 
quality of Catholicism, more intimate and more integral, which at once 
repels and attracts the men of our generation--I mean the claim of the 
Church to authority in matters of faith and morals. This claim will, of 
course, occupy us throughout the present work; it has to be treated here 
only so far as it is, to some souls, a magnet of attraction which draws 
them towards the Catholic system.

When I say that the people of our time, and especially the young people of 
our time, want authority, I do not mean that they desire to be controlled 
by a coercive authority from without; only an ascetic desires that for its 
own sake. I mean that, in the literal and primitive sense of the word 
"authority," they want a warrant to authorise them in doing what they do, 
sanctions to justify them in behaving as they behave. This is, I believe, a 
characteristic symptom of our age, and very largely a post-war symptom. In 
normal times, there is no such demand; decent people, whatever their 
beliefs, are content to be guided in matters of conduct by the deliveries 
of their own uninstructed consciences. For, after all, the rule of man's 
conduct is written in his own heart. Neither Catholicism nor any other form 
of Christianity pretends to have a special morality of its own; religion is 
meant to enforce, not to supersede, the natural code of morals. 
(Christianity, for example, forbids suicide; but then, so did Plato.) 
Ideally, the perfect pagan should interpret his moral duties exactly as a 
Christian would.

But within the last fifty years or so an open challenge has been issued to 
traditional morality in matters concerning sex. A steady, ceaseless How of 
literary propaganda has shaken the faith of our generation in the 
indissolubility of marriage, hitherto conceived as a principle of natural 
morality. Let anyone contrast "Jane Eyre" with the average modern novel, 
and he will see how far our thought has travelled, Half a century ago it 
was assumed, even in more or less free-thinking circles, that divorce was a 
disreputable subject, and that remarriage after divorce was a 
disqualification for respectable society. To-day, such principles are 
maintained among Christians only with hesitation, among free-thinkers not 
at all.

Within the last few years a second challenge has been issued, by a less 
open but not less formidable propaganda, against the fruitfulness of 
marriage. Practices hitherto connected with the unmentioned underworld of 
society have found their way into the home. Once again, it is not merely a 
Christian principle that has been thrown overboard. It is a point over 
which Jewish moralists are no less definite than our own; Ovid and Juvenal, 
with no flicker of Christian revelation to guide them, branded the 
practices in question with the protest of heathen satire. It is not 
Christian morality, but natural morality as hitherto conceived, that has 
been outraged by the change of standard.

Now, the healthier part of our fellow-citizens does not want to see the 
effects of either propaganda carried to their logical conclusion. No decent 
person wants free love; no decent person wants race suicide. They live, 
therefore, not by principle but by a compromise between principles; they 
are in favour of divorce, but not of easy divorce, of small families but 
not of too small families. Consequently, they feel themselves responsible 
for the decision where exactly the line shall be drawn, within the generous 
limits which our legal system allows. They do not like the responsibility; 
who would? Who, in tampering with institutions so sacred as those of the 
family, would not like to feel that he had an authority behind him, a 
"warrant" from somewhere to ratify his behaviour? If only there were some 
great spiritual institution which would act, in these matters, as a sort of 
public conscience, guiding, from a higher point of vision, the moral choice 
made by the individual!

So, naturally, he feels; unfortunately, he does not feel that the views of 
any non-Catholic denomination are worth having, even if they are 
discoverable. He knows that the advice of an individual clergyman will be 
unofficial and inexpert. He knows, if he has followed the course of recent 
ecclesiastical deliberations, that representatives of Christian thought 
speak with an uncertain voice on such subjects. He respects our Church for 
having, at least, definite opinions and fixed rules. He respects it, 
although he disagrees with it. He thinks us far too severe in forbidding 
remarriage after divorce, in forbidding the artificial restriction of the 
family; but although he disagrees with us for the rules we have, he 
respects us for having rules. If only the people whom we value as advisers 
would give us the advice we want!

Moral hesitations chiefly affect the young; intellectual hesitations are 
commonly put off until they reach an age when the mind has become more 
reflective, and, alas! less adventurous. It is the chief tragedy of life 
that, whereas logically thought should precede action, in the development 
of man's career action precedes thought. Men who are becoming middle-aged, 
with families growing up and asking the eternal questions of youth, feel an 
ill-defined gap in their minds if they have no creed to live by, and are 
apt to take more notice of what the religious world is doing They can 
hardly become attentive to its symptoms to-day without recognising, and 
being disturbed by, the chaos of religious sentiment which I made some 
attempt to describe in the foregoing chapter. They see how rapidly the 
fashions of thought are changing; how landmarks of tradition have been 
removed even within their own lifetime, they are conscious that even their 
own hesitating infidelities, the vogue of their youth, are becoming back 
numbers, as fresh doubts and fresh heresies crowd them out. The reaction 
from this constant flux of innovation disposes their minds I will not say 
towards the idea of certitude, but towards the idea of fixity in religious 
beliefs. To be told, by optimistic clerical friends, that the present age 
is only a period of transition, and that in twenty or thirty years' time a 
clearer perception of spiritual truths is bound to emerge, is hardly 
consoling to them; they think of their grey hairs, and wonder whether they 
will live to see it. For that matter, the clerical optimist has been saying 
the same thing steadily these hundred years past. Is it wonderful if they 
sometimes listen, to catch the whisper of an authoritative voice?

They do not, as a rule want authority in matters of belief for the right 
reason--i.e., that the whole notion of a revealed religion becomes 
logically impossible without it. They do not understand that the whole 
edifice of non-Catholic theology has always been doomed to wreck, because 
it never had any foundation in reason. But they do see that, here and now, 
there is no tradition so long established that it cannot be questioned, no 
doctrine so venerable that it cannot be controverted, they do see that the 
leaders of Protestant thought are desperately guessing at the truth, and 
covering up their uncertainties with equivocal phrases and sentimental 
whitewash. Really, the sight of it would almost make you want to be a Roman 
Catholic, if the Roman Catholics did not believe such impossible things.

The instinct for beauty, the instinct for mystery, the instinct for 
naturalness, the instinct for history, the instinct for world-wide 
citizenship, the instinct for moral guidance, the instinct for intellectual 
definiteness--all these, or any of these, may make a man, do make many men, 
look towards the Catholic Church, if not with less reprobation, at least 
with more interest, if not with less ignorance, at least with more 
curiosity. Some wish they could become Catholics; some wish they had been 
born Catholics; some content themselves with saying that it must be very 
nice to be a Catholic. If only they could tell the first lie (as someone 
has put it), how easily all the rest would follow!

III. TELLING THE FIRST LIE

That phrase about telling the first lie is a particularly revealing one. It 
reveals, not the attitude of Catholics towards religious truth, but the 
ignorance of non-Catholics about the religion of their fellow-countrymen.

I shall be accused, perhaps, of a sulky querulousness when I say this. It 
will be conjectured that I am revenging myself on those who do not agree 
with me by pretending that they do not understand me. But it is true, and 
it is a truth which becomes more luminous the more you come in contact with 
the public attitude towards Catholics, that the English people, when it 
talks about the Catholic Church loses all sense of reality, of human 
possibilities. We were for so long a despised and persecuted sect, we were 
for so long deprived of any opportunity to explain our position that 
Englishmen have come to look upon us as a race of ogres, from whom nothing 
natural, nothing human can be expected. They will believe anything of us, 
without stopping to inquire whether such beliefs are even plausible. Among 
half a dozen instances of this credulity, let me select one that is 
peculiarly striking and peculiarly well attested. At the beginning of the 
first world war, when it was suggested to the Government that Catholics, 
like their neighbours, would need an increased staff of chaplains to 
superintend their spiritual welfare, a Cabinet minister professed himself 
astonished that the ministrations of French priests would not be 
sufficient. And when it was pointed out to him that these priests would 
find some difficulty in hearing confessions, it proved that the Cabinet 
minister had assumed, all his life, that Catholics made their confessions 
in Latin. One pictures those Irish troops, a Kennedy in every knapsack So 
true is it that the English sense of realities breaks down when the habits 
of Catholics are in question. By an equally grotesque illusion, most 
Englishmen have the idea that Catholics base all their religious beliefs on 
the authority of the Church. And if we pressed them with the difficulty, 
"Yes, but on what do Catholics base their belief in the authority of the 
Church? Do they base that on the authority of the Church too?" I suspect 
that most Englishmen would reply, "Of course." These people are Catholics, 
therefore any reason or no reason is good enough for them. They are a race 
apart, ogres, not men.

Let me then, to avoid further ambiguity, give a list of certain leading 
doctrines which no Catholic, upon a moments reflection, could accept on the 
authority of the Church and on that ground alone.

(i.) The existence of God.

(ii.) The fact that he has made a revelation to the world in Jesus Christ.

(iii.) The Life (in its broad outlines), the Death, and the Resurrection of 
Jesus Christ.

(iv.) The fact that our Lord founded a Church.

(v.) The fact that he bequeathed to that Church his own teaching office, 
with the guarantee (naturally) that it should not err in teaching.

(vi.) The consequent intellectual duty of believing what the Church 
believes.

I do not say that these considerations are present to the mind of every 
Catholic, however ignorant, however stupid. I do say that these are the 
considerations which any Catholic teacher would put before him, if and in 
so far as he showed any curiosity about the matter. I would add that a 
glance at the Penny Catechism will disabuse any unbiased mind of the idea 
that the Church, even in dealing with simple folk, conceals from them the 
intellectual basis of their religion.

Yet the average Protestant persists in believing that the attitude of the 
Church towards the human intellect is adequately summed up in the phrase, 
familiar to us from childhood, "Open your mouth and shut your eyes." It is 
supposed that anybody who is brought up as a Catholic retains, without any 
further questioning or instruction on the point, the pious credulity with 
which he accepted all that his mother told him, all that the priest told 
him, when he was too young to think for himself. Any dawning doubts as to 
the sufficiency of such a motive for belief are crushed, we must suppose, 
with threats of hell and excommunication. This would be extraordinary 
enough, considering the number of Catholics there are in the world and the 
ample opportunities they have for being infected, in a world like ours, 
with the germs of unbelief. But, still more extraordinary, this Church, 
which has no proof of anything she says beyond her own bare assertion, is 
making converts, in an enlightened country like ours, at the rate of some 
twelve thousand in the year. How does she manage (one wonders) to play off 
her confidence trick with such repeated success?

This is, indeed, a phenomenon at which non-Catholics profess to feel the 
utmost astonishment. But it is a kind of astonishment which has grown 
blunted by usage; they have come to regard it as part of the order of 
things that their neighbours should become the victims, now and again, of 
this extraordinary tour de force. If they were compelled to picture to 
themselves the process of a conversion, they would, I suppose, conceive it 
something after this fashion--that the mind of the inquirer is hypnotised 
into acquiescence by the crafty blandishments of a designing priest; not by 
his arguments, for he has none, he only goes on shouting "Become a 
Catholic, or you will go to hell!"; not by his arguments, but by some fatal 
quality of fascination, which we breed, no doubt, in the seminaries. In a 
dazed condition, like that of the bird under the snake's eye, he assents to 
every formula presented to him, binds himself by every oath that is 
proposed to him, in one openmouthed act of unreasoning surrender. After 
that, of course, pride forbids him to admit, so long as life lasts, that 
the choice so made was a mistaken one; besides, one knows the power these 
priests have. Yes, it is very curious, the power attributed to these 
priests. When you have had the privilege of assisting at their education 
for seven years, you feel that "curious" is too weak a word for it.

This is, presumably, what Protestants have in mind when they represent 
submission to the Church as a form of "intellectual suicide." They mean 
that the act of faith which a man makes in joining the Church is an act of 
the will (or, more properly speaking, the emotions) in which the intellect 
plays no part. It is an entertaining fact, familiar to all who are 
acquainted with the history of Protestantism, that one of the earliest and 
one of the fiercest controversies between the Reformation and the Old 
Religion was concerned precisely with this point. It was, of course, the 
Protestants who maintained the view that faith was an act of the will (or, 
more properly speaking, the emotions), with frequent allusion to the 
misunderstood text, "With the heart man believeth unto salvation"; whereas 
their Catholic opponents earned bitter hatred by insisting that the act of 
faith, however much directed by the will, had its seat in the intellect. 
Historically, Protestantism is committed to the notion that the act of 
faith is the mere surrender of a personality to a Personality, without 
parley, without deliberation, without logical motive. The true 
representative of Protestantism in the modern world is the Salvationist who 
stands up at a street corner and cries out "I am saved." It is Catholicism 
which insists that, ideally at least, it is the intellect which must be 
satisfied first, the heart afterwards.

Nor, in point of fact, has modern Protestantism any right to tax us with 
exalting faith at the expense of reason. It was only the other day that I 
read an able defence of Theism by an Anglican philosopher who appeared to 
demand faith of some kind as a preliminary to accepting the doctrine of 
God's existence. No Catholic apologist ever fell into so grotesque an 
error. We demand, indeed, on the part of the inquirer certain negative 
dispositions, as, an absence of prejudice and of frivolity, a willingness 
to listen and to attend, determination in carrying an argument to its 
logical conclusion, etc. But to demand of the inquirer any positive "will 
to believe" as the condition of accepting the existence of God, is to beg 
the whole question, to stultify the whole process of philosophical 
discussion.

Nobody who will take the trouble to look at any manual of Catholic 
apologetics, will fail to understand that several of the questions most 
controverted to-day do not fall, from the Catholic point of view, under the 
object of faith, at least primarily. They are matters upon which we have to 
make up our minds beforehand, logically speaking, as a condition of making 
any act of faith at all. And when I say "make up our minds," I mean, not a 
mere decision of the will, but a satisfaction of the intellect. The 
existence of God, the authority of Christ, and so on, are beliefs which 
meet us and have to be dealt with before we get on to the act of faith at 
all; they are the preambles of faith, the motives of credibility. And we 
have to deal with them by a reasoning process, which throws the 
responsibility for our decision, not upon the authority of the Church, but 
upon our own private judgment. Every convert, when he goes under 
instruction, has to follow these arguments to the best of his ability. Nor 
is it only for the sake of converts that we insist upon this intellectual 
duty. A class in "apologetics" is part of the normal curriculum of a 
Catholic school. Catholic boys are learning to defend the existence of God 
at an age when you and I, reader, were dismally memorising facts abut the 
career of Jehoshaphat, and geshing our teeth on the South Galatian theory.

When you have contrived to persuade him that, for Catholics, the authority 
of the Church in matters of faith is not a self-evident axiom, but a truth 
arrived at by a process of argument, the Protestant controversialist has 
his retort ready. "You admit, then, after all," he says, "that a man has to 
use his own private judgment in order to arrive at religious truth? Why, 
then, what is the use of authority in religion at all? I had always 
supposed that there was a straight issue between us, you supporting 
authority and I private judgment; I had always supposed that you criticised 
me for my presumption in searching for God by the light of my imperfect 
human reason; it proves, now, that you are no less guilty of such 
presumption than myself! Surely your reproaches are inconsistent, and your 
distinctions unnecessary. If you use your private judgment to establish 
certain cardinal points of theology, the existence of God, the authority of 
Christ, and so on, why may not I use my private judgment to establish not 
only these, but all other points of theology--questions such as the 
doctrine of the Blessed Trinity, or the Real Presence in the Eucharist? You 
can hardly blame me for using the very privileges which you have just 
claimed so eagerly for yourself."

I could not have imagined, if I had not heard it with my own ears, the 
accent of surprise with which Protestants suddenly light upon this 
startling discovery, that the belief we Catholics have in authority is 
based upon an act of private judgment. How on earth could they ever suppose 
we taught otherwise? I say nothing here of the grace of faith, which is the 
hidden work of God in our souls. But how could the conscious process by 
which we arrive at any form of the truth begin without an act of private 
judgment? I may, indeed, overcome by a kind of emotional crisis, surrender 
myself unreflectively to an influence imaginatively experienced; but that 
is not Catholicism, it is Protestantism; it is "conversion" in its crudest 
form. If I employ my reason at all; if I employ my reason only so far as to 
say "The Church says this, and the Church is infallible, therefore this 
must be true," even so I am using private judgment; it is my own reason 
which draws its conclusions from the syllogism. Reject private judgment? Of 
course Catholics have never rejected private judgment; they only profess to 
delimit the spheres in which private judgment and authority have their 
respective parts to play.

Is it really so difficult to see that a revealed religion demands, from its 
very nature, a place for private judgment and a place for authority? A 
place for private judgment, in determining that the revelation itself comes 
from God, in discovering the Medium through which that revelation comes to 
us, and the rule of faith by which we are enabled to determine what is, and 
what is not, revealed. A place for authority to step in, when these 
preliminary investigations are over, and say "Now, be careful, for you are 
out of your depth here. How many Persons subsist in the Unity of the Divine 
Nature, what value and what power underlies the mystery of sacramental 
worship, how Divine Grace acts upon the human will--these and a hundred 
other questions are questions which your human reason cannot investigate 
for itself, and upon which it can pronounce no sentence, since it moves in 
the natural not in the supernatural order. At this point, then, you must 
begin to believe by hearsay; from this point onwards you must ask, not to 
be convinced, but to be taught." Is it really so illogical in us, to fix 
the point at which our private judgment is no longer of any service? Are we 
really more inconsistent than the bather who steps out cautiously through 
the shallow water and then, when it is breast-high, spreads out his hands 
to swim?

But there is a subtle and a more telling variation of the same argument. 
The strength of a chain, we are reminded is that of its weakest link. We 
Catholics profess to establish the truths of religion by a chain of 
argument; this chain, then, is no stronger than the weakest link in it. How 
is it that we profess to hold with absolute certitude the revealed truths 
of our religion? Reasonable enough to say that if your Church is 
infallible, the doctrines which she preaches are evidently true, and 
capable of producing absolute certitude in the mind. But the infallibility 
of your Church is not a self-evident axiom; it is a proposition which you 
have proved, and proved it by an appeal to ordinary human reason. Is it not 
clear, then, that in the last resort every statement which your Church 
makes rests upon the validity of the arguments by which, in the first 
instance, you proved your Church infallible? Now, these arguments, based as 
they are upon human reason, do not convey absolute certitude to the mind; 
they may be, in your view, overwhelmingly probable; nay, they may be 
certain with all human certainty; but human certainty is not absolute 
certainty. There is always a possible margin of error. You cannot prove the 
existence of God, the authority of Christ, or his commission to his Church, 
beyond all possibility of doubt; how then can you suppose that you have 
proved beyond all possibility of doubt the statements which you receive on 
the Church's authority?

To escape this dilemma, Catholic apologists have frequently used a metaphor 
which seems to me, I confess, singularly unfortunate. They tell us that the 
motives of credibility by which we establish the Divine origin of the 
Church, and her teaching office, are like the scaffolding which is put up 
while a building is being erected; once the building operations are 
complete, the scaffolding is unnecessary; it has served its turn, and we 
pay it no further attention. Now, theologically speaking, that metaphor 
will pass well enough; they mean that the true motive of our belief, seen 
on its supernatural side, is the infallible veracity of God in his 
revelation. But for purposes of apologetic, we shall employ such a metaphor 
in vain. Our critics will not be slow to point out that we erect a building 
inside the scaffolding, not on the top of the scaffolding; and if we did 
erect a building on the top of our scaffolding, we could not take the 
scaffolding away without letting the building fall to the ground. Our own 
parable has been turned against us.

It will be better to avoid the metaphor, and to keep in mind the 
distinction just mentioned. The motives of credibility, satisfying his 
intellect, bring the inquirer up to the point of making the act of faith. 
That act recognises God's authority in the Church's teaching; and the 
absolute nature of his authority does make all the difference to the kind 
of certitude with which, thenceforward, he holds the truths of Catholic 
doctrine. But this is inherent in the act of faith, not in the chain of 
proof by which the Catholic claim is established. Having made the act of 
faith, he cannot produce more or better arguments to convince his neighbour 
than he could have produced before. Apologetically, then, revealed truths 
have no higher certitude than the arguments by which the fact of revelation 
is established. The revealed proposition that there are Three Persons in 
the Blessed Trinity is not, apologetically, more certain than the statement 
(established in the first instance by private judgment) that our Lord left 
the charisma of infallibility to his Church.

The Catholic claim does not profess to be based on a mathematical 
certainty. The proposition "Things which are equal to the same thing are 
equal to one another" is evident in the sense that the contrary proposition 
is unthinkable. The proposition "Jesus of Nazareth suffered under Pontius 
Pilate" is not evident in that sense; the contrary proposition, in this 
case, does not defy our thought. In historical statements (and every 
revealed religion must depend, in the last resort, upon an historical 
statement) the highest kind of certainty you can attain is that which 
excludes reasonable doubt. That is the kind of proof which Catholicism 
claims for those preliminary considerations which it calls "the motives of 
credibility." And consequently no point of Catholic doctrine can claim 
anything better than this historical kind of proof. The absolute certainty 
with which we believe the teaching of the Church comes to us from the 
supernatural grace of faith, which transforms our reasoned conviction into 
a higher quality-- the water, as at Cana, is turned into wine. But for 
apologetic purposes a reasoned conviction is all we can offer to our 
neighbours; and it is this reasoned conviction which the present thesis 
attempts to maintain.

It will be observed that those Platonic admirers of the Catholic system 
whom I referred to in the last chapter-- the people who "wish they were 
Catholics" without having in fact any intention of becoming Catholics--are 
usually guilty of an utter misconception. They imagine that the Catholic 
Church is asking them to make a leap in the dark; and they feel, sometimes, 
as if they would like to make that leap, or rather, to have made it, 
because it would save them the trouble of any intellectual effort. If only 
they could be trepanned into the Church, if only they could be shanghaied 
on board the Ark of Peter, the passage would quite possibly (they feel) be 
a pleasant one. But the Church is not asking them to take any such sudden 
leap--will not allow them, in fact, to assume rights of membership until 
they have been through a course of intellectual instruction. It is their 
duty to satisfy their own minds, proportionately to their general level of 
mental culture, about God's existence, the authority of Christ, etc., 
before they can expect the grace of faith to come to them.

A full statement of Catholic belief may, of course, be made without 
entering into apologetic considerations at all. The question "What do you 
Catholics teach?" may be interpreted as a demand, inspired by enlightened 
curiosity, to have the revealed doctrines which we inculcate set forth in 
an orderly scheme. But the reader of such a document, unless he is himself 
a Catholic or at least a catechumen, holds these doctrines at arm's length 
as he considers them, regards them merely as an expose' of his neighbours' 
religious psychology; they have not, for him, the interest of an appeal or 
a challenge. I am fully conscious how difficult it is for anyone to make 
such an appeal, such a challenge successfully; fully conscious that my own 
qualifications for the task are at best those of an amateur, not those of a 
specialist. But I am writing in the hope, not merely of informing the 
reader, but of persuading him, or at least of contributing to that end. 
Consequently, I must take nothing for granted; I must adopt for my model 
the author whom Horace condemned for beginning his epic of Troy with the 
story of Leda's egg; I must assume that the reader has an open mind even on 
the question whether God exists or no.

I am the more encouraged to take this course by the fact that in our day 
many intelligent people who profess themselves Theists hold their beliefs 
precariously and unreflectively, without troubling to inquire what they 
involve; nay, that Christians themselves, from a lack of systematic 
instruction, often misconceive the Nature of the God whom their own 
theology preaches, and are half-way towards Pantheism without knowing it. 
It will do no harm to test each link in the chain of Christian apologetic, 
be the hand that wields the hammer never so unworkmanlike.


IV. THE GOD WHO HIDES HIMSELF

Philosophers have continually been exercised by the question whether our 
knowledge of God is a direct or a derived knowledge; whether the idea of 
God is in some way native to the mind, or whether we arrive at it through 
our knowledge of other things, his creatures. The mystical temperament, 
which has a strong influence on the outlook of Protestant theologians, is 
naturally disposed to claim, if the claim can in any way be justified, that 
our knowledge of God is direct. For it is the instinct of the mystic to 
reject as far as possible, all interference, all mediation, between God and 
the soul.

The simplest, the most plausible of all these theories is Traditionalism. 
As a matter of observation, it is plainly true that the origin from which 
your knowledge of God is derived, or mine, is the assurance given to us in 
infancy by our mothers or those who were responsible for our education. 
What if this should be not only the origin, but the justification of the 
concept? Adam, we must suppose, had in some way an experimental knowledge 
of God's existence. Did not he, in the strength of that knowledge, make 
Theists of his sons, and they of theirs, and so on down the whole series of 
history, until at last the information came to our mothers, and through 
them to us? The evidence we have, in that case, for the existence of God is 
a tradition, perpetuated through the long course of human history, and 
resting in the last resort on the testimony of men who had walked with God, 
who had had first-hand knowledge of the facts.

Or, failing that, there is a possible refuge in Fideism. After all, 
religion is concerned with the supernatural order, which altogether 
transcends ours; why should there not be a special, supernatural revelation 
to man which enables him to apprehend the existence of God; made, if you 
will, before he is yet old enough to be conscious of the fact? Is it not, 
perhaps, the best account we can give of this persistent human belief in a 
Deity, to suppose that there is a special faculty implanted in all of us at 
birth, but obscured in some of us by faults of training or of character, 
which apprehends God by a simple act, unintellectual because it is supra-
intellectual?

One philosopher at least, Descartes, would go further than this, and claim 
that for this purpose no supernatural revelation was needed. The thinking 
mind, according to his analysis, was primarily conscious of two clear and 
distinct ideas, itself and God. Outward things, the phenomena of sense, 
were only mirrored for it through the medium of its own consciousness; but 
the two facts of its own existence and God's were guaranteed to it 
antecedently to any reasoning whatsoever. At the very basis of all our 
thought lay the perception of a God who was responsible for implanting in 
us the ideas with which our thought is concerned; his non-existence was 
worse than unthinkable, it would destroy the very possibility of all 
knowledge. You must believe in God in order to believe in anything at all.

This was at the dawn of Idealism; but a theory not altogether dissimilar 
had found patronage even in the scholastic age--I mean the "Ontological 
proof" which is usually connected with the name of St. Anselm. The idea of 
God was necessarily one of supreme Perfection; it was impossible to 
associate the notion of any fault or defect with the idea of God. But the 
notion of non-existence is the notion of a fault or defect--indeed, a very 
considerable one. Therefore it is impossible to associate the notion of 
non-existence with the idea of God. Therefore it is unthinkable that God 
should not exist; therefore God exists.

This attempt to prove the existence of God, or to declare the proof of it 
unnecessary, without reference to the effects of his power which we 
experience in his visible creation, is a permanent temptation to the human 
mind. Intellects as far removed from one another as those of Anselm, 
Descartes, and de Bonald have umdertaken it, and it is probable that they 
will never lack successors. Protestant thought, in our day, is much wedded 
not to these but to similar speculations. Thus, you will seldom read any 
piece of non-Catholic apologetic without coming across some reference to 
man's sense of his need for God, or man's notion of holiness, a notion 
which can only be perfectly realised in God. The implication of all such 
language is that it is possible to argue directly from the existence of 
concepts in our own mind to the existence of real objects, to which those 
concepts correspond.

The Catholic Church discountenances all such methods of approach to the 
subject; some of them, at the Vatican Council, she has actually condemned. 
She discountenances them, at least, if and in so far as they claim to be 
the sole or the main argument for the existence of God. The main if not the 
sole, argument for the existence of God--so she holds, and has always held-
-is the argument which proves the Unseen from the seen, the existence of 
the Creator from his visible effects in Creation.

All these efforts at the solution of the problem really depend for their 
plausibility on a postulate which we do not grant--namely, that it would 
have been impossible for the human race to infer God's existence from his 
creatures. If this were true, then it might be argued that the notion of 
God must be an idea directly communicated to our minds. Such an argument is 
perfectly valid if applied to our sense of right and wrong; it must be 
native to the mind, because there is nothing outside ourselves which could 
possibly have suggested such a notion to us. But this is a simple idea, 
directly entertained, whereas the idea of God is a composite idea, and the 
attributes which we associate with it, power, wisdom, etc., are derived 
from our Own experience. "If there had been no God," said Napoleon, "it 
would have been necessary to invent him"--at least, we may say it would 
have been possible to invent him. Thus the fact that the idea of God is 
conceived by Our minds does not necessarily mean that it is inborn in us or 
that it is directly communicated to us by some supernatural light.

The supposition is an unnecessary one, and now, what has it to say for 
itself? If it were true, as Descartes held, that the idea of God was a 
clear and distinct idea, like that of our own existence, why is it that 
there are so few fools in the world who doubt their own existence, so many 
who say "there is no God"? If the existence of God was one of the first 
principles of all our mental process, then the contrary idea, that there is 
no God, should be unthinkable-- but is it unthinkable? People think it 
every day. "But at least," St. Anselm would retort, "it is impossible to 
think of an imperfect God, and therefore it is impossible to think of a 
non-existent God." To which the atheist replies with some justice that, 
since God does not exist, it is not necessary to think about him at all. 
You cannot argue from the ideal to the real order of things.

The apologist is on safer ground if he leaves the arena of philosophy 
altogether, and maintains that the notion of God, so far from being innate 
in our minds, is something supernaturally implanted in them by a kind of 
direct revelation. That some such revelation was made to our first parents, 
we have no ground for disputing; but it would need a robust faith in us to 
accept so momentous a doctrine on the remote authority of our first 
parents, even if popular science would give us leave to suppose that we had 
any. Can we really be certain that in so many centuries of transmission the 
revelation has remained intact--that the tale has not lost in the telling? 
On the other hand, Fideism would have us believe that such a direct 
revelation is made not once for all to the human race, but to each 
individual soul. Is it? The argument is surely one of those which admit of 
no refutation and produce no conviction. It is impossible to disprove the 
assertion that a direct revelation was made to us at a time of life from 
which no memories remain to us; but equally it is impossible to prove it. 
And if some other account can be given of the means by which the race or 
the individual arrives at the knowledge of God, surely this rather 
desperate hypothesis is best left in the limbo of mere conjecture.

I know there is a fashion amongst modern apologists to write as if man 
possessed a religious sense, comparable to his sense of music. This sense 
(so the argument runs) is most highly developed in the saint, the mystic, 
who is the real artist, the real connoisseur; in most men it is much less 
developed; in some it is hardly developed at all. Not that anyone (God 
forbid!) can be born absolutely tone-deaf to the airs of this heavenly 
music; but, through lack of development, the talent is nearly buried; there 
is no response, or practically no response, made by such a soul to the 
divine voice within. The spiritual man discerns spiritual things; he cannot 
explain to you what his experiences are, or even how he knows that they are 
real, any more than the musical expert can explain his emotional 
experiences to the mere groundling. But he knows; he has had an 
unmistakable experience of God's Presence; it does not become us, the 
ignorant amateurs, to dispute his judgment. We can only trust to his higher 
instincts; and hope that we, too, perhaps, may be privileged to hear now 
and again some echo of the strains that ravish him.

For the life of me I could never understand how far such authors mean their 
metaphor to be pressed. Is it really contended that we can argue from a 
state of mind to an objective reality which lies behind it? If a musical 
enthusiast, after listening to some rare but gay piece, should tell me that 
as he listened he could actually see elves and gnomes dancing before his 
eyes, I should be perfectly prepared to reverence both his own superior 
sensitiveness to musical impressions, and the subtle power of the art which 
could evoke such an imaginative experience. I should not suppose that elves 
or gnomes had been present, unseen to myself. And I confess that if I 
lacked the sense of religion quite so thoroughly as I lack that of music, 
the disclosures of the mystic would leave me in very much the same 
position, I might feel the mystic to be of a spiritual calibre infinitely 
superior to my own; I might bestow my admiration on those methods of 
contemplative prayer which enabled him to achieve his sense of a Divine 
Presence, his sense of Union. But I should not for that reason be inclined 
to believe in the objective existence of God, his Angels, or his Saints, if 
I did not share those beliefs already.

I do not know if I am wholly removed from the generality of mankind in 
holding such sentiments; but this type of argument seems to me both 
logically unsound and theologically perilous. And the nerve of the fallacy 
lies, I think, in the use of the word "experience." When we are asked to 
let ourselves be guided by the experiences of another in matters of common 
human importance, we acquiesce (if we do acquiesce) because the experiences 
in question are such as might have fallen to our lot instead of his; we 
have eyes, ears, and the other senses corresponding to his. And we can take 
the measure of his faculties from our own; if he says he saw a thing, we 
can relate that to our own experience of sight; if he says he heard a 
thing, we can relate it to our own sense of hearing. But if a man talks to 
us of "experiences" in which the faculties of outward sensation played no 
part, we are no longer in a position to sample those experiences for 
ourselves by proxy; we have no apparatus for sharing them with him. Where 
an experience of the outward senses is concerned, we are ready, from the 
analogy of our own experience, to believe that there was "something there." 
But when the alleged experience has been apprehended through the use of 
spiritual faculties which we either do not possess or do not use, our 
confidence in the "something there" necessarily evaporates. Which is, I 
suppose, why the Church tells us that a private revelation may be such as 
to demand credence from the soul which experiences it, but can never, of 
itself, demand credence from other people.

Nevertheless the moderns, in their desire for an easy short cut to the 
proof of God's existence, are learning to rest more and more weight on this 
tenuous argument--as I think, fatally. In the same way, they press for more 
than it is worth the argument, impressive enough in itself, that, when all 
is said and done, most people do believe in God. Buddhism, Hinduism, 
paganism have at least theologies of their own; Jewry and Islam 
acknowledge, no less than Christendom, one God who is both transcendent and 
omnipotent. In England itself, for all the decline of official Christianity 
which we were considering three chapters back, how much is there of 
positive atheism? Nor is the appeal to history less impressive; with a 
thousand strange vagaries of presentation, humanity has nearly always, 
nearly everywhere, attested its belief in the existence of unseen Powers; 
atheism nearly always, nearly everywhere, has been the reaction of a 
minority, a protest defying the popular instinct. Must there not, argues 
the apologist, be something in this popular certainty? Have we not been 
taught to remember that there is no smoke without fire? We can hardly 
account for this vast conspiracy of mankind, determined to bow down before 
some august Power, conceived as intelligent and present to the worshipper; 
we can hardly account for the satisfaction of man's highest instincts 
through such commerce with the Unseen, except on the supposition (which, 
after all, cannot be disproved) that the God so worshipped under a thousand 
forms and in a thousand manners does really exist.

This contention, put in its most naked form, means that each of us ought to 
believe in God because all the others do--an arrangement not differing much 
in principle from the economics of that famous country, whose inhabitants 
lived by taking in one another's washing. Once more we must insist, you 
cannot argue from a mere state of mind to an objective reality which that 
state of mind appears to presuppose. If indeed there were no way of 
accounting for this strange idea having got into so many people's heads, 
then the mere fact of its prevalence might make us suspect that there was 
something in it. But, as we shall see presently, it is possible to give 
some account of how the idea of God comes into men's minds. Or again, if 
each human being independently discovered the idea of God for himself, we 
might hesitate to ascribe the phenomenon to mere coincidence, But the 
doctrine of God's existence is one that is taught to childhood, one that is 
often bound up, superstitiously, with national hopes, with social 
ordinances. Even if there were no God, it is probable enough that many 
people would believe in his existence; it would not be more Surprising than 
the belief in luck, for example, or the belief in omens.

No, the true lesson of this widespread and obstinate Theism among our 
fellow-men is a slightly different one. The fact that so many men believe 
in a God ought to set us wondering whether there are not, perhaps, reasons 
for such a belief, to which we have not hitherto devoted sufficient 
attention; or perhaps reasons which we scorned to look into, because we had 
vaguely been given to understand that they were out of date and 
unfashionable. Mankind's belief in God is a rebuke to, and a condemnation 
of, the careless atheist. For it is the height of rashness or of pride to 
assume without investigation that so large a part of the race is giving 
credit to an illusion, for the existence of which no rational grounds can 
be assigned.

In a word, the existence of religion is a challenge to us to consider 
eagerly whether there are not grounds for believing in God's existence, 
philosophical grounds which will be as cogent for us as they have been for 
others. When I say "philosophical," I do not mean that it is the duty of 
the bushman or of the charcoal-burner to go through a series of carefully-
arranged scholastic syllogisms. I mean that there exists among mankind a 
sort of rough, commonsense metaphysic which demands as its first postulate 
the existence of a divine principle in things. It can be refined, it can be 
reduced to terms, by the nice ratiocinations of the philosopher; it is 
equally valid (we hold) whether as it presents itself to the charcoal-
burner or as it presents itself to the sage.

The schoolmen, whose method has left its stamp upon all subsequent Catholic 
apologetics, distinguished five avenues of approach by which we infer, from 
the conditions of our outward experience, the existence of a God.

(i.) In all motion, or rather, as we should say, in all change, you can 
separate two elements, active and passive, that which is changed and that 
which changes it. But, in our experience, the agent in such change is not 
self-determined, but determined in its turn by some higher agent. Can this 
process go on ad infinitum? No, for an infinite series of agents, none of 
them self-determined, would not give us the finality which thought demands; 
there must be, at the beginning of the series, however long, an Agent who 
is self-determined, who is the ultimate Agent in the whole cycle of changes 
that proceeds from him.

(ii.) Similarly, in our experience every event is determined by a cause. 
But that cause in its turn is itself an event determined by a cause. An 
infinite series of causes would give no explanation of how the causation 
ever began. There must therefore be an uncaused Cause, which is the 
ultimate Cause of the whole nexus of events which proceeds from it.

(iii.) In our experience, we find nothing which exists in its own right; 
everything depends for its existence on something else. This is plain in 
the case of the organised individual; for plants, animals, etc., are born, 
live, and die; that is to say, their existence is only contingent, not 
necessary-- it depends on conditions outside itself. Now, although the 
whole sum of matter does not, in our experience, increase or diminish, we 
cannot think of it as existing necessarily-- it is just there. Its 
existence, then, must depend on something outside itself--something which 
exists necessarily, of its own right. That Something we call God.

(iv.) In our experience, there are various degrees of natural perfection. 
But the existence of the good and the better implies the existence of a 
Best; for (according to Plato's system of thought) this Best is itself the 
cause and the explanation of all good. But this Best is not found in our 
earthly experience, therefore it must lie beyond our earthly experience; 
and it is this Best which we call God.

(v.) Everywhere in Nature we observe the effects of order and system. If 
blind chance ruled everything, this prevalence of order would be 
inexplicable; it would be a stupendous coincidence. Order can only be 
conceived as the expression of a Mind; and, though our mind appreciates the 
existence of order in the world, it is not our mind which has introduced it 
there. There must therefore exist outside our experience, a Mind of which 
this order is the expression; and that Mind we call God.

It is often objected that this analysis of the facts is unnecessarily 
itemised; it repeats the same argument under different forms. For the 
purposes of the plain man, it may perhaps be admitted that the first three 
of these arguments are not readily distinguishable. He apprehends God in 
his Creation, first as all-powerful and the source of all power (i., ii., 
and iii.); then as all-good and the source of all goodness (iv.); then as 
all-wise and the source of all wisdom (v.). For all the changes that have 
swept over Europe since the twelfth century, he has not been bullied out of 
his conviction.

It is true, the little books of popular science which he reads in his comer 
of the railway train, talk as if all this process of thought were 
antiquated; as if something had happened in the meantime which made 
Creation self-explanatory without the postulate of a Creator. Their 
cocksure implications affect him like briers that flick a man across the 
face without turning him aside from his direction. They tell him that 
matter is indestructible, not elucidating their meaning, which is that Man 
is incapable of destroying it; but even so he will not believe that matter 
has existed, for no particular reason, from all eternity; or that, stranger 
still, it brought itself into existence. They write of Force with a capital 
F, or Energy with a capital E, as if we had somehow managed to deify those 
conceptions, But he knows that whereas motion is a fact that can be 
observed, force is a concept with which he is only acquainted through his 
experience as a living creature; it is a function of life, and the forces 
of Nature (as they are called), over which neither man nor beast exercises 
any control, must be functions of a Life which is outside experience 
itself. They write as if Science had made the problem of existence simpler 
by explaining the causes of things hitherto unexplained--by showing us that 
disease is due to the action of microbes, or that lightning comes from the 
electricity in the atmosphere. But he knows that all this only puts the 
question a stage further back; that he is still at liberty to ask what 
caused the microbes, what caused the electricity. The thought of an 
infinite series, whether of causes or of agents, is no more attractive to 
him than to St. Thomas.

Of course, it is possible to avoid all these speculations with a bovine 
murmur of "I don't know nothing about that." But this is to give up the 
riddle, and to give it up, not because you cannot find the answer, but 
because you have found the answer, and have found it to be unpalatable. The 
lines of our experience, even in the natural world outside us, converge 
towards one point, presuppose a Creator who has necessary existence, a 
Prime Mover, a First Cause. But the created universe points to the 
existence not merely of an uncreated Power, but of an uncreated Mind.

This argument from the order and systems to be found in Creation is not 
synonymous with the argument from design; the argument from design, in the 
narrow sense, is a department or application of the main thesis. Design 
implies the adaptation of means to ends; and it used to be confidently 
urged that there was one end which the Creator clearly had in view, the 
preservation of species, and one plain proof of his purposive working, 
namely, the nice proportion between the instincts or endowments of the 
various animal species and the environment in which they had to live. The 
warm coats of the Arctic animals, the differences of strength, speed, and 
cunning which enable the hunter and the hunted to live together without the 
extermination of either--these would be instances in point; modem 
researches have given us still more salient instances of the same 
principle, such as the protective mimicry which renders a butterfly or a 
nest of eggs indistinguishable from its surroundings. Was it not a Mind 
which had so proportioned means to ends?

The argument was a dangerous one, so stated. It took no account of the 
animal species which have in fact become extinct; it presupposed, also, the 
fixity of animal types. God's mercy, doubtless, is over all his works, but 
we are in no position to apply teleological criticism to its exercise, and 
to decide on what principle the wart-hog has survived while the dodo has 
become extinct. In this precise form, then, the argument from order has 
suffered badly. But the argument from order, as the schoolmen conceived it, 
was and is a much wider and less questionable consideration. It is not 
merely in the adaptation of means to ends, but in the reign of law 
throughout the whole field of Nature, that we find evidence of a creative 
Intelligence. By a curious trick of human vanity, we describe a newly-
discovered principle in Nature as So-and-so's Law, Boyle's, or Newton's, or 
Tyndall's, as if the discoverer were himself the legislator. I am not 
grudging honour to the pioneers of research, I am only commenting on an 
oddity of phrase. Surely, when a thing is unexpectedly found, we 
congratulate the person who has found it, but our next question is 
inevitably, "Who put it there?" And, if there are laws in Nature to be 
discovered, it is but natural to ask the same question, "Who put them 
there?" If it needs a mind to discover them, did it not need a Mind to 
devise them? If the whole of our experience is not a phantasmagoria of 
unrelated facts, if water does not flow uphill, and gases do not double in 
volume when the pressure on them is doubled, who was it willed that the 
thing should be so? Not we assuredly; not Boyle, not Newton. Not blind 
Chance, for there is a limit to coincidence. Not "Nature," for there is no 
such person; she is only an abstraction. What hypothesis is left to us 
except that of an ordering Mind? Instinctively we speak of a law when we 
find a natural principle; and have we no right to argue from a law to a 
Legislator?

I know that to superior persons all this will sound very naive. But it is 
easy to suspect simplicity in your opponents mind, when the simplicity 
really lies in the facts. There are thoughts so obvious that we are apt not 
to reflect upon them, so familiar that we are in danger of forgetting them.

So far we have been dealing with the evidences for God's existence which 
are concerned with outward nature, not with the inner life of man. The 
argument from perfection adduced by the schoolmen is not the modern 
argument from moral perfection. The plain man would probably conceive the 
relations between God and man in the moral sphere with more of directness, 
more of concreteness. He would tell us that the voice of conscience was a 
voice not his own; whose then can it be, if it be not Divine? Or he would 
tell us, in Kant's vein, that the sense of moral duty is the sense of an 
obligation imposed upon us by a sovereignty outside ourselves--whose 
sovereignty, if not God's? Or he would tell us that the sense of 
compunction which he feels when he has done wrong is not to be explained 
away as mere disappointment with himself; it carries with it the sense that 
he has defied a power above himself--whose power, if it be not God's? To 
each his own appeal; there is little need to dwell on this side of the 
argument for probably everyone who has the least hankerings after Theism 
feels the force of it in one form or another. Otherwise I would ask space 
to argue that the scholastic form of it has a special value, as the truest 
both to the philosophic and to the devotional instinct.

I have made no attempt in this chapter to deal with the objections which 
will present themselves to minds influenced by the more intimate doubts of 
Idealism. I have been forced to assume, what the schoolmen assumed, and 
most ordinary people assume, that our thought is an instrument adequate to 
the cognition of objective reality. Still less have I attempted to 
anticipate the rejoiners of the Pragmatist--who, it seems to me, above all 
men should wish to be a Catholic, and above all men will find it difficult 
to become one. I have merely indicated the course which Catholic apologetic 
takes in this fundamental matter, trusting that the inquirer, if his doubts 
begin so early in the process, will find access to more lucid and more 
copious expositions than mine.


V. THE CATHOLIC NOTION OF GOD

If the arguments adduced in the foregoing chapter are valid, they commit us 
not only to a belief in the Existence of God, but to certain views as to 
his Nature. I do not mean to discuss or even enumerate here, as a text-book 
of theology would, the various Attributes of God, for fear of unduly 
crowding the canvas. It is enough for our present purposes to insist that 
the God who is postulated by a consideration of his works in Nature must be 
a transcendent God, an omnipotent God, and a personal God. The very nerve 
of our contention is that the material world which meets us in our 
experience does not provide the explanation of its own existence, or of the 
forces which control it, or of the laws which govern it, that the 
explanation, consequently, must be looked for in something that is outside 
and beyond itself. Our thought can only be satisfied by the existence of 
some necessary Being, to which all this contingent existence around us, the 
world of creation, is secondary, and upon which it depends.

Upon which, or rather, upon whom. We must always explain the lower in terms 
of the higher, not the higher in terms of the lower. And the highest form 
of existence of which we have any experience is Spirit. Man finds himself 
possessed of this apparently unique privilege, that he can become the 
object of his own thought. He can focus his attention, not merely upon 
things outside himself, but upon himself the thinker, upon himself 
thinking. Adam must have had many strange experiences when he woke in 
Paradise, but none stranger than that of meeting himself. The difference 
between this self-consciousness and mere consciousness is as real, as 
vital, as the difference between consciousness itself and mere life, or the 
difference between life and mere existence. This spiritual principle, this 
self-conscious life within man, is not accounted for (still less explained) 
by his needs as a mere citizen of the natural creation. It is something 
altogether outside the scheme of ordinary organic life; it exists for its 
own sake, and must therefore be regarded as a higher order of existence. It 
is to this higher order of existence, naturally, that he refers that 
highest of all possible existences which he calls by the name of God.

It has been a favourite taunt of the unbeliever, from Xenophanes down to 
Rupert Brooke, that if horses had conceived of theology, they would have 
imagined God like themselves, if fishes had invented a theology, they would 
have imagined God like themselves. The criticism is one of those which miss 
the mark so completely as to provide their own refutation. For the fact is 
that man is superior to horses and fishes in one point, namely, his self-
consciousness, his spiritual life; and it is precisely in virtue of that 
spiritual quality, and of that alone, that he has dared to conceive of God 
as like to himself. He conceives of God not as a Big Man, but as a Great 
Spirit, lacking precisely those features of inferiority which link man, in 
his dual nature, to the brutes. Man's soul, which in memory, in intellect, 
and in will stands outside of and superior to the accidents of his 
mortality, is the only mirror he finds in Nature of that pure Act, that 
tireless Energy which is God.

And if God be Spirit, then he is a personal God. For all our experience of 
spirit, all our evidence for its existence, rests upon the first-hand 
consciousness which each man has of himself, and second-hand indications 
which point to the existence of a similar consciousness in his neighbour. 
Each spirit, as it is given to us in our experience, is a lonely point of 
conscious existence. Matter, as we know it, may enter into various 
combinations and assume various forms; we do not meet with spirit, we only 
meet with spirits. And the notion that God is, not a Spirit, but the 
totality of existing spirits and nothing more; the notion that he is Spirit 
and not a Spirit, is pure mythology. It overlooks that individuality, that 
incommunicableness, which belongs to all spirits in our experience. It is 
not suggested, of course, that the Being who created us is subject to all 
the limitations which our minds may happen to associate with the word 
"personality." But in thinking of God as a Spirit, we cannot rule out the 
idea of conscious individuality; for that idea is essential to our whole 
conception of a spiritual nature.

We must not conceal from ourselves the fact that in so defining the Nature 
of God as transcendent, omnipotent, and personal, we have parted company 
with a great number of the more religiously affected of mankind. We have 
said nothing, so far, which could not be echoed by a Jew or by a 
Mohammedan. But we have quarrelled, already, with that pantheistic 
conception of the Divine Being which has had such a profound influence on 
other religions of the East.

The vice of Pantheism is that its theology takes Life, not Spirit, as its 
point of departure. Dichotomising the world (wrongly) into matter and life, 
the Pantheist assumes that the animal organism is the mirror of the 
universe. As, in the animal, matter finds a principle of life to organise 
it, so the whole sum of matter in existence must have a Life to organise 
it, a Life which is the summing up of all the life (vegetable or animal) 
which exists. This Life is God; God is to the world what the soul (in the 
widest sense) is to the body. Thus, on the one hand, the Pantheist theology 
contrives to give an explanation of existence which is no explanation at 
all; for the totality of our experience plus a World-Soul does not, by 
reason of the addition, provide any account of how or why it came into 
existence. And on the other hand it encumbers our thought with the concept 
of a God who is no God; who is, indeed, but an abstraction, as animal life 
divorced from matter is an abstraction; who can neither affect our 
destinies, nor prescribe our conduct, nor claim our worship; impotent, 
unmoral, and only demanding by courtesy the typographical compliment of a 
capital G.

So sharply is the God whom we Catholics worship--we Catholics, with the 
Jews and the Mohammedans--divided from the notion of deity which has 
syncretised, spiritualised, or superseded the many-headed monsters of the 
pagan East. Is the God of modern Protestantism so clearly marked off from 
his Oriental counterpart? I confess that I entertain acute and growing 
misgivings on this point. The tendency of Protestantism, as I suggested in 
the last chapter, is to find its evidence of God's existence rather in some 
supposed instinct or intuition than in any inference from premises grounded 
in experience. But such methods of proof, even granted their validity, 
would only warrant us in accepting the fact of his existence, without 
telling us anything about his Nature. Most men believe in God; yes, but 
then a very large percentage of them are Pantheists of one shade or 
another; the common belief of mankind does not, then, proclaim the 
existence of a Deity who is transcendent. There is in man's nature an itch 
for worship, an instinct for religion; yes, but what sort of religion? Why 
should not Buddhism (for example) satisfy the craving? Mystics have had 
direct experience of God's Presence; it behoves us, then, to trust their 
experience rather than our own earthbound imaginations--yes, but which 
mystics? The Christian or the Buddhist mystics? Unless we are prepared to 
fall back on the doctrine of Descartes and Berkeley, who would make God 
immediately responsible for those ideas through which alone we come in 
contact with any outside reality, it seems to me that all "direct" proofs 
of God's existence yield only a blank formula, which we have no 
intellectual apparatus for filling in.

What kind of God, then, does Protestantism mean to propose for our worship? 
Our Idealist philosophers, still mournfully chewing the cud of Hegelianism, 
have no assurance to offer, either that God is omnipotent, or in what sense 
he is personal. There remains only the moral argument to distinguish 
Protestantism in its more adventurous forms from the cruder forms of 
Pantheism. Doubtless it will always be held, at least in the Western 
Hemisphere, that the Supreme Being, however conceived, must be the summing-
up of all those aspirations towards goodness which our own moral experience 
teaches us to indulge. But is such a God necessarily the Judge of living 
and dead? Is it permissible to pray to him, in the sense of asking for 
favours which he can grant? Has he the Attributes of the God whom Jesus of 
Nazareth preached, and claimed, apparently, to reveal? Surely it is time 
that Protestant theologians should consider seriously the very fundamentals 
of their thought; and this question not least, What do we know of God's 
Nature; and on what basis of thought does that knowledge rest? For in this 
matter the ideas of their half-hearted supporters are lamentably 
incoherent; and such hesitation may easily lend a handle, before long, to 
the propaganda of Theosophy.

The doctrine of God's Omnipotence carries with it a further admission which 
will be of considerable importance in succeeding chapters--I mean, the 
permanent possibility of miracle. If the laws of the natural creation are 
not an expression of God's Nature, as the Pantheist would hold, but merely 
of his Will, it follows that he is at liberty, if he will, to suspend their 
action; or rather, to supersede their action by that of higher laws which 
have not been made known to us. It is only reasonable--would that it were 
as common as it is reasonable!to have a clear notion as to the possibility 
of miracles happening, before we come to estimate the evidence, debatable 
in itself as all historical evidence must be, which claims that miracles 
have actually occurred in history.

A century and a half ago, it would have been necessary to investigate 
carefully, in this connection, the philosophic system known as Deism. It 
was but natural that the triumphs of mechanical science in the eighteenth 
century should impose on men's minds the idea of mechanism; it was but 
natural that the Christian apologetic of the period should reflect this 
idea in its turn. Deism asserts strongly the first two scholastic proofs of 
God's existence, while neglecting the third. If we think of God merely as 
the First Cause and the Prime Mover, it is not necessary to think of him as 
influencing the course of the natural Creation here and now You may think 
of him, instead, at some moment in the infinitely remote past, fashioning a 
world, giving it laws, physical and biological, to guide its movements, and 
then turning it adrift, like a ship with its tiller lashed, to reach its 
inevitable and foreseen destiny. Paley's metaphor of the watch once for all 
wound up is, of course, the classic illustration of this Deist conception. 
It represents God as having made the universe, but not as guiding it from 
moment to moment, still less as actually holding it in being. Such a system 
was considerably embarrassed to find room for the possibility of miracle. 
To intrude miracle upon cosmos so governed would have been to put a spoke 
in the wheels of the machine, with consequences fatally disturbing to the 
scheme of the whole.

Deism, nowadays, is cited only as a vagary of the past; it has few, if any, 
living supporters. It is hardly necessary then, to remind the reader that 
laws do not carry themselves out; they are principles which need an 
executive to enforce them; and to conceive the laws of Nature as acting on 
their own initiative, independently of God's concurrence, is to personify 
those laws, if not actually to deify them. The Catholic notion of God's 
relation to the universe is summed up once for all in our Lord's statement 
that no sparrow can fall to the ground without our Heavenly Father; there 
can be no event, however insignificant, however apparently fortuitous, 
however cruel in its bearing on the individual, which does not demand, here 
and now, the concurrence of the Divine Power. I do not mean that Catholic 
thought bases this belief on our Lord's utterance; it belongs to natural, 
not to revealed theology. God alone exists necessarily; our existence is 
contingent, depends, that is to say, from moment to moment upon an exercise 
of his will, he has not left the reins, he has not lashed the tiller; he 
works not by means of the laws, but only according to the laws, which he 
has laid down for himself in determining the governance of his creatures.

It will easily be seen that, once this view of the Divine economy is 
grasped, there can be no further talk of ruling out miracles on the ground 
of impossibility. It is still open to the objector to say that it would be 
inconsistent with our idea of God's dignity to imagine him as interfering 
with his own laws; or that it would be a criticism on those laws themselves 
to suppose they could ever need to be suspended in favour of an individual 
need. Such objections we shall have to meet later; for the present, it is 
enough to point out that miracles, so far as their possibility is 
concerned, do fit into the scheme of things. Indeed, to describe God as 
Almighty is to admit that miracles are possible. The difficulty, it may 
even be said, for our human imaginations is to understand the fall of the 
sparrow rather than to understand the feeding of the Five Thousand. For in 
the fall of the sparrow, as in the feeding of the multitude, the Divine 
Power is at work; only in this case the concurrence of God as the Primary 
Cause with those secondary "causes," which we are apt to imagine as 
complete in themselves, is a thing as baffling to the imagination as it is 
necessary to thought.

We have been considering only the first article of the Creed which 
Catholics and Protestants alike recognise, "I believe in God the Father 
Almighty." It will be seen that the outline of the Catholic system is 
already beginning to take shape on the canvas; it begins already to stand 
out in relief, not only as against the pantheistic religions of the East, 
never attractive to our fellow-countrymen, but against much vagueness and 
indecision which is to be read or to be suspected in non-Catholic works of 
theology. It is not that Protestantism, in its official formularies, finds 
or has ever found cause of disagreement with us in such fundamental matters 
as these. But I shall be very much surprised if the arguments which I have 
adduced, and the conclusions I have inferred from them, in this and the 
preceding chapter, do not cause some of my clerical critics to hold up 
their hands already at the intransigence, the medievalism of the thought 
which is here represented. The Catholic notion of God ought not to be 
distinct from the Protestant notion of God, but I fear that in practice a 
shadow of difference is already discernible between them. If this is so, it 
must be attributed, first, to the departmentalism, the absence of system, 
which reigns among non-Catholic theologians; partly to the spirit of 
unauthorised adventure which makes them start out gaily in pursuit of some 
novel thesis; partly to the extreme incuriosity with which the average 
worshipper regards all details of doctrine. I wish I could think that my 
estimate of the situation was exaggerated, and my forebodings of the future 
a scruple.


VI. THE SEED-GROUND OF REVELATION

It would be wholly preposterous to approach the next stage in the argument 
for Catholicism--I mean the emergence of the Christian revelation--without 
paying some attention to the Providential history (so we reckon it) of the 
Jewish people. Circumstances have not been wanting to bring Judaism and 
Christendom into conflict; and the scars of that conflict remain. But 
Judaism and Catholicism have subtle qualities in common; and I fancy that a 
Jewish convert enters the Church more naturally and more simply than a 
Protestant would, he has less of prejudice and of scruple to live down; his 
new beliefs are a continuation rather than a correction of the old. And 
small wonder; for the foundation upon which Christian thought is based is 
not mere Theism, but Theism cast in a particular mould by the influence of 
Jewish thought.

We must not, of course, at this stage in the proceedings, talk of Old 
Testament literature as if it possessed any quality of inspiration, in the 
ecclesiastical sense of the term. That admission will be made much later 
on, for it is an admission which we accept only on the authority of the 
Church. For the present, we must accord to the Old Testament only that 
relative and guarded confidence which we should accord to Herodotus or to 
Livy. Nor do I propose to write here as if any certainty had yet been 
attained as to the dates at which the various Old Testament books were 
compiled A century of irresponsible criticism, conducted on both sides of 
the North Sea by a handful of confident scholars, has reached various 
"conclusions" on this point which will quite certainly have to be revised 
before long. It has been their favourite doctrine that most of the 
Pentateuch instead of dating from Moses, comes down to us from the time of 
the Babylonian captivity, i.e., is not much older than 500 B.C. Yet the 
Samaritans, whose traditions are certainly pre-Exilic, hold the Pentateuch 
in no less reverence than their Jewish rivals. In fact, we have to suppose 
that the forgers who produced the Pentateuch, not only passed off their 
fraud upon the Jewish public, but actually secured recognition for it from 
the intensely hostile and intensely conservative population of Samaria. A 
layman may be pardoned for feeling that such criticism as this is pure 
mythology. But, in view of the uncertainties which are prevalent, I mean to 
give here some estimate of the Jewish religious standpoint as a whole, 
without distinguishing the various alleged strata in the deposit, or 
claiming for the whole any very remote antiquity.

It will be noticed that the Jews, actuated by what they considered to be a 
Divine revelation, seem to have taken precisely that view of the Divine 
Nature which is, we have hitherto argued, the most rational view of it; 
they thought of God as an almighty, a transcendent, and a personal God. 
Poetry, and especially the poetry of Nature, gravitates at all times 
towards Pantheism; yet the Jewish writers, with the strongest possible 
appreciation of Nature, at least in her wilder moods, never failed to argue 
back from the phenomena which they saw to the creative Power which produced 
them. Heaven was God's throne, earth his footstool; the day and the night 
were his couriers; it was the voice of the Lord that made the hinds to 
bring forth young, and shook the cedars of Libanus; in the permanence of 
the everlasting hills, in the strength of Leviathan, in the lion roaring 
after his prey, or the birds nesting in the trees, Jewish poetry could read 
but one lesson, repeated almost to monotony--the greatness of the Power to 
which all these effects were due. Their Palestinian neighbours were 
heathens, who saw in the yearly process of sun, rain, harvest, and vintage 
the influence of occult spiritual influences; yet the Jews never lost the 
sense, bred in them by their desert training, of a God infinitely remote, 
yet active in every fortune of man's life and in every phase of his natural 
surroundings.

It has, indeed, been sugge