"You Catholics," he tells us, "are far too hard on sin and not nearly
indulgent enough towards poor human nature. Let me take as an instance
the sins of the flesh. Now here is a set of desires implanted by God or
Nature (as you choose to name the Power behind life) for wise and
indeed essential purposes. These desires are probably the very fiercest
known to man and certainly the most alluring; and human nature is, as we
know, an extraordinarily inconsistent and vacillating thing. Now I am
aware that the abuse of these passions leads to disaster and that Nature
has her inexorable laws and penalties; but you Catholics add a new
horror to life by an absurd and irrational insistence on the offence
that this abuse causes before God. For not only do you fiercely denounce
the "acts of sin," as you name them, but you presume to go deeper still
to the very desire itself, as it would seem. You are unpractical and
cruel enough to say that the very thought of sin deliberately
entertained can cut off the soul that indulges in it from the favour of
God.
"Or, to go further, consider the impossible ideals which you hold up
with regard to matrimony. These ideals have a certain beauty of their
own to persons who can embrace them; they may perhaps be, to use a
Catholic phrase, Counsels of Perfection; but it is merely ludicrous to
insist upon them as rules of conduct for all mankind. Human Nature is
human nature. You cannot bind the many by the dreams of the few.
"Or, to take a wider view altogether, consider the general standards you
hold up to us in the lives of your saints. These saints appear to the
ordinary common-place man as simply not admirable at all. It does not
seem to us admirable that St. Aloysius should scarcely lift his eyes
from the ground, or that St. Teresa should shut herself up in a cell, or
that St. Francis should scourge himself with briers for fear of
committing sin. That kind of attitude is too fantastically fastidious
altogether. You Catholics seem to aim at a standard that is simply not
desirable; both your ends and your methods are equally inhuman and
equally unsuitable for the world we have to live in. True religion is
surely something far more sensible than this; true religion should not
strain and strive after the impossible, should not seek to improve human
nature by a process of mutilation. You have excellent aims in some
respects and excellent methods in others, but in supreme demands you go
beyond the mark altogether. We Pagans neither agree with your morality
nor admire those whom you claim as your successes. If you were less holy
and more natural, less idealistic and more practical, you would be of a
greater service to the world which you desire to help. Religion should
be a sturdy, virile growth; not the delicate hot-house blossom which you
make it."
The second charge comes from the Puritan. "Catholicism is not holy
enough to be the Church of Jesus Christ; for see how terribly easy she
is to those who outrage and _crucify Him afresh!_ Perhaps it may not be
true after all, as we used to think, that the Catholic priest actually
gives leave to his penitents to commit sin; but the extraordinary ease
with which absolution is given comes very nearly to the same thing. So
far from this Church having elevated the human race, she has actually
lowered its standards by her attitude towards those of her children who
disobey God's Laws.
"And consider what some of these children of hers have been! Are there
any criminals in history so monumental as Catholic criminals? Have any
men ever fallen so low as, let us say, the Borgia family of the Middle
Ages, as Gilles de Rais and a score of others, as men and women who were
perhaps in their faith 'good Catholics' enough, yet in their lives a
mere disgrace to humanity? Look at the Latin countries with their
passionate records of crime, at the sexual immorality of France or
Spain; the turbulence and thriftlessness of Ireland, the ignorant
brutality of Catholic England. Are there any other denominations of
Christendom that exhibit such deplorable specimens as the runaway nuns,
the apostate priests, the vicious Popes of Catholicism? How is it that
tales are told of the iniquities of Catholicism such as are told of no
other of the sects of Christendom? Allow for all the exaggeration you
like, all the prejudice of historians, all the spitefulness of enemies,
yet there surely remains sufficient Catholic criminality to show that at
the best the Church is no better than any other religious body, and at
the worst, infinitely worse. The Catholic Church, then, is not holy
enough to be the Church of Jesus Christ."
II. When we turn to the Gospels we find that these two charges are, as a
matter of fact, precisely among those which were brought against our
Divine Lord.
First, undoubtedly, He was hated for His Holiness. Who can doubt that
the terrific standard of morality which He preached--the Catholic
preaching of which also is one of the charges of the Pagan--was a
principal cause of His rejection. For it was He, after all, who first
proclaimed that the laws of God bind not only action but thought; it was
He who first pronounced that man to be a murderer and an adulterer who
in his heart willed these sins; it was He who summed up the standard of
Christianity as a standard of perfection, _Be you perfect, as your
Father in Heaven is perfect;_ who bade men aspire to be as good as God!
It was His Holiness, then, that first drew on Him the hostility of the
world--that radiant white-hot sanctity in which His Sacred Humanity went
clothed. _Which of you convinceth me of sin?... Let him that is without
sin amongst you cast the first stone at her!_ These were words that
pierced the smooth formalism of the Scribe and the Pharisee and awoke an
undying hatred. It was this, surely, that led up irresistibly to the
final rejection of Him at the bar of Pilate and the choice of Barabbas
in His place. "_Not this man!_ not this piece of stainless Perfection!
Not this Sanctity that reveals all hearts, _but Barabbas_, that
comfortable sinner so like ourselves! This robber in whose company we
feel at ease! This murderer whose life, at any rate, is in no
reproachful contrast to our own!" Jesus Christ was found too holy for
the world.
But He was found, too, not holy enough. And it is this explicit charge
that is brought against Him again and again. It was dreadful to those
keepers of the Law that this Preacher of Righteousness should sit with
publicans and sinners; that this Prophet should allow such a woman as
Magdalen to touch Him. If this man were indeed a Prophet, He could not
bear the contact of sinners; if He were indeed zealous for God's
Kingdom, He could not suffer the presence of so many who were its
enemies. Yet He sits there at Zacchaeus' table, silent and smiling,
instead of crying on the roof to fall in; He calls Matthew from the
tax-office instead of blasting him and it together; He handles the leper
whom God's own Law pronounces unclean.
III. These, then, are the charges brought against the disciples of
Christ, as against the Master, and it is undeniable that there is truth
in them both.
It is true that the Catholic Church preaches a morality that is utterly
beyond the reach of human nature left to itself; that her standards are
standards of perfection, and that she prefers even the lowest rung of
the supernatural ladder to the highest rung of the natural.
And it is also true, without doubt, that the fallen or the unfaithful
Catholic is an infinitely more degraded member of humanity than the
fallen Pagan or Protestant; that the monumental criminals of history are
Catholic criminals, and that the monsters of the world--Henry VIII for
example, sacrilegious, murderer, and adulterer; Martin Luther, whose
printed table-talk is unfit for any respectable house; Queen Elizabeth,
perjurer, tyrant, and unchaste--were persons who had had all that the
Catholic Church could give them: the standards of her teaching, the
guidance of her discipline, and the grace of her sacraments. What, then,
is the reconciliation of this Paradox?
(1) First the Catholic Church is Divine. She dwells, that is to say, in
heavenly places; she looks always upon the Face of God; she holds
enshrined in her heart the Sacred Humanity of Jesus Christ and the
stainless perfection of that Immaculate Mother from whom that Humanity
was drawn. How is it conceivable, then, that she should be content with
any standard short of perfection? If she were a Society evolved from
below--a merely human Society that is to say--she could never advance
beyond those standards to which in the past her noblest children have
climbed. But since there dwells in her the Supernatural--since Mary was
endowed from on high with a gift to which no human being could ascend,
since the Sun of Justice Himself came down from the heavens to lead a
human life under human terms--how can she ever again be content with
anything short of that height from which these came?
(2) But she is also human, dwelling herself in the midst of humanity,
placed here in the world for the express object of gathering into
herself and of sanctifying by her graces that very world which has
fallen from God. These outcasts and these sinners are the very material
on which she has to work; these waste products of human life, these
marred types and specimens of humanity have no hope at all except in
her.
For, first, she desires if she can--and she has often been
able--actually to raise these, first to sanctity and then to her own
altars; it is for her and her only to _raise the poor from the dunghill
and to set them with the princes_. She sets before the Magdalen and the
thief, then, nothing less but her own standard of perfection.
Yet though in one sense she is satisfied with nothing lower than this,
in another sense she is satisfied with almost infinitely nothing. If she
can but bring the sinner within the very edge of grace; if she can but
draw from the dying murderer one cry of contrition; if she can but turn
his eyes with one look of love to the crucifix, her labours are a
thousand times repaid; for, if she has not brought him to the head of
sanctity, she has at least brought him to its foot and set him there
beneath that ladder of the supernatural which reaches from hell to
heaven.
For she alone has this power. She alone is so utterly confident in the
presence of the sinner because she alone has the secret of his cure.
There in her confessional is the Blood of Christ that can make his soul
clean again, and in her Tabernacle the Body of Christ that will be his
food of eternal life. She alone dares be his friend because she alone
can be his Saviour. If, then, her saints are one sign of her identity,
no less are her sinners another.
For not only is she the Majesty of God dwelling on earth, she is also
His Love; and therefore its limitations, and they only, are hers. That
Sun of mercy that shines and that Rain of charity that streams, _on just
and unjust alike_, are the very Sun and Rain that give her life. If I
_go up to Heaven she is there_, enthroned in Christ, on the Right Hand
of God;_ if I go down to Hell she is there also_, drawing back souls
from the brink from which she alone can rescue them. For she is that
very ladder which Jacob saw so long ago, that staircase planted here in
the blood and the slime of earth, rising there into the stainless Light
of the Lamb. Holiness and unholiness are both alike hers and she is
ashamed of neither--the holiness of her own Divinity which is Christ's
and the unholiness of those outcast members of her Humanity to whom she
ministers.
By her power, then, which again is Christ's, the Magdalen becomes the
Penitent; the thief the first of the redeemed; and Peter, the yielding
sand of humanity, the _Rock on which Herself is built_.