_The truth shall make you free_.--JOHN VIII. 32.
_Bringing into captivity every understanding to the obedience of
Christ_.--II COR. X. 5.
We have already considered in outline the relations between Faith and
Reason; how each, in its own province, is supreme and how each, in its
turn, supports and ratifies the other. We pass on to a development of
that theme, springing almost immediately out of it, namely, the
relations between Authority and Liberty. And we will begin that
consideration, as before, as it is illustrated by the accusations of the
world against the Church. Briefly they are stated as follows.
I. Freedom, we are told, is the note of Christianity as laid down in the
Gospels, in both discipline and doctrine. Jesus Christ came into the
world largely for this very purpose, to substitute the New Law for the
Old and thereby to free men from the complicated theology and the
minutia of religious routine which characterized men's attempts to
reduce that Old Law to practice. The Old Law may or may not have been
perfectly adapted, when first it was given, to the needs of God's
people in the early stages of Jewish civilization; but at any rate it is
certain, from a hundred texts in the Gospel, that Jesus Christ in His
day found it an intolerable slavery laid upon the religious life of the
people. Theology had degenerated into an incredible hair-splitting
system of dogma, and discipline had degenerated into a multitude of
irritating observances.
Jesus Christ, then, in the place of all this, preached a Creed that was
essentially simple, and simultaneously substituted for the elaborate
ceremonialism of the Pharisees the spirit of liberty. The dogma that He
preached was little more than that God is the Father of all and that all
men therefore are brothers; "discipline" in the ordinary sense of the
word is practically absent from the Gospel, and as for ceremonial there
is none, except such as is necessary for the performance of the two
extremely simple rites that He instituted, Baptism and the Lord's
Supper.
Now this supposed spirit of liberty, we are informed, is to-day to be
found only in Protestantism. In that system, if it can strictly be
called one, and in that system only, may a man exercise that freedom
which was secured to him by Jesus Christ. First, in doctrine, he may
choose, weigh, and examine for himself, within the wide limits which
alone Christ laid down, those doctrines or hopes which commend
themselves to his intellect; and next, in matters of discipline, again,
he may choose for himself those ways of life and action that he may
find helpful to his spiritual development. He may worship, for example,
in any church that he prefers, attend those services and those only
which commend themselves to his taste; he may eat or not eat this or
that food, as he likes, and order his day, generally, as it pleases him.
And all this, we are informed, is of the very spirit of New Testament
Christianity. _The Truth has made him free_, as Christ Himself promised.
The Catholic Church, on the other hand, is essentially a Church of
slavery. First, in discipline, an enormous weight of observances and
duties is laid upon her children, comparable only to the Pharisaic
system. The Catholic must worship in this church and not in that, in
this manner and not in the other. He must observe places and days and
times, and that not only in religious matters but in secular. He must
eat this food on this day and that on the other; he must frequent the
sacraments at specified periods; he must perform certain actions and
refrain from others, and that in matters in themselves indifferent.
In dogma, too, no less is the burden that he must bear. Not only are the
simple words of Christ developed into a vast theological system by the
Church's officials, but the whole of this system is laid, as of faith,
down to its minutest details, on the shoulders of the unhappy believer.
He may not choose between this or that theory of the mode of Christ's
Presence in the Eucharist; he must accept precisely that, and no other,
which his Church has elaborated.
In fact, in doctrine and in discipline alike, the Church has gone back
to precisely that old reign of tyranny which Christ abolished. The
Catholic, unlike the Protestant who has retained the spirit of liberty,
finds himself in the same case as that under which Israel itself once
groaned. He is a slave and not a child; he binds his own limbs, as the
old phrase says, by his act of faith and puts the other end of the chain
into the hands of the priest. Such, in outline, is the charge against
us.
* * * * *
Now much of it is so false that it needs no refutation. It is, for
example, entirely false that New Testament theology is simple. It is far
more true to say that, compared with the systematized theology of the
Church, it is bewilderingly complex and puzzling, and how complex and
puzzling it is, is indicated by the hundreds of creeds which Protestants
have made out of it, each creed claiming, respectively, to be its one
and only proper interpretation. Men have only come to think it "simple"
in modern days by desperately eliminating from it every element on which
all Protestants are not agreed. The residuum is indeed "simple." Only it
is not the New Testament theology! Dogmas such as that of the Blessed
Trinity, of the Procession of the Holy Ghost, of the nature of grace and
of sin--these, whether as held by orthodox or unorthodox, are at any
rate not simple, and it is merely untrue to say that Christ made no
statements on these points, however they may be understood. Further, it
is merely untrue to say that Protestant theology is "simple"; it is
every whit as elaborate as Catholic theology and considerably more
complex in those points in which Protestant divines are not agreed. The
controversies on Justification in which such men as Calvin and Luther,
with their disciples, continually engaged are fully as complicated as
any disputations on Grace between Jesuits and Dominicans.
Yet the general contention is plain enough--that on the whole the
Catholic is bound to believe a certain set of dogmas, while the
Protestant is free to accept or reject them. Therefore, it is argued,
the Protestant is "free" and the Catholic is not. And this brings us
straight to the consideration of the relations between Authority and
Liberty.
II. What, then, is Religious Liberty? It is necessary to begin by
forming some idea as to what it is that is meant by the word in other
than religious matters.
Very briefly it may be said that an individual enjoys social liberty
when he is able to obey and to use the laws and powers of his true
nature, and that a community enjoys it when all its members are able to
do so without interfering unduly one with the other. The more complete
is this ability, the more perfect is Liberty.
A remarkable paradox at once presents itself--that Liberty can only be
secured by Laws. Where there are no laws, or too few, to secure it,
slavery immediately appears, no less surely than when there are too
many; for the stronger individuals are, by the absence of law, enabled
to tyrannize over the weaker. Even the vast and complex legislation of
our own days is designed to increase and not to fetter liberty, and its
greater complexity is necessitated by the greater complexity and the
more numerous interrelationships of modern society. Laws, of course, may
be unwise or excessively minute or deliberately enslaving; yet this does
not affect the point that for all that Laws are necessary to the
preservation of Liberty. Merchants, women and children, and citizens
generally, can only enjoy rightful liberty if they are protected by
laws. Only that man is free, then, who is most carefully guarded.
In the same manner Scientific Liberty does not consist in the absence of
knowledge, or of scientific dogmas, but in their presence. We are
surrounded by innumerable facts of nature, and that man is free who is
fully aware of those which affect his own life. It is true, for example,
that two and two make four, and that heavy bodies tend to fall towards
the centre of the earth; and it can only be a very superficial thinker
who considers that to be ignorant of these facts is to be free from the
enslaving dogmas of them. If I am ignorant of them I am, of course, in a
sense at liberty to believe that two and two make five, and to jump off
the roof of my house; yet this is not Liberty at all in the sense in
which reasonable people use the word, since my knowledge of the laws
enables me to be effective and, in fact, to survive in the midst of a
world where they happen to be true. That man, then, is more truly "free"
whose intellect is informed of and submits to these laws, than is the
man whose intellect is unaware of them. Marconi's intellect submits to
the laws of lightning and he is thereby enabled to avail himself of
them. Ajax is unaware of them and is accordingly destroyed by their
action.
_The Truth_, then, _makes us free_. The State which controls men's
actions and educates their intellects, which, in a word, enforces the
knowledge of truth and compels obedience to it, is actually freeing its
citizens by that process. It is only by a misuse of words or a failure
to grasp ideas that I can maintain that an ignorant savage is more free
than an educated man. It is true that I am, in a sense, "free" to think
that two and two make five, if I have not learned arithmetic; on the
other hand, when I learn that they make four I rise into that higher and
more real liberty which a knowledge of arithmetic bestows. I am more
effective, not less so; I am more free to exercise my powers and use the
forces of the world in which I live, and not less free, when I have
submitted my intellect to facts.
III. (i) Now the soul too has an environment. Men may differ as to its
nature and its conditions, but all who believe in the soul at all
believe also that it has an environment, and that this environment is as
much in the realm of Law as is the natural world itself. Prayer, for
example, elevates the soul, base thinking degrades it.
Now the laws of this environment were true even before Christ came.
David knew, at any rate, something of penitence and of the guilt of sin,
and Nathan knew something, at least, of the forgiveness of sins and of
their temporal punishment. Christ came, then, with this object amongst
others: that He might reveal the laws of Grace and convey to men's minds
some at least of the facts of the spiritual life amongst which they
lived. He came, moreover, partly to modify the workings of these laws,
to release some more fully, and to restrain others; in a word, to be the
Revealer of Truth and the Administrator of Grace.
He came then, to increase men's liberty by increasing their knowledge,
as, in another sphere, the scientist comes to us with the same purpose.
Here, for example, is the law that murder is a sin before God and brings
its consequences with it, a law stated briefly in the commandment _Thou
shall not kill_. But our Divine Lord revealed more of the workings of
this law than men had hitherto recognized. _I say unto you_, declared
Christ, _that whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer._ He revealed,
that is to say, the fact that this law runs even in the realm of
thought, that the hating spirit incurs the guilt and punishment of
murder, and not merely the murderous action. Were men less free when
they learned that fact? Not unless I am less free than I was before,
when I learn for the first time that lightning kills. Christ came, then,
to reveal the _Truth that makes us free_, and He does so by informing
our intellects and enabling us to _bring into captivity every
understanding to _His obedience_.
(ii) Turn now to the Catholic Church. Here is a Society whose function
it is to preserve and apply the teaching of Christ; to analyze it and to
state it in forms or systems which every generation can receive. For
this purpose, then, she draws up not merely a Creed--which is the
systematic statement of the Christian Revelation--but disciplinary rules
and regulations that will make this Creed and the life that is
conformable to it more easy of realization, and all this she does with
the express object of enabling the individual soul to respond to her
spiritual environment and to rise to the full exercise of her powers and
rights. As the scientist and the statesmen take, respectively, the great
laws of nature and society and reduce them to rules and codes, yet
without adding or taking away from these facts, that are true whether
they are popularly recognized or not--and all with the purpose not of
diminishing but of increasing the general liberty--so the Church,
divinely safeguarded too in the process, takes the Revelation of Christ
and by her dogma and her discipline popularizes it, so to speak, and
makes it at once comprehensible and effective.
What, then, is this foolish cry about the slavery of dogma? How can
Truth make men anything except more free? Unless a man is prepared to
say that the scientist enslaves his intellect by telling him facts, he
dare not say that the Church fetters his intellect by defining dogma.
Christ did not condemn the Pharisaic system because it was a system, but
because it was Pharisaic; because, that is, it was not true; because it
obscured instead of revealing the true relations between God and man;
because it _made the Word of God of none effect through its traditions_.
But the Catholic system has the appearance of enslaving men? Why yes;
for the only way of aiming at and using effectively the _truth that
makes us free_ is by _bringing into captivity every understanding to the
obedience of Christ_.