_Blessed are the meek_.--MATT. V. 4.
_The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it
away_.--MATT. XI. 12.
We have already considered the Church's relations towards such things as
wealth and human influence and power, how she will sometimes use and
sometimes disdain them. Let us now penetrate a little deeper and
understand the spirit that underlies and explains this varying attitude
of hers.
I. (i) It has been charged against Christianity in general, and
therefore implicitly and supremely against the Church that was for so
long its sole embodiment and is still, alone, its adequate
representative, that it has fostered virtues which retard progress.
Progress, in the view of the German philosopher who explicitly made this
charge, is merely natural both in its action and its end; and Nature, as
we are well aware, knows nothing of forgiveness or compassion or
tenderness: on the contrary she moves from lower to higher forms by
forces that are their precise opposite. The wounded stag is not
protected by his fellows, but gored to death; the old wolf is torn to
pieces, the sick lion wanders away to die of starvation, and all these
instincts, we are informed, have for their object the gradual
improvement of the breed by the elimination of the weak and ineffective.
So should it be, he tells us, with man, and the extreme Eugenists echo
his teaching. Christianity, on the other hand, deliberately protects the
weak and teaches that the sacrifice of the strong is supreme heroism.
Christianity has raised hospitals and refuges for the infirm, seeking to
preserve those very types which Nature, if she had her way, would
eliminate. Christianity, then, is the enemy of the human race and not
its friend, since Christianity has retarded, as no other religion has
ever succeeded in retarding, the appearance of that superman whom Nature
seeks to evolve.... It is scarcely to be wondered at that the teacher of
such a doctrine himself died insane.
A parallel doctrine is taught largely to-day by persons who call
themselves practical and businesslike. Meekness and gentleness and
compassion, they tell their sons, are very elegant and graceful virtues
for those who can afford them, for women and children who are more or
less sheltered from the struggle of life, and for feeble and ineffective
people who are capable of nothing else. But for men who have to make
their own way in the world and intend to win success there, a more stern
code is necessary; from these there is demanded such a rule of action as
Nature herself dictates. Be self-confident and self-assertive then, not
meek. Remember that the weakness of your neighbour is your own
opportunity. Take care of number one and let the rest take care of
themselves. A man does not go into the stock-exchange or into commerce
in order to exhibit Christian virtues there, but business qualities. In
a word, Christianity, so far as it affects material or commercial or
political progress, is a weakness rather than a strength, an enemy
rather than a friend.
(ii) But if, on the one side, the gentleness and non-resistance
inculcated by Christianity form the material of one charge against the
Church, on the other side, no less, she is blamed for her violence and
intransigeance. Catholics are not yielding enough, we are told, to be
true followers of the meek Prophet of Galilee, not gentle enough to
inherit the blessing which He pronounced. On the contrary there are no
people so tenacious, so obstinate, and even so violent as these
professed disciples of Jesus Christ. See the way, for example, in which
they cling to and insist upon their rights; the obstacles they raise,
for example, to reasonable national schemes of education or to a
sensible system in the divorce courts. And above all, consider their
appalling and brutal violence as exhibited in such institutions as that
of the Index and Excommunication, the fierceness with which they insist
upon absolute and detailed obedience to authority, the ruthlessness with
which they cast out from their company those who will not pronounce
their shibboleths. It is true that in these days they can only enforce
their claims by spiritual threatenings and penalties, but history shows
us that they would do more if they could. The story of the racks and the
fires of the Inquisition shows plainly enough that the Church once used,
and therefore, presumably, would use again if she could, carnal weapons
in her spiritual warfare. Can anything be more unlike the gentle Spirit
of Him Who, _when He was reviled, reviled not again;_ of Him Who bade
men to _learn of Him, for He was meek and lowly of heart_, and so _find
rest to their souls?_
Here, then, is the Paradox, and here are two characteristics of the
Catholic Church: that she is at once too meek and too self-assertive,
too gentle and too violent. It is a paradox exactly echoed by our Divine
Lord Himself, Who in the Upper Chamber bade His disciples who _had no
sword_ to _sell their cloaks and buy them_, and Who yet, in the garden
of Gethsemane, commanded the one disciple who had taken Him at His word
to _put up the sword into its sheath_, telling him that _they who took
the sword should perish by it_. It is echoed yet again in His action,
first in taking the scourge into His own Hand, in the temple courts, and
then in baring His shoulders to that same scourge in the hands of
others. How, then, is this Paradox to be reconciled?