I am glad to say that we are emerging now from the worst of the
controversial stuff, irritating and offensive, in which Mr. Belloc
is so manifestly my master, and coming to matters of a more honest
interest.
I have stuck to my argument through the cut and slash, sneer and
innuendo of Mr. Belloc’s first twelve papers. I have done my best to
be kind and generous with him. I have made the best excuses I can for
him. I have shown how his oddities of bearing and style arise out of
the difficulties of his position, and how his absurd reasonings about
Natural Selection and his deliberate and tedious bemuddlement of the
early Palæolithic sub-men with the late Reindeer men and the Capsian
men are all conditioned by the necessity he is under to declare and
believe that “man” is, as he puts it, a “Fixed Type,” the same in the
past and now and always. He is under this necessity because he believes
that otherwise the Christian faith cannot be made to stand up as a
rational system, and because, as I have shown by a quotation of his own
words, he makes their compatibility with his idea of Catholic teaching
his criterion in the acceptance or rejection of facts.
I will confess I do not think that things are as bad as this with
Christianity. I believe a far better case could be made for Catholicism
by an insistence that its value and justification lie in the change and
in the direction of the human will, in giving comfort and consolation
and peace, in producing saints and beautiful living; and that the truth
of the history it tells of space and time is entirely in relation
to the development of these spiritual aspects, and has no necessary
connection whatever with scientific truth. This line of thought is
no novelty, and I do not see why Catholics should not keep to it and
leave the outline of history alone. I do not say that it is a line of
apologetics that would convince me altogether, but it is one that would
need far more arduous discussion and merit, far more respect than Mr.
Belloc’s _a priori_ exploits, his limping lizards and flying pigs.
But it is not my business to remind Catholics of their own neglected
philosophers, and clearly the publication of Mr. Belloc’s articles by
the _Universe_, the _Catholic Bulletin_, and the _Southern Cross_ shows
that the Catholic world of to-day is stoutly resolved to treat the fall
of man and his unalterable nature as matters of fact, even if they are
rather cloudy matters of fact, and to fight the realities of modern
biology and anthropology to the last ditch.
So the Catholics are pinned to this dogma of the fixity of man and
thereby to a denial of progress. This vale of tears, they maintain,
is as a whole a stagnant lake of tears, and there is no meaning to it
beyond the spiritual adventures of its individual lives. Go back in
time or forward, so long as man has been or will be, it is all the
same. You will find a world generally damned, with a select few, like
Mr. Belloc, on their way to eternal beatitude. That is all there is to
the spectacle. There is, in fact, no outline of history; there is just
a flow of individual lives; there is only birth and salvation or birth
and damnation. That, I extract from Mr. Belloc and other contemporary
writers, is the Catholic’s vision of life.