The disposition of those who apprehend this outline of history that
modern science has made plain to us, and who see all life as a system
of progressive change, is by no means antagonistic to religion. They
realise the immense importance and the profound necessity of religion
in this last great chapter of the story, the evolution of human
society. But they see religion within the frame of fact; they do not,
like Mr. Belloc, look through religion at fact. Man has accommodated
his originally fierce and narrow egotism to the needs of an ever wider
and more co-operative social life, very largely through the complex
self-subjugations that religion has made possible. Within the shell and
cover of religion the new less self-centred habits of mind have been
able to develop. An immense mass of imaginative work, of mythology,
of theology, that now seems tortuous, mystical, and fantastic, was
necessary for the casting of the new moral being of socialised man.
We seem to be entering upon a phase in which moral and intellectual
education may be able to free themselves from the last vestiges of
the mythology in which that new moral being was moulded; but it is
ungracious and false to the true outline of history to deny the
necessary part that the priest, the sacrifice, the magic ceremonial
for tribal welfare, the early tribal religions, have played in this
transfiguration of the sub-human into the modern human mind, upon which
all our community rests to-day.
It is because of our sense of this continuity of our present
dispositions with the religions upon which they are founded that so
many of us are loth to part with all the forms and phrases of the old
creeds and all the disciplines of time-honoured cults. Perhaps some of
us (the present writer in the crowd among others) have been over-eager
to read new significances into established phrases, and clothe new
ideas in the languages of the old scheme of salvation. It may be we
have been pouring new wine into old bottles. It may be better to admit
frankly that if man is not fixed Christianity is, and that mankind is
now growing out of Christianity; that indeed mankind is growing out of
the idea of Deity. This does not mean an end to religion, but it means
a fresh orientation of the religious life. It means a final severance
with those anthropomorphic conceptions of destiny, that interpretation
of all things in terms of personality and will with which religion
began. For many of us that still means a wrench and an effort. But the
emphatic assertions of Mr. Belloc, the stand that Catholicism, as he
expounds it, makes against any progressive adaptation to the new spirit
in human life, may render that effort easier.
In this examination of Mr. Belloc’s opening and more fundamental
attacks upon the _Outline of History_ I have shown sufficiently that
Mr. Belloc is incapable of evidence or discussion, that he imagines
his authorities, that he is careless and ignorant as to his facts and
slovenly and tricky in his logic. I have dealt kindly but adequately
with his atrocious bad manners and his insolence and impudence. I do
not think it is worth while to go on through the second half of his
outpourings with any particularity. It is exactly the same kind of
thing, but upon more familiar ground and less fundamental issues. Mr.
Belloc quibbles. He falsifies. For example, he imagines traditions to
reinforce the Gospel account of Christ’s teaching and to show that
the founder of Christianity was aware of his godhead and taught the
doctrine of the Trinity; he declares--just out of his head--that I
do not know it was the bull and not Mithra who was sacrificed in the
system of Mithraism, though I state that quite plainly in a passage
he has ventured to ignore. And so on. The wonderful methods of the
Palæolithic bow story repeat themselves with variations, time after
time. Why should I trouble to repeat the exposure in every case? I have
done enough to demonstrate the quality of this effort to bluff and
bawl away accepted knowledge and manifest fact, and that is all that I
set out to do.
And this apparently is the present state of Catholic teaching.
This stuff I have examined is the current utterance of organised
Christianity, so far as there is any utterance, upon the doctrines of
the Creation and the Fall--doctrines upon which rest the whole scheme
of Christian salvation and the entire fabric of a Christian’s faith.