which determined her mission. He points out that people often hear
voices through a morbid faculty of projecting what they have themselves
imagined. It is well known that that may happen to any one; and most
people recognise that such a phenomenon is within themselves, and
has no value of reality. Indeed, pretty well every one has at one
time or another vividly heard not-present sounds, whether through the
recollection of a loved voice or through some other emotion of fear
or violence; and it is only a question of degree whether you call the
impression ‘hearing’ or no. He also points out that in the case of
diseased people this imaginary stuff takes on a false reality, and
that many lunatics, criminal and other, imagine themselves to have
heard voices commanding them to do this or that—usually something very
unpleasant, nothing half so fine or sane as conducting a triumphant war.
All that is perfectly true. Then he comes to the specific point of
Saint Joan’s voices, and he says that, having been brought up a strong
Protestant (and, indeed, a strong Protestantism is the note of all his
writings), he cannot accept the idea that these voices were real.
Now, there you have a perfectly clear and lucid statement of the
boundary between the Catholic world and what lies outside it. The
specific difference between the Catholic and the non-Catholic—so
far as Europe is concerned—lies in what is roughly called (it is
a conversational term, and I do not accept it as accurate) the
‘acceptation of the supernatural.’ The Catholic does not believe that
every one who hears voices hears real voices. He does believe that it
is possible for such voices to be real; and he, therefore, believes
that this thing, philosophically possible, has also had, now and then,
a real historical existence.
In the same way, he does not believe nine tenths, or ninety-nine
hundredths, of the miraculous stories which have grown up out of
distortion or mere wantonness, or (for the greater part) out of the
gradual substitution of direct statement for allegorical or fictional
statement, turning fairy tales into fact; but he believes that the
miraculous—that is, an irregular suspension of the order of nature—is
philosophically possible. He, therefore, believes, when the evidence
is sufficient, that it has historical existence in certain examples.
For instance, I certainly believe that the blinded man of York had
his sight restored to him by Saint Thomas of Canterbury; but I don’t
believe that Mahommed went to the moon on donkey-back—if, indeed, that
mysterious mount of his _was_ a donkey, which the best authorities
deny. The Catholic not only believes that certain historical examples,
which are of faith, were real and took place (as, for instance, our
Lord’s walking on the water—and Saint Peter’s less successful effort),
but he also believes in general that the phenomena called miracles
continue actually to happen throughout history: that they go on to-day.
The same principle of division runs through the whole of thought.
In the matter of the development of religion, everybody outside the
Catholic body talks as though the development of the Catholic religion
were a human process. They answer the famous question, ‘Is religion of
God or of man?’ with a hearty affirmation of the second hypothesis. In
this mood they examine such a story as that of the Mass, the Papacy,
or the doctrine of our Lord’s divinity. They take it for granted that
all was man-made. In this mood they interpret (usually with guesses of
the wildest sort, which the much stricter and more rational Catholic
scholarship soon disproves) the origin of the Scriptures, and in
particular of the Gospels. Now the Catholic admits _all_ evidence
in these matters: that is a matter of course, for if you exclude any
evidence your conclusion is vitiated. But the difference between
him and the others is that he regards the action at work as divine,
willed, and, to repeat a word I have used, ‘illumined.’ That is why the
Catholic thinks of the modernist as a man of warm heart, but of poor
intelligence.
Here is an example. The man of warm heart, with a strong sentimental
attachment to his Scriptures, to familiar views, has his mind shaken
by the discovery or even the suggestion, that his document is not
wholly authentic. His intelligence must tell him—if he would use
it—that a document cannot be an authority superior to the body which
gave it its claim. But his intelligence falters. Now the Catholic,
accustomed to the theory of authority and having decided, let us say,
upon evidence sufficient for his judgment, that such and such a text
was not part of an original manuscript, could never on that account
abandon the doctrine consonant with that text. He believes a doctrine
to be a divine, a supernatural thing, communicated, revealed to the
world by an authority which still lives, and to and of which he is at
once a subject and a part. He says, upon an accepted authority, ‘This
is so.’ The presence or absence of one piece of documentary evidence
does not affect reality. I have never thought the evidence against the
‘Johannine Comma’ so strong as that in its favour: but, though it were
proved unauthentic to-morrow, what possible effect could that discovery
have on the reality of the Trinity?
The Faith is an attitude of acceptance towards an external reality: it
is not a mood.
Now, of all this the men who elbow the Catholic Church on all sides in
non-Catholic communities, such as England, remain as ignorant as they
are of Sanskrit—with those few exceptions of which I have spoken.
They seem to think that they have in their midst a body of men who go
on strangely, either because they refuse to listen to common reason,
or because they have a sentimental attachment to some old-fashioned
tradition, and will not openly admit its absurdity. In this they
resemble the simpler type of bucolic republican, who does not know that
there are any arguments for a monarchy; or the still simpler mind which
believes that the earth is flat, and thinks that those who call it
round are finicky people playing a subtle game in which they do not at
heart believe.
Perhaps the best test of the difference is to be found in the doctrine
of the Fall. The Catholic, with his acceptation of the supernatural
(I again apologise for the term), accepts, upon an authority which he
has discovered sufficient (on the statement of a Person, the Church,
whose voice he has recognised to be divine), a doctrine that man,
as man, was created superior to his present natural state; that he
was created to be supernaturally happy. Where, when, and especially
_how_—in what mode—he cannot say. It is a mystery. He, therefore,
accepts the doctrine that man, by a rebellion against the will of God,
did at some time lose the supernatural powers, the supernatural life,
the supernatural happiness, and fell into his natural state, as we see
him to-day: of this world, and yet the only exile therein. What that
process was whereby he existed with beatitude inhabiting him, we are
not told, nor in what place, nor at what date. But we are told, and we
accept it, that a certain process, a certain sequence, due to the human
will, took place; a rebellion of that will, and a consequent loss of
the supernatural life which was our inheritance. That doctrine no more
clashes with any proved historical, or probable prehistorical, process
than the discovery that William Wordsworth grew up from childhood to
manhood proves that he was never a poet, or that he never ceased to be
a poet. But the man who rejects the supernatural ignorantly distorts
(many popular preachers of heretical theory to-day distort) the
doctrine of the Fall of Man into something very different. He thinks
it means that man was once in a particular place and time—Mesopotamia
about 4004 years ago—behaving like a gentleman, and then, following
the advice of his wife, sank to be a perfectly horrible creature,
tainting everything he touched. Naturally, a person informed by this
childish idea—born, without reason, of a book—on finding what seem
to him proofs of development from a simpler to a more complex society,
and on waking up to what everybody might know by the use of plain
common sense, that men progress from one stage of art to another more
intricate (until they crash, and begin all over again), is thrown off
his basis. He begins to make a new religion and a new mythology for
himself, to talk of an ‘Ascent of Man’; he thinks himself a summit and
a glory—and at the same time he rids himself of morals. It will be
interesting to watch the end of the process.
In connection with all this—though the connection is strained—I
have often wondered to myself, and especially at night-time upon the
sea, how long the mystic Catholic doctrine of human equality would
survive in the non-Catholic world. It has survived so far because
it is flattering to the many. Only a very small number of men are
conspicuously rich or talented, or (for those who love publicity)
public; it is naturally an attractive doctrine for the obscure,
untalented, poor mass, that—not in the sight of their Creator, for
they no longer accept one, but in some incomprehensible way—we are all
equal, and that in some odd fashion which they cannot discover, but
which they have felt in their bones, the rich or talented or advertised
man is really no better than themselves. You find the doctrine
lingering most tenaciously in the popular conception of justice. Men
would still be shocked, even during the present decline of morals, at
the open admission that a man, important for wealth or public position,
should be admittedly and overtly immune from the criminal law. In
practice, of course, he is so. But so much of the old Catholic dogma
of human equality survives as forbids—so far—the open admission of
privilege.
But flattering as the old Catholic doctrine of equality is, I do not
think it can survive much longer outside the Catholic body. It is in a
high degree mysterious, and I am amused to find one man after another
suddenly making the discovery that it is not a patent truth, apparent
upon the surface of things.
I remember once sitting next a very worthy man at a banquet in the
United States: it is now nearly thirty years ago. This man explained to
me laboriously enough, but very privately, that the statement in the
Declaration of Independence, ‘Men are created equal,’ seemed to him
great nonsense. For he had come to observe that they were of different
stature, muscular strength, and even intelligence—in which last
conclusion I supported him.
There is another Catholic mystery to which the non-Catholic world still
uncertainly clings (I do not think its tenure is at all secure), and
that is the mystery of immortality.
That also is consoling, and to some even flattering. It can be used as
a soothing drug on condition that you do not work out the full theology
of it, and admit the double doom of beatitude and damnation. But the
repetition of this old Catholic doctrine as a dope, by which may be
evaded the menace and reality of death, does not seem to me to have
enough stuff in it to endure. Yet there are many men and women still
living who can remember the time when the non-Catholic world did still
accept the full doctrine.
Indeed, a living friend of mine has recited to me a verse learnt in her
childhood, which ran somewhat as follows:
‘There is a dreadful Hell
A place of aches and pains,
Where sinners must with Devils dwell,
In fires and shrieks and chains.’
But that is all over. All that is left of the doctrine of a life to
come is a very vague mood of comfortable assurance, dissipated at once
on the approach of peril. It will not last, apart from the great and
only true philosophy of which it is the last poor relic.
I wonder, indeed, how much of Catholic doctrine will survive, and what
part of it—if any—in whatever of Europe continues to reject the
present advance of the Faith. That some great section of Europe will
lose the last savour of Christian culture, and that soon, is probable;
for already the half-educated are abandoning it all over the North.
That the rest will return to full doctrine is probable. For already the
thirst for it is apparent, and the stronger minds are so returning.
But what will follow where it is wholly abandoned? We know what heavy
weather property is making to-day, and, as for marriage, it has nearly
gone by the board. The doctrine of justice is cloudily remembered,
but mixed up in some muddled way with the idea of playing a lawyer’s
game, and so sodden with sentimental frailties, and rough-edged with
cruelties and sale and purchase, that one can make nothing of it. For
instance, outside the Catholic world, it is an accepted idea that if
a man accused of murder be under grave suspicion, but not definitely
proved guilty, he must, indeed, be condemned to some horrible
punishment, such as imprisonment for life, but not to the punishment
for murder. And it is an approved idea that punishment should not be
vindictive, but only deterrent, save where the vindictive side of it
is the vengeance of the great against the weak. And it is an approved
idea that the witness in a legal case may justly be confused and
harried in order that the truth shall be concealed; and that capacity
of so confusing and harrying a witness is the great test of a man’s
moral aptitude to administer Justice. And it is an approved idea that a
lawyer may do his utmost to have an innocent man condemned, if only he
be paid highly enough. But the breakdown of the idea of justice is only
one department of the great change. There are a score of others to be
surveyed; notably the novel doctrine that a man’s wealth is the test of
his value in the State.
Well, what will come out of that welter, that corruption into which the
decomposition of the Christian culture is now dissolving?
What I think will spring out of the filth is a new religion.
I think there will arise in whatever parts of Christendom remain, say,
two hundred years hence, cut off from the advancing restoration of
the Faith, some simplified, odd, strong code of new habit, comparable
to the sudden code of habit which Arabia constructed on the ruins of
Christian doctrine in the East. Whatever refuses to accept the Catholic
restoration will sooner or later develop a new religion, because human
society cannot live on air, and to men of our strong Western blood
the substance of a doctrine and a ritual are especially needful. This
conception of a new religion (and, therefore, an evil one) arising
out of the rottenness of the grave of truth, seems to-day at once
fantastic and unpleasant. Unpleasant I admit it is; fantastic I do not
believe it to be.
From that Cornish town I had the next morning to make my way back
to London; and Stephen Reynolds, whom I met, got her round the land
safely to the ports upon the southern side, whence later I resumed this
cruise: Stephen Reynolds, that strongest-souled and most sincere of
men, who desired and did good all his life. It is the meeting with such
men, and the comparison of their public label with their true function,
of their false renown or lack of renown with their certain standing in
the eyes of their Maker, which lead all wise men to a perfect contempt
for the modern world.
Does any one remember him now of those who are reading this? Perhaps
one or two, perhaps no one. He loved the poor: he understood the sea.
He was a brother and a support to sailing-men, and he had charity,
humility, and justice in equal poise. But the truth is, I take it,
that our world is no longer fitted for governance by, nor even for
advice from, its rare great men. It is fitted for governance by those
who boast so exact an admixture of folly and of vice as makes them
reasonably consonant with the stuff they have to govern. As for those
who are too good for us, or too wise for us, why, the sooner they are
out of it the better for them. And so it is the better with Reynolds....
But I wish that I could come across him again in this world, somewhere
at the meeting of sea and land, and talk with him again about the
schools of fishes, and the labours of those who seek them along our
shores, and the souls of sailormen.
I confess to a complete ignorance of going round the land, that is, of
turning the point of Cornwall, and of passing from the northern to
the southern coast. Three times have I set out from Saint Ives with
the firm intention of passing the Longships, and putting her round
up-Channel. Never have I done so. For the Seven Gods, or one or another
of them, forbade it. Had I ever fallen so low as to put a motor into
the Nona, she would have gone round like a bus or a taxi; but under
sail alone it was forbidden me. Each of those three times I started
with a light wind and was becalmed; and at the end of the each of those
calms I drifted back so far upon the flood that I sickened of the
attempt. Saint Ives is a very long way from London, and a still longer
way from Sussex, and a man cannot spend his life indefinitely taking
that immense journey back and forth for nothing. And that is why I sent
the Nona round the land.
I have never made Newlyn. I have never gone into Falmouth, so there
is still something left for me to do. I have, indeed, seen all that
coast from within, and walked back and forth across the last peninsula
of England, and compared Mounts Bay and its rock with the towering
brother island upon the further shore: for every such sea-girt height
is dedicated to Saint Michael, being a natural perching place for
winged things. The two Mounts are little models of the two national
histories: each begins as a monastery; but one becomes a king’s prison,
then derelict, then a sort of national showplace; the other becomes a
country house.
You may trace a parallel in the fate of the Templars in the two
capitals. The secret society of the Templars, with its gigantic wealth
and universal conspiracy, was suppressed (to the salvation of Europe)
six hundred years ago. Their centre in Paris fell to the King, became
in its last stages an appanage for younger sons and cousins of the
Crown, then a prison. It was at last destroyed in the very beginnings
of the new Paris under Napoleon. Its memory has almost disappeared.
The Templars’ centre in London passed gradually to the lawyers, and now
fulfils, among other functions, the very useful one of preventing cabs
from getting too quickly from the Embankment to Fleet Street.
As for the two round churches, the mysterious symbols of that great,
now dead, freemasonry (which for a moment threatened all our lives),
that one in which the Mass was preserved has disappeared from that
capital of Europe where the Mass has perhaps most power, but that from
which the Mass was driven out is still carefully maintained in its
externals, and stands there still in the midst of London—dead.
It was upon this coast of Cornwall that I once, to my shame, wholly
misread the outline of a headland, not from sea but from land.
Standing upon the shoulder of the Lizard peninsula, and looking
eastward upon a clear summer’s day, I misread the Dodman. Now from land
this is unpardonable, because one has on land points of reference, and,
indeed, had I been careful, and with a map before me, I could not have
made such an error. But from the sea it is a thing that happens very
much oftener than sailing-men are willing to admit.
I remember once, many years ago, coming in from far outside, and making
sure of a point of French land, which I thought I knew by heart. I saw
a characteristic dip, and, in front of it, the nearer lump of land
which I knew for an island, and then there was a gap, or ‘V,’ which
I could have sworn to be the harbour town I knew. It is true that I
was surprised to find it lying so far over my starboard bow. I had
thought it to be right before me, but I trusted my eyes rather than my
reckoning. As we drew nearer I found all that inference in error. I
had, indeed, failed in my reckoning somewhat, but it was the other way
about, and the place I was looking for lay more than twenty miles to
the eastward, and, when I first saw land, my harbour was hidden below
the last horizon, over the port bow.
One would think that the outline of a headland, once one had known it
from a particular side, was an unmistakable thing, and one would think
that the same would be true of a characteristic range of hills seen
lengthwise, or even of the entrance to a valley harbour.
After all, the same sort of thing is at once recognisable by land: a
man does not mistake the Wrekin, or the Malvern Hills.
But at sea, for some mysterious reason, you never can be sure; and
that is why such pains are taken in the elaborate descriptions and
plans of sailing directions, and in the little pictures which they
make in the official books. It is not only a matter of what is called
to-day ‘visibility,’ though it is true that the thickness of the air
makes a great difference to one’s judgment of distance. No matter what
the conditions, the most absurd mistakes can be made, and are made
continually, and that by practised men. It was only the other day that
I mistook Grisnez for the end of the cliff some miles to the east of it
above the flat of Calais. You would think that Beachy Head, seen from
up-Channel looking westward, was unmistakable; for it has the exact
outline of a hippopotamus, with its little ear and fat forehead and
snout, and there is a long flat before it, so that anything rising up,
one would think, was bound to be Beachy Head, but it is not so. A man
who has been knocking about the Channel at night, and does not quite
know where he is, except that he is somewhere off the Sussex coast, may
(it sounds absurd, but it is true) take Fairlight in a haze for Beachy
Head, or (coming eastwards) he may catch in a dull dawn the low cliffs
beyond Newhaven, and, if the thick air hides Beachy from him, he may
take these for that headland.
Much more excusable, and yet much more common than mistaking the
outline of hills, or a headland, is the mistaking of a light. All of
them have carefully marked spaces of time, a flash for so many seconds,
or a change of colour, or what not. But a man cannot always be bothered
to time these things, and in a little boat under a strain he may not
be able to do so. But the very commonest form of error in this, as in
everything else, comes from an absolute and false certitude. You say to
yourself, ‘There is no doubt at all that that light is such-and-such
a light.’ You have been waiting to pick it up, and when you pick up
a light you are certain it is that light, unless the timing of it is
quite grossly different from what you expected. But you may be quite
wildly wrong. I suppose no one will believe me when I tell them that I
have known Saint Catherine’s mistaken for the Hogue.
But there are more absurd cases still. Many years ago, a ship called
the Mohegan struck the rocks called the Manacles, which are inside
Black Head, in Cornwall. She was going down the Channel, and there
would seem to be no question of danger in the matter. The Lizard Light
is there, staring plain enough; one only has to keep it well on the
starboard bow going down-Channel, and one is sure to miss England.
One cannot hit the Manacles so long as the light is well off one’s
starboard bow, for they lie inside the Point. Therefore, when the
Mohegan struck, she must have had the Lizard Light on her port bow, and
the lookout man, and the man steering, and the man setting the course,
and the man in command on the bridge must have known perfectly well
(one would think) that the situation was impossible. Yet strike she
did, and no one has ever really explained how it happened.
There are some of these mistakes which cannot be avoided, and which
are explainable, not by any failure of the human reason, but by a very
natural confusion between similar things. Thus, any one runs a risk at
Dungeness on account of the two lighthouses there; I mean any one going
up-Channel, and aiming at giving that point a very close shave.
Dungeness grows out to sea at a certain rate, so that, at long
intervals, a new lighthouse has to be built to mark its extremity.
Though it grows outwards thus into the Channel, the end is steep-to,
and there is plenty of water right up alongside the land. Therefore,
any one going up-Channel makes for the lighthouse direct, intending to
pass within a few yards of the shore, for this shortens an up-Channel
course. Also, if you have the tide with you, you have a strong stream
there to help you.