THE HUMAN RACE AND REVELATION.
'_The scandal of the pious Christian, and the fallacious triumph of
the infidel, should cease as soon as they recollect not only_ by
whom, _but likewise to whom, the Divine Revelation was
given._'--Gibbon.[37]
And now let us suppose ourselves convinced, at least for the sake of
argument, that man will always believe in himself as a moral being, and
that he will, under no compulsion, let this belief go. Granting this,
from what we have just seen, thus much will be plain to us, that theism,
should it ever tend to reassert itself, can have no check to fear at the
hands of positive thought. Let us, therefore, suppose further, that such
a revival of faith is imminent, and that the enlightened world, with its
eyes wide open, is about to turn once again to religious desires and
aims. This brings us face to face with the second question, that we have
not as yet touched upon: will the religion thus turned to be a natural
religion only, or is it possible that some exclusive dogmatism may be
recognised as a supernatural re-statement of it?
Before going further with this question it will be well to say a few
words as to the exact position it occupies. This, with regard to the
needs of man, is somewhat different to the position of natural theism.
That a natural theism is essential to man's moral being is a proposition
that can be more or less rigidly demonstrated; but that a revelation is
essential as a supplement to natural theism can be impressed upon us
only in a much looser way. Indeed, many men who believe most firmly that
without religion human life will be dead, rest their hopes for the
future not on the revival and triumph of any one alleged revelation, but
on the gradual evanescence of the special claims of all. Nor can we find
any sharp and defined line of argument to convince them that they are
wrong. The objections, however, to which this position is open are, I
think, none the less cogent because they are somewhat general; and to
all practical men, conversant with life and history, it must be plain
that the necessity of doing God's will being granted, it is a most
anxious and earnest question whether that will has not been in some
special and articulate way revealed to us.
Take the mass of religious humanity, and giving it a natural creed, it
will be found that instinctively and inevitably it asks for more. Such a
creed by itself has excited more longings than it has satisfied, and
raised more perplexities than it has set at rest. It is true that it
has supplied men with a sufficient analysis of the worth they attach to
life, and of the momentous issues attendant on the way in which they
live it. But when they come practically to choose their way, they find
that such religion is of little help to them. It never puts out a hand
to lift or lead them. It is an alluring voice, heard far off through a
fog, and calling to them, '_Follow me!_' but it leaves them in the fog
to pick their own way out towards it, over rocks and streams and
pitfalls, which they can but half distinguish, and amongst which they
may be either killed or crippled, and are almost certain to grow
bewildered. And even should there be a small minority, who feel that
this is not true of themselves, they can hardly help feeling that it is
true of the world in general. A purely natural theism, with no organs of
human speech, and with no machinery for making its spirit articulate,
never has ruled men, and, so far as we can see, never possibly can rule
them. The choices which our life consists of are definite things. The
rule which is to guide our choices must be something definite also. And
here it is that natural theism fails. It may supply us with the major
premiss, but it is vague and uncertain about the minor. It can tell us
with sufficient emphasis that all vice is to be avoided; it is
continually at a loss to tell us whether this thing or whether that
thing is vicious. Indeed, this practical insufficiency of natural theism
is borne witness to by the very existence of all alleged revelations.
For, if none of these be really the special word of God, a belief in
them is all the more a sign of a general need in man. If none of them
represent the actual attainment of help, they all of them embody the
passionate and persistent cry for it.
We shall understand this more clearly if we consider one of the first
characteristics that a revelation necessarily claims, and the results
that are at this moment, in a certain prominent case, attending on a
denial of it. The characteristic I speak of is an absolute
infallibility. Any supernatural religion that renounces its claim to
this, it is clear can profess to be a semi-revelation only. It is a
hybrid thing, partly natural and partly supernatural, and it thus
practically has all the qualities of a religion that is wholly natural.
In so far as it professes to be revealed, it of course professes to be
infallible; but if the revealed part be in the first place hard to
distinguish, and in the second place hard to understand--if it may mean
many things, and many of those things contradictory--it might just as
well have been never made at all. To make it in any sense an infallible
revelation, or in other words a revelation at all, _to us_, we need a
power to interpret the testament that shall have equal authority with
that testament itself.
Simple as this truth seems, mankind have been a long time in learning
it. Indeed, it is only in the present day that its practical meaning has
come generally to be recognised. But now at this moment upon all sides
of us, history is teaching it to us by an example, so clearly that we
can no longer mistake it.
That example is Protestant Christianity, and the condition to which,
after three centuries, it is now visibly bringing itself. It is at last
beginning to exhibit to us the true result of the denial of
infallibility to a religion that professes to be supernatural. We are at
last beginning to see in it neither the purifier of a corrupted
revelation, nor the corrupter of a pure revelation, but the practical
denier of all revelation whatsoever. It is fast evaporating into a mere
natural theism, and is thus showing us what, as a governing power,
natural theism is. Let us look at England, Europe, and America, and
consider the condition of the entire Protestant world. Religion, it is
true, we shall still find in it; but it is religion from which not only
the supernatural element is disappearing, but in which the natural
element is fast becoming nebulous. It is indeed growing, as Mr. Leslie
Stephen says it is, into a religion of dreams. All its doctrines are
growing vague as dreams, and like dreams their outlines are for ever
changing. Mr. Stephen has pitched on a very happy illustration of this.
A distinguished clergyman of the English Church, he reminds us, has
preached and published a set of sermons,[38] in which he denies
emphatically any belief in eternal punishment, although admitting at the
same time that the opinion of the Christian world is against him. These
sermons gave rise to a discussion in one of the leading monthly reviews,
to which Protestant divines of all shades of opinion contributed their
various arguments. '_It is barely possible_,' says Mr. Stephen, '_with
the best intentions, to take such a discussion seriously. Boswell tells
us how a lady interrogated Dr. Johnson as to the nature of the spiritual
body. She seemed desirous, he adds, of "knowing more; but he left the
subject in obscurity." We smile at Boswell's evident impression that
Johnson could, if he had chosen, have dispelled the darkness. When we
find a number of educated gentlemen seriously enquiring as to the
conditions of existence in the next world, we feel that they are sharing
Boswell's_ naïveté _without his excuse. What can any human being outside
a pulpit say upon such a subject which does not amount to a confession
of his own ignorance, coupled, it may be, with more or less suggestion
of shadowy hopes and fears? Have the secrets of the prison-house really
been revealed to Canon Farrar or Mr. Beresford Hope?... When men search
into the unknowable, they naturally arrive at very different results._'
And Mr. Stephen argues with perfect justice that if we are to judge
Christianity from such discussions as these, its doctrines of a future
life are all visibly receding into a vague '_dreamland_;' and we shall
be quite ready to admit, as he says, in words I have already quoted,
'_that the impertinent young curate who tells [him he] will be burnt
everlastingly for not sharing such superstitions, is just as ignorant as
[Mr. Stephen himself], and that [Mr. Stephen] knows as much as [his]
dog_.'
The critic, in the foregoing passages, draws his conclusion from the
condition of but one Protestant doctrine. But he might draw the same
conclusion from all; for the condition of all of them is the same. The
divinity of Christ, the nature of his atonement, the constitution of the
Trinity, the efficacy of the sacraments, the inspiration of the
Bible--there is not one of these points on which the doctrines, once so
fiercely fought for, are not now, among the Protestants, getting as
vague and varying, as weak and as compliant to the caprice of each
individual thinker, as the doctrine of eternal punishment. And Mr.
Stephen and his school exaggerate nothing in the way in which they
represent the spectacle. Protestantism, in fact, is at last becoming
explicitly what it always was implicitly, not a supernatural religion
which fulfils the natural, but a natural religion which denies the
supernatural.
And what, as a natural religion, is its working power in the world? Much
of its earlier influence doubtless still survives; but that is a
survival only of what is passing, and we must not judge it by that. We
must judge it by what it is growing into, not by what it is growing out
of. And judged in this way, its practical power--its moral, its
teaching, its guiding power--is fast growing as weak and as uncertain as
its theology. As long as its traditional moral system is in accordance
with what men, on other grounds, approve of, it may serve to express the
general tendency impressively, and to invest it with the sanction of
many reverend associations. But let the general tendency once begin to
conflict with it, and its inherent weakness in an instant becomes
apparent. We may see this by considering the moral character of Christ,
and the sort of weight that is claimed for His example. This example, so
the Christian world teaches, is faultless and infallible; and as long as
we believe this, the example has supreme authority. But apply to this
the true Protestant method, and the authority soon shows signs of
wavering. Let us once deny that Christ was more than a faultless man,
and we lose by that denial our authority for asserting that he was as
much as a faultless man. Even should it so happen that we do approve
entirely of his conduct, it is we who are approving of him, not he who
is approving of us. The old position is reversed: we become the patrons
of our most worthy Judge eternal; and the moral infallibility is
transferred from him to ourselves. In other words, the practical
Protestant formula can be nothing more than this. The Protestant teacher
says to us, '_Such a way of life is the best, take my word for it: and
if you want an example, go to that excellent Son of David, who, take my
word for it, was the very best of men._' But even in this case the
question arises, how shall the Protestants interpret the character that
they praise? And to this they can never give any satisfactory answer.
What really happens with them is inevitable and obvious. The character
is simply for them a symbol of what each happens to think most
admirable; and the identity in all cases of its historical details does
not produce an identity as of a single portrait, but an identity as of
one frame applied to many. Mr. Matthew Arnold, for instance, sees in
Jesus one sort of man, Father Newman another, Charles Kingsley another,
and M. Renan another; and the _Imitatio Christi_, as understood by
these, will be found in each case to mean a very different thing. The
difference between these men, however, will seem almost unanimity, if we
compare them with others who, so far as logic and authority go, have
just as good a claim on our attention. There is hardly any conceivable
aberration of moral licence that has not, in some quarter or other,
embodied itself into a rule of life, and claimed to be the proper
outcome of Protestant Christianity. Nor is this true only of the wilder
and more eccentric sects. It is true of graver and more weighty thinkers
also; so much so, that a theological school in Germany has maintained
boldly '_that fornication is blameless, and that it is not interdicted
by the precepts of the Gospel_.'[39]
The matter, however, does not end thus. The men I have just mentioned
agree, all of them, that Christ's moral example was perfect; and their
only disagreement has been as to what that example was. But the
Protestant logic will by no means leave us here. That alleged
perfection, if we ourselves are to be the judges of it, is sure,
by-and-by, to exhibit to us traces of imperfection. And this is exactly
the thing that has already begun to happen. A generation ago one of the
highest-minded and most logical of our English Protestants, Professor
Francis Newman, declared that in Christ's character there were certain
moral deficiencies;[40] and the last blow to the moral authority of
Protestantism was struck by one of its own household. It is true that
Professor Newman's censures were small and were not irreverent. But if
these could come from a man of his intense piety, what will and what do
come from other quarters may be readily conjectured. Indeed, the fact is
daily growing more and more evident, that for the world that still calls
itself Protestant, the autocracy of Christ's moral example is gone; and
its nominal retention of power only makes its real loss of it the more
visible. It merely reflects and focalises the uncertainty that men are
again feeling--the uncertainty and the sad bewilderment. The words and
the countenance, once so sure and steadfast, now change, as we look at,
and listen to them, into new accents and aspects; and the more earnestly
we gaze and listen, the less can we distinguish clearly what we hear or
see. '_What shall we do to be saved?_' men are again crying. And the
lips that were once oracular now merely seem to murmur back confusedly,
'_Alas! what shall you do?_'
Such and so helpless, even now, is natural theism showing itself; and in
the dim and momentous changes that are coming over things, in the vast
flux of opinion that is preparing, in the earthquake that is rocking the
moral ground under us, overturning and engulfing the former landmarks,
and re-opening the graves of the buried lusts of paganism, it will show
itself very soon more helpless still. Its feet are on the earth, only.
The earth trembles, and it trembles: it is in the same case as we are.
It stretches in vain its imploring hands to heaven. But the heaven takes
no heed of it. No divine hand reaches down to it to uphold and guide it.
This must be the feeling, I believe, of most honest and practical men,
with regard to natural religion, and its necessary practical
inefficiency. Nor will the want it necessarily leaves of a moral rule be
the only consideration that will force this conviction on them. The
_heart_, as the phrase goes, will corroborate the evidence of the
_head_. It will be felt, even more forcibly than it can be reasoned,
that if there be indeed a God who loves and cares for men, he must
surely, or almost surely, have spoken in some audible and certain way to
them. At any rate I shall not be without many who agree with me, when I
say that for the would-be religious world it is an anxious and earnest
question whether any special and explicit revelation from God exist for
us; and this being the case, it will be not lost time if we try to deal
fairly and dispassionately with the question.
Before going further, however, let us call to mind two things. Let us
remember first, that if we expect to find a revelation at all, it is
morally certain that it must be a revelation already in existence. It is
hardly possible, if we consider that all the supernatural claims that
have been made hitherto are false, to expect that a new manifestation,
altogether different in kind, is in store for the world in the future.
Secondly, our enquiries being thus confined to religions that are
already in existence, what we are practically concerned with is the
truth of Christianity only. It is true that we have heard, on all sides,
of the superiority of other religions to the Christian. But the men who
hold such language, though they may affect to think that such religions
are superior in certain moral points, yet never dream of claiming for
them the miraculous and supernatural authority that they deny to
Christianity. No man denies that Christ was born of a virgin, in order
to make the same claim for Buddha: or denies the Christian Trinity in
order to affirm the Brahminic. There is but one alleged revelation that,
_as a revelation_, the progressive nations of the world are concerned
with, or whose supernatural claims are still worthy of being examined by
us: and that religion is the Christian. These claims, it is true, are
being fast discredited; but still, as yet they have not been silenced
wholly; and what I propose to ask now is, what chance is there of their
power again reviving.
Now considering the way in which I have just spoken of Protestantism, it
may seem to many that I have dismissed this question already. With the
'_enlightened_' English thinker such certainly will be the first
impression. But there is one point that such thinkers all forget:
Protestant Christianity is not the only form of it. They have still the
form to deal with which is the oldest, the most legitimate, and the most
coherent--the Church of Rome. They surely cannot forget the existence of
this Church or her magnitude. To suppose this would be to attribute to
them too insular, or rather too provincial, an ignorance. The cause,
however, certainly is ignorance, and an ignorance which, though less
surprising, is far deeper. In this country the popular conception of
Rome has been so distorted by our familiarity with Protestantism, that
the true conception of her is something quite strange to us. Our divines
have exhibited her to us as though she were a lapsed Protestant sect,
and they have attacked her for being false to doctrines that were never
really hers. They have failed to see that the first and essential
difference which separates her from them lies, primarily not in any
special dogma, but in the authority on which all her dogmas rest.
Protestants, basing their religion on the Bible solely, have conceived
that Catholics of course profess to do so likewise; and have covered
them with invective for being traitors to their supposed profession. But
the Church's primary doctrine is her own perpetual infallibility. She is
inspired, she declares, by the same Spirit that inspired the Bible; and
her voice is, equally with the Bible, the voice of God. This theory,
however, upon which really her whole fabric rests, popular
Protestantism either ignores altogether, or treats it as if it were a
modern superstition, which, so far from being essential to the Church's
system, is, on the contrary, inconsistent with it. Looked at in this
way, Rome to the Protestant's mind has seemed naturally to be a mass of
superstitions and dishonesties; and it is this view of her that,
strangely enough, our modern advanced thinkers have accepted without
question. Though they have trusted the Protestants in nothing else, they
have trusted them here. They have taken the Protestants' word for it,
that Protestantism is more reasonable than Romanism; and they think,
therefore, that if they have destroyed the former, _à fortiori_ have
they destroyed the latter.[41]
No conception of the matter, however, could be more false than this. To
whatever criticism the Catholic position may be open, it is certainly
not thus included in Protestantism, nor is it reached through it. Let us
try and consider the matter a little more truly. Let us grant all that
hostile criticism can say against Protestantism as a supernatural
religion: in other words, let us set it aside altogether. Let us suppose
nothing, to start with, in the world but a natural moral sense, and a
simple natural theism; and let us then see the relation of the Church of
Rome to that. Approached in this way, the religious world will appear to
us as a body of natural theists, all agreeing that they must do God's
will, but differing widely amongst themselves as to what His will and
His nature are. Their moral and religious views will be equally vague
and dreamlike--more dreamlike even than those of the Protestant world at
present. Their theories as to the future will be but '_shadowy hopes and
fears_.' Their practice, in the present, will vary from asceticism to
the widest license. And yet, in spite of all this confusion and
difference, there will be amongst them a vague tendency to unanimity.
Each man will be dreaming his own spiritual dream, and the dreams of all
will be different. All their dreams, it will be plain, cannot represent
reality; and yet the belief will be common to all that some common
reality is represented by them. Men, therefore, will begin to compare
their dreams together, and try to draw out of them the common element,
so that the dream may come slowly to be the same for all; that, if it
grows, it may grow by some recognizable laws; that it may, in other
words, lose its character of a dream, and assume that of a reality. We
suppose, therefore, that our natural theists form themselves into a kind
of parliament, in which they may compare, adjust, and give shape to the
ideas that were before so wavering, and which shall contain some
machinery for formulating such agreements as may be come to. The common
religious sense of the world is thus organized, and its conclusions
registered. We have no longer the wavering _dreams_ of men; we have
instead of them the constant _vision_ of man.
Now in such a universal parliament we see what the Church of Rome
essentially is, viewed from her natural side. She is ideally, if not
actually, the parliament of the believing world. Her doctrines, as she
one by one unfolds them, emerge upon us like petals from a half-closed
bud. They are not added arbitrarily from without; they are developed
from within. They are the flowers contained from the first in the bud of
our moral consciousness. When she formulates in these days something
that has not been formulated before, she is no more enunciating a new
truth than was Newton when he enunciated the theory of gravitation.
Whatever truths, hitherto hidden, she may in the course of time grow
conscious of, she holds that these were always implied in her teaching,
though before she did not know it; just as gravitation was implied in
many ascertained facts that men knew well enough long before they knew
that it was implied in them. Thus far, then, the Church of Rome
essentially is the spiritual sense of humanity, speaking to men through
its proper and only possible organ. Its intricate machinery, such as its
systems of representation, its methods of voting, the appointment of its
speaker, and the legal formalities required in the recording of its
decrees, are things accidental only; or if they are necessary, they are
necessary only in a secondary way.
But the picture of the Church thus far is only half drawn. She is all
this, but she is something more than this. She is not only the
parliament of spiritual man, but she is such a parliament guided by the
Spirit of God. The work of that Spirit may be secret, and to the natural
eyes untraceable, as the work of the human will is in the human brain.
But none the less it is there.
_Totam infusa per artus
Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet._
The analogy of the human brain is here of great help to us. The human
brain is an arrangement of material particles which can become connected
with consciousness only in virtue of such a special arrangement. The
Church is theoretically an arrangement of individuals which can become
connected with the Spirit of God only in virtue of an arrangement
equally special.
If this be a true picture of the Catholic Church, and the place which
the only revelation we are concerned with ideally holds in the world,
there can be no _à priori_ difficulty in the passage from a natural
religion to such a supernatural one. The difficulties begin when we
compare the ideal picture with the actual facts; and it is true, when we
do this, that they at once confront us with a strength that seems
altogether disheartening. These difficulties are of two distinct kinds;
some, as in the case of natural theism, are moral; others are
historical. We will deal with the former first, beginning with that
which is at once the profoundest and the most obvious.
The Church, as has been said already, is ideally the parliament of the
whole believing world; but we find, as a matter of fact, that she is the
parliament of a small part only. Now what shall we say to this? If God
would have all men do His will, why should He place the knowledge of it
within reach of such a small minority of them? And to this question we
can give no answer. It is a mystery, and we must acknowledge frankly
that it is one. But there is this to say yet--that it is not a new
mystery. We already suppose ourselves to have accepted it in a simpler
form: in the form of the presence of evil, and the partial prevalence of
good. By acknowledging the claim of the special revelation in question,
we are not adding to the complexity of that old world-problem. I am
aware, however, that many think just the reverse of this. I will
therefore dwell upon the subject for a few moments longer. To many who
can accept the difficulty of the partial presence of good, the
difficulty seems wantonly aggravated by the claims of a special
revelation. These claims seem to them to do two things. In the first
place, they are thought to make the presence of good even more partial
than it otherwise would be; and secondly--which is a still greater
stumbling-block--to oblige us to condemn as evil much that would else
seem good of the purest kind. There are many men, as we must all know,
without the Church, who are doing their best to fight their way to God;
and orthodoxy is supposed to pass a cruel condemnation on these, because
they have not assented to some obscure theory, their rejection or
ignorance of which has plainly stained neither their lives nor hearts.
And of orthodoxy under certain forms this is no doubt true; but it is
not true of the orthodoxy of Catholicism. There is no point, probably,
connected with this question, about which the general world is so
misinformed and ignorant, as the sober but boundless charity of what it
calls the anathematising Church. So little indeed is this charity
understood generally, that to assert it seems a startling paradox. Most
paradoxes are doubtless in reality the lies they at first sight seem to
be; but not so this one. It is the simple statement of a fact. Never was
there a religious body, except the Roman, that laid the intense stress
she does on all her dogmatic teachings, and had yet the justice that
comes of sympathy for those that cannot receive them. She condemns no
goodness, she condemns even no earnest worship, though it be outside her
pale. On the contrary, she declares explicitly that a knowledge of '_the
one true God, our Creator and Lord_,' may be attained to by the
'_natural light of human reason_,' meaning by '_reason_' faith
unenlightened by revelation; and she declares those to be anathema who
deny this. The holy and humble men of heart who do not know her, or who
in good faith reject her, she commits with confidence to God's
uncovenanted mercies; and these she knows are infinite; but, except as
revealed to her, she can of necessity say nothing distinct about them.
It is admitted by the world at large, that of her supposed bigotry she
has no bitterer or more extreme exponents than the Jesuits; and this is
what a Jesuit theologian says upon this matter: '_A heretic, so long as
he believes his sect to be more or equally deserving of belief, has no
obligation to believe the Church ... [and] when men who have been
brought up in heresy, are persuaded from boyhood that we impugn and
attack the word of God, that we are idolaters, pestilent deceivers, and
are therefore to be shunned as pestilence, they cannot, while this
persuasion lasts, with a safe conscience hear us._'[42] Thus for those
without her the Church has one condemnation only. Her anathemas are on
none but those who reject her with their eyes open, by tampering with a
conviction that she really is the truth. These are condemned, not for
not seeing that the teacher is true, but because having really seen
this, they continue to close their eyes to it. They will not obey when
they know they ought to obey. And thus the moral offence of a Catholic
in denying some recondite doctrine, does not lie merely, and need not
lie at all, in the immediate bad effects that such a denial would
necessitate; but in the disobedience, the self-will, and the rebellion
that must in such a case be both a cause and a result of it.
In the light of these considerations, though the old perplexity of evil
will still confront us, it will be seen that the claims of Catholic
orthodoxy do nothing at all to add to it. If orthodoxy, however, admit
so much good without itself, we may perhaps be inclined to ask what
special good it claims within itself, and what possible motives can
exist for either understanding or teaching it. But we might ask with
exactly equal force, what is the good of true physical science, and why
should we try to impress on the world its teachings? Such a question, we
can at once see, is absurd. Because a large number of men know nothing
of physical science, and are apparently not the worse for their
ignorance, we do not for that reason think physical science worthless.
We believe, on the whole, that a knowledge of the laws of matter,
including those of our organisms and their environments, will steadily
tend to better our lives, in so far as they are material. It will tend,
for instance, to a better preservation of our health. But we do not for
this reason deny that many individuals may preserve their health who are
but very partially acquainted with the laws of it. Nor do we deny the
value of a thorough study of astronomy and meteorology because a certain
practical knowledge of the weather and of navigation may be attained
without it. On the contrary, we hold that the fullest knowledge we can
acquire on such matters it is our duty to acquire, and not acquire only,
but as far as possible promulgate. It is true that the mass of men may
never master such knowledge thoroughly; but what they do master of it we
feel convinced should be the truth, and even what they do not, will, we
feel convinced, be some indirect profit to them. And the case of
spiritual science is entirely analogous to the case of natural science.
A man to whom the truth is open is not excused from finding it because
he knows it is not so open to all. A heretic who denies the dogmas of
the Church has his counterpart in the quack who denies the verified
conclusions of science. The moral condemnation that is given to the one
is illustrated by the intellectual condemnation that is given to the
other.
If we will think this over carefully, we shall get a clearer view of the
moral value claimed for itself by orthodoxy. Some of its doctrines, the
great and picturable parts of them, that appeal to all, and that in some
degree can be taken in by all, it declares doubtless to be saving, in
their own nature. But for the mass of men the case is quite different
with the facts underlying these. That we eat Christ's body in the
Eucharist is a belief that, in a practical way, can be understood
perfectly by anyone; but the philosophy that is involved in this belief
would be to most men the merest gibberish. Yet it is no more unimportant
that those who do understand this philosophy, should do so truly and
transmit it faithfully, than it is unimportant that a physician should
understand the action of alcohol, because anyone independent of such
knowledge can tell that so many glasses of wine will have such and such
an effect on him. Theology is to the spiritual body what anatomy and
medicine are to the natural body. The parts they each play in our lives
are analogous, and in their respective worlds their _raison d'être_ is
the same. What then can be shallower than the rhetoric of such thinkers
as Mr. Carlyle, in which natural religion and orthodoxy are held up to
us as contrasts and as opposites, the former being praised as simple and
going straight to the heart, and the latter described and declaimed
against as the very reverse of this? '_On the one hand_,' it is said,
'_see the soul going straight to its God, feeling His love, and content
that others should feel it. On the other hand, see this pure and free
communion, distracted and interrupted by a thousand tortuous reasonings
as to the exact nature of it. What can obscure intellectual
propositions,_' it is asked, '_have to do with a religion of the heart?
And do not they check the latter by being thus bound up with it?_' But
what really can be more misleading than this? Natural religion is
doubtless simpler in one sense than revealed religion; but it is only
simple because it has no authoritative science of itself. It is simple
for the same reason that a boy's account of having given himself a
headache is simpler than a physician's would be. The boy says merely,
'_I ate ten tarts, and drank three bottles of ginger-beer._' The
physician, were he to explain the catastrophe, would describe a number
of far more complex processes. The boy's account would be of course the
simplest, and would certainly go more home to the general heart of
boyhood; but it would not for that reason be the correctest or the most
important. And just like this will be the case of the divine communion,
which the simple saint may feel, and the subtle theologian analyse.
But it will be well to observe, further, that the simplicity of a
religion can of itself be no test of the probable truth of it. And in
the case of natural religion, what is called simplicity is in general
nothing more than vagueness. If _simplicity_ used in this way be a term
of praise, we might praise a landscape as simple because it was
half-drowned in mist. As a matter of fact, however, the religion of the
Catholic Church, putting out of the question its theology, is a thing
far simpler than the outside world supposes; nor is there a doctrine in
it without a direct moral meaning for us, and not tending to have a
direct effect on the character.
But the outside world misjudges of all this for various reasons. In the
first place, it can reach it as a rule through explanations only; and
the explanation or the account of anything is always far more intricate
than the apprehension of the thing itself. Take, for instance, the
practice of the invocation of saints. This seems to many to complicate
the whole relation of the soul to God, to be introducing a number of new
and unnecessary go-betweens, and to make us, as it were, communicate
with God through a dragoman. But the case really is very different. Of
course it may be contended that intercessory prayer, or that prayer of
any kind, is an absurdity; but for those who do not think this, there
can be nothing to object to in the invocation of saints. It is admitted
by such men that we are not wrong in asking the living to pray for us.
Surely, therefore, it is not wrong to make a like request of the dead.
In the same way, to those who believe in purgatory, to pray for the dead
is as natural and as rational as to pray for the living. Next, as to
this doctrine of purgatory itself--which has so long been a
stumbling-block to the whole Protestant world--time goes on, and the
view men take of it is changing. It is becoming fast recognized on all
sides that it is the only doctrine that can bring a belief in future
rewards and punishments into anything like accordance with our notions
of what is just or reasonable. So far from its being a superfluous
superstition, it is seen to be just what is demanded at once by reason
and morality; and a belief in it to be not an intellectual assent only,
but a partial harmonising of the whole moral ideal. And the whole
Catholic _religion_, if we only distinguish and apprehend it rightly,
will present itself to us in the same light.
But there are other reasons besides those just described, by which
outsiders are hindered from arriving at such a right view of the
matter. Not only does the intricacy of Catholicism _described_, blind
them to the simplicity of Catholicism _experienced_, but they confuse
with the points of faith, not only the scientific accounts the
theologians give of them, but mere rules of discipline, and pious
opinions also. It is supposed popularly, for instance, to be of Catholic
faith that celibacy is essential to the priesthood. This as a fact,
however, is no more a part of the Catholic faith than the celibacy of a
college fellow is a part of the Thirty-nine Articles, or than the skill
of an English naval officer depends on his not having his wife with him
on shipboard. Nor again, to take another popular instance, is the
headship of the Catholic Church connected essentially with Rome, any
more than the English Parliament is essentially connected with
Westminster.
The difficulty of distinguishing things that are of faith, from mere
pious opinions, is a more subtle one. From the confusion caused by it,
the Church seems pledged to all sorts of grotesque stories of saints,
and accounts of the place and aspect of heaven, of hell and purgatory,
and to be logically bound to stand and fall by these. Thus Sir James
Stephen happened once in the course of his reading to light on an
opinion of Bellarmine's, and certain arguments by which he supported it,
as to the place of purgatory. It is quite true that to us Bellarmine's
opinion seems sufficiently ludicrous; and Sir James Stephen argued that
the Roman Church is ludicrous in just the same degree. But if he had
studied the matter a little deeper, he would soon have dropped his
argument. He would have seen that he was attacking, not the doctrine of
the Church, but simply an opinion, not indeed condemned by her, but held
avowedly without her sanction. Had he studied Bellarmine to a little
more purpose, he would have seen that that writer expressly states it to
be '_a question where purgatory is, but that the Church has defined
nothing on this point_.' He would also have learned from the same source
that it is no article of Catholic faith, though it was of Bellarmine's
opinion, that there is in purgatory any material fire; and that, '_as to
the intensity of the pains of purgatory, though all admit that they are
greater than anything that we suffer in this life, still it is doubtful
how this is to be explained and understood_.' He would have learned too
that, according to Bonaventura, '_the sufferings of purgatory are only
severer than those of this life, inasmuch as the greatest suffering in
purgatory is more severe than the greatest suffering endured in this
life; though there may be a degree of punishment in purgatory less
intense than what may sometimes be undergone in this world_.' And
finally he would have learned--what in this connection would have been
well worth his attention--that the duration of pains in purgatory is
according to Bellarmine, '_so completely uncertain, that it is rash to
pretend to determine anything about it_.'
Here is one instance, that will be as good as many, of the way in which
the private opinions of individual Catholics, or the transitory opinions
of particular epochs, are taken for the unalterable teachings of the
Catholic Church herself; and it is no more logical to condemn the latter
as false because the former are, than it would be to say that all modern
geography is false because geographers may still entertain false
opinions about regions as to which they do not profess certainty.
Mediæval doctors thought that purgatory might be the middle of the
earth. Modern geographers have thought that there might be an open sea
at the North Pole. But that wrong conjectures have been hazarded in both
cases, can prove in neither that there have been no true discoveries.
The Church, it is undeniable, has for a long time lived and moved
amongst countless false opinions; and to the external eye they have
naturally seemed a part of her. But science moves on, and it is shown
that she can cast them off. She has cast off some already; soon
doubtless she will cast off others; not in any petulant anger, but with
a composed determined gentleness, as some new light gravely dawns upon
her.
Granting all this, however, there remains a yet subtler characteristic
of the Church, which goes to make her a rock of offence to many; and
that is, the temper and the intellectual tone which she seems to develop
in her members. But here, again, we must call to our aid considerations
similar to those we have just been dwelling on. We must remember that
the particular tone and temper that offends us is not necessarily
Catholicism. The temper of the Catholic world may change, and, as a
matter of fact, does change. It is not the same, indeed, in any two
countries, or in any two eras. And it may have a new and unsuspected
future in store for it. It may absorb ideas that we should consider
broader, bolder, and more rational than any it seems to possess at
present. But if ever it does so, the Church, in the opinion of
Catholics, will not be growing false to herself; she will only, in due
time, be unfolding her own spirit more fully. Thus some people associate
Catholic conceptions of extreme sanctity with a neglect of personal
cleanliness; and imagine that a clean Catholic can, according to his own
creed, never come very near perfection. But the Church has never given
this view her sanction; she has never made it of faith that dirt is
sacred; she has added no ninth beatitude in favour of an unchanged
shirt. Many of the greatest saints were doubtless dirty; but they were
dirty not because of the Church they belonged to, but because of the age
they lived in. Such an expression of sanctity for themselves, it is
probable, will be loathed by the saints of the future; yet they may none
the less reverence, for all that, the saints who so expressed it in the
past. This is but a single instance; but it may serve as a type of the
wide circle of changes that the Church as a living organism, still full
of vigour and power of self-adaptation, will be able to develop, as the
world develops round her, and yet lose nothing of her supernatural
sameness.
To sum up, then; if we would obtain a true view of the general character
of Catholicism, we must begin by making a clean sweep of all the views
that, as outsiders, we have been taught to entertain about her. We must,
in the first place, learn to conceive of her as a living, spiritual
body, as infallible and as authoritative now as she ever was, with her
eyes undimmed and her strength not abated, continuing to grow still as
she has continued to grow hitherto: and the growth of the new dogmas
that she may from time to time enunciate, we must learn to see are, from
her own stand-point, signs of life and not signs of corruption. And
further, when we come to look into her more closely, we must separate
carefully the diverse elements we find in her--her discipline, her pious
opinions, her theology, and her religion.
Let honest enquirers do this to the best of their power, and their views
will undergo an unlooked-for change. Other difficulties of a more
circumstantial kind, it is true, still remain for them; and of these I
shall speak presently. But putting these for the moment aside, and
regarding the question under its widest aspects only--regarding it only
in connection with the larger generalisations of science, and the
primary postulates of man's spiritual existence--the theist will find in
Catholicism no new difficulties. He will find in it the logical
development of our natural moral sense, developed, indeed, and still
developing, under a special and supernatural care--but essentially the
same thing; with the same negations, the same assertions, the same
positive truths, and the same impenetrable mysteries; and with nothing
new added to them, but help, and certainty, and guidance.
FOOTNOTES:
[37] It is curious to reflect that what Gibbon said as a sarcasm, is
really a serious and profound truth, and leads to conclusions exactly
opposite to those drawn from it in that witty and most fascinating
chapter from which the above words are quoted.
[38] _Our Eternal Hope._ By Canon Farrar.
[39] See Döllinger's _Continuation of Hortig's Church History_, quoted
by Mr. J.B. Robertson, in his _Memoir of Dr. Moehler_.
[40] See _Phases of my Faith_, by Francis Newman.
[41] It is difficult on any other supposition to account for the marked
fact that hardly any of our English rationalists have criticised
Christianity, except as presented to them in a form essentially
Protestant; and that a large proportion of their criticisms are solely
applicable to this. It is amusing, too, to observe how, to men of often
such really wide minds, all theological authority is represented by the
various social types of contemporary Anglican or dissenting dignitaries.
Men such as Professors Huxley and Clifford, Mr. Leslie Stephen, and Mr.
Frederic Harrison, can find no representatives of dogmatism but in
bishops, deans, curates, Presbyterian ministers--and, above all,
curates. The one mouthpiece of the _Ecclesia docens_ is for them the
parish pulpit; and the more ignorant be its occupant the more
representative do they think his utterances. Whilst Mr. Matthew Arnold
apparently thinks the whole cause of revealed religion stands and falls
with the vagaries of the present Bishop of Gloucester.
[42] Busenbaum, quoted by Dr. J.H. Newman, _Letter to the Duke of
Norfolk_, p. 65.