THE CALVERT SERIES
HILAIRE BELLOC, _General Editor_
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND
CONVERSION
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THE CALVERT SERIES
HILAIRE BELLOC, _General Editor_
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_Belloc_: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND HISTORY
_Chesterton_: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND CONVERSION
_McNabb_: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND PHILOSOPHY
_Ward_: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE APPEAL TO REASON
_Windle_: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND ITS REACTIONS WITH SCIENCE
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THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
AND CONVERSION
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1927
_All rights reserved_
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Nihil Obstat
Arthur J. Scanlan, S. T. D.
Censor Librorum.
Imprimatur
Patrick Cardinal Hayes
✠Archbishop, New York.
New York, September 16, 1926.
Copyright, 1926,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
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Set up and electrotyped.
Published November, 1926.
Reprinted, April, 1927.
September, 1927.
_Printed in the United States of America by_
THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK.
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EDITOR’S NOTE
It is with diffidence that anyone born into the Faith can approach the
tremendous subject of Conversion. Indeed, it is easier for one still
quite unacquainted with the Faith to approach that subject than it is
for one who has had the advantage of the Faith from childhood. There is
at once a sort of impertinence in approaching an experience other than
one’s own (necessarily more imperfectly grasped), and an ignorance of
the matter. Those born into the Faith very often go through an
experience of their own parallel to, and in some way resembling, that
experience whereby original strangers to the Faith come to see it and to
accept it. Those born into the Faith often, I say, go through an
experience of scepticism in youth, as the years proceed, and it is still
a common phenomenon (though not so often to be observed as it was a
lifetime ago) for men of the Catholic culture, acquainted with the
Church from childhood, to leave it in early manhood and never to return.
But it is nowadays a still more frequent phenomenon—and it is to this
that I allude—for those to whom scepticism so strongly appealed in youth
to discover, by an experience of men and of reality in all its varied
forms, that the transcendental truths they had been taught in childhood
have the highest claims upon their matured reason.
This experience of the born Catholic may, I repeat, be called in a
certain sense a phenomenon of conversion. But it differs from conversion
properly so called, which rather signifies the gradual discovery and
acceptance of the Catholic Church by men and women who began life with
no conception of its existence: for whom it had been during their
formative years no more than a name, perhaps despised, and certainly
corresponding to no known reality.
Such men and women converts are perhaps the chief factors in the
increasing vigor of the Catholic Church in our time. The admiration
which the born Catholic feels for their action is exactly consonant to
that which the Church in its earlier days showed to the martyrs. For the
word “martyr” means “witness.” The phenomenon of conversion apparent in
every class, affecting every type of character, is the great modern
_witness_ to the truth of the claim of the Faith; to the fact that the
Faith is reality, and that in it alone is the repose of reality to be
found.
In proportion as men know less and less of the subject, in that
proportion do they conceive that the entrants into the City of God are
of one type, and in that proportion do they attempt some simple
definition of the mind which ultimately accepts Catholicism. They will
call it a desire for security; or an attraction of the senses such as is
exercised by music or by verse. Or they will ascribe it to that
particular sort of weakness (present in many minds) whereby they are
easily dominated and changed in mood by the action of another.
A very little experience of typical converts in our time makes nonsense
of such theories. Men and women enter by every conceivable gate, after
every conceivable process of slow intellectual examination, of shock, of
vision, of moral trial and even of merely intellectual process. They
enter through the action of expanded experience. Some obtain this
through travel, some through a reading of history beyond their fellows,
some through personal accidents of life. And not only are the avenues of
approach to the Faith infinite in number (though all converging; as must
be so, since truth is one and error infinitely divided), but the
individual types in whom the process of conversion may be observed
differ in every conceivable fashion. When you have predicated of one
what emotion or what reasoning process brought him into the fold, and
you attempt to apply your predicate exactly to another, you will find a
misfit. The cynic enters, and so does the sentimentalist; and the fool
enters and so does the wise man; the perpetual questioner and doubter
and the man too easily accepting immediate authority—they each enter
after his kind. You come across an entry into the Catholic Church
undoubtedly due to the spectacle, admiration and imitation of some great
character observed. Next day you come across an entry into the Catholic
Church out of complete loneliness, and you are astonished to find the
convert still ignorant of the great mass of the Catholic effect on
character. And yet again, immediately after, you will find a totally
different third type, the man who enters not from loneliness, nor from
the effect of another mind, but who comes in out of contempt for the
insufficiency or the evil by which he has been surrounded.
The Church is the natural home of the Human Spirit.
The truth is that if you seek for an explanation of the phenomenon of
conversion under any system which bases that phenomenon on illusion, you
arrive at no answer to your question. If you imagine conversion to
proceed from this or that or the other erroneous or particular limited
and insufficient cause, you will soon discover it to be inexplicable.
There is only one explanation of the phenomenon—a phenomenon always
present, but particularly arresting to the educated man outside the
Catholic Church in the English-speaking countries—there is only one
explanation which will account for the multiplicity of such entries and
for the infinitely varied quality of the minds attracted by the great
change; and that explanation is that the Catholic Church is reality. If
a distant mountain may be mistaken for a cloud by many, but is
recognised for a stable part of the world (its outline fixed and its
quality permanent) by every sort of observer, and among these especially
by men famous for their interest in the debate, for their acuteness of
vision and for their earlier doubts, the overwhelming presumption is
that the thing seen is a piece of objective reality. Fifty men on
shipboard strain their eyes for land. Five, then ten, then twenty, make
the land-fall and recognise it and establish it for their fellows. To
the remainder, who see it not or who think it a bank of fog, there is
replied the detail of the outline, the character of the points
recognised, and that by the most varied and therefore convergent and
convincing witnesses—by some who do not desire that land should be there
at all, by some who dread its approach, as well as those who are glad to
find it, by some who have long most ridiculed the idea that it was land
at all—and it is in this convergence of witnesses that we have one out
of the innumerable proofs upon which the rational basis of our religion
reposes.—_The Editor._
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY: A NEW RELIGION 15
II. THE OBVIOUS BLUNDERS 27
III. THE REAL OBSTACLES 49
IV. THE WORLD INSIDE OUT 75
V. THE EXCEPTION PROVES THE RULE 93
VI. A NOTE ON PRESENT PROSPECTS 111
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INTRODUCTORY
A NEW RELIGION
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THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND
CONVERSION
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY: A NEW RELIGION
The Catholic faith used to be called the Old Religion; but at the
present moment it has a recognized place among the New Religions. This
has nothing to do with its truth or falsehood; but it is a fact that has
a great deal to do with the understanding of the modern world.
It would be very undesirable that modern men should accept Catholicism
merely as a novelty; but it is a novelty. It does act upon its existing
environment with the peculiar force and freshness of a novelty. Even
those who denounce it generally denounce it as a novelty; as an
innovation and not merely a survival. They talk of the “advanced” party
in the Church of England; they talk of the “aggression” of the Church of
Rome. When they talk of an Extremist they are as likely to mean a
Ritualist as a Socialist. Given any normal respectable Protestant
family, Anglican or Puritan, in England or America, we shall find that
Catholicism is actually for practical purposes treated as a new
religion, that is, a revolution. It is not a survival. It is not in that
sense an antiquity. It does not necessarily owe anything to tradition.
In places where tradition can do nothing for it, in places where all the
tradition is against it, it is intruding on its own merits; not as a
tradition but a truth. The father of some such Anglican or American
Puritan family will find, very often, that all his children are breaking
away from his own more or less Christian compromise (regarded as normal
in the nineteenth century) and going off in various directions after
various faiths or fashions which he would call fads. One of his sons
will become a Socialist and hang up a portrait of Lenin; one of his
daughters will become a Spiritualist and play with a planchette; another
daughter will go over to Christian Science and it is quite likely that
another son will go over to Rome. The point is, for the moment, that
from the point of view of the father, and even in a sense of the family,
all these things act after the manner of new religions, of great
movements, of enthusiasms that carry young people off their feet and
leave older people bewildered or annoyed. Catholicism indeed, even more
than the others, is often spoken of as if it were actually one of the
wild passions of youth. Optimistic aunts and uncles say that the youth
will “get over it,” as if it were a childish love affair or that
unfortunate business with the barmaid. Darker and sterner aunts and
uncles, perhaps at a rather earlier period, used actually to talk about
it as an indecent indulgence, as if its literature were literally a sort
of pornography. Newman remarks quite naturally, as if there were nothing
odd about it at the time, that an undergraduate found with an ascetic
manual or a book of monastic meditations was under a sort of cloud or
taint, as having been caught with “a bad book” in his possession. He had
been wallowing in the sensual pleasure of Nones or inflaming his lusts
by contemplating an incorrect number of candles. It is perhaps no longer
the custom to regard conversion as a form of dissipation; but it is
still common to regard conversion as a form of revolt. And as regards
the established convention of much of the modern world, it is a revolt.
The worthy merchant of the middle class, the worthy farmer of the Middle
West, when he sends his son to college, does now feel a faint alarm lest
the boy should fall among thieves, in the sense of Communists; but he
has the same sort of fear lest he should fall among Catholics.
Now he has no fear lest he should fall among Calvinists. He has no fear
that his children will become seventeenth-century Supralapsarians,
however much he may dislike that doctrine. He is not even particularly
troubled by the possibility of their adopting the extreme solifidian
conceptions once common among some of the more extravagant Methodists.
He is not likely to await with terror the telegram that will inform him
that his son has become a Fifth-Monarchy man, any more than that he has
joined the Albigensians. He does not exactly lie awake at night
wondering whether Tom at Oxford has become a Lutheran any more than a
Lollard. All these religions he dimly recognises as dead religions; or
at any rate as old religions. And he is only frightened of new
religions. He is only frightened of those fresh, provocative,
paradoxical new notions that fly to the young people’s heads. But
amongst these dangerous juvenile attractions he does in practice class
the freshness and novelty of Rome.
Now this is rather odd; because Rome is not so very new. Among these
annoying new religions, one is rather an old religion; but it is the
only old religion that is so new. When it was originally and really new,
no doubt a Roman father often found himself in the same position as the
Anglican or Puritan father. He too might find all his children going
strange ways and deserting the household gods and the sacred temple of
the Capitol. He too might find that one of those children had joined the
Christians in their Ecclesia and possibly in their Catacombs. But he
would have found that, of his other children, one cared for nothing but
the Mysteries of Orpheus, another was inclined to follow Mithras,
another was a Neo-Pythagorean who had learned vegetarianism from the
Hindoos, and so on. Though the Roman father, unlike the Victorian
father, might have the pleasure of exercising the _patria potestas_ and
cutting off the heads of all the heretics, he could not cut off the
stream of all the heresies. Only by this time most of the streams have
run rather dry. It is now seldom necessary for the anxious parent to
warn his children against the undesirable society of the Bull of
Mithras, or even to wean him from the exclusive contemplation of
Orpheus; and though we have vegetarians always with us, they mostly know
more about proteids than about Pythagoras. But that other youthful
extravagance is still youthful. That other new religion is once again
new. That one fleeting fashion has refused to fleet; and that ancient
bit of modernity is still modern. It is still to the Protestant parent
now exactly what it was to the pagan parent then. We might say simply
that it is a nuisance; but anyhow it is a novelty. It is not simply what
the father is used to, or even what the son is used to. It is coming in
as something fresh and disturbing, whether as it came to the Greeks who
were always seeking some new thing, or as it came to the shepherds who
first heard the cry upon the hills of the good news that our language
calls the Gospel. We can explain the fact of the Greeks in the time of
St. Paul regarding it as a new thing, because it was a new thing. But
who will explain why it is still as new to the last of the converts as
it was to the first of the shepherds? It is as if a man a hundred years
old entered the Olympian games among the young Greek athletes; which
would surely have been the basis of a Greek legend. There is something
almost as legendary about the religion that is two thousand years old
now appearing as a rival of the new religions. That is what has to be
explained and cannot be explained away; nothing can turn the legend into
a myth. We have seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears this
great modern quarrel between young Catholics and old Protestants; and it
is the first step to recognise in any study of modern conversion.
I am not going to talk about numbers and statistics, though I may say
something about them later. The first fact to realise is a difference of
substance which falsifies all the difference of size. The great majority
of Protestant bodies to-day, whether they are strong or weak, are not
strengthened in this particular fashion; by the actual attraction of
their new followers to their old doctrines. A young man will suddenly
become a Catholic priest, or even a Catholic monk, because he has a
spontaneous and even impatient personal enthusiasm for the doctrine of
Virginity as it appeared to St. Catherine or St. Clare. But how many men
become Baptist ministers because they have a personal horror of the idea
of an innocent infant coming unconsciously to Christ? How many honest
Presbyterian ministers in Scotland really want to go back to John Knox,
as a Catholic mystic might want to go back to John of the Cross? These
men inherit positions which they feel they can hold with reasonable
consistency and general agreement; but they do inherit them. For them
religion is tradition. We Catholics naturally do not sneer at tradition;
but we say that in this case it is really tradition and nothing else.
Not one man in a hundred of these people would ever have joined his
present communion if he had been born outside it. Not one man in a
thousand of them would have invented anything like his church formulas
if they had not been laid down for him. None of them has any real reason
for being in their own particular church, whatever good reason they may
still have for being outside ours. In other words, the old creed of
their communion has ceased to function as a fresh and stimulating idea.
It is at best a motto or a war cry and at the worst a catchword. But it
is not meeting contemporary ideas like a contemporary idea. In their
time and in their turn we believe that those other contemporary ideas
will also prove their mortality by having also become mottoes and
catchwords and traditions. A century or two hence Spiritualism may be a
tradition and Socialism may be a tradition and Christian Science may be
a tradition. But Catholicism will not be a tradition. It will still be a
nuisance and a new and dangerous thing.
These are the general considerations which govern any personal study of
conversion to the Catholic faith. The Church has defended tradition in a
time which stupidly denied and despised tradition. But that is simply
because the Church is always the only thing defending whatever is at the
moment stupidly despised. It is already beginning to appear as the only
champion of reason in the twentieth century, as it was the only champion
of tradition in the nineteenth. We know that the higher mathematics is
trying to deny that two and two make four and the higher mysticism to
imagine something that is beyond good and evil. Amid all these
anti-rational philosophies, ours will remain the only rational
philosophy. In the same spirit the Church did indeed point out the value
of tradition to a time which treated it as quite valueless. The
nineteenth-century neglect of tradition and mania for mere documents
were altogether nonsensical. They amounted to saying that men always
tell lies to children but men never make mistakes in books. But though
our sympathies are traditional because they are human, it is not that
part of the thing which stamps it as divine. The mark of the Faith is
not tradition; it is conversion. It is the miracle by which men find
truth in spite of tradition and often with the rending of all the roots
of humanity.
It is with the nature of this process that I propose to deal; and it is
difficult to deal with it without introducing something of a personal
element. My own is only a very trivial case but naturally it is the case
I know best; and I shall be compelled in the pages that follow to take
many illustrations from it. I have therefore thought it well to put
first this general note on the nature of the movement in my time; to
show that I am well aware that it is a very much larger and even a very
much later movement than is implied in describing my own life or
generation. I believe it will be more and more an issue for the rising
generation and for the generation after that, as they discover the
actual alternative in the awful actualities of our time. And Catholics
when they stand up together and sing “Faith of our Fathers” may realise
almost with amusement that they might well be singing “Faith of our
Children.” And in many cases the return has been so recent as almost to
deserve the description of a Children’s Crusade.
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THE OBVIOUS BLUNDERS
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