THE REAL OBSTACLES
In the last chapter I have dealt in a preliminary fashion with the
Protestant case in the conventional controversial sense. I have dealt
with the objections which I suspected very early of being prejudices and
which I now know to be prejudices. I have dealt last and at the greatest
length with what I believe to be the noblest of all the prejudices of
Protestantism: that which is simply founded on patriotism. I do not
think patriotism is necessarily prejudice; but I am quite sure it must
be prejudice and nothing else but prejudice, unless it is covered by
some common morality. And a patriotism that does not allow other people
to be patriots is not a morality but an immorality. Even such a tribal
prejudice, however, is a more respectable thing than most of the rags
and tatters of stale slander and muddleheadedness which I am obliged to
put first as the official policy of the opposition to the Church. These
stale stories seem to count for a great deal with people who are
resolved to keep far away from the Church. I do not believe they ever
counted with anybody who had begun to draw near to it. When a man really
sees the Church, even if he dislikes what he sees, he does not see what
he had expected to dislike. Even if he wants to slay it he is no longer
able to slander it; though he hates it at sight, what he sees is not
what he looked to see; in that place he may gain a new passion but he
loses his old prejudice. There drops from him the holy armour of his
invincible ignorance; he can never be so stupid again. If he has a ready
mind he can doubtless set his new reasons in some sort of order and even
attempt to link them with his lost tradition. But the thing he hates is
there; and the last chapter was wholly devoted to the study of things
that are not there.
The real reasons are almost the opposite of the recognised reasons. The
real difficulties are almost the opposite of the recognised
difficulties. This is connected, of course, with a general fact, now so
large and obvious but still not clearly comprehended and confessed. The
whole case of Protestantism against Catholicism has been turned clean
round and is facing the contrary way. On practically every single point
on which the Reformation accused the Church, the modern world has not
only acquitted the Church of the crime, but has actually charged it with
the opposite crime. It is as if the reformers had mobbed the Pope for
being a miser, and then the court had not only acquitted him but had
censured him for his extravagance in scattering money among the mob. The
principle of modern Protestantism seems to be that so long as we go on
shouting “To hell with the Pope” there is room for the widest
differences of opinion about whether he should go to the hell of the
misers or the hell of the spendthrifts. This is what is meant by a broad
basis for Christianity and the statement that there is room for many
different opinions side by side. When the reformer says that the
principles of the Reformation give freedom to different points of view,
he means that they give freedom to the Universalist to curse Rome for
having too much predestination and to the Calvinist to curse her for
having too little. He means that in that happy family there is a place
for the No Popery man who finds Purgatory too tender-hearted and also
for the other No Popery man who finds Hell too harsh. He means that the
same description can somehow be made to cover the Tolstoyan who blames
priests because they permit patriotism and the Diehard who blames
priests because they represent Internationalism. After all, the
essential aim of true Christianity is that priests should be blamed; and
who are we that we should set narrow dogmatic limits to the various ways
in which various temperaments may desire to blame them? Why should we
allow a cold difficulty of the logician, technically called a
contradiction in terms, to stand between us and the warm and broadening
human brotherhood of all who are full of sincere and unaffected dislike
of their neighbours? Religion is of the heart, not of the head; and as
long as all our hearts are full of a hatred for everything that our
fathers loved, we can go on flatly contradicting each other for ever
about what there is to be hated.
Such is the larger and more liberal modern attack upon the Church. It is
quite inconsistent with the old doctrinal attack; but it does not
propose to lose the advantages arising from any sort of attack. But in a
somewhat analogous fashion, it will be found that the real difficulties
of a modern convert are almost the direct contrary of those which were
alleged by the more ancient Protestants. Protestant pamphlets do not
touch even remotely any of the real hesitations that he feels; and even
Catholic pamphlets have often been concerned too much with answering the
Protestant pamphlets. Indeed, the only sense in which the priests and
propagandists of Catholicism can really be said to be behind the times
is that they sometimes go on flogging a dead horse and killing a heresy
long after it has killed itself. But even that is, properly understood,
a fault on the side of chivalry. The preacher, and even the persecutor,
really takes the heresy more seriously than it is seen ultimately to
deserve; the inquisitor has more respect for the heresy than the
heretics have. Still, it is true that the grounds of suspicion or fear
that do really fill the convert, and sometimes paralyse him at the very
point of conversion, have really nothing in the world to do with this
old crop of crude slanders and fallacies, and are often the very
inversion of them.
The short way of putting it is to say that he is no longer afraid of the
vices but very much afraid of the virtues of Catholicism. For instance,
he has forgotten all about the old nonsense of the cunning lies of the
confessional, in his lively and legitimate alarm of the truthfulness of
the confessional. He does not recoil from its insincerity but from its
sincerity; nor is he necessarily insincere in doing so. Realism is
really a rock of offence; it is not at all unnatural to shrink from it;
and most modern realists only manage to like it because they are careful
to be realistic about other people. He is near enough to the sacrament
of penance to have discovered its realism and not near enough to have
yet discovered its reasonableness and its common sense. Most of those
who have gone through this experience have a certain right to say, like
the old soldier to his ignorant comrade, “Yes, I was afraid; and if you
were half as much afraid, you would run away.” Perhaps it is just as
well that people go through this stage before discovering how very
little there is to be afraid of. In any case, I will say little more of
that example here, having a feeling that absolution, like death and
marriage, is a thing that a man ought to find out for himself. It will
be enough to say that this is perhaps the supreme example of the fact
that the Faith is a paradox that measures more within than without. If
that be true of the smallest church, it is truer still of the yet
smaller confessional-box, that is like a church within a church. It is
almost a good thing that nobody outside should know what gigantic
generosity, and even geniality, can be locked up in a box, as the
legendary casket held the heart of the giant. It is a satisfaction, and
almost a joke, that it is only in a dark corner and a cramped space that
any man can discover that mountain of magnanimity.
It is the same with all the other points of attack, especially the old
ones. The man who has come so far as that along the road has long left
behind him the notion that the priest will force him to abandon his
will. But he is not unreasonably dismayed at the extent to which he may
have to use his will. He is not frightened because, after taking this
drug, he will be henceforward irresponsible. But he is very much
frightened because he will be responsible. He will have somebody to be
responsible to and he will know what he is responsible for; two
uncomfortable conditions which his more fortunate fellow-creatures have
nowadays entirely escaped. There are of course many other examples of
the same principle: that there is indeed an interval of acute doubt,
which is, strictly speaking, rather fear than doubt, since in some cases
at least (as I shall point out elsewhere) there is actually least doubt
when there is most fear.
But anyhow, the doubts are hardly ever of the sort suggested by ordinary
anti-Catholic propaganda; and it is surely time that such propagandists
brought themselves more in touch with the real problem. The Catholic is
scarcely ever frightened of the Protestant picture of Catholicism; but
he is sometimes frightened of the Catholic picture of Catholicism; which
may be a good reason for not disproportionately stressing the difficult
or puzzling parts of the scheme. For the convert’s sake, it should also
be remembered that one foolish word from inside does more harm than a
hundred thousand foolish words from outside. The latter he has already
learned to expect, like a blind hail or rain beating upon the Ark; but
the voices from within, even the most casual and accidental, he is
already prepared to regard as holy or more than human; and though this
is unfair to people who only profess to be human beings, it is a fact
that Catholics ought to remember. There is many a convert who has
reached a stage at which no word from any Protestant or pagan could any
longer hold him back. Only the word of a Catholic can keep him from
Catholicism.
It is quite false, in my experience, to say that Jesuits, or any other
Roman priests, pester and persecute people in order to proselytise.
Nobody has any notion of what the whole story is about, who does not
know that, through those long and dark and indecisive days, it is the
man who persecutes himself. The apparent inaction of the priest may be
something like the statuesque stillness of the angler; and such an
attitude is not unnatural in the functions of a fisher of men. But it is
very seldom impatient or premature and the person acted upon is quite
lonely enough to realise that it is nothing merely external that is
tugging at his liberty. The laity are probably less wise; for in most
communions the ecclesiastical layman is more ecclesiastical than is good
for his health, and certainly much more ecclesiastical than the
ecclesiastics. My experience is that the amateur is generally much more
angry than the professional; and if he expresses his irritation at the
slow process of conversion, or the inconsistencies of the intermediate
condition, he may do a great deal of harm, of the kind that he least
intends to do. I know in my own case that I always experienced a slight
setback whenever some irresponsible individual interposed to urge me on.
It is worth while, for practical reasons, to testify to such experience,
because it may guide the convert when he in his turn begins converting.
Our enemies no longer really know how to attack the faith; but that is
no reason why we should not know how to defend it.
Yet even that one trivial or incidental caution carries with it a
reminder of what has been already noted: I mean the fact that whatever
be the Catholic’s worries, they are the very contrary of the
Protestant’s warnings. Merely as a matter of personal experience, I have
been led to note here that it is not generally the priest, but much more
often the layman, who rather too ostentatiously compasses sea and land
to make one proselyte. All the creepy and uncanny whispers about the
horror of having the priest in the home, as if he were a sort of vampire
or a monster intrinsically different from mankind, vanishes with the
smallest experience of the militant layman. The priest does his job, but
it is much more his secular co-religionist who is disposed to explain it
and talk about it. I do not object to laymen proselytising; for I never
could see, even when I was practically a pagan, why a man should not
urge his own opinions if he liked and that opinion as much as any other.
I am not likely to complain of the evangelising energy of Mr. Hilaire
Belloc or Mr. Eric Gill; if only because I owe to it the most
intelligent talks of my youth. But it is that sort of man who
proselytises in that sort of way; and the conventional caricature is
wrong again when it always represents him in a cassock. Catholicism is
not spread by any particular professional tricks or tones or secret
signs or ceremonies. Catholicism is spread by Catholics; but not
certainly, in private life at least, merely by Catholic priests. I
merely give this here out of a hundred examples, as showing once again
that the old traditional version of the terrors of Popery was almost
always wrong, even where it might possibly have been right. A man may
say if he likes that Catholicism is the enemy; and he may be stating
from his point of view a profound spiritual truth. But if he says that
Clericalism is the enemy, he is repeating a catchword.
It is my experience that the convert commonly passes through three
stages or states of mind. The first is when he imagines himself to be
entirely detached, or even to be entirely indifferent, but in the old
sense of the term, as when the Prayer Book talks of judges who will
truly and indifferently administer justice. Some flippant modern person
would probably agree that our judges administer justice very
indifferently. But the older meaning was legitimate and even logical and
it is that which is applicable here. The first phase is that of the
young philosopher who feels that he ought to be fair to the Church of
Rome. He wishes to do it justice; but chiefly because he sees that it
suffers injustice. I remember that when I was first on the _Daily News_,
the great Liberal organ of the Nonconformists, I took the trouble to
draw up a list of fifteen falsehoods which I found out, by my own
personal knowledge, in a denunciation of Rome by Messrs. Horton and
Hocking. I noted, for instance, that it was nonsense to say that the
Covenanters fought for religious liberty when the Covenant denounced
religious toleration; that it was false to say the Church only asked for
orthodoxy and was indifferent to morality, since, if this was true of
anybody, it was obviously true of the supporters of salvation by faith
and not of salvation by works; that it was absurd to say that Catholics
introduced a horrible sophistry of saying that a man might sometimes
tell a lie, since every sane man knows he would tell a lie to save a
child from Chinese torturers; that it missed the whole point, in this
connection, to quote Ward’s phrase, “Make up your mind that you are
justified in lying and then lie like a trooper,” for Ward’s argument was
against equivocation or what people call Jesuitry. He meant, “When the
child really is hiding in the cupboard and the Chinese torturers really
are chasing him with red-hot pincers, then (and then only) be sure that
you are right to deceive and do not hesitate to lie; but do not stoop to
equivocate. Do not bother yourself to say, “The child is in a wooden
house not far from here,” meaning the cupboard; but say the child is in
Chiswick or Chimbora zoo, or anywhere you choose.” I find I made
elaborate notes of all these arguments all that long time ago, merely
for the logical pleasure of disentangling an intellectual injustice. I
had no more idea of becoming a Catholic than of becoming a cannibal. I
imagined that I was merely pointing out that justice should be done even
to cannibals. I imagined that I was noting certain fallacies partly for
the fun of the thing and partly for a certain feeling of loyalty to the
truth of things. But as a matter of fact, looking back on these notes
(which I never published), it seems to me that I took a tremendous
amount of trouble about it if I really regarded it as a trifle; and
taking trouble has certainly never been a particular weakness of mine.
It seems to me that something was already working subconsciously to keep
me more interested in fallacies about this particular topic than in
fallacies about Free Trade or Female Suffrage or the House of Lords.
Anyhow, that is the first stage in my own case and I think in many other
cases; the stage of simply wishing to protect Papists from slander and
oppression, not (consciously at least) because they hold any particular
truth, but because they suffer from a particular accumulation of
falsehood. The second stage is that in which the convert begins to be
conscious not only of the falsehood but the truth, and is enormously
excited to find that there is far more of it than he would ever have
expected. This is not so much a stage as a progress; and it goes on
pretty rapidly but often for a long time. It consists in discovering
what a very large number of lively and interesting ideas there are in
the Catholic philosophy, that a great many of them commend themselves at
once to his sympathies, and that even those which he would not accept
have something to be said for them justifying their acceptance. This
process, which may be called discovering the Catholic Church, is perhaps
the most pleasant and straightforward part of the business; easier than
joining the Catholic Church and much easier than trying to live the
Catholic life. It is like discovering a new continent full of strange
flowers and fantastic animals, which is at once wild and hospitable. To
give anything like a full account of that process would simply be to
discuss about half a hundred Catholic ideas and institutions in turn. I
might remark that much of it consists of the act of translation; of
discovering the real meaning of words, which the Church uses rightly and
the world uses wrongly. For instance, the convert discovers that
“scandal” does not mean “gossip”; and the sin of causing it does not
mean that it is always wicked to set silly old women wagging their
tongues. Scandal means scandal, what it originally meant in Greek and
Latin; the tripping up of somebody else when he is trying to be good. Or
he will discover that phrases like “counsel of perfection” or “venial
sin,” which mean nothing at all in the newspapers, mean something quite
intelligent and interesting in the manuals of moral theology. He begins
to realise that it is the secular world that spoils the sense of words;
and he catches an exciting glimpse of the real case for the iron
immortality of the Latin Mass. It is not a question between a dead
language and a living language, in the sense of an everlasting language.
It is a question between a dead language and a dying language; an
inevitably degenerating language. It is these numberless glimpses of
great ideas, that have been hidden from the convert by the prejudices of
his provincial culture, that constitute the adventurous and varied
second stage of the conversion. It is, broadly speaking, the stage in
which the man is unconsciously trying to be converted. And the third
stage is perhaps the truest and the most terrible. It is that in which
the man is trying not to be converted.
He has come too near to the truth, and has forgotten that truth is a
magnet, with the powers of attraction and repulsion. He is filled with a
sort of fear, which makes him feel like a fool who has been patronising
“Popery” when he ought to have been awakening to the reality of Rome. He
discovers a strange and alarming fact, which is perhaps implied in
Newman’s interesting lecture on Blanco White and the two ways of
attacking Catholicism. Anyhow, it is a truth that Newman and every other
convert has probably found in one form or another. It is impossible to
be just to the Catholic Church. The moment men cease to pull against it
they feel a tug towards it. The moment they cease to shout it down they
begin to listen to it with pleasure. The moment they try to be fair to
it they begin to be fond of it. But when that affection has passed a
certain point it begins to take on the tragic and menacing grandeur of a
great love affair. The man has exactly the same sense of having
committed or compromised himself; of having been in a sense entrapped,
even if he is glad to be entrapped. But for a considerable time he is
not so much glad as simply terrified. It may be that this real
psychological experience has been misunderstood by stupider people and
is responsible for all that remains of the legend that Rome is a mere
trap. But that legend misses the whole point of the psychology. It is
not the Pope who has set the trap or the priests who have baited it. The
whole point of the position is that the trap is simply the truth. The
whole point is that the man himself has made his way towards the trap of
truth, and not the trap that has run after the man. All steps except the
last step he has taken eagerly on his own account, out of interest in
the truth; and even the last step, or the last stage, only alarms him
because it is so very true. If I may refer once more to a personal
experience, I may say that I for one was never less troubled by doubts
than in the last phase, when I was troubled by fears. Before that final
delay I had been detached and ready to regard all sorts of doctrines
with an open mind. Since that delay has ended in decision, I have had
all sorts of changes in mere mood; and I think I sympathise with doubts
and difficulties more than I did before. But I had no doubts or
difficulties just before. I had only fears; fears of something that had
the finality and simplicity of suicide. But the more I thrust the thing
into the back of my mind, the more certain I grew of what Thing it was.
And by a paradox that does not frighten me now in the least, it may be
that I shall never again have such absolute assurance that the thing is
true as I had when I made my last effort to deny it.
There is a postscript or smaller point to be added here to this paradox;
which I know that many will misunderstand. Becoming a Catholic broadens
the mind. It especially broadens the mind about the reasons for becoming
a Catholic. Standing in the centre where all roads meet, a man can look
down each of the roads in turn and realise that they come from all
points of the heavens. As long as he is still marching along his own
road, that is the only road that can be seen, or sometimes even
imagined. For instance, many a man who is not yet a Catholic calls
himself a Mediævalist. But a man who is only a Mediævalist is very much
broadened by becoming a Catholic. I am myself a Mediævalist, in the
sense that I think modern life has a great deal to learn from mediæval
life; that Guilds are a better social system than Capitalism; that
friars are far less offensive than philanthropists. But I am a much more
reasonable and moderate Mediævalist than I was when I was only a
Mediævalist. For instance, I felt it necessary to be perpetually pitting
Gothic architecture against Greek architecture, because it was necessary
to back up Christians against pagans. But now I am in no such fuss and I
know what Coventry Patmore meant when he said calmly that it would have
been quite as Catholic to decorate his mantelpiece with the Venus of
Milo as with the Virgin. As a Mediævalist I am still proudest of the
Gothic; but as a Catholic I am proud of the Baroque. That intensity
which seems almost narrow because it comes to the point, like a mediæval
window, is very representative of that last concentration that comes
just before conversion. At the last moment of all, the convert often
feels as if he were looking through a leper’s window. He is looking
through a little crack or crooked hole that seems to grow smaller as he
stares at it; but it is an opening that looks towards the Altar. Only,
when he has entered the Church, he finds that the Church is much larger
inside than it is outside. He has left behind him the lop-sidedness of
lepers’ windows and even in a sense the narrowness of Gothic doors; and
he is under vast domes as open as the Renaissance and as universal as
the Republic of the world. He can say in a sense unknown to all modern
men certain ancient and serene words: _Romanus civis sum_; I am not a
slave.
The point for the moment, however, is that there is generally an
interval of intense nervousness, to say the least of it, before this
normal heritage is reached. To a certain extent it is a fear which
attaches to all sharp and irrevocable decisions; it is suggested in all
the old jokes about the shakiness of the bridegroom at the wedding or
the recruit who takes the shilling and gets drunk partly to celebrate,
but partly also to forget it. But it is the fear of a fuller sacrament
and a mightier army. He has, by the nature of the case, left a long way
behind him the mere clumsy idea that the sacrament will poison him or
the army will kill him. He has probably passed the point, though he does
generally pass it at some time, when he wonders whether the whole
business is an extraordinarily intelligent and ingenious confidence
trick. He is not now in the condition which may be called the last phase
of real doubt. I mean that in which he wondered whether the thing that
everybody told him was too bad to be tolerable, is not too good to be
true. Here again the recurrent principle is present; and the obstacle is
the very opposite of that which Protestant propaganda has pointed out.
If he still has the notion of being trapped, he has no longer any notion
of being tricked. He is not afraid of finding the Church out, but rather
of the Church finding him out.
This note on the stages of conversion is necessarily very negative and
inadequate. There is in the last second of time or hair’s breadth of
space, before the iron leaps to the magnet, an abyss full of all the
unfathomable forces of the universe. The space between doing and not
doing such a thing is so tiny and so vast. It is only possible here to
give the reasons for Catholicism, not the cause of Catholicism. I have
tried to suggest here some of the enlightenments and experiences which
gradually teach those who have been taught to think ill of the Church to
begin to think well of her. That anything described as so bad should
turn out to be so good is itself a rather arresting process having a
savour of something sensational and strange. To come to curse and remain
to bless, to come to scoff and remain to pray, is always welcome in a
spirit of wonder and the glow of an unexpected good.
But it is one thing to conclude that Catholicism is good and another to
conclude that it is right. It is one thing to conclude that it is right
and another to conclude that it is always right. I had never believed
the tradition that it was diabolical; I had soon come to doubt the idea
that it was inhuman, but that would only have left me with the obvious
inference that it was human. It is a considerable step from that to the
inference that it is divine. When we come to that conviction of divine
authority, we come to the more mysterious matter of divine aid. In other
words, we come to the unfathomable idea of grace and the gift of faith;
and I have not the smallest intention of attempting to fathom it. It is
a theological question of the utmost complexity; and it is one thing to
feel it as a fact and another to define it as a truth. One or two points
about the preliminary dispositions that prepare the mind for it are all
that need be indicated here. To begin with, there is one sense in which
the blackest bigots are really the best philosophers. The Church really
is like Antichrist in the sense that it is as unique as Christ. Indeed,
if it be not Christ it probably is Antichrist; but certainly it is not
Moses or Mahomet or Buddha or Plato or Pythagoras. The more we see of
humanity, the more we sympathise with humanity, the more we shall see
that when it is simply human it is simply heathen; and the names of its
particular local gods or tribal prophets or highly respectable sages are
a secondary matter compared with that human and heathen character. In
the old paganism of Europe, in the existing paganism of Asia, there have
been gods and priests and prophets and sages of all sorts; but not
another institution of this sort. The pagan cults die very slowly; they
do not return very rapidly. They do not make the sort of claim that is
made at a crisis; and then make the same claim again and again at crisis
after crisis throughout the whole history of the earth. All that people
fear in the Church, all that they hate in her, all against which they
most harden their hearts and sometimes (one is tempted to say) thicken
their heads, all that has made people consciously and unconsciously
treat the Catholic Church as a _peril_, is the evidence that there is
something here that we cannot look on at languidly and with detachment,
as we might look on at Hottentots dancing at the new moon or Chinamen
burning paper in porcelain temples. The Chinaman and the tourist can be
on the best of terms on a basis of mutual scorn. But in the duel of the
Church and the world is no such shield of contempt. The Church will not
consent to scorn the soul of a coolie or even a tourist; and the measure
of the madness with which men hate her is but their vain attempt to
despise.
Another element, far more deep and delicate and hard to describe, is the
immediate connection of what is most awful and archaic with what is most
intimate and individual. It is a miracle in itself that anything so huge
and historic in date and design should be so fresh in the affections. It
is as if a man found his own parlour and fireside in the heart of the
Great Pyramid. It is as if a child’s favourite doll turned out to be the
oldest sacred image in the world, worshipped in Chaldea or Nineveh. It
is as if a girl to whom a man made love in a garden were also, in some
dark and double fashion, a statue standing for ever in a square. It is
just here that all those things which were regarded as weakness come in
as the fulness of strength. Everything that men called sentimental in
Roman Catholic religion, its keepsakes, its small flowers and almost
tawdry trinkets, its figures with merciful gestures and gentle eyes, its
avowedly popular pathos and all that Matthew Arnold meant by
Christianity with its “relieving tears”—all this is a sign of sensitive
and vivid vitality in anything so vast and settled and systematic. There
is nothing quite like this warmth, as in the warmth of Christmas, amid
ancient hills hoary with such snows of antiquity. It can address even
God Almighty with diminutives. In all its varied vestments it wears its
Sacred Heart upon its sleeve. But to those who know that it is full of
these lively affections, like little leaping flames, there is something
of almost ironic satisfaction in the stark and primitive size of the
thing, like some prehistoric monster; in its spires and mitres like the
horns of giant herds or its colossal cornerstones like the four feet of
an elephant. It would be easy to write a merely artistic study of the
strange externals of the Roman religion, which should make it seem as
uncouth and unearthly as Aztec or African religion. It would be easy to
talk of it as if it were really some sort of mammoth or monster
elephant, older than the Ice Age, towering over the Stone Age; his very
lines traced, it would seem, in the earthquakes or landslides of some
older creation, his very organs and outer texture akin to unrecorded
patterns of vegetation and air and light—the last residuum of a lost
world. But the prehistoric monster is in the Zoölogical Gardens and not
in the Natural History Museum. The extinct animal is still alive. And
anything outlandish and unfamiliar in its form accentuates the startling
naturalness and familiarity of its mind, as if the Sphinx began suddenly
to talk of the topics of the hour. The super-elephant is not only a tame
animal but a pet; and a young child shall lead him.
This antithesis between all that is formidable and remote and all that
is personally relevant and realistically tender is another of those
converging impressions which meet in the moment of conviction. But of
all these things, that come nearest to the actual transition of the gift
of faith, it is far harder to write than of the rationalistic and
historical preliminaries of the enquiry. It is only with those
preliminary dispositions towards the truth that I claim to deal here. In
the chapters that follow I propose to touch upon two of the larger
considerations of this class, not because they are in themselves any
larger than many other immense aspects of so mighty a theme, but because
they happen to balance each other and form a sort of antithesis very
typical of all Catholic truth. In the first of the two chapters I shall
try to point out how it is that when we praise the Church for her
greatness we do not merely mean her largeness but, in a rather notable
and unique sense, her universality. We mean her power of being cosmos
and containing other things. And in the second chapter I shall point out
what may seem to disturb this truth but really balances it. I mean the
fact that we value the Church because she is a Church Militant; and
sometimes even because she militates against ourselves. She is something
more than the cosmos, in the sense of completed nature or completed
human nature. She proves that she is something more by sometimes being
right where they are wrong. These two aspects must be considered
separately, though they come together to form the full conviction that
comes just before conversion. But in this chapter I have merely noted
down a few points or stages of the conversion considered as a practical
process; and especially those three stages of it through which many a
Protestant or Agnostic must have passed. Many a man, looking back
cheerfully on them now, will not be annoyed if I call the first,
patronising the Church; and the second, discovering the Church; and the
third, running away from the Church. When those three phases are over, a
larger truth begins to come into sight; it is much too large to describe
and we will proceed to describe it.
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THE WORLD INSIDE OUT
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