THE EXCEPTION PROVES THE RULE
The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the
degrading slavery of being a child of his age. I have compared it with
the New Religions; but this is exactly where it differs from the New
Religions. The New Religions are in many ways suited to the new
conditions; but they are only suited to the new conditions. When those
conditions shall have changed in only a century or so, the points upon
which alone they insist at present will have become almost pointless. If
the Faith has all the freshness of a new religion, it has all the
richness of an old religion; it has especially all the reserves of an
old religion. So far as that is concerned, its antiquity is alone a
great advantage, and especially a great advantage for purposes of
renovation and youth. It is only by the analogy of animal bodies that we
suppose that old things must be stiff. It is a mere metaphor from bones
and arteries. In an intellectual sense old things are flexible. Above
all, they are various and have many alternatives to offer. There is a
sort of rotation of crops in religious history; and old fields can lie
fallow for a while and then be worked again. But when the new religion
or any such notion has sown its one crop of wild oats, which the wind
generally blows away, it is barren. A thing as old as the Catholic
Church has an accumulated armoury and treasury to choose from; it can
pick and choose among the centuries and brings one age to the rescue of
another. It can call in the old world to redress the balance of the new.
Anyhow, the New Religions are suited to the new world; and this is their
most damning defect. Each religion is produced by contemporary causes
that can be clearly pointed out. Socialism is a reaction against
Capitalism. Spiritualism is a reaction against Materialism; it is also
in its intensified form merely the trail of the tragedy of the Great
War. But there is a somewhat more subtle sense in which the very fitness
of the new creeds makes them unfit; their very acceptability makes them
inacceptable. Thus they all profess to be progressive because the
peculiar boast of their peculiar period was progress; they claim to be
democratic because our political system still rather pathetically claims
to be democratic. They rushed to a reconciliation with science, which
was often only a premature surrender to science. They hastily divested
themselves of anything considered dowdy or old-fashioned in the way of
vesture or symbol. They claimed to have bright services and cheery
sermons; the churches competed with the cinemas; the churches even
became cinemas. In its more moderate form the mood was merely one of
praising natural pleasures, such as the enjoyment of nature and even the
enjoyment of human nature. These are excellent things and this is an
excellent liberty; and yet it has its limitations.
We do not really want a religion that is right where we are right. What
we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong. In these current
fashions it is not really a question of the religion allowing us
liberty; but (at the best) of the liberty allowing us a religion. These
people merely take the modern mood, with much in it that is amiable and
much that is anarchical and much that is merely dull and obvious, and
then require any creed to be cut down to fit that mood. But the mood
would exist even without the creed. They say they want a religion to be
social, when they would be social without any religion. They say they
want a religion to be practical, when they would be practical without
any religion. They say they want a religion acceptable to science, when
they would accept the science even if they did not accept the religion.
They say they want a religion like this because they are like this
already. They say they want it, when they mean that they could do
without it.
It is a very different matter when a religion, in the real sense of a
binding thing, binds men to their morality when it is not identical with
their mood. It is very different when some of the saints preached social
reconciliation to fierce and raging factions who could hardly bear the
sight of each others’ faces. It was a very different thing when charity
was preached to pagans who really did not believe in it; just as it is a
very different thing now, when chastity is preached to new pagans who do
not believe in it. It is in those cases that we get the real grapple of
religion; and it is in those cases that we get the peculiar and solitary
triumph of the Catholic faith. It is not in merely being right when we
are right, as in being cheerful or hopeful or humane. It is in having
been right when we were wrong, and in the fact coming back upon us
afterwards like a boomerang. One word that tells us what we do not know
outweighs a thousand words that tell us what we do know. And the thing
is all the more striking if we not only did not know it but could not
believe it. It may seem a paradox to say that the truth teaches us more
by the words we reject than by the words we receive. Yet the paradox is
a parable of the simplest sort and familiar to us all; any example might
be given of it. If a man tells us to avoid public houses, we think him a
tiresome though perhaps a well-intentioned old party. If he tells us to
use public houses, we recognise that he has a higher morality and
presents an ideal that is indeed lofty, but perhaps a little too simple
and obvious to need defence. But if a man tells us to avoid the one
particular public house called The Pig and Whistle, on the left hand as
you turn round by the pond, the direction may seem very dogmatic and
arbitrary and showing insufficient process of argument. But if we then
fling ourselves into The Pig and Whistle and are immediately poisoned
with the gin or smothered in the feather-bed and robbed of our money, we
recognise that the man who advised us did know something about it and
had a cultivated and scientific knowledge of the public houses of the
district. We think it even more, as we emerge half-murdered from The Pig
and Whistle, if we originally rejected his warning as a silly
superstition. The warning itself is almost more impressive if it was not
justified by reasons, but only by results. There is something very
notable about a thing which is arbitrary when it is also accurate. We
may very easily forget, even while we fulfil, the advice that we thought
was self-evident sense. But nothing can measure our mystical and
unfathomable reverence for the advice that we thought was nonsense.
As will be seen in a moment, I do not mean in the least that the
Catholic Church is arbitrary in the sense of never giving reasons; but I
do mean that the convert is profoundly affected by the fact that, even
when he did not see the reason, he lived to see that it was reasonable.
But there is something even more singular than this, which it will be
well to note as a part of the convert’s experience. In many cases, as a
matter of fact, he did originally have a glimpse of the reasons, even if
he did not reason about them; but they were forgotten in the interlude
when reason was clouded by rationalism. The point is not very easy to
explain, and I shall be obliged to take merely personal examples in
order to explain it. I mean that we have often had a premonition as well
as a warning; and the fact often comes back to us after we have
disregarded both. It is worth noting in connection with conversion,
because the convert is often obstructed by a catchword which says that
the Church crushes the conscience. The Church does not crush any man’s
conscience. It is the man who crushes his conscience and then finds out
that it was right, when he has almost forgotten that he had one.
I will take two examples out of the new movements: Socialism and
Spiritualism. Now it is perfectly true that when I first began to think
seriously about Socialism, I was a Socialist. But it is equally true,
and more important than it sounds, that before I had ever heard of
Socialism I was a strong anti-Socialist. I was what has since been
called a Distributist, though I did not know it. When I was a child and
dreamed the usual dreams about kings and clowns and robbers and
policemen, I always conceived all contentment and dignity as consisting
in something compact and personal; in being king of the castle or
captain of the pirate ship or the man who owned the shop or the robber
who was safe in the cavern. As I passed through boyhood I always
imagined battles for justice as being the defence of special walls and
houses and high defiant shrines; and I embodied some of those crude but
coloured visions in a story called _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_. All
this happened, in fancy at least, when I had never heard of Socialism
and was a much better judge of it.
Shades of the prison-house began to close and with them came a merely
mechanical discussion as to how we were all to get out of prison. _Then_
indeed, in the darkness of the dungeon, was heard the voice of Mr.
Sidney Webb, telling us that we could only conceivably get out of our
Capitalist captivity with the patent Chubb key of Collectivism. Or to
use a more exact metaphor, he told us that we could only escape from our
dark and filthy cells of industrial slavery by melting all our private
latchkeys into one gigantic latchkey as large as a battering ram. We did
not really like giving up our little private keys or local attachments
or love of our own possessions; but we were quite convinced that social
justice must be done somehow and could only be done socialistically. I
therefore became a Socialist in the old days of the Fabian Society; and
so I think did everybody else worth talking about—except the Catholics.
And the Catholics were an insignificant handful, the dregs of a dead
religion, essentially a superstition. About this time appeared the
Encyclical on Labour by Leo XIII; and nobody in our really well-informed
world took much notice of it. Certainly the Pope spoke as strongly as
any Socialist could speak when he said that Capitalism “laid on the
toiling millions a yoke little better than slavery.” But as the Pope was
not a Socialist it was obvious that he had not read the right Socialist
books and pamphlets; and we could not expect the poor old gentleman to
know what every young man knew by this time—that Socialism was
inevitable. That was a long time ago, and by a gradual process, mostly
practical and political, which I have no intention of describing here,
most of us began to realise that Socialism was not inevitable; that it
was not really popular; that it was not the only way, or even the right
way, of restoring the rights of the poor. We have come to the conclusion
that the obvious cure for private property being given to the few is to
see that it is given to the many; not to see that it is taken away from
everybody or given in trust to the dear good politicians. Then, having
discovered that fact as a fact, we look back at Leo XIII and discover in
his old and dated document, of which we took no notice at the time, that
he was saying then exactly what we are saying now. “As many as possible
of the working classes should become owners.” That is what I mean by the
justification of arbitrary warning. If the Pope had said then exactly
what we said and wanted him to say, we should not have really reverenced
him then and we should have entirely repudiated him afterwards. He would
only have marched with the million who accepted Fabianism; and with them
he would have marched away. But when he saw a distinction we did not see
then, and do see now, that distinction is decisive. It marks a
disagreement more convincing than a hundred agreements. It is not that
he was right when we were right, but that he was right when we were
wrong.
The superficial critic of these things, noting that I am no longer a
Socialist, will always say, “Of course, you are a Catholic and you are
not allowed to be a Socialist.” To which I answer emphatically, No. That
is missing the whole point. The Church anticipated my experience; but it
was experience and not only obedience. I am quite sure now from merely
living in this world, and seeing something of Catholic peasants as well
as Collectivist officials, that it is happier and healthier for most men
to become owners than for them to give up all ownership to those
officials. I do not follow the State Socialist in his extreme belief in
the State; but I have not ceased to be credulous about the State merely
because I have become credulous about the Church. I believe less in the
State because I know more of the statesmen. I cannot believe small
property to be impossible after I have seen it. I cannot believe State
management to be impeccable after I have seen it. It is not any
authority, except what St. Thomas calls the authority of the senses,
which tells me that the mere community of goods is a solution that is
too much of a simplification. The Church has taught me, but I could not
unteach myself; I have learned because I have lived, and I could not
unlearn it. If I ceased to be a Catholic I could not again be a
Communist.
As it happens, my story was almost exactly the same in connection with
Spiritualism. There again I was modern when I was young, but not when I
was very young. While I had a vague but innocent nursery religion still
hanging about me, I regarded the first signs of these psychic and
psychological things with mere repugnance. I hated the whole notion of
mesmerism and magnetic tricks with the mind; I loathed their bulging
eyes and stiff attitudes and unnatural trances and the whole bag of
tricks. When I saw a girl I admired set down to crystal-gazing, I was
furious; I hardly knew why. Then came the period when I wanted to know
why, when I examined my own reasons and found I had none. I saw that it
was inconsistent in science to revere research and forbid psychical
research. I saw that men of science were more and more accepting these
things and I went along with my scientific age. I was never exactly a
Spiritualist, but I almost always defended Spiritualism. I experimented
with a planchette, quite enough to convince myself finally that some
things do happen that are not in the ordinary sense natural. I have
since come to think, for reasons that would require too much space to
detail, that it is not so much supernatural as unnatural and even
anti-natural. I believe the experiments were bad for me; I believe they
are bad for the other experimentalists. But I found out the fact long
before I found out the Catholic Church or the Catholic view of that
question. Only, as I have said, when I do find it out, I find it rather
impressive; for it is not the religion that was right when I was right,
but the religion that was right when I was wrong.
But I wish to note about both those cases that the common cant in the
matter is emphatically not true. It is not true that the Church crushed
my natural conscience; it is not true that the Church asked me to give
up my individual ideal. It is not true that Collectivism was ever my
_ideal_. I do not believe it was ever really anybody else’s ideal. It
was not an ideal but a compromise; it was a concession to practical
economists who told us that we could not prevent poverty except by
something uncommonly like slavery. State Socialism never came natural to
us; it never convinced us that it was natural; it convinced us that it
was necessary. In exactly the same way Spiritualism never came as
something natural but only as something necessary. Each told us that it
was _the only way_ into the promised land, in the one case of a future
life and the other of life in the future. We did not like government
departments and tickets and registers; but we were told there was no
other way of reaching a better society. We did not like dark rooms and
dubious mediums and ladies tied up with rope, but we were told there was
no other way to reach a better world. We were ready to crawl down a
municipal drain-pipe or through a spiritual sewer, because it was the
only way to better things; the only way even to prove that there were
better things. But the drain-pipe had never figured in our dreams like a
tower of ivory or a house of gold, or even like the robbers’ tower of
our romantic boyhood or the solid and comfortable house of our matured
experience. The Faith had not only been true all along, but it had been
true to the first and the last things, to our unspoilt instincts and our
conclusive experience; and it had condemned nothing but an interlude of
intellectual snobbishness and surrender to the persuasions of pedantry.
It had condemned nothing but what we ourselves should have come to
condemn, though we might have condemned it too late.
The Church therefore never made my individual ideal impossible; it would
be truer to say that she was the first to make it possible. The
Encyclical’s ideal had been much nearer my own instinct than the ideal I
had consented to substitute for it. The Catholic suspicion of
table-rapping was much more like my own original suspicion than it was
like my own subsequent surrender. But in those two cases it is surely
clear that the Catholic Church plays exactly the part that she professes
to play: something that knows what we cannot be expected to know, but
should probably accept if we really knew it. I am not in this case, any
more than in the greater part of this study, referring to the things
that are really best worth knowing. The supernatural truths are
connected with the mystery of grace and are a matter for theologians;
admittedly a rather delicate and difficult matter even for them. But
though the transcendental truths are the most important they are not
those that best illustrate this particular point, which concerns the
decisions which can be more or less tested by experience. And of all
those things that can be tested by experience I could tell the same
story: that there was a time when I thought the Catholic doctrine was
meaningless, but that even that was not the very earliest time, which
was a time of greater simplicity, when I had a sort of glimpse of the
meaning though I had never even heard of the doctrine. The world
deceived me and the Church would at any time have undeceived me. The
thing that a man may really shed at last like a superstition is the
fashion of this world that passes away.
I could give many other examples, but I fear they would inevitably tend
to be egotistical examples. Throughout this brief study I am under the
double difficulty that all roads lead to Rome, but that each pilgrim is
tempted to talk as if all roads had been like his own road. I could
write a great deal, for instance, about my early wrestlings with the
rather ridiculous dilemma which was put to me in my youth by the
optimist and the pessimist. I promptly and properly refused to be a
pessimist; and I therefore fell into the way of calling myself an
optimist. Now I should not call myself either, and what is more
important I can see that virtue may be entangled in both. But I think it
is entangled; and I think that an older and simpler truth can loosen the
tangle. But the point in the present connection is this; that before I
had ever heard of optimists or pessimists I was something much more like
what I am now than could be covered by either of those two pedantic
words. In my childhood I assumed that cheerfulness was a good thing, but
I also assumed that it was a bad thing not to protest against things
that are really bad. After an interlude of intellectual formalism and
false antithesis, I have come back to being able to think what I could
then only feel. But I have realised that the protest can rise to a much
more divine indignation and that the cheerfulness is but a faint
suggestion of a much more divine joy. It is not so much that I have
found I was wrong as that I have found out why I was right.
In this we find the supreme example of the exception that proves the
rule. The rule, of which I have given a rough outline in the previous
chapter, is that the Catholic philosophy is a universal philosophy found
to fit anywhere with human nature and the nature of things. But even
when it does not fit in with human nature it is found in the long run to
favour something yet more fitting. It generally suits us, but where it
does not suit us we learn to suit it, so long as we are alive enough to
learn anything. In the rare cases where a reasonable man can really say
that it cuts across his intelligence, it will generally be found that it
is true, not only to truth, but even to his deepest instinct for truth.
Education does not cease with conversion, but rather begins. The man
does not cease to study because he has become convinced that certain
things are worth studying; and these things include not only the
orthodox values but even the orthodox vetoes. Strangely enough, in a
sense, the forbidden fruit is often more fruitful than the free. It is
more fruitful in the sense of a fascinating botanical study of why it is
really poisonous. Thus, for the sake of an example, all healthy people
have an instinct against usury; and the Church has only confirmed that
instinct. But to learn how to define usury, to study what it is and to
argue why it is wrong, is to have a liberal education, not only in
political economy, but in the philosophy of Aristotle and the history of
the Councils of Lateran. There almost always is a human reason for all
the merely human advice given by the Church to humanity; and to find out
the principle of the thing is, among other things, one of the keenest of
intellectual pleasures. But in any case the fact remains that the Church
is right in the main in being tolerant in the main; but that where she
is intolerant she is most right and even most reasonable. Adam lived in
a garden where a thousand mercies were granted to him; but the one
inhibition was the greatest mercy of all.
In the same way, let the convert, or still more the semi-convert, face
any one fact that does seem to him to deface the Catholic scheme as a
falsehood; and if he faces it long enough he will probably find that it
is the greatest truth of all. I have found this myself in that extreme
logic of free will which is found in the fallen angels and the
possibility of perdition. Such things are altogether beyond my
imagination, but the lines of logic go out towards them in my reason.
Indeed, I can undertake to justify the whole Catholic theology, if I be
granted to start with the supreme sacredness and value of two things:
Reason and Liberty. It is an illuminating comment on current
anti-Catholic talk that they are the two things which most people
imagine to be forbidden to Catholics.
But the best way of putting what I mean is to repeat what I have already
said, in connection with the satisfying scope of Catholic universality.
I cannot picture these theological ultimates and I have not the
authority or learning to define them. But I still put the matter to
myself thus: Supposing I were so miserable as to lose the Faith, could I
go back to that cheap charity and crude optimism which says that every
sin is a blunder, that evil cannot conquer or does not even exist? I
could no more go back to those cushioned chapels than a man who has
regained his sanity would willingly go back to a padded cell. I might
cease to believe in a God of any kind; but I could not cease to think
that a God who had made men and angels free was finer than one who
coerced them into comfort. I might cease to believe in a future life of
any kind; but I could not cease to think it was a finer doctrine that we
choose and make our future life than that it is fitted out for us like
an hotel and we are taken there in a celestial omnibus as compulsory as
a Black Maria. I know that Catholicism is too large for me, and I have
not yet explored its beautiful or terrible truths. But I know that
Universalism is too small for me; and I could not creep back into that
dull safety, who have looked on the dizzy vision of liberty.
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A NOTE ON PRESENT PROSPECTS
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