A NOTE ON PRESENT PROSPECTS
On reconsidering these notes I find them to be far too personal; yet I
do not know how any conception of conversion can be anything else. I do
not profess to have any particular knowledge about the actual conditions
and calculations of the Catholic movement at the moment. I do not
believe that anybody else has any knowledge of what it will be like the
next moment. Statistics are generally misleading and predictions are
practically always false. But there is always a certain faint tradition
of the thing called common sense; and so long as a glimmer of it
remains, in spite of all journalism and State instruction, it is
possible to appreciate what we call a reality. Nobody in his five wits
will deny that at this moment conversion is a reality. Everybody knows
that his own social circle, which fifty years ago would have been a firm
territory of Protestantism, perhaps hardening into rationalism or
indifference but doing even that slowly and without conscious
convulsion, has just lately shown a curious disposition to collapse
softly and suddenly, first in one unexpected place and then in another,
making great holes in that solid land and letting up the leaping flames
of what was counted an extinct volcano. It is in everybody’s experience,
whether he is sad or glad or mad or merely indifferent, that these
conversions seem to come of themselves in the most curious and
apparently accidental quarters; Tom’s wife, Harry’s brother, Fanny’s
funny sister-in-law who went on the stage, Sam’s eccentric uncle who
studied military strategy—of each of these isolated souls we hear
suddenly that it is isolated no longer. It is one with the souls
militant and triumphant.
Against these things (which we know as facts and do not merely read as
statistics) there is admittedly something to be set. It is what is
commonly called leakage; and with a paragraph upon this point I will
close these pages. Father Ronald Knox, with that felicity that is so
good that the wit almost seems like good luck, has remarked that the
Catholic Church really does have to get on by hook or crook. That is, by
the hook of the fisherman and the crook of the shepherd; and it is the
hook that has to catch the convert and the crook that has to keep him.
He said in this connection that the conversions to the Church just now
were so numerous that they would be obvious and overwhelming, like a
landslide, if it were not that they were neutralised in mere numbers, or
rather lessened in their full claim of numbers, by a certain amount of
falling away in other directions. Now the first fact to realise is that
it is in other directions, in totally different directions. Some people,
especially young people, abandon practising Catholicism. But none of
them abandon it for Protestantism. All of them practically abandon it
for paganism. Most of them abandon it for something that is really
rather too simple to be called an _ism_ of any kind. They abandon it for
things and not theories; and when they do have theories they may
sometimes be Bolshevist theories or Futurist theories, but they are
practically never the theological theories of Protestantism. I will not
say they leave Catholicism for beer and skittles; for Catholicism has
never discouraged those Christian institutions as Protestantism
sometimes has. They leave it to have a high old time; and considering
what a muddle we have made of modern morality, they can hardly be
blamed. But this reaction, which is only that of a section, is in its
nature a reaction of the young and as such I do not think it will last.
I know it is the cant phrase of the old rationalists that their reason
prevents a return to the Faith, but it is false: it is no longer reason
but rather passion.
This may sound a sweeping statement, but if it be examined it will be
found not unjust, and certainly not unsympathetic. Nothing is more
notable if we really study the characteristics of the rising generation
than the fact that they are _not_ acting upon any exact and definite
philosophy, such as those which have made the revolutions of the past.
If they are anarchical, they are not anarchist. The dogmatic anarchism
of the middle of the nineteenth century is not the creed they hold, or
even the excuse they offer. They have a considerable negative revolt
against religion, a negative revolt against negative morality. They have
a feeling, which is not unreasonable, that to commit themselves to the
Catholic citizenship is to take responsibilities that continually act as
restraints. But they do not maintain anything like a contrary system of
spiritual citizenship, or moral responsibility. For instance, it is
perfectly natural that they should want to act naturally. But they do
not want to act naturally according to any intellectual theory of the
reliability of Nature. On the contrary, their young and brilliant
literary representatives are very prone to press upon us the crudity and
cruelty of Nature. That is the moral of Mr. Aldous Huxley, and of many
others. State to them any of the consistent theories of the supreme
claim of Nature upon us, such as the pantheistic idea of God in all
natural things; or the Nietzschean theory that nature is evolving
something with superior claims to our own; or any other definable
defence of the natural process itself, and they will almost certainly
reject it as something unproved or exploded. They do not want to have an
exact imitation of the laws of the physical universe; they want to have
their own way, a much more intelligible desire. But the result is that
they are, after all, at a disadvantage in face of those other young
people who have satisfied their reason by a scheme that makes the
universe reasonable.
For that is the very simple explanation of the affair. In so far as
there is really a secession among the young, it is but a part of the
same process as that conversion of the young, of which I wrote in the
first chapter. The rising generation sees the real issue; and those who
are ready for it rally, and those who are not ready for it scatter. But
there can be but one end to a war between a solid and a scattered army.
It is not a controversy between two philosophies, as was the Catholic
and the Calvinist, or the Catholic and the Materialist. It is a
controversy between philosophers and philanderers. I do not say it in
contempt; I have much more sympathy with the person who leaves the
Church for a love affair than with one who leaves it for a long-winded
German theory to prove that God is evil or that children are a sort of
morbid monkey. But the very laws of life are against the endurance of a
revolt that rests on nothing but natural passion; it is bound to change
in its proportion with the coming of experience; and, at the worst, it
will become a battle between bad Catholics and good Catholics, with the
great dome over all.
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Transcriber’s Notes
• Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
• Typographical errors were silently corrected.
• Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when
a predominant form was found in this book.
• Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).