“I alone know fully and teach those truths essential to the life and
final happiness of the soul. I alone am that Society wherein the human
spirit reposes in its native place; for I alone stand in the centre
whence all is seen in proportion and whence the chaotic perspective of
things falls into right order. Mankind cannot feed upon itself--for
that is death at last. I alone provide external sustenance from that
which made mankind. The soil of my country alone can fully nourish
mankind. Here, in me, alone is reality. For I alone am not man-made but
am of direct divine foundation and am by my divine Founder perpetually
maintained.”
3. Against this claim many forms of rejection are found, each with its
type of argument: as, that the claim conflicts with the ascertained
results of Physical Science: that it advances a particular affirmation
not based on the only proofs admissible by reason: that the objector
discovers in the Church not the marks of holiness which should
accompany such a claim, but rather of evil, etc.
Among the chief objections is the objection from History. It is
affirmed that the records of the past, the better they are known
and the more closely they are examined, make the more certainly for
the rejection of the Church’s claim to Divine Authority, to unique
inspiration. These records (it is affirmed) show the Church to be of
merely human origin. They yield manifold evidence that illusion, myth
and even craft have built up her structure. Her rites are of the kind
imagined by men in all ages and places wherever men have abandoned
themselves to emotional images divorced from reason. Her doctrines are
spun out of nothingness by men engaged upon mere systems invented
to explain irrational statements. Her objects of worship are but
projections of the worshipper’s mind and have no real existence.
History, it is said, can prove all this. We can trace illusion growing
from step to step: the mythical and legendary gradually accepted for
fact; the doubtful, vague, uncertain, tentative dream hardening into
fixed and absurd dogma. Supposed contemporary evidence, enlightened
History with modern apparatus, proved to be subsequent interpolations.
The writings traditionally ascribed to witnesses turn out--under the
examination of History--to be of a very different and later date.
Beyond all this and clinching the argument is the discovery through
History that men have always thus created for themselves wholly
fanciful beings whom they have worshipped always in much the same
fashions. There has been a long process of self-deception from which
humanity in its advance is gradually freeing itself, and in this
process the Catholic Church is but the last phase.
It is this objection, the argument from History, that I propose to
refute. Certain other of the main objections--the objection from
Reason, the objection from Philosophy, the objection from Physical
Science--are dealt with in other works in this series. I am dealing
with the historical objection alone. I propose to show, not that
History may convince any man of the Church’s claim, but that the
supposed argument from History against that claim has failed. I propose
to enquire upon the validity of the objection from History.