We must begin by establishing the main sections into which is divided
the argument from History against the claims of the Catholic Church.
But before setting out these sections in their order I must reject one
as having no relation to the discussion, though often confused with it:
I mean the so-called historical argument from material prosperity.
It is advanced that the claim of the Catholic Church to Divine
Authority is negatived by a proved historical process whereby societies
rejecting the Church’s claim are blessed with material prosperity,
while societies accepting that claim become poor.
Such an argument no more applies to societies in their relation to
the Church’s authority than it does to individuals in relation to the
authority of their own conscience or of their own reason. My conviction
that a course of action is morally right, or that a given statement is
intellectually true, is not to be tested by its effect upon my income.
In point of fact, the argument is as worthless in its presumptions as
in its reasoning. The historical affirmation is historically false. It
is not true that societies have risen in wealth through the rejection
of the Catholic Faith, or fallen in wealth through the retention of it.
The two phenomena are not correlated in History at all, and there is
as much to be set upon the one side of the account in this brief two
hundred years over which the rises and falls extend as on the other.
But even were the statement true, the application of it would be
clearly beside the mark: even had every Catholic society fallen into
penury and every anti-Catholic risen to affluence, it would be utterly
without bearing upon the truth or falsehood of the Catholic claim.
This being said, what are the respectable and historical arguments
against the Faith? What are those arguments drawn from History of which
the intelligent man must take serious notice? They would seem to fall
into two categories:
The first argument I will call the minor argument, because it appeals
only to the moral sense--not that the moral sense is less than the
intellectual, but that in weighing questions of material evidence
(which is the matter of History) a moral test takes the second place.
Thus, in a court of justice evidence to character, though of weight,
counts less in establishing a man’s claim than material evidence. Next
I find, and much more cogent, a major argument, which is directly
concerned with the intellectual facilities of man.
(I) The minor, or moral argument, as I have called it, is directed
against the character of the Church, and attempts to show from History
that her character is not consonant with her claims. It has many forms:
accusations of cruelty, of unsocial neglect in material things, etc.,
but the main headings are three:
(a) The Church has been historically confident upon and has affirmed
as truths a number of points since proved to be erroneous: a Divine
Authority would never go wrong upon any point.
(b) The Church has relied on falsehoods and propagated them _after_ she
had known them to be falsehoods, and has not abandoned them until she
was compelled to abandon them by the overwhelming weight of evidence.
No Divine Authority would act in this fashion.
(c) The Church is highly organised and has apparently always shown
organisation: such organisation has developed more and more from the
beginning, or at any rate from a very early stage indeed. The Church
is a body whose doctrines, institutions and structure have perpetually
proceeded from the simpler to the more complex and from the less to the
more defined. Nothing possessing divine inspiration would be organised,
for organisation is mechanical and is of death: inspiration, which is
of life, remains free, at large, untrammelled by rule.
(II) What I have called the major, intellectual argument, which is much
the more serious in all our debate, stands thus:
The Church is man-made, as can be seen by the appearance over and over
again in History of a doctrine or a practice unknown to an earlier
epoch, and more largely, by a comparison between all religions; for
the Church, which seemed a unique phenomenon to the lesser historical
knowledge of our fathers, is now discovered to be but one of many
similar phenomena, one of many religions, with rites and doctrines not
indeed identical (they differ widely), but all having parts in common
and all presumably of human institution. Therefore the Church must be
included in the character of all religions: it is but one of many and
man-made like the rest.
But this major, intellectual argument falls into two very distinct
branches, which I will call the Protestant and the purely Sceptical.
(a) The Protestant appeal to History takes the form of saying: “The
Christian revelation is indeed divine, but at some period (earlier
or later, according to the views of the disputant) it was corrupted
by man-made accretions and illusions. History is therefore opposed
to the Catholic Church: for History bears witness to the fact that
the Catholic Church as we know it is essentially man-made. But there
does underlie it some divine foundation, some moral revelation not
man-made.” (The limits of this acceptable minimum each individual
disputant fixes for himself.)
(b) The Sceptical appeal to History--much the most formidable to-day,
and always intellectually the most respectable--speaks in much bolder
tones, thus: “The whole of the Catholic Faith from beginning to end
is man-made. It is a mass of illusions: of projections of the human
mind thrown by the human imagination upon the void; of deceptions,
some of them conscious in some degree, many more but half-conscious;
by far the most unconscious, implanted in the mind by early training.
What the Catholic Church affirms is false from beginning to end, and
History shows that the affirmations of the Catholic Faith have been
thus man-made step by step from the very first origins we can discover.
The idea of a God is man-made; so is the sacramental idea, the idea of
Incarnation--the whole affair.”
Such, as it seems to me, are the historical arguments against the claim
of the Catholic Church to Divine Authority. Those arguments, tabulated
in the order of their importance, that is, of the power they wield
over a rational human mind fully open to evidence and to approaches of
reason, I will here set down in graphic form:
I propose therefore to deal with them in their order, beginning with
the least and going on to the greatest.