Compromise is odious to passionate natures because it seems a
surrender, and to intellectual natures because it seems a confusion;
but to the inner man, to the profound Psyche within us, whose life
is warm, nebulous, and plastic, compromise seems the path of profit
and justice. Health has many conditions; life is a resultant of many
forces. Are there not several impulses in us at every moment? Are there
not several sides to every question? Has not every party caught sight
of something veritably right and good? Is not the greatest practicable
harmony, or the least dissension, the highest good? And if by the
word "truth" we designate not the actual order of the facts, nor the
exact description of them, but some inner symbol of reconciliation
with reality on our own part, bringing comfort, safety, and assurance,
then truth also will lie in compromise: truth will be partly truth to
oneself, partly workable convention and plausibility. A man's life as
it flows is not a theorem to which there is any one rigid solution.
It is composed of many strands and looks to divers issues. There is
the love of home and the lure of adventure; there is chastity which is
a good, and there is love which is a good also; work must leave room
for sport, science for poetry, and reason for prejudice. Can it be a
man's duty to annul any of the elements that make up his moral being
and, because he possesses a religious tradition, shall he refuse the
gifts of his senses, of his affections, of his country and its history,
of the ruling science, morality, and taste of his day? Far from it:
religion, says the inner man, ought rather to be the highest synthesis
of our nature, and make room for all these things. It should not
succumb to any dead or foreign authority that ignores or dishonours
them. The Englishman finds that he was born a Christian, and therefore
wishes to remain a Christian; but his Christianity must be his own, no
less plastic and adaptable than his inner man; and it is an axiom with
him that nothing can be obligatory for a Christian which is unpalatable
to an Englishman.
Only a few years ago, if a traveller landing in England on a Sunday
and entering an Anglican church, had been told that the country
was Catholic and its church a branch of the Catholic church, his
astonishment would have been extreme. "Catholic" is opposed in the
first place to national and in the second place to Protestant; how
then, he would have asked himself, can a church be Catholic that is so
obviously and dismally Protestant, and so narrowly and primly national?
Why then this abuse of language? And why this silly provincialism of
insisting on always calling Catholics Roman Catholics, as if there were
any others, and they were not known by that name all the world over?
Nevertheless, the restoration of an elder Anglicanism in our day has
somewhat softened these paradoxes; and when we remember how fondly the
English screen their instincts in legal fictions and in genteel shams,
the paradoxes vanish altogether.
What is Protestantism? It is all things to all men, if they are
Protestants: but I see in it three leading _motifs_: to revert to
primitive Christianity, to inspire moral and political reform, and
to accept the religious witness of the inner man. Now the Church of
England, intensely Protestant as it seemed until the other day, is not
Protestant in any of these respects. No established national church
could possibly be so. The subjection to Parliament which renders the
English church not Catholic, renders it also not Protestant. To a
primitive Christian, to a puritan reformer or to a transcendental
mystic, a religion established by lay authority is a contradiction in
terms; a lay government may be more or less inspired by righteousness,
but it cannot mediate salvation. A Protestant is essentially a
nonconformist. Moreover, if we examine the theology of the English
church, we see that whilst incidentally very heretical, it is still
fundamentally Catholic; it admits only a single deposit of faith and
one apostolic fountain of grace for all mankind. But in its view heresy
in any branch of the church does not cut it off from the tree. Heresy
is something to which all churches are liable; the pope of Rome and
the patriarch of Constantinople fall into it hardly less often or less
desperately than the archbishop of Canterbury himself. Heresy is to be
conceived as eccentricity within the fold, not as separation from it;
it is the tacking of the ship on its voyage. Saint Peter or Saint Paul
or both of them must have been heretical in their little controversies;
and Christ himself must have had at times, if not always, but a
partial view of the truth; for instance, in respect to the date and
the material nature of his second coming. Accordingly, although it
may be a little trying to the nerves, it is no essential scandal that
a curate should be addicted to Mariolatry, or that a dean should be
unfortunately ambiguous on the subject of the Incarnation: such rapids
and backwaters in the stream of Christian thought only prove how broad
and full it is capable of being.
That many Catholic bodies, if not all, should be constantly schismatic
or heretical, is therefore no paradox with this conception of the
church; and it is obvious that Rome itself is heretical and schismatic
on this theory, since it has laid an exaggerated weight on the
text about Peter and the keys, and has claimed a jurisdiction Over
the eastern patriarchates which was certainly not primitive, and
which these patriarchates have never honestly acknowledged. On the
other hand, the Church of England belonged to the Western Empire
and its Christianity has always been Latin. It broke away from the
patriarchate of Rome not at all in sympathy with the claims of
Antioch or Constantinople, but notoriously in sympathy with German
Protestantism. This revolt was based on the same anti-Catholic and
inconsistent motives as the German Reformation--namely, greed and
desire for absolute power in princes, zeal in puritan reformers, and
impatience of moral and intellectual constraint in the body of the
clergy and laity. Nationalism, faith, learning, and licence were
curiously mingled in those turbid minds, and the Church of England
inherits all that indescribable spiritual confusion. It is national
in its morals and manners, mincing in its scholarship, snobbish in
its sympathies, sentimental in its emotions. Spiritual minds in the
church--of which there are many--suffer under this heredity incubus of
worldliness; but what can they avail? Some join the socialists; a few
escape to Rome; there at least the worldliness, however conspicuous,
is regarded as a vice and not as a virtue. The convert will find
no dearth of petty passions, machinations, vanities, tricks, and
shameless disbelief; but all this will be, like debauchery, a crust of
corruption, avowedly corrupt. It is dirt on the skin, not cancer at
the heart. But then the true Catholic has made the great surrender;
he has renounced, or never thought of maintaining, the authority of
his inner man. He is a catechumen; his teachers will read for him the
symptoms of health or disease visible in his thoughts and dispositions;
by their discipline--which is an ancient science--they will help him
to save his soul; a totally different thing from obeying the impulses
or extending the adventures of the transcendental self. The inner
man, for the Catholic as for the materialist, is only a pathological
phenomenon. Therefore the Englishman, as I conceive him, living in
and by his inner man, can never be really a Catholic, either Anglican
or Roman; if he likes to call himself by either name, it is equally a
masquerade, a fad like a thousand others to which the inner man, so
seriously playful, is prone to lend itself. He may go over to Rome on a
spiritual tour, as he might abscond for a year and live in Japan with
a Japanese wife; but if he is converted really, and becomes a Catholic
at heart, for good, and in all simplicity, then he is no longer the man
he was. Words cannot measure the chasm that must henceforth separate
him from everything at home. I am not surprised that he recoils from so
desperate a step. It is not only the outward coarseness and laxity of
Catholic manners that offend him; these vices are not universal, and he
would not need to share them. But for him, a modern Englishman, with
freedom and experiment and reserve in his blood, always nursing within
himself the silent love of nature and of rebellion, to go over to Rome
is an essential suicide: the inner man must succumb first. Such an
Englishman might become a saint, but only by becoming a foreigner.
There is another sense altogether in which the English church might
be catholic if it chose. Suppose we lay it down as an axiom that
whatever is acceptable to the inner man is good and true, and that
whatever is good and true is Christian--Christianity would then be
open to every influence which, whilst apparently denaturalizing it,
might help to manifest its fulness. It would cast off husk after husk
of doctrine, developing the living spirit and feeding it with every
substance which it was fitted to absorb. There is nothing new in this
process. Christianity was born of such a marriage between the Jewish
soul and the Greek. Greek philosophy was absorbed with magnificent
results; the restoration of Pauline theology, and the other insights
of Protestantism, led to German philosophy, which has been absorbed
too; the sloughing off of monasticism and ecclesiasticism have put
Christianity in a position to understand and express the modern world;
the reduction of revelation, by the higher criticism of the Bible, to
its true place in human history, will involve a new change of front;
and the absorption of modern science and of democracy would complete
the transformation.
To justify this method the church might appeal to an archbishop of
Canterbury who--this was in the old days--was also a saint and a great
philosopher. Saint Anselm has a famous proof of the existence of God
which runs as follows: God exists, because God is, by definition, the
most real of beings. According to this argument, if it should turn
out that the most real of beings was matter, it would follow that
matter was God. This might be thought a consequence drawn in mockery;
but I do not mean to deride Saint Anselm, whom I revere, but on the
contrary to lay bare the nerve of his argument which if the age had
given him scope, and he had not been Arch-bishop of Canterbury, he
might have followed to its sublime conclusion, as Spinoza did after
him. There is a dignity in existence, in fact, in truth which to some
speculative and rapt natures absorbs and cancels every other dignity:
and on this principle the English church might, without any sudden or
distressing negation, gradually turn its worship to the most real
of beings, wheresoever it may be found; and I presume the most real
of beings will be the whole of what is found everywhere. A narrower
conception of God might at each step give place to a wider one; and the
church, instead of embodying one particular revelation and striving
to impose it universally through propaganda, might become hospitable
to all revelations, and find a place for the inspirations of all ages
and countries under the aegis of its own progressive traditions. So
the religion of ancient Rome domesticated all the gods; and so the
English language, if it should become the medium of international
intercourse, might by translation or imitation of other literatures or
by the infiltration into it of foreign words and styles, really become
a vehicle for all human ideas.
I am not sure whether one party in the English church might not welcome
such a destiny; but at present, so far as I can see, the tenderer
and more poetical spirits in it take quite another direction. They
are trying to recover the insights and practices of mediaeval piety;
they are archaistic in devotion. There is a certain romance in their
decision to believe greatly, to feel mystically, to pray perpetually.
They study their attitudes, as they kneel in some correctly restored
church, hearing or intoning some revived early chant, and wondering why
they should not choose a divine lady in heaven to be their love and
their advocate, as did the troubadours, or why they should not have
recumbent effigies of themselves carved on their tombs, with their
legs crossed, like the crusaders. "_Things_" cried the rapturous young
priest who showed me the beautiful chapel of Pusey House, "what we need
is _Things_!"
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