Part 6

It is; and to that we answer that if there is to be such a thing as the Faith on earth, it could not but be so. If men must worship, they will worship in places. If men feel the pull of a religious emotion, at once the sacramental idea must enter in. There cannot but be a connection between the physical life of man and any religious system whatsoever, true or false, with which he is inmixed. And so surely as the ministers of the true religion will breathe and eat and walk upon their feet, each as much as the ministers of the false, so surely you will find in a true religion, if true religion there be, habits, practices, doctrines, which (not all combined, but here one, there another) men have groped for or arrived at in systems which attempted or adumbrated the truth, but did not even claim to be the full truth.

It is not an historical argument against the divinity of this one thing that it has the qualities which human things must have. Upon the contrary, it is an argument in favour of its claim.

That the unique object here displayed, the Catholic Church, is divine cannot on this account be affirmed; but it can be affirmed that if such a unique object exist, then it will have these characters attaching to it.

A man making a survey of what little is known of the old religious experiments and perversions of mankind, and being asked, as a pure hypothesis, “Suppose a divine society, corporate, distinct, highly organised, and therefore of highly differentiated function, were to arise on earth to bear witness to the Living God: suppose such a thing for the sake of argument only, what, think you, would such a body present by way of appearance, action and thought?” could not but answer that it would have of necessity present within it not only vital truths, but also practices discoverable wherever man had groped at or half remembered a revelation.

This man, with no knowledge of such a society, but considering what his fellow beings were, what the human mind is, what questions it poses, what answers it demands, would reply: “In that society you would discover the worship of a Creator, the affirmation that he had revealed himself; a mysterious link between the divine and the human, comparable to the link between the unthinking matter of our bodies and the living essence within. It would have sacrifice and veneration combined. It would sanctify objects, places, persons and rites; it would have central institutions, and in proportion to its vitality a multitude of lesser activities; it would have symbols which it would distinguish from realities and forms of reality which it would attach to symbols; for man without a soul is a corpse, and man without a body is a wraith. This supposed society which you bid men imagine would certainly present in their highest form such elements as History has also discovered, disjointedly appearing, often perverted, often degraded, in the various (and ineffective) spiritual experiments or lapses of mankind.”

Then, one might say to such a man, such a general scholar and observer of the unique animal, man, at prayer, “Should there conceivably be such a home upon the earth, how otherwise would you know it?” He could but answer, “Its nature would be such that it would satisfy to the full the demands of men; it would be unique so as to correspond to man himself who is unique on earth, and it would grant him fulness and repose.”

Such and such alone is the Catholic Church. If it be not what it claims to be, then all is void.

FOOTNOTES

[1] The Anglican authority and scholar, Dr. Lightfoot.

[2] For instance, he says there cannot have been a dragon under the Capitol because dragons are only found in Africa!

[3] For instance, the absurdity about the tides, and the argument from the phases of Venus.

[4] “Educated” Europe meant a far larger body in Catholic times than it does now. Universities were then popular institutions and their attendance was from every class.

[5] Taking the date of Pentecost as A. D. 29.

[6] Thus, a man who says, “While rejecting all dogmas and creed I revere the vaguer part of the traditional moral teaching of Jesus” is essentially a Protestant, not a sceptic, or Pagan: for such do not revere any part of our morals. Protestant also, not Pagan, is the man who confines himself to “the authentic teaching of Jesus” freed from all later stories of the marvellous and all the sophistries of Theology, which “authentic teaching” he picks out of the heap by his own infallibility. For the true sceptic or Pagan has no more use for the “authentic” fragments than for all the rest. He is equally indifferent to the whole.

[7] Heresy = Αιρεσις--“Picking and choosing.”

[8] Thus we say of a man of twenty-five that he “changes” into the man of forty. We also say of a man gone mad that he has “changed.” But the word “change” has two very different meanings in the two cases. In the one case it is change within the framework, of unity, of one character and personality. In the other it is the change _against_ that unity, a rupture of it.

Transcriber’s Note

Some inconsistencies in spelling, hyphenation, and punctuation have been retained.

This file uses _underscores_ to indicate italic text. Small capitals changed to all capitals.

p. 37: changed “phenomenom” to “phenomenon” (That such a phenomenon)

p. 48: deleted duplicate word “the” (condemned by authority of the Catholic Church)

p. 71: changed “eraliest” to “earliest” (the earliest origins of the Church)

p. 83: changed “men” to “man” (first the teacher is a revered man)

p. 96: changed “cay” to “may” (what we may say with regard to)

p. 96: changed “here” to “there” (neither here nor there)