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+Project Gutenberg's Paradoxes of Catholicism, by Robert Hugh Benson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Paradoxes of Catholicism
+
+Author: Robert Hugh Benson
+
+Release Date: July 16, 2005 [EBook #16309]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PARADOXES OF CATHOLICISM ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Geoff Horton and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
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+
+
+
+PARADOXES OF CATHOLICISM
+
+BY ROBERT HUGH BENSON
+
+
+_These sermons (which the following pages contain in a much abbreviated
+form) were delivered, partly in England in various places and at various
+times, partly in New York in the Lent of 1912, and finally, as a
+complete course, in the church of S. Silvestro-in-Capite, in Rome, in
+the Lent of 1913. Some of the ideas presented in this book have already
+been set out in a former volume entitled "Christ in the Church" and a
+few in the meditations upon the Seven Words, in another volume, but in
+altogether other connexions. The author thought it better, therefore, to
+risk repetition rather than incoherency in the present set of
+considerations. It is hoped that the repetitions are comparatively few.
+
+Italics have been used for all quotations, whether verbal or
+substantial, from Holy Scripture and other literature_.
+
+ROBERT HUGH BENSON
+HARE STREET HOUSE, BUNTINGFORD
+EASTER, 1913
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+  (i) JESUS CHRIST, GOD AND MAN
+  (ii) THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, DIVINE AND HUMAN
+
+I PEACE AND WAR
+
+II WEALTH AND POVERTY
+
+III SANCTITY AND SIN
+
+IV JOY AND SORROW
+
+V LOVE OF GOD AND LOVE OF MAN
+
+VI FAITH AND REASON
+
+VII AUTHORITY AND LIBERTY
+
+VIII CORPORATENESS AND INDIVIDUALISM
+
+IX MEEKNESS AND VIOLENCE
+
+X THE SEVEN WORDS
+
+XI LIFE AND DEATH
+
+
+
+
+PARADOXES OF CATHOLICISM
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+
+(i) JESUS CHRIST, GOD AND MAN
+
+
+_I and My Father are one_.--JOHN X. 30.
+
+_My Father is greater than I_.--JOHN XIV. 20.
+
+
+The mysteries of the Church, a materialistic scientist once announced to
+an astonished world, are child's play compared with the mysteries of
+nature.[1] He was completely wrong, of course, yet there was every
+excuse for his mistake. For, as he himself tells us in effect, he found
+everywhere in that created nature which he knew so well, anomaly piled
+on anomaly and paradox on paradox, and he knew no more of theology than
+its simpler and more explicit statements.
+
+[Footnote 1: Professor Huxley.]
+
+We can be certain therefore--we who understand that the mysteries of
+nature are, after all, within the limited circle of created life, while
+the mysteries of grace run up into the supreme Mystery of the eternal
+and uncreated Life of God--we can be certain that, if nature is
+mysterious and paradoxical, grace will be incalculably more mysterious.
+For every paradox in the world of matter, in whose environment our
+bodies are confined, we shall find a hundred in that atmosphere of
+spirit in which our spirits breathe and move--those spirits of ours
+which, themselves, paradoxically enough, are forced to energize under
+material limitations.
+
+We need look no further, then, to find these mysteries than to that tiny
+mirror of the Supernatural which we call our self, to that little thread
+of experience which we name the "spiritual life." How is it, for
+example, that while in one mood our religion is the lamp of our shadowy
+existence, in another it is the single dark spot upon a world of
+pleasure--in one mood the single thing that makes life worth living at
+all, and in another the one obstacle to our contentment? What are those
+sorrowful and joyful mysteries of human life, mutually contradictory yet
+together resultant (as in the Rosary itself) in others that are
+glorious? Turn to that master passion that underlies these
+mysteries--the passion that is called love--and see if there be anything
+more inexplicable than such an explanation. What is this passion, then,
+that turns joy to sorrow and sorrow to joy--this motive that drives a
+man to lose his life that he may save it, that turns bitter to sweet and
+makes the cross but a light yoke after all, that causes him to find his
+centre outside his own circle, and to please himself best by depriving
+himself of pleasure? What is that power that so often fills us with
+delights before we have begun to labour, and rewards our labour with
+the darkness of dereliction?
+
+I. If our interior life, then, is full of paradox and apparent
+contradiction--and there is no soul that has made any progress that does
+not find it so--we should naturally expect that the Divine Life of Jesus
+Christ on earth, which is the central Objective Light of the World
+reflected in ourselves, should be full of yet more amazing anomalies.
+Let us examine the records of that Life and see if it be not so. And let
+us for that purpose begin by imagining such an examination to be made by
+an inquirer who has never received the Christian tradition.
+
+(i) He begins to read, of course, with the assumption that this Life is
+as others and this Man as other men; and as he reads he finds a hundred
+corroborations of the theory. Here is one, born of a woman, hungry and
+thirsty by the wayside, increasing in wisdom; one who works in a
+carpenter's shop; rejoices and sorrows; one who has friends and enemies;
+who is forsaken by the one and insulted by the other--who passes, in
+fact, through all those experiences of human life to which mankind is
+subject--one who dies like other men and is laid in a grave.
+
+Even the very marvels of that Life he seeks to explain by the marvellous
+humanity of its hero. He can imagine, as one such inquirer has said, how
+the magic of His presence was so great--the magic of His simple yet
+perfect humanity--that the blind opened their eyes to see the beauty of
+His face and the deaf their ears to hear Him.
+
+Yet, as he reads further, he begins to meet his problems. If this Man
+were man only, however perfect and sublime, how is it that His sanctity
+appears to run by other lines than those of other saints? Other perfect
+men as they approached perfection were most conscious of imperfection;
+other saints as they were nearer God lamented their distance from Him;
+other teachers of the spiritual life pointed always away from themselves
+and their shortcomings to that Eternal Law to which they too aspired.
+Yet with this Man all seems reversed. He, as He stood before the world,
+called on men to imitate Him; not, as other leaders have done, to avoid
+His sins: this Man, so far from pointing forward and up, pointed to
+Himself as the Way to the Father; so far from adoring a Truth to which
+He strove, named Himself its very incarnation; so far from describing a
+Life to which He too one day hoped to rise, bade His hearers look on
+Himself Who was their Life; so far from deploring to His friends the
+sins under which He laboured, challenged His enemies to find within Him
+any sin at all. There is an extraordinary Self-consciousness in Him that
+has in it nothing of "self" as usually understood.
+
+Then it may be, at last, that our inquirer approaches the Gospel with a
+new assumption. He has been wrong, he thinks, in his interpretation that
+such a Life as this was human at all. "_Never man spake like this
+man_." He echoes from the Gospel, "_What manner of man is this that even
+the winds and the sea obey Him_? How, after all," he asks himself,
+"could a man be born without a human father, how rise again from the
+dead upon the third day?" Or, "How even could such marvels be related at
+all of one who was no more than other men?"
+
+So once more he begins. Here, he tells himself, is the old fairy story
+come true; here is a God come down to dwell among men; here is the
+solution of all his problems. And once more he finds himself bewildered.
+For how can God be weary by the wayside, labour in a shop, and die upon
+a cross? How can the Eternal Word be silent for thirty years? How can
+the Infinite lie in a manger? How can the Source of Life be subject to
+death?
+
+He turns in despair, flinging himself from theory to theory--turns to
+the words of Christ Himself, and the perplexity deepens with every
+utterance. If Christ be man, how can He say, _My Father and I are one_?
+If Christ be God, how can He proclaim that _His Father is greater than
+He_? If Christ be Man, how can He say, _Before Abraham was, I am_? If
+Christ be God, how can He name Himself _the Son of Man_.
+
+(ii) Turn to the spiritual teaching of Jesus Christ, and once more
+problem follows problem, and paradox, paradox.
+
+Here is He Who came to soothe men's sorrows and to give rest to the
+weary, He Who offers a sweet yoke and a light burden, telling them that
+no man can be His disciple who will not take up the heaviest of all
+burdens and follow Him uphill. Here is one, the Physician of souls and
+bodies, Who _went about doing good_, Who set the example of activity in
+God's service, pronouncing the silent passivity of Mary as the better
+part that shall not be taken away from her. Here at one moment He turns
+with the light of battle in His eyes, bidding His friends who have not
+swords to _sell their cloaks and buy them_; and at another bids those
+swords to be sheathed, since _His Kingdom is not of this world_. Here is
+the Peacemaker, at one time pronouncing His benediction on those who
+make peace, and at another crying that He _came to bring not peace but a
+sword_. Here is He Who names as _blessed those that mourn_ bidding His
+disciples to _rejoice and be exceeding glad_. Was there ever such a
+Paradox, such perplexity, and such problems? In His Person and His
+teaching alike there seems no rest and no solution--_What think ye of
+Christ? Whose Son is He_?
+
+II. (i) The Catholic teaching alone, of course, offers a key to these
+questions; yet it is a key that is itself, like all keys, as complicated
+as the wards which it alone can unlock. Heretic after heretic has sought
+for simplification, and heretic after heretic has therefore come to
+confusion. Christ is God, cried the Docetic; therefore cut out from the
+Gospels all that speaks of the reality of His Manhood! God cannot bleed
+and suffer and die; God cannot weary; God cannot feel the sorrows of
+man. Christ is Man, cries the modern critic; therefore tear out from the
+Gospels His Virgin Birth and His Resurrection! For none but a Catholic
+can receive the Gospels as they were written; none but a man who
+believes that Christ is both God and Man, who is content to believe that
+and to bow before the Paradox of paradoxes that we call the Incarnation,
+to accept the blinding mystery that Infinite and Finite Natures were
+united in one Person, that the Eternal expresses Himself in Time, and
+that the Uncreated Creator united to Himself Creation--none but a
+Catholic, in a word, can meet, without exception, the mysterious
+phenomena of Christ's Life.
+
+(ii) Turn now again to the mysteries of our own limited life and, as in
+a far-off phantom parallel, we begin to understand.
+
+For we too, in our measure, have a double nature. _As God and Man make
+one Christ, so soul and body make one man_: and, as the two natures of
+Christ--as His Perfect Godhead united to His Perfect Manhood--lie at the
+heart of the problems which His Life presents, so too our affinities
+with the clay from which our bodies came, and with the Father of Spirits
+Who inbreathed into us living souls, explain the contradictions of our
+own experience.
+
+If we were but irrational beasts, we could be as happy as the beasts;
+if we were but discarnate spirits that look on God, the joy of the
+angels would be ours. Yet if we assume either of these two truths as if
+it were the only truth, we come certainly to confusion. If we live as
+the beasts, we cannot sink to their contentment, for our immortal part
+will not let us be; if we neglect or dispute the rightful claims of the
+body, that very outraged body drags our immortal spirit down. The
+acceptance of the two natures of Christ alone solves the problems of the
+Gospel; the acceptance of the two parts of our own nature alone enables
+us to live as God intends. Our spiritual and physical moods, then, rise
+and fall as the one side or the other gains the upper hand: now our
+religion is a burden to the flesh, now it is the exercise in which our
+soul delights; now it is the one thing that makes life worth living, now
+the one thing that checks our enjoyment of life. These moods alternate,
+inevitably and irresistibly, according as we allow the balance of our
+parts to be disturbed and set swaying. And so, ultimately, there is
+reserved for us the joy neither of beasts nor of angels, but the joy of
+humanity. We are higher than the one, we are lower than the other, that
+we may be crowned by Him Who in that same Humanity sits on the Throne of
+God.
+
+So much, then, for our introduction. We have seen how the Paradox of the
+Incarnation alone is adequate to the phenomena recorded in the
+Gospel--how that supreme paradox is the key to all the rest. We will
+proceed to see how it is also the key to other paradoxes of religion, to
+the difficulties which the history of Catholicism presents. For the
+Catholic Church is the extension of Christ's Life on earth; the Catholic
+Church, therefore, that strange mingling of mystery and common-sense,
+that union of earth and heaven, of clay and fire, can alone be
+understood by him who accepts her as both Divine and Human, since she is
+nothing else but the mystical presentment, in human terms, of Him Who,
+though the Infinite God and the Eternal Creator, was _found in the form
+of a servant_, of Him Who, _dwelling always in the Bosom of the Father_,
+for our sakes _came down from heaven_.
+
+
+
+
+(ii) THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, DIVINE AND HUMAN
+
+
+_Blessed art thou Simon Bar-jona; because flesh and blood hath not
+revealed it to thee, but My Father Who is in heaven.... Go behind me,
+satan, for thou savourest not the things that are of God, but the things
+that are of men_.--MATT. XVI. 17, 23.
+
+
+We have seen how the only reconciliation of the paradoxes of the Gospel
+lies in the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation. It is only to him who
+believes that Jesus Christ is perfect God and perfect Man that the
+Gospel record is coherent and intelligible. The heretics--men who for
+the most part either rejected or added to the inspired record--were
+those who, on the one side, accepted Christ's Divinity and rejected the
+proofs of His Humanity, or accepted His Humanity and rejected the proofs
+of His Divinity. In the early ages, for the most part, these accepted
+His Divinity and, rejecting His Humanity, invented childish miracles
+which they thought appropriate to a God dwelling on earth in a phantom
+manhood; at the present day, rejecting His Divinity, they reject also
+those miracles for which His Divinity alone is an adequate explanation.
+
+Now the Catholic Church is an extension of the Incarnation. She too
+(though, as we shall see, the parallel is not perfect) has her Divine
+and Human Nature, which alone can account for the paradoxes of her
+history; and these paradoxes are either predicted by Christ--asserted,
+that is, as part of His spiritual teaching--or actually manifested in
+His own life. (We may take them as symbolised, so to speak, in those
+words of our Lord to St. Peter in which He first commends him as a man
+inspired by God and then, almost simultaneously, rebukes him as one who
+can rise no further than an earthly ideal at the best.)
+
+I. (i) Just as we have already imagined a well-disposed inquirer
+approaching for the first time the problems of the Gospel, so let us now
+again imagine such a man, in whom the dawn of faith has begun,
+encountering the record of Catholicism.
+
+At first all seems to him Divine. He sees, for example, how singularly
+unique she is, how unlike to all other human societies. Other societies
+depend for their very existence upon a congenial human environment; she
+flourishes in the most uncongenial. Other societies have their day and
+pass down to dissolution and corruption; she alone knows no corruption.
+Other dynasties rise and fall; the dynasty of Peter the Fisherman
+remains unmoved. Other causes wax and wane with the worldly influence
+which they can command; she is usually most effective when her earthly
+interest is at the lowest ebb.
+
+Or again, he falls in love with her Divine beauty and perceives even in
+her meanest acts a grace which he cannot understand. He notices with
+wonder how she takes human mortal things--a perishing pagan language, a
+debased architecture, an infant science or philosophy--and infuses into
+them her own immortality. She takes the superstitions of a country-side
+and, retaining their "accidents," transubstantiates them into truth; the
+customs or rites of a pagan society, and makes them the symbols of a
+living worship. And into all she infuses a spirit that is all her own--a
+spirit of delicate grace and beauty of which she alone has the secret.
+
+It is her Divinity, then, that he sees, and rightly. But, wrongly, he
+draws certain one-sided conclusions. If she is so perfect, he argues (at
+least subconsciously), she can be nothing else than perfect; if she is
+so Divine she can be in no sense human. Her pontiffs must all be saints,
+her priests shining lights, her people stars in her firmament. If she is
+Divine, her policy must be unerring, her acts all gracious, her lightest
+movements inspired. There must be no brutality anywhere, no
+self-seeking, no ambition, no instability. How should there be, since
+she is Divine?
+
+Such are his first instincts. And then, little by little, his
+disillusionment begins.
+
+For, as he studies her record more deeply, he begins to encounter
+evidences of her Humanity. He reads history, and he discovers here and
+there a pontiff who but little in his moral character resembles Him
+Whose Vicar he is. He meets an apostate priest; he hears of some
+savagery committed in Christ's name; he talks with a convert who has
+returned complacently to the City of Confusion; there is gleefully
+related to him the history of a family who has kept the faith all
+through the period of persecution and lost it in the era of toleration.
+And he is shaken and dismayed. "How can these be in a Society that is
+Divine? I had _trusted_ that it had been_ She _who should have redeemed
+Israel;_ _and now--_!"
+
+(ii) Another man approaches the record of Catholicism from the opposite
+direction. To him she is a human society and nothing more; and he finds,
+indeed, a thousand corroborations of his theory. He views her amazing
+success in the first ages of Christianity--the rapid propagation of her
+tenets and the growth of her influence--and sees behind these things
+nothing more than the fortunate circumstance of the existence of the
+Roman Empire. Or he notices the sudden and rapid rise of the power of
+the Roman pontiff and explains this by the happy chance that moved the
+centre of empire to the east and left in Rome an old prestige and an
+empty throne. He sees how the Church has profited by the divisions in
+Europe; how she has inherited the old Latin genius for law and order;
+and he finds in these things an explanation of her unity and of her
+claim to rule princes and kings. She is to him just human, and no more.
+There is not, at first sight, a phenomenon of her life for which he
+cannot find a human explanation. She is interesting, as a result of
+innumerable complicated forces; she is venerable, as the oldest coherent
+society in Europe; she has the advantage of Italian diplomacy; she has
+been shrewd, unweary, and persevering. But she is no more.
+
+And then, as he goes deeper, he begins to encounter phenomena which do
+not fall so easily under his compact little theories. If she is merely
+human, why do not the laws of all other human societies appear to affect
+her too? Why is it that she alone shows no incline towards dissolution
+and decay? Why has not she too split up into the component parts of
+which she is welded? How is it that she has preserved a unity of which
+all earthly unities are but shadows? Or he meets with the phenomena of
+her sanctity and begins to perceive that the difference between the
+character she produces in her saints and the character of the noblest of
+those who do not submit to her is one of kind and not merely of degree.
+If she is merely mediaeval, how is it that she commands such allegiance
+as that which is paid to her in modern America? If she is merely
+European, how is it that she alone can deal with the Oriental on his own
+terms? If she is merely the result of temporal circumstances, how is it
+that her spiritual influence shows no sign of waning when the forces
+that helped to build her are dispersed?
+
+His theory too, then, becomes less confident. If she is Human, why is
+she so evidently Divine? If she is Divine, whence comes her obvious
+Humanity? So years ago men asked, If Christ be God, how could He be
+weary by the wayside and die upon the Cross? So men ask now, If Christ
+be Man, how could He cast out devils and rise from the dead?
+
+II. We come back, then, to the Catholic answer. Treat the Catholic
+Church as Divine only and you will stumble over her scandals, her
+failures, and her shortcomings. Treat her as Human only and you will be
+silenced by her miracles, her sanctity, and her eternal resurrections.
+
+(i) Of course the Catholic Church is Human. She consists of fallible
+men, and her Humanity is not even safeguarded as was that of Christ
+against the incursions of sin. Always, therefore, there have been
+scandals, and always will be. Popes may betray their trust, in all human
+matters; priests their flocks; laymen their faith. No man is secure.
+And, again, since she is human it is perfectly true that she has
+profited by human circumstances for the increase of her power.
+Undoubtedly it was the existence of the Roman Empire, with its roads,
+its rapid means of transit, and its organization, that made possible the
+swift propagation of the Gospel in the first centuries. Undoubtedly it
+was the empty throne of Caesar and the prestige of Rome that developed
+the world's acceptance of the authority of Peter's Chair. Undoubtedly
+it was the divisions of Europe that cemented the Church's unity and led
+men to look to a Supreme Authority that might compose their differences.
+There is scarcely an opening in human affairs into which she has not
+plunged; hardly an opportunity she has missed. Human affairs, human sins
+and weaknesses as well as human virtues, have all contributed to her
+power. So grows a tree, even in uncongenial soil. The rocks that impede
+the roots later become their support; the rich soil, waiting for an
+occupant, has been drawn up into the life of the leaves; the very winds
+that imperilled the young sapling have developed too its power of
+resistance. Yet these things do not make the tree.
+
+(ii) For her Humanity, though it is the body in which her Divinity
+dwells, does not create that Divinity. Certainly human circumstances
+have developed her, yet what but Divine Providence ordered and developed
+those human circumstances? What but that same power, which indwells in
+the Church, dwelt without her too and caused her to take root at that
+time and in that place which most favored her growth? Certainly she is
+Human. It may well be that her rulers have contradicted one another in
+human matters--in science, in policy, and in discipline; but how is it,
+then, that they have not contradicted one another in matters that are
+Divine? Granted that one Pope has reversed the policy of his
+predecessor, then what has saved him from reversing his theology also?
+Certainly there have been appalling scandals, outrageous sinners,
+blaspheming apostates--but what of her saints?
+
+And, above all, she gives proof of her Divinity by that very sign to
+which Christ Himself pointed as a proof of His own. Granted that she
+_dies daily_--that her cause fails in this century and in that country;
+that her science is discredited in this generation and her active
+morality in that and her ideals in a third--how comes it that she also
+rises daily from the dead; that her old symbols rise again from their
+ruins; that her virtues are acclaimed by the children of the men who
+renounced her; that her bells and her music sound again where once her
+churches and houses were laid waste?
+
+Here, then, is the Catholic answer and it is this alone that makes sense
+of history, as it is Catholic doctrine which alone makes sense of the
+Gospel record. The answer is identical in both cases alike, and it is
+this--that the only explanation of the phenomena of the Gospels and of
+Church history is that the Life which produces them is both Human and
+Divine.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+PEACE AND WAR
+
+
+_Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the
+children of God._--MATT. V. 9.
+
+_Do not think that I am come to send peace on earth; I
+came not to send peace but the sword._--MATT. X. 34.
+
+
+We have considered how the key to the Paradoxes of the Gospel and the
+key to the Paradoxes of Catholicism is one and the same--that the Life
+that produces them is at once Divine and Human. Let us go on to consider
+how this resolves those of Catholicism, especially those charged against
+us by our adversaries.
+
+For we live in a day when Catholicism is no longer considered by
+intelligent men to be too evidently absurd to be argued with. Definite
+reasons are given by those who stand outside our borders for the
+attitude they maintain; definite accusations are made which must either
+be allowed or refuted.
+
+Now those who stand without the walls of the City of Peace know nothing,
+it is true, of the life that its citizens lead within, nothing of the
+harmony and consolation that Catholicism alone can give. Yet of certain
+points, it may be, in the large outlines of that city against the sky,
+of the place it occupies in the world, of its wide effect upon human
+life in general, it may very well be that these detached observers may
+know more than the devout who dwell at peace within. Let us, then,
+consider their reflections not necessarily as wholly false; it may be
+that they have caught glimpses which we have missed and relations which
+either we take too much for granted or have failed altogether to see. It
+may be that these accusations will turn out to be our credentials in
+disguise.
+
+I. Every world-religion, we are told, worthy of the name has as its
+principal object and its chief claim to consideration its establishing
+or its fostering of peace among men. Supremely this was so in the first
+days of Christianity. It was this that its great prophet predicted of
+its work when its Divine Founder should come on earth. Nature shall
+recover its lost harmony and the dissensions of men shall cease when He,
+the Prince of Peace, shall approach. The very beasts shall lie down
+together in amity, _the lion and the lamb_ and _the leopard and the
+kid_. Further, it was the Message of Peace that the angels proclaimed
+over His cradle in Bethlehem; it was the Gift of Peace which He Himself
+promised to His disciples; it was the _Peace of God which passeth
+knowledge_ to which the great Apostle commended his converts. This then,
+we are told, is of the very essence of Christianity; this is the supreme
+benediction on the peacemakers that _they shall be called the children
+of God_.
+
+Yet, when we turn to Catholicism, we are bidden to see in it not a
+gatherer but a scatterer, not the daughter of peace but the mother of
+disunion. Is there a single tormented country in Europe to-day, it is
+rhetorically demanded, that does not owe at least part of its misery to
+the claims of Catholicism? What is it but Catholicism that lies at the
+heart of the divided allegiance of France, of the miseries of Portugal,
+and of the dissensions of Italy? Look back through history and you will
+find the same tale everywhere. What was it that disturbed the politics
+of England so often from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, and tore
+her in two in the sixteenth, but the determined resistance of an
+adolescent nation to the tyranny of Rome? What lay behind the religious
+wars of Europe, behind the fires of Smithfield, the rack of Elizabeth,
+and the blood of St. Bartholomew's Day but this intolerant and
+intolerable religion which would come to no terms even with the most
+reasonable of its adversaries? It is impossible, of course, altogether
+to apportion blame, to say that in each several instance it was the
+Catholic that was the aggressor; but at least it is true to say that it
+was Catholic principles that were the occasion and Catholic claims the
+unhappy cause of all this incalculable flood of human misery.
+
+How singularly unlike, then, we are told, is this religion of
+dissension to the religion of Jesus Christ, of all these dogmatic and
+disciplinary claims and assertions to the meekness of the Poor Man of
+Nazareth! If true Christianity is anywhere in the world to-day it is not
+among such as these that it lies hid; rather it must be sought among the
+gentle humanitarians of our own and every country--men who strive for
+peace at all cost, men whose principal virtues are those of toleration
+and charity, men who, if any, have earned the beatitude of being _called
+the children of God_.
+
+II. We turn to the Life of Jesus Christ from the Life of Catholicism,
+and at first indeed it does seem as if the contrast were justified. We
+cannot deny our critic's charges; every one of his historical assertions
+is true: it is indeed true that Catholicism has been the occasion of
+more bloodshedding than has any of the ambitions or jealousies of man.
+
+And it is, further, true that Jesus Christ pronounced this benediction;
+that He bade His followers seek after peace, and that He commended them,
+in the very climax of His exaltation, to the Peace which He alone could
+bestow.
+
+Yet, when we look closer, the case is not so simple. For, first, what
+was, as a matter of fact, the direct immediate effect of the Life and
+Personality of Jesus Christ upon the society in which He lived but this
+very dissension, this very bloodshedding and misery that are charged
+against His Church? It was precisely on this account that He was given
+into the hands of Pilate. _He stirreth up the people. He makes Himself a
+King._ He is a contentious demagogue, a disloyal citizen, a danger to
+the Roman Peace.
+
+And indeed there seem to have been excuses for these charges. It was not
+the language of a modern "humanitarian," of the modern tolerant
+"Christian," that fell from the Divine Lips of Jesus Christ. _Go and
+tell that fox_, He cries of the ruler of His people. _O you whited
+sepulchres full of dead men's bones! You vipers! You hypocrites!_ This
+is the language He uses to the representatives of Israel's religion. Is
+this the kind of talk that we hear from modern leaders of religious
+thought? Would such language as this be tolerated for a moment from the
+humanitarian Christian pulpits of to-day? Is it possible to imagine more
+inflammatory speech, more "unchristian sentiments," as they would be
+called to-day, than those words uttered by none other but the Divine
+Founder of Christianity? What of that amazing scene when He threw the
+furniture about the temple courts?
+
+And as for the effect of such words and methods, our Lord Himself is
+quite explicit. "Make no mistake," He cries to the modern humanitarian
+who claims alone to represent Him. "Make no mistake. I am _not come to
+bring peace_ at any price; there are worse things than war and
+bloodshed. I am _come to bring not peace but a sword_. I am come to
+_divide families_, not to unite them; to rend kingdoms, not to knit
+them up; I am come _to set mother against daughter and daughter against
+mother_; I am come not to establish universal toleration, but universal
+Truth."
+
+What, then, is the reconciliation of the Paradox? In what sense can it
+be possible that the effect of the Personality of the Prince of Peace,
+and therefore the effect of His Church, in spite of their claims to be
+the friends of peace, should be _not peace, but the sword?_
+
+III. Now (1) the Catholic Church is a Human Society. She is constituted,
+that is to say, of human beings; she depends, humanly speaking, upon
+human circumstances; she can be assaulted, weakened, and disarmed by
+human enemies. She dwells in the midst of human society, and it is with
+human society that she has to deal.
+
+Now if she were not human--if she were merely a Divine Society, a
+far-off city in the heavens, a future distant ideal to which human
+society is approximating, there would be no conflict at all. She would
+never meet in a face-to-face shock the passions and antagonisms of men;
+she could suppress, now and again, her Counsels of Perfection, her calls
+to a higher life, if it were not that these are vital and present
+principles which she is bound to propagate among men.
+
+And again, if she were merely human, there would be no conflict. If she
+were merely ascended from below, merely the result of the finest
+religious thought of the world, the high-water mark of spiritual
+attainment, again she could compromise, could suppress, could be silent.
+
+But she is both human and divine, and therefore her warfare is certain
+and inevitable. For she dwells in the midst of the kingdoms of this
+world, and these are constituted, at any rate at the present day, on
+wholly human bases. Statesmen and kings, at the present day, do not
+found their policies upon supernatural considerations; their object is
+to govern their subjects, to promote the peace and union of their
+subjects, to make war, if need be, on behalf of the peace of their
+subjects, wholly on natural grounds. Commerce, finance, agriculture,
+education in the things of this world, science, art, exploration--human
+activities generally--these, in their purely natural aspect, are the
+objects of nearly all modern statesmanship. Our rulers are professedly,
+in their public capacity, neither for religion nor against it; religion
+is a private matter for the individual, and governments stand aside--or
+at any rate profess to do so.
+
+And it is in this kind of world, in this fashion of human society, that
+the Catholic Church, in virtue of her humanity, is bound to dwell. She
+too is a kingdom, though not of this world, yet in it.
+
+(2) For she is also Divine. Her message contains, that is to say, a
+number of supernatural principles revealed to her by God; she is
+supernaturally constituted; she rests on a supernatural basis; she is
+not organized as if this world were all. On the contrary she puts the
+kingdom of God definitely first and the kingdoms of the world definitely
+second; the Peace of God first and the harmony of men second.
+
+Therefore she is bound, when her supernatural principles clash with
+human natural principles, to be the occasion of disunion. Her marriage
+laws, as a single example, are at conflict with the marriage laws of the
+majority of modern States. It is of no use to tell her to modify these
+principles; it would be to tell her to cease to be supernatural, to
+cease to be herself. How can she modify what she believes to be her
+Divine Message?
+
+Again, since she is organized on a supernatural basis, there are
+supernatural elements in her own constitution which she can no more
+modify than her dogmas. Recently, in France, she was offered the
+_kingdom of this world_ if she would do so; it was proposed to her that
+she actually retain her own wealth, her churches and her houses, and
+yield up her principle of spiritual appeal to the Vicar of Christ. If
+she had been but human, how evident would have been her duty! How
+inevitable that she should modify her constitution in accordance with
+human ideas and preserve her property intact! And how entirely
+impossible such a bargain must be for a Society that is divine as well
+as human!
+
+Take courage then! We desire peace above all things--that is to say, the
+Peace of God, not _that peace which the world_, since it _can give_ it,
+can also _take away_; not that peace which depends on the harmony of
+nature with nature, but of nature with grace.
+
+Yet, so long as the world is divided in allegiance; so long as the
+world, or a country, or a family, or even an individual soul bases
+itself upon natural principles divorced from divine, so long to that
+world, that country, that family, and that human heart will the
+supernatural religion of Catholicism bring _not peace, but a sword_. And
+it will do so to the end, up to the final world-shattering catastrophe
+of Armageddon itself.
+
+"I come," cries the Rider on the White Horse, "to bring Peace indeed,
+but a peace of which the world cannot even dream; a peace built upon the
+eternal foundations of God Himself, not upon the shifting sands of human
+agreement. And until that Vision dawns there must be war; until God's
+Peace descends indeed and is accepted, till then _My Garments must be
+splashed in blood_ and from My Mouth comes forth _not peace, but a
+two-edged sword_."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+WEALTH AND POVERTY
+
+
+_Make to yourselves friends of the Mammon of iniquity_.
+
+_You cannot serve God and Mammon_.-LUKE XVI. 9, 13.
+
+
+We have seen how the Church of the Prince of Peace must continually be
+the centre of war. Let us go on to consider how, as a Human Society
+dwelling in this world, she must continually have her eyes fixed upon
+the next, and how, as a Divine Society, she must be open to the charge
+of worldliness.
+
+I. (i) The charge is a very common one: "Look at the extraordinary
+wealth and splendour that this Church of the Poor Man of Nazareth
+constantly gathers around her and ask yourself how she can dare to claim
+to represent Him! Go through Holy Rome and see how the richest and most
+elaborate buildings bear over their gateways the heraldic emblems of
+Christ's Vicar! Go through any country which has not risen in disgust
+and cast off the sham that calls herself 'Christ's Church' and you will
+find that no worldly official is so splendid as these heavenly delegates
+of Jesus Christ, no palaces more glorious than those in which they dwell
+who pretend to preach Him who _had not where to lay His head!_
+
+"Above all, turn from that simple poverty-stricken figure that the
+Gospels present to us, to the man who claims to be His Vicegerent on
+earth. See him go, crowned three times over, on a throne borne on men's
+shoulders, with the silver trumpets shrilling before him and the ostrich
+fans coming on behind, and you will understand why the world cannot take
+the Church seriously. Look at the court that is about him, all purple
+and scarlet, and set by that the little band of weather-beaten
+fishermen!
+
+"No; if this Church were truly of Christ, she would imitate Him better.
+It was His supreme mission to point to _things that are above;_ to lift
+men's thoughts above dross and gold and jewels and worldly influence and
+high places and power; to point to _a Heavenly Jerusalem, not made with
+hands;_ to comfort the sorrowful with a vision of future peace, not to
+dabble with temporal matters; to speak of grace and heaven and things to
+come, and _to let the dead bury their dead!_ The best we can do for her,
+then, is to disembarrass her of her riches; to turn her temporal
+possessions to frankly temporal ends; to release her from the slavery of
+her own ambition into the _liberty of the poor and the children of
+God!"_
+
+(ii) In a word, then, the Church is too worldly to be the Church of
+Christ! _You cannot serve God and Mammon_. Yet in another mood our
+critic will tell us that we are too otherworldly to be the Church of
+Christ. "The chief charge I have against Catholicism," says such a man,
+"is that the Church is too unpractical. If she were truly the Church of
+Jesus Christ, she would surely imitate Him better in that which, after
+all, was the mark of His highest Divinity--namely in His Humanity
+towards men. Christ did not come into the world to preach metaphysics
+and talk forever of a heaven that is to come; He came rather to attend
+to men's simplest needs, _to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked_, to
+reform society on better lines. It was not by His dogma that He won
+men's hearts; it was by His simple, natural sympathy with their common
+needs. He came, in a word, to make the best of this world, to use the
+elements that lay ready to His hand, to sanctify all the plain things of
+earth with which He came in contact.
+
+"These otherworldly Catholics, then, are too much apart from common life
+and common needs. Their dogmas and their aspirations and their
+metaphysics are useless to a world which wants bread. Let them act more
+and dream less! Let them show, for example, by the prosperity of
+Catholic countries that Catholicism is practical and not a vision. Let
+them preach less and philanthropize more. Let them show that they have
+the key to this world's progress, and perhaps we will listen more
+patiently to their claim to hold the key to the world that is to come!"
+
+But, surely, this is a little hard upon Catholics! When we make
+ourselves at home in this world, we are informed that Jesus Christ _had
+not where to lay His Head_. When we preach the world that is to come,
+we are reminded that Jesus Christ after all came down from that world
+into this to make it better. When we build a comfortable church, we are
+told that we are too luxurious. When we build an uncomfortable one we
+are asked how we expect to do any good unless we are practical.
+
+II. Now, of course, both these charges were also objected against our
+Blessed Lord. For He too had His double activities. It is true that
+there were times when He gave men earthly bread; it is also true that He
+offered them heavenly bread. There were times when He cared for men's
+bodies; there were other times when He bade them sacrifice all that
+makes bodily life worth living; times when He sat at meat in the house
+of a rich man, and times when He starved, voluntarily, in the desert.
+
+And the world found Him wrong whichever He did. He was too worldly when
+He healed men on the Sabbath; for is not the Law of God of more value
+than a man's bodily ease? Why can He not wait till to-morrow? He was too
+worldly when He allowed His disciples to rub corn in their hands; for
+does not the Law of God forbid a man to make bread on the Sabbath? He
+was too worldly, too unpractical, too sense-loving when He permitted the
+precious ointment to be spilled on His feet; _for might not this
+ointment have been sold for much and given to the poor?_ Is not
+spirituality enough, and the incense of adoration?
+
+And He was too otherworldly when He preached the Sermon on the Mount.
+What is the use of saying, _Blessed are the Meek_, when the whole world
+knows that "Blessed are the Self-Assertive"? He was too otherworldly
+when He spoke of Heavenly Bread. What is the use of speaking of Heavenly
+Bread when it is earthly food that men need first of all? He was too
+otherworldly when He remained in the country on the feast day. _If He be
+the Christ_, let Him be practical and say so!
+
+It was, in fact, on these very two charges that He was arraigned for
+death. He was too worldly for Pilate, in that He was Son of Man and
+therefore a rival to Caesar; and too otherworldly for Caiphas, since _He
+made Himself Son of God_ and therefore a rival to Jehovah.
+
+III. The solution, then, of this Catholic Paradox is very simple. (i)
+First, the Church is a Heavenly Society come down from above--heavenly
+in her origin and her birth. She is the _kingdom of God_, first and
+foremost, and exists for His glory solely and entirely. She seeks, then,
+first the extension of His kingdom; and compared with this, nothing is
+of any value in her eyes. Never, then, must she sacrifice God to Mammon;
+never hesitate for one instant if the choice lies between them. For she
+considers that eternity is greater than time and the soul of man of more
+value than his body. The sacraments therefore, in her eyes, come before
+an adequate tram-service; and that a man's soul should be in grace is,
+to her, of more importance than that his body should be in health--if
+the choice is between them. She prefers, therefore, the priest to the
+doctor, if there is not time for both, and Holy Communion to a good
+breakfast.
+
+Therefore, of course, she appears too otherworldly to the stockbroker
+and the provincial mayor, since she actually places the things of God
+before the things of man and "seeks first His Kingdom."
+
+(ii) "And all these things shall be added" to her. For she is Human
+also, in that she dwells in this world where God has placed her, and
+uses therefore the things with which He has surrounded her. To say that
+she is supernatural is not to deny her humanity any more than to assert
+that man has an immortal soul is to exclude the truth that he also has a
+body. It is this Body of hers, then--this humanity of hers which
+enshrines her Divinity--that claims and uses earthly things; it is this
+Body that _dwells in houses made with hands_ and that claims too, in
+honour to herself and her Bridegroom, that, so long as her spirituality
+is not tarnished, these houses shall be as splendid as art can make
+them. For she is not a Puritan nor a Manichee; she does not say that any
+single thing which God has made can conceivably be of itself evil,
+however grievously it may have been abused; on the contrary, she has His
+own authority for saying that _all is very good_.
+
+She uses, then, every earthly beauty that the world will yield to her,
+to honour her own Majesty. It may be right to set diamonds round the
+neck of a woman, but it is certainly right to set them round the Chalice
+of the Blood of God. If an earthly king wears vestments of cloth of
+gold, must not a heavenly King yet more wear them? If music is used by
+the world to destroy men's souls, may not she use it to save their
+souls? If a marble palace is fit for the President of the French
+Republic, by what right do men withhold it from the King of kings?
+
+But the world does withhold its wealth sometimes? Very well then, she
+can serve God without it, in spite of her rights. If men whine and
+cringe, or bully and shout, for the jewels with which their forefathers
+honoured God, she will fling them back again down her altar stairs and
+worship God in a barn or a catacomb without them. For, though she does
+not _serve God and Mammon_, she yet _makes to herself friends of the
+Mammon of iniquity_. Though she does not and never can serve God and
+Mammon, she will and can, when the world permits it, make Mammon serve
+her. For the Church is the Majesty of God dwelling on earth. She is
+there, in herself, utterly independent of her reception. If it is _her
+own_ to whom _she comes, and her own do not receive her_, they are none
+the less hers by every right. For, though she will use every earthly
+thing to her honour, though she considers no ointment wasted, however
+precious, that is spilled by love over her feet, yet her essential glory
+does not lie in these things. She is _all glorious within_, whether or
+not her _vesture is of gold_, for she is a _King's Daughter_. She is,
+essentially, as glorious in the Catacombs as in the Roman basilicas; as
+lovely in the barefooted friar as in the robed and sceptred Vicar of
+Christ; as majestic in Christ naked on the Cross as in Christ ascended
+and enthroned in heaven.
+
+Yet, since she is His Majesty on earth, she has a right to all that
+earth can give. All _the beasts of the field are hers, and the cattle on
+a thousand hills_, all the stars of heaven and the jewels of earth; all
+the things in the world are hers by Divine right.
+
+_All things are hers, for she is Christ's._ Yet, nevertheless, _she will
+suffer the loss of all things_ sooner than lose Him.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+SANCTITY AND SIN
+
+
+_Holy, Holy, Holy!_--IS. VI. 3.
+
+Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners_. I TIM. I. 15.
+
+
+A very different pair of charges--and far more vital--than those more or
+less economic accusations of worldliness and otherworldliness which we
+have just considered, concern the standards of goodness preached by the
+Church and her own alleged incapacity to live up to them. These may be
+briefly summed up by saying that one-half the world considers the Church
+too holy for human life, and the other half, not holy enough. We may
+name these critics, respectively, the Pagan and the Puritan.
+
+I. It is the Pagan who charges her with excessive Holiness.
+
+"You Catholics," he tells us, "are far too hard on sin and not nearly
+indulgent enough towards poor human nature. Let me take as an instance
+the sins of the flesh. Now here is a set of desires implanted by God or
+Nature (as you choose to name the Power behind life) for wise and
+indeed essential purposes. These desires are probably the very fiercest
+known to man and certainly the most alluring; and human nature is, as we
+know, an extraordinarily inconsistent and vacillating thing. Now I am
+aware that the abuse of these passions leads to disaster and that Nature
+has her inexorable laws and penalties; but you Catholics add a new
+horror to life by an absurd and irrational insistence on the offence
+that this abuse causes before God. For not only do you fiercely denounce
+the "acts of sin," as you name them, but you presume to go deeper still
+to the very desire itself, as it would seem. You are unpractical and
+cruel enough to say that the very thought of sin deliberately
+entertained can cut off the soul that indulges in it from the favour of
+God.
+
+"Or, to go further, consider the impossible ideals which you hold up
+with regard to matrimony. These ideals have a certain beauty of their
+own to persons who can embrace them; they may perhaps be, to use a
+Catholic phrase, Counsels of Perfection; but it is merely ludicrous to
+insist upon them as rules of conduct for all mankind. Human Nature is
+human nature. You cannot bind the many by the dreams of the few.
+
+"Or, to take a wider view altogether, consider the general standards you
+hold up to us in the lives of your saints. These saints appear to the
+ordinary common-place man as simply not admirable at all. It does not
+seem to us admirable that St. Aloysius should scarcely lift his eyes
+from the ground, or that St. Teresa should shut herself up in a cell, or
+that St. Francis should scourge himself with briers for fear of
+committing sin. That kind of attitude is too fantastically fastidious
+altogether. You Catholics seem to aim at a standard that is simply not
+desirable; both your ends and your methods are equally inhuman and
+equally unsuitable for the world we have to live in. True religion is
+surely something far more sensible than this; true religion should not
+strain and strive after the impossible, should not seek to improve human
+nature by a process of mutilation. You have excellent aims in some
+respects and excellent methods in others, but in supreme demands you go
+beyond the mark altogether. We Pagans neither agree with your morality
+nor admire those whom you claim as your successes. If you were less holy
+and more natural, less idealistic and more practical, you would be of a
+greater service to the world which you desire to help. Religion should
+be a sturdy, virile growth; not the delicate hot-house blossom which you
+make it."
+
+The second charge comes from the Puritan. "Catholicism is not holy
+enough to be the Church of Jesus Christ; for see how terribly easy she
+is to those who outrage and _crucify Him afresh!_ Perhaps it may not be
+true after all, as we used to think, that the Catholic priest actually
+gives leave to his penitents to commit sin; but the extraordinary ease
+with which absolution is given comes very nearly to the same thing. So
+far from this Church having elevated the human race, she has actually
+lowered its standards by her attitude towards those of her children who
+disobey God's Laws.
+
+"And consider what some of these children of hers have been! Are there
+any criminals in history so monumental as Catholic criminals? Have any
+men ever fallen so low as, let us say, the Borgia family of the Middle
+Ages, as Gilles de Rais and a score of others, as men and women who were
+perhaps in their faith 'good Catholics' enough, yet in their lives a
+mere disgrace to humanity? Look at the Latin countries with their
+passionate records of crime, at the sexual immorality of France or
+Spain; the turbulence and thriftlessness of Ireland, the ignorant
+brutality of Catholic England. Are there any other denominations of
+Christendom that exhibit such deplorable specimens as the runaway nuns,
+the apostate priests, the vicious Popes of Catholicism? How is it that
+tales are told of the iniquities of Catholicism such as are told of no
+other of the sects of Christendom? Allow for all the exaggeration you
+like, all the prejudice of historians, all the spitefulness of enemies,
+yet there surely remains sufficient Catholic criminality to show that at
+the best the Church is no better than any other religious body, and at
+the worst, infinitely worse. The Catholic Church, then, is not holy
+enough to be the Church of Jesus Christ."
+
+II. When we turn to the Gospels we find that these two charges are, as a
+matter of fact, precisely among those which were brought against our
+Divine Lord.
+
+First, undoubtedly, He was hated for His Holiness. Who can doubt that
+the terrific standard of morality which He preached--the Catholic
+preaching of which also is one of the charges of the Pagan--was a
+principal cause of His rejection. For it was He, after all, who first
+proclaimed that the laws of God bind not only action but thought; it was
+He who first pronounced that man to be a murderer and an adulterer who
+in his heart willed these sins; it was He who summed up the standard of
+Christianity as a standard of perfection, _Be you perfect, as your
+Father in Heaven is perfect;_ who bade men aspire to be as good as God!
+
+It was His Holiness, then, that first drew on Him the hostility of the
+world--that radiant white-hot sanctity in which His Sacred Humanity went
+clothed. _Which of you convinceth me of sin?... Let him that is without
+sin amongst you cast the first stone at her!_ These were words that
+pierced the smooth formalism of the Scribe and the Pharisee and awoke an
+undying hatred. It was this, surely, that led up irresistibly to the
+final rejection of Him at the bar of Pilate and the choice of Barabbas
+in His place. "_Not this man!_ not this piece of stainless Perfection!
+Not this Sanctity that reveals all hearts, _but Barabbas_, that
+comfortable sinner so like ourselves! This robber in whose company we
+feel at ease! This murderer whose life, at any rate, is in no
+reproachful contrast to our own!" Jesus Christ was found too holy for
+the world.
+
+But He was found, too, not holy enough. And it is this explicit charge
+that is brought against Him again and again. It was dreadful to those
+keepers of the Law that this Preacher of Righteousness should sit with
+publicans and sinners; that this Prophet should allow such a woman as
+Magdalen to touch Him. If this man were indeed a Prophet, He could not
+bear the contact of sinners; if He were indeed zealous for God's
+Kingdom, He could not suffer the presence of so many who were its
+enemies. Yet He sits there at Zacchaeus' table, silent and smiling,
+instead of crying on the roof to fall in; He calls Matthew from the
+tax-office instead of blasting him and it together; He handles the leper
+whom God's own Law pronounces unclean.
+
+III. These, then, are the charges brought against the disciples of
+Christ, as against the Master, and it is undeniable that there is truth
+in them both.
+
+It is true that the Catholic Church preaches a morality that is utterly
+beyond the reach of human nature left to itself; that her standards are
+standards of perfection, and that she prefers even the lowest rung of
+the supernatural ladder to the highest rung of the natural.
+
+And it is also true, without doubt, that the fallen or the unfaithful
+Catholic is an infinitely more degraded member of humanity than the
+fallen Pagan or Protestant; that the monumental criminals of history are
+Catholic criminals, and that the monsters of the world--Henry VIII for
+example, sacrilegious, murderer, and adulterer; Martin Luther, whose
+printed table-talk is unfit for any respectable house; Queen Elizabeth,
+perjurer, tyrant, and unchaste--were persons who had had all that the
+Catholic Church could give them: the standards of her teaching, the
+guidance of her discipline, and the grace of her sacraments. What, then,
+is the reconciliation of this Paradox?
+
+(1) First the Catholic Church is Divine. She dwells, that is to say, in
+heavenly places; she looks always upon the Face of God; she holds
+enshrined in her heart the Sacred Humanity of Jesus Christ and the
+stainless perfection of that Immaculate Mother from whom that Humanity
+was drawn. How is it conceivable, then, that she should be content with
+any standard short of perfection? If she were a Society evolved from
+below--a merely human Society that is to say--she could never advance
+beyond those standards to which in the past her noblest children have
+climbed. But since there dwells in her the Supernatural--since Mary was
+endowed from on high with a gift to which no human being could ascend,
+since the Sun of Justice Himself came down from the heavens to lead a
+human life under human terms--how can she ever again be content with
+anything short of that height from which these came?
+
+(2) But she is also human, dwelling herself in the midst of humanity,
+placed here in the world for the express object of gathering into
+herself and of sanctifying by her graces that very world which has
+fallen from God. These outcasts and these sinners are the very material
+on which she has to work; these waste products of human life, these
+marred types and specimens of humanity have no hope at all except in
+her.
+
+For, first, she desires if she can--and she has often been
+able--actually to raise these, first to sanctity and then to her own
+altars; it is for her and her only to _raise the poor from the dunghill
+and to set them with the princes_. She sets before the Magdalen and the
+thief, then, nothing less but her own standard of perfection.
+
+Yet though in one sense she is satisfied with nothing lower than this,
+in another sense she is satisfied with almost infinitely nothing. If she
+can but bring the sinner within the very edge of grace; if she can but
+draw from the dying murderer one cry of contrition; if she can but turn
+his eyes with one look of love to the crucifix, her labours are a
+thousand times repaid; for, if she has not brought him to the head of
+sanctity, she has at least brought him to its foot and set him there
+beneath that ladder of the supernatural which reaches from hell to
+heaven.
+
+For she alone has this power. She alone is so utterly confident in the
+presence of the sinner because she alone has the secret of his cure.
+There in her confessional is the Blood of Christ that can make his soul
+clean again, and in her Tabernacle the Body of Christ that will be his
+food of eternal life. She alone dares be his friend because she alone
+can be his Saviour. If, then, her saints are one sign of her identity,
+no less are her sinners another.
+
+For not only is she the Majesty of God dwelling on earth, she is also
+His Love; and therefore its limitations, and they only, are hers. That
+Sun of mercy that shines and that Rain of charity that streams, _on just
+and unjust alike_, are the very Sun and Rain that give her life. If I
+_go up to Heaven she is there_, enthroned in Christ, on the Right Hand
+of God;_ if I go down to Hell she is there also_, drawing back souls
+from the brink from which she alone can rescue them. For she is that
+very ladder which Jacob saw so long ago, that staircase planted here in
+the blood and the slime of earth, rising there into the stainless Light
+of the Lamb. Holiness and unholiness are both alike hers and she is
+ashamed of neither--the holiness of her own Divinity which is Christ's
+and the unholiness of those outcast members of her Humanity to whom she
+ministers.
+
+By her power, then, which again is Christ's, the Magdalen becomes the
+Penitent; the thief the first of the redeemed; and Peter, the yielding
+sand of humanity, the _Rock on which Herself is built_.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+JOY AND SORROW
+
+
+_Rejoice and be exceeding glad.... Blessed are they that mourn_.--
+MATT. V. 12, 5.
+
+
+The Catholic Church, as has been seen, is always too "extreme" for the
+world. She is content with nothing but a Divine Peace, and in its cause
+is the occasion of bloodier wars than any waged from merely human
+motives. She is not content with mere goodness, but urges always
+Sanctity upon her children; yet simultaneously tolerates sinners whom
+even the world casts out. Let us consider now how, in fulfilling these
+two apparently mutually contradictory precepts of our Lord, to rejoice
+and to mourn, once more she appears to the world extravagant in both
+directions at once.
+
+I. It is a common charge against her that she rejoices too exceedingly;
+is arrogant, confident, and optimistic where she ought to be quiet,
+subdued, and tender.
+
+"This world," exclaims her critic, "is on the whole a very sad and
+uncertain place. There is no silver lining that has not a cloud before
+it; there is no hope that may not, after all, be disappointed. Any
+religion, then, that claims to be adequate to human nature must always
+have something of sadness and even hesitancy about it. Religion must
+walk softly all her days if she is to walk hand in hand with experience.
+Death is certain; is life as certain? The function of religion, then, is
+certainly to help to lighten this darkness, yet not by too great a blaze
+of light. She may hope and aspire and guess and hint; in fact, that is
+her duty. But she must not proclaim and denounce and command. She must
+be suggestive rather than exhaustive; tender rather than virile; hopeful
+rather than positive; experimental rather than dogmatic.
+
+"Now Catholicism is too noisy and confident altogether. See a Catholic
+liturgical function on some high day! Was there ever anything more
+arrogant? What has this blaze of colour, this shouting of voices, this
+blowing of trumpets to do with the soft half-lights of the world and the
+mystery of the darkness from which we came and to which we return? What
+has this clearcut dogma to do with the gentle guesses of philosophy,
+this optimism with the uncertainty of life and the future--above all,
+what sympathy has this preposterous exultation with the misery of the
+world?
+
+"And how unlike, too, all this is to the spirit of the Man of Sorrows!
+We read that _Jesus wept_, but never that He laughed. His was a sad
+life, from the dark stable of Bethlehem to the darker hill of Calvary.
+He was what He was because He knew what sorrow meant; it was in His
+sorrows that He has touched the heart of humanity. '_Blessed_,' he says,
+'_are those that mourn_.' Blessed are they that expect nothing, for they
+shall not be disappointed."
+
+In another mood, however, our critic will find fault with our sadness.
+
+"Why is not the religion of you Catholics more in accord with the happy
+world in which we live? Surely the supreme function of religion is to
+hearten and encourage and lay stress on the bright side of life! It
+should be brief, bright, and brotherly. For, after all, this is a lovely
+world and full of gaiety. It is true that it has its shadows, yet there
+can be no shadows without a sun; there is death, but see how life
+continually springs again from the grave. Since all things, therefore,
+work together for good; since God has taken pains to make the world so
+sweet, it is but a poor compliment to the Creator to treat it as a vale
+of misery. Let us, then, make the best of things and forget the worst.
+Let us leave the things that are behind and press forward to the things
+that are before. Let us insist that the world is white with a few black
+spots upon it, be optimistic, happy, and confident.
+
+"You Catholics, however, are but a poor-spirited, miserable race. While
+other denominations are, little by little, eliminating melancholy, you
+are insisting upon it. While the rest of us are agreeing that Hell is
+but a bogy, and sin a mistake, and suffering no more than remedial, you
+Catholics are still insisting upon their reality--that Hell is eternal,
+that sin is the deliberate opposition of the human will to the Divine,
+and that suffering therefore is judicial. Sin, Penance, Sacrifice,
+Purgatory, and Hell--these are the old nightmares of dogma; and their
+fruits are tears, pain, and terror. What is wrong with Catholicism,
+then, is its gloom and its sorrow; for this is surely not the
+Christianity of Christ as we are now learning to understand it. Christ,
+rightly understood, is the Man of joy, not of Grief. He is more
+characteristic of Himself, so to speak, as the smiling shepherd of
+Galilee, surrounded by His sheep; as the lover of children and flowers
+and birds; as the Preacher of Life and Resurrection--He is more
+characteristic of Himself as crowned, ascended, and glorified, than as
+the blood-stained martyr of the Cross whom you set above your altars.
+_Rejoice, then, and be exceeding glad_, and you will please Him best."
+
+Once more, then, we appear to be in the wrong, to whatever side we turn.
+The happy red-faced monk with his barrel of beer is a caricature of our
+joy. Can this, it is asked, be a follower of the Man of Sorrows? And the
+long-faced ascetic with his eyes turned up to heaven is the world's
+conception of our sorrow. Catholic joy and Catholic sorrow are alike too
+ardent and extreme for a world that delights in moderation in both
+sorrow and joy--a little melancholy, but not too much; a little
+cheerfulness, but not excessive.
+
+II. First, then, it is interesting to remember that these charges are
+not now being made against us for the first time. In the days even of
+the Roman Empire they were thought to be signs of Christian inhumanity.
+"These Christians," it was said, "must surely be bewitched. See how
+they laugh at the rack and the whip and go to the arena as to a bridal
+bed! See how Lawrence jests upon his gridiron." And yet again, "They
+must be bewitched, because of their morbidity and their love of
+darkness, the enemies of joy and human mirth and common pleasure. In
+either case they are not true men at all." Their extravagance of joy
+when others would be weeping, and their extravagance of sorrow when all
+the world is glad--these are the very signs to which their enemies
+appealed as proofs that a power other than that of this world was
+inspiring them, as proofs that they could not be the simple friends of
+the human race that they dared to pretend.
+
+It is even more interesting to remember that our Divine Lord Himself
+calls attention to these charges. "_The Son of Man comes eating and
+drinking._ The Son of Man sits at the wedding feast at Cana and at meat
+in the rich man's house and you say, _Behold a glutton and a
+winebibber!_ The Son of Man comes rejoicing and you bid Him to be sad.
+And _John the Baptist came neither eating nor drinking._ John the
+Baptist comes from the desert, an ascetic with his camel-hair about him
+and words of penance and wrath in his mouth, and you say, _He hath a
+devil.... We have piped unto you and you have not danced_. We have
+played at weddings like children in a market-place, and you have told us
+to be quiet and think about our sins. _We have mourned unto_ you, we
+have asked you to play at funerals instead, and you have told us that it
+was morbid to think about death. _We have mourned and you would not
+lament._"
+
+III. The fact is, of course, that both joy and sorrow must be an element
+in all religion, since joy and sorrow together make up experience. The
+world is neither white with black spots nor black with white spots; it
+is black and white. It is quite as true that autumn follows summer as
+that spring follows winter. It is no less true that life arises out of
+death than that death follows life.
+
+Religion then cannot, if it is to be adequate to experience, be a
+passionless thing. On the contrary it must be passionate, since human
+nature is passionate too; and it must be a great deal more passionate.
+It must not moderate grief, but deepen it; not banish joy, but exalt it.
+It must weep--and bitterer tears than any that the world can shed--with
+them that weep; and rejoice too--with _a joy which no man can take
+away_--with them that rejoice. It must sink deeper and rise higher, it
+must feel more acutely, it must agonize and triumph more abundantly, if
+it truly comes from God and is to minister to men, since His thoughts
+are higher than ours and His Love more burning.
+
+For so did Christ live on earth. At one hour He _rejoiced greatly in
+spirit_ so that those that watched Him were astonished; at another He
+sweated blood for anguish. In one hour He is exalted high on the blazing
+Mount of Transfiguration; in another He is plunged deeper than any human
+heart can fathom in the low-lying garden of Gethsemane. _Behold and see
+if there be any sorrow like to My Sorrow._
+
+III. For, again, the Church, like her Lord, is both Divine and Human.
+
+She is Divine and therefore she rejoices--so filled with the New Wine of
+the Kingdom of her Father that men stare at her in contempt.
+
+It is true enough that the world is unhappy; that hearts are broken;
+that families, countries, and centuries are laid waste by sin. Yet since
+the Church is Divine, she knows, not merely guesses or hopes or desires,
+but _knows_, that _although all things come to an end, God's commandment
+is exceeding broad_. Years ago, she knows--and therefore not all the
+criticism in the world can shake her--that her Lord came down from
+heaven, was born, died, rose, and ascended, and that He reigns in
+unconquerable power. She knows that He will return again and take the
+kingdom and reign; she knows, because she is Divine, that in every
+tabernacle of hers on earth the Lord of joy lies hidden; that Mary
+intercedes; that the saints are with God; that _the Blood of Jesus
+Christ cleanseth from all sin_. Look round her earthly buildings, then,
+and there are the symbols and images of these things. There is the merry
+light before her altar; there are the saints stiff with gold and gems;
+there is Mary, "Cause of our Joy," radiant, with her radiant Child in
+her arms. If she were but human, she would dare but to shadow these
+things forth--shadows of her own desires; she would whisper her creed;
+murmur her prayers; darken her windows. But she is Divine and has
+herself come down from heaven; so she does not guess, or think, or
+hope--she knows.
+
+But she is human too and dwells in the midst of a human race that does
+not know and therefore will not wholly take her at her word, and the
+very height of her exaltation must also be, then, the measure of her
+despair. The fact that she knows so certainly intensifies a thousandfold
+her human sorrow, as she, who has _come that they may have life_, sees
+how _they will not come_ to her and find it, as she sees how long the
+triumph which is certain is yet delayed through their faithlessness. "If
+_thou hadst known_," she cries in the heart-broken words of Jesus
+Himself over Jerusalem, "_if thou hadst but known the things that belong
+to thy peace! Behold and see, then, if there be any sorrow like to
+mine_, if there be any grief so profound and so piercing as mine, who
+hold the Keys of Heaven and watch men turn away from the Door."
+
+So, then, in church after church stand symbolic groups of statuary,
+representing joy and tragedy, compared with which Venus and Adonis are
+but childish and half-civilized images--Mary as triumphant Queen, with
+the gold-crowned Child in her arms, and Mary the tormented Mother, with
+her dead Son across her knees. For she who is both Divine and Human
+alone understands what it is that Humanity has done to Divinity.
+
+Is it any wonder, then, that the world thinks her extravagant in both
+directions at once; that the world turns away on Good Friday from the
+unutterable depths of her sorrow, and on Easter Day from the unscalable
+heights of her joy, calling the one morbid and the other hysterical? For
+what does the world know of such passions as these? What, after all, can
+the sensualist know of joy, or the ruined financier of sorrow? And what
+can the moderate, self-controlled, self-respecting man of the world know
+of either?
+
+Lastly, then, in the Paradox of Love, the Church holds both these
+passions, at full blast, both at once. As human love turns joy into pain
+and suffers in the midst of ecstasy, so Divine Love turns pain into joy
+and exults and reigns upon the Cross. For the Church is more than the
+Majesty of God reigning on earth, more than the passionless love of the
+Eternal; she is the Very Sacred Heart of Christ Himself, the Eternal
+united with Man, and both suffering and rejoicing through that union. It
+is His bliss which she at once experiences and extends, in virtue of her
+identity with Him; and in the midst of a fallen world it is the
+supremest bliss of that Sacred Heart to suffer pain.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+LOVE OF GOD AND LOVE OF MAN
+
+
+_Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart ... and thy
+neighbour as thyself_.--LUKE x. 27.
+
+
+We have already considered two charges brought against Catholicism from
+opposite quarters; namely, that we are too worldly and too otherworldly,
+too much busied with temporal concerns to be truly spiritual, and too
+metaphysical and remote and dogmatic to be truly practical. Let us go on
+to consider these same two charges produced, so to speak, a little
+further into a more definitely spiritual plane; charges that now accuse
+us of too great activities in our ministry to men and too many
+attentions paid to God.
+
+I. (i) It is a very common complaint against Catholics, laymen as well
+as clergy, that they are overzealous in their attempts to proselytize.
+True and spiritual religion, we are told, is as intimate and personal an
+affair as the love between husband and wife; it is essentially private
+and individual. "The religion of all sensible men," it has been said,
+"is precisely that which they always keep to themselves." Tolerance,
+therefore, is a mark of spirituality, for if I am truly religious I
+shall have as much respect for the religion of my neighbour as for my
+own. I shall no more seek to interfere in his relations with God than I
+shall allow him to interfere with mine.
+
+Now Catholics are notoriously intolerant. It is not merely that there
+are intolerant Catholics, for intolerance is of course to be found in
+all narrow-minded persons, but it is Catholic principles themselves that
+are intolerant; and every Catholic who lives up to them is bound to be
+so also. And we can see this illustrated every day.
+
+First, there is the matter of Catholic missions to the heathen. There
+are no missionaries, we are told, so untiring and so devoted as those of
+the Church. Their zeal, of course, is a proof of their sincerity; but it
+is also a proof of their intolerance: for why, after all, cannot they
+leave the heathen alone, since religion is, in its essence, a private
+and individual matter? Beautiful pictures, accordingly, are suggested to
+us of the domestic peace and happiness reigning amongst the tribes of
+Central Africa until the arrival of the Preaching Friar with his
+destructive dogmas. We are bidden to observe the high doctrines and the
+ascetic life of the Brahmin, the significant symbolism of the Hindu, and
+the philosophical attitudes of the Confucian. All these various
+relationships to God are, we are informed, entirely the private affairs
+of those who live by them; and if Catholics were truly spiritual they
+would understand that this was so and not seek to supplant by a system
+which is now, at any rate, become an essentially European way of looking
+at things, these ancient creeds and philosophies that are far better
+suited to the Oriental temperament.
+
+But the matter is worse, even, than this. It may conceivably be argued,
+says the modern man of the world, that after all those Oriental
+religions have not developed such virtues and graces as has
+Christianity. It may perhaps be argued that in time the religion of the
+West, if missionaries will persevere, will raise the Hindu higher than
+his own obscenities have succeeded in doing, and that the civilization
+produced by Christianity is actually of a higher type, in spite of its
+evil by-products, than that of the head-hunters of Borneo and the bloody
+savages of Africa. But at any rate there is no excuse whatever for the
+intolerant Catholic proselytizer in English homes. For, roughly
+speaking, it is only the Catholic whom you cannot trust in your own home
+circle; sooner or later you will find him, if he at all lives up to his
+principles, insinuating the praises of his own faith and the weaknesses
+of your own; your sons and daughters he considers to be fair game; he
+thinks nothing of your domestic peace in comparison with the propagation
+of his own tenets. He is characterized, first and last, by that dogmatic
+and intolerant spirit that is the exact contrary of all that the modern
+world deems to be the spirit of true Christianity. True Christianity,
+then, as has been said, is essentially a private, personal, and
+individual matter between each soul and her God.
+
+(ii) The second charge brought against Catholics is that they make
+religion far too personal, too private, and too intimate for it to be
+considered the religion of Jesus Christ. And this is illustrated by the
+supreme value which the Church places upon what is known as the
+Contemplative Life.
+
+For if there is one element in Catholicism that the man-in-the-street
+especially selects for reprobation it is the life of the Enclosed
+Religious. It is supposed to be selfish, morbid, introspective, unreal;
+it is set in violent dramatic contrast with the ministerial Life of
+Jesus Christ. A quantity of familiar eloquence is solemnly poured out
+upon it as if nothing of the kind had ever been said before: it is said
+that "a man cannot get away from the world by shutting himself up in a
+monastery"; that "a man should not think about his own soul so much, but
+rather of what good he can do in the world in which God has placed him";
+that "four whitewashed walls" are not the proper environment for a
+philanthropic Christian.
+
+And yet, after all, what is the Contemplative Life except precisely that
+which the world just now recommended? And could religion possibly be
+made a more intimate, private, and personal matter between the soul and
+God than the Carthusian or Carmelite makes it?
+
+The fact is, of course, that Catholics are wrong whatever they do--too
+extreme in everything which they undertake. They are too active and not
+retired enough in their proselytism; too retired and not active enough
+in their Contemplation.
+
+II. Now the Life of our Divine Lord exhibits, of course, both the Active
+and the Contemplative elements that have always distinguished the Life
+of His Church.
+
+For three years He set Himself to the work of preaching His Revelation
+and establishing the Church that was to be its organ through all the
+centuries. He went about, therefore, freely and swiftly, now in town,
+now in country. He laid down His Divine principles and presented His
+Divine credentials, at marriage feasts, in market-places, in country
+roads, in crowded streets, and in private houses. He wrought the works
+of mercy, spiritual and corporal, that were to be the types of all works
+of mercy ever afterwards. He gave spiritual and ascetic teaching on the
+Mount of Beatitudes, dogmatic instructions in Capharnaum and the
+wilderness to the east of Galilee, and mystical discourses in the Upper
+Chamber of Jerusalem and the temple courts. His activities and His
+proselytisms were unbounded. He broke up domestic circles and the
+routine of offices. He called the young man from his estates and Matthew
+from custom-house and James and John from their father's fishing
+business. He made a final demonstration of His unlimited claim on
+humanity in His Procession on Palm Sunday, and on Ascension Day
+ratified and commissioned the proselytizing activities of His Church for
+ever in His tremendous charge to the Apostolic band. _Going, therefore,
+teach ye all nations ... teaching them to observe all things whatsoever
+I have commanded you; and behold I am with you all the days, even to the
+consummation of the world._
+
+Yet this, it must be remembered, was not only not the whole of His Life
+on earth, it was not even a very considerable part of it, if reckoned by
+years. For three years He was active, but for thirty He was retired in
+the house of Nazareth; and even those three years are again and again
+broken by retirement. He is now in the wilderness for forty days, now on
+the mountain all night in prayer, now bidding His disciples come apart
+and rest themselves. The very climax of His ministry too was wrought in
+silence and solitude. He removed Himself _about a stone's throw_ in the
+garden of Gethsemane from those who loved Him best; He broke His silence
+on the Cross to bid farewell even to His holy Mother herself. Above all,
+he explicitly and emphatically commended the Life of Contemplative
+Prayer as the highest that can be lived on earth, telling Martha that
+activity, even in the most necessary duties, was not after all the best
+use to which time and love could be put, but rather that _Mary had
+chosen the best part ... the one thing that is necessary_, and that it
+_shall not be taken away from her_ even by a sister's loving zeal.
+
+Finally, fault was found with Jesus Christ, as with His Church, on
+precisely these two points. When He was living the life of retirement in
+the country He was rebuked that He did not go up to the feast and state
+His claims plainly--justify, that is, by activity, His pretensions to
+the Messiahship; and when He did so, He was entreated to bid his
+acclaimants _to hold their peace_--to justify, that is, by humility and
+retirement, His pretensions to spirituality.
+
+III. The reconciliation, therefore, of these two elements in the
+Catholic system is very easy to find.
+
+(i) First, it is the Church's Divinity that accounts for her passion for
+God. To her as to none else on earth is the very face of God revealed as
+the Absolute and Final Beauty that lies beyond the limits of all
+Creation. She in her Divinity enjoys it may be said, even in her sojourn
+on earth, that very Beatific Vision that enraptured always the Sacred
+Humanity of Jesus Christ. With all the company of heaven then, with Mary
+Immaculate, with the Seraphim and with the glorified saints of God, she
+_endures, seeing Him Who is invisible_. Even while the eyes of her
+humanity are held, while her human members _walk by faith and not by
+sight_, she, in her Divinity, which is the guaranteed Presence of Jesus
+Christ in her midst, already _dwells in heavenly places_ and is already
+_come to Mount Zion and the City of the living God and to God Himself_,
+Who is the Light in which all fair things are seen to be fair.
+
+Is it any wonder then that, now and again, some chosen child of hers
+catches a mirrored glimpse of what she herself beholds with unveiled
+face; that some Catholic soul, now and again, chosen and called by God
+to this amazing privilege, should suddenly perceive, as never before,
+that God is the one and only Absolute Beauty, and that, compared with
+the contemplation of this Beauty--which contemplation is, after all, the
+final life of Eternity to which every redeemed soul shall come--all the
+activities of earthly life are nothing; and that, in her passion for
+this adorable God, she should run into a secret room and _shut the door
+and pray to her Father Who is in secret_, and so remain praying, a
+hidden channel of life to the whole of that Body of which she is a
+member, an intercessor for the whole of that Society of which she is one
+unit? There in silence, then, she sits at Jesus' feet and listens to the
+Voice which is _as the sound of many waters_; in the whiteness of her
+cell watches Him Whose _Face is as a Flame of Fire_, and in austerity
+and fasting _tastes and finds that the Lord is gracious._
+
+Of course this is but madness and folly to those who know God only in
+His Creation, who imagine Him merely as the Soul of the World and the
+Vitality of Created Life. To such as these earth is His highest Heaven
+and the beauty of the world the noblest vision that can be conceived.
+Yet to that soul that is Catholic, who understands that the Eternal
+Throne is indeed above the stars and that the Transcendence of God is as
+fully a truth as His Immanence--that God in Himself, apart from all
+that He has made, is all-fair and all-sufficient in His own Beauty--to
+such a soul as this, if called to such a life, there is no need that the
+Church should declare explicitly that the Contemplative Life is the
+highest. She knows it already.
+
+(ii) The _First Great Commandment_ of the Law, then, is inevitably
+followed by the Second, and the Catholic interpretation of the Second is
+thought by the world, which understands neither, to be as extravagant as
+her interpretation of the First.
+
+For this Divine Church that knows God is also a Human Society that
+dwells among men, and since she in herself unites Divinity and Humanity,
+she cannot rest until she has united them everywhere else.
+
+For, as she turns her eyes from God to men, she sees there immortal
+souls, made in the image of God and made for Him and Him alone, seeking
+to satisfy themselves with Creation instead of with the Creator. She
+hears how the world preaches the sanctity of the temperament, and the
+holiness of the individual point of view, as if there were no
+Transcendent God at all and no objective external Revelation ever made
+by Him. She sees how men, instead of seeking to conform themselves to
+God's Revelation of Himself, attempt rather to conform such fragments of
+that Revelation as have reached them to their own points of view; she
+listens to talk about "aspects of truth" and "schools of thought" and
+the "values of experience" as if God had never spoken either in the
+thunders of Sinai or the still voice of Galilee.
+
+Is it any wonder, then, that her Proselytism appears to such a world as
+extravagant as her Contemplation, her passion for men as unreasonable as
+her passion for God, when that world sees her bring herself from her
+cloisters and her secret places to proclaim as with a trumpet those
+demands of God which He has made known, those Laws which He has
+promulgated, and those rewards which He has promised? For how can she do
+otherwise who has looked on the all-glorious Face of God and then on the
+vacant and complacent faces of men--she who knows God's infinite
+capacity for satisfying men and men's all but infinite incapacity for
+seeking God--when she sees some poor soul shutting herself up indeed
+within the deadly and chilly walls of her own "temperament" and
+"individual point of view," when earth and heaven and the Lord of them
+both is waiting for her outside?
+
+The Church, then, is too much interested in men and too much absorbed in
+God. Of course she is too much interested and too much absorbed, for she
+alone knows the value and capacity of both; she who is herself both
+Divine and Human. For Religion, to her, is not an elegant accomplishment
+or a graceful philosophy or a pleasing scheme of conjectures. It is the
+fiery bond between God and man, neither of whom can be satisfied
+without the other, the One in virtue of His Love and the other in virtue
+of his createdness. She alone, then, understands and reconciles the
+tremendous Paradox of the Law that is Old as well as New. _Thou shalt
+love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart ... and thy neighbour as
+thyself _.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+FAITH AND REASON
+
+
+_Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall
+not enter into it_.--MARK X. 15.
+
+_Some things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and the unstable
+wrest, as also the other Scriptures, to their own perdition_.--
+II PET. III. 16.
+
+
+There are two great gifts, or faculties, by which men attain to truth:
+faith and reason. From these two sides, therefore, come two more
+assaults upon the Catholic position, a position which itself faces in
+both these directions. On the one side we are told that we believe too
+simply, on the other that we do not believe simply enough; on the one
+side that we reason too little, on the other that we do not reason
+enough. Let us set out these attacks in order.
+
+I. (i) "You Catholics," says one critic, "are far too credulous in
+matters of religion. You believe, not as reasonable men believe, because
+you have verified or experienced the truths you profess, but simply
+because these dogmas are presented to you by the Church. If reason and
+common-sense are gifts of God and intended for use, surely it is very
+strange to silence them in your search for the supreme truth. Faith, of
+course, has its place, but it must not be blind faith. Reason must test,
+verify, and interpret, or faith is mere credulity.
+
+"Consider, for example, the words of Christ, _This is My Body_. Now the
+words as they stand may certainly be supposed to mean what you say they
+mean; yet, interpreted by Reason, they cannot possibly mean anything of
+the kind. Did not Christ Himself sit in bodily form at the table as He
+spoke them? How then could He hold Himself in His hand? Did He not speak
+in metaphors and images continually? Did He not call Himself _a Door and
+a Vine_? Using Reason, then, to interpret these words, it is evident
+that He meant no more than that He was instituting a memorial feast, in
+which the bread should symbolize His Body and the wine His Blood. So too
+with many other distinctively Catholic doctrines--with the Petrine
+claims, with the authority 'to bind and loose,' and the rest. Catholic
+belief on these points exhibits not faith properly so-called--that is,
+Faith tested by Reason--but mere credulity. God gave us all Reason! Then
+in His Name let us use it!"
+
+(ii) From the other side comes precisely the opposite charge.
+
+"You Catholics," cries the other critic, "are far too argumentative and
+deductive and logical in your Faith. True Religion is a very simple
+thing; it is the attitude of a child who trusts and does not question.
+But with you Catholics Religion has degenerated into Theology. Jesus
+Christ did not write a _Summa_; He made a few plain statements which
+comprise, as they stand, the whole Christian Religion; they are full of
+mystery, no doubt, but it is He who left them mysterious. Why, then,
+should your theologians seek to penetrate into regions which He did not
+reveal and to elaborate what He left unelaborated?
+
+"Take, for example, Christ's words, _This is My Body_. Now of course
+these words are mysterious, and if Christ had meant that they should be
+otherwise, He would Himself have given the necessary comment upon them.
+Yet He did not; He left them in an awful and deep simplicity into which
+no human logic ought even to seek to penetrate. Yet see the vast and
+complicated theology that the traditions have either piled upon them or
+attempted to extract out of them; the philosophical theories by which it
+has been sought to elucidate them; the intricate and wide-reaching
+devotions that have been founded upon them! What have words like
+'Transubstantiation' and 'Concomitance,' devotions like 'Benediction,'
+gatherings like Eucharistic Congresses to do with the august simplicity
+of Christ's own institution? You Catholics argue too much--deduce,
+syllogize, and explain--until the simple splendour of Christ's
+mysterious act is altogether overlaid and hidden. Be more simple! It is
+better to _'love God than to discourse learnedly about the Blessed
+Trinity.' It has not pleased God to save His people through dialectics._
+Believe more, argue less!"
+
+Once more, then, the double charge is brought. We believe, it seems,
+where we ought to reason. We reason where we ought to believe. We
+believe too blindly and not blindly enough. We reason too closely and
+not closely enough.
+
+Here, then, is a vast subject--the relations of Faith and Reason and the
+place of each in man's attitude towards Truth. It is, of course,
+possible only to glance at these things in outline.
+
+II. First, let us consider, as a kind of illustration, the relations of
+these things in ordinary human science. Neither Faith nor Reason will,
+of course, be precisely the same as in supernatural matters; yet there
+will be a sufficient parallel for our purpose.
+
+A scientist, let us say, proposes to make observations upon the
+structure of a fly's leg. He catches his fly, dissects, prepares, places
+it in his microscope, observes, and records. Now here, it would seem, is
+Pure Science at its purest and Reason in its most reasonable aspect. Yet
+the acts of faith in this very simple process are, if we consider
+closely, simply numberless. The scientist must make acts of faith,
+certainly reasonable acts, yet none the less of faith, for all that:
+first, that his fly is not a freak of nature; next, that his lens is
+symmetrically ground; then that his observation is adequate; then that
+his memory has not played him false between his observing and his
+recording that which he has seen. These acts are so reasonable that we
+forget that they are acts of faith. They are justified by reason before
+they are made, and they are usually, though not invariably, verified by
+Reason afterwards. Yet they are, in their essence, Faith and not Reason.
+
+So, too, when a child learns a foreign language. Reason justifies him in
+making one act of faith that his teacher is competent, another that his
+grammar is correct, a third that he hears and sees and understands
+correctly the information given him, a fourth that such a language
+actually exists. And when he visits France afterwards he can, within
+limits, again verify by his reason the acts of faith which he has
+previously made. Yet none the less they were acts of faith, though they
+were reasonable. In a word, then, no acquirement of or progress in any
+branch of human knowledge is possible without the exercise of faith. I
+cannot walk downstairs in the dark without at least as many acts of
+faith as there are steps in the staircase. Society could not hold
+together another day if mutual faith were wholly wanting among its
+units. Certainly we use reason first to justify our faith, and we reason
+later to verify it. Yet none the less the middle step is faith. Columbus
+reasoned first that there must be a land beyond the Atlantic, and he
+used that same reason later to verify his discovery. Yet without a
+sublime act of faith between these processes, without that almost
+reckless moment in which he first weighed anchor from Europe, reason
+would never have gone beyond speculative theorizing. Faith made real for
+him what Reason suggested. Faith actually accomplished that of which
+Reason could only dream.
+
+III. Turn now to the coming of Jesus Christ on earth. He came, as we
+know now, a Divine Teacher from heaven to make a Revelation from God; He
+came, that is, to demand from men a sublime Act of Faith in Himself. For
+He Himself was Incarnate Wisdom, and He demanded, therefore, as none
+else can demand it, a supreme acceptance of His claim. No progress in
+Divine knowledge, as He Himself tells us, is possible, then, without
+this initial act. _Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a
+little child shall not enter into it_. Every soul that is to receive
+this teaching in its entirety must first accept the Teacher and sit at
+His feet.
+
+Yet He did not make this claim merely on His own unsupported word. He
+presented His credentials, so to say; He fulfilled prophecy; He wrought
+miracles; He satisfied the moral sense. _Believe Me_, He says, _for the
+very works' sake_. Before, then, demanding the fundamental act of Faith
+on which the reception of Revelation must depend, He took pains to make
+this Act of Faith reasonable. "You see what I do," He said in effect,
+"you have observed My life, My words, My actions. Now is it not in
+accordance with Reason that you should grant My claims? Can you explain
+away, _reasonably_, on any other grounds than those which I state, the
+phenomena of My life?"
+
+Certainly, then, He appealed to Reason; He appealed to Private Judgment,
+since that, up to that moment, was all that His hearers possessed. But,
+in demanding an Act of Faith, He appealed to Private Judgment to set
+itself aside; He appealed to Reason as to whether it were not Reasonable
+to stand aside for the moment and let Faith take its place. And we know
+how His disciples responded. _Whom do you say that I am?... Thou art the
+Christ, the Son of the Living God._
+
+At that instant, then, a new stage was begun. They had used their Reason
+and their Private Judgment, and, aided by His grace, had concluded that
+the next reasonable step was that of Faith. Up to that point they had
+observed, dissected, criticized, and analyzed His words; they had
+examined, that is, His credentials. And now it was Reason itself that
+urged them towards Faith, Reason that abdicated what had hitherto been,
+its right and its duty, that Faith might assume her proper place.
+Henceforth, then, their attitude must be a different one. Up to now they
+had used their Reason to examine His claim; now it was Faith, aided and
+urged by Reason, which accepted it.
+
+Yet even now Reason's work is not done, though its scope in future is
+changed. Reason no longer examines whether He be God; Faith has
+accepted it: yet Reason has to be as active as ever; for Reason now must
+begin with all its might the task of understanding His Revelation. Faith
+has given them, so to speak, casket after casket of jewels; every word
+that Jesus Christ henceforth speaks to them is a very mine of treasure,
+absolutely true since He is known to be a Divine Teacher Who has given
+it. And Reason now begins her new work, not of justifying Faith, but, so
+to say, of interpreting it; not of examining His claims, since these
+have been once for all accepted, but of examining, understanding, and
+assimilating all that He reveals.
+
+III. Turn now to Catholicism.
+
+It is the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church only, that acts as
+did Jesus Christ and offers an adequate object to Reason and Faith
+alike. For, first, it is evident that if Christ intended His Revelation
+to last through all time, He must have designed a means by which it
+should last, an Authority that should declare and preserve it as He
+Himself delivered it. And next, it is evident that since the Catholic
+Church alone even claims that prerogative, clearly and coherently, her
+right to represent that Authority is in proportion to the clearness and
+coherence of her claim. Or, again, she advances in support of that claim
+precisely those same credentials as did He: she points to her miracles,
+her achievements, the fulfilment of prophecy, the unity of her teaching,
+the appeal to men's moral sense--all of them appeals to Reason, and
+appeals which lead up, as did His, to the supreme claim, which He also
+made, to demand an Act of Faith in herself as a Divine Teacher.
+
+For she alone demands it. Other denominations of Christendom point to a
+Book, or to the writings of Fathers, or to the example of their members,
+and she too does these things. But it is she alone who appeals to these
+things not as final in themselves, not as constituting in themselves a
+final court of appeal, but as indicating as that court of appeal her own
+Living Voice. _Believe me, for the works' sake_, she too says. "Use your
+reason to the full to examine my credentials; study prophecy, history,
+the Fathers--study my claims in any realm in which your intellect is
+competent--and then see if it is not after all supremely reasonable for
+Reason to abdicate that particular throne on which she has sat so long
+and to seat Faith there instead? Certainly follow your Reason and use
+your private judgment, for at present you have no other guide; and then,
+please God, aided by Faith, Reason will itself bow before Faith, and
+take her own place henceforth, not on the throne, but on the steps that
+lead to it."
+
+Is Reason, then, to be silent henceforth? Why, the whole of theology
+gives the answer. Did Newman cease to think when he became a Catholic?
+Did Thomas Aquinas resign his intellect when he devoted himself to
+study? Not for one instant is Reason silent. On the contrary, she is
+active as never before. Certainly she is no longer occupied in
+examining as to whether the Church is divine, but instead she is busied,
+with incredible labours, in examining what follows from that fact, in
+sorting the new treasures that are opened to her with the dawn of
+Revelation upon her eyes, in arranging, deducting, and understanding the
+details and structure of the astonishing Vision of Truth. And more, she
+is as inviolate as ever. For never can there be presented to her one
+article of Faith that gives the lie to her own nature, since Revelation
+and Reason cannot contradict one the other. She has learned, indeed,
+that the mysteries of God often transcend her powers, that she cannot
+fathom the infinite with the finite; yet never for one moment is she
+bidden to evacuate her own position or believe that which she perceives
+to be untrue. She has learned her limitations, and with that has come to
+understand her inviolable rights.
+
+See, then, how the features of Christ look out through the lineaments of
+His Church. She alone dares to claim an act of Divine Faith in herself,
+since it is He Who speaks in her Voice. She alone, since she is Divine,
+bids the wisest men _become as little children_ at her feet and endows
+little children with the wisdom of the ancients. Yet, on the other hand,
+in her magnificent Humanity, she has produced through the exercise of
+illuminated human Reason such a wealth of theology as the world has
+never seen. Is it any wonder that the world thinks both her Faith and
+Reason alike too extreme? For her Faith rises from her Divinity and her
+Reason from her Humanity; and such an outpouring of Divinity and such an
+emphatic Humanity, such a superb confidence in God's revelation and such
+untiring labours upon the contents of that Revelation, are altogether
+beyond the imagination of a world that in reality, fears both Faith and
+Reason alike.
+
+At her feet, and hers only, then, do the wisest and the simple kneel
+together--St. Thomas and the child, St. Augustine and the "charcoal
+burner"; as diverse, in their humanity, as men can be; as united in the
+light of Divinity as only those can be who have found it.
+
+So, then, she goes forward to victory. "First use your reason," she
+cries to the world, "to see whether I be not Divine! Then, impelled by
+Reason and aided by Grace, rise to Faith. Then once more call up your
+Reason, to verify and understand those mysteries which you accept as
+true. And so, little by little, vistas of truth will open about you and
+doctrines glow with an undreamed-of light. So Faith will be interpreted
+by Reason and Reason hold up the hands of Faith, until you come indeed
+to the unveiled vision of the Truth whose feet already you grasp in love
+and adoration; until you see, face to face in Heaven, Him Who is at once
+the Giver of Reason and the _Author of Faith_."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+AUTHORITY AND LIBERTY
+
+
+_The truth shall make you free_.--JOHN VIII. 32.
+
+_Bringing into captivity every understanding to the obedience of
+Christ_.--II COR. X. 5.
+
+
+We have already considered in outline the relations between Faith and
+Reason; how each, in its own province, is supreme and how each, in its
+turn, supports and ratifies the other. We pass on to a development of
+that theme, springing almost immediately out of it, namely, the
+relations between Authority and Liberty. And we will begin that
+consideration, as before, as it is illustrated by the accusations of the
+world against the Church. Briefly they are stated as follows.
+
+I. Freedom, we are told, is the note of Christianity as laid down in the
+Gospels, in both discipline and doctrine. Jesus Christ came into the
+world largely for this very purpose, to substitute the New Law for the
+Old and thereby to free men from the complicated theology and the
+minutia of religious routine which characterized men's attempts to
+reduce that Old Law to practice. The Old Law may or may not have been
+perfectly adapted, when first it was given, to the needs of God's
+people in the early stages of Jewish civilization; but at any rate it is
+certain, from a hundred texts in the Gospel, that Jesus Christ in His
+day found it an intolerable slavery laid upon the religious life of the
+people. Theology had degenerated into an incredible hair-splitting
+system of dogma, and discipline had degenerated into a multitude of
+irritating observances.
+
+Jesus Christ, then, in the place of all this, preached a Creed that was
+essentially simple, and simultaneously substituted for the elaborate
+ceremonialism of the Pharisees the spirit of liberty. The dogma that He
+preached was little more than that God is the Father of all and that all
+men therefore are brothers; "discipline" in the ordinary sense of the
+word is practically absent from the Gospel, and as for ceremonial there
+is none, except such as is necessary for the performance of the two
+extremely simple rites that He instituted, Baptism and the Lord's
+Supper.
+
+Now this supposed spirit of liberty, we are informed, is to-day to be
+found only in Protestantism. In that system, if it can strictly be
+called one, and in that system only, may a man exercise that freedom
+which was secured to him by Jesus Christ. First, in doctrine, he may
+choose, weigh, and examine for himself, within the wide limits which
+alone Christ laid down, those doctrines or hopes which commend
+themselves to his intellect; and next, in matters of discipline, again,
+he may choose for himself those ways of life and action that he may
+find helpful to his spiritual development. He may worship, for example,
+in any church that he prefers, attend those services and those only
+which commend themselves to his taste; he may eat or not eat this or
+that food, as he likes, and order his day, generally, as it pleases him.
+And all this, we are informed, is of the very spirit of New Testament
+Christianity. _The Truth has made him free_, as Christ Himself promised.
+
+The Catholic Church, on the other hand, is essentially a Church of
+slavery. First, in discipline, an enormous weight of observances and
+duties is laid upon her children, comparable only to the Pharisaic
+system. The Catholic must worship in this church and not in that, in
+this manner and not in the other. He must observe places and days and
+times, and that not only in religious matters but in secular. He must
+eat this food on this day and that on the other; he must frequent the
+sacraments at specified periods; he must perform certain actions and
+refrain from others, and that in matters in themselves indifferent.
+
+In dogma, too, no less is the burden that he must bear. Not only are the
+simple words of Christ developed into a vast theological system by the
+Church's officials, but the whole of this system is laid, as of faith,
+down to its minutest details, on the shoulders of the unhappy believer.
+He may not choose between this or that theory of the mode of Christ's
+Presence in the Eucharist; he must accept precisely that, and no other,
+which his Church has elaborated.
+
+In fact, in doctrine and in discipline alike, the Church has gone back
+to precisely that old reign of tyranny which Christ abolished. The
+Catholic, unlike the Protestant who has retained the spirit of liberty,
+finds himself in the same case as that under which Israel itself once
+groaned. He is a slave and not a child; he binds his own limbs, as the
+old phrase says, by his act of faith and puts the other end of the chain
+into the hands of the priest. Such, in outline, is the charge against
+us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now much of it is so false that it needs no refutation. It is, for
+example, entirely false that New Testament theology is simple. It is far
+more true to say that, compared with the systematized theology of the
+Church, it is bewilderingly complex and puzzling, and how complex and
+puzzling it is, is indicated by the hundreds of creeds which Protestants
+have made out of it, each creed claiming, respectively, to be its one
+and only proper interpretation. Men have only come to think it "simple"
+in modern days by desperately eliminating from it every element on which
+all Protestants are not agreed. The residuum is indeed "simple." Only it
+is not the New Testament theology! Dogmas such as that of the Blessed
+Trinity, of the Procession of the Holy Ghost, of the nature of grace and
+of sin--these, whether as held by orthodox or unorthodox, are at any
+rate not simple, and it is merely untrue to say that Christ made no
+statements on these points, however they may be understood. Further, it
+is merely untrue to say that Protestant theology is "simple"; it is
+every whit as elaborate as Catholic theology and considerably more
+complex in those points in which Protestant divines are not agreed. The
+controversies on Justification in which such men as Calvin and Luther,
+with their disciples, continually engaged are fully as complicated as
+any disputations on Grace between Jesuits and Dominicans.
+
+Yet the general contention is plain enough--that on the whole the
+Catholic is bound to believe a certain set of dogmas, while the
+Protestant is free to accept or reject them. Therefore, it is argued,
+the Protestant is "free" and the Catholic is not. And this brings us
+straight to the consideration of the relations between Authority and
+Liberty.
+
+II. What, then, is Religious Liberty? It is necessary to begin by
+forming some idea as to what it is that is meant by the word in other
+than religious matters.
+
+Very briefly it may be said that an individual enjoys social liberty
+when he is able to obey and to use the laws and powers of his true
+nature, and that a community enjoys it when all its members are able to
+do so without interfering unduly one with the other. The more complete
+is this ability, the more perfect is Liberty.
+
+A remarkable paradox at once presents itself--that Liberty can only be
+secured by Laws. Where there are no laws, or too few, to secure it,
+slavery immediately appears, no less surely than when there are too
+many; for the stronger individuals are, by the absence of law, enabled
+to tyrannize over the weaker. Even the vast and complex legislation of
+our own days is designed to increase and not to fetter liberty, and its
+greater complexity is necessitated by the greater complexity and the
+more numerous interrelationships of modern society. Laws, of course, may
+be unwise or excessively minute or deliberately enslaving; yet this does
+not affect the point that for all that Laws are necessary to the
+preservation of Liberty. Merchants, women and children, and citizens
+generally, can only enjoy rightful liberty if they are protected by
+laws. Only that man is free, then, who is most carefully guarded.
+
+In the same manner Scientific Liberty does not consist in the absence of
+knowledge, or of scientific dogmas, but in their presence. We are
+surrounded by innumerable facts of nature, and that man is free who is
+fully aware of those which affect his own life. It is true, for example,
+that two and two make four, and that heavy bodies tend to fall towards
+the centre of the earth; and it can only be a very superficial thinker
+who considers that to be ignorant of these facts is to be free from the
+enslaving dogmas of them. If I am ignorant of them I am, of course, in a
+sense at liberty to believe that two and two make five, and to jump off
+the roof of my house; yet this is not Liberty at all in the sense in
+which reasonable people use the word, since my knowledge of the laws
+enables me to be effective and, in fact, to survive in the midst of a
+world where they happen to be true. That man, then, is more truly "free"
+whose intellect is informed of and submits to these laws, than is the
+man whose intellect is unaware of them. Marconi's intellect submits to
+the laws of lightning and he is thereby enabled to avail himself of
+them. Ajax is unaware of them and is accordingly destroyed by their
+action.
+
+_The Truth_, then, _makes us free_. The State which controls men's
+actions and educates their intellects, which, in a word, enforces the
+knowledge of truth and compels obedience to it, is actually freeing its
+citizens by that process. It is only by a misuse of words or a failure
+to grasp ideas that I can maintain that an ignorant savage is more free
+than an educated man. It is true that I am, in a sense, "free" to think
+that two and two make five, if I have not learned arithmetic; on the
+other hand, when I learn that they make four I rise into that higher and
+more real liberty which a knowledge of arithmetic bestows. I am more
+effective, not less so; I am more free to exercise my powers and use the
+forces of the world in which I live, and not less free, when I have
+submitted my intellect to facts.
+
+III. (i) Now the soul too has an environment. Men may differ as to its
+nature and its conditions, but all who believe in the soul at all
+believe also that it has an environment, and that this environment is as
+much in the realm of Law as is the natural world itself. Prayer, for
+example, elevates the soul, base thinking degrades it.
+
+Now the laws of this environment were true even before Christ came.
+David knew, at any rate, something of penitence and of the guilt of sin,
+and Nathan knew something, at least, of the forgiveness of sins and of
+their temporal punishment. Christ came, then, with this object amongst
+others: that He might reveal the laws of Grace and convey to men's minds
+some at least of the facts of the spiritual life amongst which they
+lived. He came, moreover, partly to modify the workings of these laws,
+to release some more fully, and to restrain others; in a word, to be the
+Revealer of Truth and the Administrator of Grace.
+
+He came then, to increase men's liberty by increasing their knowledge,
+as, in another sphere, the scientist comes to us with the same purpose.
+Here, for example, is the law that murder is a sin before God and brings
+its consequences with it, a law stated briefly in the commandment _Thou
+shall not kill_. But our Divine Lord revealed more of the workings of
+this law than men had hitherto recognized. _I say unto you_, declared
+Christ, _that whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer._ He revealed,
+that is to say, the fact that this law runs even in the realm of
+thought, that the hating spirit incurs the guilt and punishment of
+murder, and not merely the murderous action. Were men less free when
+they learned that fact? Not unless I am less free than I was before,
+when I learn for the first time that lightning kills. Christ came, then,
+to reveal the _Truth that makes us free_, and He does so by informing
+our intellects and enabling us to _bring into captivity every
+understanding to _His obedience_.
+
+(ii) Turn now to the Catholic Church. Here is a Society whose function
+it is to preserve and apply the teaching of Christ; to analyze it and to
+state it in forms or systems which every generation can receive. For
+this purpose, then, she draws up not merely a Creed--which is the
+systematic statement of the Christian Revelation--but disciplinary rules
+and regulations that will make this Creed and the life that is
+conformable to it more easy of realization, and all this she does with
+the express object of enabling the individual soul to respond to her
+spiritual environment and to rise to the full exercise of her powers and
+rights. As the scientist and the statesmen take, respectively, the great
+laws of nature and society and reduce them to rules and codes, yet
+without adding or taking away from these facts, that are true whether
+they are popularly recognized or not--and all with the purpose not of
+diminishing but of increasing the general liberty--so the Church,
+divinely safeguarded too in the process, takes the Revelation of Christ
+and by her dogma and her discipline popularizes it, so to speak, and
+makes it at once comprehensible and effective.
+
+What, then, is this foolish cry about the slavery of dogma? How can
+Truth make men anything except more free? Unless a man is prepared to
+say that the scientist enslaves his intellect by telling him facts, he
+dare not say that the Church fetters his intellect by defining dogma.
+Christ did not condemn the Pharisaic system because it was a system, but
+because it was Pharisaic; because, that is, it was not true; because it
+obscured instead of revealing the true relations between God and man;
+because it _made the Word of God of none effect through its traditions_.
+
+But the Catholic system has the appearance of enslaving men? Why yes;
+for the only way of aiming at and using effectively the _truth that
+makes us free_ is by _bringing into captivity every understanding to the
+obedience of Christ_.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+CORPORATENESS AND INDIVIDUALISM
+
+
+_He that shall lose his life for My sake shall find it. For what doth it
+profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own
+soul?_--MATT. XVI. 25, 26.
+
+
+No recorded word of our Lord better illustrates than does this the
+startling and paradoxical manner of His teaching. For He Who _knew what
+was in man_, Who spoke always down to man's deepest interests, dwelt and
+spoke therefore in that realm of truth where man's own paradoxical
+nature is most manifest; where his interests appear to flourish only by
+being ruthlessly pruned; where he rises to the highest development of
+self only by self-mortification. This is, in fact, the very lesson
+Christ teaches in these words. To _find the life_ is the highest object
+of every man and the end for which he was created; yet this can be
+attained only by the _losing of it for Christ's sake_. Individuality can
+be preserved only by the sacrifice of Individualism. Let us break up
+this thought and consider it more in detail.
+
+I. (i) Catholics, it is said, are the most fundamentally selfish people
+in the whole world, since all that they do and say and think is
+directed and calculated, so far as they are "good Catholics," to the
+salvation of their own souls. It is this that continually crops up in
+their conversation, and this that presumably is their chief
+pre-occupation. Yet surely this, above all methods, is the very worst
+for achieving such an end. One does not pull up flowers to see how they
+are growing. The very secret of health is to be unconscious of it.
+Catholics, on the other hand, scarcely ever do anything else; they are
+for ever examining themselves, for ever going to confession, for ever
+developing and cultivating the narrowest virtues. The whole science of
+Casuistry, for example, is directed to nothing else but this--the exact
+definition of those limits within which the salvation of the soul is
+secure and beyond which it is imperilled; and Casuistry, as we all know,
+has a stifling and deadening influence upon all who study it.
+
+Again, see how the true development and expansion of the soul must
+necessarily be hindered by such an ideal. "I must not read this book,
+however brilliant, since it might be dangerous to my faith. I must not
+mix in this company, however charming, since evil communications corrupt
+good manners." What kind of life is that which must always be checked
+and stunted in this fashion? What kind of salvation can there be that
+can only be purchased by the sacrifice of so much that is noble and
+inspiring? True life consists in experience, not in introspection; in
+going out from self into the world, not in retiring from the world
+inwards. Let us therefore live our life without fear, lose ourselves in
+humanity, forget self in experience, and leave the rest to God!
+
+(ii) So much for the one side, while from the other comes almost
+precisely the opposite criticism. Catholics, it is said, are not nearly
+individualistic enough; on the contrary they are for ever sinking
+themselves and their personalities in the corporate life of the Church.
+Not only are their outward actions checked and their words guarded, but
+even their very consciences and thoughts are informed and made by the
+collective conscience and mind of others. It is the highest ambition of
+every good Catholic _sentire cum ecclesia_; not merely to act and speak
+but even to think in obedience to others. Now a man's true life, we are
+told, consists in an assertion of his own individuality. God has made no
+two men the same; the mould was made and broken in each several case.
+If, therefore, we are to be what He meant us to be, we must make the
+most of our own personalities; we must think our own thoughts, not other
+people's, direct our own lives, speak our own minds--so far, of course,
+as we can do so without interfering with our neighbour's equal liberty.
+Once more, therefore, we are bidden to live our life to the full; not in
+this case, however, because we all share in a common humanity, but
+because we do not!
+
+We Catholics are wrong, therefore, for both reasons and in both
+directions. We are wrong when we put self first and we are wrong when we
+do not. We are wrong when we launch out into the current of life, and
+wrong when we withdraw ourselves from its waters. We are wrong when we
+insist upon our personal responsibility, and wrong when we look to the
+Church to undertake it.
+
+II. (i) Here then, indeed, is a Paradox; but it is one which our Lord
+Himself expressly emphasizes. For, first, there is nothing on which He
+so repeatedly insists as the supreme and singular value of every soul's
+salvation. If this is not attained, all is lost. _What shall it profit a
+man if he shall gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own
+soul?_ All else, then, must be sacrificed if this is in peril. No human
+possession, however great, can be weighed against this. No human tie,
+however sacred, can hold against its claim. Not only must _houses and
+lands_, but _father and mother and wives and children_ must take second
+place, so soon as eternal life is at stake. And yet, somehow or another,
+this salvation can only be attained by loss; self can only live if it be
+mortified, can only be saved by its own denial. Individuality, as has
+been said, can only be preserved by the loss of Individualism.
+
+(ii) But this is not peculiar to the spiritual sphere; it is a paradox
+that is true, in some sense, of life on every plane--civic,
+intellectual, artistic, human. The man that desires to bring his
+intellectual and personal powers to their highest pitch must
+continually be sinking them, so to speak, in the current of his fellows,
+continually exhausting, using, and wearing them out. He must risk, and
+indeed inevitably lose, in a very real sense, his personal point of
+view, if he is to have a point of view that is worth possessing; he must
+be content to see his theories and his thoughts modified, merged,
+changed, and destroyed, if his thought is to be of value. For, so far as
+he withdraws himself from his fellows into a physical or mental
+isolation, so far he approaches egotistic madness. He cannot grow unless
+he decreases; he cannot remain himself unless he ceases to be himself.
+
+So, too, is it in civic and artistic life. The citizen who truly lives
+to the State of which he is a member--the man to whom his country raises
+a monument, for example--is one, always, who has _lost himself_ for his
+nation, whether he has died in battle or sacrificed himself in politics
+or philanthropy. And the citizen who has merely hugged his citizenship
+to himself, who has enjoyed all the privileges he can get and paid
+nothing for them,--least of all himself--who has, so to say, _gained the
+whole world_, has simultaneously lost himself indeed and is forgotten
+within a year of his death. So with the artist. The man who has made his
+art serve him, who has employed it, let us say, purely for the sake of
+the money he could get out of it, who has kept it within severe limits,
+who has been merely prudent and orderly and restrained, this man has, in
+a sense, _saved his own life_; yet simultaneously he has lost it. But
+the man to whom art is a passion, to whom nothing else is comparatively
+of any value, who has plunged himself in his art, has dedicated to it
+his days and his nights, has sacrificed to it every power of his being
+and every energy of his mind and body, this man has indeed _lost
+himself_. Yet he lives in his art as the other has not, he has _saved
+himself_ in a sense of which the other knows nothing; and exactly in
+proportion as he has succeeded in his self-abnegation, so far has he
+attained, as we say, immortality. There is not, then, one sphere of life
+in which the paradox is not true. The great historical lovers in
+romance, the pioneers of science, the immortals in every plane, are
+precisely those that have fulfilled on lower levels the spiritual
+aphorism of Jesus Christ.
+
+(iii) Turn, then, once more to the Catholic Church and see how in the
+Life which she offers, as in none other, there is presented to us a
+means of fulfilling our end.
+
+For it is she alone who even demands in the spiritual sphere a complete
+and entire abnegation of self. From every other Christian body comes the
+cry, Save your soul, assert your individuality, follow your conscience,
+form your opinions; while she, and she alone, demands from her children
+the sacrifice of their intellect, the submitting of their judgment, the
+informing of their conscience by hers, and the obedience of their will
+to her lightest command. For she, and she alone, is conscious of
+possessing that Divinity, in complete submission to which lies the
+salvation of Humanity. For she, as the coherent and organic mystical
+Body of Christ, calls upon those who look to her to become, not merely
+her children, but her very members; not to obey her as soldiers obey a
+leader or citizens a Government, but as the hands and eyes and feet obey
+a brain. Once, therefore, I understand this, I understand too how it is
+that by being lost in her I save myself; that I lose only that which
+hinders my activity, not that which fosters it. For when is my hand most
+itself? When separated from the body, by paralysis or amputation? Or
+when, in vital union with the brain, with every fibre alert and every
+nerve alive, it obeys in every gesture and receives in every sensation a
+life infinitely vaster and higher than any which it might, temporarily,
+enjoy in independence? It is true that its capacity for pain is the
+greater when it is so united, and that it would cease to suffer if once
+its separation were accomplished; yet, simultaneously, it would lose all
+that for which God made it and, _saving itself_, would be _lost_ indeed.
+
+_I live_, then, the perfect Catholic may say, as none other can say,
+when I have ceased to be myself. And _yet not I_, since I have lost my
+Individualism. No longer do I claim any activity at all on my own
+behalf; no longer do I demand to form my opinions, to follow my own
+conscience apart from that informing of it that comes from God, or to
+live my own life. Yet in losing my Individualism I have won my
+Individuality, for I have found my true place at last. I have _lost the
+whole world?_ Yes, so far as that world is separate from or antagonistic
+to God's will; but I have _gained my own soul_ and attained immortality.
+For it is _not I that live, but Christ that liveth in me_.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+MEEKNESS AND VIOLENCE
+
+
+_Blessed are the meek_.--MATT. V. 4.
+
+_The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it
+away_.--MATT. XI. 12.
+
+
+We have already considered the Church's relations towards such things as
+wealth and human influence and power, how she will sometimes use and
+sometimes disdain them. Let us now penetrate a little deeper and
+understand the spirit that underlies and explains this varying attitude
+of hers.
+
+I. (i) It has been charged against Christianity in general, and
+therefore implicitly and supremely against the Church that was for so
+long its sole embodiment and is still, alone, its adequate
+representative, that it has fostered virtues which retard progress.
+Progress, in the view of the German philosopher who explicitly made this
+charge, is merely natural both in its action and its end; and Nature, as
+we are well aware, knows nothing of forgiveness or compassion or
+tenderness: on the contrary she moves from lower to higher forms by
+forces that are their precise opposite. The wounded stag is not
+protected by his fellows, but gored to death; the old wolf is torn to
+pieces, the sick lion wanders away to die of starvation, and all these
+instincts, we are informed, have for their object the gradual
+improvement of the breed by the elimination of the weak and ineffective.
+So should it be, he tells us, with man, and the extreme Eugenists echo
+his teaching. Christianity, on the other hand, deliberately protects the
+weak and teaches that the sacrifice of the strong is supreme heroism.
+Christianity has raised hospitals and refuges for the infirm, seeking to
+preserve those very types which Nature, if she had her way, would
+eliminate. Christianity, then, is the enemy of the human race and not
+its friend, since Christianity has retarded, as no other religion has
+ever succeeded in retarding, the appearance of that superman whom Nature
+seeks to evolve.... It is scarcely to be wondered at that the teacher of
+such a doctrine himself died insane.
+
+A parallel doctrine is taught largely to-day by persons who call
+themselves practical and businesslike. Meekness and gentleness and
+compassion, they tell their sons, are very elegant and graceful virtues
+for those who can afford them, for women and children who are more or
+less sheltered from the struggle of life, and for feeble and ineffective
+people who are capable of nothing else. But for men who have to make
+their own way in the world and intend to win success there, a more stern
+code is necessary; from these there is demanded such a rule of action as
+Nature herself dictates. Be self-confident and self-assertive then, not
+meek. Remember that the weakness of your neighbour is your own
+opportunity. Take care of number one and let the rest take care of
+themselves. A man does not go into the stock-exchange or into commerce
+in order to exhibit Christian virtues there, but business qualities. In
+a word, Christianity, so far as it affects material or commercial or
+political progress, is a weakness rather than a strength, an enemy
+rather than a friend.
+
+(ii) But if, on the one side, the gentleness and non-resistance
+inculcated by Christianity form the material of one charge against the
+Church, on the other side, no less, she is blamed for her violence and
+intransigeance. Catholics are not yielding enough, we are told, to be
+true followers of the meek Prophet of Galilee, not gentle enough to
+inherit the blessing which He pronounced. On the contrary there are no
+people so tenacious, so obstinate, and even so violent as these
+professed disciples of Jesus Christ. See the way, for example, in which
+they cling to and insist upon their rights; the obstacles they raise,
+for example, to reasonable national schemes of education or to a
+sensible system in the divorce courts. And above all, consider their
+appalling and brutal violence as exhibited in such institutions as that
+of the Index and Excommunication, the fierceness with which they insist
+upon absolute and detailed obedience to authority, the ruthlessness with
+which they cast out from their company those who will not pronounce
+their shibboleths. It is true that in these days they can only enforce
+their claims by spiritual threatenings and penalties, but history shows
+us that they would do more if they could. The story of the racks and the
+fires of the Inquisition shows plainly enough that the Church once used,
+and therefore, presumably, would use again if she could, carnal weapons
+in her spiritual warfare. Can anything be more unlike the gentle Spirit
+of Him Who, _when He was reviled, reviled not again;_ of Him Who bade
+men to _learn of Him, for He was meek and lowly of heart_, and so _find
+rest to their souls?_
+
+Here, then, is the Paradox, and here are two characteristics of the
+Catholic Church: that she is at once too meek and too self-assertive,
+too gentle and too violent. It is a paradox exactly echoed by our Divine
+Lord Himself, Who in the Upper Chamber bade His disciples who _had no
+sword_ to _sell their cloaks and buy them_, and Who yet, in the garden
+of Gethsemane, commanded the one disciple who had taken Him at His word
+to _put up the sword into its sheath_, telling him that _they who took
+the sword should perish by it_. It is echoed yet again in His action,
+first in taking the scourge into His own Hand, in the temple courts, and
+then in baring His shoulders to that same scourge in the hands of
+others. How, then, is this Paradox to be reconciled?
+
+II. The Church, let us remind ourselves again, is both Human and Divine.
+
+(i) She consists of human persons, and those persons are attached both
+to one another and to the world outside by a perfectly balanced system
+of human rights known as the Law of Justice. This Law of Justice, though
+coming indeed from God, is, in a sense, natural and human; it exists to
+some extent in all societies, as well as being closely defined and
+worked out in the Old Law given on Sinai. It is a Law which men could
+have worked out, at any rate in its main principles, by the light of
+reason only, unaided by Revelation, and it is a Law, further, so
+fundamental that no Revelation could conceivably ever outrage or set it
+aside.
+
+At the coming of Christ into the world, however, Supernatural Charity
+came with Him. The Law of Justice still remained; men still had their
+rights on which they might insist, still had their rights which no
+Christian may refuse to recognize. But such was the torrent of Divine
+generosity which Christ exhibited, so overwhelming was the Vision which
+He revealed of the supernatural charity of God towards men, that a set
+of ideals sprang into life such as the world had never dreamed of; more,
+Charity came with such power that her commands actually overruled in
+many instances the feeble claims of Justice, so that she bade men
+henceforward to forgive, for example, not merely according to Justice,
+but according to her own Divine nature, to _forgive unto seventy times
+seven_, to give _good measure, heaped up and running over_, and not the
+bare minimum which men had merely earned.
+
+It was from this advent of Charity, then, that all these essentially
+Christian virtues of generosity and meekness and self-sacrifice sprang
+which Nietsche condemned as hostile to material progress.
+
+For, from henceforth, if _a man take thy coat, let him take thy cloak
+also; if he will compel thee to go with him one mile, go two; if he
+strike thee on one cheek, turn to him the other also_. The Law of
+Natural justice is transcended and the Law of Charity and Sacrifice
+reigns instead. _Resist not evil_; do not insist always, that is to say,
+on your natural rights; give men more than their due, and be yourself
+content with less. _Learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and
+find rest to your souls. Forgive one another your trespasses_ with the
+same generous charity with which God has forgiven and will forgive you
+yours. _Judge not and you shall not be judged._ Do not, in personal
+matters, insist upon bare justice for yourself, but act on that scale
+and by those principles by which God Himself has dealt with you.
+
+Meekness, then, is undoubtedly a Christian virtue. Sometimes it is
+obligatory, sometimes it is but a Counsel of Perfection; it stands, in
+any case, high among those ideals which it has been the glory of
+Christianity to create.
+
+(ii) But there are other elements in life besides the human and the
+natural, beyond those personal rights and claims which a Christian may,
+if he is aiming at perfection, set aside out of charity. The Church is
+Divine as well as Human.
+
+For the Church has entrusted to her, besides the rights of men, which
+may be sacrificed by their possessors, the rights and claims of God,
+which none but He can set aside. He has given into her keeping, for
+example, a Revelation of truths and principles which, springing out of
+His own Nature or of His Will, are as immutable and eternal as Himself.
+And it is precisely in defence of these truths and principles that the
+Church exhibits that which the world calls _intransigeance_ and Jesus
+Christ _violence_.
+
+Here, for example, is the right of a baptized Catholic child to be
+educated in his religion, or rather, the right of God Himself to teach
+that child in the manner He has ordained. Here is the revealed truth
+that marriage is indissoluble; here that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.
+Now these are not human rights or opinions at all--rights and opinions
+which men, urged by charity or humility, can set aside or waive in the
+face of opposition. They rest on an entirely different basis; they are,
+so to speak, the inalienable possessions of God; and it would neither be
+charity nor humility, but sheer treachery, for the Church to exhibit
+meekness or pliancy in matters such as these, given to her as they are,
+not to dispose of, but to guard intact. On the contrary here, exactly,
+comes the command, _He that hath not, let him sell his cloak and buy a
+sword,_, for here comes the line between the Divine and the Human; let
+all personal possessions go, all merely natural rights and claims be
+yielded, and let a sword take their place. For here is a matter that
+must be _resisted, even unto blood_.
+
+The Catholic Church then is, and always will be, _violent_ and
+intransigeant when the rights of God are in question. She will be
+absolutely ruthless, for example, towards heresy, for heresy affects not
+personal matters on which Charity may yield, but a Divine right on which
+there must be no yielding. Yet, simultaneously, she will be infinitely
+kind towards the heretic, since a thousand human motives and
+circumstances may come in and modify his responsibility. At a word of
+repentance she will readmit his person into her treasury of souls, but
+not his heresy into her treasury of wisdom; she will strike his name
+eagerly and freely from her black list of the rebellious, but not his
+book from the pages of her Index. She exhibits meekness towards him and
+_violence_ towards his error; since he is human, but her Truth is
+Divine.
+
+It is, then, from a modern confusion of thought with regard to the
+realms of the Divine and the Human that the amazing inability arises, on
+the world's part, to understand the respective principles on which the
+Catholic Church acts in these two and utterly separate departments. The
+world considers it reasonable for a country to defend its material
+possessions by the sword, but intolerant and unreasonable for the Church
+to condemn, _resisting even unto blood_, principles which she considers
+erroneous or false. The Church, on the other hand, urges her children
+again and again to yield rather than to fight when merely material
+possessions are at stake, since Charity permits and sometimes even
+commands men to be content with less than their own rights, and yet
+again, when a Divine truth or right is at stake, here she will resist
+unfaltering and undismayed, since she cannot be "charitable" with what
+is not her own; here she will _sell her cloak_ and _buy that sword_
+which, when the dispute was on merely temporal matters, she thrust back
+again into its sheath.
+
+To-day[1] as Christ rides into Jerusalem we see, as in a mirror, this
+Paradox made plain. _Thy King cometh to thee, meek_. Was there ever so
+mean a Procession as this? Was there ever such meekness and charity? He
+Who, as His personal right, is attended in heaven by a _multitude on
+white horses_, now, in virtue of His Humanity, is content with a few
+fishermen and a crowd of children. He to Whom, in His personal right,
+the harpers and the angels make eternal music is content, since He has
+been made Man for our sakes, with the discordant shoutings of this
+crowd. He Who _rode on the Seraphim and came flying on the wings of the
+wind_ sits on the colt of an ass. He comes, meek indeed, from the golden
+streets of the Heavenly Jerusalem to the foul roads of the Earthly,
+laying aside His personal rights since He is that very Fire of Charity
+by which Christians relinquish theirs.
+
+[Footnote 1: This sermon was preached on Palm-Sunday.]
+
+But, for all that, it is _riding_ that _thy King cometh to thee_.... He
+will not relinquish His inalienable claim and He will have nothing
+essential left out. He has His royal escort, even though a ragged one;
+He will have His spearmen, even though their spears be only of palm; He
+will have His heralds to proclaim Him, however much the devout Pharisees
+may be offended by their proclamation; He will ride into His own Royal
+City, even though that City casts Him out, and He will have His
+Coronation, even though it be with thorns. So, too, the Catholic Church
+advances through the ages.
+
+In merely human rights and personal matters again and again she will
+yield up all that she has, making, it may be, but one protest for
+Justice' sake and then no more. And she will urge her children to do the
+same. If the world will let her have no jewels, then she will put glass
+beads in her monstrance, and for marble she will use plaster, and tinsel
+for gold.
+
+But she will have her Procession and insist upon her Royalty. It may
+seem as poor and as mean and as tawdry as the entrance of Christ Himself
+through the royal gate; for she will yield up all that the world demands
+of her, so long as her Divine Right itself remains intact. She will
+issue her orders, though few be found to obey them; she will cast out
+from her the rebellious who question her authority, and cleanse her
+Temple Courts even though with a scourge at which men mock. She will
+give up all that is merely human, if the world will have it so, and will
+_resist not evil_ if it merely concerns herself. But there is one thing
+which she will not renounce, one thing she will claim, even with
+_violence_ and "intransigeance," and that is the Royalty with which God
+Himself has crowned her.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE SEVEN WORDS
+
+THE "THREE HOURS"
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+The value, to the worshippers, of the Devotion of the Three Hours' Agony
+is in proportion to the degree in which they understand that they are
+watching not so much the tragedy of nineteen hundred years ago as the
+tragedy of their own lives and times. Merely to dwell on the Death of
+Christ on Calvary would scarcely avail them more than to study the
+details of the assassination of Caesar at the foot of Pompey's statue.
+Such considerations might indeed be interesting, exciting, and even a
+little instructive or inspiring; but they could not be better than this,
+and they might be no better than morbid and harmful.
+
+The Death of Christ, however, is unique because it is, so to say,
+universal. It is more than the crowning horror of all murderous
+histories; it is more even than the _type_ of all the outrages that men
+have ever committed against God. For it is just the very enactment, upon
+the historical stage of the world, of those repeated interior tragedies
+that take place in every soul that rejects or insults Him; since the God
+whom we crucify within is the same God that was once crucified without.
+There is not an exterior detail in the Gospel which may not be
+interiorly repeated in the spiritual life of a sinner; the process
+recorded by the Evangelists must be more or less identical with the
+process of all apostasy from God.
+
+For, first, there is the Betrayal of Conscience, as a beginning of the
+tragedy; its betrayal by those elements of our nature that are intended
+as its friends and protectors--by Emotion or Forethought, for example.
+Then Conscience is led away, bound, to be judged; for there can be no
+mortal sin without deliberation, and no man ever yet fell into it
+without conducting first a sort of hasty mock-trial or two in which a
+sham Prudence or a false idea of Liberty solemnly decide that Conscience
+is in the wrong. Yet even then Conscience persists, and so He is made to
+appear absurd and ridiculous, and set beside the Barabbas of a coarse
+and sturdy lower nature that makes no high pretensions and boasts of it.
+And so the drama proceeds and Conscience is crucified: Conscience begins
+to be silent, breaking the deepening gloom now and again with protests
+that grow weaker every time, and at last Conscience dies indeed. And
+thenceforward there can be no hope, save in the miracle of Resurrection.
+
+This Cross of Calvary, then, is not a mere type or picture; it is a
+fact identical with that so dreadfully familiar to us in spiritual life.
+For Christ is not one Person, and Conscience something else, but it is
+actually Christ who speaks in Conscience and Christ, therefore, Who is
+crucified in mortal sin.
+
+Let us, then, be plain with ourselves. We are watching not only Christ's
+Death but our own, since we are watching the Death of Christ _Who is our
+Life_.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST WORD
+
+_Father forgive them, for they know not what they do_.
+
+
+In previous considerations we have studied the Life of Christ in His
+Mystical Body from an angle at which the strange and innumerable
+paradoxes which abound in all forms of life at a certain depth become
+visible. And we have seen how these paradoxes lie in those strata, so to
+say, where the Divinity and the Humanity meet. Christ is God and God
+cannot die; therefore Christ became man in order to be able to do so.
+The Church is Divine and therefore all-holy, but she dwells in a Body of
+sinful Humanity and reckons her sinners to be her children and members
+no less than her saints.
+
+We will continue to regard the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the Words
+which He spoke from the Cross from the same angle, and to find,
+therefore, the same characteristic paradoxes and mysteries in all that
+we see. In the First Word we meet the _Paradox of Divine Forgiveness_.
+
+I. Ordinary human forgiveness is no more than a natural virtue,
+resulting from a natural sense of justice, and if a man is normal, his
+forgiveness will be a natural and inevitable part of the process of
+reconciliation so soon as a certain kind of restitution has been made.
+For example, a friend of mine sins against me--he injures, perhaps, my
+good name; and my natural answer is the emotion of resentment towards
+him and, perhaps, of actual revenge. But what I chiefly resent is my
+friend's stupidity and his ignorance of my real character. "I am angry,"
+I say, with perfect sincerity, "not so much at the thing he has said of
+me, as at this proof of his incapacity to understand me. I thought he
+was my friend, that he was in sympathy with my character or, at least,
+that he understood it sufficiently to do me justice. But now, from what
+he has just said of me, I see that he does not. If the thing he said
+were true of me, the most of my anger would be gone. But I see that he
+does not know me, after all."
+
+And then, presently, my friend does understand that he has wronged me;
+that the gossip he repeated or the construction he put upon my actions
+was not fair or true. And immediately that I become aware of this, from
+him or from another, my resentment goes, if I have any natural virtue at
+all; it goes because my wounded pride is healed. I forgive him easily
+and naturally because he knows now what he has done.
+
+II. How entirely different from this easy, self-loving, human
+forgiveness is the Divine Forgiveness of Christ! Now it is true that in
+the conscience of Pilate, the unjust representative of justice, and in
+that thing that called itself conscience in Herod, and in the hearts of
+the priests who denounced their God, and of the soldiers who executed
+their overlord, and of Judas who betrayed his friend, in all these there
+was surely a certain uneasiness--such an uneasiness is actually recorded
+of the first and the last of the list--a certain faint shadow of
+perception and knowledge of what it was that they had done and were
+doing. And, for the natural man, it would have been comparatively easy
+to forgive such injuries on that account. "I forgive them," such a man
+might have said from his cross, "because there is just a glimmer of
+knowledge left; there is just one spark in their hearts that still does
+me justice, and for the sake of that I can try, at least, to put away my
+resentment and ask God to forgive them."
+
+But Jesus Christ cries, "Forgive them because they do _not_ know what
+they do! Forgive them because they need it so terribly, since they do
+not even know that they need it! Forgive in them that which is
+unforgivable!"
+
+III. Two obvious points present themselves in conclusion.
+
+(1) First, it is _Divine_ Forgiveness that we need, since no sinner of
+us all knows the full malice of sin. One man is a slave, let us say, to
+a sin of the flesh, and seeks to reassure himself by the reflection that
+he injures no one but himself; ignorant as he is of the outrage to God
+the Holy Ghost Whose temple he is ruining. Or a woman repeats again
+every piece of slanderous gossip that comes her way and comforts herself
+in moments of compunction by reflecting that she "means no harm";
+ignorant as she is of the discouragement of souls of which she is the
+cause and of the seeds of distrust and enmity sown among friends. In
+fact it is incredible that any sinner ever _knows what it is that he
+does_ by sin. We need, therefore, the Divine Forgiveness and not the
+human, the pardon that descends when we are unaware that we must have it
+or die; the love of the Father Who, _while we are yet a great way off,
+runs to meet_ us, and Who teaches us for the first time, by the warmth
+of His welcome, the icy distances to which we had wandered. If we
+_knew_, anyone could forgive us. It is because we do not that only God,
+Who knows all things, can forgive us effectively.
+
+(2) And it is this _Divine_ Forgiveness that we ourselves have to extend
+to those that sin against us, since only those who so forgive can be
+forgiven. We must not wait until wounded pride is made whole by the
+conscious shame of our enemy; until the debt is paid by acknowledgment
+and we are complacent once more in the knowledge that justice has been
+done to us at last. On the contrary, the only forgiveness that is
+supernatural, and which, therefore, alone is meritorious, is that which
+reach out to men's ignorance and not their knowledge of their need.
+
+
+
+
+THE SECOND WORD
+
+_Amen I say to thee, to-day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise._
+
+
+Our Divine Lord, in this Second Word, immediately applies and
+illustrates the First and drives its lesson home. He shows us how the
+rain of mercy that poured out of heaven in answer to the prayer He made
+just now enlightens the man who, above all others present on Calvary,
+was the most abjectly ignorant of all; the man who, himself at the very
+heart of the tragedy, understood it less, probably, than the smallest
+child on the outskirts of the crowd.
+
+His life had been one long defiance of the laws of both God and man. He
+had been a member of one of those troops of human vermin that crawl
+round Jerusalem, raiding solitary houses, attacking solitary travellers,
+guilty of sins at once the bloodiest and the meanest, comparable only to
+the French _apaches_ of our own day. Well, he had been gripped at last
+by the Roman machine, caught in some sordid adventure, and here,
+resentful and furious and contemptuous, full of bravado and terror, he
+snarled like a polecat at every human face he saw, snarled and spat at
+the Divine Face Itself that looked at him from a cross that was like his
+own; and, since he had not even a spark of the honour that is reputed to
+exist "among thieves," taunted his "fellow criminal" for the folly of
+His "crime."
+
+"If thou be the Christ, save Thyself and us."
+
+Again, then, the Paradox is plain enough. Surely an educated priest, or
+a timid disciple, or a good-hearted dutiful soldier who hated the work
+he was at, surely one of these will be the first object of Christ's
+pardon; and so one of these would have been, if one of ourselves had
+hung there. But when God forgives, He forgives the most ignorant
+first--that is, the most remote from forgiveness--and makes, not Peter
+or Caiphas or the Centurion, but Dismas the thief, the firstfruits of
+Redemption.
+
+I. The first effect of the Divine Mercy is Enlightenment. _Before they
+call, I will answer_. Before the thief feels the first pang of sorrow
+Grace is at work on him, and for the first time in his dreary life he
+begins to understand. And an extraordinary illumination shines in his
+soul. For no expert penitent after years of spirituality, no sorrowful
+saint, could have prayed more perfectly than this outcast. His
+intellect, perhaps, took in little or nothing of the great forces that
+were active about him and within him; he knew, perhaps, explicitly
+little or nothing of Who this was that hung beside him; yet his soul's
+intuition pierces to the very heart of the mystery and expresses itself
+in a prayer that combines at once a perfect love, an exquisite humility,
+an entire confidence, a resolute hope, a clear-sighted faith, and an
+unutterable patience; his soul blossoms all in a moment: _Lord, remember
+me when Thou comest in Thy Kingdom_. He saw the glory behind the shame,
+the Eternal Throne behind the Cross, and the future behind the present;
+and he asked only to be _remembered_ when the glory should transfigure
+the shame and the Cross be transformed into the Throne; for he
+understood what that remembrance would mean: "_Remember, Lord_, that I
+suffered at Thy side."
+
+II. So perfect, then, are the dispositions formed in him by grace that
+at one bound _the last is first_. Not even Mary and John shall have the
+instant reward that shall be his; for them there are other gifts, and
+the first are those of separation and exile. For the moment, then, this
+man steps into the foremost place and they who have hung side by side on
+Calvary shall walk side by side to meet those waiting souls beyond the
+veil who will run so eagerly to welcome them. _To-day thou shalt be with
+Me in Paradise._
+
+III. Now this Paradox, _the last shall be first_, is an old doctrine of
+Christ, so startling and bewildering that He has been forced to repeat
+it again and again. He taught it in at least four parables: in the
+parables of _the Lost Piece of Silver, the Lost Sheep, the Prodigal
+Son_, and _the Vineyard_. The Nine Pieces lie neglected on the table,
+the Ninety-nine sheep are exiled in the Fold, the Elder Son is, he
+thinks, overlooked and slighted, and the Labourers complain of
+favouritism. Yet still, even after all this teaching, the complaint goes
+up from Christians that God is too loving to be quite just. A convert,
+perhaps, comes into the Church in middle age and in a few months
+develops the graces of Saint Teresa and becomes one of her daughters. A
+careless black-guard is condemned to death for murder and three weeks
+later dies upon the scaffold the death of a saint, at the very head of
+the line. And the complaints seem natural enough. _Thou hast made them
+equal unto us who have borne the burden and heat of the day_.
+
+Yet look again, you Elder Sons. Have your religious, careful, timid
+lives ever exhibited anything resembling that depth of self-abjection to
+which the Younger Son has attained? Certainly you have been virtuous and
+conscientious; after all, it would be a shame if you had not been so,
+considering the wealth of grace you have always enjoyed. But have you
+ever even striven seriously after the one single moral quality which
+Christ holds up in His own character as the point of imitation: _Learn
+of Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart_? It is surely significant that
+He does not say, expressly, Learn of Me to be pure, or courageous, or
+fervent; but _Learn to be humble_, for in this, above all, you shall
+_find rest to your souls_. Instead, have you not had a kind of gentle
+pride in your religion or your virtue or your fastidiousness? In a
+word, you have not been as excellent an Elder Son as your brother has
+been a Younger. You have not corresponded with your graces as he has
+corresponded with his. You have never yet been capable of sufficient
+lowliness to come home (which is so much harder than to remain there),
+or of sufficient humility to begin for the first time to work with all
+your heart only an hour before sunset.
+
+Begin, then, at the beginning, not half-way up the line. Go down to the
+church door and beat your breast and say not, God reward me who have
+done so much for Him, but _God be merciful to me_ who have done so
+little. Get off your seat amongst the Pharisees and go down on your
+knees and weep behind Christ's couch, if perhaps He may at last say to
+you, _Friend, come up higher_.
+
+
+
+
+THE THIRD WORD
+
+_Woman, behold thy son. Behold thy mother_.
+
+
+Our Divine Lord now turns, from the soul who at one bound has sprung
+into the front rank, to those two souls who have never left it, and
+supremely to that Mother on whose soul sin has never yet breathed, on
+whose breast Incarnate God had rested as inviolate and secure as on the
+Bosom of the Eternal Father, that Mother who was His Heaven on earth.
+Standing beside her is the one human being who is least unworthy to be
+there, now that Joseph has passed to his reward and John the Baptist has
+gone to join the Prophets--_the disciple whom Jesus loved_, who had lain
+on the breast of Jesus as Jesus had lain on the breast of Mary.
+
+Our Lord has just shown how He deals with His dear sinners; now He shows
+how He will _be glorified with His Saints_. The Paradox of this Word is
+that Death, the divider of those who are separated from God, is the bond
+of union between those that are united to Him.
+
+I. Death is the one inexorable enemy of human society as constituted
+apart from God. A king dies and his kingdom is at once in danger of
+disruption. A child dies and his mother prays that she may bear another,
+lest his father and she should drift apart. Death is the supreme sower
+of discord and disunion, then, in the natural order, since he is the one
+supreme enemy of natural life. He is the noonday terror of the Rich Fool
+of the parable and the nightmare of the Poor Fool, since those who place
+their hope in this life see that death is the end of their hope. For
+these there is no appeal beyond the grave.
+
+II. Now precisely the opposite of all this is true in the supernatural
+order, since the gate of death, viewed from the supernatural side, is an
+entrance and not an ending, a beginning and not a close. This may be
+seen to be so even in a united human family in this world, the members
+of whom are living the supernatural life; for where such a family is
+living in the love of God, Death, when he comes, draws not only the
+survivors closer together, but even those whom he seems to have
+separated. He does not bring consternation and terror and disunion, but
+he awakens hope and tenderness, he smooths away old differences, he
+explains old misunderstandings.
+
+Our Blessed Lord has already, over the grave of Lazarus, hinted that
+this shall be so, so soon as He has consecrated death by His own dying.
+_He that believeth in Me shall never die_. He, that is to say, who has
+_died with Christ_, whose centre henceforward is in the supernatural,
+simply no longer finds death to be what nature finds it. It no longer
+makes for division but for union; it no longer imperils or ends life and
+interest and possession, but releases them from risk and mortality.
+
+Here, then, He deliberately and explicitly acts upon this truth. He once
+raised Lazarus and the daughter of Jairus and the Widow's Son from the
+dead, for death's sting could, at that time, be drawn in no other way;
+but now that He Himself is _tasting death for every man_, He performs an
+even more emphatically supernatural act and conquers death by submitting
+to it instead of by commanding it. Life had already united, so far as
+mortal life can unite, those two souls who loved Him and one another so
+well. These two, since they knew Him so perfectly, knew each the other
+too as perfectly as knowledge and sympathy can unite souls in this
+life. But now the whole is to be raised a stage higher. They had already
+been united on the living breast of Jesus; now, over His dead body, they
+were to be made yet more one.
+
+It is marvellous that, after so long, our imaginations should still be
+so tormented and oppressed by the thought of death; that we should still
+be so _without understanding_ that we think it morbid to be in love with
+death, for it is far more morbid to be in fear of it. It is not that our
+reason or our faith are at fault; it is only that that most active and
+untamable faculty of ours, which we call imagination, has not yet
+assimilated the truth, accepted by both our faith and our reason, that
+for those who are in the friendship of God death is simply not that at
+all which it is to others. It does not, as has been said, end our lives
+or our interests: on the contrary it liberates and fulfils them.
+
+And all this it does because Jesus Christ has Himself plunged into the
+heart of Death and put out his fires. Henceforth we are one family in
+Him if we do His will--_his brother and sister and mother_; and Mary is
+our Mother, not by nature, which is accidental, but by supernature,
+which is essential. Mary is my Mother and John is my brother, since, if
+I have died with Christ, it is _no longer I that live, but Christ that
+liveth in me_. In a word, it is the Communion of Saints which He
+inaugurates by this utterance and seals by His dying.
+
+
+
+
+THE FOURTH WORD
+
+_My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?_
+
+
+Our Blessed Lord in the revelation He makes from the Cross passes
+gradually inwards to Himself Who is its centre. He begins in the
+outermost circle of all, with the ignorant sinners. He next deals with
+the one sinner who ceased to be ignorant, and next with those who were
+always nearest to Himself, and now at last He reveals the deepest secret
+of all. This is the central Word of the Seven in every sense. There is
+no need to draw attention to the Paradox it expresses.
+
+I. First, then, let us remind ourselves of the revealed dogma that Jesus
+Christ was the Eternal Son of the Father; that He dwelt always in the
+Bosom of that Father; that when He left heaven He _did not leave the
+Father's side_; that at Bethlehem and Nazareth and Galilee and Jerusalem
+and Gethsemane and Calvary He was always the _Word that was with God_
+and _the Word_ that _was God_. Next, that the eyes even of His Sacred
+Humanity looked always and continuously upon the Face of God, since His
+union with God was entire and complete: as He looked up into His
+Mother's face from the manger, He saw behind it the Face of His Father;
+as He cried in Gethsemane, _If it be possible_, even in His Sacred
+Humanity He knew that it could not be; as He groaned out on Calvary that
+God had forsaken Him, He yet looked without one instant's intermission
+into the glory of heaven and saw His Father there.
+
+Yet simultaneously with these truths it is also true that His cry of
+dereliction was incalculably more of a reality than when first uttered
+by David or, since, by any desolate sinner in the thickest spiritual
+darkness. All the miseries of holy and sinful souls, heaped together,
+could not approach even afar off the intolerable misery of Christ. For
+of His own will He refused to be consoled at all by that Presence which
+He could never lack, and of His own will He chose to be pierced and
+saturated and tormented by the sorrow He could never deserve. He held
+firm against the touch of consolation every power of His Divine and
+Human Being and, simultaneously, flung them open to the assaults of
+every pain. And if the psychology of this state is altogether beyond our
+power to understand, we may remind ourselves that it is the psychology
+of the _Word made Flesh_ that is confronting us.... Do we expect to
+understand that?...
+
+II. There is a human phrase, however, itself a paradox, yet
+corresponding to something which we know to be true, which throws some
+faint glimmer of light upon this impenetrable darkness and seems to
+extend Christ's experience upon the Cross so as to touch our own human
+life. It is a phrase that describes a condition well known to spiritual
+persons: "To leave God for God." (1) The simplest and lowest form of
+this state is that condition in which we acquiesce with our will in the
+withdrawal of ordinary spiritual consolation. Certainly it is an
+inexplicable state, since both the ordinary aids to our will--our
+understanding and our emotion--are, by the very nature of the case,
+useless to it. Our heart revolts from that dereliction and our
+understanding fails to comprehend the reasons for it. Yet we acquiesce,
+or at least perceive that we ought to do so; and that by doing so--by
+ceasing, that is, to grasp God's Presence any longer--we find it as
+never before. We leave God in order to find Him.
+
+(2) The second state is that in which we find ourselves when not only do
+all consolations leave us, but the very grip of intelligent faith goes
+too; when the very reasons for faithfulness appear to vanish. It is an
+incalculably more bitter trial, and soul after soul fails under it and
+must be comforted again by God in less august ways or perish altogether.
+And yet this is not the extremest pitch even of human desolation.
+
+(3) For there is a third of which the saints tell us in broken words and
+images....
+
+III. Our final point, for application to ourselves, is that dereliction
+in some form or another is as much a stage in spiritual progress as
+autumn and winter are seasons of the year. The beginners have to suffer
+one degree, the illuminated another, and those that have approached a
+real Union with God a third. But all must suffer it, and each in his
+own degree, or progress is impossible.
+
+Let us take courage therefore and face it, in the light of this Word.
+For, as we can sanctify bodily pain by the memory of the nails, so too
+can we sanctify spiritual pain by the memory of this darkness. If He Who
+_never left the Father's side_ can suffer this in an unique and supreme
+sense, how much more should we be content to suffer it in lower degrees,
+who have so continually, since we came to the age of reason, been
+leaving not His side only, but His very house.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIFTH WORD
+
+_I thirst._
+
+
+Our Lord continues to reveal His own condition, since He, after all, is
+the key to all Humanity. If we understand anything of Him,
+simultaneously we shall understand ourselves far better.
+
+He has shown us that He can truly be deprived of spiritual consolation;
+and the value of this deprivation; now He shows us the value of bodily
+deprivation also. And the Paradox for our consideration is that the
+Source of all can lose all; that the Creator needs His creation; that He
+Who offers us the _water springing up into Life Eternal_ can lack the
+water of human life--the simplest element of all. In His Divine
+Dereliction He yet continues to be Human.
+
+I. It is very usual, under this Word, to meditate on Christ's thirst for
+souls; and this is, of course, a legitimate thought, since it is true
+that His whole Being, and not merely one part of it, longed and panted
+on the Cross for every object of His desire. Certainly He desired souls!
+When does He not?
+
+But it is easy to lose the proportion of truth, if we spiritualize
+everything, and pass over, as if unworthy of consideration, His bodily
+pain. For this Thirst of the Crucified is the final sum of all the pains
+of crucifixion: the physical agony, the fever produced by it, the
+torrential sweat, the burning of the sun--all these culminated in the
+torment of which this Cry is His expression.
+
+Bodily pain, then, since Jesus not only deigned to suffer it, but to
+speak of it, is as much a part of the Divine process as the most
+spiritual of derelictions: it is an intense and a vital reality in life.
+It is the fashion, at present, to pose as if we were superior to such
+things; as if either it were too coarse for our high natures or even
+actually in itself evil. The truth is that we are terrified of its
+reality and its sting, and seek, therefore, to evade it by every means
+in our power. We affect to smile at the old penances of the saints and
+ascetics as if we ourselves had risen into a higher state of development
+and needed no longer such elementary aids to piety!
+
+Let this Word, then, bring us back to our senses and to the due
+proportions of truth. We are body as well as soul; we are incomplete
+without the body. The soul is insufficient to itself, the body has as
+real a part to play in Redemption as the soul which is its inmate and
+should be its mistress. We look for the _redemption of our body_ and the
+_Resurrection of the Flesh_, we merit or demerit before God in our soul
+for the deeds done in our body.
+
+So was it too with our Lord of His infinite compassion. The _Word was
+made Flesh_, dwelt in the Flesh, has assumed that Flesh into heaven.
+Further, He suffered in the Flesh and deigned to tell us so; and that He
+found that suffering all but intolerable.
+
+II. In a well-known book a Catholic poet[1] describes with a great deal
+of power the development of men's nervous systems in these later days,
+and warns his readers against a scrupulous terror lest they, who no
+longer scourge themselves with briers, should be neglecting a means of
+sanctification. He points out, with perfect justice, that men, in these
+days, suffer instead in more subtle manners than did those of the Middle
+Ages, yet none the less physical; and puts us on our guard lest we
+should afflict ourselves too much. Yet we must take care, also, that we
+do not fall into the opposite extreme and come to regard bodily pain,
+(as has been said) as if it were altogether too elementary for our
+refined natures and as if it must have no place in the alchemy of the
+spirit. This would be both dangerous and false. _What God hath joined
+together, let no man put asunder!_ For, if we once treat body and soul
+as ill-matched companions and seek to deal with them apart, instantly
+the door is flung open to the old Gnostic horrors of sensualism on the
+one side or inhuman mutilation or neglect on the other.
+
+[Footnote 1: Health and Holiness by Francis Thompson.]
+
+The Church, on the other hand, is very clear and insistent that body and
+soul make one man as fully as God and Man make one Christ; and she
+illustrates and directs these strange co-relations and mutual effects of
+these two partners by her steady insistence on such things as Fasting
+and Abstinence. And the saints are equally clear and insistent. There
+never yet has been a single soul whom the Church has raised to her
+altars in whose life bodily austerity in some form has not played a
+considerable part. It is true that some have warned us against excess;
+but what warnings and what excess! "Be moderate," advises St. Ignatius,
+that most reasonable and moderate of all the saints. "Take care that you
+do not break any bones with your iron scourge. God does not wish that!"
+
+Pain, then, has a real place in our progress. Who that has suffered can
+ever doubt it again?
+
+Let us consider, therefore, under this Word of Christ, whether our
+attitude to bodily pain is what God would have it to be. There are two
+mistakes that we may be committing. Either we may fear it too
+little--meet it, that is to say, with Pagan stoicism instead of with
+Christianity--or we may fear it too much. _Despise not the chastening_,
+on one side, _or faint_ on the other. It is surely the second warning
+that is most needed now. For pain had a real place in Christ's programme
+of life. He fasted for forty days at the beginning of His Ministry, and
+He willed every shocking detail of the Praetorium and Calvary at the
+end. He told us that _His Spirit willed it_ and, yet more kindly, that
+_His Flesh was weak_. He revealed, then, that He really suffered and
+that He willed it so.... _I thirst._
+
+
+
+
+THE SIXTH WORD
+
+_It is consummated._
+
+
+He has finished _His Father's business_, He has dealt with sinners and
+saints, and has finally disclosed to us the secrets of the Soul and the
+Body of His that are the hope of both sinners and saints alike. And
+there is no more for Him to do.
+
+An entirely new Beginning, then, is at hand, now that the Last Sabbath
+is come--the Last Sabbath, so much greater than the First as Redemption
+is greater than Creation. For Creation is a mere introduction to the
+Book of Life; it is the arrangement of materials that are to be thrown
+instantly into confusion again by man, who should be its crown and
+master. The Old Testament is one medley of mistakes and fragments and
+broken promises and violated treaties, to reach its climax in the
+capital Mistake of Calvary, when men indeed _knew not what they did._
+And even God Himself in the New Testament, as man in the Old, has gone
+down in the catastrophe and hangs here mutilated and broken. Real life,
+then, is now to begin.
+
+Yet, strangely enough, He calls it an End rather than a Beginning.
+_Consummatum est!_
+
+I. The one and only thing in human life that God desires to end is Sin.
+There is not a pure joy or a sweet human relationship or a selfless
+ambition or a divine hope which He does not desire to continue and to be
+crowned and transfigured beyond all ambition and all hope. On the
+contrary, He desires only to end that one single thing which ruins
+relationships and spoils joy and poisons aspirations. For up to the
+present there is not one page of history which has not this blot upon
+it.
+
+God has had to tolerate, for lack of better, such miserable specimens of
+humanity! _Jacob have I loved!_ ... _David a man after my heart;_ the
+one a poor, mean, calculating man, who had, however, that single glimmer
+of the supernatural which Esau, for all his genial sturdiness, was
+without; the other an adulterous murderer, who yet had grace enough for
+real contrition. Hitherto He has been content with so little. He has
+accepted vinegar for want of wine.
+
+Next, God has had to tolerate, and indeed to sanction--such an unworthy
+worship of Himself--all the blood of the temple and the spilled entrails
+and the nameless horrors. And yet this was all to which men could rise;
+for without it, they never could have learned the more nameless horror
+of sin.
+
+Last, for His worshippers He has had to content Himself with but one
+People instead of _all peoples and nations and languages._ And what a
+People,--whom even Moses could not bear for their treachery and
+instability! And all this wretched record ends in the Crime of Calvary,
+at which the very earth revolts and the sun grows dark with shame. Is it
+any wonder that Christ cried, Thank God that is all done with at last!
+
+II. Instead of this miserable past, then, what is to come? What is that
+_New Wine He would drink with us in His Father's Kingdom?_ First; real
+and complete saints of God are to take the place of the fragmentary
+saints of the Old Dispensation, saints with heads of gold and feet of
+clay. Souls are to be born again in Baptism, not merely sealed by
+circumcision, and to be purified before they can contract any actual
+guilt of their own. And, of these, many shall keep their baptismal
+innocence and shall go, wearing that white robe, before God Who gave it
+them. Others again shall lose it, but regain it once more, and, through
+the power of the Precious Blood, shall rise to heights of which Jacob
+and David never even dreamed. To _awake in His likeness_ was the
+highest ambition of _the man after God's Heart;_ but to be not merely
+like Christ, but one with Him, is the hope of the Christian. _I live_,
+the new saints shall say with truth, _yet now not I, but Christ liveth
+in me._
+
+Next, instead of the old worship of blood and pain there shall be an
+Unbloody Sacrifice and a _Pure Offering_ in which shall be all the power
+and propitiation of Calvary without its pain, all the glory without the
+degradation. And last, in place of the old enclosed Race of Israel shall
+be a Church of all nations and tongues, one vast Society, with all walls
+thrown down and all divisions done away, one Jerusalem from above, that
+shall be the Mother of us all.
+
+III. That, then, is what Christ intended as He cried, _It is
+consummated._ Behold _the old things are passed away!_ Behold, _I make
+all things new!_
+
+And now let us see how far that is fulfilled. Where is there, in me, the
+New Wine of the Gospel?
+
+I have all that God can give me from His Throne on Calvary. I have the
+truth that He proclaimed and the grace that He released. Yet is there in
+me, up to the present, even one glimmer of what is meant by Sanctity? Am
+I even within an appreciable distance of the saints who knew not Christ?
+Have I ever wrestled like Jacob or wept like David? Has my religion,
+that is to say, ever inspired me beyond the low elevation of joy into
+the august altitudes of pain? Is it possible that with me the old is
+not put away, the _old man_ is not yet dead, and the _new man_ not yet
+_put on_? Is that New Sacrifice the light of my daily life? Have I done
+anything except hinder the growth of Christ's Church, anything except
+drag down her standards, so far as I am able, to my own low level? Is
+there a single soul now in the world who owes, under God, her conversion
+to my efforts?
+
+Why, as I watch my life and review it in His Presence it would seem as
+if I had done nothing but disappoint Him all my days! He cried, like the
+deacon of His own Sacrifice, Go! it is done! _Ite; missa est!_ The
+Sacrifice is finished here; go out in its strength to live the life
+which it makes possible!
+
+Let me at least begin to-day, have done with my old compromises and
+shifts and evasions. _Ite; missa est!_
+
+
+
+
+THE SEVENTH WORD
+
+_Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit._
+
+
+He has cried with a loud voice, and the rocks have rent to its echo, and
+the earth is shaken, and the Veil of the Old Testament is torn from top
+to bottom as the Old Covenant passes into the New and the enclosed
+sanctity of the Most Holy Place breaks out into the world. And now, as
+the level sun shines out again beneath the pall of clouds, He whispers,
+as at Mary's knee in Nazareth, the old childish prayer and yields up
+His spirit into His Father's hands.
+
+The last Paradox, then, is uttered. He Who saves others cannot save
+Himself! The Shepherd of souls relinquishes His own. For, as we cannot
+save our lives unless we lose them for His sake, so He too cannot save
+them unless He loses His for our sake.
+
+I. This, then, is merely the summary of all that has gone before; it is
+the word _Finis_ written at the end of this new Book of Life which He
+has written in His Blood. It is the silence of the white space at the
+close of the last page. Yet it is, too, the final act that gives value
+to all that have preceded it. If Christ had not died, our faith would be
+vain.
+
+Oh! these New Theologies that see in Christ's Death merely the end of
+His Life! Why, it is the very point and climax of His Life that He
+should lay it down! Like Samson himself, that strange prototype of the
+Strong Man armed, he slew more of the enemies of our souls by His Death
+than by all His gracious Life. _For this cause He came into the world_.
+For Sacrifice, which is the very heart of man's instinctive worship of
+God, was set there, imperishably, in order to witness to and be ratified
+by His One Offering which alone could truly take away sins; and to deny
+it or to obscure it is to deny or to obscure the whole history of the
+human race, from the Death of Abel to the Death of Christ, to deny or
+obscure the significance of every lamb that bled in the Temple and of
+every wine-offering poured out before the Holy Place, to deny or to
+obscure (if we will but penetrate to the roots of things) the free will
+of Man and the Love of God. If Christ had not died, our faith would be
+vain.
+
+II. Once again, then, let us turn to the event in our own lives that
+closes them; that death which, united to Christ's, is our entrance into
+liberty and, disunited, the supreme horror of existence.
+
+(1) For without Christ death is a violent interruption to life,
+introducing us to a new existence of which we know nothing, or to no
+existence at all. Without Christ, however great our hopes, it is abrupt,
+appalling, stunning, and shattering. It is this at the best, and, at the
+worst, it is peaceful only as the death of a beast is peaceful.
+
+(2) Yet, with Christ, it is harmonious and continuous with all that has
+gone before, since it is the final movement of a life that is already
+_dead with Christ_, the last stage of a process of mortality, and the
+stage that ends its pain. It is just one more passing phase, by which is
+changed the key of that music that every holy life makes always before
+God.
+
+There is, then, the choice. We may, if we will, die fighting to the end
+a force that must conquer us however we may fight, resisting the
+irresistible. Or we may die, in lethargic resignation, as dogs die,
+without hopes or regrets, since the past, without Christ, is as
+meaningless as the future. Or we may die, like Christ, and with Him,
+yielding up a spirit that came from the Father back again into His
+Fatherly hands, content that He Who brought us into the world should
+receive us when we go out again, confident that, as the thread of His
+purpose is plain in earthly life, it shall shine yet more plainly in the
+life beyond.
+
+One last look, then, at Jesus shows us the lines smoothed from His face
+and the agony washed from His eyes. May our souls and the souls of all
+the faithful departed, through His Mercy, rest in Him!
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+LIFE AND DEATH
+
+
+_As dying, and behold we live_.--II COR. VI. 9.
+
+
+We have considered, so far, a number of paradoxical phenomena exhibited
+in the life of Catholicism and have attempted to find their
+reconciliation in the fact that the Catholic Church is at once Human and
+Divine. In her striving, for example, after a Divine and supernatural
+Peace, of which she alone possesses the secret, she _resists even unto
+blood_ all human attempts to supplant this by another. As a human
+society, again, she avails herself freely of human opportunities and
+aids, of earthly and created beauty, for the setting forth of her
+message; yet she can survive, as can no human society, when she is
+deprived of her human rights and her acquired wealth. As human she
+numbers the great multitude of the world's sinners among her children,
+yet as Divine she has produced the saints. As Divine she bases all her
+gospel on a Revelation which can be apprehended only by Faith, yet as
+human she employs the keenest and most profound intellects for its
+analysis and its propagation. In these and in many other similar points
+it has been attempted to show why she offers now one aspect and now
+another to human criticism, and how it is that the very charges made
+against her become, when viewed in the light of her double claim, actual
+credentials and arguments on behalf of that claim. Finally, in the
+meditations upon the _Seven Words_ of Christ, we considered very briefly
+how, in the hours of the deepest humiliation of His Humanity, He
+revealed again and again the characteristics of His Divinity.
+
+It now remains to consider that point in which she most manifests that
+double nature of hers and, simultaneously therefore, presents, as in a
+kind of climax, her identity, under human terms, with Him Who, Himself
+the Lord of Life, conquered death by submitting to it and, by His
+Resurrection from the dead, showed Himself _the Son of God with power_.
+
+I. Death, the world tells us, is the final end of all things, and is the
+one universal law of which evasion is impossible; and this is true, not
+of the individual only, but of society, of nations, of civilization, and
+even, it would seem, ultimately of physical life itself. Every vital
+energy therefore that we possess can be directed not to the abolition,
+but only to the postponement of this final full close to which the most
+ecstatic created harmony must come at last.
+
+Our physicians cannot heal us, they can merely ward off death for a
+little. Our statesmen cannot establish an eternal federation, they can
+but help to hold a crumbling society together for a little longer. Our
+civilization cannot really evolve an immortal superman, it can but
+render ordinary humanity a little less mortal, temporarily and in
+outward appearance. Death, then, in the world's opinion, is the duellist
+who is bound to win. We may parry, evade, leap aside for a little; we
+may even advance upon him and seem to threaten his very existence; our
+energies, in fact, must be concentrated upon this conflict if we are to
+survive at all. But it is only in seeming, at the best. The moment must
+come when, driven back to the last barrier, our last defence falters ...
+and Death has only to wipe his sword.
+
+Now the attitude of the Catholic Church towards Death is not only the
+most violent reversal of the world's policy, but the most paradoxical,
+too, of all her methods. For, while the world attempts to keep Death at
+arm's length, the Church strives to embrace him. Where the world draws
+his sword to meet Death's assault, the Church spreads her heart only to
+receive it. She is in love with Death, she pursues him, honours him,
+extols Him. She places over her altars not a Risen Christ, but a dying
+One.
+
+_If thou wilt be perfect_, she cries to the individual soul, _give up
+all that thou hast and follow me_. "Give up all that makes life worth
+living, strip thyself of every advantage that sustains thy life, of all
+that makes thee effective." It is this that is her supreme appeal, not
+indeed uttered, with all its corollaries, to all her children, but to
+those only that desire perfection. Yet to all, in a sense, the appeal is
+there. _Die daily_, die to self, mortify, yield, give in. If _any man
+will save his life, he must lose it_.
+
+So too, in her dealings with society, is her policy judged suicidal by a
+world that is in love with its own kind of life. It is suicidal, cries
+that world, to relinquish in France all on which the temporal life of
+the Church depends; for how can that society survive which renounces the
+very means of existence? It is suicidal to demand the virgin life of the
+noblest of her children, suicidal to desert the monarchical cause of one
+country, and to set herself in opposition to the Republican ideals of
+another. For even she, after all, is human and must conform to human
+conditions. Even she, however august her claims, must make terms with
+the world if she desires to live in it.
+
+And this comment has been made upon her actions in every age. She
+condemned Arius, when a little compromise might surely have been found;
+and lost half her children. She condemned Luther and lost Germany;
+Elizabeth, and lost England. At every crisis she has made the wrong
+choice, she has yielded when she should have resisted, resisted when she
+should have yielded. The wonder is that she survives at all.
+
+Yes, that is the wonder. _As dying, behold she lives_!
+
+II. The answer of course is easy. It is that she simply does not desire
+the kind of life which the world reckons alone to be life. To her that
+is not life at all. She desires of course to survive as a human society,
+and she is assured that she always shall so survive. Yet it is not on
+the ordinary terms of ordinary society that she desires survival. It is
+not a _natural_ life of which she is ambitious, a life that draws its
+strength from human conditions and human environment, a life, therefore,
+that waxes and wanes with those human conditions and ultimately meets
+their fate, but a _supernatural_ life that draws its strength from God.
+And she recognizes, as one of the most fundamental paradoxes of all,
+that such a life can be gained and held only through what the world
+calls "death."
+
+She does not, then, want merely the life of a prosperous human state,
+whether monarchy or republic. There are times indeed in her history when
+such an accompaniment to her real existence is useful to her
+effectiveness; and she has, of course, the right, as have other
+societies, to earthly dominions that may have been won and presented to
+her by her children. Or through her ministers, as in Paraguay, she may
+administer for a while the ordinary civil affairs of men who choose to
+be loyal to her government. Yet if, for one instant, such a
+responsibility were really to threaten her spiritual effectiveness--if,
+that is, the choice were really presented to her between spiritual and
+temporal dominion--she would let all the kingdoms of the world go in an
+instant, to retain her kingdom from God; she would gladly _suffer the
+loss of all things_ to retain Christ.
+
+And how is it possible to deny for one instant that her success has been
+startling and overwhelming--this fructification of Life by Death.
+
+Are there any human beings, for example, who have been more effective
+and influential than her saints--men and women, that is to say, who have
+_died daily_, in order to live indeed? They have not, it is true,
+prospered, let us say, as business men, directors of companies, or
+government officials, but such a success is simply not her ideal for
+them, not their own ideal for themselves. That is precisely the kind of
+life to which they have, as a rule, determinedly and perseveringly died.
+Yet their effectiveness in this world has been none the less. Are any
+kings remembered as is the beggar Labré who gnawed cabbage stalks in the
+gutters of Rome? Are the names of any statesmen of, let us say, even a
+hundred years ago, reverenced and repeated as is the name of the woman
+of Spain called Teresa of Jesus who, four hundred years ago, ruled a few
+nuns within the enclosure of a convent? Are any musicians or artists
+loved to-day with such rapture as is God's little troubadour, called
+Francis, who made music for himself and the angels by rubbing one stick
+across another?
+
+Or, again, is any empire that the world has ever seen so great, so
+loyally united in itself, so universal and yet so rigorous as is that
+spiritual empire whose capital is Rome? Is there any nation with so
+fierce a patriotism as she who is Supernational? Earthly kings speak
+from their thrones and what happens? And an old man in Rome who wears
+three crowns on his head speaks from his prison in the Vatican and all
+the earth rings with it.
+
+Has her policy, then, been so suicidal after all? From the world's point
+of view it has never been anything else. Her history is but one long
+example of the sacrifice of human activities and earthly opportunities;
+she has expelled from her pulpits the most brilliant of her children,
+she has silenced or alienated the most eloquent of her defenders. She
+has cut off from herself all that she should have kept, and hugged to
+her arms all that she should have relinquished! She has never done
+anything but die! She never does anything but live!
+
+III. Turn, then, to the life of her Lord for the solution of this
+riddle. Last week[1] He was going to His Death. He was losing, little by
+little, all that bound Him to Life. The multitudes that had followed Him
+hitherto were leaving Him by units and groups, they who might have
+formed His armies to seat Him on the throne of His father David.
+Disloyalty had made its way even among His chosen body-guard, and
+already Judas is bargaining for the price of His Master's blood. Even
+the most loyal of all are dismayed, and presently will _forsake Him and
+flee_ when the swords flash out in the garden of Gethsemane. A few weeks
+ago in Galilee thousands were leaving Him for the last time; and when,
+once again, a company seemed to rally, He wept! And so at last the
+sacrifice was complete and, one by one, He laid down of His own will
+every tie that kept Him in life. And then on Good Friday itself He
+suffered that beauty of His _Face to be marred_ so that no man would
+ever _desire Him_ any more, silenced the melody of the Voice that had
+broken so many hearts and made them whole again; He stretched out His
+Shepherd's Hands with which alone He could gather His sheep to His
+Breast, and the Feet that alone could bear Him into the wilderness to
+_seek after that which was lost_. Was there ever a Suicide such as this,
+such a despair of high hopes, such a ruin of all ambition, a dying so
+complete and irremediable as the Dying of Jesus Christ?
+
+[Footnote 1: This Sermon was preached on Easter Day.]
+
+And now on Easter Day look at Him again and see how He lives as never
+before. See how the Life that has been His for thirty years--the Life of
+God made Man--itself pales almost to a phantom before the glory of that
+same Life transfigured by Death. Three days ago He fainted beneath the
+scourge and nails; now He shows the very scars of His Passion to be the
+emblems of immortal strength. Three days ago He spoke in human words to
+those only that were near Him, and limited Himself under human terms of
+space and time; He speaks now in every heart. Three days ago He gave His
+Body to the few who knelt at His Table; to-day in ten thousand
+tabernacles that same Body may be worshipped by all who come.
+
+In a word, He has exchanged a Natural Life for a Supernatural in every
+plane at once. He has laid down the Natural Life of His Body to take it
+back again supernaturalized for ever. He has died that His Life may be
+released; He has _finished_ in order to begin.
+
+It is easy, then, to see why it is that the Church _dies daily_, why it
+is that she is content to be stripped of all that makes her life
+effective, why she too permits her hands to be bound and her feet
+fettered and her beauty marred and her voice silenced so far as men can
+do those things. She is human? Yes; she dwells in a _body that is
+prepared_ for her, but prepared chiefly that she may suffer in it. Her
+far-reaching hands are not hers merely that she may bind up with them
+the broken-hearted, nor her swift feet hers merely that she may run on
+them to succour the perishing, nor her head and heart hers merely that
+she may ponder and love. But all this sensitive human organism is hers
+that at last she may agonize in it, bleed from it from a thousand
+wounds, be lifted up in it to draw all men to her cross.
+
+She does not desire, then, in this world, the _throne of her Father
+David_, nor the kind of triumph which is the only kind that the world
+understands to be so. She desires one life and one triumph only--the
+Risen Life of her Saviour. And this, at last, is the transfiguration of
+her Humanity by the power of her Divinity and the vindication of them
+both.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Paradoxes of Catholicism, by Robert Hugh Benson
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+Project Gutenberg's Paradoxes of Catholicism, by Robert Hugh Benson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Paradoxes of Catholicism
+
+Author: Robert Hugh Benson
+
+Release Date: July 16, 2005 [EBook #16309]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PARADOXES OF CATHOLICISM ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Geoff Horton and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PARADOXES OF CATHOLICISM
+
+BY ROBERT HUGH BENSON
+
+
+_These sermons (which the following pages contain in a much abbreviated
+form) were delivered, partly in England in various places and at various
+times, partly in New York in the Lent of 1912, and finally, as a
+complete course, in the church of S. Silvestro-in-Capite, in Rome, in
+the Lent of 1913. Some of the ideas presented in this book have already
+been set out in a former volume entitled "Christ in the Church" and a
+few in the meditations upon the Seven Words, in another volume, but in
+altogether other connexions. The author thought it better, therefore, to
+risk repetition rather than incoherency in the present set of
+considerations. It is hoped that the repetitions are comparatively few.
+
+Italics have been used for all quotations, whether verbal or
+substantial, from Holy Scripture and other literature_.
+
+ROBERT HUGH BENSON
+HARE STREET HOUSE, BUNTINGFORD
+EASTER, 1913
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+  (i) JESUS CHRIST, GOD AND MAN
+  (ii) THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, DIVINE AND HUMAN
+
+I PEACE AND WAR
+
+II WEALTH AND POVERTY
+
+III SANCTITY AND SIN
+
+IV JOY AND SORROW
+
+V LOVE OF GOD AND LOVE OF MAN
+
+VI FAITH AND REASON
+
+VII AUTHORITY AND LIBERTY
+
+VIII CORPORATENESS AND INDIVIDUALISM
+
+IX MEEKNESS AND VIOLENCE
+
+X THE SEVEN WORDS
+
+XI LIFE AND DEATH
+
+
+
+
+PARADOXES OF CATHOLICISM
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+
+(i) JESUS CHRIST, GOD AND MAN
+
+
+_I and My Father are one_.--JOHN X. 30.
+
+_My Father is greater than I_.--JOHN XIV. 20.
+
+
+The mysteries of the Church, a materialistic scientist once announced to
+an astonished world, are child's play compared with the mysteries of
+nature.[1] He was completely wrong, of course, yet there was every
+excuse for his mistake. For, as he himself tells us in effect, he found
+everywhere in that created nature which he knew so well, anomaly piled
+on anomaly and paradox on paradox, and he knew no more of theology than
+its simpler and more explicit statements.
+
+[Footnote 1: Professor Huxley.]
+
+We can be certain therefore--we who understand that the mysteries of
+nature are, after all, within the limited circle of created life, while
+the mysteries of grace run up into the supreme Mystery of the eternal
+and uncreated Life of God--we can be certain that, if nature is
+mysterious and paradoxical, grace will be incalculably more mysterious.
+For every paradox in the world of matter, in whose environment our
+bodies are confined, we shall find a hundred in that atmosphere of
+spirit in which our spirits breathe and move--those spirits of ours
+which, themselves, paradoxically enough, are forced to energize under
+material limitations.
+
+We need look no further, then, to find these mysteries than to that tiny
+mirror of the Supernatural which we call our self, to that little thread
+of experience which we name the "spiritual life." How is it, for
+example, that while in one mood our religion is the lamp of our shadowy
+existence, in another it is the single dark spot upon a world of
+pleasure--in one mood the single thing that makes life worth living at
+all, and in another the one obstacle to our contentment? What are those
+sorrowful and joyful mysteries of human life, mutually contradictory yet
+together resultant (as in the Rosary itself) in others that are
+glorious? Turn to that master passion that underlies these
+mysteries--the passion that is called love--and see if there be anything
+more inexplicable than such an explanation. What is this passion, then,
+that turns joy to sorrow and sorrow to joy--this motive that drives a
+man to lose his life that he may save it, that turns bitter to sweet and
+makes the cross but a light yoke after all, that causes him to find his
+centre outside his own circle, and to please himself best by depriving
+himself of pleasure? What is that power that so often fills us with
+delights before we have begun to labour, and rewards our labour with
+the darkness of dereliction?
+
+I. If our interior life, then, is full of paradox and apparent
+contradiction--and there is no soul that has made any progress that does
+not find it so--we should naturally expect that the Divine Life of Jesus
+Christ on earth, which is the central Objective Light of the World
+reflected in ourselves, should be full of yet more amazing anomalies.
+Let us examine the records of that Life and see if it be not so. And let
+us for that purpose begin by imagining such an examination to be made by
+an inquirer who has never received the Christian tradition.
+
+(i) He begins to read, of course, with the assumption that this Life is
+as others and this Man as other men; and as he reads he finds a hundred
+corroborations of the theory. Here is one, born of a woman, hungry and
+thirsty by the wayside, increasing in wisdom; one who works in a
+carpenter's shop; rejoices and sorrows; one who has friends and enemies;
+who is forsaken by the one and insulted by the other--who passes, in
+fact, through all those experiences of human life to which mankind is
+subject--one who dies like other men and is laid in a grave.
+
+Even the very marvels of that Life he seeks to explain by the marvellous
+humanity of its hero. He can imagine, as one such inquirer has said, how
+the magic of His presence was so great--the magic of His simple yet
+perfect humanity--that the blind opened their eyes to see the beauty of
+His face and the deaf their ears to hear Him.
+
+Yet, as he reads further, he begins to meet his problems. If this Man
+were man only, however perfect and sublime, how is it that His sanctity
+appears to run by other lines than those of other saints? Other perfect
+men as they approached perfection were most conscious of imperfection;
+other saints as they were nearer God lamented their distance from Him;
+other teachers of the spiritual life pointed always away from themselves
+and their shortcomings to that Eternal Law to which they too aspired.
+Yet with this Man all seems reversed. He, as He stood before the world,
+called on men to imitate Him; not, as other leaders have done, to avoid
+His sins: this Man, so far from pointing forward and up, pointed to
+Himself as the Way to the Father; so far from adoring a Truth to which
+He strove, named Himself its very incarnation; so far from describing a
+Life to which He too one day hoped to rise, bade His hearers look on
+Himself Who was their Life; so far from deploring to His friends the
+sins under which He laboured, challenged His enemies to find within Him
+any sin at all. There is an extraordinary Self-consciousness in Him that
+has in it nothing of "self" as usually understood.
+
+Then it may be, at last, that our inquirer approaches the Gospel with a
+new assumption. He has been wrong, he thinks, in his interpretation that
+such a Life as this was human at all. "_Never man spake like this
+man_." He echoes from the Gospel, "_What manner of man is this that even
+the winds and the sea obey Him_? How, after all," he asks himself,
+"could a man be born without a human father, how rise again from the
+dead upon the third day?" Or, "How even could such marvels be related at
+all of one who was no more than other men?"
+
+So once more he begins. Here, he tells himself, is the old fairy story
+come true; here is a God come down to dwell among men; here is the
+solution of all his problems. And once more he finds himself bewildered.
+For how can God be weary by the wayside, labour in a shop, and die upon
+a cross? How can the Eternal Word be silent for thirty years? How can
+the Infinite lie in a manger? How can the Source of Life be subject to
+death?
+
+He turns in despair, flinging himself from theory to theory--turns to
+the words of Christ Himself, and the perplexity deepens with every
+utterance. If Christ be man, how can He say, _My Father and I are one_?
+If Christ be God, how can He proclaim that _His Father is greater than
+He_? If Christ be Man, how can He say, _Before Abraham was, I am_? If
+Christ be God, how can He name Himself _the Son of Man_.
+
+(ii) Turn to the spiritual teaching of Jesus Christ, and once more
+problem follows problem, and paradox, paradox.
+
+Here is He Who came to soothe men's sorrows and to give rest to the
+weary, He Who offers a sweet yoke and a light burden, telling them that
+no man can be His disciple who will not take up the heaviest of all
+burdens and follow Him uphill. Here is one, the Physician of souls and
+bodies, Who _went about doing good_, Who set the example of activity in
+God's service, pronouncing the silent passivity of Mary as the better
+part that shall not be taken away from her. Here at one moment He turns
+with the light of battle in His eyes, bidding His friends who have not
+swords to _sell their cloaks and buy them_; and at another bids those
+swords to be sheathed, since _His Kingdom is not of this world_. Here is
+the Peacemaker, at one time pronouncing His benediction on those who
+make peace, and at another crying that He _came to bring not peace but a
+sword_. Here is He Who names as _blessed those that mourn_ bidding His
+disciples to _rejoice and be exceeding glad_. Was there ever such a
+Paradox, such perplexity, and such problems? In His Person and His
+teaching alike there seems no rest and no solution--_What think ye of
+Christ? Whose Son is He_?
+
+II. (i) The Catholic teaching alone, of course, offers a key to these
+questions; yet it is a key that is itself, like all keys, as complicated
+as the wards which it alone can unlock. Heretic after heretic has sought
+for simplification, and heretic after heretic has therefore come to
+confusion. Christ is God, cried the Docetic; therefore cut out from the
+Gospels all that speaks of the reality of His Manhood! God cannot bleed
+and suffer and die; God cannot weary; God cannot feel the sorrows of
+man. Christ is Man, cries the modern critic; therefore tear out from the
+Gospels His Virgin Birth and His Resurrection! For none but a Catholic
+can receive the Gospels as they were written; none but a man who
+believes that Christ is both God and Man, who is content to believe that
+and to bow before the Paradox of paradoxes that we call the Incarnation,
+to accept the blinding mystery that Infinite and Finite Natures were
+united in one Person, that the Eternal expresses Himself in Time, and
+that the Uncreated Creator united to Himself Creation--none but a
+Catholic, in a word, can meet, without exception, the mysterious
+phenomena of Christ's Life.
+
+(ii) Turn now again to the mysteries of our own limited life and, as in
+a far-off phantom parallel, we begin to understand.
+
+For we too, in our measure, have a double nature. _As God and Man make
+one Christ, so soul and body make one man_: and, as the two natures of
+Christ--as His Perfect Godhead united to His Perfect Manhood--lie at the
+heart of the problems which His Life presents, so too our affinities
+with the clay from which our bodies came, and with the Father of Spirits
+Who inbreathed into us living souls, explain the contradictions of our
+own experience.
+
+If we were but irrational beasts, we could be as happy as the beasts;
+if we were but discarnate spirits that look on God, the joy of the
+angels would be ours. Yet if we assume either of these two truths as if
+it were the only truth, we come certainly to confusion. If we live as
+the beasts, we cannot sink to their contentment, for our immortal part
+will not let us be; if we neglect or dispute the rightful claims of the
+body, that very outraged body drags our immortal spirit down. The
+acceptance of the two natures of Christ alone solves the problems of the
+Gospel; the acceptance of the two parts of our own nature alone enables
+us to live as God intends. Our spiritual and physical moods, then, rise
+and fall as the one side or the other gains the upper hand: now our
+religion is a burden to the flesh, now it is the exercise in which our
+soul delights; now it is the one thing that makes life worth living, now
+the one thing that checks our enjoyment of life. These moods alternate,
+inevitably and irresistibly, according as we allow the balance of our
+parts to be disturbed and set swaying. And so, ultimately, there is
+reserved for us the joy neither of beasts nor of angels, but the joy of
+humanity. We are higher than the one, we are lower than the other, that
+we may be crowned by Him Who in that same Humanity sits on the Throne of
+God.
+
+So much, then, for our introduction. We have seen how the Paradox of the
+Incarnation alone is adequate to the phenomena recorded in the
+Gospel--how that supreme paradox is the key to all the rest. We will
+proceed to see how it is also the key to other paradoxes of religion, to
+the difficulties which the history of Catholicism presents. For the
+Catholic Church is the extension of Christ's Life on earth; the Catholic
+Church, therefore, that strange mingling of mystery and common-sense,
+that union of earth and heaven, of clay and fire, can alone be
+understood by him who accepts her as both Divine and Human, since she is
+nothing else but the mystical presentment, in human terms, of Him Who,
+though the Infinite God and the Eternal Creator, was _found in the form
+of a servant_, of Him Who, _dwelling always in the Bosom of the Father_,
+for our sakes _came down from heaven_.
+
+
+
+
+(ii) THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, DIVINE AND HUMAN
+
+
+_Blessed art thou Simon Bar-jona; because flesh and blood hath not
+revealed it to thee, but My Father Who is in heaven.... Go behind me,
+satan, for thou savourest not the things that are of God, but the things
+that are of men_.--MATT. XVI. 17, 23.
+
+
+We have seen how the only reconciliation of the paradoxes of the Gospel
+lies in the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation. It is only to him who
+believes that Jesus Christ is perfect God and perfect Man that the
+Gospel record is coherent and intelligible. The heretics--men who for
+the most part either rejected or added to the inspired record--were
+those who, on the one side, accepted Christ's Divinity and rejected the
+proofs of His Humanity, or accepted His Humanity and rejected the proofs
+of His Divinity. In the early ages, for the most part, these accepted
+His Divinity and, rejecting His Humanity, invented childish miracles
+which they thought appropriate to a God dwelling on earth in a phantom
+manhood; at the present day, rejecting His Divinity, they reject also
+those miracles for which His Divinity alone is an adequate explanation.
+
+Now the Catholic Church is an extension of the Incarnation. She too
+(though, as we shall see, the parallel is not perfect) has her Divine
+and Human Nature, which alone can account for the paradoxes of her
+history; and these paradoxes are either predicted by Christ--asserted,
+that is, as part of His spiritual teaching--or actually manifested in
+His own life. (We may take them as symbolised, so to speak, in those
+words of our Lord to St. Peter in which He first commends him as a man
+inspired by God and then, almost simultaneously, rebukes him as one who
+can rise no further than an earthly ideal at the best.)
+
+I. (i) Just as we have already imagined a well-disposed inquirer
+approaching for the first time the problems of the Gospel, so let us now
+again imagine such a man, in whom the dawn of faith has begun,
+encountering the record of Catholicism.
+
+At first all seems to him Divine. He sees, for example, how singularly
+unique she is, how unlike to all other human societies. Other societies
+depend for their very existence upon a congenial human environment; she
+flourishes in the most uncongenial. Other societies have their day and
+pass down to dissolution and corruption; she alone knows no corruption.
+Other dynasties rise and fall; the dynasty of Peter the Fisherman
+remains unmoved. Other causes wax and wane with the worldly influence
+which they can command; she is usually most effective when her earthly
+interest is at the lowest ebb.
+
+Or again, he falls in love with her Divine beauty and perceives even in
+her meanest acts a grace which he cannot understand. He notices with
+wonder how she takes human mortal things--a perishing pagan language, a
+debased architecture, an infant science or philosophy--and infuses into
+them her own immortality. She takes the superstitions of a country-side
+and, retaining their "accidents," transubstantiates them into truth; the
+customs or rites of a pagan society, and makes them the symbols of a
+living worship. And into all she infuses a spirit that is all her own--a
+spirit of delicate grace and beauty of which she alone has the secret.
+
+It is her Divinity, then, that he sees, and rightly. But, wrongly, he
+draws certain one-sided conclusions. If she is so perfect, he argues (at
+least subconsciously), she can be nothing else than perfect; if she is
+so Divine she can be in no sense human. Her pontiffs must all be saints,
+her priests shining lights, her people stars in her firmament. If she is
+Divine, her policy must be unerring, her acts all gracious, her lightest
+movements inspired. There must be no brutality anywhere, no
+self-seeking, no ambition, no instability. How should there be, since
+she is Divine?
+
+Such are his first instincts. And then, little by little, his
+disillusionment begins.
+
+For, as he studies her record more deeply, he begins to encounter
+evidences of her Humanity. He reads history, and he discovers here and
+there a pontiff who but little in his moral character resembles Him
+Whose Vicar he is. He meets an apostate priest; he hears of some
+savagery committed in Christ's name; he talks with a convert who has
+returned complacently to the City of Confusion; there is gleefully
+related to him the history of a family who has kept the faith all
+through the period of persecution and lost it in the era of toleration.
+And he is shaken and dismayed. "How can these be in a Society that is
+Divine? I had _trusted_ that it had been_ She _who should have redeemed
+Israel;_ _and now--_!"
+
+(ii) Another man approaches the record of Catholicism from the opposite
+direction. To him she is a human society and nothing more; and he finds,
+indeed, a thousand corroborations of his theory. He views her amazing
+success in the first ages of Christianity--the rapid propagation of her
+tenets and the growth of her influence--and sees behind these things
+nothing more than the fortunate circumstance of the existence of the
+Roman Empire. Or he notices the sudden and rapid rise of the power of
+the Roman pontiff and explains this by the happy chance that moved the
+centre of empire to the east and left in Rome an old prestige and an
+empty throne. He sees how the Church has profited by the divisions in
+Europe; how she has inherited the old Latin genius for law and order;
+and he finds in these things an explanation of her unity and of her
+claim to rule princes and kings. She is to him just human, and no more.
+There is not, at first sight, a phenomenon of her life for which he
+cannot find a human explanation. She is interesting, as a result of
+innumerable complicated forces; she is venerable, as the oldest coherent
+society in Europe; she has the advantage of Italian diplomacy; she has
+been shrewd, unweary, and persevering. But she is no more.
+
+And then, as he goes deeper, he begins to encounter phenomena which do
+not fall so easily under his compact little theories. If she is merely
+human, why do not the laws of all other human societies appear to affect
+her too? Why is it that she alone shows no incline towards dissolution
+and decay? Why has not she too split up into the component parts of
+which she is welded? How is it that she has preserved a unity of which
+all earthly unities are but shadows? Or he meets with the phenomena of
+her sanctity and begins to perceive that the difference between the
+character she produces in her saints and the character of the noblest of
+those who do not submit to her is one of kind and not merely of degree.
+If she is merely mediaeval, how is it that she commands such allegiance
+as that which is paid to her in modern America? If she is merely
+European, how is it that she alone can deal with the Oriental on his own
+terms? If she is merely the result of temporal circumstances, how is it
+that her spiritual influence shows no sign of waning when the forces
+that helped to build her are dispersed?
+
+His theory too, then, becomes less confident. If she is Human, why is
+she so evidently Divine? If she is Divine, whence comes her obvious
+Humanity? So years ago men asked, If Christ be God, how could He be
+weary by the wayside and die upon the Cross? So men ask now, If Christ
+be Man, how could He cast out devils and rise from the dead?
+
+II. We come back, then, to the Catholic answer. Treat the Catholic
+Church as Divine only and you will stumble over her scandals, her
+failures, and her shortcomings. Treat her as Human only and you will be
+silenced by her miracles, her sanctity, and her eternal resurrections.
+
+(i) Of course the Catholic Church is Human. She consists of fallible
+men, and her Humanity is not even safeguarded as was that of Christ
+against the incursions of sin. Always, therefore, there have been
+scandals, and always will be. Popes may betray their trust, in all human
+matters; priests their flocks; laymen their faith. No man is secure.
+And, again, since she is human it is perfectly true that she has
+profited by human circumstances for the increase of her power.
+Undoubtedly it was the existence of the Roman Empire, with its roads,
+its rapid means of transit, and its organization, that made possible the
+swift propagation of the Gospel in the first centuries. Undoubtedly it
+was the empty throne of Caesar and the prestige of Rome that developed
+the world's acceptance of the authority of Peter's Chair. Undoubtedly
+it was the divisions of Europe that cemented the Church's unity and led
+men to look to a Supreme Authority that might compose their differences.
+There is scarcely an opening in human affairs into which she has not
+plunged; hardly an opportunity she has missed. Human affairs, human sins
+and weaknesses as well as human virtues, have all contributed to her
+power. So grows a tree, even in uncongenial soil. The rocks that impede
+the roots later become their support; the rich soil, waiting for an
+occupant, has been drawn up into the life of the leaves; the very winds
+that imperilled the young sapling have developed too its power of
+resistance. Yet these things do not make the tree.
+
+(ii) For her Humanity, though it is the body in which her Divinity
+dwells, does not create that Divinity. Certainly human circumstances
+have developed her, yet what but Divine Providence ordered and developed
+those human circumstances? What but that same power, which indwells in
+the Church, dwelt without her too and caused her to take root at that
+time and in that place which most favored her growth? Certainly she is
+Human. It may well be that her rulers have contradicted one another in
+human matters--in science, in policy, and in discipline; but how is it,
+then, that they have not contradicted one another in matters that are
+Divine? Granted that one Pope has reversed the policy of his
+predecessor, then what has saved him from reversing his theology also?
+Certainly there have been appalling scandals, outrageous sinners,
+blaspheming apostates--but what of her saints?
+
+And, above all, she gives proof of her Divinity by that very sign to
+which Christ Himself pointed as a proof of His own. Granted that she
+_dies daily_--that her cause fails in this century and in that country;
+that her science is discredited in this generation and her active
+morality in that and her ideals in a third--how comes it that she also
+rises daily from the dead; that her old symbols rise again from their
+ruins; that her virtues are acclaimed by the children of the men who
+renounced her; that her bells and her music sound again where once her
+churches and houses were laid waste?
+
+Here, then, is the Catholic answer and it is this alone that makes sense
+of history, as it is Catholic doctrine which alone makes sense of the
+Gospel record. The answer is identical in both cases alike, and it is
+this--that the only explanation of the phenomena of the Gospels and of
+Church history is that the Life which produces them is both Human and
+Divine.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+PEACE AND WAR
+
+
+_Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the
+children of God._--MATT. V. 9.
+
+_Do not think that I am come to send peace on earth; I
+came not to send peace but the sword._--MATT. X. 34.
+
+
+We have considered how the key to the Paradoxes of the Gospel and the
+key to the Paradoxes of Catholicism is one and the same--that the Life
+that produces them is at once Divine and Human. Let us go on to consider
+how this resolves those of Catholicism, especially those charged against
+us by our adversaries.
+
+For we live in a day when Catholicism is no longer considered by
+intelligent men to be too evidently absurd to be argued with. Definite
+reasons are given by those who stand outside our borders for the
+attitude they maintain; definite accusations are made which must either
+be allowed or refuted.
+
+Now those who stand without the walls of the City of Peace know nothing,
+it is true, of the life that its citizens lead within, nothing of the
+harmony and consolation that Catholicism alone can give. Yet of certain
+points, it may be, in the large outlines of that city against the sky,
+of the place it occupies in the world, of its wide effect upon human
+life in general, it may very well be that these detached observers may
+know more than the devout who dwell at peace within. Let us, then,
+consider their reflections not necessarily as wholly false; it may be
+that they have caught glimpses which we have missed and relations which
+either we take too much for granted or have failed altogether to see. It
+may be that these accusations will turn out to be our credentials in
+disguise.
+
+I. Every world-religion, we are told, worthy of the name has as its
+principal object and its chief claim to consideration its establishing
+or its fostering of peace among men. Supremely this was so in the first
+days of Christianity. It was this that its great prophet predicted of
+its work when its Divine Founder should come on earth. Nature shall
+recover its lost harmony and the dissensions of men shall cease when He,
+the Prince of Peace, shall approach. The very beasts shall lie down
+together in amity, _the lion and the lamb_ and _the leopard and the
+kid_. Further, it was the Message of Peace that the angels proclaimed
+over His cradle in Bethlehem; it was the Gift of Peace which He Himself
+promised to His disciples; it was the _Peace of God which passeth
+knowledge_ to which the great Apostle commended his converts. This then,
+we are told, is of the very essence of Christianity; this is the supreme
+benediction on the peacemakers that _they shall be called the children
+of God_.
+
+Yet, when we turn to Catholicism, we are bidden to see in it not a
+gatherer but a scatterer, not the daughter of peace but the mother of
+disunion. Is there a single tormented country in Europe to-day, it is
+rhetorically demanded, that does not owe at least part of its misery to
+the claims of Catholicism? What is it but Catholicism that lies at the
+heart of the divided allegiance of France, of the miseries of Portugal,
+and of the dissensions of Italy? Look back through history and you will
+find the same tale everywhere. What was it that disturbed the politics
+of England so often from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, and tore
+her in two in the sixteenth, but the determined resistance of an
+adolescent nation to the tyranny of Rome? What lay behind the religious
+wars of Europe, behind the fires of Smithfield, the rack of Elizabeth,
+and the blood of St. Bartholomew's Day but this intolerant and
+intolerable religion which would come to no terms even with the most
+reasonable of its adversaries? It is impossible, of course, altogether
+to apportion blame, to say that in each several instance it was the
+Catholic that was the aggressor; but at least it is true to say that it
+was Catholic principles that were the occasion and Catholic claims the
+unhappy cause of all this incalculable flood of human misery.
+
+How singularly unlike, then, we are told, is this religion of
+dissension to the religion of Jesus Christ, of all these dogmatic and
+disciplinary claims and assertions to the meekness of the Poor Man of
+Nazareth! If true Christianity is anywhere in the world to-day it is not
+among such as these that it lies hid; rather it must be sought among the
+gentle humanitarians of our own and every country--men who strive for
+peace at all cost, men whose principal virtues are those of toleration
+and charity, men who, if any, have earned the beatitude of being _called
+the children of God_.
+
+II. We turn to the Life of Jesus Christ from the Life of Catholicism,
+and at first indeed it does seem as if the contrast were justified. We
+cannot deny our critic's charges; every one of his historical assertions
+is true: it is indeed true that Catholicism has been the occasion of
+more bloodshedding than has any of the ambitions or jealousies of man.
+
+And it is, further, true that Jesus Christ pronounced this benediction;
+that He bade His followers seek after peace, and that He commended them,
+in the very climax of His exaltation, to the Peace which He alone could
+bestow.
+
+Yet, when we look closer, the case is not so simple. For, first, what
+was, as a matter of fact, the direct immediate effect of the Life and
+Personality of Jesus Christ upon the society in which He lived but this
+very dissension, this very bloodshedding and misery that are charged
+against His Church? It was precisely on this account that He was given
+into the hands of Pilate. _He stirreth up the people. He makes Himself a
+King._ He is a contentious demagogue, a disloyal citizen, a danger to
+the Roman Peace.
+
+And indeed there seem to have been excuses for these charges. It was not
+the language of a modern "humanitarian," of the modern tolerant
+"Christian," that fell from the Divine Lips of Jesus Christ. _Go and
+tell that fox_, He cries of the ruler of His people. _O you whited
+sepulchres full of dead men's bones! You vipers! You hypocrites!_ This
+is the language He uses to the representatives of Israel's religion. Is
+this the kind of talk that we hear from modern leaders of religious
+thought? Would such language as this be tolerated for a moment from the
+humanitarian Christian pulpits of to-day? Is it possible to imagine more
+inflammatory speech, more "unchristian sentiments," as they would be
+called to-day, than those words uttered by none other but the Divine
+Founder of Christianity? What of that amazing scene when He threw the
+furniture about the temple courts?
+
+And as for the effect of such words and methods, our Lord Himself is
+quite explicit. "Make no mistake," He cries to the modern humanitarian
+who claims alone to represent Him. "Make no mistake. I am _not come to
+bring peace_ at any price; there are worse things than war and
+bloodshed. I am _come to bring not peace but a sword_. I am come to
+_divide families_, not to unite them; to rend kingdoms, not to knit
+them up; I am come _to set mother against daughter and daughter against
+mother_; I am come not to establish universal toleration, but universal
+Truth."
+
+What, then, is the reconciliation of the Paradox? In what sense can it
+be possible that the effect of the Personality of the Prince of Peace,
+and therefore the effect of His Church, in spite of their claims to be
+the friends of peace, should be _not peace, but the sword?_
+
+III. Now (1) the Catholic Church is a Human Society. She is constituted,
+that is to say, of human beings; she depends, humanly speaking, upon
+human circumstances; she can be assaulted, weakened, and disarmed by
+human enemies. She dwells in the midst of human society, and it is with
+human society that she has to deal.
+
+Now if she were not human--if she were merely a Divine Society, a
+far-off city in the heavens, a future distant ideal to which human
+society is approximating, there would be no conflict at all. She would
+never meet in a face-to-face shock the passions and antagonisms of men;
+she could suppress, now and again, her Counsels of Perfection, her calls
+to a higher life, if it were not that these are vital and present
+principles which she is bound to propagate among men.
+
+And again, if she were merely human, there would be no conflict. If she
+were merely ascended from below, merely the result of the finest
+religious thought of the world, the high-water mark of spiritual
+attainment, again she could compromise, could suppress, could be silent.
+
+But she is both human and divine, and therefore her warfare is certain
+and inevitable. For she dwells in the midst of the kingdoms of this
+world, and these are constituted, at any rate at the present day, on
+wholly human bases. Statesmen and kings, at the present day, do not
+found their policies upon supernatural considerations; their object is
+to govern their subjects, to promote the peace and union of their
+subjects, to make war, if need be, on behalf of the peace of their
+subjects, wholly on natural grounds. Commerce, finance, agriculture,
+education in the things of this world, science, art, exploration--human
+activities generally--these, in their purely natural aspect, are the
+objects of nearly all modern statesmanship. Our rulers are professedly,
+in their public capacity, neither for religion nor against it; religion
+is a private matter for the individual, and governments stand aside--or
+at any rate profess to do so.
+
+And it is in this kind of world, in this fashion of human society, that
+the Catholic Church, in virtue of her humanity, is bound to dwell. She
+too is a kingdom, though not of this world, yet in it.
+
+(2) For she is also Divine. Her message contains, that is to say, a
+number of supernatural principles revealed to her by God; she is
+supernaturally constituted; she rests on a supernatural basis; she is
+not organized as if this world were all. On the contrary she puts the
+kingdom of God definitely first and the kingdoms of the world definitely
+second; the Peace of God first and the harmony of men second.
+
+Therefore she is bound, when her supernatural principles clash with
+human natural principles, to be the occasion of disunion. Her marriage
+laws, as a single example, are at conflict with the marriage laws of the
+majority of modern States. It is of no use to tell her to modify these
+principles; it would be to tell her to cease to be supernatural, to
+cease to be herself. How can she modify what she believes to be her
+Divine Message?
+
+Again, since she is organized on a supernatural basis, there are
+supernatural elements in her own constitution which she can no more
+modify than her dogmas. Recently, in France, she was offered the
+_kingdom of this world_ if she would do so; it was proposed to her that
+she actually retain her own wealth, her churches and her houses, and
+yield up her principle of spiritual appeal to the Vicar of Christ. If
+she had been but human, how evident would have been her duty! How
+inevitable that she should modify her constitution in accordance with
+human ideas and preserve her property intact! And how entirely
+impossible such a bargain must be for a Society that is divine as well
+as human!
+
+Take courage then! We desire peace above all things--that is to say, the
+Peace of God, not _that peace which the world_, since it _can give_ it,
+can also _take away_; not that peace which depends on the harmony of
+nature with nature, but of nature with grace.
+
+Yet, so long as the world is divided in allegiance; so long as the
+world, or a country, or a family, or even an individual soul bases
+itself upon natural principles divorced from divine, so long to that
+world, that country, that family, and that human heart will the
+supernatural religion of Catholicism bring _not peace, but a sword_. And
+it will do so to the end, up to the final world-shattering catastrophe
+of Armageddon itself.
+
+"I come," cries the Rider on the White Horse, "to bring Peace indeed,
+but a peace of which the world cannot even dream; a peace built upon the
+eternal foundations of God Himself, not upon the shifting sands of human
+agreement. And until that Vision dawns there must be war; until God's
+Peace descends indeed and is accepted, till then _My Garments must be
+splashed in blood_ and from My Mouth comes forth _not peace, but a
+two-edged sword_."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+WEALTH AND POVERTY
+
+
+_Make to yourselves friends of the Mammon of iniquity_.
+
+_You cannot serve God and Mammon_.-LUKE XVI. 9, 13.
+
+
+We have seen how the Church of the Prince of Peace must continually be
+the centre of war. Let us go on to consider how, as a Human Society
+dwelling in this world, she must continually have her eyes fixed upon
+the next, and how, as a Divine Society, she must be open to the charge
+of worldliness.
+
+I. (i) The charge is a very common one: "Look at the extraordinary
+wealth and splendour that this Church of the Poor Man of Nazareth
+constantly gathers around her and ask yourself how she can dare to claim
+to represent Him! Go through Holy Rome and see how the richest and most
+elaborate buildings bear over their gateways the heraldic emblems of
+Christ's Vicar! Go through any country which has not risen in disgust
+and cast off the sham that calls herself 'Christ's Church' and you will
+find that no worldly official is so splendid as these heavenly delegates
+of Jesus Christ, no palaces more glorious than those in which they dwell
+who pretend to preach Him who _had not where to lay His head!_
+
+"Above all, turn from that simple poverty-stricken figure that the
+Gospels present to us, to the man who claims to be His Vicegerent on
+earth. See him go, crowned three times over, on a throne borne on men's
+shoulders, with the silver trumpets shrilling before him and the ostrich
+fans coming on behind, and you will understand why the world cannot take
+the Church seriously. Look at the court that is about him, all purple
+and scarlet, and set by that the little band of weather-beaten
+fishermen!
+
+"No; if this Church were truly of Christ, she would imitate Him better.
+It was His supreme mission to point to _things that are above;_ to lift
+men's thoughts above dross and gold and jewels and worldly influence and
+high places and power; to point to _a Heavenly Jerusalem, not made with
+hands;_ to comfort the sorrowful with a vision of future peace, not to
+dabble with temporal matters; to speak of grace and heaven and things to
+come, and _to let the dead bury their dead!_ The best we can do for her,
+then, is to disembarrass her of her riches; to turn her temporal
+possessions to frankly temporal ends; to release her from the slavery of
+her own ambition into the _liberty of the poor and the children of
+God!"_
+
+(ii) In a word, then, the Church is too worldly to be the Church of
+Christ! _You cannot serve God and Mammon_. Yet in another mood our
+critic will tell us that we are too otherworldly to be the Church of
+Christ. "The chief charge I have against Catholicism," says such a man,
+"is that the Church is too unpractical. If she were truly the Church of
+Jesus Christ, she would surely imitate Him better in that which, after
+all, was the mark of His highest Divinity--namely in His Humanity
+towards men. Christ did not come into the world to preach metaphysics
+and talk forever of a heaven that is to come; He came rather to attend
+to men's simplest needs, _to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked_, to
+reform society on better lines. It was not by His dogma that He won
+men's hearts; it was by His simple, natural sympathy with their common
+needs. He came, in a word, to make the best of this world, to use the
+elements that lay ready to His hand, to sanctify all the plain things of
+earth with which He came in contact.
+
+"These otherworldly Catholics, then, are too much apart from common life
+and common needs. Their dogmas and their aspirations and their
+metaphysics are useless to a world which wants bread. Let them act more
+and dream less! Let them show, for example, by the prosperity of
+Catholic countries that Catholicism is practical and not a vision. Let
+them preach less and philanthropize more. Let them show that they have
+the key to this world's progress, and perhaps we will listen more
+patiently to their claim to hold the key to the world that is to come!"
+
+But, surely, this is a little hard upon Catholics! When we make
+ourselves at home in this world, we are informed that Jesus Christ _had
+not where to lay His Head_. When we preach the world that is to come,
+we are reminded that Jesus Christ after all came down from that world
+into this to make it better. When we build a comfortable church, we are
+told that we are too luxurious. When we build an uncomfortable one we
+are asked how we expect to do any good unless we are practical.
+
+II. Now, of course, both these charges were also objected against our
+Blessed Lord. For He too had His double activities. It is true that
+there were times when He gave men earthly bread; it is also true that He
+offered them heavenly bread. There were times when He cared for men's
+bodies; there were other times when He bade them sacrifice all that
+makes bodily life worth living; times when He sat at meat in the house
+of a rich man, and times when He starved, voluntarily, in the desert.
+
+And the world found Him wrong whichever He did. He was too worldly when
+He healed men on the Sabbath; for is not the Law of God of more value
+than a man's bodily ease? Why can He not wait till to-morrow? He was too
+worldly when He allowed His disciples to rub corn in their hands; for
+does not the Law of God forbid a man to make bread on the Sabbath? He
+was too worldly, too unpractical, too sense-loving when He permitted the
+precious ointment to be spilled on His feet; _for might not this
+ointment have been sold for much and given to the poor?_ Is not
+spirituality enough, and the incense of adoration?
+
+And He was too otherworldly when He preached the Sermon on the Mount.
+What is the use of saying, _Blessed are the Meek_, when the whole world
+knows that "Blessed are the Self-Assertive"? He was too otherworldly
+when He spoke of Heavenly Bread. What is the use of speaking of Heavenly
+Bread when it is earthly food that men need first of all? He was too
+otherworldly when He remained in the country on the feast day. _If He be
+the Christ_, let Him be practical and say so!
+
+It was, in fact, on these very two charges that He was arraigned for
+death. He was too worldly for Pilate, in that He was Son of Man and
+therefore a rival to Caesar; and too otherworldly for Caiphas, since _He
+made Himself Son of God_ and therefore a rival to Jehovah.
+
+III. The solution, then, of this Catholic Paradox is very simple. (i)
+First, the Church is a Heavenly Society come down from above--heavenly
+in her origin and her birth. She is the _kingdom of God_, first and
+foremost, and exists for His glory solely and entirely. She seeks, then,
+first the extension of His kingdom; and compared with this, nothing is
+of any value in her eyes. Never, then, must she sacrifice God to Mammon;
+never hesitate for one instant if the choice lies between them. For she
+considers that eternity is greater than time and the soul of man of more
+value than his body. The sacraments therefore, in her eyes, come before
+an adequate tram-service; and that a man's soul should be in grace is,
+to her, of more importance than that his body should be in health--if
+the choice is between them. She prefers, therefore, the priest to the
+doctor, if there is not time for both, and Holy Communion to a good
+breakfast.
+
+Therefore, of course, she appears too otherworldly to the stockbroker
+and the provincial mayor, since she actually places the things of God
+before the things of man and "seeks first His Kingdom."
+
+(ii) "And all these things shall be added" to her. For she is Human
+also, in that she dwells in this world where God has placed her, and
+uses therefore the things with which He has surrounded her. To say that
+she is supernatural is not to deny her humanity any more than to assert
+that man has an immortal soul is to exclude the truth that he also has a
+body. It is this Body of hers, then--this humanity of hers which
+enshrines her Divinity--that claims and uses earthly things; it is this
+Body that _dwells in houses made with hands_ and that claims too, in
+honour to herself and her Bridegroom, that, so long as her spirituality
+is not tarnished, these houses shall be as splendid as art can make
+them. For she is not a Puritan nor a Manichee; she does not say that any
+single thing which God has made can conceivably be of itself evil,
+however grievously it may have been abused; on the contrary, she has His
+own authority for saying that _all is very good_.
+
+She uses, then, every earthly beauty that the world will yield to her,
+to honour her own Majesty. It may be right to set diamonds round the
+neck of a woman, but it is certainly right to set them round the Chalice
+of the Blood of God. If an earthly king wears vestments of cloth of
+gold, must not a heavenly King yet more wear them? If music is used by
+the world to destroy men's souls, may not she use it to save their
+souls? If a marble palace is fit for the President of the French
+Republic, by what right do men withhold it from the King of kings?
+
+But the world does withhold its wealth sometimes? Very well then, she
+can serve God without it, in spite of her rights. If men whine and
+cringe, or bully and shout, for the jewels with which their forefathers
+honoured God, she will fling them back again down her altar stairs and
+worship God in a barn or a catacomb without them. For, though she does
+not _serve God and Mammon_, she yet _makes to herself friends of the
+Mammon of iniquity_. Though she does not and never can serve God and
+Mammon, she will and can, when the world permits it, make Mammon serve
+her. For the Church is the Majesty of God dwelling on earth. She is
+there, in herself, utterly independent of her reception. If it is _her
+own_ to whom _she comes, and her own do not receive her_, they are none
+the less hers by every right. For, though she will use every earthly
+thing to her honour, though she considers no ointment wasted, however
+precious, that is spilled by love over her feet, yet her essential glory
+does not lie in these things. She is _all glorious within_, whether or
+not her _vesture is of gold_, for she is a _King's Daughter_. She is,
+essentially, as glorious in the Catacombs as in the Roman basilicas; as
+lovely in the barefooted friar as in the robed and sceptred Vicar of
+Christ; as majestic in Christ naked on the Cross as in Christ ascended
+and enthroned in heaven.
+
+Yet, since she is His Majesty on earth, she has a right to all that
+earth can give. All _the beasts of the field are hers, and the cattle on
+a thousand hills_, all the stars of heaven and the jewels of earth; all
+the things in the world are hers by Divine right.
+
+_All things are hers, for she is Christ's._ Yet, nevertheless, _she will
+suffer the loss of all things_ sooner than lose Him.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+SANCTITY AND SIN
+
+
+_Holy, Holy, Holy!_--IS. VI. 3.
+
+Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners_. I TIM. I. 15.
+
+
+A very different pair of charges--and far more vital--than those more or
+less economic accusations of worldliness and otherworldliness which we
+have just considered, concern the standards of goodness preached by the
+Church and her own alleged incapacity to live up to them. These may be
+briefly summed up by saying that one-half the world considers the Church
+too holy for human life, and the other half, not holy enough. We may
+name these critics, respectively, the Pagan and the Puritan.
+
+I. It is the Pagan who charges her with excessive Holiness.
+
+"You Catholics," he tells us, "are far too hard on sin and not nearly
+indulgent enough towards poor human nature. Let me take as an instance
+the sins of the flesh. Now here is a set of desires implanted by God or
+Nature (as you choose to name the Power behind life) for wise and
+indeed essential purposes. These desires are probably the very fiercest
+known to man and certainly the most alluring; and human nature is, as we
+know, an extraordinarily inconsistent and vacillating thing. Now I am
+aware that the abuse of these passions leads to disaster and that Nature
+has her inexorable laws and penalties; but you Catholics add a new
+horror to life by an absurd and irrational insistence on the offence
+that this abuse causes before God. For not only do you fiercely denounce
+the "acts of sin," as you name them, but you presume to go deeper still
+to the very desire itself, as it would seem. You are unpractical and
+cruel enough to say that the very thought of sin deliberately
+entertained can cut off the soul that indulges in it from the favour of
+God.
+
+"Or, to go further, consider the impossible ideals which you hold up
+with regard to matrimony. These ideals have a certain beauty of their
+own to persons who can embrace them; they may perhaps be, to use a
+Catholic phrase, Counsels of Perfection; but it is merely ludicrous to
+insist upon them as rules of conduct for all mankind. Human Nature is
+human nature. You cannot bind the many by the dreams of the few.
+
+"Or, to take a wider view altogether, consider the general standards you
+hold up to us in the lives of your saints. These saints appear to the
+ordinary common-place man as simply not admirable at all. It does not
+seem to us admirable that St. Aloysius should scarcely lift his eyes
+from the ground, or that St. Teresa should shut herself up in a cell, or
+that St. Francis should scourge himself with briers for fear of
+committing sin. That kind of attitude is too fantastically fastidious
+altogether. You Catholics seem to aim at a standard that is simply not
+desirable; both your ends and your methods are equally inhuman and
+equally unsuitable for the world we have to live in. True religion is
+surely something far more sensible than this; true religion should not
+strain and strive after the impossible, should not seek to improve human
+nature by a process of mutilation. You have excellent aims in some
+respects and excellent methods in others, but in supreme demands you go
+beyond the mark altogether. We Pagans neither agree with your morality
+nor admire those whom you claim as your successes. If you were less holy
+and more natural, less idealistic and more practical, you would be of a
+greater service to the world which you desire to help. Religion should
+be a sturdy, virile growth; not the delicate hot-house blossom which you
+make it."
+
+The second charge comes from the Puritan. "Catholicism is not holy
+enough to be the Church of Jesus Christ; for see how terribly easy she
+is to those who outrage and _crucify Him afresh!_ Perhaps it may not be
+true after all, as we used to think, that the Catholic priest actually
+gives leave to his penitents to commit sin; but the extraordinary ease
+with which absolution is given comes very nearly to the same thing. So
+far from this Church having elevated the human race, she has actually
+lowered its standards by her attitude towards those of her children who
+disobey God's Laws.
+
+"And consider what some of these children of hers have been! Are there
+any criminals in history so monumental as Catholic criminals? Have any
+men ever fallen so low as, let us say, the Borgia family of the Middle
+Ages, as Gilles de Rais and a score of others, as men and women who were
+perhaps in their faith 'good Catholics' enough, yet in their lives a
+mere disgrace to humanity? Look at the Latin countries with their
+passionate records of crime, at the sexual immorality of France or
+Spain; the turbulence and thriftlessness of Ireland, the ignorant
+brutality of Catholic England. Are there any other denominations of
+Christendom that exhibit such deplorable specimens as the runaway nuns,
+the apostate priests, the vicious Popes of Catholicism? How is it that
+tales are told of the iniquities of Catholicism such as are told of no
+other of the sects of Christendom? Allow for all the exaggeration you
+like, all the prejudice of historians, all the spitefulness of enemies,
+yet there surely remains sufficient Catholic criminality to show that at
+the best the Church is no better than any other religious body, and at
+the worst, infinitely worse. The Catholic Church, then, is not holy
+enough to be the Church of Jesus Christ."
+
+II. When we turn to the Gospels we find that these two charges are, as a
+matter of fact, precisely among those which were brought against our
+Divine Lord.
+
+First, undoubtedly, He was hated for His Holiness. Who can doubt that
+the terrific standard of morality which He preached--the Catholic
+preaching of which also is one of the charges of the Pagan--was a
+principal cause of His rejection. For it was He, after all, who first
+proclaimed that the laws of God bind not only action but thought; it was
+He who first pronounced that man to be a murderer and an adulterer who
+in his heart willed these sins; it was He who summed up the standard of
+Christianity as a standard of perfection, _Be you perfect, as your
+Father in Heaven is perfect;_ who bade men aspire to be as good as God!
+
+It was His Holiness, then, that first drew on Him the hostility of the
+world--that radiant white-hot sanctity in which His Sacred Humanity went
+clothed. _Which of you convinceth me of sin?... Let him that is without
+sin amongst you cast the first stone at her!_ These were words that
+pierced the smooth formalism of the Scribe and the Pharisee and awoke an
+undying hatred. It was this, surely, that led up irresistibly to the
+final rejection of Him at the bar of Pilate and the choice of Barabbas
+in His place. "_Not this man!_ not this piece of stainless Perfection!
+Not this Sanctity that reveals all hearts, _but Barabbas_, that
+comfortable sinner so like ourselves! This robber in whose company we
+feel at ease! This murderer whose life, at any rate, is in no
+reproachful contrast to our own!" Jesus Christ was found too holy for
+the world.
+
+But He was found, too, not holy enough. And it is this explicit charge
+that is brought against Him again and again. It was dreadful to those
+keepers of the Law that this Preacher of Righteousness should sit with
+publicans and sinners; that this Prophet should allow such a woman as
+Magdalen to touch Him. If this man were indeed a Prophet, He could not
+bear the contact of sinners; if He were indeed zealous for God's
+Kingdom, He could not suffer the presence of so many who were its
+enemies. Yet He sits there at Zacchaeus' table, silent and smiling,
+instead of crying on the roof to fall in; He calls Matthew from the
+tax-office instead of blasting him and it together; He handles the leper
+whom God's own Law pronounces unclean.
+
+III. These, then, are the charges brought against the disciples of
+Christ, as against the Master, and it is undeniable that there is truth
+in them both.
+
+It is true that the Catholic Church preaches a morality that is utterly
+beyond the reach of human nature left to itself; that her standards are
+standards of perfection, and that she prefers even the lowest rung of
+the supernatural ladder to the highest rung of the natural.
+
+And it is also true, without doubt, that the fallen or the unfaithful
+Catholic is an infinitely more degraded member of humanity than the
+fallen Pagan or Protestant; that the monumental criminals of history are
+Catholic criminals, and that the monsters of the world--Henry VIII for
+example, sacrilegious, murderer, and adulterer; Martin Luther, whose
+printed table-talk is unfit for any respectable house; Queen Elizabeth,
+perjurer, tyrant, and unchaste--were persons who had had all that the
+Catholic Church could give them: the standards of her teaching, the
+guidance of her discipline, and the grace of her sacraments. What, then,
+is the reconciliation of this Paradox?
+
+(1) First the Catholic Church is Divine. She dwells, that is to say, in
+heavenly places; she looks always upon the Face of God; she holds
+enshrined in her heart the Sacred Humanity of Jesus Christ and the
+stainless perfection of that Immaculate Mother from whom that Humanity
+was drawn. How is it conceivable, then, that she should be content with
+any standard short of perfection? If she were a Society evolved from
+below--a merely human Society that is to say--she could never advance
+beyond those standards to which in the past her noblest children have
+climbed. But since there dwells in her the Supernatural--since Mary was
+endowed from on high with a gift to which no human being could ascend,
+since the Sun of Justice Himself came down from the heavens to lead a
+human life under human terms--how can she ever again be content with
+anything short of that height from which these came?
+
+(2) But she is also human, dwelling herself in the midst of humanity,
+placed here in the world for the express object of gathering into
+herself and of sanctifying by her graces that very world which has
+fallen from God. These outcasts and these sinners are the very material
+on which she has to work; these waste products of human life, these
+marred types and specimens of humanity have no hope at all except in
+her.
+
+For, first, she desires if she can--and she has often been
+able--actually to raise these, first to sanctity and then to her own
+altars; it is for her and her only to _raise the poor from the dunghill
+and to set them with the princes_. She sets before the Magdalen and the
+thief, then, nothing less but her own standard of perfection.
+
+Yet though in one sense she is satisfied with nothing lower than this,
+in another sense she is satisfied with almost infinitely nothing. If she
+can but bring the sinner within the very edge of grace; if she can but
+draw from the dying murderer one cry of contrition; if she can but turn
+his eyes with one look of love to the crucifix, her labours are a
+thousand times repaid; for, if she has not brought him to the head of
+sanctity, she has at least brought him to its foot and set him there
+beneath that ladder of the supernatural which reaches from hell to
+heaven.
+
+For she alone has this power. She alone is so utterly confident in the
+presence of the sinner because she alone has the secret of his cure.
+There in her confessional is the Blood of Christ that can make his soul
+clean again, and in her Tabernacle the Body of Christ that will be his
+food of eternal life. She alone dares be his friend because she alone
+can be his Saviour. If, then, her saints are one sign of her identity,
+no less are her sinners another.
+
+For not only is she the Majesty of God dwelling on earth, she is also
+His Love; and therefore its limitations, and they only, are hers. That
+Sun of mercy that shines and that Rain of charity that streams, _on just
+and unjust alike_, are the very Sun and Rain that give her life. If I
+_go up to Heaven she is there_, enthroned in Christ, on the Right Hand
+of God;_ if I go down to Hell she is there also_, drawing back souls
+from the brink from which she alone can rescue them. For she is that
+very ladder which Jacob saw so long ago, that staircase planted here in
+the blood and the slime of earth, rising there into the stainless Light
+of the Lamb. Holiness and unholiness are both alike hers and she is
+ashamed of neither--the holiness of her own Divinity which is Christ's
+and the unholiness of those outcast members of her Humanity to whom she
+ministers.
+
+By her power, then, which again is Christ's, the Magdalen becomes the
+Penitent; the thief the first of the redeemed; and Peter, the yielding
+sand of humanity, the _Rock on which Herself is built_.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+JOY AND SORROW
+
+
+_Rejoice and be exceeding glad.... Blessed are they that mourn_.--
+MATT. V. 12, 5.
+
+
+The Catholic Church, as has been seen, is always too "extreme" for the
+world. She is content with nothing but a Divine Peace, and in its cause
+is the occasion of bloodier wars than any waged from merely human
+motives. She is not content with mere goodness, but urges always
+Sanctity upon her children; yet simultaneously tolerates sinners whom
+even the world casts out. Let us consider now how, in fulfilling these
+two apparently mutually contradictory precepts of our Lord, to rejoice
+and to mourn, once more she appears to the world extravagant in both
+directions at once.
+
+I. It is a common charge against her that she rejoices too exceedingly;
+is arrogant, confident, and optimistic where she ought to be quiet,
+subdued, and tender.
+
+"This world," exclaims her critic, "is on the whole a very sad and
+uncertain place. There is no silver lining that has not a cloud before
+it; there is no hope that may not, after all, be disappointed. Any
+religion, then, that claims to be adequate to human nature must always
+have something of sadness and even hesitancy about it. Religion must
+walk softly all her days if she is to walk hand in hand with experience.
+Death is certain; is life as certain? The function of religion, then, is
+certainly to help to lighten this darkness, yet not by too great a blaze
+of light. She may hope and aspire and guess and hint; in fact, that is
+her duty. But she must not proclaim and denounce and command. She must
+be suggestive rather than exhaustive; tender rather than virile; hopeful
+rather than positive; experimental rather than dogmatic.
+
+"Now Catholicism is too noisy and confident altogether. See a Catholic
+liturgical function on some high day! Was there ever anything more
+arrogant? What has this blaze of colour, this shouting of voices, this
+blowing of trumpets to do with the soft half-lights of the world and the
+mystery of the darkness from which we came and to which we return? What
+has this clearcut dogma to do with the gentle guesses of philosophy,
+this optimism with the uncertainty of life and the future--above all,
+what sympathy has this preposterous exultation with the misery of the
+world?
+
+"And how unlike, too, all this is to the spirit of the Man of Sorrows!
+We read that _Jesus wept_, but never that He laughed. His was a sad
+life, from the dark stable of Bethlehem to the darker hill of Calvary.
+He was what He was because He knew what sorrow meant; it was in His
+sorrows that He has touched the heart of humanity. '_Blessed_,' he says,
+'_are those that mourn_.' Blessed are they that expect nothing, for they
+shall not be disappointed."
+
+In another mood, however, our critic will find fault with our sadness.
+
+"Why is not the religion of you Catholics more in accord with the happy
+world in which we live? Surely the supreme function of religion is to
+hearten and encourage and lay stress on the bright side of life! It
+should be brief, bright, and brotherly. For, after all, this is a lovely
+world and full of gaiety. It is true that it has its shadows, yet there
+can be no shadows without a sun; there is death, but see how life
+continually springs again from the grave. Since all things, therefore,
+work together for good; since God has taken pains to make the world so
+sweet, it is but a poor compliment to the Creator to treat it as a vale
+of misery. Let us, then, make the best of things and forget the worst.
+Let us leave the things that are behind and press forward to the things
+that are before. Let us insist that the world is white with a few black
+spots upon it, be optimistic, happy, and confident.
+
+"You Catholics, however, are but a poor-spirited, miserable race. While
+other denominations are, little by little, eliminating melancholy, you
+are insisting upon it. While the rest of us are agreeing that Hell is
+but a bogy, and sin a mistake, and suffering no more than remedial, you
+Catholics are still insisting upon their reality--that Hell is eternal,
+that sin is the deliberate opposition of the human will to the Divine,
+and that suffering therefore is judicial. Sin, Penance, Sacrifice,
+Purgatory, and Hell--these are the old nightmares of dogma; and their
+fruits are tears, pain, and terror. What is wrong with Catholicism,
+then, is its gloom and its sorrow; for this is surely not the
+Christianity of Christ as we are now learning to understand it. Christ,
+rightly understood, is the Man of joy, not of Grief. He is more
+characteristic of Himself, so to speak, as the smiling shepherd of
+Galilee, surrounded by His sheep; as the lover of children and flowers
+and birds; as the Preacher of Life and Resurrection--He is more
+characteristic of Himself as crowned, ascended, and glorified, than as
+the blood-stained martyr of the Cross whom you set above your altars.
+_Rejoice, then, and be exceeding glad_, and you will please Him best."
+
+Once more, then, we appear to be in the wrong, to whatever side we turn.
+The happy red-faced monk with his barrel of beer is a caricature of our
+joy. Can this, it is asked, be a follower of the Man of Sorrows? And the
+long-faced ascetic with his eyes turned up to heaven is the world's
+conception of our sorrow. Catholic joy and Catholic sorrow are alike too
+ardent and extreme for a world that delights in moderation in both
+sorrow and joy--a little melancholy, but not too much; a little
+cheerfulness, but not excessive.
+
+II. First, then, it is interesting to remember that these charges are
+not now being made against us for the first time. In the days even of
+the Roman Empire they were thought to be signs of Christian inhumanity.
+"These Christians," it was said, "must surely be bewitched. See how
+they laugh at the rack and the whip and go to the arena as to a bridal
+bed! See how Lawrence jests upon his gridiron." And yet again, "They
+must be bewitched, because of their morbidity and their love of
+darkness, the enemies of joy and human mirth and common pleasure. In
+either case they are not true men at all." Their extravagance of joy
+when others would be weeping, and their extravagance of sorrow when all
+the world is glad--these are the very signs to which their enemies
+appealed as proofs that a power other than that of this world was
+inspiring them, as proofs that they could not be the simple friends of
+the human race that they dared to pretend.
+
+It is even more interesting to remember that our Divine Lord Himself
+calls attention to these charges. "_The Son of Man comes eating and
+drinking._ The Son of Man sits at the wedding feast at Cana and at meat
+in the rich man's house and you say, _Behold a glutton and a
+winebibber!_ The Son of Man comes rejoicing and you bid Him to be sad.
+And _John the Baptist came neither eating nor drinking._ John the
+Baptist comes from the desert, an ascetic with his camel-hair about him
+and words of penance and wrath in his mouth, and you say, _He hath a
+devil.... We have piped unto you and you have not danced_. We have
+played at weddings like children in a market-place, and you have told us
+to be quiet and think about our sins. _We have mourned unto_ you, we
+have asked you to play at funerals instead, and you have told us that it
+was morbid to think about death. _We have mourned and you would not
+lament._"
+
+III. The fact is, of course, that both joy and sorrow must be an element
+in all religion, since joy and sorrow together make up experience. The
+world is neither white with black spots nor black with white spots; it
+is black and white. It is quite as true that autumn follows summer as
+that spring follows winter. It is no less true that life arises out of
+death than that death follows life.
+
+Religion then cannot, if it is to be adequate to experience, be a
+passionless thing. On the contrary it must be passionate, since human
+nature is passionate too; and it must be a great deal more passionate.
+It must not moderate grief, but deepen it; not banish joy, but exalt it.
+It must weep--and bitterer tears than any that the world can shed--with
+them that weep; and rejoice too--with _a joy which no man can take
+away_--with them that rejoice. It must sink deeper and rise higher, it
+must feel more acutely, it must agonize and triumph more abundantly, if
+it truly comes from God and is to minister to men, since His thoughts
+are higher than ours and His Love more burning.
+
+For so did Christ live on earth. At one hour He _rejoiced greatly in
+spirit_ so that those that watched Him were astonished; at another He
+sweated blood for anguish. In one hour He is exalted high on the blazing
+Mount of Transfiguration; in another He is plunged deeper than any human
+heart can fathom in the low-lying garden of Gethsemane. _Behold and see
+if there be any sorrow like to My Sorrow._
+
+III. For, again, the Church, like her Lord, is both Divine and Human.
+
+She is Divine and therefore she rejoices--so filled with the New Wine of
+the Kingdom of her Father that men stare at her in contempt.
+
+It is true enough that the world is unhappy; that hearts are broken;
+that families, countries, and centuries are laid waste by sin. Yet since
+the Church is Divine, she knows, not merely guesses or hopes or desires,
+but _knows_, that _although all things come to an end, God's commandment
+is exceeding broad_. Years ago, she knows--and therefore not all the
+criticism in the world can shake her--that her Lord came down from
+heaven, was born, died, rose, and ascended, and that He reigns in
+unconquerable power. She knows that He will return again and take the
+kingdom and reign; she knows, because she is Divine, that in every
+tabernacle of hers on earth the Lord of joy lies hidden; that Mary
+intercedes; that the saints are with God; that _the Blood of Jesus
+Christ cleanseth from all sin_. Look round her earthly buildings, then,
+and there are the symbols and images of these things. There is the merry
+light before her altar; there are the saints stiff with gold and gems;
+there is Mary, "Cause of our Joy," radiant, with her radiant Child in
+her arms. If she were but human, she would dare but to shadow these
+things forth--shadows of her own desires; she would whisper her creed;
+murmur her prayers; darken her windows. But she is Divine and has
+herself come down from heaven; so she does not guess, or think, or
+hope--she knows.
+
+But she is human too and dwells in the midst of a human race that does
+not know and therefore will not wholly take her at her word, and the
+very height of her exaltation must also be, then, the measure of her
+despair. The fact that she knows so certainly intensifies a thousandfold
+her human sorrow, as she, who has _come that they may have life_, sees
+how _they will not come_ to her and find it, as she sees how long the
+triumph which is certain is yet delayed through their faithlessness. "If
+_thou hadst known_," she cries in the heart-broken words of Jesus
+Himself over Jerusalem, "_if thou hadst but known the things that belong
+to thy peace! Behold and see, then, if there be any sorrow like to
+mine_, if there be any grief so profound and so piercing as mine, who
+hold the Keys of Heaven and watch men turn away from the Door."
+
+So, then, in church after church stand symbolic groups of statuary,
+representing joy and tragedy, compared with which Venus and Adonis are
+but childish and half-civilized images--Mary as triumphant Queen, with
+the gold-crowned Child in her arms, and Mary the tormented Mother, with
+her dead Son across her knees. For she who is both Divine and Human
+alone understands what it is that Humanity has done to Divinity.
+
+Is it any wonder, then, that the world thinks her extravagant in both
+directions at once; that the world turns away on Good Friday from the
+unutterable depths of her sorrow, and on Easter Day from the unscalable
+heights of her joy, calling the one morbid and the other hysterical? For
+what does the world know of such passions as these? What, after all, can
+the sensualist know of joy, or the ruined financier of sorrow? And what
+can the moderate, self-controlled, self-respecting man of the world know
+of either?
+
+Lastly, then, in the Paradox of Love, the Church holds both these
+passions, at full blast, both at once. As human love turns joy into pain
+and suffers in the midst of ecstasy, so Divine Love turns pain into joy
+and exults and reigns upon the Cross. For the Church is more than the
+Majesty of God reigning on earth, more than the passionless love of the
+Eternal; she is the Very Sacred Heart of Christ Himself, the Eternal
+united with Man, and both suffering and rejoicing through that union. It
+is His bliss which she at once experiences and extends, in virtue of her
+identity with Him; and in the midst of a fallen world it is the
+supremest bliss of that Sacred Heart to suffer pain.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+LOVE OF GOD AND LOVE OF MAN
+
+
+_Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart ... and thy
+neighbour as thyself_.--LUKE x. 27.
+
+
+We have already considered two charges brought against Catholicism from
+opposite quarters; namely, that we are too worldly and too otherworldly,
+too much busied with temporal concerns to be truly spiritual, and too
+metaphysical and remote and dogmatic to be truly practical. Let us go on
+to consider these same two charges produced, so to speak, a little
+further into a more definitely spiritual plane; charges that now accuse
+us of too great activities in our ministry to men and too many
+attentions paid to God.
+
+I. (i) It is a very common complaint against Catholics, laymen as well
+as clergy, that they are overzealous in their attempts to proselytize.
+True and spiritual religion, we are told, is as intimate and personal an
+affair as the love between husband and wife; it is essentially private
+and individual. "The religion of all sensible men," it has been said,
+"is precisely that which they always keep to themselves." Tolerance,
+therefore, is a mark of spirituality, for if I am truly religious I
+shall have as much respect for the religion of my neighbour as for my
+own. I shall no more seek to interfere in his relations with God than I
+shall allow him to interfere with mine.
+
+Now Catholics are notoriously intolerant. It is not merely that there
+are intolerant Catholics, for intolerance is of course to be found in
+all narrow-minded persons, but it is Catholic principles themselves that
+are intolerant; and every Catholic who lives up to them is bound to be
+so also. And we can see this illustrated every day.
+
+First, there is the matter of Catholic missions to the heathen. There
+are no missionaries, we are told, so untiring and so devoted as those of
+the Church. Their zeal, of course, is a proof of their sincerity; but it
+is also a proof of their intolerance: for why, after all, cannot they
+leave the heathen alone, since religion is, in its essence, a private
+and individual matter? Beautiful pictures, accordingly, are suggested to
+us of the domestic peace and happiness reigning amongst the tribes of
+Central Africa until the arrival of the Preaching Friar with his
+destructive dogmas. We are bidden to observe the high doctrines and the
+ascetic life of the Brahmin, the significant symbolism of the Hindu, and
+the philosophical attitudes of the Confucian. All these various
+relationships to God are, we are informed, entirely the private affairs
+of those who live by them; and if Catholics were truly spiritual they
+would understand that this was so and not seek to supplant by a system
+which is now, at any rate, become an essentially European way of looking
+at things, these ancient creeds and philosophies that are far better
+suited to the Oriental temperament.
+
+But the matter is worse, even, than this. It may conceivably be argued,
+says the modern man of the world, that after all those Oriental
+religions have not developed such virtues and graces as has
+Christianity. It may perhaps be argued that in time the religion of the
+West, if missionaries will persevere, will raise the Hindu higher than
+his own obscenities have succeeded in doing, and that the civilization
+produced by Christianity is actually of a higher type, in spite of its
+evil by-products, than that of the head-hunters of Borneo and the bloody
+savages of Africa. But at any rate there is no excuse whatever for the
+intolerant Catholic proselytizer in English homes. For, roughly
+speaking, it is only the Catholic whom you cannot trust in your own home
+circle; sooner or later you will find him, if he at all lives up to his
+principles, insinuating the praises of his own faith and the weaknesses
+of your own; your sons and daughters he considers to be fair game; he
+thinks nothing of your domestic peace in comparison with the propagation
+of his own tenets. He is characterized, first and last, by that dogmatic
+and intolerant spirit that is the exact contrary of all that the modern
+world deems to be the spirit of true Christianity. True Christianity,
+then, as has been said, is essentially a private, personal, and
+individual matter between each soul and her God.
+
+(ii) The second charge brought against Catholics is that they make
+religion far too personal, too private, and too intimate for it to be
+considered the religion of Jesus Christ. And this is illustrated by the
+supreme value which the Church places upon what is known as the
+Contemplative Life.
+
+For if there is one element in Catholicism that the man-in-the-street
+especially selects for reprobation it is the life of the Enclosed
+Religious. It is supposed to be selfish, morbid, introspective, unreal;
+it is set in violent dramatic contrast with the ministerial Life of
+Jesus Christ. A quantity of familiar eloquence is solemnly poured out
+upon it as if nothing of the kind had ever been said before: it is said
+that "a man cannot get away from the world by shutting himself up in a
+monastery"; that "a man should not think about his own soul so much, but
+rather of what good he can do in the world in which God has placed him";
+that "four whitewashed walls" are not the proper environment for a
+philanthropic Christian.
+
+And yet, after all, what is the Contemplative Life except precisely that
+which the world just now recommended? And could religion possibly be
+made a more intimate, private, and personal matter between the soul and
+God than the Carthusian or Carmelite makes it?
+
+The fact is, of course, that Catholics are wrong whatever they do--too
+extreme in everything which they undertake. They are too active and not
+retired enough in their proselytism; too retired and not active enough
+in their Contemplation.
+
+II. Now the Life of our Divine Lord exhibits, of course, both the Active
+and the Contemplative elements that have always distinguished the Life
+of His Church.
+
+For three years He set Himself to the work of preaching His Revelation
+and establishing the Church that was to be its organ through all the
+centuries. He went about, therefore, freely and swiftly, now in town,
+now in country. He laid down His Divine principles and presented His
+Divine credentials, at marriage feasts, in market-places, in country
+roads, in crowded streets, and in private houses. He wrought the works
+of mercy, spiritual and corporal, that were to be the types of all works
+of mercy ever afterwards. He gave spiritual and ascetic teaching on the
+Mount of Beatitudes, dogmatic instructions in Capharnaum and the
+wilderness to the east of Galilee, and mystical discourses in the Upper
+Chamber of Jerusalem and the temple courts. His activities and His
+proselytisms were unbounded. He broke up domestic circles and the
+routine of offices. He called the young man from his estates and Matthew
+from custom-house and James and John from their father's fishing
+business. He made a final demonstration of His unlimited claim on
+humanity in His Procession on Palm Sunday, and on Ascension Day
+ratified and commissioned the proselytizing activities of His Church for
+ever in His tremendous charge to the Apostolic band. _Going, therefore,
+teach ye all nations ... teaching them to observe all things whatsoever
+I have commanded you; and behold I am with you all the days, even to the
+consummation of the world._
+
+Yet this, it must be remembered, was not only not the whole of His Life
+on earth, it was not even a very considerable part of it, if reckoned by
+years. For three years He was active, but for thirty He was retired in
+the house of Nazareth; and even those three years are again and again
+broken by retirement. He is now in the wilderness for forty days, now on
+the mountain all night in prayer, now bidding His disciples come apart
+and rest themselves. The very climax of His ministry too was wrought in
+silence and solitude. He removed Himself _about a stone's throw_ in the
+garden of Gethsemane from those who loved Him best; He broke His silence
+on the Cross to bid farewell even to His holy Mother herself. Above all,
+he explicitly and emphatically commended the Life of Contemplative
+Prayer as the highest that can be lived on earth, telling Martha that
+activity, even in the most necessary duties, was not after all the best
+use to which time and love could be put, but rather that _Mary had
+chosen the best part ... the one thing that is necessary_, and that it
+_shall not be taken away from her_ even by a sister's loving zeal.
+
+Finally, fault was found with Jesus Christ, as with His Church, on
+precisely these two points. When He was living the life of retirement in
+the country He was rebuked that He did not go up to the feast and state
+His claims plainly--justify, that is, by activity, His pretensions to
+the Messiahship; and when He did so, He was entreated to bid his
+acclaimants _to hold their peace_--to justify, that is, by humility and
+retirement, His pretensions to spirituality.
+
+III. The reconciliation, therefore, of these two elements in the
+Catholic system is very easy to find.
+
+(i) First, it is the Church's Divinity that accounts for her passion for
+God. To her as to none else on earth is the very face of God revealed as
+the Absolute and Final Beauty that lies beyond the limits of all
+Creation. She in her Divinity enjoys it may be said, even in her sojourn
+on earth, that very Beatific Vision that enraptured always the Sacred
+Humanity of Jesus Christ. With all the company of heaven then, with Mary
+Immaculate, with the Seraphim and with the glorified saints of God, she
+_endures, seeing Him Who is invisible_. Even while the eyes of her
+humanity are held, while her human members _walk by faith and not by
+sight_, she, in her Divinity, which is the guaranteed Presence of Jesus
+Christ in her midst, already _dwells in heavenly places_ and is already
+_come to Mount Zion and the City of the living God and to God Himself_,
+Who is the Light in which all fair things are seen to be fair.
+
+Is it any wonder then that, now and again, some chosen child of hers
+catches a mirrored glimpse of what she herself beholds with unveiled
+face; that some Catholic soul, now and again, chosen and called by God
+to this amazing privilege, should suddenly perceive, as never before,
+that God is the one and only Absolute Beauty, and that, compared with
+the contemplation of this Beauty--which contemplation is, after all, the
+final life of Eternity to which every redeemed soul shall come--all the
+activities of earthly life are nothing; and that, in her passion for
+this adorable God, she should run into a secret room and _shut the door
+and pray to her Father Who is in secret_, and so remain praying, a
+hidden channel of life to the whole of that Body of which she is a
+member, an intercessor for the whole of that Society of which she is one
+unit? There in silence, then, she sits at Jesus' feet and listens to the
+Voice which is _as the sound of many waters_; in the whiteness of her
+cell watches Him Whose _Face is as a Flame of Fire_, and in austerity
+and fasting _tastes and finds that the Lord is gracious._
+
+Of course this is but madness and folly to those who know God only in
+His Creation, who imagine Him merely as the Soul of the World and the
+Vitality of Created Life. To such as these earth is His highest Heaven
+and the beauty of the world the noblest vision that can be conceived.
+Yet to that soul that is Catholic, who understands that the Eternal
+Throne is indeed above the stars and that the Transcendence of God is as
+fully a truth as His Immanence--that God in Himself, apart from all
+that He has made, is all-fair and all-sufficient in His own Beauty--to
+such a soul as this, if called to such a life, there is no need that the
+Church should declare explicitly that the Contemplative Life is the
+highest. She knows it already.
+
+(ii) The _First Great Commandment_ of the Law, then, is inevitably
+followed by the Second, and the Catholic interpretation of the Second is
+thought by the world, which understands neither, to be as extravagant as
+her interpretation of the First.
+
+For this Divine Church that knows God is also a Human Society that
+dwells among men, and since she in herself unites Divinity and Humanity,
+she cannot rest until she has united them everywhere else.
+
+For, as she turns her eyes from God to men, she sees there immortal
+souls, made in the image of God and made for Him and Him alone, seeking
+to satisfy themselves with Creation instead of with the Creator. She
+hears how the world preaches the sanctity of the temperament, and the
+holiness of the individual point of view, as if there were no
+Transcendent God at all and no objective external Revelation ever made
+by Him. She sees how men, instead of seeking to conform themselves to
+God's Revelation of Himself, attempt rather to conform such fragments of
+that Revelation as have reached them to their own points of view; she
+listens to talk about "aspects of truth" and "schools of thought" and
+the "values of experience" as if God had never spoken either in the
+thunders of Sinai or the still voice of Galilee.
+
+Is it any wonder, then, that her Proselytism appears to such a world as
+extravagant as her Contemplation, her passion for men as unreasonable as
+her passion for God, when that world sees her bring herself from her
+cloisters and her secret places to proclaim as with a trumpet those
+demands of God which He has made known, those Laws which He has
+promulgated, and those rewards which He has promised? For how can she do
+otherwise who has looked on the all-glorious Face of God and then on the
+vacant and complacent faces of men--she who knows God's infinite
+capacity for satisfying men and men's all but infinite incapacity for
+seeking God--when she sees some poor soul shutting herself up indeed
+within the deadly and chilly walls of her own "temperament" and
+"individual point of view," when earth and heaven and the Lord of them
+both is waiting for her outside?
+
+The Church, then, is too much interested in men and too much absorbed in
+God. Of course she is too much interested and too much absorbed, for she
+alone knows the value and capacity of both; she who is herself both
+Divine and Human. For Religion, to her, is not an elegant accomplishment
+or a graceful philosophy or a pleasing scheme of conjectures. It is the
+fiery bond between God and man, neither of whom can be satisfied
+without the other, the One in virtue of His Love and the other in virtue
+of his createdness. She alone, then, understands and reconciles the
+tremendous Paradox of the Law that is Old as well as New. _Thou shalt
+love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart ... and thy neighbour as
+thyself _.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+FAITH AND REASON
+
+
+_Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall
+not enter into it_.--MARK X. 15.
+
+_Some things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and the unstable
+wrest, as also the other Scriptures, to their own perdition_.--
+II PET. III. 16.
+
+
+There are two great gifts, or faculties, by which men attain to truth:
+faith and reason. From these two sides, therefore, come two more
+assaults upon the Catholic position, a position which itself faces in
+both these directions. On the one side we are told that we believe too
+simply, on the other that we do not believe simply enough; on the one
+side that we reason too little, on the other that we do not reason
+enough. Let us set out these attacks in order.
+
+I. (i) "You Catholics," says one critic, "are far too credulous in
+matters of religion. You believe, not as reasonable men believe, because
+you have verified or experienced the truths you profess, but simply
+because these dogmas are presented to you by the Church. If reason and
+common-sense are gifts of God and intended for use, surely it is very
+strange to silence them in your search for the supreme truth. Faith, of
+course, has its place, but it must not be blind faith. Reason must test,
+verify, and interpret, or faith is mere credulity.
+
+"Consider, for example, the words of Christ, _This is My Body_. Now the
+words as they stand may certainly be supposed to mean what you say they
+mean; yet, interpreted by Reason, they cannot possibly mean anything of
+the kind. Did not Christ Himself sit in bodily form at the table as He
+spoke them? How then could He hold Himself in His hand? Did He not speak
+in metaphors and images continually? Did He not call Himself _a Door and
+a Vine_? Using Reason, then, to interpret these words, it is evident
+that He meant no more than that He was instituting a memorial feast, in
+which the bread should symbolize His Body and the wine His Blood. So too
+with many other distinctively Catholic doctrines--with the Petrine
+claims, with the authority 'to bind and loose,' and the rest. Catholic
+belief on these points exhibits not faith properly so-called--that is,
+Faith tested by Reason--but mere credulity. God gave us all Reason! Then
+in His Name let us use it!"
+
+(ii) From the other side comes precisely the opposite charge.
+
+"You Catholics," cries the other critic, "are far too argumentative and
+deductive and logical in your Faith. True Religion is a very simple
+thing; it is the attitude of a child who trusts and does not question.
+But with you Catholics Religion has degenerated into Theology. Jesus
+Christ did not write a _Summa_; He made a few plain statements which
+comprise, as they stand, the whole Christian Religion; they are full of
+mystery, no doubt, but it is He who left them mysterious. Why, then,
+should your theologians seek to penetrate into regions which He did not
+reveal and to elaborate what He left unelaborated?
+
+"Take, for example, Christ's words, _This is My Body_. Now of course
+these words are mysterious, and if Christ had meant that they should be
+otherwise, He would Himself have given the necessary comment upon them.
+Yet He did not; He left them in an awful and deep simplicity into which
+no human logic ought even to seek to penetrate. Yet see the vast and
+complicated theology that the traditions have either piled upon them or
+attempted to extract out of them; the philosophical theories by which it
+has been sought to elucidate them; the intricate and wide-reaching
+devotions that have been founded upon them! What have words like
+'Transubstantiation' and 'Concomitance,' devotions like 'Benediction,'
+gatherings like Eucharistic Congresses to do with the august simplicity
+of Christ's own institution? You Catholics argue too much--deduce,
+syllogize, and explain--until the simple splendour of Christ's
+mysterious act is altogether overlaid and hidden. Be more simple! It is
+better to _'love God than to discourse learnedly about the Blessed
+Trinity.' It has not pleased God to save His people through dialectics._
+Believe more, argue less!"
+
+Once more, then, the double charge is brought. We believe, it seems,
+where we ought to reason. We reason where we ought to believe. We
+believe too blindly and not blindly enough. We reason too closely and
+not closely enough.
+
+Here, then, is a vast subject--the relations of Faith and Reason and the
+place of each in man's attitude towards Truth. It is, of course,
+possible only to glance at these things in outline.
+
+II. First, let us consider, as a kind of illustration, the relations of
+these things in ordinary human science. Neither Faith nor Reason will,
+of course, be precisely the same as in supernatural matters; yet there
+will be a sufficient parallel for our purpose.
+
+A scientist, let us say, proposes to make observations upon the
+structure of a fly's leg. He catches his fly, dissects, prepares, places
+it in his microscope, observes, and records. Now here, it would seem, is
+Pure Science at its purest and Reason in its most reasonable aspect. Yet
+the acts of faith in this very simple process are, if we consider
+closely, simply numberless. The scientist must make acts of faith,
+certainly reasonable acts, yet none the less of faith, for all that:
+first, that his fly is not a freak of nature; next, that his lens is
+symmetrically ground; then that his observation is adequate; then that
+his memory has not played him false between his observing and his
+recording that which he has seen. These acts are so reasonable that we
+forget that they are acts of faith. They are justified by reason before
+they are made, and they are usually, though not invariably, verified by
+Reason afterwards. Yet they are, in their essence, Faith and not Reason.
+
+So, too, when a child learns a foreign language. Reason justifies him in
+making one act of faith that his teacher is competent, another that his
+grammar is correct, a third that he hears and sees and understands
+correctly the information given him, a fourth that such a language
+actually exists. And when he visits France afterwards he can, within
+limits, again verify by his reason the acts of faith which he has
+previously made. Yet none the less they were acts of faith, though they
+were reasonable. In a word, then, no acquirement of or progress in any
+branch of human knowledge is possible without the exercise of faith. I
+cannot walk downstairs in the dark without at least as many acts of
+faith as there are steps in the staircase. Society could not hold
+together another day if mutual faith were wholly wanting among its
+units. Certainly we use reason first to justify our faith, and we reason
+later to verify it. Yet none the less the middle step is faith. Columbus
+reasoned first that there must be a land beyond the Atlantic, and he
+used that same reason later to verify his discovery. Yet without a
+sublime act of faith between these processes, without that almost
+reckless moment in which he first weighed anchor from Europe, reason
+would never have gone beyond speculative theorizing. Faith made real for
+him what Reason suggested. Faith actually accomplished that of which
+Reason could only dream.
+
+III. Turn now to the coming of Jesus Christ on earth. He came, as we
+know now, a Divine Teacher from heaven to make a Revelation from God; He
+came, that is, to demand from men a sublime Act of Faith in Himself. For
+He Himself was Incarnate Wisdom, and He demanded, therefore, as none
+else can demand it, a supreme acceptance of His claim. No progress in
+Divine knowledge, as He Himself tells us, is possible, then, without
+this initial act. _Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a
+little child shall not enter into it_. Every soul that is to receive
+this teaching in its entirety must first accept the Teacher and sit at
+His feet.
+
+Yet He did not make this claim merely on His own unsupported word. He
+presented His credentials, so to say; He fulfilled prophecy; He wrought
+miracles; He satisfied the moral sense. _Believe Me_, He says, _for the
+very works' sake_. Before, then, demanding the fundamental act of Faith
+on which the reception of Revelation must depend, He took pains to make
+this Act of Faith reasonable. "You see what I do," He said in effect,
+"you have observed My life, My words, My actions. Now is it not in
+accordance with Reason that you should grant My claims? Can you explain
+away, _reasonably_, on any other grounds than those which I state, the
+phenomena of My life?"
+
+Certainly, then, He appealed to Reason; He appealed to Private Judgment,
+since that, up to that moment, was all that His hearers possessed. But,
+in demanding an Act of Faith, He appealed to Private Judgment to set
+itself aside; He appealed to Reason as to whether it were not Reasonable
+to stand aside for the moment and let Faith take its place. And we know
+how His disciples responded. _Whom do you say that I am?... Thou art the
+Christ, the Son of the Living God._
+
+At that instant, then, a new stage was begun. They had used their Reason
+and their Private Judgment, and, aided by His grace, had concluded that
+the next reasonable step was that of Faith. Up to that point they had
+observed, dissected, criticized, and analyzed His words; they had
+examined, that is, His credentials. And now it was Reason itself that
+urged them towards Faith, Reason that abdicated what had hitherto been,
+its right and its duty, that Faith might assume her proper place.
+Henceforth, then, their attitude must be a different one. Up to now they
+had used their Reason to examine His claim; now it was Faith, aided and
+urged by Reason, which accepted it.
+
+Yet even now Reason's work is not done, though its scope in future is
+changed. Reason no longer examines whether He be God; Faith has
+accepted it: yet Reason has to be as active as ever; for Reason now must
+begin with all its might the task of understanding His Revelation. Faith
+has given them, so to speak, casket after casket of jewels; every word
+that Jesus Christ henceforth speaks to them is a very mine of treasure,
+absolutely true since He is known to be a Divine Teacher Who has given
+it. And Reason now begins her new work, not of justifying Faith, but, so
+to say, of interpreting it; not of examining His claims, since these
+have been once for all accepted, but of examining, understanding, and
+assimilating all that He reveals.
+
+III. Turn now to Catholicism.
+
+It is the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church only, that acts as
+did Jesus Christ and offers an adequate object to Reason and Faith
+alike. For, first, it is evident that if Christ intended His Revelation
+to last through all time, He must have designed a means by which it
+should last, an Authority that should declare and preserve it as He
+Himself delivered it. And next, it is evident that since the Catholic
+Church alone even claims that prerogative, clearly and coherently, her
+right to represent that Authority is in proportion to the clearness and
+coherence of her claim. Or, again, she advances in support of that claim
+precisely those same credentials as did He: she points to her miracles,
+her achievements, the fulfilment of prophecy, the unity of her teaching,
+the appeal to men's moral sense--all of them appeals to Reason, and
+appeals which lead up, as did His, to the supreme claim, which He also
+made, to demand an Act of Faith in herself as a Divine Teacher.
+
+For she alone demands it. Other denominations of Christendom point to a
+Book, or to the writings of Fathers, or to the example of their members,
+and she too does these things. But it is she alone who appeals to these
+things not as final in themselves, not as constituting in themselves a
+final court of appeal, but as indicating as that court of appeal her own
+Living Voice. _Believe me, for the works' sake_, she too says. "Use your
+reason to the full to examine my credentials; study prophecy, history,
+the Fathers--study my claims in any realm in which your intellect is
+competent--and then see if it is not after all supremely reasonable for
+Reason to abdicate that particular throne on which she has sat so long
+and to seat Faith there instead? Certainly follow your Reason and use
+your private judgment, for at present you have no other guide; and then,
+please God, aided by Faith, Reason will itself bow before Faith, and
+take her own place henceforth, not on the throne, but on the steps that
+lead to it."
+
+Is Reason, then, to be silent henceforth? Why, the whole of theology
+gives the answer. Did Newman cease to think when he became a Catholic?
+Did Thomas Aquinas resign his intellect when he devoted himself to
+study? Not for one instant is Reason silent. On the contrary, she is
+active as never before. Certainly she is no longer occupied in
+examining as to whether the Church is divine, but instead she is busied,
+with incredible labours, in examining what follows from that fact, in
+sorting the new treasures that are opened to her with the dawn of
+Revelation upon her eyes, in arranging, deducting, and understanding the
+details and structure of the astonishing Vision of Truth. And more, she
+is as inviolate as ever. For never can there be presented to her one
+article of Faith that gives the lie to her own nature, since Revelation
+and Reason cannot contradict one the other. She has learned, indeed,
+that the mysteries of God often transcend her powers, that she cannot
+fathom the infinite with the finite; yet never for one moment is she
+bidden to evacuate her own position or believe that which she perceives
+to be untrue. She has learned her limitations, and with that has come to
+understand her inviolable rights.
+
+See, then, how the features of Christ look out through the lineaments of
+His Church. She alone dares to claim an act of Divine Faith in herself,
+since it is He Who speaks in her Voice. She alone, since she is Divine,
+bids the wisest men _become as little children_ at her feet and endows
+little children with the wisdom of the ancients. Yet, on the other hand,
+in her magnificent Humanity, she has produced through the exercise of
+illuminated human Reason such a wealth of theology as the world has
+never seen. Is it any wonder that the world thinks both her Faith and
+Reason alike too extreme? For her Faith rises from her Divinity and her
+Reason from her Humanity; and such an outpouring of Divinity and such an
+emphatic Humanity, such a superb confidence in God's revelation and such
+untiring labours upon the contents of that Revelation, are altogether
+beyond the imagination of a world that in reality, fears both Faith and
+Reason alike.
+
+At her feet, and hers only, then, do the wisest and the simple kneel
+together--St. Thomas and the child, St. Augustine and the "charcoal
+burner"; as diverse, in their humanity, as men can be; as united in the
+light of Divinity as only those can be who have found it.
+
+So, then, she goes forward to victory. "First use your reason," she
+cries to the world, "to see whether I be not Divine! Then, impelled by
+Reason and aided by Grace, rise to Faith. Then once more call up your
+Reason, to verify and understand those mysteries which you accept as
+true. And so, little by little, vistas of truth will open about you and
+doctrines glow with an undreamed-of light. So Faith will be interpreted
+by Reason and Reason hold up the hands of Faith, until you come indeed
+to the unveiled vision of the Truth whose feet already you grasp in love
+and adoration; until you see, face to face in Heaven, Him Who is at once
+the Giver of Reason and the _Author of Faith_."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+AUTHORITY AND LIBERTY
+
+
+_The truth shall make you free_.--JOHN VIII. 32.
+
+_Bringing into captivity every understanding to the obedience of
+Christ_.--II COR. X. 5.
+
+
+We have already considered in outline the relations between Faith and
+Reason; how each, in its own province, is supreme and how each, in its
+turn, supports and ratifies the other. We pass on to a development of
+that theme, springing almost immediately out of it, namely, the
+relations between Authority and Liberty. And we will begin that
+consideration, as before, as it is illustrated by the accusations of the
+world against the Church. Briefly they are stated as follows.
+
+I. Freedom, we are told, is the note of Christianity as laid down in the
+Gospels, in both discipline and doctrine. Jesus Christ came into the
+world largely for this very purpose, to substitute the New Law for the
+Old and thereby to free men from the complicated theology and the
+minutia of religious routine which characterized men's attempts to
+reduce that Old Law to practice. The Old Law may or may not have been
+perfectly adapted, when first it was given, to the needs of God's
+people in the early stages of Jewish civilization; but at any rate it is
+certain, from a hundred texts in the Gospel, that Jesus Christ in His
+day found it an intolerable slavery laid upon the religious life of the
+people. Theology had degenerated into an incredible hair-splitting
+system of dogma, and discipline had degenerated into a multitude of
+irritating observances.
+
+Jesus Christ, then, in the place of all this, preached a Creed that was
+essentially simple, and simultaneously substituted for the elaborate
+ceremonialism of the Pharisees the spirit of liberty. The dogma that He
+preached was little more than that God is the Father of all and that all
+men therefore are brothers; "discipline" in the ordinary sense of the
+word is practically absent from the Gospel, and as for ceremonial there
+is none, except such as is necessary for the performance of the two
+extremely simple rites that He instituted, Baptism and the Lord's
+Supper.
+
+Now this supposed spirit of liberty, we are informed, is to-day to be
+found only in Protestantism. In that system, if it can strictly be
+called one, and in that system only, may a man exercise that freedom
+which was secured to him by Jesus Christ. First, in doctrine, he may
+choose, weigh, and examine for himself, within the wide limits which
+alone Christ laid down, those doctrines or hopes which commend
+themselves to his intellect; and next, in matters of discipline, again,
+he may choose for himself those ways of life and action that he may
+find helpful to his spiritual development. He may worship, for example,
+in any church that he prefers, attend those services and those only
+which commend themselves to his taste; he may eat or not eat this or
+that food, as he likes, and order his day, generally, as it pleases him.
+And all this, we are informed, is of the very spirit of New Testament
+Christianity. _The Truth has made him free_, as Christ Himself promised.
+
+The Catholic Church, on the other hand, is essentially a Church of
+slavery. First, in discipline, an enormous weight of observances and
+duties is laid upon her children, comparable only to the Pharisaic
+system. The Catholic must worship in this church and not in that, in
+this manner and not in the other. He must observe places and days and
+times, and that not only in religious matters but in secular. He must
+eat this food on this day and that on the other; he must frequent the
+sacraments at specified periods; he must perform certain actions and
+refrain from others, and that in matters in themselves indifferent.
+
+In dogma, too, no less is the burden that he must bear. Not only are the
+simple words of Christ developed into a vast theological system by the
+Church's officials, but the whole of this system is laid, as of faith,
+down to its minutest details, on the shoulders of the unhappy believer.
+He may not choose between this or that theory of the mode of Christ's
+Presence in the Eucharist; he must accept precisely that, and no other,
+which his Church has elaborated.
+
+In fact, in doctrine and in discipline alike, the Church has gone back
+to precisely that old reign of tyranny which Christ abolished. The
+Catholic, unlike the Protestant who has retained the spirit of liberty,
+finds himself in the same case as that under which Israel itself once
+groaned. He is a slave and not a child; he binds his own limbs, as the
+old phrase says, by his act of faith and puts the other end of the chain
+into the hands of the priest. Such, in outline, is the charge against
+us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now much of it is so false that it needs no refutation. It is, for
+example, entirely false that New Testament theology is simple. It is far
+more true to say that, compared with the systematized theology of the
+Church, it is bewilderingly complex and puzzling, and how complex and
+puzzling it is, is indicated by the hundreds of creeds which Protestants
+have made out of it, each creed claiming, respectively, to be its one
+and only proper interpretation. Men have only come to think it "simple"
+in modern days by desperately eliminating from it every element on which
+all Protestants are not agreed. The residuum is indeed "simple." Only it
+is not the New Testament theology! Dogmas such as that of the Blessed
+Trinity, of the Procession of the Holy Ghost, of the nature of grace and
+of sin--these, whether as held by orthodox or unorthodox, are at any
+rate not simple, and it is merely untrue to say that Christ made no
+statements on these points, however they may be understood. Further, it
+is merely untrue to say that Protestant theology is "simple"; it is
+every whit as elaborate as Catholic theology and considerably more
+complex in those points in which Protestant divines are not agreed. The
+controversies on Justification in which such men as Calvin and Luther,
+with their disciples, continually engaged are fully as complicated as
+any disputations on Grace between Jesuits and Dominicans.
+
+Yet the general contention is plain enough--that on the whole the
+Catholic is bound to believe a certain set of dogmas, while the
+Protestant is free to accept or reject them. Therefore, it is argued,
+the Protestant is "free" and the Catholic is not. And this brings us
+straight to the consideration of the relations between Authority and
+Liberty.
+
+II. What, then, is Religious Liberty? It is necessary to begin by
+forming some idea as to what it is that is meant by the word in other
+than religious matters.
+
+Very briefly it may be said that an individual enjoys social liberty
+when he is able to obey and to use the laws and powers of his true
+nature, and that a community enjoys it when all its members are able to
+do so without interfering unduly one with the other. The more complete
+is this ability, the more perfect is Liberty.
+
+A remarkable paradox at once presents itself--that Liberty can only be
+secured by Laws. Where there are no laws, or too few, to secure it,
+slavery immediately appears, no less surely than when there are too
+many; for the stronger individuals are, by the absence of law, enabled
+to tyrannize over the weaker. Even the vast and complex legislation of
+our own days is designed to increase and not to fetter liberty, and its
+greater complexity is necessitated by the greater complexity and the
+more numerous interrelationships of modern society. Laws, of course, may
+be unwise or excessively minute or deliberately enslaving; yet this does
+not affect the point that for all that Laws are necessary to the
+preservation of Liberty. Merchants, women and children, and citizens
+generally, can only enjoy rightful liberty if they are protected by
+laws. Only that man is free, then, who is most carefully guarded.
+
+In the same manner Scientific Liberty does not consist in the absence of
+knowledge, or of scientific dogmas, but in their presence. We are
+surrounded by innumerable facts of nature, and that man is free who is
+fully aware of those which affect his own life. It is true, for example,
+that two and two make four, and that heavy bodies tend to fall towards
+the centre of the earth; and it can only be a very superficial thinker
+who considers that to be ignorant of these facts is to be free from the
+enslaving dogmas of them. If I am ignorant of them I am, of course, in a
+sense at liberty to believe that two and two make five, and to jump off
+the roof of my house; yet this is not Liberty at all in the sense in
+which reasonable people use the word, since my knowledge of the laws
+enables me to be effective and, in fact, to survive in the midst of a
+world where they happen to be true. That man, then, is more truly "free"
+whose intellect is informed of and submits to these laws, than is the
+man whose intellect is unaware of them. Marconi's intellect submits to
+the laws of lightning and he is thereby enabled to avail himself of
+them. Ajax is unaware of them and is accordingly destroyed by their
+action.
+
+_The Truth_, then, _makes us free_. The State which controls men's
+actions and educates their intellects, which, in a word, enforces the
+knowledge of truth and compels obedience to it, is actually freeing its
+citizens by that process. It is only by a misuse of words or a failure
+to grasp ideas that I can maintain that an ignorant savage is more free
+than an educated man. It is true that I am, in a sense, "free" to think
+that two and two make five, if I have not learned arithmetic; on the
+other hand, when I learn that they make four I rise into that higher and
+more real liberty which a knowledge of arithmetic bestows. I am more
+effective, not less so; I am more free to exercise my powers and use the
+forces of the world in which I live, and not less free, when I have
+submitted my intellect to facts.
+
+III. (i) Now the soul too has an environment. Men may differ as to its
+nature and its conditions, but all who believe in the soul at all
+believe also that it has an environment, and that this environment is as
+much in the realm of Law as is the natural world itself. Prayer, for
+example, elevates the soul, base thinking degrades it.
+
+Now the laws of this environment were true even before Christ came.
+David knew, at any rate, something of penitence and of the guilt of sin,
+and Nathan knew something, at least, of the forgiveness of sins and of
+their temporal punishment. Christ came, then, with this object amongst
+others: that He might reveal the laws of Grace and convey to men's minds
+some at least of the facts of the spiritual life amongst which they
+lived. He came, moreover, partly to modify the workings of these laws,
+to release some more fully, and to restrain others; in a word, to be the
+Revealer of Truth and the Administrator of Grace.
+
+He came then, to increase men's liberty by increasing their knowledge,
+as, in another sphere, the scientist comes to us with the same purpose.
+Here, for example, is the law that murder is a sin before God and brings
+its consequences with it, a law stated briefly in the commandment _Thou
+shall not kill_. But our Divine Lord revealed more of the workings of
+this law than men had hitherto recognized. _I say unto you_, declared
+Christ, _that whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer._ He revealed,
+that is to say, the fact that this law runs even in the realm of
+thought, that the hating spirit incurs the guilt and punishment of
+murder, and not merely the murderous action. Were men less free when
+they learned that fact? Not unless I am less free than I was before,
+when I learn for the first time that lightning kills. Christ came, then,
+to reveal the _Truth that makes us free_, and He does so by informing
+our intellects and enabling us to _bring into captivity every
+understanding to _His obedience_.
+
+(ii) Turn now to the Catholic Church. Here is a Society whose function
+it is to preserve and apply the teaching of Christ; to analyze it and to
+state it in forms or systems which every generation can receive. For
+this purpose, then, she draws up not merely a Creed--which is the
+systematic statement of the Christian Revelation--but disciplinary rules
+and regulations that will make this Creed and the life that is
+conformable to it more easy of realization, and all this she does with
+the express object of enabling the individual soul to respond to her
+spiritual environment and to rise to the full exercise of her powers and
+rights. As the scientist and the statesmen take, respectively, the great
+laws of nature and society and reduce them to rules and codes, yet
+without adding or taking away from these facts, that are true whether
+they are popularly recognized or not--and all with the purpose not of
+diminishing but of increasing the general liberty--so the Church,
+divinely safeguarded too in the process, takes the Revelation of Christ
+and by her dogma and her discipline popularizes it, so to speak, and
+makes it at once comprehensible and effective.
+
+What, then, is this foolish cry about the slavery of dogma? How can
+Truth make men anything except more free? Unless a man is prepared to
+say that the scientist enslaves his intellect by telling him facts, he
+dare not say that the Church fetters his intellect by defining dogma.
+Christ did not condemn the Pharisaic system because it was a system, but
+because it was Pharisaic; because, that is, it was not true; because it
+obscured instead of revealing the true relations between God and man;
+because it _made the Word of God of none effect through its traditions_.
+
+But the Catholic system has the appearance of enslaving men? Why yes;
+for the only way of aiming at and using effectively the _truth that
+makes us free_ is by _bringing into captivity every understanding to the
+obedience of Christ_.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+CORPORATENESS AND INDIVIDUALISM
+
+
+_He that shall lose his life for My sake shall find it. For what doth it
+profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own
+soul?_--MATT. XVI. 25, 26.
+
+
+No recorded word of our Lord better illustrates than does this the
+startling and paradoxical manner of His teaching. For He Who _knew what
+was in man_, Who spoke always down to man's deepest interests, dwelt and
+spoke therefore in that realm of truth where man's own paradoxical
+nature is most manifest; where his interests appear to flourish only by
+being ruthlessly pruned; where he rises to the highest development of
+self only by self-mortification. This is, in fact, the very lesson
+Christ teaches in these words. To _find the life_ is the highest object
+of every man and the end for which he was created; yet this can be
+attained only by the _losing of it for Christ's sake_. Individuality can
+be preserved only by the sacrifice of Individualism. Let us break up
+this thought and consider it more in detail.
+
+I. (i) Catholics, it is said, are the most fundamentally selfish people
+in the whole world, since all that they do and say and think is
+directed and calculated, so far as they are "good Catholics," to the
+salvation of their own souls. It is this that continually crops up in
+their conversation, and this that presumably is their chief
+pre-occupation. Yet surely this, above all methods, is the very worst
+for achieving such an end. One does not pull up flowers to see how they
+are growing. The very secret of health is to be unconscious of it.
+Catholics, on the other hand, scarcely ever do anything else; they are
+for ever examining themselves, for ever going to confession, for ever
+developing and cultivating the narrowest virtues. The whole science of
+Casuistry, for example, is directed to nothing else but this--the exact
+definition of those limits within which the salvation of the soul is
+secure and beyond which it is imperilled; and Casuistry, as we all know,
+has a stifling and deadening influence upon all who study it.
+
+Again, see how the true development and expansion of the soul must
+necessarily be hindered by such an ideal. "I must not read this book,
+however brilliant, since it might be dangerous to my faith. I must not
+mix in this company, however charming, since evil communications corrupt
+good manners." What kind of life is that which must always be checked
+and stunted in this fashion? What kind of salvation can there be that
+can only be purchased by the sacrifice of so much that is noble and
+inspiring? True life consists in experience, not in introspection; in
+going out from self into the world, not in retiring from the world
+inwards. Let us therefore live our life without fear, lose ourselves in
+humanity, forget self in experience, and leave the rest to God!
+
+(ii) So much for the one side, while from the other comes almost
+precisely the opposite criticism. Catholics, it is said, are not nearly
+individualistic enough; on the contrary they are for ever sinking
+themselves and their personalities in the corporate life of the Church.
+Not only are their outward actions checked and their words guarded, but
+even their very consciences and thoughts are informed and made by the
+collective conscience and mind of others. It is the highest ambition of
+every good Catholic _sentire cum ecclesia_; not merely to act and speak
+but even to think in obedience to others. Now a man's true life, we are
+told, consists in an assertion of his own individuality. God has made no
+two men the same; the mould was made and broken in each several case.
+If, therefore, we are to be what He meant us to be, we must make the
+most of our own personalities; we must think our own thoughts, not other
+people's, direct our own lives, speak our own minds--so far, of course,
+as we can do so without interfering with our neighbour's equal liberty.
+Once more, therefore, we are bidden to live our life to the full; not in
+this case, however, because we all share in a common humanity, but
+because we do not!
+
+We Catholics are wrong, therefore, for both reasons and in both
+directions. We are wrong when we put self first and we are wrong when we
+do not. We are wrong when we launch out into the current of life, and
+wrong when we withdraw ourselves from its waters. We are wrong when we
+insist upon our personal responsibility, and wrong when we look to the
+Church to undertake it.
+
+II. (i) Here then, indeed, is a Paradox; but it is one which our Lord
+Himself expressly emphasizes. For, first, there is nothing on which He
+so repeatedly insists as the supreme and singular value of every soul's
+salvation. If this is not attained, all is lost. _What shall it profit a
+man if he shall gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own
+soul?_ All else, then, must be sacrificed if this is in peril. No human
+possession, however great, can be weighed against this. No human tie,
+however sacred, can hold against its claim. Not only must _houses and
+lands_, but _father and mother and wives and children_ must take second
+place, so soon as eternal life is at stake. And yet, somehow or another,
+this salvation can only be attained by loss; self can only live if it be
+mortified, can only be saved by its own denial. Individuality, as has
+been said, can only be preserved by the loss of Individualism.
+
+(ii) But this is not peculiar to the spiritual sphere; it is a paradox
+that is true, in some sense, of life on every plane--civic,
+intellectual, artistic, human. The man that desires to bring his
+intellectual and personal powers to their highest pitch must
+continually be sinking them, so to speak, in the current of his fellows,
+continually exhausting, using, and wearing them out. He must risk, and
+indeed inevitably lose, in a very real sense, his personal point of
+view, if he is to have a point of view that is worth possessing; he must
+be content to see his theories and his thoughts modified, merged,
+changed, and destroyed, if his thought is to be of value. For, so far as
+he withdraws himself from his fellows into a physical or mental
+isolation, so far he approaches egotistic madness. He cannot grow unless
+he decreases; he cannot remain himself unless he ceases to be himself.
+
+So, too, is it in civic and artistic life. The citizen who truly lives
+to the State of which he is a member--the man to whom his country raises
+a monument, for example--is one, always, who has _lost himself_ for his
+nation, whether he has died in battle or sacrificed himself in politics
+or philanthropy. And the citizen who has merely hugged his citizenship
+to himself, who has enjoyed all the privileges he can get and paid
+nothing for them,--least of all himself--who has, so to say, _gained the
+whole world_, has simultaneously lost himself indeed and is forgotten
+within a year of his death. So with the artist. The man who has made his
+art serve him, who has employed it, let us say, purely for the sake of
+the money he could get out of it, who has kept it within severe limits,
+who has been merely prudent and orderly and restrained, this man has, in
+a sense, _saved his own life_; yet simultaneously he has lost it. But
+the man to whom art is a passion, to whom nothing else is comparatively
+of any value, who has plunged himself in his art, has dedicated to it
+his days and his nights, has sacrificed to it every power of his being
+and every energy of his mind and body, this man has indeed _lost
+himself_. Yet he lives in his art as the other has not, he has _saved
+himself_ in a sense of which the other knows nothing; and exactly in
+proportion as he has succeeded in his self-abnegation, so far has he
+attained, as we say, immortality. There is not, then, one sphere of life
+in which the paradox is not true. The great historical lovers in
+romance, the pioneers of science, the immortals in every plane, are
+precisely those that have fulfilled on lower levels the spiritual
+aphorism of Jesus Christ.
+
+(iii) Turn, then, once more to the Catholic Church and see how in the
+Life which she offers, as in none other, there is presented to us a
+means of fulfilling our end.
+
+For it is she alone who even demands in the spiritual sphere a complete
+and entire abnegation of self. From every other Christian body comes the
+cry, Save your soul, assert your individuality, follow your conscience,
+form your opinions; while she, and she alone, demands from her children
+the sacrifice of their intellect, the submitting of their judgment, the
+informing of their conscience by hers, and the obedience of their will
+to her lightest command. For she, and she alone, is conscious of
+possessing that Divinity, in complete submission to which lies the
+salvation of Humanity. For she, as the coherent and organic mystical
+Body of Christ, calls upon those who look to her to become, not merely
+her children, but her very members; not to obey her as soldiers obey a
+leader or citizens a Government, but as the hands and eyes and feet obey
+a brain. Once, therefore, I understand this, I understand too how it is
+that by being lost in her I save myself; that I lose only that which
+hinders my activity, not that which fosters it. For when is my hand most
+itself? When separated from the body, by paralysis or amputation? Or
+when, in vital union with the brain, with every fibre alert and every
+nerve alive, it obeys in every gesture and receives in every sensation a
+life infinitely vaster and higher than any which it might, temporarily,
+enjoy in independence? It is true that its capacity for pain is the
+greater when it is so united, and that it would cease to suffer if once
+its separation were accomplished; yet, simultaneously, it would lose all
+that for which God made it and, _saving itself_, would be _lost_ indeed.
+
+_I live_, then, the perfect Catholic may say, as none other can say,
+when I have ceased to be myself. And _yet not I_, since I have lost my
+Individualism. No longer do I claim any activity at all on my own
+behalf; no longer do I demand to form my opinions, to follow my own
+conscience apart from that informing of it that comes from God, or to
+live my own life. Yet in losing my Individualism I have won my
+Individuality, for I have found my true place at last. I have _lost the
+whole world?_ Yes, so far as that world is separate from or antagonistic
+to God's will; but I have _gained my own soul_ and attained immortality.
+For it is _not I that live, but Christ that liveth in me_.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+MEEKNESS AND VIOLENCE
+
+
+_Blessed are the meek_.--MATT. V. 4.
+
+_The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it
+away_.--MATT. XI. 12.
+
+
+We have already considered the Church's relations towards such things as
+wealth and human influence and power, how she will sometimes use and
+sometimes disdain them. Let us now penetrate a little deeper and
+understand the spirit that underlies and explains this varying attitude
+of hers.
+
+I. (i) It has been charged against Christianity in general, and
+therefore implicitly and supremely against the Church that was for so
+long its sole embodiment and is still, alone, its adequate
+representative, that it has fostered virtues which retard progress.
+Progress, in the view of the German philosopher who explicitly made this
+charge, is merely natural both in its action and its end; and Nature, as
+we are well aware, knows nothing of forgiveness or compassion or
+tenderness: on the contrary she moves from lower to higher forms by
+forces that are their precise opposite. The wounded stag is not
+protected by his fellows, but gored to death; the old wolf is torn to
+pieces, the sick lion wanders away to die of starvation, and all these
+instincts, we are informed, have for their object the gradual
+improvement of the breed by the elimination of the weak and ineffective.
+So should it be, he tells us, with man, and the extreme Eugenists echo
+his teaching. Christianity, on the other hand, deliberately protects the
+weak and teaches that the sacrifice of the strong is supreme heroism.
+Christianity has raised hospitals and refuges for the infirm, seeking to
+preserve those very types which Nature, if she had her way, would
+eliminate. Christianity, then, is the enemy of the human race and not
+its friend, since Christianity has retarded, as no other religion has
+ever succeeded in retarding, the appearance of that superman whom Nature
+seeks to evolve.... It is scarcely to be wondered at that the teacher of
+such a doctrine himself died insane.
+
+A parallel doctrine is taught largely to-day by persons who call
+themselves practical and businesslike. Meekness and gentleness and
+compassion, they tell their sons, are very elegant and graceful virtues
+for those who can afford them, for women and children who are more or
+less sheltered from the struggle of life, and for feeble and ineffective
+people who are capable of nothing else. But for men who have to make
+their own way in the world and intend to win success there, a more stern
+code is necessary; from these there is demanded such a rule of action as
+Nature herself dictates. Be self-confident and self-assertive then, not
+meek. Remember that the weakness of your neighbour is your own
+opportunity. Take care of number one and let the rest take care of
+themselves. A man does not go into the stock-exchange or into commerce
+in order to exhibit Christian virtues there, but business qualities. In
+a word, Christianity, so far as it affects material or commercial or
+political progress, is a weakness rather than a strength, an enemy
+rather than a friend.
+
+(ii) But if, on the one side, the gentleness and non-resistance
+inculcated by Christianity form the material of one charge against the
+Church, on the other side, no less, she is blamed for her violence and
+intransigeance. Catholics are not yielding enough, we are told, to be
+true followers of the meek Prophet of Galilee, not gentle enough to
+inherit the blessing which He pronounced. On the contrary there are no
+people so tenacious, so obstinate, and even so violent as these
+professed disciples of Jesus Christ. See the way, for example, in which
+they cling to and insist upon their rights; the obstacles they raise,
+for example, to reasonable national schemes of education or to a
+sensible system in the divorce courts. And above all, consider their
+appalling and brutal violence as exhibited in such institutions as that
+of the Index and Excommunication, the fierceness with which they insist
+upon absolute and detailed obedience to authority, the ruthlessness with
+which they cast out from their company those who will not pronounce
+their shibboleths. It is true that in these days they can only enforce
+their claims by spiritual threatenings and penalties, but history shows
+us that they would do more if they could. The story of the racks and the
+fires of the Inquisition shows plainly enough that the Church once used,
+and therefore, presumably, would use again if she could, carnal weapons
+in her spiritual warfare. Can anything be more unlike the gentle Spirit
+of Him Who, _when He was reviled, reviled not again;_ of Him Who bade
+men to _learn of Him, for He was meek and lowly of heart_, and so _find
+rest to their souls?_
+
+Here, then, is the Paradox, and here are two characteristics of the
+Catholic Church: that she is at once too meek and too self-assertive,
+too gentle and too violent. It is a paradox exactly echoed by our Divine
+Lord Himself, Who in the Upper Chamber bade His disciples who _had no
+sword_ to _sell their cloaks and buy them_, and Who yet, in the garden
+of Gethsemane, commanded the one disciple who had taken Him at His word
+to _put up the sword into its sheath_, telling him that _they who took
+the sword should perish by it_. It is echoed yet again in His action,
+first in taking the scourge into His own Hand, in the temple courts, and
+then in baring His shoulders to that same scourge in the hands of
+others. How, then, is this Paradox to be reconciled?
+
+II. The Church, let us remind ourselves again, is both Human and Divine.
+
+(i) She consists of human persons, and those persons are attached both
+to one another and to the world outside by a perfectly balanced system
+of human rights known as the Law of Justice. This Law of Justice, though
+coming indeed from God, is, in a sense, natural and human; it exists to
+some extent in all societies, as well as being closely defined and
+worked out in the Old Law given on Sinai. It is a Law which men could
+have worked out, at any rate in its main principles, by the light of
+reason only, unaided by Revelation, and it is a Law, further, so
+fundamental that no Revelation could conceivably ever outrage or set it
+aside.
+
+At the coming of Christ into the world, however, Supernatural Charity
+came with Him. The Law of Justice still remained; men still had their
+rights on which they might insist, still had their rights which no
+Christian may refuse to recognize. But such was the torrent of Divine
+generosity which Christ exhibited, so overwhelming was the Vision which
+He revealed of the supernatural charity of God towards men, that a set
+of ideals sprang into life such as the world had never dreamed of; more,
+Charity came with such power that her commands actually overruled in
+many instances the feeble claims of Justice, so that she bade men
+henceforward to forgive, for example, not merely according to Justice,
+but according to her own Divine nature, to _forgive unto seventy times
+seven_, to give _good measure, heaped up and running over_, and not the
+bare minimum which men had merely earned.
+
+It was from this advent of Charity, then, that all these essentially
+Christian virtues of generosity and meekness and self-sacrifice sprang
+which Nietsche condemned as hostile to material progress.
+
+For, from henceforth, if _a man take thy coat, let him take thy cloak
+also; if he will compel thee to go with him one mile, go two; if he
+strike thee on one cheek, turn to him the other also_. The Law of
+Natural justice is transcended and the Law of Charity and Sacrifice
+reigns instead. _Resist not evil_; do not insist always, that is to say,
+on your natural rights; give men more than their due, and be yourself
+content with less. _Learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and
+find rest to your souls. Forgive one another your trespasses_ with the
+same generous charity with which God has forgiven and will forgive you
+yours. _Judge not and you shall not be judged._ Do not, in personal
+matters, insist upon bare justice for yourself, but act on that scale
+and by those principles by which God Himself has dealt with you.
+
+Meekness, then, is undoubtedly a Christian virtue. Sometimes it is
+obligatory, sometimes it is but a Counsel of Perfection; it stands, in
+any case, high among those ideals which it has been the glory of
+Christianity to create.
+
+(ii) But there are other elements in life besides the human and the
+natural, beyond those personal rights and claims which a Christian may,
+if he is aiming at perfection, set aside out of charity. The Church is
+Divine as well as Human.
+
+For the Church has entrusted to her, besides the rights of men, which
+may be sacrificed by their possessors, the rights and claims of God,
+which none but He can set aside. He has given into her keeping, for
+example, a Revelation of truths and principles which, springing out of
+His own Nature or of His Will, are as immutable and eternal as Himself.
+And it is precisely in defence of these truths and principles that the
+Church exhibits that which the world calls _intransigeance_ and Jesus
+Christ _violence_.
+
+Here, for example, is the right of a baptized Catholic child to be
+educated in his religion, or rather, the right of God Himself to teach
+that child in the manner He has ordained. Here is the revealed truth
+that marriage is indissoluble; here that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.
+Now these are not human rights or opinions at all--rights and opinions
+which men, urged by charity or humility, can set aside or waive in the
+face of opposition. They rest on an entirely different basis; they are,
+so to speak, the inalienable possessions of God; and it would neither be
+charity nor humility, but sheer treachery, for the Church to exhibit
+meekness or pliancy in matters such as these, given to her as they are,
+not to dispose of, but to guard intact. On the contrary here, exactly,
+comes the command, _He that hath not, let him sell his cloak and buy a
+sword,_, for here comes the line between the Divine and the Human; let
+all personal possessions go, all merely natural rights and claims be
+yielded, and let a sword take their place. For here is a matter that
+must be _resisted, even unto blood_.
+
+The Catholic Church then is, and always will be, _violent_ and
+intransigeant when the rights of God are in question. She will be
+absolutely ruthless, for example, towards heresy, for heresy affects not
+personal matters on which Charity may yield, but a Divine right on which
+there must be no yielding. Yet, simultaneously, she will be infinitely
+kind towards the heretic, since a thousand human motives and
+circumstances may come in and modify his responsibility. At a word of
+repentance she will readmit his person into her treasury of souls, but
+not his heresy into her treasury of wisdom; she will strike his name
+eagerly and freely from her black list of the rebellious, but not his
+book from the pages of her Index. She exhibits meekness towards him and
+_violence_ towards his error; since he is human, but her Truth is
+Divine.
+
+It is, then, from a modern confusion of thought with regard to the
+realms of the Divine and the Human that the amazing inability arises, on
+the world's part, to understand the respective principles on which the
+Catholic Church acts in these two and utterly separate departments. The
+world considers it reasonable for a country to defend its material
+possessions by the sword, but intolerant and unreasonable for the Church
+to condemn, _resisting even unto blood_, principles which she considers
+erroneous or false. The Church, on the other hand, urges her children
+again and again to yield rather than to fight when merely material
+possessions are at stake, since Charity permits and sometimes even
+commands men to be content with less than their own rights, and yet
+again, when a Divine truth or right is at stake, here she will resist
+unfaltering and undismayed, since she cannot be "charitable" with what
+is not her own; here she will _sell her cloak_ and _buy that sword_
+which, when the dispute was on merely temporal matters, she thrust back
+again into its sheath.
+
+To-day[1] as Christ rides into Jerusalem we see, as in a mirror, this
+Paradox made plain. _Thy King cometh to thee, meek_. Was there ever so
+mean a Procession as this? Was there ever such meekness and charity? He
+Who, as His personal right, is attended in heaven by a _multitude on
+white horses_, now, in virtue of His Humanity, is content with a few
+fishermen and a crowd of children. He to Whom, in His personal right,
+the harpers and the angels make eternal music is content, since He has
+been made Man for our sakes, with the discordant shoutings of this
+crowd. He Who _rode on the Seraphim and came flying on the wings of the
+wind_ sits on the colt of an ass. He comes, meek indeed, from the golden
+streets of the Heavenly Jerusalem to the foul roads of the Earthly,
+laying aside His personal rights since He is that very Fire of Charity
+by which Christians relinquish theirs.
+
+[Footnote 1: This sermon was preached on Palm-Sunday.]
+
+But, for all that, it is _riding_ that _thy King cometh to thee_.... He
+will not relinquish His inalienable claim and He will have nothing
+essential left out. He has His royal escort, even though a ragged one;
+He will have His spearmen, even though their spears be only of palm; He
+will have His heralds to proclaim Him, however much the devout Pharisees
+may be offended by their proclamation; He will ride into His own Royal
+City, even though that City casts Him out, and He will have His
+Coronation, even though it be with thorns. So, too, the Catholic Church
+advances through the ages.
+
+In merely human rights and personal matters again and again she will
+yield up all that she has, making, it may be, but one protest for
+Justice' sake and then no more. And she will urge her children to do the
+same. If the world will let her have no jewels, then she will put glass
+beads in her monstrance, and for marble she will use plaster, and tinsel
+for gold.
+
+But she will have her Procession and insist upon her Royalty. It may
+seem as poor and as mean and as tawdry as the entrance of Christ Himself
+through the royal gate; for she will yield up all that the world demands
+of her, so long as her Divine Right itself remains intact. She will
+issue her orders, though few be found to obey them; she will cast out
+from her the rebellious who question her authority, and cleanse her
+Temple Courts even though with a scourge at which men mock. She will
+give up all that is merely human, if the world will have it so, and will
+_resist not evil_ if it merely concerns herself. But there is one thing
+which she will not renounce, one thing she will claim, even with
+_violence_ and "intransigeance," and that is the Royalty with which God
+Himself has crowned her.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE SEVEN WORDS
+
+THE "THREE HOURS"
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+The value, to the worshippers, of the Devotion of the Three Hours' Agony
+is in proportion to the degree in which they understand that they are
+watching not so much the tragedy of nineteen hundred years ago as the
+tragedy of their own lives and times. Merely to dwell on the Death of
+Christ on Calvary would scarcely avail them more than to study the
+details of the assassination of Caesar at the foot of Pompey's statue.
+Such considerations might indeed be interesting, exciting, and even a
+little instructive or inspiring; but they could not be better than this,
+and they might be no better than morbid and harmful.
+
+The Death of Christ, however, is unique because it is, so to say,
+universal. It is more than the crowning horror of all murderous
+histories; it is more even than the _type_ of all the outrages that men
+have ever committed against God. For it is just the very enactment, upon
+the historical stage of the world, of those repeated interior tragedies
+that take place in every soul that rejects or insults Him; since the God
+whom we crucify within is the same God that was once crucified without.
+There is not an exterior detail in the Gospel which may not be
+interiorly repeated in the spiritual life of a sinner; the process
+recorded by the Evangelists must be more or less identical with the
+process of all apostasy from God.
+
+For, first, there is the Betrayal of Conscience, as a beginning of the
+tragedy; its betrayal by those elements of our nature that are intended
+as its friends and protectors--by Emotion or Forethought, for example.
+Then Conscience is led away, bound, to be judged; for there can be no
+mortal sin without deliberation, and no man ever yet fell into it
+without conducting first a sort of hasty mock-trial or two in which a
+sham Prudence or a false idea of Liberty solemnly decide that Conscience
+is in the wrong. Yet even then Conscience persists, and so He is made to
+appear absurd and ridiculous, and set beside the Barabbas of a coarse
+and sturdy lower nature that makes no high pretensions and boasts of it.
+And so the drama proceeds and Conscience is crucified: Conscience begins
+to be silent, breaking the deepening gloom now and again with protests
+that grow weaker every time, and at last Conscience dies indeed. And
+thenceforward there can be no hope, save in the miracle of Resurrection.
+
+This Cross of Calvary, then, is not a mere type or picture; it is a
+fact identical with that so dreadfully familiar to us in spiritual life.
+For Christ is not one Person, and Conscience something else, but it is
+actually Christ who speaks in Conscience and Christ, therefore, Who is
+crucified in mortal sin.
+
+Let us, then, be plain with ourselves. We are watching not only Christ's
+Death but our own, since we are watching the Death of Christ _Who is our
+Life_.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST WORD
+
+_Father forgive them, for they know not what they do_.
+
+
+In previous considerations we have studied the Life of Christ in His
+Mystical Body from an angle at which the strange and innumerable
+paradoxes which abound in all forms of life at a certain depth become
+visible. And we have seen how these paradoxes lie in those strata, so to
+say, where the Divinity and the Humanity meet. Christ is God and God
+cannot die; therefore Christ became man in order to be able to do so.
+The Church is Divine and therefore all-holy, but she dwells in a Body of
+sinful Humanity and reckons her sinners to be her children and members
+no less than her saints.
+
+We will continue to regard the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the Words
+which He spoke from the Cross from the same angle, and to find,
+therefore, the same characteristic paradoxes and mysteries in all that
+we see. In the First Word we meet the _Paradox of Divine Forgiveness_.
+
+I. Ordinary human forgiveness is no more than a natural virtue,
+resulting from a natural sense of justice, and if a man is normal, his
+forgiveness will be a natural and inevitable part of the process of
+reconciliation so soon as a certain kind of restitution has been made.
+For example, a friend of mine sins against me--he injures, perhaps, my
+good name; and my natural answer is the emotion of resentment towards
+him and, perhaps, of actual revenge. But what I chiefly resent is my
+friend's stupidity and his ignorance of my real character. "I am angry,"
+I say, with perfect sincerity, "not so much at the thing he has said of
+me, as at this proof of his incapacity to understand me. I thought he
+was my friend, that he was in sympathy with my character or, at least,
+that he understood it sufficiently to do me justice. But now, from what
+he has just said of me, I see that he does not. If the thing he said
+were true of me, the most of my anger would be gone. But I see that he
+does not know me, after all."
+
+And then, presently, my friend does understand that he has wronged me;
+that the gossip he repeated or the construction he put upon my actions
+was not fair or true. And immediately that I become aware of this, from
+him or from another, my resentment goes, if I have any natural virtue at
+all; it goes because my wounded pride is healed. I forgive him easily
+and naturally because he knows now what he has done.
+
+II. How entirely different from this easy, self-loving, human
+forgiveness is the Divine Forgiveness of Christ! Now it is true that in
+the conscience of Pilate, the unjust representative of justice, and in
+that thing that called itself conscience in Herod, and in the hearts of
+the priests who denounced their God, and of the soldiers who executed
+their overlord, and of Judas who betrayed his friend, in all these there
+was surely a certain uneasiness--such an uneasiness is actually recorded
+of the first and the last of the list--a certain faint shadow of
+perception and knowledge of what it was that they had done and were
+doing. And, for the natural man, it would have been comparatively easy
+to forgive such injuries on that account. "I forgive them," such a man
+might have said from his cross, "because there is just a glimmer of
+knowledge left; there is just one spark in their hearts that still does
+me justice, and for the sake of that I can try, at least, to put away my
+resentment and ask God to forgive them."
+
+But Jesus Christ cries, "Forgive them because they do _not_ know what
+they do! Forgive them because they need it so terribly, since they do
+not even know that they need it! Forgive in them that which is
+unforgivable!"
+
+III. Two obvious points present themselves in conclusion.
+
+(1) First, it is _Divine_ Forgiveness that we need, since no sinner of
+us all knows the full malice of sin. One man is a slave, let us say, to
+a sin of the flesh, and seeks to reassure himself by the reflection that
+he injures no one but himself; ignorant as he is of the outrage to God
+the Holy Ghost Whose temple he is ruining. Or a woman repeats again
+every piece of slanderous gossip that comes her way and comforts herself
+in moments of compunction by reflecting that she "means no harm";
+ignorant as she is of the discouragement of souls of which she is the
+cause and of the seeds of distrust and enmity sown among friends. In
+fact it is incredible that any sinner ever _knows what it is that he
+does_ by sin. We need, therefore, the Divine Forgiveness and not the
+human, the pardon that descends when we are unaware that we must have it
+or die; the love of the Father Who, _while we are yet a great way off,
+runs to meet_ us, and Who teaches us for the first time, by the warmth
+of His welcome, the icy distances to which we had wandered. If we
+_knew_, anyone could forgive us. It is because we do not that only God,
+Who knows all things, can forgive us effectively.
+
+(2) And it is this _Divine_ Forgiveness that we ourselves have to extend
+to those that sin against us, since only those who so forgive can be
+forgiven. We must not wait until wounded pride is made whole by the
+conscious shame of our enemy; until the debt is paid by acknowledgment
+and we are complacent once more in the knowledge that justice has been
+done to us at last. On the contrary, the only forgiveness that is
+supernatural, and which, therefore, alone is meritorious, is that which
+reach out to men's ignorance and not their knowledge of their need.
+
+
+
+
+THE SECOND WORD
+
+_Amen I say to thee, to-day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise._
+
+
+Our Divine Lord, in this Second Word, immediately applies and
+illustrates the First and drives its lesson home. He shows us how the
+rain of mercy that poured out of heaven in answer to the prayer He made
+just now enlightens the man who, above all others present on Calvary,
+was the most abjectly ignorant of all; the man who, himself at the very
+heart of the tragedy, understood it less, probably, than the smallest
+child on the outskirts of the crowd.
+
+His life had been one long defiance of the laws of both God and man. He
+had been a member of one of those troops of human vermin that crawl
+round Jerusalem, raiding solitary houses, attacking solitary travellers,
+guilty of sins at once the bloodiest and the meanest, comparable only to
+the French _apaches_ of our own day. Well, he had been gripped at last
+by the Roman machine, caught in some sordid adventure, and here,
+resentful and furious and contemptuous, full of bravado and terror, he
+snarled like a polecat at every human face he saw, snarled and spat at
+the Divine Face Itself that looked at him from a cross that was like his
+own; and, since he had not even a spark of the honour that is reputed to
+exist "among thieves," taunted his "fellow criminal" for the folly of
+His "crime."
+
+"If thou be the Christ, save Thyself and us."
+
+Again, then, the Paradox is plain enough. Surely an educated priest, or
+a timid disciple, or a good-hearted dutiful soldier who hated the work
+he was at, surely one of these will be the first object of Christ's
+pardon; and so one of these would have been, if one of ourselves had
+hung there. But when God forgives, He forgives the most ignorant
+first--that is, the most remote from forgiveness--and makes, not Peter
+or Caiphas or the Centurion, but Dismas the thief, the firstfruits of
+Redemption.
+
+I. The first effect of the Divine Mercy is Enlightenment. _Before they
+call, I will answer_. Before the thief feels the first pang of sorrow
+Grace is at work on him, and for the first time in his dreary life he
+begins to understand. And an extraordinary illumination shines in his
+soul. For no expert penitent after years of spirituality, no sorrowful
+saint, could have prayed more perfectly than this outcast. His
+intellect, perhaps, took in little or nothing of the great forces that
+were active about him and within him; he knew, perhaps, explicitly
+little or nothing of Who this was that hung beside him; yet his soul's
+intuition pierces to the very heart of the mystery and expresses itself
+in a prayer that combines at once a perfect love, an exquisite humility,
+an entire confidence, a resolute hope, a clear-sighted faith, and an
+unutterable patience; his soul blossoms all in a moment: _Lord, remember
+me when Thou comest in Thy Kingdom_. He saw the glory behind the shame,
+the Eternal Throne behind the Cross, and the future behind the present;
+and he asked only to be _remembered_ when the glory should transfigure
+the shame and the Cross be transformed into the Throne; for he
+understood what that remembrance would mean: "_Remember, Lord_, that I
+suffered at Thy side."
+
+II. So perfect, then, are the dispositions formed in him by grace that
+at one bound _the last is first_. Not even Mary and John shall have the
+instant reward that shall be his; for them there are other gifts, and
+the first are those of separation and exile. For the moment, then, this
+man steps into the foremost place and they who have hung side by side on
+Calvary shall walk side by side to meet those waiting souls beyond the
+veil who will run so eagerly to welcome them. _To-day thou shalt be with
+Me in Paradise._
+
+III. Now this Paradox, _the last shall be first_, is an old doctrine of
+Christ, so startling and bewildering that He has been forced to repeat
+it again and again. He taught it in at least four parables: in the
+parables of _the Lost Piece of Silver, the Lost Sheep, the Prodigal
+Son_, and _the Vineyard_. The Nine Pieces lie neglected on the table,
+the Ninety-nine sheep are exiled in the Fold, the Elder Son is, he
+thinks, overlooked and slighted, and the Labourers complain of
+favouritism. Yet still, even after all this teaching, the complaint goes
+up from Christians that God is too loving to be quite just. A convert,
+perhaps, comes into the Church in middle age and in a few months
+develops the graces of Saint Teresa and becomes one of her daughters. A
+careless black-guard is condemned to death for murder and three weeks
+later dies upon the scaffold the death of a saint, at the very head of
+the line. And the complaints seem natural enough. _Thou hast made them
+equal unto us who have borne the burden and heat of the day_.
+
+Yet look again, you Elder Sons. Have your religious, careful, timid
+lives ever exhibited anything resembling that depth of self-abjection to
+which the Younger Son has attained? Certainly you have been virtuous and
+conscientious; after all, it would be a shame if you had not been so,
+considering the wealth of grace you have always enjoyed. But have you
+ever even striven seriously after the one single moral quality which
+Christ holds up in His own character as the point of imitation: _Learn
+of Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart_? It is surely significant that
+He does not say, expressly, Learn of Me to be pure, or courageous, or
+fervent; but _Learn to be humble_, for in this, above all, you shall
+_find rest to your souls_. Instead, have you not had a kind of gentle
+pride in your religion or your virtue or your fastidiousness? In a
+word, you have not been as excellent an Elder Son as your brother has
+been a Younger. You have not corresponded with your graces as he has
+corresponded with his. You have never yet been capable of sufficient
+lowliness to come home (which is so much harder than to remain there),
+or of sufficient humility to begin for the first time to work with all
+your heart only an hour before sunset.
+
+Begin, then, at the beginning, not half-way up the line. Go down to the
+church door and beat your breast and say not, God reward me who have
+done so much for Him, but _God be merciful to me_ who have done so
+little. Get off your seat amongst the Pharisees and go down on your
+knees and weep behind Christ's couch, if perhaps He may at last say to
+you, _Friend, come up higher_.
+
+
+
+
+THE THIRD WORD
+
+_Woman, behold thy son. Behold thy mother_.
+
+
+Our Divine Lord now turns, from the soul who at one bound has sprung
+into the front rank, to those two souls who have never left it, and
+supremely to that Mother on whose soul sin has never yet breathed, on
+whose breast Incarnate God had rested as inviolate and secure as on the
+Bosom of the Eternal Father, that Mother who was His Heaven on earth.
+Standing beside her is the one human being who is least unworthy to be
+there, now that Joseph has passed to his reward and John the Baptist has
+gone to join the Prophets--_the disciple whom Jesus loved_, who had lain
+on the breast of Jesus as Jesus had lain on the breast of Mary.
+
+Our Lord has just shown how He deals with His dear sinners; now He shows
+how He will _be glorified with His Saints_. The Paradox of this Word is
+that Death, the divider of those who are separated from God, is the bond
+of union between those that are united to Him.
+
+I. Death is the one inexorable enemy of human society as constituted
+apart from God. A king dies and his kingdom is at once in danger of
+disruption. A child dies and his mother prays that she may bear another,
+lest his father and she should drift apart. Death is the supreme sower
+of discord and disunion, then, in the natural order, since he is the one
+supreme enemy of natural life. He is the noonday terror of the Rich Fool
+of the parable and the nightmare of the Poor Fool, since those who place
+their hope in this life see that death is the end of their hope. For
+these there is no appeal beyond the grave.
+
+II. Now precisely the opposite of all this is true in the supernatural
+order, since the gate of death, viewed from the supernatural side, is an
+entrance and not an ending, a beginning and not a close. This may be
+seen to be so even in a united human family in this world, the members
+of whom are living the supernatural life; for where such a family is
+living in the love of God, Death, when he comes, draws not only the
+survivors closer together, but even those whom he seems to have
+separated. He does not bring consternation and terror and disunion, but
+he awakens hope and tenderness, he smooths away old differences, he
+explains old misunderstandings.
+
+Our Blessed Lord has already, over the grave of Lazarus, hinted that
+this shall be so, so soon as He has consecrated death by His own dying.
+_He that believeth in Me shall never die_. He, that is to say, who has
+_died with Christ_, whose centre henceforward is in the supernatural,
+simply no longer finds death to be what nature finds it. It no longer
+makes for division but for union; it no longer imperils or ends life and
+interest and possession, but releases them from risk and mortality.
+
+Here, then, He deliberately and explicitly acts upon this truth. He once
+raised Lazarus and the daughter of Jairus and the Widow's Son from the
+dead, for death's sting could, at that time, be drawn in no other way;
+but now that He Himself is _tasting death for every man_, He performs an
+even more emphatically supernatural act and conquers death by submitting
+to it instead of by commanding it. Life had already united, so far as
+mortal life can unite, those two souls who loved Him and one another so
+well. These two, since they knew Him so perfectly, knew each the other
+too as perfectly as knowledge and sympathy can unite souls in this
+life. But now the whole is to be raised a stage higher. They had already
+been united on the living breast of Jesus; now, over His dead body, they
+were to be made yet more one.
+
+It is marvellous that, after so long, our imaginations should still be
+so tormented and oppressed by the thought of death; that we should still
+be so _without understanding_ that we think it morbid to be in love with
+death, for it is far more morbid to be in fear of it. It is not that our
+reason or our faith are at fault; it is only that that most active and
+untamable faculty of ours, which we call imagination, has not yet
+assimilated the truth, accepted by both our faith and our reason, that
+for those who are in the friendship of God death is simply not that at
+all which it is to others. It does not, as has been said, end our lives
+or our interests: on the contrary it liberates and fulfils them.
+
+And all this it does because Jesus Christ has Himself plunged into the
+heart of Death and put out his fires. Henceforth we are one family in
+Him if we do His will--_his brother and sister and mother_; and Mary is
+our Mother, not by nature, which is accidental, but by supernature,
+which is essential. Mary is my Mother and John is my brother, since, if
+I have died with Christ, it is _no longer I that live, but Christ that
+liveth in me_. In a word, it is the Communion of Saints which He
+inaugurates by this utterance and seals by His dying.
+
+
+
+
+THE FOURTH WORD
+
+_My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?_
+
+
+Our Blessed Lord in the revelation He makes from the Cross passes
+gradually inwards to Himself Who is its centre. He begins in the
+outermost circle of all, with the ignorant sinners. He next deals with
+the one sinner who ceased to be ignorant, and next with those who were
+always nearest to Himself, and now at last He reveals the deepest secret
+of all. This is the central Word of the Seven in every sense. There is
+no need to draw attention to the Paradox it expresses.
+
+I. First, then, let us remind ourselves of the revealed dogma that Jesus
+Christ was the Eternal Son of the Father; that He dwelt always in the
+Bosom of that Father; that when He left heaven He _did not leave the
+Father's side_; that at Bethlehem and Nazareth and Galilee and Jerusalem
+and Gethsemane and Calvary He was always the _Word that was with God_
+and _the Word_ that _was God_. Next, that the eyes even of His Sacred
+Humanity looked always and continuously upon the Face of God, since His
+union with God was entire and complete: as He looked up into His
+Mother's face from the manger, He saw behind it the Face of His Father;
+as He cried in Gethsemane, _If it be possible_, even in His Sacred
+Humanity He knew that it could not be; as He groaned out on Calvary that
+God had forsaken Him, He yet looked without one instant's intermission
+into the glory of heaven and saw His Father there.
+
+Yet simultaneously with these truths it is also true that His cry of
+dereliction was incalculably more of a reality than when first uttered
+by David or, since, by any desolate sinner in the thickest spiritual
+darkness. All the miseries of holy and sinful souls, heaped together,
+could not approach even afar off the intolerable misery of Christ. For
+of His own will He refused to be consoled at all by that Presence which
+He could never lack, and of His own will He chose to be pierced and
+saturated and tormented by the sorrow He could never deserve. He held
+firm against the touch of consolation every power of His Divine and
+Human Being and, simultaneously, flung them open to the assaults of
+every pain. And if the psychology of this state is altogether beyond our
+power to understand, we may remind ourselves that it is the psychology
+of the _Word made Flesh_ that is confronting us.... Do we expect to
+understand that?...
+
+II. There is a human phrase, however, itself a paradox, yet
+corresponding to something which we know to be true, which throws some
+faint glimmer of light upon this impenetrable darkness and seems to
+extend Christ's experience upon the Cross so as to touch our own human
+life. It is a phrase that describes a condition well known to spiritual
+persons: "To leave God for God." (1) The simplest and lowest form of
+this state is that condition in which we acquiesce with our will in the
+withdrawal of ordinary spiritual consolation. Certainly it is an
+inexplicable state, since both the ordinary aids to our will--our
+understanding and our emotion--are, by the very nature of the case,
+useless to it. Our heart revolts from that dereliction and our
+understanding fails to comprehend the reasons for it. Yet we acquiesce,
+or at least perceive that we ought to do so; and that by doing so--by
+ceasing, that is, to grasp God's Presence any longer--we find it as
+never before. We leave God in order to find Him.
+
+(2) The second state is that in which we find ourselves when not only do
+all consolations leave us, but the very grip of intelligent faith goes
+too; when the very reasons for faithfulness appear to vanish. It is an
+incalculably more bitter trial, and soul after soul fails under it and
+must be comforted again by God in less august ways or perish altogether.
+And yet this is not the extremest pitch even of human desolation.
+
+(3) For there is a third of which the saints tell us in broken words and
+images....
+
+III. Our final point, for application to ourselves, is that dereliction
+in some form or another is as much a stage in spiritual progress as
+autumn and winter are seasons of the year. The beginners have to suffer
+one degree, the illuminated another, and those that have approached a
+real Union with God a third. But all must suffer it, and each in his
+own degree, or progress is impossible.
+
+Let us take courage therefore and face it, in the light of this Word.
+For, as we can sanctify bodily pain by the memory of the nails, so too
+can we sanctify spiritual pain by the memory of this darkness. If He Who
+_never left the Father's side_ can suffer this in an unique and supreme
+sense, how much more should we be content to suffer it in lower degrees,
+who have so continually, since we came to the age of reason, been
+leaving not His side only, but His very house.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIFTH WORD
+
+_I thirst._
+
+
+Our Lord continues to reveal His own condition, since He, after all, is
+the key to all Humanity. If we understand anything of Him,
+simultaneously we shall understand ourselves far better.
+
+He has shown us that He can truly be deprived of spiritual consolation;
+and the value of this deprivation; now He shows us the value of bodily
+deprivation also. And the Paradox for our consideration is that the
+Source of all can lose all; that the Creator needs His creation; that He
+Who offers us the _water springing up into Life Eternal_ can lack the
+water of human life--the simplest element of all. In His Divine
+Dereliction He yet continues to be Human.
+
+I. It is very usual, under this Word, to meditate on Christ's thirst for
+souls; and this is, of course, a legitimate thought, since it is true
+that His whole Being, and not merely one part of it, longed and panted
+on the Cross for every object of His desire. Certainly He desired souls!
+When does He not?
+
+But it is easy to lose the proportion of truth, if we spiritualize
+everything, and pass over, as if unworthy of consideration, His bodily
+pain. For this Thirst of the Crucified is the final sum of all the pains
+of crucifixion: the physical agony, the fever produced by it, the
+torrential sweat, the burning of the sun--all these culminated in the
+torment of which this Cry is His expression.
+
+Bodily pain, then, since Jesus not only deigned to suffer it, but to
+speak of it, is as much a part of the Divine process as the most
+spiritual of derelictions: it is an intense and a vital reality in life.
+It is the fashion, at present, to pose as if we were superior to such
+things; as if either it were too coarse for our high natures or even
+actually in itself evil. The truth is that we are terrified of its
+reality and its sting, and seek, therefore, to evade it by every means
+in our power. We affect to smile at the old penances of the saints and
+ascetics as if we ourselves had risen into a higher state of development
+and needed no longer such elementary aids to piety!
+
+Let this Word, then, bring us back to our senses and to the due
+proportions of truth. We are body as well as soul; we are incomplete
+without the body. The soul is insufficient to itself, the body has as
+real a part to play in Redemption as the soul which is its inmate and
+should be its mistress. We look for the _redemption of our body_ and the
+_Resurrection of the Flesh_, we merit or demerit before God in our soul
+for the deeds done in our body.
+
+So was it too with our Lord of His infinite compassion. The _Word was
+made Flesh_, dwelt in the Flesh, has assumed that Flesh into heaven.
+Further, He suffered in the Flesh and deigned to tell us so; and that He
+found that suffering all but intolerable.
+
+II. In a well-known book a Catholic poet[1] describes with a great deal
+of power the development of men's nervous systems in these later days,
+and warns his readers against a scrupulous terror lest they, who no
+longer scourge themselves with briers, should be neglecting a means of
+sanctification. He points out, with perfect justice, that men, in these
+days, suffer instead in more subtle manners than did those of the Middle
+Ages, yet none the less physical; and puts us on our guard lest we
+should afflict ourselves too much. Yet we must take care, also, that we
+do not fall into the opposite extreme and come to regard bodily pain,
+(as has been said) as if it were altogether too elementary for our
+refined natures and as if it must have no place in the alchemy of the
+spirit. This would be both dangerous and false. _What God hath joined
+together, let no man put asunder!_ For, if we once treat body and soul
+as ill-matched companions and seek to deal with them apart, instantly
+the door is flung open to the old Gnostic horrors of sensualism on the
+one side or inhuman mutilation or neglect on the other.
+
+[Footnote 1: Health and Holiness by Francis Thompson.]
+
+The Church, on the other hand, is very clear and insistent that body and
+soul make one man as fully as God and Man make one Christ; and she
+illustrates and directs these strange co-relations and mutual effects of
+these two partners by her steady insistence on such things as Fasting
+and Abstinence. And the saints are equally clear and insistent. There
+never yet has been a single soul whom the Church has raised to her
+altars in whose life bodily austerity in some form has not played a
+considerable part. It is true that some have warned us against excess;
+but what warnings and what excess! "Be moderate," advises St. Ignatius,
+that most reasonable and moderate of all the saints. "Take care that you
+do not break any bones with your iron scourge. God does not wish that!"
+
+Pain, then, has a real place in our progress. Who that has suffered can
+ever doubt it again?
+
+Let us consider, therefore, under this Word of Christ, whether our
+attitude to bodily pain is what God would have it to be. There are two
+mistakes that we may be committing. Either we may fear it too
+little--meet it, that is to say, with Pagan stoicism instead of with
+Christianity--or we may fear it too much. _Despise not the chastening_,
+on one side, _or faint_ on the other. It is surely the second warning
+that is most needed now. For pain had a real place in Christ's programme
+of life. He fasted for forty days at the beginning of His Ministry, and
+He willed every shocking detail of the Praetorium and Calvary at the
+end. He told us that _His Spirit willed it_ and, yet more kindly, that
+_His Flesh was weak_. He revealed, then, that He really suffered and
+that He willed it so.... _I thirst._
+
+
+
+
+THE SIXTH WORD
+
+_It is consummated._
+
+
+He has finished _His Father's business_, He has dealt with sinners and
+saints, and has finally disclosed to us the secrets of the Soul and the
+Body of His that are the hope of both sinners and saints alike. And
+there is no more for Him to do.
+
+An entirely new Beginning, then, is at hand, now that the Last Sabbath
+is come--the Last Sabbath, so much greater than the First as Redemption
+is greater than Creation. For Creation is a mere introduction to the
+Book of Life; it is the arrangement of materials that are to be thrown
+instantly into confusion again by man, who should be its crown and
+master. The Old Testament is one medley of mistakes and fragments and
+broken promises and violated treaties, to reach its climax in the
+capital Mistake of Calvary, when men indeed _knew not what they did._
+And even God Himself in the New Testament, as man in the Old, has gone
+down in the catastrophe and hangs here mutilated and broken. Real life,
+then, is now to begin.
+
+Yet, strangely enough, He calls it an End rather than a Beginning.
+_Consummatum est!_
+
+I. The one and only thing in human life that God desires to end is Sin.
+There is not a pure joy or a sweet human relationship or a selfless
+ambition or a divine hope which He does not desire to continue and to be
+crowned and transfigured beyond all ambition and all hope. On the
+contrary, He desires only to end that one single thing which ruins
+relationships and spoils joy and poisons aspirations. For up to the
+present there is not one page of history which has not this blot upon
+it.
+
+God has had to tolerate, for lack of better, such miserable specimens of
+humanity! _Jacob have I loved!_ ... _David a man after my heart;_ the
+one a poor, mean, calculating man, who had, however, that single glimmer
+of the supernatural which Esau, for all his genial sturdiness, was
+without; the other an adulterous murderer, who yet had grace enough for
+real contrition. Hitherto He has been content with so little. He has
+accepted vinegar for want of wine.
+
+Next, God has had to tolerate, and indeed to sanction--such an unworthy
+worship of Himself--all the blood of the temple and the spilled entrails
+and the nameless horrors. And yet this was all to which men could rise;
+for without it, they never could have learned the more nameless horror
+of sin.
+
+Last, for His worshippers He has had to content Himself with but one
+People instead of _all peoples and nations and languages._ And what a
+People,--whom even Moses could not bear for their treachery and
+instability! And all this wretched record ends in the Crime of Calvary,
+at which the very earth revolts and the sun grows dark with shame. Is it
+any wonder that Christ cried, Thank God that is all done with at last!
+
+II. Instead of this miserable past, then, what is to come? What is that
+_New Wine He would drink with us in His Father's Kingdom?_ First; real
+and complete saints of God are to take the place of the fragmentary
+saints of the Old Dispensation, saints with heads of gold and feet of
+clay. Souls are to be born again in Baptism, not merely sealed by
+circumcision, and to be purified before they can contract any actual
+guilt of their own. And, of these, many shall keep their baptismal
+innocence and shall go, wearing that white robe, before God Who gave it
+them. Others again shall lose it, but regain it once more, and, through
+the power of the Precious Blood, shall rise to heights of which Jacob
+and David never even dreamed. To _awake in His likeness_ was the
+highest ambition of _the man after God's Heart;_ but to be not merely
+like Christ, but one with Him, is the hope of the Christian. _I live_,
+the new saints shall say with truth, _yet now not I, but Christ liveth
+in me._
+
+Next, instead of the old worship of blood and pain there shall be an
+Unbloody Sacrifice and a _Pure Offering_ in which shall be all the power
+and propitiation of Calvary without its pain, all the glory without the
+degradation. And last, in place of the old enclosed Race of Israel shall
+be a Church of all nations and tongues, one vast Society, with all walls
+thrown down and all divisions done away, one Jerusalem from above, that
+shall be the Mother of us all.
+
+III. That, then, is what Christ intended as He cried, _It is
+consummated._ Behold _the old things are passed away!_ Behold, _I make
+all things new!_
+
+And now let us see how far that is fulfilled. Where is there, in me, the
+New Wine of the Gospel?
+
+I have all that God can give me from His Throne on Calvary. I have the
+truth that He proclaimed and the grace that He released. Yet is there in
+me, up to the present, even one glimmer of what is meant by Sanctity? Am
+I even within an appreciable distance of the saints who knew not Christ?
+Have I ever wrestled like Jacob or wept like David? Has my religion,
+that is to say, ever inspired me beyond the low elevation of joy into
+the august altitudes of pain? Is it possible that with me the old is
+not put away, the _old man_ is not yet dead, and the _new man_ not yet
+_put on_? Is that New Sacrifice the light of my daily life? Have I done
+anything except hinder the growth of Christ's Church, anything except
+drag down her standards, so far as I am able, to my own low level? Is
+there a single soul now in the world who owes, under God, her conversion
+to my efforts?
+
+Why, as I watch my life and review it in His Presence it would seem as
+if I had done nothing but disappoint Him all my days! He cried, like the
+deacon of His own Sacrifice, Go! it is done! _Ite; missa est!_ The
+Sacrifice is finished here; go out in its strength to live the life
+which it makes possible!
+
+Let me at least begin to-day, have done with my old compromises and
+shifts and evasions. _Ite; missa est!_
+
+
+
+
+THE SEVENTH WORD
+
+_Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit._
+
+
+He has cried with a loud voice, and the rocks have rent to its echo, and
+the earth is shaken, and the Veil of the Old Testament is torn from top
+to bottom as the Old Covenant passes into the New and the enclosed
+sanctity of the Most Holy Place breaks out into the world. And now, as
+the level sun shines out again beneath the pall of clouds, He whispers,
+as at Mary's knee in Nazareth, the old childish prayer and yields up
+His spirit into His Father's hands.
+
+The last Paradox, then, is uttered. He Who saves others cannot save
+Himself! The Shepherd of souls relinquishes His own. For, as we cannot
+save our lives unless we lose them for His sake, so He too cannot save
+them unless He loses His for our sake.
+
+I. This, then, is merely the summary of all that has gone before; it is
+the word _Finis_ written at the end of this new Book of Life which He
+has written in His Blood. It is the silence of the white space at the
+close of the last page. Yet it is, too, the final act that gives value
+to all that have preceded it. If Christ had not died, our faith would be
+vain.
+
+Oh! these New Theologies that see in Christ's Death merely the end of
+His Life! Why, it is the very point and climax of His Life that He
+should lay it down! Like Samson himself, that strange prototype of the
+Strong Man armed, he slew more of the enemies of our souls by His Death
+than by all His gracious Life. _For this cause He came into the world_.
+For Sacrifice, which is the very heart of man's instinctive worship of
+God, was set there, imperishably, in order to witness to and be ratified
+by His One Offering which alone could truly take away sins; and to deny
+it or to obscure it is to deny or to obscure the whole history of the
+human race, from the Death of Abel to the Death of Christ, to deny or
+obscure the significance of every lamb that bled in the Temple and of
+every wine-offering poured out before the Holy Place, to deny or to
+obscure (if we will but penetrate to the roots of things) the free will
+of Man and the Love of God. If Christ had not died, our faith would be
+vain.
+
+II. Once again, then, let us turn to the event in our own lives that
+closes them; that death which, united to Christ's, is our entrance into
+liberty and, disunited, the supreme horror of existence.
+
+(1) For without Christ death is a violent interruption to life,
+introducing us to a new existence of which we know nothing, or to no
+existence at all. Without Christ, however great our hopes, it is abrupt,
+appalling, stunning, and shattering. It is this at the best, and, at the
+worst, it is peaceful only as the death of a beast is peaceful.
+
+(2) Yet, with Christ, it is harmonious and continuous with all that has
+gone before, since it is the final movement of a life that is already
+_dead with Christ_, the last stage of a process of mortality, and the
+stage that ends its pain. It is just one more passing phase, by which is
+changed the key of that music that every holy life makes always before
+God.
+
+There is, then, the choice. We may, if we will, die fighting to the end
+a force that must conquer us however we may fight, resisting the
+irresistible. Or we may die, in lethargic resignation, as dogs die,
+without hopes or regrets, since the past, without Christ, is as
+meaningless as the future. Or we may die, like Christ, and with Him,
+yielding up a spirit that came from the Father back again into His
+Fatherly hands, content that He Who brought us into the world should
+receive us when we go out again, confident that, as the thread of His
+purpose is plain in earthly life, it shall shine yet more plainly in the
+life beyond.
+
+One last look, then, at Jesus shows us the lines smoothed from His face
+and the agony washed from His eyes. May our souls and the souls of all
+the faithful departed, through His Mercy, rest in Him!
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+LIFE AND DEATH
+
+
+_As dying, and behold we live_.--II COR. VI. 9.
+
+
+We have considered, so far, a number of paradoxical phenomena exhibited
+in the life of Catholicism and have attempted to find their
+reconciliation in the fact that the Catholic Church is at once Human and
+Divine. In her striving, for example, after a Divine and supernatural
+Peace, of which she alone possesses the secret, she _resists even unto
+blood_ all human attempts to supplant this by another. As a human
+society, again, she avails herself freely of human opportunities and
+aids, of earthly and created beauty, for the setting forth of her
+message; yet she can survive, as can no human society, when she is
+deprived of her human rights and her acquired wealth. As human she
+numbers the great multitude of the world's sinners among her children,
+yet as Divine she has produced the saints. As Divine she bases all her
+gospel on a Revelation which can be apprehended only by Faith, yet as
+human she employs the keenest and most profound intellects for its
+analysis and its propagation. In these and in many other similar points
+it has been attempted to show why she offers now one aspect and now
+another to human criticism, and how it is that the very charges made
+against her become, when viewed in the light of her double claim, actual
+credentials and arguments on behalf of that claim. Finally, in the
+meditations upon the _Seven Words_ of Christ, we considered very briefly
+how, in the hours of the deepest humiliation of His Humanity, He
+revealed again and again the characteristics of His Divinity.
+
+It now remains to consider that point in which she most manifests that
+double nature of hers and, simultaneously therefore, presents, as in a
+kind of climax, her identity, under human terms, with Him Who, Himself
+the Lord of Life, conquered death by submitting to it and, by His
+Resurrection from the dead, showed Himself _the Son of God with power_.
+
+I. Death, the world tells us, is the final end of all things, and is the
+one universal law of which evasion is impossible; and this is true, not
+of the individual only, but of society, of nations, of civilization, and
+even, it would seem, ultimately of physical life itself. Every vital
+energy therefore that we possess can be directed not to the abolition,
+but only to the postponement of this final full close to which the most
+ecstatic created harmony must come at last.
+
+Our physicians cannot heal us, they can merely ward off death for a
+little. Our statesmen cannot establish an eternal federation, they can
+but help to hold a crumbling society together for a little longer. Our
+civilization cannot really evolve an immortal superman, it can but
+render ordinary humanity a little less mortal, temporarily and in
+outward appearance. Death, then, in the world's opinion, is the duellist
+who is bound to win. We may parry, evade, leap aside for a little; we
+may even advance upon him and seem to threaten his very existence; our
+energies, in fact, must be concentrated upon this conflict if we are to
+survive at all. But it is only in seeming, at the best. The moment must
+come when, driven back to the last barrier, our last defence falters ...
+and Death has only to wipe his sword.
+
+Now the attitude of the Catholic Church towards Death is not only the
+most violent reversal of the world's policy, but the most paradoxical,
+too, of all her methods. For, while the world attempts to keep Death at
+arm's length, the Church strives to embrace him. Where the world draws
+his sword to meet Death's assault, the Church spreads her heart only to
+receive it. She is in love with Death, she pursues him, honours him,
+extols Him. She places over her altars not a Risen Christ, but a dying
+One.
+
+_If thou wilt be perfect_, she cries to the individual soul, _give up
+all that thou hast and follow me_. "Give up all that makes life worth
+living, strip thyself of every advantage that sustains thy life, of all
+that makes thee effective." It is this that is her supreme appeal, not
+indeed uttered, with all its corollaries, to all her children, but to
+those only that desire perfection. Yet to all, in a sense, the appeal is
+there. _Die daily_, die to self, mortify, yield, give in. If _any man
+will save his life, he must lose it_.
+
+So too, in her dealings with society, is her policy judged suicidal by a
+world that is in love with its own kind of life. It is suicidal, cries
+that world, to relinquish in France all on which the temporal life of
+the Church depends; for how can that society survive which renounces the
+very means of existence? It is suicidal to demand the virgin life of the
+noblest of her children, suicidal to desert the monarchical cause of one
+country, and to set herself in opposition to the Republican ideals of
+another. For even she, after all, is human and must conform to human
+conditions. Even she, however august her claims, must make terms with
+the world if she desires to live in it.
+
+And this comment has been made upon her actions in every age. She
+condemned Arius, when a little compromise might surely have been found;
+and lost half her children. She condemned Luther and lost Germany;
+Elizabeth, and lost England. At every crisis she has made the wrong
+choice, she has yielded when she should have resisted, resisted when she
+should have yielded. The wonder is that she survives at all.
+
+Yes, that is the wonder. _As dying, behold she lives_!
+
+II. The answer of course is easy. It is that she simply does not desire
+the kind of life which the world reckons alone to be life. To her that
+is not life at all. She desires of course to survive as a human society,
+and she is assured that she always shall so survive. Yet it is not on
+the ordinary terms of ordinary society that she desires survival. It is
+not a _natural_ life of which she is ambitious, a life that draws its
+strength from human conditions and human environment, a life, therefore,
+that waxes and wanes with those human conditions and ultimately meets
+their fate, but a _supernatural_ life that draws its strength from God.
+And she recognizes, as one of the most fundamental paradoxes of all,
+that such a life can be gained and held only through what the world
+calls "death."
+
+She does not, then, want merely the life of a prosperous human state,
+whether monarchy or republic. There are times indeed in her history when
+such an accompaniment to her real existence is useful to her
+effectiveness; and she has, of course, the right, as have other
+societies, to earthly dominions that may have been won and presented to
+her by her children. Or through her ministers, as in Paraguay, she may
+administer for a while the ordinary civil affairs of men who choose to
+be loyal to her government. Yet if, for one instant, such a
+responsibility were really to threaten her spiritual effectiveness--if,
+that is, the choice were really presented to her between spiritual and
+temporal dominion--she would let all the kingdoms of the world go in an
+instant, to retain her kingdom from God; she would gladly _suffer the
+loss of all things_ to retain Christ.
+
+And how is it possible to deny for one instant that her success has been
+startling and overwhelming--this fructification of Life by Death.
+
+Are there any human beings, for example, who have been more effective
+and influential than her saints--men and women, that is to say, who have
+_died daily_, in order to live indeed? They have not, it is true,
+prospered, let us say, as business men, directors of companies, or
+government officials, but such a success is simply not her ideal for
+them, not their own ideal for themselves. That is precisely the kind of
+life to which they have, as a rule, determinedly and perseveringly died.
+Yet their effectiveness in this world has been none the less. Are any
+kings remembered as is the beggar Labre who gnawed cabbage stalks in the
+gutters of Rome? Are the names of any statesmen of, let us say, even a
+hundred years ago, reverenced and repeated as is the name of the woman
+of Spain called Teresa of Jesus who, four hundred years ago, ruled a few
+nuns within the enclosure of a convent? Are any musicians or artists
+loved to-day with such rapture as is God's little troubadour, called
+Francis, who made music for himself and the angels by rubbing one stick
+across another?
+
+Or, again, is any empire that the world has ever seen so great, so
+loyally united in itself, so universal and yet so rigorous as is that
+spiritual empire whose capital is Rome? Is there any nation with so
+fierce a patriotism as she who is Supernational? Earthly kings speak
+from their thrones and what happens? And an old man in Rome who wears
+three crowns on his head speaks from his prison in the Vatican and all
+the earth rings with it.
+
+Has her policy, then, been so suicidal after all? From the world's point
+of view it has never been anything else. Her history is but one long
+example of the sacrifice of human activities and earthly opportunities;
+she has expelled from her pulpits the most brilliant of her children,
+she has silenced or alienated the most eloquent of her defenders. She
+has cut off from herself all that she should have kept, and hugged to
+her arms all that she should have relinquished! She has never done
+anything but die! She never does anything but live!
+
+III. Turn, then, to the life of her Lord for the solution of this
+riddle. Last week[1] He was going to His Death. He was losing, little by
+little, all that bound Him to Life. The multitudes that had followed Him
+hitherto were leaving Him by units and groups, they who might have
+formed His armies to seat Him on the throne of His father David.
+Disloyalty had made its way even among His chosen body-guard, and
+already Judas is bargaining for the price of His Master's blood. Even
+the most loyal of all are dismayed, and presently will _forsake Him and
+flee_ when the swords flash out in the garden of Gethsemane. A few weeks
+ago in Galilee thousands were leaving Him for the last time; and when,
+once again, a company seemed to rally, He wept! And so at last the
+sacrifice was complete and, one by one, He laid down of His own will
+every tie that kept Him in life. And then on Good Friday itself He
+suffered that beauty of His _Face to be marred_ so that no man would
+ever _desire Him_ any more, silenced the melody of the Voice that had
+broken so many hearts and made them whole again; He stretched out His
+Shepherd's Hands with which alone He could gather His sheep to His
+Breast, and the Feet that alone could bear Him into the wilderness to
+_seek after that which was lost_. Was there ever a Suicide such as this,
+such a despair of high hopes, such a ruin of all ambition, a dying so
+complete and irremediable as the Dying of Jesus Christ?
+
+[Footnote 1: This Sermon was preached on Easter Day.]
+
+And now on Easter Day look at Him again and see how He lives as never
+before. See how the Life that has been His for thirty years--the Life of
+God made Man--itself pales almost to a phantom before the glory of that
+same Life transfigured by Death. Three days ago He fainted beneath the
+scourge and nails; now He shows the very scars of His Passion to be the
+emblems of immortal strength. Three days ago He spoke in human words to
+those only that were near Him, and limited Himself under human terms of
+space and time; He speaks now in every heart. Three days ago He gave His
+Body to the few who knelt at His Table; to-day in ten thousand
+tabernacles that same Body may be worshipped by all who come.
+
+In a word, He has exchanged a Natural Life for a Supernatural in every
+plane at once. He has laid down the Natural Life of His Body to take it
+back again supernaturalized for ever. He has died that His Life may be
+released; He has _finished_ in order to begin.
+
+It is easy, then, to see why it is that the Church _dies daily_, why it
+is that she is content to be stripped of all that makes her life
+effective, why she too permits her hands to be bound and her feet
+fettered and her beauty marred and her voice silenced so far as men can
+do those things. She is human? Yes; she dwells in a _body that is
+prepared_ for her, but prepared chiefly that she may suffer in it. Her
+far-reaching hands are not hers merely that she may bind up with them
+the broken-hearted, nor her swift feet hers merely that she may run on
+them to succour the perishing, nor her head and heart hers merely that
+she may ponder and love. But all this sensitive human organism is hers
+that at last she may agonize in it, bleed from it from a thousand
+wounds, be lifted up in it to draw all men to her cross.
+
+She does not desire, then, in this world, the _throne of her Father
+David_, nor the kind of triumph which is the only kind that the world
+understands to be so. She desires one life and one triumph only--the
+Risen Life of her Saviour. And this, at last, is the transfiguration of
+her Humanity by the power of her Divinity and the vindication of them
+both.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Paradoxes of Catholicism, by Robert Hugh Benson
+
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