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{{Header
{{TextQuality|75%}}{{title
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|title= The Thing
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|author= Gilbert Keith Chesterton
|title=The Thing
|notes= 1929.
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|author=Gilbert Keith Chesterton
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CONTENTS
1.  INTRODUCTION
2.  THE SCEPTIC AS CRITIC
3.  Is HUMANISM A RELIGION?
4.  THE DRIFT FROM DOMESTICITY
5.  LOGIC AND LAWN TENNIS
6.  OBSTINATE ORTHODOXY
7.  THE USUAL ARTICLE
8.  WHY I AM A CATHOLIC
9.  WHAT DO THEY THINK?
10.  THE MASK OF THE AGNOSTIC
11.  THE EARLY BIRD IN HISTORY
12.  PROTESTANTISM:  A PROBLEM NOVEL
13.  A SIMPLE THOUGHT
14.  THE CALL TO THE BARBARIANS
15.  ON THE NOVEL WITH A PURPOSE
16.  THE REVOLT AGAINST IDEAS
17.  THE FEASTS AND THE ASCETIC
18.  WHO ARE THE CONSPIRATORS?
19.  THE HAT AND THE HALO
20.  ON TWO ALLEGORIES
21.  THE PROTESTANT SUPERSTITIONS
22.  ON COURAGE AND INDEPENDENCE
23.  THE NORDIC HINDOO
24.  SPIRITUALIST LOOKS BACK
25.  THE ROOTS OF SANITY
26.  SOME OF OUR ERRORS
27.  THE SLAVERY OF THE MIND
28.  INGE VERSUS BARNES
29.  WHAT WE THINK ABOUT
30.  THE OPTIMIST AS A SUICIDE
31.  THE OUTLINE OF THE FALL
32.  THE IDOLS OF SCOTLAND
33.  IF THEY HAD BELIEVED
34.  PEACE AND THE PAPACY
35.  THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS
-/-
== TOC ==


* [[The Thing/1|1. Introduction]]
* [[The Thing/1|1. Introduction]]
Line 101: Line 23:
* [[The Thing/16|16. The Revolt Against Ideas]]
* [[The Thing/16|16. The Revolt Against Ideas]]
* [[The Thing/17|17. The Feasts and the Ascetic]]
* [[The Thing/17|17. The Feasts and the Ascetic]]
* [[The Thing/18|18. Who are the Conspirators?]]
* [[The Thing/18|18. Who Are the Conspirators?]]
* [[The Thing/19|19. The Hat and the Halo]]
* [[The Thing/19|19. The Hat and the Halo]]
* [[The Thing/20|20. On Two Allogories]]
* [[The Thing/20|20. On Two Allegories]]
* [[The Thing/21|21. The Protestant Supertitions]]
* [[The Thing/21|21. The Protestant Supertitions]]
* [[The Thing/22|22. On Courage and Independence]]
* [[The Thing/22|22. On Courage and Independence]]
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* [[The Thing/35|35. The Spirit of Christmas]]
* [[The Thing/35|35. The Spirit of Christmas]]


 
[[Category:Gilbert Keith Chesterton]]
 
[[Category:1929]]
== THE MASK OF THE AGNOSTIC ==
{{PD-old-70}}
 
{{DEFAULTSORT:Thing}}
SIR ARTHUR KEITH, in his recent remarks on the soul, let the cat out
of the bag.  He let it out of that very prim and proper professional
bag which is carried by the "medical man" whom he described
as conscientiously compelled to assert that the life of the soul
ceases with the breath of the body.  Perhaps the figure which fits
in so well with the bag is less fortunate in the case of the cat;
a mystic animal, whose nine lives might rather be supposed
to represent immortality, at least in the form of reincarnation.
But anyhow, he let the cat out of the bag; in the sense of
revealing a secret which such wise men would be wiser to keep.
It is the secret that such scientists do not speak as scientists,
but simply as materialists.  That is, they do not give their conclusions,
but simply their opinions; and a very shaky sort of opinions some
of them are.
 
Not long ago, in his famous address on Anthropoids to the Congress
at Leeds, Sir Arthur Keith said that he spoke simply as the foreman
of a jury.  It is true that he had not apparently consulted the jury;
and it was rapidly made clear that the jury violently disagreed;
which is unusual in a jury after the foreman has delivered
the verdict.  Still, in using this image he meant to claim
complete impartiality of a judicial sort.  He meant that a juryman
is bound by oath to go entirely by the facts and the evidence,
without fear or favour.  And this effect would be a hundred times
more effective if we were left free to imagine that the juryman's
personal sympathies might be on the other side; or at least,
if we did not know that they were very keenly on the one side.
Sir Arthur should have been careful to preserve the impression that,
speaking strictly and solely as an anthropologist, he was forced
to accept the natural selection of anthropoids.  He should then
have left it to be inferred that, merely as a private person,
he might be yearning for seraphic visions and celestial hopes;
he might be searching the Scriptures or awaiting the Apocalypse.
For all it was any business of ours, or any business of anybody's,
he might be in private life a Mormon multiplying the stars in his
heavenly crown or a Holy Roller continually convulsed by the Holy Ghost.
The point was that the facts forced the Darwinian conclusion upon him.
And a man of that sort, being forced to accept them, would be a real
witness because a reluctant witness.  In the trial of Darwin the man
might feel for the plaintiff, but the juryman would be forced
to find for the defendant.
 
And now Sir Arthur Keith has thrown the whole of that imperial
impartiality away.  He has gone out of his way to dogmatise and lay
down the law about the soul; which has nothing to do with his subject,
except in so far as it is everybody's subject.  But while it does not
relate to what is his subject, it has told everybody which is his side.
It has turned the foreman of the jury into a very unmistakable
advocate for that side.  Indeed, such a partisan is more like a
party to the suit than an advocate; since it is the whole point
that as a private person he has long had the private prejudice.
Henceforth it is obvious that Keith deciding for Darwin is simply
like Bradlaugh deciding for Darwin, or Ingersoll deciding for Darwin,
or any atheist on a stool in Hyde Park deciding for Darwin.
When THEY choose the side of natural selection, we can all agree
that it is a very natural selection.
 
As to the conclusion itself, it seems almost incredibly inconclusive.
Unless Sir Arthur Keith is very badly misreported, he specially
stated that spiritual existence ceases with the physical functions;
and that no medical man could conscientiously say anything else.
However grave be the injury called death (which indeed is often fatal),
this strikes me as a case in which it is quite unnecessary to call
in a medical man at all.  There is always a certain irony,
even in the simple pages of my favourite detective stories,
in the fact that everybody rushes for a doctor as soon as they are quite
certain that a man is dead.  But in the detective story there may at
least be something to be learnt by the doctor from the dead body.
In the doctrinal speculation there is nothing whatever; and it does
but confuse the eternal detective story for the doctor of medicine
to pretend to be a doctor of divinity.  The truth is that all this
business about "a medical man" is mere bluff and mystagogy.
The medical man "sees" that the mind has ceased with the body.
What the medical man sees is that the body can no longer kick,
talk, sneeze, whistle or dance a jig.  And a man does not need
to be very medical in order to see that.  But whether the principle
of energy, that once made it kick, talk, sneeze, whistle and dance,
does or does not still exist on some other plane of existence--
a medical man knows no more about that than any other man.
And when medical men were clear-headed, some of them (like an ex-surgeon
named Thomas Henry Huxley) said they did not believe that medical men or
any men could know anything about it.  That is an intelligible position;
but it does not seem to be Sir Arthur Keith's position.  He has been
put up publicly to DENY that the soul survives the body; and to make
the extraordinary remark that any medical man must say the same.
It is as if we were to say that any competent builder or surveyor
must deny the possibility of the Fourth Dimension; because he has
learnt the technical secret that a building is measured by length,
breadth and height.  The obvious query is--Why bring in a surveyor?
Everybody knows that everything is in fact measured by three dimensions.
Anybody who thinks there is a fourth dimension thinks so in spite
of being well aware that things are generally measured by three.
Or it is as if a man were to answer a Berkeleian metaphysician,
who holds all matter to be an illusion of mind, by saying,
"I can call the evidence of an intelligent navvy who actually
has to deal with solid concrete and cast iron; and he will tell
you they are quite real."  We should naturally answer that we
do not need a navvy to tell us that solid things are solid;
and it is quite in another sense that the philosopher says they
are not solid.  Similarly, there is nothing to make a medical man
a materialist, except what might make any man a materialist.
And it is when a man has absorbed all that obvious materialism
that he begins to use his mind.  And, as some hold, does not stop.
 
This very unphilosophical irruption into philosophy was, however,
in one way enlightening.  It threw a light backwards on the speaker's
previous proclamation on things on which he has more right to speak.
Even in those things he betrayed a curious simplicity common among
such official scientists.  The truth is that they become steadily
less scientific and more official.  They develop that thin disguise
that is the daily wear of politicians.  They perform before us
the most artful tricks with the most artless transparency.
It is like watching a child trying to hide something.  They are
perpetually trying to bluff us with big words and learned allusions;
on the assumption that we have never learnt anything--even of their
own funny little ways.  Every leader-writer who thunders "Galileo"
at us assumes that we know even less about Galileo than he does.
Every preacher of popular science who throws a long word at us
thinks we shall have to look it up in the dictionary and hopes
we shall not study it seriously even in the encyclopaedia.
Their use of science is rather like the use made of it by the heroes
of certain adventure stories, in which the white men terrify
the savages by predicting an eclipse or producing an electric shock.
These are in a sense true demonstrations of science.
They are in a sense right in saying that they are scientists.
Where they are perhaps wrong is in supposing that we are savages.
 
But it is rather amusing for us who watch the preparations for giving
us an electric shock, when we are seriously expected to be shocked
by the shock.  It is rather a joke when we, the benighted savages,
are ourselves not only quite capable of predicting the eclipse,
but capable of predicting the prediction.  Now, among these facts
that have been familiar to us for a long time is the fact that men
of science stage and prepare their effects exactly as politicians do.
They also do it rather badly--exactly as politicians do.
Neither of these two modern mystagogues has yet realised how transparent
his tricks have become.  One of the most familiar and transparent
of them is what is known as the "official contradiction."
It is a strange symbolic way of declaring that something has
happened by denying that it has happened.  So whitewashing reports
are published after political scandals as regularly as bluebooks.
So the Right Honourable Gentleman hopes it is not necessary for him
to contradict what he feels sure the Honourable Member could
not have intended to insinuate.  So a Cabinet Minister is put up
to deny from a platform that there is any change in the Government's
policy about Damascus.  And so Sir Arthur Keith is put up to deny
that there is any change in the scientific attitude about Darwin.
 
And when we hear that, we all give a sort of sigh of satisfaction;
for we all know exactly what THAT means.  It means more or less
the opposite of what it says.  It means that there has been a devil
of a row about Damascus inside the Party, or, in other words,
that there is beginning to be a devil of a scandal about discredited
Darwinians inside the scientific world.  The curious thing
is that in the latter case the officials are not only solemn
in uttering the official contradiction, but much more simple
in supposing that nobody will realize that it is official.
In the case of the similar legal fiction in politics, the politicians
by this time not only know the truth, but often know that we know
the truth.  Everybody knows by this time, by the gossip that is
repeated everywhere, exactly what is meant by the absolute agreement
on everything which binds the Prime Minister and all his colleagues.
The Prime Minister does not really expect us to believe that he is
the holy and beloved king of a brotherhood of knights sworn to a
faith and giving their hearts to him alone.  But Sir Arthur Keith
does really expect us to believe that he is the foreman of a jury
containing all the different men of science, all absolutely agreed
that Darwin's particular opinion was "eternal." That is what I mean
by childish concealment; and the artless or transparent trick.
That is why I say that they do not even know how much we know.
 
For the politician is less pompously absurd than the anthropologist,
even if we test it by what they both call Progress; which is
mostly only another word for Time.  We all know the official
optimism which always defends the present government.
But this is like an official defence of all the past governments.
If a man were to say that the politics of Palmerston were eternal,
we should think him a little out of date.  Yet Darwin was prominent
at about the same date as Palmerston; and is quite equally dated.
If Mr. Lloyd George were to get up and say that the great Liberal Party
had not receded from one single position taken up by Gobden and Bright,
the only true Tribunes of the People, we should reluctantly conclude
(if such a thing be conceivable) that he was talking party
claptrap to people ignorant of the history of the party.
If a social reformer were to affirm solemnly that all social philosophy
was still proceeding strictly on the principles of Herbert Spencer,
we should know it was doing nothing of the sort, and that only
an absolutely fossilized official could pretend that it was.
Yet Darwin and Spencer were not only contemporaries but comrades
and allies; and the Darwinian biology and the Spencerian
sociology were regarded as parts of the same movement,
which our grandfathers regarded as a very modern movement.
Even considered a priori as a matter of probability it therefore
seems rather unlikely that the science of that generation was any
more infallible than its ethics and politics.  Even on the principles
Sir Arthur professes, it seems very queer that there should now
be no more to be said about Darwinism than he said about it.
But we do not need to appeal to those principles or those probabilities.
We can appeal to the facts.  As it happens, we do know something
about the facts; and Sir Arthur Keith does not seem to know
that we know.
 
It was in a Catholic paper that certain statements were made about
Darwinism to-day; statements which Sir Arthur Keith himself went
out of his way to contradict; and about which Sir Arthur Keith
himself was proved sensationally and disastrously wrong.
Probably the story is now known to all readers of that paper; but it
will possibly never come to the knowledge of most other journalists,
and it certainly will not be recorded in most of the other papers.
Touching this cosmic controversy, most of the other papers are
emphatically party papers; and they support the party leader when
he publishes the official contradiction.  They will not let the public
know how triumphantly his other contradiction was contradicted.
 
When Mr. Belloc stated that these Darwinians were out of date and ignorant
of recent biology, he quoted among a great many other recent authorities
the French biologist Vialleton as denying the possibility of natural
selection in a particular case connected with reptiles and birds.
Sir Arthur Keith, coming to the rescue of Mr. H. G. Wells, and eager
to prove that he and Mr. Wells were not out of date or ignorant
of recent biology, proceeded to contradict Mr. Belloc flatly.
He said that there was no such statement in Vialleton's book;
in other words, he accused Mr. Belloc of having misquoted or
misrepresented Vialleton's book.  It then appeared, to the amazement
of everybody, and especially of Mr. Belloc, that Sir Arthur Keith did
not even know of the existence of the book.  He was referring only
to an early and elementary work by the same author published long ago.
That was the last he had ever read of Vialleton.  The important book,
of which even I, a mere unscientific man in the street,
had heard at least something, had never come to his ears at all.
In short, the general charge, that Darwinians are out of date
in their information, was proved about as completely as anything
controversial can ever be proved in this world.
 
Now, when a thing like that has happened, above all when it
has happened to us, in the pages of a paper in which I write,
in the experience of one of my own friends, how can it be expected
that people in our position should take seriously the speech
at the opening of the British Association at Leeds?  How can we
keep a straight face when the President strikes an attitude as if
pointing to the stars and declaring Darwinism equally eternal?
That sort of thing is not meant for us; but for the reporters;
just as the true story of Wells and Belloc is generally kept out
of the reports.
 
-/-
 
== THE EARLY BIRD IN HISTORY ==
 
ST.  JOAN OF ARC, a star and a thunderbolt, strange as a meteoric
stone whose very solidity is not of this earth, may be compared
also to a diamond among pebbles; the one white stone of history.
Like a diamond, she is clear but not simple, as some count simplicity;
but having many facets or aspects.  There is one aspect of the
discussion on St. Joan which I have never seen specially noted,
and it seems to be worth a note.  It concerns that common and current
charge against the Catholic Church that she is, as the phrase goes,
always behind the times.
 
When I became a Catholic, I was quite prepared to find that in many
respects she really was behind the times.  I was very tolerant
of the idea of being behind the times, having had long opportunities
of studying the perfectly ghastly people who were abreast of the times;
or the still more pestilent people who were in advance of the times.
I was prepared to find Catholicism rather Conservative, and in that
sense slow; and so, of course, in some aspects it is.  I knew that
being in the movement generally meant only being in the fashion.
I knew that fashions had an extraordinary way of being first
omnipresent and oppressive and then suddenly blank and forgotten.
I knew how publicity seems fixed like a spotlight and vanishes
like a lightning-flash. I had seen the whole public imagination
filled with a succession of Krugers and Kaisers, who were to be
hanged next week and about whom nobody cared a hang next month.
I have lived through an overwhelming illusion that there was nobody
in the world except General Gordon or Captain Dreyfus or the elephant
Jumbo at the Zoo.  If there is something in the world that takes
no notice of these world-changes, I confess to finding a certain
comfort in its indifference.  I think it was just as well, from every
point of view, that the ecclesiastical authorities delayed a decision
about Darwinism or even Evolution; and declined altogether to be
excited in that universal excitement.  There were many, even among
the sympathetic, who seemed to think that Catholics ought to put up
an altar to the Missing Link, as Pagans did to the Unknown God.
But Catholics prefer to wait until they know what they are doing;
and would prefer to learn a little more about a thing besides
the fact that nobody can find it.  And of course it is true that
in some matters, judged by the feverish pace of recent fashion,
the Church has always been slow as well as sure.  But there is
another side of the truth, and one which is more commonly missed.
As it happens, both sides are strikingly illustrated in the story
of the status of St. Joan.
 
If we go back to the very beginning of a story, we very often find
that the Church did actually do something which her foes ignored
and even her friends forgot.  Then other social tendencies set in,
other questions occupied the world, the tides of time and change
passed over the whole business; and when that business came again
to the surface, the world had the impression that the Church was
dealing with it after a very long delay.  But the world itself
had never dealt with it at all.  The world, as a matter of fact,
had never woken up to the fact at all, until it woke up with a start
and began to abuse the Church for not having woken up before.
During all those long intervening ages, the world had really
been much more asleep than the Church.  The Church, a very long
time ago, had done something; and the world had done nothing.
The case of St. Joan of Arc is one curious example.
 
The Canonisation of St. Joan came very slowly and very late.
But the Rehabilitation of St. Joan came very promptly and very early.
It is a very exceptional example of rapid reparation for a judicial
crime or a miscarriage of justice.  There have been any number of these
judicial crimes in history.  There have been any number of heroes
and martyrs whom history regards as having suffered for their virtues.
It has almost passed into a popular proverb, especially in
modern times; as in the words of the American popular poet:
"Right for ever on the scaffold, wrong for ever on the throne."
But I can hardly remember another example of the throne paying so prompt
a salute to the scaffold.  The condemnation of St. Joan was reversed
by the Pope in the lifetime of her contemporaries, at the appeal
of her brothers; about as soon as anybody could have expected anything
of the sort to be reversed.  I do not know if the Athenian Republic
did as much for Socrates or the Florentine for Savonarola;
but I am pretty certain that nobody could have got the Carthaginians
to apologise thus to Regulus or the Antiochi to Maccabaeus.
The only really fair way of considering the fashionable subject
of the crimes of Christendom would be to compare them with the crimes
of heathenism; and the normal human practice of the Pagan world.
And while it may be a weakness of human beings, of every age
and creed, to stone the prophets and then build their sepulchres,
it is really very seldom that the sepulchre is built even as
quickly as that.  When those who build the sepulchre are really
and truly the representatives or inheritors of those who threw
the stones, it does not generally happen for hundreds of years.
To take the parallel passions of the secular side of the Middle Ages,
we should be considerably surprised to learn that when the head
of William Wallace had been stuck on a spike by Edward the First,
his remains had been respectfully interred and his character
cleared by Edward the Third.  We should be considerably surprised
if the courts of Queen Elizabeth had gone out of their way to
repudiate and quash the case against Thomas More.  It is generally
long afterwards, when the actual ambitions and rivalries are dead,
when the feuds and family interests have long been forgotten,
that a rather sentimental though sincere tenderness is shown
to the dead enemy.  In the nineteenth century the English
do make a romance about Wallace and a statue of Washington.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the English do produce
a fine enthusiasm and a number of excellent books about St. Joan.
And I for one hope to see the day when this measure of magnanimity
shall be filled up where it has been most wanting; and some such
payment made for the deepest debt of all.  I should like to see
the day when the English put up a statue of Emmett beside the statue
of Washington; and I wish that in the Centenary of Emancipation
there were likely to be as much fuss in London about the figure
of Daniel O'Connell as there was about that of Abraham Lincoln.
 
But I mean the comment here in a rather larger sense; and in a larger
sense it is an even stronger case.  I mean that if we take the tale
of St. Joan as a test, the really remarkable thing is not so much
the slowness of the Church to appreciate her, as the slowness of
everybody else.  The world, especially the wisest men of the world,
were extraordinarily late in realising what a remarkable thing
had happened; very much later than the rather rigid religious officials
of the fifteenth century.  That rigidity of fifteenth century religion
was very soon broken up, partly by good and partly by bad forces.
Comparatively soon after St. Joan's ashes were thrown into the Seine,
quite soon after the Rehabilitation, the Renaissance had really begun.
Very soon after that the Reformation had begun.  The Renaissance
produced a number of large and liberal views on all sorts of things.
The Reformation produced numberless narrow views, divided among
all sorts of sects.  But at least there were plenty of differences
and varied points of view, many of them now loosened from anything
that may have been restrictive in the medieval discipline.
Human reason and imagination, left to themselves, might at
least have made as much of Jeanne d'Arc as of John Huss.
As a fact, human reason and imagination, left to themselves,
made extraordinarily little of her.  Humanism and Humanitarianism and,
in a general sense, Humanity, did not really rehabilitate Joan
until about five hundred years after the Church had done so.
 
The history of what great men have said about this great woman is
a very dismal tale.  The greatest man of all, Shakespeare, has an
unfortunate pre-eminence by his insular insults in HENRY THE SIXTH.
But the thing went on long after Shakespeare; and was far worse in people
who had far less excuse than Shakespeare.  Voltaire was a Frenchman;
he was a great Frenchman; he professed an admiration for many
French heroes; he certainly professed to be a reformer and a friend
of freedom; he most certainly might have seized on any mediaeval
miscarriage of justice that might be turned to anti-clerical account.
What Voltaire wrote about St. Joan it will be most decent
to pass over in silence.  But it is the same all along the line;
it is the same far later in rationalistic history than Voltaire.
Byron had with all his faults a sensibility to the splendid and heroic,
especially in the matter of nations struggling to be free.
He was far less insular than any other English poet; he had far
more comprehension of France and of the Continent; and he is
still comprehended and admired there.  He called St. Joan of Arc
a fanatical strumpet.  That was the general tone of human culture,
of history as taught and talked in the age of reason.
Mr. Belloc has noted that, so strong was this secular social pressure,
that even a Catholic, when he wished to be moderate, like Lingard,
was more or less sceptical, not indeed of the morality, but certainly
of the miraculous mission of St. Joan.  It is true that Schiller
was sympathetic, though sentimental--and therefore out of touch.
But it was not till nearly the end of the nineteenth century,
not fully until the beginning of the twentieth century,
that ordinary men of genius awoke to the recognition of one of
the most wonderful women of genius in the history of the world.
One of the first really popular attempts at a rationalist
rehabilitation came, of all people in the world, from Mark Twain.
His notion of the Middle Ages was as provincial as the Yankee at the Court
of King Arthur; but it is to the credit of this rather crude genius,
of the late culture of a new country, that he did catch the flame from
the pyre of Rouen, which so many cultivated sceptics had found cold.
Then came a patronising pamphlet by Anatole France; which I for one
think rather more insulting than the ribald verse of Voltaire.
Then came the last great attempt; wrong in many ways in its contention,
but conspicuously spirited and sincere--the play of St. Joan.
On the whole, nobody can say that humanists and rationalists have
been very early in the field.  This heroine had to wait about five
centuries for Bernard Shaw.
 
Now, in that comparison, nobody can say that the Church
comes off very badly in comparison with the world.
The truth is that the ecclesiastical apology to the martyr came
so early that everybody had forgotten all about it, long before
the rest of the world began to consider the question at all.
And though I have taken here the particular case of St. Joan
of Arc, I believe that something of the same sort could be traced
through a great many other affairs in human history.
 
It is true of those who gave the Jesuits a bad name and hanged them;
and the hanging was not always metaphorical.  The simplified version
of it is to say that the Jesuits, especially in their capacity
of Casuists, suffered almost entirely from being two hundred
years before their time.  They tried to start in a cautious way
what is now surging up on every side of us in a chaotic way;
all that is implied in talking about problem novels and problem plays.
In other words, they recognised that there really are problems
in moral conduct; not problems about whether the moral law should
be obeyed, but problems about how in a particular case the moral
law really applies.  But they were not remembered as pioneers
who had begun to ask the questions of Ibsen and Hardy and Shaw.
They were remembered only as wicked conspirators who had not always
believed in the Divine Right of Kings.  They pioneered early
enough to be execrated by an earlier generation; but too early
to be thanked by a later generation.  Protestants have eagerly
supported Pascal against them, without taking the trouble to discover
that any number of the things that Pascal denounced are things
that any modern man would defend.  For instance, Pascal blamed
the infamous Jesuits for saying that a girl might in some conditions
marry against the wish of her parents.  The Jesuits would have
had all modern novels, let alone problem novels, on their side.
But they were too early in the field to have anybody on their side.
Moreover, they wished to fit these exceptions into the moral rule;
the Moderns who did it two centuries later have produced no rule,
but a welter of exceptions.
 
Here, again, is yet another example that occurs to me at the moment.
Many have given long histories of the laborious slowness with which
the idea of justice to the aborigines, to Red Indians or such races,
has advanced step by step with the progress of modern humanitarian ideas.
In such a history Penn, the great Quaker, appears like a primeval
founder and father of the republic; and he was undoubtedly very early
in the field--in the Puritan field.  But Las Casas, the Apostle
of the Indians, actually sailed in a ship with Christopher Columbus.
It would be difficult to be earlier in the American field than that.
He spent his life pleading for the rights of the savages; but he did
it at a time when nobody in the north would listen to such a story
about a saint of Spain.  In this and in many other examples, I believe
that the real history of the Catholic pioneer has been the same;
to be first and to be forgotten.
 
-/-
 
== PROTESTANTISM:  A PROBLEM NOVEL ==
 
I HAVE been looking at the little book on Protestantism which
Dean Inge has contributed to the sixpenny series of Sir Ernest Benn;
and though I suppose it has already been adequately criticised, it may
be well to jot down a few notes on it before it is entirely forgotten.
The book, which is called "Protestantism," obviously ought to be
called "Catholicism." What the Dean has to say about any real
thing recognisable as Protestantism is extraordinarily patchy,
contradictory and inconclusive.  It is only what he has to say about
Catholicism that is clear, consistent and to the point.  It is warmed
and quickened by the human and hearty motive of hatred; and it makes
everything else in the book look timid and tortuous by comparison.
I am not going to annotate the work considered as history.
There are some curious, if not conscious, falsifications of fact,
especially in the form of suppressions of fact.  He begins by
interpreting Protestantism as a mere "inwardness and sincerity"
in religion; which none of the Protestant reformers would have admitted
to be Protestantism, and which any number of Catholic reformers have
made the very heart and soul of their reforms inside Catholicism.
It might be suggested that self-examination is now more often
urged and practised among Catholics than among Protestants.
But whether or no the champions of sincerity examine themselves,
they might well examine their statements.  Some of the statements
here might especially be the subject of second thoughts.
It is really a startling suppression and falsification to say that
Henry the Eighth had only a few household troops; so that his people
must have favoured his policy, or they would have risen against it.
It seems enough to reply that they did rise against it.
And BECAUSE Henry had only a few household troops, he brought in bands
of ferocious mercenaries from abroad to put down the religious
revolt of his own people.  It is an effort of charity to concede
even complete candour to the story-teller, who can actually use
such an argument, and then keep silent upon such a sequel.
Or again, it is outrageously misleading to suggest that the Catholic
victims of Tudor and other tyranny were justly executed as traitors
and not as martyrs to a religion.  Every persecutor alleges social and
secular necessity; so did Caiaphas and Annas; so did Nero and Diocletian;
from the first the Christians were suppressed as enemies of the Empire;
to the last the heretics were handed over to the secular arm
with secular justifications.  But when, in point of plain fact,
a man can be hanged, drawn and quartered merely for saying Mass,
or sometimes for helping somebody who has said Mass, it is simply
raving nonsense to say that a religion is not being persecuted.
To mention only one of many minor falsifications of this kind,
it is quite true to say that Milton was in many ways more of a Humanist
than a Puritan; but it is quite false to suggest that the Milton family
was a typical Puritan family, in its taste for music and letters.
The very simple explanation is that the Milton family was largely
a Catholic family; and it was the celebrated John who specially
separated himself from its creed but retained its culture.
Countless other details as definitely false could be quoted;
but I am much more interested in the general scope of the work--
which allows itself to be so curiously pointless about Protestantism,
merely in order to make a point against Catholicism.
 
Here is the Dean's attempt at a definition.  "What is the main function
of Protestantism?  It is essentially an attempt to check the tendency to
corruption and degradation which attacks every institutional religion."
So far, so good.  In that case St. Charles Borromeo, for instance,
was obviously a leading Protestant.  St. Dominic and St. Francis,
who purged the congested conventionalism of much of the monasticism
around them, were obviously leading Protestants.  The Jesuits who sifted
legend by the learning of Bollandism, were obviously leading Protestants.
But most living Protestant leaders are not leading Protestants.
If degradation drags down EVERY institutional religion, it has
presumably dragged down Protestant institutional religion.
Protestants might possibly appear to purge Protestantism; but so did
Catholics appear to purge Catholicism.  Plainly this definition is
perfectly useless as a DISTINCTION between Protestantism and Catholicism.
For it is not a description of any belief or system or body of thought;
but simply of a good intention, which all men of all Churches would
profess and a few men in some Churches practise--especially in ours.
But the Dean not only proves that modern Protestant institutions ought to
be corrupt, he says that their primitive founders ought to be repudiated.
He distinctly holds that we cannot follow Luther and Calvin.
 
Very well--let us go on and see whom we are to follow.
I will take one typical passage towards the end of the book.
The Dean first remarks, "The Roman Church has declared that there can
be no reconciliation between Rome and modern Liberalism or Progress."
One would like to see the encyclical or decree in which this
declaration was made.  Liberalism might mean many things,
from the special thing which Newman denounced and defined
to the intention of voting at a by-election for Sir John Simon.
Progress generally means something which the Pope has never,
so far as I know, found it necessary to deny; but which the Dean
himself has repeatedly and most furiously denied.  He then goes on:
"Protestantism is entirely free from this uncompromising preference
for the Dark Ages."  "The Dark Ages," of course, is cant and claptrap;
we need take no notice of that.  But we may perhaps notice,
not without interest and amusement, that about twenty-five
lines before, the Dean himself has described the popular Protestantism
of America as if it were a barbarism and belated obscurantism.
From which one may infer that the Dark Ages are still going on,
exactly where there is Protestantism to preserve them.
And considering that he says at least five times that the appeal
of Protestants to the letter of Scripture is narrow and superstitious,
it surely seems a little astonishing that he should sum up
by declaring Protestantism, as such, to be "ENTIRELY free"
from this sort of darkness.  Then, on top of all this welter of
wordy contradictions, we have this marvellous and mysterious conclusion:
"It is in this direction that Protestants may look for the beginning
of what may really be a new Reformation, a resumption of the unfinished
work of Sir Thomas More, Giordano Bruno and Erasmus."
 
In short, Protestants may look forward to a Reformation modelled on
the work of two Catholics and one obscure mystic, who was not a Protestant
and of whose tenets they and the world know practically nothing.
One hardly knows where to begin, in criticising this very new Reformation,
two-thirds of which was apparently started by men of the Old Religion.
We might meekly suggest that, if it be regrettable that the work
of Sir Thomas More was "unfinished," some portion of the blame
may perhaps attach to the movement that cut off his head.
Is it possible, I wonder, that what the Dean really means is that we
want a new Reformation to undo all the harm that was done by the
old Reformation?  In this we certainly have no reason to quarrel
with him.  We should be delighted also to have a new Reformation,
of ourselves as well as of Protestants and other people; though it
is only fair to say that Catholics did, within an incredibly short
space of time, contrive to make something very like a new Reformation;
which is commonly called the Counter-Reformation. St. Vincent de
Paul and St. Francis of Sales have at least as good a right to call
themselves inheritors of the courtesy and charity of More as has
the present Dean of St. Paul's. But putting that seventeenth century
reform on one side, there is surely something rather stupendous
about the reform that the Dean proposes for the twentieth century,
and the patron saints he selects for it out of the sixteenth century.
 
For this, it seems, is how we stand.  We are not to follow
Luther and Calvin.  But we are to follow More and Erasmus.
And that, if you please, is the true Protestantism and the promise
of a second Reformation.  We are to copy the views and virtues
of the men who found they could remain under the Pope, and especially
of one who actually died for the supremacy of the Pope.
We are to throw away practically every rag of thought or theory that was
held by the people who did not remain under the supremacy of the Pope.
And we are to bind up all these views in a little popular pamphlet
with an orange cover and call them "Protestantism." The truth
is that Dean Inge had an impossible title and an impossible task.
He had to present Protestantism as Progress; when he is far too
acute and cultivated a man not to suspect that it was (as it was)
a relapse into barbarism and a break away from all that was
central in civilisation.  Even by the test of the Humanist,
it made religion inhuman.  Even by the test of the liberal,
it substituted literalism for liberalism.  Even if the goal
had been mere Modernism, it led its followers to it by a long,
dreary and straggling detour, a wandering in the wilderness, that did
not even discover Modernism till it had first discovered Mormonism.
Even if the goal had been logical scepticism, Voltaire could
reach it more rapidly from the school of the Jesuits than
the poor Protestant provincial brought up among the Jezreelites.
Every mental process, even the process of going wrong, is clearer in
the Catholic atmosphere.  Protestantism has done nothing for Dean Inge,
except give him a Deanery which rather hampers his mental activity.
It has done nothing for his real talent or scholarship or sense
of ideas.  It has not in history defended any of the ideas
he defends, or helped any of the liberties in which he hopes.
But it has done one thing:  it has hurt something he hates.
It has done some temporary or apparent harm to the heritage of St. Peter.
It once made something that looked like a little crack in the wall
of Rome.  And because of THAT, the Dean can pardon anything
to the Protestants--even Protestantism.
 
For this is the strange passion of his life; and he toils through
all these pages of doubts and distinctions only for the moment when
he can liberate his soul in one wild roar of monomaniac absurdity:
"Let the innocent Dreyfus die in prison; let the Irishman who has
committed a treacherous murder be told to leave 'politics'
out of his confession; let the lucrative imposture of Lourdes..."
That is the way to talk!  It is so tiring, pretending to talk sense.
 
-/-
 
== A SIMPLE THOUGHT ==
 
MOST men would return to the old ways in faith and morals if they
could broaden their minds enough to do so.  It is narrowness that
chiefly keeps them in the rut of negation.  But this enlargement
is easily misunderstood, because the mind must be enlarged to see
the simple things; or even to see the self-evident things.
It needs a sort of stretch of imagination to see the obvious
objects against the obvious background; and especially the big
objects against the big background.  There is always the sort
of man who can see nothing but the spot on the carpet, so that
he cannot even see the carpet.  And that tends to irritation,
which he may magnify into rebellion.  Then there is the kind of man
who can only see the carpet, perhaps because it is a new carpet.
That is more human, but it may be tinged with vanity and even vulgarity.
There is the man who can only see the carpeted room;
and that will tend to cut him off too much from other things,
especially the servants' quarters.  Finally, there is the man
enlarged by imagination, who cannot sit in the carpeted room,
or even in the coal-cellar, without seeing all the time the outline
of the whole house against its aboriginal background of earth and sky.
He, understanding that the roof is raised from the beginning as a shield
against sun or snow, and the door against frost or slime, will know
better and not worse than the rest the reasons of the rules within.
He will know better than the first man that there ought not to be
a spot on the carpet.  But he will know, unlike the first man,
why there is a carpet.
 
He will regard in the same fashion a speck or spot upon
the records of his tradition or his creed.  He will not explain
it ingeniously; certainly he will not explain it away.
On the contrary, he will see it very simply; but he will also see
it very largely; and against the background of larger things.
He will do what his critics never by any chance do; he will see
the obvious thing and ask the obvious question.  For the more I
read of the modern criticisms of religion, especially of my
own religion, the more I am struck by this narrow concentration
and this imaginative incapacity to take in the problem as a whole.
I have recently been reading a very moderate condemnation of current
Catholic practices, coming from America, where the condemnation is often
far from moderate.  It takes the form, generally speaking, of a swarm
of questions, all of which I should be quite willing to answer.
Only I am vividly conscious of the big questions that are not asked,
rather than of the little questions that are.
 
And I feel above all, this simple and forgotten fact; that whether
certain charges are or are not true of Catholics, they are quite
unquestionably true of everybody else.  It never occurs to the critic
to do anything so simple as to compare what is Catholic with what is
Non-Catholic. The one thing that never seems to cross his mind,
when he argues about what the Church is like, is the simple question
of what the world would be like without it.
 
That is what I mean by being too narrow to see the house
called the church against the background called the cosmos.
For instance, the writer of whom I speak indulges in the millionth
mechanical repetition of the charge of mechanical repetition.
He says that we repeat prayers and other verbal forms without
thinking about them.  And doubtless there are many sympathisers
who will repeat that denunciation after him, without thinking
about it at all.  But, before we come to explaining the Church's
real teaching about such things, or quoting her numberless
recommendations of attention and vigilance, or expounding the reason
of the reasonable exceptions that she does allow, there is a wide,
a simple and a luminous truth about the whole situation which anybody
can see if he will walk about with his eyes open.  It is the obvious
fact that ALL human forms of speech tend to fossilise into formalism;
and that the Church stands unique in history not as talking a dead
language among everlasting languages; but, on the contrary,
as having preserved a living language in a world of dying languages.
When the great Greek cry breaks into the Latin of the Mass,
as old as Christianity itself, it may surprise some to learn
that there are a good many people in church who really do say
KYRIE ELEISON and mean exactly what they say.  But anyhow,
they mean what they say rather more than a man who begins a letter
with "Dear Sir" means what he says.  "Dear" is emphatically
a dead word; in that place it has ceased to have any meaning.
It is exactly what the Protestants would allege of Popish rites
and forms; it is done rapidly, ritually, and without any memory
even of the meaning of the rite.  When Mr. Jones the solicitor
uses it to Mr. Brown the banker, he does not mean that the banker
is dear to him, or that his heart is filled with Christian love,
even so much as the heart of some poor ignorant Papist listening
to the Mass.  Now, life, ordinary, jolly, heathen, human life,
is simply chockful of these dead words and meaningless ceremonies.
You will not escape from them by escaping from the Church into the world.
When the critic in question, or a thousand other critics like him,
say that we are only required to make a material or mechanical
attendance at Mass, he says something which is NOT true about
the ordinary Catholic in his feelings about the Catholic Sacraments.
But he says something which IS true about the ordinary
official attending official functions, about the ordinary
Court levee or Ministerial reception, and about three-quarters
of the ordinary society calls and polite visits in the town.
This deadening of repeated social action may be a harmless thing;
it may be a melancholy thing; it may be a mark of the Fall of Man;
it may be anything the critic chooses to think.  But those who have
made it, hundreds and hundreds of times, a special and concentrated
charge against the Church, are men blind to the whole human world
they live in and unable to see anything but the thing they traduce.
 
There are, even in this record, any number of other cases of this
queer and uncanny unconsciousness.  The writer complains that
priests are led blindfold into their calling and do not understand
the duties involved in it.  That also we seem to have heard before.
But we have seldom heard it in so extraordinary a form
as in his statement, that a man can be finally committed
to the priesthood while he is still "a child."  He would appear
to have odd and elastic ideas about the duration of childhood.
As Mr. Michael Williams has pointed out in his most thoughtful and
illuminating collection of essays, "Catholicism and the Modern Mind,"
this is playing about with a matter of plain fact; since a priest
is twenty-four at the earliest when he takes his vows.  But here
again I myself am haunted by this huge and naked and yet neglected
comparison between the Church and everything outside the Church.
Most critics of Catholicism declare it to be destructive of patriotism;
and this critic says something about the disadvantages of the Church
being merely "attached to an Italian diocese."  Well, I for one have
always been a defender of the cult of patriotism; and nothing that I
say here has any connection with what is commonly called pacifism.
I think that our friends and brethren fell ten years ago in a just war
against the hard heathenism of the north; I think the Prussianism
they defeated was frozen with the pride of hell; and for these dead,
I think it is well with them; and perhaps better than with us,
who live to see how evil Peace can be.
 
But really--when we come to talk about the Church involving
young people in vows!  What are we to say to those who would pit
patriotism or pagan citizenship against the Church on that issue?
They conscript by violence boys of eighteen, they applaud volunteers
of sixteen for saying they are eighteen, they throw them by thousands
into a huge furnace and torture-chamber, of which their imaginations
can have conceived nothing and from which their honour forbids
them to escape; they keep them in those horrors year after year
without any knowledge even of the possibility of victory; and kill
them like flies by the million before they have begun to live.
That is what the State does; that is what the World does; that is
what their Protestant, practical, sensible, secular society does.
And after that they have the astounding impudence to come and complain
of us, because in dealing with a small minority of specialists,
we allow a man finally to choose a charitable and peaceful life,
not only long after he is twenty-one, but when he is well on
towards thirty, and after he has had about ten years to think
quietly whether he will do it or not!
 
In short, what I miss in all these things is the obvious thing:
the question of how the Church compares with the world outside the Church,
or opposed to the Church, or offered as a substitute for the Church.
And the fact obviously is that the world will do all that it has ever
accused the Church of doing, and do it much worse, and do it on a much
larger scale, and do it (which is worst and most important of all)
without any standards for a return to sanity or any motives
for a movement of repentance.  Catholic abuses can be reformed,
because there is the admission of a form.  Catholic sins can
be expiated, because there is a test and a principle of expiation.
But where else in the world to-day is any such test or standard found;
or anything except a changing mood, which makes patriotism the fashion
ten years ago and pacifism the fashion ten years afterwards?
 
The danger is to-day that men will not sufficiently enlarge their
minds to take in the obvious things; and this is one of them.
It is that men charge the Roman tradition with being half-heathen
and then take refuge from it in a complete heathenism.
It is that men complain because Christians have been infected
with paganism; and then flee from the plague-spotted to take refuge
with the pestilence.  There is no single one of these faults
alleged against the Catholic institution, which is not far
more flagrant and even flamboyant in every other institution.
And it is to these other institutions, the State, the School,
the modern machinery of taxation and police, to which these people
actually look to save them from the superstition of their fathers.
That is the contradiction; that is the crashing collision;
that is the inevitable intellectual disaster in which they have already
involved themselves; and we have only to wait as patiently as we can,
to see how long it is before they realise what has happened.
 
 
-/-
 
== THE CALL TO THE BARBARIANS ==
 
A BOOK was sent me the other day by a gentleman who pins his faith
to what he calls the Nordic race; and who, indeed, appears to offer
that race as a substitute for all religions.  Crusaders believed that
Jerusalem was not only the Holy City, but the centre of the whole world.
Moslems bow their heads towards Mecca and Roman Catholics are
notorious for being in secret communication with Rome.  I presume
that the Holy Place of the Nordic religion must be the North Pole.
What form of religious architecture is exhibited in its icebergs,
how far its vestments are modified by the white covering of
Arctic animals, how the morning and evening service may be adapted
to a day and a night each lasting for six months, whether their
only vestment is the alb or their only service the angelus of noon,
upon all these mysteries I will not speculate.  But I can affirm
with some confidence that the North Pole is very little troubled
by heretical movements or the spread of modern doubt.  Anyhow, it would
seem that we know next to nothing about this social principle,
except that anything is good if it is near enough to the North.
And this undoubtedly explains the spiritual leadership of the
Eskimo throughout history; and the part played by Spitzbergen
as the spiritual arena of modern times.  The only thing that
puzzles me is that the Englishmen who now call themselves Nordic
used to call themselves Teutonic; and very often even Germanic.
I cannot think why they altered this so abruptly in the autumn of 1914.
Some day, I suppose, when we have diplomatic difficulties
with Norway, they will equally abruptly drop the word Nordic.
They will hastily substitute some other--I would suggest Borealic.
They might be called the Bores, for short.
 
But I only mention this book because of a passage in it which is
rather typical of the tone of a good many other people when they
are talking about Catholic history.  The writer would substitute
one race for all religions; in which he certainly differs from us,
who are ready to offer one religion to all races.  And even here,
perhaps, the comparison is not altogether to his advantage.
For anybody who likes can belong to the religion; whereas it is not
very clear what is to be done with the people who do not happen
to belong to the race.  But even among religions he is ready to admit
degrees of depravity; he will distinguish between these disgusting
institutions; of course, according to their degree of latitude.
It is rather unfortunate for him that many Eskimos are Catholics
and that most French Protestants live in the south of France;
but he proceeds on his general principle clearly enough.
He points out, in his pleasant way, why it is exactly that
Roman Catholicism is such a degrading superstition.  And he adds
(which is what interests me at the moment) that this was illustrated
in the Dark Ages, which were a nightmare of misery and ignorance.
He then admits handsomely that Protestantism is not quite so debased
and devilish as Catholicism; and that men of the Protestant nations
do exhibit rudimentary traces of the human form.  But this, he says,
"is not due to their Protestantism, but to their Nordic common sense."
They are more educated, more liberal, more familiar with reason
and beauty, because they are what used to be called Teutonic;
descended from Vikings and Gothic chiefs rather than from the Tribunes
of Florence or the Troubadours of Provence.  And in this curious idea
I caught a glimpse of something much wider and more interesting;
which is another note of the modern ignorance of the Catholic tradition.
In speaking of things that people do not know, I have mostly
spoken of things that are really within the ring or circle of our
own knowledge; things inside the Catholic culture which they miss
because they are outside it.  But there are some cases in which
they themselves are ignorant even of the things outside it.
They themselves are ignorant, not only of the centre of civilisation
which they slander, but even of the ends of the earth to which
they appeal; they not only cannot find Rome on their map, but they
do not even know where to look for the North Pole.
 
Take, for instance, that remark about the Dark Ages and the Nordic
common sense.  It is tenable and tolerable enough to say
that the Dark Ages were a nightmare.  But it is nonsense to say
that the Nordic element was anything remotely resembling sense.
If the Dark Ages were a nightmare, it was very largely because
the Nordic nonsense made them an exceedingly Nordic nightmare.
It was the period of the barbarian invasions; when piracy
was on the high seas and civilisation was in the monasteries.
You may not like monasteries, or the sort of civilisation that
is preserved by monasteries; but it is quite certain that it
was the only sort of civilisation there was.  But this is simply
one of the things that the Nordic gentleman does not know.
He imagines that the Danish pirate was talking about Tariff Reform
and Imperial Preference, with scientific statistics from Australia
and Alaska, when he was rudely interrupted by a monk named Bede,
who had never heard of anything but monkish fables.  He supposes
that a Viking or a Visigoth was firmly founded on the principles
of the Primrose League and the English Speaking Union, and that
everything else would have been founded on them if fanatical priests
had not rushed in and proclaimed the savage cult called Christianity.
He thinks that Penda of Mercia, the last heathen king, was just about
to give the whole world the benefits of the British Constitution,
not to mention the steam engine and the works of Rudyard Kipling,
when his work was blindly ruined by unlettered ruffians with such names
as Augustine and Dunstan and Anselm.  And that is the little error
which invalidates our Nordic friend's importance as a serious historian;
that is why we cannot throw ourselves with utter confidence
and surrender into the stream of his historical enthusiasm.
The difficulty consists in the annoying detail that nothing
like what he is thinking about ever happened in the world at all;
that the religion of race that he proposes is exactly what he himself
calls the Dark Ages.  It is what some scientific persons call
a purely subjective idea; or in other words, a nightmare.
It is very doubtful if there ever was any Nordic race.
It is quite certain that there never was any Nordic common sense.
The very words "common sense" are a translation from the Latin.
 
Now that one typical or even trivial case has a larger application.
One very common form of Protestant or rationalist ignorance may
be called the ignorance of what raw humanity is really like.
Such men get into a small social circle, very modern and very narrow,
whether it is called the Nordic race or the Rationalist Association.
They have a number of ideas, some of them truisms, some of them very
untrue, about liberty, about humanity, about the spread of knowledge.
The point is that those ideas, whether true or untrue, are the very
reverse of universal.  They are not the sort of ideas that any large
mass of mankind, in any age or country, may be assumed to have.
They may in some cases be related to deeper realities; but most
men would not even recognise them in the form in which these men
present them.  There is probably, for instance, a fundamental
assumption of human brotherhood that is common to all humanity.
But what we call humanitarianism is not common to humanity.
There is a certain recognition of reality and unreality which may
be called common sense.  But the scientific sense of the special
value of truth is not generally regarded as common sense.
It is silly to pretend that priests specially persecuted a naturalist,
when the truth is that all the little boys would have persecuted him
in any village in the world, merely because he was a lunatic with a
butterfly-net. Public opinion, taken as a whole is much more contemptuous
of specialists and seekers after truth than the Church ever was.
But these critics never can take public opinion as a whole.
There are a great many examples of this truth; one is the case I
have given, the absurd notion that a horde of heathen raiders out of
the northern seas and forests, in the most ignorant epoch of history,
were not likely to be at least as ignorant as anybody else.
They were, of course, much more ignorant than anybody with
the slightest social connection with the Catholic Church.
Other examples may be found in the story of other religions.
Great tracts of the globe, covered in theory by the other religions,
are often covered in practice merely by certain human habits of fatalism
or pessimism or some other human mood.  Islam very largely stands
for the fatalism.  Buddhism very largely stands for the pessimism.
Neither of them knows anything of either the Christian or the humanitarian
sort of hope.  But an even more convincing experience is to go out into
the street, or into a tube or a tram, and talk to the actual cabmen,
cooks and charwomen cut off from the Creed by the modern chaos.
You will find that heathens are not happy, however Nordic.
You will soon find that you do not need to go to Arabia for fatalism;
or to the Thibetan desert for despair.
 
-/-
 
== ON THE NOVEL WITH A PURPOSE ==
 
I SEE that Mr. Patrick Braybrooke and others, writing to the
CATHOLIC TIMES, have raised the question of Catholic propaganda
in novels written by Catholics.  The very phrase, which we are all
compelled to use, is awkward and even false.  A Catholic putting
Catholicism into a novel, or a song, or a sonnet, or anything else,
is not being a propagandist; he is simply being a Catholic.
Everybody understands this about every other enthusiasm in the world.
When we say that a poet's landscape and atmosphere are full
of the spirit of England, we do not mean that he is necessarily
conducting an Anti-German propaganda during the Great War.
We mean that if he is really an English poet, his poetry cannot
be anything but English.  When we say that songs are full of
the spirit of the sea, we do not mean that the poet is recruiting
for the Navy or even trying to collect men for the merchant service.
We mean that he loves the sea; and for that reason would like
other people to love it.  Personally, I am all for propaganda;
and a great deal of what I write is deliberately propagandist.
But even when it is not in the least propagandist, it will
probably be full of the implications of my own religion;
because that is what is meant by having a religion.  So the jokes
of a Buddhist, if there were any, would be Buddhist jokes.
So the love-songs of a Calvinistic Methodist, should they burst
from him, would be Calvinistic Methodist love-songs. Catholics have
produced more jokes and love-songs than Calvinists and Buddhists.
That is because, saving their holy presence, Calvinists and Buddhists
have not got so large or human a religion.  But anything they did
express would be steeped in any convictions that they do hold;
and that is a piece of common sense which would seem to be
quite self-evident; yet I foresee a vast amount of difficulty
about it in the one isolated case of the Catholic Church.
 
To begin with, what I have said would be true of any other
real religion; but so much of the modern world is full of a
religiosity that is rather a sort of unconscious prejudice.
Buddhism is a real religion, or at any rate, a very real philosophy.
Calvinism was a real religion, with a real theology.
But the mind of the modern man is a curious mixture of decayed
Calvinism and diluted Buddhism; and he expresses his philosophy without
knowing that he holds it.  We say what it is natural to us to say;
but we know what we are saying; therefore it is assumed that we
are saying it for effect.  He says what it is natural to him to say;
but he does not know what he is saying, still less why he is saying it.
So he is not accused of uttering his dogma with the purpose of revealing
it to the world; for he has not really revealed it to himself.
He is just as partisan; he is just as particularist; he is just as much
depending on one doctrinal system as distinct from another.  But he has
taken it for granted so often that he has forgotten what it is.
So his literature does not seem to him partisan, even when it is.
But our literature does seem to him propagandist, even when it isn't.
 
Suppose I write a story, let us hope a short story, say, about a wood
that is haunted by evil spirits.  Let us give ourselves the pleasure
of supposing that at night all the branches have the appearance
of being hung with hundreds of corpses, like the orchard of Louis
the Eleventh, the spirits of travellers who have hanged themselves
when they came to that spot; or anything bright and cheery like that.
Suppose I make my hero, Gorlias Fitzgorgon (that noble character)
make the sign of the cross as he passes this spot; or the friend
who represents wisdom and experience advise him to consult
a priest with a view to exorcism.  Making the sign of the cross
seems to me not only religiously right, but artistically
appropriate and psychologically probable.  It is what I should do;
it is what I conceive that my friend Fitzgorgon would do;
it is also aesthetically apt, or, as they say, "in the picture."
I rather fancy it might be effective if the traveller saw
with the mystical eye, as he saw the forest of dead men, a sort
of shining pattern or silver tangle of crosses hovering in the dark,
where so many human fingers had made that sign upon the empty air.
But though I am writing what seems to me natural and appropriate
and artistic, I know that the moment I have written it,
a great roar and bellow will go up with the word "Propaganda"
coming from a thousand throats; and that every other critic,
even if he is kind enough to commend the story, will certainly add:
"But why does Mr. Chesterton drag in his Roman Catholicism?"
 
Now let us suppose that Mr Chesterton has not this disgusting habit.
Let us suppose that I write the same story, or the same sort of story,
informed with a philosophy which is familiar and therefore unobserved.
Let us suppose that I accept the ready-made assumptions of the hour,
without examining them any more than the others do.  Suppose I get
into the smooth rut of newspaper routine and political catchwords;
and make the man in my story act exactly like the man in the average
magazine story.  I know exactly what the man in the average
magazine story would do.  I can almost give you his exact words.
In that case Fitzgorgon, on first catching a glimpse of the crowds
of swaying spectres in the moon, will almost inevitably say:
"But this is the twentieth century!"
 
In itself, of course, the remark is simply meaningless.
It is far more meaningless than making the sign of the cross could
ever be; for to that even its enemies attach some sort of meaning.
But to answer a ghost by saying, "This is the twentieth century,"
is in itself quite unmeaning; like seeing somebody commit
a murder and then saying, "But this is the second Tuesday
in August!"  Nevertheless, the magazine writer who for the thousandth
time puts these words into the magazine story, has an intention in this
illogical phrase.  He is really depending upon two dogmas; neither of
which he dares to question and neither of which he is able to state.
The dogmas are:  first, that humanity is perpetually and permanently
improving through the process of time; and, second, that improvement
consists in a greater and greater indifference or incredulity about
the miraculous.  Neither of these two statements can be proved.
And it goes without saying that the man who uses them cannot prove them,
for he cannot even state them.  In so far as they are at all in the order
of things that can be proved, they are things that can be disproved.
For certainly there have been historical periods of relapse
and retrogression; and there certainly are highly organised and
scientific civilizations very much excited about the super-natural;
as people are about Spiritualism to-day. But anyhow, those two dogmas
must be accepted on authority as absolutely true before there
is any sense whatever in Gorlias Fitzgorgon saying, "But this
is the twentieth century."  The phrase depends on the philosophy;
and the philosophy is put into the story.
 
Yet nobody says the magazine story is propagandist.  Nobody says
it is preaching that philosophy because it contains that phrase.
We do not say that the writer has dragged in his progressive
party politics.  We do not say that he is going out of his
way to turn the short story into a novel with a purpose.
He does not feel as if he were going out of his way; his way
lies straight through the haunted wood, as does the other;
and he only makes Gorlias say what seems to him a sensible thing
to say; as I make him do what seems to me a sensible thing to do.
We are both artists in the same sense; we are both propagandists
in the same sense and non-propagandists in the same sense.
The only difference is that I can defend my dogma and he cannot
even define his.
 
In other words, this world of to-day does not know that all
the novels and newspapers that it reads or writes are in fact full
of certain assumptions, that are just as dogmatic as dogmas.
With some of those assumptions I agree, such as the ideal of human
equality implied in all romantic stories from CINDERELLA to
OLIVER TWIST; that the rich are insulting God in despising poverty.
With some of them I totally disagree; as in the curious idea
of human inequality, which is permitted about races though not
about classes.  "Nordic" people are so much superior to "Dagoes,"
that a score of Spanish desperados armed to the teeth are certain
to flee in terror from the fist of any solitary gentleman who has
learned all the military and heroic virtues in Wall Street
or the Stock Exchange.  But the point about these assumptions,
true or false, is that they are felt as being assumed,
or alluded to, or taken naturally as they come.  They are not felt
as being preached; and therefore they are not called propaganda.
Yet they have in practice all the double character of propaganda;
they involve certain views with which everyone does not agree;
and they do in fact spread those views by means of fiction and
popular literature.  What they do not do is to state them clearly
so that they can be criticised.  I do not blame the writers for
putting their philosophy into their stories.  I should not blame
them even if they used their stories to spread their philosophy.
But they do blame us; and the real reason is that they have not yet
realised that we have a philosophy at all.
 
The truth is, I think, that they are caught in a sort of
argument in a circle.  Their vague philosophy says to them:
"All religion is dead; Roman Catholicism is a religious sect
which must be particularly dead, since it consists of mere external
acts and attitudes, crossings, genuflections and the rest;
which these sectarians suppose they have to perform in a particular
place at a particular time."  Then some Catholic will write
a romance or a tragedy about the love of a man and woman,
or the rivalry of two men, or any other general human affair;
and they will be astonished to find that he cannot preach these things
in an "unsectarian" way.  They say, "Why does he drag in his religion?"
They mean, "Why does he drag in his religion, which consists
entirely of crossings, genuflections and external acts belonging
to a particular place and time, when he is talking about the wide
world and the beauty of woman and the anger and ambition of man?"
In other words, they say, "When we have assumed that his creed is a small
and dead thing, how dare he apply it as a universal and living thing?
It has no right to be so broad, when we all know it is so narrow."
 
I conclude therefore that, while Mr. Braybrooke was quite right
in suggesting that a novelist with a creed ought not to be ashamed
of having a cause, the more immediate necessity is to find some
way of popularising our whole philosophy of life, by putting
it more plainly than it can be put in the symbol of a story.
The difficulty with a story is in its very simplicity and especially
in its swiftness.  Men do things and do not define or defend them.
Gorlias Fitzgorgon makes the sign of the cross; he does not stop
in the middle of the demon wood to explain why it is at once
an invocation of the Trinity and a memorial of the Crucifixion.
What is wanted is a popular outline of the way in which ordinary
affairs are affected by our view of life, and how it is also a view
of death, a view of sex, a view of social decencies, and so on.
When people understood the light that shines for us upon all
these facts, they would no longer be surprised to find it shining
in our fictions.
 
-/-
 
== THE REVOLT AGAINST IDEAS ==
 
AT the time when the DAILY EXPRESS communiques provided some pretty
awful revelations about Mexico, the DAILY EXPRESS correspondence
column provided almost equally awful revelations about England.
It gave us a glimpse of what monstrous and misshapen things are
still living in our midst, veiled in red brick villas or disguised
under bowler hats.  The awful revelations about England were,
of course, mainly psychological.  It was not anarchy in the State,
which is the failing of the fighting Latin peoples.  It was anarchy
in the mind, which is the special character of those whom we call,
in moments of anger, Anglo-Saxons.  A Mexican atheist would be quite
capable of cutting the throat of a priest or training a cannon
on a nunnery.  But he would be quite incapable of arguing,
as the English Protestants did in the newspaper, that it was quite
right of Calles to persecute this belief on this occasion, because it
was quite wrong of Catholics to persecute any belief on any occasion.
No anarchist can be as anarchical as all that.  Calles might blow
up a St. Peter's but he would not blame a Spaniard for having once
done what he was praising a Mexican for trying to do.  To that extent
even Calles is more of a Catholic as well as more of a Latin.
He wants to have his own way, and to prevent thousands of people
from having their way; but he does not want to have it both ways.
That wild sacrament, the miracle of the vanishing and reappearing cake,
of the cake that is ever devoured and ever remaining--that miracle
belongs to the religion of unreason and only takes place in the chapels
of our own free country.
 
Amid a welter of such words there was a phrase in one of
the letters which is of some sociological interest to us.
One of these intolerant tolerationists was endeavouring to defend
Calles by suggesting that only prejudice can accuse him of anarchical
or anti-religious extremes of opinion.  It is quite unfair
(it was said) to call Calles an atheist or a Bolshevist.
Indeed, we may learn from all these letters that Calles is probably
a Wesleyan Methodist and regularly attends a chapel in East Croydon.
But he is even worse.  They appear to regard it as a favour
to Calles to pay him the extraordinary compliment of comparing
him to the sixteenth century Reformers.  The correspondent
here in question uses this as an argument against any alleged
anarchism in the Mexican--if he is a Mexican.  "Calles and his
partisans are branded as Atheists and Bolsheviks--Why?  Were the
English Reformers Bolsheviks?  Certainly not."
 
Here we are happily all able to agree.  With heartfelt unanimity we
can repeat, "Certainly not."  The English Reformers were certainly
not Bolshevists.  None will withhold the handsome admission that the
English Reformers were Capitalists.  Few people in history have deserved
to be described so exactly, so completely, so typically as Capitalists.
They were a great many other things besides Capitalists;
some of them were cads, some gentlemen, a few honest men,
many thieves, a baser sort courtiers, a better sort monomaniacs;
but they were all Capitalists and what they created was Capitalism.
They all conducted their powerful political operations on a basis
of much accumulated capital; but they never, even with their dying eyes,
lost the light of hope and expectation; the promise and the vision
of more capital.
 
But what concerns us nowadays is this; that it is their Capitalism
that has remained.  As a matter of fact, many of them did have other
ideals of spiritual simplification which might in some ways be compared
to Communism.  We should never be likely to call a man like Cranmer or a
man like Burleigh a Bolshevist.  We could only say, with Hamlet, that we
would he were so honest a man.  But there were men in that movement,
or that muddle, who were as mad and as honest as Bolshevists.
There were theoretical, and especially theological enthusiasms which
moved specially towards simplicity; like that of the Bolshevists.
But the point to fix and rivet is that THOSE theories are dead.
There was a logical and even lofty scheme of thought;
but it is that which is utterly abandoned by modern thought.
There were sincere ideals in some of the early Protestants;
but they are not the ideals of any of the modern Protestants.
Thus Calvinism was a clear philosophy; which is alone enough to
distinguish it from Modern Thought.  But in so far as they had an element
of Calvinism, their Calvinism is dead.  If they had had an element
of Communism, as some of them might, that Communism would now be dead.
Nothing but their Capitalism is alive.
 
We must remember that even to talk of the corruption of the monasteries
is a compliment to the monasteries.  For we do not talk of the corruption
of the corrupt.  Nobody pretends that the mediaeval institutions
began in mere greed and pride.  But the modern institutions did.
Nobody says that St. Benedict drew up his rule of labour in
order to make his monks lazy; but only that they became lazy.
Nobody says that the first Franciscans practised poverty to
obtain wealth; but only that later fraternities did obtain wealth.
But it is quite certain that the Cecils and the Russells and
the rest did from the first want to obtain wealth.  That which
was death to Catholicism was actually the birth of Capitalism.
Since then we have had, not the inconsistency that a man who vowed
to be poor became rich; but rather a shocking consistency, that the man
who vowed to be rich became richer.  After that there was no stopping
a race of relative ambition; and a belief in bigger and bigger things.
It is indeed true that the Reformers were not Communists.
It might be aptly retorted that the Religious were Communists.  But the
more vital point is not Communism, but a certain comparative spirit.
The English squire increased and the English yeoman diminished.
Both found their pride in private ownership of land.
But the pride was more and more in having a great estate, and not
in having an estate.  So, in his turn, the English shopkeeper
ceased to be proud of minding his own business and could only be
proud of the number of businesses he could mind.  From this has
come all the mercantile megalomania to-day; with its universal
transformation of Trades into Trusts.  It is the natural conclusion
of the movement away from the transformation of all Trades into Guilds.
But its genesis was the change from an ideal of humility,
in which many failed, to an ideal of pride in which (by its nature)
only a few can succeed.
 
In this sense we may agree with the newspaper correspondent;
that the Reformers were not Revolutionists.  We can reassure that simple
gentleman of our full realisation that they were not Bolshevists.
We can entirely absolve the Cranmers and the Cromwells of any restless
desire to raise the proletariat.  We can clear the great names of Burleigh
and Bacon of the stain of any dangerous sympathy with the poor.
The distinguishing mark of the Reformers was a profound respect
for the powers that be, but an even profounder respect for the wealth
that was to be; and a really unfathomable reverence for the wealth
that was to be their own.  Some people like that spirit,
and regard it as the soundest foundation of stable government;
we need not argue about it here.  It is, broadly speaking,
what is regarded as respectability by all those who have nothing else
to respect.  Certainly nobody could confuse it with revolution.
But the point of historical importance could be put in
another fashion, also more or less favourable to the Reformers.
Capitalism was not only solid, it was in a sense candid.  It set up
a class to be worshipped openly and frankly because of its wealth.
That is the point at the moment and the real contrast between this
and the older mediaeval order.  Such wealth was the abuse of the monks
and abbots; it was the use of the merchants and the squires.
The avaricious abbot violated his ideals.  The avaricious employer
had no ideals to violate.  For there never has been, properly speaking,
such a thing as the ideal good of Capitalism; though there are any
number of good men who are Capitalists following other ideals.
The Reformation, especially in England, was above all the abandonment
of the attempt to rule the world by ideals, or even by ideas.
The attempt had undoubtedly failed, in part, because those who
were supposed to be the idealists failed to uphold the ideals;
and any number of people who were supposed to accept the general
idea thwarted the fulfilment of the ideas.  But it also fell under
the attack of those who hated, not only those ideals, but any ideals.
It was the result of the impatient and imperious appetites of humanity,
hating to be restrained by bonds; but most of all to be restrained
by invisible bonds.  For the English Reformers did not really
set up an opposite ideal or an alternative set of ideas.
As our friend truly said, they were not Bolshevists.
They set up certain very formidable things called facts.
They set out almost avowedly to rule the realm merely by facts;
by the fact that somebody called Russell had two hundred times more
money than any of his neighbours; by the fact that somebody called
Cecil had obtained the power of having any of his neighbours hanged.
Facts are at least solid while they last; but the fatal thing about
them is that they do not last.  It is only the ideas that last.
And to-day a man may be called Russell and have considerably less
money than a man who is called Rockefeller; and history may see
the amazing spectacle of a man called Cecil largely thrust out
of practical politics and called an idealist and a failure.
 
The same progress of Capitalism that made the squires has
destroyed the squires.  The same commercial advance that exalted
England before Europe has abased England before America.
Exactly in so far as we have our affections healthily attached to this
adventurous and patriotic England of the last few centuries, we shall
see that our affections and attachments are bound to be betrayed.
The process called practical, the attempt to rule merely by facts,
has in its own nature the essence of all betrayal.  We discover
that facts, which seem so solid, are of all things the most fluid.
As the professors and the prigs say, facts are always evolving;
in other words, they are always evading or escaping or running away.
Men who bow down to the wealth of a squire, because it enables
him to behave like a gentleman, have to go on bowing down to
the same wealth in somebody who cannot behave like a gentleman;
and eventually perhaps to the same wealth not attached to any
recognisable human being at all, but invested in an irresponsible
company in a foreign country.  Wealth does indeed take to
itself wings, and even abide in the uttermost parts of the sea.
Wealth becomes formless and almost fabulous; indeed, they were
unconscious satirists who talked about "fabulous wealth."
Great financiers buy and sell thousands of things that nobody has
ever seen; and which are for all practical purposes imaginary.
So ends the adventure of trusting only to facts; it ends in a fairyland
of fantastic abstractions.
 
We must go back to the idea of government by ideas.  There is just
that grain of truth in the already mentioned fantasy of Communism.
But there were many richer, and subtler and better balanced ideas
even in the mediaeval make-up of Catholicism.  I repeat that this
Catholicism was ruined by Catholics as well as Protestants.
Mediaeval sins hampered and corrupted mediaeval ideas,
before the Reformers decided to throw away all ideas.
But that was the right thing to follow, or to try to follow; and there
is not and never will be anything else to do except to try again.
Many mediaeval men failed in the attempt to live up to those ideals.
But many more modern men are more disastrously failing in the attempt
to live without them.  And through that failure we shall gradually
come to understand the real advantages of that ancient scheme
which only partly failed; according to which, in theory at least,
the man of peace was higher than the man of war, and poverty
superior to wealth.
 
There is one quaint little phrase in Macaulay's essay on Bacon;
that great outbreak of the Philistines against the Philosophers.
In one small sentence the great Philistine betrays the weakness
of his whole argument of utility.  Speaking scornfully of
the Schoolmen, he says that St. Thomas Aquinas would doubtless
(such was his simplicity) have thought it more important to engage
in the manufacture of syllogisms than in the manufacture of gunpowder.
Not even the Gunpowder Plot could prevent that sturdy
Protestant from assuming that gunpowder is always useful.
Since his time we have seen a good deal more gunpowder.
One does not need to be a pacifist to think that gunpowder
need hardly go on being useful on quite such a grand scale.
And a great part of the world has now reached a mood of reaction,
in which it is disposed to cry out, "If there are any syllogisms that will
save us from all this gunpowder, for God's sake let us listen to them."
Even logic they are prepared, in their despair, to accept.
They will not only listen to religion, they will even perhaps listen
to reason, if it will promise them a little peace.
 
 
-/-
 
== THE FEASTS AND THE ASCETIC ==
 
I WAS reflecting in the course of the recent feast of Christmas
(which, like other feasts, is preceded by a fast) that the combination
is still a puzzle to many.  The Modernist, or man who boasts of
being modern, is generally rather like a man who overeats himself
so much on Christmas Eve that he has no appetite on Christmas Day.
It is called being In Advance of the Times; and is incumbent upon
all who are progressive, prophetic, futuristic and generally
looking towards what Mr. Belloc calls the Great Rosy Dawn:
a dawn which generally looks a good deal rosier the night before
than it does the morning after.
 
To many people, however, who are not offensively in advance of the times
the combination of these ideas does seem to be a sort of contradiction
or confusion.  But in real fact it is not only not so confused,
but even not so complicated.  The great temptation of the Catholic
in the modern world is the temptation to intellectual pride.
It is so obvious that most his critics are talking without in the least
knowing what they are talking about, that he is sometimes a little
provoked towards the very un-Christian logic of answering a fool
according to his folly.  He is a little bit disposed to luxuriate
in secret, as it were over the much greater subtlety and richness
of the philosophy he inherits; and only answer a bewildered
barbarian so as to bewilder him still more.  He is tempted
to ironical agreements or even to disguising himself as a dunce.
Men who have an elaborate philosophical defence of their views
sometimes take pleasure in boasting of their almost babyish credulity.
Having reached their own goal through labyrinths of logic,
they will point the stranger only to the very shortest short cut
of authority; merely in order to shock the simpleton with simplicity.
Or, as in the present case, they will find a grim amusement
in presenting the separate parts of the scheme as if they were
really separate; and leave the outsider to make what he can of them.
So when somebody says that a fast is the opposite to a feast,
and yet both seem to be sacred to us, some of us will always be moved
merely to say, "Yes," and relapse into an objectionable grin.
When the anxious ethical enquirer says, "Christmas is devoted
to merry-making, to eating meat and drinking wine, and yet you
encourage this pagan and materialistic enjoyment," you or I will
be tempted to say, "Quite right, my boy," and leave it at that.
When he then says, looking even more worried, "Yet you admire men for
fasting in caves and deserts and denying themselves ordinary pleasures;
you are clearly committed, like the Buddhists, to the opposite
or ascetic principle," we shall be similarly inspired to say,
"Quite correct, old bean," or "Got it first time, old top,"
and merely propose an adjournment for convivial refreshment.
 
Nevertheless, it is a temptation to be resisted.
Not only is it obviously our duty to explain to the other people
that what seems to them contradictory is really complementary,
but we are not altogether justified in any such tone of superiority.
We are not right in making our geniality an expression of our despair.
We are not entitled to despair of explaining the truth; nor is it really
so horribly difficult to explain.  The real difficulty is not so much
that the critic is crude as that we ourselves are not always clear,
even in our own minds, far less in our public expositions.
It is not so much that they are not subtle enough to understand it,
as that they and we and everybody else are not simple enough to
understand it.  Those two things are obviously part of one thing,
if we are straightforward enough to look at the thing; and to see
it simply as it is.  I suggested recently that people would see
the Christian story if it could only be told as a heathen story.
The Faith is simply the story of a God who died for men.
But, queerly enough, if we were even to print the words without
a capital G, as if it were the cult of some new and nameless tribe,
many would realise the idea for the first time.  Many would feel
the thrill of a new fear and sympathy if we simply wrote, "the story
of a god who died for men."  People would sit up suddenly and say
what a beautiful and touching pagan religion that must be.
 
Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Church is out of
the question; that we have nothing but the earth and the children of man
pottering about on it, with their normal mortal tales and traditions.
Then suppose there appears on this earth a prodigy, a portent,
or what is alleged to be a portent.  In some way heaven has rent
the veil or the gods have given some new marvel to mankind.
Suppose, for instance, it is a fountain of magic water, said to be
flowing at the top of a mountain.  It blesses like holy water;
it heals diseases; it inspires more than wine, or those who drink
of it never thirst again.  Well, this story may be true or false;
but among those who spread it as true, it is perfectly obvious
that the story will produce a number of other stories.
It is equally obvious that those stories will be of two kinds.
The first sort will say:  "When the water was brought
down to the valley there was dancing in all the villages;
the young men and maidens rejoiced with music and laughter.
A surly husband and wife were sprinkled with the holy water
and reconciled, so that their house was full of happy children.
A cripple was sprinkled and he went capering about gaily like an acrobat.
The gardens were watered and became gay with flowers," and so on.
It is quite equally obvious that there will be another sort of story
from exactly the same source, told with exactly the same motive.
"A man limped a hundred miles, till he was quite lame,
to find the sacred fountain.  Men lay broken and bleeding among
the rocks on the mountainside in their efforts to climb after it.
A man sold all his lands and the rivers running through them
for one drop of the water.  A man refused to turn back from it,
when confronted with brigands, but was tortured and died calling for it,"
and so on.  There is nothing in the least inconsistent between
these two types of legend.  They are exactly what would naturally
be expected, given the original legend of the miraculous fountain.
Anyone who can really look at them simply, can see that they are
both equally simple.  But we in our time have confused ourselves
with long words for unreal distinctions; and talking incessantly
about optimism and pessimism, about asceticism and hedonism,
about what we call Paganism and what we think about Buddhism,
till we cannot understand a plain tale when it is told.
The Pagan would have understood it much better.
 
This very simple truth explains another fact that I have heard
the learned insist on with some excitement:  the emphasis and repetition
touching the ascetic side of religion.  It is exactly what would
happen with any human story, even if it were a heathen story.
We remark upon the case of the man who starves to get the water more
than on the case of the man who is merely glad to get the water.
We remark upon it more because it is more remarkable.  Any human
tradition would make more of the heroes who suffered for something
than of the human beings who simply benefited by it.  But that does
not alter the fact that there are more human beings than heroes;
and that this great majority of human beings has benefited by it.
It is natural that men should marvel more at the man who deliberately
lames himself than at the man who dances when he is no longer lame.
But that does not alter the fact that the countries where that
legend prevails are, in fact, full of dancing.  I have here
only suggested how very simple, after all, is the contradiction
between austerity and jollity which puzzles our critics so much.
There is a higher application of it to ascetics, which I may consider
on another occasion.  Here I will only hint at it by saying:
"The more a man could LIVE only on the water, the more he would
prove it to be the water of life."
 
-/-
 
== WHO ARE THE CONSPIRATORS? ==
 
I CAME across, more or less indirectly, the other day, a lady
of educated and even elegant pretensions, of the sort whom her foes
would call luxurious and her friends cultured, who happened to mention
a certain small West Country town, and added with a sort of hiss
that it contained "a nest of Roman Catholics."  This apparently
referred to a family with which I happen to be acquainted.
The lady then said, her voice changing to a deep note of doom,
"God alone knows what is said and done behind those closed doors."
 
On hearing this stimulating speculation, my mind went back to
what I remembered of the household in question, which was largely
concerned with macaroons, and a little girl who rightly persuaded
herself that I could eat an almost unlimited number of them.
But when I contrasted that memory with that vision it was brought
suddenly and stunningly to my mind what a vast abyss still yawns
between us and many of our countrymen, and what extraordinary ideas
are still entertained about us, by people who walk about the world
without keepers or strait-waistcoats and are apparently, on all
other subjects, sane.  It is doubtless true, and theologically sound,
to say that God alone knows what goes on in Catholic homes;
as it is to say that God alone knows what goes on in Protestant heads.
I do not know why a Catholic's doors should be any more closed
than anybody else's doors; the habit is not unusual in persons
of all philosophical beliefs when retiring for the night; and on
other occasions depends on the weather and the individual taste.
But even those who would find it difficult to believe that an
ordinary Catholic is so eccentric as to bolt and padlock himself
in the drawing-room or the smoking-room, whenever he strolls
into those apartments, do really have a haunting idea that it
is more conceivable of a Catholic than of a Calvinistic Methodist
or a Plymouth Brother.  There does remain the stale savour of a
sort of sensational romance about us; as if we were all foreign
counts and conspirators.  And the really interesting fact is
that this absurd melodrama can be found among educated people;
though now rather in an educated individual than in an educated class.
The world still pays us this wild and imaginative compliment
of imagining that we are much less ordinary than we really are.
The argument, of course, is the one with which we are wearily familiar
in twenty other aspects; the argument that because the evidence
against us cannot be produced, it must have been concealed.
It is obvious that Roman Catholics do not generally shout to each
other the arrangements of a St. Bartholomew Massacre across
the public streets; and the only deduction any reasonable man can
draw is that they do it behind closed doors.  It is but seldom
that the project of burning down London is proclaimed in large
letters on the posters of the UNIVERSE; so what possible deduction
can there be, except that the signals are given at the private
tea-table by means of a symbolical alphabet of macaroons?
It would be an exaggeration to say that it is my daily habit to leap
upon aged Jews in Fleet Street and tear out their teeth; so, given my
admitted monomania on the subject, it only remains to suppose that
my private house is fitted up like a torture chamber for this mode
of mediaeval dentistry.  Catholic crimes are not plotted in public,
so it stands to reason that they must be plotted in private.
There is indeed a third remote and theoretical alternative;
that they are not plotted anywhere; but it is unreasonable to expect
our fellow-countrymen to suggest anything so fanciful as that.
 
Now this mysterious delusion, still far commoner than many suppose
even in England, and covering whole interior spaces of America,
happens to be another illustration of what I have been suggesting
in an earlier essay; the fact that those who are always
digging and prying for secret things about us, have never even
glanced at the most self-evident things about themselves.
We have only to ask ourselves, with a sort of shudder, what would
have been said if we really had confessed to conspiracy as
shamelessly as half our accusers have confessed to it themselves.
What in the world would be said, either in America or in Europe, if we
really had behaved like a secret society, in places where the groups
of our enemies cannot even deny that they are secret societies?
What in the world would happen if a Catholic Congress at Glasgow
or Leeds really consisted entirely of hooded and white-robed
delegates, all with their faces covered and their names unknown,
looking out of slits in their ghastly masks of white?
Yet this was, until just lately, the rigid routine of the great
American organisation to destroy Catholicism; an organisation
which recently threatened to seize all government in America.
What would have been said, if there really was a definite, recognised,
but entirely unknown thing, called the Secret of the Catholics;
as there has been for long past a recognised but unknown reality
called the Secret of the Freemasons?  I dare say a great deal
involved in such things is mere harmless foolery.  But if we had done
such things, would our critics have said it was harmless foolery?
Suppose we had started to spread the propaganda of the Faith
by means of a movement called "Know Nothing," because we were in
the habit of always shaking our heads and shrugging our shoulders
and swearing that we knew nothing of the Faith we meant to spread.
Suppose our veneration for the dignity of St. Peter were wholly
and solely a veneration for the denial of St. Peter; and we used it
as a sort of motto or password to swear that we knew not Christ.
Yet that was admittedly the policy of a whole political movement
in America, which aimed at destroying the citizenship of Catholics.
Suppose that the Mafia and all the murderous secret associations
of the Continent had been notoriously working on the Catholic side,
instead of the other side.  Should we ever have heard the last of it?
Would not the world have rung with indignant denunciation of a disgrace
clinging to all our conduct, and a treason that must never be forgot?
Yet these things are done constantly, and at regular intervals,
and right down to the present day, by the Anti-Catholic parties;
and it is never thought necessary to recall them, or say a word
of apology for them, in the writings of any Anti-Catholic partisan.
It would be just our Jesuitical way to dare to look over hedges,
when everybody else is only stealing horses.
 
In short, what I recently said of bigotry is even more true of secrecy.
In so far as there is something merely antiquated about a certain
type of doctrinal narrowness, it is much more characteristic
of Dayton, Tennessee, than of Louvain or Rome.  And in the same way,
in so far as there is something antiquated about all these antics in masks
and cloaks, it has been much more characteristic of the Ku Klux Klan
than of the Jesuits.  Indeed, this sort of Protestant is a figure
of old-fashioned melodrama in a double sense and in a double aspect.
He is antiquated in the plots he attributes to us and in the plots
that he practises himself.
 
As regards the latter, it is probable that the whole world will
discover this fact a long time before he does.  The anti-clerical
will go on playing solemnly the pranks of Cagliostro, like a medium
still blindfolded in broad daylight; and will open his mouth
in mysteries long after everybody in the world is completely
illuminated about the illuminati.  And though the almost half-witted
humour of the American society, which seemed to consist entirely
of beginning as many words as possible with KL, has been rather
abruptly toned down by a reaction of relative sanity, I have no doubt
that there is still many a noble Nordic fellow going about hugging
himself over the happy secret that he is a Kleagle or a Klemperor,
long after everybody has ceased to klare a klam whether he is or not.
On the political side the power of these conspiracies has been
practically broken in both Continents; in Italy by the Fascists and in
America by a rally of reasonable and public-spirited governors of both
political parties.  But the point of historical interest remains:
that it was the very people who accused us of mummery and mystery
who surrounded all their secularising activities with far more fantastic
mysteries and mummeries; that they had not even the manhood to fight
an ancient ritual with the appearance of republican simplicity,
but boasted of hiding everything in a sort of comic complexity;
even when there was nothing to hide.  By this time such movements
as the Ku Klux Klan have very little left which can be hidden or
which is worth hiding; and it is therefore probable that our romantic
curiosity about them will be considerably colder than their undying
romantic curiosity about us.  The Protestant lady will continue
to resent the fact that God does not share with her his knowledge
of the terrible significance of tea and macaroons in the Catholic home.
But we shall probably in the future feel a fainter and fainter
interest in whatever it is that Kleagues do behind closed--
or perhaps I should say Klosed Doors.
 
-/-
 
== THE HAT AND THE HALO ==
 
PERHAPS it is a little ungenerous to refer again to the fiasco of the
unfortunate Bishop of Birmingham, when he made an exhibition of himself
on the subject of St. Francis.  That he should be unable to restrain
himself from attacking one whom so many free-thinkers have loved
and reverenced is interesting as showing how far sectarians can go.
But the tone of the attack raises a question more interesting than
the personal one.  It may be called broadly the question of Sentiment;
but it involves the whole question of what things in life are deep
and what things shallow; what is central and what is merely external.
It is needless to say that people like the Bishop invariably
and instinctively get them the wrong way round.
 
For instance, he said something to the effect that people are now
seeing St. Francis in a halo of false sentiment, or through a haze
of false sentiment.  I am not sure which he said and I doubt whether
he knew which he meant.  If the Bishop had a halo it would probably
be rather like a haze.  But anyhow he implied that the hero-worship
of St. Francis was a sort of external and extraneous thing,
a dazzling distraction or a distorting medium, something added to
his figure afterwards; whereas the facts about the real St. Francis
were quite different and decidedly repulsive to a refined person.
Well, the poor Bishop got all his facts about St. Francis
quite wrong; and his claim to talk about the REAL St. Francis,
even in an ordinary historical sense, was pretty rapidly shown up.
But there was something behind it which interests me much more.
It is the curious trick of turning everything inside out;
so that the really central things become external and the merely
external things central.  The inmost soul of St. Francis is a haze
of false sentiment; but the accidents of his historical setting,
as viewed by people without any historical sense, are a sort
of dreadful secret of his soul.
 
According to this sort of criticism, St. Francis had a great soul;
which was merely a cloak for a miserable body.  It is sentimental
to consider what he felt like.  But it is realistic to consider
what he looked like.  Or rather it is realistic to consider what
he would have looked like to the best-dressed people in Birmingham
who never saw him, or the fashionable tailor in Bond Street
who never had the opportunity of making him a suit of clothes.
The critic tells us what some hypothetical suburban snob
of the twentieth century would have thought of the Saint
he never saw; and THAT is the real truth about the Saint.
We can tell him what the Saint would have thought of the suburban snob
(and his thoughts would have been full of the simple and spontaneous
tenderness which he showed to all small and helpless creatures)
but that is only sentiment about St. Francis.  What St Francis himself
felt about all other creatures is only a misleading and artificial
addition to his character.  But what some of the most limited and
least imaginative of those creatures might possibly think about him,
or rather about his clothes or his meals--that alone is reality.
 
When the admirers of St. Francis, who number myriads of Protestants
and Agnostics as well as Catholics, say that they admire that great man,
they mean that they admire his mind, his affections, his tastes,
his point of view.  They mean that, like any other poet, he puts them
in a position to view the world in a certain way; and that life looked
at from his mental standpoint is more inspiring or intelligible.
But when the Bishop tells them that they do not know the facts about
St. Francis, he does not mean that St. Francis had some other mind
or some other standpoint.  He means that St. Francis did not have
hot and cold water laid on in the bathroom, did not put on a clean
collar every morning, did not send a sufficient number of shirts
to the Birmingham Imperial Laundry every week, did not have black
mud smeared on his boots or white mud to stiffen his shirt front,
and all the rest of it.  And THAT is what he calls the truth about
St. Francis!  Everything else, including everything that St. Francis
did do, is a haze of sentiment.
 
That is the deeper problem of which this foolish affair happens
to be an illustration.  How are we to make these superficial people
understand that we are not being sentimental about St. Francis, that we
are not presenting an elegant and poetical picture of St. Francis;
that we are not presenting irresponsible emotional ravings about
St. Francis; that we are simply presenting St. Francis?  We are
presenting a remarkable mind; just as Plato presented a remarkable mind,
whether it was his own or somebody else's. We think no more
of Bishop Barnes and his nonsense than a Platonist would think
about some joke in Aristophanes about Socrates catching fleas.
There may have been people who saw that mind through a haze
of false sentiment; there were people who saw it through a haze
of exaggerated enthusiasm; like those heretics who made St. Francis
greater than Christ and the founder of a new dispensation.
But even those fanatics were more like philosophers than a gentleman
who is content to say either of a true saint or a false god,
that his taste in linen and steam laundries was "not ours."
In short, the true situation is simple and obvious enough.
It is we who are thinking about the real Francis Bernadone,
even the realistic Francis Bernadone, the actual man whose mind and mood
we admire.  It is the critic who is thinking of the unreal Francis,
a fantastic phantom produced by looking at him in a Bond Street
looking-glass or comparing him with the fashion-plates of 1926.
If it is well for a man to be happy, to have the way of welcoming
the thing that happens and the next man that comes along,
then St. Francis was happy; happier than most modern men.
If it be good that a man should be sympathetic, should include
a large number of things in his imaginative sympathy, should have
a hospitality of the heart for strange things and strange people,
then St. Francis was sympathetic; more sympathetic than most modern men.
If it be good that a man should be original, should add something
creative and not merely customary or conventional, should do
what he thinks right in his own way and without fear of worldly
consequences in ruin or starvation, then St. Francis was original;
more original than most modern men.  All these are tests at once
personal and permanent; they deal with the very essence of the ego
or individual and they are not affected by changes in external fashion.
To say that these things are mere sentiment is to say that the inmost
sense of the inmost self is mere sentiment.  And yet how are we
to stop superficial people from calling it mere sentiment?
How are we to make them realise that it is not we who have a sentimental
attachment to a mediaeval friar, but they who have an entirely
sentimental attachment to certain modern conventions?
 
Such critics have never really thought of asking what they mean
by "sentiment," still less what they mean by "false sentiment."
"False" is simply a conventional term of abuse to be applied
to "sentiment"; and "sentiment" is simply a conventional term
of abuse to be applied to Catholicism.  But it is very much more
applicable nowadays to Protestantism.  It is especially applicable
to Bishop Barnes's own rather nebulous type of Protestantism.
Men of his school always complain of our thinking too much of theology,
just as they complained a few centuries before of our thinking
too little of theology.  But theology is only the element of reason
in religion; the reason that prevents it from being a mere emotion.
There are a good many broad-minded persons for whom it is only an emotion;
and it would hardly be unfair to say it is only a sentiment.
And we have not to look far for them in cases like these.
 
If a school of critics were found prepared to pay divine honours
to a certain person while doubting whether he was divine,
men who took off their hats in his churches while denying that he was
present on his altars, who hinted that he was only a religious
teacher and then hinted again that he must be served as if he were
the only teacher of religion; who are always ready to treat him
as a fallible individual in relation to his rivals, and then
to invoke him as an infallible authority against his followers,
who dismiss every text they choose to think dogmatic and then
gush over every text they choose to think amiable, who heckle him
with Higher Criticism about three-quarters of what he said and then
grovel before a mawkish and unmanly ideal made by misunderstanding
the little which is left--if there were a school of critics in THIS
relation to a historical character, we might very well admit that they
were not getting to grips with it, but surrounding it with "a halo
of false sentiment."
 
That is the vital distinction.  At least we do not admit sentiment
as a substitute for statement; still less as a contradiction
of something that we state.  There may be devotional expressions
that are emotional, and even extravagantly emotional; but they do
not actually distort any definition that is purely intellectual.
But in the case of our critics, the confusion is in the intellect.
We do not claim that all our pictorial or poetical expressions
are adequate; but the fault is in the execution not in the conception.
And there is a conception which is not a confusion.
We do not say that every pink and blue doll from an
Art Repository is a satisfactory symbol of the Mother of God.
But we do say that it is less of a contradiction than exists
in a person who says there is no Original Sin in anybody, and then
calls it Mariolatry to say there was no Original Sin in Mary.
We do not profess to admire the little varnished pictures
of waxen angels or wooden children around the Communion Table.
But we do most strongly profess and proclaim that they are less of a blot
on the intellectual landscape than a bishop who suggests that the Host
may actually be the divine Presence, but that High Church curates
will do his lordship a personal favour if they take no notice of it.
We are under no illusions about the literary quality of a large
number of hymns in our hymn-books, or any other hymn-books. But we
modestly submit that though they are doggerel they are not nonsense;
and that saying that we can assert a personal God, a personal immortality,
a personal divine love that extends to the least and worst,
and do all this without holding "a Creed," IS nonsense.
We know that the nearest sane agnostic or atheist would agree
that it is nonsense.  Devotional art and literature are often out
of balance or broken in expression; sometimes because the emotion
is too real and too strong for the reason, the same thing which makes
the love-letters of the wisest men like the letters of lunatics;
sometimes from a real deficiency in the individual power of reason;
but never from a theoretical repudiation of reason, like that
of the Pragmatists and about three-quarters of the Modernists.
And in the same way it is the very reverse of the truth to say
that a mere emotional distortion of the facts has drawn the modern
mind towards St. Francis.  It is, on the contrary, emphatically an
attraction of mind to mind; and the more purely mental the process,
the less it will be interrupted by ignorant irritation against
the strangeness of Italian manners or mediaeval conditions.
And in this case there is no international problem.
Thousands of Englishmen who know nothing but England glow with love
and understanding of St. Francis.  We may well feel an unaffected
pity for the one unlucky Englishman who cannot understand.
 
-/-
 
== ON TWO ALLEGORIES ==
 
PERHAPS it is only fair that the modern iconoclasm should be
applied also to the ancient iconoclasts; and especially to the
great Puritans, those idol-breakers who have long been idols.
Mr. Belloc was recently tapping the Parliamentary statue of Cromwell
with a highly scientific hammer; and Mr. Noyes has suddenly assailed
the image of Bunyan with something more like a sledge-hammer. In
the latter case I confess to thinking the reaction excessive;
I should say nothing worse of Bunyan than of many old writers;
that he is best known by his best passages, and that many,
who fondly believe they have read him, would be mildly surprised
at some of his worst passages.  But that is not peculiar to Bunyan;
and I for one should be content with saying what I said some years ago.
A fair and balanced view of the culture and creeds involved can best
be reached by comparing the Pilgrimage of Christian with the Pilgrimage
of Piers Plowman.  The Puritan allegory is much neater (even if it
be not always neat) than the rather bewildering mediaeval medley.
The Puritan allegory is more national, in the sense that the
language and style have obviously become clearer and more fixed.
But the Puritan allegory is certainly much narrower than the
mediaeval allegory.  Piers Plowman deals with the death or resurrection
of a whole human society, where men are members of each other.
In the later work schism has "isolated the soul"; and it is
certainly mere individualism, when it is not mere terrorism.
But I will only say now what I said then; I do not want to damage
the statue of John Bunyan at Bedford, where it stands facing
(symbolically in more ways than one) the site of his own prison.
But I do wish there were a statue of John Langland, uplifted on
a natural height into a more native air, and looking across all
England from the Malvern hills.
 
But there is one intellectual side issue of the debate that does
interest me very much.  Mr. James Douglas, who once presented himself
to me as a representative of Protestant truth, and who is certainly
a representative of Protestant tradition, answered Mr. Alfred Noyes
in terms very typical of the present state of that tradition.
He said that we should salute Bunyan's living literary genius,
and not bother our heads about Bunyan's obsolete theology.
Then he added the comparison which seems to me so thought-provoking:
that this is after all what we do, when we admire Dante's genius and not
HIS obsolete theology.  Now there is a distinction to be made here;
if the whole modern mind is to realize at all where it stands.
If I say that Bunyan's theology IS obsolete, but Dante's theology
is NOT obsolete--then I know the features of my friend Mr. Douglas
will be wreathed in a refined smile of superiority and scorn.
He will say that I am a Papist and therefore of course I think
the Papist dogmatism living.  But the point is that he is
a Protestant and he thinks the Protestant dogmatism dead.
I do at least defend the Catholic theory because it can be defended.
The Puritans would presumably be defending the Puritan theory--
if it could be defended.  The point is that it is dead for them
as much as for us.  It is not merely that Mr. Noyes demands
the disappearance of a disfigurement; it is that Mr. Douglas says
it cannot be a disfigurement because it has already disappeared.
Now the Thomist philosophy, on which Dante based his poetry has
not disappeared.  It is not a question of faith but of fact;
anybody who knows Paris or Oxford, or the worlds where such things
are discussed, will tell you that it has not disappeared.
All sorts of people, including those who do not believe in it,
refer to it and argue against it on equal terms.
 
I do not believe, for a fact, that modern men so discuss the seventeenth
century sectarianism.  Had I the privilege of passing a few days
with Mr. Douglas and his young lions of the DAILY EXPRESS, I doubt
not that we should discuss and differ about many things.
But I do rather doubt whether Mr. Douglas would every now and
again cry out, as with a crow of pure delight "Oh, I must read
you this charming little bit from Calvin."  I do rather doubt
whether his young journalists are joyously capping each other's
quotations from Toplady's sermons on Calvinism.  But eager young
men do still quote Aquinas, just as they still quote Aristotle.
I have heard them at it.  And certain ideas are flying about,
even in the original prose of St. Thomas, as well as in the poetry
of Dante--or, for that matter, of Donne.
 
The case of Bunyan is really the opposite of the case of Dante.
In Dante the abstract theory still illuminates the poetry;
the ideas enlighten even where the images are dark.
In Bunyan it is the human facts and figures that are bright;
while the spiritual background is not only dark in spirit,
but blackened by time and change.  Of course it is true enough
that in Dante the mere images are immensely imaginative.
It is also true that in one sense some of them are obsolete;
in the sense that the incidents are obsolete and the personal
judgment merely personal.  Nobody will ever forget how there came
through the infernal twilight the figure of that insolent troubadour,
carrying his own head aloft in his hand like a lantern to light his way.
Everybody knows that such an image is poetically true to certain
terrible truths about the unnatural violence of intellectual pride.
But as to whether anybody has any business to say that Bertrand de
Born is damned, the obvious answer is No. Dante knew no more about it
than I do:  only he cared more about it; and his personal quarrel is
an obsolete quarrel.  But that sort of thing is not Dante's theology,
let alone Catholic theology.
 
In a word; so far from his theology being obsolete, it would be much
truer to say that everything is obsolete except his theology.
That he did not happen to like a particular Southern gentleman
is obsolete; but that was at most a private fancy, in demonology
rather than theology.  We come to theology when we come to theism.
And if anybody will read the passage in which Dante grapples with
the gigantic problem of describing the Beatific Vision, he will find
it is uplifted into another world of ideas from the successful
entry to the Golden City at the end of the Pilgrim's Progress.
It is a Thought; which a thinker, especially a genuine freethinker,
is always free to go on thinking.  The images of Dante
are not to be worshipped, any more than any other images.
But there is an idea behind all images; and it is before that,
in the last lines of the Paradiso, that the spirit of the poet
seems first to soar like an eagle and then to fall like a stone.
 
There is nothing in this comparison that reflects on the genius
and genuineness of Bunyan in his own line or class; but it
does serve to put him in his own class.  I think there was
something to be said for the vigorous denunciation of Mr. Noyes;
but no such denunciation is involved in this distinction.
On the contrary, it would be easy to draw the same distinction
between two men both at the very top of all literary achievement.
It would be true to say, I think, that those who most enjoy
reading Homer care more about an eternal humanity than an
ephemeral mythology.  The reader of Homer cares more about men
than about gods.  So, as far as one can guess, does Homer.
It is true that if those curious and capricious Olympians did
between them make up a religion, it is now a dead religion.
It is the human Hector who so died that he will never die.
But we should remonstrate with a critic who, after successfully
proving this about Homer, should go on to prove it about Plato.
We should protest if he said that the only interest of the
Platonic Dialogues to-day is in their playful asides and very lively
local colour, in the gay and graceful picture of Greek life;
but that nobody troubles nowadays about the obsolete philosophy of Plato.
We should point out that there is no truth in the comparison;
and that if anything the case is all the other way.
Plato's philosophy will be important as long as there is philosophy;
and Dante's religion will be important as long as there is religion.
Above all it will be important as long as there is that lucid
and serene sort of religion that is most in touch with philosophy.
Nobody will say that the theology of the Baptist tinker is in that sense
serene or even lucid; on many points it necessarily remains obscure.
The reason is that such religion does not do what philosophy does;
it does not begin at the beginning.  In the matter of mere chronological
order, it is true that the pilgrimage of Dante and that of Bunyan
both end in the Celestial City.  But it is in a very different sense
that the pilgrimage of Bunyan begins in the City of Destruction.
The mind of Dante, like that of his master St. Thomas, really begins
as well as ends in the City of Creation.  It begins as well as ends
in the burning focus in which all things began.  He sees his series
from the right end, though he then begins it at the wrong end.
But it is the whole point of a personal work like THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS
that it does begin with a man's own private sins and private panic
about them.  This intense individualism gives it great force;
but it cannot in the nature of things give it great breadth and range.
Heaven is haven; but the wanderer has not many other thoughts
about it except that it is haven.  It is typical of the two methods,
each of them very real in its way, that Dante could write a whole volume,
one-third of his gigantic epic, describing the things of Heaven;
whereas in the case of Bunyan, as the gates of Heaven open
the book itself closes.
 
I think it worth while to write this note on the critical remark of
Mr. James Douglas, because it is a remark that would be made as readily
by many other intelligent men to-day. But it is founded on a fallacy;
on the idea that the choice between living philosophies and dead
philosophies is the same as the choice between old philosophies and new.
It is not true of Plato and it is not true of Dante; and, apart from
whatever is our own philosophy, we should realise that some of
the most ancient are the most alive.
 
-/-
 
== THE PROTESTANT SUPERSTITIONS ==
 
THAT delightful guessing game, which has long caused innocent merriment
in so many Catholic families, the game of guessing at exactly
which line of an article say on Landscape or Latin Elegiacs, we shall
find the Dean of St. Paul's introducing the Antidote to Antichrist;
or the Popish Plot Revealed--that most familiar of our Catholic
parlour games happened to be entertaining me some time ago,
as a sort of substitute for a crossword puzzle, when I found I had hit
on a very lucky example.  I wrote above about "Catholic families,"
and had almost, by force of associations written "Catholic firesides."
And I imagine that the Dean really does think that even in this weather
we keep the home-fires burning, like the fire of Vesta, in permanent
expectation of relighting the fires of Smithfield.  Anyhow, this sort
of guessing game or crossword puzzle is seldom disappointing.
The Dean must by this time have tried quite a hundred ways of leading
up to his beloved topic; and even concealing it, like a masked battery,
until he can let loose the cannonade in a perfect tornado of temper.
Then the crossword puzzle is no longer a puzzle, though the crosswords
are apparent and appropriate enough; especially those devoted
to the great historical process of crossing out the Cross.
 
In the case of this particular article, it was only towards the end
of it that the real subject was allowed to leap out from an ambush
upon the reader.  I think it was a general article on Superstition;
and, being a journalistic article of the modern type, it was of course
devoted to discussing superstition without defining superstition.
In an article of that enlightened sort, it seemed enough for the writer
to suggest that superstition is anything that he does not happen to like.
Some of the things are also things that I do not happen to like.
But such a writer is not reasonable even when he is right.
A man ought to have some more philosophical objection to stories
of ill luck than merely calling them credulity; as certainly
as a man ought to have some more philosophical objection
to Mass than to call it Magic.  It is hardly a final refutation
of Spiritualists to prove that they believe in Spirits; any more
than a refutation of Deists to prove that they believe in Deity.
Creed and credence and credulity are words of the same origin
and can be juggled backwards and forwards to any extent.
But when a man assumes the absurdity of anything that anybody
else believes, we wish first to know what he believes; on what principle
he believes; and, above all, upon what principle he disbelieves.
There is no trace of anything so rational in the Dean's piece
of metaphysical journalism.  If he had stopped to define his terms,
or in other words to tell us what he was talking about, such an abstract
analysis would of course have filled up some space in the article.
There might have been no room for the Alarum Against the Pope.
 
The Dean of St. Paul's got to business, in a paragraph in the second
half of his article, in which he unveiled to his readers all the horrors
of a quotation from Newman; a very shocking and shameful passage
in which the degraded apostate says that he is happy in his religion,
and in being surrounded by the things of his religion; that he likes
to have objects that have been blessed by the holy and beloved, that there
is a sense of being protected by prayers, sacramentals and so on;
and that happiness of this sort satisfies the soul.  The Dean,
having given us this one ghastly glimpse of the Cardinal's spiritual
condition, drops the curtain with a groan and says it is Paganism.
How different from the Christian orthodoxy of Plotinus!
 
Now it was exactly that little glimpse that interested me in this matter;
not so much a glimpse into the soul of the Cardinal as into
the mind of the Dean.  I suddenly seemed to see, in much simpler
form than I had yet realised, the real issue between him and us.
And the curious thing about the issue is this; that what he thinks
about us is exactly what we think about him.  What I for one
feel most strongly, in considering a case like that of the Dean
and his quotation from the Cardinal, is that the Dean is a man of
distinguished intelligence and culture, that he is always interesting,
that he is sometimes even just, or at least justified or justifiable;
but that he is first and last the champion of a Superstition;
the man who is really and truly defending a Superstition, as it
would be understood by people who could define a Superstition.
What makes it all the more amusing is that it is in a rather special
sense a Pagan Superstition.  But what makes it most intensely
interesting, so far as I am concerned, is that the Dean is devoted
to what may be called par excellence a superstitious Superstition.
I mean that it is in a special sense a LOCAL superstition.
 
Dean Inge is a superstitious person because he is worshipping a relic;
a relic in the sense of a remnant.  He is idolatrously adoring
the broken fragment of something; simply because that something
happens to have lingered out of the past in the place called England;
in the rather battered form called Protestant Christianity.
It is as if a local patriot were to venerate the statue of Our Lady
of Walsingham only because she was in Walsingham and without
even remembering that she was in Heaven.  It is still more as
if he venerated a fragment chipped from the toe of the statue
and forgot where it came from and ignored Our Lady altogether.
I do not think it superstitious to respect the chip in relation
to the statue, or the statue in relation to the saint,
or the saint in relation to the scheme of theology and philosophy.
But I do think it superstitious to venerate, or even to accept,
the fragment because it happens to be there.  And Dean Inge does accept
the fragment called Protestantism because it happens to be there.
 
Let us for a moment consider the whole matter as philosophers should;
in a universal air above all local superstitions like the Dean's. It
is quite obvious that there are three or four philosophies or views
of life possible to reasonable men; and to a great extent these are
embodied in the great religions or in the wide field of irreligion.
There is the atheist, the materialist or monist or whatever
he calls himself, who believes that all is ultimately material,
and all that is material is mechanical.  That is emphatically
a view of life; not a very bright or breezy view, but one into
which it is quite possible to fit many facts of existence.
Then there is the normal man with the natural religion,
which accepts the general idea that the world has a design
and therefore a designer; but feels the Architect of the Universe
to be inscrutable and remote, as remote from men as from microbes.
That sort of theism is perfectly sane; and is really the ancient
basis of the solid if somewhat stagnant sanity of Islam.
There is again the man who feels the burden of life so bitterly
that he wishes to renounce all desire and all division, and rejoin
a sort of spiritual unity and peace from which (as he thinks)
our separate selves should never have broken away.  That is the mood
answered by buddhism and by many metaphysicians and mystics.
Then there is a fourth sort of man, sometimes called a mystic
and perhaps more properly to be called a poet; in practice
he can very often be called a pagan.  His position is this;
it is a twilight world and we know not where it ends.
If we do not know enough for monotheism, neither do we know
enough for monism.  There may be a borderland and a world beyond;
but we can only catch hints of it as they come; we may meet
a nymph in the forest; we may see the fairies on the mountains.
We do not know enough about the natural to DENY the preternatural.
That was, in ancient times, the healthiest aspect of Paganism.
That is, in modern times, the rational part of Spiritualism.
All these are possible as general views of life; and there is a fourth
that is at least equally possible, though certainly more positive.
 
The whole point of this last position might be expressed in
the line of M. Cammaerts's beautiful little poem about bluebells;
LE CIEL EST TOMBE PAR TERRE.  Heaven has DESCENDED into the world
of matter; the supreme spiritual power is now operating by the machinery
of matter, dealing miraculously with the bodies and souls of men.
It blesses all the five senses; as the senses of the baby are
blessed at a Catholic christening.  It blesses even material gifts
and keepsakes, as with relics or rosaries.  It works through water
or oil or bread or wine.  Now that sort of mystical materialism
may please or displease the Dean, or anybody else.  But I cannot
for the life of me understand why the Dean, or anybody else, does not
SEE that the Incarnation is as much a part of that idea as the Mass;
and that the Mass is as much a part of that idea as the Incarnation.
A Puritan may think it blasphemous that God should become a wafer.
A Moslem thinks it blasphemous that God should become a workman
in Galilee.  And he is perfectly right, from his point of view;
and given his primary principle.  But if the Moslem has a principle,
the Protestant has only a prejudice.  That is, he has only a fragment;
a relic; a superstition.  If it be profane that the miraculous should
descend to the plane of matter, then certainly Catholicism is profane;
and Protestantism is profane; and Christianity is profane.
Of all human creeds or concepts, in that sense, Christianity is
the most utterly profane.  But why a man should accept a Creator who
was a carpenter, and then worry about holy water, why he should accept
a local Protestant tradition that God was born in some particular
place mentioned in the Bible, merely because the Bible had been
left lying about in England, and then say it is incredible that a
blessing should linger on the bones of a saint, why he should accept
the first and most stupendous part of the story of Heaven on Earth,
and then furiously deny a few small but obvious deductions from it--
that is a thing I do not understand; I never could understand;
I have come to the conclusion that I shall never understand.
I can only attribute it to Superstition.
 
-/-
 
== ON COURAGE AND INDEPENDENCE ==
 
WHEN we are pressed and taunted upon our obstinacy in saying the Mass
in a dead language, we are tempted to reply to our questioners
by telling them that they are apparently not fit to be trusted
with a living language.  When we consider what they have done
with the noble English language, as compared with the English
of the Anglican Prayer-Book, let alone the Latin of the Mass,
we feel that their development may well be called degenerate.
 
The language called dead can never be called degenerate.
Surely even they might understand our taking refuge in it,
by the time that (in the vernacular) the word "immaculate"
is applied only to the shirt-fronts of snobs; or "unction" means not
Extreme Unction, but only unctuous rectitude.  It is needless to note
once more how the moral qualities have lost their mystical quality;
and with it all their dignity and delicacy and spontaneous
spiritual appeal.  Charity, that was the flaming heart of the world,
has become a name for a niggardly and pompous patronage of the poor,
generally amounting by this time to the enslavement of the poor.
 
But there are more subtle examples of this degeneration in ideal terms.
And an even worse example, I think, than the cheapening of the word
CHARITY is the new newspaper cheapening of the word COURAGE.
 
Any man living in complete luxury and security who chooses
to write a play or a novel which causes a flutter and exchange
of compliments in Chelsea and Chiswick and a faint thrill in
Streatham and Surbiton, is described as "daring," though nobody
on earth knows what danger it is that he dares.  I speak, of course,
of terrestrial dangers; or the only sort of dangers he believes in.
To be extravagantly flattered by everybody he considers enlightened,
and rather feebly rebuked by everybody he considers dated and dead,
does not seem so appalling a peril that a man should be stared
at as a heroic warrior and militant martyr because he has had
the strength to endure it.
 
The dramatic critic of a Sunday paper, a little while ago,
lashed himself into a frenzy of admiration for the "courage"
of some dismal and dirty play or other, because it represented
a soldier as raving like a hysterical woman against the cruelty
of those who had expected him to defend his country.  It may be
amusing that his idea of courage should be a defence of cowardice.
But it is the sort of defence of it that we have heard ten thousand
times during the reaction after the War; and the courage required
to utter it is exactly as great as the courage required to utter any
other stale quotation from the cant and convention of the moment:
such trifles as the absurdity of marriage or the sympathetic personality
of Judas Iscariot.  These things have become quite commonplace;
but they still pretend to be courageous.  So sham soldiers have been
known to swagger about in uniform when the war was over.
 
The Catholic Church, as the guardian of all values, guards also
the value of words.  Her children will not fall, I hope,
into this conventional and comfortable folly.  We need not pretend
that Catholics to-day are called upon to show anything worth
calling courage, by the standard of the Catholics in other days.
It did require some courage to be a Catholic when it involved
the definite disinclination felt by most of us for being racked
or ripped up with a knife.  It did require some courage when there
was only an intermittent possibility of being torn in pieces by a mob.
Even that our subtle human psychology regards with some distaste.
 
But I hope we do not feel any distaste for being on the opposite
side to Bishop Barnes, or for being regarded with alarm and
suspicion by Jix.  These things are almost intellectual pleasures.
Indeed, they really involve a certain temptation to intellectual pride.
Let us pray to be delivered from it; and let us hope that we
are not left altogether without occasions for courage.
But most of them will be present in private life and in other
practical aspects of public life; in resisting pain or passion
or defying the economic threat and tyranny of our time.
But do not let us make fools of ourselves like the rationalists
and the realists, by posing as martyrs who are never martyred
or defying tyrants who have been dead for two hundred years.
 
But though the name of this virtue has been vulgarized so much that it
is hard to use it even where it is exact, let alone where it is in any
case exaggerative, there is a somewhat analogous quality which the modern
world lauds equally loudly and has lost almost more completely.
Putting aside the strict sense of a Catholic courage, the world ought
to be told something about Catholic intellectual independence.
It is, of course, the one quality which the world supposes
that Catholics have lost.  It is also, at this moment, the one
quality which Catholics perceive that all the world has lost.
The modern world has many marks, good as well as bad; but by far the most
modern thing in it is the abandonment of individual reason, in favour
of press stunts and suggestion and mass psychology and mass production.
The Catholic Faith, which always preserves the unfashionable virtue,
is at this moment alone sustaining the independent intellect of man.
 
Our critics, in condemning us, always argue in a circle.
They say of mediaevalism that all men were narrow.  When they discover
that many of them were very broad, they insist that those men must have
been in revolt, not only against mediaevalism, but against Catholicism.
No Catholics were intelligent; for when they were intelligent,
they cannot really have been Catholics.  This circular argument
appears with a slight difference in the matter of independent
thought to-day. It consists of extending to all Catholicism
what are in fact the independent ideas of different Catholics.
Men start by assuming (what they have been told) that Rome rigidly
suppresses ALL variety and therefore Romanists never differ on anything.
Then if one of them advances an interesting view, they say that Rome must
have imposed it on him and therefore on all the other Roman Catholics.
I myself have advanced several economic and political suggestions,
for which I never dreamed of claiming anything more than that a loyal
Catholic can offer them.  But I would rather take any other example
than my own unimportant opinions.
 
In any case, my own experience of the modern world tells me that Catholics
are much more and not less individualistic than other men in their
general opinions.  Mr. Michael Williams, the spirited propagandist
of Catholicism in America, gave this as a very cogent reason for
refusing to found or join anything like a Catholic party in politics.
He said that Catholics will combine for Catholicism, but it is quite
abnormally difficult to get them to combine for anything else.
This is confirmed by my own impressions and is contrasted very
sharply with my recollections about most other religious groups.
For instance, what we called the Free Churches, constituting what
was also called the Nonconformist Conscience, represented a marvel
of moral unity and the spreading of a special spiritual atmosphere.
But the Free Churches were not free, whatever else they were.
The most striking and even startling thing about them was the ABSENCE
of any individual repudiations of the common ideals which the Conscience
laid down.  The Nonconformist Conscience was not the normal conscience;
they would hardly themselves have pretended that the mass of
mankind necessarily agreed with them about Drink or Armaments.
But they all agreed with each other about Drink or Armaments.
A Nonconformist minister standing up to defend public-houses,
or public expenditure on guns and bayonets, was a much rarer thing
than a heretic in much more hierarchical systems.  It was broadly
the fact that ALL such men supported what they called Temperance;
which seemed to mean an intemperate denunciation of temperate drinking.
It is almost as certain that ALL of them insisted on what they
called Peace; which seemed, so far as I could make out, to mean
such weakening of armament as would involve disaster and destruction
in War.  But the question here is not whether I disagreed
with them; but whether they ever disagreed with each other.
And one thing is at least certain, that on things of this sort
they disagreed with each other infinitely less than Catholics do.
Though the traditional culture and sacramental symbol of the vine
makes most Catholics moderately favourable to fermented liquor
in moderation, there have been many prominent Catholics who
were teetotallers in a degree hardly to be called moderate.
The great Cardinal Manning startled all his own supporters by the passion
of this private conviction; just as he startled them by many other
Radical eccentricities, such as making friends with Stead and championing
the Salvation Army.  Whether he was right is not here in question;
the point is that he thought he was right when his own religious
world thought he was wrong, and not unfrequently told him so.
You would not have found a man in the Salvation Army to defend
Irish whisky, as you found a man like Father Matthew to denounce it.
 
The same facts could be supported by a hundred facts in my
own experience.  Dean Inge observed the other day that Mr. Belloc
was the only man in England who believed that Dreyfus was guilty.
He might have added that he was nearly the only man in England
who knew any of the actual facts of the case, which were suppressed
in the English newspapers.  In any case, the phrase is an exaggeration;
for several men, like Lord Chief Justice Russell, whom no one will
call incompetent to judge evidence, and old Harry Labouchere, whom no
one will call a zealot for militarism, were of the same opinion.
But substantially it is true that Mr. Belloc, in the days
of his youth, found himself absolutely alone in almost any
assembly of English people discussing the question.  It is by no
means the only occasion on which he has found himself alone.
Merely from my own personal knowledge of him, I could give
a list as long as this article of topics on which he was opposed
to everyone else's opinion and sometimes opposed to mine.
To mention only a few things, large and small, he would probably be
the only person in a drawing-room saying that Lewis Carroll was overrated,
that Byron and Longfellow were not overrated, that wit is superior
to humour, that ALLY SLOPE'S HALF-HOLIDAY was superior to PUNCH,
that James the Second was chiefly notable as a stolid English
patriot suspicious of French influence, that an Irish political
murder might actually be as excusable as a Russian political murder
(old regime), that half the modern legislation advanced in favour
of Labour is part of a plan to re-establish pagan slavery, that it
is the mark of the Protestant culture to tolerate Catholicism
and the mark of the Catholic culture to persecute it, and a variety
of other opinions which would at least be largely regarded
as paradoxes.  And he says such things because he is a Catholic:
which does not mean that other Catholics would say the same.
On the contrary, each would say something quite different.
It is not that they need agree with him; but that he need not
agree with them.  Apart from his own genius, Catholics do differ
thus more than a company of Anglican public-school patriots
or solid Liberal Nonconformists; to say nothing of the middle
class of the Middle West, with its rigid pattern of regular guys.
Catholics know the two or three transcendental truths on which they
do agree; and take rather a pleasure in disagreeing on everything else.
A glance at the living literature, written by other Catholics
besides Mr. Belloc, will confirm what I say.
 
I might take, for instance, a book like the remarkable recent work
of Mr. Christopher Hollis, "The American Heresy."  Now surely nobody
in his senses will say that all Catholics are bound to believe
that the Slave States ought to have won the American Civil War,
that America ought never to have extended westward of Tennessee,
that Andrew Jackson was a savage, or that Abraham Lincoln was a failure,
that Calhoun was like a heathen Roman or that Wilson was an arrogant
and dishonest schoolmaster.  These opinions are not part of the
Catholic order; but they are illustrations of the Catholic liberty.
And they illustrate exactly the sort of liberty which the modern
world emphatically has not got; the real liberty of the mind.
It is no longer a question of liberty from kings and captains
and inquisitors.  It is a question of liberty from catchwords
and headlines and hypnotic repetitions and all the plutocratic
platitudes imposed on us by advertisement and journalism.
 
It is strictly true to say that the average reader of the DAILY MAIL
and the "Outline of History" is inhibited from these intellectual acts.
It is true to say that he CANNOT think that Abraham Lincoln
was a failure.  It is true to say that he CANNOT think that a
Republic should have refused to expand as it has expanded.
He cannot move his mind to such a position, even experimentally;
it means moving it out of too deep a rut, worn too smooth by
the swift traffic of modern talk and journalism, all perpetually
moving one way.
 
These modern people mean by mental activity simply an express train
going faster and faster along the same rails to the same station;
or having more and more railway carriages hooked on to it to be taken
to the same place.  The one notion that has vanished from their
minds is the notion of voluntary movement even to the same end.
They have fixed not only the ends, but the means.
They have imposed not only the doctrines, but the words.
They are bound not merely in religion, which is avowedly binding,
but in everything else as well.  There are formal praises
of free thought; but even the praises are in a fixed form.
Thousands who have never learned to think at all are urged to think
whatever may take their fancy about Jesus Christ.  But they are,
in fact, forbidden to think in any way but one about Abraham Lincoln.
That is why it is worth remarking that it is a Catholic who has
thought for himself.
 
-/-
 
== THE NORDIC HINDOO ==
 
I CANNOT, as some do, find Dr. Barnes a very exciting Bishop
merely because he is an Evolutionist in the style of fifty years
ago and a Protestant persecutor in the style of eighty years ago.
His views are stale enough; but I admit that his arguments
are sometimes amusing.
 
Thus, he reached the last limit of wildness in one remark which he made
in the course of explaining that the folklore of the Mediterranean
had been forced upon the Nordic nations--whatever that may mean.
He added abruptly that Indian and Chinese metaphysics are
now much more important than ours.  But, above all, he made
the crowning assertion that Rome is thus stamped as Provincial.
This seems to suggest to the educational mind the construction
of an examination paper in elementary general knowledge.
It might run something like this:
 
1.  From what language is the word "provincial" derived?
 
2.  To what provinces did it generally refer?
 
3.  If Athens, Antioch, Rome and Jerusalem were provincial towns,
what was their Metropolitan city?
 
4.  What reasons are there for supposing that Birmingham occupied
this Metropolitan position from the earliest times?
 
5.  Give a short account of the conquest of Southern Europe and
the Near East by the Emperors of Birmingham.
 
6.  At what date did the Papacy rebel against the Diocese of Birmingham?
 
7.  Explain the old proverb, "All roads lead to Birmingham."
 
8.  Discuss the following remark, "The most charmingly Nordic people
I know are those dear Chinamen."
 
9.  Why is the folklore of the Hindoos so much more reasonable
than that of the Romans?
 
10.  When will the Bishop of Birmingham go touring in the Provinces?
 
Answers must be sent in before the time of the Disestablishment
of the Church of England, and priests are forbidden to give their
crafty assistance to the candidates.
 
Really, I do not know any other way of dealing with even
a pretence of seriousness with such an extraordinary remark.
It was rendered even more extraordinary, of course,
by the further remarks on the subject of Chinamen and Hindoos.
Now we know all about the Nordic Man, so far as anybody can know
anything about a person who does not exist.  We know, for instance,
that up to the autumn of 1914 he used to be called the Teutonic Man.
Dean Inge used to be frightfully fond of him in those days;
even fonder than he is now.  He once quoted lavishly, and still
quotes occasionally, from that great and glorious English patriot,
Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
 
We quite understood that all Nordic Men were like gods, having long
golden hair and gigantic stature; and this made it all the more pleasant
to realize that we ourselves were Nordic Men, Unfortunately, the Germans
were even more Nordic and gigantic and beautiful to gaze upon;
they said so; and they ought to know.  The poor Teuton was a little
unpopular for five years or so; but now he is creeping out again to feel
the sun, like the kings after Napoleon's fall in Mrs. Browning's poem.
Like several other people, he changed his name during the War.
He is now entirely Nordic and not at all Teutonic.  And, as it is,
and always was, his whole profession in life to praise himself
and exalt the virtue of pride, so much undervalued by Christians,
it is perfectly natural that he should despise "Dagos"
and talk about the lower culture of lesser breeds without the law.
It is natural that he should insist that all Spaniards are cowardly
bullfighters and all Italians luxurious organ-grinders. He may
be expected to point out at intervals the sluggish incompetence
of Napoleon and the impotent languor of Mussolini.
 
All this we were used to; it was what we expected from the Nordic Man;
for nobody ever expected a Nordic Man to face facts staring him
in the face, or to learn anything even from his own experience.
We thought we had it all clear and complete, like a mutual understanding;
there was the Nordic Man who was noble because he was Protestant
and had light hair; and there was the Southern Catholic who was
a lower sort of animal, because he was swarthy and superstitious.
But why Hindoos? 0 Venerable Father in God and gentle shepherd
of souls, why Hindoos?
 
Why are we now told to learn from people who are even less
light-haired and even further off from the Arctic Circle?  Are they
not a lower race, conquered by the earth-shaking Imperialism
of Birmingham?  Are they not a lesser breed without the law?
Are we to go to Asia to escape from the folklore and magic?
Do the dear Indians never exhibit any of the errors that deface
the deplorable Romans?  If the Latins are idolaters, do the Indians
never have idols?  If Southern Europe is attached to mythology,
is Southern Asia a world of pure reason that has never been defaced
by a myth?
 
The explanation, the only explanation that I can suggest, is the one I
have already suggested; and it is in a simple word; the word DESPAIR.
Everybody knows that when a military campaign begins to fail there
is an inevitable and even pardonable temptation to every military
commander on the defeated side to lower the standard of military fitness
and collect soldiers from anywhere, whatever be their military quality.
This has happened again and again even among the white races;
something similar is constantly happening in their relation to the
other races.  So both the Dutch and the English in the South African
quarrel have been continually tempted to make use of the natives
for war as well as labour.  France has been blamed for relying on
dark troops; though I never could see why she should be blamed by us,
who drew dark troops from all over our own Empire.
 
Anyhow, it is a process that defeated or embarrassed captains fall back
upon regularly but often reluctantly.  It is a very exact parallel
to the defeat of the Bishop of Birmingham and his cry for help
to the Hindoos.  He has reached the position in which he will accept
reinforcements from anywhere except Rome.  Rome must be provincial;
even if it is the only place in the world that is provincial.
Rome must be barbaric; if all the barbarians of the earth are called
up to sack the city.
 
And when we have reached that point, it is not difficult to see
that the very invasion and spoliation proclaim it to be a Holy City;
unique and universal and towering over the tribes of men.
 
 
-/-
 
== A SPIRITUALIST LOOKS BACK ==
 
WE hear much about new religions; many of them based
on the very latest novelties of Buddha and Pythagoras.
But I have come to a conclusion which I fear will offend still more.
I fancy that all modern religions are counter-religions; attacks on,
or alternative to the Catholic Church.  They bear no likeness to
the natural pagan speculations that existed before the Catholic Church,
or would exist if it had never existed.  The attitude of Dean Inge
is certainly much more like that of Plotinus than that of Plato.
But it is even more like that of Porphyry than that of Plotinus.
He is exactly like some pagan of the decline; it is not necessary
for him to know very much about the Christian superstition;
as soon as he heard of it, he hated it.
 
In a recent work, which I have considered in this place, he is careful
to insist that the word PROTESTANT had an old meaning which was not
merely negative.  And he has certainly fulfilled an old meaning
that is positive; if the word Protestant means a man who doth
protest too much.  He is so very anxious to explain what he thinks
about the Catholic Church that he cannot keep it out of any article
about M. Coue or Monkey Glands.
 
The Dean stands by himself; and must be presumably described as
an Anglican, for want of anything else in particular to call him.
But it is very interesting to observe that even those who seem
to go out into the wilderness to stake out their own Promised Land,
like the Mormons, are eventually found to be as much a mere reaction
against orthodoxy as the Modernists.  Their march towards the new Utopia
is found to be only a rather longer and more elaborate manoeuvre
of one of the armies besieging the Holy City.  We imagined that these
new schismatics had finally gone off to pray; but we always find
(a little while afterwards) that they have remained to scoff.
They always come back to boo and riot in our churches when they
have got tired of trying to build their own.
 
One who thus reveals all that he does not know, and certainly ought
to know, is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  He broke out the other day
into a diatribe, which was supposed to begin with the relations
of his new religion to others, but which turned with incalculable
rapidity into mere abuse of his old original family religion,
as if there were no other in the world.
 
Perhaps he is right; and there is not.  But you would think
a man fresh from founding a new religion might have a few
new things to say about that; instead of old and negative
things to say about something else.  But the special strictures
of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on Catholic orthodoxy had a certain
very curious character, which alone makes them worth noting at all.
In themselves they are almost indescribably stale and thin and shabby;
and have been thrashed threadbare in a hundred controversies.
But the odd thing which I want to remark about them is this;
that they are not only old, but old-fashioned, in the sense
that they do not even fit into what is now fashionable.
They had some meaning sixty years ago.  They have no meaning
at all for anybody who looks at the living world as it is--
even at the world of new faiths or fads like Spiritualism.
But the Spiritualist is not looking even at the Spiritualist world.
He is not looking at the human world, or the heathen world, or even
at the worldly world.  He is looking only at the thing he hates.
 
For instance, he says, exactly as did our Calvinist great-grandmother,
that the Confessional is a most indelicate institution; and that
it is highly improper for a young lady of correct deportment,
in the matter of prunes and prisms, to mention such things as sins
to a strange gentleman who is a celibate.  Well, of course,
all Catholics know the answer to that; and hundreds of Catholics
have answered it to Protestants who had some sort of right or reason
to ask it.
 
Nobody, or next to nobody, has ever had to go into so much morbid
detail in confessing to a priest as in confessing to a doctor.
And the joke of it is that the Protestant great-grandmother,
who objected to the gentleman priest, would have been
the very first to object to a lady doctor.  What matters in
the confessional is the moral guilt and not the material details.
But the material details are everything in medicine, even for
the most respectable and responsible physician, let alone all
the anarchical quacks who have been let loose to hear confessions
in the name of Psychoanalysis or Hypnotic Cures.  But though we all
know the old and obvious answers, what I find startling is this:
that our critic does not see the new and obvious situation.
 
What in the world is the sense of his coming with his prunes
and prisms into the sort of society that surrounds us to-day?
If a girl must not mention sin to a man in a corner of a church,
it is apparently the only place nowadays in which she may not do so.
She may sit side by side with him on a jury and discuss the details
of the foulest and most perverted wickedness in the world,
perhaps with a man's life hanging on the minuteness of the detail.
She may read in novels and newspapers sins she has never
heard of, let alone sins she is likely to commit or confess.
She must not whisper to an impersonal presence behind a grating
the most abstract allusion to the things that she hears shouted
and cat-called in all the theatrical art and social conversation
of the day.
 
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle must know as well as I do that modesty
of that sort is not being regarded at all by the modern world;
and that nobody dreams of attempting to safeguard it so strictly as it
is safeguarded in Catholic conversation and Catholic confessions.
We can say of Rome and Purity what Swinburne said, in another sense,
about Rome and Liberty--"Who is against but all her men, and who
is beside her but Thou?"  And yet the critic has the impudence
to accuse us of the neglect of what all but we are neglecting;
simply because that charge was used against us a century ago,
and anything used against us can be used over and over again,
until it drops to pieces.  The old stick of the old grandmother
is still good enough to beat the old dog with, though if the old
grandmother could rise from the dead, she would think the dog
the only decent object in the landscape.
 
I mean nothing flippant when I say that the only interesting thing
about all this is its staleness.  I have no unfriendly feelings towards
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to whom we all owe so much gratitude in the realm
of literature and entertainment, and who often seems to me entirely
right in his manner of defending Spiritualism against Materialism.
But I do realize, even if he does not realize, that, at the back
of the whole business, he is not defending Spiritualism, and not
attacking Materialism; he is attacking Rome.
 
By a deep and true ancestral instinct with him, he knows
that this is ultimately the one Thing to be either attacked
or defended; and that he that is not against it is for it.
Unless the claim of the Church can be challenged in the modern world,
it is impossible really to set up an alternative modern religion.
He feels that to be a fact, and I am glad to sympathize with him.
Indeed, it is because I would remain so far sympathetic that I
take only one example among the doctrines he denounced;
and deliberately avoid, for instance, his strangely benighted
remarks on the cult of the Blessed Virgin.  For I confess to a
difficulty in remaining patient with blindness about that topic.
But there are other parallel topics.
 
He has some very innocent remarks about what he considers
grotesque in the sacramental system; innocent, because apparently
unconscious of what everybody else in the world considers grotesque
in the spiritualistic system.  If any Christian service was so
conducted as to resemble a really successful seance, the world
might well be excused for falling back on the word "grotesque,"
a favourite word of Dr. Watson.  Indeed, we may well question whether
the institution of the Red-Headed League or the episode of the Yellow Face
at the window, or any of the fantasies of Mr. Sherlock Holmes,
were any more fantastic than some that have been submitted to us
seriously enough by the school of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
I do not say that this test of external extravagance ought
to be final, or that no defence of such details could be made.
But when Sir Arthur deliberately gibes at our ceremonies, we may
at least be allowed to smile at his.  Suppose any Catholic rite
before the altar consisted of binding a human being hand and foot
with ropes; should we ever hear the last of the horrible survival
of human sacrifice?  Suppose we declared that the priest went
into a trance and that clouds of thick white stuff like cotton-wool
came out of his mouth, as a manifestation of celestial grace;
might not some of our critics be heard to murmur the word, "grotesque"?
If we conducted a quiet little evening service in which a big brass
trumpet careered about in the air and patted people on the head,
caressed a lady with intimate gestures of affection, and generally
exhibited itself as about as attractive an object as a philandering
trombone or an amorous big drum, would not our critics have something
to say about the unwholesome hysteria and senseless excitement
of Popery?  If the Spiritualist goes out of his way to challenge
us to a duel in the matter of dignity, I do not really think it
can be reasonably said that he is on stronger ground than we.
 
But I remark on all these charges, not in order to show how they
recoil upon themselves, but in order to show how the Spiritualist
is driven to return upon himself, and to react against his origins,
and to forget all else in making war upon his mother.
 
The man of the modern religion does not quarrel with the modern world,
as he well might, for its neglect of modesty.  He quarrels with
the ancient mother, who is alone teaching it any modesty at all.
He does not devote himself to condemning the modern dances or
the fashionable comedies for their vulgar and obvious indifference
to dignity.  He brings his special charge of grotesque extravagance
against the only ceremonial that really retains any dignity.
It seems to him, somehow, more important that the Catholic Church
should be, on the most minute point, open to misunderstanding,
than that the whole world should go to the devil in a dance
of death before his very eyes.  And he is quite right; at least,
the instinct of which this is a symbol is quite right.
 
The world really pays the supreme compliment to the Catholic Church
in being intolerant of her tolerating even the appearance
of the evils which it tolerates in everything else.  A fierce
light does indeed beat upon that throne and blacken every blot;
but the interest here is in the fact that even those who profess
to be setting up new thrones or throwing new light are perpetually
looking backwards at the original blaze if only to discover the blots.
They have not really succeeded in getting out of the orbit
of the system which they criticize.  They have not really found
new stars; they are still pointing at alleged spots on the sun,
and thereby admitting that it is their native daylight and the centre
of their solar system.
 
-/-
 
== THE ROOTS OF SANITY ==
 
THE Dean of St. Paul's, when he is right, is very right.
He is right with all that ringing emphasis that makes him in other
matters so rashly and disastrously wrong.  And I cannot but hail with
gratitude the scorn with which he spoke lately of all the newspaper
nonsense about using monkey-glands to turn old men into young men;
or into young monkeys, if that is to be the next step towards
the Superman.  Not unnaturally, he tried to balance his denunciation
of that very experimental materialism which he is always accusing us
of denouncing, by saying that this materialism is one evil extreme
and that Catholicism is the other.  In that connection he said
some of the usual things which he commonly finds it easy to say,
and we generally find it tolerably easy to answer.
 
For instance, it is a good example of the contradictory charges brought
against Rome that the Dean apparently classes us with those who leave
children entirely "unwarned" about the moral dangers of the body.
Considering that we have been abused for decades on the ground that we
forced on the young the infamous suggestions of the Confessional,
this is rather funny.
 
Only the other day I noted that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle revived
this charge of an insult to innocence; and I will leave Dean Inge
and Sir Arthur to fight it out.  And when he charges us with
indifference to Eugenics and the breeding of criminals and lunatics,
it is enough that he has himself to denounce the perversion of
science manifested in the monkey business.  He might permit others
to resent equally the schemes by which men are to act like lunatics
and criminals in order to avoid lunacy and crime.
 
There is, however, another aspect of this matter of being right
or wrong, which is not so often associated with us, but which is
equally consistent with our philosophy.  And it has a notable
bearing on the sort of questions here raised by Dean Inge.
It concerns not only the matters in which the world is wrong,
but rather especially the matters in which the world is right.
The world, especially the modern world, has reached a curious
condition of ritual or routine; in which we might almost say that it
is wrong even when it is right.  It continues to a great extent to do
the sensible things.  It is rapidly ceasing to have any of the sensible
reasons for doing them.  It is always lecturing us on the deadness
of tradition; and it is living entirely on the life of tradition.
It is always denouncing us for superstition; and its own principal
virtues are now almost entirely superstitions.
 
I mean that when we are right, we are right by principle;
and when they are right, they are right by prejudice.
We can say, if they prefer it so, that they are right by instinct.
But anyhow, they are still restrained by healthy prejudice from many
things into which they might be hurried by their own unhealthy logic.
It is easiest to take very simple and even extreme examples;
and some of the extremes are nearer to us than some may fancy.
 
Thus, most of our friends and acquaintances continue to entertain
a healthy prejudice against Cannibalism.  The time when this next
step in ethical evolution will be taken seems as yet far distant.
But the notion that there is not very much difference between
the bodies of men and animals--that is not by any means far distant,
but exceedingly near.  It is expressed in a hundred ways, as a sort
of cosmic communism.  We might almost say that it is expressed
in every other way except cannibalism.
 
It is expressed, as in the Voronoff notion, in putting pieces
of animals into men.  It is expressed, as in the vegetarian notion,
in not putting pieces of animals into men.  It is expressed in
letting a man die as a dog dies, or in thinking it more pathetic
that a dog should die than a man.  Some are fussy about what happens
to the bodies of animals, as if they were quite certain that a rabbit
resented being cooked, or that an oyster demanded to be cremated.
Some are ostentatiously indifferent to what happens to the bodies of men;
and deny all dignity to the dead and all affectionate gesture
to the living.  But all these have obviously one thing in common;
and that is that they regard the human and bestial body as common things.
They think of them under a common generalisation; or under conditions
at best comparative.  Among people who have reached this position,
the REASON for disapproving of cannibalism has already become very vague.
It remains as a tradition and an instinct.  Fortunately, thank God,
though it is now very vague, it is still very strong.
But though the number of earnest ethical pioneers who are likely
to begin to eat boiled missionary is very small, the number of those
among them who could explain their own real reason for not doing
so is still smaller.
 
The real reason is that all such social sanities are now the traditions
of old Catholic dogmas.  Like many other Catholic dogmas, they are felt
in some vague way even by heathens, so long as they are healthy heathens.
But when it is a question of their not being merely felt
but formulated, it will be found to be a formula of the Faith.
In this case it is all those ideas that Modernists most dislike,
about "special creation" and that Divine image that does not come merely
by evolution, and the chasm between man and the other creatures.
In short, it is those very doctrines with which men like Dean Inge
are perpetually reproaching us, as things that forbid us a
complete confidence in science or a complete unity with animals.
It is these that stand between men and cannibalism--or possibly
monkey glands.  They have the prejudice; and long may they retain it!
We have the principle, and they are welcome to it when they want it.
 
If Euclid were demonstrating with diagrams for the first time
and used the argument of the REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM, he would now
only produce the impression that his own argument was absurd.
I am well aware that I expose myself to this peril by extending
my opponent's argument to an extreme, which may be considered
an extravagance.  The question is, why is it an extravagance?
I know that in this case it will be answered that the social feature
of cannibalism is rare in our culture.  So far as I know, there are
no cannibal restaurants threatening to become fashionable in London
like Chinese restaurants.  Anthropophagy is not like Anthroposophy,
a subject of society lectures; and, varied as are the religions and
moralities among us, the cooking of missionaries is not yet a mission.
But if anyone has so little of logic as to miss the meaning of an
extreme example, I should have no difficulty in giving a much more
practical and even pressing example.  A few years ago, all sane people
would have said that Adamitism was quite as mad as Anthropophagy.
A banker walking down the streets with no clothes on would have been
quite as nonsensical as a butcher selling man instead of mutton.
Both would be the outbreak of a lunatic under the delusion that he was
a savage.  But we have seen the New Adamite or No Clothes Movement
start quite seriously in Germany; start indeed with a seriousness
of which only Germans are capable.  Englishmen probably
are still English enough to laugh at it and dislike it.
But they laugh by instinct; and they only dislike by instinct.
Most of them, with their present muddled moral philosophy,
would probably have great difficulty in refuting the Prussian professor
of nakedness, however heartily they might desire to kick him.
For if we examine the current controversies, we shall find the same
negative and defenceless condition as in the case of the theory
of cannibalism.  All the fashionable arguments used against Puritanism
do in fact lead to Adamitism.  I do not mean, of course, that they
are not often practically healthy as against Puritanism; still less
do I mean that there are no better arguments against Puritanism.
But I mean that in pure logic the civilised man has laid open his guard;
and is, as it were, naked against the inroads of nakedness.
So long as he is content merely to argue that the body is
beautiful or that what is natural is right, he has surrendered
to the Adamite in theory, though it may be, please God, a long
time before he surrenders in practice.  Here again the modern
theorist will have to defend his own sanity with a prejudice.
It is the mediaeval theologian who can defend it with a reason.
I need not go into that reason at length; it is enough to say
that it is founded on the Fall of Man, just as the other
instinct against cannibalism is founded on the Divinity of Man.
The Catholic argument can be put shortly by saying that there
is nothing the matter with the human body; what is the matter
is with the human soul.
 
In other words, if man were completely a god, it might be true that all
aspects of his bodily being were godlike; just as if he were completely
a beast, we could hardly blame him for any diet, however beastly.
But we say that experience confirms our theory of his human complexity.
It has nothing to do with the natural things themselves.
If red roses mysteriously maddened men to commit murder, we should
make rules to cover them up; but red roses would be quite as pure
as white ones.
 
In most modern people there is a battle between the new opinions,
which they do not follow out to their end, and the old traditions,
which they do not trace back to their beginning.  If they followed
the new notions forward, it would lead them to Bedlam.  If they
followed the better instincts backward, it would lead them to Rome.
At the best they remain suspended between two logical alternatives,
trying to tell themselves, as does Dean Inge, that they are merely
avoiding two extremes.  But there is this great difference in his case,
that the question on which he is wrong is, in however perverted a form,
a matter of science, whereas the matter in which he is right is
by this time simply a matter of sentiment.  I need not say that I
do not use the word here in a contemptuous sense, for in these
things there is a very close kinship between sentiment and sense.
But the fact remains that all the people in his position can only go
on being sensible.  It is left for us to be also reasonable.
 
 
-/-
 
== SOME OF OUR ERRORS ==
 
THE thoughtful reader, studying the literature of the enlightened
and scientific when they advise us about ethics and religion,
will be arrested by one phrase which really has a meaning.
Nay, he will observe, with increasing interest and excitement,
that it really contains a truth.  Most of the phrases that are
supposed to go along with it, and to be of the same sort,
will be found to be not only untrue but almost unmeaning.
When the Modernist says that we must free the human intellect
from the mediaeval syllogism, it is as if he said we must free it
from the multiplication-table. Some people can count or reason
quicker than others; some people put in all the steps and are safe;
some people leave out the steps and are still right; many leave out
the steps and are consequently wrong.  But the process of multiplication
is the same, and the process of demonstration is the same.
Men think in that way, except when they escape from it by ceasing
to think.  Or again, when we find in the same context the remark
that some Christian doctrine which we do know is "only a form of"
some Pagan cult that nobody really knows, we realise that the
mathematician is treating the unknown quantity as the known.
But when we find among these fallacies the remark I speak of,
we shall be wise to pause upon it with greater patience.
It is the remark, "We need a restatement of religion"; and though
it has been said thirty thousand times, it is quite true.
 
It is also true that those who say it often mean the very
opposite of what they say.  As I have remarked elsewhere,
they very often intend not to restate anything, but to state
something else, introducing as many of the old words as possible.
By this time not only the word religion, but also the word restatement,
is becoming rather an old word.  But anyhow the point is that they
do not really mean that we should give freshness and a new aspect
to religion by calling it roly-poly or rumpti-foo. On the contrary,
they mean that we should take something totally different
and agree to call it religion.  I mention, with some sadness,
that I have said this before; because I have found it quite difficult
to get them to see a fact of almost heart-breaking simplicity.
It seems to strike them as being merely a fine shade of distinction;
but it strikes me as a rather grotesque and staggering reversal.
There would be the same fine shade of difference, if somebody of a
sartorial sort came to me protesting that my aged father was waiting
in rags on my door-step, and urgently needing a new hat and coat,
and indeed a complete equipment; if he made the most animated
preparations for the reclothing of my parent, and the whole episode
ended by his introducing me to a total stranger begging for my
father's old hat.
 
Now I do really believe that there is a need for the restatement
of religious truth; but not the statement of something
quite different, which I do not believe to be true.
I believe there is a very urgent need for a verbal paraphrase
of many of the fundamental doctrines; simply because people
have ceased to understand them as they are traditionally stated.
It does not follow from this that the traditional statement is not
the true statement.  It only means that the traditional statement
now needs to be translated; although translation is seldom true.
This is especially the case in connection with Catholic ideas;
because they were originally stated in what some call a dead
language and some an everlasting language.  But anyhow, they were
stated in a language that has since broken up into other languages,
and mixed with other dialects, and produced a popular PATOIS
which is spirited, and often splendid, but necessarily less exact.
Now I do think that the Catholic culture suffers very much
from the popular misunderstanding of its original terminology.
I do think that Catholics are themselves to blame, in many cases, for not
realising that their doctrines need to be stated afresh, and not left
in language that is intrinsically correct but practically misleading.
Those who call themselves liberal, commonly take for granted that the
fault is with a dead language, as against a language that has developed.
If they were really liberal, they could enlarge their minds to see
that there is a case for the language having degenerated.  But in
either case, it is practically true that there are misunderstandings,
and that we ought chiefly to desire to make people understand.
And I think we have faults and follies of our own in this matter; and that
it is not always the fault of our enemies that they misunderstand.
There are cases in which we, more or less unconsciously,
misinform them.  We do not allow enough, in justifying the words
that we speak, for the difference in the words that they hear.
And I propose to say a few words in this article upon what I may call
Catholic criticisms of Catholic faults; or what are (in many cases)
merely Catholic accidents and misunderstanding.
 
For instance, there is a sort of misunderstanding that is
simply mistranslation.  Probably we have never properly explained
to them the real case for using Latin for something that must
be immutable and universal.  But as half of them are howling day
and night for an international language, and accepting a journalese
jibberish with plurals in "oj" because they can get no better,
some glimmering of the old use of Latin by Erasmus or Bacon might
reasonably be expected of them.  Of the full defence of such a
hieratic tongue I may say something later.  But for the moment I am
thinking of certain mistakes which arise very largely by our fault
and not theirs.  It is not the Church's Latin that is to blame;
it is the English Catholic's English.  It is not because we
do not translate it into the vulgar tongue that we are wrong;
it is because we do.  Sometimes, I am sorry to say, we translate it
into a very vulgar tongue.  When we do translate things into English,
they often only serve as a luminous argument for leaving them in Latin.
Latin is Latin, and always says exactly what it means.  But popular
versions of Latin things often only serve to make them unpopular.
 
I will venture to take one example, about which I feel very strongly.
Will somebody with better authority than I have announce in a voice
of thunder, through a trumpet or with a salute of big guns,
the vital and very much needed truth that "dulcis" is not the Latin
for "sweet"?  "Sweet" is not the English word for "dulcis";
any more than for "doux" or "douce." It has a totally different
connotation and atmosphere.  "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori"
does not mean "it is sweet and decorous to die for our country."
It means something untranslatable like everything that means anything;
but something more like "It is a gracious thing and of good report to die
for our country."  When Roland was dying in the mountains, having blown
his horn and broken his sword, and thought of "La doulce France"
and the men of his line, he did not sully his lips by saying
"sweet France," but something like "beautiful and gracious France."
In English the word "sweet" has been rendered hopelessly sticky
by the accident of the word "sweets." But in any case it suggests
something much more intense and even pungent in sweetness
like the tabloids of saccharine that are of concentrated sugar.
It is at once too strong and too weak a word.  It has not the same savour
as the same word in the Latin languages, which often means no more
than the word "gentle" as it was used of "a perfect gentle knight."
But English Catholicism, having in the great calamity of our history
gone into exile in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (at the very
moment when our modern language was being finally made) naturally had
to seek for its own finest enthusiasms in foreign languages.
It could not find a salutation to the Mass or the Blessed Virgin
except in French or Italian or Spanish or some such tongue; and it
translated these things back into a language with which the exile
had lost touch and in which his taste was not quite firm and sure.
It seemed to be thought necessary to use the word "sweet" in every
single case of the kind; which produces not only something that did
not sound English; but something which did not sound in the least
as the Latin or French sounded.  In a certain number of cases,
of course, it is exactly the right word; just as it is from time
to time in ordinary English poetry.  Sometimes it is right because it
is so obviously the natural and inevitable word that it would
seem more affected not to use it than to use it; as in the song
of Burns; "My love is like the melody that's sweetly played in tune."
Sometimes it is right because there is something to be a salt
to its sweetness, as in Sir Philip Sidney's line; "Before the eyes
of that sweet enemy France."  Similarly it is often exactly
right in good Catholic translations or compositions in English.
But this fixed notion that it must always be used wherever some such
tender expression would be used in Romance literature is simply
a blunder in translation; and a blunder that has had very bad
effects in fields much more important than literature.  I believe
that this incongruous and inaccurate repetition of the word "sweet"
has kept more Englishmen out of the Catholic Church than all
the poison of the Borgias or all the poisonous lies of the people
who have written about them.
 
Ours is at this moment the most rational of all religions.
It is even, in a sense, the most rationalistic of all religions.
Those who talk about it as merely or mainly emotional simply do not
know what they are talking about.  It is all the other religions,
all the modern religions, that are merely emotional.
This is as true of the emotional salvationism of the first Protestants
as of the emotional intuitionalism of the last Modernists.
We alone are left accepting the action of the reason and
the will, without any necessary assistance from the emotions.
A convinced Catholic is easily the most hard-headed and logical
person walking about the world to-day. But this old slander,
of a slimy sentimentalism in all we say and do, is terribly perpetuated
by this mere muddle about words.  We are still supposed to have a
silly sort of devotion, when we really have the most sensible sort,
merely because we have taken a foreign phrase and translated it wrong;
instead of either leaving it in Latin for those who can read
Latin or trusting it in English to people who can write English.
But if in this case we admit that the misunderstanding is more
our fault than our opponents' fault, the fault which we confess
is the very reverse of the fault of which the opponents complain.
It has not arisen through the Catholic practice of saying prayers
in Latin.  On the contrary, it has arisen through the Protestant
practice of always saying them in English.  It has come through
yielding merely weakly and mechanically to the Protestant pressure
in the days when our tradition was completely out of fashion.
In other words, it has come through doing exactly what they advised us
to do, and not doing it well.  Of course I do not mean that it is not
a good thing to have good popular translation when it is done well.
I think it is a very good thing indeed.  But while I see what there
is to be said for the cult of the vernacular, the Protestant
critic does not see what there is to be said for the fixed form
of the classic tongue.  He does not see that there is something
to be said even for the general idea that Catholic poetry should
be in the vernacular like the Divine Comedy and Catholic worship
in the fundamental language like the Mass.
 
It is a question between a dead language and a dying language.
Every living language is a dying language, even if it does not die.
Parts of it are perpetually perishing or changing their sense; there is
only one escape from that flux; and a language must die to be immortal.
The style of the English Jacobean translation is as noble and simple
a thing as any in the world; but even there the words degenerate.
It is not their fault; but ours who misuse them; but they are misused.
No language could lift itself into a loftier or simpler strain
than that which begins, "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people";
but even then, when we pass on to "speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem,"
we stumble over a word we have vulgarised.
 
But the world plays havoc with all such words, whether they are
in the English Bible or the Latin Canon.  There are many words
of Catholic usage which have in practice been thus misused.
When an outsider hears that a Catholic has refrained from something
for fear of "causing scandal," he instantly has an irritated
impression that it means a fear of setting all the silly old women
in the town talking gossip.  Of course it means nothing of the kind.
It does not mean that in Greek.  It does not mean that in Latin.
It ought not to mean that in English.  It ought to mean what it says;
the fear of tripping somebody up, of putting a stumbling-block
in the way of some struggling human being.  If I encourage to
carousals a man who must be kept off drink, I am causing scandal.
If I talk what might be a wholesome realism for some hearers,
to a young and innocent person who is certain to feel it as
mere obscenity, I am causing scandal.  I am doing what for me
is right, at the risk of making him do what for him is wrong.
To say that that is unjustifiable is manifest moral common sense.  But it
is not conveyed in modern English by talking about causing scandal.
All that is conveyed in modern English is that the person so
acting is disdaining idle chatter and irresponsible criticism;
which is exactly what all the saints and martyrs have consistently
lived and died by doing.  And that is a good example of what I mean
by translation; or, if the word be preferred, by restatement.
But that does not mean turning round and abusing the old statement,
which was really quite correctly stated.  It only means restating
exactly what the old statement states.
 
I could give many other examples of words which were right in their
Latin use, but which have become obscured in their English misuse.
I always feel it in the necessarily frequent phrase "offending" God;
which had originally almost the awful meaning of wounding God.
But the word has degenerated through its application to man,
until the sound of it is quite petty and perverted.  We say that
Mr. Binks was quite offended or that Aunt Susan will take offence;
and lose sight of the essential truth, and even dogma that
(in that lower sense) God is the very last to take offence.
But here again we should not abuse the Latin language;
we should abuse our own vulgarisation of the English language.
Upon this one point, of the restatement of religious ideas,
the reformers are right in everything except the one essential;
which is knowing where to throw the blame.
 
-/-
 
== THE SLAVERY OF THE MIND ==
 
I HAVE chosen the subject of the slavery of the mind because I believe
many worthy people imagine I am myself a slave.  The nature of my supposed
slavery I need not name and do not propose specially to discuss.
It is shared by every sane man when he looks up a train in Bradshaw.
That is, it consists in thinking a certain authority reliable;
which is entirely reasonable.  Indeed it would be rather
difficult to travel in every train to find out where it went.
It would be still more difficult to go to the destination
in order to discover whether it was safe to begin the journey.
Suppose a wild scare arose that Bradshaw was a conspiracy to produce
railway accidents, a man might still believe the Guide to be a Guide
and the scare to be only a scare; but he would know of the existence
of the scare.  What I mean by the slavery of the mind is that state
in which men do not know of the alternative.  It is something
which clogs the imagination, like a drug or a mesmeric sleep,
so that a person cannot possibly think of certain things at all.
It is not the state in which he says, "I see what you mean; but I cannot
think that because I sincerely think this" (which is simply rational):
it is one in which he has never thought of the other view;
and therefore does not even know that he has never thought of it.
Though I am not discussing here my own religion, I think it
only right to say that its authorities have never had this sort
of narrowness.  You may condemn their condemnations as oppressive;
but not in this sense as obscurantist.  St. Thomas Aquinas begins
his enquiry by saying in effect, "Is there a God?  It would
seem not, for the following reasons"; and the most criticised
of recent Encyclicals always stated a view before condemning it.
The thing I mean is a man's inability to state his opponent's view;
and often his inability even to state his own.
 
Curiously enough, I find this sort of thing rather specially widespread
in our age, which claims to possess a popular culture or enlightenment.
There is everywhere the habit of assuming certain things,
in the sense of not even imagining the opposite things.
For instance, as history is taught, nearly everybody assumes that
in all important past conflicts, it was the right side that won.
Everybody assumes it; and nobody knows that he assumes it.
The man has simply never seriously entertained the other notion.
Say to him that we should now all of us be better off if Charles Edward
and the Jacobites had captured London instead of falling back from Derby,
and he will laugh.  He will think it is what he calls a "paradox."
Yet nothing can be a more sober or solid fact than that, when the issue
was undecided, wise and thoughtful men were to be found on both sides;
and the Jacobite theory is not in any way disproved by the fact
that Cumberland could outflank the clans at Drummossie.
I am not discussing whether it was right as a theory; I am only
noting that it is never allowed to occur to anybody as a thought.
The things that might have been are not even present to the imagination.
If somebody says that the world would now be better if Napoleon had
never fallen, but had established his Imperial dynasty, people have
to adjust their minds with a jerk.  The very notion is new to them.
Yet it would have prevented the Prussian reaction; saved equality
and enlightenment without a mortal quarrel with religion;
unified Europeans and perhaps avoided the Parliamentary corruption and
the Fascist and Bolshevist revenges.  But in this age of free-thinkers,
men's minds are not really free to think such a thought.
 
What I complain of is that those who accept the verdict of fate
in this way accept it without knowing why.  By a quaint paradox,
those who thus assume that history always took the right turning
are generally the very people who do not believe there was any
special providence to guide it.  The very rationalists who jeer
at the trial by combat, in the old feudal ordeal, do in fact accept
a trial by combat as deciding all human history.  In the war of
the North and South in America, some of the Southern rebels wrote
on their flags the rhyme, "Conquer we must for our cause is just."
The philosophy was faulty; and in that sense it served them right that
their opponents copied and continued it in the form "Conquer they didn't;
so their cause wasn't." But the latter logic is as bad as the former.
I have just read a book called, "The American Heresy,"
by Mr. Christopher Hollis.  It is a very brilliant and original book;
but I know it will not be taken sufficiently seriously;
because the reader will have to wrench his mind out of a rut even
to imagine the South victorious; still more to imagine anybody
saying that a small, limited and agricultural America would have
been better for everybody--especially Americans.
 
I could give many other examples of what I mean by this
imaginative bondage.  It is to be found in the strange superstition
of making sacred figures out of certain historical characters;
who must not be moved from their stiff symbolic attitudes.
Even their bad qualities are sacred.  Much new light has lately
been thrown on Queen Elizabeth and Mary Stuart.  It is not only
favourable to Mary but on the whole favourable to Elizabeth.
It seems pretty certain that Mary did not plot to kill Darnley.
It seems highly probable that Elizabeth did not plot to kill Mary.
But many people are quite as tenderly attached to the idea
of a merciless Elizabeth as to that of a murderous Mary.
That a man devoted to Protestantism should rejoice that Elizabeth
succeeded, that a man devoted to Catholicism should wish that Mary
had succeeded--all that would be perfectly natural and rational.
But Elizabeth was not Protestantism; and it ought not to
disturb anybody to discover that she was hardly a Protestant.
It ought to be even less gratification to her supporters to insist
that she was a tyrant.  But there is a sort of waxwork history,
that cannot be happy unless Elizabeth has an axe and Mary a dagger.
This sense of fixed and sacred figures ought to belong to
a religion; but a historical speculation is not a religion.
To believe in Calvinism by faith alone is comprehensible.
To believe in Cromwell by faith alone is incomprehensible.
It is supremely incomprehensible that when Calvinists left off
believing in Calvinism, they still insisted on believing in Cromwell.
To a simple rationalist like myself, these prejudices are
hard to understand.
 
-/-
 
== INGE VERSUS BARNES ==
 
NONE of us I hope ever wished to be unjust to Dean Inge:
though in such fights the button will sometimes come off the foil.
And a cruel injustice is being done to him, in the suggestion
widely circulated that he agrees with Dr. Barnes.  Such things
should not be lightly said of any gentleman.  It is in accordance
with the current legend, at least, that the Gloomy Dean even when
he comes to bless should remain to curse.  But if there is one
isolated human being whom he can be imagined as wanting to bless,
one would think it would be his ally, Bishop Barnes of Birmingham.
And yet the alliance only serves to soften the curse and not
to secure the blessing.  If we may use such popular terms of such
dignified ecclesiastics, we might be tempted to say that the Dean
has found it necessary to throw over the Bishop.  An interesting
review by the Dean of the Bishop's recent book of sermons contains,
of course, a certain number of rather conventional compliments
and a certain number of rather abrupt sneers, we might say snarls,
at various other people including the greater part of Christendom.
But on the two striking and outstanding matters on which Bishop Barnes
was condemned by the Catholics, he is almost as strongly condemned by
the Dean of St. Paul's. Dean Inge is far too intelligent and cultivated
a man to pretend to have much patience with the nonsense about testing
Transubstantiation either by chemical experiments or psychical research.
He tries to break it to his Broad Church colleague as gently
as possible that the latter has made himself a laughing stock.
But allowing for such necessary politeness between partners,
it could hardly be stated better or even more plainly.
He curtly refers the Bishop to the responsible definition of
the doctrine in Father Rickaby's book on metaphysics; and drily
observes that it will be found rather more subtle and plausible than
the Bishop seems to be aware of.  He also adds, with a grim candour
which is rather attractive, that it is pretty disastrous to challenge
Catholics about whether the Mass does them any spiritual good,
since they would quite certainly unite in testifying that it does.
After these frank and arresting admissions, it is a mere matter
of routine, and almost of respectability, that the Dean should agree
with the Bishop that all such sacramentalism is very deplorable;
that the admittedly intelligent people he knows who say they
have found Christ in the Mass and not in the Morning Service
must be "natural idolaters" and that it is "obvious" that the
Blessed Sacrament has an affinity with the lower religions.
Also with the lower classes.  That, I fancy, is what the Dean really
finds so disgusting about it.
 
The point is, however, that the Dean definitely snubs the Bishop on
the one great point on which the newspapers have boomed and boosted him.
And he does exactly the same thing, if in a lesser degree,
on the second and lesser matter which was similarly boosted.
I mean, of course, the matter of Evolution.  The Dean, of course,
believes in Evolution, as do a good many other people,
Catholic and Protestant as well as agnostic.  But though he believes
in Evolution, he does not believe in Bishop Barnes's Evolution.
He comments with admirable clarity and decision on the folly
of identifying progress with evolution; or even mere complication
with progress.  Nothing could be better than the brief and brisk
sentences in which he disposes altogether of that idealisation
of the scientific theory, which is in fact simply ignorance of it.
In plain words, Bishop Barnes, for all his bluster, knows almost
as little about Evolution as he does about Transubstantiation.
The Dean of St. Paul's does not, of course, put this truth
in such plain words; but he manages to make it pretty plain.
His candour in this case also has to be balanced by general expressions
of agreement with the Bishop, and somewhat heartier expressions of
disagreement with everybody else, especially with the Bishop's enemies.
The Dean alludes scornfully to the orthodox world, as if it necessarily
repudiated certain biological theories; or as if it mattered
very much if it did.  The difference between the Broad Churchman
and the Catholic Church is not that the former thinks Evolution true
and the latter thinks it false.  It is that the former thinks Evolution
an explanation and the latter knows it is not an explanation.
Hence the former thinks it all important; and the latter thinks
it rather unimportant.  Being unable to grasp this principle,
the Dean has to fall back on quoting an old Victorian cant phrase;
and saying that a new scientific discovery passes through three stages:
that of being called absurd; of being called anti-scriptural;
and of being discovered to be quite old and familiar.
He might have added that it generally goes on to a fourth stage;
that of being discovered to be quite untrue.
 
For that is the very simple fact which both Dean Inge and Bishop Barnes
leave out; and which seems to be as utterly unknown to the more lucid
rationalism of the one as to the cruder secularism of the other.
Not only was the Archbishop of Canterbury right in suggesting that old
gentlemen like himself had been familiar with Evolution all their lives;
but he might have added that they were much more certain of it
in the earlier part of their lives than they will be by the end
of their lives.  Those of them who have really read the most recent
European enquiries and speculations know that Darwinism is every
day becoming much less of a dogma and much more of a doubt.
Those who have not read the speculations and the doubts simply go
on repeating the dogma.  While Dr. Barnes was preaching sermons
carefully founded on the biology of fifty years ago, Mr. Belloc was
proving conclusively before the whole world that Mr. H. G. Wells and
Sir Arthur Keith were unacquainted with the biology of five years ago.
In short, it is only just, as we have said, to insist on the difference
between Dean Inge and Dr. Barnes; which is like the difference
between Huxley and Haeckel.  Everybody would be better and happier
if Dean Inge were known as Professor Inge; and if Dr. Barnes were not
only a Professor but a Prussian Professor.  Then he could be boomed
along with other barbarians attacking Christianity, without having
the ecclesiastical privilege of actually persecuting Christians.
But there are heathens and heathens and there are persecutors
and persecutors.  The Dean is a pagan Roman of the Senate House.
The Bishop is a pagan Teuton of the swamps and fens.  The Dean dislikes
the Christian tradition in the spirit of Diocletian and Julian.
The Bishop dislikes it in the simpler spirit of a Danish pirate
staring at the rigid mystery of a Roman-British Church.
Even the common cause and broad brotherly maxim of CHRISTIANI AD LEONES
did not always, I fancy, reconcile the Roman and the Goth.
These historical comparisons may seem fanciful; and indeed in one sense
both parties are very much tied to their own historical period.
They are both very Victorian; but even here there is a difference
and a superiority.  The superiority of the Dean is that he knows
it and says so.  He is man enough to boast of being Victorian
and not to mind being called reactionary.  Whereas the Bishop seems
really to cherish the truly extraordinary notion that his notions
are new and up-to-date.
 
Of course they have a philosophy in common; and it would be a cheap
simplification to call it Materialism.  Indeed, we should be almost
as shallow in talking about Materialism as they are in talking
about Magic.  The truth is that the strange bigotry, which leads
the Bishop to scream and rail at all sacramentalism as Magic,
is in its inmost essence the very reverse of Materialism.
Indeed it is nothing half so healthy as Materialism.
The root of this prejudice is not so much a trust in matter as a sort
of horror of matter.  The man of this philosophy is always asking
that worship shall be wholly spiritual, or even wholly intellectual;
because he does really feel a disgust at the idea of spiritual things
having a body and a solid form.  It probably does really give him
a mystical shudder to suppose that God can become as bread and wine;
though I never understood why it should not give the same shudder
to say that God could become flesh and blood.  But whether or no
these thinkers are logical in their philosophy, I think this is
their philosophy.  It has a very long history and an ancient name.
It is not Materialist but Manichee.
 
Indeed the Dean uttered an unconscious truth when he said
the sacramentalists must be "natural idolaters."  He shrinks from it
not only because it is idolatrous, but also because it is natural.
He cannot bear to think how natural is the craving for the supernatural.
He cannot tolerate the idea of it actually working through the
elements of nature.  Unconsciously, no doubt, but very stubbornly,
that sort of intellectual does feel that our souls may belong
to God, but our bodies only to the devil or the beast.
That Manichean horror of matter is the only INTELLIGENT reason for
any such sweeping refusal of supernatural and sacramental wonders.
The rest is all cant and repetition and arguing in a circle;
all the baseless dogmatism about science forbidding men to
believe in miracles; as if SCIENCE could forbid men to believe
in something which science does not profess to investigate.
Science is the study of the admitted laws of existence; it cannot prove
a universal negative about whether those laws could ever be suspended
by something admittedly above them.  It is as if we were to say
that a lawyer was so deeply learned in the American Constitution
that he knew there could never be a revolution in America.
Or it is as if a man were to say he was so close a student of the text
of Hamlet that he was authorised to deny that an actor had dropped
the skull and bolted when the theatre caught fire.  The constitution
follows a certain course, so long as it is there to follow it;
the play follows a certain course, so long as it is being played;
the visible order of nature follows a certain course if there
is nothing behind it to stop it.  But that fact throws no sort
of light on whether there IS anything behind it to stop it.  That is
a question of philosophy or metaphysics and not of material science.
And out of respect for the intelligence of both these reverend gentlemen,
and especially for the high intelligence of the Dean of St. Paul's, I much
prefer to think that they are opposed to what they call Magic
as consistent philosophers and not as inconsistent scientists.
I prefer to think that they are thinking along the lines of great
Gnostics and Buddhists and other mystics of a dark but dignified
historical tradition; rather than that they are blundering
in plain logic in the interests of cheap popular science.
I can even understand or imagine that thrill of repulsion that seizes
them in the presence of the divine materialism of the Mass.
But I still think they would be more consistent and complete, if they
made it quite clear that they carried their principle to completion;
and said, as the Moslem says about Christmas, "Far be it from Him
to have a Son," or the terrified disciples who cried, "Far be this
from Thee," when God was going up to be crucified.
 
-/-
 
== WHAT WE THINK ABOUT ==
 
I WAS looking the other day at a weekly paper of the sort that is
supposed to provide popular culture; in this case rather especially
what may be called popular science.  In practice it largely
provides what its supporters optimistically call Modern Thought
and what we more commonly call Modernism.  It is, however, a paper
by no means unfair or exclusive of the opposite point of view;
it has more than once permitted me to reply to these views;
and in looking at the issue in question, my eye was arrested
by my own name.
 
It occurred in an article on the religious doctrines of
Mr. Arnold Bennett.  Indeed the prominence in the press of this name
in this connection is one of the standing mysteries of modern journalism.
I have not only a great admiration for the artistic genius,
but in many ways a strong liking for the human personality of
Mr. Arnold Bennett.  I like his liveliness and contempt for contempt.
I like his humanity and merciful curiosity about every thing human.
I like that essential absence of snobbishness that enables him
to sympathise even with snobs.  But talking about the religious
beliefs of Mr. Arnold Bennett seems to me exactly like talking
about the foxhunting adventures of Mr. Bernard Shaw or the favourite
vintages of Mr. Pussyfoot Johnson or the celestial visions of
Sir Arthur Keith or the monastic vows of Mr. Bertrand Russell.
Mr. Arnold Bennett has never disguised, as it seems to me,
the essential fact that he has not got any religious beliefs;
as religious beliefs were understood in the English language
as I learnt it.  That he has a number of highly estimable
moral sentiments and sympathies I do not for a moment doubt.
But the matter of Mr. Arnold Bennett is, for the moment, a parenthesis.
I mention it here merely because it was in the course of such
an article that I found myself mentioned; and I confess I thought
the reference a little odd.  It will not surprise the reader to learn
that the writer found me less Modernist than Mr. Arnold Bennett.
My religious beliefs did not present so pure and virgin and blameless
a blank, but were defaced with definite statements about various things.
But the writer professed to find something dubious or mysterious
about my attitude; and what mystifies me is his mystification.
He delicately implied that there was more in me than met the eye;
that I had that within, which passed all these Papistical shows,
but that it was hopeless to vivisect me and discover the secret.
He said:  "Mr. Chesterton does not mean to enlighten us; for all we
know he is Modernist enough in his own thoughts."
 
Now it would be thought a little annoying if an atheist were to say
of some harmless Protestant Christian like General Booth; "For all
we know, he is atheist enough in his own thoughts."  We might even
venture to enquire how the atheist could possibly form any notion
of what General Booth thought, in such complete contradiction
to everything he said.  Or I myself, on the other hand, might seem
less than graceful, if I were to suggest that Mr. Arnold Bennett must
be concealing his conversion out of cowardice; and were to express
it in the form:  "Mr. Bennett will never tell us the truth about it;
for all we know he is Papist enough in his own thoughts."
I might even be cross-examined about how I had come to form
these suspicions about the secret thoughts of Mr. Arnold Bennett;
as to whether I had hidden under his bed and heard him muttering
Latin prayers in his dreams, or sent a private detective to verify
the existence of his hair-shirt and his concealed relics.
It might be hinted that, until I could produce some such PRIMA FACIE
case for my suspicions, it would be more polite to suppose that
the opinions of Mr. Bennett were what he himself said they were.
And if I were sensitive on such things, I might make a rather
sharp request, that people who cannot possibly know anything about me
except what I say, should for the sake of our general convenience
believe what I say.  On the subject of Modernism, at any rate,
there has never been the least doubt or difficulty about what I say.
For, as it happens, I had a strong intellectual contempt for Modernism,
even before I really believed in Catholicism.
 
But I belong, as a biological product of evolution, to the order
of the pachyderms.  And I am not in the least moved by any annoyance
in the matter; but only by a very strong mystification and curiosity
about the real reason for this remarkable point of view.
I know that the writer did not mean any harm; but I am much
more interested in trying to understand what he did mean.
And the truth is, I think, that there is hidden in this curious
and cryptic phrase the secret of the whole modern controversy
about Catholicism.  What the man really meant was this:
"Even poor old Chesterton must think; he can't have actually left
off thinking altogether; there must be some form of cerebral
function going forward to fill the empty hours of his misdirected
and wasted life; and it is obvious that if a man begins to THINK,
he can only think more or less in the direction of Modernism."
The Modernists do really think that.  That is the point.
That is the joke.
 
Now what we have really got to hammer into the heads of all
these people, somehow, is that a thinking man can think himself
deeper and deeper into Catholicism, and not deeper and deeper
into difficulties about Catholicism.  We have got to make them
see that conversion is the beginning of an active, fruitful,
progressive and even adventurous life of the intellect.  For THAT is
the thing that they cannot at present bring themselves to believe.
They honestly say to themselves:  "What can he be thinking about,
if he is not thinking about the Mistakes of Moses, as discovered
by Mr. Miggles of Pudsey, or boldly defying all the terrors of the
Inquisition which existed two hundred years ago in Spain?"  We have got
to explain somehow that the great mysteries like the Blessed Trinity
or the Blessed Sacrament are the starting-points for trains
of thought far more stimulating, subtle and even individual,
compared with which all that sceptical scratching is as thin,
shallow and dusty as a nasty piece of scandalmongering in a
New England village.  Thus, to accept the Logos as a truth is
to be in the atmosphere of the absolute, not only with St. John
the Evangelist, but with Plato and all the great mystics of the world.
To accept the Logos as a "text" or an "interpolation"
or a "development" or a dead word in a dead document, only used
to give in rapid succession about six different dates to
that document, is to be altogether on a lower plane of human life;
to be squabbling and scratching for a merely negative success;
even if it really were a success.  To exalt the Mass is to enter
into a magnificent world of metaphysical ideas, illuminating all
the relations of matter and mind, of flesh and spirit, of the most
impersonal abstractions as well as the most personal affections.
To set out to belittle and minimise the Mass, by talking ephemeral
back-chat about what it had in common with Mithras or the Mysteries,
is to be in altogether a more petty and pedantic mood; not only lower
than Catholicism but lower even than Mithraism.
 
As I have said before, it is very difficult to say how we can best
set about these things.  We and our critics have come to talk
in two different languages; so that the very names by which we
describe the things inside stand for totally different things
in the absurd labels they have stuck upon the wall outside.
Often if we said the great things we have to say, they would
sound like the small things they accuse us of saying.
A philosophical process can only begin at the right end;
and they have got hold of everything by the wrong end.
But I am myself disposed to think that we should begin by challenging
one very common phrase or form of words; a thing that has become a
catch-word and a caption; or in the ordinary popular phrase a headline.
Because the journalists incessantly repeat it, and draw attention
to it by repeating it, we may possibly draw attention by denying it.
 
When the journalist says for the thousandth time, "Living religion
is not in dull and dusty dogmas, etc."  we must stop him with a
sort of shout and say, "There--you go wrong at the very start."
If he would condescend to ask what the dogmas are, he would find out
that it is precisely the dogmas that are living, that are inspiring,
that are intellectually interesting.  Zeal and charity and unction
are admirable as flowers and fruit; but if you are really interested
in the living principle you must be interested in the root or the seed.
In other words, you must be intelligently interested in the statement
with which the whole thing started; even if it is only to deny it.
Even if the critic cannot come to agree with the Catholic, he can come to
see that it is certain ideas about the Cosmos that make him a Catholic.
He can see that being Cosmic in that way, and Catholic in that way,
is what makes him different from other people; and what makes him,
at the very least, a not uninteresting figure in human history.
He will never get anywhere near it by sentimentalising against
Catholic sentiment or pontificating against Catholic pontiffs.
He must get hold of the ideas as ideas; and he will find that
the most interesting of all the ideas are those which the newspapers
dismiss as dogmas.
 
For instance; the doctrine of the Dual Nature of Christ is in
the most genuine sense interesting; it ought to be interesting
to anybody who can understand it, long before he can believe it.
It has what can be called with all reverence a stereoscopic interest;
the interest of having the two eyes in the head that create an object;
of having the two angles in the triangle that determine the third.
The old Monophysite sect declared that Christ had only the one
divine nature.  The new Monophysite sect declares that He had
only the one human nature.  But it is not a pun or a trick,
but a truth, to say that the Monophysite is by nature monotonous.
In either of his two forms, he is naturally on one note.
The question of objective historical truth is another question,
which I am not arguing here, though I am ready to argue it anywhere.
I am talking about intellectual stimulation and the starting point
of thought and imagination.  And these, like all living things,
breed from the conjunction of two, and not from one alone.
Thus I read, with sympathy but a sympathy that hardly goes
beyond sentiment, the studies of the modern Monophysites in
the life of the limited and merely mortal Jesus of Nazareth.
I respect their respect; I admire their admiration; I know that all
they say about human greatness or religious genius is true as far
as it goes.  But it goes along one line; and cannot convince
like the things that can converge.  And then, after reading such
a tribute to an ethical teacher in the manner of the Essenes,
perhaps I turn another page of the same or some similar book;
and come upon some phrase used about a real though a pagan religion;
perhaps some supposed parallel of what is called a Pagan Christ.
I find it said, if only of Atys or Adonis, "There was a conception
that the god sacrificed himself to himself."  The man who can read
those words without a thrill is dead.
 
The thrill is deeper for us, of course, because it is concerned
with a fact and not a fancy.  In that sense we do not admit
that there is any such parallel with the legends of the ancient
pagans as is implied in the books of the modern pagans.
And indeed we are surely entitled to call it mere common sense
to say that there can be no complete parallel between what was
admittedly a myth or mystery and what was admittedly a man.
But the point here is that the truth hidden even in myths and mysteries
is altogether lost if we are confined to the consideration of a man.
In this sense there is an ironic and unconscious truth in the words
of the modern pagan, who sang that "the heathen outface and
outlive us," and that "our lives and our longings are twain."
It is true of the Modernists, but it is not true of us, who find
simultaneously the realisation of a longing and the record of a life.
It is perfectly true that there were in many pagan myths
the faint foreshadowing of the Christian mysteries; though even
in saying so we admit that the foreshadowings were shadows.
But when all imaginative kinship has been explored or allowed for,
it is not true that mythology ever rose to the heights of theology.
It is not true that a thought so bold or so subtle as this one
ever crossed the mind that created the centaurs and the fauns.
In the wildest and most gigantic of the primitive epic fancies,
there is no conception so colossal as the being who is both
Zeus and Prometheus.
 
But I only advert to it here, not as arguing its truth against
those who do not believe it, but only as insisting on its
intense and intellectual interest for those who do believe it.
I only wish to explain to those who are worried in this way,
that a mind filled with the true conception of this Duality has plenty
to think about along those lines and has no need to dig up dead gods
to discredit the Everlasting Man.  There is no necessity for me
to be Modernist in my own thoughts, or Monophysite in my own thoughts;
because I think these views much duller and more trivial than my own.
In the beautiful words of the love-song in THE WALLET OF KAI LUNG,
one of the few truly psychological love-songs of the world:
"This insignificant and universally despised person would unhesitatingly
prefer his thoughts to theirs."
 
Any number of other examples could of course be given.
This person (if I may use once more the graceful Chinese locution)
would very soon exhaust the excitement of discovering that Mary
and Maia both begin with an M, or that the Mother of Christ
and the Mother of Cupid were both represented as women.
But I know that I shall never exhaust the profundity of that
unfathomable paradox which is defined so defiantly in the very title
of the Mother of God.  I know that there are not only far deeper,
but far fresher and freer developments of thought and imagination,
in that riddle of the perfectly human having once had a natural
authority over the supernaturally divine, than in any sort of
iconoclastic identification which assimilates all the sacred images
by flattening all their faces.  By the time that Christ is really made
the same as Osiris, there can be very little left of either of them;
but Christ, as conceived by the Catholic Church, is himself a complex
and a combination, not of two unreal things, but of two real ones.
In the same way an Ashtaroth exactly like one of Raphael's Madonnas,
or vice versa, would seem a somewhat featureless vision in any case;
whereas there is something that is, in the most intellectual sense,
unique about the conception of the THEOTOKOS.  In short, in all this
mere unification of traditions, true or false, there is something that
may be quite simply described as dull.  But the dogmas are not dull.
Even what are called the fine doctrinal distinctions are not dull.
They are like the finest operations of surgery; separating nerve
from nerve, but giving life.  It is easy enough to flatten out everything
for miles round with dynamite, if our only object is to give death.
But just as the physiologist is dealing with living tissues,
so the theologian is dealing with living ideas; and if he draws
a line between them it is naturally a very fine line.
It is the custom, though by this time; already a rather stale custom,
to complain that the Greeks or Italians who disputed about the Trinity
or the Sacrament were splitting hairs.  I do not know that even splitting
hairs is any drearier than bleaching hairs, in the vain attempt
to match the golden hair of Freya and the black hair of Cotytto.
The subdivision of a hair does at least tell us something of
its structure; whereas its mere discoloration tells us nothing at all.
Theology does introduce us to the structure of ideas; whereas theosophical
syncretism merely washes all the colours out of the coloured
fairy-tales of the world.  But my only purpose in this place is to
reassure the kind gentleman who was troubled about the secret malady
of modernity that must be eating away my otherwise empty mind.
I hasten earnestly to explain that I am quite well, thank you;
and that I have plenty of things to think about without falling
back on a Baconian madness of pagan parallels, or establishing
the connection between the tale of the bull killed by Mithras
and the tune the old cow died of.
 
-/-
 
== THE OPTIMIST AS A SUICIDE ==
 
FREETHINKERS are occasionally thoughtful, though never free.
In the modern world of the West, at any rate, they seem always
to be tied to the treadmill of a materialist and monist cosmos.
The universal sceptic, in Asia or in Antiquity, has probably
been a bolder thinker, though very probably a more unhappy man.
But what we have to deal with as scepticism is not scepticism; but a fixed
faith in monism.  The freethinker is not free to question monism.
He is forbidden, for instance, in the only intelligible modern sense,
to believe in a miracle.  He is forbidden, in exactly the same sense
in which he would say that we are forbidden to believe in a heresy.
Both are forbidden by first principles and not by force.
The Rationalist Press Association will not actually kidnap,
gag or strangle Sir Arthur Keith if he admits the evidence
for a cure at Lourdes.  Neither will the Cardinal Archbishop
of Westminster have me hanged, drawn and quartered if I announce
that I am an agnostic tomorrow.  But of both cases it is true to say
that a man cannot root up his first principles without a terrible
rending and revolutionising of his very self.  As a matter of fact,
we are the freer of the two; as there is scarcely any evidence,
natural or preternatural, that cannot be accepted as fitting into
our system somewhere; whereas the materialist cannot fit the most
minute miracle into his system anywhere.  But let us leave that on
one side as a separate question; and agree, if only for the sake
of argument, that both the Catholic and the materialist are limited
only by their fundamental conviction about the cosmic system;
in both thought is in that sense forbidden and in that sense free.
Consequently, when I see in some newspaper symposium, like that
on Spiritualism, a leading materialist like Mr. John M. Robertson
discussing the evidence for spiritualism, I feel exactly as I
imagine him to feel when he hears a bishop in a mitre or a Jesuit
in a cassock discussing the evidence for materialism.  I know that
Mr. Robertson cannot accept the evidence without becoming somebody
quite different from Mr. Robertson; which also is within the power
of the grace of God.  But I know quite well he is not a freethinker;
except in the sense in which I am a freethinker.  He has long ago
come to a conclusion which controls all his other conclusions.
He is not driven by scientific evidence to accept Materialism.
He is forbidden by Materialism to accept scientific evidence.
 
But there is another way in which the freethinker is not
only thoughtful, but useful.  The man who rejects the Faith
altogether is often very valuable as a critic of the man who
rejects it piecemeal, or bit by bit, or by fits and starts.
The man who picks out some part of Catholicism that happens to
please him, or throws away some part that happens to puzzle him,
does in fact produce, not only the queerest sort of result,
but generally the very opposite result to what he intends.
And his inconsistency can often be effectively exposed from
the extreme negative as well as the extreme positive point of view.
It has been said that when the half-gods go, the gods arrive;
it might be said in amiable parody that when the no-goddites arrive,
the half-goddites go; and I am not sure it is not a good riddance.
Anyhow, even the atheist can illustrate how important it is to keep
the Catholic system altogether, even if he rejects it altogether.
 
A curious and amusing instance comes from America; in connection
with Mr. Clarence Darrow, the somewhat simple-minded sceptic of that
land of simplicity.  He seems to have been writing something about
the impossibility of anybody having a soul; of which nothing need
be said except that (as usual) it seems to be the sceptic who really
thinks of the soul superstitiously, as a separate and secret animal
with wings; who considers the soul quite apart from the self.
But what interests me about him at the moment is this.  One of his
arguments against immortality is that people do not really believe in it.
And one of his arguments for that is that if they did believe in
certain happiness beyond the grave, they would all kill themselves.
He says that nobody would endure the martyrdom of cancer, for instance,
if he really believed (as he apparently assumes all Christians to believe)
that in any case the mere fact of death would instantly introduce
the soul to perfect felicity and the society of all its best friends.
A Catholic will certainly know what answer he has to give.
But Mr. Clarence Darrow does not really in the least know what question
he has asked.
 
Now there we have the final flower and crown of all modern
optimism and universalism and humanitarianism in religion.
Sentimentalists talk about love till the world is sick of the most
glorious of all human words; they assume that there can be nothing
in the next world except the sort of Utopia of practical pleasure
which they promise us (but do not give us) in this world.  They declare
that all will be forgiven, because there is nothing to forgive.
They insist that "passing over" is only like going into the next room,
they insist that it will not even be a waiting-room. They declare
that it must immediately introduce us to a cushioned lounge with all
conceivable comforts, without any reference to how we have got there.
They are positive that there is no danger, no devil; even no death.
All is hope, happiness and optimism.  And, as the atheist very truly
points out, the logical result of all that hope, happiness and
optimism would be hundreds of people hanging from lamp-posts
or thousands of people throwing themselves into wells or canals.
We should find the rational result of the modern Religion of Joy
and Love in one huge human stampede of suicide.  Pessimism would
have killed its thousands, but optimism its ten thousands.
 
Now, of course, as I say, a Catholic knows the answer;
because he holds the complete philosophy, which keeps a man sane;
and not some single fragment of it, whether sad or glad, which may
easily drive him mad.  A Catholic does not kill himself because he does
not take it for granted that he will deserve heaven in any case,
or that it will not matter at all whether he deserves it at all.
He does not profess to know exactly what danger he would run;
but he does know what loyalty he would violate and what command
or condition he would disregard.  He actually thinks that a man might
be fitter for heaven because he endured like a man; and that a hero
could be a martyr to cancer as St. Lawrence or St. Cecilia were martyrs
to cauldrons or gridirons.  The faith in a future life, the hope
of a future happiness, the belief that God is Love and that loyalty
is eternal life, these things do not produce lunacy and anarchy,
IF they are taken along with the other Catholic doctrines about
duty and vigilance and watchfulness against the powers of hell.
They might produce lunacy and anarchy, if they were taken alone.
And the Modernists, that is, the optimists and the sentimentalists,
did want us to take them alone.  Of course, the same would be true,
if somebody took the other doctrines of duty and discipline alone.
It would produce another dark age of Puritans rapidly blackening
into Pessimists.  Indeed, the extremes meet, when they are both ends
clipped off what should be a complete thing.  Our parable ends
poetically with two gibbets side by side; one for the suicidal
pessimist and the other for the suicidal optimist.
 
The point is that in this passage the American sceptic is
answering the Modernist; but he is not answering the Catholic.
The Catholic has an extremely simple and sensible reason for not
cutting his throat in order to fly instantly into Paradise.
But he might really raise a question for those who talk as if
Paradise were invariably and instantly populated with people
who had cut their throats.  And this is only one example out
of a long list of historical examples; in which those who tried
to make the Faith more simple invariably made it less sane.
The Moslems imagined that they were merely being sensible when they
cut down the creed to a mere belief in one God; but in the world
of practical psychology they really cut it down to one Fate.
The actual effect on ordinary men was simply fatalism; like that of
the Turk who will not take his wound to a hospital because he is
resigned to Kismet or the will of Allah.  The Puritans thought they
were simplifying things by appealing to what they called the plain
words of Scripture; but as a fact they were complicating things
by bringing in half a hundred cranky sects and crazy suggestions.
And the modern universalist and humanitarian thought they were simplifying
things when they interpreted the great truth that God is Love, as meaning
that there can be no war with the demons or no danger to the soul.
But in fact they were inventing even darker riddles with even
wilder answers; and Mr. Clarence Darrow has suggested one of them.
He will be gratified to receive the thanks of all Catholics
for doing so.
 
-/-
 
== THE OUTLINE OF THE FALL ==
 
I HAVE remarked on the curious rearguard action of bluff
that is being fought to cover the retreat of the Darwinians.
An example of the same thing has appeared in connection with a much
more famous name; indeed, with two famous names.  Mr. H. G. Wells
has replied to Mr. Belloc, who wrote a criticism of the "Outline
of History," chiefly to protest against a certain tone of arbitrary
generalisation and sham knowledge of the unknown.  A typical case was
that in which Mr. Wells said of the men who drew reindeers in caves:
"There seems no scope in such a life for speculation or philosophy,"
and Mr. Belloc not unnaturally answered:  "Why on earth not?"
But the details of the various works in question do not concern
me immediately here; they mostly depend on that habit of talking
as if every cave-drawing had its date obligingly inscribed on it;
or any stone hatchet might bear the inscription 400,000 B.C.
or possibly, B.O.H., or Before the Outline of History.  At the moment
the only point of contact is that which affects a continuation
of our previous criticism, touching the present state of Darwinism.
And what strikes me is that even Mr. Wells, often a sufficiently
warm controversialist, is relatively and really cold in the matter;
and his defence of Darwin is much more of an apology than an apologia.
Indeed, like so many other modern apologies, it almost amounts
to pleading that Darwin was not a Darwinian.
 
The Victorian evolutionists devoted themselves to declaring how great
Darwin's thesis was.  The new evolutionists seem to devote themselves
to explaining how small it was.  They really seem to plead, as in the
old anecdote, that it gave birth to a theory, but a very little one.
Some of Mr. Wells's words may surely, without unfairness,
be called apologetic.  He does not, like the professor previously
mentioned, try to get over the word "origin" by talking about "the
cause of the origin."  So he concentrates on the word "species,"
as if evolution had not only applied to a sub-division. He adds
that Darwin did not at the beginning even apply it to man.
What in the world would the Victorian Darwinians have said had they
heard it urged in defence of Darwinism that it was not applied to man?
Are we to understand that only the first book of Darwin is
divinely inspired?  Again, Mr. Wells says that natural selection
is common sense.  And doubtless, if it only means that things fitted
for survival do survive, it is common sense.  We may also add
that it is common knowledge.  Has it come to this, that Darwin
is defended because he only discovered what was common knowledge?
The real question, of course, is that stated by Mr. Belloc;
when he said that nobody needs to be told that in a flood fish live
and cattle die.  The question is, How soon do cattle turn into fish?
That would be an example of the true Darwinian theory;
and it is now merely minimised, represented as only one element
of evolution and without even the elements of an explanation.
We fancy there is a healthy prejudice behind it all.
Mr. Wells indignantly repudiates the slander uttered by Mr. Belloc,
who called him a patriot.  But it is true; the deep English national
pride has much to do with this devotion.  And rather than deprive
England of her Darwin, they have deprived Darwin of his discovery.
 
When a man is as great a genius as Mr. Wells, I admit it
sounds provocative to call him provincial.  But if he wants
to know why anybody does it, it will be enough to point
silently to the headline of one of his pages, which runs:
"Where is the Garden of Eden?"  To come down to a thing like that,
and to think it telling, when talking to an intelligent Catholic about
the Fall, that IS provinciality; proud and priceless provinciality.
The French peasants of whom Mr. Wells speaks are not in that
sense provincial.  As Mr. Wells says, they do not know anything
about Darwin and Evolution.  They do not know and they do not care.
That is where they are much better philosophers than Mr. Wells.
They hold the philosophy of the Fall, in the form of a simple story
which may be historic or symbolic, but anyhow cannot be more important
than what it symbolises.  In comparison with that truth, it does
not matter twopence whether any evolutionary theory is true or not.
Whether or no the garden was an allegory, the truth itself can be
very well allegorised as a garden.  And the point of it is that Man,
whatever else he is, is certainly NOT merely one of the plants
of the garden that has plucked its roots out of the soil and walked
about with them like legs, or on the principle of a double
dahlia has grown duplicate eyes and ears.  He is something else,
something strange and solitary; and more like the statue that was once
the god of the garden; but the statue has fallen from its pedestal
and lies broken among the plants and weeds.  This conception
has nothing to do with materialism as it refers to materials.
The image might be made of wood; the wood might have come from
the garden; the sculptor presumably might, and probably did, allow for
the growth and grain of the wood in what he carved and expressed.
But my fable fixes the two truths of the true scripture.
The first is that the wood was graven or stamped with an image,
deliberately, and from the outside; in this case the image of God.
The second is that this image has been damaged and defaced,
so that it is now both better and worse than the mere plants
in the garden, which are perfect according to their own plan.
There is room for any amount of speculation about the history
of the tree before it was turned into an image; there is room
for any amount of doubt and mystery about what really happened
when it was turned into an image; there is room for any amount
of hope and imagination about what it will look like when it is
really mended and made into the perfect statue we have never seen.
But it has the two fixed points, that man was uplifted at the first
and fell; and to answer it by saying, "Where is the Garden of Eden?"
is like answering a philosophical Buddhist by saying, "When were you
last a donkey?"
 
The Fall is a view of life.  It is not only the only enlightening,
but the only encouraging view of life.  It holds, as against
the only real alternative philosophies, those of the Buddhist
or the Pessimist or the Promethean, that we have misused
a good world, and not merely been entrapped into a bad one.
It refers evil back to the wrong use of the will, and thus declares
that it can eventually be righted by the right use of the will.
Every other creed except that one is some form of surrender to fate.
A man who holds this view of life will find it giving light
on a thousand things; on which mere evolutionary ethics have not
a word to say.  For instance, on the colossal contrast between
the completeness of man's machines and the continued corruption
of his motives; on the fact that no social progress really seems
to leave self behind; on the fact that the first and not the last
men of any school or revolution are generally the best and purest;
as William Penn was better than a Quaker millionaire or Washington
better than an American oil magnate; on that proverb that says:
"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance," which is only what
the theologians say of every other virtue, and is itself only a way
of stating the truth of original sin; on those extremes of good and
evil by which man exceeds all the animals by the measure of heaven
and hell; on that sublime sense of loss that is in the very sound
of all great poetry, and nowhere more than in the poetry of pagans
and sceptics:  "We look before and after, and pine for what is not";
which cries against all prigs and progressives out of the very
depths and abysses of the broken heart of man, that happiness
is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory;
and that we are all kings in exile.
 
Now to people who feel that this view of life is more real, more radical,
more universal than the cheap simplifications opposed to it, it comes
with quite a shock of bathos to realise that anybody let alone a man
like Mr. Wells, supposes that it all depends on some detail about the site
of a garden in Mesopotamia, like that identified by General Gordon.
It is hard to find any parallel to such an incongruity;
for there is no real similarity between our muddled mortal
affairs and events that were divine if they were mysterious,
and scriptures that are sacred even if they are symbolical.
But some shadow of a comparison could be made out of the modern myths.
I mean the sort of myths that men like Mr. Wells generally do believe in;
such as the Myth of Magna Carta or the Myth of the Mayflower.
Now many historians will maintain that Magna Carta was really nothing
to speak of; that it was largely a piece of feudal privilege.
But suppose one of the historians who holds this view began
to argue with us excitedly about the fabulous nature of our
ordinary fancy picture of Magna Carta.  Suppose he produced maps
and documents to prove that Magna Carta was not signed at Runnymede,
but somewhere else; as I believe some scholars do maintain.
Suppose he criticised the false heraldry and fancy-dress costumes
of the ordinary sort of waxwork historical picture of the event.
We should think he was rather unduly excited about a detail of
mediaeval history.  But with what a shock of astonishment should
we realise at last that the man actually thought that all modern
attempts at democracy must be abandoned, that all representative
government must be wrong, that all Parliaments would have
to be dissolved and all political rights destroyed, if once it
were admitted that King John did not sign that special document
in that little island in the Thames!  What should we think of him,
if he really thought we had no reasons for liking law or liberty,
except the authenticity of that beloved royal signature?
That is very much how I feel when I find that Mr. Wells
really imagines that the luminous and profound philosophy
of the Fall only means that Eden was somewhere in Mesopotamia.
Now the only explanation of a great man like Mr. Wells having
a small prejudice, like this about the snake, is that he does come
of a religious tradition that regarded the text of Hebrew Scripture
as the only authority and had forgotten all about the great
mediaeval metaphysic and the discussion of fundamental ideas.
The man who does that is provincial; and there is no harm in saying
so even when he is one of the greatest men of letters and a glory
to the English name.
 
-/-
 
== THE IDOLS OF SCOTLAND ==
 
THE thing that strikes me most in current controversy is that our
opponents are talking almost entirely in terms of the past, and that
an entirely dead past; whereas we are making some sort of attempt,
whether it be considered impertinent or eccentric or meddlesome
or paradoxical, to deal with the practical conditions of the present.
An amusing comedy on these lines seems to have arisen on the subject
of Scottish Nationalism or the notion of Home Rule for North Britain.
A worthy Presbyterian has warned his fellow-countrymen that
the movement is tainted by the presence of Roman Catholics,
and especially by that of Mr. Compton Mackenzie; and that no
little degree of the deadly peril is indicated by the fact that
Mr. Cunninghame Graham is interested in a book by Mr. Belloc;
in which the hideous sentiment is uttered that the Reformation
was the shipwreck of Christendom.  Personally I should have
thought it was obvious to anybody on any side, in one solid
and objective sense, that it was the shipwreck of Christendom.
I should imagine that it would be obvious to anybody, for instance,
who desires or even discusses the Reunion of Christendom.
There certainly was a united vessel or vehicle and it certainly
did break up into different parts.  Some people may think the ship
was a rotten old-fashioned three-decker that was bound to break up;
and that the people were lucky who got away from it in boats.
But it is certain that it did break up and that the boats were
not the same as the original ship.  A man might as well resent
our saying that the rise of the feudal kingdoms and the modern
nationalities was part of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
This is only one of the marks of such bigotry; but it is worth noting
at the outset.  One of the peculiarities of this sort of bigot is
that he cannot distinguish between provocative statements and plain
inevitable statements.  If I say that the Reformation was a relapse
into barbarism, a return to all that was worst in the Dark Ages
without anything of what was best in them, an idolatry of dead Hebrew
documents full of visions and symbols without any Daniel to interpret
the dreams, a stampede of brutal luxury and pride with a vulgar
howl of hot-gospelling for an excuse, a riot of thieves and looters
with a few foaming and gibbering lunatics carried in front of it
like live mascots for luck; the return of the Manichee, the dirty
ape of the ascetic, conspiring with the devil to destroy the world--
if I were to say all this I should think that these remarks
about Protestantism certainly had a slightly provocative flavour.
But if I were to say, with Mr. Belloc, that Protestantism was
the shipwreck of Christendom, I should regard it as an ordinary
historical statement, like saying that the American War
of Independence was a split in the British Empire.  The bigot
cannot see the difference between these two types of statement,
whether made by us or by himself.
 
The next interesting thing to note about the protest is that
the Protestant goes on to say that Mr. Compton Mackenzie and his
friends are going to ruin Scotland by removing the stern teaching
of John Knox, which has apparently created the Scottish character.
This seems a little hard on the Scottish character.
I cannot quite bring myself to believe that the character of Scott
or of Stevenson, the character of Burns or Barrie, are exact
and unaltered reproductions of the stern teaching of John Knox.
But before we come to any such comparisons, it is worth remarking,
on the face of the thing that a rather more living world,
a life more in touch with modern conditions, a grasp of
the actual problems of the present and the immediate future,
is rather more indicated by saying the words "Compton Mackenzie"
than by saying the words "John Knox."  Many very modern young men
have recently joined the same religion as Mr. Compton Mackenzie.
No such modern young men, that I ever heard of, have ever exhibited
the smallest desire to go back to the religion of John Knox.  As a
matter of plain fact, there is hardly one modern Scotsman in a thousand
who has the smallest sympathy with the real religion of John Knox.
He may vaguely respect John Knox as a Scottish hero, on the supposition
(quite startlingly false) that he was a Scottish patriot.
As a matter of fact, the patriotic party in Scotland was the wicked
Papistical party; Knox and his Presbyterians were all for helping
the pressure of England and Elizabeth.  They would have justified
themselves by saying that they had the one, true and only
right religion.  The question is, who is left even in Scotland
who believes that it was the one, true and only right religion?
I repeat, about one in a thousand; perhaps only a few splendidly
fanatical old Wee Frees in the Highlands.  Anybody who knows anything
of the Scottish Presbyterian Churches, during the last fifty years,
knows that the prevailing doctrine taught in them has NOT been
the severe Calvinism of the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries,
still less the wild Calvinism of the sixteenth.  It has been a mild
hash of Hegelian philosophy and Higher Criticism, all borrowed from
Germany and carefully learnt by Scotch students in German Universities.
And anybody who has noticed what the modern Scottish character
is really like, knows that it does not by this time (thank heaven)
bear the smallest resemblance to the sternness of John Knox.
It is rather sentimental than otherwise, though its sentiment finds
expression in more than one brilliant and admirable man of genius.
Modern Scotland is not even remotely represented by John Knox.
It is represented much more accurately, and much more honourably,
by Sir Harry Lauder and Sir James Barrie.
 
This dull habit of invoking dead things, in a world in which we
are surrounded by more and more interesting living things,
is the second mark of the sort of bigot I am describing.
It would be an extremely interesting business to write a real,
respectful and sympathetic history of the remarkable episode of
Scottish Puritanism; insisting on its integrity and its intellectual
vigour while it lasted.  But any sincere study of it must conclude
with the statement that it did not last.  One of the most brilliant
and distinguished of Scottish professors, at Edinburgh University,
himself of an origin wholly Puritan and of sympathies the very
reverse of Catholic, used to me the true and forcible expression
about the old Scottish Sabbatarianism, "It covered all Scotland;
and then one morning, it had suddenly vanished everywhere like the snow."
And though the story might be told truly from either standpoint,
or from many others, it is but natural that we should draw our own
moral from it.  And the moral is, of course, one which we find
running through the whole of our history.
 
The birth and death of every heresy has been essentially the same.
A morbid or unbalanced Catholic takes one idea out of the
thousandfold throng of Catholic ideas; and announces that
he cares for that Catholic idea more than for Catholicism.
He takes it away with him into a wilderness, where the idea becomes
an image and the image an idol.  Then, after a century or two,
he suddenly wakes up and discovers that the idol is an idol;
and, shortly after that, that the wilderness is a wilderness.
If he is a wise man, he calls himself a fool.  If he is a fool,
he calls himself an evolutionary progressive who has outgrown
the worship of idols; and he looks round him at the wilderness,
spreading bare and desolate on every side and says, in the beautiful
words of Mr. H. G. Wells:  "I see no limit to it at all."
 
That is what happened to the Calvinistic Scotsman; and the chief
comfort in the prospect is that the Scotsman is not generally a fool,
even when he has ceased to be a Calvinist.  But he very often becomes
an atheist; and the fact that so many of the hard destructive sceptics,
from Hume downwards, came from Scotland, was the early and significant
evidence of the discovery of the idol and the wilderness.
But in any case, that is the compact parable of what occurred.
The Calvinist was a Catholic whose imagination had been in some way
caught and overpowered by the one isolated theological truth of
the power and knowledge of God; and he offered to it human sacrifice,
not only of every human sentiment, but of every other divine quality.
Something in that bare idea of all-seeing, all-searching and pitiless
power intoxicated and exalted certain men for a certain period, as certain
men are intoxicated by a storm of wind or some terrible stage tragedy.
The more moderate Protestants, the Anglicans and to a large extent
the Lutherans, had something of the same queer feeling about the King.
Hence came the Cavalier doctrine of Divine Right--and the court
chaplains of Prussia.  Nothing is more intriguing and challenging
to the imagination than the necessity of trying to understand how men
in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries felt a sort of
abstract altruistic joy in the mere might and triumph of the Prince;
in the mere autocracy of the earthly ruler.  The Calvinists,
to do them justice, felt it only about the heavenly ruler.
In that sense the Scots can look proudly back on their Calvinism.
But they cannot look proudly forward to Calvinism.  They really know,
as well as anybody else, that this isolated religious idea can no longer
be kept separate from all the other religious ideas to which it belongs.
The Calvinism of the Puritan is as dead as the Divine Right of
the Cavaliers; men can no longer worship the idol, whether it is
Presbyterianism or Erastianism.  They can only worship the wilderness;
which is atheism--or, as the more polite say, pantheism.
 
Whether it be called a Catholic tendency or no, all the movements
of all the sects of late have been in the direction of trying to put
together again those separate pieces that were pulled apart in the
sixteenth century.  The main feature of our time has been the fact
that one person after another has recovered one piece after another,
and added it to the new scheme by borrowing it from the old.
There is one sufficient proof that there has indeed been a shipwreck.
And that is that Robinson Crusoe has, ever since, been continually
going back to get things from the wreck.
 
-/-
 
== IF THEY HAD BELIEVED ==
 
ONE of the things our enemies do not know is the real case for their
own side.  It is always for me a great matter of pride that the proudest,
the most genuine and the most unanswerable boast, that the Protestants
of England could ever make, was made for them by a Catholic.
Very few of the Protestants, of his time at any rate, would have
had the historical enlargement or enlightenment to make it.
For it was said by Newman, when that great master of English
was surveying the glorious triumphs of our tongue from Bacon
and Milton, to Swift and Burke, and he reminded us firmly that,
though we convert England to the true faith a thousand times over,
"English literature will always HAVE BEEN Protestant."
 
That generous piece of candour might well be represented as even
too generous; but I think it is very wise for us to be too generous.
It is not entirely, or at least not exclusively true.
The name of Chaucer is alone enough to show that English literature
was English a long time before it was Protestant.  Even a Protestant,
if he were also English, could ask for nobody more entirely
English than Chaucer.  He was, in the essential national temper,
very much more English than Milton.  As a matter of fact,
the argument is no stronger for Chaucer than it is for Shakespeare.
But in the case of Shakespeare the argument is long and complicated,
as conducted by partisans; though sufficiently simple and direct
for people with a sense of reality.  I believe that recent discoveries,
as recorded in a book by a French lady, have very strongly confirmed
the theory that Shakespeare died a Catholic.  But I need no books
and no discoveries to prove to me that he had lived a Catholic,
or more probably, like the rest of us, tried unsuccessfully
to live a Catholic; that he thought like a Catholic and felt
like a Catholic and saw every question as a Catholic sees it.
The proofs of this would be matter for a separate essay;
if indeed so practical an impression can be proved at all.
It is quite self-evident to me that he was a certain real
and recognisable Renaissance type of Catholic; like Cervantes;
like Ronsard.  But if I were asked offhand for a short explanation,
I could only say that I know he was a Catholic from the passages
which are now used to prove he was an agnostic.
 
But that is another and much more subtle question, which is
not the question I proposed to myself in starting this essay.
In starting it, I proposed to grant the whole sound and solid truth
of Newman's admission; that there has indeed arisen out of the disunion
of Europe a great and glorious English Protestant literature;
and to make some further speculations upon the point.
And I think that nothing could make clearer to the modern English,
the one supreme thing that they don't know (which is what our
religion really is and why we think it real) than to put this
rather interesting historical question.  What difference would
it have made to the great masters of English literature, if they
had been Catholics?
 
Of course, the question cannot be strictly and scientifically answered;
because nobody knows what difference would be made to
anybody by any change in the circumstances of his life.
But taking the matter broadly, as a question of ideas or even
of doctrines it is worth asking as a matter of religious history.
How far did the great Protestant writers depend on Protestantism?
 
I have no intention of discussing it adequately here; and indeed
this is not so much an essay as an essay to suggest an essay.
It is, in fact, a delicate indication, to people more learned than myself,
that I am in possession of a very good title and subject for an essay.
But at least it will be safe to say that the common or conventional
impression among English people on this point is wildly wrong.
It is wrong because it imagines that purely Protestant ideas
were in some vague way the same as liberal and emancipated ideas.
And it is wrong in a more special sense, because it is founded on the
utterly false history, which supposes that the Renaissance was the same
as the Reformation.  It would be very difficult to say what English
literature owes to the Reformation as distinct from the Renaissance.
There is the splendid sincerity that inspired the plain English of Bunyan;
but even Bunyan was a sort of exception that proved the rule.
He was a Puritan; but he was emphatically not a Puritan of the Puritans.
He was a man actually suspected by his fellow Puritans, because he was
not so much a Puritan as a Christian.  It was remarked at the time,
and it has often been remarked since, that his theory is not
very sectarian by the standard of seventeenth century sects.
Among the Calvinists he was so much of a moderate, that thousands must
have read his great book without thinking about Calvinism at all.
And if we take the great scenes in his great book, the battle with
Apollyon, the Mission of Greatheart, the death of Valiant-for-the-Truth,
when all the trumpets sounded on the other side--there is really no
reason whatever why they should not have been written by a Catholic.
I do not affirm that they WOULD have been written by a Catholic,
if the course of history had left the common people Catholics;
for that is a question which nobody can possibly answer one way
or the other.  But I am speaking strictly of doctrines in their
relation to ideas and images; and there is no possible reason why
a Catholic should be prevented by his Catholicism from writing such
a story of the pilgrimage of Man and the fight to attain to God.
 
Milton in one way is an even stronger case; since he had much
more in him of Shakespeare and the Catholic Renaissance.
And I really cannot think of any deep difference that it would
have made to his poetry, as poetry, if he had followed other members
of his family in the old faith; I do not see that he need have
been much altered, except possibly by being a much jollier man.
Many will not realise this, because they insist on regarding
artistic and intellectual freedom as something that was closed
to the Catholic countries and open only to the Protestant.
But all history is in flat contradiction to this view.  The tide
of culture in the seventeenth century flowed from France to England,
not from England to France.  Milton might have been as central as
Moliere and still remained a Catholic man in a Catholic atmosphere.
Descartes the Catholic was more truly than Bacon the Protestant,
the PHILOSOPHER of rationalist science.  The experiments,
the new forms, the great names in criticism and philosophy,
appeared during the last two or three centuries quite as much
in the Catholic countries as in the Protestant, if not rather more.
England could have produced a great English literature,
as France produced a great French literature, without any change
in the ancient European religion.
 
The real test case, to be considered in some such essay,
would be a case like that of Cowper.  There you do most emphatically
have the Protestant theology; and there you do most emphatically
have the English poetry.  But the two have precious little to do
with each other; until the coming of that dark hour when the theology
destroyed the poetry.  Poor Cowper's Calvinism drove him mad;
and only his poetry managed for some time to keep him sane.
But there was nothing whatever either in the poetry or the
sanity that could have prevented him from being a Catholic.
On the contrary, he was exactly the sort of man who would have been
very happy as a Catholic.  He was the sort of man to have been
devoted to the memory of St. Francis, if he had ever heard of him;
and there was nothing to prevent the one any more than the other
from keeping pet birds or stroking wild hares out of the woods.
It was the brutal blow of Calvin, two centuries before, that broke
the heart of that natural saint; and it is not the least of his crimes.
 
After the time of Cowper, there does indeed begin to appear another
type of difficulty; but it is not the presence but rather the absence
of Protestant theology.  There were elements even in Burns and Byron,
there were still more elements in Shelley and Swinburne, which would
doubtless have been at issue with their Catholic tradition,
if they had had it.  But it would not have been a revolt against
Catholicism half so much as it was a revolt against Protestantism.
In so far as they tended to mere scepticism, they could have found their
way to it more quickly from reading Rabelais and Montaigne in a Catholic
country than from reading Shakespeare and Milton in a Protestant one.
As soon as the Revolution has begun, in a sense as soon as
the Romantic Movement has begun, the positive Puritan theology
is left behind even more completely than the mediaeval theology.
Indeed the Romantics did develop a faint and hazy sympathy,
if not with mediaeval theology, at least with mediaeval religion.
It is true that Byron or Hugo probably preferred an abbey
to be a ruined abbey; but they would not have visited a Baptist
chapel even for the pleasure of seeing it ruined.  It is true
that Scott advised us to see mediaeval Melrose by moonlight;
with the delicate implication that the mediaeval religion was moonshine.
But he would not in any case have wanted to see Exeter Hall by gaslight;
and he would have thought its theology not moonshine but gas.
The tributes which he occasionally forces himself to make to the official
Puritanism of his own country are, it will be generally agreed,
the most sullen and insincere words to be found in his works.
On the negative side, therefore, the conclusion is altogether negative.
It is very difficult to find, at least after the doubtful case
of Bunyan and the deadly case of Cowper, anything that can
be called a purely literary inspiration coming from the purely
Protestant doctrines.  There is plenty of inspiration coming more
or less indirectly from Paganism; but after the first excitement,
hardly any from Protestantism.
 
If this is true on the negative side, it is even truer on
the positive side.  I take it that the imaginative magnificence of
Milton's epic, in such matters as the War in Heaven, would have been
much more convincing, if it had been modelled more on the profound
mediaeval mysteries about the nature of angels and archangels,
and less on the merely fanciful Greek myths about giants and gods.
PARADISE LOST is an immortal poem; but it has just failed
to be an immortal religious poem.  Those are most happy
in reading Milton who can read him as they would read Hesiod.
It is doubtful whether those seeking spiritual satisfaction
now read him even as naturally as they would read Crashaw.
I suppose nobody will dispute that the pageantry of Scott might have
taken on a tenfold splendour if he could have understood the emblems
of an everlasting faith as sympathetically as he did the emblems
of a dead feudalism.  For him it was the habit that made the monk;
but the habit would have been quite as picturesque if there
had been a real monk inside it; let alone a real mind inside
the monk, like the mind of St. Dominic or St. Hugh of Lincoln.
"English literature will always have been Protestant"; but it
might have been Catholic; without ceasing to be English literature,
and perhaps succeeding in producing a deeper literature and
a happier England.
 
-/-
 
== PEACE AND THE PAPACY ==
 
THERE is a famous saying which to some has seemed lacking in reverence,
though in fact it is a support of one important part of religion;
"If God had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent Him."
It is not at all unlike some of the daring questions with which
St. Thomas Aquinas begins his great defence of the faith.
Some of the modern critics of his faith, especially the Protestant
critics of it, have fallen into an amusing error, chiefly through
ignorance of Latin and of the old use of the word DIVUS,
and have accused Catholics of describing the Pope as God.
Catholics, I need not say, are about as likely to call the Pope God
as to call a grasshopper the Pope.  But there is a sense in which
they do recognise an eternal correspondence between the position
of the King of Kings in the universe and of his Viceroy in the world,
like the correspondence between a real thing and its shadow;
a similarity something like the damaged and defective similarity
between God and the image of God.  And among the coincidences
of this comparison may be classed the case of this epigram.
The world will more and more find itself in a position in which
even politicians and practical men will find themselves saying,
"If the Pope had not existed, it would be necessary to invent him."
 
It is not at all impossible that they may really try to invent him.
The truth is that multitudes of them would already accept the Pope
if he were not called the Pope.  I firmly believe that it would
be quite possible, in this and many other matters, to play a sort
of pious practical joke on large numbers of heretics and heathens.
I fancy it would be quite feasible to describe in accurate
but abstract terms the general idea of an office or obligation,
which would exactly correspond to the position of the Papacy
in history, and which would be accepted on ethical and social ground
by numbers of Protestants and free-thinkers; until they discovered
with a reaction of rage and astonishment that they had been
entrapped into accepting the international arbitration of the Pope.
Suppose somebody were to advance the old idea as if it were
a new idea; suppose he were to say; "I propose that there be
erected in some central city in the more civilised part of our
civilisation the seat of a permanent official to represent peace
and the basis of agreement among all the surrounding nations;
let him be by the nature of his post set apart from them all and yet
sworn to consider the rights and wrongs of all; Let him be put there
as a judge to expound an ethical law and system of social relations;
let him be of a certain type and training different from that
which encourages the ordinary ambitions of military glory or even
the ordinary attachments of tribal tradition; let him be protected
by a special sentiment from the pressure of kings and princes;
let him be sworn in a special manner to the consideration of men as men."
There are not a few already, and there will soon be many more,
who would be perfectly capable of proposing such an ideal international
institution on their own account; there are also many who would really,
in their innocence, suppose that it had never been attempted before.
 
It is true that as yet large numbers of such social reformers would
shrink from the idea of the institution being an individual.
But even that prejudice is weakening under the wear and tear of real
political experience.  We may be attached, as many of us are,
to the democratic ideal; but most of us have already realised
that direct democracy, the only true democracy which satisfies
a true democrat, is a thing applicable to some things and not others;
and not applicable at all to a question such as this.  The actual
speaking voice of a vast international civilisation, or of a vast
international religion, will not in any case be the actual articulate
distinguishable voices or cries of all the millions of the faithful.
It is not the people who would be the heirs of a dethroned Pope;
it is some synod or bench of bishops.  It is not an alternative
between monarchy and democracy, but an alternative between monarchy
and oligarchy.  And, being myself one of the democratic idealists,
I have not the faintest hesitation in my choice between the two latter
forms of privilege.  A monarch is a man; but an oligarchy is not men;
it is a few men forming a group small enough to be insolent
and large enough to be irresponsible.  A man in the position
of a Pope, unless he is literally mad, must be responsible.
But aristocrats can always throw the responsibility on each other;
and yet create a common and corporate society from which
is shut out the very vision of the rest of the world.
These are conclusions to which many people in the world are coming;
and many who would still be much astonished and horrified to find
where those conclusions lead.  But the point here is that even
if our civilisation does not rediscover the need of a Papacy,
it is extremely likely that sooner or later it will try to supply
the need of something like a Papacy; even if it tries to do it
on its own account.  That will be indeed an ironical situation.
The modern world will have set up a new Anti-Pope, even if, as in
Monsignor Benson's romance, the Anti-Pope has rather the character
of an Antichrist.
 
The point is that men will attempt to put some sort of moral power
out of the reach of material powers.  It is the weakness of many
worthy and well-meaning attempts at international justice just now,
that the international council can hardly help being merely
a microcosm or model of the world outside it, with all its little
things and big things, including the things that are much too big.
Suppose that in the international interchanges of the future some power,
say Sweden, is felt to be disproportionate or problematical.
If Sweden is powerful in Europe, she will be powerful in the council
of Europe.  If Sweden is too powerful in Europe, she will be too
powerful in the council of Europe.  And because she is the very
thing that is irresistible, she is the very thing to be resisted;
or at any rate to be restrained.  I do not see how Europe can ever
escape from that logical dilemma, except by discovering again
an authority that is purely moral and is the recognised custodian
of a morality.  It may very reasonably be said that even those
dedicated to that duty may not always practise what they profess.
But the other rulers of the world are not even bound to profess it.
 
Again and again in history, especially in mediaeval history,
the Papacy has intervened in the interests of peace and humanity;
just as the greatest saints have thrown themselves between
the swords and daggers of contending factions.  But if there
had been no Papacy and no saints and no Catholic Church at all,
the world left to itself would certainly not have substituted social
abstractions for theological creeds.  As a whole, humanity has
been far from humanitarian.  If the world had been left to itself,
let us say in the age of feudalism, all the decisions would
have been rigidly and ruthlessly on the lines of feudalism.
There was only one institution in that world that had existed
before feudalism.  There was only one institution which could possibly
carry on some faint memory of the Republic and the Roman Law.
If the world had been left to itself in the time of the Renaissance
and the Italian statecraft of the Prince, it would have been arranged
entirely in the current fashion of the glorification of princes.
There was only one institution that could at any moment be moved
to repeat, "Put not your trust in princes."  Had it been absent,
the only result would have been that the famous settlement of
CUJUS REGIO EJUS RELIGIO would have been all REGIO with precious
little RELIGIO.  And so, of course, our own day has its unconscious
dogmas and its universal prejudices; and it needs a special,
a sacred and what seems to many an inhuman separation to stand
above them or to see beyond.
 
I know that this ideal has been abused like any other; I only
say that even those who most denounce the reality will probably
begin again to search for the ideal.  But I do not, in fact,
propose that any such spiritual tribunal should act like a legal
tribunal or be given powers of practical interference with normal
and national government.  I am quite sure, for one thing,
that it would never accept any such material entanglement.
Nor do I, for that matter, desire that any of the secular tribunals
now set up in the interests of international peace should thus
have the power to interfere with nationality and local liberty.
I would much rather give such power to a pope than to politicians
and diplomatists of the sort to whom the world is giving it.
But I do not want to give it to anybody and the authority in question
does not want to accept it from anybody.  The thing of which I speak
is purely moral and cannot exist without a certain moral loyalty;
it is a thing of atmosphere and even in a sense of affection.
There is no space to describe here the manner in which such
a general popular attachment grows up; but there is no doubt
whatever that it did once grow up round such a religious
centre of our civilisation; and that it is not likely to grow
up again except for something which aims at a higher standard
of humility and charity than the ordinary standard of the world.
Men cannot have an affection for other people's emperors,
or even for other people's politicians; they have sometimes been
known to cool in affection even for their own politicians.
I see no prospect of any such positive nucleus of amity except in some
positive enthusiasm for something that moves the deepest parts of man's
moral nature; something which can unite us not (as the prigs say)
by being entirely international, but by being universally human.
Men cannot agree about nothing any more than they can disagree
about nothing.  And anything wide enough to make such an agreement
must itself be wider than the world.
 
-/-
 
== THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS ==
 
I HAVE rather rashly undertaken to write of the Spirit of Christmas;
and it presents a preliminary difficulty about which I must be candid.
People are very curious nowadays in their way of talking
about "the spirit" of a thing.  There is, for example,
a particular sort of prig who is always lecturing us about having
the spirit of true Christianity, apart from all names and forms.
As far as I can make out, he means the very opposite of what he says.
He means that we are to go on using the names "Christian"
and "Christianity," and so on, for something in which it is quite
specially the spirit that is not Christian; something that is a sort
of combination of the baseless optimism of an American atheist
with the pacifism of a mild Hindoo.  In the same way, we read
a great deal about the Spirit of Christmas in modern journalism
or commercialism; but it is really a reversal of the same kind.
So far from preserving the essentials without the externals, it is
rather preserving the externals where there cannot be the essentials.
It means taking two mere material substances, like holly and mistletoe,
and spreading them all over huge and homeless cosmopolitan hotels
or round the Doric columns of impersonal clubs full of jaded
and cynical old gentlemen; or in any other place where the actual
spirit of Christmas is least likely to be.  But there is also
another way in which modern commercial complexity eats out the heart
of the thing, while actually leaving the painted shell of it.
And that is the much too elaborate system of dependence on buying
and selling, and therefore on bustle and hustle; and the actual
neglect of the new things that might be done by the old Christmas.
 
Normally, if anything were normal nowadays, it would seem a truism to say
that Christmas has been a family festival.  But it is now possible
(as I have had the good or bad luck to discover) to earn a reputation
for paradox simply by going on saying that truisms are true.
In this case, of course, the reason, the only reasonable reason,
was religious.  It was concerned with a happy family because it
was consecrated to the Holy Family.  But it is perfectly true
that many men saw the fact without specially feeling the reason.
When we say the root was religious, we do not mean that Sam Weller
was concentrated on theological values when he told the Fat Boy
to "put a bit of Christmas," into some object, probably edible.
We do not mean that the Fat Boy had gone into a trance of mystical
contemplation like a monk seeing a vision.  We do not even mean
that Bob Cratchit defended punch by saying he was only looking
on the wine when it was yellow; or that Tiny Tim quoted Timothy.
We only mean that they, including their author, would have confessed
humbly and heartily that there was someone historically quite anterior
to Mr. Scrooge, who might be called the Founder of the Feast.
But in any case, whatever the reason, all would have agreed about
the result.  Mr. Wardle's feast centred in Mr. Wardle's family;
and none the less because the romantic shadows of Mr. Winkle
and Mr. Snodgrass threatened to break it up for the formation
of other families.
 
The Christmas season is domestic; and for that reason most people
now prepare for it by struggling in tramcars, standing in queues,
rushing away in trains, crowding despairingly into tea-shops,
and wondering when or whether they will ever get home.
I do not know whether some of them disappear for ever in the toy
department or simply lie down and die in the tea-rooms; but by
the look of them, it is quite likely.  Just before the great festival
of the home the whole population seems to have become homeless.
It is the supreme triumph of industrial civilisation that,
in the huge cities which seem to have far too many houses,
there is a hopeless shortage of housing.  For a long time past
great numbers of our poor have become practically nomadic.
We even confess the fact; for we talk of some of them as Street Arabs.
But this domestic institution, in its present ironical phase,
has gone beyond such normal abnormality.  The feast of the
family turns the rich as well as the poor into vagabonds.
They are so scattered over the bewildering labyrinth of our traffic
and our trade, that they sometimes cannot even reach the tea-shop;
it would be indelicate, of course, to mention the tavern.
They have a difficulty in crowding into their hotels, let alone
separating to reach their houses.  I mean quite the reverse
of irreverence when I say that their only point of resemblance
to the archetypal Christmas family is that there is no room for them
at the inn.
 
Now Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox;
that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.
But the other sort of paradox is not intentional and is certainly
not beautiful.  It is bad enough that we cannot altogether
disentangle the tragedy of poverty.  It is bad enough that the birth
of the homeless, celebrated at hearth and altar, should sometimes
synchronise with the death of the homeless in workhouses and slums.
But we need not rejoice in this universal restlessness brought upon
rich and poor alike; and it seems to me that in this matter we need
a reform of the modern Christmas.
 
I will now emit another brilliant flash of paradox by remarking
that Christmas occurs in the winter.  That is, it is not only a
feast dedicated to domesticity, but it is one deliberately placed
under the conditions in which it is most uncomfortable to rush
about and most natural to stop at home.  But under the complicated
conditions of modern conventions and conveniences, there arises
this more practical and much more unpleasant sort of paradox.
People have to rush about for a few weeks, if it is only to stay
at home for a few hours.  Now the old and healthy idea of such winter
festivals was this; that people being shut in and besieged by the
weather were driven back on their own resources; or, in other words,
had a chance of showing whether there was anything in them.
It is not certain that the reputation of our most fashionable
modern pleasure-seekers would survive the test.  Some dreadful
exposures would be made of some such brilliant society favourites,
if they were cut off from the power of machinery and money.
They are quite used to having everything done for them; and even
when they go to the very latest American dances, it seems to be
mostly the Negro musicians who dance.  But anyhow, on the average
of healthy humanity I believe the cutting off of all these mechanical
connections would have a thoroughly enlivening and awakening effect.
At present they are always accused of merely amusing themselves;
but they are doing nothing so noble or worthy of their human dignity.
Most of them by this time cannot amuse themselves; they are too used
to being amused.
 
Christmas might be creative.  We are told, even by those who praise
it most, that it is chiefly valuable for keeping up ancient customs
or old-fashioned games.  It is indeed valuable for both those
admirable purposes.  But in the sense of which I am now speaking it
might once more be possible to turn the truth the other way round.
It is not so much old things as new things that a real Christmas
might create.  It might, for instance, create new games, if people
were really driven to invent their own games.  Most of the very
old games began with the use of ordinary tools or furniture.
So the very terms of tennis were founded on the framework of the old
inn courtyard.  So, it is said, the stumps in cricket were originally
only the three legs of the milking-stool. Now we might invent new
things of this kind, if we remembered who is the mother of invention.
How pleasing it would be to start a game in which we scored so much
for hitting the umbrella-stand or the dinner-wagon, or even the host
and hostess; of course, with a missile of some soft material.
Children who are lucky enough to be left alone in the nursery
invent not only whole games, but whole dramas and life-stories
of their own; they invent secret languages; they create
imaginary families; they laboriously conduct family magazines.
That is the sort of creative spirit that we want in the modern world;
want both in the sense of desiring and in the sense of lacking it.
If Christmas could become more domestic, instead of less, I believe
there would be a vast increase in the real Christmas spirit;
the spirit of the Child.  But in indulging this dream we must once
more invert the current convention into the form of a paradox.
It is true in a sense that Christmas is the time at which the doors
should be open.  But I would have the doors shut at Christmas,
or at least just before Christmas; and then the world shall see
what we can do.
 
I cannot but remember, with something of a smile, that on an earlier
and more controversial page of this book I have mentioned a lady
who shuddered at the thought of the things perpetrated by my
co-religionists behind closed doors.  But my memory of it is mellowed
by distance and the present subject, and I feel quite the reverse
of controversial.  I hope that lady, and all of her way of thinking,
may also have the wisdom to close their doors; and discover that only
when all the doors are closed the best thing will be found inside.
If they are Puritans, whose religion is only based on the Bible,
let it for once indeed be a Family Bible.  If they are Pagans, who can
accept nothing but the winter feast, let it at least be a family feast.
The discordance or discomfort complained of by modern critics,
in the family reunion, is not due to that mystical focal fire
having been left burning, but to its having been left to go cold.
It is because cold fragments of a once living thing are clumsily
lumped together; it is no argument against making the thing alive.
Christmas toys are incongruously dangled before heavy and heathen uncles
who wish they were playing golf.  But that does not alter the fact
that they might become much brighter and more intelligent if they
knew how to play with toys; and they are horrible bores about golf.
Their dullness is only the last deadly product of the mechanical
progress of organised and professional sports, in that rigid
world of routine outside the home.  When they were children,
behind closed doors in the home, it is probable that nearly every
one of them had day-dreams and unwritten dramas that belonged to them
as much as Hamlet belonged to Shakespeare or Pickwick to Dickens.
How much more thrilling it would be if Uncle Henry, instead of
describing in detail all the strokes with which he ought to have got
out of the bunker, were to say frankly that he had been on a voyage
to the end of the world and had just caught the Great Sea-Serpent.
How much more truly intellectual would be the conversation of
Uncle William if, instead of telling us the point to which he had
reduced his handicap, he could still say with conviction that he was
King of the Kangaroo Islands, or Chief of the Rango Dango Redskins.
These things, projected from within, were in almost all human spirits;
and it is not normal that the inspiration of them should be so utterly
crushed by the things without.  Let it not be supposed for a moment
that I also am among the tyrants of the earth, who would impose my
own tastes, or force all the other children to play my own games.
I have no disrespect for the game of golf; it is an admirable game.
I have played it; or rather, I have played at it, which is generally
regarded as the very opposite.  By all means let the golfers golf
and even the organisers organise, if their only conception of an organ
is something like a barrel-organ. Let them play golf day after day;
let them play golf for three hundred and sixty-four days, and nights
as well, with balls dipped in luminous paint, to be pursued in the dark.
But let there be one night when things grow luminous from within:
and one day when men seek for all that is buried in themselves,
and discover, where she is indeed hidden, behind locked gates
and shuttered windows, and doors thrice barred and bolted,
the spirit of liberty.

Latest revision as of 10:53, 27 May 2008

The Thing
written by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
1929.




This work is in the public domain in countries where the copyright term is the author's life plus 70 years or less.


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