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The Faith of the Millions (2nd series)

by George Tyrrell · English · Gutenberg #10139 · 501,041 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Faith of the Millions (2nd series)

Author: George Tyrrell


        
Release date: November 1, 2003 [eBook #10139]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FAITH OF THE MILLIONS (2ND SERIES) ***

THE FAITH OF THE MILLIONS

A SELECTION OF PAST ESSAYS

SECOND SERIES

BY

GEORGE TYRRELL, S.J.

1901







"AND SEEING THE MULTITUDES HE WAS MOVED WITH
COMPASSION ON THEM, FOR THEY WERE HARASSED AND
SCATTERED AS SHEEP HAVING NO SHEPHERD."
(Matthew ix. 36.)





  _Nil Obstat:_
     J. GERARD, S.J.
         CENS. THEOL. DEPUTATUS.

  _Imprimatur:_
     HERBERTUS CARD. VAUGHAN,
         ARCHIEP. WESTMON.



CONTENTS


   XIII.--Juliana of Norwich
    XIV.--Poet and Mystic
     XV.--Two Estimates of Catholic Life
    XVI.--A Life of De Lamennais
   XVII.--Lippo, the Man and the Artist
  XVIII.--Through Art to Faith
    XIX.--Tracts for the Million
     XX.--An Apostle of Naturalism
    XXL.--"The Making of Religion"
   XXII.--Adaptability as a Proof of Religion
  XXIII.--Idealism in Straits



XIII.


JULIANA OF NORWICH.

"One of the most remarkable books of the middle ages," writes Father
Dalgairns, [1] "is the hitherto almost unknown work, titled, _Sixteen
Revelations of Divine Love made to a Devout Servant of God, called
Mother Juliana, an Anchoress of Norwich_" How "one of the most
remarkable books" should be "hitherto almost unknown," may be explained
partly by the fact to which the same writer draws attention, namely,
that Mother Juliana lived and wrote at the time when a certain mystical
movement was about to bifurcate and pursue its course of development,
one branch within the Church on Catholic lines, the other outside the
Church along lines whose actual issue was Wycliffism and other kindred
forms of heterodoxy, and whose logical outcome was pantheism. Hence,
between the language of these pseudo-mystics and that of the recluse of
Norwich, "there is sometimes a coincidence ... which might deceive the
unwary." It is almost necessarily a feature of every heresy to begin by
using the language of orthodoxy in a strained and non-natural sense, and
only gradually to develop a distinctive terminology of its own; but, as
often as not, certain ambiguous expressions, formerly taken in an
orthodox sense, are abandoned by the faithful on account of their
ambiguity and are then appropriated to the expression of heterodoxy, so
that eventually by force of usage the heretical meaning comes to be the
principal and natural meaning, and any other interpretation to seem
violent and non-natural. "The few coincidences," continues Father
Dalgairns, "between Mother Juliana and Wycliffe are among the many
proofs that the same speculative view often means different things in
different systems. Both St. Augustine, Calvin, and Mahomet, believe in
predestination, yet an Augustinian is something utterly different from a
Scotch Cameronian or a Mahometan.... The idea which runs through the
whole of Mother Juliana is the very contradictory of Wycliffe's
Pantheistic Necessitarianism." Yet on account of the mere similarity of
expression we can well understand how in the course of time some of
Mother Juliana's utterances came to be more ill-sounding to faithful
ears in proportion as they came to be more exclusively appropriated by
the unorthodox. It is hard to be as vigilant when danger is remote as
when it is near at hand; and until heresy has actually wrested them to
its purpose it is morally impossible that the words of ecclesiastical
and religious writers should be so delicately balanced as to avoid all
ambiguities and inaccuracies. Still less have we a right to look for
such exactitude in the words of an anchoress who, if not wholly
uneducated in our sense of the word, yet on her own confession "could no
letter," i.e., as we should say, was no scholar, and certainly made no
pretence to any skill in technical theology. But however much some of
her expressions may jar with the later developments of Catholic
theology, it must be remembered, as has been said, that they were
current coin in her day, common to orthodox and unorthodox; and that
though their restoration is by no means desirable, yet they are still
susceptive of a "benignant" interpretation. "I pray Almighty God," says
Mother Juliana in concluding, "that this book come not but into the
hands of those that will be His faithful lovers, and that will submit
them to the faith of Holy Church." [2] And indeed such can receive no
possible harm from its perusal, beyond a little temporary perplexity to
be dispelled by inquiry; and this only in the case of those who are
sufficiently instructed and reflective to perceive the discord in
question. The rest are well used in their reading to take what is
familiar and to leave what is strange, so that they will find in her
pages much to ponder, and but a little to pass over.

It is, however, not only to these occasional obscurities and ambiguities
that we are to ascribe the comparative oblivion into which so remarkable
a book has fallen; but also to the fact that its noteworthiness is
perhaps more evident and relative to us than to our forefathers. It
cannot but startle us to find doubts that we hastily look upon as
peculiarly "modern," set forth in their full strength and wrestled with
and overthrown by an unlettered recluse of the fourteenth century. In
some sense they are the doubts of all time, with perhaps just that
peculiar complexion which they assume in the light of Christianity. Yet,
owing to the modern spread of education, or rather to the indiscriminate
divulgation of ideas, these problems are now the possession of the man
in the street, whereas in former days they were exclusively the property
of minds capable--not indeed of answering the unanswerable, but at least
of knowing their own limitations and of seeing why such problems must
always exist as long as man is man. Dark as the age of Mother Juliana
was as regards the light of positive knowledge and information; yet the
light of wisdom burned at least as clearly and steadily then as now; and
it is by that light alone that the shades of unbelief can be dispelled.
Of course, wisdom without knowledge must starve or prey on its own
vitals, and this was the intellectual danger of the middle ages; but
knowledge without wisdom is so much food undigested and indigestible,
and this is the evil of our own day, when to be passably well-informed
so taxes our time and energy as to leave us no leisure for assimilating
the knowledge with which we have stuffed ourselves.

We must not, however, think of Mother Juliana as shut up within four
walls of a cell, evolving all her ideas straight from her own inner
consciousness without any reference to experience. Such a barren
contemplation, tending to mental paralysis, belongs to Oriental
pessimism, whose aim is the extinction of life, mental and physical, and
reabsorption into that void whence, it is said, misfortune has brought
us forth to troublous consciousness. The Christian contemplative knows
no ascent to God but by the ladder of creatures; he goes to the book of
Nature and of human life, and to the book of Revelation, and turns and
ponders their pages, line by line and word by word, and so feeds and
fills the otherwise thin and shadowy conception of God in his own soul,
and ever pours new oil upon the flame of Divine love. Father Daigairns
writes: "Juliana is a recluse very different from the creatures of the
imagination of writers on comparative morals. So far from being cut off
from sympathy with her kind, her mind is tenderly and delicately alive
to every change in the spiritual atmosphere of England.... The four
walls of her narrow home seem to be rent and torn asunder, and not only
England but Christendom appears before her view;" and he is at pains to
show how both anchorites and anchoresses were much-sought after by all
in trouble, temporal or spiritual, and how abundant were their
opportunities of becoming acquainted with human life and its burdens,
and of more than compensating, through the confidences of others,
whatever defect their minds might suffer through lack of personal
experience. Even still, how many a priest or nun whose experience had
else been narrowed to the petty domestic interests of a small family,
is, in virtue of his or her vocation, put in touch with a far larger
world, or with a far more important aspect of the world, than many who
mingle with its every-day trivialities, and is thus made a partaker in
some sense of the deeper life and experience of society and of the
Universal Church! The anchoress "did a great deal more than pray. The
very dangers against which the author of her rule [3] warns her, are a
proof that she had many visitors. He warns her against becoming a
'babbling' or 'gossiping' anchoress, a variety evidently well-known; a
recluse whose cell was the depository of all the news from the
neighbourhood at a time when newspapers did not exist." Such abuses
throw light upon the legitimate use of the anchoress's position in the
mediæval community.

And so, though Mother Juliana "could no letter," though she knew next to
nothing of the rather worthless physical science of those times, and
hardly more of philosophy or technical theology, yet she knew no little
of that busy, sad, and sinful human life going on round her, not only at
Norwich, but in England, and even in Europe; and rich with this
knowledge, to which all other lore is subordinate and for whose sake
alone it is valuable, she betook herself to prayer and meditation, and
brought all this experience into relation with God, and drew from it an
ever clearer understanding of Him and of His dealings with the souls
that His Love has created and redeemed.

It is not then so wonderful that this wise and holy woman should have
faced the problems presented by the apparent discord between the truths
of faith and the facts of human life--a discord which is felt in every
age by the observant and thoughtful, but which in our age is a
commonplace on the lips of even the most superficial. But an age takes
its tone from the many who are the children of the past, rather than
from the few who are the parents of the future. Mother Juliana's book
could hardly have been in any sense "popular" until these days of ours,
in which the particular disease of mind to which it ministers has become
epidemic.

If then these suggestions to some extent furnish an explanation of the
oblivion into which the revelations of Mother Juliana have fallen, they
also justify the following attempt to draw attention to them once more,
and to give some sort of analysis of their contents; more especially as
we have reason to believe that they are about to be re-edited by a
competent scholar and made accessible to the general public, which they
have not been since the comparative extinction of Richardson's edition
of 1877. Little is known of Mother Juliana's history outside what is
implied in her revelations; nor is it our purpose at present to go aside
in search of biographical details that will be of interest only after
their subject has become interesting. Suffice it here to say that she
was thirty at the time of her revelations, which she tells us was in
1373. Hence she was born in 1343, and is said to have been a
centenarian, in which case she must have died about 1443. She probably
belonged to the Benedictine nuns at Carrow, near Norwich, and being
called to a still stricter life, retired to a hermitage close by the
Church of St. Julian at Norwich. The details she gives about her own
sick-room exclude the idea of that stricter "reclusion" which is
popularly spoken of as "walling-up"--not of course in the mythical
sense.

With these brief indications sufficient to satisfy the craving of our
imagination for particulars of time and place, let us turn to her own
account of the circumstances of her visions, as well as of their nature.
She tells us that in her life previous to 1373, she had, at some time or
other, demanded three favours from God; first, a sensible appreciation
of Christ's Passion in such sort as to share the grace of Mary Magdalene
and others who were eye-witnesses thereof: "therefore I desired a bodily
sight wherein I might have more knowledge of the bodily pain of our
Saviour." And the motive of this desire was that she might "afterwards
because of that showing have the more true mind of the Passion of
Christ." Her aim was a deeper practical intelligence, and not the
gratification of mere emotional curiosity.

This grace she plainly recognizes as extraordinary; for she says: "Other
sight or showing of God asked I none, till when the soul was departed
from the body." Her second request was likewise for an extraordinary
grace; namely, for a bodily sickness which she and others might believe
to be mortal; in which she should receive the last sacraments, and
experience all the bodily pains, and all the spiritual temptations
incident to the separation of soul and body. And the motive of this
request was that she might be "purged by the mercy of God, and
afterwards live more to the worship of God because of that sickness." In
other words, she desired the grace of what we might call a
"trial-death," that so she might better meet the real death when it
came. Further, she adds, "this sickness I desired in my youth, that I
might have it when I was thirty years old." And "these two desires were
with a condition" (namely, if God should so will), "for methought this
was not the common use of prayer." But the third request she proffers
boldly "without any condition," since it was necessarily God's desire to
grant it and to be sued for it; namely, the grace of a three-fold wound:
the wound of true sorrow for sin; the wound of "kind compassion" with
Christ's sufferings; and the wound of "wilful belonging to God," that
is, of self-devotion.

She is careful to tell us that while she ever continued to urge the
unconditional third request, the two first passed completely out of her
head in the course of years, until she was reminded of them by their
simultaneous and remarkable fulfilment. "For when I was thirty years old
and a half, God sent me a bodily sickness in which I lay three days and
three nights; and on the fourth night I took all my rites of Holy
Church, and weened not to have lived till day. And after this I lay two
days and two nights, and on the third night I weened oftentimes to have
passed, and so weened they that were with me.... And I understood in my
reason, and by the feeling of my pains that I should die, and I assented
fully with all the will of my heart, to be at God's will. Thus I endured
till day, and by then, was my body dead to all feeling from the midst
down." She is then raised up in a sitting position for greater ease, and
her curate is sent for, as the end is supposed to be near. On arrival,
he finds her speechless and with her eyes fixed upwards towards heaven,
"where I trusted to come by the mercy of God." He places the crucifix
before her, and bids her bend her eyes upon it. "I assented to set my
eyes in the face of the crucifix if I could; and so I did; for methought
I could endure longer to look straight in front of me than right up"--a
touch that shows the previous upturning of the eyes to have been
voluntary and not cataleptic. At this moment we seem to pass into the
region of the abnormal: "After this my sight began to fail; it waxed as
dark about me in the chamber as if it had been night, save in the image
of the cross, wherein I beheld a common light, and I wist not how. And
all that was beside the cross was ugly and fearful to me, as it had been
much occupied with fiends." Then the upper part of her body becomes
insensible, and the only pain left is that of weakness and
breathlessness. Suddenly she is totally eased and apparently quite
cured, which, however, she regards as a momentary miraculous relief, but
not as a deliverance from death. In this breathing space it suddenly
occurs to her to beg for the second of those three wounds which were the
matter of her unconditional third request; namely, for a deepened sense
and sympathetic understanding of Christ's Passion. "But in this I never
desired any bodily sight, or any manner of showing from God; but such
compassion as I thought that a kind soul might have with our Lord
Jesus." In a word, the remembrance of her two conditional and
extraordinary requests of bygone years was not in her mind at the time.
"And in this, suddenly I saw the red blood trickling down from under the
garland;"--and so she passes from objective to subjective vision;[4] and
the first fifteen revelations follow, as she tells us later, one after
another in unbroken succession, lasting in all some few hours.

"I had no grief or no dis-ease," she tells us later, "as long as the
fifteen showings lasted in showing. And at the end all was close, and I
saw no more; and soon I felt that I should live longer." Presently all
her pains, bodily and spiritual, return in full force; and the
consolation of the visions seems to her as an idle dream and delusion;
and she answers to the inquiries of a Religious at her bedside, that she
had been raving: "And he laughed loud and drolly. And I said: 'The cross
that stood before my face, methought it bled fast.'" At which the other
looked so serious and awed that she became ashamed of her own
incredulity. "I believed Him truly for the time that I saw Him. And so
it was then my will and my meaning to do, ever without end--but, as a
fool, I let it pass out of my mind. And lo! how wretched I was," &c.
Then she falls asleep and has a terrifying dream of the Evil One, of
which she says: "This ugly showing was made sleeping and so was none
other," whence it seems that her self-consciousness was unimpaired in
the other visions; that is, she was aware at the time that they were
visions, and did not confound them with reality as dreams are
confounded. Then follows the sixteenth and last revelation; ending with
the words: "Wit well it was no raving thou sawest to-day: but take it,
and believe it, and keep thee therein, and comfort thee therewith and
trust thereto, and thou shalt not be overcome." Then during the rest of
the same night till about Prime next morning she is tempted against
faith and trust by the Evil One, of whose nearness she is conscious; but
comes out victorious after a sustained struggle. She understands from
our Lord, that the series of showings is now closed; "which blessed
showing the faith keepeth, ... for He left with me neither sign nor
token whereby I might know it." Yet for her personally the obligation
not to doubt is as of faith: "Thus am I bound to keep it in my faith;
for on the same day that it was showed, what time the sight was passed,
as a wretch I forsook it and openly said that I raved."

Fifteen years later she gets an inward response as to the general gist
and unifying purport of the sixteen revelations. "Wit it well; love was
His meaning. Who showed it thee? Love. Wherefore showed He it thee? For
love."

Having thus sketched the circumstances of the revelations, we may now
address ourselves to their character and substance.

There is nothing to favour and everything to disfavour the notion that
Mother Juliana was an habitual visionary, or was the recipient of any
other visions, than those which she beheld in her thirty-first year; and
of these, she tells us herself, the whole sixteen took place within a
few hours. "Now have I told you of fifteen showings, ... of which
fifteen showings, the first began early in the morning about the hour of
four, ... each following the other till it was noon of the day or past,
... and after this the Good Lord showed me the sixteenth revelation on
the night following." Speaking of them all as one, she tells us: "And
from the time it was showed I desired oftentimes to wit what was in our
Lord's meaning; and fifteen years after and more I was answered in
ghostly understanding, saying thus: 'What! wouldst thou wit thy Lord's
meaning in this thing? Wit it well: Love was His meaning.'" But this
"ghostly understanding" can hardly be pressed into implying another
revelation of the evidently supernormal type.

We rather insist on this point, as indicating the habitual healthiness
of Mother Juliana's soul--a quality which is also abundantly witnessed
by the unity and coherence of the doctrine of her revelations, which
bespeaks a mind well-knit together, and at harmony with itself. The
hysterical mind is one in which large tracts of consciousness seem to
get detached from the main body, and to take the control of the subject
for the time being, giving rise to the phenomena rather foolishly called
double or multiple "personality." This is a disease proper to the
passive-minded, to those who give way to a "drifting" tendency, and
habitually suffer their whole interests to be absorbed by the strongest
sensation or emotion that presents itself. Such minds are generally
chaotic and unorganized, as is revealed in the rambling, involved,
interminably parenthetical and digressive character of their
conversation. But when, as with Mother Juliana, we find unity and
coherence, we may infer that there has been a life-long habit of active
mental control, such as excludes the supposition of an hysterical
temperament.

Perhaps the similarity of the phenomena which attend both on
extraordinary psychic weakness and passivity, and on extraordinary
energy and activity may excuse a confusion common enough, and which we
have dwelt on elsewhere. But obviously as far as the natural
consequences of a given psychic state are concerned, it is indifferent
how that state is brought about. Thus, that extreme concentration of the
attention, that perfect abstraction from outward things, which in
hysterical persons is the effect of weakness and passive-mindedness--of
the inability to resist and shake off the spell of passions and
emotions; is in others the effect of active self-control, of voluntary
concentration, of a complete mastery over passions and emotions. Yet
though the causes of the abnormal state are different, its effects may
well be the same.

In thus maintaining the healthiness and vigour of Mother Juliana's mind,
we may seem to be implicitly treating her revelation, not as coming from
a Divine source, but simply as an expression of her own habitual line of
thought--as a sort of pouring forth of the contents of her subconscious
memory. Our direct intention, however, is to show how very unlikely it
is antecedently that one so clear-headed and intelligent should be the
victim of the common and obvious illusions of the hysterical visionary.
For her book contains not only the matter of her revelations, but also
the history of all the circumstances connected with them, as well as a
certain amount of personal comment upon them, professedly the fruit of
her normal mind; and best of all, a good deal of analytical reflection
upon the phenomena which betrays a native psychological insight not
inferior to that of St. Teresa. From these sources we could gather the
general sobriety and penetration of her judgment, without assuming the
actual teaching of the revelations to be merely the unconscious
self-projection of her own mind. But in so much as many of these
revelations were professedly Divine answers to her own questions, and
since the answer must ever be adapted not merely to the question
considered in the abstract, but as it springs from its context in the
questioner's mind; we are not wrong, on this score alone, in arguing
from the character of the revelation to the character of the mind to
which it was addressed. Fallible men may often speak and write above or
beside the intelligence of their hearers and readers; but not so He who
reads the heart He has made. Now these revelations were not addressed to
the Church through Mother Juliana; but, as she says, were addressed to
herself and were primarily for herself, though most that was said had
reference to the human soul in general. They were adapted therefore to
the character and individuality of her mind; and are an index of its
thoughts and workings. For her they were a matter of faith; but, as she
tells us, she had no token or outward proof wherewith to convince others
of their reality. Those who feel disposed, as we ourselves do, to place
much confidence in the word of one so perfectly sane and genuinely holy,
may draw profit from the message addressed to her need; but never can it
be for them a matter of faith as in a Divine message addressed directly
or indirectly to themselves. So far as these revelations are a clear and
noble expression of truths already contained implicitly in our faith and
reason, which it brings into more explicit consciousness and vitalizes
with a new power of stimulus, they may be profitable to us all; but they
must be received with due criticism and discernment as themselves
subject to a higher rule of truth--namely, the teaching of the Universal
Church.

But to determine, with respect to these and kindred revelations, how far
they may be regarded as an expression of the recipient's own mind and
latent consciousness, will need a digression which the general interest
of the question must excuse.

There is a tendency in the modern philosophy of religion (for example,
in Mr. Balfour's _Foundations of Belief_) to rationalize inspired
revelation and to explain it as altogether kindred to the apparently
magical intuitions of natural genius in non-religious matters; as the
result, in other words, of a rending asunder of the veil that divides
what is called "super-liminal" from "subliminal" consciousness; to find
in prophecy and secret insight the effect of a flash of unconscious
inference from a mass of data buried in the inscrutable darkness of our
forgotten self. Together with this, there is also a levelling-up
philosophy, a sort of modernized ontologism, which would attribute all
natural intuition to a more immediate self-revelation on God's part than
seems quite compatible with orthodoxy.

But neither of these philosophies satisfy what is vulgarly understood by
"revelation," and therefore both use the word in a somewhat strained
sense. For certainly the first sense of the term implies a consciousness
on the part of the recipient of being spoken to, of being related
through such speech to another personality, whereas the flashes and
intuitions of natural genius, however they may resemble and be called
"inspirations" because of their exceeding the known resources of the
thinker's own mind, yet they are consciously autochthonous; they are
felt to spring from the mind's own soil; not to break the soul's
solitude with the sense of an alien presence. Such interior
illuminations, though doubtless in a secondary sense derived from the
"True Light which enlightens every man coming into this world,"
certainly do not fulfil the traditional notion of revelation as
understood, not only in the Christian Church, but also in all ethnic
religions. For common to antiquity is the notion of some kind of
possession or seizure, some usurpation of the soul's faculties by an
external personality, divine or diabolic, for its own service and as its
instrument of expression--a phenomenon, in fact, quite analogous, if not
the same in species, with that of hypnotic control and suggestion, where
the thought and will of the subject is simply passive under the thought
and will of the agent.

Saints and contemplatives are wont--not without justification--to speak
of their lights in prayer, and of the ordinary intuitions of their mind,
under the influence of grace, as Divine utterances in a secondary sense;
to say, "God said to me," or "seemed to say to me," or "God showed me,"
and so on. But to confound these products of their own mind with
revelation is the error only of the uninstructed or the wilfully
self-deluded. Therefore, as commonly understood, "revelation" implies
the conscious control of the mind by another mind; just as its usual
correlative, "inspiration," implies the conscious control of the will by
another will.

There can be no doubt whatever but that Mother Juliana of Norwich
considered her revelations to be of this latter description, and not to
have been merely different in degree from those flashes of spiritual
insight with which she was familiar in her daily contemplations and
prayers. How far, then, her own mind may have supplied the material from
which the tissues were woven, or lent the colours with which the
pictures were painted, or supplied the music to which the words were
set, is what we must now try to determine.


II.

Taking the terms "revelation" and "inspiration" in the unsophisticated
sense which they have borne not only in the Judaeo-Christian tradition,
but in almost all the great ethnic religions as well, we may inquire
into the different sorts and degrees of the control exercised by the
presumably supernatural agents over the recipient of such influence. For
clearness' sake we may first distinguish between the control of the
cognitive, the volitional, and the executive faculties. For our present
inquiry we may leave aside those cases where the control of the
executive faculties, normally subject to the will and directed by the
mind, seem to be wrested from that control by a foreign agent possessed
of intelligence and volition, as, for example, in such a case as is
narrated of the false prophet Balaam, or of those who at the Pentecostal
outpouring spoke correctly in languages unintelligible to themselves, or
of the possessed who were constrained in spite of themselves to confess
Christ. In these and similar cases, not only is the action involuntary
or even counter to the will, but it manifests such intelligent purpose
as seemingly marks it to be the effect of an alien will and
intelligence. Of this kind of control exercised by the agent over the
outer actions of the patient, it may be doubted if it be ever effected
except through the mediation of a suggestion addressed to the mind, in
such sort that though not free, the resulting action is not wholly
involuntary. Be this as it may, our concern at present is simply with
control exercised over the will and the understanding.

With regard to the will, it is a commonplace of mystical theology that
God, who gave it its natural and essential bent towards the good of
reason, i.e., towards righteousness and the Divine will; who created
it not merely as an irresistible tendency towards the happiness and
self-realization of the rational subject, but as a resistible tendency
towards its _true_, happiness and _true_ self-realization--that this
same God can directly modify the will without the natural mediation of
some suggested thought. We ourselves, by the laborious cultivation of
virtue, gradually modify the response of our will to certain
suggestions, making it more sensitive to right impulses, more obtuse to
evil impulses. According to mystic theology, it is the prerogative of
God to dispense with this natural method of education, and, without
violating that liberty of choice (which no inclination can prejudice),
to incline the rational appetite this way or that; not only in reference
to some suggested object, but also without reference to any distinct
object whatsoever, so that the soul should be abruptly filled with joy
or sadness, with fear or hope, with desire or aversion, and yet be at a
loss to determine the object of these spiritual passions. St. Ignatius
Loyola, in his "Rules for Discerning Spirits," borrowed no doubt from
the current mystical theology of his day, makes this absence of any
suggested object a criterion of "consolation" coming from God alone--a
criterion always difficult to apply owing to the lightning subtlety of
thoughts that flash across the soul and are forgotten even while their
emotional reverberation yet remains. Where there was a preceding thought
to account for the emotion, he held that the "consolation" might be the
work of spirits (good or evil) who could not influence the will
directly, but only indirectly through the mind; or else it might be the
work of the mind itself, whose thoughts often seem to us abrupt through
mere failure of self-observation.

Normally what is known as an "actual grace" involves both an
illustration of the mind, and an enkindling of the will; but though
supernatural, such graces are not held to be miraculous or
preternatural, or to break the usual psychological laws of cause and
effect; like the ordinary answers to prayer, they are from God's
ordinary providence in that supernatural order which permeates but does
not of itself interfere with the natural. But over and above what,
relatively to our observation, we call the "ordinary" course, there is
the extraordinary, whose interference with it is apparent, though of
course not absolute or real--since nothing can be out of harmony with
the first and highest law, which is God Himself. And to the category of
the extraordinary must be assigned such inspirations and direct
will-movements as we here speak of. [5]

Yet not altogether; for in the natural order, too, we have the
phenomenon of instinct to consider--both spiritual and animal. Giving
heredity all the credit we can for storing up accumulated experience in
the nervous system of each species, there remains a host of fundamental
animal instincts which that law is quite inadequate to explain; those,
for example, which govern the multiplication of the species and secure
the conditions under which alone heredity can work. Such cannot be at
once the effect and the essential condition of heredity; and yet they
are, of all instincts, the most complex and mysterious. Indeed, it seems
more scientific to ascribe other instincts to the same known and
indubitable, if mysterious, cause, than to seek explanation in causes
less known and more hypothetical. In the case of many instincts, it
would seem that the craving for the object precedes the distinct
cognition of it; that the object is only ascertained when, after various
tentative gropings, it is stumbled upon, almost, it might seem, by
chance. And this seems true, also, of some of our fundamental spiritual
instincts; for example, that craving of the mind for an unified
experience, which is at the root of all mental activity, and whose
object is ever approached yet never attained; or, again, there is the
social and political instinct, which has not yet formed a distinct and
satisfying conception of what it would be at. Or nearer still to our
theme, is the natural religious instinct which seeks interpretations and
explanatory hypotheses in the various man-made religions of the race,
and which finds itself satisfied and transcended by the Christian
revelation.

In these and like instances, we find will-movements not caused by the
subjects' own cognitions and perceptions, but contrariwise, giving birth
to cognitions, setting the mind to work to interpret the said movements,
and to seek out their satisfying objects.

This is quite analogous to certain phenomena of the order of grace. St.
Ignatius almost invariably speaks, not, as we should, of thoughts that
give rise to will-states of "consolation" or "desolation," but
conversely, of these will-states giving rise to congruous thoughts.
Indeed, nothing is more familiar to us than the way in which the mind is
magnetized by even our physical states of elation or depression, to
select the more cheerful or the gloomier aspects of life, according as
we are under one influence or the other; and in practice, we recognize
the effect of people's humours on their opinions and decisions, and
would neither sue mercy nor ask a favour of a man in a temper. In short,
it is hardly too much to say, that our thoughts are more dependent on
our feelings than our feelings on our thoughts. This, then, is one
possible method of supernatural guidance which we shall call "blind
inspiration"--for though the feeling or impulse is from God, the
interpretation is from the subject's own mind. It is curious how St.
Ignatius applies this method to the determining of the Divine will in
certain cases--as it were, by the inductive principle of "concomitant
variation." A suggestion that always comes and grows with a state of
"consolation," and whose negative is in like manner associated with
"desolation," is presumably the right interpretation of the blind
impulse. [6] And perhaps this is one of the commonest subjective
assurances of faith, namely, that our faith grows and declines with what
we know intuitively to be our better moods; that when lax we are
sceptical, and believing when conscientious.

Another species of will-guidance recognized by saints, is not so much by
way of a vague feeling seeking interpretation, as by way of a sort of
enforced decision with regard to some naturally suggested course of
conduct. And this, perhaps, is what is more technically understood by an
inspiration; as, for example, when the question of writing or not
writing something publicly useful, say, the records of the Kings of
Israel, rises in the mind, and it is decided for and in the subject, but
not by him. Of course this "inspiration" is a common but not essential
accompaniment of "revelation" or "mind-control,"--in those cases,
namely, where the communicated information is for the good of others;
as, also, where it is for the guidance of the practical conduct of the
recipient. Such "inspiration" at times seems to be no more than a strong
inclination compatible with liberty; at other times it amounts to such a
"fixing" of the practical judgment as would ordinarily result from a
determination of the power of choice--if that were not a contradiction.
Better to say, it is a taking of the matter out of the jurisdiction of
choice, by the creation of an _idée fixe_ [7] in the subject's mind.

Turning now to "revelation" in the stricter sense of a preternatural
enlightenment of the mind, it might conceivably be either by way of a
real accretion of knowledge--an addition to the contents of the mind--or
else by way of manipulating contents already there, as we ourselves do
by reminiscence, by rumination, comparison, analysis, inference. Thus we
can conceive the mind being consciously controlled in these operations,
as it were, by a foreign will; being reminded of this or that; being
shown new consequences, applications, and relations of truths already
possessed.

When, however, there is a preternatural addition to the sum total of the
mind's knowledge, we can conceive the communication to be effected
through the outer senses, as by visions seen (real or symbolic), or
words heard; or through the imagination--pictorial, symbolic, or verbal;
visual or auditory; or, finally, in the very reason and intelligence
itself, whose ideas are embodied in these images and signs, and to whose
apprehension they are all subservient.

Now from all this tedious division and sub-division it may perhaps be
clear in how many different senses the words of such a professed
revelation as Mother Juliana has left on record can be regarded as
preternatural utterances; or rather, in how many different ways she
herself may have considered them such, and wished them so to be
considered. Indeed, as we shall see, she has done a good deal more to
determine this, in regard to the various parts of her record, than most
have done, and it is for that reason that we have taken the opportunity
to open up the general question. Such a record might then be, either
wholly or in part:

  (a) The work of religious "inspiration" or genius, in the sense
  in which rationalists use the word, levelling the idea down to the same
  plane as that of artistic inspiration.

  (b) Or else it might be "inspired" as mystic philosophy or
  ontologism uses the expression, when it ascribes all natural insight to
  a more or less directly divine enlightenment.

  (c) Or, taking the word more strictly as implying the influence
  of a distinct personal agency over the soul of the writer, it might be
  that the record simply expresses an attempted interpretation, an
  imaginary embodiment, of some blind preternatural stirring of the
  writer's affections--analogous to the romances and dreams created in the
  imagination at the first awakening of the amatory affections.

  (d) Or, the matter being in no way from preternatural sources,
  the strong and perhaps irresistible impulse to record and publish it,
  might be preternatural.

  (e) Or (in addition to or apart from such an impulse), it might
  be a record of certain truths already contained implicitly in the
  writer's mind, but brought to remembrance or into clear recognition, not
  by the ordinary free activity of reason, but, as it were, by an alien
  will controlling the mind.

  (f) Or, if really new truths or facts are communicated to the mind
  from without, this may be effected in various ways: (i) By the way of
  verbal "inspiration," as when the very words are received apparently
  through the outer senses; or else put together in the imagination.
  (ii) Or, the matter is presented pictorially (be it fact or symbol)
  to the outer senses or to the imagination; and then described or
  "word-painted" according to the writer's own ability. (iii) Or, the
  truth is brought home directly to the intelligence; and gets all its
  imaginative and verbal clothing from the recipient.

Many other hypotheses are conceivable, but most will be reducible to one
or other of these. We may perhaps add that, when the revelation is given
for the sake of others, this purpose might be frustrated, were not a
substantial fidelity of expression and utterance also secured. This
would involve, at least, that negative kind of guidance of the tongue or
pen, known technically as "assistance."

Mother Juliana gives us some clue in regard to her own revelations where
she says: [8] "All this blessed showing of our Lord God was showed in
three parts; that is to say, by bodily sight; and by words formed in my
understanding; and by ghostly sight. For the bodily sight, I have said
as I saw, as truly as I can" (that is, the appearances were, she
believed, from God, but the description of them was her own). "And for
the words I have said them right as our Lord showed them to me" (for
here nothing was her own, but bare fidelity of utterance). "And for the
ghostly sight I have said some deal, but I may never full tell it" (that
is to say, no language or imagery of her own can ever adequately express
the spiritual truths revealed to her higher reason). As a rule she makes
it quite clear throughout, which of these three kinds of showing is
being described. We have an example of bodily vision when she saw "the
red blood trickling down from under the garland," and in all else that
seemed to happen to the crucifix on which her open eyes were set. And of
all this she says: "I conceived truly and mightily that it was Himself
that showed it me, without any mean between us;" that is, she took it as
a sort of pictorial language uttered directly by Christ, even as if He
had addressed her in speech; she took it not merely as _having_ a
meaning, but as designed and uttered to _convey_ a meaning--for to speak
is more than to let one's mind appear. Or again, it is by bodily vision
she sees a little hasel-nut in her hand, symbolic of the "naughting of
all that is made." Of words formed in her imagination she tells us, for
example, "Then He (i.e., Christ as seen on the crucifix) without voice
and opening of lips formed in my soul these words: _Herewith is the
fiend overcome_." Of "ghostly sight," or spiritual intuition, we have an
instance when she says: "In the same time that I saw (i.e., visually)
this sight of the Head bleeding, our good Lord showed a ghostly sight of
His homely loving. I saw that He is to us everything that is comfortable
to our help; He is our clothing, that for love wrappeth us," &c.--where,
in her own words and imagery, she is describing a divine-given insight
into the relation of God and the soul. Or again, when she is shown our
Blessed Lady, it is no pictorial or bodily presentment, "but the virtues
of her blissful soul, her truth, her wisdom, her charity." "And Jesus
... showed me a _ghostly_ sight of her, right as I had seen her before,
little and simple and pleasing to Him above all creatures."

Just as in the setting forth of these spiritual apprehensions, the words
and imagery are usually her own, so in the description of bodily vision
she uses her own language and comparisons. For example, the following
realism: "The great drops of blood fell down from under the garland like
pellets, seeming as it had come out of the veins; and in coming out they
were brown red, for the Blood was full thick, and in spreading abroad
they were bright red.... The plenteousness is like to drops of water
that fall off the eavings after a great shower of rain.... And for
roundness they were like to the scales of herrings in the spreading of
the forehead," &c. These similes, she tells us, "came to my mind in the
time." In other instances, the comparisons and illustrations of what she
saw with her eyes or with her understanding, were suggested to her; so
that she received the expression, as well as the matter expressed, from
without.

But besides the records of the sights, words, and ideas revealed to her,
we have many things already known to her and understood, yet "brought to
her mind," as it were, preternaturally. Also, various paraphrases and
elaborate exegeses of the words spoken to her; a great abundance of
added commentary upon what she saw inwardly or outwardly. Now and then
it is a little difficult to decide whether she is speaking for herself,
or as the exponent of what she has received; but, on the whole, she
gives us abundant indications. Perhaps the following passage will
illustrate fairly the diverse elements of which the record is woven:

With good cheer our Lord looked into His side and beheld with joy
[_bodily vision_]: and with His sweet looking He led forth the
understanding of His creature, by the same wound, into His side within
[_her imagination is led by gesture from one thought to another_]. [9]
And then He showed a fair and delectable place, and large enough for all
mankind that should be saved, and rest in peace and love [_a conception
of the understanding conveyed through the symbol of the open wound in
the Heart_]. And therewith He brought to my mind His dear worthy Blood
and the precious water which He let pour out for love [_a thought
already contained in the mind, but brought to remembrance by Christ_].
And with His sweet rejoicing Pie showed His blessed Heart cloven in two
[_bodily or imaginative vision_], and with His rejoicing He showed to my
understanding, in part, the Blissful Godhead as far forth as He would at
that time strengthen the poor soul for to understand [_an enlightening
of the reason to the partial apprehension of a spiritual mystery_]. And
with this our Good Lord said full blissfully: "Lo! how I love thee!"
[_words formed in the imagination or for the outer hearing_], as if He
had said: "My darling, behold, and see thy Lord," &c. [_her own
paraphrase and interpretation of the said words_].

Rarely, however, are the different modes so entangled as here, and for
the most part we have little difficulty in discerning the precise origin
to which she wishes her utterances to be attributed--a fact that makes
her book an unusually interesting study in the theory of inspiration.

Thus, in provisionally answering the problem proposed at the beginning
of this article, as to how far Mother Juliana supplied from her own mind
the canvas and the colours for this portrayal of Divine love, and as to
how far therefore it may be regarded as a product of and a key to her
inner self, we are inclined to say that, a comparison of her own style
of thought and sentiment and expression as exhibited in her paraphrases
and expositions of the things revealed to her, with the substance and
setting of the said revelations, points to the conclusion that God spoke
to her soul in its own language and habitual forms of thought; and that
if the "content" of the revelation was partly new, yet it was harmonious
with the previous "content" of her mind, being, as it were, a congruous
development of the same--not violently thrust into the soul, but set
down softly in the appointed place already hollowed for it and, so to
say, clamouring for it as for its natural fulfilment. This, of course,
is not a point for detailed and rigorous proof, but represents an
impression that gathers strength the oftener we read and re-read Mother
Juliana's "showings."

_Jan. Mar._ 1900.



Footnotes:


[Footnote 1: Prefatory Essay to Walter Hilton's _Scale of Perfection._]

[Footnote 2: The Protestant editor of the Leicester edition (of 1845),
not understanding that an appreciation of difficulties, far from being
incompatible with faith, is a condition of the higher and more
intelligent faith, would fain credit Mother Juliana with a secret
disaffection towards the Church's authority. How far he is justif may be
gathered from such passages as these: "In this way was I taught by the
grace of God that I should steadfastly hold me fast in the faith, as I
had before understood." "It was not my meaning to take proof of anything
that belongeth to our faith, for I believed truly that Hell and
Purgatory is for the same end that Holy Church teacheth." "And I was
strengthened and learned generally to keep me in the faith in every
point ... that I might continue therein to my life's end." "God showed
full great pleasaunce that He hath in all men and women, that mightily
and wisely take the preaching and teaching of Holy Church; for it is His
Holy Church; He is the ground; He is the substance; He is the teaching;
He is the teacher," &c.]

[Footnote 3: _Ancren Riwle_.]

[Footnote 4: It is clear from many little touches and allusions that
throughout the "showings" Mother Juliana considers herself to be gazing,
not on a vision of Calvary, but on the illuminated crucifix hung before
her by her attendants, in which crucifix these appearances of bleeding,
suffering, movement, and speech take place. All else is shrouded in
darkness. Yet she never loses the consciousness that she is in her bed
and surrounded by others. Notice, for instance: "After this, I saw with
bodily sight in the face _of the crucifix that hung before me_," &c.
"The cross that stood before my face, methought it bled fast." "This
[bleeding] was so plenteous, to my sight, that methought if it had been
so in nature and substance" (i.e., in reality and not merely in
appearance), "it should have made the bed all a-blood, and have passed
over all about." "For this sight I laughed mightily, and made them to
laugh that were about me." Evidently she is quite awake, is well
conscious of her state and surroundings, and distinguishes appearance
from reality, shadow from substance. There is no dream-like illusion in
all this. Appearances presented to the outer senses are commonly spoken
of as "hallucinations;" but it seems to me that this word were better
reserved for those cases where appearance is mistaken for reality; and
where consequently there is illusion and deception. Mother Juliana is
aware that the crucifix is not really bleeding, as it seems to do, and
she explicitly distinguishes such a vision from her later illusory
dream-presentment of the Evil One. This dream while it lasted was, like
all dreams, confounded with reality; whereas the other phenomena, even
if made of "dream-stuff," were rated at their true value. Hence it seems
to me that if such things have any outward independent reality, to see
them is no more an hallucination than to see a rainbow. Even if they are
projected from the beholder's brain, there is no hallucination if they
are known for such; but only when they are confounded with reality, as
it were, in a waking-dream. As we are here using the word, an experience
is "real" which fits in with, and does not contradict the totality of
our experiences; which does not falsify our calculation or betray our
expectancy. If I look at a fly through a magnifying medium of whose
presence I am unconscious, its size is apparent, or illusory, and not
real; for being unaware of the unusual condition of my vision, I shall
be thrown out in my calculations, and the harmony of my experiences will
be upset by seeming contradictions. If, however, I am aware of the
medium and its nature, then I am not deceived, and what I see is
"reality," since it is as natural and real for the fly to look larger
through the optician's lense, as to look smaller through the optic
lense. I cannot call one aspect more "real" than the other, for both are
equally right and true under the given conditions. For these reasons I
should object to consider Mother Juliana's "bodily showings" as
hallucinations, so far as the term seems to imply illusion.]

[Footnote 5: For those therefore who make an act of faith in the
absolute universality and supremacy of the laws of physics and
chemistry, and find in them the last reason of all things, these
phenomena are interesting only as studies in the mechanics of illusion.]

[Footnote 6: It was largely by this method, supplemented no doubt by
that of reasoned discussion, that St. Ignatius guided himself in
determining points connected with the constitution of his Order,
according to the journal he has left us of his "experiences," which is
simply a record of "consolations" and "desolations."]

[Footnote 7: i.e., A kinæsthetic idea, as it is called, an idea of
something to be done in the given conditions.]

[Footnote 8: P. 272 in Richardson's Edit., from which I usually quote as
being the readiest available.]

[Footnote 9: On another occasion, by looking down to the right of His
Cross, He brought to her mind, "where our Lady stood in the time of His
Passion and said: 'Wilt Thou see her?'" leading her by gesture from the
seen to the not seen.]



XIV.


POET AND MYSTIC.

A biographer who has any other end in view, however secondary and
incidental, than faithfully to reproduce in the mind of his readers his
own apprehension of the personality of his subject, will be so far
biassed in his task of selection; and, without any conscious deviation
from truth, will give that undue prominence to certain features and
aspects which in extreme cases may result in caricature. A Catholic
biographer of Coventry Patmore would have been tempted to gratify the
wish of a recent critic of Mr. Champneys' very efficient work, [1] and
to devote ten times as much space as has been given to the account of
his conversion, and a good deal, no doubt, to the discussion and
correction of his eccentric views in certain ecclesiastical matters;
thus giving us the history of an illustrious convert, and not that of a
poet and seer whose conversion, however intimately connected with his
poetical and intellectual life, was but an incident thereof. On the
other hand, one less intelligently sympathetic with the more spiritual
side of Catholicism than Mr. Champneys, would have lacked the principal
key to the interpretation of Patmore's highest aims and ideals, towards
which the whole growth and movement of his mind was ever tending, and by
which its successive stages of evolution are to be explained. Again,
with all possible respect for the feelings of the living, the biographer
has wisely suppressed nothing needed to bring out truthfully the
ruggednesses and irregularities that characterize the strong and
somewhat one-sided development of genius as contrasted with the regular
features and insipid perfectness of things wrought on a small scale. If
idealizing means the filing-away of jagged edges--and surely it does
not--Mr. Champneys has left us to do our own idealizing. The faults that
marred Purcell's _Life of Manning_ are here avoided, and yet truth is no
whit the sufferer in consequence.

In speaking of Patmore as a thinker and a poet, we do not mean to
dissociate these two functions in his case, but only to classify him
(according to his own category) with those "masculine" poets whose power
lies in a beautiful utterance of the truth, rather than in a truthful
utterance of the beautiful.

We propose, however, to occupy ourselves with the matter rather than the
mode of Patmore's utterance; with that truth which he conceived himself
to have apprehended in a newer and clearer light than others before him;
and this, because he does not stand alone, but is the representative and
exponent of a certain school of ascetic thought whose tendency is
diametrically contrary to that pseudo-mysticism which we have dealt with
elsewhere, and have ascribed to a confusion of neo-platonic and
Christian principles. This counter-tendency misses the Catholic mean in
other respects and owes its faultiness, as we shall see, to some very
analogous fallacies. If in our chapter on "The True and the False
Mysticism," it was needful to show that the principles of Christian
monasticism and contemplative life, far from in any way necessarily
retarding, rather favour and demand the highest natural development of
heart and mind; it is no less needful to assign to this thought its true
limits, and to show that the noblest expansion of our natural faculties
does not conflict with or exclude the principles of monasticism. I think
it is R.H. Hutton who remarks that it is not "easy to give us a firm
grasp of any great class of truths without loosening our grasp on some
other class of truths perhaps nobler and more vital;" and undoubtedly
Patmore and his school in emphasizing the fallacies of neo-platonic
asceticism are in danger of precipitating us into fallacies every whit
as uncatholic. It is therefore as professedly formulating the principles
of a certain school that we are interested in the doctrine of which
Patmore constitutes himself the apostle.

  Lights are constantly breaking in upon me [he
  writes] and convincing me more and more that the
  singular luck has fallen to me of having to write, for
  the first time that any one even attempted to do so
  with any fulness, on simply the greatest and most
  exquisite subject that ever poet touched since the
  beginning of the world.

  The more I consider the subject of the marriage of
  the Blessed Virgin, the more clearly I see that it is the
  _one_ absolutely lovely and perfect subject for poetry.
  Perfect humanity, verging upon, but never entering the
  breathless region of the Divinity, is the real subject of
  _all_ true love-poetry; but in all love-poetry hitherto, an
  "ideal" and not a reality has been the subject, more
  or less.

Taking the "Angel of the House" as representing the earlier, and the
"Odes" the later stage of the development which this theme received
under his hands, it seems as though he passes from the idealization and
apotheosis of married love to the conception of it as being in its
highest form, not merely the richest symbol, but even the most
efficacious sacrament of the mystical union between God and the soul. He
is well aware--though not fully at first--that these conceptions were
familiar to St. Bernard and many a Catholic mystic; it was for the
poetic apprehension and expression of them that he claimed originality;
or, at least, for their unification and systematic development. "That
his apprehensions were based generally--almost exclusively, on the
fundamental idea of nuptial love must," as Mr. Champneys says, "be
admitted." This was the governing category of his mind; the mould into
which all dualities naturally fell; it was to his philosophy what love
and hate, light and dark, form and matter, motion and atoms, have been
to others.

  It was, at all events, the predominance of this conception
  which bound together his whole life's work,
  rendering coherent and individualizing all which he
  thought, wrote, or uttered, and those who study
  Patmore without this key are little likely to understand
  him.

And it is the persistent and not always sufficiently restrained use of
this category that made much of his writing just a trifle shocking to
sensitive minds.

These latter will have "closed his works far too promptly to discover
that far from gainsaying the Catholic instinct which prefers virginity
to marriage" (not a strictly accurate statement) he makes virginity a
condition of the idealized marriage-relation, and finds its realization
in her who was at once matron and virgin. Following the fragmentary
hints to be found here and there in patristic and mystical theology, he
assumes that virgin-spousals and virgin-birth were to have been the law
in that Paradise from which man lapsed back into natural conditions
through sin; that in the case of the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph the
paradisaic law was but resumed in this respect. Accordingly, he writes
of Adam and Eve in "The Contract,"

            Thus the first Eve
  With much enamoured Adam did enact
  Their mutual free contract
  Of virgin spousals, blissful beyond flight
  Of modern thought, with great intention staunch,
  Though unobliged until that binding pact.

To their infidelity to this contract he ascribes the subsequent
degradation of human love through sensuality; and all the sin and
selfishness thence deriving to our fallen race:

      Whom nothing succour can
  Until a heaven-caress'd and happier Eve
    Be joined with some glad Saint
  In like espousals, blessed upon Earth,
    And she her fruit forth bring;

  No numb chill-hearted shaken-witted thing,
    'Plaining his little span.
  But of proud virgin joy the appropriate birth,
    The Son of God and Man.

The rationalistic objection to this suppression of what seems to be of
the essence or integrity of matrimony is obvious enough, and yet finds
many a retort even in the realm of nature, where the passage to a higher
grade of life so often means the stultifying of functions proper to the
lower. As to the pre-eminence of that state in which the spiritual
excellencies of marriage and virginity are combined, Catholic teaching
is quite clear and decided; in this, as in other points, Patmore's
untaught intuitions, and instincts--his _mens naturaliter
catholica_--had led him, whither the esoteric teaching of the Church had
led only the more appreciatively sympathetic of her disciples, from time
to time, as it were, up into that mountain of which St. Ambrose says:
"See, how He goes up with the Apostles and comes down to the crowds. For
how could the crowds see Christ save in a lowly spot? They do not follow
Him to the heights, nor rise to sublimities"--a notion altogether
congenial to Patmore's aristocratic bias in religion as in everything
else. Undoubtedly it was this mystical aspect of Catholic doctrine that
appealed to his whole personality, offering as it did an authoritative
approval, and suggesting an infinite realization, of those dreams that
were so sacred to him. As far as the logic of the affections goes, it
was for the sake of this that he held to all the rest; for indeed the
deeper Catholic truths are so internetted that he who seizes one, drags
all the rest along with it under pain of self-contradiction.

No one knew better than Patmore the infinite insufficiency of the
highest created symbols to equal the eternal realities which it is their
whole purpose to set forth; he fully realized that as the lowliest
beginnings of created love seem to mock, rather than to foreshadow, the
higher forms of which they are but the failure and botched essay, so the
very highest conceivable, taken as more than a metaphor, were an
irreverent parody of the Divine love for the human soul. It is not the
_same_ relationship on an indefinitely extended scale, but only a
somewhat _similar_ relationship, the limits of whose similarity are
hidden in mystery. But when a man is so thoroughly in love with his
metaphor as Patmore was, he is tempted at times to press it in every
detail, and to forget that it is "but one acre in the infinite field of
spiritual suggestion;" that, less full and perfect metaphors of the same
reality, may supply some of its defects and correct some of its
redundancies. We should do unwisely to think of the Kingdom of Heaven
only as a kingdom, and not also as a marriage-feast, a net, a treasure,
a mustard-seed, a field, and so forth, since each figure supplies some
element lost in the others, and all together are nearer to the truth
than any one: and so, although the married love of Mary and Joseph is
one of the fullest revealed images of God's relation to the soul, we
should narrow the range of our spiritual vision, were we to neglect
those supplementary glimpses at the mystery afforded by other figures
and shadowings.

And this leads us to the consideration of a difficulty connected with
another point of Patmore's doctrine of divine love. He held that the
idealized marriage relationship was not merely the symbol, but the most
effectual sacrament and instrument of that love; "yet the world," he
complains, "goes on talking, writing, and preaching as if there were
some essential contrariety between the two," the disproof of which "was
the inspiring idea at the heart of my long poem (the 'Angel')." Now,
although in asserting that the most absorbing and exclusive form of
human affection is not only compatible with, but even instrumental to
the highest kind of sanctity and divine love, Patmore claimed to be at
one, at least in principle, with some of the deeper utterances of the
Saints and Fathers of the Christian Church; it cannot be denied that the
assertion is _prima facie_ opposed to the common tradition of Catholic
asceticism; and to the apparent _raison d'être_ of every sort of
monastic institution.

It must be confessed that, in regard to the reconciliation of the claims
of intense human affection with those of intense sanctity, there have
been among all religious teachers two distinct conceptions struggling
for birth, often in one and the same mind, either of which taken as
adequate must exclude the other. It would not be hard to quote the
utterances of saints and ascetics for either view; or to convict
individual authorities of seeming self-contradiction in the matter. The
reason of this is apparently that neither view is or can be adequate;
that one is weak where the other is strong; that they are both imperfect
analogies of a relationship that is unique and _sui generis_--the
relationship between God and the soul. Hence neither hits the centre of
truth, but glances aside, one at the right hand, the other at the left.
Briefly, it is a question of the precise sense in which God is "a
jealous God" and demands to be loved alone. The first and easier mode of
conception is that which is implied in the commoner language of saints
and ascetics--language perhaps consciously symbolic and defective in its
first usage, but which has been inevitably literalised and hardened when
taken upon the lips of the multitude. God is necessarily spoken of and
imagined in terms of the creature, and when the analogical character of
such expression slips from consciousness, as it does almost instantly,
He is spoken of, and therefore thought of, as the First of Creatures
competing with the rest for the love of man's heart. He is placed
alongside of them in our imagination, not behind them or in them. Hence
comes the inference that whatever love they win from us in their own
right, by reason of their inherent goodness, is taken from Him. Even
though He be loved better than all of them put together, yet He is not
loved perfectly till He be loved alone. Their function is to raise and
disappoint our desire time after time, till we be starved back to Him as
to the sole-satisfying--everything else having proved _vanitas
vanitatum_. Then indeed we go back to them, not for their own sakes, but
for His; not attracted by our love of them, but impelled by our love of
Him.

This mode of imagining the truth, so as to explain the divine jealousy
implied in the precept of loving God exclusively and supremely, is, for
all its patent limitations, the most generally serviceable. Treated as a
strict equation of thought to fact, and pushed accordingly to its utmost
logical consequences, it becomes a source of danger; but in fact it is
not and will not be so treated by the majority of good Christians who
serve God faithfully but without enthusiasm; whose devotion is mainly
rational and but slightly affective; who do not conceive themselves
called to the way of the saints, or to offer God that all-absorbing
affection which would necessitate the weakening or severing of natural
ties. In the event, however, of such a call to perfect love, the logical
and practical outcome of this mode of imagining the relation of God to
creatures is a steady subtraction of the natural love bestowed upon
friends and relations, that the energy thus economized may be
transferred to God. This concentration may indeed be justified on other
and independent grounds; but the implied supposition that, the highest
sanctity is incompatible with any pure and well-ordered natural
affection, however intense, is certainly ill-sounding, and hardly
reconcilable with the divinest examples and precepts.

The limitations of this simpler and more practical mode of imagining the
matter are to some extent supplemented by that other mode for which
Patmore found so much authority in St. Bernard, St. Francis, St. Teresa,
and many another, and which he perhaps too readily regarded as
exhaustively satisfactory.

In this conception, God is placed, not alongside of creatures, but
behind them, as the light which shines through a crystal and lends it
whatever it has of lustre. In recognizing whatever true brilliancy or
beauty creatures possess as due to His inbiding presence, the love which
they excite in us passes on to Him, through them. As He is the primary
Agent and Mover in all our action and movement, the primary Lover in all
our pure and well-ordered love; and we, but instruments of His action,
movement, and love; so, in whatever we love rightly and divinely for its
true merit and divinity, it is He who is ultimately loved. Thus in all
pure and well-ordered affection it is, ultimately, God who loves and God
who is loved; it is God returning to Himself, the One to the One.
According to this imagery, God is viewed as the First Efficient and the
ultimate Final Cause in a circular chain of causes and effects of which
He is at once the first link and the last--a conception which, in so far
as it brings God inside the system of nature as part thereof, is, like
the last, only analogously true, and may not be pressed too far in its
consequences.

In this view, to love God supremely and exclusively means practically,
to love only the best things in the best way, recognizing God both in
the affection and in its object. God is not loved apart from creatures,
or beside them; but through them and in them. Hence if only the
affection be of the right kind as to mode and object, the more the
better; nor can there be any question of crowding other affections into
a corner in order to make more room for the love of God in our hearts.
The love of Him is the "form," the principle of order and harmony; our
natural affections are the "matter," harmonized and set in order; it is
the soul, they are the body, of that one Divine Love whose adequate
object is God in, and not apart from, His creatures.

It would not perhaps be hard to reconcile this view with some utterances
in the Gospel of seemingly opposite import; or to find it often implied
in the words and actions of Catholic Saints; but to square it with the
general ascetic traditions of the faithful at large is exceedingly
difficult. Patmore would no doubt have allowed the expediency of
celibacy in the case of men and women devoted to the direct ministry of
good works, spiritual and corporal: a devotion incompatible with
domestic cares; he could and did allow the superiority of voluntary
virginity and absolute chastity over the contrary state of lawful use;
but he could hardly have justified--hardly not have condemned those who
leave father, friend, or spouse, not merely externally in order to be
free for good works, but internally in order that their hearts may be
free for the contemplation and love of God viewed apart from creatures
and not merely in them. He might perhaps say that, as we cannot go to
God through all creatures, but only through some (since we are not each
in contact with all), we must select according to our circumstances
those which will give the greatest expansion and elevation to our
natural affections; and that for some, the home is wisely sacrificed for
the community or the church. Yet this hardly consists with the
pre-eminence he gives to married love as the nearest symbol and
sacrament of divine.

Both these modes of imagining the truth, whatever their inconveniences,
are helpful as imperfect formulations of Catholic instinct; both
mischievous, if viewed as adequate and close-fitting explanations.
Patmore was characteristically enthusiastic for his own aspect of the
truth; and characteristically impatient of the other. Thus, of à Kempis
he says:

There is much that is quite unfit for, and untrue of, people who live in
the ordinary relations of life. I don't think I like the book quite so
much as I did. There is a hot-house, egotistical air about much of its
piety. Other persons are, ordinarily, the appointed means of learning
the love of God; and to stifle human affections must be very often to
render the love of God impossible.

In other words, the further he pushed the one conception the further he
diverged from à Kempis, whose asceticism was built almost purely on the
other.

Most probably a reconciliation of these two conceptions will be found in
a clear recognition of the two modes in which God is apprehended and
consequently loved by the human mind and heart; the one concrete and
experimental, accessible to the simplest and least cultured, and of
necessity for all; the other, abstract in a sense--a knowledge through
the ideas and representations of the mind, demanding a certain degree of
intelligence and studious contemplation, and therefore not necessary, at
least in any high degree, for all. The difference is like that between
the knowledge of salt as tasted in solution and the knowledge of it as
seen apart in its crystallized state; or between the knowledge and love
of a musical composer as known in his compositions, and as known in
himself, from his compositions. The latter needs a not universal power
of inference which the most sympathetic musical expert may entirely
lack.

Of these two approaches to Divine love and union, the former is
certainly compatible with, and conducive to, the unlimited fulness of
every well-ordered natural affection; but the latter--a life of more
conscious, reflex, and actual attention to God--undoubtedly does require
a certain abstraction and concentration of our limited spiritual
energies, and can only be trodden at the cost of a certain inward
seclusion of which outward seclusion is normally a condition.
Instinctively, Catholic tradition has regarded it as a vocation
apart--as, like the life of continence, a call to something more than
human, and demanding a sacrifice or atrophy of functions proper to
another grade of spirituality. Even what is called a "life of thought"
makes a similar demand to a great extent; it involves a narrowing of
other interests; a departure from the conditions of ordinary practical
life. The "contemplative life" is inclusively all this and more; it is a
sort of anticipation of the future life of vision. Still, though for a
few it may be the surest or the only approach to sanctity, yet there is
no degree of Divine love that may not be reached by the commoner and
normal path; there have been saints outside the cloister as well as
inside. One could hardly offend the first principles of the Gospel more
grievously than by making intelligence, culture, and contemplative
capacity conditions of a nearer approach to Christ.

It seems to us then that Patmore failed to get at the root of the
neglected truth after which he was groping, and thereby fell into a
one-sidedness just as real as that against which his chief work was a
revolt and protest.

As a convert, Patmore is most uninteresting to the controversialist. His
mind was altogether concrete, affirmative, and synthetic, with a
profound distrust of abstract and analytical reasoning. As we have said,
Christianity and, later, Catholicism appealed profoundly to his
intellectual imagination in virtue of some of their deeper tenets, for
whose sake he took over all the rest _per modum unius_.

The idea [of the Incarnation] no sooner flashed upon me as a possible
reality than it became, what it has ever since remained, ... the only
reality worth seriously caring for; a reality so clearly seen and
possessed that the most irrefragable logic of disproof has always
affected me as something trifling and irrelevant.

Again: "Christianity is not an 'historical religion,' but a revelation
which is renewed in every receiver of it." "My heart loves that of whose
existence my intellect allows the probability, and my will puts the seal
to the blessed compact which produces faith"--an ingenious application
of his favourite category.

Of the efforts of Manning and de Vere to proselytize him, he says:

Their position seemed to me to be so logically perfect that I was long
repelled by its perfection. I felt, half unconsciously, that a living
thing ought not to be so spick and span in its external evidence for
itself, and that what I wanted for conviction was not the sight of a
faultless intellectual superficies, but the touch and pressure of a
moral solid.

Whatever some may think or have thought of his theology, none who knew
him could have any doubt as to the robust and uncompromising character
of his faith. It was because he felt so sure of his footing that he
allowed himself a liberty of movement perplexing to those whose position
was one of more delicate balance. He had a ruthlessness in tossing aside
what might be called "non-essentials," that was dictated not so much by
an under-estimate of their due importance, as by an impatience with
those who over-estimated them, confounding the vessel with its contained
treasure.

When he says: "I believe in Christianity as it will be ten thousand
years hence," it would be a grave misinterpretation to suppose that he
implied any lack of belief in the Christianity of to-day. It is but
another assertion of his claim to be in sympathy with the esoteric
rather than the exoteric teaching of the present; to be on the mount
with the few and not on the plain with the many. For as the glacier
formed on the mountain slips slowly down to the plain, so, he held, the
esoteric teaching of to-day will be the popular teaching of future ages.
However little we may relish this distinction between "aristocratic" and
vulgar belief; however strongly we may hold that best knowledge of
God--that, namely, which is experimental and tactual rather than
intellectual or imaginative--is equally accessible to all; yet just so
far as there is question of the intellectual and imaginative forms in
which the faith is apprehended, the distinction does and must exist, not
only in religion but in every department of belief, as long as there are
different levels of culture in the same body of believers. It is, after
all, a much more superficial difference than it sounds--a difference of
language and symbolism for the same realities. Where language fits
close, as it does to things measurable by our senses, divergency makes
the difference between truth and error; but where it is question of the
substitution of one analogy or symbol for another, the more elegant is
not necessarily the more truthful; nor when we consider the infinite
inadequacy of even the noblest conceivable finite symbolism to bring God
down to our level, need we pride ourselves much for being on a mountain
whose height is perceptible from the plain but imperceptible from the
heavens.

Hence to say that the distinction between esoteric and exoteric teaching
means that the Church has two creeds, one for the simple, another for
the educated, is a thoughtless criticism which overlooks the necessarily
symbolic nature of all language concerning the "eternities," and
confounds a different mode of expression with a difference of the facts
and realities expressed.

Matthew Arnold, too, believed in the Catholicism of the future; but in
how different a sense! What he hoped for was, roughly speaking, the
preservation of the ancient and beautiful husk after the kernel had been
withered up and discarded; what Patmore looked forward to was the
expansion of the kernel bursting one involucre after another, and ever
clamouring for fairer and more adequate covering. With one, the language
of religion was all too wide; with the other, all too narrow, for its
real signification. Arnold belongs to the first, Patmore to the last of
those three stages of religious thought of which Mr. Champneys writes:

The first is represented by those whose creed is so simple as to afford
little or no ground for contention; the second by such as in their
search for greater precision enlarge the domain of dogma, but fail to
pass beyond its mere technical aspect; the third consists of those who
rise from the technical to the spiritual, and without repudiating or
disparaging dogma, use it mainly as a guide and support to thought which
transcends mere definition.


_Dec._ 1900.



Footnotes:


[Footnote 1: _Coventry Patmore_. By Basil Champneys. Geo. Bell and Sons,
1900.]



XV.


TWO ESTIMATES OF CATHOLIC LIFE.

Dealing as both do so largely with the inner life of English Catholic
society, it is hardly possible to avoid comparing and contrasting _One
Poor Scruple_ [1] with _Helbeck of Bannisdale_,--one the work of a
Catholic who knows the matter she is handling, almost experimentally;
the other the work of a gifted outsider whose singular talent, careful
observation, and studious endeavour to be fair-minded, fail to save her
altogether from that unreality and _à priori_ extravagance which
experience alone can correct. To the non-Catholic, Mrs. Humphrey Ward's
book will appear a marvel of insight and acute analysis; for it will fit
in with, and explain his outside observation of those Catholics with
whom he has actually come in contact, far better than the preposterous
notions that were in vogue fifty years ago. It represents them not as
monstrously wicked and childishly idolatrous; but as narrow,
extravagant, out-of-date, albeit, well-meaning folk--more pitiable than
dangerous.

Formerly when they lived secret and unknown, anything might safely be
asserted about them; nothing was too wild or improbable. In those days
"Father Clement" was the issue of a superhuman effort at charity and
fairness; and the author almost seemed to think an apology was needed
for such temerarious liberalism. But when Catholics began to breathe a
little more freely and to creep out of their burrows somewhat less
nervously; when, in fact, they were seen to be, at least in outward
semblance, much as other men; some regard had to be paid to statements
that could be checked by observation; and the Papist's disappointing
ordinariness had to be attributed to dissimulation or to be otherwise
interpreted into accord with the preposterous principles by which their
lives were thought to be governed.

Mrs. Humphrey Ward represents the furthest advance of this reform. She
at least has spared no pains to acquaint herself with facts, to gather
information, to verify statements. She is never guilty of the grotesque
blunders that other high-class novelists fall into about Catholic
beliefs, practices, and habits, simply because they are dealing with
what is to their readers a _terra incognita,_ and can, therefore, afford
to be loose and inaccurate. An artistic conscientiousness which values
truth and honesty in every detail, saves her from this too common snare.
But it does not and cannot save her in the work of selection, synthesis,
and interpretation of instances, which has to be guided, not by
objective facts, but by subjective opinions and impressions. History
written in a purely positivist spirit, _ad narrandum_, and in no sense
_ad docendum_, is a chimerical notion by which Renan beguiled himself
into thinking that his _Vie de Jesus_ was a bundle of facts and nothing
more. And Mrs. Humphrey Ward is no less beguiled, if she is unaware that
in threading together, classifying and explaining the results of her
conscientious observation and inquiry, she is governed by an _a priori_
conception of Catholicism hardly different from that which inspired the
author of "Father Clement." Hence, to us Catholics, though her evident
desire to be critical and impartial is gratifying, yet her failure is
none the less conspicuous. Dr. Johnson once observed, that what might be
wonderful dancing for a dog would be a very poor performance for a
Christian; and so, to us, "Helbeck" as a presentment of Catholic life is
wonderful as coming from an outsider, and, perhaps, especially from Mrs.
Humphrey Ward, but in itself it is grotesque enough--not through any
culpable infidelity to facts, but through lack of the visual power, the
guiding idea, whereby to read them aright.

In _One Poor Scruple_, Mrs. Wilfrid Ward brings to bear upon a somewhat
similar task, an equal fidelity of observation supplemented by a
first-hand, far wider, and more intimate experience of Catholics and
their ways, and, above all, by that key which a share in their faith and
beliefs alone furnishes to the right understanding of their conduct.
Here too, no doubt, a contrary bias is to be suspected, nor is a purely,
"positive" treatment of the subject conceivable or desirable. The view
of an insider is as partial as the view of an outsider, though less
viciously so; nor can we get at truth by the simple expedient of fitting
the two together. The best witness is the rare individual who to an
inside and experimental knowledge, adds the faculty of going outside and
taking an objective and disinterested view. In truth this needs an
amount of intellectual self-denial seldom realized to any great degree;
but we venture to say that Mrs. Wilfrid Ward proves herself very worthy
of confidence in this respect. There is certainly no artistic idealizing
of Catholics, such as we are accustomed to in books written for the
edification of the faithful. There is the same almost merciless realism
which we find in "Helbeck" in dealing with certain trivialities and
narrownesses of piety--defects common to all whom circumstances confine
to a little world, but more incongruous and conspicuous as contrasted
with the dignity of Catholic ideals. Without conscious departure from
truth, Mrs. Humphrey Ward is evidently influenced in her selection and
manipulation of facts by the impression of Catholicism she already
possesses and wants to illustrate and convey; but Mrs. Wilfrid Ward has,
we think, risen above this weakness very notably, and should accordingly
merit greater attention.

It may well be that this judicial impartiality may meet with its usual
reward of pleasing neither side altogether. Some will complain that she
brings no idealizing love to her subject, and does little to bring out
the greatness and glory of her religion. Yet this would be a hasty and
ill-judging criticism; for our faith is no less to be commended for the
restraint it exercises over the multitude of ordinary men and women,
than for the effect it produces in souls of a naturally heroic type.
That it should bring a certain largeness into the smallest life, that it
should impart a strange stability to a naturally unstable and frivolous
character; that it should check the worldly-minded with a sense of the
superior claims of the other world--all this impresses us, if not with
the sublimity or mystic beauty, at least with the solid reality and
penetrating power of the Catholic faith.

The most loyal and deep-seated love needs not to shut its eyes to all
defects and limitations, but can face them unchilled; and similarly
there is often more faith and reverence and quiet enthusiasm in this
seemingly cold and critical attitude towards the cause or party we love,
than in the extravagant idealism that depends for its maintenance on an
ignoring of things as they are.

Nothing perhaps is more unintelligible to the Protestant critic of
Catholicism, nothing more needs to be brought out prominently, than the
firm hold our religion can exercise over souls that are naturally
irreligious.

This very phrase "naturally irreligious" will fall with a shock on
sensitive Protestant ears; yet we use it advisedly. While all men are
capable of faith and of substantial fidelity to the law of God, it is
undeniable that but few are by natural inclination "religious" in the
common acceptation of the term. As there is a poetic or mystical
temperament, so also there is a religious temperament--not quite so
rare, but still something exceptional.

We find it so in all ages, ancient and modern; in all religions,
Christian and non-Christian--nay, even amid agnostics and unbelievers we
often detect the now aimless, unused faculty. But most men have,
naturally, no ardent spiritual sympathy with holiness, or mysticism, or
heroism; their interests are elsewhere; and even where there are latent
capacities of that kind, they are not usually developed until life's
severest lessons have been learnt. Thus the young, who have just left
the negative faith and innocence of the nursery behind them and stand
inexperienced on the threshold of life, are not normally religious;
whereas we naturally expect those who have passed through the ordeal,
and been disillusioned, to begin to think about their souls, since there
is nothing else left to think about.

Now, the Catholic religion clearly recognizes these facts of human
nature, and accommodates herself to them. However frankly it may be
acknowledged that a religious temperament--a certain complexus of
mental, moral, and even physical dispositions--is a condition favourable
to heroic sanctity, it must be emphatically denied that to be
"religious," in the Protestant sense of the word, is requisite for
salvation. And this denial the Church enforces by her recognition of the
"religious state" [2] as an extraordinary vocation. The purpose of
"orders" and "congregations" is to provide a suitable environment for
people of a religious temperament whose circumstances permit them to
attend to its development in a more exclusive and, as it were,
professional way. Not, indeed, that all religious-minded persons do, or
ought to, enter into that external state of life; nor that all who so
enter are by temperament and sympathy fitted for it, but that the
institution points to the Church's recognition of what is technically
called the "way of perfection" as something exceptional and
super-normal.

But the Church has a wider vocation than to provide hot-houses for the
forcing of these rare exotics, whom the rough climate of a worldly life
would either stunt or kill. Her first thought is for the multitudes of
average humanity, who are not, and cannot be, in intelligent sympathy
with many of the commands she lays upon them. They are but as children
in religious matters--however cultivated they may chance to be in other
concerns. From such souls God requires faith, and obedience to the
commandments--a due, which, in certain rare crises, may mean heroism and
martyrdom; but He does not expect of them that refinement of sanctity,
that sustained attention to divine things, which depends so largely on
one's natural cast of mind and disposition; and may even be found where
the martyr's temper is altogether wanting. We recognize that there is
certain serviceable, fustian, every-day piety, where, together with a
great deal of spiritual coarseness, insensibility to venial sin and
imperfection, there exists a firm faith that would go cheerfully to the
stake rather than deny God, or offend Him in any grave point that might
be considered a _casus belli_. And on the other hand a certain nicety of
ethical discernment and delicacy of devotion, an anxiety about points of
perfection, is a guarantee rather of the quality of one's piety than of
its depth or strength. The saint is usually one whose piety excels both
in quality and strength; the martyr is often enough a man of many
imperfections and sins, veiling an unsuspected, deep-reaching faith. The
day of persecution has ever been a day of revelation in this respect--a
day when the seemingly perfect have been scattered like chaff before the
wind, while the once thoughtless and careless have stood stubborn before
the blast.

Protestantism of the Calvinistic or Puritan type shows little
consciousness of the distinction we are insisting upon. It is disposed
to draw a hard-and-fast line between the "converted" and the reprobate.
Those who are not religious-minded, or who do not take a serious turn,
are scarcely recognized as "saved" although they may not be convicted of
any very flagrant or definite breach of the divine law. Their morality
or their "good works" go for little if they do not experience that sense
of goodness, or of being saved, which is called faith. Much stress is
laid on "feeling good" and little value allowed to what we might call an
unsympathetic and grudging keeping of God's law--however much more it
may cost, from the very fact that it is in some way unsympathetic, and
against the grain. The service of fear and reverence, which Catholicism
regards as the basis and back-bone of love, is held to be abject and
unworthy--almost sinful.

Hence it befalls that no place is found in the Protestant heaven for the
great majority of ordinary people who do not feel a bit good or
religious, who rather dislike going to church and keeping the
commandments, and yet who keep them all the same, because they believe
in God and fear His judgments and honour His law, and even love Him in
the solid, undemonstrative way in which a naughty and troublesome child
loves its parents.

That such a character as Madge Riversdale's should cover a small, firm
core of faith and fear under a cortex of worldliness and frivolity; that
religion should have such a hold on one so entirely irreligious by
nature, is something quite inconceivable to a mind like, let us say,
Mrs. Humphrey Ward's; and yet absolutely intelligible to the ordinary
Catholic.

The Church to us, is not what it is to the Protestant--a sort of pasture
land in which we are at liberty to browse if we are piously disposed. It
is not merely a convenient environment for the development of the
religious faculty. She stands to us in the relation of shepherd, with a
more than parental authority to feed and train our souls through infancy
to maturity; that is, from the time when we do not know or like what is
good for us, to the time when we begin to appreciate and spontaneously
follow her directions. Just then as a child, however naturally
recalcitrant and ill-disposed, retains a certain fundamental goodness
and root of recovery so long as it acknowledges and obeys the authority
of its father and mother; so the ordinary unreligious Catholic, who has
been brought up to believe in the divine authority of the Church, finds
therein all the protection that obedience offers to those who are
incapable of self-government. "In Madge's eyes the woman who married an
innocent divorcee was no more than his mistress." Had Madge been a pious
Protestant she naturally might have examined the question of divorce on
its own merits; she might have weighed the pros and cons of the problem;
she might have consulted God in prayer, and have listened to this
clergyman on one side; and to that, on the other: but eventually she
would have been thrown upon herself; she would have had no one whose
decision she was bound to obey. But wild and lawless as she is, yet
being a Catholic there is one voice on earth which she fears to
disbelieve or disobey. Looked at even from a human standpoint, the
consensus of a world-wide, ancient, organized society like the Roman
Church cannot but exert a powerful pressure on the minds of its
individual members. It would need no ordinary rebellion of the will for
a thoughtless girl to shake her mind so free of that influence as to
live happily in the state of revolt. But where in addition to this the
Church is viewed as speaking in the name of God, and as so representing
Him on earth that her ban or blessing is inseparable from His, it is
obvious that such a belief in her claims will give her a power for good
over the unreligious majority analogous to that possessed by a parent
over an untrained child--a power, that is, of discipline and external
motive which serves to supplement or supply for the present defect of
internal motive.

Thus it is that the Church reckons among her obedient children thousands
of very imperfect and non-religious people for whom Protestantism can
find no place among the elect.

Again, the solid faith of men with so little intellectual or emotional
interest in religion as Squire Riversdale or Marmaduke Lemarchant is
something very puzzling to the Protestant critic who, for the reasons
just insisted on, can have nothing corresponding to it in his own
experience. It is a psychological state of which his own religious
system takes no account. Where there is no intermediating Church, the
soul is either in direct and mystical union with God or else wholly
estranged and indifferent. A man is either serious and religious-minded,
or he is nothing. Like an untutored child, if he is not naturally good,
there is no one to make him so. But when the Church is acknowledged as
our tutor under God, as empowered by Him to lead us to Him; a middle
condition is found of those who are not naturally disposed to religion,
and yet who are submissive to that divine authority whose office it is
to shape their souls to better sympathies. Riversdale is a far truer
type of the Catholic country squire of the old school than the somewhat
morbid and impossible Helbeck of Bannisdale. With her preconceived
notions, Mrs. Humphrey Ward could not imagine any alternative between
'religious' and 'irreligious' in the Puritan sense. If Helbeck was to be
a good Catholic at all he must of necessity be fanatically devoted to
the propagation of the faith and offer his fortune and energies to the
service of an unscrupulous clergy only too ready to play upon his
credulous enthusiasm. His is represented as being naturally a religious
and mystical soul, but blighted and narrowed through the influence of
Catholicism. We are made to feel that the only thing the matter with him
is his creed--"all those stifling notions of sin, penance, absolution,
direction, as they were conventionalized in Catholic practice and
chattered about by stupid and mindless people."

On the other hand, in Squire Riversdale and Marmaduke Lemarchant there
is by nature nothing but healthy humanity, no mystic or religious strain
whatever; they are not semi-ecclesiastics like Helbeck; and yet we feel
that their prosaic lives are governed, restrained, and rectified by a
deep-rooted faith in the authority of the Catholic Church. "The
qualities most obvious are not those of the mystic, but of the manly
out-of-door sportsman who may seem to be nothing more than a bluff
Englishman who rides to the hounds and does his ordinary duties. Yet one
of these red-coated cavaliers would, I have not the least doubt, if
occasion called for it, show himself capable of the very highest
heroism. Men of action, I should say, and not of reflection--a race of
few words but of brave deeds."

It was just men of this unromantic type, men of solid but unostentatious
faith, given wholly to the business of this life save for one sovereign
secret reserve, who in time of persecution stood fast "ready any day to
be martyred for the faith and to regard it as the performance of a
simple duty and nothing to boast of." And if there is in the type a
certain narrowness of sympathy and lack of intelligent interest which
offends us, we may ask whether, with our human limitations, narrowness
is not to some extent the price we pay for strength; whether where
decision of judgment and energy of action is demanded, as in times of
persecution, width of view and multiplicity of sympathies may not be a
source of weakness. Contrast, for example, the character of Mark Fieldes
with that of Marmaduke Lemarchant, and it will be clear that the
strength and straightness of the latter is closely associated with the
absence of that versatility of intellect and affection which make the
former a more interesting but far less lovable and estimable
personality. To see all sides and issues of a question, is a
speculative, but not always a practical advantage; to have many
diversified tastes and affections helps to enlarge our sympathies, but
not to concentrate our energies.

Of course great minds and strong hearts can afford to be comprehensive
without loss of depth and intensity; but our present interest is with
ordinary mortals and average powers. A man who has all his life
unreflectingly adopted the traditional principle that death is
preferable to dishonour, that a lie is essentially dishonourable, will
be far more likely to die for the truth, than one who has philosophized
much about honour and veracity, and whose resolution is enfeebled by the
consciousness of the weak and flimsy support which theory lends to these
healthy and universally received maxims. And similarly those who have
received the faith by tradition, who for years have assumed it in their
daily conduct as a matter of course, in whom therefore it has become an
ingrained psychological habit, who hold it, in what might be condemned
as a narrow, unintellectual fashion, are just the very people who will
fight and die for it, when its more cultivated and reflective professors
waver, temporize, and fall away. Taking human nature as it is, who can
doubt but that this is the way in which the majority are intended to
hold their religious, moral, philosophical, and political convictions;
that reflex thought is, must, and ought to be confined to a small
minority whose function is slowly to shape and correct that great body
of public doctrine by which the beliefs of the multitude are ruled? We
do not mean to say that such prosaic "narrowness" as we speak of, is
essential to strength; but only that a habit of theoretical speculation
and a continual cultivation of delicate sensibility is a source of
enervation which needs some compensating corrective. This corrective is
found in the exalted idealism which characterizes the great saints and
reformers, such as Augustine, or Francis, or Teresa, or Ignatius--souls
at once mystical and energetically practical to the highest degree. It
is something of this temper which is parodied in Alan Helbeck. But the
Church's mission is not merely to those rare souls whose sympathy with
her own mind and will is intelligent and spontaneous; but at least as
much to the multitudes who have to be guided more or less blindly by
obedience to tradition and authority, or else let wander as sheep having
no shepherd. These considerations explain why _One Poor Scruple_ seems
to us so far truer a presentment of Catholic life than _Helbeck of
Bannisdale_--the difference lying in the incommunicable advantage which
an insider possesses over an outsider in understanding the spirit and
principles by which the members of any social body are governed. Of all
religions, Catholicism which represents the accumulated results of two
thousand years' worldwide experience of human nature applied to the
principles of the Gospel, is least likely to be comprehended by an
outsider, however observant and fair-minded.

To those for whom the lawfulness of re-marriage for an innocent divorcee
is, like the rest of their religious beliefs, a matter of opinion, the
scruple of a character like Madge Riversdale is unthinkable and
incredible. Such women do not trouble their heads about theological
points; still less, make heroic sacrifices for their private and
peculiar convictions. But those for whom the Church is a definite
concrete reality--almost a person--governing and teaching with divine
authority, will easily understand the firm grip she can and does exert
on those who have no other internal principle of restraint; who would
shake themselves free if they dared. Let those who despise the results
of such a constraint be consistent and abolish all parental and tutorial
control; all educative government of whatsoever description; nay, the
imperious restraint of conscience itself, which is often obeyed but
grudgingly.

While some features of this portrait of Catholic life are common to all
its phases, others are peculiar to the aspect it presents in England,
where Catholics being a small and weak minority are, so to say,
self-conscious in their faith--continually aware that they are not as
the rest of men; disposed therefore to be apologetic or aggressive or
defensive. Again, the circumstance of their long exclusion from the
social and intellectual life of their country is accountable for other
undesirable peculiarities which Mrs. Wilfrid Ward sees no reason to
spare.

We have not, however, attempted anything like a literary estimate of
this interesting, altogether readable work, but have only endeavoured to
draw attention to an important point, which, whether intentionally or
unintentionally, it illustrates very admirably.

_May_, 1899.



Footnotes:


[Footnote 1: _One Poor Scruple._ By Mrs. Wilfrid Ward. London: Longmans,
1899.]

[Footnote 2: We do not mean to imply that there is any close
etymological relation between these two uses of the term.]



XVI.


A LIFE OF DE LAMENNAIS.

The appearance of a work by the Hon. W. Gibson on _The Abbé de
Lamennais, and the Catholic Liberal Movement in France_, invites us to a
new attempt to grapple with a problem which has so far met with no
satisfactory solution, and probably never will. Up to a certain point we
seem to follow more or less intelligently the working of the restless
soul of De Lamennais; but at the last and great crisis of his life we
find all our calculations at fault; "we try to understand him; we wish
that penetrating into the inmost recesses of his wounded soul, we could
force it to yield up its secret, and once more sympathize with him,
perhaps console him; but we cannot. He is an enigma, as impenetrable as
the rocks on his native shore."

From whatever point of view the story of his life is regarded, it
presents itself as a tragedy. The believing Catholic sees there the ruin
of a vocation to such a work as only a few souls in the history of the
Church are called to accomplish--a ruin desperate and deplorable in
proportion to the force of the talents and energies diverted from the
right path. The non-Catholic or unbeliever cannot fail to be moved by
contemplating the fruitless struggles of a mind so keen, a heart so
enthusiastic in the cause of light and liberty--struggles ending in
failure, perplexity, confusion, and misery. But while we allow a large
element of mystery in his character which will never be eliminated, yet
as we return time after time to gaze upon the picture of his life, as a
whole, and in its details, the seemingly discordant items begin quietly
to drop into their places one after another, and to exhibit unnoticed
connections; and the idea of his distinctive personality begins to shape
itself into a coherent unity.

It is not our purpose here to summarize Mr. Gibson's admirable work, or
to give even an outline of so well-known a history; but rather to
attempt some brief criticism of the man himself, and incidentally of his
views.

Temperament and early education are among the principal determinants of
character; and certainly when we contrast Féli with his brother Jean,
who presumably received the same home-training, we see how largely he
was the creature of temperament. Jean was by nature the "good boy,"
tractable and docile; Féli, the unmanageable, the lawless, the violent.
While Jean was dutifully learning his lessons to order, Féli, the
obstreperous, imprisoned in the library, was feeding his tender mind
with Diderot, Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, and similar diet,
and at twelve exhibited such infidel tendencies as made it prudent to
defer his first Communion for some ten years.

From first to last, whether we consider his childish waywardness and
outbreaks of violent passion, which persevered in a less childish form
through manhood; or the fits of intense depression and melancholy,
alternating with spells of high nerve-tension and feverish excitement;
or the restlessness and impatient energy which showed themselves always
and everywhere, and at times drove him like a wild man into the woods,
"seeking rest and finding none;" or the prophetic, not to say, the
fanatical strain which breaks out in so much of his writing, especially
in the _Paroles d'un Croyant_,--in all alike there is evident that
predominance of the imaginative and emotional elements which, combined
with intellectual gifts, constitute genius as commonly understood. For
such a character the training which would suffice for half a dozen good
little Jeans would be wholly inadequate. So much fire and feeling ill
submits to the yoke of self-restraint in matters moral or intellectual.
The mind is apt to be fascinated by the brilliant pictures of the
imagination and to become a slave to the tyranny of a fixed idea; while
the strength of passionate desire paralyzes the power of free
deliberation. It is precisely this self-restraint, the fruit of a
careful education given and responded to, that we miss in De Lammenais
both in his moral character and in his mind. Peace and tranquillity of
soul are essential to successful thinking, more especially in
philosophy; and in proportion as a brilliant imagination is a help, it
is also a danger if let run riot. At times, wearied out with himself, he
seems to have felt the need of retreat and quiet; but he was almost as
constitutionally incapable of keeping still, as certain modern statesmen
in their retirement from public life. We smile when we hear him in the
violent first fervour of his conversion, talking about becoming a
Trappist, and, later, a Jesuit. He knew himself better when he shrank so
long and persistently from the yoke of priesthood, and when, having
yielded against his truer instincts to the indiscreet zeal of pious
friends, he experienced an agony of repugnance at his first Mass. With
different antecedents he might have profited by the yoke, but as things
stood it could but gall him.

In spite of Mr. Gibson's contention to the contrary, it can hardly be
maintained that De Lamennais was well educated in the strict sense of
the expression. The evidence he adduces points to a marvellous diversity
of interests, and even to close and careful reading. But on the whole he
was self-taught, and a self-taught man is never educated. Without
intercourse with other living minds, education is impossible. This is
indeed hoisting De Lammenais with his own petard. For, according to
"Traditionalism," the mind is paralyzed by isolation, and can be duly
developed only in society. An overweening self-confidence and slight
regard for the labours of other thinkers usually characterizes
self-taught genius. This it was that led him to cut all connection with
the philosophy of the past, and to attempt to build up, single-handed, a
new system to supplant that which had been the fruit of the collective
mind-labour of centuries. "I shall work out," he writes calmly to the
Abbé Brute, "a new system for the defence of Christianity against
infidels and heretics, a very simple system, in which the proofs will be
so rigorous that unless one is prepared to give up the right of saying
_I am_, it will be necessary to say _Credo_ to the very end." Only a man
with a very slight and superficial acquaintance with the endeavours of
previous apologists, and the extreme difficulty of the problem, could
speak with such portentous self-confidence. And the result bears out
this remark. For grand and imposing as is the structure of the _Essai
sur l'Indifférence,_ it rests on fallacies so patent that none but a man
of no philosophical training could have failed to perceive them. Here it
is that the self-taught man comes to grief and often misses the mere
truisms of traditional teaching.

Doubtless ecclesiastical philosophy and theology was then more than ever
painfully fossilized, and altogether lifeless and out of sympathy with
the spirit of the age. It needed to be quickened, adapted and applied to
modern exigencies. The undue intrusion of metaphysics into the domain of
positive knowledge needed checking; the value of _consensus communis_ as
a criterion required to be insisted on, defended, and exactly defined.
With characteristic impetuosity, De Lamennais, like Comte, must bundle
metaphysics out of doors altogether as a merely provisional but illusory
synthesis, necessary for the human intellect in its adolescence, but to
be discarded in its maturity; and thereupon he proceeds to erect his
system of Traditionalism mid-air, quite unconscious that in clearing
away metaphysics he has deprived the structure of its only possible
foundation. But this is the man all over. Because there is a truth in
Traditionalism, therefore, it is the whole and only truth; because
metaphysics alone can do little, it is therefore unnecessary and
worthless. Had he spent but a fraction of the time and trouble he gave
to the elaboration of his own system, in a liberal and critical study of
that which he desired to supersede, his genius might have accomplished a
work for the Church which is still halting badly on its way to
perfection. One feels something like anger in contemplating such
hot-headed zeal standing continually in its own light, and frustrating
with perverse ingenuity the very end which it was most desirous to
realize. For no one can deny that from his first conversion to his
unhappy death De Lamennais was dominated by the highest and noblest and
most unselfish motives; that he was a man of absolute sincerity of
purpose.

His earliest enthusiasm was for the defence and exaltation of the
Catholic Faith, for the liberation of the Church from the bonds of
nationalism and Erastianism. Even those who repudiate altogether the
extreme Ultramontanism of De Maistre and De Lamennais must allow their
conception to be one of the boldest and grandest which has inspired the
mind of man. He realized more vividly than many that the cause of the
Church and of society, of Catholicism and humanity, were one and the
same. It was the very intensity and depth of his convictions that made
him so importunate in pressing them on others, so intolerant of delay,
so infuriated by opposition. For indeed nothing is more common than to
find a thousand selfishnesses co-existing and interfering with a
dominant unselfishness, lessening or totally destroying its fruitfulness
for good. A man who is unselfish enough to devote his fortune to charity
will not necessarily be free from faults which may more than undo the
good he proposes.

The same hastiness of thought which moved him to a wholesale,
indiscriminate condemnation of metaphysics, led him to conclude that
because hitherto no happy adjustment of the relations between Church and
State had been devised, there could be no remedy save in their total
severance. Doubtless such a severance would be better, if Gallicanism
were the only alternative; or if the Church's liberty and efficiency
were to be seriously curtailed. A superficial glance might fancy a
fundamental discrepancy in this matter, as well as in the questions of
toleration, and of the freedom of the press, between the official
teaching of Gregory XVI. and Pius IX., and that of Leo XIII. But a
closer inspection shows no alteration of principle, and only a
recognition of altered circumstances, either necessitating a connivance
at inevitable evils, or totally changing the aspect of the question. But
De Lamennais should have learnt from his own teaching that liberty does
not mean the independence of isolation, but the full enjoyment of all
the means necessary for perfect self-development; that it does not mean
the weakness of dissociation, but the strength of a perfectly organized
association for mutual help and protection. And this holds good, not for
individuals alone, but for societies, and for Church and State. Aiming
at one common end, the perfection of humanity, they cannot but gain by
association and lose by dissociation. Each is weaker even, in its own
sphere, apart from the other. It is an unreal abstraction that splits
man into two beings--a body and a soul; that draws a clean,
hard-and-fast line between his temporal and eternal welfare; that
commits the former interest to one society, the latter to another,
absolutely distinct and unconnected. But all this holds true only in the
hypothesis of a nation of Christians or Theists.

When a large fraction of the community has ceased to believe in
Christianity and the Church, the demands of justice and reason are
different. It may well be allowed that, to determine the exact relation
of the Catholic Church and Christian State, and the law of their
organization into one complex society, is a problem for whose perfect
solution we must wait the further development of the ideas of
ecclesiastical and civil society. But to wait for growth of subjective
truth was just what De Lamennais could not do. He saw that past
solutions of the problem had been unsuccessful; that in most cases the
Church was eventually drawn into bondage under the State as its creature
and instrument in the cause of tyranny and oppression; that it was
insensibly permeated with the local and national spirit, differentiated
from Catholic Christendom, and severed from the full influence of its
head, the Vicar of Christ. The independence of the Church he rightly
judged to be the great safeguard of the people against the tyranny of
their temporal rulers. In the face of that world-wide spiritual society,
whose voice was at once the voice of humanity and the voice of God, he
felt that "iniquity would stop its mouth," and injustice be put to
shame. Yet all this seemed to him impossible so long as the Church
depended on the State for temporalities, and because he could devise no
form of association that would be guarantee against all abuses, he
therefore insisted on total, severance, not merely as expedient for the
present pressure, but as a divine and eternal principle.

When, therefore, it seemed to him that Gregory XVI. had condemned
Ultramontanism, it was, to De Lamennais, as though he had condemned the
cause of the Church and of humanity, and thrown the weight of his
authority into that of Gallicanism. Here again we see how his mental
intensity and impatience reduced him to the dilemma which found solution
in his apostasy. Holding as he did to the Papal infallibility in a form
far more extreme than that subsequently approved by the Vatican Council,
he was bound in consistency to accept the Pope's decision as infallible
in respect to its expediency and in all its detail. Thus it seemed to
him that the ideal for which he had lived was shattered by a
self-inflicted blow. The infallible voice of humanity had declared
against the cause of humanity. He found himself compelled, in virtue of
his principles, to choose between two alternatives. Either the cause of
humanity, as he conceived it, was not the cause of God; or else the Pope
was not the Vicar of Christ and the divinely-appointed guardian of that
cause. But of the two denials the former was now to him the least
tolerable. "Catholicism," he said, "was my life, because it was that of
humanity." _Sacramenta, propter homines_; the Church was made for man,
and not man for the Church. Given the dilemma, who shall blame his
choice? But the dilemma was purely subjective and imaginary. Though
truths are never irreconcilable, the exaggerations of truth may well
be so.

Had he possessed that intellectual patience in perplexity, without which
not only faith, but true science, is impossible, he would have been
driven not to apostasy, but to a careful re-sifting of his views,
issuing, perhaps, in a reconciliation of apparently adverse positions,
or at all events in a confession of subjective, uncertainty and
confusion. Faith, in the wider sense of the word, would have bid him to
believe, without seeing, what we have lived to see under Leo XIII.

This seems to be the intellectual aspect of his defection, though of
course there were many accelerating causes at work. Perhaps if Gregory
XVI. had met his appeal with a few words of simple explanation and
advice, instead of with that mysterious reticence which is falsely
supposed to be the soul of diplomacy, the issue might have been as happy
as it was miserable. De Lamennais himself, in his _Affaires de Rome_,
makes the same remark in so many words. Again, the illiberal and
ungenerous persecution of his triumphant adversaries, who endeavoured to
goad him into some open act of rebellion in order to bring him under
still heavier condemnation, can scarcely have failed to embitter and
harden a soul naturally disposed to pessimism and melancholy. Nor can we
omit from the influences at work upon him, that dramatic instinct which
makes a mediocre and colourless attitude impossible for those who are
strongly under its influence. Perhaps no nation is more governed by it
than the French, with their partiality for _tableaux_ and _sensation_;
and in De Lamennais its presence was most marked, as the pages of his
_Paroles_ will witness. In the _Too Late_ with which he received the
overtures of Pius IX.; in the studied sensationalism of his funeral
arrangements, and in many other minute points, we are made sensible that
if his life culminated in a tragedy, the tragic aspect of it was not
altogether displeasing to him. Still it would be a grievous slur on so
great a character to suppose that such a weakness could have had any
considerable part in his steady and deliberate refusal to see a priest
at the last. This is sufficiently accounted for by the fact that he
believed he could not be absolved without accepting the condemnation of
his own views, and so abandoning the cause of humanity. While under the
spell of his imaginary dilemma, he was constrained to follow the rule
for a perplexed conscience, and to choose what seemed to him the less of
two evils.

After his ideal had been destroyed, and the Church could no longer be
for him the Saviour of the Nations, he threw himself without reserve
into the cause of humanity and liberty. But his aims were now almost
entirely destructive and revolutionary. His enthusiasm was rather a
hatred of the things that were, than an ardent zeal for the things that
ought to be; and the bitter elements in his character become more and
more accentuated as he finds himself gradually thrust aside and
forgotten--cast off by the Church, ignored by the revolution. Even his
friends, with one or two exceptions, dropped off one by one; some
fleeing like rats from a sinking ship, others perplexed at his obstinacy
or offended by his violence; others removed by death or distance; and we
see him in his old age poor and lonely, and intensely unhappy.

When dangerously ill in 1827, he exclaimed, on being told that it was a
fine night, "For my peace, God grant that it may be my last." The prayer
was not heard, for, as he felt on his recovery, God had a great work for
him to do. How that work was done we have just seen. Féli de Lamennais,
who would have been buried as a Christian in 1827, was buried as an
infidel in 1854.

It is vain to contend that he was not a man of prayer. That he had a
keen discernment in spiritual things is evident from his _Commentary on
the Imitation_ and his other spiritual writings, as well as from the
testimony of his young disciples at La Chênaie, to whom he was not
merely a brilliant teacher, a most affectionate friend and father, but
also a trusted guide in the things of God. Yet this would be little had
we not also assurance of his personal and private devoutness.

All this would make his unfortunate ending a stumbling-block to those
who cannot acquiesce in the fact that in every soul tares and wheat in
various proportions grow side by side, and that which growth is to be
victorious is not possible to predict with certainty; who deem it
impossible that one who ends ill could ever have lived well; or that one
who loses his faith, or any other virtue, could ever at any time have
really possessed it. There is indeed some kind of double personality in
us all which is perhaps more observable in strongly-marked characters
like De Lamennais, where, so to say, the bifurcating lines are produced
further. Proud men have occasional moods of genuine humility; and
habitual bitterness is allayed by intervals of sweetness; and
conversely, there are ugly streaks in the fairest marble.

And as to the fate of that restless soul, who shall dare to speak
dogmatically? We cling gladly to the story of the tear that stole down
his face in death, and would fain see in it some confirmation of the
view according to which the soul receives in that crucial hour a final
choice based on the collective experience of its mortal life. We would
hope that as there is a baptism of blood or of charity, so there may
perhaps be some uncovenanted absolution for one who so earnestly loved
mankind at large, and especially the poor and the oppressed; who in his
old age and misery was found by their sick-bed; who willed to be with
them in his death and burial. And yet we feel something of that
agonizing uncertainty which forced from the aged Abbe Jean the bitter
cry, "Féli, Féli, my brother!"

_Jan._ 1897.



XVII.


LIPPO, THE MAN AND THE ARTIST.

"What pains me most," writes the late Sir Joseph Crowe in the
_Nineteenth Century_ for October, 1896, "is to think that the art of Fra
Filippo, the loose fish, and seducer of holy women, looks almost as
pure, and is often quite as lovely as that of Fra Giovanni Angelico of
Fiesole." And indeed, if the fact be admitted, it cannot but be a shock
to all those high-minded thinkers who have committed themselves
unreservedly to the view that personal sanctity and elevation of
character in the artist is an essential condition for the production of
any great work of art, and especially of religious art. As regards the
fact, we need not concern ourselves very long. If Rio and others,
presumably biassed by the same theory, are inclined to see Lippi's moral
depravity betrayed in every stroke of his brush, yet the more general
and truer verdict accords him a place among the great masters of his
age, albeit beneath Angelico and some others. Beyond all doubt it must
be allowed that even in point of spirituality and heavenliness of
expression, he stands high above numbers of artists of pure life and
blameless reputation; and this fact leaves us face to face with the
problem already suggested as to the precise connection between high
morality and high art--if any.

Plainly a good man need not be a good artist. Must a good artist be a
good man? I suppose from a vague feeling in certain minds that it ought
to be so, there rises a belief that it must be so, and that it is so;
and from this belief a disposition to see that it is so, and to read
facts accordingly. Prominent among the advocates of this view is Mr.
Ruskin in his treatment of the relation of morality to art. He holds
"that the basis of art is moral; that art cannot be merely pleasant or
unpleasant, but must be lawful or unlawful, that every legitimate
artistic enjoyment is due to the perception of moral propriety, that
every artistic excellence is a moral virtue, every artistic fault is a
moral vice; that noble art can spring only from noble feeling, that the
whole system of the beautiful is a system of moral emotions, moral
selections, and moral appreciation; and that the aim and end of art is
the expression of man's obedience to God's will, and of his recognition
of God's goodness." [1]

But a man who can characterize a vulgar pattern as immoral, plainly uses
the term "morality" in some transcendental, non-natural sense, and
therefore cannot be regarded as an exponent of the precise theory
referred to. Still, as this larger idea of morality includes the lesser
and more restricted, we may consider Mr. Ruskin and his disciples among
those to whom the case of Lippo Lippi and many another presents a
distinct difficulty. "Many another," for the principle ought to extend
to every branch of fine art; and we should be prepared to maintain that
there never has been, or could have been, a truly great musician, or
sculptor, or poet, who was not also a truly good man. In a way the
position is defensible enough; for one can, in every contrary instance,
patch up the artist's character or else pick holes in his work. Who is
to settle what is a truly great work or a truly good man. But a position
may be quite defensible, yet obviously untrue. Again, if by great art we
mean that which is subordinated to some great and good purpose, we are
characterizing it by a goodness which is extrinsic to it, and is not the
goodness of art itself, as such. If the end of fine art is to teach,
then its goodness must be estimated by the matter and manner of its
teaching, and a "moral pocket-handkerchief" must take precedence of many
a Turner. Yet it would even then remain questionable whether a good and
great moral teacher is necessarily a good man. In truth, a good man is
one who obeys his conscience, and whose conscience guides him right. If,
in defect of the latter condition, we allow that a man is good or
well-meaning, it is because we suppose that his conscience is erroneous
inculpably, and that he is faithful to right order as far as he
understands it. But one who sees right and wills wrong is in no sense
good, but altogether bad. Allowing that for the solution of some
delicate moral problems a certain height of tone and keenness of insight
inseparable from habitual conscientiousness is necessary, yet mere
intellectual acumen, in the absence of any notably biassing influence,
suffices to give us as great a teacher as Aristotle, who, if exonerated
from graver charges, offers no example of astonishing elevation of heart
at all proportioned to the profundity of his genius. We do not deny that
in the case of free assent to beliefs fraught with grave practical
consequences, the moral condition of the subject has much to do with the
judgments of the intellect. But first principles and their logical
issues belong to the domain of necessary truth; while in other matters a
teacher may accept current maxims and sentiments with which he has no
personal sympathy, and weave from all these a whole system of excellent
and orthodox moral teaching. And if one may be a good moralist and a bad
man, why _à fortiori_ may one not be a good artist and a bad man? If
vice does not necessarily dim the eye to ethical beauty, why should it
blind it to aesthetic beauty? In order to get at a solution we must fix
somewhat more definitely the notion of fine art and its scope.

I think it is in a child's book called _The Back of the North Wind_,
that a poet is somewhat happily and simply defined as a person who is
glad about something and wants to make other people glad about it too.
Yet mature reflection shows two flaws in this definition. First of all,
the theme of poetry, or any other fine art, need not always be gladsome,
but can appeal to some other strong emotion, provided it be high and
noble. The tragedian is one who is thrilled with awe and sorrow, and
strives to excite a like thrill in others. Again, though the craving for
sympathy hardly ever fails to follow close on the experience of deep
feeling; and though, as we shall presently see, fine art is but an
extension of language whose chief end is intercommunion of ideas, yet
this altruist end of fine art is not of its essence, but of its
superabundance and overflow. Expression for expression's sake is a
necessity of man's spiritual nature, in solitude no less than in
society. To speak, to give utterance to the truth that he sees, and to
the strong emotions that stir within his heart, is that highest
energizing in which man finds his natural perfection and his rest. His
soul is burdened and in labour until it has brought forth and expressed
to its complete satisfaction the word conceived within it. Nor is it
only within the mind that he so utters himself in secret self-communing;
for he is not a disembodied intelligence, but one clothed with body and
senses and imagination. His medium of expression is not merely the
spiritual substance of the mind, but his whole complex being. Nor has he
uttered his "word" to his full satisfaction till it has passed from his
intellect into his imagination, and thence to his lips, his voice, his
features, his gesture. And when the mind is more vigorous and the
passion for utterance more intense, he will not be at rest while there
is any other medium in which he can embody his conception, be it stone,
or metal, or line, or colour, or sound, or measure, or imagery, which
under his skilled hand can be made to shadow out his hidden thought and
emotion. We cannot hold with Max Müller and others, who make thought
dependent and consequent on language.

For it is evident, on a moment's introspection, that thought makes
language for itself to live in, just as a snail makes its own shell or a
soul makes its own body. Who has not felt the anguish of not being able
to find a word to hit off his thought exactly?--which surely means that
the thought was already there unclothed, awaiting its embodiment. As the
soul disembodied is not man, so thought not clothed in language is not
perfect human thought. Its essence is saved, but not its substantial, or
at least its desirable, completeness. A man thinks more fully, more
humanly, who thinks not with his mind alone, but with his imagination,
his voice, his tongue, his pen, his pencil. If, therefore, solitary
contemplative thought is a legitimate end in itself; if it is that
_ludus_, or play of the soul, which is the highest occupation of man, a
share in the same honour must be allowed to its accompanying embodiment;
to the music which delights no ear but the performer's; to poetry, to
painting, to sculpture done for the joy of doing, and without reference
to the good of others communicating in that joy. And if the Divine
Artist, whose lavish hand fills everything with goodness; who pours out
the treasures of His love and wisdom in every corner of our universe; of
whose greatness man knows not an appreciable fraction; who "does all
things well" for the very love of doing and of doing well; who utters
Himself for the sake of uttering, not only in His eternal, co-equal,
all-expressive Word, but also in the broken, stammering accents of a
myriad finite words or manifestations--if this Divine Artist teaches us
anything, it is that man, singly or collectively, is divinest when he
finds rest and joy in utterance for its own sake, in "telling the glory
of God and showing forth His handiwork," or, as Catholic doctrine puts
it, in praise; for praise is the utterance of love, and love is joy in
the truth.

As most of the useful arts perfect man's executive faculties, and thus
are said to improve upon, while in a certain sense they imitate nature;
so the fine arts extend and exalt man's faculty of expression, or
self-utterance, regarded not precisely as useful and _propter aliud_;
but as pleasurable and _propter se_. Even the most uncultivated savage
finds pleasure in some discordant utterance of his subjective frame of
mind; and it is really hard to find any tribe so degraded as to show no
rudiment of fine art, no sign of reflex pleasure in expression, and of
inventiveness in extending the resources nature has provided us with for
that end.

The artist as such aims at self-expression for its own sake. It is a
necessity of his nature, an outpouring of pent-up feeling, as much as is
the song of the lark. Of course we are speaking of the true creative
artist, and not of the laborious copyist. If he subordinates his work as
a means to some further end; if his aim is morality or immorality, truth
or error, pleasure or pain; if it is anything else than the embodiment
or utterance of his own soul, so far he is acting riot as an artist, but
as a minister of morality, or truth, or pleasure, or their contraries.
If we keep this idea steadily in view, we can see how much truth, or how
little, is contained in the various theories of fine art which have been
advanced from the earliest times. We can see how truly art is a [Greek:
mimaesis] an imitating of realities; not that art-objects are, as Plato
supposes, faint and defective representations, vicegerent species of the
external world, whose beauty is but the transfer and dim reflection of
the beauty of nature. Were it so, then the mirror, or the camera, were
the best of all artists. As expression, fine art is the imitation of the
soul within; of outward realities as received into the mind and heart of
the artist, in their ideal and emotional setting. The artist gives word
or expression to what he sees; but what he sees is within him. His work
is self-expression. We can from this infer where to look for a solution
of the controversy between idealism and realism. We can also see how,
owing to the essential disproportion between the material and sensible
media of expression which art uses, and the immaterial and spiritual
realities it would body forth, its utterances must always be symbolic,
never literal. We can see how needlessly they embarrass themselves who
deny the name of fine art to any work whose theme is not beautiful, or
which is not morally didactic. Finally, we can see that if fine art be
but an extension of language, there can be no immediate connection
between art as art, and general moral character; no more reason for
supposing that skilful and beautiful self-utterance is incompatible with
immorality, than that its absence is incompatible with sanctity.

Yet, as a matter of fact, and rightly, we judge of art not merely as
art, or as expression; but we look to that which is expressed, to the
inner soul which is revealed to us, to the "matter" as well as to the
"form." And it maybe questioned whether our estimate of a work is not
rather determined in most cases by this non-artistic consideration.
Obviously it is possible in our estimate of a landscape, to be drawn
away from the artistic to the real beauty; from its merits as a "word,"
or expression, to the merits of the thing signified. And still more
naturally is our admiration drawn from the artist's self-utterance, to
the self which he endeavours to utter, and we are brought into sympathy
with his thought and feeling. Much of the fascination exercised over us
by art, which precisely as art is rude and imperfect in many ways, is to
be ascribed to this source. Though here we must remember that the soul
is often more truly and artistically betrayed by the simple lispings of
childhood than by the ornate and finished eloquence of a rhetorician.

It is in regard to the matter expressed, rather than to the mode of
expression, that we have a right to look for a difference between such
men as Lippo Lippi and Fra Angelico. According to a man's inner tone and
temperament and character, will be the impression produced upon him by
the objects of his contemplation. These will determine him largely in
the choice of his themes, and in the aspect under which he will treat
them. Obviously in many cases there are noble themes of art for whose
appreciation no particular delicacy of moral or religious taste is
required. There is no reason why such a subject as the Laocoon should
make a different impression on a saint and on a profligate. It appeals
to the tragic sense, which may be as highly developed in one as in the
other. But if the Annunciation be the theme, we can well understand how
differently it will impress a man of lively and cultured faith, a
contemplative and mystic, with an appreciative and effective love of
reverence and purity; and another whose faith is a formula, whose life
is impure, frivolous, worldly. Why then is there not a more distinctly
marked inferiority in the religious art of Lippi to that of Angelico?
Why does it look "almost as pure," and "often quite as lovely"? Two very
clear reasons offer themselves in reply. First of all, the art of such a
man as Angelico falls far more hopelessly short of his ideal. Most of
the beauties which such a soul would find in the contemplation of Mary,
or of Gabriel, are spiritual, moral, non-æsthetic, and can embody
themselves in form and feature only most imperfectly. Given equal skill
in expression, equal command of words, one man can say all that he
feels, and more, while another is tortured with a sense of much more to
be uttered, were it not unutterable. Perhaps it is in some hint of this
hidden wealth of unuttered meaning that skilled eyes find in Angelico
what they can never find in Lippi. A second reason might be found in the
external influence exerted on the artist by society, its requirements,
fashions, and conventions. It is plain that Lippi, left to himself,
would never have chosen religious themes as such: it is equally plain,
that having chosen them, he would naturally try to emulate and eclipse
what was most admired in the great works of his predecessors and
contemporaries. It would need little more than a familiar acquaintance
with the great models, together with the artist's discriminating
observance, for a man of Lippi's talent to catch those lines and shades
of form and feature which hint at, rather than express, the inward
purity, the reverence, the gentleness, with which he himself was so
little in sympathy.

No doubt, were two such men equally skilled in all the arts of
expression, in language, in verse, in song and music, in sculpture and
painting, and acting, their general treatment of religious themes would
be more glaringly different; but within the comparatively narrow limits
of painting, we cannot reasonably expect more than we actually find.

The saint, as such, and the artist, as such, are occupied with different
facets of the world; the former with its moral, the latter with its
æsthetic beauty. Even were the artist formally to recognize that all the
beauty in nature is but the created utterance of the Divine thought and
love, and that the real, though unknown, term of his abstraction is not
the impersonal symbol, but the person symbolized; yet it is not enough
for sanctity or morality to be attracted to God viewed simply as the
archetype of æsthetic beauty. On the other hand, one may be drawn,
through the love of moral beauty in creatures, of justice, and mercy,
and liberality, and truthfulness, to the love of God as their archetype,
and yet be perfectly obtuse to æsthetic beauty; and thus again we see
that high æstheticism is compatible with low morality, and conversely.
Doubtless when produced to infinity, all perfections are seen to
converge and unite in God, but short of this, they retain their
distinctness and opposition. At the same time, it cannot for a moment be
denied that keenness of moral, and of æsthetic perception, act and react
upon one another. He gains much morally whose eyes are opened to the
innumerable traces of the Divine beauty with which he is surrounded, and
there are æsthetic joys which are necessarily unknown to a soul which is
selfish and gross--still more to a soul from which the glories of
revealed religion are hidden, either through unbelief or sluggish
indifference. Yet, on the whole, it may be said that sanctity is
benefited by art more than art is by sanctity, especially where we deal
with so limited a medium of expression as painting. And so it seems to
us that, after all, there is nothing to surprise or pain us in the fact
that "the art of a Fra Filippo, the loose fish, looks almost as pure,
and is often quite as lovely as that of Fra Giovanni Angelico of
Fiesoli."

_Dec._ 1896.



Footnotes:


[Footnote 1: Vernon Lee, _Belcaro_.]



XVIII.


THROUGH ART TO FAITH.

There are few books more difficult to estimate than those in which M.
Huysman sets forth the story of a conversion generally supposed to bear
no very distant resemblance to his own. It would be easy to find
excellent reasons for a somewhat sweeping condemnation of his work, and
others as excellent for a most cordial approval; and, indeed, we find
critics more than usually at variance with one another in its regard. To
be judged justly, these books must be judged slowly. The source of
perplexity is to be found in the fact that the author, who has recently
passed from negation to Catholicism, carries with him the language, the
modes of thought, the taste and temper of the literary school of which
he was, and, in so many of his sympathies, is still a pupil, a school
which regards M. Zola as one of its leading lights. _En Route_, and its
sequels, portray in the colours of realism, in the language of
decadence, the conversion of a realist, nay, of a decadent, to mysticism
and faith. "The voice indeed is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are
the hands of Esau," and according as the critic centres his attention
too exclusively on one or the other, such will his judgment be.

That his works have commanded attention, and awakened keen interest
among members of the most varying and opposite schools of thought, is an
undeniable fact which at all events proves them to be worth careful
consideration.

The story of a soul's passage from darkness to light, of its wanderings,
vacillations, doubts, and temptations, must necessarily exercise a
strong fascination over all minds of a reflective cast: "The development
of a soul!" says Browning, "little else is worth study. I always thought
so; you, with many known and unknown to me, think so; others may one day
think so." [1] It is from this attraction of soul to soul that the
_Pilgrim's Progress_, together with many kindred works, derives its
spell; and indeed it is to this that all that is best and greatest in
art owes its power and immortal interest. Here, however, is one reason
why _The Cathedral_ [2] can never be so attractive as _En Route_,
ministering as it does but little to that deepest and most insatiable
curiosity concerning the soul and its sorrows. It portrays but little
perceptible movement, little in the way of violent revulsion and
conflict; the spiritual growth which it registers is mostly underground,
a strengthening and spreading of the roots. It deals with a period of
quiet healing and convalescence after a severe surgical operation; with
the "illuminative" stage of conversion--for there is scarcely any doubt
that the three volumes correspond to the "purgative," "illuminative,"
and "unitive" ways respectively.

Between pulling down and building up--both sensational processes,
especially the former--there intervenes a sober time of planning and
surveying, a quiet taking of information before entering on a new
campaign of action. When the affections have been painfully and
violently uprooted from earth, then first is the mind sufficiently free
from the bias of passion and base attachments to be instructed and
illuminated with profit in the things concerning its peace, and to be
prepared for the replanting of the affections in the soil of Heaven. The
arid desert, with its seemingly aimless wanderings, intervenes between
the exodus from Egypt and the entrance into the Land of Promise.

Dealing with this stage of the process of conversion, _The Cathedral_ is
comparatively monotonous and barren of spiritual incident. What removes
it still further from all chances of anything like popularity in this
country is the extent to which it is occupied with matters of purely
archæological and artistic interest, and more especially with the
mystical symbolism of the middle ages as chronicled in every detail of
the great Cathedral of Chartres. Little as may be the enthusiasm for
such lore in France, it is far less in England, where the people have
for three centuries been out of all touch with the Catholic Church, and
therefore with whatever modicum of mediævalism she still preserves as
part of her heritage from the past. Architecturally we appreciate our
dismantled cathedrals to some extent, but their symbolism is far less
understood than even the language and theology of the schools, while the
study of it meets as much sympathy as would the study of heraldry in a
modern democracy. Yet we may say that the bulk of the book consists of
an inventory of every symbolic detail in architecture, in sculpture, in
painting, in glass-colouring, to be found at Chartres; to which is added
a careful elaboration of the symbolism of beasts, flowers, colours,
perfumes, all very dreary reading for the uninitiated, and to be
criticized only by the expert.

Little scope as the plan of the book offers for any variety or display
of character, being mainly occupied with erudite monologue, put
sometimes into the mouth of Durtal, sometimes into that of the Abbé
Plomb, yet the personalities of these two, as well as those of Géversin,
Madame Bavoil, and Madame Mesurat, stand out very vividly, and make us
wish for that fuller acquaintance with them which a little more movement
and incident would have afforded.

But what will give most offence, and tend to alienate a certain amount
of intelligent and valuable sympathy, is the violence, and even the
coarseness, with which the author, or at least his hero, handles, not
only the opinions, but the very persons of those from whom he differs;
the intemperance of his invective, the narrow intolerance and absolute
self-confidence with which he sits in judgment on men and things.

As a matter of fact, this is rather a defect of style and expression
than of the inner sentiment. It is part and parcel of the realist temper
to blurt out the thought in all the clothing or nakedness with which it
first surges up into consciousness, before it has been submitted to the
censorship of reason; in a word, to do its thinking aloud, or on paper;
to give utterance not to the tempered and mature judgment--the last
result of refinement and correction, but to display the whole process
and working by which it was reached. As it is part of M. Zola's art to
linger lovingly over each little horror of some slaughter-house scene,
until the whole lives for us again as in a cinematograph, so M. Huysman,
engaged in the portrayal of a spiritual conflict, spares us no link in
the chain of causes by which the final result is produced; he bares the
brain, and exposes its workings with all the scientific calmness of the
vivisector.

Whether we like or dislike this realism, we must allow for it in forming
our judgment on these volumes, nor must we treat as final and approved
opinions what are often the mere spontaneous suggestions and first
thoughts of the mind, the oscillations through which it settles down to
rest. Over and over again we shall find that Durtal subsequently raises
the very objection to his own view that was on our lips at the first
reading of it.

But even making such allowance, it none the less remains a matter of
regret that one who, with perhaps some justice, considers that in point
of art-appreciation "the Catholic public is still a hundred feet beneath
the profane public," and chides them for "their incurable lack of
artistic sense," who speaks of "the frightful appetite for the hideous
which disgraces the Church of our day," who himself in many ways, in a
hundred passages of sublime thought, of tender piety, of lyrical poesy,
has proved beyond all cavil his delicacy of sentiment, his exquisite
niceness in matters of taste, his reverence for what is chaste and
beautiful, should at times be so deplorably unfaithful to his better
instincts, so forgetful of the close and inseparable alliance between
restraint and elegance. What can be weaker or uglier, more unbecoming an
artist, more becoming a fish-wife, than his description of Lochner's
picture of the Virgin: "The neck of a heifer, and flesh like cream or
hasty-pudding, that quivers when it is touched;" or of the picture of
St. Ursula's companions, by the same hand: "Their squab noses poking out
of bladders of lard that did duty for their faces;" not to speak of the
characterization of a "Sacred Heart" too revolting to reproduce? Surely
when, after having reviled M. Tissot almost personally, he describes his
works as painted with "muck, wine-sauce, and mud," it is difficult not
to answer with a _tu quoque_ as far as this word-painting is
concerned--difficult not to see here some morbid and "frightful appetite
for the hideous" struggling with the healthy appetite for better things.

However lame and ridiculous an artist's utterance may be, yet there is a
certain reverence sometimes due to what he is endeavouring to say, and
even to his desire to say it. We do not think it very witty or tasteful
or charitable to laugh at a man because he stammers; still less do we
overwhelm him with the coarsest abuse. One may well shudder at most
presentments of the Sacred Heart, but even apart from all consideration
for the artist, a certain reverence for the idea there travestied and
unintentionally dishonoured, should forbid our insulting what after all
is so nearly related to that idea, and in the eyes of the untaught very
closely identified with it.

But an occasional trespass of this kind, however offensive, is not
enough to detract materially from the value of so much that is
meritorious; nor again will that outspoken treatment of delicate topics
(less observable in _The Cathedral_ than in _En Route_), which makes the
book undesirable for many classes of readers, prevent its due
appreciation on the part of others--unless we are going to put the
Sacred Scriptures on the Index. In this vexed question, M. Huysman takes
what seems the more robust and healthy view, but he appears to be quite
unaware how many difficulties it involves; and consequently lashes out
with his usual intemperance against the contrary tradition, which is
undeniably well represented. It is not as though the advocates of the
"flight" policy in regard to temptations against this particular virtue
were ignorant of the general principle which undoubtedly holds as
regards all other temptations, and bids us turn and face the dog that
barks at our heels. This counsel is as old as the world. But from the
earliest time a special exception has been made to it in the one case of
impurity by those who have professedly spoken in the light of experience
rather than of _à priori_ inference. Both views are encompassed with
difficulty, nor does any compromise suggest itself.

What seems to us one of the most interesting points raised by the story
of Durtal's spiritual re-birth and development is the precise relation
between the Catholic religion and fine art.

God has not chosen to save men by logic; so neither has He chosen to
save them by fine art. If the "election" of the Apostolic Church counted
but few scribes or philosophers among its members--and those few
admitted almost on sufferance--we may also be sure that the followers of
the Galilean fishermen were not as a body distinguished by a fastidious
criticism in matters of fine art. In after ages, when the Church
asserted herself and moulded a civilization more or less in accordance
with her own exigencies and ideals, it is notorious how she made
philosophy and art her own, and subjected them to her service; but
whether in so doing she in any way departed from the principles of
Apostolic times is what interests us to understand.

There is certainty no more unpardonable fallacy than that of "Bible
Christians," who assume that the Church in the Apostolic age had reached
its full expansion and expression, and therefore in respect of polity,
liturgy, doctrinal statement and discipline must be regarded as an
immutable type for all ages and countries; from which all departure is
necessarily a corruption. They take the flexible sapling and compare it
with aged knotty oak, and shake their heads over the lamentable
unlikeness: "That this should be the natural outgrowth of that! _O
tempora, O mores!_"

Like every organism, in its beginning, the Church was soft-bodied and
formless in all these respects; but she had within her the power of
fashioning to herself a framework suited to her needs, of assuming
consistency and definite shape in due time. The old bottles would not
serve to hold the new wine, but this did not mean that new bottles were
not to be sought. Because the philosophy, the art, the polity of the age
in which she was born were already enlisted in the service of other
ideas and inextricably associated with error in the minds of men, it was
needful for her at first to dissociate herself absolutely from the use
of instruments otherwise adaptable in many respects to her own ends, and
to wait till she was strong enough to alter them and use them without
fear of scandal and misinterpretation.

The Church is many-tongued; but though she can deliver her message in
any language, yet she is not for that reason independent of language in
general. There is no way to the human ear and heart but through language
of some kind or another. It is not her mission to teach languages, but
to use the languages she finds to hand for the expression of the truths,
the facts, the concrete realities to which her dogmas point. This does
not deny that one language may not be more flexible, more graphic than
any other, more apt to express the facts of Heaven as well as those of
earth. It only denies that any one is absolutely and exclusively the
best.

It is no very great violence to include rhetoric, music, painting,
sculpture, architecture, ritual, and every form of decorative art in the
category of language and to bring them under the same general laws,
since even philosophy may to a large extent be treated in the same way.
Christ has not commissioned His Church to teach science or philosophy,
nor has He given her an infallible _magisterium_ in matters of fine art.
She uses what she finds in use and endeavours with the imperfect
implements, the limited colours, the coarse materials at her disposal to
make the picture of Christ and His truth stand out as faithful to
reality as possible; and--to press the illustration somewhat crudely--as
what is rightly black, in a study in black and white, may be quite
wrongly black in polychrome; so what the Church approves according to
one convention, she may condemn according to another. May we not apply
to her what Durtal says of our Lady: "She seems to have come under the
semblance of every race known to the middle ages; black as an African,
tawny as a Mongolian;"--"she unveils herself to the children of the soil
... these beings with their rough-hewn feelings, their shapeless ideas,
hardly able to express themselves"? The more we study the visions and
apparitions with which saints have been favoured and the revelations
which have been vouchsafed to them, the more evident is it that they are
spoken to in their own language, appealed to through their own imagery.
Indeed, were it not so, how could they understand? Our Lady is the
all-beautiful for every nation, but the type of human beauty is not the
same for all. The Madonna of the Ethiopian might be a rather terrifying
apparition in France or Italy.

There is no art too rough or primitive, or even too vulgar, for the
Church to disdain, if it offers the only medium of conveying her truth
to certain minds. Though custom has made it classical, her liturgical
language, whether Latin or Greek, when first assumed, was that of the
mob--about as elegant as we consider the dialects of the peasantry. She
did not use plain-chaunt for any of those reasons which antiquarians and
ecclesiologists urge in its favour now-a-days, but because it was the
only music then in vogue. Even to-day the breeziest popular melodies in
the East are suggestive of the _Oratio Jeremiæ_. Her vestments (even
Gothic vestments!) were once simply the "Sunday best" of the fashion of
those days. If to-day these things have a different value and
excellence, it is in obedience to the law by which what is "romantic" in
one age becomes "classical" in the next, or what is at first useful and
commonplace becomes at last ceremonial and symbolic; and by which the
common tongue of the vulgar comes by mere process of time to be archaic
and stately. To "create" ancient custom and ritual on a sudden, or to
resuscitate abruptly that which has lapsed into oblivion, is, to say the
least, a very Western idea, akin to the pedantry of trying to restore
Chaucer's English to common use. _Nascitur non fit_, is the law in all
such matters.

While we assert the Church's independence of any one in particular of
these means of self-expression, her indifference to style and mode of
speech so long as substantial fidelity is secured, we must not deny that
some of them are, of their own nature, more apt to her purpose than
others and allow a fuller revelation of her sense; and that in
proportion as her influence is strong in the world she tends to modify
human thought and language, to leaven philosophy and fine art, so as to
form by a process of selection and refusal, and in some measure even to
create, an ever richer and more flexible medium of utterance.

In this sense we can with some caution speak of "Catholic art" in music,
architecture, and painting, so far, that is, as we can determine the
extent and nature of the Church's action, and therefore the tendency of
her influence in the way of stimulus and restraint with regard to
subject and treatment. We do not unjustly discern an author's style as a
personal element distinct from the language and phraseology of which no
item is his own. The manner in which he uses that language, his
selections and refusals make, in union with the borrowed elements, a
tongue that may be called his, in an exclusive sense. The Church, too,
has her style, which, though difficult to discern amid her use of a
Pentecostal variety of languages, is no doubt always the same--at least
in tendency.

Salvation-Army worship is certainly not of the Church's style, but I do
not think, were there no absolute irreverence and scandal to be feared,
that she would hesitate to use such a language, were it the only one
understood by such a people. St. Francis Xavier's "catechisms" were
often hardly less uncouth. Still, her whole tendency would be towards
restraint, order, and exterior reverence. Again, the stoical coldness
and formalism of a liturgical worship, centered round no soul-stirring
mystery of Divine love where there can be feeling so strong as to need
the restraint of liturgy and ritual, has still less of the Church's
style about it. For she is human, not merely in her reason and
self-restraint, but in the fulness of her passion and enthusiasm; and
restraint is only beautiful and needful where there is something to
restrain.

We are now in a position to consider the surface objection that will
present itself to many a reader concerning Durtal's conversion. "He has
been converted," it will be said, "by a fallacy. He has identified the
Catholic religion with the cause of plain-chaunt and Gothic
architecture, and of all that is, or that he considers to be, best in
art. He has laid hold not of Catholicism, but of its merest accessories,
which it might shake off any day, and him along with them. Indeed, he
scarcely makes any pretence at being in sympathy with the Catholicism of
to-day, which he regards as almost entirely philistine and degenerate,
if we except La Trappe and Solesmes and a few other corners where the
old observances linger on. 'It was so ugly, so painfully adorned with
images, that only by shutting his eyes could Durtal endure to remain in
Notre Dame de la Brèche.' Yes, but what sort of convert is this who is
so insensible to substantials, so morbidly sensitive about mere
accidentals? We come to the Church for the true faith and the
sacraments, not for 'sensations.' In fine, Durtal has not observed the
route prescribed by the apologetics for reaching the door of the
sheep-fold, but has climbed over in his own way, like a thief and a
robber; he has not (as a recent critic says of him) _tombé entre les
bras maternals de l'Eglise selon toutes les régles_."

Without for a moment denying one of the legitimate claims of scientific
apologetic, we may at once dismiss the idea that it pretends to
represent a process through which the mind of the convert to
Christianity either does or ought necessarily to pass. Its sole purport
is to show that if it is not always possible to synthetize Christianity
with the current philosophy, science, and history of the day, at least
no want of harmony can be positively demonstrated. As secular beliefs
and opinions are continually shifting, so too apologetic needs continual
adjustment: and as that of a century back is useless to us now, so will
ours be in many ways inadequate a century hence. It is fitting for the
Church at large that she should in each age and country have a suitable
apologetic, taking cognizance of the latest developments of profane
knowledge. It is needful for her public honour in the eyes of the world
that she should not seem to be in contradiction with truth, but that
either the apparent truth should be proved questionable, or else that
her own teaching should be shown to be compatible with it. But in no
sense is such apologetic always a necessity for the individual, still
less a safe or adequate basis for a solid conversion, which in that case
would be shaken by every new difficulty unthought of before.

Our subjective faith in the Church must be like the faith of the
disciples of Christ, an entirely personal relation; an act of implicit
trust based on no lean argument or chain of reasoning, but on the
irresistible spell, the overmastering impression created upon us by a
character manifested in life, action, speech, even in manner; as
impossible to state in its entirety and as impossible to doubt as are
our reasons for loving or loathing, for trusting or fearing.

No doubt we hear of men of intellect and learning "reading" or
"reasoning" themselves into the Church; but others as able have read and
reasoned along the same line, and yet have not come; for in truth,
reason at the most can set free a force of attraction created by motives
other than reason.

What this attraction is in each case is impossible to specify
accurately--"Ask me and I know not," one might say, "do not ask me and I
know." Each soul is hooked with its own bait, called by its own name,
drawn in its own way; and as the attractiveness of Christ is virtually
infinite in its multiformity, so is that of His Church, nor is there a
more unpardonable narrowness than that of insisting that others shall be
drawn in the same way as we ourselves, or not at all.

Let it also be noticed that a very prolonged and minute intimacy is not
always necessary in order that we should feel the spell of personality.
Much depends on our own gifts of sympathy, insight and apprehension, on
the simplicity and strength of the personality in question, on the
nature of the incidents by which it is disclosed to us. We know one man
in a moment, another only after years of intimacy, while others in
regard to the same individuals might experience the converse. We must
not then suppose that because in one case the impression is the result
of slowly-accumulated observations, and in another the work of an
instant, it is less trustworthy in the latter instance than in the
former. It may be, or it may not be. St. Augustine needed years to feel
the spell that one word, nay, one glance from Christ cast upon St.
Peter. Nor again is it always in some striking and notable crisis that a
character reveals itself abruptly, but often in the merest nuance--a
manner, an intonation, something quite unintentional, unpremeditated. We
know well, if we know ourselves at all, how irresistible is the
impression created on us at times by such trifles, and yet how more than
reasonable it often is.

Who shall say, then, that to an eye and heart attuned to quick sympathy,
any indication is too small to betray the inward spirit and character of
the Catholic Church, or to magnetize a soul and render it restless,
until it obeys her attraction and rests in union with her?

To a sensitively artistic temperament such as Durtal's, the indications
of the Church's "style," revealed in her influence upon art, in her
creations, in her selections and refusals, would be eloquent of her
whole character and ethos; it would be to him what the very tone of
Christ's voice was to the Baptist, or what His glance was to Peter, or
what His silence was to Pilate. We have known too many instances of
deep-seated and entire conviction, based on seemingly as little or less,
to wish for one moment to indulge in any foolish rationalizing or to
question the possibility or probability of God's drawing souls to
Himself by such methods.

We must, however, remember that it is not merely by the Church's
mediæval art that Durtal is attracted, but still more by that mysticism
which created it, and by which it was served and fostered in return.
Mysticism must necessarily excite the sympathy of one who is in devout
pursuit of the highest and most spiritual forms of æsthetic beauty.
Whatever be the long-sought and never-to-be-forgotten definition of the
Beautiful, of this much at least a mere process of induction will assure
us, that men count things beautiful in the measure that they are
released from the grossness, formlessness, and heaviness of matter, and
by their delicacy, shapeliness, and unearthliness, betray the influence
of that principle which is everywhere in conflict with matter and is
called spirit. Man at his best is most at home, where at his worst he is
least at home, namely, in the world of those super-realities which are
touched and felt by the soul, but refuse to be pictured or spoken in the
language of the five senses. A hard, "common-sense," labour-and-wages
religion, such as is consonant with the utilitarianism of a commercial
civilization, could never appeal to a temperament like Durtal's.

Doubtless Catholic Christianity admits of being apprehended under the
narrower and grosser aspect, which however inadequate and unworthy, is
not absolutely false. The Jews were suffered to believe not merely that
God rewards the just and punishes the wicked--which is eternally
true--but that He does so in this life, which is true only with
qualification; and that He rewards them with temporal prosperity and
adversity--which is hardly true at all. Catholic truth, in itself the
same, can only be received according to the recipient's capacity and
sensitiveness. What one age or country is alive to, another may be dead
to; nor can we pretend that here all is progress and no regress, unless
we are prepared to say that in no respect have we anything to learn from
the past. The Ignatian meditation on the "Kingdom of Christ" evoked
heroic response in an age impregnated with the sentiments of chivalry,
but to-day it needs to be adapted to a great extent, and some have
vainly hoped to gather grapes from a thistle by substituting a parable
drawn from some soul-stirring commercial enterprise--a colossal
speculation in cheese.

Whatever signs there may be of a reaction, yet the whole temper and
spirit of our age is unfavourable to that mysticism which is the very
choicest flower of the Catholic religion. The blame is not with the
seed, but with the soil. Even where least of all we should look for such
indifference, among those who have built up the sepulchres and shrines
of the great masters of mysticism, we sometimes observe a profound
distrust for what is esteemed an unpractical, unhealthy kind of piety,
while every preference is given to what is definite and tangible in the
way of little methods and industries, multitudinous practices, lucrative
prayers, in a word, to what a critic already quoted describes as _les
petitesses des cerveaux étroits et les anguleuses routines_. [3]

It is one of the narrownesses of Durtal himself to ascribe all this to
the wilful perversity of a person or persons unknown, and not to see in
it the inevitable result of the vulgarizing tendency of modern life upon
the masses. Things being as they are, surely it is better that the
Church should do the little she can than do nothing at all. The
"meditative mind" is incompatible with the rush and worry of a busy
life, especially where educational methods substitute information for
reflection, and so kill the habit, and eventually the faculty, of
thought in so many cases. But if the higher prayer is impossible, the
lower is possible and profitable. Again, if the liturgical sense has in
a great measure become extinct among the faithful owing to the
unavoidable disuse of the public celebration of the Church's worship, it
is well that they should be allowed devotions accommodated to their
limited capacity. As the Church would never dream of expecting a keen
sympathy with her higher dogmas, her mystical piety, her artistic
symbolism, her transcendent liturgy, on the part of a newly-converted
tribe of savages, so neither is she impatient with the civilized
Philistine, but is willing to speak to him in a language all his own,
hoping indeed to tune his tongue one day to something less uncouth. None
can sympathize more cordially than the writer does with Durtal in his
horror of unauthorized devotions, of insufferable vernacular litanies,
of nerveless and sickly hymns, of interminable "acts of consecration"
void of a single definite idea, more especially when these things are
brought into the very sanctuary itself, with stole and cope and every
apparent endeavour to fix the responsibility on the Universal Church.
But if the Church is willing to go in rags to save those who are in
rags, she is only using her invariable economy. We know well the sort of
robe that befits her dignity, and no doubt it is this contrast that
makes the trial of her present humiliation more difficult for us to
bear.

We do not for a moment allow that the difference between bad taste and
good is merely relative, or that a language or art which is externally
vulgar can ever be the adequate and appropriate expression of the
Catholic religion, whose tendency when unimpeded is ever to refine and
purify. But it is perhaps another narrowness to suppose that a reform
can only be effected by a return to the past, to mediæval symbolism and
music and architecture. No effort of the kind has ever met with more
than seeming success. What is consciously imitated from the past is not
the same as that natural growth which it imitates, and which was as
congenial to those days as it is uncongenial to ours. It is all the
difference between the Mass ceremonial in a Ritualist church and in a
Catholic church--the historical sense is violated in one case and
satisfied in the other.

What is once really dead can never revive in the same form--at best we
get a cast from the dead face. No doubt the old music and the old
symbolism always will have a beauty of antiquity that can never belong
to the new; but it was not this beauty--the beauty of death, of autumn
leaves, that made them once popular, but the beauty of fresh green life
and flexibility. The effort to make antiquity popular is almost a
contradiction in terms. What we may hope for at most is an improvement
in the æsthetic tastes of the Catholic public which comes from freer and
healthier surroundings, from saner ideas and wider opportunities of
education and liberal culture. When they begin to speak a richer
language, the Church will take that language and find in it a fuller
expression of her mind than she can in the present _patois_; she will be
able again to say to them in other words, as yet unknown, what she said
to the middle ages in Gregorian chaunt and Gothic cathedral. She, who in
virtue of her Pentecostal gift of tongues, speaks in sundry times and
divers manners, may in due season find words as eloquent of her heart
and mind as those which she spoke to Durtal in the aisles of Chartres
and in the cadences of Solesmes.

_July_, 1898.



Footnotes:


[Footnote 1: Introduction to Sordello.]

[Footnote 2: _The Cathedral_. By M.T.K. Huysman. Translated by
Clare Bell.]

[Footnote 3: R. P. Pacher, S.J., _De Dante à Verlaine_.]



XIX.


TRACTS FOR THE MILLION.

The paradoxes of one generation are the common-places of the next; what
the savants of to-day whisper in the ear, the Hyde Park orators of
to-morrow will bawl from their platforms. Moreover, it is just when its
limits begin to be felt by the critical, when its pretended
all-sufficingness can no longer be maintained, that a theory or
hypothesis begins to be popular with the uncritical and to work its
irrevocable ill-effects on the general mind. In this, as in many other
matters, the lower orders adopt the abandoned fashions of their betters,
though with less of the well-bred taste which sometimes in the latter
makes even absurdity graceful. In this way it has come to pass that at
the very moment in which a reaction against the irreligious or
anti-religious philosophy of a couple of generations ago is making
itself felt in the study, the spreading pestilence of negation and
unbelief has gained and continues to gain possession of the street. Some
fifty years ago religion and even Christianity, seemed to the sanguine
eyes of Catholics so firmly rooted in England that the recovery of the
country to their faith depended almost entirely on the settlement of the
Anglo-Roman controversy; to which controversy they accordingly devoted,
and, in virtue of the still unexhausted impetus of that effort, do still
devote their energies, almost exclusively. But together with a dawning
consciousness that times and conditions have considerably changed, there
is growing up in certain quarters a feeling that we too shall have to
make some modifications in order to adapt ourselves to the altered
circumstances. It is becoming increasingly evident that even could the
said Anglo-Roman controversy be settled by some argument so irresistibly
evident as to leave no _locus standi_ to the opponents of the Petrine
claims, yet the number of those Anglicans who admit the historical,
critical, philosophical, and theological assumptions upon which the
controversy is based and which are presumed as common ground, is so
small and dwindling that, were they all gained to the Church, we should
be still a "feeble folk" in the face of that tidal wave of unbelief
whose gathering force bids fair to sweep everything before it. Also the
lingering impression left from "Tractarian" days as to the intellectual
pre-eminence of the Catholicizing party in the Anglican Church, which
pre-eminence might make amends for their numerical insignificance, is
gradually giving way to the recognition of the sobering fact that at
present that party in no exclusive sense represents the cultivated
intellect of the country. It is no disrespect to that party to say that
while scholarship and intelligence are therein well represented by
scattered individuals, yet it is cumbered, like most religious movements
after they have streamed some distance from their source, with a
majority of those whose adhesion has little or no pretence to an
intellectual basis; and whose occasional accession to the Catholic
Church is almost entirely their own gain.

To give the last decisive push to those who are already toppling over
the border-line that divides England from Rome, to reap and gather-in
the harvest already ripe for the sickle, is a useful, a necessary, and a
charitable work; one that calls for a certain kind of patient skill not
to be underestimated; but there is a wider and perhaps more fruitful
field whose soil is as yet scarcely broken. It may even be asserted with
only seeming paradox that the best religious intelligence of the country
is to be found in the camp of negation rather than in that of
affirmation; among Broad Churchmen, Nonconformists, Unitarians, and
Positivists, rather than among those who seek rest in the unstable
position of a modified Catholicism. The very instability and difficulty
of that position elicits much ingenuity from its theological defenders,
though it also divides their counsels not a little; nor do we quarrel
with them for affirming instead of denying, but for not affirming
enough. But this attempt at compromise, this midway abortion of the
natural growth of an idea, even were it justifiable as sometimes happens
when legitimate issues are obscured through failure of evidence, repels
the great multitude of religious thinkers who are not otherwise
sufficiently drawn towards Catholicism to care to examine these claims.
To say that there is no logical alternative between Rome and Agnosticism
is a sufficiently shallow though popular sophism. At most it means that
from certain given premisses one or other of those conclusions must
follow syllogistically--a statement that would be more interesting were
the said premisses indisputable and admitted by all the world. Still it
may be allowed that a criticism of these premisses, which is a third
alternative, opens up to religious thought a number of roads, all of
which lead away from, rather than towards the extreme Anglican position,
and hence that the more searching religious intelligence of the country
is as adverse to that position--and for the same reasons--as it is to
our own. And by the "religious intelligence" I mean all that
intelligence that is interested in the religious problem; be that
interest hostile or friendly; be it, in its issue, negative or
constructive. For it must not be forgotten that the enemies of a truth
are as interested in it as its friends; or that the friendliest
interest, the strongest "wish to believe," may at times issue in
reluctant negation. So far then as the great mass of religious
intelligence in this country is not "Anglo-Catholic" in its sympathies;
and so far as it is chiefly on the "Anglo-Catholic" section that we make
any perceptible impression, the conversion of England, for what depends
on our own efforts, does not seem to be as imminent a contingency as it
would appear to be in the eyes of those foreign critics for whom Lord
Halifax is the type of every English Churchman and the English Church
co-extensive with the nation--save for a small irreclaimable residue of
Liberals and Freemasons.

Those who, influenced by such considerations, would have us extend our
efforts from the narrowing circle of Anglo-Catholicism to the
ever-widening circle of doubt and negation, are not always clear about
the practically important distinction to be drawn between the active
leaders of doubt, and those who are passively led; the more or less
independent few, and the more or less dependent many; between the man of
the study and the man of the street--a distinction analogous to that
between the _Ecclesia docens_ and _Ecclesia discens_, and which
permeates every well-established school of belief, whether historical,
ethical, political, or religious.

Dealing first with the latter, that is, with those who are led; we are
becoming more explicitly conscious of the fact that in all departments
of knowledge and opinion the beliefs of the many are not determined by
reasoning from premisses, but by the authority of reputed specialists in
the particular matter, or else by the force of the general consent of
those with whom they dwell. There may be other non-rational causes of
belief, but these are the principal and more universal. And when we say
they are non-rational causes, we do not mean that they are
non-reasonable or unreasonable. They provide such a generally
trustworthy, though occasionally fallible, method of getting at truth,
as is sufficient and possible for the practical needs of life--social,
moral, and religious. There is an inborn instinct to think as the crowd
does and to be swayed by the confident voice of authority. If at times
it fail of its end, as do other instincts, yet it is so trustworthy in
the main that to resist it in ordinary conditions is always imprudent.
That our eyes sometimes deceive us would not justify us in always
distrusting their evidence. If a child is deceived through instinctively
trusting the word of its parents, the blame of its error rests with
them, not with it. And so, whatever error the many are led into by
obeying the instinct of submission to authority or to general consent,
is their misfortune, not their fault. Of course there are higher
criteria by which the general consent and the opinion of experts can be
criticized and modified; but such criticism is not obligatory on the
many who have neither leisure nor competence for the task. For here, as
elsewhere, a certain diversity of gifts results in a natural division of
labour in human society; those who have, giving to those who have not;
some ministering spiritual, others temporal benefits to their
neighbours. Not that a man can save another's soul for him any more than
he can eat his dinner for him, but he can minister to him better food or
worse.

The Mussulman child, then, may be bound, during his intellectual
minority, to accept the religious teaching of its parents, just as is
the Christian child. That one, in obeying this natural but fallible
rule, is led into error, the other into, truth, only verifies the
principle that right faith is a gift of God,--a grace, a bit of good
fortune. None of those who are not professedly teachers of religion and
experts, can be morally bound to a criticism above their competence, or
to more than an obedience to those ordinary causes of assent to whose
influence they are subjected by their circumstances. The ideal of a
Catholic religion is to provide, by means of a divinely guided body of
authorities and experts, an universal, international, inter-racial
consensus regarding truths that are as obscure as they are vital to
individual and social happiness; and thus to afford a means of sure and
easy guidance to those uncritical multitudes whose necessary
preoccupations forbid their engaging in theology and controversy. This
ideal was sufficiently realized for practical purposes in the "ages of
faith," when the whole public opinion of Europe, then believed to be
coterminous with civilization, was Catholic; when dissent needed as much
independence of character, as in so many places, profession does now.
And surely it is a narrow-hearted criticism to prefer the primitive
conditions in which none but those strong enough to face persecution
could reap the benefits of Christianity. The weak and dependent are ever
the majority, and if Christianity had been intended to pass them by or
sift them out, "its province were not large," nor could it claim to be
the religion of humanity. The Christian leaven was never meant to be
kept apart, but to be hidden and lost in that unleavened mass which it
seeks slowly to transform into its own nature. The majority, in respect
to religion and civilization, are like unwilling school-boys who need to
be coerced for their own benefit, to be kept to their work till they
learn (if they ever do) to like it, and to need no more coercion. The
support that Catholic surroundings give to numbers, who else were too
weak to stand alone, cannot be overvalued, although it may weaken a few
who else had exerted themselves more strenuously, or may foster
hypocrisy in secret unbelievers who would like to, but dare not
withstand public opinion.

Now it is the gradual decay of this support--of this non-rational yet
most reasonable cause of belief, that is rendering the religious
condition of the man in the street so increasingly unsatisfactory. Not
only is there no longer an agreement of experts, and a consequent
consensus of nations, touching the broad and fundamental truths of
Christianity, but what is far more to the point, the knowledge of this
Babylonian confusion has become a commonplace with the multitudes. No
doubt there are yet some shaded patches where the dew still struggles
with the desiccating sun--old-world sanctuaries of Catholicism whose
dwellers hardly realize the existence of unbelief or heresy, or who give
at best a lazy, notional assent to the fact. But there are few regions
in so-called Christendom where the least educated are not now quite
aware that Christianity is but one of many religions in a much larger
world than their forefathers were aware of; that the intellect of
modern, unlike that of mediæval Europe, is largely hostile to its
claims; that its defenders are infinitely at variance with one another;
that there is no longer any social disgrace connected with a
non-profession of Christianity; in a word, that the public opinion of
the modern world has ceased to be Christian, and that the once
all-dominating religion which blocked out the serious consideration of
any other claimant, bids fair to be speedily reduced to its primitive
helplessness and insignificance. The disintegrating effect of such
knowledge on the faith of the masses must be, and manifestly is, simply
enormous. Not that there is any rival consensus and authority to take
the place of dethroned Catholicism. Even scepticism is too little
organized and embodied, too chaotic in its infinite variety of
contradictory positions, to create an influential consensus of any
positive kind against faith. Its effect, as far as the unthinking masses
are concerned, is simply to destroy the chief extrinsic support of their
faith and to throw them back on the less regular, less reliable causes
of belief. If in addition it teaches them a few catchwords of
free-thought, a few smart blasphemies and syllogistic impertinences,
this is of less consequence than at first sight appears, since these are
attempted after-justifications, and no real causes of their unbelief.
For they love the parade of formal reason, as they love big words or
technical terms, or a smattering of French or Latin, with all the
delight of a child in the mysterious and unfamiliar; but their pretence
to be ruled by it is mere affectation, and the tenacity with which they
cling to their arguments is rather the tenacity of blind faith in a
dogma, than of clear insight into principles.

And this brings us to the problem which gave birth to the present essay.

The growing infection of the uneducated or slightly educated masses of
the Catholic laity with the virus of prevalent unbelief is arousing the
attention of a few of our clergy to the need of coping with what is to
them a new kind of difficulty. Amongst other kindred suggestions, is
that of providing tracts for the million dealing not as heretofore with
the Protestant, but with the infidel controversy. While the danger was
more limited and remote it was felt that, more harm than good would come
of giving prominence in the popular mind to the fact and existence of so
much unbelief; that in many minds doubts unfelt before would be
awakened; that difficulties lay on the surface and were the progeny of
shallow-mindedness, whereas the solutions lay deeper down than the
vulgar mind could reasonably be expected to go; that on the whole it was
better that the few should suffer, than that the many should be
disturbed. The docile and obedient could be kept away from contagion, or
if infected, could be easily cured by an act of blind confidence in the
Church; while the disobedient would go their own way in any case. Hence
the idea of entering into controversy with those incompetent to deal
with such matters was wisely set aside. But now that the prevalence and
growth of unbelief is as evident as the sun at noon--now that it is no
longer only the recalcitrant and irreligious, but even the religious and
docile-minded who are disturbed by the fact, it seems to some that, a
policy of silence and inactivity may be far more fruitful in evil than
in good, that reverent reserve must be laid aside and the pearls of
truth cast into the trough of popular controversy.

But to this course an almost insuperable objection presents itself at
first seeming. Seeing that, the true cause of doubt and unbelief in the
uncritical, is to be sought for proximately in the decay of a popular
consensus in favour of belief, and ultimately in the disagreements and
negations of those who lead and form public opinion, and in no wise in
the reasons which they allege when they attempt a criticism that is
beyond them; what will it profit to deal with the apparent cause if we
cannot strike at the real cause? In practical matters, the reasons men
give for their conduct, to themselves as well as to others, are often
untrue, never exhaustive. Hence to refute their reasons will not alter
their intentions. To dispel the sophisms assigned by the uneducated as
the basis of their unbelief, is not really to strike at the root of the
matter at all. Besides which, the work is endless; for if they are
released from one snare they will be as easily re-entangled in the next;
and indeed what can such controversy do but foster in them the false
notion that, belief in possession may be dispossessed by every passing
difficulty, and that their faith is to be dependent on an intellectual
completeness of which they are for ever incapable. Indeed the
unavoidable amount of controversy of all kinds, dinned into the ears of
the faithful in a country like this, favours a fallacy of
intellectualism very prejudicial to the repose of a living faith founded
on concrete reasons, more or less experimental.

As far as the many are concerned, much the same difficulty attends the
preservation of their faith in these days, as attended its creation in
the beginnings of Christianity, before the little flock had grown into a
kingdom, when the intellect and power of the world was arrayed against
it, when it had neither the force of a world-wide consensus nor the
voice of public authority in its favour. In those days it was not by the
"persuasive words of human wisdom" that the crowds were gained over to
Christ, but by a certain _ostensio virtutis_, by an experimental and not
merely by a rational proof of the Gospel--a proof which, if it admitted
of any kind of formulation, did not compel them in virtue of the
logicality of its form. Further, when the conditions and helps needed by
the Church in her infancy, gave way to those belonging to her
established strength, it was by her ascendency over the strong, the
wealthy, and the learned, that she secured for the crowd,--for the weak
and the poor and the ignorant,--the most necessary support of a
Christianized, international public opinion, and thereby extended the
benefit of her educative influence to those millions whom disinclination
or weakness would otherwise have deterred from the profession and
practice of the faith.

If the Church of to-day is to retain her hold of the crowd in modernized
or modernizing countries, it must either be by renewing her ascendency
over those who form and modify public opinion, who even in the purest
democracy are ever the few and not the many; or else by a reversion to
the methods of primitive times, by some palpable argument that speaks as
clearly to the simplest as to the subtlest, if only the heart be right.
An outburst of miracle-working and prophecy is hardly to be looked for;
while the argument from the tree's fruits, or from the moral miracle, is
at present weakened by the extent to which non-Christians put in
practice the morality they have learnt from Christ. Other non-rational
causes of belief draw individuals, but they do not draw crowds.

If we cannot see very clearly what is to supply for the support once
given to the faith of the millions by public opinion, still their
incapacity for dealing with the question on rational grounds will not
justify us altogether in silence. For in the first place it is an
incapacity of which they are not aware, or which at least they are very
unwilling to admit. A candidate at the hustings would run a poor chance
of a hearing who, instead of seeming to appeal to the reason of the mob
should, in the truthfulness of his soul, try to convince them of their
utter incompetence to judge the simplest political point. Again, though
unable to decide between cause and cause, yet the rudest can often see
that there is much to be said on both sides--though what, he does not
understand; and if this fact weakens his confidence in the right, it
also weakens it in the wrong; whereas had the right been silent, the
wrong, in his judgment, would thereby have been proved victorious. This
will justify us at times in talking over the heads of our readers and
hearers, and in not sparing sonorous polysyllables, abstruse
technicalities, or even the pompous parade of syllogistic arguments with
all their unsightly joints sticking out for public admiration. Some
hands may be too delicate for this coarse work; but there will always be
those to whom it is easy and congenial; and its utility is too evident
to allow a mere question of taste to stand in the way.

Moreover, it must be remembered that while many of the class referred to
are glad to be free from the pressure of a Christianized public opinion,
and are only too willing to grasp at any semblance of a reason for
unbelief; others, more religiously disposed, are really troubled by
these popular, anti-Christian difficulties, the more so as they are
often infected with the fallacy, fostered by ceaseless controversy,
which makes one's faith dependent on the formal reason one can give for
it.

Though this is not so, yet moral truthfulness forbids us to assent to
what we, however falsely, believe to be untrue. Hence while the virtue
of faith remains untouched, its exercise with regard to particular
points may be inculpably suspended through ignorance, stupidity,
misinformation, and other causes.

In the interest of these well-disposed but easily puzzled believers of
the ill-instructed and uncritical sort, a series of anti-agnostic tracts
for the million would really seem to be called for. Yet never has the
present writer felt more abjectly crushed with a sense of incompetence
than when posed by the difficulties of a "hagnostic" greengrocer, or of
a dressmaker fresh from the perusal of "Erbert" Spencer. Face to face
with chaos, one knows not where to begin the work of building up an
orderly mind; nor will the self-taught genius brook a hint of possible
ignorance, or endure the discussion of dull presuppositions, without
much pawing of the ground and champing on the bit: "What I want," he
says, "is a plain answer to a plain question." And when you explain to
him that for an answer he must go back very far and become a little
child again, and must unravel his mind to the very beginning like an
ill-knit stoc

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