PARADOXES OF CATHOLICISM

BY ROBERT HUGH BENSON

_These sermons (which the following pages contain in a much abbreviatedform) were delivered, partly in England in various places and at varioustimes, partly in New York in the Lent of 1912, and finally, as acomplete course, in the church of S. Silvestro-in-Capite, in Rome, inthe Lent of 1913. Some of the ideas presented in this book have alreadybeen set out in a former volume entitled "Christ in the Church" and afew in the meditations upon the Seven Words, in another volume, but inaltogether other connexions. The author thought it better, therefore, torisk repetition rather than incoherency in the present set ofconsiderations. It is hoped that the repetitions are comparatively few. 

Italics have been used for all quotations, whether verbal orsubstantial, from Holy Scripture and other literature_. 

ROBERT HUGH BENSONHARE STREET HOUSE, BUNTINGFORDEASTER, 1913

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTORY (i) JESUS CHRIST, GOD AND MAN (ii) THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, DIVINE AND HUMAN

I PEACE AND WAR

II WEALTH AND POVERTY

III SANCTITY AND SIN

IV JOY AND SORROW

V LOVE OF GOD AND LOVE OF MAN

VI FAITH AND REASON

VII AUTHORITY AND LIBERTY

VIII CORPORATENESS AND INDIVIDUALISM

IX MEEKNESS AND VIOLENCE

X THE SEVEN WORDS

XI LIFE AND DEATH

PARADOXES OF CATHOLICISM

INTRODUCTORY

(i) JESUS CHRIST, GOD AND MAN

_I and My Father are one_. --JOHN X. 30. 

_My Father is greater than I_. --JOHN XIV. 20. 

The mysteries of the Church, a materialistic scientist once announced toan astonished world, are child's play compared with the mysteries ofnature. [1] He was completely wrong, of course, yet there was everyexcuse for his mistake. For, as he himself tells us in effect, he foundeverywhere in that created nature which he knew so well, anomaly piledon anomaly and paradox on paradox, and he knew no more of theology thanits simpler and more explicit statements. 

[Footnote 1: Professor Huxley. ]

We can be certain therefore--we who understand that the mysteries ofnature are, after all, within the limited circle of created life, whilethe mysteries of grace run up into the supreme Mystery of the eternaland uncreated Life of God--we can be certain that, if nature ismysterious and paradoxical, grace will be incalculably more mysterious. For every paradox in the world of matter, in whose environment ourbodies are confined, we shall find a hundred in that atmosphere ofspirit in which our spirits breathe and move--those spirits of ourswhich, themselves, paradoxically enough, are forced to energize undermaterial limitations. 

We need look no further, then, to find these mysteries than to that tinymirror of the Supernatural which we call our self, to that little threadof experience which we name the "spiritual life. " How is it, forexample, that while in one mood our religion is the lamp of our shadowyexistence, in another it is the single dark spot upon a world ofpleasure--in one mood the single thing that makes life worth living atall, and in another the one obstacle to our contentment? What are thosesorrowful and joyful mysteries of human life, mutually contradictory yettogether resultant (as in the Rosary itself) in others that areglorious? Turn to that master passion that underlies thesemysteries--the passion that is called love--and see if there be anythingmore inexplicable than such an explanation. What is this passion, then, that turns joy to sorrow and sorrow to joy--this motive that drives aman to lose his life that he may save it, that turns bitter to sweet andmakes the cross but a light yoke after all, that causes him to find hiscentre outside his own circle, and to please himself best by deprivinghimself of pleasure? What is that power that so often fills us withdelights before we have begun to labour, and rewards our labour withthe darkness of dereliction?

I. If our interior life, then, is full of paradox and apparentcontradiction--and there is no soul that has made any progress that doesnot find it so--we should naturally expect that the Divine Life of JesusChrist on earth, which is the central Objective Light of the Worldreflected in ourselves, should be full of yet more amazing anomalies. Let us examine the records of that Life and see if it be not so. And letus for that purpose begin by imagining such an examination to be made byan inquirer who has never received the Christian tradition. 

(i) He begins to read, of course, with the assumption that this Life isas others and this Man as other men; and as he reads he finds a hundredcorroborations of the theory. Here is one, born of a woman, hungry andthirsty by the wayside, increasing in wisdom; one who works in acarpenter's shop; rejoices and sorrows; one who has friends and enemies;who is forsaken by the one and insulted by the other--who passes, infact, through all those experiences of human life to which mankind issubject--one who dies like other men and is laid in a grave. 

Even the very marvels of that Life he seeks to explain by the marvelloushumanity of its hero. He can imagine, as one such inquirer has said, howthe magic of His presence was so great--the magic of His simple yetperfect humanity--that the blind opened their eyes to see the beauty ofHis face and the deaf their ears to hear Him. 

Yet, as he reads further, he begins to meet his problems. If this Manwere man only, however perfect and sublime, how is it that His sanctityappears to run by other lines than those of other saints? Other perfectmen as they approached perfection were most conscious of imperfection;other saints as they were nearer God lamented their distance from Him;other teachers of the spiritual life pointed always away from themselvesand their shortcomings to that Eternal Law to which they too aspired. Yet with this Man all seems reversed. He, as He stood before the world, called on men to imitate Him; not, as other leaders have done, to avoidHis sins: this Man, so far from pointing forward and up, pointed toHimself as the Way to the Father; so far from adoring a Truth to whichHe strove, named Himself its very incarnation; so far from describing aLife to which He too one day hoped to rise, bade His hearers look onHimself Who was their Life; so far from deploring to His friends thesins under which He laboured, challenged His enemies to find within Himany sin at all. There is an extraordinary Self-consciousness in Him thathas in it nothing of "self" as usually understood. 

Then it may be, at last, that our inquirer approaches the Gospel with anew assumption. He has been wrong, he thinks, in his interpretation thatsuch a Life as this was human at all. "_Never man spake like thisman_. " He echoes from the Gospel, "_What manner of man is this that eventhe winds and the sea obey Him_? How, after all, " he asks himself, "could a man be born without a human father, how rise again from thedead upon the third day?" Or, "How even could such marvels be related atall of one who was no more than other men?"

So once more he begins. Here, he tells himself, is the old fairy storycome true; here is a God come down to dwell among men; here is thesolution of all his problems. And once more he finds himself bewildered. For how can God be weary by the wayside, labour in a shop, and die upona cross? How can the Eternal Word be silent for thirty years? How canthe Infinite lie in a manger? How can the Source of Life be subject todeath?

He turns in despair, flinging himself from theory to theory--turns tothe words of Christ Himself, and the perplexity deepens with everyutterance. If Christ be man, how can He say, _My Father and I are one_?If Christ be God, how can He proclaim that _His Father is greater thanHe_? If Christ be Man, how can He say, _Before Abraham was, I am_? IfChrist be God, how can He name Himself _the Son of Man_. 

(ii) Turn to the spiritual teaching of Jesus Christ, and once moreproblem follows problem, and paradox, paradox. 

Here is He Who came to soothe men's sorrows and to give rest to theweary, He Who offers a sweet yoke and a light burden, telling them thatno man can be His disciple who will not take up the heaviest of allburdens and follow Him uphill. Here is one, the Physician of souls andbodies, Who _went about doing good_, Who set the example of activity inGod's service, pronouncing the silent passivity of Mary as the betterpart that shall not be taken away from her. Here at one moment He turnswith the light of battle in His eyes, bidding His friends who have notswords to _sell their cloaks and buy them_; and at another bids thoseswords to be sheathed, since _His Kingdom is not of this world_. Here isthe Peacemaker, at one time pronouncing His benediction on those whomake peace, and at another crying that He _came to bring not peace but asword_. Here is He Who names as _blessed those that mourn_ bidding Hisdisciples to _rejoice and be exceeding glad_. Was there ever such aParadox, such perplexity, and such problems? In His Person and Histeaching alike there seems no rest and no solution--_What think ye ofChrist? Whose Son is He_?

II. (i) The Catholic teaching alone, of course, offers a key to thesequestions; yet it is a key that is itself, like all keys, as complicatedas the wards which it alone can unlock. Heretic after heretic has soughtfor simplification, and heretic after heretic has therefore come toconfusion. Christ is God, cried the Docetic; therefore cut out from theGospels all that speaks of the reality of His Manhood! God cannot bleedand suffer and die; God cannot weary; God cannot feel the sorrows ofman. Christ is Man, cries the modern critic; therefore tear out from theGospels His Virgin Birth and His Resurrection! For none but a Catholiccan receive the Gospels as they were written; none but a man whobelieves that Christ is both God and Man, who is content to believe thatand to bow before the Paradox of paradoxes that we call the Incarnation, to accept the blinding mystery that Infinite and Finite Natures wereunited in one Person, that the Eternal expresses Himself in Time, andthat the Uncreated Creator united to Himself Creation--none but aCatholic, in a word, can meet, without exception, the mysteriousphenomena of Christ's Life. 

(ii) Turn now again to the mysteries of our own limited life and, as ina far-off phantom parallel, we begin to understand. 

For we too, in our measure, have a double nature. _As God and Man makeone Christ, so soul and body make one man_: and, as the two natures ofChrist--as His Perfect Godhead united to His Perfect Manhood--lie at theheart of the problems which His Life presents, so too our affinitieswith the clay from which our bodies came, and with the Father of SpiritsWho inbreathed into us living souls, explain the contradictions of ourown experience. 

If we were but irrational beasts, we could be as happy as the beasts;if we were but discarnate spirits that look on God, the joy of theangels would be ours. Yet if we assume either of these two truths as ifit were the only truth, we come certainly to confusion. If we live asthe beasts, we cannot sink to their contentment, for our immortal partwill not let us be; if we neglect or dispute the rightful claims of thebody, that very outraged body drags our immortal spirit down. Theacceptance of the two natures of Christ alone solves the problems of theGospel; the acceptance of the two parts of our own nature alone enablesus to live as God intends. Our spiritual and physical moods, then, riseand fall as the one side or the other gains the upper hand: now ourreligion is a burden to the flesh, now it is the exercise in which oursoul delights; now it is the one thing that makes life worth living, nowthe one thing that checks our enjoyment of life. These moods alternate, inevitably and irresistibly, according as we allow the balance of ourparts to be disturbed and set swaying. And so, ultimately, there isreserved for us the joy neither of beasts nor of angels, but the joy ofhumanity. We are higher than the one, we are lower than the other, thatwe may be crowned by Him Who in that same Humanity sits on the Throne ofGod. 

So much, then, for our introduction. We have seen how the Paradox of theIncarnation alone is adequate to the phenomena recorded in theGospel--how that supreme paradox is the key to all the rest. We willproceed to see how it is also the key to other paradoxes of religion, tothe difficulties which the history of Catholicism presents. For theCatholic Church is the extension of Christ's Life on earth; the CatholicChurch, therefore, that strange mingling of mystery and common-sense, that union of earth and heaven, of clay and fire, can alone beunderstood by him who accepts her as both Divine and Human, since she isnothing else but the mystical presentment, in human terms, of Him Who, though the Infinite God and the Eternal Creator, was _found in the formof a servant_, of Him Who, _dwelling always in the Bosom of the Father_, for our sakes _came down from heaven_. 

(ii) THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, DIVINE AND HUMAN

_Blessed art thou Simon Bar-jona; because flesh and blood hath notrevealed it to thee, but My Father Who is in heaven. .. . Go behind me, satan, for thou savourest not the things that are of God, but the thingsthat are of men_. --MATT. XVI. 17, 23. 

We have seen how the only reconciliation of the paradoxes of the Gospellies in the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation. It is only to him whobelieves that Jesus Christ is perfect God and perfect Man that theGospel record is coherent and intelligible. The heretics--men who forthe most part either rejected or added to the inspired record--werethose who, on the one side, accepted Christ's Divinity and rejected theproofs of His Humanity, or accepted His Humanity and rejected the proofsof His Divinity. In the early ages, for the most part, these acceptedHis Divinity and, rejecting His Humanity, invented childish miracleswhich they thought appropriate to a God dwelling on earth in a phantommanhood; at the present day, rejecting His Divinity, they reject alsothose miracles for which His Divinity alone is an adequate explanation. 

Now the Catholic Church is an extension of the Incarnation. She too(though, as we shall see, the parallel is not perfect) has her Divineand Human Nature, which alone can account for the paradoxes of herhistory; and these paradoxes are either predicted by Christ--asserted, that is, as part of His spiritual teaching--or actually manifested inHis own life. (We may take them as symbolised, so to speak, in thosewords of our Lord to St. Peter in which He first commends him as a maninspired by God and then, almost simultaneously, rebukes him as one whocan rise no further than an earthly ideal at the best. )

I. (i) Just as we have already imagined a well-disposed inquirerapproaching for the first time the problems of the Gospel, so let us nowagain imagine such a man, in whom the dawn of faith has begun, encountering the record of Catholicism. 

At first all seems to him Divine. He sees, for example, how singularlyunique she is, how unlike to all other human societies. Other societiesdepend for their very existence upon a congenial human environment; sheflourishes in the most uncongenial. Other societies have their day andpass down to dissolution and corruption; she alone knows no corruption. Other dynasties rise and fall; the dynasty of Peter the Fishermanremains unmoved. Other causes wax and wane with the worldly influencewhich they can command; she is usually most effective when her earthlyinterest is at the lowest ebb. 

Or again, he falls in love with her Divine beauty and perceives even inher meanest acts a grace which he cannot understand. He notices withwonder how she takes human mortal things--a perishing pagan language, adebased architecture, an infant science or philosophy--and infuses intothem her own immortality. She takes the superstitions of a country-sideand, retaining their "accidents, " transubstantiates them into truth; thecustoms or rites of a pagan society, and makes them the symbols of aliving worship. And into all she infuses a spirit that is all her own--aspirit of delicate grace and beauty of which she alone has the secret. 

It is her Divinity, then, that he sees, and rightly. But, wrongly, hedraws certain one-sided conclusions. If she is so perfect, he argues (atleast subconsciously), she can be nothing else than perfect; if she isso Divine she can be in no sense human. Her pontiffs must all be saints, her priests shining lights, her people stars in her firmament. If she isDivine, her policy must be unerring, her acts all gracious, her lightestmovements inspired. There must be no brutality anywhere, noself-seeking, no ambition, no instability. How should there be, sinceshe is Divine?

Such are his first instincts. And then, little by little, hisdisillusionment begins. 

For, as he studies her record more deeply, he begins to encounterevidences of her Humanity. He reads history, and he discovers here andthere a pontiff who but little in his moral character resembles HimWhose Vicar he is. He meets an apostate priest; he hears of somesavagery committed in Christ's name; he talks with a convert who hasreturned complacently to the City of Confusion; there is gleefullyrelated to him the history of a family who has kept the faith allthrough the period of persecution and lost it in the era of toleration. And he is shaken and dismayed. "How can these be in a Society that isDivine? I had _trusted_ that it had been_ She _who should have redeemedIsrael;_ _and now--_!"

(ii) Another man approaches the record of Catholicism from the oppositedirection. To him she is a human society and nothing more; and he finds, indeed, a thousand corroborations of his theory. He views her amazingsuccess in the first ages of Christianity--the rapid propagation of hertenets and the growth of her influence--and sees behind these thingsnothing more than the fortunate circumstance of the existence of theRoman Empire. Or he notices the sudden and rapid rise of the power ofthe Roman pontiff and explains this by the happy chance that moved thecentre of empire to the east and left in Rome an old prestige and anempty throne. He sees how the Church has profited by the divisions inEurope; how she has inherited the old Latin genius for law and order;and he finds in these things an explanation of her unity and of herclaim to rule princes and kings. She is to him just human, and no more. There is not, at first sight, a phenomenon of her life for which hecannot find a human explanation. She is interesting, as a result ofinnumerable complicated forces; she is venerable, as the oldest coherentsociety in Europe; she has the advantage of Italian diplomacy; she hasbeen shrewd, unweary, and persevering. But she is no more. 

And then, as he goes deeper, he begins to encounter phenomena which donot fall so easily under his compact little theories. If she is merelyhuman, why do not the laws of all other human societies appear to affecther too? Why is it that she alone shows no incline towards dissolutionand decay? Why has not she too split up into the component parts ofwhich she is welded? How is it that she has preserved a unity of whichall earthly unities are but shadows? Or he meets with the phenomena ofher sanctity and begins to perceive that the difference between thecharacter she produces in her saints and the character of the noblest ofthose who do not submit to her is one of kind and not merely of degree. If she is merely mediaeval, how is it that she commands such allegianceas that which is paid to her in modern America? If she is merelyEuropean, how is it that she alone can deal with the Oriental on his ownterms? If she is merely the result of temporal circumstances, how is itthat her spiritual influence shows no sign of waning when the forcesthat helped to build her are dispersed?

His theory too, then, becomes less confident. If she is Human, why isshe so evidently Divine? If she is Divine, whence comes her obviousHumanity? So years ago men asked, If Christ be God, how could He beweary by the wayside and die upon the Cross? So men ask now, If Christbe Man, how could He cast out devils and rise from the dead?

II. We come back, then, to the Catholic answer. Treat the CatholicChurch as Divine only and you will stumble over her scandals, herfailures, and her shortcomings. Treat her as Human only and you will besilenced by her miracles, her sanctity, and her eternal resurrections. 

(i) Of course the Catholic Church is Human. She consists of falliblemen, and her Humanity is not even safeguarded as was that of Christagainst the incursions of sin. Always, therefore, there have beenscandals, and always will be. Popes may betray their trust, in all humanmatters; priests their flocks; laymen their faith. No man is secure. And, again, since she is human it is perfectly true that she hasprofited by human circumstances for the increase of her power. Undoubtedly it was the existence of the Roman Empire, with its roads, its rapid means of transit, and its organization, that made possible theswift propagation of the Gospel in the first centuries. Undoubtedly itwas the empty throne of Caesar and the prestige of Rome that developedthe world's acceptance of the authority of Peter's Chair. Undoubtedlyit was the divisions of Europe that cemented the Church's unity and ledmen to look to a Supreme Authority that might compose their differences. There is scarcely an opening in human affairs into which she has notplunged; hardly an opportunity she has missed. Human affairs, human sinsand weaknesses as well as human virtues, have all contributed to herpower. So grows a tree, even in uncongenial soil. The rocks that impedethe roots later become their support; the rich soil, waiting for anoccupant, has been drawn up into the life of the leaves; the very windsthat imperilled the young sapling have developed too its power ofresistance. Yet these things do not make the tree. 

(ii) For her Humanity, though it is the body in which her Divinitydwells, does not create that Divinity. Certainly human circumstanceshave developed her, yet what but Divine Providence ordered and developedthose human circumstances? What but that same power, which indwells inthe Church, dwelt without her too and caused her to take root at thattime and in that place which most favored her growth? Certainly she isHuman. It may well be that her rulers have contradicted one another inhuman matters--in science, in policy, and in discipline; but how is it, then, that they have not contradicted one another in matters that areDivine? Granted that one Pope has reversed the policy of hispredecessor, then what has saved him from reversing his theology also?Certainly there have been appalling scandals, outrageous sinners, blaspheming apostates--but what of her saints?

And, above all, she gives proof of her Divinity by that very sign towhich Christ Himself pointed as a proof of His own. Granted that she_dies daily_--that her cause fails in this century and in that country;that her science is discredited in this generation and her activemorality in that and her ideals in a third--how comes it that she alsorises daily from the dead; that her old symbols rise again from theirruins; that her virtues are acclaimed by the children of the men whorenounced her; that her bells and her music sound again where once herchurches and houses were laid waste?

Here, then, is the Catholic answer and it is this alone that makes senseof history, as it is Catholic doctrine which alone makes sense of theGospel record. The answer is identical in both cases alike, and it isthis--that the only explanation of the phenomena of the Gospels and ofChurch history is that the Life which produces them is both Human andDivine. 

I

PEACE AND WAR

_Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called thechildren of God. _--MATT. V. 9. 

_Do not think that I am come to send peace on earth; Icame not to send peace but the sword. _--MATT. X. 34. 

We have considered how the key to the Paradoxes of the Gospel and thekey to the Paradoxes of Catholicism is one and the same--that the Lifethat produces them is at once Divine and Human. Let us go on to considerhow this resolves those of Catholicism, especially those charged againstus by our adversaries. 

For we live in a day when Catholicism is no longer considered byintelligent men to be too evidently absurd to be argued with. Definitereasons are given by those who stand outside our borders for theattitude they maintain; definite accusations are made which must eitherbe allowed or refuted. 

Now those who stand without the walls of the City of Peace know nothing, it is true, of the life that its citizens lead within, nothing of theharmony and consolation that Catholicism alone can give. Yet of certainpoints, it may be, in the large outlines of that city against the sky, of the place it occupies in the world, of its wide effect upon humanlife in general, it may very well be that these detached observers mayknow more than the devout who dwell at peace within. Let us, then, consider their reflections not necessarily as wholly false; it may bethat they have caught glimpses which we have missed and relations whicheither we take too much for granted or have failed altogether to see. Itmay be that these accusations will turn out to be our credentials indisguise. 

I. Every world-religion, we are told, worthy of the name has as itsprincipal object and its chief claim to consideration its establishingor its fostering of peace among men. Supremely this was so in the firstdays of Christianity. It was this that its great prophet predicted ofits work when its Divine Founder should come on earth. Nature shallrecover its lost harmony and the dissensions of men shall cease when He, the Prince of Peace, shall approach. The very beasts shall lie downtogether in amity, _the lion and the lamb_ and _the leopard and thekid_. Further, it was the Message of Peace that the angels proclaimedover His cradle in Bethlehem; it was the Gift of Peace which He Himselfpromised to His disciples; it was the _Peace of God which passethknowledge_ to which the great Apostle commended his converts. This then, we are told, is of the very essence of Christianity; this is the supremebenediction on the peacemakers that _they shall be called the childrenof God_. 

Yet, when we turn to Catholicism, we are bidden to see in it not agatherer but a scatterer, not the daughter of peace but the mother ofdisunion. Is there a single tormented country in Europe to-day, it isrhetorically demanded, that does not owe at least part of its misery tothe claims of Catholicism? What is it but Catholicism that lies at theheart of the divided allegiance of France, of the miseries of Portugal, and of the dissensions of Italy? Look back through history and you willfind the same tale everywhere. What was it that disturbed the politicsof England so often from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, and toreher in two in the sixteenth, but the determined resistance of anadolescent nation to the tyranny of Rome? What lay behind the religiouswars of Europe, behind the fires of Smithfield, the rack of Elizabeth, and the blood of St. Bartholomew's Day but this intolerant andintolerable religion which would come to no terms even with the mostreasonable of its adversaries? It is impossible, of course, altogetherto apportion blame, to say that in each several instance it was theCatholic that was the aggressor; but at least it is true to say that itwas Catholic principles that were the occasion and Catholic claims theunhappy cause of all this incalculable flood of human misery. 

How singularly unlike, then, we are told, is this religion ofdissension to the religion of Jesus Christ, of all these dogmatic anddisciplinary claims and assertions to the meekness of the Poor Man ofNazareth! If true Christianity is anywhere in the world to-day it is notamong such as these that it lies hid; rather it must be sought among thegentle humanitarians of our own and every country--men who strive forpeace at all cost, men whose principal virtues are those of tolerationand charity, men who, if any, have earned the beatitude of being _calledthe children of God_. 

II. We turn to the Life of Jesus Christ from the Life of Catholicism, and at first indeed it does seem as if the contrast were justified. Wecannot deny our critic's charges; every one of his historical assertionsis true: it is indeed true that Catholicism has been the occasion ofmore bloodshedding than has any of the ambitions or jealousies of man. 

And it is, further, true that Jesus Christ pronounced this benediction;that He bade His followers seek after peace, and that He commended them, in the very climax of His exaltation, to the Peace which He alone couldbestow. 

Yet, when we look closer, the case is not so simple. For, first, whatwas, as a matter of fact, the direct immediate effect of the Life andPersonality of Jesus Christ upon the society in which He lived but thisvery dissension, this very bloodshedding and misery that are chargedagainst His Church? It was precisely on this account that He was giveninto the hands of Pilate. _He stirreth up the people. He makes Himself aKing. _ He is a contentious demagogue, a disloyal citizen, a danger tothe Roman Peace. 

And indeed there seem to have been excuses for these charges. It was notthe language of a modern "humanitarian, " of the modern tolerant"Christian, " that fell from the Divine Lips of Jesus Christ. _Go andtell that fox_, He cries of the ruler of His people. _O you whitedsepulchres full of dead men's bones! You vipers! You hypocrites!_ Thisis the language He uses to the representatives of Israel's religion. Isthis the kind of talk that we hear from modern leaders of religiousthought? Would such language as this be tolerated for a moment from thehumanitarian Christian pulpits of to-day? Is it possible to imagine moreinflammatory speech, more "unchristian sentiments, " as they would becalled to-day, than those words uttered by none other but the DivineFounder of Christianity? What of that amazing scene when He threw thefurniture about the temple courts?

And as for the effect of such words and methods, our Lord Himself isquite explicit. "Make no mistake, " He cries to the modern humanitarianwho claims alone to represent Him. "Make no mistake. I am _not come tobring peace_ at any price; there are worse things than war andbloodshed. I am _come to bring not peace but a sword_. I am come to_divide families_, not to unite them; to rend kingdoms, not to knitthem up; I am come _to set mother against daughter and daughter againstmother_; I am come not to establish universal toleration, but universalTruth. "

What, then, is the reconciliation of the Paradox? In what sense can itbe possible that the effect of the Personality of the Prince of Peace, and therefore the effect of His Church, in spite of their claims to bethe friends of peace, should be _not peace, but the sword?_

III. Now (1) the Catholic Church is a Human Society. She is constituted, that is to say, of human beings; she depends, humanly speaking, uponhuman circumstances; she can be assaulted, weakened, and disarmed byhuman enemies. She dwells in the midst of human society, and it is withhuman society that she has to deal. 

Now if she were not human--if she were merely a Divine Society, afar-off city in the heavens, a future distant ideal to which humansociety is approximating, there would be no conflict at all. She wouldnever meet in a face-to-face shock the passions and antagonisms of men;she could suppress, now and again, her Counsels of Perfection, her callsto a higher life, if it were not that these are vital and presentprinciples which she is bound to propagate among men. 

And again, if she were merely human, there would be no conflict. If shewere merely ascended from below, merely the result of the finestreligious thought of the world, the high-water mark of spiritualattainment, again she could compromise, could suppress, could be silent. 

But she is both human and divine, and therefore her warfare is certainand inevitable. For she dwells in the midst of the kingdoms of thisworld, and these are constituted, at any rate at the present day, onwholly human bases. Statesmen and kings, at the present day, do notfound their policies upon supernatural considerations; their object isto govern their subjects, to promote the peace and union of theirsubjects, to make war, if need be, on behalf of the peace of theirsubjects, wholly on natural grounds. Commerce, finance, agriculture, education in the things of this world, science, art, exploration--humanactivities generally--these, in their purely natural aspect, are theobjects of nearly all modern statesmanship. Our rulers are professedly, in their public capacity, neither for religion nor against it; religionis a private matter for the individual, and governments stand aside--orat any rate profess to do so. 

And it is in this kind of world, in this fashion of human society, thatthe Catholic Church, in virtue of her humanity, is bound to dwell. Shetoo is a kingdom, though not of this world, yet in it. 

(2) For she is also Divine. Her message contains, that is to say, anumber of supernatural principles revealed to her by God; she issupernaturally constituted; she rests on a supernatural basis; she isnot organized as if this world were all. On the contrary she puts thekingdom of God definitely first and the kingdoms of the world definitelysecond; the Peace of God first and the harmony of men second. 

Therefore she is bound, when her supernatural principles clash withhuman natural principles, to be the occasion of disunion. Her marriagelaws, as a single example, are at conflict with the marriage laws of themajority of modern States. It is of no use to tell her to modify theseprinciples; it would be to tell her to cease to be supernatural, tocease to be herself. How can she modify what she believes to be herDivine Message?

Again, since she is organized on a supernatural basis, there aresupernatural elements in her own constitution which she can no moremodify than her dogmas. Recently, in France, she was offered the_kingdom of this world_ if she would do so; it was proposed to her thatshe actually retain her own wealth, her churches and her houses, andyield up her principle of spiritual appeal to the Vicar of Christ. Ifshe had been but human, how evident would have been her duty! Howinevitable that she should modify her constitution in accordance withhuman ideas and preserve her property intact! And how entirelyimpossible such a bargain must be for a Society that is divine as wellas human!

Take courage then! We desire peace above all things--that is to say, thePeace of God, not _that peace which the world_, since it _can give_ it, can also _take away_; not that peace which depends on the harmony ofnature with nature, but of nature with grace. 

Yet, so long as the world is divided in allegiance; so long as theworld, or a country, or a family, or even an individual soul basesitself upon natural principles divorced from divine, so long to thatworld, that country, that family, and that human heart will thesupernatural religion of Catholicism bring _not peace, but a sword_. Andit will do so to the end, up to the final world-shattering catastropheof Armageddon itself. 

"I come, " cries the Rider on the White Horse, "to bring Peace indeed, but a peace of which the world cannot even dream; a peace built upon theeternal foundations of God Himself, not upon the shifting sands of humanagreement. And until that Vision dawns there must be war; until God'sPeace descends indeed and is accepted, till then _My Garments must besplashed in blood_ and from My Mouth comes forth _not peace, but atwo-edged sword_. "

II

WEALTH AND POVERTY

_Make to yourselves friends of the Mammon of iniquity_. 

_You cannot serve God and Mammon_. -LUKE XVI. 9, 13. 

We have seen how the Church of the Prince of Peace must continually bethe centre of war. Let us go on to consider how, as a Human Societydwelling in this world, she must continually have her eyes fixed uponthe next, and how, as a Divine Society, she must be open to the chargeof worldliness. 

I. (i) The charge is a very common one: "Look at the extraordinarywealth and splendour that this Church of the Poor Man of Nazarethconstantly gathers around her and ask yourself how she can dare to claimto represent Him! Go through Holy Rome and see how the richest and mostelaborate buildings bear over their gateways the heraldic emblems ofChrist's Vicar! Go through any country which has not risen in disgustand cast off the sham that calls herself 'Christ's Church' and you willfind that no worldly official is so splendid as these heavenly delegatesof Jesus Christ, no palaces more glorious than those in which they dwellwho pretend to preach Him who _had not where to lay His head!_

"Above all, turn from that simple poverty-stricken figure that theGospels present to us, to the man who claims to be His Vicegerent onearth. See him go, crowned three times over, on a throne borne on men'sshoulders, with the silver trumpets shrilling before him and the ostrichfans coming on behind, and you will understand why the world cannot takethe Church seriously. Look at the court that is about him, all purpleand scarlet, and set by that the little band of weather-beatenfishermen!

"No; if this Church were truly of Christ, she would imitate Him better. It was His supreme mission to point to _things that are above;_ to liftmen's thoughts above dross and gold and jewels and worldly influence andhigh places and power; to point to _a Heavenly Jerusalem, not made withhands;_ to comfort the sorrowful with a vision of future peace, not todabble with temporal matters; to speak of grace and heaven and things tocome, and _to let the dead bury their dead!_ The best we can do for her, then, is to disembarrass her of her riches; to turn her temporalpossessions to frankly temporal ends; to release her from the slavery ofher own ambition into the _liberty of the poor and the children ofGod!"_

(ii) In a word, then, the Church is too worldly to be the Church ofChrist! _You cannot serve God and Mammon_. Yet in another mood ourcritic will tell us that we are too otherworldly to be the Church ofChrist. "The chief charge I have against Catholicism, " says such a man, "is that the Church is too unpractical. If she were truly the Church ofJesus Christ, she would surely imitate Him better in that which, afterall, was the mark of His highest Divinity--namely in His Humanitytowards men. Christ did not come into the world to preach metaphysicsand talk forever of a heaven that is to come; He came rather to attendto men's simplest needs, _to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked_, toreform society on better lines. It was not by His dogma that He wonmen's hearts; it was by His simple, natural sympathy with their commonneeds. He came, in a word, to make the best of this world, to use theelements that lay ready to His hand, to sanctify all the plain things ofearth with which He came in contact. 

"These otherworldly Catholics, then, are too much apart from common lifeand common needs. Their dogmas and their aspirations and theirmetaphysics are useless to a world which wants bread. Let them act moreand dream less! Let them show, for example, by the prosperity ofCatholic countries that Catholicism is practical and not a vision. Letthem preach less and philanthropize more. Let them show that they havethe key to this world's progress, and perhaps we will listen morepatiently to their claim to hold the key to the world that is to come!"

But, surely, this is a little hard upon Catholics! When we makeourselves at home in this world, we are informed that Jesus Christ _hadnot where to lay His Head_. When we preach the world that is to come, we are reminded that Jesus Christ after all came down from that worldinto this to make it better. When we build a comfortable church, we aretold that we are too luxurious. When we build an uncomfortable one weare asked how we expect to do any good unless we are practical. 

II. Now, of course, both these charges were also objected against ourBlessed Lord. For He too had His double activities. It is true thatthere were times when He gave men earthly bread; it is also true that Heoffered them heavenly bread. There were times when He cared for men'sbodies; there were other times when He bade them sacrifice all thatmakes bodily life worth living; times when He sat at meat in the houseof a rich man, and times when He starved, voluntarily, in the desert. 

And the world found Him wrong whichever He did. He was too worldly whenHe healed men on the Sabbath; for is not the Law of God of more valuethan a man's bodily ease? Why can He not wait till to-morrow? He was tooworldly when He allowed His disciples to rub corn in their hands; fordoes not the Law of God forbid a man to make bread on the Sabbath? Hewas too worldly, too unpractical, too sense-loving when He permitted theprecious ointment to be spilled on His feet; _for might not thisointment have been sold for much and given to the poor?_ Is notspirituality enough, and the incense of adoration?

And He was too otherworldly when He preached the Sermon on the Mount. What is the use of saying, _Blessed are the Meek_, when the whole worldknows that "Blessed are the Self-Assertive"? He was too otherworldlywhen He spoke of Heavenly Bread. What is the use of speaking of HeavenlyBread when it is earthly food that men need first of all? He was toootherworldly when He remained in the country on the feast day. _If He bethe Christ_, let Him be practical and say so!

It was, in fact, on these very two charges that He was arraigned fordeath. He was too worldly for Pilate, in that He was Son of Man andtherefore a rival to Caesar; and too otherworldly for Caiphas, since _Hemade Himself Son of God_ and therefore a rival to Jehovah. 

III. The solution, then, of this Catholic Paradox is very simple. (i)First, the Church is a Heavenly Society come down from above--heavenlyin her origin and her birth. She is the _kingdom of God_, first andforemost, and exists for His glory solely and entirely. She seeks, then, first the extension of His kingdom; and compared with this, nothing isof any value in her eyes. Never, then, must she sacrifice God to Mammon;never hesitate for one instant if the choice lies between them. For sheconsiders that eternity is greater than time and the soul of man of morevalue than his body. The sacraments therefore, in her eyes, come beforean adequate tram-service; and that a man's soul should be in grace is, to her, of more importance than that his body should be in health--ifthe choice is between them. She prefers, therefore, the priest to thedoctor, if there is not time for both, and Holy Communion to a goodbreakfast. 

Therefore, of course, she appears too otherworldly to the stockbrokerand the provincial mayor, since she actually places the things of Godbefore the things of man and "seeks first His Kingdom. "

(ii) "And all these things shall be added" to her. For she is Humanalso, in that she dwells in this world where God has placed her, anduses therefore the things with which He has surrounded her. To say thatshe is supernatural is not to deny her humanity any more than to assertthat man has an immortal soul is to exclude the truth that he also has abody. It is this Body of hers, then--this humanity of hers whichenshrines her Divinity--that claims and uses earthly things; it is thisBody that _dwells in houses made with hands_ and that claims too, inhonour to herself and her Bridegroom, that, so long as her spiritualityis not tarnished, these houses shall be as splendid as art can makethem. For she is not a Puritan nor a Manichee; she does not say that anysingle thing which God has made can conceivably be of itself evil, however grievously it may have been abused; on the contrary, she has Hisown authority for saying that _all is very good_. 

She uses, then, every earthly beauty that the world will yield to her, to honour her own Majesty. It may be right to set diamonds round theneck of a woman, but it is certainly right to set them round the Chaliceof the Blood of God. If an earthly king wears vestments of cloth ofgold, must not a heavenly King yet more wear them? If music is used bythe world to destroy men's souls, may not she use it to save theirsouls? If a marble palace is fit for the President of the FrenchRepublic, by what right do men withhold it from the King of kings?

But the world does withhold its wealth sometimes? Very well then, shecan serve God without it, in spite of her rights. If men whine andcringe, or bully and shout, for the jewels with which their forefathershonoured God, she will fling them back again down her altar stairs andworship God in a barn or a catacomb without them. For, though she doesnot _serve God and Mammon_, she yet _makes to herself friends of theMammon of iniquity_. Though she does not and never can serve God andMammon, she will and can, when the world permits it, make Mammon serveher. For the Church is the Majesty of God dwelling on earth. She isthere, in herself, utterly independent of her reception. If it is _herown_ to whom _she comes, and her own do not receive her_, they are nonethe less hers by every right. For, though she will use every earthlything to her honour, though she considers no ointment wasted, howeverprecious, that is spilled by love over her feet, yet her essential glorydoes not lie in these things. She is _all glorious within_, whether ornot her _vesture is of gold_, for she is a _King's Daughter_. She is, essentially, as glorious in the Catacombs as in the Roman basilicas; aslovely in the barefooted friar as in the robed and sceptred Vicar ofChrist; as majestic in Christ naked on the Cross as in Christ ascendedand enthroned in heaven. 

Yet, since she is His Majesty on earth, she has a right to all thatearth can give. All _the beasts of the field are hers, and the cattle ona thousand hills_, all the stars of heaven and the jewels of earth; allthe things in the world are hers by Divine right. 

_All things are hers, for she is Christ's. _ Yet, nevertheless, _she willsuffer the loss of all things_ sooner than lose Him. 

III

SANCTITY AND SIN

_Holy, Holy, Holy!_--IS. VI. 3. 

Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners_. I TIM. I. 15. 

A very different pair of charges--and far more vital--than those more orless economic accusations of worldliness and otherworldliness which wehave just considered, concern the standards of goodness preached by theChurch and her own alleged incapacity to live up to them. These may bebriefly summed up by saying that one-half the world considers the Churchtoo holy for human life, and the other half, not holy enough. We mayname these critics, respectively, the Pagan and the Puritan. 

I. It is the Pagan who charges her with excessive Holiness. 

"You Catholics, " he tells us, "are far too hard on sin and not nearlyindulgent enough towards poor human nature. Let me take as an instancethe sins of the flesh. Now here is a set of desires implanted by God orNature (as you choose to name the Power behind life) for wise andindeed essential purposes. These desires are probably the very fiercestknown to man and certainly the most alluring; and human nature is, as weknow, an extraordinarily inconsistent and vacillating thing. Now I amaware that the abuse of these passions leads to disaster and that Naturehas her inexorable laws and penalties; but you Catholics add a newhorror to life by an absurd and irrational insistence on the offencethat this abuse causes before God. For not only do you fiercely denouncethe "acts of sin, " as you name them, but you presume to go deeper stillto the very desire itself, as it would seem. You are unpractical andcruel enough to say that the very thought of sin deliberatelyentertained can cut off the soul that indulges in it from the favour ofGod. 

"Or, to go further, consider the impossible ideals which you hold upwith regard to matrimony. These ideals have a certain beauty of theirown to persons who can embrace them; they may perhaps be, to use aCatholic phrase, Counsels of Perfection; but it is merely ludicrous toinsist upon them as rules of conduct for all mankind. Human Nature ishuman nature. You cannot bind the many by the dreams of the few. 

"Or, to take a wider view altogether, consider the general standards youhold up to us in the lives of your saints. These saints appear to theordinary common-place man as simply not admirable at all. It does notseem to us admirable that St. Aloysius should scarcely lift his eyesfrom the ground, or that St. Teresa should shut herself up in a cell, orthat St. Francis should scourge himself with briers for fear ofcommitting sin. That kind of attitude is too fantastically fastidiousaltogether. You Catholics seem to aim at a standard that is simply notdesirable; both your ends and your methods are equally inhuman andequally unsuitable for the world we have to live in. True religion issurely something far more sensible than this; true religion should notstrain and strive after the impossible, should not seek to improve humannature by a process of mutilation. You have excellent aims in somerespects and excellent methods in others, but in supreme demands you gobeyond the mark altogether. We Pagans neither agree with your moralitynor admire those whom you claim as your successes. If you were less holyand more natural, less idealistic and more practical, you would be of agreater service to the world which you desire to help. Religion shouldbe a sturdy, virile growth; not the delicate hot-house blossom which youmake it. "

The second charge comes from the Puritan. "Catholicism is not holyenough to be the Church of Jesus Christ; for see how terribly easy sheis to those who outrage and _crucify Him afresh!_ Perhaps it may not betrue after all, as we used to think, that the Catholic priest actuallygives leave to his penitents to commit sin; but the extraordinary easewith which absolution is given comes very nearly to the same thing. Sofar from this Church having elevated the human race, she has actuallylowered its standards by her attitude towards those of her children whodisobey God's Laws. 

"And consider what some of these children of hers have been! Are thereany criminals in history so monumental as Catholic criminals? Have anymen ever fallen so low as, let us say, the Borgia family of the MiddleAges, as Gilles de Rais and a score of others, as men and women who wereperhaps in their faith 'good Catholics' enough, yet in their lives amere disgrace to humanity? Look at the Latin countries with theirpassionate records of crime, at the sexual immorality of France orSpain; the turbulence and thriftlessness of Ireland, the ignorantbrutality of Catholic England. Are there any other denominations ofChristendom that exhibit such deplorable specimens as the runaway nuns, the apostate priests, the vicious Popes of Catholicism? How is it thattales are told of the iniquities of Catholicism such as are told of noother of the sects of Christendom? Allow for all the exaggeration youlike, all the prejudice of historians, all the spitefulness of enemies, yet there surely remains sufficient Catholic criminality to show that atthe best the Church is no better than any other religious body, and atthe worst, infinitely worse. The Catholic Church, then, is not holyenough to be the Church of Jesus Christ. "

II. When we turn to the Gospels we find that these two charges are, as amatter of fact, precisely among those which were brought against ourDivine Lord. 

First, undoubtedly, He was hated for His Holiness. Who can doubt thatthe terrific standard of morality which He preached--the Catholicpreaching of which also is one of the charges of the Pagan--was aprincipal cause of His rejection. For it was He, after all, who firstproclaimed that the laws of God bind not only action but thought; it wasHe who first pronounced that man to be a murderer and an adulterer whoin his heart willed these sins; it was He who summed up the standard ofChristianity as a standard of perfection, _Be you perfect, as yourFather in Heaven is perfect;_ who bade men aspire to be as good as God!

It was His Holiness, then, that first drew on Him the hostility of theworld--that radiant white-hot sanctity in which His Sacred Humanity wentclothed. _Which of you convinceth me of sin?. .. Let him that is withoutsin amongst you cast the first stone at her!_ These were words thatpierced the smooth formalism of the Scribe and the Pharisee and awoke anundying hatred. It was this, surely, that led up irresistibly to thefinal rejection of Him at the bar of Pilate and the choice of Barabbasin His place. "_Not this man!_ not this piece of stainless Perfection!Not this Sanctity that reveals all hearts, _but Barabbas_, thatcomfortable sinner so like ourselves! This robber in whose company wefeel at ease! This murderer whose life, at any rate, is in noreproachful contrast to our own!" Jesus Christ was found too holy forthe world. 

But He was found, too, not holy enough. And it is this explicit chargethat is brought against Him again and again. It was dreadful to thosekeepers of the Law that this Preacher of Righteousness should sit withpublicans and sinners; that this Prophet should allow such a woman asMagdalen to touch Him. If this man were indeed a Prophet, He could notbear the contact of sinners; if He were indeed zealous for God'sKingdom, He could not suffer the presence of so many who were itsenemies. Yet He sits there at Zacchaeus' table, silent and smiling, instead of crying on the roof to fall in; He calls Matthew from thetax-office instead of blasting him and it together; He handles the leperwhom God's own Law pronounces unclean. 

III. These, then, are the charges brought against the disciples ofChrist, as against the Master, and it is undeniable that there is truthin them both. 

It is true that the Catholic Church preaches a morality that is utterlybeyond the reach of human nature left to itself; that her standards arestandards of perfection, and that she prefers even the lowest rung ofthe supernatural ladder to the highest rung of the natural. 

And it is also true, without doubt, that the fallen or the unfaithfulCatholic is an infinitely more degraded member of humanity than thefallen Pagan or Protestant; that the monumental criminals of history areCatholic criminals, and that the monsters of the world--Henry VIII forexample, sacrilegious, murderer, and adulterer; Martin Luther, whoseprinted table-talk is unfit for any respectable house; Queen Elizabeth, perjurer, tyrant, and unchaste--were persons who had had all that theCatholic Church could give them: the standards of her teaching, theguidance of her discipline, and the grace of her sacraments. What, then, is the reconciliation of this Paradox?

(1) First the Catholic Church is Divine. She dwells, that is to say, inheavenly places; she looks always upon the Face of God; she holdsenshrined in her heart the Sacred Humanity of Jesus Christ and thestainless perfection of that Immaculate Mother from whom that Humanitywas drawn. How is it conceivable, then, that she should be content withany standard short of perfection? If she were a Society evolved frombelow--a merely human Society that is to say--she could never advancebeyond those standards to which in the past her noblest children haveclimbed. But since there dwells in her the Supernatural--since Mary wasendowed from on high with a gift to which no human being could ascend, since the Sun of Justice Himself came down from the heavens to lead ahuman life under human terms--how can she ever again be content withanything short of that height from which these came?

(2) But she is also human, dwelling herself in the midst of humanity, placed here in the world for the express object of gathering intoherself and of sanctifying by her graces that very world which hasfallen from God. These outcasts and these sinners are the very materialon which she has to work; these waste products of human life, thesemarred types and specimens of humanity have no hope at all except inher. 

For, first, she desires if she can--and she has often beenable--actually to raise these, first to sanctity and then to her ownaltars; it is for her and her only to _raise the poor from the dunghilland to set them with the princes_. She sets before the Magdalen and thethief, then, nothing less but her own standard of perfection. 

Yet though in one sense she is satisfied with nothing lower than this, in another sense she is satisfied with almost infinitely nothing. If shecan but bring the sinner within the very edge of grace; if she can butdraw from the dying murderer one cry of contrition; if she can but turnhis eyes with one look of love to the crucifix, her labours are athousand times repaid; for, if she has not brought him to the head ofsanctity, she has at least brought him to its foot and set him therebeneath that ladder of the supernatural which reaches from hell toheaven. 

For she alone has this power. She alone is so utterly confident in thepresence of the sinner because she alone has the secret of his cure. There in her confessional is the Blood of Christ that can make his soulclean again, and in her Tabernacle the Body of Christ that will be hisfood of eternal life. She alone dares be his friend because she alonecan be his Saviour. If, then, her saints are one sign of her identity, no less are her sinners another. 

For not only is she the Majesty of God dwelling on earth, she is alsoHis Love; and therefore its limitations, and they only, are hers. ThatSun of mercy that shines and that Rain of charity that streams, _on justand unjust alike_, are the very Sun and Rain that give her life. If I_go up to Heaven she is there_, enthroned in Christ, on the Right Handof God;_ if I go down to Hell she is there also_, drawing back soulsfrom the brink from which she alone can rescue them. For she is thatvery ladder which Jacob saw so long ago, that staircase planted here inthe blood and the slime of earth, rising there into the stainless Lightof the Lamb. Holiness and unholiness are both alike hers and she isashamed of neither--the holiness of her own Divinity which is Christ'sand the unholiness of those outcast members of her Humanity to whom sheministers. 

By her power, then, which again is Christ's, the Magdalen becomes thePenitent; the thief the first of the redeemed; and Peter, the yieldingsand of humanity, the _Rock on which Herself is built_. 

IV

JOY AND SORROW

_Rejoice and be exceeding glad. .. . Blessed are they that mourn_. --MATT. V. 12, 5. 

The Catholic Church, as has been seen, is always too "extreme" for theworld. She is content with nothing but a Divine Peace, and in its causeis the occasion of bloodier wars than any waged from merely humanmotives. She is not content with mere goodness, but urges alwaysSanctity upon her children; yet simultaneously tolerates sinners whomeven the world casts out. Let us consider now how, in fulfilling thesetwo apparently mutually contradictory precepts of our Lord, to rejoiceand to mourn, once more she appears to the world extravagant in bothdirections at once. 

I. It is a common charge against her that she rejoices too exceedingly;is arrogant, confident, and optimistic where she ought to be quiet, subdued, and tender. 

"This world, " exclaims her critic, "is on the whole a very sad anduncertain place. There is no silver lining that has not a cloud beforeit; there is no hope that may not, after all, be disappointed. Anyreligion, then, that claims to be adequate to human nature must alwayshave something of sadness and even hesitancy about it. Religion mustwalk softly all her days if she is to walk hand in hand with experience. Death is certain; is life as certain? The function of religion, then, iscertainly to help to lighten this darkness, yet not by too great a blazeof light. She may hope and aspire and guess and hint; in fact, that isher duty. But she must not proclaim and denounce and command. She mustbe suggestive rather than exhaustive; tender rather than virile; hopefulrather than positive; experimental rather than dogmatic. 

"Now Catholicism is too noisy and confident altogether. See a Catholicliturgical function on some high day! Was there ever anything morearrogant? What has this blaze of colour, this shouting of voices, thisblowing of trumpets to do with the soft half-lights of the world and themystery of the darkness from which we came and to which we return? Whathas this clearcut dogma to do with the gentle guesses of philosophy, this optimism with the uncertainty of life and the future--above all, what sympathy has this preposterous exultation with the misery of theworld?

"And how unlike, too, all this is to the spirit of the Man of Sorrows!We read that _Jesus wept_, but never that He laughed. His was a sadlife, from the dark stable of Bethlehem to the darker hill of Calvary. He was what He was because He knew what sorrow meant; it was in Hissorrows that He has touched the heart of humanity. '_Blessed_, ' he says, '_are those that mourn_. ' Blessed are they that expect nothing, for theyshall not be disappointed. "

In another mood, however, our critic will find fault with our sadness. 

"Why is not the religion of you Catholics more in accord with the happyworld in which we live? Surely the supreme function of religion is tohearten and encourage and lay stress on the bright side of life! Itshould be brief, bright, and brotherly. For, after all, this is a lovelyworld and full of gaiety. It is true that it has its shadows, yet therecan be no shadows without a sun; there is death, but see how lifecontinually springs again from the grave. Since all things, therefore, work together for good; since God has taken pains to make the world sosweet, it is but a poor compliment to the Creator to treat it as a valeof misery. Let us, then, make the best of things and forget the worst. Let us leave the things that are behind and press forward to the thingsthat are before. Let us insist that the world is white with a few blackspots upon it, be optimistic, happy, and confident. 

"You Catholics, however, are but a poor-spirited, miserable race. Whileother denominations are, little by little, eliminating melancholy, youare insisting upon it. While the rest of us are agreeing that Hell isbut a bogy, and sin a mistake, and suffering no more than remedial, youCatholics are still insisting upon their reality--that Hell is eternal, that sin is the deliberate opposition of the human will to the Divine, and that suffering therefore is judicial. Sin, Penance, Sacrifice, Purgatory, and Hell--these are the old nightmares of dogma; and theirfruits are tears, pain, and terror. What is wrong with Catholicism, then, is its gloom and its sorrow; for this is surely not theChristianity of Christ as we are now learning to understand it. Christ, rightly understood, is the Man of joy, not of Grief. He is morecharacteristic of Himself, so to speak, as the smiling shepherd ofGalilee, surrounded by His sheep; as the lover of children and flowersand birds; as the Preacher of Life and Resurrection--He is morecharacteristic of Himself as crowned, ascended, and glorified, than asthe blood-stained martyr of the Cross whom you set above your altars. _Rejoice, then, and be exceeding glad_, and you will please Him best. "

Once more, then, we appear to be in the wrong, to whatever side we turn. The happy red-faced monk with his barrel of beer is a caricature of ourjoy. Can this, it is asked, be a follower of the Man of Sorrows? And thelong-faced ascetic with his eyes turned up to heaven is the world'sconception of our sorrow. Catholic joy and Catholic sorrow are alike tooardent and extreme for a world that delights in moderation in bothsorrow and joy--a little melancholy, but not too much; a littlecheerfulness, but not excessive. 

II. First, then, it is interesting to remember that these charges arenot now being made against us for the first time. In the days even ofthe Roman Empire they were thought to be signs of Christian inhumanity. "These Christians, " it was said, "must surely be bewitched. See howthey laugh at the rack and the whip and go to the arena as to a bridalbed! See how Lawrence jests upon his gridiron. " And yet again, "Theymust be bewitched, because of their morbidity and their love ofdarkness, the enemies of joy and human mirth and common pleasure. Ineither case they are not true men at all. " Their extravagance of joywhen others would be weeping, and their extravagance of sorrow when allthe world is glad--these are the very signs to which their enemiesappealed as proofs that a power other than that of this world wasinspiring them, as proofs that they could not be the simple friends ofthe human race that they dared to pretend. 

It is even more interesting to remember that our Divine Lord Himselfcalls attention to these charges. "_The Son of Man comes eating anddrinking. _ The Son of Man sits at the wedding feast at Cana and at meatin the rich man's house and you say, _Behold a glutton and awinebibber!_ The Son of Man comes rejoicing and you bid Him to be sad. And _John the Baptist came neither eating nor drinking. _ John theBaptist comes from the desert, an ascetic with his camel-hair about himand words of penance and wrath in his mouth, and you say, _He hath adevil. .. . We have piped unto you and you have not danced_. We haveplayed at weddings like children in a market-place, and you have told usto be quiet and think about our sins. _We have mourned unto_ you, wehave asked you to play at funerals instead, and you have told us that itwas morbid to think about death. _We have mourned and you would notlament. _"

III. The fact is, of course, that both joy and sorrow must be an elementin all religion, since joy and sorrow together make up experience. Theworld is neither white with black spots nor black with white spots; itis black and white. It is quite as true that autumn follows summer asthat spring follows winter. It is no less true that life arises out ofdeath than that death follows life. 

Religion then cannot, if it is to be adequate to experience, be apassionless thing. On the contrary it must be passionate, since humannature is passionate too; and it must be a great deal more passionate. It must not moderate grief, but deepen it; not banish joy, but exalt it. It must weep--and bitterer tears than any that the world can shed--withthem that weep; and rejoice too--with _a joy which no man can takeaway_--with them that rejoice. It must sink deeper and rise higher, itmust feel more acutely, it must agonize and triumph more abundantly, ifit truly comes from God and is to minister to men, since His thoughtsare higher than ours and His Love more burning. 

For so did Christ live on earth. At one hour He _rejoiced greatly inspirit_ so that those that watched Him were astonished; at another Hesweated blood for anguish. In one hour He is exalted high on the blazingMount of Transfiguration; in another He is plunged deeper than any humanheart can fathom in the low-lying garden of Gethsemane. _Behold and seeif there be any sorrow like to My Sorrow. _

III. For, again, the Church, like her Lord, is both Divine and Human. 

She is Divine and therefore she rejoices--so filled with the New Wine ofthe Kingdom of her Father that men stare at her in contempt. 

It is true enough that the world is unhappy; that hearts are broken;that families, countries, and centuries are laid waste by sin. Yet sincethe Church is Divine, she knows, not merely guesses or hopes or desires, but _knows_, that _although all things come to an end, God's commandmentis exceeding broad_. Years ago, she knows--and therefore not all thecriticism in the world can shake her--that her Lord came down fromheaven, was born, died, rose, and ascended, and that He reigns inunconquerable power. She knows that He will return again and take thekingdom and reign; she knows, because she is Divine, that in everytabernacle of hers on earth the Lord of joy lies hidden; that Maryintercedes; that the saints are with God; that _the Blood of JesusChrist cleanseth from all sin_. Look round her earthly buildings, then, and there are the symbols and images of these things. There is the merrylight before her altar; there are the saints stiff with gold and gems;there is Mary, "Cause of our Joy, " radiant, with her radiant Child inher arms. If she were but human, she would dare but to shadow thesethings forth--shadows of her own desires; she would whisper her creed;murmur her prayers; darken her windows. But she is Divine and hasherself come down from heaven; so she does not guess, or think, orhope--she knows. 

But she is human too and dwells in the midst of a human race that doesnot know and therefore will not wholly take her at her word, and thevery height of her exaltation must also be, then, the measure of herdespair. The fact that she knows so certainly intensifies a thousandfoldher human sorrow, as she, who has _come that they may have life_, seeshow _they will not come_ to her and find it, as she sees how long thetriumph which is certain is yet delayed through their faithlessness. "If_thou hadst known_, " she cries in the heart-broken words of JesusHimself over Jerusalem, "_if thou hadst but known the things that belongto thy peace! Behold and see, then, if there be any sorrow like tomine_, if there be any grief so profound and so piercing as mine, whohold the Keys of Heaven and watch men turn away from the Door. "

So, then, in church after church stand symbolic groups of statuary, representing joy and tragedy, compared with which Venus and Adonis arebut childish and half-civilized images--Mary as triumphant Queen, withthe gold-crowned Child in her arms, and Mary the tormented Mother, withher dead Son across her knees. For she who is both Divine and Humanalone understands what it is that Humanity has done to Divinity. 

Is it any wonder, then, that the world thinks her extravagant in bothdirections at once; that the world turns away on Good Friday from theunutterable depths of her sorrow, and on Easter Day from the unscalableheights of her joy, calling the one morbid and the other hysterical? Forwhat does the world know of such passions as these? What, after all, canthe sensualist know of joy, or the ruined financier of sorrow? And whatcan the moderate, self-controlled, self-respecting man of the world knowof either?

Lastly, then, in the Paradox of Love, the Church holds both thesepassions, at full blast, both at once. As human love turns joy into painand suffers in the midst of ecstasy, so Divine Love turns pain into joyand exults and reigns upon the Cross. For the Church is more than theMajesty of God reigning on earth, more than the passionless love of theEternal; she is the Very Sacred Heart of Christ Himself, the Eternalunited with Man, and both suffering and rejoicing through that union. Itis His bliss which she at once experiences and extends, in virtue of heridentity with Him; and in the midst of a fallen world it is thesupremest bliss of that Sacred Heart to suffer pain. 

V

LOVE OF GOD AND LOVE OF MAN

_Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart . .. And thyneighbour as thyself_. --LUKE x. 27. 

We have already considered two charges brought against Catholicism fromopposite quarters; namely, that we are too worldly and too otherworldly, too much busied with temporal concerns to be truly spiritual, and toometaphysical and remote and dogmatic to be truly practical. Let us go onto consider these same two charges produced, so to speak, a littlefurther into a more definitely spiritual plane; charges that now accuseus of too great activities in our ministry to men and too manyattentions paid to God. 

I. (i) It is a very common complaint against Catholics, laymen as wellas clergy, that they are overzealous in their attempts to proselytize. True and spiritual religion, we are told, is as intimate and personal anaffair as the love between husband and wife; it is essentially privateand individual. "The religion of all sensible men, " it has been said, "is precisely that which they always keep to themselves. " Tolerance, therefore, is a mark of spirituality, for if I am truly religious Ishall have as much respect for the religion of my neighbour as for myown. I shall no more seek to interfere in his relations with God than Ishall allow him to interfere with mine. 

Now Catholics are notoriously intolerant. It is not merely that thereare intolerant Catholics, for intolerance is of course to be found inall narrow-minded persons, but it is Catholic principles themselves thatare intolerant; and every Catholic who lives up to them is bound to beso also. And we can see this illustrated every day. 

First, there is the matter of Catholic missions to the heathen. Thereare no missionaries, we are told, so untiring and so devoted as those ofthe Church. Their zeal, of course, is a proof of their sincerity; but itis also a proof of their intolerance: for why, after all, cannot theyleave the heathen alone, since religion is, in its essence, a privateand individual matter? Beautiful pictures, accordingly, are suggested tous of the domestic peace and happiness reigning amongst the tribes ofCentral Africa until the arrival of the Preaching Friar with hisdestructive dogmas. We are bidden to observe the high doctrines and theascetic life of the Brahmin, the significant symbolism of the Hindu, andthe philosophical attitudes of the Confucian. All these variousrelationships to God are, we are informed, entirely the private affairsof those who live by them; and if Catholics were truly spiritual theywould understand that this was so and not seek to supplant by a systemwhich is now, at any rate, become an essentially European way of lookingat things, these ancient creeds and philosophies that are far bettersuited to the Oriental temperament. 

But the matter is worse, even, than this. It may conceivably be argued, says the modern man of the world, that after all those Orientalreligions have not developed such virtues and graces as hasChristianity. It may perhaps be argued that in time the religion of theWest, if missionaries will persevere, will raise the Hindu higher thanhis own obscenities have succeeded in doing, and that the civilizationproduced by Christianity is actually of a higher type, in spite of itsevil by-products, than that of the head-hunters of Borneo and the bloodysavages of Africa. But at any rate there is no excuse whatever for theintolerant Catholic proselytizer in English homes. For, roughlyspeaking, it is only the Catholic whom you cannot trust in your own homecircle; sooner or later you will find him, if he at all lives up to hisprinciples, insinuating the praises of his own faith and the weaknessesof your own; your sons and daughters he considers to be fair game; hethinks nothing of your domestic peace in comparison with the propagationof his own tenets. He is characterized, first and last, by that dogmaticand intolerant spirit that is the exact contrary of all that the modernworld deems to be the spirit of true Christianity. True Christianity, then, as has been said, is essentially a private, personal, andindividual matter between each soul and her God. 

(ii) The second charge brought against Catholics is that they makereligion far too personal, too private, and too intimate for it to beconsidered the religion of Jesus Christ. And this is illustrated by thesupreme value which the Church places upon what is known as theContemplative Life. 

For if there is one element in Catholicism that the man-in-the-streetespecially selects for reprobation it is the life of the EnclosedReligious. It is supposed to be selfish, morbid, introspective, unreal;it is set in violent dramatic contrast with the ministerial Life ofJesus Christ. A quantity of familiar eloquence is solemnly poured outupon it as if nothing of the kind had ever been said before: it is saidthat "a man cannot get away from the world by shutting himself up in amonastery"; that "a man should not think about his own soul so much, butrather of what good he can do in the world in which God has placed him";that "four whitewashed walls" are not the proper environment for aphilanthropic Christian. 

And yet, after all, what is the Contemplative Life except precisely thatwhich the world just now recommended? And could religion possibly bemade a more intimate, private, and personal matter between the soul andGod than the Carthusian or Carmelite makes it?

The fact is, of course, that Catholics are wrong whatever they do--tooextreme in everything which they undertake. They are too active and notretired enough in their proselytism; too retired and not active enoughin their Contemplation. 

II. Now the Life of our Divine Lord exhibits, of course, both the Activeand the Contemplative elements that have always distinguished the Lifeof His Church. 

For three years He set Himself to the work of preaching His Revelationand establishing the Church that was to be its organ through all thecenturies. He went about, therefore, freely and swiftly, now in town, now in country. He laid down His Divine principles and presented HisDivine credentials, at marriage feasts, in market-places, in countryroads, in crowded streets, and in private houses. He wrought the worksof mercy, spiritual and corporal, that were to be the types of all worksof mercy ever afterwards. He gave spiritual and ascetic teaching on theMount of Beatitudes, dogmatic instructions in Capharnaum and thewilderness to the east of Galilee, and mystical discourses in the UpperChamber of Jerusalem and the temple courts. His activities and Hisproselytisms were unbounded. He broke up domestic circles and theroutine of offices. He called the young man from his estates and Matthewfrom custom-house and James and John from their father's fishingbusiness. He made a final demonstration of His unlimited claim onhumanity in His Procession on Palm Sunday, and on Ascension Dayratified and commissioned the proselytizing activities of His Church forever in His tremendous charge to the Apostolic band. _Going, therefore, teach ye all nations . .. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoeverI have commanded you; and behold I am with you all the days, even to theconsummation of the world. _

Yet this, it must be remembered, was not only not the whole of His Lifeon earth, it was not even a very considerable part of it, if reckoned byyears. For three years He was active, but for thirty He was retired inthe house of Nazareth; and even those three years are again and againbroken by retirement. He is now in the wilderness for forty days, now onthe mountain all night in prayer, now bidding His disciples come apartand rest themselves. The very climax of His ministry too was wrought insilence and solitude. He removed Himself _about a stone's throw_ in thegarden of Gethsemane from those who loved Him best; He broke His silenceon the Cross to bid farewell even to His holy Mother herself. Above all, he explicitly and emphatically commended the Life of ContemplativePrayer as the highest that can be lived on earth, telling Martha thatactivity, even in the most necessary duties, was not after all the bestuse to which time and love could be put, but rather that _Mary hadchosen the best part . .. The one thing that is necessary_, and that it_shall not be taken away from her_ even by a sister's loving zeal. 

Finally, fault was found with Jesus Christ, as with His Church, onprecisely these two points. When He was living the life of retirement inthe country He was rebuked that He did not go up to the feast and stateHis claims plainly--justify, that is, by activity, His pretensions tothe Messiahship; and when He did so, He was entreated to bid hisacclaimants _to hold their peace_--to justify, that is, by humility andretirement, His pretensions to spirituality. 

III. The reconciliation, therefore, of these two elements in theCatholic system is very easy to find. 

(i) First, it is the Church's Divinity that accounts for her passion forGod. To her as to none else on earth is the very face of God revealed asthe Absolute and Final Beauty that lies beyond the limits of allCreation. She in her Divinity enjoys it may be said, even in her sojournon earth, that very Beatific Vision that enraptured always the SacredHumanity of Jesus Christ. With all the company of heaven then, with MaryImmaculate, with the Seraphim and with the glorified saints of God, she_endures, seeing Him Who is invisible_. Even while the eyes of herhumanity are held, while her human members _walk by faith and not bysight_, she, in her Divinity, which is the guaranteed Presence of JesusChrist in her midst, already _dwells in heavenly places_ and is already_come to Mount Zion and the City of the living God and to God Himself_, Who is the Light in which all fair things are seen to be fair. 

Is it any wonder then that, now and again, some chosen child of herscatches a mirrored glimpse of what she herself beholds with unveiledface; that some Catholic soul, now and again, chosen and called by Godto this amazing privilege, should suddenly perceive, as never before, that God is the one and only Absolute Beauty, and that, compared withthe contemplation of this Beauty--which contemplation is, after all, thefinal life of Eternity to which every redeemed soul shall come--all theactivities of earthly life are nothing; and that, in her passion forthis adorable God, she should run into a secret room and _shut the doorand pray to her Father Who is in secret_, and so remain praying, ahidden channel of life to the whole of that Body of which she is amember, an intercessor for the whole of that Society of which she is oneunit? There in silence, then, she sits at Jesus' feet and listens to theVoice which is _as the sound of many waters_; in the whiteness of hercell watches Him Whose _Face is as a Flame of Fire_, and in austerityand fasting _tastes and finds that the Lord is gracious. _

Of course this is but madness and folly to those who know God only inHis Creation, who imagine Him merely as the Soul of the World and theVitality of Created Life. To such as these earth is His highest Heavenand the beauty of the world the noblest vision that can be conceived. Yet to that soul that is Catholic, who understands that the EternalThrone is indeed above the stars and that the Transcendence of God is asfully a truth as His Immanence--that God in Himself, apart from allthat He has made, is all-fair and all-sufficient in His own Beauty--tosuch a soul as this, if called to such a life, there is no need that theChurch should declare explicitly that the Contemplative Life is thehighest. She knows it already. 

(ii) The _First Great Commandment_ of the Law, then, is inevitablyfollowed by the Second, and the Catholic interpretation of the Second isthought by the world, which understands neither, to be as extravagant asher interpretation of the First. 

For this Divine Church that knows God is also a Human Society thatdwells among men, and since she in herself unites Divinity and Humanity, she cannot rest until she has united them everywhere else. 

For, as she turns her eyes from God to men, she sees there immortalsouls, made in the image of God and made for Him and Him alone, seekingto satisfy themselves with Creation instead of with the Creator. Shehears how the world preaches the sanctity of the temperament, and theholiness of the individual point of view, as if there were noTranscendent God at all and no objective external Revelation ever madeby Him. She sees how men, instead of seeking to conform themselves toGod's Revelation of Himself, attempt rather to conform such fragments ofthat Revelation as have reached them to their own points of view; shelistens to talk about "aspects of truth" and "schools of thought" andthe "values of experience" as if God had never spoken either in thethunders of Sinai or the still voice of Galilee. 

Is it any wonder, then, that her Proselytism appears to such a world asextravagant as her Contemplation, her passion for men as unreasonable asher passion for God, when that world sees her bring herself from hercloisters and her secret places to proclaim as with a trumpet thosedemands of God which He has made known, those Laws which He haspromulgated, and those rewards which He has promised? For how can she dootherwise who has looked on the all-glorious Face of God and then on thevacant and complacent faces of men--she who knows God's infinitecapacity for satisfying men and men's all but infinite incapacity forseeking God--when she sees some poor soul shutting herself up indeedwithin the deadly and chilly walls of her own "temperament" and"individual point of view, " when earth and heaven and the Lord of themboth is waiting for her outside?

The Church, then, is too much interested in men and too much absorbed inGod. Of course she is too much interested and too much absorbed, for shealone knows the value and capacity of both; she who is herself bothDivine and Human. For Religion, to her, is not an elegant accomplishmentor a graceful philosophy or a pleasing scheme of conjectures. It is thefiery bond between God and man, neither of whom can be satisfiedwithout the other, the One in virtue of His Love and the other in virtueof his createdness. She alone, then, understands and reconciles thetremendous Paradox of the Law that is Old as well as New. _Thou shaltlove the Lord thy God with thy whole heart . .. And thy neighbour asthyself _. 

VI

FAITH AND REASON

_Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shallnot enter into it_. --MARK X. 15. 

_Some things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and the unstablewrest, as also the other Scriptures, to their own perdition_. --II PET. III. 16. 

There are two great gifts, or faculties, by which men attain to truth:faith and reason. From these two sides, therefore, come two moreassaults upon the Catholic position, a position which itself faces inboth these directions. On the one side we are told that we believe toosimply, on the other that we do not believe simply enough; on the oneside that we reason too little, on the other that we do not reasonenough. Let us set out these attacks in order. 

I. (i) "You Catholics, " says one critic, "are far too credulous inmatters of religion. You believe, not as reasonable men believe, becauseyou have verified or experienced the truths you profess, but simplybecause these dogmas are presented to you by the Church. If reason andcommon-sense are gifts of God and intended for use, surely it is verystrange to silence them in your search for the supreme truth. Faith, ofcourse, has its place, but it must not be blind faith. Reason must test, verify, and interpret, or faith is mere credulity. 

"Consider, for example, the words of Christ, _This is My Body_. Now thewords as they stand may certainly be supposed to mean what you say theymean; yet, interpreted by Reason, they cannot possibly mean anything ofthe kind. Did not Christ Himself sit in bodily form at the table as Hespoke them? How then could He hold Himself in His hand? Did He not speakin metaphors and images continually? Did He not call Himself _a Door anda Vine_? Using Reason, then, to interpret these words, it is evidentthat He meant no more than that He was instituting a memorial feast, inwhich the bread should symbolize His Body and the wine His Blood. So toowith many other distinctively Catholic doctrines--with the Petrineclaims, with the authority 'to bind and loose, ' and the rest. Catholicbelief on these points exhibits not faith properly so-called--that is, Faith tested by Reason--but mere credulity. God gave us all Reason! Thenin His Name let us use it!"

(ii) From the other side comes precisely the opposite charge. 

"You Catholics, " cries the other critic, "are far too argumentative anddeductive and logical in your Faith. True Religion is a very simplething; it is the attitude of a child who trusts and does not question. But with you Catholics Religion has degenerated into Theology. JesusChrist did not write a _Summa_; He made a few plain statements whichcomprise, as they stand, the whole Christian Religion; they are full ofmystery, no doubt, but it is He who left them mysterious. Why, then, should your theologians seek to penetrate into regions which He did notreveal and to elaborate what He left unelaborated?

"Take, for example, Christ's words, _This is My Body_. Now of coursethese words are mysterious, and if Christ had meant that they should beotherwise, He would Himself have given the necessary comment upon them. Yet He did not; He left them in an awful and deep simplicity into whichno human logic ought even to seek to penetrate. Yet see the vast andcomplicated theology that the traditions have either piled upon them orattempted to extract out of them; the philosophical theories by which ithas been sought to elucidate them; the intricate and wide-reachingdevotions that have been founded upon them! What have words like'Transubstantiation' and 'Concomitance, ' devotions like 'Benediction, 'gatherings like Eucharistic Congresses to do with the august simplicityof Christ's own institution? You Catholics argue too much--deduce, syllogize, and explain--until the simple splendour of Christ'smysterious act is altogether overlaid and hidden. Be more simple! It isbetter to _'love God than to discourse learnedly about the BlessedTrinity. ' It has not pleased God to save His people through dialectics. _Believe more, argue less!"

Once more, then, the double charge is brought. We believe, it seems, where we ought to reason. We reason where we ought to believe. Webelieve too blindly and not blindly enough. We reason too closely andnot closely enough. 

Here, then, is a vast subject--the relations of Faith and Reason and theplace of each in man's attitude towards Truth. It is, of course, possible only to glance at these things in outline. 

II. First, let us consider, as a kind of illustration, the relations ofthese things in ordinary human science. Neither Faith nor Reason will, of course, be precisely the same as in supernatural matters; yet therewill be a sufficient parallel for our purpose. 

A scientist, let us say, proposes to make observations upon thestructure of a fly's leg. He catches his fly, dissects, prepares, placesit in his microscope, observes, and records. Now here, it would seem, isPure Science at its purest and Reason in its most reasonable aspect. Yetthe acts of faith in this very simple process are, if we considerclosely, simply numberless. The scientist must make acts of faith, certainly reasonable acts, yet none the less of faith, for all that:first, that his fly is not a freak of nature; next, that his lens issymmetrically ground; then that his observation is adequate; then thathis memory has not played him false between his observing and hisrecording that which he has seen. These acts are so reasonable that weforget that they are acts of faith. They are justified by reason beforethey are made, and they are usually, though not invariably, verified byReason afterwards. Yet they are, in their essence, Faith and not Reason. 

So, too, when a child learns a foreign language. Reason justifies him inmaking one act of faith that his teacher is competent, another that hisgrammar is correct, a third that he hears and sees and understandscorrectly the information given him, a fourth that such a languageactually exists. And when he visits France afterwards he can, withinlimits, again verify by his reason the acts of faith which he haspreviously made. Yet none the less they were acts of faith, though theywere reasonable. In a word, then, no acquirement of or progress in anybranch of human knowledge is possible without the exercise of faith. Icannot walk downstairs in the dark without at least as many acts offaith as there are steps in the staircase. Society could not holdtogether another day if mutual faith were wholly wanting among itsunits. Certainly we use reason first to justify our faith, and we reasonlater to verify it. Yet none the less the middle step is faith. Columbusreasoned first that there must be a land beyond the Atlantic, and heused that same reason later to verify his discovery. Yet without asublime act of faith between these processes, without that almostreckless moment in which he first weighed anchor from Europe, reasonwould never have gone beyond speculative theorizing. Faith made real forhim what Reason suggested. Faith actually accomplished that of whichReason could only dream. 

III. Turn now to the coming of Jesus Christ on earth. He came, as weknow now, a Divine Teacher from heaven to make a Revelation from God; Hecame, that is, to demand from men a sublime Act of Faith in Himself. ForHe Himself was Incarnate Wisdom, and He demanded, therefore, as noneelse can demand it, a supreme acceptance of His claim. No progress inDivine knowledge, as He Himself tells us, is possible, then, withoutthis initial act. _Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as alittle child shall not enter into it_. Every soul that is to receivethis teaching in its entirety must first accept the Teacher and sit atHis feet. 

Yet He did not make this claim merely on His own unsupported word. Hepresented His credentials, so to say; He fulfilled prophecy; He wroughtmiracles; He satisfied the moral sense. _Believe Me_, He says, _for thevery works' sake_. Before, then, demanding the fundamental act of Faithon which the reception of Revelation must depend, He took pains to makethis Act of Faith reasonable. "You see what I do, " He said in effect, "you have observed My life, My words, My actions. Now is it not inaccordance with Reason that you should grant My claims? Can you explainaway, _reasonably_, on any other grounds than those which I state, thephenomena of My life?"

Certainly, then, He appealed to Reason; He appealed to Private Judgment, since that, up to that moment, was all that His hearers possessed. But, in demanding an Act of Faith, He appealed to Private Judgment to setitself aside; He appealed to Reason as to whether it were not Reasonableto stand aside for the moment and let Faith take its place. And we knowhow His disciples responded. _Whom do you say that I am?. .. Thou art theChrist, the Son of the Living God. _

At that instant, then, a new stage was begun. They had used their Reasonand their Private Judgment, and, aided by His grace, had concluded thatthe next reasonable step was that of Faith. Up to that point they hadobserved, dissected, criticized, and analyzed His words; they hadexamined, that is, His credentials. And now it was Reason itself thaturged them towards Faith, Reason that abdicated what had hitherto been, its right and its duty, that Faith might assume her proper place. Henceforth, then, their attitude must be a different one. Up to now theyhad used their Reason to examine His claim; now it was Faith, aided andurged by Reason, which accepted it. 

Yet even now Reason's work is not done, though its scope in future ischanged. Reason no longer examines whether He be God; Faith hasaccepted it: yet Reason has to be as active as ever; for Reason now mustbegin with all its might the task of understanding His Revelation. Faithhas given them, so to speak, casket after casket of jewels; every wordthat Jesus Christ henceforth speaks to them is a very mine of treasure, absolutely true since He is known to be a Divine Teacher Who has givenit. And Reason now begins her new work, not of justifying Faith, but, soto say, of interpreting it; not of examining His claims, since thesehave been once for all accepted, but of examining, understanding, andassimilating all that He reveals. 

III. Turn now to Catholicism. 

It is the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church only, that acts asdid Jesus Christ and offers an adequate object to Reason and Faithalike. For, first, it is evident that if Christ intended His Revelationto last through all time, He must have designed a means by which itshould last, an Authority that should declare and preserve it as HeHimself delivered it. And next, it is evident that since the CatholicChurch alone even claims that prerogative, clearly and coherently, herright to represent that Authority is in proportion to the clearness andcoherence of her claim. Or, again, she advances in support of that claimprecisely those same credentials as did He: she points to her miracles, her achievements, the fulfilment of prophecy, the unity of her teaching, the appeal to men's moral sense--all of them appeals to Reason, andappeals which lead up, as did His, to the supreme claim, which He alsomade, to demand an Act of Faith in herself as a Divine Teacher. 

For she alone demands it. Other denominations of Christendom point to aBook, or to the writings of Fathers, or to the example of their members, and she too does these things. But it is she alone who appeals to thesethings not as final in themselves, not as constituting in themselves afinal court of appeal, but as indicating as that court of appeal her ownLiving Voice. _Believe me, for the works' sake_, she too says. "Use yourreason to the full to examine my credentials; study prophecy, history, the Fathers--study my claims in any realm in which your intellect iscompetent--and then see if it is not after all supremely reasonable forReason to abdicate that particular throne on which she has sat so longand to seat Faith there instead? Certainly follow your Reason and useyour private judgment, for at present you have no other guide; and then, please God, aided by Faith, Reason will itself bow before Faith, andtake her own place henceforth, not on the throne, but on the steps thatlead to it. "

Is Reason, then, to be silent henceforth? Why, the whole of theologygives the answer. Did Newman cease to think when he became a Catholic?Did Thomas Aquinas resign his intellect when he devoted himself tostudy? Not for one instant is Reason silent. On the contrary, she isactive as never before. Certainly she is no longer occupied inexamining as to whether the Church is divine, but instead she is busied, with incredible labours, in examining what follows from that fact, insorting the new treasures that are opened to her with the dawn ofRevelation upon her eyes, in arranging, deducting, and understanding thedetails and structure of the astonishing Vision of Truth. And more, sheis as inviolate as ever. For never can there be presented to her onearticle of Faith that gives the lie to her own nature, since Revelationand Reason cannot contradict one the other. She has learned, indeed, that the mysteries of God often transcend her powers, that she cannotfathom the infinite with the finite; yet never for one moment is shebidden to evacuate her own position or believe that which she perceivesto be untrue. She has learned her limitations, and with that has come tounderstand her inviolable rights. 

See, then, how the features of Christ look out through the lineaments ofHis Church. She alone dares to claim an act of Divine Faith in herself, since it is He Who speaks in her Voice. She alone, since she is Divine, bids the wisest men _become as little children_ at her feet and endowslittle children with the wisdom of the ancients. Yet, on the other hand, in her magnificent Humanity, she has produced through the exercise ofilluminated human Reason such a wealth of theology as the world hasnever seen. Is it any wonder that the world thinks both her Faith andReason alike too extreme? For her Faith rises from her Divinity and herReason from her Humanity; and such an outpouring of Divinity and such anemphatic Humanity, such a superb confidence in God's revelation and suchuntiring labours upon the contents of that Revelation, are altogetherbeyond the imagination of a world that in reality, fears both Faith andReason alike. 

At her feet, and hers only, then, do the wisest and the simple kneeltogether--St. Thomas and the child, St. Augustine and the "charcoalburner"; as diverse, in their humanity, as men can be; as united in thelight of Divinity as only those can be who have found it. 

So, then, she goes forward to victory. "First use your reason, " shecries to the world, "to see whether I be not Divine! Then, impelled byReason and aided by Grace, rise to Faith. Then once more call up yourReason, to verify and understand those mysteries which you accept astrue. And so, little by little, vistas of truth will open about you anddoctrines glow with an undreamed-of light. So Faith will be interpretedby Reason and Reason hold up the hands of Faith, until you come indeedto the unveiled vision of the Truth whose feet already you grasp in loveand adoration; until you see, face to face in Heaven, Him Who is at oncethe Giver of Reason and the _Author of Faith_. "

VII

AUTHORITY AND LIBERTY

_The truth shall make you free_. --JOHN VIII. 32. 

_Bringing into captivity every understanding to the obedience ofChrist_. --II COR. X. 5. 

We have already considered in outline the relations between Faith andReason; how each, in its own province, is supreme and how each, in itsturn, supports and ratifies the other. We pass on to a development ofthat theme, springing almost immediately out of it, namely, therelations between Authority and Liberty. And we will begin thatconsideration, as before, as it is illustrated by the accusations of theworld against the Church. Briefly they are stated as follows. 

I. Freedom, we are told, is the note of Christianity as laid down in theGospels, in both discipline and doctrine. Jesus Christ came into theworld largely for this very purpose, to substitute the New Law for theOld and thereby to free men from the complicated theology and theminutia of religious routine which characterized men's attempts toreduce that Old Law to practice. The Old Law may or may not have beenperfectly adapted, when first it was given, to the needs of God'speople in the early stages of Jewish civilization; but at any rate it iscertain, from a hundred texts in the Gospel, that Jesus Christ in Hisday found it an intolerable slavery laid upon the religious life of thepeople. Theology had degenerated into an incredible hair-splittingsystem of dogma, and discipline had degenerated into a multitude ofirritating observances. 

Jesus Christ, then, in the place of all this, preached a Creed that wasessentially simple, and simultaneously substituted for the elaborateceremonialism of the Pharisees the spirit of liberty. The dogma that Hepreached was little more than that God is the Father of all and that allmen therefore are brothers; "discipline" in the ordinary sense of theword is practically absent from the Gospel, and as for ceremonial thereis none, except such as is necessary for the performance of the twoextremely simple rites that He instituted, Baptism and the Lord'sSupper. 

Now this supposed spirit of liberty, we are informed, is to-day to befound only in Protestantism. In that system, if it can strictly becalled one, and in that system only, may a man exercise that freedomwhich was secured to him by Jesus Christ. First, in doctrine, he maychoose, weigh, and examine for himself, within the wide limits whichalone Christ laid down, those doctrines or hopes which commendthemselves to his intellect; and next, in matters of discipline, again, he may choose for himself those ways of life and action that he mayfind helpful to his spiritual development. He may worship, for example, in any church that he prefers, attend those services and those onlywhich commend themselves to his taste; he may eat or not eat this orthat food, as he likes, and order his day, generally, as it pleases him. And all this, we are informed, is of the very spirit of New TestamentChristianity. _The Truth has made him free_, as Christ Himself promised. 

The Catholic Church, on the other hand, is essentially a Church ofslavery. First, in discipline, an enormous weight of observances andduties is laid upon her children, comparable only to the Pharisaicsystem. The Catholic must worship in this church and not in that, inthis manner and not in the other. He must observe places and days andtimes, and that not only in religious matters but in secular. He musteat this food on this day and that on the other; he must frequent thesacraments at specified periods; he must perform certain actions andrefrain from others, and that in matters in themselves indifferent. 

In dogma, too, no less is the burden that he must bear. Not only are thesimple words of Christ developed into a vast theological system by theChurch's officials, but the whole of this system is laid, as of faith, down to its minutest details, on the shoulders of the unhappy believer. He may not choose between this or that theory of the mode of Christ'sPresence in the Eucharist; he must accept precisely that, and no other, which his Church has elaborated. 

In fact, in doctrine and in discipline alike, the Church has gone backto precisely that old reign of tyranny which Christ abolished. TheCatholic, unlike the Protestant who has retained the spirit of liberty, finds himself in the same case as that under which Israel itself oncegroaned. He is a slave and not a child; he binds his own limbs, as theold phrase says, by his act of faith and puts the other end of the chaininto the hands of the priest. Such, in outline, is the charge againstus. 

 * * * * *

Now much of it is so false that it needs no refutation. It is, forexample, entirely false that New Testament theology is simple. It is farmore true to say that, compared with the systematized theology of theChurch, it is bewilderingly complex and puzzling, and how complex andpuzzling it is, is indicated by the hundreds of creeds which Protestantshave made out of it, each creed claiming, respectively, to be its oneand only proper interpretation. Men have only come to think it "simple"in modern days by desperately eliminating from it every element on whichall Protestants are not agreed. The residuum is indeed "simple. " Only itis not the New Testament theology! Dogmas such as that of the BlessedTrinity, of the Procession of the Holy Ghost, of the nature of grace andof sin--these, whether as held by orthodox or unorthodox, are at anyrate not simple, and it is merely untrue to say that Christ made nostatements on these points, however they may be understood. Further, itis merely untrue to say that Protestant theology is "simple"; it isevery whit as elaborate as Catholic theology and considerably morecomplex in those points in which Protestant divines are not agreed. Thecontroversies on Justification in which such men as Calvin and Luther, with their disciples, continually engaged are fully as complicated asany disputations on Grace between Jesuits and Dominicans. 

Yet the general contention is plain enough--that on the whole theCatholic is bound to believe a certain set of dogmas, while theProtestant is free to accept or reject them. Therefore, it is argued, the Protestant is "free" and the Catholic is not. And this brings usstraight to the consideration of the relations between Authority andLiberty. 

II. What, then, is Religious Liberty? It is necessary to begin byforming some idea as to what it is that is meant by the word in otherthan religious matters. 

Very briefly it may be said that an individual enjoys social libertywhen he is able to obey and to use the laws and powers of his truenature, and that a community enjoys it when all its members are able todo so without interfering unduly one with the other. The more completeis this ability, the more perfect is Liberty. 

A remarkable paradox at once presents itself--that Liberty can only besecured by Laws. Where there are no laws, or too few, to secure it, slavery immediately appears, no less surely than when there are toomany; for the stronger individuals are, by the absence of law, enabledto tyrannize over the weaker. Even the vast and complex legislation ofour own days is designed to increase and not to fetter liberty, and itsgreater complexity is necessitated by the greater complexity and themore numerous interrelationships of modern society. Laws, of course, maybe unwise or excessively minute or deliberately enslaving; yet this doesnot affect the point that for all that Laws are necessary to thepreservation of Liberty. Merchants, women and children, and citizensgenerally, can only enjoy rightful liberty if they are protected bylaws. Only that man is free, then, who is most carefully guarded. 

In the same manner Scientific Liberty does not consist in the absence ofknowledge, or of scientific dogmas, but in their presence. We aresurrounded by innumerable facts of nature, and that man is free who isfully aware of those which affect his own life. It is true, for example, that two and two make four, and that heavy bodies tend to fall towardsthe centre of the earth; and it can only be a very superficial thinkerwho considers that to be ignorant of these facts is to be free from theenslaving dogmas of them. If I am ignorant of them I am, of course, in asense at liberty to believe that two and two make five, and to jump offthe roof of my house; yet this is not Liberty at all in the sense inwhich reasonable people use the word, since my knowledge of the lawsenables me to be effective and, in fact, to survive in the midst of aworld where they happen to be true. That man, then, is more truly "free"whose intellect is informed of and submits to these laws, than is theman whose intellect is unaware of them. Marconi's intellect submits tothe laws of lightning and he is thereby enabled to avail himself ofthem. Ajax is unaware of them and is accordingly destroyed by theiraction. 

_The Truth_, then, _makes us free_. The State which controls men'sactions and educates their intellects, which, in a word, enforces theknowledge of truth and compels obedience to it, is actually freeing itscitizens by that process. It is only by a misuse of words or a failureto grasp ideas that I can maintain that an ignorant savage is more freethan an educated man. It is true that I am, in a sense, "free" to thinkthat two and two make five, if I have not learned arithmetic; on theother hand, when I learn that they make four I rise into that higher andmore real liberty which a knowledge of arithmetic bestows. I am moreeffective, not less so; I am more free to exercise my powers and use theforces of the world in which I live, and not less free, when I havesubmitted my intellect to facts. 

III. (i) Now the soul too has an environment. Men may differ as to itsnature and its conditions, but all who believe in the soul at allbelieve also that it has an environment, and that this environment is asmuch in the realm of Law as is the natural world itself. Prayer, forexample, elevates the soul, base thinking degrades it. 

Now the laws of this environment were true even before Christ came. David knew, at any rate, something of penitence and of the guilt of sin, and Nathan knew something, at least, of the forgiveness of sins and oftheir temporal punishment. Christ came, then, with this object amongstothers: that He might reveal the laws of Grace and convey to men's mindssome at least of the facts of the spiritual life amongst which theylived. He came, moreover, partly to modify the workings of these laws, to release some more fully, and to restrain others; in a word, to be theRevealer of Truth and the Administrator of Grace. 

He came then, to increase men's liberty by increasing their knowledge, as, in another sphere, the scientist comes to us with the same purpose. Here, for example, is the law that murder is a sin before God and bringsits consequences with it, a law stated briefly in the commandment _Thoushall not kill_. But our Divine Lord revealed more of the workings ofthis law than men had hitherto recognized. _I say unto you_, declaredChrist, _that whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer. _ He revealed, that is to say, the fact that this law runs even in the realm ofthought, that the hating spirit incurs the guilt and punishment ofmurder, and not merely the murderous action. Were men less free whenthey learned that fact? Not unless I am less free than I was before, when I learn for the first time that lightning kills. Christ came, then, to reveal the _Truth that makes us free_, and He does so by informingour intellects and enabling us to _bring into captivity everyunderstanding to _His obedience_. 

(ii) Turn now to the Catholic Church. Here is a Society whose functionit is to preserve and apply the teaching of Christ; to analyze it and tostate it in forms or systems which every generation can receive. Forthis purpose, then, she draws up not merely a Creed--which is thesystematic statement of the Christian Revelation--but disciplinary rulesand regulations that will make this Creed and the life that isconformable to it more easy of realization, and all this she does withthe express object of enabling the individual soul to respond to herspiritual environment and to rise to the full exercise of her powers andrights. As the scientist and the statesmen take, respectively, the greatlaws of nature and society and reduce them to rules and codes, yetwithout adding or taking away from these facts, that are true whetherthey are popularly recognized or not--and all with the purpose not ofdiminishing but of increasing the general liberty--so the Church, divinely safeguarded too in the process, takes the Revelation of Christand by her dogma and her discipline popularizes it, so to speak, andmakes it at once comprehensible and effective. 

What, then, is this foolish cry about the slavery of dogma? How canTruth make men anything except more free? Unless a man is prepared tosay that the scientist enslaves his intellect by telling him facts, hedare not say that the Church fetters his intellect by defining dogma. Christ did not condemn the Pharisaic system because it was a system, butbecause it was Pharisaic; because, that is, it was not true; because itobscured instead of revealing the true relations between God and man;because it _made the Word of God of none effect through its traditions_. 

But the Catholic system has the appearance of enslaving men? Why yes;for the only way of aiming at and using effectively the _truth thatmakes us free_ is by _bringing into captivity every understanding to theobedience of Christ_. 

VIII

CORPORATENESS AND INDIVIDUALISM

_He that shall lose his life for My sake shall find it. For what doth itprofit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his ownsoul?_--MATT. XVI. 25, 26. 

No recorded word of our Lord better illustrates than does this thestartling and paradoxical manner of His teaching. For He Who _knew whatwas in man_, Who spoke always down to man's deepest interests, dwelt andspoke therefore in that realm of truth where man's own paradoxicalnature is most manifest; where his interests appear to flourish only bybeing ruthlessly pruned; where he rises to the highest development ofself only by self-mortification. This is, in fact, the very lessonChrist teaches in these words. To _find the life_ is the highest objectof every man and the end for which he was created; yet this can beattained only by the _losing of it for Christ's sake_. Individuality canbe preserved only by the sacrifice of Individualism. Let us break upthis thought and consider it more in detail. 

I. (i) Catholics, it is said, are the most fundamentally selfish peoplein the whole world, since all that they do and say and think isdirected and calculated, so far as they are "good Catholics, " to thesalvation of their own souls. It is this that continually crops up intheir conversation, and this that presumably is their chiefpre-occupation. Yet surely this, above all methods, is the very worstfor achieving such an end. One does not pull up flowers to see how theyare growing. The very secret of health is to be unconscious of it. Catholics, on the other hand, scarcely ever do anything else; they arefor ever examining themselves, for ever going to confession, for everdeveloping and cultivating the narrowest virtues. The whole science ofCasuistry, for example, is directed to nothing else but this--the exactdefinition of those limits within which the salvation of the soul issecure and beyond which it is imperilled; and Casuistry, as we all know, has a stifling and deadening influence upon all who study it. 

Again, see how the true development and expansion of the soul mustnecessarily be hindered by such an ideal. "I must not read this book, however brilliant, since it might be dangerous to my faith. I must notmix in this company, however charming, since evil communications corruptgood manners. " What kind of life is that which must always be checkedand stunted in this fashion? What kind of salvation can there be thatcan only be purchased by the sacrifice of so much that is noble andinspiring? True life consists in experience, not in introspection; ingoing out from self into the world, not in retiring from the worldinwards. Let us therefore live our life without fear, lose ourselves inhumanity, forget self in experience, and leave the rest to God!

(ii) So much for the one side, while from the other comes almostprecisely the opposite criticism. Catholics, it is said, are not nearlyindividualistic enough; on the contrary they are for ever sinkingthemselves and their personalities in the corporate life of the Church. Not only are their outward actions checked and their words guarded, buteven their very consciences and thoughts are informed and made by thecollective conscience and mind of others. It is the highest ambition ofevery good Catholic _sentire cum ecclesia_; not merely to act and speakbut even to think in obedience to others. Now a man's true life, we aretold, consists in an assertion of his own individuality. God has made notwo men the same; the mould was made and broken in each several case. If, therefore, we are to be what He meant us to be, we must make themost of our own personalities; we must think our own thoughts, not otherpeople's, direct our own lives, speak our own minds--so far, of course, as we can do so without interfering with our neighbour's equal liberty. Once more, therefore, we are bidden to live our life to the full; not inthis case, however, because we all share in a common humanity, butbecause we do not!

We Catholics are wrong, therefore, for both reasons and in bothdirections. We are wrong when we put self first and we are wrong when wedo not. We are wrong when we launch out into the current of life, andwrong when we withdraw ourselves from its waters. We are wrong when weinsist upon our personal responsibility, and wrong when we look to theChurch to undertake it. 

II. (i) Here then, indeed, is a Paradox; but it is one which our LordHimself expressly emphasizes. For, first, there is nothing on which Heso repeatedly insists as the supreme and singular value of every soul'ssalvation. If this is not attained, all is lost. _What shall it profit aman if he shall gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his ownsoul?_ All else, then, must be sacrificed if this is in peril. No humanpossession, however great, can be weighed against this. No human tie, however sacred, can hold against its claim. Not only must _houses andlands_, but _father and mother and wives and children_ must take secondplace, so soon as eternal life is at stake. And yet, somehow or another, this salvation can only be attained by loss; self can only live if it bemortified, can only be saved by its own denial. Individuality, as hasbeen said, can only be preserved by the loss of Individualism. 

(ii) But this is not peculiar to the spiritual sphere; it is a paradoxthat is true, in some sense, of life on every plane--civic, intellectual, artistic, human. The man that desires to bring hisintellectual and personal powers to their highest pitch mustcontinually be sinking them, so to speak, in the current of his fellows, continually exhausting, using, and wearing them out. He must risk, andindeed inevitably lose, in a very real sense, his personal point ofview, if he is to have a point of view that is worth possessing; he mustbe content to see his theories and his thoughts modified, merged, changed, and destroyed, if his thought is to be of value. For, so far ashe withdraws himself from his fellows into a physical or mentalisolation, so far he approaches egotistic madness. He cannot grow unlesshe decreases; he cannot remain himself unless he ceases to be himself. 

So, too, is it in civic and artistic life. The citizen who truly livesto the State of which he is a member--the man to whom his country raisesa monument, for example--is one, always, who has _lost himself_ for hisnation, whether he has died in battle or sacrificed himself in politicsor philanthropy. And the citizen who has merely hugged his citizenshipto himself, who has enjoyed all the privileges he can get and paidnothing for them, --least of all himself--who has, so to say, _gained thewhole world_, has simultaneously lost himself indeed and is forgottenwithin a year of his death. So with the artist. The man who has made hisart serve him, who has employed it, let us say, purely for the sake ofthe money he could get out of it, who has kept it within severe limits, who has been merely prudent and orderly and restrained, this man has, ina sense, _saved his own life_; yet simultaneously he has lost it. Butthe man to whom art is a passion, to whom nothing else is comparativelyof any value, who has plunged himself in his art, has dedicated to ithis days and his nights, has sacrificed to it every power of his beingand every energy of his mind and body, this man has indeed _losthimself_. Yet he lives in his art as the other has not, he has _savedhimself_ in a sense of which the other knows nothing; and exactly inproportion as he has succeeded in his self-abnegation, so far has heattained, as we say, immortality. There is not, then, one sphere of lifein which the paradox is not true. The great historical lovers inromance, the pioneers of science, the immortals in every plane, areprecisely those that have fulfilled on lower levels the spiritualaphorism of Jesus Christ. 

(iii) Turn, then, once more to the Catholic Church and see how in theLife which she offers, as in none other, there is presented to us ameans of fulfilling our end. 

For it is she alone who even demands in the spiritual sphere a completeand entire abnegation of self. From every other Christian body comes thecry, Save your soul, assert your individuality, follow your conscience, form your opinions; while she, and she alone, demands from her childrenthe sacrifice of their intellect, the submitting of their judgment, theinforming of their conscience by hers, and the obedience of their willto her lightest command. For she, and she alone, is conscious ofpossessing that Divinity, in complete submission to which lies thesalvation of Humanity. For she, as the coherent and organic mysticalBody of Christ, calls upon those who look to her to become, not merelyher children, but her very members; not to obey her as soldiers obey aleader or citizens a Government, but as the hands and eyes and feet obeya brain. Once, therefore, I understand this, I understand too how it isthat by being lost in her I save myself; that I lose only that whichhinders my activity, not that which fosters it. For when is my hand mostitself? When separated from the body, by paralysis or amputation? Orwhen, in vital union with the brain, with every fibre alert and everynerve alive, it obeys in every gesture and receives in every sensation alife infinitely vaster and higher than any which it might, temporarily, enjoy in independence? It is true that its capacity for pain is thegreater when it is so united, and that it would cease to suffer if onceits separation were accomplished; yet, simultaneously, it would lose allthat for which God made it and, _saving itself_, would be _lost_ indeed. 

_I live_, then, the perfect Catholic may say, as none other can say, when I have ceased to be myself. And _yet not I_, since I have lost myIndividualism. No longer do I claim any activity at all on my ownbehalf; no longer do I demand to form my opinions, to follow my ownconscience apart from that informing of it that comes from God, or tolive my own life. Yet in losing my Individualism I have won myIndividuality, for I have found my true place at last. I have _lost thewhole world?_ Yes, so far as that world is separate from or antagonisticto God's will; but I have _gained my own soul_ and attained immortality. For it is _not I that live, but Christ that liveth in me_. 

IX

MEEKNESS AND VIOLENCE

_Blessed are the meek_. --MATT. V. 4. 

_The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear itaway_. --MATT. XI. 12. 

We have already considered the Church's relations towards such things aswealth and human influence and power, how she will sometimes use andsometimes disdain them. Let us now penetrate a little deeper andunderstand the spirit that underlies and explains this varying attitudeof hers. 

I. (i) It has been charged against Christianity in general, andtherefore implicitly and supremely against the Church that was for solong its sole embodiment and is still, alone, its adequaterepresentative, that it has fostered virtues which retard progress. Progress, in the view of the German philosopher who explicitly made thischarge, is merely natural both in its action and its end; and Nature, aswe are well aware, knows nothing of forgiveness or compassion ortenderness: on the contrary she moves from lower to higher forms byforces that are their precise opposite. The wounded stag is notprotected by his fellows, but gored to death; the old wolf is torn topieces, the sick lion wanders away to die of starvation, and all theseinstincts, we are informed, have for their object the gradualimprovement of the breed by the elimination of the weak and ineffective. So should it be, he tells us, with man, and the extreme Eugenists echohis teaching. Christianity, on the other hand, deliberately protects theweak and teaches that the sacrifice of the strong is supreme heroism. Christianity has raised hospitals and refuges for the infirm, seeking topreserve those very types which Nature, if she had her way, wouldeliminate. Christianity, then, is the enemy of the human race and notits friend, since Christianity has retarded, as no other religion hasever succeeded in retarding, the appearance of that superman whom Natureseeks to evolve. .. . It is scarcely to be wondered at that the teacher ofsuch a doctrine himself died insane. 

A parallel doctrine is taught largely to-day by persons who callthemselves practical and businesslike. Meekness and gentleness andcompassion, they tell their sons, are very elegant and graceful virtuesfor those who can afford them, for women and children who are more orless sheltered from the struggle of life, and for feeble and ineffectivepeople who are capable of nothing else. But for men who have to maketheir own way in the world and intend to win success there, a more sterncode is necessary; from these there is demanded such a rule of action asNature herself dictates. Be self-confident and self-assertive then, notmeek. Remember that the weakness of your neighbour is your ownopportunity. Take care of number one and let the rest take care ofthemselves. A man does not go into the stock-exchange or into commercein order to exhibit Christian virtues there, but business qualities. Ina word, Christianity, so far as it affects material or commercial orpolitical progress, is a weakness rather than a strength, an enemyrather than a friend. 

(ii) But if, on the one side, the gentleness and non-resistanceinculcated by Christianity form the material of one charge against theChurch, on the other side, no less, she is blamed for her violence andintransigeance. Catholics are not yielding enough, we are told, to betrue followers of the meek Prophet of Galilee, not gentle enough toinherit the blessing which He pronounced. On the contrary there are nopeople so tenacious, so obstinate, and even so violent as theseprofessed disciples of Jesus Christ. See the way, for example, in whichthey cling to and insist upon their rights; the obstacles they raise, for example, to reasonable national schemes of education or to asensible system in the divorce courts. And above all, consider theirappalling and brutal violence as exhibited in such institutions as thatof the Index and Excommunication, the fierceness with which they insistupon absolute and detailed obedience to authority, the ruthlessness withwhich they cast out from their company those who will not pronouncetheir shibboleths. It is true that in these days they can only enforcetheir claims by spiritual threatenings and penalties, but history showsus that they would do more if they could. The story of the racks and thefires of the Inquisition shows plainly enough that the Church once used, and therefore, presumably, would use again if she could, carnal weaponsin her spiritual warfare. Can anything be more unlike the gentle Spiritof Him Who, _when He was reviled, reviled not again;_ of Him Who bademen to _learn of Him, for He was meek and lowly of heart_, and so _findrest to their souls?_

Here, then, is the Paradox, and here are two characteristics of theCatholic Church: that she is at once too meek and too self-assertive, too gentle and too violent. It is a paradox exactly echoed by our DivineLord Himself, Who in the Upper Chamber bade His disciples who _had nosword_ to _sell their cloaks and buy them_, and Who yet, in the gardenof Gethsemane, commanded the one disciple who had taken Him at His wordto _put up the sword into its sheath_, telling him that _they who tookthe sword should perish by it_. It is echoed yet again in His action, first in taking the scourge into His own Hand, in the temple courts, andthen in baring His shoulders to that same scourge in the hands ofothers. How, then, is this Paradox to be reconciled?

II. The Church, let us remind ourselves again, is both Human and Divine. 

(i) She consists of human persons, and those persons are attached bothto one another and to the world outside by a perfectly balanced systemof human rights known as the Law of Justice. This Law of Justice, thoughcoming indeed from God, is, in a sense, natural and human; it exists tosome extent in all societies, as well as being closely defined andworked out in the Old Law given on Sinai. It is a Law which men couldhave worked out, at any rate in its main principles, by the light ofreason only, unaided by Revelation, and it is a Law, further, sofundamental that no Revelation could conceivably ever outrage or set itaside. 

At the coming of Christ into the world, however, Supernatural Charitycame with Him. The Law of Justice still remained; men still had theirrights on which they might insist, still had their rights which noChristian may refuse to recognize. But such was the torrent of Divinegenerosity which Christ exhibited, so overwhelming was the Vision whichHe revealed of the supernatural charity of God towards men, that a setof ideals sprang into life such as the world had never dreamed of; more, Charity came with such power that her commands actually overruled inmany instances the feeble claims of Justice, so that she bade menhenceforward to forgive, for example, not merely according to Justice, but according to her own Divine nature, to _forgive unto seventy timesseven_, to give _good measure, heaped up and running over_, and not thebare minimum which men had merely earned. 

It was from this advent of Charity, then, that all these essentiallyChristian virtues of generosity and meekness and self-sacrifice sprangwhich Nietsche condemned as hostile to material progress. 

For, from henceforth, if _a man take thy coat, let him take thy cloakalso; if he will compel thee to go with him one mile, go two; if hestrike thee on one cheek, turn to him the other also_. The Law ofNatural justice is transcended and the Law of Charity and Sacrificereigns instead. _Resist not evil_; do not insist always, that is to say, on your natural rights; give men more than their due, and be yourselfcontent with less. _Learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, andfind rest to your souls. Forgive one another your trespasses_ with thesame generous charity with which God has forgiven and will forgive youyours. _Judge not and you shall not be judged. _ Do not, in personalmatters, insist upon bare justice for yourself, but act on that scaleand by those principles by which God Himself has dealt with you. 

Meekness, then, is undoubtedly a Christian virtue. Sometimes it isobligatory, sometimes it is but a Counsel of Perfection; it stands, inany case, high among those ideals which it has been the glory ofChristianity to create. 

(ii) But there are other elements in life besides the human and thenatural, beyond those personal rights and claims which a Christian may, if he is aiming at perfection, set aside out of charity. The Church isDivine as well as Human. 

For the Church has entrusted to her, besides the rights of men, whichmay be sacrificed by their possessors, the rights and claims of God, which none but He can set aside. He has given into her keeping, forexample, a Revelation of truths and principles which, springing out ofHis own Nature or of His Will, are as immutable and eternal as Himself. And it is precisely in defence of these truths and principles that theChurch exhibits that which the world calls _intransigeance_ and JesusChrist _violence_. 

Here, for example, is the right of a baptized Catholic child to beeducated in his religion, or rather, the right of God Himself to teachthat child in the manner He has ordained. Here is the revealed truththat marriage is indissoluble; here that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Now these are not human rights or opinions at all--rights and opinionswhich men, urged by charity or humility, can set aside or waive in theface of opposition. They rest on an entirely different basis; they are, so to speak, the inalienable possessions of God; and it would neither becharity nor humility, but sheer treachery, for the Church to exhibitmeekness or pliancy in matters such as these, given to her as they are, not to dispose of, but to guard intact. On the contrary here, exactly, comes the command, _He that hath not, let him sell his cloak and buy asword, _, for here comes the line between the Divine and the Human; letall personal possessions go, all merely natural rights and claims beyielded, and let a sword take their place. For here is a matter thatmust be _resisted, even unto blood_. 

The Catholic Church then is, and always will be, _violent_ andintransigeant when the rights of God are in question. She will beabsolutely ruthless, for example, towards heresy, for heresy affects notpersonal matters on which Charity may yield, but a Divine right on whichthere must be no yielding. Yet, simultaneously, she will be infinitelykind towards the heretic, since a thousand human motives andcircumstances may come in and modify his responsibility. At a word ofrepentance she will readmit his person into her treasury of souls, butnot his heresy into her treasury of wisdom; she will strike his nameeagerly and freely from her black list of the rebellious, but not hisbook from the pages of her Index. She exhibits meekness towards him and_violence_ towards his error; since he is human, but her Truth isDivine. 

It is, then, from a modern confusion of thought with regard to therealms of the Divine and the Human that the amazing inability arises, onthe world's part, to understand the respective principles on which theCatholic Church acts in these two and utterly separate departments. Theworld considers it reasonable for a country to defend its materialpossessions by the sword, but intolerant and unreasonable for the Churchto condemn, _resisting even unto blood_, principles which she considerserroneous or false. The Church, on the other hand, urges her childrenagain and again to yield rather than to fight when merely materialpossessions are at stake, since Charity permits and sometimes evencommands men to be content with less than their own rights, and yetagain, when a Divine truth or right is at stake, here she will resistunfaltering and undismayed, since she cannot be "charitable" with whatis not her own; here she will _sell her cloak_ and _buy that sword_which, when the dispute was on merely temporal matters, she thrust backagain into its sheath. 

To-day[1] as Christ rides into Jerusalem we see, as in a mirror, thisParadox made plain. _Thy King cometh to thee, meek_. Was there ever somean a Procession as this? Was there ever such meekness and charity? HeWho, as His personal right, is attended in heaven by a _multitude onwhite horses_, now, in virtue of His Humanity, is content with a fewfishermen and a crowd of children. He to Whom, in His personal right, the harpers and the angels make eternal music is content, since He hasbeen made Man for our sakes, with the discordant shoutings of thiscrowd. He Who _rode on the Seraphim and came flying on the wings of thewind_ sits on the colt of an ass. He comes, meek indeed, from the goldenstreets of the Heavenly Jerusalem to the foul roads of the Earthly, laying aside His personal rights since He is that very Fire of Charityby which Christians relinquish theirs. 

[Footnote 1: This sermon was preached on Palm-Sunday. ]

But, for all that, it is _riding_ that _thy King cometh to thee_. .. . Hewill not relinquish His inalienable claim and He will have nothingessential left out. He has His royal escort, even though a ragged one;He will have His spearmen, even though their spears be only of palm; Hewill have His heralds to proclaim Him, however much the devout Phariseesmay be offended by their proclamation; He will ride into His own RoyalCity, even though that City casts Him out, and He will have HisCoronation, even though it be with thorns. So, too, the Catholic Churchadvances through the ages. 

In merely human rights and personal matters again and again she willyield up all that she has, making, it may be, but one protest forJustice' sake and then no more. And she will urge her children to do thesame. If the world will let her have no jewels, then she will put glassbeads in her monstrance, and for marble she will use plaster, and tinselfor gold. 

But she will have her Procession and insist upon her Royalty. It mayseem as poor and as mean and as tawdry as the entrance of Christ Himselfthrough the royal gate; for she will yield up all that the world demandsof her, so long as her Divine Right itself remains intact. She willissue her orders, though few be found to obey them; she will cast outfrom her the rebellious who question her authority, and cleanse herTemple Courts even though with a scourge at which men mock. She willgive up all that is merely human, if the world will have it so, and will_resist not evil_ if it merely concerns herself. But there is one thingwhich she will not renounce, one thing she will claim, even with_violence_ and "intransigeance, " and that is the Royalty with which GodHimself has crowned her. 

X

THE SEVEN WORDS

THE "THREE HOURS"

INTRODUCTION

The value, to the worshippers, of the Devotion of the Three Hours' Agonyis in proportion to the degree in which they understand that they arewatching not so much the tragedy of nineteen hundred years ago as thetragedy of their own lives and times. Merely to dwell on the Death ofChrist on Calvary would scarcely avail them more than to study thedetails of the assassination of Caesar at the foot of Pompey's statue. Such considerations might indeed be interesting, exciting, and even alittle instructive or inspiring; but they could not be better than this, and they might be no better than morbid and harmful. 

The Death of Christ, however, is unique because it is, so to say, universal. It is more than the crowning horror of all murderoushistories; it is more even than the _type_ of all the outrages that menhave ever committed against God. For it is just the very enactment, uponthe historical stage of the world, of those repeated interior tragediesthat take place in every soul that rejects or insults Him; since the Godwhom we crucify within is the same God that was once crucified without. There is not an exterior detail in the Gospel which may not beinteriorly repeated in the spiritual life of a sinner; the processrecorded by the Evangelists must be more or less identical with theprocess of all apostasy from God. 

For, first, there is the Betrayal of Conscience, as a beginning of thetragedy; its betrayal by those elements of our nature that are intendedas its friends and protectors--by Emotion or Forethought, for example. Then Conscience is led away, bound, to be judged; for there can be nomortal sin without deliberation, and no man ever yet fell into itwithout conducting first a sort of hasty mock-trial or two in which asham Prudence or a false idea of Liberty solemnly decide that Conscienceis in the wrong. Yet even then Conscience persists, and so He is made toappear absurd and ridiculous, and set beside the Barabbas of a coarseand sturdy lower nature that makes no high pretensions and boasts of it. And so the drama proceeds and Conscience is crucified: Conscience beginsto be silent, breaking the deepening gloom now and again with proteststhat grow weaker every time, and at last Conscience dies indeed. Andthenceforward there can be no hope, save in the miracle of Resurrection. 

This Cross of Calvary, then, is not a mere type or picture; it is afact identical with that so dreadfully familiar to us in spiritual life. For Christ is not one Person, and Conscience something else, but it isactually Christ who speaks in Conscience and Christ, therefore, Who iscrucified in mortal sin. 

Let us, then, be plain with ourselves. We are watching not only Christ'sDeath but our own, since we are watching the Death of Christ _Who is ourLife_. 

THE FIRST WORD

_Father forgive them, for they know not what they do_. 

In previous considerations we have studied the Life of Christ in HisMystical Body from an angle at which the strange and innumerableparadoxes which abound in all forms of life at a certain depth becomevisible. And we have seen how these paradoxes lie in those strata, so tosay, where the Divinity and the Humanity meet. Christ is God and Godcannot die; therefore Christ became man in order to be able to do so. The Church is Divine and therefore all-holy, but she dwells in a Body ofsinful Humanity and reckons her sinners to be her children and membersno less than her saints. 

We will continue to regard the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the Wordswhich He spoke from the Cross from the same angle, and to find, therefore, the same characteristic paradoxes and mysteries in all thatwe see. In the First Word we meet the _Paradox of Divine Forgiveness_. 

I. Ordinary human forgiveness is no more than a natural virtue, resulting from a natural sense of justice, and if a man is normal, hisforgiveness will be a natural and inevitable part of the process ofreconciliation so soon as a certain kind of restitution has been made. For example, a friend of mine sins against me--he injures, perhaps, mygood name; and my natural answer is the emotion of resentment towardshim and, perhaps, of actual revenge. But what I chiefly resent is myfriend's stupidity and his ignorance of my real character. "I am angry, "I say, with perfect sincerity, "not so much at the thing he has said ofme, as at this proof of his incapacity to understand me. I thought hewas my friend, that he was in sympathy with my character or, at least, that he understood it sufficiently to do me justice. But now, from whathe has just said of me, I see that he does not. If the thing he saidwere true of me, the most of my anger would be gone. But I see that hedoes not know me, after all. "

And then, presently, my friend does understand that he has wronged me;that the gossip he repeated or the construction he put upon my actionswas not fair or true. And immediately that I become aware of this, fromhim or from another, my resentment goes, if I have any natural virtue atall; it goes because my wounded pride is healed. I forgive him easilyand naturally because he knows now what he has done. 

II. How entirely different from this easy, self-loving, humanforgiveness is the Divine Forgiveness of Christ! Now it is true that inthe conscience of Pilate, the unjust representative of justice, and inthat thing that called itself conscience in Herod, and in the hearts ofthe priests who denounced their God, and of the soldiers who executedtheir overlord, and of Judas who betrayed his friend, in all these therewas surely a certain uneasiness--such an uneasiness is actually recordedof the first and the last of the list--a certain faint shadow ofperception and knowledge of what it was that they had done and weredoing. And, for the natural man, it would have been comparatively easyto forgive such injuries on that account. "I forgive them, " such a manmight have said from his cross, "because there is just a glimmer ofknowledge left; there is just one spark in their hearts that still doesme justice, and for the sake of that I can try, at least, to put away myresentment and ask God to forgive them. "

But Jesus Christ cries, "Forgive them because they do _not_ know whatthey do! Forgive them because they need it so terribly, since they donot even know that they need it! Forgive in them that which isunforgivable!"

III. Two obvious points present themselves in conclusion. 

(1) First, it is _Divine_ Forgiveness that we need, since no sinner ofus all knows the full malice of sin. One man is a slave, let us say, toa sin of the flesh, and seeks to reassure himself by the reflection thathe injures no one but himself; ignorant as he is of the outrage to Godthe Holy Ghost Whose temple he is ruining. Or a woman repeats againevery piece of slanderous gossip that comes her way and comforts herselfin moments of compunction by reflecting that she "means no harm";ignorant as she is of the discouragement of souls of which she is thecause and of the seeds of distrust and enmity sown among friends. Infact it is incredible that any sinner ever _knows what it is that hedoes_ by sin. We need, therefore, the Divine Forgiveness and not thehuman, the pardon that descends when we are unaware that we must have itor die; the love of the Father Who, _while we are yet a great way off, runs to meet_ us, and Who teaches us for the first time, by the warmthof His welcome, the icy distances to which we had wandered. If we_knew_, anyone could forgive us. It is because we do not that only God, Who knows all things, can forgive us effectively. 

(2) And it is this _Divine_ Forgiveness that we ourselves have to extendto those that sin against us, since only those who so forgive can beforgiven. We must not wait until wounded pride is made whole by theconscious shame of our enemy; until the debt is paid by acknowledgmentand we are complacent once more in the knowledge that justice has beendone to us at last. On the contrary, the only forgiveness that issupernatural, and which, therefore, alone is meritorious, is that whichreach out to men's ignorance and not their knowledge of their need. 

THE SECOND WORD

_Amen I say to thee, to-day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise. _

Our Divine Lord, in this Second Word, immediately applies andillustrates the First and drives its lesson home. He shows us how therain of mercy that poured out of heaven in answer to the prayer He madejust now enlightens the man who, above all others present on Calvary, was the most abjectly ignorant of all; the man who, himself at the veryheart of the tragedy, understood it less, probably, than the smallestchild on the outskirts of the crowd. 

His life had been one long defiance of the laws of both God and man. Hehad been a member of one of those troops of human vermin that crawlround Jerusalem, raiding solitary houses, attacking solitary travellers, guilty of sins at once the bloodiest and the meanest, comparable only tothe French _apaches_ of our own day. Well, he had been gripped at lastby the Roman machine, caught in some sordid adventure, and here, resentful and furious and contemptuous, full of bravado and terror, hesnarled like a polecat at every human face he saw, snarled and spat atthe Divine Face Itself that looked at him from a cross that was like hisown; and, since he had not even a spark of the honour that is reputed toexist "among thieves, " taunted his "fellow criminal" for the folly ofHis "crime. "

"If thou be the Christ, save Thyself and us. "

Again, then, the Paradox is plain enough. Surely an educated priest, ora timid disciple, or a good-hearted dutiful soldier who hated the workhe was at, surely one of these will be the first object of Christ'spardon; and so one of these would have been, if one of ourselves hadhung there. But when God forgives, He forgives the most ignorantfirst--that is, the most remote from forgiveness--and makes, not Peteror Caiphas or the Centurion, but Dismas the thief, the firstfruits ofRedemption. 

I. The first effect of the Divine Mercy is Enlightenment. _Before theycall, I will answer_. Before the thief feels the first pang of sorrowGrace is at work on him, and for the first time in his dreary life hebegins to understand. And an extraordinary illumination shines in hissoul. For no expert penitent after years of spirituality, no sorrowfulsaint, could have prayed more perfectly than this outcast. Hisintellect, perhaps, took in little or nothing of the great forces thatwere active about him and within him; he knew, perhaps, explicitlylittle or nothing of Who this was that hung beside him; yet his soul'sintuition pierces to the very heart of the mystery and expresses itselfin a prayer that combines at once a perfect love, an exquisite humility, an entire confidence, a resolute hope, a clear-sighted faith, and anunutterable patience; his soul blossoms all in a moment: _Lord, rememberme when Thou comest in Thy Kingdom_. He saw the glory behind the shame, the Eternal Throne behind the Cross, and the future behind the present;and he asked only to be _remembered_ when the glory should transfigurethe shame and the Cross be transformed into the Throne; for heunderstood what that remembrance would mean: "_Remember, Lord_, that Isuffered at Thy side. "

II. So perfect, then, are the dispositions formed in him by grace thatat one bound _the last is first_. Not even Mary and John shall have theinstant reward that shall be his; for them there are other gifts, andthe first are those of separation and exile. For the moment, then, thisman steps into the foremost place and they who have hung side by side onCalvary shall walk side by side to meet those waiting souls beyond theveil who will run so eagerly to welcome them. _To-day thou shalt be withMe in Paradise. _

III. Now this Paradox, _the last shall be first_, is an old doctrine ofChrist, so startling and bewildering that He has been forced to repeatit again and again. He taught it in at least four parables: in theparables of _the Lost Piece of Silver, the Lost Sheep, the ProdigalSon_, and _the Vineyard_. The Nine Pieces lie neglected on the table, the Ninety-nine sheep are exiled in the Fold, the Elder Son is, hethinks, overlooked and slighted, and the Labourers complain offavouritism. Yet still, even after all this teaching, the complaint goesup from Christians that God is too loving to be quite just. A convert, perhaps, comes into the Church in middle age and in a few monthsdevelops the graces of Saint Teresa and becomes one of her daughters. Acareless black-guard is condemned to death for murder and three weekslater dies upon the scaffold the death of a saint, at the very head ofthe line. And the complaints seem natural enough. _Thou hast made themequal unto us who have borne the burden and heat of the day_. 

Yet look again, you Elder Sons. Have your religious, careful, timidlives ever exhibited anything resembling that depth of self-abjection towhich the Younger Son has attained? Certainly you have been virtuous andconscientious; after all, it would be a shame if you had not been so, considering the wealth of grace you have always enjoyed. But have youever even striven seriously after the one single moral quality whichChrist holds up in His own character as the point of imitation: _Learnof Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart_? It is surely significant thatHe does not say, expressly, Learn of Me to be pure, or courageous, orfervent; but _Learn to be humble_, for in this, above all, you shall_find rest to your souls_. Instead, have you not had a kind of gentlepride in your religion or your virtue or your fastidiousness? In aword, you have not been as excellent an Elder Son as your brother hasbeen a Younger. You have not corresponded with your graces as he hascorresponded with his. You have never yet been capable of sufficientlowliness to come home (which is so much harder than to remain there), or of sufficient humility to begin for the first time to work with allyour heart only an hour before sunset. 

Begin, then, at the beginning, not half-way up the line. Go down to thechurch door and beat your breast and say not, God reward me who havedone so much for Him, but _God be merciful to me_ who have done solittle. Get off your seat amongst the Pharisees and go down on yourknees and weep behind Christ's couch, if perhaps He may at last say toyou, _Friend, come up higher_. 

THE THIRD WORD

_Woman, behold thy son. Behold thy mother_. 

Our Divine Lord now turns, from the soul who at one bound has sprunginto the front rank, to those two souls who have never left it, andsupremely to that Mother on whose soul sin has never yet breathed, onwhose breast Incarnate God had rested as inviolate and secure as on theBosom of the Eternal Father, that Mother who was His Heaven on earth. Standing beside her is the one human being who is least unworthy to bethere, now that Joseph has passed to his reward and John the Baptist hasgone to join the Prophets--_the disciple whom Jesus loved_, who had lainon the breast of Jesus as Jesus had lain on the breast of Mary. 

Our Lord has just shown how He deals with His dear sinners; now He showshow He will _be glorified with His Saints_. The Paradox of this Word isthat Death, the divider of those who are separated from God, is the bondof union between those that are united to Him. 

I. Death is the one inexorable enemy of human society as constitutedapart from God. A king dies and his kingdom is at once in danger ofdisruption. A child dies and his mother prays that she may bear another, lest his father and she should drift apart. Death is the supreme sowerof discord and disunion, then, in the natural order, since he is the onesupreme enemy of natural life. He is the noonday terror of the Rich Foolof the parable and the nightmare of the Poor Fool, since those who placetheir hope in this life see that death is the end of their hope. Forthese there is no appeal beyond the grave. 

II. Now precisely the opposite of all this is true in the supernaturalorder, since the gate of death, viewed from the supernatural side, is anentrance and not an ending, a beginning and not a close. This may beseen to be so even in a united human family in this world, the membersof whom are living the supernatural life; for where such a family isliving in the love of God, Death, when he comes, draws not only thesurvivors closer together, but even those whom he seems to haveseparated. He does not bring consternation and terror and disunion, buthe awakens hope and tenderness, he smooths away old differences, heexplains old misunderstandings. 

Our Blessed Lord has already, over the grave of Lazarus, hinted thatthis shall be so, so soon as He has consecrated death by His own dying. _He that believeth in Me shall never die_. He, that is to say, who has_died with Christ_, whose centre henceforward is in the supernatural, simply no longer finds death to be what nature finds it. It no longermakes for division but for union; it no longer imperils or ends life andinterest and possession, but releases them from risk and mortality. 

Here, then, He deliberately and explicitly acts upon this truth. He onceraised Lazarus and the daughter of Jairus and the Widow's Son from thedead, for death's sting could, at that time, be drawn in no other way;but now that He Himself is _tasting death for every man_, He performs aneven more emphatically supernatural act and conquers death by submittingto it instead of by commanding it. Life had already united, so far asmortal life can unite, those two souls who loved Him and one another sowell. These two, since they knew Him so perfectly, knew each the othertoo as perfectly as knowledge and sympathy can unite souls in thislife. But now the whole is to be raised a stage higher. They had alreadybeen united on the living breast of Jesus; now, over His dead body, theywere to be made yet more one. 

It is marvellous that, after so long, our imaginations should still beso tormented and oppressed by the thought of death; that we should stillbe so _without understanding_ that we think it morbid to be in love withdeath, for it is far more morbid to be in fear of it. It is not that ourreason or our faith are at fault; it is only that that most active anduntamable faculty of ours, which we call imagination, has not yetassimilated the truth, accepted by both our faith and our reason, thatfor those who are in the friendship of God death is simply not that atall which it is to others. It does not, as has been said, end our livesor our interests: on the contrary it liberates and fulfils them. 

And all this it does because Jesus Christ has Himself plunged into theheart of Death and put out his fires. Henceforth we are one family inHim if we do His will--_his brother and sister and mother_; and Mary isour Mother, not by nature, which is accidental, but by supernature, which is essential. Mary is my Mother and John is my brother, since, ifI have died with Christ, it is _no longer I that live, but Christ thatliveth in me_. In a word, it is the Communion of Saints which Heinaugurates by this utterance and seals by His dying. 

THE FOURTH WORD

_My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?_

Our Blessed Lord in the revelation He makes from the Cross passesgradually inwards to Himself Who is its centre. He begins in theoutermost circle of all, with the ignorant sinners. He next deals withthe one sinner who ceased to be ignorant, and next with those who werealways nearest to Himself, and now at last He reveals the deepest secretof all. This is the central Word of the Seven in every sense. There isno need to draw attention to the Paradox it expresses. 

I. First, then, let us remind ourselves of the revealed dogma that JesusChrist was the Eternal Son of the Father; that He dwelt always in theBosom of that Father; that when He left heaven He _did not leave theFather's side_; that at Bethlehem and Nazareth and Galilee and Jerusalemand Gethsemane and Calvary He was always the _Word that was with God_and _the Word_ that _was God_. Next, that the eyes even of His SacredHumanity looked always and continuously upon the Face of God, since Hisunion with God was entire and complete: as He looked up into HisMother's face from the manger, He saw behind it the Face of His Father;as He cried in Gethsemane, _If it be possible_, even in His SacredHumanity He knew that it could not be; as He groaned out on Calvary thatGod had forsaken Him, He yet looked without one instant's intermissioninto the glory of heaven and saw His Father there. 

Yet simultaneously with these truths it is also true that His cry ofdereliction was incalculably more of a reality than when first utteredby David or, since, by any desolate sinner in the thickest spiritualdarkness. All the miseries of holy and sinful souls, heaped together, could not approach even afar off the intolerable misery of Christ. Forof His own will He refused to be consoled at all by that Presence whichHe could never lack, and of His own will He chose to be pierced andsaturated and tormented by the sorrow He could never deserve. He heldfirm against the touch of consolation every power of His Divine andHuman Being and, simultaneously, flung them open to the assaults ofevery pain. And if the psychology of this state is altogether beyond ourpower to understand, we may remind ourselves that it is the psychologyof the _Word made Flesh_ that is confronting us. .. . Do we expect tounderstand that?. .. 

II. There is a human phrase, however, itself a paradox, yetcorresponding to something which we know to be true, which throws somefaint glimmer of light upon this impenetrable darkness and seems toextend Christ's experience upon the Cross so as to touch our own humanlife. It is a phrase that describes a condition well known to spiritualpersons: "To leave God for God. " (1) The simplest and lowest form ofthis state is that condition in which we acquiesce with our will in thewithdrawal of ordinary spiritual consolation. Certainly it is aninexplicable state, since both the ordinary aids to our will--ourunderstanding and our emotion--are, by the very nature of the case, useless to it. Our heart revolts from that dereliction and ourunderstanding fails to comprehend the reasons for it. Yet we acquiesce, or at least perceive that we ought to do so; and that by doing so--byceasing, that is, to grasp God's Presence any longer--we find it asnever before. We leave God in order to find Him. 

(2) The second state is that in which we find ourselves when not only doall consolations leave us, but the very grip of intelligent faith goestoo; when the very reasons for faithfulness appear to vanish. It is anincalculably more bitter trial, and soul after soul fails under it andmust be comforted again by God in less august ways or perish altogether. And yet this is not the extremest pitch even of human desolation. 

(3) For there is a third of which the saints tell us in broken words andimages. .. . 

III. Our final point, for application to ourselves, is that derelictionin some form or another is as much a stage in spiritual progress asautumn and winter are seasons of the year. The beginners have to sufferone degree, the illuminated another, and those that have approached areal Union with God a third. But all must suffer it, and each in hisown degree, or progress is impossible. 

Let us take courage therefore and face it, in the light of this Word. For, as we can sanctify bodily pain by the memory of the nails, so toocan we sanctify spiritual pain by the memory of this darkness. If He Who_never left the Father's side_ can suffer this in an unique and supremesense, how much more should we be content to suffer it in lower degrees, who have so continually, since we came to the age of reason, beenleaving not His side only, but His very house. 

THE FIFTH WORD

_I thirst. _

Our Lord continues to reveal His own condition, since He, after all, isthe key to all Humanity. If we understand anything of Him, simultaneously we shall understand ourselves far better. 

He has shown us that He can truly be deprived of spiritual consolation;and the value of this deprivation; now He shows us the value of bodilydeprivation also. And the Paradox for our consideration is that theSource of all can lose all; that the Creator needs His creation; that HeWho offers us the _water springing up into Life Eternal_ can lack thewater of human life--the simplest element of all. In His DivineDereliction He yet continues to be Human. 

I. It is very usual, under this Word, to meditate on Christ's thirst forsouls; and this is, of course, a legitimate thought, since it is truethat His whole Being, and not merely one part of it, longed and pantedon the Cross for every object of His desire. Certainly He desired souls!When does He not?

But it is easy to lose the proportion of truth, if we spiritualizeeverything, and pass over, as if unworthy of consideration, His bodilypain. For this Thirst of the Crucified is the final sum of all the painsof crucifixion: the physical agony, the fever produced by it, thetorrential sweat, the burning of the sun--all these culminated in thetorment of which this Cry is His expression. 

Bodily pain, then, since Jesus not only deigned to suffer it, but tospeak of it, is as much a part of the Divine process as the mostspiritual of derelictions: it is an intense and a vital reality in life. It is the fashion, at present, to pose as if we were superior to suchthings; as if either it were too coarse for our high natures or evenactually in itself evil. The truth is that we are terrified of itsreality and its sting, and seek, therefore, to evade it by every meansin our power. We affect to smile at the old penances of the saints andascetics as if we ourselves had risen into a higher state of developmentand needed no longer such elementary aids to piety!

Let this Word, then, bring us back to our senses and to the dueproportions of truth. We are body as well as soul; we are incompletewithout the body. The soul is insufficient to itself, the body has asreal a part to play in Redemption as the soul which is its inmate andshould be its mistress. We look for the _redemption of our body_ and the_Resurrection of the Flesh_, we merit or demerit before God in our soulfor the deeds done in our body. 

So was it too with our Lord of His infinite compassion. The _Word wasmade Flesh_, dwelt in the Flesh, has assumed that Flesh into heaven. Further, He suffered in the Flesh and deigned to tell us so; and that Hefound that suffering all but intolerable. 

II. In a well-known book a Catholic poet[1] describes with a great dealof power the development of men's nervous systems in these later days, and warns his readers against a scrupulous terror lest they, who nolonger scourge themselves with briers, should be neglecting a means ofsanctification. He points out, with perfect justice, that men, in thesedays, suffer instead in more subtle manners than did those of the MiddleAges, yet none the less physical; and puts us on our guard lest weshould afflict ourselves too much. Yet we must take care, also, that wedo not fall into the opposite extreme and come to regard bodily pain, (as has been said) as if it were altogether too elementary for ourrefined natures and as if it must have no place in the alchemy of thespirit. This would be both dangerous and false. _What God hath joinedtogether, let no man put asunder!_ For, if we once treat body and soulas ill-matched companions and seek to deal with them apart, instantlythe door is flung open to the old Gnostic horrors of sensualism on theone side or inhuman mutilation or neglect on the other. 

[Footnote 1: Health and Holiness by Francis Thompson. ]

The Church, on the other hand, is very clear and insistent that body andsoul make one man as fully as God and Man make one Christ; and sheillustrates and directs these strange co-relations and mutual effects ofthese two partners by her steady insistence on such things as Fastingand Abstinence. And the saints are equally clear and insistent. Therenever yet has been a single soul whom the Church has raised to heraltars in whose life bodily austerity in some form has not played aconsiderable part. It is true that some have warned us against excess;but what warnings and what excess! "Be moderate, " advises St. Ignatius, that most reasonable and moderate of all the saints. "Take care that youdo not break any bones with your iron scourge. God does not wish that!"

Pain, then, has a real place in our progress. Who that has suffered canever doubt it again?

Let us consider, therefore, under this Word of Christ, whether ourattitude to bodily pain is what God would have it to be. There are twomistakes that we may be committing. Either we may fear it toolittle--meet it, that is to say, with Pagan stoicism instead of withChristianity--or we may fear it too much. _Despise not the chastening_, on one side, _or faint_ on the other. It is surely the second warningthat is most needed now. For pain had a real place in Christ's programmeof life. He fasted for forty days at the beginning of His Ministry, andHe willed every shocking detail of the Praetorium and Calvary at theend. He told us that _His Spirit willed it_ and, yet more kindly, that_His Flesh was weak_. He revealed, then, that He really suffered andthat He willed it so. .. . _I thirst. _

THE SIXTH WORD

_It is consummated. _

He has finished _His Father's business_, He has dealt with sinners andsaints, and has finally disclosed to us the secrets of the Soul and theBody of His that are the hope of both sinners and saints alike. Andthere is no more for Him to do. 

An entirely new Beginning, then, is at hand, now that the Last Sabbathis come--the Last Sabbath, so much greater than the First as Redemptionis greater than Creation. For Creation is a mere introduction to theBook of Life; it is the arrangement of materials that are to be throwninstantly into confusion again by man, who should be its crown andmaster. The Old Testament is one medley of mistakes and fragments andbroken promises and violated treaties, to reach its climax in thecapital Mistake of Calvary, when men indeed _knew not what they did. _And even God Himself in the New Testament, as man in the Old, has gonedown in the catastrophe and hangs here mutilated and broken. Real life, then, is now to begin. 

Yet, strangely enough, He calls it an End rather than a Beginning. _Consummatum est!_

I. The one and only thing in human life that God desires to end is Sin. There is not a pure joy or a sweet human relationship or a selflessambition or a divine hope which He does not desire to continue and to becrowned and transfigured beyond all ambition and all hope. On thecontrary, He desires only to end that one single thing which ruinsrelationships and spoils joy and poisons aspirations. For up to thepresent there is not one page of history which has not this blot uponit. 

God has had to tolerate, for lack of better, such miserable specimens ofhumanity! _Jacob have I loved!_ . .. _David a man after my heart;_ theone a poor, mean, calculating man, who had, however, that single glimmerof the supernatural which Esau, for all his genial sturdiness, waswithout; the other an adulterous murderer, who yet had grace enough forreal contrition. Hitherto He has been content with so little. He hasaccepted vinegar for want of wine. 

Next, God has had to tolerate, and indeed to sanction--such an unworthyworship of Himself--all the blood of the temple and the spilled entrailsand the nameless horrors. And yet this was all to which men could rise;for without it, they never could have learned the more nameless horrorof sin. 

Last, for His worshippers He has had to content Himself with but onePeople instead of _all peoples and nations and languages. _ And what aPeople, --whom even Moses could not bear for their treachery andinstability! And all this wretched record ends in the Crime of Calvary, at which the very earth revolts and the sun grows dark with shame. Is itany wonder that Christ cried, Thank God that is all done with at last!

II. Instead of this miserable past, then, what is to come? What is that_New Wine He would drink with us in His Father's Kingdom?_ First; realand complete saints of God are to take the place of the fragmentarysaints of the Old Dispensation, saints with heads of gold and feet ofclay. Souls are to be born again in Baptism, not merely sealed bycircumcision, and to be purified before they can contract any actualguilt of their own. And, of these, many shall keep their baptismalinnocence and shall go, wearing that white robe, before God Who gave itthem. Others again shall lose it, but regain it once more, and, throughthe power of the Precious Blood, shall rise to heights of which Jacoband David never even dreamed. To _awake in His likeness_ was thehighest ambition of _the man after God's Heart;_ but to be not merelylike Christ, but one with Him, is the hope of the Christian. _I live_, the new saints shall say with truth, _yet now not I, but Christ livethin me. _

Next, instead of the old worship of blood and pain there shall be anUnbloody Sacrifice and a _Pure Offering_ in which shall be all the powerand propitiation of Calvary without its pain, all the glory without thedegradation. And last, in place of the old enclosed Race of Israel shallbe a Church of all nations and tongues, one vast Society, with all wallsthrown down and all divisions done away, one Jerusalem from above, thatshall be the Mother of us all. 

III. That, then, is what Christ intended as He cried, _It isconsummated. _ Behold _the old things are passed away!_ Behold, _I makeall things new!_

And now let us see how far that is fulfilled. Where is there, in me, theNew Wine of the Gospel?

I have all that God can give me from His Throne on Calvary. I have thetruth that He proclaimed and the grace that He released. Yet is there inme, up to the present, even one glimmer of what is meant by Sanctity? AmI even within an appreciable distance of the saints who knew not Christ?Have I ever wrestled like Jacob or wept like David? Has my religion, that is to say, ever inspired me beyond the low elevation of joy intothe august altitudes of pain? Is it possible that with me the old isnot put away, the _old man_ is not yet dead, and the _new man_ not yet_put on_? Is that New Sacrifice the light of my daily life? Have I doneanything except hinder the growth of Christ's Church, anything exceptdrag down her standards, so far as I am able, to my own low level? Isthere a single soul now in the world who owes, under God, her conversionto my efforts?

Why, as I watch my life and review it in His Presence it would seem asif I had done nothing but disappoint Him all my days! He cried, like thedeacon of His own Sacrifice, Go! it is done! _Ite; missa est!_ TheSacrifice is finished here; go out in its strength to live the lifewhich it makes possible!

Let me at least begin to-day, have done with my old compromises andshifts and evasions. _Ite; missa est!_

THE SEVENTH WORD

_Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit. _

He has cried with a loud voice, and the rocks have rent to its echo, andthe earth is shaken, and the Veil of the Old Testament is torn from topto bottom as the Old Covenant passes into the New and the enclosedsanctity of the Most Holy Place breaks out into the world. And now, asthe level sun shines out again beneath the pall of clouds, He whispers, as at Mary's knee in Nazareth, the old childish prayer and yields upHis spirit into His Father's hands. 

The last Paradox, then, is uttered. He Who saves others cannot saveHimself! The Shepherd of souls relinquishes His own. For, as we cannotsave our lives unless we lose them for His sake, so He too cannot savethem unless He loses His for our sake. 

I. This, then, is merely the summary of all that has gone before; it isthe word _Finis_ written at the end of this new Book of Life which Hehas written in His Blood. It is the silence of the white space at theclose of the last page. Yet it is, too, the final act that gives valueto all that have preceded it. If Christ had not died, our faith would bevain. 

Oh! these New Theologies that see in Christ's Death merely the end ofHis Life! Why, it is the very point and climax of His Life that Heshould lay it down! Like Samson himself, that strange prototype of theStrong Man armed, he slew more of the enemies of our souls by His Deaththan by all His gracious Life. _For this cause He came into the world_. For Sacrifice, which is the very heart of man's instinctive worship ofGod, was set there, imperishably, in order to witness to and be ratifiedby His One Offering which alone could truly take away sins; and to denyit or to obscure it is to deny or to obscure the whole history of thehuman race, from the Death of Abel to the Death of Christ, to deny orobscure the significance of every lamb that bled in the Temple and ofevery wine-offering poured out before the Holy Place, to deny or toobscure (if we will but penetrate to the roots of things) the free willof Man and the Love of God. If Christ had not died, our faith would bevain. 

II. Once again, then, let us turn to the event in our own lives thatcloses them; that death which, united to Christ's, is our entrance intoliberty and, disunited, the supreme horror of existence. 

(1) For without Christ death is a violent interruption to life, introducing us to a new existence of which we know nothing, or to noexistence at all. Without Christ, however great our hopes, it is abrupt, appalling, stunning, and shattering. It is this at the best, and, at theworst, it is peaceful only as the death of a beast is peaceful. 

(2) Yet, with Christ, it is harmonious and continuous with all that hasgone before, since it is the final movement of a life that is already_dead with Christ_, the last stage of a process of mortality, and thestage that ends its pain. It is just one more passing phase, by which ischanged the key of that music that every holy life makes always beforeGod. 

There is, then, the choice. We may, if we will, die fighting to the enda force that must conquer us however we may fight, resisting theirresistible. Or we may die, in lethargic resignation, as dogs die, without hopes or regrets, since the past, without Christ, is asmeaningless as the future. Or we may die, like Christ, and with Him, yielding up a spirit that came from the Father back again into HisFatherly hands, content that He Who brought us into the world shouldreceive us when we go out again, confident that, as the thread of Hispurpose is plain in earthly life, it shall shine yet more plainly in thelife beyond. 

One last look, then, at Jesus shows us the lines smoothed from His faceand the agony washed from His eyes. May our souls and the souls of allthe faithful departed, through His Mercy, rest in Him!

XI

LIFE AND DEATH

_As dying, and behold we live_. --II COR. VI. 9. 

We have considered, so far, a number of paradoxical phenomena exhibitedin the life of Catholicism and have attempted to find theirreconciliation in the fact that the Catholic Church is at once Human andDivine. In her striving, for example, after a Divine and supernaturalPeace, of which she alone possesses the secret, she _resists even untoblood_ all human attempts to supplant this by another. As a humansociety, again, she avails herself freely of human opportunities andaids, of earthly and created beauty, for the setting forth of hermessage; yet she can survive, as can no human society, when she isdeprived of her human rights and her acquired wealth. As human shenumbers the great multitude of the world's sinners among her children, yet as Divine she has produced the saints. As Divine she bases all hergospel on a Revelation which can be apprehended only by Faith, yet ashuman she employs the keenest and most profound intellects for itsanalysis and its propagation. In these and in many other similar pointsit has been attempted to show why she offers now one aspect and nowanother to human criticism, and how it is that the very charges madeagainst her become, when viewed in the light of her double claim, actualcredentials and arguments on behalf of that claim. Finally, in themeditations upon the _Seven Words_ of Christ, we considered very brieflyhow, in the hours of the deepest humiliation of His Humanity, Herevealed again and again the characteristics of His Divinity. 

It now remains to consider that point in which she most manifests thatdouble nature of hers and, simultaneously therefore, presents, as in akind of climax, her identity, under human terms, with Him Who, Himselfthe Lord of Life, conquered death by submitting to it and, by HisResurrection from the dead, showed Himself _the Son of God with power_. 

I. Death, the world tells us, is the final end of all things, and is theone universal law of which evasion is impossible; and this is true, notof the individual only, but of society, of nations, of civilization, andeven, it would seem, ultimately of physical life itself. Every vitalenergy therefore that we possess can be directed not to the abolition, but only to the postponement of this final full close to which the mostecstatic created harmony must come at last. 

Our physicians cannot heal us, they can merely ward off death for alittle. Our statesmen cannot establish an eternal federation, they canbut help to hold a crumbling society together for a little longer. Ourcivilization cannot really evolve an immortal superman, it can butrender ordinary humanity a little less mortal, temporarily and inoutward appearance. Death, then, in the world's opinion, is the duellistwho is bound to win. We may parry, evade, leap aside for a little; wemay even advance upon him and seem to threaten his very existence; ourenergies, in fact, must be concentrated upon this conflict if we are tosurvive at all. But it is only in seeming, at the best. The moment mustcome when, driven back to the last barrier, our last defence falters . .. And Death has only to wipe his sword. 

Now the attitude of the Catholic Church towards Death is not only themost violent reversal of the world's policy, but the most paradoxical, too, of all her methods. For, while the world attempts to keep Death atarm's length, the Church strives to embrace him. Where the world drawshis sword to meet Death's assault, the Church spreads her heart only toreceive it. She is in love with Death, she pursues him, honours him, extols Him. She places over her altars not a Risen Christ, but a dyingOne. 

_If thou wilt be perfect_, she cries to the individual soul, _give upall that thou hast and follow me_. "Give up all that makes life worthliving, strip thyself of every advantage that sustains thy life, of allthat makes thee effective. " It is this that is her supreme appeal, notindeed uttered, with all its corollaries, to all her children, but tothose only that desire perfection. Yet to all, in a sense, the appeal isthere. _Die daily_, die to self, mortify, yield, give in. If _any manwill save his life, he must lose it_. 

So too, in her dealings with society, is her policy judged suicidal by aworld that is in love with its own kind of life. It is suicidal, criesthat world, to relinquish in France all on which the temporal life ofthe Church depends; for how can that society survive which renounces thevery means of existence? It is suicidal to demand the virgin life of thenoblest of her children, suicidal to desert the monarchical cause of onecountry, and to set herself in opposition to the Republican ideals ofanother. For even she, after all, is human and must conform to humanconditions. Even she, however august her claims, must make terms withthe world if she desires to live in it. 

And this comment has been made upon her actions in every age. Shecondemned Arius, when a little compromise might surely have been found;and lost half her children. She condemned Luther and lost Germany;Elizabeth, and lost England. At every crisis she has made the wrongchoice, she has yielded when she should have resisted, resisted when sheshould have yielded. The wonder is that she survives at all. 

Yes, that is the wonder. _As dying, behold she lives_!

II. The answer of course is easy. It is that she simply does not desirethe kind of life which the world reckons alone to be life. To her thatis not life at all. She desires of course to survive as a human society, and she is assured that she always shall so survive. Yet it is not onthe ordinary terms of ordinary society that she desires survival. It isnot a _natural_ life of which she is ambitious, a life that draws itsstrength from human conditions and human environment, a life, therefore, that waxes and wanes with those human conditions and ultimately meetstheir fate, but a _supernatural_ life that draws its strength from God. And she recognizes, as one of the most fundamental paradoxes of all, that such a life can be gained and held only through what the worldcalls "death. "

She does not, then, want merely the life of a prosperous human state, whether monarchy or republic. There are times indeed in her history whensuch an accompaniment to her real existence is useful to hereffectiveness; and she has, of course, the right, as have othersocieties, to earthly dominions that may have been won and presented toher by her children. Or through her ministers, as in Paraguay, she mayadminister for a while the ordinary civil affairs of men who choose tobe loyal to her government. Yet if, for one instant, such aresponsibility were really to threaten her spiritual effectiveness--if, that is, the choice were really presented to her between spiritual andtemporal dominion--she would let all the kingdoms of the world go in aninstant, to retain her kingdom from God; she would gladly _suffer theloss of all things_ to retain Christ. 

And how is it possible to deny for one instant that her success has beenstartling and overwhelming--this fructification of Life by Death. 

Are there any human beings, for example, who have been more effectiveand influential than her saints--men and women, that is to say, who have_died daily_, in order to live indeed? They have not, it is true, prospered, let us say, as business men, directors of companies, orgovernment officials, but such a success is simply not her ideal forthem, not their own ideal for themselves. That is precisely the kind oflife to which they have, as a rule, determinedly and perseveringly died. Yet their effectiveness in this world has been none the less. Are anykings remembered as is the beggar Labré who gnawed cabbage stalks in thegutters of Rome? Are the names of any statesmen of, let us say, even ahundred years ago, reverenced and repeated as is the name of the womanof Spain called Teresa of Jesus who, four hundred years ago, ruled a fewnuns within the enclosure of a convent? Are any musicians or artistsloved to-day with such rapture as is God's little troubadour, calledFrancis, who made music for himself and the angels by rubbing one stickacross another?

Or, again, is any empire that the world has ever seen so great, soloyally united in itself, so universal and yet so rigorous as is thatspiritual empire whose capital is Rome? Is there any nation with sofierce a patriotism as she who is Supernational? Earthly kings speakfrom their thrones and what happens? And an old man in Rome who wearsthree crowns on his head speaks from his prison in the Vatican and allthe earth rings with it. 

Has her policy, then, been so suicidal after all? From the world's pointof view it has never been anything else. Her history is but one longexample of the sacrifice of human activities and earthly opportunities;she has expelled from her pulpits the most brilliant of her children, she has silenced or alienated the most eloquent of her defenders. Shehas cut off from herself all that she should have kept, and hugged toher arms all that she should have relinquished! She has never doneanything but die! She never does anything but live!

III. Turn, then, to the life of her Lord for the solution of thisriddle. Last week[1] He was going to His Death. He was losing, little bylittle, all that bound Him to Life. The multitudes that had followed Himhitherto were leaving Him by units and groups, they who might haveformed His armies to seat Him on the throne of His father David. Disloyalty had made its way even among His chosen body-guard, andalready Judas is bargaining for the price of His Master's blood. Eventhe most loyal of all are dismayed, and presently will _forsake Him andflee_ when the swords flash out in the garden of Gethsemane. A few weeksago in Galilee thousands were leaving Him for the last time; and when, once again, a company seemed to rally, He wept! And so at last thesacrifice was complete and, one by one, He laid down of His own willevery tie that kept Him in life. And then on Good Friday itself Hesuffered that beauty of His _Face to be marred_ so that no man wouldever _desire Him_ any more, silenced the melody of the Voice that hadbroken so many hearts and made them whole again; He stretched out HisShepherd's Hands with which alone He could gather His sheep to HisBreast, and the Feet that alone could bear Him into the wilderness to_seek after that which was lost_. Was there ever a Suicide such as this, such a despair of high hopes, such a ruin of all ambition, a dying socomplete and irremediable as the Dying of Jesus Christ?

[Footnote 1: This Sermon was preached on Easter Day. ]

And now on Easter Day look at Him again and see how He lives as neverbefore. See how the Life that has been His for thirty years--the Life ofGod made Man--itself pales almost to a phantom before the glory of thatsame Life transfigured by Death. Three days ago He fainted beneath thescourge and nails; now He shows the very scars of His Passion to be theemblems of immortal strength. Three days ago He spoke in human words tothose only that were near Him, and limited Himself under human terms ofspace and time; He speaks now in every heart. Three days ago He gave HisBody to the few who knelt at His Table; to-day in ten thousandtabernacles that same Body may be worshipped by all who come. 

In a word, He has exchanged a Natural Life for a Supernatural in everyplane at once. He has laid down the Natural Life of His Body to take itback again supernaturalized for ever. He has died that His Life may bereleased; He has _finished_ in order to begin. 

It is easy, then, to see why it is that the Church _dies daily_, why itis that she is content to be stripped of all that makes her lifeeffective, why she too permits her hands to be bound and her feetfettered and her beauty marred and her voice silenced so far as men cando those things. She is human? Yes; she dwells in a _body that isprepared_ for her, but prepared chiefly that she may suffer in it. Herfar-reaching hands are not hers merely that she may bind up with themthe broken-hearted, nor her swift feet hers merely that she may run onthem to succour the perishing, nor her head and heart hers merely thatshe may ponder and love. But all this sensitive human organism is hersthat at last she may agonize in it, bleed from it from a thousandwounds, be lifted up in it to draw all men to her cross. 

She does not desire, then, in this world, the _throne of her FatherDavid_, nor the kind of triumph which is the only kind that the worldunderstands to be so. She desires one life and one triumph only--theRisen Life of her Saviour. And this, at last, is the transfiguration ofher Humanity by the power of her Divinity and the vindication of themboth.