The Faith of the Millions Part 2

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

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

Of these two approaches to Divine love and union, the former is certainly compatible with, and conducive to, the unlimited fulness of every well-ordered natural affection; but the latter--a life of more conscious, reflex, and actual attention to G.o.d--undoubtedly does require a certain abstraction and concentration of our limited spiritual energies, and can only be trodden at the cost of a certain inward seclusion of which outward seclusion is normally a condition.

Instinctively, Catholic tradition has regarded it as a vocation apart--as, like the life of continence, a call to something more than human, and demanding a sacrifice or atrophy of functions proper to another grade of spirituality. Even what is called a "life of thought"

makes a similar demand to a great extent; it involves a narrowing of other interests; a departure from the conditions of ordinary practical life. The "contemplative life" is inclusively all this and more; it is a sort of antic.i.p.ation of the future life of vision. Still, though for a few it may be the surest or the only approach to sanct.i.ty, yet there is no degree of Divine love that may not be reached by the commoner and normal path; there have been saints outside the cloister as well as inside. One could hardly offend the first principles of the Gospel more grievously than by making intelligence, culture, and contemplative capacity conditions of a nearer approach to Christ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When he says: "I believe in Christianity as it will be ten thousand years hence," it would be a grave misinterpretation to suppose that he implied any lack of belief in the Christianity of to-day. It is but another a.s.sertion of his claim to be in sympathy with the esoteric rather than the exoteric teaching of the present; to be on the mount with the few and not on the plain with the many. For as the glacier formed on the mountain slips slowly down to the plain, so, he held, the esoteric teaching of to-day will be the popular teaching of future ages.

However little we may relish this distinction between "aristocratic" and vulgar belief; however strongly we may hold that best knowledge of G.o.d--that, namely, which is experimental and tactual rather than intellectual or imaginative--is equally accessible to all; yet just so far as there is question of the intellectual and imaginative forms in which the faith is apprehended, the distinction does and must exist, not only in religion but in every department of belief, as long as there are different levels of culture in the same body of believers. It is, after all, a much more superficial difference than it sounds--a difference of language and symbolism for the same realities. Where language fits close, as it does to things measurable by our senses, divergency makes the difference between truth and error; but where it is question of the subst.i.tution of one a.n.a.logy or symbol for another, the more elegant is not necessarily the more truthful; nor when we consider the infinite inadequacy of even the n.o.blest conceivable finite symbolism to bring G.o.d down to our level, need we pride ourselves much for being on a mountain whose height is perceptible from the plain but imperceptible from the heavens.

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

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

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

_Dec._ 1900.

Footnotes:

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

XV.

TWO ESTIMATES OF CATHOLIC LIFE.

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

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

Mrs. Humphrey Ward represents the furthest advance of this reform. She at least has spared no pains to acquaint herself with facts, to gather information, to verify statements. She is never guilty of the grotesque blunders that other high-cla.s.s novelists fall into about Catholic beliefs, practices, and habits, simply because they are dealing with what is to their readers a _terra incognita,_ and can, therefore, afford to be loose and inaccurate. An artistic conscientiousness which values truth and honesty in every detail, saves her from this too common snare.

But it does not and cannot save her in the work of selection, synthesis, and interpretation of instances, which has to be guided, not by objective facts, but by subjective opinions and impressions. History written in a purely positivist spirit, _ad narrandum_, and in no sense _ad docendum_, is a chimerical notion by which Renan beguiled himself into thinking that his _Vie de Jesus_ was a bundle of facts and nothing more. And Mrs. Humphrey Ward is no less beguiled, if she is unaware that in threading together, cla.s.sifying and explaining the results of her conscientious observation and inquiry, she is governed by an _a priori_ conception of Catholicism hardly different from that which inspired the author of "Father Clement." Hence, to us Catholics, though her evident desire to be critical and impartial is gratifying, yet her failure is none the less conspicuous. Dr. Johnson once observed, that what might be wonderful dancing for a dog would be a very poor performance for a Christian; and so, to us, "Helbeck" as a presentment of Catholic life is wonderful as coming from an outsider, and, perhaps, especially from Mrs.

Humphrey Ward, but in itself it is grotesque enough--not through any culpable infidelity to facts, but through lack of the visual power, the guiding idea, whereby to read them aright.

In _One Poor Scruple_, Mrs. Wilfrid Ward brings to bear upon a somewhat similar task, an equal fidelity of observation supplemented by a first-hand, far wider, and more intimate experience of Catholics and their ways, and, above all, by that key which a share in their faith and beliefs alone furnishes to the right understanding of their conduct.

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

It may well be that this judicial impartiality may meet with its usual reward of pleasing neither side altogether. Some will complain that she brings no idealizing love to her subject, and does little to bring out the greatness and glory of her religion. Yet this would be a hasty and ill-judging criticism; for our faith is no less to be commended for the restraint it exercises over the mult.i.tude of ordinary men and women, than for the effect it produces in souls of a naturally heroic type.

That it should bring a certain largeness into the smallest life, that it should impart a strange stability to a naturally unstable and frivolous character; that it should check the worldly-minded with a sense of the superior claims of the other world--all this impresses us, if not with the sublimity or mystic beauty, at least with the solid reality and penetrating power of the Catholic faith.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Protestantism of the Calvinistic or Puritan type shows little consciousness of the distinction we are insisting upon. It is disposed to draw a hard-and-fast line between the "converted" and the reprobate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_May_, 1899.