XLhc Cburcb Catholic 

B Y 

B. F. C. C O S T E L L O E , M.A. 

- L O N D O N : 
- O F F I C E : I S W E S T S Q U A R E , S C T U T H W A R K . S . E 

D E P O T S : 2 1 I W E S T M I N S T E R B W D G E R O A D , S . E . : 2 4 5 B R O M P T O N 
K O A D , S . W . ( o p p o s i t e t h e O r a t o f y ) ; 2 8 K I N G S T R E E T , M E Ì ; -
B O U R N E , A U S T R A L I A ; S T . . X A V I E R ' * C O L L E G E , C A L C U T T A -
3 2 ? C H U R C H S T R E E T , T O R O N T O , C A N A D A ; T H E C A T H O L I C 
P U B L I C A T I O N S O C I E T Y C Q . , 9 B A R C L A Y S T R E E T , N E W Y O M C 

Price One Penny. 



PRICE TWOPENCE. 

S o c i a l i s m : a reply to Laurence Grorilund. By the 
Rev. Joseph Rickaby, S.J. 

T h e B i b l e a n d t h e R e f o r m a t i o n . By C. F. B. 
Allnatt, 

P a p a l S u p r e m a c y a n d I n f a l l i b i l i t y . By the 
Rev. Sydney F. Smith, S.J. 

L i b e r t y o f C o n s c i e n c e : are Catholics or Pro-
testants, guilty of Intolerance? By the Rev. Walter 
Croke Robinson. 

T h e C h u r c h o f O l d E n g l a n d - By the Rev. J. D. 
Breen, O.S.B. 

PRICE ONE PENNY. 

P o s i t i v i s m . By the Rev. Joseph Rickaby, S.J. 

PRICE ONE HALFPENNY. 

Who are the Workers? 
Modern Socialists on the History of the Church. 
Whvat do Catholics believe? 
A Letter to the Working men of England. 
Evolution run wild. 
Popery on every Coin of the Realm. 
Popery in the First Century. 
" Out of the Church there is no Salvation." ' 
Why should we remember the Fifth of November? 
Transubstantiation, or the Real Presence. 
Does the Catholic Church suppress the Second Com-

mandment 

C A T H O L I C T R U T H S O C I E T Y , . 1 8 W E S T S Q U A R E , L O N D O N , S . E . 

Dsacfdlffed 



" T h r o u g h all the centuries of civilization"—so I 
imagine Macaulay's New Zealander will say to an im-
partial generation—"through all the change and chance 
of History there runs one permanent power. Alike in 
the decay of Greece and the pride of Rome, alike 
through the tempest of the barbarian times and the 
gradual uprising of the kingdoms, from the ages when men 
accepted meekly their appointed place, to the latter day 
when every man's hand was against his brother in the 
bitter war of individual competition, one system of 
things has stood secure, as a castle founded upon a rock 
stands above the rising and the falling tide, through the 
calm weather and the storm. 

" A n organization at first but of the unlearned and 
the outcasts of society—as was its Founder—placed 
under the ban of the most imperial despotism the world 
has seen, it was but a little later the sister sovereign of 
that same Empire through the Roman world: and when 
the Empire fell beneath the greatness of its task, the 
throne of the Fisherman continued to stand in the very 
palace of the Csesars, and the city where the Popes of 
four centuries had been driven like things of darkness 
underground became the world-capital of the Papacy. 

" In one age the Apostle of an ideal morality in an evil 
time; in another the conserver of learning; in a third the 

* A n address delivered on F e b . 19th, 18S8, at the South Place 
Institute, London, to a non-Catholic audience. 



2 The Church Catholic. i i 

mother of the Arts; in all, the pattern and helper of 
political and social unity—this unchanging yet ever 
varying kingdom, this stern and yet most liberal philoso-
phy, not only claimed to teach, but taught, as with autho-
rity, the children of men." 

Surely I may claim, my friends, that it is a startling 
item in the secular march of things, a masterful fact not 
lightly to be put b y — n o more than that other cardinal 
fact to which it leads us b a c k — t h e life and death of 
Jesus who was called the Christ. H e founded this power, 
H e said it should not f a i l ; and it has not failed. 

Not once but many times, indeed, there came great 
waves of what the world thought disaster. In the be-
ginning it was persecution. Edict after edict went out 
against them, till in the darkest of the night before the 
dawn an illiterate barbarian bent the force of the twin 
Empires to exterminate the Christian name: and knowing 
how easy was the detection of those who never would 
deny their crime, the imperial statesmen said that the 
dangerous rival of the Caesars would not be heard of 
any more—but it is the statesmen who are forgotten. 

Then there was the wave of Schism. T h e Arian 
heresy prevailed so far that men said the Church's 
time was ended upon the earth. Princes and peoples, 
Bishops and provinces, fell away, till there was but a 
handful left to continue the great tradition. Y e t in a 
little while the Arians passed like a mirage, and men 
asked each other the meaning of the name; 

It was an even darker hour, when a rising tide of 
moral corruption and a swift outbreak of intellectual 
doubt coinciding in the period of the Renaissance seemed 
to have killed the energies of the Church, and swamped 
in wickedness and infidelity the very Court of Rome. 
Y e t the curious reasonings of the Neo-Pagans have 
left but faint echoes in the history of thought—the worldly 
Popes and the corrupt Cardinals and all the unfaithful 
stewards who dared to lift their mitres up against their 
Master have gone to their account—and there does not 
remain upon the institutions or the morals or the doctrine 
of the Church a vestige of the evil time. 

W a v e upon wave, in the very worst of the danger, 
came the great upheaval callfed the Reformation, wherein 



The Church Catholic. 
i i 

the spirit of Individualism, personified in the rough 
violence of Luther, rent the Church in twain: and in 
this rebellion and the disorders which accompanied and 
followed it, it seemed a s if the bark of Peter must 
assuredly go down. Y e t as even Macaulay—most typical 
of English Protestants—has borne witness, the work 
of the Council of Trent and the early labours of the 
Jesuit Order and all that inner Reformation which 
accompanied these, left the Papacy not weaker but 
stronger than before. 

Finally, in our time, are come the days when countless 
new chapters of revelation are unrolled by science, and 
when a universal criticism, laying faith and reverence 
aside, has summoned every creed and every law to 
answer at the bar of reason for its right to be. All 
these great and good men who are to free us from the 
trammels of old time—whether they come as agnostics 
or in the name of evolution, whether they say they hold 
God needless, or have found our immortality to be a 
phantom, or cannot recognize that there is such a thing 
as Sin—with one accord in divers tongues cry out to 
us that the old creeds have passed for ever, and that the 
religion of the future, if religion there be at all, must 
be something less archaic than the Church of Christ 
But in the midst of them—not denying whatever truth 
they have to show, adapting indeed the message of the 
ages to the later time, but upholding always her pro-
fession of Christ's teaching and the Christian L a w — t h e 
ancient Church goes on. . 

It is in this permanence amid the changing centuries, 
it is in this enduring triumph in defeat, that even the 
most hostile critics have felt something of that great 
appeal which to her children the mere existence of the 
Church implies; and something of the force with which 
to their eyes is realized in her the prophecy of the 
Divine Founder. May we not well call it a fulfilment 
of that commission, with which, in different_ word-
ings, it pleased the Spirit that inspired the writers of 
the covenant to close three Gospels and to begin the 
Acts: " A s my Father hath sent Me, so send I you. Go 
ye therefore into all nations, baptizing them in the name 
of the Father and of the Son, .and of the Holy Spirit, 



The Church Catholic. i i 

teaching them to observe all things, whatsoever I have 
commanded you: and behold I am with you always, even 
to the end of the world." 

It is in this light, then, that I desire first to present to 
you the mission and office of the Catholic Church. Its 
name insists upon its universal claim. It is not a con-
gregation of persons agreeing together; it is not a School 
of Philosophy; it is not a Mutual Improvement Society. 
It is not even a Church among other Churches. It is 
the Church Universal—the Living Voice of God, in Christ's 
revelation, unto all people, through all time. It is for 
this reason, and this only, that it teaches as its Master 
taught,—not as the Scribes and Pharisees, but as one 
" h a v i n g authority." It is for this reason that in God's 
name it makes that awful demand upon the faith of 
men which no human power, however arrogant, would 
dare suggest—that we who accept its teaching office 
shall accept those propositions which are " o f faith," 
even where we do not wholly understand them, and 
even where they may seem to us to stand in conflict 
with other portions of our personal reasoning as to the 
things that lie within the human ken. 

Y o u will see at once that this demand cannot 
merely be waived aside as being incompatible with 
so-called rights of private judgment, unless you are 
prepared on the same principle to deny that there can 
be any authoritative revelation of God's truth at all. 

Private judgment—meaning the paramount authority 
of that which at any moment may commend itself to m e — 
must dissolve any divine authority of the Written Word, 
as surely as of the Living Voice. Luther, in his more 
consistent mood, was hardly less arrogant than Mr. 
Matthew Arnold in bis assertion that the Canon of the 
New Testament was to be limited by his own theology. 
T h e Epistle of James, said Luther, cannot be the word 
of God, because it is tainted with "Justification by 
works." This and this cannot be a Aoyiov of Jésus, 
says the modern critic, because / would not have said it. 

I do not forget that one great watchword of the six-
teenth century revolt was the appeal from the Church to 
the Bible. But the impartial critics have long since 
begun to recognize that the Bible is no ally of the 



The Church Catholic. i i 

Lutheran and Calvinist theology, much less of the eclec-
tic system of the so-called National Church of England. 
And as the inevitable disintegration has gone on, the 
appeal to the Bible has come to be an appeal against the 
Bible. 

I do not hesitate, indeed, to say that the teaching office 
of the Church and the existence of any real revelation 
must stand and fall together. If there be no Church, 
neither is there any Bible, unless you mean by a Bible 
an interesting but scrappy compendium of oriental 
literature. If the Church be not a teacher, then there 
is not any Christ at all, unless it be a self-deluded HebreV 
Socrates. 

It will enable me to make my position clearer, if I may 
for a moment assume that those whom I address accept 
the proposition that the mission of Christ was to reveal 
to the whole world some knowledge of divine things not 
attainable or not attained before. My position is that, if 
this be true, the claim of the Church to be a living voice, 
expounding with authority from age to age what was 
contained in that revelation and included in the deposit 
of faith, must of necessity be allowed. For if a revelation 
was required for the spiritual guidance of the race, it is 
self-evident that the truth intended to be revealed must 
be capable of being apprehended by all sorts and con-
ditions of men, and in the coming ages of the world, with 
some reasonable security. A revelation which in its 
cardinal points was open to such absolute doubt, that the 
most honest, enlightened and spiritual men could arrive 
at conclusions diametrically opposed, and yet have no 
kind of arbiter to whom they could refer their difference, is 
no revelation at all. That any revelation should be useful 
for the world or conceivable as a providential design, three 
things surely are necessary: that it should be guaranteed 
in its inception: that it should carry a continuing certitude: 
and that it should be applicable to the intelligence and 
practical necessities of every struggling soul. It is written, 
indeed, that the things of God are hidden oftentimes 
from the wise and learned, and are revealed rather to the 
babes and sucklings of the world. But assuredly it can-
net be true that the revelation of Christ is a thing 
discernible by sundry scholars and gentlemen, having 



6 The Church Catholic. i i 

leisure and much knowledge, but wholly misapprehended 
or not visible atall among the "little ones" of whom H e ah 
ways spoke so carefully,—by the crossing-sweeper and 
the washer-woman, the labourer in the fields, the prole-
tariat of the town. If from these, who need it most, the 
revelation of Christ is inevitably hidden, then God has 
mocked the universe. But if there be not a teaching 
authority and a living voice, how is the truth accessible 
to these? 

Will you tell me they can read the Bible? I reply, that 
men better and more learned than they have found a 
thousand contradictory religions within the covers of the 
Sacred Books of Christianity. Even i f it were not so, who 
shall guarantee to them either the degree of authority 
that attaches to these books or even the contents of the 
canon, if there be no continuing teacher in the world 
since the day when Christ last stood on Olivet, when 
not aline indeed of the New Testament was written? 

T h e movers of the revolt against authority in the 
sixteenth century felt the difficulty dimly; but they 
evidently were not aware of the far-reaching scepticism 
which their protest logically involved. T h e y adopted, 
as a working principle, the doctrine of the infallibility of 
Bible texts, supplemented by the conception of the 
" testimony of the Holy Spirit." On this view, earnest 
souls throughout Protestantism, prayerfully reading the 
Word of God with the intoxicating belief in a personal 
revelation of its import, were not long in setting up an 
infinite diversity of creed and practice, wherein for want 
of any pope, each teacher was his own. Even the 
monstrosities of the Anabaptists in the earlier time, or of 
the Mormons in our own, have come to them guaranteed 
by the same authority which guarantees the sturdy 
Calvinism of Scotland, the Puritanism of the Ironsides, 
the mystic spirituality of George Fox and William Penn. 
Of all this I merely say that, to my mind, such a 
revelation reveals nothing: and that if the office of the 
Messiah were but to live and speak for a little while, and 
charge a few uneducated persons to commit to writing a 
fragmentary account of what He did and said, and a still 
more imperfect set of epistolary remarks upon the theories 
of life and action which He taught, then He has left thfe 



The Church Catholic. i i 

world without any secure guidance in the ways of God, 
or any safe criterion of truth and right. 

Surely the cult of isolated texts which is nicknamed 
' Bibliolatry' is no possible assurance of God's teaching. 
There are texts which, taken apart, prove almost every-
thing. And conversely there are many vital matters which 
no set of texts, taken apart, will satisfactorily establish. 
If ianything is clear about the New Testament, it is 
that nowhere does it profess to set out either a reasoned 
philosophy of life or a comprehensive scheme of doctrine. 
Apart from the patent circumstance, that the 'Discipline 
of the Secret' precluded the publication of what may be 
called the esoteric dogmas of the early Christians, it is 
obvious that in no one of the Gospels or Epistles has the 
writer any idea of writing a systematic exposition, or any 
notion that he is putting on record an exhaustive or 
complete account of the teaching either of Christ or of 
the early Church. T o them, as to me, the deposit of 
faith was a body of tradition, providentially safeguarded 
by the earthly work of the Spirit of Truth, but not 
depending on nor bounded by the Sacred Books, for it 
was going on concurrently before and during their 
construction, by the same authority which adjudicated, 
first vaguely and afterwards with definite precision, upon 
the number and office of the Sacred Books themselves. 

There is of course another sense in which all Christianity 
must depend on the Bible, for it is there chiefly that we find 
the historic warrant for the belief that such a life as 
Christ's was ever lived at all. But when we have used 
our Matthew, and John, and Paul, with Clement and 
Hermas, and the Pseudo-Areopagite and the rest, as we 
might use our Tacitus or our Josephus; and in the 
character of historic students have sifted out from these 
the fact that Christ's life and acts and work and 
personality are in the main as historic as Caesar's; then, 
as a Catholic, I would say that we can collect from that 
account and the historic facts surrounding it the assurance 
not only that this momentous Person did found the 
Catholic Church—of which I am ascertain as that Cffisar 
initiated the Empire—but also that in founding it H e 
gave it a commission which, if H e was truly God, was 
verily Divine. Thus it is that when, in course of centuries 



The Church Catholic. i i 

we find it declared that Matthew, John and Paul are 
" o f the canon of scripture" and are to be read as 
inspired writings, whereas Clement and Hermas, however 
venerable, are not; then we can go back to Matthew, 
and John and Paul and reread them not as mere historical 
critics but as humble students of the word of God—and 
so are prepared to accept, on their authority endorsed by 
the authority of the faith, much in their narrative which, 
as historical critics, we were content to earmark as 
possibly legendary or of doubtful accuracy, and much in 
their doctrine which, as mere literature, might not have 
commended itself to a fastidious taste. 

I have desired to define at some length this Catholic 
view of Christ's revelation and the Catholic attitude towards 
the Bible, as opposed to the Protestant theories on these 
matters, partly because it is vital to the understanding of 
Catholicism and partly because it is seldom understood 
by those who stand outside the Church. I now pass to 
the consideration of some of the main lines of the 
Catholic teaching. It will be understood that I have 
indeed nothing to offer but a few suggestions, whose 
only value, if they have any, is that they have been borne 
in upon me by reason of much converse with those to whom 
Catholicism speaks the language of a strange country. 

Upon the commonplaces of controversy I do not 
propose to waste time. T h e "errors of R o m e " which 
exercise the mind of anti-Popery lecturers and other 
wise men, are for the most part beside the point. 
T o o often, they are either flat misstatements of Catholic 
belief, imputing to us what no Catholic would dream of 
teaching—as that "the end justifies the m e a n s ; " or they 
are a travesty of something which is the merest fringe of 
that great body of doctrine, such as the ancient usage of 
Indulgences or the celibacy of the clergy. O f such 
things, at a fit time, I should not despair of giving 
you a wholly reasonable account: but if a man desires 
to appreciate the Catholic Faith as it deserves, it is 
not with these high points of controversy that he will 
begin. It is the broad base-lines of that majestic 
plan that such a one will look for. It is the pregnant 
words which, by that living voice, the Master speaks to 
all the world and to each man's soul. 



The Church Catholic. i i 

I cannot hope to make you know these mighty words 
— w h i c h Paul heard in the third Heaven—which all of 
us will hear when the last trumpet sounds—which, as we 
well know, descend at the altar rails into many a simple 
heart. T o the ear of faith, they are not hard to hear: 
but to state them in the common language of the world, 
and above all in the customary speech of modern Eng-
land, is a work that for its full accomplishment must wait, 
I think, till God shall send again that gift of 'prophecy/ 
wherewith He touched the lips of John of the Golden 
Mouth, and lit the fiery eyes of Savonarola, and winged 
the gracious words of Lacordaire. Yet, however little 
power there be to do it, we must do the little that we 
may. For when we look back upon that woeful time 
when the Body of Christ was torn asunder, and the 
mightiest semblance of God's Kingdom which the world 
had seen was rent by civil war, I think we cannot choose 
but say that these men, however we are to judge their 
motives or their aim, threw back the world's religious 
life by centuries. 

We have had more than two hundred years of " Phoe-
nix-cremation" since the Bull of Wittenberg was burnt; 
but I doubt if another two hundred will place us at the 
point the world might have reached, if the party of re-
form had been led by men of the type of Savonarola and 
of Thomas More, rather than by Luther and Henry V I I I . 
That is our v i e w : but of those who take any other,' 
we may at least demand that they shall be will-
ing to labour with us to restore the broken unity; 
to heal the secular war, to point the nations, amid a. 
chaos that seemingly grows worse with every tide of 
books, to that City whereof the pattern is laid up 
in heaven, whose walls are justice and whose ways 
are peace, since it is builded upon the rock of an assured 
commission and lit for ever by the light of God. 

I must pray you therefore to follow me a little, while I 
try to tell you what Catholicism means to me. It implies, 
first of all, a deep tremendous consciousness of the 
heaven-high difference between good and evil, truth 
and untruth, righteousness and sin. If it seems to be 
rigid in its teaching and in its insistance on obedience, it 
is because it feels that the tolerance which holds that one 



IO The Church Catholic. i i 

thing may as well be true as any other, is but an opening 
of the floodgates of all misery. Tolerance we are per» -
fectly ready to give where it is due. Where a man 
believes error honestly, only because he is somehow 
disabled from seeing the truth, we do not venture to 
condemn him: but we cannot talk of it as if he were as 
likely to be right as we are, or as if it did not matter 
which of us was right at all. For when we say that we 
believe, we mean it: and when we profess to hold the 
Truth revealed by God in Christ, we hold it as a precious 
gift, the wanton loss of which would be by far more 
terrible than any worldly calamity. 

A s with truth, so with the consciousness of sin. 
W e are reproached, unjustly enough, with some unreason-
able hostility to modern progress, and to that all-pervading 
spirit of emancipation which is the pride of the children 
of the Great Revolution. Neither with progress, nor with 
science, nor with freedom, has the Church any quarrel. 
She has herself in many ways been the promoter and 
guardian of them all: but she has always been and is 
and will be jealous of the souls that are in danger, for 
she counts the risk of moral evil as a thing far graver 
than material prosperity. A s we would all say, surely, 
in our personal ethics, that no amount of money gain 
should weigh with an honest man against his moral 
degradation; so the Church says, upon her wider plane, 
that no amount of monetary or material progress will 
compensate a generation, if thereby it suffers moral wreck. 
" W h a t doth it profit a man," she cries from a g e to age, 
" i f he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" 
" Woe upon you," she cries to the heralds of comfortable 
Utopias of emancipation, " i f by your recklessness the 
little ones of Christ are made to stumble and to fall." 
So much,—butnomore. Churchmen have been mistaken, 
as we all admit, in their application of that principle. Y o u 
are free to say bitter things about their politics, if you will. 
But if you would do justice to the spirit which animated 
even the narrowest among them, you must remember 
that the thought which underlay their warfare was the 
paramount importance of saving, if possible, these little 
ones among their flock, from what seemed a probable 
risk of being led to sin against God. 



The Church Catholic. i i 

Throughout all the Catholic doctrine and the living 
practice of the Church runs the same dominant note of 
the consciousness of sin. T h a t God is above all things 
infinitely H o l y — t h a t every single grave and deliberate 
sin is a disaster to the universe which we cannot measure 
that, in the things of human life, sin is indeed the only 
real evil that exists, and that to advance towards perfec-
tion of personal character is our only real progress these 
are the alphabet of the Catholic rule of life. If it be 
asceticism to hold that our pain and pleasure are of 
absolutely no account in comparison with any moral 
gain, then we are all ascetics in our belief, however little 
we may fulfil that rule in practice. And the reason why 
we hold each particular sin a woeful evil, is because it 
appears to us as a direct contempt of God, Who is our 
absolute Lord and infinite benefactor, and because we feel 
that to Him by His essential nature, evil must needs be 
horrible altogether. If we are to talk of justice, therefore, 
any one rebellion could be enough to forfeit all His grace, 
forego His promises, and alienate the sinner by the issue 
of his own choice from that Heavenly Presence wherein 
no discord dwells. 

Not only does the Church so think of sin, but she goes 
on to say that even if by repentance and in God's grace 
the direct offence is put away, the rebel absolved, the 
alien soul brought back into the happy family who are 
at home with God, yet even so the mischief of that once-
committed sin is not put by. For it is the nature of evil 
to work itself out still, in evil and disablement and loss : 
and these, which are technically called the "temporal 
consequence " of sin, must needs be suffered even while 
there is rejoicing in Heaven over the sheep which was 
lost and now is found again. It is in this connection that 
we think of Purgatory. It is the life beyond this life where 
souls, who are indeed not rebels now but God's beloved 
penitents, must wait and toil and grow till they have 
wholly purged away the consequences of forgotten sin, 
and wrought upon the frail and faulty characters they built 
themselves, tha,t final beauty of holiness which is alone 
receptive of the Vision of God. 

But if the Church is stern and terrible in her anathemas 
on even the beginnings of moral wrong, she is not slow 



The Church Catholic. i i 

to preach the good tidings of the infinite mercy. I 
cannot profess to you that the God of Whom she speaks -
is the God of those who go their easy ways and say 
" H e ' s a good fellow and 'twill all be well." She 
dare not bid us think it will be well, unless we will 
it. " He made us," says St. Austin, " without our consent, 
but H e will not save us so." For with the conscious-
ness of sin, the Church insists by logical necessity on 
the paramount fact of human freedom. When the 
human soul came from the creative fiat as a self capable 
of moral life, and therein stamped with the very image of 
the Divine, it bore both the mark of responsibility and 
the inalienable power, in God's despite yet none the less 
triumphantly, to cause evil things to be, in what was 
God's fair universe before. Why did He do it? we may 
all ask: but with our little knowledge of the secrets of 
the Eternal we cannot give much other answer than that, 
as far as we can see, it was not possible to separate the 
transcendant gift of a potential moral goodness, whereby 
we are indeed ennobled as no other gift could honour us, 
from its correlative possibility of creating crime. 

On Free Will, then, the Church insists; but she insists 
no less on Grace. If God be stainless purity, H e is no 
less essential Love. If he does not compel us to obey the 
Holy Law, at least H e plies us with inducement, with 
suggestion, with facility of every kind which infinite wis-
dom joined to infinite love can offer for our aid. T h e 
world which we inhabit is the world our fathers made, and 
it is beset with the results of old ancestral sin: for it is the 
tragic property of wrong that its ill consequences affect 
not only him who does it, but also those to whom his life 
is bound in this great family of struggling souls. , We 
live then not in a Paradise of God's arranging, but in a 
Babylon of crooked ways, whose streets are littered with 
the rotting evil and barred with the accumulated rubbish 
of that past which we inherit. I do not forget, still less 
deny, that this same Babylon is a mighty city, wherein 
are also goodly sights and gracious buildings not a few, 
with many that, though still imperfect, and it may be 
dangerous in their imperfection, are full of promise for 
the later time. I am no decrier of the noble inheritance 
our fathers left us: yet I say that when I think of it as 



The Church Catholic. i i 

the abode wherein \ye must work out each of us his own 
salvation, it would to me seem little better than a fever 
swamp or stricken city of the plague, were it not for the 
grace of God. 

For, as the Church conceives, the teeming millions who 
are born and die, at mere haphazard as it were, along 
the crooked ways where to the human eye there is no 
light nor joy, are not forgotten. U p and down, as Jacob 
saw .them, go the messengers of God. T o all they 
come: to those who are working out, with fear and 
trembling always, yet with steady resolution, what 
they take to be for them the will of God; and to 
those who are wavering on the brink of danger; and to 
those no less—nay rather, more eagerly, if possible,— 
who have already sinned and are persisting in their sin. 

U p and down too go the messengers, in those hard 
places of the world where circumstance, to human eyes, 
is as a Devil-giant coercing hapless lives not only into 
pain but into moral wreck. We do not say that evil 
circumstance, that plague-inheritance of ancient sin, is a 
light thing. We think indeed that H e Who judges all 
of us will make allowance amply. It seems evident 
that to some the avoidance of a special sin—say drunk-
enness—is easier than to others. T o none, short of moral 
madness, is sin in truth a necessity: and the madman's 
acts are not sin. What we conclude is not so much that 
those who are thrown among evil surroundings are wholly 
to be excused, as that those of us who have had better ad-
vantage, have the deeper blame. But everywhere, and to 
each with the appropriate message, come the bearers of 
God's grace. 

When the man who is clothed in purple and fine linen 
and fares sumptuously every day, is basking in a sensual 
ease, some warning, whether it take the form of Lazarus 
or no, awakes him to remember better things. When 
the stricken child, to whom life never brought a 
sweeter message than the harmony of the outward 
squalor and the inward pain, lies wistfully drifting to-
wards the welcome end, there are hands unseen that 
clothe upon its soul the raiment of a lovely patience and 
light up within its eyes the radiance of an unearthly 
lesson. When the successful Philistine is blotting day by 



M. The Church Catholic. i i 

day from the tablets of his brain the memory of any 
spiritual possibilities, there is a hand that constantly 
renews the unconsidered lines, so that he cannot choose 
but sometimes see them. -For every battle there is an 
ally, for every frailty a support; with every temptation, 
however fierce.it seems to our not quite impartial judg-
ment, there goes forth for us the possibility of bearing 
it. 

Conceiving thus of human life, as a warfare wherein 
we daily fight with sin with the perpetual assistance of 
the Grace of God, the Catholic Church presents to us, as 
the central fact of the world's history, the coming of the 
Christ. 

It is not uncommon to reproach us with our acceptance 
of the supernatural: and our critics seem to be quite 
satisfied that the admission of any belief which involves 
things not explainable by so-called "natural law," is mere 
superstition—as absurd as witchcraft and less respectable 
than Spiritualism or the Mind Cure. I will not stay to 
discuss this general point of view: but I will content my-
self with the remark that there is no necessary anta-
gonism at all between Naturalism and the Supernatural, 
rightly understood. If Free Will be a fact, that alone 
transcends at once all that in the narrow sense is spoken 
of as "natural l a w : " for every free act, if it be truly free, 
introduces a spiritual new creation into the sequence of 
material and organic forces. Why should not the same 
be true in a wider field? If there be a personal 
God, why may His will not also intervene and mould the 
stolid course of physical change and consequence? And 
if there be such influence at all, why should we assume 
that it is opposed to L a w ? Rather must it be itself the 
action and evidence of a higher and more spiritual reason 
in things, which we perhaps cannot as yet follow, but 
which we too may some day see. 

T o the Catholic, then, the cardinal fact of the whole 
world's history is the birth and life and death of Christ. 
T h e old world leads up to it: the new is its development 
and outcome. Unique in all the centuries—lowliest 
and yet most royal—that dying Preacher, Who was 
crucified by Jerusalem and Rome for saying that 
H e was the very Son of God, is the corner-stone 



The Church Catholic. i i 

of the world fabric,—the key of the human mystery 
— t h e Lord of Life. Reading the simple narrative, 
waiving all question of inspiration, if you will, we can 
come to no other conclusion but that H e claimed to 
be the Incarnate God. Not at all a wise Socrates— 
not in the least, a later Isaiah—not a mystic iior a 
magician: but the very G o d — t h e Word made F l e s h — 
the absolute " I am." 

Upon this absolute and central truth of Christ's 
Divinity, the Church insists as the focus and radiating 
point of all her teaching. I have spoken of her 
wide philosophy of sin and grace. For both, she 
takes us back at once to Christ. His life and death 
— t h e perfect sacrifice, the purifying and the reconcilia-
tion of sin-stained humanity—bore in it the needed 
infinite redemption, built in the counsels of the eternal 
mercy the golden bridge by which every sinner may 
return. In the mystery of that Life and Death, at once 
true human and inalienably divine, is the origin of all 
grace. H e is the link between the Finite and the Infi-
nite: therefore H e is the W a y whereby we come to God 
and whereby God communicates Himself to us. In that, 
by reason of His Humanity, we are the brethren of the 
Son of God, so are we heirs of the heavenly kingdom. 
In His Sonship is the eternal Fatherhood of God revealed. 
In that H e died, H e conquered death: in that He lived 
and liveth, H e is the door of Life Eternal. 

On all this, I say, the Catholic Church insists—and 
with far keener and more eager vigilance than any other 
of the confessions: For if Christ be not God, she feels, 
then is our hope vain. If He, Who on a score of critical 
occasions claimed to be Divine, was But a madman or a 
fraud, let us not play at Christianity—let us rather eat 
and drink, for to-morrow we die. Because from the first 
she guarded this essential truth before all else, therefore 
she spent centuries in defining and maintaining the doc-
trine of the Trinity and the related doctrine of the Person 
of Christ, the Human and Divine. T h e elaborate 
formulae <Jf the Nicene theology and the rest are not 
scholastic subtleties or the quibbles of an oriental f a n c y : 
they are the necessary basis and security of the vital fact 
of Christianity. It is either these, or nothing. 



The Church Catholic. i i 

And as she has insisted always on the doctrine of the 
Trinity, so, for exactly the same reason, she has been 
careful to uphold the honourable prerogative of her, whom 
from the earliest centuries she has styled the Mother of 
God. Wonderful indeed it is to any Catholic to hear the 
stale invectives which are still bestowed on " Mariolatry," 
as if somehow the worship of the Divine were squandered 
on a creature: for there lives no Catholic so ignorant as 
not to be able to tell you the true answer—that we 
honour her precisely because to do otherwise would be 
to ignore the real Godhead of her Son. 

Believing then that Christ is the ' very God of very 
God,' who took upon Himself the human nature and 
dwelt with us on earth a while, the Church presents His 
earthly work under four different aspects—though these 
also are in truth the same. H e is the Saviour of the 
world; H e is the Revelation of the Truth of G o d ; H e 
is the Perfect Life; and He is the founder of the 
spiritual kingdom. Vou will see that each and all of 
these grow naturally ana at once out of the main con-
ception of His nature and His office. In the world-
reconciliation, it was needful that men should learn to 
know God better, and that they should be taught to do 
His will, seeing that the human wisdom and human good 
intentions had not sufficed. Equally, as I have sought 
to show you, was it necessary that an abiding institute 
should be created—not indeed a kingdom o f this world, 
but yet a palpable, continuing, organic f a c t — a sure 
custodian and an abiding witness. 

On some of these points I have dwelt already—of all, 
there is abundant notice in the Gospel texts. T o insist on 
them at length here would carry me beyond my scope. 
I pass therefore at once to say that beyond this funda-
mental insistance on the Divine character of Christ, there 
is another derivative sense in which the Catholic Church 
insists constantly upon the supernatural. 

I said that, in her view, the life of man must needs be 
constantly assisted by the spiritual help of G o d ; and that 
she presents the life and death of Christ, as being, in the 
design of Providence, the fountain of this unfailing Grace. 

Now it is her special pride and office to be a means of 
salvation available to a l l — t o be a-Church truly Catholic, 



The Church Catholic. 
i i 

to whom nothing of humanity is alien, from whom the 
beggar can draw spiritual wealth as surely as the prince 
or the professor, though they too find, if they will seek it, 
all the special help they need. T o the end that 
there should be in the world such tangible and easy ways 
of entering into the Heavenly Communion, of appropri-
ating; each poor nature for itself, the riches of the 
treasure of the Lord, the Church believes that Christ 
ordained that series of symbolic rites, adapted to the 
crises of our life, which we call Sacraments: and that it 
was His will to appoint concerning these that they should 
be to His disciples (apart frtom prayer) the ordinary 
channels of the communication of that grace and pardon 
and spiritual sustenance, which in and through the office 
of our Saviour we claim from the Almighty. True is it, 
that this infinite ocean of Love is waiting for us all the 
while. Y e t in the spiritual order, Love too has its own laws, 
and this is one of them: that by Christ's appointment we 
draw its channels into our souls, as freely and as fully as 
we will or as our capacity for receiving it will allow, 
by obeying the sacramental ordinances of the Chris-
tian dispensation, in faith and love and humble trust 
in Him. . 

I need not tell you—for it is patent—that of this 
sacramental system the central fact is that, which more 
than any theoretic point marks off the life of the Church 
Catholic from everything beyond it—the acceptance of 
the Real Presence of the Lord upon our altars under 
the sacramental form. 

T o those who approach this as mere critics, bringing 
neither personal experience nor sympathy to aid them, 
no man can hope to say what it implies. T o them I will 
only say ," Y o u read the Imitation and you hold it a great 
book—one of the treasures of the world—a mirror and 
revelation of the holiest in man. Read then the sacra-
mental chapters of that soul-swaying meditation, and go 
back and scoff at us, if you can." Or let them go, if they 
prefer life to literature, into any Catholic church, 
not at a fashionable midday Mass but in the early 
morning, on some great day like Easter or the Birth 
of Christ: and watch the still rapt gladness that has 
fallen on the meanest faces, watph the fellowship and 



The Church Catholic. i i 

democracy of the altar rails, catch the energy of better 
effort and of new beginning, and the enthusiasm of sincere 
repentance, and the nobility of high worship that makes 
the air electric—and tell us if they can, that it is all no 
more than mummery and priestcraft, folly counter-
signed by fraud. 

A l l this may be deception, you will say: and undoubt-
edly, although subjecti ve testimony may be much to us who 
have believed, toothers it is at the best a noticeable 
phenomenon. Something more is wanted. We must 
show a reason for our faith in this most startling or most 
mystic doctrine of a spiritual Presence that transcends 
not only sense but maddest imagination, of which yet 
there is no outward sign at all. 

Our first reason, naturally, is in the Bible text itself. We 
say, and I confess I cannot conceive that an intelligent 
atheist would doubt it, that Christ said neithermore nor less 
than what the Church teaches concerning the Eucharist, not 
only when He founded thatrite on the most solemn occasion 
of His intercourse with His Apostles, but at many other 
times, and above all in that test discussion which is recorded 
in the sixth chapter of St. John. But strong as is the 
Scriptural argument, the Church has another that is 
perhaps still stronger. 

T h e doctrine of the Real Presence, linked with that of 
the ordinance of the Last Supper as a mystic, yet most 
effectual commemoration and representation of the 
Passion of the Lord, is the essence and import of " t h e 
Mass." Now that great act of common worship and of 
mystic Sacrifice, of solemn commemoration and public 
prayer for all the living and the dead,, is and has always 
been the central office of the Church—in every age and 
nation substantially, nay even minutely, the same. Being 
so notable a corporate act, it has been always safe-
guarded by jealous provision for a settled liturgical form. 
There is no time in the history of Christendom when that 
liturgy is not before us, as a palpable and most significant 
record: for in every age and under every variation it 
testifies beyond cavil to the belief in a Real Sacramental 
Presence of the Lord as the whole point and meaning 
of the great office. I suppose there- are many: able and 
learned persons- who imagine, in a very careless ignorance, 



The Church Catholic. i i 

that the Mass is a "fond thing vainly invented," some-
where in the Middle Ages. Y e t nothing is more palpably 
untrue. 

T h e case stands thus. There exist certain great types 
of the Liturgy of the Mass—all perfectly at one in their 
intent and doctrine and general plan, and even in their 
main forms of prayer and in unexpected coincidences of 
phrase and action, yet varying in practical arrangements 
and filled in with details evidently arising by local usage. 
Each of these is clearly parallel to and not derived 

from the others. Each is attributed by the local tradition 
to an apostle, who was the early founder of the local 
church. Each is carried up, by a separate chain of 
documentary and historical evidence, to a time not very 
many generations removed from the living witness of 
those who saw and heard the Lord. What is more clear 
as a mere matter of scientific historical criticism, than that 
these great trunk lines of liturgical tradition must have 
diverged from a common Apostolic T y p e or norm—and 
that this type must have been, as they are, a central and 
Sacramental and commemorative office, involving a 
Real Presence, and being to them in all essentials what 
the office of the Mass has been to us to-day? 

Probably many of you will be incredulous, but the 
proofs are very simple. A t Rome, we have the Liturgy 
which is now the common, though by no means the only 
form used in the Catholic Church, and we trace it back 
so far, that details of its use are attributed to Popes who 
ruled between 100 A.D. and 120 A.D. T h e names of the 
Saints commemorated in the text are known to have 
been added by gradual accretion, and yet all of them, 
with a solitary exception, were martyred before A.D. 310, 
(the excepted date being 362), while the earlier names 
go back to Linus, Cletus, and Clement, the immediate 
successors of Peter's Chair. Ambrose of Milan, himself 
the editor of a special rite still preserved there, cites some 
of the Roman prayers soon after 400 A.p., as being taken 
from what he then called "the ancient rites." Like all 
the others, it was preserved in oral tradition, by reason 
of the -Discipline of the Secret, until the fifth century: but 
a copy of the Canon, exactly as it is now, was set forth 
in the Sacramentary of Pope Gelasius about 496 A.D. 



20 The Church Catholic. i i 

-There is, however, no question that the ancient form 
had been strictly preserved in.all its essentials; and we 
have on record, in the Epistles of St. Innocent I. in the 
fourth century, that Pope's opinion that the Liturgy was 
in fact the true tradition given by St. Peter to the Church 
at Rome. 

Turn now to the other great rite preserved at Alexan-
dria, which in like manner was committed to writing by 
St. Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, after 400 A.D., and 
ascribed by him and by the whole Church to the direct oral 
tradition of St. Mark himself. T h e internal evidence of the 
prayers, as they were then set down and have been since 
preserved, points to the period of persecution, say 300 
A.D., as the date of some of the added prayers, the body 
of the rite being therefore earlier. T h e condemnation of 
the Eutychian opinions in 451 led to the schism which 
detached all the Copts from Rome: yet the Copts 
have to this day a form of the same Sacramental 
Liturgy of St. Mark and St. Cyril, which was old among 
them then. 

If you go to Syria, the great Liturgy of Jerusalem, 
ascribed to the tradition of St. James himself and to the 
direct development of the Church described in the Acts 
of the Apostles, is the Liturgy long used by and still pre-
served among the Eastern Eutychians, who therefore 
held it as the true tradition before 450. T h e Nestorians, 
who have been separated since 431, keep to this day a 
related rite, named from St. Thaddaeus the Apostle. 
Indeed, we are told that Nestorius was the first of the 
schismatics of whom it was even alleged that he had 
altered the ancient Liturgy. It is curious to remember 
that the Portuguese, when they discovered Malabar in the 
16 th century, found a native church there using this very 
rite: and it is now clear that they had it from the Nesto-
rian Church of Babylon, where it was in use before 400. 
But we carry this rite still-further back with an absolute 
historic certainty. For it happens by good fortune that 
there are preserved to us the Sunday-school lessons of St. 
Cyril, who was Bishop of Jerusalem in 347. In these he 
actually instructs his catechumens in the ritual and 
meaning of the Mass, and for that purpose he explains 
point by point this venerable liturgy .of St. James, much 



The Church Catholic. i i 

as we have it still as the basis of a hundred local rites 
throughout the Catholic East. 

Now each of these three great normal types of the 
Eucharistic tradition—that of Peter at Rome, that of 
James at Jerusalem, that of Mark at Alexandria—is 
perfectly independent. N o scholar can dream that any 
is derived from, or even moulded by, any other. T h e 
hundreds of minor variations fall to the scholar's 
criticism easily under one or other of these or other 
equally ancient types. But the types themselves are 
sisters, not interdependent b u t collateral: and therefore 
they are sisters of a common stock. These three or four 
most venerable types—to leave aside the others—involve 
an archetype. Y e t each of them by about the year 300, 
was not only established but old, and based by those who 
loved it upon an apostolic tradition. W h o made the 
common archetype, I pray you, which Rome and Alex-
andria and Jerusalem and Babylon assume ? In what 
common Eucharistic centre do these traditions meet? 
Who taught the half-dozen intervening generations to 
accept this appalling mystery with common certainty, as 
a. thing not doubted even when dogmatic heresy was 
rife and all the world rang with polemical debate—as a 
thing which every schismatic took with him, whatever 
else he left? W h o taught it, I ask, or could have 
taught it, but the Master Who, on the world-historic night, 
commanded them to do in memory of Him the solemn 
act which H e did then. 

If you still doubt what I say of the Apostolic 
origin of the Eucharistic Act, I would have you read 
what is not hard of access—the Apologia of Justin, who 
is called the " Philosopher," addressed as early as 138 A.D. 
to Antoninus Pius, in defence of the Christian faith. 
Therein, speaking generally of the existing rites, for he 
had lived in Syria and at Alexandria and Rome, he 
describes the outline of the Mass. A s the core and 
heart of it, he insists in plain terms on the doctrine of 
the Real Presence. With great simplicity and directness 
he bases both the doctrine and the office upon the insti-
tutionary words of Christ. And as if to exclude any 
caviller who might suppose it a new idea of his own or 
his contemporaries, he goes on to remark as a striking 



The Church Catholic. i i 

fact that " t h e evil spirits" (as he puts it) " h a v e intro-
duced this very solemnity into the mysteries of Mithra," 
the then fashionable ritualism of R o m e : proving so 
that to his knowledge,—and he was a master of all the 
schools before his baptism,—the Mass was older than 
these fantastic Eastern rites, and was in fact, as it claimed 
to be, the commemorative office framed by those who 
first received the Eucharist at the very hands of Christ. 

If then the Mass we have to-day, was known as the 
ancient and undoubted worship of the churches by this 
Syrian convert, born when John, if dead, was only just 
dead, and to whom John's personal disciples and the 
immediate followers of James and Paul must have been 
known, what will you say ? I f the " Supper of the Lord," 
which Paul was setting in order among the Corinthians 
about 50 A.D., was not the same thing as Justin, was 
admitted to about 120 A.D., who altered it? Not the 
beloved disciple, or his pupil if you will, who wrote the 
Fourth Gospel: for the Fourth Gospel insists most mark-
edly on this very Eucharistic doctrine. Not the Church 
at Rome: for there, as I ha.ve said, the tradition preserved 
by well remembered records from the joint martyrdom of 
Peter and Paul down to the Sacramentary of Gelasius is 
unbroken by any hint of variance. T h e answer is that 
there is no change, no innovation; only an untiring 
effort to hold fast the ordinance of the Saviour, W h o 
left it as His most precious legacy when He went out 
tp die. 

Terrible it is, if you will—surpassing human speech—this 
heart of heavenly fire that lives within our worship. Y o u 
will tell me it is vain to trace it back to the Apostles, for 
the thing itself is past believing. I admit that if Christ 
be not God, our hope is vain—our holy office, as you say, 
a mummery—our Communion with the Lord of Heaven 
and Earth a bitter fraud. But I warn you that if you come 
with me so far as to agree that Christ was, and that H e 
was Divine, you must come further. If you repudiate 
the whole record, I understand you. But every com-
petent critic now admits that quite worthy witnesses are 
before us. If you take the witness as of any weight at all, 
you cannot put aside the clear consensus and wilful re-
petition of the three Synoptics who record the words ofinsti-



The Church Catholic. i i 

tution: nor the still fuller and more deliberate enforce-
ment of the same by Paul: nor, above all, that vivid 
dramatic sermon in the sixth of John. There, after His 
teaching they asked as you do, " H o w can this man give 
us His flesh to eat?" and many of the disciples went 
away and walked no more with Him. He did not call 
them back to tell them that they misconceived, nor did 
H e explain to the Apostles any hidden sense. H e only 
turned sadly to the twelve, and asked " W i l l you too go 
away ? " And Peter, spokesman of the faith as elsewhere, 
beaten down by the mystery, not understanding the hard 
saying any more than the seceders, answers, as we answer 
now, " Lord, to whom shall we go? Thoiihastthewords of 
eternal life : and we believe and know that Thou art the 
Christ, the Son of the Living God." 

I have dwelt long upon the subject of the Mass and 
of the Eucharistic dpctrine. It is, I think, an obvious 
dividing line between those conceptions of faith ana 
worship which in our own day are tending towards 
Catholicism, and those which lead away from it. I have 
only time to pass now to one other aspect, of the Catholic 
Church, in which it appeals with peculiar force to the 
present struggling generation, and to the coming time. 

A s the root idea of the Protestant Reformers was flat 
individualism, so the dominant note of the Catholic 
conception of the world is solidarity. In the beginning, 
the Church was all but a communism. In the days of 
the persecution, all who had, without other compulsion 
than the love that Christ revealed, gave up their wealth 
to feed the needy; and this fraternal distribution was 
directly organized by the Church. A t all times, though 
she has allowed private property, she has suggested that 
to forego it is the better way. A t all times, to those who 
keep their own, she has preached a far-reaching duty of 
charity to all the world, which if it were carried out, 
would leave little disparity to mourn. 

A s in property, so in all else. T h e universal brother-
hood has been to her no empty name, but a world-
reforming fact and law. Strongly, through bribe and 
menace, she has striven to uphold the equality of prince 
and peasant before the moral code: and it is her pride 
to remember that even when the hatred of the 



24 The Church Catholic. i i 

English Crown was the penalty of refusal, a weak and 
hunted and tormented Pope refused to mete out to the 
Tudor any other marriage law than would be meted out 
to the meanest hind within his realm. 

. A n d no less is it our pride that we can say that while 
the Church stood upright, here and elsewhere—even to 
the latest hour of what they call her worst corruption-^ 
she provided for the people a career, far more sure and 
better worth their following than the most advanced 
democracy has given them since. 

T a k e the great Churchmen, who, by their sheer ability 
and learning, did the chief part of the government of the 
world for many a century. T h e y are a noble line, pro-
moted often to an almost royal dignity, and in the vast 
majority of cases for no reason except their talents, or their 
virtues, or both : and of these men an enormous multitude 
are the children of the poor. There was not a country side 
that had not within reach its abbey or its cathedral: and 
where a peasant lad showed promise, and desired at once 
to serve God and to make his life useful upon a wider 
plane, it was very certain he would be put to school and 
made a ' clerk:' and once a clerk, the Church to him 
was but an organized democracy, wherein nothing, even 
to the Papal chair, was inaccessible to merit. Y o u have 
sown the land with schools; you have improved the 
Poor Law and multiplied philanthropies; and you do 
well: but for all these things it was easier for the deserving 
helpless ones of the earth to find help in their need, and 
easier for those whom God endowed with power to find 
their rightful place, before Henry sacked the monasteries 
and made himself the English Pope. 

If you pass to social or to political liberty it is still the 
same. In the Brotherhood of Christ the Church saw 
neither bond nor free. T h e patrician maiden and the 
slave girl, in the Acts of the Early Martyrs, meet as equals 
and as friends. A s swiftly as human inertia allowed, 
the Church abolished slavery. In the home, she found 
woman degraded by the licentiousness of the age. 
She freed them at a stroke when she declared that 
marriage was a Sacrament of G o d : and when she 
placed above her altars, as the symbol next in holiness 
to the Incarnate God, her stainless ideal of womanhood 



The Church Catholic. i i 

and maternity, she did more to hold in check men's 
proneness to brutality than all the laws that ever punished 

. crime. In our own and every other struggling 
commonwealth, when the feudal power was at its worst, 
and threatened to engulf for ever the liberties of thé 
tenants of the soil, it was the Church more than any 
other single force that bearded these lords of war, and 
made it possible for the common people to achieve their 
liberty. So it was the Church that gave articulate voice 
to justice and to civic reason, in adapting first and in 
administering afterwards the codes of written law : and 
here, as everywhere, she was but seeking, after the rough-
hewn fashion of human institutions, to carry out Christ's 
paramount commandment—the Law of Love. 

But not only within each single state was she a power 
for justice and emancipation—she was more and greater 
than them all. By the character of her Catholic title 
and her Catholic commission, she held up before the 
peoples the ideal of a world-community. Amid the law-
less violence of the mail-clad centuries, she provided at 
least a possible arbiter. And however men may sneer at 
the ambition of the Popes, the European peace would be 
much nearer than it is to-day if the notable example of 
Prince Bismark could be adopted as a commonplace of 
diplomacy. 

When the Empire fell, the Church upheld its 
claim. T o this hour, she refuses in the name of her 
commission, and she will refuse, to bind herself by any 
frontiers, or to be otherwise than independent in her own 
field of every national government, whether it wears its 
crown in Rome or no. She knows that the world-
progress is hampered while our narrow frontiers 
hedge us in with prejudice and tariffs, and our national 
self-seekings and distorted patriotisms keep all the nations 
lowering at each other like caged beasts, and stifle 
industry and freedom and every noble thing beneath the 
immeasurable load of military preparation: she looks for 
a better time when the human Brotherhood may be, even 
in statecraft, a practical reality. 

Y e t not even here can I pause. For if she prophesies 
of a World-State, and laughs at the little fences statesmen 
draw upon the map, no less does she bid us think of even 



26 The Church Catholic. i i 

such a commonwealth as but one province of the Hea-
venly Kingdom. " T h e Church" to her cannot be 
bounded by the little scene whereon we play our parts a 
little while; for the Church is the Body of Christ. In our 
Father's house there are many mansions; and this is but 
the outer porch. Beyond the grave her children are not 
far away. She has taught and always teaches that 
they are linked to us, and we to them, in that Community 
of Saints which reaches upwards to the throne of 
God. It may be that they, our brethren, are of the com-
pany of the Church Suffering—purging away, by what 
endurance and patience and travail we know not, the 
mortal stains they carried from the warfare of the 
Church Militant, where we were comrades and brethren 
in arms. It may be that already, if with our measures 
we can rightly appraise what with the immortals takes 
the place of time, they have passed into that other 
company of the Church Triumphant, whose place is in 
the sight of God. Y e t wheresoever they may be, our 
comrades, we can reach our hands to them and they to 
us, in prayer and spiritual fellowship, and unseen in God's 
ordering a common life goes on. Members we are 
then, of one another—here and in the unknown: mem-
bers of one transcendent spiritual yet organic w h o l e — 
and that whole is the Body of Christ. 

Endless, of course, are the things that yet remain to 
say concerning the great tradition of the Catholic teaching. 
Endless also, I believe, are the ways in which it would be 
well for us and for our children, if the Catholic Truth 
were so stated in our modern speech, that those who 
now say that every Catholic must needs be either knave 
or fool, could understand the things that they despise. 
For the present purpose I am content if I have been 
able in any measure to set forth these three outstanding 
aspects of the Catholic belief—the claim of the Living 
Voice, the treasure of the Sacraments, the Brotherhood 
of the Body of Christ. Like all else in Truth, they are 
but different aspects of the same thing,—the application, 
namely, of the work of Christ to the needs of all humanity. 
T h e y are the same in this also, that in each there 
comes the note of Catholicity. In Christ all men are 
one,—and that, not merely in any formal or theoretic 



The Church Catholic. i i 

unity, but in a brotherhood which, if we could once 
translate it into the formulae of government, would leave 
Democracies and Socialisms behind. 

Those who take themselves to be the best exponents 
of Western civilization, have been accustomed of late to 
treat the Church with scant courtesy; and I agree that 
if, as some of them suppose, religion, and perhaps duty 
also, is altogether to vanish from the earth, then the study 
of Catholicism would be but a waste of energy. But if, 
as I believe, the moral and religious consciousness of man 
be no less a fact than knowledge or physical growth or 
life or death, then I claim that this transcendent expression 
of religion through thé Christian centuries demands a 
hearing from them all. T h e y call it dead, yet it is more 
alive, in the moulding of humanity, than all their schools. 
T h e y say it belongs to a forgotten past, but there 
are not wanting signs that it shall inherit the future. In 
the field of ethics and religion, England, like the rest, 
is dividing rapidly into two camps—those who do and 
those who do not hold that religion is unnecessary and 
any reality of God superfluous. When that division is 
complete, it will be seen that the walls of the camp of 
the believers are but the fold of the Catholic Church. 

In the field of social and political relations the old order 
changes day by day more swiftly. Much is gone 
and more will go. Surely one thing is clear: that 
neither just industry nor social health nor noble govern-
ment is possible, unless we build on something better than 
selfseeking, and appeal to something holier than " t h e 
desire of a remembered pleasure ?" Individualism, and the 
Manchester School, and freedom of contract, and all the 
theories that sought justice in the war of interests and 
progress in the clash of infinite selfishness, are being 
carried out before our eyes to burial. Protestantism is 
fighting for its life with organic disintegration and intel-
lectual doubt, to which it can oppose neither a reasoned 
philosophy of life nor any authoritative gospel. It 
cannot rescue the body politic, for it cannot save itself. 
T h e masses leave it on the one side, and the leaders of 
opinion on the other. Is there no hope at all, of light 
and leadership in the coming time ? 

I submit to you that the promises of the Messiah have 



| D D O ' H l o 

28 The Church Catholic. 

not failed. His followers were the social saviours of 
the" earlier Europe: it is not more difficult to help' 
the centuries that lie before us. T h a t which H e 
promised to uphold, lives o n : and, gathering up the 
ancient truth and the modern hope, it points the nations, 
now as always, to that true Republic, where freedom is 
the law of duty; where all are equal as the sons of G o d ; 
and where fraternity is the willing service of the 
brotherhood of Christ, when the Kingdom of the Lord 
shall come. 



T H E CATHOLIC'S P E N N Y L I B R A R Y . 

Doctrinal and Controversial Series. 
T h e B l e s s e d S a c r a m e n t t h e C e n t r e o f I m -

m u t a b l e T r u t h . By Cardinal Manning. 
T h e C e r e m o n i e s o f H o l y W e e k e x p l a i n e d . 
T h e H o l y R o s a r y . By the Rev. Arthur Ryan. 
T h e O l d R e l i g i o n i n E n g l a n d . By Rev. P. Lynch, 
T r u t h , n o t W o r d s . By the same. 
B e f o r e a n d A f t e r G u n p o w d e r P l o t . By E-

Healy Thompson. 
F a i t h a n d R e a s o n . By the Rev. B. Vaughan, S.J. 
A V o i c e f r o m t h e - D e a d ; being a Letter to an 

Anglican Friend,"Jay thevCount de Montalembert. -
T h e C o n t i n u i t y o f t h e E n g l i s h C h u r c h . By 

the Very Rev. Canon Croft. 
T h e P o p e s a n d t h e E n g l i s h C h u r c h . By the 

Rev. W. Waterworth, S.J. 
W a s B a r l o w a B i s h o p ? By the late Serjeant 

Bellasis.' 
1 8 9 : o r t h e C h u r c h o f O l d E n g l a n d p r o t e s t s . 

By the Rev. J. D. Breen, O.S.B. 
T h e F a i t h o f t h e A n c i e n t E n g l i s h C h u r c h 

c o n c e r n i n g t h e H o l y E u c h a r i s t . By the 
Very Rev. J. S, Provost Northcote. 

H e n r y V I I I . a n d t h e E n g l i s h M o n a s t e r i e s . 
By Cardinal Manning. 

A F e w R e a s o n s f o r s u b m i t t i n g t o t h e C h u r c h 
o f o u r F a t h e r s . By H. Morden Bennett, M . A . 

C h u r c h D e f e n c e . — F i r s t and Second Series. 
Q u e s t i o n s a n d A n s w e r s . Comprising— 

Friendly Advice, lis. iob. 
W h y am I a Roman Catholic? is. 100. 
W h y are you a Protestant? is. 100. 
W h a t does the Bible say? " is. 100. 
Can both Churches be true? 2s. 100. 
H o w can I find G o d ' s true Church? is. 100. 
W h a t do Catholics believe? is; 100. . 

C A T H O L I C ' T R U T H S O C I E T Y , 1 8 W E S T S Q U A R E , L O N D O N , S . E . 



PRICE ONE SHILLING. 
T h e A l l e g e d A n t i q u i t y o f A n g l i c a n i s m . An 

Answer to Lord Selborne. By-the Rev. Sydney F. 
Smith, S.J. (wrapper.) fe 

T h e G h u r c h o f O l d E n g l a n d ¡being a Collection of 
Papers bearing on the, Continuity of the English 
Church, and on the attempts, to justify the Anglican/ 
position. 

Vol. I. Containing : 
- T h è Church of Old England. By the Rev. J. D . Breen, O S B 

T h e Continuity of the English Church! By Very Rev. Cahoh Crdft. 
j T h e Popes and the English Church. By the Rev. W . Waterworfh. 

A Voice from the Dead :' being a Letter to an Anglican friend from 
the Count de Montalembert : 

Was St. Peter Bishop of Rome? . By C. F . B. Allnatt. 
" C h u r c h Defence : " or, Notes on the History of .the Catholic Church 

in England. 
Vol. II. Containing: 

Henry V I I I . and the English Monasteries.',7 By Cardinal Manning 
Papal Supremacy and Infallibility. By Rev. Sydney P. Smith, "SJ 
T h e Bible and the Reformation, By C. F. B. Allnatt. 
W a s Barlow- a Bishop? By "the late Sergeant Beliasis. 
Before and after Gunpowder Pioti' "By E: Heàly Thompson. 
«89 : o r , the Church of 01d.England protests; ' B y Rev. J: D. Breen: 
T h e Faith of the Ancient English Church concerning the Holy-

Eucharist.. By the Very Rev. Provost Northcote. 
And other Papers:. 9 

PRICE SIXPE NCE. 
G r a d u s a d F i d e m : o r , T h e L o g i c o f F a i t h . 

By Rèné F. R. Conder, B. A . 
F r . H e n r y G a r n e t a n d t h e G u n p o w d e r P l o t , 

By J. H. Pollen, S.J. 
T h e P o p e a n d t h e B i b l e . An Explanation of the 

case of M. Lasserre, and of the attitude of the-
Catholic .Church to popular Bible-reading By the 
Rev. R. F. Clarke, S.J. ' ' 

x PRICE TWOPENCE. 
L e c t u r e s o n t h e P r e s e n t P o s i t i o n o f C a t h o -

l i c s i n E n g l a n d . By Cardinal Newman. 
I.- Protestant V i e w of the Catholic Church , 

II. Tradition the Sustaining. Power of the Protestant View. -
I I I . Fàble the Basis of the Protestant View. 
IV. True Testimony unequal to the Protestant View. 

Others in preparation. 

F u l l L i s t s o n a p p l i c a t i o n to 
C a t h o l i c T r u t h S o c i e t y , 18, W e s t S q u a r e , L o n d o n , S . E 

Printed at the Catholic Reformatory School, Market Weighton.