The Church and modern thought


THE CHURCH AND

MODERN THOUGHT
by

JAMES M. GILLIS, C. S. P.

Xi'**





The Church and Modern Thought
by

Rev. James M. Gillis, C. S. P.,
Editor of The Catholic World

Eight addresses delivered in the Catholic Hour produced by
the National Council of Catholic Men with the co-

operation of the National Broadcasting Company
and its associated stations.

(On Sundays from May 5 to June 23, 1935)

I. What is Modern Thought?
II. Is the Church Mediaeval?

III. Free Thought, Free Speech, Free
Press.

IV. Freedom of Conscience.

V. Academic Freedom.

VI. The Church and Democracy.

VII. The Church and the New Social
Conscience.

VIII. The Church and Progress.

National Council of Catholic Men
Producer of the Catholic Hour

1312 Massachusetts Avenue
Washington, D. C.

Printed and distributed by Our Sunday Visitor
Huntington, Indiana



Imprimatur:

p-JOHN FRANCIS NOLL, D. D.

Bishop of Fort Wayne.

DsacMsd



DEDICATED

WITH FILIAL RESPECT AND AFFECTION
TO

FATHER HECKER
FOUNDER OF THE CONGREGATION OF MISSIONARY

PRIESTS OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
(The Paulist Fathers)

ADVOCATE OF THE ALLIANCE OF THE CHURCH
WITH ALL THAT IS GOOD IN

MODERN THOUGHT



INTRODUCTION

The^
5
Wris^oni of the Catholic Church is nowhere more

obvious than "in Her refusal to Keep Her ear to the ground,
to run after novelties, or to. bid for momentary popular
success by being ^‘up to date’’ or ‘‘in tune with the age”.
Institutions which aspire to be-up to date become quickly
ou^-dated, and those that are of their age die with the age.
An eve^tlasting Church gaited for a long race seems to lag
behind the churches which adapt their speed to a short dash.
It will be interesting to examine whether the Church is really
out of step with what is good in our contemporary civiliza-
tiojh,jMi ^ith; what merely seems desirable but which wifi
probably be evanescent.

^ JAMES M. GILLIS, C. S. P.



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 5

WHAT IS MODERN thought?
(Address Delivered on May 5, 1935)

When an orthodox clergyman—particularly a
Catholic priest—offers a discourse upon “The Church
and Modern Thought,” the natural presumption is
that he will make an assault upon Modern Thought.
Common opinion has it that we are addicted to the
rather foolish custom of pointing proudly to the past,
that we lament the passing of the “good old days”
and hold as a primary principle of faith that nothing
good has happened since the rift in United Christen-
dom 400 years ago, and that in the world of thought
nothing but nonsense has been written and spoken
since the decay of Scholasticism, 500 or 600 years

ago.

If any such presumption be lurking in some re-
mote corner of the brain of even one of my hearers,
I hasten to disabuse his mind of the error.

I am no praiser of times past. I don’t believe
the good old days ever existed. “Green hills far
away” is a significant maxim, and another equally
wise if less dignified is the slangy expression “They
all look good when they’re far away.” Sometimes
we meet certain natives of the old country who,
came to America in early youth, fared well, accum-
ulated a tidy little fortune and decided to go back
home and live out their days. But the “ould dart”,
was a disappointment. It didn’t seem the same.
Either because the tempo of life in the New World
had made them restive, or because we idealize
the “scenes of our childhood when fond recollec-
tion presents them to view,” the old country turned,

-

out to be insufferable. As with the good old “dart”



6 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

SO with the good old days. If we were to be plunged
back into the golden age of antiquity, we should find
it superficially brilliant but beneath the surface

hideous, horrible, cruel, and morally foul far beyond
our own. As for the Middle Ages, I am sure we
moderns would feel ourselves cribbed, cabined, con-
fined almost to the point of mental suffocation in

them, in spite of much recent glorification of mediae-
valism. Even the 18th and 19th centuries would
seem cramped and stuffy. I have read rather much
in history, ancient and mediaeval, and as one result
I thank Heaven fervently that I am alive here and
now. Better days may come after us, but I am sure
that ours are better than any that are past. That’s
a brave thing to say, or if you prefer a hrash thing,

with the World War still fresh in our memory and
a new war—a worse war apparently—looming up.
But I think I could make good my contention
that we live in a better and happier world than our
ancestors, recent or remote. However that will keep.
Meanwhile I simply state without argument but with
conviction that the ancient world was a nightmare,
and the mediaeval world a kind of dungeon com-
pared with our own.

But suppose we grant to those who will have it so
that “there never was a time like this, never a time
like this.” Why wail about it? Isn’t there some-
thing irreverent, not to say blasphemous, in finding

fault with the age in which by the will of God we
live and move and have our being? There is an old
story about the fastidious young lady who didn’t
like this world in which her lot was cast and who
for some time rebelled againt it, but finally said
that she had decided “to accept the universe.”
Whereupon Thomas Carlyle blurted out, “Gad ! she’d



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 7

better!” Why whimper about this sad old, bad oid
world ? It’s the only world we’ve got, as yet, and if

this one were satisfactory perhaps we wouldn’t care
for another, and there would be nothing to look for-

ward to. As a matter of fact, it is foolish and
cowardly to fill the air with lamentations about what
we may be pleased to call “these terrible times.”
Good or bad, wonderful or horrible, beautiful or
hideous, these are our times and we shall not im-
prove them by carping and crying. I am told that
missionaries to the heathen are warned before
they go that if they cannot love the land and the

people to which they are assigned they had better
stay at home. Now even if we imagine that we have
been sent by Divine Providence into a wicked heath-
enish world we may perhaps ask God to take us home
again

; but so long as we are here we had better make
up our minds to like our surroundings and our
neighbors.

If, therefore, in this talk, or in this series, I hap-

pen to criticize some features of our modern civiliza-
tion, I should like to have it understood that I do so,
not viciously like a Communist condemning Capital-
ism or like an aristocratic European heaping con-
tumely upon what he calls our raw crude savage
America, but sympathetically, as a friend reproves

a friend or a father his son.

Now the age in which we live will probably be
designated in history as the “Age of Science.” Its
achievements and its glories are largely scientific.
Very well, my theology does not demand that I re-
pudiate or antagonize science. On the contrary I
am inclined to believe that the day will come when
science will be called the handmaid of theology, as
they called philosophy the handmaid of theology in



8 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

the days of Scholasticism. Even in those days there
were a good many persons of timid intelligence who
feared philosophy as something alien and hostile

to religion. And to tell the truth, philosophy had a
pagan origin, and what was worse it came into Eu-
rope not in its pure pristine condition but poisoned

with a good many Moslem ingredients. Many mediae-
val minds, some of them in high position and having
authority, considered Aristotelianism and Platon-

ism, the two principal forms of pagan philosophy,
as hopelessly anti-Christian. But Thomas Aquinas,
whose intellectual genius was coupled with a brave
bold pioneering spirit, was not afraid of the inciden-
tal heathenism in either Greco-Roman or Moslem
philosophy. Like the earlier fathers of the Church,

Clement and Cyril of Alexandria, Pope Gregory I,
Ambrose, Augustine and Jerome, he had vision
broad enough and deep enough to see that the an-
cient sages were pedagogues leading the world to
Christ.

As Thomas Aquinas and the more courageous
theologians looked upon pagan philosophy, so I
think we should look upon Modern Science.
The Creator Who first made the world and
then made man, said in effect to man, “I place
your feet upon the earth and your head beneath
the stars. I have packed earth and sea and sky and
the waters beneath the earth with mysteries. Under
the surface of. the soil, locked away in the heart of
the mountains, deep in the cavernous vaults of the

ocean, infinite distances away in the blue sky, I
have hidden secrets. I have endowed you with an
inquisitive mind. Now seek and you shall find. You
shall find the secrets of the universe one by one.
Finding them you shall find Me.” Later, much la-



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 9

ter, the Lord gave man a Book, a book replete like
the universe with mysteries, and said to man, “Dig

into the Book as you dig into the earth. Explore

the Book as you explore the sea. Scrutinize it as you

scrutinize the heavens.

“I have hidden My Mind and Myself here, there,
everywhere, in a blade of grass, in a drop of dew,

in the heart of the oak, ‘out beyond the shining of

the farthest star’, and yet I am also within the very
core of your own heart. Seek me in heaven and on
earth, in the heart of man and in the letters of the
Book, yet beneath and behind the letter, seek Me,
find Me. Snatch My secret from Me. When you
have solved one mystery I will give you a glimpse

of another, of a thousand others. Like the eagle

provoking her young to fly, I provoke you to try
the wings of the intelligence with which I have en-

dowed you.” It must have been some such fancy
as this that lay behind the axiom of Aristotle, “Man
is an inquisitive animal born to know.”

Evidently therefore not all the revelation of God
is written in a Book. It is written in the rocks, it

is cut in the face of the cliff, it is embedded deep in
the bowels of the earth, it is hidden in and behind
the clouds that scud across the heavens as if they
were playing a game with man, concealing some-
thing that is transported behind them from horizon
to horizon, teasing man to come aloft and peer be-
hind to discover what the mystery may be.

Now man with his divinely implanted
intellectual curiosity accepts the challenge of Na-
ture and of God. He prods and picks into the sur-
face of the earth, first with primitive implements
that merely scratch the surface, but gradually with
more perfect tools he bores to incredible depths.



10 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

Deep down he finds precious ores, liquid gold and
other treasure; but not content he digs ever deeper

not knowing what he shall unearth, but sure that he
will discover things hidden from the foundation of
the worid.

Venturing out from the earth he penetrates the
waters, first dropping a plummet, then letting down
grappling hooks to bring up from the depths the
most weird and grotesque mopsters which even
in their ugliness are a revelation of the infinite va-

riety in the mind of their Maker. Not satisfied with
mere scrapings from the floor of the sea, he invents
the diving bell and an observation chamber so that
he may descend and see with his very eyes just how
things go down there a hundred and a thousand
fathoms deep.

The earth and the ocean being not field enough
for his restless explorations, he soars aloft with

balloons and flying machines out of the atmosphere

into the stratosphere; he talks of rockets that will

shoot him some day completely off this planet on to
another. Tennyson says,

. . the thoughts of men are widened with the
process of the suns,” and he speaks of

“Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something
new:

“That which they have done but earnest of the things that
they shall do'.”

And he felt that man would achieve ever more

—

“For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
“Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would

be;
“Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
“Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly

bales.”

It was a prophetic vision
;
we have seen much of

it fulfilled, and—credit to whom credit is due—it



THE CHUECH AND MODERN THOUGHT 11

remained for the scientist to make good the dream
of the poet.

But perhaps boldest of all are the explorations

that man has made not into the earth or the sea or
the sky, but into the still profounder deeps of his

own human nature. For if there be mysteries hid-
den away in the bed of the ocean, in the trackless
jungle—^trackless but not impenetrable to dauntless
man—in the uttermost reaches of the firmament,
there are still more astounding mysteries tangled
up in the fibres of man’s heart. There are mysteries

biological, geological, astronomical, and I suppose

we must now say stratospherical, but the deepest
and strangest mysteries, the weiderst and most won-
derful, the most shocking and most sublime, are

those that even after all these aeons lie concealed in

the dark and tortuous depths of the mind of man.
As a’ Kempis says—and be it observed a’ Kempis did
a great deal of exploration in the human heart

—

“This shall puzzle thee and that shall puzzle thee,
but most of all thou shalt frequently be a puzzle to
thine own self.” Poets and scientists and saints have
been probing the depths of the human heart now for
many generations, but there remain many secrets
still unrevealed. It seems to be as deep to the bottom
of the heart of man as it is high to the remotest
star.

Now what has all this to do with modern thought
and modern science? Ours is the Age of Science and
it is the vocation of science to read the riddles of the
universe and of man’s nature. But beyond nature
and man is God. What we Christians have in mind
when we speak the word “God” is the Very Center
of Mystery. Poets, scientists, mystics, all are en-
gaged in the same quest. One and all they have ac-



12 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

cepted the challenge of God : “Seek and find.” What
they find is not alone nature and man, but God. The
poet knows it:

“Raise thou the stone and find Me there,
“Cleave thou the wood and there am I.”

The saint knows it:

“I sought Thee and I found both myself and Thee.”

It remains only for the scientist to know the ulti-
mate object of his search and, when he finds it, recog-
nize it.

The world is replete with mystery because it is
filled with God. God is mystery. When we unveil
a corner of the mystery we are nearer to seeing God.
On the day when Science awakens to that fact,
science will become a partner not only with poetry
—real poetry is revelation—but with theology.

So I see no reason to despair of the Age of
Science. In ancient and mediaeval days philosophy

led to religion. In our times, or the times immed-
iately after us, science will lead to religion.

Just at the moment it seems undetermined
whether science will save and enrich civilization or
destroy civilization. Tennyson, together with his

vision of the achievements of science, had a premon-
ition of the uglier possibility. He not only “saw the
heavens fill with commerce,” but he

“Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a
ghastly dew.

“From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue.”

Argosies of commerce in the sky or battleships
“grappling in the central blue,” dropping hideous

death from the skies—which shall it be?
Science must answer that question. But she

must take philoophy and religion into her counsels.



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT n

A generation ago science was scandalized because a
celebrated Catholic scholar (a litterateur by the way
and not a theologian) declared science bankrupt.

Stated just so, the proposition is doubtless too dog-

matic. But science will indeed be bankrupt unless

she enters upon a partnership with poetry and phil-

osophy and humanity and pTiilanthropy and theology

and religion. What we Christian believers desire
therefore is not to alienate science but to affiliate

with science.

As of science, so of “Modern Thought,” for the
one seems to be the basis of the other. We do not
antagonize Modern Thought. A generation or two
ago there was much discussion about the “Conflict
of Science with Religion” and modern thought was
held to be essentially incompatible with ancient and
mediaeval thought. Today there is more hope of
friendship, alliance, cooperation between the two.
Ancient Thought, Mediaeval Thought, Modern
Thought, are all precious. No one of them need be
rejected that another may be accepted. A devotion to
antiquity or to mediaevalism would be narrow if it
exclude modernity, and by the same token devotion
to modernity is fanatical if it despise and repudiate
what is ancient or mediaeval. The Old Thought and
the New, working in combination, will produce a
finer civilization than any that has hitherto been
known.



14 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

IS THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
^^MEDIAEVAL”?

(Address Delivered on May 12, 1935)

There is a familiar saying “Give a dog a bad

name and shoot him.” That dubious—not to say
vicious—device is sometimes employed, I regret to
say, in theological controversy. Witness, for ex-

ample, the use of the Avord “Casuistry” or “Propa-

ganda” or “Jesuitical” or “Fundamentalist.” Not
any of these Avords has necessarily a bad meaning.

Casuistry is the science of citing cases in support of

moral principles. “Propaganda” means simply
“dissemination”; the preaching of the Gospel is

propaganda. “Jesuitical” happens to be a mean
and libellous Avord because the lexicographers Avho

invented it and Avriters Avho used it Avere Jesuit-
haters. A “Fundamentalist” is by etymology one
Avho gets at the roots of a question. But these are
all good Avords gone Avrong. They are used as op-
probrious epithets. Epithets in place of arguments.

And so Avith the Avord in the title of this talk,
“Mediaeval.” In itself it is neutral. Some things
mediaeval are good, some are bad. But such is the
poAver of tradition and of prejudice that “mediaeval”
connotes opprobrium. And there are those Avho use
it of the Catholic Church, thinking that with that

contemptuous adjective they have sufficiently con-
demned and dismissed Her.

But it must be admitted that the use of epithets
as proofs is a convenient controversial trick.

It is concise, and simple. It saves labor. It
serves as a substitute for knowledge. With an in-
judicious audience it is effective. But the method



THE CHUECH AND MODEEN THOUGHT 15

labors under certain rather considerable disadvan-

tages. It is unscientific and it is dishonorable. Be-

sides, it could be used to prove anything. It is

possible, for example, to use the Avord “modern” in
an invidious sense. And not without apparent jus-
tification. There is modern graft, modern jazz,
modern slums, modern industrial unrest, modern
political and social chaos, modern mustard-gas war-
fare. Not all that is modern is magnificent or beau-
tiful or wonderful or hopeful.

So: not all that is mediaeval is contemptible.

Dante is mediaeval. Rheims and Chartres and
Burgos, Milan and Westminster Abbey, are mediae-
val. The Magna Charta is mediaeval. Chivalry

—

the original bona-fide chivalry, not the decadent

form that was laughed away by Cervantes—chivalry
was mediaeval. The Chanson de Roland is mediae-
val, and the Stabat Mater and the Summa of St.
Thomas Aquinas, the Book of Kells and St. Francis’
Hymn to the Sun. The university is a mediaeval
concept and a mediaeval achievement. Oxford and
Cambridge and Paris and Salamanca and Padua
are all mediaeval institutions of learning.

So—^the use of the term as a synonym for “ig-
norant” or “superstitious” is itself a mark of ignor-
ance or superstition. And when it is applied to the
Catholic Church it indicates intellectual narrow-
ness. There is provincialism of time as well as of
place. To think that nothing good can come from
another epoch than one’s own is provincial just as
surely as to think that no good can come from an-
other village than one’s own.

However, there are other observers of that
strangely bewildering phenomenon. The Catholic



16 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

Church, not unfriendly but uncomprehending, who
use the word mediaeval of Her in a kindly sense.
To them She is a picturesque survival of a by-gone
age. Or less than a survival, a ruin, moss-grown,
ivy-clad, pathetically beautiful like Muckross Ab-
bey, or Melrose in the pale moonlight. To change
the simile, I have heard the Catholic Church likened
to an extinct volcano once powerful, in a terrible

way, but now impotent and harmless; or a meteor
that once cut a brilliant path across the skies but

that burned itself out. Those who apply these com-
parisons are aesthetes, persons of artistic, poetic,

romantic temperament. They have, or think they
have, historical imagination. They are interested,
in a mild amateurish way, in old things, obsolete civ-

ilizations, the Aztecs, the Incas, the Mayans, the
Babylonians. They sense, perhaps rather dimly,
the pathos of Kipling’s line, “all our pomp of yes-
terday is one with Nineveh and Tyre.” In short,

all things remote, prehistoric, obsolete, fascinate

these aesthetes. So they love to think of the Cath-

olic Church as a mediaeval institution outdated but
in some mysterious way surviving. In the course
of a rather rudimentary education they have read

the essays of Lord Macaulay, and perhaps they re-
member his wonderment at the fact that “The au-
gust line of the dynasty of (the Catholic Church)
extends back in an unbroken series from the pope
who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century
to the pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth”, and
the continuation of that sentence in which he shows
himself the rhetorician rather than the scientific

historian, “far beyond the eighth century that line
extends until it is lost in the twilight of fable.” Of
course there is no “fable” and no “twilight” about



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 17

the list of popes any more than in the list of the
presidents.

Now to these rhetoricians and romanticists—sen-
timentalists all— let us explain kindly but positively,
that to look upon the Church as picturesque but

passe, something obsolescent and moribund if not

quite extinct, a relic if not a fossil, is a blunder.

The Church is indeed somewhat of a mystery. Her
survival is, to the uninitiated, a riddle. But one fact

should be obvious even to the casual observer. The
Church is alive, exuberantly, enormously, prodig-
iously alive. Anticipations and prophecies of Her
impending demise are and always have been fal-
sified. Even those who don’t know any other
history than Macaulay’s will remember the
concluding sentence of that same passage

:

“She (The Church) saw the commencement of
all the governments and all the ecclesiastical
establishments that now exist in the world; and
we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see
the end of them all.”

Therein, indeed, is the great mystery of The
Catholic Church: She is “ever ancient, ever new”;
old but not decrepit. She bears the burden not of
years but of centuries with miraculous ease. She ig-
nores the primary law of the universe, the law of life
and death, of growth and decay. One may attempt
to write Her history but it would be presumptuous
and ridiculous to write of Her Rise and Fall, or Her
Rise and Decline, as historians have written of other
organizations.

The Catholic Church is not therefore merely
mediaeval, but ancient, and no more mediaeval or
ancient than modern. She has had a marvelous
past; She has accumulated a vast and superb tra-



18 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

dition. But let there be no mistake, She does not
live on traditions or memories. She faces the

future with as much confidence, and with as great
zest as if She were new-born. The Catholic Church
is no doddering ancient, lingering on with tantali-

zing persistence; cheating the grave; there is no

senility in Her speech and conduct. It will be wis-
dom not to look upon the Catholic Church as an an-
cient ruin or a mediaeval survival.

However, I am not primarily concerned with the
attitude of hostile critics of the Church. What in-
terests me much more is the attitude of some of Her
friends and even of Her members who seem to imag-
ine that Mediaevalism and Catholicism are synony-

mous. Such an attitude is romantic, not realistic,
like that of certain admirers of the little poor man
of Assisi, St. Francis. The only features of his life
they seem to remember are that he preached to the
birds and the fishes, that he went about through
the towns and villages of Umbria playing upon an
imaginary fiddle; that he composed a Poem to the
Sun, that he was an artist, a dreamer, a troubadour
of God. He was all this, but it would be absurd to
take those picturesque incidents as the essential

features of his life.

So, with regard to the Middle Ages. They have
been romanticized and idealized by some of our own,
who, I fear know very little about the real history
or the true character of the Middle Ages.

I, for one, have never been a member of that
little group of Catholics, and near-Catholics, who
hark back to the Middle Ages as a period in which
human life and civilization were at its apogee, and
who hold that the modern age in all its features is
a decline from the glories and the beauties of Me-



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 19

diaevalism. To hear these devotees talk one would
imagine that there had been no art since Giotto, no
architecture since the thirteenth century, no music

since the Gregorian chant of the 5th century, or at

the latest since Palestrina; that there has been no

philosopher since Aquinas; that Dante is not only
the “central man of all the ages” but the only great
poet of any age.

But these reactionaries are only an insignificant
clique within the Church. Normal Catholics, lay
and cleric, look upon them as rather absurd and
not altogether innocuous dillettanti. They are like
those extreme ritualists in our Church and else-
where, who seem to concentrate all their powers of
mind and soul upon vestments and incense, rubrics,
ceremonial

; upon an unnecessarily austere liturgical
chant, oddly enough combined with anything but
austere ecclesiastical pageantry, as if these inci-

dental accompaniments of worship were of the very
essence of religion.

If the truth must be known—and must the
truth not be known?—^the Middle Ages were no
paradise on earth. Reverend H. E. G. Rope, writing
in The Catholic World in September, 1926, said:
“The Italy of Dante, of Boniface VIII, of Petrarch,
of St. Bernardine, of St. Catherine of Siena; the
France of Philip the Fair, or Charles V or Charles
VII; the Rhineland of the robber barons, the terri-
ble horrors of Albigensian Languedoc, were porten-
tous.”

And he quotes Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canter-
bury in the 12th century, who wrote: “This land in
which we are reels under the daily shocks of so
many and so great afflictions, is defiled with so
many adulteries and other abominations, that there



20 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

is scarcely any order of men who care for their own
souls, or even so much as care to hear the salutary
teaching which might instruct them to improvement
in the sight of God.”

Another excellent authority on the Middle Ages,

C. M. Antony in her book on St. Dominic's Country,
says, “It (The House of Foix) was a terrible race,
even in those grim days when a noble’s word was
law, and the law was instantly enforced with the
sword. It is in a sense impossible for us, in this

age of sentimental humanitarianism, accurately to

understand the almost inconceivable brutality of

that ‘altogether joyous thirteenth century’
!”

Of all the exponents of the Middle Ages Dante
is at the same time the most comprehensive and the
most reliable. And I think it may be said without
too much exaggeration that Dante’s Inferno is, in
effect, a revelation of conditions that prevailed in

Italy in the 13th century. The familiar legend has
it that when the saturnine poet passed along the
streets, men would say to one another with bated
breath : “There goes the man who has been in hell.”
He hadn’t been in hell, of course, but he had been
in Ital> and according to his evidence the Italy of the
13th century, the best of the Middle Ages, was not
unlike an Inferno.

The next century, that of St. Catherine, was, in
my judgment (though I confess myself but an ama-
teur historian) one of the two or three most horri-
ble epochs in two thousand years. In consequence
of such historical truths as these, one celebrated
champion of certain features of mediaevalism, G.
K. Chesterton, has found it advisable to say, “I do
not hold anything like the views I am supposed to
hold on the subject of mediaevalism.



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 21

“There is an idea that I represent the Middle

Ages as a sort of Utopia, where everybody was hap-

py all day long. I never said anything of the sort.

“The point about the Middle Ages which has

got to be understood is that so far from its having

been a time when everything went right, it was more
true that the Middle Ages was the time when every-
thing went wrong, because the wrong turning was
taken by humanity at the Schism . .

.

“I know there are an enormous number of people
who think I mean that we must go about in multi-
colored clothes, confine our reading to illuminated

missals, and so on. But when I say we must return
to the Middle Ages, I mean that we must return to
the principles of mediaevalism.”

But let that suffice. A more detailed description
of those unhappy far-off days would distract us
from my purpose which is to emphasize the fact
that the Catholic Church is not committed to the
Middle Ages. She holds no brief for mediaevalism.

As for me, I am not certain that we should re-
turn to all the principles of the Middle Ages. I

cannot, for instance, see that Mediaeval Feudalism

was less oppressive than Modern Industrialism. Both
systems in actual practice have involved enormous
injustice and cruelty.
The simple truth is, of course, that no age in the

history of the world has been ideal. But if com-
parisons are to be made, I think our own age will
not be found altogether worse than any other that
has past. Indeed with all its faults I think it better
than any earlier century. Civilization does pro-
gress, sometimes by fits and starts and with many
back slidings, but on the whole with a fair degree
of consistency.



22 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

Be that as it may, the fate of the Catholic
Church is not bound up with any particular form of
civilization. As one writer has said (I regret that
I cannot place the quotation)

:

“The Church, at one time imperialistic in her
political alliances, was, at another, feudalistic; but

She never committed Herself in principle to imper-

ialism or to feudalism. She spoke Greek in Athens
and Latin in Rome, and Her sons wore the chlamys
or the toga ; but She was never confined to Greece or
to Italy. In later days She lisped the nascent lan-
guages of Goth and Frank . .

.

;

but She was never
limited in life and conditions to the life and condi-
tions of Goth or Frank . . . She was merely partak-
ing, in Her human elements, of the life of Her
epoch. Her divine elements always remaining the
self-same. Two or three centuries ago She was
was courtly and aristocratic under the temporal
sway of the Fifth Charles of Spain, or of the Four-
teenth Louis of France

; but this again was a passing
phase in Her existence, and at other times She may
be as democratic in Her demeanor as the most earn-
est democrat would desire. Her canon law, which
is the expression of Her adaptability to environment,
received the impress, now of Charlemagne, now of
Hapsburgh or Bourbon edicts; but never was She
Herself mummified in Justinian or Bourbon molds,
and Her canon law may be as American as it was
Roman, as much the reflection of the twentieth cen-
tury as it was of the Middle Ages. Were not all this
true, the Church would not be Catholic.”

That, I think, expresses the true attitude of the

Church. She is not ancient or mediaeval or modern.
Or if you please, She is all three. She lives in time
but She is outside time, Catholic, Universal, in time
as well as in place and in doctrine.



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT :i3

FREE THOUGHT, FREE SPEECH,
FREE PRESS

(Address Delivered on May 19, 1935)

It is generally understood that the modern world

began at the end of the 18th century, with the revo-

lutions in America and in France. Those two cata-

clysmic upheavals were only superficially political.

Primarily and fundamentally what took place was a

revolution in the world of thought. The big idea

that came up from the heart of man
like an earthquake from the heart of the globe
was Freedom. The dominant idea of modern
civilization is or was therefore freedom. I
say was, with regret because if there be any one

high idea or holy principle that has suffered

more than another in the war and since the war,
that idea is freedom. “Freedom shrieked as Kos-
ciusko fell”, we used to orate when we were school-
boys. Freedom has done a great deal more
shrieking since then, but of late she seems to have

become too feeble to shriek or even make an audible
cry. The war that was to make the world safe for
democracy destroyed freedom, the sine qua non of
democracy. Freedom is dead—dead and buried in
an ignominious grave, in Russia, in Italy, in Ger-
many, in Mexico, and if she still lives elsewhere her
tenure of life is uncertain and precarious. Even
here in America, there are those—^not a few—^who
advocate in effect a dictatorship, the renunciation
of personal liberty subsequent to the already accom-
plished abandonment of states rights, as the only
means of extricating ourselves from the predicament
in which we now lie. Yesterday, the idea of liberty,



24 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGGHT

like the word of Caesar, “might have stood against
the world” ; now “none so poor to do it reverence”.

But there is a difference between Europe and
America in as far as freedom is concerned. Over
there with political freedom have perished freedom

of speech, freedom of the press, academic freedom,

freedom of worship. Here in the United States we
have surrendered the greater part of our political

freedom but in proportion as we have let that
go, we have clung more and more tenaciously
to our personal freedom, freedom of thought,

of expression, academic freedom, and most par-

ticularly to what we are pleased to call our
moral freedom. It has been ever thus. When the
ancient Romans, who considered themselves to be the
creators, champions, guardians of political liberty,

became degenerate and surrendered their freedom
into the hands of the Caesars, by way of compensa-
tion, as a kind of sop to their self-esteem, they

vindicated all the more fiercely their personal lib-
erty, by which they meant freedom in small things
and freedom for self-indulgence. Today we see the
phenomenon re-enacted amongst ourselves. The
pioneer Americans were savagely tenacious of their
political rights but they were austerely self-
denying as far as moral liberty is con-

cerned. We reverse the order : we permit political
liberty to slip through our relaxed and enfeebled
fingers, and we solace ourselves by taking on a
greater degree of what we call personal liberty. We
say to our president: “Relieve us of the burden of
political thought. Take over all the functions of
government. Devaluate the currency if you wish,
abrogate the contract printed on every gold cer-
tificate, control the crops, dictate to the industries.



THE CHUECH AND MODERN THOUGHT 25

determine taxation, collect and distribute the dole,

carry the entire burden of administration, take it

off our shoulders, and if we feel any shame or com-
punction at the surrender of our prerogatives and

the abandonment of the ideal of democracy, govern-

ment by the people, we will take refuge in cocktail
parties, and horse races, and gaming and lascivious
theatrical entertainment, in orgiastic dancing, in

the hop-skip and jump, on-again-off-again-gone-

again idea of marriage, in the application of an al-

leged scientific method to the limitation of offspring

(a device for the elimination of inconveniences and
responsibilities that might arise from unlimited
sexual indulgence).

A shameful and dismal outcome of the great
American Experiment in Liberty! I do not main-
tain, of course, that all this takes place as a conscious

mental process. I do not believe that our hedonistic

fellow-citizens are capable of such direct logic. But
whether or not the surrender of one kind of liberty
and the jealous, passionate determination to hold on
to another kind of liberty are cause and effect, the
fact is beyond dispute that they co-exist, and that in
the history of mankind they have always co-existed.

So much for the pathetic and tragic condition of
liberty and freedom in general. But let us see some-
thing of one particular kind of freedom, the freedom
of the press in these our days and in this our land.
Being limited for time I shall not attempt any ade-
quate discussion of that vast and important ques-
tion—^the freedom of utterance accorded the news-
papers.Withthem I am not now primarily concerned.
I shall only permit myself to say in passing that the
sensational newspapers (not only the tabloids but



26 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

many others) have so drenched and deluged the
mind of the people with vulgarity, banality, and in-
decency, that they have all but destroyed the sense

of moral and cultural values, and that the influence

of the daily papers has largely neutralized if not

negatived the influence of church and school and

college.

To put the matter graphically: Let us suppose
a home into which day after day and every day in
the year all manner of disreputable persons are
freely admitted and allowed to say what they will:
Criminals, prostitutes, gangsters, much-married and
as much unmarried screen actresses, murderers,
thieves, moral perverts, drug addicts, and what
not—and together with these, snoopers and spies
upon the underworld, photographers, police detec-
tives, scandal hounds, collectors of moral and social
garbage. Suppose that all together or one after the
other they are permitted to tell and illustrate all they
know, and this in the hearing of the father and
mother and the children in the home.

The parable needs little elucidation. This, to,
all intents and purposes, is what happens in some
millions of American homes. It brings about the
staining of the imagination, the benumbing of the
intelligence, the debasement of moral ideals, the
nullification of all efforts to inculcate knowledge and

culture and virtue.
The only possible answer to the charge that a

large section of the daily press is a debasing in-

fluence is that when the mind and the imagination
are repeatedly flooded with filth they become
immune, or even atrophied, so that they cannot
rally absorb the poison that is poured over

them. There may be some psychological truth



THE CHUECH AND MODEKN THOUGHT 27

in that observation, but I am not sure that the
benumbing of the mind and the atrophy of the
imagination are not additional crimes to lay to

the charge of the daily press rather than a pallia-

tion of their sin.

Now to allege that all this must be tolerated in
virtue of the principle of the freedom of the press is
to make that principle ridiculous, and worse than
ridiculous, immoral. Such an allegation merits no
argument. Any one who would seriously express a
conviction that freedom may be used to corrupt the
mind and weaken the moral fibre of a whole people is
beyond and beneath the reach of argument. Anar-
chists, nihilists, and libertines invoke the principle
of freedom, and with equal perverseness publishers
of sensational newspapers may cry “free press”,
“free press”, in justification of their sins against the

human soul and against society. But the invocation
of a high principle, Freedoni of the Press, in the
interests of what is after all, pornography, is noth-
ing less than preposterous. Whatever “Free Press”
means it cannot mean that.

But I have declared myself only moderately in-
terested in the problem of freedom and the daily
papers. What deeply concerns me is the more per-
manent and in the long run more influential literarj'
medium, books. I suppose that all my listeners are
aware that in recent years many novels previously
outlawed and sold only surreptitiously, are now
printed and distributed without let or hindrance. It
seems only yesterday, though it may be some ten
years ago, that a New York magistrate re-
ported to the chief of the Society for the Suppression
of Vice that he had been amazed and shocked at a
book which he found in the hands of his daughter, a



28 THE CHUKCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

girl, if I remember rightly, then in her teens. The
Society sued the publisher and lost. The book is now
on sale even in the drug stores.

Virtually all such cases are lost in the courts. The
prevailing principle seems to be that the freedom of

the press is absolute as far as book-publication is

concerned. Only such works as are obviously and

crudely obscene are suppressed. If a novel or

an essay or a pseudo-scientific treatise has any liter-

ary merit whatsoever, and a fortiori it it be con-

sidered, even by a little clique of presumed cognos-
centi, a “classic”, there seems to be no law to prevent

its publication and unlimited circulation, no matter

how erotic it may be. In a word, as all readers
know—even the readers of “ads” or of literary
supplements—certain publishers and amongst them
many who used to be conservative and reputable, are
fiooding the market with books that would have
horrified the early Americans who appended the
Bill of Rights to the Constitution and fought for the
principle of freedom of the press.

Whenever any objector dares raise his voice, be
he magistrate, or clergyman, or member of some so-
ciety for the preservation of morals, or merely an
indignant private citizen who writes in just wrath to
his favorite newspaper, his protest is howled down
with epithets “Puritan”, “Hypocrite”, “Reaction-

ary”, “Obscurantist”, “Enemy of the Free Press”.
The literary critics take up the hue and cry, but

they are careful to insert in the midst of their con-

demnations some high sounding phrases which make
it appear that they are governed solely by a zeal for
the promotion of literary art. For example, they
said of the book that scandalized the judge: “It
portrays an important part in the history of civiliza-



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 29

tion” and they added in their most top-lofty manner,

“It may be questioned whether the record of
civilization can be suppressed”. They spoke of “civil-

ization”; what the book really depicts is the de-
cadence of civilization. It concerns one of the most

degraded epochs in the history of man, in the time of

one of the most lecherous tyrants that ever lived.

Even one of the critics explained in court that it was
“alternately fascinating and disgusting”. Perhaps

more significant than these data is the simple fact
that though it is a small book it was priced at |30,
and that it was sold from under the counter to
privileged patrons. But now, as I say, any high
school boy or girl can step into a drug store and get
it for the price of two or three midday lunches. Of
another book, the critics wrote, “It is a fearless

delineation of love between man and woman”, “can-
did, vigorous, brilliant, picturesque, powerful”, and
“a forceful presentation of primitive emotion”. As
a matter of fact that book is to an incredible degree
lascivious.

On yet another occasion when two societies, one
in New York and another in Chicago, protested
against an American novel (those of which I have
hitherto spoken are not American) as “lewd,
licentious and obscene”, a dozen or a score of writers
not only here but in England burned up the wires
and the transoceanic cables with hot denunciations
of the objectors. Some of them confessed that they
hadn’t read the book but protested none the less
against its suppression. And one novelist, an Amer-
ican woman, blurted out: “What American liter-
ature needs is not more morals, but more brains”.

What I think she meant was that if a writer has
brains he need not bother about morals. And there.



30 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

I think, you have the principle upon which contem-

porary literary criticism is based. If a writer is

brilliant, or even clever, if he have the faculty of

putting down his thoughts in a fascinating or even a
graceful style, he must be permitted to say what he
will. The morality of his message doesn’t matter. As
Oscar Wilde said, “There are not good books and bad
books. There are well written books and badly
written books”. And another critic enunciates the
critical canon “The capital sin in a novel is dullness”.

But I should like to submit the matter to the
ultimate critic, the reading public. Does cleverness

or even brilliancy justify immorality? Is no book or
paper or magazine objectionable unless it be flag-
rantly and crudely indecent? Recently when
the British public commenced to take example
from the American Legion of Decency in regard to
motion pictures, an Anglican bishop spoke of “ob-
jectionable films”. “There are no objectionable
films”, retorted Bernard Shaw. And he explained
that if a producer has spent a good deal of money
on a film that is sufficient guarantee that the film

cannot be objectionable.

Here in the country that made the films famous,
we think we have taught the producers that a film
may be costly and cleverly produced, its art and its
technique may be admirable, but that if it sin
against decency and morality, we will not have it.
Must we start a campaign against the newspaper
proprietors and book publishers ? And if we do, can
we be assured of the vigorous and persistent co-
operation of the American people?

In a word, how does the public interpret the
principle of a free press? When the test comes it
will not matter much what the sophisticated critics



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

or revellers in libidinous literature, seekers and

devourers of Erotica may think. Even beyond and
above the Supreme Court, the authorized interpreter

of the Constitution, is the mind of the people.
And I for one am optimistic enough to believe

that in their heart the American people believe in

some such regulation of a free press as we have in
the Catholic Church. They may bristle at the word
“index” and they will be loath to make such an
Index. But the Catholic Church which does pro-
vide an “Index of Prohibited Books” has had a great
deal of experience on this old earth. She has picked

up a good deal of valuable psychological information
in the past nineteen centuries, not to mention the
Divine Wisdom with which She is endowed.

She is—I need hardly say to the initiated—not
opposed to the principle of freedom. She believes in
a free press. In fact at this moment She happens to
be the only advocate of a free press in all Europe.

But when She says Freedom, She means not license,
not madness, not anarchy, but true, moderate,
regulated Freedom. So say we all of us. I am con-
fident that any authentic interpretation of the prin-
ciple of freedom as found in our Federal Consti-
tution, and may I say, any universal, popular inter-
pretation of that principle by thoughtful decent
people, the true lovers of liberty, will coincide with
the ideal of freedom taught by the Catholic Church.



32 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE
(Address Delivered on May 26, 1935)

The Declaration of Independence proclaims the
famous and familiar axiom that all men are endowed
by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.
“Inalienable” is an impressive word. It fills the

mouth. It comes magnificently if not trippingly off
the tongue. Patriotic orators expound the idea elo-
quently, or at last vociferously—^the idea that noman
may take from me the rights that God has given me.
But the orators do not so frequently explain that
since my congenital rights are inalienable, even I
myself may not alienate them. That is to say, I have
no right to surrender my rights. I have, for ex-
ample, as one of my inalienable rights, freedom
of the will. I must not barter away that
freedom. It is not a commodity to be bought
and sold. Nor may any man rob me of it,
or beat it out of me. I may not give it away or
throw it away. As a matter of fact I cannot get rid
of it, try as I may. I may abuse my freedom,
smother it, paralyze it, atrophy it but so long as I am
human, my freedom remains, inemissible because
inalienable, and I shall be held responsible for it.
We sometimes say, speaking loosely, that a man
“makes a beast of himself.” But of course he can-
not. He may act like a beast, live like a beast, but
“a man’s a man for a’ that”.

I speak of a man, but quite as often nowadays we
meet with boys and girls who seem to be bent upon
dehumanizing themselves. They say in effect to us
stern crabbed antiquated moralists, “You tell me I
am free. Very well then, here goes in the name of



THE CHUECH AND MODERN THOUGHT ?,3

freedom!” They live recklessly, madly, using their
freedom to abuse freedom. They are spendthrifts
of freedom. They fling it away as a drunken sailor
flings away in one night in a brothel the hard-won
wages of a year. Later on (if there be any later on
for them), there may come to them a realization of
their folly and a faintly smoldering desire for better
things. But they say, “I have gone too far. I am
become a victim of habit ; my freedom is lost.” But
do what we will, we cannot “lose” fredom : we can-
not alienate what is inalienable. It will not be pos-
sible in the Judgment for man to say “I was only a
beast.” God will answer : “I made you a man!”

Now I wonder if every Fourth of July orator has
all this in his mind when he bellows forth that pri-
mary proposition of the Declaration, “Man is endow-
ed by his Creator with certain inalienable rights.”
Indeed I wonder if the author and the signers of the
Declaration of Independence were fully aware of the
importance in the moral world as well as in the poli-
tical world of that splendid phrase “inalienable
rights”. It is possible that Thomas Jefferson had
only in mind a political philosophy, but his axiom is
applicable also in the field of ethics and theology.
In my Church at least it is a dogma that freedom of
the will, and hence freedom of conscience, remains
inviolable. God will not, man must and can not,
deprive us of our freedom.

However, no sane philosophy and no reasonable
theology can admit that freedom—any kind of free-
dom, political freedom, freedom of conscience, free-
dom of worship^—is absolute, unlimited, entirely
sui juris, autonomous. There are rules and regula-
tions, standards and limitations of liberty. The
authors of the Declaration were not anarchists, still



34 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

less nihilists. The document that came from their
hands was a Declaration of Independence, not an
annuoncement of Political and Moral Chaos. The
war was on but the lid was not off. Any one who
imagines that the Fathers of this country established

a go-as-you-please every-man-for-himself kind of

government must think that the American Revolu-
tion was made by mad-men. True, the aristocrats
and monarchists thought them crazy. There was
much sardonic laughter in the courts of Europe. And
I venture to think that some diplomatic wiseacres
at the Court of George III counselled the king:

“Leave the rebels alone. Let them try out their
lunatic notion that all men are free and equal. They
will wreck their country in six months. Then they
will appeal to your majesty to save them from the
consequences of their own folly.”

But Jefferson and Adams and Franklin and
Hancock and Madison and Washington, like Hamlet,
were not so mad as not to know a hawk from a
handsaw. They knew liberty from anarchy. So
they wrote a Constitution as well as a Declaration.
In the Constitution they embodied a Bill of Rights,

but they took care to delimit these rights with an

elaborate system of “checks and balances”. As
we all know, there is today a great deal of
protest against some of those constitutional limita-
tions of liberty. If the radicals in our midst can

have their way, they will make our law as chaotic
and as nihilistic as our public and domestic morals.
But I think I may assert with confidence that no
enlightened American who truly understands the
spirit of American freedom imagines that our rights
are absolute—altogether unconditioned. We have
no such mad political philosophy.



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 35

But if we Americans do not cherish an exag-
gerated idea of our political freedom, I am not so
confident that we have a moderate and reasonable
notion of the extent of religious liberty. We are
so zealous for freedom of conscience and freedom

of worship that some of us seem to lose sight both
of common sense and of Christian principle. Many
of our fellow citizens will admit no limit whatso-

ever to religious liberty.

And here, ' incidentally, is an anomaly. Some
sixty millions of them belong to no Church. You
would imagine that they didn’t care whether Church
kept or not. But it would be a mistake to imagine,
because they don’t go to church, that they are in-
different about religion, or unconcerned about re-

ligious liberty. They would visit their bitter wrath
upon the head of any public official who would even
introduce the subject of church-going into a speech

or a fortiori into any kind of political pronounce-
ment. Of one thing they are convinced, that they
have a right to believe or not to believe, to worship
or not to worship as they choose, that their religion
or irreligion is no one’s business but their own, that
there is not, never was and never can be any or-
ganization on this earth having authority to com-
mand or even to instruct conscience.

With these millions who do not worship at all
and who reject with fury what they call the impu-
dence and arrogance of any one who should attempt
to persuade them to worship, there are associated
millions of others who do believe and do attend ser-
vices but who agree that no man and no Church ha.s
divine authority to say if or what a man shall be-
lieve, or which if any form of worship he shall fol-
low.



36 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

Perhaps some five-sixths of the citizens of the
United States maintain that the right to believe and

to worship is absolute, unrestricted, utterly free;

that in religion there is no analogue of the political

constitution, no system of checks and balances ; that

in religion every one is a law unto himself
;
that he

writes his own constitution, that he is at once legis-
lator, judge, and executive of the laws, if any, which

he may lay down for himself. As for any written
document such as the Bible, emanating from a source
outside his own mind, he reserves to himself the
right to accept or to reject it; and if he accepts it,

he still retains the right to make his own interpre-
tation of the text. No Church, no theologian, no
minister, no priest, no pope may tell him “such and
such in the authorized meaning of this or that text”.
In this, as in all phases of religion, he' is his own
last court of appeal. His intellectual and spiritual
autonomy is absolute.

Now, I will admit that this theory of religious
freedom is enormously interesting. It must give any
man a supreme thrill to feel that he has a right to
make or to unmake his own religion; that he may
agree or disagree with the masters of theology : that

he can approach such a perplexing religious docu-
ment as the Bible confident that he can interpret it in
all cases correctly—correctly at least as far as he is
concerned, and that after all such is the only sort of
correctness about which he need be concerned.

And it must be not merely a thrilling but a
dismaying experience to feel oneself free tofacewith-
out fear the question that stumped Pontius Pilate
and ten thousand other philosophers, “What is
Truth?” I am sure it would give me vertigo, but I
can marvel at the assurance of one who feels pre-



THE CHUECH AND MODERN THOUGHT 37

pared to answer it unappalled, just as I can marvel

at one who has the self-confidence necessary to
balance on his head on the topmost point, of let

us say the Eiffel Tower, a thousand feet above terra,

firma.

Yes, it’s a thrilling theological notion that a man
should make his own religion, irrespective of pat-
riarchs, prophets, and apostles and of all ecclesiasti-

cal authorities. But if you ask me “Is it reason-
able?” I shall ask to be excused from answering for

fear of seeming impolite, perhaps to the degree of

laughing. And if you press me further to say
whether I think any human being is entitled and
equipped to discover without the aid of any author-

itative teacher the Absolute Truth in Religion, I am
afraid I shall have to say that you must not impugn
my intelligence.

I will, however, grant that the theory of absolute

autonomy in theology is quite as reasonable as some
of the modern subjectivist philosophies that have
been the vogue for now some generations. Schopen-
hauer, for example, said, “The world is the pro-
jection of my idea. . . the whole world is an object
only in relation to a subject, it is a vision of the

beholder, in a word the projection of my own idea.”
I confess that to me that philosophical dictum sounds
like an extension of th phrase of the Count of Monte
Christo, “The World is Mine!” Mine because I
make it. Make it by projecting a thought out of
my mind. Mine because the moment I cease to hold
the thought, that moment the world ceases to be.

Also, Schopenhauer’s idea seems to me to make a
piker of Louis XIV. The king is said to have uttered
the arrogant phrase, “L’etat, c’est moir “The
State? I am the State.” Whether he said it or



38 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

not, it’s a bold utterance, but it is a picayune senti-

ment compared with that of the subjective philos-
ophy, “The World? I am the World. The world is
the projection of my idea!”

Immanuel Kent went even a step further. He
said, “a world without man would be a world with-
out God.” Apparently then, it isn’t God Who makes
man. It is man who makes God. For God exists if
I think Him. He continues to exist if I continue to
think. If I cease to think God, He ceases to be. It
may be lunacy, but it passes for philosophy in cer-
tain highly intellectual circles.

Rudolf Eucken, the great present-day philoso-

pher, says “Modern times have changed the position
of the human subject. . . it has become to man the
center of his life and the ultimate object of his en-
deavor.” That is to say, man has become egocentric.
Not eccentric, which means off center, but egocentric
which means self-centered. Before Copernicus, man
used to think that the world was the center of the
universe, that the sun and the planets and the stars
existed for the sake of the earth. The universe,
then, was geocentric, earth centered. After Coper-
nicus, man came to know that the sun was the
center, that the universe is heliocentric. But now
since the subjectivist philosophies came in with
Kant and Schopenhauer, the universe is held to be
no longer either geocentric or heliocentric but homo-
centric, the mind of man is the cause of all things:
not every man or any man but this man. I myself.
The universe is egocentric. If I think the universe,
it exists. If I think it not, it ceases to exist. Even
God is blotted out if I don’t think Him.

Now on the basis of that philosophy I can under-
stand that a man should say, “What I think to be



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 39

truth is truth. What I think not to be truth, that
is not truth. I maA:e truth. I unmake truth. What
is true for me is true. What is not true for me is not
true. Truth is in me: it is subjective. There is no

truth outside of me, no objective truth. If you tell

me that God is Truth I assent. But as I make or
unmake truth, I make or unmake God.”

To all good Christians and other devout believers,
this sounds like blasphemy. It is blasphemy. It is

also nonsense, blasphemous nonsense. But it is one

form and a very prominent form, one may perhaps
say the predominant form, of philosophy. In Oliver

Twist Mr. Bumble says, “If the law supposes that,
the law is a ass, a idiot,” and if any of my hearers
say “If a philosophy teaches that, such a philosophy

is a ass, a idiot,” I can only answer in the Scrip-
ture phrase, “Thou sayest it.”

But mark you, only on condition that a man is the
center of the universe, only on condition that the

patriarchs and prophets and apostles and doctors of
the Church revolve like planets around him; only
on condition that a man makes the universe by
projecting an idea out of his mind, only on con-
dition that a man is the first cause and the last cause,
the Alpha and Omega of all things, only on condition
that man makes or unmakes God, can a rational
being admit that a man has the right or the power to
make truth or to make his own religion. There are
two terms to religion. One is man and the other is
God. But of these two terms, the Dominant is Gk>d.
He creates man

;
man does not create Him. He re-

veals truth to man, man cannot teach God. It be-
hooves man, therefore, not to create or to manu-
facture or to imagine a religion of his own. A man-
made religion is no good to any man, especially if



40 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

the man who makes it is the man who believes it.
Religion, to borrow the magnificent phrase from the
Prologue to St. John’s Gospel, is “born not of the

will of the flesh, not of the will of man but of God.’’
To revert to the idea with which we commenced,

the idea of freedom. A man must be left free to seek
God, free to find God, free to worship God. But he
is not free to fashion God to his own fancy, to warp
God into the mold of his own mind, or to create the
kind of God or the kind of religion he thinks he
would like.

Now the Catholic Church, in spite of all modern-
istic, subjectivistic philosophies, holds to the old

philosophy that Truth exists independent of man.
Truth is not synthetically made in the laboratory of
the mind of man. Truth exists whether man exists
or not. For Truth is God. In harmony with that
philosophy, the Church teaches that no man has a
right to any other religion than the religion revealed
by God. To find and to follow that religion, a man
is free. For this he has an inalienable right.



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 41

ACADEMIC FREEDOM
(Address Delivered on June 2, 1935)

Not infrequently we Catholics call attention tc
the fact that our Church has accumulated a great
deal of wisdom in the course of her very long life
upon the earth. For this she deserves no particular
credit. It would be an abnormally stupid organiza-
tion that didn’t pick up experience and common
sense in the course of nineteen centuries.

Isn’t there a maxim “No fool like an old fool”?
And another, “Live and learn” ? Now the Church is
old but she is no fool. She has lived and learned
Even her worst enemies admit that of her. Thej
never say, “The Catholic Church is stupid”. They
may wish that she were, but they know that she
isn’t. If she were stupid, they wouldn’t need bother
about her. She would long since have perished of
her own stupidity. Evolutionists tell us that such
was the fate of the enormous—incredibly enormous
—animals that roamed our western prairies ages
and aeons ago. They had big bodies but small
brains. Recently I believe, the scientists discovered

the skeleton of a mastodon, or was it a dinosaur, in
the bed of a lake of asphalt. He was huge and
heavy but lacking in gray matter. He hadn’t the
sense to remain on solid ground. He ventured into
the mass of sticky stuff, and there his fossilized
remains were discovered after a million years.

Now the Catholic Church is big, and in a way
heavy—indeed when zealots within the fold feel
impatient with her, they say she is slow and un-
wieldy. But unlike some other big things, she
does not lack sense. She knows enough to stay where



42 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

she has a good foot-hold. She doesn’t go wandering
off into bogs and quagmires and quicksands and
ponds of asphalt. She doesn’t go in which she can-
not get out.

On the other hand there are organizations which
abandon terra firma, ventutre into dubious terri-
tory, bog down, and are engulfed.

Amongst them is the modern university. Take
it all in all, as if it were a single unit—not this uni-
versity or that, but all of them together—^the uni-
versity is a huge institution. Being big it needs big
brains. It pretends to have big brains, bigger than

any one else’s. But if it has brains it lacks what is
better than brains—^wisdom, called more popularly
common sense. It has not learned from experience.
And it has, in consequence, gone poking into some
rather sticky places. And just now it is bogged
down in a tremendous morass. Why did it go in ? It
followed what the Latins called ignis fatuus, “The
light of fools”. And the light of fools in this case
was “Academic Freedom”.

It’s a fine phrase. In the slang of the day, “It

sounds just swell.” Yes, and learned too. And
brave and bold, and adventurous and all that. It
seems to be the opposite of “stick-in-the-mud.” But
by one of the paradoxes of which the world seems
so full, the universities that followed Academic
Freedom are stuck-in-the-mud. They don’t know it
yet. The poor old dinosaur didn’t know he was
caught until the oozy stuff reached up to his inade-
quate little brain; and that took some time. It will
take some time yet for the enormous body of what
is called “higher education” to realize that it is

hopelessly engulfed.

To drop the parable and come to the concrete



THE CHUECH AND MODEEN THOUGHT 43

fact: when a generation or two ago the American
colleges were all aping the German system, they
imported from what was then held to be the most
learned nation in the world the principle of A6so-

lute Academic Freedom. What that principle in-
volved you may surmise from such statements of
it as these:

In 1898 Professor G. Kaufmann writing on
“Freedom of Teaching in the German Universities”
said, “There must be no barriers to the freedom of
a university teacher except those of his own in-
stinct for the truth.”

And Professor Friedrich Paulsen wrote, “No
thought can be commanded or forbidden to the
academic teacher or his students”.

And Adolf Harnack : “In regard to research and
knowledge, there must be unlimited freedom”. He
sees the latent possibility of danger, but he insists

:

“The fear that unlimited academic freedom throws
open the door to serious error should not in the
least deter us from it, for the most serious error of
all is the opinion that man should not enjoy perfect
freedom”.

Also recognizing the danger. Professor Kauf-
mann added to the statement I have quoted from
him, “Whatever the academic teacher produces
from his subjective veracity must be inviolable: he
may proclaim it as truth, regardless of conse-
quences.”

Those valiant proclamations of perfect aca-
demic freedom sound rather foolish and pathetic
now in view of what has happened in Germany. In
1914, as soon as the war drums commenced to roll,
most of those advocates of perfect intellectual lib-
erty swallowed their words. But in those “dear



44 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

dead days beyond recall” academic freedom was a
brave bold slogan, and the pick of American schol-
ars came back from Europe proclaiming it. It is
odd and tragic that on this side of the water, the
nabobs of higher education are still mouthing that
fine phrase “Academic Freedom”.

In 1923 President Nicholas Murray Butler of
Columbia University said—and I am sure he would
say it still : “No professor of ours is or ever has
been under any restrictions save those which he
puts upon himself by reason of good morals and
good manners. Columbia has through a long and
honorable history lived up to the highest ideals of
freedom to seek the truth and freedom to teach”

President Lowell, lately-retired president of

Harvard, answered a statement of Bertrand Rus-
sell to the effect that English universities were
freer than American. He said : “At Oxford not
long ago, if I am right, a students’ publication The
New Oxford, was suppressed on account of re-
marks that it contained. Nothing of the kind has,
I believe, occurred here in the memory of man.
During the war, you lost your fellowship at Cam-
bridge on account of your opinions. No such thing
happened at Harvard. Harvard has stood, and will
stand for the fullest academic freedom”.

President Hopkins of Dartmouth has declared
that even “pernicious” doctrines may be taught to
college boys and girls provided “like access be not
denied to other points of view”.

But perhaps these are mere rhetorical expres-
sions offered by way of attracting students who
like to fancy themselves “liberal”? Not at all!
There is plenty of evidence—too much—that the



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 45

professors have taken very seriously the carte

blanche handed them by the prexies.
One professor exercising his prerogative of say-

ing whatever his instinct for the truth dictated,

says, speaking of marriage, “Free sex intercourse

is the highly moral product of a healthy social

organism”.

And another: “Monogamy, with its lifelong
hold on both parties, is incompatible with personal

freedom”: and since divorce entails expense, he
adds “it is better to have no marriage ceremony at
all and simply have those who love each other live
together as husband and wife as long as they agree
with each other.”

That suggestion reminds me of a quaint conceit
of Cosmo Hamilton, who said in debate with G. K.
Chesterton, “Marriage is made not in heaven but
on the top of a tram, or in a canoe on a placid
stream, or during a walk in the woods, when the
boy says ‘Will you marry me ?’ and the girl answers
‘I will’. That,” said he, “is the marriage, and any
demand that it be recorded in a magistrate’s office
or at city hall or in a church is tyranny.”

, Another professor says, “Psychologically, insti-
tutional religion is sex perversion.”

A reference book used in many colleges, Metch-
nikoff’s Nature of Man explains that “man is a kind
of miscarriage of the ape”.

And another: “Jesus in condoning the offense
of the woman taken in adultery, set the stamp of
His approval upon sexual relations based on mere
inclination”.

Another quotes with approbation the dictum of
Nietzsche: “Morality is the greatest enemy of life”.

An ex-professor in a girls’ college, now writing



46 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

for a newspaper syndicate, declares dogmatically,
“all gods are the creation of the human imagin-
ation. There never has been any divine revelation
and never will be. No extant moral code, not even
that derived from the Bible, possesses divine au-
thority. Conscience is nothing more than the pro-
duct of group opinion”.

And another professor: “All crimes are pro-
duced by various chemicals called hormones which
are manufactured by the different glands”.

And again Metchnikoff : “Evolution knows noth-
ing of free will. All our actions are the necessary

outcome of chemical processes”.
A professor of Sociology ridicules the idea that

a criminal is a free moral agent responsible for his
crime, and a college reference book specifies: “Sup-
pose a tramp has murdered a child on the highway,
has robbed her of a few coppers and has thrown
her body in the ditch. Do you mean to say he is not
to blame and not to be punished? Yes, I mean to
say just that”.

But enough. Any one familiar with the current
trend in college sociology, ethics, criminology, psy-

chology, biology must be aware that a thousand
such mad statements as these could be assembled.

And in accordance with the claims of absolute
academic freedom, one may teach Socialism, Com-
munism, Bolshevism, Atheism; universal skeptic-
ism, or philosophic nihilism; the superiority of

Buddhism over Christianity; the advantage of
polygamy over monogamy; the desirability of mon-
archy rather than democracy. A professor may
teach today a subversive opinion that he will aban-

don tomorrow. Abusing the advantage of having
young men and young women when they are in



THE CHUECH AND MODERN THOUGHT 47

their most receptive and impressionable years, he

may skillfully and powerfully indoctrinate them
with views, which, after his students have gradu-

ated and are beyond his reach, he may abandon as
absurd. The implications of the theory of absolute
academic freedom are infinite.

Some years ago a group of 26 alumni of Am-
herst laying down a program for a liberal college
said : “A liberal college should give the student the
beautiful experience of exposure to conflicting

viewpoints, and train him to accept no opinion
until he has made it his own by careful examination
and critical weighing of the best possible evidence”.
Now I submit that this is pure nonsense. Anybody
who knows the intellectual caliber of under grad-
uates in American colleges, is aware that they are
quite incapable of “carefully examining and critical-
ly weighing the best possible evidence”. By the
very nature of the case, a student who takes up a
dozen or score of sciences in a four years’ college

course can have only a smattering of them when he
graduates. To tell him that he must not accept any-
thing until he has made it his own by a critical in-
vestigation is asking something of which the student
is intelligently incapable.

Indeed, his professors are likewise incapable of
it. They study for a lifetime on one subject, and
then disagree with one another. When professors
disagree, shall the student decide? You might as
well ask him to decide between Newton and Ein-
stein.

A little preaching of intellectual humility would
do the student more good than all this foolish flat-
tery. The student should be told : “You don’t know
how to think until you come to college. Unless you



48 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

are the rare exception you won’t know how to think
when you leave college. So don’t let any fool flatter
you with the notion that you have the critical

faculty of deciding for yourself what is truth and
what is not. Don’t deceive yourself and don’t let
any twenty-six alumni, or twenty-six hundred
alumni, deceive you with the statement that you, an

undergraduate, even after the ‘beautiful experience

of exposure to conflicting viewpoints’, will be able

to make an opinion your own by ‘careful investiga-
tion and critical weighing of the evidence’. My dear
boy, it cannot be done”.

Back in the early years of this century the cele-
brated Dr. Osier of Johns Hopkins gave a lecture at

Harvard on “Immortality”. The plan of the lecture
was to pass in review the supreme masters of
thought in all ages : Aristotle, Plato, Seneca,

Epictetus, Cicero, Maimonides, Mohammed, Augus-
tine, Aquinas, Erasmus, Locke, Hume, Kant, the
Bible, the Rig-Veda, the Zend Avesta, and other
authorities, Christian and non-Christian, conserva-
tive and radical, of believers and unbelievers, ortho-
dox and infidel. In the end Dr. Osier professed
himself agnostic on the subject of Immortality.

What wonder. No man can sit in judgment on the
truth or error in the mind of all the thinkers of the
human race. And if no man can do it, no boy or girl
can do it. The idea of dishing up to college stu-
dents all kinds of mental pabulum, good and bad,
true and false, healthful and unhealthful is excel-
lent if you wish to drug the students, poison them.
But if the purpose of education is to feed the mind,
not suffocate it, absolute academic freedom is non-
sense and damnable dangerous nonsense.

And this is the nonsense that the Catholic



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 49

Church has learned to reject. She claims to have
divine revelation and direct relationship with the
Holy Spirit. But she doesn’t need any supernatural
light to show her that it is a mad thing to bewilder
the minds of students and demoralize them because
of stupid devotion to a slogan “Academic Free-
dom”. Having common sense, the Church has
avoided that pitfall, that bog, that sea of sticky

slime in which the modern mastodon of University
Education is now caught and in which it is feebly
floundering before it becomes entirely and in-
extricably submerged.



50 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

THE CHURCH AND DEMOCRACY
(Address Delivered on June 9, 1935)

There is a suspicion—a rather widespread sus-
picion—^that the Catholic Church is by tradition
and on principle hostile to democracy. We are told
—or we used to be told—^that Monarchy, Feudal-
ism, or some kind of Absolutism was essential to
the existence and the progress of our Church. It
was supposed that we could not survive if the union
of Church and state were broken and all govern-
mental props and subsidies removed.

The history of the Church in the last century
and a half (here in the United States) has destroyed
that misconception. The Catholic Church has flour-
ished like the green bay tree in the democratic soil

of America. In all her long career of nineteen

centuries the Catholic Church has never taken root
in a more congenial soil or breathed a more favor-
able atmosphere than the soil and the atmosphere

of this youngest and freest of nations—America.
She has had experience of East and West, of

Monarchy and Democracy, of Imperialism and
Feudalism, of times of ignorance and times of in-
tellectual culture; she has had experience of old
countries and young, but never has she taken root

more deeply, grown more rapidly or felt herself more
thoroughly at home than here in the Land of Free-
dom, the land which after all has given democracy

its fairest trial, the land in which, in spite of all the

sneers of cynics and the fears of faint-hearted

Americans (“0 Ye of little faith!”) we are still sub-
stantially democratic.

Here in a land from which monarchy was rout-
ed, where a titled aristocracy is forbidden by law.



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 51

where notwithstanding the gradual limitation of

opportunity, a poor boy with no important ances-

tors and no social position is still free to make his
way to the top. A land wherein even
yet and indeed more now than ever before,
education' is free and the vast majority of
students poor; a land where class distinctions and
social castes are frowned upon, except by a
narrow lunatic fringe of fops and sycophants
who ape the accent and the manner of European
snobs; and with a grand fanfare of journalistic

trumpets marry off their silly little snips of
daughters to a count or a baron or a pseudo-

prince of some decadent and probably degenerate
stock; I say in this land where the blood and the
heart and the sinew of the people still remain
democratic, the Catholic Church has made such
progress and achieved such triumphs as in no other
land and in no other epoch.

Perhaps it may be well to document that fact
with a few statistics which I shall present briefly
and swiftly. In 1789 when John Carroll was ap-
pointed Bishop of Baltimore he had the entire
United States for his diocese. There were 30 priests
and 25,000 Catholic people. Today, we have in
America four cardinals, 125 bishops or archbish-
ops, 30,250 priests and over 21 million Catholic
people. With a free field and no favor, no privi-
leges, no governmental support, no union of Church
and state ; in the midst of a dozen powerful rivals,
and perhaps 200 lesser contestants for supremacy,
the Catholic Church has outdistanced them all.
Surely it is a curious and interesting phenomenon.

Now, although it may startle some of my audi-
ience, I am going to attempt to show that the rea-



52 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

son for this Catholic triumph in a democratic land
is no mere accident of circumstances but a natural
necessary consequence of the fact that the prin-

ciples upon which our American government is
built are congenial to the Catholic Church and
indeed, though to some outside the fold" this may
be surprise upon surprise, that the principles of
American democracy originated in the mind of
perfectly orthodox authoritative Catholic theolo-

gians.

The fundamental principles of the American
government, as found in the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, are identical with the fundamental prin-
ciples of the government of the Catholic Church.
Even more, I maintain that it is quite probable that
Thomas Jefferson, when writing the Declaration of
Independence, indirectly borrowed ideas and
phrases from two great Catholic authorities,
Suarez, a Spanish Jesuit, and Bellarmine, a cardi-
nal of the Roman church. It happened thus

:

A great hero with theAmerican statesmen of the
time of the Revolution was Algernon Sidney, who
had been beheaded in England a hundred years
previously for advocating democratic principles.

A new edition of Sidney’s works had been printed
in 1763. In one of his volumes is found a summary
of the political doctrine of Cardinal Bellarmine

and a copy of that volume, underscored by Thomas
Jefferson is preserved in the Congressional Library

at Washington.

Remembering that Bellarmine lived two hun-
dred years before Jefferson, listen to the Roman
cardinal’s teachings and say if Jefferson’s ideas
and even Jefferson’s phrases are not reminiscent
of those of the great Catholic authority.



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 53

Bellarmine writes : “Secular or civil power is in
the people, unless they bestow it upon a leader. The
power is immediately in the multitude.”

“It depends upon the consent of the people to
ordain over them a king, council, or other magis-
trates. If there be a lawful cause, the people may
change the kingdom into an aristocracy or a de-
mocracy.”

Cardinal Bellarmine continues: “Mankind is
naturally endowed with freedom, and at liberty to
choose what form of government it pleases. The
power that one man hath over others was first be-
stowed according to the discretion of the people.”

Surely these political principles of the Roman
cardinal are identical with those of the Declaration

of Independence:

“All men are created equal.”
“Government derives its just power from the

consent of the governed.”

“Whenever any government becomes destructive
of these ends it is the right of the people to alter

or abolish it.”

These axioms of democracy are so familiar to
us that they do not startle us; indeed they scarcely
ruffle the surface of our consciousness. But in Jef-
ferson’s day they were considered highly inflam-
matory, seditious and subversive of law and order.
But radical as they are, they emanate from a Roman
theologian whose orthodoxy was never called in
question, andwhose reputq in theChurcfh may be sur-
mised from the fact that he has been canonized.
Saint Robert Bellarmine. He might well be de-
nominated patron saint of democracy and of these
United States.

Before I pass on to a second great principle of



64 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

democracy, I feel that I must interject a few words
to show that when Cardinal Bellarmine and Thomas
Jelferson said “all men are created equal” neither
one of them was proving himself either an ignor-
amus or an imebcile. It happens to be the fashion
just now, even here in what should be the
citadel of democracy, to laugh at the axiom
“all men are created equal.” Almost any day
you may hear a sophomore, or, what is worse,
a grown man with the mentality of a sopho-
more, solemnly laboring to demonstrate that men
are not all equal, that by nature some have more
brains and more talent than others. But do they
imagine that Thomas Jeiferson wasn’t aware of
that? Had he not eyes to see that not all men have
the same facial angle or the same cranial content?
Had he not ears to hear that not all men talk with
equal wisdom? In his day as in ours there were
boobs and morons. Give the framer of the Declara-
tion his due : he couldn’t have been so silly as those
who—to their own satisfaction—obliterate his en-
tire political philosophy by pointing out that an
intellecual giant has more brains than a village
idiot. Jefferson, it may be assumed, knew that
much. When he said that all men are equal he de-
clared a truth so deeply mystical and so profound-
ly theological that small minds think it ridiculous.
I am glad to notice that at least one recent com-
mentator on the Declaration, James Truslow
Adams, in The March of Democracy, sees the truth
and the importance of what a lesser mind has
called “spectacular rhetoric.” “Such phrases,” he
says, “as ‘all men are created equal’, ‘are endowed
by their Creator with inalienable rights’, and that
‘governments derive their just power from the



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 55

consent of the governed’, were dynamic forces
which sent the world on a new course, the end of
which is not yet in sight.”

Yet certain impatient or thoughtless Ameri-

cans are willing to sell their birthright for a mess
of Fascism or Hitlerism, or Leninism. Because
some legislatures are corrupt the defeatists de-
clare themselves in favor of the abolition of all

congresses and parliaments. Because we are be-
deviled by gangs of racketeers, hysterical persons
cry aloud for some benevolent tyrant to arise, take
the situation in hand, set up a scaffold in every
public park, regale the citizns and intimidate
criminals with multitudinous executions. They
seem to forget that such experiments in schreckli-
chkeit have been tried before. But those who
reign by terror often end like Robespierre on the
guillotine, or like Marat in his bath with a dagger
under his ribs. Dictatorships are precarious: the
last state of a government that trusts in dictators
is usually worse than the first. Free citizens
(more or less free) who think to cure all their
political and social troubles by setting up a super-
man to lord it over the nation, forget the lesson
taught by history that no man is big enough, wise
enough, good enough to exercise unlimited power.
Those who bring in a dictator to do what they
themselves haven’t the energy to do, are in reality
lazy and if they haven’t the courage to do the job
that must be done they are cowards. Only a de-
generate population shirks the responsibility of

self-government. Only if we have become degenerate
is it time to call in some one to tyrannize over us.

The Jeffersonian maxim, '“All men are created
equal”, is not the most extreme expression of fun-



56 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

damental democracy. The Catholic catechism is
more radical than the Declaration of Independence.
It insists that the meanest of men—let us say a
scabrous scrofulous coolie—is so important in the
eyes of God that if the Crucifixion of Christ saves
him and no other, it will not have been in vain.
There you have the ultimate in democracy. To
“aristocratic” Christians the mad magnificent ex-
travagance of that statement is a stumbling block

and to the unbeliever it is foolishness, but it is an
inevitable corollary of the orthodox theology of

redemption.

I have spoken throughout of American Democ-
racy. But I would not have any listener imagine
me ignorant of the fact that democracy, perhaps
in a superficially different form than ours, exists
and has existed in other countries then our own.
We sometimes are tempted to believe that England
arid Canada and Australia, though technically
monarchical, and indeed members of an empire, are
more democratic in some ways than the United
States. But the democratic principles under which
these countries enjoy so large a measure of free-
dom emanate from the Magna Charta, and that
superb document—in effect a Bill of Rights

—

dates from the 13th century when all the world was
Catholic. Furthermore, the city-states of Italy
in the days of the Renaissance and earlier were,
except when they periodically fell into the hands
of tyrants like the Medici and the Sforazi, more
democratic than even ancient Athens and quite
as democratic as our own New England when the
town meeting was in its heyday.

Cardinal Moran of’Sydney, New South Wales, in
a very brilliant historical resume of “The Catholic



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 17

Church in the Nineteenth Century” quotes a Pro-
testant writer (unfortunately not named) who says
of Belgium (I beg you to observe as I read the pas-

sage that it contains not merely a eulogy of Bel-

gium but a comprehensive catalogue of democratic
principles)

:

“This most Catholic of Catholic countries
adopted from the very first the most modern of
modern Constitutions, embodying every popular
liberty in its length and breadth. Freedom of con-
science, religious equality, freedom of the press,

of meeting, of association, of education, parliamen-

tary government, ministerial responsibility, uni-

versal suffrage, inviolability of person and house,
equality before the law, permanence of judicial ap-
pointments, publicity of legal courts, trial by jury,
have all not only been legalized, but protected in
Belgium, without any of the evasions which make
similar legislation in some countries virtually a
dead letter.”

Against the various assertions that Catholic-
ism and Democracy are not at all incompatible cer-
tain hostile critics often quote the Syllabus of
Pope Pius IX written in 1870, a document in which
a careless casual reader uninstructed in the art of
interpretation might indeed seem to find a con-
demnation of democracy. The pope inveighed
against what was called “liberalism”. And indeed
it would seem at first blush that one who con-
demns “liberalism” must be illiberal. But it was
not bona fide liberalism that the pope condemned,
but moral, social, political anarchy hiding behind
a facade of liberal pronouncements. It should not
be difficult for us to understand that situation.
Aren’t we all familiar with the exclamation of



58 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

Madame Roland, “0 Liberty, how many crimes have
been committed in thy name?” And have we not
before our eyes a government that proclaims itself
the very acme of liberalism, Russia, wherein cruel-
ty, tyranny, fierce injustice, wild disregard for all

human rights and mass murder are perpetrated in
the name of humanity? The very term “Commu-
nism” originally a noble and beautiful word—the
first Christians at the height of their pristine fer-

vor, in the days when all men said “See how these
Christians love one another” were communists.
But now the word reeks and stinks with fanaticism
and savagery. So in Mexico, a small imitation of
Russia here at our doors, there is developing,

though our politicians high and low deliberately
blind themselves to the fact, a reign of tyranny

such as has hardly been seen since the days of
Diocletian or of Nero. And yet that government
calls itself “liberal”. That’s the kind of liberalism

condemned by the pope.

As far back as June 1871, the Civilta Cattolica,
a Jesuit paper in Rome, explained that Pius IX was
condemning not genuine liberalism but counter-
feit liberalism, not true democracy, but tyranny
masquerading as democracy.

Says the Civilta: “The words of Pius IX do not
refer to representative constitutions but to the

errors which under every form of government may
manifest themselves. . . It was impossible that
Pius IX could include civil and political liberty
in his condemnation of Liberalism, and so far was
it from being his intention, that at the very time
of the publication of the encyclical, he introduced

these administrative reforms into his states.”

However, before I conclude, I must be permitted



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 59

to explain that democracy like every other good
and holy principle needs to be regulated and mod-
erated. Democracy of itself, extreme and ram-
pant, might produce disintegration. You have the
idea in Daniel Webster’s phrase memorized, I am
sure, by every school boy in America since it was
first spoken, “Union and Liberty, one and in-

separable,” As union and Liberty are to be insep-
arable, so must Democracy and Authority be for-
ever united. There was until the Civil War a
theory that union was unimportant, that liberty
must be extended even to include the right to secede
from the union. That concept of democracy was
washed out in blood in the terrible years 1861-1866
and after the passions aroused in that conflict died
down, we have been able to see clearly that dis-
union would have destroyed democracy.

Now the Catholic Church is aware of that
necessary limitation of democracy. She has always
refused to allow the individual congregation or a
local group of congregations to secede from the
Unity of the Whole Church, She constantly has in
mind the prayer of Our Savior “that they may all
be One”, and the slogan of St. Paul, “One Lord, One
Faith, One Baptism”, as well as his indignant ex-
clamation, “I hear that there are schisms amongst
you. Was Christ divided?” No! democracy and
self-government must not be permitted to imperil
the divine unity of the Church. Democracy must
not degenerate into rank individualism. Democ-
racy is not to be defined, government of, for and
by the individual. Enlightened Americans, as dis-
tinct from extreme libertarians, believe in a
limited freedom and a balanced, moderated democ-
racy. And there once again, as so frequently be-



60 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

fore in this series, I am led to remark that the
American idea and the Catholic idea coincide.



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 61

THE CHURCH AND THE NEW SOCIAL
CONSCIENCE

(Address Delivered on June 16, 1935)

The most pathetic fact in the history of civiliza-
tion is that the race learns very sloAvly what is for
its social and moral good. Man takes an uncon-
scionably long time to get hold of an ethical prin-

ciple, and a still longer time to apply it in daily life.
One would imagine, for example, that slavery would
have vanished promptly when the Gospels were once
accepted by kings and emperors and people. The
idea that one man may own another and be absolute
master of the other man’s life is madly at variance
with the Sermon on the Mount. But nations that
called themselves Christian did not abolish slavery

until 1800 years after Christ.

As of slavery, so in a lesser degree of class dis-
tinctions and what St. Paul calls “fables and end-
less genealogies”. Since we are all children of the
same father, it is ridiculous that some should call
themselves “aristocrats”, “the best people”, as if

they had come down body and soul from heaven
while the rest of us were but common clay out of
the earth. Even if one cannot grasp the noble idea
of the brotherhood of man, a little common sense,
it would seem, should enable us to laugh at aristo-
cratic pretentions. As Bobby Burns has it

:

“You see young birkie, ca’d a lord,
Wha struts, and stares, and a’ that;
Tho’ hundreds worship at his word.
He’s but a coof for a’ that

;

For a’ that, and a’ that.



62 THE CHUECH AND MODERN THOUGHT

His ribbon, star, and a’ that.
The man of independent mind.
He looks and laughs at a’ that.”

But even Bobby Burns’ proud countrymen are
still so eager for ribbons and medals and badges and
decorations that they accept them from a govern-
ment that conquered their ancestors.

Certain Christians carry aristocratic distinctions

even into church. I wonder what they make of Our
Savior’s blunt condemnation of those who “love
the first places at feasts and the first chairs in the
synagogues” and of His stem condemnation of the
Pharisees who thought themselves better than the
rest of men.

Yet in the Epistle of St. James there is a denun-
ciation of Christians who draw a line of distinction
between man and man. “If there shall come into your
assembly,” says St. James, “a man having a golden
ring, in fine apparel, and there shall come in also a
poor man in mean attire, and you have respect to
him that is clothed with the fine apparel, and shall
say to him

; ‘Sit thou here well’ ; but say to the poor

man; ‘Stand thou there or sit under my footstool’,
jmu commit sin” because “you have respect to per-
sons.” There’s a bombshell for rich pewholders and

for the entire breed of aristocrats who even in
church before the altar put up a barrier between
themselves and the vulgar horde. The practice of
separating the “nice people” from the “common peo-
ple” still persists 1,900 years after St. James and in
spite of Jesus Christ.

Take the more important matter of warfare. I
suppose we dare not say that any and every
imaginable war is sinful and criminal. Self-de-
fense is the first law of nature. But one thing seems



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 63

certain : we would never go to war unless we were
first stirred up to hatred of our fellow man. Yet,

according to the Scripture, “he that hateth his

brother is a murderer”. Wars have continued, and
feuds and duels, and race hatred and international
animosities, in flat contradiction of the spirit of the

Gospel. Indeed we learn slowly. Sometimes it
seems we never learn.

So it is not to be wondered at if in the matter of
social justice the conscience of Christian people has

developed very tardily. True, we have got rid of a
few of the most obvious instances of “man’s in-
humanity to man”. Only in countries that have re-
verted to paganism, as for example, in Russia and

in Mexico, is it the custom to condemn multitudes of
men and women to penal servitude for no other
crime than that of fidelity to conscience. We no
longer slaughter captured populations or enslave

them. We don’t chain captives to the galleys or
rivet them to the rock in mines deep in the bowels of
the earth. But though the galleys are gone, I doubt
if the rowers chained to an oar in a Roman trireme
suffered more than the stokers in the hold of a
modem steamer, or than the sailors before the mast
in the wind-jammers of a generation or two ago.
And though mine workers are no longer technically
slaves, their lot in life is still desperately hard. I

have heard a priest, once a breaker-boy in a Pennsyl-
vania coal mine, tell of his childhood experiences

some sixty years ago, and I assure you the story was
harrowing. To this day there are some 800,000
children at work on farms, in factories, and in
sweat shops, and you may have read lately in the
New York Times of children working late at night
in the beet fields by the light of automobile head-



64 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

lights. Almost a century after Oliver Twist, we
still find it necessary in the Anglo-Saxon world to
maintain societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to

Children, a scandal, by the way, to the Latins and to
the Orientals who cannot understand cruelty to
children. Speaking of Oliver Twist, we like to be-
lieve that there are no longer schools for teaching
children to be pickpockets, but we have boy-bandits
in the United States

;
indeed an appalling percentage

of the prevalent crimes are committed by ado-
lescents. We read in the news-dispatches a few days
ago that in Russia, where the newest and maddest
sociological experiment is beipg tried, there is a

tidal wave of juvenile crime, and the girls are as
frequent offenders as the boys.

For another social crime, not so far away from
home, observe the slums in European and American
cities, sordid fetid tenements that breed filth, disease,

drunkenness, crime, revolt, indecency, obscenity and
even degeneracy. They are a stench in the nostrils,
literally and figuratively, and a shrieking contradic-
tion of our claim to be a civilized people. With the
advance in medical science, hygiene, and sanitation,
a slum should be impossible, unthinkable. It is less
excusable in a modern city than a leper colony amid
the rocks and caves and tombs in ancient Palestine.
Besides slums, we have huts—huts and hovels in the
very shadow of mansions. On Riverside Drive in
New York, directly in front of the palatial home of
one of the world’s wealthiest men, there was all last
winter a village of shacks made of bits of waste
lumber, fragments of scrap iron, discarded bits of
tin, put together with pathetic ingenuity by men,
some of them sbldiers in the World War, who were
not only homeless but destitute and all but straving.



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT (i5

The richest city in the world could find no shelter
for them. Few passersby seemed to sense the fact
that these pitiable makeshift homes, and the still

more pitiable occupants of them were a tragic com-
mentary upon the idea of social justice that prevails
in what some of us would like to think the most en-
lightened community in the world. That casual
juxtaposition of the millionaire’s mansion with
hovels fit only for rats but shared by rats and men,
must have caused the devils of irony to laugh a
raucous laugh at the mad inconsistencies of our
civilization.

I need not continue the catalogue of these ano-

malies. You may add to it as you will, but whether
the list be long or short we must reach the one con-,
elusion: even here in America we have scarcely
commenced to understand the rudiments of social
justice. In particular we have been blind and ob-
durate to the implications of that supreme document
of social justice (not to say of the religion that

makes our duty to man part of our worship of God)
the Gospels of Jesus Christ.

Now there are critics of Christianity—not a few
in these days of communism and atheism—who place
the blame for the slow development of a sense of
social justice at the door of the Church. They might
better lay it at the door of human nature. The
trouble is not with the Church but with man. The
Church teAches but hian refuses to learn ; the Church
cries “Come along” but man lags behind. Any one
who questions the fact that the Church, no matter
how much a laggard she may seem to the impatient
reformer, is always far in advance of the people,
might do well to examine his conscience as to
whether he keeps pace with the Bible or with the



66 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

Church in the matter of relationship with his fellow
man. If he be quite honest I think he will conclude
with the pagan poet who said “I see what is good
and I admire it. But I do what is evil”, and in that
you have an epitome of the history of humanity.

As for the Communists who criticize the entire
Christian system as fruitless of social reform, I

should imagine that they would have the good
grace to be dumb in the face of what organized
Communism has done in Russia. The machine indeed
has made progress—^terrible progress—amongst
the Soviets, especially the war-plane and the battle-
tank, but the dignity of man has been destroyed and
his freedom utterly ruined. If that be progress, I
would prefer the socially backward days of the
feudal system, or even the Greco-Roman civilization
of the Caesars, which was not only ignorant of so-
cial justice but contemptuous of the new Christian
doctrine of the brotherhood of man. Any unbiased
student of Christian origins must know that with
the preaching of the Gospel came a stupendous uni-
versal social revolution. In a course of talks on “The
Church and the Depression” given over this network
some six months ago I recapitulated some of the
teachings of the Fathers of the Church of 700, 1,000
and 1,500 years ago. I cannot now go over that
ground again.

But in these our days also, two popes, Leo XIII in
1891 and Pius XI in 1931, have issued encyclicals
that have been generally recognized as documents
of epoch-making importance, not mere academic
statements of doctrine (though they are that) but

clarion calls to practice the social justice of the Gos-

pels.

In those documents you may find, not indeed dis-



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 67

cussion of intimate details, questions of the valua-

tion of gold and silver, of a federal banking
system, of inflation, deflation, reflation, and all

that, but you find fundamental principles which like

the roots of a great tree go deep and spread wide.
See, for example, how nobly Leo XIII vindicates the
dignity of man, the foundation of all social justice.

“No man may with impunity outrage that human
dignity which God himself treats with great rever-
ence. . . Nay, more; no man has in this matter
power over himself. To consent to any treatment
which is calculated to defeat the end and purpose
of his being is beyond his right; he cannot give up
his soul to servitude ; for it is not man’s own rights
which are here in question, but the rights of God, the

most sacred and inviolable of rights.”
In consequence man must not be dealt with as if

he were an animal or a machine; the work of his
hands and the sweat of his brow are not a mere com-
modity. Pope Pius XI says : “Labor, ... is not a
mere chattel, since the human dignity of the work-
ingman must be recognized in it, and consequently
it cannot be bought and sold like any piece of mer-
chandise. None the less the demand and supply of
labor divides men on the labor market into two
classes, as into two camps, and the bargaining be-
tween these parties transforms this labor market
into an arena where the two armies are engaged in
combat.”

In this combat, both popes recognize that the

employer has the advantage over the employee, the
rich hold the upper hand over the poor. In conse-
quence, though there must be no class war and no
discriminatory legislation, the state must take the
poor particularly under its wing. Says Pope Pius:



68 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

“The richer class have many ways of shielding them-
selves and stand less in need of help from the State

;

whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of
their own to fall back upon, and must chiefly depend
upon the assistance of the State, and for this reason
wage earners, since they mostly belong to that class,
should be specially cared for and protected by the
government.”

Now the popes always speak with moderation,
they never give way to hysteria, never play the
part of the demagogue, but they do not mince
words when they set forth the social evils
that are the cause of our present unrest. Take
for example such utterances as these from Pius XI

:

“In our days not alone is wealth accumulated but
immense power and despotic economic domination
are concentrated in the hands of a few, and
those few are frequently not the owners but only
the trustees and directors of invested funds, who ad-
minister them at their good pleasure.

“This power becomes particularly irresistible
when exercised by those who, because they hold
and control money, are able also to govern credit and
determine its allotment, for that reason supplying,

SO to speak, the life-blood to the entire economic

body, and grasping, as it were, in their hands the
very soul of production, so that no one dare breathe

against their will.”

The pope does not spare his own. He says:
“There are even now, some who, while professing
the Catholic faith, are well nigh unmindful of that
sublime law of justice and charity which binds us
not only to give each man his due, but t© succor our
brethren as Christ, Our Lord Himself; worse still,
that there are those who out of greed for gain do not



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 69

shame to oppress the workingman. Indeed there are
some who can abuse religion itself, cloaking their
own unjust imposition under its name that they may
protect themselves against the clearly just demands
of their employees.”

It is not my purpose at this time to rehearse the
remedies suggested by the popes. I need only say
that after showing thus plainly that they visualize

the evil, they go on to suggest practical means for re-
forming the social condition of the world. Some of
their principles are so sweping and, as men say, so
“radical” that the world in general is not and for
some time to come will not be ready to accept them.
To give but one sample. The popes, with the theo-
logians, hold that private wealth is a public trust,

and that no man absolutely owns what he happens to
possess. Leo says: “The chief and most excellent
rule for the right use of money is one which the
heathen philosophers hinted at, but which the
Church has traced out clearly, and has not only
made known to men’s minds, but has impressed upon
their lives. It rests on the principle that it is one
thing to have a right to the possession of money,
and another to have a right to use money as one
wills. . . If the question be asked. How must one’s
possessions be used? the Church replies without
hesitation in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas :
‘Man should not consider his material possessions as
his own, but as common to all.’ ”

Call that Communism if you will; it is a noble,
magnificent, divine kind of Communism, infinitely
remote from the narrow twisted ill-natured hateful
thing rampant in our day and calling itself Commu-
nism.

But I say, this brief talk cannot pretend to be



70 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

an adequate presentation of the attitude of the
Church towards the Social Problem. I have had it
in mind only to indicate that the popes, the doctors,
and fathers of the Church in our day, and in every
day since the Gospel was first made known, have
been alive and alert for social reform. As Glad-
stone said, “The Church for 1,500 years marched at
the head of the procession of civilization.” Fifteen

hundred? Yes, nineteen hundred. So far has she
been from lagging that it might perhaps be alleged
that she goes ahead so fast that the people dare not

follow. Her doctrine is so advanced that the world
cannot or will not catch up with it. But whether or
not mankind at large is ready for the truth about
social justice, the Church like her Divine Master
refuses to condescend to some baser doctrine. She
may be ahead of and above the common conscience
in regard to social rights and social duties. But no
man can truly allege that she has been delinquent
or behind hand.



THE CHUECH AND MODERN THOUGHT 71

THE CHURCH AND PROGRESS
(Address Delivered on June 23, 1935)

Voltaire, a man of bitter poisonous genius, but
something of a sage, wrote in one of his innumerable

letters, “If there were no God, it would be necessary
to invent Him.” A few years after the appearance
of that shrewd observation, as if in confirmation of
it, the revolutionists in Paris, having dethroned God,

declared a substitute
—

“Reason”. But Reason is an
abstract philosophical sort of deity, so they person-

ified it in a fiesh and blood woman—a foul sort of
woman by the way—and actually committed the sac-
rilege of placing her upon the altar at Notre Dame.

“Reason” as a god lasted but a short while. In
our day Reason is fallen so low that no modern
philosophical system gives her recognition, not to say

a genufiection, still less an adoring prostration.

Pragmatism, Vitalism, Freudianism, Behaviorism,

all the new philosophies scout reason. They say we
are not governed by reason but by impulse and in-
deed that all our thoughts and words and deeds, our
“reactions”, our sins and crimes and virtues, are all
mechanically determined.

After Reason in place of God came Science, called
more impressively Modern Science. But science as
a god is slipping. As long ago as 1890 Ferdinand
Brunetiere, a very notable thinker, declared science

“Bankrupt”. A contemporary critic who would be
fiattered if I called him the American Brunetiere.
Joseph Wood Krutch, in The Modem Temper, after
speaking of “the despair which has beset intelli-
gent people in recent years”, devotes a whole
chapter to “Disillusion with the Laboratory”*.

*The Modern Temper, by Joseph Wood Krutch.



72 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

Back in the early years of the century Professor
Loeb was promising to create life in the labor-
atory. But instead of life, death comes from the
laboratory, hideous horrible death, mustard gas

death, and only the scientists who work in secret
know what still more horrible kinds of death will
come out of the laboratory to be utilized in the next
war, the next war that Pope Pius XI and a good
many others are already calling the “war of ex-
termination”. “Disillusion” with the laboratory?

Say rather, furious indignation with the laboratory.
The laboratory may annihilate us. The whole world
is awake to the fact that modern science may ruin
civilization. Those who used to bend the knee to
modern science have become so fearful of modern
science that some of them have tried to call a halt

—

a moratorium they call it—on science. They want
science to stop in its tracks and wait for ethics and
morals to catch up.

With science there was a twin-god, the Machine.
Machinery was to revolutionize civilization. But the
machine, now become incredibly high powered,
threatens to get out of hand and smash man
who made it. Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein;
first a novel, now a motion picture, has brought home
to readers and to film-audiences the hideous possi-
bility that the god Machine may turn out to be a
monster more ruthless than Moloch, more destruc-
tive than Juggernaut. And Eugene O’Neill in a
nightmare sort of play. Dynamo, develops with in-
tense dramatic power the idea that humanity and
civilization may be sacrificed to the machine.

Another substitute for God, contemporary with
the machine and with science, was Evolution. “Some



THE OHUReH AND MODERN THOUGHT U

call it Evolution, others call it God”, says Car-

ruthers, and irrational though it be, there still are
persons who think that Evolution can perform all
the functions of God, and that since we have evolu-
tion we may dispense with the hypothesis of any
other deity.

Herbert Spencer was the high priest of the re-
ligion of Evolution. High priest, prophet, philoso-
pher, pedagogue, and factotum. He explained that
“human society which starts from the condition in
which each family wanders about alone and isolated,
and each man at once warrior, hunter, fisherman,
tool-maker and builder, shall pass through the no-
madic stage in which several families are united in a
kind of chieftainship where the king is at once judge
and king, and eventuate in those complex settled
states of Modern Civilization where labour is carried
to its minutest subdivision and every function finds
its appropriate social organ.”*

But Thomas Huxley, who was an even
better expositor of Darwinism than Herbert
Spencer, admitted—or rather emphasized—the fact
that the evolutionary process is non-moral. Evolu-

tionary progress, he declared, wars against social
progress, ethical progress, moral progress, and
hence the progress of civilization. So if evolution is
a god it is a non-moral god, a heedless, heartless,

remorseless god. Tennyson saw that. He says:
. . . “Nature red in tooth and claw
“With rapine, shrieked against his creed’^

the creed of man who thought that God was love.
He asks if man

“Who loved, who suffered countless ills
“Who battled for the True, the Just’’

must

*J. B. Crozier, Civilization and Progress, quoted in
Christopher Dawson: Progress and Religion, P. 18.



74 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

“Be blown about the desert dust
“Or sealed within the iron hills?”

If that be the end of evolution, man, says Tennyson
(and I dare say, also God), would be

. . . “A monster then, a dream,
A discord. Dragons of the prime.
That tare each other in their slime.
Were mellow music matched with him.”

But the saddest, most tragic, most hopeless con-
clusion, if there be no God but Evolution, is that of
Bertrand Russell who speaks of “Omnipotent matter,
blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, roll-
ing on its relentless way,” and who has epitomized
the pessimism inherent in the evolution-theory in a
passage as eloquent as it is despondent:

“Man is the product of causes which had no
prevision of the end they were achieving; his
origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his
loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of
accidental collocations of atoms; no fire, no

heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling,
can preserve an individual life beyond the
grave

; all the labors of the ages, all the devo-

tion, all the inspiration, all the noon-day bright-

ness of human genius, are destined to extinction
in the vast death of the solar system; and the

whole temple of Man’s achievement must in-
evitably be buried beneath the debris of a uni-

verse in ruins.”

As a kind of fillip to that horrifying prophecy of
the ultimate fate of man, H. G. Wells, the favorite
spokesman of semi-educated worshippers at the
shrine of Evolution, says that he looks upon the
world as “a very dire and terrible world” and that
hope has been all but extinguished from his heart.



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 75

“Reason” and “Science” and “The Machine” and
“Evolution” having all disappointed the human race,
there remains, or there did remain until the war, an

undaunted though unsubstantiated belief in “Prog-

ress”. Progress is perhaps not a god alone: it is a

twin-god of Evolution, just as the Machine is a twin-

god of Science. Those who worship Progress make
an act of faith in the proposition that the universe

and man move ever onward and upward from chaos
to order, from the amoeba, a splotch of protoplasmic
jelly in a puddle of mud, to that highly complex and
intricate organism, man. Herbert Spencer gave a
classic definition of evolutionary progress in a para-

graphic sentence which we all had to memorize
when we were in college. I will not repeat it here—it
is too long and too difficult to follow—but the gist of
it is that all things that exist pass from the simple
to the multiform, from the incoherent to the coher-
ent, from the indefinite to the definite, and so on.
What it really means is that the universe with all
its worlds and all its solar systems, with all vege-
table, animal, and human life, is constantly, ever-
lasting'ly ascending, moving steadily forward to a
goal of unlimited perfection. If I may risk the pos-
sible impropriety of descending swiftly from the
very learned Herbert Spencer to the funny little
French chemist who came here a few years ago with
his simple cure for all our ills, a piece of knotted

string and a sing-song refrain: “Every day in
every way I become better and better”, may I say
that the childish formula is a popular expression of
the religion of “Progress”.

The trouble is, of course, that not only individuals
but entire races of men and indeed whole civiliza-
tions go downward and backward as well as upward



76 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

and onward. The archaeologist will tell you that the
surface of the earth is heavily encumbered with
ruins. If you dig down some 15 or 20 feet below the
surface of the sands in Egypt or in Babylonia, you
will find buried remnants of what used to be mag-
nificent, gorgeous civilizations. In Athens the ruins
stare at you gaunt and pathetic from the top of the
hill of Mars like broken tombstones : in the Forum
at Rome you see them again, beautiful in a kind of
way, but none the less tragic reminders that a civili-

zation like a man dies and rots in the earth. Indeed
they say that beneath the surface of the city of Rome
there are deeper and deeper layers, nine in all, one
dead civilization laid upon the ruins of another, as
the bones of a man may be laid in a grave above
those of his father, and the father’s in turn upon
those of his father. Edward Gibbon tells in the
familiar beautiful preface to his masterpiece The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire of his sad
musings at the ruins of the Coliseum. He didn’t put
his thoughts into verse but Kipling has done it for
him

:

^^The tumult and the shouting dies,

‘The captains and the kings depart;

“All valiant dust that builds on dust.”

The prophet Isaias wrote it a thousand years be-
fore Rome was ruined. “All flesh is grass and all the
glory thereof as the flower of the field. The grass
is withered and the flower is fallen. . . indeed the
people is grass,” and to complete the thought from
our Savior Himself, the “Grass that is today and to-
morrow is cast into the oven”. For those who do not
read Isaias or the Gospels, there is the modern.



THE CHURCil AND MODERN THOUGHT 77

ultra-modern H. G. Wells, who wrote shortly after
the war

:

“The system under which we have grown up,
the system we call modern civilization, is head-
ing very rapidly downhill towards disaster,

and people living as we do are not realizing with
any strength of conviction just what that down-
ward movement amounts to, I have seen a
modem civilized system broken down, I saw
railways falling out of use. I saw a great city
visibly dying, houses tumbling down, roads fall-

ing into the drains below> all the methods of ur-
ban transport going out of use. That process of
collapse has spread.”

In a book which made a vast impression on the
post-war mind. The Decline of the West, Oswald
Spengler, presumably one of the wisest of recent
philosophers, denies that civilization as a whole,

world-wide civilization, develops constantly. In

fact he denies that there is any one universal
civilization. There are many succesive civilizations
which spring up here and there, develop, decline,
die like individual men, and (if I read him rightly)
he seems to say that after all we don’t really get
anywhere. For whole civilizations, as for individual
men, “The path of glory leads but to the grave.”
When some evolutionists in Darwin’s day said that
although individuals are blotted out, the “type” goes

on, Tennyson answered, speaking of Nature,

‘‘So careful of the type? but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.^

”



78 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

And to drop the poets and the philosophers, do
not some of the most approved scientists, equipped
with the very latest biological and astronomical
learning, tell us that the universe is running down,
like an antiquated grandfather’s clock, and that the
day is coming when it will cease to move and the
stillness of ultimate death will reign once more, that

the universe will become once again as in the begin-
ning disorganized and disintegrated, that the cosmos
will revert to chaos?

To consider a phenomenon closer at hand and
more easily verifiable, do we not see before our very
eyes certain signs of the decadence of our own peo-
ple? Here in America, the birth rate is declining
ominously. The other day I saw a chart prepared
by the National Resources Board heavily printed in
black parallelograms with the note fhat the condition

is quite as black as it is painted, showing that where-

as in 1800 there were 976 children to every 1,000
women in the United States, there has been a con-
stant decline until in 1934 there were only 350 child-
ren to 1,000 women. We need no prophet Daniel to
read that handwriting on the wall. Americans are
going the way of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the
Greeks, the Romans, the Aztecs, the Incas, and the
Redmen of our own plains and mountains. Nor is
the decline merely arithmetical. Morally we are
slipping. We commit more murders than all Europe
combined, and our homicide rate is five times that of
England. We grind out more divorces than any
country in Europe except Russia, where divorce may
be obtained by a post-card notification to husband or
wife and to a public official. In consequence,

amongst us the institution of the family, the basis
of civilized society and of the State is riddled, in



THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT 79

some classes of society, shot to smithereens. We
lead the world with embezzlers, grafters, gangsters,

racketeers, hijackers, kidnapers, and malefactors

of great wealth. The now defunct industrial codes
were made necessary by cheaters and ruined by
chisellers even before they were legally condemned
to death by the Supreme Court. To our terrible dis-
grace there have been 4,000 lynchings in the United

States north and south, since 1898. In spite of the
expenditure of uncountable millions of dollars on

popular education, th^massi of the people remaineasy

victims of almost any demagogue, provided he be
sufficiently dogmatic, blatant, violent, intolerant, and
uninhibited by conscience from making wild, im-
possible promises to the poor, abused underdog. It

is notorious that the people at large are governed

here and now by emotion, passion, and not by
reason, notwithstanding a hundred years of common
school, high school and college education.

As for sex-sins, natural and unnatural, normal
and abnormal, you shall have to ask the custodians of
clinics and of insane asylums for the horrible statis-
tics and the ghastly details. Together with all this,
we have our share^—more than a proper share for a
young nation—of social and economic ills—imagine
five major depressions or panics in one man’s life-
time, in a land that is reeking and bursting with
natural resources.

I present these unpleasant facts not to make an
indictment against my own nation, but in the in-
terest of truth and to give pause to those evolution-
istic moderns who cry “Progress!”, as if Progress
were as plain as a mountain rising in magnificent



,80 THE CHURCH AND MODERN THOUGHT

solitude from a plain, and as undeniable as the, sun in
a cloudless sky at noonday. •

I believe in Progress myself and my Church be-
lieves in Progress. But belief in Progress demands
an act of faith. It isn’t as plain as A. B. C. or as

evident as twice 2 make 4. I believe in Progress
’because and only because I believe in God. Blot out

God and I couldn’t believe in Progress because there
would be neither a starting point from which prog-
ress could begin nor a goal towards which progress
could aim. And worse still, if there were no God
there could be no guiding hand to direct the way of
man and the Universe. The world and all bn it
would be in the same danger as the sun when the in-
experienced Phaeton drove it madly across the skies.

In a word the Church refuses to share the tragic
and pitiable despondency of the Oswald Spenglers.
the Bertrand Russells, the Herbert George Well’s,
and of the astronomers who think the world is run-
ning down, because the Church believes in God, the
only God, not Science as God, not Evolution as God,
not, Progress as God, but the one only God, the God
Who creates and inspires true science directs the
true evolution, and controls the progress of the
spheres through space and of man to his eternal
goal.