CHRISTIANITY’S

coimtiBimoN TO

CIVILIZATION

by

Rer. James M. Gillis» €• S. P.,

Editor of the “CathoUc World^^

Nin« addresses delivered in the Catholic Hour, sponsored
by the National Council of Catholic Men, with the
cooperation of the National Broadcasting Com*

pany and its Associated Stations.

(On Sundays from October 25 to December 20, 1931)

!• The Sources of Civilization.

IL The Principle of Personal Moral Responsi-
bility.

III. The Principle of Tolerance.

IV. The Principle of the Brotherhood of Man.

V. The Exaltation of Womankind Under Chris-
tianity.

VI. The Principle of Mercy.

VII. The Principle of Enthusiasm.

Vlll. The Principle of Optimism.

IX. Hie Prince of Peace.

National Council of Catholic Men

Sponsor of the Catholic Hour

1314 Massachusetts Avenue

Washington, D. C.





cHRismirs

coNimBunoN to

CmUZATION
by

Rev. James M. Gillis, C. S. P.,

Editor of the “Catholic World”

Nine addresses delivered in the Catholic Hour, sponsored

by the National Council of Catholic Men, with the
cooperation of the National Broadcasting Com-

pany and its Associated Stations.

(On Sundays from October 25 to December 20, 1931)

I. The Sources of Civilization.

II. The Principle of Personal Moral Responsi-

bility.

III. The Principle of Tolerance.

IV. The Principle of the Brotherhood of Man.

V. The Exaltation of Womankind Under Chris-
tianity.

VI. The Principle of Mercy.

VII. The Principle of Enthusiasm.

VIII. The Principle of Optimism.

IX. The Prince of Peace.

National Council of Catholic Men

Sponsor of the Catholic Hour

1314 Massachusetts Avenue

Washington, D. C.

Printed and distributed by Our Sunday Visitor
Huntington, Indiana



Imprimatur:

•h JOHN FRANCIS NOLL, D. D.

Bishop of Fort Wayne

Feast of The Circumcision, January 1, 1932.

Des^I?!3d



AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

One of the reasons for the following discussion of new

and superior elements brought into the world by Christian

civilization, was the belief which I hold, that Christianity and

paganism are now once again contending for the mastery of
the world. I think I see in present conditions a repetition of

those which prevailed in the later patristic age. There is of

course one obvious exception—at that time Christianity was
coming and paganism was going. Signs of a return of pagan-

ism are not wanting for those who claim that Christianity,
in its turn, is being thrust aside.

Very recently a large work appeared in two volumes in

which Christianity is treated as a saga (half historical, half

mythical), and indeed a saga that has come to its conclusion.

The author of this work seems to think that Christianity is
obsolescent if not obsolete. I consider that thesis unworthy

of discussion. It is too obviously false. It indicates, how-
ever, a trend of thought that may be more or less prevalent.
If there are any who consider Christianity done for and who
think it would be an advantage to the world to become once
again pagan, I hope they may find some suggestion of an
answer in the following pages.



DEDICATION

To my much admired preceptor and well beloved friend,
Bishop Shahan.



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 5

THE SOURCES OF CIVIUZATION
(Address delivered by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P., in the

Catholic Hour, October 25, 1931.)

The title of this series of talks, “The Contribution

of Christianity to the Civilization of the World,” is

perhaps a sufficient indication that I make no claim

for Christianity as the first and only civilization.

The patriarch Job, being teased and tortured by

those who are called, ironically, his comforters,

turned on them and exclaimed with surprising sar-

casm : “No doubt ye are the people and wisdom shall

die with you.” We Christians must beware lest we
lay ourselves open to a similar shaft: “So, you are

the people! Civilization was born and will die with

you!”

Of course, there were civilizations, dozens of

them, before Christ. They came and went like na-

tions and dynasties. I have seen in the British Mu-

seum mummies embalmed by the Egyptians 2,600

years before Christ, and as early as 2,000 B. C., the

Egyptians—^those wonderful pioneers of civilization
—^had developed reading and writing, mathematics,
agriculture, commerce, shipping, art, law and the

science of government. Egyptian civilization—and
with it, the Babylonian and the Assyrian—^waxed
and waned, developed, decayed, died, not only before

Christ but before history. So, too, had that of the

Hittites, who flourished for a thousand years and
had perished yet another thousand years before

Christ. Sodom and Gomorrah had become in Christ’s
time mere names for decadence. But before there

could be decadence there must have been efflores-

cence. Sidon and Tyre remained in existence, but



6 CHRISTIANITY'S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

the glory had departed out of them : all their pomp

was of yesterday.

As for the more remote civilization of India and

China, nothing was known of it in the Mediterranean

world, and most of us know little or nothing of it

even now. When Mahatma Gandhi recently referred

to the ancient glories of the Hindus, one very popu-

lar and presumably well-educated journalist demand-

ed to know what those glories were. He spoke

ignorantly. There was a vast and wonderful civil-

ization in India long before the Christian era.

Almost as far away as India, but in the opposite

direction, was a little island in the western ocean

which had developed a culture of its own, quite

independently. Ireland was a home of art, liter-

ature and general scholarship centuries before St.

Patrick heard the Macedonian cry, “Come over and

help us.” They needed help in religion rather than

in general civilization.

As for Greece, that astounding little country, not

half the size of England, she had achieved, as early

as 400 years before Christ, a civilization so superb

that it is even yet the wonder of the world; so ex-

uberant that it overflowed and enriched all its con-

temporaries and indeed all posterity. Even now,

the arts and letters, the architecture and sculpture

of pre-iChristian Greece remain an inexhaustible

source of inspiration.

The Semitic civilization—or more particularly the
Jewish—may have lagged behind the Greek, the
Egyptian and the Assyrian in art and architecture;

there are no Pyramids in Palestine, no Sphinx on

the banks of the Jordan, no splendid ruins in Judea

like those of Thebes and Karnak, or even like those



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 1

amazing piles that have been discovered in the

midst of dense jungles in Mexico or Indo-China. In

sculpture the Jews of course did little or nothing.

They were forbidden to make unto themselves grav-

en images. But in literature they more than held

their own. There is more eloquence in Isaias than

in Demosthenes, and for spiritual exaltation (which

is after all the supreme quality in literature), the

Jewish prophets far outran the Greek poets and

dramatists. Of the Psalms of David, a modern non-

Christian, non-Jew, John Cowper Powys, has said:

“The Psalms remain, whether in the Latin ver-

sion or in the authorized English translation, the

most pathetic and poignant, as well as the most

noble and' dignified of all poetic literature. The

rarest spirits of our race will always return to them

at every epoch in their lives for consolation, for sup-

port and for repose.”

And nowhere in any pagan literature will you

find so bold and beautiful an attempt as that of the

Book of Job to penetrate and to solve the mystery

that more than any other has been the theme of lit-

erature and drama from the beginning, the mystery

of pain and of evil.

But enough of that. If I have thus rapidly re-

ferred to a few of the ancient civilizations, it is

only by way of preparing for the idea which I now

ask leave to propose: Our contemporary civilization

is an amalgam of all that has gone before: it is a

melange, a potpourri of elements from the Egyptian,

the Assyrian, the Phoenician, the Arabic, the Indian,

even the Chinese, and—lest we forget—^the Irish.
When we were children, our school teachers used

to suggest a little game in geography which could be



8 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

played at home. We were to consider the foods and
drinks at the breakfast table and ask “Where did the

coffee come from?” “Mocha and Java, or Brazil.”

“The bread?” “From the wheat fields of Minnesota.”

“The sugar ?” “From Cuba.” The oranges from Cal-

ifornia, the grapefruit from Florida, and so on, until

we discovered to our surprise that even our break-

fast had come from all corners of the world.

As with our food and drink, so with our culture.

Our art we have from Greece, via ancient Rome,

modern Italy and France. Our law comes from

Rome, dating as far back as the twelve tablets, 450

years before Christ, modified and developed by the

Tarquins, and in later centuries by Augustus Caesar

and Justinian. The civil law of Rome came into

Britain with Julius Caesar, the ecclesiastical law

with Augustine. Both civil and ecclesiastical Roman

law went into the making of Magna Charta, and

Magna Charta inspired the Constitution of the

United States.

Our literature came from Greece—^again via
Rome, and from Palestine via England. The in-

comparable masterpiece of English literature is the

Bible, which of course is a translation from the He-

brew and even more directly from the Greek Septua-

gint made at Alexandria in Egypt. The King James

version is eloquent and beautiful because it managed

marvelously to capture and to communicate the at-

mosphere of Biblical times: it is not altogether a

new creation.

There is no dishonor in that. The Hebrew writers

themselves had profited by what they had learned

from Egypt. It is said in the book of Exodus that

when the Israelites went out of the land of Egypt,



CHRISTIANITY'S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 9

out of the house of bondage, they “stripped” the

Egyptians, as the Douay Bible expresses it, or “spoil-

ed the Egyptians,” according to the King James ver-

sion. They took away with them as spoils “vessels

of gold and silver, and very much raiment.” But

far more important for civilization is the fact that

they took away with them, according to their capaci-

ty, the learning and the culture of the Pharaohs.

“Moses,” says the Scripture, “was instructed in all

the wisdom of the Egyptians.” What Moses took

from Egypt he passed on to us through the Old

Testament and the New, through the Holy Land,

Greece and principally Rome, which after all has

been the chief dispenser of culture and religion to

Europe and through Europe to America.

So, culture and civilization have passed from one

country to another. We are heirs of all the ages;
we have borrowed from every land and from all

peoples. We may speak glibly of “Modern Civiliza-

tion,” but civilization is not modern : it is principally

ancient and medieval; the modern ingredients are

relatively few. Least of all is there any such thing

as an American civilization, a one hundred per cent

American civilization. “What hast thou that thou

hast not received?” says St. Paul, speaking of the

gifts that came to man from God, and the same

question may be repeated in regard to the civiliza-

tion that passes from man to man, from people to

people. What have we Americans that we did not

get from Europe, or from Asia, or even from Africa?

It is a fact in the history of culture that one man di-

rected the course that European thought was to take

a thousand years. His ideas and expressions are

to be found wherever there is, any systematic Chris-



10 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

tian philosophy. Catholics and Protestants dispute

over him as the Greek cities disputed over Homer,

as to who should have the right to claim him as their

own. His name was Augustine. His home was in

Africa. It is not difficult to find traces of Augus-

tine’s thought (somewhat misunderstood indeed) in

the theology of the Puritans and, as every American

knows, our indigenous civilization, good and bad, is

largely a product of Puritanism. Just at this mo-

ment that may seem a back-handed compliment, but

make no mistake, the Puritans deserve something

besides condemnation.

But to resume : civilization, ancient, medieval,

modern, any civilization is like an ocean fed by many

rivers. If there were no rivers there would be no

ocean. If we were to stop up all the streams that

contribute to our modern civilization, that civiliza-

tion would disappear and we should have in place

of an ocean, a desert of barbarism.

When the Catholic Church was the chief custodian

of western culture, and to a certain degree the crea-

tor and to a greater degree the director of civiliza-

tion, she was not ashamed, and not afraid to take

over and to embody whatever she thought good in

all the civilizations with which she came into con-

tact. In Rome, for example, there is a church in

honor of the Blessed Virgin built upon the site and

on the foundations of a temple of Venus. The

Pantheon, a temple dedicated to all the gods, was

baptized and consecrated to Christ, with no more

change than was involved in toppling over and

sweeping out the idols. Michelangelo, after gazing

long and intently upon the dome of the Pantheon,

said, “I will reproduce it and place it in the skies.”



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 11

He was a master artist in his own right, but he was

not too proud to learn from the masters who had

gone before him. In this case, as sometimes happens,

the pupil surpassed his teachers. The dome of St.

Peter’s is vastly more sublime than that of the

Pantheon.

To cite one more instance out of thousands: The

high column of Marcus Aurelius was made into a

a memorial of St. Paul by the simple expedient of

taking down the emperor’s statue and putting up the

Apostle’s.

In these cases and a thousand others, the substi-

tution was symbolic of the triumph of Christianity

over paganism, while at the same time the beauty

of pagan architecture and sculpture was left un-

harmed as an inspiration forever to Christian ar-

tists. Catholicism borrowed from all the heathen

—

except the Vandals and the Philistines. She never

feared what more timorous people have called

“pagan infiltrations” into Christianity. Some ele-

ments of paganism are welcome to filter in, for not

all paganism is vicious. Much of it is beautiful and

true. It does not all come from the devil. God

created the heathen as well as the Jew and the

Christian. A pagan poet has uttered a sentiment
quite in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount:

Homo mm, humani nihil a me alienum puto:
“I am a human being: therefore nothing human is
alien to me.” The Church is indeed divine, but she

is also human and she does not despise ansdihing

that is human. Fanatics in her place and having

her power, would have obliterated every trace of

Greco-Roman or Renaissance art, as the soldiers of

Cromwell smashed stained glass windows in the



12 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

English cathedrals, knocked the heads oif the

statues of the saints, and destroyed the crucifix

wherever they found it. The Catholic Church never

suffered such brain storms of bigotry. The statues

of the emperors, good and bad, Nero and Domitian,

as well as Augustus and Trajan; even those who

persecuted the Christians most violently (Marcus

Aurelius, scholar and philosopher that he was, did

that) are preserved carefully; indeed the statues

of gods and goddesses, Jupiter, Bacchus and Venus

are housed in the very palace of the Vatican. If cer-

tain narrow minds and small souls are thereby scan-

dalized and express their dissatisfaction rather vio-

lently, the Church endures their criticism with equa-

nimity. Catholic means universal, and one cannot be

Catholic without a broad tolerance for all that is

good and true or beautiful, no matter whence it

comes. If the Church had been vindictive and had

acted the vandal, not only the Church herself, but

all Christianity and all humanity would have been

the sufferer.

As with architecture, sculpture and all the fine

arts, so was it with philosophy. St. Augustine, the

master-mind of Christendom, drew largely from

Plato, with respectful and even affectionate ac-

knowledgment. Indeed he spoke of Plato as a

Christian before the Gospels. St. Thomas Aquinas

built the stupendous structure of his thought, the

Summa Theologica, upon foundations laid by Ar-

istotle.

Dante, as all the world knows, was inspired by

Virgil. He might have said of Virgil what Ben

Jonson said of Shakespeare: that he venerated him

as much as any man could “this side idolatry.”



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 13

Two centuries after Dante, the Renaissance was

a deliberate and highly successful attempt, made

under the eyes of the Church, to recapture “the

glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was

Rome.”

And here it must be confessed there arose a real

danger. Poets and painters, essayists, dramatists,

literati in general in a mad excess of admiration for

Greco-Roman culture would have swamped Catholi-

cism in paganism were it not that Catholicism is too

vigorous and too vigilant ever to be engulfed.

Providentially, when culture threatened to crush

morality and religion, there arose in the very center

of the Renaissance, the city of Florence, a monk,

Savonarola, austere as John the Baptist, fiery as

Jeremias, who slashed about with eloquence and zeal

as with a two-edged sword, in defense of Christian

faith and Christian virtue.

Such prophets have never been wanting to the

people of God. There is always an Eliag, an Isaias,

a Jeremias, a John the Baptist, a Chrysostom, a

Savonarola to excoriate the people who go “forni-

cating after strange gods” (to use the vigorous

phrase of the prophets) and to cry, “Return ye, re-

turn ye unto the Lord your God
!”

Let us not deny that there may be need of a proph-

et in our own times. We should never oppose
civilization, the arts, the sciences, literature and cul-

ture, but if civilization gets soft with too much re-

finement and threatens to go rotten, it would be a

godsend if some John the Baptist would come in

from his desert—gaunt, haggard, clad only in a loin

colth, stalk fearlessly into the centers of civilization

and castigate us for our corruption.



14 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

Have we indeed come in the present age to such

an emergency? Has art become so pagan, the

drama so obscene, literature so immoralistic, educa-

tion so desperately anti-religious that the time has

arrived for the Church to cry “Anathema,” and

to resort to interdict and excommunication in the

endeavor to save civilization—^to save it perhaps
even from itself, the perversion and degradation of

itself?

If the Church ever does so act, there will be many

to misunderstand her, and to cry aloud that she

stands in the way of intellectual and esthetic ad-

vance. The Church will not be deterred by that

calumny. Her history will be sufficient answer to

that. The Church that has for ages carefully guard-

ed all that she could salvage of the Greco-Roman civ-

ilization, the Church that has her center at Rome

where even the stones in the street cry out to testi-

fy that Catholicism is the foster-mother of culture,

the Church that placed two of the Medici family

upon the chair of Peter, can afford to smile at the

allegation of Puritanism or Manicheeism.

However, I do not say that the Church contem-

plates any rigorous criticism of our contemporary

civilization. I see no signs of it. The steady old

Church is not easily stampeded. She does not suffer

from the modern ailment of “nerves”
;
she will go

on, as always, tolerant of all true civilizations, vigi-

lant when they are threatened with corruption or

degeneracy, ready at all times to supply as a panacea

for the ills of civilization (as I hope to show in

succeeding discourses) the principles embodied in

the highest, best, purest of all civilizing instruments,

the Gospels of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVIIAZATION 15

THE PRINCIPLE OF PERSONAL

MORAL RESPONSIBDJTY
(Address delivered by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P., in the

Catholic Hour, November 1, 1931.)

Some twenty-five or thirty years ago, a celebrated

German scholar, Adolf Harnack, wrote a little book

entitled Das Wesen des Christenthums. It was

translated into a dozen, perhaps a score, of lan-

guages. In English it is entitled What Is Christian-

ity? The vast and tragic battle of Modernism was

fought around and about that little dissertation.

Now it may seem odd that men should be asking

1,900 years after Christ, “What is Christianity?”

But it is stranger still that so few seem to have hit

upon the true answer. One primary feature of

Christianity, and perhaps the most fundamental, is

the doctrine of the dignity of the individual soul, a

doctrine of immeasurable importance, not only for

religion but for civilization. If I were asked, there-

fore, what is the first contribution of Christian phil-

osophy to the civilization of the world (and I do

ask myself that question, for this is my topic

—

“What Christianity Has Contributed to Civiliza-

tion”) I should answer that Christianity, more than

any other philosophy, more than any other religion

emphasizes human dignity and in particular the

highest form of human dignity, moral dignity con-

sequent upon the natural freedom of the will.

Some adversaries of the Christian religion

profess to be scandalized because we preach the Gos-

pel of the fall of man and because in consequence

we inculcate humility and self-abasement. We call



16 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILiIZATION

ourselves miserable sinners ; we constantly cry,

“Have mercy, O God, have mercy on us !” Also we

preach submission and docility. We speak of Christ

as our shepherd and we refer to ourselves as sheep

who follow Him. Nietzsche, the exponent of the

doctrine of the superman, used to laugh at us and

despise Christianity as a “sheepish” religion. But

even more. Our Master took upon His own tongue

the prophecy that had been spoken of Him : “I am a

worm and no man.”

So, our enemies, perhaps even our friendly critics,

ask, “If you are sheep, if you are worms, how can

you be men? If you humiliate yourselves, how can

you prate of human dignity, and how dare you

claim that Christianity is the chief exponent of

human freedom?”

The answer involves an analysis of our mysteri-

ously complicated human nature. The bewildering

and even baffling creature called man is not one sim-

ple harmonious substance but a composite of contra-

dictions. Human nature is a bundle of paradoxes.

We may be, as certain biologists and physiologists
allege, brothers to the brutes, but the magnificent

paradox is that we are at the same time kin to the

angels. We confess that we have the passions of
animals, but we have also none the less the aspira-

tions of saints. We are slime of the earth and yet
children of God. We are poor miserable sinners,
conscious of our helplessness and ashamed of our

infirmities, but we are also children of God, heirs to

the kingdom of heaven.

Shakespeare knew that paradox
;
he says

:

“What a piece of work is man!

How noble in reason

!



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 17

How infinite in faculty

!

In form and moving how express and admirable

!

In action how like an angel

!

In apprehension how like a god

!

The beauty of the world

!

The paragon of animals
!”

«

But close upon that brilliant eulogy of human dig-

nity comes the question:

“Yet, to me what is this quintessence of dust?”

There you have the paradox: “noble,” “infinite,”

“angelic,” “godlike,” and “the quintessence of dust.”

If any one knows not that contradiction he knows

not man. All philosophy, all poetry, all drama,

pathos, tragedy, yes and comedy too, is in this sad,

mad, comic, tragic, pathetic self-contradiction, hu-

man nature.

Now of Jesus Christ, the Scripture says with

profound significance: “He knew what was in man

and needed not that any man should tell Him.” He

called His followers sheep but in the next breath He

exclaims, “Have I not said ye are gods
!”

The latter term of that paradox concerns us now.

Christianity, in contradiction to many another phil-

osophy, ancient and modern, teaches the doctrine of

free will, and with free will, its corollary, moral

responsibility; the only doctrine that makes man

master of his fate, captain of his soul, dictator of his

own destiny, the only doctrine, furthermore, that

can serve as a sure foundation either for the build-

ing or the rebuilding of civilization.

Greco-Roman philosophy and Greco-Roman rei-

ligion taught that man was a puppet in the hands

of the gods. Multitudinous deities who dwelt in the



18 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

skies or on the top of Mount Olympus pulled the

strings, and men and women down below danced to

the will of the gods. The Iliad of Homer, which is

at once the poetry, the philosophy, the theology of

the Greeks, commences with the wrath of Achilles.

But the wrath of Achilles is only a reflex on earth of

the anger of the gods in the heavens. Man is

wrothy, he goes to battle, he sheds blood, he devas-

tates provinces, he destroys cities, he achieves glory,

but it is all predetermined by the gods and therefore

automatic and inevitable. “As flies to wanton boys,

are we to the gods ; they kill us for their sport,” says

Gloucester in King Lear. There in a phrase you

have the essence of pagan philosophy, and incident-

ally the weak spot in pagan civilization. Man is not

master of his fate
;
fate is master of man.

If you seek the most fundamental solution of the

historical question, why did the ancient Mediterra-

nean civilization crumble, leaving only fragments

of itself in our modern civilization, like the frag-

ments of its sculpture and architecture in our mod-

ern museums, you have the key to the answer in

Greco-Roman stoicism, fatalism, the doctrine that

man is not master of himself and of the world but

a victim, driven hither and thither at the pleasure

and caprice of the gods.

The Oriental civilizations, virtually all of them,

labored under the same curse. Fatalism was even

more pronounced, more rigorous and more generally

accepted in Asia than in Europe. To this day hun-

dreds of millions of Asiatics remain under the spell

of the paralyzing philosophy of fatalism, and to that

fact, I imagine, more than to any other, more than

to climate, overcrowding, more than to the opium



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 19

habits or subservience to tyrannical rulers is due

the backwardness of Oriental civilization.

Now, curiously enough, there are fatalists here in

our midst in America, philosophers, psychologists,

scientists, educators, who reject the Christian doc-

trine of freedom of the will, and teach determinism.

Take for example, those evolutionists who are at the

same time materialists. Their theory is that man

is an animal, totally and exclusively an animal, a

highly evolved animal no doubt, the latest and per-

haps the last stage in animal evolution, but substan-

tially, essentially an animal and nothing more. Those

who teach this doctrine are often very learned, in-

deed they possess a virtual monopoly of the world

of education. Being learned, they know how to

weave words and manipulate arguments impres-

sively and with great plausibility. But behind the

verbiage which conceals or disguises their philoso-

phy, the idea remains that there is no soul, no free

will, no moral responsibility. These modern Occi-

dentals are fatalists not less than the Orientals. De-

terminism is fatalism. If a man’s will is not free,

nothing he does can be either virtuous or vicious,

nothing is good or bad, right or wrong. If the ac-

tions of man, no matter how much he may fancy

himself to be master of his own life, captain of his

own soul and all that, are determined by his heredity

and environment, his physical and psychical con-

stitution, his “urges,” his “complexes” and his “hor-

mones,” if morality be only conformity with custom

and immorality be only rebellion against the local

ethical code
;
if in a word all our actions, those that

we call good and those that we call bad, are really

predetermined either by forces within us or by the



20 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO dVILIZATTON

society that surrounds us, we are once again, like

the ancient Greco-Roman Stoics, puppets in the

hands of the gods, not now an ancient god Zeus, or

Ares, or Athene,—^but the great modern god Ma-
chine.

' Only the other day, on the occasion of the death of

Edison, a statement was printed with a great flourish

of authority by the head of a newspaper syndicate

that reaches many millions of readers that our civ-

ilization is that of the machine. And not very long

ago, a play was given for several months on Broad-

way in which the hero said his prayers to the great

god Dynamo, and in the end with pseudo-religious

ecstasy threw himself into the machine as an act of

supreme immolation.

When I was reading that play there leaped auto-

matically to my mind the closing words of Words-

worth’s sonnet

:

“Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea.

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn

;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”

Indeed I’d rather be a heathen and worship Triton

or Zeus or Vishnu or Moloch, who after all, though

monsters, were conceived as human monsters, than

this modern god of steel and brass, of cogs and

gears, of frightful power and infinite remorseless-

ness, the great god Machine.

Let us not be deceived or deluded with the smooth

phraseology of philosophers and scientists. If there



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 21

be no freedom of the will, we are in the grip of ir-

resistible mechanism. And what doth it profit us

to have gotten rid of one mythology, that of Greece

and Rome and Carthage, that of India and China

and Japan, if we fall into the maw of a more merci-

less mythology? The Greco-Roman mythology was

at least picturesque. It produced poetry and art,

sculpture, and a magnificent architecture, a rather

considerable though a deficient civilization. But the

mythology of the machine is not even beautiful; it

is not fruitful of poetry, or literature, or religion,

or any other element of civilization. Man doth not

live by bread alone. No, nor by mechanical con-

traptions and scientific conveniences alone. Civiliza-

tion is something more than an assemblage of clev-

erly contrived “gadgets” and devices. The soul of

man cannot be saved by Dynamo.

In the course of a three-cornered debate a year

or two ago, wherein a philosopher, a litterateur and

an Arctic explorer (the last named representing

science) took part, it was admitted by the scientist

that science has no power to solace the afflicted heart

or give peace to the distracted mind. “What does

it matter to a girl abandoned by her sweetheart,”

he said, “whether the theory of Einstein be true or

false? Or can the wound in her spirit be healed by

the knowledge that light travels 186,000 miles a

second, or that man can fly around the world in ten

days? Scientific facts are hard and cold and com-

fortless to a broken heart.”

There is no poetry in determinism, no substan-

tial philosophy, no drama. The Greek dramatists

who believed theoretically in fate got their dra-

matic effects by having man defy the gods. There



22 CHRISTIANITY'S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVII/IZATION

was at least some semblance of freedom in that.

But though there be dramatic possibilities in Ajax

or King Lear defying the lightning, flinging a chal-

lenge in the face of heaven, there is no drama in

defying or challenging a machine. Eugene O’Neill’s

play Dynamo is a tour de force, a dramatic curiosity,

and to tell the truth, a rather silly piece of business.

However, I am not primarily concerned with

drama, poetry, art, literature and other lesser ac-

companiments of civilization, but with morality,

without which no solid civilization is possible. Now

if there be no free will, there is of course no moral

accountability, and where there is no moral respon-

sibility, nothing is either good or bad, right or

wrong, except by a fiction. If that kind of science

and that kind of philosophy are to prevail, wherein

virtue and vice are only words without substance,

the foundations of the world are shaken and the

structure of society is doomed to collapse. If the

world does yet hold together, more or less securely,

it is due to the fact that the multitudes have not yet

accepted, indeed have not yet apprehended, what the

materialistic evolutionists and the mechanistic mor-

alists have been trying to convey to them. If ever

they do apprehend and accept the theory that man is

not free, and that therefore no one is responsible

for his actions, then shall you see the abomination

of desolation standing in the holy place; then will

appear the ultimate catastrophe.

Against that universal debacle of civilization, the

only safeguard is a belief in essential, immutable

right and wrong, in moral responsibility, in free will,

the philosophy that is taught in these days almost

exclusively by Christianity.



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 23

THE PRINCIPLE OF TOLERANCE
(Address delivered by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P., in the

Catholic Hour, November 8, 1931.)

It often happens that a common word, universally

employed, is rather generally misunderstood. Take,

for example, the word “religion.” Everybody uses

the word. Some people talk for religion, some talk

against religion, but all talk about religion. Yet if

you were to cut into an argument on religion and

challenge the contestants to stop arguing, define the

term, and not commence again until they could agree

upon the meaning of the word, that would often be

the end of the debate.

And so of many another high-sounding but vague-

ly understood word,
—

“Patriotism,” “Freedom,”

“Liberty,” “Philanthropy” and a thousand more.

In all the vocabulary of modern religion there

is no more familiar term than “toleration” and

yet perhaps seven out of ten of those who use the

word have never clearly defined its meaning even in

their own minds. Some refuse to define it because

they have a half recognized suspicion that if you de-

fine toleration clearly—^too clearly—^you may have
to change your mind about it, and a change of mind

can be a very painful procedure.

Other persons don’t define the word “toleration”

because they never define any word they use. They

are fluent—even eloquent—in conversation and in
argumentation, but it would cramp their style cruel-

ly if you were to say “Now let’s see precisely what
you mean by that word.” They are adept at flying

behind a smoke screen, but if you get them once in

the clear, you can bring them down at the first shot.



24 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

Now, not that I am anxious to bring any one down,

or that I intend to argue—I don’t—but simply be-
cause I abhor hazy, lazy thinking, I suggest that we

should define toleration before we attempt to discuss

it.

Let us therefore clear the atmosphere, dissipate

the fog, blow away the smoke screen by explaining

what toleration is not.

And first it is not indifference. Indifference is

pagan not Christian. Voltaire in his essay on Toler-

ation calls attention to the fact that Julius Caesar,

conqueror of the Gauls and the Britons, made no at-

tempt to compel them to abandon the Druids. He

didn’t care whether they worshipped trees, or stocks

or stones, the sun, the moon and the stars, or a black

rock on a blasted heath. Indeed it was the perman-

ent policy of Rome to permit all tribes and nations

and peoples to bring along their own gods and god-

desses when they came into the Empire. In conse-

quence, there was a grand conglomeration of heath-

en deities in the eternal city, gods from Greece and

Egypt and Assyria, the gods of the Germanic and

Celtic tribes, the gods of the conquered Carthagin-

ians, all added to the multitudinous gods and god-

desses indigenous to the Italian peninsula. The

streets and squares of the capital of the world were

cluttered up with statues of Isis and Osiris, Baal and

Astarthe, Athene and Diana, Jupiter, Mars, Venus,

and the rest. One of the Emperors, in a burst of

what he thought to be toleration, built a Pantheon,

a temple for all the gods, and there the Oriental gods

and the Occidental gods, the gods of the home and

the farm, the gods of the city and the state, lascivious

gods and bloodthirsty gods, gods of peace and gods



CHRISTIANITT’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 25

of war, found place cheek by jowl in the one univer-

sal temple.

The pagans thought that to be toleration. But to

the Christian, and I may add to the Jews, it was

profanation, abomination. The Hebrews said a pray-

er every morning and night: “Hear, 0 Israel, the

Lord your God is One God. He will have no gods

beside Him.” And the Christians had a prayer that

was like a battle cry, “One Lord, One Faith, One

Baptism.” For this they were considered intolerant

by the Romans.

So, as I have said, it is all important to define

toleration before you either praise it or damn it.

In our own day there are some—perhaps they are
a majority—^who commend toleration in the pagan
sense. They have a very convenient and comforta-

ble maxim: “One religion is as good as another.”

They protest against dogma and in that very protest

is concealed a dogma. It is sometimes expressed : “It

makes no difference what a man believes.” It is cruel,

as I have remarked, to check up the indifferentists

and demand to know precisely what they mean. “One

religion as good as another?” Mohammedanism as

good as Christianity? Buddhism as good as Chris-

tianity? When the King of England, who is ex officio
head of the Anglican Church, goes over into Scot-

land, he worsihps,they say, in the Presbyterian kirk.

That seems liberal and tolerant. But when he goes to

India, does he worship successively and indiscrim-

inately at a shrine of Vishnu, in a Buddhist temple,

and in a Mohammedan mosque? How far does
“toleration” go? Where and when must one cease

to be liberal? It’s all very well to be broadminded

and all that, but what about being a turncoat, or a



26 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

trimmer? And is it not held a virtue to have the

courage of one’s own convictions?

In Chicago there is, or at least there was to be, a

temple of Bahaism, a kind of modern Pantheon

where ail religions are supposed to meet and min-

gle. Is that the true American idea of toleration?

And if so, is it also the true Christian idea? Are

the followers of Jesus happy to have Christ and

Mohammed and Buddha under the same roof, on

adjacent pedestals?

And what about the poor savages? They have

gods, a good many gods, too many gods. Shall we

leave them to their gods and their gods to them?

Commander Peary, Arctic explorer and discoverer

of the North Pole, strongly advised the Christian

Churches of the United States to leave the Esqui-

maux alone. “Let them have the religion they

have always had,” he said. “Don’t bother them

with Christianity.” He considered himself the apos-

tle of toleration. And, it must be confessed, his

idea was the logical conclusion of the prime dogma

of indifferentism, “One religion is as good as an-

other.” If that slogan be true, the Esquimau’s

religion is as good as ours.

If the policy of leaving them alone is good for the

Esquimaux, why not for the Indian? There are

those who say that we have corrupted the Indian

with our civilization; and I dare say some maintain

that we corrupted them with our religion. When

Columbus landed, he christened the island San Sal-

vador, raised a cross and had the priest celebrate

Mass before anything else was done. In his letters

to the king and queen he declared that his first and

chief concern was that the Gospel should be preach-



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 27

ed to the savages. Was that a mistake ? Should he

have left them to their Manitou and not upset them

with news about Jesus Christ?

And as with the Esquimaux and the Indians, so

with the black man. When he came here, he came

in chains from the jungles of Africa. Should he

have been allowed to bripg his gods with him, his

Mumbo Jumbo and his Bingo Bango, or whatever

he called them?

Some perverse thinkers (they would prefer the

designation, independent thinkers,) will answer all

these questions with a bold affirmative: “Certainly.

Let us be tolerant, one hundred percent tolerant.

Let every man have his own gods and his own re-

ligion. One religion is as good as another.” That

may be called toleration, but it cannot be called good

sense, and still less can it be called Christianity.

Christ never uttered the easy fallacy that one re-

ligion is as good as another. If that were true He

need never have come. His people had a religion,

but He came to give them a better one. He died to

give them a better one.

Indifferentism therefore is not toleration. It is a

counterfeit of toleration.

Secondly, agnosticism is not toleration.

The prevailing philosophical and theological

theory of our day is that truth, ultimate truth, fun-

damental truth is undiscoverable. That theory,

invented a generation or two ago, and hitherto ex-

ploited principally by philosophers at various uni-

versities, has now reached the man in the street.

Only the other day I picked up a metropolitan news-

paper and read these startling sentences

:

“There is no truth. There never has been a truth.



28 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

There never can be an absolute truth. Two and two

make four because in our average every-day life, we

have found it convenient to think so. On another

planet it might make five or three. And just as

morals are merely a matter of geographical latitude

and longitude, so does truth depend upon the hour,

the place and the surrounding circumstances.”

Now I must confess that it bewilders me that one

who has arrived at that ultima Thule of negation,

should continue to exercise himself with intellectual

activities. If there be no truth, why pursue truth?

If you cannot recognize truth when you catch up

with it, why run after it? When Christopher Co-

lumbus sailed west in search of undiscovered land,

it would have been a melancholy joke, what with

mutinies on his hands and starvation looming up,

if there hadn’t been any land to find. So too all

study, all research, all exercise of the mind is a sad

occupation if there is no such thing as truth. Of

course Columbus was mistaken in a minor detail.

He thought he had found India. But he knew he

had found something, it was terra firma; you could

get off the ship and stand on what was there. You

could pitch a tent on it and live on it. It wasn’t a

mirage. The plight of the courageous mariner and

his men would have been pitiable if the land they

hoped to find had been as unreal and non-existent

as the mythical Atlantis.

Now no sane scholar would go faring forth on the
difficult and turbulent sea of philosophical and theo-

logical thought, if he were persuaded beforehand

that there is nothing to find. You may opine that he

enjoys the sail; but I doubt if one enjoys a sail

when he realizes that he is lost in mid-ocean. Yet



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 29

this is the agnostic idea: we are all lost, hopelessly

lost; and what is more, there is no sun, no moon,

no stars, no compass. We sail around and around

on the sea of thought but we never know where we

are, and we never arrive.

However, I am not now discussing agnosticism

as a philosophy, but as a condition of mind that pro-

duces a form of religious toleration. If a man does

really believe that no one can know the truth, I can

understand that he should be tolerant. If you can-

not tell whether you are right and I am wrong, or

whether I am right and you are wrong, then of

course it should be the easiest thing in the world for

you to be tolerant towards me, or for me to be tol-

erant towards you. But that is not really toleration.

The agnostic cannot even say with the indifferen-

tist that all religions are equally good. He thinks

they are all equally no good. And that, too, is not

toleration. That’s presumption. And if the ag-

nostic who thinks no religion any good none the less

is polite about my religion, that is condescension,

and condescension is a particularly offensive attitude

of mind.

Agnosticism is in effect plain apathy, lethargy, the

paralysis of thought. If - put into practice, it would

be the end of all intellectual activity and therefore

of all civilization. If some one challenges me to say

how it is that although the philosophical world, the

intellectual world, the educational, academic, uni-

versity world is agnostic, civilization does not come

to a standstill, my answer is easy and confident.
First, the academic world is not the practical world.

And second, even the intellectual world is not really

agnostic. The intellectuals are just as dogmatic as



30 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

any one else. They are just as sure of their agnos-

ticism as the dogmatist is sure of his dogmatism.

The dogmatist says “I’m right and I know I’m

right.” The agnostic says “I don’t know whether

I’m right or wrong,” but he doesn’t mean it. He’s

just as sure of himself as the other fellow. Genuine

agnosticism would be a pathological condition. I

repeat, it would be intellectual paralysis, and intel-

lectual paralysis would stop civilization dead in its

tracks.

Now, therefore, the only person who is really cap-

able of being tolerant is the man who has convic-

tions, is sure of them, doesn’t doubt them, but doesn’t

blame any other man for not having the same con-

victions. The orthodox Christian believes that his

religion is absolutely true. He believes, on the other

hand, consistently, that any religion which contra-

dicts this is false, at least in the points of contra-

diction. Yet he does not arrogate to himself any

personal superiority and does not impute to the one

who differs from him any personal inferiority, and

consequently he treats his fellow man not with con-

descension, however polite, however skillfully con-

cealed, but with hona fide brotherly love.

And if one asks how can such a condition of mind

and such a course of action be achieved, I have only

to answer, by the imitation of Christ.

Jesus, be it well understood, was no indifferentist,

no agnostic. He was too much in earnest to be a

trifler with truth. He was too sane to believe that

truth is undiscoverable. He was no philosopher in

the Athenian sense of the word, seeking ever new

theories, playing with them, knocking them back

and forth, to and from his fellow philosophers as



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 31

one plays a game of battledore and shuttlecock. He

was no agnostic, making guesses at the riddle of ex-

istence, entertaining a whimsical and gently cynical

doubt of the worth of His guesses. Jesus was no

Socrates, suggesting intellectual problems to a select

group, debating them all day and leaving them un-

answered.

No, Christ’s yea was yea and His nay was nay.

He spoke not as the Scribes and Pharisees, but as

One having authority. Again and again, the as-

tounding utterance fell from His lips : “It hath been

said of old . . . but I say unto you.” With sub-

lime self-confidence He gave command “preach my

Gospel. He that believeth shall be saved; he that

believeth not shall be condemned. Upon you I build

My Church. If any man will not hear the Church
let him be to thee as the heathen and the publican.”

And as for truth—^the existence of truth—^he declar-
ed with none of the frenzy that marks the fanatic,

but with the calm assurance of divine certainty, “I

am the truth.”

And yet—now here is the heart of the matter

—

with all that assurance, that dogmatism (if you

care to call it such) He was tolerant, infinitely tol-

erant—more than tolerant, affectionate with those
who had not the truth.

The Samaritans, whom He knew and admitted to
be heretics. He treated with no less brotherly love

than His own people. The good Samaritan, be it re-

membered, was not a member of the one true Church.

The Tyrians and Sidonians, who were heathen, he

proposed as having more spiritual discernment than

many of the chosen people. “For if in Tyre and

Sidon had been wrought the miracles that have been



32 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVIL.IZATION

wrought in you, they had long ago done penance in

sackcloth and ashes” (Matt, xi, 21).

Now if it be a paradox that Christ was dogmatic

and yet tolerant, dogmatic in teaching, tolerant in

practice, be it so. Christianity, like all transcend-

ental truth, is paradoxical. It behooves every Chris-

tian to be like Christ, unwavering in doctrine but

endlessly kind, patient, affectionate in his dealings

with his fellow man. This and this alone is Chris-

tian toleration.



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 33

THE PRINCIPLE OF THE BROTHER-

HOOD OF MAN
(Address delivered by Rev. James M. Gillis^ C.S.P., in the

Catholic Hour, November 15, 1931.)

The history of the human race, from the beginning

until now—from the time of the clash between Cain
and Abel just outside the gate of the garden of Eden,

until the clash between China and Japan in Man-

churia—^has been largely a history of injustice,
cruelty, bloodshed, warfare; of the hatred of man

for man and of nation for nation. The annals of

mankind are written upon pages that are blotted

with tears and smeared with blood. If one can imag-

ine some tremendous tragic music in the Wagnerian

manner, a kind of super-opera on the story of the

race of men upon earth, its dominant theme might

be “man’s inhumanity to man,” and from time to

time the chorus of the people would burst forth with

a hymn of hate, sounding loud and shrill like the

Marseillaise from the mouths of the “reds” of the

Midi, moving on Paris to guillotine the king and to

inaugurate the Reign of Terror. I will not exag-

gerate: these excesses, I say, occur “from time to

time.” Not every page and paragraph in human

history concerns warfare and bloodshed
;
there have

been periods of peace—too few and too short indeed

;

but all in all, tragedy and sorrow loom larger than

peace and happiness in human annals. If a history

were written with the wars left out, it would make

a thin book. Ask even the school children for the

big names in history and they will reel you off a

catalogue—Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar,



34 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

Hannibal, Charlemagne, Napoleon Bonaparte, Wash-

ington, Wellington, Foch, warriors all. To all in-

tents and purposes, for school boys and girls, Plato

and Aristotle have not existed, or Seneca, or Jus-

tinian, or Telemachus, or Francis of Assisi, and

stranger yet, the last name that comes to their lips

as that of a Great Man, is Jesus, the Name that

should head every list unless indeed it should be

spoken all alone.

From these significant facts you may surmise the

prodigious task—are we tempted to say the impos-
sible task?—of the same Jesus Christ who came into
the world to save man from Satan, but who is obliged

to commence His work by saving man from man, to

change the history of man by changing the mind of

man, re-creating the heart of man. The recognized

great of the earth, those who are commonly called

heroes, undertook a relatively simple work; they

went forth to conquer, not to convert. They made

no appeal to the mind and heart of the foe—^those
whom they were pleased to call the foe ;—^they were
content to smash and slash their way through flesh

and blood to victory. If ever we become civilized,

we shall marvel that the fame that rests on blood-

shed alone could ever have been thought magnifi-

cent. The only true Conqueror is the .One who

comes among men, finds them at one another’s

throat, persuades them to peace, and teaches them

love in place of hate.

Now this, I take it, is the primary purpose of the

Saviour of the World, and so He inaugurated His

work with the preaching of the Brotherhood of Man.

The phrase has become trite with over-use; there

are those who speak it trippingly off the tongue



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 35

thus : “The Brotherhood of Man and the Fatherhood

of God,” but in too many instances it means no more

than if they had said A. B. C. D. and U. V. W. X. Y.

Z. It is recorded that Sarah Bernhardt could de-

claim the alphabet so eloquently as to bring tears to

the eyes ; that is, she could speak something that had

no meaning of itself, and make it sound like a thing

of exquisite beauty; but there have been those who

can perform the contrary miracle; they can take

something extremely beautiful and made it sound,

to borrow a phrase from King Solomon, “like the

crackling of thorns under a pot.” “The Brotherhood

of Man” is not a formula to be mouthed like a savage

incantation. It contains in three words the rehabili-

tation of fallen man, the restoration of a kind of

paradise on earth, the re-creation of the human race,

a universal beneficent revolution.

To drop generalities, let us be specific : the Broth-

erhood of Man means the destruction of race hatred,

root and branch. It means that the Japanese must

not despise the Chinese, nor the Chinese hate the

Japanese; it means that the ages-old feud between

the French and the Germans—a feud as savage, as
foolish and as needless as the feud of the Hatfields

and the McCoys in the Kentucky mountains—must
cease. It means that the obdurate, ingrained, in-

veterate dislike of the Celt for the Saxon and of the

Saxon for the Celt must be torn out of the heart,

the Irish heart and the English heart both, in spite

of seven hundred years of aggravation; it means

that all talk of the “Yellow Peril,” or the “Pan Slav

Peril,” or any other peril must cease. Shakespeare

says, “There’s nothing either good or bad but think-

ing makes it so.” That saying needs interpretation.



36 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

But there is one point-blank pronouncement that

needs neither interpretation nor qualification; if

you think Yellow Peril, or Black Peril, or Brown

Peril (I suppose the Brown Man and the Yellow Man

in the Orient talk about the White Peril, just as in

Mohammedan countries they call Christians infidels,

in retaliation perhaps because we call them “the

unspeakable Turk,”) I say if we think and talk

Peril we create Peril. The Brotherhood of Man

knows no color line. There is neither Greek nor

Barbarian, bond nor free, says St. Paul, and so in

the brotherhood of man there is neither Brown nor

Yellow. Furthermore, let us dare the full truth

—

with God there is neither White nor Black. If we

have the mind of Christ, we must therefore drop all

contemptuous designations of our brethren. There

are no “niggers,” no “greasers,” no “Bohunks,” no

“Wops,” no “Dagoes,” no “Micks,” and, by the same

token, no “bloody Sassenachs.” The Brotherhood of

Man sweeps wide and cuts deep.

Years ago, I heard an Englishman say, with a

little sly dig at his own people, that the English, as

world conquerors, divided all tribes and nations and

peoples under the sun into three categories: “Eng-

lishmen, foreigners, natives.” When the Brother-

hood of Man prevails, there must be no connotation

of contempt attached to the word “foreigner,” and

as for “natives,” the Englishman, and every other

man who colonizes and rules amongst savages, must

learn to say in all sincerity on occasion, “You’re a

better man than I am, Gunga Din.” Do I hear some

one retort, “If the Brotherhood of Man means that

we must surrender our ages-old disgust and con-

tempt for the ‘lesser breeds without the law,’ the



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILiIZATION 37

Brotherhood of Man will never be realized.” Well,

if it is never to be realized, we shall never be civil-

ized, or most assuredly, we shall never be Christian-

ized. For myself I don’t accept that word “Never.”

There is an old adage : “Never is a long day.”

However, be that as it may, the Christian doctrine

is clear enough; you may find it dramatically ex-

pressed in the vision of St. Peter : “He saw the heav-

en opened, and a certain vessel descending, as it

were a great linen sheet let down by the four corners

from heaven to the earth
;
wherein were all manner

of fourfooted beasts, and creeping things of the

earth, and fowls of the air, and there came a voice

to him : ‘Arise, Peter, kill and eat.’ But Peter said

:

‘Far be it from me; for I never did eat any thing

that is common and unclean.’ And the voice spoke

to him again the second time : ‘That which God hath

cleansed, do not thou call common.’ ” The meaning

of the vision, of course, is that Peter was to preach

the Gospel, not only to Jews but to Gentiles. There

are no clean races, and none unclean—^with God!
If any man or any race considers some other race

as “beasts,” or “creeping things,” he has not caught

the first lesson of the Gospel.

And since we have mentioned Jew and Gentile,

let us say without flinching that the Jew is in the

Brotherhood of Man, along with the rest of us, and

the simple fact is that the Christian who despises

the Jew is no Christian. I shall not halt to make

any qualification of that statement. Pontius Pilate,

in the only praiseworthy action recorded of him said

:

Quod scripsi, seripsi—“What I have written, I
have written.” I borrow the idea. Quod dixi, dixi
—“What I have said, I have said,” about Jew and



38 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

Gentile, and about Black Man and White Man and

Yellow Man. If we are to make exceptions here and

exceptions there, our Brotherhood of Man is going

to vanish into thin air, and—what is more impor-
tant to me—if I don’t preach the Gospel of Christ
as it stands, if I tamper with it and modify it to

suit the predilections or the prejudices of this or

that race, I am not preaching the Gospel. In that

case I should be preaching race-discrimination, the

antithesis and contradiction of the Gospel. What

God hath made clean do not thou call unclean. No

race is to be treated as a leper race. The Black

Man or the Yellow Man or the Brown Man or the

Red Man is not obliged to go off among the tombs

and the rocks and cry aloud by way of warning the

passer-by “Unclean! Unclean! Touch me not for

fear of contamination. Unclean!” In the human

race, if you believe Christ, there are no untouchables.

We are all brothers. If we are not brothers of one
another, we are not brothers of Christ ; if we are not

brothers of Christ, we are not Sons of God.

Now it happens, as if by Divine Providence, that

here in America we have a better chance to exempli-

fy the Brotherhood of Man than at any other place

or at any other time in history. On Pentecost Day

at Jerusalem there were gathered together “Par-

thians, and Medes, and Elamites, and inhabitants of

Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus, and

Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, Egypt, and the parts

of Libya about Gyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews

also, and proselytes, Cretes, and Arabians.” There

was indeed material for the Brotherhood of Man,

but here on our own soil we have all those and dozens

more. The United States is a microcosm, a little



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 39

world
;
we have fellow citizens of all races and bloods

and colors. We need not go over seas to practice
brotherly love. We need not cross a frontier or a
border line even though it be an imaginary line.

We touch elbows with all mankind : we stand and sit

and work and play, cheek by jowl with every breed

that ever came from the hand of the Creator.

Now if we despise one another, hate one another,

if as St. Paul said to the Galatians, we “bite and

devour one another,” let us not dare call ourselves

Christians. We may call ourselves pagan, heathen,

or what you will, but not by the sacred name of the

One Who was Brother to all mankind.

And yet there are some—not a few, I fear,—of
our fellow citizens who consider themselves very

godly, who make a brave pretense not only of being

Christian but of being a superior kind of Christian,

and not only superior Christians, but superior Amer-

icans, whose stock-in-trade is race-hatred and the

building of barriers between brother and brother.

They love to stand and sing, patriotically, as it were,

“I love thy rocks and rills

Thy woods and templed hills,”

and that indeed is well, if they mean it, but it would

be more to the purpose if they would love their

fellow man at least as devotedly as they love the

rocks and the rills, the woods and the hills. After

all, a nation is not made of mountains and rivers;

—

a country is more than its scenery. At about the

same time when, as a young child, I learned to sing

“My country, ’tis of thee,” I learned also to “speak
a piece” entitled “What Constitutes a State,” and at

least a few of the words still come back to me

:



40 CHRISTIANITY'S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILJZATION

“Not high raised battlements or labored mound,

Thick wall or moated gate;

No! Men—^high-minded men,

—

These constitute a state.”

We cannot love our country unless we love our

countrymen. If within our own land we sow dis-

sension between race and race, we are no less trait-

ors than if we took up arms against our native land.

If the races that we despise were to turn about and

despise us, we should have civil war, and the most

intense and vicious type of civil war, race war, and

doubtless with it the most disastrous of all kinds of

war, religious war.

And what we say of the relations of man with

man inside the nation, is equally true of our interna-

tional relations. If, for example, I love not the

Italian in America, how can I make pretense of

loving the Italian in Italy? If I hate the German

here, how dare I say that I love the German abroad ?

And so on: if I go through my own land making

lines of demarcation between man and man, people

and people, what hypocrisy it is for me to send emis-

saries to Geneva or anywhere else with a view to

smoothing the relations between nation and nation.

Furthermore, if I am a poor patriot, I am a still

worse Christian. St. John says: “For he that loveth

not his brother whom he seeth, how can he love God,

whom he seeth not ?” If I love not my fellow Amer-

ican, how can I pretend to love mankind ?

But until we love one another unaffectedly, cor-

dially, there never can be peace, there will be no end

of war. Whatever other elements enter into the

making of war, economic, political, diplomatic



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 41

elements, no nation will ever go to war if we re-

member the duties that devolve upon us as members

of the Brotherhood of Man. Indeed if we realize

that vision, that dream, that project of Jesus Christ,

the Brotherhood of Man, the Kingdom of God will

come upon earth.

i



42 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

THE EXALTATION OF WOMANKIND

UNDER CHRISTIANITY
(Address delivered by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P., in the

Catholic Hour, November 22, 1931.)

The late Bishop John Lancaster Spalding, at-

tempting to explain why our civilization is not more

advanced, wrote in one of his scholarly essays, “the

low level upon which the human race has been con-

tent to dwell is attributable in no small measure to

the injustice done to woman.” I am confident that

the lamented bishop would permit me to add the

word “dishonor” to “injustice.” Injustice and dis-

honor done to woman were a fatal fiaw in the ancient

civilizations, and the dishonor, if not the injustice

that is still woman’s lot may yet be the cause, above

all others, of the collapse of contemporary civiliza-

tion.

Perhaps I run the risk of being accused of over-

emphasis, so let me explain that I do not consider

the condition of woman the only index or criterion

of civilization, nor do I delude myself with the no-

tion that there is no important morality but sex

morality. If commercial morality or political

morality becomes too debased society may be

wrecked, but I repeat, no civilization is healthy, no

civilization can live unless it upholds the dignity

—

and I mean especially the moral dignity—of woman.
If you wish to improve the race you must commence

with the improvement of woman. You cannot bring

man to heaven if you leave woman in hell.

Before the coming of Christ, under paganism,

(and all the world except Palestine was pagan)



CHRISTIANITY'S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 43

woman was in dishonor. She was rated as a thing,

an object, a chattel, not a person. In savage times

a man went hunting—^today for game, tomorrow
perhaps for a wife. What he brought home was his

own, his booty, his prey, be it bird, or beast or

woman. He went to war and returned with trophies

and spoils of victory, a head, or a scalp, or wampum

or a woman. He possessed his woman as he pos-

sessed his hunting dog, his furs and feathers, his

battle axe or his tomahawk. The savage could say

in all seriousness what Petruchio said with simu-

lated anger of Katherina

:

“I will be master of what is mine own.

She is my goods, my chattels, she is my house.

My household stuff, my field, my barn.
My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything.”

I say “the savage”, but in truth that particular

feature of savagery was carried over into the cus-

toms of civilized peoples. In all Greek literature

woman was the subject of mockery and persifiage,

or—when writers turned serious—of vituperation.
The Greek poet Hesiod called woman “an accursed

brood, the chief scourge of the human race.”

Aeschylus agreed. “Woman,” he said, “is the direst

scourge of state and home.” Socrates, the philoso-

pher supreme, made a daily prayer of thanks that

he had been born neither a slave nor a woman.

Aristotle defined woman as a truncated man—a man
marred in the making, a mistake, a failure of the

Creator. Plato in his ideal Republic, anticipating

the ugly materialism of the most advanced modern

eugenists, gave to woman the place in society that a



44 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

stock raiser gives to a brood mare on the farm. And

he approved the Greek custom of exposing super-

fluous female infants on the mountain side to be

devoured by wild beasts.

Socrates, though his life was the cynosure of the

eyes of the nation, publicly and shamelessly exalted

his concubine above his wife. Pericles, the bright

particular star of Greek civilization, took his wife to

a lecture given by Aspasia, known to be a courtesan

and his mistress. Can we imagine a modern king

or president doing anything so shameless? And Peri-

cles, be it remembered, was not considered a scape-

grace. He was the George Washington of his day.

True, in France under Louis XIV, Louis XV, and

Louis XVI there was similar shamelessness, but the

Louis’ knew that the State could not survive it:

Apres moi le deluge—“After me the deluge,” said
one of them.

In Rome in the days of the patriarchs, and later

the kings, a man could imprison his wife or his

daughter, scourge her, sell her as a slave or kill her

and be immune to punishment or even to trial. In

the later Republic and the Empire, the Roman

women were emancipated, but when they became

free, they became, as with us, too free. Women went

down into the arena to contend for prizes against

actors and gladiators. They boxed, and fenced and

wrestled, they ran naked in races with men, they

took part in obscene plays and performed orgiastic

dances as they do today in America upon the musical

comedy stage. The Lupercalian and Bacchanalian

orgies have survived in Mardi Gras festivals and

New Years’ carnivals, but the survival, bad as it is,

is innocent and chaste in comparison with what took



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 45

place in the grove of Daphne at Ephesus, or the

gardens of Nero at Rome.

Furthermore, women debauched not only domestic

life, but political life. They mixed in politics, in-

deed in some case? they dominated politics. As one

historian has said: “Women were the mistresses of

the masters of the world. The tribute of nations was

squandered on their adornment.” The supreme ex-

ample of such excess is, of course, the ruin of Antony

by Cleopatra.

In short, at Rome and Athens and Antioch and

Corinth and Ephesus, was verified the maxim,

Corruptio optimi pessima—“The worst is the cor-
ruption of the best.” A poet and dramatist of the
seventeenth century, Thomas Otway, has written

well of paradoxical woman—woman good and
woman bad, woman saint and woman devil. In one

play he apostrophizes her

:

“0 woman! lovely woman! Nature made thee

To temper man : we had been brutes without you.”

But again he exclaims:

“What mighty ills have not been done by woman !_—..

Destructive, damnable, deceitful woman!”

Beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire,

among the barbarians, there was less profligacy, but

more brutality in the treatment of woman. Roman

historians, Tacitus, Suetonius and Julius Caesar,

have given dreadful details of the savagery with

which the barbarians treated their women. Among

the Teutonic tribes, if a man killed a woman capable



46 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

of being a mother, he was fined the amount that we

should call six dollars
;

if she was not capable of

motherhood, the fine was two dollars. There was no

concern about marital fidelity upon the part of the

man, but if a wife were disloyal to her husband, she

suffered atrocious punishment. And yet if Julius

Caesar speaks the truth, he found among the British

a condition of female depravity to which history,

even Roman history, hardly furnishes a parallel.

In Ireland, centuries before St. Patrick came,

there were two kinds of marriage (as indeed there

were at Rome) and one of these forms was, in effect,

the nasty and wicked thing that is called nowadays

trial marriage or companionate marriage. It would

be amusing if it were not tragic to see certain con-

temporary agitators attempting to introduce as the

supreme achievement of modern progress an insti-

tution that was outmoded and discarded as vicious

and uncivilized 1500 or even 2000 years ago.

Also, in ancient Ireland,—extremely ancient—as
in all pagan countries, marriage was an outright

sale of woman by her father to her husband. That

paganism also has been revived, equivalently if not

absolutely, in high society of Europe and America,

though it is now generally the mother, not the fath-

er, who sells the daughter. Again in Ireland (we

have more historical records of ancient Ireland

than of other non-Roman countries) one man slave

was reputed to be worth seven female slaves or 21

horned cattle. Women went to war, and in general

there was no recognition whatsoever of what we

have learned to consider woman’s prerogatives, or

even woman’s elementary rights.

I need scarcely add that these conditions, as far



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 47

as Ireland is concerned, were modified in later pa-

gan times to such a degree that women became

judges, rulers, even queens. But taking the world

by and large, it must be said that before Christ,

woman was in a condition of unspeakable degrada-

tion—unspeakable indeed, for I have not dared tell
the half of it. For those who crave more facts along

this line, I recommended as an unsensational, scien-

tific historian, Dollinger. But perhaps we may sum

up the facts in a phrase of Merivale: “Woman was

degraded in her social condition because she was

deemed unworthy of moral consideration." Woman

was held to have no more relation to morality than

a stock or a stone. She was, as we have seen, a

thing, a chattel, at most an animal. As for man’s

attitude to woman, perhaps we may borrow a bitter

sentence from Tennyson

:

“He will hold thee, when his passion shall have

spent its novel force,

A little better than his dog; a little dearer than
his horse,”

and apply it universally as a description of man’s

opinion of woman in pagan civilization and in bar-
barism.

Such, then, was the condition of the world when

Jesus came. Obviously He faced the task of revo-

lutionizing society. And how could that be accom-

plished? By preaching? You can work no such
miracle by mere preaching. The greatest preacher

that ever lived, St. Paul, speaks of the “foolishness

not re-create the face of the earth by speaking

of preaching.” Let us make no mistake. Christ did



48 CHRISTIANITY'S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

words, however beautiful, however touching and

eloquent. Those who heard Him gave testimony,

enthusiastically: “Never man spake like this man,”

but they would have been the first to add “never

man lived like this man.” His life was more than

His speech : His example was more than His gospel.

Say rather. He was His gospel. But Jesus not con-

tent with offering Himself as our guide to eternal

life, presents to us also a woman, Mary His Mother.

“Son”, said He to the beloved disciple, “Behold thy

mother: Woman, behold thy son!” The Catholic

Church with swift and sure instinct caught the mys-

tic meaning of that word from the Cross. Mary is

mother, not alone to John, but to every disciple who

loves the Master and is loved by Him. In Christian

thought and life, therefore, Mary is exalted, and in

Mary, womankind. The Church went forth, preach-

ed Christ and Him crucified, Christ and Him glori-

fied, but also to the world which had degraded and

debauched woman, she preached Woman exalted and

sanctified. She cried aloud, “Behold your mother!

Behold Woman as Woman was meant to be: Im-

maculata, Integra, Casta, Inviolata—“Woman im-
maculate, chaste, inviolate.” To the libidinous

Greek, the corrupt Roman, the barbaric Goth, she

preached Woman, now no longer Woman as personi-

fied in Venus or Isis or Diana. No Aspasia or Cleo-

patra, or Boadicea, no goddess of lust, no patroness

of sybarites and profligates, no Amazon, but “Moth-

er maiden meek and mild,” sweet and pure and al-

together lovely.

Thereupon was inaugurated a new type of civil-

ization, a civilization in which I will not say woman

was restored to her pristine condition as the equal



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 4S

of man, but in which woman was understood to en-

joy a certain superiority over man. It should be a

source of never-ceasing wonder, and to women I

should imagine it to be a source of joy and glory,

that in the Christian dispensation not a man but a

woman was endowed by God with the highest voca-

tion and is venerated with the most respectful and

affectionate devotion. With Christ Jesus, of course,

we compare no one. We hold Him not only man

but God. As God He is first and no one is second.

He is alone. But of all mere humans, we believe

and teach that not John the Baptist, not Paul, not

Peter, not even John the Beloved Disciple, not any

man, but a woman—^the woman par excellence,
Mary,—is supreme.
And the result? An historian of civilization, not

himself a Catholic, not I fear, even a Christian in

the strict theological sense, an unbeliever, Lecky,

quite unconcerned with controversies between one

school of Christians and another, says : “The world

is governed by ideals, and seldom or never has there

been an ideal that has exercised a more salutary in-

fluence than the mediaeval conception—^the concep-
tion of the Virgin”. . . “There is little doubt that the

Catholic reverence for the Virgin has done much to

elevate and purify the ideal woman and to soften

the manners of men.” (Rationalism in Europe, iii,

234, and History of European Morals, ii, 389).

True, except that the veneration of Mary is an-

cient as well as medieval
; and I dare say more : the

history of western civilization would have been rad-

ically different had it not been for the emphasis

placed upon womanly virtue, womanly dignity, wo-

manly sanctity by the Church. There was a civiliza-



50 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

tion in India but in that civilization they practised,

and perhaps they still practise suttee, the burning

of a widow upon her husband’s funeral pyre. There

was a civilization in Egypt, but it was dominated by

Isis, a shameless deity; there was a civilization in

Babylon, but there too was a lascivious goddess

Ishtar. In Greece there was Ariadne, in Rome

Venus. They were one and all glorified symbols of

carnal lust : the worship of them caused deteriora-

tion and degradation of the people, and so became

the cause of the collapse of the civilization that they

dominated. It may be true to say that war ruins a

nation, or plague ruins a nation, or the assaults of

barbarians break down the walls that protect a civ-

ilization. But war and pestilence and the onslaught

of savage tribes cannot produce national disaster

unless the nation is first enervated, devitalized, de-

moralized by vice, particularly the kind of vice that

prospered under Isis, and Ariadne, Ishtar and Venus,

the vice that is antagonized, checked, controlled if

not altogether obliterated by the gospel of the Sanc-

tity of Woman, personified in the Blessed Virgin

Mary.

It is my purpose in these short talks, to expound

a few simple elements in the philosophy of history,

rather than to preach sermons. But I cannot deny

myself the opportunity of saying that if this modern

world of ours goes mad once more, like ancient

Greece and Rome and Egypt and India, debases

woman and glorifies sex-sin, it will collapse just as

inevitably as any of the civilizations whose wreckage

is strewn over the surface of the globe. Whatever

evil influences may conspire to destroy us—warfare,
commercial and political dishonesty, hypocrisy in



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 51

high places, scandals in religion—not any of them,
not all of them, can be fatal to our civilization if we

preach and practise the Christian principle of the

honor and glory and virtue of woman. Under God

the fate of the nation and of all this, our civilization,

depends not so much upon man as upon woman.



62 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

THE PRINCIPLE OF MERCY
(Address delivered by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P., in the

Catholic Hour, November 29, 1931.)

There is no more characteristic difference between

paganism and Christianity than that indicated by

their attitude toward the virtues of mercy, kindness,

forbearance, pity. These virtues, now universally

considered desirable and beautiful, were either un-

recognized in pagan civilization or, if recognized,

repudiated. The Greeks and the Romans, and still

more the Carthaginians, the Babylonians and Per-

sians, considered mercy a weakness of character.

They would have scorned the suggestion that it

might be a virtue. The Romans—a martial and virile
race—^would have argued that the very word “vir-
tue” embodies the word vir and vir means man. In

other words, virtue is something manly. But mercy

is womanish. As a matter of fact, it would have

been difficult to find mercy and pity even in the

women of pagan civilization. The bitter line of the

modern poet Kipling, (who, by the way, has written

more than one line that seems to mark him a woman

hater,) “The female of the species is more deadly

than the male,” was verified at least in the Roman

amphitheatre when the life or death of a fallen

gladiator depended upon a gesture of the spectators,

and the Vestal Virgins were generally the first to

turn thumbs down.

As for “gentle Jesus meek and mild,” the pagans

would never have taken Him for God. Their gods

were cruel, murderous, bloodthirsty, pitiless. There

was no such thing in pagan ethics or pagan religion

as forgiveness of injuries. Plato, though the noblest



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 53

and gentlest of the great figures of antiquity (with

the possible exception of his master, Socrates), nev-

ertheless congratulated the Athenians on having

shown in their relations with Persia a “pure and

heartfelt hatred of the foreign nature.” In Rome

whenever there was civil war—and civil war was
very frequent—^the victor generally slaughtered the
vanquished, not only in the heat of battle, but in

cold blood afterwards.

Indeed it is not too much to say that relentless,

shameless cruelty was one of the basic elements of

paganism. When the Greeks or the Romans or the

Medes or the Persians or the Phoenicians went to

war and were victorious, they did not sign an armis-

tice, to be followed by a treaty of peace, and the

payment of indemnities and reparations. In our

own day many observers have complained that the

Allies at Versailles treated the conquered Central

Powers with little generosity or magnanimity. But

Julius Caesar, or Germanicus, or Scipio Africanus

would have been amazed if the winner of a war

did not move on the enemy’s capital city, sack it,

slaughter the majority of the inhabitants and make

slaves of the remainder.

When Hindenburg capitulated to Marshal Foch,

or when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Grant, or

Cornwallis to Washington, the victors treated the

vanquished with compassion. But when Julius

Caesar conquered Vercingetorix he dragged him

hundreds of miles in chains to Rome, humiliated

hirh in the victory procession and ended by killing

him. Any other procedure would have turned the

Romans against Caesar as a weakling, and the van-



54 CHRISTIANITT’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

quished king of the Gauls himself would have de-

spised Caesar if Caesar had taken pity on him.

As a consequence of many wars and the practice

of leading the vanquished away into captivity, the

Greek cities first, and afterwards Rome, were filled

with slaves. The Greeks made slaves of the Persians

and Macedonians; in turn under Alexander the

Macedonians enslaved Egyptians, Persians, Indians,

and the Romans finally made slaves of the Macedon-

ians, Greeks, the Gauls and a dozen other peoples.

A census of Attica, the state of which Athens was
the capital, showed 20,000 citizens and 400,000

slaves. In Sparta there were 30,000 citizens, 244,000

helots (real slaves) and 120,000 perioeci who were

subject to their Spartan masters in all save the right

of life and death. At Corinth there were no less

than 460,000 slaves. At Rome, in the year 5 B. C., it

is estimated that there were 650,000 slaves. At

times, in certain cities slaves outnumbered freemen

20 or 26 to one.

These slaves were all, or almost all, white men

and women
;
many of them better educated and more

highly cultured than their owners. Yet they were

treated as beasts or as “animated instruments.” The

great Roman moralist Cato, who represents the high-

est ideal of Roman virtue, kept slaves, trafficked in

them and threw them off his premises when they

became too old for service. Slaves had no rights,

and were treated without compassion. Cicero tells

of a slave who was crucified after having his tongue

cut out, not that he had been guilty of any fault, but

because he had happened to see his mistress commit

a crime. When a noble Roman (Pedanicus Secun-

dus) was assassinated in the time of Nero, four



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 55

hundred slaves were executed because they had not

prevented the murder of their master. The hands

of slaves were cut off because of some minor care-

lessness, such as the breaking of a vase. The em-

peror Caesar Augustus ordered his steward, who

was a slave, to be crucified because he had by mis-

take ordered a trained quail to be cooked.

The more robust male slaves were often trained as

gladiators, and, as every one knows, the gladiators

were compelled to butcher one another to make a

Roman holiday. On one occasion at least, a monster

battle was held in the Coliseum to amuse the Ro-

mans, and it did not conclude until every one of

10,000 gladiators had been killed. Plays were enact-

ed with most horrible realism. One actor who took

the role of a robber chief was actually nailed to a

the cross and his eyes were plucked out. Hercules, the

mythological hero, was supposed to have been burned

alive, so when the exploits of Hercules were repre-

sented, a slave was burned to make the scene real.

These facts are reported by the pagan Romans them-

selves, as well as by other eyewitnesses of unim-

peachable veracity. The great Seneca is often quoted

as saying : “The more I go amongst men, the less a

man I return.” What he really said is that the more
he mingled with men in the amphitheatre the more

sensual, the more savage, and more inhuman he felt

himself. He tells of going to the theatre at midday

and seeing, as an interlude, gladiators fighting with

clubs and swords but without armor. “The only

end,” he says, “for all engaged can be but death;

they go to work with fire and sword and there is

no respite until the arena is empty of combatants.”

It is noteworthy that these cruelties were often



56 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

associated with lust. Arnobius, a Christian who

lived under the Emperor Diocletian, about 300 A.

D., says:

“At these public amusements, there are seated the

collective people and senate, consuls and consulars,

while Venus, the mother of the Eoman race, is

danced to the life, and in shameless mimicry is rep-

resented as revelling through all the phases of

meretricious lust. The great mother, too, is danced

;

the Dindymene of Pessinus, in spite of her age, sur-

rendering herself to disgusting passion in the em-

braces of a cowherd. The supreme ruler of the

world is himself brought in, without respect to his

name or majesty, to play the part of an adulterer,

masking himself in order to deceive chaste wives,

and take the place of their husbands in the nuptial

bed. . . . The very same assembly that assisted at

these lascivious comedies one morning, on the same

or following day glut themselves with the carnage

of a gladiatorial fight. There again they all are

reseated, priests and senators, ministers of state and

their wives, and the vestal virgins and people of all

ranks and classes, to drink in and dwell on the

sweet draughts of human blood flowing in streams,

and to feast their eyes on the gaping wounds and

convulsive throes of dying men.”

In consequence of all this cruelty and bloodthirsti-

ness, “life became a drug on the market.” Dollinger

says (The Gentile and the Jew, ii, 298) : “People saw

numbers put to death every day for mere pastime.

Nor had life any more to offer to thousands who had

emptied the intoxicating cup of pleasure to the very

dregs. Contempt of life and suicide were the order

of the day, and the Stoic creed contributed to the



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 57

general inclination by setting up a theory of suicide,

and enumerating a variety of cases in which a man

should and ought to make away with his life, with

honor to himself and the approbation of the wise

and good. Life, according to this view, was one of

the indifferent things; if it became a burden, it

might be thrown aside unhesitatingly, like a cast-off

garment. Seneca was astonished that a greater

number of slaves did not make use of this simple

means of emancipating themselves. Marcus

Aurelius recommended ‘retiring from life,’ if a

man did not feel himself strong enough to maintain

a certain moral elevation. Cato committed suicide

and his example acted on the Romans who succeeded

him. Pliny took it to be the act of a great soul to

give itself the coup de grace after a calm and

thoughtful survey of the grounds.”

The gladiators, as every schoolboy knows, some-

times rose in rebellion, as under Spartacus and

Cleon. Crassus conquered Spartacus, erected 10,000

crosses along the route from Capua to Rome, and

crucified 10,000 of the rebels. It was not strange or

unusual, therefore
; when the Emperor Nero,—a pu-

pil, by the way, of Seneca,—^falsely accusing the
Christians of the conflagration which he himself had

probably started, saturated some of them with oil,

fastened them to posts and bhrned them as torches

in his garden. These and a thousand other available

historical details, some of them too ugly to be spoken,

many of them too cruel and obscene even to be writ-

ten, will enable us to visualize slightly the magnitude

of the task that confronted Christ and His early dis-

ciples when they attempted to humanize and to

Christianize the ancient pagan world.



58 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

Worst of all, cruelty was part of the religion of

paganism. Within and without the Empire,

amongst civilized peoples and savages the gods were

believed to be merciless, vengeful, bloodthirsty. The

Phoenicians called their god Moloch : they built him

a statue of iron, heated the statue red hot, and on

solemn occasions threw into his horrible arms in-

fants snatched from their mothers’ breasts.

The Greeks and Eomans even in the days of their

highest civilization believed in a god of war and

battle. The Greeks called him Ares, the Romans

Mars. The highest spot in Athens, the spot by the

way on which the philosophers met, the spot where

St. Paul preached to them, was named Areopagus,

“the hill of Ares,” and from the word Mars, as every-

one knows, comes our word “martial,” war-like.

Ares, Mars, was therefore a god who drove men to

frenzy in battle and made them rejoice wildly in car-

nage. His name was associated with quarrels, dis-

sension, murder and madness.

Early and late, human sacrifice was offered in

Greece, not only to Ares, but to other gods; Zeus,

Dionysos, Artemis, Apollo and Poseidon, whom we

call Neptune. Even in cultured Athens “it was the

custom to maintain certain people considered worth-

less and unprofitable in order to sacrifice them as

an atonement on the odcasion of any public disaster”

(Bollinger, vol. 1, page 240). When Nero slaugh-

tered the first Christian martyrs, he probably had it

in mind not only to punish them as alleged incen-

diaries, but to propitiate the gods.

At the annual festival of Apollo, in Athens, and

in every other Greek city, two persons were decked

out gaudily, conducted beyond the city limits, and



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 59

compelled to leap from a rock, or they were burned

alive and their ashes sprinkled on the sea.

All over the world, such cruelties were aone in the

name of religion, on the theory that the gods thirsted

for human blood. In Mexico the Aztec cruelty was

hideous; in India and Polynesia, in Egypt and Per-

sia, in truth in almost every quarter of the globe,

such monstrously savage religious rites were per-

formed as cannot be recounted in detail.

Now, into that terrible world came Jesus, and He

made it the very first feature of His work to re-

veal to man in His own Person the nature of God.

He came, not like Jupiter the Thunderer, not like

Siva the Destroyer, not like Ares or Mars, to de-

vastate the world, not even like a human conqueror,

Attila, Napoleon, Ghengis Khan or Mohammed, but

gentle, kindly, preaching pity and mercy. I daresay

that of all the high and holy and beautiful truths

revealed by Christ there is none that appeals to us

more than the revelation that God is no cruel mon-

ster, but a Father of mercy and love.

Not all Christians, however, have thoroughly as-

similated that fact. Even the Apostles were slow to

grasp it. On one occasion, while Jesus was making

His way through a village of Samaria, and the in-

habitants treated Him rudely, James and John said,

“Lord, wilt Thou that we command fire to come down

from Heaven, and consume them?” And turning.

He rebuked them, saying: “You know not of what

spirit you are. The Son of Man came not to destroy

souls but to save.” And He spoke to all the people

:

“You have heard that it hath been said: ‘An eye for

an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you not



60 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CEVILiIZATION

to resist evil: but if one strike thee on thy right

cheek, turn to him also the other . . .’You have

heard that it hath been said: ‘Thou shalt love thy

neighbor and hate thy enemy’. But I say to you:

Love your enemies : do good to them that hate you.”

And this was the noble gospel preached to slaves

and gladiators, to the poor, the oppressed, the down-

trodden, as well as to the powerful and those in

authority. This was the gospel that regenerated

the world, and that made the continuation of the

abominable cruelties of paganism impossible. In

whatever degree the world has become civilized, it

is due to the influence of the meek and humble Jesus

who taught men to conquer cruelty with kindness.

Let us admit, sadly, that the gospel of non-resis-

tance, endurance of evil, non-retaliation, kindness,

mercy, pity, has not yet made its way into every

corner of the world, indeed not even into every cor-

ner of our heart. Our personal paganism dies hard.

The tiger in us retreats slowly, snapping and- snarl-

ing the while. If the world is not yet humanized,

let us not blame the world too much. We might
better blame ourselves. Perhaps we are not yet

perfectly humanized. If there remain in us any

trace of vindictiveness, unwillingness to forgive; if

we are unrelenting to those who have done us wrong

;

' if we seek revenge; if we refuse to suffer injuries

meekly, we are only perpetuating the paganism that

Christ came to obliterate. If we truly desire the

humanization and the Christianization of the world

it would be well for us to commence by humanizing

and Christianizing the little world that is our own

heart.



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 61

THE PRINCIPLE OF ENTHUSIASM
(Address delivered by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P., in the

Catholic Hour, December 6, 1931.)

In the centuries immediately preceding the com-

ing of Christ, there arose in the Greco-Roman world

certain philosophies of life and ethical systems

showing some striking similarities with Christianity.

The Stoic philosophy especially in its moral as-

pects seems to have had much in common with the

Gospels. In the Discourses of Epictetus, the philoso-

pher who though a slave was wiser and more civil-

ized than any Roman of his day; in the orations of

Cicero and still more in his letters and treatises;

and perhaps most of all in the Meditations of Mar-

cus Aurelius who, being Emperor, was at the other

extreme of the social scale from Epictetus, there is

a dignity of thought and an occasional sublimity of

utterance that remind one of the Sermon on the

Mount or of a Kempis’s precious little book “The

Following of Christ.”

Nevertheless, the Stoic philosophy at its best was

impotent to re-create the moral and spiritual world.

It lacked fervor, warmth, and hence dynamic power.

It remained a philosophy, a system of thought; it

never became a religion that could apply the torch

to man’s heart and set it ablaze. The Stoics neglect-

ed the heart while concentrating upon the mind and

the will. Christ made no such mistake. “For He

knew what was in man,” And by the same token.

He knew that although you illuminate the mind and

stimulate the will, if you do not warm the heart, you

only divide a man against himself.



62 CHRISTIANITY'S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

Shakespeare says:

“Tell me where is fancy bred

Or in the heart or in the head?”

If I may borrow the idea while changing the key

word and ask, “Where is Religion bred, Or in the

heart or in the head?” the answer must be, in both

heart and head. Pascal knew that. “The heart,” he

said, “has reasons not known to the mind,” and the

poet-philosopher Tennyson suggests the idea even

better when he speaks of “heart and mind according

well.”

But Stoicism, I say, neglected the heart. The Stoics

taught men to “take things philosophically,” as we

say, that is, with resignation, with submission to

fate. They taught men to smile in the face of adver-

sity, “to grin and bear it.” They cutlivated serenity,

—even, it must be confessed, a forced, artificial ser-
enity, tranquillity, mental poise, emotional equili-

brium. That philosophy, though the Stoics knew it

not, approaches perilously close to Buddhism and its

Nirvana. The Greeks had a name for it, <vpwtheia,

“passionlessness,” but it is really stagnation and

paralysis. Man cannot be passionless unless he be

dehumanized. The problem is not to eliminate pas-

sion, but to purify and sublimate passion.

Furthermore, the Stoics made another mistake:

they remained contemptuously aloof from what they

called the vulgar strivings of unenlightened men.

One of their poets wrote the familiar sentence Odi

profanum vulgus et arceo, “I hate the vulgar horde

and I shun them.” The Stoic doctrine forbade worri-

ment, apprehension and all manner of mental anx-

iety. In the face of wars and revolutions, earth-



CHKISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 63

quakes, volcanic explosions and indeed of any catas-

trophe they boasted themselves “serene, indifferent

to fate.”

Consequently, in their literature, as in their life,

there is a sort of frigidity that prevented the Stoic

philosophy from stirring man’s affections. Gener-

ally speaking it is as coldly transcendental as that

of the modern Ralph Waldo Emerson. The hard-

hammered epigrammatic style of the New England

successor to the Greco-Roman Stoics sometimes sim-

ulates fervor, but it cannot inflame the heart any

more than the light in the body of a, glowworm can

kindle a fire in the grass. To use another illustra-

tion: the difference between Stoicism, ancient or

modern, and Christianity, is the difference between

a marble statue and a flesh-and-blood human being.

The religion of Jesus Christ is warm-hearted and

whole-souled. “I am come,” said He, “to cast fire

upon the earth : and what will I, but that it be kin-

dled.” Christianity, therefore, was not a serene,

calm, cool philosophy making its appeal to the inner

circle of the intellectual elite. It was a living flame

burning its way across the face of the earth with the

swift advance and the universal sweep of a prairie

fire. It was an overwhelming force, tearing down

and building up; “every valley shall be filled, and

every mountain and hill shall be brought low”; it

toppled idols from their pedestals and razed the

temples of false gods to the ground : then it cleared

the ground of all the crumbled moral and religious

debris, contsructed a new civilization and re-created

the moral world.

Now the man who was the supreme embodiment
of this power, after Christ, was St. Paul. The Stoics



64 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

could not understand him. How could they appre-

ciate such a firebrand? His heart was burning and

bursting, his words came fiowing hot, he was a

total stranger to philosophic calm, he was utterly

lacking in poise. He made no attempt to attain

emotional equilibrium. He blurted out his words,

he tore the classical Greek into shreds and tatters,

and corrupted it with a jumble of Hebrew idioms.

The intellectuals counted that sacrilege, and I can

imagine that some of the polite scoffers in Athens

told him that he should have polished up his diction

before addressing the Academy.

As with his preaching, so with his writing. There

is nothing in his Epistles of the exquisite phrase-

making of Marcus Aurelius, or the jeweled sen-

tences of Epictetus. He smashes all classical stand-

ards, plunges along breathlessly, impetuously deliv-

ering his soul of its pent-up emotions. Read those

Epistles and you may feel the warmth of his great

heart burning through the cold print after nineteen

centuries.

But what that ancient world did not understand is

that the blunderer and sputterer, the man beside

himself, was alive, afire with divinity and that un-

like the ultra-refined who were polishing their

phrases and chopping their logic in the lounging

rooms of the luxurious baths and in the porches of

the Academy, that man was tearing up the founda-

tions of the old world and building a new world

before their very eyes. When they awoke out of

their intellectual trance, the work was largely done.

But I must not convey the impression that this

world conquest was achieved by the one solitary

passion of enthusiasm. We have all known men



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVIL.IZATION 65

of one idea, or of one passion, and we are, with

good reason, afraid of them. We call them fanatics

or monomaniacs. But what, is it that saves the en-

thusiast from being a madman? Some would say:

“A touch of humility,” and that is good. Others say

“A saving sense of humor,” and there is wisdom in

that. Again, it might be said: “A decent respect

for the opinions of mankind and for authority,”

and that is indeed a strong anchor to windward.

But above all these things, the one saving grace that

prevents enthusiasm from degenerating into mad-

ness is Love. The genuine fanatic is a universal

hater. He hates sin, he hates the devil, he hates bad

men, he hates good men if they stand in his way, he

hates authority,—on occasion he hates rebellion
against authority; he hates subjection, he hates de-

lay, he hates injustice; sometimes he hates justice;

he hates thousands of persons and things,—^but he
loves nobody and nothing.

Now, such a man is the antithesis of St. Paul

whom I take as an outstanding example of the en-

thusiastic Christian. The passion behind his en-

thusiasm was not hatred, but love. The supremacy

of love is stated with incomparable beauty in his

eternal classic in I Corinthians, Chapter xiii : “If I

speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, and

have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a

tinkling cymbal. And if I should have prophecy,

and should know all mysteries, and all knowledge,

and if I should have all faith, so that I could remove

mountains, and have not love, I am nothing. And if
I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor,
and if I should deliver my body to be burned, and
have not love, it profiteth me nothing. Love is pa-



66 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

tient, is kind; envieth not, dealeth not perversely,

is not puffed up; is not ambitious, seeketh not her

own, is not provoked to anger, thinketh no evil . . .

.

Now there remain faith, hope and love, .... but

the greatest of these is love.”

Love was the saving grace that made St. Paul a

world-conquering Apostle, instead of a futile, blus-

tering, ineffectual fanatic.

In consequence St. Paul took the ancient Roman

world by storm. It was not prepared for such a

tornado of enthusiasm. All the world knew that

it needed saving
;
for underneath the appearance of

civilization it was a violent and cruel world, pas-

sionate and unnaturally wicked. Yet it cried aloud

for saving, but none of the philosophers knew how

to save it. One school of them, the Peripatetics,

were so called because they walked up and down,

forward and backward on what we might call a

campus, all the while discussing, debating, talking,

everlastingly walking and- talking. Or they sat

'themselves down, as in St. Paul’s day, upon the

summit of the Acropolis, high, remote, aloof from

the throngs in the market place. But the Christian

apostles knew that the world cannot be saved by

those who sit or walk and talk, still less by those

who despise the common people and refuse to mingle

with them. The Christians did not waste their

energy in the intellectual calisthenics and the philo-

sophic pitter-patter of the academies. We read that
on Pentecost Day, as the Apostles were gathered to-

gether awaiting the coming of the Holy Spirit,

“there came a sound from heaven, as of a mighty

wind coming, and it filled the whole house . . . And

there appeared to them parted tongues as it were



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 67

of fire !” They burst forth from the house, with the

light of God upon their brows and a new enthusiasm

flashing from their eyes. Their tongues were loosed

and so fervently did they preach the good news that

the cynics and scoffers said, “These men are full

of new wine.”

Yes, new wine that ran through their veins like

fire. Christ had come to cast fire upon the earth

and now at last it was kindled. Christianity is

Life, Power, Energy, a dynamic thing. It is not

an intellectual theory, to be tossed back and forth

from mind to mind. It is rather a flaming torch

that passed from Jerusalem to Antioch—from An-
tioch to Ephesus, from Ephesus to Corinth, to Rome,

to Gaul, to Britain, to Erin, to America, to the

Orient. It climbs mountains, it crosses oceans, it

penetrates jungles, it breaks down barriers. Chris-

tianity was the first civilizing force that passed

through and beyond the Roman wall, for the stand-

ard of the cross has been planted in regions to which

the Roman Eagle never attained. It cannot be

stopped by bloody persecution, it cannot be ridiculed

out of existence, it is not to be explained away by

philosophy or so-called science. Its progress is not

halted by political maneuvers and machinations.

The Christian religion has a sweep and a power and

a conquering force that are not to be denied.

Sometimes indeed there are those within the fold

and perhaps within the inner circle, the hierarchy,

who seem to imagine that our religion is only a

conservative force—our critics would say reaction-
ary force—^that its primary function is to cry
“Stop !” to a world that is running too fast. Friendly

outsiders, wishing to praise us, tell us that they value



68 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

our organization as a bulwark, a bulwark against

this and a bulwark against that. But we are no

mere bulwark; a bulwark is static, it sits heavy on

the earth.

Nor are we a drag, a drawback to the progress

of civilization. Sometimes indeed our leaders, like

good generals, cry “Halt !” But again, the command

comes “Forward!” and we move on resistlessly.

The intelligentsia, the academicians, the critics,

the cynics and the everlasting fault-finders cannot

see that Christianity marches ahead. That’s because

they themselves have grown dizzy running around in

circles. They do not discern what is happening in

front of their eyes any more than the Areopagites

discerned that St. Paul was precipitating a revolu-

tion.

Only one thing could possibly stop Christianity

dead in its tracks, and that is an excess of caution,

of timidity, of what is sometimes misnamed discre-

tion. Discretion is very well, but we must not have

too much of it: ne quid nimis. And caution must

never extinguish the Pentecostal fire, the fire that

was kindled by Christ, communicated to the Apostles,

carried by them east and west to the ends of the

world, the fire that even now after all these centuries

does not die down, but fiames ever anew, the fire of

enthusiasm and love that is Christianity.



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 69

THE PRINCIPLE OF OPTIMISM
(Address delivered by Rev. James M. Gillis^ C.S.P., in the

Catholic Hour, December 13, 1931.)

One favorite intellectual diversion of philosophers

and common people both is that of classifying the

human race into, for example, the good, the bad and

the indifferent; or capitalists, proletariat and bour-

geoisie, or more simply, “the rich and the poor.”

Social welfare workers sometimes speak of the

“washed” and the “unwashed.” A certain humorist,
considering the speed with which automobile jug-

gernauts tear through our crowded streets, divides

us all into “the quick and the dead.”

There are thousands of such classifications. But

today I ask you to consider the division of the race

into optimists and pessimists. And I hope to show

more or less conclusively that optimism is Christian

and pessimism is pagan, though I shall not deny that

some Christians are pessimists and some pagans

seem to be optimists.

Let us admit that it is difficult for a deep thinker

or a man of wide worldly experience to be an opti-

mist. One of my own favorite authors, whose essays

I like better than any one else’s. Canon Sheehan,

in his beautiful and thoughtful volume, “Under the

Cedars and the Stars,” declares that “the world’s

greatest literature is tinged with melancholy,” that

“all deep thought is sombre thought,” and that “sad-

ness is the handmaiden of philosophy.”

He recalls the halt-comical remark made by some

cheerful idiot to Samuel Johnson: “You are a phil-

osopher, Dr. Johnson. I, too, have tried to be a phil-



70 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

osopher, but I couldn’t; cheerfulness was always

breaking in.”

As with philosophers, so with poets—every great
poet is a philosopher. “Dante,” says the learned

canon, “gnashed his teeth at the world.” His visage

was so deeply wrought with anguish that even the

urchins in the street called him “the man who has

been in hell.” Hamlet, the embodiment of the high-

est thought and deepest emotions of the incompara-

ble Shakespeare, complains that “the world is out of

joint” and cries:

“0 cursed spite

That ever I was born to set it right.”

His brow is “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of

thought,” and he soliloquizes upon “The slings and

arrows of outrageous fortune ...

“The whips and scorns of time.

The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely.

The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay.

The insolence of office and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes.”

Cardinal Newman, a man of genius not unfit to

be named in the exalted company of Dante and

Shakespeare, has a desolating passage in his

Apologia on “the greatness and littleness of man:”

“The disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the

success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the

prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idola-

tries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion,

that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet ex-

actly described in the Apostle’s words, ‘having no

hope and without God in the world,’ ” and, says he.



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 71

“all this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts

upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery,

which is absolutely beyond human solution.”

Those of us who are not philosophers, or poets,

still less men of genius, can nevertheless feel in some

measure,

“The heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,”

the business world, a kind of battleground of re-

lentless, and too often conscienceless competition,

no, not a battleground, but rather a jungle in which

men rend and tear and devour one another with

the cruelty of sabre-toothed tigers; the political

world riddled with graft, at its lowest a sordid, nasty

world wherein men without scruple or remorse

blacken an opponent’s character and progress into

office by means of humbug, buncombe and demagogy

;

the political world in which deceit masquerades as

diplomacy, and the practice of lying for one’s coun-

try has been developed as a flne art; the judicial

world in which men swear to tell the truth, the

whole truth and nothing but the truth, and then

promptly perjure themselves; the judicial world

wherein a prosecuting attorney is permitted to shout

and bulldoze and browbeat defenseless witnesses; a

world wherein justice seems to be kicked back and

forth between the attorneys for the prosecution and

the defense as if the law were a game, a game in

which all the tricks of forensic oratory may be em-

ployed to put an innocent man into jail or keep a

guilty one out; the world of international affairs in

which nations solemnly pledge themselves to re-

nounce war, yet go fiercely ahead with the increase



72 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

of armament, and at the first provocation turn their

backs upon all compacts and leagues for peace.

Sometimes there seems to be only one way of

getting away from it, and that is not to think. And

there are indeed multitudes of persons who seem

to say: “Don’t make me think, don’t let me think.”

They avoid Hamlet and Lear and Othello, they shun

Goethe and Dante as they would a plague, they take

to fiction as an escape from reality, that silly kind of

fiction and even sillier popular drama in which, in

defiance of logic, truth, natural law, and verisimili-

tude there is always a happy ending, the villain is

always unmasked and defeated, the hero always tri-

umphant, and the heroine always rescued before

harm has actually reached her.

Again, people plunge into pleasure, they run from

the dining table to the theatre, from the theatre to

the cabaret or the speakeasy, to kill time, to kill

thought. With them amusement is no longer a

pleasure, it is a drug. Above all things they shrink

from introspection or meditation because they dread

the sight of their own soul; they abhor religion be-

cause religion persists in asking the question

:

“What’s it all about? What are you doing, and

where are you going?”

If we can believe the poet. Lord Byron, the pleas-

ure seekers do not succeed in escaping from them-

selves. He had experience, quite too much exper-

ience, and he cries bitterly:

“What exile from himself can fiee

To zones though more and more remote

Still, still pursues where’er I be

The blight of life, the demon thought!”



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 73

Yes, to such as he thought is a demon. So, the

pleasure seekers make a desperate effort to eschew

deep thought altogether. They say, “Why should

I put wrinkles in my brow, furrows in my brain,
perplexity in my soul by thinking? I am no Hamlet.

Hamlet was mad. Too much thinking made him

mad. I am no Dante. You say he was in hell. I

say he is in hell. I have seen his bust, and it looks

like the portrait of one of the damned. Let Dante

go to his Inferno, let Hamlet moon and meander,

rave and storm and end by cluttering up the stage

with murder, but as for me, I say. Why worry?
Why attempt to puzzle it out, why not ‘eat, drink
and be merry?’”

I may be mistaken, but I do imagine that there is

a fair number of persons in this neo-pagan world of

ours who attempt to regard life as a holiday; they

sail along on the surface as it were of a smiling trop-

ical sea, never looking beneath to see the hideous

incredible monsters that lurk in the black depths.

They resolutely ignore poverty, crime, sin, slums,

hospitals, prisons; they pass these things by as the

Pharisee sniffed and passed by a leper, or as a

Brahmin coldly ignores an untouchable pariah. And

it must be confessed that for a time they seem to go

along serenely.

But in the long run, it won’t do. It won’t do. They

shall not escape what Unamuno calls “The Tragic

Sense of Life,” in that manner. Voltaire couldn’t do

it, jest and scoff as he would. His horror over the

Lisbon earthquake proves that he couldn’t be uncon-

cerned about tragedy in the world. And curiously

enough, one of the very best answers, and at the

same time a cutting rebuke to those who claim to be



74 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

able to live without thinking, comes from Jean Jac-

ques Rousseau. He says : “The internal void is never

felt but in hearts made to be filled. Shallow hearts

are never conscious of a vacuum.” Instantly the

great sentence of St. Augustine, the world’s deepest

thinker, leaps to mind : “Thou hast made us for Thy-

self, 0 God, and our hearts are restless until they

find rest in Thee.” Some one else, a French writer

of the last century, adds the gloss : “That which sad-

dens and torments you is the truest greatness of

your heart.”

And that brings us face to face with our real pro-

blem: Considering the disappointments and disillu-

sions of this earthly career, how shall we avoid bit-

terness, cynicism, pessimism? Knowing what we

know, permitting ourselves no illusions, suffering no

hallucinations, doing no violence to truth and con-

science, how can we maintain the attitude and still

more the spirit of optimism? Before I attempt to

answer that question, let me insist that pagan philo-

sophers, ancient and modern, have found no reply.

There come to my mind a few verses which fairly

describe, I think, the ultima Thule of Greco-Roman

paganism, generally alleged to be the happiest and

the cheeriest of all pagan civilizations

:

“On that hard pagan world

Disgust and secret loathing fell

Where deep weariness and sated lust

Made human life a hell.”

That was spoken of Greco-Roman paganism.

Oriental paganism even at its best and high-

est, Buddhism, was and is even more desolate.

The first article of its creed is that existence is a



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 75

curse, and that the only way to escape the curse is to

cease to exist, not merely to die but to be swallowed

up in nothingness. Nirvana, though this is some-

times disputed, means oblivion. The devout Hindu

purified yet more and more by a series of lives on

this lower sphere, finally attains the complete anni-

hilation of the desire to exist, slips into the abyss.

He has ceased to be, here or elsewhere, in heaven, on

earth, or in hell. He literally is no more.

The modern pagans are scarcely, if at all, less

despondent than the ancients. Ten thousand evi-

dences might be given, but permit me to quote you

only one—from Bertrand Russell:
“That man is the product of causes which had no

prevision of the end they were achieving; that his

origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves, his

beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations

of atoms, that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of

thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life

beyond the grave
;
that all the labors of the ages, all

the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noon-day

brightness of human genius, are destined to extinc-

tion in the vast death of the solar system; and that

the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevit-

ably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in

ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute,
are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which

rejects them can hope to stand.”

I think I have never read a more dismal para-

graph than that. Surely it is the nethermost depths

of hopelessness. It is a sort of philosophic nihilism.

Now what can be the cause of this dreary, hope-

less, pessimism? I find an answer where perhaps

you would never suspect it, in Frank Harris’s “Con-



76 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

temporary Portrait” of Thomas Carlyle. Harris,

once famous, then forgotten, now enjoying a little

renewed notoriety on account of the recent publica-

tion of his life of George Bernard Shaw, says of

Carlyle:

“He had a strong sad face, the saddest I ever stu-

died;” and now from this curiously unlikely source

comes the explanation : “Much of the profound sad-

ness in him came, I think, from his utter disbelief.

He had sought desperately for some sign of God,

some trace of a purpose in life, some hint however

vague, of a goal however distant, and had found

nothing.”

What a remarkable verification of the indictment

of paganism by St. Paul in the first chapter of his

Epistle to the Romans that was both a record of fact

and a prophecy. Writing later to the Ephesians he

gives the reasons of pagan degradation and despond-

ency : “They have,” he says, “no hope of the promise,

and are without God in this world.”

And now we are come to the ultimate basis of

Christian Optimism. Christianity is the religion of

the Incarnation, and the Incarnation means that God

has dwelt on this earth, indeed that God has never

left the earth. We have hope because we have God
in this world.

Robert Browning’s triumphant line that sounds

like a bugle
—

“God’s in His heaven : all’s right with

the world,”—might be amended and then adopted
by us: God is not only in His heaven, God’s in His

world, and therefore all’s right with the world.

The Christian does not delude himself with the

lie that there is no misery here below; he does not



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 77

take refuge in the literature of escape; he does not

selfishly turn away from his brother’s sorrow with

the churlish cry “Am I my brother’s keeper?” He

does not plunge into sensual pleasures as into a Lethe-

an bath; he does not attempt a brainless, thought-

less existence, as if he could make himself a mollusk,

or a machine. He does not deceive himself, nor will

he allow others to deceive him. With eyes wide open,

and mind alert, he sees, he knows, and yet he re-

mains an optimist, because he believes not only in

God but in the Providence of God. Our God is no

absentee, dwelling in cold isolation “out beyond the

shining of the farthest star.” Our God is here

now, on this very earth. His presence, it is true,

does not annihiliate evil any more than the corporeal

presence of Jesus Christ annihilated sinners in the

streets of Jerusalem and on the hillsides of Galilee.

But the infiuence of God is at work here and now as

it was then and there, and the outcome is always

the victory of good over evil. Life is a battle, we

are on the battleground, so enveloped in smoke and

dust, so excited with the clash of conflict, so bewil-

dered by the rush of opposing forces that we cannot

at the moment tell how goes the fight at this or that

sector. But we never question the outcome of the

general engagement. Our Commander has never

been permanently beaten. God is not beaten. A
thousand times the world’s condition has been so

desperate that it seemed as if all must be lost, but

the ultimate catastrophe never happens. The world

is always saved. Civilization goes on, not because

civilization has inherent power to rescue itself, but

because God sees all, knows all, directs all. This is

our Christian belief and in this belief we fight on.



78 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

never despairing, never doubting the final triumph

of good over evil.

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CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 79

THE PRINCE OF PEACE
(Address delivered by Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P., in the

Catholic Hour, December 20, 1931.)

Christ is called the Prince of Peace, and no one

who has absorbed the spirit of the Gospels will deny

that Christianity, rightly apprehended and univer-

sally applied, would abolish warfare and inaugurate

peace on earth.

Strangely, perhaps we should say miraculously,

when Jesus came, no war was actually in

progress and there had been no war for twelve

years throughout the Roman Empire. True,

peace had been imposed by power, it was peace un-

der arms, peace uneasy like a fitful, restless sleep.

As one writer has put it, “The world seemed

to sleep under the wing of the Roman eagle.” He

might have added that if any province or kingdom

had awakened and tried to escape from under that

wing, it would have been torn to pieces by the talons

and the beak of the terrible Roman Eagle.

But peace, such as it was, existed for the first time

in 700 years when Jesus Christ was born.

John Milton puts it beautifully

:

“No war, or battle’s sound.

Was heard the world around;

The idle spear and shield were high uphung

;

The hooked chariot stood

Unstained with hostile blood;

The trumpet spake not to the armed throng

:

And kings sat still with awful eye

As if they surely knew their sovran Lord was by.

But peaceful was the night



80 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

Wherein the Prince of Light

His reign of peace upon the earth began.”

And a greater poet than Milton, poet and in-

spired prophet, Isaias, had predicted, “they shall

turn their swords into ploughshares and their

spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up

sword against nation, neither shall they be exercised

any more to war” ; and speaking symbolically as it

were in an ecstasy or vision, he continues: “The

wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall

lie down with the kid : the calf and the lion ....
shall abide together .... They shall not hurt, nor

shall they kill in all my holy mountain, for the earth

is filled with the knowledge of the Lord.”

Alas for the ecstatic vision
;
alas for the prophecy

of peace, for at least as far as this earth of ours is

concerned, the prophecy has been made void, the

vision is unrealized, the heart of the Prince of Peace

is broken. “He was in the world, and the world was

made by Him, and the world knew Him not. He

came unto His own, and His own received Him not

:

.... The light shineth in darkness, and the dark-
ness did not comprehend it.” And in nothing have

we failed so dismally to measure up to the expecta-

tions of Christ as in the matter of war and peace.

Non-Christians, even the Turks, followers of the

bloody Mohammed, the heathen Chinese, the smart

and skeptical Japanese allege with scorn that we,

the followers of the gentle Nazarene, have deluged

the world again and again with blood;—and to be
frank, we dare not tell them that they lie.

Believe me, my friends, I am weary of the at-
tempts of Christians to defend warfare, to justify



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVIL.IZA'nON 81

bloodshed, to condone cruelty. It would be better to

confess our sin, to cry mea culpa and to resolve upon

amendment. When one goes to confession, he tells

his sins, he makes no excuses, he says nothing to

palliate his guilt. Of course we cotdd excuse our-

selves, saying : “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is

weak or “I am human, only human and all that.

But if we make excuses, we only cast suspicion upon

the sincerity of our repentance. Indeed, an excuse

may be one sin more. The French have a saying,

Qui s’excuse s’accuse: “He who excuses himself, ac-

cuses himself.”

So I, for one, refuse to apologize for the fact that

we Christians, though we call ourselves disciples of

the Prince of Peace, have perpetuated wars, rumors

of wars and threats of wars almost unintermittently

for nineteen centuries. The nations, as such, are

not Christian ; diplomats in action ignore the Gospel

;

the Sermon on the Mount has not yet been written

into any national constitution
;
kings and congresses,

presidents and parliaments, yes even leagues of na-

tions and world courts, though they give lip service

to the Man of Galilee, do not invite Him to sit at
council table with them: in fact they would be as

much embarrassed by His Presence as Herod was

embarrassed by John the Baptist, gaunt, unkempt,

uncouth—and unafraid—in the lascivious and mur-
derous court of Jerusalem; as embarrassed as Pon-

tius Pilate face to face with the innocent, silent

Nazarene. There was no room for Jesus at Ver-

sailles and no place is reserved for Him at Geneva.

Putting it plainly, Christ is frozen out. Govern-

ments are conducted, war is declared, and peace is

concluded by what one acute and frank historian.



82 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

Sir Philip Gibbs, has called “the same old gang,” the

non-Christian diplomats. True, the personnel

changes, but the old methods remain—^methods that
have a thousand times been tried and found want-

ing. The rulers of the world call themselves “real-

ists,” they might more truly say “materialists.”

They consider Christ and all advocates of permanent

peace idealists—nothing is so foolish to them as
idealism; they cling to the old out-moded material-

ism—^nay to militarism.
Those, therefore, who are responsible for modern

war are generally not Christian—even nominally
Christian—but when this explanation has been made
and when all other excuses are alleged, the fact re-

mains that warfare, no matter how it originates,

when waged by Christians is an anomaly, a contra-

diction of the spirit if not the letter of the Gospel,

a stumbling-block to the non-Christian, a monstrous

blasphemy that shrieks in the face of heaven. War-

fare crucifies Christ anew
;
“Christ is in agony until

the end of the world,” said Pascal. He will be in

agony until the end of the world unless we put an

end to warfare.

St. Paul, bold and blunt and honest as always,

excoriated his well-beloved Corinthians (perhaps he

excoriated them all the more fiercely because he loved

them so deeply) : “It is absolutely heard,” he says,

“that there is fornication among you, and such for-

nication as the like is not among the heathens.” He

was not afraid to tell them on occasion that they

were worse than pagans. And I verily believe that

if the fiery Apostle (afire with love of God and man)

came back to earth today, he would cry to us, “I

hear absolutely that there is bloodshed among you.



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 83

and such bloodshed as the like was never among the

heathens.” And how could we deny it? In St.

Paul’s time, men fought one another with spears

and swords and javelins, but these were toys beside

our hideous shot and shell and shrapnel. In a siege

the ancients would man a battering-ram, but what

was that compared with guns that shoot a ten-ton

projectile 20 miles and pierce 12 inches of steel?

The beseiged,in turn,would throw down burning em-

bers or boiling pitch upon the besiegers, but burning

embers and boiling pitch are a laughing matter com-

pared with poison gas that eats out a man’s lungs

and drives him insane. Our modern battles, vast,

hideous, demoniacal, with machine guns and tanks

and flame-throwers and gas bombs, with subter-

ranean and submarine mines, with flocks of aero-

planes, a mile or two miles high in the air, riddling

one another with machine gun Are, or dropping ter-

rible death from above the clouds upon defenseless

cities of non-combatant women and children; such

incredibly cruel warfare would have horrifled Julius

Caesar or Hannibal or Alexander or Genghis Khan,

to say nothing of St. Paul or of Jesus. Truly in this

at least we are worse than the heathen.

During the Russo-Japanese war, an, American

artist drew a cartoon that has left a brand upon my
memory all these years. It was a simple picture—

a

blackboard with some such figures as these written

as it were in chalk : The Battle of Lexington,

casualties, 329; Bunker Hill, 1504; Brandywine,

1700; Gettysburg, 5670 killed, 26,000 wounded; Se-

dan, 25,000
;
Port Arthur, 120,000 ; Mukden, 300,000.

Under the blackboard was the sardonic legend “The

Onward March of Civilization.” But in the World



84 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

War, after civilization had marched onward for yet

another generation, there were 9 million deaths and

21 million wounded. As for other casualties, blind-

ed, gassed, paralyzed, insane, starved, it is too hor-

rible for the tongue to speak or the imagination to

picture. And the World War is not over yet. It has

only commenced. The war with its aftermath may

even yet ruin the world.

Yet, God forgive us, we tolerate war
;
some of us

justify war or apologize for it. Shall I say the full

truth,—some who bear the name of Christ, glory in

warfare, write hymns of hate, stir up the smolder-

ing passions of men with inflammatory speeches to

precipitate war and when war has been declared and

is under way, they fling to the winds all truth, all

tolerance, all mercy, all sanity. They go berserk;

they run amok. Upon platforms or street corners,

in theatres, in workshops, in training camps, they

appeal to the bloodlust with the fury of madmen.

And then with incredible inconsistency, if not hy-

pocrisy, they go to church on Sunday, fold their

hands piously, sing hymns sanctimoniously, and tell

Jesus, the Prince of Peace, that they love Him, and

love all mankind in His name and for His sake.

On the day when the World War broke out, hap-

pening to be in Lyons, in the heart of France, I wit-

nessed the frenzy of a mob singing the bloodcurdling

Marseillaise, Q’un sang impur abreuve nos siUons:

“Let the foul blood of our enemies drench the fur-

rows of the fields.” When that most furious of all

hymns of hate was written, the sang impur, the

“foul blood,” was that of the reigning house of Bour-

bon, and perhaps that royal blood was indeed foul.

But in 1914 the French sang it again, and this time



CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION 85

the “foul blood” was that of men, their brethren

across an imaginary boundary line, men no more to

blame for the war than those who sang the song.

But we need not go over seas to find bloodlust, and

insane hatred. In our own Civil War, did not the

Southerners sing: “Avenge the patriotic gore that

decked the streets of Baltimore, and be the battle

queen of yore, ‘Maryland, My Maryland’”? And in

that same poem are not the men from beyond an-

other imaginary line called “Northern scum”?

And we were no better on this side of the line.

Did we not sing in the Battle Hymn of the Republic

that God, the God of battles, was with our arms,

that He had made our cause His own? Did we not

see Him “trampling out the vintage where the grapes

of wrath are stored” and hadn’t we a vision of a

“gospel writ in burnished rows of steel?”

My dear fellow citizens, and may I address in par-
ticular my fellow Christians, let us make no defense

of this madness. Toleration of warfare, glorifica-

tion of warfare, while we bend the knee to the Prince

of Peace, is a wild anomaly. I know there is room

for argument about just and unjust war, but at this

moment let us have no argument. One thing at a

time. Let us get the undeniable, indubitable fact

into our minds: warfare, any warfare, is a mon-

strous evil, and Christian warfare is a preposterous

contradiction in terms.

For all these nineteen centuries we have been lag-

ging behind Christ. It is time that we should catch

up with Him, or at least approach nearer to Him.

What can we do practically? One thing we can

do, the first thing: we can utterly obliterate from

our souls hatred of our fellow men. A second thing



86 CHRISTIANITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION

we can do: when war threatens we can refuse to

permit any man, even though he appeal to us in the

sacred but much abused name of patriotism, to whip

up our bloodlust ; and a third and final thing we can

do: we can rise in our numbers and in our might

and demand that our government shall be conducted

on Christian principles; that our nation, in its con-

tacts with other nations, shall conduct itself as an

individual who is truly Christian conducts himself

toward all his fellow men, with tolerance, forbear-

ance, forgiveness of injuries, with patience and mer-

cy and love. Impossible? Not at all! Cannot an

individual be a Christian? And what is the nation

but an aggregation of individuals? If the Sermon

on the Mount is good for the individual it is equally

good for a whole people. Let us be genuine Chris-

tians ourselves and demand that those who direct

our destinies shall be in all their dealings with for-

eign nations, followers of the gentle Nazarene, the

Prince of Peace.



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CARDINAL HAYES STATES AIMS OF THE CATHOLIC
RADIO HOUR

(Extract from his address at the inaugural program in the

Studio of the National Broadcasting Company, New York

City, March 2, 1930).

Our congratulations and our gratitude are extended to the

National Council of Catholic Men and its officials, and to all

who, by their financial support, have made it possible to use

this offer of the National Broadcasting Company. The heavy

expense of managing and financing a weekly program, its

musical numbers, its speakers, the subsequent answering of

inquiries, must be met. That responsibility rests upon the

National Council of Catholic Men ....
This radio hour is for all the people of the United States.

To our fellow-citizens, in this word of dedication, we wish to

express a cordial greeting and, indeed, congratulations. For

this radio hour is one of service to America, which certainly

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sure, to the voice of the ancient Church with its historic

background of all the centuries of the Christian era, and

with its own notable contribution to the discovery, explora-

tion, foundation and growth of our glorious country. . . .

Thus to voice before a vast public the Catholic Church is

no light task. Our prayers will be with those who have that

task in hand. We feel certain that it will have both the
good will and the good wishes of the great majority of our

country-men. Surely, there is no true lover of our Country

who does not eagerly hope for a less worldly, a less material,

and a more spiritual standard among our people.

With good will, with kindness and with Christ-like sympa-

thy for all, this work is inaugurated. So may it continue.

So may it be fulfilled. This work of dedication voices, there-

fore, the hope that this radio hour may serve to make known,

to explain with the charity of Christ, our faith, which we

love even as we love Christ Himself. May it serve to make

better understood that faith as it really is—a light revealing
the pathway to heaven: a strength, and a power divine

through Christ: pardoning our sins, elevating, consecrating

our common every-day duties and joys, bringing not only

justice but gladness and peace to our searching and ques-

tioning hearts.



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