lilli
 
 L r ?y 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 }
 
 ^1 
 
 
 \. A 

 
 Discourses and Essays 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN AYSCOUGH 
 
 Author of "Mezzogiorno," "Hurdcott," etc. 
 
 B. HERDER BOOK CO. 
 
 17 South Broadway, St. Louis, Mo. 
 
 AND 
 
 60 Great Russell St., London, W. C. 
 1922
 
 NIHIL OB STAT 
 
 Sti. Ludovici, die 13. Julii, 1922. 
 
 F. G. Holweck, 
 
 Censor Librorum 
 
 IMPRIMATUR 
 
 Sti. Ludovici, die //, Julii, 1922. 
 
 'i'Joannes J. Glennon, 
 Archie pise opus 
 
 Sti. Ludovici 
 
 Copyright, 1922, 
 
 by 
 
 B. Herder Book Co. 
 
 All rights reserved 
 Printed in U. S. A.
 
 
 This little book is dedicated 
 to 
 
 THE VERY REV. JOHN CAVANAUGH, D.D., 
 
 of the 
 Society of the Holy Cross 
 
 836313
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAen 
 
 The Church and Vanity Fair i 
 
 Progress and Perfection 14 
 
 Of Preaching and Practice 32 
 
 Sacr-aments and Spectacles 51 
 
 Miracles "Or Such-like Fooleries" .... 62 
 
 Of Majorities 69 
 
 Of Youth and Emotion 75 
 
 Of Emotion and Common-sense 80 
 
 Psalms or Poorer Stuff 85 
 
 Self and Self-sacrifice gi 
 
 The Golden Road 98 
 
 Continuity versus Identity 105 
 
 The Wind and the Shorn Lamb no 
 
 Continuity and Cardinals 117 
 
 Pole, Craxmer, and Continuity 123 
 
 The Continuity Tribute 128 
 
 Apostolic Witness 134 
 
 In Excuse of Silence 140 
 
 Of Camel Swallowing 175 
 
 Taste and Tolerance . . 182
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Another Tolerance 198 
 
 Two Duties 211 
 
 CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR 
 
 Pax 152 
 
 Pagan Yule 158 
 
 Once Again 163 
 
 Goodbye and Welcome 168
 
 THE CHURCH AND VANITY FAIR 
 
 ELSEWHERE we have spoken of the charge 
 brought against the Church, not by her 
 more reputable opponents, of her inferior 
 morahty. We venture to believe that no single hu- 
 man being who ever considered her claims, with the 
 faintest genuine intention of submitting to her, 
 should he find those claims to rest on justice and 
 right reason, has ever been decided against submis- 
 sion by a frank conviction that in becoming a Cath- 
 olic he would be accepting a lower rule of ethics. 
 
 No student of her history and of that of the 
 world, we are firmly convinced, has ever failed to 
 arrive at the conclusion that her stand has consis- 
 tently been on the side of good. Her vicissitudes 
 have been great, her trials very many; and they 
 would have been much less had she held the easy 
 principles, the convenient laxity, the accommodating 
 readiness to sacrifice justice for temporal, or selfish, 
 advantage with which the ignorant and the vulgar- 
 witted have credited her. 
 
 In history she Is seen, time and again, at variance 
 with the mighty. She might have lived more 
 pleasantly at ease had she been willing to snatch at 
 suggested compromises, to barter unchanging rules 
 of right for comfortable expedients; to condone 
 
 1
 
 2 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 robberies and take a present for herself; to wink at 
 evil in high places and abstain from visiting upon the 
 powerful the same censures into which the meanest 
 of her children would have fallen who had attempted 
 similar infractions of the law of God. It is not be- 
 cause she has been lax that she has stirred up against 
 herself potent adversaries, at one period or another, 
 in every country of Christendom, but precisely be- 
 cause she would hold no treaty with laxity though 
 the favour of emperors or kings might have been 
 the reward of her compliance. 
 
 Of all this the candid and not lazy student be- 
 comes fully aware. The libellers of the Church's 
 moral rectitude are not the learned, and the sincere, 
 nor the clearminded, but the shallow and ignorant, 
 the malignant, and they who invert the quality of 
 charity that thinketh no evil and rejoiceth not in 
 iniquity. There is no more practical proof of fond- 
 ness for anything than being willing to pay for it, 
 and it is to hear of iniquity that they pay who go re- 
 joicingly to the regale on the "experiences" of es- 
 caped monks and escaped nuns. 
 
 But that word of charity reminds inevitably of a 
 special difference between the Church's attitude to- 
 wards evil and that of the un-Catholic world. To- 
 wards unrepentant sin the Church holds herself rig- 
 idly: till the evil thing be put away she shuts up her 
 treasures, and lifts an ever-threatening hand of 
 warning. No sacrament of hers can avail the im- 
 penitent; no reconciliation can be held with him. 
 No lapse of time can purge his fault while to that
 
 THE CHURCH AND VANITY FAIR 3 
 
 fault he cleaves lovingly or obstinately, nor death it- 
 self if death shall have brought no penitence. She 
 does not judge the dead; vengeance is not her's but 
 God's; but neither does she presume to pronounce 
 sentence of acquittal simply because death has inter- 
 vened; death may have been, for all she can see, but 
 the final hopeless seal on a life-long evil compact. 
 Him who has died under every outward presump- 
 tion of impenitence she does not declare absolved by 
 death; he has passed beyond her jurisdiction and, in 
 awe, to God's Omniscience she leaves him. 
 
 But if he arise from the foul meal of swinish 
 husks, and from the alien land where he has dwelt 
 in folly, turn his eyes homeward, wistfully, then does 
 she run to meet him. Afar off she yearns to him, 
 and midway she encounters him with kindest em- 
 bracing; and, at his word of penitence, the golden 
 chain of love is for his neck, the clean garment of 
 reconciliation is for his sin-worn frame. She calls 
 him to his father's table, and of all his wantou oast 
 there is no chatter heard, she makes no gibe and 
 will hear none; if an elder son would cavil at her 
 kindness she stills him with a gentle reproof: "Son, 
 thou hast been always with me. This my brother, 
 was lost and is found," His wicked past is dead; 
 let the dead bury their dead. She bids him look 
 forward; after the first sorrowful tears for the 
 deeds of exile are shed he is to bring forth fruit 
 meet for repentance, and must make haste to sow 
 for a better harvest, and to that end labour; it is 
 not she that will hold him with hopeless face
 
 4 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 pressed down into the old mire, nor she that dubs 
 him Prodigal returned, but the common, harsh 
 label. 
 
 And this is what the un-Catholic world, that goes 
 sinning smugly on, cannot away with. It is not 
 hard on unrepentant sin. It knows of it, and nud- 
 ges a little and smiles a good deal, and winks 
 humanly, and is not very angry nor greatly scandal- 
 ised. It has a kindness for wild oats, and does not 
 perceive them to be much out of season, though 
 planted by quite elderly sowers. It dines with the 
 sower and drinks his wine, and avails itself of the 
 pleasant crumbs of his wealth, though he be sowing 
 still after fifty seasons — or she, for that matter. 
 He is a good fellow, or she is a "good sort." That 
 he, or she, may be outraging God Is nothing to it; 
 God is nothing to it either. The most elderly wild- 
 oats need be no offence against society. There be 
 gentlemanly oats, and lady-like, though stale and 
 stinking, foul and fetid, rotten and rot-breeding; 
 oats that help the prostitute to hell and drag 
 the well-bred, well-washed adulteress thither, but 
 conventional, look you, and, with luck, decently 
 glossed — or at all events indecently. It is all part 
 of the show: a recognised department in Vanity 
 Fair. 
 
 It is not to the unrepentant that the jostlers in the 
 Fair are austere, but to the repentant. The repent- 
 ant have left it, and the tender mercies of the un- 
 godly are no more for them. They are deserters 
 and are to be shot down: their backs are turned, and
 
 THE CHURCH AND VANITY FAIR 5 
 
 into them any knife may be thrust. It is when a 
 guilty wretch has ceased to be guilty that Vanity 
 Fair begins to cry out upon him; it is when God 
 has pardoned that the folk in the Fair discover him 
 to be unpardonable. So long as he sticks to the 
 Fair it is mean and unfriendly to note that he is mis- 
 behaving: when he gives over misbehaving then 
 is it time to proclaim loudly all he has done. What 
 sinless God has forgiven none of these fellows, 
 stuck fast in sin still, will forgive, nor will the 
 women of the Fair. St. Augustine would have been 
 well received in it in his worst days; would he have 
 been received there at all had he shown himself in 
 it when he had been long a saint? Would St. Mary 
 Magdalene? Would any penitent? The repent- 
 ant sinner may have been leading an exemplary life 
 for years, but every bull in it will gore him, every 
 goat push and butt, every filthy monkey gibber and 
 mouth — because he is penitent. 
 
 Is this simply hypocrisy in the people of the Fair? 
 They grin at the Church and throw it against her 
 that she will whitewash any scamp who comes to 
 her; do they believe that she will do this for the 
 unrepentant sinner? Not they. Nor is the outcry 
 they raise against her simply hypocrisy: it is more. 
 In every reprobate reclaimed by the Church they per- 
 ceive a loss to the Fair, a captive from their own 
 ranks. That is why they are bitter and scornful 
 against her for doing just what God does. She is 
 the servant, and the servant is not to set herself 
 above her Master, it is enough that she be as her
 
 6 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 Master: what He has forgiven she must forgive, 
 what He has cleansed she is not to call unclean still. 
 
 We said at the beginning of this paper that no 
 one was ever deterred from becoming a Cathohc by 
 an honest conviction that to do so would imply the 
 acceptance of a lower moral standard; but the truth 
 is that many hold back from entering the Church 
 because they plainly recognise that to submit to her 
 would involve the acceptance of a moral standard 
 inconveniently high. To many the idea of joining 
 the Church has never occurred at all: the whole 
 question of religion is tedious to them. To some 
 the idea has occurred, but the cost of following it 
 up is too heavy; it is not merely that there may be, 
 as there often is, some material loss to face: the loss 
 they cannot face is the loss of liberty to lead a life 
 of laxity. They perceive clearly that on Catholics 
 is laid the obligation of a rule of conduct to which 
 they would grudge obedience. Far from believ- 
 ing that the practice of the confessional is an in- 
 stance of Cathohc corruption, a pleasant way of 
 compounding with sin, a comfortable device for en- 
 abling folk to live loosely and yet with easy con- 
 science, they are strongly aware that to accept the 
 obligation of the confessional means a definite rup- 
 ture with the kind of life they are leading, and 
 from which they are unprepared to break off, and 
 that in the confessional is only applied to actual 
 conduct the Church's theoretic rule of ethics. 
 
 I believe this to be the real explanation of many 
 half-promised conversions that have never fulfilled
 
 THE CHURCH AND VANITY FAIR 7 
 
 themselves. It Is not the Church's moral laxity 
 that holds people off, but her moral austerity. 
 Nor was it corruption in religious houses that made 
 the sycophants of Henry VIII glad to see them 
 destroyed; those who had no material profit to 
 make out of their suppression (and wc may be sure 
 that many were disappointed of such profit, as 
 many made it) were well pleased to be relieved of 
 the spectacle of the Church's old counsels of per- 
 fection in daily practice. And what is true of the 
 sixteenth century is equally true of the eighteenth, 
 the nineteenth, and the twentieth: the wholesale 
 destruction of religious houses is due in part to the 
 desire for spoliation, but in part also to the fact 
 that nothing Is more repugnant to those who would 
 destroy both Christ and His law than being com- 
 pelled to see His law Illustrated in itsi most perfect 
 expression. 
 
 Those countries which have most entirely cast off 
 the bit and bridle of the Church rejoice in a free- 
 dom of which they are fully aware: the freedom 
 to do what they like. For centuries there has been 
 talk of the intellectual freedom achieved by the Ref- 
 ormation; its real asset, endearing it to millions of 
 wa}'ward human beings, is the moral freedom it 
 suggests. For to the bulk of mankind the absence 
 of law appears freedom; it Is only a minority that 
 has ever willingly recognised that in the most per- 
 fect law is the most perfect freedom. In England 
 the course of procedure has been this: at first the 
 Reformation cried to the people, "To God only are
 
 8 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 you answerable: no Pope shall enslave your con- 
 science. From him we emancipate you, and your 
 rule of right shall henceforth be the voice of God 
 alone speaking to your heart." And the ultimate 
 fruit of this axiom of private judgment has been the 
 refusal to teach God to the people, so that they are 
 bred up to know neither Him nor His law, and the 
 voice of conscience. Is the urging of the personal in- 
 clination of each individual. 
 
 Can anybody who knows Sweden or Norway, or 
 Holland or Protestant Germany, believe that what 
 the peoples of those countries dread is the intellect- 
 ual slavery of Catholicism? What they are shy of 
 Is the restraint on conduct that was removed by the 
 happy thought of private judgment. 
 
 Ask any straightforward young scapegrace and 
 he will confess that there is a delightful unsuper- 
 naturalness about the atmosphere of a thoroughly 
 non-Catholic country and society: a cosy absence of 
 any arriere pensee of the old bothersome Ten Com- 
 mandments, a most agreeable sense of being entirely 
 your own master without any other master that 
 matters on earth or above It. And, with equal in- 
 genuousness, he will complain that a thoroughly 
 Catholic society Is tiresome to live In; Catholics are 
 not, he admits, "a bad sort"; but the more Catholic 
 they are, the more awkward Is it for a fellow who 
 likes to take what's going to be jolly, and not to fuss 
 about the world to come. If a fellow were to be 
 ill, really 111, and rather uncertain of recovery, a 
 typically Catholic household would not, he avows,
 
 THE CHURCH AND VANITY FAIR 9 
 
 be a bad place for it — it happened once to himself, 
 and there was a something comfortable about it. 
 But afterwards — 
 
 The devil was ill: the devil a saint would be. 
 The devil got well : the devil a saint was he. 
 
 When a fellow has quite recovered, and the fears 
 of death are gone by, and he is strong enough to be 
 himself again — why, then, the typical Catholic 
 household is not so much the thing. There's too 
 much of the world to come about it, too much no- 
 tion of putting good resolutions in practice: as if 
 religion was not, after all, an accessory of the sick- 
 room, as if it were a matter of common life and 
 five-and-twenty. That's where the out-and-out 
 Catholics make their little mistake. The sort of 
 theories everyone has a nodding acquaintance with 
 as theories they take ati pied de la lettre and carry 
 about with them as a fellow does his ribs — inside 
 but indubitable and of week-a-day significance. 
 
 He does not wish to imply that they jaw a lot, 
 rather the contrary; but they take for granted that 
 admitted principles are things to act on. That's it. 
 Now his own principles are first-rate, but even the 
 best principles can be de trop if you let 'em; the 
 thing is to keep up sides with them, and that's what 
 these thoroughgoing Catholics can't seem to man- 
 age: their principles have them by the nose all the 
 time. Ill or well makes no odds; they aren't, not 
 to say, gloomy even when a fellow is pretty bad and 
 wondering where he'll be to-morrow; no, grave and
 
 lo DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 awfully kind-hearted, but not solemn, not too d — d 
 solemn like some are. Even the priest who looked 
 in and knew a fellow was a heretic, had a bit of a 
 joke for him, and told him to buck-up. Yes, he did; 
 not a bit in your regulation death-bed manner. 
 "Buck-up" was the word. Still they seem to sup- 
 pose that getting well makes no difference; and 
 what was true at your worst is true still. 
 
 So our candid young scapegrace. 
 
 But there are Catholic households which are not 
 typically Catholic; which our young friend would 
 readily admit were just like any other households; 
 where you might easily forget 'that your enter- 
 tainers were Catholics at all. In them there is none 
 of the supernaturalness so disconcerting in unmis- 
 takably Catholic circles. 
 
 We do not cite our candid friend as an expert 
 judge of the supernatural, but merely as an inde- 
 pendent witness to certain plain facts concerning 
 which he is without prejudice. He belongs not to 
 us but to the Fair, and his tastes are of it; but he has 
 a perfect instinct as to what does belong to it, and 
 he knows accurately what sort of people are in it, 
 and what are not. His witness is good so far — 
 that it is not in typically Catholic circles that a com- 
 fortable laxity is to be found, but in circles that are 
 not Catholic at all, or are so only in name. 
 Whereas, if the accusation of the Church's enemies 
 were true, and the Church itself were lax, it would be 
 precisely among Catholics who most typically rep- 
 resent her, and most accurately reflect her distinctive
 
 THE CHURCH AND VANITY FAIR. ii 
 
 spirit, that laxity of conduct and shallowness of prin- 
 ciple would be found. 
 
 And this is the conclusion of the whole matter: 
 the Church as she shows herself in a history of 
 nearly two thousand years, has stood immovably 
 for a law that she cannot change nor compromise, 
 because it is not a human specific but a Divine reve- 
 lation; at no cost of loss or danger to herself can 
 she, or does she, admit modifications of that law, 
 whether in dealing publicly with the States and their 
 rulers, or privately with individuals in the con- 
 fessional. Where there is transgression of the law 
 she can only admit to reconciliation on repentance 
 and amendment, but where there is repentance she 
 is as ready to forgive as God Himself, and, like 
 Him, will break no bruised reed, will not remember 
 transgression for ever. She will make no demand 
 of fallen man that He does not make. She admits 
 them who have been wicked to her table, and is con- 
 tent, as He was, to be fleered at as a friend of pub- 
 licans and sinners. Where He whispers of hope 
 she will not force those who have been shamed to 
 despair. That pitiless function she leaves to the 
 world, that has as much pity now as it had in Jewry 
 when Christ walked there. 
 
 Men, not angels, are her charge, and she remem- 
 bers we are dust; not with loud yells, vindictive, does 
 she hound the fallen to utter destruction, but out of 
 sinners she fashions saints. The human dust, in her 
 hands, is built up into a man reflecting not the first 
 Adam but the second. And that is her real offence
 
 12 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 against the world: not that she would make sinners 
 of men, but saints; for it is an undying reproach to 
 the world that saints are possible in it. The exist- 
 ence of saints is an insult to a world that would make 
 Christ's law an allegory or a dream; and the 
 Church, that makes saints out of common, fallen 
 men, is the arch-offender. So they must call her 
 liar and hypocrite — since they would have nothing 
 genuine and sincere but corruption, nothing re,al but 
 evil. The Church is reviled and miscalled because 
 she affirms God's unchanging law to be always in 
 possession, and will not confess that any modern 
 change can make it obsolete or impracticable. 
 Tender and full of encouragement, as Christ was 
 Himself, to the imperfect, she insists on the possibil- 
 ity of His own counsels of perfection, and will not 
 have them explained away, or ruled out of date. 
 Therein lies the world's grievance against her: if 
 she would indeed teach men that every demand of 
 God can be evaded, every rule of Christian ethic be 
 dispensed, and that Mammon and God can be twin 
 masters, then would the world and Mammon love 
 her well: what an ally she would bel How soon 
 would all the race of man be Satan's, if only the 
 Church would be what her enemies pretend to 
 thi'nk she is! If Giant Pope really ruled in Vanity 
 Fair how light-hearted would the folk in the Fair 
 be; how free from chill misgiving — what com- 
 plaisant, amenable children of his they would all be- 
 come. 
 
 Does any bad Catholic pretend that he is bad
 
 THE CHURCH AND VANITY FAIR 13 
 
 by connivance of the Church? If he be leading a 
 life immoral, worldly, irreligious, in oblividn of 
 God's law, selfish, sensual, of mean ideals and hell- 
 ward purposes, does he whisper to any traducer of 
 the Church that it is all with her comfortable per- 
 mission? That such an ecclesiastical custom covers 
 his case, that such a Pope's decision allows his 
 licence, or that this or that priest assured him, in the 
 privacy of the confessional, that he had nothing to 
 fear? That, so long as he did what Church and 
 Pope and priest told him, he need not worry about 
 what God has told us all? Is there any liar bold 
 enough to pretend that any wretched Catholic has 
 made this avowal, and that such Catholi.cs are typ- 
 ical of the Church? 
 
 That there are bad Catholics we know as well as 
 we know that, out of the twelve the Master chose 
 from the whole human race to be His disciples, one 
 was a devil. But can even they themselves, dearly 
 as they, and all of us, would love to make false ex- 
 cuse, pretend that their badness is due to the Church, 
 and not in spite of her? Are they her docile chil- 
 dren or her rebels? Was the apostasy of Judas 
 Christ's fault? Was David called the man after 
 God's own heart because he was an adulterer, and 
 murdered Urias? Dcres all this sound too hotly? 
 I suppose an honest man is bound to keep quite cool 
 when he hears his mother dubbed harlot.
 
 PROGRESS AND PERFECTION 
 
 DIFFERENT sorts of accusations are 
 thrown at the Catholic Church by differ- 
 ent sorts of people; and the accusations 
 of one age are not always identical with those of 
 another. Thus, many of the calumnies of old- 
 fashioned Protestantism against Catholicity are no 
 longer much attended to by a society that has es- 
 caped almost as far from the Protestant stand- 
 point as it has from the Catholic: that the old re- 
 ligion of Christendom is honeycombed with super- 
 stition that society is prepared to believe without 
 subjecting itself to the ennui of proof; but it does 
 not think the point very interesting or important, 
 for, having made up what it is pleased to call its 
 mind that all Christianity is a moribund, if not de- 
 funct, superstition, it hardly finds it worth while to 
 consider closely invidious comparisons between one 
 form of the superstition and another. It may, in- 
 deed, and often does, take up the position that if 
 people are still quaint enough to go on believing in a 
 religion that teaches the Incarnation of God, the 
 Virginal Birth and the Resurrection of Christ, they 
 may as well go the whole hog, and believe all that 
 the Catholic Church teaches; and they perceive a 
 greater picturesqueness in the unmitigated ancient 
 
 14
 
 PROGRESS AND PERFECTION 15 
 
 faith of Rome than in the half-hearted compromise 
 of a Protestantism that accepts what they consider 
 impossibilities while jibbing at miracles, or accepts 
 miracles up to a certain date, and angrily discards 
 as impostures all similar phenomena subsequent to 
 the period when decent. God-fearing Protestant 
 miracles thought it time to stop taking place. 
 
 This attitude is on the increase among non-be- 
 lievers who are free from violent rancours against 
 supernatural religion, and content themselves with 
 a placid surprise that so primitive a foible should 
 survive In any shape; obsolete survivals are not, 
 they admit, uninteresting; and the more antique the 
 more curious are such reminders of a state of things 
 which these superior persons imagine to have 
 passed away for ever. 
 
 The attitude is not quite so respectful as it is 
 sometimes assumed by the more simple-minded 
 Catholic to be; he is apt to imagine thaf it implies 
 a sort of involuntary tribute to the Church, as 
 though those who adopt it were confessing that, 
 after all, there was something in her that extorted 
 their admira.tlon and compelled their respect. The 
 admiration, when there is any, is only what an 
 aesthetic socialist might feel for the fine ruins of a 
 feudal stronghold; the respect not much deeper than 
 a young graduate of London, who has just taken 
 honours in natural science, may feel called upon to 
 render to a septuagenarian Oxford don still irritat- 
 ing himself over a disputed reading in Theocritus. 
 It is not necessarily a proof of a wider mind, and
 
 1 6 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 may only evince a shallower feeling; it certainly 
 need not be taken as a sign of readiness to consider 
 the Church's claims on their merits, but may merely 
 express the conviction that such questions are settled 
 and done for — "Quaestio finita est, Romana dam- 
 nata est." 
 
 Such critics, then, as these will never fatigue 
 themselves by loud shoutings of the sort of hoary 
 accusation dear to the true Protestant heart: a 
 pother about sacraments or indulgences, purgatory 
 and saints, seems to them a storm in a tea-cup, and 
 they are sure the tea-cup itself is cracked and cannot 
 hold even the most mildly agitated milk and water. 
 And Gallio is apt to be a smooth-mannered fellow. 
 He does not noisily revile, nor call names that are 
 universally felt to be insulting. To scream and 
 vituperate is vulgar, and degrades the accuser. He 
 does not run amuck against wind mills. That is 
 foolish. But he accuses, too, though in the meas- 
 ured tone of dispassionate, because impregnable, 
 criticism. 
 
 Interesting as the venerable institution of Cath- 
 olicity is, striking as her objective personality un- 
 doubtedly remains, grandiose as have been the spec- 
 tacles with which she has decorated the stage of his- 
 tory, noble as have been many of her aims — far be- 
 fore the times as some of them clearly were — ex- 
 alted as was the mission she set herself, great as 
 was the part she once played in civilising the savage 
 nations that were too virile to assimilate so effete a 
 civilisation as that of the Roman Empire, sick and
 
 PROGRESS AND PERFECTION 17 
 
 dying, fine as were the ideals she displayed to man- 
 kind in comparison with any that had been pro- 
 mulgated before her time, she is, alas! an enemy to 
 Progress. She is the latter-day Canute, with hei 
 throne upon the shore of time, opposed to the on- 
 rush of a tide inexorably advancing to submerge 
 it; but, unlike Canute, forbidding its advance with 
 a fatuous sincere desire of being obeyed. Her 
 throne, indeed, was planted, as she avers, not upon 
 the low and shifting sand, but upon a rock — the In- 
 tensely significant, picturesque Peter-rock; but she is 
 unable to perceive that the rock itself (owing to 
 the erosion of time) is now below high-water mark, 
 and if she persists In remaining in her ancient seat 
 she must find herself overwhelmed. They profess 
 a half-regret: If only she would get up and run in- 
 land, leaving all her impedimenta behind — her dog- 
 mas and her weird claims, her fantastic fooleries, 
 that did well enough for a world in its fairy-story 
 stage, her baubles that pleased children who had not 
 got beyond coral-mumbling — she might fit herself In 
 with meek usefulness to some subordinate part in a 
 society that has still a good many poor members. 
 What could she do better than lay aside her old 
 arrogant part of heaven-sent teacher, and assume 
 the eminently practical function of State-provided 
 relieving officer? She has, they readily concede, "a 
 way wid her," and has seemed to understand how 
 to deal with pauperism better than her more en- 
 lighted successors, the administrators of poor laws. 
 When she ruled the roost poverty was not so crim-
 
 i8 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 inal nor so menacing as it is latterly become. Let 
 her lay down her triple crown and take office under 
 the beneficent masters who have paternally cut her 
 throat, and a wide sphere, unversed by tedious 
 puerilities of belief, will be opened for her grand- 
 motherly (for she is very old) and innocuous good 
 nature. 
 
 But she will not: so she is an enemy to Progress. 
 She sticks to her old claims, and clanks her old 
 chains, like the bothersome ghost she is — a ghost 
 with an immense body, which makes her abnormal 
 and inexcusable even among ghosts. She is dead 
 and will not be buried, but stalks about galvanically, 
 like a duck whose head was of so little account that 
 she cannot realise it has been cut off. The Papacy 
 is her head, and it was cut off in 1870, not to tire 
 oneself with earlier decapitations. Her behaviour 
 is more scandalous than the duck's, for the body ran 
 back to the head, and refused to admit the fact of 
 decapitation, maintaining the same phenomena of 
 life as if no operation at all had taken place. That 
 is the worst of the Catholic Church, it is a phenom- 
 enon, and persists in a world that can only away with 
 phenomena that are natural or preternatural, and 
 finds its delicacy outraged by the naked supernat- 
 ural. The whole spirit of the age is progressive, 
 and the Catholic Church is the only considerable in- 
 stitution that refuses to take its colour from the 
 age, adopt the current axioms, discarding her own, 
 and proclaim as her objects those which the rest of
 
 PROGRESS AND PERFECTION 19 
 
 the world acknowledges to be the only ones worth 
 aiming at. 
 
 This is their accusation : that the Church is effete, 
 because out of touch with the aspirations of so- 
 ciety; and really mischievous because, so far as her 
 power goes, she retards progress and is in oppo- 
 sition: to it. Like some other accusations against 
 her, it is false in statement, but witnesses to a mis- 
 apprehension of a truth that exists. The aspir- 
 ations of the age may be discordant from those of 
 the Church, and yet she is no enemy to Progress. 
 For progress she has always been working, and is 
 working still, over all the world, in the heart of 
 each of her children who will listen to her urgent 
 voice. 
 
 If they who bring the charge could arraign her 
 before their tribunal they would smoothly warn her 
 that she was on her defence. 
 
 *'But you have no counsel: to that you are 
 entitled." 
 
 "I need none. He whose Voice I echo in this 
 world is the Prince whose name is called Councillor. 
 It suffices me. But there is a difficulty: our lan- 
 guage is not the same. I know what yours 
 means, but you do not understand mine. You ac- 
 cuse me of desiring to bar Human Progress." 
 
 "Do you deny it?" 
 
 "What do you mean by Progress?" 
 
 "Movement." 
 
 "In what direction?"
 
 20 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 "Forward of course." 
 
 "Is not all movement forward in some direction? 
 Does not every step carry him who moves towards 
 something, and is not it, therefore, a movement for- 
 ward towards that thing, whatever it is?" 
 
 "You are quibbling. Can you really not under- 
 stand us?" 
 
 "I can understand you; but I want you to express 
 your meaning." 
 
 "We mean, then, by Progress, movement for- 
 ward towards the betterment of society." 
 
 "I have been toiling for its betterment during 
 nearly nineteen centuries." 
 
 "You used to do so. We know all you have done 
 in the past. It was much. But your clock has 
 stopped, and its hands stand still." 
 
 "They point to-day as they have pointed always." 
 
 "Whither?" 
 
 "To Eternity." 
 
 (A sHght movement of Impatience on the part of 
 the Examiners). 
 
 " 'Eternity.' But Eternity Is not our affair." 
 
 "No. It Is mine." 
 
 "Our business is with men, and they belong to 
 Time." 
 
 "They belong to Eternity: a little bit of Time be- 
 longs to them — not by right, but by gift. It is lent 
 to them to work with — while it is called to-day." 
 
 "Ah, 'to-dayM That is more practical. It is 
 with to-day we concern ourselves." 
 
 "And so do I : and with yesterday — for warning
 
 PROGRESS AND PERFECTION 21 
 
 and for learning; and with to-morrow — for hope." 
 "You deal too much in hope — and promises." 
 "They are not mine. He who makes them keeps 
 
 them. It is my office to remind of them, lest they 
 
 be forgotten." 
 
 "You speak of God. It is of man we wish to 
 
 speak. We leave God to you." 
 
 "But I cannot keep Him to myself; He does not 
 
 belong to me, but I to Him, and all men are His: if 
 
 I tried to keep Him to myself I should be a thief 
 
 like you." 
 
 "We do not keep Him to ourselves." 
 
 "No. You steal Him from the world, as far as 
 
 you can ; not for yourselves, but to destroy Him — if 
 
 you could." 
 
 "You wander from the point — you are very old, 
 
 and age is discursive." 
 
 "My point is always the same — God; and I have 
 
 never wandered from it. You call me old because 
 
 I have lived long; I was alive nearly two thousand 
 
 years before you, and I shall be alive when you are 
 
 dead. But old age is feeble, and has dull hearing 
 
 and dim sight, and has no fertility, and chill feet, 
 
 and palsied hands — " 
 
 "You will wander. It w^as of Human Progress 
 
 we were to speak." 
 
 "And I told you that you could not understand 
 
 me, though I can understand you better than you 
 
 seem able to express yourselves." 
 
 "You talk arrogantly — an old fault of yours." 
 ''It sounds arrogant, in the ears of them who are
 
 22 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 not certain, when one who is certain says what she 
 
 means." 
 
 ''We are certain that you. oppose yourself (in- 
 effectually, of course) to the progress of man- 
 kind." 
 
 "I reminded you how I helped it — " 
 
 "Yes, and we admitted it. That point was con- 
 ceded. Let us get on, it is tiresome arguing round 
 and round." 
 
 "I did not know you were arguing. I thought 
 you only seemed to be asserting." 
 
 "Come! You keep harking back to the past; it 
 is excusable, for you belong to the past — " 
 
 "I must interrupt you: part of the past belonged 
 to me, for I lived in it, and helped to fashion it 
 when it was the present. But I am alive still, and 
 have my share in the present that now is." 
 
 "No. That is our contention — you turn your 
 back on the present, and abdicate it. You do not 
 belong to the living world." 
 
 "Then I am dead. And you are wasting your 
 breath on a corpse ! I thought you said you were 
 practical. Are you a sort of spirit-rappers, fooling 
 in a dark room with bogies?" 
 
 "Now you are flippant. In elderly persons it is 
 more comely to be serious." 
 
 "I am cheerful. You are dismal — it is the fash- 
 Ion of your age, and I do not wonder." 
 
 "We have nothing to be dismal about. We, the 
 heirs of all the ages — " 
 
 "But the Inheritance of the ages you discard.
 
 PROGRESS AND PERFECTION 23 
 
 Heirs who made themselves penniless are often 
 anxious and melancholy." 
 
 "That is nonsense. We have all that the ex- 
 perience of untold ages has accumulated." 
 
 "Except God." 
 
 "Why will you keep bringing Him in? You 
 seem to have only one idea." 
 
 "That is so. But it comprehends everything." 
 
 "We must agree to differ. How you elude the 
 point! Human Progress: if only you could stick 
 to it." 
 
 "I am not its bar. It is only one of the jewels in 
 my crown." 
 
 "You claim sovereignty still! You prate of 
 
 crowns." 
 
 "My crown is not regal, but vice-regal — " 
 
 "Ah, we see what you would be at! Back again 
 to the old tedious point. Will you answer our ac- 
 cusation?" 
 
 "Formulate it." 
 
 "That you are the arch-foe of Human Progress." 
 
 "That is not formulation, but repetition; that may 
 be tedious without having precisely a point." 
 
 "You oppose Liberty." 
 
 "Do I? Whence came the idea? Who first 
 taught the world that slave and sovereign had to 
 render the same account before the same tribunal?" 
 
 "The past again! But who, in the present state 
 of things, claims that every and all, and every man 
 in it, is subservient to the same irresponsible author- 
 ity?"
 
 24 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 "God." 
 
 "That name again 1 But it is commonly believed 
 that you claim this subservience for yourself." 
 
 "Commonly believed! Vulgarly believed, by the 
 ignorant and vulgar. Are vulgar beliefs so sacred 
 to you? I claim nothing for myself but everything 
 for my King — Whose viceroy in this world I am." 
 
 "You claim that every intellect should bow to your 
 decree." 
 
 "God claims that the mind of every man who 
 knows a little should bow to His that knows all." 
 
 "We cannot deal with you while you identify your- 
 self with Him. Can you not answer for yourself?" 
 
 "I have no self apart from Him. My existence 
 depends on His. I have no independent being. I 
 am His Church; if He is not, I am nothing; that is 
 why you call me dead — because you imagine He is 
 abolished." 
 
 "Subtleties!" 
 
 "Simplicities! You have always accused me of 
 subtlety. It is my simplicity that disconcerts you — 
 and always will. That the Church has no inde- 
 pendent existence, but depends on God's is what 
 annoys you. I am, only because He is; and, since 
 you want to say He is not, and never was, I am the 
 most unpardonable thing in a world that pretends 
 that He is nowhere. If I were what you say I am, 
 I should have ceased long ago." 
 
 "Such as you are, you are a fact — " 
 
 "Certainly. A witness, too; and a witness that 
 can never be cajoled, nor silenced, nor ignored.
 
 PROGRESS AND PERFECTION 25 
 
 That is my crime. You cannot disbelieve God and 
 suffer me patiently." 
 
 "You talk of ideas that are superannuated. But, 
 though you, too, are superannuated, there you are." 
 
 "You mean here." 
 
 "Very well, here. You always loved fiddling 
 with words." 
 
 "On the contrary, my habit is not to let words 
 fiddle away truth: I will not suffer them to skip 
 about, but bind them to a meaning, and see what it 
 comes to. You say I am here; that is your real 
 grievance against me. You know I am alive, and 
 you know 1 could not be if God were dead. Ex- 
 tinct monarchies have no viceroys. You arc angry 
 because you pretend God is gone, and you cannot 
 pretend I am extinct. I am His moon, and my re- 
 flected light is intolerable to you because you run 
 about saying the sun is quenched. My existence 
 is offensive to you because it is an incorruptible 
 witness to the survival of a Lawgiver Whose laws 
 you do not want to obey." 
 
 "We bow to the inexorable law of Human 
 Progress." 
 
 "If it be an inexorable law it must be obeyed 
 without your help. Your interference and assis- 
 tance must be superfluous and ofllicious — as if you 
 were to make it your business to enforce the laws of 
 gravitation." 
 
 "You are garrulous — like all old persons. 
 The point is that you set yourself against His law." 
 
 "If there be such law, who made it?"
 
 26 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 "We know what you would be at: but it is self- 
 existent." 
 
 "Then it must be divine. Perhaps you worship 
 it. If so, it is unfortunate that your god lacks the 
 attribute of omnipotence." 
 
 "Perhaps it does not lack it." 
 
 "If it be omnipotent the law of Human Progress 
 can lose nothing by the opposition you attribute to 
 me. 
 
 "Does your God lose nothing by our not obeying 
 Him?" 
 
 "He has all things." 
 
 "Except our obedience and recognition." 
 
 "Your obedience and recognition which do not 
 exist are not things. Non-existences are nothing." 
 
 "That is how you love to talk. Will you or will 
 you not, say whether you do oppose Human 
 Progress." 
 
 "I know that I have never opposed it. But you 
 have never yet told me what you mean by it." 
 
 "Yes, we have. We have told you we mean by 
 it the betterment of man." 
 
 "To make man better means to make him more 
 good. That is my endless task." 
 
 "Oh, 'good!' You are therej, are you? We 
 know pretty well what you mean by good — " 
 
 "You may well know. I have never made any 
 secret of it. But you speak slightingly when you 
 talk of goodness — " 
 
 "Of your sort of goodness." 
 
 "What is your sort?"
 
 PROGRESS AND PERFECTION 27 
 
 "We do not hold a man good who merely says 
 many prayers — " 
 
 "Nor do I." 
 
 "You make a great deal of It." 
 
 "I think a great deal of it. It is a help towards 
 being good." 
 
 "You think so. We do not. We think a man 
 good who fulfils every duty — " 
 
 "Your good men must be few." 
 
 "Especially all his duties towards mankind." 
 
 "Every man is himself a part of mankind. Has 
 he any duties towards the rest of it?" 
 
 "We never said so. You try to put words in 
 our mouths — " 
 
 "No. I am only trying to fit some meaning to 
 your words. What are a man's duties towards 
 himself?" 
 
 "They are many: to be sober, for Instance, and 
 honest and truthful." 
 
 "They are his duty. Why?" 
 
 "Do you not know?" 
 
 "Very well. But, if you know too, why not 
 say?" 
 
 "Insobriety, dishonesty, and lies are sins against 
 society." 
 
 "Sins against one's neighbour. That is true. 
 But we were talking of a man's duty to himself. 
 Mind, I am well aware these things are sins against 
 a man's self. I am glad you think so, too. But 
 you have merely alluded to their being offences 
 against society, as they certainly are. And I should
 
 28 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 like to hear why you believe them offences against a 
 man's self." 
 
 "Because every man should be a blameless 
 member of society." 
 
 "That seems rather because of his duty towards 
 society." 
 
 (One Examiner) : "Man has no existence 
 except as a unit in society." 
 
 (Another Examiner, to him) : "Take care, 1 
 am afraid she will catch hold of that; besides I am 
 not sure if it is true." 
 
 (She, to the first Examiner) : "If that be so I 
 do not see how any individual man can have private 
 duties to himself." 
 
 (First Examiner) : "In this way. Each self 
 belongs to society and the betterment of society 
 involves the betterment of self." 
 
 "That still leaves what you call betterment a 
 public duty. I cannot see quite where your private 
 duties come in." 
 
 "No, there arc no private duties. Every duty is 
 public, to the body of mankind." 
 
 "If private duties do not exist, I do not perceive 
 how private sins can exist. Is there any harm in 
 private, undetected drunkenness?" 
 
 "Of course. The man would be a private black- 
 guard; if all society consisted of private blackguards 
 it would be a blackguard society." 
 
 "I quite agree with you. But if a man should 
 happen to see no harm in being drunk, so long as no 
 one knows and no one is annoyed?"
 
 PROGRESS AND PERFECTION ig 
 
 "That does not alter facts. He is a blackguard 
 all the same." 
 
 *T agree again. You mean he breaks a law, and 
 the fact that he is not detected does not alter the 
 other fact that the law is broken." 
 
 "Precisely." 
 
 "But who made the law of sobriety?" 
 
 "Ah! you would, would you? We know what 
 you are driving at. But the law of sobriety is a 
 law of nature." 
 
 "Is nature conscious? I do not understand how 
 what is impersonal can be; nor how what is un- 
 conscious can enact laws. Perhaps I do not under- 
 stand what you mean by nature." 
 
 "Very likely. Nature is the whole universe and 
 the laws that govern it." 
 
 "You identify the universe and its laws. The 
 imposition of a law implies superiority, not identity; 
 nothing can be superior to itself." 
 
 "You are striving to entangle us In metaphysics. 
 We wish to talk plain common sense." 
 
 "I wish you would. Will your common sense 
 mind explaining how Nature has laws made by her- 
 self?" 
 
 "It is the simple fact." 
 
 "To say that the point in discussion is a simple 
 fact may be true or false, but It is not explanation. 
 You say the laws of nature are made by nature." 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Then she obeys them merely because she choses, 
 and is free to disobey them."
 
 so DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 "Nature cannot Infringe her laws." 
 
 "Then they are not hers, but are Imposed by a 
 power higher than hers. No self-made law is 
 obligatory; it is merely a resolution of self-guidance. 
 If what you call laws of nature have no obligation 
 on nature, they cannot bind the different parts of 
 which she is a whole. Mankind is a part, and each 
 man Is a part of mankind; if there be no law but 
 that of nature, he, a part of it, may say, 'This law of 
 mine Is tiresome. I dispense myself from it. It is 
 only a resolution of my own, and to keep it bores 
 me'." 
 
 "Now you are arguing for immorality." 
 
 "No I am not. I am stating facts. If morality 
 be not inherent it implies a law to enforce it. If 
 it be inherent there can be no immorality, for by 
 inherent necessity morality will subsist impregnably 
 uninfluenced by any person's conduct. If, however, 
 it be not inherent, but depends on correspondence 
 to a law, then the law must have a sanction higher 
 than that of the Individual, or of the nature which 
 he represents, of which he is a part and a constituent. 
 If there really be a law of nature, it must be enacted 
 by something higher than nature, else she need not 
 obey it. If by laws of nature you mean laws enacted 
 by nature herself, then man. If he be bound to obey, 
 Is not a part of nature, but something lower than 
 her, and therefore distinct from her." 
 
 "We are getting tired. Will you flatly say 
 whether you care for Human Progress? We 
 know you do not, that you dislike, suspect.
 
 PROGRESS AND PERFECTION 31 
 
 and fear It. Plead guilty or not guilty." 
 
 "You expect me to formulate the charge against 
 myself. Your flatulent talk has never defined 
 Human Progress. I will define your meaning for 
 you. Your object is to make men more comfort- 
 able." 
 
 "Well." 
 
 "I cannot congratulate you on your success. 
 Comfort is your ideal, not happiness. But even 
 comfort ('scorned of devils,' as your poet sings), 
 how much have you achieved in giving it? Is it 
 because men are more comfortable than ever that 
 they kill themselves more than ever? Your idea 
 of supreme discomfort is poverty. When was there 
 more of it? My object is not yours. I do not 
 confound comfort and happiness. I can gild dis- 
 comfort and make it happy — by the golden rays of 
 indestructible Hope. You scorn hope, and can 
 see nothing beyond the present; and how your 
 votaries complain of it. Your fatuous endeavour 
 is to provide sufficient comfort to go round, no 
 matter who suffers. Mine is to lead all men to 
 Perfection. This is my business: by a perfect 
 example I woo all who will be brave to an ideal 
 beyond your highest, wildest flight. You offer a 
 few instalments of dull comfort; I summon all to 
 Perfection — " 
 
 (The Examiner, laughing and interrupting) : 
 "Perfection!!!" 
 
 (A rustle and twitter of giggling merriment, 
 much nudging and shrugging. . . .)
 
 OF PREACHING AND PRACTICE 
 
 CATHOLICS who live in a non-Catholic 
 country as we do in England, must, if they 
 be worth the name of Catholic, not only 
 desire very earnestly the conversion of their non- 
 Catholic neighbours, but be much preoccupied by 
 the thought of it. Converts may, naturally, feel 
 this preoccupation with a special intensity, because 
 those of whom they are thinking, for whom they 
 are so constantly praying are their own flesh and 
 blood — the parents by whom God gave them life 
 itself, the brothers and sisters with whom they 
 played in childhood, husband even or wife. Not 
 to yearn for their conversion would seem, in their 
 case, a lack of natural affection. And remembering 
 by what roads they themselves arrived in the City 
 of God's Peace they cannot but feel eager to show 
 those roads to the dear ones they have left wander- 
 ing outside. So that, to the captious Catholic of 
 dull sympathies and sluggish imagination, they 
 sometimes appear to "think too much of Protes- 
 tants." 
 
 But though the convert may have this eagerness 
 for the conversion of those still alien to the Church 
 in a peculiar degree and though in him it may have 
 
 32
 
 OF PREACHING AND PRACTICE 33 
 
 a special vehemence of expression, no Catholic who 
 really cures for his faith and knows the treasure he 
 has in it can be at all indifferent in the matter. And 
 the more earnest a Catholic is about his religion, the 
 farther will he be from anything like indifference. 
 Accordingly, we find that some of those who in 
 England have been most eager and devoted in the 
 work of the spread of the Faith have been what are 
 called "old Catholics," whose own kith and kin and 
 ancestors had always been Catholic. 
 
 These have been willing to bear constantly In mind 
 the missionary character of the Catholic Church In 
 modern England. They have warmly welcomed 
 every prudent proposal that seemed In any way 
 calculated to promote a knowledge of the Faith 
 among non-Catholics; their own labour they have 
 not spared; and they have displayed the most 
 singular readiness of sympathy in their endeavour to 
 prejudices of those outside, 
 understand and fit themselves to the ideas or even 
 
 Without pausing upon great and famous names, 
 like those of Wiseman and Ullathorne, we may 
 truthfully say that the work of the conversion of 
 England up to the present time has largely been 
 carried on by Irish priests and Irish nuns in England 
 In spite of the extreme divergence of natural 
 sympathies and feelings beween them and the Anglo- 
 Saxon people with whom they have had to deal. 
 And nothing could more marvellously illustrate the 
 constraining force of grace, the wonderful results 
 that the sheer love of God, and of man for God's
 
 34 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 sake can effect: for the national difference of 
 character, apart altogether from accidental dif- 
 ferences such as occur in the mere region of political 
 ideas, is, as I think, much greater between an Irish- 
 man and an Englishman than that between an 
 Englishman and a German, or an Englishman and a 
 member of one of the Latin races. 
 
 In spite, I say, of this natural divergence, almost 
 antipathy, of character, I have never known an Irish 
 priest in England who did not love the English 
 members of his flock and was not loved by them in 
 return with just as true a filial devotion as if he had 
 been an Anglo-Saxon like themselves. 
 
 Accordingly at the present moment, when the 
 bulk of the Catholic clergy In England is still Irish 
 by birth, or by name and descent, every plan or 
 movement for what is called the conversion of Eng- 
 land is welcomed and adopted by the clergy with 
 untiring hope and a self-sacrificing readiness to lend 
 their own, already hugely overtaxed, labours to it. 
 Nor, on the whole, are they badly seconded by the 
 laity; for it is hardly fair to expect the laity 
 to behave like missionary priests: and a great pro- 
 portion of the Catholic laity in England do seem to 
 realize that their position too has, in a country like 
 this, some missionary character. 
 
 It is not at all my present purpose to speak of the 
 various organizations we have for the spread of 
 Catholic truth — or. In other words, for the conver- 
 sion of England; I do not want to detail them, or 
 express at large the admiration I feel for the noble
 
 OF PREACHING AND PRACTICE 35 
 
 work they are doing. I merely wish to recognise 
 their existence, and record my full sense of their 
 necessity, to rejoice in all they are doing and bid 
 God-speed to them, one and all. 
 
 Apart from any such societies there is another 
 sort of work that is being done for the spread of 
 Catholic truth — the work of preaching and of writ- 
 ing; sometimes by the same brilliant and zealous 
 men, though sometimes the preaching is done by one 
 set of Catholic apologists, and the writing by 
 another. In both cases it is being done very well. 
 The pity is that the Catholic sermons are not heard 
 and the Catholic books not read by more of those 
 for whose sake in especial they are preached and 
 written. We can only help both preacher and 
 writer by our prayers that, by what men call acci- 
 dent, more hearers from outside may accrue to the 
 preachers and more readers to the writers; and by 
 our prayers that God Himself may guide those 
 who make the sermons and the books, that they 
 may say and write what may best help to set out the 
 beauty and truth of the Catholic faith and ideal of 
 human life. 
 
 This much is put down here lest it should for a 
 moment seem as though I thought any of these 
 things, the societies, the sermons, or the books and 
 writings, anything short of indispensable. We need 
 not less of them all, but more and more. Yet there 
 is something else. The ultimate cause of any con- 
 version to the Catholic Church has lain, not in any 
 society, in any preacher, in any writer, but in the
 
 36 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 truth of that expressed by the society, the sermon, 
 or the book. In other words, It is the Church her- 
 self that converts outsiders, not her exponents. If 
 the Church were not what the society, or the sermon, 
 or the book pretended, it would be found out, and 
 conversions would not follow on any organization, 
 or any eloquence, or any brilHance of literary 
 exposition. 
 
 Heresy and unbelief have decried and defamed 
 the Church: the enquirer may take note of what this 
 or that society urges upon his attention, of what 
 such a preacher argues, what such a book pleads, but 
 he goes behind all of them, and considers for himself 
 the evidence provided by what, in fact, Catholics 
 are made by the Catholic Church to be. 
 
 There are converts, no doubt, who have been, so 
 to speak, converted by their reading. In their studies; 
 by weighing of historical, philosophical, and ethical 
 proofs and arguments; by whom the past is called 
 up to bear witness, from whom the august story of 
 the Church's Influence, of her claims and of her 
 defence of them, has been the guiding beacon that 
 led them to the City on the Hill; and such converts 
 have been among the most Influential. Their 
 conviction has convinced others In turn. But they 
 have never been, or can be, the majority; and in- 
 calculably beneficial as their conversions have been, 
 directly or indirectly, not only to those under the 
 direct Influence of their personality or of their writ- 
 ing and preaching, but upon the general estimation 
 of the Catholic body by those outside it, there,
 
 OF PREACHING AND PRACTICE 37 
 
 remains the fact that there is a class much more 
 numerous than the reading class, and a non-Catholic 
 public that never enters a Catholic church or hears a 
 Catholic preacher, incomparably more numerous 
 than that mere percentage that does occasionally 
 hear a Catholic sermon, and may, as it were, at hap- 
 hazard read some Catholic work. 
 
 By what means, humanly speaking, are such 
 people to be brought to the consideration of the 
 claims of Catholic truth? On what, in other words, 
 can we ground any human hopes of their conversion 
 — since we can hardly be content if only the student 
 or the religious expert is to be converted? 
 
 The answer lies in the consideration of the 
 Influences that have drawn such people, in the first 
 instance at all events, that are drawing many such, 
 every day, up and down the country, to give the 
 necessary initial attention to the claims of the 
 Catholic Church; for until that attention be caught 
 nothing further can be done. Apart, then, alto- 
 gether from the more intellectual type of convert, 
 whose own study brings him to recognise Catholic 
 truth, it is certain that immense numbers, to whom 
 religious study appeals as little as any other study, 
 have become Catholics by the force, in the first 
 instance, at any rate, of Catholic example. Such 
 people have had Catholic friends, relations, or 
 acquaintances; and, wholly without knowledge, as 
 they have been, of anything like dogma or of 
 history, they have been able to perceive in the 
 Catholics they knew something that i.iade them
 
 38 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 aware of a genuineness, a reality, in the religion of 
 those Catholics that was novel in their experience. 
 The Catholics themselves, hard-working, poor, with 
 little leisure and perhaps with little taste for any- 
 thing like study, may not have been experts in the 
 theory of their religion, or of its history; neverthe- 
 less, they did know what they believed, what 
 they did not believe, and what they might not be- 
 lieve; their faith was not vague, halting, wavering 
 or inconsistent, but compact and definite, clear and 
 capable of intelligible statement. And, further- 
 more, their practice was unmistakably directed by 
 their belief. Their religion, while resting on a cer- 
 tain and articulate faith, expressed its conviction of 
 professed truths in a consistency of conduct and con- 
 science, also somewhat novel to these observers; for 
 many an observer, grossly ignorant himself even of 
 elemental religious truth, is shrewd enough in 
 recognizing reality and consistency. 
 
 I believe that if the priests who receive into our 
 Church, as they are daily doing all over England, the 
 unlettered converts I am trying to describe, would 
 give their evidence, it would be found to support 
 what has just been urged: that is to say, that the 
 majority of such converts were first drawn to con- 
 sider Catholicity at all by the example of the Cath- 
 olics they knew — of their own unlettered class. 
 That example, the visible instances within their own 
 rather narrow experience, first led these non-Cath- 
 olics to surmise that the Catholic Faith does some- 
 thing for its members that no other religion does.
 
 OF PREACHING AND PRACTICE 39 
 
 "What struck them first was the easily-noted fact that 
 these Catholic neighbours of theirs cared much more 
 for their Church than any other people they knew 
 seemed to care for theirs. They perceived in Cath- 
 olics an affection for Catholicity that was singular 
 in their experience. For, among the masses belong- 
 ing nominally to the Established Religion of Eng- 
 land, any thing that could be called personal affec- 
 tion for the Church of England is very unusual: the 
 most of them would be inclined to give no stronger 
 reason for belonging to it than that they did belong 
 to it, and might as well belong to it as anything else. 
 And the other masses, perhaps more really numer- 
 ous, that belong to the various Nonconformist 
 bodies, seem to do less out of a peculiar love to 
 their own sect than out of a dislike or suspicion of 
 the Establishment; their adhesion seems to have 
 chiefly a negative, rather than a positive, significance: 
 they belong there because they refuse to belong 
 somewhere else. When most heated it is not with 
 love for their own body but with anger against, or 
 disapproval of, the body from which they seceded. 
 Of the beauty and sweetness of their own partic- 
 ular Free Church, of its credentials and Its noble 
 history, they have little to say in comparison with 
 what they have to bring in accusation against the 
 elder heresy from which they broke away: its dead- 
 ness, Erastlanism, worldliness, unspirituality, tyr- 
 anny, or corruption. The value of their own sect 
 is rather urged comparatively than positively, and 
 the measure of their fondness for It Is chiefly the
 
 40 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 degree of their animosity against that whence they 
 cast themselves loose. And this attitude expresses 
 Itself very well in vehemence and invective, but is 
 much less eloquent in eulogy; It finds itself warm and 
 glib in criticism, but more chilly in the language of 
 love. 
 
 And such observers as I am trying to describe, 
 shrewd though not much lettered or expert, can fully 
 note this, and can contrast it with the positive affec- 
 tion of Catholics, simple as themselves, for their 
 own Church. The Catholics, they perceive, have a 
 love for their religion which is not merely compara- 
 tive; they love their Church for what she is, not sim- 
 ply because she is not some other body that they dis- 
 like and have a grudge against: they would much 
 rather talk of the glories of the Church than of the 
 failure of other religions to achieve such glories. 
 If our observer sometimes begins to tell himself that 
 his Catholic friend seems a little disposed to brag of 
 the greatness of his Church, he also suspects that 
 the other religionists are not so modest but what 
 they would be equally inclined to boast of the glories 
 of their sect if they were equally able to state in what 
 those glories consisted; whereas they appear some- 
 what Inclined to leave those splendours to the imag- 
 ination of their hearer — duly inflamed by abuse of 
 the counsel on the other side. 
 
 If, he is able to perceive, his Catholic friends do 
 assume a somewhat lofty tone in talking of the won- 
 ders of the Catholic Church, they at least are ready 
 to say what those wonders are; they have a long list
 
 OF PREACHING AND PRACTICE 41 
 
 of actual possessions to detail, and the spiritual 
 riches of the Catholic Church do not merely consist 
 in the spiritual poverty of the rival religions: if 
 there were no rival bodies the Catholic Church 
 would evidently be not a penny the poorer; but 
 where would the magnificence of Nonconformity be 
 if there were no Church of England? 
 
 Our shrewd and simple observer confesses that, 
 if the Catholic also dislikes the schismatic religions, 
 it is obviously because, in his estimation, they have 
 intervened to deprive Christians of their heirloom 
 in all that should have been theirs in the Church; 
 whereas the schismatics abhor the Church, not for 
 having stolen something away, but for keeping intact 
 what they hoped to have destroyed; for insisting on 
 giving to men what they have assured mankind it 
 does not In the least require. And our observer 
 notes that all these things that the Catholics still 
 have, which their Church goes on giving them, un- 
 perturbed by the outsider's cry that they are useless 
 and mischievous, are highly valued by them who 
 still have them, and do, somehow, make them Chrlst- 
 tians of a more distinctively Christian quality, and 
 give them an unmistakable character of supernat- 
 ural, definite, unwavering, unworldly, unpagan re- 
 ligion that is not elsewhere observable. He per- 
 ceives that a Catholic is, at all events, not at all hke 
 a rationalist, an unbeliever, or a decorously-dressed 
 heathen; that Jesus Christ is to him God and law; 
 that fashions in ideas do not send him peering about 
 in search of principles; that on the voyage of Hfe lie
 
 42 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 has his place in an ancient but not untrusted boat, 
 his pilot, and his chart; that he does not stand knee- 
 deep in the surf begging it to abstain from submerg- 
 ing him, nor clutching hold of every mass of drift- 
 wood, weed, or wreckage, and begging it to be his 
 vehicle some-whither. 
 
 It will be noted that allusion has so far been made 
 to two classes or grades of converts — those who, 
 before joining the Church, have made considerable 
 study of religious and ecclesiastical questions, and 
 those who have made very little, being in this latter 
 case the sort of people who are not in the way of 
 study of any kind. There are, of course, interme- 
 diate classes. There are the moderately educated, 
 and with these also the first impulse towards the 
 Church has often sprung from observation of Cath- 
 olics, and the influences just described have affected 
 them in the same manner. Moving in a somewhat 
 higher social class, the Catholics they have known 
 have been better educated, and perhaps have been 
 able to give a more explicit account of their religion, 
 its creeds and its credentials. Nevertheless, it has 
 not been by what they have been able to say that 
 their non-Catholic friends have been drawn to give 
 some serious and respectful attention to Catholicity, 
 so much as by what the non-Catholics have perceived 
 them to be; it is as examples of Catholicity that they 
 have been mainly influential. Where the Catholic 
 is of absolutely first-rate quality this influence is very 
 great indeed; but the influence is considerable even 
 in the case of quite an ordinary Catholic, provided
 
 OF PREACHING AND PRACTICE 43 
 
 he be a genuine, practising Catholic at all. There 
 is something In this latter also which shows him to be 
 markedly unlike the nominal Christian, and like 
 nothing else except his fellow-Catholics. And It Is 
 plainly apparent that all that is best In him is due 
 to the fact of his religion; it is not attributable to 
 merely personal qualities, and cannot be mistaken 
 for the effect of individual character. An outside 
 observer soon notes that, with Catholics, the more 
 Catholic they are the better they are; and this he 
 does not perceive in the case of members of other 
 religious bodies; whence he concludes that there Is 
 something in Catholicity that tends to excellence in 
 its members. So strongly does this principle Impress 
 itself upon him that, afterwards, you will find him 
 little disposed to accuse the Church of the faults of 
 bad Catholics; for he has come to know that the 
 more faulty they are the less are they under the in- 
 fluence of their faith. Nevertheless, it remains 
 true that If he had, in the first instance, been so un- 
 fortunate as to come across only bad Catholics, he 
 would have been very little drawn to any respectful 
 consideration of Catholicity. He might have tacitly 
 assumed them to be ordinary specimens of what the 
 Church makes of her children; as it is, he takes 
 them for bad specimens. Even here, however, It 
 is fair to remark that many a very Imperfect Cath- 
 olic, of irregular life and lax practice of his religion, 
 does somehow bear witness not merely against him- 
 self but In favour of his religion; against himself by 
 being what he is; In favour of his neglected faith by
 
 44 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 oddly showing what it would do for him If he would 
 let it. Until he has lost his faith altogether, even 
 the careless Catholic has commonly something about 
 him that reminds us of the spiritual inheritance he 
 is wasting; however dormant or ill-treated, there is 
 in him a supernatural sense that will often strike a 
 brother-scapegrace. 
 
 All that I have been trying to say comes, then, 
 to this : that it is the Church herself that converts, in 
 innumerable instances, rather than any eloquence of 
 a preacher, or any arguments of a writer, or any 
 efforts of a society. It is the Inherent quality of 
 Catholicism that arrests the observer, and disposes 
 him to consider the other evidences of its truth. 
 
 From this It Is not at all intended to deduce the 
 maxim that we are to seem as good as possible; that 
 we are to behave smugly and pretend that Catholics 
 are all good; that all the professors of any rehgion 
 have ever been exemplary. I suspect that some 
 harm is done by the over-eager zeal of some good 
 people who will never admit that a Catholic has 
 been seriously at fault. Nobody's eyes are opened 
 by our trying to throw dust in them, however loyal 
 our intention may be, and to try is really not an 
 overflow of faith but a defect of it. The Church 
 has nothing to lose by the whole truth being known; 
 it is the blindness of those outside she has to heal, 
 not any keenness of their scrutiny. Catholic dirty 
 linen, it Is urged by weaker brethren, should never 
 be washed In public; that Is really a question of 
 taste, and dirty linen anywhere is obnoxious to a
 
 OF PREACHING AND PRACTICE 45 
 
 taste that Is refined. But what Is of substantial 
 consequence Is that there should be as little dirty 
 linen as possible to need washing, and that depends 
 not on history but on ourselves. In other words, 
 the quality of the Catholic body depends upon Its 
 members ; let them see to it. That Is every Catholic 
 man's share In the conversion of the non-Catholic 
 world. Some may write, some may preach, some 
 may organise, but all must be; and on what we are 
 will rest the conclusion of the outside world as to 
 the effects of Catholicity upon the Church's children. 
 That Is why I would urge the general recognition 
 of Catholics that the conversion of England, or of 
 any non-Catholic society, will not really be effected 
 by preaching, or writing, or organising, though each 
 is necessary, and an obedience that we owe to Our 
 Lord's mandate; but by the Church being what she 
 is; and our own share In proving what she Is, must 
 He in making ourselves what she wishes us to be. 
 Where, In any given region, the Church has suffered 
 real loss, apart from material loss — as of endow- 
 ment, patronage, establishment, etc. — her members 
 In that region can hardly be excused from their share 
 of responsibility for the evil; for though attacks 
 come from without, and no excellence of the 
 Church's children anywhere can disarm real malice 
 and enmity, those attacks can only wound In material 
 things, so long as the real substantial quality of the 
 Catholic body in any region Is what it ought to be. 
 If we could suppose a region where the general 
 quality of the Catholic body had fallen beneath
 
 46 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 itself, there, Indeed, would the Church be liable to 
 suffer grievous wounds in that one of her members. 
 The Church herself Is Indeed Indefectible, and we 
 have Christ's promise that the gates of hell shall 
 never prevail against her; but He has not promised 
 that they shall not prevail against the unfaithful 
 individual who, by disloyalty or failure to use the 
 graces held for him in trust by the Church, abdicates 
 his own share in the promise; and, in like manner, a 
 special group of individuals, even so large a group 
 as makes up the general body of Catholics In a given 
 region, might by neglect of their religion bring It for 
 the time almost to ruin there. 
 
 It requires no gift of prophesy to foresee that the 
 present state and progress of things will before long 
 make the Church, all over the world, what she was 
 for many ages — the only representative of Christ- 
 ianity and of supernatural religion. 
 
 The purely natural forces of sectarian Christ- 
 ianity are being rapidly exhausted; they and their 
 forbears had a certain capital of faith carried with 
 them out of the Chur,ch into exile; on that capital 
 they have been living, and It is nearly wasted; they 
 have nothing, when it Is gone, upon which they can 
 go on living. For the life of religion is not in- 
 definitely divisible, like some forms of natural life 
 whose mode of propagation consists solely of 
 progressive splitting up. The unresting splitting 
 up of the sects does not Increase their stock of life, 
 but only wears it out. 
 
 As for the ancient schismatic churches, they are
 
 OF PREACHING AND PRACTICE 47 
 
 not at all missionary or propagandist, and the un- 
 believing world is entirely uninfluenced by them. So 
 that the Catholic Church will presently stand heiress 
 by default of the Christian faith and inheritance. 
 The sum of what she will be recognized by the world 
 to possess will largely depend upon the quality of 
 her members; each individual Catholic, therefore, 
 should feel his own responsibility, and in his own 
 life and person contribute his own offering to the 
 Church's spiritual, ethical wealth. No Catholic is 
 to say to himself that the conversion of England, 
 or of any country, is the business of the writers, the 
 preachers, and theologians, the various organisa- 
 tions existing to that end in the Church; they are to 
 do their share, he is not to leave his share undone, 
 and his is to contribute to the quality of Catholicity 
 his own correspondence with the graces that the 
 Church is daily urging upon his acceptance. 
 
 If it were possible, as it is not, for the Carmelite 
 in her cell to read of some of the noble efforts being 
 made all over the Catholic world for the conversion 
 of heretics and unbelievers, can we not imagine that 
 she might feel a compunction, a scruple, a twinge, as 
 it were, of regret that in all these works she was not 
 sharing? And yet it would be a scruple, and, like 
 all scruples, a false accusation, a pitiful attempt of 
 the Arch-Accuser to confuse issues and weaken 
 strength. She would know it was so; the grace of 
 her sublime and unearthly vocation would teach her 
 to throw it from her with smiling trust and knowl- 
 edge of God, Who sets one here and another
 
 48 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 there, and never asks one to do another's work, or 
 demands that the adept with one tool or weapon 
 should bungle with another. She would know that 
 God had given her a rare and special work for the 
 world's conversion. And while she in her lowly 
 estimation of herself, would remember, perhaps, 
 only her prayers, we must remember much more. 
 Though behind the grill that hides her perfection 
 from all sight but God's no man ever hears her voice, 
 or sees her face; though it be not hers to preach, nor 
 hers to write; though her influence be unsuspected by 
 the jostling, unpraying world outside; though she 
 deliver no argument and speak of God only to Him- 
 self — yet she is doing much for the conversion of the 
 world. Of her prayers we do not speak; such 
 prayer as hers is Sacramentum Regis, the King's 
 secret, a ground holy and ineffable, into which we 
 dare not pry. But she does something else : she, 
 out of sight, on the gaunt and austere heights of 
 Carmel, is giving her quality to the Church. To its 
 spiritual wealth she is, with lavish hand, contributing 
 her daily, hourly gold; her thin hand drops more into 
 the treasury than ours. And these gifts of hers 
 are given by every religious of every Order. Of 
 some the world itself takes cognisance, because 
 their special function is to minister to the only 
 wants the world can understand: sickness and 
 poverty and gross ignorance. But, noble as all these 
 works are, whether done by religious or seculars, 
 by those dedicated openly to God's service in priest- 
 hood or cloister, or by the Catholic layman or
 
 OF PREACHING AND PRACTICE 49 
 
 woman, we, who are Catholics, must ever remember 
 that it is not in their "utility" (as the world has it) 
 that their sole glory lies; rather it is because all 
 who share in such labours are contributing each 
 his share or hers to the spiritual quality of Cath- 
 olicity, that is, of the actual body Catholic. 
 
 Do all Catholics remember this? I myself have 
 heard Catholics say of themselves: '^JVe are 
 workers. Your Carmelites, your Poor Clares, your 
 Trappists, and the rest, what do they do?" 
 
 Should they not rather ask themselves what the 
 Trappists and the Poor Clares and the Carmelites 
 arel By what they are, these hidden servants 
 serve. Giving themselves to God and His Church, 
 they give more than any sermon can give, or any 
 book, or any speech; it is by such gifts as theirs that 
 the Church is held on a plane higher than that of the 
 most restlessly energetic sect. It is they, and those 
 who are like them, who make true the things we say 
 about the Church and her ineffable. Inimitable 
 sanctity. 
 
 The sects can preach and talk and organise, so 
 must we; but unless there is more behind us, we shall 
 hardly be what we are to be if the world Is still 
 to see In the Church something wholly different 
 from the sects, something marked with a higher 
 and more divine impress, that intrinsic quality that 
 in every age has convinced the world that Christ 
 dwells in the Church at home, as He does not any- 
 where besides. 
 
 We must work; but the kingdom of God cometh
 
 50 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 not with observation. There is a world to convert, 
 and it means toil and thought and trouble; but it 
 means more: that those who aim at a supernatural 
 result must be supernatural themselves, and realise 
 that their fellow-workers are not all visible on 
 platforms, on committees, or even in pulpits, or to be 
 heard in books and newspapers. The Church's 
 claim lies in what she is, not in what the most 
 eloquent tongue can say of her; it is a finer work to 
 help in making true the best that could be said of her 
 effect upon her children than to run about declaring 
 what that effect is.
 
 SACRAMENTS AND SPECTACLES 
 
 DURING many years of the Victorian age, 
 England was indulged with very little in 
 the way of public spectacle. The Great 
 Exhibition was followed all too soon by the death of 
 the Queen's Consort, and, though his widow relaxed 
 nothing of her indefatigable attention to public 
 affairs, and remained devoted as ever to work, she 
 had lost heart for great ceremonial displays. 
 During a period longer than many reigns her public 
 appearances were few, and they were mostly sur- 
 rounded with a minimum of state and splendour. 
 London was almost left to its Lord Mayor's Show 
 for gratification of the citizens' taste for spectacular 
 effects. 
 
 But, almost suddenly, the last quarter of the old 
 century and the first decade of the new saw a remark- 
 able change : the two Jubilees were celebrated with 
 an entirely new magnificence; there were many other 
 great Royal functions; and then, in all too brief suc- 
 cession, followed two Coronations, to say nothing of 
 the sad but grandiose ceremonial of the two Royal 
 funerals. 
 
 Since 1887 it has appeared how fond the English 
 people may become of show and spectacle, and that 
 fondness has been indulged by a number of Royal 
 
 51
 
 52 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 functions, State or semi-State, and of other great 
 displays, municipal and otherwise. The new 
 England has been showing, in many ways, how much 
 it likes to look at things — foreign fleets and 
 potentates, Indian troops and princes, emperors, 
 kings, presidents, and, now, the cinematograph. 
 
 'Tis a natural fondness, and no one should want 
 to scold it. The Catholic Church has ever recog- 
 nised its existence and has consistently indulged 
 it in her own magnificence of ritual. Her mission 
 is to make man what he should be, but she never 
 aims at doing this by ignoring what he is. To do 
 that latter thing is quite easy, and doing it may save 
 a good deal of trouble: to behave as though men 
 were angels, without passions or senses, requires no 
 wonderful gifts; it only implies a lack of insight, and 
 a certain dulness of sympathy. If, these lazy critics 
 urge, men were truly spiritual, they would not need 
 or desire a ritual of worship visible and audible; 
 perhaps, but it is no matter of uncertainty that 
 man, on the whole, has never yet given proofs of 
 having attained to perfect spirituality; and the 
 kindly Mother takes him as he is, while gently lead- 
 ing him on to what she would make him if he would 
 suffer her. That he is no angel, of a purely spiri- 
 tual being, she knows: he has eyes and ears, and he 
 will fill both, for he has an eye-hunger and an ear- 
 hunger, as well as the stomach-hunger that no one 
 pretends should be ignored. She will not leave him 
 coldly alone to fill eye and ear with nothing beautiful 
 in which she has any share. There is, of course
 
 SACRAMENTS AND SPECTACLES 53 
 
 the clean beauty of Nature, with all her lovely infini- 
 tude of exquisite sights and sounds and smells; but 
 the Church will not behave as if all men lived within 
 reach of Nature's wealth, or as if all possessed a 
 sense which no experience of theirs has ever 
 awakened or fostered; millions of her children are 
 penned in huge towns — she cannot leave them to 
 guess of the beauty of the Creator by the glory of 
 the things created; the first Author of beauty Is 
 lovelier than them all, but they can never see those 
 things. And yet, in them also lies the dormant 
 sense of beauty and dignity of show: sunrise on sea 
 or hill they never see, nor spring's rapture of resur- 
 rection, but they have eyes, too, and ears, though 
 to them never comes the sound of the sea's song 
 along the summer shore, the lark's hymn "from 
 heaven's gate, or near it," the poignant ecstasy of 
 nightingale from moonlit river-meads, the cry of 
 pheasant, or love-croon of dove "from out the 
 woven copse." Shall she forget them? Shall she 
 hold herself with a proud affectation that all are 
 rich, or set In the sweet heart of quiet country places : 
 that fair spectacle and noble melody are not needful 
 to the poor, or appreciable by them? God's gifts 
 of loveliness are given already, she cannot give them 
 over again; she cannot heal man's dire necessity, or 
 greed, or vanity, that drives him from them; what 
 she can she does. She surrounds the worship of 
 Him with a tribute to His sovereignty. His Eter- 
 nal Majesty has a right to all that ephemeral royalty 
 claims; and to render it, even in these outward things
 
 54 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 of sight and sound, is inevitable to her generous, 
 loving loyalty. There is no pompous self-glorifica- 
 tion in it all, no pride of her own; no one accuses the 
 Viceroy of ambition in his splendid state, it is all 
 meant for the far-away, invisible King. The 
 representative, for the moment, of Imperial Majesty 
 in India does not, by gorgeous spectacle of which he 
 is the centre, render himself suspect of disloyalty 
 or of ambitious vanity; he holds the Vice-regal seat 
 to-day, another to-morrow, the real Emperor is 
 distant but not forgotten, and all the splendour of 
 his representative is but an evidence and reminder 
 of his right and majesty. And so it is with the 
 Church and her ancient, immemorial grandeur of 
 ceremonial; it is all a part of a Vice-regal tribute to 
 the King Eternal, and finds its supreme expression in 
 the dignities of the King's Viceroy on earth, himself. 
 But while thinking first of God, and bearing 
 tribute in all her ceremonial, in the first place, to His 
 Majesty, the Church never forgets man, and to 
 make him remember is her secondary, but great 
 purpose. It is like the first and great command- 
 ment, and the other like to it. "But God needs no 
 tribute such as this." What tribute does He needl 
 Would He be God if He needed anything? Would 
 they who urge this shallow plea against the solem- 
 nity of exterior worship declare that God would not 
 be God if every soul were lost? Yet to save one 
 soul He would not grudge His own death at the 
 hands of the men He made? Should these little 
 things be grudged if the common run of common
 
 SACRAMENTS AND SPECTACLES 55 
 
 men are helped even a little by them? Grant they 
 are a condescendence to human infirmity — the 
 Church is full of it; half her business is condescend- 
 ence, and the other half encouragement. It is her- 
 esy that will not condescend, but bids man be an 
 angel forthwith or accept the instant alternative of 
 damnation. The Church is a Mother with every 
 sort of child, and she will not shoulder out the im- 
 perfect, though the perfect reflect her inner mind 
 and heart. Her patience has to last as long as the 
 world, and the world is not yet a thing of the past. 
 There are those who see God; but there are those 
 who could never conceive of Him without a picture 
 to hint of something in some one or two things sug- 
 gestive of him — ^His power in one picture, His 
 tenderness in another, His sovereignty here. His 
 humility there, His awful self-sacrifice in the 
 simplest of all. And of these folk she has a 
 constant mind in all her year-long procession of 
 ceremonial. By eye and ear she will lead them, 
 by the heart as well as by the intellect. It is not her 
 affectation to assume that man is a brain on two 
 crutches. God's existence may be proved by reason, 
 but man's salvation is not forced by any syllogism. 
 He is "man and capable of his nature; few are 
 angels;" he looks and listens. She will not scold 
 him down and bid him argue only; she sets things 
 before his eyes and fills his ear with sweet strains, 
 that by those two homely avenues she may enter to 
 his odd, man-filled, God-created heart. Her theory 
 is to fill what else would be left vacant for this visible
 
 56 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 world to fill up and occupy. For this condescendence 
 the heartless gibe at her; because man is half ma- 
 terial, and even the material half she will preoccupy 
 for God if she can, she is dubbed material and un- 
 spiritual herself. Were the starven anchorites ma- 
 terialists — and who decries them? Is it the Church 
 that scoffs at Simeon on his pillar, at the gaunt her- 
 mit in his cave among the hills? It is not she who 
 insists that mortification of sense must mean misery; 
 it is not she who talks as though happiness were im- 
 possible to an un-indulged stomach. They who 
 scold her for indulging the material side of man by 
 her ceremonial worship are the same who condemn 
 her for not condemning her Carthusians; as though 
 materiality lay only in the eyes and ears, and the pal- 
 ate and stomach were purely spiritual organs. 
 
 She insists that God's grace can make man tri- 
 umph over humanity itself; but she will not pretend 
 that human nature is in the main angelic. And to 
 human tastes she will condescend that by their means 
 also man may be led to think of God; the world has 
 its music for man's ears, she will have hers to carry 
 the name of God where else It might never come; 
 the world shall not have all the fine sights at which 
 men love to look, she must have hers to remind him 
 of another King, whose subjects they all are. Such 
 things are, urges the shallow, scornful critic, but 
 toys, and the grown man needs none. But this 
 Mother does not pretend that all her children are 
 grown up; the most of us attain our full manhood 
 only in eternity. And some of those who here are
 
 SACRAMENTS AND SPECTACLES 57 
 
 proudest of their adult manliness lack the grace to 
 know how sacred a toy may be to a child. 
 
 But, though the Church indulges her children In 
 that taste for spectacles which nations allow them- 
 selves, she would be ill-satisfied were they to be 
 content with them. They are only a means to an 
 end: on the one hand a recognition of God's Sover- 
 eignty, and so a due act of homage from His lieges, 
 a reminder to them of their debt towards an in- 
 visible King; and on the other hand a condescen- 
 dence to a very general need of men, by whose help 
 they may be lifted out of the flatness of dull or 
 common things to some remembrance of Eternal 
 beauty. 
 
 A nation may, however, become too fond of 
 pageants or fall Into too dependent an indulgence 
 of its taste for them; and, should this happen, the 
 effect on national character would be enervating. A 
 people may become so given to spectacles, may 
 acquire so morbid a craving for the excitement of 
 watching games or shows, that it leaves its business 
 undone, or suffers others to do its business for it. 
 
 And individuals are subject to the same danger, 
 since nations are only very large groups of indi- 
 viduals, and what would hurt the big group will hurt 
 its members one by one. 
 
 The Church would not think him a satisfactory 
 Catholic whose religious acts consisted in watching 
 her ceremonial, as it were, from outside. He has 
 his business also, a spiritual business, to do himself, 
 and, should he absorb himself exclusively in an en-
 
 58 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 joyment of ecclesiastical pageantry, he would be apt 
 to leave that business undone, or trust to someone 
 else doing it all for him. 
 
 The countless ceremonies of the Church's year 
 are used best when they are used as a sort of sacra- 
 mentals, but they can never be sacraments, or do 
 the work of sacraments. And this some people are 
 willing to forget. It is much easier to indolence to 
 watch than to act, and far more congenial to a skin- 
 deep spirituality to frequent ceremonies than to 
 frequent the Sacraments. You will find many very 
 willing even to carry something in a procession who 
 want a great deal of persuading to go to Confession 
 and Holy Communion. No doubt the taking part 
 in the procession, even as onlookers, without carry- 
 ing anything, does draw many to the Sacraments, 
 partly by force, as it were, of mere reminder, partly 
 by the operation of graces of which the procession 
 is the occasion; but it is true also that some will take 
 part in the procession without being moved to 
 confess their sins and receive the Blessed Sacrament. 
 That is not saying that in their case the taking part in 
 the procession is quite useless, a merely empty, out- 
 ward act, without any spiritual result: every religious 
 act is good for religion; and among such acts there is 
 an incalculable gradation — from that of the most 
 perfect who takes part in it, down to that of the most 
 imperfect: even in the lowest case the outward 
 participation must serve as a reminder, must help 
 to keep up a certain intimacy with the Church and 
 her faith, must tend to ward off estrangement and
 
 SACRAMENTS AND SPECTACLES 59 
 
 coldness. And the Church will never quench the 
 flax that only smokes. She will not obey the chill 
 admonition of hard and unloving critics who cry out : 
 "That fellow is not much of a Christian, even your 
 Christianity he does not practise; he fights shy of 
 your sacraments — and will only come ta church 
 when there Is something fine to see; what business 
 has he walking with a banner, or a torch, in his hand? 
 Why do you not send him off?" 
 
 Were all they who cast their garments before 
 Christ, and tore down branches from the way-side 
 trees to strew His path withal. In the grace of God? 
 Who can tell? But we know this, that He forbade 
 none of them, and sent none of them coldly away. 
 It may have been but an outward tribute with many 
 of them, but He did not refuse or scorn It. Never- 
 theless, it Is true that the Church wants her gcvod 
 things to be used In the best manner: she will snatch 
 no crumb out of any mouth, but she longs to give 
 fuller food. And the business of the faithful is to 
 watch her upward-pointing finger without waiting 
 for her hand to scourge. So that they who are 
 content to Indulge themselves with ceremonies, and 
 hold still aloof from sacraments, are but dull chil- 
 dren, surface-listeners whose ears are filled with 
 sounds and keep hearts empty of their noble mean- 
 ings; and silly, too, for it Is a fool's part to grasp the 
 pretty wrappings of a great gift, and fling the gift 
 aside. 
 
 The wordly-wise are not imprudent thus, In their 
 generation; when they know what is worth most,
 
 6o DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 they will not seize what looks finest instead. But 
 some of us are fooHsh fellows, and, because there is 
 little show about a sacrament — how simple a thing 
 is the giving of Holy Communion, how plain is the 
 brief. Divine Word of Absolution ! — we hke better 
 to walk in a procession, or take our ticket for a 
 pilgrimage. Not, again, that we are to leave these 
 last undone, but that we must not, on pain of blind- 
 ness, leave the former undone. 
 
 Long ago a quiet voice said that they who go on 
 many pilgrimages do not soon become perfect men. 
 We know he did not mean that pilgrimage is not a 
 special means of grace: but there are greater, and 
 they lie to the hand of each, the poorest and the most 
 home-bound. It would be odd indeed if God suf- 
 fered the greatest means of grace to be the most 
 costly — we know He does not — the most priceless 
 cost nothing, and are as easy to the penniless as to 
 the rich. 
 
 In some "Poor" Missions you shall hear those 
 who love to excuse themselves complaining that 
 there is not this or that; that some fair function 
 they have seen elsewhere is not to be seen where they 
 are; that some splendour of ritual, some richness of 
 decoration, some magnificence of setting they have 
 admired in another place, is lacking there — as if 
 the ceremonial were more than its centre; as if Jesus 
 Christ in the White Raiment of His Love-Prison 
 depended for His Majesty on trappings that form 
 no part of Himself. By no people is the patience 
 of the most patient priest more hardly tried: they
 
 SACRAMENTS AND SPECTACLES 6i 
 
 do not perceive that they are snobs of religion, 
 though they are keen enough at noting the snobbery 
 of those who are dazzled by the fine feathers of the 
 world's fine birds, and think more of a man because 
 his house or his clothes are sumptuous. They can- 
 not, or will not, themselves remember that a king 
 in a mean hovel makes a more potent appeal to real 
 loyalty than when he is in his palace, surrounded 
 with all the outward signs of majesty. They can 
 condemn the sycophancy of earthly courtiers, that 
 love to stand near jewelled thrones, while themselves 
 are in the same case, holding aloof from their King 
 till they can see Him in a grander place with finer 
 things about Him.
 
 MIRACLES— OR "SUCH-LIKE 
 FOOLERIES" 
 
 COWPER, so far as I am aware, is the only 
 writer of eminence who ever set down in 
 black and white that the great lexicographer 
 was a coxcomb, and it is probable he did not use the 
 term in any of the senses attached to it by the doctor 
 himself in his dictionary. For he could hardly have 
 meant to call him either a "fop or a superficial 
 pretender." 
 
 Most of us remember in what terms Macaulay 
 speaks of Johnson's unreadiness to believe reports 
 of extraordinary occurrences in the natural order, 
 and of his credulity in the case of events of which 
 there could be only a supernatural explanation. 
 But, possibly, the great essayist did not quite appre- 
 ciate the great lexicographer's point of view: 
 Macaulay disliked the supernatural, and Johnson 
 didn't. Johnson may have been willing to admit 
 the truth of a supernatural occurrence the evidence 
 for which would strike Macaulay as utterly insuffi- 
 cient; but then would Macaulay ever have admitted 
 as sufficient the evidence for any event which could 
 only be explained as being supernatural? No one 
 is surprised if a man who believes all war to be 
 
 unjustifiable decides at once on the injustice of any 
 
 62
 
 MIRACLES— OR "SUCH-LIKE FOOLERIES" 63 
 
 particular war of which there is question. Johnson 
 was one of those to whom the unseen world is a 
 reality as actual as anything the senses perceive : to 
 him the world of spirits was not a phrase, but an 
 immovable fact. And his mind was singularly 
 reverent; nothing was more repugnant to it than the 
 ordinary smug readiness to rule out whatever lies 
 outside the mere limits of common experience. He 
 could not admit that Omnipotence has nothing to do 
 with modern life, or that what did not happen yester- 
 day, and will probably not happen again to-morrow, 
 cannot have happened to-day. 
 
 That some of the supposed circumstances which 
 he was ready to believe might have occurred should 
 rather be described as preternatural than super- 
 natural may be true enough: but it is, perhaps, as 
 true that Macaulay would have been as impatient 
 of one as of the other: both, to his taste, would 
 have been tarred with the same brush — the brush of 
 impossibility. A ghost and a miracle would have 
 annoyed him equally. No evidence would have 
 convinced him of either, because both, in his estimate 
 would be impossible. 
 
 The Catholic Church is not specially addicted to 
 ghosts: if a census of them could be taken I suspect 
 it would be found that the ghostly population of 
 Catholic countries would be vastly out-num.bered by 
 that of Reformation countries. Scotland, England, 
 the Scandinavian Kingdoms, and the Protestant 
 States of Germany are thickly populated with ghosts. 
 Rome is singularly deficient.
 
 64 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 But then in Reformation countries they are free 
 from miracles: you can't have everything. Scot" 
 land, in addition to its enormous ghostly population, 
 has the second sight, and it was more generously 
 supplied with witches till quite recent times than any 
 other region in Europe, though Protestant New 
 England ran it very close In the seventeenth and 
 eighteenth centuries. 
 
 'But if the Catholic Church Is not peculiarly 
 addicted to ghosts it is addicted to miracles. That 
 is one of Its spots, and, like the leopard, it v/ill not 
 change them, possibly for the same reason — the 
 leopard did not invent his spots, but accepts them a3 
 a part of the Divine plan in his regard. 
 
 What is the real objection to miracles? 
 
 Why is it held so offensive a feature in the 
 Catholic view of things that they are there 
 "tolerated"? A belief in them — i. e., a belief that 
 they can still happen, and do still happen — is still 
 commonly assumed as an instance of the mental 
 imbecility inherent in out and out Catholics: a proof 
 of their uncritical, unpractical outlook on the 
 world, of their inferior masculinity of Intellect — in a 
 word, of their superstltlousness. 
 
 Are "ghosts" then a distinctly Catholic institu- 
 tion? Are Catholics the only people who will not 
 sit down thirteen to dinner; who are upset by seeing 
 crossed knives on a table; who object to seeing the 
 new moon through a window; who are pleased to see 
 two magpies in a field but worried if they only see 
 one; who touch wood to propitiate Nemesis when
 
 MIRACLES— OR "SUCH-LIKE FOOLERIES" 65 
 
 they have boasted of good health or fortune; who 
 dislike dreaming of a wedding; who are complacent 
 when they bark their shins by falling upstairs, but 
 cross with the housemaid for meeting them there; 
 who will come down to breakfast, wreathed with 
 smiles of expectant prosperity, in a waistcoat inside 
 out, because they so put it on by genuine inadver- 
 tance; who throw rice and old shoes after a bride; 
 who used to carry a mutton-bone in their pocket to 
 keep off cramp; who wish when they pull a lucky 
 bone? 
 
 Is the second sight a Roman accomplishment or a 
 Scottish, and did the second sight disappear from 
 Scotland with the advent of the glorious Knox? 
 But all these superstitions have received Protestant 
 toleration, and why? Because they happen to be 
 merely unreasonable, and to have no justification by 
 faith. They are inexplicable by reason, and a 
 miracle is not: so they are pardonable and a miracle 
 isn't. 
 
 If you are pleased by seeing a compact group of 
 bubbles on the surface of your tea, and eat it with 
 your spoon, expecting money, you render no tribute 
 to Omnipotence: a little sacrifice on the world-old 
 altar of folly is merely amiable and prettily old- 
 fashioned. It is not simply old-fashioned to believe 
 in Omnipotence not obsolete, but a servile 
 recognition of a King in exile: to confess the 
 possibility of a miracle in the next street is to lift 
 the standard of an eflfete Power, as though you 
 should move back the clock to Israelitish days, when
 
 66 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night, 
 proved to a people wandering in the Desert of Sin 
 that they had a leader greater than Moses. 
 
 Archaism in itself is not objected to: but a form 
 of archaism that must imply recognition of uncur- 
 tailed Omnipotence is thoroughly objectionable to 
 the modern world. 
 
 The original attitude of non-Catholics was that 
 of disbelief in modern miracles: only those recorded 
 in the Bible could be admitted: but those recorded 
 there must be believed. That position is rapidly 
 being abandoned, for there is a Nemesis of logic 
 more inexorable than that of fate. And the 
 Catholic Church, which for centuries was assumed 
 to be all against the Bible, and frightened of it, is 
 quickly succeeding to the position of its heir by 
 default: she will soon be the only champion of Its 
 integrity: she, who was supposed to weaken the 
 splendour of the scriptural miracles by permitting 
 rival miracles in modern life, will presently be the 
 only defender of the reality and truth of those Bible 
 miracles. 
 
 But those who will no longer believe in any 
 miracles, because they have ceased to believe in 
 Omnipotence, are often willing to believe in 
 fooleries. Palmistry, Crystal-gazing, Astrology 
 gain more and more adherents as faith loses them. 
 It is not because a belief in miracles is unreasonable 
 that such a belief is unpopular; for, admitting the 
 existence of Omnipotence, the belief in them is
 
 MIRACLES— OR "SUCH-LIKE FOOLERIES" 67 
 
 simply reasonable and logical: the unpopularity of 
 the belief is due to the fact that it is a part of the 
 logic of faith. Nor is the belief in miracles scorned 
 because it is superstitious; superstition lies in attrib- 
 uting effects to causes incapable of producing them 
 and there is nothing superstitious in admitting that 
 Omnipotence can do anything, in the latest as in the 
 earliest ages. 
 
 Cheiromancy, Crystal-gazing, Astrology, and such 
 like, are popular because they are superstitions: they 
 have nothing to do with God; and they attribute 
 effects to causes that have no existence as such. Nor 
 are they popular because they are capable of a 
 scientific explanation. If any scientific explanation 
 were forthcoming they would lose popularity instead 
 of gaining it. A chelromantist who confined himself 
 to saying that a man's character is expressed in his 
 hand, as it is in his face, would have few devotees: 
 he makes his money by pretending to read the future 
 of his devotee in the lines if his palm. Crystal- 
 gazing is believed in by those who in it imagine 
 something inexplicable by reason; that belief in ir 
 is contrary to reason, loses it no adepts and no 
 devotees. Astrology is not less admired because 
 science declares that the Constellations have, and can 
 have, no influence on the character or destiny of men. 
 
 Those who are too modern to believe In the 
 archaism of such miracles as the Church declares to 
 be possible, are delighted to believe in what science 
 and reason alike declare to be impossible, because
 
 68 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 the former imply unchanging Omnipotence, to which 
 all creation is subject, and the latter' implies the 
 existence of blind forces, helpless themselves, bu^ 
 potent to ruin the happiness and innocence of men.
 
 OF MAJORITIES 
 
 OF all stupid vulgarities and sycophancies 
 none, as it seems to me, is much more 
 stupid, vulgar, and sycophantic than the 
 abject prostration of the present age before 
 majorities as such. If different ages, as has always 
 been assumed, have had their special virtues and 
 their special vices, there seems no reason why they 
 should not also have their special vulgarities. 
 
 There may have been times when society abased 
 itself before the thrones on which tyrants sat: but 
 perhaps prostration was then mainly practised by 
 courtiers, and they may have had the excuse of 
 believing that they could not help themselves: to 
 flatter Nero, Caligula, or Caracalla may have 
 seemed to their unhappy servants but a venial con- 
 descension to sheer necessity, since they largely did 
 it in the desperate hope of saving themselves from 
 death and torture. And in some instances there is 
 a healthy suggestion of irony in the compliments 
 addressed to omnipotent ill-temper, as when the 
 Chaldeans cried to the Babylonian tyrant, "O King, 
 live for ever!" which happened to be the one thing 
 w^hich he could not do, as they knew, and he knew 
 that they knew. 
 
 In later ages, when the thirst of certain nations 
 
 69
 
 70 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 for liberty had clipped royalty of many of its 
 prerogatives, the privileges of monarchs were 
 commonly assumed to be in commission, and great 
 Whig lords put on the halo of which they had 
 stripped their masters. Flatteries as fulsome as 
 any ever offered to Emperors and Kings were 
 lavished on glorious beings who wore only coronets. 
 The flatterers could not now allege fear and neces- 
 sity, but they mostly did it for what they hoped to 
 get out of It. Patronage was held tight in the fists 
 of these guardians of the liberties of England: and 
 those who flattered need not have been blind, but 
 merely alive to the advantages of pensions and 
 places. They set, however, a fashion, and it was 
 followed, as fashions are, by many who had not 
 anything definite to make by it: anybody powerful 
 enough to start a mode, but unluckily short of one 
 eye, may set a fashion of wearing the hair so as to 
 conceal the empty orbit: of the thousands who 
 follow it all but a few must be depriving themselves 
 of half their vision. So arose that national 
 characteristic of snobbery out of which one of the 
 greatest of our writers has made a literature. But 
 the Book of Snobs, though immortal, is obsolete or 
 nearly: if Thackery were here to-day, and inclined 
 to risk a sequel, it would not concern itself much 
 with lords and their meek adorers — "faint but pur- 
 suing." No one would now think a celestial 
 paradise attained by walking down Piccadilly arm- 
 in-arm with two lords: a snobbish Duke would 
 merely long to stroll through Limehouse with a
 
 OF MAJORITIES 71 
 
 local vot^r linked to each elbow. Of course there 
 is the cult of wealth — apart from the greed of 
 possessing it. The worship is, no doubt, of ancient 
 prescription; but its liturgy, as enshrined in the 
 Canon of the daily Press, is more fulsome, more 
 abject, more shameless, and more cynical than it 
 ever was before. That is one reason why the 
 taste for high poetry and for high romance is almost 
 extinct: the Golden Calf is the most arid theme for 
 poets and romanticists; sapless of all inspiration, 
 it is ignored by all inspired singing and all romance 
 gilt with the light that never was on sea or land. A 
 Press that grovels and slavers before millions of 
 sovereigns is incomparably meaner than the trem- 
 bling flatterer of an omnipotently cruel sovereign 
 before whom he bowed simply to save his life. And 
 the same Press that chaunts the Apotheosis of brutal 
 wealth is as ready to proclaim the Infallibility of 
 equally brutal majorities. 
 
 In both cases the ugly cult proceeds from the 
 same cause. There is an instinct in the human 
 animal for omnipotence : and God-given instincts, 
 forbidden to tend whither they were meant, lie open 
 to perversions the reverse of Divine. Thus men, 
 taught to disbelieve in the immortality of the soul, 
 reach out ever more wistful fingers after some sub- 
 stitute, as for the immortality of names and deeds: 
 and even the outcast and the criminal will strive to 
 snatch from the prurient curiosity of the only world 
 they know an immortality of ignominy. And the 
 modern Press helps them, as they know it will.
 
 72 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 In the same way the modern confusion of masses 
 of population that we are to call Society has decided 
 to eliminate the idea of Divine omnipotence: if the 
 idea persists it must be as a private idea, an idiosyn- 
 cracy (and heavily taxable) : there is to be no public 
 recognition of it: and yet there is the innate longing 
 for omnipotence, somewhere, somehow. So the 
 omnipotence of wealth is cajoled by people who are 
 more impatient of poverty than any ever were till 
 now, who think shame of poverty, and cry shame on 
 riches, and, with greedy hands outstreched to snatch 
 and steal them, proclaim them the accursed thing 
 — the god-devil, adoring it with horrible abuse and 
 envy, with self-tortures, agonised leapings towards 
 it, and shrieking efforts to tear the golden idol down 
 and share it piecemeal. 
 
 And the windy, empty hearts that have exiled 
 Divine omnipotence profess to find its heir in the 
 incoherent will of majorities. 
 
 This new flattery is as mean as the old: it is still 
 the prostration of those who know that they know 
 better, to a tyrant: still frightened, cowardly, abject. 
 Only the tyrant has many heads, and millions of dis- 
 cordant tongues, unanimous never, except in the de- 
 mand for destruction; sympathetic (even with 
 itself), never, except in the irritable clamour for 
 something new, for the trying of some rare and 
 fatuous experiment; and ingenious never, except in 
 devising plans for the sapping of foundations no 
 matter what world-old fences and venerable edifices
 
 OF MAJORITIES 73 
 
 rest upon them. Until "Pereat" and "Fiat" mean 
 the same thing Fox Populi and Fox Dei will never 
 be synonymous. 
 
 But it is assumed that they are the same thing: 
 or rather it is assumed that Fox Dei is a delusion, 
 because it is assumed that Revelation never was Fox 
 Dei, and never was more than the bleating of priests 
 announcing their own inventions from behind a veil 
 in a darkened sanctuary. 
 
 Just as every age has its peculiarly out-standing 
 virtues, vices, and vulgarities, so may it have its 
 distinctive superstitions. And the special super- 
 stition of this age of ours is the divinity ascribed to 
 majorities — i. e., to brute numbers. It is based on 
 the mathematical principle that by multiplying 
 nothing by millions you get everything. The word 
 of one foolish person is admittedly silly; but by 
 adding to his voice those of a million others as silly 
 as himself, the expression of infallible wisdom 
 results. Each unit in the mob may be brutally 
 ignorant, cruel, selfish, greedy, material, but the sum 
 total of it all must be divine. 
 
 This superstition had to wait till faith had receded 
 from the ground it was to occupy: and it can never 
 seem very alluring to those who hold the Catholic 
 faith in Christ. Where was the majority on 
 Calvary? Which side did it take? What was 
 it about? Have the majorities ever been on God's 
 side since the fall of man? Was it to reward the 
 fidelity of the mass of mankind that the deluge
 
 74 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 came? Were the prophets in the majority or those 
 who stoned them? Has the whole world ever 
 ranged itself on the side of the Church — does It 
 now?
 
 OF YOUTH AND EMOTION 
 
 IT may no longer be the fashion for elderly 
 persons to warn the young against allowing 
 themselves to be influenced by emotion and to 
 preach up the glories of common sense. It certainly 
 was the way when the present writer was young him- 
 self. It seemed, then, to be an axiom of the wise, 
 i. e., of those who had turned forty, that "feel- 
 ing," emotion, was dangerous, and an alm.ost sure 
 guide to disaster. Humble juniors succumbed to 
 the theory; and, when they felt anything very 
 strongly, knew that it behoved them to conceal the 
 fact till they could cure it, else they wq^ld be be- 
 laboured with that tedious axiom. Emotion was 
 assumed to be a phase of imprudence, its seed or 
 embryo. 
 
 It was also insinuated that emotion was a weak- 
 ness incident to youth, that should be outgrown as 
 rapidly and completely as possible; to hnve out- 
 grown it was one of the splendours of middle-age. 
 It was, in fact, put in the corner, as a youthful 
 delinquency. 
 
 No doubt there are vices of youth, and some of 
 them bear fruit, with seasonable regularity and per- 
 sistence, long after youth has gone for ever. Youth 
 is sometimes selfish, but seldom so selfish as middle- 
 
 75
 
 76 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 age : what was a mere tendency at twenty Is a deeply 
 cherished habit at forty or fifty. Of course, we are 
 to beware, in youth, the tendencies that will make 
 our age abominable. But there are plenty of 
 elderly vices that never were, so to speak, young: 
 avarice, for instance, which, if ever seen in a boy, 
 is seen so rarely that it almost makes a monster of 
 its victim. Sloth, again, seldom disfigures a lad, 
 though it does sometimes; but it is so common as 
 hardly to seem a vice in elderly persons. 
 
 It is often taken for granted that youth is specially 
 liable to irreligion, whereas it is only liable to a 
 peculiar sort of thoughtlessness, that is apt to con- 
 cern itself chiefly with the visible and obvious. If a 
 census of this sort could be taken, I doubt if the 
 majority of really irreligious people would be found 
 among the young. A studious and self-conscious 
 decorum has not much to do with religion. Youth 
 is more given to speaking out than mature age, and 
 all our transient irritations, likes and dislikes, will 
 not sound religious when expressed. Middle-age is 
 more cautious to express itself correctly, and has 
 more experience as to what may be said without 
 disapprobation: it has found the convenience of say- 
 ing what other people say, and it mostly says it on 
 every subject, whether it be art, literature, politics, 
 ethics or religion. 
 
 And there is the speech of action : youth expresses 
 itself, in this manner too, with a more disconcerting 
 frankness than age. Like Adam before fhe fall, it 
 is naked and not ashamed. Sometimes it acts like
 
 OF YOUTH AND EMOTION 77 
 
 Adam after the fall, and ought to be ashamed: but 
 so does riper age ; only riper age has learned to cover 
 itself up. 'When it misbehaves it does not say so; 
 rather the contrary. 
 
 I know it is the convention to talk as though the 
 sins of sense were specially the sins of youth, and it 
 is true that they are uglier and more disgusting in 
 persons who are no longer young. But that they 
 are really more common among young men than 
 middle-aged men is assumed rather than proved. 
 It is the grace of God that is our sanctuary from sin, 
 not any point of life. Are the thoughts of the 
 middle-aged and elderly, cleaner than those of 
 youth? And a man's thoughts are often a truer 
 picture of himself than anything he does : for no man 
 ever yet rose above his highest thought, or fell 
 beneath his lowest, and millions of men are lower 
 than their external conduct, as many are really 
 higher than sudden and isolated acts of theirs. 
 
 It is chiefly middle-age that Insists on youthful 
 faults: if youth retaliated it might have as much to 
 say of the mean and sordid soul-smothering vices ot 
 age: but youth is mainly otherwise employed, and it 
 has not envy to egg it on. What is there in 
 middle-age for youth to be jealous of? What 
 would not age give to be young again? So age, 
 like the fox who had lost his tail, is at pains to 
 preach its own superiority — at more pains, for that 
 tail of youth can never, by any luck or solicitude, 
 be made to grow again. Ev^en preachers, I think, 
 fall into the taint of this convention : many are young
 
 78 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 enough, but, instead of letting out their youth In 
 sermons, they mostly assume a brevet of age, and 
 preach as though they were In the decline of life. 
 Elderly folk are assumed to be the only listeners, 
 except when children are being specially preached to, 
 and I can answer for one child who used to be 
 peculiarly bored by children's sermons. Only very 
 old priests, and children themselves, know how to 
 preach to children: young men never can, but they 
 could preach to young men If they would. 
 
 The elderly, having mostly lost that tail of emo- 
 tion, are in a conspiracy to declare Its danger. They 
 do not discriminate much; nor is that surprising; it 
 Is not surprising that a Quaker should denounce any 
 particular war, since he holds all war Intrinsically 
 evil; and those who have lost the capacity of all 
 emotion can hardly distinguish between one and 
 another. I do not count delight In a profitable 
 investment among emotions, nor the transports of a 
 Lord Mayor over a long over-due Baronetcy; those 
 are sensations almost physical in their character. 
 
 Of course, there are people who are never middle- 
 aged : In generous youth they linger on till the Great 
 Hope dawns and makes them children again, not 
 lately born, but on the exultant verge of birth. It 
 Is not they who decry emotion: it Is what has kept 
 their youth untarnished. And they know how few 
 emotions that are real at all can be enkindled by 
 what is of less than eternal significance. If emotion 
 be, indeed, a special sign of youth it Is because youth 
 is nearer to the Eternity whence it was "struck out
 
 OF YOUTH AND EMOTION 79 
 
 as a spark, into the organised glory of things, from 
 the deep of the dark." They know that the much- 
 vaunted superiority to emotion is only the final 
 wearing-out of those clouds of glory we trailed with 
 us whence we came : the discarding of our intimations 
 of immortality: a common devolution, mean and sor- 
 did, nothing to brag of, but our cowardly comprom- 
 ise with imperfection and our truckling to it, our ab- 
 dication of ourselves as we might have been, our 
 resignation of the crown we might have worn over 
 ourselves, and our recognition that the mastery in 
 ourselves is to belong to the jostling majority of 
 unideal, utilitarian selfishnesses and greedinesses.
 
 OF EMOTION AND COMMON SENSE 
 
 THOSE who cry down in the young that 
 liability to Emotion which they have them- 
 selves outgrown, are seldom at pains to 
 distinguish: it saves trouble to talk as if all Emotion 
 were pretty sure to be worthless. And yet their 
 own emancipation from it is not in general a proof 
 of their being nearer heaven than they were in the 
 far-away days when they too felt themselves up- 
 lifted on its airy wings; but rather a symptom of 
 the world's influence, for worldliness and emotion 
 are sworn enemies. That which the Eighteenth 
 Century called Enthusiasm was near akin in spirit 
 to Emotion : and when the Eighteenth Century 
 spoke of enthusiasm it usually meant the attitude 
 towards religion which is most disliked: a kind of 
 polite chill was alone held to be safe and circumspect. 
 The Evangelical revival and the Oxford Movement 
 were equally revolts against the flat and worldly 
 spirit admired by the dull Theism of the Eighteenth 
 Century; and, divergent as their course was, each 
 had its origin in, and derived its force from, the 
 Enthusiasm abhorred by that very elderly century. 
 Emotion in religion was assumed to be the very label 
 of misguidedness: for religion, it was held, should 
 consist in a detached concession to certain moral 
 
 80
 
 OF EMOTION AND COMMON SENSE 8i 
 
 apothegms, in which feeling had no share at all. 
 That the moral apothegms had been mostly 
 sanctioned by enlightened paganism, and implied 
 little that paganism would not have admitted, made 
 them seem all the more respectable to a century 
 that loved heathen Rome as much as it detested 
 Christian Rome. The Pope is the arch-expression 
 of Christian Rome, and the Pope's arch-offence was 
 in his claim to be the Vicar of Christ; for the very 
 title of Vicar of Christ must always keep alive the 
 idea of a Personal God, and of a personal religion 
 expressing the intimate relations of every person 
 with God. Whereas the religion of the admired 
 heathen was not a personal affair, and left the 
 feelings, that is, the heart, untouched: it came to 
 consist in a merely public admission of some ethical 
 truths that every State must profess in self-defence, 
 of a coldly theoretic morality which the admired 
 heathen had long ceased to apply to private 
 conduct. 
 
 Christian Rome stood for a personal relation 
 of every soul with Christ, which implied a sort of 
 interference highly objectionable to a society 
 formed by Voltaire, however it might profess some 
 mild regret at his excesses. The "Grand Gibbon" 
 — his adjective, not ours — ^was the complete embodi- 
 ment of this attitude towards "Enthusiasm:" which 
 he abhorred because he thoroughly disliked 
 Christianity. Enthusiasm is often no more than the 
 abiding result of Emotion: a large crop from its 
 little seed.
 
 82 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 Instead of scolding down emotion, therefore, it 
 would be more honest to distinguish. Of course 
 there may be false emotion — but that is mere senti- 
 ment, and remarlcably unlike true emotion and as 
 different from it as prettiness is from beauty. And 
 even true emotion may be transient and inoperative : 
 but then the pity is, not that there was a brief dawn 
 of emotion, but that the dawn came to no day: and 
 many a true emotion, that was all on the side of the 
 angels, was transient chiefly because it was frowned 
 down, and stifled by the "prudent" — the prudent 
 who are commonly supposed to be those indolent 
 persons whose fear is always of doing too much: 
 whereas what has been done has usually been done 
 by them who tried to do much more, and might 
 have done more but for them who were mortally 
 afraid of doing anything — the Weaker Brethren, 
 who never fail because they never attempt. The 
 Weaker Brethren are not a prey to Emotion — nor 
 was the Old Man of the Mountains; their oflice 
 is the production of disagreeable sensations in 
 others. It is very easy to take for granted, and 
 very hard to prove, that Emotion is dangerous. I 
 suspect it is, whenever genuine (and an insincere 
 emotion is not readily conceivable) on the 
 Angel's side. The Saints were glaring instances of 
 Enthusiasm, and especially the Apostles: St. Peter 
 was obviously subject to Emotion: and it did not 
 prevent his Master choosing him for their Prince: 
 perhaps it led him to his downward cross. St. 
 'Paul's letters pulse and throb with emotion — and
 
 OF EMOTION AND COMMON SENSE 83 
 
 he is the villain of the piece of Christianity with 
 them who dislike it. 
 
 Common Sense is held up as the monitress of 
 Emotion: and the commoner it is, the more 
 complacently it submits to the role. Wisdom is 
 justified of her children, but Common Sense is only 
 her putative daughter, and has flat and vulgar 
 features that do not strongly bring to mind the 
 Wisdom of which the Holy Ghost tells us all. Till 
 Common Sense has learned to be a little less 
 worldly, her pose as an authority in spiritual matters 
 fits her ill. She is the goddess of worldly wisdom, 
 and to Christian ideas goddesses are unsympathetic. 
 Aware of this, she smugly poses as Prudence, and 
 assumes all the weight of a Cardinal Virtue; but the 
 real Christian Prudence, wary walker as she is, goes 
 undaunted with Charity's blazing torch to guide and 
 lead her: Common Sense prefers to sit down upon 
 it. The Saints had Christian Prudence in an 
 eminent degree, else they would never have been 
 canonized, but their Prudence showed itself in 
 making less of this world than of the next. That is 
 not at all the way with Common Sense. Her voice is 
 that of the current majority, extremely audible now 
 and here, and well enough content to drown a still, 
 small voice of which we have heard. "You had 
 better not," is her counsel of perfection. "Not" 
 and "better" are her synonyms. "Yes" and "Best" 
 are the synonyms of cardinal virtue Prudence. 
 "Come," says she to Emotion, "and I will show you 
 how to do it." "Go back," says Common Sense,
 
 84 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 "and presently I will make you understand the cost 
 of it all, the trouble of it, and the distance of the 
 goal, how steep the way, and how stony, the 
 brambles that shall scratch you, and the gibes that 
 shall accompany you. The Kingdom of Heaven is 
 not set upon a hill; Violence shall never take it by 
 force: Violence is not particularly well-bred. 
 Singularity is vulgar, and singularity consists in 
 supposing you should try and do what everybody else 
 is not doing already. Come, now, let me quench 
 that flax of yours that only smokes, and enlightens 
 no one, and warms no one : it makes our eyes smart 
 and prevents your seeing what we all see — the exag- 
 gerated nature of your aims; nothing is so delusive 
 as exaggeration." 
 
 As if the Devil never exaggerated, as if he never 
 made inaccessible mountains out of trumpery mole- 
 hills that honest effort could kick into dust. Of 
 course the Devil never exaggerated the difficulties of 
 decency and made people scoundrels out of despair, 
 or kept middling Christians hovering at Heaven's 
 gate out of a timorous shrinking from the excesses 
 of perfection.
 
 PSALMS OR "POORER STUFF" 
 
 THE Lenten Pastoral of one of our most 
 gifted Bishops is a plea for the wider and 
 more habitual use of the Psalter by the 
 faithful in their prayers. He quotes St. Jerome to 
 remind us of a time when the psalms were not 
 treated as the monopoly of lettered clerks and 
 cloistered monks or nuns, but were sung in every 
 Christian home and by humble peasants at their toil, 
 by the ploughman as he traced the slow furrow, 
 by the vine-dresser as he pruned the vine, by lonely 
 shepherds, and by the labourer as he wielded his 
 heaxT" tools. The Bishop calls St. Chrysostom to 
 witness how many that in his day had no literature, 
 knew by heart the eternal songs of the poet-king. 
 
 For centuries after St. Jerome and St. Chrysos- 
 tom, the Bishop notes, the Psalter was "the one 
 prayer-book of all who could then read." "They 
 have nourished the life of the Church in every age, 
 and moulded the hearts of her saints." All who 
 read the lives of the Saints must remember how 
 spontaneously the words of the psalms arose to 
 their lips in joy and sorrow, trial and jubilant 
 thanksgiving. And, then, in a noble passage we are 
 briefly shown how perfectly every phase of human 
 emotion, every need of man's soul, every aspiration 
 
 85
 
 86 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 of his spirit in penitence or devout love and grati- 
 tude, finds itself expressed for us in words that pass 
 our own powers but become at once our own, be- 
 cause they are God-inspired, and eternally true for 
 each of us, in these never-failing outpourings of one 
 of the greatest hearts that God ever made. 
 
 This world-poet sang not only for himself, but 
 of all things that in their infinite variety time cannot 
 wither nor custom stale — of God and all man; ot 
 God alone; of the triple drama of Creation, Fall 
 and Redemption; of the Church, unborn yet, but to 
 be born out of the wounded side of Christ; of all 
 God's lovely world. Nature, as we call It, and the 
 universe of stars, the ring upon His creating finger, 
 the gems wherewith the fringe of His raiment is 
 jewelled. 
 
 In' an ugly age we long for beauty, in a tired sea- 
 son we turn hither and thither for rest; and in the 
 psalms we find both as we can scarce find them else- 
 where. Not that they are sad. The sorrowful 
 may in them find a sympathy that is incomparably 
 human because it is also divine; but they are often 
 exultant, often jubilant, a rhapsody of clear triumph 
 and delight as poignant as the skylark's. They are 
 more human than any other poems, and more spirit- 
 ual. There is no instinct of man's more innate than 
 the relic of paradise that assails him with the desire 
 to rise above himself whither he came; and nowhere 
 Is that instinct voiced with more wistful p.athos than 
 in the psalms, nowhere more tenderly encouraged.
 
 PSALMS OR "POORER STUFF" 87 
 
 Who will give me wings like a dove, 
 And I will fly and be at rest. 
 Lo, far off have I gone, flying away, 
 And I abode in the wilderness. . . . 
 
 You shall be as the wings of a dove, 
 Covered with silver; 
 And the hinder parts of her back 
 With the paleness of gold. 
 
 One of the purest of our own poets knew that 
 there are times when the loneliness of man will drive 
 him far from men to find a salve for his wound in 
 the wilderness where God is easier seen. It was no 
 new discovery: the shepherd-king, who sang most 
 sweetly of Him Who was to be King and Shepherd, 
 had sung of it long before. Where Is a Nature- 
 song like this? 
 
 O Lord, my God, Thou art great, exceedingly! 
 
 Thou hast put on praise and beauty, 
 
 And art clothed with light as with a garment. 
 
 Who stretchest out, like a pavilion, the heavens: 
 
 Who coverest the higher rooms thereof with water: 
 
 Who makest the clouds Thy chariot: 
 
 Who walkest upon the wings of the winds: 
 
 Who makest Thine angels spirits 
 
 And Thy ministers a burning fire: 
 
 Who hast founded the earth on its own bases: 
 
 It shall not be moved for ever and ever: 
 
 The deep, like a garment, is its clothing. 
 
 Above the hills shall the waters stand . . .
 
 88 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 Thou hast set a bound they shall not pass, 
 
 Nor turn again to cover the earth. 
 
 Thou sendest forth springs in the vales, 
 
 Between the midst of the hills shall the vi^aters pass. 
 
 All the beasts of the field shall drink thereof, 
 
 And the wild asses wait in their thirst: 
 
 Over them the birds of the air shall dwell, 
 
 From out of the rocks shall they give forth their voices, 
 
 From Thy upper rooms Thou waterest.the hills. 
 
 The earth shall be filled with the fruit of Thy works. 
 
 Bringing forth grass for cattle. 
 
 And herb for the service of men 
 
 That Thou mayest bring forth bread out of .the earth 
 
 And wine that may cheer the heart of man. 
 
 The trees of the field shall be filled, 
 
 And the cedars of Libanus which He hath planted 
 
 There the sparrows shall make their nests — 
 
 The highest of them is the house of the heron; 
 
 The high hills are a refuge for the harts, 
 
 The rocks for the irchins. 
 
 He hath made the moon for seasons. 
 
 The sun knoweth his going down. 
 
 Thou hast appointed darkness, 
 
 And it is night; 
 
 In it all the beasts of the wood go about, 
 
 The young lions roaring after their prey 
 
 And seeking their meat from God. 
 
 The sun ariseth, and they are gathered together. 
 
 And they shall lie down in their dens. 
 
 Man shall go forth to his work 
 
 And to his labour till the evening. 
 
 How great are Thy works, O God! 
 
 Thou hast made all things in wisdom, 
 
 The earth is filled with Thy riches.
 
 PSALMS OR "POORER STUFF" 89 
 
 So is this great sea 
 
 Which stretcheth wide its arms. 
 
 There are creeping things without number, 
 
 Creatures little and great. 
 
 There shall the ships go, 
 
 And this sea-dragon 
 
 Which thou hast formed to play therein : 
 
 All wait for thee to give their food in season. . . . 
 
 But this book of universal poems is much neglected 
 now by those who choose their prayers for them- 
 selves. ". . . and if to-day they seem to be ousted 
 from their place of honour, and to have made room 
 for poorer stuff, this does but show that many, in 
 selecting their devotions, prefer the compositions 
 of men and women, albeit pious, to those of the 
 Source of Holiness itself." 
 
 The Church leaves each of us free to choose 
 among the Saints those w^hom each prefers for 
 special patrons; nevertheless, she shows that among 
 the Saints are some who must receive the devotion 
 of us all, as Christ's Mother and St. Peter. Nor 
 does she fussily dictate uniformity In private prayer 
 to those who, holding one faith, belong to every 
 clime and age; to young and old, to northern and 
 southern, to lettered and unlettered, to the coarse 
 and the refined — for the coarse and vulgar may be 
 saved too. Yet by her own example she hints at 
 what would be best for all; and Into the hands of 
 all on whom she lays the obligation of stated prayer 
 she puts the psalms: the prayer of the priest and of 
 the religious, as she enjoins It on them, consists, as to
 
 90 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 nine parts out of ten, of psalms. And the-se, her 
 clergy and her religious, are her salt wherewith the 
 whole soil of her kingdom is to be seasoned. From 
 them, therefore, she looks for a piety the most 
 sincere, the most virile, the most practical and 
 genuine; and to form it, and feed it, to give it its 
 character and colour, its sinews and its nerves, she 
 puts into their praying mouths the psalms. The 
 most loyal and loving child obeys without a word of 
 command, on the first apprehension of his mother's 
 desire. And from what the Church does herself 
 we may teach ourselves what to do. When she 
 prays it Is with the psalms. 
 
 But there is a piety barely skin-deep, exotic and 
 heat-forced, not much inured to sharp breeze or 
 nipping frost, not of the outdoor, work-a-day sort, 
 not over-masculine, nor vigorous, nor meant for 
 rough usage. And it likes prettiness better than 
 beauty, sentiment more than sense, rhetoric rather 
 than resolve; and the psalms are not much loved by 
 It. They hardly lend themselves to It — though they 
 lend themselves to all that is real, virile, and gen- 
 uine. The psalms are divine prayer, and what this 
 sort of piety prefers is not even manly.
 
 SELF AND SELF-SACRIFICE 
 
 IT is no grand discovery that war, whose ruin 
 and pain all can perceive, may be a medicine 
 of Omnipotence for surfeited peoples grown 
 wanton in prosperity. That has always been known, 
 and it is a thing we may need to remember, but are 
 not now to learn : unless, indeed, we can be said to 
 learn that which we have wilfully forgotten and are 
 forced to call to mind. 
 
 Among the worst effects upon a person, or upon 
 a people, that a long course of prosperity may 
 produce, is that of selfishness, which is nothing else 
 than an oblivion of the Two Great Commandments 
 of the Law. The love of God, above all things, 
 and the love of our neighbour as ourself, are ousted 
 by the portentous self-consideration engendered by 
 too great facilities for indulging it. 
 
 And security of ease in self-indulgence is apt to 
 produce in a nation, which is only a many-headed 
 (or many-stomached) person, what it tends to 
 produce in an individual. So God, who cares more 
 for our good than for our goods, intervenes : and 
 we are reminded of things. 
 
 His commandments are only Divine sanctions 
 of facts that we cannot ignore without ruining our- 
 selves. In our petulance of youth, perhaps, we 
 
 91
 
 92 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 wish, in our unavowed secret hearts, that He had 
 not made so many commandments: as if their 
 number had been arbitrary and casual, and there 
 might have been fewer had irresponsible Omnipo- 
 tence so chosen. But presently we perceive that, 
 if God had been silent, man would have had to make 
 the Commandments- for himself. That is our dis- 
 covery about the Ten Commandments. 
 
 The Two Great Commandments of the Law are 
 more summary, and at first may strike us as less 
 intimate, a sort of transcendental generalisation 
 towards which we admit a nodding acquaintance, and 
 pass on not unwillingly. And, if we do, we are 
 ruined again. For they also are only a statement 
 of impregnable fact. God matters to man more 
 than man matters to himself; and no individual man 
 can stand alone heedless of his fellow men. God, 
 in the beginning, said: "It is not good for man 
 to be alone": because he cannot; if he tries, he 
 becomes a monster, nor less horrible to angels 
 because he may be, by a whole civilisation, removed 
 from a savage; to angelic loyalty, and to angelic 
 intelligence, indeed, that which we call civilisation 
 may not appear peculiarly beautiful. There was 
 only one perplexing rebellion in heaven: to the un- 
 fallen angels loyalty is the only beauty, and terres- 
 trial civilisation has often been disloyal to Heaven's 
 King and ours. To celestial intelligence mundane 
 efforts to find happiness and freedom without God 
 can only appear perverse stupidity: a pitiable
 
 SELF AND SELF-SACRIFICE g^ 
 
 attempt to make emptiness look full and rottenness 
 smell sweet. 
 
 Still, the attempt Is made: each new civilisatlo/i 
 tries the experiment. God, it asserts, in more or 
 less decorous phrase, civic or national, is not essen- 
 tial to it; and each individual man proceeds to feel: 
 "Neither is anyone else to me." 
 
 And, because God's facts are facts for all men and 
 for all time, then come the barbarians and blow up 
 the civilisation that had two mines under it. Now 
 war. Itself very often the direct consequence and ripe 
 fruit of a monarch's or a nation's selfishness, serves 
 often for the sharp and searching medicine against 
 these two poisons of forgetfulness. While it rigor- 
 ously reminds us of undethroned Omnipotence, and 
 sends us piteously entreating to the steps of that 
 throne, it also brings us back to the sense that isola- 
 tion in ourselves will not do. A common danger 
 and a common dread compel us to remember our 
 need of others, and their need of us; and we per- 
 ceive that this need is greater and more real than our 
 need of mere things; forced to recognise Death's 
 august and dread presence in our midst, at our 
 threshold, we no longer can think life less than the 
 trappings of it. 
 
 And this awakening to a poignant mutual need 
 and inter-dependence between us and our brothers 
 sets alight a generosity by whose warmth our self- 
 absorption is kindled to self-sacrifice. 
 
 We may see that happening all over England to-
 
 94 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 day and all over the great family of peoples that 
 Is called by the name of British Empire. But what 
 happens closest to our own eyes is what we most 
 plainly notice. 
 
 Here, then, we witness a great and significant 
 change in the attitude and demeanour of the people. 
 It is more grave; and everywhere there is a marked 
 disposition to share in the common work and the 
 common self-denial. A noble example of this dispo- 
 sition of heart and mind is that given by them who 
 have enlisted for military or naval service since the 
 war began. It is a thing that cannot now be done 
 lightly: and it is done with the deliberate purpose 
 of going to help, or to relieve, them who have 
 borne the first terrific onslaught of the enemy: out 
 of a high and noble determination that they shall 
 not be left unaided, that on them shall not fall the 
 whole burden and the whole danger. 
 
 But a short while since and no young man became 
 a soldier except to please himself: that is no longer 
 the idea : immense numbers of those who have now 
 taken service, whether as officer or as private 
 soldier, have done so against all, every inclination 
 of mere taste and liking. They are young men, who 
 if it were time of peace, would never have turned, 
 by choice, to the profession of arms. They are, 
 many of them, undergraduates of great universities, 
 whose imagined careers were to have been wholly 
 different: numbers of others have left posts of 
 comfort and emolument, not too easy to have gained, 
 which they were filling to their own satisfaction and
 
 SELF AND SELF-SACRIFICE 95 
 
 that of their employers. Nothing is more striking 
 than the way in which men, and mere lads, too, of 
 the highest and of the upper and lower middle- 
 classes, have laid aside their own pleasures and 
 profit, and that very largely out of the simple motive 
 of not leaving to comrades already in the field, 
 comrades bound to it by previous engagement, the 
 given dangers and sufferings of a calling which they 
 themselves had never meant to follow, which they 
 never chose when it involved neither suffering nor 
 danger. And what is true of the young men of 
 those classes is true of the young men of a lower 
 class who have recently enlisted and are enlisting 
 now. It is no fancy for a red coat that has called 
 them from their homes, from the fields whose ridges 
 have been their horizon, from their factories and 
 their workshops : theirs is no red coat. To them the 
 soldier life, untried and unknown, is strange and 
 mostly uninviting. They also have much to sacrifice 
 — everything that they know and are used to: and 
 they, too, have but one life apiece, and most, in 
 leaving home and the friends they have cared for, 
 take it in their hands whither they barely know and 
 whence there may be no return. And this heroic, 
 plain thing they are brought to do most of all lest 
 they should seem to be leaving in the lurch men not 
 yet their comrades: because they will not sit selfishly 
 by a secure hearth while those others bear and are 
 in danger. 
 
 There are a thousand arguments against a 
 voluntary army: there may arise an absolute neces-
 
 96 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 sity to lay aside its principle to save the life of our 
 nation: but in the meantime it has this singular and 
 splendid quality, that every soldier offering himself 
 to it at a juncture like the present is doing what I 
 have tried to describe. And hundreds of thousands 
 have done it, and are doing It, up and down the 
 country. 
 
 Each man, I say, who so acts Is the centre of a 
 self-sacrifice that extends far beyond himself. In 
 so abdicating himself and his own selfish likings he 
 mounts, however silently and humbly, a throne from 
 whose steps selfishness shrinks away out of sight, 
 and to which Innumerable acts and impulses of self- 
 sacrifice crowd as courtiers. He infects — 'tis an 
 old pleasure of mine to insist how good and noble 
 conduct and ideas are just as infecting as bad and 
 mean — he Infects a whole neighbourhood: and the 
 mere movements of natural affection set going 
 springs of generosity and self-sacrifice : fathers, 
 mothers, sisters, friends, who cannot soldier, must 
 do what they can for the lad who has chosen that 
 hard and noble part at such a time as this. You see 
 it in operation all over the Empire, In every class 
 and condition of life : though It never may be known, 
 here on earth, what has been done. Is being done, by 
 the rich and by the poor, and by those, perhaps, 
 whose self-denial costs most of all, the poor who are 
 forced by tyrannous but not Ignoble convention to 
 seem to belong rather to the rich than to the poor, 
 who may not go ragged, who must uphold the
 
 SELF AND SELF-SACRIFICE 97 
 
 slowly-dying tradition of a gentle name and gentle 
 habits. 
 
 What, I wonder, have this past Chrlstmas's 
 presents to our troops and to our ships cost all these? 
 /What pinchings at home? What laying aside of 
 little pleasures and luxuries grown almost sacred by 
 custom and association? 
 
 A Merry Christmas! Who durst use that 
 beloved phrase — coming down to us from days when 
 Merry meant, in English, a word that might be fitted 
 to angelic Christmas in Heaven — who, I say, durst 
 use It this time? Whatever motto was on the cards, 
 the real one, unwritten, was self-sacrifice.
 
 THE GOLDEN ROAD 
 
 FOR the first time for forty years I passed, 
 in the train last week, the station where I 
 used to get out when going to my first 
 school : and presently the boys will be hurrying down 
 there from the many-spired town to go home for 
 Christmas. I call them all my school-fellows, just 
 as when I was there (with their grand-fathers, per- 
 haps). I thought of Addison and David Garrick, 
 of Dr. Johnson and Elias Ashmole as my school-fel- 
 lows . . . and will the journey home seem to them 
 as it used to seem to me in those far-away days that 
 crowd closer on me, and have a more intimate near- 
 ness than the summers of these years since I have 
 grown old? I hope so; for It seemed a golden 
 journey, not like any others, half unearthly, and yet 
 the most perfectly homely of any one could make — 
 homewards, and for Christmas. The gold was not 
 in my pocket — of that sort of gold there was little 
 at home, either: to buy my ticket I needed one bit, 
 and the change left was not abundant; but it did not 
 matter in the least: of course, there were millions 
 of things one could have bought, but to go without 
 them was no hardship; the thought of them was 
 possession enough, and kept alive a wider sense of 
 rich possibilities than prosaic acquisition could have 
 
 98
 
 THE GOLDEN ROAD 99 
 
 yielded. I never remember envying rich people, 
 least of all other boys, who might be rich : the rich- 
 ness of the wealthy was part of the world (that 
 belonged to me, too), and varied it, as lovely parks 
 and old castles do, making it more interesting for 
 me: England would have been a much duller place 
 for one and everybody if it were clipped out in 
 allotments of a mediocre prosperousness. Even the 
 shops would have suffered, for they would never 
 have been so well worth looking at if they had held 
 only the sort of things I could ever have pictured 
 myself able to buy. Rich boys I certainly could not 
 be jealous of, for the richest of them had not my 
 home, and I would not have given sixpence for any- 
 body else's. And I was going there — 
 
 That was why the cab that rattled and rumbled 
 me down to the station, and was dampish, and had a 
 smell like a cold stable, never aroused in me the 
 slightest adverse criticism: the lean velveteen or 
 corduroy padding, the jolts and creaks, the clatter- 
 ing windows, were merely a part of the general 
 sublime episode — home-going. The horse had 
 broken his knees so often that he was pretty indif- 
 ferent to breaking them again; the driver might 
 cock his hat with a forlorn attempt to look doggish 
 and slightly dissipated, an attempt somewhat 
 assisted by his holly-berry nose; but to me they were 
 both friendly and cheerful creatures, bound to bring 
 me to the train that would carry me to the place I 
 had been hungry for, dying with hunger for, all these 
 months. The horse always did go quick enough for
 
 loo DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 that, and the cabman even forced him Into a mon- 
 strous feint of galloping for the last hundred yards. 
 That was to earn my modest tip, on which the man 
 spat for luck, not scornfully at all as he wished me 
 "a merry Christmas when it comes" — full well he 
 knew that next time we should meet the sight of him 
 would not be so pleasant. There were Christmas 
 hampers In the station (not nearly so many as now) 
 and bundles of mistletoe and evergreens; and the 
 porters handled them with a friendly sympathy, or 
 trundled them along on big barrows with little 
 wheels, caUing out, "By your leave!" — as If anyone 
 would give leave to have his toes wheeled over I 
 The man who sold you your ticket had a generous 
 look, as though aware that It was worth double the 
 money, but you were welcome to It — not like the 
 fellow at our own station who would ask as much In 
 five weeks for a very different ticket with a conscious 
 air of monstrous Imposition. Of him one did not 
 choose to think. Your own particular porter (In 
 a waistcoat with black calico sleeves: if Mr. Lloyd 
 George alters them, then, indeed, will he have 
 completed the destruction of that England I knew 
 as a boy) came for his tip, too, not hintingly, but 
 with calm reliance on the presence of justice In a 
 world that even then was said (by elderly persons) 
 to have its faults. He did not spit on the money, 
 but rendered It invisible to mortal eye without seem- 
 ing to pocket it, and certainly not holding It in his 
 hands, as he clapped them together, saying it was 
 seasonable weather and looked like snow.
 
 THE GOLDEN ROAD loi 
 
 "And a merry Christmas, sir, and a happy New 
 Year, when it comes," he called out as the train be- 
 gan to move. 
 
 The trains went slower then, and took more cog- 
 nizance of intermediate stations — at least, mine did, 
 and I thought it an advantage : one saw more of 
 one's native country and gathered a fuller realiza- 
 tion that it was the journey home for Christmas, to 
 which every stop, with all its one-tuned incidents, 
 contributed, like the countless notes of a symphony, 
 each valueless alone, but altogether making the 
 wonderful sweet music. 
 
 These cold Midlands outside the windows would 
 have given buc a poor notion of England's beauty to 
 a stranger; flat, raw fields under a low, grey sky, 
 ragged hedgerows, broken by trees, naked, and not 
 usually very big; but I knew how lovely are the quiet, 
 plain things that go to make an English countryside 
 when you can see them closely and leisurely, not 
 glancing dully on them, as on a jumbled succession 
 of maps. And all about were dotted homesteads 
 and cottages, each a warm heart of life, all the ten- 
 derer for not flaunting it too publicly. 
 
 Through the level pastures crept a slowly-winding 
 canal, continually reappearing \vhen it seemed to 
 have been left miles behind, with mellow, lichen- 
 crusted bridges; and I liked it better, somehow, than 
 a river, for in rivers only fishes have their homes. 
 Canals carry on their unturbulent, still bosoms a 
 never-ending procession of homes of men and wo- 
 men and their children, who are always moving (like
 
 102 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 all of us) and always at home, go where they will 
 (as we all are, so long as it means to us our Father's 
 rest and presence.) 
 
 I saw the slow barge-houses moving deliberately 
 through the patient, winter lands, the long, long 
 rope behind them, now taut, now oddly slack, 
 though the boat never stopped, and at the end of the 
 long barge, with its queer, delightful house and the 
 father steering, outside his own front door. His 
 children played upon the roof; his wife was hanging 
 out her Christmas wash to dry on the lines that ran 
 along a path of plank reaching from stem to stern. 
 She was evidently joking with the little ones, and 
 they were skipping and laughing, while their odd, 
 mongrel terrier yapped at a passenger on the towing- 
 path and made dashes at him that nearly sent his 
 shaggy little body overboard. And the bargeman 
 pretended to encourage his dog, and the wayfarer 
 on the foot-path didn't mind, but laughed and hol- 
 loed "A Merry Christmas!" The noisy, disrep- 
 utable-looking cur meant no harm, and couldn't get 
 at him if he did; and wasn't he going home for 
 Christmas, too? — home, I was certain, to yonder 
 grey-red mill on the little hill, where a mealy-looking 
 man (the traveller's father, it was plain) was run- 
 ning out and calling to the stout, comfortable, eld- 
 erly woman who came out at once, wiping soap-suds 
 from her ruddy arms. And the traveller had a 
 mistletoe-sprig in his cap, and the bargeman had a 
 bit of holly in his, and over the roof tilted a pole
 
 THE GOLDEN ROAD 103 
 
 with intertwined hoops hanging from it, all wreathed 
 in ivy and holly and mistletoe. 
 
 Then came the change at the great junction, and 
 the wait there that I counted as half the day's ad- 
 ventures; the hurrying Christmas traffic, the book- 
 stall bristling with Christmas numbers of hollyish 
 outside, and robins, with snowy pictures, and never 
 a pretence that Christmas, after all, is a tiresome, 
 expensive season; and crowds of people going every- 
 where, but all going home to keep Christmas and 
 knit up ravelled threads of love and friendliness. 
 All strangers, and the more exciting; all unknown, 
 but all intimate friends bound to each other and to 
 me by the golden cord of Christ's near birthday, 
 and with one set purpose of keeping it together — 
 only seemingly apart. They have reached home 
 now, many, many of them; and so shall I soon; but 
 on the way they le^t a pleasant trail behind of smiles 
 and laughing; and many of their smiles fell kindly 
 on the stranger face of the boy they never saw be- 
 fore, and never would see again, but home-bound, 
 too — a fellow traveller. And so, without speaking, 
 they also gave him Merry Christmas, and he thanks 
 them for it yet. 
 
 After a good hour and a half of this ungrudged 
 waiting and watching of all those crossing currents 
 of the great life that was part of me, as I of it, a 
 train that seemed smaller, and was certainly slower, 
 took me on; no longer by the great main line north 
 and west, but by a cross country line, where no one
 
 104 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 seemed to be going so far, and most of the passen- 
 gers had a look of nearing their journey's end. One 
 knew the names of all the stations now and the exact 
 order in which they would be reached, and many of 
 the people standing about the platforms had quite 
 familiar faces, though unknown names. 
 
 Then another change and a shorter wait, at a 
 much smaller junction, where you began to hear 
 Welsh talked by the passengers — all the women 
 were knitting and some of them wore the odd 
 steeple-hats that even then were growing rare. 
 After that there were only three or four stations, and 
 first each hill and wood, and soon each tree in the 
 windy hedgerows had a familiar, friendly look, and 
 seemed to call out. Welcome Home. 
 
 The wintry day was closing in when the journey 
 was ended — and who could be sorry? Our little 
 streets looked warmer and more welcoming with the 
 shops lighted up, and home itself never could look so 
 dressed for welcome as when it shut itself close 
 against the snow that was just beginning, but opened 
 itself to fold you in. 
 
 Along that same Golden Road the passengers 
 will now be hurrying, our Father's other children, 
 our countless unknown brothers and sisters: and we 
 must needs think of them, and pray Him bless their 
 journey, and bring them also home.
 
 CONTINUITY VERSUS IDENTITY 
 
 WHAT some very excellent people mean 
 by Continuity they themselves must be 
 supposed to know, though what it is 
 they do mean not everyone else is capable of grasp- 
 ing: what Identity means even ordinary people 
 are able to perceive with all practical correctness. 
 I say with all practical correctness, because no one 
 wants to pretend that perception necessarily implies 
 the faculty of accurate definition. There may be a 
 million persons, or more, who know perfectly what 
 a tree is, for one who could define a tree scientifically. 
 Perhaps a child's power of recognition, of perception 
 of what any known object is, is as clear as that of 
 the most cautious adult, but only phenomenal 
 children have any faculty of exclusive definition. 
 Probably ninety-nine children out of a hundred have 
 as true an idea as their teachers of what a spirit is, 
 but nine out of ten will say, if you ask them, that a 
 spirit is something you can't see, without pausing 
 to remember that you can't see the East Wind, or 
 the smell of a halfpenny egg, and may not be able 
 to see your own feet, though they can see theirs. 
 We are not just now concerning ourselves either 
 with children, who usually can define nothing, or with 
 adults of trained thought and speech who are 
 
 los
 
 io6 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 accustomed to define all their meanings with perfect 
 accuracy. Ordinary adults do not belong to that 
 class. For ordinary people mean a great deal more 
 than they would ever take the trouble to define. 
 
 And ordinary people, without defining it, have a 
 just and plain appreciation of what is implied in 
 identity. When they talk of identifying a man 
 they mean ascertaining, or proving that he is him- 
 self, and is not somebody else; and, on the whole, 
 they have a sufficiently correct notion how it can be 
 done. If the particular man in question is well 
 known to themselves it would be very hard to 
 convince them that some other person was he: 
 astounding cases of personal resemblance occur, but 
 they are phenomenal, and personal resemblance in 
 such a case would not settle the matter: identity 
 would not be admitted without a number of other 
 proofs, and the offered proofs break down, for the 
 straightforward and simple reason that the claimant 
 is not the man he says, but another. This common 
 notion of identity does not, even among the most 
 ordinary people, preclude the idea of development, 
 or (as they call it) "change." The Queen Victoria 
 who celebrated her Diamond Jubilee had developed 
 vastly from the Princess of 1837 : she had "changed" 
 immensely in those sixty years, as was inevitable, 
 seeing that during all those three-score years she had 
 been alive: she was, as we say, a different person; 
 but none of her subjects doubted that she was the 
 same person. Every sane man was certain of the 
 "identity" of the old Queen with the maiden
 
 CONTINUITY VERSUS IDENTITY 107 
 
 Princess In spite of all the development and change, 
 in spite of all anyone could say as to there being not 
 one atom of her body, blood, or bone the same after 
 sixty years as before, in spite of all conceivable 
 change in opinion, colour of thought, like, dislike, 
 or what not. 
 
 And ordinary people can and do recognise 
 identity In other things than individual persons: for 
 instance, they can and do perceive the identity with 
 herself of the Catholic Church, no matter where 
 they see her. Many of them dislike her extremely; 
 and those who dislike her most, detest the sight of 
 her equally in Ireland and Italy, Austria and 
 Andalusia, Sicily and Sardinia, Chile and China, 
 Portugal and Peru. No matter in what language 
 Catholicity is expressed it is equally offensive to these 
 persons, so long as they can understand it at all. 
 Some Catholics may be well educated, or plausible, 
 or (what is better) well-off, but their Catholicity is 
 as intolerable as that of the most ignorant, the least 
 adroit, and the poorest, because it is Catholicity, 
 and all the same thing. 
 
 Without mentioning Catholics themselves, who 
 like their own Church everywhere, there are many 
 non-Catholics who respect the Church, and have 
 good words for her. And they also fully recognise 
 the identity of the Catholic Church with itself 
 all over the world. It may be urged by some that 
 Catholicity shows to more advantage In one country 
 than in some other; an Ulster Protestant thinks it 
 shows to peculiar disadvantage in Ireland; but the
 
 io8 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 llkers and dislikers all feel that the Catholic Church 
 Is one and the same. If the Catholic Faith could 
 be regarded as a lotal or national idiosyncrasy it 
 would not be the bugbear it is to many persons. 
 Nor are her enemies merely our present contem- 
 poraries; she may have new enemies in a new age, 
 but she has had enemies a long^ while, and they 
 bear witness to her identity with herself all along. 
 In spite of all the development nineteen centuries 
 must imply in a living organism, her offensive 
 identity remains unmistakable and unpardonable. 
 She is the same villain of the piece through a tedious 
 sequence of ages. Should some milder critic plead 
 that she has improved, these others would scout 
 the notion of any radical improvement — because she 
 is the same, in spite of any seeming changes incurably 
 one with herself always. Should a sterner critic 
 scold her as worse now than ever, he would himself 
 admit that she had only done at last what she, in her 
 nature. In the Inexorable logic of growth, was bound 
 to do* sooner or later; that her present faults were 
 not accidental but inbred in her bone and sinew, her 
 heart, mind, and spirit, the inevitable result of her 
 being what she Is, and always was, the honest yield- 
 ing to her unchangeable, but living, character; the 
 throwing off of a mask, perhaps, but then that 
 process only reveals Identity more clearly. 
 
 It Is labouring a stale point, all this, no doubt, a 
 point that does not at all concern the vast majority of 
 non-Catholics, any more than it concerns us. But it 
 does concern the wistful plea of Anglican continuity
 
 CONTINUITY VERSUS IDENTITY 109 
 
 with the pre-Reformation Church in England. The 
 continuity plea demands ruthlessly one of two things : 
 either the assertion that the Catholic Church, as 
 understood not only by Catholics themselves but 
 by non-Catholics of every sort, the schismatic 
 Eastern Communions, the Protestant sects, the 
 whole world of Islam, the vast body of Buddhist be- 
 lievers, and the huge agglomeration of non-believers 
 — that the present Catholic Church, I say, is not, 
 change or no change, development apart, the 
 Catholic Church of the Middle Ages; which neces- 
 sitates the further assertion that the Catholic Church 
 has now ceased to exist; and that it did not, in the 
 Middle Ages, exist in England. Or else a proof 
 that the present Church of England Is identical with 
 the Catholic Church of Spain, Ireland, Italy, Austria, 
 South America, and so on. Continuity implies 
 identity. Let us presently consider (i) the non- 
 existence of the Roman Church; (2) the identity of 
 Anglicanism with the Roman Church, if it still exists. 
 Neither of these points concerns the bulk of man- 
 kind that has its mind made up on them; but both 
 of them concern closely the dwellers In that shadowy 
 realm where "continuity" Is necessary to sustain life.
 
 THE WIND AND THE SHORN LAMB 
 
 ONE cannot say everything at once: and It 
 is to be remembered that, for our present 
 purpose, there is no need to consider 
 whether the CathoHc Church, as she was known to 
 the Christendom of the Middle Ages, had or had not 
 diverged from "Primitive" Christianity. That, as 
 Mr. Kipling used to say. Is another story. It does 
 not for the moment concern us to prove that, as the 
 Church had been alive during all the centuries that 
 joined the Middle Ages to the "Primitive Age," the 
 alleged divergence amounted to no more than 
 natural growth and the development of inherent 
 principles. For the holders of "Anglican Con- 
 tinuity" do not in the least doubt that there was a 
 Catholic Church In the Middle Ages; they do not 
 deny, or wish to deny, that In the centuries 
 Immediately preceding the Reformation the Catholic 
 Church existed; they are convinced she did exist In 
 England, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, etc., — In 
 Christendom at large. The Catholic Church was 
 the Church of all those countries; that the believers 
 in "Continuity" fully admit and assume. Then 
 came the Reformation, which they largely dislike; 
 which we also dislike, but cannot ignore; they, on 
 the other hand, are really disposed to ignore it; for 
 
 no
 
 THE WIND AND THE SHORN LAMB in 
 
 while we perceive (as the unconcerned outside world 
 clearly perceived, and has always known) that the 
 Reformation changed the religion of England; they 
 are driven, by their new plea of Continuity, to deny 
 or ignore that change and to assert that what had 
 been the religion of England under the Plantagenets 
 remained the religion of England under the Tudors, 
 Stuarts, and Hanoverians: that Cardinal Beaufort, 
 who became Bishop of Winchester in 1405, and Dr. 
 Benjamin Hoadly, who became Bishop, of Win- 
 chester in 1734, were Bishops of the same Church. 
 That Cardinals Langton, Kilwarly, Langham, 
 Stafford, Kemp, Bourchier, Morton and Pole not 
 only held the See of Canterbury before Dr. Tillotson 
 — of whom the Benchers of Lincoln's Inn com- 
 plained that "since Mr. Tillotson came Jesus Christ 
 has not been preached among us" — but were Bishops 
 of the same Church as that to which Tillotson 
 belonged. 
 
 If, however, the Church to which Hoadly and 
 Tillotson belonged was the Catholic Church, then 
 the Catholic Church existed in England only, and 
 had ceased to exist anywhere else. For no one 
 except the continuity folk. Catholic or Calvinist, Jew 
 or Turk, can believe that Cardinals, of any country, 
 contemporary with Hoadly and Tillotson, belonged 
 to the Church of which those gentlemen were 
 ornaments. 
 
 Apparently the Reformation had an effect even 
 more damaging than any even we attribute to it; for, 
 while it left England in possession of the Catholic
 
 112 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 Church and Faith, It destroyed the Catholic Church 
 and Faith everywhere else ! 
 
 England which discarded the Pope, and five sacra- 
 ments, and discarded Purgatory, the invocation of 
 saints, the sacrifice of the Mass, monks, nuns, and a 
 great deal besides, remained Catholic. Rome, and 
 all who continued in her obedience, retained all those 
 things, just as they had been held in the times of all 
 Cardinals, Archbishops of Canterbury or York, 
 Bishops of Winchester, Lincoln, Rochester, Salis- 
 bury, Durham, and so on, but ceased to be Catholic. 
 
 Providential for England? Yes, but (as Dickens 
 would say) a little particular of Providence. It was 
 perhaps, hard on that vastly larger part of Christen- 
 dom that hadn't changed its beliefs at all to have lost 
 the Faith altogether; while the little bit that had 
 thrown its ancient beliefs overboard was left in 
 solitary possession of the real Catholic Faith! 
 Hard, that, except in England, the real Catholic 
 Faith had expired at the Reformation. 
 
 Of course, a blow is never so painful when one Is 
 wholly unconscious of it; a pain that you don't feel 
 doesn't hurt so much, and foreign Christendom was 
 quite unaware that it had lost its Catholic Church 
 and Faith. Italy, France, Spain, Austria, Hungary, 
 Ireland, Poland, half Germany, and so forth, had 
 not the least idea that they had become mere 
 "Romans," while In happy England nothing 
 particular had happened, in spite of delusive appear- 
 ances to the contrary. They did not realise that 
 in holding what their forefathers had held they had
 
 THE WIND AND THE SHORN LAMB 113 
 
 fallen from the Faith, while the true believers were 
 those who, lonely in the northern sea, had discarded 
 those veteran beliefs and held whatever they chose, 
 so long as it was not what their forefathers had 
 believed. The bishops of Italy, France, Spain, 
 Poland, Ireland, Austria, Hungary and unreformed 
 Germany went on obeying the Pope, just as the 
 unreformed bishops in England had done, without 
 ever awakening to the fact that true ecclesiastical 
 obedience lay in contradiction, vilification, and 
 defiance; and their simple flocks followed them. 
 Monks and nuns abroad went on keeping the same 
 rule that had been kept in England for a thousand 
 years without adverting to the fact that in the 
 insular, but true. Catholic Church monasticism was 
 abolished. People abroad adored the veiled Christ 
 of the Eucharist without realising that they should 
 wait for several centuries till the results of the 
 Oxford Movement should have legitimised the 
 practice: they went openly to confession to a priest, 
 and had Masses said for their dead friends, and 
 begged our Lady and the Saints to pray for them — 
 all without perceiving that such small matters were 
 in abeyance for the next three centuries or so: in 
 fact, they went on, up and down Europe, just as if 
 nothing had happened to theni, and the disaster had 
 fallen on the English. Shorn of their Catholicity, 
 these foreign lambs had the bleak wind of their 
 loss tempered to them by being simply unaware of 
 it. What had happened to them was unknown, not 
 only to them, but to all the world beside, except in
 
 114 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 England — and England kept the secret for several 
 centuries: it was not till the nineteenth century that 
 anyone even in England spoke up, and let it be 
 known that the Reformation had not cut England 
 free from the Catholic Church: that the' Reforma- 
 tion Church of England had remained Catholic 
 (obviously without suspecting it for a few ages) : 
 that Dr. and Mr. Parker had belonged to the same 
 Church as Cardinal Pole; and Dr. and Mr. Hoadly 
 to the same Church as Cardinal Beaufort — but that 
 Cardinal Wiseman, Cardinal Newman, Cardinal 
 Manning, and Cardinal Vaughan did not belong to 
 the same Church as Cardinal Langton, Cardinal 
 Bainbridge, or Cardinal Morton: for no one ever 
 doubted the Catholicity of those ancient Cardinals, 
 or called them "Romans" (though princes of the 
 Roman Church and eligible, each of them, to the 
 papacy itself). This singular result, it was disccw- 
 ered, had been produced on the Catholic Church by 
 a Protestant Reformation — or at the time when a 
 Protestant Reformation was commonly believed to 
 have occurred, but hadn't really — that whereas, be- 
 fore it, all English Bishops and Cardinals in com- 
 munion with Rome had been Catholic, after it all 
 English bishops in communion with Rome were not 
 Catholic but schismatic: that those who had never 
 dropped one iota of Catholic belief were Catholic 
 no longer, and those who had abjured nearly every 
 distinctively Catholic dogma were Catholic still. 
 Certainly it was a comfort to these faithful schis- 
 matics that the wind of their bleak schism, involving
 
 THE WIND AND THE SHORN LAMB 115 
 
 the great majority of ecclesiastical Christians, was 
 tempered to them by ignorance of their unhappy 
 state: and it was odd that no strangers suspected 
 what had happened to them. Jews in Rome, Paris, 
 Vienna, Toledo, Warsaw, Munich, Brussels, and so 
 on, were quite in the dark as to the great fact that 
 what had been the Catholicity of their neighbours 
 had become schismatic, since all these "Roman 
 Catholics" belonged to the same Church with the 
 Roman Catholics of Dublin or London, whose 
 Church was no longer Catholic but schismatic. 
 
 The Lutherans of Northern Germany and Scandi- 
 navia, the Calvinists of Switzerland, the Presby- 
 terians of Scotland, the Huguenots of France, and 
 the English Nonconformists supposed that men like 
 Cardinal Beaton, Cardinal Mazarin, the Cardinal 
 Duke of York, Cardinal Allen, Cardinal Cullen, and 
 so on, all belonged to one and the same Church, the 
 old Church to which Langton, Wolsey, Beaufort, 
 or Balnbrldge had belonged, which their incompar- 
 able Reformation had driven out of Scandinavia and 
 Scotland, England, and half of Switzerland, Hol- 
 land and half Germany: and they had not the least 
 idea that the Reformation had done no such thing in 
 England, but that the old Catholic Church ilourished 
 as ever In England under their Graces of Canter- 
 bury and York, with merely a Hanoverian Pope not 
 in holy orders. 
 
 And so of the Galllos, who troubled themselves 
 not at all with such matters: did Frederick the Great 
 ever know that the State Church of England was the
 
 ii6 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 ancient Catholic Church of that country? Did 
 Voltaire? Did Napoleon? We know that George 
 Washington never told a lie; would he have been 
 ready to affirm that the Church of which George III. 
 was the legal head was the identical Church of which 
 Adrian IV. had been the head, undoubtedly Catholic 
 then? 
 
 When Henry IV. of France turned Catholic did 
 Queen Elizabeth think he had joined the religion of 
 her bishops? She didn't seem to think much of her 
 bishops: was that why it annoyed her? 
 
 "Oh, Liberty!" cried Madame Roland, "the 
 things that are done in thy name !" 
 
 "Oh, Continuity!" we must exclaim, "the things 
 th-at would have to be said for thy sake !"
 
 CONTINUITY' AND CARDINALS 
 
 S' 
 
 * *|^~^ IXPENCE in the box, please, for each 
 visitor — thank you, sir," said the verger; 
 and, being satisfied (the box having a glass 
 front) that a shilling had gone down, he threw open 
 the iron gate giving access to the south aisle of the 
 choir, and bowed two visitors in. "The one with 
 the puce tie (or shirt-front; would it be a shirt- 
 front?)," he perhaps informed himself, as he re- 
 sumed his seat by the box with the glass front, "is 
 some sort of Catholic priest." 
 
 The other, who was not elderly, might be any- 
 thing. "Just a lame 'un." The two visitors passed 
 on, wondering how long it would take, at the present 
 apparent rate of progress, to fill in the whole walls 
 of the Cathedral with glittering brass panels. 
 Having admired William of Wykeham's noble 
 chantry in the nave, they were somewhat impatient 
 to reach the other chantry-tombs in the "retro- 
 choir," and hardly willing to do more than pause a 
 moment by the exuberant monument of Bishop 
 Wilberforce in the transept. 
 
 "Soapy Sam!" one of them murmured, not un- 
 gratefully, mindful of some of the courtly prelate's 
 classic witticisms. Then, since the six stone angels 
 in charge can say nothing, he offered a little prayer, 
 
 117
 
 ii8 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 and turned to the steep steps. There was another 
 tomb to pray by, much less ornate, in mid-choir, 
 where for centuries it has lain before the great altar, 
 through thousands of Requiems and Dirges, low, 
 plain, and sombre, with no courtly phrases of epitaph 
 — the Red King's. Though all these requiems and 
 dirges of over four hundred years had been for him, 
 he would need them all, if ever he were to see that 
 Face he would swear by so hardily. What could a 
 stranger do but stand by the low dark stone and 
 offer them all up again, as though in truth they had 
 been meant for him whose mad heart had crumbled 
 to dust within? It was strange to think that had 
 he been some great servant of God, instead of His 
 rebel, these dry bones might long ago have been torn 
 hence and scattered to the winds. 
 
 It was strange, too, to look up at the countless 
 carven figures of the huge reredos, not all original 
 and ancient: to see the sculptured bishops, in mitre 
 and chasuble, dalmatics and alb, gloves and buskins, 
 as the bishops of Rome's obedience wear them to- 
 day: and, midmost of all, to see the great stone 
 crucifix, and remember its perfect legality, being a 
 wall-fixture, and how illegal and affronting it would 
 be if it stood, where stands the empty cross, on the 
 shelf beneath. 
 
 The younger visitor was venerating, not super- 
 stitiously, but genealogically and eclectically, the 
 regal bones, Saxon and Danish, hidden in coffers 
 high up on the stone screen : for some were his 
 ancestors, and some were not. And so, presently,
 
 CONTINUITY AND CARDINALS 119 
 
 the two visitors left the choir and came to the grove 
 of tombs and chantries behind: Richard Fox's, 
 Stephen Gardiner's, WilHam of Waynflete's, 
 Wilham of Edindon's: three of them Chancellors 
 of England, one of them Lord Privy Seal — and all 
 of them such Protestants ! How plainly had their 
 lives and deeds shown them members of the same 
 Church with their successor down yonder in the 
 transept, my lord Samuel of quippish memory! 
 
 But of all those tombs and chantries the most 
 significant there is Beaufort's. One stands a few 
 paces off; behind perhaps, with the plain eastern 
 side of the great reredos at one's back, and the 
 southern sun shines in and lights up the massive 
 painted figure on the tomb: the red robes and red 
 hat give out all their colours in the caressing light. 
 One may have just come from St. Cross, which he 
 refounded; which stands still among the green meads 
 by the river, a lovely monument of princely, and 
 better than princely generosity and tenderness for 
 the old and broken, as the College hard by is of 
 Wykeham's reverent love of youth, and that other 
 loveliest college, by that other river, is of Wayn- 
 flete's: but thick as these memories of good deeds 
 crowd, they are not the point that hits and insists, 
 and urges itself here. 
 
 Yonder Winchester Bishop, lying there in Rome's 
 scarlet, might be no effigy, but a figure just dead, 
 lying by Peter's tomb, in Peter's basilica, for 
 reverence before his burial: a dead Cardinal. He 
 was a Cardinal: like his predecessor, the first founder
 
 I20 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 of St. Cross; like Langton of Canterbury, and Kil- 
 warby, and Langham, Stafford, Kemp, and Bour- 
 chier, Morton, Warham and Pole, all Primates of 
 England; like Thoresby, Kemp, and Bainbridge, of 
 the Northern Primacy; like Louis de Luxemburgh, 
 Bishop of Ely; Philip de Replngdon, Bishop of 
 Lincoln; Pandulph, Bishop of Norwich; John 
 Fisher, Bishop of Rochester; Robert Hallum, 
 Bishop of Salisbury; John Thoresby, Bishop of 
 Worcester; Thomas Langly, Bishop of Durham — 
 all Cardinals. Were they really Bishops of these 
 English sees, or weren't they really Cardinals? 
 What a Cardinal has to do with Rome, and Rome's 
 Pope, all the world knows : they are above all others 
 Pope's men; his Privy Councillors, his electoral 
 princes, his hands and arms and eyes and cars. He 
 was one of them, one of them will take his place, 
 when his death voids It. Next to the Pope himself 
 nothing more papal conceivable than a Cardinal— 
 a very stale truism, certainly, what a cardinal has to 
 do with the Pope — but a very unanswerable question 
 what he has to do with Anglican continuity. 
 
 This Henry Beaufort, of the title of Sant Euseblo, 
 Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, has there 
 ever been question that he was in fact and truth 
 Bishop of Winchester? Here his effigy lies upon 
 his tomb; yonder In the fields still stands his benefac- 
 tion of St. Cross; 'tis as holder of this see he lies 
 here. No one ever doubted he was Bishop here, 
 and no one doubts he was one of the Pope's 
 Cardinals. To what Church belonged this Card-
 
 CONTINUITY AND CARDINALS 121 
 
 inal? Or did he belong to one Church, and his 
 flock and clergy to another. Was he "Roman," 
 and were they "Anglican"? Common-sense and 
 plain, indifferent history know he was Cardinal, and 
 prince of the Roman Church: does history pretend 
 he was no true Bishop here, or that the diocese he 
 ruled here, its clergy, and its people, held another 
 faith from his, and held him for an alien and schis- 
 matic, they belonging to one Church and he to 
 another and a foreign one? Or can any man doubt 
 to what Church the Cardinal of Sant Eusebio be- 
 longed, to what faith he professed obedience before 
 he received yonder red hat? That he preceded Dr. 
 Wilberforce as occupant of this episcopal throne no 
 one pretends to doubt: can anyone pretend to believe 
 that he was Dr. Wilberforce's predecessor in a 
 common faith; that the Church of that waggish 
 divine was also his Church : that what the nineteenth 
 century prelate believed he believed, and (what may 
 be as much to the point) that what the nineteenth 
 century prelate disbelieved he disbelieved too? 
 
 If anyone can believe all that, one readily under- 
 stands what is meant by saying that faith is the 
 faculty of believing what one knows to be impossible. 
 
 Or was Winchester a Papal island in an Anglican 
 sea: all England else duly Anglican, this one diocese 
 "Roman"? In sooth there must have been a 
 "Roman" archipelago in this England, or Canter- 
 bury never had those nine Cardinal-Primates, nor 
 York those three, and Luxemburgh was never 
 Bishop of Ely, Repingdon of Lincoln, Pandulph
 
 122 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 of Norwich, Hallum of Salisbury, Thoresby of 
 Worcester, Langley of Durham, or the Blessed 
 Fisher of Rochester. 
 
 And the Pope Adrian? Was he no true member 
 of the Catholic Church in England of his day, or 
 had he abjured the island-church of his baptism 
 before grasping Peter's heavy keys? Was he 
 Anglican or "Roman"? A twelfth century Pope is 
 commonly accounted pretty Roman, and, as history 
 has been written so far, Adrian has never been 
 presented to the world as an Anglican Antipope. 
 
 Till the devout holders of "Continuity" have 
 proved that Pope Adrian was an Anglican on 
 Peter's throne, or a renegade to Papal faith and 
 the Papal Church; till they have demonstrated that 
 Henry Beaufort was no Cardinal, or that he was 
 never Bishop of Winchester; if they had nothing 
 else to prove, they must support patiently the smile 
 of common-sense at their wistful, forlorn hope of 
 a claim. If Wilberforce's effigy, between its six 
 supporting angels, could smile, I warrant it would, 
 and pretty broadly, at anyone who should assure 
 him that he and his predecessor, the Cardinal, be- 
 longed to the same Church and held the same creed. 
 He was a man of insupportable common-sense, with 
 an intolerable capacity for recognising the very 
 bores of theory — beastly facts.
 
 POLE, CRANMER, AND CONTINUITY 
 
 THE admirers of Continuity are far from 
 denying that the Church, as it was in 
 England under the Plantagenets, was 
 CathoHc, that it was Cathohc under the Lancastrian 
 and Yorkist kings, under Henry VIL, and at the 
 accession of Henry VIII. : during all of which time 
 it was in communion with the Pope, and with all the 
 other Churches under his obedience, with the Papal 
 Churches of France, Spain, Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, 
 Corsica, Poland, Austria, etc., and professed in 
 matters of Faith precisely what they all professed. 
 No one. Continuity-folk or otherwise, denies, or is 
 concerned to deny, that so far all these people, of 
 different race, language, and country, were 
 Catholics, belonging to one Church under one 
 visible head. 
 
 Then there arrived the English Reformation, the 
 result of which was that the English Church dis- 
 carded the Pope and his communion, and also 
 discarded a great mass of belief integral to the 
 Church, of which he was the visible head. If it 
 be correct to say that the Pope was a Roman 
 Catholic it is also correct to say that all the 
 Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops, prelates, abbots, 
 priests, monks, nuns, and lay people who were in 
 
 123
 
 124 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 communion with him in France, Spain, Italy, and 
 so on, were Roman Catholics too: he did not belong 
 to one Church and religion and they to another. 
 And it must equally be said that the Archbishops, 
 bishops, etc., who occupied the English Sees when 
 Henry VIII. mounted the throne were Roman 
 Catholics; they had one Faith with the Pope, and 
 belonged to the Church which everywhere acknowl- 
 edged him as its visible head. When the time 
 arrived in which the English Church fell out of 
 Communion with the Pope, and with all those under 
 his obedience over the seas, and ceased to teach 
 what he and they taught, then, according to their 
 own belief, and that of all the world besides, its 
 members were no longer members of his Church, 
 and their religion was no longer the same as his. 
 They had a Church of their own, of which the 
 Pope was not the head, and a religion of their 
 own which had discarded a mass of that teaching 
 Integral to all the Churches in communion with 
 Rome. They were no longer Roman Catholics: 
 they no longer belonged to the same Church and 
 the same religion to which foreign Roman Catholics 
 belonged. They had changed their rehglon. 
 According to the Continuity-folk they were, how- 
 ever. Catholics, though not Roman Catholics. 
 What had they been in their youth? Only Roman 
 Catholics? And was the profession of Prot- 
 estantism necessary to Catholicise them? If, we 
 must say again, the "reformed" Church of England 
 was Catholic, then the Catholic Church existed only
 
 POLE, CRANMER, AND CONTINUITY 125 
 
 in England, and had ceased everywhere else: for 
 Indubitably the reformed religion of England was 
 not the religion of any other country in the world. 
 The Churches of Catholic Europe had, elsewhere, 
 ceased to be Catholic: they had done nothing, but 
 had changed, and lost their Catholicity. They had 
 discarded nothing, innovated nothing, but had 
 changed; while the English Church, that had In- 
 novated and discarded right and left, was left 
 serenely unchanged. Catholic still! But even in 
 England there were those who changed nothing, and 
 innovated nothing: did Sir Thomas More die a 
 Catholic? did Cardinal Fisher? or had they fallen 
 into mere Roman Catholicism? At what date 
 did they change their religion from Catholic to Ro- 
 man Catholic? Cardinal Pole and Cranmer were 
 both Archbishops of Canterbury: which was the 
 Catholic? No human being has ever believed they 
 both belonged to the same religion at the time of 
 their respective deaths; everybody knows they had 
 belonged to the same religion as children; which 
 changed? Was Cranmer burnt because he was a 
 Catholic? Was it Catholicity of which he signed 
 the retractation with that right hand, which, ac- 
 cording to Macaulay's ruthless gibe, must shine with 
 peculiar brilliancy in heaven? I know that Cran- 
 mer will never be canonised if he has to wait for a 
 Continuity Pope to do it: the Continuity-folk do not 
 like him. Is it because he was a Protestant? — 
 a Protestant Primate of a Church that has always 
 been, and is still. Catholic? — whose other Primates
 
 126 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 were all Catholic — like Whitgraft, Tillotson, Seeker, 
 and the rest! 
 
 Anyway, Cranmer and Pole, though both brought 
 up in the same Church, did not belong to the same 
 Church during the reign of Edward VI. If 
 Cranmer was the Catholic during Edward's reign, 
 Pole wasn't. When did he leave the Catholic 
 Church? He had changed nothing from his birth, 
 how was his religion changed over his head? 
 Catholicity must be an odd concern if it sticks to 
 us when we alter our faith and slips from us when 
 we don't. If the Continuity-folk have the right idea 
 of Catholicity, then was Catholicity unknown till 
 the Protestant Reformation introduced it into 
 England, had never been known in any other land 
 or age, and has, with some insular prejudice, con- 
 fined itself to England and her dependencies ever 
 since — a rinsu to all the rest of the world. Christian 
 or heathen, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, 
 Atheist, or Agnostic, that has always laboured under 
 the delusion that the Pope was a Catholic, and that 
 those of his obedience belonged to his Church, while 
 those who belonged to religious bodies refusing his 
 obedience were not members of his Church, and were 
 not Catholics. 
 
 Had the English Reformers themselves recked 
 of "Continuity," they might well have devoted an 
 Article of the Church of England's faith to it: 
 and made up the forty — a more mystic number, 
 with less anti-apostolic associations, for the thirty- 
 nine are suggestive chiefly of the forty stripes save
 
 POLE, CRANMER, AND CONTINUITY 127 
 
 one five times suffered by St. Paul at the hands of 
 those to whom Christian faith was odious. "A fond 
 thing vainly invented" they might have called it, 
 like five of the Church's sacraments. And then the 
 Protestant Catholics would have been sure it was 
 all right, for nothing endears a proposition so much 
 to your Protestant Catholic as that it should stand 
 utterly condemned by the most authoritative defini- 
 tions of faith promulgated by the founders of his 
 religion.
 
 THE CONTINUITY TRIBUTE 
 
 WHAT, then, does the Continuity plea 
 really mean? That is a question which 
 it is worth while asking ourselves 
 before we leave this subject. The plea itself is 
 one which no one will admit except those by whom 
 it Is made: It is made not by a Church, or by a 
 religion, but by a mere section of a Church, by a 
 small minority of the members of a numerous 
 religious body. That large portion of the 
 Established Church which is still perfectly content 
 with the name of Protestant Is not at all anxious 
 to claim Identity with the unreformed religion as 
 it existed In England at the accession of Henry VIII., 
 and this is true not only of the extreme Low Church 
 party in the Church of England, but equally true 
 of the much larger moderate section, which is, 
 probably, as little attracted by violent Low 
 Churchism as it is by Ritualism. The Anglican who 
 likes "nice" services in church, who prefers to have 
 pretty flowers on the altar and sees no harm In a 
 cross as a centrepiece, or indeed in a pair of candle- 
 sticks flanking the cross, or In a coloured stole; who 
 is accustomed to see those in the chancel turn east- 
 ward during the Creed, and all the Gloria Patri, and 
 
 does not care whether a clergyman's head is covered 
 
 128
 
 THE CONTINUITY TRIBUTE 129 
 
 at a rainy funeral by a biretta or a college-cap — 
 that sort of Anglican not only dislikes the somewhat 
 obsolete ugliness and bareness of old-time Prot- 
 estanism, but he is also slightly scornful of ritualistic 
 "mummeries and millinery," of Roman importa- 
 tions, in the way of dress and ceremonial, and he is 
 entirely unconvinced by "Roman teaching" pro- 
 pounded to him as the real faith of the Church to 
 which he and his have belonged for several centuries. 
 He is certain that such teaching in pulpits occupied 
 by clergymen of the Church of England is new and 
 alien. The extreme Low Churchman, the more 
 moderate Evangelical, the "ordinary Churchman," 
 and the Broad Churchman are all agreed in one 
 conviction — that the Church of England did at the 
 Reformation renounce the Catholic doctrines In 
 force when the Reformation came: that the old 
 religion of England, under the Plantagenets, for 
 instance, was Roman Catholic, and that the 
 Reformation gave England a new religion which 
 was not Catholic but Protestant. 
 
 And this was recognised, outside England, and has 
 been recognised ever since, by all those who, as 
 outsiders, were unconcerned, and had nothing to do 
 in the matter, but merely saw and acknowledged 
 an obvious fact: the plain fact that England had 
 turned Protestant, and had abjured Catholicity as 
 a nation. That fact was no more apparent to the 
 foreign Catholics, who had made no change, than it 
 was to the foreign Protestants who had made new 
 religions of their own, and to those who never had
 
 I30 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 belonged to the Catholic Church, Jews, Mahome- 
 tans, and so on. 
 
 All this we have said, and all this is perfectly 
 well known to the world at large. 
 
 What then does the Plea of Continuity mean? 
 
 That a plea so quaint, so blind to every considera- 
 tion of mere fact, should be advanced at all, must 
 point to something. What does it mean? 
 
 To us it seems that the answer to that question 
 is both simple and touching. The plea is a tribute, 
 none the less significant because it is involuntary and 
 reluctant. 
 
 For a long time it pleased those who had with- 
 drawn themselves from Catholic unity and Cath- 
 olic obedience to vilify and deride the name of 
 Catholic. They justified their own change by a 
 rancorous abuse of that which they had abandoned. 
 They spared no condemnation of the Catholic teach- 
 ing and of the Church that taught it. Nothing 
 would have been felt by them as a fouler insult 
 than such an assertion (if anyone had ventured on 
 an assertion so preposterous) as that they had 
 changed nothing, but were still bound by the old rule 
 of faith; that the Reformation meant no more for 
 England than the Council of Trent meant for the 
 Catholics of the Continent. To be Catholic they 
 held to be damnable, to be Protestant was their 
 national glory: Englishman and Protestant meant 
 the same thing: to be Catholic was to be foreign, 
 un-English, a taint of disloyalty, a bend sinister on 
 the escutcheon of patriotism.
 
 THE CONTINUITY TRIBUTE 131 
 
 And the Plea of Continuity is Time's reprisal. 
 The vilified name of Catholic is envied, and, as far 
 as may be, stolen. After all the black abuse of 
 Catholicity, a campaign of calumny over three 
 hundred years old, there is something, after all, so 
 great and incommunicable in the name of Catholic 
 that descendants of those who would fain have 
 obliterated it are wistfully clutching at it, in spite of 
 all evidence of fact and common sense, as if 
 the mere name were something to conjure Heaven 
 with ! 
 
 God is one, and His truth is one: that was the 
 great promulgation of Catholicity: it was the family 
 secret of the Hebrew Church, To the outside 
 Heathen world, with many gods, it was a new idea, 
 and by it Christianity conquered paganism. Multi- 
 form heathenism would never have succumbed to a 
 multiform Christian Church. The uncaring, in- 
 different pagan might gibe at the Catholic intolerance 
 of heresy, but it was the unity of Catholic faith that 
 alone would destroy the vague, all-tolerating, sub- 
 divided polytheism, and did destroy it. As soon as 
 Christianity divided against itself, paganism and 
 polytheism began the revival of which we are 
 witnessing the fruits. Paganism will never lie 
 conquered under the vague and multiform theories 
 of a Christianity that tolerates divided teaching 
 within itself. Christianity that is not Catholic 
 is only sectarian and Paganism will not admit 
 superiority in any sect of any name: its only 
 superior and conqueror has been Catholicity that
 
 132 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 holds to the hard fact — One only God and one only 
 truth about Him. 
 
 Paganism is the new preoccupation of the new 
 world, as it preoccupied the world when Catholicism 
 came and ousted it. 
 
 Those who put forth this faltering plea of Con- 
 tinuity are aware of it. They know well that the 
 Reformation undid the work of fifteen centuries; 
 they are bitterly ashamed of it; and the only thing 
 they can see to do is to ignore it, as far as their 
 own country and Church is concerned, and, in spite 
 of notorious and dismal fact, deny it. 
 
 The Church Catholic did what no Protestant 
 Churches have done, or could do. And the Con- 
 tinuity people are so deeply sensitive of it that they 
 can only cry out "We are Catholics. The Church 
 of the One God must: be Catholic. So we belong 
 to It. We always did: we and those who split off 
 from it (they never could have done anything so 
 ruinous and frightful; filial piety forbids our con- 
 fessing they did so horrible a thing). You do not 
 understand us, nor our Church: you will not realise 
 that in calling themselves Protestant our forefathers 
 meant 'Catholic' all the time. As for us, we 
 utterly abjure the ugly, disastrous name of Prot- 
 estant. We like all you like, we loathe the heresies 
 you loathe: look at our altars, our vestments, our 
 incense, our very rosaries and Benedictions of the 
 Blessed Sacrament! Is all that Protestant? Are 
 we not eagerly bringing back all those things our 
 fathers — no they didn't banish them: they — "
 
 THE CONTINUITY TRIBUTE 133 
 
 Can they look around them, and look back, back 
 such a little way, and say that all these things have 
 always been a part of the religion established in 
 England at the Reformation? 
 
 Can a country have a Protestant religion and a 
 Catholic Church? Were the bishops, who ousted 
 the old Catholic bishops, Catholic in religion? 
 Were their successors Protestant in faith or 
 Catholic? 
 
 What would have happened to a pre-Reforma- 
 tlon bishop in England (or anywhere else) who 
 taught what the bishops of the English Church have 
 been teaching these three hundred years and more? 
 Has any bishop, any dean, any clergyman, ever been 
 turned out of the English Church for teaching 
 Protestanism? And in the Catholic Church abroad, 
 admitted to be Catholic by the Continuity people 
 there, could any bishop, or prelate, or priest, teach 
 Protestantism and be suffered to remain where he 
 was? 
 
 Has any portion of the Catholic Church of the 
 Continent taught Protestant heresy during a century 
 and remained a part, a branch of the Catholic 
 Church? That the English Church taught Prot- 
 estant heresy throughout the eighteenth century no 
 one as yet denied: to the Continuity plea it is 
 necessary to say that a national religion and a 
 national Church are different things: that those who 
 belong to the national religion may be all Protestant, 
 and the Church to which they belong be altogether 
 Catholic.
 
 APOSTOLIC WITNESS 
 
 WHAT Catholics mean when they say that 
 the true Church of Christ must be not 
 only One, Holy and Universal, but 
 also Apostolic, they know very well. A Catholic 
 child knows : but it is by no means certain that non- 
 Catholics in general know. What is more probable 
 is that our idea of an Apostolic Church is not 
 attractive to them. 
 
 To certain High Anglicans it is so far attractive 
 that they are aggrieved if we do not admit their 
 claim to Apostolicity by which they mean, 
 apparently, no more than that the clergy of the 
 Established Church have, as they maintain, an un- 
 broken spiritual descent through ordination by duly 
 consecrated bishops from the Apostles. But the 
 High Anglicans are only a section even of their own 
 Church; and a great number even of the clergy of 
 the Church of England are very little interested in 
 this claim, because its tenabillty or non-tenabillty is 
 immaterial to their position. Still less do the rank 
 and file of the laity of their Church concern them- 
 selves with the matter. 
 
 Outside the Establishment the Protestant feeling 
 is, on the whole, worse than indifferent to Apostol- 
 icity, even in the United Anglican sense. To 
 
 134
 
 APOSTOLIC WITNESS 135 
 
 immense numbers of those who belong to the Free 
 Christian Churches the Idea of a clergy claiming 
 apostolic descent is simply repellent, as involving 
 that sacerdotalism which they hold in abhorrence. 
 Some, at least, of these Free Churches have no clergy 
 at all; no doubt "Christian Scientists," for instance, 
 consider themselves Christians; but they certainly 
 do not want any priests with Apostolic Descent. 
 And there are innumerable sects who want them just 
 as little: not only among the newest, but also among 
 the older religious bodies. 
 
 Probably the vast majority of Protestants, far 
 from envying the Apostolicity claimed by the 
 Catholic Church, regard it with repugnance, and 
 consider it one of the Church's blemishes and 
 drawbacks. 
 
 And the reason that underlies this attitude 
 towards Apostolicity is precisely that which is at 
 the root of their dislike of Unity, Sanctity, and 
 Catholicity, as notes of a Church. For Apostolicity, 
 quite as truly as the other three notes, is not recon- 
 cilable with Private Judgement, 
 
 How could Mrs. Eddy found a religion, how could 
 anybody^ at this time of day, if Apostolicity were 
 an essential? And the foundation of new religions 
 is a very seductive occupation: a field of activity that 
 the modern world loves to keep open to all comers. 
 To originate a sect is one of the easiest ways of 
 achieving a certain measure of importance. To 
 become even a political leader is more difficult, and, 
 perhaps more expensive, though the expense is less
 
 136 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 than It used to be. To be a demagogue calls for 
 hardly any capital; nor does it necessitate very high 
 Intellectual endowments: but It demands adroitness, 
 sleight of speech, a thick skin, an Indifference to 
 results that might stagger men of even a very 
 commonplace conscientiousness and a power of 
 seducing the ear and fancy of large bodies of men. 
 You can found a sect even though you be able to 
 get round only a handful of old women. Your 
 Intellectual capital may be sheer beggary: you may 
 have merely a parlour voice, that would not carry 
 twenty yards out of doors; you need not be funny, 
 even vulgarly funny, though It will help you if you 
 are; you may lack even that knowledge of men that 
 consists in a deft Instinctive perception of human 
 greed and appetite, that consists indeed in taking 
 for granted that the ears of a crowd will be apt 
 receivers of the message of your own spite, envy, 
 and maliciousness. 
 
 It would be hard to conceive of any single 
 attribute of ordinary leadership of which It could 
 be said that without It no one could found a sect. 
 The most blatant demagogue must not seetn silly; 
 but no one's silliness need keep him back from 
 originating a sect. A demagogue must have a 
 lar^e following; but the smaller sect is often the 
 pleasantest to handle, and Is apt to be rather pleased 
 by the notion that it Is a "little flock." The prudent 
 sectary has no idea of a universal appeal. He 
 (or she) knows better than to aim at anything which 
 could answer to the needs of all men of every race
 
 APOSTOLIC WITNESS 137 
 
 and tongue. He only aspires to be the hero of a 
 group: and it may be local, and must be idiosyn- 
 cratic. But Apostolicity would ruin him: and he 
 knows it. 
 
 Of course, some religious innovators have been 
 rich in the gifts of demagogy, Luther was, Knox 
 was, Calvin was : Cranmer was not, but Latimer was. 
 
 And some sect-founders, having some of the 
 demagogue's adroitness, have aimed at, and secured, 
 large audiences and strong "following." Others, 
 with slightly different gifts, have also known how 
 to tickle many ears. They may have possessed but 
 a shallow intellectual equipment; what they did 
 possess was a shewd, instinctive perception of some 
 phase in the character of their own time. Mrs. 
 Eddy, for instance; she was clearly not a woman of 
 high mental capacity; she was without culture, and 
 her spiritual sense was obtuse. Even religiosity was 
 with her no life-long hobby, which established habit 
 had taught her to ride with practised judgment. 
 But she was shrewd, and she was perceptive enough 
 to be aware that her age was morbidly neurotic. 
 The assimilation of that meagre discovery was 
 sufficient for her purpose, and she exploited it with 
 results that might amaze even Carlyle's pessimistic 
 estimate of human wisdom. 
 
 Christian Science could not have been founded in 
 the Middle Ages; because, with many faults (all 
 duly Insisted upon now) they were not In the least 
 neurotic. But Mrs. Eddy, if the choice had been 
 left to her, would have been far too sharp to have
 
 138 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 been born In the Middle Ages. Fate favoured her; 
 and she adorned the age of patent-medicines, the 
 drug-habit, morphomanlacs. Nursing Homes, and 
 health-faddists. 
 
 Here was a field asking for a general specialist 
 and she stepped forward with a prescription of en- 
 gaging simplicity. Her success was, and is, 
 phenomenal; but how if Apostolicity had mattered 
 sixpence to her patients? 
 
 There are worse sects than hers; but the same 
 incubus would have smothered them also. Shakers, 
 Spiritualists, Swedenborgians, Latterday Saints — 
 and so on for as long as you like — what on earth 
 would have happened to them if this little tedious 
 note of Apostolicity had been held, like a pistol, at 
 what the poverty of the English language allows us 
 to call the heads of their originators? 
 
 Then again — that very word brings us up against 
 the root of the objection. A modern sect must 
 seem to embody some sort of "originality," some- 
 thing of a new discovery; and there Is nothing 
 "original" in Apostolicity. The "doctrine and tradi- 
 tion of the Apostles" squashes originality in religion: 
 and sectarian faddism won't be squashed. 
 
 Mr. Pecksniff's feelings would not consent to be 
 smothered like the young princes in the Tower: the 
 more he pressed the bolster on them, the more they 
 looked round the corner of It. So with the modern 
 faddists of religiosity: the Apostolic note would be 
 their bolster: the Doctrine and Tradition of the 
 Apostles would smother them — if they would endure
 
 APOSTOLIC WITNESS 139 
 
 its application: but they won't, and the more you 
 tried to press it on them, the more would they gurgle 
 and choice, and goggle wistfully round the corner 
 of it. For the -Apostolic note stands for precisely 
 what they do not want: its function is that of 
 perpetual and incorruptible witness of God's 
 declared will in belief and practice, and what they 
 like is to express a new and half-formed opinion of 
 their own. 
 
 Non desideriis homimim, sed voluntate Dei wrote 
 Cardinal York on his medals of his own royalty. 
 The doctrine and tradition of the Apostles stands as 
 indefectible reminder of the will of God in the 
 sphere of faith and morals: and what the novelty 
 monger in religion wants is no such reminder, but a 
 free hand in the promulgation of the desires of men. 
 The unity of the Church is the necessary result, and 
 the reflex of the Unity of God, and is therefore 
 intolerable to peoples who have clearly abandoned 
 the idea of one objectively existent God, and have 
 really adopted the idea of many very different 
 subjectively existent Gods, American Gods, gods 
 adapted to Anglo-Saxon, German, or Swedish tastes 
 in religion; gods for the wise, supercultured gods, 
 and vulgar gods. 
 
 And the Apostolic note insists on the changeless- 
 ness of God; whereas the modern sectarian fancy 
 reflects its own unstable love of change in the ever- 
 changing god whose feeble portrait it is forever 
 painting and blurring, smudging and repainting, in 
 the thinly disguised effort at self-deification.
 
 IN EXCUSE OF SILENCE 
 
 IT was, apparently, a consolation to many people 
 suffering from the shock of Cardinal Newman's 
 submission to Rome to say that he wished him- 
 self back again. As a child I was constantly assured 
 by very honest persons that this was notoriously the 
 case; and I cannot believe that they would have said 
 it unless they really thought it. Being a pecuhar 
 child, for a Protestant, it caused in me a feeling of 
 antagonism to the great Oratorian; he had possessed 
 himself of a treasure I envied, and, if this were 
 true, he wanted to be rid of it. How far I was 
 convinced that the report really was true I cannot 
 pretend to say for certain now — much more than 
 forty years afterwards; but I doubt if I was fully 
 convinced, for even a child knows that people will 
 assume, without much question, that to be a fact 
 which they desire should be a fact, and I could 
 perceive that it was felt to be a heavy slur on the 
 Church of England that Newman should have found 
 himself constrained to leave it. To believe that he 
 had repented at leisure, that he was disappointed in 
 the Catholic Church and disillusioned, and would 
 fain return whence he came, was a strong comfort to 
 those who had that belief. 
 
 That the thing should ever have been said at all 
 
 140
 
 IN EXCUSE OF SILENCE ,141 
 
 may not be surprising; for Newman's name was one 
 around which report was apt to fly : it was the stormy 
 petrel of rumour, conjecture, and assertion. And 
 the un-CatholIc world never has been able to realise 
 how much discussion is freely indulged among 
 Catholics, how much individual character and taste 
 are allowed their natural and legitimate play; it 
 seems to be assumed, outside, that all really loyal 
 Catholics are cast in one mould, made to one pattern, 
 and, because they hold the same faith, have also 
 precisely the same way of looking at everything — at 
 politics, at devotional methods, at matters of taste, 
 at each and all of the thousand questions that every 
 day and week, month and year, bring into 
 consideration. 
 
 Because, for instance, Newman was known to hold 
 very strong views about university education, and 
 that they were not the views of Archbishop Man- 
 ning, it was promptly assumed that he was not in 
 sympathy with Catholic opinion; and because it was 
 also known that he had sympathisers, it was 
 immediately asserted that he held a sort of sec- 
 tarian position. With great glee it was concluded 
 that the position was one of wistful leanings of an 
 Anglican tinge — that he longed to be home again in 
 the bosom of the Church for which his enormous 
 influence had done so much. 
 
 It was a human feeling enough, and honest 
 enough, maybe, in the beginning; but how any honest 
 person who believed a word that Newman could say 
 or write, who held him to be honest, could go on
 
 142 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 making the same assertion after Newman's letter to 
 the Duke of Norfolk, it is very difficult to under- 
 stand. That he should have felt himself constrained 
 to make that disclaimer of regret for his change 
 from Anglicanism to Catholicity, must have seemed 
 to him cruel. That there should be any, the least, 
 necessity to put on record his never-wavering 
 gratitude to God for the grace that had brought him 
 into the Church must have seemed to him out- 
 rageous. But no disclaimer could have been more 
 simple, solemn, frank, and convincing; no record 
 could be more monumental in its plain brevity, direct- 
 ness, and sufficiency. It should have sufficed even 
 those who had never been at the pains to read his 
 Apologia, or any, indeed, of the works he wrote as 
 a Catholic. Nevertheless, the old assertion was 
 still made; was made, no doubt, after he had become 
 a Cardinal; may, for aught I know, be made now. 
 Similar assertions will, perhaps, go on being made 
 concerning any convert to "Rome'* whos^e passing 
 thither is felt to be a sword-thrust between the ribs 
 of Protestantism. 
 
 It is a weak effort at revenge for a fact that must 
 always be disconcerting: the fact that converts to 
 Rome are commonly those who have been striving 
 to have the highest ideal of the Church of England; 
 who have been most eager to believe her Catholic;' 
 the most earnest in their endeavour to live a super- 
 natural life by grace of her sacraments. That a 
 man who cares at all for the ideal of a Church 
 should come to confess that it is not to be found in
 
 IN EXCUSE OF SILENCE 143 
 
 that of England; that he who thinks It an essential 
 of true and full Christianity to be Catholic should 
 be forced to the conviction that Anglicanism Is not 
 Catholicity, but only a more ornate Protestantism; 
 that one who has grasped the fact that, by Christ's 
 Institution, sacramental life Is necessary to super- 
 natural life on earth, should feel himself constrained 
 to declare that the Church which has always pos- 
 sessed all seven sacraments is their true and natural 
 home, and that five are really missing In the Church 
 of England — all this must be really offensive to such 
 as are still willing to content themselves with 
 Anglicanism and their own somewhat eccentric 
 position In it. To such It must come as a pleasant 
 reprisal to assert, and believe If they can, that he 
 who has left them for "Rome" has not found hi 
 Rome what he went to seek; that there he has 
 experienced, not the realization of his Ideal, but Its 
 shattering and failure. 
 
 And there Is, besides, the great, not particularly 
 Anglican, bulk of stolid Protestantism, heavily 
 moribund, but not deprived of the faculty of speech, 
 which clings still to outworn, obsolete, dull mis- 
 representations, and likes to go on declaring that 
 Catholicity is really bad, immoral, and wicked. In 
 their care the only scandal Is that a good man (no 
 one gabbles more of goodness than they who think it 
 slightly impious to call anyone good) should turn 
 to Rome as to a fit and safe instructress In piety 
 and morals. So to them also it is a satisfaction to 
 believe that the deluded creature who aimed at
 
 144 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 goodness and sought help in "Rome" should find 
 himself cozened, and secretly long for escape from 
 its sink of iniquities. To neither party does it seem 
 to occur that he who could change once might with 
 even greater facility change again; that he who was 
 able to cut himself loose from lifelong associations, 
 affections, tastes, predilections, for conscience' 
 sake, might very easily fling off new and strange 
 fetters, abhorred and not beloved, strange, irksome, 
 and resented, and be free again. I was always 
 assured as a child and young boy that Newman 
 would be a Protestant again if he could, but no one 
 mentioned why he could not. "Ah ! he longs to 
 come back — if they would let him," was the formula. 
 
 It was odd that I never pictured him immured in 
 the dungeons of the Holy Office, but I never did. 
 Perhaps some did. It is one of the finest joys of 
 innocent Protestantism to imagine every medieval 
 power of the Papacy in full and unrestrained 
 operation, in spite of that practical abolition of the 
 Papiacy in which they also complacently believe. 
 
 Converts to Catholicity are often twitted with 
 their fondness for writing books about their con- 
 version: kt seems to me that the sort of habit we 
 have been noticing provides of itself a sufficient 
 excuse, if any excuse be necessary. It proves the 
 naturalness and legitimacy of their attitude, who, 
 having made such a change, wish to give a reasonable 
 account of it, and desire, incidentally, to show their 
 satisfaction in the change, and on what that comfort 
 and satisfaction is grounded. Nevertheless, to
 
 IN EXCUSE OF SILENCE 145 
 
 write such books must, as I think, be very difficult, 
 must even be very painful, and only to be done at a 
 sharp personal cost. To be done at all it must 
 involve a self-revelation, an opening of hidden and 
 sacred recesses of the heart and spirit, from which 
 we shrink with a sort of horror and repugnance 
 that is almost decency. No doubt there is a 
 temperament to which it is easier to make the in- 
 visible, impersonal public a confidant than it would 
 be to confide in almost any individual; poets can sing 
 aloud to all the world things they could never bring 
 themselves to say to a brother or a friend in the most 
 secure privacy. But not everyone has that tempera- 
 ment; to most of us the public is of all audiences 
 the most horrible. And of all the things we may 
 have to confide, those are the least easy to speak of 
 which concern the inner motions of our own spirit, 
 our ways of thinking about God, His ways of dealing 
 with us, spiritual episodes, our own religious growth 
 and stagnation, our starts and standings still, our 
 hurries and delays in all that inward life of ours 
 which is a natural secret. 
 
 Supposing a man able to write at all, and suppos- 
 ing him to feel under some obligation, or impulse, 
 to write thus of his own intimate matters, it would 
 seem to me that he would usually try to veil himself 
 under some shape of fiction. To his natural 
 reticence it would appear less repugnant to say what 
 he desired, not as of himself, but as of some 
 Imaginary personage. Thus do poets, who, for the 
 most part, confess themselves through the mouths of
 
 146 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 many third persons. And thus, 1 think, most would 
 choose to act who had a spiritual tale to tell, a soul's 
 story to embody. It relieves them of the incubus- 
 sense of egoism, and it leaves them immensely more 
 free. For a man setting about such a narration of 
 himself in propria persona must be appalled by the 
 fear of seeming to make himself out a more spiritual 
 person than he knows himself to be — perhaps a sort 
 of saint, since the stupid are apt to confound 
 spiritual experiences with sanctity, and he is iware 
 that stupid readers are seldom In a complete 
 minority. The picture he has to present must be 
 partly one-sided; it shows In general only the 
 spiritual and higher side; while decency forbids him 
 to parade the other side — the lower, the side of his 
 sins and shortcomings; he Is half afraid of seeming, 
 even to himself, a hypocrite. 
 
 By telling his story as of some other ficti- 
 tious personage, he Is saved all this scruple and 
 bondage. He can write with more reality and 
 fuller truth, though the form of his narration is 
 fictional, and a more genuine revelation Is possible. 
 Neither Rousseau nor Montaigne were morbidly 
 reticent; the former was morbidly unreticent; the 
 latter, if he lacked morbidity, had also a lack of 
 the faculty of decency: I suspect that both would 
 have left the world a revelation of themselves as 
 vivid and sincere, more just and more complete. If 
 the Confessions and the autobiography wrapped up 
 in the Essays had been embodied in the form of 
 fiction. It is certainly not intended to put in
 
 IN EXCUSE OF SILENCE 147 
 
 comparison the two books just cited with those 
 accounts of their conversion which converts have 
 given us in propria persona. The motive of the two 
 former is utterly opposed to the motive of the 
 latter. The Confessions of Rousseau and the 
 Essays of Montaigne are monuments of egoism that 
 can be compared only to the pyramids; the latter 
 are only accused of egoism by superficial and un- 
 sympathetic criticism; they are intended as gifts to 
 a cause, are offered in payment of a debt; the speaker 
 is not the hero of the piece, but its chorus: the real 
 hero is the Catholic Church, and it is her justifica- 
 tion that is really meant, not the speaker's own. 
 Each of these several works, though made by many 
 men, aim at one thing — to illustrate the various and 
 legitimate attraction of Catholic truth for minds of 
 ev^ery cast. If anyone can do it, it is a good and 
 useful work, obnoxious to no sincere objection of 
 vanity or self-absorption. For myself, I doubt if 1 
 could do it. Many times I have been asked to do 
 it, sometimes by direct and private application, some- 
 times by public suggestion — as recently in a review 
 of a book of mine called Gracechurch: 
 
 We are tantalised (says the reviewer) by his (the 
 author's) references to his religious life as a child, and we 
 wish he could have seen his way to expand them. The 
 making of a Churchman — beginning, as in this instance, in 
 a boy's search for the religious help he felt himself to need — 
 is a subject of psychological interest, and deserves a better 
 place than the odd pages modestly assigned to it in these 
 sketches.
 
 148 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 That is a frank and cordial invitation. It 
 deserves, perhaps, a response as frank and cordial. 
 Catholic and very friendly readers have urged the 
 same thing, as a duty, on the author of the book. 
 But I think them all mistaken. A man can only do 
 what God has given him the power of doing. The 
 power to strip himself of the shield and veil of 
 fiction, and still be frank, sincere, unaffected; to 
 stand, naked and unashamed, unclad in that innocent 
 mask and disguise of fiction, has been, this writer 
 thinks, withheld from him. An author may often be 
 deceived as to what he can do; it is seldom he is 
 wrong in his convictions as to what is quite beyond 
 him. Did St. Philip say: "Brothers, let us make 
 fools of ourselves for Jesus Christ?" Anyway he 
 never made himself anything in the least like a fool. 
 It may be a duty to do what is impossible — but only 
 when One Voice gives the command, as when the 
 man whose arm was withered was told by pitying 
 Omnipotence to stretch it out. To go beyond one's 
 impotence may be to go beyond one's grace, and we 
 need not attempt it because a kindly critic, or eager 
 friends, urge it as a literary or a religious duty. 
 
 Another friendly, and unknown, voice from over 
 the great and bitter water that divides this Old 
 World, to which I belong, from that New World, 
 whither I can adventure only in a hundred disguises 
 of fiction, came to me of late begging that I would 
 write, for a book to be made up of such revelations, 
 my reasons for being glad of being what I am — like 
 a very different some one — "after all a child of the
 
 IN EXCUSE OF SILENCE 149 
 
 Church." So many thousands of words were con- 
 ceded to me for the telling — but, ah ! how few they 
 seemed! I suppose the world itself, with all its 
 myriad tongues, contains not words enough for such 
 a telling as that. How attempt it? How dare I — 
 for sheer reverence? Perhaps five-and-thirty years 
 ago I could have set down for any man to read the 
 causes of my gladness and gratefulness for being a 
 Catholic, it was a new country then, and first impres- 
 sions are sharp and easily noted: the traveller in a 
 strange land is alert to perceive and tell things, and 
 true things, that escape the attention of men who 
 have always dwelt there. To another traveller, 
 following him, it seems that he knew the land well 
 — because both of them knew it so little. 
 
 On that October morning, five-and-thirty years 
 ago, when I could hardly believe (like Thomas prae 
 ff audio) that I was a Catholic, and asked some one 
 if I really were and was answered, "As truly a Cath- 
 olic as the Pope," then, perhaps, I thought I knew 
 what it was to be one and could have told out, or 
 written down for anyone who demanded it, what 
 cause I had for all my exultant joy; why it was that 
 the sun shone differently on a new and gladsome 
 world, and every autumn leaf seemed a syllable in a 
 chorus of whispering congratulation, and every little 
 breath of crisp October air was saying, gleefully, in 
 my ear, "You are a Catholic — a Catholic." 
 
 No doubt I thought I knew why: with the alpha- 
 bet of my gladness in my hands I never suspected 
 all the million words those few baby letters would
 
 150 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 come to spell. But after five-and-thlrty years! 
 Eh ! how little was it that I knew of the meanings of 
 being a Catholic at the beginning of them — how im- 
 possible to tell it all at the end of them, when one 
 knows so much more. To snatch an instance : 1 
 thought, then, that I knew how to hear Mass, and it 
 was years before I knew. Dare I, for reverence, try 
 to write down in cold print what hearing Mass is? 
 No doubt he said truly, in one sense, who told me, 
 "You are a Catholic as truly as the Pope." But 
 there is another sense, in which one may say as 
 truly that no one can become a Catholic in a minute, 
 nor in a year; that it takes many years, slow and rev- 
 erent, patient and listening, whereof every day and 
 week is a lesson, or a group of lessons, wherein one 
 is always learning, learning — ah ! and unlearning — 
 many a mistake and hurried misapprehension, so 
 shall we die neophytes at last: but simpler, hum- 
 bler, than we began. 
 
 How slowly, with what reverence, has the Church 
 unfolded, leaf by leaf, all the trees of her Divine 
 teaching that Christ laid in her breast an indestruc- 
 tible seed; and how few lives are long enough, pa- 
 tient enough, to assimilate, as bone of their bone 
 and flesh of their flesh, that food of knowledge. 
 All the great heresiarchs choked themselves with 
 hurry and haste: too irreverent to wait till the half- 
 truth they had snatched at should be exorcised of its 
 half-falsehood, with blatant stumbling arrogance 
 they proclaimed it the very, truth itself, and became 
 liars teaching a lie.
 
 IN EXCUSE OF SILENCE 151 
 
 And is this not why those who have been Cath- 
 olics many years seldom write of what they gained 
 by conversion? It is not, maybe, the reason as- 
 sumed by critics hostile to the Church. To them it 
 is easier to say that they who are old converts are 
 no longer enamoured of the mistress whose faults 
 they have learned; that to the old convert Cathol- 
 icity has grown stale, and the beauties of Catholicity 
 have dwindled down to paint and tinsel, not very 
 moving at near hand; that the old convert keeps his 
 mouth shut because he would not be let open it, for 
 fear he should tell too plain a truth. 
 
 But such a shallow, dull accusation of critics whom 
 nothing will make candid or friendly, will not vex 
 us. The young lover may be a glib sonneteer of his 
 mistress's eyebrow; but he to whom she has been 
 wedded half a lifetime writes no sonnets — though 
 his love is deeper, stronger, faithfuller, more rever- 
 ent, because he knows what once he only hoped. 
 No fourteen lines could knit up all he might say; 
 and, for reverence of her, he will hold his peace, lest 
 his stammering eulogies should do her an injustice. 
 
 Our Lady the Church, whose face was all we kn«w 
 once, is beyond our praise; and we shrink from be- 
 traying our own inadequacy, and hold our peace; 
 though still it is well that the young sonneteer should 
 sing and fill the world with echoes that keep it 
 sweeter; his praise of beauty reminds of truth, for 
 his song means always this, that "God is one and His 
 Church is one; and she is His mirror, wherein, by 
 every shifting light is caught, and caught again, some 
 reflection of His Supreme Beauty."
 
 PAX 
 
 I REMEMBER with what vehement, though nec- 
 essarily silent, protest I first heard, in church, 
 that Easter is the greatest of all Festivals : 
 when one is seven or eight years old the Resurrec- 
 tion Feast cannot appeal like that of Christ's human 
 birth. Death has never drawn near; the life we 
 know here looks illimitable, and those whom we love 
 seem immortal like ourselves: some of them are, 
 perhaps, already old, most of them are much older 
 than ourselves, but they appear to us to be fixed in 
 their respective ages : they are big boys and girls, 
 young men and women, middle-aged folk, and old 
 people, and we only remember them as they are: in 
 our memory they have hardly changed, and we can- 
 not imagine them changing, least of all do we realise 
 the change that will take some of them away from 
 our sight altogether. 
 
 But we have a memory already, an,d it enshrines 
 chiefly things outside our own short-shadowed ex- 
 perience : the Bible stories are as real to us in child- 
 hood as those that elder persons treasure, half wist- 
 fully, all tenderly, out of their own lengthening past. 
 And of all those exquisite tales the loveliest is that 
 of Bethlehem. Perhaps it is the first a child learns, 
 and it should be. Once heard, it brings God down 
 
 IS2
 
 PAX 153 
 
 to us, and lifts us to Him : there can be no aloofness 
 between a little child and the Christ of whom he first 
 thinks as of a Divine baby in an adorirfg mother's 
 arms. I do not believe a grown man ever betters 
 upon the picture of Bethlehem he first drew in his 
 mind from his own mother's tender, simple descrip- 
 tion. It is one that simplicity and tenderness can 
 best describe; no eloquence or fine phrasing can 
 make it more real, more human, or more Divine. 
 The scene is homely and humble, and the figures of 
 its groups, poor folk all of them, of no unfamiliar 
 grandeur or worldly consequence. The poverty of 
 the stable has no bleakness, the starlit night no chill, 
 for the listening child. To him that midnight can 
 never seem dark, but shining out of a past that 
 seems but yesterday, sacred, not aloof, with the 
 light that never was on sea or land. And learning 
 that ineffable story the child needs not to be told 
 that God Is Love; he knows It for always. And the 
 Christmas gladness is more than earthly; he feels 
 all the world to be the Christ-Child's church, the 
 wintry fields by Bethlehem its sanctuary and chancel, 
 the singing angels its carol-choir, the crib Its altar. 
 All the joyous greetings have a ring like that of the 
 bells that fling the Christmas message through the 
 clear and frozen air; the Christmas gifts arc more 
 than mere presents — they are sacred and mysterious; 
 the child can never think they were bought with 
 common money In any common shop; the other Child 
 sent them from Bethlehem, and they are holy from 
 His fingers. Christmas games are not like games of
 
 154 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 other seasons; they are wonderful and full of a 
 strange joyousness, as though among the rest, un- 
 seen but intimately felt, the Child from Heaven were 
 playing too. The very laughter of Christmas is 
 only an echo of the silver-throated bells, and the 
 bells themselves are but echoing on the Angel's 
 hymn of glory and peace. 
 
 So was Christmas to us long ago, in the far-away 
 years before the hard noon of life came upon us, 
 before the world meant anything worse to us than 
 the lovely word God's creating whisper spelled, 
 when sin meant to us only a naughtiness that was 
 itself innocent, and the devil was a terror to us, 
 unimaginable as a friend. So is it now to millions 
 of children who have to-day all the wisdom" we have 
 unlearned in the crowded school of folly. To 
 children Merry Christmas! Mirth and Christmas 
 are theirs by special right of fitness, and happiest 
 is our own Christmas when we can help to make 
 theirs all that we remember ours to have been once. 
 A season of peculiar unselfishness, our best hope of 
 finding it still happy ourselves must lie in the 
 endeavour to make it so to others. To try in. later 
 life doggedly to reconstruct what is unalterably past 
 can yield us only disappointment and disillusion; he 
 who says within himself. This Christmas shall be as 
 the old ones: good cheer and jocund doings shall 
 bring back the joys we remember, must fail. A 
 world-aged man's Christmas cannot be as the child's. 
 Many strive to forget this, and their failure make-s 
 them bitter, ready to carp and grumble at the holy
 
 PAX 155 
 
 sweet season, as sweet and holy still as when they 
 themselves were holy and sweet. 
 
 Our Christmas, who have half a hundred behind 
 us, must be full of memories, not Impersonal as a 
 child's, but strung together out of our own gathered 
 rosary of experience, joyful, mysterious, and 
 sorrowful, not many glorious. And the joyful ones 
 themselves take a tinge of wistfulness as they shine 
 out of an ever-lengthening past. We sit alone, and 
 unforgotten figures arise to greet us, smilingly, but 
 with smiles that have grown unearthly, for their 
 light is not hence, but the reflection of what falls 
 upon their faces in a holy place where we are not 
 with them. 
 
 "The least gift that they left to our childhood in long ago 
 
 years 
 Is changed from a toy to a relic, and gazed at through 
 
 crystals of tears." 
 
 And other partings have come: all the world's 
 thickness lies between brother and brother — one 
 here, one keeps his Christmas In the midsummer of 
 the earth's other side, and quarrels and jealousies 
 have divided those who were dear to each other 
 once — one half-grudges the others new wealth or 
 consequence, and one has outgrown the old friend's 
 homeliness and mediocrity. 
 
 We must fain think of the child that was once our- 
 self, and fain regret him; but the cure of the wounds 
 we have put upon him lies In the little hand of the 
 other Child; the scars In It can take out all ours.
 
 156 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 Only the Baby in the Manger can give us back what 
 we grown men have wasted. Let the children, and 
 the lonely, gather Him to their chilled heart, and 
 He will nestle to them; this thick night of self- 
 blurred murk and freezing will hang out again its 
 leading star, noise and jostle will pause to listen 
 again for the carol-cry of glory and of peace, and 
 the poverty of the sweet stable will make us rich, or 
 heal the hunger wealth may have brought us. 
 
 The child, we said, whose circle Death has never 
 touched, is jealous of Easter's praise for Christmas, 
 and to him Easter seems an age away; but to us 
 elders the Resurrection Feast comes hot-foot on the 
 Birth Feast, and is not its rival, but its complement; 
 our many years have broken the ring we remember, 
 there are more gaps now than links; but a few years 
 more and Easter will make it whole again. 
 
 The more we make our Christmas a part of 
 our religion the less can age steal from it. It is a 
 sad season only to them in whose mind it is but a 
 memory of outgrown happiness — a day of contrasts. 
 It is all too common a plaint with some that for 
 them it is no time of mirth — an occasion rather of 
 poignant reminders hard to face without wincing. 
 If we could think less of ourselves and more of the 
 Little Child who came to lead us, less of Christmas 
 would be lost; for He is not lost, nor anything He 
 brought. The more Christian our Christmas is, the 
 more will its sweetness survive all time's assault: 
 it is when we make of a great feast of our religion 
 only a half pagan wassail-day that it fails us after
 
 PAX 157 
 
 youth is fled. The Child of the Manger was not 
 to lie there a Child for ever, and the Man of the 
 Cross knew all that we have learned of life's shadow, 
 and can brighten it and sweeten it. It is only when 
 we lose sight of Christmas as the first act in the 
 drama of redemption that its joy seems to elude us 
 as the years run by. And it is because millions do 
 forget, that their Christmas mirth rings hollow and 
 half-hearted, and to the sad seems heartless. 
 
 On Christmas Day, as on every other day, Death 
 comes to many homes. Can mourners feel happy? 
 Only if they remember that the birth of the Child 
 at Bethlehem was the cure of Death for ever. 
 
 No man can bring back the past or call childhood 
 back, merry and innocent; but the present is our 
 own, and out of it we can make the future. 
 
 A few more Yules, and, if we will, we may keep 
 our Christmas with the Master of it, and hear the 
 same angels singing who welcomed Him to churlish 
 Bethlehem.
 
 PAGAN YULE 
 
 DICKENS revelled in Christmas writing as 
 he "wallowed naked in the pathetic," and 
 his Christmas writing makes delightful 
 reading. So is Bracehridge Hall delightful and 
 Old-fashioned Christmas, and no bit of writing 
 could be more perfect in its kind than George Eliot's 
 Christmas described in Silas Marner. And there 
 are unnumbered passages in other writers that do 
 meet homage to what Dickens calls the fine old 
 season. 
 
 And more than half the charm In all of these is 
 due to the season itself, whereto they serve as 
 mirrors. To be savoured aright they must be read 
 at Christmas: in a hot August afternoon they will 
 be scarce more entrancing than a mince-pie. Even 
 when enjoyed in season they suggest to the adult 
 reader one consideration: that, to relish Christmas 
 thus described, one had better be pretty well-off. 
 One may even realise that a Pickwickian Christmas 
 implies an iron constitution and an impregnable 
 digestion. Mr. Pickwick's Christmas was, not to 
 put too fine a point upon it, gluttonous; and if 
 elderly gentlemen who get drunk deserve a headache 
 In the morning Mr. Pickwick certainly deserved one. 
 
 To be of a bilious habit is, perhaps, criminal: but 
 
 158
 
 PAGAN YULE i59 
 
 no one labouring under that imperfection could have 
 faced a Dingley Dell Christmas even with 
 resignation. 
 
 The Christmas of our dear friend presupposes 
 a chronic thirst, a Gargantuan appetite, and roaring 
 spirits: and especially it implies a pocket pro- 
 portionate to their indulgence. To suggest that a 
 Dickensian Christmas Is partly based on a cosy 
 affectation would be Scroogian and horrid. Lots of 
 folk are still young, many are wealthy, England is 
 not yet entirely peopled by dyspeptics, in spite of 
 the advertisements of pills and beans: and even the 
 wicked creatures with middling taxable incomes will 
 stretch a point and spend a little extra on Christmas 
 jollities. God bless them all! 
 
 But, however gladly we would forget poverty and 
 pain, anxiety and lonely sickness, they do not cease 
 because we think it unseasonable to remember their 
 existence. They will not be Pod-snapped away. 
 Nothing would have shocked that immortal and still 
 insistent personage more than to breathe a mention 
 of them in his ear, or in that of the young person, 
 at his well-laden Yule-night board. He would not 
 hear of them: he waved them aside. 
 
 Can we wave them aside? Can we make them 
 non-existent? Have old-age pensions obliterated 
 them, or Trade Unions, or any other substitute for 
 the peace of God? 
 
 If not, is Christmas, after all, an orgy of the rich? 
 Are the poor and wretched to understand that their 
 business on the feast is to be forgotten?
 
 i6o DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 If It were so the reason would be, flatly, this: 
 that Christmas has lost its Christian meaning and 
 ossified into a pagan carnival, A day of mere 
 gorging and extravagance can concern the poverty- 
 stricken very little: an extra glass or so of gin on 
 credit, by some easy-tempered landlord's indulgence, 
 is about all tbcy can look for to celebrate the day. 
 
 And how suggestive of wealth and feasting the 
 Bethlehem stable is! How rich the Child there, 
 and His Mother and her spouse! 
 
 God rest you, merry gentlemen, have a thought 
 of that Child, poor no longer, and help the poor 
 children and their much poorer parents. Was 
 Dives a disreputable person? What harm did he, 
 except that, while he ate pleasantly, there was unfed 
 Lazarus at his gate ? Did he bid the wretch starve ? 
 Had he defrauded or impoverished him? 
 
 Nay, but though every Dives in all England 
 should forget the empty bellies, through solicitude 
 for his own, over-weighted and outraged, yet will 
 not Christ. It is not the rich man's festival: It is 
 only his extravagant opportunity. The pauper 
 Child, In the chill stable. It Is His feast, and His 
 gifts are for all: only they are pushed aside and 
 unnoted. 
 
 If Christmas In England were more Christian its 
 contrasts would not make us gasp, and half-shame us 
 of our own well-being. Were the contrasts so 
 ghastly In the old days before the dour Reformation 
 came to shut the monk's guest-houses, and give to 
 the Indigent Poor Laws Instead?
 
 PAGAN YULE i6i 
 
 Let the rich do what they can — if they would — to 
 sweeten the sting of poverty: let Christ's charity 
 brood wider than any new-fangled State Philan- 
 thropy: and yet there will be poor, and sad, and sick. 
 We know it well. 
 
 Is there no cure? 
 
 Only one: the Child Himself. 
 
 Give Him back to the people: teach Him again. 
 Cease cheating the children of England of their 
 knowledge of Him, and their share in Him, and half 
 the bitterness of being unwillingly like Him In his 
 penury will be healed. Go on breeding up 
 England's children pagans, and, as they grow in 
 numbers, so will the huge total grow of those who 
 see in poverty the only shame and evil, the one 
 thing intolerable. 
 
 Make your Christmas more and more heathen, be 
 less and less mindful of Its Christian meaning, and 
 more and more will the pagan poor hate and envy 
 and grudge the selfish, smug Christmas of the rich. 
 Shoulder Christ out of Christmas, and a chill more 
 bitter than that of the wintry night will benumb the 
 hearts of rich and poor alike. In Bethlehem was 
 no room, in home or Inn, for the Divine outcast; 
 that, not the poverty of the place, made poignant 
 the pathos of the stable. And less and less room for 
 Him is found In home and hostel among us: be- 
 cause His story Is fast fading Into legend — for how 
 can He be known to a nation to whom He Is not 
 taught? The children of England are stolen from 
 the Child: and the children become men as churlish
 
 i62 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 to Him as they of Bethlehem, unwitting of His 
 presence in their midst. Let England go on thus, 
 breeding up heathens, and her ginshops and brothels 
 will be full, her churches empty: the hooligan will 
 illustrate her civilisation, and those whose bed, on 
 Christmas night, Is on the windy wall beside the cold 
 river will witness to the fine State Philanthropy that 
 serves our modern world in place of the Church's 
 ancient charity. All the more bitter is their chill for 
 that they know nothing of the Child who left Heaven 
 for the stable: is it their fault? How should they 
 know, who may be taught anything else but that? 
 
 The Reformation robbed the English poor of 
 their Church: the new education has stolen Christ 
 out of their lives, and ousted Him from their homes. 
 Does the decorous statesman, listening in his highly 
 garnished church, to the old tale of churlish 
 Bethlehem, pause to wonder from how many doors 
 he has helped to drive Christ into the night: how 
 dire he has helped to make the poverty of those who 
 were poor enough before? Sharp and biting close 
 can be the want of the poor Christian: but how 
 death-cold is the penury of the poor pagan who has 
 not even learned of hope.
 
 ONCE AGAIN 
 
 TO hear him talk you would say that Man 
 was a self-satisfied animal, but it is only his 
 little way: all these trumpetings are merely 
 for the public. He remains personally unconvinced. 
 In reality dissatisfaction comes easier to him than 
 optimism, and his deepest dissatisfaction is 
 commonly with his circumstances, of which he counts 
 himself a part. Whoever else heeds his boastings, 
 he does not: they are only an uneasy effort at self- 
 defence, to prevent his contemporaries from 
 arriving at his own conclusions about himself. 
 
 This is not saying that he is really a humble 
 creature, for humility is not quite the same thing as 
 a sense of soreness at not being a finer fellow. 
 Humility never thinks of being fine. 
 
 Of course there are people whose optimism 
 begins, like charity in the proverb, at home : they are 
 impervious to experience of themselves, and judge 
 themselves by their preconceived picture of them- 
 selves without any tedious comparisons of it with 
 the original. Outside opinion has no weight with 
 them, and they are never dashed by any failures to 
 behave as they have decided that they will behave. 
 A revelation from on high would not convince them 
 that they were not particularly like the ideal they 
 
 163
 
 'i64 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 have very pleasantly conceived of themselves. 
 They do not need to boast, for boasting implies a 
 certain insincerity. 
 
 But they are, I think, rare birds: most people 
 think worse of themselves than would appear, and 
 are rather pessimistic in their own regard than over- 
 sanguine. And that, perhaps, is why persons who 
 have reached a point beyond youth shrink instinc- 
 tively from the making of good resolutions. 
 
 It is a shallow assumption that the only difficulty 
 about good resolutions is In the keeping of them; 
 that simply to make them is as easy as admitting that 
 two and two are four. It may be easy for the young, 
 who have but a short experience of themselves, to 
 damp them: who still suppose that to resolve and to 
 do are much the same thing. But It Is not such a 
 comfortable process for those who have learned, by 
 a hundred trials, how wide the difference Is between 
 resolving and achieving. Once bitten, twice shy: 
 and every broken resolution leaves the mark of its 
 teeth on us. 
 
 It is not, again, so easy to be insincere with our- 
 selves as is commonly pretended: to arrive at any- 
 thing like compete and complacent Insincerity with 
 oneself is a matter of much time and effort and 
 Implies a habit formed by innumerable pitiful acts, 
 and much more deliberate intention than is at all 
 usual. The majority of Imperfect human creatures 
 are not so apt to be insincere with themselves as to 
 be pusillanimous; they are more liable to think them- 
 selves hypocritical than to be so, and of having to
 
 ONCE AGAIN 165 
 
 think themselves hypocrites they are unduly fearful. 
 For they have not the pluck to tell themselves (and 
 the Devil) that the good in themselves is just as 
 real as the bad: perceiving by experience that the 
 good has often been sent to the wall by the bad, they 
 are ever-ready to listen when the Devil assures them 
 that the bad was all genuine and the good a mere 
 pretence all along. If your self-complacent, 
 personal optimist is a rare bird, I believe your 
 proper hypocrite to be much rarer. If he be so 
 common as is pretended why do I not continually 
 meet him? Ask any priest and see if he will tell 
 you that he comes across many hypocrites. In- 
 consistency is not hypocrisy: to aim at a tree-top and 
 only hit one of the lower boughs may not be marks- 
 manship, but it is not hypocritical: 
 
 "He who means the sky 
 
 Shoots higher far than he that means a tree." 
 
 It is a shame to talk as though the poor fellow who 
 tries a higher standard than he has grace for is a 
 hypocrite. But no one is more ready to condemn 
 him than himself. Deadly conscious of a thousand 
 failures, he comes to fancy that a new attempt would 
 be insincerity. And so he shrinks from making 
 good resolutions; partly out of a timorous dread ot 
 his own accusation of hypocrisy, and partly out of a 
 dismal sense of the labour it involves — a labour so 
 often proved unfruitful. For the labour grows 
 more and more. There is an exhilaration in the 
 first repentance: 'tis a novel excursion into a region
 
 i66 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 full of promise. But what broken promise Is so 
 bitter to remember as our own? It is only In child- 
 hood that the broken promises of other people hurt 
 and surprise us much: they cease to scandalise us 
 as we grow older : but our own promises broken hurt 
 and horrify us still. So we become afraid of making 
 them : and most of all afraid of promising to be what 
 we have never been. 
 
 Experientia docet^ says a proverb; and like all 
 proverbs It Is a sort of oracle; an,d In all oracles 
 there is apt to lurk a lie twisted in and out of its 
 truth. Experience teaches; but does it always teach 
 the bravest truth? What had experience taught 
 the man by the pool in Siloam through eight and 
 thirty gibing years? That it was all no use: that 
 to-day must repeat yesterday's failure: he never had 
 had anyone help him to the healing pool, and he had 
 not yet: others ha,d always had their helpers, and 
 they reached the saving water, and would this time 
 too. But he would not listen to the cold, grim 
 warning of experience. He would not heed the grin 
 of any looker-on: he had been trying to scramble to 
 the pool for thirty and eight years, and the only 
 hope he had was to try and scramble still. So the 
 other Man came by. Who had seen each daily fruit- 
 less effort, and never scoffed at it, and the horrible 
 long patience was all forgotten. The frouzy bed 
 on which he had lain so many days, wet with 
 tears of a thousand disappointments, the Man bade 
 him take up — ^and walk. He never whined that he 
 could not: that there he must lie rotting to the
 
 ONCE AGAIN 167 
 
 obvious end. The Kindest Voice that has ever 
 spoken had told him to brush aside all ghastly 
 experience, and the meaning of the Voice was Hope: 
 as it is to all of us, who know not whither else to 
 turn for it. Let him heed nothing but the mandate ; 
 let him stand up and look Him in the face who with 
 such plain mercy said that he must lie on the dull 
 reminder of his helplessness no more, but carry it 
 away thence, and walk. 
 
 There is no other Voice that can hearten us weary 
 with a life-time of daily failures. Our own falters: 
 the crooked finger of our fellows points at the 
 squalid past. Only the Faultless bids us cease to sit 
 glowering in our faults: "Have they," He asks us 
 gently, "abolished MeT' 
 
 Was it a faultless world He came to re- fashion? 
 We are so timid that we hold ourselves as though 
 our broken pnomises voided His: as if our mean 
 experience of ourselves were to set His measure of 
 dealing with us. Having blurred the given likeness 
 of ourselves to Him, we forget what He is like: and 
 obscure Him in impatience like our own, and fancy 
 Him pitiless as our human judges are, with 'a stone 
 in His fist for us like theirs. 
 
 So we shrink back, with cowardly pride, from 
 even the worn effort to be different: as if a new year 
 could hold for us no hope stouter than the years 
 already wasted. Because our hope has been in our- 
 selves, and we are so bitter slow to learn that it can 
 only be in Him.
 
 GOODBYE— AND WELCOME 
 
 NINETEEN HUNDRED AND THIR- 
 TEEN is on his last legs, and in a few days 
 they will have carried him off, with all his 
 imperfections on his head, to stand for judgment 
 among all the other past things and years. 
 
 He came into the world weighted with the heavy 
 disadvantage of a bad name: the people who bother 
 themselves and their neighbours about "luck," 
 never expected any good of him; and every evil that 
 befell any of us during his course was no matter of 
 surprise to them. 
 
 "What else could you look for in the year '13?" 
 they demanded with a grizzly complacence. Well, 
 they may comfort themselves with the reflection that 
 2013 can do them no harm. 
 
 It is not pretty, anyway, to insult a death-bed, 
 
 and it is not our intention now to repeat the tale of 
 
 offences chargeable by the human race against 19 13 ; 
 
 and old folk are argumentative — he might pretend 
 
 that some of the trouble was of man's own making 
 
 as much as his. If, he might urge, you men would 
 
 be less greedy, less quarrelsome, less vindictive, less 
 
 furiously hurried, more deliberate, more patient, 
 
 more charitable to each other, a little wiser, and a 
 
 little mare mutually considerate among yourselves, 
 
 168
 
 GOODBYE— AND WELCOME 169 
 
 I might have been as lucky a year as the rest. 
 Meanwhile, I want to repent of my real faults, and 
 you may as well make the responses to my Litany of 
 self-condemnation. 
 
 I suppose the years also suffer a particular as well 
 as a general judgment; only that the former, in their 
 case, is often crude and hasty, and is liable to 
 considerable revision by the latter. So, all we need 
 do, is to call out to our unpopular friend, 19 13, as 
 he goes, "Goodbye — and Welcome." Should he be 
 sensitive to innuendo he may scent one in the form of 
 the farewell, though we, of course, mean only, "And 
 welcome 19 14." 
 
 When we watch other friends leaving us we know 
 that they take with them something of our own — a 
 bit of our heart at least, and perhaps other trifles. 
 A parting year cannot go empty-handed either; three 
 score and ten are the golden coins life is apt to 
 promise us for our spending, and one of them 
 (whether our stock be really seventy or no) he 
 carries off in his fist. What has he left us for it? 
 Nay, what did we buy with it? A better conscience, 
 a higher purpose; some translation of fine purpose 
 into decent achievement; some lesson learned; some 
 ugly knowledge unlearned; a gentle patience; a 
 more patient hope? 
 
 There is only One who can answer, and He will 
 not — yet. 
 
 It is no wonder, says the Autocrat of the Break- 
 fast Table, that when two men talk to each other 
 they are so liable to misunderstand — six folk all
 
 I70 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 speaking at once! *'Six?" demanded, I think, the 
 young man called John. 
 
 "Why, yes," answered the Autocrat (I quote only 
 his substance, out of a naughty memory) . "Take 
 Tom and Bill. There's Tom as Bill thinks he is, 
 and Tom as Tom thinks he is, and Tom as God 
 knows him to be : and Bill as Tom imagines him, and 
 Bill as Bill imagines himself, and Bill as God knows 
 he is: all at loggerheads." 
 
 And out of all those six, there's only one on each 
 side that matters. The world may think that you 
 have done a lot in 19 13, and you may think you have 
 done worse than nothing: the fact does not lie some- 
 where between the world and you, but up in heaven, 
 where God knows. 
 
 To me it seems a comfortable truth: the world 
 is no pattern of perfection, but God save us from 
 its judgment: only to the judgment of Perfection 
 can Imperfection look with any hope. Who, if God 
 would suffer it, would choose that the final judgment 
 should be passed on himself, by himself? "For 
 though our heart reprehend us, God is greater than 
 our heart, and knoweth all things." So wrote the 
 Beloved of Love itself, echoing something he had 
 overheard from the Heart whereby he lay that last 
 supper-night before the King put on His Crown, and 
 mounted his bitter throne to reign in sweetness. 
 
 Repentance is our self-function not judgment. 
 That is no more ours than it is our fellow-man's: 
 "Neither judge I myself," said St. Paul. We are 
 know-nothings, and our Hope must stretch out
 
 GOODBYE— AND WELCOME 171 
 
 pleading fingers to Omniscience — only another name 
 of His who called Himself Charity. And He tells 
 us what it means. "Charity is patient, is kind . . . 
 seeketh not her own, is not provoked to anger, 
 thinketh no evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity, endureth 
 all things. Charity never falleth away ... we 
 know in part . . ." 
 
 But Charity is Omniscience, and greater than our 
 heart, and knoweth all things. 
 
 Of God's patience and compassion we all take 
 account when it is question of great sinners — has He 
 no patience or compassion for those who try not to 
 sin, and fail, and go on trying? When we are mad 
 with impatience against ourselves, and our failures 
 and sloth, is it out of humility? "He who 
 believeth, let him not make haste." Was Isaias 
 giving a Counsel of Imperfection — or remembering 
 that we must go up step by step, and that the steps 
 are steep, and our knees faltering, and only by the 
 Hand of Omnipotent Charity can we be helped and 
 heartened up at all? 
 
 19 13 is not our judge ; only one of many witnesses. 
 Another witness is coming; neither in his eyes can we 
 throw dust; he comes not really to give or to steal, 
 but to watch. He shall invent nothing, foist up no 
 slander against us, but note what he sees. It 
 depends on us, and whether we let God help us, or 
 shoulder Him away from our lives. 
 
 We need not too tediously wander back over the 
 dull, stubbled fields of the dead year to scan if there 
 be, after all, some forgotten gleanings of good grain
 
 172 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 belonging to us : God will do that for us, did it when 
 we were not looking. A father's tenderness does not 
 ignore the good points in his worst son: they never 
 slip his memory. Eh! What things God makes 
 much of — half a soldier-lad's cloak to make him 
 warm in Heaven, Who had all the universe of stars 
 for the fringe of His raiment. 
 
 "Little Bro-thers," pleaded the Poor Man of 
 Assisi, with a patience and modesty learnt out of the 
 Heart of the Poor Man of Nazareth, "let us begin 
 to love Jesus Christ a little." 
 
 It is high time. Where have we be-en all these 
 truant years; what silly, ugly things have we been 
 teaching ourselves were wise and fine, outside the 
 school where the humble Master has been asking, 
 asking that the three and thirty letters of his 
 alphabet might spell for us the only word we need 
 — Love? Birth and Death, Miracle and Parable, 
 the long, silent years after Bethlehem and before 
 Calvary, Pity and Patience, Healing and Help, His 
 daily toil for His daily bread, all the thirty and 
 three letters that made that Life on earth of the 
 Carpenter whose Throne the angels were bowing 
 down before in Heaven. He keeps his patient eyes 
 on us, pushing them to us this way and that, and 
 bids us group them into one word: what can they 
 spell but Love? 
 
 Can the angels understand? All their knowl- 
 edge is not Omniscience, and its light makes even 
 their science cast a shadow; and all along they have
 
 GOODBYE— AND WELCOME 173 
 
 been watching Him and us. Can they understand 
 it, Divine Patience and human refusal? They saw 
 the Child when first He came at Bethlehem; watched 
 His exiled babyhood, His ignored childhood; heard 
 Joseph command, and saw Him obey; hovered about 
 His work, as He learned it; listened when He began 
 at last to teach, and missed no miracle He did, up 
 to the last miracle of His raising Himself from 
 death. Alas, they saw us too: saw our first 
 repulse of Him at Bethlehem, hardily maintained 
 ever since: that He came to His own, and His own 
 received Him not they knew before St. John put it 
 into piteous words, and the world is His own as 
 much as ever, and will no more receive Him now 
 than at first. Can they fathom it? They know 
 who He is, and what we are; and they have to stand 
 by and watch Him standing, a beggar for love, 
 showing His wounds at the gate of the hearts of 
 men, outside. Cold was the night wind when He 
 came, colder and colder blows the blast of man's 
 indifference, in which mankind itself is freezing to 
 death. And they see it all; men huddled and 
 grovelled at the feet of any tyrant, lying and cruel; 
 blind with staring at any beauty that is scarce at 
 pains to hide its ugliness and horror behind a half- 
 mask — but resolute to defend themselves against the 
 King who will not call us servants, but friends, and 
 with eyes obstinately shut against the loveliness of 
 the Most Beautiful of the children of men. 
 
 Qua.nidiu? How long, they must needs cry out,
 
 174 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 will the incomprehensible story last; when shall God 
 write Finis to the book of His long patience and of 
 man's thankless insolence? 
 
 Meanwhile they come to each of us, the escort to 
 every man of another year; and they whisper, with 
 shamed angelic faces, let this hold your Reparation : 
 let it make up for the stale failures of the past, and 
 carry through its length message after message of 
 awakening tenderness. Abyssus ahyssiim invocat — 
 the fathomless deeps of God's love cry out to you to 
 deepen your heart for Him : till at last you, knowing 
 that all your fault and failure is known, may still 
 gather hope because you also can cry: 
 
 "But, Lord Thou knowest all things, Thou know- 
 est that I love thee."
 
 OF CAMEL SWALLOWING 
 
 THE Eighteenth Century, which had amassed 
 a good deal that waa especially its own to 
 leave, apart from what it had inherited, be- 
 queathed to its posterity, among other things, an in- 
 tense dislike of miracles. That dislike was partly 
 an heirloom, neatly conserved in Protestant wrap- 
 pings, rather yellow and cracked at the joints; but 
 eighteenth century attachment to Protestantism was 
 mainly negative — it did not so much love Protes- 
 tantism for what it had modestly represented itself 
 to be, as liked it for certainly not being something 
 else. Protestantism, wherever it was, had always 
 announced itself as Christianity Pure and Evangel- 
 ical, and the Eighteenth Century was not partic- 
 ularly fond of Christianity at all; but, then. Protes- 
 tantism was obviously not Catholicity, and that was 
 everything. In so far as Protestantism ha.d got rid 
 of the Pope, and of Papal Dogma, it was truly ad- 
 mirable; in so far as it retained a belief in Christian- 
 ity, as a religion implying faith in Christ as God, it 
 had much to learn of the negative kind, of the 
 Eighteenth Century; and it did not obstinately re- 
 fuse to be taught. 
 
 Thus, the heirloom we have mentioned, carefully 
 
 I7S
 
 176 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 treasured by the Eighteenth Century, was handed 
 on with a new, or somewhat enlarged, purpose. 
 
 The original and traditional Protestant objection 
 to miracles made a distinction; it had been largely 
 due to the fact that for many hundreds of years the 
 miracles had been Catholic miracles, and to admit 
 them would have been incompatible with the simple 
 theory that the Pope was Antichrist. All the mir- 
 acles, during all the ages, in which the performers 
 were compelled to confess that the Papal Church had 
 existed, were redolent of a Catholic taint; they had 
 been the indiscreet work of saints indubitably Cath- 
 olic and Papal, or had been connected with some 
 distinctively Catholic doctrine, such as the belief in 
 Holy Relics (as of the True Cros.s, or the other in- 
 struments of the Passion,) and the belief in the Real 
 Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. If such mir- 
 acles had been true, it would, the Reformers per- 
 ceived, be difficult to maintain that the religion they 
 had illustrated was false and abominable to God. 
 But there had been, said, they, an earlier age, when 
 there was no Church in the Papal sense of it; a pure, 
 Biblical, unecclesiastical age, when bishops were 
 merely Presbyterian ministers with large congre- 
 gations. Miracles In that age were on a different 
 footing; instead of offensively arguing in favor of a 
 haughty Papal Church, they would only be a proof 
 of the divine sanctions of Christianity — pure New 
 Testament Christianity. (St. Stephen and St. 
 James of Jerusalem were unhappily not New Tes- 
 tament Christians, as no part of the New Testament
 
 OF CAMEL SWALLOWING 177 
 
 had been written while they were ahve.) So 
 "Bible" minicles were all right, and, for much the 
 same reason, "Ecclesiastical" miracles were all 
 wrong. 
 
 The Eighteenth Century, however, was not 
 wrapped up in the New Testament, and was, in- 
 deed, remarkably disengaged as to the Divine origin, 
 basis, and authority of Christianity. So it handed 
 on the miracle-hating heirloom with an added gusto, 
 and without any reservations. For many ages mir- 
 acles had done a pestilent work in confirming the be- 
 lief of a credulous world in the supernatural char- 
 acter and Divinely accredited Mission of the Papal 
 Church: that was pitiable and shocking. But to re- 
 tain belief in any miracles, even though reported in 
 the New Testament, would only tend to maintain 
 the hideous shackles of "superstition," that is, of the 
 foolish idea that Christianity itself was anything 
 more than a growth — like the inimitable British Con- 
 stitution; that it was, in fact, a supernatural religion, 
 with a supernatural origin, a Divine Founder, a Di- 
 vine Revelation, and a Divine (instead of a merely 
 political, ethical and utilitarian) Authority and Mis- 
 sion. The strong and determined preoccupation of 
 the Eighteenth Century was to escape altogether 
 from the incubus of the supernatural; religion could 
 only be tolerated as a Department of State, like the 
 Lunacy Board, and few things could be imagined 
 more inconvenient and embarrassing than a State 
 Department with a Divine and irresponsible head. 
 "What constitution," as the doctor argued against
 
 178 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 Eternal Punishment, "could stand it?" Some 
 Eighteenth Century legacies have been lost or dissi- 
 pated. There are people who think the present 
 age less well-mannered, and less addicted to books, 
 more frankly superficial, and more frankly greedy. 
 But the dislike of miracles is still much prized. 
 
 The grounds of a survival that might seem ar- 
 chaic, the reasons for this antipathy, are worth con- 
 jecturing. The explanation cannot be found in "the 
 fact that miracles are impossible." Nothing is 
 more attractive to contemporary taste (so to speak) 
 than the obviously and demonstrably impossible. 
 Write a novel hanging on an "impossible fact," and 
 it's odd if it be ever popular, experto crede; tell a 
 story, at a dinner party, involving two or three 
 physical impossibilities, and you will be asked again; 
 tell another, with twenty points each irreconcilable 
 with Euclid or the late Professor Huxley, and you 
 will have invitations for an entire season. 
 
 It is not because the present age is overridden by 
 logic, or by its profound realization of, and rever- 
 ence for, admitted discoveries in the realm of 
 science (where nothing but what is physical may 
 dare to assert its existence), that it can't stand a 
 miracle. I dare say that nine agnostic metaphy- 
 sicians out of ten would handsomely admit that a 
 Jesuit is likely to be as good a logician as a stock- 
 broker, and that ninety-nine physicists out of a hun- 
 dred would freely confess that the laws of physics 
 are not even darkly surmised by that omniscience 
 classically termed the Man in the Street.
 
 OF CAMEL SWALLOWING 179 
 
 But the man in the street Is too wide-awake for 
 a miracle. Why? Because the rules of evidence 
 are better realized by him than they were, for in- 
 stance, by St. Thomas Aquinas. Not precisely; the 
 only rules of evidence he studies are those illustrated 
 in criminal trials, his greedy, ghoulish and obscene 
 taste for which is pandered to by the most indecent 
 press that ever existed, a press whose hero is the 
 murderer, and whose heroine is the adulteress. 
 
 But from the man in the street belief in the su- 
 pernatural has been sedulously eliminated. If mir- 
 acles were merely vulgar stupidities, or dark and 
 foul abnormalities, he would swallow them vora- 
 ciously; and his press would pry his mouth open, if 
 he was not already agape for them, that they might 
 be pushed in and down with the least attempt at dis- 
 cussion or mastication. 
 
 "Ecclesiastical" miracles stand on a different 
 base, and are evidences of life and action in a higher 
 plane; they presuppose God, as a saint presupposes 
 God. Saints are the world's fools as they are God's 
 wise men. And miracles are intolerable to a society 
 that wants to forget God, because their occurrence 
 is an insistence on Him; they are an insuperable re- 
 minder that human life is not a sheer anarchy, 
 though it may be in a wide-spread rebellion against 
 an Omnipotent Master: for every miracle, by the es- 
 sential fact that it is a suspension of, or an exception 
 to law, proves the law, and insists on the Lawgiver 
 who alone can override it. A miracle Is explicable 
 only on one hypothesis, that God exists and is Om-
 
 i8o DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 nipotent. So the man who is only sure of one thing 
 — that behef in God, His law, and His omnipotent 
 justice, that must reward or punish, is inconvenient 
 to him — will jeer at every miracle suggested, apart 
 altogether from the question of evidence; but he 
 will listen, greedily, to a tale that is not explicable 
 on any hypothesis whatever. To hear of impossi- 
 bilities delights his craving for what is unreal, feeds 
 his morbid appetite for the flatly incomprehensible, 
 and releases him, he fancies, for a moment from that 
 dull prison of hideous materialism in which by his 
 own choice he is bound; he knows how vulgar and 
 sordid his gaol is, and he wistfully turns to avenues 
 of escape more vulgar and sordid still. His own ex- 
 periences have been mostly all commonplace, and 
 such as any dull and unscrupulous animal might 
 share with him; he devours hungrily the experiences 
 alleged by some one else that range into the unfet- 
 tered regions of blank impossibility. But a miracle I 
 That is not impossible, not incomprehensible either, 
 if God be remembered, and His Omnipotence real- 
 ized; only he does not at all wish to remember God, 
 and Omnipotent Justice is a bleak thing to contrast 
 with certain habits of his own. Those other im- 
 possibilities have no ethical significance whatever, 
 and the tales of them are free from that tedious 
 thing, a moral; that is what is so nice about them. 
 If Jones, as Smith avers, patted Smith's shoulder in 
 Piccadilly, on a date specified, and took him into a 
 pastry cook's to eat ices (of which he had ever been 
 inordinately fond), and it subsequently transpired
 
 OF CAMEL SWALLOWING i8i 
 
 that poor Jones was, at that Identical moment, be- 
 ing himself devoured by a tiger (also notoriously ad- 
 dicted to this sort of refreshment) In Bengal — It Is 
 enthrallingly Interesting, and does not In the least 
 Imply that Williams need lead a better life. There Is 
 nothing personal about that camel, and Williams 
 swallows it with ease and pleasure, unconcerned by 
 the odd appearance It may lend to his figure. But a 
 miracle, once taken Into the system would logically 
 Imply consequences: God; a moral law not Identical 
 with that of the clubs; obedience, or disobedience — 
 with results. An Inconvenient gnat that. A reg- 
 ular diet of camels leads nowhere — there's the beauty 
 of it — whereas a single miracle admitted Into, and 
 lodged In, the system may demand a total change 
 of life and habits. All the WlUIamses, a "practi- 
 cal" race, members of the best clubs, and Immovably 
 resolved to lose no pleasure, no profit, and no ad- 
 vantage in the gift of AYorld, Flesh or Devil, nat- 
 urally choke at the mere sight of a gnat, and natur- 
 ally prefer being camel-swallowers.
 
 TASTE AND TOLERANCE 
 
 IS not the simple truth this — that there may 
 profitably be as many different sorts of sermons 
 as there are different sorts of people? And 
 is not the frank recognition of this very simple truth 
 a legitimate encouragement to different sorts of 
 preachers? Some who are bound to preach are 
 thoroughly aware that they are not what is called 
 good preachers; for the sake of those who are their 
 listeners they wish they were; and for their own sake 
 too, since it is human nature to desire that any work 
 we have to do should not be of an inferior quality. 
 Nevertheless it does not follow that the defect of 
 preaching power they admit in themselves, and re- 
 gret, even when others would agree with their self- 
 criticism, is in actual reality so serious a drawback 
 as it would superficially appear. A priest may be, 
 as he humbly conceives, a "bad preacher," and it is 
 likely enough that there will be critics to remark it: 
 but there is more in a man than anything he says, 
 and that superiority of the man himself to his words 
 is not lost in the pulpit. Indeed, it is often to the 
 man we listen rather than to any special things he 
 may enunciate in speech. His congregation knows 
 him for a good man, and it matters more to them 
 
 than his phrases or epithets. The phrases may lack 
 
 182
 
 TASTE AND TOLERANCE 183 
 
 much; they may be somewhat flat, somewhat out- 
 worn; they may be very inadequate to the nobility 
 of his theme, poorly inexpressive of sublime ideas, 
 miserably weak for the weight of the message in- 
 tended: his use of epithets may be even tedious; he 
 chooses them awkwardly, and they may be, and often 
 are, calculated rather to dull the force of what he 
 means than to sharpen and illustrate it. But none 
 of this matters so much as he, meekly aware of it 
 all, though helpless to better it, imagines: because 
 the force is in himself that he, and others too, miss 
 in his words. 
 
 He may dutifully spend all the hours available in 
 preparation, and the result almost disheartens him: 
 but the real preparation has been in his life, and the 
 result does not depend on his present, conscious ef- 
 fort. 
 
 Of course a congregation likes "good sermons"; 
 enjoys them, and perhaps may remember them bet- 
 ter than "bad sermons" ; it may grumble at the "bad' 
 sermons: nevertheless it profits by them, by reason 
 of the man himself. For the only really bad ser- 
 mons would be such as were insincere. A platitude 
 in the pulpit is not a stale saying, but a saying which 
 is only words and has no conviction at the back of 
 it. 
 
 Say a sermon was "stupid." It does not follow it 
 Is bad. It may be thoroughly earnest, but the 
 thoughts are, perhaps, dull and pedestrian. A con- 
 gregation is, as our old grammars would say, a 
 noun of multitude, and In a multitude there are many
 
 i84 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 people: some are neither dull nor stupid, their 
 thoughts are not precisely pedestrian: well, they are 
 bored. They are disposed to think the sermon be- 
 neath them. Let them practise patience and humil- 
 ity. But in the congregation are some dull folk too, 
 honest creatures, and the honest stupid sermon suits 
 them. It is their turn to be satisfied. The finer 
 discourses, though just as honest and sincere, are 
 over their heads, and they would be bored too if 
 they dared. 
 
 A sermon which is insincere expresses nothing, 
 however big the words: it is the only bad sort, and 
 is worst of all for the preacher. 
 
 The fact, not a recondite one, of there being so 
 many different kinds of people in even an average 
 congregation of no uncommon size, makes part of 
 the preacher's difficulty. He would wish to be of 
 use to all, but he cannot even know what all need, 
 even if, knowing, he were able to give each what was 
 especially useful to each. But some difl^iculties are 
 so great that they answer themselves: God asks 
 none of us to do impossibilities, and He asks no 
 one to do two things at once. It is we ourselves, 
 who try, if we be over-solicitous, and unconsciously 
 fussed by expecting too much of ourselves. It is very 
 right we should do our best, and not let ourselves off 
 with less: but our best is not always equally good, 
 and if somebody else's worst is better than our best 
 it is not his fault, and need not be our misfortune. 
 It is a lucky stone that kills two birds at one throw; 
 we need not worry ourselves if in one sermon we
 
 TASTE AND TOLERANCE 185 
 
 cannot take direct aim at two or three hundred birds 
 at once. After all, the plain truth, if we stick to it, 
 hits everybody, and if it hits many who have been 
 hit before, it is all right: the truest truths are not 
 the newest. 
 
 Though nine-tenths of a congregation should go 
 away and think we had made no great figure, they 
 do not know all about it. God does, and He does 
 not specially care for majorities. Even if only one 
 person has got any good of us, and we cannot know 
 of even that one, God is not necessarily dissatisfied. 
 We do not read of flocks of converts after the 
 Sermon on the Mount, and it was the Sermon on the 
 Mount, and God preached it. After the Crucifixion 
 itself, after the Resurrection, the number of those 
 He had converted, in three and thirty years, appears 
 to have been about a hundred and twenty. What 
 do we expect? 
 
 To return to the variousness of hearers: surely it 
 leaves us ground for hoping that all sorts of sermons 
 may appeal to some. 
 
 It may well be that a greater number will prefer 
 the style that is called popular. It may well be 
 admitted, too, that there is more than mere 
 preference: that the "popular" sermon not only 
 pleases, but profits them best. They cannot attend 
 without interest, and only this sort awakes their 
 interest. Their emotions want stirring: without 
 emotion they are dead, and nothing arouses their 
 emotion but the downright "popular" sermon. It 
 would be affectation to ignore that emotion is a large
 
 i86 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 part of us, and it is utterly unfair to pretend that 
 there is anything inferior in appeal to emotion in 
 preaching. No other road is open to the interior 
 of immense numbers of people : why should we leave 
 the devil the key of the gate? If we occupy the 
 path there is the less room for the three concupis- 
 cences to lodge in it. 
 
 Let us be plain-spoken: there are huge numbers 
 who can hardly be awaked from spiritual somnolence 
 and lethargy except by a method of preaching that 
 is, not to put too fine a point upon it, ranting. Then 
 let those who can rant. It is not the highest style 
 of preaching? Never mind, if it catches lower-class 
 souls. A silken net never caught a whale — his 
 blubber weighs too much. To tell the truth it is 
 not a net that does catch him, but harpoons, 'and 
 there is blood about while the harpooning is going 
 forward. 
 
 St. Paul, we may be reminded, never ranted. 
 For my part I do not know, for I never heard. But 
 of one thing we may feel quite sure, he would have 
 used any sort of sermon that his unfailing spiritual 
 instinct showed him was called for by the quality 
 of his audience. If there be listeners who in 
 spiritual matters are semi-deaf, and you can shout, 
 then shout. It others can hear only partly with 
 their ears, and have to listen with their eyes as well; 
 then jump about. Only shout the truth : no yelling 
 will make two and two more than four: and do not 
 lash yourself into an excitement that you do not 
 feel; if a genuine fervor jumps you, never mind how
 
 TASTE AND TOLERANCE 187 
 
 high; but, for shame's sake, do not try and skip 
 yourself above yourself or your sincere emotion. 
 Even that might bring you popularity, but there is 
 One among your audience who will not away with it. 
 Anything else He will suffer; slips of grammar, 
 faults of "taste," indifferent arguments, two-legged 
 syllogisms, lapses of memory, historical blunders, 
 controversial insecurity, argumenta ad homines 
 etiam imhecilles, but not that: nor stage violence; 
 the stage-hero, denouncing the stage-villain does 
 not, for all his rage, think a penny the worse of him: 
 they are the best of friends and will sup together 
 presently. Though he foam with rage at the mouth, 
 no one supposes him to be in the least angry; no one 
 wants him to be. His voice may crack with the fury 
 of his tirade against the monster opposite, but it 
 would not scandalize us to hear of his borrowing ten 
 shillings from the monster before they part for the 
 night. On the stage neither hero nor villain speaks 
 his oivn feelings, for himself, but the feelings of his 
 part: the villain may be the hero in to-morrow's 
 play: and no one will think he has morally degener- 
 ated: the villain takes the character of persecuted 
 merit and he is not pretending to be a jot better than 
 he was yesterday. He is deceiving nobody, and try- 
 ing to deceive nobody. Stage acting is not pretence. 
 But I should be pretending were I in the pulpit to 
 assume a fire that had not set me alight, in hopes that 
 it might enkindle me. The actor is guilty of no in- 
 sincerity: he is only trying to express another man's 
 sentiment with all the force he can summon : I should
 
 i88 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 be guilty of the worst sort of insincerity trying to 
 deceive myself first that others might be deceived 
 the more defencelessly. Non sic ad astra. 
 
 This is not saying that a preacher is not to be 
 warmed by his- theme: the more it heats him the 
 more likelihood that others will be set on fire. By 
 all means let his theme warm him: only let It be 
 that: let the theme do it, not himself. It can only 
 be from sincere enthusiasm that a man Is genuinely 
 carried way. But there may be a pulpit excitement 
 which Is not the irresistible effect of genuine 
 enthusiasm. It may be "effective", but It effects 
 nothing for God. Not by making folk stare can we 
 force the Spirit of God to come down Into them. I 
 dare say there were many on Carmel who thought 
 it a fine thing when Baal's priests cried out and 
 cut themselves with knives after their manner, but it 
 brought no fire down from heaven. 
 
 It is supercilious and pharlsalc to decry preaching 
 because it Is emotional. Is It pretended that our 
 emotions were all given us by Satan? He certainly 
 aims at getting hold of them: why should not we 
 pre-occupy them for God? Only let the emotion be 
 honest, and genuine; nothing real is useless. It is 
 not to the point to urge that emotion is transient. 
 Life itself is transient. Any emotion we feel may 
 be our last; It must be better that it should be an 
 emotion on God's side. The chances are, as we say 
 in common speech, it will, not be our last. Admit 
 it dies down: still it has grooved a mark on our soul, 
 and a good one. Say it is a fire gone out: it may
 
 TASTE AND TOLERANCE 189 
 
 well leave a smouldering spark capable of re-kind- 
 ling: when a fire is gone out, all is not instantly 
 cold. Put it at its worst: the flame is extinguished, 
 the heat is chilled: still there was fire and good fire. 
 It is better to have been hot on God's side for a 
 time than to have been cold throughout. A thing 
 which is not the very best must be far better than the 
 worst of all : and the worst thing of all is complacent, 
 unmoved spiritual lethargy: it is the beginning of a 
 habit and tends to be a fixed one: once fixed, not 
 sermons but miracles are needed to break up that 
 ever-thickening ice. 
 
 If I labour this it is lest any reader should think 
 me against preaching of the popular, vehement kind : 
 there are many who need it: let us confess it again, 
 many who need downright "ranting," in which there 
 may be more sentiment than thought, for many 
 have much less capacity for thinking than they have 
 for feeling: and no preaching can confer a capacity 
 that is wanting: a preacher, indeed, may be capable 
 of educating dormant capacity, but hardly in one 
 sermon, and he may have only the opportunity of 
 one : he does what he can with the material on which 
 he has to work that once. 
 
 An audience may be thoroughly unintellectual and 
 not in the least vulgar. But it may even be vulgar. 
 Yet vulgar men and women have souls, and they are 
 not a bit more easy to save on that account. They 
 also need preaching, and if any will sink himself to 
 them it is a great work. It may be to the preacher 
 a great mortification too : one from which some-
 
 190 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 thing within him shrinks as something in a saint 
 shrank when he put his lips to a sore. Not all of 
 us could do what St. Catherine did at Siena, what 
 St. Ignatius did: we are not saints. But if a man 
 will do even that for Christ, it must bear fruit: it 
 was only when Catherine drank her awful cup that 
 the nearly lost soul of Andrea was won. And our 
 Lord made the ghastly drink sweet. 
 
 If a preacher should bend his head to catch souls 
 even through the vulgarity of their ears, let us be 
 content to confess that we could not do it ourselves, 
 and stand aside for him. God knows: and He does 
 not ask us to do what we cannot do. When we 
 know He asks us to do something, then we know 
 that we can do it, though we have thought it a moral 
 impossibility, or a physical: it is a physical impossi- 
 bility for a man with a withered hand to stretch it 
 out; but He bade the man stretch it out and he did, 
 else would he have carried it withered to the grave. 
 
 What we cannot do ourselves let us not refuse 
 leave to others to do, in preaching also. There is 
 room for all sorts. 
 
 But just as in a congregation there may be some 
 whom, humanly speaking, a preacher can reach only 
 by rhetoric, fine rhetoric; or by a rhetoric less fine, 
 if more fiery; or by vehemence; or even by a rough 
 wit, and banter (as one may often hear in a Catholic 
 country) ; so there are others to whom even fine 
 rhetoric in a pulpit is almost repugnant; to whom 
 a rhetoric that fails of being fine, and is only fierce, 
 is utterly repugnant; to whom any extreme
 
 TASTE AND TOLERANCE 191 
 
 vehemence is repellent and physically disagreeable, 
 and well-night intolerable; whom the heat of some 
 preachers does not warm but chill, with a quite in- 
 voluntary sense of shrinking, almost of aversion, 
 almost of protest. They are as unaffected in dis- 
 liking violent action, noisy declamation, passionate 
 appeal to emotion, as those who like it are sincere in 
 admiration. It does not carry them off their legs, 
 but stiffens their backs. It does not engage their 
 sympathy, but arouses a perfectly genuine remon- 
 strance, and goes far to awaken an antipathy that 
 they can no more help than they can help preferring 
 argument to assertion, and proof to argument. It 
 is no more conceited in them to have one sort of 
 taste than it is beggarly and mean in others to have 
 a different taste, or no taste at all. In the one case 
 the popular preacher appeals to a natural quality ot 
 mind; in the other the natural quality of mind is all 
 against such an appeal as his. They are not to 
 condemn him; but neither are they bound in sincerity 
 to condemn themselves. If they should belittle him, 
 and deny him sincerity, they misbehave : but it is 
 not misbehavior in them not to like what the tone of 
 their mind dislikes. If they are wishing it was a dif- 
 ferent sort of preacher's turn to hold the pulpit, they 
 are only yielding to the same spontaneous feeling as 
 the man in the next pew who is rejoicing that he came 
 to-night instead of to-morrow — to-morrow when the 
 vault will resound with no loud echoes, and a very 
 quiet voice will lay down, in measured cadence, 
 positions from which there is no logical escape : when
 
 192 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 un-falth will be beaten with a cold rod of iron, and 
 unbelief be made to show itself as not only cruel 
 and unhappy but silly too : when humanistic excuses 
 for lax morals will be forced to appear no better 
 than vapid sentimentality, scrambling on one knock- 
 kneed leg. The man who loves the popular 
 preacher, and is only capable of him, is hardly to be 
 accused of resisting the Holy Ghost because he 
 merely suffers from distraction while those calm, 
 though really irresistible, things are being said. It 
 is not malice, but incapacity, that makes him think 
 the theologian dull. If he finds the preacher's huge 
 nose queer, he does not mean to be flippant: he is 
 only what he is, and he cannot help it. But neither is 
 the other man resisting the Holy Ghost because he 
 cannot, for the life of him, understand why rivers of 
 sweat should accompany allusion to the river of life 
 and grace. He does not want to be bored : he is not 
 assuring himself that it ia superior to remain quite 
 cool while the preacher is so frightfully hot. 
 Nevertheless his mind wanders: the preacher sets it 
 off : the preacher starts down an alley and the 
 listener goes down to the end of it, while 
 the preacher has dashed eagerly off into another. 
 The preacher gives a smack at one objection to 
 faith, but by no means knocks It down; another has 
 leapt into his mind and he must punch at it; the lis- 
 tener lingers to consider how the first ought to have 
 been flattened; before he had made up his mind, he 
 sees the preacher sparring with indomitable pluck at 
 a third objection, with glorious pluck, but with lam-
 
 TASTE AND TOLERANCE 193 
 
 entable want of science. Such agility makes the 
 hearer blink, but it is quite as fatiguing to try and 
 follow as it is dazzling. "Come along," cries the 
 preacher, with amazing spirit. "Any amount of 
 you. The more the merrier. I've a black eye in 
 my fist for each of you." The courage, the activity, 
 the readiness to duck, and hit, and lunge out in 
 another direction, are all marvellous: but a black eye 
 blinds no one permanently: science will give it 
 against the hitter for all his popularity: and this 
 unfortunate spectator is on the side of science, he 
 cares more for victory than for a fine show. 
 
 Well, well ! What metaphors have we been slip- 
 ping into! Misfortune brings us strange bed- 
 fellows, says the proverb, and metaphor leads us 
 into odd company. I apologize, and resume. 
 
 Talking of metaphor; there may be hundreds of 
 profiting listeners to a rough-and-ready preacher 
 who have no objection in life to a mixed metaphor. 
 But it tries the other sort of listener. He has noth- 
 ing to urge against the metaphor of shipwreck: like 
 the young lady in Pride and Prejudice who said, "The 
 idea of the olive-branch perhaps is not wholly new," 
 he confesses to himself that the shipwreck simile is 
 rather venerable than original; but it is none the 
 less true for being time-worn. He listens with 
 respect; but when the preacher, hastily remembering 
 what is the symbol of Hope, adjures his hearers to 
 cling to the sheet anchor of Hope, when all is storm 
 and darkness, and all seem sinking, he cannot help 
 considering the buoyancy of anchors. He recognizes
 
 194 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 that the tangled mazes of a forest brake, with 
 thorny undergrowth, and light obscured overhead, 
 not inaptly illustrate muddled doubt; and faith is 
 doubt's contrary and cure; but is "faith's golden 
 key" suggested? Are keys, even of gold, of much 
 service to lost and benighted wayfarers? 
 
 There are, we have said, many in a given audience 
 who can be reached by the way of feeling, and very 
 little by appeal to thought: the avenue to their 
 spiritual sense is the heart, and not the head. Why 
 should we not own it, and act upon it? 
 
 But it is mainly by way of the head others are 
 taken. Must we not acknowledge that also? No 
 one wants to compare them or weigh their values. 
 But facts are facts: and one of these facts is as 
 real and legitimate as the other. Some sermons are 
 little theological treatises, and some hearers find 
 them heavy of digestion: not every one can 
 assimilate the solidest food. But to some they are 
 the most welcome kind of sermon, and not to priests 
 only. They would as lief have their bread without 
 sweetening or plums in it. 
 
 I heard a couple of country folk discuss a sermon 
 once. 
 
 " 'Twere fine!" declared one. "As full ot 
 flav'rin' and fruit as a Simnel cake." 
 
 "Eh, but I've no stomach for cake," confessed the 
 other. "I like them bready." Much more 
 accomplished judges like them bready too. 
 
 It is objected to some preachers that they can 
 only preach essays, and yet some people hke essays,
 
 TASTE AND TOLERANCE .195 
 
 and can remember what is in them better than a 
 more "appealing" sermon. I cannot help suspect- 
 ing that some of the finest sermons we have are 
 liable to this reproach: St. Gregory's, for example; 
 though Cardinal Newman's are more undeniable 
 instances. They are better printed than spoken, it 
 may be urged. We, who only read them, and could 
 not have heard them, cannot disprove the assertion. 
 But it is certain that they were heard eagerly, that 
 they drew willing throngs, and were powerfully 
 effective: they could not have been condemned as 
 ineffective though they had not survived their 
 original utterance and come to be printed. Nor is 
 it fair to urge that they were essays by essayists of 
 extraordinary power, and therefore cannot be 
 instanced to make a rule, as preachers of extra- 
 ordinary power can never be of ordinary occurrence. 
 Preachers of exceptional force in the other class, the 
 class most unlike essay preachers, are of exceptional 
 occurrence too. We do not daily fall in with the 
 best of any sort. 
 
 What is pleaded here is that there should be no 
 attempt to form a rule at all. That we should 
 recognize the enormous variety of hearers, the huge 
 divergence of taste : and frankly confess that every 
 kind of preaching is legitimate because every kind 
 will find some one to whom it appeals — even essay 
 preachers. 
 
 The answer it not that a preacher must try so 
 to modify himself as to appeal to all: he never can. 
 He can only be himself, and the effort to be several
 
 196 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 people will not give him three heads: it was only 
 Cerberus who, as Mrs. Malaprop said, was "three 
 gentlemen at once." 
 
 Every preacher may not exactly suit every congre- 
 gation: but it does not follow that it is the preacher's 
 fault, any more than it is the fault of the congrega- 
 tion: it is nobody's fault. But I suspect that every 
 genuine preacher, and we have concern with no 
 other, suits some part of his congregation — even the 
 essay preacher. If the congregation that does not 
 like essays is the larger part, it is certainly their mis- 
 fortune; but, majorities do so well for themselves in 
 most ways, that, if the minority has the best of it 
 in this instance, no frightful injustice is done. Even 
 majorities may learn patience and be none the worse 
 for it. If they also learned humility it would be a 
 valuable illustration of the truth that the age of 
 miracles is not past. 
 
 In England the finest preacher we have reads his 
 sermons from a manuscript, and I dare say many 
 would say they were homilies ,or essays. It is 
 possible that many preachers are preferred to him 
 by many hearers. No one wants to compel these 
 many to hear him instead of those they prefer. 
 But those who prefer to hear him never forget what 
 they have heard: may they not also have their 
 taste? It is certainly a strong measure to read a 
 sermon from writing: it is not suggested that every 
 preacher, or many preachers, should do it. But it 
 might be suggested that if some preachers were to 
 commit their sermons to writing they would never be
 
 TASTE AND TOLERANCE 197 
 
 preached — and that would be a pity, for they are 
 excellent in their sort: only there are other sorts. 
 
 A certain Scotch minister, departing from this 
 life, bequeathed his sermons, the sermons of forty 
 years, to his parish. After the funeral it was 
 debated in full sederunt what should be done with 
 them. Some Elders proposed printing, others con- 
 curred, but advised selection. Finally one Elder 
 arose and pawkily suggested that the Kirk Session 
 should "reeverently burn them." I know one 
 preacher, at all events, who if he should be forced to 
 write his sermons (and read them afterward) would 
 undoubtedly burn them — but I am not sure about 
 "reeverently." 
 
 It is urged against the essay preachers that they 
 are thinking of how the sermons would print. The 
 force of the insinuation, and a real force too where 
 the Insinuation is justified, is that they are thinking 
 not of their congregation but of the public. "Every 
 woman writer," said Heine, "writes with one eye on 
 herself, and one eye on some man, except Countess 
 Hahn-Hahn, who has only one eye." If an essay 
 preacher composes his sermons with one eye on the 
 public and one eye on himself, he degrades the office 
 of preaching: but he may, as well as the "popular" 
 preacher, have both eyes on God. And truth, logic, 
 and dogma will always "print."
 
 ANOTHER TOLERANCE 
 
 THERE are, at the present moment, on both 
 sides of the Atlantic, a considerable number 
 of Catholic writers of weight whose pens 
 are employed on works in the various departments 
 of theology, dialectic, history, biography, and 
 fiction, distinctly and unmistakably on the Catholic 
 side. But there are also a number of writers, 
 especially in the field of fiction, who are themselves 
 Catholics but whose writing is, so to speak, non- 
 committal. Only those who know they are 
 Catholics would know they were Catholics. I would 
 like at once to make it clear that, in so speaking 
 of them, there- is no wish on my part to find fault, 
 or to put them on their defence. For I am not 
 here speaking of writers who, in spite of being 
 Catholics, write in a fashion disloyal to their 
 religion, or injurious to it, or unworthy of it. 
 Reference is intended only to writers who, being 
 Catholics, have for their theme subjects in which, 
 they would frankly say, the question of religion 
 does not accrue. They may be comic writers, 
 or nursery-rhymesters, writers of fairy-tales, or 
 novelists of the light and airy description. They 
 may be employed in the production of short stories 
 
 198
 
 ANOTHER TOLERANCE 199 
 
 for the non-Catholic press, or reviewers of books 
 for non-Catholic papers. 
 
 My object here la not to belittle them, or pick 
 holes in their way of earning a very precarious 
 livelihood, but, on the contrary, to put in a plea for 
 them, and to show, if I can, that they may also do a 
 good work. The whole question of literature and 
 the press is one of the most important with which 
 the Church has to concern herself in the modern 
 world: and to that fact the rulers of the Church, not 
 only in her metropolis, but in every country are 
 keenly alive. 
 
 The point I would desire to accentuate is a ver)' 
 simple one, and perhaps may appear to be over- 
 obvious : but it is not commonly admitted as such. 
 And in two words, it is this: that service may be 
 done to the good cause in many degrees of varying 
 importance, but that even the least seemingly 
 important is worth while and should not be decried. 
 
 Every Catholic perceives that he who writes works 
 of Catholic theolog}', controversy, devotion, 
 hagiology, history, biography, and such like, is serv- 
 ing the Church. So he is, and in a specially direct 
 and unmistakable fashion. 
 
 Catholics Recognize that those are serving the 
 Church who write only fiction when the works 
 produced by them are, in fact, works of Catholic 
 apologetic: novels with a purpose — the obvious 
 purpose being the presentment of the Catholic 
 Church and faith in colors such as must recommend 
 both to the non-Catholic reader. But in this
 
 200 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 particular matter I venture to think that Catholics 
 are sometimes more eager than discreet. For I 
 cannot help thinking that they are occasionally dis- 
 posed to force the hand of such writers; and, when 
 they succeed, their success may have deprived the 
 writers in question of a great part of their useful- 
 ness. If a Catholic writer of romance or fiction 
 writes only for a Catholic public there cannot be 
 too much Catholicity in his novels. But, if those 
 novels are to reach the public outside, there can 
 easily be too much: for they may be so vehemently 
 Catholic that the non-Catholic reader is frightened 
 away altogether. He says to himself: "The Catho- 
 lic drum is being beaten too loud and insistently by 
 this novelist. I have had enough of him and shall 
 read him no more." That is hardly a point gained. 
 A great number of ears are lost, that might have 
 been gently educated, and an attention that might 
 have been attracted to the Church, her beauty, and 
 her truth, can no more be engaged by the writer in 
 question. Henceforth he may delight a Catholic 
 audience, and win its hearty applause, but what he 
 might have done. In drawing toward the faith them 
 who are without it, he has forfeited the chance of 
 doing. Yet it has not been his fault, but is the un- 
 fortunate result of having had his hand forced. 
 
 I think this does happen. A new writer appears 
 and there is something in his work that largely 
 attracts a public not given to the reading of Catholic 
 works: yet there is in his work that which marks It 
 Catholic. He is clearly on the Catholic side: there
 
 ANOTHER TOLERANCE 201 
 
 seems a special sphere of service for him. Men are 
 found reading him who never read a Catholic 
 author before, and who listen with interest and 
 attention to his quiet and reasonable presentment of 
 Catholic ideas and things. He gives them a new 
 conception of the sanity and wisdom of Catholic 
 life and Catholic customs. What a good thing it 
 would be, in such an instance, to leave well alone. 
 But is it always left alone? That the writer is 
 Catholic is plainly perceived by Catholics too: they 
 cannot doubt it. They plainly recognize a clear 
 hall-mark, and they too welcome the new writer in 
 their fashion. But they cry loudly, "Here is a 
 writer whom everybody reads, and a Catholic 
 writer: why isn't he more Catholic?" In other 
 words, why is he not undisguisedly controversial? 
 Why are not his novels sermons on the Seven 
 Sacraments, or the Celibacy of the Clergy, or the 
 Doctrine of Purgatory? And if he do not very 
 promptly conform to their ideals of a Catholic 
 novelist, they may soon hint pretty loudly that he is 
 not half a Catholic after all. The Catholics in his 
 books, they begin to discover, are more like human 
 beings than angels, and the non-Catholics are not 
 monsters. He had there a fine opportunity of 
 bringing in a conversion — and let it slip: and there 
 he might have drawn a real saint — and didn't: and 
 that scamp would very easily have been shown as a 
 devil incarnate (without saying what he did), 
 whereas he is no more than a scamp, and had some 
 good points too, which scamps shouldn't have.
 
 202 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 One result is that the Catholic writer, whom non- 
 Catholics were listening to with some confidence, is 
 listened to. no longer by them. They perceive that 
 something has happened to him. What has hap- 
 pened is that he has, being human, taken fright, and, 
 in dread of being misunderstood by his own people, 
 has succumbed to the least capable critics. He 
 writes what they insist upon, but what those whom 
 he might have gradually gained will not read at any 
 price. 
 
 The perception of this sort of fact accounts, in 
 my opinion, for the other fact that a considerable 
 number of writers, who are really Catholics, and 
 good ones too, are careful to write in such wise that 
 their Catholicity does not appear at all. They 
 choose a ground which appears to them safe : so long 
 as they never go near the deeper interests of 
 humanity they are on less contentious ground. No 
 one will complain that a joke is not a Catholic joke; 
 that a nursery-rhyme is void of Catholic intention; 
 that a soliloquy by a tin soldier leaves out any 
 allusion to the question of indulgences; that there is 
 nothing truly Catholic about a dialogue between a 
 Hippopotamus and a Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
 Even a novel may escape censure which Is inerely 
 pretty, or merely silly, or as shallow as a comic- 
 opera. And they do pretty well. It doesn't matter 
 a farthing to anybody whether they be Catholics or 
 Confucians: they do not matter to anybody at all. 
 Nobody asks whether the man inside the Punch-and-
 
 ANOTHER TOLERANCE 203 
 
 Judy show is a Catholic, or the lady who leaps 
 through paper hoops in a circus. 
 
 But ought we to scold them? 
 
 If it be assumed that they are, In fact, capable 
 of better things: that there is a talent in a napkin: 
 then we must feel regret that the napkin smothers 
 it all. But part of the scolding is due to those in- 
 discreet but excellent Catholics who have frightened 
 them a little. We ought all to be heroic, but we 
 are not all heroes: and it calls for a singular degree 
 of courage to face the strict criticism of our own 
 fellow-religionists who are, as I think, over-ready 
 to demand of every Catholic foot that may nppear 
 that it should prove itself a whole Catholic Hercules 
 — or get out. 
 
 But, if, on the other hand, there be no serious 
 talent hidden away, and these good Catholic people, 
 who are writing to make folk laugh, or make chil- 
 dren merry, or keep alive for children the dear old 
 realm of fairy-land (where nothing base is met, only 
 the strange, the deliciously impossible, the lovely, 
 and the gloriously happy), or even to amuse* harm- 
 lessly the harmless necessary library-subscriber, then 
 I think these writers are serving a good turn. 
 They are occupying a ground that might else be 
 occupied much amiss. 
 
 There will always be- children, and, though most 
 children may be near'er heaven, than ourselves, they 
 will not, commonly, be always thinking of it. And 
 grown people are often babies: and some are not
 
 204 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 very wise : and some are silly enough : and many like 
 to laugh — at indifferent jokes too: and library- 
 subscribers will take out such novels, and are not 
 every day in tune for books that ai-e books in my 
 sense of it; and young persons will hanker after 
 tales about young persons much like themselves: and 
 weddings and engagements will never be quite un- 
 popular — nor denounced by our kindly Mother, the 
 Church, either. 
 
 Is it best that all this matter should he produced 
 by those who are not Catholics, who think the 
 Church a folly or a nuisance, and religion an affecta- 
 tion or a bore, an anachronism or a fetter on the 
 limbs of men and maidens? Should we be wise if 
 we chased Catholic writers off this harmless ground, 
 and left it open to occupation by people whose 
 principles are all against the Church, whose 
 sympathies are enlisted on the opposite side? 
 
 We must have a real Catholic press, and there are 
 departments of literature which we must do all we 
 can to make strongly, vigorously Catholic. The 
 supply of Catholic, and deeply Catholic, writers, on 
 theology. Scripture exegesis, hagiology, ecclesiastical 
 and general history, sociology, and many other mat- 
 ters — including the roman a these — must be kept up. 
 And, as we have already said, those who do their 
 best to keep it up are rendering a special and vital 
 service to religion. 
 
 But there will be the other sorts of writing and 
 one of two things may happen in relation to them: 
 cither they may be abandoned to writers who are
 
 ANOTHER TOLERANCE 20S 
 
 against the Church, and perhaps against all religion; 
 or the ground may be largely occupied by writers 
 who are Catholics, and who will slip in nothing ad- 
 verse to faith or morals. 
 
 It seems to me quite possible to frighten Catholic 
 writers off such ground altogether, or to cause them 
 to feel that in occupying it they are falling Into sus- 
 picion. That would be the case if they were made 
 to feel that their fellow-Catholics held them to be 
 failing to serve the good cause inasmuch as they 
 w^ere not doing more, doing something more defin- 
 itely and undeniably on the Catholic side. Merely 
 to frighten them off that harmless ground would be 
 a great tactical error, and a great pity: because their 
 gaps would be filled by people not harmless. But, 
 as long as there is "a deal of human nature in a 
 man" it would in all likelihood do worse harm; for 
 the writing-man must write: it is part of his nature, 
 as it is a part of other men's nature that they must 
 be killing things. Nobody complains of a Catholic 
 that he only shoots rabbits, though it would not mat- 
 ter at all to the Church if his rabbits were shot by 
 an agnostic or a vehement Protestant. It would 
 surely be a pity to scold away Catholics who feel 
 they can write such matters as we have indicated be- 
 cause they are not writing something more obviously 
 useful to religion. For the chances are they would 
 go on writing and in worse company write, as it 
 were, on the sly, keeping their faith up their sleeve, 
 among folk who sympathized with them but were 
 the reverse of sympathetic with the Church or re-
 
 2o6 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 ligion of any color. I believe this does happen, and 
 that where it happens, evil communications corrupt 
 good manners, so that these originally harmless 
 persons feel themselves in opposition, and pick up 
 small antagonisms, because of the antagonism they 
 have experienced. 
 
 If they were made to feel that In doing no more 
 than writing harmlessly in harmless, if not exalted, 
 departments of the press, fiction, and what not, they 
 were doing good, though humble, service, it seems 
 to me that it would be only just and would be wise. 
 
 Any square foot of territory occupied by a Cath- 
 olic on good terms with his religion is a foot of 
 ground lost to the occupation of the myriad forces 
 arrayed against the Church in the press and in litera- 
 ture. 
 
 Is there sense in frowning down these good folk 
 because they are only what they are? 
 
 Even in a monastery all are not abbots, or even 
 choir-monks. But the lay-brother who cooks the 
 dinner is a religious and is helping the cause of re- 
 ligion. Brother Porter may be a garrulous crea- 
 ture, and fond of a harmless exchange of news, and 
 his daily talk with the butcher-boy, or the fish- 
 monger, helps those persons to realize the human- 
 ism of monastic Hfe. They do not, perhaps, see 
 much of the abbot, or of Father Placid the great 
 preacher: and those great men might not precisely 
 know how to interest them. But Brother Porter 
 does, and they acquire a rooted conviction that mon- 
 asticism is not a dismal institution, nor an inhuman:
 
 ANOTHER TOLERANCE 207 
 
 and it does them a little good. It did the Catholic 
 Church in England no disservice that for years 
 Punch was edited by a Catholic. He did not con- 
 vert that organ into a weekly budget of controversy; 
 except that it was alive to the humors of Anglican 
 Episcopacy, it was not theological. But, with a 
 good Catholic in its editorial seat, there could be no 
 gibes at things sacred to us, no belittling of any- 
 thing great in Catholic eyes: no light treatment of 
 matters we hold to be beyond the scope of laughter. 
 I do not say there is now — but there were times when 
 all the wit of Punch was pitted against the Pope. 
 
 Would it have been wisdom to insist that Sir 
 Francis Burnand should write only hagiology — or 
 else be skewered himself? 
 
 My impression is this: that many clean and de- 
 cent, harmless, healthy novels, many inoffensive 
 plays, many wholesome tales for children, or for 
 boys, or big girls, are so because they were written 
 by undiscovered Catholics who feel in themselves no 
 aptitude for anything more clearly religious: if they 
 were frightened off, other books would be written, 
 by very different writers, neither clean, nor whole- 
 some. Would that be a gain to religion? 
 
 Perhaps more encouragement would be more wise 
 toward these lay-brothers of letters. 
 
 It is not official discouragement that is depre- 
 cated: there is none. Those responsible for the 
 government of the Church, either in her headquar- 
 ters or elsewhere, are by no means addicted to inter- 
 ference. Nor does the discouragement come from
 
 2o8 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 the clergy, but from a rather foolish class of lay 
 persons, whom we have, in another place, endeav- 
 ored to describe as the Weaker Brethren. It is one 
 of their peculiarities to be unable to recognize the 
 truth that God does not expect the majority of His 
 creatures to do two things at once. Archbishops 
 and bishops do not call upon CathoHc lads playing 
 cricket to demonstrate the Infallibility of the 
 Church. If a Catholic writer wrote a funny skit on 
 the Multiplication Table it would not be the clergy 
 who complained that it did not, incidentally, confute 
 the Three Chapters — that would be for an erudite 
 Weaker Brother, the layman afflicted with a slight 
 determination of Theology to the brain. 
 
 A pet accusation of outsiders against the Church 
 is that of intolerance: an experience of five-and- 
 thirty years teaches me that she is singularly tolerant 
 and by no means addicted to fussy interference, that 
 she is peculiarly disinclined to lend herself to 
 "cranks," or frown on harmless people who may be 
 doing a little good, in quite obscure fashion, because 
 it is not a greater good and more striking in its 
 methods. She is not given to quench flame that only 
 smokes (your Weaker Brethren never smoke, they 
 are above it) ; and she is not willing to call her 
 lambs that skip, in a lambish manner, black little 
 sheep. All that is the function of the Weaker 
 Brethren, the bugbears of bishops, the skeletons in 
 the good-natured cupboards of poor harassed, 
 over-worked priests : the critics who never write 
 anything or do anything themselves, but to whom
 
 ANOTHER TOLERANCE 209 
 
 there is a private, dismal, revelation how nothing 
 should be done, and how everything should be writ- 
 ten in some other fashion. 
 
 It is from the Weaker Brethren I would fain de- 
 fend the Catholic writers who fill gaps that would 
 else be filled by the Church's enemies, even though 
 they fill them with nothing greater than a nursery- 
 book, or a "smooth tale mostly of love," a poem 
 something less than Shakespearean, or a comic effort 
 that will be best relished by those whose idea of hu- 
 mor is not that of superior persons. If eveiybody 
 only read the very best sort of book, or the most lit- 
 erary sort of newspaper, then nobody would have 
 any business to produce middling books, or to help 
 to produce popular papers. And they who, accord- 
 ing to the measure of capacity God has given them, 
 do try to add to the bulk of what is really literature, 
 are helping religion in more ways than one. But 
 they who are conscious of no such capacity, but are 
 able to write as well, in their less literary sphere of 
 operations, as their non-Catholic or anti-Catholic 
 competitors, are they not, in helping to crowd out 
 such competitors, but doing a service and deserving 
 of some encouragement? 
 
 For my part I should be glad if all the comic pa- 
 pers (one need not read them) were written by 
 Catholics, and all the funny plays, all the fairy-tales 
 and nursery-books, all the novels that walk in hur- 
 ried procession through the libraries and cannot 
 walk too quick for me, and all the other stuff one 
 sees people reading in trains and road-cars, which is
 
 210 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 certainly not literature, but might then be free of 
 any graver fault. 
 
 The more Catholic encouragement such writers 
 meet with the less likely are they really to need dis- 
 couragement. 
 
 What the Weaker Brethren would insist upon is 
 that all Catholics should be, like themselves, Su- 
 perior Persons: whereas the Church only wants to 
 lead us all to perfection, and that by many mean 
 streets: for all decent people cannot inhabit the best 
 quarters of the town. The Church's purview in- 
 cludes noisy places, and vulgar too : she has never 
 proclaimed herself a monopoly of the genteel.
 
 TWO DUTIES 
 
 A CERTAIN priest whose Sunday Mass was 
 always served, and had for a number of 
 years been served, by the same young man, 
 on one occasion felt compelled to make him, on 
 their return to the sacristy after Mass and sermon 
 were over, a little apology. "On this Sunday last 
 year I had," said he, "the same subject to preach 
 about as to-day. It was a different sermon, but it 
 had to deal with the same things; they are so bound 
 up with the day, and so Important. I am afraid, 
 though, you and the congregation may have found 
 the repetition rather tedious." 
 
 "Bless you, Father," the amiable creature replied 
 cheerfully, "let's hope they weren't listening both 
 times." Then, with a smile of engaging candor, 
 '7 wasn't." 
 
 The blessing. If irregular, was so cordially given 
 that the priest accepted It gratefully, and the consol- 
 ation too — as far as it went. 
 
 On this side of the Atlantic I have written on the 
 Apostolate of the Press, and some things Involved 
 in It; but it is likely that no one on your side was 
 listening. And that is why I would v^enture to take 
 my parable again on the same theme with a different 
 audience. 
 
 211
 
 212 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 That Leo XIII and the late Sovereign Pontiff, 
 Benedict XV have in very weighty words insisted 
 on the necessity of Cathohc journals the Catholic 
 public is, in general, everywhere aware. Yet as 
 George Eliot's Uncle Pullet "had a great natural 
 faculty for ignorance," so some excellent people 
 seem to have a surprising natural capacity for re- 
 maining ignorant of what their neighbours have 
 long been talking about. 
 
 But as a whole the Catholic public is alive to the 
 fact that two Popes have in recent years spoken 
 strongly on the necessity of there being a powerful 
 and efficient Catholic press. They quite perceive 
 the necessity, and are all for a Catholic press equal 
 in every way, and superior in some ways, to the huge 
 non-Catholic press, which is alas! so often anti- 
 Catholic. 
 
 What they do not, perhaps, seem to perceive so 
 plainly is that an efficient Press must be flourishing, 
 and that, in order that it may flourish, it must be vig- 
 orously supported. One necessity of a strong and 
 effectual Catholic Press they do understand — that 
 able and willing Catholic writers should be forth- 
 coming. They are forthcoming both in England 
 and in America: and, on both sides of the Atlantic, 
 they are willing as well : willing to forego the chances 
 of much higher pay for their work than would be 
 theirs if their services were not mainly reserved for 
 Catholic journals and a Catholic audience. In thus 
 reserving their services Catholic writers exercise 
 another sort of self-denial, and a higher: for every
 
 TWO DUTIES 213 
 
 writer naturally prefers the widest audience pos- 
 sible: the wider the audience the greater natural 
 stimulus is there to a writer. Just as empty benches 
 naturally chill a preacher, and a packed church 
 warms him as well as it, so is it with a writer. And 
 this is not merely because of the greater chance of 
 applause but because of the wider hope of sympathy 
 and understanding. Nevertheless, both on this 
 side of the Atlantic and yours, I repeat that Catholic 
 writers show themselves perfectly ready to devote 
 themselves to the service of the Catholic Press, re- 
 gardless of smialler pecuniary rewards, and of a 
 smaller audience. 
 
 But, whether the Catholic public is equally loyal 
 in support is another question. In England I doubt 
 if it is. How it may be in America, I do not know 
 for certain. 
 
 This at all events is certain: that the Apostolate 
 of the Press depends not on the Press itself alone. 
 However authoritative the mission of an apostle 
 may be, however unsparing of himself he may be, 
 however noble his message, and competent his pres- 
 entation of it — he must have hearers. And if 
 people will not listen he cannot have them. 
 
 And more: even an apostolate as that of Apostles 
 or apostolic men to unbelieving nations, implies cer- 
 tain material things, a certain equipment. Bur 
 such an apostolate as that of the Press demands an 
 equipment that is extremely costly. In this case 
 zeal and self-sacrifice alone is not enough. To 
 carry on an able and efficient Press campaign im-
 
 214 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 plies great expense and a Catholic Press must be 
 crippled, and ultimately silenced, unless it is main- 
 tained by an adequate and efficient response to meet 
 that expense. 
 
 Catholics are not always backward in criticism of 
 their own Press: they expect it to equal the general 
 Press in literary power and in appearance too. The 
 paper must not be flimsy; the type must not be un- 
 sightly; the illustrations must be first-rate; the news 
 of the newest, the reviews striking and original, and 
 the editorship in fact of the highest degree of ex- 
 cellence. Well, all this costs money. And the 
 money can only be available if the Catholic Press be 
 as well supported as the Press which is not Catholic. 
 And that support must mainly, and in the first in- 
 stance, be given by Catholics themselves. 
 
 A Catholic paper may do worlds of good by com- 
 ing into non-Catholic hands. But it cannot if it 
 does not exist, and its existence must be contingent 
 on the cooperation of the Catholic Public. 
 
 All this may seem a mere string of truisms. But 
 some truisms are largely ignored — as that, if you 
 spend more than comes in to you, you will end in 
 debt and disaster. If then the Catholic Press is 
 not to end in debt and disaster, as much must come 
 into it as it pays out to make itself and keep itself 
 what the Catholic Public expects it to be: and what 
 comes in must come from the Catholic public chiefly. 
 Does every Catholic family regularly subscribe to 
 even one Catholic paper? Few are the families, 
 even among the quite poor people in which one, and
 
 TWO DUTIES 215 
 
 often more than one, non-Catholic paper is not reg- 
 ularly taken. Some of these non-Catholic papers 
 are good enough: some are bad enough: and many 
 are silly, worthless, and such as to require an anti- 
 dote. Almost all, it is seriously to be borne in mind 
 by Catholics, are written by people who have no reli- 
 gious beliefs at all, or whose religious beliefs, such 
 as they are, are wholly alien from our own, often 
 very inimical, often supercilious and scornful of 
 every Catholic ideal, often permeated by thor- 
 oughly lax morality — as for instance in regard to 
 the sanctity and indissolubility of Christian mar- 
 riage. Even comic papers, which would seem to be 
 neutral ground, sin very heavily in this respect: the 
 whole point (what there is of it) of half the jokes in 
 many of them presupposes that marriage itself is a 
 joke, though a bad one: that conjugal infidelity is 
 another joke, and a better one. And it is largely 
 assumed by them that religion is a bore, a conven- 
 tion, and a pretence: that straightforward folk dis- 
 card the nuisance and the false pretence. 
 
 The presence of such papers in Catholic house- 
 holds needs at least an antidote; and Catholic pa- 
 pers are the obvious and indispensable antidote. 
 
 The public atmosphere of life in almost all "civil- 
 ized" countries is not only un-CatholIc but irreli- 
 gious. At best it mostly assumes that religion has 
 nothing to do or say with public life: that, if a man 
 chooses to be religious it is a personal idiosyncrasy, 
 and he must do it at his own cost, and keep it quiet. 
 Anti-Christ may make all the noise he can, but Chris-
 
 2i6 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 tianlty Is a private fad and is not to annoy tKe public. 
 
 And, meanwhile, it is in this atmosphere that 
 Catholics are to live and breathe. In the hygiene 
 of the body men are growing more and more alert 
 to the necessity of precaution and antidote. Where 
 circumstances imply risk, measures of self-defence 
 are adopted: those who are forced to encounter 
 vitiated air are warned how to minimize danger of 
 infection. But is the breathing of an atmosphere 
 inimical to Christian faith and morality less hazard- 
 ous? If Inevitable, are we excused from arming 
 ourselves with such antidotes and safeguards as lie 
 In our power? 
 
 Catholics in business. In society, and at play, are 
 everywhere exposed to an Infective atmosphere. It 
 is breathed around them by the public Press, and by 
 the daily discussion of every topic they hear spoken 
 of. Many who create it they perceive, or believe, 
 to be clever. Intelligent, capable people — more so, 
 perhaps, than themselves. Scientists will tell us in 
 alarming figures the weight of the physical atmos- 
 phere upon our heads: who can measure the weight 
 of this un-Christlan atmosphere upon the heads, 
 hearts, and morals of our Christian people? 
 
 There are supernatural antidotes: we do not for- 
 get them. God's grace and His sacraments are still 
 with us. But the reason we do not now speak of 
 them here is that many of those subjected to the in- 
 fluences we mention do not in fact make use of those 
 supernatural safeguards against them. Catholic 
 nev/spapers are not to supersede the Church's sacra-
 
 TWO DUTIES 217 
 
 ments, but to help powerfully in bringing the mem- 
 ory of them and of all other means of grace to the 
 minds of her children. 
 
 I should like to say a word as to what may be 
 called Catholic insulation. 
 
 The circumstances of modern life do largely in- 
 sulate from Catholic surroundings, Catholic ideals, 
 and even Catholic memories, large numbers of our 
 people. Even families feel it: there are places 
 where this or that Catholic family finds itself, or 
 imagines itself, to be so placed as to be without 
 Catholic society of its own calibre. Social inequal- 
 ities exist even in republics: perhaps nowhere more 
 than in republics are such inequalities more insisted 
 upon. Where there are no titles, and where theo- 
 retically there is no rank, other distinctions are all 
 the more perceived by those that have them. Many 
 families in a republican state are well-born, and they 
 do not forget it: others are intellectual, well-educa- 
 ted, cultured, refined. Where there are not fami- 
 lies of corresponding birth, breeding, or mental su- 
 periority they miss it, and are not inclined to merge 
 their own real or supposed advantages altogether. 
 A Catholic family with such claims to superiority in 
 a restricted neighbourhood where other Catholic 
 families of their own sort are few or absent, will 
 probably mix largely if not entirely in non-Catholic 
 circles: and as long as human nature is what it is this 
 will be so. This is one sort of Catholic insulation. 
 
 Then there is the much commoner case of individ- 
 ual Catholics, separated from home and family:
 
 2i8 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 young men and young women who have gone out 
 into the world to earn their bread. They often 
 live, and sometimes are almost bound to live, among 
 people, who have not their faith, or who have no 
 faith of any kind. These people among whom their 
 lives are lived may be bad and repulsive, or bad and 
 by no means repellent, or "good" in a way that is 
 not the Church's way; at any rate their influence is 
 not on the Church's side. This is another sort of 
 Catholic insulation. 
 
 In both the insulated Catholic family or individ- 
 ual is subject to the continual erosion of forces 
 stronger and more persistent than could easily be 
 exaggerated. There is a more than daily influx of 
 a tide that would be irresistible but for omnipotent 
 grace. 
 
 The counter-influence, against such erosion, 
 against the diurnal tides of doubt and chill, which 
 might be effected by the constant use of Catholic 
 papers is really enormous. 
 
 Such insulation tends to make Catholic house- 
 ho.lds and Catholic individuals wholly forgetful of 
 what the Church is, what her work is, what are her 
 struggles at home and abroad, her interests, her 
 preoccupations, her daily martyrdom, her noble en- 
 ergies, her self-sacrifice, her vital power, her undy- 
 ing and undiminished importance, her intellectual 
 superiority, her moral preeminence, her Divine au- 
 thority, and her unabated claims. Catholics thus 
 isolated are by the use of Catholic papers put in in-
 
 TWO DUTIES 219 
 
 evitable and indespensablc reminder of these the 
 forgotten thnigs. 
 
 The insulation we speak of tends directly to a sort 
 of selfishness and meanness of outlook. A nobler 
 spirit of community and fellowship is directly engen- 
 dered and fostered by reading of what the world- 
 wide energies of the Church are. The habitual 
 use of Catholic papers forbids a Catholic to assume 
 that his Church is obsolete or behind-hand. It 
 compels him to ask himself whether it be not he who 
 is a sluggard and faineant. It whets his zeal, and 
 stimulates his sympathy: it begets brotherly love 
 and an emulation in good. 
 
 In the United States there are published immense 
 numbers of Catholic journals, magazines, reviews, 
 and what not, in English, German, French, Italian, 
 and Spanish. They are not cutting each other's 
 throats: there is not one too many. If some might 
 be better than they are, can they be made better 
 without more efficient support? If many are as 
 good as they could conceivably be, would not their 
 efficiency be immensely increased if the number of 
 their readers were what it might easily be? 
 
 The efficiency of a paper, or a review, does not 
 depend merely on its own excellence : the noblest 
 preacher that ever stood in a pulpit would preach 
 in vain if nobody stopped to listen. And no matter 
 how good the Catholic Press may be, its apostolate 
 can only bear fruit among those whom it reaches. 
 
 We end, therefore, with the question with which
 
 220 DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 we set out — Is the Catholic Press adequately sup- 
 ported by the Catholic Public? If not, is our duty 
 done when an adequate Catholic Press Is provided? 
 If we wish to carry out the papal mandate, we have 
 not only to supply the Catholic papers but to do 
 all In our power to foster and enlarge the demand 
 on which the supply must in the long run depend. 
 
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