Efe Books for the founding if a CoIUge in Mifiolony" 'icaEJE-wapfKKainnr- • IUIISIRAJSEr • DIVINITY SCHOOL TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER Works by THE REV. GEORGE TYRRELL NOVA ET VETERA: Informal Meditations. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. HARD SAYINGS: A Selection of Meditations and Studies. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. THE FAITH OF THE MILLIONS : A Selection of Past Essays. Two Series. Crown 8vo. 5s. net each. LEX ORANDI ; or, Prayer and Creed. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. LEX CREDENDI : A Sequel to Lex Orandi. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. EXTERNAL RELIGION : Its Use and Abuse. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net. A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net. OIL AND WINE. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. THROUGH SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS : or, The Old Theology and the New. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. THE SOUL'S ORBIT; or, Man's Journey to God. Compiled and Edited, with additions, by M. D. Petre. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net. LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA. A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER BY GEORGE TYRRELL AUTHOR OF "LEX CREDENDI," ETC. Ay me ! what act That roars so loud and thunders in the index? Hamlet NEW JMPRESSION- LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 1907 All rights reserved CONTENTS PACE INTRODUCTION . . . . .1 LETTER TO A UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR . 37 NOTES . . . . . 91 EPILOGUE ..... IOI A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER INTRODUCTION IT is necessary to justify the present publi cation of a letter whose privacy was origi nally its chief justification. To do so I need only retrace briefly the steps by which I have arrived at a decision counter to my first intention. On 7 January, 1906, I received a letter from the late Father Martin, General of the Jesuits, in which he says : " My only motive in writing is to learn from your Reverence whether or not you are the author of the expressions quoted in the Milanese ' Corriere della Sera' of 1 January, of which I send you a copy herewith. The Archbishop of Milan asks me whether it is true that any Father of the Society has written such things, and I want an answer from you which I can transmit to the Archbishop." 2 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER The following is a translation of the enclosure : THE IDEAS OF A CATHOLIC REFORMER (an unpublished brochure) (From our Vatican Correspondent) Rome, December 31. P.M. I have come across a most interesting docu ment with which I make haste to acquaint you. It is a brochure entitled, "A Confidential Letter to a Friend who is a Professor of Anthro pology." The origin of this document — not on sale, and in possession of but few — is as follows : An eminent English Catholic,1 finding it im possible to square his science with his faith, had resolved to give up Catholicism, and had revealed his intention to a friend of his who is an English Jesuit. The latter sought to dis suade him, and to that end addressed to him the Confidential Letter now in my hands. In point of boldness, the ideas of this Jesuit go beyond anything so far published by even the most advanced "reformist" Catholics. I wish I could reproduce this strange document in its entirety, which reads like a page from Fogaz- zaro's " Santo " ; but I must confine myself to the pith of the matter. 1 This account abounds in minor inaccuracies. A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 3 "To-day," writes the English Jesuit,1 "the positions of conservative Catholics can only be maintained by force of systematic or wilful ignorance. I see how the vigorous historical investigation of the origin and development of Christianity must undermine many of our most fundamental assumptions in regard to dogmas and institutions. I see how the sphere of the miraculous is daily limited by the growing difficulty in verifying such facts, and the growing facility of reducing either them or the belief in them to natural and recognized causes. I see and feel moreover how these and liko objections would be as nothing could we point trium phantly to the Christian ethos of the Church, to the religious spirit developed by her system as by no other ; and were there not in the approved writings of her ascetical teachers, and her moralists ; in the prevailing practices of her confessors and directors ; in the liturgical biographies of her canonized saints ; in the principles of her government and in her methods of education ; much that revolts the very same moral and religious sense to which in the first 1 I re-translate from the Italian translation so as to repro duce one or two inaccuracies which are of moment. 4 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER instance her claims to our submission must appeal. Here indeed, as you say, we are in volved seemingly in self-contradiction ; as soon, namely, as authority bids us repudiate the very principles and sentiments on which alone our obedience to it can rest." Nevertheless, the author of the Confidential Letter, while recognizing these grave defects of traditional Catholicism, dissuades his friend from leaving the Church. " Catholicism- is not primarily a theology, or at most a system of practical observances regu lated by that theology. No, Catholicism is primarily a life, and the Church a spiritual organism in whose life we participate, and theology is but an attempt of that life to formu late and understand itself — an attempt which may fail wholly or in part without affecting the value and reality of the said life." In fine, the author develops at great length the notion that official and theoretical Catholi cism is only approximatively representative of living Catholicism ; and he applies to the question of faith the now generally familiar dis tinction between the conscious and the sub conscious. " How little do we know of our A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 5 own deepest sentiments ; of what we believe underneath our surface beliefs ; of our hidden capacities of good or evil I "* "It is the function of a good representative government to formulate the thoughts, wishes, and sentiments of the people. But how rarely does this obtain I So with the Church. ' ' The truths which regulate our spiritual life are but few, and are too fundamental to be dependent on the fate of any particular theo logical school. Thus in the lives of the greater saints, that which lends them their Christian and Catholic character has but little relation to the complications of theological instruction. The whole of the Christian and Catholic creed should be viewed as a symbol of the impress made by the Infinite on the understanding of a great and eminent fraction of the human race. For the most part the theologians, fallible and ignorant mortals like the rest of us, are in good faith, as were some of those strict-minded rabbis who refused to listen to Christ, who con demned His teaching as heretical, who quoted 1 What follows is a rather curious patchwork of passag-es from different pages of the letter fastened together by a few sentences of which I cannot claim the authorship. Still, I do not quarrel with the result. 6 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER the prophets to show that salvation was of the Jews alone, and that in the end the whole world would be circumcised. How right they were, and yet how wrong ! Well, may not this his tory repeat itself? May not our theologians be right, but in another sense than they imagine? May not Catholicism, like Judaism, be destined to a far higher and nobler form of life than any hitherto attained? Catholicism, the author concludes, remains the highest expression, the most efficacious instrument of the spiritual life so long as it is not robbed of its liberty or tied to a faction." This Letter, of which I have been able to give but a feeble analysis, and which will surely be published sooner or later, strikes me as an important document, and makes one of the strangest pages in the history of the Catholic Reform Movement. It sounds, I repeat, like a chapter of " II Santo," and will no doutt interest the numerous readers of Fogazzaro. In reply to the Father General's letter, I wrote (13 January) as follows : — " I hasten to acknowledge as much responsi bility as I honestly can for the ' Lettera Con- A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 7 fidenziale.' I do not know1 who has translated it, nor have I read the translation. I am told it has been freely adapted to suit local exigencies, and for these adaptations of course I cannot answer. But I have no doubt that the sub stance of it — all that you would most dislike — is founded on a letter written by me two or three years ago to meet a particular yet not uncommon case. There is no statement of that original Letter which is not theologically defensible. Yet as a whole it is a medicine for extreme cases ; not for common ailments. It can only be judged as a whole, in the context of its suppositions, and not by mischievous and sensational extracts. It supposes explicitly that things are as bad, not as the writer but, as the recipient imagines. You cannot but know that thousands of educated Catholics who are not experts in criticism or history, are aware of the disputes of experts about the most fundamental matters, and that the mere existence of such disputes reduces them to a state of perfectly inculpable theo logical confusion which they easily mistake for loss of faith. I myself am no expert, and am in the same position as they ; and I am 1 I did not then. 8 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER bound in conscience to share with my fellow- sufferers those considerations which enable me to cling to the Church with implicit faith in spite of temporary theological obscurities. Were every one to leave the Church who is unable to arbitrate between contending critics, who could be saved ? The remedy for the "inexpert" is prayer, patience, and work ; not controversy. What would really do harm would be the publicity and notoriety given to such a Letter by any kind of official notice of it. Till was condemned, he was comparatively un known, and his dry technical writings were read mostly by those already in sympathy with them. But now he has become a cult and a fashion, and for ten who followed him before, a thousand follow, or profess to follow, him now. The methods of one time are not always the best for another time." In reply to this, His Paternity wrote (20 January) insisting anew on the scandal caused by those extracts from the " Letter," which were published in the " Corriere della Sera." " And although," he continues, "you say it was a private letter written a good while ago and A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 9 adapted to the peculiar mental requirements of the receiver, yet, according to the opinion of learned theologians whose judgment I have consulted, it certainly contains many inadmis sible assertions, and what is still more certain, it has caused scandal to many, even to some eminent dignitaries who reasonably complain that the Society should allow such things to be written by her subjects. I am therefore obliged to remove this scandal, and to require you to send me a declaration, to be published in the papers, repudiating such doctrines as are there1 propounded." In reply to this point of His Paternity's letter, I wrote (24 January) : — "As to the ' Lettera Confidenziale,' it is hardly worth while offering an explanation which falls so short of your requirements. Still, it would be unjust not to exonerate the Society from all responsibility. But you would not, I am sure, wish me to repudiate what I should not have written had I not sincerely believed it. Am I to deny, or pretend to deny, the existence of the common difficulties enumerated in the 1 Sc. in the "Corriere's" quotations. io A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER first paragraph quoted by the ' Corriere ' ? Have not the authorities themselves admitted all these things ? Am I to say that Religion is primarily theology, and not Eternal Life ? Am I to say that Catholicism is not something greater and grander than can ever attain ade quate expression in its theology or in its institu tions, however they may progress? I should be contradicting the Scriptures and the greatest saints and doctors of the Church." The "explanation" which I enclosed for publication ran as follows : — "Sir, — I have been ordered by those who have a right to command me to explain my position in regard to the ' Lettera Confiden- ziale,' noticed in the 'Corriere della Sera' of i January, 1906. Let me say first that I am not responsible for the adaptations and changes of the Italian translation, which I have not read, and whose author I do not know. The original letter was perfectly private — an argu- mentum ad hominem, adapted throughout to the presuppositions of the recipient, not to those of the writer. Those presuppositions, owing to the publicly notorious disputes of experts A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER n about fundamental matters, are common to thousands of sincerely religious educated lay men who are not experts in criticism and theology, and whose position is simply one of 'inculpable ignorance.' If all such were allowed to mistake theological confusion for loss of faith, the Church would lose many of her most living members. It is needful, therefore, to remind them that in such states of blameless perplexity the implicit faith of the little child suffices. To publish such a letter broadcast would be to administer to all the medicine intended only for some. That the ' Corriere ' should have made part of it public was certainly not my wish, nor probably that of the trans lator. As they appear, isolated from their con text and presuppositions, the paragraphs may seem startling and sensational. Yet read care fully they contain nothing that has not been said over and over again by saints and doctors of the Church. Only the first sentence mis represents my meaning. It puts voluntaria for involuntaria, and applies to ' le posizioni dei catholici conservatori ' in general what I said only of certain particular conservative positions in Scripture criticism abandoned now by the more 12 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER moderate conservatives, and maintained only by those who do not, or will not, read. Need less to say that the Society of Jesus is in no way responsible for private correspondences and conversations never destined for publicity, and therefore never submitted to its official censorship. I am, etc." On 7 February the English Provincial of the Society notified to me that "the document from Rome severing my connexion with the Society had come." Before accepting it, and as a check on such possible misstatements as have actually been made, I wrote to ask precisely on what ground I was dismissed. The General replied to the Provincial, quoting his own letter to me dated i February, which, being enclosed with the form of dismissal, I had not yet received : — "The reason of the dismissal is clearly indi cated in my letter to Father Tyrrell of i Feb ruary, namely: 'Which defence,1 as it fails to remove the scandal, does not satisfy the de mands of ecclesiastical authority nor of the Society. And since your Reverence declares 1 Against the complaints raised by the passages published in the "Corriere." A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 13 that he cannot send such a declaration as is required, nothing remains, etc.'" 1 Although it may not be strictly relevant, I may as well add here the note (19 February) by which I closed this correspondence, and which 1 I wish to note here that it was not the Letter as a whole, but strictly and only the passages quoted in the "Corriere" which I was required to repudiate. Other parts of the Letter I oould have repudiated more easily ; for even if absolutely defensible, their first sense is obviously counter to received theology. But journalists |are not theologians, and easily mistake commonplaces in smart clothes for sensational novelties. Indeed, ecclesiastical authorities themselves will sooner tolerate modernity in the garb of antiquity than antiquity tricked out in the newest fashion, and this because "the faithful," like any other public, is influenced by sound rather than sense. Thus only can I explain the scandal said to be given to certain 'grave Church dignitaries by what is surely as banal in substance as anything I have ever written ; and that is saying much. No doubt the " Corriere's " un fortunate mistranslation, or misprint, of the first line was not calculated to prepossess the said dignitaries in favour of the remainder, read in the lurid light of so ungracious an insinua tion. But having corrected that error, I could not, on reading and re-reading the passages many times, find aught to amend or repudiate. An authoritative judgment of a Sacred Con gregation would of course have required some act of at least external deference on my part ; but here it was a question of repudiation, of deposing my opinion in favour of another, and this in deference to the judgment of certain anonymous theologians who neither stated their precise points of dissent nor the reasons which might have brought me round to their view ; who told me that I was wrong, but did not say where or why. 14 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER testifies to my sentiments of respect for the late General : — "Your Paternity, — I should like to assure you, now that I stand outside the Society, how completely I realize that we have both of us been driven to this unpleasant issue by the necessities of our several minds and consciences, and your Paternity still more by the exigencies of a most difficult position. You may depend on me that whatever explanations I may at any time be forced to give of what has happened will make this quite apparent. Nothing could be further from my sentiments than any kind of personal ran cour or resentment. I feel that this is a collision of systems and tendencies rather than of persons, and that many such collisions must occur before the truth of both sides meets in some higher truth. And though you may say, God forbid ! I do not doubt that in the deepest principle of all we are more in agreement with one another than with many of our respective fellow-thinkers. I thank you for your promised prayers and holy sacrifices. My own sacrifices must now be of another — and more expensive if less valuable — sort,1 but such as they are I will offer them for you." 1 Alluding to the suspension entailed in my dismissal. A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 15 Even had the confidence expressed in this letter been mistaken, I should not regret having written it or having erred on that side rather than the other. But those later untoward developments, which at first sight seem to con vict me of too easy a trustfulness, admit of another explanation ; and I still believe that Father Martin acted against me always with reluctance, and only in obedience to pressure brought to bear upon him by others ; nay, that he even restrained the more intemperate zeal of those whom his last illness and death left free to follow their bent unchecked. Although the Confidential Letter was not immediately put on the Index — probably for the reasons suggested above in my letter of 13 January — yet other circumstances, into which I need not enter, soon lent it as great a notoriety as such an official condemnation would have done. Moreover, at Rome, where controversial tem perance is difficult and perhaps impossible, the Letter came into prominence just when a storm had been long brewing, and therefore drew to itself all the reactionary electricity with which the air was then charged. Even "II 16 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER Santo" seemed more forgivable. The "Cor- riere's " estimate of its unique and unparalleled boldness became an article of faith with multi tudes to whom it was inaccessible because unpublished, and it was accepted as fixing the high-water mark of liberal Catholic advance. To the few who had read the Letter for them selves, and in general to the narrow circle of my more intimate friends, these sensational reports of its character were of as little consequence as to myself. But on the larger and more in definite multitude of those who had got to know me and trust me through my writings alone, the effect was necessarily "scandalous," i.e. spiritually harmful, in one or other of two ways. Either their confidence in me, and there fore in all the good they had seemed to derive from me, was rudely shaken ; or else their con fidence in those authorities who had con demned me, i.e. in their normal ex -officio spiritual guides. To my less intimate friends and well-wishers, therefore, I owe a strict debt of explanation. It is not merely that as a man I have an inalien able right to defend my good name, but that the said right can and has become a clear duty A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 17 from which no one on earth can dispense me. The many Catholics of the reactionary school who have long, and in a sense rightly, distrusted me and my spirit and method may well be par doned if they use this denouement to point a moral and adorn a tale. Grace might seal their lips, but Nature is not equal to such miracles of generosity. They will not be inclined to mini mize the theological trespasses of the "Confi dential Letter," especially where exaggeration is safe from the possible check of reference. Anything may be true of a letter which nobody can see. Hence, those who have trusted me are put to confusion and are at a loss what to think or say. In every hypothesis I am bound to give them the chance of seeing for themselves. I certainly must not let them think that I have written something subversive of faith or morals, something blasphemous or irreverent, or even something much more rash and liberal than I have actually written. Nor, on the other hand, must I retain their trust and confidence in myself, and perhaps at the expense of their confidence in those who have condemned me, by allowing them to suppose I have written something perfectly and palpably 1 8 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER innocuous, and that there is nothing whatever to be said on the other side. For though my friends are my chief creditors, I must acknowledge, freely and spontaneously, that a debt is also due to that ecclesiastical authority which as a Catholic I not merely respect and defer to absolutely within its proper limits, but whose rights have been both directly and indirectly the cause to which my life and labours have been devoted. Seeing that the express purpose of the Con fidential Letter was to dissuade my friend from that breach with the Church which would mean an assertion of individualism and a denial of authority and corporate life ; seeing that my whole line of argument was to insist that the reasonable and moderate claims of the Church over the individual were not invalidated by any extravagant interpretation of those claims, it would be a grave inconsistency were I, by silence, to suffer even the informal action of authority in my own case to be judged too un fairly, or were I to leave unexplained what might otherwise seem to be on my part a dis obedient resistance to its lawful claims. While thus hesitating and balancing the A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 19 reasons for and against publication, I learnt that an Italian journal, "Lo Spettatore," had solved the problem for me by presenting its readers with a complete translation of the Letter. I say nothing of the literary morality of such a pro cedure ; the practical consequence is my chief concern. Plainly, it is best that I should fore stall any similar enterprise on the part of an English publisher by publishing myself the text with such explanations and comments as may best mitigate the ill effects of miscel laneous circulation. These, then, were some of the principal reasons for publishing the Letter in question. On the other hand, it was "confidential" for the reason already given, so that it would be an unpardonable scandal to give as bread to the multitude what was a strong and danger ous remedy prepared to meet a comparatively small number of desperate cases. Moreover, if it would not actually harm and upset less troubled minds, yet it would so much the more seem to them a very inexcusable and unneces sary bit of " liberalizing " on my part. Hence, plainly it could only be published together with some sort of commentary by way of antidote 20 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER and justification. But here a greater difficulty lay in my path ; for the true sense of what was mainly an answer could only be determined by the question which it attempted to solve. The true context of the whole Letter was to be found in the entire array of difficulties, critico-his- torical and philosophical, with which it dealt indirectly and by way of evasion and diversion, rather than directly point by point. Could I, in conscience, put such an array of problems before the general reader, who would in all likelihood be far more impressed by the direct attack than by the indirect defence? It seemed best, therefore, to allow my case to be somewhat weakened by its one-sided pre sentment rather than strengthen it at the price of causing as much or more distress than it was my design to alleviate. I therefore publish the answer without the question except so far as the latter is implied in and shows through the former, or is explicitly quoted here and there in the notes and comments explanatory of the text. In one point I feel at a great disadvantage with, I will not say my adversaries or my enemies, but with those who differ from me and A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 31 think right to oppose me. It is precisely in my inability to take this cordially hostile attitude in controversies of great complexity and uncer tainty. Experience and reflection confirm me 1 daily in the conviction that life is less simple ' than we learnt from our copy-books and our cate chisms, and that our choices — leastways, those of any moment — are rarely between good and evil, divisible as it were with a hatchet, but rather between courses mixed in varying proportions of both one and the other. The heroes of moral romance sail serenely through life's darkest storms, cheered by the certainty of their fault- . less rectitude and by the hearty applause of a thoroughly satisfied conscience. But in real1 life it seems to me that such serenity, and the'; undoubted force and energy which it secures, are the privilege not so much of the heroic as of * the unreflective. The law of struggle and com- ' petition is not confined to the physiological world, but extends its sway over the social and moral life of man, where class conflicts with class, interest with interest, and duty with duty; where the victory of one combatant means the defeat and injury of the other. Benevolence to the spider means cruelty to the fly ; and, con- 22 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER versely, to rescue the fly is to rob the spider of his well-earned dinner. Looked at closely, our moral life presents us with the same problem at every turn. Mostly we are so content to have chosen the lesser rather than the greater evil, that we qualify such action as simply good ; we so rejoice with the rescued fly that we forget to weep with the disappointed spider. Yet since the Divine Will is behind all ; since it fights on both sides, giving energy to conqueror and conquered alike, this one-sided sympathy cannot be the divinest and best. Yet were such egotism and one-sidedness lacking to either combatant, were he always sensitively weighing the rights of his adversary's case, what would become of his nerve and sinew and vigour? Were both sides similarly affected, what would become of that wholesome discipline by which Nature selects the best of each kind? Doubt less the disciples of Socrates — not to mention a greater — were much more confident of the abso lute injustice of his judges than he was himself. He was only too well aware that good and evil are inextricably tangled, and that there is always a case for the other side ; that for his judges as for himself it was a choice of evils ; that subjec- A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 23 tively both might well be wholly right, but that objectively both were to some extent necessarily wrong. Had Peter thought so nicely as his Master about the case for those who sat in the seat of Moses, he would have been less prompt to draw and brandish his sword ; and doubtless the feebleness of the runaway disciples was in large part due to the absence of egotism and one-sided fanaticism on the part of their Master. A Mahomet's whole-hearted condemnation of his adversaries would have inspired a firmer stand. But, after all, there was something to be said, as the event proved, for the official guardians of the Jewish theocracy, though on the whole they were perhaps more wrong than right. It is, then, inevitable that in the dis pensation of Nature which favours the strongest fighter they should go under who weigh their adversaries' claims in the same scales as their own — that they should be crucified, poisoned, or otherwise worsted and eliminated. For my own part, I love to read the cudgel controver sialists of bygone days, and to hear the resound ing thwacks and thuds of those vigorous blows with which they belaboured one another, and which owed their vigour to the absence of all 24 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER suspicion of a case for the other side. Nor am I at all sure that if charity suffered, truth may not have gained a good deal by this violent advo cacy of its several contradictory aspects and extremes ; or that if the combatants themselves were blinded by the dust of their scuffle, the cool onlooker may not have learnt more from their very extravagances than from years of quiet and perhaps apathetic solitary reflection. Nor is the race of cudgel controversialists by any means extinct, though its manners have been softened and its tone lowered to suit a more fastidious day. In the clerical and theological world it still owns extensive territories, and there the traveller from a less bracing clime may yet be refreshed by the converse of men who most heartily believe that there is abso lutely nothing to be said in favour of their opponents' position. With such men I neces sarily feel at a considerable disadvantage, since I must allow them a good deal, whereas they will allow me nothing at all. I must allow that this " Letter to a Professor," though the less of two evils, was nevertheless an evil in some degree, and, while I consider myself justified in having written it, I must allow that those who A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 25 have condemned me for writing it may also be justified. I have often wondered whether, if all the cir cumstances were known, the priest and Levite, whose conduct is contrasted with that of the Good Samaritan, might not have had much to urge in extenuation of their apparent heartless- ness. There are duties of non-interference, of j minding one's own business; there are the evils ' of indiscriminate charity ; there are the perils of mere impulsiveness to be considered. A large experience of "distress cases" often teaches the priest and Levite a slow caution which seems callousness to the tender-hearted amateur phil anthropist. It may be that their charity was not less than the Samaritan's, but that it was more educated ; that a prudent casuistry had taught them to balance the claims of conflicting duties ; and that before their mental debate was finished they had passed by and left the sufferer behind. Similarly, he who should hesitate to throw a rope to a drowning man until he had obtained leave of the owner, or who should fear to come promptly to the rescue in any other dubiously lawful way, is not one whom we can 26 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER condemn absolutely. Yet, on the whole, our sympathy will ever be with the more unscrupu lous and impulsive charity that does not reckon the rights and wrongs too nicely, but makes a bold dash for the nearest means to its end. It is to such an unscrupulous impulse that the " Letter to a Professor" owes its conception and birth ; and though no understanding (were such possible) of all the circumstances could clear it from certain taints of original sin and illegitimacy, yet it would do much to spread a fair mantle of charity over these disfiguring blemishes. The drowning soul now in question was one of those men of scientific and historical rather than of philosophical culture, who are content to take their inherited theology for granted until some accident forces them to consider its coherence with that realm of knowledge in which they themselves are specialists. A faith ful and devout Catholic at all times, and one who had suffered some considerable inconveni ence in the cause of "Clericalism," it is only in mid life that his responsible office brings him into touch with others, both equals and dependents, who have every right to look to A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 27 him for a reconciliation between the affirmations of science and criticism and those of traditional theology. With all the confidence of devout faith he throws himself into what he believes will be an easy task, only to find himself more and more entangled in its perplexities. The confessor to whom he first presents his own difficulties demands of him what would be equivalent to a renunciation of his whole educa tion and acquired mentality as the only con dition under which he can remain a Catholic. Another confessor takes a wider and vaguer view of the case. A third is as intransigent as the first. And so on. Finally, a prelate too busy to attend to the case himself, yet un willing to let so large a fish slip the net of Peter, suggests my name with those of two or three others to my friend, who naturally enough turns to the man he knows already rather than to the more competent strangers. Were it not that my method of dealing with such cases has always been indirect, I might well have refused the responsibility of minister ing to the diseases of a mind so much abler and more instructed than my own ; but such medicine as I have, and I hope it is no 28 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER quackery, is a kind of panacea suitable for all sorts of intelligences, high and low ; one which cannot do harm, and which within my narrow experience has rarely failed to do good. It consists in removing the yoke which galls, so as to give the sore place a chance of healing. It assumes that if a man is absolutely and practically sincere to whatever little measure of religious and moral truth he still holds, he is bound to advance to whatever fuller measure of truth may be necessary for him. It assumes that nothing short of conscious and deliberate wickedness of some kind or other can separate a man from communion with Christ and His Church. It declines to admit the existence of any such wickedness in those whose whole trouble is due solely to their anxiety to think, say, and do what is right. It has no sympathy with indifferentism ; for it regards a desire to possess the truth as the very test and proof of sincerity ; yet while it holds the desire of truth to be essential, it allows that the possession may be often dispensable. In short, it consists in finding out what a man does believe, and building on that ; in fostering the sound and healthy parts of his soul instead of physicking A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 29 the unhealthy — nay, in cutting these off, as far as may be, by diverting from them that nervous attention which can only irritate and spread inflammation through the whole system. This is the reason of the stress which the Letter lays on the distinction between faith in the Christian revelation, in Christ as a Person, in the Church as a living corporation ; and theology which strives to translate revelation from the imaginative language of prophecy into the conceptual language of contemporary scientific thought ; which strives to define Christ and to define the Church so as to satisfy the exigencies of our understanding and bring it into harmony with the deeper intuitions of faith. The understanding is subject to a pro cess of rapid transformation from generation to generation. According as the results of ex perience, observation, and inquiry accumulate, new arrangements, new systems of classifica tion, new methods are requisite to deal with this tangle of matter and get it into serviceable shape and order. It is the function of theology to find place in this system for the truths of the Christian revelation, to translate the un changing imaginative presentment of prophetic 30 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER utterance into the shifting terms of current conceptual language. Obviously, to keep pace with the progress of language is necessary under pain of becoming unintelligible, or worse. Yet circumstances for which no one is to blame may for a time isolate one section of the community from the rest and make it lag behind ; in which case it will adhere mainly to the older speech or develop it along lines of its own. In such case it is not possible to make up arrears in a moment, and at once to fall into line with the main body again. It is just those whose mentality is specifically modern, whose minds are well knit together and unified by the categories and methods of current thought, who will necessarily realize the difficulty of assimilating a theology fabricated to suit the mentality of an earlier day, and couched in conceptual language many of whose terms have either become obsolete or, still worse, have so shifted their meaning as to be positively misleading. The ordinary un trained or half-trained mind is too consciously jumbled to be sensitive to or intolerant of that clash of contradictory elements which is so painful to one whose lifelong preoccupation has A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 31 been the pursuit of unity and coherence. It is easy to counsel patience to those to whom the presence of undigested matter in their mental system causes no pain whatever, but more active minds demand a different treatment. A synthesis they will have, yet to synthesize elements taken from largely heterogeneous mental systems is a feat beyond the capacity of even the ablest individual, and one demanding the slow and difficult co-operation of many minds. Pending the tardy results of such collective labour, I see no relief for minds of the more active and exigent sort but in a clearer and better understanding of the relation between revelation and theology ; between faith and theological assent ; between religion and the scientific formulation of religion. Of the natural necessity of theology ; of a harmony between the concepts of the understanding and the deep intuitions of faith, there can be no doubt ; nor should the temporary impossibility of such a concord ever be acquiesced in or accepted as normal and healthy.1 Yet it is equally evident that, however closely allied and dependent the 1 See "The Rights and Limits of Theology"; Quarterly Review, October, 1905 ; and more particularly, Lex Credendi, pp. 139 ff. 32 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER interests of the mind and the heart may be in general, they are not tied together by any law of " convariance " that holds for individual cases. We cannot say that the deepest faith always goes hand-in-hand with the most correct theology, or that they may not often be in precisely inverse proportion one to another. Religious experience, like every other sort of experience, is largely wasted for future and general utility unless it be subjected to the reflection of the understanding. Yet though such understanding enables us to control and command a fuller experience than were other wise possible, it does not hinder the fact that experience may come to us, and come more abundantly, in other ways. Much as the soil will yield to art in a stubborn clime, it will yield far more to unassisted Nature elsewhere ; and similarly, for all the service theology may render to faith, we may find a maximum of faith con sistent in certain circumstances with a minimum of theology. I am convinced that it is a fallacy to appeal to Christ's seeming anti-theological attitude in favour of non-dogmatic religion. His opposi tion, in this as in other matters, was to the abuse A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 33 not to the use of the external and institutional side of religion. We are too apt to regard His informal wayside prayings and preachings as the substance of His religion, and not merely as a supplement ; to forget that He lived and died a practising Jew ; that if He was opposed to legalism, formalism, sacerdotalism, and the other diseases to which religion is liable, He accepted and reverenced the law and the forms, and the priesthood and the sacrifices of the religion of His fathers. Yet it is equally plain that His emphasis was all on the danger of exalting the external over the internal, theo logy over faith ; and on the preference to be given to the latter in case of conflict. To-day such conflict as there is, is due not to the fact that Christian theology takes account of that Revelation which is its very subject-matter, but to the fact that for centuries it has in many cases treated the prophetic and inspired lan guage of Revelation as possessing exact philo sophical or scientific value, and has thus deduced prosaic conclusions from quasi-poetical pre misses; proving, e.g., the non-existence of the Antipodes from: "Every eye shall behold Him " ; or the immobility of the earth from : 34 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER " He hath established the round world so that it shall never be moved." In the measure that hundreds of such premisses, immutable because revealed, have been woven into its texture and made to support whole chains of deduction, dogmatic theology has grown more and more out of joint with the rest of science. The other sciences have arrived too late (if they have yet quite arrived) at a clear consciousness of their own proper scope and method to afford to throw stones ; especially since from the nature of the case the relation of theology to its subject- matter is exceedingly complex. For it deals, not with the divine realities and facts themselves, but with that imaginative prophetic present ment of them which is, as it were, their moving, living shadow — something as real and concrete as themselves ; by no means conceptual or in tellectual, as theology has sometimes forgotten. I do not, then, think that a temporary em barrassment of theology is something very surprising or very alarming ; least of all in the case of any particular individual whose faith and good will are abundantly evident, and who there fore has got the " root of the matter " in him. A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 35 So much being premised, I now propose to go through the following letter in company with the patient reader, and point out on the road anything that may deserve explanation or comment. A LETTER TO A UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR Dear I thought it better to leave your letter un answered all these weeks than answer it hastily or less fully than I now propose to do. As a teacher and professor you will understand how much easier it is to be brief in propounding problems than in solving them, and will there fore pardon an unavoidable prolixity which wearies me in one way, if it wearies you in another. No, I am neither surprised, nor shocked nor alarmed at your candid confession, but only sincerely sorry for your temporary distress of mind, and earnestly anxious to do all I can to alleviate that distress, even though I should be unable to remove it altogether. I am "not surprised," because in point of fact the percentage of educated Catholics who are 37 3^ A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER similarly troubled is necessarily and rapidly on the increase : and because unfortunately so many of them refer, or are referred, to me in their perplexities (as though I were the inventor of some secret panacea) that I get a somewhat exaggerated impression of their numerical pro portion to the untroubled many, and begin to regard them as representing the rule rather than its exceptions. To many a priest even of wide experience and repute the very existence of such a class is unknown save by remote hearsay — thus by a sort of magnetism do we each select and fashion a little world of our own which we too readily mistake for the universe, for the sole possible world. I am therefore only too well used to such revelations ; and moreover all that I know of your antecedents and circumstances, of the trend of your thoughts and your private studies, of the set into which your profession has thrown you, and of your special intimacies and interests, has prepared me for this almost inevit able denouement. As I am "not surprised" so neither am I "shocked" as though my estimate of your moral worth had suddenly been proved false or exag gerated. The inclination to ascribe the denial A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 39 on the part of others of our own beliefs and opinions to stupidity, immorality and bad faith is as unchristian as it is uncritical. Only when we take the word "Faith" in its ethical and evangelical sense, is it true to say that loss of faith necessarily implies some moral weakness or imperfection. To this I shall have more to add presently. But the saying is palpably false when faith is made to stand for theological orthodoxy, for assent to a dogmatic system. It is admitted on all hands that such faith as this may, and often does, go with the extremest moral depravity — with sensuality and cruelty and injustice and untruthfulness and hypocrisy. Prejudice and superstition ; temporal and selfish interests of one sort or another ; or more com monly still an absolute lack of all sympathetic and intelligent interest in their religion will keep the great majority of such men in the paths of orthodoxy as long as orthodoxy is in public fashion and favour. Of this sort, nowise in terested in the truth of religion for its own sake, the presumption holds good that their revolt against orthodoxy may always be explained by some less worthy motive. That they themselves should hold this explanation to be in all cases 40 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER the only possible and conceivable one, is of course very understandable ; but that there is another, is also perfectly obvious. Indeed theo logians themselves allow for the case of blame less or "invincible" ignorance — of mental incapacity. Convinced as they were of the per fectly self-evident character of their principles and facts, and of the mathematical cogency of their deductions therefrom ; crediting the intel lectual system itself with that firmness which only belonged to their own hold on it in a Catholic age and country where no other system was subjectively thinkable, they formerly limited the excuse of "invincible ignorance" (as far as Christians were concerned) to cases of quite abnormal mental incapacity. But times have changed, and what with the relative inertness and immutability of orthodox theology on the one side, and the inconceivably rapid expansion of knowledge and of means and methods of inquiry on the other, difficulties have accumu lated to a degree that makes the ablest and most cultivated minds to be those least capable of effecting a reconciliation between orthodox theology and the rest of the field of knowledge. For one reason or another theologians have, for A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 41 generations, been letting their accounts get into disorder ; they have trusted to the one general principle of "authority" for the quieting of all possible doubts and have paid less and less attention to particulars. They have forgotten that, by a necessary law of the mind, the claims of authority will de facto inevitably be called in question as soon as the reasons on which those claims rest are cancelled or outweighed by those which stand against the particular teachings of authority ; that though a Catholic as such cannot consistently call this or that Catholic doctrine in question, he can1 consistently call his Catholicism in question. The most trusted and competent teacher may presume on his credit and make assertions so extravagant as to force us at last to doubt his veracity or his sanity. To believe him might involve a denial of the very principles and sentiments on which our trust in him originally depended. I can easily imagine that for many a one the "cumulative" argument against Catholicism might be relatively and subjectively far stronger than that in its favour ; and that for such a one assent had, without any shadow of fault on his 1 As far as logic goes. 42 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER side, become a mental impossibility. On the contrary, had he been more worldly-minded, less interested in religion for his own sake and for the sake of others, he might have preserved his orthodoxy undisturbed. But by some it might be counted to you as a fault that you allowed yourself to be over whelmed by these difficulties ; that you ex aggerated your own mental strength, whereas it was your duty to protect your faith by shutting your eyes or by running away from dangers. Now, however unwilling a man may be to raise doubts in his own mind, he cannot live in an age and country like yours without their being thrust upon his attention at every turn. In mediaeval Spain, where index and inquisition were practi cally workable methods of protection, it was other wise. There and then one only needed not to think in order to be at peace ; here and now one needs also not to see or hear or read or converse or live. There is now no educational grade so low as to be exempt entirely from the spirit of criticism, whose influence is of course still more strongly felt as we ascend to the higher grades. Where faith was a matter of course with all, one was never challenged for a reason for one's convictions; A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 43 but where dissensions and negations are the rule, the challenge is perpetual and must compel one to reflect on, and criticize one's position. And then, behind this warning against over rating one's wisdom by measuring swords with one's intellectual betters, lies the supposition that we are encroaching on the rights of a privileged class ; that if for the majority such an endeavour be presumptuous, there is a minority for whom it is a duty, and who are competent to acquit themselves of that duty. It is implied that modesty bids us trust to these experts and distrust ourselves. But apart from the obvious objection that there are experts on the opposite sides in every great controversy ; that doctors differ and that the layman and the unlearned must at last choose between them either on caprice, or by some exercise of private judgment and criticism — apart from this, we may ask : Who are these experts who can and ought to face these difficulties, and who have faced them? Certainly if we turn to the clergy we find a great readiness on the part of individuals to disclaim the honour, and also a curious vagueness as to its precise depositaries.1 Taken individually,* they frankly say that they are themselves incom- * For Notes see end of Letter. 44 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER petent to deal with such problems, but they imply that they have an unbounded confidence in their own collectivity, or in certain persons, unknown and unknowable, whose speciality it is to adjust the claims of sacred and secular know ledge. Thus the responsibility divided over the whole multitude of the Church's children is shifted from shoulder to shoulder, and comes to rest nowhere in particular ; nor is there, we are prone to suspect, any solid cash answering to these paper-notes that pass from hand to hand. Surely, if there is any class of Catholics either fit, or bound to make itself fit to deal with these matters, it is the class to which you belong by profession, the class of savants and university professors whose duty it is to dispense the fruits of culture to the young men of the rising generation.2 It is to the class from which the ablest criticism of religion derives that we should look for the ablest counter-criticism and defence of religion. If you and your peers must shut your eyes to difficulties, then who on earth is free to face them? Is there no faith anywhere in the world that can bear the full light of day? Is voluntary or involuntary ignorance its universal and necessary condi- A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 45 tion ? And then the very nature of your studies, historical, philological and philosophical, in every way bearing critically on religion ; and the keen controversies of your non-Catholic friends and colleagues about Christian origins and developments ; and your position in rela tion to the Catholic undergraduates who looked to you far more than to their clergy for an under standing sympathy with their dawning per plexities — these and countless other reasons not only justified your criticism of Catholicism, but made it a plain duty. So far then from being " shocked " at what to some might seem to imply a falling away from higher standards and principles, I can well imagine that your present unfortunate predica ment is actually the result of your conscientious fidelity to those principles. As I am not "surprised" nor "shocked," so neither am I " alarmed " by your self-revelation ; certainly far less alarmed than you yourself seem to be. I do not underrate the moral and spiritual dangers of one who finds all his old landmarks suddenly obliterated ; all his guides discredited ; all his authorities called in doubt ; of one who finds himself no longer supported and carried 46 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER along in the crowd of which he had been a part and by whose customs and ways of thought, speech, and action he had been determined far more than he ever suspected till the support gave way ; of one who is thrown upon himself, as it were dropped down in the midst of a path less desert, to find his own way and fend for himself as best he can. I can imagine a man brought to such a pass by no fault of his own ; nay, in consequence of his strict inward truth fulness and fidelity, and yet losing his head when he views himself, not in the mirror of his own conscience, but as we are so prone to do, in the mirror of popular opinion ; I can fancy his independence of judgment which has carried him so far, breaking down wearily just at this critical point, refusing to justify him in his own eyes, and persuading him that he has thrown in his lot with the irreligious and taken a lower moral platform. It is hard suddenly to resist the verdict of the little orbis terrarum to which he has deferred from childhood and not to feel wrong even when he knows he is right. And then there is that other orbis terrarum, formerly hostile, now ready to welcome him as a convert and recruit, igfiorant of the unwillingness, the A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 47 reluctance, the hesitancy of his accession to their ranks ; dense to the differences which he conceives still to separate his position infinitely from theirs, as light from darkness. It is not easy to stand solitary and aloof between the two camps, drawn to the one by kindnesses and flatteries, driven from the other by vitupera tions and slanders. What wonder if he begin to rate himself as others rate him, and end by being what he thus falsely believes himself to be ! That is a danger to which the best of men might be exposed, yet it is not one to which it is necessary or likely that you will fall a victim, and therefore I am not alarmed. I see no reason to fear that you will ever be less sincere and conscientious and essentially religious- minded than you always have been and are now. You may perhaps never see your way any more clearly than at present, yet " God is with us in the night, who made the darkness and the light, and dwells not in the light alone, but in the darkness and the cloud." I have read very carefully the MS. which accompanied your letter and which contains the sum and substance of your indictment against, I will not say, Catholicism, but rather against 48 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER the theological presentment and defence of Catholicism. I can honestly say, it contained nothing that was new to me ; no difficulty to whose force I am insensible. Indeed in many a case I could have dotted the * and crossed the t. I am quite alive to the far-reaching con sequences of Scripture-criticism especially as applied to the Gospels, and to its direct and indirect bearing on the Church's claims to in fallibility. I see that there are not really, as might seem on the surface, two Catholic parties who, having both fairly faced the evidences of the critics, have reached opposite conclusions (conservative and radical) as to their signifi cance ; but that moral unanimity prevails among them just in the measure that they have appro priated the evidence ; that the conservative posi tions are maintained by ignorance, systematic or involuntary. I see how the close historical study of Christian origins and developments must undermine many of our most fundamental assumptions in regard to dogmas and institu tions. I see how the sphere of the miraculous is daily limited by the growing difficulty in verifying such facts, and the growing facility of reducing either them or the belief in them to A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 49 natural and recognized causes. I see and feel moreover how these and like objections would be as nothing could we point triumphantly to the Christian ethos of the Church, to the religious spirit developed by her system as by no other ; and were there not in the approved writings of her ascetical teachers, and her moralists ; in the prevailing practices of her confessors and directors; in the liturgical bio graphies of her canonized saints ; in the prin ciples of her government and in her methods of education, much that revolts the very same moral and religious sense to which in the first instance her claims to our submission must appeal. Here indeed, as you say, we are involved seemingly in self-contradiction; as soon, namely, as authority bids us repudiate the very principles and sentiments on which alone our obedience to it can rest.3 I might perhaps (though to little purpose) deal with these difficulties in detail ; but I agree with you that if, as Newman says, the cumula tive argument, the verdict of the inferential sense, is to be admitted in favour of the Church's claim, it must also be admitted on the other side ; and therefore that a man may, E So A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER by the insensible accumulation and confluence of small difficulties, each no more than a prob ability, find the balance turned some fine day without being able to credit the result to any particular hair in the scale. His negation may be subjectively justified (at least intellectually) without his being able or bound to offer any distinct dialectical proof thereof. In your case, I see that it is so ; and even were I able — which I am not — to deal satisfactorily with the formu lated expression of your difficulties, I can quite imagine that your general impression would remain unchanged, that you would only feel you had made a false diagnosis of your ailment. As to the reasons you have put down on paper, I might quarrel with some of them in detail ; but taken all together they constitute a massive objection against received theological positions which, frankly, I am unable to solve. Nor will I pretend that in this I am modestly deferring to the more competent, for I am quite unable to satisfy your alternative request and refer you to some better-informed theologian as a substitute for myself. I could send you to A who is alive to one side of the problem, or to B, C, and D who are alive to others ; but to no A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 51 one who at once sees all round it and professes to have reached a constructive solution. All would at a given point make confession of their ignorance and of their faith in the faith of others. The plain truth is that nobody in the Church yet knows the solution which, if it exists at all, exists piecemeal among many minds, or lies potentially in the depths of the collective subconsciousness of the faithful at large. Let it be granted, for argument's sake, that things are quite as bad as you say, and that the intellectual defence of Catholicism breaks down on every side as far as you are concerned ; or that at least your mental confusion is so hope less that you dare not commit yourself to any affirmation one way or the other — does it straightway follow you should separate your self from the communion of the Church ? Yes, if theological "intellectualism" be right; if faith mean mental assent to a system of con ceptions of the understanding ; if Catholicism be primarily a theology or at most a system of practical observances regulated by that theology. No, if Catholicism be primarily a life, and the Church a spiritual organism in whose life we 52 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER participate, and if theology be but an attempt of that life to formulate and understand itself — an attempt which may fail wholly or in part without affecting the value and reality of the said life.4 We are familiar now with the distinction between the conscious and the subconscious in the individual ; still more between a man's diag nosis of himself and what he really is, unknown to himself; between the sum-total of memories and ideas, of deliberate aims, purposes, and intentions of which he is, or can freely make himself, conscious ; and that immeasurably vaster resultant of forgotten and unregistered experiences personal or ancestral, and of im pulses and tendencies determined by the same experiences, which constitute his unknown, un formulated self, compared with which his freely- fashioned, conscious, formulated self is as but the emergent point of a submerged mountain whose roots broaden out till they are merged with the bulk of the entire earth. Our active life as free, self-forming person alities, is necessarily limited by the character and capacities of this buried soul which is com mitted to our cultivation, as it were, an unknown A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 53 wilderness. In the measure that we come to understand more truly the nature of the soil and climate we shall reap more abundant re turns and shall be able to render the soil itself more fruitful. True, the husbandman works for the sake of the fruit, and not for the sake of work ; whereas our active and spiritual (as opposed to our passive and psychic) life is an end in itself, and the psychic produce is but subordinate and secondary. It is the struggle, the thought, the labour, the conflict with the stubborn soil, with the weeds and briers, with the caprices of climate, that constitute our truest personality ; what we make ourselves actively, not what we find ourselves passively ; what we would be, not what we are. But how often do we diagnose ourselves partly or wholly amiss I How little do we understand of our deepest beliefs and feelings ; of our strengths and weaknesses ; of our capacities and in capacities for good or for evil ! How often are we sufprised and thrown out in our calculations by "up-rushes," as they are called, of passions or convictions or irresistible determinations — by " possessions " as it were of alien spirits counter to our conscious voluntary self — and 54 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER forced perhaps to reconstruct our whole theory of ourselves from the foundations, to readjust the whole system of our aims and purposes — like a physician suddenly aware that he has radically misjudged the case before him 1 Well, if this be hardly questionable as psy chology of the individual, it is far more evident by way of analogy when we deal with states and societies and communities. There, obviously, a good representative government is supposed to gauge and formulate the mind and will and sentiments of the governed masses, and to bring them to consciousness. So far as it does so correctly, it is instrumental in the civilizing and improvement of those masses ; in bring ing them into spontaneous sympathy with the laws of their growth and development. But how seldom is this realized ! and how often is revolution the only possible remedy of bad government based on total miscalculation of the disruptive forces — the ideas, sentiments, and tendencies — buried in the collective sub consciousness ! Can we be very far wrong in applying all this to the Christian Society, to the Catholic Church?5 Must we not there too distinguish A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 55 between the collective subconsciousness of the " People of God " and the consciously formu lated mind and will of the governing section of the Church ? May not our faith in the latter be at times weak or nil, and yet our faith in the former strong and invincible?6 We know that the psychic subconscious self of the individual is a very wilderness of conflict ing elements, good and evil, false and true ; and that it is the task and very life of the free, conscious spiritual self to develop the better, to repress the worse ; and that the resultant owes its individuality not wholly to the freedom of our choice, but also to the limits and character of its subject-matter (i.e. of the psychic, passive, subconscious self). It is idle to deny that some have a happier temperament, a less thorny and stubborn soil to deal with, than others ; that their spontaneous uncultivated judgments and tendencies are more generally on the side of reason and right. If it is true that, in some degree, the free spiritual self succeeds in modifying and improving the psychic self, in training it, so to say, to a more willing and effectual serviceableness ; it is also true that the psychic self, in its own order, by its passive 56 A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER resistances or its propensions, can obstruct or further the development of the free self, can present to it temptations or "graces," vicious or virtuous inclinations. There is a practical limit to what a man can make out of himself; there are good or evil propensities which he may overcome for a time, but which will assert themselves again and again as long as he lives. Hence we feel sure of some men that though they may go wrong for a time they will come right again ; and of others, that though they keep right for a time yet they will fall again sooner or later. In the one case we have faith in the man ; in the other we have not. Analo gously, it seems to me that a man might have great faith in the Church, in the people of God, in the unformulated ideas, sentiments and tendencies at work in the great body of the faithful, and constituting the Christian and Catholic "Spirit"; and yet regard the Church's consciously formulated ideas and intentions about herself as more or less untrue to her deepest nature ; that he might refuse to believe her own account of herself as against his in stinctive conviction of her true character ; that he might say to her : Nescitis cujus spiritus A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER 57 estis — "You know not your own essential spirit." (Cf. Note 6.) Hence it seems to me that unless a man iden tifies Catholicism with the formulated ideas and intentions of those in whom at the present mo ment the spirit of the whole body of the faithful strives to arrive at some degree of self-conscious ness or self-understanding, his quarrel with the expression is no reason per se for quarrelling with the thing expressed — any more than his dissatisfaction with the political theory and ac tion of his country's representatives would be a reason for denying his nationality. "But who," you will ask, "is to say what Catholicism is if not the official representatives of this Society? if not her Popes, Councils, Bishops, theologi ans?" No one, officially or with authority; but when authority is dumb or stultifies itself, pri vate conviction resumes its previous rights and liberties. It sent us to authority in the first instance not by a suicidal self-contradictory act; bu