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THE KEY

THE WORLD'S PROGRESS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
A MANUAL OF
POLITICAL ECONOMY.
(Stonyhurst Philosophical Series.)
Crown 8vo, 7s. 6d.

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.,
LONDON, NEW YORK, AND BOMBAY.

THE KEY

TO

THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
BEINO
AN ESSAY ON HISTORICAL LOGIC

BY
CHARLES STANTON DEVAS
M.A. Oxon.
LATE EXAMINER IN POLITICAL ECONOMY AT
THE KOYAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND

— Archytas

NEW IMPRESSION

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PREFACE.
The purpose and method of this volume, as an
introduction to historical study, are explained
sufficiently in the First Part ; let this preface
rather serve me to make profession of following
as my guide and teacher the Great Master of the
nineteenth century, John Henry Newman ; who,
looking before and after, foresaw the intellectual
problems of the future, and whose work, though
part was concerned with the transient contro
versies and peculiar opinions of his own time,
was mainly concerned with the lasting needs and
chronic infirmities of our nature — Newman, who
by some even now is not yet understood, and for
many years in time past was covered by a cloud
of misunderstanding, the inevitable penalty of in
tellectual pre-eminence.
To be linked even in some slight way to so
great a name is not an unworthy ambition ; or to
join, however imperfectly, in the task of sifting
and sorting his work ; leaving aside those portions

vi PREFACE
that the fashions of controversy or the progress of
historical study have rendered obsolete ; making-
more accessible those portions that are for all
time ; and in this particular volume giving to the
logic and history of Newman an economic or
sociological setting.
It may be taken for granted that like any others
in England who would aim at fruitful Apologetics,
I owe much to the writings of Father George
Tyrrell and Mr. Wilfrid Ward, and have attempted
to utilise the stores of permanent apologetic value
to be found scattered in the works of Faber. The
names also of two economists, Professor W. J.
Ashley and Dr. William Cunningham, ought here
to find a place, because they have taught the
present generation the great lesson that economic
science without history is idle, indeed almost
meaningless. It only remains for me to thank those who have
given me their personal help in this work, and to
join their names, among my roll of benefactors, to
all who in my own time have laboured on the
walls of Sion, and in an age of grievous discord
have been set for my guidance and consolation.
November, 1905.

CONTENTS. PART I.
THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION.
SECTION PAGE
i. Efforts to reach a philosophy of history  i
2. Need of a principle of selection  4
3. Meanings of civilisation, culture and progress .... 7
4. Difficulties in the comparison of times and places ... 13
5. Schedule for making a specific comparison .... 16
6. Balance of loss and gain  18
7. Apparent paradox on progress  21
8. The manifold facts of retrogression  26
g. Pantheism, Materialism and Theism as solutions of the world
problem  30
10. Difficulties of Theism  34
11. Christianity's claim to solve the difficulties of Theism , . 38
12. Distinction of Fore-Christians, Jews, Christians and After-
Christians  42
13. The After-Christian Moslems  44
14. The After-Christians of France  51
15. Other examples  55
16. The Fore-Christians  58
17. Claim of the Catholic Church to solve the difficulties of
Christianity  62
18. Analogous difficulties in non-theological matters ... 66
ig. Intellectual and moral reasons for the obscurity of God . 68
20. Application of this obscurity to the Church .... 72
vii

viii CONTENTS

PART II.

THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY.
SECTION FAOE
21. Ten antinomies of the Christian Church ..... 75

CHAPTER I.
THE CHURCH AND CULTURE.
22. Ground of the reproaches of ignorance and illiteracy . . 77
23. The foundations of aestheticism  82
24. The Church and all forms of art  86
25. Philosophic culture and the Church  8g
26. Her golden mean in philosophy  g3
27. Her inevitable conflict with each time-spirit . . • • 93

CHAPTER II.
THE CHURCH AND PROSPERITY.
28. Seeming opposition to material civilisation . ... 98
29. Yet its support — by checking reckless greed .... 101
30. By asserting the dignity of duty and labour .... 103
31. By upholding family life  , , 107
CHAPTER III.
CHRISTIAN MORALITY.

32. The preaching of abjection and asceticism
33. Hostility of the world and its doctrine of pleasure .
34. This pleasure not for the masses, but for the few only
33. Disillusion even for these .....
36. Joyfulness of Christianity 

no"3
116119121

CONTENTS

ix

CHAPTER IV.
THE CHURCH AND THE STATE.

SECTION
37. Nationalism ever a trouble to Christianity
38. But regulated not ignored by the Church
39. Church autonomy opposed to the State .
40. Yet the Church the prop of the State .
41. Making obedience and government easy .

PAGE 124 126 129132 135

CHAPTER V.
THE SOCIAL QUESTION.
42. Meaning of diversity of wealth and service
43. Recognition of slavery by Christian Church
44. Yet the Church the very soul of emancipation
45. Modern labour problems and socialism
46. Justice but not equality upheld . .
47. Social reform combined with moral

139
H3 146
150 i55
157

CHAPTER VI.

SCANDALS AND SANCTITY.
48. Fact of scandals  161
49. Extreme parties  163
50. Scandals foretold and explained  167
51. The ordinary and the heroic observance of the Christian law , 172
52. Examples of Christian family life  173
53. The saints and their importance ...... 178
54. Historical examples ........ 181
55. The consensus of experts  186

X

Contents

CHAPTER VII.
LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE.

SECTION PAOE
56. The meaning and supremacy of conscience .... i8g
57. The meaning of freedom and its harmony with law . . . 191
58. Popular character of ecclesiastical intervention . . . 196
59. Historical on religious intolerance  199
60. The " modern " presumption and its distortion of history . . 202
61. Weakness of the theory of toleration  207
62. Change of circumstances but not of principles for the Church . 210

CHAPTER VIII.
HERETICS AND SCHISMATICS.
63. Horror of disunion in the Early Church  215
64. Facts of heresy and schism  218
65. Origins and pathology ........ 221
66. Via media in caricature  226
67. Invisible membership of the Church, and Christian family life
of dissidents  229
68. Providential functions of heresy and schism .... 232

CHAPTER IX.
DEVELOPMENT.

6g. Uprising of the historical spirit . .
70. Growth of the theory of development
71. Explanation of the theory of development
72. Changes in discipline and devotion .
73. Caricatures of development . . .
74. Importance of the theory , ,

235238242 246247 251

CONTENTS xi

CHAPTER X.
DEFEAT AND VICTORY.
SECTION pA0E
75. Apparent failure of the Church  254
76. Historical examples  256
77. Calamities the prelude to victory  261
78. Perennial calumny  263
79. The witness of the children  266
80. The need of an explanation  26g

CHAPTER XI.
THE EXPLANATION OF THE MIRACULOUS.
81. Denial of the possibility of the miraculous .... 272
82. Denial of the fact of the miraculous  275
83. Catholic doctrine of the supernatural taken as an hypothesis . 278
84. Found alone to explain all the observed facts (as magic and
possession)  282
85. Character of Catholic miracles  285
86. Specific examples of miracles ....... 28g
87. The miraculous in its fitting place  296
EPILOGUE.
88. Lux inter umbras et imagines  301
Index , . . , ,  307

PART I.
THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION.
Section I.
Many writers have sought in recent years and
many still seek a meaning in man's history, an
explanation of the course of society, a forecast of its
future. Such names as the growth of civilisation,
the philosophy of history, the science of sociology,
social dynamics or social evolution are some of those
chosen to express a science, as yet desired rather
than attained, which is to solve the riddle of the
universe. The keenness of the desire is shown by
the eager welcome of one theory of evolution after
another, though as yet their apparent deficiency is
their common failure to agree with the detailed
facts of history.1 All the while the need of a valid
1 For example, how reconcile Hegel's philosophy of history with
the case of Chinese civilisation ; Comte's three stages with Indian
history; Buckle's theory of the subordination of man to his physi
cal surroundings with Egyptian history or with a comparative view
of Greek and Phcenician colonisation ; how reconcile the Dar-
I

2 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
theory grows daily greater. The very progress
in historical research during the last twenty-five
years has rendered specialisation a necessity both
for teachers and students ; only a few years with
in a restricted area can be effectively portrayed
by any one man ; and without some general theory
to be our guiding star, we must lose our way and
cannot reach a fit estimate even of the narrow time
and place which are the special object of our study.
We must have first a framework into which our
portion may be fitted, a totality of which it may be
reckoned a part.
But who will provide a guiding principle in
harmony with history and statistics? Who can
find order among materials so complicated and
obscure? Who can hope to succeed where so
many have failed, and to be borne safely through
this rugged pass already white with the bones of
a thousand dead theories ? If we read Dr. Flint's
History of the Philosophy of History? we may
winian theory of Marx and his followers on the economic inter
pretation of history, even in the cautious re-statement by Prof.
Seligman, with the wide-spread phenomenon of decay and de
generation ; how reconcile Mr. Kidd's brilliant theories with the
details of the Greek Orphic religion, or with the social history of
Rome, or with recent statistics of population ?
1 This work, published in Edinburgh in 1893, is practically the
second edition of his Philosophy of History in Europe, published in
1874 ; but the earlier volume must still be consulted for the
author's account of German theories from Leibnitz and Lessing

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 3
well be startled at the inefficiency of theory after
theory displayed in that gallery of ghosts ; and
fresh years have added to the fruitless theories.
Yet in spite of these examples, and the warnings
of the late Dr. Henry Sidgwick,1 and the despair
of Prof. Graham,2 the author has this of encourage
ment, that when all is ready it needs but a poor
instrument to give the last feeble stroke ; that the
latest comer has by his very late coming an ad
vantage ; that the recent progress of science,
to Lotze and Hermann. Some additional criticisms are given by
Dr. Flint in his History of Classifications of the Sciences, 1904.
1 Some attempts at sociology, weighed in his delicate balance
and found wanting, are described in his presidential address of
1885 to the British Association, and in The National Review of
1894, both reprinted as Papers vii. and ix. in the posthumous
volume, Essays and Addresses, 1904. He deals with the sociological
theories of Comte, Herbert Spencer, Schaffle, Pearson and Mr.
Kidd, notes the lack of continuity of teaching, of consensus of
experts, and of effectual prevision in the attempted science ; and
shows how each writer has started de novo, built his own founda
tions, and displayed in relation to the others a portentous dis
agreement. In the latest address (1899), reprinted in this
collection as Paper xi., Sidgwick seems more ready to allow the
existence of sociology, having before him the facts that professorial
chairs of sociology can be found in America as well as sociological
handbooks for students ; still he brings no fresh evidence to alter
his previous and reasoned conclusion that such a science was not
yet constructed, only adumbrated. We may be confirmed in this
caution by the singular variety and obscurity of opinion among
the Sociological Papers recently published for the Sociological
Society (Macmillan & Co., 1905).
2 English Political Philosophy from Hobbes to Maine, London, 1899,
p. 302, where he abandons in despair all attempts at a sociology.
1 *

4 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
physical and historical, has redoubled this ad
vantage ; that he is not constructing a sociology
or science of history but offering a key to unlock
the materials of construction. Section II.
Perhaps, indeed, it may be asked what is the
need after all of any historical theory? Cannot
we suffer historians without prejudgment to pursue
their narrative in peace, and the facts to speak for
themselves? But facts themselves are dumb, and
a historian is no purveyor of an indiscriminate
collection of facts, is no unscientific chronicler,
but precisely one whose narrative is the fruit of a
process of reasoning. For out of the vast mass of
recorded facts, a confused and unintelligible heap,
he must select what is pertinent, relevant, im
portant, characteristic. Even as a skilled lawyer
extracts from a mass of evidence what is pertinent
to the question at issue, so the historian must pass
his materials through a series of sieves of increas
ing fineness before they are ready for history ; he
must know what special facts are to be searched
for, must grasp what is worth remembering, dis
cern amid a crowd of trifles the leading features
of the society of which he writes, show order and
drift amid the maze of facts, and among those that

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 5
deserve any mention determine their proper place
and relative importance.
But to do this he must have something previous
to his observation ; some previously established
general propositions, some theoretical anticipa
tions, some criterion to judge what is relevant
or irrelevant, what is characteristic or merely ex
ceptional, what is of vital or little importance ; and
any simple inductive process is triply confused in
the case of historical science by the multiplicity
of causes, by their complicated interaction, by the
frequent loss certain or suspected of many pertinent
facts that have dropped from the historical record.1
And the example of serious historians shows that
it is no mere accumulation of facts taken at ran
dom, nor a blind induction which guides them
and leads them to such contradictory results, but
rather for each historian his own implicit or explicit
assumptions, tacit understandings, an impalpable
notion of reasonableness, critical feeling, personal
conceptions and historical tact, that determine his
choice of facts and the issue of his argument.
1 Among English writers Cornewall Lewis, Walter Bagehot,
Herbert Spencer (in his Study of Sociology), and above all Mr.
Keynes (Scope and Method of Political Economy, chap. vi. and note
B to chap, ix.) and Cardinal Newman (Grammar of Assent, chap, ix.,
§ 3, and Idea of a University, especially Discourses iv. and vi.) have
thrown light on this — the historical — department of logic.

6 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
A theory therefore is needed beforehand : no
gazing at facts will itself provide one. Before we
enter the labyrinth we must have a clue, and a
lamp before we enter the forest of obscurity.
Antecedent to any history we need a philosophy
of history for the selection, the adjustment, the ap
preciation, the limitation of the manifold material.
Unity is before and above all number ; the whole
must precede the parts ; and " in order to have
possession of truth at all we must have the whole
truth," and if we have not a true view we must
make for ourselves a false one, as every day can
be seen in the extravagances of undisciplined talent
and the narrowness of complacent ignorance. As
of knowledge in general, so of historical knowledge
in particular, there must be some architectonic
science that is the arbiter of the claims and place
of the manifold specialists. If history is not to be
aimless and unprofitable, we must in some way
map out the Universe, know the relative disposi
tion of things, and see in history a various and
complicated drama with interacting parts and a
grand significance. "You must be above your
knowledge, not under it, or it will oppress you ;
and the more you have of it the greater will be
the load." Moreover, to history as to all know
ledge applies the principle that nearly every

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 7
statement may be in a sense true and yet may be
perverted and made false because it is not the
whole truth ; and that what is true under one
aspect only, is therefore altogether insufficient.
The political exhortation to think imperially can
be transferred with greater precision and certainty
to the scientific field. A high protecting power,
a sovereign science maps out the territory of each
subordinate science, " acts as umpire between
truth and truth, and assigns to all their due order
of precedence ". If, then, we are not to confess our
failure and idly acquiesce in a barren scepticism,
we need an imperial theory of history that shall
serve as a fruitful hypothesis, and that the
severest test of ascertained fact shall not be able
to dissolve. Section III.
To make our search easier we must determine,
at least for these pages, the meaning of the words
progress, civilisation, and culture, that are in all
mens' mouths and block the way with their
obscurity. Civilisation is most conveniently described as
the condition of a large group of men displaying
the following seven characteristics : —
First, the possession of a city worthy of the
name ; not the extended villages of the Germans

8 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
described by Tacitus or of the Gauls till a short
time before the Roman Conquest. Secondly,
some degree of political order and power ; not a
clan system like that of the Scotch Highlanders
described in Waverley and Rob Roy. Thirdly,
some proficiency in the industrial arts, in agri
culture, manufactures, mining, building, and trans
port ; not the rude agriculture of the Kaffirs in
Mashonaland, the negroes in Nigeria or the
aboriginal tribes in the forests of Central India.
Fourthly, some proficiency in the fine arts, in
architecture, sculpture, painting and music ; not
the simple decorations of the royal palaces in
Dahomey or Ashanti or the Celtic ornamentation
in pre-Roman Britain. Fifthly, some knowledge
of philosophy, history and physical science, above
the standard of the peasant commonwealth of the
fifteenth century Swiss. Sixthly, a written litera
ture ; not the unwritten songs of the heroic age
of poetry, such as the old Greek or Norse or
Celtic epics. Seventhly, a small portion of the
people differentiated as an upper class with con
siderable wealth and leisure ; not the simple equality
of Red Indian tribes, or the scanty difference of
social position among pastoral peoples without
settled abodes or accumulation of wealth.
Most of these characteristics of civilisation allow

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION a
of variation ; and one country may be more civilised
than another, because either its cities are more
numerous or its means of communication and pro
duction more effective, or its art and literature
more splendid, or its science more profound.
Again, these characteristics are clearly divisible
into material and intellectual ; the special word
culture, though sometimes used for civilisation in
general, is oftener used for intellectual as distinct
from material civilisation, and is confined to pro
ficiency in the fine arts, in literature, in historical
and physical science.
Hence in examining two societies, if the first is
more wealthy and orderly than the second, with
more cities and better communications, it is the
more civilised of the two materially. If the
second can show better works of art, literature,
music, pure science and learning, it is the more
civilised of the two intellectually or more cultured.
But neither society can be set down absolutely as
more civilised than the other or less civilised.
Each excels in certain characteristics of civilisa
tion, and is deficient in others.
And civilisation, if we take this view of it, is
not to be measured by religion, morality or
general happiness. No doubt the word can be
stretched so as to include them ; but becomes

io KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
valueless by the inclusion, and we should be in
volved in the fruitless paradox that the Romans
in the height of their civilisation were in some
most important aspects less civilised than the
illiterate barbarians of the North. Whereas the
fruitful comparison is rather that of the ideals and
religion among barbarians, such as the Scythians
of the time of Darius or the Norsemen of the
tenth century, with the ideals and religion among
civilised nations, such as the Carthaginians in the
fourth century before Christ, or the Saracens of
the Bagdad Caliphate in the height of their culture
some twelve hundred years later. In like manner
it is fruitful to compare the respective vices and
virtues, the respective distress and contentment of
civilised and uncivilised societies, rather than to
place virtue and contentment among the charac
teristics of civilisation, and by this ill use of words
to throw history into confusion. It is well then
to follow St. Augustine, who was an observant
witness of the society around him, and marked off
precisely its elaborate civilisation from its moral
conditions. He distinguishes seven grades of the
human soul, the first of which (animatio) we share
with plants, the second (sensus) with animals, but
the third (ars or civilisation) is man's own.
Then, after describing in glowing colours the

THE "COURSE OF CIVILISATION u
political and social structure of the Roman Em
pire, the orderly government, the agricultural and
industrial arts, the fine arts and architecture, the
libraries and schools, the wonders of music, of
literature, of the mathematical and historical
sciences, he marks how all this magnificent abund
ance is the common possession of the souls that
are good and of the souls that are evil.1 And he
tells us in a later work how all the wonderful in
ventions of which the world is full, and whereby
this mortal life is adorned, are the work of the
human mind, not the work of grace or the way
whereby immortal life is reached.2 Nor is it
without significance that of the seven steps upward
attainable by man, civilisation is only the third,
and four remain above it, so much greater and
higher than the sphere of the physical and intel
lectual is the sphere of the moral and the spiritual.
The word progress, no less than civilisation,
requires to be used with precision, and precisely
in these pages is used to express an increase in
the quantity or quality of some good.3 Obviously
lDe quantitate animae, cap. xxxiii., sect, lxxii., Migne, i., 1074.
2De civitate Dei, 1. 22, cap. xxiv.
3 It seems best to avoid the negative use of the term seen in
such phrases as the progress of disease, of destruction, or of
wickedness. Rather these are cases of retrogression in health
in wealth, in virtue.

12 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
the narrower the good the greater the precision ;
to speak, for example, of the progress in the
science of geology among specialists during the
last twenty-five years rather than of the pro
gress of the knowledge of geology among the
English people ; or to speak of the progress of
Danish agriculture during this period rather than
of the progress of European agriculture. Hence
although we can apply the word progress to civil
isation as a whole, we can seldom say more than
whcft is vague or uncertain. If we distinguish
material from intellectual civilisation we can make
our statements more precise ; for example, that the
Roman Empire of the second century after Christ
showed in material civilisation a great advance
over the first century before Christ, but in intel
lectual civilisation a decline ; or that Spain in the
first half of the seventeenth century compared to
the second half of the fifteenth century displayed
great progress intellectually (with her five stars in
Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Velasquez, Murillo and
Calderon), but retrogression materially. But if in
either of these two instances we sought to deter
mine whether in civilisation as a whole there had
been retrogression or progress, we should be met
by the difficulty of having no common measure
for comparing Roman roads with the poems of

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 13
Virgil or for comparing a flourishing woollen
manufacture with the pictures of Velasquez.
Section IV.
Even if we look only to the material civilisation
of different times and places the difficulties of com
parison are very great. For though we seem to
have in money a common measure and an easy
means of expressing the sum of external and
material goods, we find our measure continually
failing us. First, the purchasing power of gold
or silver is ever varying according to time and
place, and though a diligent calculation can make
allowance for these variations in the wholesale
prices of free and open markets,1 the difficulty of
making any such allowance is increased a hundred
fold in the case of the vast majority of purchases,
namely, the retail prices actually paid day after
day and varying immensely according to the
locality, the social standing, and the respective
combination of buyers and sellers. Secondly,
wherever a large proportion of material goods are
never bought or sold, our money measure fails
us ; for example, much of the produce of peasant
cultivators for their own domestic consumption,
1 Reckoning appreciation or depreciation of gold or of silver
and expressing it by " index numbers ".

14 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
the free waters of navigable rivers, the free fuel,
building material and game in a land mostly
covered with forest, and the abundance of open
ground for pasture and recreation in a thinly
peopled country. Thirdly, the variety of human
necessities makes elusive a merely monetary
measurement of material civilisation ; for a people
cannot be called more civilised (materially) because
a cold, damp climate requires costly provision of
fuel and clothing, more elaborate houses, even
more abundant food than in Sicily or Andalusia.
Fourthly, no money measure will enable us to
explain the paradox that the amount of wealth in
a given country at a given time is no absolute
quantity but depends considerably on the manner
of its distribution among the inhabitants. For as
the price of any object expresses its value, and its
value depends largely on its utility, and its utility
varies with the man who uses it, and even to him
is not the same if he is already provided with the
same sort in abundance ; it follows that we must
first tell who has the use and enjoyment of a
country's wealth, how it is shared among the
inhabitants and used in each household, before
we can reckon its amount.1
1 Some of these difficulties are well faced in Sidgwick's Political
Economy, book i., chap, iii., and Fr. G. Tyrrell justly observes

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 15
But difficulties are either an incentive to over
come them, or a sign that we have strayed from
the high road and taken a by-path. And these
difficulties in making a monetary and mathematical
calculation of the conditions of societies, are meant
to show that we gain little or nothing by isolating
wealth from other features of society, our attempted
precision being baffled on our finding that the
very weajth of which we have taken stock is being
hourly transmuted by intellectual and moral forces.
Hence, while it is needful to distinguish material
civilisation from intellectual, and both kinds of
civilisation from the conditions of morality and
religion, this is to clear our abstract thought, not
to sunder what in the concrete is inseparable. It
is the real state of different societies, physical, in
tellectual and moral, that we need to know, not
vague generalities but a detailed specification, in
the double form of the lower statistics that can be
expressed in figures and the higher statistics that
transcend numeration.1
how poverty to a great extent is relative, and therefore that the
increase of a country's wealth will not lessen poverty, only alter
the standard ; leaving the amount of discontent and suffering
unchanged (Hard Sayings, p. 460).
1 A presentation of these two kinds of statistics applied to different
times and places, is the very foundation of history, and the trac
ing of causes the very essence of scientific history; yet so hard
to reach that Prof. Ashley has declared history (he means the
science of social facts sometimes called sociology) to be the most

16 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Section V.
As a rough provisional specification of the items
of inquiry or schedule of social comparison, let us,
having before us a particular area and particular
time make our inquiry somewhat as follows : On
the natural resources of the country, the climate,
soil, rivers, mountains, and minerals, and the
number and racial characteristics of the inhabit
ants ; then on how they are making use of their
patrimony, their agriculture, manufactures, mines,
fisheries, shipping and commerce and means of
communication ; and how far in their use there
has been waste, damage or destruction, in particular
how far they have yielded to that peculiar form of
human destructiveness, the wasting of the forests,
whereby much of the globe in subtropical lati
tudes has been rendered a desert, and many of
the fairest mountains and valleys irretrievably
damaged. Again, we must assess the damage by
difficult of sciences (Preface to the translation of Fustel de
Coulanges, Origin of Property in Land.) This very difficulty
removes another : how it is possible that such totally different
pictures are presented to us of such countries and peoples open
to our present observation, facts that seem to stare us in the face,
such, e.g., as the moral, intellectual and material conditions of the
Russians or the Boers or the Germans. Only experts can profit
ably examine into concrete facts (as Mr. Rowntree at York) ; to
convert the concrete into the abstract and to grasp the true issue
of the facts, requires a considerable outfit of logic and philosophy.

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION i;
the waste of sewage, by the pollution of the air
with fumes and smoke, by the pollution of the
rivers with all kinds of refuse, by the destruction
of natural beauty. We must inquire also in each
particular industry the character and surroundings
of daily work, the organisation of industry, the
leisure at the disposal of different classes. Then
turning from the side of production to that of
consumption we must take stock of the quantity
and quality of the habitual food, clothing, dwell
ings, fuel and furniture of all classes of the people,
the proportion of urban to rural population, the
medical and surgical provision, the recreations of
young and old, of high and low. We must further
be told the conditions of ownership, the actual
distribution of property, and the political organisa
tion, especially under the four heads of the security
of life and property, of the certainty, speed and
cheapness of legal procedure, of the weight of taxa
tion compared with taxable capacity, and fourthly
of the vigour of efficiency of local government
Then we must scrutinise the conditions of culture
whether confined to a few or spread among many,
the provision of elementary, secondary and higher
schools, and the fruits of such provision seen in
the actual literature read, the music and fine art
actually enjoyed, the habitual knowledge by the

18 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
inhabitants of the history and natural history of
their native land. Then, having examined the in
tellectual civilisation, we should pass on to the most
difficult part, but also to the crown, of our inquiry,
on which true happiness and popular welfare
depend, namely, the moral and religious condition
of the people, their views of life and death, the
habitual relation of husband and wife, parent and
child, brother and sister, the supreme statistics of
the proportion of homes within whose walls we
can find a sanctuary of innocence and peace.1
Section VI.
With such a schedule of comparison in their
hands, or rather with one more elaborate and
precise, each item duly marked with number or
letter, the students of history, if equipped with
sound first principles and sober judgment, might
hope to make many profitable comparisons. And
one of the first lessons to learn would be the com
plication of their task, the perplexing balance
of advantage and disadvantage between different
countries, the perplexing balance of loss and gain
between different periods, so that frequently they
would have to be content with the honest if
1Some of the foregoing is from the author's paper read in
December, 1899, before the Manchester Statistical Society.

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 19
modest conclusion that matters were in some
aspects better and in others worse. Take, for
example, the Egyptian statue of an officer of
high rank about B.C. 1300, seated beside his wife
or sister, to be seen in the Egyptian gallery of
the British Museum ; inquire from Egyptologists
the probable history of that man, his means of
income, his house and garden, his family and
servants, his education, the art and literature at
his disposal, his knowledge and practice of the
moral law and religious teaching ; compare him
in all these matters with a Hindu gentleman of
high birth and office at the court of some native
state in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Here would be comparison of different places
at different times.
Take again England (proper) and the Grand
Duchy of Tuscany shortly before the middle of the
nineteenth century : the industrial energy and
commercial activity of the one state, the centre of
a great empire and the world's commerce, vigorous
in literature ; and compare this with the political
feebleness, commercial insignificance, and literary
ineptitude of Tuscany ; and also per contra how
England's working population in field, mine, factory
and ship (it was in the days before efficient Factory
and Merchant Shipping Acts or efficient Trade

20 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Unions) were mostly sunk in material misery and
often in moral degradation, whereas in Tuscany the
mass of the people enjoyed material well-being and
lived the idyllic life that any one can read in the
famous chapter on metayers in Mill's Political
Economy. Here would be a comparison of different places
at the same time.
Take again the district now called the county
of London at the deaths of Edward I., George II.,
and Queen Victoria ; at the second time of ob
servation much greater than at the first in popula
tion, a far greater centre of commerce and industry ;
in material welfare the food, clothing and housing
of the mass of its inhabitants and bodily health
probably much the same or perhaps better ; in
beauty, though still a beautiful city in a beautiful
framework, yet lacking the woods and hunting
grounds of the earlier period ; sadly fallen more
over from the Gothic glories of the great Edward ;
and fallen still lower in its morality, the processions
of the multitudinous guilds, lay and religious,
changed sadly into the scenes of street life depicted
by Hogarth. Then the third point of observation
shows a total contrast to the other two, the growth
of numbers and wealth unparalleled and intoxicat
ing; vigorous commerce and manufactures; an

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 21
awe-inspiring imperial centre of world dominion ;
unparalleled improvement in public health ; but
per contra the beauty gone, the buildings blackened,
the sky daily clouded with a curtain of smoke, the
rich and poor districts sharply divided, and an
appalling aggregate of overcrowding and poverty
such as can be studied in the sober pages of Mr.
Charles Booth's Labour and Life in London.
Here would be a comparison of the same place
at different times. Section VII.
In all these comparisons one thing is clear, the
difficulty of making any accurate assessment of loss
and gain ; and if any readers would object, that
whatever may be the comparisons between the
ages and the places of the past, surely none can
deny the marvellous advance in modern times and
the great deeds of the nineteenth century, I would
refer him again to the unfailing schedule of com
parison and ask for particulars of place and time,
and entreat him to be something better in his youth
than a platform speaker on modern progress, to
become by reaction in his old age a laudator
temporis acti.
If we keep to the material sphere only, we must
indeed recognise to the full the wonderful increase

22 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
of human power due to steam, electricity, me
chanical invention, chemical discoveries, medical
science during the last 150 years, and the mar
vellous increase in the numbers of the human race.
But, then, when all is said, the solid fact remains
that those who enjoy a plenteous income are
comparatively as few as before, and the mighty
engines of advance seem to have laboured in vain.
Among the reasons for this paradox we may
here name the four that follow : — ¦
First, the very increase of numbers, without
which the technical progress would have been
impossible, is itself a cause which, if other things
remained the same, would have made the con
ditions of life harder. But then precisely the very
meaning of technical progress is that other things
do not remain the same ; and a general equilibrium
is reached by these forces of population and pro
gress acting on and neutralising each other.
Secondly, improved production is often accom
panied by a reckless waste of material resources,
such as injury to the soil by exhaustive agriculture,
destruction of forests (for example, to supply
railway sleepers in the United States and British
India), exhaustion of coal and minerals, extermina
tion of useful animals (for example bisons and seals),
destruction of river fish by the pollution of waters,

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 23
Thirdly, in place of former articles of general con
sumption the frequent introduction of new articles
apparently cheap but in reality dear — inferior cloth
ing, inferior furniture, inferior food and drink,
produced no longer at home or locally and adapted
to local consumption, but produced wholesale in
concentrated factories and tending to perpetuate
the mischief by damaging the capacities, because
lessening the sphere, of the ancient housewife.
Fourthly, the very technical triumphs of the
nineteenth century have made the means of com
munication cheap and easy, and have thereby
removed the old difficulty of feeding large cities,
but at the same time have thereby removed
the main counterpoise to the attractive forces
of town industry and town life ; the very in
ventions thus becoming the prime occasion of
one of the chief troubles of our times known
as urban congestion. Low quarters and over
crowding and low life in great cities are indeed
ancient evils ; what is new is not so much the
quality as the quantity of the mischief, the
enormous proportion of national life now absorbed
in town life, the extent rather than the acuteness
of the "house famine," the tens of millions to
whom the payment of " the rent " is the absorbing
preoccupation, and for whom the manifold gifts

24 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
of the good fairy Progress have been turned to
ashes by the malign breath of her twin sister
Urban Congestion.
Loss and gain are thus intermingled and en
tangled ; it needs a skilful hand to disentangle
them. The figures are in ever varying confusion
and it needs more than a common actuary to
frame a true balance sheet. Even if we use the
mere calculus of pleasure and pain, it may be
questioned whether in the passage from a rude
to a civilised life, and from lesser to greater civil
isation, the new joys brought to most men are
not more than cancelled by the attendant sorrows.1
And if we use an intellectual calculus we have to
face the fact that progress among the few may be
balanced by retrogression among the many. So
in Greece the heroic age, with comparative intel
lectual equality of man and man, gave place to a
society differentiated into a cultured literary
philosophical few (the Kakol Kayadol), and on the
other side a double group of uncultivated slaves
and of free citizens, who, in the words of the
German historian Professor Beloch, understood as
little of the Greek poets " as our (German) people
do of Schiller and Goethe ". 2
1 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 462.
a Grieschische Geschichte, 1893, v°l- i-> chap. xvii.

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 25
So in Rome the brilliant society made familiar
to us by the letters of Cicero was bought at the
price of a degraded mob of slaves and citizens,
instead of the simple life of early Roman civilisa
tion, when client and patron were linked by a
religious bond, when no gulf separated the slaves
from the masters, who were almost their equal in
number, and when all partook of the songs, the
dances, and the simple pleasures of rural life — a
life of which the survival in the remote, half-
deserted country villages still delighted the nobler
hearts, or soothed the jaded votaries of pleasure,
in the later times of civilisation.
So in England of to-day the culture of the
cultivated is held very high, and far above that
of the mandarin in China. But if we take the
lower four-fifths of the inhabitants and compare
them with the lower four-fifths of the province of
Shantung, about an equal population, the Chinese
would appear to many the more intellectually
civilised of the two. For the comparison would
turn on the actual literature read, the manners
and courtesies of daily life, the practical knowledge
in the minds of the rural workmen and farmers,
the prevalent amusements and particularly, as a
mirror of life, the theatrical representations, the
music hall entertainments or nightly festival of

26 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
the western people compared with the historical
drama still the delight of the eastern.1
So again on many sides we meet the sorrowing
complaint that the poetry and beauty of rural life,
the folklore and the peasant songs 2 of the British
Isles and all Europe are perishing, like the old
picturesque costumes and the old rural sports and
pastimes, before an iron uniformity of town-made
speech, town-made dress, and town-made manners.
Section VIII.
Moreover, the history of the world tells the tale
of the fall of nations as well as their rise ; and we
must face the fact of retrogression as well as the
fact of progress. The great ruins in Java, Cam
bodia, Mexico, Guatemala, Southern Arabia ; the
thousands of miles of stone wall terraces for ir-
1 The love of the theatre permeates all classes of Chinese. The
poor are admitted free to the pit ; the plays almost entirely re
present events of Chinese history, previous to those under the
present reigning dynasty, and give an accurate and life-like repre
sentation. Like our own stage in Shakespeare's time the female
parts are taken by boys and there is no scenery ; but the skill of
the actors overcomes all deficiencies and holds the audience as if
bewitched. See the works of Davis, Gray, H. E. M. James, Wells,
Williams, and Archibald Little.
2 Ere they die away efforts have been made to preserve their
memory in such works as Ruskin's edition of Miss Alexander's
Road-Side Songs in Tuscany, or Mr. G. W. White's Songs of the
Spanish Sierras, or Mr. Douglas Hyde's Love Songs of Connaught.

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 27
rigated agriculture on the Inyanga plateau of
Southern Rhodesia ; the sculptures in many
islands of the Pacific — all are silent witnesses of
former civilisations. The deciphered testimony
of Babylonia and Egypt gives us in writing some
of the evidence of the height of civilisation at
tained long ago and then lost in the valleys of the
Euphrates, the Tigris and the Nile. Good judges
hold that Egyptian art, whatever may have been
the race of the artists, reached its perfection about
b.c 4000, and fresh discoveries are ever exciting
our fresh admiration ; while a diligent search into
the antiquities of Greece and Italy, and the excava
tions in Troas and Crete, have made known un
expected civilisation previous to the time we have
been accustomed to call classical. Even to this
day we cannot recover the Roman cement or the
range of musical expression attained by the Greeks.
And modern savages join with ancient monuments
in giving their testimony to the fact of retrogres
sion ; some visibly declining before our eyes,
others, notably the Fuegians, the Hottentots, the
Esquimaux and the black Australians, proving by
their elaborate language an anterior cultivated
condition from which they have fallen.
We learn indeed nothing positive on the con
dition of primitive man from the evidence of

28 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
retrogression, and here as elsewhere must take
heed lest we outrun our information. The Greeks
and Romans played with the theory of an original
degraded and brutal condition of mankind ; it was
not till the nineteeth century that this theory was
assumed as a scientific postulate to support a
biological theory, and by a strange disregard of
historical logic, existing savages, the lowest and
the worst, though chronologically as modern as
civilised races, were assumed to be scientifically
ancient, and to be the nearest representatives of
primitive humanity. But this assumption fails in
three ways. First, because the proved fact of
retrogression destroys any certainty that a given
state of degradation is the original, and not rather
a fallen state. Secondly, because the evidence as
far as ascertainable on the earliest known men,
shows them in their material and moral outfit to
be above the level of the lowest existing savages.
Thirdly, because the low moral state, supposed or
postulated, of primitive men, must have rendered
their mere survival hardly possible, still less any
advance. Instead, therefore, of so faulty an assumption
the more reasonable guess would be that men
started with some stock of material advantages, and
resembled in moral dispositions the better among

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 29
modern savages, like the Eastern Esquimaux,
the Veddahs of Ceylon, the natives of the Banda
Archipelago, the modest and hospitable Ainos of
Japan, or some of the American Indians or Central
African negroes, those namely who have been
uncontaminated by European or Arab intruders.1
But after all this, scientifically, is mere guess
work, and as far as historical evidence goes, human
evolution has no appearance of a great process of
advance, but of oscillation between progress and
retrogression, which may exist simultaneously in
the self-same society. Material civilisation may
be advancing while art and morality are declining ;
within the very domain of morality " progress in
benevolence may co-exist with regress in fortitude
and purity. . . . And in every realm, growth and
decay, life and death, seem so to intertwine and
oscillate, that it is very gratuitous to designate the
total process as being one or the other." 2
1 See the evidence collected by Dr. G. Gutberlet, Der Mensch,
and edit., 1903 ; and by Victor Cathrein, Moralphilosophie, 4th
edit., 1904, vol. i., pp. 571-618; ii., pp. 384-391.
"Tyrrell, Faith of the Millions, ii., pp. 338, 339. Compare the
passage in Newman's Development, chap, v., § vi. : " There is ever
a maximum in earthly excellence, and the operation of the same
causes which made things great, makes them small again. Weak
ness is but the resulting product of power. Events move in
cycles ; all things come round, the sun ariseth and goeth down,
and hasteth to his place where he arose. Flowers first bloom and

30 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Indeed the very progress of knowledge and the
cultivation of reason which at first act in favour of
material civilisation, seem to hold the germs of
decay : all institutions being exposed to argumen
tative reason, the belief in any sacredness fades
away, national traditions grow feeble, loyalty and
patriotism give place to self-interest, a great
empire becomes no more than a valuable com
mercial asset, heroic self-sacrifice in its defence,
especially among those to whom it brings no
palpable gain, appears foolishness, and civil dis
sension, the crrao-is of the Greeks, no longer able to
be averted by any compromise, material civilisa
tion becomes its own executioner.
The whence and the whither, the origin and
issue of man's course, remain unexplained ; all
things appear in a Heracleitan flux, all knowledge
in confusion and uncertainty, and all explanations,
one only being excepted, to end in disillusion.
Section IX.
Apart from views that are partial and halting there
remain three coherent systems that have striven
then fade ; fruit ripens and decays. The fermenting process unless
stopped at the due point corrupts the liquor which it has created.
The grace of spring, the richness of autumn are but for a moment,
and worldly moralists bid us Carpe diem, for we shall have no
second opportunity."

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 31
from time immemorial to give a consistent theory
of the world ; and the three are pantheism, ma
terialism, and theism. Either we ourselves and
all around us are merely the manifestation of one
and the same substance, one original force that
thinks in a man, seizes its prey in a wild beast,
unfolds bud and leaf in an oak, darts through the
clouds in lightning, strikes the cliffs in a storm-
wave ; or secondly we ourselves and all around us,
eaith and all the stars, are due to chance, the
product of whirling atoms, how arisen, how
ending, known to none ; or thirdly, all has arisen
from the fiat of an intelligent Creator, and all exists
in consequence with a definite purpose.1
These are the three, and among them we have
ultimately to make our choice ; for to be rid of
them all by professing permanent uncertainty is to
rest in agnosticism and to abandon the pursuit of
truth.2 The three systems indeed are not to
be put on a level, not simply co-ordinated, but
rather the first two to be bracketed against the
'Victor Cathrein, Moralphiksophie, vol. i., p. 81.
2 The divergence of view and confusion of terminology among
modern philosophers of English and German speech may seem to
complicate the issue and give plausibility to the existence of some
quartum quid, that cannot be resolved into materialism, pantheism,
or theism. But time is the test ; and when these soft deposits of
modern thoughts are hardened by pressure, their character as
one or other of the three varieties will be made manifest.

32 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
third. For the first two uphold a monistic con
ception of the universe, that is, they reduce All to
One, though pantheism would make all spiritual
and materialism make all material ; whereas theism
recognises the dualism of matter and spirit And
while pantheism and materialism agree in reject
ing the reality of a personal God creating and
directing the universe, Himself being distinct from
it, theism emphatically affirms this reality as a
fundamental truth, without which no science physi
cal or historical can have a sure foundation.
Thus the solutions of the riddle of the universe
seem to be simplified into two, the theistic and
antitheistic, in irreconcilable opposition, whereas
pantheism and materialism appear rather as pro
vinces of one empire, or aspects of one view, and
the passage from the one to the other easy and
frequent as the poetical or the practical sentiment
is predominant. So, for example, it was easy for
Karl Marx to pass from Hegelian pantheism to
Feuerbach's materialism, and to unfold the history
of mankind as an evolution corresponding to the
Darwinian interpretation of organic nature, and
wholly based on the varying conditions of acquir
ing and sharing wealth.
The present work is explanatory rather than
controversial, and makes no profession of confuting

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 33
pantheistic or materialistic writers or those who
hover uncertain on the borders.1 Much rather
the theistic position, which is that of the vast
majority of historical mankind, is taken as a postu
late without which in the words of M. Brunetiere,2
" history becomes a chaos, a disorderly succession of
meaningless movements, an empty and tumultuous
agitation, a fleeting delusion, the Maya of Indian
philosophers, the dream we carry on without know
ing when it was begun, nor whether we shall finish
it, nor why we are dreaming it. But in the light
of the supernatural everything grows clear ; the
life of our species is vested with a meaning, the
history of mankind becomes organised ; we de
velop ourselves in the indifference or hostility of
nature, like an empire within an empire, under a
law partaking of the divinity of its author."
Thus we may sum up in M. Brunetiere's apho
rism : " The hypothesis of Providence is the con
dition of intelligible history".
1 Perhaps some of the acutest criticism of their theories is to
be found scattered in the works of Fr. George Tyrrell, particularly
in his Faith of the Millions, vol. ii., Essays xx. and xxii. Whether
Mr. Benjamin Kidd's noted work on Western Civilisation is or is
not pantheistic can scarcely be determined, so long as it remains
uncertain whether, " projection into the future," to which he so
frequently appeals, refers to this world or to the nexts
2 Translated in The Pilot, 21st May, 1904.
3

34 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Section X.
But those would be sadly deceived who thought
that the postulate of theism at once made all
things easy.
The opposing theories would never again and
again have acquired adherents so numerous and
so great, and would not have become the chronic
maladies of the human mind, were it not that the
path of theism is strewn with boulders. To re
move some of them from the highway of truth is
the purpose of this work, a task made easier by
recent science physical and historical.
If we looked indeed on the surface of things,
the notion of order in history and the guidance of
man's course by Divine Providence seem contra
dicted by facts. "To consider the world in its
length and breadth, its various history, the many
races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their
mutual alienation, their conflicts ; and then their
ways, habits, governments, forms of worship ;
their enterprises, their aimless courses, their ran
dom achievements and acquirements, the impotent
conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so
faint and broken of a superintending design, the
blind evolution of what turn out to be great
powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 35
unreasoning elements, not towards final causes,
the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reach
ing aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over
his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat
of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental
anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the
pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary
hopeless irreligion, ... all this is a vision to
dizzy and appal, and inflicts upon the mind a sense
of profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond
human solution." 1
But the negative solution of him who hath said
in his heart, There is no God, only issues in a
second problem more difficult than the first. We
cannot raise the question : How can there be evil
if God exists ? without raising the second, How can
there be good if He exist not?2
If our hearts are frozen at the sight of evil, let
them be enkindled at the sight of good. And to
see good we must do more than look on the
surface of things, for truth is not on the surface of
things but in the depths. Nay, virtue and sanctity
are in great measure secret gifts known only to
God and good angels. The evil of the world is
1 Newman, Apologia, chap, v., ad init.
"Boethius, Con-sol. Phil., i., iv. : "Quidam familiarium quaesivit:
si quidem Deus, inquit, est, unde mala ? bona vero unde, si non est ?"
3*

36 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
not seeming in its existence but seeming in its
predominance. Our picture of the world is often
like a geological map that shows by its colours the
uppermost rock though only a shallow layer on the
surface and without showing the rock below though
of ten times the thickness. For evil is uppermost
but everywhere underlined by good. We observe
all startling acts of wickedness, but the daily round
of ordinary goodness passes unobserved ; we hear
the drunken clamour of the streets, but not the
silent worshippers in the watches of the night ; we
hear the loud iniquity of the prime of life, not the
silent change in sickness and old age ; we see the
ill deeds all too plainly, but the excuses for ill
deeds, the confusion of mind, the stress of tempta
tion, these are mostly hidden ; we see the rough
exterior, the coarse violence, the brutal ungodliness
of whole quarters of our great cities, not the com
passion and generosity, not the courage and chi
valry, not the instinct of prayer concealed all the
while below the surface. Do we not find out
daily, if we search, how harshness in these dark
regions avails nothing, while sympathy wins the
heart ? There must be a heart then to win. The
very graceless youths, for whom many can offer no
better remedy than the. scourge and the prison-
house, can be made docile as children by kindness

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 37
and sympathy. Truly all men are better than
they seem and their actions often worse than their
hearts. Even the squalid tenements of English
cities are daily witnesses of mutual help and
unfailing charity. And if in the darker places of
the world we can discover so many flowers of
goodness, still more in the lighter, and can count
up the beautiful aggregate of the acts of human
love, filial and parental, fraternal and conjugal, and
the ever freshly springing stream of childhood and
innocence. Nor are the physicians of our bodies
and our goods to be heard as judges : rather as
ex parte witnesses whose main business is with the
abnormal conditions of disease and injustice. A
better judgment is by the physicians of our souls
who look on both sides, the good and the evil ;
who see how evil is made the occasion of good, as
it were its counterpart and correlative ; who read
the unwritten record of unexhausted patience, of
continuous self-sacrifice, of repentant tears ; to
whom ill doers are transmuted into the material for
the triumph of grace, and appear the yet ungar-
nered harvest of the Passion and the Cross.1
1 See Faber's works, especially The Creator and the Creature, bk.
iii., chap. ii.

38 KEY TO THE, WORLD'S PROGRESS
Section XI.
Taking the word antinomy to mean a seeming
and soluble as distinct from a real and insoluble
contradiction, and holding fast to the truth of the
theistic explanation of the world, we are plainly
confronted with a great antinomy, a thesis and
antithesis to be harmonised in a synthesis. To do
this is the claim of Christianity, the mighty claim
to solve, and to stand alone in solving, the riddle
of the universe. The claim is to satisfy the crav
ing of the soul for love that is more than the
transient love which earth can offer, for an ideal
that is not finite but infinite, for goodness, truth
and beauty that are not relative but absolute ; all
else proving vanity and illusion. It is a claim to
be alone in correspondence with man's spiritual
life, and in man's actual condition to be the only
true theism according to the old saying that man's
soul was Christian by nature (anima naturaliter
Christiana). For apart from Christianity mere
theism, if it teach the infinitude of the Creator
and the nothingness of the creature, fails to bridge
the gulf between the finite and the infinite and
satisfy man's yearning for companionship with
God. All it can do is to lower God to man's
level. But the Christian doctrine of Grace and
Adoption leaves Divine Majesty intact and yet

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 39
raises men up to be called and to be the children
of God ; and this supernatural elevation results in
the blending of an awestruck reverence with
familiar tenderness, in that lowly confidence and
daring love, the peculiar signet of Christian
sanctity. Indeed, Christianity tells us we are so
completely made for God that we are not fully
ourselves except when we are united to Him ;
that " the soul, apart from God, is as meaningless,
as useless as a stray key ".1
And the Christian claim is to give a plain and
simple answer to the perpetual questioning of
weariness, pain and sorrow, to solve the problem
they offer to the intellect, to show their true
significance, and to be the Divine messenger that
brings an effectual consolation.
And there is the claim externally to have
transformed the world by introducing so to speak
a new dynamic principle rendering stagnation im
possible, not a preservative indeed against catas
trophes to particular civilisations, but a provider
of a principle of recovery ; a transformation of
economic and political life, of language, literature,
art, philosophy and (at least in potentiality) of the
sciences, thus becoming the very keystone of
'Tyrrell, Lex Orandi, introd. and chap. xv. ; also Hard Say
ings, p. 3 ; and Faber, Bethlehem, p. 453, ed. i860.

40 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
civilisation, so that the Incarnation may be held
the turning point or centre of human history.
It claims to have introduced a circle of moral
notions peculiar to itself, "the strength of weak
ness, the triumph of defeat, the blessing of sorrow,
the might of pain, the power of concealment, the
glory of submission ".1 It has " an answer which
will give a meaning to pain and temptation and
sin and sorrow, which will point to law and order
where otherwise there is nothing apparent but pain
ful darkness and confusion, which will verify and
connect what is to all seeming manifold and discon
nected," so that darkness is touched with joy and
the needs of the human soul at last are satisfied.2
And while other teachers have vainly striven
to acquire a comprehensive history of the world
as a whole, some intelligible survey of humanity,
Christianity claims to have entered into possession,
to have appeared as man's redemption at a definite
historical time, to stretch forward through all time
to the end, to stretch backwards in preparation
through all time to the beginning, to rest secure
on the timeless and the infinite.3
1 Faber, Blessed Sacrament, bk. iv., sect. iii.
2 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, introd.
8 Otto Willmann, Geschichte des Idealismus, vol. ii., p. g. The
theological view of the history of Creation was put by Faber (fol
lowing Lessius) with singular attractiveness fifty years ago in The
Creator and the Creature, especially in book iii., chap. ix.

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 41
And thus as the explanation of all things, as
Alpha and Omega, the Christian Church declares
itself to be, not one religion among many, but the
one religion for all places and all times ; her view
of life not to be one view among many, but the
one, and only view, to be the judge of all and be
judged by none, the higher being able to compre
hend the lower but not the lower to comprehend
the higher ; she claims alone to be the fitting
vessel of supernatural gifts ; to have gathered up
all the scattered fragments of true religion in the
pagan world, to have combined in harmonious
proportions the three constituent elements of true
religion ; namely a holy law, a mystical union, an
intellectual doctrine.
At last therefore the freedom of man was re
conciled with the sovereignty of God and the
order of the universe ; at last the gulf between
unity and plurality, singleness and multiplicity, was
bridged over ; at last the yearning of man's heart
was satisfied for a God at once transcendant and
yet immanent ; at once adorable and yet lovable.1
This is a mighty claim indeed : that Christianity
was the culmination of all that went before intel
lectually and morally, and a foundation of a new
intellectual and moral life on a higher plane.
'Willmann, Idealismus, vol. ii., pp. 91. 214.

42 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Section XII.
Although at this stage we can make no valid
induction, still a certain presumption and pre
liminary justification of these great claims can be
found in the course of the world's history since the
advent of Christianity. Certain portions of the
world were converted to the new creed and there
arose by degrees, and has ever after with varying
fortunes continued, a Christendom. But great
portions of the world, many races and nations have
to this day never been effectually penetrated by
Christian influence, and thus lasting with no
breach of continuity between themselves and their
ancestors before Christ, may be called Fore-
Christians. A third distinct body of men are
those whose fathers or forefathers or it may be
themselves, have passed through Christian in
fluence, and rejected it for something that seemed
to them better, an improved or complete religion,
or a truer philosophy of life. They may be called
After-Christians, and are composed of two prin
cipal groups, the Mahometans who have sup
planted the Christians in vast regions of Africa
and the East, and secondly a group with various
names who have spread in less than a century and
a half through parts of Europe, North America

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 43
and Australasia, nowhere wholly dominant, but
in most of France and Australasia, in much of
the North American Union, and in parts of Eng
land and Germany, sufficiently powerful to be a
serious influence on social life. There still remains
a fourth body of men, the Jews, who occupy a
position apart, neither Fore-Christian nor After-
Christian, but standing to Christianity in a singular
relation. Now beginning with this fourth body of men,
their history presents a singularity that must be
explained by any philosophy of history, any theory
of sociology, that deserves the name. Through
nearly nineteen centuries they appear apart and
hostile to the rest of mankind ; always feared,
often hated as usurious parasites, often persecuted,
yet ever surviving, never assimilated, as if masters
of some hidden power, sometimes conspicuous
for great works of benevolence, rising ever and
anon to be great physicians (as in the ninth and
twelfth and fourteenth centuries) and great finan
ciers (as under Louis le Debonnaire or in Anjevin
England or in the sixteenth century Papal States,
or in Europe of the nineteenth century), some
times shut up in ghettos to protect them from
popular violence, sometimes forming ghettos of
their own (as in London of to-day), conspicuous

44 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
for mutual help and yet for making pitiless profit
from the distress and ignorance of their fellow-men,
themselves appearing in many things exempt from
the weaknesses of ordinary men.
Their singular history supports the Christian
claims, because Christianity alone gives an in
telligible explanation— it can be read in the last
chapter of the Grammar of Assent — and raises a
presumption in its favour, at least till some other
teacher can give to the cumulative marvels of this
history an equally intelligible interpretation.
Section XIII.
The presumption in favour of Christian claims
is strengthened if we glance at the fortunes of the
Fore-Christians and the After-Christians. Let the
last be taken first, and the first among them the
Mahometans. From being no more than a cloud
on the horizon the religion of Mahomet in a few
years overspread the East, swept half the existing
Roman empire into its power, overthrew the
Zoroastrian kingdom of the Sassanians in Persia,
and the Christian Teutonic kingdom of Spain ;
and seemed to call up a civilisation with agriculture
and manufactures, literature and philosophy, science
and architecture, that threw the Christian world
into the shade. Nay, while the world was full of

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 45
hereditary inequalities of wealth and power, Islam
at one bound seemed to leap over centuries,
and to secure the equality which is the aim of
modern socialists ; if the sexes were separate, at
least the men among themselves, and the women
among themselves, each formed a frankly demo
cratic society, all classes mingling in free equality,
the lowest able to rise to the highest temporal
post, worth not birth being taken as the test, and
the sphere of friendship and social intercourse
being enlarged, because the spectre of mesalliance
was exorcised. Moreover, the simple monotheism,
the plenteous almsgiving, the decorous public
worship, join in giving to the religion of Mahomet
the semblance of advance.
But exitus acta probant : wait for the grey
evening of that brilliant day. Or rather there is
no need to wait, but to look closer, that we may
discover the true aspect of this mighty creed.
The seeming progress of intellectual and material
civilisation in the ex-Christian countries was all
in the earlier and not in the latter half of their
history, and is judged by good observers to have
been mainly the work not of the After-Christians
themselves, but of the Christians, or Jews, or
Persians under their dominion, or at least the
early generations of converts to the new creed.

46 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
The glory of the eastern Caliphate, Ommiad and
Abbasid, has the name of Arab culture, and used
Arabic as its vehicle ; but in reality was the con
tinuation of the Greek, the Syrian, and the Persian
culture which preceded it, a culture of which the
greatness is still imperfectly appreciated among
us, like that in the seventh century of the two
great empires of Persia and Byzantium.1 The
fairy parts of the Arabian Nights are not of
Arabian but of Persian or Indian origin. Neither
the beautiful architecture of the eastern Caliphate
nor the deep philosophy were Islam's own, but
were drawn from feeding on others, were para
sitic and therefore transitory. So too the Moorish
culture (as it is called) in Spain was parasitic.
The Arab literature of Spain has made no per
manent addition to the intellectual possessions of
mankind ; Averroes, the most eminent among them,
was in no sense a product of Islam, and the intel
lectual bloom was the work of those Christians
and Jews who for the sake of preserving their
property had apostatised. Thus being without
root the culture withered away when there was
no longer any great body of Christians or lapsed
Christians to be its support ; witness the rapid
¦See the manual by Prof. Pizzi, the Orientalist, of Turin,
L'Islamismo, Milano, 1903.

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 47
decay after the thirteenth century. Indeed at the
end of the fourteenth century Ibn Khaldun tells
how in Arabia, Syria, Persia and North Africa
civilisation and population had fallen, and the very
land seemed to have lost its fertility under the
blighting rule of his fellow- Arabs.1
In this there is nothing strange ; for the Ma
hometan religion itself brings no new principle of
progress into the world, but much rather stereo
types a low form of civilisation, and is not by
accident but by essence the opponent of all higher
culture. So even supposing it raised the pagan
pre-Moslem Arabs, a very dubious elevation, if
we regard the old chivalrous heroic literature of
the " Ignorance," as Moslems call the time,2 the
new religion effectually blocked any prospect of a
great future civilisation.
For Islam in very truth is a foe to the human
race. The uncompromising Unitarianism puts a
gulf between God and man ; the theology, a nar
row Calvinism, inhumane and unprogressive, is
the death warrant of culture ; the sacred Koran
1 See the instructive extract translated in Dr. Flint's Philosophy
of History, 1893, PP- I66, 167.
2 See W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages, 1904, p. 14; Baumgartner in
Stimmen aus Maria-Laach, Aug. and Sept., 1894 (giving many illus
trations) ; Lane Poole in The Academy, and Feb., 1878 (resuming
A. von Kremer).

48 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
was a substitute for all literature and science, was
the fount of jurisprudence,1 the base of a militant
theocracy, that showed its fruits when Omar, a few
years after the conquest of Egypt, burnt the Alex
andrian library,2 as the libraries of Ctesiphon and
Seleucia had been burnt before, and showed the
same fruits again in East and West, when philo
sophy was found incompatible with Mahometan
theology and was repressed, first in the East, and
finally during th£ thirteenth century in the West.3
This theology displays a narrow formalism ; the
five principal duties binding on all, ablution, prayer,
fasting, pilgrimage and almsgiving (as a means of
supporting the holy war against infidels), these
constitute a mere external religion, and imply no
change of heart, no sorrow for sin, far less any
loving union with God. Much rather this man-
made creed fosters spiritual pride and ruthless perse
cution. Non-Moslems are despised as infidel dogs,
practically without rights, mere outlaws, with the
sword of massacre ever suspended over their heads.
1 On the identification in Islam of law with religion see Sir
James Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence, Essay xiii.
2 The needed correction of Gibbon is given in The Quarterly
Review, July, 1895.
3 Previously attempts had been made, notably by the Brothers
of Sincerity in Mesopotamia about the year 1000, to affect a pan
theistic transmutation of the Koran, See The International Journal
of Ethics, July, 1898.

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 49
This awful logic of the Moslem creed was de
veloped by degrees, and the condition of the
Christian subjects, from the early days of human
ity and toleration in Syria, Egypt, North Africa
and Spain, grew progressively worse. Solemn
promises were broken, the churches seized or
destroyed, and the Christians ground down under
a ferocious despotism.1 And in our own time
some of us remember the massacres of the
Maronites, of the Armenians, of the Bulgarians,
or have heard our fathers tell of fair Scio with
her harvest of death. Nor can we expect
otherwise of a smouldering fire but that from
time to time it will burst out into blood-red
flame. Further, the jurisprudence of Islam is at once
a witness and a promoter of lax family life. The
complicated rules of succession to property, the
complete assimilation of realty and personalty,
the separate property of married women, all are
adapted for transient families, habitual polygamy,
habitual divorce ; and effectually hinder in general
any stock of honourable family traditions, any care
ful guarding of genealogies, any solid peasantry
rooted to the soil. A careful comparison of the
details of family life would place the After-Chris-
' Dozy, Histoire des Musulmans d'Espagne, ii., pp. 48-50.
4

So KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
tian Mahometans immeasurably below the Fore-
Christian Chinese.1
Indeed the pleasant equality among Mahometan
men is bought at the price of woman's degradation.
Held inferior in intelligence, inferior in virtue, in
ferior in religion, brought up as far as possible in
seclusion, and trained to be led by the two principal
motives of fear and sensuality, women form a world
apart, are no companions for their husbands, can
invoke no religious sanction to support his con
stancy or affection, are as drudges among the
poor, as courtesans among the rich. Plurality
of wives, plurality of concubines, the legal recog
nition of the status of slave concubine, are in
startling contrast to the austerity of Christian
teaching. But even the lax code of Islam is
not wide enough for the insatiable cravings of
licentiousness ; the standard, low as it is, remains
too high ; and the realm of these After-Christians
is covered with a slimy deposit of moral corruption.
Yet even here let us beware of exaggeration.
For first the power of good breaks out amid the
worst surroundings ; and in the midst of Islam
we may find sincere attachment between husband
and wife though the wife has lost her beauty and
' This and other comparisons can be found in the author's
Studies of Family Life, 1886.

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 51
lacks, both herself and her relatives, any wealth or
power. And secondly while the rich Moslems and
the townsfolk tend to self-destruction, the case is
not the same with poor husbandmen, rural life
often being a purificator, and giving less scope for
the moral degradation of women. And thirdly the
dark picture above applies only to where Islam
is fully developed and can work out its true nature
as the supplanter of Christendom ; but not to its
merely nominal adherents like the Bedouins of
the Arabian desert, the Turcomans or Kurds of
Eastern Asia Minor, the Berber tribes of the
Sahara, and perhaps only in a lesser degree to
the Indian and negro Mahometans, to Delhi and
Timbuctoo : for it is not there that Christianity
has been weighed and found wanting.
Section XIV.
The second group of After-Christians afford on
a superficial view a startling contrast to the first,
but on a closer view a startling likeness. They
began in France in the eighteenth century, the
second example, Islam being the first, of a large
body of men, as distinct from the sporadic and
chronic secession of individuals, embracing a new
doctrine to supersede Christianity. Voltaire and
Rousseau were the most influential heralds of this

52 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
new revolt against Christianity, and France having
been under their influence for more than a hundred
years, is the most conspicuous example of After-
Christianity. But other countries have followed,
the north-easterly and more settled portion of
the United States from about the middle of the
nineteenth century, and spreading with the spread
of the elementary, gratuitous, and non-religious
schools they call " public," long and blindly wor
shipped, and now calling forth the humiliating
avowal : We cannot teach duty or the spirit of
obedience.1 In England the Christian forces have
been stronger, but still in England (as distinct from
Wales, Scotland and Ireland) large masses both
urban and rural have abandoned Christianity. In
the German Empire their numbers and localities
can be roughly judged by the number of the
Social Democrats ; in Australia, New Zealand,
and the Canadian province of Ontario they are
certainly numerous, but their proportion to the
Christians is guesswork.
These cases present the greatest variety of race,
of government, of economic surroundings. And
the actual doctrines of life professed by the leaders
'See for recent witnesses G. Stanley Hall's Adolescence, and
W. E. Chancellor's American Schools, reviewed in The Times, 31st
March, 1905.

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 53
of this movement are also various. They may be
theistic (like the other great branch of After-
Christians), or pantheistic, or materialistic, or halt
on temporary standpoints between these three
main positions.
What is common to them is negative, the re
jection of the Christian view of the end of life, of
the Christian view of man's nature, of the Christian
view of the sanctity of marriage and the training
of the young.1 In these negations they resemble
the Moslems ; and they are like them in being
essentially parasitic, and destructive of the" very
civilisation they seem to foster : the early en
thusiasm ends in bitter disillusion ; they only
differ in the process being much more rapid than
with their earlier brethren. France offers as yet
the most complete specimen for observation : the
brilliant outburst of emancipated humanity, her
tongue, her influence, and later her arms dominat
ing all Europe, admired or dreaded, and then
the steady ebb of that glory, as the accumulated
waters of Christianity gradually flowed away. To
sink from being in the first place politically to the
seventh or lower is a comparatively small matter,
and may be due to other causes ; the loss of
1 An account of many leading After-Christians is to be found
in the brilliant pages of Dr. Barry's Heralds of Revolt, 1904.

54 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
literary and intellectual eminence is graver ; but
the main point is the loss of moral influence and
to be a labelled specimen of decadence : here the
After-Christian appears in his development ; he
treats as illusion all belief in God, as illusion
all devotion to prince or people, as illusion all
eternal and spiritual human love, as illusion his
own free will and undying personality. So all
that gave life its value and dignity is abandoned,
and all that remains are the calculated pleasures of
the cynic who resolves to be a dupe no more.1
One visible and outward sign of the changed
condition of France is the record of vital statistics.
Slowly, steadily the birth-rate of France has sunk
lower and lower till the population has reached a
stationary state and long ago would actually have
declined were it not that certain portions remain
Christian and the surplus of births, e.g., in Auvergne
and Brittany, supply the deficiency in Normandy
and Picardy, and is masked by the immigration
of Flemings and Italians. And here again is a
resemblance to the depopulation of Islam ; here
again the After-Christians appear as parasites
fed by others ; and the importation of Circassian
and negro slaves into Moslem countries, the former
raids of Barbary pirates, and the transformation of
'Tyrrell, Faith of the Millions, ii., p. 258 (quoting F. W. Myers).

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 55
kidnapped Christian children into Turkish janis
saries, are analogous to the foreign immigration
into France and the absorption of the Highlanders
into After-Christian populations.
Section XV.
Analogous facts are to be observed among the
Americans. Their public schools have produced
a type that tends to self-destruction ; the high
birth-rate of olden times, the " American in
crease" that so startled Malthus a century ago,
has decayed pari passu with the decay of religion,
and now the native American is in process of
disappearance ; in the case of Massachusetts
where elaborate statistics are kept the very
figures can be given ; l and this sterility is openly
deplored by the President of the Republic.2 The
population of the United States advances in
deed by leaps and bounds, but is not composed
of the descendants of the older settlers, much
rather by the multitudinous new-comers from the
Christian parts of Europe, many of these emi
grants soon to be caught in the After-Christian
whirlpool and to be taught and practise the new
ways of life and the new morals of divorce and
1 Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. xvi., Nov., 1901, Feb., 1902.
'North American Review, July, 1903.

56 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
sterility. Similarly in Australia and New Zea
land in the bloom of their first After-Christian
efflorescence the blight of a decaying birth-rate
has darkened with startling suddenness their
brilliant prospects. Again the Germans as far as
After-Christian are beginning to show symptoms
of an inward malady. Their superb literature
(now seemingly of the past), their patient science,
their supreme music, were the heritage of centuries
of Christianity ; no less than their solid family life
and their traditions of industry. Like the French
before them their exploits were wonderful and
the world admired and still admires ; but already
they suffer from a persistent and organised force of
social disorder ; and if as yet the population has
advanced apace, and the excess of births over
deaths amounted in the thirty years following their
victorious war to some eighteen million souls,
while in France it amounted to little over one
million,1 all analogy points to a speedy diminution
of the German birth-rate ; nay, already it has
sunk low in Berlin, the centre of After-Christian
thought ; while for the empire as a whole, the
birth-rate in the large and numerous Christian
regions masks the earlier stages of the After-
1 Naturally allowance being made for the alteration of territory ;
and Alsace-Lorraine being eliminated from the comparison,

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 57
Christian decline. And in England, the same tell
tale witness of vital statistics shows during the
last twenty-five years a steady decline in the birth
rate ; and this fact, as well as the serious increase
of divorce, the growth of life in hotels and flats,
the open abandonment of Christian family life
among sections of the higher, the middle and the
artisan classes, all show a visible approximation
to the conditions of France. It is not then sur
prising if grave writers warn us of the perils of a
materialised civilisation, of spiritual atrophy, of the
vices of popular government that no manipulation
can amend, but only regeneration ; and that though
we may see the spectre drawing near, we may be
unable to arrest our inevitable decline.1 Truly
inevitable ! but only if we will not hear the one
Healer of the nations.
Further details of After-Christianity, though
available, are here unnecessary, where we are
only seeking a preliminary presumption in favour
of the Christian claims. It is enough that the
examples before us seem to point to a probable
conclusion, namely, that Christianity is final, that it
provides the highest type of family life (on which
all society rests), and that those who desert
' The Times, 13th Jan., 1905, in the reviews of Dr. Dill's Roman
Society and of Mr. Hobhouse's Democracy and Reaction,

58 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Christianity are cut off from the possibility of
reverting to the higher types of Fore-Christian
families (like the solid family of modern inner
China, of regal Rome, of Homeric Greece, of the
Egyptians of the Great Pyramids), and find them
selves driven back to lower forms, and threatened
with the worst abominations of outcast and de
graded races. But then, inasmuch as family life
is the main foundation of civilisation and of happi
ness ; and no substitute is available for the love
between husband and wife, parent and child,
brother and sister ; nor device yet discovered for
man's moral outfit, that can compare in efficacy
with being brought up in a devout and honourable
home, it follows that After-Christians of all kinds,
in attacking the Christian family, by the very
attack stand condemned.1 Section XVI.
On the Fore-Christians who have lived since the
advent of Christianity little need here be said —
little, though the greater part of mankind through
' So the theory of Dr. Francis Galton, renewed by the Ameri
can Professor Ross, " on the all-importance of the best breed," and
how every institution is to stand or fall by the breed of human
beings it favours (Quarterly Journal of Economics, vols. xvi. and
xvii.), though sadly astray on the facts of history, still points un
wittingly to the all-importance of Christian family life.

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 59
1900 years is included — little, though their for
tunes show almost infinite variety, and the tale
would tell of the rise and fall of whole literatures
and civilisations — little, because they can all be
embraced in the negative generalisation, that apart
from Christians and After-Christians and taken as
a world by themselves, no general law is to be
found for them, no steadfast evolution, no philo
sophy of history, no scientific explanation of their
vicissitudes. How was it, for example, that the
civilisation in Persia was so brilliant in the sixth
century, and of Vijayanagar (Southern India) in
the fifteenth and sixteenth, and the Jaina temples
of Dilwarra (South Rajputana) of the twelfth cen
tury so indescribably beautiful ? How account
for the languages and culture of the Hausas of
Central Africa before they were conquered by the
Felah Arabs ? — for the high position of women, and
the art and industry, among the Scandinavian
Vikings ? — for the persistent civilisation of the
Chinese and their golden age of poetry in the
seventh, eighth and ninth centuries ? — for the arts of
the mid-nineteenth century Japanese ? — for the grim
civilisation of the Mexicans and the ordered social
ism of the Peruvians as found by the Spaniards ? —
for the marvellous empire of the Tartars when our
early Edwards were reigning ?

60 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
All seems chaos till we grasp the principle by
which the very vicissitudes can be made orderly
and take their place in the circular movement of
Fore-Christian history. The Incarnation is for all
time, and in the historical as distinct from the
theological sense, for them the Incarnation is not
yet come. No one can reprove them (it is of
nations, tongues and tribes I am speaking, not of
individuals) with having cast aside Christianity.
If hitherto their civilisation has never been able to
overpass a certain level, if their best hope has been
to retain that level and not roll backwards down
the slope, still they have the prospect of Christi
anity in front of them and all the potentialities of
advance ; they are not doomed to degradation and
decay ; if they have already been degraded they
can be raised again even if standing so low as the
very savages of Western Australia, witness the
work of the Benedictines at New Norcia ; and to
the Christian vision they stretch over the globe as
fields white for harvest
How far great portions of Islam may be reckoned
among them has been briefly indicated, nor will I
presume to judge further. But this seems likely,
that Fore-Christians, when Christianity is mani
festly put before them and they come as it were
to the knowledge of good and evil (perhaps the

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 61
Japanese are a good example, not indeed in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but now in the
twentieth), have before them a solemn alternative, it
being no longer possible as a third choice to remain
morally as they were, in a state of unstable equili
brium. Two courses and two alone are open to
them ; and within no great period of time they must
needs follow the one or the other, must take their
stand with the Christians or the After-Christians
and for good or for evil abide the consequences.
[The world's religions and their numbers may be
given from the careful studies of Fr. Krose in the
Stimmen aus Maria-Laach, July and August, 1903.
Christians of all sorts are reckoned at 549 millions
(mainly under the heads of Catholics 264, Protes
tants 166, and Greek Orthodox 109). The rest are
as follows : —
Confucians and Ancestor Worshippers 235 millions

Brahmans (Hindus) .

.

. 210

Mahometans of all ki

ads .

. 202

Fetish Worshippers a

ad other

Pagans 144

Buddhists

,

. 120

Taoists (of China) .

.

• 32

Shintoists (of Japan)

•

• 17

Old Indian worships

12

Jews

1 1

Sundry .

2

62 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
In this catalogue the After-Christians have no rubric
to themselves, and are to be extracted almost wholly
from the three headings of Catholics, Protestants
and Mahometans, and among these three, chiefly
from those who speak French, English, German,
Arabic or Turkish. To give any figures of their
actual numbers would be mere guesswork.
The figure on Buddhism corresponds with the
reasonable estimate of Sir M. Monier-Williams
{Buddhism, 1889) correcting former controversial
and extravagant estimates like that of Rhys Davids
raising the numbers of Buddhists to 500 millions.
It may be added that the moral over-estimates of
Buddhism have been even more excessive than
the numerical, and have required to be reduced to
the level of reason. This has been done by many,
and perhaps by none better than by Dahlmann
in the Stimmen aus Maria-Laach, Nov., 1897. J
Section XVII.
If we have raised a presumption in favour of
Christian claims, still a presumption can be
rebutted ; and just as theism has grave difficulties
which in fact can only be met by Christianity as
complete theism, so Christianity itself has grave
difficulties «-hich can only be met by the Church
as complete Christianity, the Church to which in

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 63
the Creed we make our profession of loyalty :
Credo tn Sanctam Ecclesiam Catholicam. If
we are to have the explanation of world-history
we must first have the true theory — rationale —
idea — of the Christian Church and her life through
eighteen centuries. This is the master key to
open a hundred closed doors ; this is Kirchen-
(reschichte als Weltgeschichte, the world record
made intelligible by the Church record ; this the
indispensable and flexible instrument of research,
bringing deductive reasoning into agreement with
inductive, theory with fact, hypothesis with veri
fication ; this alone puts the relation of the natural
and the supernatural in a light that we can
endure.1 1 For lack of this key we find that excellent advocates grow
incoherent and faltering on the Christian claims. Because
Christianity has only spread by degrees and only by degrees has
exercised its social as distinct from its individual influence, they
think that Christianity was misunderstood from the first, that " the
glorious and comprehensive truth set forth in the parables of the
kingdom was for centuries ignored or sadly narrowed and per
verted, and is, in fact, very defectively apprehended even at the
present day" (Flint's Philosophy of History, and ed., p. 97). But
how then can the Incarnation be the centre of the world's history ?
And if Christianity was given over for centuries to degrading
thraldom, priestly obscurantism, false superstition ; if it departed
from truth, justice and liberty for ages (ibid., pp. 131, 184, 343, 387),
how could Christ have come in the fulness of time, and in Him all
things have been renewed ? or how could the martyrs have given
the testimony of their blood on a misunderstanding ? Thus a
noble thesis falls to nought because of untenable presuppositions.

64 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Let us therefore gaze steadily on the Christian
Church if perchance we may discern her linea
ments and her characteristics. For if Church
History is the key to Universal History, the
notes of the Church, the marks by which we may
recognise her, are of world-wide importance and
neither Christianity, nor Theism, nor the course
of society can be understood without them.
Now one mark or token of the Christian Church,
indeed a primary characteristic, is to observe in all
things the golden mean. She incorporates into her
system a multitude of truths, yet is ever mindful
that unity precedes multiplicity, that single truths
represent one aspect only of truth, and cannot pro
perly be understood by themselves ; so that if we
dwell on them overmuch as single and apart, we
insensibly turn them from being truths into being
errors : not that truth can contradict truth, but that
our notions of truth can contradict each other, as
being insufficient exhibitions, inadequate repre
sentations, partial apprehensions, instead of the
whole truth.
It is not surprising then that to many the
Christian Church appears in her history and
teaching to be full of paradox, to be involved in
contradiction. But they forget that from the very
nature of her claims, from the weakness of human

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 65
thought and the imperfections of human language,
man's lack of understanding and of expression,
they must expect to find in her, not contradictions
but seeming contradictions or antinomies, for
which without fail she provides a practical solu
tion ; and most often also a theoretical solution ;
but not always ; else the infinite Creator could be
fully grasped by the finite creature ; which, accord
ing to the commonplace, would in itself be the
greatest of contradictions. Thus the great anti
nomies of God being One yet Three, of Christ
being God yet Man, of man being free yet in the
hand of omnipotent foreknowledge, these are
not to be harmonised in any synthesis man's
intelligence can devise, but are to be received as
mysteries which no imagination can depict. Our
image of God "never is one, but broken into
numberless partial aspects independent each of
each. . . . We know one truth about Him and
another truth, but we cannot image both of
them together ... we drop the one while we
turn to take up the other." For purposes of de
votion they must be dwelt on separately not in
combination ; but again not dwelt on exclusively,
lest we rush in one direction beyond the limits of
the truth.1
1 Grammar of Assent, part i., chap, iv., § 2.
5

66 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Section XVIII.
Similar limitations confront us in non-theological
matters : the problem of free will has to be faced
even by those who will not hear of revelation.
Thus the genius of Schelling saw that history
combined freedom and necessity, and he made
brilliant efforts, one after another, to show how the
combination could be effected, all indeed in vain
as the clue was Jacking.1 Again, we cannot deny
the existence of space, though the idea can gain
no rest in our minds ; "for we find it impossible
to say that it comes to a limit anywhere ; and it
is incomprehensible to say that it runs out in
finitely ; and it seems to be unmeaning if we say
that it does not exist till bodies come into it, and
thus is enlarged according to an accident." 3
A similar dilemma afflicts us regarding time ; 3
and even in physical science no experimentalist
can answer the question how the will can act on
the muscles ; astronomy and biology seem in con
tradiction on the age of the earth ; the nature of
matter and force, the origin of motion, the origin of
'Flint, Philosophy of History, ed. 1874, pp. 438, 439.
2 Idea of a University, "Christianity and Scientific Investigation''.
8 Of the numerous criticisms on Kant's theory of time and space
perhaps to many the most welcome may be that of Mr. Bertrand
Russell in his Principles of Mathematics, 1903.

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 67
life, of sensation, of rational thought, all remain to
mere natural investigation an impenetrable mystery.
Again, in mathematical science the presence of
truths seemingly irreconcilable have to be en
dured ; " the existence of an infinite number of
curves, which are able to divide a space, into
which no straight line, though it be length without
breadth, can ever enter . . . (and) certain lines,
which approach to each other continually with a
finite distance between them, yet never meet".1
And every system of philosophy has its antinomies,
its blind alleys, its crudities ; and must needs fill
up the gaps of the argument with assumptions and
postulates.2 We must learn then our limitations, must con
fess with sacred and profane writers that over-
wisdom is folly, must be content with many a
formula of definition which is not exact, but is
some approximation to exactitude and sufficient
for our purpose. To one integral subject, to one
whole of which all the parts are correlative we
direct our attention by means of sciences, which
are partial views and give as their conclusion only
abstractions which are true hypothetically and as
' Idea of a University, " Christianity and Scientific Investiga
tion ." Another pertinent example is to be found in the case of
algebra, in the Grammar of Assent, chap, iv., § I.
' Tyrrell, Faith of the Millions, ii., p. 367.
5*

68 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
far as they go, but do not represent whole and
substantive things, and neecf correction by other
sciences. Their truths are not the whole truth,
must not be made the measure of all things, lest
we confuse probability with certainty, inchoate
and subordinate processes with final conclusions,
and be led into inexplicable difficulties.
And when thus, for the sake of learning at least
something, we have cut into fragments the unity
of knowledge, the very energy with which we
grasp one fragment lessens our hold on the others.
For "any one study of whatever kind exclusively
pursued deadens in the mind the interest, nay the
perception of any other ". All else appears dull
and uncouth. To gaze intently for most of us is
to concentrate our vision and to put aside a com
prehensive view. If we are to mark the very spot
where the sun sets on the horizon, we cannot see
the glow on the mountains behind us nor the
measureless depths of the many-coloured heaven
to the right and the left of us.1
Section XIX.
And if in temporal things the intellect can
rarely discern truth as a whole, still less in the
1 See many passages in the Idea of a University especially Dis
courses iii. and iv. and "A Form of Infidelity of the Day".

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 69
relation of God and the soul ; inadequate views
are all we can attain, not hitting the centre of
truth but glancing aside to the right or the left ;
conceptions only analogously true and not to be
pressed too far as if they were adequate and close
fitting. Analogies we must have ; for without
figures of speech we cannot represent the timeless
and spaceless ; and thus symbolism is the insepar
able companion of religion.1 It is quite true then
that we cannot affirm anything exactly in the
same sense (univoce) of God and man. This
would be to form for ourselves a Deity in human
fashion in our own minds ; and though we attri
buted to it the sum of all our virtues and gave it
of our very best, it would be human after all — an
anthropomorphic God. But we must not run into
the other extreme of an unknowable God, as
though nothing could be affirmed in common of
the Creator and the creature, unless we played
with words and used them in a wholly different
sense (cequivoce) in the two affirmations. We are
caught in no dilemma between anthropomorphism
and agnosticism. For we have a third choice,
and in speaking both of God and of man we can
make use of a common term, not indeed simply,
but by analogy, metaphorically, imperfectly, ac-
1 Tyrrell, Faith of the Millions, ii., pp. 49-54, 267.

?0 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
cording to the measure of our apprehension. And
in this way precisely, between the extremes that
we can know all or can know nothing, we reach the
mean that we can know something, and a something
that is sufficient, nay our all and our salvation.1
And not merely from the very nature of things,
from the necessities of ontology, from the rule of
right reason, are we constrained to admit that God
is partly knowable and partly unknowable, seen
as in a glass darkly, half veiled and half revealed ;
but also from the needs of our moral nature, that
we should live under the law of search and that
He whom we worship should be a hidden God.
Search is to be the law of earth and vision the
law of heaven. It is God's will to be sought, the
searching being our test. For He will be found
1 This truth is taught with his accustomed brevity and sense
by St. Thomas, especially in the first fourteen Quaestiones of the
Summa Theologica ; and among many contemporary writers by none
better than by Fr. George Tyrrell in many places scattered through
his works, such as Lex Orandi, pp. 80-83, an(* Faith of the Millions, i.,
chap. v. In Ruskin's earlier and better writings many of these
truths are expressed, not perhaps with theological accuracy, but
at least with beautiful imagery : " Our whole happiness and power
of enwgetic action depend on our being able to breathe and live
in the cloud ; content to see it opening here and closing there ;
rejoicing to catch through the thinnest films of it glimpes of stable
and substantial things ; but yet perceiving a nobleness even in
the concealment, and rejoicing that a kindly veil is spread where
the untempered light might have scorched us, or the infinite clear
ness wearied ". — Modern Painters, vol. v.

the course of civilisation u
by the diligent, humble, pure and awestricken
seeker, but hidden from the eyes of pride and
corruption. Therefore "He will neither over
whelm the minds of men with the oppression of
His majesty, nor constrain their wills by the
visible pageant of His justice ". So " what hides
Him most utterly from those who will not see
Him, reveals Him most distinctly to those whose
hearts are seeking Him". To these He is ever
lifting the veil from His sanctuaries, filling their
eyes with light and their hearts with sweetness.
And love is the perpetual explanation of all except
itself, how God can deign to seek man's love. For
just as of old at the supreme moment when accord
ing to our feeble thoughts the need of disclosure
was the greatest, the glory of Christianity was
shrouded by the veil of an ignominious death, in
the same manner continuous love perpetuates a
continuous mystery. Even poor human love shares
in some degree the mystical character and is above
and beyond reason ; much more therefore the love
between God and man. But our love of God is
the essence of true religion and the summing up
of all holiness ; so true religion must be mystical.1
1 The latter part of this section is drawn from many passages
in Faber's Blessed Sacrament. See also the two chapters, " What is
Mysticism ? " and " True and False Mysticism," in Tyrrell's Faith
of the Millions.

72 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Section XX.
Although the Church of Christ is by her very
nature visible, is a city set on a hill, she is also in
a sense hidden, and a city covered with a cloud.
Her very claim to be the continuation of the life of
Her Divine Founder, her history to be the mirror
of the history of Christ to Whom she is mystically
united as the spouse to the bridegroom, as the
body to the head, involves a share in ignominy
as well as in glory. From her very claim to be
Divine she must be lit up indeed by Divine illu
mination, but also must be wrapped in the clouds
and darkness that encompass the throne of the
Most High. And though the cloud around the
Church is partly the work of her enemies distort
ing her doctrines and calumniating her ministers,
it comes mainly from her very nature, the con
tinuous witness of a Divine and therefore
mysterious message.
Hence it is no difficulty for the claims of the
Christian Church, but a confirmation, when she
appears involved in paradoxes : that we can under
stand Divine things and yet cannot understand ;
that we are free yet foreknown ; that religion is
mystical and yet rational ; that suffering is vicarious
and yet responsibility personal ; that her teaching

THE COURSE OF CIVILISATION 73
is the religion of sorrow and yet of joy ; that the
Church exalts the claims of family life and yet
makes them subordinate ; appears at once as a
friend and a rival to the powers of the State. For
she must follow her mission, and refuse to allow
one aspect of her Divine message to exclude or
obscure another. Thus " Christianity is dog
matical, devotional, practical all at once ; it is
esoteric and exoteric ; it is indulgent and strict ; it
is light and dark ; it is love and it is fear ".1
And these seeming notes of discord are only the
prelude to the harmony of the golden mean. For
Holy Church will lean neither to the right nor to
the left ; neither to credulity that would make the
actual coextensive with the possible ; nor on the
other hand to scepticism that would refuse to
extend the possible beyond what is known as
actual ; 2 she rejects alike the false simplicity of
quietism and the false reasoning of intellectualism ; s
is a mean between under-guidance of men and
over-guidance ; is not merely external religion, or
merely internal, but the due combination of both ;
allows the alternation of epochs of expansion or
assimilation and epochs of concentration or dog-
1 Development of Christian Doctrine, chap, i., § i.
"Tyrrell, Faith of the Millions, ii., p. 245.
9 Ibid., i., introd.

H KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
matism ; of tranquil large-mindedness during
peace, and again of uniform discipline during
warfare ; x neither wholly accepts the ways of the
world nor wholly refuses them, but, by a process
of partial absorption and partial rejection, aims at
the permeation by Christianity and continuous
transformation of each ever-changing civilisation.
Let us trace, as best we may, some rude sketches
to exemplify her course, scattered outlines for
others to connect and to fill in : awaiting the time
when some writer worthy of the task shall rather
all together, construct the Church Record as the
World Record, and so far as the dim vision of
man can reach, make the oudines of human history
clear.
1 Wilfrid Ward, Lift of Wiseman, iL, p. 419.

PART II.
THE COURSE OF CHRISTIANITY.
Section XXI.
Not as any final classification, not as exhausting
the list of the Christian antinomies, but as a pro
visional attempt to number and name the more
conspicuous among them, I have singled out ten ;
and with these the second part of this inquiry will
be principally occupied.
These ten antinomies are as follows : —
i. The Church appears in opposition to intel
lectual civilisation and yet to foster it.
2. The Church appears in opposition to material
civilisation and yet to foster it.
3. The Church represents a religion of sorrow
and yet of gladness ; teaches a morality which is
austere and yet joyful.
4. The Church appears the opponent and yet
the support of the State ; its rival and yet its ally.
5. The Church upholds the equality of men and
yet the inequality of property and power.
75

76 KEY TO THE WORLDS PROGRESS
6. The Church is full of scandals and yet all holy ;
proclaims a law at once difficult and yet easy.
7. The Church upholds and yet opposes religious
freedom and liberty of conscience.
8. The Church is one and yet Christendom has
ever been divided.
9. The Church is ever the same and yet ever
changing. 10. The Church is ever being defeated and yet
is ever victorious.
Each of these ten antinomies deserves to itself
a separate treatise wherein the historical details of
the apparent contradiction would be set forth in
fulness, and the historical sources diligently scrutin
ised, fairly appraised, clearly sorted and arranged
for the benefit of scholars and students. But now
to the present writer there falls a humbler task, to
give a mere brief description, a mere popular out
line of these ten seeming contradictions, and to
set forth the conclusion as it were by anticipation.

CHAPTER I.
THE CHURCH AND CULTURE.
Section XXII.
We have counted as the first antinomy that the
Church appears in opposition to intellectual civili
sation and yet to foster it.
Here is a striking paradox ; the same Church
charged with being a lover of darkness, fanatical,
retrograde, seeing in the flesh nought but the
devil, crushing the aspirations of man after the
beautiful, chaining his thought, fearful of his
science ; and yet praised as the saviour of learn
ing and literature, the constant promoter of study,
the founder of universities, the inspirer and patron
of the noblest examples of poetry and painting,
sculpture and architecture.
To reconcile this contradiction an historical
theory had been framed that in the middle period
the Church was indeed in her place and the
great promoter of culture, but its enemy in the
77

78 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Graeco- Roman period that went before and in
the times that came after. Now if we strictly
limit the middle period to the time between the
sixth and the eleventh century, this theory may
perhaps indicate the truth that where there is
great deficiency of culture the Church sedulously
fosters it as did the Benedictine monks of those
Dark Ages ; and that where culture falls into
excess, as before and after, she restrains it. But
such generalities tell us little ; and the explanatory
theory by a grave historical blunder brackets to
gether the days of Alfred the Great and Richard
Cceur de Lion under the common title of mediaeval,1
and is no help in understanding the relations of
Christianity to culture in the days of Origen and
Cyprian, or in the days of St. Augustine, or
later in those of St. Dominic in the thirteenth
century, of St. Charles Borromeo in the sixteenth,
or in the second quarter of the nineteenth in the
days of Gorres and Ozanam.
Here as elsewhere Christianity is a mean
1 If in literature we must separate " modern " from " mediaeval,"
the change is not at the "renaissance" but towards theclose of
the eleventh century. Modern verse is closely akin to the rhymes
of France and Provence ; Chretien de Troyes and then Walther
von der Vogelweide are part of " modern " literature ; and the gulf
is not between Chaucer and Dr. Johnson, but between Chaucer
and the author of Beowulf. — See W. P. Ker's two lucid volumes
Epic and Romance, 1897, and The Dark Ages, 1904.

THE CHURCH AND CULTURE 79
between extremes, a synthesis between two ap
parent antitheses.
Thus in one sense it is quite true that Christi
anity makes little of culture : mere dust in the
balance compared with a virtuous life, and to be
taken with due precaution lest it lead to the double
evil of false doctrine and intellectual pride.
Rude fishermen were the first preachers of the
Gospel, and the most intellectual of the Apostles
reiterates his warnings against intellectualism : not
to be wise above measure but to embrace the
folly of the cross instead of the wisdom of this
world, that before God was foolishness ; God
having chosen the foolish things of this world to
confound the wise, and the weak to confound the
strong, that no flesh should glory in His sight.
And whereas worldly science puffeth up and phil
osophy can be emptiness and fallacy and vain
pretence, it is the mission of Christianity to bring
every intelligence as a captive to Christ, to Christ
in whom are hidden all the treasures of true
wisdom and true science.
Fourteen hundred years later the doctrine of
the Imitation repeats the same lesson : it is the
virtuous life that matters, not the fair speeches of
the " best thinkers " of our time ; or what avails
to know by heart all the teachings of all philosophy

80 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
and yet lack God's grace ? Check the craving for
knowledge ; Noli alta sapere ; there is much that
it is unprofitable to know, and woe to him who
forgets that the more he knows, the holier the life
he is bound to lead. If a man knew all the
secrets of science, what would it be but the vain
vision of a passing world ; let all the learned keep
silence ; all else but to be united to God is as
nothing — with God who in one brief moment can
teach more than a long course of deepest study ;
nor at the great assize shall we be asked what we
have learnt, but how we have lived.
Let another interval go by, and hear the same
teaching re-echoed by the Master of the nineteenth
century : The labours of the Church have not had
for their purpose to spread abroad knowledge, or
cultivate reason, but to avert sin and to save the
souls of men, compared with which the value of
the whole world is but as dust and ashes. For it
is not things of time that she places first, but things
of eternity ; and literature, science and art are
things of time.
The note of ignorance and illiteracy was in fact
an early reproach. Peter and John were described
before the council as illiterate men and of the
lower sort. Celsus and other pagans derided the
Christians as stupid and uneducated, ignorant and

THE CHURCH AND CULTURE 81
credulous, as women, servants, slaves, as collected
from the dregs of the people; and the Christian apo
logists confirm their general low level in the social
and intellectual scale, a mixed unlettered multitude,
yet lit by an inward vision that was hidden from
the scornful eye of their cultivated adversaries.
And so far from art and splendour being re
quisite, the externals and trappings of religion,
whenever need be, are set aside ; the very
vessels of the sanctuary are sold for the redemp
tion of captives, the very highest form of worship
conducted, for fear of the persecutor, in cellars
and caverns or wind-swept heaths or frozen wastes ;
the sacraments administered amid the horrors of
the battlefield or the squalor of the low quarters
of a great city.
For the fine arts no less than literature and
science are bid keep in their place, recognise their
subordinate position, that they are only one part
of a mighty system, that whatever is good in them
comes from above, and that for all their fairness
they become imposture and corruption when made
a minister to pride and sensuality. Better a
crowded and devout congregation in a church
constructed and adorned in violation of every rule
of art, than a few cold worshippers in a faultless
building amid masterpieces of adornment; better

82 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
having one eye to enter into the kingdom of
heaven, than having two eyes to be cast into outer
darkness. Section XXIII.
Nevertheless the earth is the Lord's and the
fulness thereof; the gifts of intellect are His gifts,
their purpose His glory. Whatever was beautiful
and seemly in pagan worship, as far as not insepar
ably connected with falsehood or sensuality, was
gradually adopted by the Christian Church ;
temples and altars and images and lights and
incense and processions and votive offerings and
sacerdotal vestments. Or were the enemies of
Christianity to be left the monopoly of seemly
worship, and the fair gifts of the Most High only
to be used to His dishonour? Is not imagination
the gift of the Author of nature, and the Author of
nature the Author of the Church? Hence every
kind of natural religious symbolism has been con
secrated to the service of truth, and the craving of
man's natural emotions reasonably satisfied. Ex
tremes meet, and the spirit of the iconoclast or the
puritan calls forth with its harsh note the sinister
echoes of rebellion crying out that art is its own
end, and of licentiousness crying out that the end
of art is sensual gratification, and of pessimism,
that art is the bloom of decay : so low we fall if we

THE CHURCH AND CULTURE 83
forget that of all that is beautiful God is the arche
type and the origin.
Let us listen rather to another teacher, how the
musical sounds of instrumental harmony are an
outward and earthly form under which great
wonders unknown seem to be typified. "There
are seven notes in the scale ; make them fourteen ;
yet what a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise !
What science brings so much out of so little ? Out
of what poor elements does some great master in it
create his new world ? Shall we say that all this
exuberant inventiveness is a mere ingenuity or
trick of art like some game or fashion of the day
without reality, without meaning?" Or "is it
possible that that inexhaustible evolution and
disposition of notes, so rich yet so simple, so
intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so ma
jestic, should be a mere sound, which is gone and
perishes ? Can it be that those mysterious stirrings
of heart, and keen emotion, and strange yearnings
after we know not what, and awful impressions
from we know not whence, should be wrought in
us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes,
and begins and ends in itself? It is not so ; it
cannot be. No ; they have escaped from some
higher sphere ; they are the outpourings of eternal
harmony in the medium of created sound ; they

84 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
are echoes from our Home ; they are the voice of
Angels, or the Magnificat of Saints, or the living
laws of Divine Governance, or the Divine Attri
butes ; something are they besides themselves,
which we cannot compass, which we cannot utter,
— though mortal man, and he perhaps not other
wise distinguished above his fellows, has the gift of
eliciting them ".1
Hear again another writer, himself indeed, alas!
an After-Christian, but raised by his very subject
to the Christian level, where he tells us rightly how
poetry transcends science, appealing to the some
thing more than one limited faculty. "It is not
Linnaeus or Cavendish or Cuvier who gives the
true sense of animals, or water, or plants, who
seizes their secrets for us, who makes us participate
in their life ; it is Shakespeare with his
daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty.
It is Wordsworth with his-
voice . . . heard
In springtime from the cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides."8
The exponents of physical science can describe
with much accuracy the cosmic dust, the refraction
1 Oxford University Sermons, Sermon xv.
2 Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, ed. 1865, p. 8.

THE CHURCH AND CULTURE 85
of light, the degrees of moisture, and other causes
that make the sky what it is in the ruddy sunsets
of a stormy summer ; or the forces that uphold
the stone roof of a Gothic cathedral a hundred feet
above our heads ; or the chemical analysis of the
pigments of Raphael's Madonna degli Ansidei.
But of the main thing they tell us nothing ; still
less those who would explain in terms of material
istic psychology our appreciation of the beautiful
as no more that visual, auditory, or motor sensa
tions, the mere awakening of pleasing emotions
by an organic stimulus. For to those who have
spiritual eyes to see and ears to hear, the beauty
of nature and of art point heavenward ; through
the medium of created form and colour we gain
some glimpse of uncreated beauty ; the glow of
crimson cloud and depths of golden light are a
faint foreglance of the city that hath no need of
sun or moon to light it, the soaring columns and
fretted roof are to lead us upwards to the seven
pillars of the Jerusalem that is on high ; to
depict the human countenance divine, the highest
achievement of earthly painting, though but a
sketch on the walls of a prison, house, is an effort
after the unattainable beauty of glorified man.1
1 Perhaps among the moderns none has excelled the Norman
peasant painter, Jean Francois Millet, in showing tb« pathos and

86 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Section XXIV.
Now given this view of music and painting, of
sculpture and architecture, of all that is beautiful
in this world of sense, it is plain that these good
things should be led captive to Christ ; that the
best they could give should be at the service of
Christian ritual ; their utmost efforts, the very
marbles and mosaics of Santa Sophia,1 the very
choir of Beauvais, the very dome of St. Peter's,
being all unworthy of the surpassing dignity of
the Christian sacrifice.
But once again let us beware of over-stepping
the mean, of confounding good art and good
life, of forgetting the manifold deficiencies which
any genuine history of Christian art would have
to unfold ; lest we invite the mockery of the un
believer who would bid us compare the sprawling
angels of the rococo period with the sculptures of
the Parthenon, or the clumsy front of St. Peter's
with the Flavian amphitheatre. But this we can
say, that Christianity having in common with most
dignity of man in the humblest surroundings, a dignity which our
own great painter Lord Leighton, in spite of marvellous technical
perfection, failed to grasp, because it was the Hellenic ideal rather
than the Christian that he painted.
'Well described by Mrs. Bury in her separate chapter on
Byzantine Art inserted in vol. ii. of Prof. Bury's History of the
Later Roman Empire.

THE CHURCH AND CULTURE 87
religions the encouragement of art, exceeds them
in the greatness of its encouragement by the central
doctrine of the bodily presence of the Divinity ;
and exceeds them in the greatness of artistic in-
spiration of which its sublime doctrines can be the
occasion. Nor, if it puts restraint on the artist, is
the restraint other than a wise guard against abuse ;
unlike Mahomet's polygamous Methodism1 that is
fatal to all but the lowest forms of painting and
sculpture because it forbids us to represent the
human form or any natural substance such as fruit
or flowers. But then the Church herself can
neither create art nor hinder its decline, like the
decline of Gothic from the ©lory of Lincoln
O v
Minster to the ignominy of Bath Abbey, or the
change from the manifold graces of the early
renaissance to the graceless piles that laid a
heavy load on Europe for 200 years, or from the
art of Mantegna and Luini to the square miles of
roof and wall covered with tasteless mediocrity.
Indeed the course of art and literature remains
inexplicable ; we can indeed trace the change from
rude and simple art to art well-trained in the
technique of drawing and colouring, just as we can
trace the change from naive and heroic literature
to conventional and civilised. But the first step
'To borrow Prof. Ker's illuminating phrase, The Dark Ages. p. 14.

88 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
accomplished, we seem unable to go further and
trace any causes except the obvious and negative
generalisation that art cannot bloom amid wide
spread anarchy and poverty. More than this we
can scarcely affirm ; and we must be content with
registering the annals of art rather than attempting
to write its history. There is no standing, as in
physical and historical science, on the shoulders
of those who have gone before us. The spirit of
art bloweth where it listeth, and none can say why
or for how long. Why was Venice so conspicu
ously its home, and the kindred republic of Genoa
as a stranger's house? How account for the
uprising of Gothic architecture in Northern France
and reaching in a few years its highest pinnacle of
glory ; or centuries later the succession in Germany
of unrivalled musicians.1 Again, in the very ages
when the architecture of Europe lay low, a bloom
of beauty was being spread over the vast area of
Spanish America. The traveller stands entranced
at the sanctuary of Esquipulas raised on a plat
form in the open country with four great towers
and central dome all of dazzling white, built in
mid-eighteenth century ; or at the blue-tiled dome
and red stone campanile of the cathedral of
Zacatecas, and the many other glories of Spanish
1 See Lord Leighton's Addresses, London, 1896,

THE CHURCH AND CULTURE 89
American art of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.1 But this is no history of art ; enough that the
Christian Church wherever her influence is strong,
is a perpetual incitement to the artist without
indeed giving any guarantee for his success, and
is a perpetual framework ready at hand for
artistic adornment. Section XXV.
Let us turn to another department of culture,
so far as the works of intellect can be separated
from those of emotion and imagination, and the
field of philosophy from that of art.
The intellectual truths scattered in Fore-
Christian religions and philosophies were gathered
up one by one into Christian theology. The
Church has ever been "sitting in the midst of the
doctors, both hearing and asking them questions ;
claiming to herself what they said rightly, correct
ing their errors, supplying their defects, completing
their beginnings, expanding their surmises, and thus
gradually by means of them enlarging the range
'A curious parallel to the ignorance among the "educated"
classes concerning the " Middle Ages " when Hallam's work was
first published, is the ignorance now concerning the vast empire
of Spain in North and South America for 300 years, an empire
not lost till the After-Christian spirit had seized on the ruling
glasses of Old Spain,

9o KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
and refining the sense of her teaching ".1 And
just as the very affinities of Catholic worship to
pagan rites are a witness to its fitness, so also the
very affinities to pagan mythology are a witness to
the truth of the Catholic doctrine of heavenly
mediators, a doctrine which corrects what was
previously imperfect, and points to the substantial
unity of the human mind fitted by nature for
theism.2 Hence the Church has gathered in, from age to
age, the harvest of a hundred philosophies ; and
those who seemed most antagonistic she has forced,
when the due time came, to yield up for her service
the good that was in them. Thus " the theology
of St. Thomas, nay of the Church of his period, is
built on that very Aristotelianism which the early
Fathers denounce as the source of all misbelief,
and in particular of the Arian and Monophysite
heresies ".3 An excellent historian 4 has traced
1 See the whole luminous passage Development of Christian
Doctrine, chap viii., ad fin.
2 Tyrrell, Faith of the Millions, ii., pp. 270, 275.
3 Development of Christian Doctrine, chap, xii., § 8. Some details
can be found in Mr. Wilfrid Ward's Witnesses to the Unseen,
pp. 86-90.
* Willmann, Geschichte des Idealismus, vol. ii., i8g6, especially
the chapters on " Refounding of Philosophy by Christianity,"
"Christian Idealism linked to that of Antiquity," and "St
Augustine ''.

THE CHURCH AND CULTURE 91
how the philosophy of the Fore-Christians was
founded anew by Christianity ; their confused
longings fulfilled, and their partial view made
complete. Thus by the recognition of the holy
will of a Personal God, a sure foundation was
reached for understanding the double truth that
the world was created, and that man was subject
to moral law. Thus the notions of God and Self
and the Cosmos were no longer mingled in con
fusion ; for though God was in the world He was
above the world (transcendent as well as im
manent) ; and though man was of the earth,
natural and transitory, he was also of heaven,
supernatural and eternal. Thus man was raised
out of the realm of mere appearances, of shallow
grubbing on the surface of things ; he was raised
out of himself beyond the narrow circling around
his own personality ; and he entered a realm of
mysticism, aiming at intimate union with an in
dwelling God (immanent in His creatures) and at
some participation in the Divine nature ; yet ever
held in check by the Divine law and the transcend
ent majesty of the Creator ; so that the fountains
of self-deceit were stopped up, and man could not
become a law to himself, his own master, nay his
own God, self-centred, self-complete (reducing
science to autosophy and action to autonomy),

92 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
but rather was to know by believing and to reign
by serving.
This balanced mind, this clear vision of inno
cence, this golden mean of Christian teaching,
made it possible to do what Plato and Aristotle
had not succeeded in doing, to place theology and
philosophy in right relation, to make philosophy
by stooping to be a handmaid {ancilla theologian),
rise supreme over all the other sciences, itself the
sovereign science, the harmony of all, the preserver
of the unity of all knowledge ; and the nearest
approach, ere we pass ex umbris et imaginibus in
veritatem, to the restful vision of the entire truth.1
So it became possible for Christianity to make
a fearless appropriation of Fore-Christian philo
sophy. The salt was at hand wherewith all could
be savoured ; and the adoption of Platonic termin
ology by the Fathers of the Church could be
done with the utmost freedom, precisely because
they knew where Plato as the voice of God-given
reason became silent, and Plato as the voice of
erring man began to speak. The possession of a
criterion of truth and error gave the same freedom
1 See especially the third Discourse in the Idea of a University.
Had these discourses been familiar to Dr. Flint, a great advantage
would have accrued to his instructive essay on " Philosophy as
Scientia Scientiarium" prefixed to his History of Classifications of
t}\e Sciences, 1904^.

THE CHURCH AND CULTURE 93
to adopt Aristotelian language in the days of Scho
lasticism ; and gives the same security in our own
time ; so that when a specious subjectivism bids us
reject all certitude, hold fast to nothing, shrink from
putting any limit to the intellectual progress of
humanity, admit a ceaseless self-making self-evolv
ing world, and soul, and God : Christian theology
says, No ; for we have tried whether your philo
sophy can express the truths of Holy Faith, we
have tested it by the unfailing touchstone in our
hands, and have found it wanting.1
Section XXVI.
Indeed in philosophy as elsewhere it is ever the
golden mean proclaimed by the genuine voice of
Christianity. The claims of explicit reasoning, of
criticism and argumentation, are not rejected, only
put in their proper place as part of a whole, an
assistant towards attaining the truth and an ex
cellent negative test, but not the supreme teacher.
We must recognise that faith and tradition and
unconscious inference are also our informants ;
that we are not self-sufficing in regard to know
ledge, but must cling to others, accept their witness
and authority, admit in many things the consensus
humani generis, nay that the vox populi is the vox
' Cf. Lagrange, La Methode historique. ed. 1904, p. 34.

94 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Dei, or perish in our wilful individualism.1 But then
testimony is not everything ; and if rationalism is
an exaggeration on one side, so is traditionalism
on the other. To say we can adequately express
in words all valid inferences, is to fall from our
middle way, as though there were not many of
the most valuable of them and most practical, nay
the very principles of reason and morality, too
subtle or too obscure or too complex for state
ment. But we fall equally on a different side, if
we scoff at logic, deny the validity of words, or the
use of definitions, and reduce science, sacred and
profane alike, to a condition of mist.
Similarly the Church keeps the golden mean
between the materialism that will not recognise
the higher and spiritual side of man, and a mis
called idealism that is so enamoured of the higher
side as to ignore the reality of the lower ; 2 she
will not allow the crude realism (like that of
Tertullian) which confuses the corporal with the
real ; nor again the nominalism which transmutes
all super-sensual things into mental products, merely
distinguished by the name ; rather she chooses the
middle course and unites a true idealism with a
true realism. Indeed from the time of St. Augus-
1 Faith of the Millions, ii., chaps, ii. and ix.
2 Ibid., chaps, xx. and xxiii.

THE CHURCH AND CULTURE 9S
tine, the central figure in history, who was the
heir of all ancient wisdom, the starting point of
all new, the Church has handed down with un
broken continuity a philosophia perennis1 ever
growing more comprehensive and gaining force
from every controversy, those yielding perhaps
the greatest contribution who have been in ap
pearance, from Porphyry to Kant, her greatest
opponents. Section XXVII.
And thus we must expect an intellectual conflict
between the Church and the world. The intel
lectual position known as the spirit of the age
{der Zeitgeist) incessantly varying with the age,
displays amid many variables one constant char
acter of opposition to the Church. This is to be
expected, because contemporary science and the
fashions of the day are inevitably defective and
distorted ; not wholly wrong, but mingling to
gether extravagance and good sense, and present
ing a teaching that cannot claim our assent, till
the dross be separated from the gold. This is
done by degrees, and then, after having moulded,
leavened, checked, and corrected the new ways of
science or life, the Church adopts in tranquillity
and assimilates what at last has been proved to
'This is the main thesis of Willmann's. Geschichte des Idealismus

96 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
be sound theory and wholesome practice. Only
this tardy Concordat is no bar to a similar conflict
beginning over again. We smile now at the
thought that the study of Greek literature, and
Homer in particular, could seriously imperil the
Christian faith ; we are in no danger of being so
impressed by the majestic structure of the Roman
Law as to think it an oracle of heaven and give
the name of priests to its lawyers ; we no longer
hold it of vital importance to eschew Gothic bar
barism, to write Ciceronian Latin, and to conform
our lives to an imaginary picture of Roman or
Greek civilisation ; we are little touched by the
eighteenth century repugnance to enthusiasm ;
indeed think little worth having, that fails to
enkindle it ; even the ideals of our own fathers
set forth in the political and economic liberalism
of barely fifty years1 ago, appear to us empty and
unreal ; yet in the fourth century, in the twelfth,
in the fifteenth, in the eighteenth, in the nineteenth,
the Church had to face these overmastering views
of learning and living, and mould them to her
purposes. And are we to expect our own time
to be without its favourite notions, its shibboleths,
its presuppositions, its exaggerations, its distortion
of the relative magnitudes of truths and duties?
The more completely we are the children of our
1 This was written in 1906.

THE CHURCH AND CULTURE 97
own age the more behind the age will the Church
appear ; yet might equally be called before the
age, which is but a transitory phase of human
thought and imagination encompassed by a more
than human society that is eternal.
How pitiable then the lack of knowledge, how
gross the self-deception of those who take occasion
of this chronic discord between the Church and
the world to make shipwreck of their faith. In
stead of possessing their souls in peace, instead of
knowing when it is the time to wait and be silent,
they press forward sword in hand for an instant
solution, demand an immediate triumph, cannot
suffer with Christ or endure the appearance of
uncertainty and defeat. And as the Church fails
to support them, they must needs reform the
Church who in her essence is irreformable ; and
forgetting that the first reform must be within
themselves, they raise, all laden with their infirm
ities, the standard of revolt ; and because they
cannot see the immediate solution of some anti
nomy, they leave the realm of tempered light for
the realm that is for ever darkened by irreconcil
able contradictions.1
' See the essay on " Unchanging Dogma and Changeful Man " in
Wilfrid Ward's Problems and Persons, 1903 ; also Tyrrell's Faith of
the Millions, pp. 80, 81 ; and Hard Sayings, pp. 365, 368.
7

CHAPTER II.
THE CHURCH AND PROSPERITY.
Section XXVIII.
We have counted as the second antinomy that
the Church appears in opposition to material
civilisation and yet to foster it.
In the solemn ritual of Christian baptism the
catechumen, about to be baptised, is asked what
he seeks from the Church of God ; and answering,
"faith," he is asked further what he will gain by
faith ; whereupon he answers " life everlasting ".
He professes no expectation that the great sacra
ment he is to receive is to be for the benefit of his
temporal life ; at certain times and places manifold
damage to that life, and even the total loss of it,
were not improbable consequences of his act ; and
at all times he was pledged to the renunciation of
no small part of it known as the pomps and works
of the Evil One. His eyes were not to be opened
to new methods of enrichment, new rules of health,
new refinements of enjoyment, but wandering in
98

THE CHURCH AND PROSPERITY 99
the night time of this present world the eyes of
his heart were to be opened to recognise the triune
and eternal Creator, and to walk in the ways of
truth. Moreover, in the solemn exorcisms, one
after another, the truth is reiterated, so alien to
the dreams of earthly empire and worldly aggran
disement, that the end is surely coming when
humanity will perish and the earth be judged by
fire. Truly it seems but scant encouragement to
build up a great empire, when the empire, as
surely as each single citizen, is doomed to death ;
and when the Christian teachers from age to age
have uttered their warning of vanitas vanitatum,
have taught us that the schemes of mighty kings
are but as the sports of children, and have put as
the test of importance the unrelenting question :
Quid hoc ad mternitatem ? Or how can we adorn
and cultivate the earth or make the desert flourish
like the slopes of Lebanon or the rose gardens of
Jericho, when we remember the end, and the
words of the prophet, the earth as a garden of
pleasure before the devouring flames, and after
them as the dread solitude of the wilderness ?
And the spirit of the Christian Church has re
mained persistent, ever seeming to make light of
worldly prosperity, and to be set up in contradic-

7*

ioo KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
tion to the philosophy and practice of the world.
The whole mighty structure of the Church, through
so many ages, has had one primary end, the indi
vidual soul. It is not nations and their temporal
prosperity, but souls and their eternal salvation,
that are her concern, and for whom all things else
must be sacrificed. And this being her errand, to
heal from inward and spiritual wounds, to protect
from a supernatural foe, to lead to a supernatural
end these individuals committed to her charge ; all
else in comparison must be disregarded.1
And her purpose being to reconcile and unite
the soul with its Maker, it follows that her stand
ard for judging the relative importance of various
virtues and vices is very different from that of the
world ; of the world that makes the immediate
bearing on temporal prosperity the standard, and
thus abhors external acts of violence, but pays no
regard to what is internal, whether a man has
committed murder or adultery in his heart ;
whereas it is the heart of which the Church takes
note, whether full or empty of faith, of purity, of
charity ; nor reckons the homicidal act of a sudden
outburst of passion so grave as the inward malice
which daily wishes a rival's death. Hence, for
what are called the failures of society, weaklings,
1 See Lecture viii. of Anglican Difficulties.

THE CHURCH AND PROSPERITY 101
outcasts, criminals, she has ever shown a singular
tenderness, inasmuch as for them, no less than
for the orderly and prosperous, flowed the well-
springs of Calvary.
Thus driven on by her over-mastering prin
ciples the Church incurs the reproach of fostering
poverty, beggary and improvidence ; it is a
plausible reproach ; nay from Gospel days to our
own we see again and again how the children of
this world are wiser in their generation than the
children of light. Section XXIX.
Nevertheless this very Church that makes so
light of this world, of all the kingdoms thereof
and their glory, is their very pillar and prop ; and
without professing to advance material civilisation
becomes indirectly its powerful promoter. And
this chiefly in three ways.
First by the very appeal to men to follow ideals
more lofty than those that the vain vision of this
world can offer, and by the plain spoken condem
nation of covetousness as one of the seven deadly
sins, the Christian teaching puts a drag on the
unscrupulous greed (the Greek ir\eove£la) that
grasps at its own present enrichment, all reckless
of how the wealth may be won, all reckless of

102 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
the consequences of that winning. The careful
husbanding of the sources of wealth, the far-seeing
and orderly development of national resources,
the far-seeing and humane treatment of the poorer
classes, are in contradiction to the heedless pursuit
of wealth that fells forests without replanting, ex
tracts from the soil its elements of fertility without
replacing them, empties fisheries without restock
ing them, exhausts mines without providing for
the day of exhaustion, seizes on the labour of the
young and of women without regarding the future
provision of a healthy race, forces even adults and
males to unhealthy overwork, displays immense
energy, talent and time in the barren task of
over-reaching others, and making gain from their
loss. And the wealth thus ill earned is not spent
for the most part in that rational consumption that
ministers to right living (the Aristotelian ro eu £fjv) ;
but rather is written down in the books of the higher
statistics as a negative acquisition, and is speedily
dissipated in senseless display or wasteful sensuality.
But the Church is ever at work checking this
wasteful production, checking this wasteful con
sumption, checking the social discord and social
hatred that they engender, and thus is the very
salt of the body politic, an antiseptic against
threatening corruption and dissolution.

THE CHURCH AND PROSPERITY 103
Section XXX.
Secondly, the Church having emphatically
taught the dignity and duty of labour, has supplied
a stronger motive for honest daily toil than dread
of the lash or the prison house. To effect this
rehabilitation of labour1 example has been added
to teaching : the example first of all of Him who
was blacksmith and carpenter, the son (as Celsus
says in derision) of a poor workwoman {pauper-
cula? operariceque matris) with workmen as dis
ciples ; then the example of St. Paul practising
as well as preaching manual labour ; the example
of those of high birth, like St. Crispinianus, practis
ing a servile trade ; of noble matrons working
diligently at home ; of the monks of Palestine and
Egypt, men of high position among them, exercis
ing a multitude of trades, self-supporting though
tens of thousand in number, nay sending forth
supplies to regions stricken with famine ; of the
monks of St. Basil in whose rule was conspicuous
the duty of labour, and in whom the old Roman
vigour, the improbus labor of the days of Cincin
nati or Regulus, seemed renewed. Then later
in the West, where the indolent barbarians, almost
' Paul Allard's Les Esclaves Chretiens remains an excellent
account of this, though the first edition was published as early as
1876.

104 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
as much as the slave-stricken society of the
Empire, needed a living example of voluntary
work, the Benedictine monks gave them the
example : the overabundant forests of the northern
plain cleared, marshes drained, dry land irrigated,
cultivation extended, many new crops and fruits
acclimatised, bridges and roads built, refuges for
travellers set on desert ways by these pious hands,
to say nothing of the salvage of Greek and Latin
literature, that threatened to disappear as Baby
lonian and Phoenician had disappeared before them,
but were saved by the Church and monasticism.1
Moreover in the eleventh century, the en
thusiastic movement in favour of order and
peace that arose in Aquitaine under the name of
the Peace of God, and spread through Western
Europe, was encouraged, propagated and enforced
by the clergy, and as regulated and made practical
in 1 04 1, established a truce {Treuga Dei) for all
combatants from Wednesday at sunset to Monday
at sunrise, besides a permanent peace for the un
armed clergy, merchants, pilgrims, women and
peasants. Even the imperfect observation of this
truce and peace was a great help to material
1 On this intellectual rescue see the fascinating work of Hart-
mann Grisar, Geschichte Roms und der Pdpste, vol. i., 1901, especially
numbers 343 and 454.

THE CHURCH AND PROSPERITY 105
civilisation ; and the salutary principle of protect
ing the cultivator of the soil, and shielding the
peasantry, the women and the children, was
continued by the religious institution of chivalry.
The work of transforming desert and marsh
into fruitful field and flowery meadow was
continued by the Cistercians (an offshoot of
the Benedictines), and later in the seventeenth
century by the Trappists ; nay to this day the
same work may be seen accomplished in many
parts of the world, as South Africa and Western
Australia ; and the full benefit of monastic tenure
can be gauged a little by the desolation that
has followed its destruction, the hillsides stripped
of their protecting forests, the water let loose in
the valleys, the fair gardens choked with weeds,
the numerous inhabitants, that had gathered round
the homes of religion, forced to choose between
starvation and flight ; waste seen for example in
England in the reign of Edward VI., in the plains
watered by the South American Parana in the
reign of Charles III. of Spain, in the valleys of
California under the early Mexican Republic, in
the hapless province of Basilicata in Italy of to-day.
It seems then, after all, that even material
civilisation has a friend in Christian teaching ;
and that those who use the earth as though they

106 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
used it not, who daily proclaim that it will perish
as grass cast into the oven, yet because they treat
it with reverence and restraint, because they re
cognise more than meets the senses in its crystal
streams, fair flowers, fragrant woods, singing birds,
green meadows and fruitful fields, would not have
the work of God's hands recklessly defaced by
man's work ; but rather adorned to the utmost as
being not merely a Divine work but the very
guest-chamber of the Divinity — it is men such as
these who use the earth to the best ultimate
advantage.1 And thus the chosen people have gathered once
more the spoils of the Egyptians. For the most
graceful and salutary of Fore-Christian supersti
tions, how the woods and waters were peopled
with divinities and were to be secured from reck
less profanation, and reverence to be given to our
'An exaggeration of this truth was taught in the sixties by
Charles P6rin, Professor of Political Economy at the University
of Louvain, author of La Richesse dans les societes chretiennes. He
was right in emphasising (bk. i., chap, iv.) the fact that the life
of Christian people was full of apparent contradictions ; but over
stated his case in many of his propositions, e.g., " c'est le mepris
des richesses qui engendre la richesse '*. Still remember he lived
in the days when Political Economy taught ex cathedra a number
of " scientific truths " now relegated to the lumber heap ; and
living under the spell of those illusions Pyrin's half-truths on
"abstinence" and "population" are more meritorious than the
easier whole truths of those who live when the spell has been
broken.

THE CHURCH AND PROSPERITY 107
sacred Mother Earth, beliefs in themselves allied
with polytheism or pantheism ; and perhaps also
the geomantic superstition called Feng-shui amid
the multitudinous Chinese, with the similar effect
of orderly restraint — these are but the distorted
realisations or imperfect anticipations of Christian
truth. Section XXXI.
And in a third way, in her teaching on family
life, the Christian Church is a powerful support
of material civilisation. For the family is the very
prop of that civilisation ; where it is weak and lax,
civilisation is parasitic and precarious ; but where it
is strong, great nations have rested on its strength.
And just as superstition has been accidentally or
rather providentially beneficial by teaching rever
ence for the earth, so the doctrine of ancestor
worship in its many historical forms has been
beneficial by teaching family reverence, and though
false, is a thousand times truer than the imagined
enlightenment of the After-Christian family. So
among the Romans of the regal times and the
Greeks of the Homeric age, venerating the spirits
of their ancestors and the private gods of the
house ; so also among the ancient Egyptians ; so
again to this day in its elaboration among millions

108 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
of Hindus ; as a powerful force among the Japanese,,
and all-pervading among the Chinese.
But the Christian Church, the sublime vessel of
all truth, cannot rest on any illusion however grace
ful or practical, and her teaching on family life once
again keeps the golden mean between excess and
defect in the strictness of the bonds of kinship ;
forbidding worship but enjoining reverence ; hostile
to the total subjection but also to the total inde
pendence of women ; rejecting the right of parents
to force or forbid the marriage of their children,
but also maintaining the right of parents to educate
their children and control their youth ; regarding
marriage as the providential state for the great
mass of men and women ; confirming it as mono
gamous, indissoluble and religious ; exalting it as
a Christian Sacrament overflowing with super
natural graces and bearing a mystical significance ;
and yet exalting celibacy still more, as the
providential state for the few who were to be
united in a higher and more than earthly union,
and were to form while on earth the vanguard of
continence, and by the example of this celestial
life to protect the terrestial family from all inroads
of corruption.
The essentials of Christian family life being
kept intact, the accidental and accessory parts

THE CHURCH AND PROSPERITY 109
might vary and have varied according to times
and places, national peculiarities, conditions of
civilisation ; such accidentals for example as the
legal rules of succession to property at death, the
father's power to dispose of property during his
life-time, the rights of children over their separate
earnings, whether brothers dwell united in joint
families or are scattered in separate establish
ments, and the strength or laxity of the tie be
tween remoter relatives. Such accidentals have
varied, but not the fundamental relations of
husband and wife, parent and child ; and nations
that rest on that foundation have within them
selves in spite of external calamities an ever-
renewed fountain of recovery.
Thus the Church accused of being " other
worldly" or weltflilchtig, and the opponent of
material civilisation, is seen by those who look
below the surface, to be of that civilisation the
surest guarantee.

CHAPTER III.
CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
Section XXXII.
We have counted as the third antinomy, that the
Church represents a religion of sorrow and yet of
gladness ; teaches a morality which is austere and
yet joyful.
Of the austerity taught from the very beginning
of Christianity, there is no manner of doubt, nor
of the moral impossibility of unaided obedience to
the Christian law. The pride of man is rudely
confronted with the humiliating confession of his
own impotence and guilt; "any standard of duty
which does not convict him of real and multiplied
sins, and of incapacity to please God of his own
strength, is untrue ; and any rule of life, which
leaves him contented with himself, without fear,
without anxiety, without humiliation, is deceptive ;
it is the blind leading the blind ". So the confes
sion of sin enters into the highest saintliness ; and
while the self-complacency of man is an abomina-

CHRISTIAN MORALITY in
tion before God, self-prostration is the very badge
and token of his servants. The saints of Christ,
one and all, the young and unspotted, the aged
and most mature, he who has sinned least, he who
has repented most, the fresh innocent brow, and
the hoary head, they unite in this one litany ; " O
God be merciful to me a sinner ". Nor can they
escape from their conclusion precisely because
each advance in Divine love has brought them a
clearer vision of the All-Holy, All- Beautiful, All-
Perfect One, and the contrast with themselves
makes them sink into the earth with self-contempt
and self-abhorrence.1
Moreover we find that the tremendous truths
proclaimed by Christianity exact a corresponding
high standard of duty. The Christian is called
upon to fight daily against the world, the flesh and
the devil ; to deny himself; to take up his cross
and follow Christ ; and is warned that only through
many tribulations can he enter the kingdom of
God. Nor are these teachings left as vague generalities.
The strongest passions of man are to be kept under
rigid control ; the very hidden thoughts of his
heart, even for these he is held responsible no less
than for the outward deed. Not the smallest in-
' Occasional Sermons, Sermon ii.

112 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
dulgence is granted in the relation of the sexes
to youthful frailty ; and outside the indissoluble
marriage tie, an absolute chastity is inflexibly
upheld.1 The man in the stress and strain of
middle life, with envious rivals, interested calumni
ators, unpitying foes around him, is forbidden even
to wish them evil. The old man resting after a life
of honest toil, and enjoying his well-earned riches,
is not left in tranquillity ; but warned of his pressing
responsibilities, that his position is perilous but
for abundant deeds of mercy, and that if he set
his heart on his riches and his honours they will
assuredly, for all their honest earning, drag him
down to perdition. And the deeds have followed
the doctrine ; asceticism, mortification in a hundred
forms, of body and of desire, fasting and watching,
and long prayers, and long silence, and taming the
flesh and breaking the will, and self-sought humili
ation, from the days of the great ascetic St. Paul
the Apostle in the first century to the days of his
namesake St. Paul of the Cross in the eighteenth,
nay in the Church to this day and this hour.
'For example, in Japan it was the moral difficulty that in the
sixteenth century was the great obstacle to conversion. A con
temporary tells how the Jesuit Fathers were begged in vain to
relax the rigour of the Sixth Commandment and thus gain a
harvest of conversions. See H. Thurston in The Month, March,
1905, pp. 304, 305.

CHRISTIAN MORALITY 113
Section XXXIII.
Shall we then exclaim : O intolerable burden !
O pitiful self-delusion ! O grievous yoke of super
stition ! the bright world made dark, the gaiety of
life turned to sorrow, man's freedom to servitude ?
So appears the Christian religion to many of this
generation, just as it appeared to many before
them ; and not Christianity only, but the fore
courts of Christianity in the Old Law, and even
all religion to the unbelieving heart.
Thus we read in the second chapter of the Book
of Wisdom, written in the days of great material
civilisation, exhortations to pleasure that might be
taken from the pages of many modern heralds of
revolt. "Come therefore and let us enjoy the
good things that are present and let us speedily
use the creatures as in youth. Let us fill ourselves
with costly wine and ointments : and let not the
flower of the time pass by us. Let us crown our
selves with roses before they be withered ; let no
meadow escape our riot." And as a God-fearing
life was a tacit condemnation of the godless, such
life was not to be permitted ; being in fact a public
annoyance and offence, to which no reasonable
man could extend toleration. " Let us therefore
lie in wait for the just, because he is not for our
turn, and he is contrary to our doings, and up-

H4 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
braideth us with transgressions of the law, and
divulgeth against us the sins of our way of life.
He boasteth that he has the knowledge of God,
and calleth himself the son of God. He is become
a censurer of our thoughts. He is grievous unto us,
even to behold ; for his life is not like other men's."
Thus again Lucretius makes use of the ex
quisite medium of his poetry to express his loath
ing and hatred towards the doctrine of stern duty,
of strict responsibility, of dread liability to sin ;
and as a happy contrast to the heavy yoke of
religion, shows us the easy rule of Alma Venus.
And if his view of religion was the true one, it
would indeed be the work of every generous mind
to extirpate this joy-killing pestilence, to judge
Christianity, in the manner of Tacitus, as an ex-
itiabilis superstitio, guilty of hatred of the human
race, and to repeat with Voltaire, ecrasez Finf&me.
Indeed the Roman Empire in the height of its
power tried to crush this unworldly religion that
from the Roman standpoint of worldly wisdom
appeared as criminal madness. And though the
great persecution failed, the spirit of the godless
world survived ; and its aims and views have been
summed up for us by St. Augustine, just as the
great empire of law and order, of material and
intellectual civilisation, which gave to the world's

CHRISTIAN MORALITY 115
votaries all that for them made life worth living,
was crumbling away.
What sort of commonwealth, he asks, did those
wish who accused Christianity of the public ruin ?
There must be all good things in abundance, vic
tory in war, or better still, a well-established peace.
Let the rich and powerful daily grow in their
riches and power, in order to meet the daily
expenses needed to bind the weak to their service.
Among freemen the poor1 must serve the rich,
in order to enjoy food in abundance and an
easy quiet life under exalted patronage ; while
the rich will make use of the poor freemen to be
their convenient dependants and serve as adjuncts
to their patron's splendour. Let the common-
. wealth applaud those who provide, not forsooth
for the intangible public welfare, but for the
tangible public pleasures. Nothing is to be en
forced or forbidden on the plea of public morality :
and the law is simply to look at damage to an
other's property or person or health or enjoyment ;
but otherwise everyone is to be wholly free to do
as it pleases him with his own property and his
own slaves, and even with the free as it pleases
him, provided they on their part are willing. Let
1 " Poor whites " or " mean whites " is perhaps the best transla
tion as opposed to "natives" or "coloured people."
8*

116 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
there be abundant provision of public prostitutes
for the especial benefit of those who cannot afford
such pleasures in their own private establishments.
Let the finest houses be built and nobly furnished,
and within them let men eat and drink and play to
their hearts' content, just as they please, day and
night. Let the professional buffoons and dancers
be everywhere, and the theatres be filled with the
applause of indecent merriment and every variety
of the most savage or most filthy pleasure. Let
him be reckoned a public enemy to whom such a
state of happiness is displeasing ; and whoso at
tempts to change or to remove it, close his mouth,
drive him from his place, put an end to his life.
And let those be true gods who take measures to
provide this state of happiness for the people and
make it lasting : to them and theirs be all the
worship and all the forms of it they may wish : if
only they will make sure that nothing is to be
feared from war or from pestilence or from any
other calamity, to mar the enjoyment of this
Sardanapalan felicity.1 Section XXXIV.
It is written in the pages of history how this
felicity was marred, and marred speedily : the
1 De civitate Dei, bk. ii., chap. xx.

CHRISTIAN MORALITY 117
sumptuous palaces overthrown, the exquisite furni
ture in ashes, the ministers of pleasure dispersed
or dead, the theatres and amphitheatres a dismal
solitude ; the civilisation dying away ; the joys of
it gone ; and yet the religion of shame and sorrow
living on, as though it had some principle of
vitality lacking to the mighty world that was its
foe. How was this ? Or was it possible that the
ascetics who crowded round the tombs of the
martyrs were right after all, and He right who
uttered the Beatitudes ?
To such questionings the Christian can answer
that for those who look closely, the religion of the
cross is at the same time, and by virtue of that
very cross, the religion of gladness ; and again
that the very joys of the old pagan world, and the
analogous joys of the great centres of the modern
world, require as the cost of their production a vast
sum of unhappiness ; while even for those who en
joy them the issue in the main is bitter disillusion
and sorrow heaped on sorrow. Indeed we can
turn on our accusers with a confident tu quoque,
and say to them : It is not we but you that, judged
by the measures of the higher statistics, are declared
to be the authors and abettors of the world's woe.
For if we look back, for example, to the picture
by St. Augustine, we shall see that first of all,

118 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
as the very foundation of all pleasures, there was
a vast mass of humanity who were not counted
among the sharers. The Aristotelian doctrine
that slavery was necessary to liberty, was distorted
in a sense that Aristotle himself would have dis
avowed, and made the basis not of plain living and
high thinking, but of licentious enjoyment. The
boasted happiness of cheerful paganism was de
pendent on the life-long servitude of the majority
of the people ; and of the free portion the greater
part lived in precarious and degrading dependence.
It was man preyed on by man, homo homini lupus,
in extreme contrast to the fraternal charity of
those who were brothers in Christ.
And not in the Roman Empire alone, but
everywhere and from the necessity of the case, an
unchristian and worldly felicity (or seeming feli
city) rests on a substratum of unhappiness. So in
the midst of those passages given above from the
Book of Wisdom we can read the significant
avowal : " Let us oppress the poor man who is
upright, let us not spare the widow, nor reverence
the grey locks of the aged ; but rather let our
strength be our law of justice ; for whatever is
weak is to be adjudged as useless." Precisely, the
weak, the poor, the vast multitude : not for their
lip is the draught of pleasure, but amid sorrow

CHRISTIAN MORALITY 119
and weariness to forge the cup and tread the wine
press for the gladness of the few.
Section XXXV.
And then even among this few, even among the
higher ranks of society and among their favourite
freemen, we seek in vain for a life of happiness
and contentment. Greek " blitheness " exists
rather in the imagination of the poet Goethe than
in the facts of history. For when we look closely,
it is among the Christians, with all their asceticism,
that we find blitheness and hope and peace, while
gloom and melancholy dogged the footsteps of the
heathen. A recent writer, all the better witness
because the ways of Christian asceticism repel
him, has set forth the disillusion, the sadness, the
essential hopelessness of the heathen writers ; the
sorrow summed up in the Virgilian lines : —
Optima quaeque dies miseris mortalibus aevi
Prima fugit ; subeunt morbi, tristisque senectus,
Et labor, et durae rapit inclementia mortis :
and how the later writers could only escape the
note of utter sadness by ignoring all serious pro
blems, and resting in a shallow and makeshift truth,
that could not face the realities of life and offered
to sorrowing souls neither consolation nor hope.1
1 T. R. Glover, Life and Letters in the Fourth Century, 1901. See
especially p. 348.

120 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
The same truth of the joy of the Christians, the
sadness of the pagans, had been previously set
forth by an equally unsuspected witness, Walter
Pater, in the exquisite tale of Marius the
Epicurean. We see a world oppressed with the
uncertainty and illusion of all philosophy ; we
learn the total insufficiency of Marcus Aurelius,
from whose barren soil neither Christian joy could
be drawn nor Christian charity. We seem
to hear the wail of the Greek anthology : All is
dust, all is ashes, all is nothingness.1 Not to
know ! O intolerable doubt, turning every banquet
to bitterness, every melody to discord ! Not to
love ! How then is life worth the while ? Or if
we may love, and seek therein our consolation, as
the sweet-tongued After-Christian poet bids us : —
Ah, love, let us be true to one another ! For the world
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain,
our consolation is ever dwindling away, as nearer
we draw to the heartrending moment of an ever
lasting farewell : —
Atque in perpetuum frater ave atque vale.
Or if intoxicated with power and possession we
would revel in the darkness, the dawn will draw
from us the cry — not of the millions of Buddhists
'Joseph Rickaby, Cambridge Conferences, 1898, No. viii.

CHRISTIAN MORALITY 121
who, like other Fore-Christian peoples, believe
and worship and pray, but — of philosophic
Buddhism : All is transitory, all is misery, all is
unreality ; nor as we watch the loved one writhing
in pain, is it of any avail to cry to heaven for
pity and comfort ; there is no heaven to hear.1
Section XXXVI.
But in extreme contrast to pessimism and
disillusion, all gloom is an alien and enemy in
Christian hearts. If Christianity is the religion
of sorrow, it is also, and pre-eminently, the religion
of joy ; the solution of this antinomy being that
Christianity is the religion of love, and that in this
world love and sorrow are linked by a mysterious
partnership. Now Christian asceticism is no
superstitious pain-worship, no offering to some
pain-loving deity, some evil principle opposed to
the good, as though life and health were not God's
good gifts ; nor again has it aught in common,
except sometimes the outward show, with the
proud self-righteousness of the Hindu ascetic or
Moslem dervish. Much rather Christian ascetic
ism is a form of love ; and love being the root of
joy, it follows that Christian joyfulness is not in
spite of asceticism but its consequence. We are
'C/. C. J. Forbes, British Burma, 1878; Dr. Flint, Anti-
theistic Theories, 1879, Lect. vii.

122 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
taught as an elementary truth that man is on earth
for the one end of perfecting himself in the love
of God. This is his purpose and probation. But
only through labour, pain and suffering is love
perfected. Christianity then has no mission to
eliminate labour, pain and suffering from this world
{pati et perpeti humanum est wrote Leo XIII.),
but to transmute them. They can be the means
whereby we can obtain the subjection of the lower
selfish life and of greedy individualism ; the
suppression of false self-assertion and of blind
nature before the law of reason and of God.1
Christianity is frankly "the religion of suffering,
of mortification, of self-sacrifice, of consuming love,
of self-forgetting zeal, of self-crucifying union. . . .
the religion of the Cross and the Crucified."2
Joyous abandonment, generous self-sacrifice, these
are the watchwords, and to become living images
of the Divine Model of whom it is written that
He pleased not himself.3
To preserve then, and to express, and to in
tensify our love are the functions of Christian
asceticism, from the lowest stages of the all-needful
struggle against rebellious nature and against
supernatural antagonists, to the highest flights of
1 Tyrrell, Nova et Vetera, pp. 405, 406.
2 Faber, Growth in Holiness, chap. iv. s Ibid.

CHRISTIAN MORALITY 123
mystical union of chosen souls who know Christ
only and Him crucified ; thus ranging from the
fight for freedom to the liberty of holiness. And
the common issue is joy. Nay the joyful serenity
of the athletes of Christ has often appeared scandal
ous merriment ; and the light-heartedness of true
Christian populations cannot be crushed by eco
nomic or political oppression. And no wonder,
when the Gospel has proclaimed the Grand Charter
of true emancipation: "Blessed are the poor, the
mourners, the sick, the oppressed, the persecuted ''.
No wonder again, when the Christian family with
its restraint and its sweetness, and the double
strength it gives to all holy natural affections, is
for the vast multitude of Christians a perennial
fountain of gladness.
And while we see around us the After-Christian
world grow daily more terrified at pain and suffer
ing, throwing a veil of euphemism over the stern
realities of disease, grasping at every anodyne,
shrinking from self-discipline and self-denial, the
Christians can say with simple confidence in Cruce
salus. This principle is for them a source of
strength and victory, while the others are involved
in a principle of irremediable weakness.1
'See especially the first chapter and the striking appendix on the
" Gospel of Pain " in Tyrrell's Hard Sayings ; also Faber, Growth
in Holiness, chaps, iv. and xi.

CHAPTER IV.
THE CHURCH AND THE STATE.
Section XXXVII.
We have counted as the fourth antinomy, that
the Church appears the opponent and yet the sup
port of the State ; its rival and yet its ally.
The antagonism of Church and State is derived
principally from two of the characteristics of the
Church, her cosmopolitanism and her autonomy ;
she is both international and independent.
It was the very mission of Christianity from the
beginning to break down the barriers that separated
Jew and Gentile, Greek and barbarian, Roman
and Scythian ; and thereby to come into conflict
with the strongest sentiments of natural' man.
" There is nothing men more pride themselves in
than birth, for this very reason that it is irrevoc
able ; it can neither be given to those who have
it not, nor taken away from those who have."1
It is conspicuous among barbarous tribes : " The
1 Lectures on the Turks, Lect. iv.
*21

THE CHURCH AND THE STATE 125
meanest and most ignorant of the Tartars preserve
with conscious pride the inestimable treasure of
their genealogy, and, whatever distinctions of rank
may have been introduced by the unequal distribu
tion of pastoral wealth, they mutually respect them
selves and each other as the descendants of the
first founder of the tribe".1 But the sense of
racial superiority is far from being confined to
barbarians. The Jews of old, conscious of in
alienable superiority of birth, looked on Roman
and Greek, Syrian and Egyptian with ineffable
arrogance and scorn. And as the world in their
view was divided into Jew and Gentile, so to
Greek eyes into Greeks and barbarians. A simi
lar national pride is cherished among the leading
and active nations of modern civilisation, and their
sense of superiority and their contempt of the
foreigner, whether latent or expressed, is gener
ally in proportion to their temporal success. The
French as la grande nation were long held a stock
example of national vanity. Among ourselves the
old men who remember England of the forties and
fifties in the nineteenth century can testify to the
scorn of the ignorant, backward, unwashed, ill-
governed foreigner, the absolute conviction of the
utter superiority of the English Constitution and
1 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chap. xxvi.

126 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
manners. And similar national prejudices are
seen to this day.1 Nor are such feelings a harm
less and laughable weakness. Alas! the world is
full of all too earnest racial antagonism. There is
scarce a country great or small, that is not troubled
with bitter strife of language and colour, outward
and unmistakable signs abused by a perversity, at
once human and inhuman, to separate those who
should be brothers in Christ
Section XXXVIII.
Such separation is abhorrent to the Christian
Church ; national pride, like all other pride, can
only expect her condemnation ; she warns us that
the last may be first, and the first last ; gives
us the example from her annals that though for a
time some favoured countries and nations may be
her peculiar territory and home, none are secure
of that fair possession, but by an awe-striking and
inscrutable Providence may see it pass to others.
And far from being bound to race or caste, the
Church is like a new nationality, above the little
1 See the comic literature of the time, and even the serious ;
such books as Samuel Laing's series, Notes of a Traveller, with
their blind scorn of the students and professors of Germany. To
day it is rather among the Germans themselves, whose ruler ap
plauds them as the salt of the earth, that we see national vanity ;
or among the Americans to whom it is indisputable that among
all nations they are the first.

THE CHURCH AND THE STATE 127
nationalities of Government, geography and blood,
a heavenly nation with its own uncircumscribed
territory, its own visible government, its own
peculiar laws and universal jurisdiction.
But by this very universality that prevents the
Church from being appropriated by any one
nationality and narrowed to the mind, the ways of
thought, or the predilections of any one, ever ex
poses her to the danger of being regarded as an
alien by all. She cannot be national because she
is universal ; and her exalted character of the
one holy Catholic Church, the Bride and Mystical
Body of the one Christ, makes the notion of a
national Catholic Church a contradiction in terms.
For thus upholding in its integrity the religion of
reason, refusing the support of false pretences, of
national pride and blind fanaticism, she must pay
the penalty. It was more than the Jews could
bear to hear, even from their own Scriptures, how
there were many widows in Israel in the days of
Elias, yet to none was he sent, but rather to a
widow of Sidon ; and many lepers in Israel in the
days of Eliseus, yet none healed, but rather
Naaman the Syrian. And perverted nationalism 1
'The word "nationalism" has two senses, one the effort to
prevent absorption by another nationality, as the efforts of the
Poles, Flemings, Catalonians and Finns, lest they be absorbed by
the German, French, Spanish and Russian nationalities; against

128 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
has continued a repeated source of trouble, from
the complaints of undue preference to Jewish over
Greek widows narrated in the Acts, or the opposi
tion of the native Egyptians to the Greek settlers
in the fifth century, down to the struggle between
Bohemian and German or between Hungarian and
Croatian in our own day.
But is then nationality to be ignored and all
nations treated as though they were identical?
Not so ; for this would be to deny the providential
distinction of nations each bound to use its special
character for the glory of the Most High, and
would be to deny the fitness of the Church to deal
with each. All alike must be addressed, but each
addressed in its own peculiar way, nor any rigid
uniformity preserved of outward expression. For
indeed the fashions of speech and action vary so
much with race and nation, that what would imply
evil in the one, say falsehood or irreverence, implies
no evil in the other ; not that the principles of
morals vary geographically, but the significance of
externals ; and thus each man feels, and feels
rightly, that a foreigner is no judge of his conduct,
and lacks the subtle appreciation needed for a fair
which efforts the Church has no word to say. The other sense,
which is anti-Christian, is to put country or race before the law
of God and the dictates of charity, and to adhere to a religion not
because it is true, but because it is national.

THE CHURCH AND THE STATE 129
estimate. But the Church, precisely because in
one sense she is a foreigner to all, is a foreigner to
none ; and brings with her not only the general
graces needed for all, but also the particular grace
needed to correct the particular form of human
corruption prominent in the natural character of
each nation ; ministering as a common source of
grace to each varied necessity. Unity is her mark :
unification her work : by nature the members
of the Church are not one and would not become
one ; yet in the essentials of their faith, their de
votions, and their moral ideas, she makes them one.
And thus evil once more, as it only exists for
the sake of good, has to yield to good ; and the
struggle of nationalities, that is ever a trouble to
the Church and a difficulty, becomes the witness
of her unifying powers, and the very material of
her triumph. Section XXXIX.
But the complaint of the State or civil power
against the Christian Church has not been merely
that she refuses to be national, but that she
claims an influence and independence that seems
to overpass all limits. An international society
that only taught some obscure doctrines of no
practical import, could be left undisturbed in its
9

130 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
obscurity. But here was a definite message to
all mankind on the gravest of truths ; here was a
definite body that came to set right and to govern
the world ; here too were no empty claims, but
the visible obedience to this alien power by all
classes of men. "If the Church is independent
of the State, so far as she is a messenger from
God, therefore should the State with its high
officials and its subject masses, come into her
communion, it is plain that they must at once
change hostility into submission. There was no
middle term ; either they must deny her claim to
divinity or humble themselves before it, that is as
far as the domain of religion extends, and that
domain is a wide one. They could not place God
and man on one level." 1 For the mightiest war
lord, the most keen-witted legislator, there was no
exemption from obedience.
Such a Church with such claims has ever been,
and if from God, ought ever to be, in conflict with
the civil power ; and the acuteness of the conflict
has shown incessant variation. The unregenerate
civil power of Ancient Rome held the Christians
to be a rebel people, a nefarious conspiracy, men
of a desperate faction ; and looked on the Church
as intolerant, engrossing, tending to a new model-
1 Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, p. 24 :

THE CHURCH AND THE STATE 131
ling of society, breaking laws, dividing families,
introducing unsettlement and discord into the
social and political world ; an organised body
closely welded together and holding all outside
its pale as rebels or misbelievers, itself grasping
at paramount influence and control.1
And not merely in the days of unregenerate
paganism, but ever since, and in proportion to
their unregeneracy, the rulers of this world have
watched the Church with untiring jealousy, and
under the decent mask of civil obedience have
upheld the principles of ecclesiastical servitude
known in recent centuries as Erastianism or
Ca^sarism. And she, for all their watching, has
upheld her great tradition of Apostolic independ
ence and freedom of speech, and has continued to
give her message to the world, and her testimony,
whatever the consequence, in behalf of the moral
and revealed law from the far distant days of
Athanasius, of Chrysostom, or of Pope Martin
against the Emperors of the East, onwards to
the struggle for liberty against Henry IV. of
Germany, or John of England, or Philip the Fair
of France ; onwards again to the nefarious con
spiracies of the Bourbon Courts and Joseph II.
1 See the accumulation of passages given in the Development of
Christian Doctrine, chap, vi., § 1. 9*

132 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
in the eighteenth century, and the treacherous
Napoleon who followed in their evil track, even
down to the days our own eyes have seen, when
Ledochowski of Posen, Eberhard of Treves, Mel-
chers of Cologne, and Mermillod of Geneva were
in bonds or banishment. Truly the Church can
say with the Psalmist : I spoke of thy testimonies
even before kings, and I was not ashamed.
Section XL.
Nevertheless this very Church that seems to
the powers of the world so unwelcome an intruder,
is found on closer scrutiny to be their very stay and
support. As she herself sings on the Epiphany : —
Crudelis Herodes, Deum
Regem venire quid times ?
Non eripit mortalia,
Qui regna dat caelestia.
The fear of her is an idle fear ; she robs not
kings and magistrates of their earthly crowns by
putting a heavenly crown within their reach ; and
Caesar will receive his own with tenfold security,
if to God are rendered the things that are God's.
This conclusion that is a seeming paradox is
reached in the following manner : It is true that
Christianity as the religion of reason and the re
ligion of civilisation has so far produced discord,
that it disallows a union based on fable ; will not

THE CHURCH AND THE STATE 133
suffer a brotherhood based on common descent
from a demigod ; invites the scrutiny of en
lightened reason ; dissipates those objects of im
agination, such as a Divine dynasty, that are the
bond of a barbarous state ; renders impossible the
peace and stability of stagnation by introducing a
dynamic force ; restrains us by no superstitious
fears from exploring to our utmost the earth, the
sea and the very stars ; but yet in all this merely
does what reason and civilisation without any
religion would have done in any case ; only does
more. For they, having made a clean sweep of
picturesque illusion and serviceable fanaticism,
leave a tabula rasa, a bare smooth surface, whereon
no principle of union can find a hold. True, there
is the recommendation to maintain law and order,
to secure complete protection to property, person
and health. But what heart is stirred or conscience
moved by such a recommendation? And this sober
appeal to self-interest loses the very appearance
of reasonableness when addressed to those who
lack property to be protected or an easy life to be
made secure. The antique loyalty may have been
incompatible with reasonable political science : —
I once had sons, but now hae nane;
I bred them toiling sairly,
And I wad bear them a' again,
And lose them a' for Charlie.

134 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
But is the voice of reason and civilisation in the
first letter of Junius of any value as a practical
substitute? "Loyalty in the heart and under
standing of an Englishman is a rational attach
ment to the guardian of the laws ". We need
some better principle of union than this, some
stronger basis of law and order ; and we can find
it in the teaching of the Christian Church on unity
and obedience. For knowing that union in belief
and thought is the only lasting basis of union in
action, she lays the greatest stress on unity of
faith, and expressly teaches the superior efficacy
and dignity of public prayer and worship over
private ; we are dearer to God when in union with
others. Instead of admitting a disruptive indi
vidualism, each one living for himself in self-seek
ing isolation, the Church binds us together by the
doctrine of corporate merit and corporate guilt,
of vicarious suffering and atonement, of mankind
linked together for weal or woe.1 True individu
alism indeed was upheld, almost created, by the
Catholic doctrine of the absolute and ineffaceable
value of the individual soul, to whom as an indi
vidual were administered the Sacraments, and for
whom an individual judgment was in store. But
individualism in this sense was in no opposition
'See Tyrrell's Nova et Vetera, pp. 114, 174, 184, 243.

THE CHURCH AND THE STATE 135
to each man being in his special place amid order
and subordination, knit by a thousand ties to his
fellow-men. No doubt, in the eighteenth century
a theory arose that the maximum of public good
would arise from each man seeking unhindered
his own ends without any regard for the public
weal. But the bitter experience of the waste of
national resources, the waste of lives and goods
(already described in the second chapter), is the
best reply to the imagined harmony of private
self-aggrandisement and public weal. Indeed in its
acute form this reckless egoism appears as revolt
on the one side, and tyranny on the other, both of
them lawless, both of them self-seeking, both of
them in extreme opposition to Christian teaching
that we should seek not our own things but the
things of Christ. Section XLI.
And this same teaching takes, so to speak, the
sting out of obedience. Where reason has dis
solved the charm that threw a halo round authority,
and we meet all unveiled a mere man, advanced in
years, not quick to hear or see, unwieldy in body,
eager for choice food, narrow in mind — there is a
difficulty in obeying him ; or again if, being our
selves grave with age and dignity, we are called

136 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
on to obey an inexperienced stripling. But
reasonable religion replaces the veil of awe that
simple reason had been compelled to remove.
There is no power, it tells us, but from God : by
Him kings reign and princes decree justice.
Earthly power, in the sense of lawful authority, is
a fragment borrowed from the plenitude of Him
who said of Himself: "All power is given to Me
in Heaven and on earth ". To resist the earthly
power is therefore to resist the ordinance of God.
And thus again, it is not the person — not the frail
man encompassed with infirmities — but the office,
the authority, of which God's authority is the
archetype, that we revere and obey. The man
set over us may be our inferior by many degrees
in all mental and physical gifts ; but beside him
stands one who in all things is our superior not by
degrees but by infinitude.1
So it comes about that the Church is the stay
and support of temporal rulers against anarchic
individualism. It is not a loss to them but a gain
to be stripped of seeming power by the Christian
maxim, We must obey God rather than man ;
when the second Christian maxim, All power is
from God, makes solid alike the presidential chair
or royal throne. And this all the more because
1 Hard Sayings, pp. 243-246.

THE CHURCH AND THE STATE 137
by its teaching on the duty of labour and the
sanctity of family life, Christianity provides a stock
of numerous families trained in the laws of obedi
ence and self-restraint, and taught as connected
duties to fear God and honour the King. Whereas
an idle, critical, lax, unprincipled, semi-childless
crowd, to whom it appears the better the less
there is of authority and direction, and having for
its watchword that every man please himself — it
is this After-Christian crowd, untaught the prin
ciple of obedience or having unlearnt it, and not
the Christian Church, that is the danger to order
and to government.
The science of politics is full of difficulty, its
doctrines obscure, its precepts in many points
disputable. But on one point there seems agree
ment, that the constitutional forms of any govern
ment are of little moment compared with the
character of the men on whom devolves their
working. Now the Church, by her own declara
tion, is indifferent to forms of government ; x but
she is a coefficient in producing the character of
men, and profoundly interested in the product.
And this being so, we can repeat the ancient
answer of St. Augustine : " Let those who say that
1 See for example the encyclical Immortale Dei, issued by
Leo XIII. in 1885.

138 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
the doctrine of Christ is adverse to the State ... let
them show us an army of soldiers such as the
doctrine of Christ has commanded them to be, let
them show us such governors of provinces, such
husbands and wives, such parents and children,
such masters and servants, such kings, such judges,
as the Christian teaching would have them to be,
nay such contributors of all manner of taxes and
such gatherers of taxes ; and then let them have
the face, if they can, to call this teaching injurious
to the State." 1
And the same teacher who has cited this ancient
apologia, tells us, not that the British flag (or some
other flag) is for the prudent citizen a commercial
asset of fluctuating value, and to be treated accord
ingly ; but rather tells us that Christians are bound
by the very law of nature (or rule of right reason)
to love and cherish their native land, even to being
ready as good citizens to sacrifice their very lives
for her from whom they have received the use of
this mortal life ; and that of this natural love of
earthly country the author and the cause is God.2
1Epist. 138, "ad Marcellinum," appositely cited in the ency
clical Immortale Dei.
2 Encyclical Sapientia Christ ianite of 1890. Cf. the delightful
chapter on " Instinct de la patrie " in Chateaubriand's Genie du
Christianisme, part i., bk. v., ch. xiv.

CHAPTER V.
THE SOCIAL QUESTION.
Section XLII.
We have counted as the fifth antinomy, that the
Church upholds the equality of man and yet the
inequality of property and power.
The inequalities of social position are a chronic
difficulty to philosophers, a periodical difficulty to
statesmen : not indeed that one man should be
wealthy and in command, another man poor and
subordinate ; for this might seem the fair result of
the competence of the one and the incompetence of
the other ; but that one man should start life with
an equipment of wealth and education, another
uneducated and penniless. This difficulty was
augmented during the nineteenth century by
various economic theories which, in their efforts
to answer socialism, obscured the nature of in
equality. Adam Smith had understood it and
expressed it clearly : that a man is rich or poor
according to the quantity of the labour of other
139

Ho KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
people which he can command or which he can
afford to hire ; 1 that " wherever there is great
property there is great inequality. For one very
rich man there must be at least 500 poor, and the
affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the
many ".2 The fact indeed was a commonplace.
The only meaning of a family rising above the
general level of poor labouring men was that for
that family others were working, others in part or
wholly its servants. And an increase in such
service is of the very essence of every rise through
the multitudinous grades of the middle class to the
higher ranks of the professional and military classes
(the Aristotelian fiicroi) till we reach the man of
" independent means " who enjoys at leisure the
ministrations of his domestic servants, and the pro
duce of his industrial servants in the shape of his
rents, dividends and interest. Without servants
he could neither receive nor enjoy his income.3
1 Wealth of Nations, bk.i., chap. v. 2Ibid., bk. v., chap. i.,partii.
3 Mr. Charles Booth divides the population of London into 8o*i
per cent, who keep no (domestic) servants, n'3 who keep them,
4-9 who are themselves servants, and 37 who are inmates of in
stitutions. But as in nearly half the cases of servant-keeping one
person waits on four or more, while in less than a tenth of the
cases the servants equal or exceed the number of those they
serve ; we may reckon roughly a serving class of 85 per cent., an
intermediate class of io"3 per cent, and a commanding class of
only 1 per cent., the rest being inmates of institutions. — Life
and Labour in London, vol. v., ed. 1895.

THE SOCIAL QUESTION 141
Let this much explain the nature of hereditary
inequality ; its justification, speaking broadly, is its
necessity for civilisation. " Mankind," said Dr.
Johnson, " are happier in a state of inequality and
subordination. . . . All would be losers if all were
to work for all ; they would have no intellectual
improvement. All intellectual improvement arises
from leisure ; all leisure arises from one working
for another." 1
The same truth was expressed by Aristotle in
the seeming paradox that " slavery " is a necessity
for "liberty". For by Aristotelian slavery we
may understand subordination and service of the
great majority ; and by Aristotelian liberty we
may understand the intellectual cultivation and
social and political rule of the comparatively few :
the condition, and the necessary condition of highly
civilised States in the time of Aristotle, and of Dr.
Johnson, and of ourselves.
But this is not the whole truth. How comes it
that our own times are filled with the attempted
solutions of the problem of inequality, and that
Aristotle himself is confused and hesitating on the
institutions of his time that we call slavery ? How
comes it that two minds so radically opposed as
Adam Smith the free-thinker and Dr. Johnson the
' Boswell's Life of Johnson, ii. , p. 207, edit. Napier.

142 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Christian, are both alike, with mid-eighteenth
century conditions before them, so tranquil and
so clear?
The answer here, as so often, is only to be
gained by looking to history. Now the point of
importance is not whether we find great inequality
of wealth from childhood upwards Or whether we
find (what is the same thing in other words) the
great bulk of the people acting as servants and
providers of rent and interest for comparatively
few ; for this is a common feature of civilisation.
The real point of importance is how the inequality
is organised, what are the personal relations be
tween the master and his servants, the employer
and his workmen, the landlord and his tenants.
These relations on a broad view of history are
principally four. Two of them, where the servants
are permanently bound, differ between themselves
fundamentally according to whether the service is
limited and the masters bound by serious obliga
tions, or whether the service is unlimited and the
masters not bound ; the first to be called serfdom,
the second slavery. The two remaining relations
of service have in common that their duration is
limited and their origin a contract ; they differ in
whether the conditions of contract are or are not
seriously regulated by law, custom or other com-

THE SOCIAL QUESTION 143
bination. Both are called free service, or a state
of freedom, in contrast to serfdom or slavery ;
but no particular term has been adopted to dis
tinguish whether they are regulated or unregu
lated, except the misleading antithesis of customary
and competitive.
The notions expressed by the words poor and
rich, servant and master, bond and free, are mere
skeletons till clothed in the flesh of concrete cir
cumstance and shown in actual examples. We
cannot even take for granted that " slaves," still
less "serfs," are in a worse economic condition
than " free " workmen. It is only a presumption
which in any particular case may have to be with
drawn.1 Section XLIIl.
Now precisely in the great world-empire, where
Christianity was first preached, the prevailing
conditions of service were those of unmitigated
slavery ; the slaves were bereft of country, of
family, of a proper name, of marriage ; any child
of theirs was at law without kith or kin ; they
existed only for the benefit of the master who
1 Thus in mid-nineteenth century " free " negroes in Barbadoes
were not in a better but in a worse condition than the Contem
porary "slave" negroes in Brazil; the Russian "serfs" in 1850
were not in a worse but in a better condition than in 1900 when
they were " free ".

144 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
could maltreat them even to death, and separate
or sell them as he pleased.
To this condition the great civilised world of
Greece and Rome had sunk when Christ was
born. No doubt there were many examples of affec
tion and devotion on the part of slaves towards
their masters ; no doubt kind treatment and
emancipation were common ; nor strange when
we remember that the offices of tutor, private
secretary, librarian, and medical man, were fre
quently fulfilled by slaves. But all honest friend
liness rested on the good pleasure of the master,
and the law was a perpetual incitement to the
indulgence of every evil passion.
Was slavery declared by the new religion to
be unlawful ? Or was it approved ? Or was there
silence concerning this most unhappy form in
which the necessary inequality of civilisation had,
in this particular civilisation, taken shape ?
Slavery was not left in silence, was not declared
unlawful ; was recognised rather as a great fact,
as part of the structure of society. It was no ex
ternal emancipation that Christianity proclaimed ;
nay, from the Sermon on the Mount and the
Epistles of St. Paul onwards, the reiterated teach
ing was : Obey, submit, serve your masters most

THE SOCIAL QUESTION 145
diligently, even the harsh and evil tempered ; be
glad of humiliations ; be mindful that for your
sake the Lord of Heaven took on Himself the
form of a slave ; and rejoice in poverty that
was the very condition chosen by Him after whose
way you should walk. Indeed a passage in St.
Paul (1 Cor. vii. 21) was considered by some of
the Fathers as a recommendation to remain a slave
even if the opportunity arose of being emanci
pated ; x and Christian slaves were expressly
warned not to make light of Christian masters
because of their community of faith (1 Tim. vi.
2). Nay, the Christian Church cast forth from
her pale the Eustathians of Cappadocia, who re
fused the title of Christian to all slave-owners ;
and cast forth the Circumcellians of Africa, who
urged the slaves to revolt, and the Ebionites who
exaggerated into temporal equality the spiritual
equality of Christianity, and the Carpocratians
who taught a doctrine akin to the extremer forms
of modern socialism.
The early Church then made no attempt at a
social revolution, suffered the terms of service and
distribution of property to remain unaltered, and
' See Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali, Rome, October,
1904, pp. 169, 170, in the series of articles by S. Talamo based on
the available texts and entitled "La Schiavitu secondo i Padri
della Chiesa ". 10

146 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
might be thought to have left in heretical hands
the charge of emancipation. Section XLIV.
Nevertheless the same Church that by her
glorification of poverty, obedience and humilia
tion might seem the very buttress of slavery, and
of the social order of the great world of Rome
and Greece, was all the while preparing the way
for a radical transformation. And this not by
mere words — many and beautiful were the words
of pagan poets and philosophers on the natural
equality and dignity of man, from Plautus and
Cicero to Juvenal, Epictetus and Marcus Au-
relius. The Christians too, when they had gained
the freedom of their literary voice, had passages
no less eloquent, such as we can read in the
institutes of Lactantius or the Scripture com
mentaries of St. Gregory of Nyssa. But long
before her children could be eloquent the Church
worked a work for which no mere eloquence could
avail ; and having within herself a force that could
change the heart, she began at her very outset
the great and immediate work of freeing her
children from the slavery to passion and sin, an
internal emancipation compared to which the
external and legal emancipation was but a small

THE SOCIAL QUESTION 147
thing, and could be left, according to external
conditions, leisurely to follow. The poor slaves,
hitherto with no will and, so to speak, with no
soul and conscience of their own, were once more
made men by Christianity ; and while in all else
their obedience was quickened, they were totally
exempt from the obedience that implied im
morality or injustice. The sacred words, We
must obey God rather than man, applied to the
social and domestic sphere no less than to the
political. The Christian master, though he could
still command, and indeed with more efficacy than
before, because the Christian slave was bound by
a new and moral obligation, yet could command
only with limitations, lest the law of God be
broken ; and besides this negative limit, was
bound by the positive obligation to minister to
the spiritual welfare of his slaves, or to be as one
who had denied the faith and was worse than an
unbeliever. Thus the obligation became two-
sided ; the very essence of slavery was dissolved ;
those who served a Christian master became as
bondservants or serfs ; and in spite of the letter
of the Roman Law and the jurisprudence of its
exponents, were no longer slaves.
Further, the great wall built of scorn and
abjection, the cruel work of a high unchristian

148 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
civilisation was thrown down by the fraternity and
equality of Christian worship, master and slave
sharing it alike, equal before God,1 with the same
religious duties, partaking of the same august
sacraments and divine mysteries, alike able to be
raised (the slave after emancipation) to be a priest
or bishop, even bishop of Rome (as St. Calixtus),
nay to reach the highest of all glories and to be
numbered among the saints. In fact, a whole
army of martyrs were mere slaves of whom the
names have mostly been lost, but some few pre
served ; 2 and on the anniversary of the martyr's
death (natalitia) the pious crowd knelt round the
tomb, though it was but the tomb of a slave.
Moreover, the honour and obligation of labour,
rendering it worthy of a freedman ; the prohibition
of the exposure of children, a practice that had
supplied a recruiting ground for the slave-specu
lator, who reared the children {alumni) for slavery ;
the adoption of foundlings to be reared in free
dom ; the bloom of institutions from the fourth
' In the Christian catacombs the word servus, in the sense of
slave to another, is scarcely if ever found on an inscription, and
the word libertus (freedman) rarely, though both are very common
on pagan inscriptions.
8 See the chapter, " Les Esclaves Martyrs,'' in Paul Allard, Les
Esclaves Chretiens. Some of the most famous were women slaves,
like St. Blandina of Lyons in the second century and St. Felicitas
in Africa.

THE SOCIAL QUESTION 149
century for widows and orphans, captives and
debtors, sick and poverty-stricken ; and various
laws of Christian Emperors, hesitating indeed and
slow, but by the time of Justinian fairly impressed
with Christian influence — all were factors in the
change from slavery to a condition partly of free
labour and partly of serfdom. And then, in the
Teutonic kingdoms of the West, the Church had
to engage in a long struggle to prevent the
renewal of the old abuses of slavery, such as
unpunished homicide, removal far from home,
and commercial slave trading. And gradually as
the sense of man's dignity, being the participator
in the divine nature, exercised its force, as well as
the sense of Christian fraternity, it came to be
seen that, at least for those races long in the fold,
there was something incongruous in the life-long
subordination of serfdom ; and the manumission
of serfs though not imposed on their masters as
a duty, was recommended as among the works
known theologically as meritorious.
The same dignity of man made it meritorious
to provide all with the means of intellectual culture.
The Church, by her own simple yet sublime teach
ing, imparted to all her children a training that
in a sense can be called philosophical ; by the
history of her saints she put before them examples

ISO KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
of heroic virtue ; by the beauty of her ritual she
provided a means of aesthetic culture for the
poorest, so that the peasant, even if illiterate, was
not uncultured. But she went further and urged
the provision of literary training even for the
poorest ; and so effectively that our England could
show cathedral, monastery, and collegiate schools
together with hospital, guild, chantry, and inde
pendent schools, till they were destroyed, mostly
without any educational substitute, during the
spoliations under Henry VIII., and Edward VI.
Nor was hers the policy that opposed teaching
the American negroes to read and to write.
Section XLV.
Although the inequality necessary to civilisation
implies a certain chronic antagonism between the
classes of society, it is only from time to time that
the antagonism becomes acute, either from wide
spread abuse of property and power ; l or secondly,
from revolutionary religious changes i or the slow
decay of religion/ whereby the ground is weakened
1 So at the time of the Gracchi, and later of the slave revolt
under Spartacus.
aSo the Peasants' War in Germany after the preaching of
Luther. s So in many Greek towns, Corinth among them, as described
by Polybius in the second and third centuries b.c.

THE SOCIAL QUESTION 151
on which rests the acquiescence in service and in
equality ; or thirdly from a combination of these
causes. Such a combination has been the cause in the
nineteenth century of the grave dissension, known
in many countries as the labour question or social
question ; and though not co-extensive with the
growth of After-Christian populations, yet stands
to it in close and frequent connection.
The industrial revolution, that began in England,
spread afterwards to Europe, and later to America,
showed as its first-fruits the collection of vast bodies
of workpeople to take part in the new methods of
production, the displacement of many of the
workers on the old methods, and the dissolution
of the former organisation of master and servant.
Free labour regulated had given place to free
labour unregulated ; and though the legal con
ditions of service were totally unlike those of the
classical Roman Empire, there was a sinister like
ness in the practical abuse of irresponsible power.
For before the law intervened or workmen's
associations became effective, a large proportion of
workmen found themselves forced to accept any
condition of work, however hard, in order to live ;
and forced to see their women and children exposed
defenceless to cruelty and demoralisation such as

152 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Europe had not witnessed for fifteen hundred
years. One government after another has attempted to
adjust the law to the the new circumstances ; and
new codes of workmen's legislation have sprung
up on all sides — factory laws, workmen's insurance,
laws on mines, merchant shipping, education and
public health. In some countries, conspicuously
in Germany, a large part of the evils due to the
industrial revolution have been remedied by legisla
tion. In others, conspicuously in England, legisla
tion has been assisted or supplemented by work
men's associations. But in no country has a
remedy been found for the new evil of an ever-
increasing proportion of the people being com
pelled, themselves to live and their children to be
reared, no longer in the open country, but in the
physical congestion and moral contagion of great
cities. Nor with the examples of Germany, Great
Britain, France and America before us, dare we
affirm that even the best of labour legislation will
ensure contentment, or that associations will be
efficacious for those most in need of it, or not be
perverted, from being a bulwark against oppres
sion and a means of conciliation, to become a
promoter of discord. And then the adoption by
masters and men of After-Christian doctrines and

THE SOCIAL QUESTION 153
negations have widely weakened, politically and
socially, the notions of reverence, duty, obedience
to superiors, submission to Providence ; so that
often those with the least cause of complaint are
the least content.
The word Socialism is often used in a loose
sense to express any effort to prevent or to
mitigate the evils of industrial life ; and in this
sense all social endeavour of Christian and After-
Christian, of Jew or Fore-Christian, to make better
the condition of workmen would be called forms
of socialism ; and every Christian almost ex vi
termini would be a socialist. But this use of the
term deprives it of all scientific value. It is wiser
to confine it to those theories that have in
common the wish to abolish rather than amend
inequality and service, and thus make an end of
income from interest, rent and dividends. This
proposed abolition of " unearned income " became,
by the brilliant reasoning of Karl Marx,1 a terror
'The critics of Karl Marx generally miss the main point, and
fix attention on his teaching that value is congealed labour, and
that history is wholly the result of economic forces. To over
throw Marx on these points is to leave socialism as strong as ever.
One opponent indeed, Dr. Menger, bravely faces the issue, and
states the problem or iniquity of "unearned income" (arbtitsloses
Einkommen) as plainly as Marx himself. But then he makes all
rights to farm-rents, ground-rents, house-rents, annuities, rent-
charges, royalties, dividends, interest from mortgages, from

154 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
to the holders of property and power, many of
whom were conscious of their dubious title to the
possessions called their own. And just as in the
early centuries of Christian history7 we find various
heretical bodies teaching the unlawfulness of
service or of inequality, their doctrine made
specious because of the abuses of slavery — or just
as the abuses of the new West European refine
ment and enrichment of the twelfth century gave
plausibility to the heretical socialism of the Poor
Men of Lyons and the Fraticelli, the unorthodox
perverters of Franciscan social reform — or just as
in the fourteenth century the abuses of decaying
chivalry and uprising legalism gave some show
of justice to the anarchical Lollards — so in these
days various unorthodox Christian bodies, appalled
by the social evils that surround them, unlit by
any beacon, uncertain in their principles, are ready
to forbid rent and interest, and fondly think that
in opposing hereditary inequality they are repeating
to the modern world the genuine teaching of the
Christian Fathers, nay of Christ Himself.
government or municipal stock, or from any kind of loan — all this
"unearned income" to rest, not on any principle of justice, but on
the slipper)" basis of positive law. And his is merely another way
of saying beati possidentis or Might makes Right See the English
translation of The Riglit to the WhoU Produce of Labour edited in
1899 by Prof. Foxwell who himself takes the Christian standpoint
that humanity and justice are needful accompaniments of property.

THE SOCIAL QUESTION 155
Section XLVI.
It is otherwise with the Church to whom those
teachings are secured and made plain by a Divine
illumination ; who, when the due time has come,
will apply her old principles to the new situation.
To meet ancient slavery she had taught that the
mere inequality of wealth was not to blame, nor
the necessity of service, but the misuse of wealth
and the misuse of service. In like manner she
proclaimed in the nineteenth century no levelling
of inequalities, no abolition of domestic or industrial
service, no prohibition of rents, or dividends, or
any form of non-usurious interest. St. Paul's ex
hortations have been followed almost to the letter ;
the same emphasis laid on patience, obedience,
submission, fidelity ; the same disapproval of vio
lence, of confiscation, of revolt. But then the
modern Church, like the ancient, has been equally
emphatic on the duties of Christian masters and
men of wealth, and on the duties (of no practical
import in St. Paul's time) of the Christian State.1
Strict justice, we are taught, forbids all evil
enrichment ; forbids overreaching one's neighbour
in business ; forbids unfair prices, whether to the
'See in general the Acta Leonis XIII,, and in particular the four
encyclicals Arcanum Divine of 1880, Immortale Dei of 1885, Sapien
tial Christiana of 1890, and Rerum Novarum of 1891.

156 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
ruin of competitors or to the injury of purchasers ;
forbids secret commissions, frauds on the exchanges,
and all forms of the ever-renewed evil of usury, of
which the unwearied condemnations by the Church
marks her as the watchful protector of the weak.
Strict justice moreover in the relation of employer
and employed, forbids underpay or overwork, or
misuse of weak age or sex for unsuitable tasks, or
exposing them to immoral or unsanitary influences,
or doing injury to the home life of those employed.
Now matters of strict justice fall within the pro
vince of the State ; and no Christian government
worthy of the name would suffer these evils to
endure, without some effort to abate them ; but
would rather aim at securing in the teeth of so
phistical economists and interested obstructors the
prevalence of fair rents, fair interest, fair wages,
fair prices, fair taxes — in short, society transfused
with justice.
Nor is the plea available that a man can do what
he will with his own ; " own " implies justice, and
for ownership to be perverted to injustice is to cut
at the root of its justification.
Nor again is the plea of free contract available,
and the right of individual bargaining. Extremes
meet, and the individualist demand for unrestricted
contract is akin to the socialist demand for universal

THE SOCIAL QUESTION 157
equality. Both rest on the supposition that men
are mere atoms fortuitously meeting with no relevant
antecedents ; when in fact they are already parts
of a social organisation, and already involved in a
network of rights and duties. No contract is valid
that involves either party in a neglect of their
duties or makes them partakers of injustice. No
laws of property are to be approved that would
separate utterly the fortunes of parents and children,
remove parental responsibility and put the children
of the idle, the drunken and the profligate on a par
with the children of the upright. Both the indi
vidualist and socialist position alike presuppose no
previous family union, no link of native land, no
bonds of citizenship and association, and are adapted
to a yet untried society where not merely the waifs
and strays but the whole population would be
reared in a cosmopolitan foundling-house, and, as
far as legitimate union and offspring were concerned,
would live and die wifeless and childless. So both
theories can be dismissed as unhistorical.
Section XLVI I.
Further, we are taught by the Church that
those in power should promote association and
ownership among the masses of the people as the
two pillars of their welfare ; and so that instead of

158 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
being like a heap of shifting sand or grain in bulk,
that they may be bound in cohesion by multi
tudinous unions according to trade and locality,
and given easy access to a hundred forms of
property and insurance ; a guard moreover being
set lest they be robbed directly or indirectly of the
fruit or the root of their sobriety and toil.
Finally the old teaching of the Christian Fathers
has been uttered anew, on the duties of charity,
on the moral responsibilities of the rich, on the
blessing of almsgiving ; and we may repeat with
Lactantius after sixteen centuries, that if justice
is the basis of society, the bond thereof is com
passion {misericordia vel humanitas). The rich
and powerful and cultured are to spend on the less
richly endowed classes not mere money but them
selves. For the social question is much more
than a money question, and no code of laws, how
ever wise, can provide all that is needful for
fruitful reform. Nay, the chief thing needful
would be missing ; intra animum medendum est.
There must be interior reformation, without which
neither workmen's insurance, nor factory laws, nor
continuation schools, nor public baths and libraries,
nor abundant leisure, nor high wages, nor short
hours of work, nor cheap and sanitary dwellings,
nor allotments and small holdings, nor light and

THE SOCIAL QUESTION 159
equable taxation, will avail for social peace. All
these are good things and desirable ; but their
efficacy is neutralised if those who enjoy them
become entangled in the toils of After-Christian
corruption. Nature not grace prevails, and a
double pestilence, the greed for wealth and the
thirst for pleasure, makes men poor in the midst
of abundance, breaking up homes, setting neigh
bours at variance, making men like the beasts who
prey on one another. Then is forfeited man's
noblest prerogative to dwell together in unity ;
and by a process the very reverse of Christian
asceticism, they who seek their life lose it, and
the tree of happiness they have planted brings
forth ashes as its fruit.
Thus the Church amid externals of which almost
every feature has changed, repeats the same
message that she delivered by the voice of Paul
or Chrysostom ; proclaims the all-importance of
the spiritual life of man ; bids us first seek the
Kingdom of God and His justice ; and then that
all things else shall be added to us ; stands as the
peacemaker between warring classes, between the
embittered slaves and irresponsible masters of the
Roman Empire, between the feudal lords and their
serfs, between the burghers {popolani) and nobles
{grandi) of the Italian republics, and then again

160 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
between the higher burghers {populo grasso) and
humbler citizens {populo minuto) of the Italian
cities ; and once more between employers and
employed in the great industrial centres of our
own day ; urging again and again amid chronic
backsliding the renovation of society by the reign
of Christ.

CHAPTER VI.
SCANDALS AND SANCTITY.
Section XLVI 1 1.
We have counted as the sixth antinomy, that
the Church is full of scandals and yet all holy :
proclaims a law at once difficult and yet easy.
The fact of evil living and evil deeds among
believing Christians is beyond question. Even
if we take no count of the sin and scandal of
heresy and schism (to be dealt with in the eighth
chapter), and even if we remove the mountainous
accumulation of fables, false judgments, blind
prejudice and malignant calumny, there still re
mains, alas ! a second mountain of scandalous fact,
beginning with what we read in the pages of the
New Testament, such as the many failings of
the Corinthian converts or the tepid Church of
Laodicea ; and discernible century after century.
So, for example, the worldly Christians whose
portraiture is to be found in the Shepherd of
Hermas, during the time of peace before the
n 161

162 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
persecution of Decius, and then in natural sequence
a multitude of defections ; again a hundred years
later the influx of laxity after the age of persecu
tions had ended, those unworthy members of the
Church who almost made the great St Ambrose
lose heart, and who clung so fast to pagan licen
tiousness that in Africa the rude Vandal conquerors
wTere astonished at the spectacle of vice ; then
later the scandalous courts of the two great
Christian states, the Frankish and the Byzantine ;
the popes of the tenth century mere puppets of
the factious Roman nobles ; the sad moral con
dition even among the pious Anglo-Saxons of the
laicised monasteries before the reforms of St.
Dunstan ; the concubinage of the clergy before
the reforms of Gregory VII. (HUdebrand) ; the
heaven-defying court of William Rufus ; the un
christian hatreds and homicides of later mediaeval
I tal)' ; the life and surroundings of Pope Alexander
VI., and the licentiousness of the Italian Renaiss
ance ; the forlorn state of the archdiocese of Milan
when St. Charles Borromeo took possession ; the
antagonism of rival orders in the face of a common
foe, with such disastrous results, for example, in
England and Japan; the heartrending testimony
of missionaries that the scandalous lives of
Christians are the greatest of all obstacles to the

SCANDALS AND SANCTITY 163
spread of the faith. Even in lesser things there
appears a continuity of abuse, and we might think
the Fathers were living in the days of Chaucer,
when St. Jerome and St. Gregory of Nyssa bear
witness to the abuses mingled with the use of
pilgrimages, and when St. Chrysostom rebukes
the superstitious use of amulets in Antioch and
Constantinople, though himself enthusiastic in the
rightful veneration of the relics of the martyrs
and the wood of the Holy Cross.
Section XLIX.
And then through all centuries we shall be
troubled and confused by the distressing antagon
ism of laxity and rigour, unless indeed we have so
grasped the key of the golden mean, that even
this obstacle is unlocked, and we see how the very
antagonism, man being as man is, and truth as
truth is, forms a witness to the Church.
Indeed her writers point out that this antagon
ism was foreshadowed on Calvary, and that there
the petty jealousies and miserable disputes which
were to come, the lack of concord and charity
among believing Christians, such dislocation yet
without fracture of the mystical Body of Christ —
all was signified by the racking and stretching of
the Real Sacred Body, yet with no bone broken.
11 *

164 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
But the historical fact remains that all through
Christian history to this day we can trace two oppos
ing characters within the Church, both of them far
from sharing her spirit of sweetness and sanctity.
On the one side we see those who exalt opinions
into dogmas, state truths in the most paradoxical
form, stretch principles till they are close upon
snapping, love to exaggerate decisions of the
Church till these appear to the imagination, not in
their genuine import, strictly guarded, carefully
applied (in the endless special cases of the con
crete), but in monstrous proportions ; as though no
tenderness was to be shown to weaker vessels
(who often in spite of much learning are weak
because ill-educated) ; and as though it were zeal
and fervour, not false fervour and fanaticism, to
trample on the little ones of Christ.
This false fervour exaggerates all things, doctrine
and practice alike, ritual and austerity ; loves to
differ from others, and to thrust before them an
image of God without His beauty, but rather the
wild and puerile fancies of their own half-converted,
half-cleansed and less than half-humbled souls ;
and thus lacking the gravity and tranquillity of the
truth, they bring piety into disesteem.
From this false fervour spring the ill-prepared
apologists who think ignorance can be made up

SCANDALS AND SANCTITY 165
for by declamation and vituperation, practising
no forbearance, making no allowance ; extremists
with portentous self-confidence, like the unhappy
De Lamennais, who thought because there is truth
in traditionalism it is the whole and only truth,
and that because metaphysics alone can do little,
metaphysics are unnecessary and worthless.1
And then, on the other extreme to the violent
and rigorous, are the weak-kneed and worldly ;
false moderation in contrast to false fervour.2
They forget that for a man to give himself up to
the spiritual life is to be out of harmony with the
world around him, that those who realise the in
visible world have a different standard from the
votaries of earth. They think reasonable the
world's narrow code of prudence and discretion ;
'See The Rambler, vol. x., 1858, pp. 70, 118 et seq. ; Tyrrell, Faith of
the Millions, ii., pp. 85, 86 ; and for various examples of the violent
spirit, the chapter on the " Catholic Revival and the New Ultra-
montanism " in Wilfrid Ward's W. G. Ward and the Catholic Revival,
pp. 117, 123. Mark three points in which their exorbitance was
rectified from Rome : first, the defence of the Classics in clerical
education by the encyclical of March, 1853, against the Abb6
Gaume's attack on them ; then, the condemnation of traditional
ism by the Holy See in 1855 ; and thirdly, the tempered definition
in 1870 of Papal Infallibility.
2 Examples from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are
admirably depicted in Wilfrid Ward's Life of Cardinal Wiseman,
chaps, vi., xvii. and xxiv. On the theory of these Christians see
the chapter " What it is to have a Creator " in Faber's The Creator
'nd the Creature.

166 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
are infected with its hostility to spiritual direction,
to mortification, to Church authority. Concession
and compromise are on their lips, to meet the
world half way, to disavow unpopular beliefs, to
lack loyalty to the Holy See, to think lightly of
the majesty of the Church, to appear to the world
as men of sense and intelligence. It is not they
who have vanquished the mean, ungenerous, selfish
spirit of our nature " which at the very first rumour
of command, places itself in opposition to the
superior who gives it ; asks himself whether he is
not exceeding his right, and rejoices in a moral
and practical matter to commence with scepticism ".1
It is they who not in the generous years of youth,
but in the egotistical self-importance of middle
life, become malcontents, out of harmony with the
Church, and ready (in theological language) to
sacrifice the supernatural to the natural, the passive
to the active, the infused to the acquired, minimis
ing the incomparable efficacy of the Christian
sacraments ; and thus a sour, captious, querulous
old age may be the end of a life that started with
fairest promise.2
1 Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, § 5.
2 To bring back to the centre these unhappy beings was the
life-work of Newman and Faber; two men far apart in many lesser
things and externals, yet united in the main thing. And though
it was chiefly the violent with whom Newman had to contend, and

SCANDALS AND SANCTITY 167
In view of so many failings are we to falter in
our faith ? Or to join those who cry out in deri
sion : Is this the glorious Church of Christ ? — this,
His Bride without stain or wrinkle, holy and
immaculate ? — this, the heavenly Sion, the home
of joy and peace ? And indeed the narrative may
be so woven by a skilful hand, that without stray
ing from the nominal truth, the history of the
Church may be made to appear a chronicle of
scandals.
Section L.
Nevertheless these very scandals, if once again
we look below the surface of things to the depths,
if we seek the testimony not of partial but of total
fact, if we remember our theological principles —
these very scandals in the Church are a witness to
her divinity;
Now one first principle to grasp is this, that
" Faith is illuminative not operative ; it does not
force obedience, though it increases responsibility ;
it heightens guilt, it does not prevent sin "} And
thus though faith remains, charity may have fled,
knowledge can exist without love, and the things
Faber with the lax, vainly would the lax seek to find countenance
from Newman or the violent from Faber. Both have been my
guides ; and those familiar with their works will recognise in the
text above little more than their words interwoven.
1 Anglican Difficulties, Lecture ix.

168 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
unseen, though still believed, may attract no
longer. Given then the fallen state and corrupt inclina
tions of man, given the high standard of duty
exacted by the Church, given the doctrine of our
incessant need of reiterated grace, of the life-long
struggle placed before every soul, given the impli
cation of frequent falls by the provision of such
abundant means of recovery — so potent a spiritual
apparatus for raising the fallen — given all this, we
must then expect to see among the faithful a
constant conflict of good and evil, incessant
alterations upwards and downwards among in
dividual Christians, a presumable tendency of all
bodies and institutions to decline and be perverted,
and their need of periodical recall to the principles
of their origin. Nature is not destroyed by grace,
and all the natural dispositions and intellects with
their several infirmities are found inside the
Christian pale as well as outside : " the weak and
the strong-minded, the sharp and the dull, the
passionate and the phlegmatic, the generous and
the selfish, the idle, the proud, the sceptical, the
dry-minded, the scheming, the enthusiastic, the
self-conceited, the strange, the eccentric ; all of
whom grace leaves more or less in their
respective natural cast or tendency of mind.

SCANDALS AND SANCTITY 169
Thus we have before us a confused and motley
scene, such as the world presents generally ; good
and evil mingled together in all conceivable
measures of combination and varieties of result." 1
There is moral confusion in spite of the prevailing
intellectual apprehension of the truths of faith and
the rules of conduct.
The Church must indeed pay the penalty for her
title of Catholic, in particular by enduring in her
fold an abundance of dissension. She cannot
avail herself of the natural bonds of union that
come from a common nationality, common civil
government, common sentiments on daily be
haviour, common tastes or recreations, literature
and art ; or again from a common party spirit or
a community in privileges jealously guarded
against the outside world. She has to forfeit
these particular and natural links because of her
supernatural and universal claims. She is formed
of a miscellaneous crowd that nature would speedily
scatter and that grace alone unites.2 The marvel
is not that there are dissensions among the faithful,
or that even St. Paul had indignantly to ask : " Is
Christ divided ? " but that there is overruling unity.
Nor can the Church select her subjects and
discriminate in the class or culture or nationality of
1 Anglican Difficulties, Lecture ix. 2Ibid., Lecture x.

170 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
her converts ; all have the one unquestionable
title, a soul to be saved ; they have but to knock
and the door must be opened ; and no lack of
courtesy, gentility, learning, good antecedents, are
a bar to receive the ministrations of her who holds
in her hand the chalice of salvation, and in virtue
of that precious charge, whatever else she may be,
must remain the Church not only of the ill-
mannered and coarse-minded, but of the criminal
and the outcast. And this too she must needs be
in order to be assimilated to her Divine Archetype
who took on Himself the burden of man's disgrace
and guilt ; and she must journey through the
centuries bearing as the heaviest of her trials and
the greatest hindrance to her success the daily
shame of her unworthy members, and be well con
tent if she can save at their death those who have
been a disgrace to her during their life.
Moreover from the very first the All Holy
Church has known full well the conditions of her
earthly pilgrimage, and it has ever been her formal
doctrine that she includes sinners among her mem
bers, weeds among the wheat not to be rooted out
till the Domesday harvest ; that her net is to gather
in not good fish only but bad ; that the foolish
virgins no less than the wise come to meet the
Bridegroom ; that there is woe to those by whom

SCANDALS AND SANCTITY 171
scandal comes, but come indeed it must. We are
only yet on the road — in via ; the goal is not yet
reached ; the ideal not yet attained ; the Church is
not a congregation of the perfect, but a training
school of the imperfect ; l and to mistake the Church
Militant for the Church Triumphant is an heretical
anachronism. Indeed the Church has formally cast
forth as heretics the Novatians and Donatists of
the old time, and the Lollards and Lutherans of
the later time, who held that bad men are not
members of the Church but only the predestinate.2
Further, from her very nature and very claims
we must expect examples of great wickedness
within her fold ; if a Christian can rise incompar
ably higher than an alien to the faith, he can also
fall lower ; corruptio optimi pessima : the best
becomes the worst.
Finally the very teaching on asceticism and un-
worldliness (explained in the third chapter) implies
the likelihood that the richer classes — by necessity,
as we have seen, the comparatively few — will be
in habitual rebellion ; the men of business will not
endure her teaching on fair dealing, nor a gilded
youth her austere morality.
'Well explained by the Rev. E. R. Hull in his controversy in
1904 with the Parsees of Bombay, and reprinted as Theosophy and
Christianity, London, Catholic Truth Society, 1905.
2 Present Position of Catholics, Lecture iv.

172 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Section LI.
But do not these explanations after all only
show that Christianity preaches a doctrine too
difficult to be observed, loads us with burdens too
heavy to bear, is pitched in too high a key for our
voices to sing in harmony ? And indeed we might
be tempted thus to think, and to abandon the law
of Christ as too lofty for human endeavour, if we
steeped ourselves in the details of evil-doing, and
fed our imagination daily with the record of Chris
tian scandals. To provide such a detailed record
is fondly thought by many to be a scientific,
historical, meritorious provision of objective truth.
Each single fact they narrate is true, each state
ment based on genuine documents. And all the
while they forgot the warning of historical science
that partial truth may issue in total error, that the
quantity of our words telling of good and evil must
be in suitable proportion to the relative quantity of
actual good and evil, and the true individual facts
when out of their place in the general scheme of
things, when out of focus in our own minds, when
out of proportion to the totality of facts, may be
the greatest of falsehoods. When therefore for
every three words written the threescore are left
unwritten that are needed to set the three in their

SCANDALS AND SANCTITY 173
place, the readers, if ill-instructed and ill-prepared,
will end by knowing less than they knew before ;
they lose what they possessed ; their acquisition of
knowledge, like a youth's first knowledge of licen
tiousness, is not a positive but a negative acquisition ;
their minds are left laden with a balance of error,
and their second state of ignorance is worse than
the first.
Now there are two great categories of fact,
without which the scandals of Christianity can
neither be weighed, measured or understood.
The first is the actual practice of the Christian
law in a multitude of homes, mostly but not
exclusively rural and humble ; and the second is
the heroic life of the great army of God's chosen
servants. Therefore, lest I fall into the very
fault I have just condemned, it is necessary, having
spoken of Christian scandals, to speak again ; ne
cessary to add, as the avowed advocate of detailed
historical fact, some reference to the particulars
both of the ordinary Christian life and of the
heroic. Section LI I.
The ordinary daily life and habitual homes of a
Christian people are indeed not easy to ascertain
or to portray ; but we are fortunate in possessing
ready at hand the great work of Frederic le Play

174 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
(of nineteenth century economists second to none)
who described with needful details in a series of
monographs some sixty typical families of the
working classes from one extremity of Europe
to the other, as they appeared about the middle
of the nineteenth century.1 Many examples are
to be found among these where the Christian re
ligion is taught and practised in its integrity.
Look at the Hungarian peasant family on the
plains of the Theiss observed by Le Play in the
year 1846 (vol. ii., chap, vii.) ; solid piety, religious
education of children, purity of morals, not an
illegitimate child in the commune, affection and
care bestowed on children, respect for women and
the aged, early but not premature marriages, pro
found reverence by children all their life to their
parents. Look, again, at the German iroh-smelter's
family at Hundsrucke, near Coblentz, observed by
Le Play in 1851 (vol. iv., chap. ii.). Look at the
Basque families of peasants and fishermen as they
were to be seen in 1856 at St. Sebastian in Spain,
or at Lavedan and Labourd in France (vol. iv.,
chap, vi., and vol. v., chap. v.). Look at that
amiable Provencal family described by M. Focil-
1Les Ouvriers Europeens, published originally in 1855 m a large
folio volume. They were republished in six large octavo vols, in
1879. The references that follow in the text are to this latter
edition.

SCANDALS AND SANCTITY 175
Ion in 1859, and typical of a whole class, half
peasants in their native village, half workers in
the soap factories of Marseilles, and whom the
iniquities of French legislation, and the tempta
tions of a great city, had not been able to turn
from reverence, from moral purity and domestic
peace (vol iv., chap. viii.). Look at the crofter of
Brittany visited by M. Duchatellier in 1851 (vol.
iv., chap. vii.). Look at the family of Tuscan
metayers as they were found by M. Peruzzi in
1857 and, like a multitude of their fellow-peasants,
living happy and secure, full of affection and re
verence, and honouring religion by the outward
and inward practices of piety (vol. iv., chap, iii.).1
Come nearer home and consider the example of
Ireland — Ireland let us say during the sixty years
before the great famine — where a vast population
in the sordid poverty that comes from the extreme
of economic misrule, lacking literary or artistic
cultivation, their religion shorn of its beautiful
externals and accidental dignity by the hand of
persecution, still in virtue of that religion, and by
obedience to it, giving a shining example of Chris
tian family life, immorality unknown or scarcely
known, reverence for parents and dutiful care for
1 These illustrations are drawn from a previous work of the
author now out of print, Studies of Family Life, 1886.

176 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
brethren universal, and happy patience amid con
stant troubles — virtues so luminous, a practice of the
Christian law so diligent, that by the mere example
they drew to their faith an hereditary antagonist.1
Once more when the repute of Spanish America
was perhaps at its lowest, and Mexico had suffered
some fifty years of anarchy, an After-Christian
traveller from America in 1869 was amazed at
the universal excellence of Mexican family life, the
reverence for parents, affection in the home, total
absence of the precocious insolence and vice so
familiar to him in his own land.2 He declared that
in the family circle they were models for the world,
and was only mistaken in thinking their conduct
strange and solitary, due to their nationality not
to their religion.
But indeed such family life was nothing new;
and let France, conspicuous to-day as the sad
parent of the After-Christians, give an example from
her happier past. Various sources, in particular
those unpublished family records known as libri
rationum or livres de raison, have been examined
by M. de Ribbe in his book on the families of
' See Wilfrid Ward's Life of Aubrey de Vere, p. 183, on the con
version of Sir Stephen de Vere. It was almost as if the coolies of
Assam or Guiana were to convert, by the spectacle of their virtues,
an English tea-planter or sugar-planter to their faith.
3 Colonel A. S. Evans, Our Sister Republic, chap. xvi.

SCANDALS AND SANCTITY 177
France in the olden time. The inner life of the
French homes has been laid before him, and he
has found in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seven
teenth centuries a deeply religious spirit among
rich and poor, filial piety, parental devotion, rever
ence to the mother and the widowed mother, the
traditions of the past handed down from one
generation to another, a family house for poor as
well as rich, not a lodging or a tenement, cultiva
tion of the intellect among women as well as men,
charity to the poor, edifying deaths, pious legacies
(notably there were foundations in almost every
village to enable poor girls to marry), wills a
source of union, not of disputes and lawsuits, peace
among brethren ; in a word, the Christian family.1
The pious home of France had its counterpart
in Germany, and the details can be read for the
fifteenth century in Janssen's, for the twelfth
century in Michael's, histories of the German
people. Moreover, the trade guilds of the fifteenth
century and previous centuries reflect the spirit of
contemporary family life ; immorality was a bar to
admission ; the members were bound as though
they were brothers, to mutual help, common wor
ship, and works of charity to the poor ; the wife or
widow of a master was given a position of privilege
1 Family Life, pp. 183, 183.
12

178 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
and honour ; and fourthly, a fatherly care was taken
of the apprentice, who became a member of the
family, and for whose moral as well as technical
training the master was responsible.
Let this little be sufficient to show that those
who say the common Christian virtues are beyond
the common reach will find in history their con
demnation. Section LI 1 1.
Let us pass to the second category of fact, the
heroic life of the great army of saints. And if
we shrink from the task, we cannot escape it ;
all too urgent are the commands of genuine his
torical science, that bids us, if it is with man's
history that we are dealing, not to pass by the
greatest of historical facts ; and if it is man that
we are making known, not to hide the highest
summits to which man has attained. There is no
help for it ; and unless the secular history of these
later ages is interwoven with Church history, and
Church history is interwoven with hagiography, we
had better close the historical record altogether ;
for silence is better than falsehood, and a blank
page better than a caricature.
The great fact then is this, that the Catholic
Church is the mother of saints ; that, from the
very beginning of Christianity to this day, weak

SCANDALS AND SANCTITY 179
creatures, raised to participate in the Divine nature,
have led a life of supernatural virtue, acting and
suffering with faith, patience and love, all three
superhuman, and crowning all with a death,
sometimes by violence, sometimes in tranquillity,
but always superhuman ; and decade after de
cade, through nineteen centuries, sometimes more
numerous, sometimes less, but always present,
have formed an unbroken golden chain, men and
women, old and young, of all tribes and tongues,
of all ranks of society, of all callings and occupa
tions ; some putting the seal to a life of innocence,
some raised from an ordinary life, some rescued
from a life of guilt ; amid every variety of circum
stance ; sorrow and failure being to some the
occasion of sanctity, gladness and success to
others ; a beautiful mosaic of souls of every con
ceivable pattern and complection of sanctity,
making up the fulness of Christ ; J and while
1 Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, pp. 419, 430. The same writer well
rebukes the singular narrowness that has no good word for the
contemplative life as distinct from the active; when the very
notion of the corporative life of the Church requires all kinds of
sacred functions, the whole being perfected by the perfection of
each part, and in this case requiring that some should be set
apart (as a supreme privilege) for incessant worship and for a
testimony to man's last and highest end. It follows that " St.
Simeon Stylites in the desert was as actively a member of the
Christian community as St. Paul ".
I 1 "*

180 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
some of them have born the yoke from their
youth upwards, others have shot up at once to
their high stature, fulfilling in a short space a long
time, drawn all of a sudden into the irresistible
whirlpool of Divine love, like the jailor or exe
cutioner or simple bystander converted by the
sight of Christ's martyrs, and then and there
unexpectedly enrolled in the white-robed army,
marching with joy forthwith to torment and
death, having drawn from the fountains in the
home of the Mother of Grace, whither they have
entered, the spirit of indomitable fortitude ; but
however they have entered, how long or in what
manner they have served, all alike in the one
thing and the one thing necessary, all drawn by
a personal love for a Crucified Redeemer, all aim
ing at that mystical union with God, the prelude
and foretaste of that personal, self-annihilating,
adoring, unchanging, eternal love in which alone
our heart can find rest.1
Such in general is the great fact of heroic life ;
the particular details can be gathered from the
literature of hagiography, whence we can draw
what is needful for the purposes of Church
'Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, p. 186 ; Faber, The Creator and the Crea
ture, bk. iii., chap. iv. ; Newman, Present Position of Catholics,
Lecture ix., 6.

SCANDALS AND SANCTITY 181
history and of science. For if we set the facts
in chronological order we shall have to pronounce
that the phenomenon of heroic sanctity, amid the
greatest variety of circumstances, is an invariable
concomitant of the Church, not of one place indeed
or one nation, but always present in some part of
the Church and a perpetual witness to her super
natural character.
Let us then glance in the briefest and most
fragmentary of surveys at the great reality.
Section LIV.
The innumerable martyrs of the first three
centuries, in all parts of the Roman Empire — who
can forget them, or their sweet-tongued poet
Prudentius ? Then followed in quick succession
the multitudinous band of Egyptian hermits, and
the great Fathers of the Church in East and West
alike, showing there was no divorce between the
gifts of intellect and the gifts of faith. And if in
some measure there came peace to the Church
within the Roman Empire, there raged in Persia,
beyond her south-eastern borders, an appalling
persecution. Then came the barbarian invasions,
but no break in the history of sanctity ; and a new
phase of holy living can be traced in the monasteries
of St. Basil in the East, St. Benedict in the West,

1 82 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
and St. Columba in the North ; while far away,
all unexpectedly, the pagan dream of the Islands
of the Blest seemed to take solid form in Ireland
and then England, before the Danish devastation,
as Islands of the Saints. A little later, with the
fresh bloom of Europe, came the Saints of the
Middle Ages, Gregory VII., and Anselm, and
Bernard, and Bruno, and Thomas of Canterbury ;
then the mighty thirteenth century, with saints
numbered by thousands who followed in the track
of Dominic and Francis ; and even in the latter
and sadder times the golden chain is still unbroken :
Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena brighten
the dark days of Avignon ; and Thomas a Kempis
in the North, and in the South Bernadine of Siena
and Antoninus of Florence turn to sweetness the
bitter draught of the fifteenth century. And our
own England ? Whose pulses do not beat quicker
as the time draws nigh when we see what men can
do and what men can be, and when we read the
acts of the protomartyrs of the new persecution ;
of John Fisher, Thomas More, the London
Carthusians, the Observant Friars ; their stead
fastness amid defection, their clear minds amid
confusion, their ardour amid coldness, their en
durance amid faintheartedness ? Truly the annals
of sanctity amid human darkness are like sparks

SCANDALS AND SANCTITY 183
running to and fro among the reeds and ever and
anon lighting up a brilliant flame. Such a flame
illumined the whole world in the later sixteenth
and earlier seventeenth centuries ; names in all
men's mouths, such as Francis Xavier, Philip
Neri, Teresa, Francis of Sales, Vincent of Paul ;
and a renewed army of martyrs, conspicuously
those in England, the noblest trophy of the
Elizabethan age, and the immense multitudes who
shed their blood for the faith in Japan, where the
persecution almost surpassed in atrocity and in
glory the persecution by Pagan Rome.1
The eighteenth century came, a sorrowful time,
when the forces of evil seemed to overpower the
forces of good ; and yet a century illuminated, not
by the lurid glare of Voltairian " enlightenment "
or German Aufklarung, but by the pure flame of
Christian devotion, by the martyrdoms in China
counted by tens of thousands at the beginning of
the century, and by the copious martyrdoms at the
end during the French Revolution, as of the
sixteen Carmelite nuns of Compiegne singing
together sweetly as they were led to the scaffold,
the youngest novice first ; and the sound not
ceasing but only becoming weaker as the voices
'See the details from authentic sources given by Fr. H.
Thurston in The Month, April, 1905.

1 84 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
became fewer, till the Prioress last of all was slain
and the song was silenced. These latter years
of the eighteenth century matched well with the
earlier ; and the years between were adorned with
the bright supernatural lives (to name no others)
of Grignon de Montfort, Alfonso Liguori, and
Paul of the Cross.
Nor has the nineteenth century failed us, but
even now from the yet imperfect record can show
her muster roll of heroism : simple parish priests
like the Curd of Ars or his contemporary John
Baptist Guarino ; laymen and lay women like the
young workman Nunzio Sulprizio of Naples or
Anna Maria Taigi of Rome ; founders of con
gregations like Mother Barat or Don Bosco ; a
crowd too large to enumerate, who have added to
the old religious orders a new lustre ; bishops like
Lawrence Imbert in 1839, and a goodly band of
priests who in Annam, China and Corea have laid
down their lives for their faith,1 mingling their
blood in those lands with the blood of many
thousands of native Christians, who have shown
themselves of the same dauntless race {to dfia^ov
1 See Cardinal Steinhuber's article in the Stimmen atis Maria-
Laach, January 1905, based on the work Catalogus ac status
causaram beatificationis Servorum Dei et Beatorum canonizationis,
Romae 1901.

SCANDALS AND SANCTITY 185
yeVos) in whom St. Chrysostom fourteen centuries
before could rejoice.
And within the limits of Europe itself during
the nineteenth century a vast roll of statistics can
be compiled on sufferings for the faith : the pillage
and slaughter that befell the monks and friars in
Spain in the thirties ; the persecution in Switzer
land in the forties ; the martyrdoms under the
Commune in Paris ; the persecution in Germany
in the seventies, called with unconscious irony
the struggle for intellectual civilisation — Germany
whence many hundreds of priests and some 8,000
women, devoted to good deeds, were driven, with
out even the form of a trial, into exile ; where
many of the clergy, bishops among them, were
cast into prison, and hundreds of parishes lay long
with none to minister to the needs of souls.
But all these things are less appalling than the
recurrent and ruthless persecution in the East of
Europe, Lithuania and Poland under Russian
rule, renewing in the nineteenth century the work
begun by the Empress Catherine in the eighteenth ;
hundreds of thousands of Catholic " Uniates "
forcibly registered as Schismatic " Orthodox,"
and then forbidden to practise the Catholic re
ligion under pain of fines, of imprisonment, of
scourging, of seeing their children torn from them,

186 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
of being sent to the living death of Siberia. Nay,
the persecutor has not shrunk from inflicting the
tortures of a lingering death, witness the piteous
annals of the mines of Siberia ; witness the acts of
the Polish nuns of Minsk, dying under the scourges,
or slowly drowned as they were dragged after a
boat through the waters, rather than abandon
their faith.
Better now can we understand the words of the
Creed, bracketed as the ninth article in the
Catechism, "I believe in the Holy Catholic Church,
the Communion of Saints ". Better now can we
understand how the Church, though the Church of
sinners, is yet holy : holy in potentiality, in many
cases holy in act, in all cases aiming at the holy
supernatural life, and leading to it ; exhibiting
sanctity inchoate and in the process of making, ever
directed towards an ideal to be reached at last,
the sanctity undimmed of the Church Triumphant.
Section LV.
Vae soli, woe to him who stands alone, is a
sociological as well as a scriptural maxim. It is
needful in all the sciences to make use of the
previous accumulation of knowledge, and not our
selves start afresh or stand apart, but rather
follow the consensus of experts. Still more in

SCANDALS AND SANCTITY 187
spiritual things it is not for each man to find out
all by himself, or take his own separate and sub
jective experience as the test of truth. Rather
we must make use of the treasures of spiritual
labour and experience that have been accumulated
in the past, and not stand apart from spiritual
experts, the Saints who in virtue of their sanctity
have been the chief ministers of the Divine Spirit
by whom the dogmas of the Church have been
unfolded. For those best know the doctrine who
best live the life.
We must then hold fast to continuity of dogmas
and hierarchy ; we must hold fast to fellowship
with all the Saints ; sanctity being inextricably
entwined with faith and obedience ; without dogma
there are no Saints ; without Saints there is no
union with God.1
It is the unwilling mission of all error to minister
in the service of truth ; and " things evil have a
soul of goodness that we may observingly distil it
out". The unsuspected unwitting recognition of
the all-importance of heroic sanctity — this is the
soul of goodness to be distilled out of the repulsive
philosophy of the German Frederick Nietsche.
'The foregoing has followed chapters v. and ix. of Tyrrell's
Lex Orandi and the remarkable review of that book under the
heading "A Grammar of Faith," by the Rev. Herbert Lucas in
The Tablet, 16th April, 1904.

1 88 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
For he proclaimed that the supreme task of
mankind was to produce the Uebermensch or
Super-man, the grand and lawless being above and
beyond good and evil. In this he was only
partially wrong. For the temple he built for the
monstrous Uebermensch belongs rather to those
who have shown themselves, in the truest sense, to
be men. And these are the Christian saints ;
these " the choicest flower, the richest fruit of
humanity, . . . who like Christ have gone forth
in all ages and peoples as sheep in the midst of
wolves, self-sacrificed victims to the cause of
God, . . . who have sown in tears that others
might reap in joy, . . . who have laboured hard
and long that others might enter quickly and easily
into the fruit of their labours ".1
To produce Christian saints is the supreme task
of mankind ; and it is for each poor wanderer to
utter as his supreme cry : Let my lot be with the
saints and my end like theirs !
1 Lex Orandi, chap, v., p. 29.

CHAPTER VII.
LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE.
Section LVI.
We have counted as the seventh antinomy that
the Church upholds and yet opposes religious
freedom or liberty of conscience.
To offer the alternative of conversion or the
sword is a Moslem not a Christian practice. Much
rather " the Church takes anxious care that none
be compelled unwillingly to embrace the Catholic
faith ; for no man, as Augustine wisely warns us,
can believe unless he is willing to believe ".1 In
deed the incongruity is obvious between faith as
the gift of God, and force as the work of man ; and
it is a fundamental claim of the Church to demand
liberty of conscience. Only let us understand
what is meant by conscience and what is meant
by liberty.
Now as opposed to the materialistic or panthe-
' Leo XIII., encyclical Immortale Dei, given in Denzinger's En
chiridion, n. 1737. 189

190 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
istic answer to man's questionings, the theistic
answer proclaims a Divine law as the rule of
ethical truth, and the standard of right and wrong ;
the Divine reason or will commanding the obser
vance of the natural order of things, an order that
itself is from God. The impression or light of this
Divine law in the minds and hearts of rational
creatures is what is called in Christian theology the
natural law. " This law, as apprehended in the
minds of individual men, is called ' conscience ' ;
and though it may suffer refraction in passing into
the intellectual medium of each, it is not thereby so
affected as to lose its character of being the Divine
law, but still has, as such, the prerogative of com
manding obedience." 1 Hence it is never lawful to
go against our conscience : it claims to be a Divine
voice speaking within us, and telling us that this or
that is now to be done or not to be done, and
demanding, not in a speculative matter but in our
present conduct, a dutiful obedience. The particu
lar dictate may be mistaken ; conscience may be
(as it is called) erroneous ; but yet it is to be
obeyed. It is a spiritual and invisible influence too
subtle for science, too profound for literature ; in
dependent of the powers of the State. It is the
aboriginal Vicar of Christ ; and even though the
' Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, § 5, on " Conscience ".

LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE r9i
eternal priesthood throughout the Church could
cease to be, still in the voice of conscience the
sacerdotal principle would remain and would have
a sway.1 And if the application of force can neither
awaken nor lay to rest the sense of right and
wrong, the consciousness of transgression, the
pangs of guilt, the dread of retribution, that are
first principles in religion, still less can it touch the
love that is a first principle of the Christian religion.
As Christians we boast that a personal love of
God is the very substance of our spiritual life ; and
we are taught to beg that our union with God and
with our brethren may be like to the ineffable love
and union of wills that subsist eternally between
the Persons of the Divine Trinity. How can any
earthly magistrate touch this region of mysterious
affection ? How can love be enkindled by external
compulsion ? Section LVII.
Conscience then indeed and a religion of love
must be free. But what is freedom or liberty?
Not the false liberty that is, so to speak, an artificial
determinism, surrendering our own will to the
domination of the strongest motive and becoming
1 Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, § 5.

192 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
the slave of passion ; not the false liberty that
recognises no supreme rule of a moral law, no
Creator above us, but claims as a right to think,
speak, write, act according to its judgment or its
humour without any thought of God at all ; and
claims for each man "to be his own master in all
things and to profess what he pleases, asking no
one's leave, and accounting priest or preacher,
speaker or writer, unutterably impertinent, who
dares to say a word against his going to perdition,
if he like it, in his own way ".1
This is mere lawlessness, the irrational freedom
of the wild beast. This is the freedom "by which
the luxurious mean licence, and the reckless mean
change ; by which the rogue means rapine and the
fool equality ; by which the proud mean anarchy
and the malignant mean violence".2 This is "the
very spirit of Whiggery : opposition for its own
sake, striving against the truth because it happens
to be commanded us ; as if wisdom were less wise
because it is powerful ".3 This is the liberty of
which Dr. Johnson said : " We are all agreed as to
our own liberty, we would have as much of it as we
can get ; but we are not agreed as to the liberty of
1 Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, § 5.
2 Ruskin, Seven Lamps, vii., § 2.
'Newman's Letters, ed. by Anne Mozley, p. 269.

LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE 193
others : for in proportion as we take, others must
lose".1 This is the liberty meant by Rousseau
when he says in his Contrat Social : " Man is born
free, and yet everywhere is in chains ".
Much rather the sober definition of liberty in
the social and political sphere is the being un
hindered in the exercise of our rights and the
practice of our duties. But rights and duties are
meaningless without law ; and human law is in
coherent if not resting on Divine law. Therefore
Divine law is the needed foundation not merely
of internal conscience but also of external liberty.
Wisely then it has been said by Coleridge :
"What then is freedom? Rightly understood, a
universal licence to be good." So Montesquieu :
" Political liberty does not consist in a man doing
what he wishes, but in being able to do what he
ought to wish ". So Boetius twelve centuries
earlier : " To be obedient to justice is the very
height of liberty ". So George Eliot in the mouth
of the preacher in Felix Holt : " I apprehend that
there is a law in music, disobedience whereunto
would bring us in our singing to the level of
shrieking maniacs or howling beasts : so that
herein we are well instructed how true liberty can
be nought but the transfer of obedience from the
1Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. Napier, iii., p. 375.
13

i94 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
will of one man or of a few men to that which is
the norm or rule for all men ".
Everything human indeed can be abused ; but
human law in its use as distinct from its abuse is
not the opponent but the protector of liberty, men
being subject to this law precisely because they are
free and reasonable beings, not irrational automata.
By human law the rights and duties of men in
society (and we have to deal with no other men)
instead of being confused and imperilled are made
clear and secure ; and they are thus enabled to live
more easily in agreement with the rule of reason
and the law of God, and to fulfil the very object
for which they are on earth.1
Hence it is a misconception to complain of the
multitude of modern laws as a diminution of our
liberty. If they are a diminution, it is not because
they are laws or because they are multitudinous,
but because they are mistaken or ill-executed ; and
if with the growth of population and the change in
the methods of industry, the area of restraint is
enlarged, this enlargement is precisely to protect
1 " Igitur in hominum societate libertas veri nominis non est in
eo posita ut agas quod lubet, ex quo vel maxima existeret turba
et confusio in oppressionem civitatis evasura, sed in hoc, ut per
leges civiles expeditius possis secundum legis aeternae praescripta
vivere." — Encyclical Libertas praestantissimum of Leo XIII., June
1888.

LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE 195
the liberty of good citizens by the restraint of evil
doers.
Now, madam, may his highness live in freedom,
And this man out of prison ?
Thus for over fifty years the law of England
has forbidden women to work in underground
mines, and thereby has made a salutary addition
to the restraint of covetousness, and a salutary
addition to the liberty of womanhood. Again,
the law of Germany effectively forbids the common
practices by which usurious money-lenders inveigle
men and women to their ruin ; and the law thereby
has made a salutary addition to the restraint of
evil-doers and to the liberty of the German people.
If this is the true conception of law and liberty,
it follows that the rights of conscience, like other
rights, can claim protection ; and that a wise
legislation will increase the area of restraint in
order to increase the area of liberty. If it will not
suffer the defenceless public to be robbed of their
material goods, but puts restraint on thieves ; so
too it will not suffer the defenceless public to be
robbed of their moral and intellectual patrimony,
but puts restraint on deceivers, lest a nation's
greatest asset, the fundamental truths of faith and
morals, of justice and society, be whittled away by
sophistry. 13*

196 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Section LVIII.
And here once again we see that Holy Church
through good report and evil report has shown
herself the true friend of the common people ; and
when men murmur against the Index, denounce
the Inquisition, and spit, like a recent enlightened
traveller from America, on the tomb of Torque-
mada, they forget that the Church is primarily
for the poor, the weak, the unlearned and the
simple. It is for those described in a recent con
troversy as " large popular audiences whose inno
cence is such that to deceive them is like deceiving
a little child," and as "that big fateful child, the
public, to whom above all maxima debetur rever-
enlia".1 To preserve to these, the much greater
part of society, the incomparable goods of pure
morals and the true faith, goods that (as we have
seen) even in this world are to them the source,
and indispensable source, of happiness — to prevent
this defenceless multitude from being robbed of
their supremest patrimony — what man with any
soul of honour or sense of humanity who would
not draw his sword for their preservation?
Religion's all or nothing ; it's no mere smile
O' contentment, sigh of aspiration, sir —
No quality o' the finelier tempered clay
Like its whiteness or its lightness ; rather, stuff
1 The Times, 24th Oct., 1904.

LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE tgf
O' the very stuff ; life of life, and self of self,
I tell you men won't notice. When they do,
They'll understand.'
No wonder therefore when the Church has been
raised to a position of earthly power, when the
rulers of the world have knelt at her feet and
asked for her guidance, she has implored them to
protect her little ones from scandal, to preserve
her tender sheep from the ravening wolves. No
wonder that she has ever been on the watch
against lawless literature which appeals not to
argument and reason and fact, but to imagination,
to curiosity, to the sense of honour, to the sense of
beauty, to the sense of ridicule, which insinuates,
seduces, declaims, inflames, carries captive — that
the Church is on the watch lest so versatile an
agent should cause that which is not true to pass
under the name of truth.
No wonder again that she emphatically bids
men ol science take " great care to avoid scandal
or shocking the public mind or unsettling the weak ;
the association between truth and error being so
strong in particular minds that it is impossible to
weed them of the error without rooting up the
wheat with it'.2
'These verses of Robert Browning are aptly prefixed to Fr.
Tyrrell's profound volume Lex Orandi.
2 Idea of a University, Lecture on "Christianity and Scientific
Investigation "

!9S KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
And against reckless hypotheses that may or
may not be ultimately established as truth, against
half truths or premature truths that in the present
context are the parents of falsehood, she bids her
children be on their guard, and fights with the
best weapons she is able ; and again no wonder.
For not to her does the multitude appear as a
field for the experiments of men of science, a
corpus vile for their vivisection. It is not her
voice that will ever consent to sacrifice the welfare
of the many for the benefit — even if it be the
benefit — of the few.1 And thus the few, those
strong and superior beings who are immune from
common ignorance and corruption, for whom the
exhibition of vice is no allurement, for whom the
dissection of putridity is no danger, who can read
anything and hear anything without harm, whose
intelligence is above the risk of deception, whose
imagination never overpowers their reason, whose
judgment is never swayed by prejudice still less
distorted by passion, these winged and chosen
mortals must perforce be tolerant with the parapets
and balustrades and fences and walls and sign-
1 See Wilfrid Ward in the Epilogue to his Life of Cardinal
Wiseman, ii., 552, 553. He well explains how in defence of the
highest truth the Church has not hesitated to make " temporary
inquisitorial incursions on critical and physical science as practic
ally dangerous to the faith of the multitude '' — Ibid., p. 548.

LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE 199
posts and danger posts that compassionate au
thority has set up for us, the unwinged, ill-equipped
and stumbling multitude. Section LIX.
As a matter of history the divorce of religion
from the State may be termed an After-Christian
invention ; for the theory if not the practice of the
Fore-Christians may be summed up in the maxim
that the first care of the State should be the
service of the Gods.
And it has appeared the obvious duty and has
been the habitual practice of Christian Governments
to restrain what seemed to them the mischievous
propagation of error, and at the least not to allow
(to use the words of a once famous pamphlet) "a
perfectly free course to blasphemy, filthiness and
sedition".1 Not to all, but to many, of those who have
rebelled against the unity of the Church, one or
more of these ill-sounding names have been appli
cable ; and in any case the early Church was
unanimous in regarding heresy and apostasy as
extreme wickedness. It is not surprising then
that the Roman State, when it passed from being
a persecutor to being a neophyte, endeavoured by
1 Gladstone's Vaticanism, p. 22.

266 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
laws to repress the mischief brought by false teach
ing to the Church and the Empire. "As the
Donatists, after the Synods of Rome and Aries,
as well as after their trial by Constantine, did not
submit, but persisted in their defiant demeanour
and deeds of violence, the emperor issued in 316
a severe edict, depriving them of their churches,
confiscating their property, and banishing the
most stubborn of their leaders. After the Council
of Nica^a, in 325, he pronounced banishment upon
Arius and two bishops of his party. Further, the
immunities of the clergy were limited to Catholics,
heretical assemblies were forbidden, heretical writ
ings sought out and destroyed. Theodosius pub
lished an edict, in which he threatened heretics,
required from all his subjects an acknowledgment
of the Nicene Creed, deprived the Arians in Con
stantinople of their Churches, which he gave to
Catholics, and in 381 forbade heretics to possess
churches or hold divine worship in the cities.
" Laws still more severe were subsequently en
acted against the Manicheans, against whom an
edict had been issued by the [pagan] emperor Dio
cletian, a.d. 296, on account of their excesses and
their immoral doctrines, condemning the leaders to
be burnt and their followers to decapitation or loss
of property. Theodosius declared the Manicheans

LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE 201
to be infamous and incapable of inheriting or of
making wills ; those amongst them called Encra-
tites were to be punished with death. The Pre-
torian Prefects were to appoint inquisitors — the
name first appears here — to discover and prosecute
them." x
There was no question on the principle of such
laws being right, no scandal at the civil power
doing what appeared its obvious duty. St. Au
gustine indeed had thought differently, but rea
soning and experience, as he tells us, brought him
to a complete change of his view ; and the Roman
law has enshrined in the Theodosian code the
maxim that what is done against Divine religion is
an injury to all.2
And this principle was a juridical commonplace
for more than a thousand years and proclaimed
anew in the eighteenth century by Blackstone
when he declared : " All moral evidence, all con
fidence in human veracity, must be weakened by
irreligion and overthrown by infidelity. Where
fore all affronts to Christianity, or endeavours to
depreciate its efficacy, are highly deserving of
human punishment. " Nay in the earlier years of
' Hergenrother, Catholic Church and Christian State, English
edition, ii., pp. 301, 302.
aIbid., pp. 304, 305.

262 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
the nineteenth century a Chief Justice of England
pronounced that Christianity was the law of the
land ; and Dr. Arnold for all his ante-sacerdotalism
could not endure the thought of the admission into
Parliament of Jews and avowed unbelievers in
Christ.1 Section LX.
But a complete change of opinion has swept
over the world ; the doctrine of religious tolera
tion, imperfectly promulgated by Locke, has been
held to be a fundamental acquisition of modern
thought ; that no theological doctrine is more than
an opinion which happens to be held by bodies of
men ; that liberty of conscience means the right
of every man to reason and judge on religious
matters without any interference on the part of
any earthly authority ; that consequently the civil
power has no positive duty to maintain religious
truth ; while every educated and reasonable man,
as opposed to a blind fanatic, should be tolerant of
the opinion of others, a Christian above all, who
professes to be charitable in his judgments of
others, and humble in the estimate of his own
wisdom. So steeped is public opinion in this view, so
1 W. G. Ward ami the Oxford Movement, p. 378.

Liberty of conscience 203
overpowering the dominion of this portion of the
spirit of the age, so grave the charge of intolerance
against the Christian Church that a reasonable
discussion of fact and opinion is scarcely possible.
It has indeed been pointed out wisely and well that
the matter of toleration must be viewed historic
ally, circumstances having utterly changed since a
tribunal of intolerance could serve as a bulwark of
the Church directly, and of the Christian State
indirectly ; that many of the heretics of early and
mediaeval times were worse than the worst social
ists, anarchists, or secret societies of modern times,
and were propagators of horrible immoralities, and
always threatened and often executed sacrilege,
plunder, violence and slaughter against true Chris
tians, and were totally destructive not merely of
the existing but of all social order ; that the Church
has made a clear distinction between formal or
wilful heretics, and material or unwitting, between
initial rebellion and hereditary antagonism ; that
the sphere for the latter has in later years been
greatly increased ; that rights and political powers
acquired by dissidents in a Catholic country have
been, and are to be, respected; that civil and
political toleration does not imply dogmatic toler
ation ; again, that compared with the lay tribunals
of former times the contemporary procedure and

204 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
punishments of ecclesiastical tribunals were rational
and humane ; that the Church had to restrain the
severity of lay courts and lay opinion in dealing
with heretics ; that the Spanish Inquisition in
particular, though by no means a mere department
of State, was used at times as an instrument of
State to secure the imperilled national unity of
Spain, its severity being highly displeasing to the
Holy See, whither flowed when possible both fugi
tives and appeals ; that the prevention or suppres
sion of all kinds of immorality and of criminal
magic were among the main functions of ecclesi
astical tribunals ; that by any fair standard of
comparison the treatment of heretics and likewise
of Jews in the centre of Christendom has been con
spicuous by mildness ; that if there have been, and
there is no denying it, many abuses, these are
common to all institutions where power is in the
hands of man, a chronic infirmity of all govern
ments ; and that the abuses of ecclesiastic courts
are as nothing to those of the civil courts.
But to point out these historical considerations
avails little against the tyranny of a first principle
in favour of religious toleration, and rejecting any
sort of religious restraint. This has become a
popular dogma ; it is taken to be plain common
sense ; of the truth of it each individual is still

LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE 205
more sure because it is not merely his own opinion,
but the opinion of nearly every one about him (like
the opinion in the Carolinas in mid-nineteenth
century on the rightfulness of negro slavery, or
in Manchester and Birmingham on the incontro
vertible fitness of free trade ; or among the higher
classes, the men of letters and manufacturers of
Great Britain on the folly and mischief of trade
unions). Such popular dogmas cease to be opinions,
are taken for truths, and the opposite opinions are
looked upon as impossible and absurd.1
Hence while this state of mind continues, any
detailed account of the history of religious restraint,
though every fact be verbally true, issues in a
practical accumulation of falsehood, because it has
become a practical accumulation of scandal ; and
our wearied reason yields before the incessant
suggestion of the imagination that all is ignorance,
superstition, folly and injustice. It is as if we
had to describe the daily life of London or Paris
to a vegetarian community among whom it was a
first principle that to take animal life for the sake
of food was intrinsically immoral. For our portrait
' Thus in the sixties so popular and respected a writer as Rus-
kin was held to be writing sheer nonsense when in a popular
magazine he challenged some of the dogmas (now abandoned)
of the current Political Economy; and a prudent editor stopped
the articles abruptly.

206 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
of those cities would be horribly distorted by the
imagination of our hearers. The most refined and
honourable men and women, full of kindness and
deeds of mercy, would appear no better than canni
bals, every meat salesman no better than a pur
veyor of human flesh, the details of rearing live
stock, the course of the cattle trade, the sanitary
regulations of slaughter-houses, the wages and pro
fits of the workers in the trade, all would be seen
through a horrible medium of cruelty and blood.
It is not otherwise with a community steeped
in the doctrine that has deceptively taken the
name of liberty of conscience, and claims unlimited
toleration for all places and all times. They
cannot receive an accurate narrative of fact — say
of the religious laws of the Theodosian code in
the fifth century, or the English anti- Lollard legis
lation of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, or
the Roman Inquisition in the seventeenth. For
all this would be seen through a distorted medium,
and facts true in themselves would be changed by
their passage through the mind of the recipients
into a repulsive caricature.
So even were this the place for historical de
tails, give them I would not. That enlightened
traveller to the tomb of Torquemada, of whom I
have spoken, must first abandon his mistaken first

LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE 207
principle before he can understand the records of
history. Section LXI.
For indeed this first principle of universal tolera
tion, this dogma of undogmatism, which so warps
our judgment and overpowers our understanding,
far from being an established truth, cannot be
carried out in its integrity without leading us to
social dissolution. In the postscript to his reply
to Gladstone's attack on the Church, Newman
set forth the legitimate conclusions of Mill's Essay
on Liberty as follows : " No immoral doctrines,
plays, poems, novels, conduct, acts, may be visited
by the reprobation of public opinion ; nothing must
be put down, I do not say by the laws, but even
by society, by the press, by religious influence,
merely on the ground of shocking the sense of
decency and the modesty of a Christian com
munity. Nay, the police must not visit Holywell
Street, nor a licence be necessary for dancing
rooms ; but the most revolting atrocities of heathen
times and countries must for conscience' sake be
allowed free exercise in our great cities. Averted
looks indeed and silent disgust is admissible against
them, but nothing of a more energetic character." x
' Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, Postcript to § 6.

208 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Mill indeed, as the great master pointed out, is
not to be charged with having advocated these
conclusions ; but they followed from his argument,
and they are the inevitable issue of the undog-
matic principle and the theory of toleration. And
the reason is this ; the evidence for the first
principles of morality and order, and for natural
religion, are no less obscure, even obscurer, than
those for revealed religion ; they can just as easily
and with equal plausibility be argued away ; and
every theoretical halting place on the downward
slope is but an illogical compromise, but a slippery
foothold. Conscious or subconscious scepticism
is the major premise of theoretical toleration,
whereas, in the words of Prof. Graham, " con
vinced men if they have the power must persecute
unless they discover that persecution may defeat its
end". Hence the man without "the will to perse
cute " (he should have written " the will to repress
mischievous error ") is a man without convictions.1
Locke, himself a pioneer of " toleration, " is com
pelled to make exceptions so wide that at least
three-fourths of Christendom would have been
excluded from his indulgence.2 And in our
1 English Political Philosophy from Hobbes to Maine, " Essay on
Locke "
2He excluded firstly "opinions contrary to human society or
to those moral rules which are necessary to the preservation of

LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE 269
own days, when other matters are under discussion
and for a moment the Index and Inquisition are
forgotten and men speak out their mind, patience,
persuasion and public opinion are held as old-
fashioned liberalism, ridiculed as a " Quaker-like
mind," and it is openly proclaimed to be the duty
of Liberals to be intolerant towards the actively
intolerant and those who would undermine all
reasonable liberty.1
But reasonable liberty may simply mean my
liberty as opposed to your liberty ; it may mean
the liberty which the After-Christian classes in
Germany asserted in their furious campaign against
the Lex Heinze that would have bridled im
morality — the liberty for Zola and Ibsen and
Hauptmann and D'Annunzio ; it is the liberty
described above in the third chapter from the
pages of St. Augustine, the unrestrained self-
such society " ; secondly those who arrogate to themselves peculiar
prerogatives, opposed to the civil rights of the rest, e.g., those who
uphold that " dominion is founded on grace" ; thirdly those who
will not teach and practice toleration or who give themselves up
to another prince ; fourthly all atheists. On these principles there
would have been no toleration for Catholics, for Orthodox Greeks
and for many zealous Protestants, notably American Puritans, all
disqualified under the third head. In modern times, apart from
disqualifications under the fourth head, almost any doctrine could
be " persecuted " under the elastic provision of the first head.
1 See the letter in The Times, 26th Nov., 1904, from its Vienna
correspondent. 14

216 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
indulgence, moral and intellectual, of the few, based
on the degradation and servitude of the many.
Section LXII.
But the Church, claiming illumination from a
Divine teacher, is without hesitation or inconsist
ency. It is no inconsistency to recognise a change
of circumstances, nay her very profession is to adapt
herself to them all. Now whenever de facto a
number of different religions dwell intermingled;
we need a modus vivendi for the sake of social
peace. In some cases absolute equality of social
position and political rights may be the most
suitable constitution for the composite society ; in
other cases the reverse, and inequality suitable ;
a mosaic of different rights and privileges, to be
compared to the mosaic of rights in the British
Empire, wherein 400 million human beings are
bound together with amazing inequality according
to race, colour, language, locality and religion.1
Moreover, the technical revolution in the means
1 Compare, for example, two substantial tradesmen, one an
Englishman at Oxford and another a Hindu at Benares. Forty
pages would not suffice to explain the diversities of the legal and
social position of the two ; the Englishman having a voice in the
management and taxation, and free of the run, of the Empire ; the
Hindu with lifelong disabilities in both respects ; but in local
government the Hindu in no worse, perhaps in a better position
than the Englishman ; and his religion protected not penalised.

LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE 211
of transport, in the methods of industry, in the
provisions for warfare, which have rendered this
great empire possible, have caused such an
intermingling of mankind, such incessant contact
among members of various religions, that to pre
serve in any large country the unity of religion is
rarely possible, or only possible at the cost of
evils even greater than the breach of unity. In
practice therefore there is need of a compromise ;
the State indeed ought to have a conscience. " But
what if it happens to have half a dozen, or a score,
or a hundred in religious matters each different
from each ? . . . No government could be formed
[in England] if religious unanimity was a sine qua
non ".1 To preserve indeed as much enforcement
of the moral law and of simple theism as a sickly
social body can endure, has become a pressing duty
of government among European races if they are
not to be swallowed up in the gulf of social dis
solution, and see their heritage pass to Fore-
Christian hands. But the duty is difficult to fulfil
even for the most Christian of rulers ; and to
restore in Europe and America the ancient union
of Church and State seems a hopeless task " unless
Providence interposed by an effusion of Divine
grace on the hearts of men, which would amount
1 Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, § 6.
14 *

212 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
to a miracle and perhaps would interfere with
human responsibility ".1
But toleration of evil is not approval, and the
supreme principles, which Christianity proclaimed
from the first, no new circumstances in our mode
of life, no new discoveries in physical science, no
new analysis of man's reasoning process, can alter
one whit. Therefore with our lot cast in the midst
of those to whom the world seems
a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night,
let us hear the words of our Master, the doctrine
of light and order set out face to face against the
doctrine of darkness and confusion : —
" That there is a truth then ; that there is one
truth ; that religious error is in itself of an immoral
nature; that its maintainers, unless involuntarily
such, are guilty in maintaining it ; that it is to be
dreaded ; that the search for truth is not the grati
fication of curiosity ; that its attainment has nothing
of the excitement of a discovery ; that the mind is
below truth, not above it, and is bound, not to
descant upon it, but to venerate it ; that truth and
falsehood are set before us for the trial of our
hearts ; that our choice is an awful giving forth of
' Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, § 6.

LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE 213
lots on which salvation or rejection is inscribed ;
that ' before all things it is necessary to hold the
Catholic faith ' ; that ' he that would be saved
must thus think,' and not otherwise ; that, 'if thou
criest after knowledge, and liftest up thy voice for
understanding, if thou seekest her as silver, and
searchest for her as for hid treasure, then shalt
thou understand the fear of the Lord, and find the
knowledge of God,' — this is the dogmatical prin
ciple, which has strength.
" That truth and falsehood in religion are but
matter of opinion ; that one doctrine is as good as
another ; that the Governor of the world does not
intend that we should gain the truth ; that there is
no truth ; that we are not more acceptable to God
by believing this than by believing that ; that no
one is answerable for his opinions ; that they are
a matter of necessity or accident ; that it is enough
if we sincerely hold what we profess ; that our
merit lies in seeking not in possessing ; that it is
a duty to follow what seems to us true, without
a fear lest it should not be true ; that it may be
a gain to succeed, and can be no harm to fail ; that
we may take up and lay down opinions at pleasure ;
that belief belongs to the mere intellect, not to the
heart also ; that we may safely trust to ourselves
in matters of Faith, and need no other guide — this

2i4 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
is the principle of philosophies and heresies, which
is very weakness." J
These things being so, who among us would
so cower with belated terror, as to leave the stead
fast rock, to surrender the principle of strength,
and to give himself over to the principle of weak
ness, at the very moment when the weakness is
growing daily more evident among the After-
Christian populations, grasping at present pleasure,
craving for excitement, abounding in negations,
failing in convictions, uncertain in opinions, terrified
at pain, shrinking at sacrifice. Are we to yield
to men like these, and not rather, forgetting any
present weakness, to stretch forth our hands with
joyful hope towards the future? For the future
belongs to the children of the martyrs not to the
children of Voltaire.
1 Development of Christian Doctrine, chap, viii., § i.

CHAPTER VIII.
HERETICS AND SCHISMATICS.
Section LXIII.
We have counted as the eighth antinomy that
the Church is one and yet Christendom has ever
been divided.
The unity of the Church is perhaps of all her
characteristics the most important and august. In
the solemn and effectual prayer of her Founder it
is made the very note and evidence of her divin
ity : "I pray for those also who through their word
shall believe in Me ; that they all may be one, as
Thou, Father, in Me and I in Thee ; that they also
may be one in Us ; that the world may believe
that Thou hast sent Me ". And the apostle amid
his bonds exhorted his converts to be true to their
vocation, to be one body and one spirit as became
those who confessed one hope, one Lord, one faith,
one baptism, one God and Father of all. Here is
a principle fundamental and unchangeable ; there
3*5

216 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
were not to be two Churches and two Christs, but
one ; not two folds and two shepherds, but one.
And unity being thus made the very evidence of
Divinity, it is not surprising that those who chose
for themselves a separate doctrine or separate
authority, leaving the straight path of orthodoxy
and obedience, were regarded by the faithful with
the utmost horror as involved in the extremity of
wickedness. They were as those who wilfully
obscured the light of the sun in the heavens ; they
were held and denounced as the ministers of
Satan ; and the strongest epithets to show ab
horrence of them have Scripture warrant.1 For
they made a breach in that order which the
providence of God had placed in the world to he
the special witness of His handiwork; and by
darkening the light of the one faith and one
Mediator, darkened the evidence for the unity of
God. They sought to render and tear the mysti
cal body of Christ, the Church being recognised
as the body of which Christ was the head.
For us in these present days it is difficult to
grasp the repulsion felt by the early Christians
towards heresy and schism — we, from whom the
supernatural gifts {charismata) of the early Church
'2 Corinth, xi. 13,15; Galat. i. 9; 1 Tim. i. 10, n, ig,20,iv. 1, 2 ;
a Tim, ii. 16, iii. 8, 13 ; 2 Peter ii. 1, 3, 10 ; 3 John 7 ; Jude 8, 12, 13.

HERETICS AND SCHISMATICS 217
have long since departed; we, to whom the
spectacle of great bodies of heretics and schis
matics has become familiar ; we, among whom it
is the exception and not the rule that heresy or
schism is the responsible act of the individual
dissident, not an irresponsible inheritance ; we, to
whom the good life and pious deeds of our separ
ated brethren are often accurately known ; we,
who gladly grasp at the welcome possibility that
only in name and appearance are they outside the
membership of the visible Church, but in reality
are invisible members. Yet deliberate and formal
breach of unity remains what it was, even to
this day ; and against its authors and abettors
the Church ceases not and will never cease to
pronounce her anathema.1 Only mark, it is
she herself and none other, her own corporate
voice and none other to speak the words of repro
bation ; nor may her individual children, un
authorised and unbidden, attribute self-deceit to
1 As this book is only for candid readers it is scarcely needful
to point out, that doctrinal disputes among the children of the
Church, and their diversities of theological views, rather make
stronger than weaker the unity of the Church, and are no breach
of it. For they involve agreement in the common doctrines of
faith, on which each bases his own contention ; just as litigation
implies the principles of law and the prevalence of order without
which a decision could neither be reached nor enforced. See the
whole matter treated in Anglican Difficulties, Lecture x,

218 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
their fellow-men, or wilful blindness, or diabolical

delusion,

Section LXIV.
But the notable fact remains, that the light of
the Church through nineteen centuries has been
obscured, sometimes more, sometimes less, but
always obscured by a persistent mass of heresy
and schism. The true Church is like a brilliant
star that yet in her sublime orbit through the
heavens has been incessantly accompanied by a
cloud of varying dimensions and density, borrow
ing its light from her rays, and interposing between
them and this lower earth a nebulous screen, so
that they reach us as the feeble illuminations of
the cold and misty north rather than as the strong
sunshine of the south.
Already (in Part I.) I have spoken on the fact
and its fitness, that in Divine things we live under
the law not of sight but of search. So it has been
from the beginning of the Christian record, under
the old law as well as under the new. False pre-
1 So Pius IX. in his allocution of December, 1854, explained how
" it is held as certain that those labouring under invincible ignor
ance of the true religion are not in this matter blameworthy in the
eyes of God. And who is the man so presumptuous as himself to
lay down, according to national, local or personal character and a
host of other circumstances, the limits of this ignorance ? " — See
the original in Denzinger's Enchiridion, n. 1504.

HERETICS AND SCHISMATICS 219
tences are ever found that deceive at first sight,
confuse the evidence, perplex the inquirer, false
miracles, false prophets, specious schisms, a temple
not on the holy hill of Jerusalem alone, but also
on mount Gerizim, specious counterfeits, seducers
who must be plausible or they could not seduce,
ravening wolves who could not enter were they
not clad in sheep's clothing, the repeated uprising
of "bold plausible, imposing counter-claims on the
part of error ",1 " From the first the Church was
but one Communion among many which bore the
name of Christian, some of them more learned,
and others affecting a greater strictness than her
self". Hence by an historical induction we con
clude that, taking men as they are, corruptions of
the Gospel are a necessary phenomenon, no less
than its total acceptance or total rejection; and
that " large organised, flourishing, imposing com
munions, which strike the imagination as necessary
portions of the heritage of Christ," may yet be
corporately reprobate, as being corporately in
volved in heresy or schism, and as a body not
gathering with Christ but scattering abroad,
without part in the Redeemer, albeit the in
dividual members even by thousands or tens of
' Anglican Difficulties, Lecture xi., whence is drawn much that
follows.

220 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
thousands may be invisibly united to Him, and
invisibly standing within the one sacred fold.
Such simulacra or phantom Churches were the
Donatists with 400 episcopal sees, and the Nova
tians whose stern discipline stretched from Rome
to Scythia, from Spain to Asia Minor, and the
multitudinous Gnostics who for long held the
great St. Augustine under the spell of their seem
ing wisdom, and the Arians who reigned over
Gaul and Iberia and Africa and Italy, till the
days of Gregory the Great, and the Nestorians
who for centuries had all further Asia to them
selves, besides their establishments in hither Asia,
and the Monophysites in Syria and Egypt (great
centres of population and intelligence before the
Mahometan blight), and the Greek schism, that
cut off from the Church the most learned and
wealthy of her subjects, and the Albigenses who
culled the first-fruits of the new reign of culture
and riches in the fairest regions of Europe, and
the vast if ill-united bodies of Lutherans and
Calvinists, and the two Churches, that having
identified themselves with two vigorous nations,
the Russian and the English, have grown with
their growth and made the national triumphs their
own. And besides these imposing claimants for re-

HERETICS AND SCHISMATICS 221
cognition as part of Christ's Church, smaller sects
almost innumerable have sprung up age after age ;
and a great book would be needed merely to
register briefly the names and chief tenets of the
many dissidents from Catholic unity.
Section LXV.
Here is a wide field for pathological study, to
trace the causes and development of these morbid
growths ; not to be appalled by their multiplicity,
nor confused by the manifold diversity of their
surroundings, as Syria in the fourth century, Pro
vence in the twelfth, or Great Britain in the
twentieth ; and to classify all heretical and schis-
matical varieties on some intelligible principle.
In general they mark a departure from the
golden mean of Catholic teaching. The heretical
spirit falls into excess on one side or on the other ;
leaning in practice either to rigorism or to laxity ;
and in theory laying too much stress on some par
ticular doctrines, too little on others, "it being
almost a definition of heresy that it fastens on some
one statement as if the whole truth, to the denial of
all others, and as the basis of a new faith -,"1 thus
distorting both what it holds and what it rejects,
' Oxford University Sermons, Sermon xv.

222 KEY TO THE WORLDS PROGRESS
as neither can be understood without the other.
It takes one aspect for the whole aspect, as though
a mere part was intelligible without the whole.
Hence we find the hallowed doctrines of
Christian faith distorted into a thousand caricatures.
All the weaknesses of our fallen nature, all our
manifold passions, all the varieties of self-deceit,
applied to Christian truths can act each as a mirror
of distortion ; every man is in potentiality, though
not in act, a heretic, some part of him intolerant
of certain spiritual truths ; so that a keen-sighted
spiritual physician could pronounce, not that he
would fall, but that if he fell, he would fall in one
particular direction rather than in another. And
the same inclination towards a particular fall, each
man towards his aijfKpvTov ko.k6v, may apply to
bodies of men as well as to individuals, and may
render particular points of discipline or doctrine
uncongenial to particular nations at particular
stages of their development Even apart from
this, the miserable antagonism of nationalities,
their mutual scorn or antipathy, one main obstacle,
as we saw in the fourth chapter, to the spread of
the Gospel, is a dangerous occasion of religious
dissidence ; and often a heresy or schism has
behind it the assertion of nationality against the
despised or envied or hated foreigner — so of Copts

HERETICS AND SCHISMATICS 223
against Greeks, of Byzantines against Franks, of
fourteenth century Czechs against Germans, of
nineteenth century Germans against Czechs, of
Russians against Poles.
Then in the recondite realm of spiritual theology,
if the interior is disunited from the exterior, or the
one is dwelt on to the neglect of and depression
of the other, the material for heresy is at hand.1
So the Jansenistic doctrine that perfection (a
perfection that is on the Index) consists in doing
what we dislike,2 that our affections and passions
will never be brought to like the things of God or
be in harmony with grace. This ancient and Puri
tanical abhorrence of the sense-world as radically
evil and hostile to the spiritual life, and the
opposite (Monophysite) error that confounded
Nature with Spirit, external with internal — both
these extremes were excluded by the true
Christian spirit "which teaches us that Nature is
the instrument of our healing as of our hurt :
' Peccat caro ; mundat caro '. Unconquered and
blindly obeyed, Nature stands as an impenetrable
barrier between man and God ; conquered and
brought under the will, it becomes the organ of the
divinity, the channel of communication between
1 Faber, Growth in Holiness, chap. xi.
2 Ibid., chap. xiii.

224 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
spirit and spirit ; not merely symbolising but
effecting what it symbolises."1
Again, instead of the golden mean of the Church
between instability and immobility (to be treated
in the next chapter), heresy and schism fall into
the extremes. Thus many heresies are those of
impatience, the work of men who claim to know
better and wish to advance faster than the au
thorities of the Church ; 2 anticipating prematurely
what the Church is about to say, and saying
it incorrectly, so that it is changed into a grotesque
foreshadow of true statements that are to come
when the time is at last ripe for the new enun
ciation of an old truth. So Tertullian, and again
Sabellius, tried of themselves to correct the
errors that the Church was to correct later ;
and fell into heresy as the consequence of their
attempt. So the Gnostics anticipated the intel
lectual theology of St. Irena^us, St. Athanasius,
and St. Augustine ; and marred it by their anticipa
tion. So Apollinaris was beforehand in the work
of St. Cyril and of the Council of Ephesus ; and
beforehand to his own ruin. So Abelard, pre
mature and self-willed in his novelties, could not
separate the dross from the ore, and went wrong
'Tyrrell, Lex Orandi, chap. xxi.
2 Rickaby, Development, 1905, pp. 16, 56.

HERETICS AND SCHISMATICS 225
with the very instrument of scholastic philosophy
that was to be turned afterwards, under the guid
ance of the Church, to such glorious issues.1 And
once more the beautiful austerity of St. Francis
and his followers can be traced in unsightly anti
cipation among the penitential but heretical
Montanists.2 Not as though truth varied with the
times ; but our aptitude for understanding and
expressing the truth varies ; to be untimely is in
a sense and in effect to be untruthful, and to be
one whom it is the duty of those in authority to
silence.3 On the other hand we find heresies lagging
behind, rejecting development, clinging to an
obsolete discipline that may be a present heresy,
harping back from the living present to early ages,
and by a fossilised antiquarianism converting the
Church into a Record Office of ancient decisions,
incapable of facing any new questions.4 So the
Britons clinging to the obsolete rule of Easter, the
Lutheran appeal to the early Church, the Jansenist
and " Old Catholic " appeal to Christian antiquity.
But why dwell further on these and other morbid
conditions, on the uncertainty and endless variation
1 Newman, Historical Sketches, " Rise of Universities," chap. xvi.
2 Development of Christian Doctrine, chap, viii., § 1.
3 Apologia, chap, v., p. 259, edit. 1865.
4 Rickaby, Development, pp. 16, 48, 72.
IS

226 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
of heretical doctrines, the continuous tending to
split into independent bodies unless restrained by
the hand of the State, their one common bond
being hatred of the Church as their one common
antagonist, the common target of their vituperation.
For these features have already sixty years ago
been traced by a master hand.1
Section LXVI.
Let this alone be still added, one more instance
of marvellous distortion. For even the character
istic attitude of the Church, as the calm centre and
golden mean between opposing errors, has not
been exempt from caricature ; and the specious
appearance of a via media has been made a mask
for heretical latitudinarianism. This variety of
theological error has borrowed from practical
politics the methods of compromise, mutual con
cession, give and take ; admirable in practical
politics where all is involved in the concrete, every
case a special case ; but inadmissible in science or
theology — like interposing between the extremes
of Ptolemy and Galileo a via media, that the
earth goes round the sun from Mondays to
Wednesdays, and the sun round the earth from
1 See Development of Christian Doctrine, especially chap, v., § %
and chap, vi., § n.

HERETICS AND SCHISMATICS 227
Thursdays to Saturdays, and on the Sundays
alternately. So the Catholic doctrine is taken (by
an extreme misrepresentation) as an extreme on
one side, and some heretical doctrine like that of
Arius — bold, keen, stern and violent Arius — on
the other side, and a mean taken between them,
like Semi-Arianism (or Eusebianism), a compro
mise dear to the civil power that desires peace
at any price, that lacks understanding of the point
at issue, that holds to dogmatic truths so loosely
as to be ready to accept or modify or abandon
them to suit any present convenience — even the
fundamental truth that Christ is ever and was ever
truly God. But from the very nature of the case
such benevolent neutrality is impossible ; to admit
nine-tenths of Catholic doctrine as true is all-un
availing if one-tenth is to be abandoned as
erroneous, and an infallible Church forced to
admit her fallibility. " Not to submit to the
Church is to oppose her, and to side with the
heretical party; for medium there is none."1
So this specious error alike in the fourth century
of the Semi-Arians, in the fifth of the Monophy-
sites, in the seventeenth of the Anglicans, is marked
by the same characteristics ; "the drama of religion
and the combat of truth and error were ever one
1 Anglican Difficulties, Lecture xii.
iS*

228 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
and the same". The Church in each case " might
be called peremptory and stern, resolute, over
bearing and relentless ; and heretics were shifting,
changeable, reserved and deceitful, ever courting
the civil power, and never agreeing together,
except by its aid ; and the civil power was ever
aiming at comprehensions, trying to put the in
visible out of view, and to substitute expediency
for faith ".1
Thus in this kind, as in all other heresies, the
human spirit can be discerned at war with the
Divine ; man asserting against God his own self-
will. Yet after all, however accurate the psychological
and historical study of these morbid growths, the
mere knowledge of how all has come about is
scarcely more consoling than to know amid the
afflictions of illness the causes and medical diag
nosis of our complaint ; and we are still stricken
with grief at the multitude and persistence of those
who remain in dismal twilight or outer darkness.
Some of this trouble is irremediable, being indeed a
part of the general problem of evil ; why the whole
world is not yet Christian being as much a problem
as why the whole of Christendom is not yet Ca
tholic ; we must humble ourselves before a mystery,
1 Anglican Difficulties, Lecture xii.

HERETICS AND SCHISMATICS 229
before the fact of darkness being in some way the
inseparable concomitant of light, before the fact
of evil being in some way the pre-requisite and
counterpart of good.
But still some of our grief at the division of
Christendom can be lessened by duly appraising
the disaster. Section LXYII.
Let us then remember that the multitude out
side the visible unity of the Church are no homo
geneous body, but comprise the greatest variety in
doctrine, ranging from those who scarcely hold
any Christian belief (like the Manicheans of old
or the Unitarians of to-day) to those who hold the
greater part of the Christian creed (like the
Greek Church of the eleventh century or a por
tion of the Anglican Church of to-day). And in
personal characteristics we see still greater diver
sity — from apostates and heresiarchs, like Julian or
Arius, arch-foes of Christ, to the simple-minded
Christian, living up to his lights, like the Arian
Visigoth in the middle of the sixth centurv or the
Puritan New Englander in the middle of the
eighteenth century. A stream may issue from
an upland city foul with manifold impurities and
repulsive to the very sight ; but let it flow through

230 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
miles of woodland and meadow, and with each
mile it loses more and more of its foulness; it
cannot recover indeed the unsullied freshness of its
mountain source, but at least has become clear
and clean. And thus immense populations may
live in the realms of disunion and yet peacefully
garner much of the harvest of the Christian faith ;
and if the glorious road of supernatural sanctity is
not to be trodden by their feet, they can at least
walk in the commoner way that leads to salvation,
all the more easily if they preserve, as eighty million
Russians have preserved, the Christian sacraments.
Nor have unappointed judges any right to limit,
according to their fancy, the uncovenanted mercies
of God, or to restrict the exuberant numbers of
those who bear the appearance of aliens or even
of enemies to God's Church, but in reality are her
invisible members — invisible on earth but visible
from on high.
And lest we be lost in generalities and fail to
grasp what sort of home life can be reached by
imperfect Christianity, let us turn once more to Le
Play's great collection of monographs,1 and read the
account by MM. Coronel and Allan of the fisher
men and crofters of the island of Marken in
Holland in the year 1862 (vol. iii., chap. v.).
' Les Ouvriers Europeens, edit. 1879, in six vols.

HERETICS AND SCHISMATICS 231
They were a church-going, bible-reading com
munity, the children given a religious education,
parents receiving, with scarce an exception, respect
and obedience, mothers devoted to the training
of their children, illegitimate children rare, and
the fault always repaired by the subsequent
marriage of their parents. There was freedom
of choice in marriage, mutual affection between
husband and wife ; and divorce, though permitted
by their civil law and by their Calvinist religion
(they followed the Synod of Dordrecht of 16 18),
was unknown in practice ; nay even second
marriages were rare, for to continue in widow
hood was held a form of conjugal fidelity. The
same simple observance of all the Christianity they
knew, and the same happy and healthy family life,
were to be found among the Lutheran lute-makers
of the Erzgebirge in Saxony (vol. iii., chap, ii., §
xxii.), and much good was to be found in the
family life of the Lutheran Swedes in 1845 (v°l-
iii., chap, i.), of the Russian peasants in 1853
(vol. ii., chap, ii.), and of the Bulgarians in 1848
(vol. ii., chap. vi.).
Nor was England, at least twenty years ago,
without many examples of the Christian family,
such as the household of the Shropshire small
farmer (described in detail in The Nineteenth

232 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Century, Oct., 1884), church-going, God-fearing,
bible-reading (a chapter read daily after the morn
ing meal), and displaying order, discipline and
union. Such a family showed a character akin to
that of those Dutch and Saxon peasants just
named, and the character was Christian. Nay in
all ranks, not merely in the healthier sphere of
rural handwork, but amid the snares of wealth and
of cities, who of us has come to the years of later
life and has not gathered in his memory a garland
of Christian lives, though they seemed to stand
outside the one fold of Christ, or who has not
exclaimed, as the sweet legend tells of Pope
Gregory, non Angii sed Angeli? Truly there
are fields white for the harvest, and if as yet there
is no reaper, on whom is the blame to fall if not
on such as ourselves, unworthy, dull and torpid
members of a light-bearing life-giving Head?
Section LXVIII.
Still when all has been said that can be said in
reason to mitigate the horror of heresy and schism,
there remains an irreducible minimum that would
appal us, did we not see, as a merciful Providence
allows us to see, the purpose for which they are
permitted, and their almost necessary function to

HERETICS AND SCHISMATICS 233
promote the life and vigour of the very Church
they would destroy.
Never has the action of man been so visibly
over-ridden by the action of Providence ; never
has the saying sic vos non vobis been more con
spicuously applicable ; never have captives laboured
so hard to build the walls of fortress or palace for
their captors, as these rebels have laboured all
unwittingly to build up the walls of the new
Jerusalem, the intellectual temple of God. In
stead of Christian doctrine being put forth from
the beginning in all its fulness, and heresy and
schism forestalled and precluded, they have been
turned to good purpose to draw forth by their
contradiction the conclusions of Catholic theology,
and indicate the value of certain truths by their
very opposition to them. Thus truths have been
brought out one by one and fitted into their
places ; one region of Christian doctrine after
another has been lit up by a supernatural search
light ; and great dogmas, such as concern the
Eternal Generation of the Word, the reality of
the Sacred Humanity, the singleness of Christ's
Person, the duality of His Natures, the glories
of Mary for the sake of her Son ; or again
touching Christ's Soul and Sacramental Flesh,
His two Wills, His Church and the gifts of

234 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Grace — each in due course and in due time has
been irradiated.1
In St. Augustine's words, no one would discover,
for no one would discuss, unless roused by the
blows of misrepresentation. For while heretics
misrepresent, the little ones are scandalised. . . .
Truth would not be sought so industriously had it
no enemies to oppose it with falsehood.2 And thus
"Theodore of Mopsuestia, Julian of Eclanum,
Calvin and Strauss, have not been without their
usefulness. An able adversary, sincere in his error
and skilful in maintaining it, is in the long run a
boon to the cause of religion. The greatness of
the error is the measure of the triumph of truth.
The intellectual armour with which the doctrine
of the Church is assailed becomes the trophy of
her victory. All her battles are defensive, but
they all terminate in conquest." 8
Heresy and schism are therefore almost a con
dition of the Church's life, and for these seemingly
unwelcome intruders we find in history their
proper place and proper explanation.
' Discourses to Mixed Congregations, Discourse xvii., and Faber's
Blessed Sacrament, bk. iii., § vi.
2Serm. ad pop., lib. xi. "The Rambler, 1858, vol. x., p. 103.

CHAPTER IX.
DEVELOPMENT.
Section LXIX.
We have counted as the ninth antinomy that
the Church is ever the same yet ever changing.
Historical study and archaeology have made the
notion familiar to recent generations that past
ages were profoundly different in their habits and
ways of expression and thoughts from the present,
and that to learn to understand them is as difficult
a task as to acquire a new language or to learn to
understand the ways and sentiments of a foreign
country. To have established this truth, to have, so to
speak, created the historical sense, is the glory
of the German historical school of the early
nineteenth century ; J to have ignored it in law and
economics is the reproach of the English analytical
school of jurisprudence (Bentham and Austin
1 See Willmann, Geschichte des Idealismus, vol. iii., 1897, chap.
xvii., on the Historical Principle. 235

236 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
conspicuous among them), and still more of the
English school of political economy that even to
the seventies remained unhistorical.
But then the very effort to correct an error in
one direction impelled the historical school into an
error in the opposite direction — so hard is it to
keep the balance, so hard for a man daily occupied
with upholding the relative character of human
desires, beliefs, political and social constitutions,
daily urging how they are variable according to
race, education, traditions, knowledge, religion,
climate and wealth, daily explaining that there
are no hard and fast lines of division, but a con
tinuous transition from one set of social actions to
another, and that things generally are involved,
mutually implicated and continuous — it is hard for
a man daily occupied in this manner to recognise
simultaneously that behind the relative there is the
absolute, behind the variable there is the constant,
behind the continuous there is the opposed ; and
that otherwise all is chaos, and the sciences, histori
cal science among them, impossible.
Once more then the doctrine of the golden mean
is our salvation and one-sidedness our ruin. We
have to do with change indeed (whether called
•yeVeo-is, Werden, or evolution), but with some
thing more than change. We cannot understand

DEVELOPMENT 237
the past if we have naught in common with the
past. We cannot understand Homer if we hear
not as he heard, or if the same sun that lit his world
lights not ours. The ideal without the historical
is indeed empty : but the historical without the
ideal is blind.1 We must avoid superfluous defini
tions, delusive clearness, greater precision than the
subject-matter allows ; and in drawing lines we
must take manifold care. But we must draw them.
Else in our efforts to avoid formality and over-
precision we efface all distinctions, become inco
herent, and can neither learn nor teach. It is
difficult to name a precise moment when night-time
has begun. Are day and night then indistinguish
able? It is difficult to lay down clearly when a
trade commission becomes dishonest. Is there no
difference then between an honest man and a
rogue ? The surroundings are of almost indescrib
able variety, but the same daily comedies and
daily tragedies of human life are reproduced by
the same human nature whether witnessed by
Hammurabi, by Aeschylus, by Juvenal, by the
Minnesingers, by Shakespeare, or by ourselves;
and the accidental diversity is linked together by
essential similarity.
'See Willmann, Geschichte des Idealismus, p. 703, echoing
Trendelenburg and Eucken.

238 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Section LXX.
These elements of historical logic have been
repeated that we may better understand how the
Catholic Church is the same now as at any time,
how she is of unchanged identity, and yet in
appearance most different ; how she is rigid and
yet flexible ; how she has been exposed to the
opposite and plausible charges of changing,
corrupting, augmenting by human inventions the
Divine message, and yet of clinging obstinately
to antiquated positions, unchangeable in error, a
fossil amid living organisms.
The explanation of these paradoxes is to be
found in the theory of development of the doctrine,
constitution and discipline of the Christian Church.
Prematurely outlined in the fifth century by an
obscure Gallic monk, Vincent of Lerins, the theory,
though not unrecognised or contested, slept and
could not but have slept for many centuries ; and
although foreshadowed by Petavius and others
in their efforts to meet the Protestant appeal to
history,1 it could hardly take shape and be worked
'J. Tixeront, La Theologie Ante-niceenne (being the first volume
of Histoire des Dogmas), Paris, 1905, p. 12. See also the Literary
Notes in The Tablet of 14th September, 1904, for the text and
translation of the passage on development in Blessed John Fisher's
answer to Luther.

DEVELOPMENT 239
out till first in secular science the historical method
and spirit had gained a foothold.
An age steeped in anachronisms, when for ex
ample Jerusalem was depicted by the Flemish
painters of the fifteenth century as if it were a
contemporary walled city of Flanders, or when
the heroes of Greece and Rome appeared on the
classical French stage duly attired with the wig
and the robes of the time of Louis XIV. — in ages
like these the theory of development was out of
place and premature. Indeed we must admit the
paradox that the only refuge for truth was in
error ; for the erroneous notion that the Church
in the early centuries was in appearance just like
the existing Church — the Pope surrounded by his
Cardinals, missions and retreats habitual methods
of devotion, Easter confession and Communion
the test of submission and allegiance — this outer
coating of historical misapprehension preserved
the essential truth that the Church of Gregory
and Innocent was one and the same as the Church
of the Fathers and of the early martyrs, identical
with the Church of the Apostles, the one faithful
witness of the one Christ, the one sure bulwark of
the belief in an all-holy, all-wise and omnipotent
God. But when the time came for historical studies

240 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
to flourish, and anachronisms ceased to serve
any longer any useful purpose, and documentary
history showed a striking variety in the expres
sions of Christian doctrine, the methods of Church
government, and the forms of Christian devotion,
the man arose, by God's providence, to show that,
as in other matters, so in the life of the Church,
there was no divorce between nature and grace ;
that the ordinary growth of natural societies and
of human doctrines was not reversed or utterly
changed in the case of the Christian Church, only
supernaturally guided ; and that here also we must
distinguish between constants and variables, be
tween immobility in dogma and progress in our
apprehension of it, between objective truth and
subjective knowledge, between the permanent or
essential and the temporary or accidental, between
changes as the outriders of growth and changes
as the heralds of decay and dissolution. Need
indeed there was to make these sovereign distinc
tions, and in a highly complex matter to beware
of fatal indiscrimination.1
Then John Henry Newman in the great crisis
of his life, his period of storm and stress, and to
weather the storm, wrote his Essay on the De-
1 Lagrange, La Mithode Historique, pp. 124, 172, 173 ("defions-
nous du bloc ").

DEVELOPMENT 241
velopment of Christian Doctrine ; faced boldly the
problems for which history demanded a solution,
and upheld the grand thesis that the modern
Catholic faith was not merely historically but
logically the representative of the ancient faith,
and that all the manifold changes from the day
of Pentecost to that hour were not departures,
undoings, corruptions, but the natural growth and
lawful development of the idea of the Church,
showing preservation of type, continuity of prin
ciples, logical sequence, the power of assimilation,
its beginnings anticipating its future, its later
phenomena being protective of its past, and itself
vigorous in its action from first to last.1
At Jength the foundations were laid for a history
of dogma that should be a true history because
based on true methods and not on false presup
positions ; and by a timely anticipation the process
was discovered whereby the young and vigorous
trees of unregenerate history, like Prof. Harnack's
History of Dogma, bringing forth only bitter and
unwholesome fruit, could serve as stocks whereon
to graft a germ that would bring forth the sweet
and wholesome fruit of Christian science.
1 Development of Christian Doctrine, chap. v.

16

242 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Section LXXI.
In popular language the account of the develop
ment of Christian doctrine is as follows : There
are truths which are not upon the surface of the
legacy of revelation made to the Apostles, "but
which from time to time are brought into form by
theologians, and sometimes have been proposed
to the faithful by the Church as direct objects of
faith ". They are not deduced in their fulness and
exactness from the belief of the first centuries, but
under the guidance of a Divine voice are " the new
form, explanation, transformation or carrying out
of what in substance was held from the first, what
the Apostles said, but have not recorded in writing,
or would have said under our circumstances, or if
they had been asked, or in view of certain uprisings
of error, and in that sense being really portions of
the legacy of truth of which the Church ... is
the divinely appointed trustee".1
In other words, what has been said once is never
unsaid, but said with more accurate definition, more
completely, nearer the truth as it exists in the
Divine mind ; so that we understand more clearly
and can state explicitly what before was only held
implicitly. The course of centuries must run
' Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, § 8.

DEVELOPMENT 243
before all the bearings and consequences of a
doctrine are perceived and adopted. Indeed it is
precisely the work of Christian thought to take
possession of the primitive data of revelation and
illuminate, fertilise, unfold, co-ordinate them, with
out altering the substance or modifying the
doctrinal foundation. From the outset the sacred
doctrine started on its course of development : the
Epistles of St. Paul, and the Gospel of St. John
already display what may be called a development
of the three Synoptic Gospels ; and to take a later
example, the great conflicts of the third century
regarding penitential discipline brought out clearly
two dogmatic results — first, a more distinct con
sciousness in the Church of her power to pardon
every sort of sin ; secondly, a clearer view that of
this power the ecclesiastical hierachy was the sole
depositary, and of its application the sole judge.1
Then on the eve of Arianism we can take stock of
the points whither Christian doctrine had reached
before the great crisis that was imminent had
clarified many obscurities, dissipated many con
fusions, and shown the full consequences of many
truths. For example, the famous word 6ju,ooucrios
was already known in part ; but it needed St.
1 Tixeront, Histoire des Dogmas, La Theologic Ante-niceenne , 1905,
P- 380. 16 *

244 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Athanasius to arise before it could be known in all
its fulness.1
Thus the formula quod semper quod ubique quod
ab omnibus, namely that a doctrine to be true must
have been taught in the Church always, every
where and by all, is liable like many another
formula to be perverted into a misunderstanding.
" Dogma is not a set of dead crystallised notions,
only the verbal setting of which can ever be
changed, as though one were to move a collection
of minerals from one case and rearrange them in
another, but lives and thrives as an infant grow
ing to manhood — to the measure of the full stature
of Christ (Eph. iv. 13)." 2 What was obscure at
first, what was latent at first, what was germinal
at first, had to be made clear in later times and
explicit, and adult ; not all indeed or all at once,
but whatsoever and whensoever it might seem
pleasing to the Holy Spirit, whose presence — such
is the fundamental claim of the Church — per
petually guides her, when she takes counsel, and
will not suffer her official deliberation ever to issue
in error. Errors indeed have often, and must have
often, been taught within the Church but not by
1 Tixeront, Histoire des Dogmas, La Theologie Ante-niceenne, chap.
xv. 2 Rickaby, Development, pp. 18, 19.

DEVELOPMENT 245
the Church. Errors have been the providential
builders of truth. Errors have been needful, and
the fire of contradiction, to separate the ore from
the dross, and to cause a doctrine to be distinctly
elaborated in, thought and enunciated in set
formula. Errors concerning Christ and the Holy
Trinity were the proximate occasions of the de
crees of Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus and
Chalcedon. Similarly, the opposition to the pri
macy of the Holy See was the very food that fed
its development : the opposition of Africa in the
third century, of Byzantium in the ninth, of France
in the seventeenth, bore witness to the truth they
opposed, and prepared a doctrine not to be formu
lated in its full distinctness till the days of our
fathers.1 And so in general the history of dogma presents
three stages, first, implicit and vague ; secondly,
imperfectly thought out, inaccurately stated, arous
ing and in part rightly arousing opposition ;
thirdly, accurately and explicitly formulated.2 The
best of men may be in opposition to dogma in the
first and second stages : only in the third stage it
becomes a test whether they are the children of
self-will or of obedience.
' Rickaby, op. cit., pp. 54, 65-69.
2 Ibid., pp. 22, 23.

246 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Section LXXII.
If in dogma we find the changes expressed by
the word development, still more so in discipline
and devotion. " There was a time when a priest
as a matter of private devotion might say seven
or more Masses in a day : there have been other
times when Mass was rarely said by anyone but a
bishop. For more than 1000 years the practice of
visiting the Blessed Sacrament or of Benediction
was unknown ; but these things are now the very
life of Catholic devotion. . . . The penances of
many years duration, familiar in the early
ages, have long since fallen into desuetude.*'1
The reign of canonical penances has been suc
ceeded by the reign of indulgences. The devotion
to St. Joseph, so conspicuous in the modern
Church, lay dormant for centuries till Gerson
was raised up to be its theologian, St Teresa its
saint, Sl Francis of Sales its popular teacher.8
And these changes are partly the fruit and
expression of development of doctrine, such as the
outburst of devotion to the Blessed Virgin after the
council of Ephesus, when there was no longer risk
of this devotion obscuring the Divinity of Christ ;
or when some new aspect of the Incarnation is
'Fr. H. Thurston in T'ii Tablet, 15th April, 1903.
'Faber. BUssed Sacrawtt, bk. ii., section v.

DEVELOPMENT 247
realised that before had never struck the mind of
the faithful, like the devotion to the Holy Name in
the fifteenth century and to the Sacred Heart in
the seventeenth ; partly they are the answer of a
divinely illuminated soul-saver to the ever chang
ing needs of the souls to be saved. Because the
world changes in each age the Church must be in
a perpetual condition of adaptation, if she is ever
to remain the same healer of the nations, to deal
with each generation in its own way, to meet its
peculiar temptations and difficulties, to be its
efficacious guide. Variety and growth of new
devotions, far then from being contrary to her
sameness, are the very fruits of it.1 Not that all
are wise, all good, all approved : far from it ; and
just as certain doctrines held at any given time by
some of the faithful are imperfect or unsound, and
in process of correction or elimination, even so
with devotions ; and they require perpetual watch
fulness and the guiding hand of authority, lest
they become involved in human corruption.
Section LXXII I.
Nay, the very principle of development of
doctrine is itself capable of abuse and excess.
It is one thing to say that the unchanging
' Faber, Growth in Holiness, chap. xxii.

248 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
dogma of the Church has to be presented to man's
finite intelligence in a language and manner which
he can understand, that " it is the special function
of an infallible Church — invested with infallibility
by its Divine Author for the purpose — at once to
preserve the essential dogma unchanged and to
present it afresh to each succeeding age in the
language which that age best understands " x — it is
quite another thing to repeat the (condemned)
proposition of Giinther : "In time by the progress
of science, a new sense may have to be assigned to
dogmas proposed by the Church, different from
that which the Church has hitherto understood and
at present understands ". This is not the growth
of a sapling oak into the king of the forest, or the
change of a young law student by the lapse of
years into a judge, or the completion of an un
finished building according to its original plan, or
the deduction of conclusions from the premisses in
which though hidden, they are already contained ;
but rather the change of an oak into a pine, of one
man into another, a substitution of a new building
for an old, an addition not to mere conclusions but
to the original premisses. So in the earlier times
1 Review in The Times, 30th Oct., 1903, of Wilfrid Ward's Prob
lems and Persons, a volume that contains among other good things
the admirable paper on " Unchanging Dogma and Changeful Man ".

DEVELOPMENT 249
of the Church the Gnostics pretended to substitute
a loftier knowledge {yucocris) for the common faith.
Eloquence and learning, joined to an austere life,
seemed to guarantee the truth of this plausible
philosophy of Christianity, this profounder intel
ligence of the Christian faith, that yet was an
attempt to change the work of God into the work
of man.1
Such was no development of Christian faith but
would have been its destruction.
Another ground of error is to compare the old
dispensation with the new, and by a false analogy
to bracket together the course of the Christian
Church and the course of the Jewish Synagogue.
But between the Old Testament and the New
there is a fundamental distinction. Dogma had
reached a definite term in the New Testament ;
nothing essential remained to be revealed ; and
a sacred deposit was entrusted to a doctrinal
authority ; truths that could receive development
only and not alteration. Whereas in the Old
Testament there was no infallible doctrinal au
thority, and if we use the word development at
all in its regard in the sense explained in this
chapter, we must instantly add, that there was
much more than development. For we can trace
'Tixeront, La Theologic Ante-nic'eenne, chap, iv., § 4.

250 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
a progressive revelation, a gradual increase of light,
till the time was ready for the full and final day
light of Christianity. Excellent and Divine, so far
as it went, the Old Law brought nothing to per
fection till Christ came.1 But when He had come
and by coming had brought grace and truth, there
was no need to wait for any development before
soaring upwards to the highest flights of con
templation, or in outward action doing the most
heroic deeds for Christ. The sacred dogma had
from the first its full power ; and all the after
developments, admirable and needful as they have
been, the fairest fruit of the God-given gift of
reason guided by the Spirit of Love, are but the
unfolding of the faith of the first Christians, the
belief in Christ truly crucified, in Christ truly
risen from the dead. Greatly should we err if
we thought development was a mere natural in
tellectual process of dialectic, without Divine
guidance and practical import for our spiritual
life ; but no less should we err if we thought the
simple, undeveloped, undifferentiated Christianity
1 See the luminous Second Conference in PSre Lagrange's La
Methode Historique, edit, of 1904, a work now accessible in
English. See also G. Tyrrell, Hard Sayings, pp. 19, 20 ; Franzelin,
De Ecclesia, Thes. iii. ; and the remarkable articles on the Church
and the Bible by Baron Friedrich von Hiigel in The Dublin Review,
Oct., 1894, and April and October, 1895.

DEVELOPMENT 251
of the first Christians was the simplicity of ignor
ance ; ! or that their lack of explicit formulas was
a lack of certainty in their faith.
Section LXXIV.
But although the theory of development cannot
escape, like all else in our feeble hands, a liability
of perversion, it is a theory now perhaps more
than ever of supreme importance. Every epoch
has its providential task ; and just as the centuries
from the third to the fifth and again the twelfth
and the thirteenth displayed a philosophical de
velopment of the faith ; so it may be the task of
the twentieth century to display an exegetical
development, namely, to apply the resources of
our time and historical methods to the study of
the Bible. Nor need any Christian fear lest the
Church be unequal to the task, and the sacred
deposit become as spoil for the spoilers. For she
who shrank not from the construction of an intel
lectual theology, though the false science of the
Gnostics might seem to have discredited the
attempt, is not to be held back from her course,
is not to be hindered in the providential develop
ment of her exegesis, by the scarecrow of rational
istic criticism ; and the new Gnostics, who show
' Lagrange, op. cit., pp. 39, 40; Tyrrell, Lex Orandi, concl.

252 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
in many ways a singular resemblance to the old,
are constructing with their tools of scholarship
and criticism, through the rocks and morasses of
history, a level causeway, not for the triumphal
chariot of a higher Gnosis, but for the humble
tread of Christian footsteps.1
Thus the theory of development solves the
problem of an unchanging Church in a changing
world, of a Church that preserves the golden mean
between heretical instability and schismatical im
mobility. If a correct report could be drawn up
of some great centre of Catholic life, at intervals
of 300 years, to show the theoretical truths ex-
1 Thus the narrow and imperfect notion of the Divinity held by
the Jewish Patriarchs, and pointed out by St. Cyril of Alexandria
(Lagrange, op. cit., p. 58), might be made a pretext for denying the
supernatural character of the Jewish religion and for reducing its
course to the common level of mere natural religious evolution.
In the same way the resemblance of Mosaic and Babylonian
legislation may be made a pretext for denying the supernatural
character of the Jewish Commonwealth. But it is a sorry induc
tion that rests on observed resemblances only, and ignores ob
servable differences; and a full study of Semitic religion and
Semitic antiquities shows in both cases so singular a difference,
that unless we are bound over by our pre-suppositions to reject
the supernatural, its interposition is the easiest solution. On the
total freedom of the Bible from obscene myths and on the trans
cendent view of the One God that it displays, see Lagrange, ibid.,
pp. 205, 206 ; and on the distinction of Mosaic from Babylonian
legislation (here again the element of obscenity is a striking test
of dissimilarity), see ibid. , p. 170, and the articles in the Stimmen
aus Maria-Laach, April, May and August, 1903, by F. X. Kugler.

DEVELOPMENT 253
plicitly taught, and the Christian life actually
lived; and starting at Rome or Antioch in the
year 100, if we examined them again in the year
400, and Rome or London in the years 700, 1000
and 1300, and Rome or Vienna in 1600 and 1900,
a long volume would scarce suffice to enumerate
the differences. And yet the Church proclaims
herself all the while to be the same, and rightly.
For these very differences are the witness of her
identity, a living identity not a lifeless similarity.
Were she now {per impossibile) to appear externally
the same as 900 or twice 900 years ago, and were
she then (as she was most truly) the living Church
of God, assuredly now the external similarity
would be but the mask of death, and she herself
but a mummified corpse, instead of being, as she
is, the living Bride of Christ.

CHAPTER X.
DEFEAT AND VICTORY.
Section LXXV.
We have counted as the tenth and last antimony,
that the Church is ever being defeated and yet is
ever victorious.
Failure and defeat seem from the first the lot of
the Church, and the Divine operations everywhere
frustrated. Instead of carrying their dominions to
the bounds that had been assigned to them, the
chosen people themselves were carried into
captivity. There was but one temple of the true
God, and this was profaned and destroyed.
And the Old Dispensation was here but the
anticipation of the New, wherein the flight of
Christ into Egypt appears perpetually re-enacted ;
and if the hardness of men's hearts extorted
divorce under the Old Law, men's unbelief
hindered the miracles of Christ under the New.
We have to confess the apparent triumph on all
sides and through all ages of man's will over God's
254

DEFEAT AND VICTORY 255
will, the course of multitudes along the dark and
miry paths of error and vice instead of walking in
the luminous road which leads to the mountain of
Sion, and we are confronted by an appalling
mystery — appalling till we understand the necessity
of free-will, the power of Divine grace, the efficacy
of prayer, the meaning of omnipotence in bonds, the
glory of the hidden victories of the Most High.1
Moreover, if the Christian Church can show no
more than a partial fulfilment of the Kingdom of
the Messiah, she knew her own prospective future
from the beginning, warned her preachers of the
fate before them, that they would be as sheep
among wolves, would be hated for Christ's name,
nay, that persecution was to be their blessing, and
those their encouragement who had been racked,
mocked, stoned, cut asunder — the example of
men who suffered and who failed.2 From the
beginning she knew and avowed the weakness
and seeming folly of her preaching, that yet was
to overcome all the strength and wisdom of the
world — weakness and folly, lest God's work should
perchance be taken for man's work.
'Faber, Blessed Sacrament, bk. iii., § 7, bearing the significant
title : "The works and ways, the weights and measures, the failure
and success of God". — Cf. Ramiere, Apostleship of Prayer, intro
duction. 2 Grammar of Assent, chap, x., § 2.

256 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Thus over and over again the Divine Pilot
seemed to slumber while the ship was sinking;
over and over again the Lord of all seems to keep
silence, to yield, to fall back, to cast aside all
carnal weapons, to leave the issue to time, waiting
in a way scarce endurable to our impatience, till
pride should be its own correction, broken without
hands, dissolved under its own insufficiency.
Indeed if the life of the Church was to be the
continuation of the life of her Divine Founder,
how could it be other than a life in appearance of
defeat and humiliation, and in reality of victory ?
She must needs practise her Founder's new
manner of warfare, whose triumphs are the depths
of His abasement ; and around her, as they stood
around Him, must stand the five mystical figures,
bearing on their foreheads their names of Poverty,
Abandonment, Rejection, Secrecy and Mortifica
tion.1 Section LXXVI.
Take, for example, the pontificate of Gelasius,
and the year of Christ 493 ; how forlorn appeared
the outlook, how fruitless the conversion of the
Empire the century before, how certain on mere
human principles the speedy downfall of the
1 Faber, Bethlehem, chap. iii.

DEFEAT AND VICTORY 257
Church. All the East was in the hands of traitors
to the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon, all the
West was under the Arians who rejected the
Ecumenical Council of Nica^a ; the Pope himself
was under an Arian master. " And if one heresy
were not enough, Pelagianism was spreading
with the connivance of the bishops in the territory
of Picenum. In the North of the dismembered
Empire, the Britons had first been infected by
Pelagianism, and now were dispossessed by the
heathen Saxons." The Catholic clergy were
oppressed in the Arian kingdoms of Burgundy,
Aquitaine and Spain, and Catholic worship sus
pended by the Arian Vandals of Africa. Nearly
the whole of the East sided with the Patriarch of
Constantinople (Acacius) in a schism from the
West and were partakers of the Monophysite
heresy, while outside the Empire the opposite
heresy of Nestorianism was advancing on its
scandalous progress.1
Or is this a mere solitary instance ? Go back
then some 115 years just before St. Gregory of
Nazianzen had begun to preach at Constantinople
(a.d. 378), and confess that the fortunes of the
Church, the Christian world being overladen with
Arianism and torn by schisms, appeared desperate.
» Development of Christian Doctrine, chap, vi., § 3.
17

258 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
Or go forward some ninety years to the time
before St. Gregory the Great had begun his
pontificate, and confess that the end of the Church
appeared at hand, the remnants of Roman civilisa
tion sinking before the desolating advance of the
Lombards in Italy ; East and West afflicted with
famine, earthquake, pestilence ; the Christian
Britons slaughtered or enslaved or driven to the
barren hills by their pagan foe ; Arianism still
holding Spain and much of Italy in its embrace.1
No wonder that St. Columban was not alone in
thinking the end of the world at hand.2
If we divide, by the number of years, into three
equal portions the earthly course that as yet the
Church has run, these tempests of disaster just
named were all in the first portion, but were to be
matched by what was to follow. Let us pass over
those in the second portion (a.d. 636-1270), when
again and again destruction seemed at last come
upon her, as when much of her work was ruined
by the Mahometan invaders in the eighth century
and the Northmen in the ninth, or when in the
tenth century the papacy seemed submerged, or
later endangered by the mighty Henries and
Frederics of Germany. Let us look rather at
1 Development of Christian Doctrine, chap, vi., § 2.
8 Grisar, Geschichte Roms und tfer Papsten., pp. 452, 453.

DEFEAT AND VICTORY 259
the third portion as the nearest to our own time ;
and mark, among others, three periods of stress,
during which, on all principles of historical proba
bility, the Catholic Church was doomed to perish :
first the Great Schism when for thirty-seven
years her very foundations seemed shattered, the
principle of obedience brought into disrepute, the
existence of bona fides, nay, of sanctity, on both
sides, appearing to show providential guidance at
war with itself. Secondly came the Protestant
outburst, introduced with indescribable calumny
and vituperation against the Catholics, with plunder,
destruction, and (generally) bloodshed. So Eng
land in 1540 wore the aspect of a pillaged country,
works of art and stores of learning, the accumula
tion of centuries, lost and gone. So in France the
churches destroyed could be counted by hundreds,
the priests and monks butchered by thousands,
Catholic rulers declared unworthy of obedience,
the Catholic religion outraged by unendurable
sacrilege. And at one time, in the face of this
storm of self-interest and fanaticism, two-thirds of
her previous empire seemed irretrievably lost to
the Church. The third period of stress was the
triumph of Jansenism in the eighteenth century,
when the great Church of France was infected
with it to the core, when Joseph the Emperor and
17*

260 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
the Archduke of Tuscany and the Neapolitan
Kingdom seemed about to throw off their allegi
ance to the Holy See, when Catholic doctrines
such as indulgences, auricular confession, and the
cultus of the saints, were openly disputed by
bishops and professors ; when the Jesuits, the
special champions of the Holy See against Pro
testantism and Jansenism, were assailed with
deadly persecution in Portugal and Spain, France
and Naples, and the Holy See compelled by the
menace of a schism to suppress this chosen body
guard in the very hour of need. The powers
called Catholic had all turned against the Holy
Church and who was to defend her? Who in
deed ! if not One whose hand is not shortened
that it cannot save, or ear heavy that it cannot
hear.1 And once more in mid-nineteenth century the
triumph of heresy and schism seemed assured,
when Protestantism had been vociferously re
affirmed in England, was the religion of scientific
Germany, was being spread through the world in
the two immense and growing empires, the British
and the American, while Spain and the vast
regions once her colonies seemed plunged in un
ending civil war and hopeless decay, when more
1 Anglican Difficulties, Lecture x., 8, 9.

DEFEAT AND VICTORY 261
than half of Mexico had been conquered by the
United States, and it seemed a mere question of
time for the rest to follow ; when schismatic Russia
was rising daily higher and higher, and the relative
number of Catholics compared with heretics and
schismatics was daily declining, so that under the
sheer weight of numbers the Church seemed about
to be overwhelmed. Section LXXVII.
Yet precisely in those years the Master could
repeat to desponding followers the timely encour
agement Noli cemulari, be not jealous of the evil
doers. Man's necessity is God's opportunity. Be
patient. You have in you what others have not,
an unearthly spirit of endurance, you who can
realise the law of moral conflicts, the incoherence
of falsehood, the issue of perplexities, the end of
all things, the presence of the Judge.1
In truth, whoever studies Church history will
find the very periods of stress the antecedents of
victory, the darkest hour followed by a dawn.
So, for example, Constantine followed Diocletian ;
the three dark times in the fourth, fifth, and sixth
centuries issued in the respective conversions, big
1 Present Position of Catholics, Lecture ix.

262 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
with blessing, of St. Augustine, of Clovis, of the
Anglo-Saxons ; the desolations of the dark ages
were followed by Hildebrand and the Crusades ;
the zeal of the Dominicans and Franciscans, and
the light of St. Thomas's Summa, were, so to
speak, the Divine reply to imperial tyranny and
Albigensian heresy ; the gaping wound of the
Great Schism was scarce healed when we meet
the flower of Christian art in Fra Angelico, and
then in St. Thomas a Kempis the flower of
Christian mysticism ; Luther and Calvin were
but the rough pathway to the fair garden of the
new martyrs, to the true reformation by the
Council of Trent, to the new missions in East and
West ; Jansenism was so exalted only to fall the
more irretrievably ; and the threatened over
whelming of Catholic population by the dissidents
fifty years ago has already, like a hundred threats
before it, come to naught.
This essay is by pre-eminence a study of facts
and how to account for them. How account then
for the fact that the Christian Church, through so
many centuries, is ever being stricken down, yet
ever rising afresh, and though ever dying, dies
not, but lives ? Or how account for the connected
facts, briefly to be noted, that the tongue of
calumny and the sword of persecution have been

DEFEAT AND VICTORY 263
let loose against her from the beginning to this
day ? Section LXXVIII.
The calumnies that overwhelmed the Author of
Christianity have been heaped on the heads of
His servants ; if they have called the good man of
the house Beelzebub, how much more those of
his household, and the singular beatitude has
been singularly fulfilled, that against them should
be said all manner of evil. Among the pagans
the grossest tales of foulness and blood were
current accusations against the early Christians,
guilty, it was said, of revolting incest, feeding on
children's flesh, giving worship to monsters, their
religion a dark and malevolent magic. By the
heretics of the early centuries the Catholics were
described as apostates, man-worshippers, flesh-
lovers, traitors, sinners, servants of Antichrist,
their Church a brothel and a synagogue of Satan.1
The pagans in their turn, when the victory of
Christianity rendered the old calumnies impossible,
contrived in their literary circles a conspiracy of
silence : to ignore the presence and triumphs of
the Christians was a primary canon of good style.2
1 Development of Christian Doctrine, chap, vi., § 2.
2T. R. Glover, Life and Letters in the Fourth Century, pp. 108,
171, 240.

264 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
And later the disasters to the Empire gave a new
plausibility to the ancient calumny that the Chris
tians were the cause of every calamity : the Tiber
is in flood : cast the Christians to the lion.
But to follow the devious course of calumny
would be long. Think, for example, of the pages
needed to tell all that was falsely forged and
uttered in France against the Holy See and its
servants when Philip the Fair was on the throne
and Pierre Flotte the minister of his misdeeds.
Rather let us keep our eyes at home and look a
moment at the great unholy legend that grew up
in England against God's Church, dominated our
land for 300 years, and if driven at last from its
high place, still holding a great multitude under
its malevolent spell. Ushered in by covetous
mendacity in the reign of Henry VIII., augmented
by the crafty slanders of the following reigns,
notably of Cecil under James I., the legend reached
its climax in the homicidal falsehoods of Titus
Oates and the frenzy of Parliament and people
under Charles II., renewed in a milder form in the
Lord George Gordon riots a century later, and
again in 1850 when Newman could sorrowfully
exclaim : " Alas ! there is no calumny too gross
for the credulity of our countrymen, no imputation
so monstrous which they will not drink up greedily

DEFEAT AND VICTORY 265
like water ".1 And in a whole volume, lightened
by inimitable humour, he showed in detail the
marks of the Protestant view of the Catholic
Church ; fable its basis, tradition its sustaining
power, true testimony insufficient for it, its logical
inconsistency, prejudice its life, assumed principles
its intellectual ground, ignorance its protection.2
Yet even such a masterpiece appeared written in
vain to those who witnessed the persistent life of
the hideous legend in the days of Garibaldi's
triumph or of the Vatican Council.
We have no need to inquire how far this par
ticular calumnious legend is still an active force,
or whether on the eve of disappearance. For the
point is not its death, but the explanation of its
long-continued life, what the law of the pheno
menon, what the meaning of that general and
secular calumny of which the English case is
one example.
And indeed calumny and obloquy are but the
corollary of persecution. " The lion rends his
prey and gives no reason, but man cannot per
secute without assigning to himself a reason for
his act ; his very moral constitution forbids con
tentment with mere brute force ; and if he is to
1 Occasional Sermons, " Christ upon the Waters ".
2 Present Position of Catholics, 1st edit., 1851,

266 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
wage war with the moral influence of the Church,
as good reasons fail, nothing is left to him but to
misstate and defame ; there is no alternative." x
Calumny acts as the incentive to persecution
and is its justification and persecution is the final
cause of calumny.
So, through all her course, persecution of the
Church in multitudinous forms is ever immi
nent, and the light of martyrdom never failing.
Section LXXIX.
Of this glorious light already, in the sixth chapter,
I have said enough, not indeed for the sublimity
and all-importance of this department of history,
but for the purpose of this volume. Here amid
the ranks of the white-robed army let us recall
alone the martyr children, whose testimony bears
a singular significance. Take first the Roman
persecution. Barulas, a boy of seven years old,
was scourged to blood for repeating before the
heathen judge : There is but one God and Jesus
Christ is the true God. " At Merida a girl of
noble family, of the age of twelve, presented
herself before the tribunal, and overturned the
idols. She was scourged and burned with torches ;
' Present Position of Catholics, Lecture vi.

DEFEAT AND VICTORY 267
she neither shed a tear, nor showed other signs of
suffering. When the fire reached her face, she
opened her mouth to receive it, and was suffocated.
At Ca^sarea, a girl, under eighteen, went boldly
to ask the prayers of some Christians who were in
chains before the Pra^torium. She was seized at
once, and her sides torn open with the iron rakes,
preserving the while an open and joyous counten
ance." Again Peter, Dorotheus and Gorgonius,
boys of the imperial household, suffered dreadful
torments, dying under them without a shadow of
wavering in their Christian faith.1
Take a second series of examples from the
Japanese persecution, and we see that from the
same sacred root spring the same fragrant flowers.
" When we read of the boy Lewis, at the age of
twelve, who ran like a second St. Andrew to
embrace the Cross upon which he was to die ; of
Magdalen, who, as she was being burned to death,
gathered up in her hands the red-hot coals and
crowned her brows with them as though they had
been roses ; of the little martyr of six who, running
to keep up with the soldier who led him to death,
gazed without dismay at the disfigured corpses of
his father and uncle, and then kneeling down and
joining his hands, looked up into the face of the
1 Grammar of Assent, chap, x., § 2 vers. fin.

268 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
executioner with a bright, expectant smile ; or of
the Christian mother who being herself, by a
refinement of cruelty, respited from death, spent
her time in teaching her doomed little ones how
they were to kneel down, to bow their heads and
to cry out Jesus ! Mary ! with their latest breath
. . . and of countless other incidents which closely
resemble them, we are tempted to wonder whether
we are not breathing the atmosphere of legend.
... But they are facts, . . . attested for the most
part by the evidence of eye-witnesses, and con
firmed in many indirect ways by the secular history
of Japan as we read it alike in native and in Chris
tian authors." !
And can we show none in our own Islands of the
West that can be placed side by side with these
fair flowers of the Church, reckoned in this life
as children and yet, because of the light of Him
they love, understanding more than the aged ? If
we search perchance we may find. Thus at the
time of the great Irish famine many depots were
opened by proselytising societies for distributing
food to the starving people, gratis indeed, but at
the price of giving up the Catholic faith and being
instructed or numbered as Protestants. Then a
certain widow in north-west Kerry (her name
1 Fr. Herbert Thurston in The Month, April, 1905, p. 394.

DEFEAT AND VICTORY 269
and place can be made precise), seeing her children
wasting away with hunger, herself unable to save
them, and across the way one of these depots
filled with food, in her bewilderment and without
evil intent asked the eldest boy, who was but ten
years old, to cross over and simply show himself
at the depot in the hope that the very sight of his
wretchedness would move the distributors to
minister to his hunger without assailing his faith.
But then as promptly as if he had been Lewis of
Japan or Dorotheus of Rome, the boy answered,
"Ah, mother, death were better". So with his
two brothers this child of faith and fortitude died
slowly of starvation.1 Nor can those who know
the land and the people doubt that many others in
the same plight in those years of sorrow and of
heroism showed the same spirit of unconquerable
faith.
Section LXXX.
This brief survey, these scanty examples, are
yet enough to indicate a marvellous history and to
justify us in presenting at the domicile of historical
science a demand-note for an explanation. It was
otherwise in the early centuries of the Church :
her eventual triumphs were matters of faith only
1 P. S. Dinneen, Faith and Famine, 2nd ed., 1902 (Dublin: Gill
and Son).

270 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
and not of sight, except as seen in the anticipa
tions of the saints. But as the centuries have
increased in number the marvels have accumulated,
with the reiterated failure of brute force, of subtle
thought, of plausible calumny to bring the Church
to her destruction. Or is it nothing, to go back no
further than times our grandfathers might have
remembered, that in those dark Jansenistic days
I have recalled, the sinister French Revolution
swept over Europe, breathing fire and slaughter
against the Church ; and yet when it had passed, not
the Church but her arch-foe Jansenism lay dying?
Or is it nothing that when reinvigorated and
exuberant Protestantism seemed an overpowering
adversary, two fresh forces, personified in the names
of Strauss and Darwin, were added to the hostile
camp : and yet it was not the Church but her
Protestant foe that they left slowly bleeding to
death on the intellectual battlefield ? Or nothing
that the Church has become insensibly an object
of reverence and imitation in the eyes of many to
whom formerly she was an object of abhorrence,
and multitudes, though outside the visible fold, are
taught to their inestimable profit an abundance of
Catholic doctrine, and learn, like the Franks under
Clovis, to burn what they had adored and to adore
what they had burned ?

DEFEAT AND VICTORY 271
And perhaps the most strange of all these
portents is the development of the dogmas of the
Christian faith described in the preceding chapter.
Consider the incessant mental activity of the
maintainers of this faith, its living energy, how it
grows and is not overgown, spreads and is not
enfeebled, is ever germinating yet ever consistent
with itself, and how its upholders, in spite of failures
in points of detail of gifted Fathers and Saints,
have worked out a coherent theory of doctrine after
doctrine, when at any time a single false step
would have thrown all into confusion.1 Here are
phenomena which exceed the effects of any natural
causation ; here is an effect without a cause, a
body hanging loose in the natural universe lacking
a proper place to be assigned to it ; here is an
earthly power exposed to all the laws of history and
yet so defiant of them, that no explanation avails
except to acknowledge that this earthly power is
something more than earthly, and though dying in
its individual members, for they are human, is
immortal in its succession, for it is Divine.3
This conclusion will be confirmed in the follow
ing final chapter on the miraculous and its ex
planation.
1 Development of Christian Di\t>ine. chap. xii.
2 Lectures on the Turks, Lecture iii., part ii.

CHAPTER XI.
THE EXPLANATION OF THE MIRACULOUS.
Section LXXXI.
Using miraculous in the wide sense of ah inter
position in the course of nature by powers superior
to those of nature, and in a manner that can
be perceived by sight or hearing, or some
other sense, we can say that a belief in the
miraculous is a characteristic of man ; not merely
of man in a rude illiterate state, but of civilised
man, from the Egyptians, to go back no further,
under the First Dynasty, sixty-six centuries ago,
to our own day.
Cheaply and easily this gigantic fact has been
dismissed by recurrent materialism as a tissue of
delusion and fraud. It is assumed as a first prin
ciple that we can know phenomena and can know
nothing beyond phenomena ; that physical uni
formity is universal, all things within the domain
of science, this the reign of law, the miraculous
consequently non-existent ; and as a further con-
272

EXPLANATION OF THE MIRACULOUS 273
sequence that prayer is of necessity in vain, not
merely prayer for such objects as for rain or
for recovery from sickness, but for such objects as
help to resist temptation or to make in some grave
matter a wise choice. For mental phenomena
proceed on fixed laws (it is said) no less than
extra-mental ; and as there could be no physical
science if we allowed supernatural interposition in
the physical world, so there could be no psychology
if we allowed the invariable sequence of thoughts,
volitions and emotions to be disturbed by the
actions of (imaginary) human free will, or by the
(imaginary) intervention of a personal Creator and
Sanctifier. It is not my business to deal with this stand
point, which has a certain appearance of logical
consistency, and was put before the public in the
sixties with triumphant cogency.1 The amazing
assumptions needed to start this theory on its
course, and the appalling conclusions that followed
from it, have been sufficiently shown by many
writers during the past twenty-five years, and
have been shown indirectly by the flourishing
'See the lucid article in the Dublin Review, April, 1867, by
W. G. Ward on Science, Prayer, Free-will and Miracles, re
printed 1881. It is described in chapter xi. of Mr. Wilfrid Ward's
W. G. Ward and the Catholic Revival. 18

274 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
manufacture of pantheistic drapery to veil the
repulsive nakedness of naturalistic atheism. My
business here is rather to notice that this theory
is unhistorical, giving no proper explanation of
the belief and practice of the vast majority of
mankind, and leaving without an adequate cause
so gigantic an effect. For the denial of miracles
indeed there is an adequate cause, as one single
instance would render the materialistic position for
evermore untenable ; and perhaps would ultimately
if not instantly be equally fatal to the manifold
forms of pantheism. For a genuine miracle is in
compatible with monism.
But for a theist the difficulties disappear. God
being the Author of nature and of the laws and
uniformity of nature on which physical science
depends, there is no contradiction in a Divine
interposition, which to be a miracle at all, pre
supposes an ordinary uniformity ; else there could
be no breach of it in the particular case. Nor is
there any difficulty in allowing to God the power
to suspend or transcend the ordinary laws of
nature, when the free-will of man has been at
work for centuries, interposing in the realm of
determinism and modifying the aspects of physical
nature, transforming the flora and fauna of con
tinents without damage to the science of botany

EXPLANATION OF THE MIRACULOUS 275
and zoology ; nor damaging geology because the
banks of the Thames at London are lined with
Aberdeen granite that no glacial drift or any other
known force of unassisted nature could have
lodged there. And science dealing with the
general and the abstract has no need to be troubled
by Divine interposition in the particular and the
concrete. Section LXXXII.
But to recognise the theoretical possibility of
the miraculous is one thing ; to have a due ap
preciation of historical fact is another thing. To
say that the question of miracles seems to be
simply a question of evidence,1 is one thing ; to
treat the evidence in a judicial spirit is another
thing. And just as some writers without proof
and in the face of apparent facts take as a first
principle that miracles cannot be, and disallow
all evidence to the contrary ; in the same way
other writers who allow that miracles can happen,
or even have happened, and allow the continuance
of answer to prayer for interior graces and of
psychological miracles, yet take as a first principle
that physical miracles ceased long ago, and refuse
'As the late Duke of Argyll said some forty years ago in his
Reign of Law. 18*

276 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
to look any facts in the face that testify to their
continuance. In dealing with unwelcome evidence our frail
humanity appears at its weakest. Thus touching
a celebrated miracle at Milan to which St. Ambrose
and St. Augustine bear testimony, the theological
writer Isaac Taylor about the year 1840 wrote as
follows : —
" In the Nicene Church, so lax were the notions
of common morality, and in so feeble a manner
did the fear of God influence the conduct of leading
men, that on occasions when the Church was to
be served and her assailants to be confounded,
they did not scruple to take upon themselves the
contrivance and execution of the most degrading
impostures."1 And when Newman about ten years later pro
claimed his belief in certain specific miracles
because of the strength of the evidence for them,
he foresaw that the avowal would be imputed by
many, as in fact it was, " to insanity, or to an
idiosyncrasy, or to imbecility of mind, or to de
crepitude of powers, or to fanaticism, or to hypo
crisy."2 And he foresaw, besides, that this
1 Ancient Christianity, ii., p. 270, quoted in Dr. Marcus Dods,
translation of the City of God, p. 485.
"Present Position of Catholics, Lecture vii., 8.

EXPLANATION OF THE MIRACULOUS 277
rejection of "ecclesiastical miracles," peremptory,
a priori, without weighing the evidence, would be
applied, as in fact it has been, to the Gospel
miracles. The curious Protestant standpoint of the seven
teenth century, when ecclesiastical miracles and
the aid of saints were rejected as superstitious,
and yet the miraculous interposition of evil spirits
held to be of constant occurrence, is now only of
historical interest ; but the same spirit of rejecting
evidence is seen to this day. Wishing to be fair-
minded, unwilling to impute fraud, our contempo
rary scholars and men of science cannot have
recourse, like the old fanatical Protestants, to the
ever-ready explanation in the shape of a crafty
priesthood and wilful deception. But their own
position grows ever more difficult by the pressure
of facts they cannot explain properly ; and those
specialists in physical science who will not hear
of any supernatural explanation of the phenomena
of Lourdes or Naples, or of spiritualism,1 are akin
to the specialists in historical science, at a loss
to explain the wonders recorded at the shrine of
St. Thomas of Canterbury, or those attributed
1 See William James, The Will to Believe, 1897, pp. 317-325 on
the " scientific " antagonism to the researches and the results of
the Society for Psychical Research.

278 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
on such good testimony to St. Catherine of Siena
or St. Philip Neri ; who would have us believe
that a Church professing to be founded on
miracles handed down with minutest detail, did in
fact grow up all suddenly on a make-belief ; who
would have us admit, in the teeth of documentary
evidence, that the Latisiac History of Palladius
was no genuine history, because it narrated the
miraculous life of the hermit St. Anthony ; x who
would leave us no alternative but to write down
the supreme foe and the supreme defender of
Christianity, the Neo-Platonist philosopher Por
phyry and a century later St. Augustine, as both
of them stupefied by superstition, and gaping like
a half-witted countryman at the tricks of a mounte
bank. Section LXXXII I.
If one hypothesis fails to solve scientific diffi
culties or account satisfactorily for the phenomena,
the method of science is to try another.
Let us then, as a mere hypothesis, try the
Catholic teaching on the supernatural, and see
1 See the evidence by Dom Cuthbert Butler in J. Armitage
Robinson's Texts and Studies, Cambridge, 1898 ; and the neglect of
the evidence in Mr. T. R. Glover's (otherwise excellent) Life and
Letters in the Fourth Century, p. 384.

EXPLANATION OF THE MIRACULOUS 279
whether it will account in these matters for the
records of history and observed phenomena.
We must assume, therefore, that God the
omnipotent Creator established the natural order
of which the laws are the subject-matter of
physical science. We must assume that in the
world the action of man, as a beinp- endowed with
o
freedom, has resulted in the artificial order, the
subject-matter of moral and historical science.
We must assume that God interposes by way of
grace or miracle, apart from the two preceding
realms of determinism or indeterfninism ; and this
interposition forms the supernatural order. To
this may be added (though more strictly called the
preternatural order) the action of incorporeal
beings on men or things.
Now concerning this grave and highly pertinent
matter, we must hold that one part of the world of
pure spirits, bodiless, immortal, created before
man, created good (Priscillian notwithstanding),
created free, misused their freedom to sin, became
radically changed, irremediably evil (Origen not
withstanding) and permitted to interfere in man's
world as his perpetual enemy because of their
enmity to his Creator. Hence, linked by the bond
of a common hatred, the evil spirits form a king
dom of darkness under their chief to whom the

280 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
name of adversary or calumniator has been appro
priated {Satanas, Diabolus), and is often taken
collectively to express the evil mind and evil will
of all evil spirits.
These spirits are allowed to attack men normally
and habitually by tempting them to sin, or by
producing illusions that have sin as their final
cause ; while occasionally and sporadically they are
allowed to take possession of man's mental and
bodily faculties. But the powers of evil spirits are
limited ; they can never force the will ; as far as
wrongdoing is concerned any child can vanquish
any evil spirit ; and it is heresy not orthodoxy to
attribute our sins to the tremendous power of
Satan rather than to our own cowardice, effeminacy
and self-love. Nor does the ordinary power of
evil spirits in external things reach to the sus
pension of the laws of nature ; but they know these
laws so well and so far beyond the range of human
knowledge, that often they appear to foresee
events and produce effects in a manner that
simulates the genuine suspension of a law of nature
in a divine miracle. Indeed their characteristic is
to be surrounded by a cloud of deception in con
trast to Divine truth, and to work by illusion and
simulation, mockery and caricature.
So it has come about that over against the

EXPLANATION OF THE MIRACULOUS 281
masterpiece of the holy Church of God, is set up
a mock church, the masterpiece of Satan, the union
of evil spirits and evil men their agents and
dupes ; and while the whole life of a Christian is
to be conformed to the likeness of the Most High,
so by a permission that startles us, the adversary is
suffered to become in blasphemous caricature " the
ape of God " to use the expression of one of the
Fathers ; J and two cities stand one against the
other, the City of God or Christ's Church and the
Kingdom of Satan, in never-ceasing warfare.2 But
the final issue is never doubtful. The ceaseless
activity and visible work of Satan and his angels
as disclosed in the history of the Church and of
individual souls might indeed appal us did we not
know that he is everywhere met and matched by
the activity of grace, his wiles unmasked, his
schemes baffled, his rage impotent, his head
crushed beneath the woman's feet ; and those
whose eyes are opened like the eyes of the
prophet, can see in this secular warfare the horses
and chariots of fire that fill the mountains round
the servants of God.3
1 Cited by H. Ramiere, Apostleship of Prayer, ed. 1891, p. 107.
2 See St. Augustine, De civitate Dei, especially the Prjefatio and
lib. xiv., c. 28, and the encyclical of Leo XIII. entitled Humanum
Genus, published April, 1884, especially the fine exordium.
s Faber, The Creator and the Creature, bk. iii., chap. ii.

282 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
And if any should ask why these things are so,
and our weakness assailed by a supernatural foe,
I might dismiss the question as not here to the
point. But I would rather refer to what has
already been said in the tenth section touching
the permission of evil ; and would add here from
Faber that as all holiness consists in the personal
love of God, this love (beside which all else is
nothing worth) is the explanation of all difficulties :
explains sin because its forgiveness is the sweetest
preacher of Divine love on earth ; explains the
Kingdom of Satan, because the personality of the
evil spirit drives us into personal love of God as
our security and refuge.1
But this by the way ; our immediate task has
been not to defend the Church on the supernatural,
but to explain it as an hypothesis.
Section LXXXIV.
Now granting this hypothesis, all observed facts
and appearances regarding the supernatural will
fit into their place and receive adequate explana
tion. But stay ! the reader may exclaim, What is
this? Are we to commit ourselves to accept as
sober truth all the tales of the miraculous, carry
' Faber, The Creator and the Creature, bk. iii., chap. iv.

EXPLANATION OF THE MIRACULOUS 283
our heads in our hands like St. Denis, or ride
on a broomstick to the witches' Sabbath on the
Brocken ?
Heaven forbid ! But we commit ourselves, with
the Church as our guide, to look the facts fairly
in the face ; and looking we see how here as
everywhere she preserves the golden mean, an
ever present witness to her Divinity. Given
human nature as she presents it, given the super
natural forces good and evil, as she presents them,
we must expect a whole mountain of superstitious
illusion and deliberate deception, and to see magic
in a hundred forms practised from generation to
generation. It is not necessary, it is frequently
impossible, to determine how much is merely
human, a vast department of morbid mental
phenomena, and how much is in part also dia
bolical ; indeed, since confusion and darkness are
characteristic of evil spirits (on our hypothesis),
the human and the super-human action may be
inextricably intermingled. And (partly from the
hypothesis, partly that from a posteriori reasoning)
we must expect that the action of evil spirits will
be intermittent and various according to the forces
of good and the particular condition of an age or
country. Thus the phenomena of diabolical pos
session, so minutely described in the New Testa-

284 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
ment, so especially provided for in the exorcisms
of the Church, so clearly distinguished from bodily
disease and not to be confused, though in ignorant
eyes often confused, with insanity and abnormal
mental phenomena — this possession has been found
again and again on the first preaching of Christi
anity to a pagan people, and is seen in modern
China, where idiocy, insanity, epilepsy, and
hysteria have each their separate names, and all
distinct from diabolical possession.
Take again the extraordinary development of
magical practices that grew up in the northern
countries, particularly in Germany, in the fifteenth
century, fostering, as well as fostered by, the out
break of Protestantism, and culminating in the
dark superstitions of witchcraft that pressed
heavily in the seventeenth century like a night
mare on Germany, England and Scotland, while
the Latin countries were almost exempt. To
suppose that evil spirits had no part in this mental
epidemic is almost as hard a supposition to accept
as to accept all the foolish tales of the victims, and
is to rush from the one extreme of seeing Satan
everywhere to the other extreme of seeing him
nowhere. Moreover, the end and aim of the Evil One and
his agents being to produce sin, there is an ante-

EXPLANATION OF THE MIRACULOUS 2S5
cedent probability that the visible manifestation
of their influence will vary with the circumstances
of time and place; and that alternations will be
seen (as they have been) of deep superstition and
shallow scepticism, each state of mind leading,
though by a different road, to the ends of wicked
ness. And far from modern science "disproving the
devil," it has enabled us better to understand the
process of diabolical delusion, by its showing us
natural forces hidden from us before, but at all
times (on the hypothesis) known to evil spirits,
and giving to their deceptions the appearance of
an exercise of Divine power.
Section I. XXXV.
We see further in the Church the same avoid
ance of extremes in the matter of miracles in the
stricter sense, wrought by God Himself or His
ministers. Uncritical acceptance and uncritical
scepticism are both brushed aside. The accept
ance of any particular miracle except the dogmatic
miracles of her foundation, is not forced by the
Church on her children ; but at all times she up
holds the present possibility of miracles, according
to the promise of her Founder,1 and according to
'John xiv. 1 1.

286 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
the analogy of divine works, that God would
continue what He had begun, and that the very
suspension of one order seems to point to another
order ; so as to make any single miracle only one
of a series, and convert the apparent exception
and anomaly into an additional law of His pro
vidence.1 Hence while the history and preservation of the
Church, the singular animosity with which she
has been assailed, the singular fortitude with
which she has been defended, the singular de
velopment of her doctrines, the singular fortunes
of the Jews and the After-Christians, forbid a
natural explanation, and give a strong presump
tion in favour of the miraculous events on which
the Church rests her claim to our acceptance ;
it follows that, once granted the Apostolic miracles
— and if we refuse them we fall into historical
nescience and chaos — the continuance of the mir
aculous down to this day presents no intellectual
difficulty. It becomes a question in each case
of facts and evidence.
Nor is it necessary to answer as serious objec
tions the multitude of spurious miracles, the obvious
motives for their manufacture, the eagerness of a
credulous crowd to receive them. As well argue
' Present Position of Catholics, Lecture vii.

EXPLANATION OF THE MIRACULOUS 287
against the existence of genuine diamonds from
the multitude of false diamonds, and the obvious
motives for making them and wearing them. The
test in each case is specific evidence.
And this evidence has been rendered clearer
and miracles better established by the progress
of science which has shown that various pheno
mena, formerly held to be miraculous, can be
explained by natural causes. For example the
medical investigation of the gangrenous affection
known as ergotism enables us to explain naturally
certain cures that seemed miraculous ; and the
accounts of blood flowing from cut loaves, need
imply no portent, but only the development in the
yeast of the bacillus prodigiosus. But then the
very accuracy of the details given by the chronicler
in these cases where modern science can control
them, confirms his accuracy of observation and
sober truthfulness in narrating cures for which
modern science can provide no natural explanation.1
To those who are under the sway of the tyrann
ous prejudice that physical laws can never be
overridden, the detailed evidence appeals in vain.
But they leave a whole chapter of human history
'See the interesting and highly instructive Life of St. Hugh of
Lincoln, by the Rev. Herbert Thurston, S.J., London, 1898, pp. 478-
483, 505-510 and the preface pp. x-xii.

288 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
irremediably in darkness, nay the whole course of
human history, and are confronted by a crowd of
facts that somehow must be explained away ;
whereas our reasonable hypothesis exempts us
from the Procrustean process of cutting down our
facts to the narrowness of our presuppositions.
Presuppositions indeed we must have, but let
them be broad and deep and capable of explaining
our history and our human nature. As Mr. Wil
frid Ward has well said, summing up Newman's
position : —
" Commence by the realisation of the depths of
the human soul, of its relations with God, of the
probability that God would grant a revelation, of
the points of contrast between the Christian reve
lation and other religions, and facts [of religious
history] assume a different colour. If Christianity
in its true exhibition is unlike religious fanaticism,
and is unique among religions, the antecedent
improbability of its miracles to a great extent
ceases. An event solitary in human history for
its greatness and significance may well bring
marvels in its train. The inquirer proceeds then,
in comparing it with other religions, to note differ
ences rather than similarities." l
'IV. G. Ward and the Oxford Movement, chap, xv., ad fin. pp. 402,
403.

EXPLANATION OF THE MIRACULOUS 289
The differences ! aye there's the rub. And just
as between Babylonian and Israelite legislation
and morality it is the differences that are the fact of
significance, so the differences between miraculous
appearances within the Church and without her,
are what strike us, whether claimed to be, or
denied to be, miraculous ; for those without
show such feebleness, incompleteness and imita
tion, compared with the completeness, originality
and power of those within. Let us recognise,
indeed, or rather affirm that Catholic miracles
may utilise and apply as well as override natural
causes, and may be under a higher law of causa
tion ; for who is to deny that Providence may not
here act through intermediaries and bind them by
laws whose mystery and subtleness transcend our
fragile comprehension. But this much is certain,
the striking contrast between the miracles of the
Catholic Church and every external attempt at
approximation.1 Section LXXXVI.
Preaching without practice is proverbially uncon
vincing ; and having urged the need of specifica
tion and details, I must myself give some few cases
1 See the note on miracles appended (pp. 574-578) to Fr. Thur
ston's Life of SL Hugh of Lincoln. 19

290 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
of the miraculous, easily accessible, and, on the
hypothesis adopted in this chapter easily explain
able ; but on any other hypothesis inexplicable.
Take first the recovery from blindness of Severus,
one of the guild of butchers at Milan, at the time
when St. Ambrose and St. Augustine were there
together. The man was well known, had been
compelled to abandon his trade because of his
blindness, and then recovered his sight by touching
the freshly found relics of St. Gervasius and St.
Protasius. The details can be read in the twenty-
second letter of St. Ambrose translated in Pusey's
Library of the Fathers ; and more shortly the
miracle is described in the Confessions of St.
Augustine? and in his City of God? For the
needs of modern readers it has been re-stated by
Dr. Ryder with admirable clearness and wit.3
Take, secondly, the case of the African con
fessors, a crowd of men who spoke clearly and
perfectly when their tongues had been barbarously
and completely cut out ; a case all the more
noticeable because the argument against its co
gency, tolerated in the Apologia? has been shown
by Dr. Ryder to be but an argument of straw.5
1 Book ix., chap. vii. 2 Book xxii., chap. viii.
3 In an article "On Certain Ecclesiastical Miracles," in The
Nineteenth Century, August, 1891.
4 Ibid. B The Nineteenth Century, Ic.

EXPLANATION OF THE MIRACULOUS 291
Take thirdly the cure of Innocentius wrought at
Carthage under the very eyes of his friend St.
Augustine, and minutely described in the City of
God.1 The patient had suffered from fistula ; had
been skilfully operated upon ; but one sinus among
the many that had been laid open, had escaped
the notice of the surgeons. When this deficiency
was discovered they long hoped to effect a cure by
medical treatment without further operation. For
the extreme pain which the patient had suffered
from the previous operation, naturally without
anaesthetics, caused him to shrink in terror from
a second operation. At last they were forced
to the sorrowful conviction that there could
be no cure without it. The patient then in anger
dismissed his medical advisers and called in a
famous surgeon of Alexandria, who saw like the
others the absolute necessity of a second operation ;
and with a true sense of professional honour
persuaded the patient to allow it to be performed
by the previous surgeons, of whose skill he had
convinced himself by examining the traces of their
previous work. The operation was then fixed for
the next day. During the terrible interval some
' Book xxii., chap. viii. The passage is fairly rendered into
English, though not with medical precision, in Dods' translation
Edinburgh, 1S72, 19 *

292 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
servants of God, Bishop Saturninus among them,
and St. Augustine himself, sought to console the
patient, who made no doubt he would die of the
inevitable torture under the surgeons' hands ; and
all betook themselves to prayer with such tears
and fervour that Augustine cried out in his heart :
" O Lord, what prayers of Thy people dost Thou
hear, if Thou hearest not these ? " Then came the
dreaded day ; the same spiritual consolers are at
the bedside, the surgeons and their frightful instru
ments are there ; the operator makes all ready ; he.
looks for the sinus that is to be laid open {secandum
sinum) ; he finds a perfectly healed scar {flrmissi-
mam cicatricem) ; and amid unutterable joy and
thanksgiving to God the patient is declared cured
without an operation.
Then passing over the ages when from lack of
civilisation it is more difficult, though by no means
impossible, to secure trustworthy evidence,1 let us
1 E.g., the suppleness a week after death of the limbs of St.
Hugh of Lincoln, to which fact his quite trustworthy chaplain
testifies. See p. 549 of the Life of St. Hugh by Fr. Thurston, who
adds the following note: "There is no class of alleged miracles
for which the evidence seems to me to be so overwhelmingly con
clusive as the marvellous occurrences which are constantly re
corded in connection with the bodies of the saints after death.
Whatever explanation may be given of them, it is impossible to
doubt the facts. The perfect flexibility of the limbs many days
after death, the freedom from any sign of corruption, the sweet

EXPLANATION OF THE MIRACULOUS 293
take as our fourth illustration the proceedings in
later ages of the Roman Congregation of Rites in
the process of Beatification and Canonisation ; the
careful scrutiny of evidence before a miracle is ac
cepted as proved ; the distinction of three classes
of the miraculous ; while in regard to cures seven
serious conditions are required before they can be
admitted as miraculous.1 If then we suppose that
the whole multitude of miracles proved before the
Congregation of Rites, besides many disallowed
because not quite reaching the high standard of
proof required, are all of them a tissue of ignorance,
misunderstanding, delusion and falsehood, we are
making an unreasonable supposition.
Fifthly and finally let us take a few of the many
hundred well-authenticated cases of those cured
in our own time at the waters of Lourdes, and let
this suffice ; for it is no history of thaumaturgy
fragrance exhaled from them, and many other remarkable pheno
mena, are attested in case after case by witnesses whose veracity
there is not the least reason to suspect. . . . Neither have these
phenomena become any less frequent in modern times. . . . The
only difference ... is that in our day the evidence is more care
fully sifted."
1 These conditions are : (i) that according to medical testimony
the illness has been grave and inveterate ; (2) not at a stage when
amendment may be expected; (3) that it has been medically
treated; (4) that convalescence has been sudden or speedy; (5)
not ensuing on some physical crisis; (6) that the cure has been
complete ; (7) and persistent.

294 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
that I am writing, but rather a brief survey of
Church history as the key to universal history.
In 1869 Leonie Chartron from la Nievre having
for some five years suffered from Pott's disease
(caries of the spine) was cured suddenly on being
bathed in the spring at Lourdes, her serious de
formity (hunch- back) disappearing instantly.1
Peter Rudder, a rural labourer of Jabbeke in
Flanders, was suffering since 1867 from gangrenous
wounds due to a broken leg. Many doctors saw
him, declared the wounds incurable, and amputa-
tation, which the patient refused, the only remedy.
He was taken in 1875 t0 tne Lourdes Grotto of
Oostacker near Ghent, was instantaneously cured
there, the broken bones reunited, the wounds gone,
crutches needed no longer, capacity for work no
less than before his accident. He was at work
and vigorous in 1892 when a medical inquiry was
made into his case and its supernatural character
confirmed. In 1898 he died of pneumonia at the
age of seventy-five and twenty-three years after
his cure. In the following year the body was ex
humed and the clear traces found both of the
fracture and of its mysterious healing.2
' George Bertrin, Histoire Critique des ivinements de Lourdes,
5me 6dit., 1905, Paris, Lecoffre, pp. 176, 177.
2 Bertrin, pp. 207-232, and in the Appendix, pp. 514-520.

EXPLANATION OF THE MIRACULOUS 295
Francis Vion-Dury, a soldier, suffering for seven
years from double detachment of the retina and
thus incurably blind, at last in 1890, at the advice
of the nuns of the hospice near Bellegarde, applied
some water from Lourdes to his eyes. At the
third application he felt a sharp pain as of a knife,
and then in his own words, as suddenly as a rifle
shot he found he was cured, and henceforth his
sight was approximately normal.1
Among children cured at Lourdes have been
Paul Mercere, aged twelve months, in 1866, of
congenital hernia ; A. Mertens, aged nineteen
months, in 1895, °f paralysis of the right arm;
Yvonne Aumaitre, aged twenty-three months, in
1896 of a double club-foot; Ferdinand Balin and
George Lemesle, both aged two and a half years,
one in 1895 °f a deformity {deviation) of the knee,
the other in 1897 °f infantile paralysis.2
Theresa Rouchel of German Lorraine had been
attacked in 1890 by lupus. Ulceration in the face
and mouth gradually grew worse, and was pro
nounced by one doctor after another, including two
German specialists, to be incurable. Both to her
self and to others she was an object of horror. She
reached Lourdes on 4th September, 1903, after a
painful journey, the bandages over her face needing
1 Bertrin, pp. 140-43. 'Ibid., pp. 182, 183.

296 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
incessant renewal. Then the next day during a
procession of the Blessed Sacrament she was
suddenly cured ; became on her return to Metz an
object of wonder and of inquiry to the German
police and the doctors ; and by a strange coincid
ence, almost in the words addressed by the Jews
to the blind man in the ninth chapter of St. John's
Gospel, she was called upon to describe her cure.
Indeed it was a case for inquiry, as two perforations
of the palate and right cheek, deep and of long
standing, had disappeared suddenly, and skin and
muscles had been suddenly formed, replacing the
flesh that had perished, and joined on to the sound
flesh. There was no relapse, and as late as Febru
ary, 1905, the cure was perfectly maintained.1
Section LXXXVII.
The contemporary phenomena of Lourdes con
firm the point already emphasised, how great is
the difference between the miraculous within and
without the pale of the Catholic Church, between
the genuine and the spurious. Let the student
regard on the one hand the precision, the lucidity,
the quiet observation, the constant presence of
reason characteristic of such cases as I have given,
and how the medical office {Bureau des constata-
1 Bertrin, pp. 308-329.

EXPLANATION OF THE MIRACULOUS 297
tions mddicales) established at Lourdes can be
described as une sorte de clinique du miracle ; ^ and
then on the other hand let him regard the ex
travagances of spiritualism, or again (in Dr.
Ryder's phrase) the obscure amalgam of brain
waves, faith healing, and sympathetic enthusiasm
used to account for facts that cannot be denied ;
and he will be struck by the significant contrast.
Significant also is the absence at Lourdes of
"suggestion" or "auto-suggestion" in any proper
sense. No certainty of cure is taught or felt : the
only certainty is the belief in God's power to heal
if He will. And the dubious present results, the
admitted limitations, and the gradual operation of
"psychotherapeutics" are quite unlike the un
deniable, the unlimited, and the speedy results of
the waters of Lourdes.2
1 Bertrin, p. in.
2 See the careful study of the Interpretation of the Facts
given by Bertrin, pp. 147-199, where he shows that neither the
physical character of the waters (very ordinary), or the more
plausible explanation of suggestion, can by any possibility account
for the cures. In the note on miracles to the Life of St. Hugh of
Lincoln, Fr. Thurston (writing seven years before M. Bertrin) has
the following pertinent passage : " Nothing seems to me more
striking than the limitations of those faith-cures . . . induced by
Professor Charcot and his associates. The cures of Catholic
miracles are in numberless instances complete, permanent and
instantaneous. The faith-cures are partial, temporary, and
gradual. The signs wrought by Moses and Aaron did not more
completely transcend those of Pharaoh's magicians than the

298 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
But on the hypothesis of this chapter physical
and historical science are delivered from grave
embarrassment by being delivered from the
burdensome pre-supposition that the miraculous
is impossible. Remove this prejudice, and then
without serious difficulty all manner of phenomena
can be fitted each into its proper place, and order
succeeds to chaos. For grace being built upon
nature, keeps its own foundation in good repair :
the trustworthiness of our reasoning powers and
the trustworthiness of our senses and the trust
worthiness of evidence are supported by revelation
against a false idealism and a morbid criticism that
would dissolve all into nescience. The natural and
the supernatural are not indeed to be confounded
together, but lucidly distinguished ; not foolishly
fused, nor again foolishly set, one against the
other, in hostility ; their relations are rather of
harmony and alliance.
In this essay it is not questions of physical
science or psychology that have been the primary
concern, but those rather of historical logic, and
miracles of Lourdes surpass those of the Paris hospitals. If the
Salpfitriere physicians would take an hysterical patient with an
ulcer of many years' standing, persuade her she is about to be
cured, and then at the psychological moment remove the bandage
and show the ulcer healed, there would be a real parallel to
Catholic miracles '' (pp. 576, 577).

EXPLANATION OF THE MIRACULOUS 299
to show that universal history is orderly and in
telligible by the very presence of the one great
exception to all ordinary rules, the one super
natural Church. I have sought to show by a
cumulation . of evidence drawn both from the
fortunes of those outside her borders, and from
ten of the antinomies or seeming contradictions
in her life and teaching, that her history can be
explained on no natural principles ; that there is no
accounting for her strange combination of success
and failure, for her vitality and for the extraordin
ary and secular violence of the enmity against her,
for her change and yet her sameness, for her
divisions and yet her unity, for her scandals and
yet her sanctity, for her seeming opposition to
earthly government, culture and material civilisa
tion yet all the while their sustenance, for her
combined austerity and joyfulness — no solution
for such a cumulation of marvels but to acknow
ledge the Church as supernatural. Then the
question of the miraculous that is so troublesome
to physical and historical science, becomes a
tractable quantity and can take its place as part
of a wider phenomenon.
Thus at last we seem to have reached the long-
desired summit and long-sought conclusion, that
the supernatural is the key to the natural ; that

300 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
the difficulties of history find their solution in
theism ; that Christianity solves the difficulties of
theism ; that the Holy Catholic Church solves the
difficulties of Christianity ; that Church history,
properly understood, solves the difficulties of
Catholicism ; that Church history therefore is all
important for the understanding of universal
history and for our mental outfit ; that without
it we are compelled on matters the gravest, on a
field the widest, on subjects of the most fascinating
interest, on issues incomparable, to remain in irre
mediable darkness.

EPILOGUE.
Section LXXXVIII.
Am I then to end with a note of triumph over
fallen foes ? Not so. For such is not the temper
suited to this world of obscure images, or to the
feeble state of man, who is warned when he
thinketh he standeth to take heed lest he fall.
Indeed, such exultation would contradict the words
written already at the close of the First Part.
Therefore let no one think the previous reason
ing is meant to be a demonstration, or that the
evidence is so irresistible that our reason is forced
to admit the conclusion ; for there is lacking a
cogency that would overpower us into conviction.
Nor is the deficiency due merely, though much
is due, to the many imperfections of the present
writer, but due also to the very nature of the case ;
so that even in the best of hands there must be a
cloud over the argument. For the Church cannot
expect her light to be more overwhelming in its
brilliancy than the light of the moral law ; and
301

302 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
her proofs are imperfect or inferential, unable to
enforce acceptance on the unwilling. Let the
Master who has spoken so often in these pages,
speak once more : —
"The sense of right and wrong, which is the
first element in religion, is so delicate, so fitful, so
easily puzzled, obscured, perverted, so subtle in
its argumentative methods, so impressible by
education, so biased by pride and passion, so
unsteady in its course, that, in the struggle for
existence amid the various exercises and triumphs
of the human intellect, the sense is at once the
highest of teachers, yet the least luminous." x
Again, " Those higher sciences . . . Morals
and Religion, are not represented to the intelli
gence of the world by intimations and notices
strong and obvious, such as those which are the
foundation of physical science. . . . Instead of
being obtruded on our notice, so that we cannot
possibly overlook them, they are the dictates either
of Conscience or of Faith. They are faint shadows
and tracings, certain indeed, but delicate, fragile,
and almost evanescent, which the mind recognises
at one time not at another, discerns when it is
calm, loses when it is in agitation. The reflection
of sky and mountains in the lake is a proof that
1 Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, Section on Conscience.

EPILOGUE 303
sky and mountains are around it, but the twilight
or the mist or the sudden thunderstorm hurries
away the beautiful image, which leaves behind it
no memorial of what it was. . . . How easily can
we be talked out of our clearest views of duty :
how does this or that moral precept crumble into
nothing when we rudely handle it ! how does the
fear of sin pass off from us, as quickly as the glow
of modesty dies away from the countenance ! and
then we say ' It is all superstition '. However,
after a time we look around, and then to our
surprise we see, as before, the same law of duty,
the same moral precepts, the same protests
against sin, appearing over against us, in their old
places, as if they had never been brushed away,
like the Divine handwriting upon the wall at the
banquet." x
It is not otherwise with the Holy Church. The
evidence may grow troubled ; objections may close
over her like a dark mist coming up from the sea,
and her face be hidden. Or can she expect her
own evidence to be clearer than that of the supreme
truths, the being of a God, the certainty of a
future retribution, the claims of the moral law, the
reality of sin, the hope of supernatural help ? truths
of which she is the one undaunted defender. And
1 Idea of a University, "Christianity and Medical Science".

304 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
by every sort of persecution she has ever paid,
and must pay, for that defence the penalty. The
world is a rough antagonist to spiritual truth ;
sometimes with mailed hand, sometimes with
pertinacious logic, sometimes with a storm of
irresistible facts that are the truth, but not the
whole truth or the most important truth, it presses
on ; and the Church cannot hope for any normal
visible interposition to protect her servants and
sacraments from contempt or violence. God will
not enforce the acceptance of the Divine message ;
He will not overawe irreverence by a display of
His majesty. Rather He discloses Himself to
us by hiding Himself and seems by the apparent
helplessness of the Divine ways, and by giving
the fullest play to our free-will, to raise us to
the most submissive and intelligent worship.
Thus it is by the first principles deeply lodged
in the heart of man that God leaves his Church to
gain her footing and achieve her success : the
sense of right and wrong, the consciousness of
transgression, the pangs of guilt, the dread of re
tribution, the yearning for more than earthly love.
Thus again it is to man's feeble hands that is en
trusted the guardianship of Christ's priceless truth,
nay, even the defence of Christ's Immaculate Bride.1
'Faber, Blessed Sacrament, bk. iii., § vii.

EPILOGUE 305
If these things are so, how all important is a
true delineation of the Church, how enkindled
should be every ambition to achieve so incom
parable an end! It was worth while when the
Roman Empire stretched over Western Europe
and Northern Africa and hither Asia, to attempt
the history of so magnificent a growth. It was
worth while again when the British Empire within
the brief span of some hundred years had arisen
and spread over the earth, to attempt the history
of such a progress, and trace the humble sources
of so mighty a stream. Still more was it worth
while in the days of Eusebius of Ca;sarea, though
he might shrink from the task as too great for his
strength, to gather up into one body the scattered
records of the Church, to set forth her glories, and
to answer the pagan reproach that she was but a
thing of yesterday, by showing her foundations
to have been laid with the foundations of the
world.1 And now, after the further lapse of nearly
sixteen centuries, how much more is it worth while
to set forth the annals of the faith, to tell the length
ened tale of heroism, to discern the home of grace
and sanctity ; to display man in his true manhood,
and our reason sustained against the persistent
' Eusebius Pamphili, Hist. Eccles., Preface. Compare also the
Prefaces of Livy and Macaulay. ao

306 KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS
attacks of ever-varying unreason ; to recognise the
undying torch-bearer, dissipating the darkness of
our mortal life till the time of darkness is over, and
she goes forth, faithful and true, to meet the im
mortal Bridegroom with whose heart she has ever
been in sweet accord {cor ad cor loquitur) and to
pass into all truth and never-fading light {ex
umbris et imaginibus in veritatem).
Lovers gaze gladly on the likeness of one they
love ; and gladly therefore should we gaze on
the authentic portrait of the Church, and dwell
lovingly on the features of the never-failing friend
of all the sons of men : this Church who by her
very nature is the loving mother of us all ; the
rriother of those whose fresh youth is not yet
dimmed by sophistry, nor made crafty by decep
tion, nor soured by disappointment, nor hardened
by iniquity ; the mother who may be thrust aside
in the hour of prosperity, but is the ever ready
refuge, to whom those can turn whose burdens
are heavy, whose hopes are shattered, whose
days are drawing to a close, whose hearts are
aching with irremediable sorrow. Ah ! indeed
in this dark world of illusion it is worth while to
make her known ; for to know her is to love her.

INDEX.
Abelard, 224.
Adam Smith, 139^.
Adoption, Christian doctrine of, 38.
After-Christians, meaning and numbers of, 42, 43, 62 ; examples
of among Mahometans, 44-51, 54, 55 ; in America, 52, 55 ; in
Australia, 52, 56; in England, 52, 57; in France, 51, 53-55,
176 ; in Germany, 56, 209 ; in Spain, 89 n. ; their fear of pain,
123, 314; anarchical character, 53, 137, 311 ; connected with
Socialism, 151, 153, 159.
Agnosticism, 69, 94, 898. Cf. Relativism.
Alexander VI., 163.
Allard (Paul), 103 »., 148 ».
Ambrose (St.), 162, 276, 390.
Analogies, 69.
Ancestor Worship, 107, 133.
Anima naturaliter Christiana, 38, 82, 90, 107.
Anthropomorphism, 69.
Antinomy, defined, 38 ; antinomies of the Church, 64, 65, 75, 76,
299 ; similar difficulties of secular science, 66-68, 84, 85.
Apollinaris, 224.
Apostacy, Early Church on, 199, 216.
Aquinas. See Thomas (St.).
Arab Culture parasitic, 45-47.
Arabs before Mahomet, 47.
Argyle (Duke of), 375.
Arianism, 90, 200, 320, 229, 243, 257, 258.
Aristotle, as philosopher, 90, 92; as economist, 102, 118, 140,
141.
Arius, 200, 227, 229. 307 20 *

308 INDEX
Arnold (Dr.), 202.
Arnold (Matthew), 84, 120, 312.
Art, a part of civilisation, 8 ; character of, 84, 85 ; inexplicable
history of, 87-89 ; how far favoured by the Church, 82, 86 ff.
Asceticism, of the Catholic Church, 79 ff., 98-100, 110-112, 121-
123, 138, 146, 159, 165, 223 ff., 255; Hindu or Moslem, 131.
Ashley (Prof. W. J.), Preface, 15 n.
Athanasius (St.), 324, 244-
Augustine (St.), as once a Gnostic, 220, 262 ; as a philosopher,
90, 94, 95 ; as a theologian, 224; on Roman civilisation, 10, 11 ;
on the hedonistic commonwealth, 114-116, 209 ; on Christians
as citizens, 137, 138 ; on the Two Cities, 381 n. ; on freedom
of conscience, 189, 301 ; on the use of heresies, 234 ; on
miracles, 276, 278, 290-292.
Austerity. See Asceticism.
Austin, the jurist, 235.
Averroes, 46.
Babylonia, 37, 104, 237, 252 »., 289.
Baoehot (Walter), 5 n.
Barry (Dr. W.), 53 «.
Baumgartner, 47 ».
Beloch (Prof.), 24.
Bentham, 335.
Bertrin (George), 294-297.
Bible, exegetical development in twentieth century regarding,
35i-35«; Old Testament, contrast with New Dispensation,
249, 250, 352 n., 354 ; contrast with Babylonian civilisation,
252 »., 289; heresies and schisms in, 318, 219; judgment on
the world in the Book of Wisdom, 113, 118; New Testa
ment on asceticism, in, 112; on submission, 144, 145; on
unity, 215, 216; on scandals, 170, 171 ; on persecutions, 255.
Birth-rates, significance of decline of, 54-58.
Blackstone, coi.
Boetius, 35 «., 193.
Booth (Charles), on London, 21 ; on servants, 140 ».
Browning (Robert), on religion, 196.
Brunetiere (F.),' 33.
Bryce (Sir James), on Moslem jurisprudence, 48 n.

INDEX 309
Buckle, i n.
Buddhists, numbers of, 61, 62 ; doctrines of, 62, 120, 121.
Bury (Mrs.), 86 n.
Butler (Dom Cuthbert), 278 n.
Calumnies, against the Church, 77, 101, 113, 160, 359, 262-265,
276 ; connected with persecution, 365, 366.
Catholic Church, as complete Christianity, 63 ; golden mean of,
64, 73, 82, 92, 108, 163, 221 ff., 252, 283, 285 ; history of, alone
explaining the world's history, 63, 64, 298-300; obscurity of,
64, 72, 301 ff. ; seeming contradictions (antinomies) of, 64, 65,
72-76, 399; attitude towards modern Socialism, 155-160;
friend of the poorer and weaker classes, 81, 146-150, 158, 196-
199; apparent failure of, 254 ff. ; cumulative marvels of history
of, 269-271, 286^., 299 ; attempts to imitate, 219, 220, 280, 281.
Cathrein (Victor), on anthropology, 29 ; on pantheism, material
ism and theism, 31.
Celsus, 80, 103.
Chateaubriand, 138 n.
Child Martyrs, 266-269.
China, culture in, 25, 26'; family life in, superior to the Mahometan,
50 ; ancestor worship in, 107, 108 ; diabolical possession in,
284.
Chivalry, 105, 154.
Christianity, claims to solve difficulties of theism, 38-41, 300 ;
claims to be final, 40, 41, 57, 58, 60^. ; comparison with Jews,
fore-Christians and after-Christians, 42 ff. ; statistics of, 61,
62 ; antinomies of, 64, 65, 75, 76 ; the prop of civilisation, 39,
101 ff. ; the religion of reason, 108, 132, 133, 305, 306 ; alleged
impracticability of, 172/.; attitude of, towards ancient slavery,
146 ff.; towards modern Socialism, 154, 160.
Church History, as world history, 63, 298-300; importance of
understanding, 64, 300, 305, 306.
Civilisation, described, 7-11; material and intellectual, 9, 12;
drawbacks of, 34 ; summary on progress and decay of, 29, 30 ;
difficulty of comparing examples of, 12-15, 18 ; seeming op
position of Christianity to, 98 ff. ; Christianity the antiseptic
for, 39, 101 ff.
Columba (St.), 182.

310 INDEX
Columban (St), 358.
Comte (Auguste), 1 »., 3 ».
Conscience, meaning of, 190 ; liberty of, 193, 195.
CORNEWALL LEWIS, 5 ».
Culture, defined, 9 ; how far restrained by the Church, 77 ff. ; how
far promoted, 82, 86 ff., 104 ; popular, endangered by material
progress, 34-36; favoured by the Church, 149, 150, 158.
Cyril (St.), of Alexandria, 234, 352 n.
Dahlmann on Buddhism, 63.
Dark Ages, 78, 104, 105, 149, 163, 181, 258 ; distinguished from
mediaeval, 78.
Darwin, i n., 370.
Development of Christian doctrine, popularly explained, 342-345 ;
Newman's great work on, 240, 241 ; marvel of, 271 ; import
ance of, 251 ; caricature of, 247-251 ; applied to devotions and
discipline, 246, 347.
Dill (Dr.), 57 n.
Dissensions among Catholics, 163, 163, 169.
Dissidents from the Church, horror of, by early Christians, 316 ;
modern standpoint of Catholics on, 316-218 ; good life among,
317, 339-232.
Donatists, 171, 200, 220.
Egypt, ancient civilisation of, ig, 27, 107, 272 ; hermits of, 103, 181.
England, condition of, at different periods, 19-21 ; modern culture
contrasted with Chinese, 25, 26 ; workman's associations in,
152 ; After-Christians in, 43, 62 ; Christian life in, 37, 331-333 ;
Church of, 320, 227, 229 ; Protestants in, 259, 260, 264, 265 ;
saints and martyrs of, 182, 183.
Epictetus, 146.
Equality and Christianity, 146-150, 155, 170.
Erastianism, 131.
Eucken (Prof.), 337 ».
Eusebianism, 227.
Eusebius, 305.
Evil, problem of, 35-37, 129, 187, 228, 229, 233, 234, 255, 383.
Evil Spirits, 279, 285.

INDEX 311
Extremists, false fervour of, 164, 165, 217, 218 ; laxity of, 165, 166,
226, 338.
Faber (F. W.), on good underlying evil, 35-37 ; on love, 39, 180 ;
on specific Christian virtues, 40 ; on the history of creation,
40M.; on the hiddenness of God, 71 »., 304; on joy and as
ceticism, 121-123; on lax Christians, 165, 166; on rigourists,
166, 223 ; on use of heresies, 233, 234 ; on development in devo
tions, 246, 247; on seeming failure of the Church, 255 »., 256.
Factory Laws. See Workmen, legislation for.
Family Life of After-Christians — of Mahometans, 49-51 ; of
French, 53-55 ; of Americans, 55 ; of other After-Christians,
56, 57; of Fore-Christians, 58, 107, 108; of Christians, 57,
107-109, 123, 137-138, 173-178 ; essential to human happiness,
58, 107; Individualism and Socialism both hostile to, 157.
Fisher (BI. John), 182, 238 n.
Flint (Dr.), his History of the Philosophy of History, 2; his
Scimtia Scientiarum, 92 n. ; his History of the Classifications
of the Sciences, 3 «., 92 n. ; on Mahometan civilisation, 47 n. ; on
Schelling, 66».; on Buddhists, 121 n. ; his misapprehension on
Christianity, 63 n.
Fore-Christians, meaning of, 42; culture of, 59, 60; family
life of, 58, 107, 108 ; choice before them, 60, 61 ; as theists,
91, 121.
Forests, destruction of, 16, 33, 105.
Foxwell (Prof.), 154 ».
France, After-Christian origin and development in, 51, 53-55 ; old
Christian family life in, 176, 177; Christian life in nineteenth
century in, 174, 175 ; persecution of the Church in, 183, 185.
Franciscans, austerity of, 325; social reform by, 154; saints
among, 182.
Franzelin (Cardinal), 350 ».
Fraticelli, the, 154.
Free Service, 143, 151.
French Revolution, the, 270.
G alton (Dr. Francis), 58 n.
Gaumb (L'abb6), 165 n.
Gelasius (Pope), times of, 256.

3I2 INDEX
George Eliot, 193.
Germany, After-Christians in, 43, 56, 209 ; Christian family of, 174,
177, 231 ; persecution in (Kulturkampf), 133, 185 ; wise social
laws in, 152, 185 ; national pride in, 126.
Gibbon, 48 «., 124.
Gladstone, his Vaticanism, 199, 307.
Glover (T. R.), ug, 363 »., 278 ».
Gnostics, 220, 224, 24g, 251.
Goethe, on Greek blitheness, 119.
Good, underlying evil, 35-37. See Evil, problem of.
Gracchi, the, 150 n.
Graham (Prof. W.), on sociology, 3 ; on toleration, 208.
Greeks, civilisation of, 34, 27, 30, 46, 96, 101, 107 ; pessimism
among, 119; philosophy of, adopted and adapted by Christi
anity, 92.
Gregory of Nazianzen, 257.
Gregory of Nyssa, 146.
Gregory the Great, 258.
Gregory VII. (Hildebrand), 162, 182, 262.
Grisar (Hartmann), 104 »., 258.
Gunther, 248.
Guilds of fifteenth century, 177.
Gutberlet (Dr. G.), 29.
Harnack (Prof.), 241.
Hegel, i »., 32.
Heresies and Schisms, persistence of, 218-221 ; horror against,
216 ; variety of, 221, 229 ; character of, and causation, 221-228 ;
providential function, 233, 334 ; good life of members, 339-232.
Hergenrother (Cardinal), 201.
Hindu Civilisation, 19,33, 59i aio'».
Historical Logic, need of principle of selection, 1-7, 16 »., 178,
288 ; danger of a false principle, 172, 173, 178, 205-207, 241,
287, 288; need of detailed specification, 15-18, 21 (see also
Statistics); on truth seeming to vary, 225, 235, 23g; on dis
tinguishing constants from variables, 236, 237, 340 ; explana
tion of phenomena imperative, 269-271, 2g8 ; science and the
miraculous in no opposition, 274, 275, 285, 286, 388, 389. See
also Supernatural.

INDEX 313

Historical School, 233.
Hobhouse (L. T.\ 57 11.
Hugel (Baron von), 250 n.
Hull (Rev. E. R.), 171 n.
Hyde (Douglas), 26.
Ibn Khaldun, 47.
Imperial Theory of history, 7.
Incarnation (the) as the centre of human history, 39, 40, 63, 299,
300, 305, 306.
Individualism, 93, 94, 115, 122, 134, 136, 156, 157, 186, 187.
Inequality, problem of, 139/.
Inquisition, first inquisitors, 201; of later centuries, 203, 204,
206.
Intellectualism, 73, 79, 93, 133, 249, 251, 252, 277, 278, 284-286,
298. See also Agnosticism and Relativism.
Ireland, Christian family life in, 175, 176 ; saints in, 182 ; child
martyrs in, 268, 269.
James (Prof. William), 277 n.
Jansenism, 223, 225, 259, 260, 262, 270.
Janssen, 177.
Japan, alternative before, 61 ; family life in, 108 ; morality of, in
sixteenth century, 112 «. ; missionaries in, 162; martyrdoms
in, 183 ; child martyrs in, 267, 268.
Jesuits, persecution and suppression of, 260.
Jews, unique history of, 43, 44 ; race-pride of, 125-127 ; of the Old
Testament, 249, 250, 252 n.; treatment of, by Popes, 204 ; in
British Parliament, 202.
Johnson (Dr.), on inequality, 141 ; on liberty, 192.
Joy of Christianity, 119, 121-123.
Joylessness of Paganism, 117-121.
Junius, 134.
Justice on labour questions, 155-158.
Kant, 66 «., gs.
Ker (W. P.), on Arabs of the heroic age, 47 ; on mediaeval and
modern literature, 78 n. ; on Mahometanism, 87.
Keynes (J. N.), 5 n.

3i4 INDEX
Kidd (Benjamin), 2 »., 3 »., 33 "•
Kugler (F. X.), 252.
Labour rehabilitated by Christianity, 103, 104, 148.
Labour-questions,, Christian solution of, 155/.
Lactantius, 146, 158.
Lagrange (Pere), 93, 240, 250-252.
Lamennais, 165.
Lane Poole, 47.
Latitudinarianism, 226.
Lax Christians, 161, 162, 165, 166.
Leighton (Lord), 86 ». , 88.
Leo XIII., on labour questions, 155; on patriotism, 138; on
government, 137, 155 ; on liberty and law, 194 n. ; on freedom
of faith, 189 ; on suffering, 122 ; on the Two Cities, 281 n.
Le Play, his great work, 173, 174 ; his witness to family life of
Catholics, 174, 175 ; and of dissident Christians, 330, 331.
Lessius, 40 n.
Lewis (Cornewall), 5 ».
Liberty, various meanings of, 191-195, 209, 210 ; J. S. Mill on, 207,
208.
Livy, 305 n.
Locke on toleration, 202, 208.
Logic See Historical Logic.
Lollards, 154, 171.
Lourdes, cures at, 28g-2g6 ; constatations midicales at, 2g6, 2g7.
Love, the essence of the Catholic religion, 71, 121, 132, 191, 250,
282 ; as seen in the saints, 179, 180 ; mysterious nature of,
71 ; linked with sorrow, 121 ; need for more than earthly, 38,
305.
Lucas (Rev. Herbert), 187 n.
Lucretius, 114.
Macaulay, 305 n.
Magic, 304, 284, 385.
Mahometans, as After-Christians, 44-50; better types of, 50, 51,
60 ; numbers of, 61 ; jurisprudence of, 48, 49 ; parasitic culture
of, 45-47-
Manicheans, 200, 201, 229.

INDEX 315
Marcus Aurelius, 120, 146.
Marx (.Karl), on evolution, 2 n. ; on Socialism, 153 ; his philosophy,
33-
Materialism, 31-33, ^7--~74-
Mathematics, antinomies of, 67. 68.
Medlbval, confusion on the meaning of, 77. 78 ; literature not to
be contrasted with modern, 7S n. ; historical references, 105,
150, 162, i$->. ^59, 291.
Menger (Karl\ on Socialism, 153 n.
Mexico, family life in, 176; art in, SS ; persecution in, 103 ,
threatened absorption of, 261.
Michael ^Emil), his history of Germany, 177.
Mill J. S.X on liberty. ^07, 20$; on Tuscan metayers, 2a
Millet, the painter, Sj «.
Miracles, denial of, by non-theists, 2j2. ^74 ; denial of, bvtheists,
^75--7S ; theory of, J74, 2-9. .iSj-^o, j$g ; modern science
and, JS5. 2S7; difference of C.nholics from others, ^6j, -\i6,
^97 ; specific examples of, 390-296.
Miraculous, meanings of, 372, ^$5.
Money Measure, weakness of, 13, 14. See also Statistics.
Monier-W'illiams \,Sir M.\ 62.
Monks and Friars, work of, 7S, 103-105, *.Si ; martyrdoms of,
iS^, 1S5. J59.
Monofhysites, 90, ;;o, j^3. ^^7, ^57.
Montanists, J^j.
Montesquieu, 103.
Music, significance of, S3, S4.
Myers (F. W.), 54 «.
Mysticism, 71, 91, 10S, i^j. 123.
Napoleon. 132.
Nationalism, two senses of, 1^7 «.
Nationality, a recurrent difficulty to the Church, 1^7, i^S; how
far approved of by the Church, iiS, ug; pride of, 1.24. i.'6;
a cause of heresy and schism, ;.:.:. -23.
Natural Law, theological meaning of. io-\
Nature and Grace. See Supernatural, relation of, to natural.
Newman vCardin.\l\ f.issim. e.g., on logical method, 4-7; on
progress, jg«. ; on the Jews, 44; on the Golden Mean, 64,

3i6

iNDEX

65 ; on antinomies of science, 66-68 ; on antinomies of religion,
34; 35j 65, 72, 73 ; on music, 83, 84 ; on absorption of all good
by the Church, 8g, go ; on relation of philosophy to theology,
g2 ; on the austerity of Christianity, no, in ; on Church and
State, 130, 132, 211, 212; against extremists, 164, 166 n. ;
explains Christian scandals, 167-171 ; on meaning and supre
macy of conscience, 189-igi ; on false liberty, ig2, 197, igg,
207; on the two doctrines of life, 212, 314; on disputes not
heresies, 217 n. ; on the extent of schism and heresy, 2ig, 230;
on the pathology of heresy, 221-236, 228 ; his work on
Development, 240-242 ; on apparent failure of the Church,
34, 35, 256-260; on eventual triumph, 261 ; on persecution
and calumny, 255, 264-267 ; on the cumulative marvels of
Church history, 270, 271 ; on the miraculous, 276, 277, 285,
286, 288, 290 ; on the obscurity of the moral law and of the
Church, 302-304.
Nietzsche, 187, 188.
Nominalism and Realism, 94.
Novatians, 171, 220.
Nuns of Minsk, 186; of Compifegne, 183; of Germany, 185.
Obedience, emphasis laid on, by Church, 112, 130, 144, 147, 155,
166, 216, 245; made easy by Christian doctrine on power,
135, 136-
Obscurity of theism, 34-37, 65, 6g-7i, 304 ; of the moral law, 208,
301-303; of the Church, 72, 218, 2ig, 301, 303, 304.
Old Catholics, 225.
Old Testament. See Bible.
Origen, 78, 379.
Palladius, 378.
Pantheism, relation to materialism and theism, 31, 32, 189, 190;
veiling atheism, 274 ; Church on guard against, 91, 93 ; super
stitions allied to, 107 ; among Mahometan philosophers, 48.
Papal Primacy, 245.
Parsees, 171 n.
Pater (Walter), 120.
Patriotism, Church on, 137, 138 ; decay of, among Ancient Greeks,
30 ; among After-Christians, 54, 137.

INDEX

3»7

Pearson (C. H.), 3 ».
P6rin, 106 n.
Persians, civilisation of, 46, 5g.
Pessimism, 54, 82, ng-121.
Petavius, 238.
Philip the Fair, 264.
Philosophy and the Church, 38-41, 8g-g5, 224, 225, 248, 249, 3g8.
Pius IX. on invincible ignorance, 218.
Pizzi (Prof.), 46 ».
Plato, 92, 222.
Political Economy, classical unhistorical, 106 »., 135, 156, 205 ».,
336 ; historical preface, 13/., 34, 39, 335.
Politics, science of, 137.
Polybius, 150 ».
Porphyry, the Neoplatonist, 95, 378.
Possession (diabolical), 280, 283, 284.
Primitive Man, 27-29.
Priscillian, 279.
Progress, defined, 11-13; paradox on, explained, 21-24; and popu
lation, 22 ; summary on, 24, 39, 30. See also Retrogression.
Protestants, numbers of, 61, 63, 260, 261 ; early violence of, 150,
259 ! calumnies by, against the Church, 63 «., 259, 264, 265,
276, 277 ; many disqualified for Locke's toleration, 209 n. ;
good family life among, 230-232; on miracles, 275-277; on
witches, 277, 284; unhistorical, 255, 270.
Prudentius, 181.
Psychical Research, 277 ».
Psychotherapeutics, 297.
Puritanism, 82, 223. See also Jansenism.
Quietism, 73.
Race-hatred, 134-138, 322, 223.
Ramiere (Pere), 255, 281.
Relativism, abuse of, 94, 236, 34a
Retrogression, examples of, 36, 37.
Rhys Davids, 63.
Ribbe (de), 176.
Rickaby (Joseph), on pagan sorrow, 130 n. ; on development, 224,
225, 244, 345-

318 INDEX
Rites, Roman Congregation of, 293.
Roman Civilisation, earlier, 58, 103, 107; later, 10, 11, 12, 25,
114, 116; based on slavery, 35, 118, 143 ff. ; downfall of, 116,
117 ; joylessness of, 119, 120.
Ross (Prof.), 58 n.
Rousseau, After-Christian herald, 51 ; on liberty, 193.
Rowntree (B. S.), 16 n.
Ruskin, on popular culture, 36 n. ; on our partial knowledge, 70 ». ;
on liberty, 192 ; on political economy, 305 n.
Russell (Bertrand), 66 n.
Ryder (Dr. Ignatius), 390, 297.
Sabellius, 334.
Saints, vast significance of, 178-181, 187, 188; the Church, the
mother of, 178, 180, 186, 187; examples of, 181-186, 262,
266-269.
Savages, evidence on, 27, 39 ; presupposition on, 38.
Scandals, facts and their significance, 161 ff.
Schaffle, 3 n.
Schelling, 66.
Schism, the Great, 259, 263.
Schisms. See Heresies and Schisms.
Schools, modern American, 52, 55 ; mediaeval, 150.
Selection, principle of. See Historical Logic.
Seligman (Prof.), 2 n.
Semi-Arians, 337.
Semi-Socialism of Mahometans, 45, 49, 50.
Serfdom, 143, 143, 147.
Servants, meaning and numbers of, 140, 143.
Service, free, 143, 151.
Shepherd of Hermas, Christians of the time of, 161.
Sidgwick (Henry), on sociology, 3; on measurement of wealth,
14 n.
Simeon Stylites (St.), 179 n.
Slavery, essence of, 143 ; in antiquity, 145, 146, 148 ; attitude of
Christianity to, 118, 146 ff.; Aristotle on, 118, 141; transfor
mation of, by Christianity, 147.
Socialism, causes of the growth of, 150-153 ; explanation of the
term, 153, 154 ; attitude of the Church to, 155-160.

INDEX 319
Socialistic Heresies, 145, 154, 203.
Social Struggles, Church peacemaker in, 159, 160.
Sociological Papers, 3 n.
Sociology, 1-5, 15 n.
Spain, fifteenth and seventeenth centuries in, compared, 12, 13 ;
Inquisition of, 204; persecution in, 185, 26a
Spanish America, art in, 88, 89; ignorance concerning, 89 ».;
family life in, 176 ; seeming decay of, 360, 261.
Spencer (Herbert), 3 »., 5 n.
Spiritualism, 277, 297.
State, the relation to the Church, 139 #.; jealousy of the Church
by, 124, 130-132 ; short sighted, 132, 134-138 ; love of religious
compromise by, 237.
Statistics, higher and lower distinguished, 11, 15, 18, 24, 102,
117; comparative, a schedule for, 16-18, 21 ; difficulties of
comparing, 12-15, x8; of religions, 6i, 62.
Steinhuber (Cardinal), 184 ».
Sterile Families, ot After-Christian Mahometans, 51 ; of the
French, 54 ; of other After-Christians, 55 ; of savages, 27, 58.
Strauss, 234, 270.
Supernatural, relation of, to natural, 63, 168, 240, 271, 279-282,
298-300.
Superstitions, within the Church, 163, 247, 286; without the
Church, 106-108, 133, 204, 280, 284, 285, 297.
Tacitus, 114.
Talamo (Prof.), 145 n.
Taylor (Isaac), 376.
Tertullian, 94, 224.
Theism, confronts pantheism and materialism, 31, 32 ; an indis
pensable postulate, 33; difficulties of, 34 ff., 113; obscurity
of, 34, 69, 70, 302; proclaims a divine law, 190; Christianity
the support of, 38-41, 300.
Theosophy, 171 n.
Thomas a Kempis (St.), 79, 182, 263.
Thomas Aquinas (St.), 70 «., 90, 262.
Thurston (Rev. Herbert), on Japanese morality, 112 n. ; on
Japanese martyrs, 183 n., 267, 268 ; on changes in Church
discipline and devotion, 246 ; on miracles, 287, 289, 393, 397.

320 INDEX
Tixeront (J.), 238, 243, 244, 349-
TORQUEMADA, I96, 204, 206.
Traditionalism, g3, 94, 165 and «.
Trendelenburg, 237 n.
Truce of God, 104.
Tuscany in 1840, 19, 30.
Tyrrell (Rev. George), on civilisation and happiness, 14 »., 24 ;
on progress, 29; on pantheism, 33 ».; on the anima naturaliter
Christiana, 38 ff., 90 ; on After-Christians, 54, 123 ; on anti
nomies, 67 ; on analogy, 6g, 70 ; on love and religion, 71, 133,
180 ; against extremists, 73, g4, 165 ; his Lex Orandi, 187 «.,
ig7 ».; on the Zeitgeist, 97 n.; on asceticism, 121, 123; on
individualism, 122, 134, 187, 188 ; on obedience, 136 ; on the
contemplative life, 179-7J.; on Puritanical theories, 224.
Uebermensch, the, 188.
Unhistorical Spirit, 157, 335, 336, 33g.
Uniates, persecution of, 185, 186.
Unitarianism, 22g ; of Mahometans, 47.
Unity of the Church, zeal of early Christians for, 215, 217.
Urban Congestion, 23, 24.
Usury, war of the Church against, 155, 156; German law against,
195-
Via Media, 226-228. Cf. Catholic Church, golden mean of.
Vincent of L£rins, 238, 244.
Violent Catholics, 164, 165, 317, 318.
Vion-Dury, cure of, 3g5.
Voltaire, 51, 114, 183, 314.
Ward (Dr. W. G.), on prayer and miracles, 273.
Ward (Wilfrid), on the Church unchanging yet adaptable and
historical, 74, go, 97, 248 ; on violent Catholics, 165 n. 1 ; on
weak-kneed Catholics, 105 ». 2 ; his life of Aubrey de Vere,
176; on the multitude not held to be a corpus vile by the
Church, ig8 ; on Dr. Arnold, 202 ; his Problems and Persons,
248 n. ; on Dr. Ward and materialism, 273 ». ; on scientific
method and the supernatural, 288.
Willmann (Otto), on the significance of Christianity, 40, 41 ; on
Christian philosophy, go-g2, 94-95 ; on the historical principle,
235-337-

INDEX 321
Witchcraft. See Magic.
Women, position of, in Islam, 45, 50 ; position in Christianity,
108, 174-177,230-232; under unregulated "free" labour, 151,
152; protection of, 152, 195. See also Family Life.
Workmen, combinations of, 151-152, 157; legislation for, 19,20,
149, 156, 158, 194, 195.
Zeitgeist (time-spirit), the, 95-97, 203 ff
Zola, 205.

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