,,the ,,calvert ,,series ,,hilaire ,,belloc1 ,general ,editor ,,the ,,catholic ,,church ,,and ,,conversion ---------------------------------------- -------------------------------- ,,the ,,calvert ,,series ,,hilaire ,,belloc1 ,general ,editor ------- ,belloc3 ,,the ,,catholic ,,church ,,and ,,history ,chesterton3 ,,the ,,catholic ,,church ,,and ,,conversion ,mc,nabb3 ,,the ,,catholic ,,church ,,and ,,philosophy ,ward3 ,,the ,,catholic ,,church ,,and ,,the ,,appeal ,,to ,,reason ,windle3 ,,the ,,catholic ,,church ,,and ,,its ,,reactions ,,with ,,science ---------------------------------------- -------------------------------- ,,the ,,catholic ,,church ,,and ,,conversion ,,by ,g4 ,k4 ,,chesterton ,new ,york ,,the ,,macmillan ,,company #aibg ,all rights reserved ---------------------------------------- -------------------------------- ,nihil ,obstat ,arthur ,j4 ,scanlan1 ,s4 ,t4 ,d4 ,censor ,librorum4 ,imprimatur ,patrick ,cardinal ,hayes ,archbishop1 ,new ,york4 ,new ,york1 ,september #af1 #aibf4 ,copyright1 #aibf1 ,,by ,,the ,,macmillan ,,company4 ------- ,set up and electrotyped4 ,published ,november1 #aibf4 ,reprinted1 ,april1 #aibg4 ,september1 #aibg4 ,printed in the ,united ,states of ,america by ,,the ,,ferris ,,printing ,,company1 ,,new ,,york4 ---------------------------------------- -------------------------------- ,,editor',s ,,note ,it is with diffidence that anyone born into the ,faith can approach the tremendous subject of ,conversion4 ,indeed1 it is easier for one still quite unacquainted with the ,faith to approach that subject than it is for one who has had the advantage of the ,faith from childhood4 ,there is at once a sort of impertinence in approaching an experience other than one's own 7necessarily more imperfectly grasped71 and an ignorance of the matter4 ,those born into the ,faith very often go through an experience of their own parallel to1 and in some way resembling1 that experience whereby original strangers to the ,faith come to see it and to accept it4 ,those born into the ,faith often1 ,i say1 go through an experience of scepticism in youth1 as the years proceed1 and it is still a common phenomenon 7though not so often to be observed as it was a lifetime ago7 for men of the ,catholic culture1 acquainted with the ,church from childhood1 to leave it in early manhood and never to return4 ,but it is nowadays a still more frequent phenomenon--and it is to this that ,i allude--for those to whom scepticism so strongly appealed in youth to discover1 by an experience of men and of reality in all its varied forms1 that the transcendental truths they had been taught in childhood have the highest claims upon their matured reason4 ,this experience of the born ,catholic may1 ,i repeat1 be called in a certain sense a phenomenon of conversion4 ,but it differs from conversion properly so called1 which rather signifies the gradual discovery and acceptance of the ,catholic ,church by men and women who began life with no conception of its existence3 for whom it had been during their formative years no more than a name1 perhaps despised1 and certainly corresponding to no known reality4 ,such men and women converts are perhaps the chief factors in the increasing vigor of the ,catholic ,church in our time4 ,the admiration which the born ,catholic feels for their action is exactly consonant to that which the ,church in its earlier days showed to the martyrs4 ,for the word 8martyr0 means 8witness40 ,the phenomenon of conversion apparent in every class1 affecting every type of character1 is the great modern witness to the truth of the claim of the ,faith2 to the fact that the ,faith is reality1 and that in it alone is the repose of reality to be found4 ,in proportion as men know less and less of the subject1 in that proportion do they conceive that the entrants into the ,city of ,god are of one type1 and in that proportion do they attempt some simple definition of the mind which ultimately accepts ,catholicism4 ,they will call it a desire for security2 or an attraction of the senses such as is exercised by music or by verse4 ,or they will ascribe it to that particular sort of weakness 7present in many minds7 whereby they are easily dominated and changed in mood by the action of another4 ,a very little experience of typical converts in our time makes nonsense of such theories4 ,men and women enter by every conceivable gate1 after every conceivable process of slow intellectual examination1 of shock1 of vision1 of moral trial and even of merely intellectual process4 ,they enter through the action of expanded experience4 ,some obtain this through travel1 some through a reading of history beyond their fellows1 some through personal accidents of life4 ,and not only are the avenues of approach to the ,faith infinite in number 7though all converging2 as must be so1 since truth is one and error infinitely divided71 but the individual types in whom the process of conversion may be observed differ in every conceivable fashion4 ,when you have predicated of one what emotion or what reasoning process brought him into the fold1 and you attempt to apply your predicate exactly to another1 you will find a misfit4 ,the cynic enters1 and so does the sentimentalist2 and the fool enters and so does the wise man2 the perpetual questioner and doubter and the man too easily accepting immediate authority--they each enter after his kind4 ,you come across an entry into the ,catholic ,church undoubtedly due to the spectacle1 admiration and imitation of some great character observed4 ,next day you come across an entry into the ,catholic ,church out of complete loneliness1 and you are astonished to find the convert still ignorant of the great mass of the ,catholic effect on character4 ,and yet again1 immediately after1 you will find a totally different third type1 the man who enters not from loneliness1 nor from the effect of another mind1 but who comes in out of contempt for the insufficiency or the evil by which he has been surrounded4 ,the ,church is the natural home of the ,human ,spirit4 ,the truth is that if you seek for an explanation of the phenomenon of conversion under any system which bases that phenomenon on illusion1 you arrive at no answer to your question4 ,if you imagine conversion to proceed from this or that or the other erroneous or particular limited and insufficient cause1 you will soon discover it to be inexplicable4 ,there is only one explanation of the phenomenon--a phenomenon always present1 but particularly arresting to the educated man outside the ,catholic ,church in the ,english-speaking countries--there is only one explanation which will account for the multiplicity of such entries and for the infinitely varied quality of the minds attracted by the great change2 and that explanation is that the ,catholic ,church is reality4 ,if a distant mountain may be mistaken for a cloud by many1 but is recognised for a stable part of the world 7its outline fixed and its quality permanent7 by every sort of observer1 and among these especially by men famous for their interest in the debate1 for their acuteness of vision and for their earlier doubts1 the overwhelming presumption is that the thing seen is a piece of objective reality4 ,fifty men on shipboard strain their eyes for land4 ,five1 then ten1 then twenty1 make the land-fall and recognise it and establish it for their fellows4 ,to the remainder1 who see it not or who think it a bank of fog1 there is replied the detail of the outline1 the character of the points recognised1 and that by the most varied and therefore convergent and convincing witnesses--by some who do not desire that land should be there at all1 by some who dread its approach1 as well as those who are glad to find it1 by some who have long most ridiculed the idea that it was land at all--and it is in this convergence of witnesses that we have one out of the innumerable proofs upon which the rational basis of our religion reposes4--,the ,editor4 ---------------------------------------- -------------------------------- ,,contents ,,chapter ,,page ,i4 ,,introductory3 ,a ,,new ,,religion #ae ,,ii4 ,,the ,,obvious ,,blunders #bg ,,iii4 ,,the ,,real ,,obstacles #di ,,iv4 ,,the ,,world ,,inside ,,out #ge ,v4 ,,the ,,exception ,,proves ,,the ,,rule #ic ,,vi4 ,a ,,note ,,on ,,present ,,prospects #aaa ---------------------------------------- -------------------------------- ,,introductory ,a ,,new ,,religion ---------------------------------------- -------------------------------- ,,the ,,catholic ,,church ,,and ,,conversion ,,chapter ,i ,,introductory3 ,a ,,new ,,religion ,the ,catholic faith used to be called the ,old ,religion2 but at the present moment it has a recognized place among the ,new ,religions4 ,this has nothing to do with its truth or falsehood2 but it is a fact that has a great deal to do with the understanding of the modern world4 ,it would be very undesirable that modern men should accept ,catholicism merely as a novelty2 but it is a novelty4 ,it does act upon its existing environment with the peculiar force and freshness of a novelty4 ,even those who denounce it generally denounce it as a novelty2 as an innovation and not merely a survival4 ,they talk of the 8advanced0 party in the ,church of ,england2 they talk of the 8aggression0 of the ,church of ,rome4 ,when they talk of an ,extremist they are as likely to mean a ,ritualist as a ,socialist4 ,given any normal respectable ,protestant family1 ,anglican or ,puritan1 in ,england or ,america1 we shall find that ,catholicism is actually for practical purposes treated as a new religion1 that is1 a revolution4 ,it is not a survival4 ,it is not in that sense an antiquity4 ,it does not necessarily owe anything to tradition4 ,in places where tradition can do nothing for it1 in places where all the tradition is against it1 it is intruding on its own merits2 not as a tradition but a truth4 ,the father of some such ,anglican or ,american ,puritan family will find1 very often1 that all his children are breaking away from his own more or less ,christian compromise 7regarded as normal in the nineteenth century7 and going off in various directions after various faiths or fashions which he would call fads4 ,one of his sons will become a ,socialist and hang up a portrait of ,lenin2 one of his daughters will become a ,spiritualist and play with a planchette2 another daughter will go over to ,christian ,science and it is quite likely that another son will go over to ,rome4 ,the point is1 for the moment1 that from the point of view of the father1 and even in a sense of the family1 all these things act after the manner of new religions1 of great movements1 of enthusiasms that carry young people off their feet and leave older people bewildered or annoyed4 ,catholicism indeed1 even more than the others1 is often spoken of as if it were actually one of the wild passions of youth4 ,optimistic aunts and uncles say that the youth will 8get over it10 as if it were a childish love affair or that unfortunate business with the barmaid4 ,darker and sterner aunts and uncles1 perhaps at a rather earlier period1 used actually to talk about it as an indecent indulgence1 as if its literature were literally a sort of pornography4 ,newman remarks quite naturally1 as if there were nothing odd about it at the time1 that an undergraduate found with an ascetic manual or a book of monastic meditations was under a sort of cloud or taint1 as having been caught with 8a bad book0 in his possession4 ,he had been wallowing in the sensual pleasure of ,nones or inflaming his lusts by contemplating an incorrect number of candles4 ,it is perhaps no longer the custom to regard conversion as a form of dissipation2 but it is still common to regard conversion as a form of revolt4 ,and as regards the established convention of much of the modern world1 it is a revolt4 ,the worthy merchant of the middle class1 the worthy farmer of the ,middle ,west1 when he sends his son to college1 does now feel a faint alarm lest the boy should fall among thieves1 in the sense of ,communists2 but he has the same sort of fear lest he should fall among ,catholics4 ,now he has no fear lest he should fall among ,calvinists4 ,he has no fear that his children will become seventeenth-century ,supralapsarians1 however much he may dislike that doctrine4 ,he is not even particularly troubled by the possibility of their adopting the extreme solifidian conceptions once common among some of the more extravagant ,methodists4 ,he is not likely to await with terror the telegram that will inform him that his son has become a ,fifth-,monarchy man1 any more than that he has joined the ,albigensians4 ,he does not exactly lie awake at night wondering whether ,tom at ,oxford has become a ,lutheran any more than a ,lollard4 ,all these religions he dimly recognises as dead religions2 or at any rate as old religions4 ,and he is only frightened of new religions4 ,he is only frightened of those fresh1 provocative1 paradoxical new notions that fly to the young people's heads4 ,but amongst these dangerous juvenile attractions he does in practice class the freshness and novelty of ,rome4 ,now this is rather odd2 because ,rome is not so very new4 ,among these annoying new religions1 one is rather an old religion2 but it is the only old religion that is so new4 ,when it was originally and really new1 no doubt a ,roman father often found himself in the same position as the ,anglican or ,puritan father4 ,he too might find all his children going strange ways and deserting the household gods and the sacred temple of the ,capitol4 ,he too might find that one of those children had joined the ,christians in their ,ecclesia and possibly in their ,catacombs4 ,but he would have found that1 of his other children1 one cared for nothing but the ,mysteries of ,orpheus1 another was inclined to follow ,mithras1 another was a ,neo-,pythagorean who had learned vegetarianism from the ,hindoos1 and so on4 ,though the ,roman father1 unlike the ,victorian father1 might have the pleasure of exercising the patria potestas and cutting off the heads of all the heretics1 he could not cut off the stream of all the heresies4 ,only by this time most of the streams have run rather dry4 ,it is now seldom necessary for the anxious parent to warn his children against the undesirable society of the ,bull of ,mithras1 or even to wean him from the exclusive contemplation of ,orpheus2 and though we have vegetarians always with us1 they mostly know more about proteids than about ,pythagoras4 ,but that other youthful extravagance is still youthful4 ,that other new religion is once again new4 ,that one fleeting fashion has refused to fleet2 and that ancient bit of modernity is still modern4 ,it is still to the ,protestant parent now exactly what it was to the pagan parent then4 ,we might say simply that it is a nuisance2 but anyhow it is a novelty4 ,it is not simply what the father is used to1 or even what the son is used to4 ,it is coming in as something fresh and disturbing1 whether as it came to the ,greeks who were always seeking some new thing1 or as it came to the shepherds who first heard the cry upon the hills of the good news that our language calls the ,gospel4 ,we can explain the fact of the ,greeks in the time of ,st4 ,paul regarding it as a new thing1 because it was a new thing4 ,but who will explain why it is still as new to the last of the converts as it was to the first of the shepherds8 ,it is as if a man a hundred years old entered the ,olympian games among the young ,greek athletes2 which would surely have been the basis of a ,greek legend4 ,there is something almost as legendary about the religion that is two thousand years old now appearing as a rival of the new religions4 ,that is what has to be explained and cannot be explained away2 nothing can turn the legend into a myth4 ,we have seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears this great modern quarrel between young ,catholics and old ,protestants2 and it is the first step to recognise in any study of modern conversion4 ,i am not going to talk about numbers and statistics1 though ,i may say something about them later4 ,the first fact to realise is a difference of substance which falsifies all the difference of size4 ,the great majority of ,protestant bodies to-day1 whether they are strong or weak1 are not strengthened in this particular fashion2 by the actual attraction of their new followers to their old doctrines4 ,a young man will suddenly become a ,catholic priest1 or even a ,catholic monk1 because he has a spontaneous and even impatient personal enthusiasm for the doctrine of ,virginity as it appeared to ,st4 ,catherine or ,st4 ,clare4 ,but how many men become ,baptist ministers because they have a personal horror of the idea of an innocent infant coming unconsciously to ,christ8 ,how many honest ,presbyterian ministers in ,scotland really want to go back to ,john ,knox1 as a ,catholic mystic might want to go back to ,john of the ,cross8 ,these men inherit positions which they feel they can hold with reasonable consistency and general agreement2 but they do inherit them4 ,for them religion is tradition4 ,we ,catholics naturally do not sneer at tradition2 but we say that in this case it is really tradition and nothing else4 ,not one man in a hundred of these people would ever have joined his present communion if he had been born outside it4 ,not one man in a thousand of them would have invented anything like his church formulas if they had not been laid down for him4 ,none of them has any real reason for being in their own particular church1 whatever good reason they may still have for being outside ours4 ,in other words1 the old creed of their communion has ceased to function as a fresh and stimulating idea4 ,it is at best a motto or a war cry and at the worst a catchword4 ,but it is not meeting contemporary ideas like a contemporary idea4 ,in their time and in their turn we believe that those other contemporary ideas will also prove their mortality by having also become mottoes and catchwords and traditions4 ,a century or two hence ,spiritualism may be a tradition and ,socialism may be a tradition and ,christian ,science may be a tradition4 ,but ,catholicism will not be a tradition4 ,it will still be a nuisance and a new and dangerous thing4 ,these are the general considerations which govern any personal study of conversion to the ,catholic faith4 ,the ,church has defended tradition in a time which stupidly denied and despised tradition4 ,but that is simply because the ,church is always the only thing defending whatever is at the moment stupidly despised4 ,it is already beginning to appear as the only champion of reason in the twentieth century1 as it was the only champion of tradition in the nineteenth4 ,we know that the higher mathematics is trying to deny that two and two make four and the higher mysticism to imagine something that is beyond good and evil4 ,amid all these anti-rational philosophies1 ours will remain the only rational philosophy4 ,in the same spirit the ,church did indeed point out the value of tradition to a time which treated it as quite valueless4 ,the nineteenth-century neglect of tradition and mania for mere documents were altogether nonsensical4 ,they amounted to saying that men always tell lies to children but men never make mistakes in books4 ,but though our sympathies are traditional because they are human1 it is not that part of the thing which stamps it as divine4 ,the mark of the ,faith is not tradition2 it is conversion4 ,it is the miracle by which men find truth in spite of tradition and often with the rending of all the roots of humanity4 ,it is with the nature of this process that ,i propose to deal2 and it is difficult to deal with it without introducing something of a personal element4 ,my own is only a very trivial case but naturally it is the case ,i know best2 and ,i shall be compelled in the pages that follow to take many illustrations from it4 ,i have therefore thought it well to put first this general note on the nature of the movement in my time2 to show that ,i am well aware that it is a very much larger and even a very much later movement than is implied in describing my own life or generation4 ,i believe it will be more and more an issue for the rising generation and for the generation after that1 as they discover the actual alternative in the awful actualities of our time4 ,and ,catholics when they stand up together and sing 8,faith of our ,fathers0 may realise almost with amusement that they might well be singing 8,faith of our ,children40 ,and in many cases the return has been so recent as almost to deserve the description of a ,children's ,crusade4 ---------------------------------------- -------------------------------- ,,the ,,obvious ,,blunders ---------------------------------------- -------------------------------- ,,chapter ,,ii ,,the ,,obvious ,,blunders ,i have noted that ,catholicism really is in the twentieth century what it was in the second century2 it is the ,new ,religion4 ,indeed its very antiquity preserves an attitude of novelty4 ,i have always thought it striking and even stirring that in the venerable invocation of the 8,tantum ,ergo10 which for us seems to come loaded with accumulated ages1 there is still the language of innovation2 of the antique document that must yield to a new rite4 ,for us the hymn is something of an antique document itself4 ,but the rite is always new4 ,but if a convert is to write of conversion he must try to retrace his steps out of that shrine back into that ultimate wilderness where he once really believed that this eternal youth was only the 8,old ,religion40 ,it is a thing exceedingly difficult to do and not often done well1 and ,i for one have little hope of doing it even tolerably well4 ,the difficulty was expressed to me by another convert who said1 8,i cannot explain why ,i am a ,catholic2 because now that ,i am a ,catholic ,i cannot imagine myself as anything else40 ,nevertheless1 it is right to make the imaginative effort4 ,it is not bigotry to be certain we are right2 but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong4 ,it is my duty to try to understand what ,h4 ,g4 ,wells can possibly mean when he says that the medival ,church did not care for education but only for imposing dogmas2 it is my duty to speculate 7however darkly7 on what can have made an intelligent man like ,arnold ,bennett stone-blind to all the plainest facts about ,spain2 it is my duty to find if ,i can the thread of connected thought in ,george ,moore's various condemnations of ,catholic ,ireland2 and it is equally my duty to labour till ,i understand the strange mental state of ,g4 ,k4 ,chesterton when he really assumed that the ,catholic ,church was a sort of ruined abbey1 almost as deserted as ,stonehenge4 ,i must say first that1 in my own case1 it was at worst a matter of slights rather than slanders4 ,many converts far more important than ,i have had to wrestle with a hundred devils of howling falsehood2 with a swarm of lies and libels4 ,i owe it to the liberal and ,universalist atmosphere of my family1 of ,stopford ,brooke and the ,unitarian preachers they followed1 that ,i was always just sufficiently enlightened to be out of the reach of ,maria ,monk4 ,nevertheless1 as this is but a private privilege for which ,i have to be thankful1 it is necessary to say something of what ,i might be tempted to call the obvious slanders1 but that better men than ,i have not always seen that the slander was obvious4 ,i do not think that they exercise much influence on the generation that is younger than mine4 ,the worst temptation of the most pagan youth is not so much to denounce monks for breaking their vow as to wonder at them for keeping it4 ,but there is a state of transition that must be allowed for in which a vague ,protestant prejudice would rather like to have it both ways4 ,there is still a sort of woolly-minded philistine who would be content to consider a friar a knave for his unchastity and a fool for his chastity4 ,in other words1 these dying calumnies are dying but not dead2 and there are still enough people who may still be held back by such crude and clumsy obstacles that it is necessary to some extent to clear them away4 ,after that we can consider what may be called the real obstacles1 the real difficulties we find1 which1 as a fact1 are generally the very opposite of the difficulties we are told about4 ,but let us consider the evidence of all these things being black1 before we go on to the inconvenient fact of their being white4 ,the usual protest of the ,protestant1 that the ,church of ,rome is afraid of the ,bible1 did not1 as ,i shall explain in a moment1 have any great terrors for me at any time4 ,this was by no merit of my own1 but by the accident of my age and situation4 ,for ,i grew up in a world in which the ,protestants1 who had just proved that ,rome did not believe the ,bible1 were excitedly discovering that they did not believe the ,bible themselves4 ,some of them even tried to combine the two condemnations and say that they were steps of progress4 ,the next step in progress consisted in a man kicking his father for having locked up a book of such beauty and value1 a book which the son then proceeded to tear into a thousand pieces4 ,i early discovered that progress is worse than ,protestantism so far as stupidity is concerned4 ,but most of the free-thinkers who were friends of mine happened to think sufficiently freely to see that the ,higher ,criticism was much more of an attack on ,protestant ,bible-worship than on ,roman authority4 ,anyhow1 my family and friends were more concerned with the opening of the book of ,darwin than the book of ,daniel2 and most of them regarded the ,hebrew ,scriptures as if they were ,hittite sculptures4 ,but1 even then1 it would seem odd to worship the sculptures as gods and then smash them as idols and still go on blaming somebody else for not having worshipped them enough4 ,but here again it is hard for me to know how far my own experience is representative1 or whether it would not be well to say more of these purely ,protestant prejudices and doubts than ,i1 from my own experience1 am able to say4 ,the ,church is a house with a hundred gates2 and no two men enter at exactly the same angle4 ,mine was at least as much ,agnostic as ,anglican1 though ,i accepted for a time the borderland of ,anglicanism2 but only on the assumption that it could really be ,anglo-,catholicism4 ,there is a distinction of ultimate intention there which in the vague ,english atmosphere is often missed4 ,it is not a difference of degree but of definite aim4 ,there are ,high ,churchmen as much as ,low ,churchmen who are concerned first and last to save the ,church of ,england4 ,some of them think it can be saved by calling it ,catholic1 or making it ,catholic1 or believing that it is ,catholic2 but that is what they want to save4 ,but ,i did not start out with the idea of saving the ,english ,church1 but of finding the ,catholic ,church4 ,if the two were one1 so much the better2 but ,i had never conceived of ,catholicism as a sort of showy attribute or attraction to be tacked on to my own national body1 but as the inmost soul of the true body1 wherever it might be4 ,it might be said that ,anglo-,catholicism was simply my own uncompleted conversion to ,catholicism4 ,but it was from a position originally much more detached and indefinite that ,i had been converted1 an atmosphere if not agnostic at least pantheistic or ,unitarian4 ,to this ,i owe the fact that ,i find it very difficult to take some of the ,protestant propositions even seriously4 ,what is any man who has been in the real outer world1 for instance1 to make of the everlasting cry that ,catholic traditions are condemned by the ,bible8 ,it indicates a jumble of topsy-turvy tests and tail-foremost arguments1 of which ,i never could at any time see the sense4 ,the ordinary sensible sceptic or pagan is standing in the street 7in the supreme character of the man in the street7 and he sees a procession go by of the priests of some strange cult1 carrying their object of worship under a canopy1 some of them wearing high head-dresses and carrying symbolical staffs1 others carrying scrolls and sacred records1 others carrying sacred images and lighted candles before them1 others sacred relics in caskets or cases1 and so on4 ,i can understand the spectator saying1 8,this is all hocus-pocus02 ,i can even understand him1 in moments of irritation1 breaking up the procession1 throwing down the images1 tearing up the scrolls1 dancing on the priests and anything else that might express that general view4 ,i can understand his saying1 8,your croziers are bosh1 your candles are bosh1 your statues and scrolls and relics and all the rest of it are bosh40 ,but in what conceivable frame of mind does he rush in to select one particular scroll of the scriptures of this one particular group 7a scroll which had always belonged to them and been a part of their hocus-pocus1 if it was hocus-pocus72 why in the world should the man in the street say that one particular scroll was not bosh1 but was the one and only truth by which all the other things were to be condemned8 ,why should it not be as superstitious to worship the scrolls as the statues1 of that one particular procession8 ,why should it not be as reasonable to preserve the statues as the scrolls1 by the tenets of that particular creed8 ,to say to the priests1 8,your statues and scrolls are condemned by our common sense10 is sensible4 ,to say1 8,your statues are condemned by your scrolls1 and we are going to worship one part of your procession and wreck the rest10 is not sensible from any standpoint1 least of all that of the man in the street4 ,similarly1 ,i could never take seriously the fear of the priest1 as of something unnatural and unholy2 a dangerous man in the home4 ,why should a man who wanted to be wicked encumber himself with special and elaborate promises to be good8 ,there might sometimes be a reason for a priest being a profligate4 ,but what was the reason for a profligate being a priest8 ,there are many more lucrative walks of life in which a person with such shining talents for vice and villainy might have made a brighter use of his gifts4 ,why should a man encumber himself with vows that nobody could expect him to take and he did not himself expect to keep8 ,would any man make himself poor in order that he might become avaricious2 or take a vow of chastity frightfully difficult to keep in order to get into a little more trouble when he did not keep it8 ,all that early and sensational picture of the sins of ,rome always seemed to me silly even when ,i was a boy or an unbeliever2 and ,i cannot describe how ,i passed out of it because ,i was never in it4 ,i remember asking some friends at ,cambridge1 people of the ,puritan tradition1 why in the world they were so afraid of ,papists2 why a priest in somebody's house was a peril or an ,irish servant the beginning of a pestilence4 ,i asked them why they could not simply disagree with ,papists and say so1 as they did with ,theosophists or ,anarchists4 ,they seemed at once pleased and shocked with my daring1 as if ,i had undertaken to convert a burglar or tame a mad dog4 ,perhaps their alarm was really wiser than my bravado4 ,anyhow1 ,i had not then the most shadowy notion that the burglar would convert me4 ,that1 however1 ,i am inclined to think1 is the subconscious intuition in the whole business4 ,it must either mean that they suspect that our religion has something about it so wrong that the hint of it is bad for anybody2 or else that it has something so right that the presence of it would convert anybody4 ,to do them justice1 ,i think most of them darkly suspect the second and not the first4 ,a shade more plausible than the notion that ,popish priests merely seek after evil was the notion that they are exceptionally ready to seek good by means of evil4 ,in vulgar language1 it is the notion that if they are not sensual they are always sly4 ,to dissipate this is a mere matter of experience2 but before ,i had any experience ,i had seen some objections to the thing even in theory4 ,the theory attributed to the ,jesuits was very often almost identical with the practice adopted by nearly everybody ,i knew4 ,everybody in society practised verbal economies1 equivocations and often direct fictions1 without any sense of essential falsehood4 ,every gentleman was expected to say he would be delighted to dine with a bore2 every lady said that somebody else's baby was beautiful if she thought it as ugly as sin2 for they did not think it a sin to avoid saying ugly things4 ,this might be right or wrong2 but it was absurd to pillory half a dozen ,popish priests for a crime committed daily by half a million ,protestant laymen4 ,the only difference was that the ,jesuits had been worried enough about the matter to try to make rules and limitations saving as much verbal veracity as possible2 whereas the happy ,protestants were not worried about it at all1 but told lies from morning to night as merrily and innocently as the birds sing in the trees4 ,the fact is1 of course1 that the modern world is full of an utterly lawless casuistry because the ,jesuits were prevented from making a lawful casuistry4 ,but every man is a casuist or a lunatic4 ,it is true that this general truth was hidden from many by certain definite assertions4 ,i can only call them1 in simple language1 ,protestant lies about ,catholic lying4 ,the men who repeated them were not necessarily lying1 because they were repeating4 ,but the statements were of the same lucid and precise order as a statement that the ,pope has three legs or that ,rome is situated at the ,north ,pole4 ,there is no more doubt about their nature than that4 ,one of them1 for instance1 is the positive statement1 once heard everywhere and still heard often3 8,roman ,catholics are taught that anything is lawful if done for the good of the ,church40 ,this is not the fact2 and there is an end of it4 ,it refers to a definite statement of an institution whose statements are very definite2 and it can be proved to be totally false4 ,here as always the critics cannot see that they are trying to have it both ways4 ,they are always complaining that our creed is cut and dried2 that we are told what to believe and must believe nothing else2 that it is all written down for us in bulls and confessions of faith4 ,in so far as this is true1 it brings a matter like this to the point of legal and literal truth1 which can be tested2 and so tested1 it is a lie4 ,but even here ,i was saved at a very early stage by noticing a curious fact4 ,i noticed that those who were most ready to blame priests for relying on rigid formulas seldom took the trouble to find out what the formulas were4 ,i happened to pick up some of the amusing pamphlets of ,james ,britten1 as ,i might have picked up any other pamphlets of any other propaganda2 but they set me on the track of that delightful branch of literature which he called ,protestant ,fiction4 ,i found some of that fiction on my own account1 dipping into novels by ,joseph ,hocking and others4 ,i am only concerned with them here to illustrate this particular and curious fact about exactitude4 ,i could not understand why these romancers never took the trouble to find out a few elementary facts about the thing they denounced4 ,the facts might easily have helped the denunciation1 where the fictions discredited it4 ,there were any number of real ,catholic doctrines ,i should then have thought disgraceful to the ,church4 ,there are any number which ,i can still easily imagine being made to look disgraceful to the ,church4 ,but the enemies of the ,church never found these real rocks of offence4 ,they never looked for them4 ,they never looked for anything4 ,they seemed to have simply made up out of their own heads a number of phrases1 such as a ,scarlet ,woman of deficient intellect might be supposed to launch on the world2 and left it at that4 ,boundless freedom reigned2 it was not treated as if it were a question of fact at all4 ,a priest might say anything about the ,faith2 because a ,protestant might say anything about the priest4 ,these novels were padded with pronouncements like this one1 for instance1 which ,i happen to remember3 8,disobeying a priest is the one sin for which there is no absolution4 ,we term it a reserved case40 ,now obviously a man writing like that is simply imagining what might exist2 it has never occurred to him to go and ask if it does exist4 ,he has heard the phrase 8a reserved case0 and considers1 in a poetic reverie1 what he shall make it mean4 ,he does not go and ask the nearest priest what it does mean4 ,he does not look it up in an encyclopdia or any ordinary work of reference4 ,there is no doubt about the fact that it simply means a case reserved for ecclesiastical superiors and not to be settled finally by the priest4 ,that may be a fact to be denounced2 but anyhow it is a fact4 ,but the man much prefers to denounce his own fancy4 ,any manual would tell him that there is no sin 8for which there is no absolution02 not disobeying the priest2 not assassinating the ,pope4 ,it would be easy to find out these facts and quite easy to base a ,protestant invective upon them4 ,it puzzled me very much1 even at that early stage1 to imagine why people bringing controversial charges against a powerful and prominent institution should thus neglect to test their own case1 and should draw in this random way on their own imagination4 ,it did not make me any more inclined to be a ,catholic2 in those days the very idea of such a thing would have seemed crazy4 ,but it did save me from swallowing all the solid and solemn assertion about what ,jesuits said and did4 ,i did not accept quite so completely as others the well-ascertained and widely accepted fact that 8,roman ,catholics may do anything for the good of the ,church02 because ,i had already learned to smile at equally accepted truths like 8,disobeying a priest is the one sin for which there is no absolution40 ,i never dreamed that the ,roman religion was true2 but ,i knew that its accusers1 for some reason or other1 were curiously inaccurate4 ,it is strange to me to go back to these things now1 and to think that ,i ever took them even as seriously as that4 ,but ,i was not very serious even then2 and certainly ,i was not serious long4 ,the last lingering shadow of the ,jesuit1 gliding behind curtains and concealing himself in cupboards1 faded from my young life about the time when ,i first caught a distant glimpse of the late ,father ,bernard ,vaughan4 ,he was the only ,jesuit ,i ever knew in those days2 and as you could generally hear him half a mile away1 he seemed to be ill-selected for the duties of a curtain-glider4 ,it has always struck me as curious that this ,jesuit raised a storm by refusing to be ,jesuitical 7in the journalese sense ,i mean71 by refusing to substitute smooth equivocation and verbal evasion for a brute fact4 ,because he talked about 8killing ,germans0 when ,germans had to be killed1 all our shifty and shamefaced morality was shocked at him4 ,and none of those protesting ,protestants took thought for a moment to realise that they were showing all the shuffling insincerity they attributed to the ,jesuits1 and the ,jesuit was showing all the plain candour that they claimed for the ,protestant4 ,i could give a great many other instances besides these ,i have given of the hidden ,bible1 the profligate priest or the treacherous ,jesuit4 ,i could go steadily through the list of all these more old-fashioned charges against ,rome and show how they affected me1 or rather why they did not affect me4 ,but my only purpose here is to point out1 as a preliminary1 that they did not affect me at all4 ,i had all the difficulties that a heathen would have had in becoming a ,catholic in the fourth century4 ,i had very few of the difficulties that a ,protestant had1 from the seventeenth to the nineteenth4 ,and ,i owe this to men whose memories ,i shall always honour2 to my father and his circle and the literary tradition of men like ,george ,macdonald and the ,universalists of the ,victorian ,age4 ,if ,i was born on the wrong side of the ,roman wall1 at least ,i was not born on the wrong side of the ,no ,popery quarrel2 and if ,i did not inherit a fully civilised faith1 neither did ,i inherit a barbarian feud4 ,the people ,i was born amongst wished to be just to ,catholics if they did not always understand them2 and ,i should be very thankless if ,i did not record of them that 7like a very much more valuable convert7 ,i can say ,i was born free4 ,i will add one example to illustrate this point1 because it leads us on to larger matters4 ,after a long time--,i might almost say after a lifetime--,i have at last begun to realise what the worthy ,liberal or ,socialist of ,balham or ,battersea really means when he says he is an ,internationalist and that humanity should be preferred to the narrowness of nations4 ,it dawned on me quite suddenly1 after ,i had talked to such a man for many hours1 that of course he had really been brought up to believe that ,god's ,englishmen were the ,chosen ,race4 ,very likely his father or uncle actually thought they were the lost ,ten ,tribes4 ,anyhow1 everything from his daily paper to his weekly sermon assumed that they were the salt of the earth1 and especially that they were the salt of the sea4 ,his people had never thought outside their ,british nationality4 ,they lived in an ,empire on which the sun never set1 or possibly never rose4 ,their ,church was emphatically the ,church of ,england--even if it was a chapel4 ,their religion was the ,bible that went everywhere with the ,union ,jack4 ,and when ,i realised that1 ,i realised the whole story4 ,that was why they were excited by the exceedingly dull theory of the ,internationalist4 ,that was why the brotherhood of nations1 which to me was a truism1 to them was a trumpet4 ,that was why it seemed such a thrilling paradox to say that we must love foreigners2 it had in it the divine paradox that we must love enemies4 ,that was why the ,internationalist was always planning deputations and visits to foreign capitals and heart-to-heart talks and hands across the sea4 ,it was the marvel of discovering that foreigners had hands1 let alone hearts4 ,there was in that excitement a sort of stifled cry3 8,look6 ,frenchmen also have two legs6 ,see6 ,germans have noses in the same place as we60 ,now a ,catholic1 especially a born ,catholic1 can never understand that attitude1 because from the first his whole religion is rooted in the unity of the race of ,adam1 the one and only ,chosen ,race4 ,he is loyal to his own country2 indeed he is generally ardently loyal to it1 such local affections being in other ways very natural to his religious life1 with its shrines and relics4 ,but just as the relic follows upon the religion1 so the local loyalty follows on the universal brotherhood of all men4 ,the ,catholic says1 8,of course we must love all men2 but what do all men love8 ,they love their lands1 their lawful boundaries1 the memories of their fathers4 ,that is the justification of being national1 that it is normal40 ,but the ,protestant patriot really never thought of any patriotism except his own4 ,in that sense ,protestantism is patriotism4 ,but unfortunately it is only patriotism4 ,it starts with it and never gets beyond it4 ,we start with mankind and go beyond it to all the varied loves and traditions of mankind4 ,there never was a more illuminating flash than that which lit up the last moment of one of the most glorious of ,english ,protestants2 one of the most ,protestant and one of the most ,english4 ,for that is the meaning of that phrase of ,nurse ,cavell1 herself the noblest martyr of our modern religion of nationality1 when the very shaft of the white sun of death shone deep into her mind and she cried aloud1 like one who had just discovered something1 8,i see now that patriotism is not enough40 ,there was this in common between the ,catholics to whom ,i have come and the ,liberals among whom ,i was born3 neither of them would ever have imagined for a moment that patriotism was enough4 ,but that insular idealism by which that great lady lived really had taught her unconsciously from childhood that patriotism was enough4 ,not seldom has the ,english lady appeared in history as a heroine2 but generally as facing and defying strangers or savages1 not specially as feeling them as fellows and equals4 ,those last words of the ,english martyr in ,belgium have often been quoted by mere cosmopolitans2 but cosmopolitans are the last people really to understand them4 ,they are generally trying to prove1 not that patriotism is not enough1 but that it is a great deal too much4 ,the point is here that hundreds of the most heroic and high-minded people in ,protestant countries have really assumed that it is enough to be a patriot4 ,the most careless and cynical of ,catholics knows better2 and so did the most vague and visionary of ,universalists4 ,of all the ,protestant difficulties1 which ,i here find it hard to imagine1 this is perhaps the most common and in many ways commendable3 the fact that the normal ,british subject begins by being so very ,british4 ,by accident ,i did not4 ,the tradition ,i heard in my youth1 the simple1 the too simple truths inherited from ,priestly and ,martineau1 had in them something of that grand generalisation upon men as men which1 in the first of those great figures1 faced the howling ,jingoism of the ,french ,wars and defied even the legend of ,trafalgar4 ,it is to that tradition that ,i owe the fact1 whether it be an advantage or a disadvantage1 that ,i cannot worthily analyse the very heroic virtues of a ,plymouth ,brother whose only centre is ,plymouth4 ,for that rationalism1 defective as it was1 began long ago in the same central civilisation in which the ,church herself began2 if it has ended in the ,church it began long ago in the ,republic3 in a world where all these flags and frontiers were unknown2 where all these state establishments and national sects were unthinkable2 a vast cosmopolitan cosmos that had never heard the name of ,england1 or conceived the image of a kingdom separate and at war2 in that vast pagan peace which was the matrix of all these mysteries1 which had forgotten the free cities and had not dreamed of the small nationalities2 which knew only humanity1 the humanum genus1 and the name of ,rome4 ,the ,catholic ,church loves nations as she loves men2 because they are her children4 ,but they certainly are her children1 in the sense that they are secondary to her in time and process of production4 ,this is1 as it happens1 a very good example of a fallacy that often confuses discussion about the convert4 ,the same people who call the convert a pervert1 and especially a traitor to patriotism1 very often use the other catchword to the effect that he is forced to believe this or that4 ,but it is not really a question of what a man is made to believe but of what he must believe2 what he cannot help believing4 ,he cannot disbelieve in an elephant when he has seen one2 and he cannot treat the ,church as a child when he has discovered that she is his mother4 ,she is not only his mother but his country's mother in being much older and more aboriginal than his country4 ,she is such a mother not in sentimental feeling but in historical fact4 ,he cannot think one thing when he knows the contrary thing4 ,he cannot think that ,christianity was invented by ,penda of ,mercia1 who sent missionaries to the heathen ,augustine and the rude and barbarous ,gregory4 ,he cannot think that the ,church first rose in the middle of the ,british ,empire1 and not of the ,roman ,empire4 ,he cannot think that ,england existed1 with cricket and fox-hunting and the ,jacobean translation all complete1 when ,rome was founded or when ,christ was born4 ,it is no good talking about his being 8free0 to believe these things4 ,he is exactly as free to believe them as he is to believe that a horse has feathers or that the sun is pea green4 ,he cannot believe them when once he fully realises them2 and among such things is the notion that the national claim upon a good patriot is in its nature more absolute1 ancient and authoritative than the claim of the whole religious culture which first mapped out its territories and anointed its kings4 ,that religious culture does indeed encourage him to fight to the last for his country1 as for his family4 ,but that is because the religious culture is generous and imaginative and humane and knows that men must have intimate and individual ties4 ,but those secondary loyalties are secondary in time and logic to the law of universal morality which justifies them4 ,and if the patriot is such a fool as to force the issue against that universal tradition from which his own patriotism descends1 if he presses his claim to priority over the primitive law of the whole earth--then he will have brought it on himself if he is answered with the pulverising plainness of the ,book of ,job4 ,as ,god said to the man1 8,where were you when the foundations of the world were laid80 ,we might well say to the nation1 8,where were you when the foundations of the ,church were laid80 ,and the nation will not know in the least what to answer--if it should wish to answer--but will be forced to put its hand upon its mouth1 if only like one who yawns and falls asleep4 ,i have taken this particular case of patriotism because it concerns at least an emotion in which ,i profoundly believe and happen to feel strongly4 ,i have always done my best to defend it2 though ,i have sometimes become suspect by sympathising with other people's patriotism besides my own4 ,but ,i cannot see how it can be defended except as part of a larger morality2 and the ,catholic morality happens to be one of the very few large moralities now ready to defend it4 ,but the ,church defends it as one of the duties of men and not as the whole duty of man2 as it was in the ,prussian theory of the ,state and too often in the ,british theory of the ,empire4 ,and for this the ,catholic rests1 exactly as the ,universalist ,unitarian rested1 upon the actual fact of a human unity anterior to all these healthy and natural human divisions4 ,but it is absurd to treat the ,church as a novel conspiracy attacking the ,state1 when the ,state was only recently a novel experiment arising within the ,church4 ,it is absurd to forget that the ,church itself received the first loyalties of men who had not yet even conceived the notion of founding such a national and separate state2 that the ,faith really was not only the faith of our fathers1 but the faith of our fathers before they had even named our fatherland4 ---------------------------------------- -------------------------------- ,,the ,,real ,,obstacles ---------------------------------------- -------------------------------- ,,chapter ,,iii ,,the ,,real ,,obstacles ,in the last chapter ,i have dealt in a preliminary fashion with the ,protestant case in the conventional controversial sense4 ,i have dealt with the objections which ,i suspected very early of being prejudices and which ,i now know to be prejudices4 ,i have dealt last and at the greatest length with what ,i believe to be the noblest of all the prejudices of ,protestantism3 that which is simply founded on patriotism4 ,i do not think patriotism is necessarily prejudice2 but ,i am quite sure it must be prejudice and nothing else but prejudice1 unless it is covered by some common morality4 ,and a patriotism that does not allow other people to be patriots is not a morality but an immorality4 ,even such a tribal prejudice1 however1 is a more respectable thing than most of the rags and tatters of stale slander and muddleheadedness which ,i am obliged to put first as the official policy of the opposition to the ,church4 ,these stale stories seem to count for a great deal with people who are resolved to keep far away from the ,church4 ,i do not believe they ever counted with anybody who had begun to draw near to it4 ,when a man really sees the ,church1 even if he dislikes what he sees1 he does not see what he had expected to dislike4 ,even if he wants to slay it he is no longer able to slander it2 though he hates it at sight1 what he sees is not what he looked to see2 in that place he may gain a new passion but he loses his old prejudice4 ,there drops from him the holy armour of his invincible ignorance2 he can never be so stupid again4 ,if he has a ready mind he can doubtless set his new reasons in some sort of order and even attempt to link them with his lost tradition4 ,but the thing he hates is there2 and the last chapter was wholly devoted to the study of things that are not there4 ,the real reasons are almost the opposite of the recognised reasons4 ,the real difficulties are almost the opposite of the recognised difficulties4 ,this is connected1 of course1 with a general fact1 now so large and obvious but still not clearly comprehended and confessed4 ,the whole case of ,protestantism against ,catholicism has been turned clean round and is facing the contrary way4 ,on practically every single point on which the ,reformation accused the ,church1 the modern world has not only acquitted the ,church of the crime1 but has actually charged it with the opposite crime4 ,it is as if the reformers had mobbed the ,pope for being a miser1 and then the court had not only acquitted him but had censured him for his extravagance in scattering money among the mob4 ,the principle of modern ,protestantism seems to be that so long as we go on shouting 8,to hell with the ,pope0 there is room for the widest differences of opinion about whether he should go to the hell of the misers or the hell of the spendthrifts4 ,this is what is meant by a broad basis for ,christianity and the statement that there is room for many different opinions side by side4 ,when the reformer says that the principles of the ,reformation give freedom to different points of view1 he means that they give freedom to the ,universalist to curse ,rome for having too much predestination and to the ,calvinist to curse her for having too little4 ,he means that in that happy family there is a place for the ,no ,popery man who finds ,purgatory too tender-hearted and also for the other ,no ,popery man who finds ,hell too harsh4 ,he means that the same description can somehow be made to cover the ,tolstoyan who blames priests because they permit patriotism and the ,diehard who blames priests because they represent ,internationalism4 ,after all1 the essential aim of true ,christianity is that priests should be blamed2 and who are we that we should set narrow dogmatic limits to the various ways in which various temperaments may desire to blame them8 ,why should we allow a cold difficulty of the logician1 technically called a contradiction in terms1 to stand between us and the warm and broadening human brotherhood of all who are full of sincere and unaffected dislike of their neighbours8 ,religion is of the heart1 not of the head2 and as long as all our hearts are full of a hatred for everything that our fathers loved1 we can go on flatly contradicting each other for ever about what there is to be hated4 ,such is the larger and more liberal modern attack upon the ,church4 ,it is quite inconsistent with the old doctrinal attack2 but it does not propose to lose the advantages arising from any sort of attack4 ,but in a somewhat analogous fashion1 it will be found that the real difficulties of a modern convert are almost the direct contrary of those which were alleged by the more ancient ,protestants4 ,protestant pamphlets do not touch even remotely any of the real hesitations that he feels2 and even ,catholic pamphlets have often been concerned too much with answering the ,protestant pamphlets4 ,indeed1 the only sense in which the priests and propagandists of ,catholicism can really be said to be behind the times is that they sometimes go on flogging a dead horse and killing a heresy long after it has killed itself4 ,but even that is1 properly understood1 a fault on the side of chivalry4 ,the preacher1 and even the persecutor1 really takes the heresy more seriously than it is seen ultimately to deserve2 the inquisitor has more respect for the heresy than the heretics have4 ,still1 it is true that the grounds of suspicion or fear that do really fill the convert1 and sometimes paralyse him at the very point of conversion1 have really nothing in the world to do with this old crop of crude slanders and fallacies1 and are often the very inversion of them4 ,the short way of putting it is to say that he is no longer afraid of the vices but very much afraid of the virtues of ,catholicism4 ,for instance1 he has forgotten all about the old nonsense of the cunning lies of the confessional1 in his lively and legitimate alarm of the truthfulness of the confessional4 ,he does not recoil from its insincerity but from its sincerity2 nor is he necessarily insincere in doing so4 ,realism is really a rock of offence2 it is not at all unnatural to shrink from it2 and most modern realists only manage to like it because they are careful to be realistic about other people4 ,he is near enough to the sacrament of penance to have discovered its realism and not near enough to have yet discovered its reasonableness and its common sense4 ,most of those who have gone through this experience have a certain right to say1 like the old soldier to his ignorant comrade1 8,yes1 ,i was afraid2 and if you were half as much afraid1 you would run away40 ,perhaps it is just as well that people go through this stage before discovering how very little there is to be afraid of4 ,in any case1 ,i will say little more of that example here1 having a feeling that absolution1 like death and marriage1 is a thing that a man ought to find out for himself4 ,it will be enough to say that this is perhaps the supreme example of the fact that the ,faith is a paradox that measures more within than without4 ,if that be true of the smallest church1 it is truer still of the yet smaller confessional-box1 that is like a church within a church4 ,it is almost a good thing that nobody outside should know what gigantic generosity1 and even geniality1 can be locked up in a box1 as the legendary casket held the heart of the giant4 ,it is a satisfaction1 and almost a joke1 that it is only in a dark corner and a cramped space that any man can discover that mountain of magnanimity4 ,it is the same with all the other points of attack1 especially the old ones4 ,the man who has come so far as that along the road has long left behind him the notion that the priest will force him to abandon his will4 ,but he is not unreasonably dismayed at the extent to which he may have to use his will4 ,he is not frightened because1 after taking this drug1 he will be henceforward irresponsible4 ,but he is very much frightened because he will be responsible4 ,he will have somebody to be responsible to and he will know what he is responsible for2 two uncomfortable conditions which his more fortunate fellow-creatures have nowadays entirely escaped4 ,there are of course many other examples of the same principle3 that there is indeed an interval of acute doubt1 which is1 strictly speaking1 rather fear than doubt1 since in some cases at least 7as ,i shall point out elsewhere7 there is actually least doubt when there is most fear4 ,but anyhow1 the doubts are hardly ever of the sort suggested by ordinary anti-,catholic propaganda2 and it is surely time that such propagandists brought themselves more in touch with the real problem4 ,the ,catholic is scarcely ever frightened of the ,protestant picture of ,catholicism2 but he is sometimes frightened of the ,catholic picture of ,catholicism2 which may be a good reason for not disproportionately stressing the difficult or puzzling parts of the scheme4 ,for the convert's sake1 it should also be remembered that one foolish word from inside does more harm than a hundred thousand foolish words from outside4 ,the latter he has already learned to expect1 like a blind hail or rain beating upon the ,ark2 but the voices from within1 even the most casual and accidental1 he is already prepared to regard as holy or more than human2 and though this is unfair to people who only profess to be human beings1 it is a fact that ,catholics ought to remember4 ,there is many a convert who has reached a stage at which no word from any ,protestant or pagan could any longer hold him back4 ,only the word of a ,catholic can keep him from ,catholicism4 ,it is quite false1 in my experience1 to say that ,jesuits1 or any other ,roman priests1 pester and persecute people in order to proselytise4 ,nobody has any notion of what the whole story is about1 who does not know that1 through those long and dark and indecisive days1 it is the man who persecutes himself4 ,the apparent inaction of the priest may be something like the statuesque stillness of the angler2 and such an attitude is not unnatural in the functions of a fisher of men4 ,but it is very seldom impatient or premature and the person acted upon is quite lonely enough to realise that it is nothing merely external that is tugging at his liberty4 ,the laity are probably less wise2 for in most communions the ecclesiastical layman is more ecclesiastical than is good for his health1 and certainly much more ecclesiastical than the ecclesiastics4 ,my experience is that the amateur is generally much more angry than the professional2 and if he expresses his irritation at the slow process of conversion1 or the inconsistencies of the intermediate condition1 he may do a great deal of harm1 of the kind that he least intends to do4 ,i know in my own case that ,i always experienced a slight setback whenever some irresponsible individual interposed to urge me on4 ,it is worth while1 for practical reasons1 to testify to such experience1 because it may guide the convert when he in his turn begins converting4 ,our enemies no longer really know how to attack the faith2 but that is no reason why we should not know how to defend it4 ,yet even that one trivial or incidental caution carries with it a reminder of what has been already noted3 ,i mean the fact that whatever be the ,catholic's worries1 they are the very contrary of the ,protestant's warnings4 ,merely as a matter of personal experience1 ,i have been led to note here that it is not generally the priest1 but much more often the layman1 who rather too ostentatiously compasses sea and land to make one proselyte4 ,all the creepy and uncanny whispers about the horror of having the priest in the home1 as if he were a sort of vampire or a monster intrinsically different from mankind1 vanishes with the smallest experience of the militant layman4 ,the priest does his job1 but it is much more his secular co-religionist who is disposed to explain it and talk about it4 ,i do not object to laymen proselytising2 for ,i never could see1 even when ,i was practically a pagan1 why a man should not urge his own opinions if he liked and that opinion as much as any other4 ,i am not likely to complain of the evangelising energy of ,mr4 ,hilaire ,belloc or ,mr4 ,eric ,gill2 if only because ,i owe to it the most intelligent talks of my youth4 ,but it is that sort of man who proselytises in that sort of way2 and the conventional caricature is wrong again when it always represents him in a cassock4 ,catholicism is not spread by any particular professional tricks or tones or secret signs or ceremonies4 ,catholicism is spread by ,catholics2 but not certainly1 in private life at least1 merely by ,catholic priests4 ,i merely give this here out of a hundred examples1 as showing once again that the old traditional version of the terrors of ,popery was almost always wrong1 even where it might possibly have been right4 ,a man may say if he likes that ,catholicism is the enemy2 and he may be stating from his point of view a profound spiritual truth4 ,but if he says that ,clericalism is the enemy1 he is repeating a catchword4 ,it is my experience that the convert commonly passes through three stages or states of mind4 ,the first is when he imagines himself to be entirely detached1 or even to be entirely indifferent1 but in the old sense of the term1 as when the ,prayer ,book talks of judges who will truly and indifferently administer justice4 ,some flippant modern person would probably agree that our judges administer justice very indifferently4 ,but the older meaning was legitimate and even logical and it is that which is applicable here4 ,the first phase is that of the young philosopher who feels that he ought to be fair to the ,church of ,rome4 ,he wishes to do it justice2 but chiefly because he sees that it suffers injustice4 ,i remember that when ,i was first on the ,daily ,news1 the great ,liberal organ of the ,nonconformists1 ,i took the trouble to draw up a list of fifteen falsehoods which ,i found out1 by my own personal knowledge1 in a denunciation of ,rome by ,messrs4 ,horton and ,hocking4 ,i noted1 for instance1 that it was nonsense to say that the ,covenanters fought for religious liberty when the ,covenant denounced religious toleration2 that it was false to say the ,church only asked for orthodoxy and was indifferent to morality1 since1 if this was true of anybody1 it was obviously true of the supporters of salvation by faith and not of salvation by works2 that it was absurd to say that ,catholics introduced a horrible sophistry of saying that a man might sometimes tell a lie1 since every sane man knows he would tell a lie to save a child from ,chinese torturers2 that it missed the whole point1 in this connection1 to quote ,ward's phrase1 8,make up your mind that you are justified in lying and then lie like a trooper10 for ,ward's argument was against equivocation or what people call ,jesuitry4 ,he meant1 8,when the child really is hiding in the cupboard and the ,chinese torturers really are chasing him with red-hot pincers1 then 7and then only7 be sure that you are right to deceive and do not hesitate to lie2 but do not stoop to equivocate4 ,do not bother yourself to say1 8,the child is in a wooden house not far from here10 meaning the cupboard2 but say the child is in ,chiswick or ,chimbora zoo1 or anywhere you choose40 ,i find ,i made elaborate notes of all these arguments all that long time ago1 merely for the logical pleasure of disentangling an intellectual injustice4 ,i had no more idea of becoming a ,catholic than of becoming a cannibal4 ,i imagined that ,i was merely pointing out that justice should be done even to cannibals4 ,i imagined that ,i was noting certain fallacies partly for the fun of the thing and partly for a certain feeling of loyalty to the truth of things4 ,but as a matter of fact1 looking back on these notes 7which ,i never published71 it seems to me that ,i took a tremendous amount of trouble about it if ,i really regarded it as a trifle2 and taking trouble has certainly never been a particular weakness of mine4 ,it seems to me that something was already working subconsciously to keep me more interested in fallacies about this particular topic than in fallacies about ,free ,trade or ,female ,suffrage or the ,house of ,lords4 ,anyhow1 that is the first stage in my own case and ,i think in many other cases2 the stage of simply wishing to protect ,papists from slander and oppression1 not 7consciously at least7 because they hold any particular truth1 but because they suffer from a particular accumulation of falsehood4 ,the second stage is that in which the convert begins to be conscious not only of the falsehood but the truth1 and is enormously excited to find that there is far more of it than he would ever have expected4 ,this is not so much a stage as a progress2 and it goes on pretty rapidly but often for a long time4 ,it consists in discovering what a very large number of lively and interesting ideas there are in the ,catholic philosophy1 that a great many of them commend themselves at once to his sympathies1 and that even those which he would not accept have something to be said for them justifying their acceptance4 ,this process1 which may be called discovering the ,catholic ,church1 is perhaps the most pleasant and straightforward part of the business2 easier than joining the ,catholic ,church and much easier than trying to live the ,catholic life4 ,it is like discovering a new continent full of strange flowers and fantastic animals1 which is at once wild and hospitable4 ,to give anything like a full account of that process would simply be to discuss about half a hundred ,catholic ideas and institutions in turn4 ,i might remark that much of it consists of the act of translation2 of discovering the real meaning of words1 which the ,church uses rightly and the world uses wrongly4 ,for instance1 the convert discovers that 8scandal0 does not mean 8gossip02 and the sin of causing it does not mean that it is always wicked to set silly old women wagging their tongues4 ,scandal means scandal1 what it originally meant in ,greek and ,latin2 the tripping up of somebody else when he is trying to be good4 ,or he will discover that phrases like 8counsel of perfection0 or 8venial sin10 which mean nothing at all in the newspapers1 mean something quite intelligent and interesting in the manuals of moral theology4 ,he begins to realise that it is the secular world that spoils the sense of words2 and he catches an exciting glimpse of the real case for the iron immortality of the ,latin ,mass4 ,it is not a question between a dead language and a living language1 in the sense of an everlasting language4 ,it is a question between a dead language and a dying language2 an inevitably degenerating language4 ,it is these numberless glimpses of great ideas1 that have been hidden from the convert by the prejudices of his provincial culture1 that constitute the adventurous and varied second stage of the conversion4 ,it is1 broadly speaking1 the stage in which the man is unconsciously trying to be converted4 ,and the third stage is perhaps the truest and the most terrible4 ,it is that in which the man is trying not to be converted4 ,he has come too near to the truth1 and has forgotten that truth is a magnet1 with the powers of attraction and repulsion4 ,he is filled with a sort of fear1 which makes him feel like a fool who has been patronising 8,popery0 when he ought to have been awakening to the reality of ,rome4 ,he discovers a strange and alarming fact1 which is perhaps implied in ,newman's interesting lecture on ,blanco ,white and the two ways of attacking ,catholicism4 ,anyhow1 it is a truth that ,newman and every other convert has probably found in one form or another4 ,it is impossible to be just to the ,catholic ,church4 ,the moment men cease to pull against it they feel a tug towards it4 ,the moment they cease to shout it down they begin to listen to it with pleasure4 ,the moment they try to be fair to it they begin to be fond of it4 ,but when that affection has passed a certain point it begins to take on the tragic and menacing grandeur of a great love affair4 ,the man has exactly the same sense of having committed or compromised himself2 of having been in a sense entrapped1 even if he is glad to be entrapped4 ,but for a considerable time he is not so much glad as simply terrified4 ,it may be that this real psychological experience has been misunderstood by stupider people and is responsible for all that remains of the legend that ,rome is a mere trap4 ,but that legend misses the whole point of the psychology4 ,it is not the ,pope who has set the trap or the priests who have baited it4 ,the whole point of the position is that the trap is simply the truth4 ,the whole point is that the man himself has made his way towards the trap of truth1 and not the trap that has run after the man4 ,all steps except the last step he has taken eagerly on his own account1 out of interest in the truth2 and even the last step1 or the last stage1 only alarms him because it is so very true4 ,if ,i may refer once more to a personal experience1 ,i may say that ,i for one was never less troubled by doubts than in the last phase1 when ,i was troubled by fears4 ,before that final delay ,i had been detached and ready to regard all sorts of doctrines with an open mind4 ,since that delay has ended in decision1 ,i have had all sorts of changes in mere mood2 and ,i think ,i sympathise with doubts and difficulties more than ,i did before4 ,but ,i had no doubts or difficulties just before4 ,i had only fears2 fears of something that had the finality and simplicity of suicide4 ,but the more ,i thrust the thing into the back of my mind1 the more certain ,i grew of what ,thing it was4 ,and by a paradox that does not frighten me now in the least1 it may be that ,i shall never again have such absolute assurance that the thing is true as ,i had when ,i made my last effort to deny it4 ,there is a postscript or smaller point to be added here to this paradox2 which ,i know that many will misunderstand4 ,becoming a ,catholic broadens the mind4 ,it especially broadens the mind about the reasons for becoming a ,catholic4 ,standing in the centre where all roads meet1 a man can look down each of the roads in turn and realise that they come from all points of the heavens4 ,as long as he is still marching along his own road1 that is the only road that can be seen1 or sometimes even imagined4 ,for instance1 many a man who is not yet a ,catholic calls himself a ,medivalist4 ,but a man who is only a ,medivalist is very much broadened by becoming a ,catholic4 ,i am myself a ,medivalist1 in the sense that ,i think modern life has a great deal to learn from medival life2 that ,guilds are a better social system than ,capitalism2 that friars are far less offensive than philanthropists4 ,but ,i am a much more reasonable and moderate ,medivalist than ,i was when ,i was only a ,medivalist4 ,for instance1 ,i felt it necessary to be perpetually pitting ,gothic architecture against ,greek architecture1 because it was necessary to back up ,christians against pagans4 ,but now ,i am in no such fuss and ,i know what ,coventry ,patmore meant when he said calmly that it would have been quite as ,catholic to decorate his mantelpiece with the ,venus of ,milo as with the ,virgin4 ,as a ,medivalist ,i am still proudest of the ,gothic2 but as a ,catholic ,i am proud of the ,baroque4 ,that intensity which seems almost narrow because it comes to the point1 like a medival window1 is very representative of that last concentration that comes just before conversion4 ,at the last moment of all1 the convert often feels as if he were looking through a leper's window4 ,he is looking through a little crack or crooked hole that seems to grow smaller as he stares at it2 but it is an opening that looks towards the ,altar4 ,only1 when he has entered the ,church1 he finds that the ,church is much larger inside than it is outside4 ,he has left behind him the lop-sidedness of lepers' windows and even in a sense the narrowness of ,gothic doors2 and he is under vast domes as open as the ,renaissance and as universal as the ,republic of the world4 ,he can say in a sense unknown to all modern men certain ancient and serene words3 ,romanus civis sum2 ,i am not a slave4 ,the point for the moment1 however1 is that there is generally an interval of intense nervousness1 to say the least of it1 before this normal heritage is reached4 ,to a certain extent it is a fear which attaches to all sharp and irrevocable decisions2 it is suggested in all the old jokes about the shakiness of the bridegroom at the wedding or the recruit who takes the shilling and gets drunk partly to celebrate1 but partly also to forget it4 ,but it is the fear of a fuller sacrament and a mightier army4 ,he has1 by the nature of the case1 left a long way behind him the mere clumsy idea that the sacrament will poison him or the army will kill him4 ,he has probably passed the point1 though he does generally pass it at some time1 when he wonders whether the whole business is an extraordinarily intelligent and ingenious confidence trick4 ,he is not now in the condition which may be called the last phase of real doubt4 ,i mean that in which he wondered whether the thing that everybody told him was too bad to be tolerable1 is not too good to be true4 ,here again the recurrent principle is present2 and the obstacle is the very opposite of that which ,protestant propaganda has pointed out4 ,if he still has the notion of being trapped1 he has no longer any notion of being tricked4 ,he is not afraid of finding the ,church out1 but rather of the ,church finding him out4 ,this note on the stages of conversion is necessarily very negative and inadequate4 ,there is in the last second of time or hair's breadth of space1 before the iron leaps to the magnet1 an abyss full of all the unfathomable forces of the universe4 ,the space between doing and not doing such a thing is so tiny and so vast4 ,it is only possible here to give the reasons for ,catholicism1 not the cause of ,catholicism4 ,i have tried to suggest here some of the enlightenments and experiences which gradually teach those who have been taught to think ill of the ,church to begin to think well of her4 ,that anything described as so bad should turn out to be so good is itself a rather arresting process having a savour of something sensational and strange4 ,to come to curse and remain to bless1 to come to scoff and remain to pray1 is always welcome in a spirit of wonder and the glow of an unexpected good4 ,but it is one thing to conclude that ,catholicism is good and another to conclude that it is right4 ,it is one thing to conclude that it is right and another to conclude that it is always right4 ,i had never believed the tradition that it was diabolical2 ,i had soon come to doubt the idea that it was inhuman1 but that would only have left me with the obvious inference that it was human4 ,it is a considerable step from that to the inference that it is divine4 ,when we come to that conviction of divine authority1 we come to the more mysterious matter of divine aid4 ,in other words1 we come to the unfathomable idea of grace and the gift of faith2 and ,i have not the smallest intention of attempting to fathom it4 ,it is a theological question of the utmost complexity2 and it is one thing to feel it as a fact and another to define it as a truth4 ,one or two points about the preliminary dispositions that prepare the mind for it are all that need be indicated here4 ,to begin with1 there is one sense in which the blackest bigots are really the best philosophers4 ,the ,church really is like ,antichrist in the sense that it is as unique as ,christ4 ,indeed1 if it be not ,christ it probably is ,antichrist2 but certainly it is not ,moses or ,mahomet or ,buddha or ,plato or ,pythagoras4 ,the more we see of humanity1 the more we sympathise with humanity1 the more we shall see that when it is simply human it is simply heathen2 and the names of its particular local gods or tribal prophets or highly respectable sages are a secondary matter compared with that human and heathen character4 ,in the old paganism of ,europe1 in the existing paganism of ,asia1 there have been gods and priests and prophets and sages of all sorts2 but not another institution of this sort4 ,the pagan cults die very slowly2 they do not return very rapidly4 ,they do not make the sort of claim that is made at a crisis2 and then make the same claim again and again at crisis after crisis throughout the whole history of the earth4 ,all that people fear in the ,church1 all that they hate in her1 all against which they most harden their hearts and sometimes 7one is tempted to say7 thicken their heads1 all that has made people consciously and unconsciously treat the ,catholic ,church as a peril1 is the evidence that there is something here that we cannot look on at languidly and with detachment1 as we might look on at ,hottentots dancing at the new moon or ,chinamen burning paper in porcelain temples4 ,the ,chinaman and the tourist can be on the best of terms on a basis of mutual scorn4 ,but in the duel of the ,church and the world is no such shield of contempt4 ,the ,church will not consent to scorn the soul of a coolie or even a tourist2 and the measure of the madness with which men hate her is but their vain attempt to despise4 ,another element1 far more deep and delicate and hard to describe1 is the immediate connection of what is most awful and archaic with what is most intimate and individual4 ,it is a miracle in itself that anything so huge and historic in date and design should be so fresh in the affections4 ,it is as if a man found his own parlour and fireside in the heart of the ,great ,pyramid4 ,it is as if a child's favourite doll turned out to be the oldest sacred image in the world1 worshipped in ,chaldea or ,nineveh4 ,it is as if a girl to whom a man made love in a garden were also1 in some dark and double fashion1 a statue standing for ever in a square4 ,it is just here that all those things which were regarded as weakness come in as the fulness of strength4 ,everything that men called sentimental in ,roman ,catholic religion1 its keepsakes1 its small flowers and almost tawdry trinkets1 its figures with merciful gestures and gentle eyes1 its avowedly popular pathos and all that ,matthew ,arnold meant by ,christianity with its 8relieving tears0--all this is a sign of sensitive and vivid vitality in anything so vast and settled and systematic4 ,there is nothing quite like this warmth1 as in the warmth of ,christmas1 amid ancient hills hoary with such snows of antiquity4 ,it can address even ,god ,almighty with diminutives4 ,in all its varied vestments it wears its ,sacred ,heart upon its sleeve4 ,but to those who know that it is full of these lively affections1 like little leaping flames1 there is something of almost ironic satisfaction in the stark and primitive size of the thing1 like some prehistoric monster2 in its spires and mitres like the horns of giant herds or its colossal cornerstones like the four feet of an elephant4 ,it would be easy to write a merely artistic study of the strange externals of the ,roman religion1 which should make it seem as uncouth and unearthly as ,aztec or ,african religion4 ,it would be easy to talk of it as if it were really some sort of mammoth or monster elephant1 older than the ,ice ,age1 towering over the ,stone ,age2 his very lines traced1 it would seem1 in the earthquakes or landslides of some older creation1 his very organs and outer texture akin to unrecorded patterns of vegetation and air and light--the last residuum of a lost world4 ,but the prehistoric monster is in the ,zological ,gardens and not in the ,natural ,history ,museum4 ,the extinct animal is still alive4 ,and anything outlandish and unfamiliar in its form accentuates the startling naturalness and familiarity of its mind1 as if the ,sphinx began suddenly to talk of the topics of the hour4 ,the super-elephant is not only a tame animal but a pet2 and a young child shall lead him4 ,this antithesis between all that is formidable and remote and all that is personally relevant and realistically tender is another of those converging impressions which meet in the moment of conviction4 ,but of all these things1 that come nearest to the actual transition of the gift of faith1 it is far harder to write than of the rationalistic and historical preliminaries of the enquiry4 ,it is only with those preliminary dispositions towards the truth that ,i claim to deal here4 ,in the chapters that follow ,i propose to touch upon two of the larger considerations of this class1 not because they are in themselves any larger than many other immense aspects of so mighty a theme1 but because they happen to balance each other and form a sort of antithesis very typical of all ,catholic truth4 ,in the first of the two chapters ,i shall try to point out how it is that when we praise the ,church for her greatness we do not merely mean her largeness but1 in a rather notable and unique sense1 her universality4 ,we mean her power of being cosmos and containing other things4 ,and in the second chapter ,i shall point out what may seem to disturb this truth but really balances it4 ,i mean the fact that we value the ,church because she is a ,church ,militant2 and sometimes even because she militates against ourselves4 ,she is something more than the cosmos1 in the sense of completed nature or completed human nature4 ,she proves that she is something more by sometimes being right where they are wrong4 ,these two aspects must be considered separately1 though they come together to form the full conviction that comes just before conversion4 ,but in this chapter ,i have merely noted down a few points or stages of the conversion considered as a practical process2 and especially those three stages of it through which many a ,protestant or ,agnostic must have passed4 ,many a man1 looking back cheerfully on them now1 will not be annoyed if ,i call the first1 patronising the ,church2 and the second1 discovering the ,church2 and the third1 running away from the ,church4 ,when those three phases are over1 a larger truth begins to come into sight2 it is much too large to describe and we will proceed to describe it4 ---------------------------------------- -------------------------------- ,,the ,,world ,,inside ,,out ---------------------------------------- -------------------------------- ,,chapter ,,iv ,,the ,,world ,,inside ,,out ,the first fallacy about the ,catholic ,church is the idea that it is a church4 ,i mean that it is a church in the sense in which the ,nonconformist newspapers talk about ,the ,churches4 ,i do not intend any expression of contempt about ,the ,churches2 nor is it an expression of contempt to say that it would be more convenient to call them the sects4 ,this is true in a much deeper and more sympathetic sense than may at first appear2 but to begin with1 it is certainly true in a perfectly plain and historical sense1 which has nothing to do with sympathy at all4 ,thus1 for instance1 ,i have much more sympathy for small nationalities than ,i have for small sects4 ,but it is simply a historical fact that the ,roman ,empire was the ,empire and that it was not a small nationality4 ,and it is simply a historical fact that the ,roman ,church is the ,church and is not a sect4 ,nor is there anything narrow or unreasonable in saying that the ,church is the ,church4 ,it may be a good thing that the ,roman ,empire broke up into nations2 but it certainly was not one of the nations into which it broke up4 ,and even a person who thinks it fortunate that the ,church broke up into sects ought to be able to distinguish between the little things he likes and the big thing he has broken4 ,as a matter of fact1 in the case of things so large1 so unique and so creative of the culture about them as were the ,roman ,empire and the ,roman ,church1 it is not controversial but simply correct to confine the one word to the one example4 ,everybody who originally used the word 8,empire0 used it of that ,empire2 everybody who used the word 8,ecclesia0 used it of that ,ecclesia4 ,there may have been similar things in other places1 but they could not be called by the same name for the simple reason that they were not named in the same language4 ,we know what we mean by a ,roman ,emperor2 we can if we like talk of a ,chinese ,emperor1 just as we can if we like take a particular sort of a ,mandarin and say he is equivalent to a ,marquis4 ,but we never can be certain that he is exactly equivalent2 for the thing we are thinking about is peculiar to our own history and in that sense stands alone4 ,now in that1 if in no other sense1 the ,catholic ,church stands alone4 ,it does not merely belong to a class of ,christian churches4 ,it does not merely belong to a class of human religions4 ,considered quite coldly and impartially1 as by a man from the moon1 it is much more sui generis than that4 ,it is1 if the critic chooses to think so1 the ruin of an attempt at a ,universal ,religion which was bound to fail4 ,but calling the wreckers to break up a ship does not turn the ship into one of its own timbers2 and cutting ,poland up into three pieces does not make ,poland the same as ,posen4 ,but in a much more profound and philosophical sense this notion that the ,church is one of the sects is the great fallacy of the whole affair4 ,it is a matter more psychological and more difficult to describe4 ,but it is perhaps the most sensational of the silent upheavals or reversals in the mind that constitute the revolution called conversion4 ,every man conceives himself as moving about in a cosmos of some kind2 and the man of the days of my youth walked about in a kind of vast and airy ,crystal ,palace in which there were exhibits set side by side4 ,the cosmos1 being made of glass and iron1 was partly transparent and partly colourless2 anyhow1 there was something negative about it2 arching over all our heads1 a roof as remote as a sky1 it seemed to be impartial and impersonal4 ,our attention was fixed on the exhibits1 which were all carefully ticketed and arranged in rows2 for it was the age of science4 ,here stood all the religions in a row--the churches or sects or whatever we called them2 and towards the end of the row there was a particularly dingy and dismal one1 with a pointed roof half fallen in and pointed windows most broken with stones by passers-by2 and we were told that this particular exhibit was the ,roman ,catholic ,church4 ,some of us were sorry for it and even fancied it had been rather badly used2 most of us regarded it as dirty and disreputable2 a few of us even pointed out that many details in the ruin were artistically beautiful or architecturally important4 ,but most people preferred to deal at other and more business-like booths2 at the ,quaker shop of ,peace and ,plenty or the ,salvation ,army store where the showman beats the big drum outside4 ,now conversion consists very largely1 on its intellectual side1 in the discovery that all that picture of equal creeds inside an indifferent cosmos is quite false4 ,it is not a question of comparing the merits and defects of the ,quaker meeting-house set beside the ,catholic cathedral4 ,it is the ,quaker meeting-house that is inside the ,catholic cathedral2 it is the ,catholic cathedral that covers everything like the vault of the ,crystal ,palace2 and it is when we look up at the vast distant dome covering all the exhibits that we trace the ,gothic roof and the pointed windows4 ,in other words1 ,quakerism is but a temporary form of ,quietism which has arisen technically outside the ,church as the ,quietism of ,fenelon appeared technically inside the ,church4 ,but both were in themselves temporary and would have1 like ,fenelon1 sooner or later to return to the ,church in order to live4 ,the principle of life in all these variations of ,protestantism1 in so far as it is not a principle of death1 consists of what remained in them of ,catholic ,christendom2 and to ,catholic ,christendom they have always returned to be recharged with vitality4 ,i know that this will sound like a statement to be challenged2 but it is true4 ,the return of ,catholic ideas to the separated parts of ,christendom was often indeed indirect4 ,but though the influence came through many centres1 it always came from one4 ,it came through the ,romantic ,movement1 a glimpse of the mere picturesqueness of medivalism2 but it is something more than an accident that ,romances1 like ,romance languages1 are named after ,rome4 ,or it came through the instinctive reaction of old-fashioned people like ,johnson or ,scott or ,cobbett1 wishing to save old elements that had originally been ,catholic against a progress that was merely ,capitalist4 ,but it led them to denounce that ,capitalist progress and become1 like ,cobbett1 practical foes of ,protestantism without being practising followers of ,catholicism4 ,or it came from the ,pre-,raphaelites or the opening of continental art and culture by ,matthew ,arnold and ,morris and ,ruskin and the rest4 ,but examine the actual make-up of the mind of a good ,quaker or ,congregational minister at this moment1 and compare it with the mind of such a dissenter in the ,little ,bethel before such culture came4 ,and you will see how much of his health and happiness he owes to ,ruskin and what ,ruskin owed to ,giotto2 to ,morris and what ,morris owed to ,chaucer2 to fine scholars of his own school like ,philip ,wicksteed1 and what they owe to ,dante and ,st4 ,thomas4 ,such a man will still sometimes talk of the ,middle ,ages as the ,dark ,ages4 ,but the ,dark ,ages have improved the wallpaper on his wall and the dress on his wife and all the whole dingy and vulgar life which he lived in the days of ,stiggins and ,brother ,tadger4 ,for he also is a ,christian and lives only by the life of ,christendom4 ,it is not easy to express this enormous inversion which ,i have here tried to suggest in the image of a world turned inside out4 ,i mean that the thing which had been stared at as a small something swells out and swallows everything4 ,christendom is in the literal sense a continent4 ,we come to feel that it contains everything1 even the things in revolt against itself4 ,but it is perhaps the most towering intellectual transformation of all and the one that it is hardest to undo even for the sake of argument4 ,it is almost impossible even in imagination to reverse that reversal4 ,another way of putting it is to say that we have come to regard all these historical figures as characters in ,catholic history1 even if they are not ,catholics4 ,and in a certain sense1 the historical as distinct from the theological sense1 they never do cease to be ,catholic4 ,they are not people who have really created something entirely new1 until they actually pass the border of reason and create more or less crazy nightmares4 ,but nightmares do not last2 and most of them even now are in various stages of waking up4 ,protestants are ,catholics gone wrong2 that is what is really meant by saying they are ,christians4 ,sometimes they have gone very wrong2 but not often have they gone right ahead with their own particular wrong4 ,thus a ,calvinist is a ,catholic obsessed with the ,catholic idea of the sovereignty of ,god4 ,but when he makes it mean that ,god wishes particular people to be damned1 we may say with all restraint that he has become a rather morbid ,catholic4 ,in point of fact he is a diseased ,catholic2 and the disease left to itself would be death or madness4 ,but1 as a matter of fact1 the disease did not last long1 and is itself now practically dead4 ,but every step he takes back towards humanity is a step back towards ,catholicism4 ,thus a ,quaker is a ,catholic obsessed with the ,catholic idea of gentle simplicity and truth4 ,but when he made it mean that it is a lie to say 8you0 and an act of idolatry to take off your hat to a lady1 it is not too much to say that whether or not he had a hat off1 he certainly had a tile loose4 ,but as a matter of fact he himself found it necessary to dispense with the eccentricity 7and the hat7 and to leave the straight road that would have led him to a lunatic asylum4 ,only every step he takes back towards common sense is a step back towards ,catholicism4 ,in so far as he was right he was a ,catholic2 and in so far as he was wrong he has not himself been able to remain a ,protestant4 ,to us1 therefore1 it is henceforth impossible to think of the ,quaker as a figure at the beginning of a new ,quaker history or the ,calvinist as the founder of a new ,calvinistic world4 ,it is quite obvious to us that they are simply characters in our own ,catholic history1 only characters who caused a great deal of trouble by trying to do something that we could do better and that they did not really do at all4 ,now some may suppose that this can be maintained of the older sects like ,calvinists and ,quakers1 but cannot be maintained of modern movements like those of ,socialists or ,spiritualists4 ,but they will be quite wrong4 ,the covering or continental character of the ,church applies just as much to modern manias as to the old religious manias2 it applies quite as much to ,materialists or ,spiritualists as to ,puritans4 ,in all of them you find that some ,catholic dogma is1 first1 taken for granted2 then exaggerated into an error2 and then generally reacted against and rejected as an error1 bringing the individual in question a few steps back again on the homeward road4 ,and this is almost always the mark of such a heretic2 that while he will wildly question any other ,catholic dogma1 he never dreams of questioning his own favourite ,catholic dogma and does not even seem to know that it could be questioned4 ,it never occurred to the ,calvinist that anybody might use his liberty to deny or limit the divine omnipotence1 or to the ,quaker that anyone could question the supremacy of simplicity4 ,that is exactly the situation of the ,socialist4 ,bolshevism and every shade of any such theory of brotherhood is based upon one unfathomably mystical ,catholic dogma2 the equality of men4 ,the ,communists stake everything on the equality of man1 as the ,calvinists staked everything on the omnipotence of ,god4 ,they ride it to death as the others rode their dogma to death1 turning their horse into a nightmare4 ,but it never seems to occur to them that some people do not believe in the ,catholic dogma of the mystical equality of men4 ,yet there are many1 even among ,christians1 who are so heretical as to question it4 ,the ,socialists get into a great tangle when they try to apply it2 they compromise with their own ideals2 they modify their own doctrine2 and so find themselves1 like the ,quakers and the ,calvinists1 after all their extreme extravagances1 a day's march nearer ,rome4 ,in short1 the story of these sects is not one of straight lines striking outwards and onwards1 though if it were they would all be striking in different directions4 ,it is a pattern of curves continually returning into the continent and common life of their and our civilisation2 and the summary of that civilisation and central sanity is the philosophy of the ,catholic ,church4 ,to us1 ,spiritualists are men studying the existence of spirits1 in a brief and blinding oblivion of the existence of evil spirits4 ,they are1 as it were1 people just educated enough to have heard of ghosts but not educated enough to have heard of witches4 ,if the evil spirits succeed in stopping their education and stunting their minds1 they may of course go on for ever repeating silly messages from ,plato and doggerel verses from ,milton4 ,but if they do go a step or two further1 instead of marking time on the borderland1 their next step will be to learn what the ,church could have taught4 ,to us1 ,christian ,scientists are simply people with one idea1 which they have never learnt to balance and combine with all the other ideas4 ,that is why the wealthy business man so often becomes a ,christian ,scientist4 ,he is not used to ideas and one idea goes to his head1 like one glass of wine to a starving man4 ,but the ,catholic ,church is used to living with ideas and walks among all those very dangerous wild beasts with the poise and the lifted head of a lion-tamer4 ,the ,christian ,scientist can go on monotonously repeating his one idea and remain a ,christian ,scientist4 ,but if ever he really goes on to any other ideas1 he will be so much the nearer to being a ,catholic4 ,when the convert has once seen the world like that1 with one balance of ideas and a number of other ideas that have left it and lost their balance1 he does not in fact experience any of the inconveniences that he might reasonably have feared before that silent but stunning revolution4 ,he is not worried by being told that there is something in ,spiritualism or something in ,christian ,science4 ,he knows there is something in everything4 ,but he is moved by the more impressive fact that he finds everything in something4 ,and he is quite sure that if these investigators really are looking for everything1 and not merely looking for anything1 they will be more and more likely to look for it in the same place4 ,in that sense he is far less worried about them than he was when he thought that one or other of them might be the only person having any sort of communication with the higher mysteries and obviously rather capable of making a mess of it4 ,he is no more likely to be overawed by the fact that ,mrs4 ,eddy achieved spiritual healing or ,mr4 ,home achieved bodily levitation than a fully dressed gentleman in ,bond ,street would be overawed by the top-hat on the head of a naked savage4 ,a top-hat may be a good hat but it is a bad costume4 ,and a magnetic trick may be a sufficient sensation but it is a very insufficient philosophy4 ,he is no more envious of a ,bolshevist for making a revolution than of a beaver for making a dam2 for he knows his own civilisation can make things on a pattern not quite so simple or so monotonous4 ,but he believes this of his civilisation and his religion and not merely of himself4 ,there is nothing supercilious about his attitude2 because he is well aware that he has only scratched the surface of the spiritual estate that is now open to him4 ,in other words1 the convert does not in the least abandon investigation or even adventure4 ,he does not think he knows everything1 nor has he lost curiosity about the things he does not know4 ,but experience has taught him that he will find nearly everything somewhere inside that estate and that a very large number of people are finding next to nothing outside it4 ,for the estate is not only a formal garden or an ordered farm2 there is plenty of hunting and fishing on it1 and1 as the phrase goes1 very good sport4 ,for this is one of the very queerest of the common delusions about what happens to the convert4 ,in some muddled way people have confused the natural remarks of converts1 about having found moral peace1 with some idea of their having found mental rest1 in the sense of mental inaction4 ,they might as well say that a man who has completely recovered his health1 after an attack of palsy or ,st4 ,vitus' dance1 signalises his healthy state by sitting absolutely still like a stone4 ,recovering his health means recovering his power of moving in the right way as distinct from the wrong way2 but he will probably move a great deal more than before4 ,to become a ,catholic is not to leave off thinking1 but to learn how to think4 ,it is so in exactly the same sense in which to recover from palsy is not to leave off moving but to learn how to move4 ,the ,catholic convert has for the first time a starting-point for straight and strenuous thinking4 ,he has for the first time a way of testing the truth in any question that he raises4 ,as the world goes1 especially at present1 it is the other people1 the heathen and the heretics1 who seem to have every virtue except the power of connected thought4 ,there was indeed a brief period when a small minority did some hard thinking on the heathen or heretical side4 ,it barely lasted from the time of ,voltaire to the time of ,huxley4 ,it has now entirely disappeared4 ,what is now called free thought is valued1 not because it is free thought1 but because it is freedom from thought2 because it is free thoughtlessness4 ,nothing is more amusing to the convert1 when his conversion has been complete for some time1 than to hear the speculations about when or whether he will repent of the conversion2 when he will be sick of it1 how long he will stand it1 at what stage of his external exasperation he will start up and say he can bear it no more4 ,for all this is founded on that optical illusion about the outside and the inside which ,i have tried to sketch in this chapter4 ,the outsiders1 stand by and see1 or think they see1 the convert entering with bowed head a sort of small temple which they are convinced is fitted up inside like a prison1 if not a torture-chamber4 ,but all they really know about it is that he has passed through a door4 ,they do not know that he has not gone into the inner darkness1 but out into the broad daylight4 ,it is he who is1 in the beautiful and beatific sense of the word1 an outsider4 ,he does not want to go into a larger room1 because he does not know of any larger room to go into4 ,he knows of a large number of much smaller rooms1 each of which is labelled as being very large2 but he is quite sure he would be cramped in any of them4 ,each of them professes to be a complete cosmos or scheme of all things2 but then so does the cosmos of the ,clapham ,sect or the ,clapton ,agapemone4 ,each of them is supposed to be domed with the sky or painted inside with all the stars4 ,but each of these cosmic systems or machines seems to him much smaller and even much simpler than the broad and balanced universe in which he lives4 ,one of them is labelled ,agnostic2 but he knows by experience that it has not really even the freedom of ignorance4 ,it is a wheel that must always go round without a single jolt of miraculous interruption--a circle that must not be squared by any higher mathematics of mysticism2 a machine that must be scoured as clean of all spirits as if it were the avowed machine of materialism4 ,in living in a world with two orders1 the supernatural and the natural1 the convert feels he is living in a larger world and does not feel any temptation to crawl back into a smaller one4 ,one of them is labelled ,theosophical or ,buddhistic2 but he knows by experience that it is only the same sort of wearisome wheel used for spiritual things instead of material things4 ,living in a world where he is free to do anything1 even to go to the devil1 he does not see why he should tie himself to the wheel of a mere destiny4 ,one of them is labelled ,humanitarian2 but he knows that such humanitarians have really far less experience of humanity4 ,he knows that they are thinking almost entirely of men as they are at this moment in modern cities1 and have nothing like the huge human interest of what began by being preached to legionaries in ,palestine and is still being preached to peasants in ,china4 ,so clear is this perception that ,i have sometimes put it to myself1 as something between a melancholy meditation and a joke4 8,where should ,i go now1 if ,i did leave the ,catholic ,church80 ,i certainly would not go to any of those little social sects which only express one idea at a time1 because that idea happens to be fashionable at the moment4 ,the best ,i could hope for would be to wander away into the woods and become1 not a ,pantheist 7for that is also a limitation and a bore7 but rather a pagan1 in the mood to cry out that some particular mountain peak or flowering fruit tree was sacred and a thing to be worshipped4 ,that at least would be beginning all over again2 but it would bring me back to the same problem in the end4 ,if it was reasonable to have a sacred tree it was not unreasonable to have a sacred crucifix2 and if the god was to be found on one peak he may as reasonably be found under one spire4 ,to find a new religion is sooner or later to have found one2 and why should ,i have been discontented with the one ,i had found8 ,especially1 as ,i said in the first words of this essay1 when it is the one old religion which seems capable of remaining new4 ,i know very well that if ,i went upon that journey ,i should either despair or return2 and that none of the trees would ever be a substitute for the real sacred tree4 ,paganism is better than pantheism1 for paganism is free to imagine divinities1 while pantheism is forced to pretend1 in a priggish way1 that all things are equally divine4 ,but ,i should not imagine any divinity that was sufficiently divine4 ,i seem to know that weary return through the woodlands2 for ,i think in some symbolic fashion ,i have walked that road before4 ,for as ,i have tried to confess here without excessive egotism1 ,i think ,i am the sort of man who came to ,christ from ,pan and ,dionysus and not from ,luther or ,laud2 that the conversion ,i understand is that of the pagan and not the ,puritan2 and upon that antique conversion is founded the whole world that we know4 ,it is a transformation far more vast and tremendous than anything that has been meant for many years past1 at least in ,england and ,america1 by a sectarian controversy or a doctrinal division4 ,on the height of that ancient empire and that international experience1 humanity had a vision4 ,it has not had another2 but only quarrels about that one4 ,paganism was the largest thing in the world and ,christianity was larger2 and everything else has been comparatively small4 ---------------------------------------- -------------------------------- ,,the ,,exception ,,proves ,,the ,,rule ---------------------------------------- -------------------------------- ,,chapter ,v ,,the ,,exception ,,proves ,,the ,,rule ,the ,catholic ,church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age4 ,i have compared it with the ,new ,religions2 but this is exactly where it differs from the ,new ,religions4 ,the ,new ,religions are in many ways suited to the new conditions2 but they are only suited to the new conditions4 ,when those conditions shall have changed in only a century or so1 the points upon which alone they insist at present will have become almost pointless4 ,if the ,faith has all the freshness of a new religion1 it has all the richness of an old religion2 it has especially all the reserves of an old religion4 ,so far as that is concerned1 its antiquity is alone a great advantage1 and especially a great advantage for purposes of renovation and youth4 ,it is only by the analogy of animal bodies that we suppose that old things must be stiff4 ,it is a mere metaphor from bones and arteries4 ,in an intellectual sense old things are flexible4 ,above all1 they are various and have many alternatives to offer4 ,there is a sort of rotation of crops in religious history2 and old fields can lie fallow for a while and then be worked again4 ,but when the new religion or any such notion has sown its one crop of wild oats1 which the wind generally blows away1 it is barren4 ,a thing as old as the ,catholic ,church has an accumulated armoury and treasury to choose from2 it can pick and choose among the centuries and brings one age to the rescue of another4 ,it can call in the old world to redress the balance of the new4 ,anyhow1 the ,new ,religions are suited to the new world2 and this is their most damning defect4 ,each religion is produced by contemporary causes that can be clearly pointed out4 ,socialism is a reaction against ,capitalism4 ,spiritualism is a reaction against ,materialism2 it is also in its intensified form merely the trail of the tragedy of the ,great ,war4 ,but there is a somewhat more subtle sense in which the very fitness of the new creeds makes them unfit2 their very acceptability makes them inacceptable4 ,thus they all profess to be progressive because the peculiar boast of their peculiar period was progress2 they claim to be democratic because our political system still rather pathetically claims to be democratic4 ,they rushed to a reconciliation with science1 which was often only a premature surrender to science4 ,they hastily divested themselves of anything considered dowdy or old-fashioned in the way of vesture or symbol4 ,they claimed to have bright services and cheery sermons2 the churches competed with the cinemas2 the churches even became cinemas4 ,in its more moderate form the mood was merely one of praising natural pleasures1 such as the enjoyment of nature and even the enjoyment of human nature4 ,these are excellent things and this is an excellent liberty2 and yet it has its limitations4 ,we do not really want a religion that is right where we are right4 ,what we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong4 ,in these current fashions it is not really a question of the religion allowing us liberty2 but 7at the best7 of the liberty allowing us a religion4 ,these people merely take the modern mood1 with much in it that is amiable and much that is anarchical and much that is merely dull and obvious1 and then require any creed to be cut down to fit that mood4 ,but the mood would exist even without the creed4 ,they say they want a religion to be social1 when they would be social without any religion4 ,they say they want a religion to be practical1 when they would be practical without any religion4 ,they say they want a religion acceptable to science1 when they would accept the science even if they did not accept the religion4 ,they say they want a religion like this because they are like this already4 ,they say they want it1 when they mean that they could do without it4 ,it is a very different matter when a religion1 in the real sense of a binding thing1 binds men to their morality when it is not identical with their mood4 ,it is very different when some of the saints preached social reconciliation to fierce and raging factions who could hardly bear the sight of each others' faces4 ,it was a very different thing when charity was preached to pagans who really did not believe in it2 just as it is a very different thing now1 when chastity is preached to new pagans who do not believe in it4 ,it is in those cases that we get the real grapple of religion2 and it is in those cases that we get the peculiar and solitary triumph of the ,catholic faith4 ,it is not in merely being right when we are right1 as in being cheerful or hopeful or humane4 ,it is in having been right when we were wrong1 and in the fact coming back upon us afterwards like a boomerang4 ,one word that tells us what we do not know outweighs a thousand words that tell us what we do know4 ,and the thing is all the more striking if we not only did not know it but could not believe it4 ,it may seem a paradox to say that the truth teaches us more by the words we reject than by the words we receive4 ,yet the paradox is a parable of the simplest sort and familiar to us all2 any example might be given of it4 ,if a man tells us to avoid public houses1 we think him a tiresome though perhaps a well-intentioned old party4 ,if he tells us to use public houses1 we recognise that he has a higher morality and presents an ideal that is indeed lofty1 but perhaps a little too simple and obvious to need defence4 ,but if a man tells us to avoid the one particular public house called ,the ,pig and ,whistle1 on the left hand as you turn round by the pond1 the direction may seem very dogmatic and arbitrary and showing insufficient process of argument4 ,but if we then fling ourselves into ,the ,pig and ,whistle and are immediately poisoned with the gin or smothered in the feather-bed and robbed of our money1 we recognise that the man who advised us did know something about it and had a cultivated and scientific knowledge of the public houses of the district4 ,we think it even more1 as we emerge half-murdered from ,the ,pig and ,whistle1 if we originally rejected his warning as a silly superstition4 ,the warning itself is almost more impressive if it was not justified by reasons1 but only by results4 ,there is something very notable about a thing which is arbitrary when it is also accurate4 ,we may very easily forget1 even while we fulfil1 the advice that we thought was self-evident sense4 ,but nothing can measure our mystical and unfathomable reverence for the advice that we thought was nonsense4 ,as will be seen in a moment1 ,i do not mean in the least that the ,catholic ,church is arbitrary in the sense of never giving reasons2 but ,i do mean that the convert is profoundly affected by the fact that1 even when he did not see the reason1 he lived to see that it was reasonable4 ,but there is something even more singular than this1 which it will be well to note as a part of the convert's experience4 ,in many cases1 as a matter of fact1 he did originally have a glimpse of the reasons1 even if he did not reason about them2 but they were forgotten in the interlude when reason was clouded by rationalism4 ,the point is not very easy to explain1 and ,i shall be obliged to take merely personal examples in order to explain it4 ,i mean that we have often had a premonition as well as a warning2 and the fact often comes back to us after we have disregarded both4 ,it is worth noting in connection with conversion1 because the convert is often obstructed by a catchword which says that the ,church crushes the conscience4 ,the ,church does not crush any man's conscience4 ,it is the man who crushes his conscience and then finds out that it was right1 when he has almost forgotten that he had one4 ,i will take two examples out of the new movements3 ,socialism and ,spiritualism4 ,now it is perfectly true that when ,i first began to think seriously about ,socialism1 ,i was a ,socialist4 ,but it is equally true1 and more important than it sounds1 that before ,i had ever heard of ,socialism ,i was a strong anti-,socialist4 ,i was what has since been called a ,distributist1 though ,i did not know it4 ,when ,i was a child and dreamed the usual dreams about kings and clowns and robbers and policemen1 ,i always conceived all contentment and dignity as consisting in something compact and personal2 in being king of the castle or captain of the pirate ship or the man who owned the shop or the robber who was safe in the cavern4 ,as ,i passed through boyhood ,i always imagined battles for justice as being the defence of special walls and houses and high defiant shrines2 and ,i embodied some of those crude but coloured visions in a story called ,the ,napoleon of ,notting ,hill4 ,all this happened1 in fancy at least1 when ,i had never heard of ,socialism and was a much better judge of it4 ,shades of the prison-house began to close and with them came a merely mechanical discussion as to how we were all to get out of prison4 ,then indeed1 in the darkness of the dungeon1 was heard the voice of ,mr4 ,sidney ,webb1 telling us that we could only conceivably get out of our ,capitalist captivity with the patent ,chubb key of ,collectivism4 ,or to use a more exact metaphor1 he told us that we could only escape from our dark and filthy cells of industrial slavery by melting all our private latchkeys into one gigantic latchkey as large as a battering ram4 ,we did not really like giving up our little private keys or local attachments or love of our own possessions2 but we were quite convinced that social justice must be done somehow and could only be done socialistically4 ,i therefore became a ,socialist in the old days of the ,fabian ,society2 and so ,i think did everybody else worth talking about--except the ,catholics4 ,and the ,catholics were an insignificant handful1 the dregs of a dead religion1 essentially a superstition4 ,about this time appeared the ,encyclical on ,labour by ,leo ,,xiii2 and nobody in our really well-informed world took much notice of it4 ,certainly the ,pope spoke as strongly as any ,socialist could speak when he said that ,capitalism 8laid on the toiling millions a yoke little better than slavery40 ,but as the ,pope was not a ,socialist it was obvious that he had not read the right ,socialist books and pamphlets2 and we could not expect the poor old gentleman to know what every young man knew by this time--that ,socialism was inevitable4 ,that was a long time ago1 and by a gradual process1 mostly practical and political1 which ,i have no intention of describing here1 most of us began to realise that ,socialism was not inevitable2 that it was not really popular2 that it was not the only way1 or even the right way1 of restoring the rights of the poor4 ,we have come to the conclusion that the obvious cure for private property being given to the few is to see that it is given to the many2 not to see that it is taken away from everybody or given in trust to the dear good politicians4 ,then1 having discovered that fact as a fact1 we look back at ,leo ,,xiii and discover in his old and dated document1 of which we took no notice at the time1 that he was saying then exactly what we are saying now4 8,as many as possible of the working classes should become owners40 ,that is what ,i mean by the justification of arbitrary warning4 ,if the ,pope had said then exactly what we said and wanted him to say1 we should not have really reverenced him then and we should have entirely repudiated him afterwards4 ,he would only have marched with the million who accepted ,fabianism2 and with them he would have marched away4 ,but when he saw a distinction we did not see then1 and do see now1 that distinction is decisive4 ,it marks a disagreement more convincing than a hundred agreements4 ,it is not that he was right when we were right1 but that he was right when we were wrong4 ,the superficial critic of these things1 noting that ,i am no longer a ,socialist1 will always say1 8,of course1 you are a ,catholic and you are not allowed to be a ,socialist40 ,to which ,i answer emphatically1 ,no4 ,that is missing the whole point4 ,the ,church anticipated my experience2 but it was experience and not only obedience4 ,i am quite sure now from merely living in this world1 and seeing something of ,catholic peasants as well as ,collectivist officials1 that it is happier and healthier for most men to become owners than for them to give up all ownership to those officials4 ,i do not follow the ,state ,socialist in his extreme belief in the ,state2 but ,i have not ceased to be credulous about the ,state merely because ,i have become credulous about the ,church4 ,i believe less in the ,state because ,i know more of the statesmen4 ,i cannot believe small property to be impossible after ,i have seen it4 ,i cannot believe ,state management to be impeccable after ,i have seen it4 ,it is not any authority1 except what ,st4 ,thomas calls the authority of the senses1 which tells me that the mere community of goods is a solution that is too much of a simplification4 ,the ,church has taught me1 but ,i could not unteach myself2 ,i have learned because ,i have lived1 and ,i could not unlearn it4 ,if ,i ceased to be a ,catholic ,i could not again be a ,communist4 ,as it happens1 my story was almost exactly the same in connection with ,spiritualism4 ,there again ,i was modern when ,i was young1 but not when ,i was very young4 ,while ,i had a vague but innocent nursery religion still hanging about me1 ,i regarded the first signs of these psychic and psychological things with mere repugnance4 ,i hated the whole notion of mesmerism and magnetic tricks with the mind2 ,i loathed their bulging eyes and stiff attitudes and unnatural trances and the whole bag of tricks4 ,when ,i saw a girl ,i admired set down to crystal-gazing1 ,i was furious2 ,i hardly knew why4 ,then came the period when ,i wanted to know why1 when ,i examined my own reasons and found ,i had none4 ,i saw that it was inconsistent in science to revere research and forbid psychical research4 ,i saw that men of science were more and more accepting these things and ,i went along with my scientific age4 ,i was never exactly a ,spiritualist1 but ,i almost always defended ,spiritualism4 ,i experimented with a planchette1 quite enough to convince myself finally that some things do happen that are not in the ordinary sense natural4 ,i have since come to think1 for reasons that would require too much space to detail1 that it is not so much supernatural as unnatural and even anti-natural4 ,i believe the experiments were bad for me2 ,i believe they are bad for the other experimentalists4 ,but ,i found out the fact long before ,i found out the ,catholic ,church or the ,catholic view of that question4 ,only1 as ,i have said1 when ,i do find it out1 ,i find it rather impressive2 for it is not the religion that was right when ,i was right1 but the religion that was right when ,i was wrong4 ,but ,i wish to note about both those cases that the common cant in the matter is emphatically not true4 ,it is not true that the ,church crushed my natural conscience2 it is not true that the ,church asked me to give up my individual ideal4 ,it is not true that ,collectivism was ever my ideal4 ,i do not believe it was ever really anybody else's ideal4 ,it was not an ideal but a compromise2 it was a concession to practical economists who told us that we could not prevent poverty except by something uncommonly like slavery4 ,state ,socialism never came natural to us2 it never convinced us that it was natural2 it convinced us that it was necessary4 ,in exactly the same way ,spiritualism never came as something natural but only as something necessary4 ,each told us that it was the only way into the promised land1 in the one case of a future life and the other of life in the future4 ,we did not like government departments and tickets and registers2 but we were told there was no other way of reaching a better society4 ,we did not like dark rooms and dubious mediums and ladies tied up with rope1 but we were told there was no other way to reach a better world4 ,we were ready to crawl down a municipal drain-pipe or through a spiritual sewer1 because it was the only way to better things2 the only way even to prove that there were better things4 ,but the drain-pipe had never figured in our dreams like a tower of ivory or a house of gold1 or even like the robbers' tower of our romantic boyhood or the solid and comfortable house of our matured experience4 ,the ,faith had not only been true all along1 but it had been true to the first and the last things1 to our unspoilt instincts and our conclusive experience2 and it had condemned nothing but an interlude of intellectual snobbishness and surrender to the persuasions of pedantry4 ,it had condemned nothing but what we ourselves should have come to condemn1 though we might have condemned it too late4 ,the ,church therefore never made my individual ideal impossible2 it would be truer to say that she was the first to make it possible4 ,the ,encyclical's ideal had been much nearer my own instinct than the ideal ,i had consented to substitute for it4 ,the ,catholic suspicion of table-rapping was much more like my own original suspicion than it was like my own subsequent surrender4 ,but in those two cases it is surely clear that the ,catholic ,church plays exactly the part that she professes to play3 something that knows what we cannot be expected to know1 but should probably accept if we really knew it4 ,i am not in this case1 any more than in the greater part of this study1 referring to the things that are really best worth knowing4 ,the supernatural truths are connected with the mystery of grace and are a matter for theologians2 admittedly a rather delicate and difficult matter even for them4 ,but though the transcendental truths are the most important they are not those that best illustrate this particular point1 which concerns the decisions which can be more or less tested by experience4 ,and of all those things that can be tested by experience ,i could tell the same story3 that there was a time when ,i thought the ,catholic doctrine was meaningless1 but that even that was not the very earliest time1 which was a time of greater simplicity1 when ,i had a sort of glimpse of the meaning though ,i had never even heard of the doctrine4 ,the world deceived me and the ,church would at any time have undeceived me4 ,the thing that a man may really shed at last like a superstition is the fashion of this world that passes away4 ,i could give many other examples1 but ,i fear they would inevitably tend to be egotistical examples4 ,throughout this brief study ,i am under the double difficulty that all roads lead to ,rome1 but that each pilgrim is tempted to talk as if all roads had been like his own road4 ,i could write a great deal1 for instance1 about my early wrestlings with the rather ridiculous dilemma which was put to me in my youth by the optimist and the pessimist4 ,i promptly and properly refused to be a pessimist2 and ,i therefore fell into the way of calling myself an optimist4 ,now ,i should not call myself either1 and what is more important ,i can see that virtue may be entangled in both4 ,but ,i think it is entangled2 and ,i think that an older and simpler truth can loosen the tangle4 ,but the point in the present connection is this2 that before ,i had ever heard of optimists or pessimists ,i was something much more like what ,i am now than could be covered by either of those two pedantic words4 ,in my childhood ,i assumed that cheerfulness was a good thing1 but ,i also assumed that it was a bad thing not to protest against things that are really bad4 ,after an interlude of intellectual formalism and false antithesis1 ,i have come back to being able to think what ,i could then only feel4 ,but ,i have realised that the protest can rise to a much more divine indignation and that the cheerfulness is but a faint suggestion of a much more divine joy4 ,it is not so much that ,i have found ,i was wrong as that ,i have found out why ,i was right4 ,in this we find the supreme example of the exception that proves the rule4 ,the rule1 of which ,i have given a rough outline in the previous chapter1 is that the ,catholic philosophy is a universal philosophy found to fit anywhere with human nature and the nature of things4 ,but even when it does not fit in with human nature it is found in the long run to favour something yet more fitting4 ,it generally suits us1 but where it does not suit us we learn to suit it1 so long as we are alive enough to learn anything4 ,in the rare cases where a reasonable man can really say that it cuts across his intelligence1 it will generally be found that it is true1 not only to truth1 but even to his deepest instinct for truth4 ,education does not cease with conversion1 but rather begins4 ,the man does not cease to study because he has become convinced that certain things are worth studying2 and these things include not only the orthodox values but even the orthodox vetoes4 ,strangely enough1 in a sense1 the forbidden fruit is often more fruitful than the free4 ,it is more fruitful in the sense of a fascinating botanical study of why it is really poisonous4 ,thus1 for the sake of an example1 all healthy people have an instinct against usury2 and the ,church has only confirmed that instinct4 ,but to learn how to define usury1 to study what it is and to argue why it is wrong1 is to have a liberal education1 not only in political economy1 but in the philosophy of ,aristotle and the history of the ,councils of ,lateran4 ,there almost always is a human reason for all the merely human advice given by the ,church to humanity2 and to find out the principle of the thing is1 among other things1 one of the keenest of intellectual pleasures4 ,but in any case the fact remains that the ,church is right in the main in being tolerant in the main2 but that where she is intolerant she is most right and even most reasonable4 ,adam lived in a garden where a thousand mercies were granted to him2 but the one inhibition was the greatest mercy of all4 ,in the same way1 let the convert1 or still more the semi-convert1 face any one fact that does seem to him to deface the ,catholic scheme as a falsehood2 and if he faces it long enough he will probably find that it is the greatest truth of all4 ,i have found this myself in that extreme logic of free will which is found in the fallen angels and the possibility of perdition4 ,such things are altogether beyond my imagination1 but the lines of logic go out towards them in my reason4 ,indeed1 ,i can undertake to justify the whole ,catholic theology1 if ,i be granted to start with the supreme sacredness and value of two things3 ,reason and ,liberty4 ,it is an illuminating comment on current anti-,catholic talk that they are the two things which most people imagine to be forbidden to ,catholics4 ,but the best way of putting what ,i mean is to repeat what ,i have already said1 in connection with the satisfying scope of ,catholic universality4 ,i cannot picture these theological ultimates and ,i have not the authority or learning to define them4 ,but ,i still put the matter to myself thus3 ,supposing ,i were so miserable as to lose the ,faith1 could ,i go back to that cheap charity and crude optimism which says that every sin is a blunder1 that evil cannot conquer or does not even exist8 ,i could no more go back to those cushioned chapels than a man who has regained his sanity would willingly go back to a padded cell4 ,i might cease to believe in a ,god of any kind2 but ,i could not cease to think that a ,god who had made men and angels free was finer than one who coerced them into comfort4 ,i might cease to believe in a future life of any kind2 but ,i could not cease to think it was a finer doctrine that we choose and make our future life than that it is fitted out for us like an hotel and we are taken there in a celestial omnibus as compulsory as a ,black ,maria4 ,i know that ,catholicism is too large for me1 and ,i have not yet explored its beautiful or terrible truths4 ,but ,i know that ,universalism is too small for me2 and ,i could not creep back into that dull safety1 who have looked on the dizzy vision of liberty4 ---------------------------------------- -------------------------------- ,a ,,note ,,on ,,present ,,prospects ---------------------------------------- -------------------------------- ,,chapter ,,vi ,a ,,note ,,on ,,present ,,prospects ,on reconsidering these notes ,i find them to be far too personal2 yet ,i do not know how any conception of conversion can be anything else4 ,i do not profess to have any particular knowledge about the actual conditions and calculations of the ,catholic movement at the moment4 ,i do not believe that anybody else has any knowledge of what it will be like the next moment4 ,statistics are generally misleading and predictions are practically always false4 ,but there is always a certain faint tradition of the thing called common sense2 and so long as a glimmer of it remains1 in spite of all journalism and ,state instruction1 it is possible to appreciate what we call a reality4 ,nobody in his five wits will deny that at this moment conversion is a reality4 ,everybody knows that his own social circle1 which fifty years ago would have been a firm territory of ,protestantism1 perhaps hardening into rationalism or indifference but doing even that slowly and without conscious convulsion1 has just lately shown a curious disposition to collapse softly and suddenly1 first in one unexpected place and then in another1 making great holes in that solid land and letting up the leaping flames of what was counted an extinct volcano4 ,it is in everybody's experience1 whether he is sad or glad or mad or merely indifferent1 that these conversions seem to come of themselves in the most curious and apparently accidental quarters2 ,tom's wife1 ,harry's brother1 ,fanny's funny sister-in-law who went on the stage1 ,sam's eccentric uncle who studied military strategy--of each of these isolated souls we hear suddenly that it is isolated no longer4 ,it is one with the souls militant and triumphant4 ,against these things 7which we know as facts and do not merely read as statistics7 there is admittedly something to be set4 ,it is what is commonly called leakage2 and with a paragraph upon this point ,i will close these pages4 ,father ,ronald ,knox1 with that felicity that is so good that the wit almost seems like good luck1 has remarked that the ,catholic ,church really does have to get on by hook or crook4 ,that is1 by the hook of the fisherman and the crook of the shepherd2 and it is the hook that has to catch the convert and the crook that has to keep him4 ,he said in this connection that the conversions to the ,church just now were so numerous that they would be obvious and overwhelming1 like a landslide1 if it were not that they were neutralised in mere numbers1 or rather lessened in their full claim of numbers1 by a certain amount of falling away in other directions4 ,now the first fact to realise is that it is in other directions1 in totally different directions4 ,some people1 especially young people1 abandon practising ,catholicism4 ,but none of them abandon it for ,protestantism4 ,all of them practically abandon it for paganism4 ,most of them abandon it for something that is really rather too simple to be called an ism of any kind4 ,they abandon it for things and not theories2 and when they do have theories they may sometimes be ,bolshevist theories or ,futurist theories1 but they are practically never the theological theories of ,protestantism4 ,i will not say they leave ,catholicism for beer and skittles2 for ,catholicism has never discouraged those ,christian institutions as ,protestantism sometimes has4 ,they leave it to have a high old time2 and considering what a muddle we have made of modern morality1 they can hardly be blamed4 ,but this reaction1 which is only that of a section1 is in its nature a reaction of the young and as such ,i do not think it will last4 ,i know it is the cant phrase of the old rationalists that their reason prevents a return to the ,faith1 but it is false3 it is no longer reason but rather passion4 ,this may sound a sweeping statement1 but if it be examined it will be found not unjust1 and certainly not unsympathetic4 ,nothing is more notable if we really study the characteristics of the rising generation than the fact that they are not acting upon any exact and definite philosophy1 such as those which have made the revolutions of the past4 ,if they are anarchical1 they are not anarchist4 ,the dogmatic anarchism of the middle of the nineteenth century is not the creed they hold1 or even the excuse they offer4 ,they have a considerable negative revolt against religion1 a negative revolt against negative morality4 ,they have a feeling1 which is not unreasonable1 that to commit themselves to the ,catholic citizenship is to take responsibilities that continually act as restraints4 ,but they do not maintain anything like a contrary system of spiritual citizenship1 or moral responsibility4 ,for instance1 it is perfectly natural that they should want to act naturally4 ,but they do not want to act naturally according to any intellectual theory of the reliability of ,nature4 ,on the contrary1 their young and brilliant literary representatives are very prone to press upon us the crudity and cruelty of ,nature4 ,that is the moral of ,mr4 ,aldous ,huxley1 and of many others4 ,state to them any of the consistent theories of the supreme claim of ,nature upon us1 such as the pantheistic idea of ,god in all natural things2 or the ,nietzschean theory that nature is evolving something with superior claims to our own2 or any other definable defence of the natural process itself1 and they will almost certainly reject it as something unproved or exploded4 ,they do not want to have an exact imitation of the laws of the physical universe2 they want to have their own way1 a much more intelligible desire4 ,but the result is that they are1 after all1 at a disadvantage in face of those other young people who have satisfied their reason by a scheme that makes the universe reasonable4 ,for that is the very simple explanation of the affair4 ,in so far as there is really a secession among the young1 it is but a part of the same process as that conversion of the young1 of which ,i wrote in the first chapter4 ,the rising generation sees the real issue2 and those who are ready for it rally1 and those who are not ready for it scatter4 ,but there can be but one end to a war between a solid and a scattered army4 ,it is not a controversy between two philosophies1 as was the ,catholic and the ,calvinist1 or the ,catholic and the ,materialist4 ,it is a controversy between philosophers and philanderers4 ,i do not say it in contempt2 ,i have much more sympathy with the person who leaves the ,church for a love affair than with one who leaves it for a long-winded ,german theory to prove that ,god is evil or that children are a sort of morbid monkey4 ,but the very laws of life are against the endurance of a revolt that rests on nothing but natural passion2 it is bound to change in its proportion with the coming of experience2 and1 at the worst1 it will become a battle between bad ,catholics and good ,catholics1 with the great dome over all4 ---------------------------------------- -------------------------------- ,transcriber's ,notes ,missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected4 ,typographical errors were silently corrected4 ,inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book4 ,text in italics is enclosed by underscores 7italics74