There was certainly never a time in the history of Christendom, nor of the paganism that went before it, never a time in the history of our race, when we Europeans (I cannot answer for the Asiatics or the niggers) were so split up, one small set of men knowing nothing about another small set of men at their elbows.
The worst form it takes, of course, is the division between rich and poor, which is quite a modern thing, and an abominable one—the product, I suppose, of what people call ‘democracy.’
Mr. Wilfrid Blunt and I would often talk of this in connection with my own dear county of Sussex. He was much older than I, between twenty-five and thirty years older, and he could, therefore, remember a simpler and a better time than that into which we have descended; yet he confirmed me in my judgment that, no matter how fond a man might be of his country, or how long he might live in it, he would never, if he were of the wealthier, cultivated sort, know the lives of the poor people about him. I had lived among them on and off all my life, and so had he; and I certainly loved them with all my heart, and so did he; but as for knowing how they live or what they really think, there is a gulf dug between us. It ought not to be so.
Apart from this modern separation of the rich from the poor, there are any number of side separations. It is only by an accident that the writing or teaching man knows anything of business, though the commercial man more often knows something of writing. But the greatest anomaly of all, the one that has puzzled me most of a hundred such, is the complete ignorance of what the Catholic Church is and means—the ignorance even of what its doctrines may be. One would think it should be a mere matter of encyclopædias and textbooks—easy for any one to look up. In nations of Catholic culture, of course, the Church is thoroughly well known, even by its worst enemies; but in nations not of Catholic culture the absence of all contact with, and of even elementary information upon, this essential thing, is stupefying.
Here is the corporate tradition which made Europe: the Thing which is the core and soul of all our history for fifteen hundred years, and on into the present time: the continuator of all our pagan origins, transformed, baptised, illumined; the matrix of such culture as we still retain. For any European not to know the elements of that affair is to be in a blind ignorance of all his making, and, therefore, of his self. Yet it is perfectly true that the Englishman or Scotsman, cultivated to excess, saturated with the knowledge of all he thinks there is to know, fatigued and cynical after too much sounding of the world, says things with regard to that great affair which show him to be as little acquainted with its essentials as he might be with another planet. He has many Catholic acquaintances; he probably has some reading of his own country before the death of Elizabeth; he is certain to have read Shakespeare—a writer who wrote for and in a Catholic England, and a writer whose whole atmosphere is Catholic. He may justly pride himself upon his knowledge of the architecture, or even the institutions of the Occident before the great sundering of three hundred years ago. Yet, when he is dealing with this mighty business, he says things more grotesque than anything said by any Colonial about that very governing class to which he himself belongs. He produces an effect, when he touches upon the Faith, which—I say it honestly—is as startling and as comic as the effect produced by those ingenuous millionaires from the backwoods who come barging in among the London subtleties of ancient wealth.
And if this is true—as it is true—of the old governing class, who have some few of them direct family traditions connected with the Faith, nearly all of them relatives and every one of them friends and acquaintances who are Catholic, it is, of course, still more true of the average writing and speaking man of lower birth upon whom general opinion depends.
Now and then one comes across a man who talks or writes with some knowledge, if not of what lies beyond the boundary, at least of the boundary itself; but it is exceedingly rare. The latest example I know of the thing is the preface by Mr. Bernard Shaw, written for his play ‘Saint Joan.’ Here there is a clear recognition of the boundary between the Faith and what lies outside: between the garden and the heath, or marsh.
He is writing there of the voices which Saint Joan of Arc heard, and which determined her mission. He points out that people often hear voices through a morbid faculty of projecting what they have themselves imagined. It is well known that that may happen to any one; and most people recognise that such a phenomenon is within themselves, and has no value of reality. Indeed, pretty well every one has at one time or another vividly heard not-present sounds, whether through the recollection of a loved voice or through some other emotion of fear or violence; and it is only a question of degree whether you call the impression ‘hearing’ or no. He also points out that in the case of diseased people this imaginary stuff takes on a false reality, and that many lunatics, criminal and other, imagine themselves to have heard voices commanding them to do this or that—usually something very unpleasant, nothing half so fine or sane as conducting a triumphant war.
All that is perfectly true. Then he comes to the specific point of Saint Joan’s voices, and he says that, having been brought up a strong Protestant (and, indeed, a strong Protestantism is the note of all his writings), he cannot accept the idea that these voices were real.
Now, there you have a perfectly clear and lucid statement of the boundary between the Catholic world and what lies outside it. The specific difference between the Catholic and the non-Catholic—so far as Europe is concerned—lies in what is roughly called (it is a conversational term, and I do not accept it as accurate) the ‘acceptation of the supernatural.’ The Catholic does not believe that every one who hears voices hears real voices. He does believe that it is possible for such voices to be real; and he, therefore, believes that this thing, philosophically possible, has also had, now and then, a real historical existence.
In the same way, he does not believe nine tenths, or ninety-nine hundredths, of the miraculous stories which have grown up out of distortion or mere wantonness, or (for the greater part) out of the gradual substitution of direct statement for allegorical or fictional statement, turning fairy tales into fact; but he believes that the miraculous—that is, an irregular suspension of the order of nature—is philosophically possible. He, therefore, believes, when the evidence is sufficient, that it has historical existence in certain examples. For instance, I certainly believe that the blinded man of York had his sight restored to him by Saint Thomas of Canterbury; but I don’t believe that Mahommed went to the moon on donkey-back—if, indeed, that mysterious mount of his _was_ a donkey, which the best authorities deny. The Catholic not only believes that certain historical examples, which are of faith, were real and took place (as, for instance, our Lord’s walking on the water—and Saint Peter’s less successful effort), but he also believes in general that the phenomena called miracles continue actually to happen throughout history: that they go on to-day.
The same principle of division runs through the whole of thought. In the matter of the development of religion, everybody outside the Catholic body talks as though the development of the Catholic religion were a human process. They answer the famous question, ‘Is religion of God or of man?’ with a hearty affirmation of the second hypothesis. In this mood they examine such a story as that of the Mass, the Papacy, or the doctrine of our Lord’s divinity. They take it for granted that all was man-made. In this mood they interpret (usually with guesses of the wildest sort, which the much stricter and more rational Catholic scholarship soon disproves) the origin of the Scriptures, and in particular of the Gospels. Now the Catholic admits _all_ evidence in these matters: that is a matter of course, for if you exclude any evidence your conclusion is vitiated. But the difference between him and the others is that he regards the action at work as divine, willed, and, to repeat a word I have used, ‘illumined.’ That is why the Catholic thinks of the modernist as a man of warm heart, but of poor intelligence.
Here is an example. The man of warm heart, with a strong sentimental attachment to his Scriptures, to familiar views, has his mind shaken by the discovery or even the suggestion, that his document is not wholly authentic. His intelligence must tell him—if he would use it—that a document cannot be an authority superior to the body which gave it its claim. But his intelligence falters. Now the Catholic, accustomed to the theory of authority and having decided, let us say, upon evidence sufficient for his judgment, that such and such a text was not part of an original manuscript, could never on that account abandon the doctrine consonant with that text. He believes a doctrine to be a divine, a supernatural thing, communicated, revealed to the world by an authority which still lives, and to and of which he is at once a subject and a part. He says, upon an accepted authority, ‘This is so.’ The presence or absence of one piece of documentary evidence does not affect reality. I have never thought the evidence against the ‘Johannine Comma’ so strong as that in its favour: but, though it were proved unauthentic to-morrow, what possible effect could that discovery have on the reality of the Trinity?