We put in that day for water and to provision. We stayed but a little while, coming in by the southern and going out by the eastern gate, and passing as we did so that sad wreck of munitions wherein lay, I believe, the bodies of men entombed.
My companion took the helm up past the Foreland in a rather fresher breeze than we had yet had, and with more north in it, and I looked back along our wake and thought how here our time has managed to change too thoroughly what was the most famous sight of western Europe, the entry into England.
Although the old harbour (which lay between the hills—where the gasworks are to-day) had long ago gone dry, yet the marks of it and much human ingenuity added, maintained the port of Dover; and through that port went the prodigious traffic which bound this province of Christendom to the rest. Here, throughout the intense activity of the Middle Ages, passed and repassed the blood of the State, and the life running outwards from the heart of Europe at Rome. During all that time, on to days I can myself remember, this main majestic entry into England presented something of the same aspect to the traveller coming in from the sea. There was the town in its cleft; the masts in the little harbour; the castle on its height. Now, to my eye, the huge new haven, with its miles of wall, has changed and spoilt all this.
But, alas, something worse, more dreadful and more definite has come by way of change. Something which cannot be undone and which has subtly stolen their meaning not only from old Dover, but from the great keels of the fleet and its guns.
You may see the memorial of it marked upon the turf: the memorial of the place where the first man (and he a Frenchman), having flown the Channel, landed upon the sacred island, without leave of the sea.
That was a date for you, if you like! That was a year to remember! In history perhaps, many a generation hence, it will be made a dividing point between the old and the new relations of the peoples of Europe.
It is in the irony of Providence that the more man comes to control the material world about him, the more does he lose control over the effects of his action; and it is when he is remaking the world most speedily that he knows least whither he is driving.
It is absorbing to watch change coming upon a whole civilisation. The thirty years of active manhood, the forty years of consecutive experience and memory which a man of my age can remember, the years 1884-1894-1924 form, perhaps, the best period for watching such things that we Europeans of the West have had since the Renaissance.
That may sound extravagant. The very great change introduced by the use of coal, and the machinery dependent upon coal, one hundred and fifty years ago, produced, I suppose, greater outward effects; but the spiritual fruits of the change were not ripe till our day.
The characteristic of our time is the crisis in the _philosophy_ of Western Christendom: the thing began with Voltaire, but it has come to a head somewhat suddenly, following long after the material change.
For the great characteristic of the mental change between, say, 1885 and the present day, is the final segregation of Catholic philosophy from an opponent mood. That is the formula now applying to all the Occident, to all the one group of human beings who are variously called the Spaniards, the French, the Italians, the English, the more southern Germans of the Rhine and the Danube, the Dutch, the Scandinavians, the Irish, and the Scotch.
It is this group of human beings which conducts the world and will probably continue to conduct it; for it has the best physical stock, the greatest energy, the greatest intelligence, and the strongest and most continuous will: and its colonies can never replace it. It has always been at the head of humanity, even before it acquired, through its conversion to Catholicism fifteen hundred years ago, those vast new powers which have since distinguished it. Before Western Europe had opportunities for conducting the world as a whole, it was still manifestly the greatest thing in the world, and when its soldierly adventurers and seamen, and its growing mastery over physical things gave it opportunity it took a place from which I do not think it can be dislodged.
Most modern men assume a shifting of the headship of the world from our regions to some other; as to Asia or to the New World. But as they base their calculation upon mere measurement they are sure to be wrong. They make their estimate of human affairs on the analogy of physical science: counting only what can be exactly calculated and noting only the growth or decline of numbers, in men, in goods, in speed.
But human affairs are moved from deeper springs altogether. A spirit moves them. It is by the acceptation, the denial, the renewal of philosophies that this society of immortal mortals is marked, changed, or restored.
The Catholic philosophy is, I say, to-day, at last clean separate from its opponent. Its opponent is losing all trace of Catholic dogma. That is the special mark of our time.
It is important to emphasise this position; unless we understand it, the future which is upon us will not be understood.
In the sixteenth century the unity of Western Christendom made shipwreck. But there did not then arise (as would seem to have been the necessary sequence when one reads the great men of the Renaissance, Erasmus, or any of the lesser ones) an immediate separation between the Catholic exposition of the world, the Catholic revelation, and a new scepticism. The process was much slower than that. It covered nearly four hundred years, and it went, as is a habit of human change, through very tortuous channels before it settled into its final form—which has now arrived.
First came a curious process of irrational selection in dogma. Nearly all those who were reacting against the authority of Catholic truth preferred to select a bundle of Catholic dogmas, and even of Catholic disciplines out of the total and to reject the remainder.
Most of those in revolt, for instance, accepted the Incarnation and the Trinity; nearly all accepted the personal immortality of the soul. The general Catholic discipline of society, such as property, indissoluble monogamous marriage, and the rest was still taken for granted.
For more than a century the growing division appeared as a contrast between Catholic tradition and what was called ‘Protestantism’ in its various forms, the latter presenting bodies of doctrine chosen out of Catholicism, but less than the total of Catholic doctrine and discipline. The new selections produced, of course, a harvest of social results more tangible and concrete than the abstract differences in dogma and formula, and there arose a Protestant culture of the North side by side with the remaining Catholic culture of the South. The geographical division was purely accidental. Nothing could be more Catholic than the Irish of Donegal, nor more Protestant than the Huguenots of Nîmes, and the living centre of Protestantism was rather in southern France than in any other one region of the West.
But to this there succeeded another phase which, again, was not as logical as it should have been: a respectable development called ‘rationalism,’ which arose in France and gradually permeated Europe. Its highest moment of expression was the middle of the eighteenth century, its greatest pen that of Voltaire, and perhaps its clearest intelligence that of Diderot.
This short-lived but attractive philosophy reduced its main dogmas, or postulates, to as small a number as possible, and proposed that nothing should be accepted save upon the criteria admissible by all sane men: particularly the criteria of the senses and common experience. It still tended to preserve a certain small but fundamental proportion of Catholic dogma; but it did so on the plea that such dogma was (as it imagined) universal to the human race, or at least to all sane men. Most of its adherents—not all of them—postulated one, personal, creative God, the sustainer of the universe. Of the Catholic discipline they accepted property as a moral right, and its twin institution of indissoluble monogamous marriage as a necessary thing in society, though they were perfectly ready to discuss these and any other disciplines.
Undoubtedly the underlying conception common to the rationalists was this, that there is a certain knowledge of reality to be obtained through the reason dealing with the senses and experience common to all men, and only what can be so obtained is to be affirmed as true. What could not be so obtained is to be rejected as doubtful or false. But while this was their underlying conception, they could not shake off a considerable body of their Catholic past.
This rationalism rejected the miraculous in every form, and even the unusual. It began to substitute the document for tradition in history, it proceeded to a strict and most successful progressive examination of the physical world, discovering more and more of its sequences. This imprinted on all the rationalists did (not _thought_) a very special stamp, the stamp of _proved certitude_. They carried the feeling of scientific certitude which physical research had given them into the field of ideas. They came to imagine their metaphysical dogmas to be not transcendental but demonstrable by experiment, or, at least, by the common sense of mankind. Here was a curious and, perhaps, unique incident in human history: a faith which did not know it was a faith. The rationalists had not any doubts at all, because everything exterior to their faith seemed to them insignificant save in so far as it combated their faith.