For instance, if you take Gibbon (who was the principal English writer among them, and who was the chief English pupil of Voltaire) you will see that most transcendental truths affirmed by Catholicism—such as the divinity of Our Lord, the affirmation of miracle, the admission of tradition in history, side by side with the document, etc.—were to him ideas ridiculous in themselves, and in themselves therefore of no value. But though direct Catholic statement inspired him with a strong aversion, yet he revelled in, he took for granted, that very civilisation, Europe, which the Catholic Church had made. He had no conception whither rationalism was leading.
These people were certain; they stood upon a rock; and from the nature of their certitude they took it for granted that all the world would come to the same certitude by a mere process of evidence. They took it for granted that there was in all men a certain line of reason which only had to be turned upon any mass of affirmation in order to distinguish at once what was false in it from what was true, reckoning amongst the false whatever was affirmed without such proof behind it (of document or experiment) as they required.
They made no doubt that all this was final, that they themselves had reached finality, that the world was rapidly reaching it, and that nothing could disturb such a progress save some hardly imaginable reversion to Catholicism.
They were quite wrong. Before they had so much as convinced the bulk of educated Europe, three further developments were upon them, one of which has survived, and has become the modern opponent of the Catholic Church. The first of these three developments was a sceptical attack upon the postulates of the rationalists themselves: a questioning whether humanity and its common experience had ever grasped reality. That nonsense was German; it was Kant’s muddlement of the great and clear Descartes.
Next they had to meet a development rather English than German, which noted with great practical common sense the irrational flaw in the rationalists’ position. This flaw was the statement that a thing affirmed without the proof of common experience could not be true. It does not at all follow that because a statement lacks material proof, therefore it is untrue; it does not at all follow that because a thing is most unusual therefore it has not been.
For instance, witnesses were brought forward to state that a man had lifted himself off the ground without material force to aid him, and had so remained suspended in an ecstasy. The thing was most unlikely; it was opposed to the common experience of mankind. Therefore, said the rationalists, it is false. They were attacked by those who replied: ‘Your “therefore” is ill-chosen; it is itself a mere affirmation without proof. The thing _may_ have happened.’ Hence mere suspense of judgment and what was called ‘agnosticism’ in England.
This second phase also was destined to a very brief life; but it contained two permanent elements of truth. These were, first that it denied the necessary truth of the rationalists’ postulates save only the postulate of the evidence of the senses (it denied the necessity of common experience being the only experience), and secondly that it affirmed (what was obviously true) that a mass of things credited to be real were not susceptible of proof through the evidence of the senses, or the common sense of mankind.
This spirit advanced to the denial not of a personal God, but of the rationalists’ belief in a personal God; and it attached to the Power or Powers behind the universe the comic term ‘Great Unknowable.’
The third development attacking the rationalists now occupies all the Western mind outside the Catholic Church. It came not from the head, but from the heart. It is an affirmation that truths may be recognised emotionally, and are not to be rejected because the intellect is either incapable of analysing them or of discovering any foundation for them. One might take as the germ of this movement a commonplace sentence of Pascal’s which has become, because it is obvious and superficial, far more famous than his deeper sayings: the saying that ‘the heart has its reasons of which the head knows nothing.’ This emotional protest against rationalism appealed to the vivid response awakened in the human heart by the life of nature. Such a trend could only end in pantheism: and pantheist the modern world, outside the Catholic body, has become.
The reason, for instance, that the poet Wordsworth attained so ill-proportioned a popularity in the latter part of the nineteenth century in England was his pantheism. He is the exponent of that mood; not the most vivid—for he is vivid only in a few flashes, and usually dull and thoroughly bad; not the most intelligent, for he made no pretence at an intelligent exposition of the mood; but because he was so thoroughly steeped in pantheism: because every line of his betrays a taken-for-granted and, as it were, necessary pantheism.
In France and Italy this same reaction took the form of accepting the universe as blind but moral; the pantheist movement of the anti-clerical factions deified what were taken to be the common moral emotions of mankind speaking particularly of ‘Truth’ and ‘Justice’ as though there were real beings in a universe where the personal power and virtues of a Creator were denied. Throughout the more cultivated Europe a certain number of special marks of the thing increased, notably the insistence upon landscape, upon our fellowship with the rest of animated creation, and side by side with these a disdain or negligence or despair upon the sharp points of Divine Will, of personal immortality, of possible doom.
There was formed at last in our own time, as the crystallisation of all this boiling, a philosophy, a set of judgments accepted vaguely, but finally, by all that is not Catholic in the Occident, and this I will call ‘sceptical pantheism.’ Over against it stands the defined, exact, and traditional revelation maintained by the Catholics intact. This revelation is as separate from that other mood as is the firm strand from sea water, or waking from dreams.
Here many men reading me (if indeed many men shall read me, for whatever number of men may read this hotchpotch of a book, most of them, I think, will skip these musing passages—seeing that their subjects are the only ones of real import) will reply:
‘In face of this great, new, general, modern spirit, which you call sceptical pantheism, and which I admit to be the chief moral phenomenon of our time, the Catholic Church is negligible. I accept your statement that there is a great general modern spirit or mood full of this feeling for nature and of brotherhood with all animated creatures and a substitution of emotional materialism for dogma. I may or may not accept your particular title “sceptical pantheism,” but I know what you mean. We are all agreed that the spirit is there; and in face of it the Catholic position no longer has weight: it no longer counts. It is a mere surviving habit with most of its so-called adherents (who at heart are themselves shaken in their adherence). It is ignorance on the part of a few sincere ones; a bitter refusal to accept evidence on the part of a larger number of less sincere ones: a deliberate shutting of the eyes. Catholicism is in process of dissolution and has become politically negligible.’
That is the reply which I think most educated men in England would give to the proposition I have just advanced: the proposition that the modern world is now divided into two sharply defined camps (of which Catholicism is one) standing each over against the other.
Now these objectors are provincial, both the better informed and the less. They should appreciate the modern world more exactly. They could arrive at such an appreciation by a wise use of travel, and of even their own contemporary society; by getting to know many kinds of men intimately in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Belgium, and by reading the words written upon the Catholic side—a thing which, for the most part, they wholly neglect to do.
Indeed, I have noticed that the finest and most conclusive pieces of Catholic apologetics are, in England and America, hidden away in little publications read by no one but Catholics; and by few, even of these.
If those who make the objection I have just recited would use travel wisely, or even read contemporary Catholic writing in their own country, they would appreciate that what I have said is true if one regards Western Europe as a whole. Outside England every one is aware of the Catholic Church; two great armies face each other, and the issue is doubtful. All instructed Europe sees a great duel set between the Catholic Church and its opponent. All instructed Europe sees that this duel is taking the form of anti-Catholic laws and of proposals of laws upon the one side, and upon the other of growing Catholic social power.
Those who, in England, once followed Calvin, who then at second hand followed Diderot and Voltaire, who then at second or third hand followed the French romantics, would to-day do well to follow this great modern quarrel, as it is joined upon the old battleground of European debate: the arena which lies between the Pyrenees and the Channel, between the Rhine and the Atlantic: Gaul.