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 101(7- 
 
 CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 Nixon Grriffis 
 
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 External religion 
 
 Cornell University Library 
 
 3 1924 031 210 234 
 olin.anx 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031210234 
 
External Religion: 
 
 3te lOee anb abuse. 
 
 GEORGE TYRRELL, S.J. 
 
 llMt6,9t Of "1biic6 S«Bfn«»" »»!> "ilBova et »etet«.' 
 
 T/sJyi Edition. 
 
 LONDON: 
 SANDS & CO. 
 
 1902. 
 
908090 
 
 ROEHAMPTON '. 
 FKIMTED BY JOHN GRIFFIN. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The proverbial fruitlessness of religious or 
 philosophical controversy is doubtless in some 
 measure due to the fact that, each one's seem- 
 ingly many thoughts on such matters are indeed 
 but one thought in diverse clothings ; that the 
 conclusions to which we cleave, really so modify 
 our understanding of the principles from which 
 we profess to draw them, that even the few 
 premisses we may seem to hold in union with our 
 opponents are held in a different sense, and thus 
 there is no common basis for argument It 
 might be thought that, agreeing in the Apostles' 
 Creed and all it involves, a Catholic and 
 Protestant could easily advance to still fuller 
 agreement ; but it may well be doubted if their 
 
VI PREFACE, 
 
 inner understanding of a single article is 
 exactly the same ; while we venture to suspect 
 that the little differences in each case would be 
 found ultimately to depend upon, rather than 
 support the great conclusions concerning which 
 they are at issue. Whether theoretically it must 
 be so, matters little, since practically, so it is 
 that, for the most part, men first fix their beliefs, 
 and then fabricate reasons in support of them. 
 We flatter ourselves that our thoughts are built 
 up logically from principles which are inde- 
 pendent of their consequences ; but in reality, 
 they are rather as the stones of an arch of which 
 each is supported by all the rest. In purely 
 abstract science, where perfect precision of terms 
 is attainable, logic holds inexorable sway ; nor 
 is there room for difference of opinion ; but 
 where the conceptions dealt with are necessarily 
 imperfectly defined, recourse to dialectical 
 reasoning is idle, until agreement in the manner 
 of simple apprehension can be secured. 
 
 Here, however, the same difficulty besets the 
 
PREFACE. Vll 
 
 •elements of the discussion as attends on the total 
 construction to which it is directed. There is no 
 rule for forcing another to apprehend things 
 exactly as we ourselves apprehend them, 
 whether they be simpler notions, or their 
 more complex resultants ; the only resource 
 is, by every artifice of exposition and illus- 
 tration, to set out our idea so clearly that it 
 may find its way readily into any mind already 
 capable of responding to it. But as the same 
 bias of vision, or refraction, which distorts 
 the image of the whole, will proportionally 
 distort the image of each component part, one 
 may just as well begin with the former, and face 
 the problem in the gross as in detail. Nay, 
 better ; for it is our mode of conceiving the 
 whole that determines our mode of conceiving 
 the parts, rather than inversely. 
 
 It is then by the frequent and diversified 
 setting forth of the Catholic conception of 
 Christianity in its entirety, viewed now from 
 one side, now from another, that we best render 
 
Vlll PREFACE. 
 
 assistance to those many souls who, consciously 
 or unconsciously, are in need of such an ideal 
 and to whom it has only to be clearly presented 
 in order to be apprehended, desired, and 
 accepted. 
 
 These lectures, slight as they are in many 
 ways and directed to practice rather than to 
 speculation, do nevertheless sketch, in a few 
 rough strokes, one particular outline of the 
 Catholic Religion, which may be of interest 
 just now when the question of ecclesiasticism 
 has come into prominence once more before the 
 eyes of the British public — a question whose 
 solution largely depends on the view we take of 
 the relation of external to internal religion. 
 The Catholic and the Protestant conception of 
 Christianity are distinct from one another not 
 only in their entirety, but — such is the organic 
 unity of each system — in their every detail,, 
 notwithstanding many ail-but coincidences and » 
 points of ail-but contact. Were these contacts 
 and coincidences perfect, logic might force the 
 
PREFACE. IX 
 
 opponents to total concord under pain of 
 incoherence. But, since as a fact they are not, 
 we shall better deal at once with the two con- 
 ceptions in their entirety, than wrangle about 
 any of their parts, since these are really shaped 
 and animated by the same spirit that charac- 
 terizes the whole. In either case our task is 
 one, not of argument, but of exposition ; we 
 have but to let the Truth appear, and then bid 
 men " Come and see ! " And of these, some will 
 remain and some will go away, according to the 
 power of seeing they bring with them. 
 
 G. T. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Lecture I. The Incarnation a Redemption of the 
 
 internal through the external . . i 
 
 Lecture II. The religion of the Incarnation, 
 
 external and internal . , .19 
 
 Lecture III. Insufficiency of merely internal religion 39 
 
 Lecture IV. Insufficiency of merely external religion 58 
 
 Lecture V. Abuse of external means of grace . 80 
 
 Lecture VI. Abuse of external means of light . 106 
 
 Lecture VII. Abuse of the promise of indefectibility 128 
 
 Lecture VIII. Interior Faith J48 
 
LECTURE I. 
 
 THE INCARNATION A REDEMPTION OF THE 
 INTERNAL THROUGH THE EXTERNAL. 
 
 It has been thought advisable, as far as 
 practically possible, to preserve some kind of 
 rough sequence in these courses of instruction ; ^ 
 and therefore as my Right Reverend predecessor 
 has dealt with the Incarnation, it has been 
 suggested that I should deal with what is some- 
 times called the " Extension of the Incarnation " 
 in the Church and in the individual. To 
 explain in general what we mean by this con- 
 ception, will perhaps best serve as a programme, 
 or an argument of what is to follow. 
 
 A work so many-sided as that of the Incarna- 
 tion, looking to so many different ends that it 
 is impossible for us to say which is principal in 
 the Divine mind, branches out and extends 
 itself in countless directions ; so that if we are 
 
 ■■ These were instructions given to the Catholic undergraduates 
 at Oxford on the Sundays in Lent Term, 1899. 
 
 B 
 
2 THE INCARNATION A REDEMPTION OF 
 
 not to be lost in labyrinths of perplexity, we 
 must fix on some one of these many divergent 
 lines of its development, and content ourselves 
 with seeing how this or that particular feature 
 of the Incarnation reproduces itself in the 
 Church and in the individual. 
 
 Plainly this can be seen only by a process of 
 comparison ; by looking first upon one picture 
 and then upon the other, on the original and 
 the reproduction, on Christ and on the Church. 
 
 It will be necessary for us, therefore, to look 
 again upon the mystery of the Incarnation, not 
 indeed in its many-sided entirety, but with a 
 view to fixing our attention upon that particular 
 feature of it which it is our purpose to consider 
 as repeated in the Church. i 
 
 Whether, as St. Bonaventure and many others 
 have thought, in the event of man's perseverance 
 in original justice, the Son of God would have 
 become incarnate, not as a " man of sorrows 
 and acquainted with grief," but in a glorified 
 impassible humanity — whether He would have 
 assumed the headship of mankind, wedding our 
 unfallen race into the family of the three Divine 
 Persons, and by this alliance lifting it above 
 that of the angels — all this is matter of a more 
 or less probable and even profitable conjecture, 
 but in no sense, of revealed truth. "Chq'st 
 
THE INTERNAL THROUGH THE EXTERNAL. 3 
 
 Jesus came into this world to save sinners," sa}'S 
 St. Paul ; but whether He would have come had 
 there been no sinners to save, we are not told. 
 One thing is, however, fairly clear, that if we 
 regard the shining forth, and revelation of God's 
 goodness and wisdom and love, as the domi- 
 nating end of all His works in our regard, a far 
 fuller revelation of these attributes has been 
 rendered possible by the permission of sin than 
 would have been otherwise possible. Wonderful 
 as were the gifts of grace bestowed upon man 
 in Paradise, surpassing all that God has done for 
 him in the natural dignity of his spiritual being, 
 yet far more wonderful is grace restored to man 
 who had forfeited it by sin, — the kiss of peace, 
 the costly robe and ring, the banquet of welcome 
 prepared for the returning spendthrift and rebel. 
 O certe necessarium Adce peccatum, sings the 
 Church in her Easter jubilee — " O truly needful 
 sin of Adam " — needful and necessary on the 
 supposition that God's love was to speak itself 
 more fully and superabundantly, not merely in 
 t^giving but in pardoning, not only in liberality 
 but in mercy and meekness, grace superabound- 
 ing where sin had abounded. Had God been 
 made man in a world unfallen, we had known 
 Him indeed, fair and glorious among the sons 
 of men, bright with the radiance of Tabor, with 
 
4 THE INCARNATION A REDEMPTION OF 
 
 the splendour of His risen and ascended Body, 
 with a glory appealing to the tastes of our 
 spiritual childhood and imperfection ; but our 
 finer and more mature perception of a greater 
 glory than all this would never have been 
 awakened, the glory of the Divine Lover 
 emptied of His glory — suffering, afflicted, 
 humbled, slain ; the glory which shone upon 
 the pallid face of the dead Christ. 
 
 It was, therefore, by preference into a sinful 
 world that the Lamb of God chose to come, — 
 not into pleasant pastures beside the still 
 waters, but into the valley of the shadow of 
 death, into the midst of wolves, to be torn to 
 pieces by sin ; to absorb into Himself the venom 
 of our malice against Him, which else had 
 reacted upon ourselves and poisoned us. For 
 when man struck against God by sin, he was as 
 a bird in the tempest that flings itself against 
 the face of a cliff, and had been dashed to 
 pieces had not God in His pity become soft and 
 yielding, and taken to Himself a suffering 
 nature, that the hurt of the shock might be His** 
 and not ours. 
 
 Healing, restoration, redemption, atonement, 
 such is the purpose and end of the Incarnation 
 most emphasized in Divine revelation. Propter 
 nos homines, says the Creed, et propter nostrum 
 
THE INTERNAL THROUGH THE EXTERNAL. 5 
 
 salutem — words which indeed admit of a wider 
 sense, but whose simpler meaning is doubtless 
 the one intended. Humanity had fallen among 
 thieves and lay by the wayside robbed, stript, 
 wounded, and half-dead ; and God, the Good 
 Samaritan, the physician and healer of human 
 nature, drew nigh binding up our wounds, 
 pouring in wine and oil, walking on foot that 
 we might ride at our ease ; taking us to the 
 shelter and hospitality of His Church, there to 
 be cared for and ministered to, till His 
 return. 
 
 We are then considering our Incarnate Lord 
 as the healer of our wounded nature, in 
 order that we may see how the Church carries 
 on this same work of healing, and by what are 
 substantially the same methods, taking care 
 of redeemed humanity entrusted to her keeping 
 by that Good Samaritan. 
 
 And for this end we must notice more closely 
 the nature of our wounds, and the kind of treat- 
 ment by which our Lord has salved them. 
 
 Apart from supernatural assistance, man, as 
 compared with the angels, is by nature a weakly 
 and vulnerable creature, being composed of two 
 unlikely and in some sense antithetical elements 
 — spirit and matter, soul and body. In virtue 
 of his body he belongs to the order of things 
 
6 THE INCARNATION A REDEMPTION OF 
 
 visible, tangible, measurable in reference to 
 time and place ; subject to succession, change, 
 corruption, and death. In virtue of his soul, he 
 is a spirit, lower indeed than the angels, but 
 like them belonging to that invisible, intangible 
 world outside time and space, which we can in 
 no way imagine, and of which we can speak and 
 think only in symbols and metaphors, drawn from 
 things that appeal to our senses. In man these 
 two worlds are mingled and wedded together ; 
 he is, so to say, the child of their marriage ; 
 owning an earthly and a Heavenly Father; — as it 
 might be, a tree rooted indeed in the invisible 
 but leaning over and dipping its branches into 
 the passing stream of things visible. And these 
 two elements in man are so adjusted that the 
 lower shall minister to and be subject to the 
 higher ; the earthly, the relative, the temporal, 
 to the heavenly, the absolute, the eternal ; the 
 senses and imagination feeding the mind, 
 embodying and expressing its thought ; the 
 passions and animal feelings mingling with, 
 aiding, and seconding the spiritual will, giving 
 body and expression to its movements. 
 
 Yet the lower principle being blind and head- 
 strong is of itself incapable of intelligent 
 sympathy with the higher, and needs to be guided 
 and governed by it ; and therefore the free self- 
 
THE INTERNAL THROUGH THE EXTERNAL. 7 
 
 induced perfection of man lies in a certain 
 delicate and easily-disturbed balance, between 
 the visible and the invisible principles of his 
 being ; between the flesh and the spirit. 
 Spiritus quidem promptus est, caro autem infirma 
 — " The spirit indeed is ready, but the flesh is 
 infirm." The flesh is the weak, the corruptible, 
 the vulnerable element of our composition, in 
 virtue of which our equilibrium is at the best 
 fearfully unstable. Speaking in the gross all the 
 sins which men commit — sins of the mind as well 
 as sins of the body — are, if not directly, at least 
 indirectly traceable to the infirmity of the flesh 
 — to the fact that, our spirit is, through its 
 dependence upon the body and the senses, tied 
 down to the world of feelings and illusions and 
 appearances. 
 
 So much is this the case, that in Holy 
 Scripture the "flesh" is more commonly used 
 to denote all that is corrupt and sinful within 
 us, whereas the spirit stands for all that is god- 
 like or divine. Not indeed that one part of our 
 nature is essentially evil — weak is not evil — and 
 the other essentially good, as heretics have often 
 taught ; for where due equilibrium is preserved 
 each part in balancing helps the other, and fulfils 
 it. For it is in the embodied spirit, not in the 
 disembodied, that the highest and fullest human 
 
8 THE INCARNATION A REDEMPTION OF 
 
 perfection is realized. Man is not an angel 
 prisoned in a body ; but through his body 
 supplements in some little way the poverty 
 and imperfection of a spiritual nature of a 
 lower grade than that of the angels. Yet 
 because all human sin is traceable to culpable 
 ignorance or to passion, i.e., to some illusion 
 of the senses or imagination, some uncontrolled 
 outbreak of ungoverned heat, some failure of 
 faith or even of intelligence as to the reality of 
 things invisible and the unreality of things visible 
 — for this reason the flesh which through our 
 senses links us with the visible world, has come 
 to stand for the principle of sin ; whereas the 
 spirit which through faith and reason links us 
 with the invisible world, has come to be regarded 
 as the principle of righteousness and divinity. 
 
 Left to ourselves, and in the merely natural 
 order of things, the perfect balancing of the 
 spiritual with the fleshly elements of our being, 
 of reason with imagination, of the will with the 
 feelings, is something attained very slowly and 
 with great difficulty ; and in the attaining of 
 which our life-task of self-development consists 
 
 But it is a point of common Catholic teaching 
 that God having destined our first parents for 
 a perfection and blessedness altogether above 
 and beyond what was naturally due to them, 
 
THE INTERNAL THROUGH THE EXTERNAL. Q 
 
 started them at that point of perfection which 
 would otherwise have been their goal, and by 
 certain preternatural endowments, gave them 
 what they had not laboured for, namely, all 
 those virtues of mind, heart, affections and 
 passions, by which the flesh and spirit are 
 brought into perfect harmony and concord, 
 that so their energies might be set free and 
 multiplied for conflicts and temptations of an 
 altogether higher order, temptations attendant 
 on altogether superhuman aspirations and 
 attainments ; mysterious temptations, such as 
 we can imagine the angels to have been proved 
 by. 
 
 There is enough in that dim Oriental record 
 of the Fall, to satisfy us that it was through 
 unbelief in the invisible, through intellectual 
 self-sufficiency, through spiritual pride, that man 
 wilfully and inexcusably subjected himself 
 to the bondage above which he had been 
 supernaturally raised, to the tyranny of things 
 visible — of the flesh, the senses, the imagination, 
 the passions. " Of every tree in the garden 
 shalt thou eat, but of the tree of the knowledge 
 of good and evil thou shalt not eat ; for in the 
 day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." 
 Here there is figured some mysterious and at 
 first sight unreasonable restriction of the 
 
10 THE INCARNATION A REDEMPTION OF 
 
 indulgence of the natural inclination, a restric- 
 tion to be submitted to with blind faith in the 
 wisdom and goodness of God. And this restric- 
 tion was disregarded, seemingly, not through any 
 extreme pressure of carnal appetite, but through 
 a certain revolt of the mind, rebelling against 
 the invisible, impatient to see and understand 
 everything, as though God had no right to keep 
 a secret from man. 
 
 Although then the flesh in its healthy state 
 of perfect obedience to the spirit, could not 
 have been the instigating motive of the Fall, 
 could not have responded in any irregular and 
 unmanageable way to temptation from without, 
 yet it was the instrument which man deliberately 
 chose for his own destruction ; and in so doing, he 
 released it from its obedience, and cut the 
 cords by which God had bound the lower 
 appetite into subjection to the higher ; and in 
 freeing the slave, soon found that he had let 
 loose a tyrant : Servi dominati sunt nostri — 
 " Our slaves have become our tyrants." Hence- 
 forward, he himself became the slave of the 
 visible, the tangible, the illusory, the unreal, 
 of that world, to which he belongs as a creature 
 of space and time, of flesh and blood. Thus 
 it was that the flesh, the instrument of his sin, 
 became the instrument of his chastisement 
 
THE INTERNAL THROUGH THE EXTERNAL. II 
 
 Man was robbed and wounded and left half- 
 dead. 
 
 It was then for the greater manifestation of 
 God's power and wisdom, that He should not 
 only in His mercy undo the work of sin ; but 
 that He should take the very instrument 
 and occasion of evil — the flesh namely, and the 
 visible order of things to which it belongs — and 
 make it an instrument for the remedy of evil. 
 
 Hoc opus nostras salutis 
 Ordo depoposcerat 
 Multiformis proditoris 
 Ars ut artem falleret 
 Et medelam ferret inde 
 Hostis unde Iseserat — 
 
 as the Church sings in one of her Passion-tide 
 hymns. 
 
 " A certain sense of order and justice," she 
 tells us, " demanded that the work of our 
 restoration should be in such wise, that the 
 craft of the many-sided traitor should be met 
 by God's counter-craft, fetching our cure from 
 the same quarter whence the enemy had brought 
 our hurt," namely, from the flesh, from the 
 visible element of our composition. 
 
 It is therefore on this feature of the economy 
 of the Incarnation that we wish to dwell ; how 
 Christ has not merely redeemed the whole man. 
 
12 THE INCARNATION A REDEMPTION OF 
 
 body as well as soul ; the whole creation, visible 
 as well as invisible ; but how He has used the 
 weaker element for the redemption of the 
 stronger ; saving the spirit through the flesh ; 
 the invisible through the visible ; the internal 
 through the external ; how He has chosen the 
 feeble things of this world to confound the 
 strong ; the foolish to confound the wise ; the 
 ignoble to confound the noble ; the things that 
 relatively are not to confound the things that 
 are — "to confound," that is, to rebuke, to 
 humble, and so to exalt and redeem. 
 
 Not without some intentional emphasis does 
 St. John proclaim the mystery as " the Word 
 made flesh" rather than " the Word made man ; " 
 glancing, it would seem, at the lower and more 
 humiliating aspect of our nature. 
 
 Peccat caro mundat caro 
 Regnat Deus Dei caro."^ 
 
 But we must also notice that together with 
 man's body and fleshly part, the whole visible 
 bodily world was put out of joint by man's sin ; 
 thrown back, not indeed into primeval chaos 
 and confusion ; but into its state of natural 
 wildness and uncultivation. " Cursed is the 
 
 * For flesh hath cleansed what flesh had stained 
 And God's own flesh as God hath reigned. 
 
THE INTERNAL THROUGH THE EXTERNAL, 13 
 
 earth for thy sake, on thy account," says God 
 to the first Adam ; " thorns and briers shall it 
 bring forth." Through Adam's sin, the whole 
 visible order of things was cursed and alienated 
 from God. It had been created to give praise 
 to God through man. Itself soulless and voice- 
 less, it could not know itself or praise God for 
 what He had made it ; but man could see it 
 and know it, and praise God for it ; and so in 
 man it was to have found a voice and given 
 glory to God. The chords were there, tuned 
 by Divine skill, but silent till struck by human 
 hands. But by sin, man lost the art of that 
 music, and his every touch upon that instrument 
 drew out some harsh discord. There was no 
 change in God's work — good and exceeding 
 good as He had pronounced it — the change 
 was all and only in man's heart. " Thorns and 
 briers shall it bring forth." The visible order 
 of things previously submitted by the power of 
 God to man's service, and yielding its fruit 
 in response to light and pleasurable labour, now 
 returned to its natural unruliness, bringing forth 
 thorns and briers, sorrows and snares, and 
 needing to be weeded and laboriously cultivated 
 in the sweat of man's brow, to yield him even 
 in niggardly measure that bread whereby his 
 soul might live. Absolutely speaking, thorns and 
 
14 THE INCARNATION A REDEMPTION OF 
 
 briers were there before, yet relatively to man 
 they were not, till he threw himself wilfully in 
 their midst to be entangled and pierced. The 
 change was not in nature, but in man ; it was 
 the effect not of things visible, but of man's 
 misuse of things visible. For thorns and briers, 
 sorrows and temptations, are largely little else 
 than a " form " our own mind puts upon things. 
 " It depends on how we take things," as we say. 
 What is sweet in itself is bitter to the disordered 
 palate ; and light that gladdens the healthy 
 eye, hurts and tortures that which is weak and 
 unduly sensitive. 
 
 And, therefore, since Christ has come with 
 healing in His wings ; to breathe into us once 
 more the breath of life ; to sanctify and 
 harmonize our flesh and spirit through contact 
 with His own sacred Flesh and Spirit, so far as 
 He has already begun even in this life to change 
 us and bring our flesh once more into obedience 
 to our spirit ; in that same measure and degree, 
 He has begun the restoration of the whole 
 visible world to the service of man and the 
 glory of God. It became dumb and blind and 
 deaf, when man was separated from God and 
 enslaved to his own flesh ; but now, through the 
 sacred Flesh of Christ, and that of the saints of 
 Christ, it has received vision and voice and 
 
THE INTERNAL THROUGH THE EXTERNAL. 15 
 
 hearing : " He hath done all things well ; He 
 hath made the deaf to hear and the dumb to 
 speak," the long-silent spheres take up their 
 broken melody once more ; the heavens again 
 tell out the glory of God, and the firmament 
 showeth His handiwork. 
 
 Yet here again it is in us and through us that 
 the transformation is wrought. The nature of 
 water was not in itself changed when Christ 
 trod the restless waves ; nor was that of fire 
 robbed of its natural destructiveness when it 
 singed not a hair of God's saints while it con- 
 sumed their tormentors ; nor were lions less 
 fiercely-natured in the moment when they 
 crouched and licked the feet of the martyrs in 
 the arena ; nor did the timid birds of the air 
 belie or alter their natural character when they 
 trustfully gathered around the Saint of Assisi. 
 "What manner of man is this that the winds 
 and the sea obey Him?" A wisely put question ! 
 They did not say : What manner of sea and 
 wind is this? It was in Him and not in the 
 elements that they sought the explanation of 
 the marvel. In the measure that man is what 
 he ought to be, that he approaches his lost 
 supernatural dignity as a son of God, the world 
 will be to him what it ought to be, and so it too 
 will be delivered from its bondage and servitude 
 
l6 THE INCARNATION A REDEMPTION OF 
 
 by being brought under man's feet, even as man 
 finds his liberty at the feet of God. Of this con- 
 summation the Prophet says : "Thou hast made 
 him little less than a god, and hast put all things 
 under his feet ; " and again : " Sit at My right 
 hand till I make thy foes thy footstool;" till thy 
 enemies have become thy lovers and servants. 
 
 To deal with the extension of the Incarnation 
 as we propose, is to show how the Catholic 
 religion carries on the work of man's redemption 
 by the same methods as Christ, turning by 
 some wondrous magic the poison into an 
 antidote, using for our cure those same visible 
 things which we had misused and still misuse 
 to our hurt. 
 
 Other defective and false interpretations of 
 our religious instinct seeing all the sin and evil 
 occasioned by the misuse of the senses and the 
 material world, have come to regard the body, 
 the senses,and everything corporeal, as essentially 
 and irredeemably evil, and to seek the liberation 
 and redemption of the spirit through the destruc- 
 tion of the flesh, and by way of a false and 
 impossible asceticism. This error has charac- 
 terized, not merely the great non-Christian 
 religions of the East, in whose dim twilight so 
 many hundreds of millions have had to grope 
 their way to Heaven as best they might ; but 
 
THE INTERNAL THROUGH THE EXTERNAL. XJ 
 
 also numberless Christian sects of the Puritan 
 or Catharist type, as well as many schools 
 of pietism just barely tolerated within the 
 Church, — alien to her spirit and guided largely 
 by an unconscious bias of neo-platonism \ 
 escaping her censure only through the very 
 confusion of their modes of thought and 
 expression. 
 
 But in that interpretation of our religious 
 instinct which God Himself has given us through 
 the Incarnation and in the Catholic religion of 
 Human Nature, the essential and ineffaceable 
 goodness of all God's creatures is the pre- 
 dominant idea. The seeming evilness of the 
 senses and of material things is not in them- 
 selves, but in the perverse will of man who 
 misuses them. Let that will be healed and 
 rectified, and at once the visible world returns 
 to its original obedience ; and what before were 
 stumbling-blocks, are now steps sloping up to 
 the throne of God. The body, the senses, the 
 imagination, the feelings, the passions, are all,, 
 through the redemption of Christ, restored to 
 their original functions as instruments for the 
 sanotification of the soul. 
 
 That there should be a visible and hierarchic 
 Church, involving a duty of visible membership' 
 as a normal condition of salvation ; that she 
 c 
 
l8 THE INCARNATION A REDEMPTION. 
 
 should use visible rites and sacraments in the 
 sanctification of souls ; that the Divine Word 
 should be brought to our souls not by private 
 inspiration, but by the folly and weakness of 
 preaching ; that the mysteries of eternity, the 
 dogmas of faith, should be conceived in the forms 
 of human thought, expressed in the language of 
 human speech ; that in a thousand ways this 
 Catholic religion should press the visible order 
 into the service of the invisible, redeeming every 
 form of human thought and love and action 
 from the service of sin to the service of God, 
 making the kingdoms of this world, — the king- 
 doms of art and of science and economics and 
 politics, to be the kingdoms of God and His 
 Christ ; bringing music and painting and song 
 and drama into the very Holy of holies itself, 
 all this is but a certain extension of the Incar- 
 nation; an expansion of that economy whereby 
 the flesh, i.e., the visible world, which through 
 sin was made opaque and hung as a heavy 
 curtain between us and the invisible, has been 
 made once more transparent and has become 
 the medium of communication between the 
 Heart of God and the heart of man. 
 
 Peccat caro mundat caro 
 Regnat Deus Dei caro. 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION, 
 EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL. 
 
 It sounds almost irreverent to speak of the 
 religion of the Incarnation as being but one of 
 many actual and possible religions, and it would 
 be false as well as irreverent, did we mean that 
 God were in any sense indifferent as to which of 
 the numerous existing religions a man should 
 adopt. God desires all men, as far as possible 
 to come to fullest attainable knowledge of 
 ■Christian and Catholic truth. Still it is always 
 good for us to wake ourselves up to the fact 
 that the state of things, the order of ideas — 
 social, political, religious — to which we have 
 been accustomed from childhood, is not on that 
 account the necessary, the natural, the only 
 conceivable order of things. If we are to 
 have intelligent notions on any such subject, we 
 must try to approach it with a fresh, unused 
 part of our mind, and to get out of the common 
 
20 THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION, 
 
 groove of speaking and thinking which custom- 
 and repetition have hollowed for us. We must try 
 in some measure to rediscover for ourselves what 
 has long since been discovered and communi- 
 cated to us by others ; for this is to make the 
 truth our own ; to realize it, instead of merely 
 repeating it. In our boyhood the laws of 
 physical nature on the one hand, and on the 
 other, the manners, customs, and institutions of 
 our home and country, seem to us equally neces- 
 sary and inevitable. Not till we begin to read 
 or to travel, and in other ways to widen the field' 
 of our experience, do we come to feel the vast 
 difference between things that must be and things- 
 that may or may not be. It is the purpose of 
 a liberal education to rid us of this mental " pro- 
 vincialism," to save us from the narrowness of a 
 particular, as opposed to an all-round, universal 
 view of the main interests of life. It should 
 help us to take an outside impersonal survey of 
 ourselves, which so few uneducated persons are- 
 really capable of doing ; to compare our ideas, 
 beliefs, habits, and tastes, with those of the most 
 cultivated minds, whether of our own or of 
 other times and countries, and thus measuring,, 
 to criticize and correct ourselves. 
 
 If, therefore, we are to be educated and intelli- 
 gent Catholics, it is necessary for us to wake to- 
 
EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL. 21 
 
 the fact that this religion of ours, unique as it is 
 in some ways, is not the only conceivable, nor 
 the only existing religion ; and that other reli- 
 gions — all inadequate, all more or less false — 
 can be, and are accepted, as seriously and as 
 earnestly by millions of mankind. Ignorant 
 people can never realize that a foreigner's 
 -language is to him native, and not foreign. 
 Seeing that a horse is a horse, why a Frenchman 
 should persist in calling it cheval, is to them 
 ■always an obscure mystery, an instance of that 
 strange unreasonableness which distinguishes the 
 foreigner from the true-born Briton. In like 
 manner it is some time before the possibility of 
 a religion other than our own, becomes to us a 
 real thought. Yet, till it does so, till we can 
 compare and contrast our own religion with 
 other religions that have been, or that might 
 have been, till we can recognize its distinctive 
 ■characteristics, we can hardly be said to know it 
 intelligently ; for all intelligent knowledge im- 
 plies discrimination — that is, a sense of difference 
 and opposition. 
 
 This premised, let us notice that just as the 
 "various sorts of social and political institutions 
 which prevail, and have prevailed, among men 
 ■of different races and ages, are so many attempts 
 
22 THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION, 
 
 to satisfy and interpret a certain instinct of 
 civilization, which is universal and native to the 
 human soul ; so the various and conflicting 
 religions upon the face of the earth are all 
 attempts to interpret, explain, and satisfy a 
 certain religious instinct or craving, which is- 
 now allowed on all hands to be as much a part 
 of our nature as is the faculty of speech or of 
 reason. Man, always and everywhere, feels that 
 there is something in the unseen world he must 
 worship and obey. What that object is, how it 
 is to be worshipped, in what it is to be obeyed — 
 this is not written in his soul ; he is left to 
 learn it from others, or find it out for himself. 
 But the feeling, the craving, the spiritual instinct,, 
 is there by nature ; just as by nature we all 
 suffer bodily hunger, and yet have to learn by 
 costly experience, and through many mistakes,, 
 what may be eaten, what must be left ; what 
 foods are wholesome or agreeable, what un- 
 savoury or deleterious ; matters in which races- 
 and peoples differ as much as they do in their 
 religions. 
 
 Of course, just as at one end of the scale of 
 civilization we may find savages so degraded as 
 to have lost all wish for civilization, or, at the 
 other end, philosophers like Rousseau, who, dis- 
 gusted with a corrupt and effete civilization,. 
 
EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL. 25 
 
 have sophisticated their minds and reasoned 
 away their healthy instincts in the matter, so in 
 regard to the religious faculty we may find 
 individuals, or classes, whose better nature has 
 for one reason or another been perverted, and 
 their spiritual instinct paralyzed. But in spite 
 of these exceptions, the fact stands out plain 
 that man is essentially a religious animal, just 
 as he is essentially a reasoning animal, however 
 irreligious or unreasonable he may be in his life 
 and conduct. 
 
 Left to themselves, and apart from the super- 
 natural teaching of revelation, men have always 
 striven to frame some relatively satisfactory 
 explanation of this religious craving or ten- 
 dency ; to form some theory or view of human 
 life, its origin and its end, which will fit in with 
 and explain their sense of duty, their conviction 
 of the infinite opposition between right and 
 wrong, their remorse of conscience, their fear of 
 judgment, their hope of immortality and of a 
 diviner and fuller life. We know what it is tc> 
 be troubled by some imperious, yet vague and 
 indefinite want, which we try to satisfy first by 
 one thing, then by another, but can never per- 
 fectly quiet or allay. So it is with man when he 
 tries to invent a religion for himself ; he obeys 
 an inexorable appetite of his spiritual nature,, 
 
24 THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION, 
 
 hungering for a god and a religion ; but in his 
 understanding and interpretation of that appe- 
 tite, in the food that he offers it, he is fallible, 
 inadequate, more or less false, yet capable of ever 
 progressing towards something better, just as he 
 is capable of a sort of blundering progress in 
 ■science, or in the arts of civilization. 
 
 For our present purpose then, we mean by a 
 " religion," an interpretation, whether human or 
 divine, natural or revealed, of our inborn religious 
 instinct — an explanation that will account for it, 
 justify it, and give it practical direction and 
 guidance. But just as man's soul fashions to 
 itself a body to complete its otherwise imperfect 
 spiritual nature, so man's thoughts and theories 
 and abstract ideas must always fix and embody 
 themselves in some concrete form, that appeals 
 to the imagination and the senses, in some story 
 or myth, or symbol or picture ; or at least in 
 some " form of words," by which the ideas may 
 be caught, and tied down to earth before they 
 -vanish into thin air. And therefore, in all these 
 religions, or interpretations of the religious 
 instinct, whether true or false, Christian or non- 
 Christian, we observe two parts — outward and 
 inward ; body and soul ; visible and invisible ; 
 ■on the one side beliefs, convictions, theories 
 belonging to the mind ; on the other, facts. 
 
EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL. 25 
 
 legends, rites, formulse in which those beliefs are 
 ■clothed and made visible to the eye of the 
 imagination. A religion, to be human and prac- 
 ticable, must, like man himself, have a body and 
 soul ; all puritanical attempts at a merely philo- 
 sophical, spiritual religion, discarding outward 
 and imaginative expression, are violently un- 
 natural, and foredoomed to failure. 
 
 Untaught by Divine revelation, and left to 
 their own efforts to find out a sort of natural 
 religion for themselves, men might indeed 
 succeed in advancing, however slowly, from very 
 childish to less childish and more worthy con- 
 ceptions of things Divine, somewhat as they 
 advance in their interpretation of physical nature 
 as a whole. But even this advance would be 
 on the condition of a perfect and laborious 
 fidelity to the light of natural reason, and to the 
 guidance of natural conscience — a condition 
 never realized in any great measure, owing, first, 
 to the persistent illusions of the senses and 
 imagination, and then .to the unruliness of the 
 animal affections and passions — in other words, 
 owing to man's bondage to things visible ; to 
 the natural weakness of his faith, of his hold on 
 the invisible. 
 
 Just because man's religion must have a body 
 as well as a soul ; an outward expression, as 
 
26 THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION, 
 
 well as an inward meaning ; therefore, unless it 
 be of Divine origin, and under supernatural 
 protection, it is, by nature, as corruptible, as- 
 vulnerable, as man himself We are all prone to 
 do what is easier and demands least exertion. 
 It is easier to let the body shape and govern the 
 soul, than to subject it to the soul; and similarly,, 
 it is easier to let our imagination and our 
 passions govern our beliefs than to bring them 
 into conformity with, and subjection to, our- 
 beliefs. It is easier to suppose that things are in 
 themselves as they seem to the eye, or as they 
 sound to the ear, than to discern the vast and 
 momentous difference between appearance and 
 reality. The history of the various man-made- 
 religions shows us everywhere that idolatry,, 
 superstition, and corruption of the truth, arises 
 from the tendency to forget that the outward 
 and visible embodiment of Divine truth is not 
 its soul and essence ; that it answers indeed, as- 
 words do, to the inward sense, yet is as distinct 
 from it as words are f^om the realities they 
 stand for. 
 
 If, then, the endeavour to embody invisible- 
 truths in some visible form is so universally a 
 source of corruption ; if all decay originates in- 
 the bodily envelope of religion, is not this an 
 argument for a purely spiritual, philosophical- 
 
EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL. 27 
 
 religion — without creed or dogma or ritual or 
 visible hierarchic Church ; a religion merely of 
 the heart and mind ? This, however, would be 
 to say in other words that because our body is 
 a source of so much sin and trouble to us, it 
 would be better to dispense with the body alto- 
 gether ! An idle supposition, since we are 
 inevitably men and not angels ; and our highest 
 life and perfection, however difficult of attain- 
 ment, must be an embodied perfection consist- 
 ing of an harmony between the flesh and the- 
 spirit. So, too, the ideal religion towards which 
 man, unassisted by revelation, vainly aspires, is 
 one in which the outward and visible expression 
 shall be entirely governed by and obedient to 
 the ever-growing inward truth, not perverting 
 or obscuring it, but suffering it to shine through 
 without distortion, as light through pure crystal. 
 But taking fallen man as he is, the flesh lusting 
 against the spirit, and the spirit against the 
 flesh ; the outward and inward, the visible 
 and invisible continually at war ; this ideal is, 
 apart from revelation, hopelessly unattainable ; 
 and in every man-made religion, words almost 
 necessarily tend to usurp the place of truths ; 
 images to be substituted for realities ; shadows 
 for substances ; the letter for the spirit. 
 
2,8 THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION, 
 
 Having thus glanced at the ordinary type of 
 -all man-made and natural religions, we can 
 better estimate the distinctive superiority of the 
 supernatural God-made religion of the Incar- 
 nation. 
 
 As grace does not destroy or detract from 
 anything good in nature, but simply elevates 
 and perfects it by way of addition, so the 
 Christian revelation lacks nothing that belongs 
 to our ideal of a perfect religion, but satisfies 
 superabundantly, and beyond all hope, the 
 cravings of our natural religious instinct. It 
 not only gives us gratis, without money, without 
 price, without labour, what else, centuries of 
 labour had ill compassed, if at all ; it not only 
 starts us at that point of religious enlighten- 
 ment, which else had been our practically un- 
 attainable goal ; but it raises the whole level 
 of our progress into an altogether higher plane, 
 and sets before us such a goal as eye hath not 
 seen, nor ear heard, nor heart conceived. 
 
 If, however, ours is a Divine and supernatural 
 religion, it is, for that very reason, of all religions 
 the most supremely human, adapted to all the 
 •complex needs of our double nature, bodily and 
 spiritual, by His skill who as He made man, and 
 was made man, so knows, as none other, what 
 is in man. 
 
EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL. 2g 
 
 Now Christ's religion would not have been, 
 what it is so pre-eminently, a human religion, 
 had it been content simply with instructing our 
 intelligence in the truths pertaining to the 
 Kingdom of God, without at the same time 
 providing for the worthy expression and embodi- 
 ment of those truths and clothing them in visible 
 and imaginable forms. It had been of no avail 
 for God to supplement the struggling light of 
 our reason with the noon-day brightness of 
 supernatural revelation, had He at the same 
 time left us to the mercy of our own imagination 
 — that source of all error and spiritual illusion — 
 for the embodiment and concrete setting forth 
 of that truth, in a form accessible to those un- 
 cultivated millions for whose redemption He 
 came principally. 
 
 And so the Word had breath and wrought 
 
 With human hands the creed of creeds, 
 
 In loveliness of perfect deeds 
 More strong than all poetic thought ; 
 Which he may read that binds the sheaf, 
 
 Or builds the house, or digs the grave ; 
 
 Or those wild eyes that watch the wave 
 In roarings round the coral reef. 
 
 That is to say, the Word-made-flesh clothed 
 His words in flesh ; gave His doctrine its perfect 
 complement and correlative — a visible form and 
 
30 THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION, 
 
 body fitted to it by the same Divine skill that 
 fashioned our body to be the expression, the 
 complement, the instrument of our soul. Else, 
 He had left the weak and vulnerable element of 
 religion, the source of all its decay and corrup- 
 tion, unhealed and unredeemed. 
 
 Nor is this divinely-given embodiment of 
 truth a contingent feature of Christian religion, 
 •but altogether distinctive and essential. Catho- 
 licity is before all else the religion of the Word- 
 made-flesh, i.e., of Divine Truth, naturally 
 invisible, and, in a sense, abstract, but now 
 made visible and concrete ; emptied of its 
 glory, swathed as it were in the bands of human 
 words, rites, and symbols ; laid in the manger 
 -to be the food, the common daily bread of the 
 rudest and simplest. It is the religion which 
 transforms the outward and bodily, from being 
 a source of corruption, to being a source of 
 health and life, using it to resuscitate, to rule, 
 to correct the inward and spiritual ; just as 
 noble standards of art awake, educate, and 
 refine the artistic sense latent within us, which 
 ■else would manifest itself, if at all, in all manner 
 -of frivolous vulgarity. 
 
 Our Lord, then, not only taught the truth 
 with His lips and clothed it in words of Divine 
 authority, but He lived and acted the truth in 
 
EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL. 3I 
 
 His life, and this not merely in the sense that 
 He fulfilled the Divine will in all His conduct, 
 thus making the highest ideal of sanctity visible 
 in a concrete example ; but in the sense that 
 every deed and event of His mortal life was 
 prophetic ; was as it were a sacrament or symbol 
 of the mysteries of the Kingdom of God ; was 
 crowded with inexhaustible meaning touching 
 the things of the eternal and invisible world. 
 
 For let us notice that quite apart from the 
 Incarnation, the Eternal Word was and is the 
 true light enlightening every man that cometh 
 into the world. The light of reason and what- 
 ever truth reason has attained is from Him. 
 He gave us our natural religious instinct ; 
 and whatever light lingers in the corruptest 
 Teligions of the world, is a spark of that Eternal 
 Light that shines ever in darkness, though the 
 darkness cannot comprehend it. 
 
 It was His Divine will that from the very 
 •beginning had, under the abstract name of 
 Conscience, been struggling against the selfish 
 and sinful will of every child of Adam ; so 
 constantly and persistently, that men mistook 
 that Divine presence within them for part of 
 themselves, for one of their natural springs of 
 action. Here and there the truth dawned upon 
 •choicer and purer minds, a Socrates or a Marcus 
 
32 THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION, 
 
 Aurelius. But the bulk of men were too gross,, 
 too self-ignorant, to discern a presence so near 
 them, so subtly intertwined with their own soul ;. 
 and therefore it was needful that this conscience 
 of theirs, this indwelling Will of God, this Power 
 within making for justice, should go outside 
 them, should become Incarnate and face them,, 
 and speak to them, as man to man : that God 
 should live visibly and outwardly upon earth 
 that life of humiliation which He lives millions- 
 of times over in human souls ; that thus our 
 slow minds might apprehend, at least in figure, 
 that tragedy which is realized daily in the very 
 core of our being. 
 
 For there, with the first dawn of reason, 
 the first glimmer of conscience, God comes 
 knocking at the heart's door for admission 
 that the Divine Life may be born in our 
 will. He comes to His own and His own 
 receive Him not ; or, if He is received, it is 
 to dwell with us in all the feebleness and depen- 
 dence of a helpless babe, left at the mercy of 
 our free-will to be driven out at any moment, 
 or to be neglected, starved, slighted ; for it rests- 
 with our choice whether the spark of Divine 
 fire shall be rudely extinguished, or shall be 
 fostered in our soul. 
 
 His whole life within us is a life of poverty,. 
 
EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL. ^^ 
 
 labour, and sorrow ; of agonizing and struggling 
 for dominion over the heart He has created to 
 be His kingdom. In the resistance we offer 
 to the command of conscience, to this inward 
 impulse of the Divine will, God is continually 
 betrayed, forsaken, denied, condemned, scorned, 
 spat upon, crucified, buried, and forgotten. By 
 taking to Himself a suffering body, God has 
 made visible to our bodily eyes the true nature 
 of sin. He has brought home to our senses 
 what men do, when they fight against goodness 
 and justice and truth and charity and all that is 
 Divine ; against what is in any sense the cause 
 of God ; or against the servants and representa- 
 tives of God ; how as far as lies in them they 
 are fighting against Him, slaying and crucifying 
 their God. Until God was passible and mortal, sin 
 could do Him no harm, and could hurt none but 
 the sinner ; when He became passible, sin leapt 
 upon Him and rent Him limb from limb as a 
 wolf rends a lamb. The Crucifix is the collective 
 sin of the world made visible. It shows us our 
 sins preying upon God, and God meekly sub- 
 mitting to our violence, lest it should react upon 
 us to our own destruction. 
 
 The Resurrection, again, is the outward 
 counterpart of that inward resurrection of Christ 
 in the soul when conscience, quickened from the 
 
 D 
 
34 THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION, 
 
 dead by grace, reasserts itself once more and 
 reigns victorious in the penitent heart ; while 
 Christ, the once feeble Babe of Bethlehem, 
 coming at last in glory to judge the world, 
 speaks to us of the eventual and certain triumph 
 of that Christ within our conscience, of whose 
 present meekness we take such cowardly 
 advantage, but who, we know, will at last be, 
 and even now is, our inexorable Judge — Nunc 
 est judicium hujus miindi — already has the Last 
 Judgment begun within us. 
 
 Once more, the best and purest men of 
 every generation, those who have lived for the 
 service of goodness, truth, justice, and mercy, 
 as for something greater than themselves ; as 
 for an interest claiming the sacrifice of their 
 private interest — something indistinctly felt 
 to be the will of a Divine Power ; such 
 men have ever sought and longed for some 
 concrete embodiment of the cause they have 
 lived for, in which it should be personified, loved, 
 and worshipped ; they have formed or imagined 
 to themselves a multitude of heroes and deities, 
 and have distributed amongst them all that 
 they knew and loved of the Divine perfection. 
 Now, this natural desire God has at once 
 satisfied and infinitely surpassed in becoming 
 Man, to the end that in Christ, without any 
 
EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL. 35 
 
 metaphor or fancy, but in literal plain fact, we 
 should possess not only the highest finite 
 example of all that is good and true and fair ; 
 of all that is worth living and dying for ; but 
 the very source and substance of all such good- 
 ness ; God Himself, incarnate, personal, human, 
 bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh. 
 
 Thus we see how the religion of the Incarna- 
 tion explains and satisfies beyond all measure 
 the religious aspirations of those rare souls who 
 have been perfectly faithful to the nature God 
 has given them ; and how at the same time it 
 is calculated to evoke like aspirations in that 
 great multitude of sinful men who cannot 
 apprehend spiritual truths, except as embodied 
 in some visible form. We see how the external 
 and visible Christ, the Word Incarnate, reveals 
 and makes plain to our earthly minds, all, and 
 immeasurably more, that the internal Christ of 
 our conscience, the Light which lightens every 
 man that comes into this world, would teach us, 
 did we not harden our hearts by infidelity to 
 grace. We see how this Christ that is outside 
 us, calls aloud to the stifled and buried Christ 
 that is within us, Veniforas! "Come forth!" and 
 how our conscience is resonant to that call and 
 
36 THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION, 
 
 answers, and comes forth from the sepulchre to 
 a new and supernatural life ; and how by this 
 union of the outward and inward rule of Christ — 
 the inward supplemented, corrected, and elevated 
 by the outward — our nature is lifted up to com- 
 panionship with God. 
 
 The importance of being clear in this matter 
 cannot be exaggerated in these days, when 
 Catholics are sometimes so lamentably hazy as to 
 the great principles which separate their unique 
 religion from every other religion, and make it 
 sui generis and singular. A contempt for the 
 exterior part of religion, for dogmas, sacraments, 
 rites, hierarchic order, and all the " machinery," 
 as it might be called, of a visible Church, is just 
 now very prevalent, not among the enemies oi 
 religion — that would not surprise us — but among 
 those who are obviously religious-minded and 
 sincere. Comparing the religions of the world 
 one with another, and finding some fragmentary 
 truth and goodness in all ; and at the same time 
 seeing that all their errors, superstitions, and 
 corruptions are connected with the endeavour to 
 make religion tangible and intelligible to our 
 imperfect minds, it has seemed wiser to these 
 men, to regard all this outward part of religion 
 as but provisional and unimportant — the mere 
 clothes of truth that must be continually altered, 
 
EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL. ^J 
 
 and from time to time discarded altogether as 
 old-fashioned and impossible. 
 
 This would undoubtedly be a just view had 
 God left us unaided in our natural state ; had 
 He simply given us our religious instinct and left 
 the interpretation of it to ourselves, as He has 
 left to us the interpretation of physical nature. 
 But by the Incarnation, God has taken this 
 work out of our hands ; and has by way of 
 revelation, not only interpreted to us clearly all 
 that our religious instinct involves and implies, 
 but has created in us new aspirations and 
 desires by putting before us hopes exceeding 
 all that nature could ever have dreamt of. 
 
 Because then the Catholic religion, viewed 
 outwardly as an embodiment of truth, is not 
 a natural and human interpretation of our 
 religious instincts, but supernatural and Divine, 
 we are constrained to regard it, not as provisional 
 and tentative, but as infallible and final. He 
 who has redeemed the body as well as the soul, 
 and has won for it immortality and incorrupti- 
 bility, beyond its nature. He too has redeemed 
 and transformed the naturally corruptible part 
 of religion, its outward expression and embodi- 
 ment, and has made it, no longer detrimental, 
 but obedient and serviceable to the inward and 
 spiritual part. 
 
38 THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION. 
 
 We do not mean that there is no progress in 
 the Church's understanding of the deposit of 
 faith committed to her by Christ ; no develop- 
 ment in the structure of the visible Body of 
 Christ. We do not mean that outside that core 
 of divinely authorized religion there may not 
 be among Catholics many religious beliefs, true 
 or false ; many religious practices, healthy or 
 unhealthy, which are simply of human origin, 
 the fruit of our endeavours to interpret for our- 
 selves, in matters where the Church has not 
 spoken ; but we mean that Christ's truth is the 
 same yesterday, to-day, and for ever ; and that 
 He is with us all days, even to the end of the 
 world ; that as we adore the Sacred Humanity 
 and, with It, every part of that fleshly Body 
 wherein God became in some sort visible to 
 mortal eyes ; so do we yield a relatively Divine 
 honour to the hierarchic Church upon earth, to 
 every word and letter, sacrament and symbol, 
 chosen by God Himself to embody as much of 
 the Eternal Truth, as our weak eyes can as yet 
 bear to look upon. 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 INSUFFICIENCY OF MERELY INTERNAL 
 RELIGION. 
 
 In our first instruction we fixed on that particular 
 feature of the Incarnation which we proposed 
 to consider as reproduced in the Church and in 
 the individual. We saw how God had chosen to 
 display His wisdom and power more gloriously 
 by taking as the instrument and cause of our 
 redemption what had been the instrument and 
 •occasion of our ruin — our body, and the bodily 
 world to which it belongs and with which it 
 connects us. We saw that as our mind was 
 naturally prone to error and illusion through its 
 dependence on the imagination ; and our will 
 still more prone to perversion by reason of its 
 alliance with the passions and feelings, so God 
 •chose these very sources of weakness and corrup- 
 tion — the body, the senses, and the visible world, 
 to undo the mischief they had occasioned ; thus 
 miraculously changing the poison into an anti- 
 
40 INSUFFICIENCY OF 
 
 dote, the forbidden fruit of death into the medicine 
 of immortality. Our second Conference brought 
 us to a more particular application of this 
 method of redemption. We saw that every 
 human religion — by which we meant an inter- 
 pretation of our inborn religious instincts and 
 appetites — in order to be practicable and con- 
 genial to our nature, must have its body as well 
 as its soul ; its outward and visible expression, 
 in words, dogmas, rites, and organization ; as 
 well as its inward sense, ^e went on to notice 
 that in all man-made, unrevealed religions, this 
 bodily part was naturally the corruptible element, 
 the source of decay and death ; and that there- 
 fore, consistently with the above principle of 
 using the weak to confound the strong, our 
 Saviour had not only revealed to us a Divine 
 and infallible interpretation of our spiritual 
 cravings, but had done so through the medium 
 of human words and deeds and actions that 
 addressed themselves to our senses. He might 
 have worked from within, putting the truth 
 directly into our souls by internal inspiration j 
 and leaving it to us to clothe it in imagery, or 
 to work it out into visible deeds as best we 
 might. But He preferred, what might seem to 
 us the meaner method, of coming in from outside 
 through the lowly door of our eyes and ears 
 
MERELY INTERNAL RELIGION. 41 
 
 and Other senses. Henceforth external reh'gion 
 was not to be merely our very imperfect self- 
 devised utterance of a religion already planted 
 by God within our soul ; but it was to be the 
 divinely formed channel through which a super- 
 natural religion was to get into the soul — was 
 to pass from the mind and heart of God into 
 the mind and heart of man. At all times the 
 Word of God was by nature in the very centre 
 of every human soul, ready to teach it a certain 
 measure of Divine truth, would it but listen ; 
 but as men, engrossed in the things of sense,, 
 would not listen, the Word went outside them 
 and took flesh and spoke to them through their 
 senses, as it were, to force them to listen. Thus 
 the religion of the Incarnation is before all else 
 an external religion, approaching the soul from 
 without, just as Christ when on earth spoke to 
 men face to face from without. The Eternal 
 Light which was incarnate in Him and shone in 
 Him, was from Him communicated to us, as 
 from an outside source of illumination. 
 
 We have already hinted at a rough illustration 
 of our point to be drawn from the aesthetic 
 order. Most men have some dormant musical 
 capacity in their souls, to be wakened sometimes 
 designedly, sometimes by accident, sometimes 
 never at all. Left to himself, each one in his 
 
42 INSUFFICIENCY OF 
 
 endeavour to satisfy the sense of music of which 
 he has become conscious, might evolve some 
 sort of rude, uncouth melody of his own ; but 
 for the most part our musical faculty is wakened 
 in us, formed, and educated by the influence, 
 good or evil, of those among whom we dwell, 
 whereas the viciousness of public taste in this 
 matter keeps us back and perverts and hinders 
 our progress. We know the advantage, in this 
 as in other matters, of a correct and classical 
 standard ; how it hastens, guides, and amplifies 
 the growth of the sense of music within us ; 
 how it enables us gradually to appropriate to 
 ourselves the accumulated experience and judg- 
 ment of the best critics in the art, who have 
 gone before us. We see also how this external 
 standard of music — the possession of the public 
 at large and of no individual in particular — is 
 not formed by our own private taste, but rather 
 forms it ; how it is something outside us and 
 not our own ; yet which we strive to bring 
 inside us and to make our own ; for there is in 
 us something that corresponds to it and can be 
 shaped by it to its likeness. So our religious 
 sense, our capacity for a certain Divine music, 
 and harmony with God in thought and affection, 
 might long lie dormant, or would at best exhibit 
 a wild and straggling growth, were it left solely 
 
MERELY INTERNAL RELIGION. 43 
 
 to our own cultivation ; were there not also, 
 outside us, a divinely revealed standard in 
 Christ, to wake up and gradually bring to per- 
 fection the latent Christ that is within us. There 
 are infinite differences of genius, but the greatest 
 genius will do little or nothing in isolation un- 
 aided by teaching and by examples of excellence 
 already attained ; and there are infinite differ- 
 ences of religious inspiration — a sort of genius 
 for things Divine — yet the most abundant will 
 be cramped and largely wasted for lack of an 
 external religion ; for want of a Christ and a 
 Catholic Church. 
 
 Needless to say, the external guide and 
 standard is of no avail if there be not the 
 internal capacity to develop. We cannot 
 educate or draw out of ourselves what is not 
 in us. But every man who has reason and 
 conscience and liberty and the measure of grace 
 accorded to all, has it in him to know and love 
 God. 
 
 Still the possession of both the capacity and 
 the standard is profitless unless we use the 
 latter to develop the former. For this develop- 
 ment of interior religion is the whole end and 
 purpose of that which is exterior. How does 
 it better us to be forced to sit and listen to good 
 music if it wake no echo of sympathy and 
 
44 INSUFFICIENCY OF 
 
 appreciation in our soul ; if it do not in some 
 degree educate and improve our taste ? There 
 are, we know, earless, tuneless people who would 
 pose as musical simply because they make it a 
 point to be bodily present wherever the best 
 music is to be had, though it penetrates them as 
 little as the rain that patters on a rock. And 
 there are Catholic Christians who are satisfied 
 with the knowledge that in the Church they 
 have ready at hand a divinely revealed standard 
 of spiritual truth, and who imagine that Christi- 
 anity consists in the profession and acknow- 
 ledgment of this fact ; forgetting that the Christ 
 and the Religion that is outside them is but a 
 means to wake up and develop the Christ and 
 the Religion that is latent within them. If we 
 hold a light to the end of a taper, it is only in 
 order that the flame may be communicated to the 
 taper and make it in some sense an independent 
 source of light. Were the taper damp or other- 
 wise incombustible, we might go on for ever 
 holding the light there. The applied flame 
 would seem to be, but would not be its own. 
 External religion, such as we have in Christ and 
 the Catholic Church, applies the flame of truth 
 and love to our soul. Perhaps by way of 
 laborious friqtion we might have been able to 
 produce some little spark of Divine life in our- 
 
MERELY INTERNAL RELIGION. 45 
 
 selves, aided by those graces which God scatters 
 outside the Church to all men ; but by super- 
 natural revelation God puts a blazing brand 
 into our hands to hasten and facilitate matters, 
 for He wants a big conflagration and that 
 speedily. Ignem veni mittere in terram, He 
 says, et quid volo nisi ut accendaturf 
 
 This brings us to the consideration of a truth 
 that lies midway between tv/o false extremes, 
 and concerns the more exact relation of this 
 exterior religion to our personal and interior 
 religion. 
 
 The revolt against the Catholic Church which 
 broke out in the sixteenth century tended 
 towards an excessive depreciation of the need 
 of an outward objective religion with fixed 
 dogmatic teaching, with forms of worship and 
 sacramental means of grace. It favoured the 
 opinion that Christ's teaching was perpetuated 
 by the Holy Ghost speaking, not to the visible 
 Church collectively, and through the visible 
 Church to the individual, but indirectly and 
 independently to each several soul. This is the 
 principle of private inspiration, private judgment 
 — a sort of false mysticism — which though 
 slightly modified is not substantially changed by 
 inconsistently acknowledging the Bible as an ex- 
 ternal standard of religious truth. It is the denial 
 
46 INSUFFICIENCY OF 
 
 of any outward religious authority upon earth to 
 which obedience is due ; and the assertion of an 
 excessive Hberty and self-sufficiency on the part 
 of the individual. For although it recognizes a 
 sort of divinely provided guidance in the Sacred 
 Scriptures and in the religious traditions and 
 practices of Christians, yet it is not the guidance 
 of a will, a personality, distinct from our own, 
 which conimands with authority ; it is not the 
 guidance of an external Christ, our Master and 
 Lord ; but only such as we find in books, or 
 examples, or in the advice of others by which 
 we freely choose to guide ourselves — the respon- 
 sibility being all ours. The doctrine may be 
 there for us to find if we choose and are able ; 
 but there is no living teacher upon earth whose 
 duty it is to bring it to us ; whose right it is to 
 impose it upon us. 
 
 Contrary to this denial of external religious 
 authority, and as it were at the other extreme, 
 is that formalism or externality which comes 
 of forgetting that the outward exists solely for 
 the sake of the inward; that Christ has gone 
 outside us and become incarnate, only that 
 He may live within us more fully and wonder- 
 fully than had been possible had we known 
 Him only in the voice of conscience, and 
 not also in the words of His human speech. 
 
MERELY INTERNAL RELIGION. 47 
 
 Our Christian religion, as we said, is pre- 
 eminently and essentially an incarnation, an 
 embodying of Divine Truth ; but this visible 
 Church, this Kingdom of God on earth, is for 
 the sake of the invisible Church, that is, for the 
 sake of His kingship and dominion in each 
 particular soul. This formalism is not the error 
 of any definite sect or party, but a tendency on 
 the part of certain minds to misunderstand the 
 stress rightly laid by the Catholic Church in 
 these modern days of lawless individualism, on 
 the great principles of authority and obedience 
 and Church-membership. It shows itself in the 
 tendency to pervert what God has designed to 
 be supernatural helps, into occasions of hind- 
 rance ; to use the light and guidance He has 
 given us, not, as He intended, to stimulate and 
 exalt our intelligence and to carry it far above 
 and beyond what it otherwise could have 
 accomplished ; but as an occasion of mental 
 lethargy and sluggishness ; to use the sacra- 
 ments and means of grace, not as fountains of 
 new energy, making possible and obligatory 
 greater exertion than we had else been capable 
 of, but as short cuts to an easy level of virtue 
 which might well have been attainable without 
 them ; to make them substitutes for trouble 
 and exertion and watchfulness, and the other 
 
48 INSUFFICIENCY OF 
 
 abundant natural means already at our disposal. 
 This is of course to hide the candle of revela- 
 tion under a bushel, instead of using it to light 
 up every dark corner of our mind ; it is to bury 
 the talent of sacramental grace in cold earth, 
 instead of trading with it industriously and 
 using it to extend the field of our spiritual 
 activity. 
 
 An external religion so abused becomes to 
 many an occasion of ruin instead of a cause of 
 resurrection, it stunts and paralyzes instead of 
 expanding and quickening their will and intel- 
 ligence. ' 
 
 They might in some cases be better without 
 it. Alms does an idle man harm, if want would 
 have forced him to work. We sometimes find 
 that those who have no external religion or 
 church to help them, feeling that they are 
 thrown entirely upon their own resources, exert 
 themselves more strenuously than we do, and 
 make use of every atom of the little they have, — 
 of the light of reason and conscience, of the 
 fragments of Catholic truth that still linger with 
 them, of the uncovenanted graces v/hich God 
 offers to all earnest souls. And thus they really 
 produce more fruit than many a carefully culti- 
 vated tree that cumbers the ground in the 
 luxuriant vineyard of the Catholic Church ; — 
 
MERELY INTERNAL RELIGION. 49 
 
 they show more intelligent interest in the 
 fraction of truth which they possess ; they have 
 more spontaneous sympathy with what they 
 hold to be the law and will of God. 
 
 By the " formalist," we do not mean only, or 
 chiefly, the Catholic in name, who makes no 
 attempt to practise the external duties pf a 
 Catholic; whose connection with the visible 
 Church is merely nominal ; but him rather who 
 lazily puts his whole trust in these external 
 conformities, as though they were an end in 
 themselves, the essence of the Christian life, and 
 not merely its condition ; who forgets that our 
 Catholic religion is principally, though not ex- 
 clusively, interior, and does not consist in 
 professions and observances, although it does 
 not exist without them. We mean the Catholic 
 who is satisfied to swear by all the Church 
 teaches, without caring to know in detail what 
 she does teach, or to feed his mind and intelli- 
 gence upon her doctrine, and to advance in his 
 understanding of it ; and who makes the 
 frequentation of the sacraments, and other 
 observances of piety, a substitute for that 
 struggle and conflict for which they are pre- 
 cisely designed to strengthen us. 
 
 To have defined these erroneous extremes is 
 to have already roughly indicated the golden 
 E 
 
50 INSUFFICIENCY OF 
 
 mean of Catholic truth, which teaches on the 
 one hand that submission to the external religion 
 of Christ and His visible Church is, in normal 
 cases, the indispensable condition of that fulness 
 of interior religion to which Christians alone 
 are enabled to aspire ; and, on the other, that 
 this external religion, destined to be a rock of 
 security, may become a rock of offence, if, 
 instead of being used for the expansion and 
 elevation of our religious faculty, it is misused 
 as a pretext for its neglect. 
 
 We shall devote the rest of this instruction to 
 briefly emphasizing the former point, leaving 
 the latter for future occasions. 
 
 In the light of all that we have seen as to 
 the purpose and meaning of the Incarnation, the 
 wonder is how any one with even a mediocre 
 comprehension of that mystery could regard 
 the visible Church and her institutions as merely 
 a convenience to be left or used at will, or other- 
 wise than as the divinely appointed instrument 
 of eternal life, without which there is no salva- 
 tion for those who wilfully refuse to make use of 
 it. " I am the Way," says Christ, " no man 
 Cometh to the Father but by Me." The Man- 
 hood of Christ, the human words of Christ, the 
 human actions of Christ, — by these means the 
 grossness, the unspirituality of our fallen nature 
 
MERELY INTERNAL RELIGION. 5I 
 
 was to be counteracted ; God was to stoop to 
 our lowness, bend with our frailty, that He 
 might raise us and strengthen us. During the 
 days of His brief sojourn upon earth, the 
 methods of His ministry were clearly defined. 
 His mission was not to the few, but to the 
 many ; not to the subtle-minded and learned, 
 but to the plain-minded and ignorant ; not 
 to the scrupulously conscientious and faultless, 
 but to publicans and sinners : " I came not to 
 call the just, but sinners to repentance." Again, 
 He came to teach this mob, representative in 
 small of the uncultivated millions of humanity, 
 not truisms, nor moral platitudes, nor plain facts 
 of easy observation, but mystical, spiritual 
 truths ; and these, not merely such as a few pure 
 and thoughtful minds here and there might 
 have dimly conjectured for themselves after a 
 process of delicate self-analysis, but mysteries 
 of an entirely supernatural order, of which there 
 had otherwise been found no hint in the natural 
 aspirations of even the noblest and most im- 
 maculate soul. 
 
 This being so. He necessarily taught with 
 authority, or dogmatically, not as the scribes 
 and doctors, tentatively, arguing, appealing, 
 persuading ; not even as Socrates did, trying to 
 make men conscious of the deity within them 
 
52 INSUFFICIENCY OF 
 
 by questioning them, and making them explicitly 
 aware of what they unconsciously knew already. 
 " I am the Truth, I am the Light of the world ; 
 hear not Moses or Elias, but hear Me. He that 
 believeth not shall be condemned." No other 
 method was conceivably possible if the Words 
 of Eternal Life were to be made the common 
 possession of the millions that sat in darkness 
 and in the shadow of death. For that end it 
 was indispensable that those Words should be 
 made Flesh and dwell among us familiarly. 
 St. Paul tells us that it was because the method 
 of private judgment had denied God, that God 
 cast it aside in favour of the folly of preaching, 
 i.e., in favour of the dogmatic method — not 
 proving the truth, but asserting it on authority. 
 
 Private judgment is not something intrin- 
 sically wrong or ridiculous, except on the 
 supposition that public and authorized judgment 
 has made the labour unnecessary. Contrariwise, 
 to find the truth for ourselves is a method more 
 becoming our dignity as free, self-forming 
 agents, than to be taught it as children who 
 repeat what they are told, and because they are 
 told. Yet God chose the lowlier method, as 
 better accommodated to the needs of the multi- 
 tudes, discarding the method more agreeable to 
 the pride of human wisdom. 
 
Merely internal religion. 55 
 
 Naturally it should have been the duty and 
 office of the wise and the learned to keep alive 
 the knowledge of God in the world, so far as it 
 could have been attained without revelation ; 
 and to break the bread of truth to the unlettered 
 crowds who had neither time nor talent to learn 
 for themselves, but were necessarily dependent 
 on the tradition and teaching of their leaders. 
 But as the wise of this world abused their trust, 
 and held back the truth from the people, because 
 they themselves loved better the ways of dark- 
 ness, therefore God cast them off, and Himself 
 became the Teacher of the millions ; He sent a 
 handful of fishermen to preach to the whole 
 world truths transcending all that Plato had 
 ever dreamt of. 
 
 Nor did He make special provision that the 
 cultured and philosophical minority might enter 
 the Kingdom of Truth by sonie more seemly 
 and less barbarous route than that followed by 
 the common herd. Only those who were willing 
 to join the crowd, to receive the Kingdom as 
 Kttle children, to listen with faith to the teaching 
 of external authority, could enter in at all. 
 
 There is no doubt then, that Christ's ow n 
 method of enlightening souls during His earthly 
 ministry, was the dogmatic method, not the 
 method of private judgment. He did not say : 
 
54 INStJFiflCIENCY OF 
 
 Look into yourselves ; but : Listen to Me ; He 
 did not say : Examine My reasons and accept 
 My doctrine as far as you understand it ; but : 
 Believe My doctrine whether you understand it 
 or not. In other words. He was in Himself 
 what His Church claims to be now, an external 
 rule of truth by which the mind might test itself 
 and with which it should strive to conform itself. 
 Furthermore, He was a Divine and infallible 
 rule. We spoke of the need of certain outside 
 standards of good art, say, of good music. But 
 at the best these standards are tentative and 
 variable ; and disputes as to their absolute and 
 final value are infinite. When we have corrected 
 ourselves by them we know that we are at 
 least fashionable, or conventionally right ; but 
 whether we are absolutely right, who can 
 decide ? Perhaps another generation may hold 
 us for Philistines. But Christ was not among 
 religious teachers what Homer was among poets^ 
 or Aristotle among philosophers, a great name, 
 a great classic, nor even the greatest ; He was 
 the absolute Truth Incarnate, a standard of 
 unquestionable and final value. 
 
 Are we then to suppose, that when He was 
 withdrawn from earth He left no provision for 
 the continuance of the same method ; that this 
 infallible external standard of truth ascended 
 
MERELY INTERNAL RELIGION. 55 
 
 with Him into Heaven ; or was carelessly left 
 on earth so ill-guarded that now men scarce 
 know where to look for it ; and must listen to 
 the claims of any fanatic who cries out : Lo, 
 here is Christ, or, lo, there ! 
 
 "As the Father hath sent Me," He says to 
 His Church, " so send I you." " I am the light 
 of the world." " You are the light of the world." 
 " He that heareth you heareth Me." These and 
 many other like sayings get their best inter- 
 pretation from the fact that there always has 
 been since Christ's Ascension, an united 
 hierarchic Church claiming to inherit these 
 promises and to possess and apply that standard 
 of truth which Christ left in her hands. 
 
 Through this visible Church we have still 
 contact with Christ in so much as her oiificial 
 acts are His. It is Flis hand reaching out 
 across the centuries, which baptizes and con- 
 secrates and blesses and sacrifices. 'It is His 
 words spoken two thousand years ago and 
 echoed from one generation to the next, which 
 the Church of to-day still treasures and ponders 
 in her heart. She is, therefore, the extension, 
 the stretching out of Christ all over the earth 
 and all through the ages, even to the consumma- 
 tion of the world. And what we have said of* 
 the Church considered as an external source of 
 
56 INSUFFICIENCY OF 
 
 light for the mind — a standard of religious 
 truth ; holds of her equally when viewed as an 
 external source of grace. For as by her teaching 
 she gives us light beyond all that the best and 
 wisest had ever attained unassisted, so by her 
 sacraments rightly received and rightly followed 
 up, she gives energy to our will and warmth to 
 our good desires beyond all that we could 
 naturally have drawn forth from ourselves. 
 
 Finally, let us notice that the organized unity 
 of the hierarchic visible Church is itself in some 
 way the sacrament, the outward and effectual 
 sign of that invisible union in Christ of all souls 
 in Heaven and on earth, in whom the love of 
 Divine goodness holds the first place. For they 
 being many, are by charity one with each other 
 and with God ; and have but one mind and 
 heart and life. To be thus in the communion 
 of saints is to be in the state of grace or sal- 
 vation, ©f this mysterious unity the outward 
 unity of the visible Church is at once the symbol 
 and the effectual instrument. To be organically 
 incorporated with the visible Church as its 
 member, is, for those whom ignorance or im- 
 possibility does not excuse, a sine qua non of 
 incorporation into the communion of saints. 
 For such, " Outside the Church, there is, no 
 salvation." But is there necessarily salvation 
 
MERELY INTERNAL RELIGION. 57 
 
 for them inside ? It is as with other sacraments. 
 Baptism is of no avail without the due dis- 
 positions ; and yet without Baptism there is no 
 salvation for those to whom that sacrament 
 is accessible. Similarly, for us who know, 
 membership, outward, real, active, and not 
 merely nominal membership, with the visible 
 external Church is an essential condition for 
 salvation ; although it is not enough, not the 
 only condition. Those who have never seen or 
 heard Christ in Himself or in His Church, may 
 in God's mercy, be waked some other way to 
 the recognition of the Christ that lives in the 
 conscience of every man who comes into this 
 world ; but for us, that wakening is provided for 
 in the human voice of Christ incarnate, who 
 called Lazarus from the grave ; the voice which 
 we still hear in the Catholic Church ; of which 
 He says : " He that heareth you heareth Me," 
 and again : " My sheep hear My voice, and they 
 follow Me." 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 
 INSUFFICIENCY OF MERELY EXTERNAL 
 RELIGION. 
 
 Where there is smoke there is sure to be fire, 
 though it is not always the hottest fire that 
 makes the greatest smoke ; rather otherwise. 
 That the theory of a purely internal Christianity, 
 communicated by the Holy Spirit to each soul 
 independently, has found acceptance with so 
 many men of undoubted sincerity and piety ; 
 men equal in point of general learning and 
 intelligence to the best of those whom the 
 Church numbers in her ranks, is a fact full of 
 help for us if we view it aright ; full of hurt 
 if we misunderstand or ignore it. If there were 
 any real danger to our faith at a University 
 like this, it would lie not in any supposed 
 wickedness or general moral inferiority of the 
 professors of an alien creed — that, indeed, would 
 rather confirm us in our own — but in seeing the 
 genuine goodness, the evident attractiveness of 
 
INSUFFICIENCY OF EXTERNAL RELIGION. 59 
 
 numbers whose religious opinions are not only 
 different from, but in many cases antagonistic 
 to the beliefs of the Catholic Church. 
 
 Now, good men are attracted only by what 
 seems good ; and are repelled only by what seems 
 evil. There must then be some seeming good 
 in their view of a purely internal religion, and 
 there must be some seeming evil in the external 
 religion of Catholicism as it presents itself to 
 their eyes. Our faith assures us, before even 
 we attempt to see it with our reason, that the 
 seeming good of their system exists really far 
 more fully in the Catholic religion ; while what 
 to them seems evil in the Church is either not 
 really evil, or else is no part of our religion at 
 all, but may and should be condemned as 
 heartily by every good Catholic, as by the 
 most fervent evangelical Protestant, or by any 
 man of sound sense and moral integrity. 
 
 It is very important for us to know the 
 impression, true or false, that we make upon 
 those with whom we have to deal, and to this 
 end we should avail ourselves of the criticism 
 of friends and foes alike, in each case discounting 
 for bias ; for thus only shall we arrive at a 
 knowledge, not of what we really are in our- 
 selves — that is a secret known to God alone ; 
 but of what appearance we present to reasonably 
 
6o INSUFFICIENCY OF 
 
 unprejudiced eyes, and of what seeming founda- 
 tion we give to others for speaking of us as they 
 do. The misfortune is that really unprejudiced 
 impartial people will never trouble themselves 
 to criticize us at all, but only our well-wishers 
 or ill-wishers, whose distorted verdicts need to 
 be carefully corrected and set off one against 
 the other. But of the two, the verdict of our 
 enemies is chiefly to be weighed, as it is more 
 necessary to know our failings, real or apparent, 
 than to know our perfections — not of course, 
 the verdict of our unintelligent, fanatical, 
 ignorant enemies ; but of the thoughtful, and 
 intelligent, who are shrewd enough to realize 
 that it can never be for their interest to be 
 deceived ; whose bias is therefore unconscious, 
 though none the less real and perversive of 
 clear insight. 
 
 In our last conference we dealt briefly with 
 those two opposite errors, of which one makes 
 Christianity all interior ; the other, all exterior. 
 We showed how untenable the former was, in 
 the face of what we had already seen, first, as 
 to the meaning of the Incarnation ; then, as to 
 the obvious purport and method of Christ's 
 ministry on earth, and lastly, as to His intention 
 of perpetuating that ministry to the end of time, 
 and extending the Incarnation over all the world 
 and through all the ages to come. 
 
MERELY EXTERNAL RELIGION, 6l 
 
 The contrary error of " formalism " or pure 
 externality in religion, will now be best explained 
 and refuted by attending to some of the 
 objections made against an external religion 
 by fairly clear-headed Protestants who have 
 sense enough to weave their accusations out of 
 what is at least superficially apparent, and not 
 straight out of their own imaginations. We 
 shall see in all cases how their objections, so 
 far as they contain any element of truth and 
 justice, tell not against an external religion, 
 but against that abuse of it, which we have 
 designated "formalism," — an abuse which consists 
 in forgetting that the whole end and purpose of 
 the Christ and the religion outside us, is to wake 
 up and develop the Christ and the religion that 
 is inside us. An illustration of what I mean, 
 is afforded by a leaflet recently issued by a 
 well-known and strictly Protestant Bishop, 
 wherein he says : 
 
 " There are two distinct and separate systems 
 of Christianity in England at the present day. It 
 is useless to deny it. Their existence is a great 
 fact, and one that cannot be too clearly known. 
 
 " According to one system, religion is a mere 
 corporate business. You are to belong to a 
 certain body of people. By virtue of your 
 membership of this body, vast privileges, both 
 
62 INSUFFICIENCY OF 
 
 for time and eternity, are conferred upon you. 
 It matters little what you are, and what you 
 feel. You are not to try yourselves by your 
 feelings. You are a member of a great ecclesi- 
 astical corporation. Then all its privileges and 
 immunities are your own. Do you belong to 
 the one true visible ecclesiastical corporation ? 
 That is the grand question. 
 
 "According to the other system, religion is 
 eminently a personal business between yourself 
 and Christ. It will not save your soul to be an 
 outward member of any ecclesiastical body 
 whatever, however sound that body may be. 
 Such membership will not wash away one sin, 
 or give you confidence in the day of judgment. 
 There must be personal faith in Christ, — 
 personal dealings between yourself and God, — 
 personal felt communion between your own 
 heart and the Holy Ghost. Have you this 
 personal faith? Have you this felt work of 
 the Spirit in your ' soul ? This is the grand 
 question. If not, you will be lost." 
 
 You see at once how the first of these systems 
 represents not the Catholic religion, as the 
 writer fondly believes, but a possible and not 
 infrequent abuse to which every external religion 
 is necessarily liable. To be united as a visible 
 member to the visible corporation of the Church 
 
MERELY EXTERNAL RELIGION. 63 
 
 is indeed, for those who know, a sine qua non of 
 salvation both here and hereafter ; but though 
 a condition, it is not the sole condition ; nor 
 does our salvation consist in such union, though 
 it does not exist without it. 
 
 The second system in nearly all that it asserts, 
 is simply and purely Catholic ; but it implies 
 certain denials that are unsound and at variance 
 with that religion of the Incarnation, which, as 
 we have seen, uses the visible and outward for 
 the cure and help of the invisible and inward. 
 As the Bishop truly says : " Religion is eminently 
 a personal business between yourself and Christ," 
 nor will it " save your soul to be an outward 
 member of any ecclesiastical body whatever." 
 But there is a third supposition which he denies 
 or forgets ; namely, that God has ordained this 
 outward membership with the visible Church to 
 be the means and condition of securing inward 
 membership with the invisible Church ; that it 
 is through Christ's word spoken to our bodily 
 ears that the Divine word is to be wakened in 
 our hearts ; and through the sensible touch of 
 Christ's hands in the sacraments that our souls 
 are to be touched and healed ; and our inward 
 sight and hearing restored. 
 
 What this writer loves in his own religion is 
 all found in ours more easily, more abundantly ; 
 
64 INSUFFICIENCY OF 
 
 while what he censures in ours is no part of it, 
 but only a perversion to which it is necessarily 
 liable, — men being the limited and fallible 
 creatures that they are. 
 
 A slightly different form of the same objection 
 is found in the very common allegation that 
 Catholicism crushes out all individuality of 
 character, and that by interposing itself as a 
 channel of communication between God and 
 the soul, it hinders the full and free inflow of 
 light and grace, and that consequent expansion 
 of the spiritual faculties which would result 
 were there no such intermediary in the way. 
 The individual is not treated as an individual 
 with a proper personality ; but simply as a 
 member of a great organism, a wheel in a complex 
 mechanism, a soldier in a vast fighting army. 
 God's direct dealing is with the whole, not with 
 the several parts ; these He provides for through 
 the whole and for the sake of the whole. On 
 this supposition the individual soul is not as 
 a flower planted out in the full sunshine, but as 
 one languishing in a cellar, into which some 
 streak of pale light feebly twists its way. 
 
 " My soul and my God and nothing* between ; 
 
 no mediator," that is the Protestant ideal. Or 
 
 if Christ be a mediator, it is not as one who 
 
 . stands between as a connecting link, one hand 
 
MERELY EXTERNAL RELIGION. 65 
 
 in mine and the other in God's ; but as one who 
 joins the hands of two enemies, and then steps 
 aside leaving them locked together and 
 reconciled. 
 
 But the visible Church is thought to interpose 
 herself between God and the soul— a notion 
 very intolerable to those who look on the 
 Church as a corruptible and corrupt body of men ; 
 who do not distinguish between the heavenly 
 treasure and the earthly vessel which contains 
 it ; between the leaven of unfailing truth and 
 sacramental grace, and the unleavened mass 
 which it struggles to permeate and transform — 
 for the Church is the representative, not solely 
 of Christ, the sinless and incorruptible, but of 
 Christ together with those crowds that clung to 
 Him and followed Him. It is thought, then, 
 that this Church in her collective and corporate 
 totality holds on to God, while the individual 
 holds on to her blindly and unintelligently, and 
 is dragged into Heaven at her skirts. She is 
 considered as a closely organized military state 
 — a sort of ecclesiastical Sparta — fighting for 
 some advantage belonging to her as a totality, 
 and distinct from the personal and private 
 advantage of the members of which she is 
 composed. Her subjects are, as it were, so 
 burdened with the, taxes and services entailed 
 ¥ 
 
66 INSUFFICIENCY OF 
 
 by the state war, that they have neither leisure 
 nor means for that peaceful life of self-expansion 
 which it should be the only aim of a state to 
 secure ; their duties as soldiers interfere with 
 and encroach beyond all reason upon their duties 
 as men and free citizens. Thus the Church is 
 viewed as a society existing for the dissemination 
 among those outside her pale of certain hard- 
 and-fast religious, moral, and political opinions ; 
 as being before all else a proselytizing body 
 crossing land and sea to make one convert ; 
 and when made, caring nothing more for him 
 personally, but only as for another fighting 
 man won from the enemy and added to her own 
 ranks. To be a good Catholic is to be a red- 
 hot controversialist or else an insidious propa- 
 gandist of the aforesaid opinions. It is not to live 
 by them, but to fight for them ; it is not to use this 
 external religion as an instrument of personal 
 sanctification and spiritual enlightenment ; it is 
 not to apply the divine medicine to our own 
 cure ; but simply to honour it outwardly, to 
 acknowledge it to be the best of all instruments, 
 the most efficacious of all medicines ; and to 
 force as many as possible to acknowledge the 
 same, not by experimental proof, but by dia- 
 lectical arguments. For such a militant Church, 
 we are told that military obedience, blind, 
 
MERELY EXTERNAL REt-IGION. 67 
 
 unquestioning, is an absolute necessity — the 
 one indispensable virtue whose presence will 
 atone for the lack of all others. Swear blindly 
 by all the Church says and does ; obey blindly 
 all that she enjoins ; and then she on her part 
 will give you her absolutions and indulgences, 
 and will promise you Eternal Life as pay for 
 your submission. Not now however ; but here- 
 after ; for Eternal Life is not the life she now 
 wants you to lead ; but something quite 
 distinct from it ; something postponed for the 
 present, because this militant ecclesiastical life 
 is incompatible with it ; just as the life of the 
 active soldier is incompatible with the life of 
 the peaceful civilian. Eternal Life consists in 
 the highest perfection and exercise of our 
 intelligence and our will ; but at present we 
 are supposed to have no time to be holy ; our 
 duties as good militant Catholics are thought 
 to entail the suppression of both intelligence 
 and will ; the mind and will of the Church is 
 said to be simply substituted in all religious 
 matters for our own mind and will — not entering 
 into them in any way or shaping them. It is as 
 when we commit ourselves passively to the judg- 
 ment and guidance of another, and do not in any 
 way understand or appropriate his mind, but 
 simply hang on to it to save ourselves trouble. 
 
68 INSUFFICIENCY OF 
 
 This is the impression that Catholicism 
 makes on many fairly intelligent outsiders, and 
 would, indeed, there were nothing in the attitude 
 of many of us towards the Church, to give any 
 appearance of plausibility to the notion ! 
 
 Doubtless there is something very attractive 
 to our love of freedom from interference, some- 
 thing that appeals to the Protestantism latent 
 in every human heart in this idea of the soul 
 dealing directly with God, and needing the aid 
 of no creature whatever — church or minister or 
 sacrament ; there is something in it especially 
 congenial to the independence of the English 
 mind. We have lately heard confession, the 
 Mass, sacerdotalism, and other points of the 
 Catholic religion condemned, simply and finally 
 on the score of being repugnant to English- 
 men ; good enough perhaps for the decadent 
 Latin races, but uncongenial to the Anglo-Saxon 
 mind. This were sound sense had God given 
 us no divine external religion, and had He left 
 us free to interpret our religious instincts for 
 ourselves, and to find expression for them in 
 our own way. Then indeed the nations of 
 the earth might lawfully have been as various in 
 their outward religions, as in their languages 
 and customs. But as things are, even the 
 English mind is not at liberty to shape an 
 
MERELY EXTERNAL RELIGION. 69 
 
 external religion for itself, but must, under pain 
 of fatal isolation, shape itself into agreement 
 with that which God has revealed ; with that 
 religion which is Catholic or universal as being 
 adaptable to all stages and varieties of civiliza- 
 tion — ancient or modern ; eastern or western ; 
 Latin or Teutonic — to the childhood of races 
 as to their maturity or old age ; to periods of 
 decadence as to periods of renaissance — a 
 religion expressly designed to bind together all 
 nations of the world in what is the highest and 
 chiefest human interest. 
 
 But quite apart from this divine revelation, 
 God, in the very nature of things, makes the 
 development of man's religious faculty dependent 
 upon his fellows. Just as He gives each of us 
 the power of language, and yet makes its 
 development depend on our being born amongst 
 those who are in possession of a language 
 ready formed, which we learn by imitation ; 
 so our religious faculty would scarce assert itself 
 in us perceptibly, were it not stimulated by 
 the religion of those around us. Hence this 
 idea of God alone being the soul's teacher 
 were in any case too ambitious for creatures 
 such as we are ; the limitations of our nature 
 forbid it, as much as do the conditions of 
 revelation. Furthermore, we riot only need the 
 
70 INSUFFICIENCY OF 
 
 society of others in order to know God and to 
 have the occasions and means of serving Him, 
 but God refuses to be united to us in our 
 solitude. We have first to unite ourselves with 
 our Incarnate Lord and with all who are already 
 united with Him ; and then as members of this 
 mystical unity, God deals with us and quickens 
 us ; just as the animal soul will not dwell in 
 or quicken any separated part or member of 
 the body, but only the whole united body made 
 up of parts and members. But then, even as 
 the body is not some third thing interposed 
 between the soul and the parts of the body, so 
 neither is Christ and His Church some third 
 thing interposed like a wall between God and 
 the members of Christ and His Church. 
 
 Contrariwise, it is precisely because we are 
 parts of Christ and parts of His Church that 
 God's immediate intercourse with our soul is so 
 much more abundant and frequent than it would 
 be were we left in our solitude to approach God 
 alone, instead of hand in hand with Christ and 
 His faithful. 
 
 " Individuality," again, is a word to conjure 
 with in these days, but then, like " liberty " and 
 ■' equality " and similar cries, it is susceptive of 
 various meanings, right and wrong. Liberty, 
 we know, is not freedom from all restraint, but 
 
MERELY EXTERNAL RELIGION. 7I 
 
 from all undue or hurtful restraint ; it means the 
 opportunities and conditions of the best and 
 fullest life we are capable of, and this can only 
 be secured by association, by dependence upon 
 others, by self-restraint and self-sacrifice. It 
 means not doing what we please, but what we 
 ought. Similarly the individualism which dis- 
 sociates the member from the organism which 
 lops the branch off the vine is fatal to its vitality 
 and fruitfulness. It is based on the false idea, 
 borrowed from the imagination, that men's souls 
 are, as their bodies, locally separate and inde- 
 pendent atoms, connected at most by the bond 
 of descent from a common father, as though the 
 multitude of souls were not in some sort inter- 
 penetrated by an identical life, converging as 
 they do to God their common root, from whom 
 they are ever springing, new-born, like divergent 
 rays from the source of light ; in Whom they 
 live, and Who lives in the centre of each of 
 them, one and identical and common to all. 
 Ignorant or forgetful of this, the false indi- 
 vidualism, so popular in these days, would 
 exempt us from many irksome duties and 
 restrictions only by excluding us from the 
 common life which courses through the veins 
 of the community whose members we are ; it 
 would delude us with the fancy that we are 
 
72 INSUFt-IClENCV OP 
 
 isolated independent units, made for an isolated 
 and independent happiness ; as though anything 
 less than God and the whole community of our 
 fellow-creatures, whereof we are but part, were 
 the adequate object for which our heart had 
 been made, or could expand it to its full 
 stretch. 
 
 Applied to religion, this theory would make 
 each soul a little church in itself, sanctified 
 alone and saved alone; helped perhaps and 
 served by others, but not better sanctified or 
 saved because of their sanctification. But it is 
 only in association with others and by recog- 
 nizing ourselves as parts of a living organism 
 that we can really develop our nature aright. 
 We are primarily God's, and our own only 
 secondarily. There is no complete individuality 
 and independence but God's. The earth com- 
 pared with the moon is independent and 
 individual ; but compared with the sun it is 
 itself subject and incomplete ; even as the surl 
 may be, in regard to a more central body. 
 We allow then only that individuality which 
 recognizes the fact that our happiness does 
 not lie compactly in the well-being of our 
 solitary self, but in that of the whole community 
 • — God and our fellows — to which as members 
 we are subject. 
 
MERELY EXTERNAL RELIGION. 73 
 
 This is tlie great principle embodied and 
 symbolized in the doctrine of the visible Church 
 and of the obligation of Church-membership as 
 a condition of salvation. 
 
 But if such membership is a necessary con- 
 dition for our spiritual growth and development, 
 it must not be supposed that there is no room 
 for individuality. Unity is not uniformity ; 
 sameness of spirit is compatible with, nay, it 
 requires, an infinite variety of manifestation. A 
 military and militant state, it is true, tends to 
 turn all its subjects into soldiers, and to reduce 
 them to the uniformity of nine-pins in outward 
 appearance and carriage, and to some degree 
 even in inward character ; because it aims 
 immediately, not at individual life, but at a 
 remote condition of individual life, na.me\jr, at 
 conquest or self-defence. Public tranquillity 
 and security is a necessary condition, but is not 
 the end and substance of a happy and pros- 
 perous life Men do not normally live in order 
 to fight, but; they fight in order to live. For the 
 time being, they have often to give up and lay 
 aside their domestic and civil life in order to 
 fight ; but it is only that they may resume it 
 again more .securely. Peace is ever the motive 
 of just war. 
 
 But the end for which the Catholic Church 
 
74 INSUFFICIENCY OF 
 
 exists, is not an end that is distinct from, or can 
 interfere with, the fullest and highest life of each 
 single one of her members. What she toils 
 and fights for principally is, not a remote condi- 
 tion of our enlightenment and sanctification, but 
 the thing itself As the vine lives only to 
 produce grapes, so the Church exists and 
 labours only to produce good men, that is, to 
 reproduce the life of Christ as fully as possible 
 in each particular soul ; to bring minds into 
 conformity with the mind of Christ ; and hearts 
 into conformity with the heart of Christ. Of 
 course she also necessarily fights for the remoter 
 conditions of this individual sanctification of 
 souls — for moral and just legislation, for freedom 
 in the exercise of her jurisdiction, for a Christian 
 and Catholic educational system ; yet she does 
 not stop there, but carries her work up to the 
 point where only our own free-will can hinder 
 its perfect accomplishment. 
 
 Still it must not be thought that the same 
 spiritual uniformity is to be desired among 
 Catholics as exists between the several grapes 
 of a cluster. That same divine Truth and Good- 
 ness which is incarnate in Christ, though simple 
 in itself, is inexhaustible in the infinite diversity 
 of its possible manifestations. Each particular 
 soul is capable of reflecting only some single 
 
MERELY EXTERNAL RELIGION. 75 
 
 and individual aspect of it ; and even all souls 
 taken collectively together, as one complex 
 organism of diverse and harmonious parts, ex- 
 hibit at best but a fraction of the perfection 
 hid in Christ and scattered among them — as it 
 were, put in commission. No two ages, no two 
 nationalities, no two individuals receive Christ 
 or receive the Catholic religion into the same 
 mould ; and though what is received is the 
 same, yet the measure of its reception, the shape 
 it takes, the result of the combination, is always 
 different. " I have many things to say to you," 
 said our Lord to the Church of that day, " but 
 you cannot bear them now.'' As Catholics we 
 all say the same things and we do the same 
 things ; we repeat the same creeds and we use 
 the same sacraments ; but how differently ! 
 " Vide parts sumptionis, quam sit dispar exitus" 
 says Aquinas ; words which we may apply 
 generally to the results of the external Catholic 
 religion on different souls. The agent is always 
 the same, but the reaction is never the same. 
 
 The Blessed in Heaven all behold the same 
 God, yet one penetrates immeasurably further 
 than another into the infinite depth of Truth. 
 And for ourselves here below, the word " God " 
 means the same to all of us, substantially or in 
 outline ; but the filling in of that outline is the 
 
76 INSUFFICIENCY OF 
 
 same for no two alike, and is capable of 
 indefinite correction and completion. 
 
 So as regards the teaching of the Church, 
 and the grace of her sacraments. There is 
 outside us, in this external religion of the Incar- 
 nation, an inexhaustible source of spiritual light 
 and strength which all Catholics agree in 
 acknowledging, but there the uniformity ends ; 
 for as to the manner and the degree in which 
 they draw upon this treasury and appropriate 
 and use its wealth, there neither is, nor ought to 
 be, nor can be, perfect sameness in kind but the 
 purest possible individuality — one body but 
 no two members alike, one spirit but an endless 
 diversity of manifestations. Had Christ been 
 merely some human hero or saint, the imitation 
 of His finite and measurable character by His 
 followers would have produced in them an 
 uniformity not merely of spirit and principle, 
 but of manifestation and outward expression ; 
 such as we notice in schools and sects and 
 religious orders. His life would have been a 
 sort of rigid rule, helpful and suitable for some, 
 but not for all, interfering with rather than 
 developing the exhibition of personality and 
 natural character ; but because His Divine good- 
 ness was infinite and inexhaustible, all might 
 imitate it to their utmost capacity, as closely 
 
MERELY EXTERNAL RELIGION. 77 
 
 as possible, and yet no two be alike. So also 
 the Church's truths, though cased in finite 
 forms and expressions, though uttered in words 
 which are the same for all who know their creed 
 and catechism, are in themselves inexhaustible ; 
 transcending the deepest human intelligence, 
 striking no two minds at the same angle of 
 incidence nor ever reflected twice in precisely 
 the same way. 
 
 It is therefore only so far as we are mere 
 formalists, and make our Catholicity consist 
 wholly in repeating the same words, in per- 
 forming and submitting to the same rites ; it 
 is only so far as we forget that external 
 Christianity is designed to evoke, elevate, and 
 strengthen the anima natitraliter Christiana 
 which is within us, that the abuse of Catholicity 
 tends to destroy individuality by producing a 
 dead uniformity. 
 
 And if we are in a true sense soldiers, 
 militant members of a militant Church, yet this 
 warfare is not distinct from that in which our 
 private spiritual life consists ; nor does the 
 service of the Church withdraw us from that 
 one paramount avocation which is the chief end 
 of our existence. In the secular state we have 
 to distinguish between our duties as citizens and 
 our duties as men ; but in the Church it is just 
 
78 INSUFFICIENCY OF 
 
 by perfecting ourselves as individuals that we 
 best profit the whole body. Here our public 
 and personal duties never clash ; they are 
 distinct only in thought and name ; not in 
 reality. " Sic luceat lux vestra coram homi- 
 iiibus" says our Saviour. It is in the measure 
 that the light of Catholic truth has become our 
 own, has caught on to us as flame to a torch, 
 and penetrated our life, that we shall be quietly 
 and unnoticeably effectual in its dissemination. 
 As long as we are mere controversialists, trying 
 to impose upon others an external rule of belief 
 and practice which we have not begun to 
 appreciate and use for the internal reformation 
 of our own mind and heart, we know nothing 
 of the methods of Christ's warfare ; and we but 
 hinder what we would forward : Nescitis cujus 
 spiritus estis. 
 
 Lastly, Eternal Life is not a bribe in the 
 distant hereafter to stimulate the belligerent 
 Catholic, or to tame him into blind obedience 
 to a system of drill which he cannot understand 
 or sympathize with. Eternal life begins here 
 and now ; and is the life of the divine and 
 eternal part of us ; the life of an intelligence 
 and love whose objects are incorruptible, inde- 
 pendent of place and of time. And this is the 
 life which is aroused and kindled in us ever 
 
MERELY EXTERNAL RELIGION. 79 
 
 more and more in the measure that we make 
 energetic use of the sources of divine h'ght and 
 grace which God has put at our disposal in the 
 external religion of the Incarnation ; that is, in 
 the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. 
 
 To be, not a formalist, but a true Catholic ; 
 to be not only outwardly united to the visible 
 Church, but also quickened inwardly with her 
 spirit, and nourished with the blood that flows in 
 her veins ; this is Eternal Life. It is not merely 
 the condition or price of its future bestowal ; but 
 is its present actualization in a far fuller measure 
 than is in anywise possible for those who are 
 separated from these external supernatural aids. 
 " I came that they might have life," says Christ, 
 " and that they might have it more abundantly," 
 more easily, more freely. Vital Catholicism ts 
 Eternal Life ; the life not merely of the highest 
 human intelligence, the purest human affection, 
 the life not merely of man at his best and 
 noblest ; but of the Spirit of God mysteriously 
 mingled with the spirit of man. 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 ABUSE OF EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. 
 
 One of the great problems of education in 
 almost every department is the right adjustment 
 of liberty and restriction ; in other words, to 
 know exactly how far people should be helped, 
 supported, and protected, and how far they 
 should be thrown upon themselves and left with 
 a certain freedom of action. An excess in either 
 direction is fatal. Those who are insufficiently 
 helped and guided are exposed to temptations 
 and difficulties altogether beyond their strength 
 and experience ; those who are over-helped and 
 over-guided never develop that independence 
 and spontaneity of action, which is the very end 
 of all education. For education is but the 
 means ; whereas life, the best and fullest life we 
 are capable of, is the end. A thing is alive so 
 far as it moves itself ; but if it is dead or lifeless, 
 it moves just so far as it is moved, and then 
 comes to a dead stop. 
 
ABUSE OF EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. 8l 
 
 Now this power of self-movement, self- 
 guidance, self-government, is not increased in 
 any direction by doing things that we can 
 do quite easily and without effort. It may be 
 maintained and kept up to the mark by such 
 actions ; or it may be lost by the continued 
 omission of such, actions ; that is, by getting 
 out of practice. Nor, again, is it increased by 
 attempting patent impossibilities ; but only by 
 attempting such things as are at once difficult 
 in some degree, but still possible. The problem 
 of education, therefore, is just to help the learner 
 so far as a task is at present impossible for him 
 and beyond his reasonable powers ; and yet on 
 no account to help him any further ; but to let 
 him encounter difficulties even with the certainty 
 that he will fail many times and suffer many 
 pains and humiliations ere he acquire the 
 sought-for skill. Were we always to guide the 
 pen in the child's trembling hand, were we 
 never to leave him a chance of going wrong and 
 of making mistakes, he would never learn to 
 write ; and so we only give him as much help 
 as is absolutely necessary ; more at first and 
 then less, until at last the habit of spontaneous 
 and independent activity is perfectly formed. 
 
 Of course, as we have already said, no finite 
 being is independent of all help ; and the extent 
 
 G 
 
82 ABUSE OF 
 
 of our independence is at the best grotesquely 
 limited ; yet such as it is, it is within the limits 
 of that little region that our liberty is exercised, 
 and that our personality and individuality lies. 
 Whatever hinders the development of any sort 
 of vitality, any power of self-movement that is 
 latent in us, cramps the fulness of our spiritual 
 being, and inflicts the worst of all injuries upon 
 us. If it is the part of charity to help and 
 succour and serve those who really need it, 
 there is no greater " uncharity " than the weak, 
 short-sighted indulgence which regards all pain 
 indiscriminately as an evil ; and which unwisely 
 helps those who can already help themselves, 
 and in so doing exempts them from that needful 
 exertion and conflict with difficulty, wherein the 
 very food and medicine of their moral growth 
 is found. 
 
 And this principle throws an important light 
 upon the whole idea of the religion of the 
 Incarnation. It is not possible that God, whose 
 Nature is the root of all law, the cause of all 
 that is necessary in the essence of things, should 
 Himself act contrary to the law which His 
 Being imposes upon finite creatures ; or that 
 He who is Charity should so fail in true charity 
 as to offer us any help whatsoever, natural or 
 supernatural, simply to save us from salutary 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. 83 
 
 labour and difficulty ; or should wish to spare 
 us any exertion of mind or will whereby our 
 hidden energies should be brought out, exer- 
 cised, and strengthened. For God to expose us 
 to superhuman and invincible temptations, to 
 overwhelm and confuse us with more liberty 
 than we can possibly profit by ; to 'leave us 
 absolutely unguided and unprotected, and throw 
 us wholly on our own resources, would be to 
 destroy us. That is the judgment which they 
 bring upon themselves who presumptuously 
 spurn His needful aid. But on the other hand 
 we may hold it for a certain and universal truth, 
 that God, in offering us helps, never intends to 
 spare us any profitable labour or superable 
 difficulty which we should otherwise .have had 
 to face ; that in giving us a revelation of truth 
 and in providing us with sacramental means of 
 grace, He does not so much intend to make easier 
 what is already possible, as to make possible 
 a far more difficult and supernatural salvation. 
 He does not intend to exempt us from one 
 particle of that endurable pain and trouble 
 which would naturally have been necessary for 
 the perfecting of our mind and the acquisition 
 of moral virtues ; -but simply to give us capacity 
 for a far higher spiritual perfection, and there- 
 with the power and the duty of exerting our- 
 
84 ABUSE OF 
 
 selves far more than would otherwise have been 
 possible for us or incumbent upon us. This is 
 almost a truism when stated, yet is often as far 
 from our practical recognition as though it were 
 the greatest of paradoxes. 
 
 Therefore, as we said in our opening con- 
 ference, when God endowed our first parents in 
 Paradise with wonderful gifts of soul and body, 
 with grace and knowledge and self-control and 
 dominion over nature, and immortality, it was- 
 not that they might luxuriate idly in the 
 consciousness of these gifts, but that they might 
 trade with them as with so much gold to be 
 put out to usury and rigorously accounted for ;. 
 it was that instead of being responsible for the 
 one or two talents of unassisted nature, they 
 might enter upon a ten-fold or hundred-fold 
 responsibility ; it was not that they might 
 without trouble be set down at the goal of 
 ordinary human perfection, to rest there ; but 
 that what else had been their scarcely attainable 
 end, might now be their starting-point for a- 
 supernatural end — a perfection more divine than 
 human. It was not that they might be carried 
 easily on the breast of a full tide high above 
 the rocks and shoals of temptations at an 
 immeasurable depth below them, but that they 
 might be capable of profiting by a temptation 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. 85 
 
 altogether superhuman and beyond their natural 
 forces — a temptation worthy to decide the 
 •destiny of a whole race. 
 
 And it is in precisely the same light that we 
 are to view the supernatural helps accorded to 
 us by the religion of the Incarnation. We often 
 hear people speaking as though the grace which 
 superabounded in our Saviour, or in His Blessed 
 Mother, or in His saints, made the will of God 
 easy for them — far easier than it could ever be 
 for us ; whereas in truth it only made them 
 capable of greater labour and suffering and 
 temptation than we can ever be called upon to 
 endure. It increased their latent power, but it 
 also increased their responsibility and called for 
 a greater exertion and putting forth of that 
 power — which exertion can never be without 
 pain. It is true to say that it made things 
 harder for them, rather than easier. That they 
 ■did not sin, means that they suffered more ; for 
 it is easier to yield and more painful to hold out. 
 And it was because they were faithful to grace 
 and held out and would not yield, that God 
 gave them more grace and still more — habenti 
 dabitur ; and the reason He gives us so little is 
 because we will not hold out, but shrink from 
 ■effort. We fancy that more grace would make 
 things easier for us ; that it would spare us 
 
85 ABUSE OF 
 
 some exertion that we can already make, but 
 are unwilling to make ; and so we pray for 
 grace and do not get it; for God only gives 
 more power to those who are using the power 
 they have already got ; who exert themselves to 
 their utmost and who want to exert themselves 
 still more. 
 
 Roughly, the supernatural helps given to us 
 by the Catholic religion are of two kinds — 
 strength for our will ; light and understanding 
 for our mind ; in other words, sacramental grace- 
 and infallible teaching. With regard to both 
 one and the other, it has often been asserted 
 that in the actual working their whole tendency 
 is to hinder rather than promote spiritual 
 development, to discourage spontaneity, ta 
 destroy independence of action and thought in 
 all religious matters, to accustom us from our 
 infancy onwards to moral and intellectual 
 crutches, and to persuade us that we cannot 
 possibly do without them. Notice, we are not 
 wasting breath in dealing with the absurd charge 
 that Catholics are tyrannized over by their priests 
 in the affairs of every-day life, that they are not 
 allowed to think for themselves or act for them- 
 selves even in matters secular and profane ; but 
 only with the more plausible notion that their 
 Church says to them equivalently : " Come tO' 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. 87 
 
 me, you that labour and are burdened, and I will 
 make goodness cheap and easy for you. You 
 shrink from the difficulty of mortification and 
 self-conquest ; very well, receive my sacraments 
 instead ; you shrink from the labour of thought 
 and meditation about divine things ; very well, 
 be passive, and accept my teaching instead ; let 
 me think for you, and act for you ; and do you 
 be passive and obedient and inert." 
 
 Is there any seeming foundation for this 
 calumny, for this notion that the Church, instead 
 of stimulating us to help ourselves, tries to 
 persuade us that we are more helpless than we 
 really are, in order that we may depend upon 
 her and submit to her more utterly ; that she 
 trades upon our indolence and softness and 
 never lets us down out of her arms lest we 
 should discover that we can walk alone ? 
 
 Yes, undoubtedly ; but the foundation for the 
 charge is not to be sought in any haziness and 
 uncertainty on the part of the Church's clear 
 and unceasing warnings ; it is easily and 
 abundantly found in the perverse heedlessness 
 and inattention of her children to the very 
 obvious principle above insisted on as to the 
 meaning and right use of helps of every kind, 
 natural or supernatural, human or divine. 
 
 Our Lord tells us that we are to pray and to 
 
88 ABUSE OF 
 
 watch so as to resist temptation. Prayer, com- 
 prehends all sorts of dependence on God — all 
 the means of increasing grace and spiritual 
 energy; watching, comprehends all sorts of 
 dependence on self, every kind of co-operation 
 with grace, every sort of exertion or putting 
 forth of that energy won through prayer and the 
 sacraments. Neither condition avails without the 
 other. We must rely upon God and rely upon 
 ordinary means. The Pelagians thought that 
 their own natural vigilance was enough ; and 
 this isi an error in which we all follow them at 
 some time or another of our life — perhaps 
 always to some little extent. But just as 
 dangerous is the error of a certain pious fatalism 
 which confounds trust in God with presumption ; 
 which regards prayer and the sacraments as 
 substitutes for vigilance, instead of as means 
 to it. 
 
 " Pray and watch " are not co-ordinate duties • 
 but the former is directed to the latter as means 
 to an end. Orate ut vigiletis is the true sense ; 
 pray that you may have the inclination, the 
 energy, the perseverance, to watch and to use 
 every possible natural means that prudence can 
 devise in order to combat temptations and 
 conquer yourself. So understood and so used, 
 prayer and the means of grace, far from sparing 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. 89 
 
 US any exertion we are already capable of, 
 simply make us capable of more and demand 
 more of us in consequence. 
 
 But naturally we all shrink from that exertion 
 which is the indispensable condition of our 
 growth in any direction ; our tendency as finite 
 creatures is to sink down towards the zero 
 from which we were lifted by creation, rather 
 than to struggle upwards towards God and to 
 •correspond with the creative movement by 
 which He ever draws us from nothingness 
 towards Himself, as' a flower is drawn out of 
 the earth by the sun's magic. We always try 
 the path of least resistance — the cheapest, the 
 easiest route. We are ever the too-ready 
 dupes of any one who pretends to have found 
 out some trouble-saving method of salvation ; 
 something we can get through once and for all 
 and have done with ; some substitute for weary 
 vigilance, and tiresome perseverance, and bitter 
 mortification, and for the other necessary causes 
 without which even God Himself often could not 
 ensure the desired effects. We clutch eagerly at 
 a miraculous medal, a girdle, an infallible prayer,, 
 a scapular, a novena, a pledge, a vow — all helps, 
 in their way, all excellent if used rightly as 
 stimulants to greater exertion, greater vigilance, 
 greater prayerfulness ; but if adopted as substi- 
 
go ABUSE OF 
 
 tutes for labour, for the eternally necessary 
 and indispensable means, then, no longer helps. 
 but fsest hurtful superstitions. Do they stimu- 
 late or do they relax our efforts? — that is the 
 one test as to whether we are using such things 
 to our help or abusing them to our hurt. We 
 shall not be saved by anything we hang round 
 our necks, except so far as the grace it 
 conveys to us in virtue of the Church's blessing 
 stimulates us to that exertion and watchfulness 
 by which alone, under God, we are to sanctify 
 and save ourselves. 
 
 And what is true of these devotions and' 
 methods which the Catholic Church certainly- 
 tolerates as capable of a right use, and which 
 her Pontiffs have often even promoted and 
 indulgenced, is true also of prayer and the 
 sacraments — those means of grace which God 
 Himself has appointed and blessed. All-needful 
 as they are for that fulness of spiritual life to- 
 which Christianity calls us ; yet they can be and 
 often are perverted in such wise as to be no 
 longer helps, but positive hindrances. As 
 intended by God they are designed, not to 
 save us any spiritual exertion which is needful 
 for us ; not to exempt us from the duty of 
 watchfulness, of retrospection and foresight and 
 circumspection ; but solely to make greater 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. gi 
 
 exertion possible for us ; to put more into us^ 
 that we may have more to draw out of our- 
 selves, more to educate. The perceptible part 
 of the result of prayer and the sacraments, 
 if we do not misuse them, is not a miraculous 
 infusion of those good habits which can be 
 formed only by repeated actions and persevering 
 efforts, but rather a deepened spiritual insight, 
 clearer ideals of perfection, dissatisfaction with 
 our past, desire of advancing to something 
 better, resolution to face greater exertion. 
 
 But these seeds, these possibilities and begin- 
 nings of good, have to be fostered and furthered 
 by attending to them, praying about them, 
 above all, by acting upon them at once — else 
 they die away fruitless and leave us worse and 
 harder than before. Facienti quod est in se non 
 deerit Deus — God will not fail those in their 
 difficulties who do all that they can ; but if they 
 do less than they can ; if there be a store of 
 unused energy lying idle in their souls ; if they 
 pray only to escape exertion they are already 
 capable of, and not to become capable of greater 
 exertion, if they pray more only in order that 
 they may watch less, then they pray in vain, 
 and perhaps to their hurt. 
 
 Stranger still, even mortification, asceticism, 
 and self-denial, may be, and often are, abused 
 
92 ABUSE OF 
 
 in just the same way, when they are used as 
 substitutes for the natural and necessary means 
 of attaining virtue. That attainment often 
 depends essentially on just the one thing we 
 will not do, the one sacrifice we will not make. 
 We will do anything else, something much 
 harder perhaps in itself, but not that. We know 
 right well, for example, that chastity depends 
 on a thousand little carefulnesses, singly quite 
 possible and easy, yet collectively hard and' 
 tiresome ; but instead of this sacrifice, fixed by 
 God and by the inherent nature of things, we 
 want to substitute another less troublesome ; 
 we want to buy off a continual tax by paying 
 ■down a lump sum. We want to do something 
 violent that can be got over and done with ; 
 some big austerity that will purchase for us a 
 miraculous exemption from the natural con- 
 sequence of our actions, that will permit us to 
 be quite careless about the aforesaid little things. 
 Our confessor wisely advises more frequent 
 Communion ; we try, and are no better. And 
 why? Because we go to the Sacrament, not 
 to get stimulus for greater exertion, but to 
 be miraculously delivered from the need of 
 exertion ; to be exempted from the ordinary 
 laws of cause and effect. 
 
 In the light of these considerations we shall 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. 93 
 
 have no difficulty in facing fairly, what otherwise 
 might seem grave problems, offered by facts 
 which are undeniable. 
 
 On the one hand we often find that, both in 
 ourselves and, as far as we can judge, in others, 
 the fruit of much prayer and mortification and 
 frequenting of the sacraments, is far less than 
 what we might thoughtlessly have expected 
 d priori. When we think of the stupendous 
 offering of Himself which God makes to the 
 soul in the Blessed Eucharist, it cannot but 
 astonish us how little perceptible difference our 
 reiterated Communions make in us ; it cannot 
 but astonish us how those who communicate 
 almost daily, such as priests and religious and 
 many devout lay-folk, are so little different from 
 others ; so little like what we should have been 
 led to expect. If their Communions are bad, 
 such persons ought to be so much worse than 
 they are ; if good, so much better. But de facto 
 they are very often painfully ordinary people, 
 as mediocre in virtue as the rest. We cannot 
 of course judge individuals by outward results, 
 since we never know the extent of the resistance 
 particular souls have to contend with ; but we 
 may fairly so judge classes, as contrasted with 
 other classes. All this would indeed be a 
 difficulty if sacraments worked their perceptible 
 
94 ABUSE OF 
 
 effect as medicines do, independently of the free 
 co-operation of the recipient. This perceptible 
 effect is the increased putting forth of spiritual 
 energy which the sacrament renders possible ; 
 but which only our co-operation and effort can 
 render actual. God gives the talent, but it is 
 not perceptible till we begin to use it. That 
 there is an imperceptible effect of some kind 
 — an increase of substantial grace, as they call 
 it — whenever the sacrament is not actually 
 profaned, is common Catholic teaching ; but for 
 practical purposes, what boots this energy stored 
 away in the soul except so far as it is used and 
 turned to account ? We are to be judged, not 
 by our powers, but by our works. Buried talents 
 will not profit us. True we cannot lose habitual 
 grace but by sin ; yet is there no sin of sloth 
 in leaving God's gold rusting in the earth when 
 He has bidden us trade with it ? Serve nequain 
 is God's verdict on such a one. 
 
 Similarly it need not astonish us as it might 
 otherwise do, that souls can draw nigh time 
 after time to the Sacrament of Penance, and 
 yet be so lacking in the penitential broken- 
 hearted spirit which it is the purpose of that 
 ordinance to increase in us more and more. To 
 wash away sin is not like washing away soil 
 from a garment, which once done cannot be 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. 95 
 
 more done ; but sin is extruded from the soul 
 by the introduction of the love of God and 
 hatred of what is contrary to God. For this 
 reason the same sin can be ever more and more 
 forgiven, and may be confessed and absolved 
 again and again. Amplius lava me ab iniquitate 
 mea — Lavabis me et super nivem dealbabor. We 
 can be washed ever cleaner and cleaner ; and 
 made ever whiter and whiter. But here, again, 
 because penance and the penitential spirit is 
 something laborious and troublesome, we are 
 disposed to use the Sacrament of Penance as a 
 substitute for the virtue of penance instead of 
 as a means to increase that virtue in ourselves. 
 We draw near to it often, not with a mind to 
 make things harder for ourselves, but to make 
 things easier ; not to increase our responsibilities, 
 but to shirk them. 
 
 Then, on the other hand, there is the fact that 
 we very often find those who are inculpably 
 deprived of the aids of external religion, 
 Catholics and non-Catholics, producing much 
 more in the way of results than those who 
 abound in sacraments. Or, again, our personal 
 experience and that of others will sometimes 
 tell us, though not commonly, that we progressed 
 more rapidly in periods of rarer Communions, 
 than in those of more frequent Communions. 
 
g6 ABUSE OF 
 
 Or, what might seem strangest of all, there are 
 the by no means unheard-of cases of some who, 
 after abandoning the religious practices and 
 even the faith of the Church, have attained to 
 continence, or industry, or sobriety, or self- 
 control, or some other virtue which they had in 
 vain sought to secure by means of the sacra- 
 ments or of ascetical practices. 
 
 All these phenomena have one and the 
 same ready explanation. The very fact of 
 having abundant helps ready to hand, is a snare 
 to those who misunderstand the meaning and 
 use of helps and who treat them as substitutes 
 for that exertion which they are designed to 
 render possible and to stimulate. Let these 
 helps be withdrawn, and at once such persons 
 feel that they are thrown entirely upon their 
 own internal resources, that they must put forth 
 all their energy or else perish ; and under this 
 apprehension they begin for the first time in 
 their lives, to use the strength that was within 
 them all along ; to make that painful exertion 
 for which they secretly, almost unconsciously, 
 hoped the frequentation of the sacraments might 
 serve as a substitute. 
 
 Even the apostate and renegade may easily 
 find in pride, or in ambition, or in some other 
 form of intense self-love, a stronger stimulus 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. 97 
 
 to exertion than the love of God ever furnished 
 him with in the days of his belief and piety. 
 Such a victory over self is what Augustine calls 
 a victoria viiiosa, i.e., the control of one vice by 
 another ; and the continence or sobriety so 
 produced is only a manifestation of the strength 
 of the master-vice. Some of the strongest- 
 seeming men on earth have been the weakest. 
 The pride, or ambition, or lust, which enslaved 
 them, also enslaved all their other vices to 
 its own service, and made them temperate, 
 enduring, thrifty, prudent, bold. Yet their 
 force was but the force of a falling body. 
 But we need not suppose that it is always 
 so with the apostate. The change for the better 
 in his morals may find sufficient explanation 
 in the fact that, during his years of piety he 
 was using prayer and mortification simply as 
 substitutes for vigilance and not as means to it ; 
 and that what he abandoned were, as abused by 
 him, not means of grace, but hindrances of 
 nature. 
 
 Thus we see how a superficial consideration 
 of such facts as these, might seem to the 
 thoughtless to justify the charge, that the helps 
 which the sacraments hold out to us, far from 
 strengthening and stimulating our will, tend 
 rather to enfeeble and enervate it. We see that 
 H 
 
g8 ABUSE OF 
 
 this is simply to confound the use with the 
 abuse of the sacraments, and that it is an 
 objection which would hold equally against the 
 whole economy of the Incarnation — nay, against 
 every help offered us by God or man, not only 
 in the supernatural, but even in the natural 
 order. God does not give a people a rich and 
 luxuriant soil in order to make them idle or to 
 save them exertion, yet more often than not 
 they so misuse His liberality that it makes for 
 decadence rather than progress. Deplorable as 
 such perversity may be in things temporal, it 
 is in addition, sinful and inexcusable in things 
 eternal. Doubtless it will be more tolerable for 
 Sodom and Gomorrha in the Judgment, than 
 for the cities which Christ vainly blessed with 
 His miracles and teaching ; and for heretics and 
 pagans and agnostics than for many a Catholic ; 
 yet we may not on that account even harbour 
 the impious wi.sh that God, in affording us such 
 superabundant helps and graces, had not called 
 us to such terrible responsibilities — to such 
 multiplied labours and exertions. 
 
 De facto, a sterner soil may be better for us 
 than a richer, if it cause us to work harder ; 
 yet this is due to our own perversity, not to the 
 nature of the gift which in itself is a poorer one. 
 De facto, it were better for Judas had he never 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. 99 
 
 been born, yet not because birth could ever 
 be an evil of its own nature, or other than an 
 unmerited blessing, but because of his own 
 perverse misuse of God's mercy. 
 
 So too, de facto, it were better for many a 
 Catholic to have had fewer sacraments, fewer 
 means of grace, if he has misused them as a 
 pretext for less exertion than he would actually 
 have put forth had he been thrown more entirely 
 upon himself; and yet God did, and intended to 
 do, for him what was the more liberal and 
 kinder thing ; to confer upon him that more 
 lavish grace, of which it is said : " To whom 
 much is given, from him much shall be required." 
 
 NOTE TO LECTURE V. 
 
 It might seem, on superficial consideration, 
 that the view here set forth is barely consonant 
 with that not uncommonly held as to the effect 
 of the sacraments, wherein it is said that, pro- 
 vided there be the minimum requisite disposition 
 in approaching Holy Communion, a certain 
 minimum increase of sanctifying grace is derived 
 from the sacrament ex opere operate. From this 
 it would seem to follow that, so long as one is 
 not in mortal sin, it were always better to 
 
100 4BUSE OF 
 
 receive than to abstain ; and, were it permitted, 
 to receive several times a day rather than once. 
 Also, it has even been said sometimes, that one 
 who receives daily and is content with keeping 
 clear of mortal sin and makes no attempt to 
 avoid venial sin, may in virtue of the latent 
 sanctifying grace thus stored up in his soul, be 
 a holier man — that is, diviner, and more near to 
 God — than one who strives to keep from lesser 
 offences, who is devout and charitable and 
 mortified, yet approaches the sacraments only 
 weekly or monthly. These conclusions are so 
 at variance with the sensus fidelium — so " offen- 
 sive to pious ears," that the principle from 
 which they seem to follow, and which is in 
 itself undeniable, plainly needs careful expla- 
 nation. 
 
 Between the ultra-Protestant view which 
 denies all ex opere operato value to the sacra- 
 ments, and the opposite extreme which would 
 make their operation simply mechanical, lies the 
 Catholic truth which teaches that the disposi- 
 tions of the recipient, though not a cause, are a 
 condition of the grace received — a condition, 
 moreover, to which normally that grace is pro- 
 portioned. They are the vessel wherewith we 
 draw from the well, and whereby our draught is 
 measured. It might therefore be conceivable 
 in the abstract, that froni one annual Corn- 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. lOI 
 
 munion more grace should be drawn than 
 from 365 daily Communions. But the pre- 
 sumption is certainly against it ; for those 
 who go seldom and reluctantly are not likely 
 to be so very fervently disposed. On the 
 other hand, those who go daily, if they are 
 leading a dissipated and careless life, are not 
 likely to get as much benefit from seven such 
 Communions as from one received with better 
 dispositions. Thus, in practice, it is only those 
 who are striving after perfection who will, in 
 that measure, draw profit from frequent Com- 
 munion ; whereas one in no way minded to do 
 more than what is simply obligatory, will 
 profit less by frequent Communion received in 
 such ungracious dispositions than by much rarer 
 and worthier receptions. The principle that, one 
 cannot have too much of a good thing, and that 
 therefore one should never miss any opportunity 
 of sacramental grace, taken crudely, leads to 
 ridiculous consequences ; such as that, it would 
 be reasonable to expect a confessor to answer 
 reiterated confessions of the same fault with 
 reiterated absolutions one after another as fast 
 as time will permit ; or that, it is unreasonable 
 of the Church to forbid reiterated Communions 
 in the same day. If the sacraments work quasi- 
 physically, irrespective of a positive disposition 
 of spiritual appetite, it is hard to exclude these 
 
I02 ABUSE OF 
 
 repulsive consequences, so opposed to the 
 instinct of sane Catholicism. But obviously the 
 disposition for Communion, though sometimes 
 described negatively as consisting in freedom 
 from mortal sin, is in itself something positive, 
 namely, the love of God whereby sin is ex- 
 truded, and a desire for grace, springing from 
 and proportioned to that love. This love is not 
 something necessarily equal in all such cases^ 
 nor can we therefore suppose that there is a sort 
 of arithmetical minimum of grace given by each 
 sacraiment, unless we are prepared to say that 
 there is a minimum of love. Both as to Com- 
 munion and Penance we may say that, the 
 desire for the sacramental grace is the sub- 
 stantial disposition. It does not create the 
 grace, but it creates, or rather is, the capacity 
 for grace. Only so far as a new and unsatisfied 
 capacity for grace may be presumed to have 
 arisen between two Communions, can they be 
 properly regarded as two. I take it that to 
 receive several hosts in immediate succession 
 would be morally one manducatio — one 
 eating ; nor would a longer interval make any 
 material difference were the dispositions un- 
 altered. If we might justify sane Catholic 
 practice by an homely illustration : we do not 
 refill our ink-bottle after every dip of the pen, 
 but we wait till it runs low ; we do not run to 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. I03 
 
 the bank with every penny, but wait till we 
 have a reasonable sum ; we do not eat again 
 the moment the sense of full satiety begins to 
 subside, but allow our appetite to go unsatisfied 
 that later it may be better satisfied ; and 
 similarly the faithful, except so far as they are 
 guided by some reflex rationalistic principle 
 rather than by the promptings of healthy piety, 
 do not think it necessary to satisfy the very 
 first stirrings of the spiritual appetite, but trust 
 that it will endure and gather strength for fuller 
 satisfaction at those reasonable intervals which 
 their circumstances of life, spiritual and tem- 
 poral, may determine. 
 
 In fine, if the view from which we might 
 seem to differ really leads to consequences so 
 repugnant both to the instincts of unsophisti- 
 cated piety, and to the interests of an upward- 
 tending morality and religion, it cannot be 
 accepted for a moment as part of Catholic 
 teaching ; if, however, it can be cleared of such 
 consequences, it is only because it is explained 
 as agreeing with substantially and differing only 
 verbally from the ordinary view presented in 
 these pages. 
 
 In regard to frequency of Communion, the 
 average practice of the faithful has varied 
 enormously in different periods and places ; 
 nor can it be affirmed, in the light of history, 
 
104 ABUSE OF 
 
 that there has been a steady tendency towards 
 greater frequency, such as is at present observ- 
 able, and which is only a return to the primitive 
 practice. Doubtless the daily Communion of 
 all has ever been the ideal, even when other 
 necessities may have made it least realizable ; 
 but the Church's astonishing elasticity in this 
 respect is only intelligible on the principles here 
 explained. And as it would be rash to conclude 
 that we in England to-day are, as a class, better 
 than our forefathers who lived under persecu- 
 tion, and whose Communion-standard was " eight 
 times a year," as contrasted with our " once a 
 week ; '' so, taking this " once a week " as our 
 present norm of devout practice, it would be 
 rash and illiberal to condemn those who go 
 much more rarely as being therefore less devout; 
 or those who go daily, as making pretensions to 
 extraordinary sanctity. The local standard for 
 the time being will determine what is to be con- 
 sidered relatively frequent or rare Communion ; 
 and we may say that it needs some positive 
 reason to depart from it notably by excess or 
 defect ; but such reasons are sufficiently common 
 to forbid us to judge one another, or to deny 
 one another that ample liberty which our religion 
 allows us and no man may take from us. Often 
 temporal circumstances — sickness, distance, oc- 
 cupation, make access to the altar physically 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. IO5 
 
 impossible or very difficult ; while mental, moral, 
 and spiritual conditions are still more various. 
 There are those who can quickly throw off 
 pre-occupations and concentrate themselves on 
 prayer ; and there are others who focus their 
 attention slowly and laboriously ; and, according 
 to these and similar diversities, some will profit 
 by more frequent, others by less frequent access. 
 
LECTURE VI. 
 
 ABUSE OF EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT. 
 
 In our last Conference we dealt with one parti- 
 cular form of that abuse which we have agreed 
 to call " externality " in religion — an abuse 
 diametrically opposed to the contrary error of 
 mere " internality," that is, the denial of the 
 utility, the need, and the existence of an obli- 
 gatory outward religion. We considered, so to 
 say, the theory of helps in general, and then, 
 dividing the supernatural helps which the reli- 
 gion of the Incarnation affords us, into means 
 of grace or spiritual strength, and means of 
 light or spiritual guidance, we saw how the 
 former might be either rightly used to stimulate 
 and increase our capacity for exertion and 
 vigilance ; or else wrongly used as substitutes 
 for efforts already well within our capacity, 
 with the effect of enervating and eventually 
 paralyzing the natural vigour of our will. We 
 do not mean that such Communions and con- 
 fessions are positively unworthy or sacrilegious, 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT. IO7 
 
 but that whatever grace they convey lies idle 
 in the soul, and is therefore simply fruitless of all 
 perceptible effect ; because we do not approach 
 with a real desire to exert ourselves more, but 
 with a subtle hope that we shall hereby need to 
 exert ourselves less. 
 
 The sacraments were not designed to save us 
 any salutary effort, or to make cheaper for us 
 that natural virtue obligatory on all mankind ; 
 but rather to oblige us each time anew to some 
 degree of Christian perfection and to the exertion 
 of those still greater efforts needed for its attain- 
 ment. 
 
 Let us now consider how the means of light 
 and spiritual guidance may similarly be either 
 used or abused. As free, intelligent creatures, 
 it is our special dignity to be in some measure 
 and always under God, self-formed, self-taught, 
 self-moved, self-guided. Of course our inde- 
 pendence is exceedingly limited, and what we 
 can do for ourselves is only a little fraction of 
 what God and our fellow-creatures have to do 
 for us ; but little as it is, in that little our 
 personality is exercised. Were we, however, 
 proudly to discard any available help, simply 
 on the score that we prefer to do every- 
 thing for ourselves from the very beginning ; 
 were we to refuse to enter into our heritage 
 
ro8 ABUSE OF 
 
 from the past, to reap and enjoy the fruits of 
 others' labours, to accept the accumulated results 
 of their experience and reflection and activity, 
 we should not thereby in any way enlarge the 
 field of our self-acquired perfections ; but should 
 only be sacrificing priceless advantages to the 
 gratification of a short-sighted self-defeating 
 love of independence. For there is no indignity 
 in being helped in order to exert ourselves 
 more ; but only in being helped in order to 
 shirk exertion. 
 
 As money is an instrument for getting money ; 
 so truth and knowledge are instruments for 
 getting truth and knowledge ; and the more 
 that others can impart to us by way of a starting 
 capital, the greater and more fruitful is the 
 mental exertion we are capable of; and conse- 
 quently by such help rightly used, the field of 
 our self-acquired advantages will be indefinitely 
 enlarged. Take what you actually know of 
 history or of science, and compare it with the 
 most that your unassisted efforts could possibly 
 have attained to ; and you will see that not only 
 your acquired knowledge, but even your power 
 of acquiring knowledge, is multiplied many times 
 over through assistance received from others. 
 For this reason, to live in the company of 
 others, far from hindering the development of 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT. lOQ 
 
 personality and self-sufficingness, is the most 
 indispensable condition thereof. 
 
 We may be sure then that when God gifted 
 our first parents in Paradise with preternatu rally 
 infused knowledge, it was not that they might 
 live ever after inertly in a state of mental stag- 
 nation ; but that starting with minds full-formed 
 and well instructed, they might set the talent 
 out to usury and make it the instrument of such 
 an intellectual activity and advance as had been 
 nowise possible for them had they been left to 
 their merely naturally resources — individual and 
 social. 
 
 Similarly with regard to the supernatural reve- 
 lation accorded to fallen man (piecemeal through 
 the prophets of the Old Law, and in its final 
 plenitude by the lips of the Word-made-flesh, 
 who has committed it to the custody of the 
 Holy Ghost in His Church), we must not for a 
 moment imagine that God intended hereby to 
 exempt us from any particle of that careful 
 thought and consideration which we are naturally 
 bound to give to the affairs of our soul and 
 eternity before all else ; or that He intended 
 to save us the profitable trouble of using and 
 training our minds in the matter of religion. 
 His design rather tended to multiply our labours 
 by giving us more material to work upon ; and, 
 
no ABUSE OF 
 
 by the added light of every new truth, to increase 
 our powers of spiritual apprehension. Undoubt- 
 edly a truth that we find out for ourselves is our 
 own in a more real way than a truth which, being 
 simply put into us from outside, is nowise our 
 own product — ^just as the wealth we produce by 
 our own labour is our possession in a sense 
 that no gift ever can be. But as our wealth- 
 earning power depends ultimately on the gifts 
 and helps we receive from God and from our 
 fellow-men, so our truth-earning power is pro- 
 portioned to the amount of ready-made truths 
 communicated to us at the outset. Doubtless 
 it were grander to know these latter inde- 
 pendently, as God does ; but being what we 
 are, it is far better we should know them in 
 this less perfect, dependent way, than be left 
 in our helplessness and not know them at all. 
 For so it is, that our mind is most helpless and 
 dependent in regard to the most necessary 
 truths, whether natural or supernatural. In one 
 case God has to infuse the first principles into 
 our intelligence ; in the other He has to reveal 
 them ; and it is only after He has thus far 
 helped us, that we can begin to help ourselves 
 on a little further. 
 
 Far from being called to less mental activity 
 in regard to religious questions and the ultimate 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT. Ill 
 
 problems of human life, the educated Catholic 
 is called to a great deal more than others, to 
 whom a narrower measure of truth and light 
 has been committed in trust. And yet it is 
 commonly objected against us that the tendency 
 of our belief in the Church's infallible guidance, 
 is to paralyze our intelligence in this department, 
 by encouraging us to use the judgment of the 
 Church as a substitute for our own judgment, 
 rather than as a rule or instrument for its 
 formation and development, as a spur to set it 
 in rapid motion. The Catholic is likened to 
 one who is content to possess the best books 
 on a given subject, without ever attempting to 
 master their contents with a view to becoming 
 himself somewhat expert therein. This objection, 
 which one hears very commonly, is put into the 
 mouth of one of the characters in a recent 
 Catholic novel.'^ " I never yet met a Protestant," 
 he says, " who was not anxious to talk religion ; 
 nor a Catholic who was not anxious to avoid it. 
 Why ? " " Because," says the other, " we are so 
 secure of our religion it does not interest us. 
 You know there must be doubt in order to 
 create interest" " How is it," another acute 
 observer asks, "that in all religious questions 
 
 * The Triumph of F<^ilur(. By Rev, p. A. Sheehan. 
 
112 ABUSE OF 
 
 Catholics are in some way much less interesting 
 to speak to than Protestants ? " 
 
 That the fact is so to some extent, I think we 
 must admit ; that it should be so we must 
 altogether deny ; nor can we allow, that to be 
 secure of a truth justifies our losing all interest 
 in it ; nor yet, that outside a comparatively 
 small oasis of revealed truths concerning which 
 we are secure, there does not stretch an almost 
 infinite region of religious problems which God 
 has left to our disputation, that we ourselves 
 may bring to bear upon them the super- 
 natural light of revelation which He has given 
 us. 
 
 It will help, in dealing with this question, to 
 recall an old-fashioned theological distinction 
 almost forgotten in these days when the spread 
 of education is supposed to have put all classes 
 at an equal advantage in passing judgment upon 
 every sort of question. Yet this old distinction 
 between the majores and the minores, that is, 
 between the adepts and the laymen in each 
 department, is too deeply fixed in the nature of 
 things for any educational system to uproot. 
 It is a pleasant popular fiction, that no truly 
 enlightened modern ever believes aught that he 
 has not either seen with his own eyes, or 
 demonstrated from the root upwards to his own 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT. II3 
 
 satisfaction ; that he takes nothing on hearsay, 
 or on faith, or by way of tradition ; that he 
 never thinks and says anything solely because 
 his father said it before him, or because every- 
 body says it all round him. It is a pleasant 
 fiction, but none the less a fiction ; for full nine- 
 tenths of the knowledge of the most independent 
 thinker that ever lived, is necessarily either 
 taken blindly on trust or else based on premisses 
 so taken, and were he to reject everything he 
 had not personally verified, his mental condition 
 would be little different from that of a clever 
 savage. Still this same independent thinker 
 may be classed with the majores, so far as he 
 uses the help derived from others, to help 
 himself on a little further than they have carried 
 him, and adds some little quota to the common 
 stock of enlightenment. But so far as of 
 necessity, he is chiefly taught by tradition^ 
 and simply repeats and imitates what others 
 say and think ; so far as he receives passively 
 into his brain the impression worked upon it by 
 the entire deposit of knowledge existing in the 
 society he belongs to, he is on a par with the 
 tninores. 
 
 For the practical purposes of life, this 
 traditional method is the one best fitted for us 
 by the wisdom of God. But it is only by the 
 
114 ABUSE OF 
 
 labour of the majores, of the active and in de- 
 pendent thinkers, that this body of public truth, 
 •which they break and distribute to the multitude, 
 is increased, modified, and corrected ; and there- 
 fore such a class of thinkers is a necessity for 
 ■every progressive community. Roughly speaking 
 this is the educated class, so far as education 
 implies a power of rediscovering for ourselves 
 what tradition has taught us ; of setting the 
 form and stamp of our own individual mind 
 upon it ; of realizing what we have hitherto 
 ■only repeated ; a power of active and productive 
 intelligence, as opposed to merely passive and 
 receptive intelligence. 
 
 The mission of Christ and the Church, as we 
 said, is primarily to the uneducated masses, and 
 to the educated, only so far as they are willing 
 to submit to the method of tradition and faith, 
 to the " folly of preaching," by which alone it 
 is possible for the multitudes to lay hold of 
 divine truth. For our own practical sanctifica- 
 tion we must all be content to enter the Kingdom 
 ■of Heaven as little children with the " common 
 people who heard Him gladly," or else to stay 
 outside. The keenest spiritual insight, is not 
 enough to steady us in the hour of temptation, 
 but only faith in the word of another, and that 
 other, God. It is upon His mind we must 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT. II5 
 
 then rely, and not upon our own ; on the eternal 
 enduring rock, not on the shivering sand. 
 
 Still it remains true that revelation is not 
 designed to exempt us from any exercise of 
 religious thought that we are naturally capable 
 of; but rather to increase that capacity and to 
 make our exertions more fruitful. 
 
 Hence, our Lord requires of educated Catholics 
 besides faith, a certain intelligence about their 
 religion, proportioned to their general ability 
 •and opportunities ; nor can any man be credited 
 with very deep or vital faith, if it is not a faith 
 that seeks intelligence as far as intelligence is 
 possible for him ; if from being a matter of 
 practical utility for him, it does not come to be 
 also one of intellectual interest. 
 
 This wakening of intellectual interest in 
 religion, as in any other subject, depends upon 
 our realizing that it is connected with the whole 
 body of our thought, that it is a factor needed 
 to set our disconnected views of life in order, and 
 .reduce them to unity. Children usually accept 
 blindly the political views of their parents, 
 without realizing or inquiring why such stress 
 should be laid upon them, until the growth of 
 their own mind, and the expansion of their 
 personal and social interests, force them to look 
 at the matter independently. 
 
Il6 ABUSE OF 
 
 But far more than politics, religion is a subject 
 which is most closely wrapt up with the great 
 problems of life, practical and speculative ; and' 
 hence we find that no man whose mind is really 
 awake, and who can be called educated in any 
 general sense, can afford to be without some 
 definite views about religion — whether for, or 
 against, whether dogmatic or sceptic. In. 
 England indeed, owing to the above-mentioned 
 " spread of education," religious questions are a 
 matter of interest and discussion in almost every 
 class, high and low, and in every school, Chris- 
 tian or anti-Christian. 
 
 Are we to except the Catholic community 
 alone from intelligent sympathy with these vital 
 problems ? 
 
 The novelist we quoted suggests that where 
 there is certainty and no doubt, there can be 
 no interest, no discussion ; if we have found' 
 the truth, or if we have never lost it, we do not 
 search for it ; if we are not searching, we are not 
 interested. There is a good deal of reason in 
 this. Our very position as Catholics supposes 
 that we accept without hesitation all the official 
 teaching of the Church ; that we have no doubt 
 about the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Eucharist, 
 the Priesthood, or the Sacraments ; or about any 
 of the momentous dogmas of faith. Whatever 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT. II7 
 
 the Church has left open to our disputation is, 
 from the nature of the case, as yet unimportant, 
 whatever it may become in future ages. Our 
 internecine controversies are not, like those of 
 Protestants, about matters of Hfe and death, but 
 about points confessedly secondary. Men cannot 
 be expected to struggle as ardently and univer- 
 sally about the dispensable luxuries of life as 
 about its indispensable necessities. In the 
 Catholic religion God has secured the Bread of 
 Eternal Truth to be broken in unfailing supply 
 to the hungry multitudes, to the poor and the 
 uneducated. He has not left them with a volume 
 of riddles for their sole guidance, nor to the 
 interpretation of scribes and doctors wrangling 
 over those riddles. Abounding as they do in 
 solid bread, in the necessities of supernatural 
 life, the faith-taught crowds are not called to 
 disputations beyond their ability, demanding an 
 independence of mind whereof they are in- 
 capable. And as regards these daily necessities 
 of spiritual enlightenment, learned and un- 
 learned, classes and masses, are on a par. All 
 are equally helpless as to religious truths beyond 
 reason, while as to those within reason, the 
 mental grasp of even the wisest is too infirm, 
 and needs to be replaced by faith. 
 
 But in the gift of revelation, though God 
 
Il8 ABUSE OF 
 
 helps us so far as we cannot help ourselves, He 
 helps us no further ; and in matters where 
 failure is easily remediable where it only hurts 
 lightly, and does not kill. He leaves us to our- 
 selves. Outside the clearly-hedged field of 
 revealed truth, there is an infinitely vast region 
 of religious inquiry wherein the mind should 
 exercise itself according to the utmost of its 
 ability. That an educated Catholic should misuse 
 the help of revelation as a pretext for mental 
 sloth in regard to the supreme interests of 
 humanity, is altogether to be deplored and repre- 
 hended ; since that help is designed wholly to 
 extend and stimulate our religious intelligence, 
 and not to enable us to sit down idly, with a 
 blissful sense of omniscience, as though we had 
 nothing more to learn. Even supposing we knew 
 our religion so thoroughly that we could not know 
 anything more about its nature or its history,, 
 still we who are educated are bound to be able 
 to give a reason for the faith that is in us, and 
 to make it intelligible to others who inquire of 
 us. This means trying to enter into the minds 
 of others who believe differently, and, so to say, 
 studying the articles of faith in their contraries 
 and denials — an unlimited field of labour, for 
 the mark of truth can be missed in an infinity 
 of ways. We are not allowed to sit on the rocks. 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT. II9. 
 
 indifferent spectators of the struggles of those 
 who are battling with the surf, hugging ourselves 
 in ah ecstasy of safety. 
 
 But besides this there is inexhaustible work 
 for our mind to do. As we said before, no two 
 of the Blessed see God in the same way or 
 measure ; and no two Catholics apprehend their 
 faith alike ; and as long as we live and think,, 
 we can go on burrowing our way further and 
 further into the depths of meaning stored away 
 in the dogmas of the Church. Our first progress 
 is simply a gathering in of materials, as word 
 by word, and line by line, the Church's officiat 
 teaching is communicated to us ; then com- 
 mences the process of pondering and consider- 
 ing these parts in their relation one to another,, 
 and building them up gradually into something 
 ever approaching yet never attaining that unity 
 they possess in the Divine Mind, where all 
 truths are but one truth, and all thoughts but 
 one thought. Of course our religious intelli- 
 gence can never be a philosophy, a complete 
 and coherent system of truths neatly jointed 
 together — to demand it should be so, is the 
 error of rationalism. In dealing with mysteries, 
 truths fringed with darkness, there will always 
 be gaps and seeming contradictions in our 
 attempted unifications ; and for this very reason 
 
120 ABUSE OF 
 
 the work will never be finished : there will 
 always be more for us to do. 
 
 Again, in the reconciliation of the Catholic 
 faith with the ever-shifting attitude of science 
 and history ; in the whole bearing of religion 
 upon the altering conditions of secular thought 
 and secular life, there is endless work for the 
 religious intelligence of any educated Catholic 
 ■who wishes to be in sympathy at once with his 
 age and with his Church ; and the fruit of 
 his endeavour will be a deepened under- 
 standing and appreciation of both one and the 
 other. 
 
 And here let us observe that to be afraid to 
 face anything that history or science or'criticism 
 may have to say, lest it should prove at variance 
 with our religious beliefs, far from being the 
 mark of a firmly-rooted faith, is just the con- 
 trary. We must not only profess with our lips, 
 but by our conduct we must prove our convic- 
 tion that no contradiction can exist between 
 natural and revealed truth ; and that wherever 
 it seems to exist it is only because we mis- 
 understand one side or the other. And wrhile 
 the misunderstanding lasts, even though it last 
 for our lifetime, true and intelligent faith will be 
 willing to let the two irreconciled truths live 
 quietly side by side in the mind, without. forcing 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT. 121 
 
 a premature reconciliation, or casting out either 
 -one or the other. 
 
 Again, those who are favoured by God with 
 the grace of a good education and a certain 
 power of independent thought, and who are 
 accordingly bound to add some degree of 
 intelligence and criticism to their faith, are 
 rightly blamed for what is largely inevitable 
 and blameless in the multitudes who hold 
 religious truth by faith alone. We said long 
 since, that man-made religions are essentially 
 corruptible and fallible in virtue of their visible 
 part — of that outward embodiment by which 
 they are brought home to the senses and 
 imagination ; and therefore our Lord oame to 
 give us a divine interpretation of our religious 
 instinct and a divinely guaranteed embodiment 
 of that interpretation. But outside this core of 
 revelation, the religious intelligence of man 
 works in its own natural way, both for better 
 and for worse ; and inevitably generates 
 numerous superstitions in the minds of the 
 uncritical ; and even in more cultivated minds, 
 not a few*. It is, then, part of that loyal 
 reverence which the educated Catholic owes 
 to truth and to the Church's authority, to 
 <liscern clearly and separate infinitely what is of 
 -divine revelation from what is of merely human 
 
122 ABUSE OF 
 
 addition, be that addition true or false. " One- 
 is your Master, even Christ." We acknowledge 
 but one supreme teaching-authority on earth, 
 and it is treason to listen to any other with like 
 reverence. Moses and Elias are well in their 
 way; but they are not Christ, they are not 
 Peter. As a feeble, half-hearted faith is timor- 
 ously cautious of meeting difficulties, so too it 
 always leans to the lazy, trouble-saving fallacy 
 that it is better to believe too much than too- 
 little, and that credulity and superstition is an. 
 error on the right side. There is but one side 
 when truth is in question. 
 
 Of course we should deal gently with supersti- 
 tion in others, especially in the uneducated,, 
 mindful lest in puUing up the tares we pull up 
 the wheat along with it ; lest in snuffing the 
 candle we extinguish it. So St. Paul dealt with- 
 those weaker brethren, those simple souls for 
 whom Christ died, whose false conscience forbade- 
 their eating meat offered to idols — as though, 
 idols were aught. Yet in our own minds and 
 in the minds of those who are capable of better 
 things, we must strive sedulously that our faith 
 be reverently housed in a soul from which every 
 cobweb of unworthy superstition has been care- 
 fully swept away. We are to be children ia 
 fcdth, but not children in folly. " Be ye childrea 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT, I23 
 
 in guile," says the Apostle, " but not children in 
 understanding." To think accurately is the gift 
 of the few ; and the ruder a mind is, the more 
 are its perceptions mingled with illusion. If the 
 faithful were to refrain altogether from drawing 
 inferences from the teachings of the Creed, and 
 from making applications for themselves of 
 revealed principles ; if they were to be purely- 
 passive and receptive under the Church's guid- 
 ance, then on the one hand there would be no 
 superstition or delusion ; but on the other there 
 would be no intelligence added to the faith. 
 The mind fnust perforce work upon what it 
 believes ; and this working, in the case of the 
 rude and unlettered, must abound in fallacies 
 and delusions which they can hardly detect even 
 when pointed out to them. To throw doubt on 
 their false deductions would often be to make 
 them doubt the true premisses from which they 
 erroneously drew them. Sinite crescere — " Let 
 both grow till the harvest." 
 
 Does this justify the charge that the Catholic 
 Church has one religion for the educated, 
 another for the masses ? God forbid ! The 
 faith that is common to educated and unedu- 
 cated is an indefinitely higher gift than the most 
 enlightened religious intelligence ; and this faith 
 finds on the whole purer and better dispositions- 
 
124 ABUSE OF 
 
 in the unspoilt minds of the simple, who know 
 their ignorance, than in the minds of the 
 cultured, who over-estimate their knowledge. 
 Yet this does not alter the fact that superstition^ 
 which is the parasite of simplicity, is a blemish 
 and an unworthy cohabitant of faith ; and that 
 it is the duty of the intelligent and educated to 
 weed it out of their minds studiously. Not in 
 regard to faith, but in regard to religious intelli- 
 gence, they are the majores, and their function 
 in the Church is steadily and quietly to check 
 the growth of superstition ; just as it is the 
 function of the better classes in society to 
 maintain standards of good taste and good 
 j-.idgment in a thousand matters, and so to 
 resist the downward influence of the uncritical 
 majority. 
 
 If from a falsely conceived intellectual humi- 
 lity we were all to imitate, not only the faith 
 and simplicity, but the folly and superstition of 
 the multitude, and were to use the education 
 and influence God has trusted us with for their 
 sakes, not to hinder the evil, but to further it, 
 the wheat of Catholic truth would quickly be 
 obliterated and lost in a tangle of tares. 
 
 Plainly, then, if ever Catholics think less and 
 talk less on religious questions than Protestants 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT. I25 
 
 do, it is not for lack of matter to think and talk 
 about ; it can only be because they sometimes 
 culpably misuse, to the hurt of their religious 
 intelligence, that external rule of belief which 
 God intended for its help. 
 
 This mistake manifests itself sometimes in 
 a total apathy and listlessness of mind — as 
 in the case of those who simply hold on to 
 the Church as they might hold on to a book, 
 satisfied to know that it contains the truth, 
 without ever caring to open it, or turn over 
 its leaves ; sometimes in a certain narrow, 
 cock-sure orthodoxy, most alien from the 
 gentle self-diffidence of humble faith, — as in 
 the case of those who know their catechism 
 well by heart, and carry cut-and-dried answers 
 to all difficulties, wrapt up in pellets to shoot 
 out on occasion ; to whom everything is clear, 
 and common-sense, and obvious ; who can define 
 a mystery, but have never felt one. That the 
 human words and ideas in which eternal truths 
 are clad cannot, even through divine skill, 
 convey to us more than a shadow of the reali- 
 ties they stand for ; that they cannot, like 
 numbers, be added, subtracted, and multiplied 
 together so as to deduce new conclusions with 
 arithmetical simplicity and accuracy, never 
 occurs to them when they are instructing others 
 
126 ABUSE OF 
 
 as ignorant ; or refuting them as idiotic ; or 
 rebuking them as immoral. For such persons 
 religion has the same kind of interest as the 
 multiplication-table, and no more. There is 
 nothing mysterious, or beautiful, or awful about 
 it ; nothing to feed the mind or to subdue it 
 with inexhaustible wonder. 
 
 Lastly, as in matters of faith and right belief, 
 so in those pertaining to morals and right 
 conduct, the infallible guidance which the 
 ■Church offers us should not paralyze, but 
 invigorate our practical judgment. Besides the 
 <lecalogue, she gives us a fairly large number of 
 moral precepts which, being of universal applica- 
 bility, may serve as principles for our guidance 
 in concrete cases. But the application of these 
 principles to varieties of time, place, condition, 
 individual character, and the like, is left to our 
 own mind. Here, if there is any danger of 
 abuse, it might be in 'the case of those who look 
 on their spiritual director as a substitute for 
 their own conscience ; and not as one whose 
 whole task is to help them to develop their 
 conscience — to teach them so to judge for them- 
 selves that gradually they shall become nearly 
 independent of such assistance ; to guide them 
 to the best of all guides — God's Holy Spirit. 
 This, however, is an abuse to which not only 
 
EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT. I27 
 
 spiritual advice and direction, but all advice is 
 liable. Indolent minds will never think for 
 themselves as long as there is somebody to ask ; 
 and there are always plenty of oracular " some- 
 bodies '' whose readiness to give advice is in 
 direct proportion to the narrowness of their 
 experience and the rashness of their judgment. 
 
 Therefore, as with the sacraments and the 
 means of grace, so it is with the means of light 
 which the Church affords us. They are designed 
 to increase and not to check our spiritual 
 activity ; to develop, not to extinguish our 
 personality. God looks, and has a right to look 
 to us Catholics for immeasurably more than He 
 expects from others. What more could He 
 have done for His vine that He has not done? 
 Will He then be content if it bring forth wild 
 ■grapes for sweet ? Shall not much be required 
 from us to whom so much has been given ? 
 
LECTURE VII. 
 
 ABUSE OF THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY. 
 
 In the two preceding conferences we considered 
 the religion of the Incarnation, that is, the^ 
 Catholic Church, as an external instrument for 
 the internal sanctification of her own members 
 — as quickening and stimulating the mind to 
 supernatural activity by an outward rule of 
 truth ; and the will, by outward means of grace. 
 But she has other sheep which are not of this 
 fold, and them she must also bring, that there 
 may be one fold and one shepherd. She is, as- 
 we have already said, a militant body, and her 
 warfare is both defensive and offensive — defen- 
 sive, in so far as she protects her own children 
 and gathers her brood under her wing, and all 
 timid though she be by nature, waxes fierce 
 against the birds of prey that would molest 
 them ; offensive, in so far as she desires all men 
 outside the fold to be saved and to come, not 
 merely to that sufficient knowledge of saving, 
 truth which is denied to none, but to that 
 
THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY. I29 
 
 fulness of knowledge, that exuberant richness 
 of salvation which is found only within her pale. 
 Conquest is her end, no less than self-defence ; 
 yet it is conquest for the good of the conquered, 
 not for their hurt. When an earthly state is at 
 war, the energies of her citizens are drained 
 and diverted from the work of peaceful self- 
 expansion to the work of aggression or self- 
 defence. No doubt this temporary suspension 
 of civic progress and prosperity is directed to 
 its eventual acceleration and increase ; for peace 
 is the motive of war. Still the arts of peace 
 and the arts of war are totally distinct, whereas 
 in the Civitas Dei they are identical. We are 
 not called on to lay aside, even for a time, the 
 work of our individual salvation in order to 
 labour for the salvation of others ; but it is 
 precisely by being on fire ourselves that we are 
 to set fire to the world all round us. 
 
 Some would almost seem to think that as we 
 distinguish the Ecclesia docens from the Ecclesia 
 discens, the Church teaching from the Church 
 taught ; so we should distinguish the Church 
 active and militant, from the Church passive and 
 quiescent ; the former body being identical with 
 the clergy and the latter with the laity — the 
 clergy labouring and rowing ; the laity simply 
 paying their fare and sitting idly as so much 
 
130 ABUSE OF 
 
 ballast in the bark of Peter. Plainly this is a 
 most false and pernicious analogy. It is not 
 only to the clergy but also to the laity — to the 
 whole Church, both collectively and distribu- 
 tively, that our Saviour says : You are the light 
 of the world ; you are the salt of the earth ; let 
 your light so shine before men that they may 
 see your good works and glorify your Father 
 who is in Heaven. 
 
 We must not therefore imagine that the 
 Church has done all her work in our regard 
 when she has developed our spiritual faculties 
 to the full. As soon as the work of personal 
 development is complete the period of repro- 
 ductive fertility sets in. The vine puts forth the 
 grape, but the grape in its maturity carries a 
 seed in its bosom. The Church's work in our 
 soul is complete only when that soul becomes a 
 centre of new life, communicating the flame to 
 others We are not solitary, but social beings ; 
 as we depend upon others and receive from 
 them nine-tenths of what we are, so they depend 
 upon us and look to us for some little fractional 
 return. This sense of our indebtedness to 
 society, to the Church, to the world at large ; 
 and of our obligation to live wholly for others — 
 whether directly or indirectly — and for ourselves 
 only in order to live more effectually for others ; 
 
THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY. I3I 
 
 IS, SO to say, the last grace with which our 
 humanity is crowned ; it is like a latent faculty, 
 which makes its appearance only when the work 
 of spiritual development is otherwise complete. 
 
 When this country is at war we do not all 
 feel the effects of it. We perhaps pay extra 
 taxes, or others pay taxes for us ; but the 
 fighting is done by deputy. But universal 
 conscription is the Church's law ; all must fight ; 
 there is no buying out. Her warfare is not 
 carried on solely by the Pope or the Bishops or 
 the clergy ; the layman is not a mere civilian in 
 the Civitas Dei ; for the Church is altogether 
 and perpetually a militant state ; and her victory 
 requires and is measured by the exertion of each 
 single one of her members, from the greatest to 
 the least. 
 
 But, it will be said, her victory is secured ; it 
 is fated by an everlasting decree : " On this 
 rock, eternal, immutable, will I found My 
 Church. The powers of Hell shall not prevail 
 against it. Lo ! I am with you all days even 
 to the consummation of the world." 
 
 Here, again, we have to deal with the same 
 kind of misapprehension which occupied us in 
 our two previous Conferences. Helps, natural 
 or supernatural, are promised and given to us 
 by God, not to exempt us from any labour we 
 
132 ABUSE OF 
 
 are capable of— from any exertion we should" 
 otherwise have made, but to make us capable of 
 greater exertion and to stimulate and encourage 
 us so to use up that increased capacity that we 
 shall merit to receive yet greater increase 
 
 If, then, God has promised by some special' 
 providence to save the Church from the ordinary 
 and universal law of social growth and decay, 
 it is not that Catholics should, on that account, 
 exert themselves less for the spread and triumph 
 of religion than they would do if its prevalence 
 depended upon them alone. Contrariwise, it is 
 in order that, fighting as they do against such 
 fearful odds, they may have confidence and 
 courage to go on fighting in many a crisis where 
 reason and common-sense, and anything less 
 than faith in a divine promise, would bid them 
 give up and surrender to the inevitable. That 
 promise is therefore designed to make them 
 fight, not less, but more. It does not tell them 
 that the victory is to be secured without fight- 
 ing, but through fighting. It does not suspend 
 the natural laws of cause and effect ; or bid 
 them look for the end without using the means ; 
 but spurs them on to be more active in studying 
 the causes and applying the means of victory.. 
 History shows us over and over again, how men 
 will fight to the death against the most fearful 
 
THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY. I33 
 
 •odds when, falsely or truly, they believe that 
 victory is divinely assured to them, provided only 
 they believe that it is through fighting it is to be 
 effected. Of course if they think their deliver- 
 ance is to be wrought through the intervention 
 of miracles, then indeed their confidence will 
 enervate rather than stimulate their activity. 
 So it is with ourselves. We never attempt what 
 we believe to be impossible ; and the commonest 
 ■cause of failure is the false conviction that fail 
 we must. To banish this illusion, to convince a 
 man that he can succeed, that he will succeed, 
 is often the only way to rouse him from hope- 
 less lethargy. Thus it is that the Church is 
 animated, time after time, to renew what else 
 would seem a fruitless struggle with the world ; 
 nor does she ever forget that her promised 
 perpetuity is the result, not of a miracle or 
 series of miracles, but of Divine assistance and 
 special providence, using the workings of natural 
 Jaws 
 
 According to these laws the history of other 
 ""religious revivals" and movements may be 
 compared to the effect produced by a stone 
 falling into a smooth pond. From the centre 
 of disturbance the wavelets circle out wider and 
 wider, and weaker and weaker, till the original 
 /orce is altogether spent, as far as perceptible 
 
134 ABUSE OF 
 
 movement is concerned. The founder of a 
 religious movement embodies in himself the 
 fulness of its spirit, which he communicates 
 with some slight diminution to his immediate 
 disciples and followers ; these again transmit it 
 to others. And as time goes on and as numbers 
 are multiplied, and the average of capability 
 thereby lowered, that original spirit is less^ 
 completely communicated, and gradually dies 
 away and is forgotten. It may perhaps be 
 studied and analyzed and dissected and talked 
 about ; but it is not felt. 
 
 Following this law, the impulse given by^ 
 Christ to the human soul should naturally have 
 produced, as it did, its fullest fruit in Mary and 
 the Apostles and the early Christians and 
 martyrs, and then have died away quietly long 
 since. But as a matter of fact God has so far 
 maintained the Church in existence by a series 
 of providential revivals, by ever reinforcing the 
 weakening energy as often as, at periods of 
 decadence it seemed all but exhausted. He 
 has raised up a saint or a reformer or the 
 founder of an Order just at the right moment,, 
 when all seemed lost, and the ship was just 
 heeling over. Nor can we regard this exactly 
 as a Deus ex machina expedient, as something 
 strictly miraculous ; for that saints should arise 
 
THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY. I35, 
 
 from time to time is no more wonderful in the 
 world of grace, than the occasional appearance 
 of a poet or a genius in the world of nature. It 
 only means that the arms of God's providence 
 are round His Church, that He disposes all 
 things sweetly in her behalf, working, according 
 to His invariable economy, by natural means as 
 far as may be. Looking into the history of the 
 Church, there is perhaps little or nothing which 
 the philosopher of history could not explain by 
 the ordinary laws which govern the conduct of 
 men, save only this providential supply and 
 succession of enthusiasts who lash the Church 
 into vigour again and again when her force 
 seems well-nigh spent. 
 
 From all this it is clear that the promise 
 of perpetuity or indefectibility made to the 
 Church should not relax our efforts, but should 
 multiply them. It is through the energy of her 
 children that - she is to prevail ; and further- 
 more, the degree of her triumph — whether she 
 is merely to escape extinction and drag her 
 way through the world feeble and dishonoured, 
 or to live a full and glorious existence, the 
 Mistress of many nations ; all this depends, on 
 each particular day and in each particular place, 
 entirely upon us, upon each one of us. All God 
 has promised is, that however unfaithful and 
 
136 ABUSE OF 
 
 indolent we may be, yet for the sake of the 
 world at large and for the sake of Christ and 
 His saints, He will always preserve His Church 
 in conspicuous evidence. 
 
 It is sometimes very hard to resist the im- 
 pression that members of other religious denomi- 
 nations who have no divine guarantee for the 
 perpetuity of their sect, who believe, therefore, 
 that all depends on their united efforts, are often 
 more zealous, more united, more public-spirited, 
 generous, self-sacrificing, than many Catholics 
 who, under cover of confidence in the Divine 
 promise, justify a certain apathy and indiffer- 
 ence in the Church's cause, which is really the' 
 fruit of a secret fatalism. These latter say : 
 ■" God will bring all things right in the end ; ' 
 but they forget that we must help Him to bring 
 them right ; that " how far right " depends 
 wholly on us; that if "less right" through our 
 supine' fatalism, it will be anything but right 
 for us. 
 
 Thus, as we saw before in regard to the 
 Church's sacraments and her teaching, so here 
 we see that what God intends to be a help and 
 a stimulus may be misused and perverted into a 
 hindrance ; what was designed to encourage 
 effort in the day of storm and battle may be 
 used to discourage effort in the day of peace 
 
THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY. 137 
 
 and tranquillity ; nay, sometimes it is only when 
 the Church is so hard pressed that men's faith 
 in the divine promise weakens, that they rouse 
 themselves to action and begin to do what they 
 could and should have done long before. 
 
 But apart from this unfortunate fatalism, 
 which may infect all alike — clergy as well as 
 laity, the energies of the latter are often 
 paralyzed by the misapprehension, already 
 alluded, to which regards the relation between 
 clergy and laity as analogous to that between 
 soldier and civilian in the secular state, and 
 therefore considers the layman as exempt from 
 all duty of forwarding the Church's cause upon 
 ■earth, and limits his obligation to that of pas- 
 sively submitting his own soul to be operated upon 
 by the sacraments and teaching of the Church. 
 
 Now undoubtedly the Church's warfare in- 
 volves an immense diversity of functions and 
 ministrations, and some of these, such as the 
 •official ministry of the word and the sacraments 
 is the proper province of the clergy. But 
 religion, and the Catholic religion especially, 
 penetrates into all departments of human life — 
 departments from the greater number of which 
 the clergy are often excluded by the very nature 
 of their profession. Wherever there is an alterna- 
 tive of right or wrong, of false or true, of fair or 
 
138 ABUSE OF 
 
 foul, there the interest of the Church needs to 
 be looked after. In the world of thought^ 
 whether we consider history or philosophy or 
 science, there is always a false and a true, and 
 the cause of truth is the cause of Christ and 
 His Church. In the world of action, if we turn 
 to art and literature, there is the fair and the 
 foul, the ennobling and the debasing, a potent 
 influence on the human spirit for good or for 
 evil ; and it is not hard to see on which side 
 Christ's interests lie. If we turn to the domain 
 of practical utility, is there any corner wholly 
 exempt from the jurisdiction of religion and 
 morality, whether we look to politics, domestic 
 and foreign ; or to the profession and pursuits 
 of the educated ; or to commerce and business ;. 
 or to public enterprises affecting the temporal 
 and spiritual welfare of millions ? With all these 
 matters the cause of the Church and of Chris- 
 tianity is intimately bound up, and the Catholic 
 layman has a side to take and a part to play. 
 Nay, it is principally in these matters that 
 Christianity extends its influence and roots itself 
 in human society. The priests, with their preach- 
 ing and sacraments, do nothing in the Church's- 
 external warfare, except so far as they incite 
 and stimulate laymen to use their influence, 
 each in his own department, for the cause. 
 
THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY. I39 
 
 of Christ — for what is just and right and fair 
 and good. They preach the Crusade, they 
 harangue the crusaders, but the actual pushing 
 of the Church's interests is nearly altogether in 
 the hands of the laity. Look into the past, and 
 you will see how largely it has been so. And if 
 you think you see the priest too often in politics, 
 perhaps it is because the layman is not seen, 
 there often enough. 
 
 One probable cause of periods of apathy and 
 inertness among the laity is the different exigen- 
 cies of times of danger and times of safety. In 
 crises of special peril, where much depends on 
 unity and promptitude both of judgment and 
 action, all initiative is wisely gathered up to the 
 head and centre of the Church's social organism, 
 and that blind, passive obedience is required of 
 the members which is required of soldiers in the 
 hour of battle, when, if each were left to judge 
 as he chose, and to act as he judged, chaos and 
 defeat would be the result. But what is good 
 in a crisis and in time of danger is not good at 
 other times. Blind obedience is the best on certain 
 occasions, but it is not the best in itself; it is 
 not the better for being blind. In itself and 
 where practicable, an intelligent and sympathetic 
 obedience is better, such as was the obedience of 
 Christ to His Father's will. 
 
140 ABUSE OF 
 
 Ignatius Loyola/ whose doctrine is ignorantly 
 supposed to be extreme sind exceptional in 
 this matter, says rightly that when the judg- 
 ment is not in sympathy with what is com- 
 manded, the obedience is very imperfect {valde 
 imperfecta) and cannot be relied upon. Further- 
 more, such obedience is not educative, as it does 
 not teach the subject to guide himself inde- 
 pendently when the guidance of authority cannot 
 be had ; since he does not see the principles 
 and reasons of the command given. Yet when 
 for one reason or another he is not capable of 
 seeing the reasons, and prompt action is required, 
 this blind obedience is relatively the most 
 reasonable. 
 
 But in times of comparative peace and tran- 
 quillity all this centralization is relaxed and the 
 power of initiative flows out to the extremities 
 
 1 St. Ignatius uses " blind " in an unusual sense. Commonly 
 obedience is called "blind" when, as in a secret society, one 
 acts without knowing why or wherefore, as an automaton. 
 This is military obedience ; and is not educative in any sense ; 
 i.e., it does not make the subject capable of independent judg- 
 ment when guidance is withdrawn. But St. Ignatius calls 
 •obedience blind in so far as in accordance with the principles 
 ■of sound reason and fairmindedness we strive to bring our 
 judgment into agreement with that of a superior so as to see 
 MS he sees — not indeed doing violence to truth, but doing 
 violence to the narrowing bias of egoism and self-will. As 
 ■dying to one's selfishness is the secret of living ; so being blinded 
 to one's prejudices is the secret of seeing. 
 
THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY. I4I 
 
 once more, just as the sap of a tree rises In 
 spring-time and gives vitality to the branches 
 and twigs that have been sleeping through the 
 winter. Then authority is largely relieved of 
 its burden ; and its care is rather to encourage, 
 to guide, and at times perhaps to check the 
 too exuberant activity which everywhere buds 
 and blossoms and fruits and covers the gaunt 
 skeleton with a living garment of verdure. In 
 the day of battle and in the crisis where collec- 
 tive action is necessary, there is but one 
 judgment and one will — that of the commander; 
 every other will or judgment so far as it is 
 original or different from his is simply in the 
 way. But in the day of calm every opinion is 
 listened to, every hindrance to spontaneity and 
 initiation is removed ; all the collective intelli- 
 gence and spiritual energy of the community 
 which before was pent up and useless, is now 
 let loose and turned to account ; and authority 
 emulates the wisdom of a good rider in making 
 the curb felt as little as possible. 
 
 But to pass from the conditions and methods 
 of a state of danger to those of a state of safety 
 cannot be done in a day; and on the part of both, 
 rulers and subjects the old habits cling closely 
 and are slowly put aside ; and so in these days 
 we find the Catholic laity in many places sadly 
 
142 ABUSE OF 
 
 wanting in spontaneous interest and initiative 
 in Church matters, and if not indifferent yet 
 passive, and disposed to look to the clergy for 
 everything, or at least for all suggestion and 
 direction. And on the other hand, we may find 
 clergy who have been brought up under the 
 shadow of persecution and oppression, unaware 
 that a new day has dawned, or rubbing dazed 
 eyes, and still mistrustful of any symptom of 
 initiative in the laity as though it foreboded 
 mutiny in the ranks. And thus there is lost 
 to the Church's cause a great store of spiritual 
 ■energy and intelligence distributed among her 
 members, which is truer and more real wealth 
 than money or political influence or than estab- 
 lishment and endowment. 
 
 Of this state of things a novelist already 
 quoted writes : " If then this Church is the 
 bulwark of modern society, can there be a 
 more ignoble destiny than to sit still and let 
 her, unaided and single-handed, confront the 
 vast and terrific forces that are arrayed against 
 her ? On the other hand, can there be a more 
 sublime destiny, or a more noble undertaking 
 than to stand by her side and throw in such 
 little forces as are placed at our disposal in 
 her support and for the confusion of her enemies? 
 Yet hitherto the entire struggle has been tacitly 
 
THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY. I43 
 
 left by laymen in the hands of the captains of 
 the King's hosts. Against all the natural and 
 supernatual agencies at work in the world, 
 opposed to God and His Christ — heresy and 
 infidelity, with their tremendous intellectual 
 forces, irreligious governments, with all State 
 appliances, treasuries, armies, navies, at their 
 disposal ; the press, with its far-reaching power; 
 literature that derives its supreme attraction 
 from its un-Christian or immoral teachings ; 
 art, that is the workshop of Satan ; politics that 
 would exile the Church from the world ; the 
 drink syndicates that are becoming omnipotent 
 ■through human impotency ; the social evil that 
 has forced itself to be State recognized ; schools 
 from which God is banished ; family circles 
 where religion is never mentioned ; society that 
 would take offence at God's name, — in a word, 
 against all the professed badness of the world, 
 and against all the unconfessed indifference 
 marshalled in hostile array . . . stand timidly 
 on the side of Christ, a handful of priests, a 
 few weak women, a literature that is saved 
 from ridicule barely by its good intentions, and 
 a few saints who lift up their hands . . . from 
 the mountain whilst the armies of Israel are 
 hard pressed in the valleys of humiliation and 
 -defeat. All this time what are Catholic laymen 
 
144 ABUSE OF 
 
 doing ? Absolutely nothing ; either defensive 
 or aggressive. With the exception of a few 
 Vincent de Paul Societies, there is absolutely 
 no organization that would combine into one 
 solid body all the zeal and talent of thousands 
 of young men who would dare and do a great 
 deal for Jesus Christ, but who are now kept 
 back from want of an inspiring voice that 
 would tell them : Go, and throw in all your 
 resources of mind and body to destroy the 
 empire of Belial and to extend the empire of 
 Christ." 
 
 But besides whatever we can do for the 
 furtherance of Christian principles and measures 
 in the society around us ; we have also, each 
 of us, a mission to individuals. Not a preach- 
 ing nor a controversial mission — Heaven forbid ! 
 but a mission of practical influence. Let your 
 light so shine before men, not that they may 
 hear your good arguments, but that they 
 may see your good works ; and this again, 
 not that they may glorify you, but that they 
 may glorify your Father in Heaven, that is, 
 your religion ; that they may say : This is 
 what Catholicism effects in those who make 
 use of its teaching and its sacraments. 
 
 Our Saviour strictly forbids us to put the 
 truth before those who do not already want to 
 
THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY. I45 
 
 believe it : " Cast not your pearls before swine." 
 For the sake of those whose affection is already 
 drawn to the Church in some other way, and 
 who want to believe but cannot, owing to some 
 ignorance or obscurity ; and for the sake of 
 Catholics who love their religion and yet have 
 difficulties of the mind, controversy may have 
 its lawful sphere. But wrangling with those 
 who hate our doctrines and who simply want 
 to justify themselves or to confound us is 
 altogether unjustified. The true method is to 
 get men to wish to believe ; that is, to make 
 them know and love the idea of the Church 
 and wish it to be true. Given this disposition, 
 God will see to the rest ; without it, all other 
 labour is vain. 
 
 And to effect this, our first endeavour must 
 be to make men better morally, that is, to 
 make them more conscientious, more strictly 
 obedient to what they believe, truly or falsely, 
 to be right ; not at first troubling to rectify 
 their judgment, to disturb or change their 
 beliefs, but by all means getting them into 
 that state of perfect sincerity and good faith 
 which is at once the essential condition and 
 the infallible cause of spiritual enlightenment. 
 Let us take men as we find them, Jews, Turks, 
 infidels, heretics, and discerning the elements 
 
146 ABUSE OF 
 
 of truth and goodness which are already in- 
 them by the grace of God, foster and encourage 
 them and leave the rest alone, trusting that as 
 these grow they will naturally extrude all that 
 is alien. 
 
 And the next great thing is, as Joubert 
 says, to make the truth lovely, not to send 
 her forth in full armour bristling with darts- 
 and javelins, to challenge defiance and rouse 
 opposition ; but rather to imitate the Incar- 
 nate Truth, Who made Himself lowly and 
 fair and attractive, coming among us unarmed 
 and unresisting; a meek and humble-hearted 
 Teacher unlike the pedantic Scribe and the 
 subtle-minded Pharisee ; one Who bade Peter 
 sheathe his violent sword. Who touched and 
 healed the rude wound his fiery zeal had 
 inflicted. In hoc signo vinces. It was by the 
 method of the Cross, by the method of meek- 
 ness, that Christianity conquered the world ; 
 and whenever her well-meaning defenders have 
 invoked fire from Heaven, whenever they have 
 taken the sword, whether the sword of steel or 
 the envenomed sword of the tongue, whether 
 trusting to physical violence and political craft, 
 or to keenness of mind in dialectical fencing ; 
 or to sharpness of retort in acrimonious con- 
 troversy — in all cases alike the sword has turned 
 
THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY. I47 
 
 back upon them, and by the sword they have 
 perished. 
 
 " Put thy sword into its scabbard," says our 
 Lord. Were His Kingdom of this world, 
 His servants would fight, with twelve legions 
 of angels at their back. 
 
LECTURE VIII. 
 
 INTERIOR FAITH. 
 
 We said at the very beginning of our con- 
 ferences, that man's human perfection lay in a 
 self-induced subjection of the flesh to the spirit 
 — of the senses, the imagination, the passions, 
 the feelings, to reason, intelligence, and will ; in 
 guiding his life not by transitory appearances, 
 but by eternal realities ; not by that which 
 seems to be, but by that which is. All admit 
 this, at least implicitly. A man who lacks 
 prudence or foresight, or whose judgments are 
 all prima facie or superficial, is so far regarded 
 as a child or a savage, that is, as an undeveloped 
 man, because he has not yet learnt to guide 
 his actions by what is future and therefore 
 invisible, or by what underlies the outward 
 semblance of things present. 
 
 So far as the word faith might be used to 
 signify a practical hold on unapparent truths, 
 on unseen realities, a power of resisting the 
 illusions of the senses and the imagination, faith 
 
INTERIOR FAITH. 149- 
 
 might be said to be a condition of all human, 
 as opposed to merely animal, life ; a condition 
 of success even in business and in the subordinate 
 affairs of our daily existence wholly unconnected 
 with religion. 
 
 But when we come to the supreme and 
 eternal interests to which all these temporal 
 concerns are or ought to be subordinate, where^ 
 as in the case of what is called natural religion,, 
 the realities by which our conduct is to be 
 guided. He at the extreme horizon of our intelli- 
 gence ; or, as in the case of supernatural religion, 
 altogether beyond it ; then faith, in the above 
 sense of realizing the unseen, is at once far more 
 difficult and far more imperatively necessary.. 
 Without faith it is impossible to please God, 
 i.e., impossible to lead a moral and religious life. 
 For the things of religion are after all the great 
 concern of life ; and what will it profit us to- 
 have been wise and prudent in the choice and 
 use of the means, if we are ignorant or mistaken 
 in regard to the end ; what avails the swiftest 
 running, if what we are pursuing is the rainbow? 
 
 And yet because the truths of even natural 
 religion are ultimate truths— the deepest down,, 
 the furthest off of all, we can never get all round 
 them or grasp them comfortably, but at most 
 can touch them with the tip of our finger. They 
 
150 INTERIOR FAITH. 
 
 are the solid earth on what we build the fabric 
 of our life and thought, and which we pre- 
 suppose as the basis of all our labours, but which 
 we cannot measure and hew and cart about as 
 we do the stones we pile upon it. For we have 
 necessarily to think and speak of eternal and 
 spiritual realities in the terms of those temporal 
 and bodily things which fall under our experi- 
 ence. We are as one born blind, who must 
 think of the visible world of colour and form in 
 terms of sound and touch and the other senses. 
 He gets to know it very imperfectly by symbol 
 and metaphor, but not in its own terms ; and 
 yet he is affected by that colour-world in many 
 ways, and must guide his actions by such 
 knowledge of it as he can gain from others. 
 
 Still more helpless are we in regard to strictly 
 supernatural religious truths which God Himself 
 has tried in some little measure to explain to 
 us in the language of things we know ; using 
 such homely and popular notions as Father, Son, 
 Spirit, nature, unity, substance, and the like, 
 which convey to us just so much of the corres- 
 ponding reality as we are at present capable of 
 apprehending. We must not suppose that God 
 willingly hides from us any part of these truths 
 just in order to try us by making faith difficult ; 
 that He is as one who puts a truism in the form 
 
INTERIOR FAITH. 151 
 
 •of a riddle in order to make it as obscure as 
 possible. Far from this, God wants all men to 
 ■come to a knowledge of all truth so far as they 
 are capable of it ; and dogmas are difficult, not 
 because He wants to puzzle us, but because, we 
 being as yet so imperfect, even He cannot make 
 the truth any plainer to us at present — " I have 
 yet many things to tell you of, but you cannot 
 bear them now." 
 
 If, however, it is very necessary for us to 
 guide our lives by these ultimate truths — so 
 ■unreal, so far off, in relation to our almost 
 animal mind — it is also very difficult. Our 
 whole propensity when we let go and suffer 
 ourselves to drift passively, is to live by the 
 visible, not by the invisible ; to be animal in our 
 mind as well as in our morals. The whole 
 labour of our spiritual and reasonable life is to 
 resist this downward pull, and to raise ourselves 
 slowly from a state of animal-mindedness to a 
 state of human-mindedness ; and therefore. 
 Divine Faith, so far as it is the realizing of things 
 hoped for in the future, the evidence of things at 
 present not apparent, far from doing violence 
 to our rational soul, is but an extension of its 
 natural perfection. It is but a carrying onwards 
 and upwards of what might be called the 
 fundamental natural virtue, which distinguishes 
 
153 INTERIOR FAITH. 
 
 the man from the mere savage, or the child, ot 
 the animal. For the supernatural does not 
 either here or elsewhere extrude nature, nor is 
 it abruptly superimposed thereon, but mingles 
 with it and transforms it as light streaming 
 through a stained window. 
 
 When we said that the Word was made flesh 
 in order that He might heal the invisible part 
 of our nature through the visible part which 
 had occasioned its hurt ; we were saying in 
 another way that He came to strengthen our 
 faith ; to tighten our grasp on those eternal 
 and invisible realities in accordance with which 
 our life as a whole must be governed ; and that 
 He came to effect this through the instru- 
 mentality of a visible Church, teaching through 
 human words and notions, and sanctifying 
 through human rites and symbols. 
 
 Even in the ordinary affairs of life we know 
 how in moments of passion, or fear, or intense 
 desire, our judgment is blinded and unbalanced ; 
 how our attention is all focussed upon that one 
 side of a question which appeals to our present 
 feelings and emotions, and is withdrawn from 
 every other consideration ; how what seemed 
 prudent and right to us in our calm hours, now 
 seems so no longer. And if we know ourselves 
 by past experience of the like kind, we try tO' 
 
INTERIOR FAITH. 155 
 
 resist this illusion of the feelings ; and how do 
 we do so ? Not by trying to see the truth when 
 we are incapable of seeing it — when our dimmed 
 eyes are smarting with dust and fog — but by 
 holding on blindly with our will to what we 
 judged right in the hour of calm, when we were 
 capable of seeing. We appeal from our mad 
 and distracted self to our sane and sober self 
 Or what often serves us just as well in the same 
 or similar crises, we hold on blindly by our will,, 
 not to our own past judgment, but to the present 
 judgment of some one else whom we know and 
 love and trust; and who is not biassed and 
 disturbed like ourselves. 
 
 Now all this is essentially faith ; it is holding 
 on by sheer force of will to truths that at the 
 moment we cannot see or verify for ourselves. 
 
 But, as we have said, religious truths are at 
 once the most practically important of all, and 
 the most difficult of all ; and in respect to them 
 our whole life is a temptation and a season of 
 blindness ; and therefore we need to reach out 
 our will and hold on tight to God's word and 
 judgment, and so steady ourselves in the turbid, 
 rushing stream of life's illusions and appear- 
 ances, which else would carry us away to des- 
 truction. And since to do so is as necessary a 
 condition of our spiritual life, as eating is of our 
 
154 INTERIOR FAITH. 
 
 bodily life, it is a plain duty and a command of 
 God ; not merely a matter ot counsel or advice. 
 Just as it would be wicked to let ourselves 
 seriously doubt about the wrongness of lying or 
 murder or impurity or suicide, because perhaps 
 there seemed to us some unanswered difficulties 
 of a philosophical nature on the other side ; so 
 it would be wicked for us, in the matter of faith, 
 to let loose the grip of our will on the word of God, 
 for the sake of any difficulty that might offer 
 itself to our present limited view. For this would 
 be to prefer our worse to our better judgment. 
 
 Hence, we get a clearer idea of what faith is. 
 It is holding on blindly by our will to God's 
 word, because He tells us to hold on to it. 
 He says to our conscience : " This is My word, 
 and My word is the truth itself Hold to it 
 with your will, as firmly as you would do if you 
 saw it with your mind." And as a little child 
 obeys its mother and believes what she tells it, 
 and as firmly as she tells it, not because it has 
 first criticized her ability or her truthfulness, but 
 because it recognizes instinctively her right to 
 command in the matter ; so those who recognize 
 the authority of God's voice, whether in con- 
 science, or in Christ, or in the Catholic Church, 
 obey because they are told. " My sheep," He 
 says, " hear My voice." They do not prove it, 
 
INTERIOR FAITH. 155 
 
 but they recognize it by a sort of instinct; 
 just as on the other hand, they will run from 
 a wolf, though they have never seen one before. 
 Thus, by nature, we recognize that conscience 
 is to be obeyed even to death ; and those who 
 are true to conscience, recognize exactly the 
 same voice in Christ and in the Church. Can you 
 explain to another how you recognize some one 
 by his tread, or his voice, or his expression .' 
 No, and yet you do not doubt it. And so 
 though we may not be able to explain why the 
 voice of conscience and of Christ and of the 
 Church is to our ears all one, yet we who have 
 once felt can never doubt it. 
 
 We said indeed that an educated Catholic 
 has some kind of obligation proportioned to 
 his intellectual standing, of being able to give 
 reasons for his faith, by showing how current 
 philosophy and history and science all point to 
 the truth of Christianity, and how nothing we 
 are really bound to believe can be shown to be 
 contrary to any finally established scientific or 
 historic truth. But since history and science 
 are always changing and fluctuating, and since 
 even the Church's understanding and expression 
 of the faith changes as it grows deeper and 
 more discerning, it is plain that all such recon- 
 ciliations of faith with secular knowledge are 
 
156 INTERIOR FAITH. 
 
 only provisional and tentative ; never final or 
 exhaustive ; and so it would be a disastrous 
 thing were we to rest our own personal faith on 
 any frail logical fabric of the kind. It would 
 mean that with every new discovery of science 
 or history, every new difficulty suggested to us 
 by reason, every new fashion of philosophy, 
 the whole structure would be shaken, perhaps 
 to its foundations, and our faith would, so to 
 say, have to be suspended till we could build it 
 up again, and work the new data into harmonious 
 agreement with the old. It is vitally important 
 to realize that our faith does not and should not 
 rest on the defence we can make of our faith — 
 on any thread of syllogisms or arguments how- 
 ever skilfully spun. 
 
 The latter is an intellectual luxury for the 
 few ; and has certain uses for a limited nature ; 
 but it is a necessity for none. Faith is produced 
 not by the power of arguments over the mind ; 
 but by the power and authority of God's will 
 felt and obeyed by the human will — very much 
 as a dog feels and obeys the will of his master 
 made known in a look or a word. 
 
 If faith had to be produced by force of 
 arguments, or if it needed them as its necessary 
 condition, what would become of the unlettered 
 crowds whose faith nevertheless is held up as 
 
INTERIOR FAITH. j-„ 
 
 the type to which ours must be conformed, if 
 we are to enter the kingdom with them ? What 
 sort of reasoned defence of their faith could 
 Peter or Andrew or the sons of Zebedee have 
 made to the Scribes and Doctors, when at a look 
 or a word they rose up and followed Christ, as 
 sheep follow their shepherd ? 
 
 It is evident then that our personal faith in 
 God depends on a certain internal power of 
 hearing which can be dulled and lost by per- 
 sistently stopping our ears to the voice of 
 conscience, and resisting the influence of its 
 authoritative tone. " My sheep hear My voice ; " 
 that is, those who habitually listen to God's 
 voice within, will recognize it when it speaks to 
 them from without. If a conscientious pagan 
 resists Christianity, or a conscientious Christian 
 resists Catholicity, it is either that his mind 
 inculpably lacks those intermediate truths that 
 would make the fuller truth intelligible to it ; or 
 that the messenger has garbled the message and 
 made it ridiculous and incredible. 
 
 Plainly, then, difficulties of the mind, diffi- 
 culties from history or science or philosophy, 
 however they make us doubt about our logical 
 defence of the faith, even should they break it 
 down altogether, as may happen at times, 
 cannot touch our faith itself in any way ; just as 
 
158 INTERIOR FAITH. 
 
 no failure in the popular proofs of our own 
 identity would shake our belief in it or change 
 our practical conduct in the least detail. 
 
 But notwithstanding this, our faith can be 
 indefinitely strengthened, or it can be gradually 
 weakened and lost altogether, according as we 
 draw nearer to God and get to know the tone of 
 His voice more intimately ; or as we wander 
 away from Him till we are altogether out of 
 hearing ; for in point of fact it is by doing, and 
 not by thinking or reasoning that we apprehend 
 God and His truth in this life. In the next life 
 He will present Himself directly to the soul's 
 eye, as something to be gazed upon, as the 
 subsistent Light and Truth ; but here He offers 
 Himself principally to us as something to be 
 done, as an Eternal Will, or Eternal Justice, 
 Eternal Holiness — not to be looked at or talked 
 about, but to be produced in our own soul, and 
 brought into it, — to be conceived and born and 
 matured there. God is not directly reached by 
 our mind, or our imagination, but only an idea 
 or picture of God which we ourselves have 
 constructed out of the fragments of our experi- 
 ence — a crude, childish representation at the 
 best. It is not God, but only this rude image 
 of God we set before our mind's eye when 
 we pray to Him or think of Him, and try to 
 
INTERIOR FAITH. 159 
 
 love Him and find it so hard to succeed. No 
 wonder, then, that He seems so far away, so 
 uncertain, so intangible. 
 
 But it is not thus in their minds and in their 
 ideas and in their imaginings that the poor and 
 the simple seek God, and find and love Him, or 
 that we are to be content to seek Him. His 
 Eternal Will is really working in us and mingles 
 its activity with ours, just as the weight of our 
 bodies, which is no absolute quality of their 
 own, but simply the perennial influence of the 
 earth's attraction upon them, mingles with and 
 rules all their other proper activities. Take the 
 earth from under our feet by annihilation, and 
 all our sense of weight and downward tendency 
 would vanish with it ; take away God, and all 
 our sense of upward tendency, all our drawing 
 towards what is good and better would disappear 
 just as effectually. Conscience would be instantly 
 extinguished. God, who created our soul in His 
 likeness, and made it capable of indefinitely 
 closer assimilation to its archetype, is ever draw- 
 ing that soul towards Himself, towards every 
 kind of goodness and betterness, and this will or 
 attraction, which we call "conscience,"' is ever 
 mingling with and trying to dominate our 
 narrow, selfish will, and make it one with His. 
 While a body is impeded in its fall to earth, the 
 
l60 INTERIOR FAITH. 
 
 earth really, though imperceptibly, acts on it ; 
 but that action is not manifest till the body is 
 set free ; and the longer it falls, and so yields to 
 the earth's draw, the more violently and rapidly 
 is it drawn. So with God ; the more we yield 
 ourselves to that Eternal Will in us which draws 
 us towards Him, so much the more is His action 
 manifested and exercised in us, and the divine 
 life and being more largely mingled with and 
 made visible in our own life and being. Every 
 good action we do is a joint product ; it is the 
 child of God's will and our own co-operating 
 will ; and as married love is cemented more 
 firmly than ever when it is fruitful in offspring, 
 so by every good action, interior or exterior, 
 there is a new bond of union between God and 
 ourselves, and He permeates our soul more fully, 
 as light permeates water that gradually grows 
 clearer and purer. 
 
 And thus we get a sort of experimental know- 
 ledge of God which can never be got from 
 the most elaborate philosophical or theological 
 notions of His nature, nor even from the most 
 realistic meditations on His self-revelation in 
 Christ, which, after all, can only appeal to those 
 who have first known Him experimentally. 
 Gustate et videte — " Taste and see how sweet 
 He is,'' says the Psalm ; that is to say : Do not 
 
INTERIOR FAITH. l6l 
 
 reason about God, but go and let Him mingle His 
 life with your life, His will with your will, and 
 see what sweetness and strength He will bring 
 into your existence ; for " His ways are ways of 
 pleasantness, and all His paths are peace." 
 
 A man who by some chance had never seen 
 salt and had formed no idea of what it is like in 
 its crystallized state, might all the same know it 
 very practically as that which made sea-water 
 taste so differently from fresh ; and similarly 
 millions whose mental pictures and ideas of God 
 are absurd enough, who have the vaguest and 
 most erroneous notion of what He is in Himself, 
 considered separately as a substance apart, may 
 know Him very really and immediately as the 
 Will whose predominance within them makes 
 the difference between the sweetness of a good 
 life and the bitterness of a bad one. 
 
 This is the way in which our religion, by 
 being lived and put in practice, becomes a solid, 
 tangible reality, instead of a mere bundle of 
 ideas and arguments — it becomes a matter of 
 experience, something to be done, and realized 
 in the doing, instead of a matter of theory, to 
 be discussed and speculated about. It is not 
 difficult for a blind man to believe in the sun, 
 which he has never seen, when he is saturated 
 with its heat; and it is not hard for us to 
 
l62 INTERIOR FAITH. 
 
 believe in the unseen realities faith tells us of 
 when our whole life is permeated and trans- 
 formed by their influence. 
 
 And thus it is wisely said, that action is the 
 great cure for doubt ; not in the sense that fuss 
 and preoccupation distract our attention from 
 criticism and inquiry, and make us content to 
 take things for granted ; but because by acting 
 our faith, by yielding to God's urgency in our 
 conscience, we become better and purer in our- 
 selves, and our spiritual vision is cleared ; — for 
 obscurity is not in the truth, but in us. If 
 a man's mind and energy were paralyzed, as 
 sometimes happens, by scepticism as to his own 
 identity or as to the existence of what we call 
 an " external world," we should say to him : 
 " Leave your study and your books and go out 
 into God's fresh air ; live in the world, handle 
 it, use it, deal with it, and it will become a 
 reality to you again. You have been using one 
 faculty of your soul too exclusively, and neglect- 
 ing the others, on which its right exercise 
 depends directly or indirectly ; you are therefore 
 in a morbid, unbalanced state. Why trust your 
 philosophic reason so much, and yet distrust 
 those primitive and instinctive apprehensions 
 whose validity you inevitably, though uncon- 
 sciously, presuppose and assume in all your 
 
INTERIOR FAITH. 165, 
 
 reasonings. What does it matter to you that 
 your metaphysics cannot justify your instinctive 
 belief in your own identity, or in the reality of 
 all around you, if at the same time it tells you 
 that the practical effects and impressions will, 
 always be the same, and that your conduct must 
 be guided in all respects as before. Neither 
 human society nor God will acquit you for 
 living like a madman because, forsooth, your 
 philosophy did not square with your common 
 sense. If in attempting to fly you have broken 
 your neck, you cannot blame God, who never 
 made you for flying." 
 
 Thus we should argue with such a one, and 
 rightly ; for after all God gave us our minds, not 
 for metaphysics, but for the great practical 
 needs of life ; just as He gave us our feet, not 
 for dancing on tight ropes, but for walking on< 
 the flat earth. Have we a right to complain 
 that we cannot get a clear, metaphysical view 
 of God and our reKgion, if we have abundant 
 light to know Him as one whom we must obey, 
 even unto death, and if by obeying Him we 
 come to an ever deeper sense of His presence 
 and His will and His divine character. 
 
 And what is true about belief in God, is true 
 of the whole Catholic creed, which but develops 
 the notion of God as He has supernaturally 
 
t:64 interior faith. 
 
 revealed Himself to us in the religion of the 
 Incarnation. Our faith is never in danger so 
 long as it permeates and seasons our life ; it is 
 always in danger when it is a mere assent of the 
 mind and a profession of the lips. Intellectual 
 difficulties are like microbes in the air, fatal to 
 the sickly, but powerless against a healthy con- 
 stitution. If the heart be sound, difficulties may 
 enter the mind and lie there unsolved for years 
 or for ever, without raising a single real doubt, 
 or even disquieting the imagination ; for the 
 faith that has been felt and has proved itself in 
 action, has nothing to fear from speculation. 
 
 And all this drives home the theme we have 
 been mainly occupied with in our Conferences 
 namely, the danger of mere externality and 
 formalism in our religion, of being content with 
 passive orthodoxy and with frequenting the 
 sacraments and with conformity to the Church's 
 laws — as though these outward things were ends 
 in themselves, and not merely instruments to 
 develop the latent Christ that is in each of us ; 
 to develop the light of Christ in our minds and 
 the holiness of Christ in our wills and affections 
 and the zeal of Christ in our activity — in a 
 word, to develop the life of faith and make it 
 dominant over the life of sense. It was from 
 this life of faith that our first parents fell, 
 
INTERIOR FAITH. 165 
 
 yielding to the illusions of outward impressions 
 and appearances ; it is to this life of faith that 
 Christ restores us, using these same outward 
 impressions and appearances to convey to us 
 those truths which by nature they hide from us ; 
 curing our inward life by means of the outward, 
 the spirit by means of the flesh, which had 
 occasioned its ruin. 
 
 Yet it is not enough to believe in this cure, to 
 swear by it, to recommend it to others, unless 
 we use it on ourselves. It is by living our faith 
 that it strikes root deep in our heart; else in 
 time of temptation it will wither away. 
 
 And thus we complete, more or less roughly, 
 the exposition of that one thought which has 
 occupied us throughout. Having agreed to 
 view the Incarnation as God's design to restore 
 faith through sense, the invisible through the 
 visible, the spirit through the flesh, turning the 
 poison into an antidote ; we saw how this design 
 was extended in Catholicity, which, with its 
 outward and inward aspect, is the religion of 
 the Incarnation, of the Word made Flesh. And 
 seeing how this Divine conception might be 
 misapprehended in two ways, we first spoke 
 of the error of those who, despising the external 
 part of Christianity, think the internal all- 
 sufiicient. And as our purpose was domestic 
 
 M 
 
l66 INTERIOR FAITH. 
 
 improvement, and not polemical aggression, we 
 passed lightly over that well-trodden ground, 
 and turned to the contrary error of those who 
 are too satisfied with external Christianity ; who 
 forget that outward dogmas, rites, and practices 
 are btit means to interior life, which is the 
 principal end. Then, in detail, we saw how 
 this mistake might show itself in the misuse of 
 those outward helps, which are designed not to 
 save us any labour we are capable of, but to get 
 more labour out of us ; and first of all in regard 
 to sacraments and outer means of grace ; then 
 as to dogmatic teaching and outward means of 
 light. Then we saw how that help by which 
 God secures indefectibility to the visible Church 
 might in like manner be misused as an excuse 
 for listless apathy. Finally, we have insisted 
 directly on the all-importance of that inner life 
 of faith to which all this outward religion is but 
 instrumental, and which is established in us, not 
 by any working of our mind, in the way of 
 arguing or reasoning, or criticizing ; but by the 
 working of our will, where God's action mingles 
 with ours, and where we get to know Him 
 intimately and experimentally, and to talk with 
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