YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

THE LIBRARY OF THE
DIVINITY SCHOOL

THROUGH SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

NOVA ET VETERA : Informal Meditations. Crown
8vo, $s. net.
HARD SAYINGS : A Selection of Meditations and
Studies. Crown 8vo, $s. net.
THE FAITH OF THE MILLIONS : A Selection of .
Past Essays. Two Series. Crown 8vo, 5s. net each.
LEX ORANDI ; or, Prayer and Creed. Crown 8vo,
5^. net.
LEX CREDENDI : A Sequel to ' Lex Orandi '. Crown
8vo, 5J-. net.
THE SOUL'S ORBIT; or, Man's Journey to God.
Compiled and Edited, with additions, by M. D. Petre.
Crown 8vo, 4s. 6d. net.
A MUCH-ABUSED LETTER. Crown 8vo, 2s. 6d. net.
EXTERNAL RELIGION: Its Use and Abuse. Crown
8vo, 2s. 6d. net.
OIL AND WINE. Crown 8vo, $s. net.

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.,
LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA.

THROUGH SCYLLA
AND CHARYBDIS

OR

THE OLD THEOLOGY AND THE NEW

GEORGE TYRRE

E^L^

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1907
All rights reserved

"And now the time in special is, by privilege' to write and speak what
may help to the further discussing of matters in agitation. The temple
of Janus with his two controversal faces might now not unsignificantly be
set open. And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play
upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing
and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood
grapple ; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open
encounter. Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing."
" For who knows not that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty ; she
needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious ;
those are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power. "
Milton.

PREFACE
I AM not mad, most noble Festus," says S. Paul, " but
speak forth the words of sobriety and truth."
There is many a Festus to-day to whom a belief in the /
resurrection of Catholicism will seem the fruit either of ]
too much learning or of too little — either of an over
crowded, overwrought brain, or of a totally inadequate
experience of men and things.
It may well be that the most noble Festus himself is
not exempt from limitations and narrownesses ; that
secularity has its fanatics as well as clericalism. Nor
is even the aloofness of a Gallio the best critical
attitude. It is, in any case, certain that the " common-
sense" judgment of the majority, of the official, of the
average, is anything but final in matters that lie ever
so little below the surface of the ordinary and self-
evident. To fear that judgment, to work for it, to live
for it, is to be the slave of human respect — to forfeit
one's spiritual liberty and manhood.
But there is surely a " divine respect " whereof no
man need be ashamed, and to lack which is mere
insolence and self-sufficiency.
We cannot sift them out from the mass, but there
is always a minority, a saving leaven, whose judgment
is in truth the judgment of God, and before whom we
stand as before an invisible eye that watches and judges,

viii PREFACE 
condemns or acquits. Higher than the highest official
tribunal, its silent approval should be our greatest ambi
tion, its silent censure our deepest dread. To wish to
justify ourselves at its bar is no weakness ; to fear its
censure, no dishonour. For in it we recognise the
highest expression of the Divine within us — of our
better self, of our conscience.
To be heard by this silent few, it is unfortunately
necessary to be overheard by the loud multitude through
which they are scattered at wide intervals. One may
regret such publicity, but one cannot avoid it. Auricular
confession is not possible, and the bystanders may suffer
in consequence.
One may then laudably desire not to be counted a
fool by wise men, nor a knave by good men, nor a
fanatic by sober men. One may desire to show that the
cause for which he has lived and laboured all the best
years of his life, is not so preposterous, intellectually and
morally, as of late it has been made to appear by its
noisier and more aggressive representatives ; that he
has never been duped by the sophistries and puerilities
of its approved controversialists, but has rested on
graver and worthier reasons, however ill-defined and ill-
expressed ; that even if his defence of it should have
failed, he has not failed in courage or candour or
sincerity ; nor has he ever wittingly lent himself to the
defence of folly or imposture.
True, it has been, in all ages, a task of no little
subtlety and patience, this ever renewed effort (as it
must seem to many) to stretch the lion's skin of the
ideal over the rough-coated homeliness of the actual,
and to have one's attempts frustrated time after time

PREFACE ix
by some loud-mouthed betrayal. But subtlety is not
necessarily deceit, unless artist, poet, and prophet are
deceivers in their endeavour to read the deeper truth
that lies, in crude embryo, beneath the dulness and
uncouthness of everyday appearances.
If with this volume, as far as apologetic and defence
are concerned, I throw down my cards on the table, it
is not because I believe the game quite desperate, or
the hand quite impossible, but rather in the hope that,
hereafter, should reason and sobriety become audible once
more, some more skilful player may perhaps take them
up and turn them to better account. Nor again, is it
that self-respect plainly forbids one to repeat the offer of
gifts and services that are flung back in his face, time
after time. Scio cui servio — I know whom I am serving ;
nor do I mistake the man for the master. It is simply
that the task has grown beyond my tastes and mypowers ;
and needs stronger and rougher handling. I am no
surgeon, and where surgery is inevitable homoeopathy
is mere idling.
How far I have read, or misread, the corporate mind
of the Church ; how far I have rightly, or wrongly,
anticipated the line of its future developments, the
Church alone can tell as time goes on. As for my
conformity with the official interpreters of that cor
porate mind, which for them, as for me, is the supreme
rule of Catholic faith, it is twofold — outward and in
ward. Outward, so far as obedience can be stretched
without insincerity or untruthfulness, or that menda
cious silence which is constructive untruthfulness. In
ward, so far as it does not involve a sacrifice of the
only interpretation of Catholicism, which enables me

x PREFACE
personally, and many others, to regard the said officials
as having any claim whatsoever to our deference. Of
unconditioned obedience to an avowedly conditioned
authority, the Catholic religion knows nothing, whatever
the obsequious courtiers of absolutism may contend.
As M. George Fonsegrive has recently said :
"Aussi loin qu'on voudra pousser notre obedience
legitime, on nous trouvera dociles. Comme tous ceux
qui voudraient imposer une autorite qu'ils n'ont pas
nous trouveraient fiers.
" Nous ne sommes pas de ceux qui se courbent pour
mieux dominer.
" Nous sommes de ceux qui se redressent pour mieux
servir."
G. TYRRELL.
Great Warley, May, 1907.

CONTENTS

PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION . . I
II. REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 20
III. LEX ORANDI, LEX CREDENDI . 85
From The Month
IV. SEMPER EADEM (i) . . lo6
From The Month
V. SEMPER EADEM (il) . I33
From The Catliolic Wcr'.d
VI. MYSTERIES A NECESSITY OF LIFE 155
From The Month
VII. PRAGMATISM . . 191
From the Annates de Phil. Chritienne
VIII. RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY 200
From the Quarterly Review
IX. PROPHETIC HISTORY . 242
From the New York Review
X. THE CORPORATE MIND . 254
From the New York Review
XL REVELATION . . 264
XII. "THEOLOGISM" . . 3°8
XIII. "FROM HEAVEN, OR OF MEN?" 355
From // Rinnovamento

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
IT is with a certain sense of shame that I venture to
put forward these somewhat arid disquisitions at
a time when the world is flooded, as perhaps never
before, with theological literature, and when the ears of
the anxious inquirer are bewildered by a thousand con
flicting cries of "Lo ! here," and "Lo ! there." If, however,
I have been once more beguiled into the dusty arena of
apologetic and controversy, if my interest in the contest
has led me once more to abandon the serener part
of a quiet spectator, it has been solely in the cause of
quiet and serenity, and from the feeling that no honest
effort to quell the confusion should be neglected through
fear of adding to it. To suppose one could put an
" End to Controversy " were indeed a fond and foolish
notion, for the thing is not only impossible, but un
desirable. Controversy in some sense is the indis
pensable condition of our progress in the apprehension
of truth.
Truth being inexhaustible, controversies must be 1
eternal But they differ in kind, and the range between

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

the highest and the lowest is as that between heaven
and hell ; between the formal courtesy of a duel and
the brawling of savages. To end such a brawl or
scrimmage is not to end, but rather to forward a con
troversy. It is to call the combatants to order; to
remind them of the point at issue; to insist on the
rules of the game. Such intervention is in the interests
of peace, not of strife ; for the antagonism between
peace and controversy, however usual, is not necessary.
One need not be so sanguine as to suppose that his
voice will be heard in the din, or that if heard it will or
ought to be attended to. He may only feel that having
once said his say, were it only to vacancy, he is free to
indulge his bent and resume his seat with the sense of
having done what he could, and so won his right to be
a spectator of the doings of others.
The controversy dealt with in these pages is one of
those which reach their acutest stage in the Roman
communion, just because the principles engaged have
been at work there for a much longer time and on
a much wider scale than elsewhere, and have conse
quently been developed to their extremest conclusions
by the great logic-mill of life. Yet there is no Christian
communion that in taking over some portion, however ,
small, of Catholic doctrine, has not thereby committed
itself to the same conceptions of theology and revela
tion, and of their relations one to another. If less
extensively and less pressingly, yet all are to some
degree encumbered by the same difficulties, and must,
sooner or later, be forced to a similar criticism of
traditional assumptions. Hence these essays are of
much more than domestic interest. Were it not so

INTRODUCTION

they would never have been gathered together in this
form. For, indeed, I cannot expect that they will be
very welcome to those of my own communion who,
ignoring the existence of the problem to which they
are addressed, will regard my efforts as idle and un
called for, if not as wantonly mischievous. In the eyes
of such, the so-called "liberal" Catholic is one who
goes forth like a schoolboy with his catapult to break
and slay for the mere pleasure of breaking and slaying
— one to whom peace and security are a burden. They
will draw up a catena of his novelties and rash utter
ances and set them in sharp contrast over against
established utterances, so as to impress the uninstructed
many with a sense of his enormities ; but of the
sincerity and loyalty of his intentions, of the difficulties
which have forced him, all reluctant and kicking, from
his earlier and more comfortable to his later and less.
comfortable positions, never a word. For, indeed, the
confusion and disorder of those who march in the van
must often seem mere petulance and mutiny to those
in the rear, from whose sight the danger that threatens
the flank is as yet hidden. It would then be unreasonable
to expect my work to be anything but unacceptable to
those who do not believe in the proximity of a deluge
or the necessity of an ark. I address myself, therefore,
to those who believe in both, for the simple reason that
they are already afloat.
What I have here put together might be described as
the history of a religious, or rather of a philosophical,
opinion. For an opinion it is, and nothing more. I
am much more certain that some other opinions are
wrong than that this is right ; and if anyone will show

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

me a better, he shall be numbered among my bene
factors. Indeed, my principal motive in putting it
forward at all, is that someone may take it up, criticise
it and improve on it. For my method, I have simply
arranged the essays in their logical, which almost coin
cides with their chronological, order, and have prefixed
to each such brief explanations and corrections as
seemed necessary and sufficient to bring it into harmony
with the rest. By this means the process through which
I have reached my present position will appear as a
wavering, rather than as a straight line — a result that
should greatly facilitate the critic's task. For he will
see me labouring tediously to my conclusion through
a series of blunderings and amendments ; not leaping
to it intuitively with the perplexing rapidity of a
conjurer. To many, the conclusion in question will at first sight
seem entirely reactionary. For it is a return to the
earlier and stricter view as to the unchanging, unpro
gressive character of the apostolic revelation. It is a
repudiation of all attempts to mitigate the supposed
difficulties of this severer view by theories of develop
ment, dialectical or otherwise. It insists rigorously on
the theological contention that the dogmatic decisions
of the universal Church do not in any way add to or
amplify the revelation which it is their purpose but to
safeguard and reassert ; that, whatever be true of the
natural light of reason or of theological science, the
supernatural Light of the World does not shine more
brightly on us to-day than on the earliest Christian
generations. Understanding by "dogma" a religious
truth imposed authoritatively as the Word of God, not

INTRODUCTION

as a conclusion of theological reflection, it rejects the
very notion of the development, and still more of the
multiplication of dogmas, and acquiesces cordially in
the patristic identification of novelty and heresy.
May not such apparent reaction, however, be some
times a necessary step in a process of evolution? When
we make hypotheses that eventually break down, are we
not constrained for the moment to return to our point
of departure ?
In view of the seemingly manifest difference between
later and earlier Christian beliefs and institutions, it was
necessary to uphold the sacred principle of apostolicity
and antiquity by such hypotheses as the "disciplina
arcani," or that of " sameness in variety," as expounded
by Vincent of Lerins and by the schoolmen, and in
these latter days by Newman and others. The need of
such expedients was not felt in earlier days when the
differences in question were less marked, or in later days
when they were concealed through historical ignorance
and it was possible for the imagination to push back]
full-blown Catholicism into the apostolic age. But as
the history of the origins and progress of Christianity
became better known, the need of such explanations
grew more pressing ; and now that the insufficiencies
of the first attempts have been finally proved, we find
ourselves to-day seeking refuge in various developments
of the development theory. " In days within my memory,"
wrote Gladstone ("The Vatican Decrees," 1874), "the
constant, favourite, and imposing argument of Roman
controversialists was the unbroken and absolute identity
in belief of the Roman Church from the days of our
Saviour until now. No one, who has at all followed the

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

course of this literature during the last forty years, can
fail to be sensible of the change in its present tenour.
More and more have the assertions of continuous uni
formity of doctrine receded into scarcely penetrable
shadow. More and more have another series of asser
tions, of a living authority, ever ready to open, adapt,
and shape Christian doctrine according to the times,
taken their place."
These more recent hypotheses have been viewed with
keen distrust by conservative theologians, both inside
and outside the Roman Church. It is felt instinctively
that they are at bottom revolutionary ; that they do not
deepen and explain, but rather explain away the tradi
tional notion of apostolicity as the criterion of revealed
truth ; that they are conservative in sound rather than
in sense. With this sort of objection I am fully in
sympathy. In the main, conservative positions are the
spontaneous product of life and experience, and their
very irrationalities and incoherencies are due to the fact
that it is impossible to formulate life with any sort
of logical adequacy. Reflex theories framed in the
interests of such logical adequacy are necessarily some
what abstract, and involve the neglect of inconvenient
and irreducible tracts of experience. They often miss
the deeper reason that is covered by superficial un
reasonableness, and when the clearer view is put to the
test of life its poverty becomes apparent, and forces us
to confess that " the old is better." Hence, if this new
development theory does not save all the true values of
the ancient conception of the unity and immutability of
the faith, one or the other should be frankly abandoned,
nor should we carry on a new business under the old sign.

INTRODUCTION

Yet that, in spite of their instinctive reluctance, the
conservative theologians have yielded themselves more
and more passively to the force of this new current is,
I believe, due to the fact that they themselves are the
inheritors of mistaken concessions of principle derived
from the " liberalisings " of a bygone day, but now
hallowed by a sort of prescription. And if this be so,
remedy must be sought in going back still further to
the point of the original deviation ; behind the school
men ; behind perhaps Vincent of Lerins ; though it
cannot be denied that the more ancient view has
lived on, even to our own days, concurrently and in
consistently with these theories of dogmatic develop
ment. Accepting the apostolic revelation, not as an element
of a collective religious experience, not as the subject-
matter of theological reflection, but as itself a divinely
authorised, though rudimentary theological system, con
servative theologians regard it as an inherent though
fundamental part of the entire doctrinal system which
had been deduced from it dialectically. Of this deduced
development certain conclusions have from time to
time received the oecumenical approbation of the
Church. But these, as well as the revealed basis, are
considered as organic parts of the entire theological
system. And, therefore, so far as all its parts are
knitted together syllogistically, those that are divinely
authorised entail the acceptance of the rest under pain
of constructive heresy. Moreover, since theology and
all other departments of man's knowledge are (in ideal)
knit into one system, the indirect authority of revela
tion extends beyond theology to the utmost bounds of

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

science and history. Given that sacred scriptures and
ecclesiastical dogmas are to be taken as divinely
authorising certain philosophical and scientific catego
ries, and certain readings of history, there is no evading
these claims. If any one principle or admission
possesses a certain grade of authority, the whole sys
tem of its necessary antecedents and consequences
possesses the same.
But putting aside the conflicts thus involved between
revelation and science, there is a more serious objection
on the side of Catholic tradition. As against J. S,
Mill and others who deny the positive value of mere
a priori deduction, conservative theologians rightly
contend that the schoolboy who has mastered the first
book of Euclid is considerably more enlightened than
when he possessed the same knowledge only implicitly
in the definitions and principles. Though we look at
the same object, we see more with clearing glasses than
without. Granted even that nothing is "of faith"
to-day that was not contained implicitly in the apostolic
revelation, and has not been deduced from it by a
comparison of one revealed premiss with another, can
it be denied, at that rate, that we who possess not the
germ, but the fully expanded system, are far beyond the
early Church in point of supernatural enlightenment?
Is not any Roman Catholic to-day more supernaturally
enlightened than St. Bernard or St. Thomas, who denied
Mary's Immaculate Conception ? Must we not regard
the apostolic age, when all these deduced dogmas were
confused and indiscernible, as one of relative darkness
and chaos? Yet what would the Fathers, with their
continual appeal to the tradition of the apostolic sees,

INTRODUCTION

have thought of such a contention ? What would
St. Paul, with his belief in a proximate advent, have
thought of the view that his saving doctrine was but
germinal and rudimentary, and that a fuller light was
reserved for long ages to come ? Again, are not super
natural light and supernatural life correlative and pro
portionate ? Do not faith and charity go hand in hand,
co-factors of one grace? Yet can it be maintained
that there has been a development of charity, or that
its earliest manifestations were but rudimentary ?
On the other hand, the hopeless antagonisms between
revelation and science, entailed by the view in question,
are responsible for certain modern theories of doctrinal
development, which in the last resort are altogether
inconsistent with the patristic conception of the " de-_
posit of. .faith " and of the rights of ecclesiastical
dogma, and which practically deny revelation in the
ordinary sense of the word. For in assuming that we
cannot be bound to the obsolete categories in which
revelation and dogma were originally expressed, but
only to a belief in the same realities and experiences
as expressed in the categories of to-day, they must deny
that the apostolic " form of sound words " is (as the
Fathers taught) the highest form of dogmatic truth,
and must regard it as the least perfect, because the
earliest attempt to formulate the mysteries of faith.
Moreover, they assume, what antiquity never dreamt of,
that the realities and experiences which were the
subject-matter of the apostolic revelation are still
accessible to our investigation, and can serve as the
criterion of our dogmatic restatements, just as the
abiding phenomena of Nature can be used to test our

io SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

scientific restatements. In this view, revelation does
not mean the inspired record of a past supernatural
experience, but the steady continuance, of that expe
rience, ever inspiring new and more adequate ex
pressions of itself, and rendering earlier expressions
obsolete and worthless. Philosophically alluring as
this notion may be, it is not a deeper and clearer ex
planation of the patristic notion, but another notion
altogether. If the conservative idea of merely dia
lectical development subjects the ' Present to the Past
to the detriment of all scientific and historical liberty,
this subjects the Past to the Present, to the utter
evaluation of the traditional appeal to scripture and
the apostolic age.
Out of these difficulties there seems to be no issue
except, perhaps, by a careful reconsideration and
criticism of the engaged notions and principles — re
velation, dogma, theology. Were it possible to show
that underneath the obvious sense of revelational and
dogmatic utterances there lay a deeper sense, a truth
of an entirely different order ; were it possible, in the
light of the comparative study of religions and of an
immensely deepened psychological insight, to give
a more real and undeniable value to the notion of
" prophetic truth " than I can claim to have done, then
it seems to me we might perhaps be able to reconcile
perfect fidelity to the ancient principles of Catholic
tradition with an equal fidelity to the fullest exigencies
of scientific truth and moral truthfulness ; we might,
once and for all, break free from that network of
equivocations and insincerities, and suppressions and
false suggestions in which centuries of apologetic and

INTRODUCTION

controversy have entangled us — not through any con
stitutional untruthfulness inseparable from the very
nature of religion, but through that same defective
criticism of principles which in every department of
thought has made the conquest of truth so arduously
painful, so wholesomely humiliating.
For then, in the case of prophetic utterances, whether
revelational or dogmatic, we should be able to retain
" the forms of sound words," not as mere formulas, not
as voided of all sense, but as expressive of a deeper and
other meaning than that conveyed immediately to the
common understanding. We should retain them as of
their own nature immutable and irreformable ; we
should repudiate all demands for restatement ; all
suggestions of development — dialectical or otherwise.
Could we regard the apostolic revelation not as a reflex,
thought-out life-theory, but as the spontaneous self-
expression of a profound religious experience; as a
prophetic vision of the Kingdom of God directed to the
orientation of the spiritual life, and enshrining a
mysterious truth independent of those other truths
used for its illustration ; could we take the Church's
teaching more strictly as simply protecting and re
asserting, but in no wise as adding to or developing
revelation ; could we do this, we should then certainly
avoid the perplexing consequence of allowing a great
supernatural advantage to later and more cultured ages
over earlier and less cultured, or to the theologically
wise and prudent over the rude and simple to whom the
Gospel was more especially preached.
On the other hand, in claiming no more than illustra
tive value for the language of prophecy and revelation,

12 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS  ___
and no more than protective and reassertive value for
that of ecclesiastical dogma, we should at once liberate
theology and all the sciences with which it is necessarily
implicated, from their baleful entanglement with another
genus of knowledge altogether — from Revelation and
Dogma. These would be regarded no longer as a part
of theology but as its subject-matter; they would
control it not as statement is controlled by statement,
but as statement is controlled by fact. Thanks to such
control, as well as to that exercised by the laws of
reason, there could be no possible place for theological
indifferentism. Truth would remain as much as ever an
obligation of the intellectual conscience ; unity, as much
as ever the goal of intellectual effort. But no true
supernatural advantage would, in defiance of the Gospel,
be attached to merely intellectual enlightenment ; the
fullest faith would be free to the crowds, and in no sense
the privilege of a theological aristocracy.
Theology could then be recognised as belonging
simply to the institutional part of Christianity, and as
governed by the same necessary laws of change and
development and accommodation. There would be no
inconvenience in allowing that its later phases may con
demn the earlier to obsolescence ; or that the Church
of to-day is theologically more enlightened than that of
the Apostles. No longer holding to revelation and
dogma as mere theology, we could rid ourselves frankly
of all those fallacious " germ-and-organism " metaphors
which attempt to describe spiritual in terms of physio
logical development — the higher in terms of the lower.
For whereas we can predict exactly that an egg will
result in a chicken, or an acorn in an oak, or that a boy

INTRODUCTION 13

will grow into a man, we can never predict how the boy
will (as we say) turn out ; what his experiences will be
from day to day, or how he will arrange them in his
mind and deal with them in his conduct ; how he will
build up his own mental and moral character ; what
heroes, what ideals or standards he will set before him
self. Physically, men are of the same species ; spiritually,
each is a species apart. And so with the collective
spirit and its developments ; . so with sciences and arts
and institutions, and societies and religions. On their
spiritual side, and so far as they are freely self-forming,
their future evades all prediction, since it is not con
tained in or predetermined by their present. Only so
far as they have also a material side which brings them
under the general uniformities of nature, can we foretell
certain eventualities common to their class. Spiritual
development is not a process of passive unfolding, of
which each step is rigorously determined by the pre
ceding ; but a process of active reconstruction, con
ditioned by the chance materials furnished through the
quite incalculable succession of experiences. As in the
interests of taste and symmetry we have to arrange and
break up and rearrange the bouquet we gather in a walk
by the hedgerows, so the growth of a science, or of any
arrangement of gathering experience, involves periodic
revolutions, changes of method, revision of categories,
as steps in the very process of its development. The
old is continually being swallowed up by, and forgotten
in, the new. This must hold good of theology, if
it is to be a true, living, and fruitful science. But
it cannot possibly hold good of it, if theology is
bound to unalterable revelation and dogma as to an

i4 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

inherent part of itself, and not merely as to its subject-
matter. It is therefore to the careful disentanglement of
revelation and theology, and to the right adjustment of
their relations of mutual dependence and independence,
that we may perhaps look for a deliverance from our
present grievous embarrassments.
But not only will such suggestions seem intrusive and
wantonly subversive to those conservative theologians
who are not sensible of any such embarrassment ; who,
as a wit has said, are too engrossed in disputes about
the papering of the attics to be aware that the basement
of their house is in flames. They will seem ten times
more futile to their most extreme opponents, who to a
large extent share their " all or nothing " view of the
situation, but decide in favour of nothing, and who are
as crude in their easy pessimism as those in their supine
optimism. To such, Catholicism is as a tree that for long centuries
has spread its protecting branches over the soil from
which it sprung, but which now lies prostrate and up
rooted, its vitality doomed to speedy exhaustion. That
knaves and sophists should plead so desperate a cause,
and weave specious subtleties and evasive arguments in
its favour, is to them altogether accountable ; but that
any sane and honest man should do so, they can only
explain by some blameless ignorance or some uncon
scious bias of the affections. " Can it be," they ask,
" that an intelligent man who knows not merely this or
that fragment, but the whole of the heavy indictment
against Catholicism, both as a system on paper and as a
process in history, both in theory and in practice, can

INTRODUCTION 15

still find or w'sh to find a word in its favour ? — can he
honestly believe that he is serving the ends of truth and
morality, of religion and civilisation in pleading such a
cause ? If he is not consciously dishonest, if he is not
a frivolous paradox-monger, must we not look for some
unconscious bias to account for such Quixotry? For
what can be more Quixotic than to defend those who
regard one's defence as a wanton attack, and who, like
delirious patients, try to strangle those who would serve
them ? Such defenders have never been wanting to the
Church, but their fate has been ever the same, and
proves how little they can claim to understand or repre
sent her. Securus judicat orbis terrarum — the obvious,
the surface, presentment of Catholicism, as accepted
both by the official Church and by her enemies, is
surely more reliable than the dreams of these dreamers
scorned by both alike.
" Must we not (they say) seek an explanation else
where ? "
Perhaps in that persistence of psychological habit,
reinforced by the continual suggestion and auto-sugges
tion of religious practices and observances, which gives
an artificial reality and solidity to the beliefs of our
childhood, sufficient to withstand every assault of reason
and to lend them the semblance of immediate intui
tions ?
Perhaps in an incurably falsified conscience, also
the result of early education, which deprives a man of
his full mental freedom and makes him turn instinct
ively from certain questionings as from a sin of the
deepest dye?
Perhaps in that almost inevitable, often quite un-

16 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

conscious, egotism, or parochialism, or provincialism
which makes it psychologically difficult, if not im
possible, for vigorous and self-assertive natures not to
believe their cause to be the best cause, and their
country the best country, and their religion the best
religion in the whole wide world ?
Perhaps in the laudable tenderness and patient affec
tion that grown men and women may feel towards
the nurse of their childhood, who now sits by the ingle,
aged and paralysed, blind and deaf, and tells over the
old tales that thrilled their infant minds ; and, forgetful
of intervening years, threatens and scolds and com
mands, while they on their part yield her a love and
reverence and service, due rather to what she has done
for them in the past than to what she can dp for them
in the present or future ?
Perhaps in the personal experience of moral and
spiritual benefit mediated through the ordinances and
ministrations of the Church, and uncritically viewed as
proof of her supernatural character, but which are
really due to the goodwill, fidelity, and moral industry
of the person in question, who would have felt the same
benefit in the energetic practice of any other religion ;
and who, inverting cause and effect, credits his moral
advance to the exercise of his religious duties ?
Perhaps in a similarly fallacious conviction that the
Catholic Church has been in no wise the effect and
product, but purely the cause, the mother and guardian
of our civilisation, and that with her fall we should
necessarily relapse into moral, social, and political bar
barism ; that she is the sole barrier against the threaten
ing deluge of godless materialism ?

INTRODUCTION 17

Perhaps in the fact that whether as a convert to
Catholicism, or as a professed apologist of its claims,
one is deeply committed to it as to a thesis for which
one has fought long and suffered much with a tenacity
fed and strengthened by opposition, and which one
could not abandon without a confession of failure such
as no wise man will make even to himself?
In these and a hundred similar suppositions many
will seek some explanation of the adhesion of honest
men to the Catholic Church, in the face of what must
seem to them an overwhelming " cumulative argument "
against its claims. The problem exists only for the
few non-Catholics who, being capable of appreciating
that argument, are honestly convinced by it ; and only
in regard to the equally few Catholics of like capability
and honesty who, having faced it, are not convinced by it.
Now, while I might easily demur to and discuss
these contentions and explanations, I prefer to grant
that they are largely just and entirely plausible ; but at
the same time to deny that their negative conclusion is
justified. From the statement : if A is true, B is true,
I may not infer, A is not true, therefore B is not true.
It does not follow that because the ordinary apologetic
supports break down Catholicism must fall. It may be
found to have stronger and more massive pillars and
buttresses than earlier apologists either needed or
suspected, to which, rather than to their dialectical de
fences, its vitality and endurance are to be ascribed.
I propose, therefore, in the following chapter to indi
cate some few reasons typical of the sort which weighs
with thoughtful men in favour of the Church, and makes
it impossible for them to be satisfied with any poorer

18 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

and less comprehensive synthesis that evades the diffi
culties of Catholicism by a drastic uprooting of wheat
and tares; by a reflex simplification which overlooks
large tracts of inconvenient experience and ignores
many of what comparative study shows us to be the
essential and universal characteristics of religion.whether
personal or institutional.
Truth is not simple except when the mind deals with
its own creations, with forms and measures and abstrac
tions. In regard to the concrete, the real, the living, in
regard to so infinitely complex a phenomenon as the
religious process, the obvious is sure to be the false.
The judgment of the orbis terrarum is the safest as to
matters of appearance, and of direct perception, but in
proportion as inference and reflection are demanded we
must look from the many to the few. For this reason
we should be profoundly mistrustful of any reflex
judgment for or against Catholicism which commends
itself quickly to the multitude — of all common-sense,
straightforward, rough and ready views of the matter,
And therefore I do not attempt any sort of complete*
ness or logical coherence in the following notes and
suggestions. I do not pretend that any or all of them
together ought to settle the question in favour of
Catholicism, still less of Roman Catholicism ; but only
that as a fact they do settle it for many who are neither
ignorant nor self-deceived as to the difficulties of their
position, and who on the strength of such considerations
can be satisfied with it and with no other. I would also
commend them to those who dream of brand-new syn
theses by which Christianity may be able to cut itself
off sharp from an inconvenient past, and to start fresh

INTRODUCTION ig

without any encumbrance of tradition. I would ask
them to consider whether such an idea is not in flagrant
contradiction with all we now know of the laws of life
and growth ; and whether in the light of such deepened
knowledge we must not confess that Erasmus was
profoundly right and Luther profoundly wrong, and
that had the counsels of the former prevailed, the cause
of religion and culture, thrown back equally by Reforma
tion and Counter-Reformation, would have advanced/
incalculably further than it has at present advanced.
Nor am I in any wise moved by the knowledge that
the larger and more humanistic type of Catholicism has
always been represented by a feeble and oppressed
minority, and branded with the disapprobation of the
reigning average. The same might be said of the
prophets of Israel and of the pioneers of progress in
every department of human life. They do not claim to
represent the average, or to speak in its name. They
claim to see more deeply into the mind of the Church,
to understand its implications more clearly, to foresee
its future developments more distinctly and, therefore,
to be not less but more loyal than the average to the
Spirit of Christ, of which she is the imperfect embodi
ment Deferential within the limits of conscience and
sincerity to the official interpreters of her mind, they
must, nevertheless, interpret such interpretations in
accordance with the still higher and highest canon of
Catholic truth ; with the mind of Christ. It is He who
sends us to them ; not they who send us to Him. He
is our first and our highest authority. Were they to
forbid the appeal, their own dependent authority would
be at an end.

CHAPTER II
REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM
(0
ONE of the results of the comparative study of
religions has been to convince us that religion
Is just as necessary and universal a factor of general
culture and civilisation as language is ; that it is
" natural " to man in just the same sense. Like language
or the arts of life, in all its infinite varieties and degrees
of development, it is governed by one and the same
end, and by certain generally uniform characteristics
and methods. Gradually the genealogical tree, in
which the parentage of religions each and all may
be traced, is advancing towards completion, and shows
us that the religious process is but an integral part of
the great historical process of human civilisation and
development. This conception confirms rather than denies the
Catholic tenet of the Logos, which gives light to every
man coming into this world, not one of whom is left
without sufficient means of salvation. And since that
Light, at once transcendent and immanent, at once
above and within Nature, guides all men to one and the
same supernatural end, it is plain that the process is at
once, and without contradiction.natural and supernatural,
20

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM

As little as one civilisation is as good as another,
though all civilisations aim at the utmost plenitude of
life ; so little is one religion as good as another, though
all religions aim at the same plenitude of truth and
righteousness and of communion with the Divine. They
differ infinitely in their methods and in the degree of
their actual attainment. Nor is it the difference between
the babe, the boy, the youth, and the man ; for spiritual
development is not like organic development — as has
been already explained. The need they would satisfy,
the end they would serve is the same ; but it is under
stood with different degrees of truth and explicitness ;
and the means are determined partly by chance con
ditions, partly by free choice.
Yet in spite of this the religious process is one ; and
the unity of the need and of the end on one hand, and
the unity of the human spirit on the other, secure a
certain uniformity characterising all religions ; rendering
the definition of " a religion " possible, however difficult,
and making it practically easy to recognise a religion as
such when we see it.
Now Catholicism with its priesthood, its sacraments,
its ritual, its dogmas, its tradition, and all their uses and
abuses is plainly a " natural " religion in the same sense
as Judaism, Christ's own religion, was. It as plainly takes
its place as a member in the universal family of
religions, and presents the unmistakable family features.
It is as evidently a product of the same general process
by which God is bringing man into conscious relation
ship with Himself.
Now one of the reasons for trusting Catholicism is
because it is in this sense " natural " ; because it is a

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

growth, a part of a larger growth — Nascitur non fit.
Its conformity to the psychological laws that govern
the growth of religion everywhere proves it to be a
product of those laws, which after all are God's laws.
So far it is from God, and not, like thought-out systems,
from man. There is a huge presumption in favour of what
is "natural." Its adaptation to human nature in its
entirety, to every factor of man's being, to every
level of his culture, proves the Church's divinity — not
as their proximity to rivers proves God's miraculous
care for the needs of great cities, but as what is natural,
in the adequate sense, is thereby proved to be divine.
A true religion is a growth and not a manufacture.
The so-called founders of new religions have one and all
sprung from old religions, which they have but modified
and stamped with their individuality. They have been
reformers, not creators. What seems the most original
and independent religious experience of the solitary
mystic has invariably some historical religion behind it,
of which it is the unconscious product. Our seemingly:
simplest ideas and words have been elaborated by
generations of organised human life. Revolutions have
their own place, not in organic, but in spiritual develop
ments, and do not break continuity. As little could
one man create a new religion as a new language. A
Chaucer, a Shakespeare, a Dante may at most inaugu
rate a new philological epoch.
But the true revolution must be wholly constructive ;
destructive only of what is destructive. It must take up
in a higher synthesis all the truth and experience of the
old system. It must obey, and not defy, the natural
law of its development. Else continuity is broken. For

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 23
reasons that may presently appear it seems to us
Catholics that the Protestant synthesis is too crude and
hasty a simplification in many ways, too artificial and
reflex ; that it has so far broken itself off in several re
spects from the natural religious process and suffered
grave impoverishment.
On the other hand, what is so often used as a reproach
against Catholicism — its various affinities with non-
Christian religions, with Judaism, and Graeco-Roman,
and Egyptian paganism, and all their tributaries — seems
to us one of its principal glories and commendations.
We like to feel the sap of this great tree of life in our
veins welling up from the hidden roots of humanity.
To feel so, to possess this sense of solidarity with all
the religions of the world ; to acknowledge that they
are all lit, however dimly, by the same Logos-light which
struggles, unconquered, with even their thickest darkness
— this is to be a Catholic ; this is to rise above exclu-
siveness and sectarianism, without in any wise falling
into indifferentism; this is to be His disciple Who,
believing salvation to be of the Jews, found such faith
in the Samaritan and the Gentile as He found not in
Israel. To have thus recognised the " natural " character of
religion and of Christianity and of Catholicism is no
novelty, but only an " explicitation " of the thought of
the greater prophets, of Christ, of St. Paul, of Tertullian,
of Origen, of Clement of Alexandria — a thought which
had to struggle long with opposing tendencies, tra
ditional opinions and sentiments that have only gradu
ally yielded and made way for its full manifestation in
these latter days.

24 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

I am not concerned to defend this conception of
Catholicism as a natural and therefore a divine religion
against those friends or foes of the Church who, using
the term " natural " in a now unintelligible and obsolete
sense, choose to stigmatise the view as rationalistic,
naturalistic. I am only stating a consideration which,
rightly or wrongly, weighs with certain minds in favour
of Catholicism as distinguished from more artificial
and reasoned-out syntheses — the products of man's
freedom, rather than of God working, through the
universal laws of man's nature. CO
Allied with and dependent on this consideration there
are others. Catholicism is characterised by a certain
irrationality, incoherence, and irregularity — a certain
irreducibleness to exact and systematic expression —
which, far from being scandalous, is another presump
tion in its favour. As an illustration we might point to
its Breviary or its Ritual — manifestly composite works —
wrought at different times by hands guided in no two
cases by quite the same ideas and principles, or by
an adequate grasp of the exact meaning of preceding
efforts. To criticise the result as guided by one stead
fast aim and rule, to ask why this and why that, is to
seek for a consistency that does not and could not exist
in a product of spiritual development, whose regularity
must be continually broken up by the accumulation of
fresh experience, to be reconstituted by a new con
structive effort. Catholicism as a religion of the people
must in its growth betray the same sort of irregularities
as the other co-factors of civilisation, as language or

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 25
social custom or traditional political institutions. It
requires two principles for its development ; one, a
principle of wild luxuriance, of spontaneous expansion
and variation in every direction ; the other, a principle
of order, restraint, and unification, in conflict with the
former, often overwhelmed by its task, always more or
less in arrears. The tangle and undergrowth of the
forest is always more than the woodmen can cope with.
The growth and fertility is not from them, but from
God through Nature. They by taking thought can but
secure the conditions of Nature's free play and fullest
fruitfulness. By understanding and obeying her laws,
Art and Cultivation can win her richer favours. Were
they to fail wholly or in part, the forest would not
forthwith disappear, but would at worst return to its
primitive wildness. Thus its very wildnesses and bar
barisms point to the natural character of Catholicism,
and distinguish it from all planned-out philosophical
religions, whose over-trimness is an indication of their
poverty and exhaustion ; for nothing that lives and
grows can keep its shape long. Its durableness is
therefore not dependent merely on the wisdom of its
theologians, or the prudence of its officers, or this or
that theory of its essence, or this or that form of its
organisation. As long as a fibre of its roots remains
anywhere, it is capable of renewing itself and spread
ing abroad over the face of the earth. It has the
durability and indestructibleness of the natural as
against the transitoriness of the artificial. Because it
is a natural religion Catholicism is full of compromises.1
1 Cf. Sir J. Stephen's Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography, p. 334. The
Port-royalists.

26 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS 
In all the opposing elements of its syncretism there is
a part-truth to which the religious spirit clings in spite
of logic, and wisely. For a syncretism, a more or less
violent forcing together of incompatibles, is the pre
liminary stage of an harmonious synthesis which can
never be finally and fully realised just because new
elements are ever coming in. Ground one against the
other the fragments lose their angles in time, and
approximate to coherence and continuity. Art can
compel a premature and poorer unification by throwing
out this or that recalcitrant member of the various
antitheses; but God in Nature works slowly and
surely through the unimpeded struggle of opposites.
Now it would be paradoxical to say that the greater
incoherence of Catholicism were without more ado an
argument in its favour ; or that the mere completeness
and tidiness of other systems were fatal to their claims.
Nature is orderly ; chaos is incoherent and not divine.
But when the order is suggested by experience and
waits on experience it can never be finished and logic
ally satisfactory ; when it is complete and logical it
means that irreducible tracts of experience have been
artificially excluded from the synthesis.
True, the Anglican reproaches Roman Catholicism
precisely because of its logical and artificial unity, and
uses the above argument in his own favour. But first
of all, minor controversies apart, Anglicanism is far
more of the Catholic than of the Protestant type, and
belongs to the same tradition more or less. Secondly,
the objection identifies Roman Catholicism with its
present dominant theological system, or its present
ecclesiastical polity. These are but examples of the

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 27
incoherence in question ; parts of the whole, factors
in the syncretism, elements at war with other elements ;
not to be thrown out but reduced and penetrated by
the vital principle of Catholicism. Their persistence
must be explained, their essential values must be saved,
before their husks are discarded. (iii)
Again ; viewing religion as a natural process, as a
factor in the general process of man's rational and
spiritual development, it seems to us that in Catholic
Christianity that process attains, not indeed to an im
possible finality, but to a crisis that begins a new epoch.
For in it the mystical process and the " moral " process
(understanding " moral " widely, as including the
" ought " of intellect, feeling, and will) run into one and
recognise their former separateness as merely the result
of imperfect enlightenment. The mystical need of
conscious communion and self-adjustment with the
super-sensible and superhuman world, to which the
sensible and human world is felt to be subordinate,
seems distinct from the " moral " need until the character
of the superhuman order is realised as " moral," and till
the voice of Conscience — moral, intellectual, and aesthetic
— is accepted as the Voice of God. Nor till then is it
felt that obedience to every sort of conscience puts man
in harmony with the universe of being, and is the very
essence and inwardness of religious worship and sacri
fice. Of the two, the religious interpretation of
" morality " is a greater gain for mankind than the
" moral " interpretation of religion. It is more im
portant that the "moral" life should gain a mystical

28 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

height and supernatural sanction as a life of union with
the eternal and universal principle of all being than
that the religious life should be, at once, levelled up and
flattened down to the plane of "moral" symbolism.
In Catholicism, Conscience — moral, intellectual, and
aesthetic — is raised to the throne of God, and worship
ped with all that religion has ever offered in honour of
its divinities. The whole system, centred round the
crucifix, invests such "morality" with the awe and
reverence due to the mysterious all-pervading, all-sus
taining Will of the Eternal,
Here, then, it seems to us that the rationalising anti-
mystical tendencies of many other Christian bodies are
impoverishing, both in their narrowed conception of
morality as merely ethical, and in their reduction of
religion to morality ; and that they overshoot the mark
in their revolt against the residues of non-ethical pagan
religiousness not yet subdued in the Catholic synthesis.
As for systems of independent conduct-morality they
have yet to prove their ability to do what the Church
has so often done on so large a scale for the masses.
The ethical code she enforced was often more barbaric
than Christian ; yet she did enforce it, and precisely by
giving a mystical and religious depth to ethical require
ments, however crudely understood. (iv)
Again ; it seems to us that Catholicism is, more than
J other systems, a religion of the whole man, body, soul,
and spirit ; 1 a religion for every stage of his culture, and
1 This conception is powerfully developed by Mr. W. J. Williams, in his
volume Newman, Pascal, and Loisy (Griffiths), with which I find myself
unreservedly in agreement.

 REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 29
not for one only ; for every mood of his variability, and
not only for the highest ; for every sort of man, and not
merely for a religious, ethical, intellectual, or social
aristocracy; that it enters as an organic part into the
whole process of civilisation with its multitudinous
interests ; that it makes us sensible of our solidarity with,
and dependence on, the whole of humanity, past, present,
and to come ; all this, of course, in virtue of principles
and ideals to which it has never been wholly faithful or
unfaithful, and in spite of discordant elements in the
Graeco-Roman paganism over which the Christian leaven
can never be fully victorious.
It is a religion of the whole man. A made and
thought-out religion is governed by some theoretic and
abstract view of man and of the hierarchic order of his
faculties and exigencies. Not so, one that is slowly
being shaped by the play of man's conflicting require
ments over a world-wide area. In Catholicism we
find the competing claims of his intellect, his feelings,
his heart, his senses asserting themselves more or less
discordantly and, as it were, fighting their way towards
an unattainable ideal of harmonious agreement. We
find mysticism and intellectualism at war ; practical and
contemplative religion looking askance at one another ;
externality and inwardness contending for the mastery ;
the asceticism of John despising the humaneness of Jesus.
No interest of man's complex nature has been disre
garded or unrepresented in deference to a forced and
premature unification.
The modern psychologist, with his deepened know
ledge of the sub-conscious self, of the nature and play
of habit, suggestion and automatism, must confess that

30 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

instinctively and experimentally Catholicism has always
acknowledged and utilised these psychological laws and
principles, which thought-out syntheses were bound to
ignore as long as they were unrecognised by contem
porary science. Perhaps nothing is more characteristic
of the difference between Catholicism and that sort of
scholastic Protestantism which ripened into the cold
eighteenth-century deism than the attitude of the two
systems towards the sub-conscious, towards that deep
and wide-spreading basis of the visible emergent peak
of our clear consciousness. Both accepted the crude
definition of man as " a reasoning animal," but while
Protestantism applied it to the condemnation of all
that was not reason, Catholic experience ignored and
belied it.
Thus Catholicism has always known, not theoretically
but experimentally, the use and value of suggestion and
auto-suggestion in the formation of habits good or evil,
religious or otherwise. It has known the need of con
tinually building-up and perfecting a complex mechan
ism of habit as the condition of a fuller and more
fruitful exercise of free conscious action. It has learnt
the utility of certain deliberately induced narrowings
and concentrations of the field of vision, and of the
range of interests, without which nothing great has
ever been accomplished, and to which we owe the
effectiveness not only of saints and prophets, but of
scholars, discoverers, heroes, and conquerors. A psycho
logically false spirituality, in despising these almost
mechanical bases and conditions of free origination,
has fallen to the ground through striving to fly without
wings. Suggestion, auto-suggestion, and fixed ideas

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 31
are spiritually indifferent. They guarantee nothing for
the truth or falsehood, goodness or badness, of what
they impose upon us. But the True and the Good
must be so imposed on us by ourselves or by our
educators; must be worked into the mechanical and
automatic basis of our rational life, if they are to
fructify and not to be as seed sown by the wayside.
And in the same way, Catholicism has learnt to
recognise, allow and provide for the non-religious
temperament, and for the religious temperament in its
non-religious moods, in its states of mere potentiality,
in its rudimentary stages of development. It has learnt
that though men ought to, men cannot, pray with
out ceasing ; that in the best of us the spirit slumbers
and sleeps through many of our waking hours ; that in
most of us its moments of full self-consciousness are
few and far between ; and that in the dull intervals we
are left to the guidance of habits, formed or deepened
in those better moments. Catholicism recognises a
certain lower goodness in these semi-conscious, auto
matic or merely mechanical species of activity, partly
as disposing towards, partly as resulting from, intelligent
self-chosen acts of goodness. When the mind is barren
and feeling is dead, mechanical prayers and religious
practices are not so merely and utterly mechanical but
that they are also exercises and acts of conscience and
freewill — earnests of " the better " we fain would offer
if we could, in " the day of small things," when the flax
smoulders without flame, and the bruised reed cannot lift
itself upright. Catholicism refuses to despise the half
because it is not the whole, or to confound little with
nothing. In the bare-walled conventicles of pure

32 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

reason, if the soul cannot do her best she can do nothing.
In a Catholic temple she can do her second best or her
third. There are altars to visit and candles to light,
and beads to finger, and litanies to mutter, and the
crucifix to gaze on, and a hundred little occupations not
less good because others are so much better, or because
abuses are easy and frequent. In short, man is psycho
logical as well as spiritual — mostly the former ; and in
Catholicism he finds a lower psychological religion
ministerial to the higher and spiritual ; and this, not
designed, or planned, or even quite acknowledged, but
shaped by the necessities of humanity in the mass and
on the average. (v)
Similarly, Catholicism stands out as a religion of the
whole man against the pedantry of a purely reasonable
religion that would abolish the luxuriant^-doubtless at
times too luxuriant — wealth of symbolism in favour
of a " ministry of the word " alone, taking " word " in its
baldest literal sense ; and that would limit the converse
between God and man to what can be uttered in spoken
or written language.
Yet all language is poetical in its origin. It tries
to express the whole inner state — not merely the truth,
but the emotions and feelings in which the truth is
embedded ; for the so-called " faculties " — mind, will,
feeling — have not yet been marked off from one
another by abstract thought. It is only later that the
utility of exact ideas and corresponding verbal signs
leads to prosaic precision, and turns what once were
living metaphors into sober measurements. But outside
this region of strict usefulness, and wherever man would

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 33
utter his whole spirit or receive the whole utterance
of another spirit, the language of poetry becomes in
dispensable ; for inward feelings are not directly com
municable, but only suggestible through their outward
and natural signs. We know them in ourselves alone ;
in others we can see but their symptoms. Because
religion is of the whole soul and of no single faculty,
because it springs immediately from the deep root of our
nature, and not from any one of the branches, therefore
the converse of man with God, of the finite spirit with
the infinite, must of necessity be in the symbolic lan
guage of poetry ; for it is the indistinct utterance of all
that man knows, feels, and wills about God, and of all
that God knows, feels, and wills about man. But not
only is all exact lingual expression, but all possible
lingual expression, inadequate to such fulness of utter
ance. In Religion as in Nature, God speaks to every
sense with a thousand voices, and bids us answer Him
again, as far as we can, in His own tongue. There
is, then, no small pedantry of intellectualism in the
notion that worship in spirit and in truth must neces
sarily be conducted in circumstances of sought-out
plainness, and divested of all appeal to the senses, the
imagination, and the emotions ; of all sacraments and
symbols — a worship which would suffer no more of God's
message to enter the soul than can find its way through
the narrow slit of common sense, and clothe itself in the
stiff primness of colourless prose. Of such worship
Christ and His apostles — Jews as they were and lovers
of the Temple with its soul-stirring symbolism — knew
nothing, nor has any religion ever thriven long on such
a fallacy of puritanism strictly adhered to. If it has

34 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

exercised a soul -compelling power over the masses, it is
only because it has, in fact, appealed to more than the
mere understanding through psalms and hymns, and
through a preaching that was impassioned as well as
argumentative; that addressed the eye as well as the ear;
that spoke by glances, gestures, intonation, and all the
symbolism of will and emotion. A strict " rationalis
ing" of worship would, therefore, mean an infinite
impoverishment of the language of religion. One need
not deny the advantages of a vernacular liturgy. Yet
it may be that the mere " dumb-show " of a high mass,
with all its suggestions of mystery, faith, and reverence,
speaks more fully and directly to the spirit of man ;
does more for the right attuning of his soul, than could
the most exquisitely balanced theological discourse on
the sacrifice of the altar.
Here, again, it seems to us that the conservative
position, as the product of the slowly accumulated ex
perience of multitudes and centuries, has probably
more to say for itself than plain common sense can
see at a glance or two. (vi)
Again, under the alluring semblance of simplification
and a return to the spirit of a Gospel preached to the
poor and unlettered, puritanism seems to us in some
way to be vitiated by a false simplicity — a simplicity of
impoverishment, not a simplicity of comprehensive uni
fication. God, the theologians say, is infinitely simple,
and yet he is the plenitude of every sort of being and
perfection. And our evolutionists tell us that the highest
type of organism is that in which the greatest multi
plicity of structure and function is most perfectly

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 35
unified. Given equal richness of content, the simpler
unity is the better ; but not if the simplification be at
the expense of content. The tendency of puritanism
is to reduce Christianity to its lowest terms ; to cast
off all that has grown out of, or on to, its primitive
expression ; to bring it down to the level of the lowest
and most universal spiritual capacity; to make it
democratic in just what seems to us the wrong and
popular sense of the term. For it is to favour one
section of the Church at the expense of another ; to
starve the higher and rarer capacity in the interests of
the lower and commoner ; to assume that the spiritual
equality of God's sons means an equality of gifts and
graces ; to forget that the Christian demos includes
and needs every grade and kind of spirituality from the
lowest to the highest.
For this reason as well as for its severe rationality
puritanism, in spite of its studied abstract simplicity,
has always been the religion of a certain class, and a
certain temperament, and a certain culture. Whereas
Catholicism, in spite of, or rather because of, its vast
complexity, has been, as no other, a religion both of the
crowds and masses, and also of the intellectual, the
cultivated, the mystical, the aesthetic minority.
Seeing the intimate psychological bond that exists
between the letter and the spirit, the body and the soul,
the outer expression and the inner significance of a
religion, we are not fanciful, but thoroughly philosophic
in concluding that as a Catholic church (say S. Etienne
in Paris) is to a puritan conventicle, or as Catholic
public worship is to the simplicity of prayer-meeting, so
is the Catholic spirit to the puritan — both simple ; one

36 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

with the simplicity of an imperfectly harmonised fulness
and multiplicity; the other, with that of an exclusive
and rigorous parsimony. It is true that the religion of
Christ is the religion of the poor and simple. But
popular folk-religions have always been of the Catholic
type in their untrimmed luxuriance ; whereas Unitarian-
ism, for all its abstract simplicity, has never been
popular; and what commends Methodism or Salva-
tionism to the crowd is really their departures from
dryness and severity; their concessions to the experi
enced demands of the non-rational elements of human
nature. The religion or spirit of Christ has the sim
plicity of a principle of life and growth ; but what
grows out of it is an organised multitude of beliefs,
precepts, observances, and institutions in which its
potential fulness and fruitfulness is progressively and
endlessly revealed. The Pantheon is at once an exceed
ingly simple and an exceedingly complex structure, the
product of repeated applications of a single law. Com
plex as Catholicism is, it is governed by a few simple
ideas. The whole church of S. Etienne, with its altars
and furniture, its ritual, its music, its cycle of fasts and
feasts, is subordinated to and governed by the figure of
the Crucified which surmounts the Tabernacle of His
mystical presence. All is but the expansion of the
meaning and significance of Christ crucified for
humanity. " The Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood
of man " — there is Christianity in a nutshell ; the very
kernel of the Gospel. Yes ; but Christianity in a nut
shell is not enough. If it is to cover the needs of
humanity ; to spread its branches more widely, century
after century; to reveal its latent possibilities; the

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 37
kernel must be taken out of the nutshell and planted.
The inexhaustible plenitude of all truth lies wrapped up
in the innocent formula : " The Fatherhood of God, the
brotherhood of man." As it stands it is not simple but
"mysterious" in the deepest sense. The complex
doctrinal system of Catholicism is really an attempt to
simplify and explain it. (vii)
Moreover, we find in such a church as S. Etienne
the expression, not of an individual, but of a collective ('
spirit, world-wide and ancient, of which it is the product. I
Everything there speaks of communion with a great i
international religious organism ; with the remote past ¦;
of Catholicism ; and, through Catholicism, with the l
past of those older religions out of which it has grown.
It is a visualised and sensible expression of the religious
experience of the best part of humanity, by means
of which the religious sense of the individual is wakened,
stimulated, and informed ; and his consciousness of
solidarity with the general life of mankind deepened
and strengthened. Every such renewed consciousness
of communion with Catholicism is a sacramental re
inforcement of the spiritual and " over-individual "
elements of his interior Hfe — an inward grace mediated
through an outward sign. It brings the soul into a
more or less dimly understood, but sensibly felt, union,
not only with the religious life of past centuries, but
with the secular history of France, of Europe, of the
world. For Catholicism means the leavening of every
human interest with the leaven of the Gospel, the
christianising, not merely of the religious process, but
of the whole process of civilisation — of labour, science,

38 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

art, of social and political institutions. The life of the
Church has not been eremitical and aloof, but tangled—
often far too much tangled— in that of the world around
it. In her temples we are surrounded by the memorials,
not only of saints, but of heroes and warriors and
statesmen and poets and philosophers and writers ; for
these, too, contribute to the multitudinous elements
unified in the spirit of Catholicism. To be a Catholic
is to be historically related to them, to feel one's kin
ship with them as children of the same civilisation which
Catholicism has fostered and impregnated, and of which
it has been a constituent factor.
As a complexus of feelings, judgments, and impulses,
a " spirit " necessarily tends to increase in complexity
with every moment that brings new experiences to be
drawn into its synthesis. Our life-task is one of unifi
cation, of building-in these accumulating experiences so
skilfully as not to destroy, but rather to perfect the
harmony of our multitudinous thoughts, desires, and
sentiments. If our religion, our Christianity, is alive
and growing, it must necessarily be ever evolving a
complex system of feelings, determined by and deter
mining an equally complex system of judgments,
fructifying in a correspondingly complex system of im
pulses. Simple as is the law of these developments,
the product is not simple in content, but inexhaustible
beyond all formulation.
And what holds for the individual spirit, holds still
more evidently for the collective spirit — the spirit
of Catholicism — that resultant of the religious experi
ence of whole nations and centuries, which is presented
to us in the institutional Church, and which acts as an

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 39
instrument of spiritual education in enabling us to feed
on and appropriate, according to our several needs and
capacities, the gathered riches of so vast and ancient
a tradition. While, then, condemning that superfluity and lavish
ness which fails to secure a good, or a truth, or a loveli
ness that may be attained more effectually by fewer
and simpler means, we condemn no less heartily that
impoverishing puritanism which values such simplicity
absolutely, and not merely in proportion to the richness
of the result secured. To use a thousand words in
expressing what could be said better in a hundred
is a sin against simplicity ; but it is no less a sin to use
a hundred when a thousand are necessary, and to sacri
fice content and clearness to brevity. Religion aims at
communicating God to man, at filling the soul with the '
inexhaustible riches of divine truth and goodness and
loveliness. It cannot put the infinite into a nutshell ; it
cannot put the whole truth into three words. Though
it may — and often does — sin against simplicity, both
by undue compression and undue diffusiveness, all the
language and symbolism at its disposal is not enough
for what it has got to convey.
Life on a desert island is simplified — and starved.
To find everything for oneself; to be dependent on
God alone — that is, on God as outside and transcen
dent, not as mediated through creation and humanity
— means sterility in every department of life, inward
and outward. Can religion be an exception ? Is it not
plain that its possibilities are increased in every dimen
sion through our connection with a close-knit, world
wide, world-old communion ?

40 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

(viii)
This point of antiquity, of continuity with the past,
weighs with us a great deal in favour of Catholicism as
one of the older surviving religions.
There are poorer and richer, thinner and fuller,
moments in every life. Our best moments are those
which bring the fullest light from our past and present
to bear on our future ; our worst, those when our past is
largely obliterated, and our present narrowed just to
the most immediate perceptions ; when our conscious
ness dwindles to a point and is robbed of all breadth
and depth. The ideal experience is one that would lay
bare all the hidden treasures of memory. And the
same holds good of the people or community whose
present consciousness is richer and more fruitfully
active in the measure that it is fed from the treasury of
the past, and that its collective memory reaches back
to remoter generations, and can produce its well-ordered
stores at command. To break with the past is to cut
away the roots of its life. The corporate spirit, the
national sentiment, is tri-dimensional. It is not merely
la sense of fellowship with the living; but still more a
sense of fellowship with the dead. It is a sharing of a
collective experience, whereof the greater part by far is
memory and imagination. Hence the folly of that wild
eighteenth-century revolutionism, which in its blind
rage against the abuses of authority and tradition
strove to obliterate the past as such. Hence too its
necessary failure, and the return of dethroned authority,
sobered but not cured of its excesses, to the temple
from which the goddess of Reason-gone-mad had

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 41
driven it. Hence many an extravagance and counter-
extravagance yet to come, before Reason, clothed and
in her right mind, shall finally take her seat at the feet
of Christ as identical with sane Authority and purified
Tradition. For Authority is as blind in its way when
it refuses reverence to the present and future, forgetting
that growth and progress are the ends to which con
servatism and stability are but ministerial. The Past may
not be imposed as a dead burden on the shoulders of
the Present, but needs a criticism of its values, so as to
retain what is essential and to discard what is merely
accidental to the process of growth. For the meaning
and drift of that process reveals itself gradually. We
to-day can know better than our fathers what they
were aiming at and feeling after ; and each generation
interprets itself less wisely than it interprets its prede
cessors. Catholicism, then, means a sense of communion, not !
only with the present but with the past multitudes of
the Church's children. It is a solid, not a surface, senti
ment. Its depth is even greater than its extension. 1
Schism impoverishes the spirit even more by breaking)
its sensible communion with the past, than it does by
severing it from the life of the present. Doubtless the
conflicting claims of past and present, of authority and
reason, of tradition and progress have not yet found,
and may never wholly find, their adjustments. Theorisers
can do little to hasten, and much to impede, Nature's
slow experimental process of solving the difficulty. It
was, however, a mere accident of his times and circum
stances that Christ died at the hands of authority in the
cause of reason and liberty. In other conditions he

42 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

would have died at the hands of liberty in the cause of
authority and tradition. (ix)
As the spiritual sense of communion with the distant
multitudes of the past and present is so necessary to
the essence and fulness of our selfless and social life —
our life in humanity, and outside ourselves — every kind
of symbolism that wakes and fosters that sense is of
high educational importance for the development of
the spirit. Every sign and expression of uniformity
with the distant in time and place helps to make that
distant near and present ; to gather up the Whole into the
consciousness of each several part ; to make the entire
organism live and work in each member. Here is the
use of even the most useless hereditary aristocracy
which carries down the dwellings, the traditions, the
customs and other memorials of an otherwise dead
and forgotten past into the midst of the living present,
and thus helps a nation to feel, imagine and realise, its
historical continuity. Here, too, the justification of
custom for custom's sake after its original utility has
been forgotten, and so long as it does not hinder a
greater good than it secures. So in the Catholic
Church, much of her formula, her ritual, her custom,
which has lost all other use and meaning is significant
and efficacious in that it feeds the corporate life of
each member, and links us with the religious process
of distant lands and distant ages. Apart from any
other inherent value it may have, every act of con
formity to such traditional observances possesses a
quasi-sacramental power of deepening this sense of
spiritual solidarity, of forming a new tie between the

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 43
one and the all. It is a new exercise of voluntary
adherence ; of faith in the common creed, of hope in
the common triumph, of love of the common welfare.
Chief among these effective symbols of unity are those
seven sacraments which have come down to us prac^
tically from the beginning, .and are accepted ''semper,
iflngiMjJtp omnibus^ What the canonical scriptures are
to theology, these are to the great mass of sacramental
symbolism that has been developed, not so much from
them, as around them, by applications of the same
principle, in the same spirit ; and of which some parts
are more, others less, Catholic as to antiquity and
universality. Now it seems to us, rightly or wrongly, that this sacra-
mentalism provides for a psychological and spiritual
need of man's nature which is not provided for, to
anything like the same degree, by newer and more
narrowly localised systems. Even could they inspire
us with their whole corporate life, that life strikes us as
somewhat recent, narrow and separate compared with
one whose roots and fibres are tangled with those
of humanity. But besides this, a symbolism, like a
language, must be a gradual growth. It cannot, if it is
to win veneration, be invented and imposed like
Esperanto. Hardly any ancient ceremony, civil or
religious, but was prosaic and utilitarian in its origin ;
and it is just the forgottenness of that origin which
lends it its suggestion of antiquity and mystery.
(*)
Again, paradoxical as it will seem, we find in a great
many of the obvious paganisms, and even moral and

44 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

spiritual corruptions of Catholicism, no reason whatever
for surprise or scandal, but rather another evidence of
its character as a religion that has been shaped by
God, working through the laws of human psychology
and using the natural in the service of the supernatural.
We find in them a reason for trusting it as we could
never trust a theological synthesis or any other work of
conscious philosophic effort.
As for its paganism, it is undeniable that in its
generic aspect as a religion, one of the great religions
of the world, Catholicism is older than Christ ; as old
as humanity itself; as old as speech and language. Re
ligions themselves, on their social and institutional side,
are but the languages in which man holds converse
with God. And these languages are of one family and
one origin, human and divine ; the work of God
through man, and of man under God ; owing all their
inspiration and strength to the principal cause ; all
their error and limitation to the feeble intelligence, the
imperfect morality, of the instrumental cause.
When we say " from God through man " we do not
mean merely as all man's free actions and creations
presuppose divine concurrence ; but as all that is done
in us, and of which we are the passive subjects, is from
God ; as our natural instincts and supernatural inspira
tions are from God.
To the making of Catholicism two great streams of
religious tradition have run together, each in its turn
produced by the confluence of innumerable tributaries
whose sources are lost in a limitless past. Of these two
streams Christianised Judaism is the tributary, and the
Graeco-Roman empire-religion the receiver. It was not

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 45
pure Judaism ; but Judaism reformed and spiritualised
by the prophets ; universalised by the philosophy of
Alexandria ; perfected in both respects by Christ ;
preached and proclaimed explicitly as a world-religion
by St. Paul, that was rejected by the Synagogue and
received by the Gentile world, already prepared to wel
come a religion of humanity, a synthesis of all other
religions : " He came to His own; but His own received
Him not. But to as many as received Him gave He
power to become the sons of God."
What is received is moulded and shaped by the re
ceiver, as the necessary condition of its reception. The
leaven buried and lost to sight in the mass of savourless
paste forthwith begins a slow and wearisome struggle
for the mastery. To enter into the Gentile religion,
Christian Judaism had to lose nearly all its exclusively
Judaic elements, retaining only such as belonged to
the generic character of every religion, together with
its specifically Christian difference — its belief in Christ
the Son of God ; the Revelation or Word of the Father ;
the Redeemer of mankind ; the founder of an universal
and spiritual Kingdom of God upon earth. Obviously
in receiving a new religion men will change their forms
of religious thought and expression as little as possible ;
and the missionary will accommodate himself to this law J
of least resistance as far as his conscience will stretch- \
Thus Christianity, following what is the true law, and
the precise inverse of the supposed law, of religious de
velopment, " transubstantiates " paganism, keeping the
accidents, changing the substance. It takes on itself/
the clothes, the regalia, of the old gods into whoseA
temples it enters. It adopts the institutions, rites, and

46 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

terminology of the empire-religion as far as it can, and
much further perhaps than it ought ; it finds for them
a new significance in its own interests ; it uses them as
a fuller and richer vehicle of self-expression than
Judaism could ever have been. But plainly the adapta
tion is imperfect ; neither of the wedded systems is at
its ease ; each tries to force the other violently to its
own shape. Whence a continual paganising of Chris-
/ tianity, concurrent with a continual Christianising of
1 paganism — a process which we see at work even in the
Catholicism of to-day ; for the Church is as yet young
in history, and the Gospel-leaven far from victorious.
Paganism will have found in Christ all that it sought
elsewhere — a true Logos, and incarnation of deity, a
Son of God ; but will in many ways have debased the
truth in endeavouring to understand it in terms of a
less spiritual religion. Christ, the impersonation of the
Gospel — of the Truth that He taught and that He was —
will have entered into the temple prepared for another
god, but in so doing He will have purified it of its
defilements, and have given spiritual significance and
sacramental efficacy to everything at all susceptible of
redemption. And so in a thousand ways Christianity will have
preached, and paganism will have apprehended, the
new religion in terms of the old ; nor do the laws of
human thought admit of any other supposition, especi
ally when we remember that the empire was not won to
Christianity by individual conversions, but by the en
masse accession of multitudes, to whom at first it can
have meant little more than a change of names. As
little could a new religion be abruptly imposed on a

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 47
race as could a new language. Religions are growths,
not manufactures. Herein is their strength and their
dignity. Catholicism is but the most fully developed
branch of a tree that springs from the very roots of
humanity, and bears traces and proofs of its kinship
with every other branch of the religious process. Its
paganisms bear testimony not only to its antiquity and
universality, but still more to the strength and vigour of
the Christian spirit, which can subdue all things to its
own ends and uses. It is greater to capture the enemy's
fleet than to destroy it. The conquest is not yet com
plete ; the conflict is not yet over ; the old pagan spirit
still holds its own in part ; in part still claims what has
been wrested from it ; the synthesis is still in the
making. But as we have already said, incoherencies
and inconsistencies are a sign of natural life and growth ;
while artificial completeness means stagnation and
death. (xi)
What concerns the other corruptions and diseases to
which Catholicism is subject, be they moral, intellectual,
or aesthetic — whether ignorance, or error, or superstition,
or intolerance, or dogmatism, or sacerdotalism, or
clericalism, or worldliness, or ambition, or licentiousness,
or cruelty, or fraud, or mendacity, or avarice, or vulgarity
— we are the last to wish to minimise them or palliate
them, just because we feel that if they constitute a
difficulty at all, it is that they should obtain in any
degree and not that they should do so in a great degree.
Once abandon the notion of a society of sinless saints ;
once accept the parables of the wheat and tares, of the
good fish and the bad, of the leaven and the meal, and

48 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
you have no reason to postulate that tares shall be the
exception, or that the leaven shall sensibly predominate.
The forces and obstacles with which the Gospel has to
contend are not evenly distributed through the world
and through the ages. When it has leavened five
measures of meal, fifty may unexpectedly be added,
and the whole process thrown back for generations.
Before it was a distinct religion, while it was yet but
a revival movement in the bosom of Judaism, Christi
anity was a little band of saints getting ready for the
near advent of the Day of Judgment. But when their
eyes were opened to a deeper understanding of the
Kingdom, and to the true perspective of their hopes ;
when they realised that the salt of the earth must be
mingled with the earth ; that the light of the world
must not be sheltered under a bushel from the risk of
extinction, but set in the open to struggle with surround
ing darkness, they saw that they must enlarge their
borders and find room for the sinner beside the saint,
and that their little spiritual aristocracy must develop
into a world-embracing religious institution.
And every attempt, from Montanism onwards, to
reproduce the primitive Society of Saints in the absence
of those primitive convictions and hopes that made it
possible for a time, has issued in the worst of all cor
ruptions — hypocrisy and pretence. For as soon as any
external profession — Christian, priest, pope, monk, and
the like — is supposed to be a guarantee for certain
spiritual and moral attainments, and not merely for
aspirations, duties, and ideals, pride, both corporate and
individual, will cover its failures with the cloak of
sanctimoniousness.

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 49
It is impossible, then, that the Church should leaven
the world without being leavened by it. " I pray," said
Christ, " not that Thou shouldst take them out of the
world, but that Thou shouldst keep them from evil " —
a prayer which looks to the inevitableness of such con
tamination to a greater or less degree. If the visible)
Church is to be spotless, she must fly to the desert and!
leave the world to its fate. We might as well ask for |
an ideal, incorruptible State as for an incorruptible '
Church. Both equally fall short of their profession;
neither can afford to throw stones at the other.
As for the long and sordid record of clerical scandal
that we find in Church history, the persistent re
crudescences of avarice, ambition, and licentiousness in
the ministers of the sanctuary, it is hard to see- what
more it can prove against Catholicism than the like
phenomena in the ministers of law and government
can prove against law and government. The attempt
to deny or mitigate such charges seems to imply the
worst sort of "sacerdotalism" — namely, the right of
priests in virtue of their merely official and ecclesias
tical superiority to that honour which belongs solely to
personal, ethical, and " charismatic " superiority. It is
all-important to keep distinct the invisible and spiritual
hierarchy from the visible and official hierarchy of the
Church ; to see in the latter but the symbol and servant
of the former; to see in the former Christ Himself,
vicariously represented by the latter; to distinguish
the preconstitutional formless Church from the govern
mental form which it has elaborated for its own
apostolic needs. Deplorable as they are, the corrup
tions of the official hierarchy keep this vital distinction

50 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
clear before the Catholic consciousness, and save us
from man-worship. If, notwithstanding, sacerdotalism
has flourished in Catholicism as nowhere else, it has
been of a far more naive and less dangerous character
than that of puritanism. It has been based on a
crudely materialistic imagination of the source and
nature of the priest's spiritual dignity and authority ;
on the arrogation of magical, quasi-physical powers.
It was almost inevitable that this pagan conception of
priesthood should have mingled with, and for a time
have almost overcome, that Christian conception ac
cording to which the priest is but the authenticated
instrument and representative through whom the whole
Church functions, and in whom it is Christ, or the
Church, who baptises, blesses, consecrates, anoints,
absolves, teaches, and rules. (xii)
While sympathising profoundly with the self-costing
revolt of so pure, upright, and conscientious a soul as
that of Blanco White against ecclesiastical corruptions,
we cannot but regard his secession as a crude and
unsatisfying solution. He failed to see what perhaps
no one in his time and surroundings could have seen,
that the health of Catholicism, and of every religious •
institution of the Catholic type, lies in a balance of
opposing and never perfectly reconcilable tendencies ;
that its diseases result from the inevitable disturbances
of that balance ; that dogmatism, sacerdotalism, legal
ism, formalism and the like are merely excesses of
what is good, of tendencies that hold in check other
tendencies no less liable to abuse. The issue in his

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 51
typical case was that extreme anti-ecclesiasticism
which looks on Christ as standing for the pure nega
tion, and not for the reform of all those elements
natural to religion whose abuse He combated; which
forgets that Christ loved and practised the Jewish
religion all His life ; that if He and His apostles died
excommunicated it was not because they had rejected it,
but because its officials had rejected them ; that their
informal, family, wayside worship was not a substitute
for, but a supplement to the religion of the Temple,
with its priesthood, its sacrifices, its ceremonial, its laws.
It was only as violently cut off from that religion and
from the conditions of its practice, not as condemning
it, that the early Christian community, prior to its
alliance with the Graeco-Roman religion, was left form
less, without temple, priest, or altar, like the unhoused
hermit-crab wandering unprotected in search of a new
and larger shell.
Had he appreciated this, had he not mistaken the
messianic reform movement for the new religion that
was to be, but that as yet was not, either in fact or in
intention ; had he realised that Christ and Peter would/,
have clung to the Synagogue if the Synagogue had not
expelled them, Blanco White might have seen, as we
do, the true solution of his difficulties in the attitude of
Christ towards Judaism. He would have faced and
borne unjust excommunication if necessary ; but he
would not have seceded.
On its external and institutional side a religion of the
Jewish or Catholic type is a social organism, built up
and shaped by the repetitions, customs and habits
of past generations, and transmitted by them to the

52 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

present, to be again preserved and perfected for the use
of future generations. We inherit it as we inherit the
city or State, which every century adds to and improves,
and which becomes progressively the instrument of an
ever increasing fulness of social life. By dint of repeti
tion and insistence, new adaptations harden into habit
and custom ; and become a " second nature " to the
institution, The tendency of the unreflecting multitude at all
times is to be passively determined by imitation,
habit, and custom ; and indeed this is the normal con
dition of the fulness and fruitfulness of their lives,
since it frees their attention and energy for dealing
with those irregularities of experience for which
custom can make no provision, directed, as it is, to
the uniform and recurrent contingencies. Yet general
and abiding changes of circumstances, and the pro
gressive enrichment of public life by accumulating
experience, demand a continual formation of new
habits, laws, and customs, and a modification or
abolition of those that have become inadequate or
obstructive ; they demand an endless labour of reform
and readjustment, whose cessation means social disease
and death. Such reform is naturally the function of
the provident and progressive minority which consti
tutes the plastic principle of the social organism, and
to which there answers, on the part of the multitudes,
a certain just-conquerable stubbornness — a power of
resistance that yields reluctantly to innovation ; a
power of retaining impressions as if graven by steel on
rock. This resistant organism of customs, laws, rites,
and dogmas is the subject-matter of the prophet's or

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 53
reformer's energy; it is the dead letter that at once
serves and opposes his living spirit ; the rough block
that he must shape and chisel in the sweat of his brow.
He is at war with it ; yet not to destroy, but to perfect
and fulfil. Let him destroy it in petulant anger,
and he destroys himself; for it is "object" to his
subjectivity. So it was with Christ and the Jewish Church of his
day, who exemplify these two normal yet conflicting
elements of every living religion, the progressive and
the stationary — the latter driven towards reaction in
self-defence, the former towards revolt ; whence a ten
sion that may end in schism, through fault on either
side. But whereas most prophets minister to some one
particular religion, and to some one particular disease
of that, Christ's medicine was of universal efficacy. He
rose up against those fundamental corruptions common
to Judaism with every institutional religion — against
perverse and unspiritual conceptions of God and the
soul, of Heaven and Hell ; of priesthood and sacrifice ;
of sacrament and ceremony ; of sin, prayer, atonement,
repentance, asceticism. Hence, His was implicitly a
reform of every religion as exemplified in Judaism ;
it was of catholic importance and extension ; a leaven
as applicable to the Graaco-Roman as to the Hebrew
religion. In it we find the assertion of those principles
which are ever struggling in Catholicism against the
principles of religious decadence. In Him we may
study the right attitude of a loyal Catholic towards
ecclesiastical scandals and corruptions.
May it not be, then, that in breaking away from a
painful and aggressive environment, men like Blanco

54 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
White have really destroyed the condition of their own
spiritual development as members of that active-
minded minority whose resistance to the passive
majority is essential to the Church's life, and whose
place in her economy is to maintain that balance of
opposites in which her health consists? Is it not
through conflict with such uncongenial surroundings
that such characters are braced up and held together?
Have not saints and schismatics been shaped from the
same stuff by the same methods — those successfully,
these unsuccessfully? The negative peace of difficulties
evaded and not conquered ; the peace of the desert
spells spiritual stagnation and decay. Doubtless we
must not make this a reason for remaining in Hell, or
in a society whose badness is irremediable, or so exces
sive as to overwhelm and carry us along in its current.
But it may be a reason why a society of saints might
not be the best school of sanctity ; and why the better
and the best men in a community must always expect
to be at war with the inert and backward majority, and
must strain every muscle to tow the passive, unwieldy
barge up-stream.
It is said of Ignatius Loyola, of Marie Angelique,
and others, that they were at one time inspired to seek
out a relaxed rather than an observant religious order
as the theatre of their pursuit of perfection. Their
instinct seems sound. For such an order has the
advantage of a high theoretical standard and many
means and opportunities of grace, without the grave
disadvantage of a strong current of public opinion and
example facilitating the practice of morality by non-
moral or immoral motives. When all around us are

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 55
observant, when regularity is respectable and laxity
disreputable, we can never know how far our religion
is merely respectability ; we can never test and deepen
its roots by the exercise of opposition and inde
pendence. But where indifference and corruption pre
vail to some extent, whatever little success we may
realise is purely the fruit of our liberty ; and such
examples as we find in the small minority are a
thousandfold more helpful because of their unrewarded
spontaneity. Where human respect is on the side of
edification, there the pharisee and hypocrite abound.
It is not only good example, but still more bad
example, which edifies and instructs us ; for we know
things best by their contraries. We learn more medi
cines from disease than from health. Errors are neces
sary for the penetration and comprehension of truth.
From our neighbours' sins and mistakes we learn a
thousand ways and possibilities of going wrong, and
thus, as by a prism, the white light of perfection is
analysed for us, and broken up into its several compo
nents — its partial and therefore defective manifestations.
Unlike the apostolic band of saints, the Catholic
Church is a community of the called as well as of the
chosen. But many are called and few are chosen. In
the Kingdom of Grace, as in that of Nature, failure is
the rule, success the exception. (xiii)
Again, we feel that Catholicism is, in tendency, a
religion of all levels of spiritual development, and not of
one only; that it has milk for babes and meat for
adults ; that it is a language in which the simplest and

56 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
the subtlest can hold converse with Heaven on the
shallowest themes and the deepest. And this range
and versatility commends it to us as a product of
experience, of God working through Nature ; and not a
device of human reflection. We should find a more
exclusively aristocratic or a more exclusively popular
religion hard to reconcile with the universalism of
Christ's spirit. If there is much that offends my taste,
or violates my reason, or shocks my moral sense, what
right have I to make my subjective needs a standard
for all so long as I am free ? It is not enough that my
religion suits me, it must suit mankind ; it must cater
for all — just as the State must look to the interests of
every class, and not only to mine. I could not be
satisfied with a religion which, however much it did for
me, did nothing for the masses or for the classes — too
academic for the former, too barbaric for the latter.
The board spread for all must have every sort of fare,
so that each may find something, though none can find
everything, to his taste and requirement. It is no
small gain to be forced into one pale and communion
with spiritual sorts and conditions so unlike our own,
and to be compelled to bear with, and learn from others
who have to bear with and learn from us, and thus to
overcome our mental insularity.
Thus there is an aesthetic intolerance that despises
the day of small things, and would impose abruptly
upon the worship of the rude and uncultured a severity
in music, decoration, and the like for which they are
educationally unprepared, which fails to detect in their
woefully barbaric beginnings a partial, if inadequate,
self-utterance of the beautiful, which forgets that our

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 57
own higher expressions are only relatively less in
adequate. And there is an intellectual intolerance which treats
truth as an exact equation of thought to thing, which
knows no half-truths, but only Yea and Nay, and brands
as a lie whatever deviates from mathematical precision.
Of the merely approximate character of our best
religious conceptions it has no suspicion, but would
force, as finally true, on childish minds what even for
adults is only a less inadequate approximation. It will
not tolerate what it considers the falsehoods through
which the unfolding mind must pass if the fuller truth
is to be of its own growing, and not merely stuck in
rootless from outside. To it the malice of superstition
consists in mental error and ignorance, and not merely
in the demoralising and decadent results that some
times attend it — not merely in the evasion of duty by
external observances — in the neglect of natural means
through trust in charms or in prayer.
It is not superstition if men turn to Mary, as a truer
embodiment of the divine, rather than to a God, whom
they ignorantly suppose to be inhuman and vindictive.
But if they think her intercession and favour will allow
them to live more carelessly for having a friend in
court, that indeed is essentially superstition. Yet God
Himself may be worshipped superstitiously by the
most infallible theologian who over lived.
And lastly, there is an ethical intolerance, both as to
moral standards and to moral attainments, which seems
again to make no account of the laws of growth, to
demand an impossible uniformity of level, and to forget
that the ethical, like the aesthetic and intellectual, educa-

58 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
tion of persons and classes, must be graduated. Nature
does nothing in jumps. The highest cannot abruptly be
fitted on to the lowest. We must be content to lead men
from where they stand to the next stage, and not to the
next but one. And this wisdom and toleration is forced
on us in a Church which is the home of all sorts
and conditions of men, of whom no class or level can
say to the other : " I have no need of thee," and
where the law of Christ bids us bear one another's
burdens. (xiv)
Again, one of the most fundamental and distinctive
principles of Catholicism is the subjection of the in
dividual mind, will, and sentiment in matters of religion
to the collective mind, will, and sentiment of the com
munity ; of the private to the Catholic conscience ; in a
word, the principle of authority. And here once more
it seems to us that the system has been shaped by the
psychological laws of man's spiritual development ; that
it is devised, not by the wit of man, but by the wisdom
of God working through Nature.
We find but different utterances of the same truth in
the popular adages that "two heads are better than
one," or that " in the multitude of counsellors there is
wisdom," and in Christ's promise that " where two or
three are gathered together in My name, there am I in
the midst of them." When objective truth is in ques
tion — and the Church judges only of what is true for
all — individual judgment is liable to the warp of private
ends and interests, to the prejudices of tribe and caste,
to the limitations of a narrow and imperfect experience,
to personal fallacies of inference and induction. All

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 59
these sources of illusion are removed in proportion
as the same conclusion is reached by an ever greater
number of truly independent witnesses, and is main
tained from land to land and from generation to
generation. This goes without saying, and only means
that the social and collective mind is the full and
adequate organ through which the truth is made
manifest. But it is the voice of the people, and not that of the
populace, which is the voice of God. The crowd's
agreement is valid and decisive only as to appearances
and immediate perceptions. It is worthless when
inferences and underlying realities are in question. In
such matters its witnesses are never truly independent
witnesses ; their agreement is caused and not reasoned ;
it is a passively received impression from a common
external influence — imitation, obedience, faith in the
faith of others, and so forth.
The voice of the populace is not the voice of the
people. It is not a product of original faith or reason
or spiritual intuition. The general life of a permanent
community gives birth to a complex body of opinions,
sentiments, and practical attitudes in regard to a
thousand matters. In this body we can distinguish
between the average and the best and the worst. And
we observe in it a progress, or shifting upwards, where
by the best of to-day becomes the average of to
morrow, and the average of to-day becomes the worst
of to-morrow. And thus truth works its way into the
community, entering in at the apex of the pyramid
and spreading downwards to the base. The higher, as
a Kempis says, does not stand without the lower.

60 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

Every level is necessary to the whole structure and
process. But when we wish to educate our children we
push them upwards, and strive to bring them under the
influence of the very best that has been thought, and
felt, and spoken, and written on every subject. And in
so doing, we recognise that though it is the same truth
which percolates the whole community, it is found more
pure and undiluted at the apex than at the base ; and
that though it is one and the same collective mind
which is in process of formation, that process is more
advanced with the few than with the many. What we
mean then by the voice of the people in Church or
State is not the average opinion, but the best, the highest
product, the ripest fruit of the whole social process ;
the nearest approximation to truth as yet realised by
the labour of the collective mind. The progress of that
mind depends on our discontent with the best, and on
our endeavour to interpret its deeper implications, and
reach forward to its future developments. And to do
so successfully, we must determine the direction in
which the whole process is moving ; we must consider
the base along with the altitude and inclination ; the
lower along with the higher ; the past along with the
present. For each part throws light on all the rest ;
and helps us to determine what is and what is not con
genial to the entire process, what is and what is not
a true interpretation of the social mind.
The common objection that authority, so understood,
is hostile to liberty of conscience and to intellectual
sincerity is really baseless. It is valid against corrup
tions of the principle, but not against the principle
itself. For it is psychologically impossible for any

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 61
individual so to get outside the social process which
has made him what he is, as to form a judgment which
shall at once be just and yet contradictory to the social
mind. Either he has blundered and misinterpreted the
social mind, in which case it is only his liberty of error
that is violated ; or he has interpreted it more deeply
and truly than the average and official interpreters,
in which case he differs from these, but does not
contradict them, inasmuch as his is only a stricter
conformity to the same rule as they profess to obey.
He will be accounted heterodox by the average, but he
will have an intuitive certainty that he is nothing of the
sort, and that where he stands to-day they will stand
to-morrow. From the nature of the case he can under
stand and justify them, though they cannot understand
and justify him.
Only through such differences from the average and
official reading of the social mind has progress been
made at any time — by the often embittered conflict
between the principle of movement, and the principle
of stability.
We must not allow that it is only by blameworthy
revolt that advance is possible, or that fruitful experi
ments can be tried ; we must not admit that moral evil
is a necessary condition of social improvement. We
must hold that there is also a blameless dissent from
that average and official judgment which of its
essential nature is, and should be, hostile to progress.
When we depart from it for purely self-interested
motives we are manifestly immoral. When we do so
merely because we do not see the utility or justice
of some law or custom or sentiment or tradition,

62 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
based probably on a wider collective experience than
we can possibly compass or estimate, we are guilty
of freakishness and self-conceit ; even though our
motive be the common good. But when we positively
see that the average judgment or custom has grown
to be a public danger and impediment ; and, moreover,
when we find a growing multitude of sporadic and
independent witnesses to the same conviction, then
in following this minority against the majority, we are
following a surer than the average reading of the
social mind ; nor can we be said to contradict or dis
obey the lower social tribunal in conforming ourselves
to the higher.
True originality which learns and assimilates, before
it attempts to teach and improve on, social tradition is
one thing ; eccentricity or sham originality which would
teach before it has learnt, is another. Granted that
ideals are far distant ; that the tyranny of average and
official judgment has often sterilised the Church and
retarded her progress by the repression of a great deal
of creative thought and effort, yet what may be called
the " selective " value of the system must not be over
looked. It is most desirable that those who eventually do
get the lead of the progressive movement and overcome
the inertia of the average, should be the very strongest
and the very best ; that mediocrity, eccentricity, and
blatancy should never be able to seize the reins ; that the
pedant, the crank, the faddist, should have nothing to
do with the process of social development. And this
is certainly secured by the jealous and repressive
attitudes of the organised average. Only the strongest,
the best, and the most prudent can without disaster

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 63
force their way through the barriers and barbed wires
opposed to every departure from the customary arid
traditional. Whatever worth is repressed, or is killed in
resisting repression, may not always be too high a price
to pay for the repression of so much that is worthless and
dangerous. Nor is it merely a gain to literature and
philosophy that the forced necessity of expressing the
new in terms of the old produces a subtlety and
delicacy both of thought and style lacking to those
whose facile Muse is unfettered, and making all the
difference between hammered steel and cast iron. The
chief gain is to the process of social development
itself, which requires that the new shall not contradict
but comprehend and justifiy the old ; not to speak of
the gain to the work itself, which instead of being
wasted in the wild effort to create a new world, is
eternalised in contributing to the advance and per
fection of the old. We do not mean that blatancy and
sham originality are not as rampant in the Church as
elsewhere. But they are harmless and ineffectual ;
always on the side of the average or sub-average;
always shouting safely with the largest crowd. They
do not get the lead, or affect the Church's history in
any permanent way as the great saints, and doctors,
and reformers have affected it.
To represent these and similar good results as due to
the sage design, the preternatural wisdom and foresight
of the official world, is, of course, mere sophistry.
Society is not worked that way, but by the conflict of
opposite interests, each caring for itself alone. It is in
spite of itself that the conservative interest furthers the
progressive, and the progressive the conservative.

64 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
While then we regret the excesses of either, we are
not surprised at them, nor do we find in them any
argument against the principles so abused; and we
confess that we prefer the type of mental and moral
greatness, produced within a closely organised traditional
institution, to that which flourishes under easier and less
costing conditions of growth. (XV)
Turning our attention more particularly to the
influence of authority over mental development in
matters outside revelation and dogmatic reassertions of
revelation (for in regard to these latter development
does not obtain) — in other words, to the whole body of
tradition which has developed round, but outside,
revealed truth, and is but its protective envelope — it
seems to us that what S. T. Coleridge says of the sacred
Scriptures (Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit) must be
said of the whole Catholic tradition whereof they are
but a canonised part.
The distinction between written and unwritten, can
onical and extra-canonical tradition is not essential,
but to some extent arbitrary and conventional. There
is, however, a real difference between what is sifted and
approved, and what, after a time, is winnowed out and
rejected ; between what has sprung up quickly, and as
quickly withered away, because it had no root in man's
spiritual nature, and what has stood the test of time and
tempest ; between words from the lips heard for a day
and forgotten, and words from the heart of humanity,
whose sound has gone out into all lands to reverberate
as long as the world shall last.

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 65
To a vast extent this sifting process is natural, and is
governed by psychological laws ; but like other natural
processes it may be assisted (and, of course, also im
peded) by artificial guidance and by the attempted
understanding of its meaning and direction. There are
professional guardians of tradition whose office it is to
distinguish growth from deformity, and to keep the
stream pure ; and who acquit themselves with a varying
success measured by their understanding of the process
and the skill and energy with which they apply such
understanding to the work in question. The need of
such a class is obvious. For though every special
process might be trusted to itself if it existed apart (as
by abstraction we can think of it apart) from the entire
process of human development, yet such isolation is but
the work of abstract thought, and does not obtain in the
real world where interests jostle and oust and corrupt
one another in their struggle for pre-eminence — each
claiming that unfettered liberty which is only the right
of all collectively. Because religion and religious tra
dition are not outside life as a whole, but tangled with
every other thread of its texture, they are corruptible
and need, as does every great interest, the art and
intelligence of appointed guardians to look after their
rights and privileges.
Coleridge would be the first to acknowledge the benefit
religious tradition received by the formation of the
canon of Scripture ; by the exclusion, even if too severe,
of works of dubious inspiration and authority ; by the
inclusion, even if too uncritical, of what a fairly univer
sal and continuous experience had proved to be of the
best quality. Yet this was no spontaneous result of

66 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

tradition left to itself and its own laws, but of the
deliberate intervention of men who were the official
guardians of tradition, and whose successors to-day
exercise the same office in regard to the further develop
ments of the same tradition.
And in these non-scriptural parts of the Christian
tradition we can distinguish what is canonical, deutero-
canonical, tolerated, disapproved. And even within the
canonical part we must find the same difference which
Coleridge finds in the Bible, and which no one now cares
to dispute, between meat, bone, and gristle. We cannot
have the meat without the bone, the edible without the
inedible ; but we do not attempt to swallow and digest
the bone along with the meat, } This tradition is as a
banquet spread by the millions of the past for the
millions of the present — a selection from the religious
experiences of whole races and centuries. Even the
Bible, which is sometimes opposed to tradition as " the
pure word of God," is after all the voice of the Church
of many generations — of God speaking in and through
the religious experience of successive multitudes under
all the limitations of their mentality and language.-
From this infinitely varied store of nutriment each can
draw according to his need, if only he will be tolerant of
the different needs and tastes of others. It is not all
for him.
Perhaps the strongest cumulative argument for the
Catholic tradition is the same mutatis mutandis which
Coleridge finds for the divinity of the Bible and which I
reproduce. "In every generation, and wherever the light of
Revelation has shone, men of all ranks, conditions, and

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 67
states of mind, have found in this volume a correspon
dent for every movement toward the better, felt in their
own hearts, the needy soul has found supply, the feeble
a help, the sorrowful a comfort ; yea, be the recipiency
the least that can consist with moral life, there is an
answering grace ready to enter. The Bible has been
found a Spiritual World, spiritual and yet at the same
time outward and common to all. You in one place, I
in another, all men somewhere or at some time, meet
with an assurance that the hopes and fears, the thoughts
and yearnings that proceed from, or tend to, a right
spirit in us, are not dreams or fleeting singularities, no
voices heard in sleep, or spectres which the eye suffers
but not perceives. As if on some dark night a pilgrim,
suddenly beholding a bright star moving before him,
should stop in fear and perplexity. But lo ! traveller
after traveller passes by him, and each, being questioned
whither he is going, makes answer, ' I am following yon
guiding star ! ' The pilgrim quickens his own steps,
and presses onward in confidence. More confident still
will he be, if, by the wayside, he should find, here and
there, ancient monuments, each with its votive lamp, and
on each the name of some former pilgrim, and a record
that there he had first seen or begun to follow the
benignant Star !
" Nor otherwise is it with the varied contents of the
Sacred Volume. The hungry have found food, the
thirsty a living spring, the feeble a staff, and the
victorious warfarer songs of welcome and strains of
music ; and as long as each man asks on account of his
wants, and asks what he wants, no man will discover
aught amiss or deficient in the vast and many-

68 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
chambered storehouse, But if, instead of this, an idler
or scoffer should wander through the rooms, peering
and peeping, and either detects, or fancies he has
detected, here a rusted sword or pointless shaft, there
a tool of rude construction, and superseded by later
improvements (and preserved, perhaps, to make us
more grateful for them) ; — which of two things will a
sober-minded man, — who, from his childhood upward,
had been fed, clothed, armed, and furnished with the
means of instruction from this very magazine — think
the fitter plan ? Will he insist that the rust is not rust,
or that it is a rust sui generis, intentionally formed on
the steel for some mysterious virtue in it, and that the
staff and astrolabe of a shepherd-astronomer are iden
tical with, or equivalent to, the quadrant and telescope
of Newton or Herschel ? Or will he not rather give
the curious inquisitor joy of his mighty discoveries, and
the credit of them for his reward ?
" Or lastly, put the matter thus : For more than a
thousand years the Bible, collectively taken, has gone
hand in hand with civilisation, science, law — in short,
with the moral and intellectual cultivation of the
species, always supporting, and often leading the way.
Its very presence, as a believed Book, has rendered the
nations emphatically a chosen race, and this too in
exact proportion as it is more or less generally known
and studied. Of those nations which in the highest
degree enjoy its influences it is not too much to
affirm that the differences, public and private, physical,
moral, and intellectual, are only less than what might be
expected from a diversity in species. Good and holy
men, and the best and wisest of mankind, the kingly

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 69
spirits of history, enthroned in the hearts of mighty
nations, have borne witness to its influences, have
declared it to be beyond compare the most perfect
instrument, the only adequate organ, of Humanity ; the
organ and instrument of all the gifts, powers, and
tendencies, by which the individual is privileged to rise
above himself — to leave behind, and lose his dividual
phantom self, in order to find his true self in that
Distinctness where no division can be — in the Eternal
I AM, the Ever-living Word, of whom all the elect,
from the archangel before the throne to the poor
wrestler with the Spirit until the breaking of day, are
but the fainter and still fainter echoes. And are all
these testimonies and lights of experience to lose their
value and efficiency because I feel no warrant of history,
or Holy Writ, or of my own heart for denying, that in
the framework and outward case of this instrument a
few parts may be discovered of less costly materials
and of meaner workmanship? Is it not a fact that the
Books of the New Testament were tried by their conso
nance with the rule, and according to the analogy of
faith ? Does not the universally admitted canon — that
each part of Scripture must be interpreted by the
spirit of the whole — lead to the same practical conclu
sion as that for which I am now contending — namely,
that it is the spirit of the Bible, and not the detached
words and sentences, that is infallible and absolute?
Practical, I say, and spiritual too ; and what knowledge
not practical or spiritual are we entitled to seek in our
Bibles? Is the grace of God so confined — are the
evidences of the present and actuating Spirit so dim
and doubtful — that to be assured of the same we must

70 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
first take for granted that all the life and co-agency of
our humanity is miraculously suspended ?
"As long as Christians considered their Bible as a
plenteous entertainment, where every guest, duly called
and attired, found the food needful and fitting for him,
and where each — instead of troubling himself about the
covers not within his reach — beholding all around him
glad and satisfied, praised the banquet and thankfully
glorified the Master of the feast — so long did the tenet
— that the Scriptures were written under the special
impulse of the Holy Ghost — remain safe and profitable.
Nay, in the sense, and with the feelings, in which it was
asserted, it was a truth — a truth to which every spiritual
believer now and in all times will bear witness by virtue
of his own experience. And if in the overflow of love
and gratitude they confounded the power and presence
of the Holy Spirit, working alike in weakness and in
strength, in the morning mists and in the clearness of
the full day ; if they confounded this communion and
co-agency of divine grace, attributable to the Scripture
generally, with those express, and expressly recorded,
communications and messages of the Most High which
form so large and prominent a portion of the same
Scriptures ; if, in short, they did not always duly dis
tinguish the inspiration, the inbreathement, of the pre
disposing and assisting SPIRIT from the revelation of
the informing WORD, it was at worst a harmless hyper
bole. It was holden by all, that if the power of the
Spirit from without furnished the text, the grace of the
same Spirit from within must supply the comment.
" Let it but be read as by such men it used to be read ;
when they came to it as to a ground covered with manna,

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 71
even the bread which the Lord had given for his people
to eat ; where he that gathered much had nothing over,
and he that gathered little had still no lack. They
gathered every man according to his eating. They
came to it as to a treasure-house of Scriptures ; each
visitant taking what was precious and leaving as precious
for others; — Yea, more, says our worthy old Church-
historian, Fuller, where ' the same man at several times
may in his apprehension prefer several Scriptures as
best, formerly most affected with one place, for the
present more delighted with another, and afterwards,
conceiving comfort therein not so clear, choose other
places as more pregnant and pertinent to his purpose.
Thus God orders it, that divers men (and perhaps the
same man at divers times) make use of all His gifts,
gleaning and gathering comfort as it is scattered
through the whole field of the Scripture.' "

The objections against tradition, as we have described
it, are often directed rather against the consequences of
some theory about it, than against what it is in experi
ence and history ; or at least what it would be if un
affected by such theories. The view of the Bible as
being of one texture and level from Genesis to Revela
tion was a view fraught with danger to religion and
morality — a danger which was realised whenever living
tradition was discarded for a religion of the Bible only,
with the result that the spirit of the Gospel was adul
terated with that of the earliest stages of religious
barbarism. In Catholicism such an inspiration-theory
never fructified in practice, and the Bible was instinc-

72 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
tively left to the learned, till these days when a truer
perspective has dispelled the dangerous illusion. And
so with tradition. Imposed en bloc as of equal value
throughout, it would be more of a curse than a blessing.
But, theories notwithstanding, it never has obtained
such an acceptance in the life of the Church. It has
been accepted as a whole only in the sense that it con
tains truth of all sorts and levels, and stands in need of
continual sifting and correction. As for the theories
about it, they too are but part of it, and their value is
ever under discussion.
While, then, we do not wish to minimise the abuses
and limitations of the principle of tradition, we are far
from certain that it can be safely disregarded by any
religious synthesis which is to do more for the future
than Catholicism has done for the past.
(xvi)
To conclude, Catholicism seems to us to stand for
the widest, the oldest, the deepest stream of collective
Christian experience. As such, its mind moves more
slowly than that of younger and narrower systems.
It reaches the truth more tardily because its experi-
• ments are conducted on a far larger scale ; because it
looks back on a longer past, and round on a wider
present ; because it advances with the grave pace of
•Nature and will not be rushed on by its theoricians.
Better, we feel, to be borne more quietly along on the
bosom of this broad, slow current than to be hurried
along more rapidly on the surface of some brawling
stream. If our religious life is a corporate super-
individual life; if it approximates in ideal to the

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 73
religious life of humanity, we will not wish to press for
ward alone, but will gladly hold back to help on the
rest of our fellow-travellers. (xvii)
These, then, are some very few considerations typical
of the sort that weigh with what are usually called
"liberal" Catholics, and make it possible for them,
without prejudice to their honesty or their intelligence,
to remain comparatively unmoved in the face of
the enormous and undeniable indictment that can be
brought against their religion. Disconnected and
casual as they are, they can make no pretence at con
stituting a synthesis or complete apology. Indeed, they
go to show that such a synthesis is from the nature of
things impossible; that Catholicism, like the civilisa
tion of which it is a factor, being in endless process of
unfolding and explaining itself, cannot be comprehended
and explained as if it were planned and carried out by
the wit of man. They study it, and view it from this
side and that ; not as a theory or a paper-religion, but
as an historical phenomenon, a living concrete reality.
There is nothing in these or a hundred such reasons to
force any man to believe in Catholicism ; but there is
much to incline him to adhere to it ; and certainly
enough to show that there is more than unconscious
bias or blindness to account for his hesitation to
renounce it.
The surprise which such hesitation on the part of the
fully informed Catholic causes to the equally informed
non-Catholic is due in great measure to the persistent
confusion of the theory of Catholicism with the thing.

74 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
This confusion is the work of controversy; of the
word-war between system and system, in which
Catholicism necessarily stands for a set of theses and
propositions, and not for a living social organism with
two thousand years of history behind it, comprehensible
only to an infinite mind. The theological scheme of
the Church is as little exhaustive of her reality as the
categories of physical science are exhaustive of the
nature and meaning of the universe. " Our little
systems have their day," but God's works are immeasur
ably deeper than our understanding can dive, and
higher than it can soar. Now if Catholicism meant
the theory of Catholicism as presented in the current
manuals of apologetic theology, the liberal Catholic
would be inexcusable in the eyes of the fully informed
outsider. For that theory is not, as some suppose, sick
or dying, but dead and only waiting to be buried
and forgotten. As long, however, as it is above ground
at all, it is an abiding stumbling-block and offence to
many who, attending to the apologists, identify the
Church on paper with the Church in experience. But
in truth the Church of experience goes her way as
little affected by the theorisers as is the orderly course
of the universe by the speculations of science. The
monkey believed he was driving the elephant as long
as their ways coincided ; but when their ways parted
the latter pursued his stately march all heedless of his
rider's impotent chatter. So it has been with Catholi
cism in the past ; so it will be in the future. We shall
. never find a theory to fit it. We shall never quite know
what it is, or what it may turn into — a controversial
disadvantage no doubt, but not without compensations.

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 75
The considerations on which we have dwelt are not
exactly reasons of the head, nor yet reasons of the
heart, but rather reasons of life and experience. On
the whole we do not see any system which satisfies so
many of the exigencies of man's religious nature, while
most systems are woefully lacking in some of these
requirements to which Catholicism answers. They
offer us the symmetry and elegance of a well-weeded
garden, neatly walled in ; but not the wild luxuriance
of mountain and plain and valley and forest primeval.
In them we should feel cramped and stifled and cut off
from the great unwalled garden of Nature, far too vast
ever to be brought into order to such an extent. Be
cause we can comprehend and define, we cannot rever
ence the work of human reason as we can reverence
that of divine reason.
While others are asking if Catholicism on paper is
true, we are asking if Catholicism in history is alive
and going to live. We do not say that the former
question has nothing to do with the latter. It matters
much for successful self-management whether a man
understands or misunderstands his own physical con
stitution, and the unhistorical a priori and sectarian
theories of Catholicism now in vogue are plainly a
grave obstacle to the Church. But that they count for
enough to endanger her existence may surely be
doubted in the light of history. Eventually the
elephant goes his own way, and his rider either dis
mounts, or else changes his plans to save his dignity.
Similarly, a more historically and philosophically
adequate comprehension of Catholicism will, no doubt,
do much for its renovation and progress.

76 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
To have recognised that the supernatural character
of religion in general, and of Catholicism in particular,
consists with its being a co-factor in the natural process
of man's spiritual development, is one of the first con
ditions for its redemption and successful cultivation.
At present it is in the helpless condition that physical
science was in before Bacon, or medicine in the days
of Galen. It is the unresisting prey of diseases and
epidemics, which men in their ignorance put down to
the visitation of God or the intervention of the Devil.
Looking to preternatural agencies at once, they never
discover the natural causes of such ills, or apply the
natural remedies often to hand. Let religion be accepted
as part of the natural process of civilisation, and men
will observe and study the laws of its growth and
decay, and through such knowledge will be able to
further the one and hinder the other as never here
tofore. Yet, however much we may improve upon Nature by
understanding and obeying her laws, she lives by her
own vitality and not by our ingenuity, and runs her
course for the most part independently of our assistance.
It is the Church that produces theologies, not theologies
that produce the Church. The leaves come and go,
but the tree remains ; they hang upon it, it does not
hang upon them.
Viewing the matter this way, we can still hope, in
these days when those who identify the Church with
a theory must indeed despair. And for the same
reason we think it worth our while to seek a defence
for so much that to others must seem unworthy of a
serious thought. For in everything that has obtained

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 77
wide and enduring currency in her life, we recognise the
product of some natural law of religious psychology,
under which a discerning criticism will detect at least
the perversion or imperfect expression of a vital truth ;
and this, because for us it is a product of life and
experience, and not of reflection and design. Instead 1
of brushing aside revelation, dogma, theology, infalli
bility, miracles, papalism, and so forth as riddled with
bullets of criticism ; instead of treating them as mere
theses and theories, we are confident that they stand
for experienced values imperfectly apprehended and
expressed ; and that they must be retained as they are
until those values can find a clearer and higher ex
pression. (xviij)
Again, it is our trust in Catholicism as divine with
the divinity of a natural process, which makes us regard
schism with profound suspicion as entailing an im
poverishment of the sense of continuity and a narrow
ing of the field of collective experience, from which the
collective spirit is taught and nourished. We find
the discussion of brand new syntheses, of religions d la
mode.oi scientific Christianity exceedingly uninteresting ;
for our civilisation the day of new religions is over.
The experiments of the last three centuries are not
encouraging. What we need is to continue, purify,
widen, and deepen the process that was in possession
before these schismatic movements took place. We
freely admit that every such schism stands for the
emphasis — usually the over-emphasis — of some too
neglected aspect of Catholic truth and life, and that
till such neglect is manifestly repaired we cannot hope

78 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
that the Church's claims will be considered. But we
are equally convinced that if it is the Church's duty to
make room for all, even at a certain sacrifice of uniformity,
it is the duty of all to make reciprocal efforts towards
reunion, even at a certain sacrifice of individuality. As
for the fruitful friction and competition often alleged
in favour of a disunited Christendom, it certainly
never was wanting, never could be wanting, in Catholi
cism as we conceive and desire it, with its natural
variety and diversified luxuriance, its forced toler
ance and encouragement of every level of spiritual
culture. With our principles, therefore, secession is unthink
able. Besides, what other body could offer us anything
that we have not got, or even half that we want?
And if the Church offers much more than many of us
need, much that we could do without, yet others
need it ; and we would not have a Church narrowed
down to our own individual tastes and notions. What
ever attracts us abroad, we can find at home if we look
long enough. To whom, then, should we go? It is
only the fantastic notion that we must eat everything
on the table that makes the banquet seem burdensome
to us. (xix)
And now if the name is at all new, the thing signified
by " liberal Catholicism " is as old as the Church, and is
a necessary element of her constitution, a vital condi
tion of her health and progress. We absolutely
repudiate the perverse signification which they would
fain attach to the term who wish to discredit its bearers
and represent them as a sect or party. One might as

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 79
well say that "average Catholic" or "indifferent
Catholic" was a sectarian term. The name "• Liberal"
does not qualify the Catholicism of its bearer, but his
general outlook on men and life. We ought not to
discard it as evil because it is ignorantly associated
with political or utilitarian principles, or with a negative
and militant attitude towards established order in
Church and State. It is English, and not foreign,
usage that must determine the sense of English words ;
and in English a liberal does not mean a rascal. It is
only a certain modesty that should forbid a man to
profess a liberal Catholicism ; for it implies nothing
more nor less than the Catholicism of a man of liberal
education ; of a broad outlook over the world of the
past and the present — such an education as delivers a
man from parochialism and provincialism of every sort ;
enables him to enter into the heart and mind of other
races, times, religions, and civilisations than his own ;
to take an outside and objective, as well as an inside
and subjective, view of his own special interest or
cause, and, while deepening his loyalty and devotion
to it, preserves him from bigotry, one-sidedness, and
fanaticism. So understood, liberal Catholicism has
no necessary connection with a minimising tendency
as to doctrine or discipline. What it excludes is
the negative, militant, intolerant spirit, whether of
orthodoxy or heterodoxy, whether conservative or
progressive. Liberalism of this sort can never be too extreme;
we can never have enough of it. It alone can make us
conscious of the full depth and complexity of the prob
lems for which the multitude demands, and must have,

80 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
sensational, extreme, and apparently simple solutions,
one way or the other — the absolutism of authority or
the absolutism of freedom, wholesale socialism or
wholesale individualism, unqualified credulity or un
qualified scepticism. Only by such war-cries is the
majority led, and hence Liberal Catholicism is always
ignored or suspected by the multitude and its official
leaders. Yet, though never in favour, it is a constant and
necessary element in the Church's life, and can claim
for its representatives many, if not most, of the great
personalities that have stood as landmarks in her
history — men whose worth has, in so many cases, but
slowly won that public recognition to which their
liberalism taught them to be indifferent. Ground
between the upper and the nether mill-stone, they have
needed to possess their souls in patience. Their com
prehensive and tolerant sympathy with warring ex
tremes has won them the dislike of both sides, each
of which holds him a cold friend who ventures a good
word for its antagonist, or who would slack down the
fires of hatred. Sharing as they do, in all sincerity, the
faith, they by no means share the opinions or theology
of the majority, nor of those who have to control the
majority ; knowing well that for those truths which are
reached by reflection and inference, general consent is
the worst possible guide.
Hence they are usually regarded as heterodox by the
majority which fails to distinguish between deviations
from, and developments of, received doctrinal opinions,
and between the truth of theology and the truth of
revelation.

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 81
But for the most part, the liberal Catholic knows his
Church history too well to be moved very greatly by
hard words, or even by hard blows, which he finds have
been dealt out to his spiritual predecessors with a
prodigal recklessness that somewhat robs them of their
significance. He does not respect officials less, but
rather more, for his clear knowledge of the precise
basis, scope, and limitation of their jurisdiction. He
does not value the sacraments and outward privileges of
a Catholic less, because he recognises that internal is
more necessary than external union with the Church,
and that " the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth "
is more essential to the soul than even the sacramental
bread of life. It is no mere juridical bond to be
snapped at the word of an angry bishop that makes
him a Catholic, but a massive consciousness of solid
arity with the whole Catholic communion, past and
present, by whose spirit he is animated, whose beliefs,
hopes, aspirations, and sentiments he shares. Recog
nising the practical deference which is due to the
official interpretations of that spirit, and is demanded
by the interests of order and discipline, he will use
every honest endeavour to conform to such decisions ;
but should he fail, and should he, without any conscious
ness of fault, incur juridical excommunication, he will
not in his own mind cease to feel himself a Catholic,
nor will he suffer any true and inward excommunication
so long as he is sincerely convinced of being faithful to
a deeper and truer interpretation of the Church's spirit
than has yet been reached by the average mind, of
which the official Church is the guardian and exponent.
Between the deeper and the less deep, the truer and the

82 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
less true, there is difference — a difference that may
surprise and trouble — but there is not contradiction.
Not till he is sensible of such contradiction, not till he
feels that he has certainly ceased to be an honest inter
preter of the more recondite implications of Catholicism,
will he feel himself excommunicated in spirit and in
truth. In conclusion, then, the position of a liberal Catholic,
fully informed of the massive indictment that may be
preferred against his religion, and lacking neither in
intelligence nor in intellectual honesty and detachment,
is by no means so inconceivable as would seem to those
who confound the cause of Catholicism with that of its
popular controversialists ; who instead of studying the
living organism, study the books that have been written
about it. Nor is he the special pleader of a desperate
cause, but a true philosopher if — against those who,
treating Catholicism as a theory, would show that it
cannot live — he treats it as something that does live and
has lived, and strives to determine the secrets of its
life; if instead of discussing Dogma, Revelation, and
Theology as mere notions, he examines them as actual
living factors of Catholicism, and searches out the
principle of their vitality in the past, in order that
it may be saved in some fuller synthesis of the future.
Keenly as he may feel all the pressures and problems
of a difficult conformity, he is the last man who can
consistently yield to the charm of easy simplifications,
intellectual or practical. Life itself, in the measure
that we are alive, that we are in it and not out of it, is
a ceaseless balancing of conflicting interests, a fierce
fight for the unification of experiences that gather more

REFLECTIONS ON CATHOLICISM 83
quickly than we can arrange and adjust them. If then,
for the individual and for the race, life itself is an
endless problem that cannot be evaded ; if all the great
warring interests of life — political, social, educational —
teem, each in its turn, with interior discords and diffi
culties, why should religion, why should Catholicism, be
an exception? Those who fly to it for simplification
are fools ; those who fly from it only for that motive are
still greater fools. "The cross is always ready and
awaits thee everywhere ; thou canst not escape it, run
where thou wilt," says a Kempis. We leave a service
able house because the chimneys smoke, and for a time
we experience a grateful relief. But presently we find
that the new one is damp or ill-drained and, forgetful
of smoky flues, we wish ourselves back.
The wedded union between the Church and Society,
between religion and culture, is not without endless
domestic jars, endless demands on mutual patience.
Yet this is no reason for an impossible divorce. The
Fathers have long since discovered an image of the
Church in Eve, drawn from the side of Adam to be a
helpmeet for him, albeit a costing one in many ways.
In some respects the Hindu legend of the same event
is even more illustrative. It tells us that when the
Creator had taxed a million contradictory elements
of the universe for contributions which he blended into
a new creature and presented to man, the man came to
him in eight days and said : " My lord, the creature
you gave me poisons my existence. She chatters with-
' out rest, she takes all my time, she laments for nothing
at all, and is always ill."
And Twashtri received the woman again.

84 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
But eight days later the man came again to the god
and said : —
" My lord, my life is very solitary since I returned
this creature."
And Twashtri returned the woman to him.
Three days only passed, and Twashtri saw the man
coming to him again.
" My lord," said he, " I do not understand exactly how,
but I am sure the woman causes me more annoyance
than pleasure. I beg of you to relieve me of her."
But Twashtri cried : " Go your way and do your
best." And the man cried : " I cannot live with her ! "
" Neither can you live without her," replied Twashtri.
And the man was sorrowful, murmuring : " Woe is
me ! I can neither live with nor without her."

CHAPTER III
LEX ORANDI, LEX CREDENDI
THIS essay appeared in the The Month (Nov.,
1899), and later in The Faith of the Millions
(Series I) under the title "The Relation of Theology
to Devotion." I reprint it here under a new title,
because it is fundamental to all the essays that follow,
and to the whole point of view developed in the volumes,
Lex Orandi and Lex Credendi. On re-reading it care
fully I am amazed to see how little I have really advanced
since I wrote it ; how I have simply eddied round and
round the same point. It is all here — all that follows
— not in germ but in explicit statement — as it were in
a brief compendium or analytical index.
Again : it marks a turning-point in my own theo
logical experience. Previously, I had uncritically
accepted the more rigid scholastic view of the " Deposit
of Faith " as being " Chapter the First " of Catholic
theology written by an inspired pen ; and in the earlier
essays, reprinted in Faith of the Millions, had sought
to evade the obvious difficulties of that supposition by
a liberal use of the theory of doctrinal development.
Later, the insufficiencies of such apologetic became
so pressing that one was forced to consider whether
the " Deposit of Faith " should be viewed as essentially
SS

86 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
a " form of sound words " and not rather as a Spirit, or
a Principle, or an Idea — a view which would liberate
theology and all the sciences with which it is neces
sarily entangled from bondage to the categories of a
past age consecrated by Divine Authority.
Finally it seemed, and still seems to me, that we can
reconcile the traditional notion of the "Deposit" as being
a "form of sound words" with all the exigencies of
mental freedom, by carefully distinguishing Revelation
and Theology as generically different orders of Truth
and Knowledge ; by denying strenuously any sort of
development of Revelation or Dogma, such as obtains
only in Science and Theology.

Theology may be used in a wider or a more restricted
sense. Here we employ the term to signify what is
known as scholastic theology, that is, the essay to
translate the teachings of Catholic revelation into the
terms and forms of Aristotelian philosophy; and thereby
to give them a scientific unity.
Roughly speaking the difference between the philo
sophical and the vulgar way of conceiving and speaking
about things, is that the former is abstract, orderly, and
artificial ; the latter, concrete, disorderly, and natural.
The exigencies of our feeble and limited memory make
it necessary for us to classify our experiences into some
sort of unity. A library is no use to us unless we can
introduce some kind of system or order into its arrange
ment, and make an intelligible catalogue of its contents.
We can consider the order of size, or of subject, or
of authors and titles taken alphabetically, or of date

LEX ORANDI, LEX CREDENDI 87
of publication ; or taking any of these as the first class-
note, we can employ the others for subdivision. We do
not invent these orders, but we find them ; and so when
we map out the world into categories, we do not invent
but recognise one or other of these arrangements that
things admit of. We can, however, classify the books,
not only in our mind or in a catalogue, but also in our
library ; we can even classify Nature in our museums ;
but the world at large refuses to be harnessed to our
categories, and goes its own rude unscientific way.
Now who will deny that a natural-history museum does
truly represent Nature? that under a certain aspect one
who has studied Nature there, knows more about her
than he who has lived all his life in the woods ? But
only under a certain aspect is this true. For such a
presentation of Nature is abstract and negatively unreal.
Beetles do not march the fields in such logically ordered
phalanxes ; nor do they wear pins thrust through their
middles ; nor are birds' eyes made of glass, or their
viscera of sawdust, or their muscles of wire. A visitor
from some other creation who knew no more of our
world than that, would think it a very simple affair ;
very easy to remember and to retail. Still how little
would he know of its reality compared with a denizen
of the backwoods ! Yet if our backwoods-man could be
educated scientifically in such a museum, he would
receive almost a new power of vision, a power of observ
ing and recognising and remembering order where
before he had only seen chaos. And in this lies the
great advantage of abstract and scientific consideration ;
of precisions that are unreal; of suppositions that are
impossible. Only by these devices can we digest our

88 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
experience piecemeal, which else would remain in con
fused unsorted masses. But the more abstract, general,
and simple our classification is, and the further removed
it is from the infinite complexity of concrete reality, the
more we need continually to remind ourselves that its
truth is merely hypothetical, and holds only in the
abstract. This is what the earlier political economists
(for example) forgot, when they drew many conclusions
that were perfectly irrefutable, on the purely abstract
supposition that man's sole motive is the desire to
make money; but that were altogether false in the
concrete real world where thousands of other motives
complicate the problem.
It must further be noticed that on the whole the
backwoods-man has a truer knowledge of Nature than
a mere acquaintance with a science-manual could ever
impart. Both kinds of knowledge are in their own way
lamentably imperfect ; the one through indistinctness
and confusion ; the other through unreality and poverty
of content. Yet it is less misleading to take a confused,
general view of an object, than to view one of its parts
or elements violently divorced from the rest. The
rudest clown knows better what man is, than would
some being who should know nothing but the articula
tion of the human skeleton— true as this latter know
ledge would be as far as it went.
It is clear then that, as far as the natural world
is concerned, what is scientifically true in the abstract,
may be practically false in the concrete. But when we
are dealing with the spiritual and supernatural world,
we are under a further disadvantage ; for we can think
and speak of it only in analogous terms borrowed from

LEX ORANDI, LEX CREDENDI 89
this world of our sensuous experience, and with no
more exactitude than when we would express music in
terms of colour, or colour in terms of music. So far
as the most abstract and ultimate ideas of our philo
sophy prescind from all sensible determinations of being,
and deal with the merest outline and empty framework
of thought, they may have some literal value in the
supersensible world. We can say : This, that, or the
other follows necessarily from the principles of meta
physics, and is therefore as true as those principles are.
But it is not the whole truth; and indeed the more
abstract and general are the terms under which a thing
is known, the less do we know about it. A compara
tively concrete idea like Man or King gives us a mine
of information about the subject of which it is predi
cated ; whereas Being, Substance, Cause, give us the
very minimum of information. Now the terms that are
in any sense common to the world of our experience
and to the world beyond it, are, from the nature of the
case, the most barren and shadowy of all. If, e.g., we
look at Porphyry's tree where " substance " bifurcates
into " material substance " and " spiritual substance," the
former branch develops and subdivides down to the
real and particular, but the latter breaks off abruptly
and leaves us in the dark as to all its concrete deter
minations. For all reason tells us, we know nothing"
of angels except what can be deduced a priori
from the general idea of non-material substance. To
our imagination they are utterly characterless and un-,
interesting beings ; quite different from the Saintsj
of whom we can sometimes feel the individuality in
spite of their biographers.

90 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
Granted then all that the most exacting meta
physician might claim, any non-analogous ideas we can
form of the other world are necessarily of the thinnest
and most uninstructive description, and it is only by
liberal recourse to analogy that we can put any flesh on
their bare ribs. Whatever shred of truth they convey
to us may, or rather must, like all half-evidence, get an
entirely different complexion from the additional mass
of truth that is hid from us. When, however, we begin
to supplement by use of analogy, and (e.g.) to cover the
bare notion of a First Cause by clothing it with all the
excellences of creation, multiplied to infinity, purified of
their limitations, and fused into one simple perfection,
then we must frankly own that we are trying to com
prehend the incomprehensible, to equal a sphere to a
plane. In saying this, we do not deny for a moment,
that the infinite can to some extent be expressed in
terms of the finite ; but are only insisting on the purely
analogous character of such expression. Nor again are
we denying the utility, or even the necessity, of such an
endeavour ; for we should be forced equally to deny the
use of all scientific, as opposed to vulgar, modes of con
ception ; whereas these two modes check and supple
ment one another.
It is a received principle of scholasticism that the
" connatural " object of the human mind is this material
world which is presented to our senses ; and that we are
forced to think of everything else, even of our own soul,
in the terms of that world. Hence all our " explana
tions" of spiritual activity are, however disguisedly,
mechanical at root ; thought is a kind of photography or
portraiture ; free-will a sort of weighing process ; the

LEX ORANDI, LEX CREDENDI 91
soul itself, so far as it is not described negatively, is
described in terms of body. Having a direct intuitive
knowledge of these spiritual operations we can be, and
should be, conscious that our explanations of them are
inadequate and analogous. Still more when we try to
explain that world inferred from, but beyond, experi
ence, internal or external, ought we to be on our guard
lest we forget the merely analogous character of our
thought. The error called " anthropomorphism " does
not lie so much in thinking and speaking of God human-
wise — for that we are constrained to do by the structure
of our minds — as in forgetting that such a mode of con
ception is analogous. The chief use of metaphysic or
natural theology lies in the fact — not that it gives us
any more comprehensible idea of God — but that it im
presses upon us the necessary inadequacy of our human
way of regarding Him. Neither the metaphysical nor
the vulgar idea is adequate, though taken together they
correct one another ; but taken apart, it may be said
that the vulgar is the less unreal of the two. To illus
trate this from nearer and simpler cases : The peasant
thinks of his soul as a filmy replica of self interfused
with his body ; as co-extended with it, part answering
to part ; but the philosopher will tell him that the soul
is present " wholly in the whole body, and wholly in
each several part." But this latter statement has no
real value, save so far as it insists that the peasant's
view is only equivalent and not literal truth — that is, so
far as it is a repudiation of anthropomorphism. What
does it tell us as to the real mode of presence ? That
the truth lies unassignably between two erroneous ex
tremes ; first, that the soul is, as the peasant conceives

92 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
it, interfused co-extensively with the body ; secondly,
that it is concentrated in every point of the body. There
are certain advantages attached to either mode of
presence ; but these two modes, though incompatible
for extended substances, are in some way combined in
a spiritual substance, not literally, but as far as the
practical advantage of them is concerned. The vulgar
notion would deprive the spirit of some of its excellence,
and would create many difficulties if not recognised as
inadequate and anthropomorphic. Similarly, if the
philosopher forgets that he has only determined the
locus of truth, the extremes between which it lies
inaccessibly ; if he thinks that he has got to more than
its practical equivalent, or has got any proper non-
analogous notion of spiritual substance and presence, he
may wake to find that, in combining two incompatible
ideas, he has got zero for his result.
The same is to be said of our conception of the
Divine omnipresence :
Out beyond the shining of the furthest star
Thou Thyself art stretching infinitely far,
Nature cannot hold Thee, earth is all too strait
For Thy endless glory and Thy royal state.
This is the common, human way of viewing the
matter ; but the philosopher sees at once that it
" negates " a certain perfection or advantage to be
found in concentrated, " punctual " presence ; and that
all such advantages, however incompatible with any
mode of being familiar to us, must be realised in God.
Hence he insists on this latter as well ; saying, at the
\ same time, that God is not referable to space as an
I extension or a point might be, but in some way quite

LEX ORANDI, LEX CREDENDI 93
inconceivable in itself, though conceivable as to its
advantages. The effect of such an explanation on the
common mind will often be that God is not everywhere,
as hitherto supposed, but nowhere ; not far, indeed, yet
not near ; not distant, yet not present. Again, eternity,
to the peasant, means time without end, century upon
century, per omnia sacula sceculorum : the divine life,
like our own, drags on, part after part, experience upon
experience. God is the " Ancient of Days," lined and/
wrinkled with aeonian cares. But to remove the limita
tions involved in such a conception, the philosopher tells
us that God's life is tola simul, all gathered up into an in
divisible now , into the imaginary crack that divides one
second of time from another. As before, he tells us to
take these two extreme errors together ; and without
attempting to fuse them, to hold them side by side in
the mind, confident that the truth lies indefinably
between them. And so far he does well. But if he
thinks that these two assertions can be combined into a
direct expression of the truth, he will come to the con
clusion that God is in no way referable to time ; and so
miss that half-truth which the peasant apprehends.
Thus the use of philosophy lies in its insisting on the
inadequacy of the vulgar statement ; its abuse, in for
getting the inadequacy of its own, and thereby falling
into a far more grievous error than that which it would
correct.1 1 It is curious to find the same lesson inculcated in a very different
school, but in a parallel connection. Speaking of the attempts of meta
physics to describe the Absolute in negations, Professor Andrew Seth
(Man's Place in the Cosmos, p. 218) asks : " What is the inevitable effect
upon the mind of this cluster of negations ? Surely it will be this : Either
the Absolute will be regarded as a mere unknowable with which we have

94 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
It is a fact that the Judaeo-Christian revelation has
been communicated in vulgar and not in philosophical
terms and modes of thought. The Old Testament
seems frankly anthropomorphic from the first ; God
lives, thinks, feels, acts under limitations, differing only
in degree from our own ; and it would almost seem as
if the Incarnation were timed to counteract the weaken
ing of religion, incident to the more abstract and philo
sophic theology of later ages. Men are influenced
directly through their imagination and their emotions ;
and only remotely through their abstract ideas. In the
measure that God is dehumanised by philosophy, He
becomes unreal and ineffectual in regard to our life and
no concern ; or the denial of will, intellect, morality, personality, beauty,
and truth " [i.e., the denial of these attributes in their experienced forms
and with their finite limitations and distinctness] " will be taken to mean
that the Absolute is an unity, indifferent to these higher aspects of experience.
It will be regarded as non-personal and impersonal in the sense of being
below these distinctions ; and our Absolute will then remarkably resemble
the soulless substance of the materialist. Nothing is more certain than
that extremes meet in this fashion ; and that the attempt to reach the
superhuman falls back into the infra-human. Now Mr. Bradley, of
course, intends his unity to be a higher, not a lower unity. ' The Abso
lute is not personal, because it is personal and more. It is, in a word,
super-personal.' But he is not blind to the dangers that lurk in his
denials. ' It is better,' he even warns us, if there is risk of falling back
upon the lower unity, ' to affirm personality than to call the Absolute im
personal. ' But there is more than a risk, I maintain ; there is a certainty
that this will be the result. . . . Our statements about the Absolute . . .
are actually nearer the truth when they give up the pretence of literal
exactitude, and speak in terms (say) of morality and religion, applying to it
the characteristics of our own highest experience. Such language recog
nizes itself in general (or at least, it certainly should recognize itself) as
possessing only symbolical truth — as being, in fact, 'thrown out,' as
Matthew Arnold used to say, as a vast reality. But both religion and the
higher poetry — just because they give up the pretence of an impossible
exactitude — carry us, I cannot doubt, nearer to the meaning of the world,
than the formula; of an abstract metaphysics. " *

LEX ORANDI, LEX CREDENDI 95
conduct. God has revealed Himself, not to the wise
and prudent, not to the theologian or the philosopher, ''
but to babes, to fishermen, to peasants, to the profanum
vulgus, and therefore He has spoken their language,'
leaving it to the others to translate it (at their own
risk) into forms more acceptable to their taste. The
Church's guardianship in the matter is to preserve, not
to develop, the exact ideas which that simple language
conveyed to its first hearers, knowing well that those
human ideas and thought-forms are indefinitely in
adequate to the eternal realities which they shadow forth.
" This is My Body " — what did these words mean for
Peter and Andrew and the rest ; that is all she inquires
about. What does she care about the metaphysics of
transubstantiation, except so far as metaphysicians have
to be answered in their own language, and on their own
assumptions ? If she says the soul is the " form " of
the body, it is not that she has a revelation of philosophy
to communicate, but because the question is asked by a
hylomorphist ; and it is the nearest way the truth can
be put to him..
This "deposit" of faith, this concrete, coloured,
imaginative expression of Divine mysteries, as it lay
'in the mind of the first recipients, is both the lex orandi
and the lex credendi ; it is the rule and corrective, both
of popular devotion and of rational theology. Devo
tion tends to become more and more anthropomorphic
and forgetful of the inadequacy of revelation, and thus
to run into puerilities and superstitions. Philosophical
theology tends to the other extreme of excessive
abstraction and vague unreality. The Church, by ever
recalling them to the original rule of tradition, pre-

96 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
serves the balance between them and makes them help
one another. Just as experience is the test and check
of those scientific hypotheses, by which we try to
classify, unite, and explain experience ; so revelation
is the test and check of all philosophical attempts to
unify and elucidate its contents. We do not, of course,
mean that popular devotions are to dictate to theology,
but that theology together with them, must be brought
to the test of primitive revelation as interpreted by the
Church. Any rationalist explanation that would make
prayer nonsensical, or would encourage laxity, or would
make havoc of the ordinary sane and sensible religious
notions of the faithful, is eo ipso condemned as not squar
ing with facts. So far, for example, as the philosophical
conception of God's independence tends to create an
impression that He is not pleased with our love, or
grieved by our sin, it is opposed to revelation, which
says : " Grieve not the Holy Spirit " ; or " My Spirit
will not alway strive with man " ; and which every
where speaks of God, and therefore wants us to think
of God, as subject to passions like our own. And in
so thinking of God, we think inadequately no doubt, but
we are far less inadequate than were we to think of
Him as passionless and indifferent. The one concep
tion paralyses as the other stimulates devotion. Again,
if the philosophical explanation of God's working in
our will creates an impression fatal to the sense of
liberty and responsibility, it is so far counter to revela
tion ; and no less so is any explanation of our liberty
which would take the reins out of God's hands, or make
Divine foreknowledge impossible. Here obviously is
a case where philosophy shoots aslant the truth, first on

LEX ORANDI, LEX CREDENDI 97

one side and then on the other ; and can never strike
it fair, but commends to us the paradox : " Watch, as
though all depended on watching ; and pray, as though
all depended on praying." Again, predestination and
foreknowledge are doctrines destructive of religious
energy, as soon as we forget their abstract and merely
scientific character; but revelation plainly intends us
to go on as though God knew as little of the future as
we do, and were waiting for events to develop, before
fixing our doom. " Oh, did I but know that I should
persevere," cried a Kempis, puzzled with the theology of
predestination and trying to look at things as God sees
them. " Do now, what thou wouldst do if thou didst
know, and thou shalt be very safe," was the answer.
Rational theology is in some sense an attempt to look
at things back-before, in a non-human, non-natural
way ; and it is justified in this endeavour only so far as
it tends to cure us of our terrestrial " provincialism " ;
but it is not wonderful that to us things so viewed
should seem distorted and unreal, the moment we
forget that its use is mainly corrective — that it is
medicine and not food.
To come to more distinctively Christian beliefs, we
have examples in the Trinity and Incarnation, of the
inability of the human mind to strike a truth fair in
the centre, and of its need of seemingly contrary and
complementary expressions of inaccessible ideas. The
simple believer can successively affirm that in God
there are three Persons, and that in God there is one
Nature. He can even know that what is not simul
taneously verifiable of creatures, may be verifiable of
the Creator in some higher sense as yet unsuspected ;

o8 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
that the truth lies midway between what he means by
one person and what he means by three persons. But
let the theologian begin to explain "nature," and
"person," and to insist on his mentally putting to
gether, in one whole, assertions hitherto held as true
but irreconcilable parts ; and the chances are that
one or other of these parts will be sacrificed in the
vain effort to secure a forced harmony.
But more particularly it is in relation to the Incarna
tion and its attendant mysteries, that it is important to
remember the abstract character of certain theological
conclusions, and the superiority of the concrete language
of revelation as a guide to truth. The whole doctrine
of Christ's Kevaxris or self-emptying, can be explained in
a minimising way almost fatal to devotion, and calcu
lated to rob the Incarnation of all its helpfulness by
leaving the ordinary mind with something perilously
near the phantasmal Christ of the Docetans. Christ,
we are truly taught to believe, laid aside by a free act
all those prerogatives which were His birthright as the
God-Man, that He might not be better off than we who
have to win our share in that glory through humiliation
and suffering ; that He might be a High Priest touched
with a feeling for our infirmities, tempted as we in all
points, sin only excepted. Yet when the theologian has
finished his treatise : De Scientia Christi ; when he has
impressed upon us that Christ was exempt from the
two internal sources of all our temptations, sc, the
darkness of our mind and the rebellion of our body ;
that in His case, temptations from without met with no
more response from within, than when we offer food to
a corpse ; we cannot help feeling that under whatever

LEX ORANDI, LEX CREDENDI 99
abstraction this may be true, yet it cannot be the whole
truth, unless all who have turned to Christ in their
temptations and sorrows have been woefully deluded —
unless the lex orandi and the lex credendi are strangely
at strife. Also when we are told that Christ's Sacra
mental Body is not referred to space ratione sui, but
only ratione accidentis ; that it is not moved when the
species are carried in procession ; that we are not nearer
to it at the altar than at the North Pole ; we can only
say that this " ratione sui " consideration does not con
cern us, nor is it any part of God's revelation. It does
well to remind us that our Lord's Body is not to be
thought of carnally and grossly; that our natural
imagination of this mystery is necessarily childish and
inadequate. But it does not give us a more, but if any
thing, a less adequate conception of it. " This is My
Body" is nearer the mark than metaphysics can ever
hope to come ; and of the two superstitions, that of the
peasant who is too literally anthropomorphic, is less
than that of the philosopher who should imagine his
part of the truth to be the whole.
Again, what is called the Hidden Life of our Lord in
the Sacrament, is a thought upon which the faith and
devotion of many saints and holy persons has fed itself
for centuries ; yet it is one with which a narrow meta
physics plays havoc very disastrously. The notion of
the loneliness, the sorrows, and disappointments of the
neglected Prisoner of Love in the tabernacle may be
crude and simple ; but it is assuredly nearer the truth
than the notion of a now passionless and apathetic
Christ, who suffered these things by foresight two
thousand years ago, and whose irrevocable pains cannot

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

possibly be increased or lessened by any conduct of
ours. I have more than once known all the joy and
reality taken out of a life that fed on devotion to the
Sacramental Presence, by such a flash of theological
illumination ; and have seen Magdalens left weeping at
empty tombs and crying : " They have taken away my
Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him."
There is perhaps a tendency on the part of schoolmen
to delight in disconcerting the minds of others by a
display of rare and esoteric knowledge, especially of
such knowledge as owes its rarity to its abstraction and
its remoteness from the wholesome concrete reality of
things, and which offers to minds more acute than deep
a quicker road to distinction than the laborious and
humbling path of general education. But after all,
destructive work does not demand much genius, nor
does it need more than the merest smattering of bad
logic and worse metaphysics, to be able to represent the
beliefs of simple devotion in a ridiculous light, and to
pull down in a moment what the labour of years cannot
build up again. Even if vanity be not the motive, yet
a well-meant but ill-judged desire to pluck up tares
whose root-fibres are tangled with those of the wheat,
will often issue in the same disaster.
This, of course, is not the use, but the abuse of
theology ; it is the result of a " little learning," which,
in unskilful hands, is the most dangerous of all weapons.
The first effect produced upon the believing mind by
departing from the childlike concrete presentment of
Divine truth as put before us in revelation, is un
doubtedly disconcerting and uncomfortable, like every
other process of transition from one resting-place to

LEX ORANDI, LEX CREDENDI

another ; and those who have not strength to carry the
process through, are often injured spiritually by their
inability either to go back to the older forms, or to go
forward far enough to find anything as satisfying ; and
these are just the people who, in the spirit of the tailless'
fox, delight in communicating their unrest to others.
But a deeper and more comprehensive theology seems
in most cases to bring us back to our original point of
departure, albeit on a higher plane ; to restore to us the
stimulus of our childlike conceptions, not only fully, but
superabundantly ; and to convince us almost experi
mentally, that God's way of putting the truth was,
after all, the better and the wiser.
What, for example, is the purport of the Incarnation,
but to reveal to us the Father, so far as the Divine
goodness can be expressed in the terms of a human
life? to bring home to our imagination and emotion
those truths about God's fatherhood and love, which are
so unreal to us in their philosophic or theological garb ?
To say that love and sorrow, joy and anger, exist in
God eminenter, purified from their imperfections, identi
fied with one another, is for us, and as far as any
effectual idea is concerned, the same as telling us that
they do not really exist in God at all. There is in Him,
we are told, something that equals their perfection ; but
then, what that something is we do not and cannot
know. But the Incarnation assures us that whatever
consoles and helps us in our simpler anthropomorphic
conception of God, is not more, but far less than the
truth. As soon as the Divine love becomes capable of
a human exhibition, as soon as it translates itself into
mortal language, it is seen to be, at least, a suffering,

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

grieving, passionate, pitiful love ; we are shown that
practically to deny these characteristics to the Eternal
is a far greater error than practically to attribute
them. Even if, in some non-natural metaphysical sense, the
Sacred Humanity suffers nothing in the sacramental
state, yet what would such suffering avail except to
reveal to us the transcendental suffering of the Divinity,
and its yearning for men's souls ? If the thirst of
Calvary is over and gone, was not its chief end to
assure us of the reality of the eternal thirst and passion
of God which there found but a finite and halting
utterance? "For the same thirst," says Juliana1 of
Norwich, " that He had upon the rood-tree (which
desire and longing and thirst, as to my sight, was in
Him from without beginning), the same hath He yet,
and shall have unto the time that the last soul that
shall be saved is come up to His bliss. For as truly as
there is a property in God of ruth and pity ; as verily
there is in God a property of thirst and longing."
1 Elsewhere, explaining that all contrition and holy sorrow in our soul
is from God, and therefore must be more excellently in God, whose Spirit
it is in us which postulat pro nobis gemitibus inenarrabilibus (Romans viii.
26), she writes : " He abideth us moaning and mourning. Which
meaneth, that all the true feeling that we have in ourself in contrition and
in compassion ; and all moaning and mourning for that we are not united
with our Lord, and such as is profitable — it is Christ, in us. And though
some of us feel it seldom, it passeth never from Christ till what time He
have brought us out of all our woe. For Love suffereth Him never to be
without pity. And what time we fall into sin and leave the mind of Him
and the keeping of our own soul, then beareth Christ alone all the charge
of us. And thus standeth He moaning and mourning. . . . And that
time I be strange to Him by sin, despair, or sloth, then I let my Lord
stand alone, inasmuch as He is in me." (Rev. xvi.) All this is no mere
concession to devout fancy, but a far nearer, though still defective,
approach to the truth than the metaphysics of theology can pretend to.

LEX ORANDI, LEX CREDENDI 103
What does the revelation of Christ's human heart
import except so far as it brings home, as it were,
to our very senses, the truth that Love is the core, the
very central attribute of the Divinity round which all
the other attributes cluster, from which they spring, on
which they depend; that blood and water, guilt and
remission, death and life, evil and good, darkness and
light, both, stream from and return to the same
fountain ; both manifest one and the same goodness,
and owe their seeming difference and colouring to the
narrowness and imperfection of our weak faithless
vision ? And even if the Eucharist were no more than
the bare remembrance of Calvary, it should speak to us
principally not of that past human passion, but of the
present Divine passion whereof Calvary was but the
symbol. But in truth, a better conception of the un
reality of time before the Divine mind, will convince us
that the simple devotion which regards God's passion
as continually present, as augmented by our sins, as
alleviated by our love, is less inadequate and more
philosophically true than the shallowly rationalistic
view. For it is only the merciful fading of our memory
that prevents our whole past being co-present to us.
To God it is (and was from eternity) as though
the nails were at this moment being driven through
His hands.
Similarly with regard to all other pseudo-philosophic
difficulties we have alluded to, we may say : Lex orandi
est lex credendi. The saints have always prayed to a
God, conceived human-wise, albeit with the conscious
ness of the imperfection of even God's own self-chosen
mode of revelation, and it is this consciousness that has

104 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
saved them from superstition and anthropomorphism.
We say "the saints," beause purity of heart is the safe
guard against superstition. It is the desire to " exploit "
religion, to bribe the Almighty, to climb up by some
other way, rather than go through the one door of self-
denial, that is the source of all corruption.
The " deposit " of faith is not merely a symbol or
creed, but it is a concrete religion left by Christ to His
Church ; it is perhaps in some sense more directly a
lex orandi than a lex credendi ; the creed is involved in
the prayer, and has to be disentangled from it ; and
formularies are ever to be tested and explained by the
concrete religion which they formulate. Not every
devotion of Catholics is a Catholic devotion, and the
Church needs to exercise her authority continually in
checking the tendency to extravagate, and in applying
and enforcing the original lex orandi. In this work she
is helped by a wise and temperate theology. But
theology is not always wise and temperate ; and has
itself often to be brought to the lex orandi test. It has
to be reminded that, like science, its hypotheses, theories,
and explanations, must square with facts — the facts
here being the Christian religion as lived by its con
sistent professors. If certain forms of prayer and
devotion are undoubtedly Catholic, no theology that
proves them unreal or ridiculous can be sound. If any
analysis of the act of faith or of charity or of con
trition, would make such acts seem exceedingly difficult
to realise, we know at once the analysis must be faulty,
since the simplest and most ignorant Catholics make
such acts easily and abundantly. If any theology of
grace or predestination or of the sacraments would

LEX ORANDI, LEX CREDENDI 105
make men pray less, or watch less, or struggle less;
then we may be perfectly sure that such theology is
wrong. Devotion and religion existed before theology,!
in the way that art existed before art-criticism ; reason-!
ing, before logic ; speech, before grammar. Art -
criticism, as far as it formulates and justifies the best
work of the best artists, may dictate to and correct
inferior workmen ; and theology, as far as it formulates
and justifies the devotion of the best Catholics, and
as far as it is true to the life of faith and charity as
actually lived, so far is it a law and corrective for all.
But when it begins to contradict the facts of that
spiritual life, it loses its reality and its authority ; and
needs itself to be corrected by the lex orandi.

CHAPTER IV
SEMPER EADEM (I)
THE following review of Mr. Wilfrid Ward's Problems
and Persons was intended not to solve but to state
the apparent dilemma raised by the conception of the
Deposit of Faith as a body of theological doctrines and
statements from which other statement might be deduced
syllogistically. Either the whole process of theological
and scientific development is held down to the categories
of that statement and practically paralysed ; or the
patristic and traditional notion of the Deposit as a
" form of sound words " must be abandoned altogether
in favour of the notion that it is a Spirit, or Idea, or a
perpetuated experience to be expressed by each genera
tion in its own way, but having no sacred or classical
form of expression. It seemed to me that Mr. Ward
had not grasped this dilemma ; that the " development "
admitted by scholastic theology had nothing but the
name in common with the "development" of science,
and could form no basis of reconciliation between the
two ; that as long as he admitted or did not deny that
the Deposit of Faith was the first chapter of Theology,
Mr. Ward's logical place was with the scholastics and
not with the liberals— in short, that he had sought but
1 06

SEMPER EADEM (I) 107
had not found a via media between scholastic theology
and science — between the old theology and the new.
My own solution is hinted at in the concluding para
graphs, where I suggest that the sacred " form of sound
words " may have other than theological value ; that
its categories are eternalised merely as illustrative of
that other value ; and not as philosophically or scien
tifically valid. I was not yet clear enough to say more ;
and certainly the distinction between revelation and
theology is not merely that between figurative and
exact statements of the same truth — a distinction which
would give a preference to theology as the underlying
substance of revelation, and would land U3 again in the
dilemma we were trying to escape. I had not yet seen that
Revelation is not a record, metaphorical or otherwise,
of a supernatural experience, but a persistent part or
element of such an experience. Nor had I yet realised
the difference between biological and spiritual develop
ment, and the fallacy of explaining the higher in terms
of the lower.

It is with the Problems rather than with the Persons
dealt with in Mr. Ward's collected essays that I propose
to occupy myself.1
These problems are reducible to one, that, namely, of
effecting a reconciliation between theology and science,
meaning by science the rest of the field of knowledge)
so far as it has been unified and systematised by th^f
labour of contemporary investigation and reflection.
But in so far as the task has already been carried out to
1 Problems and Persons. By Wilfrid Ward. Longmans. 1903.

io8 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
some extent by religious thinkers outside the Church,
who, unfettered by the obligations of Catholic dogma,
have given us a purely scientific or liberal theology
possessing a sort of generic identity under many
varieties, we may state our problem more conveniently
as that of reconciling whatever may be reasonable in
the claims of this liberal theology with the requirements
of Catholic theology.
This problem has been created by the comparatively
conservative, or even intransigent, attitude of theology
during the period in which the other sections of human
thought have, more or less uniformly, passed with ever
accelerated rapidity through various phases of progress ;
the result being that sacred and secular science have
gradually ceased to understand one another, to affect
one another, or to realise that at least as parts of the
totality of life and knowledge they have interests in
common, and are mutually impoverished by their an
tagonism. If in earlier times each generation witnessed some
sort of quarrel between theology and speculation ;
to-day, owing to the rate of scientific and historical
advance, we have a more wholesale problem to cope
with ; we witness more change in a decade than many a
century has seen in the past. Reflection, once underfed
by experience, is now surfeited beyond its powers of
healthy digestion.
Nothing has more contributed to this surfeiting in our
own day than the application, by way of analogy, of
the theory of biological evolution to the spiritual or
rational life of man. The science of evolution has sug
gested the evolution of science, of language, of art, of

SEMPER EADEM (I) 109
religion, of theology, of social and political institutions.
All are now viewed dynamically, as processes. It is the
law of their growth that matters, not the analysis or
definition of their present stage of expansion. A
" scientific " knowledge no longer means a mere under
standing of the formal, material, efficient, and final
causes, but an orderly, historical understanding of con
nected origins and developments ; it means tracing all
life back to the first perceptible microscopic germ in
which it becomes visible out of the darkness of the
unknowable. The notion that religions, creeds, and beliefs, like
everything else, are growths, conflicts rudely with their
all but universal claim to a miraculously supernatural
origin through divine revelation ; it conflicts with " the
old supposition as to the fixity of theology," — "a fixed
theology viewed as final, with no thought either of its
sources or of its possible future modifications." l
Between the claims of such a theology to dictate to
science, and those of science to dictate to theology, Mr.
Ward, a true disciple of Newman, hopes to find some
via media. " To believe then in the Christian revelation,"
he writes,2 " and to believe that it is a salutary check on
the anti-theological extravagances of the men of science,
and yet to believe in the methods of modern science
and criticism and to see in them a salutary check to the
excursions of theologians beyond their province — is not
this a tenable via media ? "
We are to believe in the fact of a divine revelation,
an abrupt extra-natural intervention analogous to those
which presumably bridge over the gulfs dividing dead
1 p. xi. 2 P. 102.

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

matter from living ; senseless from sentient life ; and
this, from human life. This fact of revelation, duly
proved of course, the scientist must accept as one of the
data of his problem, not to be ignored on account of a
priori difficulty.
But with the scientists, we are to believe that theology
is a growth governed by the usual laws of mental
development — a development of the formless theology
of the first followers of Christ ; that it is semper eadem
only in substance, not in form ; and that the function of
the sane, as opposed to the extravagant theologian who
would paint St. Peter with a tiara, is to criticise these
developments by the original rule of faith, to reject such
as are spurious ; to approve, foster, and elaborate such
as are legitimate. The result would be a theology
encumbered by no greater scientific difficulty than is
involved in the admission of the initial miraculous
intervention by which Christianity was created.
Now Mr. Ward contends "that there is abundant
room already provided by acknowledged theological
principles" for such developments in Scholastic theo
logy as an assimilation or at least a toleration of the
results and methods of modern science would demand.
" The fault in the more conservative theologians has
been (if my contention is true) that they have not seen
the full capabilities of their own principles, but have
identified their utmost reach with the very limited ap
plication of them which past circumstances have de
manded." 1 He recurs several times to the Church's
assimilation of the once dreaded Aristotelianism as
a crucial instance among many proving that practi-
1 P. xviii.

SEMPER EADEM (I)

cally or by implication the Church has admitted the
principle of development before ever it reached distinct
formulation. He can even find such a formulation of
it as might reasonably be looked for in that age, in the
Commonitorium of Vincent of Lerins, side by side with
and qualifying the quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab
omnibus. The prominence and growing credit which Newman's
great name has of late years given to the principle of
doctrinal development makes it important in the in
terests of truth to subject to a searching and perfectly
detached criticism this suggested possibility of finding
in it a via media between the two extremes (or ex
travagances) of theological intransigence and scientific
absolutism — between the Scylla of the old theology and
the Charybdis of the new. Should any one, in conse
quence, see reason to suspend his judgment for the
present, he will not thereby commit himself to either
extreme in hesitating to trust himself to the path
indicated. He may believe that there is a via media,
yet question whether he has really found it, or defined
its exact course.
The test of a middle position, which takes something
from both extremes, is whether these elements naturally
attract and integrate one another, blending in some
higher combination ; whether they are not as oil and
water violently shaken together to separate instantly
as soon as the vessel is at rest. Can it be shown that
there is any via media to be looked for through the
doctrine of development (common to science and
theology), which shall not be a syncretion of incompat
ible principles in virtue of one of which we should, in

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

all consistence, go to the extreme right ; and in virtue
of the other, to the extreme left ; which shall not keep
us in the middle merely by confusing us ; which shall
give us rest otherwise than on a rack, that at one and
the same time drags us with equal stress in opposite
directions ?
We must see, then, whether what seems an excess of
conservatism on the part of scholastic theology be
really separable from that measure of conservatism
which we must justify ; and similarly whether the
excesses of liberal or purely critical theology can be
pruned away without fatal results to its governing
principles and methods.
Let us then briefly compare or contrast the two
systems, and see whether they can in any way be re
conciled and " come to terms " ; whether by way of
amalgamation, or by the absorption of one by the
other, or by some amicable modus vivendi.
Scholastic theology occupies itself about the " deposit
of faith '' as its principal object. By this it understands
a certain body of divine knowledge revealed super-
naturally to the Apostles and delivered by them under
the form of certain categories, ideas, and images, to
their immediate successors. This formulated revela
tion is the depositum fidei. It was not as though the
tabernacle doors of the heavens, thrown open to the
Apostles, were to remain so for ever. What the
Apostles saw they recorded and formulated. To their
followers they transmitted the record ; not the privilege
of direct vision. Although many of the truths of the
Christian faith are coincident with those of " Natural
Religion," or even of Sacred History, yet both on

SEMPER EADEM (I) 113
account of their organic connection with those principal
mysteries (the Trinity and the Incarnation) which lie
altogether beyond reason, and on account of the
manner in which they are communicated to us, they
may be considered as organic parts of one and the
same supernatural revelation. Here, on the very
threshold of our inquiry, we encounter a radical and
I think irreconcilable difference between scholastic
and liberal theology — between the old and the new.
For the realities dealt with are, in the case of the
former confessedly beyond, and in that of the latter
within the experience of all men. The teachings of
the latter can, those of the former cannot, be brought
^directly to the test of experience, of comparison be
tween ideas and things. If the heavens, once opened
to the Apostles, remained open for every baptised
Christian ; if the same revelation, and not merely the
record of that revelation, were given to each of us as
to them, then we should need no depositum fidei, no
divinely authorised standard of expression ; we should
be comparatively indifferent to the efforts of past ages
to formulate that vision ; they would be to us as men's
first savage attempts to formulate Nature — the earlier
the worse. But it is rather as though centuries ago
men had been struck blind and partially paralysed, and
as if our knowledge of Nature depended on what was
handed down to us from the date of that calamity.
How carefully we should have to treasure up the
1 mental forms of that precious tradition and see that
the fluctuations of language did not lead us to misin
terpret the experience-values of its original terms !
That which is semper idem, constantly the same under

H4 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
all developments and accretions, is jn the case of
scholastic theology a doctrine, a record of an ex
perience gone, never to be repeated, preserved for us
only in and through that doctrine. Just because that
experience cannot be repeated, it is all important to
preserve, if not the exact words, yet the exact sense
and meaning which the record had for the minds of
those to whom it was first delivered by the Apostles ;
to represent to ourselves just what it represented to
them. Thus the ideas, categories, and symbols which
constitute this representation are of the very substance
of the depositum fidei ; if there is a contingent and
accidental element it must be looked for merely in the
language, in the verbal signs that stand for these ideas.
The " constant," the semper idem of liberal theology,
on the other hand, is the reality dealt with, and not any
doctrine, or representation of that reality. It deals
with those ever-present evidences of God in Nature and
in the universal religious experiences of mankind which
are accessible to all, at all times, and by which all
theories and doctrines as to the origin, nature, and end
of these experiences can be experimentally tested.
Taking " Nature " in the most comprehensive sense,
liberal theology is a branch of the science of Nature. It
is the old " Natural Theology " enriched and improved
by an application of the inductive historical and ex
perimental method to the religions of mankind. Nature
is always there to be studied and formulated, and is not
given us only by tradition from a privileged past gene
ration. Tradition and co-operation are indeed requisite
for the development of a science of Nature, but not for
the preservation of its object. Our interest in the crude

SEMPER EADEM (I) 115
science of the remote past is not reverential but his
torical ; we test present results not by their agreement
with that primitive science, but by their agreement with
Nature. From this radical difference in the ultimate objects of
their study — in the one case a certain class of natural
experiences ; in the other, a record of past super
natural experiences — flows another affecting the manner
of growth and development in liberal and in scholastic
theology severally.
In the study of Nature (or of any particular depart
ment of natural experience, like that of natural religion),
so far as that study is one and continuous through long
tradition and wide co-operation (so far, namely, as it is
virtually the work of a permanent society and represents
the growth of its collective mind), we expect to find
and do find a true development of doctrine, following
analogously and mutatis mutandis the laws of biological
development. The first conceptions and generalisa
tions are childlike, and naively anthropomorphic ; and
between these and the latest scientific advances there is
a certain thread of continuity — not merely that of
•historic succession ; nor that of reference to the same
object or reality, but that of a growing truthfulness, a
diminishing inadequacy. The earliest is to the latest as
^is the germ to the more or less developed organism ;
this has grown out of that ; that has grown into this.
Now, though stages of the same process, the germ and
the organism are not the same thing : a hen is not an
egg ; is not even the chicken that was, except so far
as we recognise there some absolute unchanged, un
developed identity of soul or consciousness. What is

n6 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
there thus identical in the sapling of a century ago and
the oak of to-day? Neither stuff nor fashion. Each
stage of development dies into the next ; ceases in
favour of the next. Our science is " the same " as that
of our ancestors only by descent and as part of the same
growth of the collective mind. Thus in the department
of natural religion it is not hard to trace the roads by
which religious reason has often passed, in its concep
tions of divinity, from grossly anthropomorphic poly
theism, to the purest monotheism. Yet these doctrines
are in no plain sense " the same " ; they are doctrines
about the same thing, but they are not the same
doctrine; the latter does not contain the former as a
constant nucleus amid explanatory or decorative accre
tions, but simply supplants and discards it. The
former persists as little as the caterpillar does in the
butterfly — which is not merely a winged caterpillar.
When liberal theology speaks of doctrinal or scientific
development it is always in this sense. As Judaism had
to die into the Gospel and be abolished, so, it conceives,
the theology of one age must always be supplanted by
that of the next. It looks back on its own past as
a man does on his childhood — not with contempt or
severity, but as on something that had to be gone
through and left behind for the sake of the present,
much as Chemistry, Physiology or Biology look back
with a sort of dilettante curiosity to their conjectural
origins in the darkness of the past.
But this comparative indifference to the doctrinal
forms and categories of the past is out of the question
in the case of Scholastic theology, whose principal
subject-matter is the record of an ancient and never-to-

SEMPER EADEM (I) 117
be-repeated revelation of supernatural and inaccessible
realities — realities, therefore, which cannot be consulted
in order to determine the precise sense of that record,
the precise degree of its inadequacies ; for they are
known to us only representatively ; only in and through
that record. To speak of the hidden realities as the
" substance," and of the record as the " form " of reve
lation, is misleading if it is meant to imply that we
can in some degree be indifferent to the latter, if only
we hold by the former. This is true for liberal the
ology, which can get at its object directly; not for
Scholastic theology, which can only get at the repre
sentation or record of its object.
It follows at once that it is a matter of life and
death for Scholastic theology, custodire depositum, to hold
fast to its primitive record, if not to the very words, at
least to the very ideas, symbols, and categories, in
which the Christian revelation has been given to it.
Inadequate though the representation of eternity in the
language of time must necessarily be, yet we have no
means of comparing it with its original, of defining
the limits of inadequacy, of sundering substantials from
accidentals. As experience is the criterion to which the liberal
theologian brings all developments, so this original
deposit of faith is necessarily the supreme criterion
of Scholastic theology. Its fruitfulness for knowledge
depends, not on its dying and being changed into
something else ; but on its being preserved fixed and
unchangeable. Round it, and concerning it, a vast
body of doctrine has gathered through the prolonged
collective labour of Catholic thought. But in virtue

n8 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
of this unchanged nucleus, Catholic doctrine may be
rightly considered semper eadem ; just as in virtue of a
persistently identical soul or self-consciousness, the
man and the babe (as St. Vincent of Lerins says) are
"the same," notwithstanding the gradual supplanting
of the infant by the adult organism. There is some
thing there that does not develop. We might roughly
compare it to the growth of archaeological lore about
some such monument as the Moabite Stone : a growth
partly in the interpretation of the sense of the inscrip
tion, and partly in the adjustment of history to such
data as it can be considered to establish. So, too,
Catholic doctrine grows in the measure that Catholic
thought busies itself about the meaning of the deposit
of faith and its bearing on other departments of know
ledge ; about its " explication " and its " application."
By its " explication " is to be understood that process
of analysis by which what is from the first actually,
albeit confusedly, contained within the limits of the
deposit of faith, becomes more distinctly and explicitly
recognised, through inferences drawn from revealed
data, or owing to a growth in perspicacity on the part
of the reflecting mind whose, as it were, microscopic
power is increased by general cultivation. And by
" applications " scholastics mean inferences drawn from
the combination of revealed with unrevealed premisses ;
and other adjustments of secular to sacred knowledge.
Now we have seen that certain categories and con
ceptions belong to the very substance of the deposit
of faith ; that were they exploded we should lose not
merely the containing vessel but its content as well,
since we have no means of separating one from the

SEMPER EADEM (T) 119
other. True, as Mr. Ward says, "no philosophy was
revealed ; no science was revealed." " Yet," as he adds,
" the Christian message could only be handed on in
terms which include both." 1 But more than this, every
truth of the creed, we are told, is either philosophical
or historical. We cannot view it as a mere envelope
of some other kind of truth. "God is a Spirit."
" God is three persons in one nature." Let some
new development of philosophy rob these categories
— "spirit," "person," "nature" — of all their meaning
and value, and what should we have left? They
imply a whole system of philosophy just as every
historical affirmation or denial affirms or denies the
whole of history.
Hence scholastic theology has always and consistently
fought tooth and nail for those philosophical categories
and historical beliefs which it conceives to be involved
in the very substance of the deposit of faith ; it has
never (as liberal theology could consistently do) treated
them as indifferent vehicles of values that could be
otherwise and better secured. On the ground that
revealed and natural truth, as both from God, must
be one, it has steadily condemned as spurious those
developments of secular knowledge which seem to
contradict its own reading of philosophy and history.
The task of Catholic theology has brought it into
continual opposition and conflict with the ceaseless
changes and developments of secular knowledge, which
of their own nature threaten at times to obliterate those
philosophical and historical beliefs in which the faith
has been for ever enshrined. Hence it is that scholastic,
1 P. 104.

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

unlike liberal theology, cannot be indifferent to the
said changes and developments as though its ultimate
criterion were realities and experiences, and not rather
a doctrine about realities. On the contrary, it has con
sistently claimed a sort of indirect jurisdiction over the
whole field of knowledge so far as the interests of its
own categories and beliefs are thereby engaged. This
is why we hear of " Catholic History," " Catholic Philo
sophy," no less than of " Catholic Theology " : but
not of " Catholic Mathematics," or of " Catholic
Geography." If then we speak of this body of doctrine, of expli
cations and applications, which has gathered round the
unchanging deposit of faith as a "development," it is
not in the quasi-biological sense in which liberal theology
uses the term ; for it is only the protective husk, the
clothing of the deposit which has grown ; the kernel,
that which is protected and clothed, remained unaltered.
The contrast is like that between the simple bread-
breaking at table in the bald surroundings of some
early-Christian home and the solemnities of High Mass
at St. Peter's. The nucleus remains, untransformed
and undeveloped, in the changeless words of consecra
tion. Nor are all the tomes of eucharistic theology and
controversy otherwise related to the simple primitive
sense of those words.
But though the logical development of this accumu
lating body of deductions is largely the work of theo
logical inquiry and reflection applied to the deposit of
faith in its relation to the rest of knowledge, yet the
justice of such developments is ultimately determined,
not as in the case of liberal theology by the fallible

SEMPER EADEM (I)

rule of theological reasoning or of the consensus of
experts ; but by the infallible criterion of the Church's
authority — a criterion as manifestly supernatural as is
the deposit of faith itself. On no other condition
indeed could the benefit of a revealed theology, final
and universally valid, be secured to all generations
to the end of the world against the obliterating in
fluences of time and change.
Hence the old theology consistently teaches that
the value of such infallible decisions is not causally
dspendent on the theological reasonings on which they
are based, and by which they are occasioned ; that
they are in some sense prophetic, "oracular," from
above. The accumulation of such decisions means
necessarily a narrowing of liberty of thought by a
further determination of truth, just as any growth
of legislation means a narrowing of liberty of action
by a further determination of right. It means bringing
an increasing number of philosophical and historical
positions, with all their implications, under the rule
of sacred doctrine ; it means an ever-increasing tension
between conservative theology and free thought. This
can seem nothing but a calamity from the standpoint
of those (like Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson in his article
" Ecclesiasticism " in the Independent Review, October,
1903) who do not believe in the divine truth of the
deposit of faith, or of the Church's decisions ; it can
seem nothing but a great benefit to science from the
standpoint of those who do.
If then scholastic theology ever appropriates the
fashions and developments of secular knowledge it is
as a mistress adopting a handmaid and imposing

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

restrictions on her liberty. Nutriment is changed into
the nature and lives with the life of the organism ; not
conversely. Aristotelianism adopted by the Church
was no longer Aristotelianism but Scholasticism. It
was no longer free thought, unfettered save by the laws
of reason and the facts of experience, but was bound by
the categories and facts implied in ecclesiastical dogma.
These it might illustrate, amplify, explain, but it might
not alter. So long as it seemed unconquerable it was
anathema in the eyes of theology. In the strong hands
of Thomas Aquinas it was conquered and broken-in to
her service. Doubtless in this as in other cases there
was a severe struggle, wounds were given and taken ;
and theology may have appropriated more than she
could assimilate ; much that disagreed with her con
stitution for many a long day. To-day in face of the
" new framework " of contemporary science and history,
scholastic theology pauses, not with any thought of
abandoning herself unresistingly to be absorbed there
by, of suffering herself to be worked up, as a branch of
science, into the synthesis of the new philosophy, or
of "coming to terms" by way of submission or con
cession, but only to see if she can absorb and subdue it,
if she can use it to illustrate, amplify, and explain her
own unalterable categories ; if she can make of it a
new ancilla theologies.
Such a wholesale appropriation would be far more
difficult than in the instance of Aristotelianism. For if
in some measure what is called the " Rigidity of Rome "
be, as Mr. Ward says, but a temporary defensive atti
tude against a passing danger, or merely a paradoxical
case of vital pliancy and self-adaptability, yet it is also

SEMPER EADEM (I) 123
true that since the thirteenth century there has been a
steady development of the principle and exercise of the
power of ecclesiastical authority ; that numberless
questions then open are now closed ; that the roots of
theology have spread out far more widely into the field
of secular knowledge ; that the Councils of Trent and
the Vatican represent, not passing, but permanent and
very considerable contractions of the realm of free
thought ; that this tightening-up was really a recurrence
to and development of the old principle of authority
which had been weakened by the spirit of free-criticism
that still breathed in the imperfectly digested body of
Aristotelianism. Moreover, it cannot be ignored that
the categories, methods, and actual teachings of Aristotle
were much more congenial and assimilable to a theology
already framed for the most part on the lines of Greek
philosophy than are the entirely heterogeneous methods
of modern critical thought with all their disconcerting
iconoclastic results. Still less can we parallel this
present position to that of early Christianity in the face
of that Alexandrine philosophy, by the appropriation of
whose forms Catholic theology, in any strict sense of the
term, was practically first created. Such an appropri
ation had plainly no elaborated theology to contend
with. Even the Judaism that furnished the categories
in which the Christian revelation found its original
expression was largely Hellenised ; just as Alexandrine
Hellenism was largely Orientalised, not to say Judaised.
We must now turn to a deeper contrast, underlying
a surface resemblance, between the development of
scholastic and of liberal theology.
Apart from the occasional interventions of ecclesi-

124 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
astical authority the development of Church theology
is, like that of any other branch of knowledge, the work
of experts as distinct from a far larger body of lay-folk
who are passively receptive of what they are taught.
Between these two bodies there intervenes a class of
dispensers or middlemen who popularise and deal out
the results of expert thought in the form and measure
required. Such are preachers, catechists, school-teachers,
text-book writers, and so forth. In a loose analogous
sense we might call the experts the Ecclesia docens (the
Teaching Church), and the lay-fold the Ecclesia discens
(the Church Taught), and might class the middlemen
with one or the other from different points of view. As
there is nothing distinctively Catholic about it, it is not
strange that this conception of authoritative teaching
should also obtain in liberal theology, except in so far
as there is perhaps something unprotestant about it,
something that indicates an abandonment of a more
individualistic in favour of a more social, and so far a
more Catholic, conception of Christianity ; a reinstate
ment of public authority as a criterion of religious truth
in lieu of private judgment.
" The real problem of an intellectual life," writes Dr.
Caird,1 " is how to rise to a judgment which is more
than a private judgment." We but travesty the theo
retical position of the Reformers, if we think they
denied this first principle of all education. Their error
was in forgetting that the charismatic dispensation
described in the New Testament was provisional and
transitory ; in supposing that every Christian could be
the recipient if not of direct revelation, at least of such
1 Quoted p. 54.

SEMPER EADEM (I) 125
a miraculous charisma of interpretation as is now
claimed only by the Pope ; that each one's interpreta
tions could thus be of divine and therefore of universal
or over-individual value. They took to themselves
severally, what Catholics applied to the Church col
lectively : " Ye have an unction from the Holy One and
know all things ; and need not that any man should
teach you." They were at one with the Church as to
the semper eadem nature of the Christian faith ; but,
contrasting the nucleus of the New Testament doctrine
with the bulk of Catholic doctrine, they denied the
identity, and considered the Church's authority dis
credited. Till then, the distinction between the original
deposit and its authoritative explications and applica
tions had been of little practical moment, nor was
theology ready at once to draw the exact line in every
instance. But the subsequent anti-Protestant contro
versy was all directed to show, first, that the essentials
of Catholic doctrine were contained in Scripture and
the earliest tradition ; and secondly, that the Church,
and not the individual, possessed the charisma of infal
lible interpretation in regard to explications and appli
cations. Development in this purely dialectical sense (not
in the sense of liberal theology) was defended as rational,
necessary, and divinely authorised.
It is a matter of fact that there was an outpouring
of the spirit of prophecy and interpretation among
Christians individually in the first generation— a dispen
sation that died away quickly as soon as the Church
took more definite shape and made it unnecessary. As
the flood of prophecy ebbed, the dissentient utterances
of individuals sought reconcilement in the higher

126 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
charisma of the assembly. Similar reasons subjected
the dissensions of assemblies to the community or to
the Bishop. Thence the appeal passed to Councils of
Bishops, to GEcumenical Councils ; till at last the process
of definition came to rest in 1870, when the Pope was
acknowledged as the highest and ultimate depositary of
that supernatural charisma of infallible interpretation
which the Reformers — on the assumption that the con
ditions of the first generations of Christianity were to
be permanent — had claimed each for himself.
Needless to say, dissensions of doctrine quickly
proved the assumption baseless ; the theoretical criterion
of individual divine guidance became in practice the
criterion of private opinion, while the reference of dis
putes to more public authorities as depositaries of a
higher charisma would have been self-condemnatory as
a virtual return to abandoned Catholic principles.
It was inevitable therefore that pure Protestantism
should soon fall a victim to the narrow individualism of
the renaissance ; that it should be absorbed and mas
tered by what it had not strength of constitution to
absorb. Not till the claim to particular inspiration had
been forgotten and discredited by the rationalism of
the Aufklarung ; not till the nineteenth century had
wakened to the natural and organic (as opposed to the
artificial and mechanical) conception of society, and
seen in it the necessary condition of individual life and
development, did Protestant theology begin, in the
question of private judgment, to adopt a quasi-Catholic,
but more strictly a liberal position. It began to see
that it was necessarily in the collective mind of a society
that religious (like other) truth must be elaborated and

SEMPER EADEM (I) 127
developed ; that the public mind must in some measure
be the rule for the individual mind ; that authority so
understood was a condition of true liberty and originality
as distinct from licence and eccentricity ; it began to see
such a society in the Christian Church — but all this as a
consequence of the purely natural laws that more or
less fallibly govern the development of the human
mind, and apart from any belief in supernatural and
infallible guidance.
If this meant a return to the rational and natural
element of Catholicism, yet it meant a more complete
abandonment of the deeper supernatural element — of
the belief in charismata — in miraculous revelation and
guidance. The differences are thus more fundamental
than the resemblances. In point of growth, scholastic
differs from liberal theology as wall-fruit from wild.
The natural force of development is the same for both ;
but the peculiar fertility claimed by the former is secured
by the intervention of a quasi-supernatural guidance from
without. Each year demands and sees new fastenings,
new restrictions of the natural wayward luxuriance.
The recognition of the authority of experts in divinity, as
shaping common belief and thus ruling the lay mind,
has its parallel in the relation of scholastic theologians to
the untheological multitudes of the faithful, but not in
the dogmatic authority of the Teaching Church over the
Church Taught. For the growth of Catholic theology
is not, as we have seen, left solely to the fallible methods
of theological reasoning, but claims to be supernaturally
checked and controlled from time to time by divine
dogmatic decisions or oracles whose truth is independent
of the natural reasonings that normally precede them,

128 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
and is due to a special supernatural charisma possessed
ex officio by the ruling authority.1
The submission which a Catholic yields to such
decisions is nowise like that which every prudent lay
man will yield to the consensus of experts in any matter
— a consensus whose value lies open to, and invites
experimental test ; but Church-authority is ex officio,
and independent of natural or acquired gifts and en
dowments. If the disputes of experts in philosophy,
science, and history were decided by the authority of
the Crown, could any one accept these decisions as final
and irreversible, as binding to interior assent under pain
of sin, unless he credited the kingly office with a pro
phetic gift above and independent of the laws of natural
reason ? But the Pope's authority is one by which the
theological experts themselves are judged and their
schisms healed. Nor has it any parallel in the position
of those dispensers and middlemen, those teachers and
lecturers and writers who diffuse expert wisdom over
the face of the earth. For these, too, are ultimately
judged and taught by the experts. In short, there is
and there can be no parallel in the natural order to the
supernatural interpretation, any more than to the super
natural revelation, of religious truth. The former is but
the complement and integration of the latter ; both
together are the presupposition of scholastic theology ;
they determine ever more closely the limits within
which, the lines along which, it must move — limits the
1 In all this I wrote now from a strictly scholastic, now from a strictly
liberal standpoint, not hinting at my own position, so as to present the
dilemma between the old theology and the new as clearly and objectively
as possible.

SEMPER EADEM (I) 129
absence of which is the essential characteristic of the
liberal theology that deals directly with natural experi
ences, and not with revealed doctrines relating to super
natural experiences.
Not necessarily denying, but putting aside all belief
in the miraculous and the supernatural, liberal theology
works out the consequences of modern scientific pre
suppositions and critical methods as applied to the
religion of mankind. Christianity is usually viewed by
it as the so far highest and fullest development of the
religious spirit ; but Christ's revelation was but one of
many that have been and may yet be. It was a great
stride forward, but how many greater may remain to be
made ? Like Judaism, like every great religion, Christi
anity fancies itself the final and universal form ; — " After
us the deluge ! After us the Parousia." Yet vainly.
For, after a certain series of transformations, identical
only as parts of the same process, it must die in order to
rise again and live in some other form. Death and
decay, no less than growth and development, are the
universal law of life. The organism at last reaches the
limits of its power of self-adaptation ; and can hope to
survive only in its offshoot, its progeny ; as Judaism
survived in Christianity.
Here is a free and unfettered application of the
categories of biological evolution to the subject of
religion, in which liberal theology with its own presup
positions and exclusions is perfectly consistent But
whatever abstract or ex hypoihtsi truth such conclusions
may possess, they cannot be maintained absolutely and
in the concrete, except at the cost of a wholesale re
pudiation of the bases of Catholic theology.

I3o SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
Thus it seems on examination that the recalcitrant
elements in each system which make their amalgama
tion impossible, are of their very essence. Neither
could " come to terms " by way of concession to the
other, without being absorbed, without ceasing to be
itself altogether.
Yet though it be vain to seek a via media by way of
amalgamation or synthesis, we may find it equivalently,
as Mr. Ward seems to think, in a modus vivendi.
" Present reunion and war," he says, " are not ex
haustive alternatives." *• Neighbours quarrel because of
their nearness ; the jealousies and rivalries of adjacent
territories are notorious. Now that the narrower
channel of difference which divided us from those who
formerly agreed with us as to the entirely supernatural
character of Christianity has broadened into an ocean
through the denial of that presupposition, we can in
some way better afford to be on friendly terms with
liberal theology without thereby seeming to compromise
ourselves. After all, as professedly scientific, its affirmations and
denials can pretend to no more than an abstract ex
hypothesi value. It is not useless for us to consider
what consequences flow from certain premisses and ex
clusions ; to see how Christianity stands according to
the categories and connections of present-day philo
sophy ; and on the supposition that the miraculous is
not to be reckoned with; or that the Scriptures are
purely human documents. Such abstract considerations
of a subject help us to understand it better, and to
realise the differences due to the excluded suppositions.
1 P. 91.

SEMPER EADEM (I) 131
Thus it is that liberal theology throws light on Catholic
theology ; and shows us more exactly how and where
it stands in relation to modern thought. In some sense
it is the very task of Apologetic to argue from the
admissions of its opponents however narrow ; to seek
coincident proofs by every method, however unpromis
ing ; to show that truth may be approached from many
sides and yet present more or less the same general
aspect Again, it may mitigate the impatience of liberal
theology to insist more emphatically than has always
been done on the fact that the deposit of faith is a
translation of supernatural experiences into the terms of
natural ; that its truth is the truth of analogy, not of
exact scientific equation ; that in guarding unchanged
this divinely given " form of sound words " — these
apostolic conceptions and categories and symbols — in
securing that all subsequent theological language shall
conform to them in sense or shall not contradict them, the
Church is the guardian of an expression, that she claims
no direct access to the experiences expressed — unique
experiences which lie outside that world of ordinary
experiences with which liberal theology deals. Custodi
depositum, that is the sum and substance of the Church's
commission as a teacher : Ego enim accepi a Domino
quod et tradidi vobis is the substance of her claim.
Moreover a recognition and emphasis of the distinction
between a nucleus of revelation semper eadem and identi
cal with the deposit of faith, and a developing body
of theological explications and applications of that
revelation, cannot but conduce to a better understanding
of Catholic theology. The sifting of these two elements

132 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
is in some cases difficult ; and here improved historical
methods lie at the service of the theologian by which he
can trace the body of doctrine backward through the
centuries, and determine more accurately the limits
between apostolic revelation and ecclesiastical teaching,
between the original sense of the deposit of faith and
what is merely protective of that sense against the cor
ruptive influences of changing thought and language.
Catholic and liberal theology therefore move in differ
ent planes, deal with different subject-matters, develop
by different laws, are governed by different criteria. In
a true sense each may say to the other : " What have I
to do with thee ? "
It is by a clearer recognition of their essential and
all-permeating diversity that they may come to regard
each other with eyes untroubled by passion, and to
understand their several functions in the working out of
religious truth through the conflict of opposites, through
the clash of Yea and Nay.

CHAPTER V
SEMPER EADEM (II)
THE purely critical and non-committal character
of the previous article was not understood by
certain theologians of the ultra-conservative school.
Regarding Mr. Ward's very moderate and reluctant
liberalism with suspicion, and finding in my article what
they considered a very just exposition of their own
view, together with a criticism of the extreme opposite,
they concluded that my object was to attack him as
identified with that extreme, and to identify myself with
the other. Hence they applauded with both hands ;
and many to whom I had been previously anathema
wrote to congratulate me as a returning prodigal. Even
Mr. Ward himself was led away by their enthusiasm
into accepting their interpretation of my intentions.
In truth I had been equally just to both Views, equally
merciless to their limitations ; and as to Mr. Ward, my
point was that he had failed to reconcile them, and
was, in principle, still on the scholastic side. When
I repudiated the intentions attributed to me, those to
whom moderation and objectivity are inconceivable at
once inferred that I was making a covert attack on
orthodoxy and a defence of ultra-liberalism.
The position was a sufficiently embarrassing one ; and
133

134 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
to rectify misunderstandings I wrote the following
article which the editor of The Month declined to insert,
but which appeared a year later in The Catholic World.
In a previous article I discussed some difficulties
attendant on the effort to find in the doctrine of de
velopment a middle way between the dominant theology
of the Catholic schools 1 and that of liberal writers —
" liberal," in so far as they discard the fetters imposed
on free thought by the belief in a supernatural
revelation and in a supernatural interpretation of the
same. We can believe in the rights of criticism
on the one hand, and of Catholic theology on the
other to work out the results of their several pre
suppositions ; we can believe in unity of all truth,
natural and revealed ; and yet fail for the moment, or
for ever, to establish that unity in a way satisfactory to
our own or to other minds.
Yet the unifying effort is a plain duty on the part
of the professed exponents of Catholic truth, nor will
any number of failures justify inertia or intransigence.
Not only is it incumbent on our theologians of to-day
to establish by sound apologetic their presupposition
of a miraculous revelation miraculously interpreted ; but
they must also show either that these presuppositions
do not absolutely bind us down to the bygone thought-
forms and categories of the various ages in which our
1 Needless to say that Catholic theology is related to Catholicism
as Christology is to Christ, or as natural science is to Nature, or as the
theory of any living organism is to that life and organism, or as a man's
account of himself is related to what he is. Between natural and super
natural reality there can be no conflict, but only between the theories
of one and the other, between natural and sacred science.

SEMPER EADEM (II) 135
doctrines were formulated ; or else that to be so bound
down is not that grave intellectual disadvantage which
at first sight it would appear. For if to adhere to the
social forms, languages, and usages of past time would
cut us off from all healthy participation in the social
life of our age and country, so too we should be shut
off in sterile seclusion from the movement of contem
porary mental life were we irrevocably committed to
obsolete modes of thought with all their implications
and consequences — unless indeed we were to cut away
our religious thought from the unity of our mind and
put it to moulder away in a watertight compartment
by itself.
But if, on the other side, we are asked to accept the
unanimous conclusions of critical experts, we may
surely suspend our judgment until we see some way
of reconciling these conclusions with convictions derived
from more sacred sources. It may well be that the
results of free criticism do not seem to us more ir
reconcilable with the teachings of faith than the
philosophy of Aristotle seemed to the Fathers, or than
the astronomy of Copernicus seemed to the theologians
of the sixteenth century ; but we too have a right and
duty of intransigence pendente lite.
I ventured to suggest in my last article that the
attempt to find a solution of the dilemma in the principle
of development of ideas was in many ways unsatis
factory; that the principle was all-dominating in the
case of liberal theology; that it was dominated and
brought under that of authority in the case of Catholic
theology. There it was a wild horse in the prairies ;
here, a tram-horse in harness moving up and down

136 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
within fixed limits along fixed lines ; there it was
mistress ; here, it was but a handmaid, an ancilla
theologies. And the root of this difference I assigned
to the fact that liberal theology, like natural science,
has for its subject-matter a certain ever-present depart
ment of human experience which it endeavours pro
gressively to formulate and understand, and which is
ever at hand to furnish a criterion of the success of such
endeavours ; whereas our school-divinity finds its subject-
matter in the record or register of certain past experiences
that cannot be repeated and are known to us only
through such a record. In the former case our know
ledge progresses not merely (as in the latter) in virtue
of mental labour and reflection brought to bear on an
unchanging datum, but in virtue of an ever new supply
of experience, presenting us with ever new aspects and
parts of the subject-matter. Our first naive formula
tions and categories soon prove too tight and narrow
for our accumulating experience, and after a certain
amount of stretching and adaptation they burst alto
gether, and more comprehensive conceptions take their
place. These we criticise not by their correspondence
to the abandoned forms, whose interest is henceforth
merely historical, but by their adequacy to the newly
revealed matter. We do not ask if Copernican be true
to Ptolemaic astronomy, but if it be true to experience.
Nor does the liberal theologian ask or care that his
theology be substantially identical with that of the past,
but only that it be truer to experience than that which
it supersedes. The new contains the old, not as an
unchanged nucleus with additions, not as three contains
two ; but only as Copernicus contains Ptolemy ; as

SEMPER EADEM (II) 137
a new hypothesis is said loosely and inaccurately to
contain the old, because it explains the same facts and
experiences, albeit in a totally different synthesis.
For theological developments of this sort the con
ception of the depositum fidei as a record of a bygone
supernatural experience leaves no place whatever.
Those to whom that supernatural experience was ac
corded could not communicate it directly to others ;
they could not open the eyes of others to see what they
saw. They could only (under divine inspiration) re
construct the revealed realities in the rude algebra of
conventional signs or symbols, by means of which
others, for whom those signs possessed a like value,
might reproduce this reconstruction in their own minds,
and see, not what the Apostles saw, but the symbol
thereof, the expression of things supernatural and
ineffable in terms of things natural and communicable.
That symbol, that " form of sound words," is the
depositum fidei ; the realities symbolised were revealed
for a moment and then withdrawn again into darkness.
Hence the preservation of that symbol, not merely of
the dead words but of the meaning they bore for their
first hearers, of the figures under which the mysteries
revealed to the Apostles were presented by them to
the minds of their followers, is the supreme object of
the Church's conservative authority. From the nature
of the case this original expression of the mysteries
of faith is classical, normative, inspired ; for it alone
has been shaped in face of the realities expressed.
Were it a mathematical equation, and not merely a
defective presentment of the higher in terms of the
lower, we might safely translate it into its equivalents

138 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
and not alter its truth-value ; but, as it is, we dare not
tamper with it; we cannot adjust or correct a repre
sentation of what we only know through and in that
representation. But the Church can and does correct
and adjust later copies, expansions, and illustrations of
that representation by means of it. For not only are
the inevitable explications and applications of the
apostolic tradition liable to error ; but the meaning of
the language and symbolism in which it is transmitted
is continually shifting. Words and material signs, so
far as they are dead things, are comparatively stable,
but their sense grows and varies incessantly with the
growth and variations of the living mind. " La fixite
des mots," says a recent writer, "qui designent des
choses mouvantes, trompe les esprits et cause de faux
jugements." Obviously it is the sense, the thought-
forms, the categories and not the material signs that
constitute the depositum fidei. The Church criticises
doctrinal developments by the standard of "Aposto
licity," i.e. of their conformity to the sense of her
original record, in respect to which they are either false
or true. Her criterion of dogmatic truth is not the
eternal reality, but the inspired representation of that
reality given to her keeping by the Apostles. That
later presentments of dogma should swallow up and
supersede these earlier and earliest, as Copernican
superseded Ptolemaic astronomy, is therefore (from the
nature of the presuppositions of Catholic theology)
quite impossible. For doctrinal development in that
sense there is no room. The Athanasian Creed is not
the fruit of a fuller supernatural experience than the
confession of St. Peter, but is simply the explication of

SEMPER EADEM (IT) 139
that confession, the fruit of the Church's reflection
thereon, of her ponderings and inferences ; of her
endeavours to relate it to the rest of human knowledge.
There is no question of gathered experience bursting
through the narrower categories and formulations ; of
new wine seeking new bottles. All unworthy though
even the original inspired formulations must necessarily
be, we dare not, in the absence of the eternal realities
for which they stand, translate them into higher
categories such as inspiration might have used had the
revelation been deferred to our own day. For we only
hold so much of those realities as is symbolised in the
narrower categories ; nor have we any other data
beyond that limit.
By way of illustration of all that I have said, I would
venture, with some diffidence, to contrast Newman's
Anglican Theory of Developments of Religious Doctrine,
as sketched in the University Sermon of 1843, with the
application of the same theory in his Catholic Essay on
the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845); and to
show how, in being combined with the presupposition
of a past revelation infallibly interpreted by present
authority, it necessarily becomes an ancilla theologies,
and loses that independence and supremacy which it
possesses on the presuppositions of liberal theology.1
In the University Sermon of 1843, Newman asks:2
" Why should there not be that real connection between
1 I am only speaking of these two writings of Newman's, considered
apart from the context of his entire life and work. Also I quite recognise
the purely ad hominem character of the Essay on Development which
simply takes Tractarianism on its own admissions, and may stand with
a different synthesis in the author's mind to that which he is actually
defending. 2 P. 328 in Longmans' edition of 1900.

140 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
science and its subject-matter in religion which exists in
other departments of thought ? " He speaks throughout
of the object of Revelation (the Trinity or the Incarna
tion) as continually presented to our apprehension in a
way quite parallel to that in which the natural world
is presented, and as therefore furnishing us in like
manner with a sort of experimental criterion of our for
mulations and mental reconstructions of that object
" Revelation sets before it [the Christian mind] pertain
supernatural facts and actions, beings and principles ;
these make a certain impression or image upon it ; and
this impression spontaneously or even necessarily
becomes the subject of reflection on the part of the
mind itself, which proceeds to investigate it and to
draw it forth in successive and distinct sentences." l
Revelation is described as an abiding " master-vision "
controlling the workings of the Church's mind.2 A
dogma professes to formulate the results of "direct
contemplation " of the object defined.3 The very " first
impulse " of every Christian's faith " is to try to express
itself about the 'great sight' which is vouchsafed to
it," and which is the subject-matter of its theory just as
the vision of Nature is the subject-matter of natural
science.4 The devout mind turns "to the contempla
tion of the object of its adoration and begins to form
statements concerning Him" till "what was first an
impression on the Imagination has become a system or
creed in the Reason."8 This " impression" of God "is
not a thing of parts. It is not a system. ... It is the
vision of an Object," and " may be fitly compared to
1 P. 320. 2 Pp. 322, 323. 3 p. 325.
1 P. 327. * p. 329.

SEMPER EADEM (II) 141
the impressions made on us through the senses." 1 As
being " images of what is real," the ideas which we are
granted of Divine objects may be called real ; 2 and
like all real concrete objects can never be exhaustively
formulated. " Creeds and dogmas live in the one idea
which they are designed to express and which alone is
substantive." s This idea or " sacred impression," which
is " prior " to its formulations, " acts as a regulating
principle, ever present, upon the reasoning," just as
ever-present Nature offers the test of direct experience
to the theories of science.4 " Religious men, according
to their measure, have an idea or vision of the Blessed
Trinity in Unity, of the Son Incarnate and of His
Presence. . . . not as the subject of a number of pro
positions, but as one and individual and independent of
words, as an impression conveyed through the senses." 5
For the understanding of all these quotations it is only
needful to remember that with Newman "idea" does
not mean the mental formulation of an experienced
object, but the object itself considered as apprehensible
and intelligible. In his Essay on Development,6 he defines
the " idea " of an object as " the sum-total of its possible
aspects," or, as we might say, the sum-total of possible
experiences in regard to it ; and as this sum-total is
inexhaustible to the finite mind, it follows that we can go
on for ever developing our formulation (or reasoned re
construction) of the idea.
This conception of doctrinal development, though
applied to a supernatural revelation, is, I think, in
principle identical with that of liberal theology. For,
1 P. 330. 5 P. 330. 3 P. 331.
1 P. 334- s P- 331- 6 p- 34-

142 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
in this view, the subject-matter of development is not a
formulation of the object revealed, but the object itself
ever present to experience — or at least present in the
same way that material objects are present. To the
objection : " There is no such inward view of these
doctrines distinct from the dogmatic language used to
express them," he answers : " It should be considered
whether our senses can be proved to suggest any real
idea of matter," 1 of the thing in itself, as distinct from
the sum-total of experiences it produces in us. But
this answer still insists on the parallelism between
natural science and theology in respect of the abiding
presence of those experiences which they formulate.
" The senses do not convey to us any true impression of
matter, but only an idea commensurate with sensible
impressions."2 Of matter in se we know nothing, but
only of matter as it impresses itself on the senses ; of
the Trinity in se we know nothing, but only of the
impression which it makes on the human mind by its
revealed presentment thereto. This "impression" is not a
verbal formula, but as real an experience as any sense-im
pression. Newman feels the difficulty of this supposition
of a perpetuated revelation abiding in the Christian
mind. He suggests that divine grace may implant new
ideas ; or refine and elevate to sacramental efficacy
those of the natural mind ; s that the illuminating grace
of Baptism may produce at least a capacity for receiv
ing impressions ; * that " the terms and figures which
are used in the doctrines of the Holy Trinity . . . may
by their combination create ideas which will be alto-
1 Pp- 338, 339- 3 P. 340.
3 P. 339- * P. 333-

SEMPER EADEM (II) 143
gether new though they are still of an earthly character."1
But when we reconstruct some unique experience in
terms of conventional signs for purposes of communica
tion, all we can possibly communicate is this reconstruc
tion and not the experience symbolised. Only those
who have experienced the like will translate our com
munication into its true experience-value. It is vain to
describe a symphony to a man deaf from birth; the
novel word-combinations simply puzzle him. Unless
we have here an "impression" of the supernatural
already, words can never evoke such an impres
sion to memory; no combination of natural ex
periences can yield a conception of an incommensur
able order.
It seems to me, therefore, that as in the later Essay
he is trying to square the same theory with theology,
so in this sermon Newman is trying as far as possible to
square theology with the free and unfettered theory of
doctrinal development as applicable to matters of im
mediate experience ; and that to this end he is trying to
see how far revelation may be regarded, not as a past
event, living on only in its record, but as an ever-
abiding perpetuated experience of the mind of the
Church. Were it such, then it is hard to see why we
should venerate and rule ourselves by the past, and pre
sumably less perfect, formulations of an ever-present
object ; why we should not be as free of the past as the
. liberal theologian who finds his subject-matter not in a
sacred doctrine given long since from Heaven, but in the
present facts of conscience and religious experience ; or
why we should need the intervention of an infallible
1 P- 339-

144 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
authority to control the work of development and reflec
tion, seeing that such a principle of control would be
furnished by the experienced impression of the eternal
realities themselves.
May it not be, that this sermon is a tentative counter-
theory opposed to the Biblical-Protestant and, to some
extent, to the Tractarian, appeal across the silent
centuries to the oracles of a dead past as the all-suffi
cient rule of Christian truth ; that is, a plea for a
revelation that still lives and teaches, even as Christ's
Spirit still lives and teaches, in the living Church; that
it gropes after the notion of an " apostolicity " that is
not the privilege of one age, but the attribute of all,
making all equally authoritative ; that it is so far in the
direction of Catholic as opposed to Protestant and
Tractarian theology ? Yet as a theory it differs from
that of the Essay and that of the prevalent school-
theology in so far as it conceives the Spirit of Christ as
an abiding principle of revelation, perpetuating in the
mind of the Church that " master-vision" of God which
was given to the Apostles; not indeed adding substan
tially to the content of that vision, but continuously
expanding and elaborating its expression in accordance
with the growth and development of the human mind
from age to age — so that the Church of to-day speaks
from vision, not from memory, of revealed truth. It con
ceives Christ's revelation as an element or germ of
supernatural truth knit up from the first with the
organic unity of the human mind of the Christian
community, growing with its growth, strengthening with
its strength, changing with its changes — and yet semper
eadem, always the same in the sense in which every

SEMPER EADEM (II) 145
organic growth (whose past nevertheless dies away into
its present) preserves its identity.
In this view, the criterion of present expressions of
the ever-revealed truth is not their identity with, or
subjection to, those of the past, but their conformity to
supernatural experience of the present — a criterion of
little external or demonstrable value, and whose appli
cation is most difficult and obscure, compared with that
of the school-theology. At best it might be possible to
point out the unity of spirit between later and earlier
developments; to show that these find their explana
tion and " final cause " in those ; or to use the observed
law of growth and expansion as a criterion ; or to appeal
to the test of universal spiritual fruitfulness. "As
objects excite sentiments," he says in the Essay,1 " so
do sentiments imply objects." It might be said that the
Spirit was given to us primarily as Charity, as a senti
ment, and that doctrinal truth was but the object im
plied in, and deduced from, that sentiment — even as our
constructions of the material world are deduced from
our felt experiences. But all such criteria are hopelessly
lacking in definiteness for purposes of doctrinal state
ment and confessional agreement
In the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine
(1845) it seems to me that Newman, having the same
theory of development in his mind as in 1843, applies
it, only just so far as it is applicable, to the actual
history of Catholic theology. He is arguing with the
Tractarians on their own presuppositions. He is show
ing them that they can identify the Catholicism of the
first four General Councils with the depositum fidei only
1 Ch. i, sect. ii. n. 7.

146 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
by the implicit acceptance of a principle of develop
ment which should equally compel them to accept the
Council of Trent. If this principle was always implicit
in the dogmatic life of the Church ; if it became im
perfectly explicit in a writer here and there, as in
Vincent of Lerins; yet it was too little in harmony
with the statical modes of thought and with the im
perfect historical sense of earlier centuries to have
admitted in those days of the easy recognition which
Newman, more than any one else, has now secured for
it. The reference of doctrinal disputes of the first ages
to the Apostolic Sees was dictated by the belief that
they held the pure apostolic tradition unchanged and
undeveloped. Actual, literal, and not merely sub
stantial and virtual, apostolicity was for centuries the
criterion of orthodoxy. The sub-apostolic age with its
belief in an immediate consummation of all things
could have no sense, no need of the supposition of
doctrinal developments. Apostolicity was its criterion;
and subsequent ages followed suit. In the theology of
S. Thomas and the scholastics there is little or no
explicit reference to the principle of development as
a solvent of problems. It is assumed that the whole
doctrinal system could be discovered in the Scriptures
or in the Fathers by careful analysis and exegesis, as it
were, by the use of a theological microscope and scalpel.
The disciplina arcani and the imperfection of documents
are liberally invoked to explain discrepancies which our
modern theologians would explain at once by develop
ment. Literal apostolicity was still the test. Could
they have seen the whole past history of theology even
as we now see it, the fact, the process, and laws of its

SEMPER EADEM (II) 147
growth would have forced themselves into recognition ;
but the interval that divided their age from that of the
Apostles was for them buried in obscurity. In the
sixteenth century the Reformers and their opponents
argued largely on the implicit common assumption
that literal, actual apostolicity was the test of Christian
truth, and haggled over texts instead of testing the
legitimacy of developments. The Tractarians, against
whom Newman urges the principle of development,
were certainly patristic in refusing it explicit and
sufficient recognition, and in their notion of apos
tolicity, actual and not virtual, as the rule of faith. He
shows them that both they and the Fathers implicitly
admitted the principle, and that they must abide by its
consequences ; that it formulates a necessary law of the
mind in its reflection on any subject-matter whatever,
be it a fact or a document, an experience or a record of
experience. But the whole Essay of 1845 assumes the pre
supposition of the Tractarians, namely : the conception
of the depositum fidei as being the communicable
record and symbolic reconstruction of a revelation
accorded to the Apostles alone. The subject-matter of
the development there discussed is not an object re
vealed but the symbol of that object, the primitive
Credo. Consistently with this, and only with this, con
ception of the matter Newman declares the need of
" an infallible developing authority," not merely a con
serving authority ; for he holds that dogmas must be de
veloped in order to remain the same.1 Were the object
ever present to us by a perpetuated revelation we should
1 Ch. ii. sect, ii,

148 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
have in itself a sufficient criterion of its formulations ;
as we have of natural science in Nature. But the ever-
shifting sense-value of dead words and symbols would
quickly and hopelessly obliterate the sense of the
primitive Credo in default of some supernatural inter
vention. In the hands of an unscholarly reader the New
Testament yields a vastly different sense to that which
it bore to its writers. If he have faith, he will try to
square the rest of his mind with this misconceived
divine teaching to the prejudice of reason ; if he have
no faith, he will scoff at what he has simply misunder
stood owing to the changed value of language.
Again, it is consistent with, and only with, the same
presupposition when Newman claims for this Credo and
for its infallibly warranted developments that jurisdic
tion over all departments of thought which " imparts to
the history both of states and of religions its specially
turbulent and polemical character,"1 and this, because
" facts and opinions which have hitherto been regarded
in other relations and grouped round other centres
henceforth are gradually attracted to a new influence
and subjected to a new sovereign."2 If we hold the
revealed object only as communicated in certain con
secrated categories or thought-forms ; if we have
no direct access to it for purposes of adjustment, of
re-expression and re-clothing, then the preservation
of those categories is a matter of life and death. But
they belong to and entail the unity of the whole living
organism of human thought and knowledge ; if they
are to live they must be in agreement therewith ; if, in
the event of discord, they cannot yield to novelty,
1 Ch. i. sect. i. n. 5. a P. 185. Edit. 1900. Cf. p. 355.

SEMPER EADEM (IT) 149
novelty must yield to them. Else religion will be
a walled-off department of our mind ; neither affecting
nor affected by the rest. Here we have the conflict of
Church and State reproduced in the realm of know
ledge ; another application of the same principle,
Again, he is consistent to the same presupposition
when he makes the earlier developments the criterion
of the later; and the depositum fidei the supreme
criterion of all — thus subjecting the present and future
to the past. The inverse obtains in Natural Science,
which can afford to discard its past theories or to judge
them by their conformity to present views. For, in
organic and psychological as distinguished from
mechanical or dialectical developments, the earlier
stage is explained and criticised by the later ; the
means by the end. The true criterion, namely, the
final issue, lies hidden inaccessibly in the future. So
far as present developments explain and find a use
for what was inexplicable in the past, they are pre
sumably in the right direction ; but who can say what
present irregularity or evil may not find its justification
in what is yet to come? Liberal theology lacks that
definite workable criterion which is furnished by an
appeal to the past ; it can only appeal to the criterion
of an imperfectly determined spirit or law of develop
ment, if it is not to justify the whole existing state of
things en bloc.
If Newman amends 1 the almost purely quantitative
conception of development implied in Vincent of Lerins:
"Small are a baby's limbs, a youth's are larger," by
suggesting that there may be " considerable alteration
1 P. 172.

150 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
of proportion and relation as time goes on," and that
the butterfly is the development, though not the image
of the grub ; yet this is but to make room for " a
multitude of propositions . . . which gather round the
inspired sentence of which they come,"1 or for "doctrines,
rites, and usages," which "have grown up round the
Apostles' Creed and have impenetrated its articles,
claiming to be part of Christianity, and looking like
those additions 2 which we are in search of." 3 The con
ception throughout is clearly that of an unchanging
dogmatic nucleus round which " additional" propositions
ever group themselves into a doctrinal system ever "the
same," because its central beliefs are actually, its sub
sidiary beliefs virtually apostolical, i.e. identical with
the " deposit of faith."
Such is the daring scheme of the celebrated Essay
which harmonises as far as possible the dynamical con
ception of orderly growth and development with the
more statical conception of an unchanging original
deposit of faith, supplemented by infallible and irre-
formable interpretations from time to time. Though
at first viewed askance by many, it has since com
mended itself so universally that the more ancient
and literal interpretation of the test of apostolicity
is now hardly maintained anywhere in its purity,
except perhaps in the petrified theology of the oriental
Churches and among Protestant Bible Christians, if
there be any left. The disciplina arcani rusts away
quietly among other obsolete weapons of controversy.
The growth of doctrine is a fact that in the Western
world has become evident to all. We must either (with
1 P. 59. 2 Italics mine. 8 P. 92.

SEMPER EADEM (IT) 151
Protestantism) deny all apostolicity to these growths ;
or accept them as lawful developments, and as therefore
virtually apostolic.
In the case of so subtle a dialectician as Newman, we
cannot conclude at once that he is himself quite satisfied
with a theory which he happens to be urging ad hominem,
or that he is unaware of its difficulties and limitations.
Thus, when he urges that the violent and unseemly
modes of procedure which are sometimes alleged against
Catholic orthodoxy of modern times were equally
characteristic of the orthodoxy of the patristic age, and
that courtesy and gentleness often seemed the mono
poly of heterodoxy ; or when l he replies to the charge
against later Catholic theology of unreal and fantastic
handling of texts by showing that respect for the letter
and for the immediate sense of Scripture went oftenest
with heresy, and that orthodoxy stood for the loose
mystical sense, all this is plainly ad hominem and is not
a plea for violence or for inaccuracy. And so, too, as a
whole, the Essay cannot be adduced as demonstrably
representing Newman's inmost, still less his final, view,
or as really contradicting the University Sermon which
deals with the theory of doctrinal developments and
not with its application to a particular controversy
and its data. Great however as is the relief which the
Essay offers to "what has now (1845) become a necessary
and an anxious problem," 2 it raises or leaves unsolved
some great difficulties.
As each department of thought and knowledge, so
too (according to the prevalent evolutionary philo
sophy) knowledge as a whole grows from generation to
1 Ch. vii. sect. 4. * P. 30.

152 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
generation into something qualitatively different ; it is
not only more, it is other. The collective mind of our
day, it is said, is not that of savagery, plus that of
barbarism, plus medievalism, plus modernity ; — as it
were concentric circles framing one another, or storeys
of a house piled one on top of another, or wings and
additions of different styles made to it at different
periods and still persisting in their differences. The
categories of the past have died and dissolved into
those of the present ; they do not and cannot coexist
unchanged. Words and signs like dead monuments
may survive, but their sense has perished to live again
in something fuller or other. If this is not so, we must
show that it is not so. We must show that the general
mind does not grow in this organic fashion, but rather,
as the scholastics teach, by working on certain perma
nently established categories, principles, and facts, the
same for all men at all times, and by progressively
building these up dialectically into an ever more com
plex and comprehensive system of knowledge ; we
must show that the development of doctrine, as de
scribed in the Essay, is simply a particular case of the
general conditions, static and dynamic, of mental
growth. If the first conceptions in which the Christian
revelation was given us can grow out of all shape
and recognition like letters cut on the bark of a
young tree; if they are not immune from the law
of progressive transformation ; if the very subject-
matter of our theology grows with the growth of
the mind, how can it be used as a fixed standard
and criterion of that growth ? A building may grow,
but if the building-materials also grow, the results

SEMPER EADEM (II) 153
will be like those of the croquet-party in Alice's
Adventures. \'|
Ultimately the question resolves itself into this :
Does thought grow architecturally or biologically ? If
the former, then the problem arises : Does the " deposit
of faith " and do the infallible definitions of the Church,
bind us absolutely to the proper values of the categories
and thought-forms of the age in which they were framed.
That they do, would seem to be indicated by the cease
less polemic aforesaid between theology and profane
philosophy,science,and history consequent on theindirect
jurisdiction which the Church claims over the whole realm
of man's thought — a claim which would be unnecessary
did she hold these categories to be of but a relative
and symbolic value which they could retain irrespective
of the fluctuations of thought, and did she not treat
them as finally assured, not as amendable results. If,
as it seems, we are bound to them as of absolute value,
as finally true for philosophy, science, and history, then
we have a new brood of problems, for we must show
that those of different ages are consistent with one
another, and that those of all the ages together are still
valid and furnish collectively a rule by which modern
thought should be corrected. That is the difficulty on
one side. On the other, if we deny that past forms are
to be the criterion of present, and if we stand by all
the implications of that denial, we not only contradict
tradition in a substantial point, but we shall find it
hard in many ways to erect a secure barrier against
liberal theology. To find some via media between the
Scylla and Charybdis of these pressing difficulties is
the endeavour of those who, like Mr. Wilfrid Ward,

154 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
follow in the footsteps of Newman. To criticise this
or that point of their solution is not (as I said in my
last article) to deny the need of a solution ; or to with
hold any measure of the sympathy due to those en
gaged in so prickly and thankless a task. I have
merely raised a question whether in principle Mr. Ward
(or Newman in the Essay of 1845) has really departed
from the position of those whom he considers ultra-
conservatives ; whether de jure he is really in the
middle at all and not still at the extreme right — just as
I might criticise certain other suggested vies medics on
the score that they must eventually land us on the
extreme left. These articles do not pretend to con
tribute directly towards a solution of the problem in
question ; but only indirectly, that is, by endeavouring
to clear the issue as much as possible, to indicate the
precise lie of Scylla on one side and Charybdis on the
other. There is no reason why we should be impatient to
press in between them and to hurry the solution of
a purely intellectual problem which has hardly yet got
to the stage of clear statement ; and whose data are
necessarily complex. Surely it is best to drop anchor
outside and wait for a pilot ; to be content with such
a workable modus vivendi as I suggested in my first
part, and to be exceedingly chary of premature
theoretical unifications.

CHAPTER VI
MYSTERIES A NECESSITY OF LIFE
THIS essay appeared first in The Month, and then
in the later editions of Faith of the Millions. It
bears on Catholic Doctrine, as a whole, and does not
depend on, or make for, the distinction between Reve
lation and Theology, experience and reflection, fact and
theory. I republish it to show how baseless are the
charges of " fideism " and doctrinal individualism that
my scholastic critics have alleged against me ; how
absolutely necessary I hold social co-operation and
tradition to be for the right development of indi
vidual belief; how far I stand from rationalism or
" ethicism," and how near to mysticism ; how entirely
I demand a metaphysical depth, as well as a moral
elevation for life. The essay accepts the positive, but
not the negative or exclusive principles of " Pragmatism."
As in Lex Orandi, so here I assume that the usefulness
of hypotheses is not their sole truthfulness, but, within
certain strict limits, an index of their conformity to the
constitution of that world to which they enable us to
adapt ourselves successfully.

iS5

156 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
(I)
The atmosphere of popular thought at the present
day grows less and less congenial to faith in the
mysteries of religion. " Religion without dogma" seems
to be the goal of modern aspiration so far as religion in
any sense is its object. And by " dogma " is meant a
formulated mystery — formulated by theology for pur
poses of communication and for the guidance of thought
and life.
Even those, however, who hope to reduce religion to
ethics propped up by theism, or to strike out religion
altogether in favour of " absolute morality ", remind us
continually that life is solemn and significant, and that
the ultimate whence and whither are wrapt in im
penetrable mystery. " Significant of what ? " we might
ask ; for here, " mystery" stands, not for the object of a
dim and manywise imperfect knowledge, but for the
altogether unknowable Beyond, which can in no way be
formulated or expressed, or used for the guidance of
life and thought. In that sense no one dreams of deny
ing that life is compassed with mystery. Nor again
will any deny that in the plane of scientific and historic
inquiry the territory of the " unknown but knowable "
stretches away indefinitely beyond that of the known ;
and that between the two there lies a certain borderland
of the uncertain and conjecturable, which may therefore
be called " mysterious."
The mystery, which religious dogma formulates,
purports to be a truth belonging to a plane of reality
above and beyond that which is subjected to man's
scientific and historic inquiry; a truth which can be

MYSTERIES A NECESSITY OF LIFE 157
known dimly, but which cannot possibly be known
clearly by him under his present limitations ; a truth
which, being necessarily formulated in the terms of
things which belong to the lower plane, defies exact
expression and perfect intelligibility.
It is the tendency of modern thought to reject such
knowledge, first, as chimerical and impossible ; then, as
valueless for purposes of life. Let us briefly examine
this assumption ; and to avoid every sort of special
pleading, let us abstract from any dogma or dogmatic
system in particular and consider the question in its
most general terms and in the light of the common
assumptions of those who would exclude mysteries from
life as a useless or dangerous encumbrance ; and let us
see whether, on the contary, their function in life may
not be as necessary as that of scientific or historical
truths. This will not be to furnish a positive argument
in favour of any given dogma or dogmatic system, but
to show that there is an exigency of the human mind
which must be satisfied either by the mysteries of
revealed religion or by their equivalent ; that such half-
knowledge is an inseparable condition of man's upward
development as spirit and subject; and yet that in
every case it must be assailable by the same objections
that are currently alleged against faith in the dogmas
of Christianity.
One of the ever more widely accepted assumptions of
our day is the practical character of all perception and
knowledge; its complete subordination to life and
action in whose service it has been developed pari passu.
As far as any creature is passively determined by the
forces of physical Nature and forms part of her universal

158 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
mechanism, it is, we are told, automatic, insentient,
unconscious. As far as it possesses any true activity,
any power of self-government and self-adjustment ; any
power of opposing itself to and controlling the mechan
ism of physical Nature, so far is it, because it needs to
be, perceptive and conscious. For self-adjustment
implies an " awareness " of the terms to be adjusted —
i.e. of Self and Nature.
This principle is conceived to hold good for every sort
of subjectivity — from the lowest sentient speck of living
matter up to the highest developments of humanity.
All alike are possessed of some degree of dominion over
that mechanism of Nature, of which they form part in
virtue of their organism ; and their rank in the world of
subjectivity is estimated by the way and extent to which,
in virtue of their perception and activity, they can resist
and control the determinism of Nature and prove them
selves independent and opposing agents. Furthermore,
it is generally assumed that the goal of the collective
effort and struggle of life ; of the ceaseless conflict
between what may roughly be called Mind and Matter,
is the working out of still higher and higher types of
subjectivity which, in the manner and extent of their
victory over determinism, in the fulness of their per
ception and action, shall approximate ever more closely
to that divine but unattainable limit in which the
opposition, carried to infinity, suddenly vanishes; in
which such distinctions as Subject and Object no longer
obtain, and whose mode of life and being cannot there
fore be properly conceived by us at all, but must be
expressed analogously in terms proper to our own
order of life and being.

MYSTERIES A NECESSITY OF LIFE 159
So far as we are allowed nowadays to speak of
purpose and finality in the world, we may say that the
whole determinism of Nature is conceived as existing
solely to be the instrument and condition of this pro
gressive development of subjectivity or personality ;
that so far as subjects act upon, resist, and modify
Nature, it is only to perfect the instrument of their own
development and to make a fuller and higher sort of
action possible for themselves ; that this action is an
end in itself, and the very substance of life — to be valued
for what it is in itself, and not primarily for what it may
effect outside itself. In the language of religion we
might say that Nature exists as instrumental to the
development of the divine image in the subjective
order — that is, in the world of feeling, thought, love, will,
and action — where the creature is like to God just in
the measure that it is able to " put all things under its
feet," and to rise above the passivity and determinism
of Nature.
The unceasing effort of conscious life, in all its
grades, in all its subjects, is held to be upwards and
onwards, towards a fuller and higher action, that is,
towards a fuller knowledge and mastery of the opposing
world — a mastery won and measured by comprehension
and self-adjustment ; nor does this straining come to
rest as satisfied in man, but rather attains in him its
greatest accentuation. By inventing for itself new
instruments, devices, and methods, both of perception
and of action, human life changes its range and character
with a rapidity that bewilders us, and day by day pushes
down large tracts of Nature's determinism under its
victorious feet. Above all, by combination with others,

160 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
the individual is able to appropriate the collective and
traditional experience of the society of which he is a
member, and to secure its co-operation for ends in
finitely beyond his separate capacity.
But the ends of human life are of two kinds : those
that are clearly definable as being at least remotely
within the compass of our present powers of understand
ing and accomplishment; which require an extension
rather than an elevation of our capacities; which lie,
however distantly, in the plane of our present attain
ments ; and not in a higher plane. And then, besides
this reaching out in all directions over the plane in which
our faculties are so perfectly at home, there is an irre
pressible and universal reaching upwards towards ends
that lie on a higher plane ; towards a mode of action
and life which in some measure is beyond our capacity,
which we cannot coherently formulate or satisfactorily
realise ; and which we desire all the more restlessly as
we are less able to interpret or justify our desire.
The perennial murmur of man's discontent not only
with what " the world " can give but with what it can
be conceived as ever giving, is one of the banalities of
literary and philosophic reflection at all times. We
need only refer to John Stuart Mill's well-known con
fession that the realisation of his utmost ideals of a
positivist Paradise on earth would still have left him
infinitely discontented. He but gives voice to the con
viction of all who have ever tried to understand them
selves. No spreading out of life over the plane already
attained can quiet its upward aspiration towards a
higher plane ; no fulfilment of the needs that we can
formulate can suffice as long as we are pressed by

MYSTERIES A NECESSITY OF LIFE 161
others which refuse exact formulation. The source of
this ineradicable discontent, which is the very nerve and
mainspring of all upward and onward effort, is to be
found in the consciousness that the world of our clear
perception and competent action is but part of a whole ;
that it is not self-explanatory ; that the ends we can
exactly formulate are worthless except as subordinated
to some dim ends which we cannot so formulate ; that
our life seems ultimately governed by some secret
universal power, for some secret universal end, and that
we understand but the middle of the matter. But,
according to one of our provisional assumptions, if we
are conscious of a certain practical situation it is just
because we are not passively determined in regard to it,
but are free to determine ourselves actively/ If then we
have the sense of a Whole, whereof the realm of our
clear intelligence and definite desire is but part, it is
because we have the power and need and duty of freely
determining our action in regard to it.
Conscious life is essentially self-expansive in the
direction of a fuller expression of divinity; it grows
irrepressibly towards a fuller and higher sort of action
guided by a deeper and wider comprehension of that
world, by the mastery of which its spiritual distinctness
and free personality is realised and measured. If there
fore man has a sense of that Whole which includes and
stretches indefinitely beyond and rises above the area
of his powers of distinct knowledge and effectual
mastery, it is because he is capable of some action in
regard to that Whole, and is not merely passively
determined by it as if he were a wheel of the universal
machinery ; it is because his liberty and self-government
M

162 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
are not limited to a particular area, but are universal — the
liberty of a creature capable of the concept of " Being";
capable of the concept of a Whole, whereof he and his
proximate surroundings are but part, and through which
alone they can be rightly dealt with ; capable therefore
of dealing with the Whole so far as he can adjust
himself to it or oppose himself to it. Hence the self-
expansive force of his life demands that he should
strive more and more to know and understand the
Whole in order to deal with it more effectually, and
thereby to realise a higher and fuller kind of action
or life ; it urges his inquiry not only outward over the
boundless field of the clearly knowable, but upward
into the region of the dimly knowable ; not only to the
furtherance and extension of that kind of life which he
has attained and to which his faculties are adequate,
but to the furtherance of that higher kind which he
is trying to attain and to which his faculties are in
adequate — a life infinite in every dimension, because
it is the life of the Infinite, and as such unattainable,
though indefinitely approachable, by the finiteA We
are impelled by an inborn discontent to push forward
and upward ; to endeavour to overcome the limits
of space and be everywhere at once; to overcome the
limits of time and make past and future co-present
in an eternal " now " ; to gather all possible knowledge
into the unity of a single all-comprehensive intuition ;
to accumulate and multiply our power in the direction
of omnipotence; to bring together the countless ir
reconcilable experiences, between which we have to
choose, into the fulness of some one impossible single
experience ; and to embrace all life and reality in the

MYSTERIES A NECESSITY OF LIFE 163
simplicity of one Pure Act. In short, we must strive to.
live and express an eternal and infinite life "in the
terms" and under the conditions of a temporal and
finite life. The endeavour is inherently absurd and
self-contradictory ; its goal is not only unattainable but
unthinkable; for the eternal is not reached by any
relative victory over time however great ; nor is the
infinite an amalgamation of finitudes. Yet, though
man cannot equal his desire, to strain towards that
equality is the very law of his spiritual nature according
to which all finite subjectivity presses upward stage by
stage towards the inaccessible level of that Infinite
Subjectivity which we are constrained to conceive in our
own image and likeness — though in it the distinction
between subject and object is meaningless since these
two, as excluding one another, can never be absolutely
infinite. Still it is as conceived thus imperfectly as
Infinite Subject that it is the goal of our spiritual effort.
We can only think of it as of a spirit whose know
ledge and power and action and life realise that victory
over limits towards which we shall strive for ever with
out possibility of attainment, finding our ultimate bliss
in the assurance of an unimpeded progressive appro
priation of those inexhaustible treasures of life whose
possession shall have been inamissibly secured to us.
This infinite life and action, which we are constrained
to express in terms of the highest of which we are now
capable, necessarily evades our clear conception and
remains for ever the " mystery " par excellence, of which
all other mysteries are but determinations, or closer
definitions. Every higher level of life than that in
which we are at home must be to us to some degree

164 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
mysterious ; dimly conceived ; imperfectly realised ;
and therefore the ultimate and unattainable goal of all
subjective development is plainly the mystery of mys
teries and the source of all others.
I If then our discontent with our physical and external
conditions is the mainspring of our search into and
mastery of the secrets of Nature ; our discontent with
all that this external life could ever possibly give us
has been at all times a stimulus of inquiry into the
secrets of that Whole Life, eternal and infinite, the
vague but irrepressible sense of which is the source
of our incurable discontent with the partial and finite.
On the current assumption of the complete subordi
nation of knowledge to will and action, it follows that,
if, on its " conative " side, life gives us not only a mass
of clearly defined and realisable desires and ends, level
with our capacities ; but beyond these a deep-seated
though inexplicable dissatisfaction with any ideal we
can coherently formulate, and a vague though universal
and irrepressible yearning towards ends which we cannot
define ; it must, on its " cognitive " side, give us a tract
of clear knowledge and " knowabilities " level with our
mind ; and beyond this a region of dim knowledge and
" knowabilities " partly above that level which can be
expressed only in terms of the clearly knowable — a
twilight vision of that higher life the search after which
is the active principle of all our spiritual expansion.
That the higher aspirations and apprehensions should
be thus vague, half-formed, and imperfect, is consistent
with another of the popular assumptions of modern
thought according to which life is viewed dynamically
as a movement, not as a state ; as consisting in a certain

MYSTERIES A NECESSITY OF LIFE 165
process of continual transformation of which each
moment dissolves into the nextp We are told that our
disputes as to the meaning of life are fruitless so long
as we suppose that life makes for some definite and
final state, some ethical, social, and political Paradise,
in which its movement is destined to come to rest, — a
state which human thought will some day be able to
define, and human effort, to realise ; so long as we
look for some golden age which has solved life's
problem in the past or will solve it in the future ; so
long as we take some fixed maximum of savagery as
the Nadir, some fixed maximum of culture as the
desired Zenith of development. Of no stage may we
say : " This is human life par excellence'' The earliest
deserves the name as much as any subsequent — or
rather as little ; for life consists in the very transition
from lower to higher ; in forgetting what is behind
and in reaching out to what is before. Any stage that
should seek to perpetuate itself as final to the exclusion
of further progress would be the end of life and also the
beginning of death.
If this be so, we must look for something in the
development of subjective life analogous to the physio
logical distinction between formed matter and un
formed ; we must expect to find that the higher kind
of life, which is in process of formation, contrasts with
the lower which is already formed and finished, as
being more vague, feeble, and ill-defined ; just as in art
the higher and rarer results are less formulable, less
securely attainable, more chance-governed than the
lower and commoner which have been brought fully
under our rule and control. And yet the lower is

166 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
valued solely for sake of the higher, the formed for
sake of the unformed ; just as formed habits of action
are valuable for the sake of free and conscious action ;
and obedience, law, and order for the sake of initiative,
liberty, and personality. This distinction between the
formed and the unformed, the definite and the indefinite,
areas of the mind and will, is essential to the growing
conception of life as of a process ever striving to
change itself into something higher in kind, as moving
upwards to a future level as well as outwards on its
present level. Thus, if on the practical or " conative "
side, human life is ever marked in its higher manifesta
tions by a partly vain endeavour to satisfy ill-defined
aspirations towards a more absolute kind of life,
through those means and activities that are adequate
only to the clearly intelligible ends proper to our
present level ; on the cognitive side we have a parallel
endeavour to think that more absolute life, and the world
in which it is lived, in the terms and categories of this
lower mode of existence ; and the formulated results
of this endeavour are necessarily mysteries.
Hence, from the assumptions already indicated, it
follows that the recognition not merely of an utterly
unknowable Beyond, but of a half-knowable Beyond, is
a necessity of the human mind ; that mysteries of some
sort are as needful a part of its normal furniture as are
the clear truths of history or science. If the desire to
know and the desire to live are but two facets of the
same energy ; if the vigour of man's soul is measured
by its dissatisfaction with its bonds and by its aspira
tion after a nearer approach to an eternal, infinite,
absolute sort of being and action ; it must be measured

MYSTERIES A NECESSITY OF LIFE 167
equally by a straining to see beyond the limits of clear
knowledge into the twilight of the half-knowable. To
discourage this craving of the mind as though its object
were altogether unattainable, or of no life-value if
attained, is implicitly to deny man's power and need of
upward progress, and to tie him down to the plane of
earth. '¦ If it is wrong or useless to strain ceaselessly
against the limits of our present mode of life, if con
tentment is a duty, then of course we should shut out
this troublesome thought of the Beyond, of the Whole
through which alone our partial life is explicable ; nor
should we strive to know it in full detail with a view to
adjusting our life and action to it. But then, what
becomes of the assumption that consciousness is cor
relative and co-extensive with self-government ; that
knowledge is only of practical situations to be deter
mined by our action ? Whence this idea of the Tran
scendent, of the Whole, of the Infinite Beyond, if it does
not concern us practically ; if it is not for the guidance
of our life ? And if it is for our guidance, how can we
not want a more detailed knowledge of it? We are
not content with a general conception of the physical
world, but go on determining its laws and groupings to
the minutest ascertainable detail ; and in the measure
in which we succeed, our power of self-adjustment or
resistance is multiplied, and the possibilities of our
natural life are extended in every direction. A similar
determination of the over-natural x world would plainly
1 We use "over-natural," throughout, not in the theological sense of
"supernatural," but for the whole realm of spirit and freedom as opposed
to that physical determinism which is the subject-matter of Natural
Science. Similarly "natural" is taken in a correspondingly restricted
sense.

168 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
lead to a like acceleration of our upward progress.
The quest of such detail must be more difficult, less
fruitful, than our investigation of that world to which
our faculties are adequate ; its results may be only
analogous to the first gropings of the earliest savagery
after some rude science of Nature ; but it is as justifi
able and even more imperative.
In this view of the matter, the mystery-hunger of the
soul, rightly understood, is not to be checked, but
rather deepened and fostered as an indispensable
condition of subjective development. To limit our curi
osity to the "exactly knowable" would be equivalently
to limit our life-desire to the plane of our present
possibilities and to forbid it to look higher ; it would be
to quench all spiritual aspiration and to preach con
tent with the prospect of some socialist millennium in
which life should pass into slumber for lack of further
aims. Further, it may be plausibly contended in the light
of history, if not also a priori, that, in the gross,
upward progress and outward progress are causally
connected ; that life cannot be permanently cramped in
any dimension of its growth without suffering in the
others ; that the practical materialism which is fatal to
every sort of aspiration after the more-than-natural or
over-natural life is eventually self-defeating ; that the
eternal quest of the absolute life, ever to be approached,
never to be reached, is the secret root, not only' of that
movement by which the soul strains upwards and
labours for riches not yet clearly conceivable or firmly
attainable, but also of that by which she spreads out in
all directions over the plane of this earth and heaps up

MYSTERIES A NECESSITY OF LIFE 169
those riches of experience which are within the comfort
able grasp of her present modes of conception and
action. Hence the rationalism which would sweep away
mysteries as mere cobwebs of the mind, would cut at
the very roots of all progress, spiritual and temporal.
A somewhat similar treatment of almost the same
question from the Protestant side is given by Dr.
Bernhard Duhm, of Basel (Das Geheimnis in der
Religion. Mohr, Leipzig, 1896). To Newton's influence
on recent modes of thought he ascribes the tendency of
modern Protestantism toexcludethe mysterious elements
of Christianity as much as possible and to defend re
ligion as simply the fulness of philosophy. Not only has
this rationalism been viewed coldly by those champions
of "exact knowledge" whom it was designed to
propitiate ; but en revanche it has roused certain thinkers
to appease their starved but unquenchable mystery-
craving by an attempt to reduce occultism to the form
of " exact knowledge " — to create a science of " thauma-
tology." Laying aside, as a novel and arbitrary abstrac
tion, the notion of Religion in itself, and viewing it,
not in the philosophies, the ethics, the institutions in
which it embodies itself, but as the positive reality so
embodied, and studying it historically, Dr. Duhm finds
it everywhere, from its lowest to its highest grade,
occupied with a mysterious intercourse between man
and invisible (and therefore mysterious) beings of a
higher order — an intercourse whereby the level of man's
life and powers is raised towards the plane of the
superhuman or divine, and his natural limitations are
overcome. Everywhere there is a looking forward to
some future and better condition — to some life that will

170 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
be immortal because akin to that of the naturally
immortal gods.
In ecstasy he finds the central mystical experience
(Hauptgekeimnis) of the older or ruder religions ; in
ecstasy which, just because it seemed to raise the psychic
powers to wholly new kinds of activity (not to speak of
accompanying physical wonders), was not unnaturally
ascribed to some sort of " possession " whereby the re
cipient shared a divine mode of life and being. In the
disciplinary, ritual, and ascetical institutions common
to all religions, he sees an attempt to communise
these higher experiences, which are naturally the
privilege of a favoured minority ; and from a know
ledge of these laws and conditions to put them within
the reach of all.
This induction is interesting as showing how world
wide and world-old is man's instinctive striving towards
a more absolute, though indefinable kind of life, in
which the limitations of his present definable life will
be overcome ; and that his discontent is not merely
with his perennial failure to realise his clear ethical or
social ideals, but with those ideals themselves. It
shows, moreover, how precisely the mystery of Christi
anity : " To them gave He power to become the sons of
God," answers this universal aspiration of the religious
sense. Our chief difference with Dr. Duhm is in that
he seems not to distinguish between the use and the
abuse of those rational systems in which the experiences
of the over-natural life are used to construct a plan of
that over-world to which they belong. Theology, as we
shall try to show presently, is related to that world as
science is to the natural world. Each multiplies and

MYSTERIES A NECESSITY OF LIFE 171
communises the possibilities of life in its own order. Only
when we forget that the over-natural world is necessarily
expressed in terms of the natural, and therefore
inexactly, does theology become what Dr. Duhm thinks
it must always be — the foe of mystery. Then only do
its dogmas become "Ratsel der Theologie," bristling
with contradictions which when they are weeded out or
interpreted as " ethics in parables," leave us with nothing
but a soul-starving philosophy on our hands.
(n)
It seems then that, on the leading presuppositions
which find favour with many who are impatient of
mysteries in religion, the recognition of a partly know-
able " over-natural " world beyond that world of Nature
which Naturalism treats as the Whole, is bound up with
the recognition of the fact of man's universal and neces
sary discontent with even the utmost clearly definable
limits of his present mode of life and action. We must
go on to show more fully that this over-world cannot
be known even partially except under the veil of
mysteries — whether natural or revealed does not here
concern us.
As regards the manner in which our knowledge is
acquired and formulated, there are other presupposi
tions to consider in order to see their bearing upon our
problem. Our knowledge of Nature, so far as it means
a sort of mental reproduction, constructed by the
memory and understanding — a sort of plan or scheme,
according to which we guide our action and supplement
the meagre data of immediate perception and infer the
distant from the near, and the future and past from the

172 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
present — such knowledge of Nature is won, we are told,
by experiment ; we live and act before we can have any
theory of living and acting. The theory multiplies our
power of living, and indirectly thereby makes an ever
fuller theory possible. But venture and experiment is
prior to the first and to every subsequent step of sub
stantial theoretical progress. In the face of some new
situation which is presented to us in consciousness we
determine ourselves this way or that ; more or less on a
prudent venture ; we observe the consequences ; we re
member and tabulate them for future use, entering them
in that plan of Nature which we are continually perfect
ing for our practical guidance. In this sense our know
ledge of reality proceeds from our need of acting and
not conversely. We do not first act because we know,
but we first know because we are constrained to act.
The Scholastic axiom that knowledge precedes action
and will (Nihil volitum nisi prcscognitum) is true, univer
sally, only in the sense that there is a divine or at least
a sub-conscious knowledge behind even our blindest
instincts and appetites. It is literally true indeed of our
free, self-determined will ; for plainly, we cannot desire a
definite object unless we have a definite idea of it.
Yet not only our animal and race appetites and in
stincts, but also our spiritual craving for the divine pre
cede any explicit knowledge on our part of the objects
to which they are directed. It is solely by groping and
trying that we discover what satisfies and explains
them. And this holds most evidently of that total
satisfaction of his whole nature which man is ever seek
ing, not merely to attain, but to know. The supreme
will and desire of man's life is towards an end which he

MYSTERIES A NECESSITY OF LIFE 173
cannot define. It is an implanted desire, not one which
he has determined and chosen for himself.
Our immediate experience of the outer world at any
given moment is not greater, but rather less, than that
of the veriest savage ; our advantage lies in our inter
pretation of the same data — in what we read into them
and infer from them in the light of that scheme or plan
of Nature which has been slowly elaborated by the
collective observation and reflection of society, and com
municated to us by tradition. Aided by this schematic
reconstruction we can recognise and classify our present
experience and learn what to expect from it. In other
words, it is as an instrument of clairvoyance that this
mental construction of Nature — this putting together of
a world which is given us only piecemeal in direct ex
perience — is so valuable ; as enabling us to see what is
here present to us, not only in itself, absolutely and
apart, but in connection with the distant, the past, and
the future which are hidden from us ; as making our
corresponding action to be one of self-adaptation to a far
wider area of reality than were else possible, and thus
deepening, widening, and prolonging our natural life.
The elements and materials of this reconstruction are
given to us, but the arrangement and structure is our
own. There are no universals a parte rei ; we may not
project the sections and symbols of the map into the
territory it represents. And yet as a sure and effectual
guide to the traveller the map has a truth of its own — a
practical truth ; although neither in area, nor in appear
ance, nor in effect, can it pretend to be a replica of the
concrete reality which it symbolises. Such is said to be
the truth of that conception of Nature and History

174 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
which we have built up for our use, with all its con
nections and groupings, its laws of sequence and
co-existence — the truth of practical efficiency as an
instrument of life. Thus the old astronomy was true so
far as it could predict our experiences ; but the new is
truer because its hypotheses seem to cover all cases
more simply. Short of the unattainable limit of absolute
life and of absolute power over Nature, our Nature-
theory as a whole and in each detail can only be
an approximation even to practical truth ; else we
should not need to labour endlessly at correcting and
perfecting this instrument of life and fitting it more
exactly to its purpose. It must always remain defective
as a whole, and by consequence defective in all its
parts. It seems, then, that in each moment of our natural life
in which we have to determine ourselves to act or not to
act, to act in this way or that, the situation we have to
face is constituted first by the meagre data of direct
perception as a nucleus, and then by a certain Beyond
(on the same level, however, of natural life) both of time
and distance which is supplied by our mind as inter
preting those data. Were it not for the previous in
dustry of the mind, that Beyond would be simply an
unfurnished blank; our action could be adjusted only
to the present data as though they constituted the whole
world of time and space, and it could have no far-
reaching or enduring value.
Assuming this view of the nature and function of
knowledge, and turning our attention to that obscure
upward movement of life towards a higher plane of
action to which its present faculties are only partially

MYSTERIES A NECESSITY OF LIFE 175
adequate, we should expect to find that there too we
must act and live before we can have any theory of that
life and action ; that practical situations are first offered
to our direct perception, as it were in their isolation,
which our ignorance cannot interpret in all their con
nections and implications, or as to their ultimate bear
ings ; that the Beyond to which they are felt to belong
is as yet an absolute blank ; that in the face of these
isolated situations we determine ourselves, with prudent
venture, to some kind of action or inaction, and record
the observed consequences in our mind for future use ;
that gradually these recorded observations are systema-
tised by the collective labour of society and pieced
together into a mental construction of the spiritual
world which is communicated by tradition to each
member of society, to be received and modified no
doubt according to his individuality ; that aided by the
light of this schema we can adapt our action not merely
to the bare data of direct perception — to the single
"grace" of the moment as though it were the whole
Kingdom of Grace — but to as much of the spiritual
Beyond as they now reveal to us ; and thus raise the
level and extend the sweep of our life and liberty.
Here, as in the natural order, though experience is
prior to every substantial increase of knowledge, yet
that increase of knowledge enlarges our possibilities of
life and experience. Here, too, the truth of the mental
construction is its practical efficiency as a guide to that
absolute world, that Whole in the using of which our
higher life consists. The elements indeed of that con
struction would be given us by direct experience, piece
meal, — as it were, a succession of pinhole peeps — but

176 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
the structure and arrangement would be determined by
the nature of our mind and of our needs. Even
practically and as an instrument of spiritual life the
truth of such a construction could never be adequate,
altogether or in part ; could never give us that ex
haustive grasp of the whole situation which would be
the correlative of an absolute and infinite life. Still less
should we be justified in projecting the "universals" —
the laws and relations — of this mental arrangement of
experience into the world beyond our mind. Like
those of our Nature-scheme, they would be " formally "
in the mind, and in the Beyond only " fundamentally,"
except so far as the Beyond included other minds like
our own. The "truth" and reality of the scheme
would mean : Go here or there ; do this or that, and
the grouping and sequence of your experience will be
thus or thus. Whether "truth" can have any more
speculative meaning than this — whether its correspon
dence be that of a portrait to its original ; of two
objects that may be presented to and compared by the
faculty — need not concern us here.
If then our subjective life strives not only to spread
out over the level attained, but to rise to a higher level,
we need a mental construction of the upward as well
as of the outward Beyond ; the mere undetermined
idea of that Beyond can supply no practical direction
as to our action in regard to it; our upward growth
must be and has been proportioned in point of fulness
and definiteness to the detail with which the " truth " of
that Beyond is constructed in our mind, and its re
sources thus brought under our control.
But if there is thus a parallel between our knowledge

MYSTERIES A NECESSITY OF LIFE 177
of the natural and of the over-natural, there is also
a divergence corresponding to the clearness and accessi
bility of the one realm and the obscurity and in
accessibility of the other in relation to our faculties.
The highest developments of our subjective life are
necessarily the least finished ; we are but half-alive and
half-aware in regard to the eternal and spiritual order ;
and this half-knowledge is what we mean by mystery.
Half-knowledge of the natural order is due simply to
a defect of evidence ; but here it is also due to the
defect of vision in the face of the /fullest evidence ; the
fault is in the eye, not in the light/ We find in ourselves
an idea of the eternal and infinite — sure proof that we
can and must determine our action in relation to the
situation so revealed— and yet this very idea bristles
with seeming contradictions, being expressed, as it must
be, in terms of the finite and successive. And our up
ward desire and effort ; our practical response to the
attraction which the Whole exercises upon our spirit is
marked with a corresponding incoherence. When we
would shape to ourselves that ultimate good, that high
est sort of life which is to deliver us from our present
incurable discontent, we fail miserably, because we can
only build it up out of the materials of the best that we
know clearly ; we can only conceive some millennium in
which every now definable good will be realised — as
though quantity could alter kind ; or as though any
widening of the cage of our captivity could satisfy our
need of a free upward flight. As Fichte points out, and
as Mill has confessed, the highest conceivable ameliora
tion of the lot of humanity on earth cannot justify or
explain the dictate of conscience and the religious

178 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
sense : " It serves no earthly end ; there must therefore
be some over-earth whose end its serves " ; and again :
" There is something in me that demands something of
me and serves no purpose in the whole compass of this
natural life, something that is altogether aimless and
superfluous even for the highest ends that can be
realised on earth."
If our attempt to live this higher life in terms of the
lower is like the attempt to render an orchestral sym
phony on a shepherd's reed, our attempt to think and
express it must labour under the same limitation ; it
must take the shape of mystery. " Of mystery," and
not merely of parable or metaphor ; for a parable may
express the lower in forms of the higher ; it may be in
no degree simpler and more familiar than the truth
which it is designed, whether to veil or to illustrate,
or even to prove by analogy ; whereas a mystery is an
inaccessible truth squeezed as far as it will go into the
mould of common language, without any poetic or
figurative intention, but with a desire of the greatest
attainable prosaic accuracy. The result of the attempt
to fit the greater into the less must be that, when one
side is adjusted the other will overlap, and that to
correct one error we must always create another.
Hence a mystery is a truth which can never be quite
coherently thought or described, but which can be ex
pressed more or less approximately by two or more
complementary but partly inconsistent statements.
Every construction of the over-world in which our
over-natural life is lived must be mysterious ; it must
be in terms that will seem contradictory as long as we
fancy that upward Beyond as a sort of outward Beyond

MYSTERIES A NECESSITY OF LIFE 179
— as a mere extension of our present plane of life into
some region removed from our vision, but not from our
understanding — an undiscovered continent of whose
wonders we may learn by hearsay without learning
anything altogether unintelligible. The assailants of
mystery, partly through the fault of its defenders, are
apt to overlook this difference ; and to argue as though
a mystery were a miracle in some outlying region of
Nature, guaranteed by some sort of hearsay evidence.
A miracle, by definition, must be intelligible as to the
substance of the fact, — as intelligible as the uniformity
to which it is the exception, — the only mental difficulty
it presents is one of causal explanation, not of descrip
tion. But a mystery strives to state what may be
an obvious necessity or uniformity of the over-world.
The Christian does not believe that his subjective diffi
culties about the Trinity correspond to a sort of muddle
at the centre of all being and order ; he does not credit
the stick with the crookedness which it owes to re
fraction. What enters the denser mind as a paradox
may be a truism for higher powers.
This confusion of two causes, which, if indirectly allied,
are not necessarily so — the causes of Mystery and Miracle
— is not without a natural basis in the philosophy of re
ligion. The first naive tendency is to regard the higher,
transcendent world as alongside of, or intercalated with,
the lower, rather than as above, through, or behind it; to
view it as revealing its existence by interferences with
established uniformities ; as similar in kind to the lower
world though indefinitely greater in its measurements.
In a word, the necessary inadequacy of our attempts to
express it is not at first recognised, and they are taken

180 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
as of literal value, actual or possible. Much that seems
to us superstitious in the earlier and ruder forms of
religion is due to the first efforts of an instinct that is
as deeply rational as it is universal and irrepressible — to
a desire to adjust our action to a world that lies beyond
that realm of observed uniformities which we call
Nature ; to break through the limits imposed on us by
the ordinary sequences of cause and effect, and rise to
some sort of over-natural life. This hope, in its naive
form, is made to depend on the belief in observable
breaches of Nature's uniformities, and as growing
science brings these seeming irregularities more and
more under the reign of law the basis of the said hope
is narrowed, and is driven backwards from point to
point till the fear of absolute extinction rouses it to
recognise that its foundations are to be laid not in the
level plains of the clearly knowable, but "in the holy
hills," in the high realm of the half-knowable.
Even in higher forms of religion where the miraculous
has been thrust down to a subordinate place as a mere
authentication of prophetic witness and a seal of divine
commission, the tendency to confound mystery and
miracle, and to identify the existence of an over-natural
world with the existence of certain rifts in Nature's
uniformities which have so far baffled the scientists, re
asserts itself very persistently. It is often as " disturb
ing " agencies that God and the spirits of the departed
are expected to manifest their existence, under pain of
their existence being denied. Faith, conceived as con
testing the same plane of knowledge as Science, is really
degraded below Science, as though it were but a second
hand or hearsay knowledge of things, marvellous indeed

MYSTERIES A NECESSITY OF LIFE 181
but not mysterious. Yet, rightly understood, as a dim
vision of the over- world, per speculum et in cenigmate, it
gains in kind over Science whatever it loses in clearness.
The notion of a conflict between the truth of science
and the mysteries of faith is possible only so long as
faith and science are thus supposed to divide the same
plane of knowledge between them, the former giving a
hearsay knowledge of facts outside the range, but not
outside the competence of the latter. But the concord
rightly claimed for their affirmations is not that between
the results of independent labours in the same field ; as,
for example, between the conclusions of two historians
working at the same problem by different methods.
The conclusions of faith and science should be har
monious, but in kind they are generically different
On the presupposition, therefore, that life is essen
tially progressive, or rather is a progress; that it ex
pands in every dimension, upwards as well as outwards ;
that it amplifies in quality as well as in degree, some
kind of knowledge of that over-world to which it strives
to adjust itself becomes a necessity. And on the pre
supposition of the ultimate subordination of knowledge
to action, the success of that striving will be precisely
proportioned to the measure of that knowledge. Again,
since the highest developments of an unfinished process
are themselves necessarily unfinished and half-formed,
our knowledge of that over-world must be a half-know
ledge clothed in terms of things we know clearly. In
other words, on the presuppositions we are assuming,
mysteries of some sort are a necessity of human life
and progress. " Mysteries," and not merely mystery,
not merely belief in the one mystery of an altogether

182 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
unknowable Beyond, which were as barren of practical
fruit as belief in an unknowable Nature.
It will consequently be through action and experiment
that we get this knowledge ; we do not first know the
world and then live in it, but conversely by living in it
we get to know it ; much as one, blind from birth, comes
to construct a plan of the house he lives in. He feels
his way about, groping at venture ; and these successive
experiences he builds up according to some system into
a mental structure of co-existent parts ; and this he
modifies and improves with every new experience, and
by its aid is put in the way of ever fuller experience
wherewith to modify it. But the structure is not in
terms of vision, though it has a truth of its own which
can be brought to the test of experiment. Similarly
under its present limitations, against which it chafes, the
human mind has nothing analogous to a vision of the
over-world : yet this does not prejudice the truth of that
mental structure thereof which it builds up in accord
ance with its experiences, however obscure and difficult
of interpretation those experiences may be. Here, as in
the knowledge of the Nature-world, we owe much no
doubt to the ordinary daily experiences and reflections
which are in some measure within the compass of all
men ; to those who start normally from the results
given them by tradition, who work out and verify for
themselves the rules and principles that others have
formulated, who prove the worth of the theoretical con
struction by its life-value. But we have a right to expect
that this world too should have its Newtons ; its revolu
tionary discoverers and originators to whose gifts and
graces the whole race is indebted ; men to whom chance,

MYSTERIES A NECESSITY OF LIFE 183
so called, has granted altogether exceptional experiences
revealing the secrets that lie nearer the very heart of
things and enabling them to reconstruct and revolutionise
our previous constructions of the over-world with a
truth, not indeed exhaustive, but as different in kind
from that previously attained as the science of Newton
is from the magic of a sorcerer.
Assuming the purpose of knowledge to be wholly
practical, to be merely that of an instrument of fuller
life and action — a method of utilising our past experi
ence for future use — it is obvious that it can throw light
on each new practical situation, and justify our expecta
tions of what it involves, only in so far as the connec
tions and sequences of Nature are supposed to be
uniform and constant — only in so far as Nature is con
ceived as a mechanism or determinism. This hypothesis
of uniformity is the Alpha from which natural science
starts and the Omega for which it makes. The experi
ence gathered by human memory can be used just so far
as it can be put in order and brought into one system
whose members can be inferred one from another. We
seek for, at once, the simplest and the most detailed
catalogue of our experience ; so as to pack away the
greatest possible amount of information in the fewest
possible ideas ; to explain the particular or less familiar
as merely cases of the more familiar and general. All
scientific advance is in the direction of this ideal simpli
fication, this construction of Nature in terms of its most
universal elements — matter and motion ; this reduction
of quality to quantity, of organism to mechanism, and,
in general, of the higher to a mere complication of the
lower. Just so far as Nature can be represented as a

1 84 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
determinism of this kind ; i.e., just so far as this repre
sentation verifies our predictions and expectations of
experience ; can we shape our action fruitfully in relation
to Nature and bring its resources under our control.
The fundamental hypothesis of Nature-knowledge is not
merely indifferent to, but exclusive of, freedom and
spirit and the absolute ; it is necessitarian, materialistic,
and atheistic. But this profanity is harmless if its
hypothetic character be always borne in mind, as un
fortunately it so seldom is. A false or absurd hypothesis
is an instrument of truth not only in geometry. We
need to resolve the concrete, mentally, into elements
which we consider separately and as they can never
possibly exist, in order to understand their contribution
to the simple resultant ; we have to ask ourselves how a
body in motion would behave apart from friction and
other influences that could not possibly be absent ; and
we give an answer that is true only under the abstrac
tion in question — on the supposition that there is no
friction. And similarly the deterministic presentment
of Nature as a mechanical whole, is true on the suppo
sition that there is no subjective order, no freedom, no
spirit, no God. And this false supposition, as such, is an
instrument of truth and life, making not only for the
better knowledge of the natural order, but for that of
the over-natural, and of the whole of which they are both
the mentally sundered elements or parts — sundered for
purposes of understanding and, eventually, for purposes
of life and action.
And from this we can see once more why our know
ledge of the over-natural must necessarily be mysterious.
The attempt at a complete understanding of what is seen

MYSTERIES A NECESSITY OF LIFE 185
and known and willed, i.e. of the Object, as if it were
one independent world apart ; and at a similarly ex
clusive comprehension of the Subject, i.e. of the Self
and its seeing and knowing and willing, as though it
too could be adequately understood divorced from its
correlative — rests on a false but practically useful hypo
thesis forged in the interests of truth. The abstraction
issues in certain absurdities on both sides which con
tradict experience as given us in the concrete. Either
part, treated as a self-explaining whole, must be in a
large measure unintelligible and mysterious, still more
must the whole itself when expressed in terms of either
part alone.
But it is because both the whole and the higher part
must be expressed in terms proper to the lower part,
that the world of the Subject and of the Transcendent
seems to be, and indeed is, shrouded in obscurity and
mystery, while the objective world seems to have a
monopoly of clearness. For, it is through communica
tion of mind with mind that thought grows in volume
and accuracy and that the mental construction of the
world, which has been wrought by common labour, is
communicated to each. The dependence of thought
upon language is the closest conceivable. But for
practical and necessary reasons our language first deals
with that external world which is common to the outward
senses of all; which can be pointed at, weighed, and
measured ; it speaks to the eye and ear in terms of
things outwardly sensible. In this region alone can
it be clear and demonstrably accurate. Slowly and
laboriously, by comparison and inference, this sensible
imagery can be shaped to a rude symbolism of those in-

186 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
ward experiences which cannot be directlycommunicated
to others. If we seem at last to get an appearance of
scientific accuracy in Psychology which deals with the
subjective world, it is in virtue of a transformation of
that world into terms of the outwardly sensible ; it is
through describing, not only complex sensations, but
also feelings, emotions, volitions as aggregates of simple
sensations — by a sort of psychological atomism. The
attempt is useful for purposes of speech and understand
ing and action, like other false hypotheses, but it leads,
like them, to various absurdities such as the denial of
freedom and of true action ; it proves the changes of our
inward life to be as passive as those of a kaleidoscope —
and as valueless. This dependence of our thought, for
its clearness, upon language which is communicable to
the outward senses, and into whose material terms our
spiritual and religious experiences must be translated
for purposes of conference with others, makes the
obscurity of the over-natural world inevitable. Every
communicable expression of it must be a transformation
of it into lower terms ; and these, if taken literally, must
at points be in contradiction with one another and with
the facts of that world to which they properly belong.
As long as such constructions of the over-natural
world as are given us by philosophy or religion, — natural
or revealed, — are assailed or defended without a recog
nition of these incontestable principles; as long as
mysteries are confounded with miracles, i.e. with breaches
of uniformity in the plane of clear knowledge, they will
naturally be brought into discredit. While the growing
recognition of the reign of law in physical Nature can
never prejudice the possibility of an occasional inter-

MYSTERIES A NECESSITY OF LIFE 187
ference with her uniformities connected with the occa
sional cataclysms of that subjective world whose organ
and embodiment she is ; yet the reduction to rule of so
much that once seemed irregular; the difficulty of
getting at the precise facts and then of being sure that
they are outside, not only the actually known, but the
possibly knowable uniformities of Nature — all tend to
deepen men's practical belief in an all-pervading deter
minism of the physical world. This belief is undoubt
edly hurtful to the credit of faith and religion, so far as
their cause has been unduly tied up with the possibility
of establishing rifts in the network of Nature's groupings
and sequences; so far as the conception of the over-
natural as merely an extension of the plane of the
natural has been taken asjnore thajj an accommodation
of truth to the limits of language and clear thought.
But, on the other hand, it is the deadening pressure
of this same brutal determinism on the living human
heart that first rouses us to break the meshes of the
fallacies that have entangled our faith ; to seek its
mysteries above us and not around us ; and to turn
seeming loss into certain gain. If science starves out
the superstition that makes the over-natural merely an
extension of the natural, it also starves out the super
stition of Naturalism by working out the false hypo
thesis to its absurd issues ; by showing that to explain
the whole of human experience in terms of a mere
part means to deny it in other parts and finally to
deny it altogether.
Simply then in the light of current presuppositions,
whose value we are not discussing, it is evident that
human life and progress involve an upward straining

1 88 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
towards increasing self-adjustment with that over-
natural whole of which the natural is felt to be only a
part ; and that this effort is futile except so far as some
construction or plan of that strange country is possible ;
and that such a construction must necessarily be in
terms of things clear and familiar, and therefore must
be mysterious.
Those who look on our discontent with the best that
this world could possibly offer and with any sort of bliss
that could be clearly formulated, as a morbid symptom
to be ruthlessly checked, are consistent in their repu
diation of mysteries. If the Beyond is nothing to us —
if it be only an idle unpractical notion that goads us for
goading's sake but for no purpose and in no direction —
let us, in thought at least, cut ourselves off from that
Beyond and live and act as though this abstraction were
true, and as though this world were a self-explanatory
whole. But let us not in the same breath talk of life as
an endless process of expansion in every dimension, up
wards as well as outwards ; of the practical bearing of
every idea ; of the significance of every universal and
natural form of discontent, and so forth.
Still less consistent is the position of those who,
desirous to retain religion and yet rid themselves of
mysteries which they confound with miracles, would
interpret their creed as merely an ethical parable, as
susceptive of a banal and perfectly intelligible meaning
in the moral order though, in its literal sense, irrecon
cilable with the determinism of the physical universe.
In the first place they can hardly leave the Beyond so
blank and unfurnished but that they will hold to some
sort of thin deism or pantheism which itself is neces-

MYSTERIES A NECESSITY OF LIFE 189
sarily, under all circumstances, a dogmatic construction
bristling with mysteries as soon as we try to think it
coherently in those terms of the Nature-world in which
it must perforce be expressed. Secondly, our conduct
in society cannot be determined till we know what we
are, what our destiny is, and how we are related to one
another. It is easy to say that to love one another is
the essence of Christianity. It is indeed ; but love is
manifold in kind and strength — not a colourless abstrac
tion ; and it is mysterious in every form. Love is not
conduct, but it is the motive and end of conduct and
gives it its energy and character. It is of all things
social, an affection of will towards will ; and it takes its
tone and quality from some apprehension of the bond
which ties us together and of the world to which our
life is related — be it the narrow world of Nature's
determinism or the infinite world which includes the
finite. Our affective relation to our fellow-men and our
duties to them are absolutely different, according as we
leave the Beyond wholly unfurnished or as we furnish it
this way or that. Every single element of a man's
religious belief lends its special tinge to the character
of that love which constitutes his mystical and over-
natural life. The over-natural life of the Christian — his
mystical experience — is a love whose unique tone and
character and mode of practical utterance is determined
by that construction of the over-world which is given
him in the dogmas of that creed that has come to him
through Christ, and by which he is able to interpret and
control and multiply the experiences of his upward life,
and deal effectually with the situations that are offered
to him in the light of a knowledge of their remote

190 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
implications and bearings, and not as though they stood
apart unconnected with a wider world of grace.
Christian ethics are bound up inseparably with
Christian mysteries. Clear these away and, in default
of some substituted construction of the over-natural
world, what remains is an ethics without foundation,
without end, without character ; neither Christian nor
anything else ; and that love which is the substance of
the inward immanent life of the Christian soul, as op
posed to the life of outward conduct, gives place to a
vague amiability whose roots are nowhere and its
branches anywhere.

CHAPTER VII
PRAGMATISM
NOTHING lightens the critic's labour more than
to fix some class-name upon a writer and forth
with ascribe to him all the attributes of that class.
Because, as is plain from the last chapter, I am in
sympathy with "pragmatism," and use many of its
terms and principles, it has pleased certain hard-worked
reviewers, with no leisure for microscopy, to dump me
down with the pragmatists and have done with me. In
deprecation of such summary treatment I penned
the following article for the Annales de Philosophie
Chre'tienne (October, 1905), under the title " Notre
Attitude en face du Pragmatisme."
******
Apologetic theology has its fashions and moods to
a degree which does not obtain in theology proper.
For it is essentially an effort to accommodate religion
to current tendencies of thought. There is always
some great and permanent gain to religious thought
from this effort ; something that remains after the said
fashions have changed. For there is ever a root of
reason to account for the fashions. Still there is
always a danger lest the apologist fall in love with his
191

192 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
tools, and in gratitude for their undoubted services
decline to criticise them, and suffer himself to be really
mastered by them. The more a philosophy or a
hypothesis is in fashion, and the more abundantly
fruitful it proves for apologetic purposes, the greater
the need of fixing our attention on its limitations, lest
in easing the present distress we create a burden of
difficulty for those who come after us. " Pragmatism,"
especially in the hands of W. James and F. Schiller, is
an easy and illuminative philosophy, particularly pliable
to the needs of the apologist. It bids fair to become
as seductive, as popular, as tyrannical as " Evolution."
In making Life the criterion of Truth, in subjecting the
Law of Belief to the Law of Prayer it is evidently at
one with the teaching of Christ. This fact creates an
almost violent prepossession in its favour on the part of
the apologist, and makes it all the more needful for us
to consider it as objectively as possible, and, while
acknowledging its merits, to question its claims as
critically as we can.
Truth, in the intellectual sense, is simply the agree
ment of the Predicate with the Subject. To say it is
adcsquatio intellectus et rei usually implies that the mind
copies something outside the mind — which, of course,
it could not do, nor could it verify the copy, unless the
something were already in the mind. In general terms,
the truth of our mind means the agreement of the
totality of our predications with the totality of our
experiences. A world, or rather the materials of
a world, is given to us in our inward and outward
sensations ; this has our own body (so far as it
is an object of sense-perception) for its centre and for

PRAGMATISM 193

the condition of all further sense - perceptions ; and
round this centre we are given the physical world, and
the bodies of our fellow-men, and all the movements
and changes and processes of these sense-objects. But
as I cannot think of them except as being in space or
in time, so neither except as beingjn thought — whether
my own thought or another's.
But I do not gaze idly and indifferently on all this
phantasmagoria. I not only perceive, but I feel these
things ; they hurt me or they please me, or they
threaten pain or promise pleasure. They are all referred
to feeling1 as necessarily as to thought. As we easily
confound thought, which contains all things, with the
things themselves, and call these "thoughts," so we
confound feeling with the things felt and call these
feelings. The same sweetness that pleases one palate
disgusts another ; the feeling is the same for both, yet not
the same. Pleasure and pain, whatever their object, be it
sensual or spiritual, are conditions of the spirit as much
as thought and perception are. The child at his play, the
saint at his prayers, each is conscious of a rightly ad
justed experience, of a harmonious relation to the
environment ; each is conscious of possessing his good
— and this consciousness is pleasure. This does not
mean that pleasure is homogeneous, or susceptible
merely of quantitative differences. It is qualified by
its object, and by that need or faculty in the subject
1 I use "feeling " here for pleasure and pain in their widest sense ; for
our consciousness of subjective benefit or hurt. It is one thing to ' ' feel "
a certain degree (e.g.) of heat, another to feel that it is pleasant or un
pleasant ; and it may be either, according to our subjective need or condi
tions. We badly want » word to distinguish these two senses of
" feeling."

194 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
which is satisfied by the object. It stands for an
analogy, not for an identity; as play to the child, so
is prayer to the saint.
By abstraction I can fancy myself purely passive in
relation to what is given in experience ; the prey, there
fore, of dreams that flit by and plague or delight me at
their will, but over which I have no sort of control.
Such may be the life of a plant or a polyp. Yet con
sciousness and feeling would serve no practical end in
Nature were they not directive of actions in some
degree. Not only do I perceive and feel what is given,
but I also control it in favour of good and its consequent
pleasure, and against evil and its consequent pain. I
find that that central object in the field of consciousness,
which I call my body, or even my Self, and to which all
others must be related in order to be perceived and felt,
is changeable at will, as a whole and in its parts ; that I
have not to wait till things pass by and act upon me,
but can go to meet them, and act upon them, and so
determine my relations to them : that by moving my
self, its centre, I can change the whole world of my
experience and control pleasure and pain. In a word,
feeling develops into action, and feeling with reference
to such action in the further interests of feeling is called
" will." To inquire which is principal or final in the
life of the spirit, perception, feeling or will, is useless,
for each is inseparably bound up with the other two ;
their relation is organic ; they are but three aspects
of one and the same life or movement. \ \
Were not the world of experience saturated with
Reason ; were it disorderly and irrational ; were there no
uniformities or repetitions of groupings and sequences,

PRAGMATISM 195

then memory of experiences would be an idle cum-
brance ; life would be impossible, or would be narrowed
to that of a simple cell, whose pulses of action would
have no connection beyond that of a mechanical con
tinuity. That we can adapt our actions to conditions
further and further removed from us in place and time ;
that we can thus deal with an ever expanding world ;
that, by reproducing the Reason of the world in itself,
the Subject or Spirit develops towards Deity — that is,
towards an ever fuller mastery and control of the Object —
is due to the fact that experience is rational and regular,
that it is stored in the memory, sorted and interpreted
by the understanding ; that we can fashion for ourselves
a symbolic scheme or plan of the world, which enables
us to see far beyond the actually present data, and
accommodate our action to a larger view of things. To
"think" is to try to put together those successive
experiences that come to us in a more or less casual
order, and are retained coexistently or simultaneously in
memory ; it is to discover their laws of grouping and
sequence ; to deduce a world-scheme. Thinking assumes
the unity and rationality of the world ; it is an effort to
reproduce in ourselves that Reason with which the
world, given to our thought, is saturated ; that Reason
whose children we are, whose nature we share, whose
likeness we must perfect in ourselves. To relate one
thing to another is simply to recognise them both as
parts of one connected whole of experience. " What
think you of Christ?" means "Whose son is he?"
Truth is therefore the agreement of our understanding
with our given experience ; of our predicates with our
subjects. And if by thing we mean not something

196 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
outside our experience, but what is thus given in our
experience as the subject-matter of thought, then we
may say truth is " Adaequatio intellectus et rei." Truth
is from first to last an instrument, or rather a factor of
life, of action ; and so far, pragmatism is unassailable.
" Copying for copying's sake " is, as W. James insists, an
indefensible view of truth. We must know only because
we must act, and love, and live ; nor is it a concession to
" intellectualism " to allow that it is equally true to say
we must live and love in order that we may know.
What we deny is any real separation or priority of spirit-
life. We deny moralism and sentimentalism as well as
intellectualism. Life is the test and criterion of truth,
as serviceableness is of any instrument But it does not
follow that whatever is immediately or apparently useful
to life is truly so, and therefore true. Nor does truth
belong per prius to particular propositions, but to the
whole mind or world-scheme with which such particulars
cohere, and which they involve or imply. Such a scheme
is truer just in the degree that it extends our power and
control more widely over experience as a whole. And
this total experience includes far more than the physical
world of our sensations. It embraces the whole world
of human life — aesthetic, ethical, social, political, religious
— over which the spirit of man broods by reflection, feel
ing, will, and action ; through which it is developed and
enlarged in the direction of deity. It embraces the laws
and uniformities of that spiritual side of the world to
which, as by a new sense, man is referred by his selfless
over-individual life of disinterested goodness, and to
which he subordinates his separate and individual
interest — which is the life of the Whole in him, so far as

PRAGMATISM 197

he becomes conscious of himself as an instrument of the
universal Reason or Spirit. That this world-scheme can
ever be adequate, or absolutely true, is impossible. It
must always be an attempt to think the Whole in terms
of the part ; or to treat the part known as if it were the
Whole. But it can be progressively truer and truer, and
this truth is tested by increased control of experience in
its totality. The pragmatist reasonably protests against
the Absolute in the sense of an external Something to
be copied by the mind, which Something has no common
measure with our experience, or in the sense of a Good
ness which is transcendentally or infinitely unlike the
goodness of human conduct and will, and can in no
sense be copied or imitated practically. But truth is
none the less an agreement with God as with an eternal
or absolute standard ; it is an agreement of our mind and
reason with the Mind and Reason with which our given
experience is saturated, not with a Mind out of all
relation to us and our world. 'For God is the law of our
life and being; our being is the expression of God.
Even the tree may grow crooked and prove false to the
law of its expansion, much more may self-determining
man. True life is that which is true to the law of our
Being, true to God ; what contradicts that law is doomed,
sooner or later, to sterility and death. Thus, indirectly,
God is the measure even of our mind, i.e. of our inter
pretation of experience. In growing towards deity,
through the understanding and control of experience,
we grow true to that Spirit which works not only in us
but in all else, and whose Reason permeates the world,
and is reproduced in us in the measure that we grow
perfect, even as our Father in Heaven is perfect. But

198 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
this growth in truth and perfection is not merely mental,
it is also moral and aesthetic ; we must not only think,
but we must also feel and act in harmony with the
deepest law of our being, with conscience in its amplest
sense, with the all-pervading Reason, Love, and Good
ness — in a word, with God.
To give the name of " Truth " to any one factor of
this harmony, apart from the other two, is to plunge into
a sea of confusion and perplexity.
If "Pragmatism" has been severely criticised, and this
not merely by intellectualists of the Hegelian School, it
is partly the fault of its exponents, who are not guiltless
of the onesidedness attendant on all reactionary move
ments ; partly because the very word " Pragmatism "
savours of that moralism which is sister-fallacy to
intellectualism and sentimentalism. Mr. F. W. Schiller
has therefore been well advised in calling his philosophy
" Humanism." Largely as we may agree with the
general tendency of that philosophy, we cannot view
it as more than a rough draught, needing careful revision
and correction. Still, we do it an injustice if we suppose
that its war against the Hegelian "'Absolute" is a whole
sale abandonment of metaphysics, or an opening of the
door to pure relativity. "The stream of Truth," says
Mr. Schiller,1 "which waters the fertile fields of Conduct,
has its sources in the remote and lonely uplands inter
apices philosophies, where the cloud-capped crags and
slowly-grinding glaciers of metaphysics soar into an air
too chill and rare for our abiding habitation, but keenly
bracing to the strength of an audacious climber."
1 ' ' The Ethical Basis of Metaphysics," International Journal of
Ethics, July, 1903.

PRAGMATISM 199

Far from abandoning metaphysics, to deduce it from
life and conduct, rather than from notions and concepts,
is to place it for the first time on a firm basis, and to
give it that interest which attaches to every study that
bears, however remotely, on life and action,

CHAPTER VIII
THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY
THIS essay, reprinted by kind permission of the
editor, appeared in the Quarterly Review, October,
1905 ; and was inspired mainly by Dr. A. White's book,
A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology tn
Christendom (New York, Appleton, 1903). It contains
my first attempt to elaborate the distinction hinted at
in the article, Semper Eadem, between Theology and
Revelation, and to find therein a liberation for both
interests. In substance I hold to it still, though if I
were to modify it in some details, it would be in a con
servative and traditional direction.
Thus, I have since seen that the revelations of those
who knew Christ personally must naturally differ in
kind from later revelations, and be venerated as classical
and normative.
Again, though the spirit of Christ is the unifying
principle of doctrinal growth, yet that spirit is appre
hended only through its earliest, purest, and most
vigorous self-embodiment in the Gospel. In this article
I am too inclined to solve the riddle at the expense of
the patristic and traditional notion of the deposit of
faith as being a " form of sound words."

THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY 201
Also the term " Revelation " is here used sometimes to
cover the whole complexus of beliefs reached through
religious experience, without any distinction between
apostolic revelation and dogmatic decisions, merely
protective of that revelation. If Theology is cut free,
and allowed to develop on its own lines, Revelation
is also conceived, not as strictly developing, but as
growing by accretion through dogmatic decisions.
This is to allow to such decisions far more than that
merely "protective" value which tradition assigns to
them. It is to treat them not merely as reasserting,
but as amplifying the Gospel.
Finally, though Revelation and Dogma do not con
trol Theology as statement controls statement, they
control it as a science is controlled by its subject-matter.
This, though meant and implied in this essay, needs to
be underlined.

Dr. Andrew White's volumes appeared first in 1895.
They are a collection of magazine articles that had been
published from time to time in the Popular Science
Monthly. If they are popular they are none the less the
fruit of serious research and reflection. However dis
putable his main conclusion may seem to some, and his
subordinate conclusions to many others, none will dispute
the great value of the work viewed as evidence arrayed
for judgment, as a repertoire of facts and documents that
must be reckoned with and explained, not so much one by
one as in their collectivity and accumulative force. Much
as he admired Professor J. W. Draper's well-known work
on The Conflict between Science and Religion, Dr. White

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

tells us that he himself felt that the conflict were better
understood and described as one " between science and
dogmatic theology," or " between two epochs in the evo
lution of human thought — the theological and the scien
tific" (Vol. I, p. 9). His aim, then, is to separate the
causes of religion and theology, which Professor Draper
confused, and to exonerate religion from a burden of
guilt that we should lay wholly on the shoulders of
theology. In support of his contention that theology has in
variably, and therefore presumably of its own nature,
been hostile to the interests of both science and religion
in the past, and that it must be so in the present and
future, he shows us how, as regards the matter, manner,
time and date of creation, and its sundry details ; as
regards the form, the delineation, and the size of the
earth, the possibility and existence of the antipodes, the
geocentric theory, the nature and movements of the
heavenly bodies and their causes ; as regards natural
signs and wonders, comets, eclipses, earthquakes ; as
regards geology, the deluge, the antiquity of man, pre
historic remains, the theory of man's decadence ; in the
matter of chemistry and magic, causes and remedies of
diseases and epidemics ; in the explanation of lunacy,
hysteria, and exceptional psychic phenomena ; in the
matter of philology and the origin of languages ; finally,
as regards the origin of religion, of Christianity, of the
Church and her institutions, and of the sacred Scriptures
— as regards all these matters he shows us how theology
has been invariably the bitter persecuting foe of scientific
truth ; and this because she has claimed a divine and
supernatural, and therefore supreme, jurisdiction over

THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY 203
the whole realm of truth. In each several case he
shows how the innovations of science have been repelled,
often violently and injuriously, as being blasphemous
and heretical, as calling the divine veracity in question,
as contrary to the sacred Scriptures, to the consensus of
the Fathers, to the very substance of Christian reve
lation ; how, in each instance, science, beaten back again
and again, has at last come out victorious, while the
theologians have been reduced, first, to disingenuous
compromises, and finally, to discreet silence ; and how
what was defended as the very essence and substance of
revealed doctrine has been quietly let drop into the class
of non-essentials and accidentals, and the whole episode
buried in edifying oblivion.
Much as we appreciate the ability, the sincerity, the
religious purpose of Dr. White's work, we raise an objec
tion to it analogous to that which he raises against Pro
fessor Draper. We feel that the conflict is not between
science and theology, but between science and what, for
convenience, may here be called dogmatic theology.1 We
use the term " science " and its derivatives throughout in
that widest sense in which Dr. White uses it, not in the
sense of naturalists, who would build up their whole
philosophy according to the categories of the purely
physical sciences ; we use it in the sense of reasoned, as
opposed to revealed, knowledge, based directly or in
directly on experience, such as can be attained by man's
natural faculties, unassisted by extraordinary divine

1 " Dogmatic theology" in the lawful sense is that which reckons with
revelation and dogma as data of religious experience and not as theological
statement. Here I use it as the equivalent of what I elsewhere call
"theologism" or "the old theology" or "the dogmatic fallacy."

204 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
interference ; in a sense therefore that will include ethics,
metaphysics, and theology no less than physics or
mathematics. We would submit therefore that, so far as
theology is a science, it can raise no other conflict with
reason than such as exists at times between one science
and another ; and that, so far as any other sort of
conflict seemingly exists, it is only between science and
that pseudo-science which we call dogmatic theology.
To establish this contention and, as a corollary, to de
termine the true relation between theology and reve
lation, is the purpose of this article ; or, in other words,
to suggest a supplementary chapter for Dr. White's
book on the transition, now in process, from theologism
to scientific theology.
" On appelle dogme " (says Reville, Preface, p. ix) " une
doctrine religieuse formulee par ceux qu'on regarde
comme ayant le droit d'exprimer officiellement la croy-
ance de la society religieuse dont ils font partie."
When theologians take the dogmas or articles of the
creed and use them as principles or premisses of argu
mentation, when they combine them with one another,
or with truths outside the domain of faith, so as to de
duce further conclusions to be imposed on the mind
under pain of at least " constructive " heresy, the result
ing doctrinal system is what is here meant by theo
logism. We have called it a pseudo- science, not
because it takes its principles blindly on faith — given
the testimony of an omniscient and infallible witness,
what could be more reasonable ? — but because it treats
prophetic enigmas and mysteries, which of their very
nature are ambiguous and incapable of exact deter
mination, as principles of exactly determinable in-

THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OP THEOLOGY 205
tellectual value, and argues from them accordingly.
We propose to call this the dogmatic fallacy, and may
now proceed to make good our contention.
It may here be assumed that the divine which is
immanent in man's spirit does naturally and inevitably,
at a certain stage of his mental and moral progress,
reveal itself to him, however dimly, as a vita nuova,
a new sort of life, the life of religion, with its needs and
its cravings for self-adjustment to realities lying beyond
the bourne of time and place ; that, reflecting on this
need, man seeks to explain it to himself by various
religious conceptions and beliefs ; and that, with regard
to such explanations, it serves the purpose of an in
stinctive criterion or selective principle, as the appetite
of an animal does in regard to its fitting dietary. It is
chiefly and more immediately as a determinant of con
duct as consciousness of right and wrong, that this
manifestation of the divine will is experienced. Man
lives long before he possesses a scientific theory of life,
even before he reaches those ruder practical explana
tions of its nature and functions that are forced on him
at the very dawn of reflection. Yet the science is there
from the first, implicit in life itself. So too the practices
and observances of religion precede the explicit formu
lation of those truths by which, nevertheless, the said
practices are determined. They form the skeleton
which grows in and with the living body ; it is not first
constructed apart and then clothed with flesh, and
nerves, and sinews.
What revelation (considered actively as the self-mani
festation of the divine in our inward life) first defines for
us is therefore a certain mode or way of life, action, and

206 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
conduct. It is only later, and in the second place, that
our intelligence begins to reflect on this process and
tries to picture it and understand it, to invent a philo
sophy or a history to explain it, and still more for the
practical purpose of registering or fixing our expe
riences, of communicating them and comparing them
with those of others. If we consider the generic char
acteristic of these explanations, to wit, the affirmed ex
istence of superhuman transcendent beings beyond the
range of ordinary experience, with whom, nevertheless,
man stands in close practical relations of subjection and
dependence, it is plain that the way of life or mode
of action whereof these imaginings are explanatory
must have reference to a world or order of existence
beyond, above, yet closely related with, the world of
daily experience. In this sense the teaching of religion
is a popular substitute for metaphysics, so far as this
latter stands for that part of philosophy which deals
with the ultra-phenomenal ; but they differ radically in
that metaphysics, in obedience to a merely intellectual
need, is deduced from a scientific reflection on the
totality of phenomena, whereas religious beliefs are, in
obedience to a practical need, explanatory only of the
facts and phenomena of religious life, and are there
fore only indirectly representative of the world to
which those phenomena have reference. They are
determined by life, sentiment, and conduct, whereas
the rational "theology" of the metaphysician pre
cedes and determines his practical life so far as it
affects it at all.
In the main, then, religious belief is directly explana
tory and justificatory of religious life and sentiment.

THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY 207
These latter are, in the first instance, determined by the
nature and action upon us of that order of things to
which they have reference, and not by our knowledge of
that order. Certain suggestions or occasions first awake
the religious need into consciousness ; and then, by ex
periment, co-operation, tradition, we determine a com
plete code of fas and nefas, of piety and impiety. Lastly,
reflection sets the imaginative intelligence to work to
construct some picture, idea, and history of the world
to which this code strives to adjust our conduct.
So far, then, revelation (considered objectively) is a
knowledge derived from, as well as concerning, the
"other world," the supernatural. But its derivation is
decidedly indirect. What alone is directly given from
above, or from beyond, is the spiritual craving or im
pulse with its specific determination, with its sympathetic
and antipathetic responses to the suggestions, practical
or explanatory, that are presented to it, whether casually
or by the industry of the reflective religious intelligence.
Here is the true " Urim and Thummim," laconic as the
voice of conscience, deigning no information beyond
" yea " and " nay," according to our questionings. To find
the object which shall explain this religious need and
bring it to full self-consciousness is the end and purpose
of the whole religious process.
Every man has the power of shaping some rudimentary
language for himself — a power which tradition and educa
tion render unnecessary, except so far as the language
he has been taught may on occasion prove too narrow
for his needs. So too revelation, in the above sense, is
accorded to most men ; but religious tradition and educa
tion are usually beforehand to wake up the religious need

208 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
and to overwhelm it with the treasures of the collective
spiritual experience and reflection of the past. They are
few who ever master this tradition in its entirety ; fewer
still who rise above it or revolutionise it. It is these
last, however — the great founders and reformers — who
alone are credited with being the recipients of revelation
from on high, whereas in truth they often but reap what
has been sown by multitudes of forgotten labourers.
There is, however, little doubt that an intense feeling,
passion, or emotion will in some instances incorporate
itself in congenial imaginations and conceptions ; that
from the storehouse of the memory it will, as it rushes
outwards, snatch to itself by a sort of magnetism such
garments as may best set it forth on the stage of thought.
In respect to such conceptions and visions the recipient
is almost as passive and determined as he is in regard to
the spiritual emotion so embodied. Hence these present
ments of the supernatural world seem to be quite specially
inspired, to possess a higher authority and to come less
indirectly from God than those that are deliberately
sought out in explanation of the life of religion. Yet in
fact their only superiority is that they may indicate a
stronger, purer, deeper impulse of the divine spirit ; not
that they are any more directly representative of those
invisible realities known to us merely by the blind
gropings of love. All revelation truly such is in some
measure or other an expression of the divine mind in
man, of the spirit of God ; but it is not necessarily a
divine expression of that spirit ; for the expression is
but the reaction, spontaneous or reflex, of the human
mind to God's touch felt within the heart, and this
reaction is characterised wholly by the ideas, forms,

THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY 209
and images wherewith the mind is stocked in each
particular case.
But in thus allowing that the rudest religious beliefs
are inspired so far as they originate purely in a
spontaneous effort to interpret the workings of grace
in the heart, we do not for a moment equalise them
otherwise than generically ; nor do we forget that there
is here, as in other spheres of human life — in art, in
science, in politics, in ethics — a true progressive ten
dency and a firm criterion of such progress, the criterion
of life amplified and invigorated, or life contracted and
impoverished. If the whole field of experience, if that
world from which the philosopher draws his meta
physical theology, may in some sense be called a revela
tion of God, yet we shall be keeping closer to the original
and historical sense of the term " revelation " if we refer
it to those presentations of the other world which are
shaped and determined by man's inward religious experi
ence, individual and collective. Here it is that man
seems to be guided and taught, not through the ordinary
ways of knowledge, but more or less supernaturally, by
a divine spirit in direct communication with his own ;
and this in the interests of conscience and duty and wor-
shipifnot in those of speculative curiosity. Hence the
peculiarly sacred character attached to revelation as
distinct from theology. For the former, God is felt to
' stand guaranty, whereas the latter is fallible with the
fallibility of the human mind. And yet it is to their
eventual confusion as truths in the same order, to the
ascription of divine authority to theology and of scien
tific or philosophic exactitude to revelation, that the
mischievous results of theologism must be traced.

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

But in what sense are religious revelations divinely
authorised ? What sort of truth is guaranteed to them
by the " seal of the spirit " ? In accordance with what
has been already said we must answer — a truth which
is directly practical, preferential, approximative, and only
indirectly speculative. What is immediately approved,
as it were experimentally, is a way of living, feeling, and
acting with reference to the other world. The explana
tory and justificatory conceptions subsequently sought
out by the mind, as postulated by the " way of life,"
have no direct divine approval. Again, the divine
approval of the way and the life (and therefore in
directly of the explanatory truth) is mostly preferential,
it is a favouring of one alternative, not as ideal and
finally perfect, but as an approximation to the ideal, as
a " move in the right direction."
To take the inspired imagery of revelation as repre
senting the divine mind in the same way as a philosophy
or science represents the human mind ; to view it as a
miraculously communicated science, superseding and
correcting the natural results of theological speculation,
is the fundamental mistake of theologism. Yet like
all widespread and persistent errors it is a very natural
one, as natural as the belief in geocentricism. It needs
no slight degree of critical development to distinguish
momenta in a phenomenon that seems to be given all
at once and is therefore taken in the lump, i.e. to discern
the soul of the act from its body, its essence from its
accidents, the action of grace from the reaction of
nature, the warmth of the heart from the light which it
kindles in the mind, the infusion of divine love from
the inspired image in which it clothes itself or from the

THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY 211
theological concepts in which it is afterwards clothed by
our reflection.
The story of the birth of our dogmatic theology is
now fairly well made out. Dr. Paul Wernle, in his Die
Anfdnge unserer Religion, with perhaps a somewhat
too indiscriminate antitheological bias, shows the process
by which a religion, that in its origin and spirit was
so largely a protest against that theologism which
builds a theology on the letter-value of spiritual and
prophetic utterances, and makes the Word of God of
none effect through the vain traditions of men, came
itself to lapse into that very same fallacy. While ad
mitting that religion without some sort of dogmas, some
sort of beliefs and symbols of the other world, is as im
practicable as ordinary life would be without some rude
practical knowledge of ourselves and our surroundings ;
while even allowing that theology, though not essential,
may be as helpful to religion as science is to daily life ;
yet it is all but impossible to imagine the Christ of the
synoptics, the advocate of the poor and simple against
the intellectual tyranny of lawyers, scribes, and theolo
gians, attaching the slightest religious value to the theo
logically correct formulation of the inscrutable mysteries
prophetically symbolised by the Heavenly Father, the
Son of Man, the kingdom of God, etc., or making
salvation to depend on any point of mere intellectual
exactitude. In its first form the Christian revelation was alto
gether apocalyptic, prophetic, visionary in character.
The ethical teaching of the Gospel was not considered
as part of it, or as in any wise new. The kingdom of
heaven, its nature, the circumstances of its advent — this

212 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
was the " good news '' ; but the repentance, the prepara
tion for the day of the Lord, lay simply in walking in the
paths of holiness already trodden and marked out by the
saints and prophets. But of these apocalyptic teachings
the prophetic spirit was the criterion, even as it was the
author; they were at first avowedly the setting forth
of the future ideal order in figurative and imperfect
language, borrowed from a lower order of reality ; and,
while thus understood, the only opposition with natural
experience which they had to fear, and did encounter,
was with the history of the future, which they seemed
to predict more or less ambiguously. Very early, how
ever, arose the apologetic desire to show that, as the
spirit gave to children and weaklings a virtue and self-
control exceeding that of the philosophers, so it gifted
them with a miraculous wisdom or philosophy which
turned pagan light into darkness. Hence the endeavour
to argue deductively from prophetic visions to scien
tific conclusions; to discover the highest philosophical
systems embedded in the Christian revelation, and then
to find gropings after Christianity, thus interpreted, in all
the best philosophies. Forthwith the resulting system,
compounded of prophetic revelations and philosophical
theories and conceptions, is proposed for general belief
as a divinely revealed Weltanschauung or general philo
sophy, as having all the oracular authority of a prophecy
with all the exactitude of a scientific theology. Here
we have theologism full-blown in all its hybrid enormity,
i.e. a would-be science governed, not by a scientific, but
by a prophetic criterion.
Concurrently with this transformation of revelation
into a revealed theology there arises a parallel and

THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY 213
dependent perversion of the notion of faith into that
of theological orthodoxy. Faith is now an intellectual
assent to this revealed theology as deriving directly from
the divine intellect ; it is no longer the adhesion of the
whole man, heart, mind, and soul, to the divine spirit
within — primarily a spirit of life and love, and only
thereby a guide or beacon leading the mind gradually
to a fuller instinctive apprehension of the religious truth
implicit in the inspirations of grace.
So long as the Christian revelation was felt to be
an utterance of prophetic enthusiasm, a communication
of visions whose correspondence to the felt realities
of eternity was more or less enigmatic and inexact,
variations of form were not considered prejudicial to its
truth. Prophets, like poets, may deal quite differently,
yet quite truthfully, with the same theme. But, as soon
as it pretended to be a revealed philosophy and to possess
a more or less literal and exact correspondence to fact,
substantial variations of form were felt to be inconsistent
with the oneness and unchangeableness of truth. As
mysteries of faith, the threefold personality of God, or
the godhead of Christ, could not come in conflict with
theological monotheism or the metaphysics of nature
and personality, but as theological statements they had
to be squared with the requirements of intellectual
unity. One inevitable result of this intellectualising of reve
lation was the sterilising (due to other causes as
well) of the sources of prophetic inspiration. Under
the tyranny of a dominant classicism, art and poetry
dry up ; yet this at most is the tyranny of a fashion,
not that of a divinely-revealed immutable standard. To

214 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
force prophetic or poetic vision to take certain theo
logical shapes and forms under pain of anathema is to
silence and quench that spirit, the breath of whose life
is freedom. Tried by such standard orthodoxy, the
prophets who could not prophesy to order and rule were
discarded as charlatans and impostors, and gradually
their whole caste fell into discredit ; nor was their func
tion as agitators and reformers compatible with a con
servative ecclesiastical institution, such as that into which
the primitive communities were being fast welded. Such
additions and modifications as the canonised doctrinal
system subsequently received were chiefly the work
of theological reflection, deduction, explanation, con
troversy, definition.
The current theological, philosophical, and historical
beliefs and conceptions, in which the original Christian
afflatus or enthusiasm embodied itself, being thus
canonised as part and parcel of a revealed theology,
and as being therefore God's own philosophy of exist
ence and of human history, the whole force of the
Christian religion, with all its highest sanctions and
motives, was thrown into the scale against the progress
of knowledge and, thereby, of civilisation. All those
categories, philosophical, scientific, and historic, all those
readings of the world and of history, that were involved
and presupposed in the canonical traditions and scrip
tures, were imposed by conscience upon the under
standing as the Word of God, as matter of divine faith,
to be questioned only at the peril of one's immortal soul.
So closely interwoven are all the parts of the kingdom
of knowledge that this meant its entire subjection (at
least in the event of conflict) to the ultimate control of

THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY 215
revelation now identified with dogmatic theology. The
superiority of this so-called revelation over reason was
no longer that of a higher kind of truth over a lower,
excluding the possibility of conflict in the same plane,
of prophetic mysteries veiled from the impertinent
scrutiny of reason, but only that of a higher truth in the
same plane or order.
Quite apart from the juridical and physical coercion
so freely resorted to by ecclesiastical authority, the very
conception of a divinely revealed doctrinal system,
ramifying out into every corner of the field of know
ledge, held the Christian intelligence for centuries
captive to the Christian conscience. No philosophical
speculation, no scientific or historical discovery, could
merit consideration or toleration which seemed to come
into conflict with a divinely revealed theology. Re
luctantly, as time went on, and as the hopes of a near
Parusia yielded place to a prospect of possible centuries
of delay and of an intervening ecclesiastical era, the
idea of development or growth had to be admitted to
justify undeniable additions and alterations forced on
the Church by the necessity of adapting her teaching to
new times and regions and circumstances, to new forms
of thought and speech. Yet in theory, at least, this
theological development allows of no^ transformation of
those scriptural and primitive conceptions, with all their
now largely obsolete historical and philosophical pre
suppositions, in which the spirit of Christ first uttered
itself. These are to be developed, like the immutable
first principles of geometry, by combination with one
another, or with truths of natural reason and experience
outside their own order. Revelation having ceased with

216 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
the apostles, it is only in and through these primitive
conceptions that we retain any sort of distant and
mediate contact with the facts and realities which dog
matic theology defines, and by which its truth may be
experimentally verified and criticised. In sight of these
facts and realities, were they still present to us, we
might venture to readjust these their earliest expression
to our own mode of thought and speech ; but now such
a criticism is impossible. It is therefore a necessary
supposition of dogmatic theology that the scriptural
and apostolic utterances were faultlessly and divinely
perfect, not merely as symbols, but as theology, history,
and science ; that it is itself practically like an abstract
science in being delivered from these revolutions and
changes of governing categories which befall sciences
ever confronted and controlled by the experiences
which constitute their subject-matter. Such, then,
is the theoretical immutability of dogmatic theology.
Needless to say, it is an impossible and unattainable
ideal. Two causes at least have at all times resisted this
attempt to petrify the whole body of knowledge by
thus giving divine certainty and finality to one of the
governing members of its organism, i.e. to theology.
First, the theologico-apologetic necessity (already indi
cated) of trying to demonstrate the harmony between
the revealed and the scientifically assured conceptions
of philosophy and history. Secular knowledge moves
on by a process of true development and transformation,
the old ever dying away and dissolving into the new.
Dogmatic revealed theology professes to stand still;
to say, to mean, the same to-day as two thousand years

THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY 217
ago ; to be as exactly and finally true. In all cases, as
Dr. White's induction shows, the first artifice of self-
defence employed by dogmatic theology is to throw
discredit upon those innovations of science which seem
proximately or remotely irreconcilable with the obsolete
scientific conceptions involved in the language and
symbolism of the primitive tradition ; to denounce
them as heretical and blasphemous ; to muster all the
forces of religion and conscience to the task of their
suppression. But, in proportion as this repressive effort
proves impossible, as science marches forward heedless
of anathemas, and as the credit and authority of religion
seem likely to be the only losers in the conflict, the next
self-defensive artifice is that of accommodation and
compromise, of reinterpretations and distinctions be
tween the letter and substance of revelation — all result
ing in an ungracious concession to pressure, whereby,
under cover of mere comment and explanation, the
substantial sense of the "form of sound words'' is
quietly transformed into something different. He would
be a bold theologian who should affirm that such
articles of belief as the Creation, or as Christ's ascent
into Heaven, His descent into Hell, His coming to judge
the living and the dead, and many others, are held
to-day in substantially the same theological sense as
formerly. We may say that what we still hold is, and
therefore always was, their substance or essential value,
purged of non-essential accidents. But these accidents
were once held to be essential sub anathemate ; and
those who questioned their necessity were (as Dr. White
shows abundantly) persecuted and condemned as
blasphemers, as denying integral parts of the divine

218 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
revelation. Theologians find it convenient to forget
these chapters of history, but we cannot afford to
forget them. What guarantee have we that what
theologians impose on us to-day as substantial may
not in like manner be explained away as accidental in
some future generation ? In consequence of this
stealthy process of accommodation, the professedly
immutable dogmatic teaching of theology has been
reluctantly dragged in the wake of general mental pro
gress, always lagging behind far enough to incur the
reproach of obscurantism, yet not so far as to merit the
dubious if not damning praise of absolute immutability,
purchasable only at the sacrifice of all vital connection
with the mind of the age,
The other cause which hinders the attempt to petrify
theology is to be found, not in the theological and
ecclesiastical, but in the spiritual and religious life of
the Church. However perverted from its original use,
Christian theology is, according to its primary intention,
an instrument of the spiritual life ; it offers a construc
tion of that mysterious world to which the spiritual life
has reference, in the light of which construction the soul
can shape its conduct and school its sentiment, profiting
thus by the registered collective experience of the whole
Church, and building, not from the ground, but from
where former generations have left off. That this con
struction has not been excogitated a priori, nor revealed
miraculously at one burst, nor addressed immediately to
the understanding, but has been suggested, bit by bit, by
the instinctive movements and blind gropings of the soul
after its rest and centre, has already been implied. But
the developments of the spiritual and religious life, both

THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY 219
social and individual, require, like those of the mental
life, a continual alteration and transformation of religious
categories. Its thought is, as it were, its shadow, which
grows and moves with its growth and movement ; it is
the index and register of the degree of correspondence
between the soul and its supernatural environment ; and
of that environment it gives but an indirect, more or less
symbolic, presentment, capable of endless modification
and adjustment. It is as though we had to walk back
wards towards the light, and to guide our steps by the
shadows cast in front of us by the objects behind us.
For the exigencies of this ceaselessly developing life
an unalterable theology would be a strait-waistcoat,
a Procrustean bed ; every day it would become less
helpful, and at last hurtful and fatal. The soul that
is alive, and wants to live and grow, must have a con
genial, intelligible idea of the world it would live in,
and will therefore either adapt and interpret the current
theologies to suit its requirements, or else break away
from them altogether and make a home for itself. To
the irrepressible vigour of the spiritual life we owe those
movements of religious revival within the Churches
which have ever been opposed by the theological schools,
and yet, when victorious, have always exercised a modi
fying influence on theological intransigence, even when
the victory has been at the cost of a revolt or schism.
If dogmatic theology cannot afford to quarrel utterly
with the scientists, still less can it afford to split with the
saints, for nine-tenths of its strength are due to the fact
that it can enlist, and has so largely enlisted, conscience
and piety in its cause. Its great power in the past and
present is principally due to its pretence of being at once

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

a revelation and a science, of possessing all that spiritual
authority over conscience which is due to the promptings
of divine grace, as well as all that logical authority over
the intellect which is due to apodictic demonstration. If
it has been unable to maintain its immutability abso
lutely, yet in the effort to do so it always has been, and
will be, detrimental both to intellectual and to religious
progress. It has crucified Christ, and "which of His
prophets has it not persecuted?" and yet always in the
name of God and truth and conscience and religion.
We have thus, in accordance with our proposal at
starting, endeavoured to pass from the merely inductive
conclusion of Dr. White's volumes (namely, from the fact
that dogmatic theology is naturally and always the rival
of science) to some more or less a priori understanding of
the necessity of this hostility ; and we have seen that it
lies not so much in the general idea of theology as in its
specific differentiation as dogmatic, oracular, or revealed.
Hence we may understand, what Dr. White's investiga
tions make so evident, why there is so little to choose
between Catholicism and Protestantism, at least in its
extreme form, so far as hostility to science is concerned ;
and that such difference as exists is just proportional to
the different amount of " revealed theology " accepted by
the two confessions. If the dogmatic fallacy is excluded
by the spirit of the Reformation, yet that spirit has been
very slow to arrive at adequate self-consciousness and
self-utterance on this point. The Reformers took over
with them the greater part of the old theology; their
quarrel was with some of its conclusions rather than
with its fundamental principles and presuppositions.
And, even in its most anti-ecclesiastical developments,

THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY 221
Protestantism has clung fast to the dogmatic fallacy in
retaining the Augustinian conception of scriptural in
errancy in other than purely religious matters.
But it would be an unpardonable exaggeration to lay
the blame of all obscurantism at the door of dogmatic
theology, even though it is responsible for its frequently
religious and fanatical character. The inertia of customary
ways of thinking, speaking, and acting is as much a factor
of social development as is the progressive spirit with
which it is ever at war. A permanent and entire pre
dominance of one or the other would be equally fatal.
It matters little whether societies, institutions, systems,
sciences perish by petrifaction or by disintegration. Every
new discovery, practical or theoretical, is met at first
with a very wholesome public scepticism, and is expected
to struggle for, and prove its right to, existence. Besides
this, it often comes into collision with various vested
interests, and threatens existing monopolies and privi
leges ; and hence it is almost sure to encounter a more
active and unscrupulous opposition than that of mere
inertia. Moreover, some one with Dr. White's skill
might easily fill a couple of volumes with the " warfare
of science with the scientists," for these too have their
tradition, their " authority," their inert resistance to all
innovation, nay, more, their class-interests, their jealousies
and bigotries ; these too, " the priests of science," build
up the sepulchres of those prophets whom their fathers
persecuted. Also it must be allowed that, in the common
conscience, what is customary and comes to us with all
the weight of universal agreement is so nearly synony
mous with what is moral, that the opposition offered to
the innovator is largely sanctified and authorised in the

222 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
name of morality. Still, this is as nothing to the force,
heat, and vehemence with which novelty is opposed, in
the name of faith and religion, as blasphemy, heresy,
atheism — a vehemence due to the belief that certain
philosophical and historical propositions were miracu
lously revealed by God ; a belief which has consecrated
and set free some of the worst passions in some of the
best and holiest of men.
But, whatever advantages (as well as disadvantages)
have accrued to Christianity from the process which so
soon transformed it from a movement inspired by a belief
in an immediate consummation of all things into a
permanent institution and world-religion, the like must
be credited to dogmatic theology as part of the same
process. However great the price paid, it must be
allowed that, but for the said process, Christianity could
not have survived the disappointment of its primitive
hope, or have lived to understand itself better and to
determine its own essence more fully. In the creed
of the Church there survives for us, as gold in the ore,
the spontaneous self-expression of the most primitive,
and yet most vigorous, stage of her spiritual life, clothed
in the now largely obsolete forms and categories of that
day; while in her dogmatic theology, which is pro
fessedly but the further definition and the extension of
that creed, we have the product, not merely of apologetic
and theological ingenuity, but also of the spirit of
Christianity struggling to adjust the forms of the past to
the religious needs of the present. If less legible and
more sparing, the testimony scratched on the intractable
but durable rock is worth more to posterity than the
most elaborate record written in the sand. A patient

THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY 223
pondering and criticism of that testimony may enable
us to discern those elements of our doctrinal system
that have been selected, if not fashioned, purely by the
exigencies of the spiritual life from those shaped by
theological curiosity and other causes, good, bad, and
indifferent. It is then the slow working-out of the dogmatic
fallacy that is revealed to us chapter by chapter in Dr.
White's work. When, in opposition to the wisdom of
the Greeks, the Christian revelation first claimed to be
the "true gnosis," miraculously delivered by way of
oracle and put within the reach of the poor and simple,
to the confusion of the learned and cultured, this gnosis
was hardly considered as a theology in our narrow
restricted sense, but rather as a philosophy in the wider
sense, a comprehensive view of all known truth under
its widest and deepest aspects. As such it was in
clusively a revelation of science and of history, of all
those matters whereof it was avowedly a divine inter
pretation. The fields of sacred and secular gnosis were much
more largely coincident then than now, and gave the
spectacle of one and the same territory under a double
jurisdiction. The conflict was not so much between
dogmatic theology on one side and science on the other
as between sacred knowledge and profane, between the
miraculously and the naturally obtained knowledge of
the same matters. Thus, for the Christian, the Church
became, if not the exclusive, yet the supreme arbiter of
truth in every department. Subordinate to revelation
as to the ultimate criterion, natural methods of investi
gation might have free play, but their conclusions could

224 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
have no weight if opposed by the Word of God. Con
scious of this, no Christian inquirer could enter upon
natural investigations unfettered and with a perfectly
open mind. His faith, his . conscience, bade him bring
to the task certain revealed conclusions, that, ex
hypothesi, would have aided and lightened his labour
and given him an incalculable advantage over the
unbelieving inquirer, but which, in fact, were only so
much dust thrown into his eyes, rendering impartiality
impossible and even criminal. Never were fact and
hypothesis more diametrically opposed.
One unfortunate result of the tension thus created
between the interests of conscience and candour, of faith
and intellectual sincerity, was the gradual identification
of the cause of scientific truth with that of irreligion ;
for, just so far as a philosopher or historian was a
conscientious churchman, he would shrink from lines of
investigation that might lead to heterodoxy, and would
count it a matter of devotion either to torture incon
venient facts into agreement with ecclesiastical tradition,
or else to bury them in a shroud of edifying silence.
Hence the light of profane knowledge, if occasionally
kindled, more or less innocently, by the dutiful and
devout, was kindled more often by the inquisitiveness
of minds less scrupulously religious. Certainly, in all
cases where the glare of truth has been too strong for
orthodox eyes, it has been mainly through the oppo
sition of the heterodox and of the irreligious that the
efforts to extinguish it have failed in the end. Thus
even the religious and orthodox have come to acquiesce
in the very embarrassing admission that, as a fact,
science and religion are mutually hostile, that candour

THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY 225
and freedom of inquiry are dangerous to faith. To
have thus falsified one of the first principles of morality,
which tells us that conscience and truth are inseparable
allies ; to have perverted conscientiousness into a cause
of mental darkness rather than of light, is the deadliest
fruit of the dogmatic fallacy.
Dr. White, then, shows us the process by which the
sciences, practical and speculative, broke away, one after
another, from the control of faith and from the jurisdic
tion of revelation, and asserted their independence under
the control each of its own proper criterion — a process
by which the domain of revelation has been steadily
narrowed down till at last little is left to it beyond the
still disputed territory of theology and ethics, over which
its hold grows weaker as that of science grows stronger.
But in his final chapter (" From the Divine Oracles to
the Higher Criticism ") he consciously or unconsciously
passes to another plane. Science having wrested the
various matters just enumerated from the dominion
of scripture, and of dogma based on scripture, at last
turns its search-light upon the sacred writings themselves,
on the history and causes of their formation and canoni
sation. This plainly is a more radical attack, a criticism
of principles and presuppositions. Yet, here too, the
dogmatic conception of the Scriptures as verbally dictated
by a divine voice has been driven for ever off the field,
and the claims of miraculous inspiration have been
narrowed and altered out of all recognition. Needless
to say that the claims of ecclesiastical infallibility, so far
as they rest on, and are implicated with, those of such a
scriptural inerrancy, must suffer a corresponding and
even a greater enfeeblement. Moreover, the scientific
Q

226 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
history of the current creeds or dogmatic systems, like
that of the sacred records, offers proof conclusive that
they too have not been created in full perfection once and
for all in a remote past, but have grown like rivers from
a confluence of innumerable tributaries deriving often
from insignificant and untraceable sources. They are
not the work of a week of fiats, but of the slow struggling
of the spirit of light with the spirit of darkness in the
heart of man.
Driven thus from one department after another of the
field of knowledge, the last and of course the most vital
claim for which dogmatism holds out is that of ultimate
jurisdiction over reason within the strict limits of theo
logical science. If all other assertions and implications
contained in the divine tradition, written or oral, must
be excluded from the substance and kernel of the in
spired Word as so much protective husk, as accidental
or incidental, as obiter dicta or what not, yet surely our
notions as to the nature of the other world, and as to
the conduct of our life in reference thereto, pertain
directly to religion. If these matters are to be delivered
over to the disputations of philosophers, what will
become of the crowds? What, moreover, will be left
of the once universal sway of religion over the human
intelligence? Here the time-honoured arguments for
the necessity of a divine revelation of some sort are
plausible, and of course owe their plausibility to that
mingling of truth and error whose hybrid issue is
fallacy. Religious truths, it is said, are of two kinds — those
that can, absolutely speaking, be reached by man's wit,
and those that cannot. Of the latter class are such

THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY 227
strict mysteries as the Trinity, the Incarnation, the
Atonement, etc., where neither are there premisses given,
within the range of natural experience, from which such
conclusions could be deduced, nor are the conclusions
themselves capable of exact apprehension and statement
To the former class belong some of the most vital and
fundamental beliefs of religion, such as the existence
of God and the immortality of the soul ; yet so feebly,
rarely, and hesitatingly are these all-important beliefs
reached by the individual reason, that a divine revelation
of them is necessary for the salvation of those multitudes
who have neither ability nor inclination for philosophical
dispute. What is true in this view is the perception of the
utter inadequacy of human philosophy to the practical
ends of religion ; what is false is the idea of fetching
a ready-made philosophy from heaven as a substitute,
or in other words, the implied " intellectualism," the
notion of revelation as a direct instruction of man's
intellect by God. In what sense it is indirectly instruc
tive we have already seen, namely, in offering us ex
periences which the mind must strive, as best it can, to
represent and explain, and in constantly shaping and
correcting such explanatory presentments by further
and fuller experiences.
This last struggle of dogmatism is doomed to the
fate of its predecessors ; theology and ethics as intel
lectual interests must inevitably be free from the direct
control of faith with its practical and religious interests.
The notion of revealed theology will prove as inco
herent and fallacious as that of revealed astronomy,
cosmogony, chemistry, medicine, or any other sort of

228 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
revealed science. For indeed the imaginary compro
mise by which dogmatism resigns the control of every
science but one is daily proving itself impossible. The
scientific system is one, and its parts are too closely
knit together and interdependent to admit of the
severance of one of the principal members, if not the
very head and heart of its organism. In the realm of
science the dogmatic criterion must be " aut Caesar aut
nullus." If Caesar, then our attitude towards the
natural criteria of truth must be one of conditional or
suspensive submission — whence that tendency to a
sceptical or agnostic habit of mind which so often goes
with blind traditionalism, and gives plausibility to the
definition of faith as an act of intellectual suicide or
desperation. Abandoning the idea of revealed theology as in
coherent, we have therefore to inquire as to the true
relation between theology and revelation, that is to say,
between that philosophical construction of the other
world which has been built up from the data of general
experience by the reflection and labour of the under
standing, and which belongs to the unity of the whole
system of our organised knowledge, and that other
construction of the same world which has been more or
less instinctively created out of materials supplied by
popular beliefs, sentiments, traditions, and views in
obedience to the requirements of the religious life, and
which is the spontaneous mental self-embodiment of the
collective religious experience of whole peoples and
communities. Accustomed for centuries to the notion of a theology

THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY 229
that professes to be revealed, and of a revelation which
professes to be theological, it is hard for us to fancy
a relation of comparative independence which never has
obtained and perhaps never can obtain altogether ; for
the intellect has always been curious about God and the
other world, and about problems of ethics ; so that,
amongst the materials from which religious experience
seeks a garment wherein to clothe and communicate
itself, there are usually many theological and ethical
conceptions, and these, in the measure that they are felt
to be apt and congenial, are likely to be credited with
a directly divine origin, or at least adoption. As known
to us, the Christian revelation is largely expressed in
the language of theology ; while, on the other hand,
theology, if truly scientific, must take account of the
phenomena of religion in general and of Christianity
itself, i.e. of a revelation embodying certain individual
and collective religious experiences, which is given in
and with those experiences, and belongs itself to the
category of experience and not to that of statement.
Hence we can only clear the point by some sort of
abstraction from the condition of complication which
actually obtains.
Given a long-continued working of the religious spirit
under favourable conditions in some people or society,
the result will necessarily be the growth and develop
ment of a certain system of conduct and observances
by which man's life in reference to the world beyond is
found experimentally to be fostered and extended. Ex
planatory of such observances, there will arise a pub
licly accepted body of beliefs and dogmas representa
tive, at least figuratively, of the nature of that world

t

230 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
beyond, whose growth and modification will, if disturb
ing influences are left out of account, be determined
pari passu by that of practical religion.
But, intellectualism and theological curiosity apart —
which they never wholly are — the truth of these reve
lations or explanatory beliefs is best described as
" prophetic '' in relation to historic and philosophic facts
and realities. No prophet feels or would allow that his
utterances are merely poetical or allegorical ; he feels
that they are not less but more truly representative of
reality, or representative of a truer and deeper reality,
than the prose language of historical narrative or philo
sophical affirmation. Yet he feels that the said reality
is transcendent with respect to clear thought and per-
eption, that it looms through clouds, is revealed piece
meal by glimpses and vague shadowings ; and hence
that the fact-value of his enigmatic utterances is not
closely determinable and may be subject to the cor
rection of other criteria without any prejudice to the
supremacy of faith over reason. Philosophic or scientific
truth is always more or less abstract and hypothetical,
and owes its definitiveness and certainty to this fact.
Under such abstraction much may be true which in the
concrete is false, and yet is incapable of scientific dis
proof. Hence the justice of the claims of intuition, of
common sense, and of practical experience against many
a scientific theorem. Our religious experience, being the
sense of the dynamic relationship obtaining between our
spirit and the Universal Spirit, affords us a practical
criterion in virtue of which we can set aside any theory
inconsistent with such experience. As merely a human
explanation of our supernatural religious experiences,

THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY 231
revelation has no standing against science or even against
theology, so far as theology is a science ; it is simply
the artless explanation of a child as against that of an
instructed mind. But the child's story, because artless,
has another value as an unsophisticated statement and
direct product of experience; and in this sense too
revelation and prophetic utterance are worth more than
theology or science, because they are simply the natural
shadow of experience, of religious fact. Hence, too,
traditional belief, so far as it is the product of the
collective and continuous experience of the community
and has not been sophisticated by theology, has that
critical superiority over science which the concrete has
over the abstract ; it is critically valuable, not as an
explanation, but as embodying or implying the phe
nomenon to be explained. Its artless constructions of
history and science and philosophy may crumble under
the touch of criticism ; but this latter will be condemned
unless its reconstructions find room for all that revelation
strove to shelter.
It is impossible within these limits to give perfect
precision to this notion of prophetic truth whose object,
unlike that of science or history, is the ideal rather than
the actual ; the future, or else the eternal, rather than
the past or present ; what ought to be and is in process
of becoming, rather than what is. The character of
what, by way of contrast, we may call fact-truth is
coherence or consistence with that systematic recon
struction of the world which is slowly built up by the
labour of the understanding. Though such coherence is
no proof of truth, yet any historical or scientific assertion
which is out of joint with the rest of our systematised

232 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
knowledge must be rejected, or else the whole system
must be modified to make room for it. Prophetic truths,
as incapable of exact determination, cannot be thus
systematised. Misinterpreted as literal statements of
fact, they are often inconsistent with one another and
with the world of fact-truths.
Prophecy has a twofold utterance. It expresses itself
in deliberately sought-out symbolism, observance, ritual,
parable, and fiction, or else in a more or less idealised
reading of history and nature. The moral and religious
sense of man is determined by his fundamental unity
with the source and end of his being and of all being, of
what ought to be and is in process of becoming, as well
as of what is. It is ever seeking to understand and
interpret itself, and to find that ideal or object in which
its satisfaction will be complete. In its reading of history
and nature it is ever keen and impatient to see its own
desire realised ; to interpret the kingdom of God as
near ; to believe that what, according to its limited out
look, ought to be, already is ; that what ought to have
been, actually was ; to narrow up prematurely to a
sudden apex the slowly convergent lines of God's
providence stretching out beyond all range of our
vision ; and to find the fulness of His scheme in the
brief pages of our recorded history. Hence it is ever at
war with common sense and with fact as a bias, a
principle of falsification. Yet each is right in its own
order of truth ; each wrong in its trespass on the other's
territory ; both right only when they listen to and learn
from each other, and strain after that perfect accord
which belongs to their ideal perfection. Eventually
prophecy justifies and gains through the resistance

THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY 233
offered by common sense to its impatience of fact, even
as common sense comes at last to justify the instinct,
though not the critical judgment of prophecy. Still, at
any given stage, the prophetic reading of history is truer
to the deeper and more distant realities than is the
common-sense reading ; it is more like what ought to be
and what will be, than what is ; more like what there
fore is, in the deepest stratum of reality, than what is,
on the surface.
Plainly the attitude of prophecy towards historic and
scientific truth can never be so indifferent as that of
poesy and art. Religion and morality claim the
supreme government of man's life, i.e. they imply that
the ultimate purpose and reality of life are religious.
To see God working in history and in nature, not
merely as power and wisdom, but principally as good
ness and love, is an exigency of religion. Prophecy,
unlike art, is not merely contemplative, but is primarily
practical and directive of that life which man lives in
history and in nature, and with reference to God as
working in both one and the other. Poetry has no such
function. For the poet the aesthetic value of the
Gospels is independent of their prose-truth; for the
prophet this prose-truth is the very subject-matter
which is transfused and perhaps transfigured by the
glow of his spirit.
Considered as true with the truth of prophecy, which,
as utterances of the prophetic spirit, is all that they can
claim, the dogmas of revelation would rarely, if ever,
come into dialectical conflict with one another or with
science and history, and, as time went on, would in
sensibly modify their form of expression so as to retain

234 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
their symbolic value unaltered. Their exponents would
rightly refuse to be tied to exact statements of their
speculative value, insisting rather on their pragmatical,
provisional, and approximative truth, so far as the
" fact-world " is concerned, and on the necessarily
undefinable nature of the " ought-world " and its
eternal realities. The development of such a body of
dogmas or mysteries would not be dialectical, like that
of abstract sciences, nor quasi-organic, like that of
natural sciences, but analogous to that of ecclesiastical
ritual and observance, which preserves its substantial
unity of signification in spite of local variations and a
continual process of obsolescence and accretion ; and,
like ritual, it would call for and be subject to the unify
ing control of the Church. As there is a continuous
development of the Christian life and spirit in the
Christian people, so there would be a unity and con
tinuity in the varying symbolism of successive ages by
which that life and spirit is interpreted — such a unity as
might belong to an educated man's conceptions and
explanations of his own nature and character at the
different decades of his life. The unifying principle is
not any " fundamental theologoumenon," but that spirit
of Christianity which is characterised by what God is,
and man is, and Christ is, not by our notions of what
they are. Our notions of what they are, are embodied
in dogmas and prophetic mysteries ; and these are
fundamental in the sense that certain rites (baptism,
or the breaking of bread) are fundamental, binding
ages and nations together, making a permanent core
round which is clustered a body of variable usages,
and serving as an outward and effectual sign of an

THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY 235
all-pervading unity of the inward spirit. To demand,
as some liberals do, an up-to-date restatement of dogmas
is really to ignore their prophetic character and to
interpret them scientifically as dogmatic theology does.
But, both for good and evil, theological curiosity (as
well as other obstructive influences) hinders the course
of true religion from running so smoothly. The
exponents of religion are early tempted to claim
dominion over all knowledge in consequence of their
close relation with the deity, and to present revelation
as a miraculous gnosis. Moreover, in assuming current
theological notions as congenial vehicles of self-
expression, the spirit is too readily supposed to seal
them with a theological finality and certainty. Finally,
as soon as revelation is credited with scientific, instead of
prophetic truth, it is at once petrified and begins, as far
as possible, to resist all adaptation to the growth of the
spirit, and thereby even to retard its growth by refusing
it room to expand, and forbidding it to seek room else
where. Turning now to theology as such, we must remember
that merely intellectual curiosity about the gods and
about another world was bound to be wakened early in
history by the facts of religion, as well as by the facts of
nature, whose governing forces were conceived human-
wise and were dealt with accordingly. In the endeavour
to answer these childish questionings we have the first
germs of theological science. But, in so far as it is a
science, theology is but one department of that syste-
matising and unifying of all knowledge by which the
understanding turns universal experience to account and
makes from it an instrument whereby we can pass from

236 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
the near to the distant, from the present to the past and
the future, and thus adapt our action to an indefinitely
wider view of the world than else were possible. If, " in
the intention of nature " (to use a convenient phrase), the
purpose of this systematising is practical and directed to
a greater fulness and range of life, yet, "in the intention of
the individual," the effort is more often stimulated by the
interest and pleasure naturally attached to speculation ;
and men of thought seek to perfect and integrate the
system without any very explicit reference to its practical
utility in the cause of general progress. Obviously, so
important a section of human experience (individual,
social, and racial) as is religion must find its place and
connection in this synthesis ; while the whole of experi
ence (in which this section is included) must raise ques
tions as to the ultimate what, whence, and whither of
that totality which are more commonly answered by
means of theological conceptions. So far, therefore, as
the understanding reflects on the data of religious experi
ence (that is, on the revelation of God as given in the
general religious movement in the world), and upon the
ultimate problems raised by the totality of all sorts of
experience, and then strives to frame a theory of these
matters harmonious with the rest of its systematised
knowledge, it gives us a theology, Needless to say that
like every other science, its tendency is to twist and warp
experience by omissions and rearrangements, and even
by fictitious additions, into agreement with the schemes,
hypotheses, and categories of its predilection ; whereas
experience always strains against the sides of these
bottles, stretches, and at last bursts them.
The same thing happens, though more slowly, to the

THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY 237
totality of our systematised knowledge, which makes for
unity in its entire complexus as well as in each of its
parts. A revolution in any one such part involves a
readjustment of the whole, either as cause or as effect,
or as both. Hence the science of theology will be always
liable to revolutions according as the accumulation of its
own proper sort of experience calls for restatement of its
theories and conceptions, and also owing to the progress
of the whole complexus of knowledge whereof it is a part
or member. Nor will mere patchings and lettings-out
suffice; there must be transformations, the dying of form
into form — the new containing the old virtually and
effectually ; explaining as much and far more, but alto
gether differently, and not merely by an extension of the
same principle of explanation. And, side by side with
this quasi-organic development of theology, we ought,
in an ideal state of things to which we may ever
approximate, to find a living and growing creed or body
of dogmas and mysteries reflecting and embodying the
spiritual growth and development of the community ;
one, not with the coherence of a logical system and
according to the letter-value of its statements and articles,
but with the coherence of divers manifestations of one
and the same spirit ; a living flexible creed that repre
sents the present spiritual needs of the average, the past
needs of the more progresive, the future needs of the
less progressive members of the Church.
This " revelation," viewed rather as an immediate and
natural reflex of experience, nearly equivalent to experi
ence itself, than as (what it also is) a popular and practical
explanation of that experience, supplies theological re
flection with new subject-matter. Theology, on the other

238 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
hand, more even than any other department of general
knowledge, furnishes the religious spirit with new living
categories for its self-expression in harmony with the
general thought of the time. To look for a perfect
adequation between two such totally different orders
of truth — the prophetic truth of revelation, the scientific
truth of theology — is the root-error of theologism.
Neither can be independent of the other without pay
ing the penalty of sterility. A revelation that ignores
the check of theology, that speaks in a dead language,
that uses an obsolete and unintelligible thought-system ;
a theology that ignores the check of revelation, the con
tinual progressive self-manifestation of God in the re
ligious life of humanity, and seeks Him only in the sub
human — both these are alike fruitless. Neither, however,
has any right to trespass on the other's territory, or to
hamper its free development on its own lines and accord
ing to its own principles. This is what happens whenever
revelation asserts itself to be a divine theology and offers
its prophetic enigmas as scientific truth, or when theology
en revanche would force revelation to keep to the lines,
methods, and pace of theological development, thus
equivalently putting fetters on that religious experience
which is its own subject-matter, and cutting off its own
food-supply. Thus, however intellectually and theologi
cally untenable, there might be more religious truth,
and therefore ultimately more intellectual truth, a fuller,
richer, and better embodiment of the divine, in a poly
theistic pantheon of personified excellences than in a
sterile and possibly non-moral monotheism. Intellectual
unification might be purchased at too great a sacrifice of
ethico-religious values. Idolatry or heresy, as a merely

THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY 239
theological mistake, is harmless compared with the moral
idolatry of the heart. What is intellectually a supersti
tion may not be so ethically or religiously ; many a prayer
or sacrifice to the true God may be more unworthy
and superstitious than those offered to idols. Hence a
premature intellectualising or theologising of religious
beliefs may be eventually detrimental to theology no less
than to religion.
If, therefore, this delimitation of territories, this de
termination of the true relations of dependence and
independence, between revelation and theology, should
obtain clearer recognition as time goes on, it will not be
due to religion alone, which cares nothing for philosophical
interests, but seeks itself everywhere and in all things ;
nor will it be due merely to philosophical reflection,
which cares as little for the interests of religion, and has
no patience with revelation and prophetic enigmas. It
will be due to the shock and clash of their interests in
the soul of man ; it will be the work of philosophical
reflection originated and stimulated by the religious
need. Philosophy will not endure the pretensions of
dogmatic theology ; religion will not endure the negation ,
of that world-wide experience to whichdogmatic theology '>
seeks to give expression.
But at present dogmatic theology holds, as for
centuries it has held, the field ; it is as old as the
"catholicising" of Christianity; it is an important
element of that process, and shares, among its other
inevitable limitations, its tendency to make law and
rule not merely an aid to, but a substitute for, the
creative spirit of light and love. As given us in the
creeds, and in their orthodox theological extensions,

240 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
the Christian revelation retains only a few relics of its
original prophetic form of expression, and still fewer
traces of influence from the subsequent workings of the
prophetic spirit in the Church. Its forms and phrases
are partly scriptural, prophetic, evangelical, but mainly
theological. Still more, they are the forms of a theology
belonging to a bygone and all but obsolete thought-
system. If then the sacredness which they possess as vehicles
of prophetic truth, as illustrative or protective of re
vealed mysteries, be transferred to their theological
values and implications ; if these also are imposed upon
our faith, the result must be fatal both to faith and to
theology. Both are tied to the same corpse.
Let us then remember that the discrediting of dog
matic theology is not the discrediting of revelation
or of theology ; it is not even their divorce a vinculo,
but simply the establishment of a truer and better rela
tionship between them. The criticism of the creed, in
the light of science in general or of theology in
particular, cannot touch that religious value which,
quite independently of the external history of its
origin, it has been proved to possess as an instrument
of the spiritual life of the Churches, cannot assail its
truth as a prophetic utterance (at least by adoption) of
the spirit of Christ and of the mysteries of the kingdom
of God. It can and must destroy its illegitimate claim
to be a body of premisses for exact theological argu
mentation, i.e. a source of schism and hatred among
men rather than of unity and love. Not only will the
Churches still retain all their functions as guardians of
prophetic or revealed truth, and of a flexible doctrinal

THE RIGHTS AND LIMITS OF THEOLOGY 241
unity analogous to the unity of rites and observances,
but liberated from all the entanglements of an indefen
sible claim to scientific inerrancy — a claim as obsolete as
that to temporal or coercive jurisdiction — will recover
their sorely compromised dignity and credit. Moreover,
their merely theological divisions, the bitterest fruit of
the dogmatic fallacy, will cease to be regarded as differ
ences of faith when the prophetic nature of dogmatic
truth is more intelligently recognised. After all, their
doctrinal rulings have ever been avowedly in the name
of prophecy, not of theology ; as imposed by the spirit,
not by theological reasonings. The spiritual authority
of the traditional creed, as of the product and expres
sion of the collective religious experience of the com
munity, will ever be needed to waken, foster, and educate
the Christian spirit in the individual.

CHAPTER IX
PROPHETIC HISTORY
THIS essay appeared in the New York Review of
October-November, 1905, under the title, " The
Dogmatic Reading of History." It repudiates certain
misinterpretations of Lex Orandi, sufficiently repudiated,
I should have thought, in the Preface to that work.
The present title seems to me clearer, and indicates its
bearing on the preceding chapter.
Christianity is nothing if not an interpretation of life
and history. To suppose that the commentary could be
indifferent to the very existence of the text is a patent
absurdity ; though to suppose that it is not always
borne out by the text is certainly permissible.

The Christian tradition incorporates a certain reading
or construction of history with which modern historical
criticism finds itself frequently in conflict. To mitigate
this conflict some apologists insist plausibly on the
comparative indifference of religion to history as such ;
they point out, for example, that as far as the religious
significance is concerned it matters nothing whether
Christ's ascent into Heaven be taken as a fact or as
a prophetic vision. The same may be said of his
242

PROPHETIC HISTORY 243
descent into Hell, of his session at the Father's right
hand, of His re-descent to judgment ; and if we ask :
" Why not, therefore, of His resurrection, of His miracu
lous birth ? " their principle provides no answer.
By this method of defence the sceptic is pardonably
reminded of that allegorising of popular beliefs or
myths which marked the passing of the Homeric faith,
or he thinks of the Philonian volatilising of the Old
Testament folk-lore. He will agree with the orthodox
opponents of the same system that Christianity so inter
preted may still have great practical worth as a philo
sophy in symbol, as a guide to life, as an expression of
religious, ethical, and aesthetic ideals, but that it is no
longer " historical Christianity."
The orthodox, following the lines of Augustine, and
especially of his exegesis of the fourth Gospel, admit
(perhaps too readily) that it is the spirit, the religious
and moral value, of the Gospel history which quickens ;
that the flesh, the letter, the history-value, profits
nothing; but that nevertheless the flesh is the organ
and vehicle and pledge of the spirit ; that whatever
" might have been " in the abstract, yet in the concrete
God has chosen to speak to us by the symbolism of
deeds and facts rather than by that of visions and
parables. Whence the inevitable conclusion that cer
tain matters of fact and history, as such, belong directly
to the very substance of the Christian revelation and
are to be believed with divine faith, and if need be in
the teeth of criticism, part of whose territory is thus
brought under the distinct, and possibly conflicting,
jurisdictions of faith and science. In the event of con
flict, faith claims precedence; and this claim is vindi-

244 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
cated either on " intellectualist " lines, by proving that
the testimony of an omniscient and absolutely veracious
witness vouches for the facts in question; or on moral
lines, by showing that they are inextricably bound
up with the sovereign interest of our moral and
spiritual life, as part and parcel of the religion by which
we live.
Between the new apologists who would save Chris
tianity from the conflict with criticism at the risk of
raising it up into the clouds, and those who would treat
sacred tradition somewhat profanely as instruments of
detailed historical criticism ; or, in other words, between
those who deny and those who affirm that we can settle
historical particulars through divine faith, independently
of natural methods, there is, I venture to suggest, a
plausible via media which ought to be reckoned with.
Although we may have no right to look for a precise,
point for point agreement between (what I may call)
the " prophetic " reading or construction of history, and
the scientific reading of the same ; although we may
not at once use separate points of sacred tradition as so
many historical arguments ; yet the truth of Christianity
requires that in its entirety the " dogmatic " reading of
history should be true to the scientific, in much the
same way that the artistic idealisation of an episode, its
dramatic or poetic treatment, should be substantially
true to fact.
In brief elucidation of this position let me say that
by the "scientific reading of history" I mean that
determination of the bare order and connection of
events in time and place which is prior to all discussion
of their inward meaning and connection, and which for

PROPHETIC HISTORY 245
the historian1 is an end in itself, an independent interest,
prosecuted according to the rules of evidence. In " the
'prophetic' reading of history" the arrangement of
events is not sought for its own sake, nor according to
the principles of scientific history.
That matters of fact are often ascertained otherwise
than according to such principles cannot well be denied.
Without recourse to the rare and perhaps abnormal
phenomena of clairvoyance ; or building too much on
the apparent divinations of animal instinct ; we can
point to a faculty of perfectly natural divination in
man, a sagacity equivalent to intuition, which enables
him, as it were a priori and independently of all
historico-critical investigation, to determine, with vary
ing measures of inerrancy, matters of fact beyond the
range of his direct experience. Nor does it affect my
contention to admit that this "feeling" of the truth
may be at root an unconscious complex inference from
an infinity of unformulated premisses. It is enough
that it evades all possibility of critical analysis and
justification. Assuming that the Divine Will is the root and the
immanent cause of the whole universe and of the pro
cess of human history, a process by which the Ideal,
1 I am conscious here of using the word "historian" somewhat im
properly for one whose science is really subordinate to history, for one
who collects the materials out of which historical constructions are to
be built and by which they must be criticised and checked. His search
requires, no doubt, a philosophy of evidence and therefore of human
nature, and is not independent of presuppositions. Nor is the positivist
ideal of "objectivity" coherent. Yet the aim of the historical critic is
not construction, but the criticism of constructions whether prospective or
finished. He tells the historian proper what materials are sound, what
suspicious or worthless.

246 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
" that which ought to be," is endeavouring gradually to
realise itself, it follows that a perfectly sympathetic
understanding of " that which ought to be " applied to
an adequate information as to existing facts and con
ditions would serve as a principle of historical divina
tion as to the past and the future ; and that the said
divination becomes fallible just in the measure that
sympathy with the Divine Will (the Ought-Judgment)
or information as to existing conditions (the Fact-
Judgment) is defective. Every Ought-Judgment is
of course relative to certain hypothetical facts and
conditions, whose existence and reality is the object
of the Fact- Judgment.
From the strictly historico-critical standpoint the
inference from the Ideal to the Actual ; from what
ought to have happened, to what did happen ; is as
irrelevant as any other sort of divination or prophecy.
Yet perhaps no other form of divination has had more
to do with the reconstruction of the past in pre-critical
times. In the realm of hagiography its licence has
been almost unfettered ; and there accordingly its
methods are best studied. Thus we have a priori bio
graphies of the Virgin, of St. Joseph, or St. Anne, etc.,
written in all good faith, with no conscious mendacity —
though doubtless with no adequate sense of the require
ments of truth. Starting with certain fixed dogmatic
assumptions and with certain unquestioned devout
sentiments, the writer arranges and supplements the
loose conflicting traditions he finds to hand in accord
ance with what his religion and his conscience tell him
ought to have happened.
The actual worthlessness of such legends does not

PROPHETIC HISTORY 247
affect the contention that, were the Ought-Judgments
and the Fact-Judgments correct, the inferences from
them would be valid ; and that it is only because such
correctness is never attainable, that a priori, or prophetic,
history can never yield certainty in matters of detail,
but must always be subject to historical criticism. The
cogency of the "potuit; decuit ; ergo fecit" argument
(God could ; God ought ; and therefore God did) is
undeniable — if only the premisses be verified.
When we turn to that religious reading of history which
is incorporated in the Christian Tradition, it must be
observed in the first place that the errors and deficiencies
of the prophetic spirit in the individual are in a great
measure eliminated in a divination determined by, and
proceeding from, the collective spirit of the entire
religious community ; and that this latter possesses all
the authority of collective over individual experience.
Nor is it only the Ought-Judgment but also the Fact-
Judgment that is thus raised in value. Let us call this
more or less authoritative divination the "dogmatic"
reading of history, to distinguish it from that of the
private individual. With a very important difference,
its relation to the critical reading of history is analogous
to that of an artistic or dramatic rendering of some
verifiable episode. We should not go to Shakespeare to
determine some disputed point of history relating to the
reign of John or of Richard III or of Henry VIII. Yet
we recognise these plays as avowed idealisations, in the
dramatic interest, of presupposed matters of fact ; and
this, with no certain internal principles of distinction
between the facts and the idealisation by which they are
transfused. These facts are told us not strictly as they

248 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
did happen, but rather as they ought to have happened
had the dramatist been guiding history solely in the
interest of drama. We recognise that interest as a
principle of bias, of historical falsification, in the cause
of greater dramatic truth. We know that correspondence
with the bare order and external connection of events
in time and place is quite a secondary, subordinate end ;
that the dramatic and the historic interests are different
and at times hostile ; that it is for the historian alone,
by means of extrinsic criteria, to draw the line between
the matter idealised and the idealisation. The result
therefore is a substantial, or in globo, correspondence
which renders all inference from dramatic to historical
particulars formally invalid, but allows us to speak
rightly of these plays as historical.
But whereas the poet, painter, or dramatist knows
very well that history is not guided primarily in the
artistic interest, and that he has no right whatever
to attach any historical value to the idealisation postu
lated by his art, or to argue from the aesthetic " ought "
to the historical fact, the man of religious faith and hope
rightly believes that the process of events is shaped
ultimately in the interests of morality and religion, and
that "what ought to be", so far as it is judged rightly, is
identical with what is, has been, or will be. His un
certainty is as to the purity of his ideals and his
acquaintance with the existing facts ; not as to the
general principle. If his interpretation is wrong he feels
that it is saved in, and transcended by, the truth, as far
as its religious value is concerned ; an assurance which
the dramatist in analogous circumstances has no busi
ness to feel. Hence his comparative recklessness, his

PROPHETIC HISTORY 249
sense of being under rather than over the religious
truth of the matter ; his too easy indifference to the
rights of history. The motive of the " prophetic "
idealisation of history is, of course, religious and not
artistic ; it is the effect of hope ; of the wish to
believe ; of a too impatient desire to see God's Will
already done on earth as it is in heaven ; to trace His
presence and operation everywhere ; to give a premature
completeness to those designs which are spread out over
the immensities of time and place, far beyond the com
pass of our narrow experience.
If, in the imperative interests of truth and therefore
eventually of religion itself, this dogmatic reading of
history needs to be continually opposed and corrected
by historical criticism, yet on the other hand the mere
sequence and external connection of events is barren of
all fruit for human life without such a key to their inward
truth and meaning as it is the office of religion to
furnish ; so that the " prophetic " and the critical read
ings of history are needed to check and complete one
another, each in its own order of truth.
For if superfluous and largely ineffectual as a guide
to the external connection of events, the " prophetic "
reading of history reaches a deeper order of truth, not
merely in spite of, but because of, and through, its
partial infidelity to bare fact, just as drama so often
does. By his infidelities to fact the poet or dramatist
gets at the secret heart of life, at the immanent spirit
or will Which seeks to objectify itself in the histories of
men and peoples ; and yet never finds adequate utter
ance therein. To seize the idea imperfectly uttered in
facts and to give it more adequate utterance is the work

250 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
of the artist. To be true to the idea he must be untrue
to the facts. For the knowledge of " man," as distinct
from knowledge "about men," Schopenhauer very
rightly commends us to poetry rather than to history ;
to the dramatic rather than to the critical historian.1
Owing to the narrowness of even our widest critical
outlook and to the partial character of even the fullest
evidence attainable, the true inward meaning and import
of history may at any given moment be not only
obscured from us, but perverted altogether, very much
as may the sense of a sentence prior to its completion ;
or as the beauty of a sculptured figure arrested at some
grotesque stage of its fashioning. In such case when
the bias of Faith and Hope falsifies facts in order to
make them a truer vehicle and expression of their
inward meaning, it proceeds by a method directly
inverse to that of the critic ; and yet not without a
justification analogous to that of artistic bias. Apolo
getic zeal, of the old-fashioned discursive sort, delighted
in childishly one-sided arrangements of evidence from
Nature in proof of the Goodness and Wisdom of God.
However false to external facts, this idealisation was
truer to the deeper realities than perhaps a more critical
presentment of the available evidence would have been.
" Good " people have always delighted in moral rather
than in veracious readings of history ; in moral tales
of virtue steadily rewarded and vice ever put to con
fusion. They have striven at all times to interpret
history in all its details as evidence of a moral govern
ment, and have tried to anticipate the Day of Judg
ment ; to construct systems of Divine Justice out of
1 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstcllung. Drittes Buch, § 51.

PROPHETIC HISTORY 251
the chaos of difficulties and perplexities offered by the
spectacle of human life.
As fact-truth all such results may be ludicrously
inadequate ; as ought-truth or ideal-truth they may be,
and mostly have been, far truer than an exact statement
of available fact-truth could have been.
And so of what I called the " prophetic " reading of
history incorporated in the Christian Tradition — the
idealisation of facts effected by specifically Christian
faith and hope in the collective mind of the communion
of the faithful. As fact-truth, it is necessarily defective
in detail in the interests of ought-truth, and it is for
criticism gradually to determine the limits between the
idealised matter and its idealisation. There have been
and there may yet be many capitulations to criticism
on the part of theology ; and yet the theologian will
be justified in holding to the substantial fact-truth of
the " prophetic " reading of history. Between such
beliefs as that in the existence and crucifixion of Christ
on the one hand, and that in his session at the Father's
right hand on the other, there are some whose exact
degree of fact-truth may be matter of long and bitter
dispute ; but we can rest assured that their religious
truth is proof against all assaults, and that they are
organically one with a creed whose incorporated reading
of history is substantially true to the facts of time as
well as to eternal realities. Is there not after all some
danger in the abstract or methodic articulation of the
creed ; in treating each several, or rather severed, mem
ber of the organism as an independent object of faith,
instead of finding that object in the whole presentment
of God and man and Christ, and their relations as set

252 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS 
forth mystically, and therefore with some avowed
degree of inexactness in the entire complexus of
beliefs? And if it seems that we must determine
certain fact-truths to be necessary elements of the his
torical core or substance of the Creed, let us dis
tinguish carefully between "the substance of Christi
anity" — and "the substance of some particular theo
logian's statement of Christianity" — for the two are
by no means coincident. A particular theological con
struction may be ruined by a negation which leaves
God on his throne unmoved : nor did the stars fall with
the Ptolemaic system. In conclusion, the view here
put forward, if not quite a truism, cannot claim to be
new in substance or otherwise than in mode or em
phasis ; for we are already implicity committed to the
principles on which it rests. In dealing with the fact-
value of the Messianic predictions, in pointing out their
subsequent historical verification, we have always been
content with a substantial, or in globo correspondence
between the prophecy and its fulfilment ; we have
allowed for the idealisation of the prophetic spirit ; we
have admitted the right of historical criticism to deter
mine the precise fact-value of those utterances ; we
have never dared to assert a point for point agreement
between the enigmatic vision and the subsequent events.
When we consider that the authority of the Creed is,
on our own confession, that of a revelation, of a
prophetic reading of history, shaped by a Christian
sense of "what ought to be," and is not that of historico-
critical principles, it is plainly indifferent whether the
prophetic history relates to the past or to the future —
to the story of the Creation, or to the story of the final

PROPHETIC HISTORY 253
consummation — as far as its fact-value and interpreta
tion are concerned.
Still it will always be for the Church herself to deter
mine what is or is not of the substance of her " dogmatic "
reading of history. Belief in herself as an historical
religion implies her assurance that there are parts of
her traditional history against which criticism will, as a
fact, never prevail. Yet this assurance is grounded in
faith, not in historical criticism. Were she, for the
time, worsted by the latter on its own ground and with
its own weapons, yet she could not yield without
suicide, but must wait for criticism to correct itself. A
complete indifference to and independence of all
abstractly conceivable results of criticism is impossible
on the part of a religion that claims to be historical.

CHAPTER X
THE CORPORATE MIND
THIS essay appeared in the New York Review, of
August-September, 1905, under the title, Con
sensus Fidelium. Its bearing on the general position
maintained in this volume is sufficiently obvious to need
no further elucidation. To make the collective mind of
the Christian community the supreme rule of Christian
faith would be to sanction infinite superstition and folly,
if we made no distinction between the community and
the crowd, the people and the populace. This point
has been dwelt on also in the second chapter.
******
Father Delehaye, S.J., the Bollandist, has lately given
us, within the compass of 264 pages, a work of far
deeper significance than appears at first sight.1 The
days of that specialism that spreads itself over the
boundless wilderness of detail and loses all interest in
the whole are fortunately gone by. Investigation and
experiment are pursued only for the sake of induction.
Else they are held to be dilettante idlings, as aimless as
the busy hoardings of a miser. Here at last, in these
1 Les Legendes Hagiographiques, par Hippolyte Delehaye, s.j. Bureau
des Bollandistes, Bruxelles, 1905. 254

THE CORPORATE MIND 255
pages, we cull the ripe fruit of the protracted collective
labours of the learned compilers of the Acta Sanctorum,
and are presented with inductions bearing directly
indeed on hagiography, but indirectly on history in
general, on theology, on philosophy.
It is with one of these indirect but more deeply and
widely important bearings of the subject that I purpose
to deal ; namely, with the question, which will be forced
on every reflective reader of the book, as to the trust
worthiness of general or popular tradition as an instru
ment of education, as a witness and guardian of truth.
In defence of the social and ecclesiastical, as opposed to
the individualistic, idea of Christianity we rightly appeal
to the analogy of general education and lay stress on
the absolute insufficiency of the separate mind, and
on its dependence on " authority," on the collected and
communised experience of past generations, as preserved
for it in the inherited language, opinions, beliefs, tradi
tions, customs of the society into which it is born. But
when we turn to M. G. Le Bon's book — Psychologie des
Foules — which Father Delehaye quotes more than once,
and of which his own is an elaborate and eloquent
illustration, it might seem that this apologetic weapon
bends in our hand. For the analogy, to have any value,
must apply to tradition as tradition, and not as super
natural. But if the influence of popular tradition is
rather a necessity than an advantage; if it is more often
for evil than for good, for darkness than for light, there
might seem to be a good case for individualism.
The "Crowd -psychology" of M. Le Bon deals
primarily with the mob, the multitude in assembly ; but
its strictures are largely applicable to such a " crowd "

256 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
as Father Delehaye has in eye, — the crowd that weaves
the legends of saints and heroes ; that shapes the purely
receptive mind of the uneducated, unreflecting units of
which it is composed.
Now the " mentality " of the crowd is, we are shown,
of a deplorably inferior character to that of its units.
It is not that of the lowest of them, still less of the
highest ; nor that of the majority ; nor that of the
average ; but something quite different, if not contrary,
in kind. It is not a resultant or combination of
their conscious thoughts and opinions, of their ordi
nary moods, sentiments and purposes, but something
as different from that as a man's hypnotic self is from
his normal self. In moments of very great abstrac
tion our action is often controlled by long-buried and
forgotten habits ; as, with the very aged, the past self
displaces the present in consciousness. So, the swarm
ing, buzzing, gossiping crowd hypnotises itself; indivi
dual differences of normal mentality are put to sleep,
and what surges up uniformly into the consciousness of
all and binds them into one, is really the buried men
tality of a past stage of civilisation, something relatively
childish, barbarous, savage.
And perhaps the secret of this transformation is to be
found in that act by which, sometimes quite uncon
sciously, we merge ourselves into a crowd and suffer
ourselves to be engulfed and swept along by it ; an act
of faith in the faith of others, whose faith again is one
of the same kind ; a resignation of our responsibility and
thereby of our personality and morality. For it is not
numbers that make the crowd. The crowd may exist
in essence where but two or three are gathered together ;

THE CORPORATE MIND 257
or even where they are but morally united in their local
dispersion. Let each singly hold the rest responsible in
any matter, and the result is a group in which no one is
responsible — an impersonal non-moral agency, a collec
tive mind and feeling, subject to no controlling will, or
sense of responsibility.
Hence, the entirely impersonal character of the crowd,
or of the individual, while under its influence ; as im
personal as a pack of wolves, or a flock of sheep. Its
action may be heroic or criminal, viewed externally ;
but inwardly, it is neither moral nor immoral ; for its
collective will is a fiction; its individual wills are
paralysed. Responsibility may rest with the dema
gogue who understands it and " plays " it as the angler
plays and fools the fish ; but, as leader, he is not of,
but outside the crowd. The crowd is as non-moral as a
dreamer. Hence, too, its unthinking mechanical re
sponsiveness to forcible " suggestion " ; the subjection
of its judgment to the force of bare, unsupported, and
especially of assiduously reiterated, affirmation ; to the
tyranny of " advertisement " in every form. Gregarious,
imitative as a flock of sheep, it is the prey of panics,
moods, fashions, fancies of which no one of its members
could furnish a rational account ; all leap at the same
spot, yet none knows why ; the faith of each is in the
faith of all the rest. The poverty of its mind is
notorious. Images reign supreme. Principles and
ideas in the strict sense it has none ; only their empty
husks, the now discarded formulas, phrases, catchwords
in which they once lived. Like all narrow minds the
crowd-mind is intolerant, extreme, fanatical, impatient
of many-sided, well-balanced judgments. Like a child,

258 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
the crowd confounds facts and fancies, subjective and
objective, in all simplicity. Uniformly mendacious in a
negative, non-moral sense, its testimony as a witness is
immeasurably worse than worthless ; for it can neither
see right, nor say right.
But there are crowds and crowds. And though the
relative distance of the crowd to the rear of the sane in
telligence of any place or time must be practically the
same, yet within the limits of its essential laws the
crowd-mind is capable of advance and is towed along
slowly and from afar in the wake of civilisation. It can
no more be forced and hurried by the conscious efforts
of lawgivers, educators, and preachers, than the growth
of a child's stature can be hastened by " taking thought."
Sentiments, ideas, and institutions for which it is not yet
ready, lie on its surface as seed by the wayside.
Severe as M. Le Bon's estimate of the crowd-mind
may be, it is fairly borne out by the evidence Father
Delehaye's book affords of its influence, be it noted,
precisely as an instrument of religious tradition and
education. Sterile, senseless, tasteless, dead to all living
principles and ideas, to all deeper and inward values of
religion and morality, the crowd-mind can receive the
Saint only on condition of forcing him into some one or
other of its familiar traditional hero-categories ; and
how purely external, unspiritual and materialistic its
notion of heroism is, we all know. Its unchecked in
fluence in the cultus of the Saints is always and every
where corrupt and debasing ; dragging the Saints down
to its own mental and moral level. And in liturgical
matters, in our prayers, hymns, devotions, pictures,
decorations, music, religious art ; in our moral and

THE CORPORATE MIND 259
ascetical tradition; in the whole mentality of our
religion, who can deny that the influence of the crowd-
mind is altogether decadent and retrograde ?
Yet some talk as though the Church made it her
sovereign standard, — a rule, imposed by Popes and
Councils, to the crushing out of all individuality and
distinction. They will quote the widespread popularity
of a cult, a belief, a devotion as unambiguous evidence
of its soundness : — " Securus judicat orbis terrarum."
Plainly what we need is a careful distinction between
the Christian populace (or crowd) and the Christian
people ; between uncontrolled tradition and controlled.
The "authority" of the crowd-mind over the in
dividual has, indeed, its legitimate use and function ;
but the limits that separate its use from its abuse are
soon reached. It is exercised and submitted to in
stinctively ; being a natural rather than an artificial
institution — as natural as are the parental and filial
sentiments. Like all such instincts, its purpose is the
more or less material welfare of the individual and the
race ; and it is efficacious for that end alone, and only
under ordinary circumstances and as a general rule.
Used for higher ends it becomes, in the same measure,
an instrument of destruction. The authority of the
crowd-tradition concerns the first and humblest and
most universal necessities of social life. It lifts us, as
we all must be lifted, to its own level ; but it can lift us
no further. Our nurse cannot always be our pope. For
higher educational ends, artifice has to come to the relief
of Nature. For the crowd is not society, but a factor
in society — its raw material ; nor is the crowd-mind
identical with the public mind. Spontaneously, in

260 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
regard to every interest or department of culture,
society falls into classes — the progressive and the
stationary, the active and the receptive, the original and
the imitative. Needless to say, the original are few and
the imitative many, for " many are called but few are
chosen" is the law of Nature. But the law of Grace,
if not also of rational Nature, is that the few are for the
sake of the many ; and those that have, for the service
of those that have not. Confirma fratres is the com
mand imposed upon them by their gifts. The Greek
ideal of an aristocracy preying on a serf-class failed
because it did not rise above the law of mere animal
nature, the law of egotistic competition. In a deeper
sense, then, it is " natural " that the crowd-mind should
be slowly educated, raised and controlled by the in
fluence of the active-minded and progressive minority.
But it is just here that artifice and the conscious organi
sation of society can do so much to accelerate this
natural process. Mediating between these two sections
of society — the progressive and the inert — we soon find
a system of educational machinery, whose function it is
to bring the active-minded into communication, to focus
the scattered rays of their light, to collect and to dis
tribute among the many the assured results of their
co-operative labour. As of " middlemen," it is the office
of teachers and educators to break the bread of know
ledge to the multitudes, that is, to distribute it in small
doses ; to translate, symbolise, accommodate ; to re
cognise that what is absolutely less true or less right
may be relatively more true and more right ; not to
force growth, but to know and obey its laws. As a
class, there is something of the crowd and the crowd-

THE CORPORATE MIND 261
mind about them ; for they are depositaries and
guardians of a tradition. But it is a tradition of which
each is, at least professedly (though by no means
actually), a competent critic. He believes because he
has seen ; his faith is not supposed to be merely in the
faith of others ; he has not discovered, but he has
verified. It is a tradition for which each holds himself
responsible, and it is, therefore, not a crowd-tradition.
We must not suppose that the official teaching-class
is authoritative only in relation to the mentally inert
multitudes ; or that it is itself simply passive and re
ceptive in relation to the active-minded minority. As
holding in possession the accepted results of the best
work done so far, it is, up to a certain stage, the teacher
of its teachers. No one is fit to teach it who has not
first been taught by it ; who has not assimilated, before
he has attempted to modify and perfect, the tradition of
which it is the depositary.
On the other hand, the official teaching-class may
easily degenerate and take on some of the characteristics
of the crowd. It may, and often does, stiffly resist all
modification and perfection of its tradition, and so cut
itself off from the very sources of its life and fruitful-
ness. And it may, in consequence, try to rule the
minority and the multitude by exactly the same
methods, with the eventual result of losing credit and
influence with both. Or, worse still, by a complete in
version of its function, it may become an instrument by
which the crowd-mind is imposed on the minority, and
" Folly, doctor-like," assumes the control of skill. But
these are perversions of an institution whose general
utility and excellence is beyond question.

262 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS 
When, therefore, we argue against individualism in
faith, and in favour of ecclesiastical consensus and tradi
tion, we should be careful to draw our analogy, not from
the tradition of the crowd, but from that of the official
teaching-class. And, among ourselves, when we appeal
to its popularity in favour of a usage or belief, we should
consider whether the source of this popularity is from
above or from below ; for, in the latter case, we do not
win an argument, but raise an objection.
It is certainly no detriment to our belief in the
Church's supernatural character to see how closely the
analogy between her constitution and that of civilised
society may be pressed. Onwards, from the day that
she put forth her canonical Gospels to check the
mythologising process that gave us the essentially
" vulgar " apocryphal gospels, her teaching-class has
striven assiduously to bring the crowd-mind under the
purifying and elevating influence of her minority — of
her Saints and Doctors. Her official hierarchy has
existed to gather, dispense, and communise the gifts and
graces of her charismatic hierarchy ; to collect the
wealth of the rich and scatter it among the poor.
While regarding the connection between personal gifts
and ecclesiastical office as a desideratum, she has never
admitted it to be essential ; the teacher need not be a
discoverer, nor the dispenser a producer. Thus she
avoids that encouragement of hypocrisy which is given
when office is supposed to be the guarantee of personal
gifts of insight and holiness ; and yet at the same time
secures those public advantages of a teaching-class which
Quakerism, with its purely charismatic hierarchy, would
forfeit.

THE CORPORATE MIND 263
For all its concrete difficulties and limitations, we can
hardly imagine any other system by which the religious
education of mankind could be carried out on a large
scale. The crowd and the crowd-mind will always be
with us ; not as something to acquiesce in or to defer to ;
but as something to combat, to purify, to elevate.
Father Delehaye's book should make it impossible for
us to confound Catholic folklore with Catholic teaching,
or with the Consensus Fidelium.

CHAPTER XI
REVELATION
IN many instances I have laid stress on the distinction
between prophetic and theological language ; and on
the danger of deducing conclusions from avowedly
figurative utterances. In the following essay, hitherto
unpublished, I try to give greater precision to the
conception of prophetic language, and to show that it
differs from theological not merely as a poetical from a
prosaic statement of the same truth — in which case
theology would be its very substance and kernel — but
rather as a fact of religious experience differs from the
analysis of its cause and significance — in which case
revelation is to theology what the stars are to astronomy ;
or what ontological truth is to logical truth. The
success or failure of the analysis leaves the fact un
touched.

The distinction between Theology and Revelation,
the determination of their respective rights and limits,
and of their relation of mutual dependence, are matters
of ever growing importance. It is now generally felt
that their entanglement is fatal to both interests ; that
264

REVELATION 265
Revelation is thereby subjected to all the vicissitudes,
uncertainties, and contradictions of theological specula
tion; that Theology is fettered in its free growth and de
velopment by the finality and divine authority which
consecrate oracular and prophetic utterances. To some
extent the cause in question, the principle at stake,
is closely akin to that involved in the problem of the
relations of Church and State. In both cases, the
divorce is desired by each party in its own interest, and
is assumed to be a far more simple and satisfactory
solution than it really is. It is too readily supposed that
wedded organisms which have grown together for
centuries and lived a common life can be abruptly cleft
asunder without any danger of bleeding to death.
Because we have arrived at a more or less satisfactory
distinction in the abstract, where formerly all was
blurred and confused, we hasten to effect a separation
in the concrete, as though thought were exhaustive of
reality. It is, however, rather from the side of religion than
from that of philosophy that the divorce of Revelation
from Theology is apt to be too eagerly precipitated.
It is a case of lightening an endangered vessel by
throwing the cargo overboard. Panic is not content
with a measured and discriminating rejection, but
recklessly wholesale in its sacrifices to safety, and may
easily part with the necessary minimum of ballast. It
may be that when we have sifted revelation of its
theological implications we shall find our sieve empty of
all residue. If it is true that theology but translates
revelation from its imaginative into conceptual or intel
lectual language, it may be also urged that revelation

266 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
translates theology into terms of sense and imagination,
that religion is but popularised theology, that the
substance and reality and truth are to be sought in the
intellectual concepts, not in their imaginative expression.
May it not be that theology just gets under the popular
form of revelation to its solid core of intellectual truth,
that it cracks the shell and picks out the kernel ? That
e.g. behind the more or less human mask of Fatherhood
it detects Ultimate Causality, Plenitude of Being, and so
forth? In that case, to sift out the implicit theology
were to sift out the whole content of revelation — of
what were, then, merely a symbolised theology. Above
all, is not this wholesale severance of Church and State,
of Revelation and Theology, perfectly chimerical ? Can
it ever be that a Christian should be so indifferent to
theology as to profess Materialism, or Atheism, or
Pantheism while holding the Faith in all its integrity?
And if not, how can we deny that Revelation, directly
or indirectly, fetters his theological liberty, and requires
him to take account of Divine oracles in his search
after philosophical truth? Or how can we blame or limit
the world-old interference of priests with the liberties
of philosophical speculation ?
Yet, on the other hand, a certain spiritual equalising
or levelling of all men in the matter of Faith and Re
ligion, is an essential and distinctive feature of Chris
tianity, whose truth is hid from the wise and prudent
and revealed to little ones, not by flesh and blood, but by
the common Father who is in Heaven. That the gifts of
Faith and Grace should be conditioned by anything so
uncertain, so variable, so monopolised by an intellectual
aristocracy as philosophical orthodoxy, is hardly con-

REVELATION 267

sistent with the spirit and desire of its Founder. It may
be that His desire held an inherent though unobserved
contradiction ; yet at least His sympathies were seem
ingly in favour of a divorce between Theology and
Revelation. Nor is it accordant with the Gospel-spirit
to allow that the philosopher as such should possess a
spiritual advantage over the peasant ; or a cultured over
a barbarous age or people. " Look at your elect," writes
Paul, " how there are not many wise according to the
flesh, not many great, not many noble, but the foolish
things of this world hath God chosen that He may con
found the wise." This is essentially the keynote of
Christianity, and would seem to make its frequent lapses
into " intellectualism " as manifestly discordant with its
spirit as its no less frequent lapses into worldliness and
moral corruption. Can we then say that philosophical
orthodoxy is a necessary condition of Faith ? That we
must convert a man to Aristotle or to Plato, or from
Kant, or from Spencer, before we can convert him to
Christ? What then ? Shall we say that Christianity labours
under an inherent contradiction ; that the divorce of
Theology from Revelation is at once essential to it and
yet impossible ; that its lapses into intellectualism are
the inevitable fruit of the contradictory and Utopian idea
of a free Revelation and a free Theology, side by side in
the same mind? Here, then, it would seem we have
another case of the old fallacy of abstraction ; another
attempt to split up the organic unity of human life with
a hatchet into fragments that are expected to survive
the operation, and to live all the more fruitfully for it.
I have elsewhere considered the problem more from

268 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS 
the side of Theology; I purpose now to approach it
more from the side of Revelation ; to ask myself what I
mean by Revelation ; what are its rights and its limits
with respect to Theology.
First, I notice that the word is used primarily to
denote an experience, and derivatively to denote the
record or expression by which that experience is retained
and communicated to others. For us the Revelation of
St. John is but the record of an experience; for him it
was an experience. St. Stephen saw the Heavens
opened ; we are but told that he saw them opened. To
him they were revealed, to us it is only revealed that
they were revealed. Here at once is an important dis
tinction strangely slurred over, which raises the question,
Can Revelation be communicated ? Can I believe on
the strength of God's word to another ? Can such be
lief be (in defiance of logic) stronger than my purely
human faith in the veracity of that other? Must not
God speak to me directly? Must He not, at least from
within, illuminate the revelation thus verbally communi
cated to me by another ; and bring it home to me with
a super-rational intuitive certitude? Must not Con
science — God's Vicar — make the message its own, and
command the homage of my Faith ?
Putting aside this question, and taking Revelation in
its primary sense, as an experience, I first notice that as
far as etymology and even common usage are concerned,
it seems to imply the sudden dropping of a veil, or
lifting of a mist, or the lightening-flash glimpse of a
landscape at night. " It came to me as a revelation,"
we say ; but hardly, " It dawned upon me as a revela
tion." Abruptness, discontinuity with the ordinary

REVELATION 269

process of knowledge is its usual (perhaps not essential)
characteristic. Again, we discover or find out by seeking, by volun
tary use of our natural faculties. Revelation comes to
us unsought; it is given to us, or happens to us. Some
times its object is altogether new ; sometimes it is old,
familiar, use-worn but struck with a sudden sunbeam,
lit up with a new light. " Startling," " Strange," " Sen
sational," are the terms by which our news-sheets qualify
revelations. If there was no preceding mystery or
problem, there was at least a tranquil unsuspicion which
has been rudely disturbed.
Revelation is not merely of what is hidden, but of
what is improbable or even incredible. Too often, how
ever, we speak of "revealed mysteries" as though revela
tion as such proposed riddles instead of solving them.
It may do so incidentally, but not formally as revelation.
A revealed mystery ceases to be a mystery, just as a
revealed secret ceases to be a secret, so far as it is re
vealed. The answer to one question may of course raise
another, and the revelation of one mystery may create
another ; but the end and purpose of revelation is to
kill, not to create, mystery ; to enable us at least to see
through a glass darkly, not to hinder us from seeing
face to face.
When the subject-matter is religious, when it relates
to the other world, revelation means knowledge conveyed
in a miraculous or at least supernatural or extraordinary
manner. It is used in contradistinction to that know
ledge of divine things which is acquired through reflec
tion on the phenomena of nature, or on the laws and
uniformities of movement and life and thought; from

270 v SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS 
all that is sometimes called " Natural Theology." Pro
ficiency in this latter depends on breadth of experience
coupled with philosophical acumen; whereas the simplest
and most ignorant may be the recipient of Revelation.
If we speak of Science or of Nature as a Divine Revela
tion we use the word in a derived and improper sense.
So much may suffice for the verbal definition. It
enables us at once to distinguish Revelation from
" Natural Theology," from that knowledge of divine
things which the mind, by its own labour and reflection,
derives from the observed_uniformities of man and of
nature. But it also enables us to distinguish it from
that "supernatural" or "dogmatic" theology, — so called,
not because it is any less the work of natural reason
than any other branch of philosophy, but because
Revelation and the data of Revelation constitute the
subject-matter of its reflection. Dogmatic Theology
supposes Revelation ; but the converse is not true.
As a' rule, religions begin with revelation and end with
doctrine or theology ; just as art-theory and criticism
are the reflection of an uncreative period on the creations
of the Past. " Religion," says Stade,1 " is the sense
(Empfindung) of, and the converse with, superhuman
beings. Only so far as this gives birth to a social
organisation and a constructive view of life does it
result in Doctrine. Even in those religions where this
result obtains, usages and institutions plax a larger
part in the religious life than doctrine does." This
sense of the superhuman world issuing in, or inspiring,
an imaginative construction of the same is something
given to man. His power of creation is as little self-
1 Biblische Theolog. d. A.T. Bd. I, s. ii.

REVELATION 271

earned as his power of generation. His causal action
in both cases is instrumental rather than principal, and
implies a maximum of passivity, a minimum of delib
eration and design. Theology, on the other hand, as
the science or systematic knowledge of the divine, i.e.
of ultimate metaphysical realities, is essentially a human
elaboration of the most artificial description, uncertain
in proportion to its abstractness, and apprehensible only
by a small minority of philosophical specialists. The
precise relation of Theology to Revelation, however,
can only be determined after we have formed some
clearer idea not only of what the word " Revelation "
stands for, but of what the thing itself really is.

Without adding to the myriad definitions of religion,
let us accept that above quoted from Stade as at least a
just description of what seems common to all the
religions that have of later years been made the subject
of comparative study by such writers as Tiele and
Jastrow. It is a sense of superhuman beings with whom
man can enter into practical relations. Forthwith there
arises some imaginative picturing of these beings and of
the world they inhabit, and of their relation to man and
to this world. And on this picturing are founded the
- usages and practices by which these beings can be pleased
and bought over to man's ends. In the interests of
such knowledge and service, associations and institutions
spring up later ; and with the growth of general culture
they are developed, and finally a theory or doctrine of
the whole system becomes an exigency of the mind, and
tends in its turn to shape the system to itself.

272 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
D From the first faint dawn of reason man feels himself
part of a greater Whole, to which he must adjust him
self as a matter of life or death. And yet he is sensible
of infinite blindness and feebleness. He stands on a
little islet of " the known " in the boundless ocean of
" the unknown," and his power is precisely coterminous
with his knowledge. Between these two realms of
Known and Unknown, he feels dimly that there is close
continuity, solidarity, dependence.)! Here we have the
root of the universal dualism of earth and heaven ;
visible and invisible ; matter and spirit ; here and here
after ; time and eternity. To people and furnish that
Beyond is the first effort of religious imagination — to
interpret the limitless Unknown in terms of that infini
tesimal fraction of the Whole which falls under man's
clear knowledge — magnifying, eliminating, adapting, ac
cording to the measure of his cultivation. Quickly he
peoples that Beyond with gods, one or many, conflicting
or hierarchically unified — gods whom man must not
anger or offend, but please and propitiate so as to have
them on his side in the battle of life ; just as he wants
the elements, the forces of Nature, nay, the animals and
plants on his side, and tries to understand them and
manage them. Indeed, these latter are his gods till he
suspects something behind them in whose hands they
are. To please the gods he must do what they want,
and what that is he can only judge from his own highest
wants and ideals. His gods will have all that he lacks
and longs for — brute strength, cunning, wisdom, pleasure,
immortality. His own needs are the mould in which
their images are cast. As long as he is contentedly
selfish, idle, animal, cruel, vindictive, vainglorious, his

REVELATION 273

gods will be the same, and will be pleased by what
ministers to their vices. But when he grows dissatisfied
with himself and strives to become moral, and spiritual
and inwardly unified, he tends towards the conception
and worship of one divine love, which wills and seeks
not itself, but man's moral and spiritual development,
and towards the recognition of the dictate of Conscience
as being in its absoluteness, its universality, its indiffer
ence to self-interests, the Will of the Whole asserting
itself in the consciousness of the part. I *
It is at this point that the converging streams of
religious and moral development flow together, and
recognise that they have one end as well as one source.
Not merely is religion moralised, but morality is
" religionised," and its roots in eternity laid bare. Of
the two results, perhaps this is the more important for
life, which wins a new depth and tone when morality
imposes itself explicitly as the Will of the Eternal ; as
the highest law of our being because the highest law of
all being ; as a life which is common to ourselves and to
God, and is the bond of union between all spirits and
the Divine Spirit- Far from a substitution of morality
for religion, we have here a subsumption of morality
under religion ; though plainly religion here first attains
its true character. /( Morality relates us unconsciously
and implicitly to God, but the fulness of our spirit-life
demands that this self-relating should be fully conscious
and explicit, and it is religion that makes it so; or
rather, such conscious self-relating to God is an act of
religion. -' Without the express consciousness of such
dynamic union and harmony, man feels adrift like a
straw on the ocean of existence ; he has no sense of

274 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
permanence, or reality, or significance. He needs, how
ever vaguely, to feel himself linked on to the Alpha and
the Omega — to that which is everywhere and always,
and not merely here and now, like himself. He wants
to feel a vested interest in the whole world and its fate.
For there is a timeless, spaceless Self in him that revolts
against the limits of his organic individual Self, and
cannot rest but in a conscious relation to the Universal
and Eternal. '\ This is a spiritual need, perfectly distinct
from man's moral need. It is his mystical need ; the
need which any sort of religion satisfies to some degree.
In its lowest and meanest forms and perversions, and
prior to all ethical interests whatsoever — as mere sorcery,
magic, devil-worship, ghost-worship — religion caters for
this groping instinct. We must not too hastily sweep
aside all this pseudo-mysticism as void of significance.
At least it manifests some discontent with our finitude,
some belief in the transcendental, some desire to peer
through the veil that separates the Known from the
Unknown ; some sense that the world of clear know
ledge is not enough for us, that the eye is not filled with
seeing, nor the ear with hearing. Men are at once
terrified and fascinated by any apparent contact with
that other world ; they long to see ghosts, yet dread to
see them ; invoke them, yet fly from them. They
cannot leave the veil alone, but are ever lifting a corner
or seeking a rift to catch a terrified glimpse of what,
after all, eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor heart con
ceived — of what no man could face and live. For
between the psychic and the spiritual in man there is
an unstable equilibrium; there is a struggle of attraction
with repulsion, of love with terror. " What have I to do

REVELATION 275

with thee ? Art thou come to torment me ? " is ever the
cry of Sense against Conscience, of Flesh against Spirit,
of ailing and enthralled Nature against the healing and
redeeming Supernatural. If the spirit in us feels its
affinity with the Eternal and the Immense, the flesh
cries out in fear and pain ; for " flesh and blood cannot
possess the Kingdom of God ; nor corruption, incorrup-
tion." The blind, psychic Self has no sympathy with
the Universal Whole, but would drag all to its own ends
and uses, and dreads the Spiritual Self, with its stern
discipline of disinterested Love, as a wayward child
dreads the schoolmaster and his rod. Here, then, is
the root of that sense of kinship and strangeness, of
longing and terror, which accompanies the pseudo-
mystical experiences of rudimentary religion. Yet
between them and the experiences of Christian Saints
and ecstatics there is at least a generic unity. The
difference is one of intellectual and ethical level ; of
truer conceptions and sentiments concerning that un
known Beyond to which we need to relate ourselves
consciously, in order to escape from the felt limitation of
our lower, psychic, or organic selves. The mystical
need, like the moral need, is one and the same spiritual
driving-force throughout. It is in its guidance and
direction alone, that development takes place.
We may, then, regard the moral impulse and the
mystical impulse as two closely related essential factors
of man's spiritual constitution which together make up
what for convenience we shall call his " religious faculty "
or capacity. This natural faculty is just as much suscep
tive of cultivation, guidance, and improvement as is his

276 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS 
intelligence or his social instinct, or his affections and
passions. The strength of the impulse to do right may
not be stronger in cultivation than in savagery ; but it
is better directed. Man progresses in his understanding
of what is right, of what is true, of what is lovable and
beautiful and adorable ; but not necessarily in the force
of his impulses in these directions. On the contrary,
within certain limits, advance in refinement and form is
often at the cost of force. Religion is more intense in
its earlier stages ; art languishes in a reflective and
critical period ; the social sense is deeper in more
primitive communities ; moral heroism has perhaps
achieved most under ruder ethical codes.
The "religious faculty" is the subject-matter of
religion — the part of man's spirit which religion has to
educate and develop. It is the point d'appui, the hook
by which the supernatural is linked on to the natural.
If supernatural revelation is an enlightenment of the
spirit, there must be in us a capacity of enlightenment,
which if it does not absolutely demand revelation is at
least susceptible of it and proportioned to it.1
We do ill to look on Conscience as purely " formal,"
as merely an impulse to believe what seems true and to
do what seems right, but as in no wise capable of deter
mining what is true or what is right, This is to treat it
as a faculty apart from the ethical and religious reason ;
whereas it is simply the same faculty viewed as divinely
obligatory and authoritative. Besides the compulsive-
ness of the laws of thought, there is an instinctive com-
1 To dany all commensurability of the two orders involves absurdity.
If the natural man needs to be supernaturally disposed in order to be pro
portioned to the supernatural, we are involved in a vicious circle.

REVELATION 277

pulsiveness which tells us that the spirit has found the
truth even when reason is silent or contradictory ;
which at times even refuses the seerningly valid results
of ethical or theological reasoning, j There is an " ap-
petitus rationalis" in man to which truth and right
appeal as infallibly as healthy food appeals to a healthy
man in spite of all physiological reasoning to the con
trary. ) Conscience, as Newman rightly saw, is revela
tional, not merely negatively but positively. Because
man is part and parcel of the spiritual world and of the
supernatural order ; because in God he lives and moves
and has his being, the truth of religion is in him im
plicitly, as surely as the truth of the whole physical
universe is involved in every part of it. Could he read
the needs of his own spirit and Conscience he would
need no teacher/ But it is only by groping, by trying
this or that suggestion of reason or tradition that he
finds out what he really wants, what explains and
satisfies that restless discontent of his, which is nothing
else than the truth within him struggling to clear con
sciousness. ) Reason can but offer him this solution or
that. It is Conscience that by an act of eager recogni
tion leaps forward at times to grasp its own, and to lift
the assent of reason to the level of a Faith that can
then afford to dispense with reason's suffrage. " I have
found Him whom my soul loveth. I will hold Him
and will not let Him go." For these reasons we must
firmly deny any sort of mere relativity of religious and
ethical truth. However remote and practically un
attainable, there is as surely a sole right and natural
development of Conscience as there is of our physio
logical organism ; and in the quest of this perfect self-

278 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS 
expression Conscience is not merely passive but cease
lessly and energetically active.
This religious faculty, then, is capable of a twofold in
struction, naturaT and supernatural, or acquired and
revealed ; and, in fact, the lights from these two sources
are always inextricably blended. It is only by an effort
of difficult abstraction that we can conjecture what
man's religious mind would be under only one or other
of these guidances. Analogous to the first rude efforts
at physical science there are, among the earliest types of
humanity, childish strivings after some sort of religious
philosophy which are simply a product of natural
reason, of reflection on observation, and are in no sense
spontaneous creations of the religious spirit. On the
other hand, there are revelations in the true sense ;
picturings of the other world given by, in, and along
with religious experience, though expressed with all the
crudeness of those uncultured minds from which they
spontaneously spring, and to whose compeers they are
addressed. \\ At this stage, before "theology" has at
tained its proper abstract and conceptual form, and while
it is yet largely imaginative and pictorial, it is most
difficult to distinguish it from revelation to which such
concreteness is normal and perpetual. There is little or
nothing in their form to distinguish one of these systems
of religious knowledge from the other. Yet the one is
given to man without his labour ; the other is deliber
ately wrought out by the exercise of his reason ; the
one is dependent only on moral action and disposition,
the other only on mental ability.
With the development of theological abstraction
comes another source of confusion of forms. For

REVELATION 279

Revelation spontaneously clothes itself in whatever lan
guage it finds to its hand ; and where the mind of the
prophet is already largely instructed with theological
categories and conceptions, these will largely mingle
with and govern the images in which his vision seeks to
embody itself. Thus, without being theology, revelation
may be couched in theological terms, which it uses not
for their proper and theological values, but for their
illustrative and symbolic values.
It seems to me that a very analogous duality of know
ledge obtains in other departments of life ; that prior to
any deliberate explanatory efforts, certain spontaneously
suggested picturings or imaginings accompany all in
stinctive action. The child who neither understands
nor yet wants to understand himself and his world does,
nevertheless, possess an imaginative synthesis of the
same, formed in and by the very process of living and
moving and acting. Incoherent though it be, yet as the
direct fruit of experience, of which it is the very shadow,
the mental reaction, it serves the purpose of practical
guidance even more successfully than do subsequent
self-sought explanation and theory, which only too often
impede the easy spontaneity of instinct. Similarly, it
may be that a great deal of the earliest mythology is
not the fruit of an after-effort to understand Life and
Nature as presented immediately to experience, but is
the very form in which that direct experience has written"
itself in the imagination. In the latter case it is a
knowedge given to man in and along with the ex
perience of which it is a part ; and so far is analogous
to Revelation and not to Theology, which is a self-
acquired of self-wrought knowledge.

28o SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

The same point might be illustrated by the difference
between the spontaneous and the philosophical state
ments of the phenomenon of Moral Conscience. Prior
to any intention of explaining that experience, men
speak of Conscience as a voice, as something locally in
side them, in their breast, their heart, their brain, — some
thing that whispers to them, and says Stop ! or as the
voice of God or of the Holy Spirit, or of some Guardian
Angel, or daimonion, or of the indwelling Christ, or of
their own Better Self. They deal with Conscience so
pictured, obeying or disobeying it. And this dramatic
symbolism possesses a most evident "working-truth,"
which is therefore guarantee for its possessing some
kind of quite indefinable metaphysical and representa
tive truth. It may be safely said that without this
imaginative apprehension men could not deal with
Conscience at.all ; that it is given to them in and along
with the experience, and is a necessary instrument for
the further control of that experience. Yet a moment's
reflection tells us we are here not dealing with concepts
but with images and figures ; that we have something
quite different from a psychological and metaphysical
explanation of Conscience ; that we are dealing with a
passive impression, not with an active expression of
truth. 
If, however, Revelation belongs rather to the category
of impressions than to that of expression, we should do
ill to consider all/religious truth of the former sort de
serving of the name of Revelation. For that, it is not
enough that the truth be given us, but it must be given
in an extraordinary degree, and be of a " supernatural "
kind. Else it might be most reasonably contended that

REVELATION 281

revelation were a perfectly normal and universal phe
nomenon ; which would be to use the word in a very
reasonable, but yet an unusual and misleading sense.
The art-faculty exists in some degree in all men, but in
its creative degree it is the privilege of a very few ; and
the same holds good for the gift of revelation. When
we say that the truth revealed is "supernatural," we
mean that it is not of a kind simply postulated as
necessary for the ordinary course of spiritual and
religious development. 'The normal and universal ex
periences of the moral and mystical life embody them
selves in images which constitute a revelation of God
and the other world distinct from the theories of religious
philosophy, yet which do not merit the name of "Super
natural Revelation," of Revelation in the usual sensev
But it must be maintained that natural Revelation is
presupposed to supernatural, just as every faculty is
.presupposed to its perfect formation or transformation.
1 No heightening or exaltation of our understanding or
free mental activity, however miraculous, could make it
an organ of Revelation. For, there it is always and
necessarily we ourselves who speak to ourselves ; who
(aided no doubt by the immanent God) work out truth
for ourselves. Nothing could ever come from the
understanding but theology or philosophy or science
or systematic thought. Revelation, on the other hand,
is a transforming and heightening, not of the active, but
of that receptive part of our mind which evades our free
control ; and which we may compare to the sense of
hearing. We listen, we do not speak ; we receive, we
do not give ; we are shown something, we do not show^
Classifying Revelation and Theology as alike forms

282 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
of religious knowledge, we are liable to fall into many
fallacies by not attending carefully to their differences.
For the word " knowledge '' nearly always implies a
representation resulting from reflection on the thing
known — a predication about a subject — a judgment.
The subject as such (though it may itself be a product
of previous judgment) is there before us ; it is some
thing given. We reflect upon it, and compare it with
certain possible representations of it, whose agreement
with it we affirm or deny by the act of judgment A
whale might be represented by a fish. On reflection we
judge it is not a fish. The subject as such is something
presented, something impressed upon us, something of
which we are aware or conscious. But till it is actively
represented and expressed in the predicate we do not
"know" it properly; we have not fitted it into that
scheme of things which our understanding is ever
elaborating, as an instrument by which we can control
experience. We possess the material, but we have not
yet built it into the fabric of our systematised thought.
It is given to us, but we have not yet received and
appropriated it
" Knowledge," then, is used in a very different sense
of experience and of reflection on experience, of pre
sentation and of representation. It is used in an equally
different sense of Revelation and of Theology. {-For
Revelation is not so much a representation of something
experienced, as one of the elements of a complex
spiritual experience — an experience made up of feelings
and impulses and imaginings ; which reverberates in
every corner of the soul and leaves its impress every
where ; in the mind no less than in the heart and will —

REVELATION 283

just as the impulse and sentiment of Conscience entail a
complementary impression on the mind which is part
and parcel of the same experience. It would be mis
leading to regard that impression as a " representation "
of the impulse and feelings, and to regard these latter as
the exclusive substance and reality of the experience, or
as the " content " or significance of that so-called " repre
sentation." It is as much a part of the experience as
they are ; it is as directly " given " or " presented " ; and
in no wise the result of reflection upon them, or of an
attempt to understand and classify them. On the con
trary, it is, together with them, the subject-matter of a
subsequent act of reflection which strives to understand
the whole complex experience in the interests of theology
or philosophy.
From this it follows that we must not regard Reve
lation and Theology as two sorts of "representative"
knowledge dealing with the same theme or subject-
matter, the one treating it poetically and imaginatively,
the other conceptually and scientifically. We must not
regard it as the function of the latter to translate poetry
into prose ; to substitute exact concepts for loose meta
phors. Revelation is itself a part of that concrete
" presented " reality which is the subject-matter of theo
logical reflection ; it is an element of the " experience "
to be explained and digested.
The contrary supposition is accounted for by the fact
that whereas the affective and volitional elements of
the religious experience are evanescent, the mental or
imaginative element abides in memory and survives
as the representative of the total experience. I cannot
repeat the whole experience at will, but I can volun-

284 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

tarily recall the impression it made on my imagination.
This remembered impression very naturally arrogates to
itself the name of Revelation which strictly should
*tand for the total original experience, and not for the
'memory of a part of it. Whence it comes that we
easily regard this memory of its mental element as
"representative" of the remaining elements. Yet this
memory only"-' represents " the past mental impression,
which impression was as much a part of the direct
experience as the other elements. It did not represent
those elements, but they, with it, correspond to and so
far "represent" the hidden causes of the total experi
ence. For effects are in some sense " representative " of
their causes, though not by way of similitude or like
ness, or as a predicate " represents " its subject.
The theologian therefore looks, or should look, upon
revelation as a part of religious experience, by means of
which he can, to some extent, reconstruct the whole of
that experience (as an object may be reconstructed from
its shadow, or an extinct species of animal from its
vestiges). Viewing that total experience as an effect,
he then endeavours to divine the nature of its causes
and to draw certain theological and metaphysical con
clusions. Thus revelation is simply his subject-matter, the
experience on which his science is founded, and which
it endeavours to understand and explain. It is not
a co-ordinate system of knowledge related to the same
subject-matter, and treating it merely in another way
(i.e. imaginatively rather than conceptually ; less rather
than more accurately).
Against the possibility of a justifiable collision be-

REVELATION 285

tween Revelation and theological or scientific thought
it is usually alleged that God, who is the Author of
every sort of truth, cannot contradict Himself. This
is commonly understood as though God spoke the
same truths, made the same statements, with two
different voices, or in two different languages — super-
naturally through revelation, naturally through the
instrumentality of man's reason. Plainly there is some
thing at first sight redundant and superfluous in this
notion, something discordant with Divine methods of
harmonious and orderly dispensation. But this im
pression vanishes when we recognise that Revelation is
not statement but experience. " Truth " is used differ
ently of experience and of judgment about experience ;
and therefore the principle in question is that which all
admit, namely, that no theory is true which contradicts
experience. It is very important to remember that, strictly speak
ing, Revelation consists in the total religious experience
and not simply in the mental element of that ex
perience; which is to the rest as those strange images
of the nature and cause of a pain are to the pain which
they so often accompany and which are so unlike its
rational explanation. Every doctor knows what curious
imagery patients use to describe their feelings, and yet
how safe and serviceable such descriptions are as a
guide to diagnosis. They will speak of gnawing, cutting,
stabbing sensations ; of a weight on the brain or the
chest ; of a stitch in the side ; of a lump in the throat ;
of a tight string round the head, and so forth. These
images are rarely thought out, but are suggested and
impressed upon the sufferer's imagination by the pain

286 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

itself. They are part of the experience. They are
purer and more reliable as description in proportion as
the sufferer is freer from any sort of medical knowledge
and less capable of any disturbing reflective effort It
is no mere figure of speech to say that Christ's whole
life and action, no less than His words, constituted the
substance of His Revelation. He was the Truth, and He
lived the Truth no less than He spoke it. " He that hath
seen Me, hath seen the Father " ; not merely, " He that
heard me hath heard the Father." It is a poor thin
rationalism or scholasticism which supposes that words
alone, unsupplemented by the gesture of life and deed
and passion, could ever adequately utter an experience
which is of the entire spirit and not merely of the mind.
For I am not prepared to dispute with any who will
deny that while God is transcendent, He is also imma
nent ; that the spirit is as sensible of His approach or
distance, of its own harmony or discord with the Divine,
as the body is of its ceaseless and changing relation to
the centre of the earth. I assume that all spirits and
intelligences and wills belong to a system of which the
Divine Spirit, the Absolute Truth, the Eternal Will is
the governing and active centre drawing them all into
harmony with itself; that each seeks its place and func
tion in this spiritual organism, this "communion of
Saints," this " Kingdom of God." I assume that if man
is active in this process of self-adjustment to God, it is
by way of response to Divine impulses ; but that God is
the principal Agent and Mover, and that He is to be felt,
and felt directly, in every movement of the mind towards
Truth, in every impulse of the Conscience towards
Right, in every kindling of the heart towards Goodness.

REVELATION 287

By consequence every movement of the Spirit's life
means an adjustment of the whole spirit, — mind, heart,
and will, — for all play their part in every such movement.
When, therefore, God reveals Himself to the spirit in an
extraordinary way and degree, it is in the total experi
ence that we are to look for the revelation and not merely
in the mental element. In this total experience He is
revealed, not as a fact is revealed by a statement, but
as a cause is revealed in its effect. He suddenly draws
near to the soul and fills her with Himself to overflow
ing, flooding each spiritual faculty with His own Spirit,
and thereby working at times strange transformations
even in the very senses and the bodily organism. Reve
lation is not a statement, but a " showing." God speaks
by deeds, not by words. The same shock which gives
fire to the heart and impulse to the will, fills the mind
with some interpretative image of the agency at work —
much as the sound of a footfall evokes the image of a
pedestrian ; or as any sound suggests an idea of its
source and meaning.
The nature of the mental element of Revelation may
be illustrated roughly by the immediate effect of a
thunderstorm on the mind. Whether for savage or
savant the external sense-impressions are approximately
the same — blinding flashes, awe-inspiring peals of thun
der, darkness, torrential rain, and so forth. But the
impression on the imagination differs considerably
according to their several mental habits. In the savage
there rises at once the image of the angry storm-god ;
in the savant nothing is evoked but the idea of a thun
derstorm. In neither case is the mental reaction the
result of deliberate explanatory reflection. It is as

288 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
immediate an automatic response to the external stimuli
as is that of the eye or ear. Only, whereas eye and
ear are about equally developed in both, the mind
is unequally developed and therefore reacts differently.
But this automatic mental reaction is as much part of
the experience as is the sense of light and sound ; it is
part of the subject-matter of subsequent reflection.
The savage has heard his god thundering; the savant
has witnessed a thunderstorm — not merely lightning
and thunderpeals, but all that he automatically infers
or co-apprehends as connected therewith. Now though
one would not accept the savage's account of what had
happened as possessing the slightest scientific or ex
planatory value, one could gather from it what had
really happened just as well as from the savant's soberer
and less pictorial statement. It is valuable as a record,
not as an explanation, of experience. From the im
pression made on that simple mind we can divine what
really happened ; as we so often do from the accounts
that children give us of what has befallen them. If
they have seen an animal with a tail at each end, we
know it was an elephant.
Equally abundant illustration might be drawn from
the various mental images and categories in which the
passion of love embodies and records itself in differently
cultured minds. In all cases the non-mental element
of the experience is practically the same, but the inspired
mental expressions are different. From these latter one
would not seek a philosophy of love, but one might take
them as part and parcel of the experience, which would
constitute the subject-matter of such a philosophy.
Amongst the phenomena of love, almost the chief would

REVELATION 289

be the various forms of its spontaneous mental self-
expression. It is plain, then, that there is a generic difference
between Revelational and Theological truth, and that
they cannot be compared as two statements — poetic and
scientific — of the same fact. " Prophetic " truth cannot
be used, as statements can be used from which we may
deduce other statements. Revelation is a showing on"
the part of God, a seeing on the part of the receiver.
Prophecy is but the communication of this vision to
others. Theology must take prophecy not as statement,
but as experience ; must try to understand it as a
religious phenomenon, and use it as factual not as
verbal evidence for its conceptual constructions of the
supernatural order.
If, then, we say there is a theology implicit in Revela
tion, it is not as one statement is implicit in another, but
as theory is implicit in experience, and as a conclusion
is implied in the evidential facts that support it.
Thus certain religious experiences have filled the
prophetic imagination with images of the power, majesty,
and transcendence of God ; others have evoked images
of His tenderness, His mercy, His nearness, His Father
hood. To St. Peter Christ is suddenly brought home
with a realisation embodied in the idea of " the Messias,
the Son of the living God." To the author of the
Fourth Gospel He appears as the Eternal Logos. To
St. Paul He is the Second or Heavenly and Spiritual
Adam. In each case the mental reaction to the same
shock of religious experience is somewhat different.
These conceptions, as revealed, have no direct theological
value ; they are but part of the experience whose

290 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

character they help to determine. It is that experience,
taken as concrete fact and reality, which forms the
subject-matter of theological explanation. In each case
the theologian will observe that Christ arrogates to
Himself the highest categories with which the mind
happens to be equipped for the glorification of a human
being — Messias, Son of God, Archetypal Humanity,
Eternal Word. To still later Christian experience He
becomes co-equal, consubstantial with the Father, thanks
to a current theology which finds such exaltation con
ceivable and consistent with His perfect manhood. But
from first to last the experience dealt with, the truth
revealed, is practically the same. It is because men
have felt and experienced Christ to be their God, their
Saviour, their Spiritual Bread, their Life, their Way,
their Truth, that they have apprehended Him under
these forms and images, of which some are more apt
than others to satisfy the soul's need of giving utterance
to its fulness.
If there is a certain contingency about the forms and
images which make part of these supernatural religious
experiences, it is none the less true that for the recipient
they possess a divine authority as given along with the
other parts of the same experience and proceeding from
the same source. In this they differ from all subsequent
and voluntary representations of the event. Speaking
of divine illumination in general, Ignatius Loyola bids
us carefully discriminate between just what was given
to us and what our subsequent reflection has added, and
to beware of giving to the latter the authority of the
former. Plainly it is of the utmost importance, for the
future practical and theological use of the experience^

REVELATION 291

that its natural self-expression should be retained pure
and intact as something sacred. What Charles Lamb says
of the creative artist's revelation has its place here. The
prophet, like the artist, feels no liberty to tamper with
or improve upon what has been shown him. He must
be as true to it as the historian is to his facts. Dante did
not make his visions ; he saw them, and could no more
see otherwise than had they been the common objects
of bodily sense. " Hogarth excepted," writes Lamb,
" can we produce any one painter within the last fifty
years . . . that has treated a story imaginatively? By
this we mean, upon whom his subject has so acted that
it seemed to direct him — not to be arranged by him ?
Any upon whom its leading or collateral points have
impressed themselves so tyrannically that he dare not
treat it otherwise lest he should falsify a revelation ? " 1
Some sense of this tyrannical necessity of fact lies at
the bottom of the sacredness with which Christianity
has guarded the apostolic revelation from any sort of
modification or development, and has made novelty
synonymous with heresy. Instinctively the Church has
felt that its truth is not the truth of theological state
ment, but that of fact and experience. It is the vestige,
the imaginative impress which Christ made on the
mentality of an age that had known and seen and
touched Him ; that had, through Him, been brought face
to face with God, and had been filled to overflowing with
the Divine Spirit. In that impression we still hold one
element of that great collective religious experience.
From it we can judge of the nature of the other
^elements, aided, moreover, by some measure of like
1 " Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty," last Essays of Elia.

292 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
experience within ourselves — much as a man in love will
to some extent rightly interpret the self-utterances of
some heroic and classical lover, even though his own
passion falls short of that standard in strength and purity.
Having the spirit of Christ in ourselves, we so far
understand its~classical self-utterance as given us in the
apostolic revelation.
It is then a patent fallacy to speak of a "develop
ment " of revelation as though it were a body of state
ments or theological propositions.
We must, however, hold that revelation is a perennial
phenomenon which obtains in every soul that is religi
ously alive and active. As the Spirit did not cease with
the apostles, so neither did revelation and prophecy.
But a peculiar character rightly attaches to that which
was the effect of immediate contact with Christ, and of
the Spirit as it was breathed forth from his very lips.
This has rightly been regarded as alone classical and
normative, as the test by which all spirits and revelations
in the Church are to be tried. As a fountain cannot rise
above its source, so neither can the waves that circle out
from that central and original disturbance excel or even
equal it in intensity. The revelations of later ages are
to those of the apostolic age as the studies of followers
to the works of a Great Master. With it they do not
build up a logical system or whole ; they may integrate
it as different, though lesser, manifestations of the same
spirit ; they may resolve it as light is resolved by a
prism into its multiple virtualities, but they do not com
plete it organically or develop it.
Whatever advance there may be, and undoubtedly is,
in theological reflection and analysis, there is no advance

REVELATION 293
in revelation. That supernatural Light shone as brightly
(in some ways more brightly) in the apostolic age as in
any after age, even as charity burned as warmly then as
ever. For the two are correlative and proportional. If
we allow that the Life was lived in its fulness and purity
in the earliest age, we cannot maintain that to a later
was reserved the privilege of a clearer and wider illu
mination. (' Theological advance may be a gain for the
understanding, but it is not directly a gain for the heart.
At best it aids to the protection and preservation of
Revelation in its original form and purity. Even the
dogmatic decisions of the Church add nothing to, but
only reassert the apostolic revelation. Their sole " faith-
content " is that part of it of which they are protective.
The Church but declares what the Apostles declared,
and that was not theology. Dogmatic decisions are
neither theological nor revelational in value, but merely
protective of revelation. They no more form a dialec-
tically developed system than do the patches and props
and buttresses by which some ancient fortress has been
repaired from time to time according as it has been
assailed and battered from one side or another in
this way or in that. The logical unity of creeds is
the more or less forced result of after-arrangement.
Heresies do not arise according to any logical plan of
succession. The notion of some sort of development of Revela
tion is possible only so long as we really confound
theology and revelation. Undoubtedly these two
utterly heterogeneous kinds of religious knowledge
have been tangled together into one hybrid system by
taking the language of revelation according to its theo-

294 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
logical values, and making it a divinely authorised basis
for deduction. Theology has not taken that inspired
utterance as but part of a revealing experience, which
in its totality demands a philosophical explanation, and
is but the subject-matter of theological reflection. It has
rather treated this utterance as an inchoate theology,
metaphorically and loosely expressed, which must be
translated into precise terminology and then dialectically
expanded. It has not recognised that the theological
terms in which revelation incidentally expresses itself
are not the expression of theological effort and thought,
but of a massive spiritual experience ; that they are
used for their illustrative, not for their theological value ;
that their theological value is in no wise divinely
authorised by such illustrative use. In consequence of
this entaglement, and of the absolute inevitableness of
allowing a development of theology, revelation has
come to be viewed as susceptible of development also. .
And similarly a theological valuation of ecclesiastical
dogmas, a confusion of their theological with their, pro
tective import, has introduced the hybrid and anti-
patristic notion of " dogmatic development" Hence
a somewhat fatal consequence. For as surely as the
scientific light of to-day is beyond all question a sub
stantial advance on medieval darkness, so surely must
the " developed " revelation and dogma of to-day make
the Apostolic Age seem a period of primeval twilight.
Where there is a true development, the end of the
process is the criterion of the beginning. /But nothing
is more vital to Catholicism than the criterion of Aposto
licity, or than the belief that Christ and his apostles
realised Christianity in its greatest spiritual fulness. To

REVELATION 295

speak of that Christianity as germinal is to turn every
thing topsy-turvy.
No one can pretend that the Apostolic revelation was
"final" in the sense that another Christ, another In
carnation, is inherently unthinkable. Nor in the sense
of excluding any further revelation in or outside the
Church. It is "final" in the sense that it alone is
normative and authoritative for Christianity, and is the
fullest manifestation of that Spirit by which all subsi
diary revelations are to be tested ; and in the sense that
it does not admit of development as theology does.
Indeed, we might as well speak of a development of
Christ. From its very nature Revelation admits of develop
ment as little as does poetry or art, and for much the
same reason. For in man it is, after all, only the mind
and the intellect that develop in any appreciable sense
by the steady accumulation of experience and informa
tion and by the continual effort to understand and
systematise that experience for the guidance of life,
thought, speech and action. But the great driving-
forces of life — the passions, affections, emotions — are as
constant as the structure of man's bodily frame and as
his organs of sensation or locomotion — constant at
least in the variety and irregularity of their distribution.
Here we find no sort of systematic progress and develop
ment. Faith, Hope, Desire, Fear, Love — human and
divine — these are to be found sporadically in their
highest intensity at any time in history, at any stage of
mental development. It is not in these driving-forces,
but in the direction which the mind gives to them,
that we are to look for development. There is no

*96 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
progress in goodness, i.e. in the love of what is
right ; but only in ethics, i.e. in the understanding
of what is right. There is no progress in religion,
i.e. in the spirit of Faith, Hope and Charity ; but only
in theology, i.e. in the understanding of things divine.
Can it be maintained that for all our clearer under
standing, religious feeling has ever risen higher than in
some of the Psalms or in Deutero-Isaiah ? or that for all
the ethical refinement that separates us from savagery
and barbarism, there has been a proportional advance on
the moral heroism of the past ? Has poetry developed
since Homer, or Dante, or Shakespeare ? Has passion
grown in depth and purity with the succession of
centuries ? All we can say is that the mysticism, the
heroism, the inspiration of those creative spirits would
have found in our time a fuller, more flexible, more
intelligent medium of self-expression ; that the forces
would have been more skilfully, less wastefully, directed.
Revelation stands in this respect on the same level as
those great creations of art and poetry which are but
the natural self-expression of that passionate experience
which they embody imaginatively — as natural as a
cry, or a sob, or a groan, which signify but do not
state ; whose truth is not that of statement. Such
creations would be of no greater artistic truth had they
been embodied in the terms and images of a more
delicate and highly developed culture. Nay, the ruder
and less pliant the medium, the stronger and greater
does the inspiration seem which could mould it like wax
to its purpose. Revelation, the natural self-expression
of a divine afflatus, is as the record of itself made by a
passing hurricane in the wrack and ruin which it leaves

REVELATION 297

in its wake. The nature of that record varies according
to what lies in the track of the tempest ; but whether it
be written in the heaped and furrowed sands of the
desert, or in the uprooted trunks, torn limbs and
scattered foliage of the forest, or in the bared roof-
trees, levelled walls and fallen towers of the wind
swept city, its lesson is equally legible as a revelation of
the strength and direction of a mighty spirit that has
passed by. Had Christ come in another age to another
people, the Gospel, written in different words and deeds,
had been still the same Gospel, the record of the same
Power and Spirit, albeit in conflict with another class of
oppositions and obstructions.
Hence, though it is preposterous for a science and,
therefore, for Theology to be under the bondage of the
past, and to look to its first crude essays as normative
and canonical, there is no such unreasonableness in
requiring art or literature to look to the great creations
of former times for their inspiration and guidance ; and
for the same reason there is no obscurantism in holding
that a revelation two thousand years old may be a
standard and test for all future time. When it is a
question of Christian theology or ecclesiastical institu
tions, which are the work of human reflection and in
genuity, the appeal to the criterion of primitive times is
treason against the laws of progress. Not so when it is
a question of the Christian spirit and of the Revelation
in which it is embodied ; for these lie outside the realm
of progress and admit of no quasi-organic development.
But although Apostolic revelation is in no sense the
beginning or first chapter of Christian theology, yet it is
in some sense the criterion both of theology and of all

298 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
those institutional means which the Church has taken
for the preservation of the spirit and truth of the Gospel.
The end is always the criterion of the means and instru
ments devised for its attainment. Also it is plain that
while any science must be absolutely free in the applica
tion of its methods, it is as absolutely limited by the
nature and character of its subject-matter. Theology
may have no right to argue from revealed utterance
regarded as theological statement, but it has every right
and is bound to argue from it regarded as spiritual
phenomenon. In the hagiography, in the mystical and ascetical
writers of the Church, we have a vast store of materials
for a scientific religious psychology, which is as yet only
in its infancy. The form in which it is perpetuated for
us is utterly unscientific. We have a tangle of con
tradictory maxims and apothegms — contradictory only
because the same facts have clothed themselves in irre
concilably different figures and metaphors in different
minds — have evoked different reactions. To accept
these artless utterances as reflex statements, to try to
reconcile them, to argue a system from them, is to for
get that their whole evidential value is that of natural
effects. The psychologist has to ask himself first, What
were the experiences that presented themselves in this
guise to unscientific simple minds ? and then, What do
these experiences signify for science ? Similarly, the
theologian should ask, What are the experiences ex
pressed in revealed utterances, and what do those
experiences signify for theology ?
Were it merely a question of translating metaphorical
into exact language, the result would be to void theology

REVELATION 299

of all but relative value. For when a truth is known
only through a metaphor, when we have no means of
comparing the metaphor with the reality or of defining
the limits of likeness and unhkeness, every attempt to
get at the hinted truth is mere guesswork. Viewed,
however, as spiritual phenomenon, revelation, however
difficult to explain, does admit of theological explana
tion. Theology, like every other science, is in quest of
a truth involved in facts, a truth that is one and one
only. As the guardian of all religious interests, the
Church is also the natural guardian of theology — of the
religious interests of the intellect. And this all the
more because, owing to the common confusion of
theology with revelation, the statements of the former
may easily seem hostile to the supposed " statements "
of the latter. Here her protective instinct rouses her to
hurl defiance at even the most cogent theological reason
ing as long as it seems to endanger the supernatural
truth of revelation. Still, her guardianship of theology
is of a wholly different character to that which she
exercises over revelation, and is dependent on and con
ditioned by it. She has no gift of scientific or theo
logical inerrancy. She is inerrant, as instinct is inerrant,
in her sense and affirmation of what is revealed and of
what imperils revelation, but by no means in her theo
logical assertions regarded as theological. She knows
and feels the impression they make, it is this impression
which she approves or disapproves. What is perfectly
true may create a false impression ; what is perfectly
false may create a true impression. Relatively to a
certain mentality the greater truth may be the greater
lie. The denial of geocentricism may for a certain age

300 SCYLLAHAND CHARYBDIS
mean the denial of religion. In this way she has in
terfered, and will always interfere, with theological
liberty ; just as she interferes with external and profane
interests for like motives. In both cases she may err, and
has erred in theology, in science, in practical prudence,
but not in her instinct of self-preservation. She has
been at once right and wrong — right in her own depart
ment, wrong in her neighbours'. To expect anything
else would be to expect a dispensation of continual
miracles. All interests in life elbow and jostle one
another in a struggle that makes for an ideal of harmony
ever approached, never attained. In the long run in
justices and violences are requited, and those who sin
eventually suffer — be the sinner Church or State,
Theology or Science.
It is naturally to doctors as a class that we look for
the development of medical science, though there is no
monopoly that would exclude others from the same
pursuit ; and similarly it is mainly, but by no means
exclusively, to the clergy that we look for the develop
ment of theology, i.e. of the science of their profession.
But we cannot regard this as part of the Church's
divine mission, which is simply prophetic and practical.
The Apostles were sent not to teach theology, but
to preach the Gospel. It were, however, a monstrous
inference to conclude that the Church should sit by
indifferent as to whether her children were taught
pantheism or deism or atheism. The love and defence
of natural truth is a duty incumbent on the Church as
on any Christian man ; and, therefore, merely in the
name of Reason and apart from any claim to divine
inerrancy, she must go forth against false philosophy

REVELATION 301

with the weapons of reason. But over and above this,
such errors may be contradicted by what is implied in
revelation considered strictly as a spiritual phenomenon.
They may contradict religious experience. This contra
diction she may either prove fallibly by theological re
flection, or feel by an infallible instinct, which will
justify a certain blind opposition to such false tenets.
As we have said already, Conscience is not merely
formal and negative in its indication ; it is also positive
and constructive. Truth is one and one only, whether
it come to us through natural or supernatural experi
ence ; whether through reflection on the uniformities
and regularities of the world and man, or through
reflection on the events of the spiritual life, the free
creative action of God in man and through man. How
ever various the imagery and language in which reve
lation utters itself in different ages and cultures, the
underlying reality which reveals itself, now more or less
purely and unimpededly, is ever necessarily the same,
even as human love is ever the same phenomenon, how
ever various the words and deeds in which it spon
taneously finds utterance. The differences are analogous
to those of the reactions of the same chemical element
in various combinations, all of which alike reveal its
nature and unfold its endless potentialities. God is one,
and the spirit of man is one ; and there is, therefore,
but one legitimate course for the development of con
science; one, and one only, truth that explains and
satisfies its restlessness and reveals it to itself.
From this we can understand how various revelations
may be related to one another as perfect or less perfect
betrayals of the same supernatural reality, of the nature

302 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
of God and man, of their relations to one another,
of the ultimate meaning and end of the world and of
human history.
If we speak of their truth as " prophetic truth," it is
to indicate that they show us the world and history sub
specie eeternitatis ; that as the poet or dramatist manipu
lates history and philosophy in the interests of a higher
ideal, that finds but an imperfect expression in the
actual ; or as the artist corrects " the trembling hand of
Nature" and gives forth in its purity the thought she
stumbles over; so the prophet sees and expresses the
religious meaning of the world and life ; reaches back
to the Alpha and forward to the Omega, and gives us
a "statical" and foreshortened presentment of the
whole process, making Past and Future meet in the
Present; letting the latent and struggling ideal shine
like its aura through the actual and earthly reality.
His work is a work of interpretation ; of getting at the
\more inward and deeper truth through the husk of the
phenomenal and relative. His reading of past history
is as little historical as his reading of future history ;
whether he looks back to the creation or forward to the
Messianic consummation, in both cases he sees fact
indeed, but fact transfigured and rearranged so as to
bring out the underlying meaning of the whole process.
And the like is to be said of the prophet's philosophy
or science.
The governing end of prophecy is the practical
interests of the religious life ; to provide a direction and
a stimulus ; to give a construction of the other world and
of this world in relation to the other. '
If, then, to deny all historical or philosophical content

REVELATION 303

to prophetic vision is to misapprehend its character as a
supernatural interpretation or view of the world and
history; yet to regard it as historical or philosophical
statement, and to use such supposed statements as the
basis of argument, is equally to confound together things
so generically different as experience and reflection on
experience. It is precisely the theologian's task to discern as best he
may what historical and philosophical truths are implied
in such prophetic visions, viewed not as statement, but
as psychological experience — whether it be that of an
individual prophet or that of an inspired community like
the apostolic body. But such deductions and analyses
can never have more than the authority of reason ; they
are drawn from, but are no part of, that supernatural
experience which we call Revelation — which is a vision
or showing, but not a statement.

It is not possible to do more than touch upon the
notion of Revelation, considered not as an experience,
but as the record and expression of an experience
capable of being communicated to others. The end of
all such communication must be in some measure to
evoke the same spiritual phenomenon in others, to bring
them to a like relation to the Eternal. This needs a
certain translation of inward vision into outward language
and symbolism — a translation that can never be exhaus
tive or adequate, but at most suggestive. Under the
influence of a strong and personal afflatus, while the
seer is still actually dominated and absorbed by his
vision, such utterance is spontaneous and inspired, and

304 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
may be considered a continuous part or prolongation of
the total experience called revelation. On the other
hand, it may be the result of quiet after-thought, of
reflection on remembered experience, and so far, however
adequate or truthful, it is not inspired. More commonly
we should expect a mixed product ; reflection and volun
tary adaptation intervening in a moment of inspiration,
and inspiration supervening on after-thought and re
membrance. " And as I mused, the fire kindled."
On the ears of the hearer prophetic utterance must
fall dead, unless there be within him a capacity to be
evoked and directed by the Divine Word, a spirit to
answer the Spirit. In default of such, the word may
present concepts to the understanding and pictures to
the imagination, but no real spiritual content. It will,
if anything, rather puzzle, perplex, and annoy, than
illuminate and kindle; for it will be estimated as theology
or history, and not as true religious revelation — as
statement and not as experience. To recur to what is
plainly the aptest illustration, it will be as the great
poetic and dramatic self-utterances of love to one who
has never been stirred by passion, who lacks all experi
ence of the spiritual force that so utters itself. Divine
Love, the love of God, and of man in relation to God, is
the very sum and substance of religious experience. It
is the phenomenon that explains itself spontaneously in
Revelation, and which it is the prophet's aim to repro
duce in others through the communication of the Divine
Word. His work, then, is a social work, analogous to
that of the teacher. Thanks to the teaching and tradi
tion of the society into which we are born, we can
appropriate the gathered results of the experience and

REVELATION 305

reflection of others, and start, not from nothingness, but
with a vast capital at our disposal. Left to ourselves
(were such destitution conceivable) we could not hope to
get further than the most savage rudiments of culture.
And the like holds of our mystical or spiritual capacities,
which would be all but dormant were they not roused
and stimulated and directed by the communicated
experience of others ; were we left simply to those
ordinary revelations given to all, and which, even then,
are so largely influenced by the mental formation which
we have received.
Plainly then, the great majority depend for the fulness
of their spiritual life on the assimilation of the Divine
Word communicated to them from outside.
This assimilation is precisely an act of inward
recognition — a response of spirit to spirit, and not only
the mental apprehension and acceptance of statements
and meanings. This latter is but the assent to the
word of man falling on the ear ; not to the word of God
spoken in the heart and conscience. Conscience must
first appropriate the word, recognise it as its own, as the
explanation of itself, and so impose it, as it imposes all
its behests, imperiously and absolutely. In other words,
the teaching from outside must evoke a revelation in
'ourselves; the experience of the prophet must become
experience for us. It is to this evoked revelation that
we answer by the act of Faith, recognising it as God's
word in us and to us. Were it not already written in
the depths of our being, where the spirit is rooted in God,
we could not recognise it.
Nor is this to confound Faith and Charity, for one
may receive and yet be disobedient to the Heavenly

306 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
Vision; "the man whose eyes God hath opened" may
fight against the Truth, may kick against the goad.
Without personal revelation, then, there can be no
faith, nothing more than theological or historical assent.
Revelation cannot be put into us from outside ; it can
be occasioned, but it cannot be caused, by instruction.
Paul may sow, and Apollos may water, but God alone
can give the increase (cf. a Kempis, Bk. Ill, c. 2, "They
can utter words, but they give not the spirit ; they
deliver the letter, but Thou openest the sense," etc.).
This is what underlies the common teaching of even
the scholastic " intellectualists," when they affirm that,
after apologetic has done all it can do by way of
instruction and proof, it needs a supernatural illumina
tion of the mind and a supernatural inclination of the
will to change intellectual assent into divine faith. God
from within the soul must echo the prophet's message
and make it his own. He must touch the inward ear
with an " Ephphatha ! " This is what Browning describes
in "Paracelsus": —
Time flies j youth fades j life is an empty dream,
'Tis the mere echo of time ; and he whose heart
Beat first beneath a human breast ; whose speech
Was copied from a human tongue, can never
Recall when he was living and knew not this.
Nevertheless, long seasons come and go,
Till some one hour's experience shows what nought,
He deemed, could clearer show ; and ever after
An altered brow, and eye, and gait, and speed
Attest that now he knows the adage true :
Time fleets, youth fades, life is an empty dream.
Yet few of us are fated to have prophets for our
immediate guides who, filled with the vision of the

REVELATION 307

truth they utter, could cast and recast its expression to
suit our tardy apprehension ; whose inward fire, more
over, could impart a quickening power to their words,
which must ever be wanting to the written letter or even
to the cold repetition of inspired utterance by uninspired
lips. For the most part we are left to the guidance of a
traditional revelation, i.e. of a revelation contained or
embedded in the traditional religious teaching of the
society to which we belong.
Such a tradition we find in the sacred books of the
Old and New Testament, and in the authentic teachings
of the Christian Church. Here, mingled inextricably, as
gold in the ore, with much that is merely theological and
ethical reflection, and much that is mere history and
sacred legend, we have that revelation of Himself which
God has given at sundry times and in divers manners to
the prophets, and last of all through His Son Jesus
Christ and his chosen apostles. We have, so to say, the
utterance of a collective and continuous experience of
the human spirit in varying degrees and modes of con
tact with the Divine., '-It is ever one and the same truth,
one and the same Love, that strives to break into full
consciousness, and find a sufficing self-utterance, which
it finds at last in Him who was pre-eminently the Word
of God.
It is, then, in this great religious tradition that the
soul finds the normal and necessary instrument of her
awakening, formation, and guidance. Yet to take it as
such it must be given her from within. She must see it
mirrored in the depths of her own being.

CHAPTER XII
"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY
ALTHOUGH it involves a good deal of repetition
l\. of what has already been said, I can hardly do
better than conclude this sequence of essays with a
reply to what purports to be a general criticism of my
whole theological attitude, by the R. P. Lebreton, S.J.
That criticism appeared in the Revue Pratique d'Apolo-
ge'tique, February, 1907. Its substance can be easily
gathered from the following pages. In the foregoing
chapter I have tried to give some precision to what I
mean by Revelation as distinct from Theology. Here
I try to make a somewhat similar distinction between
the dogmatic and the theological values of those
doctrinal decisions of oecumenical authority which are
avowedly not additions to, but reassertions of Revela
tion, and whose principal and solely obligatory truth is
the truth which they implicitly reassert and protect. As
explicit theological statements they bind the intellect,
like other scientific conclusions, so far as they are cor
rectly demonstrated. Of this distinction I can only
say, Capiat qui capere potest — Let him take it who can ;
and that I could wish there were a straighter way out of
a labyrinth of difficulties. It is, at least, founded on
the admissions of theologians, and they will do well to
308

"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 309
secure a better fire-escape before they discard this
one. One possible inference I wish to repudiate; namely,
that one may tell lies to protect the truth. This is done
every day, and has been done from the beginning by those
whom Coleridge rather savagely calls " orthodox liars for
God"; by men who in their infidel heart of hearts do not
believe that their faith will bear criticism and investiga
tion ; who stretch out a lying hand to steady the totter
ing ark of truth. From the first day when the Gospels
began to be corrected in the interests of "edification,"
up to the present, a growing debt to truth has been thus
accumulated and passed on from generation to genera
tion, each less able than the preceding to clear up its
tangled accounts.
And it is just upon us that the burden falls in these
days when truth will be denied no longer. "The fathers
have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set
on edge." Because they continually purchased edifica
tion at the cost of truth, we have to buy back truth at
the cost of infinite scandal.
A lie has never protected truth in any permanent and
ultimate sense. But for the finite mind truth and error
are tangled as the roots of tares and wheat. Strive how
we will to be truthful, to grasp things as they are, to
utter them sincerely as they seem to us, we shall never
get the gold without the alloy. So closely do they
interpenetrate and cling together that, for a given
mentality, it is often psychologically impossible to con
vey a truth without conveying an error ; to uproot an
error without uprooting a truth. One may even foresee
and have to permit the error for sake of the truth, trust-

310 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
ing that time will bring the correction. But this is very
different from deliberately teaching error for truth's
sake. All I maintain in this essay is, that for a certain
time, and for a certain mentality and culture, the re-
assertion of revealed truth may necessarily and inculpably
involve the assertion of what for other times is a theo
logical or philosophical or scientific or historical error.
The assertion and the reassertion being netted together,
I would submit that it is to the latter, and not to the
former, that we owe the homage of faith ; that the latter
is the substance, the irreformable element of dogma.

It is comparatively rare, in my narrow experience, to
find a theological critic like R. P. Lebreton, who, while
differing from me profoundly, not only abstains from
every sort of personality and sinister innuendo, but also
endeavours to present my views in the fairest and most
favourable light. It is no qualification of this praise to
insist that in one or two instances he has not read me
carefully, and has made me say what I did not say ; and
that his general interpretation of all that I do say is one
which I must repudiate. A certain percentage of in
accuracy is to be looked for in all quotation ; and it is
hopeless to interpret one system by the categories of
another. If this latter principle seems to make it hope
less for myself to do justice to M. Lebreton, I must
remark that, whereas I have belonged to, and passed out
of, his school, I have no reason to think that he has
belonged to, and passed out of, mine. Whence I may,
without arrogance, claim to know and understand all
that is to be said for his position ; to be fully alive to its

"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 3n
strength and its weakness. Formerly a thomist and
scholastic, as he probably knows, supra coestaneos meos,
it was not for nothing that I left a system so alluring in
its simplicity, directness, and universality, for one of
whose tentative and imperfect character I am only too
fully aware. Nor shall I be otherwise than cordially
grateful if M. L. can persuade me that the easier and
simpler way is also the safer and truer. Neither I nor
my system claim to be infallible.
The main theme of my observations is contained in
the two concluding paragraphs of M. L.'s critique, which
run as follows : —
(i) "Cette analyse du dogme nous fait assez com-
prendre ce que M. Tyrrell entend par la theologie : c'est
toute representation intellectuelle de la verite dogma-
tique, quelles que soient d'ailleurs son origine et ses
garanties ; les definitions des papes et des conciles, les
symboles de foi regus par l'Eglise cecumenique ne
peuvent, pas plus que les conclusions des theologiens,
pretendre a une verite' infaillible et s'imposer a la con
science chretienne. Si, dans le symbole de saint
Athanase, ces mots ' ceci est la foi catholique, et qui-
conque n'y croit pas ne peut etre sauve ' se rapportaient,
comme ils le paraissent, a l'analyse theologique qui les
precede, ils seraient ridicules. Leur seul sens tolerable
est : Ceci est l'analyse de la foi catholique, des faits et
des verites dont on doit vivre (ou du monde surnaturel
dans lequel on doit vivre) si Ton veut etre sauve."
(2) " II est superflu, je crois, de discuter longuement
cette theorie ; sa signification est assez evidente, et tout
catholique sait ce qu'il doit en penser. La foi n'est pas
pour nous le sens ou le gout de Dieu ; c'est I'adhesion

312 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
libre de notre esprit a une verite revelee par Dieu. Nous
savons que l'objet de la foi est hors de notre portee, que
nous ne pouvons l'atteindre immediatement et en lui-
meme, mais seulement dans la revelation qui nous le
presente. Le motif supreme de notre foi ne sera done
point une experience personnelle, que l'enseignement
exterieur ne ferait que provoquer ; ce sera l'autorite
divine, dont nous aurons reconnu le caractere dans la
revelation chretienne, et qui s'impose a notre assenti-
ment comme un temoignage irrefragable. L'objet de
notre foi ne sera point ces forces incertaines et vagues
que le sentiment religieux peut entrevoir et postuler, ce
seront tous les dogmes que Dieu nous aura reveles.
Respectueux de tout le magistere de l'Eglise, nous
adhererons aux propositions qu'il formule dans la
mesure ou il le demande et dans le sens qu'il leur
donne ; et sachant que cette soumission est obligatoire
pour toute conscience humaine, et que seule l'ignorance
invincible en peut excuser, nous reciterons sans hesita
tion le symbole de saint Athanase, et nous n'aurons pas
besoin d'en forcer l'interpr^tation pour lui preter un
sens ' tolerable.' "
Of these two paragraphs, the first purports to put my
position in a nutshell ; the second, to set forth the
Catholic position as something quite opposite.
I propose, therefore, to show, first, that I can and do
accept every proposition of this second paragraph as
cordially as M. L., though probably, or even certainly,
not in M. L.'s sense. Then, I will show that the first
paragraph, owing to M. L.'s scholastic prepossessions, is
a pure travesty of my position. Incidentally, I trust
that I shall be able to state that position in terms

"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 313
adapted to such prepossessions, and to make it clear
why I cannot accept what I presume to be M. L.'s
interpretation of the second paragraph.
" La foi n'est pas pour nous le sens ou le gout de
Dieu ; c'est I'adhesion libre de notre esprit a une verite
revelde par Dieu." What is denied here I have always
denied, and what is asserted I have always asserted.
I have filled many pages of Lex Credendi, not to speak
of earlier writings, with a repudiation of the fallacy
of Sentimentalism ; and though to exclude altogether
the element of feeling from the act of faith would be to
fall into a similar fallacy (whether "intellectualism" or
"voluntarism"), yet to make faith consist in an un
directed, objectless, unilluminated feeling would be a
shallowness that I should be sorry to attribute to any
serious thinker. How alien such " fideism " is from my
whole system of thought may be seen in my two articles
on " Mysteries a Necessity of Life " (chapter vi), and
indeed from the most superficial acquaintance with my
writings in general. Is M. L. quite sure as to what he
means by " fideism ? "
If, however, by "le sens de Dieu" M. L. intends to
repudiate my words which he quotes (p. 547) : " La foi
est une vue de Dieu," let him notice that I add " non
face en face, mais dans un miroir," and that I am using
the language of S. Paul (1 Cor. xill). If I have dwelt
(as against scholastic intellectualism and rationalism)
more frequently on the affective and voluntary elements
of the act of faith, I have both explicitly and implicitly
always recognised its cognitive character as involving a
presentment of divine realities. My psychology forbids
me to conceive any spiritual act whose real and in-

3i4 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
divisible simplicity may not be logically analysed into
knowledge, feeling, and will, or which does not imply an
apprehended truth as well as a desired end and a
practical determination. Most cordially, then, do I en
dorse the statement that faith is "I'adhesion de notre
esprit a une verit.6." Equally do I assert that this
truth, unlike that of Natural Theology, is not given us
by "flesh and blood" — by our own reasonings or the
reasonings of others — but by the "Father who is in
heaven " : " car, cette vue ne depend pas de nous, mais
nous est donnee " (p. 547).
I can hardly suppose that M. L. contends that this
"gift" must come to us from a local or spatial "out
side," that this message must arrive through the external
senses. I presume that the first recipients of a divine
revelation are capable of "faith" in the fullest sense,
although they may have acquired the truth, " sine
predicante," by an inward vision. Indeed, Revelation
must be ultimately of things, not of words or symbols
of things. It is some communicated experience of God's
presence or providence or fatherhood, of Christ's saving
and atoning power over the soul, of communion with
the Saints, of the forgiveness of sins, of the hope
of immortality, which fills and inspires the spirit of the
prophet, and spontaneously utters and expresses itself
through the categories and images with which his mind
happens to be instructed. To conceive revelation as
necessarily trumpeted from the clouds is surely to be
led astray by the naive symbolism of Christian art.
It is indifferent to the essential idea of revelation
whether the Divine Spirit causes the revealed truth
to spring up in our own minds, or throws a supernatural

"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 315
and revealing light from within on a truth presented
to us from without. In both cases the revelation is
from within, is individual and incommunicable. If this
be " fideism," then all the Fathers and Doctors of the
Church are " fideists," and I am at a loss how to classify
M. L. otherwise than as an " intellectualist." I take
it as indisputable that a man may assent intellectually
to the whole apologetic and theological doctrine of the
Church and yet, for lack of such inward revelation, ,
have no more faith than a dog. As to the object
of Faith, the Divine and hidden Reality, of which
revelation gives us a symbolic presentment, I am sure
that M. L. has no intention of putting himself in
opposition to Catholic tradition as represented by
S. Paul and S. Augustine, and S. Teresa and S. John
of the Cross, and the universal consensus of all mystics
(and indeed of all devout souls), by denying that God
makes Himself directly and immediately felt through His
effects and workings in the religious experience of every
one as a " Power which makes for Righteousness."
I am told that my reviewer in the Bulletin de Lit.
Ecclesiastique (February, 1906) repudiates for himself
any such inward experience of God ; but rather than
admit such abnormality I prefer to think that his
introspective self-analysis is at fault. What God is " in
Himself" and for His own divine experience is " hors
de notre porte'e." Any further knowledge of God is
given to us in the mirror of reason or in that of revela
tion. In no case is it face to face knowledge, but per
speculum, in esnigmate.
When M. L. speaks of our adhesion to revealed truth
as a free adhesion, I am sure he is not referring merely

316 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
to the non-coerciveness of the apologetic reasons in
favour of the Creed, as though their scientific imperfec
tion were a condition of faith, or as though there would
be no room for faith were the demonstration perfect.
Here, I believe, his school has wisely departed from the
doctrine of S. Thomas, that there cannot be faith and
science about the same matter. I am sure he means, as
I do, that revelation, as such, comes to us, not as a
theological argument, perfect or imperfect, but as the
Word of God in the soul and to the soul ; not from flesh
and blood, but from the Father ; that its cogency is in
no sense the cogency of the laws of thought ; that its
freedom is in no sense the freedom of an assent to
probable reasoning, but that of the answer of the soul
to the voice of its Maker. M. L. knows the theology of
his own school too well to be guilty of so crude an
" intellectualism '' as the denial of all this would involve.
He knows that without a pius credulitatis affectus and a
supernatural illuminatio (which must manifestly be some
sort of revelation) no argumentation can elicit more than
mere intellectual assent. It is precisely and only in
virtue of this " illuminatio " that I can " recognise the
divine authority of the Christian Revelation," and
that it becomes a personal revelation from God to my
self; an interior word of God in me addressed to my
own Conscience. Seeing that both the " illuminatio "
and the " pius affectus " are personal and incommuni
cable experiences, it is plain that M. L. does not deny
that the recognition of the divine authority of Chris
tianity cannot be forced upon me by any argument, but
is a personal and direct experience given to the soul by
God, occasioned, but not caused, by external instruction.

"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 317
External instruction can give me " reasons " for holding
the Gospel to be the revealed word of God ; it cannot
throw upon it that supernatural light which God alone
can kindle in my soul. It can elicit theological assent.
It cannot elicit Faith. " Flesh and blood hath not
revealed it to thee, but my Father who is in Heaven."
He can therefore only mean that the " supreme motive
of our faith" is not that "illuminatio" viewed as a mere
psychological event, but its divine authority as a " locutio
Dei," whereby God adopts as His own word what else
(as a mere theological tradition) were but the word of
man — of flesh and blood. If he meant more than this,
I should be inclined to recommend him a closer study
of approved manuals.
When he goes on to say: "L'objet de notre foi ne
sera point ces forces incertaines et vagues que le senti
ment religieux peut entrevoir et postuler," he alludes, I
presume, to that " puissance qui tend vers la justice"
made known to every soul in those elementary and
natural experiences of the moral Conscience which it is
the function of revelation to explain and develop. Now,
that vaguely apprehended Puissance is God. To make
that vague apprehension more distinct is the work of
Revelation — to perfect supernaturally that religious
faculty in man which else admits only of a lower order
and lesser degree of perfection through the use of reason
and observation. Deny this natural religious faculty,
these vague apprehensions of God, and man would be
as little receptive of revelation, as little capable of faith
as a reasonless brute would be of scientific instruction.
I am sure therefore that M. L. does not mean to deny that
God is, as all theologians agree, the central " material

318 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
object" of our faith ; that He is the principal theme of
revelation ; that He is the hidden Sun whose light shines
upon us dimly through the mists and enigmas of revela
tion. What M. L. means is what I mean ; that the
t direct object of faith is revelation — the enigmatic
presentment of Himself which God reveals to us in the
teachings of Christianity.
I will not for one moment allow that M. L. excels me
in respect for the magisterium of the Church, or in his
adhesion to the propositions which it formulates " dans
la mesure qu'il demande et dans le sens qu'il leur donne."
But he must allow — nay, he insists — that the " foi de
charbonnier " is not sufficient for a theologian, and that
there is much latitude of opinion, first, as to what pro
positions can claim the authority of the magisterium ;
secondly, as to the exact sense which it gives to them ;
thirdly, as to the measure of assent it claims for them.
For this reason I have no hesitation whatever in reciting
the Athanasian Creed, though I deny that the easy and
superficial interpretation of such deep theological utter
ances is at all likely to be the true one.
I have therefore shown that I can and do accept every
proposition of this second paragraph as cordially as
M. L. does. To say that I accept them in M. L.'s sense
I should have first to know to which, if any, of the con
flicting scholastic " faith-theories" — S. Thomas's, Suarez's,
De Lugo's, Franzelin's, etc. — he gives his adhesion. For
nowhere is scholasticism, with its coarse psychology
of sharply divided "faculties," more helpless than in
striving to escape the inevitable vicious circle resulting
from the endeavour to treat the act of faith as the con
clusion of an argument, and yet to give it a force im-

"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 319
measurably greater than its premisses — to treat it as an
intellectual process, and yet to exempt it from intellectual
laws. The mere existence of such irreconcilable schools
proves that for Catholics the question as to the nature
and analysis of the act of faith is a perfectly open one.
When the Scholastics shall have agreed among them
selves, we non-scholastics will give all due consideration
to so significant an agreement. Meanwhile, we keep our
liberty. I must now show that the first of the two paragraphs
which I am criticising is, owing to M. L.'s scholastic
prepossessions, a pure travesty of my position.
His words convey, and are plainly intended to con
vey, to the reader that I have no more respect for the
oecumenical definitions of the Church than for the un
authorised conclusions of theology — in a word, that I am
not a Catholic at all. Nor does he hesitate (on p. 550)
to speak of " ces doctrines fideistes " — thus defining the
heresy which should exclude me from the Church. And
he confirms all this by what I say about the preamble
of the Athanasian Creed.
Though I am not a " fideist " I do not wish to repel
the reproach with violence, any more than Christ re
pelled the reproach of being a Samaritan. There are
good Samaritans and good " fideists." There is no
"ism," not even scholasticism, that does not stand for
some partial, but too much neglected, aspect of truth.
To conquer a heresy we must not only understand it,
but sympathise with it ; and it is through the lack of
such sympathetic understanding on the part of Church
men that heresies rise, live and prosper. Much then as
I sympathise with fideism against scholasticism, I also

320 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
sympathise with scholasticism against fideism ; though
I share neither heresy, but am a Catholic sine addito —
neither of Paul, nor of Apollos, nor of Cephas. For
although in its idolatry of the raison raisonnante, in its
contempt of the mystical and sub-conscious side of man's
spiritual nature, in its saturation with the pantheistic
tendencies of its Arabian progenitors, scholasticism has
given birth to the earlier Protestantism, to Socinian-
ism, to Spinozism, to the Deism and Rationalism of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is equally evident
that fideism runs off into vague " mysticality " for lack
of the bridle of systematic reasoning; and that both
alike sin by an inadequate and abstract conception of
the sources of human knowledge and certainty.
Precisely, then, because he is a scholastic, because he
regards the " depositum fidei " as a miraculously com
municated body of theological statements, committed
to the Church's care, to be developed by theological
methods, M. Lebreton necessarily supposes that the
Church is primarily the guardian of a theology ; that
the sole or principal value of her definitions is a theo
logical and scientific value, and that therefore to deny
their theological and scientific values would be to deny
them all value whatsoever.
It is plainly in the interests of truth that I should say
openly, and without hedging, what I think in this
matter ; that I should give M. Lebreton every possible
chance of convicting me of error. For many years
previous to my essay on the Relation of Theology to
Devotion} I held his thesis and did my best to defend
it, till its utter inadequacy forced me into my present
1 Chapter iii.

"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 321
very tentative position. In an article entitled " Semper
Eadem,"1 I endeavoured to delineate the desperate con
sequences that must result from the supposition that
the use of certain philosophical and scientific categories
for the expression of divine realities (whether in revela
tion or in the dogmatic pronouncements of the Church)
lent a divine authority to the systems from which those
categories were borrowed. I pointed out that it would
imply a revelation of natural philosophy and of science
concurrent with a revelation of supernatural truth. It
would follow that, under pain of sin against faith, Catholic
philosophers and scientists would be bound to work
within the limits of those categories ; and that since the
liberty to criticise and reconstitute categories is the sine
qua non of scientific progress, they would necessarily be
confined to the mere explication and application of
principles involved in their faith. This seemed to me
to make Science not the handmaid, but the slave of re
vealed truth. I asked : " Does the deposit of faith, and
do the infallible definitions of the Church bind us abso
lutely to the categories and thought-forms of the age in
which they were formulated ? " I am still waiting for a
plain answer to this plain question, and I trust M. L. will
enlighten me. The consequences of either "Yes" or
"No" are sufficiently momentous to merit a reply. Those
of the affirmative answer (which I need not develop here
and can be found in the said article) seemed to me so fatal
to religion that I was driven to consider those of the
negative. But here, too, it seemed plain that what I
described as " liberal theology," i.e. a theology unfettered
by deference to the formulations of the Past, was in-
1 Chapter iv.

322 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
compatible with the traditional reverence given to the
utterances of Revelation and of oecumenical councils.
The synthesis already implied in my article on the
" Relation of Theology to Devotion," and developed in
" The Rights and Limits of Theology," 1 seemed to lie in
distinguishing between the prophetic, oracular, or super
natural value of such utterances, and their philosophic,
scientific, and natural values ; and in regarding these
latter as but ministerial to the former, as the mere
vehicle or medium of expression, as winning a certain
consecration from their use, yet as in no wise limiting
the freedom of mental development.
On closer examination it became clear to me that
such a view, far from being a " modernism," was simply
a reaction towards the teaching of the Fathers, and a
renunciation of that theory of development which treats
revelation not as the mere subject-matter of theological
reflection, but as itself a theology ; which makes it an
inherent and fundamental part of the theological Whole.
Development of this sort would place the Church of
earlier ages at a great spiritual disadvantage, and would
stultify the appeal of the Fathers to the criterion of
actual (not merely of virtual) apostolicity of tradition.
If the first ages possessed but the germs and rudiments
of Christian truth, and we possess the organism in
a highly developed stage, it is an equivocation to say
that there has been no increase of revelation. Every
filling-in and determination of vague principles and out
lines is an increase of knowledge in whatever order of
knowledge it be. A schoolboy who has mastered the
first book of Euclid knows more than when he knew
1 Chapter viii.

"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 323
only the definitions and axioms from which it is de
veloped. Not only for the Fathers but for S. Thomas,
and for all theologians till comparatively recent times,
the "sameness" of the faith in all ages was a literal
sameness and not that of a growing organism. For
them, the function of the Church's magisterium was not
to add to, but to protect and to keep unchanged the
revelation committed to her care — a work which de
manded divine assistance and a special providence, but
in no wise a new inspiration or a further revelation.
The above distinction between revelation and
theology ; between prophetic truth and the scientific
formulation of prophetic truth ; between the illustrative
meaning and the proper meaning of philosophical and
scientific propositions or terms,1 seemed at once to
bring me into line with the older Catholic instincts, and
to offer a readier solution of those difficulties which the
modern insistence on Development is vainly designed
to meet.
I recognise then two fountains of religious truth —
natural and supernatural, reason and revelation, and
two corresponding styles of utterance — the one scienti
fically exact, the other prophetic and inspired ; the one
under the control of man's will and calculation, the
other given to him, or forced from him, by the Spirit
qui locutus est per prophetas. To bring these two
generically different orders of truth and utterance into
one system by a sort of " confusion of natures," by
using prophetic utterances as theological premisses, by
1 A proposition of astronomy may be asserted in the interests of
astronomy, or simply to protect or illustrate a truth in some other order, in
which latter case the said truth is its " dominant " meaning.

324 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
giving supernatural authority to scientific terms and
propositions (qua scientific), is to lose oneself in a
labyrinth of insoluble difficulties. It is equally vain to
deny the close dependence of these two systems —
theology and revelation — which conspire to one and the
same end of religious truth and stand in the relation
of scientific reflection and the subject-matter of that
reflection ; which therefore, retaining their distinctness,
help one another each in its own order. The nature of
this dependence I have described in " The Rights and
Limits of Theology," and in Lex Credendi (under the
Second Petition). I assume, with the Fathers, that the
revelation given through Christ and His Apostles, apart
from any subsequent theological reflection, contained
all that was needful for the fullest life of Faith, Hope,
and Charity. With them too I hold that the death of
the last apostle closed the normative or classical period
of Christian inspiration. Not that revelation, which is
in some degree a privilege given to every living soul,
ceased abruptly; but that all such subsequent revela
tions need to be tested and tried by their agreement in
spirit with the normative apostolic revelation. Their
relation to it is that of the work of the disciples of a
school of painting to the work of its founder and
master. To call them " developments " in the sense of
scientific or theological developments is somewhat con
fusing and misleading : "the disciple is not greater than
his Master." Seeing that revelation is not a work of
deliberate understanding and judgment, but the in
spired, spontaneous, and natural self-expression of the
Divine Spirit in man, we have no right to look for any
kind of development of Revelation that would neces-

"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 325
sarily set the Past at a disadvantage with the Present or
Future. The development of man's spirit is properly
and immediately a development of his understanding
and judgment. His instincts, his passions, his affec
tions, his love of Truth, of Goodness, of Beauty, his
love of God and man, are more or less constant in their
varieties and irregular distribution. They may become
progressively better instructed, better directed, owing to
the development of his understanding ; but as forces
they do not develop. If anything, they have been
stronger under barbarism and weaker under culture.
Their refinement has often been at the cost of their
vigour. It cannot be pretended that moral and religious
heroism have gone hand in hand with ethical and theo
logical progress. The gain of such progress has been
to direct and school, but not to augment, these spiritual
forces. We know more theology than S. Peter or S. Mary
Magdalene or S. Paul ; but do we believe more or hope
more or love more ? Does the Church produce a more
full-blown and abundant sanctity to-day than formerly ?
Yet if there is no development of hope and charity why
should there be a development of faith ? If there is no
progress in supernatural life, what need of a progress in
supernatural light ? For this reason I find no difficulty
whatever in accepting literal (not merely implicit)
apostolicity, in the patristic sense, as the criterion of
faith, and cannot but regret that confusion of revelation
with theology which seems to allow of a " development "
of the " deposit of faith." The " substantial " identity
of the boy and the man, of the acorn and the oak, does
not get over the fact that the man is more than the
boy and the oak more than the acorn ; and that a

326 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
developed revelation is a further and fuller revelation
than its germ ; just as the physical science of to-day
is a fuller science than that of a century ago.
The apostolic revelation is precisely that construction
of the supernatural world, and of this world in its
supernatural aspect, which is demanded by, and in
volved in, the Christian life and the Christian spirit.
It is itself the inspired and spontaneous creation of
that spirit; no deliberate work of understanding, re
flection, and inference ; but a prophetic vision. Not an
intellectual and theological synthesis within the appre
hension of a cultured few ; but an imaginative present
ment within the apprehension of all — revelasti eaparvulis.
As here the wise have no advantage over the simple, so
neither has a later and cultured century over a barbarous
and earlier. It is in the light and by the guidance of
this prophetic vision that the Christian life is lived. The
materials of which it is built up are necessarily borrowed
from the mental furniture, the popular beliefs, the im
ages, the theological, scientific, and historical conceptions
of the people to whom it was first accorded.
If it be asked, in what the religious truth of such a
revelation or prophetic utterance consists, it is plainly in
its adequacy as an inspired, yet avowedly symbolic,
presentment of the supernatural order of reality; and
secondarily, in its consequent efficiency in shaping and
directing our spiritual life in harmony with that super
natural order. As regards the materials of which this
presentment is constructed — the categories and judg
ments and conceptions of the contemporary Jewish and
Hellenic mind — it is not their several proper values,
but their collective illustrative value or truth which

"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 327
possesses the authority of revelation and demands the
response of faith. The ascent of Christ into Heaven,
His descent into Hell, present the same image to those
who believed in, and to us who do not believe in, the
ancient cosmology. The hidden object of faith is the
same, and the practical religious consequences are the
same. But it is the illustrative and not the proper
truth of the cosmological category which is divinely
guaranteed. If M. L. thinks otherwise I invite him to
say so frankly and to stand by the consequences. For
centuries Churchmen held that cosmology to be as
closely bound up with revelation as many scholastics
now suppose hylomorphism to be. Both in a sense are
right ; but it is the illustrative and not the proper values
that are consecrated or canonised.
To suppose otherwise ; to consider the proper values
of these conceptions as binding on faith ; to build on
these proper values a sacred system of theology, phil
osophy, science, and history would be (and has been) to
wrest all these departments of perfectly natural know
ledge from the jurisdiction of observation and reason,
and to make them not the free servants, but the crippled
slaves, of revealed truth.
Of this normative apostolic revelation, this prophetic
vision of the Kingdom of God, the Church is, according to
Catholic teaching, the divinely assisted guardian. De
positum custodi is the substance and the limit of her
teaching-office and authority. Her work is to perpetuate,
unchanged, in the consciousness of all generations, that
same revealed construction of the supernatural order
by which the faith, hope, and charity of the apostolic
age was determined and characterised. Her work of

328 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
guardianship is also necessarily a work of interpretation.
For although much of the pure imagery of which the
apostolic revelation is woven must be the same for all
men at all times, yet many of the categories, conceptions,
and judgments belonged only to the time and place of
its origin — nay, even some of the connotations of its
images (Fatherhood, Sonship, Kingship, etc.) are as
variable as man's social institutions.
From this it follows that a merely literal tradition of
that revelation would be surely misinterpreted by minds
dominated by other philosophical, scientific, and his
torical systems than those of the apostolic age ; that it
would give them a somewhat different construction of
the supernatural order, a different impression, a different
spirit, a different guidance. Against these corruptions
and variations it is for the Church to preserve unity
of spirit, — " One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God
and Father of all " ; and this she does by denying or
modifying those elements of current philosophic or scien
tific or historical belief which, rightly or wrongly, lead
to the misconstruction and misinterpretation of the
depositum fidei and threaten the unity and pure aposto
licity of the Christian Faith.
Has she, then, a special charisma of philosophical and
scientific intuition ? Does she proceed by the historico-
critical method to reconstruct the apostolic mentality?
Have Catholics the unspeakable advantage over other
thinkers and searchers of a supernatural short-cut to
certainty in matters otherwise accessible only to observa
tion and reason ? History scarcely bears out such a
supposition. For instead of a miraculous acceleration of
scientific advance, what we have to explain is that, in its

"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 329
conflicts with natural reason, dogmatic authority has not
merely occasionally, but almost invariably — as it were
infallibly — been in the wrong as far as the "proper
value " of its philosophic or scientific utterances is con
cerned. For this I need only refer to the cumulative
argument furnished by the documentary evidence col
lected in such books as Dr. Andrew White's Warfare of
Science with Theology}
It is impossible, then, to accept so low a conception of
the Church's authority as this which represents her as
wrangling with reason on its own ground and coming
out of the conflict dishonoured and defeated. Her
mission, like that of her Master, is not to the wise and
prudent, but to the little ones, and her methods are no
less naive and simple. He who has forbidden her the
sword of physical violence has surely not entrusted her
with the no less fleshly weapons of mental subtlety or
philosophical acumen : " non in persuasibilibus humanae
sapientiae." Her mission is prophetic and her method
is prophetic. It is by the Spirit that she interprets the
Spirit — not by argumentation, but by a divine instinct
or tact. It is this spiritual instinct that bids her
hold out, with a certain blindness and " unreasonable "
obstinacy, against any assertion of reason so long
as, and so far as, it imperils, or seems to imperil,
the sense and the spirit of the apostolic revelation.
Her utterances are prophetic, and must be interpreted
prophetically, and not necessarily according to their sur
face and proper value. They are divine oracles. As
such, their sense is more or less cryptic and enigmatic.
To treat them as miraculous "theologoumena" is to
1 Appleton, New York.

330 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
degrade them to the plane of reason. Their prophetic
value or meaning is not that of a new revelation, but
that of the apostolic revelation which they are designed
to protect. It is a protective value. Depositum custodi —
that is the Church's commission. The truth or meaning
which they commend to our faith is not a truth of
philosophy, or theology, or any other human science, but
that of the Divine Revelation which they protect and
implicitly reassert. If we are told that the sun moves
round the earth, we must remember that we are dealing
not with an astronomical but with a prophetic and
Scriptural utterance, that the meaning of such an utter
ance in dogma, as in Scripture, is rarely the surface
meaning, but must often wait on time for its disclosure ;
that it has been dictated by some obscure religious
instinct or interest not usually fully self-conscious, such
(e.g.) as a belief in the inspiration of Scripture.
When, therefore, M. L. says : " Nous adhererons aux
propositions que l'Eglise formule dans la mesure ou elle
le demande et dans le sens qu'elle leur donne," the rule
he lays down is not so simple as he supposes. Were it
so, it would be hard to explain that ail-but invariable
conflict between dogma and reason which, in the right
view of the matter, is neither surprising nor scandalous,
but which would be most scandalous if the Church
claimed infallibility in the field of science, and bound
our faith not merely to the "protective" but to the
" proper " significance of her dogmatic utterances.
Does it follow from all this that I think as lightly of
oecumenical decisions as of the conclusions of un
authorised theological speculation ; that, even when the
Church adopts such conclusions and lends them the

"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 331
authority of her magisterium, they remain for me theology
and nothing more? This is what M. L. charges me
with. Let me remind him that according to his own school
the theological reasonings on which a Council bases its
dogmatic conclusions are not the cause of, and do not
participate in, the infallibility of that conclusion ; that
were all the said reasoning invalidated, it would not lessen
the authority of the decision in any degree. What does
this mean except that it is not in the name of theology,
or on the strength of theology, that this conclusion is
authorised ; that when thus adopted by the Church it is
imposed on our faith not as a theological, but as an
oracular and prophetic pronouncement. Were we bound
to its theological as well as to its protective value, we
should be no less bound to all its implicit and necessary
theological premisses. We are not then allowed to treat
such dogmas as infallible theology, or to regard the
Church of Christ as an infallible theologian. Like her
Master and His apostles she teaches through the Spirit
and not through reasoning, theological or otherwise; or,
rather, she guards and protects what they have already
taught. It is clear that many largely obsolete categories of
Jewish and Hellenic thought, which are woven into the
prophetic presentment of the supernatural order given
us in the apostolic revelation, have been thereby conse
crated and canonised, and retained for ever their
illustrative, though not their proper, value and signifi
cance. So, too, those categories, theological or other
wise, in which from time to time the Church has
couched her dogmatic decisions, are canonised and

332 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
consecrated, and retain for ever their protective, though
not necessarily their proper, value, be it philosophical,
theological, or scientific. These dogmas are for ever
true as to their deepest sense. They are true with the
truth of that revelation which they reassert and protect,
but to which they do not and cannot add.
Again, as many terms and conceptions of the apostolic
revelation were liable to be misconstrued by minds of
a different period and culture, and needed the protec
tive interpretations of the Church, so these same inter
pretations, being adapted to a certain mentality, needed
in their turn the protection of subsequent decisions, lest
for a later mentality they might pervert rather than pro
tect the sense of primitive revelation. Taken all together,
not according to their proper values, but to their
protective and prophetic values, they give us, not a
dialectically developed body of theological truth, but
a more or less accidental congeries of defensive propo
sitions, whose religious truth is in every case the re
asserted truth of the revelation which they protect. To
look on the whole series of the Church's dogmatic
decisions as governed by any sort of law of growth or
development, is to suppose that heresies arise in some
necessary logical order. We might as well look for
such order in the successive repairs and patches and
buttresses of an ancient citadel assailed at sundry
times and in diverse manners, now from this side, now
from that. After-thought may classify these protective
measures for convenience, as far as they will admit of
classification. But even the most superficial examina
tion of our creeds in the light of history shows lacunae
and irregularities quite inconsistent with an orderly

"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 333
logical or organic development. Each dogma records
a battle or a storm. It stands as a bulwark erected by
Faith in the defence of Revelation. But not only is
their religious truth, i.e. their revealed implication, bind
ing on the faith of all ages ; but their " proper " and
explicit meaning for the thought of their time has a
doctrinal value for other generations with other fashions
of thought. Were our age, by its ignorance of the
history of thought, incapable of understanding the
mentality (philosophic, scientific, and historic) of the
apostolic age ; were we to read the New Testament
crudely in the light of our modern mind, we should
certainly understand it amiss in many substantial points.
But by means of criticism we can overcome this diffi
culty. Similarly, for the instructed theologian, the
dogmatic utterances of past ages possess a value which
they cannot possess for the uninstructed in whose
behalf new utterances are needed from time to time.
Through them he can learn the identity of the Chris
tian revelation and spirit under all varieties of their
practical and speculative expression ; he can study the
nature of their unchanging substance manifested through
its actions and reactions in an endless multitude of com
binations. These utterances are monuments marking
the Church's progress through the centuries, from which
monuments he may decipher the unchanging unity of
that revelation to which they bear indirect witness.
If, however, it is now evident that M. L. has unin
tentionally travestied my meaning, and implied that
oecumenical decisions mean as little to me as theo
logical conclusions do, yet it cannot be denied that my
interpretation of their value is very different from his.

334 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
I might urge that such a theological restatement of the
value of ecclesiastical dogmas is not more revolutionary
than the restatement of the value of Scriptural utter
ances which is slowly being forced on theologians ; that
in both cases it is simply a yielding to the pressure
of the accumulating evidence by which Divine Provi
dence forces such a restatement upon us ; that what the
Fathers and Doctors of the past have said as to the
literal and surface interpretation of dogma is as nothing
to what they have said about the literal and surface
interpretation of Scripture ; that in neither case is there
any need of a " new theology," but only of a more exact,
pure, and careful statement of the same truth which the
older theology uttered less purely and exactly according
to the only categories then at its disposal.
This conception of the whole body of ecclesiastical
dogmas as a protective husk wrapped round the kernel
of apostolic revelation is eminently patristic ; far more
so than the view which regards that revelation as a
rudimentary theology which the Church has developed
dialectically by applications and explications — thus
making the husk continuous with the kernel and of like
texture. Nor is it only the dogmatic utterances of the
Church, but the entire ecclesiastical apparatus of institu
tions and customs which go to constitute this protective
envelope. Harnack is unfortunate both in his admis
sion and in his metaphor, when he allows that the
Gospel could not have survived save for the protecting
husk of ecclesiastical dogmas and institutions. That we
do not eat the husk does not prove that it is worthless,
since without it we could not have the kernel. Kernel
and husk alike are the output of one and the same vital

"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 335
principle. Just because ecclesiasticism is necessary for
the protection of the Gospel, it is evidently the creation
of the same spirit : " Qui vult finem, vult et media ad
finem." Whatever be the fault of my interpretation of the
value of ecclesiastical dogma it has at least the merit
of making peace between faith and reason by so putting
the realms of authority and science on different planes
as to render collision impossible, and of thus ending a
secular conflict which has been a source of infinite
scandal and has no better basis than an imperfect
criticism of principles. To pretend that this synthesis
is complete or wholly satisfactory would be to condemn
it as unworthy of serious consideration. There is no
final truth in such complex matters ; only a truth of
tendency and direction. Still when M. L. (p. 442)
complains of the incompleteness of my system I cannot
but think it is due to his scholastic eagerness to
classify me as a Fideist or a Newmanist or a Liberal
Catholic, and so to lighten his critical task by ascribing
to me all the usual opinions of my supposed school or
party. Had he studied me in my isolation and
individuality I think he might have failed to classify
me in the end, but he might also have discovered a
unity in my thought which his partisan prepossessions
have caused him to miss. Liberal Catholics are not
cast in one mould like seminary students ; nor are all
admirers of Newman or Loisy sworn to a servile imita
tion of their views. I am in some respects much more
old-fashioned than either, in other respects much more
new-fashioned. But since M. L. undoubtedly holds the simpler view of

336 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
a divinely revealed rudimentary theology developed by
an infallible ecclesiastical dialectic, I feel I have a right
to point out one or two of the many difficulties which
have driven me from that very much more comfortable
position to which I entreat M. L. to restore me if he
possibly can. And since he finds fault with my inter
pretation of the Creed of S. Athanasius, I propose to
put before him some of the difficulties I experience in
accepting his interpretation of it. Besides, in so doing,
I shall confine myself to the question of the value
of theological categories used in dogmatic utterances,
since it is mainly about theology and not about other
sciences that the controversy between us becomes acute.
Undoubtedly there is no difference of principle between
the dogmatic valuation of theological and of astronomical
or biological concepts and propositions. Like any
science, theology (as distinct from the revelation
which is its subject-matter) belongs to the jurisdiction
of observation and reflection, and is a matter not of
faith but of understanding. Yet because (albeit on the
plane of natural reason) it deals with God, its liberation
from the jurisdiction of revelation is felt to be more
perilous than that growing liberation of other sciences
which, if not granted by M. L.'s school of thought, is at
least not too vehemently denied. There is a disposition
not to press the purely natural scientific implications of
dogma and revelation too imprudently in these evil
times ; but when it comes to the categories of religious
or moral philosophy, such compliance is not possible for
those who view revelation as a supernaturally communi
cated theological science rather than as a prophetic pre
sentment of the realities of time and eternity.

"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 337
M. L., then, censures me for saying that the object
proposed to our faith in the Athanasian Creed is not
the theological analysis or translation of the apostolic
revelation, but is that revelation itself. He will not
be content to allow to that analysis a merely protective
value for a certain mentality of the past, and a present
and eternal witness-value as to the unity of faith amid
the variety of its theological reactions. He holds, not
merely as I do, that the mental categories used in the
expression of revelation and dogma are sacrosanct and
not to be tampered with ; but also, that they are
divinely guaranteed as scientifically valid and final ;
that they constitute a revealed philosophy, a criterion of
valid reasoning, sovereign (directly or indirectly) over
the whole realm of human thought. He holds that :
" The Word was made Flesh " binds both our faith
and our reason to the "Logos" category of Philo to
gether with all its inevitable philosophical implications;1
— that Transubstantiation binds both our faith and our
reason to the scholastic categories of Substance and

1 This position may be best illustrated by its opposite. " The evangelist
is seeking to express ideas essentially religious under metaphysical categories
which were in this matter inadequate to his purpose. ... It was a form
borrowed from the time, and the vital teaching of the Gospel can be dis
engaged from it." (E. F. Scott, M.A., The Fourth Gospel, p. 367. Edin
burgh, T. and T. Clark, 1906.) Here I would add that, thanks to the
difference of form, new aspects and bearings of the underlying truth are
revealed which could not be revealed through the synoptic form ; that if
the substance revealed is the same it is seen differently through different
media. (Cf. p. 319, ibid.) "We can recognise that under the categories of
an alien philosophy John is striving to set forth the facts of a profound
religious experience. . . . He was conscious of a living fellowship with
Christ, which had meant life and peace and illumination to him ; and
assurance was given to him that in this fellowship with Christ he had
entered into communion with God Himself."

338 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
Accident together with all their inevitable philosophical
implications, that he who denies these categories and
their implications : " shall without doubt perish everlast
ingly." Of course M. L. makes allowance for those
idiotcs who, through invincible ignorance and theological
incapacity, "know not the law," and are thereby shut
out from the plenitude of faith and spiritual enlighten
ment. But he plainly means that there is a large class
of educated people, including theologians, who, unless
they submit their philosophical reason to be shaped and
governed by these Alexandrine and Scholastic cate
gories, will, without doubt, perish everlastingly. Having
had much the same theological advantages as M. L.
I cannot plead the invincible ignorance of the " idiotae.''
" What, then," I ask myself somewhat nervously, " are
my chances of salvation if M. L. is right ? "
The Platonic and Alexandrine1 categories of the
Athanasian Creed — Person, Nature, Substance, Unity,
Conversion, Assumption — though akin to, are not quite
identical with those of Scholasticism with which I am
familiar ; and here at once there is danger of some
intellectual confusion that may imperil my salvation.
I may understand in a Scholastic sense what is meant in
an Alexandrine sense. M. L. says : " Respectueux de
tout le magistere de l'Eglise, nous adhererons aux pro
positions qu'il formule, dans la mesure oil il le demande,
et dans le sens qu'il leur donne . . . nous reciterons sans
hesitation le symbole de Saint Athanase." I confess I
am too conscious of my ignorance and of the dimness
1 I do not pretend to decide the question as to the Eastern or Western
origin of the Creed. In either case its categories are pre-scholastic and
more or less Alexandrine.

"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 339
of my metaphysical intuitions to share M. L.'s cheerful
confidence and inhesitancy. I might assent to many of
the clauses of this Creed with a blind " foi de charbon-
nier," but I could never be sure that I had gripped their
exact meaning. Yet I am told this fides implicita is not
enough for a theologian ; that I must get my brain
right, as well as my heart. I have a hazy idea that this
Creed was called into existence by certain old-world
controversies about Substance and Person that hung
largely on the ambiguity of the term ousia, which stood
sometimes for the "substantia prima," sometimes for
the " substantia secunda " of the Aristotelian categories.
Unless I know all this controversy to my fingers' ends,
which I do not, I may easily misread the Creed with
my scholastic spectacles — to my eternal ruin.
Yet even if I am allowed to interpret the Creed in a
scholastic sense, I am not much better off. I know that,
as regards the category of natural human personality,
Thomists, Scotists, Suarezians, etc., are at daggers
drawn, and that it is impossible to assign any fixed
content to the category about which they will agree.
They only agree in repudiating just the one meaning
which personality conveys to modern ears — i.e. a unit of
will and intelligence. Tell any educated man in these
days that there is but one person in Christ, and you
make him a Monophysite or Monothelite. Tell him
there are two wills and two minds in Christ, and you
make him a Nestorian. Tell him there are three perons
in God, and he will suppose three wills. Tell him there
is but one will, he will suppose one person. To cure
him of his Tritheism or his Unitarianism you will have
to tell him that in theology personality does not mean

340 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
what it means elsewhere ; that theologians are not yet
agreed as to what it does mean ; but that whatever it
means in the human order, it means something far less
definable and merely analogous in the Divine order. Is
there not some danger of the cure being worse than the
disease, and leading to a lapse into pantheism or atheism
through the denial of any mental content whatever
answering to the term " person " ?
For such a modernised layman perhaps the " foi de
charbonnier " may suffice owing to his " invincible
ignorance." But since this " implicit faith " on the part
of some, supposes an " explicit faith " on the part of
others, and since there must be some public to whose
mind all this dogmatic instruction is addressed, what
about theologians like M. L. and myself? Are not we
at least bound to assent to some clear and definite
mental judgment corresponding to the propositions of
the Creed? M. L. will say so. Yet I am afraid
that, whereas for the aforesaid layman, who "adheres
without hesitation " to them, the propositions mean
something absolutely heretical, for me and for M. L., in
the measure that we are trained scholastic theologians,
they mean either nothing at all, or something so vague
and indefinite that we could never be certain of anything
beyond a mere verbal agreement with those who com
piled the Creed. In other words, if its theological cate
gories and judgments be matter of faith, then our faith
too is merely a " foi de charbonnier" — faith in the faith
of others ; and, since this is not enough for us theologians ,
we " shall without doubt perish everlastingly." Not be
cause we deny what is true, or affirm what is false, but
because in the absence of any presentable mental con-

"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 341
cepts we have not the materials for a judgment one way
or the other. So much for the difficulties connected
with the idea of personality. Passing over those that
spring from the less familiar and more abstract idea of
substance or nature, let me turn to those relative to the
eternal generation of the Son by the Father without
any co-principle of conception and parturition. On the
face of it, the mental equivalent of these words is
not easily represen table. What sort of "fatherhood" is
that which does not postulate a correlative "mother
hood" ? Who can attach meaning to reproduction by
way of " generation " alone without any corresponding
conception, gestation and parturition ? Would not an
eternal and original parturition of the Son by a Divine
Mother symbolise all we believe just as aptly and far more
presentably? It is easy to fit words together, but unless
we can fit their meanings together we cannot assent ;
we can only repeat like parrots. Have we even a vague
generic idea of this eternal generation, active and passive?
But for a theologian a vague generic idea of production
or radiation or emanation will not do ; " nee factus, nee
creatus, sed genitus." He must distinguish "generation"
from "creation" and from "making," not merely verbally
(like a layman or charbonnier) but mentally by distinct
ideas and representations. Moreover, he must have a
distinct mental representation of that " procession " of
the Holy Spirit which, being from a double principle
(the Father and the Son), is, so far, more akin to
"generation " and yet it is not generation; and he must
see, from the content of his concepts, that the one
ought to be, and that the other ought not to be called
" generation."

342 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
It is well, perhaps, to make my point clear. If by
Filius est genitus ; Spiritus est procedens non genitus I
only mean Filius est X ; Spiritus est Y, non X, my
faith is, according to M. L., not that of a theologian, but
of a peasant. I must have definite concepts of X and
Y and of their distinctness. I must see that Divine
Sonship has something in common with human sonship
that distinguishes it from creation, from making, and
from procession. This cannot be likeness and identity
of nature, which belong also to the Holy Spirit ; nor is
it temporal posteriority, nor dependence, nor community
of gender, nor some element of what we understand by
the process of active or passive generation. Will
M. Lebreton tell me what precise content is left ? It is
doubly important, as we know nothing of the second
person except what is contained in this predicate genitus,
which leaves us with the proposition, Genitus est genitus
or Filius est filius. There is nothing beyond the con
tent of the predicate whereby even to designate the
subject. To all intents and purposes both are proper
names, since the Genitus is unique and incommunicable.
Petrus est Petrus has meaning because it implies
humanity which we know ; but X is X has none till X
is intelligibly determined. If we cannot give content
to this X our ignorance is total.
Then the work proceeds from its maker ; the creature
from the Creator, the Son from the Father ; but the
procession of the Spirit is none of these. What is it
then ? Spiration ? Spiritus est spiratus ? Y is Y ?
" Breathing " is plainly a metaphor. And man's spirit
is created by God, not "breathed" forth, and there
fore gives us no analogy ; nor do spirits make or

'THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 343

create or beget or expire spirits. Will M. L. tell me
what precise content is left to this Y to distinguish it
from X? He surely must know, since his salvation
depends on it. Revelation is not of words, but of
meanings. For myself, till better instructed, I must
regard these propositions not as having metaphysical,
but merely protective value ; as reasserting the prophetic
utterance of the Apostolic revelation which presents
us with One God and with three Divine Persons — a
Father, a Son, a Spirit — utterances that would be con
tradictory were they metaphysical and not merely
prophetical and symbolic ; which possess an imaginative
and devotional and practical value ; which dimly
shadow forth a truth that defies definition, yet excludes
Unitarianism, Arianism, Tritheism, Sabellianism, and
every similar impertinence of metaphysical curiosity.
It is not as theological, but as anti-theological, that
the Creed has a protective value. It pulverises every
attempt at a rationalistic and literal explanation of
purely prophetic utterances.
And now it is to theological propositions, built up
of concepts like these — vague, shifting, semi-intellectual,
semi-imaginative — that M. L. considers himself bound,
as a theologian, to yield not merely a verbal and
external assent, but an intellectual and internal assent
under pain of anathema. Frankly, I cannot believe
that either he or I are in such jeopardy of our souls.
I think it will be enough if we recite that Creed with
perhaps little more intelligence than the educated lay
man or the uneducated coal-heaver, conscious all the
time that our intelligence gives us no spiritual advantage
over them, nor makes our Faith other or better than

344 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
theirs, nor gives us any fuller measure of that Truth
which is revealed to the simple and hidden from the
wise and prudent. We can recite it with a clearer
consciousness that it is the protective and "revelational"
values, and not the proper and theological values, of
its propositions that are proposed to our faith. We
may more easily than they discern in it, not a monu
ment of " intellectualism," but one of the many bul
warks against the aggressions of intellectualism which
the self-protective instinct of Christianity has erected
in the face of theologies that would trouble or destroy
that Faith of the simple which is the standard of all
Faith. We may feel a certain admiring exultation
at the defiance upon defiance hurled in the teeth of
any reasoning, how plausible soever, which has not
yet proved its compatibility with that revealed con
struction of the supernatural order given to us by
the prophetic spirit of the Apostolic age. As a
product of the shock between revelation and reason,
this Creed may bear witness more readily for us than
for them to the unity of faith from age to age under
the infinite variety of its reactions, and of its combina
tions with diverse mentalities. We should as little
tolerate any tampering with its consecrated formulas
as with the more solemn sacramental rites and cere
monies which bind the ages and nations of Catholicism
together and admit the individual of to-day to a
participation in the life of the whole Church from
the very beginning. We should feel as little sympathy
with such crude efforts at " restatement " as with the
mendacious " concordism " that works on a coarse
mechanical idea of the spiritual unity of the Sacred

"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 345
Scriptures. We desire to preserve in its integrity
every monument of the Church's Past, in the light of
which alone we can understand her Present and prepare
for her Future. It is just in the interests of this true
conservative spirit that we must set our faces against
taking the documents of a remote past "unhesitatingly"
according to their surface sense, and must interpret
them cautiously and critically in the light of the par
ticular mentality and need from which they sprang
and to which they were addressed. The Christian
Revelation is as stable and unprogressive as man's
spiritual forces of love, human and divine ; " the same
yesterday, to-day, and for ever." Theology is as
variable as his intelligence and information ; to-day
different from yesterday ; to-morrow from to-day. And
yet just because it is so pregnant with life and meaning
for us, palpitating as it were with the heart-pulses
of the Revelation which it covers and protects, this
Creed may well be a source of puzzlement and con
fusion, not to the illiterate charbonnier, but to the
educated layman, who is apt to receive it "unhesita
tingly " as theology rather than as protective dogma ;
and therefore we shall be glad that, unlike the Anglican
Church, the Church of Rome has practically reserved
it for clerical use.
What I have said of the Alexandrine categories of
the Athanasian Creed applies equally to the Scholastic
categories of later dogmatic decisions ; nay, to those
earlier categories in which "revelational" and not
merely " protective " values have been conveyed to us —
to the diversified theological categories of the Pen
tateuch, of the Psalms and the Prophets, of the

346 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
Hellenised Old Testament writings, of the Synoptics,
of the Pauline and Johannine documents. Surely M. L.
will not deny that these, together with the various
theological categories of the Christian ages, belong to
perfectly irreconcilable thought-systems ! Surely he will
not pretend that they can be united in one and the same
metaphysic to be imposed on our faith as the revealed
Word of God ! Will he maintain that the metaphysic
latent in Genesis III is the same as that latent in John I ?
Or to take a more congenial instance, will he maintain
that the same psychology underlies the definition of the
Council of Vienne which declares that man's soul is the
" form " of his body, and the clause of the Athanasian
Creed : "As the reasonable soul and the human flesh are
one man ; so God and man are one Christ " ? Does he
not know quite well that, for Alexandrine thought, body
and soul were two complete substances, and not matter
and form, co-principles of one single substance ? Is it
not plain that to reconcile these pronouncements we
must look to their illustrative and protective values, and
not to their proper values ; to their bearing on the
Apostolic Revelation ; not to their bearing on purely
intellectual problems?
I own to a little surprise that in what professes to be
a critique of my whole theological position, M. L. shows
no acquaintance with the later articles which I published
in The Month on the subject in question — e.g. with
" Mysteries, a Necessity of Life " ; still more with
" Semper Eadem," which caused a certain flutter in
Jesuit dove-cotes and eventually brought my connec
tion with that sedate periodical to an end. In that
article I ventured to present M. L.'s view clearly and

" THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 347
distinctly with all its consequences — the view namely
that " deposit of faith," the " form of sound words," in
which Apostolic revelation was first given to us, is a
rudimentary theology susceptible of strictly dialectical
development ; that its theological and scientific implica
tions are divinely authorised, not only as illustrative of
super-scientific reality, but as principles and criteria of
correct reasoning. My intention was to exclude two
conceptions of doctrinal development, one of which
practically ignores the patristic belief in a definite
verbal deposit of faith, the same for all ages and
peoples — a norm and criterion of the true Christian
spirit and life ; while the other treats the same deposit
as the first chapter of ecclesiastical theology, and thereby
not only admits the quite unpatristic notion of a de
velopment of Faith, but brings theology and all science
to a standstill by subjecting them to the categories of a
particular age and locality. The solution (hinted at in
the final paragraphs) lies in the recognition of that
generic diversity of prophetic and theological utterance,
which forbids the attempt to weld revelation and
theology into one system, or to relate them otherwise
than as a concrete subject-matter is related to its
science. In that article, which many of M. L.'s confreres
applauded with both hands for its exact presentment of
their views, I described the "Depositum fidei" in the
following terms : " Catholic theology occupies itself
about the « deposit of faith ' as its principal object. By
this it understands a certain body of divine knowledge
revealed supernatually to the Apostles and delivered by
them under the form of certain categories, ideas and

348 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
images, to the immediate successors. This formulated
revelation is the depositum fidei. It was not as though
the tabernacle doors of the heavens, thrown open to the
Apostles, were to remain so for ever. What the
Apostles saw, they recorded and formulated. To their
followers they transmitted the record ; not the privilege
of direct vision."
"If the heavens, once opened to the Apostles,
remained open to every baptised Christian ; if the same
revelation, and not merely the record of that revelation,
were given to each of us as to them, then we should
need no depositum fidei, no divinely authorised standard v
of expression ; we should be comparatively indifferent
to the efforts of past ages to formulate that vision ; they
would be to us as men's first savage attempts to formu
late Nature — the earlier the worse. But it is rather as
though centuries ago men had been struck blind and
partially paralysed, and as if our knowledge of Nature
depended on what was handed down to us from the date
of that calamity. How carefully we should have to
treasure up the mental forms of that precious tradition
and see that the fluctuations of language did not lead
us to misinterpret the experience-values of its original
terms ! That which is semper idem, constantly the same
under all developments and accretions, is in the case of
Catholic theology a doctrine, a record of an experience
gone, never to be repeated. It is all-important to
preserve, if not the exact words, yet the exact sense and
meaning which the record had for the minds of those
to whom it was first delivered by the Apostles ; to
represent to ourselves just what it represented to them.
Thus the ideas, categories, and symbols which con-

"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 349
stitute this representation are of the very substance
of the depositum fidei ; if there is a contingent and
accidental element it must be looked for in the
language, in the verbal signs that stand for these
ideas." That is, I think, the patristic and traditional concep
tion of the " Deposit," and as such I hold to it, with
M. L., against a certain modern school whose theory of
Doctrinal Development is, I believe at root, inconsistent
with any such authentic and immutable " form of sound
words." Where I differ from M. L. is in my denying that the
theological and scientific categories which constitute the
vehicle of revelation or of dogmatical ecclesiastical
decisions are binding on our faith as theology and
science, or otherwise than as vehicles of a higher order
of truth. The disastrous consequences of the contrary
supposition both for revelation, theology, and science in
general I have worked out in the said article, and I here
invite M. L. to show either how he proposes to evade
these consequences, or how they are not so disastrous as
they seem. Let him show either that his view does not
fetter our human understanding with a divinely re
vealed philosophy built up out of irreconcilable cate
gories drawn from all ages and levels of culture ; or else
let him show that such miraculous guidance in purely
intellectual problems has proved in fact, what it should
be a priori, an immense gain to the cause of general
enlightenment ; that, thanks to the philosophic and
scientific implications of apostolic revelation and eccle
siastical dogma, that cause, far from being hindered,
has been furthered in a demonstrably miraculous

350 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
manner and degree — that the attempt to solve scientific
controversies by an appeal to scripture has been
universally successful.
And now let me conclude by insisting here, as so
often elsewhere (Lex Credendi; Rights and Limits of
Theology, etc.), that my quarrel has never been with
Theology, but only with what M. L. calls Theology,
and what I prefer to call by the sectarian name of
"Theologism,"1 since I regard it as the mother and
mistress of all heresies from the beginning ; as the sword
which has hewn Christendom into pieces ; as the force
which both keeps and drives out of the Church multi
tudes of the most religious-minded men of our day ; as
the corrupter at once of revelation and theology ; the
enemy alike of faith and of reason.
For theology, as for every true science, I have the
profoundest respect. Nor by theology do I mean
abstract theosophy, or theodicy, or " natural theology " ;
but the fruit of philosophic reflection on the facts of
religious experience, among which facts the Apostolic
Revelation is central and normative. Nor do I mean
this or that particular system of Christian theology, but
any system so long as it preserves its free scientific and
critical attitude, and claims no other sort of authority
than that of reason. I have the sincerest veneration
for the truly theological spirit of my earliest guide,
S. Thomas Aquinas, but I have very little for the drilled
school of " theologists " who invoke his name, and
swear by the letter of his work to the destruction of
its spirit.
I will not give the honourable name of theology or
1 Formed from Theologia, as "sophism'' from Sophia.

"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 351
science to a hybrid system which, applying logical
deduction to the inspired and largely symbolic utter
ances of prophecy, imposes its conclusions in the name
both of revelation and of reason, as binding at once
on the conscience and- on the understanding ; which
bullies the mind when it cannot persuade it, and supple
ments argumentative insufficiency by moral, and even
external coercion.
A science which is not absolutely free to criticise its
own categories and assumptions, and to revolutionise
itself in the light of wider experience and deeper re
flection ; a science whose conclusions are from time to
time nailed down to the counter by divine authority
as final and above criticism, is no science at all. Yet
such must be the issue, if we are bound not merely to
the protective, but to the theological and scientific
implications of dogmatic decisions ; and if the field
of free inquiry is thus progressively narrowed with
every new doctrinal decree, and the breach between
Catholic and non-Catholic enlightenment progressively
widened. Every wise man acknowledges the intellectual value
of the consensus of experts in theology as in any other
science. He would be a rash fool who took no heed of
it, or who departed from it before he had explained its
existence and got outside of it. But then it is just the
perfect spontaneity and independence of such concordant
judgments that creates a presumption that the concord
is founded in the nature of things, or in the nature of
mind. I cannot, then, attach any more evidential signifi
cance to the consensus of our "theologists," which is
engineered from outside by governmental methods, than

352 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
to the uniformity of a regiment of soldiers. It is a
symptom not of intellectual life, but of death. Does the
agreement of all Dominicans against the Jesuit view of
Grace, or that of all Jesuits against the Dominican view,
possess the slightest evidential significance ? And is the
agreement of all the ecclesiastical schools, collectively,
against non-scholastic theology procured in any other
way, or possessed of any greater significance ? It only
signifies that every movement of the tortured mind on
its Procrustean bed is promptly checked and punished ;
that professors are deposed, preachers silenced, writings
suppressed — in the supposed interests of truth, we may
at least hope. But to accept the resulting uniformity
of doctrine as a significant consensus of theological
experts, or to consider it as theology in any proper
sense of the term, would be to trifle with language. It is
simply dogma from beginning to end ; for out of dogma
nothing but dogma can come by logical deduction.
Grant (what is false) that dogmas are theology, and the
result is inevitable. The only difference would be between
dogmas which the Church has, and those which she has
not yet recognised ; but which " theologists " have got
ready for her imprimatur.
It was not, however, primarily in the interests of
theology, but in those of devotion and of the mystical
life, that I first took up my pen against " theologism "
in the article called " The Relation of Theology to
Devotion" — much as the Church herself was first
driven into the philosophical arena in the interests of
her unphilosophical multitudes, and to save their faith
against those who, treating it as a theology, exposed it
to the attacks of a yvuxris, falsely so called. Against

"THEOLOGISM"— A REPLY 353
our domestic Gnostics I wished to strike once more the
warning note struck by a Kempis against scholasticism
in its earlier and far purer days, ere it had degenerated
from theology into " theologism " : " What profit is there
in lengthy quibbling about hidden things for the ignor
ance of which we shall not be blamed in the day of
judgment? . . . and what have we to do with genera
and species ? Oh, if men bestowed as much labour on
rooting out vices as they do in raising curious questions,
there would not be such evils and scandals among the
people, nor such looseness in Religious Houses."
All subsequent reflection has deepened my conviction
that the liberation of the tangled interests of faith and
reason, and the establishment of helpful relations be
tween them, depend above all on fidelity to the patristic
idea of the Apostolic Revelation as the authentic and
normative expression of the Spirit of Christ ; on the
realisation of the essentially prophetic and non-theo
logical character of that more or less imaginative con
struction of the supernatural order destined to guide the
Christian heart ; on the recognition that from the nature
of things this revelation does not need, and is not sus
ceptible of, development any more than is sanctity;
that God our Father ; Christ crucified and risen ; the
Holy Spirit, etc., are identical values for all times and
capacities — " the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever " :
that the theological and scientific categories woven into
the substance of this inspired presentment are divinely
sanctioned, not as theological, but only as illustrative
values; that this revelation, viewed as experience, is
rightly and profitably made the subject-matter of theo
logical reflection, and that such theology, like any other

354 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
science, must develop itself freely under no other limita
tions than those imposed by its subject-matter and the
laws of thought: that the Church's teaching-office is
simply to guard the Apostolic Revelation identically for
all ages and capacities ; that consequently her dogmatic
decisions possess a protective but not a scientific or
philosophical infallibility.
And now since it seems I am so wrong, I ask M. L,,
in his courtesy and charity, to set me right.

Note. — The following passage from S. Hilary (De Trinitate,
II, 2) might be commended to M. L.'s reflection: "Compellimur
hasreticorum et blasphemantium vitiis illicita agere, ardua scandere,
ineffabilia loqui, inconcessa praesumere. Et cum sola fide ex-
plorari, quae prascepta sunt, oporteret, adorare scilicet Patrem et
venerari cum eo Filium, sancto spiritu abundare, cogimur sermonis
nostri humilitatem ad ea, quae inenarrabilia sunt, extendere, et in
vttium vitio coarctamur alieno; ut, quae contineri religione
mentium oportuisset, nunc in periculum humani eloquii profer-
antur." — " We are forced through the fault of heretics and blas
phemers to do that which is unlawful ; to climb inaccessible
heights ; to speak what cannot be uttered ; to assume what cannot
be granted. And whereas we should be content to find out by
simple faith what we have to do — namely, to adore the Father, and,
together with Him, to honour the Son, and to abound in the Holy
Ghost — we are compelled to stretch the littleness of our discourse
to the compass of matters unspeakable, and are driven to wrong
doing through the wrong-doing of others ; so that what should be
treasured in the devout soul is now committed to all the dangers
of human language."

CHAPTER XIII
"FROM HEAVEN, OR OF MEN?"
THE following essay, published in // Rinnovamento,
does not belong directly to the sequence which
concludes with the preceding chapter. Yet it bears so
nearly on the conception of the Church assumed
throughout this volume, that the whole system stands
or falls with its main contention. The authority of the
collective over the individual mind as being the adequate
organ through which truth, whether natural or super
natural, progressively reveals itself, has always been the
fundamental assumption of Catholicism — Securus judicat
orbis terrarum. Any interpretation of papal infallibility
which finds the organ of Catholic truth in the mira
culously guided brain of one man ; which renders futile
the collective experience and reflection of the whole
Church, destroys the very essence of Catholicism in
favour of a military dictatorship which is the apotheosis
of individualism. To interpret the Church's collective
mind is the office of bishops, councils, and popes ; as it
is the office of a judge, not to make, but to interpret
the law. He is below it, not above it. They are
witnesses to, not creators of, the Church's faith and
practice. They speak ex cathedra so far as they say
what she says; and in so doing what they say is in-
355

356 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
fallible in the way that she is infallible. For purposes
of law, order, and unity, their interpretation of her
mind must prevail in foro externo over any non-official
interpretation. But no man who submits himself to
what, rightly or wrongly, he believes to be the Church's
mind is a heretic in foro conscientice, for he submits to
that higher informal tribunal from which all formal and
official tribunals derive their authority.
I shall, no doubt, be told that the ancient and his
torical Catholicism for which I am here pleading is to
day either extinct or else is realised, if anywhere and
in any degree at all, only outside the Roman Com
munion, whether in the Churches of the East, or in the
Established Church of England, or in the old Catholic
remnant ; that if it lingers on secretly in the Papal
Church, it is only as an obstinate survival of an earlier
phase of its development, now formally reprobated in
principle. I shall be told that in 1870 the principle of
official absolutism, after a struggle of two thousand
years, was finally victorious in that Church over the
antagonist and catholic principle of official responsi
bility, and that the supremacy which had already passed
away from the orbis terrarum, first into the hands of the
entire clergy, and thence into those of the episcopate,
was finally and by logical necessity deposited in the
hands of a single bishop ; that by a gradual process of
self-inflation the " servant of servants " became the ruler
of rulers and bishop of bishops in the precise sense
repudiated by Gregory the Great as blasphemous and
heretical (" temerarium nomen," " superbae appellationis
verbum," " nomen istud blasphemise," " hsec stultitia,"
"haec levitas"); that beside and over the episcopal

"FROM HEAVEN, OR OF MEN?" 357
authority in each diocese there was now established a
distinct authority called " apostolic," as though, forsooth,
every bishop were not as truly an apostle as the Bishop
of Rome. I shall be told that the Catholic Church of
Rome, as constituted in the beginning, was thus lifted as
a pyramid off its basis and poised unstably on its apex,
enabling the Bishop of Rome to say in all seriousness
and sobriety, L' Eglise c'est moil and that no theory of
development could justify from the charge of heresy
such a transformation of the catholic system into its
diametrical opposite.
It would be idle and insincere to deny the plausibility
of such an objection, or the fact that, whether in defiance
or in ignorance of history, a strong theological party
worked hard, though not successfully, to impose this
heresy on the Church through the Vatican Council, and
is still working to read this sense into its undoubtedly
ambiguous utterances. Absolutism is a practical and
speculative simplification of the problem of government
that always commends itself to the multitude and its
rulers. But considerations of convenience cannot alter
the verdict of history, nor the principles on which the
Church is built. Catholicism is too complex an idea to
be thus put in a nutshell for the benefit of intellectual
laziness. The simple feel, the educated know, that it
cannot be so easily comprehended as all that. It is to
the large intermediate class, to the bourgeoisie of intelli
gence, that the abstract, unhistorical, nutshell view seems
so necessary.
No thoughtful Roman Catholic can for a moment
allow that the Vatican Council cut away the very bases
of its own power to decree the papal infallibility. It

358 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
avowedly claimed no more for Pius IX than Gregory
the Great claimed for himself. Given a seeming contra
diction between that avowal and certain of its decrees,
we must explain the latter into agreement with the more
universal and fundamental principle of dogmatic im
mutability, and deny that they intend to teach the
absurdity of a double episcopal jurisdiction in each
diocese. An organic whole has "immediate jurisdic
tion " in and with, but not over and against, every part
of the organism. For it is not something distinct from,
and super-imposed on, the sum of its parts — as it were,
doubling each and all of them. No united and living
part or diocese of the Church could ever be opposed to
the whole or oecumenical Church as a subject may be
opposed to his ruler ; since the part in question is a con
stituent of the whole, and would therefore be ruler, or
at least joint-ruler, of itself. The whole Church lives
and speaks in each united part. The voice of each
diocese is the voice of that immanent whole ; and so
far as each bishop speaks and witnesses for his diocese,
and so far as Peter speaks for the whole Church, the
voice of each bishop is also the voice of Peter. Yet
there are not two voices, but one voice ; not two juris
dictions, but one jurisdiction, with a double aspect and
relation — local and oecumenical. The voice of the schis
matic bishop ceases to be the voice of Peter. In this
sense Gregory might allow the title of " universal " not
only to the Pope, but to every bishop (" si enim univer-
salem me papam vestra sanctitas dicit, negat se hoc esse
quod me fatetur universum") ; but he plainly distrusts
the title. If the Vatican decrees meant more than
Gregory meant, they would contradict themselves, and

'FROM HEAVEN, OR OF MEN?" 359

they would contradict catholic tradition. And since
this cannot be allowed, neither can it be allowed that
the ancient struggle between Caesarism and Catholicism
in the Roman Communion has been, or ever can be,
decided in favour of the former. Moreover, since the
struggle in question may be the necessary preliminary to
that synthesis of liberty and authority which no institu
tion, civil or religious, can yet pretend to have success
fully effected, it may be a healthier symptom than a
sterile peace due to the undisputed reign of one prin
ciple or the other. For, as we have contended all along,
the idea of Catholicism does not admit of a smart
scholastic definition, but unfolds itself progressively
from age to age.
That this essay has been widely reprobated by the
defenders of absolutism is natural enough. But one could
wish, in the interests of truth, that it had been seriously
refuted instead of simply abused. A text from Cyprian
or Irenseus is not much use when Cyprian or Irenasus are
in question. Nor is it to the purpose to point out that
whereas political power comes from God, through the
people, to the government, Church-power comes directly
from Christ to the episcopate. For, in the first place,
this Suarezian view of political power scarcely, if at all,
harmonises with the "divine right of kings" assumed
by S. Paul and by the Church's liturgical references to
the Roman Emperor and by her historical attitude
towards kings and rulers. All authority, civil and
ecclesiastical, is there assumed to come from God in
exactly the same way. In the second place, this essay
maintains that all authority, civil and ecclesiastical,
comes to rulers and bishops directly from God or

360 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
from Christ; but from God or Christ as immanent in
the community, according to the teaching of S. Paul
and the Gospels. What it repudiates is Deism and
the notion of a sort of direct " telegraphic " communi
cation between Heaven and the rulers of Church and
State. It therefore merits a more serious refutation
than it has yet received. And for that reason I publish
it in the interest of truth. For, be it right or wrong,
the view is a very general one in these days, thanks
precisely to those principles of political government to
which Suarez gave such impetus.
I have not built my argument as I might well have
done on the results of historico-critical investigations as
to the origin and development of the episcopate. How
ever much experts may differ in detail, they are certainly
agreed as to the untenableness of the traditional a priori
reading of the facts. The defenders of that tradition must
either disprove or frankly accept the results of critical
history. If the latter, they must accommodate their theory
of sacerdotal power to the facts which they accept.

For all who believe in institutional Christianity in
any form, the problem of Church-authority, its nature,
its extent, its limits, is one that presses more acutely
every day, and does not seem to be nearing its solution.
It has been rudely solved in the past, sometimes to the
utter destruction of individual liberty, sometimes to the
practical annihilation of law and order, occasionally by
compromises which offered up consistency on the altar
of expediency.
There is great mischief in " precipitating things " and

"FROM HEAVEN, OR OF MEN?" 361
leaping forward to syntheses for which the times are not
ready, and of which perhaps some of the essential
elements are yet lacking. But it is only by ceaselessly
dragging our nets though the waste waters that we may
hope at last to enclose what we have sought patiently
through so many dark hours of failure. For this
reason I am not ashamed to make another grasp at
an elusive truth that has so often slipped through my
fingers before, and will no doubt do so again. We often
get more instruction and edification from the mistakes
than from the successes of our neighbours ; and my
vain endeavours to struggle out of the labyrinth of my
difficulties may possibly suggest the right path to some
quieter spectator of my struggles. Here, at least (sc.
in the pages of 7/ Rinnovamento), I shall be indulged
with that liberty of making mistakes which is denied
me elsewhere, nor need I fear that what is said tenta
tively will be taken dogmatically.
For the occasion I will use the word "priesthood"
widely as the equivalent of all ecclesiastical authority.
It is this conception of " priesthood " in its widest sense
which I wish to examine, and more particularly that
perversion of it known as " sacerdotalism."
The priest is an official who has received power and
authority to teach and govern the religious community,
and to administer its sacred rites. From whence has
he received this power, from Heaven or of men ? In
one sense, from Heaven and not of men ; in another,
of men and not from Heaven. And for whom has he
received it? Plainly not for himself, not for his own
profit or aggrandisement, but for the community. He is
the " servant of the servants of God."

362 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
" Sacerdotalism" corrupts and perverts this conception
of priesthood in two respects. First of all, in the more
vulgar and obvious way of regarding the sheep as
purely ministerial to the ease and dignity of the shep
herd. In this form the perversion is easily detected and
universally reprehended. But it lurks more subtly and
perniciously in the notion that the whole ecclesiastical
apparatus and system is something which exists for
its own sake and not merely and purely as an instrument
for the spiritual service of those who support it. We do
not escape egotism by ministering, however selflessly, to
the egotism of the corporation or caste or trade union
to which we ourselves belong. There is " sacerdotalism "
in forgetting that the Sabbath and the whole Law is
made for man, and not man for the Sabbath or for the
Law; that the sacraments are for man, and not man
for the sacraments ; that the priest is for the layman
and not the layman for the priest. The " son of man "
(i.e. man) is lord even of the Sabbath. He who put
all things else under his feet and at his service, last
of all ordained even the Sabbath for man's rest and
refreshment, to be his servant, not his tyrant. Man is
therefore master and lord of the Sabbath, the Law, the
Church, the Sacraments, the Priesthood. The sacer
dotalism which forgets this has, of course, its direct
counterpart in the abusive conception of civil and
political offices and institutions as being ends in them
selves. The human mind is so easily and so absorb
ingly interested in the mechanism of government that
it rarely criticises the machine itself by the supreme
criticism of utility and productiveness. Now and then
it wakes from its wondering ecstasy to the world of

"FROM HEAVEN, OR OF MEN?" 363

plain fact, and asks : What, after all said and done, after
all this clanking and grinding and spinning of cumbrous
wheels, what has become of " the man in the street," of
some millions of neglected units for which all this
Stately or Churchly apparatus is supposed to exist?
In this sense Sacerdotalism is Bureaucracy in the
Church ; Bureaucracy is Sacerdotalism in the State.
But in the second place, the legitimate idea of priest
hood may be perverted by a false conception of the
source from which, the channel through which, the priest
derives an authority to teach, rule, and minister, which
in a true sense is divine and supernatural. However
immoral in many of its consequences, this error is not
necessarily the fruit of immorality, of the egotism of
individuals or corporations, but derives from that more
or less pictorial and imaginative way of representing
truth which is proper to religion as distinct from philo
sophy. The immanental aspect of God can never be that
of popular religion, which necessarily addresses itself to
the imagination, and speaks of things divine in terms of
things human and easily visualised. For such a religion,
God, the source of all power and authority, stands
entirely outside of, and above, the creature. He guides
and governs the race and the unit only from without,
not also from within. Heaven is His throne, Earth is
His footstool. From His dwelling on high He looks
down upon the wide world outspread at His feet, and
through the ministry of ascending and descending
angels He rules as a king over His subjects, a shepherd
over his flock, being in no sense identified with that
which He rules.
We know how authority is imagined in this scheme,

364 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
and how easily the symbol or parable is mistaken for
the truth which it symbolises. To the priest or the
ruler, as to his delegate or vicegerent on earth, this
external God imparts a measure of His own spirit — a
spirit of wisdom, a spirit of power, a spirit in all cases
conceived somewhat materialistically and even imper
sonally. And in virtue of this gift the priest or ruler is
raised in spiritual character and quality above his fellows.
He is raised to a higher order of being, his official
words and actions are spoken and done by God Himself,
whose passive instrument he is. *As God, so also God's
vicegerent stands outside and above the community
over which he is set. Officially he is no constituent
part of its organisation. It does not act through him,
but God through him acts upon it. In a word, he is the
delegate of a purely transcendent, not of an also
immanent God. The power and authority is, of course,
given him not for himself, but for the service of men.
Yet, since he derives it not from men, but from Heaven,
he is responsible to Heaven and not to men.
As mere symbolism, as a pictorial and imaginative
explanation of the source and meaning of authority, all
this may be quite harmless, useful, and even necessary.
Our sacred scriptures are full of this language and
imagery. They show us the heavens opened and the
Spirit descending and resting on God's delegates in the
form of a dove, or of fiery tongues, or transmitted from
soul to soul through bodily contact. Nor has Christian
tradition ever departed from these figures and metaphors
by which alone the highest truth can enter into the
lowliest doors. But squeeze any metaphor hard enough
and it will yield poison ; in this case the poison of

"FROM HEAVEN, OR OF MEN?" 365
absolutism and irresponsible government, the poison
which constitutes the second objectionable element of
" sacerdotalism." It is possible for the priest to use his power and
authority disinterestedly, and solely in the service of the
community, and yet to hold himself in no wise respon
sible to that community for the use of his power ; to
consider himself the superior of all collectively, and not
merely of each singly ; to account himself answerable
only to an " absentee " transcendent God to whom appeal
is impossible ; or to an assize for whose sentence we
must wait till the dawn of eternity. The existence of
men or classes of men who so conceive their authority
has been and must always be fraught with mischief and
danger for societies whether civil or ecclesiastical. To
trace the growth of this conception of religious authority
back to its first beginnings almost in apostolic times
would be to discover the ultimate fibres of a malignant
cancer which has steadily undermined the strength and
vigour of Christianity, century after century. That it
has not slain Christianity altogether is only because the
wheat of truth is more deep-rooted than the tares of
error. It is because of that instinctive, unconscious (or
sub-conscious) spirit of sane democracy which breathes
through the Gospel from beginning to end ; which un
derlies those same inspired figures and images to which
absolutism perversely appeals — a spirit which, in the
eyes of absolutists, makes the Bible one of the most dan
gerous books not yet put on the Index.
All figurative and metaphorical language is open to
perverse interpretation. Hence, when Our Lord speaks
of His Kingdom, He has to remind us that it is not of

366 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
this world ; that His servants are not to take the sword,
or fight ; and so in other matters. If then the absolutist
and the democratic conceptions of authority are irrecon
cilably opposed, there is no such irreconcilable opposi
tion between the former and the imaginative language
in which religion explains the nature and source of
authority. Stripped of all imagery, and reduced to its
strict philosophical content, this popular view of the
matter may be only (as even Suarez seemed to find) an
earlier and cruder expression of exactly the same under
lying truth ; just as the external God of elementary and
even mature religious imagination is but another ex
pression of the immanental God of deeper reflection.
In our endeavour to interpret the former coherently, we
are gradually forced on to the latter as its only con
ceivable meaning.
It is no longer difficult for us to believe that " no man
has seen God at any time " ; seen Him, that is, as some
thing external and apart from the world and humanity ;
or that no man has heard God at any time calling out
from the clouds, or from the burning bush, or from the
summit of Sinai. We have long since not merely re
signed ourselves to a silent and a hidden God, but have
come to recognise our seeming loss as a priceless gain.
For now we have learnt to seek Him where alone He is
to be found, and seen, and heard ; near and not far ;
within and not without ; in the very heart of His crea
tion, in the centre of man's spirit ; in the life of each ;
still more, in the life of all. It is from the Sinai of
Conscience (individual and collective) that He thunders
forth His commandments and judgments ; it is from the
heights of His holiness that he looks down in pity upon

"FROM HEAVEN, OR OF MEN?" 367
our earthliness and sinfulness ; it is in His Christ, in His
Saints and Prophets, that He becomes incarnate and
manifest, and that He tabernacles with the children of
men. Along with this sense of the Divine Immanence has
grown that of the authority of the general over the
individual mind and conscience, as being a relatively
more adequate organ and expression of God's truth and
God's will ; as furnishing a standard from which the in
dividual may not fall short, and which he must first
attain before he is competent to criticise and develop it.
The fragmentary revelations of Himself which God
makes to every mind and heart coalesce in the mind and
heart of the community, and form a steadily developing
body of traditional beliefs, laws, and customs, through
contact with which the individual spirit is wakened,
guided, and stimulated. If individual judgments and
impulses are liable to the warp and bias of private aims
and interests, there is a strong presumption that the
consentient mind and will .of the community are free
from such limitations, and are determined by an end
that is more approximately universal and divine, more
truly representative of the normal developments of the
human spirit.
Yet we must not confound this general spirit, this
authoritative mind and will of the community, with its
provisional embodiment in certain formulated beliefs,
laws, and customs. To give to this latter the honour
that belongs to the former would be to imprison the
spirit in the letter, and to make progress impossible. The
formulation of a living and growing spirit can never be
of more than approximate and relative value. It is, at

368 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
best, a compromise for purposes of social intercourse and
co-operation. Growth and progress demand that under
certain conditions the individual may and even must
depart from established forms of belief, law, and custom,
in obedience to the higher and more ultimate law of the
spirit itself. It is a false explanation which makes a
certain lawlessness of private will and judgment a con
dition of advance, as though it were only through
disobedience and rebellion that new paths of progress
could be discovered. Disobedience is never lawful, but
fidelity to the letter may be infidelity to the spirit ;
obedience to a lower may be disobedience to a higher
authority ; loyalty to our rulers may be disloyalty to our
Church or to our country, in whose interest they rule
and for whose sake alone they are to be obeyed. To
disregard law, custom, or command solely from self-
interested motives is plainly disobedience ; it is a sin
against society, against the Spirit of God as revealed in
the general mind. To disregard it simply for the nega
tive reason that we do not understand its social utility —
which is so often proved by a far wider and longer range
of experience than lies within the field of individual
vision — is an exercise of private judgment in the most
objectionable sense. Here a certain "blindness" of
obedience is surely to be desired ; but when we see, or
sincerely think, that such a law or custom is generally
hurtful, that its abolition or modification is clearly
for the common good, we not only may, but we ought
to depart from it in obedience to that highest social law
from which all lower laws depend. Thus, among the
first women who claimed certain liberties unknown to
former generations, but now universally admitted to be

"FROM HEAVEN, OR OF MEN?" 369
just and beneficial, some may have been merely forward
and shameless, but others clearly saw the public mis-
chievousness of the rules and conventions which they
were transgressing. It is not to the blamable trans
gression of the former, but to the blameless and
courageous transgression of the latter, that the merit
is due.Analogously, those who depart from current and
well-established traditional beliefs solely on the strength
of some personal view — which, in such matters can
never be quite self-evident — are following private judg
ment in its bad sense. But when it is clear that a
counter-belief is gaining ground in such a way that
it represents the " consensus " of the future ; when the
same conclusion is reached simultaneously and indepen
dently by different thinkers, one may, and at times one
ought, to follow the belief that lives in the spirit (how
ever small the number of its supporters) rather than
that which stagnates in the formula (however vast the
multitude of its passive adherents) ; for in so doing one
departs from the dead letter only to conform oneself
to a truer, higher, and more authoritative expression of
the living spirit.
Thus, it is in the widest, the most enduring, the most
independent consensus that we possess the fullest avail
able manifestation of that Divine Spirit, partially and
imperfectly manifested in our own individual mind
and conscience — the spirit of Truth and Righteousness,
the source of all moral power and authority — God
revealed in man. Authority, then, is not an external
influence streaming down from heaven like a sunbeam
through a cleft in the clouds and with a finger of light
2 B

370 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
singling out God's arbitrarily chosen delegates from the
multitude, over and apart from which they are to stand
as His vicegerents. Authority is something inherent
in, and inalienable from, that multitude itself; it is the
moral coerciveness of the Divine Spirit of Truth and
Righteousness immanent in the whole, dominant over
its several parts and members ; it is the imperativeness
of the collective conscience.
For us, once freed from our imaginative representation
of an external God, who works upon humanity from
outside ; for us who recognise that the Divine Spirit is
to be sought in the human spirit where alone it speaks
to us and reveals itself, the question as to whether
authority (civil or religious) is from Heaven or of men
assumes a new complexion, and needs a new formulation.
We should rather ask, whether it is from what is
Heavenly in man, or from what is earthly ; from the
Spirit or from the Flesh ; from what (according to the
idea of Gamaliel) is true to the law of his spiritual
development and therefore permanent ; or false to that
law and therefore evanescent. This is the philosophy
that underlies such religious and imaginative expres
sions as, " If this counsel or work be of men it will
come to naught ; but if it be of God you cannot over
throw it" (Acts v. 37) ; or, "Every plant that My Father
hath not planted shall be uprooted."
If then the community to be governed is a higher
organ, a fuller manifestation of the immanent Deity,
than any of the laws, councils or rulers, by which it is
governed ; if God is never to be found by man so truly
outside as inside humanity — in conscience, both in
dividual and collective — there is no such thing as an

"FROM HEAVEN, OR OF MEN?" 371
authority for whose use or abuse its bearer is accountable
solely to an absentee external God, and to an indefi
nitely distant assize. He is accountable, perhaps, to no
higher officer or council ; he is accountable, in a sense,
to God alone ; but it is to God immanent in the col
lective mind and conscience of the community, and to
a tribunal whose throne is always set in judgment,
whose will, revealed not in words but in events, is
always eventually ascertainable.
To say that all spiritual and moral power is inherent
in the people and derives from the people, in no wise
contradicts the truth that it derives from God and is
divine. It is only to insist that, for us, God's highest
and fullest manifestation is given, not in the clouds,
nor in the stars, but in the spirit of man, and therefore
most completely in that completest expression of man's
spirit which is obtained in the widest available consensus,
and is the fruit of the widest collective experience, of
the deepest collective reflection. With the clear recog
nition of this truth, which gains ground rapidly on all
sides, the second element of " sacerdotalism " is robbed
of its apparent justification. The priest is not only for
the people but from the people ; his baptism is indeed
from Heaven, but it is also from men. That it is from
the Spirit, through the community is inevitably implied
in the practice of ceremonial ordination. That it is
from the Spirit in the community is only the rational
interpretation of the symbolic and pictorial account of
its heavenly origin which religion gives us. It is from
Him Who dwells not in temples made with human
hands, but in that human temple which His own hands
have made. The priest stands above the layman solely

372 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
as the representative of the whole organism of the
Church of which he and the layman alike are constituent
members. From that organism, as from God, all his
spiritual powers are derived, and to it, as to God, he is
responsible for their use or abuse.
Such seem to me the inevitable results of a more
adequate emphasis of the Divine Immanence. Let us
now see whether in this, as in so many other matters,
reason and revelation, the Gospel of Nature and the
Gospel of Grace, are in harmony one with another.
In other words, let us try to understand our Lord's
attitude towards " sacerdotalism." It makes a great
change in that understanding if we frankly accept the
truth that He either believed in, or at least accommo
dated His language to, the current belief in the speedy
consummation of the world ; that Judaism was His
religion ; and that what He personally inaugurated was
not another religion, but a reformed Judaism ; that the
earliest Christianity was not a substitute for, but a
supplement of that religion, somewhat, within limits, as
the earliest Wesleyanism was of the religion of the
Church of England : that to His human mind religion
implied an institution, with priesthood, hierarchy, ritual,
sacrifice, theology, tradition, and all those features which
history shows us to be in some form characteristic of all
religions, and therefore to be postulated by something
in the very nature of man. Since it was not agaipst the
reasonable use, but against the anti-spiritual, anti-social
abuses of these things He set His face ; since He came
not to destroy, but to perfect and spiritualise, we cannot
say that the subsequent transformation of the Christian
movement into a religion of the same universal and

"FROM HEAVEN, OR OF MEN?" 373
catholic type was in any way counter to the mind of
Christ ; we cannot say that the very notion of a priest
hood is antagonistic to the Gospel.
But that "sacerdotalism" is antagonistic, we can
most confidently affirm. This is perfectly obvious as
far as sacerdotalism implies that the priesthood, the
ecclesiastical officialdom, exists for its own sake and not
purely for the service of the people. Here it is notorious
that Christ but continued the burden of Ezechiel's
rebuke to the shepherds of Israel, who fed themselves
rather than their flocks ; who viewed their own corpora
tion or caste as the more precious and privileged part
of the community, as an aristocracy worthy to be sup
ported by the profane laity who " knew not the Law."
Against this spirit we have the lifelong example and
most explicit teaching of Him Who came (He tells us)
not to be ministered to, but to minister — the Good
Shepherd Who gave His life for the sheep, Whose
" good news " was precisely to those " poor" who were
so scorned by the ecclesiastical aristocracy, Who was in
the midst of His own disciples as one Who serves, Who
warned them that the greatest of them must be as the
least, and that their serviceableness was the only ground
and measure of their greatness. When He inveighs
against the theologians, canonists, casuists, and priests,
the ground of His indignation is ever the same — this
inversion of the right order of means and end, this
subjection of Man to the Sabbath, the Law, the Temple
— of man, for whose service all these things had been
instituted by God. It is needless to develop so familiar
a topic. Nothing could be more antagonistic to the
spirit of the Gospel than the usage by which in certain

374 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
quarters the " Church" has come to be almost a synonym
for the clergy.
As to the second and less obtrusively immoral element
of " sacerdotalism," it seems to me that it would be an
anachronism to look for any explicit recognition of
what may be called the democratic conception of
authority in the human mind or language of our Lord.
Mind and language alike were shaped by the religion
to which He belonged ; by those imaginative and
pictorial presentments of truth contained in the sacred
scriptures of the Old Testament. There, as we have
seen, God is represented as mainly transcendent, as out
side and above the world and humanity, and as com
municating a somewhat similar outsideness and superi
ority to those whom He commissions to be the rulers of
Israel, and upon whom He pours down some measure
of His Spirit by which they are raised above their fellows
to a higher order of being. The underlying and com
plementary truth of the Divine Immanence, with all
its democratic consequences, could scarcely have been
grasped or formulated by the mentality to which our Lord
addressed Himself, and to which, if He did not actually
share it, He certainly accommodated Himself. But vital
and eternal truths are felt long before it is possible to
formulate them in the understanding, or picture them
in the imagination. We are swayed and governed by
them long before we become conscious of them ; and
those who yield to their obscure pressure, who trust
their own best instincts rather than their clearer and
more superficial apprehensions, are never misled by
their imperfect and simpler expression of the same
truths. If Christ spoke, and had to speak the language

"FROM HEAVEN, OR OF MEN?" 375
of pure transcendence, His whole life and teaching and
spirit implied the truth of immanence.
That He spoke the language of pure transcendence
needs no showing. The authority of the shepherd is
not inherent in, or derived from his flock. He stands
outside and above it, as a being of a superior order.
The authority of the Scribes and Pharisees was that
which Moses received from God on Mount Sinai. The
baptism of John was not of men, but from Heaven.
His own Messianic power descended upon him from the
clouds in the form of a dove ; and upon his apostles in
the form of descending tongues of fire.
But that He felt the great truth, thus imperfectly
figured and symbolised ; that it shone out in the prac
tical interpretation which He gave to these symbols and
figures, becomes more apparent on closer reflection. It
is indicated in his steady condemnation of that peculiar
sort of priestly arrogance which is the parasite and
index of a sense of power derived not merely from a
superhuman, but from an extra-human source ; of re
sponsibility to no earthly and accessible tribunal ; of a
supremacy which knows no rival in the visible and
present order of things. " Do not desire to be called
Master or Father," he says to His apostles. " The rulers
of the Gentiles lord it over them ; but be ye not so."
" I your Lord and Master wash your feet," He says,
insisting, as the context shows, not merely on the
service, but on the implied reverence and subjection.
For there can be service without subjection, as of
parents to their children. It may be no affectation of
humility when a Pope calls himself " Servant of the
servants of God " ; but whether he considers himself

376 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
answerable to the servants of God, taken collectively,
or considers his authority derived from them — from God
as in them — is another matter.
A clearer indication of the same implicit immanentism
is found in the assertion that, because the Sabbath is
made for man, therefore man is Lord of the Sabbath.
The Sabbath is not only for man, but in some senses
from man and dependent on man. What we feel at
work in and behind such sayings, is the great truth that
the good of man is the will of God ; that the two causes
and interests are identical ; that it is precisely in man's
spiritual nature and its needs that God speaks to us and
proclaims His will, and gives us a supreme law and
criterion of all lower laws. It is from this Spirit of God
working in the spirit of man that all laws and rulers
ultimately derive their authority. By a momentary
recognition of this truth the inspired writer of Genesis
translates the natural instinct of reproduction into a
Divine Command : " Increase and multiply." " Natura
exigit, imperat Deus" — what Nature demands, God
enjoins — was the principle in the light of which Suarez
made such strides towards the democratic conception
of authority and its source. Man needs the Sabbath
because God wills it ; God wills it because man needs
it. Man's deepest needs are God's highest and most
imperative laws.
Again, in his assertion that the Children of the
Kingdom are free in respect to human laws, our Lord
implies the sovereign and divine authority of the
liberated spirit of man ; of reason redeemed by grace ;
pre-eminently of the collective reason of Christendom,
in which that spirit finds its fullest attainable expres-

"FROM HEAVEN, OR OF MEN?" 377
sion. His Gospel but realises the prophetic dream of
a coming day, in which no man should say to his fellow,
" Know the Lord " ; bringing as it were a message from
outside and from afar ; but when all should know Him,
from the least to the greatest, just because they would
learn to find His law written in their hearts by the
spirit, and not graven on outward tables of stones at
the dictation of a voice from the clouds.
Once more. Who is the judge and the law-giver to
whom we are to be accountable at the last ? It is God,
indeed ; but God as present in, and represented by,
humanity; as declaring His Will and His Law in the
needs and exigencies of human nature. The hungry,
the thirsty, the naked, the sick, the sinful, these are our
judges, these are our law-givers. In them God is
immanent ; in the cry of their struggling spirit His Law
is proclaimed, in their deliverance and salvation His
Will is accomplished.
Perhaps it is not too much to suggest that the same
idea is implied in the story of the forgiveness of the
paralytic man. In the common religious conception of
the Jews, forgiveness "descended like the gentle rain
from heaven upon the earth beneath " ; it was from God
alone, from God apart from man. Christ tells us that it
is from the Son of Man, from God in man, here upon
earth. Every sin, whether classified as against God, our
neighbour, or ourself, is in a deep and fundamental
sense a sin against Man, against what -is divine in
humanity. And it is for the offended to forgive. That
the offence is both committed against and absolved by
the whole community is openly recognised in the
General Confession of the Roman Liturgy.

378 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
It is surely in accordance with this notion of authority
as immanent in, and emanating from, the highest in
man that Christ says : "Where two or three are gathered
together in My Name, there am I in the midst of
them " ; and that He bids a dispute to be referred first
to the judgment of two or three witnesses as to a fuller
manifestation of the Divine Will ; and finally to the
whole community as to the highest available mani
festation. I think, then, that though our Lord necessarily spoke
about authority in the language of His hearers, there
can be little doubt that His Spirit was governed entirely
by the truth of which that language was a most inade
quate and easily misleading expression ; that the real
substance of His teaching demanded, and has eventually
brought about, a truer and less imperfect way of think
ing and speaking of the matter.
When we turn from Christ to Christianity it seems to
me that what we find is, at first, a very pronounced
democratic sentiment still clothing itself in the dress
and unsuitable forms of scriptural thought and expres
sion, and then its gradual decline and extinction owing
to the persistence, conservation, and literal interpretation
of those same forms ; and, finally, a revolt against the
extreme logical, and profoundly anti-Christian, conse
quences of such misinterpretation, and the explicit recog
nition and more adequate expression of the immanence
of Divine Authority in the human spirit, in conscience
both individual and collective.
In its first amorphous state, as a brotherhood of
saints preparing for a near Advent, the Christian body
was bound together by no other tie than that of one and

"FROM HEAVEN, OR OF MEN?" 379
the same indwelling Spirit of Christ, imparting gifts in
various kinds and measures to each for the edification of
all. Its sole hierarchy was one of charismata and graces.
Office and competence went hand in hand. When any
member of the organism might be filled with the in
dwelling spirit ; when none was wholly ungifted or with
out office ; when the individual was subject to the
judgment and approval of the group, and the lesser
group to that of the larger, there was no place for
the sacerdotalist conception of irresponsible authority
derived from a source outside and not in the community.
Christ was the source ; but Christ was immanent, not
absent. He was with every two or three. He was with
His Church always, even to the end of the world.
Later, when it was necessary for the Christian move
ment (one might almost say the Christian " revival ") to
form itself into a permanent religion, with all those
institutional features without which it seems no religion
can battle with and conquer the world to any great
extent, its organised hierarchy of officials was still
conceived, not only as instrumental to the general good,
but as authorised by, and answerable to, the whole body
of the faithful taken collectively, both lay and cleric.
Its function was just to mediate between the more and
the less spiritually gifted levels in the community, to
secure the communising of those richer graces and
powers which were, given to the few for the help and
edification of all. The Spirit, in whose name they ruled,
and ministered and taught and baptised and conse
crated, was still viewed as immanent in the whole body,
as audible in the collective voice.
The very process by which, under the influence of the

380 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
imperial conception of authority, and of that current in
the religions which Christianity overcame through a
policy of assimilation, the democratic nature of the
Christian priesthood was gradually forgotten, is fairly
well known. The language and imagery of sacred
scripture and inspired history lent themselves readily
enough to such a perversion.
As soon as the bishop came to take the shepherd
metaphor quite literally; to regard himself not as repre
senting and " recapitulating " his flock ; nor as drawing
his power and authority from the Holy Ghost immanent
in the flock, he could no longer consider himself as
answerable to the body of whose organism he formed
no part, and which he ruled as an outsider with a com
mission from afar.
If he subjected himself to the collective episcopate,
such a council was bound in its turn to consider itself
not as the organic head, in which the whole Church and
the spirit pervading it became self-conscious and vocal,
but as ruling the passive Church from outside, as a
shepherd rules his flock (from which he differs in
species), in virtue of powers, whether derived directly
from an external heaven or through the mediation of a
monarchic, universal bishop matters not one whit.
Against the Pope, the Council of Bale had no logical
standing so far as it regarded itself as responsible not to
a living, accessible tribunal, not to the Holy Ghost
immanent in the Church, but only to the Holy Ghost in
Heaven, to an inaccessible tribunal to whom the subject
Church might appeal in vain. As to who is the re
pository of such irresponsible power it matters but little.
The vital question is, Where is that God to Whom alone

"FROM HEAVEN, OR OF MEN?" 381
both Pope and Council claim to be responsible ? Is He
immanent in the whole Church where we can ultimately
learn His mind and will ; or is He away beyond the
stars where we can know nothing of either, save what
the episcopate is given to know by some mysterious
intuition ? By what vehicle does He speak and com
municate with us ? By voices from the clouds or by the
gradual evolution of His Mind and Will in the collec
tive spirit of mankind ?
It may be denied that there is any institutional
tribunal by which the laws and formulas of Pope or
Council (whichever be held supreme) can be revised ;
that there is any formal appeal to the general vote of
the faithful on which the validity of such decisions
depends. But, above the constitutional headship, there
is the preconstitutional, which is a necessary fact and
not a doctrine. It cannot be denied that in the life of
that formless Church which underlies the hierarchic
organisation, God's Spirit exercises a silent but
sovereign criticism ; that His resistlessly effectual judg
ment is made known, not in the precise language of
definition and decree, but in the slow manifestation
of practical results ; in the survival of what has proved
itself life-giving; in the decay and oblivion of all
whose value was but relative and temporary.
The path of the Church's progress is simply littered
with the bleached bones of long-forgotten decisions and
decrees which, in their day, were reverenced as immortal.
One thing, at least, is certain, that democracy has
come to stayj that to the generations of the near
future any other conception of authority will be simply
unthinkable ; that if the authority of Popes, Councils,

382 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
and Bishops cannot be reinterpreted in that sense, it is
as irrevocably doomed as the theologies of man's
childhood. The receptivity of the general mind is
a fact that priesthoods have to reckon with, and always
do reckon with in the long run. They cease to say,
nay, they cease to believe that to which the general ear
has become permanently deaf. They would fain seem
to lead, but, in fact, they follow the spirit in its develop
ments ; for it is there, and there only, that truth is
worked out. To command Nature, man must obey it ;
to command the general mind, priesthoods must obey
it. If they assail it, if they fling themselves against
that rock, they, and not it, shall be bruised ; if it turn
against them and fall upon them, it shall grind them to
powder. Already, as might be expected in that quarter,
the mind of the American Roman Catholic is becoming
blind and impervious to the interpretation of authority
current among the traditional theologians of his Church.
Saturated with the democratic principle, he tends irre
sistibly to invert the hierarchical pyramid carefully
balanced on the Pope as its apex, and to set it firmly
on its base again ; to represent it as built up from the
earth, not as fallen headforemost from the skies. It
is this utter decay of the ancient categories of Abso
lutism that lies at the root of what is condemned at
Rome as Americanism. So too the instinctive, and not
groundless, dread of lay intervention which is the pre
cise and essential cause of Rome's present opposition to
the Christian-Democrat movement in Italy, or to the
Worship- Associations in France — a dread which is for
mulated in all good faith as zeal for the hierarchic
dignity — is another sign that the conflict between the two

"FROM HEAVEN, OR OF MEN?" 383
conceptions of authority is becoming acute. Naturally,
it is felt most keenly in that communion where the abso
lutist conception has been worked out most continuously
and ruthlessly, and revealed in all its bearings ; but it is
felt proportionally in every communion of the Catholic
type. There is an uneasy suspicion abroad that if in the
military stage of our civilisation the Church could assert
herself and prevail only by means of a military polity
and a military interpretation of her Divine authority,
in these days her success depends on an abandonment
of both. If a religion is to influence and leaven our
civilisation and culture it must be recognised as a
part of it, as organically one with it ; not as a foreign
body thrust down into it from above, but as having
grown up with it from the same root in the spirit of
humanity. Our forefathers too believed that civilisation
and religion had but one source ; that both came from
God who taught man the use of speech, who instituted
marriage and government, who dictated the laws of
family and social life. Hence they knew nothing of that
fatal discord which arises when religion is derived from
outside and civilisation from inside. To their belief we
must return in a better form, and derive both one and
the other from God, but from God immanent in the spirit
of man. Else we must expect to witness a steady ad
vance of that alienation of the laity from the Church, of
which there are manifest signs all round us. To retain
them or to win them back we must restore them to their
original active participation in the Church's life of
which they have been deprived by the gradual prevalence
of the absolutist over the democratic interpretation of
priestly authority.

384 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
Need I waste a paragraph to explain that by de
mocracy I do not mean the subjection of the clergy to
the laity ; of the few to the many ; but of clergy and
laity alike to the whole body which exists logically
prior to any such division ; to that formless Church, to
whose service the hierarchic institution is but instru
mental, from which its authority is derived, to which it
is responsible, by which it is reformable. That body of
the Holy Ghost, which underlies and gives life to the
superimposed ecclesiastical organisation it has evolved
for itself, has ever retained its own charismatic hierarchy
of gifts and graces ; its royal priesthood after the order
of Melchizedek to which the official priesthood is
related as a sacrament to its substance, or as the
material and temporal to the spiritual and eternal. To
this aboriginal Church, to this Christian demos, clergy
and laity alike are subject and answerable. Its voice is
not heard in the streets, its will and judgment are not
formulated, but sooner or later they prevail, and all that
is framed against them comes to naught. Say what they
will, bishops, popes, and councils await its verdict, and
await it trembling.
We do not then want to laicise the Church, but only
to recognise the participation of the laity in that
sovereign priesthood and authority from which those
of the official hierarchy are derived.
He may expect to be laughed to scorn who suggests
that the spirit of democracy in the Catholic communions
is not dead, but only slumbering. And he would per
haps merit ridicule who placed his hope in any cession
of their claims on the part of priesthoods. It is said
reforms must come from below. Let us rather say they

"FROM HEAVEN, OR OF MEN?" 385
must come from above, from God immanent in the
entire community which stands above both priesthood
and laity. To trust in that is to trust in God, in nature,
in the spirit, in the irresistible force of truth and right.
There is no need of violent revolution, but only of
a quiet, steady re-reading and re-interpretation of exist
ing institutions. For what we have to combat has come
about by a like noiseless process of misinterpretation.
We need not destroy or even invert the hierarchical
pyramid ; we need only regard it from above instead of
from below. Abundant traces still remain of the
primitive view of the priesthood and its powers, and
these traces we must deepen and follow up and insist
on. The deviation was not wilfully planned, and so the
footsteps of the past were not carefully obliterated,
but remain for our guidance, involuntary witnesses
of the truth. These vestiges are, for the sacerdotalist
theology of to-day, so many anomalies to be explained
away by an ingenuity that takes account of everything
but history. How is it that in the Roman liturgy the
people collectively absolve the priest in exactly the same
terms as those in which the priest absolves the people ?
How is it that in response to the " Dominus vobiscum,"
which it is now only lawful for priests to utter, the con
gregation answers : " Et cum spiritu tuo"? How comes
the priest to say : " Pray, brethren, that my sacrifice and
yours be acceptable before God " ; and what means the
" us " and " we " which pervade the Canon of the Mass
from beginning to end? How comes it that baptism,
the greatest of all the sacraments, can be validly
ministered by a layman or woman, or even by an
infidel * or that the ministers of the sacrament of

386 SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS
marriage are the contracting parties? To solve these
and a hundred similar problems on sacerdotalist lines
is to do violence to history and to common sense.
Collectively they furnish an irresistible cumulative
argument in favour of the original conception of the
hierarchy as being simply representative of the entire
Church in whose bosom the plenitude of all spiritual
power and authority resides. In her minister, however
designated or set apart, it is the Church herself, it is
Christ and the Spirit of Christ immanent in the whole
body, Who baptises and absolves, and consecrates and
anoints, and teaches and rules.
We hold the clue, then, in our hands. What is needed
is a steady, persevering work of re-interpretation, of
study, enlightenment, and instruction. It must needs
be that error should arise, and spread, and work out its
own disproof in order that Truth be made manifest,
our minds being so constituted that we know nothing
fully till we know its opposite. When we return to the
abandoned Truth we return to it in a new and better
form, and with a deepened appreciation of its value. So
it is that we may hope to return to the profoundly
Christian and Catholic conception of the democratic
character of all authority, whether civil or ecclesiastical,
and of " the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free."

FINIS

WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD.
PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH

A SELECT LIST OF
ROMAN CATHOLIC BOOKS

INCLUDING THE WORKS OF

CARDINAL NEWMAN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

page

Works by Cardinal Newman

2

The Catholic

Church . . 9

Works by the Rev. George

Poetry

. 10
Tyrrell ....
7
Fiction
. 10
For the Clergy and Students
7
Biography
. 11
The Westminster Library .
8
History
. 11
Stonyhurst Philosophical
Works by
the Very Rev.
Series ...
8
Canon Sheehan, D.D. . 12
LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C.
91-93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
8 HORNBY ROAD, BOMBAY
303 BOWBAZAR STREET, CALCUTTA
A SELECT LIST OF WORKS

Works by Cardinal Newman,
i. SERMONS.
Parochial and Plain Sermons. Edited by Rev. W. J. Copeland, B.D.,
late Rector of Farnham, Essex. 8 vols. Sold separately. Crown
8vo. 3s. 6d. each.
Contents of Vol. I. : — Holiness necessary for Future Blessedness — The Immortality
of the Soul — Knowledge of God's Will without Obedience — Secret Faults — Self-Denial the
Test of Religious Earnestness — The Spiritual Mind — Sins of Ignorance and Weakness-
God's Commandments not Grievous — The Religious Use of Excited Feelings — Profession
without Practice — Profession without Hypocrisy — Profession without Ostentation-
Promising without Doing — Religious Emotion — Religious Faith Rational — The Christian
Mysteries— The Self-Wise Inquirer — Obedience the Remedy for Religious Perplexity — Times
of Private Prayer — Forms of Private Prayer — The Resurrection of the Body — Witnesses of
the Resurrection — Christian Reverence — The Religion of the Day — Scripture a Record of
Human Sorrow — Christian Manhood.
Contents op Vol. II. : — The World's Benefactors— Faith without Sight — The Incar
nation — Martyrdom — Love of Relations and Friends — The Mind of Little Children-
Ceremonies of the Church — The Glory of the Christian Church — St. Paul's Conversion
viewed in Reference to his Office — Secrecy and Suddenness of Divine Visitations — Divine
Decrees — The Reverence Due to the Blessed Virgin Mary — Christ, a Quickening Spirit-
Saving Knowledge — Self- Contemplation — Religious Cowardice — The Gospel Witnesses-
Mysteries in Religion — The Indwelling Spirit — The Kingdom of the Saints — The Gospel,
a Trust Committed to us — Tolerance of Religious Error — Rebuking Sin — The Christian
Ministry — Human Responsibility — Guilelessness — The Danger of Riches — The Powers of
Nature — The Danger of Accomplishments — Christian Zeal — Use of Saints' Days.
Contents of Vol. III.: — Abraham and Lot— Wilfulness of Israel in Rejecting Samuel
— Saul — Early Years of David — Jeroboam — Faith and Obedience — Christian Repentance —
Contracted Views in Religion — A Particular Providence as revealed in the Gospel — Tears
of Christ at the Grave of Lazarus — Bodily Suffering — The Humiliation of the Eternal Son
— Jewish Zeal a Pattern to Christians — Submission to Church Authority — Contest between
Truth and Falsehood in the Church — The Church Visible and Invisible — The Visible
Church an Encouragement to Faith — The Gift of the Spirit — Regenerating Baptism — Infant
Baptism — The Daily Service — The Good Part of Mary — Religious Worship a Remedy for
Excitements — Intercession — The Intermediate State.
Contents of Vol IV. : — The Strictness of the Law of Christ — Obedience without Love,
as instanced in the Character of Balaam — Moral Consequences of Single Sins — Acceptance
of Religious Privileges Compulsory — Reliance on Religious Observances — The Individuality
of the Soul — Chastisement amid Mercy — Peace and Joy amid Chastisement — The State of
Grace — The Visible Church for the Sake of the Elect — The Communion of Saints — The
Church a Home for the Lonely — The Invisible World — The Greatness and Littleness of
Human Life — Moral Effects of Communion with God — Christ Hidden from the World —
Christ Manifested in Remembrance — The Gainsaying of Korah — The Mysteriousness of
our Present Being — The Ventures of Faith — Faith and Love — Watching— Keeping Fast
and Festival.
Contents of Vol. V. : — Worship, a Preparation for Christ's Coming — Reverence, a
Belief in God's Presence — Unreal Words — Shrinking from Christ's Coming — Equanimity —
Remembrance of Past Mercies — The Mystery of Godliness — The State of Innocence —
Christian Sympathy — Righteousness not of us, but in us — The Law of the Spirit — The New
Works of the Gospel— The State of Salvation — Transgressions and Infirmities — Sins of
Infirmity — Sincerity and Hypocrisy — The Testimony of Conscience — Many called, Few
chosen — Present Blessings — Endurance, the Christian's Portion — Affliction, a School of
Comfort— The Thought of God, the Stay of the Soul— Love, the One Thing Needful— The
Power of the Will.
Contents of Vol. VI.: — Fasting, a Source of Trial — Life, the Season of Repentance-
Apostolic Abstinence, a Pattern for Christians — Christ's Privations, a Meditation for Chris
tians — Christ the Son of God made Man — The Incarnate Son, a Sufferer and Sacrifice—
The Cross of Christ the Measure of the World — Difficulty of realising Sacred Privileges —
The Gospel Sign Addressed to Faith — The Spiritual Presence of Christ in the Church —
The Eucharistic Presence — Faith the Title for Justification— Judaism of the Present Day
—The Fellowship of the Apostles— Rising with Christ — Warfare the Condition of Victory
— Waiting for Christ — Subjection of the Reason and Feelings to the Revealed Word —
The Gospel Palaces— The Visible Temple— Offerings for the Sanctuary — The Weapons
of Saints — Faith Without Demonstration — The Mystery of the Holy Trinity— Peace in
Believing.

PUBLISHED BY LONGMANS, GREEN, &¦ CO.

Works by Cardinal Newman — continued.
SERMONS— continued.
Contents of Vol. VII.:— The Lapse of Time— Religion, a Weariness to the Natural
Man— The World our Enemy— The Praise of Men— Temporal Advantages— The Season of
Epiphany— The Duty of Self-Denial— The Yoke of Christ— Moses the Type of Christ— The
Crucifixion — Attendance on Holy Communion — The Gospel Feast — Love of Religion, a new
Nature— Religion Pleasant to the Religious— Mental Prayer— Infant Baptism— The Unity
of the Church — Steadfastness in the Old Paths.
Contents of Vol. VIII. : — Reverence in Worship — Divine Calls— The Trial of Saul—
The Call of David— Curiosity, a Temptation to Sin— Miracles no Remedy for Unbelief—
Josiah, a Pattern for the Ignorant — Inward Witness to the Truth of the Gospel— Jeremiah.
a Lesson for the Disappointed — Endurance of the World's Censure — Doing Glory to God
in Pursuits of the World — Vanity of Human Glory — Truth Hidden when not Sought after
— Obedience to God the Way to Faith in Christ — Sudden Conversions — The Shepherd of
our Souls — Religious Joy — Ignorance of Evil.
Selection, Adapted to the Seasons of the Ecclesiastical Year,
from the "Parochial and Plain Sermons1'. Edited by the Rev. W.
J. Copeland, B.D. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Contents: — Advent: Self-Denial the Test of Religious Earnestness — Divine Calls —
The Ventures of Faith — Watching. Christmas Day : Religious Joy. New Year's Sunday :
The Lapse of Time. Epiphany: Remembrance of Past Mercies — Equanimity — The
Immortality of the Soul — Christian Manhood — Sincerity and Hypocrisy — Christian
Sympathy. Septuagesima : Present Blessings. Sexagesijna : Endurance, the Christian's
Portion. Quinquagesima : Love, the One Thing Needful. Lent: The Individuality of the
Soul — Life, the Season of Repentance — Bodily Suffering — Tears of Christ at the Grave of
Lazarus— Christ's Privations, a Meditation for Christians — The Cross of Christ the Measure
of the World. Good Friday : The Crucifixion. Easter Day : Keeping Fast and Festival.
Easter Tide : Witnesses of the Resurrection— A Particular Providence as revealed in the
Gospel— Christ Manifested in Remembrance— The Invisible World— Waiting for Christ.
Ascension: Warfare the Conditiqn of Victory. Sunday after Ascension: Rising with
Christ. Whitsun Day : The Weapons of Saints. Trinity Sunday: The Mysteriousness
of our Present Being. Sundays after Trinity : Holiness Necessary for Future Blessedness
—The Religious Use of Excited Feelings — The Self- Wise Inquirer — Scripture a Record of
Human Sorrow — The Danger of Riches — Obedience without Love, as instanced in the
Character of Balaam — Moral Consequences of Single Sins— The Greatness and Littleness
of Human Life— Moral Effects of Communion with God— The Thought of God the Stay of
the Soul— The Power of the Will— The Gospel Palaces— Religion a Weariness to the
Natural Man— The World our Enemy— The Praise of Men— Religion Pleasant to the
Religious— Mental Prayer— Curiosity a Temptation to Sin— Miracles no Remedy for Un
belief—Jeremiah, a Lesson for the Disappointed— The Shepherd of our Souls— Doing Glory
to God in Pursuits of the World.
Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford,
between a.d. 1826 and 1843. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Contents-— The Philosophical Temper, first enjoined by the Gospel— The Influence of
Natural and Revealed Religion respectively— Evangelical Sanctity the Perfection of
Natural Virtue— The Usurpations of Reason— Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating
the Truth— On Justice as a Principle of Divine Governance— Contest between Faith
and Sight— Human Responsibility, as independent of Circumstances— Wilfulness, the Sin
of Saul— Faith and Reason, contrasted as Habits of Mind— The Nature of Faith in Relation
to Reason— Love, the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition— Implicit and Explicit
Reason— Wisdom, as contrasted with Faith and with Bigotry— The Theory of Develop
ments in Religious Doctrine.
Sermons Bearing upon Subjects of the Day. Edited by the Rev.
W. J. Copeland, B.D., late Rector of Farnham, Essex. Crown
8vo. 3s. 6d.
r™T„K,-r<i  The Work of the Christian— Saintliness not Forfeited by the Penitent—
Our Lord's Last Supper and His First-Dangers to fte Penitent.-The Three Offices of

A SELECT LIST OF WORKS

Works by Cardinal Newman — continued.
SERMONS— continued.
Christ— Faith and Experience— Faith unto the World— The Church and the World— In
dulgence in Religious Privileges — Connection between Personal and Public Improvement
—Christian Nobleness— Joshua a Type of Christ and His Followers — Elisha a Type of
Christ and His Followers — The Christian Church a Continuation of the Jewish— The
Principles of Continuity between the Jewish and Christian Churches — The Christian
Church an Imperial Power — Sanctity the Token of the Christian Empire — Condition of the
Members of the Christian Empire — The Apostolic Christian — Wisdom and Innocence-
Invisible Presence of Christ — Outward and Inward Notes of the Church — Grounds" for
Steadfastness in our Religious Profession — Elijah the Prophet of the Latter Days — Feast
ing in Captivity — The Parting of Friends.
Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Contents : — The Salvation of the Hearer the Motive of the Preacher — Neglect of Divine
Calls and Warnings— Men not Angels — The Priests of the Gospel — Purity and Love—
Saintliness the Standard of Christian Principle — God's Will the End of Life — Perseverance
in Grace — Nature and Grace — Illuminating Grace — Faith and Private Judgment— Faith
and Doubt — Prospects of the Catholic Missioner — Mysteries of Nature and of Grace — The
Mystery of Divine Condescension — The Infinitude of Divine Attributes — Mental Sufferings
of our Lord in His Passion — The Glories of Mary for the Sake of Her Son — On the Fitness
of the Glories of Mary.
Sermons Preached on Various Occasions. Crown 8vo. 3 s. 6d.
Contents: — Intellect the Instrument of Religious Training — The Religion of the
Pharisee and the Religion of Mankind — Waiting for Christ — The Secret Power of Divine
Grace — Dispositions for Faith— Omnipotence in Bonds— St. Paul's Characteristic Gift —
St. Paul's Gift of Sympathy — Christ upon the Waters — The Second Spring — Order, the
Witness and Instrument of Unity — The Mission ot St. Philip Neri— The Tree beside the
Waters — In the World but not of the World — The Pope and the Revolution.
2. TREATISES.
The Doctrine of Justification. Crown 8 vo. 3s. 6d.
Contents: — Faith considered as the Instrumental Cause of Justification — Love con
sidered as the Formal Cause of Justification — Primary Sense of the term "Justification " —
Secondary Senses of the term " Justification " — Misuse of the term " Just " or " Righteous "
— The Gift of Righteousness — The Characteristics of the Gift of Righteousness — Righteous
ness viewed as a Gift and as a Quality — Righteousness the Fruit of our Lord's Resurrection
—The Office of Justifying Faith — The Nature of Justifying Faith — Faith viewed relatively
to Rites and Works — On Preaching the Gospel — Appendix.
The Development of Christian Doctrine. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated. I. In Nine Dis
courses delivered to the Catholics of Dublin; II. In Occasional
Lectures and Essays addressed to the members of the Catholic
University. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
The Grammar of Assent. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
An Indexed Synopsis of Newman's "Grammar of Assent". By
the Rev. John J. Toohey, S.J. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
3. ESSAYS.
Two Essays on Miracles. i. Of Scripture. 2. Of Ecclesiastical
History. Crown 8vo, 3s, 6d.

PUBLISHED BY LONGMANS, GREEN, &¦ CO.

Works by Cardinal Newman — -continued.
ESSAYS — continued.
Discussions and Arguments. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
I. How to accomplish it. 2. The Antichrist of the Fathers. 3. Scrip
ture and the Creed. 4. Tamworth Reading-room. 5. Who's to Blame ?
6. An Argument for Christianity.
Essays, Critical and Historical. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. 7s.
1. Poetry. *. Rationalism. 3. Apostolic Tradition. 4. De la Men-
nais. 5. Palmer on Faith and Unity. 6. St. Ignatius. 7. Prospects of
the Anglican Church. 8. The Anglo-American Church, g. Countess of
Huntingdon. 10. Catholicity of the Anglican Church. n. The Anti
christ of Protestants. 12. Milman's Christianity. 13. Reformation of
the XI. Century. 14. Private Judgment. 15. Davison. 16. Keble.
4. HISTORICAL.
Historical Sketches. 3 vols. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. each.
1. The Turks. 2. Cicero. 3. Apollonius. 4. Primitive Christianity.
5. Church of the Fathers. 6. St. Chrysostom. 7. Theodoret. 8. St.
Benedict, g. Benedictine Schools. 10. Universities, n. Northmen and
Normans. 12. Mediaeval Oxford. 13. Convocation of Canterbury.

5. THEOLOGICAL.
The Arians of the Fourth Century. Crown 8yo. 3s. 6d.
Select Treatises of St. Athanasius in Controversy with the
Arians. Freely translated. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. 7s.
Theological Tracts. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
1. Dissertatiunculas. 2. On the Text of the Seven Epistles of St.
Ignatius. 3. Doctrinal Causes of Arianism. 4. Apollinarianism. 5. St.
Cyril's Formula. 6. Ordo de Tempore. 7. Douay Version of Scriptures.

6. POLEMICAL.
The Via Media of the Anglican Church. 2 Vols. Crown 8vo..
3s. 6d. each.
Vol I. Prophetical Office of the Church.
Vol. II. Occasional Letters and Tracts.

A SELECT LIST OF WORKS

Works by Cardinal Newman — continued.
POLEMICAL— continued.
Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching Con
sidered. 2 Vols.
Vol. I. Twelve Lectures. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Vol. II. Letters to Dr. Pusey concerning the Blessed Virgin, and to
the Duke of Norfolk in defence of the Pope and Council.
Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Present Position of Catholics in England. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Apologia pro Vita Sua. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Pocket Edition. Fcp. 8vo. 2s. 6d. net. Leather. 3s. 6d. net. Contains
a letter, hitherto unpublished, by Cardinal Newman to Canon Flanagan in
^51^ which may be said to contain in embryo the "Apologia" itself.
Popular Edition. Sewed, 8vo. 6d. net.
7. LITERARY.
Verses on Various Occasions. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
The Dream of Gerontius. i6mo, sewed, 6d. ; cloth, is. net.
New Edition, with Introduction and Notes by Maurice Francis Egan,
A.M., LL.D., Professor of English Language and Literature in the Catholic
University of America, Washington, D.C. With Portrait. Crown 8vo.
is. 6d.
LOSS and Gain. The Story of a Convert. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Callista. A Tale of the Third Century. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
8. DEVOTIONAL.
"Meditations and Devotions. Part I. Meditations for the Month of
May. Novena of St. Philip. Part II. The Stations of the Cross.
Meditations and Intercessions for Good Friday. Litanies, etc.
Part III. Meditations on Christian Doctrine. Conclusion. Oblong
Crown 8vo. 5s. net.

"Letters and Correspondence of John Henry Newman during his
Life In the English Church. With a brief Autobiography. Edited, at
Cardinal Newman's request, by Anne Mozley. 2 vols. Cr. 8vo. 7s.
Addresses to Cardinal Newman, with his Replies, 1879-81. Edited
by the Rev. W. P. Neville (Cong. Orat.). With Portrait Group.
Oblong crown 8vo. 6s. net.

PUBLISHED BY LONGMANS, GREEN, &> CO.

Works by the Rev* George TyrrelL
Nova et Vetera : Informal Meditations. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.-
Hard Sayings: a Selection of Meditations and Studies. Crown8vo. 5s.net.
Lex Orandi; or, Prayer and Creed. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Lex Credendi : a Sequel to Lex Orandi. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Oil and Wine. Crown Svo. 5s. net.
External Religion : its Use and Abuse. Crown Svo. 2s. 6d. net.
The Soul's Orbit ; or, Man's Journey to God. Compiled and Edited,
with Additions, by M. D. Petre. Crown Svo. 4s. 6d. net.
The Faith Of the Millions : a Selection of Past Essays. Two Series.
Crown 8vo. 5s. net. each.
First Series: Introduction — 1. A More Excellent Way — 2. Wiseman: his Aims and
Methods— 3. The Prospects of Reunion — 4. "Liberal" Catholicism — 5. "Rationalism in
Religion "—6. Sabatier on the Vitality of Dogmas — 7. Authority and Evolution, the Life
of Catholic Dogma— 8. "The Mind of the Church "—9. The Use of Scholasticism— 10. The
Relation of Theology to Devotion — 11. What is Mysticism?— 12. The True and the False
Mysticism. Second Series: 13. Juliana of Norwich— 14. Poet and Mystic — 15. Two Estimates of
Catholic Life— 16. A Lite of De Lamennais — 17. Lippo, the Man and the Artist — 18. Through
Art to Faith- 19. Tracts for the Million — 20. An Apostle of Naturalism — 21. " The Making
of Religion " — 22. Adaptability as a Proof of Religion — 23. Idealism in Straits.
A Much- Abused Letter. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.
H ** This letter was written by Father Tyrrell to a Professor of Anthropology in a Con
tinental University, who found it difficult, if not impossible, to square his science with his
faith as a Catholic.
Extracts more or less inaccurate appeared in an Italian paper, the result being that he has
been dismissed from the Order of Jesuits.
Father Tyrrell, in an Introduction to the letter, gives an account of the whole matter, and
vindicates the position which he took up in dealing ivith the doubts and fears of his corre
spondent.
For the Clergy and Students.
Outlines of Dogmatic Theology. By Sylvester Joseph Hunter, S.J.
Crown 8vo. 3 vols., 6s. 6d. each.
Studies on the Gospels. By Vincent Rose, O.P., Professor in the
University of Fribourg. Authorised English Version, by Robert
Fraser, D.D. , Domestic Prelate to H.H. Pius X. Crown 8vo. 6s.net.
Essays in Pastoral Medicine. By Austin o'Malley, M.D., Ph.D.,
LL.D., Pathologist and Ophthalmologist to Saint Agnes's Hospital,
Philadelphia ; and James J. Walsh, Ph.D., LL.D., Adjunct Professor
of Medicine at the New York Polytechnic School for Graduates in
Medicine. 8vo. ios. 6d. net.
* * The term " Pastoral Medicine " may be said to represent that part of medicine which.
is oi*imbort to a pastor in his cure, and those divisions of ethics ana moral theology which
concern a physician in his practice. This book is primarily intended for Roman Catholic
confessors.

A SELECT LIST OF WORKS

For the Clergy and Students— continued.
THE WESTMINSTER LIBRARY.
A SERIES OF MANUALS FOR CATHOLIC PRIESTS AND STUDENTS.
Edited by the Right Rev. Mgr. Bernard Ward, President of St. Edmund's
College, and the Rev. Herbert Thurston, S.J.
The Tradition of Scripture : its Origin, Authority and Interpretation.
By the Rev. William Barry, D.D., some time Scholar of the English
College, Rome. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
The Holy Eucharist. By the Right Rev. John Cuthbert Hedley,
Bishop of Newport. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
The following Volumes are also in Preparation, and others will follow: —
The Story of the Saints : A Study of the Legendary Element in Sacred
Biography. From the French of Pere Delehaye, S.J. Translated
by Mrs. Virginia M. Crawford.
The Priest's Studies. By the Rev. T. B. Scannell, D.D., Joint
Editor of The Catholic Dictionary.
The Christian Calendar. By the Rev. Herbert Thurston, S.J.
The Study Of the Fathers. By the Rev. Dom John Chapman, O.S.B.
STONYHURST PHILOSOPHICAL SERIES.
Edited by RICHARD F. CLARKE, S.J.
Logic. By Richard F. Clarke, S.J. Crown 8vo. 5s.
First Principles of Knowledge. By John Rickaby, S.J, Crown
8vo. 5s.
Moral Philosophy (Ethics and Natural Law). By Joseph Rickaby,
S.J. Crown 8vo. 5s.
General Metaphysics. By John Rickaby, S.J. Crown 8vo. 5s.
Psychology. By Michael Maher, S.J., D.Litt., M.A. Lond. Crown
8vo. 6s. 6d.
Natural Theology. By Bernard Boedder, M.A., S.J. Crown 8vo.
6s. 6d.
Political Economy. By Chas. S. Devas, M.A. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d

PUBLISHED BY LONGMANS, GREEN, &¦ CO.

The Catholic Church.

Catholic Church (The) from Within. With a Preface by His Eminence
Cardinal Vaughan, late Archbishop of Westminster. Crown 8vo.
6s. 6d. net.

Letters from the Beloved City. To S. B. from Philip. By the Rev.
Kenelm Digby Best. Crown 8vo. is. 6d.
Contents. — Why Philip writes these Letters to S. B. — S. B.'s Difficulties fully stated
— The Good Shepherd — I come that they may have life — Feed my Lambs — Feed my
Sheep — One Fold and One Shepherd — Christ's Mother and Christ's Church — Unity —
Holiness — Catholicity — Apostolicity — Our Lady's Dowry — War — Pacification.

Lent and Holy Week : Chapters on Catholic Observance and Ritual.
By Herbert Thurston, S.J. Crown 8vo. 6s. net.

Bishop Gore and the Catholic Claims. By Dom John Chapman,
O.S.B. 8vo, sewed, 8d. ; cloth, is. net.

Aspects of Anglicanism ; or, Some Comments on Certain Incidents
in the 'Nineties. By Mgr. James Moyes, D.D., Canon of Westminster
Cathedral. Crown 8vo. 6s. 6d. net.
V* This book is a free comment from a Roman Catholic standpoint upon certain incidents
in the religious life of Anglicanism in the 'Nineties. It deals incidentally with the Lambeth
Judgment, and with the question of continuity. It represent, the criticism which,- from the
point of view of history and theology, some of the later developments of Anglicanism would
suggest to a Roman Catholic mind.

The Papal Commission and the Pentateuch. By the Rev. Charles
A. Briggs, Professor of Theological Encyclopedia and Symbolics,
Union Theological Seminary, New York, and Baron Frederich
von Hugel, Member of the Cambridge Philological Society. Svo.
2s. 6d.
Divine Authority. By J. F. Scholfield, M.A., Trinity College, Cam
bridge, late Rector of St. Michael's, Edinburgh. Crown Svo. 2s.6d.net.
T-nfalliWlitv • a Paper read before the Society of St. Thomas of
UOIAUIO^/^ ry the Rev VmcENT McNabb, O.P., at Holborn
Town Hall, on Thursday, i6th May, 1905. With an Introduction
bv the Rev. Spencer Jones, M.A., President of the Society of
St. Thomas of Canterbury. Crown 8vo. Sewed, is. net.

A SELECT LIST OF WORKS

The Catholic Church — continued.
The Key to the World's Progress : being an Essay in Historical
Logic. By Charles Stanton Devas, M.A. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
*** The object of this book is to give to the logic and history of Newman an economic or
sociological setting, and thus to show that "for the explanation of World-history we must
first have the true theory of the Christian Church and her life through eighteen centuries ".
Part I. states briefly the problems which the philosophy of history seeks to resolve. Part II.
presents the solution offered by Christianity and takes the form of an historical analysis of the
principles by which the Church has been guided in her relations with the world.
The Old Riddle and the Newest Answer. By John Gerarh, S.J.,
F.L.S. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.
Self-Knowledge and Self-Discipline. By the Rev. B. W. Maturin.
Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Laws Of the Spiritual Life. By the same Author. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
The Inner Life of the Soul. Short Spiritual Messages for the Ecclesi
astical Year. By S. L. Emery. Crown Svo. 4s. 6d. net.
The Profit of Love. Studies in Altruism. By A. A. McGinley, with
Preface by the Rev. George Tyrrell. Crown Svo. 5s. net.
The School of the Heart. By Margaret Fletcher. Fcp. 8vo.
2s. 6d. net.
Contents. — Falling in Love — Married Life — The Woman of Leisure.
Stories on the Rosary. By Louise Emily Dobree. Parts I., II., III.
Crown 8vo. is. 6d. each.

Poetry.
Mariale Novum : a Series of Sonnets on the Titles of Our Lady's Litany.
By Members of the Society of Jesus. Printed on hand-made paper,
and bound in art green canvas, with cover design in blue and gilt,
gilt top. Pott 4to. 3s. 6d. net.

Fiction.
One Poor Scruple : « Novel. By Mrs. Wilfrid Ward. Cr. Svo. 6s.
Out of Due Time : a Novel. By the same Author. Cr. 8vo. 6s.

PUBLISHED BY LONGMANS, GREEN, &¦ CO.

Biography.
The History of St. Dominic, Founder of the Friar Preachers.
By Augusta Theodosia Drane. With 32 Illustrations. 8vo. 15s.
The History of St. Catherine of Siena and her Companions.
With a Translation of her Treatise on Consummate Perfection. By
the same Author. With 10 Illustrations. 2 vols. 8vo. 15s.
A Memoir of Mother Francis Raphael, O.S.D. (Augusta Theodosia
Drane) . some time Prioress Provincial of the Congregation of Domin
ican Sisters of St. Catherine of Siena, Stone. With Portrait. Crown
8vo. 7s. 6d.
Life of St. Elizaheth of Hungary, Duchess of Thuringia. By the
Count de Montalembert, Peer of France, Member of the French
Academy. Translated by Francis Deming Hoyt. Large Crown
8vo. ios. 6d. net.
History of St. Vincent de Paul, Founder of the Congregation of the
Mission (Vincentians), and of the Sisters of Charity. By Monseig-
neur Bougaud, Bb.hop of Laval. With 2 Portraits. 2 vols. 8vo.
1 6s. net.
The Life and Times of Cardinal Wiseman. By Wilfrid Ward.
With 3 Portraits. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. ios. net.
Aubrey De Vere * a Memoir based on his unpublished Diaries and
Correspondence. By the same Author. With 2 Photogravure Por
traits and 2 other Illustrations. 8vo. 14s. net.

History,
A History of England for Catholic Schools. By E. Wyatt-Davies,
M.A. With 14 Maps. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Outlines of British History. By the same Author. With 85 Illus
trations and 13 Maps. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d.
Historv of the Society of Jesus in North America : Colonial and
ii.»ou>/ij^^ B^ Thomas Hughes, of the same Society. Royal 8vo.
Text. Volume I. From the First Colonization till 1645. With 3
Maps and 3 Facsimiles. 15s. net.
Documents. Volume I. 1605-1828.

12 A SELECT LIST OF WORKS
History — continued.
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE CHURCH.
A SERIES OF HISTORIES OF THE FIRST CENTURY.
By the Abbe Constant Fouard, Honorary Cathedral Canon, Professor of
the Faculty of Theology at Rouen, etc., etc. Translated by George
F. X. Griffith.
The Christ, The Son of God. A Life of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus
Christ. With an Introduction by Cardinal Manning. With 3 Maps.
2 vols. Crown 8vo. 14s.
St. Peter and the First Years of Christianity. With 3 Maps. Cr.
8vo. 9s.
St. Paul and His Missions. With 2 Maps. Crown 8vo. gs.
The Last Years of St. Paul. With 5 Maps and Plans. Cr. 8vo. as.
St. John and the Close of the Apostolic Age. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d.

Works by the Very Rev. Canon Sheehan, D.D. (
Early Essays and Lectures. Crown 8vo. 6s. net.
Contents. — Essays. Religious Instruction in Intermediate Schools — In a Dublin Art
Gallery — Emerson — Free-Thought in America — German Universities (Three Essays) —
German and Gallic Muses — Augustinian Literature — The Poetry of Matthew Arnold —
Recent Works on St. Augustine — Aubrey de Vere (a Study). Lectures. Irish Youth and ,
High Ideals — The Two Civilisations — The Golden Jubilee of O'Connell's Death — Our \
Personal and Social Responsibilities — The Study of Mental Science — Certain Elements of 1
Character — The Limitations and Possibilities of Catholic Literature.
" Lost Angel of a Ruined Paradise " : a Drama of Modern Life. '
Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Luke Delmege. A Novel. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Grlenanaar : a Story of Irish Life. Crown 8vo. 6s.
No. 10. 5,ooo/v/07. A.U.P.

YALE UNIVERSITY I