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DIVINITY SCHOOL
TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY

EXTERNAL RELIGION.

Works by
THE REV. GEORGE TYRRELL.

NOVA ET VETERA : Informal Meditations. Crown
8vo. 5s. net.
HARD SAYINGS: A Selection of Meditations and
Studies. Crown 8vo. 5s. 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.
5s. net.
LEX CREDENDI : a Sequel to Lex Orandi. Crown
8vo. 5s. net.
Also Compiled and Edited, with additions, by
M. D. Petre.
THE SOUL'S ORBIT; or, Man's Journey to God.
Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.

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

External Religion

3ts TSLse anb abuse.

REV. GEORGE TYRRELL
Sutbor of " TBaro Savings " an6 " IRova et Wetera '

Fourth Impression

LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK AND BOMBAY

1906

PREFACE.

The proverbial fruitlessness of religious or
philosophical controversy is doubtless in some
measure due to the fact that, each one's seem
ingly many thoughts on such matters are indeed
but one thought in diverse clothings ; that the
conclusions to which we cleave, really so modify
our understanding of the principles from which
we profess to draw them, that even the few
premisses we may seem to hold in union with our
opponents are held in a different sense, and thus
there is no common basis for argument. It
might be thought that, agreeing in the Apostles'
Creed and all it involves, a Catholic and
Protestant could easily advance to still fuller
agreement ; but it may well be doubted if their

VI PREFACE.
inner understanding of a single article is
exactly the same ; while we venture to suspect
that the little differences in each case would be
found ultimately to depend upon, rather than
support the great conclusions concerning which
they are at issue. Whether theoretically it must
be so, matters little, since practically, so it is
that, for the most part, men first fix their beliefs,
and then fabricate reasons in support of them.
We flatter ourselves that our thoughts are built
up logically from principles which are inde
pendent of their consequences ; but in reality,
they are rather as the stones of an arch of which
each is supported by all the rest. In purely
abstract science, where perfect precision of terms
is attainable, logic holds inexorable sway ; nor
is there room for difference of opinion ; but
where the conceptions dealt with are necessarily
imperfectly defined, recourse to dialectical
reasoning is idle, until agreement in the manner
of simple apprehension can be secured.
Here, however, the same difficulty besets the

PREFACE. Vll
elements of the discussion as attends on the total
construction to which it is directed. There is no
rule for forcing another to apprehend things
exactly as we ourselves apprehend them>
whether they be simpler notions, or their
more complex resultants ; the only resource
is, by every artifice of exposition and illus
tration, to set out our idea so clearly that it
may find its way readily into any mind already
capable of responding to. it. But as the same
bias of vision, or refraction, which distorts
the image of the whole, will proportionally
distort the image of each component part, one
may just as well begin with the former, and face
the problem in the gross as in detail. Nay,
better ; for it is our mode of conceiving the
whole that determines our mode of conceiving
the parts, rather than inversely.
It is then by the frequent and diversified
setting forth of the Catholic conception of
Christianity in its entirety, viewed now from
one side, now from another, that we best render

Vill PREFACE.
assistance to those many souls who, consciously
or unconsciously, are in need of such an ideal
and to whom it has only to be clearly presented
in order to be apprehended, desired, and
accepted. These lectures, slight as they are in many
ways and directed to practice rather than to
speculation, do nevertheless sketch, in a few
rough strokes, one particular outline of the
Catholic Religion, which may be of interest
just now when the question of ecclesiasticism
has come into prominence once more before the
eyes of the British public — a question whose
solution largely depends on the view we take of
the relation of external to internal religion.
The Catholic and the Protestant conception of
Christianity are distinct from one another not
only in their entirety, but — such is the organic
unity of each system — in their every detail,
notwithstanding many ail-but coincidences and
points of ail-but contact. Were these contacts
and coincidences perfect, logic might force the

PREFACE. IX
opponents to total concord under pain of
incoherence. But, since as a fact they are not,
we shall better deal at once with the two con
ceptions in their entirety, than wrangle about
any of their parts, since these are really shaped
and animated by the same spirit that charac
terizes the whole. In either case our task is
one, not of argument, but of exposition ; we
have but to let the Truth appear, and then bid
men " Come and see ! " And of these, some will
remain and some will go away, according to the
power of seeing they bring with them.
G- T.

CONTENTS.

page
Lecture I. The Incarnation a Redemption of the
internal through the external . . i
Lecture II. The religion of the Incarnation,
external and internal . . ig
Lecture III. Insufficiencyofmerelyinternalreligion 39
Lecture IV. Insufficiency ofmerely external religion 58
Lecture V. Abuse of external means of grace . 80
Lecture VI. Abuse of external means of light , 106
Lecture VII. Abuse of the promise of indefectibility 128
Lecture VIII. Interior Faith . . 148

LECTURE I.
THE INCARNATION A REDEMPTION OF THE
INTERNAL THROUGH THE EXTERNAL.
It has been thought advisable, as far as
practically possible, to preserve some kind of
rough sequence in these courses of instruction ; *
and therefore as my Right Reverend predecessor
has dealt with the Incarnation, it has been
suggested that I should deal with what is some
times called the " Extension of the Incarnation "
in the Church and in the individual. To
explain in general what we mean by this con
ception, will perhaps best serve as a programme,
or an argument of what is to follow.
A work so many-sided as that of the Incarna
tion, looking to so many different ends that it
is impossible for us to say which is principal in
the Divine mind, branches out and extends
itself in countless directions ; so that if we are
1 These were instructions given to the Catholic undergraduates
at Oxford, on the Sundays in Lent Term, 1899.

2 THE INCARNATION A REDEMPTION OF
not to be lost in labyrinths of perplexity, we
must fix on some one of these many divergent
lines of its development, and content ourselves
with seeing how this or that particular feature
of the Incarnation reproduces itself in the
Church and in the individual.
Plainly this can be seen only by a process of
comparison ; by looking first upon one picture
and then upon the other, on the original and
the reproduction, on Christ and on the Church.
It will be necessary for us, therefore, to look
again upon the mystery of the Incarnation, not
indeed in its many-sided entirety, but with a
view to fixing our attention upon that particular
feature of it which it is our purpose to consider
as repeated in the Church.
Whether, as St. Bonaventure and many others
have thought, in the event of man's perseverance
in original justice, the Son of God would have
become incarnate, not as a '' man of sorrows
and acquainted with grief," but in a glorified
impassible humanity — whether He would have
assumed the headship of mankind, wedding our
unfallen race into the family of the three Divine
Persons, and by this alliance lifting it above
that of the angels — all this is matter of a more
or less probable and even profitable conjecture,
but in no sense, of revealed truth. " Christ

THE INTERNAL THROUGH THE EXTERNAL. 3
Jesus came into this world to save sinners," says
St. Paul ; but whether He would have come had
there been no sinners to save, we are not told.
One thing is, however, fairly clear, that if we
regard the shining forth, and revelation of God's
goodness and wisdom and love, as the domi
nating end of all His works in our regard, a far
fuller revelation of these attributes has been
rendered possible by the permission of sin than
would have been otherwise possible. Wonderful
as were the gifts of grace bestowed upon man
in Paradise, surpassing all that God has done for
him in the natural dignity of his spiritual being,
yet far more wonderful is grace restored to man
who had forfeited it by sin, — the kiss of peace,
the costly robe and ring, the banquet of welcome
prepared for the returning spendthrift and rebel.
O certe necessarium Adoe peccatum, sings the
Church in her Easter jubilee — " O truly needful
sin of Adam " — needful and necessary on the
supposition that God's love was to speak itself
more fully and superabundantly, not merely in
giving but in pardoning, not only in liberality
but in mercy and meekness, grace superabound-
ing where sin had abounded. Had God been
made man in a world unfallen, we had known
Him indeed, fair and glorious among the sons
of men, bright with the radiance of Tabor, with

4 THE INCARNATION A REDEMPTION OF
the splendour of His risen and ascended Body,
with a glory appealing to the tastes of our
spiritual childhood and imperfection ; but our
finer and more mature perception of a greater
glory than all this would never have been
awakened, the glory of the Divine Lover
emptied of His glory — suffering, afflicted,
humbled, slain ; the glory which shone upon
the pallid face of the dead Christ.
It was, therefore, by preference into a sinful
world that the Lamb of God chose to come, —
not into pleasant pastures beside the still
waters, but into the valley of the shadow of
death, into the midst of wolves, to be torn to
pieces by sin ; to absorb into Himself the venom
of our malice against Him, which else had
reacted upon ourselves and poisoned us. For
when man struck against God by sin, he was as
a bird in the tempest that flings itself against
the face of a cliff, and had been dashed to
pieces had not God in His pity become soft and
yielding, and taken to Himself a suffering
nature, that the hurt of the shock might be His
and not ours.
Healing, restoration, redemption, atonement,
such is the purpose and end of the Incarnation
most emphasized in Divine revelation. Propter
nos homines, says the Creed, et propter nostram

THE INTERNAL THROUGH THE EXTERNAL. 5
salutem — words which indeed admit of a wider
sense, but whose simpler meaning is doubtless
the one intended. Humanity had fallen among
thieves and lay by the wayside robbed, stript,
wounded, and half-dead ; and God, the Good
Samaritan, the physician and healer of human
nature, drew nigh binding up our wounds,
pouring in wine and oil, walking on foot that
we might ride at our ease ; taking us to the
shelter and hospitality of His Church, there to
be cared for and ministered to, till His
return. We are then considering our Incarnate Lord
as the healer of our wounded nature, in
order that we may see how the Church carries
on this same work of healing, and by what are
substantially the same methods, taking care
of redeemed humanity entrusted to her keeping
by that Good Samaritan.
And for this end we must notice more closely
the nature of our wounds, and the kind of treat
ment by which our Lord has salved them.
Apart from supernatural assistance, man, as
gompared with the angels, is by nature a weakly
and vulnerable creature, being composed of two
unlikely and in some sense antithetical elements
— spirit and matter, soul and body. In virtue
of his body he belongs to the order of things

6 THE INCARNATION A REDEMPTION OF
visible, tangible, measurable in reference to
time and place ; subject to succession, change,
corruption, and death. In virtue of his soul, he
is a spirit, lower indeed than the angels, but
like them belonging to that invisible, intangible
world outside time and space, which we can in
no way imagine, and of which we can speak and
think only in symbols and metaphors, drawn from
things that appeal to our senses. In man these
two worlds are mingled and wedded together ;
he is, so to say, the child of their marriage ;
owning an earthly and a Heavenly Father; — as it
might be, a tree rooted indeed in the invisible
but leaning over and dipping its branches into
the passing stream of things visible. And these
two elements in man are so adjusted that the
lower shall minister to and be subject to the
higher ; the earthly, the relative, the temporal,
to the heavenly, the absolute, the eternal ; the
senses and imagination feeding the mind,
embodying and expressing its thought ; the
passions and animal feelings mingling with,
aiding, and seconding the spiritual will, giving
body and expression to its movements.
Yet the lower principle being blind and head
strong is of itself incapable of intelligent
sympathy with the higher, and needs to be guided
and governed by it ; and therefore the free self-

THE INTERNAL THROUGH THE EXTERNAL. 7
induced perfection of man lies in a certain
delicate and easily-disturbed balance, between
the visible and the invisible principles of his
being ; between the flesh and the spirit.
Spiritus quidem promptus est, caro autem infirma
— " The spirit indeed is ready, but the flesh is
infirm." The flesh is the weak, the corruptible,
the vulnerable element of our composition, in
virtue of which our equilibrium is at the best
fearfully unstable. Speaking in the gross all the
sins which men commit — sins of the mind as well
as sins of the body — are, if not directly, at least
indirectly traceable to the infirmity of the flesh
— to the fact that, our spirit is, through its
dependence upon the body and the senses, tied
down to the world of feelings and illusions and
appearances. So much is this the case, that in Holy
Scripture the "flesh'' is more commonly used
to denote all that is corrupt and sinful within
us, whereas the spirit stands for all that is god
like or divine. Not indeed that one part of our
nature is essentially evil — weak is not evil — and
the other essentially good, as heretics have often
taught ; for where due equilibrium is preserved
each part in balancing helps the other, and fulfils
it. For it is in the embodied spirit, not in the
disembodied, that the highest and fullest human

8 THE INCARNATION A REDEMPTION OF
perfection is realized. Man is not an angel
prisoned in a body; but through his body
supplements in some little way the poverty
and imperfection of a spiritual nature of a
lower grade than that of the angels. Yet
because all human sin is traceable to culpable
ignorance or to passion, i.e., to some illusion
of the senses or imagination, some uncontrolled
outbreak of ungoverned heat, some failure of
faith or even of intelligence as to the reality of
things invisible and the unreality of things visible
— for this reason the flesh which through our
senses links us with the visible world, has come
to stand for the principle of sin ; whereas the
spirit which through faith and reason links us
with the invisible world, has come to be regarded
as the principle of righteousness and divinity.
Left to ourselves, and in the merely natural
order of things, the perfect balancing of the
spiritual with the fleshly elements of our being,
of reason with imagination, of the will with the
feelings, is something attained very slowly and
with great difficulty ; and in the attaining of
which our life-task of self-development consists
But it is a point of common Catholic teaching
that God having destined our first parents for
a perfection and blessedness altogether above
and beyond what was naturally due to them,

THE INTERNAL THROUGH THE EXTERNAL. 0.
started them at that point of perfection which
would otherwise have been their goal, and by
certain preternatural endowments, gave them
what they had not laboured for, namely, all
those virtues of mind, heart, affections and
passions, by which the flesh and spirit are
brought into perfect harmony and concord,
that so their energies might be set free and
multiplied for conflicts and temptations of an
altogether higher order, temptations attendant
on altogether superhuman aspirations and
attainments ; mysterious temptations, such as
we can imagine the angels to have been proved
by. There is enough in that dim Oriental record
of the Fall, to satisfy us that it was through
unbelief in the invisible, through intellectual
self-sufficiency, through spiritual pride, that man
wilfully and inexcusably subjected himself
to the bondage above which he had been
supernaturally raised, to the tyranny of things
visible — of the flesh, the senses, the imagination,
the passions. " Of every tree in the garden
shalt thou eat, but of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil thou shalt not eat ; for in the
day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."
Here there is figured some mysterious and at
first sight unreasonable restriction of the

10 THE INCARNATION A REDEMPTION OF
indulgence of the natural inclination, a restric
tion to be submitted to with blind faith in the
wisdom and goodness of God. And this restric
tion was disregarded, seemingly, not through any
extreme pressure of carnal appetite, but through
a certain revolt of the mind, rebelling against
the invisible, impatient to see and understand
everything, as though God had no right to keep
a secret from man.
Although then the flesh in its healthy state
of perfect obedience to the spirit, could not
have been the instigating motive of the Fall,
could not have responded in any irregular and
unmanageable way to temptation from without,
yet it was the instrument which man deliberately
chose for his own destruction ; and in so doing, he
released it from its obedience, and cut the
cords by which God had bound the lower
appetite into subjection to the higher ; and in
freeing the slave, soon found that he had let
loose a tyrant : Servi dominati sunt nostri —
" Our slaves have become our tyrants." Hence
forward, he himself became the slave of the
visible, the tangible, the illusory, the unreal,
of that world, to which he belongs as a creature
of space and time, of flesh and blood. Thus
it was that the flesh, the instrument of his sin,
became the instrument of his chastisement

THE INTERNAL THROUGH THE EXTERNAL. Il
Man was robbed and wounded and left half-
dead. It was then for the greater manifestation of
God's power and wisdom, that He should not
only in His mercy undo the work of sin ; but
that He should take the very instrument
and occasion of evil — the flesh namely, and the
visible order of things to which it belongs — and
make it an instrument for the remedy of evil.
Hoc opus nostra salutis
Ordo depoposcerat
Multiformis proditoris
Ars ut artem falleret
Et medelam ferret inde
Hostis unde laeserat —
as the Church sings in one of her Passion-tide
hymns. " A certain sense of order and justice," she
tells us, " demanded that the work of our
restoration should be in such wise, that the
craft of the many-sided traitor should be met
by God's counter-craft, fetching our cure from
the same quarter whence the enemy had brought
our hurt," namely, from the flesh, from the
visible element of our composition.
It is therefore on this feature of the economy
of the Incarnation that we wish to dwell ; how
Christ has not merely redeemed the whole man,

12 THE INCARNATION A REDEMPTION OF
body as well as soul ; the whole creation, visible
as well as invisible ; but how He has used the
weaker element for the redemption of the
stronger ; saving the spirit through the flesh ;
the invisible through the visible ; the internal
through the external ; how He has chosen trie
feeble things of this world to confound the
strong ; the foolish to confound the wise ; the
ignoble to confound the noble ; the things that
relatively are not to confound the things that
are — " to confound," that is, to rebuke, to
humble, and so to exalt and redeem.
Not without some intentional emphasis does
St. John proclaim the mystery as " the Word
madey?^," rather than " the Word made man ; "
glancing, it would seem, at the lower and more
humiliating aspect of our nature.
Peccat caro mundat caro
Regnat Deus Dei caro.1
But we must also notice that together with
man's body and fleshly part, the whole visible
bodily world was put out of joint by man's sin ;
thrown back, not indeed into primeval chaos
and confusion ; but into its state of natural
wildness and uncultivation. " Cursed is the
1 For flesh hath cleansed what flesh had stained
And God's own flesh as God hath reigned.

THE INTERNAL THROUGH THE EXTERNAL. 13
earth for thy sake, on thy account," says God
to the first Adam ; "thorns and briers shall it
bring forth." Through Adam's sin, the whole
visible order of things was cursed and alienated
from God. It had been created to give praise
to God through man. Itself soulless and voice
less, it could not know itself or praise God for
what He had made it ; but man could see it
and know it, and praise God for it ; and so in
man it was to have found a voice and given
glory to God. The chords were there, tuned
by Divine skill, but silent till struck by human
hands. But by sin, man lost the art of that
music, and his every touch upon that instrument
drew out some harsh discord. There was no
change in God's work — good and exceeding
good as He had pronounced it — the change
was all and only in man's heart. " Thorns and
briers shall it bring forth." The visible order
of things previously submitted by the power of
God to man's service, and yielding its fruit
in response to light and pleasurable labour, now
returned to its natural unruliness, bringing forth
thorns and briers, sorrows and snares, and
needing to be weeded and laboriously cultivated
in the sweat of man's brow, to yield him even
in niggardly measure that bread whereby his
soul might live. Absolutely speaking, thorns and

14 THE INCARNATION A REDEMPTION OF
briers were there before, yet relatively to man
they were not, till he threw himself wilfully in
their midst to be entangled and pierced. The
change was not in nature, but in man ; it was
the effect not of things visible, but of man's
misuse of things visible. For thorns and briers,
sorrows and temptations, are largely little else
than a " form " our own mind puts upon things.
" It depends on how we take things," as we say.
What is sweet in itself is bitter to the disordered
palate ; and light that gladdens the healthy
eye, hurts and tortures that which is weak and
unduly sensitive.
And, therefore, since Christ has come with
healing in His wings ; to breathe into us once
more the breath of life ; to sanctify and
harmonize our flesh and spirit through contact
with His own sacred Flesh and Spirit, so far as
He has already begun even in this life to change
us and bring our flesh once more into obedience
to our spirit ; in that same measure and degree,
He has begun the restoration of the whole
visible world to the service of man and the
glory of God. It became dumb and blind and
deaf, when man was separated from God and
enslaved to his own flesh ; but now, through the
sacred Flesh of Christ, and that of the saints of
Christ, it has received, vision and voice and

THE INTERNAL THROUGH THE EXTERNAL. 15
hearing : " He hath done all things well ; He
hath made the deaf to hear and the dumb to
speak," the long-silent spheres take up their
broken melody once more ; the heavens again
tell out the glory of God, and the firmament
showeth His handiwork.
Yet here again it is in us and through us that
the transformation is wrought. The nature of
water was not in itself changed when Christ
trod the restless waves ; nor was that of fire
robbed of its natural destructiveness when it
singed not a hair of God's saints while it con
sumed their tormentors ; nor were lions less
fiercely-natured in the moment when they
crouched and licked the feet of the martyrs in
the arena ; nor did the timid birds of the air
belie or alter their natural character when they
trustfully gathered around the Saint of Assisi.
"What manner of man is this that the winds
and the sea obey Him?" A wisely put question !
They did not say : What manner of sea and
wind is this? It was in Him and not in the
elements that they sought the explanation of
the marvel. In the measure that man is what
he ought to be, that he approaches his lost
supernatural dignity as a son of God, the world
will be to him what it ought to be, and so it too
will be delivered from its bondage and servitude

l6 THE INCARNATION A REDEMPTION OF
by being brought under man's feet, even as man
finds his liberty at the feet of God. Of this con
summation the Prophet says : " Thou hast made
him little less than a god, and hast put all things
under his feet ; " and again : " Sit at My right
hand till I make thy foes thy footstool;" till thy
enemies have become thy lovers and servants.
To deal with the extension of the Incarnation
as we propose, is to show how the Catholic
religion carries on the work of man's redemption
by the same methods as Christ, turning by
some wondrous magic the poison into an
antidote, using for our cure those same visible
things which we had misused and still misuse
to our hurt.
Other defective and false interpretations of
our religious instinct seeing all the sin and evil
occasioned by the misuse of the senses and the
material world, have come to regard the body,
the senses,and everything corporeal, as essentially
and irredeemably evil, and to seek the liberation
and redemption of the spirit through the destruc
tion of the flesh, and by way of a false and
impossible asceticism. This error has charac
terized, not merely the great non-Christian
religions of the East, in whose dim twilight so
many hundreds of millions have had to grope
their way to Heaven as best they might ; but

THE INTERNAL THROUGH THE EXTERNAL. 17
also numberless Christian sects of the Puritan
or Catharist type, as well as many schools
of pietism just barely tolerated within the
Church, — alien to her spirit and guided largely
by an unconscious bias of neo-platonism ;
escaping her censure only through the very
confusion of their modes of thought and
expression. But in that interpretation of our religious
instinct which God Himself has given us through
the Incarnation and in the Catholic religion of
Human Nature, the essential and ineffaceable
goodness of all God's creatures is the pre
dominant idea. The seeming evilness of the
senses and of material things is not in them
selves, but in the perverse will of man who
misuses them. Let that will be healed and
rectified, and at once the visible world returns
to its original obedience ; and what before were
stumbling-blocks, are now steps sloping up to
the throne of God. The body, the senses, the
imagination, the feelings, the passions, are all,
through the redemption of Christ, restored to
their original functions as instruments for the
sanctification of the soul.
That there should be a visible and hierarchic
Church, involving a duty of visible membership
as a normal condition of salvation ; that she
c

l8 THE INCARNATION A REDEMPTION.
should use visible rites and sacraments in the
sanctification of souls ; that the Divine Word
should be brought to our souls not by private
inspiration, but by the folly and weakness of
preaching ; that the mysteries of eternity, the
dogmas of faith, should be conceived in the forms
of human thought, expressed in the language of
human speech ; that in a thousand ways this
Catholic religion should press the visible order
into the service of the invisible, redeeming every
form of human thought and love and action
from the service of sin to the service of God,
making the kingdoms of this world, — the king
doms of art and of science and economics and
politics, to be the kingdoms of God and His
Christ ; bringing music and painting and song
and drama into the very Holy of holies itself,
all this is but a certain extension of the Incar
nation; an expansion of that economy whereby
the flesh, i.e., the visible world, which through
sin was made opaque and hung as a heavy
curtain between us and the invisible, has been
made once more transparent and has become
the medium of communication between the
Heart of God and the heart of man.
Peccat caro mundat caro
Regnat Deus Dei caro.

LECTURE II.
THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION,
EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL.
It sounds almost irreverent to speak of the
religion of the Incarnation as being but one of
many actual and possible religions, and it would
be false as well as irreverent, did we mean that
God were in any sense indifferent as to which of
the numerous existing religions a man should
adopt. God desires all men, as far as possible
to come to fullest attainable knowledge of
Christian and Catholic truth. Still it is always
good for us to wake ourselves up to the fact
that the state of things, the order of ideas —
social, political, religious — to which we have
been accustomed from childhood, is not on that
account the necessary, the natural, the only
conceivable order of things. If we are to
have intelligent notions on any such subject, we
must try to approach it with a fresh, unused
part of our mind, and to get out of the common

20 THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION,
groove of speaking and thinking which custom
and repetition have hollowed for us. We must try
in some measure to rediscover for ourselves what
has long since been discovered and communi
cated to us by others ; for this is to make the
truth our own ; to realize it, instead of merely
repeating it. In our boyhood the laws of
physical nature on the one hand, and on the
other, the manners, customs, and institutions of
our home and country, seem to us equally neces
sary and inevitable. Not till we begin to read
or to travel, and in other ways to widen the field
of our experience, do we come to feel the vast
difference between things that must be and things
that may or may not be. It is the. purpose of
a liberal education to rid us of this mental " pro
vincialism," to save us from the narrowness of a
particular, as opposed to an all-round, universal
view of the main interests of life. It should
help us to take an outside impersonal survey of
ourselves, which so few uneducated persons are
really capable of doing ; to compare our ideas,
beliefs, habits, and tastes, with those of the most
cultivated minds, whether of our own or of
other times and countries, and thus measuring,
to criticize and correct ourselves.
If, therefore, we are to be educated and intelli
gent Catholics, it is necessary for us to wake to

EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL. 21
the fact that this religion of ours, unique as it is
in some ways, is not the only conceivable, nor
the only existing religion ; and that other reli
gions — all inadequate, all more or less false —
can be, and are accepted, as seriously and as
earnestly by millions of mankind. Ignorant
people can never realize that a foreigner's
language is to him native, and not foreign.
Seeing that a horse is a horse, why a Frenchman
should persist in calling it cheval, is to them
always an obscure mystery, an instance of that
strange unreasonableness which distinguishes the
foreigner from the true-born Briton. In like
manner it is some time before the possibility of
a religion other than our own, becomes to us a
real thought. Yet, till it does so, till we can
compare and contrast our own religion with
other religions that have been, or that might
have been, till we can recognize its distinctive
characteristics, we can hardly be said to know it
intelligently ; for all intelligent knowledge im
plies discrimination — that is, a sense of difference
and opposition.
This premised, let us notice that just as the
various sorts of social and political institutions
which prevail, and have prevailed, among men
of different races and ages, are so many attempts

22 THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION,
to satisfy and interpret a certain instinct of
civilization, which is universal and native to the
human soul ; so the various and conflicting
religions upon the face of the earth are all
attempts to interpret, explain, and satisfy a
certain religious instinct or craving, which is
now allowed on all hands to be as much a part
of our nature as is the faculty of speech or of
reason. Man, always and everywhere, feels that
there is something in the unseen world he must
worship and obey. What that object is, how it
is to be worshipped, in what it is to be obeyed —
this is not written in his soul ; he is left to
learn it from others, or find it out for himselfi
But the feeling, the craving, the spiritual instinct,
is there by nature ; just as by nature we all
suffer bodily hunger, and yet have to learn by
costly experience, and through many mistakes,
what may be eaten, what must be left ; what
foods are wholesome or agreeable, what un
savoury or deleterious ; matters in which races
and peoples differ as much as they do in their
religions. Of course, just as at one end of the scale of
civilization we may find savages so degraded as
to have lost all wish for civilization, or, at the
other end, philosophers like Rousseau, who, dis
gusted with a corrupt and effete civilization,

EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL. 23
have sophisticated their minds and reasoned
away their healthy instincts in the matter, so in
regard to the religious faculty we may find
individuals, or classes, whose better nature has
for one reason or another been perverted, and
their spiritual instinct paralyzed. But in spite
of these exceptions, the fact stands out plain
that man is essentially a religious animal, just
as he is essentially a reasoning animal, however
irreligious or unreasonable he may be in his life
and conduct.
Left to themselves, and apart from the super
natural teaching of revelation, men have always
striven to frame some relatively satisfactory
explanation of this religious craving or ten
dency ; to form some theory or view of human
life, its origin and its end, which will fit in with
and explain their sense of duty, their conviction
of the infinite opposition between right and
wrong, their remorse of conscience, their fear of
judgment, their hope of immortality and of a
diviner and fuller life. We know what it is to
be troubled by some imperious, yet vague and
indefinite want, which we try to satisfy first by
one thing, then by another, but can never per
fectly quiet or allay. So it is with man when he
tries to invent a religion for himself ; he obeys
an inexorable appetite of his spiritual nature,

24 THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION,
hungering for a god and a religion ; but in his
understanding and interpretation of that appe
tite, in the food that he offers it, he is fallible,
inadequate, more or less false, yet capable of ever
progressing towards something better, just as he
is capable of a sort of blundering progress in
science, or in the arts of civilization.
For our present purpose then, we mean by a
" religion," an interpretation, whether human or
divine, natural or revealed, of our inborn religious
instinct — an explanation that will account for it,
justify it, and give it practical direction and
guidance. But just as man's soul fashions to
itself a body to complete its otherwise imperfect
spiritual nature, so man's thoughts and theories
and abstract ideas must always fix and embody
themselves in some concrete form, that appeals
to the imagination and the senses, in some story
or myth, or symbol or picture ; or at least in
some " form of words," by which the ideas may
be caught, and tied down to earth before they
vanish into thin air. And therefore, in all these
religions, or interpretations of the religious
instinct, whether true or false, Christian or non-
Christian, we observe two parts — outward and
inward ; body and soul ; visible and invisible ;
on the one side beliefs, convictions, theories
belonging to the mind ; on the other, facts,

EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL. 25
legends, rites, formulas in which those beliefs are
clothed and made visible to the eye of the
imagination. A religion, to be human and prac
ticable, must, like man himself, have a body and
soul ; all puritanical attempts at a merely philo
sophical, spiritual religion, discarding outward
and imaginative expression, are violently un
natural, and foredoomed to failure.
Untaught by Divine revelation, and left to
their own efforts to find out a sort of natural
religion for themselves, men might indeed
succeed in advancing, however slowly, from very
childish to less childish and more worthy con
ceptions of things Divine, somewhat as they
advance in their interpretation of physical nature
as a whole. But even this advance would be
on the condition of a perfect and laborious
fidelity to the light of natural reason, and to the
guidance of natural conscience — a condition
never realized in any great measure, owing, first,
to the persistent illusions of the senses and
imagination, and then to the unruliness of the
animal affections and passions — in other words,
owing to man's bondage to things visible ; to
the natural weakness of his faith, of his hold on
the invisible.
Just because man's religion must have a body
as well as a soul ; an outward expression, as

26 THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION,
well as an inward meaning ; therefore, unless it
be of Divine origin, and under supernatural
protection, it is, by nature, as corruptible, as
vulnerable, as man himself. We are all prone to
do what is easier and demands least exertion.
It is easier to let the body shape and govern the
soul, than to subject it to the soul; and similarly,
it is easier to let our imagination and our
passions govern our beliefs than to bring them
into conformity with, and subjection to, our
beliefs. It is easier to suppose that things are in
themselves as they seem to the eye, or as they
sound to the ear, than to discern the vast and
momentous difference between appearance and
reality. The history of the various man-made
religions shows us everywhere that idolatry,
superstition, and corruption of the truth, arises
from the tendency to forget that the outward
and visible embodiment of Divine truth is not
its soul and essence ; that it answers indeed, as
words do, to the inward sense, yet is as distinct
from it as words are from the realities they
stand for.
If, then, the endeavour to embody invisible
truths in some visible form is so universally a
source of corruption ; if all decay originates in
the bodily envelope of religion, is not this an
argument for a purely spiritual, philosophical

EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL.. 27
religion — without creed or dogma or ritual or
visible hierarchic Church ; a religion merely of
the heart and mind ? This, however, would be
to say in other words that because our body is
a source of so much sin and trouble to us, it
would be better to dispense with the body alto
gether ! An idle supposition, since we are
inevitably men and not angels ; and our highest
life and perfection, however difficult of attain
ment, must be an embodied perfection consist
ing of an harmony between the flesh and the
spirit So, too, the ideal religion towards which
man, unassisted by revelation, vainly aspires, is
one in which the outward and visible expression
shall be entirely governed by and obedient to
the ever-growing inward truth, not perverting
or obscuring it, but suffering it to shine through
without distortion, as light through pure crystal.
But taking fallen man as he is, the flesh lusting
against the spirit, and the spirit against the
flesh ; the outward and inward, the visible
and invisible continually at war ; this ideal is,
apart from revelation, hopelessly unattainable ;
and in every man-made religion, words almost
necessarily tend to usurp the place of truths ;
images to be substituted for realities ; shadows
for substances ; the letter for the spirit

28 THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION,
Having thus glanced at the ordinary type of
all man-made and natural religions, we can
better estimate the distinctive superiority of the
supernatural God-made religion of the Incar
nation. As grace does not destroy or detract from
anything good in nature, but simply elevates
and perfects it by way of addition, so the
Christian revelation lacks nothing that belongs
to our ideal of a perfect religion, but satisfies
superabundantly, and beyond all hope, the
cravings of our natural religious instinct. It
not only gives us gratis, without money, without
price, without labour, what else, centuries of
labour had ill compassed, if at all ; it not only
starts us at that point of religious enlighten
ment, which else had been our practically un
attainable goal ; but it raises the whole level
of our progress into an altogether higher plane,
and sets before us such a goal as eye hath not
seen, nor ear heard, nor heart conceived.
If, however, ours is a Divine and supernatural
religion, it is, for that very reason, of all religions
the most supremely human, adapted to all the
complex needs of our double nature, bodily and
spiritual, by His skill who as He made man, and
was made man, so knows, as none other, what
is in man.

EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL. 29
Now Christ's religion would not have been,
what it is so pre-eminently, a human religion,
had it been content simply with instructing our
intelligence in the truths pertaining to the
Kingdom of God, without at the same time
providing for the worthy expression and embodi
ment of those truths and clothing them in visible
and imaginable forms. It had been of no avail
for God to supplement the struggling light of
our reason with the noon-day brightness of
supernatural revelation, had He at the same
time left us to the mercy of our own imagination
— that source of all error and spiritual illusion —
for the embodiment and concrete setting forth
of that truth, in a form accessible to those un
cultivated millions for whose redemption He
came principally.
And so the Word had breath and wrought
With human hands the creed of creeds,
In loveliness of perfect deeds
More strong than all poetic thought ;
Which he may read that binds the sheaf,
Or builds the house, or digs the grave ;
Or those wild eyes that watch the wave
In roarings round the coral reef.
That is to say, the Word-made-flesh clothed
His words in flesh ; gave His doctrine its perfect
complement and correlative — a visible form and

30 THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION,
body fitted to it by the same Divine skill that
fashioned our body to be the expression, the
complement, the instrument of our soul. Else,
He had left the weak and vulnerable element of
religion, the source of all its decay and corrup
tion, unhealed and unredeemed.
Nor is this divinely-given embodiment of
truth a contingent feature of Christian religion,
but altogether distinctive and essential. Catho
licity is before all else the religion of the Word-
made-flesh, i.e., of Divine Truth, naturally
invisible, and, in a sense, abstract, but now
made visible and concrete ; emptied of its
glory, swathed as it were in the bands of human
words, rites, and symbols ; laid in the manger
to be the food, the common daily bread of the
rudest and simplest. It is the religion which
transforms the outward and bodily, from being
a source of corruption, to being a source of
health and life, using it to resuscitate, to rule,
to correct the inward and spiritual ; just as
noble standards of art awake, educate, and
refine the artistic sense latent within us, which
else would manifest itself, if at all, in all manner
of frivolous vulgarity.
Our Lord, then, not only taught the truth
with His lips and clothed it in words of Divine
authority, but He lived and acted the truth in

EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL. 31
His life, and this not merely in the sense that
He fulfilled the Divine will in all His conduct,
thus making the highest ideal of sanctity visible
in a concrete example ; but in the sense that
every deed and event of His mortal life was
prophetic ; was as it were a sacrament or symbol
of the mysteries of the Kingdom of God ; was
crowded with inexhaustible meaning touching
the things of the eternal and invisible world.
For let us notice that quite apart from the
Incarnation, the Eternal Word was and is the
true light enlightening every man that cometh
into the world. The light of reason and what
ever truth reason has attained is from Him.
He gave us our natural religious instinct ;
and whatever light lingers in the corruptest
religions of the world, is a spark of that Eternal
Light that shines ever in darkness, though the
darkness cannot comprehend it.
It was His Divine will that from the very
beginning had, under the abstract name of
Conscience, been struggling against the selfish
and sinful will of every child of Adam ; so
constantly and persistently, that men mistook
that Divine presence within them for part of
themselves, for one of their natural springs of
action. Here and there the truth dawned upon
choicer and purer minds, a Socrates or a Marcus

32 THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION,
Aurelius. But the bulk of men were too gross,
too self-ignorant, to discern a presence so near
them, so subtly intertwined with their own soul ;
and therefore it was needful that this conscience
of theirs, this indwelling Will of God, this Power
within making for justice, should go outside
them, should become Incarnate and face them,
and speak to them, as man to man : that God
should live visibly and outwardly upon earth
that life of humiliation which He lives millions
of times over in human souls ; that thus our
slow minds might apprehend, at least in figure,
that tragedy which is realized daily in the very
core of our being.
For there, with the first dawn of reason,
the first glimmer of conscience, God comes
knocking at the heart's door for admission
that the Divine Life may be born in our
will. He comes to His own and His own
receive Him not ; or, if He is received, it is
to dwell with us in all the feebleness and depen
dence of a helpless babe, left at the mercy of
our free-will to be driven out at any moment,
or to be neglected, starved, slighted ; for it rests
with our choice whether the spark of Divine
fire shall be rudely extinguished, or shall be
fostered in our soul.
His whole life within us is a life of poverty,

EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL. 33
labour, and sorrow ; of agonizing and struggling
for dominion over the heart He has created to
be His kingdom. In the resistance we offer
to the command of conscience, to this inward
impulse of the Divine will, God is continually
betrayed, forsaken, denied, condemned, scorned,
spat upon, crucified, buried, and forgotten. By
taking to Himself a suffering body, God has
made visible to our bodily eyes the true nature
of sin. He has brought home to our senses
what men do, when they fight against goodness
and justice and truth and charity and all that is
Divine ;, against what is in any sense the cause
of God ; or against the servants and representa
tives of God ; how as far as lies in them they
are fighting against Him, slaying and crucifying
their God. Until God was passible and mortal, sin
could do Him no harm, and could hurt none but
the sinner ; when He became passible, sin leapt
upon Him and rent Him limb from limb as a
wolf rends a lamb. The Crucifix is the collective
sin of the world made visible. It shows us our
sins preying upon God, and God meekly sub
mitting to our violence, lest it should react upon
us to our own destruction.
The Resurrection, again, is the outward
counterpart of that inward resurrection of Christ
in the soul when conscience, quickened from the
D

34 THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION,
•dead by grace, reasserts itself once more and
reigns victorious in the penitent heart ; while
Christ, the once feeble Babe of Bethlehem,
coming at last in glory to judge the world,
speaks to us of the eventual and certain triumph
of that Christ within our conscience, of whose
present meekness we take such cowardly
advantage, but who, we know, will at last be,
and even now is, our inexorable Judge — Nunc
est judicium hujus mundi — already has the Last
Judgment begun within us.
Once more, the best and purest men of
every generation, those who have lived for the
service of goodness, truth, justice, and mercy,
as for something greater than themselves ; as
for an interest claiming the sacrifice of their
private interest — something indistinctly felt
to be the will of a Divine Power ; such
men have ever sought and longed for some
concrete embodiment of the cause they have
lived for, in which it should be personified, loved,
and worshipped ; they have formed or imagined
to themselves a multitude of heroes and deities,
and have distributed amongst them all that
they knew and loved of the Divine perfection.
Now, this natural desire God has at once
satisfied and infinitely surpassed in becoming
Man, to the end that in Christ, without any

EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL. 35
metaphor or fancy, but in literal plain fact, we
should possess not only the highest finite
example of all that is good and true and fair ;
of all that is worth living and dying for ; but
the very source and substance of all such good
ness ; God Himself, incarnate, personal, human,
bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh.

Thus we see how the religion of the Incarna
tion explains and satisfies beyond all measure
the religious aspirations of those rare souls who
have been perfectly faithful to the nature God
has given them ; and how at the same time it
is calculated to evoke like aspirations in that
great multitude of sinful men who cannot
apprehend spiritual truths, except as embodied
in some visible form. We see how the external
and visible Christ, the Word Incarnate, reveals
and makes plain to our earthly minds, all, and
immeasurably more, that the internal Christ of
our conscience, the Light which lightens every
man that comes into this world, would teach us,
did we not harden our hearts by infidelity to
grace. We see how this Christ that is outside
us, calls aloud to the stifled and buried Christ
that is within us, Veni foras! "Come forth!" and
how our conscience is resonant to that call and

36 THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION,
answers, and comes forth from the sepulchre to
a new and supernatural life ; and how by this
union of the outward and inward rule of Christ —
the inward supplemented, corrected, and elevated
by the outward — our nature is lifted up to com
panionship with God.
The importance of being clear in this matter
cannot be exaggerated in these days, when
Catholics are sometimes so lamentably hazy as to
the great principles which separate their unique
religion from every other religion, and make it
sui generis and singular. A contempt for the
exterior part of religion, for dogmas, sacraments,
rites, hierarchic order, and all the " machinery "
as it might be called, of a visible Church, is just
now very prevalent, not among the enemies oi
religion — that would not surprise us — but among
those who are obviously religious-minded and
sincere. Comparing the religions of the world
one with another, and finding some fragmentary
truth and goodness in all ; and at the same time
seeing that all their errors, superstitions, and
corruptions are connected with the endeavour to
make religion tangible and intelligible to our
imperfect minds, it has seemed wiser to these
men, to regard all this outward part of religion
as but provisional and unimportant — the mere
clothes of truth that must be continually altered,

EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL. ^J
and from time to time discarded altogether as
old-fashioned and impossible.
This would undoubtedly be a just view had
¦God left us unaided in our natural state ; had
He simply given us our religious instinct and left
the interpretation of it to ourselves, as He has
left to us the interpretation of physical nature.
But by the Incarnation, God has taken this
work out of our hands ; and has by way of
revelation, not only interpreted to us clearly all
that our religious instinct involves and implies,
but has created in us new aspirations and
desires by putting before us hopes exceeding
all that nature could ever have dreamt of.
Because then the Catholic religion, viewed
outwardly as an embodiment of truth, is not
a natural and human interpretation of our
religious instincts, but supernatural and Divine,
we are constrained to regard it, not as provisional
and tentative, but as infallible and final. He
who has redeemed the body as well as the soul,
and has won for it immortality and incorrupti
bility, beyond its nature, He too has redeemed
and transformed the naturally corruptible part
of religion, its outward expression and embodi
ment, and has made it, no longer detrimental,
but obedient and serviceable to the inward and
spiritual part.

38 THE RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION.
We do not mean that there is no progress in
the Church's understanding of the deposit of
faith committed to her by Christ ; no develop
ment in the structure of the visible Body of
Christ. We do not mean that outside that core
of divinely authorized religion there may not
be among Catholics many religious beliefs, true
or false ; many religious practices, healthy or
unhealthy, which are simply of human origin,
the fruit of our endeavours to interpret for our
selves, in matters where the Church has not
spoken ; but we mean that Christ's truth is the
same yesterday, to-day, and for ever ; and that
He is with us all days, even to the end of the
world ; that as we adore the Sacred Humanity
and, with It, every part of that fleshly Body
wherein God became in some sort visible to
mortal eyes ; so do we yield a relatively Divine
honour to the hierarchic Church upon earth, to
every word and letter, sacrament and symbol,
chosen by God Himself to embody as much of
the Eternal Truth, as our weak eyes can as yet
bear to look upon,

LECTURE III.
INSUFFICIENCY OF MERELY INTERNAL
RELIGION.
In our first instruction we fixed on that particular
feature of the Incarnation which we proposed
to consider as reproduced in the Church and in
the individual. We saw how God had chosen to>
display His wisdom and power more gloriously
by taking as the instrument and cause of our
redemption what had been the instrument and
occasion of our ruin — our body, and the bodily
world to which it belongs and with which it
connects us. We saw that as our mind was
naturally prone to error and illusion through its
dependence on the imagination ; and our will
still more prone to perversion by reason of its
alliance with the passions and feelings, so God
chose these very sources of weakness and corrup
tion — the body, the senses, and the visible world,
to undo the mischief they had occasioned ; thus
miraculously changing the poison into an anti-

40 INSUFFICIENCY of
dote, the forbidden fruit of death into the medicine
of immortality. Our second Conference brought
us to a more particular application of this
method of redemption. We saw that every
human religion — by which we meant an inter
pretation of our inborn religious instincts and
appetites — in order to be practicable and con
genial to our nature, must have its body as well
as its soul ; its outward and visible expression,
in words, dogmas, rites, and organization ; as
well as its inward sense. We went on to notice
that in all man-made, unrevealed religions, this
bodily part was naturally the corruptible element,
the source of decay and death ; and that there
fore, consistently with the above principle of
using the weak to confound the strong, our
Saviour had not only revealed to us a Divine
and infallible interpretation of our spiritual
cravings, but had done so through the medium
of human words and deeds and actions that
addressed themselves to our senses. He might
have worked from within, putting the truth
directly into our souls by internal inspiration ;
and leaving it to us to clothe it in imagery, or
to work it out into visible deeds as best we
might. But He preferred, what might seem to
us the meaner method, of coming in from outside
through the lowly door of our eyes and ears

MERELY INTERNAL RELIGION. 41
and other senses. Henceforth external religion
was not to be merely our very imperfect self-
devised utterance of a religion already planted
by God within our soul ; but it was to be the
divinely formed channel through which a super
natural religion was to get into the soul — was
to pass from the mind and heart of God into
the mind and heart of man. At all times the
Word of God was by nature in the very centre
of every human soul, ready to teach it a certain
measure of Divine truth, would it but listen ;
but as men, engrossed in the things of sense,
would not listen, the Word went outside them
and took flesh and spoke to them through their
senses, as it were, to force them to listen. Thus
the religion of the Incarnation is before all else
an external religion, approaching the soul from
without, just as Christ when on earth spoke to
men face to face from without. The Eternal
Light which was incarnate in Him and shone in
Him, was from Him communicated to us, as
from an outside source of illumination.
We have already hinted at a rough illustration
of our point to be drawn from the aesthetic
order. Most men have some dormant musical
capacity in their souls, to be wakened sometimes
designedly, sometimes by accident, sometimes
never at all. Left to himself, each one in his

42 INSUFFICIENCY OF
endeavour to satisfy the sense of music of which
he has become conscious, might evolve some
sort of rude, uncouth melody of his own ; but
for the most part our musical faculty is wakened
in us, formed, and educated by the influence,
good or evil, of those among whom we dwell,
whereas the viciousness of public taste in this
matter keeps us back and perverts and hinders
our progress. We know the advantage, in this
as in other matters, of a correct and classical
standard ; how it hastens, guides, and amplifies
the growth of the sense of music within us ;
how it enables us gradually to appropriate to
ourselves the accumulated experience and judg
ment of the best critics in the art, who have
gone before us. We see also how this external
standard of music — the possession of the public
at large and of no individual in particular — is
not formed by our own private taste, but rather
forms it ; how it is something outside us and
not our own ; yet which we strive to bring
inside us and to make our own ; for there is in
us something that corresponds to it and can be
shaped by it to its likeness. So our religious
sense, our capacity for a certain Divine music,
and harmony with God in thought and affection,
might long lie dormant, or would at best exhibit
a wild and straggling growth, were it left solely

MERELY INTERNAL RELIGION. 43
to our own cultivation ; were there not also,
outside us, a divinely revealed standard in
Christ, to wake up and gradually bring to per
fection the latent Christ that is within us. There
are infinite differences of genius, but the greatest
genius will do little or nothing in isolation un
aided by teaching and by examples of excellence
already attained ; and there are infinite differ
ences of religious inspiration — a sort of genius
for things Divine — yet the most abundant will
be cramped and largely wasted for lack of an
external religion ; for want of a Christ and a
Catholic Church.
Needless to say, the external guide and
standard is of no avail if there be not the
internal capacity to develop. We cannot
educate or draw out of ourselves what is not
in us. But every man who has reason and
conscience and liberty and the measure of grace
accorded to all, has it in him to know and love
God. Still the possession of both the capacity and
the standard is profitless unless we use the
latter to develop the former. For this develop
ment of interior religion is the whole end and
purpose of that which is exterior. How does
it better us to be forced to sit and listen to good
music if it wake no echo of sympathy and

44 INSUFFICIENCY OF
appreciation in our soul ; if it do not in some
degree educate and improve our taste ? There
are, we know, earless, tuneless people who would
pose as musical simply because they make it a
point to be bodily present wherever the best
music is to be had, though it penetrates them as
little as the rain that patters on a rock. And
there are Catholic Christians who are satisfied
with the knowledge that in the Church they
have ready at hand a divinely revealed standard
of spiritual truth, and who imagine that Christi
anity consists in the profession and acknow
ledgment of this fact ; forgetting that the Christ
and the Religion that is outside them is but a
means to wake up and develop the Christ and
the Religion that is latent within them. If we
hold a light to the end of a taper, it is only in
order that the flame may be communicated to the
taper and make it in some sense an independent
source of light. Were the taper damp or other
wise incombustible, we might go on for ever
holding the light there. The applied flame
would seem to be, but would not be its own.
External religion, such as we have in Christ and
the Catholic Church, applies the flame of truth
and love to our soul. Perhaps by way of
laborious friction we might have been able to
produce some little spark of Divine life in our-

MERELY INTERNAL RELIGION. 45
selves, aided by those graces which God scatters
outside the Church to all men ; but by super
natural revelation God puts a blazing brand
into our hands to hasten and facilitate matters,
for He wants a big conflagration and that
speedily. Ignem veni mittere in terram, He
says, et quid volo nisi ut accendatur?
This brings us to the consideration of a truth
that lies midway between two false extremes,
and concerns the more exact relation of this
exterior religion to our personal and interior
religion. The revolt against the Catholic Church which
broke out in the sixteenth century tended
towards an excessive depreciation of the need
of an outward objective religion with fixed
dogmatic teaching, with forms of worship and
sacramental means of grace. It favoured the
opinion that Christ's teaching was perpetuated
by the Holy Ghost speaking, not to the visible
Church collectively, and through the visible
Church to the individual, but indirectly and
independently to each several soul. This is the
principle of private inspiration, private judgment
— a sort of false mysticism — which though
slightly modified is not substantially changed by
inconsistently acknowledging the Bible as an ex
ternal standard of religious truth. It is the denial

46 INSUFFICIENCY OF
of any outward religious authority upon earth to
which obedience is due ; and the assertion of an
excessive liberty and self-sufficiency on the part
of the individual. For although it recognizes a
sort of divinely provided guidance in the Sacred
Scriptures and in the religious traditions and
practices of Christians, yet it is not the guidance
of a will, a personality, distinct from our own,
which commands with authority ; it is not the
guidance of an external Christ, our Master and
Lord ; but only such as we find in books, or
examples, or in the advice of others by which
we freely choose to guide ourselves — the respon
sibility being all ours. The doctrine may be
there for us to find if we choose and are able ;
but there is no living teacher upon earth whose
duty it is to bring it to us ; whose right it is to
impose it upon us.
Contrary to this denial of external religious
authority, and as it were at the other extreme,
is that formalism or externality which comes
of forgetting that the outward exists solely for
the sake of the inward; that Christ has gone
outside us and become incarnate, only that
He may live within us more fully and wonder
fully than had been possible had we known
Him only in the voice of conscience, and
not also in the words of His human speech.

MERELY INTERNAL RELIGION. 47
Our Christian religion, as we said, is pre
eminently and essentially an incarnation, an
embodying of Divine Truth ; but this visible
Church, this Kingdom of God on earth, is for
the sake of the invisible Church, that is, for the
sake of His kingship and dominion in each
particular soul. This formalism is not the error
of any definite sect or party, but a tendency on
the part of certain minds to misunderstand the
stress rightly laid by the Catholic Church in
these modern days of lawless individualism, on
the great principles of authority and obedience
and Church-membership. It shows itself in the
tendency to pervert what God has designed to
be supernatural helps, into occasions of hind
rance ; to use the light and guidance He has
given us, not, as He intended, to stimulate and
exalt our intelligence and to carry it far above
and beyond what it otherwise could have
accomplished ; but as an occasion of mental
lethargy and sluggishness ; to use the sacra
ments and means of grace, not as fountains of
new energy, making possible and obligatory
greater exertion than we had else been capable
of, but as short cuts to an easy level of virtue
which might well have been attainable without
them ; to make them substitutes for trouble
and exertion and watchfulness, and the other

48 INSUFFICIENCY OF
abundant natural means already at our disposal.
This is of course to hide the candle of revela
tion under a bushel, instead of using it to light
up every dark corner of our mind ; it is to bury
the talent of sacramental grace in cold earth,
instead of trading with it industriously and
using it to extend the field of our spiritual
activity. An external religion so abused becomes to
many an occasion of ruin instead of a cause of
resurrection, it stunts and paralyzes instead of
expanding and quickening their will and intel
ligence. They might in some cases be better without
it. Alms does an idle man harm, if want would
have forced him to work. We sometimes find
that those who have no external religion or
church to help them, feeling that they are
thrown entirely upon their own resources, exert
themselves more strenuously than we do, and
make use of every atom of the little they have, —
of the light of reason and conscience, of the
fragments of Catholic truth that still linger with
them, of the uncovenanted graces which God
offers to all earnest souls. And thus they really
produce more fruit than many a carefully culti
vated tree that cumbers the ground in the
luxuriant vineyard of the Catholic Church ; —

MERELY INTERNAL RELIGION. 49
they show more intelligent interest in the
fraction of truth which they possess ; they have
more spontaneous sympathy with what they
hold to be the law and will of God.
By the " formalist," we do not mean only, or
chiefly, the Catholic in name, who makes no
attempt to practise the external duties of a
Catholic; whose connection with the visible
Church is merely nominal ; but him rather who
lazily puts his whole trust in these external
conformities, as though they were an end in
themselves, the essence of the Christian life, and
not merely its condition ; who forgets that our
Catholic religion is principally, though not ex
clusively, interior, and does not consist in
professions and observances, although it does
not exist without them. We mean the Catholic
who is satisfied to swear by all the Church
teaches, without caring to know in detail what
she does teach, or to feed his mind and intelli
gence upon her doctrine, and to advance in his
understanding of it ; and who makes the
frequentation of the sacraments, and other
observances of piety, a substitute for that
struggle and conflict for which they are pre
cisely designed to strengthen us.
To have defined these erroneous extremes is
to have already roughly indicated the golden
E

50 INSUFFICIENCY OF
mean of Catholic truth, which teaches on the
one hand that submission to the external religion
of Christ and His visible Church is, in normal
cases, the indispensable condition of that fulness
of interior religion to which Christians alone
are enabled to aspire ; and, on the other, that
this external religion, destined to be a rock of
security, may become a rock of offence, if,
instead of being used for the expansion and
elevation of our religious faculty, it is misused
as a pretext for its neglect.
We shall devote the rest of this instruction to
briefly emphasizing the former point, leaving
the latter for future occasions.
In the light of all that we have seen as to
the purpose and meaning of the Incarnation, the
wonder is how any one with even a mediocre
comprehension of that mystery could regard
the visible Church and her institutions as merely
a convenience to be left or used at will, or other
wise than as the divinely appointed instrument
of eternal life, without which there is no salva
tion for those who wilfully refuse to make use of
it. " I am the Way," says Christ, " no man
cometh to the Father but by Me." The Man
hood of Christ, the human words of Christ, the
human actions of Christ, — by these means the
grossness, the unspirituality of our fallen nature

MERELY INTERNAL RELIGION. 51
was to be counteracted ; God was to stoop to
our lowness, bend with our frailty, that He
might raise us and strengthen us. During the
days of His brief sojourn upon earth, the
methods of His ministry were clearly defined.
His mission was not to the few, but to the
many ; not to the subtle-minded and learned,
but to the plain-minded and ignorant ; not
to the scrupulously conscientious and faultless,
but to publicans and sinners : " I came not to
call the just, but sinners to repentance." Again,
He came to teach this mob, representative in
small of the uncultivated millions of humanity,
not truisms, nor moral platitudes, nor plain facts
of easy observation, but mystical, spiritual
truths ; and these, not merely such as a few pure
and thoughtful minds here and there might
have dimly conjectured for themselves after a
process of delicate self-analysis, but mysteries
of an entirely supernatural order, of which there
had otherwise been found no hint in the natural
aspirations of even the noblest and most im
maculate soul.
This being so, He necessarily taught with
authority, or dogmatically, not as the scribes
and doctors, tentatively, arguing, appealing,
persuading ; not even as Socrates did, trying to
make men conscious of the deity within them

52 INSUFFICIENCY OF
by questioning them, and making them explicitly
aware of what they unconsciously knew already.
" I am the Truth, I am the Light of the world ;
hear not Moses or Elias, but hear Me. He that
believeth not shall be condemned." No other
method was conceivably possible if the Words
of Eternal Life were to be made the common
possession of the millions that sat in darkness
and in the shadow of death. For that end it
was indispensable that those Words should be
made Flesh and dwell among us familiarly.
St. Paul tells us that it was because the method
of private judgment had denied God, that God
cast it aside in favour of the folly of preaching,
i.e., in favour of the dogmatic method — not
proving the truth, but asserting it on authority.
Private judgment is not something intrin
sically wrong or ridiculous, except on the
supposition that public and authorized judgment
has made the labour unnecessary. Contrariwise,
to find the truth for ourselves is a method more
becoming our dignity as free, self- forming
agents, than to be taught it as children who
repeat what they are told, and because they are
told. Yet God chose the lowlier method, as
better accommodated to the needs of the multi
tudes, discarding the method more agreeable to
the pride of human wisdom.

MERELY INTERNAL RELIGION. 53
Naturally it should have been the duty and
office of the wise and the learned to keep alive
the knowledge of God in the world, so far as it
could have been attained without revelation ;
and to break the bread of truth to the unlettered
crowds who had neither time nor talent to learn
for themselves, but were necessarily dependent
on the tradition and teaching of their leaders.
But as the wise of this world abused their trust,
and held back the truth from the people, because
they themselves loved better the ways of dark
ness, therefore God cast them off, and Himself
became the Teacher of the millions ; He sent a
handful of fishermen to preach to the whole
world truths transcending all that Plato had
ever dreamt of.
Nor did He make special provision that the
cultured and philosophical minority might enter
the Kingdom of Truth by some more seemly
and less barbarous route than that followed by
the common herd. Only those who were willing
to join the crowd, to receive the Kingdom as
little children, to listen with faith to the teaching
of external authority, could enter in at all.
There is no doubt then, that Christ's own
method of enlightening souls during His earthly
ministry, was the dogmatic method, not the
method of private judgment. He did not say:

54 INSUFFICIENCY OF
Look into yourselves ; but : Listen to Me ; He
did not say : Examine My reasons and accept
My doctrine as far as you understand it ; but :
Believe My doctrine whether you understand it
or not. In other words, He was in Himself
what His Church claims to be now, an external
rule of truth by which the mind might test itself
and with which it should strive to conform itself.
Furthermore, He was a Divine and infallible
rule. We spoke of the need of certain outside
standards of good art, say, of good music. But
at the best these standards are tentative and
variable ; and disputes as to their absolute and
final value are infinite. When we have corrected
ourselves by them we know that we are at
least fashionable, or conventionally right ; but
whether we are absolutely right, who can
decide ? Perhaps another generation may hold
us for Philistines. But Christ was not among
religious teachers what Homer was among poets
or Aristotle among philosophers, a great name,
a great classic, nor even the greatest ; He was
the absolute Truth Incarnate, a standard of
unquestionable and final value.
Are we then to suppose, that when He was
withdrawn from earth He left no provision for
the continuance of the same method ; that this
infallible external standard of truth ascended

merely Internal religion. 55
with Him into Heaven ; or was carelessly left
on earth so ill-guarded that now men scarce
know where to look for it ; and must listen to
the claims of any fanatic who cries out : Lo,
here is Christ, or, lo, there !
"As the Father hath sent Me," He says to
His Church, " so send I you." " I am the light
of the world." " You are the light of the world."
".He that heareth you heareth Me." These and
many other like sayings get their best inter
pretation from the fact that there always has
been since Christ's Ascension, an united
hierarchic Church claiming to inherit these
promises and to possess and apply that standard
of truth which Christ left in her hands.
Through this visible Church we have still
contact with Christ in so much as her official
acts are His. It is His hand reaching out
across the centuries, which baptizes and con
secrates and blesses and sacrifices. It is His
words spoken two thousand years ago and
echoed from one generation to the next, which
the Church of to-day still treasures and ponders
in her heart. She is, therefore, the extension,
the stretching out of Christ all over the earth
and all through the ages, even to the consumma
tion of the world. And what we have said of
the Church considered as an external source of

56 INSUFFICIENCY OF
light for the mind — a standard of religious
truth ; holds of her equally when viewed as an
external source of grace. For as by her teaching
she gives us light beyond all that the best and
wisest had ever attained unassisted, so by her
sacraments rightly received and rightly followed
up, she gives energy to our will and warmth to
our good desires beyond all that we could
naturally have drawn forth from ourselves.
Finally, let us notice that the organized unity
of the hierarchic visible Church is itself in some
way the sacrament, the outward and effectual
sign of that invisible union in Christ of all souls
in Heaven and on earth, in whom the love of
Divine goodness holds the first place. For they
being many, are by charity one with each other
and with God ; and have but one mind and
heart and life. To be thus in the communion
of saints is to be in the state of grace or sal
vation. Of this mysterious unity the outward
unity of the visible Church is at once the symbol
and the effectual instrument. To be organically
incorporated with the visible Church as its
member, is, for those whom ignorance or im
possibility does not excuse, a sine qua non of
incorporation into the communion of saints.
For such, " Outside the Church, there is, no
salvation." But is there necessarily salvation

MERELY INTERNAL RELIGION. 57
for them inside ? It is as with other sacraments.
Baptism is of no avail without the due dis
positions ; and yet without Baptism there is no
salvation for those to whom that sacrament
is accessible. Similarly, for us who know,
membership, outward, real, active, and not
merely nominal membership, with the visible
external Church is an essential condition for
salvation ; although it is not enough, not the
only condition. Those who have never seen or
heard Christ in Himself or in His Church, may
in God's mercy, be waked some other way to
the recognition of the Christ that lives in the
conscience of every man who comes into this
world ; but for us, that wakening is provided for
in the human voice of Christ incarnate, who
called Lazarus from the grave ; the voice which
we still hear in the Catholic Church ; of which
He says : " He that heareth you heareth Me,"
and again : " My sheep hear My voice, and they
follow Me."

LECTURE IV.
INSUFFICIENCY OF MERELY EXTERNAL
RELIGION.
Where there is smoke there is sure to be fire,
though it is not always the hottest fire that
makes the greatest smoke ; rather otherwise.
That the theory of a purely internal Christianity,
communicated by the Holy Spirit to each soul
independently, has found acceptance with so
many men of undoubted sincerity and piety ;
men equal in point of general learning and
intelligence to the best of those whom the
Church numbers in her ranks, is a fact full of
help for us if we view it aright ; full of hurt
if we misunderstand or ignore it. If there were
any real danger to our faith at a University
like this, it would lie not in any supposed
wickedness or general moral inferiority of the
professors of an alien creed — that, indeed, would
rather confirm us in our own — but in seeing the
genuine goodness, the evident attractiveness of

INSUFFICIENCY OF EXTERNAL RELIGION. 59
numbers whose religious opinions are not only
different from, but in many cases antagonistic
to the beliefs of the Catholic Church.
Now, good men are attracted only by what
seems good ; and are repelled only by what seems
evil. There must then be some seeming good
in their view of a purely internal religion, and
there must be sorrfe seeming evil in the external
religion of Catholicism as it presents itself to
their eyes. Our faith assures us, before even
we attempt to see it with our reason, that the
seeming good of their system exists really far
more fully in the Catholic religion ; while what
to them seems evil in the Church is either not
really evil, or else is no part of our religion at
all, but may and should be condemned as
heartily by every good* Catholic, as by the
most fervent evangelical Protestant, or by any
man of sound sense and moral integrity.
It is very important for us to know the
impression, true or false, that we make upon
those with whom we have to deal, and to this
end we should avail ourselves of the criticism
of friends and foes alike, in each case discounting
for bias ; for thus only shall w e arrive at a
knowledge, not of what we really are in our
selves — that is a secret known to God alone ;
but of what appearance we present to reasonably

60 INSUFFICIENCY OF
unprejudiced eyes, and of what seeming founda
tion we give to others for speaking of us as they
do. The misfortune is that really unprejudiced
impartial people will never trouble themselves
to criticize us at all, but only our well-wishers
or ill-wishers, whose distorted verdicts need to
be carefully corrected and set off one against
the other. But of the two, the verdict of our
enemies is chiefly to be weighed, as it is more
necessary to know our failings, real or apparent,
than to know our perfections — not of course,
the verdict of our unintelligent, fanatical,
ignorant enemies ; but of the thoughtful, and
intelligent, who are shrewd enough to realize
that it can never be for their interest to be
deceived ; whose bias is therefore unconscious,
though none the less real and perversive of
clear insight
In our last conference we dealt briefly with
those two opposite errors, of which one makes
Christianity all interior ; the other, all exterior.
We showed how untenable the former was, in
the face of what we had already seen, first, as
to the meaning of the Incarnation ; then, as to
the obvious purport and method of Christ's
ministry on earth, and lastly, as to His intention
of perpetuating that ministry to the end of time,
and extending the Incarnation over all the world
and through all the ages to come.

MERELY EXTERNAL RELIGION. 6l
The contrary error of " formalism " or pure
externality in religion, will now be best explained
and refuted by attending to some of the
objections made against an external religion
by fairly clear-headed Protestants who have
sense enough to weave their accusations out of
what is at least superficially apparent, and not
straight out of their own imaginations. We
shall see in all cases how their objections, so
far as they contain any element of truth and
justice, tell not against an external religion,
but against that abuse of it, which we have
designated "formalism," — an abuse which consists
in forgetting that the whole end and purpose of
the Christ and the religion outside us, is to wake
up and develop the Christ and the religion that
is inside us. An illustration of what I mean,
is afforded by a leaflet recently issued by a
well-known and strictly Protestant Bishop,
wherein he says :
" There are two distinct and separate systems
of Christianity in England at the present day. It
is useless to deny it. Their existence is a great
fact, and one that cannot be too clearly known.
" According to one system, religion is a mere
corporate business. You are to belong to a
certain body of people. By virtue of your
membership of this body, vast privileges, both

62 INSUFFICIENCY OF
for time and eternity, are conferred upon you.
It matters little what you are, and what you
feel. You are not to try yourselves by your
feelings. You are a member of a great ecclesi
astical corporation. Then all its privileges and
immunities are your own. Do you belong to
the one true visible ecclesiastical corporation ?
That is the grand question.
"According to the other system, religion is
eminently a personal business between yourself
and Christ. It will not save your soul to be an
outward member of any ecclesiastical body
whatever, however sound that body may be.
Such membership will not wash away one sin,
or give you confidence in the day of judgment.
There must be personal faith in Christ, — •
personal dealings between yourself and God, —
personal felt communion between your own
heart and the Holy Ghost. Have you this
personal faith? Have you this felt work of
the Spirit in your soul ? This is the grand
question. If not, you will be lost."
You see at once how the first of these systems
represents not the Catholic religion, as the
writer fondly believes, but a possible and not
infrequent abuse to which every external religion
is necessarily liable. To be united as a visible
member to the visible corporation of the Church

MERELY EXTERNAL RELIGION. 63
is indeed, for those who know, a sine qua non of
salvation both here and hereafter ; but though
a condition, it is not the sole condition ; nor
does our salvation consist in such union, though
it does not exist without it.
The second system in nearly all that it asserts,
is simply and purely Catholic ; but it implies
certain denials that are unsound and at variance
with that religion of the Incarnation, which, as
we have seen, uses the visible and outward for
the cure and help of the invisible and inward.
As the Bishop truly says : " Religion is eminently
¦a. personal business between yourself and Christ,"
nor will it " save your soul to be an outward
member of any ecclesiastical body whatever."
But there is a third supposition which he denies
or forgets ; namely, that God has ordained this
outward membership with the visible Church to
be the means and condition of securing inward
membership with the invisible Church ; that it
is through Christ's word spoken to our bodily
ears that the Divine word is to be wakened in
our hearts ; and through the sensible touch of
Christ's hands in the sacraments that our souls
are to be touched and healed ; and our inward
sight and hearing restored.
What this writer loves in his own religion is
all found in ours more easily, more abundantly ;

64 INSUFFICIENCY OF
while what he censures in ours is no part of it,
but only a perversion to which it is necessarily
liable, — men being the limited and fallible
creatures that they are.
A slightly different form of the same objection
is found in the very common allegation that
Catholicism crushes out all individuality of
character, and that by interposing itself as a
channel of communication between God and
the soul, it hinders the full and free inflow of
light and grace, and that consequent expansion
of the spiritual faculties which would result
were there no such intermediary in the way.
The individual is not treated as an individual
with a proper personality ; but simply -as a
member of a great organism, a wheel in a complex
mechanism, a soldier in a vast fighting army.
God's direct dealing is with the whole, not with
the several parts ; these He provides for through
the whole and for the sake of the whole. On
this supposition the individual soul is not as
a flower planted out in the full sunshine, but as
one languishing in a cellar, into which some
streak of pale light feebly twists its way.
" My soul and my God and nothing between ;
no mediator," that is the Protestant ideal. Or
if Christ be a mediator, it is not as one who
stands between as a connecting link, one hand

MERELY EXTERNAL RELIGION. 65
in mine and the other in God's ; but as one who
joins the hands of two enemies, and then steps
aside leaving them locked together and
reconciled. But the visible Church is thought to interpose
herself between God and the soul — a notion
very intolerable to those who look on the
Church as a corruptible and corrupt body of men ;
who do not distinguish between the heavenly
treasure and the earthly vessel which contains
it ; between the leaven of unfailing truth and
sacramental grace, and the unleavened mass
which it struggles to permeate and transform —
for the Church is the representative, not solely
of Christ, the sinless and incorruptible, but of
Christ together with those crowds that clung to
Him and followed Him. It is thought, then,
that this Church in her collective and corporate
totality holds on to God, while the individual
holds on to her blindly and unintelligently, and
is dragged into Heaven at her skirts. She is
considered as a closely organized military state
• — a sort of ecclesiastical Sparta — fighting for
some advantage belonging to her as a totality,
and distinct from the personal and private
advantage of the members of which she is
composed. Her subjects are, as it were, so
burdened with the taxes and services entailed
F

66 INSUFFICIENCY OF
by the state war, that they have neither leisure
nor means for that peaceful life of self-expansion
which it should be the only aim of a state to
secure ; their duties as soldiers interfere with
and encroach beyond all reason upon their duties
as men and free citizens. Thus the Church is
viewed as a society existing for the dissemination
among those outside her pale of certain hard-
and-fast religious, moral, and political opinions ;
as being before all else a proselytizing body
crossing land and sea to make one convert ;
and when made, caring nothing more for him
personally, but only as for another fighting
man won from the enemy and added to her own
ranks. To be a good Catholic is to be a red-
hot controversialist or else an insidious propa
gandist of the aforesaid opinions. It is not to live
by them, but to fight for them ; it is not to use this
external religion as an instrument of personal
sanctification and spiritual enlightenment ; it is
not to apply the divine medicine to our own
cure ; but simply to honour it outwardly, to
acknowledge 'it to be the best of all instruments,
the most efficacious of all medicines ; and to
force as many as possible to acknowledge the
same, not by experimental proof, but by dia
lectical arguments. For such a militant Church,
we are told that military obedience, blind,

MERELY EXTERNAL RELIGION. 67
unquestioning, is an absolute necessity — the
one indispensable virtue whose presence will
atone for the lack of all others. Swear blindly
by all the Church says and does ; obey blindly
all that she enjoins ; and then she on her part
will give you her absolutions and indulgences,
and will promise you Eternal Life as pay for
your submission. Not now however ; but here
after ; for Eternal Life is not the life she now
wants you to lead ; but something quite
distinct from it ; something postponed for the
present, because this militant ecclesiastical life
is incompatible with it ; just as the life of the
active soldier is incompatible with the life of
the peaceful civilian. Eternal Life consists in
the highest perfection and exercise of our
intelligence and our will ; but at present we
are supposed to have no time to be holy ; our
duties as good militant Catholics are thought
to entail the suppression of both intelligence
and will ; the mind and will of the Church is
said to be simply substituted in all religious
matters for our own mind and will — not entering
into them in any way or shaping them. It is as
when we commit ourselves passively to the judg
ment and guidance of another, and do not in any
way understand or appropriate his mind, but
simply hang on to it to save ourselves trouble.

68 INSUFFICIENCY OF
This is the impression that Catholicism
makes on many fairly intelligent outsiders, and
would, indeed, there were nothing in the attitude
of many of us towards the Church, to give any
appearance of plausibility to the notion !
Doubtless there is something very attractive
to our love of freedom from interference, some
thing that appeals to the Protestantism latent
in every human heart in this idea of the soul
dealing directly with God, and needing the aid
of no creature whatever — church or minister or
sacrament ; there is something in it especially
congenial to the independence of the English
mind. We have lately heard confession, the
Mass, sacerdotalism, and other points of the
Catholic religion condemned, simply and finally
on the score of being repugnant to English
men ; good enough perhaps for the decadent
Latin races, but uncongenial to the Anglo-Saxon
mind. This were sound sense had God given
us no divine external religion, and had He left
us free to interpret our religious instincts for
ourselves, and to find expression for them in
our own way. Then indeed the nations of
the earth might lawfully have been as various in
their outward religions, as in their languages
and customs. But as things are, even the
English mind is not at liberty to shape an

MERELY EXTERNAL RELIGION. 69
external religion for itself, but must, under pain
of fatal isolation, shape itself into agreement
with that which God has revealed ; with that
religion which is Catholic or universal as being
adaptable to all stages and varieties of civiliza
tion — ancient or modern ; eastern or western ;
Latin or Teutonic — to the childhood of races
as to their maturity or old age ; to periods of
decadence as to periods of renaissance — a
religion expressly designed to bind together all
nations of the world in what is the highest and
chiefest human interest.
But quite apart from this divine revelation,
God, in the very nature of things, makes the
development of man's religious faculty dependent
upon his fellows. Just as He gives each of us
the power of language, and yet makes its
development depend on our being born amongst
those who are in possession of a language
ready formed, which we learn by imitation ;
so our religious faculty would scarce assert itself
in us perceptibly, were it not stimulated by
the religion of those around us. Hence this
idea of God alone being the soul's teacher
were in any case too ambitious for creatures
such as we are ; the limitations of our nature
forbid it, as much as do the conditions of
revelation. Furthermore, we not only need the

70 INSUFFICIENCY OF
society of others in order to know God and to
have the occasions and means of serving Him,
but God refuses to be united to us in our
solitude. We have first to unite ourselves with
our Incarnate Lord and with all who are already
united with Him ; and then as members of this
mystical unity, God deals with us and quickens
us ; just as the animal soul will not dwell in
or quicken any separated part or member of
the body, but only the whole united body made
up of parts and members. But then, even as
the body is not some third thing interposed
between the soul and the parts of the body, so
neither is Christ and His Church some third
thing interposed like a wall between God and
the members of Christ and His Church.
Contrariwise, it is precisely because we are
parts of Christ and parts of His Church that
God's immediate intercourse with our soul is so
much more abundant and frequent than it would
be were we left in our solitude to approach God
alone, instead of hand in hand with Christ and
His faithful.
" Individuality," again, is a word to conjure
with in these days, but then, like " liberty " and
"equality" and similar cries, it is susceptive of
various meanings, right and wrong. Liberty,
We know, is not freedom from all restraint, but

Merely external religion. 71
from all undue or hurtful restraint ; it means the
opportunities and conditions of the best and
fullest life we are capable of, and this can only
be secured by association, by dependence upon
others, by self-restraint and self-sacrifice. It
means not doing what we please, but what we
ought. Similarly the individualism which dis
sociates the member from the organism which
lops the branch off the vine is fatal to its vitality
and fruitfulness. It is based on the false idea,
borrowed from the imagination, that men's souls
are, as their bodies, locally separate and inde
pendent atoms, connected at most by the bond
of descent from a common father, as though the
multitude of souls were not in some sort inter
penetrated by an identical life, converging as
they do to God their common root, from whom
they are ever springing, new-born, like divergent
rays from the source of light ; in Whom they
live, and Who lives in the centre of each of
them, one and identical and common to all.
Ignorant or forgetful of this, the false indi
vidualism, so popular in these days, would
exempt us from many irksome duties and
restrictions only by excluding us from the
common life which courses through the veins
of the community whose members we are ; it
would delude us with the fancy that we are

72 INSUFFICIENCY OF
isolated independent units, made for an isolated
and independent happiness ; as though anything
less than God and the whole community of our
fellow-creatures, wher,eof we are but part, were
the adequate object for which our heart had
been made, or could expand it to its full
stretch. Applied to religion, this theory would make
each soul a little church in itself, sanctified
alone and saved alone ; helped perhaps and
served by others, but not better sanctified or
saved because of their sanctification. But it is
only in association with others and by recog
nizing ourselves as parts of a living organism
that we can really develop our nature aright.
We are primarily God's, and our own only
secondarily. There is no complete individuality
and independence but God's. The earth com
pared with the moon is independent and
individual ; but compared with the sun it is
itself subject and incomplete ; even as the sun
may be, in regard to a more central body.
We allow then only that individuality which
recognizes the fact that our happiness does
not lie compactly in the well-being of our
solitary self, but in that of the whole community
— God and our fellows — to which as members
we are subject.

Merely external religion. 73
This is the great principle embodied and
symbolized in the doctrine of the visible Church
and of the obligation of Church-membership as
a condition of salvation.
But if such membership is a necessary con
dition for our spiritual growth and development,
it must not be supposed that there is no room
for individuality. Unity is not uniformity ;
sameness of spirit is compatible with, nay, it
requires, an infinite variety of manifestation. A
military and militant state, it is true, tends to
turn all its subjects into soldiers, and to reduce
them to the uniformity of nine-pins in outward
appearance and carriage, and to some degree
even in inward character ; because it aims
immediately, not at individual life, but at a
remote condition of individual life, namely, at
conquest or self-defence. Public tranquillity
and security is a necessary condition, but is not
the end and substance of a happy and pros
perous life. Men do not normally live in order
to fight, but they fight in order to live. For the
time being, they have often to give up and lay
aside their domestic and civil life in order to
fight ; but it is only that they may resume it
again more securely. Peace is ever the motive
of just war.
But the end for which the Catholic Church

74 INSUFFICIENCY OF
exists, is not an end that is distinct from, or can
interfere with, the fullest and highest life of each
single one of her members. What she toils
and fights for principally is, not a remote condi
tion of our enlightenment and sanctification, but
the thing itself. As the vine lives only to
produce grapes, so the Church exists and
labours only to produce good men, that is, to
reproduce the life of Christ as fully as possible
in each particular soul ; to bring minds into
conformity with the mind of Christ ; and hearts
into conformity with the heart of Christ. Of
course she also necessarily fights for the remoter
conditions of this individual sanctification of
souls — for moral and just legislation, for freedom
in the exercise of her jurisdiction, for a Christian
and Catholic educational system ; yet she does
not stop there, but carries her work up to the
point where only our own free-will can hinder
its perfect accomplishment.
Still it must not be thought that the same
spiritual uniformity is to be desired among
Catholics as exists between the several grapes
of a cluster. That same divine Truth and Good
ness which is incarnate in Christ, though simple
in itself, is inexhaustible in the infinite diversity
of its possible manifestations. Each particular
soul is capable of reflecting only some single

Merely external religion. 75
and individual aspect of it ; and even all souls
taken collectively together, as one complex
organism of diverse and harmonious parts, ex
hibit at best but a fraction of the perfection
hid in Christ and scattered among them — as it
were, put in commission. No two ages, no two
nationalities, no two individuals receive Christ
or receive the Catholic religion into the same
mould ; and though what is received is the
same, yet the measure of its reception, the shape
it takes, the result of the combination, is always
different. " I have many things to say to you,"
said our Lord to the Church of that day, " but
you cannot bear them now." As Catholics we
all say the same things and we do the same
things ; we repeat the same creeds and we use
the same sacraments ; but how differently !
" Vide paris sumptionis, quam sit dispar exitus"
says Aquinas ; words which we may apply
generally to the results of the external Catholic
religion on different souls. The agent is always
the same, but the reaction is never the same.
The Blessed in Heaven all behold the same
God, yet one penetrates immeasurably further
than another into the infinite depth of Truth.
And for ourselves here below, the word " God "
means the same to all of us, substantially or in
outline ; but the filling in of that outline is the

76 Insufficiency of
same for no two alike, and is capable of
indefinite correction and completion.
So as regards the teaching of the Church,
and the grace of her sacraments. There is
outside us, in this external religion of the Incar
nation, an inexhaustible source of spiritual light
and strength which all Catholics agree in
acknowledging, but there the uniformity ends ;
for as to the manner and the degree in which
they draw upon this treasury and appropriate
and use its wealth, there neither is, nor ought to
be, nor can be, perfect sameness in kind but the
purest possible individuality — one body but
no two members alike, one spirit but an endless
diversity of manifestations. Had Christ been
merely some human hero or saint, the imitation
of His finite and measurable character by His
followers would have produced in them an
uniformity not merely of spirit and principle,
but of manifestation and outward expression ;
such as we notice in schools and sects and
religious orders. His life would have been a
sort of rigid rule, helpful and suitable for some,
but not for all, interfering with rather than
developing the exhibition of personality and
natural character ; but because His Divine good
ness was infinite and inexhaustible, all might
imitate it to their utmost capacity, as closely

MERELY EXTERNAL RELIGION. 77
as possible, and yet no two be alike. So also
the Church's truths, though cased in finite
forms and expressions, though uttered in worHs
which are the same for all who know their creed
and catechism, are in themselves inexhaustible ;
transcending the deepest human intelligence,
striking no two minds at the same angle of
incidence nor ever reflected twice in precisely
the same way.
It is therefore only so far as we are mere
formalists, and make our Catholicity consist
wholly in repeating the same words, in per
forming and submitting to the same rites ; it
is only so far as we forget that external
Christianity is designed to evoke, elevate, and
strengthen the anima naturaliter Christiana
which is within us, that the abuse of Catholicity
tends to destroy individuality by producing a
dead uniformity.
And if we are in a true sense soldiers,
militant members of a militant Church, yet this
warfare is not distinct from that in which our
private spiritual life consists ; nor does the
service of the Church withdraw us from that
one paramount avocation which is the chief end
of our existence. In the secular state we have
to distinguish between our duties as citizens and
our duties as men ; but in the Church it is just

78 insufficiency of
by perfecting ourselves as individuals that we
best profit the whole body. Here our public
and personal duties never clash ; they are
distinct only in thought and name ; not in
reality. " Sic luceat lux vestra coram homi
nibus" says our Saviour. It is in the measure
that the light of Catholic truth has become our
own, has caught on to us as flame to a torch,
and penetrated our life, that we shall be quietly
and unnoticeably effectual in its dissemination.
As long as we are mere controversialists, trying
to impose upon others an external rule of belief
and practice which we have not begun to
appreciate and use for the internal reformation
of our own mind and heart, we know nothing
of the methods of Christ's warfare ; and we but
hinder what we would forward : Nescitis cujus
spiritus estis.
Lastly, Eternal Life is not a bribe in the
distant hereafter to stimulate the belligerent
Catholic, or to tame him into blind obedience
to a system of drill which he cannot understand
or sympathize with. Eternal life begins here
and now ; and is the life of the divine and
eternal part of us ; the life of an intelligence
and love whose objects are incorruptible, inde
pendent of place and of time. And this is the
life which is aroused and kindled in us ever

MERELY EXTERNAL RELIGION. 79
more and more in the measure that we make
energetic use of the sources of divine light and
grace which God has put at our disposal in the
external religion of the Incarnation ; that is, in
the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
To be, not a formalist, but a true Catholic ;
to be not only outwardly united to the visible
Church, but also quickened inwardly with her
spirit, and nourished with the blood that flows in
her veins ; this is Eternal Life. It is not merely
the condition or price of its future bestowal ; but
is its present actualization in a far fuller measure
than is in anywise possible for those who are
separated from these external supernatural aids.
" I came that they might have life," says Christ,
" and that they might have it more abundantly,"
more easily, more freely. Vital Catholicism is
Eternal Life ; the life not merely of the highest
human intelligence, the purest human affection,
the life not merely of man at his best and
noblest ; but of the Spirit of God mysteriously
mingled with the spirit of man.

LECTURE V.
ABUSE OF EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE.
One of the great problems of education in
almost every department is the right adjustment
of liberty and restriction ; in other words, to
know exactly how far people should be helped,
supported, and protected, and how far they
should be thrown upon themselves and left with
a certain freedom of action. An excess in either
direction is fatal. Those who are insufficiently
helped and guided are exposed to temptations
and difficulties altogether beyond their strength
and experience ; those who are over-helped and
over-guided never develop that independence
and spontaneity of action, which is the very end
of all education. For education is but the
means ; whereas life, the best and fullest life we
are capable of, is the end. A thing is alive so
far as it moves itself; but if it is dead or lifeless,
it moves just so far as it is moved, and then
comes to a dead stop.

ABUSE OF EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. 8l
Now this power of self-movement, self-
guidance, self-government, is not increased in
any direction by doing things that we can
do quite easily and without effort. It may be
maintained and kept up to the mark by such
actions ; or it may be lost by the continued
omission of such actions ; that is, by getting
out of practice. Nor, again, is it increased by
attempting patent impossibilities ; but only by
attempting such things as are at once difficult
in some degree, but still possible. The problem
of education, therefore, is just to help the learner
so far as a task is at present impossible for him
and beyond his reasonable powers ; and yet on
no account to help him any further ; but to let
him encounter difficulties even with the certainty
that he will fail many times and suffer many
pains and humiliations ere he acquire the
sought-for skill. Were we always to guide the
pen in the child's trembling hand, were we
never to leave him a chance of going wrong and
of making mistakes, he would never learn to
write ; and so we only give him as much help
as is absolutely necessary ; more at first and
then less, until at last the habit of spontaneous
and independent activity is perfectly formed.
Of course, as we have already said, no finite
being is independent of all help ; and the extent
G

82 ABUSE OF
of our independence is at the best grotesquely
limited ; yet such as it is, it is within the limits
of that little region that our liberty is exercised,
and that our personality and individuality lies.
Whatever hinders the development of any sort
of vitality, any power of self-movement that is
latent in us, cramps the fulness of our spiritual
being, and inflicts the worst of all injuries upon
us. If it is the part of charity to help and
succour and serve those who really need it,
there is no greater " uncharity " than the weak,
short-sighted indulgence which regards all pain
indiscriminately as an evil ; and which unwisely
helps those who can already help themselves,
and in so doing exempts them from that needful
exertion and conflict with difficulty, wherein the
very food and medicine of their moral growth
is found.And this principle throws an important light
upon the whole idea of the religion of the
Incarnation. It is not possible that God, whose
Nature is the root of all law, the cause of all
that is necessary in the essence of things, should
Himself act contrary to the law which His
Being imposes upon finite creatures ; or that
He who is Charity should so fail in true charity
as to offer us any help whatsoever, natural or
supernatural, simply to save us from salutary

EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. 83
labour and difficulty ; or should wish to spare
us any exertion of mind or will whereby our
hidden energies should be brought out, exer
cised, and strengthened. For God to expose us
to superhuman and invincible temptations, to
overwhelm and confuse us with more liberty
than we can possibly profit by ; to leave us
absolutely unguided and unprotected, and throw
us wholly on our own resources, would be to
destroy us. That is the judgment which they
bring upon themselves who presumptuously
spurn His needful aid. But on the other hand
we may hold it for a certain and universal truth,
that God, in offering us helps, never intends to
•spare us any profitable labour or superable
difficulty which we should otherwise have had
to face ; that in giving us a revelation of truth
and in providing us with sacramental means of
grace, He does not so much intend to make easier
what is already possible, as to make possible
a far more difficult and supernatural salvation.
He does not intend to exempt us from one
particle of that endurable pain and trouble
which would naturally have been necessary for
the perfecting of our mind and the acquisition
of moral virtues ; but simply to give us capacity
for a far higher spiritual perfection, and there
with the power and the duty of exerting our-

84 ABUSE OF
selves far more than would otherwise have been
possible for us or incumbent upon us. This is
almost a truism when stated, yet is often as far
from our practical recognition as though it were
the greatest of paradoxes.
Therefore, as we said in our opening con
ference, when God endowed our first parents in
Paradise with wonderful gifts of soul and body,
with grace and knowledge and self-control and
dominion over nature, and immortality, it was
not that they might luxuriate idly in the
consciousness of these gifts, but that they might
trade with them as with so much gold to be
put out to usury and rigorously accounted for ;.
it was that instead of being responsible for the
one or two talents of unassisted nature, they
might enter upon a ten-fold or hundred-fold
responsibility ; it was not that they might
without trouble be set down at the goal of
ordinary human perfection, to rest there ; but
that what else had been their scarcely attainable
end, might now be their starting-point for a
supernatural end — a perfection more divine than
human. It was not that they might be carried
easily on the breast of a full tide high above
the rocks and shoals of temptations at an
immeasurable depth below them, but that they
might be capable of profiting by a temptation

EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. 85
altogether superhuman and beyond their natural
forces — a temptation worthy to decide the
destiny of a whole race.
And it is in precisely the same light that we
are to view the supernatural helps accorded to
us by the religion of the Incarnation. We often
hear people speaking as though the grace which
superabounded in our Saviour, or in His Blessed
Mother, or in His saints, made the will of God
easy for them — far easier than it could ever be
for us ; whereas in truth it only made them
capable of greater labour and suffering and
temptation than we can ever be called upon to
endure. It increased their latent power, but it
also increased their responsibility and called for
a greater exertion and putting forth of that
power — which exertion can never be without
pain. It is true to say that it made things
harder for them, rather than easier. That they
did not sin, means that they suffered more ; for
it is easier to yield and more painful to hold out.
And it was because they were faithful to grace
and held out and would not yield, that God
gave them more grace and still more — habenti
dabitur ; and the reason He gives us so little is
because we will not hold out, but shrink from
effort. We fancy that more grace would make
things easier for us ; that it would spare us

86 ABUSE OF
some exertion that we can already make, but
are unwilling to make ; and so we pray for
grace and do not get it; for God only gives
more power to those who are using the power
they have already got ; who exert themselves to
their utmost and who want to exert themselves
still more.
Roughly, the supernatural helps given to us
by the Catholic religion are of two kinds —
strength for our will ; light and understanding
for our mind ; in other words, sacramental grace
and infallible teaching. With regard to both
one and the other, it has often been asserted
that in the actual working their whole tendency
is to hinder rather than promote spiritual
development, to discourage spontaneity, to
destroy independence of action and thought in
all religious matters, to accustom us from our
infancy onwards to moral and intellectual
crutches, and to persuade us that we cannot
possibly do without them. Notice, we are not
wasting breath in dealing with the absurd charge
that Catholics are tyrannized over by their priests
in the affairs of every-day life, that they are not
allowed to think for themselves or act for them
selves even in matters secular and profane ; but
only with the more plausible notion that their
Church says to them equivalently : " Come to

EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. 87
me, you that labour and are burdened, and I will
make goodness cheap and easy for you. You
shrink from the difficulty of mortification and
self-conquest ; very well, receive my sacraments
instead ; you shrink from the labour of thought
and meditation about divine things ; very well,
be passive, and accept my teaching instead ; let
me think for you, and act for you ; and do you
be passive and obedient and inert."
Is there any seeming foundation for this
calumny, for this notion that the Church, instead
of stimulating us to help ourselves, tries to
persuade us that we are more helpless than we
really are, in order that we may depend upon
her and submit to her more utterly ; that she
trades upon our indolence and softness and
never lets us down out of her arms lest we
should discover that we can walk alone ?
Yes, undoubtedly ; but the foundation for the
charge is not to be sought in any haziness and
uncertainty on the part of the Church's clear
and unceasing warnings ; it is easily and
abundantly found in the perverse heedlessness
and inattention of her children to the very
obvious principle above insisted on as to the
meaning and right use of helps of every kind,
natural or supernatural, human or divine.
Our Lord tells us that we are to pray and to

88 ABUSE OF
watch so as to resist temptation. Prayer, com
prehends all sorts of dependence on God — all
the means of increasing grace and spiritual
energy; watching, comprehends all sorts of
dependence on self, every kind of co-operation
with grace, every sort of exertion or putting
forth of that energy won through prayer and the
sacraments. Neither condition avails without the
other. We must rely upon God and rely upon
ordinary means. The Pelagians thought that
their own natural vigilance was enough ; and
this is an error in which we all follow them at
some time or another of our life — perhaps
always to some little extent. But just as
dangerous is the error of a certain pious fatalism
which confounds trust in God with presumption ;
which regards prayer and the sacraments as
substitutes for vigilance, instead of as means
to it.
" Pray and watch " are not co-ordinate duties;
but the former is directed to the latter as means
to an end. Orate ut vigiletis is the true sense ;
pray that you may have the inclination, the
energy, the perseverance, to watch and to use
every possible natural means that prudence can
devise in order to combat temptations and
conquer yourself. So understood and so used,
prayer and the means of grace, far from sparing

EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. 89
us any exertion we are already capable of,
simply make us capable of more and demand
more of us in consequence.
But naturally we all shrink from that exertion
which is the indispensable condition of our
growth in any direction ; our tendency as finite
creatures is to sink down towards the zero
from which we were lifted by creation, rather
than to struggle upwards towards God and to
correspond with the creative movement by
which He ever draws us from nothingness
towards Himself, as a flower is drawn out of
the earth by the sun's magic. We always try
the path of least resistance — the cheapest, the
easiest route. We are ever the too-ready
dupes of any one who pretends to have found
out some trouble-saving method of salvation ;
something we can get through once and for all
and have done with ; some substitute for weary
vigilance, and tiresome perseverance, and bitter
mortification, and for the other necessary causes
without which even God Himself often could not
ensure the desired effects. We clutch eagerly at
a miraculous medal, a girdle, an infallible prayer,
a scapular, a novena, a pledge, a vow — all helps,
in their way, all excellent if used rightly as
stimulants to greater exertion, greater vigilance,
greater prayerfulness ; but if adopted as substi-

90 ABUSE OF
tutes for labour, for the eternally necessary
and indispensable means, then, no longer helps.
but most hurtful superstitions. Do they stimu
late or do they relax our efforts? — that is the
one test as to whether we are using such things
to our help or abusing them to our hurt. We
shall not be saved by anything we hang round
our necks, except so far as the grace it
conveys to us in virtue of the Church's blessing
stimulates us to that exertion and watchfulness
by which alone, under God, we are to sanctify
and save ourselves.
And what is true of these devotions and
methods which the Catholic Church certainly
tolerates as capable of a right use, and which
her Pontiffs have often even promoted and
indulgenced, is true also of prayer and the
sacraments — those means of grace which God
Himself has appointed and blessed. All-needful
as they are for that fulness of spiritual life to
which Christianity calls us ; yet they can be and
often are perverted in such wise as to be no
longer helps, but positive hindrances. As
intended by God they are designed, not to
save us any spiritual exertion which is needful
for us ; not to exempt us from the duty of
watchfulness, of retrospection and foresight and
circumspection ; but solely to make greater

EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. gi
exertion possible for us ; to put more into us,
that we may have more to draw out of our
selves, more to educate. The perceptible part
of the result of prayer and the sacraments,
if we do not misuse them, is not a miraculous
infusion of those good habits which can be
formed only by repeated actions and persevering
efforts, but rather a deepened spiritual insight,
clearer ideals of perfection, dissatisfaction with
our past, desire of advancing to something
better, resolution to face greater exertion.
But these seeds, these possibilities and . begin
nings of good, have to be fostered and furthered
by attending to them, praying about them,
above all, by acting upon them at once — else
they die away fruitless and leave us worse and
harder than before. Facienti quod est in se non
deerit Deus — God will not fail those in their
difficulties who do all that they can ; but if they
do less than they can ; if there be a store of
unused energy lying idle in their souls ; if they
pray only to escape exertion they are already
capable of, and not to become capable of greater
exertion, if they pray more only in order that
they may watch less, then they pray in vain,
and perhaps to their hurt.
Stranger still, even mortification, asceticism,
and self-denial, may be, and often are, abused

92 ABUSE OF
in just the same way, when they are used as
substitutes for the natural and necessary means
of attaining virtue. That attainment often
depends essentially on just the one thing we
will not do, the one sacrifice we will not make.
We will do anything else, something much
harder perhaps in itself, but not that. We know
right well, for example, that chastity depends
on a thousand little carefulnesses, singly quite
possible and easy, yet collectively hard and
tiresome ; but instead of this sacrifice, fixed by
God and by the inherent nature of things, we
want to substitute another less troublesome ;
we want to buy off a continual tax by paying
down a lump sum. We want to do something
violent that can be got over and done with ;
some big austerity that will purchase for us a
miraculous exemption from the natural con
sequence of our actions, that will permit us to.
be quite careless about the aforesaid little things.
Our confessor wisely advises more frequent
Communion ; we try, and are no better. And
why? Because we go to the Sacrament, not
to get stimulus for greater exertion, but to
be miraculously delivered from the need of
exertion ; to be exempted from the ordinary
laws of cause and effect.
In the light of these considerations we shall

EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. 93
have no difficulty in facing fairly, what otherwise
might seem grave problems, offered by facts
which are undeniable.
On the one hand we often find that, both in
ourselves and, as far as we can judge, in others,
the fruit of much prayer and mortification and
frequenting of the sacraments, is far less than
what we might thoughtlessly have expected
d priori. When we think of the stupendous
offering of Himself which God makes to the
soul in the Blessed Eucharist, it cannot but
astonish us how little perceptible difference our
reiterated Communions make in us ; it cannot
but astonish us how those who communicate
almost daily, such as priests and religious and
many devout lay-folk, are so little different from
others ; so little like what we should have been
led to expect. If their Communions are bad,
such persons ought to be so much worse than
they are ; if good, so much better. But de facto
they are very often painfully ordinary people,
as mediocre in virtue as the rest. We cannot
of course judge individuals by outward results,
since we never know the extent of the resistance
particular souls have to contend with ; but we
may fairly so judge classes, as contrasted with
other classes. All this would indeed be a
difficulty if sacraments worked their perceptible

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effect as medicines do, independently of the free
co-operation of the recipient. This perceptible
effect is the increased putting forth of spiritual
energy which the sacrament renders possible ;
but which only our co-operation and effort can
render actual. God gives the talent, but it is
not perceptible till we begin to use it. That
there is an imperceptible effect of some kind
— an increase of substantial grace, as they call
it — whenever the sacrament is not actually
profaned, is common Catholic teaching ; but for
practical purposes, what boots this energy stored
away in the soul except so far as it is used and
turned to account? We are to be judged, not
by our powers, but by our works. Buried talents
will not profit us. True we cannot lose habitual
grace but by sin ; yet is there no sin of sloth
in leaving God's gold rusting in the earth when
He has bidden us trade with it ? Serve nequam
is God's verdict on such a one.
Similarly it need not astonish us as it might
otherwise do, that souls can draw nigh time
after time to the Sacrament of Penance, and
yet be so lacking in the penitential broken
hearted spirit which it is the purpose of that
ordinance to increase in us more and more. To
wash away sin is not like washing away soil
from a garment, which once done cannot be

EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. 95
more done ; but sin is extruded from the soul
by the introduction of the love of God and
hatred of what is contrary to God. For this
reason the same sin can be ever more and more
forgiven, and may be confessed and absolved
again and again. Amplius lava me ab iniquitate
mea — Lavabis me et super nivem dealbabor. We
can be washed ever cleaner and cleaner ; and
made ever whiter and whiter. But here, again,
because penance and the penitential spirit is
something laborious and troublesome, we are
disposed to use the Sacrament of Penance as a
substitute for the virtue of penance instead of
as a means to increase that virtue in ourselves.
We draw near to it often, not with a mind to
make things harder for ourselves, but to make
things easier ; not to increase our responsibilities,
but to shirk them.
Then, on the other hand, there is the fact that
we very often find those who are inculpably
deprived of the aids of external religion,
Catholics and non-Catholics, producing much
more in the way of results than those who
abound in sacraments. Or, again, our personal
experience and that of others will sometimes
tell us, though not commonly, that we progressed
more rapidly in periods of rarer Communions,
than in those of more frequent Communions.

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Or, what might seem strangest of all, there are
the by no means unheard-of cases of some who,
after abandoning the religious practices and
even the faith of the Church, have attained to
continence, or industry, or sobriety, or self-
control, or some other virtue which they had in
vain sought to secure by means of the sacra
ments or of ascetical practices.
All these phenomena have one and the
same ready explanation. The very fact of
having abundant helps ready to hand, is a snare
to those who misunderstand the meaning and
use of helps and who treat them as substitutes
for that exertion which they are designed to
render possible and to stimulate. Let these
helps be withdrawn, and at once such persons
feel that they are thrown entirely upon their
own internal resources, that they must put forth
all their energy or else perish ; and under this
apprehension they begin for the first time in
their lives, to use the strength that was within
them all along ; to make that painful exertion
for which they secretly, almost unconsciously,
hoped the frequentation of the sacraments might
serve as a substitute.
Even the apostate and renegade may easily
find in pride, or in ambition, or in some other
form of intense self-love, a stronger stimulus

EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. 97
to exertion than the love of God ever furnished
him with in the days of his belief and piety.
Such a victory over self is what Augustine calls
a victoria vitiosa, i.e., the control of one vice by
another ; and the continence or sobriety so
produced is only a manifestation of the strength
of the master-vice. Some of the strongest-
seeming men on earth have been the weakest.
The pride, or ambition, or lust, which enslaved
them, also enslaved all their other vices to
its own service, and made them temperate,
enduring, thrifty, prudent, bold. Yet their
force was but the force of a falling body.
But we need not suppose that it is always
so with the apostate. The change for the better
in his morals may find sufficient explanation
in the fact that, during his years of piety he
was using prayer and mortification simply as
substitutes for vigilance and not as means to it ;
and that what he abandoned were, as abused by
him, not means of grace, but hindrances of
nature. Thus we see how a superficial consideration
of such facts as these, might seem to the
thoughtless to justify the charge, that the helps
which the sacraments hold out to us, far from
strengthening and stimulating our will, tend
rather to enfeeble and enervate it. We see that
H

98 ABUSE OF
this is simply to confound the use with the
abuse of the sacraments, and that it is an
objection which would hold equally against the
whole economy of the Incarnation — nay, against
every help offered us by God or man, not only
in the supernatural, but even in the natural
order. God does not give a people a rich and
luxuriant soil in order to make them idle or to
save them exertion, yet more often than not
they so misuse His liberality that it makes for
decadence rather than progress. Deplorable as
such perversity may be in things temporal, it
is in addition, sinful and inexcusable in things
eternal. Doubtless it will be more tolerable for
Sodom and Gomorrha in the Judgment, than
for the cities which Christ vainly blessed with
His miracles and teaching ; and for heretics and
pagans and agnostics than for many a Catholic ;
yet we may not on that account even harbour
the impious wish that God, in affording us such
superabundant helps and graces, had not called
us to such terrible responsibilities — to such
multiplied labours and exertions.
De facto, a sterner soil may be better for us
than a richer, if it cause us to work harder ;
yet this is due to our own perversity, not to the
nature of the gift which in itself is a poorer one.
De facto, it were better for Judas had he never

EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. 99
been born, yet not because birth could ever
be an evil of its own nature, or other than an
unmerited blessing, but because of his own
perverse misuse of God's mercy.
So too, de facto, it were better for many a
Catholic to have had fewer sacraments, fewer
means of grace, if he has misused them as a
pretext for less exertion than he would actually
have put forth had he been thrown more entirely
upon himself; and yet God did, and intended to
do, for him what was the more liberal and
kinder thing ; to confer upon him that more
lavish grace, of which it is said : " To whom
much is given, from him much shall be required."

NOTE TO LECTURE V.
It might seem, on superficial consideration,
that the view here set forth is barely consonant
with that not uncommonly held as to the effect
of the sacraments, wherein it is said that, pro
vided there be the minimum requisite disposition
in approaching Holy Communion, a certain
minimum increase of sanctifying grace is derived
from the sacrament ex opere operato. From this
it would seem to follow that, so long as one is
not in mortal sin, it were always better to

100 ABUSE OF
receive than to abstain ; and, were it permitted,
to receive several times a day rather than once.
Also, it has even been said sometimes, that one
who receives daily and is content with keeping
clear of mortal sin and makes no attempt to
avoid venial sin, may in virtue of the latent
sanctifying grace thus stored up in his soul, be
a holier man — that is, diviner, and more near to
God — than one who strives to keep from lesser
offences, who is devout and charitable and
mortified, yet approaches the sacraments only
weekly or monthly. These conclusions are so
at variance with the sensus fidelium — so " offen
sive to pious ears," that the principle from
which they seem to follow, and which is in
itself undeniable, plainly needs careful expla
nation. Between the ultra-Protestant view which
denies all ex opere operato value to the sacra
ments, and the opposite extreme which would
make their operation simply mechanical, lies the
Catholic truth which teaches that the disposi
tions of the recipient, though not a cause, are a
condition of the grace received — a condition,
moreover, to which normally that grace is pro
portioned. They are the vessel wherewith we
draw from the well, and whereby our draught is
measured. It might therefore be conceivable
in the abstract, that from one annual Com-

EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. IOI
munion more grace should be drawn than
from 365 daily Communions. But the pre
sumption is certainly against it ; for those
who go seldom and reluctantly are not likely
to be so very fervently disposed. On the
other hand, those who go daily, if they are
leading a dissipated and careless life, are not
likely to get as much benefit from seven such
Communions as from one received with better
dispositions. Thus, in practice, it is only those
who are striving after perfection who will, in
that measure, draw profit from frequent Com
munion ; whereas one in no way minded to do
more than what is simply obligatory, will
profit less by frequent Communion received in
such ungracious dispositions than by much rarer
and worthier receptions. The principle that, one
cannot have too much of a good thing, and that
therefore one should never miss any opportunity
of sacramental grace, taken crudely, leads to
ridiculous consequences ; such as that, it would
be reasonable to expect a confessor to answer
reiterated confessions of the same fault with
reiterated absolutions one after another as fast
as time will permit ; or that, it is unreasonable
of the Church to forbid reiterated Communions
in the same day. If the sacraments work quasi-
physically, irrespective of a positive disposition
of spiritual appetite, it is hard to exclude these

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repulsive consequences, so opposed to the
instinct of sane Catholicism. But obviously the
disposition for Communion, though sometimes
described negatively as consisting in freedom
from mortal sin, is in itself something positive,
namely, the love of God whereby sin is ex
truded, and a desire for grace, springing from
and proportioned to that love. This love is not
something necessarily equal in all such casesi
nor can we therefore suppose that there is a sort
of arithmetical minimum of grace given by each
sacrament, unless we are prepared to say that
there is a minimum of love. Both as to Com
munion and Penance we may say that, the
desire for the sacramental grace is the sub
stantial disposition. It does not create the
grace, but it creates, or rather is, the capacity
for grace. Only so far as a new and unsatisfied
capacity for grace may be presumed to have
arisen between two Communions, can they be
properly regarded as two. I take it that to
receive several hosts in immediate succession
would be morally one manducatio — one
eating ; nor would a longer interval make any
material difference were the dispositions un
altered. If we might justify sane Catholic
practice by an homely illustration : we do not
refill our ink-bottle after every dip of the pen,
but we wait till it runs low ; we do not run to

EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. 103
the bank with every penny, but wait till we
have a reasonable sum ; we do not eat again
the moment the sense of full satiety begins to
subside, but allow our appetite to go unsatisfied
that later it may be better satisfied ; and
similarly the faithful, except so far as they are
guided by some reflex rationalistic principle
rather than by the promptings of healthy piety,
do not think it necessary to satisfy the very
first stirrings of the spiritual appetite, but trust
that it will endure and gather strength for fuller
satisfaction at those reasonable intervals which
their circumstances of life, spiritual and tem
poral, may determine.
In fine, if the view from which we might
seem to differ really leads to consequences so
repugnant both to the instinccs of unsophisti
cated piety, and to the interests of an upward-
tending morality and religion, it cannot be
accepted for a moment as part of Catholic
teaching ; if, however, it can be cleared of such
consequences, it is only because it is explained
as agreeing with substantially and differing only
verbally from the ordinary view presented in
these pages.
In regard to frequency of Communion, the
average practice of the faithful has varied
enormously in different periods and places;
nor can it be affirmed, in the light of history,

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that there has been a steady tendency towards
greater frequency, such as is at present observ
able, and which is only a return to the primitive
practice. Doubtless the daily Communion of
all has ever been the ideal, even when other
necessities may have made it least realizable ;
but the Church's astonishing elasticity in this
respect is only intelligible on the principles here
explained. And as it would be rash to conclude
that we in England to-day are, as a class, better
than our forefathers who lived under persecu
tion, and whose Communion-standard was " eight
times a year," as contrasted with our "' once a
week ; " so, taking this " once a week " as our
present norm of devout practice, it would be
rash and illiberal to condemn those who go
much more rarely as being therefore less devout;
or those who go daily, as making pretensions to
extraordinary sanctity. The local standard for
the time being will determine what is to be con
sidered relatively frequent or rare Communion ;
and we may say that it needs some positive
reason to depart from it notably by excess or
defect ; but such reasons are sufficiently common
to forbid us to judge one another, or to deny
one another that ample liberty which our religion
allows us and no man may take from us. Often
temporal circumstances — sickness, distance, oc
cupation, make access to the altar physically

EXTERNAL MEANS OF GRACE. 105
impossible or very difficult ; while mental, moral,
and spiritual conditions are still more various.
There are those who can quickly throw off
pre-occupations and concentrate themselves on
prayer ; and there are others who focus their
attention slowly and laboriously ; and, according
to these and similar diversities, some will profit
by more frequent, others by less frequent access.

LECTURE VI.
ABUSE OF EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT.
In our last Conference we dealt with one parti
cular form of that abuse which we have agreed
to call " externality " in religion — an abuse
diametrically opposed to the contrary error of
mere " internality," that is, the denial of the
utility, the need, and the existence of an obli
gatory outward religion. We considered, so to
say, the theory of helps in general, and then,
dividing the supernatural helps which the reli
gion of the Incarnation affords us, into means
of grace or spiritual strength, and means of
light or spiritual guidance, we saw how the
former might be either rightly used to stimulate
and increase our capacity for exertion and
vigilance ; or else wrongly used as substitutes
for efforts already well within our capacity,
with the effect of enervating and eventually
paralyzing the natural vigour of our will. We
do not mean that such Communions and con
fessions are positively unworthy or sacrilegious,

EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT. IO7
but that whatever grace they convey lies idle
in the soul, and is therefore simply fruitless of all
perceptible effect ; because we do not approach
with a real desire to exert ourselves more, but
with a subtle hope that we shall hereby need to
exert ourselves less.
The sacraments were not designed to save us
any salutary effort, or to make cheaper for us
that natural virtue obligatory on all mankind ;
but rather to oblige us each time anew to some
degree of Christian perfection and to the exertion
of those still greater efforts needed for its attain
ment. Let us now consider how the means of light
and spiritual guidance may similarly be either
used or abused. As free, intelligent creatures,
it is our special dignity to be in some measure
and always under God, self-formed, self-taught,
self-moved, self-guided. Of course our inde
pendence is exceedingly limited, and what we
can do for ourselves is only a little fraction of
what God and our fellow-creatures have to do
for us ; but little as it is, in that little our
personality is exercised. Were we, however,
proudly to discard any available help, simply
on the score that we prefer to do every
thing for ourselves from the very beginning ;
were we to refuse to enter into our heritage

108 ABUSE OF
from the past, to reap and enjoy the fruits of
others' labours, to accept the accumulated results
of their experience and reflection and activity,
we should not thereby in any way enlarge the
field of our self-acquired perfections; but should
only be sacrificing priceless advantages to the
gratification of a short-sighted self-defeating
love of independence. For there is no indignity
in being helped in order to exert ourselves
more ; but only in being helped in order to
shirk exertion.
As money is an instrument for getting money;
so truth and knowledge are instruments for
getting truth and knowledge ; and the more
that others can impart to us by way of a starting
capital, the greater and more fruitful is the
mental exertion we are capable of; and conse
quently by such help rightly used, the field of
our self-acquired advantages will be indefinitely
enlarged. Take what you actually know of
history or of science, and compare it with the
most that your unassisted efforts could possibly
have attained to ; and you will see that not only
your acquired knowledge, but even your power
of acquiring knowledge, is multiplied many times
over through assistance received from others.
For this reason, to live in the company of
others, far from hindering the development of

EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT. log
personality and self-sufficingness, is the most
indispensable condition thereof.
We may be sure then that when God gifted
our first parents in Paradise with preternatu rally
infused knowledge, it was not that they might
live ever after inertly in a state of mental stag
nation ; but that starting with minds full-formed
and well instructed, they might set the talent
out to usury and make it the instrument of such
an intellectual activity and advance as had been
nowise possible for them had they been left to
their merely naturally resources — individual and
social. Similarly with regard to the supernatural reve
lation accorded to fallen man (piecemeal through
the prophets of the Old Law, and in its final
plenitude by the lips of the Word-made-flesh,
who has committed it to the custody of the
Holy Ghost in His Church), we must not for a
moment imagine that God intended hereby to
exempt us from any particle of that careful
thought and consideration which we are naturally
bound to give to the affairs of our soul and
eternity before all else ; or that He intended
to save us the profitable trouble of using and
training our minds in the matter of religion.
His design rather tended to multiply our labours
by giving us more material to work upon ; and,

110 ABUSE OF
by the added light of every new truth, to increase
our powers of spiritual apprehension. Undoubt
edly a truth that we find out for ourselves is our
own in a more real way than a truth which, being
simply put into us from outside, is nowise our
own product — just as the wealth we produce by
our own labour is our possession in a sense
that no gift ever can be. But as our wealth-
earning power depends ultimately on the gifts
and helps we receive from God and from our
fellow-men, so our truth-earning power is pro
portioned to the amount of ready-made truths
communicated to us at the outset. Doubtless
it were grander to know these latter inde
pendently, as God does ; but being what we
are, it is far better we should know them in
this less perfect, dependent way, than be left
in our helplessness and not know them at all.
For so it is, that our mind is most helpless and
dependent in regard to the most necessary
truths, whether natural or supernatural. In one
case God has to infuse the first principles into
our intelligence ; in the other He has to reveal
them ; and it is only after He has thus far
helped us, that we can begin to help ourselves
on a little further.
Far from being called to less mental activity
in regard to religious questions and the ultimate

EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT. Ill
problems of human life, the educated Catholic
is called to a great deal more than others, to
whom a narrower measure of truth and light
has been committed in trust. And yet it is
commonly objected against us that the tendency
of our belief in the Church's infallible guidance,
is to paralyze our intelligence in this department,
by encouraging us to use the judgment of the
Church as a substitute for our own judgment,
rather than as a rule or instrument for its
formation and development, as a spur to set it
in rapid motion. The Catholic is likened to
one who is content to possess the best books
on a given subject, without ever attempting to
master their contents with a view to becoming
himself somewhat expert therein. This objection,
which one hears very commonly, is put into the
mouth of one of the characters in a recent
Catholic novel.1 " I never yet met a Protestant,"
he says, " who was not anxious to talk religion ;
nor a Catholic who was not anxious to avoid it.
Why ? " " Because," says the other, " we are so
secure of our religion it does not interest us.
You know there must be doubt in order to
create interest" " How is it," another acute
observer asks, "that in all religious questions
1 The Triumph of Failure. By Rev. P. A. Sheehan.

112 ABUSE OF
Catholics are in some way much less interesting
to speak to than Protestants ? "
That the fact is so to some extent, I think we
must admit ; that it should be so we must
altogether deny ; nor can we allow, that to be
secure of a truth justifies our losing all interest
in it ; nor yet, that outside a comparatively
small oasis of revealed truths concerning which
we are secure, there does not stretch an almost
infinite region of religious problems which God
has left to our disputation, that we ourselves
may bring to bear upon them the super
natural light of revelation which He has given
us. It will help, in dealing with this question, to
recall an old-fashioned theological distinction
almost forgotten in these days when the spread
of education is supposed to have put all classes
at an equal advantage in passing judgment upon
every sort of question. Yet this old distinction
between the majores and the minores, that is,
between the adepts and the laymen in each
department, is too deeply fixed in the nature of
things for any educational system to uproot.
It is a pleasant popular fiction, that no truly
enlightened modern ever believes aught that he
has not either seen with his own eyes, or
demonstrated from the root upwards to his own

EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT. II3
satisfaction ; that he takes nothing on hearsay,
or on faith, or by way of tradition ; that he
never thinks and says anything solely because
his father said it before him, or because every
body says it all round him. It is a pleasant
fiction, but none the less a fiction ; for full nine-
tenths of the knowledge of the most independent
thinker that ever lived, is necessarily either
taken blindly on trust or else based on premisses
so taken, and were he to reject everything he
had not personally verified, his mental condition
would be little different from that of a clever
savage. Still this same independent thinker
may be classed with the majores, so far as he
uses the help derived from others, to help
himself on a little further than they have carried
him, and adds some little quota to the common
stock of enlightenment. But so far as of
necessity, he is chiefly taught by tradition,
and simply repeats and imitates what others
say and think ; so far as he receives passively
into his brain the impression worked upon it by
the entire deposit of knowledge existing in the
society he belongs to, he is on a par with the
minores. For the practical purposes of life, this
traditional method is the one best fitted for us
by the wisdom of God. But it is only by the

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labour of the majores, of the active and in de
pendent thinkers, that this body of public truth,
which they break and distribute to the multitude,
is increased, modified, and corrected ; and there
fore such a class of thinkers is a necessity for
every progressive community. Roughly speaking
this is the educated class, so far as education
implies a power of rediscovering for ourselves
what tradition has taught us ; of setting the
form and stamp of our own individual mind
upon it ; of realizing what we have hitherto
only repeated ; a power of active and productive
intelligence, as opposed to merely passive and
receptive intelligence.
The mission of Christ and the Church, as we
said, is primarily to the uneducated masses, and
to the educated, only so far as they are willing
to submit to the method of tradition and faith,
to the " folly of preaching," by which alone it
is possible for the multitudes to lay hold of
divine truth. For our own practical sanctifica
tion we must all be content to enter the Kingdom
of Heaven as little children with the " common
people who heard Him gladly," or else to stay
outside. The keenest spiritual insight is not
enough to steady us in the hour of temptation,
but only faith in the word of another, and that
Other, God. It is upon His mind we must

EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT. 115
then rely, and not upon our own ; on the eternal
enduring rock, not on the shivering sand.
Still it remains true that revelation is not
designed to exempt us from any exercise of
religious thought that we are naturally capable
of; but rather to increase that capacity and to
make our exertions more fruitful.
Hence, our Lord requires of educated Catholics
besides faith, a certain intelligence about their
religion, proportioned to their general ability
and opportunities ; nor can any man be credited
with very deep or vital faith, if it is not a faith
that seeks intelligence as far as intelligence is
possible for him ; if from being a matter of
practical utility for him, it does not come to be
also one of intellectual interest.
This wakening of intellectual interest in
religion, as in any other subject, depends upon
our realizing that it is connected with the whole
body of our thought, that it is a factor needed
to set our disconnected views of life in order, and
reduce them to unity. Children usually accept
blindly the political views of their parents,
without realizing or inquiring why such stress
should be laid upon them, until the growth of
their own mind, and the expansion of their
personal and social interests, force them to look
at the matter independently.

Il6 ABUSE OF
But far more than politics, religion is a subject
which is most closely wrapt up with the great
problems of life, practical and speculative ; and
hence we find that no man whose mind is really
awake, and who can be called educated in any
general sense, can afford to be without some
definite views about religion — whether for, or
against, whether dogmatic or sceptic. In
England indeed, owing to the above-mentioned
" spread of education," religious questions are a
matter of interest and discussion in almost every
class, high and low, and in every school, Chris
tian or anti-Christian
Are we to except the Catholic community
alone from intelligent sympathy with these vital
problems ?
The novelist we quoted suggests that where
there is certainty and no doubt, there can be
no interest, no discussion ; if we have found
the truth, or if we have never lost it, we do not
search for it ; if we are not searching, we are not
interested. There is a good deal of reason in
this. Our very position as Catholics supposes
that we accept without hesitation all the official
teaching of the Church ; that we have no doubt
about the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Eucharist,
the Priesthood, or the Sacraments ; or about any
of the momentous dogmas of faith. Whatever

EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT. II7
the Church has left open to our disputation is,
from the nature of the case, as yet unimportant,
whatever it may become in future ages. Our
internecine controversies are not, like those of
Protestants, about matters of life and death, but
about points confessedly secondary. Men cannot
be expected to struggle as ardently and univer
sally about the dispensable luxuries of life as
about its indispensable necessities. In the
Catholic religion God has secured the Bread of
Eternal Truth to be broken in unfailing supply
to the hungry multitudes, to the poor and the
uneducated. He has not left them with a volume
of riddles for their sole guidance, nor to the
interpretation of scribes and doctors wrangling
over those riddles. Abounding as they do in
solid bread, in the necessities of supernatural
life, the faith-taught crowds are not called to
disputations beyond their ability, demanding an
independence of mind whereof they are in
capable. And as regards these daily necessities
of spiritual enlightenment, learned and un
learned, classes and masses, are on a par. All
are equally helpless as to religious truths beyond
reason, while as to those within reason, the
mental grasp of even the wisest is too infirm,
and needs to be replaced by faith.
But in the gift of revelation, though God

Ii8 ABUSE OF
helps us so far as we cannot help ourselves, He
helps us no further ; and in matters where
failure is easily remediable where it only hurts
lightly, and does not kill, He leaves us to our
selves. Outside the clearly-hedged field of
revealed truth, there is an infinitely vast region
of religious inquiry wherein the mind should
exercise itself according to the utmost of its
ability. That an educated Catholic should misuse
the help of revelation as a pretext for mental
sloth in regard to the supreme interests of
humanity, is altogether to be deplored and repre
hended ; since that help is designed wholly to
extend and stimulate our religious intelligence,
and not to enable us to sit down idly, with a
blissful sense of omniscience, as though we had
nothing more to learn. Even supposing we knew
our religion so thoroughly that we could not know
anything more about its nature or its history,
still we who are educated are bound to be able
to give a reason for the faith that is in us, and
to make it intelligible to others who inquire of
us. This means trying to enter into the minds
of others who believe differently, and, so to say,
studying the articles of faith in their contraries
and denials — an unlimited field of labour, for
the mark of truth can be missed in an infinity
of ways. We are not allowed to sit on the rocks,

EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT. II9
indifferent spectators of the struggles of those
who are battling with the surf, hugging ourselves
in an ecstasy of safety.
But besides this there is inexhaustible work
for our mind to do. As we said before, no two
of the Blessed see God in the same way or
measure ; and no two Catholics apprehend their
faith alike ; and as long as we live and think,
we can go on burrowing our way further and
further into the depths of meaning stored away
in the dogmas of the Church. Our first progress
is simply a gathering in of materials, as word
by word, and line by line, the Church's official
teaching is communicated to us ; then com
mences the process of pondering and consider
ing these parts in their relation one to another,
and building them up gradually into something
ever approaching yet never attaining that unity
they possess in the Divine Mind, where all
truths are but one truth, and all thoughts but
one thought. Of course our religious intelli
gence can never be a philosophy, a complete
and coherent system of truths neatly jointed
together — to demand it should be so, is the
error of rationalism. In dealing with mysteries,
truths fringed with darkness, there will always
be gaps and seeming contradictions in our
attempted unifications ; and for this very reason

120 ABUSE OF
the work will never be finished ; there will
always be more for us to do.
Again, in the reconciliation of the Catholic
faith with the ever-shifting attitude of science
and history ; in the whole bearing of religion
upon the altering conditions of secular thought
and secular life, there is endless work for the
religious intelligence of any educated Catholic
who wishes to be in sympathy at once with his
age and with his Church ; and the fruit of
his endeavour will be a deepened under
standing and appreciation of both one and the
other. And here let us observe that to be afraid to
face anything that history or science or criticism
may have to say, lest it should prove at variance
with our religious beliefs, far from being the
mark of a firmly-rooted faith, is just the con
trary. We must not only profess with our lips,
but by our conduct we must prove our convic
tion that no contradiction can exist between
natural and revealed truth ; and that wherever
it seems to exist it is only because we mis
understand one side or the other. And while
the misunderstanding lasts, even though it last
for our lifetime, true and intelligent faith will be
willing to let the two irreconciled truths live
quietly side by side in the mind, without forcing

EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT. 121
a premature reconciliation, or casting out either
one or the other.
Again, those who are favoured by God with
the grace of a good education and a certain
power of independent thought, and who are
accordingly bound to add some degree of
intelligence and criticism to their faith, are
rightly blamed for what is largely inevitable
and blameless in the multitudes who hold
religious truth by faith alone. We said long
since, that man-made religions are essentially
corruptible and fallible in virtue of their visible
part — of that outward embodiment by which
they are brought home to the senses and
imagination ; and therefore our Lord came to
give us a divine interpretation of our religious
instinct and a divinely guaranteed embodiment
of that interpretation. But outside this core of
revelation, the religious intelligence of man
works in its own natural way, both for better
and for worse ; and inevitably generates
numerous superstitions in the minds of the
uncritical ; and even in more cultivated minds,
not a few. It is, then, part of that loyal
reverence which the educated Catholic owes
to truth and to the Church's authority, to
discern clearly and separate infinitely what is of
divine revelation from what is of merely human

122 ABUSE OF
addition, be that addition true or false. " One
is your Master, even Christ." We acknowledge
but one supreme teaching-authority on earth,
and it is treason to listen to any other with like
reverence. Moses and Elias are well in their
way ; but they are not Christ, they are not
Peter. As a feeble, half-hearted faith is timor
ously cautious of meeting difficulties, so too it
always leans to the lazy, trouble-saving fallacy
that it is better to believe too much than too
little, and that credulity and superstition is an
error on the right side. There is but one side
when truth is in question.
Of course we should deal gently with supersti
tion in others, especially in the uneducated,
mindful lest in pulling up the tares we pull up
the wheat along with it ; lest in snuffing the
candle we extinguish it. So St. Paul dealt with
those weaker brethren, those simple souls for
whom Christ died, whose false conscience forbade
their eating meat offered to idols — as though
idols were aught. Yet in our own minds and
in the minds of those who are capable of better
things, we must strive sedulously that our faith
be reverently housed in a soul from which every
cobweb of unworthy superstition has been care
fully swept away. We are to be children in
faith, but not children in folly. " Be ye children

EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT. 123
in guile," says the Apostle, " but not children in
understanding." To think accurately is the gift
of the few ; and the ruder a mind is, the more
are its perceptions mingled with illusion. If the
faithful were to refrain altogether from drawing
inferences from the teachings of the Creed, and
from making applications for themselves of
revealed principles ; if they were to be purely
passive and receptive under the Church's guid
ance, then on the one hand there would be no
superstition or delusion ; but on the other there
would be no intelligence added to the faith.
The mind must perforce work upon what it
believes ; and this working, in the case of the
rude and unlettered, must abound in fallacies
and delusions which they can hardly detect even
when pointed out to them. To throw doubt on
their false deductions would often be to make
them doubt the true premisses from which they
erroneously drew them. Sinite crescere — " Let
both grow till the harvest."
Does this justify the charge that the Catholic
Church has one religion for the educated,
another for the masses ? God forbid ! The
faith that is common to educated and unedu
cated is an indefinitely higher gift than the most
enlightened religious intelligence ; and this faith
finds on the whole purer and better dispositions

124 ABUSE OF
in the unspoilt minds of the simple, who know
their ignorance, than in the minds of the
cultured, who over-estimate their knowledge.
Yet this does not alter the fact that superstition
which is the parasite of simplicity, is a blemish
and an unworthy cohabitant of faith ; and that
it is the duty of the intelligent and educated to
weed it out of their minds studiously. Not in
regard to faith, but in regard to religious intelli
gence, they are the majores, and their function
in the Church is steadily and quietly to check
the growth of superstition ; just as it is the
function of the better classes in society to
maintain standards of good taste and good
judgment in a thousand matters, and so to
resist the downward influence of the uncritical
majority. If from a falsely conceived intellectual humi
lity we were all to imitate, not only the faith
and simplicity, but the folly and superstition of
the multitude, and were to use the education
and influence God has trusted us with for their
sakes, not to hinder the evil, but to further it,
the wheat of Catholic truth would quickly be
obliterated and lost in a tangle of tares.
Plainly, then, if ever Catholics think less and
talk less on religious questions than Protestants

EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT. 125
do, it is not for lack of matter to think and talk
about ; it can only be because they sometimes
culpably misuse, to the hurt of their religious
intelligence, that external rule of belief which
God intended for its help.
This mistake manifests itself sometimes in
a total apathy and listlessness of mind — as
in the case of those who simply hold on to
the Church as they might hold on to a book,
satisfied to know that it contains the truth,
without ever caring to open it, or turn over
its leaves ; sometimes in a certain narrow,
cock-sure orthodoxy, most alien from the
gentle self-diffidence of humble faith, — as in
the case of those who know their catechism
well by heart, and carry cut-and-dried answers
to all difficulties, wrapt up in pellets to shoot
out on occasion ; to whom everything is clear,
and common-sense, and obvious ; who can define
a mystery, but have never felt one. That the
human words and ideas in which eternal truths
are clad cannot, even through divine skill,
convey to us more than a shadow of the reali
ties they stand for ; that they cannot, like
numbers, be added, subtracted, and multiplied
together so as to deduce new conclusions with
arithmetical simplicity and accuracy, never
occurs to them when they are instructing others

126 ABUSE OF
as ignorant ; or refuting them as idiotic ; or
rebuking them as immoral. For such persons
religion has the same kind of interest as the
multiplication-table, and no more. There is
nothing mysterious, or beautiful, or awful about
it ; nothing to feed the mind or to subdue it
with inexhaustible wonder.
Lastly, as in matters of faith and right belief,
so in those pertaining to morals and right
conduct, the infallible guidance which the
Church offers us should not paralyze, but
invigorate our practical judgment. Besides the
decalogue, she gives us a fairly large number of
moral precepts which, being of universal applica
bility, may serve as principles for our guidance
in concrete cases. But the application of these
principles to varieties of time, place, condition,
individual character, and the like, is left to our
own mind. Here, if there is any danger of
abuse, it might be in the case of those who look
on their spiritual director as a substitute for
their own conscience ; and not as one whose
whole task is to help them to develop their
conscience — to teach them so to judge for them
selves that gradually they shall become nearly
independent of such assistance ; to guide them
to the best of all guides — God's Holy Spirit.
This, however, is an abuse to which not only

EXTERNAL MEANS OF LIGHT, I27
spiritual advice and direction, but all advice is
liable. Indolent minds will never think for
themselves as long as there is somebody to ask ;
and there are always plenty of oracular " some
bodies " whose readiness to give advice is in
direct proportion to the narrowness of their
experience and the rashness of their judgment.
Therefore, as with the sacraments and the
means of grace, so it is with the means of light
which the Church affords us. They are designed
to increase and not to check our spiritual
activity ; to develop, not to extinguish our
personality. God looks, and has a right to look
to us Catholics for immeasurably more than He
expects from others. What more could He
have done for His vine that He has not done?
Will He then be content if it bring forth wild
grapes for sweet ? Shall not much be required
from us to whom so much has been given ?

LECTURE VII.
ABUSE OF THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY.
In the two preceding conferences we considered
the religion of the Incarnation, that is, the
Catholic Church, as an external instrument for
the internal sanctification of her own members
— as quickening and stimulating the mind to
supernatural activity by an outward rule of
truth ; and the will, by outward means of grace.
But she has other sheep which are not of this
fold, and them she must also bring, that there
may be one fold and one shepherd. She is, as
we have already said, a militant body, and her
warfare is both defensive and offensive — defen
sive, in so far as she protects her own children
and gathers her brood under her wing, and all
timid though she be by nature, waxes fierce
against the birds of prey that would molest
them ; offensive, in so far as she desires all men
outside the fold to be saved and to come, not
merely to that sufficient knowledge of saving
truth which is denied to none, but to that

THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY. 129
fulness of knowledge, that exuberant richness
of salvation which is found only within her pale.
Conquest is her end, no less than self-defence ;
yet it is conquest for the good of the conquered,
not for their hurt. When an earthly state is at
war, the energies of her citizens are drained
and diverted from the work of peaceful self-
expansion to the work of aggression or self-
defence. No doubt this temporary suspension
of civic progress and prosperity is directed to
its eventual acceleration and increase ; for peace
is the motive of war. Still the arts of peace
and the arts of war are totally distinct, whereas
in the Civitas Dei they are identical. We are
not called on to lay aside, even for a time, the
work of our individual salvation in order to
labour for the salvation of others ; but it is
precisely by being on fire ourselves that we are
to set fire to the world all round us.
Some would almost seem to think that as we
distinguish the Ecclesia docens from the Ecclesia
discens, the Church teaching from the Church
taught ; so we should distinguish the Church
active and militant, from the Church passive and
quiescent ; the former body being identical with
the clergy and the latter with the laity — the
clergy labouring and rowing ; the laity simply
paying their fare and sitting idly as so much I

130 ABUSE OF
ballast in the bark of Peter. Plainly this is a
most false and pernicious analogy. It is not
only to the clergy but also to the laity — to the
whole Church, both collectively and distribu
tive^ that our Saviour says : You are the light
of the world ; you are the salt of the earth ; let
your light so shine before men that they may
see your good works and glorify your Father
who is in Heaven.
We must not therefore imagine that the
Church has done all her work in our regard
when she has developed our spiritual faculties
to the full. As soon as the work of personal
development is complete the period of repro
ductive fertility sets in. The vine puts forth the
grape, but the grape in its maturity carries a
seed in its bosom. The Church's work in our
soul is complete only when that soul becomes a
centre of new life, communicating the flame to
others We are not solitary, but social beings ;
as we depend upon others and receive from
them nine-tenths of what we are, so they depend
upon us and look to us for some little fractional
return. This sense of our indebtedness to
society, to the Church, to the world at large ;
and of our obligation to live wholly for others —
whether directly or indirectly — and for ourselves
only in order to live more effectually for others ;

THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY. 131
is, so to say, the last grace with which our
humanity is crowned ; it is like a latent faculty,
which makes its appearance only when the work
of spiritual development is otherwise complete.
When this country is at war we do not all
feel the effects of it. We perhaps pay extra
taxes, or others pay taxes for us ; but the
fighting is done by deputy. But universal
conscription is the Church's law ; all must fight ;
there is no buying out. Her warfare is not
¦carried on solely by the Pope or the Bishops or
the clergy ; the layman is not a mere civilian in
the Civitas Dei ; for the Church is altogether
and perpetually a militant state ; and her victory
requires and is measured by the exertion of each
single one of her members, from the greatest to
the least.
But, it will be said, her victory is secured ; it
is fated by an everlasting decree : " On this
rock, eternal, immutable, will I found My
Church. The powers of Hell shall not prevail
against it. Lo ! I am with you all days even
to the consummation of the world."
Here, again, we have to deal with the same
kind of misapprehension which occupied us in
our two previous Conferences. Helps, natural
or supernatural, are promised and given to us
by God, not to exempt us from any labour we

132 ABUSE OF
are capable of — from any exertion we should
otherwise have made, but to make us capable of
greater exertion and to stimulate and encourage
us so to use up that increased capacity that we
shall merit to receive yet greater increase
If, then, God has promised by some special
providence to save the Church from the ordinary
and universal law of social growth and decay,
it is not that Catholics should, on that account,
exert themselves less for the spread and triumph
of religion than they would do if its prevalence
depended upon them alone. Contrariwise, it is
in order that, fighting as they do against such
fearful odds, they may have confidence and
courage to go on fighting in many a crisis where
reason and common-sense, and anything less
than faith in a divine promise, would bid them
give up and surrender to the inevitable. That
promise is therefore designed to make them
fight, not less, but more. It does not tell them
that the victory is to be secured without fight
ing, but through fighting. It does not suspend
the natural laws of cause and effect ; or bid
them look for the end without using the means ;
but spurs them on to be more active in studying
the causes and applying the means of victory.
History shows us over and over again, how men
will fight to the death against the most fearful

THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY. 133
odds when, falsely or truly, they believe that
victory is divinely assured to them, provided only
they believe that it is through fighting it is to be
effected. Of course if they think their deliver
ance is to be wrought through the intervention
of miracles, then indeed their confidence will
enervate rather than stimulate their activity.
So it is with ourselves. We never attempt what
we believe to be impossible ; and the commonest
cause of failure is the false conviction that fail
we must. To banish this illusion, to convince a
man that he can succeed, that he will succeed,
is often the only way to rouse him from hope
less lethargy. Thus it is that the Church is
animated, time after time, to renew what else
would seem a fruitless struggle with the world ;
nor does she ever forget that her promised
perpetuity is the result, not of a miracle or
series of miracles, but of Divine assistance and
special providence, using the workings of natural
laws According to these laws the history of other
" religious revivals " and movements may be
compared to the effect produced by a stone
falling into a smooth pond. From the centre
of disturbance the wavelets circle out wider and
wider, and weaker and weaker, till the original
force is altogether spent, as far as perceptible

134 ABUSE OF
movement is concerned. The founder of a
religious movement embodies in himself the
fulness of its spirit, which he communicates
with some slight diminution to his immediate
disciples and followers ; these again transmit it
to others. And as time goes on and as numbers
are multiplied, and the average of capability
thereby lowered, that original spirit is less-
completely communicated, and gradually dies
away and is forgotten. It may perhaps be
studied and analyzed and dissected and talked
about ; but it is not felt.
Following this law, the impulse given by
Christ to the human soul should naturally have
produced, as it did, its fullest fruit in Mary and
the Apostles and the early Christians and
martyrs, and then have died away quietly long
since. But as a matter of fact God has so far
maintained the Church in existence by a series
of providential revivals, by ever reinforcing the
weakening energy as often as, at periods of
decadence it seemed all but exhausted. He
has raised up a saint or a reformer or the
founder of an Order just at the right moment,
when all seemed lost, and the ship was just
heeling over. Nor can we regard this exactly
as a Deus ex machina expedient, as something
strictly miraculous ; for that saints should arise

THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY. 135,
from time to time is no more wonderful in the
world of grace, than the occasional appearance
of a poet or a genius in the world of nature. It
only means that the arms of God's providence
are round His Church, that He disposes all
things sweetly in her behalf, working, according
to His invariable economy, by natural means as
far as may be. Looking into the history of the
Church, there is perhaps little or nothing which
the philosopher of history could not explain by
the ordinary laws which govern the conduct of
men, save only this providential supply and
succession of enthusiasts who lash the Church
into vigour again and again when her force
seems well-nigh spent.
From all this it is clear that the promise
of perpetuity or indefectibility made to the
Church should not relax our efforts, but should
multiply them. It is through the energy of her
children that she is to prevail ; and further
more, the degree of her triumph — whether she
is merely to escape extinction and drag her
way through the world feeble and dishonoured,
or to live a full and glorious existence, the
Mistress of many nations; all this 'depends, on
each particular day and in each particular place,
entirely upon us, upon each one of us. All God
has promised is, that however unfaithful and

136 ABUSE OF
indolent we may be, yet for the sake of the
world at large and for the sake of Christ and
His saints, He will always preserve His Church
in conspicuous evidence.
It is sometimes very hard to resist the im
pression that members of other religious denomi
nations who have no divine guarantee for the
perpetuity of their sect, who believe, therefore,
that all depends on their united efforts, are often
more zealous, more united, more public-spirited,
generous, self-sacrificing, than many Catholics
who, under cover of confidence in the Divine
promise, justify a certain apathy and indiffer
ence in the Church's cause, which is really the
fruit of a secret fatalism. These latter say :
" God will bring all things right in the end ; '
but they forget that we must help Him to bring
them right ; that " how far right " depends
wholly on us; that if "less right" through our
supine fatalism, it will be anything but right
for us.
Thus, as we saw before in regard to the
Church's sacraments and her teaching, so here
we see that what God intends to be a help and
a stimulus may be misused and perverted into a
hindrance ; what was designed to encourage
effort in the day of storm and battle may be
used to discourage effort in the day of peace

THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY. 137
and tranquillity ; nay, sometimes it is only when
the Church is so hard pressed that men's faith
in the divine promise weakens, that they rouse
themselves to action and begin to do what they
could and should have done long before.
But apart from this unfortunate fatalism,
which may infect all alike — clergy as well as
laity, the energies of the latter are often
paralyzed by the misapprehension, already
alluded, to which regards the relation between
clergy and laity as analogous to that between
soldier and civilian in the secular state, and
therefore considers the layman as exempt from
all duty of forwarding the Church's cause upon
earth, and limits his obligation to that of pas
sively submitting his own soul to be operated upon
by the sacraments and teaching of the Church.
Now undoubtedly the Church's warfare in
volves an immense diversity of functions and
ministrations, and some of these, such as the
official ministry of the word and the sacraments
is the proper province of the clergy. But
religion, and the Catholic religion especially,
penetrates into all departments of human life —
departments from the greater number of which
the clergy are often excluded by the very nature
of their profession. Wherever there is an alterna
tive of right or wrong, of false or true, of fair or

138 ABUSE OF
foul, there the interest of the Church needs to
be looked after. In the world of thought,
whether we consider history or philosophy or
science, there is always a false and a true, and
the cause of truth is the cause of Christ and
His Church. In the world of action, if we turn
to art and literature, there is the fair and the
foul, the ennobling and the debasing, a potent
influence on the human spirit for good or for
evil ; and it is not hard to see on which side
Christ's interests lie. If we turn to the domain
of practical utility, is there any corner wholly
exempt from the jurisdiction of religion and
morality, whether we look to politics, domestic
and foreign ; or to the profession and pursuits
of the educated ; or to commerce and business ;.
or to public enterprises affecting the temporal
and spiritual welfare of millions ? With all these
matters the cause of the Church and of Chris
tianity is intimately bound up, and the Catholic
layman has a side to take and a part to play.
Nay, it is principally in these matters that
Christianity extends its influence and roots itself
in human society. The priests, with their preach
ing and sacraments, do nothing in the Church's
external warfare, except so far as they incite
and stimulate laymen to use their influence,
each in his own department, for the cause

THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY. 139
of Christ — for what is just and right and fair
and good. They preach the Crusade, they
harangue the crusaders, but the actual pushing
of the Church's interests is nearly altogether in
the hands of the laity. Look into the past, and
you will see how largely it has been so. And if
you think you see the priest too often in politics,
perhaps it is because the layman is not seen
there often enough.
One probable cause of periods of apathy and
inertness among the laity is the different exigen
cies of times of danger and times of safety. In
crises of special peril, where much depends on
unity and promptitude both of judgment and
action, all initiative is wisely gathered up to the
head and centre of the Church's social organism,
and that blind, passive obedience is required of
the members which is required of soldiers in the
hour of battle, when, if each were left to judge
as he chose, and to act as he judged, chaos and
defeat would be the result. But what is good
in a crisis and in time of danger is not good at
other times. Blind obedience is the best on certain
occasions, but it is not the best in itself; it is
not the better for being blind. In itself and
where practicable, an intelligent and sympathetic
obedience is better, such as was the obedience of
Christ to His Father's will.

14° ABUSE OF
Ignatius Loyola,1 whose doctrine is ignorantly
supposed to be extreme and exceptional in
this matter, says rightly that when the judg
ment is not in sympathy with what is com
manded, the obedience is very imperfect (valde
imperfecta) and cannot be relied upon. Further
more, such obedience is not educative, as it does
not teach the subject to guide himself inde
pendently when the guidance of authority cannot
be had ; since he does not see the principles
and reasons of the command given. Yet when
for one reason or another he is not capable of
seeing the reasons, and prompt action is required,
this blind obedience is relatively the most
reasonable. But in times of comparative peace and tran
quillity all this centralization is relaxed and the
power of initiative flows out to the extremities
1 St. Ignatius uses ' ' blind " in an unusual sense. Commonly
obedience is called "blind" when, as in a secret society, one
acts without knowing why or wherefore, as an automaton.
This is military obedience ; and is not educative in any sense ;
i.e. , it does not make the subject capable of independent judg
ment when guidance is withdrawn. But St. Ignatius calls
obedience blind in so far as in accordance with the principles
of sound reason and fairmindedness we strive to bring our
judgment into agreement with that of a superior so as to see
as he sees — not indeed doing violence to truth, but doing
violence to the narrowing bias of egoism and self-will. As
dying to one's selfishness is the secret of living ; so being blinded
to one's prejudices is the secret of seeing.

THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY. 141
once more, just as the sap of a tree rises in
spring-time and gives vitality to the branches
and twigs that have been sleeping through the
winter. Then authority is largely relieved of
its .burden ; and its care is rather to encourage,
to guide, and at times perhaps to check the
too exuberant activity which everywhere buds
and blossoms and fruits and covers the gaunt
skeleton with a living garment of verdure. In
the day of battle and in the crisis where collec
tive action is necessary, there is but one
judgment and one will — that of the commander;
every other will or judgment so far as it is
original or different from his is simply in the
way. But in the day of calm every opinion is
listened to, every hindrance to spontaneity and
initiation is removed ; all the collective intelli
gence and spiritual energy of the community
which before was pent up and useless, is now
let loose and turned to account ; and authority
emulates the wisdom of a good rider in making
the curb felt as little as possible.
But to pass from the conditions and methods
of a state of danger to those of a state of safety
cannot be done in a day; and on the part of both
rulers and subjects the old habits cling closely
and are slowly put aside ; and so in these days
we find the Catholic laity in many places sadly

142 ABUSE OF
wanting in spontaneous interest and initiative
in Church matters, and if not indifferent yet
passive, and disposed to look to the clergy for
everything, or at least for all suggestion and
direction. And on the other hand, we may find
clergy who have been brought up under the
shadow of persecution and oppression, unaware
that a new day has dawned, or rubbing dazed
eyes, and still mistrustful of any symptom of
initiative in the laity as though it foreboded
mutiny in the ranks. And thus there is lost
to the Church's cause a great store of spiritual
energy and intelligence distributed among her
members, which is truer and more real wealth
than money or political influence or than estab
lishment and endowment.
Of this state of things a novelist already
quoted writes : " If then this Church is the
bulwark of modern society, can there be a
¦more ignoble destiny than to sit still and let
her, unaided and single-handed, confront the
vast and terrific forces that are arrayed against
her? On the other hand, can there be a more
sublime destiny, or a more noble undertaking
than to stand by her side and throw in such
little forces as are placed at our disposal in
her support and for the confusion of her enemies?
Yet hitherto the entire struggle has been tacitly

THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY. I43
left by laymen in the hands of the captains of
the King's hosts. Against all the natural and
supernatual agencies at work in the world,
opposed to God and His Christ — heresy and
infidelity, with their tremendous intellectual
forces, irreligious governments, with all State
appliances, treasuries, armies, navies, at their
¦disposal ; the press, with its far-reaching power;
literature that derives its supreme attraction
from its un-Christian or immoral teachings ;
art, that is the workshop of Satan ; politics that
would exile the Church from the world ; the
¦drink syndicates that are becoming omnipotent
through human impotency ; the social evil that
has forced itself to be State recognized ; schools
from which God is banished ; family circles
where religion is never mentioned ; society that
would take offence at God's name, — in a word,
against all the professed badness of the world,
and against all the unconfessed indifference
marshalled in hostile array . . . stand timidly
on the side of Christ, a handful of priests, a
few weak women, a literature that is saved
from ridicule barely by its good intentions, and
a few saints who lift up their hands . . . from
the mountain whilst the armies of Israel are
hard pressed in the valleys of humiliation and
defeat. All this time what are Catholic laymen

I44 ABUSE OF
doing ? Absolutely nothing ; either defensive
or aggressive. With the exception of a few
Vincent de Paul Societies, there is absolutely
no organization that would combine into one
solid body all the zeal and talent of thousands
of young men who would dare and do a great
deal for Jesus Christ, but who are now kept
back from want of an inspiring voice that
would tell them : Go, and throw in all your
resources of mind and body to destroy the
empire of Belial and to extend the empire of
Christ." But besides whatever we can do for the
furtherance of Christian principles and measures
in the society around us ; we have also, each
of us, a mission to individuals. Not a preach
ing nor a controversial mission — Heaven forbid 1
but a mission of practical influence. Let your
light so shine before men, not that they may
hear your good arguments, but that they
may see your good works ; and this again,
not that they may glorify you, but that they
may glorify your Father in Heaven, that is,
your religion ; that they may say : This is
what Catholicism effects in those who make
use of its teaching and its sacraments.
Our Saviour strictly forbids us to put the
truth before those who do not already want to

THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY. I45,
believe it : " Cast not your pearls before swine."
For the sake of those whose affection is already
drawn to the Church in some other way, and
who want to believe but cannot, owing to some
ignorance or obscurity ; and for the sake of
Catholics who love their religion and yet have
difficulties of the mind, controversy may have
its lawful sphere. But wrangling with those
who hate our doctrines and who simply want
to justify themselves or to confound us is
altogether unjustified. The true method is to-
get men to wish to believe ; that is, to make
them know and love the idea of the Church
and wish it to be true. Given this disposition,
God will see to the rest ; without it, all other
labour is vain.
And to effect this, our first endeavour must
be to make men better morally, that is, to-
make them more conscientious, more strictly
obedient to what they believe, truly or falsely,
to be right ; not at first troubling to rectify
their judgment, to disturb or change their
beliefs, but by all means getting them into-
that state of perfect sincerity and good faith
which is at once the essential condition and
the infallible cause of spiritual enlightenment.
Let us take men as we find them, Jews, Turks,
infidels, heretics, and discerning the elements K

146 ABUSE OF
of truth and goodness which are already in
them by the grace of God, foster and encourage
them and leave the rest alone, trusting that as
these grow they will naturally extrude all that
is alien. And the next great thing is, as Joubert
says, to make the truth lovely, not to send
her forth in full armour bristling with darts
and javelins, to challenge defiance and rouse
opposition ; but rather to imitate the Incar
nate Truth, Who made Himself lowly and
fair and attractive, coming among us unarmed
and unresisting; a meek and humble-hearted
Teacher unlike the pedantic Scribe and the
subtle-minded Pharisee ; one Who bade Peter
sheathe his violent sword, Who touched and
healed the rude wound his fiery zeal had
inflicted. In hoc signo vinces. It was by the
method of the Cross, by the method of meek
ness, that Christianity conquered the world ;
and whenever her well-meaning defenders have
invoked fire from Heaven, whenever they have
taken the sword, whether the sword of steel or
the envenomed sword of the tongue, whether
trusting to physical violence and political craft,
or to keenness of mind in dialectical fencing ;
or to sharpness of retort in acrimonious con
troversy — in all cases alike the sword has turned

THE PROMISE OF INDEFECTIBILITY. I47
back upon them, and by the sword they have
perished. " Put thy sword into its scabbard," says our
Lord. Were His Kingdom of this world,
His servants would fight, with twelve legions
of angels at their back.

LECTURE VIII.
INTERIOR FAITH.
We said at the very beginning of our con
ferences, that man's human perfection lay in a
self-induced subjection of the flesh to the spirit
— of the senses, the imagination, the passions,
the feelings, to reason, intelligence, and will ; in
guiding his life not by transitory appearances,
but by eternal realities ; not by that which
seems to be, but by that which is. All admit
this, at least implicitly. A man who lacks
prudence or foresight, or whose judgments are
all prima facie or superficial, is so far regarded
as a child or a savage, that is, as an undeveloped
man, because he has not yet learnt to guide
his actions by what is future and therefore
invisible, or by what underlies the outward
semblance of things present.
So far as the word faith might be used to
signify a practical hold on unapparent truths,
on unseen realities, a power of resisting the
illusions of the senses and the imagination, faith

INTERIOR FAITH. 149
might be said to be a condition of all human,
as opposed to merely animal, life ; a condition
of success even in business and in the subordinate
affairs of our daily existence wholly unconnected
with religion.
But when we come to the supreme and
eternal interests to which all these temporal
concerns are or ought to be subordinate, where,
as in the case of what is called natural religion,
the realities by which our conduct is to be
guided, lie at the extreme horizon of our intelli
gence ; or, as in the case of supernatural religion,
altogether beyond it ; then faith, in the above
sense of realizing the unseen, is at once far more
difficult and far more imperatively necessary.
Without faith it is impossible to please God,
i.e., impossible to lead a moral and religious life.
For the things of religion are after all the great
concern of life ; and what will it profit us to
have been wise and prudent in the choice and
use of the means, if we are ignorant or mistaken
in regard to the end ; what avails the swiftest
running, if what we are pursuing is the rainbow ?
And yet because the truths of even natural
religion are ultimate truths — the deepest down,
the furthest off of all, we can never get all round
them or grasp them comfortably, but at most
can touch them with the tip of our finger. They

150 INTERIOR FAITH.
are the solid earth on what we build the fabric
of our life and thought, and which we pre
suppose as the basis of all our labours, but which
we cannot measure and hew and cart about as
we do the stones we pile upon it. For we have
necessarily to think and speak of eternal and
spiritual realities in the terms of those temporal
and bodily things which fall under our experi
ence. We are as one born blind, who must
think of the visible world of colour and form in
terms of sound and touch and the other senses.
He gets to know it very imperfectly by symbol
and metaphor, but not in its own terms ; and
yet he is affected by that colour-world in many
ways, and must guide his actions by such
knowledge of it as he can gain from others.
Still more helpless are we in regard to strictly
supernatural religious truths which God Himself
has tried in some little measure to explain to
us in the language of things we know ; using
such homely and popular notions as Father, Son,
Spirit, nature, unity, substance, and the like,
which convey to us just so much of the corres
ponding reality as we are at present capable of
apprehending. We must not suppose that God
willingly hides from us any part of these truths
just in order to try us by making faith difficult ;
that He is as one who puts a truism in the form

INTERIOR FAITH. 151
of a riddle in order to make it as obscure as
possible. Far from this, God wants all men to
come to a knowledge of all truth so far as they
are capable of it ; and dogmas are difficult, not
because He wants to puzzle us, but because, we
being as yet so imperfect, even He cannot make
the truth any plainer to us at present — " I have
yet many things to tell you of, but you cannot
bear them now."
If, however, it is very necessary for us to
guide our lives by these ultimate truths — so
unreal, so far off, in relation to our almost
animal mind — it is also very difficult Our
whole propensity when we let go and suffer
ourselves to drift passively, is to live by the
visible, not by the invisible ; to be animal in our
mind as well as in our morals. The whole
labour of our spiritual and reasonable life is to
resist this downward pull, and to raise ourselves
slowly from a state of animal-mindedness to a
state of human-mindedness ; and therefore,
Divine Faith, so far as it is the realizing of things
hoped for in the future, the evidence of things at
present not apparent, far from doing violence
to our rational soul, is but an extension of its
natural perfection. It is but a carrying onwards
and upwards of what might be called the
fundamental natural virtue, which distinguishes

T52 INTERIOR FAITH.
the man from the mere savage, or the child, ot
the animal. For the supernatural does not
either here or elsewhere extrude nature, nor is
it abruptly superimposed thereon, but mingles
with it and transforms it as light streaming
through a stained window.
When we said that the Word was made flesh
in order that He might heal the invisible part
of our nature through the visible part which
had occasioned its hurt ; we were saying in
another way that He came to strengthen our
faith ; to tighten our grasp on those eternal
and invisible realities in accordance with which
our life as a whole must be governed ; and that
He came to effect this through the instru
mentality of a visible Church, teaching through
human words and notions, and sanctifying
through human rites and symbols.
Even in the ordinary affairs of life we know
how in moments of passion, or fear, or intense
desire, our judgment is blinded and unbalanced ;
how our attention is all focussed upon that one
side of a question which appeals to our present
feelings and emotions, and is withdrawn from
every other consideration ; how what seemed
prudent and right to us in our calm hours, now
seems so no longer. And if we know ourselves
by past experience of the like kind, we try to

INTERIOR FAITH. 153
¦resist this illusion of the feelings ; and how do
we do so ? Not by trying to see the truth when
we are incapable of seeing it — when our dimmed
eyes are smarting with dust and fog — but by
holding on blindly with our will to what we
judged right in the hour of calm, when we were
capable of seeing. We appeal from our mad
and distracted self to our sane and sober self.
Or what often serves us just as well in the same
or similar crises, we hold on blindly by our will,
not to our own past judgment, but to the present
judgment of some one else whom we know and
love and trust ; and who is not biassed and
•disturbed like ourselves.
Now all this is essentially faith ; it is holding
on by sheer force of will to truths that at the
moment we cannot see or verify for ourselves.
But, as we have said, religious truths are at
once the most practically important of all, and
the most difficult of all ; and in respect to them
our whole life is a temptation and a season of
blindness ; and therefore we need to reach out
our will and hold on tight to God's word and
judgment, and so steady ourselves in the turbid,
rushing stream of life's illusions and appear
ances, which else would carry us away to des
truction. And since to do so is as necessary a
condition of our spiritual life, as eating is of our

154 INTERIOR FAITH.
bodily life, it is a plain duty and a command of
God ; not merely a matter ot counsel or advice.
Just as it would be wicked to let ourselves-
seriously doubt about the wrongness of lying or
murder or impurity or suicide, because perhaps
there seemed to us some unanswered difficulties
of a philosophical nature on the other side ; so
it would be wicked for us, in the matter of faith,
to let loose the grip of our will on the word of God,
for the sake of any difficulty that might offer
itself to our present limited view. For this would
be to prefer our worse to our better judgment.
Hence, we get a clearer idea of what faith is.
It is holding on blindly by our will to God's-
word, because He tells us to hold on to it.
He says to our conscience : " This is My word,.
and My word is the truth itself. Hold to it
with your will, as firmly as you would do if yo»
saw it with your mind." And as a little child
obeys its mother and believes what she tells it,.
and as firmly as she tells it, not because it has
first criticized her ability or her truthfulness, but
because it recognizes instinctively her right to-
command in the matter ; so those who recognize
the authority of God's voice, whether in con
science, or in Christ, or in the Catholic Church,
obey because they are told. " My sheep," He
says, " hear My voice." They do not prove it,.

INTERIOR FAITH. 155.
but they recognize it by a sort of instinct ;
just as on the other hand, they will run from
a wolf, though they have never seen one before.
Thus, by nature, we recognize that conscience
is to be obeyed even to death ; and those who-
are true to conscience, recognize exactly the
same voice in Christ and in the Church. Can you
explain to another how you recognize some one
by his tread, or his voice, or his expression ?"
No, and yet you do not doubt it. And so
though we may not be able to explain why the
voice of conscience and of Christ and of the
Church is to our ears all one, yet we who have
once felt can never doubt it.
We said indeed that an educated Catholic
has some kind of obligation proportioned to
his intellectual standing, of being able to give
reasons for his faith, by showing how current
philosophy and history and science all point to
the truth of Christianity, and how nothing we
are really bound to believe can be shown to be
contrary to any finally established scientific or
historic truth. But since history and science
are always changing and fluctuating, and since
even the Church's understanding and expression
of the faith changes as it grows deeper and
more discerning, it is plain that all such recon
ciliations of faith with secular knowledge are

I56 INTERIOR FAITH.
only provisional and tentative ; never final or
exhaustive ; and so it would be a disastrous
thing were we to rest our own personal faith on
any frail logical fabric of the kind. It would
mean that with every new discovery of science
•or history, every new difficulty suggested to us
by reason, every new fashion of philosophy,
the whole structure would be shaken, perhaps
to its foundations, and our faith would, so to
say, have to be suspended till we could build it
up again, and work the new data into harmonious
agreement with the old. It is vitally important
to realize that our faith does not and should not
rest on the defence we can make of our faith —
on any thread of syllogisms or arguments how
ever skilfully spun.
The latter is an intellectual luxury for the
few ; and has certain uses for a limited nature ;
but it is a necessity for none. Faith is produced
not by the power of arguments over the mind ;
but by the power and authority of God's will
felt and obeyed by the human will — very much
as a dog feels and obeys the will of his master
made known in a look or a word.
If faith had to be produced by force of
arguments, or if it needed them as its necessary
condition, what would become of the unlettered
crowds whose faith nevertheless is held up as

INTERIOR FAITH. 157
the type to which ours must be conformed, if
we are to enter the kingdom with them ? What
sort of reasoned defence of their faith could
Peter or Andrew or the. sons of Zebedee have
made to the Scribes and Doctors, when at a look
or a word they rose up and followed Christ, as-
sheep follow their shepherd ?
It is evident then that our personal faith in
God depends on a certain internal power of
hearing which can be dulled and lost by per
sistently stopping our ears to the voice of
conscience, and resisting the influence of its-
authoritative tone. " My sheep hear My voice ; "
that is, those who habitually listen to God's
voice within, will recognize it when it speaks to
them from without. If a conscientious pagan
resists Christianity, or a conscientious Christian
resists Catholicity, it is either that his mind
inculpably lacks those intermediate truths that
would make the fuller truth intelligible to it ; or
that the messenger has garbled the message and
made it ridiculous and incredible.
Plainly, then, difficulties of the mind, diffi
culties from history or science or philosophy,.
however they make us doubt about our logical.
defence of the faith, even should they break it
down altogether, as may happen at times,.
cannot touch our faith itself in any way ; just as

158 INTERIOR FAITH.
no failure in the popular proofs of our own
identity would shake our belief in it or change
¦our practical conduct in the least detail.
But notwithstanding this, our faith can be
-indefinitely strengthened, or it can be gradually
weakened and lost altogether, according as we
draw nearer to God and get to know the tone of
His voice more intimately ; or as we wander
away from Him till we are altogether out of
hearing ; for in point of fact it is by doing, and
not by thinking or reasoning that we apprehend
God and His truth in this life. In the next life
He will present Himself directly to the soul's
eye, as something to be gazed upon, as the
subsistent Light and Truth ; but here He offers
Himself principally to us as something to be
done, as an Eternal Will, or Eternal Justice,
Eternal Holiness — not to be looked at or talked
about, but to be produced in our own soul, and
brought into it, — to be conceived and born and
-matured there. God is not directly reached by
our mind, or our imagination, but only an idea
or picture of God which we ourselves have
constructed out of the fragments of our experi
ence — a crude, childish representation at the
best. It is not God, but only this rude image
of God we set before our mind's eye when
we pray to Him or think of Him, and try to

INTERIOR FAITH. 159
love Him and find it so hard to succeed. No
wonder, then, that He seems so far away, so
•uncertain, so intangible.
But it is not thus in their minds and in their
ideas and in their imaginings that the poor and
the simple seek God, and find and love Him, or
that we are to be content to seek Him. His
Eternal Will is really working in us and mingles
its activity with ours, just as the weight of our
bodies, which is no absolute quality of their
own, but simply the perennial influence of the
earth's attraction upon them, mingles with and
rules all their other proper activities. Take the
earth from under our feet by annihilation, and
all our sense of weight and downward tendency
would vanish with it ; take away God, and all
our sense of upward tendency, all our drawing
towards what is good and better would disappear
just as effectually. Conscience would be instantly
extinguished. God, who created our soul in His
likeness, and made it capable of indefinitely
closer assimilation to its archetype, is ever draw
ing that soul towards Himself, towards every
kind of goodness and betterness, and this will or
attraction, which we call "conscience," is ever
mingling with and trying to dominate our
narrow, selfish will, and make it one with His.
While a body is impeded in its fall to earth, the

160 INTERIOR FAITH.
earth really, though imperceptibly, acts on it ;
but that action is not manifest till the body is
set free ; and the longer it falls, and so yields to
the earth's draw, the more violently and rapidly
is it drawn. So with God ; the more we yield
ourselves to that Eternal Will in us which draws
us towards Him, so much the more is His action
manifested and exercised in us, and the divine
life and being more largely mingled with and
made visible in our own life and being. Every
good action we do is a joint product ; it is the
child of God's will and our own co-operating
will ; and as married love is cemented more
firmly than ever when it is fruitful in offspring,
so by every good action, interior or exterior,
there is a new bond of union between God and
ourselves, and He permeates our soul more fully,
as light permeates water that gradually grows
clearer and purer.
And thus we get a sort of experimental know
ledge of God which can never be got from
the most elaborate philosophical or theological
notions of His nature, nor even from the most
realistic meditations on His self-revelation in
Christ, which, after all, can only appeal to those
who have first known Him experimentally.
Gustate et videte — " Taste and see how sweet
He is," says the Psalm ; that is to say : Do not

INTERIOR FAITH. l6l
reason about God, but go and let Him mingle His
life with your life, His will with your will, and
see what sweetness and strength He will bring
into your existence ; for " His ways are ways of
pleasantness, and all His paths are peace."
A man who by some chance had never seen
salt and had formed no idea of what it is like in
its crystallized state, might all the same know it
very practically as that which made sea-water
taste so differently from fresh ; and similarly
millions whose mental pictures and ideas of God
are absurd enough, who have the vaguest and
most erroneous notion of what He is in Himself,
considered separately as a substance apart, may
.know Him very really and immediately as the
Will whose predominance within them makes
the difference between the sweetness of a good
life and the bitterness of a bad one.
This is the way in which our religion, by
being lived and put in practice, becomes a solid,
tangible reality, instead of a mere bundle of
ideas and arguments — it becomes a matter of
experience, something to be done, and realized
in the doing, instead of a matter of theory, to
be discussed and speculated about. It is not
difficult for a blind man to believe in the sun,
which he has never seen, when he is saturated
with its heat ; and it is not hard for us to
L

l62 INTERIOR FAITH.
believe in the unseen realities faith tells us of
when our whole life is permeated and trans
formed by their influence.
And thus it is wisely said, that action is the
great cure for doubt ; not in the sense that fuss
and preoccupation distract our attention from
criticism and inquiry, and make us content to
take things for granted ; but because by acting
our faith, by yielding to God's urgency in our
conscience, we become better and purer in our
selves, and our spiritual vision is cleared ; — -for
obscurity is not in the truth, but in us. If
a man's mind and energy were paralyzed, as
sometimes happens, by scepticism as to his own
identity or as to the existence of what we call
an " external world," we should say to him :
" Leave your study and your books and go out
into God's fresh air ; live in the world, handle
it, use it, deal with it, and it will become a
reality to you again. You have been using one
faculty of your soul too exclusively, and neglect
ing the others, on which its right exercise
depends directly or indirectly ; you are therefore
in a morbid, unbalanced state. Why trust your
philosophic reason so much, and yet distrust
those primitive and instinctive apprehensions
whose validity you inevitably, though uncon
sciously, presuppose and assume in all your

INTERIOR FAITH. 163
reasonings. What does it matter to you that
your metaphysics cannot justify your instinctive
belief in your own identity, or in the reality of
all around you, if at the same time it tells you
that the practical effects and impressions will
always be the same, and that your conduct must
be guided in all respects as before. Neither
human society nor God will acquit you for
living like a madman because, forsooth, your
philosophy did not square with your common
sense. If in attempting to fly you have broken
your neck, you cannot blame God, who never
made you for flying."
Thus we should argue with such a one, and
rightly ; for after all God gave us our minds, not
for metaphysics, but for the great practical
needs of life ; just as He gave us our feet, not
for dancing on tight ropes, but for walking on
the flat earth. Have we a right to complain
that we cannot get a clear, metaphysical view
of God and our religion, if we have abundant
light to know Him as one whom we must obey,
even unto death, and if by obeying Him we
come to an ever deeper sense of His presence
and His will and His divine character.
And what is true about belief in God, is true
of the whole Catholic creed, which but develops
the notion of God as He bas supernaturally

164 INTERIOR FAITH.
revealed Himself to us in the religion of the
Incarnation. Our faith is never in danger so
long as it permeates and seasons our life ; it is
always in danger when it is a mere assent of the
mind and a profession of the lips. Intellectual
difficulties are like microbes in the air, fatal to
the sickly, but powerless against a healthy con
stitution. If the heart be sound, difficulties may
enter the mind and lie there unsolved for years
or for ever, without raising a single real doubt,
or even disquieting the imagination ; for the
faith that has been felt and has proved itself in
action, has nothing to fear from speculation.
And all this drives home the theme we have
been mainly occupied with in our Conferences
namely, the danger of mere externality and
formalism in our religion, of being content with
passive orthodoxy and with frequenting the
sacraments and with conformity to the Church's
laws — as though these outward things were ends
in themselves, and not merely instruments to
develop the latent Christ that is in each of us ;
to develop the light of Christ in our minds and
the holiness of Christ in our wills and affections
and the zeal of Christ in our activity — in a
word, to develop the life of faith and make it
dominant over the life of sense. It was from
this life of faith that our first parents fell,

INTERIOR FAITH. 165
yielding to the illusions of outward impressions
and appearances ; it is to this life of faith that
Christ restores us, using these same outward
impressions and appearances to convey to us
those truths which by nature they hide from us ;
curing our inward life by means of the outward,
the spirit by means of the flesh, which had
occasioned its ruin.
Yet it is not enough to believe in this cure, to
swear by it, to recommend it to others, unless
we use it on ourselves. It is by living our faith
that it strikes root deep in our heart ; else in
time of temptation it will wither away.
And thus we complete, more or less roughly,
the exposition of that one thought which has
occupied us throughout. Having agreed to
view the Incarnation as God's design to restore
faith through sense, the invisible through the
visible, the spirit through the flesh, turning the
poison into an antidote ; we saw how this design
was extended in Catholicity, which, with its
outward and inward aspect, is the religion of
the Incarnation, of the Word made Flesh. And
seeing how this Divine conception might be
misapprehended in two ways, we first spoke
of the error of those who, despising the external
part of Christianity, think the internal all-
sufficient. And as our purpose was domestic

l66 INTERIOR FAITH.
improvement, and not polemical aggression, we
passed lightly over that well-trodden ground,
and turned to the contrary error of those who
are too satisfied with external Christianity ; who
forget that outward dogmas, rites, and practices
are but means to interior life, which is the
principal end. Then, in detail, we saw how
this mistake might show itself in the misuse of
those outward helps, which are designed not to
save us any labour we are capable of, but to get
more labour out of us ; and first of all in regard
to sacraments and outer means of grace ; then
as to dogmatic teaching and outward means of
light. Then we saw how that help by which
God secures indefectibility to the visible Church
might in like manner be misused as an excuse
for listless apathy. Finally, we have insisted
directly on the all-importance of that inner life
of faith to which all this outward religion is but
instrumental, and which is established in us, not
by any working of our mind, in the way of
arguing or reasoning, or criticizing ; but by the
working of our will, where God's action mingles
with ours, and where we get to know Him
intimately and experimentally, and to talk with
Him as a friend with a friend.
FINIS.

BOOKS RECENTLY PUBLISHED.

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.
The addresses given in this book were those presented to Cardinal Newman
on the occasion of his acceptance of the Cardinalate conferred upon him by Pope
Leo XIII. in 1878. The addresses are preceded and followed by an account,
written by the late Father Neville, of some of the incidents attending the offer of
the Cardinalate, and of Dr. Newman's subsequent journey and projected second
journey to Rome, he being over seventy-eight years old at this time. Portions of
the official correspondence with reference to the offer and Dr. Newman's acceptance
of the same are also given.
Gregory the Great : his Place in History and Thought. By
F. Homes Dudden, B.D., Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. 2 vols.
8vo. 30s. net.
Some Aspects of Anglicanism : or, Comments on Certain
Incidents in the 'Nineties. By the Right Rev. Mgr. Moyes, D.D.,
Canon of Westminster Cathedral. Crown 8vo. 6s. 6d. net.
Divine Authority. By J. F. Scholfield, M.A., Trinity College,
Cambridge, late Rector of St. Michael's, Edinburgh. Crown 8vo.
2s. 6d. net.
The Catholic Church from Within. With a Preface by his
Eminence Cardinal Vaughan, late Archbishop of Westminster.
Crown 8vo. 6s. 6d. net.
The Inner Life of the Soul. Short Spiritual Messages for the
Ecclesiastical Year. By S. L. Emery. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
The Old Riddle and the Newest Answer. By John Gerard,
S.J., F.L.S. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
*+* This is an inquiry as to how far modern science has altered the aspect of
the problem of the Universe.

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE CHURCH.
A Series of Histories of the First Century. By the Abb<5 Constant
Fouard, late Honorary Cathedral Canon, Professor of the Faculty of
Theology at Rouen, &c. , &c.
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.
Crown 8vo. 9s.
St. Paul and his Missions. With 2 Maps. Crown 8vo. 9s.
The Last Years of St. Paul. With 5 Maps and Plans.
Crown 8vo. 9s.
St. John and the End of the Apostolic Age. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d.

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

BOOKS RECENTLY PUBLISHED.

Letters from the Beloved City. To S. B., from Philip. Crown 8vo.
is. 6d.
Contents : — Why Philip writes these letters to S. B. — S. B.'s diffi
culties 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.
Roads to Rome, being Personal Records of some of the more
recent Converts to the Catholic Faith. With an Introduction by his
Eminence Cardinal Vaughan, late Archbishop of Westminster.
Compiled and Edited by the Author of Ten Years in A nglican Orders.
Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.
Studies on the Gospels. By Vincent Rose, O.P., Professor in
the University of Fribourg. Authorized English Version, by Robert
Fraser, D. D. , Domestic Prelate to H. H. Pius X. Crown 8vo. 6s. net.
Lent and Holy Week : Chapters on Catholic Observance and
Ritual. By Herbert Thurston, S.J. With 3 Plates and 14
Illustrations in the text. Crown 8vo. 6s. net.
The Key to the World's Progress. Being an Essay on
Historical Logic. By Charles Stanton Devas, M.A. Oxon. ,
sometime Examiner in Political Economy at the Royal University of
Ireland. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Self-Knowledge and Self-Discipline. By B. W. Maturin,
formerly of Cowley St. John, Oxford. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.

WORKS BY WILFRID WARD.
Aubrey De Vere : a Memoir based on his unpublished Diaries
and Correspondence. With 2 Portraits and 2 other Illustrations.
8vo. 14s. net.
The Life and Times of Cardinal Wiseman. With 3 Portraits.
2 vols. Crown 8vo. 10s. net.

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, Ware, and the Rev. Herbert Thurston, S.J.
The Tradition of Scripture : its Origin, Authority, and Interpre
tation. By the Rev. William Barry, D.D. , sometime Scholar of
the English College, Rome, formerly Professor of Theology in
St. Mary's College, Oscott. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Other Volumes of the Series are in preparation.

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.,
LONDON, NEW YORK, AND BOMBAY.
ROEHAMPTON : I'RINTED BV JOHN GRIFFIN.

A SELECT LIST

OF

THEOLOGICAL BOOKS

(MAINLY ROMAN CATHOLIC)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE
Works by Cardinal Newman 2
Works by the Rev. George
Tyrrell .... 7
For the Clergy and Students 7
The Westminster Library . 7
Stonyhurst Philosophical
Series  9

PAGE

The Catholic Church . . 9

Biography

11

11

11

13
Works by the Very Rev
Canon Sheehan, D.D.
12
LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C.
91-93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
8 HORNBY ROAD, BOMBAY
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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 of 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 or
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, 6- CO. 3
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 ReHgion, 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 Sermons". 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. Sexagesima : 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 Condition 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
ReHgious — 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.
Contents: — The Work of the Christian— Saintliness not Forfeited by the Penitent—
Our Lord's Last Supper and His First— Dangers to the Penitent— The Three Offices oi

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. 3s. 6d.
Contents: — Intellect the Instrument of Religious Training — The Religion of the
Pharisee and the ReHgion 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 of 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 8vo. 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.

3. ESSAYS.
Two Essays on Miracles. 1. Of Scripture. 2. Of Ecclesiastical
History. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.

PUBLISHED BY LONGMANS, GREEN, &¦ CO. 5
Works by Cardinal Newman— continued.
ESSAYS — continued.
Discussions and Arguments. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d.
1. How to accomplish it. a. 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. 2. Rationalism. 3. Apostolic Tradition. 4. De la Men-
nais. 5. Pal. nee on Faith and TJu'ty. 6. St. Ignatius. 7. Prospects of
the Anglican Church. 8. The Anglo-American Church. 9. 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, d. St. Chrysostom. 7. Theodoret. 8. St.
Benedict. 9. Benedictine Schools. 10. Universities, n. Northmen and
Normans. 12. Mediaeval Oxford. 13. Convocation of Canterbury.

5. THEOLOGICAL.
The Arians of the Fourth Century. Crown 8vo. 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. Dissertatiunculse. j.. 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. 6c'. 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.
A Popular Edition is now ready, containing a letter, hitherto unpublished,
by Cardinal Newman to Canon Flanagan in 1857, which may be said to
contain in embryo the " Apologia " itself. 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.
Xoss and Gain. The Story of a Convert Crown. 8vo. 3s. 6d.
iCallista. 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. Cr. 8vo. 5s. net .
Lex Orandi ; or, Prayer and Creed. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
Lex Credendi : a Sequel to Lex Orandi. Crown 8vo. 5s. net.
A Much-Abused Letter. Crown 8vo. 2S. 6d. net.
*** This letter was written by Father Tyrrell to a Professor of Anthropology in a Con
tinental Umversity, 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 with the doubts and fears of his corre
spondent. External Religion : its Use and Abuse. Crown 8vo. 2s. 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 — n. 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 — iG. 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. Adaptibility as a Proof of Religion — 23. Idealism in Straits.
The Soul's Orbit ; or, Man's Journey to God. Compiled and Edited,
with Additions, by M. D. Petre. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.

For the Clergy and Students.
THE WESTMINSTER LIBRARY.
A SERIES OF MANUALS FOR CATHOLIC PRIESTS AND STUDENTS.
Edited by the Right Rev. Mgr. Ward, President of St. Edmund's College,
and Father 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. [Continued

A SELECT LIST OF WORKS

For the Clergy and Students — continued.
THE WESTMINSTER LIBRARY— continued.
The following Volumes are also in Preparation, and others will follow : —
The Philosophy of Church History. By Wilfrid Ward.
The Holy Eucharist. By the Right Rev. John Cuthbert Hedley,
O.S.B., Bishop of Newport.
The Catholic Calendar. By the Rev. Herbert Thurston, S.J.
Our Young People : a Book for Priests and Parents. By the Very
Rev. James Canon Keatinge.
The Priest's Studies. By the Rev. T. B. Scannell, D.D.
The Mass. By the Rev. Herbert Lucas, S.J.

The Priest and his Choir. By the Right Rev. Monsignor James
Canon Connelly.

The Study of the Fathers. By the Rev. John Chapman, O.S.B.

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 Engl'sh 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. 10s. 6d. net.
*#* The term " Pastoral Medicine " may be said to represent that part of medicine which
is of import to a pastor in his cure, and those divisions of ethics and moral theology which
concern a physician in his practice. This booh is primarily intended for Roman Catholic
confessors.

PUBLISHED BY LONGMANS, GREEN, &¦ CO.

For the Clergy and Students — continued.
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.

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. Lrown 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 — Apostohcity — Our Lady's Dowry — War — Pacification.
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