The Catholic Church and history

It is alive, but it is not alive with a life of development; and so far from presenting any organisation through which its doctrine can be developed as well as affirmed, it is specifically repugnant to such organisations. In a phrase, Mohammedanism is essentially anti-clerical.

If it be true of Mohammedanism (the chief historically active opponent of the Faith) that it has not the peculiar marks which make the Catholic Church different from any other society in the world, that it has not some major quality by which all religions are distinct and which is also the major quality of the Catholic Church, that statement is still more true of Buddhism.

Buddhism never pretended to make, and does not make to-day, an affirmation to be accepted corporately by the universal world. It presents a certain philosophy—which I cannot but call the philosophy of despair, and which is quite certainly a philosophy of negation. It presents this gloom for acceptation by the individual mind. But it claims no corporate rule; it affirms no divine authority: it enjoys no functional power of excretion nor any of assimilation. You cannot say of Buddhism, “Here is orthodoxy and the living tradition searching out heresy and denouncing it, maintaining its life triumphantly by insistence upon a personality of its own and by a corresponding power of attack against whatever would diminish or threaten that life.”

If we turn from the great systems to the local worships we find another character, wholly separate from that apparent in Catholicism: that they do not pretend to certitude; they pretend to no more than the satisfaction of emotion and to a corporation tradition. They have their myths, but will readily accept them as myths or compare them unoffended with the myths of others. They have their sanctities: but their sanctities make no pretence at all to be universal. There was one, and only one, historical phenomenon, which in this point did compare with the Faith—the phenomenon of the Jewish religion; and that is precisely why we Catholics call the Jewish religion the forerunner of our own and the preparation of the world for its Incarnate God.

It is; and to that we answer that if there is to be such a thing as the Faith on earth, it could not but be so. If men must worship, they will worship in places. If men feel the pull of a religious emotion, at once the sacramental idea must enter in. There cannot but be a connection between the physical life of man and any religious system whatsoever, true or false, with which he is inmixed. And so surely as the ministers of the true religion will breathe and eat and walk upon their feet, each as much as the ministers of the false, so surely you will find in a true religion, if true religion there be, habits, practices, doctrines, which (not all combined, but here one, there another) men have groped for or arrived at in systems which attempted or adumbrated the truth, but did not even claim to be the full truth.

A man making a survey of what little is known of the old religious experiments and perversions of mankind, and being asked, as a pure hypothesis, “Suppose a divine society, corporate, distinct, highly organised, and therefore of highly differentiated function, were to arise on earth to bear witness to the Living God: suppose such a thing for the sake of argument only, what, think you, would such a body present by way of appearance, action and thought?” could not but answer that it would have of necessity present within it not only vital truths, but also practices discoverable wherever man had groped at or half remembered a revelation.

This man, with no knowledge of such a society, but considering what his fellow beings were, what the human mind is, what questions it poses, what answers it demands, would reply: “In that society you would discover the worship of a Creator, the affirmation that he had revealed himself; a mysterious link between the divine and the human, comparable to the link between the unthinking matter of our bodies and the living essence within. It would have sacrifice and veneration combined. It would sanctify objects, places, persons and rites; it would have central institutions, and in proportion to its vitality a multitude of lesser activities; it would have symbols which it would distinguish from realities and forms of reality which it would attach to symbols; for man without a soul is a corpse, and man without a body is a wraith. This supposed society which you bid men imagine would certainly present in their highest form such elements as History has also discovered, disjointedly appearing, often perverted, often degraded, in the various (and ineffective) spiritual experiments or lapses of mankind.”

Then, one might say to such a man, such a general scholar and observer of the unique animal, man, at prayer, “Should there conceivably be such a home upon the earth, how otherwise would you know it?” He could but answer, “Its nature would be such that it would satisfy to the full the demands of men; it would be unique so as to correspond to man himself who is unique on earth, and it would grant him fulness and repose.”