EDITOR’S PREFACE
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Belloc, Hilaire
There needs but a brief introduction from the same pen as that which composed the essay which follows it.
It must be to this effect.
The general subject “The Catholic Church and History” might be treated from a hundred different positions. Perhaps the most important in the eyes of the cultured man of our day is the question whether the Catholic Church is, or is not, proved by the general story of European history for the last two thousand years to have been a beneficent influence. That question, however, I cannot touch upon because the question whether the Church be beneficent or no is, to a Catholic, subsidiary to the point whether its claim to be the very truth is valid or no. If this claim is justified, then certainly the Church must be beneficent. If it be proved beneficent, that will indeed be some support of its claim; but a weak one, because we cannot even judge whether it be beneficent or no until we have decided what we think better and what worse—and this issue cannot be decided until we are certain of our philosophy, that is, of our religion.
It is another and more important point to discuss whether the Church in her long history has, or has not, shown exceptional signs of holiness and of supernatural power, which are an evidence of her claim. There are also, as I have said, very many other points of discussion which the general title suggests.
I have confined myself to one, and one only, to wit, the rebutting of a certain argument drawn from History against the Church. I have done so for the reason that, in my eyes at least, much the most formidable assault delivered against the Catholic Church to-day is the assault delivered from the historical argument. There remains (as I have said in the Essay that follows) much of the old Protestant argument, to wit, that an original excellent establishment or message of divine origin was corrupted in the course of the centuries and that the Roman Communion still defends that corruption, so that its claim to authority fails. This I have attempted to meet. But of far more weight in my judgment, at the present moment, is the general argument that, regarding History as a whole and adding to it what little we can guess, and what very little we positively know, about man before he began to establish records, the Faith is but an illusion, parallel to many another such illusion to which men have been subject by the process of projecting their own imaginations upon the void of the universe.
This I am convinced is the chief attack which we of the Faith have to meet in modern times. The modern white world, the world of the European races and their oversea expansion, is rapidly becoming divided into two fairly definite camps: those who accept the full mission of the Catholic Church and those who are convinced, by the study of geology and recorded History, that the Catholic Church is but one more example of man’s power of self-delusion.
Two questions may be asked of me by those who should read the analysis which makes up my booklet. First, why have I confined myself to rebutting, that is, to a negative position, instead of advancing positive evidence from History in favor of the Catholic claim (evidence drawn from holiness, continuity, unity, etc.)? Secondly, why have I given but a portion, and not the largest portion, of my space to what I have called the most important part of the attack, to wit, the attack from general pre-History and History, the purely Sceptical attack which I deal with at the end of my Essay? My answer to these two questions is as follows:
First, that, in my judgment, the action of the Catholic Church is here a defensive action. The opponent takes it for granted that History and pre-History disprove the Catholic claim. He must be met as one attacking.
Secondly, that though the general Sceptical attack is by far the more important, yet it needs less space in writing for the meeting of it than does the discussion of the old Protestant attitude. The reason is that the issue between the Faith and mere scepticism is narrower and sharper, and at the same time more general. If you are debating whether the Church declined or was corrupted you must go into more historical detail. You must in some degree, even in so short an essay as this, be concrete. But on the other and larger issue you have a very simple and direct “yes” or “no”; which is, briefly, the answer to that old, eternal question “whether religion be from God or from man”; and upon the answer to that question depends the future of our civilisation.—The Editor.