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003 - The Obvious Blunders · Catholic Church and Conversion

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Speaker 1: Chapter two of the Catholic Church and Conversion. This is
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Speaker 1: a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
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Speaker 1: For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
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Speaker 1: Chapter two, The obvious blunders. I have noted that Catholicism
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Speaker 1: really is in the twentieth century what it was in
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Speaker 1: the second century. It is the new religion. Indeed, its
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Speaker 1: very antiquity preserves an attitude of novelty. I have always
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Speaker 1: thought it striking and even stirring, that in the venerable
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Speaker 1: invocation of the tantum ergo, which for us seems to
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Speaker 1: come loaded with accumulated ages, there is still the language
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Speaker 1: of innovation, of the antique document that must yield to
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Speaker 1: a new right for us. The hymn is something of
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Speaker 1: an antique documentary itself, but the right is always new.
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Speaker 1: But if a convert is to write of conversion, he
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Speaker 1: must try to retrace his steps out of that shrine,
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Speaker 1: back into that ultimate wilderness where he once really believed
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Speaker 1: that this eternal youth was only the old religion. It
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Speaker 1: is a thing exceedingly difficult to do, and not often
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Speaker 1: done well, And I, for one, have little hope of
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Speaker 1: doing it even tolerably well. The difficulty was expressed to
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Speaker 1: me by another convert, who said, I cannot explain why
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Speaker 1: I am a Catholic, because now that I am a Catholic,
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Speaker 1: I cannot imagine myself as anything else. Nevertheless, it is
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Speaker 1: right to make the imaginative effort. It is not bigotry
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Speaker 1: to be certain we are right, but it is bigotry
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Speaker 1: to be unable to imagine how he might possibly have
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Speaker 1: gone wrong. It is my duty to try to understand
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Speaker 1: what HG. Wells can possibly mean when he says that
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Speaker 1: the medieval Church did not care for education, but only
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Speaker 1: for imposing dogmas. It is my duty to speculate, however darkly,
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Speaker 1: on what can have made an intelligent man like Arnold
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Speaker 1: Bennett Stone blind to all the plainest facts about Spain.
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Speaker 1: It is my duty to find, if I can, the
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Speaker 1: threat of connected thought in George Moore's various condemnations of
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Speaker 1: Catholic Ireland. And it is equally my duty to labor
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Speaker 1: till I understand the strange mental state of G. K.
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Speaker 1: Chesterton when he really assumed that the Catholic Church was
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Speaker 1: a sort of ruined abbey, almost as deserted as Stonehenge.
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Speaker 1: I must say first that in my own case it
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Speaker 1: was at worst a matter of slights rather than slanders.
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Speaker 1: Many converts far more important than I have had to
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Speaker 1: wrestle with a hundred devils of howling falsehood, with a
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Speaker 1: swarm of lies and libels. I owe it to the
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Speaker 1: liberal and universalist atmosphere of my family of Stopford Brooke
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Speaker 1: and the Unitarian preachers they followed, that I was always
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Speaker 1: just sufficiently enlightened to be out of the reach of
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Speaker 1: the Maria Monk. Nevertheless, as this was but a private
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Speaker 1: privilege for which I have to be thankful, it is
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Speaker 1: necessary to say something of what I might be tempted
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Speaker 1: to call the obvious slanders, but that better men than
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Speaker 1: I have not always seen that the slander was obvious.
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Speaker 1: I do not think that they exercise much influence on
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Speaker 1: the generation that is younger than mine. The worst temptation
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Speaker 1: of the most pagan youth is not so much to
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Speaker 1: denounce monks for breaking their vow as to wonder at
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Speaker 1: them for keeping it. But there is a state of
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Speaker 1: transition that must be allowed for in which a vague
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Speaker 1: Protestant prejudice would rather like to have it both ways.
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Speaker 1: There is still a sort of wooly minded philistine who
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Speaker 1: would be in tend to consider a friar a knave
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Speaker 1: for his unchastity and a fool for his chastity. In
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Speaker 1: other words, these dying calumnies are dying but not dead,
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Speaker 1: and there are still enough people who may still be
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Speaker 1: held back by such crude and clumsy obstacles that it
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Speaker 1: is necessary to use some extent to clear them away.
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Speaker 1: After that we can consider what may be called the
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Speaker 1: real obstacles, the real difficulties we find, which, as a
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Speaker 1: fact are generally the very opposite of the difficulties we
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Speaker 1: are told about. But let us consider the evidence of
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Speaker 1: all these things being black before we go on to
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Speaker 1: the inconvenient fact of their being white. The usual protest
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Speaker 1: of the Protestant that the Church of Rome is afraid
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Speaker 1: of the Bible, did not, as I shall explain in
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Speaker 1: a moment, have any great tears for me at any time.
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Speaker 1: This was by no merit of my own, but by
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Speaker 1: the accident of my age and situation. For I grew
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Speaker 1: up in a world in which the Protestants, who had
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Speaker 1: just proved that Rome did not believe the Bible, were
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Speaker 1: excitedly discovering that they did not believe the Bible themselves.
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Speaker 1: Some of them even tried to combine the two condemnations
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Speaker 1: and say that they were steps of progress. The next
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Speaker 1: step in progress consisted in a man kicking his father
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Speaker 1: for having locked up a book of such beauty and value,
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Speaker 1: a book which the son then proceeded to tear into
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Speaker 1: a thousand pieces. I early discovered that progress is worse
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Speaker 1: than Protestantism so far as the stupidity is concerned. But
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Speaker 1: most of the free thinkers who were friends of mine
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Speaker 1: happened to think sufficiently freely to see that the higher
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Speaker 1: criticism was much more of an attack on Protestant Bible
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Speaker 1: worship than on Roman authority. Anyhow, my family and friends
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Speaker 1: were more concerned with the opening of the Book of
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Speaker 1: Darwin than the Book of Daniel, and most of them
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Speaker 1: regarded the Hebrew scriptures as if they were Hittite sculptures.
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Speaker 1: But even then it would seem odd to worship the
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Speaker 1: sculptures as gods and then smash them as idols, and
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Speaker 1: still go on blaming somebody else for not having worshiped
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Speaker 1: them enough. But here again it is hard for me
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Speaker 1: to know how far my own experience is representative, or
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Speaker 1: whether it would not be well to say more of
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Speaker 1: these purely Protestant prejudices and doubts deny. From my own experience,
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Speaker 1: am able to say the church is a house with
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Speaker 1: a hundred gates, and no two men enter at exactly
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Speaker 1: the same angle. Mine was at least as much Agnostic
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Speaker 1: as Anglican, though I accepted for a time the borderland
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Speaker 1: of Anglicanism, but only on the assumption that it could
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Speaker 1: really be Anglo Catholicism. There is a distinction of ultimate
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Speaker 1: intention there, which in the vague English atmosphere is often missed.
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Speaker 1: It is not a difference of degree, but of definite aim.
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Speaker 1: There are high churchmen as much as low churchmen, who
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Speaker 1: are concerned first and last to save the Church of England.
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Speaker 1: Some of them think it can be saved by calling
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Speaker 1: it Catholic, or making it Catholic, or believing that it
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Speaker 1: is Catholic. But that is what they want to save.
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Speaker 1: But I did not start out with the idea of
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Speaker 1: saving the English Church, but of finding the Catholic Church.
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Speaker 1: If the two were one, so much the better. But
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Speaker 1: I had never conceived of Catholicism as a sort of
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Speaker 1: shadowy attribute or attraction to be tacked on to my
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Speaker 1: own national body, but as the inmost soul of the
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Speaker 1: true body, wherever it might be. It might be said
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Speaker 1: that anglic Catholicism was simply my own uncompleted conversion to Catholicism.
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Speaker 1: But it was from a position originally much more detached
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Speaker 1: and indefinite that I had been converted an atmosphere, if
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Speaker 1: not agnostic, at least pantheistic or unitarian. To this I
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Speaker 1: owe the fact that I find it very difficult to
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Speaker 1: take some of the Protestant propositions even seriously. What is
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Speaker 1: any man who has been in the real outer world,
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Speaker 1: for instance, to make of the everlasting cry that Catholic
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Speaker 1: traditions are condemned by the Bible. It indicates a jumble
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Speaker 1: of topsy turvy tests and tail foremost arguments of which
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Speaker 1: I never could at any time see the sense. The
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Speaker 1: ordinary sensible skeptic or pagan is standing in the street,
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Speaker 1: in the supreme character of the man in the street,
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Speaker 1: and he sees a procession go by of the priests
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Speaker 1: of some strange cult, carrying their object of worship under
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Speaker 1: a canopy, some of them wearing high headdresses and carrying
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Speaker 1: symbolical staffs, others carrying scrolls and sacred records, others carrying
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Speaker 1: sacred images and lighted candles before them, others sacred relica
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Speaker 1: in caskets or cases, and so on. I can understand
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Speaker 1: the spectator saying this is all hocus pocus. I can
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Speaker 1: even understand him in moments of irritation, breaking up the procession,
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Speaker 1: throwing down the images, tearing up the scrolls, dancing on
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Speaker 1: the priests, and anything else that might express that general view.
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Speaker 1: I can understand his saying, your croziers are bosh, your
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Speaker 1: candles are bosh. Your statues and scrolls and relics and
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Speaker 1: all the rest of it are bosh. But in what
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Speaker 1: conceivable frame of mind does he rush in to select
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Speaker 1: one particular scroll of the scriptures of this one particular group,
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Speaker 1: a scroll which had always belonged to them and been
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Speaker 1: a part of their hocus pocus. If it was hocus pocus,
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Speaker 1: why in the world should the man in the streets
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Speaker 1: say that one particular scroll was not bosh, but was
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Speaker 1: the one and only truth by which all the other
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Speaker 1: things were to be condemned. Why should it not be
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Speaker 1: as superstitious to worship the scrolls as the statues of
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Speaker 1: that one particular procession. Why should it not be as
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Speaker 1: reasonable to preserve the statues as the scrolls by the
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Speaker 1: tenets of that particular creed. To say to the priests,
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Speaker 1: your statues and scrolls are condemned by our common sense
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Speaker 1: is sensible. To say, your statues are condemned by your scrolls,
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Speaker 1: and we are going to worship one part of your
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Speaker 1: procession and wreck the rest is not sensible from any standpoint,
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Speaker 1: least of all that of the man in the street. Similarly,
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Speaker 1: I could never take seriously the fear of the priest
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Speaker 1: as of something unnatural and unholy, a dangerous man in
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Speaker 1: the home. Why should a man who wanted to be
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Speaker 1: wicked encumber himself with special and elaborate promises to be good?
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Speaker 1: There might sometimes be a reason for a priest being
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Speaker 1: a profligate, But what was the reason for a profligate
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Speaker 1: being a priest? There are many more lucrative walks of
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Speaker 1: life in which a person with such shining talents for
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Speaker 1: vice and villainy might have made a brighter use of
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Speaker 1: his gifts. Why should a man encumber himself with vows
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Speaker 1: that nobody could expect him to take, and he did
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Speaker 1: not himself expect to keep. Would any man make himself
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Speaker 1: poor in order that he might become avaracious or take
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Speaker 1: a vow of chastity frightfully difficult to keep in order
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Speaker 1: to get into a little more trouble when he did
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Speaker 1: not keep it. All that early and sensational picture of
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Speaker 1: the Sins of Rome always seemed to me silly, even
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Speaker 1: when I was a boy or an unbeliever, and I
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Speaker 1: cannot describe how I passed out of it, because I
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Speaker 1: was never in it. I remember asking some friends at Cambridge,
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Speaker 1: people of the Puritan tradition, why in the world they
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Speaker 1: were so afraid of papists. Why a priest in somebody's
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Speaker 1: house was a peril or an irish servant the beginning
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Speaker 1: of a pestilence. I asked them why they could not
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Speaker 1: simply disagree with papists and say so, as they did
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Speaker 1: with theosophists or anarchists. They seemed at once pleased and
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Speaker 1: shocked with my daring, as if I had undertaken to
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Speaker 1: convert a burglar or tame a mad dog. Perhaps their
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Speaker 1: alarm was really wiser than my bravado. Anyhow, I had
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Speaker 1: not then the most shadowy notion that the burglar would
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Speaker 1: convert me. That, however, I am inclined to think, is
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Speaker 1: the subconscious intuition in the whole business. It must either
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Speaker 1: mean that they suspect that our religion has something about
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Speaker 1: it so wrong that the hint of it is bad
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Speaker 1: for anybody, or else that it had something so right
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Speaker 1: that the presence of it would convert anybody to do
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Speaker 1: them justice. I think most of them darkly suspect the
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Speaker 1: second and not the first. A shade more plausible than
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Speaker 1: the notion that Popish priests merely seek after evil was
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Speaker 1: the notion that they are exceptionally ready to seek good
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Speaker 1: by means of evil. In vulgar language, it is the
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Speaker 1: notion that if they are not sensual, they are always
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Speaker 1: sly to dissipate. This is a mere matter of experience.
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Speaker 1: But before I had any experience, I had seen some
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Speaker 1: objections to the thing, even in theory. The theory attributed
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Speaker 1: it to the Jesuits was very often almost identical with
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Speaker 1: the practice adopted by nearly everybody I knew. Everybody in
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Speaker 1: society practiced verbal economies, equivocations, and often direct fictions without
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Speaker 1: any sense of essential falsehood. Every gentleman was expected to
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Speaker 1: say he would be delighted to dine with a bore.
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Speaker 1: Every lady said that somebody else's baby was beautiful, even
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Speaker 1: if she thought it as ugly as sin, for they
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Speaker 1: did not think it a sin to avoid saying ugly things.
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Speaker 1: This might be right or wrong, but it was absurd
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Speaker 1: to pillory half a dozen Popish priests for a crime
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Speaker 1: committed daily by half a million Protestant laymen. The only
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Speaker 1: difference was that the Jesuits had been worried enough about
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Speaker 1: the matter to try to make rules and limitations, having
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Speaker 1: as much verbal veracity as possible, whereas the happy Protestants
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Speaker 1: were not worried about it at all, but told lies
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Speaker 1: from morning to night as merely and innocently as the
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Speaker 1: birds sing in the trees. The fact is, of course,
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Speaker 1: that the modern world is full of an utterly lawless casuistry,
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Speaker 1: because the Jesuits were prevented from making a lawful casuistry.
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Speaker 1: But every man is a casuist or lunatic. It is
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Speaker 1: true that this general truth was hidden from many by
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Speaker 1: certain definite assertions. I can only call them, in simple
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Speaker 1: language Protestant lies about Catholic lying. The men who repeated
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Speaker 1: them were not necessarily lying because they were repeating. But
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Speaker 1: the statements were of the same lucid and precise order
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Speaker 1: as a statement that the pope has three legs, or
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Speaker 1: that Rome is situated at the north pole. There is
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Speaker 1: no more doubt about their nature than that one of them.
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Speaker 1: For instance, is the positive statement, once heard everywhere and
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Speaker 1: still heard often. Roman Catholics are taught that anything is
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Speaker 1: lawful if done for the good of the church. This
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Speaker 1: is not the fact, and there is an end of it.
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Speaker 1: It refers to a definite statement of an institution whose
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Speaker 1: statements are very definite, and it can be proved to
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Speaker 1: be totally false. Here is always that critics cannot see
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Speaker 1: that they are trying to have it both ways. They
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Speaker 1: are always complaining that our creed is cut and dried,
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Speaker 1: that we are told what to believe and must believe
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Speaker 1: nothing else, that it is all written down for us
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Speaker 1: in the bulls and confessions of faith. In so far
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Speaker 1: as this is true, it brings a matter like this
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Speaker 1: to the point of legal and literal truth, which can
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Speaker 1: be tested, and so tested it is a lie. But
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Speaker 1: even here I was saved at a very early stage
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Speaker 1: by noticing a curious fact. I noticed that those who
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Speaker 1: were most ready to blame priests for relying on rigid
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Speaker 1: formulas seldom took the trouble to find out what the
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Speaker 1: formulas were. I happened to pick up some of the
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Speaker 1: amusing pamphlets of James Britton, as they might have picked
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Speaker 1: up any other pamphlets of any other propaganda. But they
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Speaker 1: set me on the track of that delightful branch of
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Speaker 1: literature which he called Protestant fiction. I found some of
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Speaker 1: that fiction on my own account, dipping into novels by
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Speaker 1: Joseph Hacking and others. I am only concerned with them
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Speaker 1: here to illustrate this particular and curious fact about exactitude.
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Speaker 1: I could not understand why these romancers never took the
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Speaker 1: trouble to find out a few elementary facts about the
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Speaker 1: thing they denounced. The facts might easily have helped the
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Speaker 1: denunciation where the fictions discredited it. There were any number
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Speaker 1: of real Catholic doctrines I should then have thought disgraceful
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Speaker 1: to the Church. There are any number which I can
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Speaker 1: still easily imagine being made to look disgraceful to the church.
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Speaker 1: But the enemies of the Church never found these real
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Speaker 1: rocks of offense. They never looked for them. They never
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Speaker 1: looked for anything. They seemed to have simply made up
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Speaker 1: out of their own heads. A number of phrases, such
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Speaker 1: as a scarlet woman of deficient intellect might be supposed
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Speaker 1: to launch on the world, and left it at that
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Speaker 1: boundless freedom reigned. It was not treated as if it
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Speaker 1: were a question of fact at all. A priest might
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Speaker 1: say anything about the faith, because a Protestant might say
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Speaker 1: anything about the priest. These novels were petted with pronouncements
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Speaker 1: like this one, for instance, which I happen to remember.
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Speaker 1: Disobeying a priest is the one sin for which there
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Speaker 1: is no absolution. We term it a reserved case. Now, obviously,
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Speaker 1: a man writing like that is simply imagining what might exist.
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Speaker 1: It has never occurred to him to go and ask
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Speaker 1: if it does exist. He has heard the phrase a
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Speaker 1: reserved case and considers, in a poetic reverie what he
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Speaker 1: shall make it to mean. He does not go and
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Speaker 1: ask the nearest priest what it does mean. He does
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Speaker 1: not look it up in an encyclopedia or any ordinary
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Speaker 1: work of reference. There is no doubt about the fact
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Speaker 1: that it simply means a case reserved for ecclesiastical superiors,
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Speaker 1: and not to be settled finally by the priest. That
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Speaker 1: may be a fact to be denounced, but anyhow it
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Speaker 1: is a fact. But the man much prefers to denounce
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Speaker 1: his own fancy any manual would tell him that there
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Speaker 1: is no sin for which there is no absolution, not
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Speaker 1: disobeying the priest, not assassinating the pope. It would be
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Speaker 1: easy to find out these facts, and quite easy to
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Speaker 1: base a Protestant invective upon them. It puzzled me very much,
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Speaker 1: even at that early stage, to imagine why people bringing
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Speaker 1: controversial charges against a powerful and prominent institution should thus
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Speaker 1: neglect to test their own case, and should draw in
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Speaker 1: this random way on their own imagination. It did not
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Speaker 1: make me any more inclined to be a Catholic in
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Speaker 1: those days, the very idea of such a thing would
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Speaker 1: have seemed crazy, But it did save me from swallowing
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Speaker 1: all the solid and solemn assertion about what Jesuit said
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Speaker 1: and did. I did not accept quite so completely as others,
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Speaker 1: the well ascertained and widely accepted fact that Roman Catholics
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Speaker 1: may do anything for the good of the Church. Because
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Speaker 1: I had already learned to smile at equally accepted truth
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Speaker 1: like this. So being a priest is the one sin
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Speaker 1: for which there is no absolution. I never dreamed that
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Speaker 1: the Roman religion was true, but I knew that its accusers,
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Speaker 1: for some reason or other, were curiously inaccurate. It is
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Speaker 1: strange to me to go back to these things now
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Speaker 1: and to think that I ever took them even as
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Speaker 1: seriously as that. But I was not very serious even then,
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Speaker 1: and certainly I was not serious long. The last lingering
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Speaker 1: shadow of the Jesuit gliding behind curtains and concealing himself
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Speaker 1: in cupboards faded from my young life about the time
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Speaker 1: when I first caught a distant glimpse of the late
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Speaker 1: Father Bernard Vaughan. He was the only Jesuit I ever
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Speaker 1: knew in those days, and as you could generally hear
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Speaker 1: him half a mile away, he seemed to be ill
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Speaker 1: selected for the duties of a curtain glider. It has
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Speaker 1: always struck me as curious that this Jesuit raised a
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Speaker 1: storm by refusing to be jesuitical in the journally sense.
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Speaker 1: I mean, by refusing to substitute smooth equivocation and verbal
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Speaker 1: evasion for a brute fact. Because he talked about killing Germans.
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Speaker 1: When Germans had to be killed, all our shifty and
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Speaker 1: shamefaced morality was shocked at him. And none of those
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Speaker 1: protesting Protestants took thought for a moment to realize that
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Speaker 1: they were showing all the shuffling insincerity they attributed to
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Speaker 1: the Jesuits, and the Jesuit was showing all the plain
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Speaker 1: candor they claimed for the Protestant. I could give a
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Speaker 1: great many other instances besides these I have given to
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Speaker 1: the hidden Bible, the profligate priest, or the treacherous Jesuit.
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Speaker 1: I could go steadily through the list of all these
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Speaker 1: more old fashioned charges against Rome and show how they
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Speaker 1: affected me, or rather why they did not affect me.
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Speaker 1: But my only purpose here is to point out, as
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Speaker 1: a preliminary that they did not affect me at all.
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Speaker 1: I had all the difficulties that a heathen would have
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Speaker 1: had in becoming a Catholic in the fourth century. I
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Speaker 1: had very few of the difficulties that a Protestant had
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Speaker 1: from the seventeenth to the nineteenth. And I owe this
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Speaker 1: to men whose memories I shall always honor, to my
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Speaker 1: father and his circle, and the literary tradition of men
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Speaker 1: like George MacDonald and the universalists of the Victorian age.
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Speaker 1: If I was born on the wrong side of the
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Speaker 1: Roman wall, at least I was not born on the
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Speaker 1: wrong side of the no popery quarrel. And if I
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Speaker 1: did not inherit a fully civilized faith, neither did I
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Speaker 1: inherit a barbarian feud. The people I was born amongst
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Speaker 1: wished to be just to Catholics if they did not
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Speaker 1: always understand them, and I should be very thankless if
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Speaker 1: I did not recurt of them that, like a very
23:02
Speaker 1: much more valuable convert, I can say I was born free.
23:08
Speaker 1: I will add one example to illustrate this point, because
23:11
Speaker 1: it leads us on to larger matters. After a long time,
23:16
Speaker 1: I might almost say, after a lifetime, I have at
23:20
Speaker 1: least begun to realize what the worthy liberal or socialist
23:23
Speaker 1: of bal Ham or Battersea really means when he says
23:26
Speaker 1: he is an internationalist and that humanity should be preferred
23:29
Speaker 1: to the narrowness of nations. It dawned on me quite suddenly,
23:34
Speaker 1: after I had talked to such a man for many hours,
23:37
Speaker 1: that of course he had really been brought up to
23:39
Speaker 1: believe that God's Englishmen were the chosen race. Very likely
23:44
Speaker 1: his father or uncle actually thought they were the Lost
23:47
Speaker 1: Ten Tribes. Anyway, everything from his daily paper to his
23:52
Speaker 1: weekly sermon assumed that they were the salt of the earth,
23:55
Speaker 1: and especially that they were the salt of the sea.
23:59
Speaker 1: People had never thought outside their British nationality. They lived
24:04
Speaker 1: in an empire on which the sun never set or
24:07
Speaker 1: possibly never rose. Their church was emphatically the Church of England,
24:13
Speaker 1: even if it was a chapel. Their religion was the
24:17
Speaker 1: Bible that went everywhere with the Union Jack. And when
24:21
Speaker 1: I realized that, I realized the whole story. That was
24:25
Speaker 1: why they were excited by the exceedingly dull theory of
24:28
Speaker 1: the Internationalist. That was why the Brotherhood of Nations, which
24:33
Speaker 1: to me was a truism, to them, was a trumpet.
24:37
Speaker 1: That was why it seemed such a thrilling paradox to
24:40
Speaker 1: say that we must love foreigners. It had in it
24:44
Speaker 1: the divine paradox that we must love enemies. That was
24:48
Speaker 1: why the Internationalists was always planning deputations and visits to
24:52
Speaker 1: foreign capitals, and heart to heart talks and hands across
24:55
Speaker 1: the sea. It was the marvel of discovering that foreigners
24:59
Speaker 1: had hands, let alone hearts. There was in that excitement
25:04
Speaker 1: a sort of stifled cry. Look, Frenchmen also have two legs.
25:09
Speaker 1: See Germans have noses in the same place as we now.
25:15
Speaker 1: A Catholic, especially a born Catholic, can never understand that attitude,
25:21
Speaker 1: because from the first his whole religion is rooted in
25:23
Speaker 1: the unity of the race of Adam, the one and
25:26
Speaker 1: only chosen race. He is loyal to his own country. Indeed,
25:32
Speaker 1: he is generally ardently loyal to it, such local affections
25:36
Speaker 1: being in other ways very natural to his religious life,
25:40
Speaker 1: with its shrines and relics. But just as the relic
25:44
Speaker 1: follows upon the religion, so the local loyalty follows on
25:47
Speaker 1: the universal brotherhood of all men. The Catholic says, of course,
25:52
Speaker 1: we must love all men. But what do all men love.
25:57
Speaker 1: They love their lands, their lawful boundaries, the memories of
26:01
Speaker 1: their fathers. That is the justification of being national. That
26:06
Speaker 1: it is normal. But the Protestant patriot really never thought
26:10
Speaker 1: of any patriotism except his own. In that sense, Protestantism
26:15
Speaker 1: is patriotism. But unfortunately it is only patriotism. It starts
26:21
Speaker 1: with it and never gets beyond it. We start with
26:25
Speaker 1: mankind and go beyond it, to all the varied loves
26:28
Speaker 1: and traditions of mankind. There never was a more illuminating
26:32
Speaker 1: flash than that which lit up the last moment of
26:35
Speaker 1: one of the most glorious of English Protestants, one of
26:39
Speaker 1: the most Protestant, and one of the most English. For
26:43
Speaker 1: that is the meaning of that phrase of Nurse Cavell, herself,
26:46
Speaker 1: the noblest murtyr of our modern religion of nationality, when
26:51
Speaker 1: the very shaft of the white sun of death shone
26:53
Speaker 1: deep into her mind, and she cried aloud, like one
26:57
Speaker 1: who had just discovered something. I see now, that patriotism
27:02
Speaker 1: is not enough. There was this in common between the
27:07
Speaker 1: Catholics to whom I have come and the Liberals among
27:09
Speaker 1: whom I was born. Neither of them would have ever
27:13
Speaker 1: imagined for a moment that patriotism was enough, But that
27:17
Speaker 1: insular idealism by which that great lady lived really had
27:20
Speaker 1: taught her, unconsciously from childhood, that patriotism was enough. Not
27:26
Speaker 1: seldom has the English lady appeared in history as a heroine,
27:30
Speaker 1: but generally as facing and defying strangers or savages, not
27:34
Speaker 1: especially as feeling them as fellows and equals. Those last
27:39
Speaker 1: words of the English martyr in Belgium have often been
27:42
Speaker 1: quoted by mere Cosmopolitans. But cosmopolitans are the last people
27:47
Speaker 1: really to understand them. They are generally trying to prove
27:52
Speaker 1: not that patriotism is not enough, but that it is
27:55
Speaker 1: a great deal too much. The point is here that
27:59
Speaker 1: hundreds of the most heroic and high minded people in
28:01
Speaker 1: Protestant countries have really assumed that it is enough to
28:05
Speaker 1: be a patriot. The most careless and cynical of Catholics
28:09
Speaker 1: knows better, and so did the most vague and visionary
28:13
Speaker 1: of Universalists. Of all the Protestant difficulties which I here
28:18
Speaker 1: find it hard to imagine, this is perhaps the most common,
28:22
Speaker 1: and in many ways commendable, the fact that the normal
28:26
Speaker 1: British subject begins by being so very British. By accident,
28:31
Speaker 1: I did not the tradition I heard in my youth,
28:35
Speaker 1: The simple the two simple truths inherited from Priestley and
28:39
Speaker 1: Martinau had in them something of that grand generalization upon
28:44
Speaker 1: men as men, which in the first of those great
28:46
Speaker 1: figures faced the howling jingoism of the French Wars, and
28:51
Speaker 1: defied even the legend of Trefelger. It is to that
28:55
Speaker 1: tradition that I owe the fact, whether it be an
28:58
Speaker 1: advantage or a disadvantage, that I cannot worthily analyze the
29:02
Speaker 1: very heroic virtues of a Plymouth brother whose only center
29:06
Speaker 1: is Plymouth. For that rationalism defective as it was began
29:11
Speaker 1: long ago in the same central civilization in which the
29:15
Speaker 1: Church herself began. If it has ended in the Church,
29:19
Speaker 1: it began long ago in the Republic, in a world
29:23
Speaker 1: where all these flags and frontiers were unknown, where all
29:27
Speaker 1: these state establishments and national sects were unthinkable, a vast
29:32
Speaker 1: cosmopolitan cosmos that had never heard the name of England
29:36
Speaker 1: or conceived the image of a kingdom separate and at war,
29:40
Speaker 1: in that vast pagan piece, which was the matrix of
29:43
Speaker 1: all these mysteries, which had forgotten the free cities, and
29:47
Speaker 1: had not dreamed of the small nationalities which knew only humanity,
29:52
Speaker 1: the humanum Janus and the name of Rome. The Catholic
29:58
Speaker 1: Church loves nations as she loves me men, because they
30:01
Speaker 1: are her children. But they certainly are her children in
30:05
Speaker 1: the sense that they are secondary to her in time
30:08
Speaker 1: and process of production. That is, as it happens, a
30:13
Speaker 1: very good example of a fallacy that often confuses discussion
30:17
Speaker 1: about the convert. The same people who call the convert
30:20
Speaker 1: a pervert and especially a traitor to patriotism, very often
30:25
Speaker 1: use the other catchword to the effect that he is
30:27
Speaker 1: forced to believe this or that. But it is not
30:31
Speaker 1: really a question of what a man is made to believe,
30:34
Speaker 1: but of what he must believe what he cannot help believing.
30:39
Speaker 1: He cannot disbelieve in an elephant when he sees one,
30:42
Speaker 1: and he cannot treat the Church as a child when
30:45
Speaker 1: he has discovered that she is his mother. She is
30:48
Speaker 1: not only his mother, but his country's mother. In being
30:51
Speaker 1: much older and more aboriginal than his country, she is
30:56
Speaker 1: such a mother, not in sentimental feeling, but in historical
30:59
Speaker 1: fils fact. He cannot think one thing when he knows
31:03
Speaker 1: the contrary thing. He cannot think that Christianity was invented
31:07
Speaker 1: by Penda of Mercia, who sent missionaries to the heathen
31:11
Speaker 1: Augustine and the rude and barbarous Gregory. He cannot think
31:15
Speaker 1: that the Church first rose in the middle of the
31:17
Speaker 1: British Empire and not of the Roman Empire. He cannot
31:22
Speaker 1: think that England existed with cricket and fox hunting and
31:26
Speaker 1: the Jacobean translation all complete when Rome was founded or
31:30
Speaker 1: when Christ was born. It is no good talking about
31:34
Speaker 1: his being free to believe these things. He is exactly
31:38
Speaker 1: as free to believe them as he is to believe
31:40
Speaker 1: that a horse has feathers, or that the sun is
31:43
Speaker 1: p green. He cannot believe them when once he fully
31:47
Speaker 1: realizes them. And among such things is a notion that
31:50
Speaker 1: the national claim upon a good patriot is in its
31:53
Speaker 1: nature more absolute, ancient, and authoritative than the claim of
31:58
Speaker 1: the whole religious culture, which first met out its territories
32:01
Speaker 1: and anointed its kings. That religious culture does indeed encourage
32:06
Speaker 1: him to fight to the last for his country as
32:09
Speaker 1: for his family. But that is because the religious culture
32:12
Speaker 1: is generous and imaginative and humane, and knows that men
32:17
Speaker 1: must have intimate and individual ties. But those secondary loyalties
32:21
Speaker 1: are secondary in time and logic to the law of
32:24
Speaker 1: universal morality, which justifies them. And if the patriot is
32:29
Speaker 1: such a fool as to force the issue against that
32:32
Speaker 1: universal tradition from which his own patriotism descends, if he
32:36
Speaker 1: presses his claim to priority over the primitive law of
32:39
Speaker 1: the whole earth, then he will have brought it on himself.
32:42
Speaker 1: If he has answered with the pulverizing plainness of the
32:45
Speaker 1: Book of Job, as God said to the man, where
32:49
Speaker 1: were you when the foundations of the world were laid?
32:52
Speaker 1: We might well say to the nation, where were you
32:55
Speaker 1: when the foundations of the church were laid? And the
32:58
Speaker 1: nation will not know in the least what to answer
33:02
Speaker 1: if it should wish to answer, but will be forced
33:04
Speaker 1: to put its hand upon its mouth, if only like
33:07
Speaker 1: one who yawns and falls asleep. I have taken this
33:11
Speaker 1: particular case of patriotism because it concerns at least an
33:14
Speaker 1: emotion in which I profoundly believe and happen to feel strongly.
33:19
Speaker 1: I have always done my best to defend it, though
33:21
Speaker 1: I have sometimes become suspect by sympathizing with other people's
33:25
Speaker 1: patriotism besides my own. But I cannot see how it
33:29
Speaker 1: can be defended except as part of a larger morality,
33:33
Speaker 1: and the Catholic morality happens to be one of the
33:35
Speaker 1: very few large moralities now ready to defend it. But
33:39
Speaker 1: the Church defends it as one of the duties of men,
33:42
Speaker 1: and not as the whole duty of man, as it
33:45
Speaker 1: was in the Prussian theory of the state. And too
33:47
Speaker 1: often in the British theory of the empire. And as
33:51
Speaker 1: for the Catholic rests exactly as the universalist unitarian rested
33:56
Speaker 1: upon the actual effect of a human unity anterior to
33:59
Speaker 1: all the healthy and natural human divisions. But it is
34:04
Speaker 1: absurd to treat the Church as a novel conspiracy attacking
34:07
Speaker 1: the state, when the state was only recently a novel
34:10
Speaker 1: experiment arising within the Church. It is absurd to forget
34:14
Speaker 1: that the Church itself received the first loyalties of men
34:17
Speaker 1: who had not yet even conceived the notion of founding
34:20
Speaker 1: such a national and separate state. That the faith really
34:25
Speaker 1: was not only the faith of our fathers, but the
34:27
Speaker 1: faith of our fathers before they had even named our fatherland.
34:33
Speaker 1: End of Chapter two