Then again, there is everywhere a strong insistence upon History as a Science, yet as a Science possessing throughout a method, type and aim quite special to itself and deeply different from those of Physical Science; and an even greater stress upon the important, indeed irreplaceable function of both these kinds of Science, or of their equivalents, in the fullest spiritual life. Here the insistence upon History, as a Science, is still unusual in England; and the stress upon the spiritually purifying power of these Sciences will still appear somewhat fantastic everywhere.—Yet that conception of two branches of ordered human apprehension, research and knowledge, each (in its delicate and clear contrastedness of method, test, end and result) legitimate and inevitable, so that either of them is ruined if forced into the categories of the other, has most certainly come to stay. And the attempt to discover the precise function and meaning of these several mental activities and of their ethical pre-requisites, within the full and spiritual life of the soul, and in view of this life’s consolidation and growth, will, I believe, turn out to be of genuine religious utility. For I hope to show how only one particular manner of conceiving and of practising those scientific activities and this spiritual life and consolidation allows, indeed requires, the religious passion,—the noblest and deepest passion given to man,—to be itself enlisted on the side of that other noble, indestructible thing, severe scientific sincerity. This very sincerity would thus not empty or distract, but would, on the contrary, purify and deepen the soul’s spirituality; and hence this spirituality would continuously turn to that sincerity for help in purifying and deepening the soul. And, surely, until we have somehow attained to some such interaction, the soul must perforce remain timid and weak; for without sincerity everywhere, we cannot possibly develop to their fullest the passion for truth and righteousness even in religion itself.
And then again a Catholic, one who would be a proudly devoted and grateful son of the Roman Church, speaks and thinks throughout the following pages. Yet it is his very Catholicism which makes him feel, with a spontaneous and continuous keenness, that only if there are fragments, earlier stages and glimpses of truth and goodness extant wheresoever some little sincerity exists, can the Catholic Church even conceivably be right. For though Christianity and Catholicism be the culmination and fullest norm of all religion, yet to be such they must find something thus to crown and measure: various degrees of, or preparations for, their truth have existed long before they came, and exist still, far and wide, now that they have come. Otherwise, Marcion would have been right, when he denied that the Old Testament proceeds from the same God as does the New; and three-fourths or more of the human race would not, to this very moment, be bereft, without fault of their own, of all knowledge of the Historic Christ and of every opportunity for definite incorporation into the Christian Church, since we dare not think that God has left this large majority of His children without any and every glimpse and opportunity of religious truth, moral goodness, and eternal hope. Yet such a recognition of some light and love everywhere involves no trace of levelling down, or even of levelling up; it is, in itself, without a trace of Indifferentism. For if some kinds or degrees of light are thus found everywhere, yet this light is held to vary immensely in different times and places, from soul to soul, and from one religious stage, group or body to another; the measure and culmination of this light is found in the deepest Christian and Catholic light and holiness; and, over and above the involuntary, sincere differences in degree, stage and kind, there are held to exist, also more or less everywhere, the differences caused by cowardice and opposition to the light,—cowardices and oppositions which are as certainly at work within the Christian and Catholic Church as they are amongst the most barbarous of Polytheists. I may well have failed adequately to combine these twin truths; yet only in some such, though more adequate apprehension and combination resides the hope for the future of our poor storm-tossed human race,—in a deep fervour without fanaticism, and a generous sympathy without indifference.
And lastly, a lay lover of religion speaks throughout, a man to whom the very suspicion that such subjects should or could, on that account, be foreign to him has ever been impossible. A deep interest in religion is evidently part of our very manhood, a thing previous to the Church, and which the Church now comes to develop and to save. Yet such an interest is, in the long run, impossible, if the heart and will alone are allowed to be active in a matter so supremely great and which claims the entire man. “Where my heart lies, let my brain lie also”: man is not, however much we may try and behave as though he were, a mere sum-total of so many separable water-tight compartments; he can no more fruitfully delegate his brains and his interest in the intellectual analysis and synthesis of religion, than he can commission others to do his religious feeling and willing, his spiritual growth and combat, for him.—But this does not of itself imply an individualistic, hence one-sided, religion. For only in close union with the accumulated and accumulating experiences, analyses and syntheses of the human race in general, and with the supreme life and teaching of the Christian and Catholic Church in particular, will such growth in spiritual personality be possible on any large and fruitful scale: since nowhere, and nowhere less than in religion, does man achieve anything by himself alone, or for his own exclusive use and profit.
And such a layman’s views, even when thus acquired and expressed with a constant endeavour to be, and ever increasingly to become, a unit and part and parcel of that larger, Christian and Catholic whole, will ever remain, in themselves and in his valuation of them, unofficial, and, at best, but so much material and stimulation for the kindly criticism and discriminating attention of his fellow-creatures and fellow-Christians and (should these views stand such informal, preliminary tests) for the eventual utilization of the official Church. To this officiality ever remains the exclusive right and duty to formulate successively, for the Church’s successive periods, according as these become ripe for such formulations, the corporate, normative forms and expressions of the Church’s deepest consciousness and mind. Yet this officiality cannot and does not operate in vacuo, or by a direct recourse to extra-human sources of information. It sorts out, eliminates what is false and pernicious, or sanctions and proclaims what is true and fruitful, and a development of her own life, teaching and commission, in the volunteer, tentative and preliminary work put forth by the Church’s unofficial members.
And just because both these movements are within, and necessary to, one and the same complete Church, they can be and are different from each other. Hence the following book would condemn itself to pompous unreality were it to mimic official caution and emphasis, whilst ever unable to achieve official authority. It prefers to aim at a layman’s special virtues and function: complete candour, courage, sensitiveness to the present and future, in their obscurer strivings towards the good and true, as these have been in their substance already tested in the past, and in so far as such strivings can be forecasted by sympathy and hope. And I thus trust that the book may turn out to be as truly Catholic in fact, as it has been Catholic in intention; I have striven hard to furnish so continuous and copious a stream of actions and teachings of Christian saints and sages as everywhere to give the reader means of correcting or completing my own inferences; and I sincerely submit these my own conclusions to the test and judgment of my fellow-Christians and of the Catholic Church.
My obligations to scholars, thinkers and great spiritual souls are far too numerous and great for any exhaustive recognition. Yet there are certain works and persons to whom I am especially indebted; and these shall here be mentioned with most grateful thanks.
In my Biographical and Critical Part Second, I have had, in Genoa itself, the help of various scholars and friends. Signor Dottore Ridolfo de Andreis first made me realize the importance of Vallebona’s booklet. Padre Giovanni Semeria, the Barnabite, put me in touch with the right persons and documents. The Cavallière L. A. Cervetto, of the Biblioteca Civica, referred me to many useful works. The Librarian of the Biblioteca della Missione Urbana copied out for me the inventory of St. Catherine’s effects. And Signor Dottore Augusto Ferretto, of the Archivio di Stato, made admirably careful, explicitated copies for me, from the originals, so full of difficult abbreviations, of the long series of legal documents which are the rock-bed on which my biography is built.
The courteous help of the Head Librarian of the Genoese University Library extended to beyond Genoa. For it was owing to his action, in conjunction with that of the Italian Ministry, of the English Embassy in Rome, and of the British Museum Authorities, that the three most important of the manuscripts of St. Catherine’s life were most generously deposited for my use at the latter institution. I was thus enabled to study my chief sources at full leisure in London.
The Rev. Padre Calvino, Canon Regular of the Lateran, made many kind attempts to trace any possible compositions concerning St. Catherine among the Venerable Battista Vernazza’s manuscripts, preserved by the spiritual descendants of Battista’s Augustinian Canonesses in Genoa; it was not his fault that nothing could be found.