Take this case of the fading away of Priesthood and the mastering of it by a civil power as a necessary part of human “Progress.” It is not what happened in our European community. It is not what happened in the history of our own race during the last twenty-five centuries, of which we know infinitely more than we do of the Euphrates or the Nile Valleys thousands of years ago.
What happened in the history of our own race is very well known: the religions of Pagan European antiquity had Priesthoods—all of them. Those Priesthoods were of very varying political power, and the variation in their political power had nothing to do with the stage of culture. You do not find Priests more powerful in the lower stages of culture, less powerful in the higher stages of culture; you certainly find them more powerful in Gaul, for instance, than you do in the more barbaric world beyond the Rhine. There is hardly a trace of any Priesthood among the lowest of all, the Scythians.
What Priesthood was in Etruria we do not know, but we do know that in the Roman religious origins which were probably Etruscan there is a curious rigidity and strength attaching to the hierarchic function, a union (again) between civil rule and Priestly action, and yet certainly not a government of Priests. We know how powerful was the horrible Priesthood of Carthage, but we know that government was civilian. There is every sort of type and degree in the power, the character, the rise and fall of Priesthood, and no indication whatsoever of a monotonous, regular elimination of the Priest by “Progress” such as Mr. Wells was taught in his youth.
When the great change comes over the recorded history of our race—the conversion of the Roman Empire to Catholicism—it is not the power of any Priesthood that weakens; it is the hold of the local Pagan religion that weakens. The Pagan Priest is in no way conquered by the civil power. There is no trace of such a thing. On the contrary, it is the civil power which, as Paganism dies, works hard to keep the Pagan Priest going. Next arises the Catholic Church. It has a Priesthood, and a very strong organized Priesthood, from the earliest records of it that we possess.
In the later centuries you find, in the West, that Priesthood acting together under a personal Chief and at last dominating society in the main struggle between this head of the hierarchy and the nominal head of civil society. It is the head of the hierarchy (the Pope) who wins, and the head of the civil society (the Emperor) who loses—not the other way about.
With the destruction of religious unity and the introduction of widespread differences of belief into Western Europe the civil power naturally preponderates. There came a maximum when the civil power might almost be said to have obliterated its rival during the nineteenth century. But it is pretty clear to people who know their Europe that something of a turn of the tide is already apparent.
What the future holds in the matter we cannot see; but it is plain detailed History of the most glaring and obvious sort that during these known two thousand five hundred years, there has been no regular process one way or the other. There has been no gradual fading away of Priesthood in the growing light and its replacement by an anti-Priestly, “progressive” civil power. What has actually happened is what a sound intelligence, shy of too easy theories, would expect—a complicated, eddying, series of changes, swelling gradually up towards maxima of strength on the one side, and then to maxima of strength on the other.
It is here as everywhere. When Mr. Wells touches on the point of religion, even when he has recorded History to go upon, he at once begins to repeat the popular theories of the anti-Catholic world and to repeat them crudely and in a fashion convincing only to those who had already been told what he tells them. What is more interesting for the Catholic reader in this kind of thing is to remember out of what an atmosphere it arose. Put in a different dress, it is really nothing more than the old cry of “Priestcraft,” which the more provincial sort of anti-Catholicism perpetually repeated though with failing accents during the middle third of the nineteenth century.
It is no safeguard against this for Mr. Wells to say—and he says it quite sincerely—that the Priests in some measure, some of them, believed what they taught. That is only part of the urbane tolerance which is used as a sort of oil to smooth the downward passage to destruction of such outworn things as the Faith. When they know our strength we shall have less of such courtesy.
Of two things, one: either Priesthood being a normal function of religion, like Veneration, Sacrifice, Sacrament, Shrines, Ritual, and the rest, will be found present in a true religion and is no argument against the truth of that religion; or, there being no true religion, Priesthood began as a man-made cheat, like all the other functions of religion—since (by this theory)—all religion and all its attendant functions are wholly illusion.