I must end upon a much graver note. What are we to say of that world in which a book like this has a sale which, however ephemeral, is at any rate enormous?
The question is one that my contemporaries do not seem to have put to themselves sufficiently. I mean, my Catholic contemporaries (for outside the Catholic Church very few people nowadays put any questions to themselves ultimately: they are content to drift and feel).
There has not, in my judgment, been nearly enough astonishment, alarm, or even aroused and curious interest in the vast social transformation of which we are the spectators.
Some of my contemporaries have criticized me with indignation when I have said that, outside the Catholic body, the last fragments of Catholic doctrine were rapidly dissolving before our eyes: yet surely the huge sales of such a book as this are proof enough that what I have said in this matter was true.
Within my own memory there remained of the Catholic scheme a most insufficient, but still solid, skeleton structure maintaining society in the English-speaking non-Catholic world. Within my own memory the Incarnation was commonly held by rich and poor in England and America, and very much of what the Incarnation implies was taken for granted in the structure of society. An attack upon that doctrine, stated in so many words, would have been violently offensive not forty years ago. As for a mere taking for granted that it was false, the books doing this were then thought eccentric. By a curious irony, the non-Catholic English-speaking world connected such blasphemy with the specifically Catholic cultures which were (in those days) alluded to as “Continental.”
Side by side with this fundamental doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity, which certainly such a brief time ago was the commonplace of all our society, it possessed sundry other essential dogmas of Catholic truth—the Personality of God, His omnipotence, His creation of all things, the Immortality of the Human Soul, and the dual destiny of mankind: the conviction that man by his own free will might lose the grace of God, and that if he lost it his eternal existence would be marred and deprived of the end for which it was created. In plain English, men believed in Heaven and Hell: particularly wicked men—upon whom such ideas have the most salutary effect. The whole range of emotions which arise from such doctrines as surely, and are as inseparable from them, as a scent from a flower or the emotions of landscape from the living eye, permeated society.
Not only were these doctrines retained with all their effect, but the chief Catholic social disciplines still had value. Property was still held to be a right, not a mere arrangement or a system. Its proper distribution was thought a good: its capture by a few, an evil: the Socialist attack on it as a principle, inhuman. The family was still the unit of the State. The control of the parent over the child was taken for granted and the action of the State, or of any other authority, was regarded as a delegation, and a perilous delegation at that. Marriage was normally regarded as indissoluble.
Behind all this remaining grasp of the last but most essential factors in the general scheme of Catholic society—all that by which men could still vaguely be called “Christians”—went the common-sense appreciation of the truth that Man was Man: that we could not deal with Man by experiment as a changeable being, that he was not a mere phase in process of passing, but a fixed type with a known nature.
Man was—within my own memory—even to the highbrow non-Catholic world, what he still is (I am glad to say) to the populace—the most certain, the most fixed, known thing in the world; for Man knows himself as he knows no other thing. Hence was there a security in the sense and application of justice; hence was there a powerful comprehension of the past. For it was rightly taken for granted that men had always acted upon much the same motives. Hence was there a hearty recognition of the human conscience (which every man discovers in himself), and a corresponding contempt for sentimental excuses of misconduct.
Not only was this true of the dogmas, the disciplines, and the social effect of such remains of the Catholic Church as survived in the non-Catholic English-speaking world about us; but it was true of the intellectual heritage. Plain logic was accepted. The reason was given its due place. Men did not move by suggestion or by repetition; they still examined; and the presentation to that older generation (which I and all my contemporaries can remember) of statements unproved, the confusion of scientific hypothesis with scientific fact, were ridiculed. They were less and less ridiculed, it is true, as the nineteenth century drew to its close. Confusion of thought became more prevalent, and the swallowing whole of the last unproved and improbable affirmation in Biology, Pre-history, or Textual Criticism was already growing to be a habit. But the habit was not yet universal.