and seem less natural and more complicated than the Jewish theory of a divine unity and a personal human responsibility. But complexity and incomprehensibility are not proofs of falsity. Tertullian, indeed, in his great lyric cry of faith, would make them proofs of truth. Certum est quia impossibile est. And it may be conceded to Tertullian that in a universe of mystery all compact, the word of the enigma can scarcely be a platitude. But there is a limit to this comfortable canon. Impossibility can only continue a source of certitude so long as transcendental theological conceptions are concerned. But when, leaving the tenuous empyrean of metaphysics, the Impossible incarnates itself upon earth, it must stand or fall by our terrestrial tests of historic happening, and the canon should rather run: Providing it has really happened, its mere impossibility does not diminish its certitude. So that, per contra, if it never happened at all, its mere impossibility cannot guarantee it. Impossibility is a quality it shares with an infinite number of propositions, and if it wishes to single itself out from the crowd, it must seek extraneous witnesses to character. And if it fails in this quest, its impossibility will not save it. We may believe the unproved, but not the disproved. The true interpretation of the universe must be incomprehensible, my interpretation is incomprehensible, therefore my interpretation is true—what tyro in the logics will not at a leap recognise the fallacy of the undistributed middle? Yet on this basis rest innumerable volumes of apologetics.
Nay, Sir Thomas Browne himself fell into this “Vulgar Error.” “Methinks,” he cries, basing himself upon Tertullian, “there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith . . . I love to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my Reason to an O altitudo!” As if “O altitudo” is not pursuable by the simplest pagan, following the maze of Space and Time. The author of “Religio Medici” confesses that certain things in Genesis contradict Experience and History, but he adds: “Yet I do believe all this is true, which indeed, my Reason would persuade me to be false; and this I think is no vulgar part of Faith, to believe a thing not only above, but contrary to Reason and against the Arguments of our proper Senses.” Pardon me, esteemed Sir Thomas. It is precisely the vulgar part of Faith—Religio Populi! It is putting the disproved and disprovable on the same plane as the unproved and the unprovable, where alone the ecstasy of the O altitudo may be legitimately pursued.
The friction between the Bible and Science has grown raspier since Sir Thomas’s day, and by a new turn in human folly we are told that Science is bankrupt—with the implication that therefore the Bible is solvent. Poor old autocosms! They are both bankrupt, alas! Neither the ancient Bible nor the twentieth century Science can pay twenty shillings in the pound. Not that the Bible cannot meet its creditors honourably, nor that Science will not be permitted to go on dealing. The salvage from both is considerable. But neither can afford an autocosm in which the modern intellect can breathe and the modern soul aspire.
Nor was such work ever within the capacity of Science. She, the handmaid of religion, forgot her place when she aspired to the pulpit. And religion, with Time and Space and Love and Death for texts around her, stepped down from hers when she persisted in preaching from withered parchments of ambiguous tenor and uncertain authorship. What can be more pathetic than the joy of orthodoxy when the pick strikes some Old Testament tablet and it is discovered that there really was an Abraham or a Lot. As well might a neo-Pagan exult because the excavations in Crete prove that the Minotaur really existed—but as a fighting bull to which toreadors imported from conquered Athens sometimes fell victims. Not even Lot’s wife supplies sufficient salt to swallow Genesis with. The Old Testament autocosm is dead and buried—it cannot be dug up again by the Palestine Exploration Fund. It is no longer literally true, even in the Vatican, where, if I understand aright, only the miracles of the New Testament still preserve their authenticity.
“Things are what they are, and the consequences will be what they will be,” as the much-deluded Butler remarked. Wherefore, though you imagine yourself living in your autocosm, you are in truth inhabiting the macrocosm all the time and obnoxious to all its curious laws and inflexible realities. It is as if, playing cards in the smoking-room of a ship and fancying yourself at the club, you should be suddenly drowned. Only by living in the macrocosm itself can you avoid the stern surprises which await those who snuggle into autocosms. Hence the perils of the Catholic autocosm for its inhabitants. For in the real universe pestilences and earthquakes are not due to the wrath of God. The physical universe proceeds on its own lines, and the religious motives of the Crusaders did not prevent a Christian host from dying of the putrefying infidel corpses which it had manufactured so abundantly. Nor did heaven endorse the theory of the Children’s Crusade—that innocence could accomplish what was impossible for flawed manhood. The poor innocents perished like flies, or were sold into slavery. These things take their course as imperturbably as Halley’s comet, which refused to budge an inch even before the fulminations of Pope Callixtus III. Nor is the intermission of earthquakes or pestilence to be procured by the intercession of the saints or by the efficacy of their relics. A phial of the blood of Christ was carried about in Mantua during the plague of 1630, but there were not enough boats to carry away the corpses to the lakes. It was those marshes round Mantua that should have been drained. But it is in vain God thunders, “Thus and thus are My Laws. I am that I am.” Impious Faith answers, “Not so. Thou art that Thou art not.”
Pestilence—we know to-day—can be averted by closing the open cesspools and opening the sunless alleys of mediævalism; malaria can be minimised by minimising mosquitos, and earthquakes can be baffled by careful building after the fashion of Japan, which, being an earthquake country, behaves as such. After the Messina earthquake the Japanese Government sent two professors—one of seismology and the other of architecture—to study it and to compare it with the great Japanese earthquake of 1891, and they reported that although the Japanese shock was greater and the population affected more numerous, the number of Italian victims was four hundred and thirty times as great as the number of Japanese, and that “about 998 out of 1000 of the number killed in Messina must be regarded as having fallen victims to the seismologically bad construction of the houses.” But where reliance is placed on paternosters and penitence, how shall there be equal zeal for antiseptics or structural precautions? The censer tends to oust the fumigator, and the priest the man of action. “Too easily resigned and too blindly hopeful,” says the Messagero of Rome, commenting on the chaos that still reigns among the population of Messina.
“Trust in God and keep your powder dry” was the maxim of a Protestant. Cromwell but echoed the Psalmist, “Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight.” This is the spirit that makes the best of both cosms. The too trustful denizen of the Catholic autocosm with his damp powder and his flaccid fingers risks falling a prey to the first foe.
But the balance-sheet is not yet complete. For it may be better to live without sanitation or structural precaution and to die at forty of the plague or the earthquake, after years of belief in your saint or your star, than to live a century without God in a bleak universe of mechanical law. True, the believer has the fear of hell, but by a happy insanity it does not interfere with his joie de vivre. He has had, indeed, to pay dearly for the consolation and courage the Church has sold him—since we are at the balance-sheet let this be said too—and seeing how in the last analysis all this overwhelming ecclesiastic splendour has come out of the toil of the masses, I cannot help wondering whether the Church could not have done the thing cheaper. Were these glittering vestments and soaring columns so absolutely essential to the cult of the manger-born God?
But perhaps it was the People’s only chance of Magnificence. And after all the mediæval cathedrals were as much public assembly rooms as churches.
Dear wrinkled contadine whom I see prostrated in chapels before your therapeutic saints; dear gnarled facchini whose shoulders bow beneath the gentler burden of adoration; poor world-worn beings whom I watch genuflecting and sprinkling yourselves with the water of life, as the spacious hush and the roseate dimness of the great cathedral fall round you; and you, proud young Venetian housewife, whose baby was carried to baptism in a sort of cage, and who turned to me with that heavenly smile after the dipping and that rapturous cry, “Ora essa è una piccola Cristiana!”—and most of all you, heart-stricken mothers whose little ones have gone up to play with the Madonna’s bambino, think ye I would prick your autocosm with my quill or withdraw one single ray from the haloes of your guardian genii? Nay, I pray that in that foreign land of death to which we must all emigrate, ye may find more Christian consideration than meets the emigrants to England or America. May your Christ be waiting at the haven ready to protect you against the exactions of Charon, to rescue you from the crimps, and initiate you into the alien life. Only one thing I ask of you—do not, I pray you in return, burn up my autocosm—and me with it. And ye, gentlemen of the cassock and the tonsure, continue, unmolested by me, your processions and your pageants and your mystic operas and ballets, your drinking ceremonials and serviette-wipings; for, bland and fatherly as you seem, you are the fiercest incendiaries the world has ever known—the arson of rival autocosms your favourite virtue. And I am not of those who hold your power or passion extinct. Even in your ashes live your wonted fires, and I may yet see the pyres of Smithfield blaze as in the days of Mary. For to hold the keys of Heaven and Hell is as unsettling as any other form of monopoly. Human nature cannot stand it. And by every channel, apert or subterranean, you are creeping back to power, carrying through all your labyrinths that terrible torch of faith. Already relics have been borne in procession at Westminster. But perhaps I wrong you. Perhaps your very Inquisition will make some concession to science and the age, and electrocute instead of burning.