We dined alone, and I told Riley what Professor Langer had said. He said: "Most Protestants, whether they have any religion or not, attribute Protestant notions to the Catholic Church. What these people say shows to what extent the conception of Rome has been distorted by their being saturated with Protestant ideas. Mallock says somewhere that the Anglicans talk of the Catholic Church as if she were a lapsed Protestant sect, and they attack her for being false to what she has never professed. He says they don't see the real difference between the two Churches, which is not in this or that dogma, but in the authority on which all dogma rests. The Professors you quote take for granted that Catholics base their religion, as Protestants do, on the Bible solely, and judged from that point of view she seems to them superstitious and dishonest. But Catholics believe that Christ guaranteed infallibility to the Church in perpetuum: perpetual infallibility. Catholics discover this not at first from the Church as doctrine, but from records as trustworthy human documents, and they believe that the Church being perpetually infallible can only interpret the Bible in the right way. They believe she is guided in the interpretation of the Bible by the same Spirit which inspired the Bible. She teaches us more about the Bible. She says this is what the Bible teaches."
He said: "Mallock makes a further point. It is not only Protestant divines who talk like that. It is your advanced thinkers, men like Langer and his colleagues. They utterly disbelieve in the Protestant religion; they trust the Protestants in nothing else, but at the same time they take their word for it, without further inquiry, that Protestantism is more reasonable than Catholicism. If they have destroyed Protestantism they conclude they must have destroyed Catholicism a fortiori. With regard to Langer's geological friend, it doesn't make a pin's difference to a Catholic whether evolution or natural selection is true or false. Neither of these theories pretends to explain the origin of life. Catholics believe the origin of life is God." He had heard a priest say, not long ago: "A Catholic can believe in evolution, and in evolution before evolution, and in evolution before that, if he likes, but what he must believe is that God made the world and in it mind, and that at some definite moment the mind of man rebelled against God."
Monday, June 27th.
A. telephoned for me. I saw him this afternoon. His room was full of flowers. He will not be allowed to get up till the end of the week. As soon as he is allowed to go out the doctor says he ought to go away and get some sea air. There is no question of his going to Canada. The Housmans have asked him to go to Cornwall and he is going there as soon as he can. He asked me when I was going. I said at the end of the month, if that would be convenient to him.
Tuesday, June 28th.
Finished Renan's Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse. He says: "Je regrettais par moments de n'être pas protestant, afin de pouvoir être philosophe sans cesser d'être Chrétien. Puis je reconnaissais qu'il n'y a que les Catholiques qui soient conséquents." Riley's argument. Dined at the Club.
Wednesday, June 29th.
Dined with Hope at a restaurant in Soho. Quite a large gathering, with no one I knew. We had dinner in a private room. Two journalists—Hoxton, who writes in one of the Liberal newspapers, and Brice, who edits a weekly newspaper—had a heated argument about religion. Brice is and has always been an R.C. Hoxton's views seemed to me violent but undefined. He said, as far as I understood, that the Eastern Church was far nearer to early Christian tradition than the Western Church, and that by not defining things too narrowly and by not having an infallible Pope the Greeks had an inexpressible advantage over the Romans. Upon which someone else who was there said that the Greeks believed in the infallibility of the First Seven Councils; they believed their decisions to be as infallible as any papal utterance, and that dogma had been defined once and for all by the Councils. Brice said this was quite true, and while the Greeks had shut the door, the Catholic Church had left the door open. Besides which, he argued, what was the result of the action of the Greeks? Look at the Russian Church. As soon as it was separated it gave birth to another schism and that schism resulted in the rise of about a hundred religions, one of which had for one of its tenets that children should be strangled at their birth so as to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven without delay. That, said Brice, is the result of schism.
The other man said that there was no religion so completely under the control of the Government as the Russian. The Church was ultimately in the hands of gendarmes. Hoxton said that in spite of schisms, and in spite of anything the Government might do, the Eastern Church retained the early traditions of Christianity. Therefore, if an Englishman wanted to become a Catholic, it was absurd for him to become a Roman Catholic. He should first think of joining the Eastern Church and becoming a Greek Catholic. The other man, whose name I didn't catch, asked why, in that case, did Russian philosophers become Catholics and why did Solovieff, the Russian philosopher, talk of the pearl Christianity having unfortunately reached Russia smothered under the dust of Byzantium?
Brice said the Greek Church was schismatic and the Anglican Church was heretical and that was the end of the matter. Hoxton said: "My philosophy is quite as good as yours." Brice said it was a pity he could neither define nor explain his philosophy. Hope, who was bored by the whole argument, turned the conversation on to the Russian stage.