"Indeed, yes," said Adelaide. "Our great regret is that we have not faith. The system which you propose is beautiful in all its bearings. It is our torment to feel that all that is beautiful in poetry or in art, nay, even in ethics, belongs to Catholicity, yet we do not belong to it. A hall of sculpture representing the Catholic ideal, as the figures of the duke's pantheon represent the pagan myth, would form the most sublime elucidation of the high triumphs of soul over self that could be imagined. There is no act of heroism, mental, moral, or physical, that would not find a representative in some authenticated historic personage. From martyrdom endured to maintain the truth of alleged facts, to voluntary poverty chosen as the best preservative of the disposition to receive and maintain truth, there is a regular chain of virtue personified. There is a reality about Catholicity (in books at least) which we find nowhere else."
"Where is your difficulty, seeing that you admit all this?"
"I can hardly explain it, yet it seems to shape itself thus: Why, if men are so blessed with a divine religion, is the world so bad? History gives us saints, sublime ones, who make our very souls thrill with the recital of their unselfish spirt, exemplified in act; but, on the other hand, the same history tells us of multitudes of bad men for one good one. The men who attempted to poison St. Benedict, were monks, men who had renounced all for Christ; and the multitudes were Catholic up to the fifteenth century, yet what fearful struggles for power, and indulgence of luxury in high places, and of crime among all, high and low! Most of the saints were reformers, combating with their fellow-Catholics for virtue; and now, are all Catholics unselfish, unworldly?"
"It seems," said Hester, "that a very definite amount of good has been achieved by Christianity, in giving an impetus to the spirit of the masses to claim intellectual rights by the recognition of man's spiritual equality before God; and to strip off illegitimate uses of power from the sense of justice thus evolved. It has also placed our sex on a footing permitted by no other religion—this is much, very much; but here it seems to stop, and these are but indirect results. Religion professes to inculcate higher motives than the improvement of earthly position, desirable as this may be. Men are now selfish in their avowed principle, and this, I think, must ultimately destroy all that has been achieved. Self-gratification as a motive, and the only motive recognized, must lead back to want of discipline, and from that the step to barbarism is easy. Only under the Christian dispensation has labor been honored; in all other civilizations, slaves, captives of the sword and spear, have performed by compulsion the work of tilling the soil and so forth; and yet men now seek to avoid labor, the real labor of producing, as if they still thought it fit for slaves only; any other kind of occupation is preferred, as more noble. If this is the result of eighteen hundred years of Christian teaching, I own it puzzles me. Where are the direct results of unselfishness and of corporal sacrifice for the attainment of spiritual good, that books teach us to expect?"
"These are very painful facts," said the abbé, "which distress the heart of many a Catholic priest; but with reference to their influence on faith, I think a little reflection will explain most of the phenomena without prejudice to such souls as are earnestly seeking truth. We must remember that there was a time when whole nations suddenly assumed the name of Christians under the influence of the ruling powers. The majority of these people were not only ignorant, but many did not care to learn high spiritual truths; the conversion was necessarily partial, even that which was genuine. But because all divine truth is positive and co-relative to natural truth, some degree of enlightenment followed even in the natural order; and worldly minds, who had no affinity for spiritual revelations laid hold, notwithstanding this, of the types that presented spiritual truths, and, finding they bore an earthly signification also (as all real enlightenment does, the body being the mate for the soul), they seized on the lower meaning, and hence the civilization of that ilk. This is not wrong, but it is defective; as far as it is moral, it is the material expression of a spiritual idea; but it does not touch the first step of the ladder by which we rise to God—it is the lesser influence of a principle comprehending affinities of an infinitely higher character."
"But this does not explain the corruption in high places."
"Power and greatness and wealth do not confer spirituality; no, nor does intellect. When the church grew wealthy and powerful, many a wolf entered in sheep's clothing for the sake of the perquisites. The miracle is that the church survived such destructive influences, not that she suffered by them."
"And the more immediate trouble with the present conduct of Catholics?"
"May be referred to similar causes. They inherit their religion without giving its real conditions a thought; to this may be added the fact that, for the last three hundred years, the attention of immense numbers has been directed to polemics instead of to the requirements of religion. There have been so many disputes about which is the true faith, that practically faith has been assumed to mean 'holding a correct intellectual creed.' Now, without derogating, in the least degree, from the importance of holding the right faith, even in this light, it is certain that these controversies have drawn the soul from that more serious business to which a right intellectual creed is but the first step, though an important, a very important one. The object of religion is, the union of the soul to the will of God. This is an individual matter, one which cannot be laid hold of en masse, but must be personally brought home to every individual. To effect this, there must be;
1. Desire of good—real, earnest, sincere.
2. Prayer for good, arising from the firm conviction that in God only resides all good—from him only all good can come.
3. Co-operation in act, including not only correct moral action, but a constant endeavor to instruct ourselves, more and more, in divine lore, with an earnest zeal of rising continually in spiritual life.