This union of a changeless creed with an adaptive devotional system, of dogmatic authority with elasticity and play, and of unquestioning submission with the freest choice, has one obvious consequence. It renders the church unintelligible to the world, and to all professors of the world's many religions. A casual observer, looking on the Catholic system from without its pale, is at a loss to reconcile attributes which to him appear inconsistent. Why, he asks, should the church be so unswerving under one aspect, yet so pliant under another? If she will not yield one jot or tittle of doctrine, why allow so large an oscillation in forms of devotion? or, if she aims at accommodating and condescending in the latter, why remain inflexible in the former? He would perhaps add: The Catholic system has advantages over others in virtue of this her spirit of adaptation, so far as it reaches. But it is partial! The same economy and consultation for individual minds should extend into the sphere of its dogma; then the character of the church would be consistent, its response to the demands of the age would be satisfactory, and its triumph might be complete.
We are here only concerned with one side of this supposed theorist's difficulty. The answer is surely as follows:
1. On one hand, the church is objective, or what he would call unaccommodating in her teaching, because she is the guardian and depository of supernatural truth. All truth is objective, because it is the reflection of the mind of God, and the subject-matter of his revelation. Hence, in spite of the infidel's sarcasm that between Homoousion and Homoiousion there is but an iota, and an iota (he adds) that divides the Christian world, the church will neither add to nor take from the "form of sound words" committed to her by that one small letter. That jot, that tittle stands against the return and salvation of countless souls till they shall themselves erase it; for the question involved is nothing less than the fulness of the truth and revelation of God. Human statements in religion aim at a compromise; the church, like Job under trial, "still continues in her simplicity." They would avoid extremes; she is zealous for the full and explicit enunciation of the whole deposit of faith. Whatever portions of dogmatic teaching can still be retained, apart from the faith, are in constant process of disintegration and fusion: diminutae sunt veritates a filiis hominum. But, on the other hand, if there can be degrees and measures where all is essential truth, the church may be said to become more dogmatic, and so, if possible, more objective, as her life proceeds. This, it is plain, is a simple result from her office of perpetual teacher; it is the fulfilment of the primary commission,
She must expand her teachings to the needs of the day, and meet emergent heresies by fresh definitions. Hence, to take some salient points history presents to us, the objectivity of Homoousion against Arius, of Theotokos against Nestorius, of Filioque against the heresies of the East, of Transubstantiation against Luther and others, of the Immaculate Conception in our own day.
2. All this being so, and being one great ground of objection against the church, why is her system so subjective, all the while, in other departments? She seems to men to err as much on the other side by overcondescension and adaptation. We need not linger over such charges as that of Macaulay, who, following perhaps in the steps of the Provincial Letters, accuses certain theologians of accommodating even the moral law to retain men within the Catholic unity; as thinking, unless I misquote him, "that, if a man must needs be a libertine, that was no reason for his being a heretic besides." An impression less hurtful certainly, and less gratuitous, though equally false, pervades much that we find in other non-Catholic writers. The church seems to them to lay herself out in her devotional functions, to captivate the senses and the imagination. We might adduce a catena of passages to prove this impression of theirs, from controversialists assuming the fact and reasoning upon it, down to tourists recording their personal experiences of the Continent. A leading article in a prominent journal on some recent celebrations at Boulogne, and, with a deeper personal impression, the descriptions of newspaper correspondents on the late centenary and canonizations in Rome, contribute their quota to swell this great tradition or popular belief. The church, according to such theorists, is wide enough to compensate for the inflexibility of her dogma by pliancy, adaptation, and attractiveness in all besides. Like the old Roman tyrants, they would say, whose home and whose spirit she has inherited, she is prodigal to her subjects of the Panem et Circenses, that take off their attention from the thraldom in which they are held. There is a story of Bolingbroke being present at high Mass in the Chapel Royal, in Paris. Struck with the majesty of the function, he turns to a friend and whispers, "If I were king of France, I would allow no one to perform this but myself." The anecdote is no unfair sample of the popular impression made by Catholic ceremonies on those who misunderstand them, because they disbelieve the truths which they clothe. They are taken to be the result of a design and deliberation to arrest the imaginative faculty, and thus to maintain supremacy over the will. That the will owns the church's supremacy is a patent fact; the supposed captivity of the imagination through eye and ear is, to such thinkers, one chief rationale of it. She leads captive, they say, the intellect of her votaries, but she has the art to gild their chains by the richness and beauty of her ceremonial.
To consider this assertion for a moment. May we not advance the direct contrary? May it not be said that, if, apart from experience, we were to speculate on the probable ceremonies with which the church would surround the adorable sacrifice, and the solemn administration of her sacraments, our anticipations would outrun what she actually has decreed? Let us instance the ceremonies of the Mass. What is here that does more than carry, so to say, the great mystery round which they cluster? Give it as a problem to a political theorist, to a Bolingbroke, or to a minister of public worship, to invent and combine certain ceremonies, in order to express the highest act of a nation's worship. The function is to be one that shall symbolize such a belief as the Catholic belief in the adorable sacrifice. I think it may safely be said, the result produced would be something of more outward show, more complicated, and more arresting to the eye and the imagination, than is seen in the ceremonies of solemn high Mass.
To meet more broadly the assertion that the devotional system of the church is unduly subjective, that is, overpliant to the varieties of her children. She condescends, she adapts herself, she seems to mere spectators to be one great economy. We accept the charge, not in their sense. Why should the church not be so? The changelessness of the faith being first secured, her problem then is, the greatest devotion of the greatest number. "I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some." This is her mission: to attract souls, to win them, and to save them. She would not attract them, were she not beautiful; nor gather them in, were she not all-sided; nor save the mass of them, were she not elastic. There is no stiffness about the church, or she would not work with breadth and freedom. It is St. Peter's net, and is drawn, as the prophet says, "with cords of Adam." She is not antiquarian, or she would only affect the mind of each age as a venerable record or curious relic of the past. The church is not primitive, mediaeval, or modern; not Celtic, Teutonic, southern, classical, barbarian, Scythian, bond, or free, in any exclusive sense. She is simply Catholic; that one title interprets all. And being the church of the "great multitude which no man can number, of all nations, and languages, and peoples, and tongues," she authorizes their popular devotions by sanction and permission.