Few things are more remarkable in the tone and character of modern Catholic writers than the small amount of use they make of Scripture: so strangely in contrast with the old writers, and with even the great French spiritual authors of a century and a half ago. Their pages are rich with Scriptural lore. Their style is a constant recognition of the government and designs of God as shown to us in our past and present, and as we are bound to anticipate them in the future. In our time this has given place to emotional devotion; a most excellent thing in its way, but only likely to have much influence over our lives when it is grounded on solid theology and directed by real knowledge. No doubt it is so in the minds of the authors themselves; but we fear it is rare in those of their ordinary readers, who thus drink the froth off the wine, but are not benefited by the strengthening properties of the generous liquid itself. Nor will they be until they have made up their minds to believe and understand that conversion is not an isolated fact in their lives, but a progressive act involving all the intellect, all the faculties, be they great or small (for each one must be full up to his capacity), and all the heart, mind, and soul. The whole man must work and be worked upon in harmony; and we must remember that it is work, and not merely feeling, consolation, emotion, prettiness, and ornament, but an intellectual growth, going on pari passu with a spiritual growth, until the whole vessel is fitted and prepared for the glory of God.
We think we may venture to say that few things will conduce more to this than the study of the divine Scriptures under the light and teaching of the Catholic Church. In them we find a profound revelation of the character of God. We are, as we read them interpreted to us by the lamp of the sanctuary, let down into awful depths of the divine Eternal Mind. We watch the whole world and all creation working up for the supreme moment of the birth of Jesus; while in the life of our Blessed Lord himself we find, condensed into those wonderful thirty-three years, the whole system of the church—the spiritual fabric which is to fill eternity, the one God-revealing system which is finally to supersede all others.
Unhappily many persons are under the delusion that narrowness and ignorance are the same as Christian simplicity, and that innocence means ignorance of everything else, as well as of evil. These are the people who are afraid to look facts in the face, and to read them off as part of the God-directed history of the world. These are they to whom science is a bugbear. They hug their ignorance as being their great safeguard, and wear blinkers lest they should be startled by the events which cross their path. Grown men and women do it for themselves and attempt it for their children, and meanwhile those to whom we ought to be superior are rushing on with headlong daring, carrying intellectual eminence, and originality, and investigation of science, all before them; while we, who should be clad in the panoply of the faith, and afraid of nothing, are putting out the candles and shading the lamps, that we may idly enjoy a shadow too dense for real work.
And yet is not the earth ours? Is not all that exists our heritage? To whom does anything belong if not to us, the sons of the church, the sole possessors of infallible truth, the only invulnerable ones, the only ever-enduring and ever-increasing children of the light? The past is ours; the present should be ours; the future is all our own. Our triumph may be slow (and it is slower because we are cowards), but it is certain. Are we not tenfold the children of the covenant, the sons of the Father’s house, the heirs of all? We alone are in possession of what all science and art must ultimately fall back upon and harmonize with. There is no success possible but what is obtained, and shall in the future be obtained, in union with the church of God. Have we forgotten, are we ever for a moment permitted to forget, that the church of God is not an accident, nor a cunningly-devised, tolerably able, partially infirm organization, but that she is the spouse of the God-Man, the one revelation of God, perfect and entire, though but gradually given forth; that all the harmonies of science are fragments of the harmony of God himself, of his pure being, of the Qui Est; and that the harmony of the arts is simply the human expression of the harmony of the Logos, the human utterances of the articulations of the divine Word, as they come to us in our far-off life-like echoes from eternity?
Even the great false religions of the past, and of the present in the remote East, are but man’s discord breaking the harmony of truth while retaining the key-note: the immortality of the soul and the perfection of a future state in the deep thoughts of Egypt, the universality of God’s providential government of the world in Greek mythology, the union of the soul with God in Brahminism, and the One God of Mahometanism. Each has its kernel of truth, its ideal nucleus of supernatural belief, which it had caught from the great harmony of God in broken fragments, and enshrined in mystic signs. Even now, as we look back upon them all, we are bound to confess that they stand on a totally different ground from the multitudinous sects of our day, which break off from the one body of the church and drift off into negation or Protestantism. Far be it from us to insinuate that any, the lowest form of Christianity, the weakest utterance of the dear name of Jesus, is not ten thousand fold better than the most abstruse of the old Indian or Egyptian religions. Wherever the name of Jesus is uttered, no matter how imperfectly, there is more hope of light and of salvation than in the deepest symbols of heathen or pagan creeds. It may be but one ray of light, but still it is light—the real warming, invigorating light of the sun, and not the cold and deleterious light of the beautiful moon, who has poisoned what she has borrowed.[281] Nevertheless, and maintaining this with all the energy of which we are capable, it is still true that each one of the great false religions, which at various times and in divers places have swayed mankind, was rather the overgrowth of error on a substantial truth than the breaking up of truth into fragmentary and illogical negation, which is the characteristic of all forms of secession from the Catholic unity of the church. The modern aberrations from the faith are a mere jangle of sounds, while the old creeds were the petrifaction of truth. The modern forms of faith outside the church are a negation of truth rather than a distortion. Consequently, they are for ever drifting and taking Protean shapes that defy classification.
They have broken up into a hundred forms; they will break up into a thousand more, till the whole fabric has crumbled into dust. They have none of the strong hold on human nature which the old religions had, because they are not the embodiment of a sacred mystery, but rather the explaining away of all mystery. They are a perpetual drifting detritus, without coherence as without consistency; and as they slip down the slant of time, they fall into the abyss of oblivion, and will leave not a trace behind, only in so far that, vanishing from sight, they make way for the fuller establishment of the truth—the eternal, the divine, spherical truth, absolute in its cohesion and perfect in all its parts.
The hold which heathen and pagan creeds have had upon mankind conveys a lesson to ourselves which superficial thinkers are apt to overlook. It is certain they could not have held whole nations beneath their influence had not each in its turn been an embodiment of some essential truth which, though expressed through error, remains in itself essentially a part of truth. They snatched at fragments of the natural law which governs the universe, or they embodied in present expression the inalienable hopes of mankind. They took the world of nature as the utterance neither of a passing nor of an inexorable law, but of an inscrutable Being, and believed that the mystical underlies the natural. Untaught by the sweet revelations of Christianity, their religion could assume no aspect but one of terror, silent dread, and deep horror. Their only escape from this result was in the deterioration that necessarily follows the popularization of all abstract ideas, unless protected by a system at once consistent and elastic, like that which is exhibited in the discipline of the Catholic Church. They wearied of the rarefied atmosphere of unexplained mystery. They wanted the tangible and evident in its place. Like the Israelites, they lusted after the flesh-pots of Egypt; and their lower nature and evil passions rebelled against the moral loftiness of abstract truth. The multitude could not be kept up to the mark, and needed coarser food. The result was inevitable. But as all religion involves mystery, instead of working upward through the natural law to the spiritual and divine law, they inverted the process, and grovelled down below the natural law, with its sacramentalistic character, to the preternatural and diabolic. Mystery was retained, but only in the profanation of themselves and of natural laws, until they had passed outside all nature, and, making a hideous travesty of humanity, had become more vile and hateful than the devils they served.
Thus the Romans vulgarized the Greek mythology; and that which had remained during a long period as a beautiful though purely human expression of a divine mystery, among a people whose religion consisted mainly in the worship of the beautiful, and who themselves transcended all that humanity has ever since beheld in their own personal perfection of beauty, became, when it passed through the coarser hands of the Romans, a degenerate vulgarity, which infected their whole existence, in art and in manners, quite as effectually as in religion. Then Rome flung open her gates to all the creeds of all the world, and the time-honored embodiments of fragmentary but intrinsic truth met together, and were all equally tolerated and equally degenerated. All!—except the one whole and perfect truth: the Gospel of Salvation. That was never tolerated. That alone could not be endured, because the instinct of evil foresaw its own impending ruin in the Gospel of peace.
It was a new thing for mankind to be told that a part of the essence of religion was elevated morality and the destruction of sin in the individual. Whatever comparative purity of life had co-existed with the old religions was hardly due to their influence among the multitude, though it might be so with those whose educated superiority enabled them to reason out the morality of creeds. While the rare philosopher was reading the inmost secret of the abstract idea on which the religion of his country was based, and the common pagan was practising the most degraded sorcery and peering into obscene mysteries, without a single elevation of thought, suddenly the life of the God-Man was put before the world, and the whole face of creation was gradually changed.
But as the shadows of the past in the old religions led up to the light, so shall the light of the present lead up to the “perfect day.”