Between the forms of attack on, or resistance to, the Faith which are
retiring exhausted--Survivals--and new forms not yet fully developed but
only beginning to appear--New Arrivals--stand, at any one moment in
history, the Main Opponents of the day.

This Main Opposition of the moment has, as I pointed out on an earlier
page, varied astonishingly in character from one age to another; so much so
that we find it hard to realize what that world must have been like in
which the terrifying conqueror of Christians was the Mahommedan, or in
which, some centuries later, an enthusiasm for general damnation and for a
Moloch-God led to so intense an offensive against the Catholic Church
because she defended beauty and joy. These Main Oppositions in the past
have all arisen as New Arrivals, all passed at last through the state of
becoming Survivals and on to a later stage of oblivion. But each in its
moment was supreme.

The Main Opposition of any movement is characterized by its confidence. It
doubts not of its victory, for it takes its truth for granted and therefore
its strength. The Survivals are conscious of defeat, the New Arrivals are
still timid, but the Main Opposition is hearty in attack. It feels its own
success to be part of the nature of things, and, to the certitude of the
Catholic (which is Faith) it opposes an equal counter-certitude often so
fixed and habitual that it is hardly aware of its own limited character.

Thus in the old days when the Bible Christian was a Main Opponent he
produced his creed and its conclusions with a simplicity born of complete
confidence, "Your Confessional is an absurd and degrading excrescence. It
is a fraud--for I find no Confessional boxes in my family Bible. Your
doctrine of Purgatory and of an applicable fund of merit is nonsense. It is
not in my family Bible: to support it you have had to drag in Maccabees:
which I see is not in my Pukka Bible but only part of my Apocrypha." It was
no good telling him that we didn't accept his premises; that we did not
admit the authority of a literally interpreted text of his own choosing. He
did not believe us. He thought it impossible that to any man this Bible of
his, as read by himself, should not be the final Court of Appeal. Today
that attitude looks comic. But it was no more comic in the time of its
power than Nationalism is comic today.

We saw the same thing with Scientific Negation in the hour of its greatest
strength. It was quite unquestionable to it that Metric Truth alone was
true. It was the same thing with the old dead Deism in its day and with
that older Protestant doctrine the Divine Right of Kings. It was the same
thing with reference of all things to an imaginary Primitive Church.

This test of confidence in success applies today to those great forces
which between them make up the Main Opposition of our time. There are
three: Nationalism, Anti-Clericalism and what I will call (for so it calls
itself) the "Modern Mind." It is these three, singly or in combination,
which occupy the energies of Catholicism today in its battle for
continuance and triumph.

It is to be remarked that none of these three is a doctrinal opponent--no,
not even anti-clericalism. None of them prepares in set terms--as did the
Materialist, the Scientific Monist, the Anti-Catholic Historian--a thesis
which clashes with the Thesis of the Catholic Church. None of them has a
direct preoccupation with her dogma. The mark of today's Main Opposition,
differentiating it from nearly all the perils of our Christian past, is
that it propounds no explicit heresy. Its conflict with the Faith is a
conflict of mood; it is a conflict following on a certain mentality, not on
any body of propositions. In the case of all the old heresies a definite
series of propositions came at the origin of the affair; a conflict of
moods followed. An anti-Catholic habit of mind was produced, with all its
consequences in a myriad social customs and in all the atmosphere of a
society, but at the root lay perfectly clear doctrinal postulates which
could be discussed in the abstract and accepted or denied without reference
to their possible indirect effects.

We all know what Calvinism is in the concrete, what is meant by a Puritan
tradition in any society, and we instinctively reject it with disgust as we
reject a repellent taste or smell. But the doctrines of Calvinism were not
vague ideas slowly distilled from such a society in long process of years.
They were formulated before the concrete Puritan came into existence and
they were the cause of him. They were laid down in black and white--the
denial of Free-will, the consequent valuelessness of works, the foundation
of Church government in popular election, the denial of sacerdotal powers,
the contempt for holy poverty and the laudable pursuit of wealth, etc.

With each section of the Main Opposition today it is the other way about.
You may by prolonged analysis extract from its moods its ultimate
principles, but the moods do not start from those principles. Their victims
are not conscious of any such principles. When presented with them, they
will often, and honestly, deny them to be held.

The Main Opposition to Catholicism in our time, then, is not of like kind
with ourselves. We need it as an obstacle rather than as enemy fire. It is
not an armed body, recognizable by its uniform and having for its direct
object our destruction. It is rather a difficulty of terrain. It is a
number of mental states, affections, policies, ignorances under which
Catholicism is indirectly menaced, or stifled, or deflected or weakened in
its action on human society.

Even Anti-Clericalism is not a doctrinal attack. It is a political thing
and does not of itself challenge any dogma. It professes--and in such of
its adherents as are sincere, sincerely professes--to do no more than
delimit the line beyond which the Catholic hierarchy exceeds its functions
and invades a civil field where it has no right to act.

So with Nationalism. The ardent patriot does not challenge any doctrine of
the Church, nor, qua patriot, feel opposed to Her. On the contrary, when
the Faith is the national religion--particularly of an opposed nationality-
-it is most ardently supported and even treated sometimes as a test of
civic devotion. While as for the poor "Modern Mind," though anti-Catholic
in essence, it has not the intellectual power to frame the simplest creed.
It does but meander on, often quite ignorant of the Church's whereabouts,
and when it blunders into us its first feelings are a mixture of grievance
at our having bumped it and of apology for having got in the way.

Individuals attached to one or more of these three moods, Nationalism,
Anti-Clericalism and the Modern Mind, are often led into direct and
personal hatred of the Catholic Church because that organization has
clashed with the object of their devotion. Such often end with a special
preoccupation of hatred which takes the place of their older allegiance,
and they become more concerned with the destruction of Catholicism than
with the preservation of their country or the defense of lay rights or
their delight in that repose of not-thinking, which is the Modern Mind's
especial lure and value for weary man. But the three moods themselves are
not specifically and consciously anti-Catholic; they are not so by
definition nor to their own knowledge. They appear so only indirectly and
usually by reaction against Catholic effort or advance. Lastly let it be
noted that our Main Opposition today powerfully affects Catholics
themselves. Coloring all our time, it cannot but tinge the Catholic body
therein present.

It has always been so. If in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when
that doctrine of devotion to one's Prince (now forgotten) was of the Main
Opposition, you challenged a Catholic and said, "Yes or No--Do you
repudiate your sovereign's authority because it is in such and such a point
opposed to the Church?" that man, though holy and even zealous, would shift
uneasily. He was often at a loss to reply. He would do all in his power to
reconcile the two opposing powers of Crown and Church. Prelates as
admirable as Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, soldiers as admirable as
Bayard, the noblest Catholic knight of his time,5 came down on the wrong
side of the hedge. So also Jansenism, though working within the Church, was
a wave from the mighty tide set flowing by the dark genius of Calvin.

This affecting of Catholics today by the spirits of Nationalism, yes, and
of Anti-Clericalism itself, even (to their shame!) by something so much
beneath their level as the "Modern Mind," I shall deal with under each of
these heads. It is a principal cause of weakness in our position throughout
the world.
 

(i) Nationalism

I take first of the three elements in our modern Main Opposition--
Nationalism.

I do so because it is common to the Catholic and Protestant cultures, is
everywhere apparent, and can everywhere be understood. Further, I take it
first because of the three it is--as yet--the least overtly at issue with
the Faith. Finally, I take it first because it will probably, at long last,
be the first to yield. AntiClericalism will fight fiercely in all the
coming battles, and is so much a necessary by-product of Catholic society
that the more the Faith grows, the stronger grows this peril. As for the
"Modern Mind," nothing can deal with it but dissolution. It is like a huge
heap of mud which can only be got rid of by slow washing away. It will be
the last of the three to remain as a Survival.

But Nationalism, in the sense in which I use the term here the intense
Nationalism of our day, though it has yet some margin for increase, cannot
maintain its present energies for more than a couple of lifetimes at the
most, and probably hardly for so long.

This Nationalism is an exaggerated and extreme mood from which all the
white world suffers today.

It has all the marks of a religion. Not of a full religion in the sense of
a creed accompanied by a ritual and a developed ethical doctrine; but of a
religion in the aesthetic sense: in the sense of that which in a religion
exalts the emotions, prompts to sacrifice, ensures enthusiastic support: of
a religion in the sense of devotion to an object of worship--worship
passionate to the point of men's sacrificing all they have, all else they
love, and life itself, without question, to the thing adored.

In this it is that conflict exists potentially, always and everywhere,
between Nationalism and the Catholic Church. In this it is that conflict
has already arisen, and may in the near future arise much more strongly.

For there is no room for two religions in any man's mind. Of any two
loyalties one must take precedence over the other. And religion--that is,
the recognition of the ultimate reality, the adoration of that for which
everything else must be sacrificed--is a mood of affection such that it
will bear no equal rival.

There can be no doubt that today Nationalism has acquired this strength of
a religion, and of a religion which, in the minds of nearly all men,
rivals, and in the minds of perhaps most men, quite eclipses, the religion
called Catholic.

But before we go further it is important to define exactly in what sense we
are using our words and what exactly is this "Nationalism" which is today
so different from anything Christendom has known in the past, and why it is
part of what today most vitally opposes the religion of our race.

There is here an ambiguity into which it is easy to fall, and which one
must beware of. Patriotism has always existed, and always will, so long as
men are bound in societies. One may feel that emotion of loyalty towards a
tribe or a town, a tiny district, a feudal group and lord, a large nation
or a whole vast culture; but it is always present, and always must be
present. For if it were not, society could not hold together. Now, men must
live in society; and therefore by every law of man's nature (that of self-
preservation, that of the organ arising to supply the need, etc.), devotion
to what the Greeks call "the City" must be present.

One may go much further and say that in sound morals, patriotism must not
only be present in every society, but should be strong; because the absence
of it is inhuman and unnatural, and even the weakness of it a degradation
to the individual: a dereliction in the duty which he owes to himself and
to that which made him--for we are the products each of his own country.

But the essence of Nationalism, in its present form as a menace to
religion, lies in this: that the nation is made an end in itself: When that
mood appears, there is present, in the strictly technical sense of the
word, Heresy: there is present false doctrine, and all the dangers of
spreading and ramifying evil which spring from false doctrine as from one
poisonous seed.

Now, this making of the nation an end in itself is a heresy rampant
throughout our European culture and its plantations overseas in the New
World. It has all that flaming enthusiasm which marks the spring of such
upheavals. It is as violently alive as was Islam in its first charge, or
the fury of the early Reformation. Only, men are so used to it that they do
not perceive its enormity.

Let us take a few tests and judge by them the quality of the thing.

Here is one. Modern men boast that they do not persecute opinion. That is,
they do not seek out mere expression of opinion and punish it when it
disagrees with the official opinion. They make that boast in connection
especially with varieties of transcendental doctrine. The boast is vain.
Because they do not punish an opinion which operates to the denial or
perversion of our ancestral religion. They proceed to the unreasonable and
untenable idea of Universal Toleration and assure you that they chastise no
expression of thought--let alone silence it. Which is as much as to say
that they hold nothing sacred.

They malign themselves. Men still have the idea of sanctity, though
misplaced. And here is a test.

Go to a public park on two successive Sundays. On the first, stand upon a
chair and declaim at length against the discipline of religion. Ridicule
the doctrine of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the right of a Christian
society to enforce the practice of Christian ritual. Nothing will happen to
you.

On the second Sunday get up on a chair and declaim at equal length and with
equal zeal against the country and its conduct in the late war. Praise
enthusiastically some more specially unpopular foreigners--enemies for
choice--laugh at the heroism of the troops, call them cowards and go on to
denounce with vigor the obedience rendered to their officers and soldiers
and sailors. A great number of things will happen to you. Even after the
police have rescued you from the hands of the mob, the State will proceed
to deal with you in a fashion which will enlighten you for good upon the
limits of toleration.

Again, when the nation is in active peril, as in time of a really dangerous
war, men who lessen the power of national resistance by denouncing the war,
however rationally, are severely punished. That is quite right. But if
there be any doubt as to which of the two religions is predominant, we have
but to note the complete immunity of those who similarly denounce Christian
effort as evil and who support its opponents.

The distinction is apparent in many other ways. Thus, when men have lost
faith, they are never weary of denouncing the frauds which may arise from
zeal in religion. They are particularly insistent upon the stark necessity
for exact and invariable truth on all occasions. They never weary of
denouncing the Casuists who have examined on what rare occasions it may be
possible to conceal the truth without sin. But let a modern nation be at
war, and the most honorable of men will stoop unhesitatingly to the most
flagrant falsehoods in the pursuit of what is called "propaganda." Under
the effect of Nationalism a chivalric and sensitive man will tell any lie
or assume any disguise. He will act in the capacity of a spy; he will lure
the enemy's agents to their death; he will disseminate the most enormous
myths upon enemy actions--and all this without suffering a sense of
dishonor.

This novel religion of Nationalism, this making of the nation an end in
itself, has had among other lamentable results the splitting up of our
common cultural tradition, our general quality as Europeans, into a number
of isolated fragments which do not lament their division as an accident to
be remedied, but glory in it as a thing to be increased by all means in
their power.

The situation is grotesque to any man with a sense, or even a mere
knowledge, of the past. It is tragic--a sort of murder of Christendom. Our
various tongues are not bridged as they once were by a common use of Latin.
And the divisions between them are not a negative force. Their divergence
is actively emphasized by every device. The national language is imposed by
force upon minorities. In the same spirit transport and commerce are
everywhere impeded by frontier walls. An army of men are lost to
production, and wasted in checking and taking toll of all movements between
State and State in what once was Christendom; and (perhaps the worst effect
of all) that very conception of Christendom--upon which the continuance of
our civilization depends--is effaced. Your politician, when he talks in
terms of nations, thinks of Japan as he would of Italy--one rigid unit in
an uncoordinated mechanical jumble of separate isolated peoples.

But how (it may be asked) does all this come into conflict with
Catholicism? That it is inimical to the general culture which Europe has
inherited from the Catholic Church, is obvious. But that is an effect only
indirectly hostile to the Faith. Where can direct hostility come in?

There are two main ways in which such a conflict is developed, or perhaps
(by a sub-division of the second way) three.

First, it interferes with the universality of Catholicism.

Secondly, it lends to national ends functions which are essentially
religious, such as the teaching of morals, the presentation of true history
and geography (a department of morals), the choice of literature and above
all the general education of the young. In this last department, the
general education of the young, the conflict is so serious that, as I have
said, the thing might properly be made a separate third example of the
conflict between Nationalism and the Church.

In the first of these, the interference of Nationalism with Catholic
Universality, the evil is not clearly apparent upon the surface.

The nations have for the most part hesitated to thrust their divisions into
the framework of the Church.

It is true that each nation has a national clergy and hierarchy--a
principle not too Catholic--and also that each exercises some slight
pressure--greater in societies of Catholic culture than of Protestant--upon
the appointment of the church's ministry--particularly of bishops. It is
also true that in the relations of each nation to foreign Catholic
religions--that is, monks and nuns--in its midst there still remains a good
deal of give and take. Even during the war there was some measure of
exception made for the universal, or (as it was called) the "international"
quality of the Church. It is also true that Nationalism has, as yet,
produced no formidable schism; as yet no excess of national feeling has
broken the discipline of unity within the official body of the Church, and
it may even be fairly surmised that Nationalism will never be strong
enough--in our time--to create a situation so disastrous. For we have had
before our eyes during now so many generations, such a lesson in what
follows upon the loss of unity, that the most enthusiastic of Catholic
Nationalists fight shy of establishing new independent national Churches.
But it remains true that Nationalism has divided the Church today into very
sharply defined regions. For instance, one can point to territories which
changed hands after the last war, and in which, as a result, the local
hierarchy was at once changed, as though it were a part of national
officialdom. Yet, I repeat, on the surface the evil of excessive
Nationalism as affecting the universality of the Church has not strikingly
appeared. Its effects have been slight--so far.

In the second department, that of letters and of the official attitude
towards history and geography, contemporary and of the past, and especially
the education of the young, it is another matter. There the effect of
Nationalism comes in very strongly indeed, and there are already districts
in which a clash between it and the very minimum required by the Faith has
taken place.

Nationalism has, among other evils, bred that of a powerful bureaucracy in
each state: a rigid centralization, and a deplorable uniformity within each
frontier exactly corresponding to the violent contrast between either side
of that frontier.

The worship of the nation has been able to make men tolerate under its
authority what they could never have tolerated from princes: a submission
to rule, which, through sumptuary laws on food and drink, through
conscription, through a cast-iron system of compulsory instruction for all
on State-ordered lines, and through a State examination at the gate of
every profession, has almost killed the citizen's power to react upon that
which controls him, and has almost destroyed that variety which is the mark
of life.

In the field of compulsory state instruction especially has Nationalism
come in conflict with Catholicism.

The phenomenon can be studied with greater clearness in a nation of
Catholic culture than in a nation of non-Catholic. Thus in England the
Protestantism which has been the homogeneous culture of the nation for over
two hundred years so permeates the national literature, history and
attitude towards all political problems, that it has become difficult to
distinguish it from citizenship. I have seen historical textbooks which are
little more than anti-Catholic propaganda--the late Mr. Bright's, for
instance, and Mr. Trevelyan's--used currently in Catholic schools. The
national Protestant legend is paramount. In Italy and France it is not so.
There is there a very clear-cut distinction between the tendency which
subordinates all education towards a national ideal and that which puts the
religious ideal first. There is not only a distinction--there is conflict.

This religion of Nationalism is supplemented by the character of modern
governments, and we discover that, throughout Europe, governments (whether
Parliamentary, and therefore oligarchic and plutocratic, as in France and
England, or monarchical, and therefore popular, as in Poland, Spain and
Italy) are either anti-Catholic at the worst, or, when they are sympathetic
with the Church, quite external to Her and capable on any occasion of
hostility.

Now, these governments--or those behind them who speak through them--have
the executive in their hands: the police and the courts of law.

It is therefore essential in any study of the political circumstance in
which the Church stands today to admit a consideration of the attitude of
the various governments towards it.

We have all observed since the War the effect produced by the releasing of
some Catholic peoples, notably the Poles and the Irish, and the increase of
power in others--notably Italy. On that side the Church has been greatly
strengthened. But governments are not the same things as peoples.
Governments are, under a dictatorship, the instruments of popular feeling,
and even in Parliamentary countries they are, though really the servants of
the wealthy, nominally the spokesmen of the populace, however weak their
title to such spokesmanship may be. But in neither case are they the
people. And however Catholic a people, it will hardly, today, have a
Catholic government.

Further, the strength of governments is still considerable. It is no longer
as great as the strength of finance, and it is more efficacious in one
country than in another. For instance, government is far stronger and of
more effect on the national fate in Italy than in France, for the Italians
admire and support their highly personal form of government, and obey it.
The French despise their Parliamentarians, and obey them as little as
possible. But everywhere government makes a great difference, and the
attitude of government, for or against the Catholic Church, is of first-
class political moment.

To a great many people the mere suggestion that a modern government may be
"for" or "against" the Catholic Church sounds nonsense. The forms of modern
government mask its character, and the fashion of our day is in favor of a
pretended neutrality in the matter of religion. Moreover, it is perfectly
true that (until the fashion changes) you will have neither overt
persecution of the Church nor, for that matter, overt establishment of it.
Thus, the Masonic Government at Prague, in its most anti-Catholic moment,
strongly supported an attempted schism within the body of the Church in
Bohemia, but it dared not, in its desire to conform with its own "liberal"
formula, actually attack the Church as such; it could not forbid her
services or the practice of the Faithful. The only government so to act has
been that of Mexico; and even there some sort of pretext was advanced, not
religious, but political. On the other hand, Poland, as we have seen, when
upon the point of declaring Catholicism the established religion of the
country, also felt the influence of our current irreligious conventions,
avoided the issue, and did not confirm that establishment.

But though there is no overt declaration of hostility, the governments of
the world can nonetheless be classed as upon the whole opposed to the
influence of the Catholic Church. This character can be seen more in their
indirect effects than in any other fashion. The hostility is hardly ever,
save in such extreme cases as Mexico, to be discovered in the active
suppression of the Faith. It is to be seen in the discountenancing of
Catholic immigration, in the spirit wherewith educational laws are
administered and even in the diplomatic treatment of foreign nations. Thus
there is no doubt that the political sympathy in England and America with
Prussia after the war, the saving at Versailles by the English and American
delegates of the unnatural rule of Prussia over the Catholic West of
Germany, the dismemberment of Austria, the denial to the Hungarians of
their natural prince--all these were the products of religious sympathy and
antipathy. The outcry against the occupation of the Ruhr and against the
establishment of a Rhenish state were other examples.

But that point in the world where you see the thing under the strongest
light is Paris. It is the attitude of a French Government towards the
Catholic Church, which is of most effect at the present moment upon the
political side of that Church's fortunes. This is because the French people
are themselves so strongly divided between clerical and anti-clerical;
because the organization of the State in France is so military and
mechanical; and because national feeling is perhaps more intense among the
French, in spite of their divisions, than among any other people.

Two factors are of especial prominence in lending to the attitude of the
French Government towards the Church such high importance today. The first
is the French influence upon the whole world through a mixture of lucidity
and energy in thought, phrase and action. The second is the central
physical position held by France. This last is but a geographical factor
and therefore only a material one, but it has its weight. When you read a
good French newspaper upon the affairs of Europe, you feel as though you
were standing upon a hilltop and looking down upon a plain all about you.
Paris is equally interested in London, Berlin, Rome, Prague, Warsaw,
Vienna, Madrid and New York, and the lines radiating from that central
point to the others are lines of moral communication, the patterns of which
upon the map are a symbol of that central station, with all its influence
of centrality.

French government has been opposed to Catholicism for fifty years. There
have been moments when the opposition has been more intense, there have
been moments when it has been relaxed, but government upon the whole
favorable to Catholic influence has not been present in the Republic since
the fall of MacMahon in 1877. A highly organized clique, largely masonic,
then captured the electoral machine and has kept it ever since.

It has often been said, and quite truly, that this state of affairs does
not reflect the French people. The French Government is, less than that of
any other people, the expression of national feeling. The system by which
professional politicians whom everyone despises share in rotation the
perquisites of their trade is disgusting to the nation at large; but it is
so fluid a system that it is most difficult to destroy. It was nearly
destroyed in the later 'eighties of the last century. Had the Great War
been short and successful, it would have been destroyed at once. It was all
but destroyed in the July of 1926 when mobs began gathering to throw the
professional politicians of the Parliament House into the street. But the
thing has never come off; and meanwhile the clique in power remains still
anti-Catholic in tone and direction. There is an extreme case.

In Belgium, in Italy, in Spain, the tendency is other. But it still remains
true that even in the Catholic culture (and as a matter of course in the
Protestant), governments are, as supplements to Nationalism, out of step
with the spirit of the Church. This material strength of governments,
coupled with and supporting the far more important effect of Nationalism as
a spiritual power, forms everywhere an obstacle to full Catholic life.

It remains to discuss whether this exceptional contemporary force of
Nationalism, of the State as an object of worship to the exclusion of, or
at any rate, far superior to, any other object of worship, is long to
remain.

May we say that there are forces already apparent tending to its decline?
Can we reasonably forecast the coming of a decline in Nationalism during
the near future? Of course, in the long run such forces must appear,
because all human moods are mortal, Nationalism like the rest. But are the
tendencies present today so that we can watch them? And are there, besides
these, contemporary conditions which point to a future hostility to
Nationalism?

I think there are. Besides the Catholic Church there are at least two great
international forces (not to quote more) which are already clearly
apparent. One is that of Finance, the other is that of the protest of the
Proletariat against Capitalism; a protest which in its most lucid and most
logical form is called Communism. Both these act as solvents to that
religion of nationality which was universal before the Great War.

These two forces, International Finance and International Socialism, act
after fashions often unexpected, and the more drastic. For instance, the
big newspapers (and nearly all the Press of large circulation is purely
Capitalist--a mere propagandist agent for Capitalism) bang the Nationalist
drum as hard as they can--even to deafening and to weariness. But that
exaggerated Nationalism of theirs more and more loses its effect through a
manifest insincerity due to their unconcealable anxiety for Big Business.
They have to bawl Nationalism at the top of their vulgar voices because
circulation demands that theme, but they are compelled, in the interest of
their millionaire owners, to preach goodwill for Capitalist enterprises
interlocked throughout the world. They may, for instance, demand a special
British policy in the matter of oil, but they will not oppose the interest
of American oil or Dutch. They may roar for reparations--but they won't
roar against the ultimate transfer of reparations to the international bond
holder.

As for the banks, they are almost openly international today. One can no
longer speak of any country as having a national financial policy. Some are
more particularist than others--notably France and Italy--but all respond
to the pull of New York, and here, in England, the banking system is but a
branch of New York's, to which it is voluntarily but also necessarily
bound.

But the wave of Nationalism will rise higher before it declines, for there
is one element which tends to preserve it, and that is the nobility of the
ideal presented.

Here we have a situation quite different from that which applies to our
other enemies, such as anti-Clericalism and the rest. They excite no
enthusiasm; they prey upon the baser part of man, and actually warn the
isolated and the ignorant against an elevation of spirit. But Nationalism
has running through it the ardent character of devotion. That is its glory,
and that is also what renders it a peril.

The effect of Socialism (logically, Communism) as a solvent of Nationalism
is far less strong. Partly because it is an inhuman ideal not possible in
practice (as everyone knows at heart--even those who proclaim its ideal
loudest) and more because it is sporadic and partial. It can only flourish
where there is an industrial proletariat. It cannot convert the bulk even
of this, and even should it succeed in doing so, these industrial
proletariats are patchy. If you were to take a map and set down on it the
industrial areas of the world, you would have something like a rather
disjointed rash: nothing homogeneous; while of single nations, England,
which is by temperament the least inclined to communism, is the only
completely industrialized of them all. Communism will increase. It will
increase greatly. It will not affect national separateness as finance will
affect it. But the combined effect of proletariat and banker will be
formidable.
 

(ii) Anti-Clericalism

I come in this section to a factor in the Main Opposition which has a
character of its own, markedly different from all others--the factor of
Anti-Clericalism.

It is of special importance to emphasize, to define and to explain it to an
audience of English and American readers because it does not come into
their daily lives: they have no direct experience of it. It is important to
emphasize it lest an essential part of the Church's conflict today should
be overlooked, to define it because it is perpetually confused with
antiCatholicism in general, with wholesale rancor against religion and with
the spirit of persecution at large: to explain it because until we
understand its nature, we cannot follow the process whereby its votaries
have become allied to the mass of moods combined against the Catholic
Church, and have by now almost dissolved into that mass--no longer
maintaining their original character. Anti-Clericalism may, in the near
future, indirectly affect the condition of Catholics even where they are in
a minority amid Protestant surroundings, and it is well to be ready with an
understanding of it before that happens.

The subject, I say, must be emphasized because of its unfamiliarity outside
the nations of Catholic tradition. The ancient Catholic culture reacts
towards the Church and the Church towards it in a very different fashion
from that which we find in the area of Protestantism.

Nothing is more startling, or, indeed, less comprehensible, to the average
Catholic who has lived all his life as the citizen of an essentially
Protestant State and under the surrounding atmosphere of the Protestant
culture, than this principal phenomenon in the nations of Catholic culture.

It is not too much to say that the Catholic belonging to a nation of
Protestant culture feels this form of the quarrel between the Church and
the world--Anti-Clericalism--to be more alien to him than any other product
of any social spirit foreign to his own. As a rule he does not know what it
is all about; it either seems to him mere blind hate which no explanation
can make intelligible; or he confuses it with that general hostility to
Catholicism in his own world of which all are in some degree aware, and
many, especially converts, have experienced very gravely.

If this be the reason for emphasizing Anti-Clericalism as a modern force,
how shall it be defined?

Anti-clericalism may be defined as the spirit which is goaded into activity
by the invasion of the civil province by clerical agency.

That is the minimum definition; that is the definition of the thing in its
origin and before it entered into alliance with the enemies of the Faith.
St. Louis can be quoted as anti-clerical when he refused the French Bishops
the right to seize the goods of excommunicated people. The Irish leaders
can be quoted as anti-clerical when they refused to be restrained in their
land policy and political programme by certain of the hierarchy and even by
the advice of the Pope. Their picturesque phrase: "We will take our
religion from Rome but our politics from Hell" is anti-clerical.

In this minimum sense Anti-Clericalism is always potentially present in the
mass of a Catholic civilization and may be excited at any moment without
reference to doctrine or to the general acceptance of Catholic ideas and
morals as a whole.

The more legitimate protests which preceded the Reformation were
essentially anti-clerical--and a good example of the peril that spirit
involves. The irritation caused in England by excessive Church taxation,
the exasperation of pre-Reformation London in particular with mortuary dues
and their irrational incidence, are examples of Anti-Clericalism in action.
The great upheaval which followed in Germany started essentially as an
Anti-Clerical thing which preceded and provoked the subsequent doctrinal
chaos.

Anti-Clericalism then, may appear at any moment in any place where the
Church fills society, and is as probable a feature of the future as of the
past.

But the Anti-Clericalism of which we speak today is something far exceeding
this minimum definition. It has risen to be a chief force antagonistic to
Catholicism as a whole and it is with that force we are here concerned.

That force is universally present in the societies which maintained or
recovered the Faith after the great storm of the sixteenth century. It
varies in degree with time and place. Governments now support it, now
oppose it. But it is everywhere present, in Belgium, in Spain, in France,
in Portugal, in Italy; it might at any moment acquire a renewed power in
any one of these countries, as for that matter in Poland itself, or even in
Ireland.

In what was for long the leader of the Catholic culture, in France, it is
particularly powerful and has held the levers of the governmental machine
for nearly a lifetime, with effects of the most profound sort, which are
only today beginning to show their final fruit. It was all-powerful in
Italy until quite recently; it dominated Belgium until half a lifetime ago,
and may at any moment now recover a majority there at the elections. It has
had bouts of revolutionary power in Spain, and just before the war provoked
something like a revolution, with difficulty suppressed, in Catalonia.

What is this contemporary hostile force in the concrete today? What is this
social and political agent now called "AntiClericalism," so absent from the
nations of Protestant culture that they cannot conceive its nature? So
familiar to the nations of the old Catholic culture that they take it for
granted, and that its opponents, while fighting it to the death, comprehend
it as familiarly as they do their own position--feeling profoundly in
themselves the emotions from which it has proceeded? We must explain it to
understand it.

Anti-Clericalism of this present kind derives no longer from a protest
against extravagant clerical action, but from a conflict between two
incompatible theories of the State--the Catholic and the Neutral, or Lay.
It is essentially a product of the universality of the Church and of its
admitted power in a Catholic country, coupled with the recognition of the
truth (so unpalatable to most men today, and especially to those of the
Protestant culture), that the Catholic Church must either rule society or
be ruled in Her own despite.

It is not because the Catholic discipline is so strong; it is not because
the Catholic scheme has developed for so many centuries into so highly
organized a thing, that the present AntiClericalism has arisen. These
elements of strength in the Catholic position act, of course, as irritants
to the opponents of the Faith; but they are not the main roots of that
Anti-clericalism. Such Anti-Clericalism proceeds, I repeat, from a
recognition in the Catholic quite as much as in his opponent, that Catholic
life is not normal to a society unless Catholic morals and doctrine be
supreme therein. Unless the morals of the Faith appear fully in the laws of
that society, unless it be the established and authoritative religion of
that society, the Church is ill at ease.

In other words, and to put it as plainly as possible, the Catholic Church
is not a sect, and will never be able to regard itself as a sect, or to
accept what is to Her the fiction, yet to others in non-Catholic countries
a truism, that She is a sect.

The fiction that the Catholic Church is a sect, like any of the various
bodies around it in nations of Protestant culture, that She is a sect, like
the Mormons, or the Baptists, or the Quakers, is nourished by a score of
conventions; by that false phrase, "the Churches"; by the offensive
adjunct, "Roman" as though the Faith were but one fashion in a hundred
Catholicisms, or as if Catholicism were a thing split into numerous
factions, of Rome, Canterbury, Boston and Timbuctoo! Yet the falsehood is
so firmly fixed and so long established here that it has recently begun to
affect the Catholic body itself. The position is half accepted by them,
though in their hearts they know that it is a lie. For the line of cleavage
does not fall between the various groups, Catholic, Agnostic, Evangelical,
or what not, but between the Catholic Church and all else. She is unique,
and at issue with the world.

She proposes to take in men's minds even more than the place taken by
patriotism; to influence the whole of society, not a part of it, and to
influence it even more thoroughly than a common language. Where She is
confronted by any agency inimical to Her claim, though that agency be not
directly hostile, She cannot but oppose it. She denounces such laws as
impose universal instruction upon Catholic children by force and forbid
that instruction to be explicitly Catholic; as permit divorce; as license
foul art; as favor contraception or the mutilation of the deficient. She
does not admit the thesis that legislation and executive action, in Her
eyes immoral, is no concern of Hers: that in this Christendom which She
made She is to tolerate by silence and acquiescence what is damnable.

Hence the prodigious quarrel! Hence the fact--for it is a fact--that She
lies suspect throughout the Protestant culture, and that throughout the
whole area of Catholic culture are present in varying degrees the elements
of a religious war.

Remark the inevitable effect of the Church's claim to authority (through an
absolute possession of the truth) upon two kinds of men in such a society
of Catholic culture: first, upon those who are in personal practice
Catholic but who have become attached to the idea of State neutrality;
second, upon those who, starting with no special hostility against
Catholicism, are yet not Catholics in belief or practice.

The first sort admit the claims of the Church in a homogeneous Catholic
society. If all were Catholic they would have no objection to the
establishment of the Church, to her control of Education, and so forth.
Such a society is their ideal. But as it is not achieved; as large bodies,
even in nations of the Catholic culture, are, by this time, indifferent or
hostile to Catholicism, they are led into the solution of neutrality. They
regard the effort (for instance) of the Church to obtain State Catholic
teaching for Catholic children as an invasion of State rights. They became
anti-clerical.

Many such have I known in Catholic countries, especially among the
wealthier classes which had caught the Liberal air of the nineteenth
century from University and Press.

With the second sort, those who are not Catholic in their private lives,
the effect is far stronger.

Judge the effect of the Church's claim upon a group of citizens who do not
admit those claims, and who are numerous or powerful enough to withstand
them.

It needs, at the outset, no special malice upon their part, nor,
originally, any conscious hatred of the Faith, to arouse them at once to
action against demands which cannot seem to them abominably extravagant.

     "Think what you like," they say, "and even within certain limits act
     as you like; but allow others who are not of your kind a similar
     freedom. Be content with a common system of morals applied in common
     law; and for the rest, treat your particular doctrines as the private
     affair of your individual members Do not propose to identify yourself
     with the State, or to demand the support of the State, as of right,
     not only for your protection, but against the efforts of others, your
     opponents."

What could be more reasonable, or more natural, or more obvious, to men
steeped in the idea that religion is a matter of opinion, and that all men
are now so hopelessly divided upon it that unity is neither possible nor
desirable?

To which the Church replies:

     "The fallacy in your contention, the flaw in its logic, lies in your
     presumption of a common system of morals applied in a common law.
     There is no such thing. There is no common system of morals. There is
     System A, System B, System C, and so on, indefinitely. The Catholic
     system of morals is the only one by which mankind can live as it
     should live; it is the only one under which men are normal and, so far
     as the word can apply to a fallen race, reasonably happy. It is the
     system by which your society was made and to which it owes allegiance.
     Your laws will be founded upon your morals, and where those morals are
     not Catholic they will be anti-Catholic.  It is inevitable.

     "You say that part of your 'common morals' is monogamy. You got that
     from me. You cannot pretend that it is universal to the human race.
     And observe that, as you abandon me, you are becoming more changeable
     upon it. The more you depart from my own special standard therein, the
     more you break up that tradition of society by which we have all
     hitherto lived.

     "It is the same with the doctrine of property. It is the same with the
     doctrine of future reward and punishment for good and evil deeds done
     on earth. It is the same with the institution of the family, with the
     authority of parents over their children and of the older over the
     younger generation. Where my authoritative voice is not supreme, there
     you are in conflict with myself; with me, who made Christendom."

Such is the Church's reply: and to the anti-Catholic it is monstrous.

Starting from this original contradiction the antagonism between the two
positions becomes rapidly embittered.

The Anti-Clerical says:

     "Since you will not live at peace with your neighbors, we must
     dominate you. You shall accept our schools. We guarantee they shall in
     no way offend your particular tenets, but on the other hand we will
     give these no countenance nor even mention them. The children shall
     not be told that the Presence in the Sacrament is a fairy-tale, nor
     given lessons on the beauty of divorce, nor even warned against the
     evils of your own intolerance, but on the other hand we will not teach
     an item of your doctrines. We will teach reading, writing and
     arithmetic; history in terms of Humanity and Patriotism--doctrines on
     which all are agreed. In private you may add to that as much as you
     will, but that is all we shall do. Our system of State morals, our
     laws of the moment, we will impose upon you. If you do not like them,
     so much the worse for your rebellion. If we change them more and more
     in a direction opposed to your views, that is our affair, and you must
     submit."

The Catholic Church answers again:

     "With every step you take you show yourself more clearly hostile. In
     the name of neutrality you leave even the mention of God out of your
     system of education; you are already destroying marriage; tomorrow you
     will probably begin to destroy property--not as fools think, to the
     advantage of the many, but to the advantage of a few rich and to the
     enslavement of the rest. In acting thus you are destroying society
     itself. I intend to oppose you tenaciously, with all My power, and at
     the first opportunity to counter-attack and reverse your slow murder
     of Christendom."

Here you have a situation which could never arise save in a society the
great mass of which still preserved Catholic tradition, and in which the
claim of the Catholic Church to impose its influence was still so much a
matter of practical politics that resistance to such a claim was felt to be
defense against an active peril. Here you have the issue between Anti-
Clericalism as we know it today and the Church.

I will examine the consequences which have come of this and have made of
Anti-Clericalism so dangerous an opponent today.

The battle being set between the two irreconcilable policies--the one which
presupposes a universal Catholic scheme; the other which presupposes a
neutral or lay State, with the Catholic Church relegated to the position of
a private corporation--certain consequences follow which the original
authors of AntiClericalism never intended.

The first of these concerns the institution of Monasticism.

In theory the Anti-Clerical should leave the religious orders of men and
women to go their own way. I do not say that the anti-Catholic should do so
in theory. He, of course, by his every principle is led to the destruction
of an institution which is so essential a support of Catholicism. The Anti-
Clerical soon becomes the anti-Catholic? No doubt. It is a process I will
later describe. But for the moment I point out that in theory, by his own
declaration, the Anti-Clerical in his liberalism and in his passion for the
neutral State should leave monks and nuns alone. If he likes them, it will
be his pleasant duty to do so; if he dislikes them, his painful duty; but,
either way, his duty. The religious are members of private corporations,
acting privately after their own fashion, and so long as they don't force
anyone to join them or constrain their members by violence, the State has
no concern with them one way or another.

But the religious orders which teach influence a great body of the growing
generation and form the minds of these into a mold different from that
which the State is imposing through its schools. Their zeal extends the
area of their educational action. Their corporate wealth and devotion,
their self-sacrifice and independence of financial reward, create a
conquering competition against the Neutral State schools. If the process
continues, the State will be paralyzed, its effort to dominate the Church
will be turned in flank. The teaching religious orders are suppressed.

But when you suppress a religious order, you have the opportunity to loot
its property. Under the oligarchic Parliamentary system (strangely called
"democracy!") the loot will go into the pockets of the politicians, the
lawyers, and the hangers-on of both. This first taste of loot breeds an
increasing appetite. Religious orders which had nothing to do with
teaching, which were merely contemplative, are driven out; the Carthusians,
for instance, from their mountain home; and some hundreds of thousands of
pounds more are poured into the pockets of the Parliamentarians, their
relatives, their legal connections and other hangers-on. At last you get an
established principle that monasteries and convents are to be looted
wholesale. Their property taken from them and their members dispersed or,
if they will not disperse, exiled. Monks and nuns are put out of the common
law. They may not own with the same security as other men and women. They
may not associate.

That is how the thing ends: a gross violation of the most fundamental
principle in which the "Liberalism" of the Anti-Clerical was, at first,
rooted.

More follows. A tendency to forbid the public employment of men avowedly
Catholic increases. It begins with a complaint against this man or that.
The principle is stated that public money should not go to those who will
accept the State system; under the guise of neutrality, individual
persecution appears and grows. But there is much more to come. Within the
State are not only the original authors of protest against Catholic claims
to authority, the original sincere theorists who acted without malice or
hatred upon what seemed to them an obviously just and simple conception of
civic rights; but numbers who are by tradition positively and even
violently hostile to the Faith, and who desire to destroy it.

Such are men who have come to associate Catholicism with opposition to some
cherished ideal, as of republicanism, or of the nation. The French
republicans remember their quarrel with the clergy in the moment of
royalist invasion a century ago, the Italian patriots the sympathy of
priests with Austria.

Such are, in one nation, some large minority of dissidents, who have
suffered from disabilities in the past when the Church was supported by the
civil authority, who have retained great wealth, and who are ready to
destroy that which they have always opposed to the best of their ability.
The French Huguenots are of this kind--hardly a twentieth of the nation,
but controlling perhaps a third of its available liquid capital.

Again, an organization ready to hand--the Masonic organization, for
instance--is organized like an army against the Church.

And here I may digress to remark that, in point of fact, the Masonic body
is throughout the world an enemy of the Catholic Church and active in
seeking Her destruction; nor is there any difference in its activity
between one country and another, save that it is naturally more in evidence
in a country where Catholicism is strong than in a country where it is
weak. It is beside the mark to plead that it has no connection, hostile or
other, with the Faith, that its elaborate Jewish ritual nowhere contradicts
a Catholic doctrine, that its inculcation of good fellowship and its many
charities, its arrangements for mutual aid among its members, are indeed
consonant with the Catholic idea of charity. All that has nothing to do
with plain fact which stares us all in the face throughout the world, that
Masonry acts as an enemy of Catholicism. Where Catholicism is very weak, as
in England, the hostility is negligible. But exactly the same lodges are
far from neglible in Ireland, and in the United States that hostility is
prominent in almost exact proportion to the local strength of the Church.
Where She is very strong it is rampant. Where the Catholic body is weak it
is less noticeable. Where Catholics are negligible in numbers it
disappears. In the Catholic nations--France, Italy, Belgium and Spain--the
hostility of Freemasonry is a commonplace, and the programmes for the
destruction of the Church, drawn up in the lodges, are available for all to
read. I have heard it advanced that the origin of the quarrel lies not with
Masonry, but with the Church itself, which, in denouncing on principle all
secret societies, has put itself voluntarily in conflict with the powerful
corporation of Masonry and must face the consequence. That is debatable.
But the fact of universal hostility cannot be doubted. So much for this
digression on a most important side issue. Let us resume our examination of
the Anti-Clerical.

Anti-Clericals find themselves inevitably allied with all forms of
antagonism to the Catholic Church: with opposing religions and
corporations, with all those to whom the Faith is an offense.

Meanwhile, from a theoretical attitude of neutrality, sincere enough in its
original holders, there is bred in them and their descendants, through the
exasperation of the quarrel, a definitely hostile attitude towards the
Church which brings them nearer to her avowed enemies.

At last you have two armies opposed one to the other (among the directing
classes at least); the first avowedly and definedly Catholic, having
attached to them not a few who, from sympathy with tradition, support the
Faith politically, although they do not accept it in their hearts; the
second, men determined by every means in their power--subject to
safeguarding some remnants of consistency with their old doctrine of
neutrality--to destroy the Catholic Church root and branch.

When that state of affairs has been arrived at, it is win or lose. It is a
clear battle between the Church and her enemies: and that is the situation
today. Anti-Clericalism means today the fruit of Anti-Clericalism: its
maturity. And, as such, there is a duel to the death between Her and that
evil fruit.

One unforeseen consequence of this final black-and-white contrast is the
disappearance of that once large body of men who attempted to reconcile the
fashionable Liberalism of their day with the claims of that Church to which
they are so truly attached.

These men had said for years that the elementary school (for instance),
though neutral and avoiding even the mention of our Creator, was not
thereby definitely hostile and might well be accepted.

They have continued to say--it sounded reasonable to them--that though the
Prelates of the Catholic Church were not admitted to official ceremonies,
yet that was but a point of civic procedure; that the great thing was to
convert society again to a universal Catholic spirit and not to trouble
about details of etiquette.

But the facts have become too strong for them. A battle is by this time
engaged, which a man must be upon one side or the other. And when in the
last development of Anti-clericalism the movement becomes explicitly one
for the destruction of the Faith, they will divide. Some will rally to
reality, begin to forget the empty formulas of political theory, and
consider and serve the Faith alone. The rest will be as frankly opposed to
the Faith, root and branch, as any other of its avowed enemies.

There, put as briefly as I can put it, is the development of Anti-
Clericalism, and we must never forget that it is present, and will be
present for a long time to come, wherever the Catholic Church was
maintained as the dominant religion of the people after the great
catastrophe of the Reformation.

The struggle has had universal effects on the life of Europe and the world.

Twenty years ago it turned the world upside down over the Dreyfus business,
destroyed the intelligence department of the French army (which was
transferred to the police), gave us, as an ultimate result, the Great War,
and, in consequence, the perilous economic condition of England today.

After the Great War it presided at the portioning of the world.

There was a moment when it hung by a thread whether Bavaria should not be
joined with Austria to form a Danube State. But Clemenceau cried, "What--
Another Catholic State in Europe? No, thank you! Poland is quite enough!"
And Prussia gained the prize.

Certainly, most certainly, Anti-Clericalism concerns us all, even those who
live in sheltered Catholic minorities under the protection of Protestant
Governments and who are to the raging battle between the Church and the
world as boats in harbor are to the wild sea outside.

But that battle is not yet won by one or other side. The story is not
concluded. What we have to remember is, in all our inquiry into the
position of the Church today, that throughout the nations of Catholic
culture the Church is thus imperiled with risks quite different from her
dangers in the non-Catholic culture. There is internecine war. For in the
nations of Catholic culture the Church will never accept a position of
inferiority or the fiction that she is but a tolerated fragment. If she
goes down she will go down still fighting for a Catholic society and
Catholic laws.

So far the process has led to a very disparate result. In France, Anti-
Clericalism holds the field, triumphantly and yet precariously. It is done
by preventing the women from voting, by rejecting the family vote, of
course, and through the anti-clerical grasp of all State machinery;
administration by anti-Catholic officials; the imposition of the anti-
Catholic spirit by State teachers in a compulsory educational system;
filling of posts in the higher education with anti-Catholics and the
provision of anti-Catholic history; with the same doctrine governing all
public examinations; the checking of promotion of Catholics in as many of
the professions as can be influenced directly or indirectly by the State.

But the political cliques which act thus stand for only a minority of the
nation, and not a very secure minority. Their preoccupation with attack
upon the Church has weakened them further. They have created, wantonly, the
Alsatian trouble. They came within an ace of ruining the currency. The
basis upon which they and the French Parliamentary faction reposes weakens
from day to day. It is confusedly at issue with the average man. At any
moment, so far, the whole structure might crumble. But its directors rely
upon the slow and persistent effects of anti-Catholic education in the
elementary schools and upon the economic policy of starving the Church
through lack of endowment, coupled with a vigilant repression of that main
organism for the propagation of the Faith, the Religious Teaching Orders.

There is something in their contention. There is ground for anxiety lest--
and that soon--they prove right in their conjecture that victory will
ultimately be theirs and the Faith reduced in France to a fragment of the
people unable to give tone to the whole.

After so many years of their action over education and political reward the
anti-Catholic effort is beginning to be felt throughout the nation at
large. It is apparent to the wise in its remote effects upon art, letters,
building, all the externals of a civilization in jeopardy. It is apparent
in the national temper and manners. It is also apparent already in a more
obvious form, the loss of practice. I have seen districts in France which
might be called "de-Catholicized." At any rate, they were districts where
the ordinary practices of religion had so far declined as to be familiar to
but a very small minority: and the sight suggests a coming generation in
which, throughout considerable spaces of the countrysides, that tradition
upon which all their civilization is based will be lost.

Herein lies both the interest and peril of the situation. Parliamentary
government will always be detested by the French because the French cannot
bear oligarchy, even in an aristocratic form, let alone in a form which has
no social sanction and has become frankly ridiculous as well as odious. But
Parliaments in France may well continue, and if they continue the official
forces adverse to the survival of the Faith will grow; for the official
machine wills it so.

The apologetic for religion is, I fancy, better carried on in France than
in any other modern country. There is active opposition to the official
anti-Catholic stuff in history, for instance, such as you get nowhere else;
and there is an increasing volume of powerful literature which is in
sympathy with, and based upon, the Catholic traditions of the country. All
this means that the intelligence of the nation tends to return towards
Catholicism. But how far does this tendency affect the mass of the people?
Undoubtedly it affects the towns more than the country. But how far does it
effect even the towns? That is the essential question, and it is one not
easy to answer. We shall be better able to answer it at the end of another
twenty years. So far the position is still doubtful, but it is menacing and
disquieting. If after this critical passage and balance between political
anti-Catholicism in France and the solid culture of the nation, the weight
begins to fall to the Catholic side, the effect upon the political fortunes
of Catholicism throughout the world will be very great. If it falls upon
the other side and the Faith sinks in France to be a separated minority of
the people, the effect of that will not be confined to France either. It
will be felt throughout the world.

For it is an invariable rule in the history of our race that the spiritual
direction of the Gauls should be an index of general movements outside of
their boundaries. They determine the triumph of the Trinitarians. They
enlarge the Papacy. They gave Calvinism to the world and with it the core
of dissension. In the struggle of the Reformation they were at one moment
far nearer losing tradition than was Britain. Their recovery of the Faith
determined--humanly speaking--the survival of religion. Their enthusiasm
for the revolutionary trend transformed all Europe. Their effect on thought
and action remains. Though it be negative and an example of decline, that
decline will color all our world. Therein lies the intense, the perilous
interests of the French scene. France determines, or at least chiefly
influences; and so far France lies in the balance.

But a survey of the Catholic culture as a whole very strongly supports the
repeated epigram of the last years, that "the tide has turned in Europe."

In Spain and Italy, with vigorous efforts, the Anti-Clerical advance has
been checked, and by this time reversed. The thing was done first long ago
in Spain, and was more directly religious there. If the happy destruction
of the Parliamentary oligarchy in that country has confirmed the good
tendency, we may be fairly certain that whatever military struggles a
monarchic system brings in its train, the politicians at least will not
trouble Spain again, and with that sort absent Anti-Clericalism droops; for
a Parliamentary clique is its necessary agent.

As all the world knows, the thing has been done even more thoroughly in
Italy. It is there rather connected with a general civil policy than with
any special preoccupation with religion, but reaction towards religion is
strong and fully supported. It is particularly to be noted that the Masonic
Corporation is, for the first time in history, subjected to the general law
against secret societies and prevented from acting as one. As a
consequence, Anti-Clericalism, the very note of all official action between
the creation of modern Italy and the Great War, is stricken with the palsy.

It does not follow that new and difficult perils may not there arise for
the Faith. But they will hardly arise from the old Anti-Clerical side. It
seems to be finally and definitely defeated.

Spain and Italy stand in our day both of them emancipated from one great
evil of their past; in both those countries the reaction against Anti-
Clericalism is successful and established.

In Poland Anti-Clericalism has not gathered momentum; to the traveller it
is hardly apparent, though it is potentially present and a few powerful
individuals are certainly sympathetic with it. The past of the country, its
crucifixion at the hands of Prussia and Russia (in each case with hatred of
the Catholic Church for a main motive), has identified the religion, so
far, with the nation, and that effect remains.

It is perhaps the same with Anti-Clericalism in Ireland. Though there, of
course, there is a much larger anti-Catholic body than in Poland. Anti-
Clericalism proper would seem not yet to have attained any corporate being.
As in Poland, the forces of nationalism and the effect of recently past
history strongly support the Faith. The citizens of both those recently
emancipated countries would, I think, in general proclaim the impossibility
of any strong Anti-Clericalism among them in the near future--but beyond
that judgment a foreigner cannot go.
 

(iii) The Modern Mind

The third and far the most formidable element of Main Opposition to the
Faith today, is what I propose to call by its own self-appointed and most
misleading title: "The Modern Mind." How misleading and false that title
is, I will discuss in a moment, premising here, that I adopt it only
because terms are necessary to discussion, and this is the admitted and
well-known term ready to hand. Were I to invent a new one, I should hamper
my argument, for it would be unfamiliar.

We note that it acts in a fashion wholly negative. It is not an attack, but
a resistance. It does not, like Anti-Clericalism, exercise an active effect
opposed to religion, nor, like Nationalism, substitute a strong counter-
emotion which tends to supplant religion. It rather renders religion
unintelligible. Its effect on religion is like that of an opiate on the
power of analysis. It dulls the faculty of appreciation, and blocks the
entry of the Faith. Hence its power.

We further note that it is of far more effect in the Protestant than in the
Catholic culture, though common to both. In the former it is discovered
higher up in the intellectual and social scale than in the latter, and is
very widespread. In the latter it is more restricted in area and less
accepted by the educated classes.

But everywhere it is of the same character, and everywhere so far as its
influence extends, it fills with despair those who attempt to deal with its
fearful incapacities.... And even before they can deal with it at all, they
are brought up against the absence of a language to effect their end.

For, indeed, we are met at the outset of this, perhaps the most important
section of our enquiry, by a difficulty which was not known in any other
time than ours: that difficulty to which I have alluded, that this chief
adverse condition we have to examine has no suitable name. There is no
fixed term or definition for that major factor in our present difficulties,
the spirit which is everywhere a main adversary of the Catholic Church, and
peculiar to our generation. Many a name has been attempted none has been
found satisfactory; and there is legitimate complaint against all those
which have hitherto been loosely used for the thing in question.

That mood running through the lower masses of the modern world, of wide
influence, therefore, in Europe and America, and rapidly spreading to the
travelled or westernized in the Mahommedan and pagan cultures, is baffling
to label.

That name which its own victims use (and which I here adopt), the "Modern
Mind" (or "Modern Thought"), is a misnomer, because it ignorantly begs the
question of universality. It presupposes that those suffering from the
disease are the mass of our contemporaries and those free from it a
negligible exception.

Of course, it is not so. Most modern men do not feel this spirit. No
Catholic feels it--at least, no Catholic who cares to remain orthodox. The
greater part of really cultivated men outside the Catholic Church despise
it; and everything traditional and solid in our civilization, notably, the
peasantry of agricultural countries, leaves it to one side.

Nevertheless, as it is the word its own votaries use, I will here call it
by that name--but in inverted commas. I will speak of it as the "Modern
Mind," but emphasizing continually as I do so the falsity of the term.

If we call it (as some do) "realism," we are confused by the use of that
term with a precise and profound meaning in true philosophy (where it
signifies the Reality of Ideas--as opposed to Nominalism); we are also
confronted by the disturbing fact that, even in the conversational sense of
the word, the spirit of which I speak is the very opposite of recognizing
the real world. It is a spirit all print and tags, all soaked in ready-made
phrases which have been swallowed whole, without the least examination, by
minds incapable of criticism.

Were we to call it "Modernism," we should be nearer the mark, but
unfortunately that word has already been assigned to a definite theological
school of error, whereas the spirit of which I speak is something far more
extended, vaguer and, indeed, of more effect; for Modernism in the
technical sense of the word is pretty well dead, but the spirit of which I
speak is very much with us.

We all know the thing. It is the spirit which tells us, on hearing any
affirmation or hypothesis not within its own limited experience, that the
affirmation or hypothesis must be false. It is the spirit especially prone
to take for granted the falsity of an unfamiliar idea if that idea is known
to have been familiar in the past. It is the spirit which confuses
development in complexity with the growth of good and the process of time
with a process of betterment. It is the spirit which appeals, as to a final
authority, to whatever has last been said in a matter: "the latest
authority." It is the spirit which has lost acquaintance with logical form
and is too supine to reason. It is the spirit which lives on bad science
and worse history at third hand. It is the spirit, not of the populace or
of the scholars, but of the half-educated.

What may be the causes of this philosophical disease--and it is an
appalling one--which is affecting such large numbers in our time, I shall
consider later. Here I propose first to analyze its character.

Upon dissecting it we discover the "Modern Mind" to contain three main
ingredients and to combine them through the force of one principle. Its
three ingredients are pride, ignorance, and intellectual sloth; their
unifying principle is a blind acceptance of authority not based on reason.

Pride causes those who suffer from this disease to regard whatever they
think they have learned, whatever they have absorbed, through no matter how
absurd a channel, as absolute and sufficient.

Ignorance forbids them to know with any thoroughness what men have
discovered about these things in the past, and how certainly.

Intellectual sloth forbids them to examine an argument, or even to
appreciate the implications of their own assertions.

With most men who are thus afflicted the thing is not so much a mixture of
these vices as the mere following of a fashion; but these vices lie at the
root of the mental process in question.

As to the principle of blindly accepting an authority not based on reason,
it runs through the whole base affair and binds it into one: Fashion,
Print, Iteration, are the commanders abjectly obeyed and trusted.

Let us take a leading test: the attitude taken by the "Modern Mind" towards
the supernatural--the shrine, the inhabiting spirit, and, particularly,
towards miracle.

Witness has been borne to a certain marvel, a thing outside ordinary
experience. The spirit of which I speak will deny, not the actual
occurrence upon this or that good intellectual ground (as of insufficient
evidence, or what not), but the very possibility of the marvel. And it will
repose that denial upon something presumed with regard to the physical
universe, which presumption it accepts as intelligently as a fetish
worshipper will accept his African idol. It will tell you that a mumbo
jumbo which it calls "Science" has achieved in the knowledge of reality--or
whatever lies behind the phenomena of matter--a final apprehension which in
fact Physical Science never has achieved, and never can; because such
apprehension cannot be attained by man's measurements and observations of
the phenomena alone. And note that this spirit is removed by depths from
that old and grander, now disappearing thing, the true "Scientific
Negation" of a lifetime ago. That proceeded from men who abused knowledge,
but who had knowledge and who possessed a philosophical method. This
proceeds from mere assertion based on something hurriedly read or heard.

Again, this spirit, this "Modern Mind," will refer to all transcendental
belief in terms which imply the inferiority of the past to the present--
that is, of other people's epochs to the vain man's own epoch. It will call
such faith "reactionary," or "medieval," or "exploded"; it will tell you
that the Creed belongs to "an uncritical age," and in saying so it will
show its own ignorance of all that vast mass of intellectual work with
which the past of Europe was filled, and of the almost equal mass of high
modern work in defense of supernatural experience.

The color in which the whole of the "Modern Mind" is dyed is essentially
stupidity: it will not think--and that is a very strange weakness for
anything which calls itself a "mind"!

If it were an active enemy, its lack of reason would be a weakness: being
(alas!) not active, but a passive obstacle, like a bog, it is none the
weaker for being thus irrational.

I have said that its unifying principle was the acceptation of false
authority: blind faith divorced from reason. The "Modern Mind" takes for
granted without examination a number of first principles--as, for instance,
that there is a regular progress from worse to better in the centuries of
human experience, or that parliamentary oligarchies are democratic, or that
democracy is obviously the best form of human government, or that the
object of human effort is money and that the word "success" means the
accumulation of wealth. Having taken these things for granted, without
examination, it goes ahead cheerfully under the illusion that its opponents
have the same ideas. What is more, it betrays that extraordinary ability
for disbelieving the evidence of one's own senses which is the mark of
unintelligent fanaticism. It will gaze upon that most hideous of human
prospects, the industrial town, and compare it favorably with a medieval
city--Huddersfield with Siena. It will call a society wealthy when a great
part of its inhabitants are half starving; it will believe any new
hypothesis in physical science to be ascertained fact, though it has
assisted at the destruction of half-a-dozen other such hypotheses within
the last fifty years.

I have said that this odd habit of preferring long words picked up in the
newspapers to the evidence of one's own senses is essentially fanatical,
and indeed the hold of this mood may be seen in the singular phenomenon
that the certitudes of the "Modern Mind" seem to vary in inverse proportion
to the direct sensible evidence available.

For instance, its victims will be far more sure of the existence of
vitamins than they are of a nasty taste in chemical beer. They will be far
more sure of electrons than of fresh eggs; and when the electron or the
vitamin bursts in its turn, tomorrow or the day after, and is supplanted by
the What-not, they will accept the What-not with equal simplicity and
fervor.

Why is this mood so dangerous to the Catholic Church? That patently it is
so, we see. It inhibits men from so much as understanding what the Faith
may be, and bars the action of a true authority by the unquestioned
acceptation of false; we can see it doing that every day before our eyes.

But in what, we may ask, is it a peril? It is a peril because true faith is
based upon reason, and whatever denies or avoids reason imperils
Catholicism. There is nothing more inimical to the Faith than this
abandonment of thought, this dependence upon a great number of fixed
postulates which men have not examined, but have accepted upon mere printed
affirmation, and by the brute effect of repetition.

Well, then, the "Modern Mind" is essentially opposed to Catholic action
because it is unreasoning: but why so powerful? Why should this spirit,
however strong to move the indignation of the wise or the impatience of the
commonsense populace, have also such special weight with the more shallow
of our time?

I think the explanation lies in the fact that the dupes of this fashion
believe it to be based upon evident proof which the least capable could, if
he chose, test for himself.

Here I must introduce the last consideration which may complete our
understanding of the unpleasant thing: I mean, a consideration of its
origins.

The "Modern Mind" is the dregs of certain much nobler forces of the past,
some of which still drag on as Survivals, others of which are dead. It is
the base product of a better ancestry.

By one line it descends as a degraded bastard from that high Scientific
Negation of a generation now passing: the Survival we have already
examined. By another, it derives, ludicrously enough, from the clear-headed
Skeptical Rationalists. By another from the great republicans of the
eighteenth century. In its puerile metaphysic it is but misunderstanding
the strong scientific agnostics of the past.

The "Modern Mind" is confirmed in its folly by the fixed idea that someone
or other somewhere "proved" its errors to be truths and that the proof was
final and obvious.

This attitude of the "Modern Mind" is due to that great advance in those
forms of knowledge which are based, as we saw in the matter of the old
"Scientific Negation," on exact measurement; the physical sciences and the
close examination of documents.

Of such measurements we make today many thousands where our fathers not a
hundred years ago made but a score. The practice has given us a novel and
astonishing collection of powers over the physical universe, and not a few
(though much more doubtful) discoveries upon the nature and origin of
classical and medieval texts. At the same time, abused, it can without a
doubt paralyze intelligence, and the "Modern Mind" is the poor product of
its abuse; or rather, the confused memory of an abuse committed by greater
men, immensely superior to it. So the "Modern Mind," when it undertakes any
activity--which is not often--confines itself to Physical Science.

Anyone can measure accurately over and over again; anyone can catalogue
points in a document or carry on a series of experiments. It needs no
effort of the intelligence. So, when the results are reaped, the fallacy is
easily entertained that because so much can be done without the use of the
reason, therefore the reason may be despised. At the same time, the habit
of proof by minute and exact measurement deadens the sense of proof by
other methods, and, as we are unhappily aware when we look around us, it
paralyzes the sense of beauty.

In themselves the habits necessary to an expansion in physical science are
admirable, for they are instruments in the noble search after truth, and in
that discovery of reality which is the chief business of mankind. But when
they are isolated and take a false place of their own to the exclusion of
the higher powers of the soul, they may inflict mortal injury.

Such injury has been inflicted in the class of which I speak. A stratum
neither of the people nor of the humanists, but somewhere in between, has
come, especially in our chaotic industrial towns, to believe that repeated
and certain experiment producing proof of regular material sequence applies
not only (as it does) to physical science, but to all things. They are the
heirs of the high scientific despair of older days; but the unworthy and
illiterate heirs. They make no reservations. They attempt no coordinated
system. They simply believe.

They have further come to hold, vaguely but firmly, that sundry men whose

names they hear quoted are infallible authorities, because they are said to
have "discovered" this, that, and the other. Hence is it today that whether
you are discussing the authenticity of a Gospel or Greek poem, the
excellence of a picture, or the greatness of a nation, you find yourself
presented by such men, at best, with statistics commonly irrelevant, or, at
the worst, with the mere name of some man competent in his own sphere, but
in the sphere under debate quite incompetent.

To all this the "Modern Mind" has added an ethic of whose origin it never
heard, but which has for its author Comte. It is the worship of Humanity,
and of Humanity mortal. That is good which makes men happier here--or looks
as though it might; and happier, not mainly through the satisfaction of
justice nor even by a search for beauty, but in seeking things much more
tangible and perishable; mainly of the body. And this worship of ourselves
in the place of God is heavily reinforced by Nationalism on the one hand,
by the Communist cry for economic equality on the other.

Much else enters into the formation of the "Modern Mind"...It is the dregs
of that too simple creed launched or confirmed by the French philosophers
of the Encyclopedia. It is the dregs of that German Monism and that German
Pantheism which so much affected the nineteenth century. It is the dregs of
fatigue in an overcomplex civilization; and it suffers the organized
propagation of myth, especially in the matter of man's unknown origins. But
in the main the source of this modern disease is the false application of
mechanical methods, inapplicable to higher spheres of thought, which it
couples with that ethic of Positivism, the worship of Humanity.

Such are the sources. But the "Modern Mind" is far from its sources and
settled into something much lower than the dead or dying ideas from which
it drew its own lack of ideas; much less than the philosophies on which it
bases its lack of philosophy.

Note in connection with the "Modern Mind" its inability to state its own
position.

The old-fashioned Agnostic laid down definitely a dogma, and a dogma worth
listening to. He said: "There may be Something. On the whole I think there
is Something; but we cannot know what it is. The organs by which alone we
can know anything tell us nothing about that Something, so let us, like
honest men, proclaim our ignorance of that Something."

The pure skeptic had a somewhat different position, and on the whole, a
better one. He said: "How do we know anything? We cannot even affirm our
own selves; for personality it is a variable thing, a function of time and
memory, mysteries no man can sound. Let us not pretend to know anything at
all."

The day of such honest men is past, or they are dwindled to a little band.
Those who oppose the Faith today as devotees of "The Modern Mind" cannot
tell us what they themselves believe. After we have made every allowance
for the natural desire to shirk the consequences of unbelief, or not to
lose income, it remains a wonder that they cannot tell us what they
believe.

And this applies not to them alone, but also to the better minds who stoop
to flatter them. Read this:

"The real trend of religion among the younger generation is away from
dogmatic and institutional Christianity, and towards an individual and
personal faith resting not on authority but on experience....The new
Protestantism is not relativist in the objects of its faith; it believes
that truth is absolute, and that God is unchanging. But it accepts the
necessity of growth and change in our beliefs. . .We must sit very loose to
tradition, and keep our minds open. Our anchor is what used to be called
the testimony of the Holy Spirit, which assures us of the reality and
primacy of those eternal values which Christ came to reveal. This is the
true Christianity, and we need not be discouraged about its prospects of
victory if we look for them in the fruits of the spirit, and not in
institutional statistics or successes of organization."

Was ever such a mass of verbiage! There is no rhyme or reason in it. Not
one definite statement of doctrine, save that God is unchanging--followed
by the necessity of change in our beliefs: therefore, of course, a change
in our belief that God is unchanging. Strange rigmarole!

What are "the Eternal values that Christ came to reveal?" No answer! What
is "sitting loose to tradition?" In what degree, where arid how may
traditions be a guide? No answer! What is that "experience" which, though
an "experience," has no authority? No answer! What has he to say against a
personal experience of the value of authority? No answer! What is
"Christianity"? No answer! How does it carry on without institutions? No
answer!

Yet it is from the pen of Dean Inge, a man whose whole public standing is
that of one criticizing religious doctrine from the superior plane of our
modern advance in knowledge, and that pen when it deals with any other
matter than religion is as precise as any now writing and as clear.

I would not accuse such an intelligence as his from suffering the collapse
of the "Modern Mind" but he panders to it. He has an eye on the readers of
his journalism.

There stands the "Modern Mind," a morass.

The great difficulty of the intelligent in dealing with this thing, whether
they be Catholic or skeptical, is the lack of hold. It is like fighting
smoke. It affords a commentary on the famous tag that with stupidity the
gods themselves will wrestle in vain.

What are you to do with a man who always argues in a circle? Who tells you
that some political arrangement is good because it is "democratic," and
when you ask

     (a) whether it is as a fact democratic,

     (b) why democracy is an evident good, answers you by saying that you
     are sinning against democracy and its holy name.

What are you to do with a man who does not recognize his own first
principles? Who tells you that he believes a thing on the authority of a
name or a bit of print, and who, when you ask him the grounds of his
confidence in such, answers you by giving another name and another bit of
print?

What are you to do with a man who uses the same word in different senses
during the same discussion? As, for instance, who says he "believes in
Evolution," meaning growth (which all men believe in), and in the same
sentence make it mean: (a) The bestial origin of man's body--which is
probable enough, (b) Darwin's theory of Mechanical Natural Selection, which
is as dead as a door-nail.

What are you to do with a man who puts it forth as a foundation for debate
that the human reason is no guide, and who then proceeds to reason through
hundreds of pages on that basis?

Yet all that, and hundreds of derivatives therefrom, make up the horrible
welter of the "Modern Mind."

Well, we must hope that intelligence will resume its rights, even against
such; but the prospect is not cheerful. Meanwhile the monstrous apparition
of the "Modern Mind" has produced one good among many evils; it has
produced a belated Brotherhood of the Intelligent. We of the Faith and the
cultured Pagans have a common opponent. A common donkey blocking the car,
and needing to be shouldered off the lane into the ditch, breeds fellow-
feeling between the Catholic and the clear-minded skeptic. Each feels a
peculiar disgust with the "Modern Mind." So we have, at last, allies.

The "Modern Mind" feeds. The animal is nourished or it could not live. All
moods must thus receive regular sustenance or perish. What is the food
which aliments the "Modern Mind"? It absorbs two forms of nutrition--one
from the imposed elementary school, one from the popular press. Between
them they secure the continuity and permanence of the "Modern Mind." These
two instruments were unknown to the past; they are of strong effect on the
present. They are of effect throughout the whole of the modern European and
American world, and their effect is increasing. I will state them in their
order.

The first thing to be said about universal compulsory instruction as it is
now arranged, is that it is necessarily at issue with the Catholic
conception of society because it sets out upon a first principle which the
Catholic conception of society denies. That is not a judgment agreeable to
modern fashion, but it is true; and before we consider the particular way
in which this institution sustains the "Modern Mind, we must appreciate how
and why it necessarily clashes with that Faith to which the "Modern Mind"
is now the principal obstacle.

This first principle upon which universal compulsory instruction is based
is the idea that a certain minimum of instruction in a certain category of
learning is the first essential to right living. Other things come after;
but a knowledge of these, at least, is indispensable to man and society,
and must therefore be imposed on all by force. This category includes
letters, that is, reading and writing, elementary arithmetic, by which
ordinary civic occupations are carried on, some very general knowledge of
the past and of contemporary nations, their geography and character, the
whole tinctured with the (today) inevitable religion of Nationalism and a
vague general ethic, humanitarian and therefore (unwittingly) positivist.

These having been imposed upon every child of the community by force,
whether the parents are willing or unwilling, its other activities, such as
religion, seem subsidiary. They may or may not be engaged in, and whether
they are engaged in or not is indifferent to society and therefore to the
State.

The Catholic conception of human nature is actively at issue with this.
According to it, the first, the most necessary thing, is the teaching of
the children, affirmatively, as a divine truth necessary not only to the
conduct of its own life, but also to that of all society, the doctrines and
the particular, defined, morals of the Catholic Church.

In comparison with instruction in that one prime essential, nothing else
counts. It is good to be able to read and write and cast up simple sums; it
is better still to know something of the past of one's people, and to have
a true idea of the world around one. But these are nothing compared with
the Faith.

Here is the first point of conflict between the Church and her enemies in
the matter of this new instrument which is beginning to be of such
prodigious effect throughout our imperilled civilization. Next let it be
noted that there is another issue perhaps even graver, and that is, the
issue between the Family and the State and between the full multiple life
of free will in action and the uniform restricted death-in-life of things
done by constraint and on a mechanical model.

As between the Family and the State, Catholic doctrine is fixed. The family
is the unit. The parent is the natural authority (auctoritas auctoris). The
State is secondary to the family, and especially in the matter of forming a
child's character by education. Now here the State of today flatly
contradicts Catholic doctrine. It says to the parent, "What you will for
your child must yield to what I will. If our wills are coincident, well and
good. If not, yours must suffer. I am master." At least, so the State
speaks to the poorer parent; to the richer it is more polite.

Many Catholics are afraid to say so, but that is, in Catholic terms,
abominably bad morals: the morals of tyranny.

The issue between free will and constraint is less direct--but it is very
real. It is not without significance that the claim to interfere by force
not only in the all-important character of early instruction, but in a
score of other domestic things, has gone side by side with the spread of
fatalism in the world and with the inhuman concept of unalterable
mechanical laws. It is not insignificant that the Church in the rare places
and times when She had power to do so, did not compel the mind. During all
that intense intellectual life of the thirteenth century, instruction was
by choice: endowed--so that the poorest could reach the highest
inspiration, but at the choice of the individual or family will, to be
taken or left.

Compulsory universal instruction, then, clashes with every canon of
Catholic social ethics, even in its compulsion, even in its universality,
but especially in its choice of what it calls essentials.

Although these things are so, one may hear from the "Modem Mind" a plea
which it is so confused as to hold applicable. It advances this argument:
"I do not say that the things imposed by force upon the mass of young minds
are the most ultimately important. All I say is that they are what none
will differ about and what all will agree to be necessary to life in
society. As to other, perhaps more important, but debated things, I keep
neutral." Yet it should be evident that how things are taught, even things
which have no direct relation with religious teaching, makes all the
difference to the effect of an education. The teaching as a whole must be
Catholic or non-Catholic. You cannot make a school which shall not be the
one or the other, any more than you can make a home which shall not be the
one or the other.

It is one of the sure tests of stupidity in those who discuss this matter
when they put forward the plea that religion cannot i come into the
teaching of arithmetic; the very same people . would violently object to
having their own children taught arithmetic by one of whose morals and
outlook they disapproved.

But arithmetic is not the only thing taught. Some kind of morals must be
taught. And here a violent issue arises, which is an issue between diverse
orders; for the order in which you teach morals makes all the difference.

Are you going to teach children that the excessive consumption of liquor is
the prime evil of human life? Are you going to teach them that
consideration for others is the highest duty of man? Are you going to teach
them that kindness to animals is among the highest of virtues?

No one denies that drunkenness is a bad thing, or that cruelty to animals
is a bad thing, or that the service of one's neighbor is a good thing; but
the point is, in what order are you going to teach them, what relative
importance are you going to give them? Everything turns on that. With one
set of proportions you produce one type of character, with another,
another. In one order you have Catholic morals, in another Protestant, in
another Pagan.

Truth lies in proportion. It is proportion which differentiates a caress
from a blow, a sneer from a smile. It is the sequence and the relative
weight of doctrines, not the bald statement, that makes the contrast
between what damns and what saves. Let a child experience through the
working day and through most days of the year that this or that is
emphasized in its teaching, and what is so emphasized becomes, for it, and
for all its life, the essential.

Apart from this consideration--which applies to all subjects--there is a
multitude of subjects in which the effect of teaching makes for truth or
falsehood according to religious atmosphere. Take a single example from
elementary geography. It relates to Holland, a country the origin of whose
religious opinions was mentioned on an earlier page.

A little while ago the Dutch authorities protested against a textbook used
in our English (Protestant) elementary schools describing Holland as a
wholly Protestant country--with sundry other remarks upon the virtues which
presumably follow from such a character. The remark that Holland is a
country wholly Protestant, and that the whole point of Holland is its
Protestantism, would seem so obvious to nine out of ten modern Englishmen
that they must have marvelled at any protest being made: yet it is, of
course, a completely false statement, and the falsehood is highly
characteristic of the way in which a religious atmosphere affects teaching.

Holland is a country largely divided between the two religions; rather more
than half its people are Protestant, rather less than half are Catholic.
The whole point of the Dutch example to a man trained in true history is
the way in which a State which was, in its origins, artificially created by
a revolt against taxation, next strengthened by a violently anti-Catholic
temper, maintained for generations by an exclusion of Catholics from power,
has come now to something like a balance of the two cultures. Yet it is
almost inevitable that such a textbook statement should be imposed upon our
elementary schools, which have to accept what our official historians--
brought up on stuff like Motley--themselves so naively believe.

There is a case taken from elementary geography. With history, of course,
the thing is patent. If you are teaching the official nationalist history
of our day, you are teaching anti-Catholic history, and there is no way out
of it. The whole business from A to Z is anti-Catholic propaganda.

Now this instrument of universal compulsory education must obviously be of
vast effect, but of how vast an effect it may be, what changes in society
may be effected by the manipulation of it, people have hardly yet realized.

It originated in the French Revolution, and the first man to give form to
one of its constituents was Danton, when he said that, after bread, the
first need of the populace was instruction. The seed was sown. It was--to
the reformers of the eighteenth century

a truism that all would be well with men if they had "light." Ignorance in
terrestrial matters they thought the parent of all ill. Since this was so,
to make elementary instruction, at least, in such matters, universal,
seemed an unmixed good. But how could one ensure its being universal unless
one made it compulsory?

Such was the chain of policy: the enormous result was not intended. The
sole intention was to give citizens what the limited views of its authors
thought an obvious advantage.

The idea was carried out in the course of the nineteenth century more or
less thoroughly, according as the organizations of the various nations and
the degree of their servility to the State made compulsion easier or harder
to apply, and according to the degree in which opinion accepted this new
doctrine that elementary instruction was all-important.

In England, with a population more and more urban as time went on, and more
thoroughly controlled than any other by a very numerous and highly
organized police, the system reached perfection. For a lifetime past hardly
a family (below a certain high level of income) has escaped the huge
machine. It has stamped its mold upon the whole nation and changed it
profoundly.

But if this new force has been most thoroughly applied in England, it is
almost as effective in other western countries, and is now the strongest
political instrument of our time.

It is strange how long it took people to wake up to the situation. Even now
the most of men have not begun to speculate on its possible use for certain
definite ends of propaganda. But the great religious quarrel in France, the
change worked by the elementary school in Britain, the recurrent agitations
in the United States against public grants for the schools of a religious
minority, have begun to make the latent power of the system apparent.

The wisest observers now clearly perceive that if compulsory elementary
universal instruction be captured and used to a certain end, it can
completely transform the character of all society. When we remember that
the system is supported and confirmed by the ever-increasing network of
public examinations, all taking the same history, geography and philosophy
for granted, the formidable character of this new thing should be
sufficiently apparent.

Therefore, the inevitable conflict between the Catholic and the non-
Catholic conceptions of human nature, life and destiny, cannot but make the
elementary school their battlefield.

There are those who think the problem can be solved by the compromise of
tolerating the existence of Catholic schools, side by side with those of
the common kind--schools with Catholic teachers and the right to teach
Catholic doctrine at odd hours.

Such a subjection has never passed current in countries of Catholic
culture; but in the Prussian Reich it has worked easily for a long
lifetime, and in Britain for as long.

The only peril (it is claimed) lies in sundry individual anti-Catholic
false statements in historical textbooks, or, in morals, specific
assertions opposed to the Catholic Faith. Let the Catholic object to such
and such particulars in the textbooks; if these are eliminated, all will be
well.

It is not so. These Catholic tolerated schools are supported with State
money as State institutions only so long as they conform to State standards
of instruction, and therefore to State doctrines in the thing taught. No
solution can be reached on such lines.

Such a compromise presupposes a common body of truth in morals, a common
standard of philosophy, a common attitude towards the past, the external
world and the nature of man. It presupposes this common attitude to be the
one important thing, the foundation upon which the less important
differences in beliefs and morals arise.

The presupposition is false. There is no such thing as a primal neutral
core of truth with various particular accretions around it of Catholic,
Protestant, Jewish, or Mahommedan feeling. Any one philosophy strongly held
permeates the whole body of ideas and actions, and, inevitably, if you have
a single system of textbooks, of inspection and regulation, of
examinations, and an official curriculum of teaching, all these will have
one general philosophy running through them. The universal machine imposed
upon all in the years when the character is formed, will imprint its own
philosophy, both directly and still more by indirect influence. If you
doubt this, look around you.

Such a philosophy may well be that of the majority, but can never be that
of all. Any philosophy not of the machine must suffer, and in the case of
so distinctive an entity as the Catholic Church--a thing distinct from all
the rest of the world, understanding and penetrating, yet separate from the
world--the hostile character of such a machine should be self-evident.

I am proposing no solution, I am making no prophecy; but I am stating an
issue which none, I think, can, upon consideration, deny. The elementary
school, mastered by the lay State, and imposing its instruction by
compulsion, is of its nature hostile to the Faith, whether hostile
intention be present or no.

How hostile we can see by observing that it has produced and continues to
nourish the "Modern Mind."

But how has it done so? How is this novel and gigantic instrument of policy
accountable for this particular disease? To answer that question consider
the affinities between the two and the way in which they will naturally act
and react the one on the other till each is cause and effect at once.

A universal and compulsory system of instruction has for its first and main
effect uniformity. It produces to a pattern. It fills the millions of a
nation (at the age when the mind is being fixed) with one set of ideas to
the exclusion of others. No mere limited freedom of choice in textbooks and
teachers can prevent this effect, when the whole system is subject to State
regulation, supervision, examination and test. Indeed, it can be verified
by experience that there is sometimes even more diversity of result in a
centralized system of education than in one where local authorities and
various religious bodies have power of selecting books and instructors.
Thus in France it is a frequent complaint, on the part of those with a
passion for national unity, that the elementary school does not provide it,
while in England, where the system is theoretically far less rigid, no one
can or does complain of stray differences in its results, for there are
little or no differences apparent. It is not the particular form of the
system, it is its universal character which is of this effect. On
reflection we see that it must be so. A body of national teachers will come
into being and will be informed with a corporate spirit. They will be
trained all in much the same fashion to the same fixed "standards" and with
the same ends in view. They will teach under the shadow of a vast
bureaucracy and to ends set them by an army of inspectors, examiners and
departmental officials.

You have, therefore, here one essential condition of the "Modern Mind"; its
lack of diversity; its mechanical deadness. This, when it is achieved,
reacts in turn upon the elementary school, and each, the agent and the
object, the school and the scholar, increases the sterility of the other.
Uniformity acquired by the second makes easier the action of the first, and
both conform to a common fixedness.

Indirectly but more strongly still this mechanical uniformity tends to
exclusion of ideas. That which is not taught at all to a child, or is
taught as something subsidiary, falls out of his consciousness or is
diminished therein. For the most part what is not emphasized is not
believed to exist. Often, from its unfamiliarity, that which is a stranger
to education in childhood, is thought incredible by the grown man.6

Were there multiple, individual diversity as there was when education was
voluntary, men would be acquainted in early life with its presence even
when they did not experience it themselves. But, where all is the same, the
very possibility of difference ceases to be accepted. Now the ideas
excluded under our system of universal compulsory State instruction are
necessarily those the absence of which produce the "Modern Mind" as readily
as the absence of certain elements in food scrofula.

Here is an example: the attitude of the "Modern Mind" to illiteracy. The
chief subjects of elementary instruction are reading and writing. Therefore
a weakness or incapacity in these two departments becomes the test of
inferiority. One nation may build, sing, paint, fight, better than another;
but if it has a larger proportion unable to read, it is branded as the
lesser of the two. A Spaniard of Estremadura may carve stone images as
living as those of the thirteenth century, but if he cannot read, the
"Modern Mind" puts him far below the loafer picking out racing tips in his
paper. In the same connection we all know how the restriction of writing to
a comparatively small class in the past is put forward as an example of our
progress. That writing was then an art, that its materials were expensive,
that to draw up a letter in, say, the eleventh century needed as much
special training and expense as it does today to engrave a brass tablet--
all that is missed. The "Modern Mind" notes that there was less writing,
and is satisfied that such a lack was inexcusable.

And here let us note in passing a practical effect of Universal Compulsory
Instruction which is at first not logically apparent but the reason of
which can be discovered; I mean its fostering of that illusion of
"Progress" which is so intimate a part of the "Modern Mind." The elementary
school does, in practice, make the less intelligent believe that they are
better than their fathers and better off as well; materially in advance of
them and morally in advance of them. It might be thought that this folly of
vain glory was but an accident of our time. The stupid opinion of our time
is all for "Progress" as an inevitable succession from worse to better--
Wednesday better than Tuesday, and Tuesday, than Monday. This illusion,
bred of Pride and Ignorance, appears (it may be said) in our official
instruction, because it happens to be the fashion. Let the mood change, let
some succession of catastrophes awaken in men a sense of decline, and
vulgar opinion will renounce the illusion of Progress, will praise the past
at the expense of the present, and the new mood will reflect itself in all
institutions, including that of the educational bureau.

This is an error. Compulsory Universal Instruction will always make for the
illusion of Progress, because it must justify itself by affirming
improvement. It would stultify itself if it did not regard itself as a
progressive good, and a proof of continued advance from a time in which it
was unknown.

Universal Compulsory Instruction contains also on its compulsory side, as
well as in the matter of its universality, a force making for the creation
of the "Modern Mind." Compulsion, long continued, breeds acceptance; and
the acceptance without question of such authority as it meets--especially
that of print--"blind faith" we have said, "divorced from reason" is a very
mark of the "Modern Mind."

This atmosphere of compulsion pervades the whole affair. It is not the
presence of compulsion affirmed in the laws (upon which Elementary State
Instruction is based today) which counts here, it is the daily practice of
it by millions--by all. The Parent does not choose his child's instructor
nor the nature of his teaching, both are imposed by the Civil Authority.
The child goes daily to and from that institution, has its whole life
colored by it, knows that its attendance is not an order of its parents but
a public command enforced by the Police.

All teaching is dogmatic. Dogma, indeed, means only "a thing taught," and
teaching not dogmatic would cease to be teaching and would become
discussion and doubt. But this new sort of teaching by force has an added
effect, beyond that found in any other kind of teaching. It is at once
teaching and law, and those subjected to it are inoculated from its
earliest years with a paralysis in the faculty of distinction--of clarity
in thought through analysis. Look around you and note the incapacity for
strict argument, the impatience with exact definition, the aversion to
controversy (mother of all truth) and the facility in mere affirmation.
Herein lies their root.

The second great new instrument nourishing the "Modern Mind" is the popular
Press. Here, happily, there is not such an issue as in the case of
compulsory education.

In the field of compulsory education the issue is absolute and inevitable.
A universal and homogeneous system of compulsory instruction imposed by the
State upon the family cannot fit in with the Catholic Church. Even with a
society homogeneously Catholic it could not fit, for automatically the
Catholic spirit would dissolve its compulsory quality and its mechanical
uniformity of universal action. The Catholic spirit automatically restores
diversity of mind and freedom.

But with the Press it is otherwise. The popular Press is often represented
as a solvent of religion, and in particular a solvent of Catholicism; but
there is nothing in its nature to make it so.

It happens to have arisen in a world where the false conception that
religion was a private affair had taken root. Therefore it does not spread
the atmosphere of religion, it does not concern itself with life in the
order which true religion demands. It presents as matters of chief
importance things not even important in natural religion, let alone in the
eyes of the Church.

It tends, for instance, to substitute notoriety for fame, and to base
notoriety upon ridiculous accidents of wealth or adventure. Again, it
presents as objects for admiration a bundle of things incongruous: a few of
some moment, the great part trivial. Above all it grossly distorts.

Its chief force as a sustainer of the "Modern Mind" lies in its power to
intensify any disease prevalent in the masses, and especially in the human
dust of our great towns. Thus the "Modern Mind" dislikes thinking: the
popular Press increases that sloth by providing sensational substitutes.
Disliking thought, the "Modern Mind" dislikes close attention, and indeed
any sustained effort; the popular Press increases the debility by an orgy
of pictures and headlines. The "Modern Mind" ascribes a false authority to
reiteration; the popular Press serves it with ceaseless iteration. The
"Modern Mind" has accepted a mythology of the prehistoric and loves to hear
both of marvels in connection with prehistory and of its own superiority to
its remote ancestry: the popular Press crams it with food for such an
appetite. It will give countless millions of years to a bit of bone of
which no mortal knows the age; it will provide at call the most horrible
beasts for our forbears, adding to them a peculiar vileness in morals to
spice the dish--though beasts can do no wrong.

In all these ways and twenty others the popular Press as we have it today
thrusts the "Modern Mind" lower than it would otherwise have fallen, swells
its imbecility and confirms it in its incapacity for civilization and
therefore for the Faith.

But the popular Press does not act thus from a sort of conspiracy against
truth and religion and our high, inherited Catholic culture; it acts thus
because the society in which and by which it lives has not yet recovered
its religion; if, indeed, it shall ever do so. In a society restored to
unity of religion and to devotion to it, the popular Press would recover
and reflect that general mood.

There are, molding a popular newspaper, three forces: the advertisement
subsidy by which it lives, the particular desires of its owner, and the
appetite of the public for that particular sheet. Of these the third is
much the most important. The first, advertisement revenue, is mainly
dependent upon public demand for the paper. The effect of the proprietor
lies chiefly in his power of private blackmail (especially, in
parliamentary countries, of blackmail exercised against politicians) and in
his power (when he acts in combination with his few fellows) to suppress a
truth of public interest. But the owner of a widely read newspaper, even
when, by some accident, he happens to be a man of intelligence, hardly ever
imposes an idea.

It may be said with justice that a popular Press in our day will always
tend to be demagogic, and therefore somewhat offensive in moral tone. In
some countries, notably in England, it has submerged the old cultivated and
educated press of a generation ago. It is, therefore, commonly ridiculous;
but it does not follow that it is a negative force against the power of the
Catholic Church in the modern world.

For all its vulgarity it may indirectly be of service to the Faith, for the
discussion of religion today has a high interest value, and thus the
popular Press has certain rough uses as an arena for that most profitable
form of debate.

It would be hopeless, I think, to expect just now in any country the advent
of a popular paper which should act, however indirectly, as an instrument
for actually spreading the Faith. But I doubt whether the judgment should
be passed that in any country the popular Press will, in the main, become
an instrument against the spreading of the Faith: it will reflect, very
roughly and coarsely, the main currents of popular opinion in this matter
as in others.

It will, for instance, reflect the modern religion of Nationalism until
that religion begins to wane. It will reflect the desire which the mob has
always had for spectacles of wealth, violence and peril. It will exaggerate
the popularity of what is popular and the unpopularity of what is
unpopular.

In itself it is not our enemy, but, then, neither can it be used by us in
favor of the truth, save in its character of an arena for debate. There it
may in the future become (it has not yet so become) an instrument of real
value.

The reason it has not yet become such is the still prevailing ignorance on
the elements of theological discussion, coupled with the fatigue and decay
of intelligence in a period where words have grown meaningless or
contradictory (for instance, the word "Temperance") and have been turned
into a kind of false currency to take the place of thought.

Meanwhile the novel power of the popular Press is having one curious
effect, which is, I think, to be deplored, in connection with the situation
of the Church in the modern world. It is this:

The specialization of Catholic journalism in all countries today, or nearly
all countries (Ireland is largely an exception), excludes a Press secular
in interest but Catholic in tone. Your widely read newspaper makes a point
of what it regards as religious neutrality (aiming as it does at the
largest possible circulation); therefore the Catholic writer can only put
forth his arguments in publications which are (a) confined to specifically
clerical activities, (b) read only by his co-religionists. *They tell you
much of the clergy; they discuss pilgrimages, centenaries, new
ecclesiastical foundations; they have controversies upon individuals or
doctrines when such are attacked. They do not reach the non-Catholic
masses.

But of all that I will write when we come, at the close of this book, to
consider our modern opportunities of recovery.

With this I end the analysis of those main forces of opposition which the
Church has to meet at the moment, and turn to those interesting young
strangers, the New Arrivals: they that are to be our main opponents of
tomorrow.

6. See for instance with what difficulty the nineteenth century schoolboy, brought up on the official history of his time, could appreciate in manhood the idea that our exclusive patriotism was a modern thing! See how he read it, when he became a man, into the medieval history of his country![back]

* Unfortunately, the heresy of Modernism has arisen again in the years
since the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Modernism had seemingly been
effectively destroyed in the early 20th Century by the vigorous efforts of
Pope St. Pius X (1903-1914), who called it "the synthesis of all heresies."
However, Modernism had actually gone quiescent, awaiting a more favorable
time to re-emerge--which occurred in the 1960's, especially after Vatican
Council II. Since then it has grown pretty much unimpeded. In Modernist
thought, all religions, including Catholicism, are based on the inner
experience of man, rather than on objective truths. In Modernist practice,
Catholic dogmatic formulas may be retained, but their meaning is understood
by the Modernist as adapted to the religious experience of the individual
believer. Thus, a Modernist can say with perfect ease, "If it is not 'true
for me' it is not true." Therefore, according to Modernists, Catholic faith
can differ radically from age to age and from believer to believer, which
is diametrically opposed to Catholic teaching, which holds that truths are
based on objective reality and are true for all time and for all ages.
Obviously, Modernism leaves nothing of Catholicism but the name, and
according to Pope St. Pius X, it is a sure path to atheism.--Editor, 1992.