spiritual freedom and peace. ... It is a part of Protestantism to be austere, energetic, unwearied in some laborious task. The end and profit are not so much regarded as the mere habit of self-control and practical devotion and steadiness. The point is to accomplish something, no matter what; so that Protestants show on this ground some respect even for an artist when he has once achieved success.'1

Such are some of the fruits of making Faith exclusively an act of the will, or moral sense. In my next lecture I shall show how the prevailing distrust of theoretical constructions has given birth to a peculiar kind of empiricism in religion, which has produced rather startling developments in the Roman Church.

Santayana, Reason in Religion, p. 116.

CHAPTER X

FAITH BASED ON PRACTICAL NEEDS-MODERNISM

THE rulers of the Roman Church have always fully recognised the great influence of Faith upon conduct, and have paid careful attention to the formation of beliefs. The whole educational method of Romanism assumes quite frankly that it is desirable to prejudice the minds of the young in favour of certain beliefs, and that it is justifiable to use almost any means to strengthen and confirm them. The mind of the child, under Catholicism, is moulded into a particular shape almost from his cradle; even in the elementary school-room he is not allowed to breathe a nonCatholic atmosphere; and in mature life he is forbidden to question, even in thought, what his Church has taught him. In many cases this system is as successful in producing the type of character desired as Sandow's gymnastic course is in producing a muscular frame. The Catholic lives and dies in an untroubled assurance that he has possession of the truth; he performs a number of actions, some morally estimable, others morally indifferent, some perhaps morally flagitious, in obedience to his directors, and abstains from others. Like a hothouse flower, he blooms luxuriantly when carefully shielded from the rude winds of free thought and free discussion.

Catholicism is best regarded as an art of holiness. The theory and method of the system are those of all artistic training. The disciple wishes to acquire certain aptitudes -in this case, a certain kind of character-and he puts himself under the care of trained experts who tell him how

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the desired result is to be attained. The young painter does not enquire whether the relation between his pigments and the object which he is trying to copy is 'real' or apparent'; he is content if he can produce the effect of a tree or river upon his canvas. A sham relic or miracle is as good as a real one in stimulating emotion, if it is believed in. And the promised results do follow. The Catholic discipline does produce peace of mind and selfcontrol; it economises energy by prohibiting experiments; it counteracts the effect of individual weakness, and utilises one line at least of racial experience.

The merits and defects of this system have been already considered under the head of Authority. Here we have only to note its pragmatic character in all that falls outside religious truth. It is so much more important to avoid sin than to have correct opinions on scientific matters, that error and even imposture will often be encouraged in the interest of belief and conduct.

nest

And yet Catholicism can never acquiesce in the subjectivism and anti-intellectualism of the philosophy which we have just been discussing. Catholic theology is built on a foundation of Greek philosophy, and is intimately connected with the transcendental realism of Plato and Plotinus, modified but not contradicted by the study of Aristotle. The Roman Church has anathematised the Kantian dootrine which confines our knowledge to phenomena; it asserts that the being and attributes of God may be proved intellectually. The active intervention of God in human affairs is rescued from the clutches of the mechanical sciences, not by scepticism about the objective existence of the phenomenal world, but by belief in the supernatural. Belief in miracle, not only certain miracles in the past, guaranteed by authority, but in miracle as a part of the constitution of the world, is an essential part of Catholicism. The Catholic view of the world is a modified realism, within which it is possible to distinguish two orders,' the natural and the

supernatural, interacting on the same plane. The Church has left to its philosophers great latitude in attempting to determine the relations of the time-process to eternity, and has never shrunk from crude pictorial images in its exoteric teaching. But it has consistently refused either to accept idealism, in the post-Kantian sense, or to abandon the supernaturalism which forms the connecting link between God and nature.

Modern science has inflicted a grievous wound upon this system by its denial of the miraculous. The nature of the quarrel between science and Catholic orthodoxy, on this head, is often misunderstood. Apologists are pleased when they find that wonderful cases of 'mind-gure' can be substantiated. But this line of defence can only prove that a few alleged miracles are not miraculous, not that any miracles are true or possible. What is necessary for Catholicism is to prove the intercalation of the genuinely supernatural with the natural, and this would be a refutation of the uniformity of natural law, the working hypothesis of all the sciences. The scientific habit of mind, with its exacting rule of testimony, has become so general that belief in miracles grows harder every year. There are still a good many people who are unable or unwilling to separate Wahrheit and Dichtung, truth of fact from imaginative representation; but their number dwindles, and those who retain the old beliefs on aesthetic grounds are less earnest defenders of the faith than the genuinely superstitious; their religion is little more than a mode of refined enjoyment. This blow has fallen with the greatest severity on the ecclesiastical machinery. The sacerdotal and sacramental system of the Catholic Church is based on supernatural mechanism-on divine interventions in the physical world conditioned by human agency. If these interventions do not take place, almost all that makes Catholicism attractive to the laity and lucrative to the hierarchy has vanished.

It was only to be expected that intelligent priests in the Roman Church, who understand the gravity of the situation, should endeavour to find a sounder basis for Catholic truth than this discredited theory of supernatural interventions. We have seen that there is much in the Catholic view of life which is in sympathy with pragmatism, and that the sceptical Nominalists of the Middle Ages came very near to this theory of knowledge. Accordingly, it was inevitable that the suggestion should be made that the traditional realism of Catholic apologetics should be abandoned; and that by reducing the external world to a mere system of instruments, arranged by the human mind for its own purposes, relief might be found for distressed faith. On this hypothesis, there is no sacredness or inviolability in natural laws, in and for themselves. They are approximately true, as diagrams of everchanging phenomena, fixed, for purposes of observation, in a series of discontinuous pictures, like the successive scenes of a cinematograph. But even if the theoretical abstractions of the intellect corresponded accurately to concrete fact, which is not the case, what is the understanding but the tool and instrument of the will? We want to know only in order that we may act and live. These static laws, of which we have made such bug-bears, are of very subordinate importance. The real world is the world of will and feeling, the world of action; and if religious truths-the dogmas of the Church-are found to belong to this sphere, and not to the inferior order of existential fact, that is only what we should expect and desire to hear about them.

The philosophical defence of the Modernist position has been conducted mainly by Frenchmen, among whom Le Roy1 and Laberthonnière 2 may be named. As Catholics,

1 Dogme et Critique.

• Le Réalisme Chrétien et l'Idéalisme Grec; Essais de philosophie religieuse.