The cruise of the Nona The story of a cruise from Holyhead to the Wash, with reflections and judgments on life and letters, men and manners

a conversational term, and I do not accept it as accurate) the ‘acceptation of the supernatural.’ The Catholic does not believe that every one who hears voices hears real voices. He does believe that it is possible for such voices to be real; and he, therefore, believes that this thing, philosophically possible, has also had, now and then, a real historical existence. In the same way, he does not believe nine tenths, or ninety-nine hundredths, of the miraculous stories which have grown up out of distortion or mere wantonness, or (for the greater part) out of the gradual substitution of direct statement for allegorical or fictional statement, turning fairy tales into fact; but he believes that the miraculous—that is, an irregular suspension of the order of nature—is philosophically possible. He, therefore, believes, when the evidence is sufficient, that it has historical existence in certain examples. For instance, I certainly believe that the blinded man of York had his sight restored to him by Saint Thomas of Canterbury; but I don’t believe that Mahommed went to the moon on donkey-back—if, indeed, that mysterious mount of his _was_ a donkey, which the best authorities deny. The Catholic not only believes that certain historical examples, which are of faith, were real and took place (as, for instance, our Lord’s walking on the water—and Saint Peter’s less successful effort), but he also believes in general that the phenomena called miracles continue actually to happen throughout history: that they go on to-day. The same principle of division runs through the whole of thought. In the matter of the development of religion, everybody outside the Catholic body talks as though the development of the Catholic religion were a human process. They answer the famous question, ‘Is religion of God or of man?’ with a hearty affirmation of the second hypothesis. In this mood they examine such a story as that of the Mass, the Papacy, or the doctrine of our Lord’s divinity. They take it for granted that all was man-made. In this mood they interpret (usually with guesses of the wildest sort, which the much stricter and more rational Catholic scholarship soon disproves) the origin of the Scriptures, and in particular of the Gospels. Now the Catholic admits _all_ evidence in these matters: that is a matter of course, for if you exclude any evidence your conclusion is vitiated. But the difference between him and the others is that he regards the action at work as divine, willed, and, to repeat a word I have used, ‘illumined.’ That is why the Catholic thinks of the modernist as a man of warm heart, but of poor intelligence. Here is an example. The man of warm heart, with a strong sentimental attachment to his Scriptures, to familiar views, has his mind shaken by the discovery or even the suggestion, that his document is not wholly authentic. His intelligence must tell him—if he would use it—that a document cannot be an authority superior to the body which gave it its claim. But his intelligence falters. Now the Catholic, accustomed to the theory of authority and having decided, let us say, upon evidence sufficient for his judgment, that such and such a text was not part of an original manuscript, could never on that account abandon the doctrine consonant with that text. He believes a doctrine to be a divine, a supernatural thing, communicated, revealed to the world by an authority which still lives, and to and of which he is at once a subject and a part. He says, upon an accepted authority, ‘This is so.’ The presence or absence of one piece of documentary evidence does not affect reality. I have never thought the evidence against the ‘Johannine Comma’ so strong as that in its favour: but, though it were proved unauthentic to-morrow, what possible effect could that discovery have on the reality of the Trinity? The Faith is an attitude of acceptance towards an external reality: it is not a mood. Now, of all this the men who elbow the Catholic Church on all sides in non-Catholic communities, such as England, remain as ignorant as they are of Sanskrit—with those few exceptions of which I have spoken. They seem to think that they have in their midst a body of men who go on strangely, either because they refuse to listen to common reason, or because they have a sentimental attachment to some old-fashioned tradition, and will not openly admit its absurdity. In this they resemble the simpler type of bucolic republican, who does not know that there are any arguments for a monarchy; or the still simpler mind which believes that the earth is flat, and thinks that those who call it round are finicky people playing a subtle game in which they do not at heart believe. Perhaps the best test of the difference is to be found in the doctrine of the Fall. The Catholic, with his acceptation of the supernatural (I again apologise for the term), accepts, upon an authority which he has discovered sufficient (on the statement of a Person, the Church, whose voice he has recognised to be divine), a doctrine that man, as man, was created superior to his present natural state; that he was created to be supernaturally happy. Where, when, and especially _how_—in what mode—he cannot say. It is a mystery. He, therefore, accepts the doctrine that man, by a rebellion against the will of God, did at some time lose the supernatural powers, the supernatural life, the supernatural happiness, and fell into his natural state, as we see him to-day: of this world, and yet the only exile therein. What that process was whereby he existed with beatitude inhabiting him, we are not told, nor in what place, nor at what date. But we are told, and we accept it, that a certain process, a certain sequence, due to the human will, took place; a rebellion of that will, and a consequent loss of the supernatural life which was our inheritance. That doctrine no more clashes with any proved historical, or probable prehistorical, process than the discovery that William Wordsworth grew up from childhood to manhood proves that he was never a poet, or that he never ceased to be a poet. But the man who rejects the supernatural ignorantly distorts (many popular preachers of heretical theory to-day distort) the doctrine of the Fall of Man into something very different. He thinks it means that man was once in a particular place and time—Mesopotamia about 4004 years ago—behaving like a gentleman, and then, following the advice of his wife, sank to be a perfectly horrible creature, tainting everything he touched. Naturally, a person informed by this childish idea—born, without reason, of a book—on finding what seem to him proofs of development from a simpler to a more complex society, and on waking up to what everybody might know by the use of plain common sense, that men progress from one stage of art to another more intricate (until they crash, and begin all over again), is thrown off his basis. He begins to make a new religion and a new mythology for himself, to talk of an ‘Ascent of Man’; he thinks himself a summit and a glory—and at the same time he rids himself of morals. It will be interesting to watch the end of the process. In connection with all this—though the connection is strained—I have often wondered to myself, and especially at night-time upon the sea, how long the mystic Catholic doctrine of human equality would survive in the non-Catholic world. It has survived so far because it is flattering to the many. Only a very small number of men are conspicuously rich or talented, or (for those who love publicity) public; it is naturally an attractive doctrine for the obscure, untalented, poor mass, that—not in the sight of their Creator, for they no longer accept one, but in some incomprehensible way—we are all equal, and that in some odd fashion which they cannot discover, but which they have felt in their bones, the rich or talented or advertised man is really no better than themselves. You find the doctrine lingering most tenaciously in the popular conception of justice. Men would still be shocked, even during the present decline of morals, at the open admission that a man, important for wealth or public position, should be admittedly and overtly immune from the criminal law. In practice, of course, he is so. But so much of the old Catholic dogma of human equality survives as forbids—so far—the open admission of privilege. But flattering as the old Catholic doctrine of equality is, I do not think it can survive much longer outside the Catholic body. It is in a high degree mysterious, and I am amused to find one man after another suddenly making the discovery that it is not a patent truth, apparent upon the surface of things. I remember once sitting next a very worthy man at a banquet in the United States: it is now nearly thirty years ago. This man explained to me laboriously enough, but very privately, that the statement in the Declaration of Independence, ‘Men are created equal,’ seemed to him great nonsense. For he had come to observe that they were of different stature, muscular strength, and even intelligence—in which last conclusion I supported him. There is another Catholic mystery to which the non-Catholic world still uncertainly clings (I do not think its tenure is at all secure), and that is the mystery of immortality. That also is consoling, and to some even flattering. It can be used as a soothing drug on condition that you do not work out the full theology of it, and admit the double doom of beatitude and damnation. But the repetition of this old Catholic doctrine as a dope, by which may be evaded the menace and reality of death, does not seem to me to have enough stuff in it to endure. Yet there are many men and women still living who can remember the time when the non-Catholic world did still accept the full doctrine. Indeed, a living friend of mine has recited to me a verse learnt in her childhood, which ran somewhat as follows: ‘There is a dreadful Hell A place of aches and pains, Where sinners must with Devils dwell, In fires and shrieks and chains.’ But that is all over. All that is left of the doctrine of a life to come is a very vague mood of comfortable assurance, dissipated at once on the approach of peril. It will not last, apart from the great and only true philosophy of which it is the last poor relic. I wonder, indeed, how much of Catholic doctrine will survive, and what part of it—if any—in whatever of Europe continues to reject the present advance of the Faith. That some great section of Europe will lose the last savour of Christian culture, and that soon, is probable; for already the half-educated are abandoning it all over the North. That the rest will return to full doctrine is probable. For already the thirst for it is apparent, and the stronger minds are so returning. But what will follow where it is wholly abandoned? We know what heavy weather property is making to-day, and, as for marriage, it has nearly gone by the board. The doctrine of justice is cloudily remembered, but mixed up in some muddled way with the idea of playing a lawyer’s game, and so sodden with sentimental frailties, and rough-edged with cruelties and sale and purchase, that one can make nothing of it. For instance, outside the Catholic world, it is an accepted idea that if a man accused of murder be under grave suspicion, but not definitely proved guilty, he must, indeed, be condemned to some horrible punishment, such as imprisonment for life, but not to the punishment for murder. And it is an approved idea that punishment should not be vindictive, but only deterrent, save where the vindictive side of it is the vengeance of the great against the weak. And it is an approved