The Fruit and the Seed

Extract

Historically, by far the most interesting thing in the process of the Catholic Church is the embryonic character of every Catholic institution at its origin. In this the Catholic process is exactly consonant with creation.

Most moderns would say that this was true of all human institutions: it is the fashionable tag of the day based on a vague materialism, or Pantheism, and it is entirely wrong. In almost all human institutions except Catholic institutions, the work of man is deliberate, planned, and fails. It does not develop consonantly to its origins: you do not see in its growth the unfolding of a germ. Institutions very often grow up unconsciously from origins which have no sort of resemblance to or communion with their final form: but then their origins are exactly not embryonic. Such developments are but examples of the truth that the human will cannot impose itself upon the world. What is remarkable about Catholic institutions from the smallest to the greatest (until it is at last found to be true of the Church itself) is that the origins are (1) of one essence with the final thing, and yet are (2) simple, i.e. undifferentiated, and (3) apparently insignificant : and in those three lies the true meaning of the word embryonic.