The Christian and the Post‐Christian

Extract

A Cultured priest of my acquaintance has remarked to me more than onee that the penny Catechism, with all its virtues, is out of date. Many of its precise definitions and carefully chosen texts are aimed at a Bible Protestantism which hardly anyone believes in. On the other hand, difficulties which the modem convert is apt to raise are not met, and the standard ‘companions’ to the Catechism do not always-help. Similar objections apply, I believe, to a great deal of recent apologetic writing. Brilliant and compelling as it can be—I am thinking of books like The Everlasting Man—it frequently fails in two respects. First, it often does not carry the battle on to the ground where the modern intelligentsia choose to fight. This was the Complaint made by Professor Haldane against Mr Arnold Lunn, and the same could have been said, perhaps with more justice, in a number of other controversies. Secondly, an apologist labours under the immense handicap that whereas he is inside the Church, most of the people to whom his work is addressed are outside—and not only outside the Church, but outside what is popularly called Christianity. It is a testimony to Catholicism that it transforms one’s thinking even when it does not transform one’s life; but the difference must be paid for. Catholic spokesmen suffer from being Catholic. They try to communicate a vision which can only be had from within, and this is the business of the artist, not the apologist.