By this time it must be obvious that every single thing in the Catholic Church which was condemned by the modern world has now been re-introduced by the modern world, and always in a lower form. The Puritans rejected art and symbolism, and the Decadents brought them back again, with all the old appeal to sense and an additional appeal to sensuality. The rationalists rejected supernatural healing, and it was brought back by Yankee charlatans who not only proclaimed supernatural healing, but forbade natural healing. Protestant moralists abolished the confessional and the Psycho-Analysts have re-established the confessional, with every one of its alleged dangers and not one of its admitted safeguards. The Protestant patriots resented the intervention of an international faith, and went on to evolve an empire entangled in international finance. Having complained that the family was insulted by monasticism, they have lived to see the family broken in pieces by bureaucracy; having objected to fasts being appointed for anybody during any exceptional interval, they have survived to see teetotalers and vegetarians trying to impose a fast on everybody for ever.

When Cervantes created ‘Don Quixote,’ the greatest and most delightful of satires, the perfect picture of Spanish national life and manners, that exquisite ‘Book of Humanity’ as Sainte Beuve calls it, he had it in mind to laugh away and burlesque out of existence those foolish romances of chivalry so prevalent in his day, which he held to be in deplorable taste and fraught with harm for the morals of his country. How well he succeeded, all the world knows.

Two centuries later, Spain brought forth a second Cervantes, a satirist of hardly less eminence, but scarcely known to Englishmen of the present day. He too produced a ‘Book of Humanity,’ a lively study of national character; he too had it in mind to laugh away and ridicule into nothingness something which he held to be dangerous to Spain and a slur on her good name. And he too, on a more modest stage, achieved his object. His book in its only English translation, that of 1772, lies before us in faded calf volumes, as we write: ‘The History of the famous Preacher, Friar Gerund de Campazas.’

There may be some readers of the Commedia who are not familiar with the Convivio, or ‘Banquet’ ; the unfinished philosophical commentary on certain of his odes, which Villani called ‘a beautiful, subtle and very great work.’ And yet its medieval lore, its depth of feeling and (for those who read Italian) its wonderful word-music render it as fascinating as the love-story of the Vita Nuova which Rossetti popularised. One may therefore perhaps venture to introduce such readers to its Fourth Book, in which Dante discourses of ‘true nobility.’

Its title is Contra gli erranti, ‘Against the erring ones,’ which he takes, he says, ‘from the example of the good brother Thomas of Aquino, who gave to a book which he wrote for the confusion of all who depart from our faith the title Contra Gentili.’ He undertakes a mighty work, grande e alta opera, and one that has rarely been handled by others, viz. to examine what constitutes natural nobility. To understand this potenza di natura is all-important, because our mistakes about it lead to the confusion of moral values in our social estimates.

At the end of the reign of King Edward the First, there lived in the city of Salisbury a poor, honest Parson, who had in his charge a small church abutting on the market-place and the souls of a few hundred people thereabouts. Of both church and people he was the careful and loving custodian, but chiefly of the latter ; for he held it as a truth indubitable, that though Our Blessed Lord deigns to dwell on the altar, it is merely as a stepping-stone to the souls of the faithful.

Under this simple conviction, the Parson—Sir Nicholas by name—toiled his hardest from morning till night to help every man, woman and child in his flock build and beautify, in his or her own heart, a shrine for the Most High. He aided proud, indolent and clumsy sinners to hew new stones for the repairing of their dilapidated or ruined souls; the heaviest stones he carried himself, lent a hand to fit them into their allotted places, and stepped back gaily with the poor wretch, their owner, to admire the progress of his puny fabric and congratulate him as though he were the founder of Rome itself—alter Romulus, says my pious original. For souls more advanced, he was an equal authority on spires and pinnacles, crockets and weather-vanes. All the dizziest flights of heavenly architecture he knew by heart—something from books, something from experience, and something from the inspiration on which he faithfully counted.

Abbot Butler has written an extremely fascinating book on a subject of enthralling interest. The mystical life is the highest of all practical sciences in the sense that of all others, it matters most to a human being on earth. A purely speculative knowledge of God, however profound, is wisdom, but it is not to be compared in this life with love of God, since here below the mind only thinks God, whereas the will goes out to grasp Him. The mind for ever remains within the logical order, but the will whose every act is based on love seeks to get hold of the reality—that is to say, its term or rest is the ontological. In heaven the converse is true as regards the taking hold of God : the will of a truth will attain its supreme satiety in cleaving to God, but it is the mind, first and foremost, that takes hold of God, the will cleaving to the reality made captive by the mind.

In the Beatific Vision, we hold as true that which Hegel perversely endeavoured to apply to this world, namely, the identity of the logical and ontological orders. In the Beatific Vision alone are ‘thought’ and ‘thing’ identified; for the ‘thought’ of God in the created mind is the ‘reality’ of God Himself. When Hegel formulated his astounding philosophy, he was unknowingly formulating one of the most profound doctrines of Thomistic theology concerning the Beatific Vision.

‘You must be a believer,’ said an Irish Protestant, ‘to go to Oberammergau.’ Perhaps this good paterfamilas, revealed what the shock of the actualities of Catholicism awoke in him—the sense that he was a vague Theist, or perhaps, as theologians might say, some sort of Monophysite, but that he was disinherited from the Incarnation, and was but confounded, when taken inside the household of faith. All round him in Ireland the faithful lived, bad and good; and had the Faith. But he never went into the only places that best be called churches, nor divined the instinct for reality, the knowledge of the true proportion of things, the supernatural insight, belonging even to the most untried faith.

It is, indeed, no light mantle of greatness, worn (thought Dr. Martineau), by even the humblest Catholic, belonging to a religion passing times and lands, in which there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither bond or free, of which kings have been the nursing fathers, and queens the nursing mothers, for which princes have laid down their crowns, and where, daily, wealth hides its pomp under the rough robe of the cloister (that place in which the Christians still have all things in common); the religion that cares not for race, nor language, for feudalism nor revolution; in the sense, that, whatever turns up among

‘the rapid, blind,
And fleeting generations of mankind,’

the Church will be always there, at home under Charles the Great, and in English haphazard colonies, that Church of the French Jesuits, at the court of the Sun-King, or going, thence to follow Indian trails, that Church of English minsters and of the harried Irish; that Church growing to-day in an American un-traditional State, and not less under a German Republic than under an Austrian Catholic monarchy; the Church which survived the Reformation plannings and plunderings, and which the French Revolution shook out of its officials’ complacency in princely patronage and corroding un-Roman Erastianism; the Church Catholic, in which the nations tortured by inhuman nationalism may find defence against their devouring madness, if not cure of their chronic disease.