Part II
Parish Minister
Following close upon my resolution to delay proceedings for a time and take to prayer and study came an appointment as parish minister. Scotch folks elect their pastor by popular vote. It may seem funny to a Catholic that the sheep should choose the shepherd.
But, then, a minister is not really a shepherd in the sense in which we Catholics understand it; he is rather the president or chairman of a religious society whose members are more or less united in the same views and aims and agree to make him their head. In this sense the popular election of a minister is not so incongruous as it would appear at first sight and is certainly much more reasonable than the old system of lay patronage which was abolished in 1874.
I had then to stand this popular election test. Five or six candidates preached and prayed on successive Sundays before the congregation at E.; and, on a vote being taken, it was found that I had more votes than the others put together; hence I was elected. This shows how ridiculous is the method of taking a man’s popular preaching as a test of his fitness for the ministry of a parish. Most Presbyterian clergymen read their sermons off like an essay. Now, the Scotch infinitely prefer a sermon delivered without manuscript, just as they prefer–in fact, will hardly tolerate anything else than–prayers delivered without book or manuscript.
So it happens that the candidate who has either the “gift of the gab” (to use a slightly vulgar expression) or the gift of a good memory and can declaim his sermon in an apparently extempore manner will be almost certain to carry the day. Once in, he cannot be put out, except for heresy or immorality. Heresy is a thing of the past. Immorality is not, but the expenses of a libel action are so great that Scotch folks are unwilling to undertake it.
It would be a waste of time to detail all the steps that followed the election and culminated in my installation in the parish–the “taking on trial” by the Presbytery, the “ordination,” the “laying on of hands,” the luncheon, and the presentation in the evening. I was supremely thankful when the ceremonies were ended.
There was everything in my new sphere to make me happy and contented in the Church of Scotland, if happiness was to be found in it at all. A simple and hospitable people to minister to; a beautiful district; a fine house, with plenty of glebeland round it, a huge garden, and ample salary–all more suited for a man with a wife and six children than for a miserable bachelor; these are a few of the things that might have made anyone happy who wished to be.
After all, these were merely external comforts and could not reach a man’s soul, if he cared about his soul; and if a man’s soul is not at peace with God, no amount of exterior comfort or wealth or luxury can possibly make him happy. On the other hand, a man might be in direst poverty, yet, if he were interiorly tranquil, he need not envy the happiness of an angel.
Such was the conclusion that forced itself upon me after I had spent some time in my new surroundings. I was still unhappy. “Ordination,” the full charge of a parish, the care of the souls, I found was no remedy for my troubles. At first, and indeed for a considerable period (although I was parish minister for only about twenty months in all), hard work kept me from worrying much. But the haunting dread that I was in the wrong ship never left me and at length began again to reassert itself with its old strength.
I prayed night and day for God’s help to see the truth and faithfully to follow it whenever found. Latterly I invoked (with fear and trembling lest I should be doing wrong) the Mother of God, whose picture I had exposed in various rooms. l read much Catholic literature, as before, and studied the controversy in all its details. I often had consultations and discussions with my friend B., whom I visited from time to time. He knew the controversy more thoroughly than I and could enlighten me on many points.
I spent holidays in that most Catholic land, Ireland. I took every opportunity, both there and in Scotland, of visiting Catholic churches and studying the working of the system on the minds of its people. In my visitations I entered the Catholic houses and was well received, and I exhorted them to go to Mass and be staunch to their faith. The priest afterwards said I had acted as a curate to him! So much attracted was I by the Catholic services and doctrine that, even when I had preached in a Presbyterian church in the morning, I would, if I could, go in the evening and assist at Benediction and hear a Catholic sermon.
An interesting experience in this way befell me in Edinburgh. I had preached in an Established Church on the Blessed Trinity. In the evening I attended Mary’s Catholic Cathedral, where I heard Canon Donlevy (whom God rest!) preach about the first council of Jerusalem and its decrees, and, as it was the week of the sittings of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Churches, he was able to draw an amusing and highly striking contrast between the binding force of the decrees of Catholic councils and the utter uselessness and invalidity of the decisions of the General Assembly, which bind no one, whether minister or “elder,” any further than he wants to be bound. This was precisely the position of the church in which I was unfortunately situated: There was no authority, and consequently there was naught but confusion, disunity, and chaos.
Well, after many months of anxious and prayerful study, of investigation of the question on every conceivable side–without consulting any Catholic priest, impelled only by a desire and determination to arrive at some definite conclusion, absolutely uninfluenced by any human or earthly consideration–I came to the conviction that I was wrong; the church I was in was wrong; she was not the true Church, the historical Church of Christianity; she was a modern invention; and her creed and her worship, the work of John Calvin and John Knox, were things the like of which, I was convinced, had never, till the sixteenth century, been seen either in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters underneath the earth. What were the arguments and considerations that led me thus painfully to this conclusion?
Now, to begin with, the first and most damning fact that impressed itself upon me was the utter disunity among Protestants, the multiplicity of sects and divisions, the chaotic condition of Christianity outside of Rome. I was quite sure, from what I read in the Bible and from the whole conception of the Christian revelation as delivered by Jesus Christ, that his true Church must be one, that there could not be two true churches teaching contradictory doctrines, and, whatever modern indifferentists might find it convenient to say in their excuse, still it could not be really true that one religion was as good as another, and Almighty God never meant it so.
Not only did I see various churches and sects warring against each other and holding contradictory opinions, but I found each church at war with itself. I knew, for example beyond doubt, that even in my own church there were three distinct schools of theology and that I actually had relatives, and near relatives too (clergymen), who believed and taught differently from what I believed and taught. Yet we belonged to the same church and were supposed to have sworn that we believed the same “confession.”
This was a spectacle and a state of things which I felt, and knew from my study, had no parallel or sanction in the days of the apostles, or in the days of the early Church, or indeed in any succeeding century till the sixteenth. It was the creation of the Reformation and was a thwarting and opposing of the will of Christ. The Church, then, by whatsoever name it might be known, exhibiting this blot and defect, could lay no claim to be part of that body of Christians for whom Jesus Christ prayed “that they all may be one,” concerning whom he declared there must be “one faith, one baptism,” and to whom Paul wrote that “if even an angel from heaven preached any other gospel than that which had been preached to them, let him be accursed.”
I turned to the “sister Church of England” and saw the same desolating spectacle; indeed, I saw a worse spectacle in some respects. Bad as the Church of Scotland was, she had a final authority within herself. In the matter of deciding questions of dogma or ritual, the General Assembly was the supreme tribunal, and from this there was no appeal to any higher court.
Much as the English Church boasted of her apostolical succession and her “incomparable liturgy,” the supreme deciding arbiter of her doctrinal and ritual disputes was the Privy Council, and the Privy Council was a body composed of men who might be Christians, Jews, infidels, heretics, or atheists. That a committee of such persons, of any belief or of no belief, should have the power, and should use it, of pronouncing infallibly upon matters of Christian dogma and worship was the climax of absurdity. Yet the English wished it so. The king was their head in all things, spiritual as well as temporal.
But a step further led me to see the cause of all this chaos and division: It was the setting up of the Bible as the ultimate authority in religion. This I came gradually to see was no ultimate authority at all. The Bible was never meant to be the sole and self-sufficient guide to men in learning the revelation of Almighty God. It could not possibly have been the authority at a time when it did not exist as a Bible; it was not fitted to be an authority for all, for it was a difficult book to understand; and, as a matter of fact, it led to the most divergent and incompatible conclusions. Each sect staked its opinion upon the Bible, yet each was different from the other.
The Protestant attitude to this book was, therefore, a wrong attitude. The Reformers gave it a false place in God’s economy of dealing with men: Having abolished an infallible Church, they set up an infallible Bible. But, unfortunately, the Bible is only an infallible guide if you can tell infallibly what it means, and this is what you cannot do, as Almighty God has not gifted private individuals with the attribute of infallibility.
Daily I saw the deplorable evils into which an unlicensed and irresponsible interpretation of the Holy Scriptures had led the people in Scotland and became sick to death of the arrogance, confidence, and self-righteousness with which each little “sectling” would demonstrate from “the Book” that it and it only was right. Division and subdivision into all manner of sects and meeting-houses had followed the principle of “the Bible and the Bible only.”
In two out of the three parishes in which I had labored I had known of houses divided against themselves–the father going to one meeting and the mother to another –and of the congregation of “the Lord’s people” consisting of one family only. Doubtless they considered that, because the Lord had spoken of the “little flock,” therefore they were likely to correspond to it. The Bible, then, I discovered to be a thoroughly unsatisfactory and impossible rule of faith, yet to the Protestant churches it was the be-all and the end-all of their existence.
In the Wrong
Again, on the historical side, the Presbyterian Church hopelessly broke down. It was quite clear to me, from the evidence of Scripture itself, as well as the whole nature of God’s revelation in his Son, that he had founded a Church to which he had committed his truth to be preserved and perpetuated till the end of time, that this truth was a definite, recognizable body of doctrines, and that his Church must have been endowed with the power of guarding and teaching and handing down this truth. Wherever this Church was to be found, it assuredly could not be the Church of Scotland, which came into existence only in 1560, which contained relatively a mere handful of members, and which taught conflicting and fluctuating opinions instead of “the faith once delivered to the saints.”
I could not persuade myself that the Kirk was the Church founded by our divine Lord on the day of Pentecost, and if it was not that, it was nothing. It was a small sectarian institution adopted by one nation in an out-of-the-way corner of the earth, but it was condemned alike by the Greeks and Anglican schismatics and by Rome. Its psalm-singing and Kirk session and Lord’s Supper and barren worship and hideous churches, and its whole system of doctrine and ceremonies, were, as I said before, a new thing upon the earth: an invention of certain men to propagate certain newly-discovered opinions in the sixteenth century–opinions which are now being discarded and growing old-fashioned.
It could by no possibility be identified with the Church of the apostles, the Church of the Fathers, the Church of the early and later Middle Ages, or the Church existing in Scotland and Europe before the Reformation. Its theologians and textbooks claimed for it that it was thoroughly scriptural, that it was based upon, and could be supported by the Gospels, Acts, and the epistles of Paul. This I could not admit; but, even supposing so much were granted, it would not be enough. A church to be the true Church of Christ must continue and persevere and preserve its identity; must develop and subsist all through the centuries. The Church was intended to be perpetuated from age to age, living and growing and extending, yet ever the same, teaching the same truths, keeping up an unbroken continuity and succession, according to the promise of its Founder that the gates of hell should not prevail against it and that he should be with it always.
This continuous succession and history of preservation, of course, the Presbyterian Church could not show and made no attempt to show. Indeed, the great boast was that the Church had become incurably corrupt, both in doctrine and morals, for many centuries and that, through the labors and genius of heaven-inspired prophets like Calvin and Knox, the true gospel had again been discovered and the true Church of God set up in Scotland.
Such a claim as this, to my thinking, condemned Presbyterianism out and out. A church which was compelled to skip over many centuries and jump back, over the heads of saints and Doctors and Fathers, right into the Acts of the Apostles to find its origin, repudiating and rejecting all that intervened, could not conceivably be the institution that our Lord meant to continue throughout all ages and to stand out as a witness in every century for his revealed doctrine.
“Take care, young man!” said an aged doctor of divinity to me, when discussing this point. “Once you get into the Fathers, like Newman you are on an inclined plane that leads right into Rome.” It is perfectly true, but it cannot be helped. The Fathers must be reckoned with, for they represent the development of the Christian Church and present to us Christian doctrine as it came down from the apostles. If a church in the nineteenth or twentieth century could not square its doctrines with those of the Fathers, then it should at once give up its claim to be apostolic.
The Presbyterian Church, needless to say, threw the Fathers overboard, because it was sadly conscious that their doctrines and hers were irreconcilably at variance. Historically, she was a thing of yesterday. All our forefathers before the Reformation in Scotland were Catholics. If I had been living then, I should have been a Catholic too.
The saints that looked out at me from the pictures, whether in my own house or in Catholic churches, were all Catholics and would not recognize me as a member of the same body as themselves. I should be reckoned an alien, an outcast, and a heretic. I could claim no spiritual kinship with them, no communion with them, no share in their prayers and labors and sanctity. What a horrible thing, to be cut off from all lot and part in the sanc tity of all the ages!
The glorious cathedrals and monasteries and abbeys and churches, whose ruins abounded in every part of this unfortunate land, were all witnesses to a different faith from mine. They were built by the pious labor of priest, monk, and layman, who believed in abbeys and monasteries and in the conventual and monastic system–who were in short Catholics. What they believed in then, all the Christian world believed in also. Scotland was not Protestant at that period: She was Catholic and had never been aught but Catholic. Her ecclesiastical pedigree ran back right to the time of Ninian and Columba and Mungo, who had preached a faith that was Roman and Catholic, for at that age there was no other. In the sixteenth century, therefore, there had been a religious somersault; the only thing to be done was to take a somersault back again.
But I am going a little too fast. It was one thing to be convinced your own church was wrong; it was another thing to be sure which one was right. That it was necessary to belong to the true Church to save one’s soul, I was perfectly certain; that I could not save my soul in the Presbyterian Church I was equally certain. Thousands of others, because they were not disturbed in their conscience, and saw no reason to change their belief, might be in good faith. But I was not in that position. I had entered upon an inquiry and was bound before God to pursue it to the uttermost, come what might.
In the meantime I should simply stay where I was, holding what truth there was in the Church of Scotland and officiating for the people until I was convinced that it was sinful and dangerous to remain longer. So long as I had not made up my mind that some other particular church was the true Church of Christ, I considered I was doing the only wise thing in stopping where I was.
I know that I offended some by preaching un-Presbyterian sermons and uttering Catholic sentiments which were abhorrent to them, for some expressed resentment at it, and probably many more felt resentment who gave no expression to it. I found that simple Scotch folks such as I had to deal with would bear with much before voicing their objection. Doubtless, too, many persons were offended when I indulged in certain ritualistic practices connected with the administration of the sacraments, the celebration of marriage, and the furnishing of the church. I have since learned that immediately after my departure they removed some objectionable objects, such as a Popish-looking communion table, a missal stand, and other “relics of superstition.”
One can perfectly understand their objecting to me or any minister trying to foist upon a simple Presbyterian flock ritual and doctrines against which it was the very object of their existence to protest and to get rid of which was the chief purpose of their revolt from Rome. We were not paid for doing that. Much blood had been spilled, and many fierce battles had been fought, and “covenants” entered into to banish such things from the land.
Little wonder, then, that people should object to the introduction again of the thin end of the wedge of this hateful thing and ask themselves if their minister was attempting to undo, in as subtle a way as possible, the glorious work of reformation and of cleansing, to effect which their fathers had bled and died. (I repeat, they were entitled so to complain. They had every right to be protected from one who should aim at forcing upon them rites and ceremonies and beliefs which they detested and which did nothing but cause distraction, disharmony, and disedification. To this extent they had reason to complain of me.) Yet they complained as little as possible and were friendly to the very last. I quite believe they “thought furiously,” but, excepting one or two, they said nothing.
Rome Satisfies
By the grace of God and the intercession of his Blessed Mother, I was enabled to free the good people from the incubus of a Romanizing incumbent–or “encumbrance,” as Punch makes a country bumpkin call his vicar–and to find that peace and satisfaction for which my soul was longing. Day by day I felt myself further and further alienated from the Presbyterian, and indeed from the entire Protestant, ideal and system.
It came at last to be a settled conviction that the whole conception of Christianity in the Protestant sense was utterly vitiated and wrong, and I was like a fish out of water in the midst of it. There was no rest for my soul day or night, and the solution of this most painful dilemma and perplexity was the subject that absorbed all my thoughts from the moment I rose in the morning till the hour that I retired. Some definite conclusion, and that a speedy one, was absolutely necessary to put me out of pain. Now every argument and consideration that I could think of pointed to one Church, and to no other, as the ultimate authority that could solve all my difficulties, and that was the Catholic and Roman Church.
I have used the word “authority.” I felt the need of this. Everyone feels the need of authority, though, unhappily, not all look to the same authority or to the right one. Some, like Rationalists, take reason for their sole autho rity for everything; others, like the Evangelicals, take the Bible; but an authority of some kind everyone must have. I was clearly convinced that the authority for me was one that could teach me with infallible certainty and leave me in no doubt whatsoever as to the great truths about salvation. I wanted to have certainty, and I believed that Almighty God meant mankind to have it.
Some good friends, in arguing on the point, would fain have persuaded me that this was an erroneous and unhealthy craving on my part, that God never meant we should have this kind of absolute certainty, and that Rome’s claim to put us in possession of all necessary truth, without possibility of error, was false and delusive and pernicious, leading simple souls astray with its glamour and plausibility.
I could never agree with persons who took up that position. To me it seemed that the Incarnation of the Son of God, and his sojourn among men, and his teaching his apostles and declaring God’s truth to them, and his founding a Church would have been superfluous and absurd and useless if he had not intended that men should be taught with unerring certainty what to believe. The very object and purpose of his coming down from heaven was to give men certainty about God and their relation to him, both in the present and for the future.
To leave them, then, still in doubt and uncertainty, pursuing after the truth, struggling to find it out, confessing that they really could not take it upon themselves to say with absolute confidence whether or not this or that doctrine was true–all this struck me as making void the work and word of Jesus Christ, as stultifying and nullifying the teaching authority of our divine Master. If this were the true view of Christianity, then it appeared to me that men were in little better case now than they were before Christ came at all.
An authority, therefore, teaching with divinely-protected inerrancy, which could assure me that this was false and that was true, with the same certainty as our Lord assured his companions–for I felt that we had as much right to certainty in matters of religion as the first disciples–this was what I wanted. Precisely this was what no Protestant authority gave me; what, in fact, they expressly declared they could not give. This seemed to them almost anticipating the last day when the Messiah would “come and tell us all things.” There was much, they said, in regard to which we must be content to remain in the dark, much that was obscure and uncertain and would be cleared up only in heaven.
Now, I did not want to be in the dark about anything when l thought I could be in possession of the light. I had been in the dark long enough–about thirty years, to be precise. I knew that the true Light had come into the world, enlightening all who wished to be enlightened. I felt certain that that Light, so far from shining with dazzling brilliancy for thirty-three years and then being extinguished, was shining still as brilliantly, to illuminate my darkness, if only I could come to it. As it was not shining in the Protestant Church, the probability was that it was to be found in the Catholic Church.
At all events the Catholic Church was the only Christian body on earth that claimed to have the light and the truth and to give it with infallible certainty. That was so much in her favor, to begin with, so much to attract the inquiring and dissatisfied soul, for a sick man turns away from a physician who proclaims his incapacity to cure him and appeals to the doctor who claims that he has a remedy that will prove effectual.
Examining, then, the “claims of Rome,” I saw, from my reading of history, that she was the only Church that could reasonably and plausibly pretend to speak with authority, because she was the only one that could trace her ascent back to the apostles. She was emphatically apostolic. You could tell the day and the place and the circumstances of the rise of every other church in history and could name the very men who took the foremost part in founding it. But you could not point to any date or place when the Catholic Church took its origin except that occasion when our Lord said to Peter: “Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.” Here was a Church which came to me with a genealogy that could not be questioned, which could trace her family history back to Jesus Christ himself, which could justly boast of an unbroken, continuous growth from the seed to the great tree and from childhood to manhood. There was solid, matter-of-fact proof on hand of her genuineness and antiquity.
The illustration that Mr. W. H. Mallock used to support her claims in his book Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption seemed to me singularly bright and conclusive. In that remarkable volume, in which, with ruthless logic, he makes mincemeat of the Anglican claim to speak in the name of doctrinal Christianity, he pictures the Church of Rome as “not a mere aggregate of undifferentiated units, but a living organism with a single enduring personality”–an organism like that of a human being, growing from childhood to boyhood, from boyhood to manhood, still preserving the same individuality through all development and growth and possessing a memorythat never fails. “Being endowed,” he says, “with a single brain, the Church is endowed also with a continuous historic memory; is constantly able to explain and restate doctrine and to attest, as though from personal experience, the facts of its earliest history. Is doubt thrown on the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ? The Churc h of Rome replies: ‘I was at the door of the sepulchre myself. My eyes saw the Lord come forth. My eyes saw the cloud receive him.’ Is doubt thrown on Christ’s miraculous birth? The Church of Rome replies: ‘I can attest the fact, even if no other witness can, for the Angel said: “Hail!” in my ear as well as Mary’s.”
Such appeared to me the precise position of the Catholic Church in the world today, and no other church known to me could advance any title in the faintest degree resembling it. What confirmed me in this view of Rome’s claim was the clear and unmistakable fact of her supremacy over the whole Christian Church from the earliest times. I took a long time to see this, but at length I could resist the evidence no longer. Anglican controversialists like Puller (in his Primitive Saints and the See of Rome) try hard to disprove the universal headship of the Roman Church in the early centuries, but the arguments and evidence in support of it, brought together in such books as the reply of Father Luke Rivington and the work of Allies, seemed to me overwhelming.
Over every part of the Church Catholic, both East and West, Rome stood forth as not only claiming but as exercising jurisdiction, and her jurisdiction was obeyed. She would not have been obeyed had she not the right and title of apostolic authority to be obeyed. It was a right and a power and a privilege inherent in the See of Rome, the See of Blessed Peter, to rule and govern the universal flock of Christ. Every bishop of the Catholic Church was, indeed, a true successor of the apostles and had a flock committed to his jurisdiction, for the ruling and feeding of which he was responsible. But his jurisdiction he derived from, and held in submission to, the bishop of Rome, the prince of the apostles. To be in communion with him was the test of orthodoxy; to “speak with the successor of the Fisherman” was to be in the true Church. What had been then, continued to be now.
Our Lord’s provision for the government of his Church and the preservation of the faith had undergone no change. It was as necessary today as in primitive times to be united with those whom our Lord had set in authority. Now, it could only have been by the will of God, effected by the Holy Ghost who came at Pentecost, that Rome should have acquired the supremacy over the whole Church, that the external government of the body of Christ should have assumed this particular form and organization, and that the preservation of the gospel in its entirety and purity should have been indissolubly bound up with the Bishop of Rome. The Church, considering the promises, explicit and unconditional, of our divine Redeemer, could not have gone so far wrong as to lapse into this mistake. He had pledged his word that he would be with her always and that the Holy Spirit would lead her into all the truth.
The supremacy of Rome, then, was a matter of divine ordering and had been believed to be such from apostolic and sub-apostolic days. The fact that some had revolted and cut themselves off from her authority in no way invalidated her prerogative. Nothing was left, therefore, for me but to get myself in line with the rest of Christendom and get into the Bark of Peter, which, like that of Noah, was launched to save them that would be saved. Where Peter was, there was Christ, for it was from Peter’s boat that Christ taught.
Besides, I saw plainly that unity, which was to be a mark of the true Church and which our Lord had absolutely willed and required among his disciples, never had been and never could be secured in any other way than by the supreme authority of the Roman Pontiff. Some of my friends–indeed most of those with whom I argued the point–scoffed at the necessity of unity, in Rome’s sense, declared our Savior never intended such unity of dogma and of worship, and asserted that such a uniformity and unanimity meant degradation, stagnation in the intellect, and paralysis in the soul. It was, they said, the peace and unity such as one sees in a cemetery.
Presuming that unity was demanded by Jesus Christ, as I believed it was, I saw that, as a matter of historical fact, it never existed out of the Roman communion. No other plan or means of attaining to it had ever succeeded, and experience told me that what had been the fate of other methods in the past would similarly overtake those devised by men in time to come: Nothing but the supreme, independent, irreformable judgment of one man, and that the bishop of Rome in his office as Vicar of Christ and the successor of Peter, could preserve the union of the faithful which the Founder of Christianity willed his religion to possess.
It was, of course, a stupendous power and authority to attribute to one man alone–the power of declaring and defining what was the revealed truth of Almighty God and of binding the consciences of all men under pain of mortal sin to believe and accept his decision–a decision not reversible by the judgment of any other court, not to be submitted to any other tribunal for correction or approval, but a final, authoritative, independent, infallible decision, against which no man dare appeal. So great, indeed, was this power that it would have been utterly b.asphemous, and a glaring usurpation of the divine attribute, to invest with it any man on earth who had not been unmistakably singled out by God to receive it.
This was what I believed about the pope: that he was truly the successor of Peter, whom our Lord had appointed Head of the Church, to rule and teach and guide it, and that, to do so effectually and perfectly, this gift of infallible authority was absolutely necessary. Without this, his authority would have been in reality no authority at all; there would have been no unity. Who believes the Archbishop of Canterbury to be infallible? Who believes the whole united Episcopal Bench in England (if you can imagine the Bench united) to be infallible? Who believes the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, or the Union of the Baptist Church, to be infallible? The very question is ludicrous. What is the consequence? No authority that is worth the name.
What follows this? Chaos, confusion, division, disunity on the most vital and fundamental matters, each man is a law to himself and does that which seems right in his own eyes. If there is agreement among them, it is accidental, and it happens, not because any authority has spoken on the subject, but because the same ideas chance to commend themselves to different people.
Now, as l said before, this is a state of things which pleases millions of persons; this is Protestantism–freedom from all authority except your own, intellectual liberty or license to think out doctrines for yourself. This, they say, is far nobler and higher than a compulsory unity. It is certainly a pleasant creed to profess and a popular creed, one that flatters human nature and human pride, panders to self-conceit, and frees a man from all subjection to external authority. On these terms, a man may believe anything or nothing, may stroll through life, so to speak, a religious libertine.
In my eyes the fatal drawback about this so plausible position was that it was utterly opposed to the will of Christ, to his intention, to his teaching. I could not believe that he meant Protestantism to be the ideal of his religion. I did believe that he intended every Christian to hold precisely the same truths, the same set of doctrines, and that these must always be the same, must be unchangeable, and all for the simple reason that he himself had descended from heaven to teach a certain set of truths, that these truths were, of course, divine and could never be altered, and that anything and everything different from these truths must be false.
The truths of Christianity, I held, could no more change than the truths of arithmetic; if they were true yesterday, they must be true today and tomorrow and forever. To change them meant that they must be susceptible of change and of improvement, and, if that were so, they might never have been true at all. Once g.asp the fact that Jesus Christ was a divine teacher, was God in the flesh, and then his every word was divine, and divinely true, and true for all eternity. Hence it followed that his teaching must be a unity, that no part of it could be in contradiction to any other part, for truth is one–error only is manifold.
This was the Catholic conception of Christ’s mission as a teacher, and it appealed to me as the true and noble conception. The Protestant conception was false and dishonoring.
On examining the claim of the Catholic Church to unity, I saw it could stand the most searching investigation. No doctrine of hers in one century ever came into conflict with her doctrine in any other century. No pope had ever contradicted another pope on matters of faith and morals. You could not discover such a case. True, some plausible instances to the contrary were trumped up by Rome’s opponents, but, on careful and conscientious examination, I found that they broke down, were capable of a perfectly reasonable explanation, and did not at all affect the claim of the Catholic Church to have set forth unity of doctrine before the world from the day of Pentecost to the latest pronouncement of pope or council.
Now, this was obviously quite supernatural; no human institution could stand such a test, could have produced such a record. That the Church of Rome all through these centuries, with such vicissitudes and trials, both without and within, dealing with such profound subjects as matters of eternal truth, should never have stumbled into the least error or self-contradiction was to me an indisputable proof that she had been divinely guarded and preserved. Only the finger of the right hand of the Most High could have brought her through unscathed.
On the other hand, I looked at Protestantism. Her career even for three centuries had been a record of variations, denials, changes, contradictions; she was split into a thousand fragments and was splitting into more. Herein was her condemnation. It was a necessity of her very being. It was just as necessary a consequence of her principles that she should be disunited as it was a consequence of Rome’s principles that she could not be disunited. Unity was to me a beautiful, a heavenly thing; our Lord demanded it, and only in Catholicism could it be realized, only through the unerring voice of Rome’s Head, the Vicar of Christ.
Nearing the Goal
Over and above the conclusive proofs of Rome’s God-given supremacy and authority, I examined and saw for myself that all her doctrines were beautiful and reasonable and attractive. Theoretically, of course, the proper thing to be done by an inquirer after the true Church is first of all to find out where the true Church is by the evidences of credibility, as they are called, to search and discover, by historical proofs, by Christ’s promises, by the four marks and other lines of investigation, where lies that Church which the S on of God set up upon this earth, and, having found it, submit to it and believe all that it teaches, convinced that, being infallible, it cannot teach aught except what Christ taught.
As a matter of fact, however, I suspect that the majority of inquirers do not pursue this method, logical and consistent though it be; there are too many difficulties and stumbling blocks to be got rid of first. There is a whole lifetime of ignorance and suspicion and delusion and bigotry to be undone. The trees must first be cut down and the ground cleared before one can set about building the edifice of Catholic truth. Hence for the most part I think that converts who wish to be intellectually convinced and are really in earnest about the matter examine each of Rome’s doctrines one by one, and sift it, and try it by Scripture, and see whether it is reasonable or not. They also find it necessary to investigate the truth or falsehood of the most common charges and accusations against Rome’s historical record, such as those of persecution, immorality, dishonesty, and the like.
I admit that, in a certain sense, this method is putting the cart before the horse, because many doctrines and practices which might appear strange and repellent to one still trusting only to his reason would assume quite a different.aspect and seem altogether reasonable and holy after the inquirer had received the gift of divine and Catholic faith. An outsider, to put the matter plainly, is really no judge of the Catholic interior.
Nevertheless, this method (of examining each doctrine singly) has decided advantages, and this I felt, and feel now, very much to my consolation. The common Protestant idea about the affair is that a man becomes a Catholic, somehow or other, hypnotized and deluded by Rome’s “glamour” that then he is obliged to assent to all the most ridiculous and unreasonable doctrines; he has simply to open his mouth, shut his eyes, and swallow everything wholesale: He becomes, in fact, a driveling nonentity, in a state of mental stupefaction and paralysis, compelled against his will to express his formal belief in things which are too silly and childish for any man of average intellect.
Brought up in heresy and trained by the tradition of generations to look on the Catholic teaching as both irrational and unscriptural, I discovered from personally investigating every item of it that, so far from being of this nature it was, when properly understood, lovely and reasonable and satisfying. I could even see the necessity of much of it, if the Christian faith was to be consistent. Though the Catholic Church declared that all her doctrines were matters of revelation, still, none of them, so far as I could see, was contrary to reason, but rather every one of them had a solid foundation in reason, and none of them was opposed to any part of the teaching of Holy Scripture.
On the contrary, many passages of Scripture which, taken by themselves, were meaningless or at least unintelligible became clothed with significance and consistency when understood in the light of the Catholic faith and interpretation. Even those doctrines of the Roman Church most ridiculed and attacked by Protestants–such as those dealing with the religious life, the priesthood, the pope, purgatory, confession, the Bible, and the Mass–assumed a beauty hitherto undreamed of, and the fact that her doctrines were all beautiful and holy and elevating to the soul was a proof that she must be the true Church.
It required a long time, I confess, and much discussion and thrashing out of the pros and cons of the case before I could see through indulgences and intercession of the saints and before I convinced myself that the undeniable prosperity, in temporal things, of Protestant countries, and their seeming superiority in that respect to Catholic nations, was really no argument against the divinity of the Catholic Church.
Each convert seems to have his own particular stumbling-blocks according to his bent of mind or his upbringing or his previous study, and what troubles one doubting soul may never cause the least difficulty to another. I see now perfectly well that I was judging of this temporal prosperity question and many other questions from a thoroughly wrong standpoint and that if I had considered the matter purely from the point of view of a Christian instead of a Scotsman, I should have sooner reached the correct solution.
Furthermore, as I think I hinted before, I found that the gravest charges against Rome, whether in regard to her popes, her clergy, her religious, or her influence on people’s lives, were, for the most part, wholly false, always misleading, and very often deliberate inventions of notorious enemies. In the publications of the Catholic Truth Society and other controversial literature the scandals and falsehoods and calumnies were exposed in fine style and in a manner that satisfied me that the Catholic Church was the only Christian body now existing which fulfilled our divine Lord’s prophecy about the persecution and slander that would overtake his true disciples. She and she alone was everywhere spoken against, like the company of Christians after Pentecost and during the earliest centuries.
This appeared a mark of her divine origin. What was true in the charges made against her was nothing else than what one might expect in any institution that had a human side and was composed of frail men and women, whilst, on the other hand, the fact that she had survived and prospered and progressed in spite of the weakn esses and wickedness of her members and officials proved that she had a divine side, as no other body had.
I will not, indeed, deny that I saw and heard things that scandalized me in the Catholic Church and in the lives of Catholics. Some of them, I now admit, were not a just cause of scandal, while others were. I knew nothing, at that time, of “pharisaical scandal” and the “scandal of the weak” and other distinctions drawn in moral theology. I should have suffered much less anxiety and doubt had I been acquainted with them.
When all was said and done, I perceived that if there were any corruption or disedification, it was accidental and incidental and was in no way owing to the teaching of the Church, but in spite of it, and that the most attractive and edifying and devout characters were always those who were staunch Papists and were faithfully practicing their religion and observing its every precept. When Catholics were good people, it was because they were good Catholics– their religion made them good. On the other hand, if a Protestant was a good man, it was not because he was a good Protestant first: His religion had really nothing to do with it; he was far better, indeed, than his creed, which a Catholic could never be. Herein was a proof of the sublime influence of Catholicism.
Last of all–for I am not writing a treatise on the proofs for the divinity of the Catholic Church, but merely recalling as best I can the main points that appealed to me in her favor–I will confess that the worship of the Roman Church drew me as much as her doctrine. I did not at that time understand the meaning of it all or perceive the significance of the various details of the ritual, yet I loved it and was impressed by it; there was about it a sanctifying, soothing, elevating influence that was to be experienced nowhere else.
I would pay visits secretly to Catholic chapels and remain for long, attracted by some mysterious power, subdued by the air of reverence and awe that always seemed to pervade the building, watching the lamp flickering in the sanctuary and the faithful stealing out and in with silent adoration. How I envied their faith! How I marveled at their devotion and reverence and profound seriousness! Religion appeared to be a real living thing to them; to most Protestants, on the contrary, their religion was a thing put on and off like their Sunday clothes. It was not a habitual, integral part of their daily life, as was the Catholic’s.
Then, how grand and inspiring was the ceremonial of Mass and Benediction! I assisted at both the one and the other in various places, and, I repeat, I could not have explained what they were, but I felt there was a grandeur and solemnity about them, a hallowing and uplifting influence, that was utterly lacking in the bald, uninteresting, dreary meetings of Presbyterians. The very buildings themselves were holy and edifying and true “houses of prayer,” and, where the Catholics could afford it, they were obviously meant to be as worthy of the majesty of God as poor mortals could make them.
The kirks of the Scotch people were little better than four walls and a roof and seemed designed on the principle that, however grand might be the houses of the rich, anything that would accommodate a congregation in comfort was good enough to be a temple of the Most High. In this certainly they were consistent enough, as they did not, and do not, believe that God “dwelleth in temples made with hands” they hold that no one place is more sacred than another, seeing that God is everywhere, and consider that the main functions to be performed in a church is the preaching of sermons.
On these grounds, naturally enough, it comes about that the chief thing considered in the kirks is not the glory of God, but the convenience of the minister and the people. This was abhorrent to my ideas of Christian worship, but it was Protestant.
I am persuaded now that what drew me into these sweet chapels, and moved my heart and captivated my love, and made me feel so happy, yet so mystified and awe-struck, as I sat or knelt and stared at the tabernacle or the stations or the images and wondered and meditated, was nothing less than the Real Presence of our Blessed Lord, who was there watching me and drawing me to him.
What has happened to me in this particular has happened to many another. “There hath stood One in the midst of you whom you know not” is as literally true of non-Catholics visiting a Catholic church as it was true of the Jews in the time of our Lord. Only when they have received the gift of faith do they realize what was that silent, strong, irresistible Power that drew them to the altar as the magnet draws the steel and constrained them to abide there till the Incarnate God himself had wounded their hearts with the darts of his love.
But was it right to love such worship? Was it not too sensuous? Was this not the “fatal glamour” of Rome which we were so often warned against? Did it not appeal too much to the emotions and the sentiments? Was it not too splendid and gorgeous? Was it not mere outward show? Was it lawful to allow one’s aesthetic and musical taste to be ravished and carried away by such fascinating and overpowering ceremonial? Should we not, according to our Lord himself, “worship God in spirit and in truth”?
I have purposely crammed into these queries all the common stock-in-trade of Protestant objections to Catho lic worship–objections sometimes felt, too, by timorous and scrupulous inquirers–not in order that I may refute them one by one, but that I may put on record the fact that they troubled me for a time, that I came to see through the fallacies with which they bristled on every side, and that I may dispose of them in a summary manner, in the hope that perchance some doubting soul may be encouraged also to look them boldly in the face and pierce through their hollowness.
The “glamour of Rome”! Of course there is a glamour. How could it be otherwise? Is it wrong that there should be a glamour about anything? Take a great orator or a great preacher who captivates and, as it were, electrifies his hearers, who seems to emit a kind of magnetism that draws and fascinates the audience that hangs upon his lips. Is that wrong? No: It is a gift from God. Why, then, should you object to the glamour and attractiveness about the worship of the Roman Church–I mean merely on natural grounds? Must it be wrong because it is beautiful? Are not beauty and loveliness and harmony creations of Almighty God? Must the worship of the true Church be hideous and repellent and bare and dreary?
Doubtless, in the eyes of those who have reduced the practice of ugliness in church building and church worship to a perfect science, it will seem most heinous to worship the Lord in the holiness of beauty, as in the “beauty of holiness.” But sensible people unwarped by prejudice will confess that God is pleased with beautiful things and that the worship of the Most High is not any the more likely to be acceptable to him because it is ugly and monotonous and mean. The worship of the Church of Rome must be beautiful and fascinating, because it is the true worship; all the works of God are perfect. Heretical worship is hideous, because it is false. Truth is lovely, but error is ugly. The ritual of the Mass could not possibly be aught but sublime and beautiful because it has been fashioned by the Holy Ghost to be the one true worship in God’s one true Church.
The same may be said of all the authorized ceremonial of the Catholic Church for all her liturgical services: It enshrines and adorns the inward offering of the faithful; it is the setting, the framework, so to call it, encircling some doctrinal truth, some revealed truth of God; it is the divinely appointed ceremony and form of giving back to God that which he himself first taught us. It is the belief of Catholics (as it is a fact) that Almighty God has shown us not only the right faith, but also the right form of worship. He has prescribed a method of offering him public adoration. He has not left us to haphazard or chance. Mass, then, is the liturgy that Almighty God has willed as the chief act of Christian worship, and we have no right to attempt any other.
Must it not, therefore, be lovely and attractive? Surely! There is a glamour about it! If there were not, it would indeed be surprising.
The One Fold
Should we allow ourselves to be affected by what appeals so much to the senses? Strange though it must appear to those who have been born in the Catholic Church, I have heard this question asked with much anxiety by intelligent and well-disposed Protestants.
You might imagine, from the query, that we were pure spirits and not in possession of a body at all, without ears and eyes and other senses and faculties by which we appreciate material things. Is music wrong? Is painting wrong? In itself, certainly not. Well, then, is it wrong when employed in the worship of our Creator? Again, no. Why should it be? Has God given us an artistic and aesthetic sense, a faculty of enjoying and being moved by sensible objects, and yet declared it wrong to satisfy these senses and operate with these faculties?
Primarily, of course, all the grandeur and beauty about Catholic worship is designed to give glory to God and magnify his praise. We consider it but fitting that all the treasures of art and music and ceremonial should be impressed into the service of our Maker. But if, incidentally and as it were by way of secondary consequence, the worshipers themselves are moved and fascinated and pleased by the worship, is that wrong? Are we to be doomed forever to a form of service that lacerates our feelings, violates our aesthetic and musical taste, and outrages every recognized principle of beauty and orderliness?
Thank God, many non-Catholics have been brought into the true fold through the sublime and heavenly ritual that Rome has composed century by century, under the guidance of the Holy Ghost! It was God’s own way of bringing them in; then they came to see that the interior worship of God, the true doctrines, the life of sacrifice in the Church, were even more beautiful than the external ceremonial which had attracted them. They learned that only in Catholicity are fulfilled Christ’s words that his followers would worship him “in spirit and in truth.”
There is no contradiction between outward splendor in ritual and the inward worship of the soul. If there were, how could thousands of persons of the greatest sanctity have loved it and been united to their Lord throug h it? Men could be sincere and earnest and devoted worshipers of Almighty God in “spirit and in truth,” assisting at a pontifical High Mass, whilst, on the contrary, a man might be offending God, “drawing near with his lips whilst his heart was far away,” when attending a Presbyterian meeting-house.
I came to the conclusion, therefore, that the Protestant objections to the beautiful in Rome’s worship sprang from false principles in regard to the nature of worship and the nature of man, from a prolonged bondage to the falsities of Calvinism, which had crushed out all love for the sweet and beautiful and attractive. Yet so firmly ingrained in my mind was the notion that, somehow, one could not be genuinely worshiping God with the heart in the midst of so much gorgeous ceremony, and that the Catholic was spending all his devotion on forms and ritual, that I required a long time to emancipate myself from such a delusion.
The truth I now know to be precisely the reverse– namely, that as a matter of fact, much of the Protestant service is nothing but a respectable lip-service, a mere form to be gone through once a week for the sake of appearance, whereas the worship of the Catholic is the heart’s adoration, presented to God in the most beautiful and perfect manner imaginable. His ritual is fixed; he need never bother his head about it; his whole attention is given, free and undivided, to the inward worship in spirit and in truth, whether he is priest or layman.
Here is, indeed, unity of worship, for it is the same divine Sacrifice and the same liturgy the world over. But yet there is a most wondrous diversity along with it, for every soul has its own particular needs and desires and.aspirations and presents them before God with its own words, so that the humble beggar kneeling obscurely in a corner of the great cathedral, who unites with the nobleman and the grand lady–aye, and with the bishop and the pope himself, if he be offering the Holy Sacrifice–is as much a worshiper apart and separate, and dear to the heart and the eye of God, as though there were no other in the wide world.
O truly sublime and wonderful worship of the Roman Church! Beautiful outwardly, beautiful inwardly, made according to the pattern God himself has shown, no marvel is it that so many distracted and tempest-tossed souls have been riveted and fascinated and consoled by it. No wonder that it should have satisfied their heart and their intellect as well as their senses, for Jesus Christ, “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world,” is in it. He is its glory and its beauty, here as in heaven. He is the center of the worship of the Catholic Church, for he is the Sacrifice of the Church. So it comes that half an hour of the Roman Mass excels all the worship of all the heretics throughout the world.
Home at Last
But now it is time to tell of the final act by which I gave effect to those convictions which forced themselves upon me with an urgency that was irresistible. Many an hour and many a day of fear and trembling and terror, lest I should be taking a wrong step, did I spend. What if, after all, the whole thing was a huge delusion? What if I took the “plunge” that was really irrevocable and found myself duped and befooled and miserable? What of my father, an aged minister broken in health through illness and in heart through bereavement? Years ago I had asked him: “Suppose l turned Roman Catholic?” “If you wish to break your father’s heart, do so,” was his answer.
What of beginning life over again, and giving up old friends, and tearing oneself up by the roots, and sitting down again at school and learning a new religion? What of all the publicity and fuss and distress and legal proceedings to be gone through in severing my connection with the Church of Scotland and cutting the ropes that bound me to my parish? These and a hundred other reflections that Satan inspired flooded my soul day by day. Could we–my friend B. and myself–not emigrate to some colony and there take the step which was so difficult to take at home? No, that would be cowardly.
I made bold to call upon the priest in the parish and ask him many questions, without, however, acquainting him with our exact position. He gave us all the answers we desired. His quiet, simple, lonely life in the little house beside the chapel seemed to me much more apostolic than that of the ministers with their wives and families. It was a life of poverty, of celibacy, of self-denial, of devotion–in short, a supernatural life–that found no parallel in the Protestant ministry. I always consoled myself with this thought. Catholicism looked so beautiful to one who understood it not, and saw it only from the outside; how much more beautiful would it be once we were inside and knew and understood it all!
My friend and l agreed that the hour had come for us both to act together–to pack up and go. We adopted the line of least resistance, which was that of taking the step first and then informing our relatives and the public afterward. By the experience of others we had come to know that this was the best way to avoid opposition, bitterness, and all attempts to persuade us to draw back. We straightway gave in our resignations. I got a special meeting of the Presbytery called to deal with the matter. We visited a canon of the Cathedral in Glasgow, who arranged for our reception at a Benedictine abbey. I found mountains of obstacles (as I supposed then) dissolving into molehills. God wondrously opens up the way straight in such cases.
I went to communicate the news to my aged father.
At first he was shocked and saddened. His hopes and intentions for my future were rudely shattered. He thought he would never see me again and that I would he bound to hold that he and all his were going straight to hell. But by next morning he regained his equanimity and (such is the philosophy of the Scotch) inquired whether I would be in need of funds to carry me on. He appreciated the argument I used wherewith to comfort him: that the step was going to make me happy and that he could not wish anything better for me than that I should be happy.
I was then suspended from my ministerial functions, awaiting the final decisions of the Presbytery. Summoned before the reverend “fathers and brethren,” I explained that I had made up my mind, and had ” burned my boats,” and that it was useless to argue–a thing which some of them showed a desire to do. They were sorry for me, and pitied me, and thought I was more or less demented, and said they would let me know what they were going to do with me.
Meanwhile I arranged for my departure from the parish, preached farewell sermons (with difficulty), and said good-bye to some of my more intimate friends. They were all my friends still. Though regretting that my conscience had dictated such a step, they yet admitted that conscience must be supreme. Thus did all others whose acquaintanceship I valued. Some came to me and begged me to reconsider my decision and made all sorts of offers to induce me to remain, but, of course, in vain. I had steeled my heart against all such influences and determined that this time there should be no looking back. The moment had arrived to “leave my people and my father’s house,” and to love God and his Church above all things, and to take up the cross and follow Christ.
So soon as the newspapers inserted a notice of the impending “perversion,” I was inundated with letters, books, pamphlets, entreaties, and all manner of terrifying literature, intended to stop me in my mad rush into the arms of Rome. Needless to say, most of it went into the wastepaper basket, to some of it I replied, in terms as firm and strong as were consistent with politeness; some of the book-stuffs I returned, uncut and unread.
Almighty God and his dear Mother helped me through the crisis and solved its difficulties in a way that now, looking back at it, seems quite miraculous. The good priest of the place, too–a German–assisted me with his counsel and his strong Catholic enthusiasm at a time when I was almost fainting and tempted sorely to turn back. He held me fast and kept me from falling. Never, so long as I live, shall I forget his share in helping to save my soul. This is a crisis of your life when you need a strong Catholic friend to be constantly beside you to keep the devil at bay, for never does the devil exert his infernal powers more subtly than at the hour when he sees a soul about to be rescued from heresy.
In due course I was solemnly “deposed from the holy ministry of the Church of Scotland,” having my name called three times at the door of the Presbytery with no response. I sold off, and, having for some weeks received hospitality and lodging from the canon aforementioned, was sent to Fort Augustus’s Benedictine abbey for reception. Having satisfactorily passed an examination in the Penny Catechism and made other preparations, under the charge of Father Columba, himself a convert, I was received into the fold and made my First Communion on the feast of the Assumption.
Now my story (tedious, I am afraid, to many) is ended. I could fill many pages more with the record of these first glorious days as a Catholic. I could tell of the deep peace and comfort and satisfaction of those first confessions–the joy and consolation of my first Holy Communions, the ever-increasing delight and wonder at the new world of beauty and sanctity that gradually opened out before me, as I passed month after month of new feasts and fasts and observances and devotions. It was like being transported into a new and unexplored world. I felt as ignorant as a child of real Catholicity, and the experience of all the loveliness and sweetness and holiness of the Church surpassed my wildest imaginings.
But of this I have written elsewhere and shall not now repeat my impressions after I went to Rome to study for the priesthood. Enough if I have explained the steps and reasons that led me from Calvinism to Catholicity. From the moment of my conversion till now, not a single doubt have I entertained that the Catholic and Roman Church and she alone is the true Church which our Lord set up on earth and that to be sure of salvation every one must belong to her.
Would that all who have at any time harbored suspicions about their own religious beliefs would set to work and inquire and pursue their inquiry with a merciless determination to find at all costs the true faith! If they did so, Almighty God would certainly give them light and grace to enable them to discover it and reward them with a peace that surpasseth all understanding. There are today thousands of Protestants in Scotland who are naturally good, with the making of saints in their character, but who will never become saints because they ha ve not the means of sanctity within their sect. They have not the machinery (so to put it) for turning out the article. A bird cannot fly without wings, nor can a Presbyterian ascend the ladder of perfection, supernaturally, without the sacraments of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Sad, indeed, it is that a nation so blessed and enriched by Providence in the natural order should yet remain in the lowest scale in the things of religion. But a better day is dawning. Scales are falling from the eyes of many, and not a few are returning to the fold from which their forefathers departed. God increase their number till, illumined with the light of the true faith, the whole of the people led astray by Calvin and Knox find their way back “from the Kirk to the Catholic Church”!